So guys we have a new update in regards to the damage migration and official update from people can fly today we're getting to all the latest news. How's it going guys my name's DPJ and if you enjoyed the video leaving a like really helps out and if you like what you see and want to see more outriders on a daily basis be sure to subscribe. Okay so if you ain't aware and I don't know how you won't be there's basically a bug in place in the game right now where a lot of people out of nowhere seemingly are being one shot by enemies that have no right in doing so your health your shield just gets completely drained. Say bug I myself have encountered it say bug many many players have encountered I made a video on it earlier this week and talked about a possible workaround found by Chadley but today we have an official update from people can fly in regards to the bug new information on it and again a workaround so let's get into it and this has come straight from their reddit post dropped literally 10 minutes ago. Okay so as you can see latest update here the 7th of May 2021 we believe we have identified one of the core underlying reasons for lack of damage migration in certain circumstances. We are compiling and testing a new build with this fix included but doing so will take a bit more time and the final rollout will be dependent on it being successfully tested confirmed as fixed. We will update you as soon as we have news while we continue to work on this map here are some potential workarounds which have helped some players who encountered the issue consistently. Unequip all your armor then reequip it again if this doesn't help unequip all armor hard restart your game this means not returning to the lobby screen this means restarting the game completely from dashboard then once you're loaded back in reequip the said armor or you can unequip all armor change to a different character and back out then reequip said armor. Using mud such as life of the party may help increase survivability as this mud works differently to other defensive months. Avoid tanking brood movers and alphas in particular as they are particularly prone to the below explained one slash two hit risk explanation to this bug. Once the bug occurs all regular armor mods are much less effective so most defensive mods are less viable the matter of instant deaths even when they appear to be a one-shot kill looks to be a case of two damage hits being dealt though they are displayed as one meaning that the one-shot kill protection mechanic doesn't trigger since they detect two damage hits and that is it guys that is what they've said so they've obviously figured out one of the main problems to this like they said they're testing and working on a fix which will be incorporated soon but right now they talk about workarounds now these are the same workarounds I covered in a video earlier this week found by Chadley a fellow content creator and streamer but this is just a confirmation that these workarounds will work although if you check the comment section of that video I posted it seems to work for many many people it did work for me as well so yes guys a damage migration issue we know is a problem although a lot of people at first thought it was an excuse for them fixing the golem mod I can never remember what a golem mod is you know the protective golem mod well if it's called a lot of people blame that and since that was fixed a lot of people can't hack the game anymore due to relying on said perk but this is a much much deeper issue and it's a problem many people who didn't use that mod have experienced so yes guys this is the latest news in regards to the game and this damage migration issue let's hope when a patch finally comes for this nothing else occurs in terms of other issues but yeah guys just keeping you guys up to date on the latest news surrounding this game a short but sweet one this Friday and I hope you enjoyed the rest of your week ends on that note the end of the video has arrived if you enjoyed it leaving a like really helps out if you're new around here want to see more outriders on a daily basis be sure to subscribe and if you never want to miss a video I upload you can turn notifications on by hitting that bell button but guys thanks as always for stopping by and hopefully I will see you on that next one


This has been a year and a half of higher rates that is built up to this moment. And now we're about to go into January where it normally takes off and we have all this pent up demand and retracted market. So what I'm saying is, is right now, here's the opportunity. Right now, you gotta get as many listings as you can in December because everything in January is going under contract. And if you let this moment go by where you don't take advantage and stack up as much inventory as you can, when January hits and you're busy, you're selling, you'll be doing good and everything, but you're going to wish to God, you would have stacked up as many, at least as many as you could, now, while things are slow, while you have time to actually do it before the wave actually hits and you don't have time to do it anymore, plus the wave's hitting, it's too late. You gotta get, well, when do you prepare for a market surge during the surge or before the surge? Okay, before. And that's right now. And every day that goes by is just one more day of a lost opportunity because these days are clicking by real fast. And we, starting last week, we had four full work weeks with no holidays in between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Christmas is gonna hit Monday in like three weeks. You had four full work weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas to really crush it.  That's what you need to be doing. And a lot of us during this time of year, we kinda just lay back, well, the market's slow. You know, what's the use? People aren't doing anything anyway. Listings are just sitting there, blah, blah, blah. Okay, this is the calm before the storm. If you wanna be like massive, like high, high producer, you've got to realize these cycles and take advantage of the moments.  Yeah, this is the kinda stuff that I started realizing in 2008. These ebbs and flows of the market and how to take advantage of the down moments to ramp up before the next surge happens. Yeah, this is it right now. So yeah, a little pep talk for you. Let's see if you guys have some questions. I'd love to dig into some of your specific situations. And if not, I can just keep rambling because I can ramble all day long. Feel free to unmute, right? Tell me what's going on in your business. Come on in, Jeff. Unmute, Jeff, and ask your question. I was just wondering, obviously, there's gonna be pent up demand. Yeah, but again, the usual grill in the room is there gonna be inventory to support the demand? It doesn't matter about inventory. And I'm speaking to a chair. It doesn't matter what inventory is. Here's the thing. When let's just take the example, the theory, the circumstance that rates come down, okay? When are rates gonna come down? Nobody knows that. All the gurus in the mortgage industry thought that rates would be around 5% at the end of this year. Well, they were wrong. They were right about inflation coming down, right? And they thought, okay, inflation comes down and the 10-year treasury follows inflation and mortgage rates follow the 10-year treasury. They're right about all that, but you know where they got it wrong? They didn't realize that the spread between the 10-year treasury and the mortgage rate was gonna be higher than normal because the investors don't want the risk and they know people aren't really gonna hang on to these higher rates. They're gonna refinance pretty soon. They're not gonna make much on the loan. And so they had to have this higher spread. So they didn't put that into consideration. So predicting rates, bad game to play. However, when rates come down, let's just think about the world when rates come down, okay, when rates come down, this is what I see happening is that the trade-up seller is gonna list and buy, right? They're gonna list their home and upgrade. They're tighter their home. This is like huge, this is a huge market. I mean, I could even ask you guys, like how many sellers do you have that want to sell? They don't need, they need an extra bedroom. They wanna be on the water. They need to move across town, but they can't because they're sitting on this low rate and they just can't do it. How many of those clients do you have, right? How many buyers do you have? First time home buyers that are waiting on prices to come down are waiting on rates to come down. Like it's crazy. So when rates come down, let's just think about this hypothetical situation that the trade-up seller lists and then upgrades. So what does that do to the market in terms of inventory? Well, they're adding one to inventory, but then they're taking one away from inventory. So it's a net even for inventory, okay? So that didn't do anything to inventory, but it created two transactions. So inventory stayed the same overall, active listings, but we have two plus on the transaction board, okay? So activity has increased. Now we've got two deals, two commissions, really four because there's a buyer and seller on each deal, okay? But then the first time home buyers come in, they rush the market. They take a property off the market, but they don't add a property to the market. So what does that do to active listings? It brings it down, but it created a transaction. So what happens in my opinion when rates come down is we're gonna see transactions spike.  So inventory doesn't have to come up. Who was it, Jeff? Inventory doesn't have to come up for activity and transactions to spike. See what I'm saying? We can live in a world. I'll take your question and say, we can live in a world where inventory goes down, but our business is all explode. See what I'm saying? So you have to realize we can't control rates or inventory or any of that stuff. What we got to do is our best to make sure the most people that own property in our market know who we are and feel like we're their friend and never forget us. That's all. That's all we can control. That's all we can do. And then we let the market kind of play out however it plays out. We're just here to help and service our people. Whatever inventory does or this that I don't know, don't care. Right? Transactions are gonna spike regardless. They're gonna come back. Go ahead. I'm listening. Linda, was it you? Who had a question? I've got a question. I've been farming two farms for 15, 25 years. And 15, 25 years. Got it. And I've gotten a lot of sales from it. But over the last couple of years, I've had zero response to my marketing and I can't afford to do it anymore. Just wondering what you're. A lot of flyers, basically magnets, they would update. Yeah, have you called those people? Do you ever call through the subdivisions? I know. Why wouldn't you? Oh, and I'm not a great. Fun guy, I guess. And I'm not a doorknocker. Maybe I should be. Well, Jim, let me let me just let me just give you my two cents. The the premise of your job as a real estate agent is to talk to people you do and don't know to help them buy some real estate. So so your job is to talk to people that you do and don't know to help them buy some real estate. So why don't you just do that? Sending out mailers is great, guys. Doing videos on social is great, guys.  But if you're not talking to people that you do and don't know all day long to help them buy and sell real estate, you're not doing your job.  Like, did you expect did you expect Jim for that to like blow your business up? It used to. Well, well, I don't want to dig into like what that business actually looked like. OK, but let me just say it could be 15 times bigger. It could have been 15 times bigger than and you could be blowing up right now. See, what you got to realize is that this is kind of far out there to think about it like this. OK, I'll break it down from the furthest out in space all the way back down to maybe around the moon and then we'll bring it down to earth. The first thing is, is how many how many humans do you guys think will ever live on the planet? There's there's like eight billion now, right? How many humans you think will ever live on the planet? You think it will hit a trillion? Who knows, right?  I don't know. OK, a lot. What are the chances that another human being lives during the same time that you do? Not only that, in the same area you do, what are the chances pretty much like one in a trillion? Let's just say if there's going to be a trillion people ever live on earth, one in a trillion is the chances that this person lives next to you in the same time. All right, if you were on a bus in Paris and you're on a three hour, you know, train ride and there was this guy sitting across from you mean mugging, looking really mad. And you're like, man, that guy just seems angry. I don't want to talk to him.  They're pretty nice. And then you're like, where are you from? And they're like D.C. As soon as he said D.C., wouldn't you feel like automatically connect? Like you have a connection with this person now you're in Paris. You realize that you're both from D.C. Wouldn't you be like, wow, we're both from D.C. You feel this connection with them, right? What I'm what I'm getting at is that anyone in your market that lives anywhere should literally be looked at as family. Like you should look you should look at that. They're these are your neighbors. Like what are the chances that that a human lives in your area? It's like so low. It's it's it's like lightning striking the same spot 15 times.  You used to do. I'm sure this is not the first time you've said somebody say that they don't love making phone calls. But you sort of said you made a lot of cold calls, not even the relationships that knew you. You called the mean Munga guy on the bus and just started a conversation and worked to create a relationship. But you kind of shared it was like a four or five people on the front end that you would call just to get things started and get yourself in the right headspace, could you kind of share them? Like what might jumpstart those phone calls for them? Do you remember what you said? I can remind you if you don't. But there's a couple of different things you can do. You know, you can take the first couple calls to do follow up with people that you're currently kind of following up with, right?  You know, send them mail. See, Jim, you're in the perfect position because you've sent these people like calendars and postcards and flyers forever.  You know, you can be like, hey, I'm Jim. I'm the guy that, you know, did you get my calendar? Then we're like, hey, Jim, yeah, I've been getting your stuff for years. Thought you'd never call, right? You've got to, you've got to reach out to these people or you're just dead in the water, guys. If you're not talking to people all day long about buying a selling real estate, then you're dead in the water. It's not, it's not going to work.   Just think of every single one of them, okay? Every single one of those activities comes right back to the same thing. Okay, it's a, those, those are like top line funnel that come right back to the exact same thing every single time before there's a transaction. Okay.  I'm talking. Conversation. It doesn't matter if it's a Zillow lead, open house lead, you know, you got them on social, you know, whatever it is until you talk to them, nothing will happen. So when I realized that I was like, oh, okay. Like you mean I don't have to do all that stuff. I can just call the people I want to do business with and have the conversation right now. I don't have to spend time, money and energy on all the stuff most agents do.  Why don't I just have conversations instead of like wasting my time doing millers and open houses and making videos and running ads and buying Zillow leads and all the stuff that people do. I was like, why don't I want to spend time, money and energy doing that? Those inefficient activities. When I could just call the exact person I want to do business with for a penny. Why wouldn't I just do that? Yeah. Personal fear of the phone call is fine, Kendra, but the thing is, is all these things come right back to you talking to them on the phone. It's crazy the amount of money, like the thousands of dollars that agents spend to try to not make calls, to just turn around and call the leads that they spent thousands of dollars on. It's crazy, guys.  Remember, it all comes back to this same thing. Right? So why not in your mind, if you're like, oh, well, it's a warm lead. It's a Zillow lead. It's a postcard. It's a mail out. It's an open house. It's a warm lead. Okay. Well, if you want to be Mr. Mega Agent, why don't you just do some reverse psychology on yourself and just take a list of every property owner that owns property that you want to represent and pretend in your mind that they're a Zillow lead or pretend in your mind that they're an open house lead or that they called about your postcard or whatever you got to tell yourself to get in the mindset that this is not a cold lead because guess what? It's not a cold lead. This person lives in your area. Like this is your neighbor. You should feel like most comfortable calling these people and saying how you're doing and introducing yourself and seeing what's going on with them today and letting them know what you do, who you are, and that you're here to help. You're not trying to sell them, by the way. You're not trying to see if they want to buy or sell something.  You don't want to do anything great. Is there an agent you would work with if you were to do something? No? Well, cool. Well, listen, I'm sure you'll do something at some point. Maybe not even for another five or 10 years. Either way, I'd love the opportunity to work with you in that day comes. I'd be hard if I just stayed in touch. Yeah? Great. What's a good email? Boom. Weekly email, done. Stack that to the moon, done. Done. So the only thing between you guys and a million dollars a year are thousands of one-on-one conversations with people in your market. That's it. You can stretch those thousands of conversations over the course of 20 years, 30 years, 40 years for the rest of your life, or you can smash them all into a good three to five years and be done with it. Get to the million dollars a year and move on to bigger and better things. Buying properties, coaching, speaking, writing, whatever you want to do. The world is your oyster at that moment because you're making a million bucks and you're just doing a weekly email every week and you don't have to prospect anymore. Why don't we just build that business now? Instead of like playing around with just sending mail outs forever, hoping that something happens. I don't need to live in a world of hope. Guys, I want to make a million bucks now so I can move on to something else. So, ask your question then. My ears are wide open. So, you have plenty of people on here. Okay, let's say they want to go make their calls. They go and they pull a database of numbers, you know, through Reiner or another source to have the addresses. What are your recommendations for them? Get the phone numbers and then to be able to scrub them against the DNC list because, you know, this is the DC metro area where we have more. We have more lawyers and approaches. So, I'll put a link right here, redaxdiscount.com to get a discount there and just get GeoLeads Plus. You can get 7500 property ownership of your choice. It marks some DNC. Like it marks the DNCs and you don't have to call them if you don't want to. I call them because number one, they're the highest quality phone number. But number two, I'm not calling to sell these people. Again, I'm not calling to sell them. I'm calling to introduce myself. I'm calling to see if there's something I could do to help them. I'm calling to offer a friend, I'm a friendship. I'm calling to see how they're doing and what's going on. I'm thinking about doing anything if there's something I could do to help. So, oh, here, I'll put this here. I've got a platform where you can get all my scripts and all that stuff for free. Joinrickie.com. Weekly email, my weekly email templates are there. All my scripts are there. Everything. What do you think about door knocking? Because I think it's even further than called calling. You're even face-to-face to the people you meet. Like, it's even better. Here's the thing. It's whatever works for you. So, like, what I'm talking about is I'm just going to call everybody. That doesn't work for everyone. I understand that. I'm empathetic towards it. If you want to crush it on social media and it works, and I know people that sold $100 million, several agents sold $100 million on YouTube and TikTok in the past couple years, you know, if that's what you want to do, great. For me, social media kind of attracts more buyers than sellers. So, everybody has to make a decision, right? You know, everybody's going to make money at, say, 7 o'clock at night. The question is, are you going to be home chilling with your family eating dinner while eight of your, you know, 21 listings are being shown, right? Or are you going to be the agent on TikTok who's out showing the properties at 7 o'clock at night because you've got a bunch of buyers coming in? See, we have a choice of how we want to structure our business and everything. As far as door knocking versus cold calling versus open houses, right? It's what works best for you. I don't care what you do. The bottom line is, if you're not talking to people that you do and don't know to help them buy and sell real estate, you're dead. You're not doing nothing. You're not being productive. You're not doing nothing. Nothing. So, like, if you like, if you like door knocking, go knock yourself out. I never door knock because I grew up roofing houses and I'm like, I'm not going to go out in the sunshine if I don't have to. Like, I got enough of that growing up. If I can sit in the air conditioned environment and just like click a few buttons and talk to hundreds of people, well, by all means, that sounds like the most efficient thing for me to do. If I go door knock and three people don't answer, I've got to walk to each house. Hell, I could have dialed like 30 numbers during that same time at the office sitting in the air conditioning. That's just me. You may love door knocking. If you do, go crush it. I don't care what you do. Just do something. I mean, door knocking could be even with commercial. Like, you don't need to be door knocking to homes. You could be door knocking to retail stores, people who own little boutiques. There are, they could be also sellers and buyers too. And it's maybe better to reach them in the day, you know? Figure out, listen, all of the, okay, if you take the weirdest prospecting methods that you've ever heard of, okay, you guys can type something in if you want to. Like, what's the weirdest, craziest, strangest lead gen activity you ever heard of? I promise you, the craziest, weirdest ones, even those, people are making a million bucks a year off of them. Every single lead gen activity works.  Don't door knock to commercial people. I don't care. But you better, again, just talking to thousands of one-on-one people. Whatever gets you to talk to thousands of people one-on-one, over the next three to five years to get to that million bucks a year, I don't care what the path is that you choose to do it. You got to figure out what works best for you. I can't do that for you. But whatever you can tell yourself to go do it, great. Go do it. Thank you. Ricky, you mentioned you had one, I guess, an admin person, ISA. At what point did you bring that person on and how did it expand? I never had an ISA. I never had an ISA. Nobody ever made calls for me. I brought on an assistant to handle all my admin stuff. So, when I got to 30 active listings, I couldn't handle all the showing requests from other buyers, from other agents trying to show my listings. And it bogged me down. I couldn't do my prospecting. I couldn't do all my stuff I wanted to do to continue to build my business. So, that was the first. So, it depends on what the bottleneck becomes in your business. If you're chugging along and you're doing two deals a month and you're handling everything on your own, great. You're good. But when you get to five and 10 deals a month and you find those bottlenecks in your specific business, that's going to be different than my bottlenecks. It's going to be different than Craig's bottlenecks. It's going to be different than Jim's bottlenecks. Everybody has a different bottleneck in their business from how they operate. And so, whatever that bottleneck becomes, that's what you hire somebody to take over. And then you start handing them everything else once they take that off your shoulders. So, she came in. She started setting up the showings for agents wanting to show my listings. And then I started handing her all the transaction coordination stuff and then all the MLS stuff. And then she started doing the postcards and all the other things for me. So, bottleneck and then you kind of reverse it into all the other things that you need them to do. So, a follow-up on that then. So, how do you, what would you say as far as going from that two deals a month, getting stuck at that? To blowing it out and obviously talking with a lot of people and getting a lot of people in your database is a big part of that. But anything else you could... No, there's nothing else. See, that's the simplicity of it. People hear what I'm saying and they're like, Oh, it can't be that simple. It is that simple. If you're stagnant in your business, that means you quit building your database. You just quit building. You quit talking to people you don't know, adding them to your database and then doing your weekly email and all that stuff. You quit building. That's it. When you see these agents that make 200,000 every year forever, they never go above that. They just make that forever and they don't know why. They're living in a mirage because they're getting business and they think any day their business is going to take off, but they quit building their database. They built their database up to the point that they're making 200, then they quit. Then they're just living off the database. When you get to where you're living off your database, you're going to make the same amount of money every year. So, if you build your database up to a million bucks a year and then quit, you live off the database, you make a million bucks a year every year. That's what happened to me. If you're stagnant, it's because you quit building your database. So, continue building your database, putting people in there. Have your lead gen activities that work best for you. Time blog those, crush those, meet new people, create new friends, put them in your database, continue marketing to them so they never forget who you are. It's real simple. How many phone calls do you make a day in average just for us to have an idea about? Back when I built my business, we didn't have dialers. That's not so crazy about what's happening right now. We didn't have autodialers. So, I had a hand dial. You know, this is like the early 2000s, late 2000s, the early 2010s, you know, when I was really in my building stages. So, I would dial 100 a day and it took me from nine to three. And a lot of people say, oh, I'll hand out 100 numbers in a couple hours.  Like I did that. I did it so many times that I know how long it takes to hand out 100 numbers. Okay. It takes that long. And then I would do handwritten letters from like, from, you know, after three, I would do handwritten letters. I would follow up with people, do some emails. And then about five o'clock, I would start looking up numbers to call the next day, which took me like three hours to look up 100 numbers. Because I did it one at a time on Spokio.com, Bigfoot.com, WhitePages.com, Google. I had to look all these up one at a time. I didn't have RedX and the data to be able to go click, click, boom, and get thousands of people's cell phone numbers and then click another button and auto dial them 100 an hour. It's crazy. But I wouldn't, you're muted, but I wouldn't focus on how many, I would focus on how many hours I committed to make the call. So, you can't control if people are going to answer, not answer, talk to you for 30 minutes. You can't control all those different things. But you can control, hey, I said I was going to make calls from 9 to 12. I'm going to make calls from 9 to 12. I'm going to make calls solid from 9 to 12 no matter what happens. I'm going to make calls during that time. And you may have a call session where you have three people talk to you for 30 minutes this time. Next time, you talk to way more people. They were shorter conversations. Just put the hours in and just don't worry about the results. Just do your best to try to become a better communicator. Every call session, you learn a little bit about how to talk and kind of what worked and what didn't work and how to make people feel comfortable with you. And you use that on the next call session and then you get better that call session for the next call session. You use that to get better for the next call session.  Exactly. Just the hours that you decided to do it. A good like back of the mind goal is to make five new friends a day with property owners. If you make five new friends a day with property owners, 250 working days a year, that's 6,000 over five years. You got 6,000 friends with property owners that are getting a weekly email from you on the same day of the week forever with your opinions on stuff, not generic stuff. Don't hire a company to do your email for you guys. Sit down and write it yourself based on how you're feeling about stuff. New listings, new restaurants, market stats, good deals, articles, developments coming. Put your stuff in there. And I actually have a four-week email template system and I actually have four weeks templates where you can just plug and play. If you go to that joinricky.com link, yeah, it takes you to Gold Bar. Gold Bar is the platform. It's all for free there. I've got and you can see every email I did for a year to my clients for the past year. You can see every email I did. Look at it. Get ideas. Use that stuff. Boyd just answered your question and Ricky just did, but Gold Bar is a training platform. So it's got all his stuff on there. It's not a scam. That's it. Yep, I got it. Thank you. I don't see the scripts however, but I'll find them. Yeah, it's right there. As soon as you make an account, it's right there. It says scripts and email templates.  And I think that that everybody signs on to programs like this, hoping that you're going to tell them something that they can do that's going to make it so that they don't have to talk to people. And what I hear you saying for the last 40 minutes is you got to talk to people. And I think that we're just resistant to that. And it's it's just that we do have a I did create a challenge where we do handwritten letters first. The handwritten letters actually do get listings, but the magic behind it is to call after the letters. So this has been a one size fits all, whether you're an introvert, an extrovert, if you're new, if you're experienced, if you want to ramp up your business and really get straight to the source of property owners and everything. We've developed this program where we're doing 30 day listing challenges right there on that Gold Bar platform every month. Weekly calls, the letters, the phone calls. We keep a leaderboard of how many whoever gets the most listings. We give prizes and all that good stuff. So we have something that even the extroverts don't want to make the calls makes it easier because they do the letters. They get they get some they get some calls, but then it's easier to make the calls because you're calling about the letter you sent. So it makes it a little easier, you know, for some people.  You know, they're just happy to call anybody about anything, to talk to them, see how they're doing, see what they could do to help them. And they do it very consistently. Yeah, I think people are scared to call because they feel like they're going to ask for something. But actually, you're not asking for something. You're offering something. It wouldn't matter if I was asking for something, offering something that that again is just another excuse. Another cop out people use. It doesn't matter what you're doing, what you're calling them about. Call them, call them, treat them like family. Yeah, this is what you guys need to think of, okay? If this were my mom, what would I say? If this were my dad, if this were my brother, if this was my daughter, if this was my close family, it's like when when when, you know, if somebody wants to sell something, you're going on a listing appointment, okay? For example, think in your mind, if this were my mom, how would I handle this? What there are questions I would be asking. What are my mannerisms? How is my body language? How am I going to handle this situation? Think, well, how would I treat this person if it were my dad, if my mom, my cousin, my uncle, my best friend from high school, people I'm very comfortable with, people I'm really close with, people I love. When I got that, when I realized that my prospects needed to be treated exactly like a treat my family, that's when my business exploded. Because people felt it, because I wasn't there to make money. I was there to really figure out what they're trying to do and why and help them do it. That's, that's amazing. It is amazing. And that's why I decided to write books and start coaching and stuff. Because no coach talks about this stuff. So I want to just pivot over to the lawsuits. A lot of people are worried about what they can and can't say and how they should approach that. I'm kind of the opinion that we just keep doing business for the most part, like we've been doing business. But what do you take? Yeah, absolutely do. It's really a non-issue at all. You handle every situation as it comes. If somebody brings it up and wants to not try, not pay a buyer agent commission or something, fine. We call those pocket listings. We call those for sale by owners. If you don't want to pay, if you don't want to offer to pay the buyer agent, what's so crazy is when all this started, it's really, it's just a money grab guys. It's just, it's just, and they don't really care what happens to the industry and stuff. It's like the sellers agreed to pay this commission. They were happy with what they netted. They were happy to pay the 5% or 6% regardless if there was a buyer agent involved or not. So it's like, you're happy to pay the 5%. When it was me, why do you care if I take some of the 5% that you agree to pay me and another agent gets some of that? Why do you care so much?  It's no more money that you paid. It's really just a money grab. For everybody and I think it'll get shot down honestly, but you never know with the way everything's ran and you guys as a city, you never know how all this could play out. There's people that think that MLS will change the rules to where you can't offer a buyer agent commission. We'll just put it in the contract and make the offer. But yeah, it's really a non-issue. If they change the rules dramatically, we could lose a lot of agents who just are scaredy cats. Let's just call them. They're just going to run away. They don't know how to handle and how to adapt. What's going to happen is agents that stay are going to get more market share. And they're going to do far better than we were doing before. But just think about it. If they ban commissions from MLS, the only reason to really poach your listing there is to syndicate it to Zillow. Well, if they ban buyer commission, now Zillow isn't making money on their flex program for giving buyer leads. So then they're not going to allow the syndication. I wouldn't think that Zillow would allow the syndication at that point because they're going to want to pay to play now. Now they're going to want us to pay to put our listings on Zillow. Well, in that world, what's the point of putting a property on MLS? You're not advertised into the other agents because you're not paying them anything. And it's not getting syndicated to Zillow to get to the buyers. So now what's the purpose of putting the property on MLS? There's not going to be one. So now in that world, now we live in a world where buyers don't see every property for sale in one spot. So now what happens? Commissions go up. Why? Because now buyers, agents who actually have a buyer are far more valuable in a world where the buyer can't see all the listings. And now if you got an agent that has a seller who might sell or even you have a seller yourself, you're looking at the seller like, hey, I got a buyer, but what are you going to pay me? Because I can just take my buyer to another listing. So in that world, it's going to be like commercial is now. The residential world will turn into what commercial actually is right this second where things are very pocket listed. Things are kind of under the radar.  You just, it takes a little more savvy of an agent to live in that world because the world we have been living in is a lot simpler. But and it's great for consumers because they get to see everything. That's what's so good about it. And they get representation without coming out of their pocket. So the world now is like really, really incredible. And they're just trying to crush it and crash and burn it. But in the opposite world, worst case scenario and stuff, the more business savvy agents will really do well, really do phenomenal. You basically create your own market where you have your own buyers and sellers. Pretty much double into everything just about. You may have some agents you're friends with that you do deals with. And that's worst case scenario though. And like the agents that are just like buyers agents and they get handed leads from Zillow or team leaders and stuff like that, those agents may be the first ones to go. It's going to be the top business savvy agents that will stay.  Go ahead and start sharpening your skills to go out there and become one of the greatest listing agents that the planet's ever seen. Hold on, guys. I got a little special guest. I think we're watching a family moment here. He's shy. Guys, you're watching somebody who's got his values in the right place. Oh, you found the elf. Where was he today? Watch you some Christmas tree cookies. So, yeah, listen, nothing to worry about on that wall suit thing. It'd actually be fun. If that happened, we lose a ton of agents and it would be it would be a lot of fun because we'd make more money. So bring it on. I like that attitude. Anybody else have any questions right now? I fought one on the on the chat looking to get some ideas. We see listings coming out already where there's an offer by a commission much less than what I have, let's say, in my representation contract. And so any ideas, Ricky, on how to work that back into the contract, into the offer conversations with the seller's agent, which seemed to be forbidden up till now? I wouldn't worry about what the listing agent is getting because, honestly, we don't know what the listing agent's getting, or we don't really know what the listing agent's getting. Here, you see the buyer agent commission. I don't know what the listing agent commission. The buyer agent commissions are like 2.4, and then I'll go to closing the listing agent's getting like four, some four or five or something. This is like what in the world is going on here. But I would just put it in the contract. Like, what do you normally get for a buyer? What's your what's your standard? What do you happy with? What do you normally want on a buyer agent commission? Well, we see a lot of two and a half. Two and a half. Yeah. So you could put two and a half. I would just put in other provisions. Seller to pay, buyer agent commission of two and a half percent, or three percent, or whatever it is that you want. You might want to start out at three, and then negotiate down if you have to, you know, or something like that. But I would just start putting it in the contract every time.  But if it's one of these like discounted one-offs, or zero, or whatever, put it in the contract, you know, and then let them figure it out. They need to figure out what they need to counter back at to cover your fee, et cetera. Okay. Thanks, Ricky. Yeah, ma'am. I have a quick question for you. Over the last, well, first of all, back up to that point in Maryland, we cannot add commission to the contract from our buyer. So that's a big no-no. But as far, I mean, on the offer to the seller, we can't get into that. But on the other part, I was going to say is... Can you hear me? Yeah. You cannot include your compensation as a buyer's agent in the offer from the buyer to the seller. Is it a state rule? Is it a local MLS rule? It's a state rule. Okay. Yeah. So that's something you have to kind of tackle and try to figure that out. There are ways around it, but you can't specifically state it. Okay. So anyway, over the last two years, my business has been predominantly death, divorce, downsizing, and transfers since the interest rates started going up. When do you... I'm thinking we still have another two years of that till the pain point gets to where the sellers that are in the house with the lower interest rates are willing to give that up. Do you see anything different than that? Yeah. Than what?  Yeah. Because like I said, most of my business this year was death, divorce, downsizing, and transfers for my listings. Yeah. Ones that had to. It wasn't a choice. Yeah. That's the only people doing deals right now, people that have to. So your question is, how long do I think it's going to be before the trade-up sellers start selling? Yeah. I think they're going to start selling in January. It's going to be a trickle effect because what's happening is, is we've been a year and a half worth of higher rates, longer than that, actually, of higher rates. And so what happens, I mean, the same thing happened back in the 80s and stuff, like people become accustomed to these higher rates. They kind of get used to the fact that rates are going to be higher. We'll see fluctuations, like it was at 8, and then it got down close to 7. It'll probably go back up some, but it's going to hover around here, and people are just going to finally just, see, every day they hate their current home more and more and more. And so it just gets to the point where they're like, okay, screw it, we're just going to go for it.  So I think it's just going to be a trickle. If rates come down quite a bit, we'll see like a big rush. But I think outside of the big rush, if that ever happens, if we ever see like a drop all of a sudden, outside of that, I think it's just going to be a trickle. I don't think we're going to see like this just massive, like, okay, you know, in August, we're just going to see a ton of like trade-up sellers. I just think it's going to be like this trickle that happens, and I think it's going to start in January. I think people are finally, after New Year's, they're going to be like, okay, this is the year. We're going to do this. We're tired of waiting. We can't wait anymore. Our daughter is three now, and two, and we've got to have another room. We can't wait anymore. And so then what happens is the people that used to not be the need-to people now become the need-to people, right? And then rates don't matter as much. So I just think it's going to be a more of a trickle with those. But a nice trickle, not just like a little trickle. It's going to be like a nice flow trickle. Hey, Ricky, outside of the weekly, once you've connected with a remote land. That's all you have to do. It does all the heavy lifting for you. That weekly email does all the heavy lifting for you. You don't have to, I used to try to send Christmas cards, and I would do yearly check-ins with my top 200 clients. I did that for a couple years as I was in the building stages, but then I got to where I was too busy to even do those things and come to find out it didn't matter anyway. They loved when they talked to me the first time. The great first impression I gave them was everything. Then the weekly email kept me in front of them until they decided to buy or sell. Did that process win everyone over? No, no process is going to win everybody over, but it will win a lot of people over, especially if you treat them like family. So it's that family feel every time they communicate with you, that family feel when they call you out of the blue and, you know, 17 months and they just want to know what's sold in their neighborhood or something and you get right back to them. You don't try to sell them. You get them the information. It's just doing those things where they just feel like, man, he just really takes care of me whenever they need something. Just that's what keeps them coming back. It's not necessarily, you know, the closing gifts and the, you know, the check-ins and the stuff like that. One thing I did love to do when I put in my weekly email a lot was I just asked a lot of people to lunch. Like anybody that would be willing to sit down and have lunch with me, I was just, if I could have lunch five days a week with clients and pay for lunch and just sit down and just get to know them better and enjoy some time and, you know, talk about real estate if they wanted to, whatever, the more of those I could do, the better because I'm just deepening those relationships and stuff. So it's like the weekly email should be your foundation, your bread and butter for the nurturing process and that anything you do on top of that is just consider that a bonus.  It's like you make the weekly email, the foundation, sprinkle social media on top, you know, like salt and pepper.  But yeah, that would be literally could be all of it. How did you decide on weekly versus any other? You know what it was? I just listened to my clients. Back in 2007, when I started getting back in the game, I got so many messages from people who wanted a weekly list of foreclosures because foreclosures were big back then. So they wanted this weekly list of foreclosures. So I started sending this weekly list of foreclosures to all these people that asked for it. There were sort of like 10 or 20 people at the time. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to start sending this to everyone in my database, which was like 500 people at the time. I'm going to start sending this to everybody every week. So it started out this weekly report of foreclosures where I was also given some extra market information, doing a little self-promotion, some new listings I was getting and stuff like that. And then over time, as the foreclosures kind of dwindled and went away, I just continued to send it every week and I kind of morphed into this market report. And then I just got better and better and better at it. But it actually originated from back then, and I was just listening to my clients. That's what they wanted. And the rest kind of just fit into place. And I didn't even realize it, but what I was doing was building a brand. I didn't know that that's what I was doing. I was building a brand with the people that get the email. And actually, I was doing social media. You see, email is social media. It's a place that you post original, consistent content to stay in front of people, yada-yada. It's a different platform. It's a different format. But it's the same thing as social media. It's like I didn't even realize that I was doing social media doing the email, that I was building a brand doing the email. I didn't realize all this at the time, but looking back, that's exactly what I was doing. Man, well, I can't thank you enough. I think everybody who's sitting on this call, Ricky, has gotten tremendous value. I mean, I took pages and notes myself. A couple of things I carried away from it were it doesn't matter what you do, just identify your thing, your most efficient thing. Do it efficiently and do a lot of it now to prime your pump to get ready for the next year. And every single people, I've scrolled through the whole Zoom, every single one of you is going to make a million dollars. It's a matter whether you're going to make it in six months, a year, or 10 years. And that road is paved with conversations. And the person that's in charge of that, the exciting news is you. And so I hope that that came through today. Ricky, we can't thank you enough. I know they can connect with you on YouTube. You put the links in there for the Join Ricky. If they want the Red X discount, they search your name on YouTube, right? To find you if they want to sort of follow you and get you on there. What else should they do? Or how else can they stay connected with you? Right here, right here. I forgot about this. You can text me here too.<PHONE_NUMBER>. And I send out daily little motivational text messages. But that'll also send you the coaching program and all that stuff. And I look at all those replies. I write all those text messages. So you can also hit me up there. But hey, enjoy it, guys.  Hope you got something really good out of this. And let me know if there's something I could do to continue helping you guys. Thanks, Ricky. We really appreciate it. See you guys. Appreciate you big time. Thank you. Thank you.


Hi. Hi. Guess what? What? I hit one million YouTube subscribers. I know. We have celebrate. How? Andies. Andies? Ice cream? Yeah. Hi. We're being so awkward. Maybe you are. I'm not. Well, you didn't give me context to what the video was about. I know. I just told her, hey, come say hi really quick. This is the video. I forgot to film other parts of the day. So basically, this is going to be somewhat it, but not really. Riveting content. Okay. Also, so this is on a tripod. So this is kind of hard to move over, but you can see all those with this huge bin full of spin art paints, spin art paintings that I'm sending out today. Oh, you're still here. I thought you left. I'm going to let you rephrase that. You're kind of tripping over. All right. Let's, let's go. Let's go bring this out to the car. Wait, did she just really leave? You're not going to help. Okay. Let's roll this out here. Oh, look. Just typical Monday. Did you ever think this would be our life? This? Yeah. Or like doing spin art? Like small business. Not really. Kind of like it. We've been doing it for like two years. Oh no. That's what's crazy. It's closer to two years than not. So did I tell you? What? That one of my videos is going to be on TV. What are you talking about? One of my videos will be on literally national television. Which one? Well, I'll tell you if it goes on national television. But A&E picked it up.  Yeah. A&E picked it up and I'll tell you guys more about it and I'll tell you after this. Just dropped them off. That guy over there is taking all of them. Got 60 to 65 going out today. Love it. Let's go. Now it's a quick stop at Michaels and then we're going to go back home and I'm doing a 7 p.m. CST time spin art live tonight at my house on my Tiktok live. So I'm going to go to Michaels and then go home. I probably won't bring the camera inside just because I want to get in there. Go home quick. Get some stuff done. But yeah. Guys check this out. I got a package from Bang. Like what? It was just today. I got this like cool gym bag. Kind of nice. There's some like nice goodies in here. I'll show you. Cool bottle and the headband or what is this? That's it. Cool. Thanks a lot Bang. Appreciate it. Okay. Well, I'm back home. Obviously. I dropped off packages. That was it. I went to Michaels. Paint and some 18 by 24 canvases. How about them chiefs? By the way. Amazing. Okay. This is the end of this video. Again. I'm liking these videos in 2022. Just kind of filming my everyday life.  Showing you guys behind the scenes pretty much. You want to see anything else? Please let me know down in the comments below. Or hit me up on email. Email. Hit me up on the DM's on IG. And until then I'll see you guys next time. Oh and yes. I have the gold play button on the way from YouTube for reaching a million subs. That's exciting. And I'll be on TV. Well my video will be on TV. Maybe not my face. Maybe my face. But it's a video I took about a year and a half ago. So pretty happy about it. We'll see if it works out. Okay guys. I'll catch you in the next Johnny Q video. Love you all. Thanks for watching. If this gives anyone a seizure I'm so sorry. I should put up a warning. I should put up a warning that says this video might cause...


So, I want to tell you a story today about intelligence and intelligence collection. And when you talk about intelligence, unless there's been a well-known leak in the press or something, there aren't a whole lot of examples to talk about. And we'll certainly talk about those. But I was really wanting to do today is talk about some actual projects. And most of the time, like my intelligence clients, they don't want me to talk about what I'm doing for them, for obvious reasons. Sometimes I get lucky like two years ago and I had a client where we did a project maybe like six, seven years prior. I was able to talk about that, but normally that's not the case. So a couple years ago, I decided that I wanted to become my own intelligence client, okay? So what I ended up doing is I wanted a business with my girlfriend, and we have an online retail business. And it's doing pretty well. We're in our second year, and it's growing. And I like to think the reason that it's growing is not because we work hard, but we do work hard. I like to think it's because we have got these little hacker brains, and we just have better intelligence than everybody else. Or we create better intelligence, I should say.  In addition to the other examples I'm going to show. So I'm going to show you how we do intelligence campaigns not only on our competitors, but also on the sales channels that we use. And I'll describe why that's important in a bit here. The other thing that's important for retail businesses is you want to know exactly what kind of inventory to buy before you buy it. I'll show you the intelligence that we use to do that. And I'm also going to show you how we manipulate markets. Or as I tell my mother, how we protect our investments. All right, so when people hear the word intelligence, usually they think immediately military intelligence, right? Well, there's not a whole lot of that that applies to what we do. You know, the other side of it is either business intelligence or competitive intelligence. And those two are really pretty different. But I think it's important that we describe the differences between the two. Business intelligence is what's happening within your business. You use internal data and you focus on knowing your operations and you focus on knowing your resources. And what you're really trying to do is make your whole operation just more effective and more efficient and everything. And that's all very useful. But it's also very different than competitive intelligence. Because with competitive intelligence, you're trying to find what's happening outside your organization. And it doesn't matter if you are a business or a political organization, or if you are a investigative journalist trying to collect information. This is all more competitive intelligence.  So this is the area where we're gonna live today. We're gonna live in the competitive intelligence area. So a lot of people, they think competitive intelligence, that's kind of, that's kind of murky. But it's important to know that competitive intelligence is taught in every top business school. In fact, if you are running a business, it's your responsibility to do this kind of stuff. And it's also important to know that there is actually a professional association of people who do competitive intelligence. With newsletters and conferences and a whole shot. So I wanna talk about the title a little bit, Applied Intelligence. So when I'm talking about applied intelligence, I'm talking about intelligence that's actionable, right? Something that's gonna change the way you're doing things. The problem is, is that most of the intelligence that's collected for the organizations that do collect it, it's not actionable. It won't actually change what they're doing. And the other problem is, most organizations tend to over collect intelligence when they do collect it. So when you do that, it comes at a higher cost and you've got more exposure. The other thing is that a lot of the intelligence that's collected is done because people just feel obligated to collect it. Not with any real reason. So for example, I don't know how many of you saw this, this is something I had up, I was tweeting about it. I came up with a little scraper that every hour would go off to the DEF CON site and it would make a printable, mobile friendly version of the DEF CON speaker schedule. And it's still up there if you're looking for it. And if you go through my Twitter account, you can find it. So I'm doing this and it's cool and it's useful. And I know a lot of people were using it because I was collecting analytics on this stuff, right? So I got the access, time, IP addresses, I wrote a cookie so I could tell people they were looking at it more than once. But this is more analytics, it's not really intelligence. And the reason I don't really consider this to be good intelligence is because there is absolutely nothing in these logs that would have changed anything that I was doing.  But again, that's not gonna really affect anything that I was doing.  And it also potentially would have created some actionable intelligence. Because if I had this information and if I had it in aggregate, I could make some projections as to which talks are gonna be really popular, which ones are gonna run out of seating and it could have been useful for people doing speaker ops. I didn't do any of this kind of stuff, but I see the potential use that could have changed the way things were done. Okay, the second part of the title, information that's not there or isn't there, that is a direct reference to metadata. Now, for most of us, we had no idea what metadata was until the Edward Snowden disclosures came across.  You know, we all know what that is and we knew that things that we were doing online, on our phones, even at the library, were now subject to surveillance. And there was something called metadata that was involved in this. And people in the United States, we were pretty much confused. But fortunately, we have public officials that can help us in this area. So Diane Feinstein comes up and says, this was a very hastily called meeting from the Intelligence Committee. And she goes, as you know, this is just metadata. There's no content involved. Okay, so as a citizen of the United States, this made me feel pretty damn good, all right? It's just, okay, so you know I went to the library, but you don't know what I looked at. Okay, okay, that's pretty good. So then our own president got involved. So it's nobody's listening to your phone calls. That's not what this program's about. They're just looking at names, or they're not looking at names and they're not looking at content, but sifting through this so-called metadata. Okay, they're sifting through the data, okay? And I think I'm pretty familiar with data. I'm not familiar with a SIFT command. You know? So this was good. This was very good. This was very good because now I know more about metadata. You can SIFT it, okay? So I'm starting to feel pretty good about metadata, but I really got confused then when Michael Hayden, who was the former NSA boss chimed in, and he said, oh, we kill people based on metadata. So okay, I need to know a little more now. I need to know just a little more. Okay, so metadata. Metadata is so important, and it's largely misunderstood. And we probably all know that metadata is data that describes other data, right? But more importantly than that, it's data that provides context for information. And usually the very best metadata doesn't even really exist. It needs to be created, all right? And that's where the fun is. That's where the data hacking happens. So if you study metadata, you know, academically in college, they've got this whole plethora of categories for metadata. I like to keep it simple and say there's two kinds, basically. There's parametric data, and that's data that has to be collected or created. And then there's embedded data, and this is probably where most people got familiar with metadata initially, like in the 90s. And that's generally user-created. It tends to be kind of stuff like the embedded headers in a digital photograph that describes the camera that was used when the picture was taken, the F stops, Geocodes. In fact, this stuff has become like a whole branch of law now, because this is all submissible in courts. So I've got a couple of examples of these and some of the data that's leaked this way. This is one I actually used last year if you're at my talk, and I'm using it again because I just love it. This is a selfie of a Russian soldier that was uploaded to Instagram. And unfortunately, before he uploaded it, he didn't remove the Geocodes. So it revealed the fact that while his government said they had no troops in Ukraine, he was in Ukraine. Another example, another war-related example, this is kind of a famous one. This is the Tony Blair memo. This was the memo that was the justification for the invasion of Iraq in what, 2002, 2003, something like that, right after 9-11. And it was actually used by Colin Powell when he went to the United Nations to make his justification. And the assumption was that this was done by area specialists, and it was all original work, well researched. What we find out, it was actually plagiarized. And not just plagiarized, but it was plagiarized by a graduate student someplace in the UK. Oh, that was the original document, was a graduate student's paper. And they know it was plagiarized because not only was the content the same, but so were the grammatical errors. So where this gets interesting though is in the metadata.  And some of it is for version control and all kinds of stuff. But if you look at the metadata here, we can see that the people who did the plagiarizing, we can figure out who they were. And we can see that they were not area specialists, but they were actually political advisors to Tony Blair. So it's kind of a nasty thing. This kind of stuff happens a lot though. The CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, a couple years ago, he wanted to just to put a PowerPoint presentation online. That was just kind of a general status report for how things were happening at Google. What he neglected to do though is that when he made that report, he actually made a copy of a very confidential PowerPoint presentation that was for internal use only. And he did a lot of editing of the slides. What he neglected to do was edit the speaker notes. And within the speaker notes, he leaked the existence of a brand new project called Google Drive. And that was well before it ever was officially announced. So watch what you put in your speaker notes because there's a lot of, you know, it's out there. Okay, so let's talk, that was embedded metadata. Let's look a little bit about parametric metadata and see how that's used. So according to the NSA, this is their own admission. This is what they collect. They collect phone numbers of parties making phone calls. They collect the time a call was placed. They collect the duration of a phone call and also who initiated the call. Okay, that's kind of invasive, right? But you know, it's actually, they're not doing anything that any Android app isn't making available to the developer, right? I mean, it's, stuff's in there. It's in all your phones if you have an Android. But with this metadata, you can get a lot of really interesting stuff. What they're really after is the relationships between callers, okay? Because the metadata creates the context within the phone calls, how they were placed. And within that, you can figure out the relationships of the callers. And these relationships can then be profiled. And once you've profiled them, you can pick out the anomalies and outliers. And at that point, it becomes possible to differentiate between a phone call being made by a parent at work to their child, making sure they got home from school, okay? That phone call is gonna look very different than some criminal operative calling in for instructions. It's gonna look very different. And they're also able to identify things like burner phones because those things are big outliers that kind of stick up when all this stuff gets profiled. The other thing is you can look at these, the patterns that people are calling and the relationships, and you can tie them to other events. And if other events affect the way people relate, there may be a connection between that and those events. So these are the kinds of things that the NSA looks for. These are the real red flags. And they'll go three hops, okay? So what that means is if you have a phone call unknowingly with somebody who has had a phone call with somebody who is a person of interest, when all suddenly you're kind of a person of interest too. So that's how that all works. So you could look at this and say, well, yeah, it makes sense that they would look at metadata because it's the easy way out. Otherwise they'd have to look at all these conversations and they'd probably have to do some kind of speech to text conversion and deal with languages and they'd have to deal with dialects and all that kind of stuff. But it's just better data. Just flat out better data. It's already digital. It can be processed, but it needs to be created, okay? And that's the important thing about metadata. All these relationships and stuff need to be figured out. It's kind of like, how long do you need to play the game of Clue before you know it's Mrs. Peacock killing Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick, right? If you're good at this, you're gonna figure it out long before the other people that are playing the game. So that's where the mind games come in with metadata. Okay, so how do we do metadata? How do we process things? Well, I'm not the NSA. I don't have unlimited resources and stuff. So the area where I live is called OPSEC, or Operational Security, and that is a military term. And what that refers to is looking at your day-to-day operations to see what kind of intelligence you're leaking. And if you had an adversary looking at your day-to-day operations, what kind of actionable intelligence could they collect? Okay, well, I do this online. The internet is my theater. So I look at things like employment postings. Last year, I gave examples about how companies leak strategic plans through their employment postings. And I think you can kind of figure out how that could probably happen, right? If you think individuals leak information about themselves and social media, wait till you get a whole organization together leaking information on social media. A lot of information gets leaked this way. The way orders are fulfilled, so if you go online, place an order on a website, and if you watch the process, you see what kind of emails you get back, you look at order numbers, all this kind of stuff, you can learn a lot about the way a company fulfills items, where things are shipped from, all that kind of stuff. If they have a store, and if they maintain a store, you can learn all kinds of stuff about pricing strategies, the products they choose to stock, the products that they choose not to stock, very rich source of intelligence. If you sell something to a company online, the way they buy things can be very revealing. In fact, you can tell a lot about an organization's financial health just by looking at the check numbers, just little things like that. And then there's the whole regulatory area, and this is largely things that are done for transparency, financial filings, things that get filed with the courts, variants, licenses, all that kind of stuff. Together, this is where I get competitive intelligence from. This is where I live. And for my counter-intelligence clients, this is what we protect, okay? So the first area I'm gonna talk about is for things that we really have been able to capitalize on is sequential numbers. And the privacy leak, the data leaks that happen with sequential numbers, it's really staggering. Sequential numbers are used everywhere.  They're on your vehicle identification number, social security numbers, ticket numbers, order numbers. I mean, they are literally everywhere. And from a data standpoint, you need unique identifiers to represent things like orders, people, all that kind of stuff. But you don't need sequential numbers. And typically, the only reason these numbers become sequential is because it's sloppy programming. Somebody programs a online app, and instead of providing a unique order number, they basically reveal the index for that order and at some table someplace, right? So they end up being sequential. Well, unless you've got charged backs and weird things going on, but you can pretty much count on these things being sequential. So I'm gonna show you a little story, I'm gonna tell you a little story to show the power of sequential numbers and how the US government almost let an entire generation be susceptible to identity fraud, all right? So here's how it happened. Social security cards, they all have numbers on them. And the first three are an area number, the middle two are a group number. I really don't care too much about those. They basically kind of identify the regions you're from and that kind of thing and where things were processed. But the last four digits are interesting because those were serial numbers. And from 1935 up until 1972 when they changed the law, they were truly sequential numbers. But it wasn't a big deal because, I don't know about you guys, but I grew up like in the 70s and I was probably 14, 15 years old when I got my social security card. And if I had gone with a buddy or if there had been somebody else applying for the number at the same time, we would have got sequential social security numbers. Not a big deal because there wouldn't be a whole lot to connect these two people together. So if you knew one number, you probably couldn't guess the other one because you wouldn't know who the other person was, right? Well, this all changed in 1972. These numbers became no longer sequential. And I don't know why they did that, but I know the way the government works. And I know it wasn't because they had a lot of foresight and were thinking about the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Because in 1986, the IRS said, if you are going to declare a dependent on your taxes, that dependent needs to have a social security number. And I think it was probably done more for tax reform to weed out fraudulent activity on taxes because the year they did this, there were 7 million fewer dependents claimed on tax forms. But again, I believe it was an accident that in 72 they stopped doing the sequential numbers. It wasn't because of this, I can't believe it was. But if they hadn't changed the law in 72, this would have been the scenario. You've got three kids back in the late 80s. You need to declare them as dependents on your tax forms. You've got kids that are maybe ages five, three and one or something. They don't have social security numbers, so what do you do? You go to the post office, you go to the Social Security Administration, and you file for social security cards for all of your children at once. So the bigger the family, the bigger the threat because each of these siblings will have sequential social security numbers. And it's pretty easy to pick up a social security number, right? If you work in HR, if you do credit kind of stuff, or if somebody dies, you're all familiar with the Social Security death list, right? As soon as you die, if you're an American citizen, your social security number gets published. It becomes public, so nobody uses it. But if you know one of these numbers and you know they have siblings, it would be trivial to guess what their social security numbers are. So I'm very thankful that they changed the law, but it would have been catastrophic otherwise if they hadn't. Okay, so how do we use sequential numbers in our business? And sequential numbers, again, are usually not thought of as being metadata, but they really are. So my girlfriend and I, we started our business and we had tried other things before and nothing really caught on. But we got excited about this one because our month-to-month sales were pretty good. We were having like 150% increase in sales pretty much pretty consistently every month that we were going on this. And I was excited. I mean, this was growing a lot faster than my consulting practice. And I think probably in the next year or two, it's going to surpass my consulting practice, I think. But we were getting very confident at this point, right? You know, along by August and September, we were plowing money into the business. Everything that we were making, we were putting back in plus some. So we were investing in an inventory, we were investing in space, shelving, fulfillment equipment like scales and all kinds of stuff.  We had about six months of consecutive growth. We're in this now, okay? And then came October. You know, sales just went through the floor. So what you need to remember here is that we sell on a number of different channels and probably 80% of our business comes from this one channel. And our business on that channel was really, really off. And we were getting very concerned because we were still plowing money into this business, right? So we're thinking, you know, we don't know this business. We've only been at this for a few months. Did we enter at a bubble? You know, did we hit the peak of the bubble? Now this is, it's going to be this from now on? You know, we didn't know. So we were trying to figure out what was going on. We're pulling up spreadsheets. We're looking at old orders. We were trying to get a clue, right? So my girlfriend's reading off order numbers and amounts and stuff and I'm plugging things into a spreadsheet. And we both noticed at about the same time that the order numbers were getting bigger. And then it was like, okay, we need to find two orders that were close together. And we found two that were placed almost at the same time and the order numbers that we were getting from this channel were incremental. Well they weren't incremental, they were sequential, right? It's like, okay, we got something now. So here's what we did. We took the last order number that we had to fulfill in October and we subtracted the last order number we had from September. And this gave us an estimate of the number of orders that were fulfilled through the sales channel by all of our competitors for the month of October. Pretty cool, huh? We knew that they fulfilled 6,500 orders roughly that month. This was our bad month, mind you. So we're thinking, well, our average order, we figured out to be 1248. And we had no reason to believe that our orders were any different than anybody else's that was using the sales channel. And we determined this to be pretty typical. It's very competitive. So this was pretty typical. So we took our average sale, and by the way, that should not be July, that should be October. We multiply it by the number of orders that we estimated for October. And we figured out that the gross sales on this channel in the month of October, our bad month, was just over $81,000. All right, that's pretty cool. So now let's look at the other months. So we took the last order number from the last order that we fulfilled coming from the sales channel from April, May, June, July, all the way through October and we were able to figure out the number of orders that were placed, right? And from this, we were able to figure out the gross sales for that channel, right? Fun with metadata, cool stuff, right? We were happy because we looked at our October sales and it's like, well, it's not consistent with the channel. The market is fine.  We did something that caused our sales to be off or maybe it was just a fluke, but we did not enter the market at the beginning of a bubble. So we were able to sleep much better at night knowing this, okay? So better living through metadata. So this is what the channel sales actually looked like. Even though ours was really down for October, theirs was actually up a little bit. So we're like, well, what else can we figure out? Well, if you wanna figure out what you can figure out, write down what you know. Well, we know that the channel that we were selling on, their commission's around 20%. So we're able to figure out how much commission they were making every month. And they're making $15,000, $16,000 a month commission. It's like, well, that's interesting. Well, we also know that when somebody buys something on this channel, they're charged for postage and as resellers, we get some of that back, but the channel keeps $1.25 on every sale. So we're able to look at their postage that they get and we're able to figure out that their average monthly profit for this sales channel, this website, is about $24,000 a month and that they have annual profits of about $300,000 a year. Well, this really got us thinking, we're thinking this is probably not information they wanted to share, probably not with somebody who's got 20 years of web development experience.  I can't imagine that it takes anybody more than a couple hours a month to run this, seriously. They don't advertise, they have no expenses, they carry no inventory. Their business model's clearly better than ours. So for now, but again, all because of metadata and sequential numbers. So I'm gonna look a little bit at how we buy inventory. One of the things that I've learned in retail is that there's a market price for everything. And if you're lucky, you will get the market price if it's inventory, as it gets older, you tend to kind of lower the price over time. So you really wanna get that market price, but you're not gonna make it in retail by trying to charge for more than market. You know, that's a good way to not sell stuff. So the way you make money in retail is not by selling stuff. You make money when you buy stuff, right? Because if something has a market value, you know you can probably sell it for that. But if you can buy it for well below market, that's where you make your money. So procurement is really important for us. And there's a number of websites where we buy stuff too. And we sell on multiple websites, but there's one channel that's got like 80% of our business. It's the only true market that we really deal with. And I refer to it as a true market because it's large enough. I mean, there's, I don't know how many people sell on this market, but there's a lot of them. They're not eBay, but they're big, okay? You know, and there's literally millions of products out there. So it's mature enough. There are enough professional sellers out there. There's enough market demand supply and demand curve going on. So that it is a true market.  So what we do is we have bots, we have software that goes off and autonomously looks for things that we might wanna buy. And it compares them to our main channel where we sell. And it looks for market prices. And it comes up with a little report like this for us. This would be really time consuming to develop on our own. Having software that does this is really nice. Basically what it does, it identifies the item where it found it, what the price is, what the market price is. Anything with a margin of less than 300%, we really don't deal with. And then it tells us if we should buy it or ignore it, which is really cool. It's a real time saver for us. So the little buy thing, there's actually a link. If you click on it, it'll actually go off and show you where you can buy it. And it's, like I said, it's a real time saver. The next step would be to automate this so that we automatically buy our inventory. We don't have to think about it. Kind of like, was it two years ago? The bots that I wrote that bought cars. Over a nine month period, we bought like $20 million worth of cars. Something like that. So one of the reasons that we're able to do this is because we're selling unique items. And there are major, major privacy issues for retailers that sell unique items. So unique items, truly unique items, would be things where there's only one of. So real estate. You've got an address. There's one piece of real estate there. Vehicles. You've got a stock number. You've got a VIN. It directly identifies a specific vehicle. Original art is another one. You only have one copy of an original art unless it's like a signed photo or something. Even then, you've got a numbering system to identify it. Then there's also likely unique items. That would be things like first edition books, autographed items, most used things. And these are things where it's possible that you've got two copies of something but you probably don't. It's rare enough where they only probably have one copy of a first edition of Catcher in the Rye, for example, because it's rare enough. So when you've got a situation like this, here's what we do. Remember that we were very new to this. We did not know this industry at all, but we wanted to learn. And what we did is we wrote software that automatically collected the entire inventory of what we considered to be our main competitors. And this channel actually made it really easy for us to do this, because they actually list the top resellers on the channel. So we would look at all of their inventory and we would do it again. And basically the delta, the difference between these two over maybe like a day or a week's time, would give us metadata that described what they sold and for how much and also what didn't sell during that period. So this is how we learned about our competition. And we did this a lot. So the more of this we did, the more metadata we got that described what sold, how much, how long their inventory stayed online before it was sold. And again, what didn't sell. And the worry we're able to do with this is because you look at the inventory one day, you look at it another day, if something's missing here, you assume that it sold for the last known price, right? And this is, I mean, you can tell so much about businesses that sell unique or probably are likely unique items. And if you think of all the businesses out there that put all their inventory out online, you can study this to the point where you can almost do their books for them. You know what their money is coming in. So okay, one more. How do we protect our investments? Well, we have software that looks for situations like this. So if we're seller C and our price is 19.50 and we're competitive with sellers D and E that are selling for a little bit more of this, we have software that'll go out and it'll flag situations like this where people for whatever reason, they're dumping stuff for below market value. So we have software that goes off and we immediately buy these things, okay? This is how we kind of pseudo manipulate our markets. So if we find things that are underpriced like that, we just buy them, they become our inventory and we're protecting our investment. But again, we couldn't do this without intelligence. And like I said, I have to believe if we were just typical sellers, we would just kind of not be doing that well. You gotta really know the business. And in our case, our proprietary intelligence tools and our collection of metadata really make the difference for us. So if you find this kind of thing interesting, you can follow me on Twitter and I'll leave my Twitter handle up for the rest of the slides here. I tend to almost live tweet while I'm developing, you know, like I'll talk about bugs I'm finding in my own code and stuff like that. The other thing you can do is watch the DEF CON website. This set of slides will be made available on that website. These are much more complete than what you've got on your conference DVD. There was also an article written about me on the Christian Science Monitor last week. That's something you might wanna check out. Six of my other DEF CON talks are online. They're all on YouTube. And with the exception of, I think, one, they all involve intelligence and competitive intelligence. And then finally, the last thing you might wanna do is this is the book that I wrote. This is actually the second edition of the book I wrote. And right after this, I am heading over to the No Starks booth to do a book signing. If you just have a question, that'd be a great time to sit and talk. And I'd really love to see you there. So thank you very much.