Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Good morning.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: It is 02:00 p.m. oh, no, it's noon, high noon here on a Thursday.
[00:00:07] Speaker A: 09:00 a.m. on this very beautiful, sunny San Diego day where I got my blinds are down because we get the morning set in the room.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Well, we have quite a show today about a loan officer who will be joining us, who's created his own platform, was out there originating and seeing the trends of if you have a following big or small, it's more likely to be able to lead to opportunity. And I think that's what he's going to get into, which I posted on it last night. Mike, I've had more and more opportunities from us doing the show, and I don't know what would the analogy guess? People naturally go to like, working out, but all of a sudden it's been 52 weeks, right? Like we started last June, where we're past 52 straight weeks when we started. I can see why they say like, 99% of podcasts don't get past seven. The 7th episode that I think I had done a couple in my, the mobile patio, I think got to like seven to ten, and I didn't keep it up. So it's on. All of a sudden now you're seeing the results and it might, you know, whether it's in impressions, views, or just the people reaching out an opportunity. And I, you know, Mike, going to get into that today, I'm sure, but I'm sure you're seeing it, too. And I guess we should use this to encourage others to do what we did.
[00:01:32] Speaker A: I think that, you know, you don't know what you don't know. And it's like, even if, you know, let's say you go to seven to ten episodes and you've been doing it once a month, you're like, well, we've been doing it for a year because we've been doing it every month and we don't really see any results. So I guess, I guess we better stop pouring money into something that doesn't work. And I think it's just something that you got to sit there and be more consistent on the consistency of, well, how many phone calls are you going to make? How many emails are you going to send or even the other way around? How many emails you send before you get to the phone call? And then how many phone calls you make before you actually show up on somebody's door to go chase after either the lead, the referral source, or what does it take to even if, or if you have the deal going on to go close the deal, to meet them in person. And I think that it goes to show how much we need to be able to as salespeople and for our listeners and our viewers that are out there, how much, if you are in sales, how much consistency you need to bring. And this is just one aspect in our podcast and our show. Not just, not just showing up for the show, but how you do anything is how you do everything. So we don't just do this for our show, we're also doing this in our email campaigns. We're doing this in our LinkedIn follow up, in our email follow up, in our telephone follow up, and then in the work, in the background work that we do when Michael and I are talking for him at 01:00 in the morning and me at 10:00 at night, in our follow up before the show and sometimes on the weekends. And I think that these are just things that if you may not see behind the scenes, but we do it. And I know that for our viewers and our listeners that are out there, they also, if they are doing it, then they may be seeing some results. And if you don't see the results yet, you just need to stick to it. You're only 5ft from gold and I think you need to be able to continue. We talked about that last night a little bit, Mike, 5ft from gold. Just keep on doing it so you can see the results.
[00:03:36] Speaker B: Yeah. Mike Mills, who's joining us today, is going to show us that you can do both. It's not one or the other. So we're going to bring him here into the studio and he's going to talk. You can be a producing loan officer and you can do the podcast piece for, as I talked about in the beginning, to diversify and build a platform, because Mike talked about, when I spoke with him, Mike Mills. Wow, this is really mic that. We're gonna have three mics.
[00:04:04] Speaker C: We're over miked. We're over miked here.
[00:04:08] Speaker B: In all of our prepping, it never occurred to me we were gonna have three mics on a mic'd up show. So you throw it in my face, though, and now, now it's very obvious.
[00:04:17] Speaker C: Yes, we are super mic'd. And by the way, I want to apologize for being tardy to our event. I didn't realize we were starting right on time. And then I had just wrapped up my podcast that I just did. So I was like finishing that. I looked, I was like, oh, crap. And then I got here, I was like, maybe we'd have a few minutes, like, no, man, we're going. So let's go. I'm good. I'm ready to go, though.
[00:04:35] Speaker B: Yeah, we're right into it. And we are. We're live on LinkedIn. We're live on YouTube. But what we really do this for is for our podcast. So if you're listening on Spotify on YouTube, on Apple, please give it a, like, a follow. Recommend it that this is where we are really trying to add value.
Mike, I was going to tell your origin story, but you might as well tell it how you understood as a loan officer building an audience and then choosing podcast. And I think we also want to touch on, like, you went from local to more of a national. And you want to talk about what changed in that mindset, too, so that others can learn how to get to where you are and how it can happen overnight.
[00:05:25] Speaker C: I'm still climbing the mountain, but. But thank you for that. Yeah, no, I. So I've been a loan officer, you know, producing loan officer for almost 15 years. Been doing this for a little bit. And it's one of those things where when I started doing mortgages, you know, it was just. It was like a call center deal. I'm on the phone talking to folks, you know, trying to get leads, that kind of thing. And I, um. And then I moved into the retail world, which is like, you have to go out and get your own business, so you have to actually be the one that's out there, you know, meeting agents and getting, you know, creating relationships and doing all that kind of stuff. And. And I did that for a very long time as well. And really, you know, got pretty good. I can. I can talk to people and love having conversations with folks and love meeting people and finding out about them and all that kind of stuff. So. So that worked out, you know, pretty well for a long time. And then we got to the world in 2020 and 2021, uh, where business just exploded. Right. Money's incredibly cheap. Um, everybody was out there just, you know, making great money, selling real estate, doing mortgages, title. And if you were in and around real estate for the last, you know, for those two or three years, you were killing it. Everybody was. And you didn't have to do anything, like, really, you could just sit at your house and your phone to ring, and people knew what you did. Well, just like anything else, when I got into. When I was doing leads, when I was. It was during the refi time. This was like 2007, 2008. Rates were low. Well, I knew rates were going to go up, and I knew I had to get out of just doing refinances and moving into purchases. So that's why I switched over to retail, because I knew that low rate environment wouldn't last. I needed to get my chops at doing purchase business, so I started doing that. Well, after rates went down again and we got into a ton of refinances, we were still doing purchases, actually, primarily doing purchases still.
I knew that when rates went back up, which they would, because that's what they do, that it wasn't going to be, you could just sit around and do nothing. Like, you had to find a new way to do it. And then when we add into all of this, the advent of technology, where now you have social media, now AI is creeping in the way that lending is handled in general, because I think things like blockchain, and I'm not talking about crypto, but just all of the financial tools that are going to start to adjust how we do stuff in our industry. I knew I needed to find another route to start being able to put myself out there and get more and more business because, you know, I didn't anticipate it was going to happen like this, where, you know, we're literally, I read an article yesterday, this is the, in the last 25 years, this is the most, or, you know, depressed or whatever you want to call it, time for mortgages that we've seen in 25 years. Like, we're doing fewer mortgages now than we've ever done in 25 years. Even, you know, worse than real estate because you got new homes and things like that that are still coming up. But so it's one of those things where, you know, I knew there had to be something that I needed to add to my arsenal. Well, one of the things, as you can tell, that I like to do is talk. I love talking to people. I love, you know, having conversations. I'm not a. It's funny because I'm not a small talk dude. Like, if you put me in a networking group where there's like 25 people that are all trying to sell their own crap, like, I'm not that you're gonna find. I'm gonna go find one guy or gal and I'm gonna go talk to them as long as I can because I don't want to talk about the weather and, you know, how your kids are, like, I'm just not interested.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: How are you at high school reunions, then? Cause it's the same question 20 straight times.
[00:08:48] Speaker C: Yeah, that one's a little different. Cause then at least it's like you remember and you wanna, but still, then I would rather talk to one person for an hour than I would to talk to 20 people for five minutes. Like, that's just not, because you just find out so much more about them and you learn so much because when you have conversations with people, that's when you grow your own knowledge base. Because there's always strongly believe that every single person you talk to, it doesn't matter who they are, where they come from, what they do, their level of intelligence, none of that matters. Every single person you talk to, you can learn something from, right? Whether it's what to do, what not to do, you know, where they came from. You know, it's like even that asshole that you meet, no custom on this, but even that jerk that you meet, that is, is, you know, like the biggest whatever. When you find out who their parents were, where they came from, what their life was like, you start to understand, okay, now I see why you are the way that you are, and, and that's a learning experience and that's something that you can pick up. So that's something that I've always wanted, that I've always liked. Like, this isn't something that is like a new thing that I've developed. This has just been my entire life. But so when it comes to marketing, right? And this is, this is something I talk with agents about. These are things that I've done my show about. Marketing is something that everybody, there's no secret tricks to this stuff, right? There's leads that you can get. There's videos you can make. There's, you know, bus stop signs, whatever you want to do. But the key to marketing is finding something that you like to do and that you will do consistently, okay, that you will do all the time. Because if you're, I always use the example of leads, like realtors, especially when we talk about this, I say, okay, they're like, well, I'm going to get zillow leads or I'm going to pay this thing to do leads. I'm like, that's fine. There's plenty of people that make a lot of money taking online leads to. However, do you like calling random strangers on the phone 30 times a day and sending text messages and sending emails? Do you have a process to do this? Are you very system oriented? Are you very detail oriented? Because if you're not, then you're going to be wasting your money buying leads. Because unless you're that person, which there are plenty of people out there like that, you're not going to have success with that model because that's not you, right? So you have to find, what am I good at? What do I do? Well, and then what will I stay consistent with? Well, I listen to podcasts all the time. I'm a huge Joe Rogan fan. I listen to Lex Friedman. I listen. My favorite podcast right now is the all in podcast, and if you guys know that one. But all of this about money and investing, these are all like angel investor guys are. It's awesome to listen to. I'm into politics. I'm into, you know, all of this stuff. So I listen. I go outside every Saturday, and I work. I have like three acres in my house, and I mow, I edge, I do yard work. And the whole time I'm listening to podcasts. Like, that's what I do. When I'm working out, I'm listening to podcasts. When I'm walking, I'm listening to podcast. That's just what I do. I enjoy it. So I always start, man, I'd like to. I'd like to do this because I like to talk. I like to meet people. So I want to do a podcast. So that's what I did. I decided, okay, I'm going to do it. So my very first podcast, I called a buddy of mine who was. He was a roofer. His name's Cody durham. Shout out to Cody.
Great roofer in Dallas Fort Worth. So ten gauge ridge roofing. Give him a call. He's awesome. I said, hey, cody, I need a favor. I need you to come to my office. It sounds crazy. I want you to sit down with me. I'm going to record us, and we're going to talk, and I'm going to interview you and talk about roofing as it relates to real estate, right? Because if I'm going to do something, I need it to benefit my business somehow, right? You know, I mean, otherwise it's waste of time or it's not a waste of time, but you know what I mean? So he came in, we sat down, we talked. You know, I interviewed him. We were sitting in front of a green screen. You know, I had some questions prepared. I recorded it, and then I kind of went back and edited it a little bit, and then I posted it and, you know, just kind of trial and error, right? And then I brought in another guy to sit down with me a couple of weeks later, reached out to a broker that I knew, brought him in and talked to me and just asked him questions about what they do. So then I was like, all right, well, I'm going to use this podcast avenue initially to interview realtors, right? Because it's a way for me as a mortgage lender to meet agents that I don't know, right. Obviously, the people that I do know, I bring them in because they've been sending me business and I want to reciprocate. And then I could take those at least. Again, there's an idea between what I want to do and what I actually did, but I wanted to take all of those and clip them up because at that time, social media was still, this was a couple of years ago, and then use them to say, okay, you can post this as a real. So now I'm giving them value, right? You're coming to talk to me. You're spending an hour speaking to me. I'm going to take this interview, and I'm going to cut it up into pieces, and I'm going to post it on YouTube. I'm posting on Facebook. I'm going to tag you. So now this is a way for you to promote yourself to your clients. And here's the cool thing about podcasts. It doesn't matter if there's six people watching. It doesn't make any difference. When you have a clip of a person with headphones on with a microphone, and they're talking about their expertise, okay, you've put them in this image of being, hey, this person knows what they're saying. It gives them, like, credibility. It's almost like you're not writing a book. But you know how when people say, hey, if you write a book, whether anybody reads it or nothing, you can be like, hey, I'm an author. Right? So it's kind of the same idea. If you put a microphone in headphones, they're being interviewed, they're asked their opinions. This puts them in a light of being an expert in that particular topic. So it's a benefit for them and it's a benefit for me. So it's mutually beneficial in this thing. So I did that for a while. Now what I will tell you, here's what I found out. The people that I worked with that were already my agents. They loved it. They appreciated it. You know, we were stronger, bonded, more time to spend together because, you know, again, I don't like, you know, just hanging out and going to lunch and, you know, I'm just not a small talking guy, but this was the chance for me to really get to know my partner.
[00:14:24] Speaker B: When you say that, are you saying in the moment of recording or the preparing the recording the clips after it constantly, and then talking about how good the show was. Like, what is the lasting effect of that intimate relationship around the podcast? Is it hours, days, or a month or more?
[00:14:44] Speaker C: Well, for people that I was already working with, I'd already established the relationship with, then it was just an extra. Another level to it. Right. So it just. It just bonded them to you even more, because now I'm spending an hour really spending time and talking to them and asking them questions, not to mention the lead up before and after and sharing the clip. So, you know, the thing about any kind of sales is the more touches you can get with your clients, the better.
[00:15:09] Speaker A: I.
[00:15:09] Speaker C: Right. Because if you can contact and speak to your clients as much as possible, then that's gonna develop a stronger relationship with you and them. So when it's time to refer out their next deal or do whatever, they're gonna think of you first before they think of everybody else. Right. So. So that's the concept behind it, is this gives me a chance to have a stronger relationship. Yeah.
[00:15:28] Speaker B: Marketing has gone. I'm diving really deep into AI in marketing, specifically clay. If anyone wants to call me out of spent 100 hours on clay in the last two months, and if there's anybody in real estate or mortgage on Clay, DM me, I would love to brainstorm, but. So it's gone from, like, inbound and outbound, which you said, like, obviously outbound is not the most enjoyable thing in the world. Cause it requires some cold calls and some leads and. Right. But now it's, like, all bound, and it's intent based marketing. And if you can create intent triggers, do it in the way that you're saying is the most enjoyable to you, and if that means that you don't mind talking and getting in front of a mic, which, by the way, you could reach out to any of the mics on here, we'll. We'll help you. I don't know if we all like. But not speaking on it for you, Mike, but you just have a big heart. Um, so.
[00:16:24] Speaker C: Well, and then the other avenue to this was that I also thought, okay, I thought, well, I can also reach out to agents that I don't know. Like, this is a good avenue for me to introduce myself to new people and create something there. Right. And then in my mind, I'm like, okay, I can reach out to these people. I can make a relationship, and if they have a decent audience on a certain platform. So, like, I would search through Instagram or I would search through TikTok or any of the platforms, and I would find agents that were local that I could physically meet. Right. Not necessarily someone that was, like, in Austin or Houston that I would have to do online because it's a little harder, but I would physically bring them into my studio and then meet them, and then we would have a conversation, and I'm like, okay, this is going to be the relationship. Well, what I found out with that was that the people that already had a following, which were the most of the ones that I did well, they were kind of at a place in their career or where they wanted to be that.
That they didn't. Not that they didn't need me, but it was, hey, this is just another way for me to get my message out, which I totally understand. That was the reason I reached out to them. But I also found that that relationship was much more difficult to try to create and maintain and try to get business and referrals off of. Because in the reality is that. Let's say that I've interviewed.
I'm on, like, my episode now. I think I'm at 100, almost at 150. I'm, like 147 or something, or 137 or something like that. Let's say that I've talked to 25 agents in that period because I do some individual podcasts that I didn't know.
There might have been two of those that I've gotten referrals from for business now, the ones that I already worked with and the ones that I have worked with in the past that even I did an interview just because they saw me online and they saw me talking to people, and they saw me on a regular basis, which this goes back to the, you know, frequency of marketing and advertising, because they saw me all the time. They weren't necessarily trying to get on the show because, you know, a lot of them, they don't, like, I don't want to be on camera, they don't want to talk. But I would get calls from someone that I hadn't worked with for six months who would say, hey, I got a borrower want to send you, you know, blah, blah. Hey, I saw your podcast. I think it's awesome. Thank you, you know, whatever. And so I found that what this started to do was my original intent was create better relationships with my agents that I already have and create new relationships with agents that I didn't, you know, work with. And the stronger relationships worked. But it also worked. Even if I didn't interview them, I could get them to come in or, I mean, I could create stronger bonds with them regardless. Cause we would talk about the show or, or whatever, and then they saw me in a regular basis, and then the ones that I tried to go get that were new didn't really work out the way I wanted. And I'm sure, like, if I would have pushed harder, and I'm not a. Unfortunately, this is probably my downfall of sales. I'm not a, you know, call them every week and ask them for business and that kind of guy. I just, you know, probably need to be better at that, but I'm not good at that. So.
So then what I decided to do was, as I started gaining traction and, you know, you watch your stats every week and see how your, your views are going up. And most of my stuff comes from audio. I post this on YouTube. It's all on my social sites. But the vast majority of my listeners come from the audio side of things because that's what I like and that's what I tailor it to.
I started to notice that when I talked about bigger issues, like, you know, I've been talking a lot about the nar settlement and been talking a lot about, you know, just. Just ways to market yourself with experts that do that kind of stuff, like social media experts and that kind of thing. Those episodes were getting much better traction than the ones where I was talking to and particular agent about what they did and how they did their business. Okay, they did okay, but they weren't doing as well as, like, the expert interview. So that's when I really started to shift and go, okay, I want to talk to people that are not necessarily realtors, but are around real estate, where now it's a resource for agents to go to and listen and say, I want to learn about roofing. I want to learn about marketing, I want to learn about interest rates. I want to learn what's happening in the narrow settlement. I want to learn these things. And this is a place I can go to every week to pick that up. And that's where I started to shift to more national level.
[00:20:32] Speaker B: That was the question I've had, is loan officer first starting purposefully goes after the realtors in their area, really has to make that decision.
Do I go with the realtors I have now and strengthen that relationship, or do I go for new realtors to try and get more business? I think the obvious answer nowadays is probably find listings and use data providing software to find ones that are actually listing property.
Then step two is, as it progresses, you start to.
Now you start saying, I want to do something more, Nash and Mike and I kind of wrestle with this, too. And so it's what you want to be. You start to struggle with, like, who is your target audience for what you're selling to versus who you want to be seen as a podcaster in the future. Right. And it's so like a curious one is I think you had Rob Christman on the show, right? Is that.
[00:21:35] Speaker C: I haven't had Rob yet. No. I've had James Kleiman, who's the managing editor for housing Wire. I have had Lance Lambert, who is. He runs Resi Club. He was a managing editor for Forbes for a number of years. I've got Dan Habib, who is. He's coming up in the next couple of weeks. He is with MBS Highway. Barry, I don't know if you know, is, you know, he's got cancer, is going through chemo right now, but so Dan, his son is coming on. We're going to talk. So I've taken more people that are sources for other people in our industry that go to them for information, and they have huge audiences, and those are the ones that I've been aiming and trying to get. And also new technologies because, like you, AI, to me, I think, is going to complete it already started, has, but is going to completely change how we do everything. And the more people I can talk to that are building platforms around AI, even if it's a. A little disruptive to what my audience who are realtors, you know, I'm like, hey, look, this is coming. You know, I had a lady, um, uh, Amanda Orson, who was on, uh, who runs a. They've, they've created a web website that is basically, you can list your house for sale. Um, it keeps transaction fees lows. It's driven by, you know, it's driven by AI to go in and put all this stuff together, but the cost is low. They connect buyers and sellers, and there isn't a huge need for realtors in that environment. And they've designed the entire platform around that. Well, my audience is realtors, so that would kind of piss off a lot of people. But I'm. I'm taking the approach of, hey, look, whether you like this or not, this is happening. So you need to be aware. And that's, that's what I try to do when I interview the people like that.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: Mike, one of the things I've noticed in listening to you and also doing a little bit of research is that you're like, what's that saying? Six degrees of Kevin Bacon and you're like six degrees of separation from one step to the next step to the next step. One of the things that I appreciate about what you've been doing recently is that you've been going deep with all of your relationships. But one thing that I think that you're still working on right now, and I appreciate as well, is that your demographic is moving from your regionalized realtor base and you're going much more naturally. You have Dan Habib coming on. You have a few more nationally, more well known people.
I noticed that one of the people that you interviewed recently actually is your own daughter as you're talking about your fiscal literacy series.
[00:23:52] Speaker C: Yep, did that today.
[00:23:54] Speaker A: Yeah, and I saw that. And I appreciate that because not only are you expanding nationally, but you're also expanding out in your audience as well. And that, and the audience that you're speaking to is not just the realtors and not just national audience and loan officers and maybe C suite executives and so on and so forth, but you're expanding your entire demographic.
And I don't know if you've reached the 6th degree of Kevin Bacon or the 6th degree of separation from one person to another yet, but the expansion and the model of who your demographic is, there is no boundary. But there also is a common thread that you have through everything creating that degree that you're moving from step to step.
Do you have a map of how you're doing that? Are you kind of winging it? Or do you think that you'd like to go from, hey, this is our regional basis. This is our national basis. These are the demographics that we're working on right now. Do you know what is your actual ultimate goal for maybe not just your fiscal literacy series, but also your generation of business series as well? Do you have that common goal of where you're headed toward for each series?
[00:25:05] Speaker C: Well, yes and no. So, so I will say that a lot of what I do or have done is, is pretty organic in that it has developed what it's just been over time. And I think, you know, and I've, I talked to agents about this stuff too, a lot of times because I really, what I focus all of my business on, whether it be my clients that are borrowing money or whether it be my realtors that are, you know, trying to do marketing better, is, I try to. I'm an educator by, by, by nature. Like I grew up, I ran a swim school for kids for, uh, for ten years. In my twenties, um, we had 2000 kids I managed at 24 years old. I was managing 15 employ or 20 employees with 2000 kids at a swim school teaching swim lessons. Um, I've coached both of my kids from the time they were three years old until basically they went to high school. In every single sport I had, you know, two basketball teams, two baseball teams, two football teams, even kids that weren't mine, that were on the team that I was coaching, because I enjoy it. So, like, that's part of a passion of mine, is. Is when I learn. And I don't claim to know everything. It's just like when I learn something, I want to. I honestly, it's part of the education process. And, you know, any, you read any psychology book or anything, that'll tell you the way you learn is, you know, you, you take in information, you see it, you read it, you, you speak it, but then teaching it to somebody else helps solidify that knowledge base so much better. So. So when I look at my podcast, I look at it from an education platform. Wherever I learned this thing that I've found out about, and I want to tell you about it because it's going to help me learn better. So that's always been my approach in everything that I've done. Now, what path I go down and who I'm talking to in my audience, it started from, this is my business, I need to talk to realtors. That's who I'm going towards. But when I look at the real estate environment today, and I see all the lawsuits happening, and I see home affordability being the lowest that it's ever, one of the lowest levels it's ever been. And I was actually in a. Not a tweeting argument yesterday, but I was going back and forth on Twitter because I had a couple of guys that were like, hey, in the eighties, affordability was worse, based on this graph. And I'm like, okay, I agree with that. However, back then, one income could support a household. Okay. And the reason home affordability was where it was, was because of interest rates. Because interest rates were 18% to 20%. Okay, well, today interest rates are seven, which. Seven's not that bad. When you look at historically, it's not. But back then, the median home price was $90,000, and today it's $450,000 or 420 or whatever it is right now. So it's a different thing and it's not getting better. Back then. I feel like you could see a light to say, okay, we'll build more housing. Rates are going to come down, incomes are still pretty good, we're going to be fine. But now, if you want to support a family of four, okay, you have to have a two income household and sometimes a three income household because you have people working multiple jobs. And I've been speaking on this a lot in my market updates about how these jobs reports have been completely b's because they're showing that we're adding jobs, but we've added, we've lost full time jobs to a dramatic effect over the last six months, twelve months, and we've added a ton of part time jobs. So that just means that people are having to work more at more jobs just to survive. Right. So if home affordability is getting out of hand and rates are still relatively reasonable, where's the end of the light at the end of the tunnel? Because, you know, we've, we rent our cars, we rent our media, we rent our phones. We want their, they, whoever they are, are trying to push us into this world. We rent our houses, too. So that's a real concern for me when I'm a mortgage lender and my wife is a realtor. So we are, we make our entire life in this real estate business. And from my point of view, looking at it, watching this, I see that industry just contracting and shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. And is it going to go away? No. People are always going to buy and sell homes to some extent. But with the advent of technology and with all the threats of lawsuits and everything that are coming into our industry, I really feel like that you're certainly not going to be able to make the same amount of money that you made over the last 20 years in real estate, whether you're title, you know, mortgages, whatever. And as technology becomes more and more impactful, the compensation for the human is going to shrink. So I look at that landscape and I go, all right, I'm not going to get out of mortgages. My wife's not going to stop selling real estate. But we have to figure out what's our path to try to support our family, right? So if I like talking to people, I like having the show. So I got to say, okay, can I build an audience to a point where I can then use that and monetize that in some other way? What is that way? I don't know. We'll see. But that's kind of where I've started to take it. And so I want to diversify. I'm the Texas Real estate and finance podcast. It's as simple and easy as possible. I talk about real estate, but I also talk about money, and everybody likes money. So when I sit down and talk to my daughter about financial education. Well, first off, we get to talk. And, you know, if you. I don't know if you guys have teenagers, but I. They don't want to talk to you ever. So this was, you know, like, today was a great episode. Like, I almost cried, but we were chatting about our. What we were doing and. But that's like, we had a real conversation. I love that. So that's like a fourth one. So I don't care if anybody listens to that. I love doing it.
[00:30:19] Speaker B: That's usually when you get the best, best results, is when you don't care. Right. And then it pops. But let's just, in mic'd up fashion, let's talk about what you just said, because that's stuff that this show talks about quite a bit.
I talked about it when I was on Rick Rock, Brock and the Friday podcast, Friday broadcasting and Jerry Potter's podcast.
One of the points that my birdie from DC was going through different pieces.
50% of all municipalities in our entire country are funded from real estate tax. So the idea that they're going to let this get to a point, I guess you asked what the light of the tunnel is. At some point, they don't want private equity funding.
The us government really at a local level. They want citizens doing it. So I think they'll pull back.
In the meantime, though, insurance costs is going to be a real thing. And you see. Starting to see the Charlie Munger, who is Warren Buffetts longtime partner, he always believed in self insurance or not getting insurance and really looking at risk. We can go right to Mike Zhao here in capital markets. I don't know what your thoughts are, Mike, on this, but how many people do you actually know that have had a house fire since technology has come out from fire detectors to just what houses are made of? Right. Um.
Do you think, like, I like if. If. What is it? There's one carrier, Liberty Mutual, maybe that is actually just saying we're going to take all five years and recoup it in one. So their premiums are going for people from like $3,800 a year to $7,500, doubling. The rest of them are working over five years to get there. But in five years, all homeowners insurance will essentially be doubled. Somewhere along the line, in order to afford the home, you're going to have to start taking the risk that pilgrim days, if it burns down, you're going to have to figure out how to restart your life, really. I mean, right?
[00:32:35] Speaker A: One of the things you got to be able to look at if you're, if you're. If you're an insurance company. They have what's called actuaries. And what these actuaries do is they take. They take these numbers, they say, well, every seven years, something is going to happen. So, for example, like, I'm in San Diego. It used to be like every seven years, there's going to be some physical calamity, a fire or some other type of thing. I remember the fires from, like, 2003 and then 2008, and there hasn't been one. But yet here we have insurance costs skyrocketing to the point to, I know that my insurance costs went from a certain dollar amount, and then it went to like. And it quadrupled. And going from $2,000 up to $12,000 was like, holy moly, I got to figure out how to reduce that cost. I mean, if it just went up, and it has since still gone up since I've gotten a new insurance company, but still, that those types of costs are, if I didn't already have other forms of passive income to create the ability to accommodate that increasing cost, then I'd be in a world of perk. But I couldn't even imagine what would it be if you're a w two employee. One of the things, Mike, I want to be able to touch that it might be interesting to you, is that ever since the invent of our nation, going back a few hundred years, if you take 30 year increments, there have been multiple quarters of recessionary times, economically speaking.
But if you take the last 30 years, since the late eighties, we actually haven't. Even though we had the biggest, the SNL crisis in the late eighties, and then we have the subprime crisis in the early two thousands, we actually haven't experienced as many quarters of loss. It's not like we had the great Recession and the decibel era where we had soup lines and so on and so forth. And then we didn't have World War Two, where those experienced a tremendous amount of not only economic loss, but also physical loss in people. And so we've had multiple generations where we, even though we had two military conflicts, one in the nineties, in the early two thousands, we really haven't experienced a lot of physical, familial, generational, or economic loss in a large period of time. And the result of that, of not experiencing the multiple economic quarters of loss, has given us a loss of financial education. In other words, we may have had grandparents that may have experienced loss then, but then we had Generation X and people born in the seventies and the eighties and then, you know, we just kind of overspec because we didn't really, you know, we don't have that much loss because all we had was really the korean Vietnam war loss. And then in the nineties, we don't really have a lot of loss. And so as a result, our kids don't have that loss. And if you don't have multiple generations or multiple decades of loss, you're not going to. It's really, really challenging to teach financial literacy because there's no reason. Right. And so the only, and now we have, you know, and social media has actually damaged us. This says, oh yeah, you know, you can house hack your way, you can car hack your way, you can social media hack your way into traditional wealth. It scares me because we haven't really taught our kids on what loss really means because they really haven't experienced it.
[00:35:51] Speaker B: And you don't count the 92 or like the big short crash as, or 911 or any of those as like.
[00:35:59] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I mean, if you go back like we have, we have our savings rate in m one. I think that if you, if you're looking at the actual demand deposits that's going on right now, yes, we've had increases, but we still have the disparity of the haves and have nots. There's a disparity of income that we have.
[00:36:16] Speaker C: So that's, that's my only pushback. When you were saying we haven't had the financial, you know, as many financial crisis as we had maybe prior to. I think you're, you're absolutely correct. However, the gap between the haves and the have nots has drastically grown in that period of time. And the people with money and the people with wealth has shrunk. I mean, now don't get me wrong, they have way more right. The PPP loans that were given out during COVID was the greatest transfer of wealth from the haves. The half. Everybody wants to talk about the checks. The stimmy checks that went out, the dollar 1200 that went out two times, that was nothing. The trillions of dollars that went to some helped a lot of small businesses. So I want to be fair. You know, it, there was benefits to that, but there were a lot of really big companies that got a lot of money that didn't have to pay any of it back. And it did not trickle down, as we all know. So, so I think that. Yes, yeah, exactly right. Like that. Yes. There haven't been as many financial crisis. But when we measure crisis based on the stock market, and only 20% of the population participates in the stock market, I don't think it's as good of a measure of where we are as a society financially as it. As it used to be, because now we have way more people that are on social, social programs. We have people that can, you know, single family households, people not having kids. Our population is declining. Whether people realize it or not, all of these things are going to have dramatic impacts on our society going forward. And like I said originally, we don't own, like, back then, you owe, you paid cash for your car, you maybe had a ten year mortgage on your house. You didn't have credit cards, maybe you had one. That stuff wasn't there. Now the government's in the highest level of debt we've ever been, which is terrifying. We are individually at the highest levels of debt that we've ever carried in our life. So it's like, where does all this go? Yeah, it seems like, okay, everything is fine, but underlying, I don't think it is. And that's what concerns me.
[00:38:10] Speaker B: And, like, the phone, right? The fact that the phone doesn't count in a mortgage. DTI is staggering to me because people could not live without it. It is a monthly payment that did not exist 20 years ago. I think cable is something that our family cut cable growing up. It was kind of traumatic, but we didn't have anything.
I could go over other people's houses, but I feel like you can't do that now because you'd be cutting the Wi Fi, right? Or at least like, you're. You're committed to about $100 a month in Wi Fi, regardless of what class you are, because you need it for so much.
Those two alone already make it a different society. Then what you're saying is our insurance.
[00:38:56] Speaker C: Look at how much. In Texas, insurance premiums have gone up 60% in the last five years across the board, 60%. That's insane. And, oh, by the way, in case you guys didn't know, this year, right? I did. I did this in my market update yesterday. Um, we are experiencing the highest temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean. And I don't want the climate change. I don't get into all that, but the temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean are the highest they've been since 2005, and they're higher by. By a pretty substantial margin than they were in 2005. Well, you know what happened in 2005? Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Rita, Hurricane Wilmae. Those were some of the most damaging weather events that we've, that we've had happen in our country in the last 30 years, and now with the cost of everything being what it is to go through, because now these billion dollar weather events used to be, you know, isolated to hurricanes on a particular coast. Well, now, because everything's so much more damn expensive, a billion dollar weather event could be a tornado that rips through, uh, you know, two towns in Kansas. Okay, so, so you take that. We just had hurricane, uh, blight, blyle light that hit on the Texas coast. I have friends that their houses were flooded. You know, there's neighborhoods that are torn down. And it was a category one, but it was the earliest hurricane that has been a category four that formed out in the gulf that's occurred in history. It occurred in January 28. The last time was when Hurricane Katrina formed earnest. Excuse me. Hurricane Dennis in 2005 was a category four that formed in July 8. So we're earlier, the temperatures are hotter, and they're expecting this year to be the worst hurricane season. I hope it changes, but right now, they're expecting it to be worse than it was in 2005, which was one of the worst. So talk about insurance premiums. They're not coming down anytime soon.
[00:40:31] Speaker B: And I think these topics, people are looking for an outlet to get this information. And that's why, you know, bigger picture, there is a huge vacuum for loan officers to come in and create a podcast, and they're coming off of a big time where they were really successful.
And so it might have been harder to, because right before you jumped on Mike, Mike and I were talking where this journey, like many, and I couldn't think of the perfect analogy, but once you get past, like, your 10th episode and you're in a groove of consistency, then somewhere along the line, there's no predictable metric, but people start coming up to you and saying, hey, you know, your show's great. You got to keep it up. And, and it just feels good. And you're like, oh, I guess it's finally clicking. And I think we want to encourage, if we can have some sort of onboarding or help or message us, anybody here? But I think loan officers need to understand that. Yeah, at first, you're not going to get that pop in vanity metrics, and that's not what it's about. It's really about getting started and staying consistent.
That's the magic.
[00:41:44] Speaker C: Well, and I would say, too, for your, for your audience, right? Because you guys are talking to, you know, like you said, c suite level executives, right? If you're running a mortgage company, if you're running a real estate company, right? And this is what you're doing, these are the things that you need to be focusing on, right. These are the type of, you know, it's the days of, I'm gonna put a infographic up on Facebook that says, you know, Va loans are gonna serve. Okay? Nobody cares about that. What they want is they want information, they want knowledge, they want education. So you can, you can push that down to the lower level, you can push it to your loan officer, you can push it to your realtor and say, hey, you guys got to do this because it's important. Or you can run your company and say, we're going to make this a priority. So I'm going to identify my loan officers, I'm going to identify my realtors, and I'm going to say, hey, I need you guys and I'm going to help you. I'm going to help you. I'm going to give you resources. I'm going to give you editing tools. I'm going to give you this. Because if I can create a platform that's geared around my company, I work for Geneva Financial. So if Geneva Financial says, hey, Mike's our mouthpiece for this type of stuff, or, or you know what? Quicken has five or six people that talk, that's where you're going to start pushing the next generation of marketing that's out there. Because if you look, just look at the presidential race, right? A guy like Robert F. Kennedy, junior, okay, previously, prior to the first, last five or ten years, if you wanted to get a guy like that out there, aside from his name being Kennedy, all right, he had to go on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, all those big networks in ABC, CB's in order to get himself out there. Okay, well, he's not doing that. He's going to the all in podcast. He's going to Lex Friedman, he's going to Joe Rogan, he's going to all these, he's going to podcasts that have an audience of 20,000 people, an audience of million people. And he's talking to them because he's reaching people where they are. And it's another avenue to get to clients. So if you want to reach clients, if you want to reach the buyer, if you want to reach the borrower, then you have to get to where they are. And social media is there, but you got to get where their news sources are and how they get, it's no different than putting an ad in a newspaper. And so if I were running a Fortune 500 mortgage company. I would go find these people within my organization that have the personality that have the chops and whether it be podcasts or reels or whatever at man on the street, interviewing people, asking funny questions about real estate or whatever, I would focus on that and get into that guerrilla marketing on a low level and get people out there on the street talking to, talking to people.
[00:44:09] Speaker A: Yeah. What he's doing is basically what you actually similar to what you're doing for your podcast right now. Right? Six degrees of separation. So he's just at top. He's not, he's not throwing out birds out in the park saying, come vote for me. He's going out to the masses and saying, this is my demographic that needs to vote for me. These are the voters and this is who I'm reaching out to and this is who I want to vote for me. So that's who I'm going to reach out to.
[00:44:29] Speaker C: And by the way, it's super cost effective. Okay? You know, if you were gonna go spend an, you know, $2 million on an ad that run on, that runs on Fox or runs on CB's, if I'm quicken and I'm gonna advertise in the Super bowl, okay, that's fine. I can do that. Which, by the way, don't. I hate quicken. But, but what I'm saying is, is if, if you're gonna be that company, then why would you not save money, right? Because you're not spending and just get granular and have your marketing department go, how do we get to these individuals that we can have that closer relationship with through the podcast, through the video, through the funny TikToks, whatever, whatever route you decide you want to go, how do we, through the blogs, through the articles that we write that are really in depth and come from a person and not from a company? Because in real estate, especially, you guys know this, an individual borrower. A borrower uses a realtor that they know and that they're, excuse me, a buyer or a seller uses a realtor, a human that they know and are comfortable with and have a relationship with, then that realtor refers that borrower in most cases to a lender that they know and they feel comfortable with. So it's all a relationship. It's not. I'm a realtor and I see bank of America commercials every day. So I'm going to send my people to bank of America, okay. Or quicken or whatever, I'm going to send them to Mike or I'm going to send them to Sally or I'm going to send them to whoever because I like them and I have that relationship. Well, if you can go into your individual communities, into your markets and say, okay, in our Dallas market, we're going to have this person. In our Houston market, we're going to have this person. In our San Diego market, we're going to have this person and spend less time and money on big scope things and focus on little pieces and build a process around that. I think those companies are going to be the one that have the most success going into the future if they decide to make that effort to do that and get away from their traditional marketing that we've seen for the last 20 years.
[00:46:16] Speaker A: Yeah. One of the things I'd like to say that I appreciate about what you're saying right now is you're renewing every time you get on the air, you're renewing your bonding to your audience, even if you don't see them one to one, this is where you're doing something that you didn't think that you were doing. You said in the early part of our podcast that, hey, I don't like speaking to the masses. I want to go deep one to one. But actually through your podcast, you're speaking to the masses, but you're renewing your bond with them by speaking to them. And that renewing of that bonding still allows you go out to the mass audience while, while when you are speaking one on one to your guests, whether it's your daughter, like this morning, or whether it's to your roofer at the beginning or whether to your other agents, they're getting to know you in the renewed bonding with each individual person. And then when in the masses, when they get to speak to you, you get to renew to them on a mass basis. And that's what the difference is in marketing right now between, hey, I'm going to go, I'm going to go do my telemarketing, my email and my whatever XYZ campaign one to one versus the podcasts that we're doing right now is we're getting out to our audience. They may not be able to get our phone calls or LinkedIn messages or Facebook messages, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever. So on an individual basis, the one off, but through this mass media exchange, they get to hear grow with us, and at the same time, we get to grow individually when we do get to speak to, like when we have our conversation right now, that we'll get to grow with each other and get to know each other on a deeper level right now, Mike. And I think that for our listeners that are out there that want to get onto a podcast or go deeper with their client base, whether it's a voter or whether it's a referral source or an individual client, getting the consistency of doing this type of marketing and doing the consistency of asking the right questions and then going deep with who we are as people helps us in the way that we're accommodating our business or, or the people that we're doing business with. So it's, I'm in deep appreciation. For what? Of renewing that bonding process?
[00:48:25] Speaker C: Well, it doesn't have to be, by the way, it doesn't have to be podcasts, because again, going back to, I said earlier, when it comes to marketing of any kind, do what you like to do and do a consistent that you'll do consistently and focus on that. But I will say the thing about podcasts and the reason, and I, and I use, you know, everybody uses Joe Rogan isn't because he's the, you know, the biggest podcast on the planet, but I, the reason I got into that, he says this a lot on his show is he says, when I sit down one on one, and I talk to this scientist or this MMA fighter or this comedian or whoever it is, okay, and you're listening, it's like you're a part of that conversation. You're sitting in a room with those two people. You can't ask questions. It's frustrating because you're like, oh, why would you say that? But you're in that room having that conversation. And then I relate that to, and I don't know about you guys. You tell me. Growing up as a kid, okay, I sat around the Thanksgiving dinner table, or my family had Sunday dinners, you know, every Sunday together, like my extended aunts, uncles, cousins, whatever. And I was one of the oldest young of the kids. And so as a kid, I had to sit at the adult table because there wasn't a kid table. And my parents would talk with my aunts and uncles, and grandparents would talk about politics, they talk about religion, they talk about, they didn't really talk about money, but they would talk about all that kind of stuff. And I was, I didn't have a choice because back then I didn't have playstations and all that stuff. So I was sitting there, but I gained an appreciation for the art of conversation. And when you're sitting in that room, and those are the things that I remember as a kid, and when you go to your Thanksgiving dinner, you go to your family gathering. The thing that we all walk away with that we enjoy the most wasn't the food. It was the game we all played together in the living room when we play scattergories or when, you know, when, when Aunt Jo told us about her boyfriend. That's the stuff that you remember. And that's what the podcast platform is. It's that intimate conversation that two people are having that you get to be a part of and experience that. I think that all humans, just in our nature, we love that stuff.
[00:50:15] Speaker A: Yeah. And as you say that, my parents are immigrants and my wife is an immigrant from another country. And so we talk about money because my parents talk to me about money. Right? Talk about, we talk about budgets, we talk about financial education, and then we talk about, this is the type of income that you want, passive income, active income in, you know, balancing the checkbook and things like that. We talk about these things at the dinner table and, and also on game night, writing out contracts to ourselves and making promises of accountability. Because my wife and immigrant came from a little bit background about her is that she came from a war torn country where there was a lot of, there was a lot of death and so on and so forth. Anyway, my point and then my parents came from that just after World War two. So I think that when we come from that, when we talk about financial literacy through game night and so on and so forth, maybe our kids don't talk about that. Just like in your family you didn't because maybe your parents weren't in a war as, I don't know your family background, but I think that it's these types of backgrounds that they migrate and they just develop and they mature. And I think that when we have these types of relationships in marketing, at the same time we mature in our marketing based upon what we know. If we don't come from that lead environment.
Because I don't like getting, I don't. I, when I purchased leads, I was just so bad at it. I just couldn't figure out why.
And that was because I like going just like, just like you. I like going deep with the people that I work with and the people that I like talking to. And so as a result, you know, guess what? You're doing a podcast. I'm doing a podcast because we like talking. We like educating, and we like doing things to foster, encourage, uplift the people that we are around.
[00:52:02] Speaker B: In the final five minutes here, I think we have some, some great people up here to help motivate people to get started. So if you're watching and you're a loan officer, be the leader at your company and really follow the blueprint of podcasting for the first year and then getting on other people's podcasts for year two is the answer for you. Along the way, AI is going to come along and really help you with the getting ready for the podcast and following up. On that note, Mike, what is, how can they find your podcast? But what would you give? And assuming today's tech stack is available back then, for the. For the sake of this role play for the mic that was first starting again, just because that's what, where most people are, what would be like your three step or five step kind of granular way that they shouldn't overlook? Um, as far as microphones, like settings starting on, you know, what, Google or YouTube or they start here. Do they do it on camera? Do they need show notes? Do they need to comment other places? Do they need a co host? What, what would you say that you've noticed for that person that just keeps saying it every year that they're going to start a podcast?
[00:53:20] Speaker C: So that's the key right there. Number one, do it. Just do it. Whether you do it on your phone, whether you sit in your car and ramble on for 15 minutes about something that you were thinking about that you want to talk about, or if you have a mic and you want to set or a camera and you want to set your phone up on a tripod and record, you don't need a mic. You don't need. Everything that you need is right here. Okay? Is it the best? Is it great? No, no, no. But it's. It's all right here. Okay? So start there. Just do it. Do one. Put it out there. Don't put it out there. Practice one time, whatever. But do it and then do it again. And then do it again. And then do it again. Okay, now what you'll find is once you do it a few times, that's when you start to refine what it is you're going to do. All right? That's when you start to say, okay, now I'm going to use this. I'm going to use this. I'm going to use this. And that's exactly what my adventure was like. The very first time I did it, it was with my phone on a tripod, in an empty room, sitting on a chair, talking to somebody else. I didn't have mics. I didn't have special cameras. I didn't have anything. That's all it was. Okay. I did. That was probably the first five that I did was just on my phone. So, um, I published them. I put them out. You know, I didn't know much about editing. I didn't know anything. I just was like. But you start to figure it out now, that being the most important thing of all things. Do it. Start, do it. And do it consistently. Do it three or four times before you start thinking about or planning or buying or doing any of that other crap. Okay? Because I'm the most guilty person of that. I'm going to start working out. So I'm going to go buy workout clothes. I'm going to buy weights. I'm going to go buy a treadmill. I'm going to do all of. And then you don't ever get on the thing and do it. So. So just do it. Right. Number one. Number two. Now, if you want to get into, what do you need to have? Let's. Let's say we go from just doing it to now. You want to. You're in. And I have a friend of mine that I've helped with this. And you ready to go full more? Okay, well, the number one thing is a microphone. Okay. Sound. Um. I. I read this one time. I've seen it multiple times. But Netflix, for example, when you have broadband issues at your house and your feed slows down, your Internet slows down, or you start having issues, the first thing Netflix will pull back in order to keep the stream going is video. So your video will pixelate. It'll go from hd to standard or whatever. Okay? It doesn't look good. That goes away. What they don't kill is audio. And the reason for that is because they've learned that people watch, even watching a video, they will stick with it. If they can continue to hear you and hear it, because they assume it's going to come back. It's like when we're here and we have Internet issues, if you freeze or whatever, but you can still hear what you're saying, people will hang in there. Okay. But if your audio goes away, then they're out. So if. If I. The first thing I would invest in is a decent microphone, whether it be something that connects to your phone or you have wireless ones. And there's a ton of great ones out there. Exactly. All right, that's number one. Number two is when you start moving is. Okay, now get it now to get a good camera. Okay. But I don't even think. I think your phone is a really good camera. You don't necessarily have to have one, but like, I just have a regular hd camera that I bought on Amazon. I think it was like a, it wasn't anything like super fancy. I've got two of them. So if I have a guest, I can turn my screen around and we can talk and do whatever.
Then once you get to a point where you're recording on a regular basis, the key to getting it out there is you have to have a publishing platform. So the one that I use is called captivate. There's a bunch of different ones out there. I can't think of all the names off the top of my head. But if you just go look for podcast publishing, audio is great to put them on. They're primarily audio based. If you want to do a YouTube podcast, you can do that too. And it's all video and audio together.
But YouTube's a great outlet to do it that way. I just chose the audio platform because I listen to audio on Spotify and Apple myself. That's where I listen to most of my podcasts.
But you need to get that and they have all kinds of bells and whistles and you'll go through, I'll tell you, I had a, so when I first started, I was like, all right, now I got to start publishing this thing more and getting it out there because I was just putting out myself. So I found a guy online because, oh, by the way, if you start doing a podcast, every person from every country in the world is going to email you and text you and tell you how they're going to make your podcast amazing.
So I found a dude and he was like, I'll publish this for you. And he charged me, I think he was charging me like $200 a month or something to publish it out there. And I would send him one episode because I didn't know. I was like, okay, fine. So I sent him my stuff. He put it out. I would create like descriptions and stuff when I put it on YouTube. And so I started seeing he was publishing and putting them out there and it wasn't, you know, I'm a big, I want to learn how this stuff works so I can know the value that I'm paying for. So I was paying him money to do it. And then I started looking at my captivate site and it just wasn't as robust as I thought it should have been. And once I start, you know, because once you get into it, you start reading. I listen to podcasts about podcasts and how to podcast. So I started getting more and more knowledge, and so I went on my captivate site and I started looking at, okay, what do I have to do to publish it? And I just, all right, you got to upload your audio, you got to create a title, you got to create a description, you got to create a thumbnail, all this kind of stuff. And I went and did one one day. The first time I did it because I was just like, let me just try to do it myself. It took me about an hour because I was trying to figure it out. Now I can publish it onto my captivate website in five minutes. I do it just all by myself. Okay. Now I've created a process to it a little bit. I've got some steps that I do every single time that, that handle that. So you can do it yourself. It's really not that hard. There's a learning curve. Just like with all things, you're going to have to learn how to do it a little bit. You can google it, YouTube and all that stuff, but you'll figure it out.
Then next level is okay. Now I need like a website. So the next thing that happened to me that blew my mind was the website. So there's a company I use. It's called Pod page. I think I told you about it, Michael. I love them. They're awesome.
I got the, like, we have it.
[00:58:49] Speaker B: Now, by the way, from your recommendation. So collaboration is so important. Hope our listeners are out there is how you get started. You listen to these steps and, and the page is awesome, by the way.
[00:59:01] Speaker C: It is. And I got the best version. It was $300. I think they have one that's like a year, by the way, $300 for the whole year. So it was fantastic. You know, once you go in there, you'll see. I had my episodes on Captivate. It was like, what's your feed? I typed it in or copied and pasted or whatever and it just created my site in like 3 seconds. Awesome. It gives you SEO tools so you can put in keywords, which is something I was like, how do I learn how to do this? Where's this? Or whatever. Okay, so captivate pod page then canva because you got to create thumbnails. Very easy to do. You can create templates. They have them just Google podcast template and put pictures in and create titles. Super easy. And then the thing that has changed my entire podcast game. Okay, tune in next week for more.
[00:59:46] Speaker B: Viked up to hear what has changed the game. No, I'm just kidding. Keep going. The audience is loving this.
[00:59:54] Speaker C: Chat DPT. Okay, so I have, I interviewed a wonderful lady on one of my podcasts. She's based out of Oregon. Her name's Ginger. She runs, she does the sheer book back here, AI prompt handbook. She's like an AI expert. We've collaborated on classes for agents and stuff, and she taught me all of this stuff. Now, I, I told my daughter, I tell her all the time, don't try to reinvent the wheel. Like, go ask somebody how this stuff works, because you can get more from an individual. So she taught me so much about creating prompts and putting this stuff together. And now I have an entire word document that's got like 100 prompts on it that I copy and paste. I download my transcript, which there's different services to transcript your podcast. I download it, I plug it into chat GPT, and I say, give me a description from my podcast. Give me show notes, give me a title, give me SEO keywords, give me a Facebook post to promote it. Give me a blog to, to go along with the show that comes from this. And it does all of that stuff. I literally, now, if I hired somebody, which I'm close, if I hired somebody, I think I could go from where I think I could ten x where I'm at right now, and I could do that in six months. I just haven't done it yet because I haven't found the right person. But everything that I do on my.
[01:01:12] Speaker B: Podcast right now, are you saying the right person? Because I struggle with this, too. It's like a copywriter that can use the prompts but understands the mortgage industry enough that you don't sound.
[01:01:23] Speaker C: No, I need some. If I hire somebody, it is going to be someone that can edit, because this is the hardest part, is editing clips to put onto social media that will drive people to your show. Okay. Because I get a decent audience from my audio piece, but I want to get more. So, like, here's an example of a great hack that I figured out is I became a member of a bunch of groups on Facebook. I'm probably a member right now of about 55 groups on Facebook that are either podcast centric or real estate centric in my area. And I created a bookmark. And by the way, chat GPT told me how to do this. I created a bookmark for each page on my web browser. Then I can go in and I can open up each bookmark in a separate window. So it opens up 55 windows immediately. And then I copy my Facebook post that I put out on my Facebook page with the link to the site and I just copy and paste that and I post it in each one, each one of those pages. And it takes me all of about ten minutes. And I've shared my podcast to 50 groups across Facebook and grow. So there is some human labor involved. So I need somebody that can do that and I need somebody that can take my clip that is a minute for a reel and give it a little bit more pop. Because like, opus clip is a great tool. Right now. I can take my market update that's 30 minutes or my hour long, and I can upload it to Opus clip and it will give me 15 or 21 to three minute clips from my podcast. It's not perfect. It's still, it's AI, so it's still, you got to edit it a little bit and do a few things to it. But I could take those and share those directly, puts, it puts captions in, it takes, you can get b rolls and get images that it'll put in there. Again, there's some refining to it, but if I had somebody that their entire job was to just take my show and reshare it and publish and put it, not, not even publish it, but just put it a bunch of different places, because I still have to do loans, I still have to go to my daughter's volleyball game, I still have to spend time with my wife, you know, like, I still have a life I have to live. I have people that work, that work for me, that I gotta manage. So all that stuff is still going on. So I only have so many hours in the day. But if I could get somebody to do that legwork for me and pay them to do it and that were good, then I feel like I could take it even to the next level. So that's the part that I'm trying to grow right now. But you can do all the stuff that I'm doing and I don't have anybody that works for me. I publish it, I edit it, I post all that stuff all by myself. It just takes time.
[01:03:51] Speaker B: And so if I was like, c level of mortgage, like, if you were running a mortgage company, you would have this person for your superstar. You would buy them the microphone, you would get them the headphone set, you would empower them, and then you would have a advisor checking in with them every week. How can I help you with your show and how can I get you on other shows? Right, what's the most popular show? Let's book you and we're going to get you a t shirt that shows our logo. Right.
And, you know, we're going to it. The recipe is there. It makes sense. I'll give you the I talked about on the last show. But there's the experience.
Or are you like a referral company? And I think 99% of companies are referral companies and mortgage, and I think it got lost in translation. I don't mean, like, go find referral partners. I think everything is technically a referral. If it's a text chain and someone gives your name, that's a referral. If, um, you're calling a past client and they're working with you, I kind of see that more as a referral because they didn't call you up and say, hey, that experience was so good. I told Tom, like, no, they're more referring you because your advice was so good. Not that, like, you had this lights out. Because I think the experience is built after close. If you really wanted to be that, like, oh, you know, the fact that you let us know we needed a new ring, and the ring would cover from this part of my street to that.
That's more safe now in this house. Thank you for getting into it and keeping an eye out for me. Nobody does that. So that's like, why I think that experience pieces is sort of. And so I think if you're going to be in the referral part, this is the new world of it. And this is where mortgage companies should be investing in, because this is where the referrals come from, the intent.
Thank you for coming on the show here, Mike. I loved it. We have a great editing team that I. We usually don't go into our.
[01:05:55] Speaker C: You'll.
[01:05:56] Speaker B: You'll do the mic drop after we don't go into our main part, but I think we're going to snip out that part at the end so that we can help. As many loan officers do this without our motivation, see if they can get started and then reach out to us if they want some help, any, any of us.
[01:06:09] Speaker C: I think you can do it on a super high efficient, professional level with two people. You can, with all the technology tools available to you today. You need the personality or whoever the one is that's going to be in front of the microphone, and then you need the support person, and the support person can. Can do the booking, can do the editing, can do all of those things. And probably because of the way the technology is available today, that one person could probably support three to five personalities in different markets and could handle all of that with it. If you had a. If you had a rock star that was able to do that and that was their job.
I can easily imagine a full time job being able to handle five people and doing it at a very high, professional, sharp looking level. I don't think it takes that many people. And those, by the way, Opus clip is $36 a month, captivates $100 a month. You know, the, all of these tools are, they're less than $1,000 a month for all of that stuff.
[01:07:06] Speaker B: So get started today. You don't need all that to get started if you're a loan officer, but if you're a c level, that's what you need. And we can help on both, any of any of us. Three, any final thoughts?
[01:07:17] Speaker A: Michael Zo, this was a great show. Mike, thanks so much for coming up on the air with us. I'm excited about our, our short show, the mic'd up recap because I think we'll be able to get some more nuggets out of this.
[01:07:32] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. And we have some stars coming up here in the future weeks. We're going to have to do a promo video on that. So until next week, we'll be back at our normal time. Thursday, 02:00 p.m. eastern.
[01:07:44] Speaker C: My pleasure, guys. It was a blast. Love it.
