CW 440 – Lori Ann LaRocco – 7-Steps To Success In Business, CNBC & Author of ‘Opportunity Knocking’

Today’s episode of the Creating Wealth Show deals with issues other than business and finance, but guest Lori Ann LaRocco of CNBC joins Jason Hartman to discuss her latest book, Opportunity Knocking: Lessons from Business Leaders. She talks about the pyramid notion of achieving leadership success both in your personal and business life and how important it is to know yourself before you can even hope to expand your potential for success.

 

Key Takeaways

01.53 – Stocks of the physical merchandise of the Meet the Masters and Creating Wealth Home Study Courses are still available but running low: www.JasonHartman.com/Products

03.24 – Successful leaders in any field all seem to follow a series of seven strategies, starting with something as simple as knowing yourself.

06.46 – Find others who inspire you and then form and follow your own aspirations.

10.33 – Take your idea and stick with it. Even if it’s not always popular, stick with what you know to be right.

16.54 – True passion is much more attractive to an employer or investor because it’s a great motivator.

19.55 – Some levels of the pyramid take longer to achieve, but it’s the culminated effort which brings success.

27.03 – Self-belief is really one of the most important elements here.

28.05 – To find out more information about Lori Ann LaRocco, head to her blog at www.LoriAnnLaRocco.wordpress.com

30.06 – In Lori Ann LaRocco’s earlier book, Thriving in the New Economy, she created the mini biographies of various CEOs to show their reactions and their mistakes in the lead-up to and aftermath of the financial crisis.

33.55 – The way that these bubbles work is that when you’re in it, you just can’t see it. Even with hindsight, we don’t seem able to learn.

 

Mentioned in this episode

Opportunity Knocking: Lessons from Business Leaders by Lori Ann LaRocco

Thriving in the New Economy by Lori Ann LaRocco

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek

 

Tweetables

All good leaders have heightened self-awareness, and this knowledge is where the leadership stems from. Tweet this!

Ultimately, it’s the people involved that can make or break a company. Tweet this!

In times of stress, the way that you handle it will make you a leader or a loser. Tweet this!

 

Transcript

Introduction:
This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company. For more information and links to all our great podcasts, visit www.HartmanMedia.com

Welcome to Creating Wealth with Jason Hartman. During this program, Jason is going to tell you some really exciting things that you probably haven’t thought of before, and a new slant on investing. Fresh new approaches to America’s best investment that will enable you to create more wealth and happiness than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine self-made multi-millionaire who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. He’s been a successful investor for 20 years, and currently owns properties in 11 states and 17 cities. This program will help you follow in Jason’s footsteps on the road to financial freedom. You really can do it, and now, here’s your host, Jason Hartman, with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Jason Hartman:
Welcome to the Creating Wealth Show, this is your host, Jason Hartman, and this is episode number 440. Thank you so much for joining me today for this 10th Show episode, and as you know, regular listeners, we go off-topic and we’ve got a great guest today – it’s Lori Ann LaRocco, and she is CNB’s Senior Talent Producer and author of Opportunity Knocking: Lessons From Business Leaders. She is said to have a trillion dollar Rolodex, so I think you’re really going to like this intro and you’re going to learn a lot about personal stuff, but also about business stuff. This wouldn’t necessarily even have to be a tenth show because it’s pretty business orientated, but as she profiles in her book, talking about some of these people that have just had incredible success in business, I think you’re going to learn a lot of good stuff here. It’s a pretty good interview here with Lori, so I think you’ll like this a lot.

I just want to remind you, be sure to check out our physical products. We’re almost out of those and we’re not going to republish these, so at www.JasonHartman.com in the Store, we’ve got pretty hefty discounts on the Meet the Masters Home Study Course and the Creating Wealth Home Study Course. A lot of you have purchased those already, and we’re going to be doing another shipment to you this week. That’s something to check out. Also, be sure you register for the Meet the Masters event. We’re already having a price increase coming up on that because we’ve had a lot of registrations, so get those early bird discounts and get these products on sale. They are a great deal. Go to www.JasonHartman.com and click on Events, and then click on the Products and you’ll take advantage of some great savings on those.

Let’s get to our guest today. It’s my pleasure to welcome Lori Ann LaRocco to the show. She is CNBC’s Senior Talent Producer and the author of three books including her latest, entitled Opportunity Knocking: Lessons from Business Leaders. Lori Ann, welcome, how are you?

Lori Ann LaRocco:
I’m doing well, how’re you doing?

Jason:
Good, fantastic. So you wrote this book with Dick Armey – well, Dick Armey wrote the foreword, I guess.

Lori Ann:
Yes.

Jason:
It looks very interesting. Let’s dive in and you can tell us all about it.

Lori Ann:
Sure. I have been at CNBC for 14 years, and before that I was an anchor and reporter around the country for about a decade. The reason why I wrote the book was because it dawned on me that no matter what job you have – you could be the owner of a corner deli or the manager or even a billionaire – all successful leaders have seven strategies that they use in order to achieve success. What I wanted to do in Opportunity Knocking was actually create what I call ‘the opportunity pyramid’, which takes you through the seven layers until you achieve what I like to call ‘world domination’. This is pretty much being the absolute best that you can be.

Jason:
It looks like that opportunity pyramid – very logically – starts with fortifying one’s foundation. Tell us about that.

Lori Ann:
The very first thing you need to do when you want to assess an opportunity or be successful is to know yourself. You have to know your strengths and you have to know your weaknesses. All good leaders know both. You want to prance on your strengths and you want to work on your weaknesses. If you actually do something that you like and you’re good at, chances are you’re going to be very good at it. That’s the very first level of the pyramid.

Jason:
There’s two schools of thought there; some say that if you work on strengthening your weaknesses, at the end of the day you’ll just have a bunch of strong weaknesses. Some, like Dan Sullivan, who’s been on the show says: Just focus on your unique ability and let all that other stuff go. If you’re not good at it or you’re not interested in it, just ignore it. I don’t know if you can really do that in a small business. For example, if you’re great at sales and you hate accounting, someone better be doing the accounting.

Lori Ann:
You have to work on your weaknesses because, say you’re not a good communicator, you have to have that self-awareness. All good leaders have a very heightened self-awareness, so if you can’t communicate and that is a weakness, you’re not going to go anywhere. You have to recognize what you need to work on and you have to really focus on your strengths. You have to focus on both, so I’m not saying you divide your attention, but you have to recognize that you do have shortcomings. You have to play on your strengths, because that’s what’s going to make you special and that’s what’s going to make you different. If you own your company, you’re going to play on what you’re good at. If you work for somebody, you want to show your boss – Hey, listen, this is what I can contribute to the team. You and I both know that when it comes to a successful company or a small business, everybody plays a part and everybody supports each other and everybody has those strengths and weaknesses that complement each other. That’s why it’s so important.

Jason:
Yeah, it definitely is. Okay, well know thyself – that’s certainly been said throughout the ages and it’s most certainly important. What’s next on the opportunity pyramid?

Lori Ann:
Once you lay down your foundation in knowing yourself, you want to build your knowledge on what you want to achieve. In Opportunity Knocking, I actually do mini biographies so the reader can get to know this one individual that I want to use as an example in building that layer of the pyramid.

Jason:
It looks like, for building your knowledge, it’s Harold Hamm.

Lori Ann:
Exactly. Harold Hamm is America’s richest oil man and he’s a billionaire with a High School education. I wanted to show him because if Harold can become successful, anybody can, and here’s why. He was one of thirteen children, his parents were sharecroppers, he only went to school during the winter time and they lived in a one-room house. He had to work and it was a very, very tough time. When he was younger, he actually met somebody in the oil industry, and it left such an impression on him that he said ‘This is what I want to do’. He literally worked from the ground up; he would drag the lines and he got to pick everyone’s brain and he was like ‘Listen, no job is too small’.

One day, because somebody liked him, they told him that somebody was falling behind on their payments for their oil truck. He took out a loan and he bought one oil truck, and his motto was ‘If I can have the best service and not charge as much as the next guy, I will become successful’, and he did. Throughout the years, Harold would save his money. He worked hard, he put some of the money back into his company and then he was able to take a couple of courses from college to help expand his oil business, and he took classes in geology. Now, of course, he’s got Continental Resources, which is the largest fracking company in North Dakota.

Jason:
Amazing.

Lori Ann:
I wanted to show the reader, and especially with today’s economy and with the prices of education and people trying to re-invent themselves for jobs – Harold is a wonderful example that shows that if you’re strategic, you can do it. Who can really afford to go back to school for four years? He played on his strengths, but he also built his knowledge. He furthered his knowledge by being strategic, and he did the geology courses. I really tried to hit home saying “Listen, if he can do it, so can you. It takes a long time, but you can do it.”

Jason:
Yeah. What strikes me about Harold Hamm, and you alluded to it, of course, is the humble nature there. There’s just the concept that there’s no small parts, only small actors. He was willing to do any job, just to be around that industry and to really learn it from the ground up.

Lori Ann:
Exactly, and it shows the passion and the drive.

Jason:
The next is ‘Define your opportunity strategy and stick to it”, and you profile Alan Mulally.

Lori Ann:
I do. Alan Mulally, when he took that job over at Ford, a lot of people didn’t want it. It was a beleaguered icon; it was terrible, it was bloated, it had all these different brands, it didn’t know who it was. It was in the middle of not only a financial disaster, but also an identity crisis. Alan had to really redefine the company, and I always say that the biggest story could be at the end of your nose and you might not realize it – you just have to open your eyes. Alan was flipping through old ads and he came across an ad from 1927, created by Henry Ford. It was very simple: ‘Opening the highways to all mankind.’ That was his mission statement. That fit and it was the lightbulb that went off. He thought ‘This is what we have to do, this is what Ford needs’. He sat down and said, OKay, how am I going to achieve this? He defined his opportunity strategy at every decision that Ford made, be it on their lines of autos that they’re creating, or anything – it all goes back to that one mission statement – Opening the highways to all mankind.

He had tough decisions to make. As you know, he sold off brands like Volvo, he had to lay people off – they were tough decisions, but he had to make these plans and stick with them, even though they weren’t popular, in order to stick to what he wanted. He knew himself, he built his knowledge in terms of what he had to do and continued with that strategy. I thought Alan would be a wonderful example for folks to see just how sometimes, you have to go back to the drawing board in order to achieve the success that you need.

Jason:
I love the mini biography format, by the way – it’s just an excellent format, Lori Ann. It’s a great CliffNotes. You don’t have to read a whole book about Steve Case, your next example, who has a fascinating story – you can get it in a chapter. You’ve distilled one of his main qualities that’s really important, and about how you make a whole person or a whole strategic plan out of the seven different items on the pyramid.

Lori Ann:
Thank you. Steve is amazing – everybody knows, of course, AOL.

Jason:
AOL, yeah.

Lori Ann:
AOL was his thing, but it’s interesting. The reason why I wanted to have Steve, particularly when you’re looking at stoking your inner passion is because passion is what gets you through the highs and the lows. Steve actually went through it twice. He left his job at Procter & Gamble to go to GameLine, which was actually the precursor to AOL. He gave up a solid job for his dream, which was social media. Back then, it wasn’t called social media but that is, in essence, what it was. At his first meeting, he realized that the company was going under. You can imagine driving cross-country with all your belongings and you go to your first meeting and you’re like ‘Jeez Louise, what am I going to do?’

A couple of his colleagues and himself created what was America OnLine. At one point, and a lot of people don’t realize this, Steve Case was thinking of buying Apple, back when they were talking.

Jason:
Wow.

Lori Ann:
Could you imagine what Apple would be like today if AOL bought it? It’s just unbelievable.

Jason:
Without my comment – I don’t want to prejudice you – what do you think it would be like? I’m curious.

Lori Ann:
I don’t know.

Jason:
What year was that?

Lori Ann:
I don’t know, it’s kind of weird. Steve Jobs was such a visionary, and I’m not saying that Steve Case isn’t..

Jason:
But he’s not a Steve Jobs.

Lori Ann:
Steve Jobs was a visionary and fearless and driven, and he really pushed the boundaries. I don’t know, folding it in, if it would have been part of it all. It’s not like a fold-in brand. Apple is Apple.

Jason:
Right, it has it’s own soul, for sure.

Lori Ann:
It’s a stand-alone.

Jason:
Obviously the AOL-Time Warner thing didn’t work out too well, but it’s interesting.

Lori Ann:
Yeah, it’s definitely an interesting side-note. Then, of course, with the demise of AOL-Time Warner, Steve had to reinvent himself yet again. He’s been very successful with Revolution, and he has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs, including the big brands such as Lolly Wolly Doodle and Zipcar – there are countless companies out there that he’s given his money to. He is very passionate in terms of the team. He lives by this African proverb, and I’m going to sum it up because it’s a little bit long and I’m not going to remember all of it. He says something to the effect of: ‘If you want to get there quick, go alone. If you want to go further, go with others.’

Again, it kind of ties back everything in terms of the human capital that makes or breaks a company. It’s the people. You have to value people and you have to support one another and encourage one another. That comes from passion. Remember when you were little and your Mom said ‘Your friends are a reflection of you?

Jason:
Yeah, she was always orchestrating who I was hanging out with.

Lori Ann:
Exactly.

Jason:
And of course, she was right, I’ll admit it.

Lori Ann:
But it’s the same thing with your colleagues, and even if you’re a small businessman, you want to hire people that are like you in terms of the passion. You don’t want them like a carbon copy because that would be boring and you might clash.

Jason:
And then you don’t have any new thinking, which is bad.

Lori Ann:
Exactly, but you want people that are passionate. If you’re passionate why are you going to want a Debbie Downer? That’s the whole level of the pyramid and why I wanted Steve in there.

Jason:
And that goes back to the late business philosopher, Jim Rohn – you’re probably familiar with him. He would always talk about how your income will be the average of the five people you spend most of your time with. I think that’s true, and that passion is contagious. It also reminds me of Simon Sinek and the ‘Why?’ issue. If you can get people on your team that are thinking ‘This is not really about money’ – of course it’s always about money to some degree, but we want to prove something. I would rather have someone who’s out to prove something. That person is far more motivated than any amount of money will ever motivate anybody.

Lori Ann:
Exactly, and you want to be happy. We work a very long time in our lives, why don’t we do something that we like?

Jason:
Oh, of course! It’s a good third of our life, if not more.

Lori Ann:
That’s also part of it as well.

Jason:
Absolutely. Okay, let’s keep going up the pyramid here and talk about the last few items.

Lori Ann:
Sure, the next one is staying the course and I chose Ron Kruszewski of Stifel Financial. Ron is very, very charismatic, and he is a CEO whose plan is not a specific plan. He sets a goal and then he doesn’t have every point in between A and Z to get there; he assesses the situation as he goes and he relies on his team. Because he has no plan, a lot of people don’t understand it, so when he first started his job at Stifel, he would have these business meetings and they would always complain that this is wrong and that is wrong. He told his wife, ‘Listen, when I go into my first meeting I’m not going to say anything’. That’s because he does tend to talk a lot and not listen. So he listened and then the next day he came in and said ‘I want you guys to fix these problems. I don’t know how you’re going to do it, but just fix it.’ He said they would have the next meeting when they had the next problem, and that was about ten years ago.

Jason:
[Laughs]. Wow, that’s great.

Lori Ann:
He’s all about empowering, and he would have his Board meetings with his Board members, and he’d say ‘I want to grow the company by, let’s say 15%’. They’d ask how and he’d say ‘I don’t know, when the opportunity comes by, I’ll let you know because I’m assessing everything right now’. They just couldn’t wrap their arms around it because they wanted to know every piece of the puzzle. Sometimes, as you know, and especially in business, you’ve got to let things go and you’ve got to let it flow. That’s his management style and now he’s been there for a very long time and his Board members actually understand and are fine with it. They didn’t understand how he would stay the course if everything wasn’t plotted out. I thought he’d be a good example to say ‘Listen, you’ve got your course, you know what you want, but not everything is in your control. Staying the course takes a long time. Success doesn’t happen overnight.’

It’s interesting – Brian Sullivan from CNBC, when I was on Squawk Box, was filling in for Joe and he hit the nail on the head, saying ‘Not every level of the pyramid is going to be quick’. I really believe that staying the course is one of the longest levels of that pyramid because that’s where you’ve got to get everything going in terms of getting to where you want to go, and that’s where you rely on your passion and things like that because you’ve got to stay the course.

Jason:
Absolutely. Staying the course, no question about it. Also, you need to not be attached to the idea that you’ve alluded to – you’re not going to know everything. You’re not going to know how to figure this out before you just do it. Business, life, it’s all an iterative process. We just learn as we go, and every new learning expands our ability to solve problems.

Lori Ann:
Exactly. You might hit failure along the way, but that doesn’t mean that you’re never going to achieve success – it’s just a different definition of success. They’re all learning experiences. Harold Hamm had 17 dry wells.

Jason:
Wow.

Lori Ann:
17! That’s a lot, and that’s expensive, but he stayed the course because he knew that something had to break. I always say if you work so hard, something’s got to give, right? Something good has to come out of something if you’re working so hard. You just have to wait for it.

Jason:
Yeah, absolutely. And Harold Hamm – back to the ‘Build your knowledge’ as the second level on the pyramid – he invented fracking, huh?

Lori Ann:
He didn’t invent it because the technology was already there, but his was the leading fracking company in the nation.

Jason:
Wow, amazing. What a boon! What’s next?

Lori Ann:
The second to last level is ‘Execution’, and this is where everything starts coming together because you’ve stayed the course. Now you’ve just got to kick it into gear and you really have to execute. You have to pay attention to the details because you can’t be sloppy. David Rubenstein, who is one of the co-founders of Carlyle is meticulous. They created what is called ‘The Carlyle Culture’, where if you go into any office around the world – be it China, London, the US, Latin America – everything is the same. It’s where everybody believes in the same principles and in how you achieve that. They even have little touchkeys on the desk that are all identical. The posters that are in the lunch rooms are all the same, because that way, it feels like home. If you’re traveling abroad, it’s comfortable and it’s familiar.

He’s very meticulous about the details, especially in today’s world where you’ve got smart phones, you’ve got Twitter, you’ve got Facebook, you’ve got all this stuff. Our time is so limited in terms of paying attention to things, it’s crazy. He says that when you’re a business leader, if you work for somebody or if you want to be that aspiring entrepreneur, you have to take the time. That’s what’s so important about the execution phase – you have to look at everything and you have to re-look at everything. It’s the strategies that you employ that will make or break you, and in times of stress, the way that you handle it will make you a leader or a loser. That’s so pivotal because once you execute everything and you’re successful at it, that’s where you reach the apex of the pyramid, which is world domination.

Jason:
World domination – I love the sound of that!

Lori Ann:
You know, it’s a happy word, but come on, don’t we all want to have world domination in our own little worlds?

Jason:
Yes, we do!

Lori Ann:
You want to be the best that you can be, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a stay at home Mom or you own a small business. I work for CNBC – I want to be the best Senior Talent Producer they have. I want to be valuable. I want to be invaluable. I want them to be worried that they would lose me.

Jason:
Of course.

Lori Ann:
You want to be that pivotal part and in this level, I choose the three founders of BlogHer. These three women were all successful in previous careers, but they all shared one common element: they were miserable. They hated their jobs. Take Elisa Camahort Page, for instance. She worked in Silicon Valley when the dotcom bubble burst. One Friday, pink slips went out. She left work and was miserable. Why? She didn’t get a pink slip. She wanted to be fired and she was like ‘Oh my! What is wrong with me? I’m one of the few people that didn’t get a pink slip and I don’t want to work there’. That was her come-to moment, saying ‘Listen, I need a change’. She went into her job and said ‘Can you please lay me off?’ They said ‘No, we like you.’ She said ‘But I really don’t want to be here anymore’ and then she went into consulting.

Then you have Lisa Stone who was a correspondent for CNN, but she’d just recently had a son. When you’re a correspondent for national news, of course you travel a lot, and she knew that she didn’t want that anymore. Then you have Jory Des Jardins, who worked in publishing. It took her three tries to quit her job before she finally totally lost. They all had different stories that a lot of people can relate to – say you’re a new mom or you can’t stand your job or you want to be an entrepreneur but you’re too afraid to leave.

Jason:
Yup.

Lori Ann:
I just figured that there are three stories and they’re something you can relate to. They created BlogHer, which is this enormous blogging network on social media, and they created this space where Fortune500 companies approach these bloggers – and a lot of them are Mommy Bloggers – to put ads on their blogs. They make money from it! For a lot of women, that’s how they make their income. They created something out of nothing, so what I wanted to do was to give you guys a wide breadth of individuals. I wanted to say ‘Take what you can and be inspired, because one thing will inspire you, one thing will inspire me, but in the end, it’s something that ignites that flicker inside you where you can believe in yourself that you can do it.’ I know it sounds corny, but it’s true. You have to believe in yourself before anybody will believe in you. That’s what’s going to drive you and that’s what’s going to give you the energy.

Jason:
Absolutely. That’s going to drive you, and believing in yourself is really believing in your mission, your why and some of the other things that we’ve alluded to today. Without that self-confidence, you just can’t get anywhere. You’re not going to stay the course and you’re not going to do the other levels on the pyramid.

Lori Ann:
You’re not, and I think it’s very easy to be negative. It’s much easier to be negative than positive.

Jason:
No question about it.

Lori Ann:
I think that sometimes we dwell on so much of the negative that you don’t realize the positives that are right there. That’s what’s going to get you to the next level.

Jason:
Absolutely. Those are excellent points. Lori Ann, give out your website and tell people where they can find you and just learn more about your work and your three books.

Lori Ann:
Oh sure. I have a blog and it’s www.LoriAnnLaRocco.wordpress.com – I think that’s what it is.

Jason:
It is, by the way.

Lori Ann:
It is! Is that it? OKay, thanks. I don’t type it in for myself so I just go to my homepage.

Jason:
I verified it.

Lori Ann:
That’s pretty much where all of my stuff is. I do speaking engagements and I have some videos up.

Jason:
Sure. Of course, you’re also with CNBC, which we’re all very familiar with, and you do a great job there. I want to ask you before you go if you can tell us a little bit about your book from 2009, Thriving in the New Economy. I find your timing for writing that pretty interesting, I must say – right on the heels of the financial crisis.

Lori Ann:
I’m known in the industry as the producer with a trillion dollar Rolodex because I have at least 13 billionaires on hand, and then, of course, that’s coupled with the multi-millionaires that I know. During the financial crisis when things crashed, I was having a lot of these big contacts calling me, asking what was going on. That was kind of scary because I’m a reporter, so I’m just reporting on what’s going on. I don’t have the answers for you! It was a very interesting time because normally when you’re working in breaking news, you kind of know that if it’s a hurricane, you’re going to be going non-stop for so many days, but then life will go on. With this, with the financial crisis, it was going on and there was no end in sight. There was a lot of chaos and a lot of confusion, and people were scared. It dawned on me during that time, and I alluded to it earlier. It’s the strategies that you employ and how you react to a crisis that will enable you to be successful.

In Thriving in the New Economy, what I did there was, again, I did mini biographies. I took those CEOs back to get their reaction to the financial crisis, but more importantly, what they did about it. Take, for instance, Wilbur Ross – he was over in Asia when it happened, so can you imagine seeing everything going down the drain and you’re millions of miles away, and you’re a time ahead? It was interesting to get their thoughts, but they also admitted some mistakes. Richard LeFrak, who comes from a real estate dynasty, told me that it was about 8 months before the financial crisis hit and his caddy had 13 kids and had known Richard for many, many years. He went to Richard LeFrak and said ‘Mr LeFrak, can I please have a loan for $8,000?’ Richard said ‘Sure, what’s this for?’ He said ‘I’m putting a down-payment on the house’. Richard’s like ‘Wow, where are you buying?’ He said ‘Well, I’m buying an $8,000 home in Brooklyn.’ Richard’s like ‘Oh, okay’, but looking back at it, he thinks that ‘if that wasn’t the biggest red flag being waved in front of a bull, I would have known right then and there that the real estate market was going to blow up’. That caddy made about $25,000 a year, so common sense would tell you – how can a man that makes $25,000 a year afford a house that is $800,000, but not only that, put down $8,000 on the home? His whole industry is real estate and he failed to see it.

Jason:
I didn’t have any trouble predicting the mortgage and foreclosure crisis. I have a real estate investment company and teach people how to invest and I was saying that about two years before it happened, but the part I didn’t know is what was going on on Wall Street. I had no idea about all the acronyms we all learnt. Maybe you knew about it because you’re closer to it than I am obviously, but I didn’t know about all the acronyms we learned after the crisis and all of the ‘financial innovation’ that was going on until after the fact. I just had no way of knowing about that. It was so obvious that the mortgages were just getting stupid. It was fog in the air to get a loan, it was just dumb. I don’t know how anybody could miss that, frankly, but I guess a lot of people did.

Lori Ann:
They truly believed it wouldn’t end. I remember we were doing some interview – I can’t remember who I was talking to, but we would get some housing data every month and gosh, I was there for 7-8 years so it was like 2006-2007. I asked somebody and said ‘If I have a loan and it’s 6 now but in two years it’s going to be up at whatever percentage, what happens if I have an $800,000 loan and it goes from 3% to 18%? How am I going to make my payments?’ The person’s answer – and it was the CEO – was ‘That will never happen.’

Jason:
Yeah. That’s just mind-boggling, but that’s the nature of every bubble throughout history. It’s the nature of the tulip bubble, it’s the nature of every bubble. The vast majority of people cannot see it while they’re in it, because the whole context within which they live their lives is shaded by that belief system. In real estate, we call it the greater fool theory – no matter what I pay for this property, some greater fool will come along and pay more. It ends this way every time and we all should learn from history. We should learn from history about big government – it doesn’t work. Human beings are stubborn learners, aren’t we?

Lori Ann:
My second book is the shipping book. The shipping industry is very cyclical and has problems, as you know. I interviewed a banker who said ‘The reason why people make the same dumb mistakes is because they’re different people and they think they’re not as dumb as the other people that made those decisions before them. You know what? They’re just as stupid.’

It’s different people making the same stupid mistakes. People don’t learn from the mistakes of others.

Jason:
That is most certainly true.

Lori Ann:
It’s crazy!

Jason:
Yeah, it’s crazy, but it’s the way things are. That’s just part of life and human nature; it’s fun to watch, but let’s not make the same mistakes ourselves, right?

Lori Ann:
Exactly. With business it’s almost like psychology.

Jason:
Oh, of course it is!

Lori Ann:
If you just observe and watch others, you can learn a lot.

Jason:
Oh, you sure can, and I always say, Lori Ann, if you think for a moment that people are actually logical creatures, get a clue! They are not!

Lori Ann:
Exactly!

Jason:
We make decisions with our emotions and rationalize them with our logical abilities.

Lori Ann:
Exactly.

Jason:
Well, it’s been very interesting talking to you. What a great topic, and we covered some really interesting stuff. Your books are, of course, on Amazon with fantastic reviews, so thank you so much for joining us. Everybody, that’s Lori Ann LaRocco, thank you.

Lori Ann:
Thanks for having me.

Outro A:
I’ve never really thought of Jason as subversive, but I just found out that’s what Wall Street considers him to be.

Outro B:
Really? Well how is that possible at all?

Outro A:
Simple, Wall Street believes that real estate investors are dangerous to their schemes because the dirty truth about income property is that it actually works in real life.

Outro B:
I know. How many people do you know, not including insiders, who created wealth with stocks, bonds and mutual funds? Those options are for people who only want to pretend they’re getting ahead.

Outro A:
Stocks and other non-direct traded assets are a losing game for most people. The typical scenario is you make a little, you lose a little, and spin your wheels for decades.

Outro B:
That’s because the corporate crooks running the stock and bond investing game will always see to it that they win. This means, unless you’re one of them, you will not win.

Outro A:
And, unluckily for Wall Street, Jason has a unique ability to make the everyday person understand investing the way it should be. He shows them a world where anything less than a 26% annual return is disappointing.

Outro B:
Yup, and that’s why Jason offers a one-book set on Creating Wealth that comes with 20 digital download audios. He shows us how we can be excited about these scary times and exploit the incredible opportunities this present economy has afforded us.

Outro A:
We can pick local markets untouched by the economic downturn, exploit packaged commodities investing and achieve exceptional returns safely and securely.

Outro B:
I like how it teaches you how to protect the equity in your home before it disappears and how to outsource your debt obligations to the government.

Outro A:
And this set of advanced strategies for wealth creation is being offered for only $197.

Outro B:
To get your Creating Wealth Encyclopaedia Book One, complete with over 20 hours of audio, go to www.jasonhartman.com/store.

Outro A:
If you want to be able to sit back and collect cheques every month, just like a banker, Jason’s Creating Wealth Encyclopaedia series is for you.

Outro:
This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company, all rights reserved. For distribution or publication rights and media interviews, please visit www.hartmanmedia.com or email [email protected]. Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own and the host is acting on behalf of Empowered Investor Network Inc. exclusively.