Michael Duryea

If you go out into the real world, if you get out into the out from the noise and you go find real successful people that have done things, there are many, many, many people that have used whole life insurance very effectively. Like Nelson was describing, it was just that Nelson provided this very complete explanation and framework that's better than anybody else is out there, hands down. It's like he says in the book, I don't, I don't think he says you're not going to find, yes, there's other people out there that understand pieces of this, but you're not going to find an explanation that is as complete as the one I'm about to give you. Welcome to the Infinite Banking Initiative, a podcast from the Nelson Nash Institute, the official home of the Infinite Banking concept and becoming your own banker. I'm Lee Bargoneer, along with David Sterns, and we're your host. In this episode, we're joined by IBC practitioner Michael Durey from Emporia, Kansas. Thanks for listening. Well, Michael, thank you for joining us on the Infinite Banking Initiative. Let's start off by hearing your journey and how you discovered the Infinite Banking concept. Yeah, I have a brother in law who's a either fourth or fifth generation row crop farmer here in Kansas. And Josh is just a, he's an amazing entrepreneur. And I just had this spark in me about 2016 to learn about business and money and wealth building and entrepreneurship. I just felt like I had a real lack of financial education. And he, his, his father had gotten one of their big pieces of farm equipment stuck in electrical wire and gotten badly electrocuted when John, when Josh was about 19 years old. And so when he was 19, he had to take over the family farm and he had to farm several thousand acres by himself all year and did it very successfully. And so I just, I was watching him and what he was doing. I was really impressed by his entrepreneurship, by his ability to manage income statements and balance sheets and make things work. And so I went to him and said, what could I do to learn more about business and entrepreneurship? And he pointed me to a book called Rich Dad Portad by Robert Kiyosaki. And that was really the beginning of me learning more about business. Not long after that, we had a mutual mentor, Greg, who I went to and asked him because he was also an entrepreneur. And he had become a really meaningful mentor to both Josh and I had come out of the lumber industry and had built a, a fishing lodge and some other things. And he said, you need to read this book, this little black book called The Coming Your Own Banker by Nelson Nash. That was the first time I'd ever heard of it. So he gave, I got this book and I read it twice and I couldn't make any sense of it at all. I mean, I couldn't understand what Nelson was trying to say. And then a year after that, I saw Greg again, he said, hey, did you read that book? And I said, yeah, I couldn't make any sense of it, Greg. I'm sorry. I don't, I don't know why pee is on the shelf and bank robbers and like, I don't understand. He said, you need to read it again. And so I read it a third time. And for whatever reason, the third time I read it, the light bulbs just came on. I saw, this isn't some idea that the some guy made up in the 80s. This isn't some like weird investment that you can kind of go start. These are principles that have always existed since the beginning of time. And if I learn to think this way, this is a financial framework that I can use as the foundation for everything that I do. And so when I saw that, I just got really excited. I went off and got my first policy and the rest is history. That's how I found out about it. I found about, found out about from a friend. What made you want to pursue becoming an IBC practitioner? Well, at the time when I got my first policy, I was the music director at the Catholic Church and I was teaching elementary school music at the elementary school. And I was doing some part-time work at the local university and doing weddings and funerals and kind of piecing a living together as a musician, which worked really well for a while. But I wanted to continue bettering myself. I had a really good mentor who told me once that the reason that we work is to to eat and to grow. And I wanted to continue to grow as a person. And I realized living in a little town of 25,000 people in Eastern Kansas that if I wanted to better my music career, I was praying about it a lot. And God said, "Well, if you really want to grow as a musician, you're going to have to go back." I had gotten my bachelors and my master's degree, but God's like, if you really want to grow in choir conducting was my thing. Being a professional choir conductor was really the track. And God showed me that if I wanted to do that, I was going to need to go back to school, go get my doctorate and then go wherever the job takes me. But the reason that we live in this little town is because my wife's family has a ranch. They've been ranchers since the early 1900s. Shane's great grandfather, staked out the farm. It's a beautiful place. We love the stability of being near family and being near the ranch. So I was kind of torn between, "Well, I could go get my doctorate, but when you get a doctorate like that, they really help you get a job, but you got to go where the job takes you, whether it's Miami, Dallas, Seattle, Chicago, New York, LA, it doesn't matter where the job takes you, you got to go." And so I started praying again. God, please, I'll go do that, but is there something that I could do for a living that would be really impactful to the kingdom, really impactful to people and that would use my skills that would allow me to stay here in Eastern Canada and live near the farm like I want to live? And my first policy was with a guy Ray Potete at Living Wellth and that's who I had gotten started with. And I started praying that and about a week later he called me and told me he wanted me to work for him. And I did not expect that at all, but I took it as a sign from God that that's what I was supposed to do. And so I started working at Living Wellth. I got my license to sell life insurance. I started prospecting clients and I started working with Paul Bowlin at Living Wellth. A lot of the nuts and bolts of how to help clients with IVC. So I was doing some W2 work for them as well. But the more I got into this, the more I realized that I'm extremely extroverted. I'm extremely outgoing. I love people. I'm addicted to people. I can talk to people all day long. Like if I start at 7 a.m. and I talk to people all day and I look down and it's 7 p.m. it feels like 20 minutes. I know that sounds like terrible to people who are introverted and whether you know some people like working with people more than they like working with things and some people like working with things more than they like working with people. And God God made people both ways. And he made me where I really like there's I always think of that scene in the movie The Matrix where he's stuck in that little cubicle like working. I always thought that if you were in business, that's where you would be. That you'd be stuck in some little cubicle crunching numbers all day. And that sounded horrible to me, which is why I was working teaching in a school and working with kids all day and working with choirs and just working with people. Well, I learned that businesses actually need outgoing people people to go prospect and tell the public what what this is all about. And so when I found out that I was like, really? I could go talk to people for a living all day and be in business. This is amazing. Hey, Michael, that's the secret sauce. Okay. A lot of folks get in the industry don't understand that and they're not extroverts. Okay. So yeah. Yeah. Well, it was it was a humongous revelation to me because so this guy right here in that the nice tie that's my great grandfather and he and my grandfather built a vending business in Southern Michigan in Jackson, Michigan called Jessup vending. And my great grandfather, um, he went to war. He was training in the army to invade Japan. That's what his unit was training to do. He got drafted in 1945. Well, thank God the Japanese surrendered. But he did do a tour of the Pacific diffusing unexploded ordinance. That was his job. So he would find he would find bombs that hadn't gone boom and he would go get rid of them so they wouldn't go boom and hurt a bunch of people would got dip theory. A really bad. Um, he woke he went into a coma for a long time. He woke up in a hospital in Tokyo. He had no idea where he was and he made his way home. And when he got home, he looked at grandma and burl and said, "Burl, I never want to leave home ever again." That's enough. And he bought a jukebox. He was a very skilled mechanic and knew how to do everything. Anything. But he bought a jukebox and he put it in the on-stead bar in Southern Michigan. And that was how his vending business got started. And pretty soon he had soda pop machines and candy bar machines and pool tables and cigarette machines. And by the time by the early 80s they had two warehouses and 15 trucks gone on. all over the place, all over Southern Michigan and stuff. And he retired to Florida. Actually, he bought a little house on the Manitio River down in Manitio County, Florida. And my grandpa took over the business after that and then they sold the business. But entrepreneurially, they were always very inspiring to me. My I grew up, by the time I was a child that I lived in Florida, my grandpa lived right down the street. And there was always something very entrepreneurship and being an entrepreneur was always this amazing thing that other people could do that I thought was awesome, but I never thought I would be able to do it. Well, 'cause I never saw how I fit into business. I didn't think I could be that really smart guy in the cubicle, like crunching all the numbers and being amazing and stuff. But when I found out about this, it was just a real revelation to me that I could go, I could go be on the front end, I could go be prospecting and telling people about this and I could hire staff to take care of all that stuff, which I have now. So that was just a really big revelation in my life that God had built me to talk to people and share with people about something that I'm passionate about. And I'm very passionate about infinite banking. Well, how have you seen the infinite banking concept impact your clients' lives? Like, you know, sounds like you've got a good relationship with many people, share some stories on how you've seen the impact in their lives. - Man, there's a lot of different ways you can answer that question because it's different for different people. But, so one thing I believe I'm gonna do in the future, which I haven't done much of yet is, but I'm excited to do it is to teach other people how to do what I do because I didn't know how to do what I do. And Ray taught me that. And it was really impactful for me when he taught me that and how to talk to people. And when people wanna go share infinite banking, they wanna talk all about the life insurance and infinite banking and this idea. They wanna talk about the solution and what Nelson always said was, if people don't understand the problem, the solution is not gonna matter to them. And so, the transformation for people happens when you come to them and you talk to them about what a problem banking is for them and how much money banking is costing them and how much stress it's costing them because they're not in charge of it. They're not in control of it at all. I was talking to Bruce Wainer the other day, and he said, not being in control of banking is like driving your car around all the time without car insurance. And I love that analogy that he used because it's so true. If you go cancel your car insurance right now and drive around, you're gonna be constantly worried about what happens with this or what happens with that or what happens if I hit this person or if I crash this vehicle. In consciously or subconsciously, there's this stress that, and I see it in people's lives, people are stressed about banking. They don't like having loans. They don't like having loan obligations to some other bank because they owe the money every month. They see the money go out the door every month. And they don't wanna think about what would happen if they suddenly, they couldn't pay that loan and suddenly they're in some kind of bankruptcy or foreclosure process. And on the flip side, that's the loan side. And then on the cash side, people get uneasy when they start building up a large amount of money in the bank because they know that the banking systems are unstable and people still remember the 1930s and their grandparents remember it even better and it's kind of embedded in, like, I'm not a expert in history, okay? But I have heard that banks were offering depositors, pennies on the dollar for their deposits because banks were going bankrupt. So people sort of have this subconscious uneasiness about banking and if you talk to them about that stress that they have in their lives and that discomfort and then they start asking me, okay, what could I do to get those banks out of my life and I start sharing the message of Nelson, people get emotional sometimes. But like, is that really possible? It's like, yes, it's possible. It's not easy. It doesn't happen overnight. It's a very long-term process. You know, in the book, Nelson says it takes 20 years to fully get the banks out of your life. I've heard the other day that Nelson was 67 years old before he got the snakes and dragons out of his life. That's what he's got, the snakes and dragons. You know, if you've got a snake or a dragon living in your basement, it's uncomfortable. (laughing) If the basement of your finances is a dragon, you feel like, well, I need him because I can't know any other way to move money and store money and do the finance function. But it is so impactful to people to, and that's at the personal level to get the banks out of their life. And now, with some of my mentors at the Nelson Institute, Tim Eurick in particular, I'm starting to learn more about what a freeing process it can be for businesses to get the banks for a business to function without being dependent on banks at all. Carlos Lara has an amazing presentation about a bank, not a bank, a business like a corporation or something and how dependent corporations are on banks and what it would look like for a corporation to build an alternative system of banking so that they're not dependent on that more either. So that's where I see the impact in people's lives where I show an understanding for the stress and the cost of banking that they're already experiencing. And if I demonstrate that I understand that stress that they're already experiencing, then they get curious about the possibility of, is there a way to remove that stress and it's from a lack of control? And how Nelson demonstrated that the guarantees of a life insurance contract put you back in control of that finance function and that's really impactful to people. Well, what would you say or some of the challenges or misconceptions that you've heard about IBC? Oh, there's so many. Nelson talked about noise. It's the noise. Infinite banking is so simple, a child can understand it. My son has a little piggy bank that says Caspian's policy on it. And he puts money in his policy. I mean, I know that's not exactly how it works, but I'm teaching him from the time that he's young. Children understand it so easily. There is so much noise in the marketplace of, well, there's the IRA and the 401K and the crypto and the golden silver and the precious metals and the real estate and the tariffs and the economy and the politics and the Democrats and the Republicans and the Catholics and the Protestants and like, not all of these things matter in their real. The, the Psalms say, be still and know that I am God. I don't believe it's possible to absorb infinite banking if you're not being still. If your mind is full of the internet gurus and the guys that want you to get to dump tons of money into crypto or real estate, if your mind, infinite banking lives in a part of the brain that doesn't exist where all that stuff, other stuff exists. I'm not trying to throw any of that other stuff under the bus. I know guys that are making incredibly good money with crypto strategies. I'm not involved in it. I don't want to be involved in it, but some people do. The, um, it's the noise. There's so much noise in the world and number one and number two, everyone that I talk to, not 92%, not 97%, 100% of people that we talk to are taught. It's been drilled into them, term life, good, whole life, bad, low premium, good, high premium, bad. And so when those preconceptions that are out there are difficult to break through because Nelson says on the very opening page of the book, he's like, this book demonstrates what would happen, what would happen if my premiums were really high? You know, I mean, you want to make them manageable for they needs to be a good number for somebody. It's there is such a thing as premiums that are too high that you can't handle. That's for sure. What he was saying, he says, most people try to make their whole life premiums as small as possible 'cause that's how we're taught. And then the policy is really small and then the policies are never big enough to finance a major item. And therefore, all your major items have to be financed with the bank. And so it's the noise and the preconditioning, I guess, is what I would say and answer that question. Yeah, either they don't understand what we're talking about or they're complicit for some other reasons. reason, because obviously a term premium buys death benefit over a term, a period. And so when you're looking at, you're trying to solve the equation for death benefit over a certain term, then you can't compare that to a whole life cash value, divinning, paying premium because that, yes, that buys you a death benefit, but the term is your life. And the different component there is number one, return a premium in the form of dividends. And number two is the cash surrender value component, which doesn't exist in a term policy correct. So just understanding that the playing field and is what a lot of people skip and death benefit is critically important. We all know that. And Nelson would say that too, but he's not solving for death benefit with IB. He's solving for the building capital to use as collateral to use the finance your major expenses in your life, which like you suggested earlier creates a quote unquote alternative bank, which puts you in a much more efficient position to control your cash and to get rid of the snakes and dragons, which are commercial retail banks to some degree of form. I mean, it's as simple as that. And so you can't compare that with another asset class like crypto, precious metals, real estate. These is not, it's not an asset class. It's a, it's a process. Okay, banking is a process. The infinite banking is a process. And a lot, if somebody understands that and wraps their head around that, then it's a different conversation. Yeah. Right. That's right. The, the qualities of whole life insurance allow people to go through a process that no other product allows them to go through, but you're right. It is the process. There isn't another process to take charge of the financing function. Another really big problem that I see is when I talked about this is another noise problem. Is that like if you YouTube infinite banking, one of the first videos that comes up is Dave Ramsey saying that infinite banking is a scam. And I actually love that because fires bring fire trucks. You know, if you're, if you're standing for something that nobody opposes, you're probably not standing for something worthwhile. So I actually love it whenever I find a new idea, if I find people saying, this is really bad, you should never do it. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. Why did, why are they trying to hush that up so hard? Like, why are they trying so hard to, if there weren't any value, they wouldn't feel threatened by it and they wouldn't be trying to, they wouldn't be trying to silence it, you know. And so all the generic financial education out there for financial advisors and everything else doesn't include this. It doesn't include infinite banking. I can speak from experience like people talk about Walt Disney uses this Harley Davidson uses this Joe Biden uses this all that's true, but I can speak from personal experience. I have found very successful entrepreneurial people who have used this for a very, very long time. I'll give you an example. I'm going to bring this guy in my podcast. There's a guy that owns a real, he's a realtor. He owns a real estate company here in town. I play golf with him, go to church with him. And when I started doing this, he found me. He's like, Michael, what are you doing for a living? And I told him and he's like, oh, I know what you're doing. He's like, when I graduated college, I bought all these Northwestern mutual whole life policies. And I used him to buy real estate my whole life. And the interest was so cheap, I just took a really long time to pay back those loans. And like, I'm 78 years old. I didn't pay those loans back fully until like four or five years ago. Now I have all the cash value in my policies and all the real estate too. He did infinite banking his whole life. He just didn't, he had never read this book and he didn't know that it was called that. And if you go out into the real world, if you get out into the out from the noise and you go find real successful people that have done things, there are many, many, many people that have used whole life insurance very effectively. Like Nelson was describing, it was just that Nelson provided this very complete explanation framework that's better than anybody else is out there hands down. It's like he says in the book, I don't, I don't think he says, you're not going to find, yes, there's other people out there that understand pieces of this, but you're not going to find an explanation that is as complete as the one I'm about to give you. And that's definitely what I've found. And that's what a lot of people have found. But yeah, my friend Jerry, he had done that for, he had done it his whole life. And I could give you other examples, but that's the, that's one of the best ones I've, I've found. Yeah, and Nelson also really, really, really, broke to the forefront, the, the paid up edition is writer. Yeah. And that was, that was something that was not understood by a lot of people. And a lot of companies didn't even have it as an optional writer. So that, that, you know, that really, that really brought it to the forefront. And when he's, Nelson started doing this, there were several insurance companies that, picked up on his, his, his, his book, his ideas and his lessons. And they actually created policies that would be able to replicate what he was teaching to, to, to, to a better degree. So some companies, like, and they introduce writers based upon IBC that they're not going to talk about that in public because that's not part of their, their compliance playbook. But those policies do exist out there now. So anyway, it's, yeah, I mean, you know, like, like you said earlier, IBC is, is, is nothing really hard. Okay. It's, it's, you, you just have to think about money differently. And a lot of folks don't understand what money really is and what capital is. And it's, once you get your head around that and then you understand the, the way to control that flow of money into just like a bank doesn't make money on their savings accounts that make money on their, their loan accounts. Okay. So it's almost the same thing for an IBC practitioner with a small P, you know, another argument is like, why should I pay interest on money that I own? It's like, that's stupid. No, it's not. It's called economic value added. Okay. Right. That's, that's another topic for another discussion. But EVA is, is essentially IBC at the individual level. Understand your, that your capital has cost and, and respect that capital and pay the cost for it. Be just going to do nothing but grow. You know, so, can I zero in on EVA a little bit actually? That, because to me, that's the critical concept. If people understand that from the beginning, the rest is a piece of cake. If, if people can grasp the truth that every dollar of capital that they ever get has a cost and they can't avoid paying it. If they understand that, then, then all the rest of infinite banking is very easy to understand. It's very easy. It's, it's, it's, you either pay interest to a lender. Whenever you finance something, you, whenever you buy something, you have to finance it. That's the really the principle of EVA. You have to finance it. You either pay interest to a lender if you, if you use debt to finance it or you pay cash with your own money and you lose all the interest that you would have made on that money forever if you had kept it and invested it yourself. The loan provision of a life insurance policy is the only thing that puts you in control of that leverage. It allows you to borrow against the value of your capital while your capital continues to grow at the same time in an environment where you control how much you can borrow when you pay it back and, and all the, you know, what happens if you don't pay it back. You're in control of that whole process, which is why entrepreneurs use debt all the time. And that's why there's all these gurus out there, you know, counseling people to borrow as much money as you possibly can from the banks and go buy all these assets. Well, that's what Nelson did. He read all those books. He borrowed a ton of money to buy all that real estate. But then he found out what happens when the deal goes bad and the banks in charge of everything because it's not the real estate or the asset or the management of the property that's really in control of the whole thing. It's who financed it. That's who's in control of everything. So if everything goes really well with your investment, yeah, you'll pay the banker all his interest and you'll get your investment and everything's hunky-dory. But if it goes the other way, it's a nightmare. And that's the problem that infinite banking solves. I told that story to so many people like when so many people when they ask me, what is infinite banking? I just tell them what happened to Nelson. He borrowed all this money for real estate. The deal went bad. The bank was giving him a nightmare and he used it. the life insurance to pay off the banks, get the bank out of the, and then he experienced what it was like to finance a major item with life insurance and the breathing room and the control and the freedom that that gave him. A really bad experience became an incredible learning opportunity for him. And this is something that we don't learn from the really big successes as much as we learned from the failures. Infinite banking came out of a big mistake that Nelson made, really, by involving the bit and, but this awesome thing, thank God he was able to, like he said, thank God I had paid such high premiums for so long, so that I had the cash values to get that bank out of my life. Well, a couple of minutes and pieces here. Number one is, he had a couple of bad deals, but the biggest problem was interest rates picked at 21.5%. And so they called his notes if he couldn't pay at a higher rate like that at 21%. Okay, that's number one. And he says, "Oh, it's good." And he said, "His annual payment is equaled." I don't remember what the number was, $500,000, whatever, to say that. It's like, I can't pay that. So do you declare bankruptcy or do you refinance? What do you do? And so that's what really got him. And so he got the point where he could, he had enough cash surrender value in the policies that he had access to that he owned, where he could service those debts short term and then build a strategy to increase his policy portfolio. So he could take over the entire debt portfolio. And that's what took him 13 years to do that. So yeah, but like you said, you know, bad deals, he had several bad deals where one of his partners were bankrupted. And so he had to assume that guy's debt also and that that was, he was not prepared for either. So there's all kinds of things out there. And the key word is, here's preparation prepared to do it. Are you prepared to take over bad debt? Are you prepared to all of a sudden, you know, have a, have a blown portfolio where they, your interest rate is skyrocketed? Well, I don't think most people are. But if that debt is something, you know, through collateral whole life policies from mutual insurance company, then guess what? You are prepared because the debt is on your, is on your term, you know, your terms. So anyway. I, you, thank you, thank you for reminding me of those pieces that's, I, as you were talking, I remembered another piece, Nelson said this. So he's like, if you read those books on real estate and you go do these deals, the way that the financial genius is to scribe it, he says, if the deal goes bad and you go back to them and ask them, okay, what do I do now? They usually mumble something about selling the real estate. And then he says, but what fool would buy that deal under those circumstances? It's like, hey, I have this deal that really went really bad. You want to buy it? You know, and so there's just no, that's the, that, again, that's the freedom and control that I love seeing. I love when we were in Cincinnati. I think it was Bruce said, what we do, sharing this with people, if it was easy, everybody would do it. It's not easy. And it gets really hard sometimes, but that's why I do it because that's why it's so valuable to people when, when, when the relationship works and the conversation works and people really start to implement it, that's why it's so rewarding. It's specifically because it's not easy. And I have a suspicion of anybody's like, you can make a ton of money. It's so easy. I don't think so. You got to, you don't have to change your thinking on some. It's hard work. It is because, you know, a lot of, a lot of insurance agents that are IBC, affectionados, their target set is they go out for people in debt. Right? Because, you know, Nelson Rosebook about, hey, this, you know, he was in debt and this helped him transfer that debt to, you know, insurance policy loans. And so that's the, that's the, that's the clientele these agents go after. Well, then you really have to look at the human factors. Okay. If you, these people, these clients are in so much debt, what kind of debt are they in and how they get there? If you got somebody who's like, mega, mega credit card debt and you're going to say, IBC is going to save you. Are you sure about that? Right. Right. Right. And I guess that, you know, so again, it's like you said, this could be hard stuff because, you know, Nelson spent, you know, probably 30% of his teaching time talking about the human condition and how important that is because if you have somebody who's quote, unquote, thief, ie, they're living on credit card debt because they're, they're stealing money out of their own pocket, servicing that debt. Then, then IBC might not be a good solution for them either. So, so there's a lot of different ways to look at it and understand it. And that's why they need somebody like you and use other practitioners. You can understand, you know, that is like, we have, we have practitioners who will meet with somebody who's dying to implement IBC in their life. And they say, okay, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to put you on a financial diet for a year. And then we're going to, and you talk to me whenever you need to, but you're on a diet for a year. And these are the goals we're trying to achieve for you to, to, you know, not lose weight, but to lose debt. Okay. On your own, you know, and then we'll get together and we'll see if you're a good candidate to actually to being control, you're in control of your finances when you're more responsible so that we see that a lot too. So yeah, if, if they can't whip Parkinson's law, they're not going to be able to do it. If they're, if they're spending everything that they make, they're going to, the only way to get started is to break that first. You got to break that first. You got to make a commitment that you're going to, that you're going to spend less than you make. Otherwise, if you don't, if you're not spending less than you make, then you don't have any excess capital to start capitalizing a business. And that's really what you're building when you're building a system of policies is you're building a family business. It's a, it's a, it's a financing business. And Nelson talks about that. That's very laser accurate. It's a, and you have to be able, you have to have the discipline to think like an entrepreneur and control your capital and tell it where to go. Yeah. I have found, I'll, I'll just say, I think the majority of my clients already have that whipped before they talk to me. I've had a few success stories as well, which is awesome of people that were in all this debt and they didn't have any control. And then the principles of infinite banking gave them a pathway to step into control. And that was really fun. And it's, you know, pursuing those types of relationships is great. It just hasn't been the majority of the relationships for me. The majority of us have been people who already have Parkinson's law whipped in their life. Well, yeah, when I say practitioners, there's some, there's some that subscribe to, you know, their primary strategy is to attack, you know, things like credit card debt and whatever, which is not a good way to start this, you know, so. Well, Michael, one of the things that we talked about earlier was, you know, the importance of supporting your clients in their journey. Can you expand a little bit on that for our viewers and listeners? Yeah. So establishing this way of thinking and establishing a system of policies that's really going to work long term takes a lot of doing. And the number one thing that people need is they need to be able to talk to their practitioner. They need to be able to get on their schedule. They need to be able to get a hold of them. They need to be able to have meetings with them. They need to get back and strategize because I know it's exactly, it's a, this different way of thinking. You talk to somebody, you see that these concepts are built in their mind. They've found a landing spot in their mind and they understand them six months later, they're gone. And you got to teach them it all over again. And you and the best, the greatest teacher in the world and God is like this with his people. If you read the whole testament, he's so patient. He doesn't matter how many times you got to teach it to him. He teaches him again and again and again and again and again until it sticks. And so in order to really be successful, people need somebody who's willing to pour into them again and again and again and again and again. And I get concerned about my clients that I haven't heard from in a while and I reach out to them. I try to get meetings with them. And they always really appreciate that. I have a really good friend. I'm going to tell on him a little bit. Shane Tiffany, Tiffany cattle company here in Harrington. very successful entrepreneurial entrepreneur. or great business guy. I went to him also when I was really learning early on learning about a lot of these concepts and I said, "Shane, I really want to build my clientele and build my business and grow it." I look at all these strategies out in the world, click funnels and build this funnel and get tons of people into your funnel, all this stuff. And I'm not criticizing that. It works really well for a lot of people. I don't want to criticize that. Not, I'm saying. I said, "That doesn't feel right to me. It doesn't feel like it fits my personality. What do I do?" And we were in the car and he and his wife reached over and they lay their hands on me and started praying for me right there in the car. I was like, "Wow, okay, I'm going to hear something now." And they, and he said, "Take care of the business that you already have and God will give you more." He said, "You want more clients? Take care of the ones you already have." Look, and there is a deep truth in that. There's a wonderful book called The Gap in the Gain out there that I will recommend by Dan Sullivan. And he says, "When you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have." So if you're focused on all the clients that you don't have, you're going to lose the clients you have. But if you focus on what you have, you gain what you lack. So if you focus on the clients that, that is my medicine. When I feel like I want to grow my business, I just find somebody, I go through my whole client list, who have I talked to recently, who have I not talked to in a while, I reach out to them, I bug them, I become a nuisance to them. How are you doing? What's going on? How's your from Aaron's? How's your health? How's your kids? What have you been thinking about IBC and I try to talk to them and take I try to take care of them and it's messy. It's a messy process. It's never easy, clean, smooth sailing. But I have found that to be a huge blessing and just trying everything I can do to make sure that first of all, my family is taking care of because that's first like and one was the last time I looked at my policies and I really, like I actually did a deep dive on all my policies that I have recently and I was surprised by some of the numbers. I didn't, I didn't really know what was going on. So that's actually step one. Are you implementing it yourself and have you really looked at what you're really doing with your own policies? Raise my hand there. I needed to look at that and then go look at the people that I've already talked to. Just be a friend to them. Maybe they don't even really need to talk about IBC but they want to talk about some tough situation that's going on with their son who's 17 years old and they're whatever it is, get involved in their lives. Infinite banking is a lifestyle and so get involved in their lifestyle. See what's going on their life and I'll never forget when Shane told me that it was critical lesson in my journey as a business person. Don't everybody out there is focused on getting more and more and more and again, there are wonderful strategies to attract new people to this. We need those strategies. We need to learn that. Those are wonderful. Not at the expense of the people that we've already made a commitment to. That's important. That's really important. I'm glad you brought that up. Just said something I really don't think about typically. It's the same thing from my perspective for not clients but some of our students that kind of drift off campus. Go back and reach out to them and find out what's going on. I did some sales training years ago with a life insurance company. I don't remember what it was but they threw out a stat and they said if you survey people who buy life insurance in the mass on all those 360,000 life insurance agents in the United States, something like that, if you survey them and ask them what's the biggest problem with the life insurance industry? They will tell you it's I bought a policy from somebody and then I could never get a hold of them again. That's the biggest problem from the consumer perspective in the whole life insurance industry. I hate to say this because I'm in this industry and it's a little bit embarrassing but I get people all the time. They come to me with two, three, four, five policies and they want to talk to me because I haven't had this experience with someone who is an infinite banking person yet. It's mostly, but they bought these policies and the agent they bought them from, they just they don't get any help from them. They can't get a hold of them. They can't talk to them and they want to learn how to use the cash value properly but they end up talking to me because or and I think that's a pretty common experience for IBC practitioners. They get a lot of or you know orphans so to speak that feel like they need some help and it's a real blessing to help those people and I that's yeah that's how we help help clients. Well Michael as we wrap up our time together today, will you please share what IBC means to you? You're going to make me emotional. Come on. That's a really good question. Elijah said on the only one left, nobody else believes in God, nobody cares. I feel so alone and God said no, there's this whole group of people. I wanted people in my life. I wanted people in my life that would tell me the truth. And Nelson had the courage to tell the truth and the entire world, I mean the government, the banks, they did not. They you know want him to speak that truth but he had the courage to speak the truth. And man, it takes courage to tell the truth. Infinite banking is a community of people that tells the truth about money and that's what it means to me. I get to I can't describe the blessing that Tim Eurick and Bruce Wainer in particular were to me at the coaching academy in Cincinnati. Just speaking some truths into my life, Richard Canfield speaking some truths into my life that and you David, I mean everybody Lee, I mean infinite banking means to me that I have a community of people that I didn't I don't know if I said this at the beginning, but I was praying that God would put people in my life that would teach me the truth about money and business. And that's when I found out about infinite banking. And it's a community of people that had the courage to tell me the truth and are teaching me how to speak the truth and being part of a community where I know, I know that I know that I'm building my family's financial people financial future on on principles that can never change that are always going to be there. And I don't I don't have to worry if I'm building my financial life on sand because because Nelson had the courage to tell the truth. That's what it means to me. Thank you, Michael. Well, thank I thank you guys. Thank you guys for carrying on Nelson's legacy and doing everything that you can to continue to share his message because man, it's not just me. It's a community of people that I care about. I have a whole of it. I care about these people. These people are my dearest and precious, most precious friends, some of these clients. And thank you for the support and for the truth because it's having a massive impact on a on a whole network of people in my world that that everybody is extremely grateful for. So thank you as well. Let's lead the charge. Let's keep going. Keep going. Yeah. Thanks, Michael. You know, we're going to keep trying to gain the 10% quote unquote. There you go.