144: Mike Dillard Built Multiple 8-Figure Businesses After Failing for Years, Here’s How – 8FE

How do you handle failure?

Do you let it hold you back, or do you turn it into a stepping stone for success?

In episode 144 of Beyond A Million, Brad chats with Mike Dillard, the creator of Magnetic Sponsoring and Elevation Group, about his remarkable journey—from waiting tables to building multiple 8-figure businesses. Mike shares his early struggles in network marketing, the painful $50M loss to a fraudulent partner, and the personal battles he faced with a brain injury and mold poisoning.

Throughout it all, Mike reveals the invaluable lessons he’s learned from these life-altering setbacks and how they helped him succeed.

Tune in!

Inspiring Quotes

• “I realized I was the only common denominator in the streak of failures.” – Mike Dillard
• “The purpose of your business is not to make money to spend, but to make money to buy assets.” – Mike Dillard
• “I was chasing opportunities, chasing the dream, chasing the new product and all of those shiny things. But at the end of the day, I still didn’t know how to sell. I still didn’t know how to market. And that was the epiphany that started my journey to success.” – Mike Dillard 
• “It’s harder than ever today to figure out who’s full of shit and who’s not.” – Brad Weimert 
• “Network marketing is an industry of marketing and promotion pursued by people who have no idea how to market and promote.” – Mike Dillard
• “It is infinitely more efficient to sell your own product and keep 100% of the revenue, then sell somebody else’s product and keep 10% of it.” – Mike Dillard
• “The purpose of your business is not to make money to spend, but to make money to buy assets.”- Mike Dillard

• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:03:27 How it all started
• 00:08:13 The beginning of online marketing
• 00:13:33 Starting Elevation Group 
• 00:21:46 The con artist that stole $50 million dollars
• 00:25:50 How to tell who’s full of crap 
• 00:29:24 The story of Evergrow 
• 00:41:36 Mike’s brain injury 
• 00:51:33 Using psychedelics as medicine 
• 00:57:06 Heavy metal and mold toxicity 
• 01:04.49 Mindset and personal development 
• 01:09:12 Investing in crypto 
• 01:24:31 When to start making passive income 
• 01:27:37 Outro

00:00
Mike Dillard
1996 to 2000, network marketing was basically your only option. And so I pursued that for five or six years, incredibly unsuccessfully. I don’t think I made a dollar for five years.

00:10
Brad Weimert
I mean, you and a lot of people.

00:12
Mike Dillard
And so by that time, I realized the only issue here was me. Over the next four to five years, became the number one distributor and my company built magnetic into a $6 million a year info education business and had really done at that point, everything I could possibly do in the network marketing industry fairly quickly.

00:29
Brad Weimert
Damn it.

00:30
Mike Dillard
Once the stock market got back up to its previous all time high, before zero eight, the business just tailored. They ended up stealing over $50 million worth of our people’s money. I wanted to find, subconsciously a way to make it up to the world. I felt a little click in the back of my head one day, and that moment changed my life. I couldn’t physically fall asleep again for the next four to five years. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through. I would not wish it upon my worst enemy. And it was also the best thing I’ve ever been through because it forced me to change absolutely every single aspect of my life.

01:07
Brad Weimert
What is the approach to solving the mold problem in the first place and detoxifying yourself?

01:11
Mike Dillard
It’s not a matter of if you have this, it’s how much do you have in your system? Again, if you’re above the age of 35, you’re living in the United States. You’re going to have heavy metal.

01:20
Brad Weimert
Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even ten figures. I’m Brad Weimerta, and as the founder of Ezpaydirect, I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building, and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today. In those multi million eight, nine and ten figure businesses. Life can get exciting beyond a million. Mike Dillard, I’m so glad we get some FaceTime here. Yeah.

02:03
Mike Dillard
Thank you, Brad.

02:04
Brad Weimert
Absolutely. So, I’ve known you from Austin for a long time, but I don’t know that I’ve actually ever really talked business with you at all.

02:14
Mike Dillard
I don’t think so.

02:16
Brad Weimert
I’ve known you from, I knew your name from magnetic sponsoring, but that’s really all I knew about it. So in prep for this, I kind of, you know, did our. Did our little Internet digging and found a video from 2010 of you and Kurt Molly talking about the launch of the elevation group.

02:36
Mike Dillard
Yeah. Yeah.

02:37
Brad Weimert
Which is hilarious, but little backdrop. So what I got was you were a server here in 2004 in San Antonio.

02:46
Mike Dillard
Oh, in San Antonio, living with my parents.

02:48
Brad Weimert
Oh, fun.

02:49
Mike Dillard
Yeah.

02:49
Brad Weimert
Love that.

02:51
Mike Dillard
Super strategic decision, but intentional, but still no fun.

02:55
Brad Weimert
The smart move.

02:55
Mike Dillard
Yeah.

02:56
Brad Weimert
Yeah. Starting point, Washington. Launched a seven figure company in your twenties and then multiple eight figure companies. And there are a bunch of things that I want to talk about kind of through your journey, because there are focal points for you that I think are really helpful for entrepreneurs that are directly pertaining to business. And then there’s other stuff that is really directly pertaining to business, but it’s kind of life level stuff that a lot of the time people don’t focus on or they shift in and out of the focus. And I think you were missed to ignore that stuff altogether, 100%. So let me start with the beginning. So what is magnetic sponsoring? How did it start? And tell me more.

03:35
Mike Dillard
Yeah. So I graduated from Texas A and M the year 2000. And during my four years there, I had already figured out that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And I learned that waiting tables at the original Romano’s Macaroni grill in burning, Texas before it was ever a chain of. And used to bus tables there and would come home at, you know, 01:00 a.m. On a Saturday night. 02:00 a.m. Back to my parents house and would sit there and turn on the tv to kind of decompress for a little bit. And there’s nothing on at 01:00 a.m. On a weekend back in those days with cable television, except infomercials.

04:10
Brad Weimert
Right.

04:10
Mike Dillard
And so that exposed me tony Robbins and Carlton sheets and, like, you know, all of that stuff. And what it did was show me that, hey, there is something else out there that you can pursue outside of a corporate job. And so that really kind of lit a fire under me. And having a job really allowed me to figure out that I didn’t like being told what to do and where to be and when to be there and how long I had to be there and how much money I was going to make. And so kind of the fire for entrepreneurship was started there.

04:38
Mike Dillard
And in college it was spent pursuing network marketing, because 1996 to 2000, there was no online marketing, there was no social media if you wanted to start a business as a kid with 100, $200 in your pocket, network marketing was basically your only option. And so I pursued that for five or six years, incredibly unsuccessfully. I don’t think I made a dollar for five years.

05:03
Brad Weimert
I mean, you and a lot of people.

05:05
Mike Dillard
Yeah, yeah. And it was really good. But at the end of the day, it came down to the fact that I was very introverted, I was very shy at that point in my life. Didn’t have a lot of like self confidence in an extroverts industry, talking to adults that, you know, again, we didn’t have Internet marketing back then, so it was going to meetings, calling friends and family members, trying to sell them on a business opportunity. And I’m literally like a 20 year old kid, right?

05:30
Brad Weimert
Yeah.

05:31
Mike Dillard
I got to a point where I graduated school, still continued to pursue that business, and still failed miserably at it.

05:37
Brad Weimert
Same business or several different network marketing.

05:39
Mike Dillard
Partners, I probably joined at least twelve of them.

05:41
Brad Weimert
Yeah, yeah.

05:42
Mike Dillard
And that was also pretty common. Yeah. And that was a big, I would say around that five, six year mark. That was when the big epiphany happened. And I realized that I’m the only common denominator in the streak of failures. Over a dozen different companies. And in every single one of those companies there’s people walking across the stage getting awards, making millions of dollars and having success. And so by that time I realized the only issue here was me. The people who were making money in that world were world class at something. They were world class at holding events or talking to prospects over the phone, you know, holding little meetings for, you know, warm market prospects, whatever it may be, speaking from stage. They had spent years and years, if not decades, becoming absolutely world class at that particular skill set.

06:31
Mike Dillard
And that is what was allowing them to get a result. And I realized that I hadn’t done jack shit from a skill set perspective. I was chasing opportunities and chasing the dream and the new product and the new comp plan and all of the things that, you know, are shiny. And at the end of the day, I still didn’t know how to sell it. I still didn’t know how to market. And that was, epiphany number two was that network marketing is an industry of marketing and promotion pursued by people who have no idea how to market and promote. And I was one of them at the time. And so I realized that if I was going to stay in this industry, I was again an introvert in an extroverts industry. And if I was gonna stay in it.

07:08
Mike Dillard
I wanted to figure out a way to build a business that was aligned with my personality type as an introvert. And so there’s around that time I’m discovering Dan Kennedy and the very first Internet marketers out there. Corey Rudol sold the very first ebook that I bought online and how to do online marketing. And I realized or discovered direct response marketing. And it’s like, hey, I can learn how to write copy and sell a product service or a business opportunity. Never actually have to speak to anybody. I was like, that sounds awesome. That sounds like something that would be perfect for me. And so I spent the next year and a half literally writing out sales letters by hand every day for about an hour, and then waiting tables at PF Chang’s the rest of the time.

07:55
Mike Dillard
And I taught myself how to write sales copy, and then I taught myself Google Adwords, which was brand new at the time. I had to learn how to make a capture page by going and buying HTML from dummies and using Dreamweaver and like, oh, that was brutal. Hand coding an HTML page.

08:13
Brad Weimert
That era was so difficult to build web pages. Yeah, I mean, it was really like, you had to actually be not an expert, but you had to be pretty fucking good to do it.

08:21
Mike Dillard
There’s no online classes. No, like video. Finding a video on the Internet back then was like, oh, wow, yeah, that’s high tech stuff. And so I’m literally going through HTML for Dummies books on Dreamweaver and building a capture page. And I built that first page and I didn’t have any money, but I was learning these skills. So I went to the old guys in the industry and I said, hey, Internet marketing is a thing now. Internet lead generation is a thing. Let me do a lead gen campaign for you and run it for you, and we’ll split the leads. Or you can pay me, you know, money, $5 a lead I generate for you, or whatever it may be.

08:54
Mike Dillard
And so we started doing that, and before you know it, I’m generating, I don’t know, 5100 leads a day for these guys and getting paid per lead to do it. And so that’s really how I mastered that skill and started to do it for myself. And now I’ve got leads contacting me. I wrote a long sales letter for an opportunity that I was promoting at the time. And exactly what I wanted to happened. I had people starting to email and call me up and saying, hey, I want to join your team and learn how to do this stuff too. That turned into a training manual, 55 page training manual that I wrote for my new growing team. And that was called magnetic sponsoring.

09:38
Mike Dillard
And it was about how to attract leads and prospects to you without having to chase people down, which using the Internet was a brand new concept for that industry.

09:46
Brad Weimert
It was specifically around network marketing.

09:48
Mike Dillard
Yeah, yeah. It was again written as a training manual for my team. And then a bunch of other leaders in the industry found it. They’re like, we want to use this for our team. So I made it generic, turned it into a book, started selling it for $40 a copy on my own webpage with my own ad campaign. And I think within three months I was selling 50 grand a month of that book.

10:08
Brad Weimert
Nice.

10:09
Mike Dillard
And then that kind of turned into an eight figure business in the next couple of years. And I’d say after about five years, over the next four to five years, became the number one distributor in my company, built magnetic into a $6 million a year info education business, and had really done at that point everything I could possibly do in the network marketing industry fairly quickly once I broke the seal.

10:36
Brad Weimert
So most kids, I shouldn’t even say that it’s not most kids. Most people struggle with this idea of doing what they’re good at versus honing a skill to better at something. And I don’t know what the right advice is, but what do you think led you to the place of, instead of trying to do what everybody was teaching you in network marketing, saying, no, no, I have to find something else that is more in line with my natural skill set, you know?

11:04
Mike Dillard
Again, I pursued it for five years. Didn’t work. I finally learned, thanks to some great mentors, how to sponsor people and close people over the phone. I probably sponsored 30, 40, 50 people over the next six month period and was building a team at a team of a couple hundred people. This is right before magnetic. And I was like, okay, I can do this now. I’ve officially done this, I can get a result, I can make money. And I absolutely hate this. If this is what it’s going to look like for the next 1020 years of my life and I’m going to build a career doing this, I actually don’t want to do this. This would be horrible. And so it reached an inflection point.

11:44
Mike Dillard
It’s like, do I leave the industry and throw away the last five to six years of effort just when I figured things out? Or do I figure out a way to do this that would feel good to me? And that was really what motivated me to go try and do that because outside of that I had no idea what I would do. I really had no clue if that wasn’t going to work out for me because again Internet marketing was just becoming a thing. But that was the pain was the thing that motivated me to continue to look for new approaches and thankfully it worked out.

12:19
Brad Weimert
So in retrospect you can say I built a $6 million info product company in the network marketing space serving it at the time. Were you aware that was what it was?

12:30
Mike Dillard
I mean after I started making 50 grand a month selling an ebook I’m like this is a hell of a lot more fun than prospecting and building a team and constantly training new people who have no idea how to market, how to teach Susie and Johnny Homemaker how to become network marketers. It became very apparent to me that very quickly that network marketing is a very inefficient way to make money. Your goal is to generate revenue. It is infinitely more efficient to sell your own product and keep 100% of the revenue, then sell somebody else’s product and keep five to 10% of it and then try to train people to do the same thing. It’s kind of ridiculous. But again that industry was built before the Internet. So if you think out of it from that perspective it was quite brilliant.

13:19
Mike Dillard
But once the Internet came along and you and I could go market and sell our products to anyone in the world from our home, all of the middlemen and inefficiencies of a network marketing business kind of just became anchor that I was quickly willing to get rid of.

13:33
Brad Weimert
So where did you take it from there?

13:34
Mike Dillard
That was around the age of 30 to 32. I left the industry, gave that business over to my partner Tim Irway in 2010. And at the end of 2010 I launched the elevation group. And so here I was in my late twenties making millions of dollars a year doing all of the stupid shit that one would do. Buying a 6000 square foot house right down the street and Westover, a boat, the cars, all the things right and not saving or investing any of that money. And I think one of the biggest landmines that young people come across is we were the first generation of young Internet entrepreneurs. Like no one before us in their twenties was making millions of dollars a year like were. Most of us came from families that didn’t have that kind of money.

14:28
Mike Dillard
My parents couldn’t comprehend what I was doing or making or how to give me advice to handle that right. So we just did what we would naturally do is buy all the things that were on our vision board for the previous five to ten years that were dreaming about. And when you’re that young and you’re making that kind of money, you create a confirmation bias as you experience that and you assume that if you’re making 300 or 400 grand a month, that’s going to continue indefinitely, especially if you’ve been doing it for, you know, one to two years at a time. The crash of 2008 had just previously happened. We were coming out of that, and I watched everyone who had invested money lose half of their retirement accounts. I was like, well, that’s something I’m not going to do.

15:09
Mike Dillard
What do the rich actually do with their money? I’m going to go learn and figure that out. Because I also observed that during that crash, there’s a lot of people that made billions of dollars. And I was like, okay, there’s two categories of people here. The sheep who are the victims, and then the wolves, if you will, who are just more educated and who are paying attention and who have different skill sets that can turn market crashes into huge opportunities. And so I wanted to learn how to do the same. So the idea for that is becomes the elevation group. And it was very simple. I was having my son at the time, so I wanted a lifestyle business.

15:47
Mike Dillard
And I started by sitting down and defining how much I wanted to work, what the topic was going to be about, what my deliverables were going to be, and how much money I wanted that business to make. And I really re engineered everything backwards from there. So the time is I only wanted to spend a couple hours a week on the business. I didn’t want to have a team or an office. I wanted to have one deliverable that I was responsible for a month. So the idea around it was, I’m going to interview the most successful investors I can find on video, post that in a private members area, and that’s going to be the content every month. I was not an expert in money. I was not the expert in this industry.

16:26
Mike Dillard
And I think that’s important for people to realize and understand is you don’t have to be that. I was basically going to be Oprah or Oprah’s not an expert, she’s just the interviewer. That was the idea behind it. One deliverable per month. I thought 97 a month, 597 a year would be a fair price, considering one specific tax or investment strategy. Could easily pay for twelve, you know, be worth $1,200 or more for somebody’s membership over the course of twelve months. But I had no idea if it was going to work. I spent probably three months writing an hour and a half long webinar, going through financial money history and the Federal Reserve and all of those big topics back then and after the zero eight crashed creature from Jekyll island and all of that stuff. But that’s what I was super passionate about.

17:17
Mike Dillard
That’s what I read about every day in my spare time. And put this webinar together, launched it to my list from magnetic, and yeah, it took off. We did 3.2 million in revenue in our first seven days.

17:30
Brad Weimert
Damn.

17:31
Mike Dillard
Biggest launch I’ve ever done for sure. Especially for a product that was $600 or less. No upsells or anything like that.

17:40
Brad Weimert
Yeah, also interesting because that was to.

17:42
Mike Dillard
A network marketing list, let’s call it entrepreneurs, right? Who are always going to be interested in money making stuff one way or another. But yeah, it was a very different industry and it was taking a huge risk because I left magnetic. I didn’t have any money coming in at that point. It was kind of all or nothing.

17:59
Brad Weimert
I guess you can call it entrepreneurs, but a network marketing list is distinctly different in that it’s sort of like, I think about it like biz op versus for sure, entrepreneurs, right? It’s like real estate agents. Are they real estate professionals? Most real estate agents sell one thing a year. So network marketing folk, right? And no disrespect, like, I know I’ve got several friends that have absolutely destroyed in that industry, but I don’t know that those are people I would go to for financial advice.

18:33
Mike Dillard
No, what it really was with my email list, I’d obviously built a really great relationship with them, which I’m quite well known for, is the relationship that I build with my readers and the emails that I send out. And it was, I’d spent the previous months transitioning them into my new interests and why those interests were important. And all of those individuals, regardless of industry, just got a massively whacked over the head in the crash of zero eight. So everybody in any kind of business pursuit, network marketing, Internet marketing, small business, at the end of the day, the primary common thread between all of them is they’re trying to make more money and a lot of them had just lost it.

19:16
Mike Dillard
And so that was one of the reasons that product was so successful is it really tapped into a zeitgeist moment that was far beyond me and what I was talking about, because everybody in the United States just experienced it and it was a very painful event. And so I was coming around with a solution for that pain in the form of something very simple and very approachable, because a part of the sales copy for that was, hey, I’m just a normal guy. I’m not a financial advisor. I don’t know how to read those complicated stock charts either. And we’re not going to sit here and send you a bunch of technical charts talking about, you know, PE ratios and all of the stuff that you don’t even have.

19:57
Mike Dillard
Understand this is going to be coming from a new person, you know, which I am when it comes to this topic, trying to figure things out on my own. And if you want to join me on this journey and adventure as I figure out how to, you know, really become financially independent through investing, then that’s what we’re going to be talking about. And so that was the pitch, and it really resonated. But what was interesting is we did almost, I want to say, between 600,000 and a million a month that first year, and that business did really well for the first two years, and then we can get into it or not. But giant issue running into a con artist, that kind of blew the business up.

20:40
Mike Dillard
But I think more important for that is the fact that once the stock market got back up to its previous all time high before zero eight, the business just tailored. It just tanked because the problem had now disappeared.

20:54
Brad Weimert
Yeah.

20:54
Mike Dillard
Yeah. And so I thought that was really interesting and a really valuable lesson learned.

20:58
Brad Weimert
So, easy pay direct serves the creator market really heavily. And when I think about kind of the two different models that people use in the education space, and I’ve talked about this before, but there’s the expert model and there’s the learning through the journey model, and yours was the latter. Right. You were saying, hey, I’m trying to learn financial education. Here it is. Do you think that after the collapse, the expert model would have performed better?

21:30
Mike Dillard
I think it would have done equally well. I mean, that’s when Robert Kiyosaki went to a whole new level as an expert. Right. So I think either one would have been fine. I just, and I probably would have done that if I was an expert. I would have taken that route, but that was not an option.

21:46
Brad Weimert
So what happened with the explosion of the business? The con artist?

21:51
Mike Dillard
Yeah. So as I mentioned earlier, the model was interviewing someone who was really good at, on a different investing topic every single month. And were 18 months into this. And believe it or not, it’s really damn hard to find a new strategy to talk about when it comes to investing 17 months in a row, there’s not that much to do, right, especially if you’re trying to keep things super simple for folks and not get really deep into complicated niches of different types of real estate or debt and things like that. We ran into this guy that was in the forex industry and had never covered that before, interviewed, flew out. He was from Australia, flew out to interview him and get to know him with my business partner Robert at the time.

22:41
Mike Dillard
And we got presented, went to their high rise office in downtown Brisbane and got presented with all of their docs of their past performance from KPMG, all of this audit stuff. And the results were really impressive, like 100% plus returns a year based on all the docs we saw. So we did a lesson with them, came back and did another live session, and they had a product that they sold, an education product, and then they had an investment firm that you could invest in, and they would do, you know, they would trade. And so, yeah, I invested with their business. We promoted their product and their service to our audience. And for a few months, everything was fine.

23:28
Mike Dillard
I don’t remember the exact timeline, if it was six months later, but some period later, everybody woke up and they’d had like, a massive loss, like 50% overnight. And we’re trying to get a hold of these guys, hey, what’s going on? And the thing we got was, oh, it was just. It was a trader’s mistake. Fat thumb error. The decimal was off by a point. So instead of a 5% loss, it was a 50% loss. You know, just tell everybody to invest more money and we’ll make their returns back faster. And as soon as that went off, I was like, oh, fuck.

23:59
Mike Dillard
So we literally called the SEC and the FBI and the CFTC and all these people, and I’m literally at our desk at the w hotel here, like a month later around all of these people with my attorney telling them what happened, and they ended up stealing over $50 million worth of our people’s money, mine included. Wow, over a thousand people. And it turns out that this was a very sophisticated global scam that had been Ponzi scheme, basically, that had been being run for years, and it finally caught up with him. And unfortunately, I was the winning person who got to pop that bubble.

24:37
Mike Dillard
And then that was definitely the hardest thing that I’d ever gone through because I was almost kind of like tai Lopez level known at that period from that business to where the point I would go to grocery stores and get recognized, I’d go to hotels in different cities and get recognized. And now, all of a sudden, all of that attention got turned to me with a giant question around my integrity, and was I a part of this whole thing and all of that, which was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through. And when you’re in a situation like that, the first thing the lawyers tell you is you can’t say anything. So now I can’t talk about it. I can’t email my list, right? All of our sales tank 90% overnight.

25:20
Mike Dillard
We’ve got a team and an office and overhead, and all of that revenue dried up, and our legal bills went from maybe $500 a month to $50,000 a month. And so it got hard really fast, while I was also going through a divorce at the same time. So that was 2012 through 2015 was the next three years. Just depression and alcohol and survival. So.

25:50
Brad Weimert
It’S harder than ever today to figure out who’s full of shit and who’s not. How can you tell who’s full of shit?

26:02
Mike Dillard
One, I think, is time, right? You know, thank God I had a track record at that point, of a significant track record of always doing things right and having built up a really solid reputation. And so building a reputation over time is, number one, when this was happening. It brings me to number two. I reached out to Mark Ford, one of the founders of Agora and Palm beach and billion dollar info business in the financial education space. Michael Masterson, pen name for all of the best selling books that he’s ever written. And I was like, hey, Mark, I know you went through something like this where you literally had the FBI show up at your front lawn and, like, you know, bring your reputation into question. What did you do? And he’s like, you’ve only got one option. That’s tell the truth.

26:56
Mike Dillard
Like, just be completely transparent and tell the truth to everybody, and that’s all you can do, and everybody else will make up their own mind at that point. So I followed that advice. As soon as I got the go ahead from my attorney, I wrote. It was probably a 20 page long blog post where I put everything in there, copies of the affidavit from the legal process, which is basically, here’s what I say happened, and this is what I’m telling the attorneys in the SEC happened, and here’s the evidence to back that up, because I had to give my laptop and everything over, and I just gave access over to everything and basically became the witness for the prosecution. And I just said, hey, here’s what happened, and I fucked up. And I trusted somebody that basically took advantage of my naivete.

27:54
Mike Dillard
They had forged all of those documents from KPMG. They were all fake. And I didn’t know any better. You know, I was 30 something years old in the finance space, and I’d come from a world where everybody helps each other out, and you don’t screw people over, because why would you do that? And apparently, there’s people who don’t, you know, see the world in the same way and that we’re willing to do so. So that was the best thing that I did, because it communicated to the world that, hey, even if I screw up, I’m gonna be honest about it, and I’m gonna tell you exactly what happened, and I’m not gonna try and hide it, and I’m just gonna own it. I’m gonna apologize and learn my lessons, share my lessons, and move on from there. And that’s what I did.

28:40
Mike Dillard
And so the business obviously took a big hit. I walked away from it. As soon as the legal proceedings were over and those guys went to jail, I basically stepped away from the business, said, I can’t do this anymore. It’s kind of like having to go see my ex wife every single day and continue to have a relationship there that there’s been too much trauma around. Had no idea what to do. Ended up Tony Robbins date with Destiny event. I want to say November, December of 2015. And that really pulled me out of that period of depression and kind of allowed me to forgive myself and give myself permission to go do something new and different and just start to think about the future again.

29:24
Mike Dillard
And that’s where I got the idea for evergrow and for self made man, and had a new idea to pursue a new lease on life at that point. So rough.

29:38
Brad Weimert
How has having $50 million stolen from you impacted your capacity to trust business partners in the future?

29:53
Mike Dillard
I don’t really. I’ve come to the conclusion I’m 47 now. Right. So this was a while ago. This was ten years ago. More than that. Well, if you’re 2012, you know, more than that. 1213 years ago. At this point, especially after the health. Health crisis that came in 2018, my priorities are completely different. But, yeah, back then, I would think I would only be willing to do a business partnership if I knew someone and had known them for a long time, like, were already friends, had an established relationship together, etcetera. But priorities changed after that. It’s like, okay, I don’t want to go out and build a hundred million dollar company anymore.

30:38
Mike Dillard
And I just want to do what I’m good at, which is to write and to teach and get the bills paid, and really just came back to, I think I want to say, in some ways, a more centered place, but in other ways, something was really interesting. I’ll share with you. I don’t know if I’ve shared this with anybody, but coming out of that period from EVG and going to the Tony Robbins event, I wanted to find subconsciously a way to make it up to the world. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing at the time, but after, years after that, through therapy, I realized that’s what was happening. And so I wanted to start evergrow, which was a hydroponic system that I developed. And the idea there was to decentralize the ag industry and bring organic food into everybody’s home.

31:28
Mike Dillard
I wanted to do something as a physical product that my face didn’t have to be a part of. And I wanted to build an asset that I could sell, and walk away and retire and never have to work again. And so I lived literally right across the street from Whole Foods in downtown Austin, would go over there every day and buy greens to juice, and hated the fact that I literally spend $100 on a basket full of greens to go juice for two days worth of juice. And I’m like, you have to be rich in order to just buy food today that’s not covered in poison. And that kind of pissed me off.

32:00
Mike Dillard
And around that time, I was reading Peter Diamandis’s book around the whole decentralization age that was coming about at the time, odesk and 99 designs and all of these companies that were empowering the individual. Instead of companies, you can go directly to an individual for a service. And I was like, why hasn’t anyone decentralized the food industry? And they really hadn’t. There was a few products at the time that did exist that were hydroponic towers you could put in your house, and it had lights on it, you could grow stuff. But it was a pain in the ass. I bought one, and you had to balance the ph every day and refill it with water and clean it out, and it was just a really big pain in the butt.

32:43
Brad Weimert
It looked like a pain in the ass, too. I remember the infomercials of that era.

32:46
Mike Dillard
Yeah.

32:47
Brad Weimert
And I was like, that looks like a big fucking thing I have to keep on my counter, and it’s gonna.

32:50
Mike Dillard
Take little counter ones. And then there’s the. There was the tower ones. I can’t remember the name of it off the top of my head right now, they still sell them today, but you’re literally having to dose nutrients and measure the ph, like taking care of a miniature pool every single day. And so I was like, I want to automate this. And that became kind of my vision. And I hired a company, a design company in Whipsaw in Silicon Valley, who did a lot of apple esque products. And I think that’s where I started, is like, this is going to become an appliance in somebody’s home. So it has to look like a piece of art. Like that would something that apple would make. So hired whipsaw to help me design this. And I literally didn’t know anything about growing anything.

33:36
Mike Dillard
So I bought every book I could find on Amazon about hydroponics and growing food and just started to dive in on it. And we started to develop the concept in a prototype. And I want to say I spent the next two to three years building that device. And we did it. We. Over about three years, we built a prototype that was in my living room growing food that was fully automated with Wi Fi and lights and ph sensors and dosers. So you’d put the ph bottles and the nutrient bottles in there, and it would automatically dose them as needed. It had an app that would show you everything that’s going on in the system, notify you when it needs more water.

34:17
Mike Dillard
The lights would map to the sun’s, you know, the rhythm of the sun, so it would match sunrise and sunset for your own personal circadian rhythm in the house. And it was super cool. We were getting to a stage where were starting to put little talk about, put little cameras above each one, and so it would identify what plant is in what pod and dose nutrients for that specific plant. It was unbelievably fun because it was such a cool challenge to make something that had never been made that before. And it was literally me and two designers at this other company building something that was kind of groundbreaking and, yeah.

34:58
Mike Dillard
And so the hard part was, is that learning to developing a physical product for the first time, and especially something that had never been done before and didn’t have a precedent to model or follow. The scope initially was 350 grand to design the prototype. And by year three, where I was well over three mil, and that was 100% personally funded. And so, you know, if you make $3 million online, your profit margins probably 35% if you’re using paid ads. So to make 3 million to write a check for that means I made 9 million in sales revenue, just to fund that right before taxes and everything else. And so I was having to build an info business again and make 300, 400, $500,000 a month there, just to then shove all of that money into evergrow to develop that.

35:50
Mike Dillard
And unfortunately, around June of 2018, I developed that from 2015 to 2018. I felt a little click in the back of my head one day, and that moment changed my life. I couldn’t physically fall asleep again for the next, I want to say, four to five years.

36:12
Brad Weimert
Whoa.

36:13
Mike Dillard
Without a massive cocktail of sedatives. And almost the first seven days, I didn’t sleep for a single minute. Started to go insane, called the doctor, started to get suicidal, who put me on Ambien and Xanax, which I’ve never taken either of those things, and those are Xanax, huge tranquilizer, Ambien, you know, most powerful sleep med you can take. Very addictive. And taking both of those the first night got me an hour to 45 minutes to an hour of disassociation. Not even sleep. More of, like, an awaking dream state. A double dose the next day maybe got me an hour and a half, but still no deep going, unconscious sleep. And that turned into the scariest year of my life, where I literally couldn’t fall asleep. And my life changed.

37:12
Mike Dillard
It went from working on this amazing new project to living on my couch all day during the day, moving to my bed all night during at night, and trying not to literally jump off the balcony of the 26th floor of my apartment, not being able to work, not really being able to drive, not being able to write. And that continued over the next year. Every night before I go to bed, I’d literally lay down on the bathroom floor and have a muse headband on and just try to meditate to relax my body, which was just in fight or flight. It was as if you had injected me with an adrenaline pen 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s what it felt like, and that’s why I couldn’t physically fall asleep. It’s just pure adrenaline nonstop.

37:59
Brad Weimert
So let’s get to what happened there. So you have this huge open loop of this thing you invested $3 million into, which is a totally new product type. It’s a totally new category for you. So there’s this expansive learning journey to figure out not only what the industry is about, but also how you create a business in the industry. And it sounds like what you ended up doing to fund that was go back to what you knew, which was sell education around something, but what was that? What were you doing along those times to fund that before we hit this?

38:33
Mike Dillard
Yeah, yeah. That time I started up the self made man podcast, and that was gaining a lot of traction. I didn’t really sell anything through there, but it built a fairly big audience for me. And the primary product that funded that was a course called Lisgro. And during the EVg days, I built an email list of about 650,000 people and I basically decided to write a course on that. I was like, hey, here’s the most valuable skill I’ve ever learned online. It’s how to build an email list, and here’s how to do it.

39:08
Mike Dillard
And I sold that on an automated webinar for $1,500, did something pretty unusual that I’d never really seen anyone else do, which was I offered to give people 100% of their money back within the next year if they finished the course and actually built out their marketing funnel that was fully functional and sent it in for approval, basically. And I could see that it’s working along with the testimonial, which I think really helped sell that product. Again, were making 300 month, selling that product consistently every month just through that automated webinar.

39:43
Brad Weimert
Wow.

39:44
Mike Dillard
For about three years. And that’s what funded evergrow. And what I learned for the second time now, because I learned this with elevation group once, this was the second time, is that if you have a really successful offer that you are promoting with paid ads on a daily basis, the shelf life of that product is about 36 months. And after that, conversion rates are going to start to drop. Cost to acquire a customer is going to continue to go up until it’s no longer profitable to acquire any more new customers. And so what you’re doing by marketing and putting your ads out there every day over that three year period is all of your best customers buy first, then it’s the next group.

40:25
Mike Dillard
And 36 months in, anybody who is interested in that product has seen it and they’ve bought it or they’ve decided not to buy it. But at that point, went from spending $300 to $400 to acquire a customer, to over $1,000 to acquire a customer, and, you know, end up. And then the brain injury happened and all of it just came to an end. But yeah, the brain injury brought evergrow to an end, brought Lisgro to an end, brought it all to an end, and it just went into pure survival for the next three years after that.

40:56
Brad Weimert
So, so you were working on Evergrow with two designers, but otherwise you, were you working on the info side of things with anybody?

41:05
Mike Dillard
I always do everything myself outside of. I have a tech person to help on the tech integration stuff, zapier and WordPress and all of those things. And then I have someone that I outsource the paid ad campaigns out to manage those, and I focus on creating the course content, creating the writing emails and creating the ad copy.

41:30
Brad Weimert
So heavily dependent on you.

41:32
Mike Dillard
Yes.

41:34
Brad Weimert
What? I mean, I asked that for a lot of reasons, but what was the brain injury?

41:42
Mike Dillard
That was, I found out a year later. So during that year, just pure desperation. Income dried up, bills continued to come in, medical bills started to come up to increase substantially.

41:56
Brad Weimert
Sir, let me pause you for 1 second, because I think you mentioned a brain injury. And the way that you described it to me just now, you mentioned a click, which was like the beginning, and then you continued by saying that you couldn’t sleep for seven days. And as somebody that has not been a very good sleeper in his life, I think it’s worth explaining to people that have never had a challenge with sleep how dramatically it impacts your personality and your capacity to interact with the world.

42:27
Mike Dillard
Yeah, I mean, it’s used as a form of torture, literally, in war. And so everybody thinks it’s a big deal when you stay up and you do a 24 hours push or you’re up for 24 hours straight because you feel it. And then if you do 48 hours, well, then that’s just weird. What are you doing that for? Because you’re just miserable. Seven days in, you can feel your organs start to shut down. Your body needs sleep to function. And the hardest part about all of this was initially, is the fact that I could not find a single other individual in the entire world on the Internet who was talking about what I was experiencing. First thing you do, you get on YouTube, you get on Google, chronic insomnia, severe insomnia.

43:19
Mike Dillard
Not a single person was talking about what I was experiencing and that freaked me out. My doctor didn’t know what was going on. That freaked me out. So it’s one thing if it’s like, oh, this happened, and here’s how to fix it. It’s another thing of no one in the world knows what’s going on with you, and we have no idea if this is ever going to stop. That’s where the depression comes in and the hopelessness, you know? Yet I have my son, and so I’ve still got to do my best to try and take care of him. And so that’s kind of what just kept me in survival mode and going. And I want to say about five months in, mister hal Elrod, mutual friend of ours, literally saved my life when he gave me a THC. Gummy.

44:05
Mike Dillard
So hal, this is when he was going through cancer, and he was taking high dose THC to help with the pain and everything around. Yeah. And I’d never taken THC, and I’d never been into cannabis. Not my deal. So I try that, and that night I got, I want to say, 2 hours of actual sleep where my brain, the dissociation effect of the THC, turned off the alarm system for a couple of hours, enough to allow me to go unconscious and actually get 2 hours of sleep.

44:38
Brad Weimert
Wow.

44:39
Mike Dillard
That saved my life. And that’s what kept me going for the next six months until I ran into my friend JP newman, and he said, were at lunch one day, and he said, mike, go see Ann, doctor Ann shippy, and get tested for mold, which he had just gone through.

44:57
Brad Weimert
Did that with Ann.

44:58
Mike Dillard
I did, yeah. So I went to that. Yeah, I went and got a mycotoxin test, which is just a urine test, through Ann, and got the results back a week or two later, and that was it. And so I was living at the Bowie, and on the bowie, it’s a brand new building. It has a pool on the roof. And six months, about six months before the click in the brain went off, Austin had record flooding. The pool had flooded. It had come down all the way down the elevator shafts and flooded the whole building. And, you know, they had dryers in there for days trying to dry everything off. It didn’t work. I assume mold started growing all throughout the building and got into the acoustical ducks and just started to grow in the building.

45:39
Mike Dillard
And because I had been drinking a lot the previous years before and just not eating well, high stress alcohol, you know, bad for you. Foods and gluten and things like that start to take a toll on your body’s detoxification system. Let’s just say that it’s like a pipe that starts to get filled with crud until it eventually closes. And once it stops working, your body literally loses its ability to detox certain toxins, like heavy metals and mold toxins, and they literally just start to build up like a filter for an AC system that is completely full of junk and there’s just no air moving through it. And so that’s what had happened to my body is I got the machotoxin results back, and the scale went from zero to 50, anything above five was in the red. That’s really dangerous, because mycotoxins are neurotoxins.

46:38
Mike Dillard
They get stored in your body’s fat tissue. Your brain is made of fat, and it starts to basically rot your brain, literally, and just gets. It starts to f with your brain. Same thing with heavy metals. And so, on a scale of zero to 50, anything above five is bad. My result was 21,000.

46:56
Brad Weimert
Whoa.

46:57
Mike Dillard
They had never seen anything like that before. And, like, the lab called the doc, and the doc called the lab, and, like, is this accurate? And they’re like, yeah, it’s accurate. Well, they did it twice. So mold, black mold specifically, will absolutely kill you. Luckily, I had something called penicillium, which was not as bad as black mold, which is why I was still alive. But it starts to eat away the myelin sheath of your brain, which is what holds together all of the parts of your brain and allows them to talk to each other. And so, during this process, I basically developed Parkinson’s, so I couldn’t write by hand anymore. I remember writing my buddy Aubrey a happy birthday note, and I looked like I couldn’t write anymore.

47:40
Mike Dillard
But that’s how degenerated I had gotten, just living in a constant state of paranoia, fear, and brain fog. I’d walk out downtown, and I’d get this overwhelming and adrenaline rush. Like the buildings were going to fall on me, and basically my brain was being eaten alive, hence the constant adrenaline rush. But I just didn’t know that until I’d had that test done a year later. And by that time, living in that environment 23 out of 24 hours a day, that was the worst thing that happened to me, is I didn’t know. And I continued to stay in there longer and longer for an entire year. It just compounded it times ten. So that’s. Yeah, so that’s what happened. And it was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through.

48:24
Mike Dillard
I would not wish it upon my worst enemy, and it was also the best thing I’ve ever been through, because it forced me to change absolutely every single aspect of my life. I lost everything during those years. I couldn’t eat the foods that I liked anymore. I couldn’t have dairy, couldn’t have gluten, couldn’t drink alcohol anymore. So I didn’t have a way to medicate myself or the pain that I was going through. Couldn’t drive or race cars anymore, which is my primary hobby. Couldn’t work on my business, couldn’t write, couldn’t think, couldn’t read. All I could literally do was sit at home and I would basically watch television and movies and that’s all I could do. And so, which has to feel kind.

49:04
Brad Weimert
Of depressing when you’re used to producing all the time.

49:06
Mike Dillard
Well, you lose your identity. And you hear about that from people maybe who were a football player and they get in a car wreck, paralyzed or something along those lines, and they literally lose their life and they lose their identity of how they define themselves. And so, yeah, I realized during that process that I had defined myself as a quote unquote successful entrepreneur. And as soon as I didn’t have that ability anymore, well, then what purpose did I serve? And now it’s existential threat and doubt and now I’m just a burden and I have nothing to contribute. Why am I even here anymore? Went from putting all of the money in my savings into evergrow and every penny that I was making into evergrow to all of that income stopping. And so now I didn’t have any money at all.

49:54
Mike Dillard
Really the only way that I could keep the bills paid was to thank God I had my email list and I would just rerun old promotions from the past three years from products that I still had. And that’s literally how I paid the bills for the next three to four years. The biggest blessing was I went into deep down the psychedelic rabbit hole because especially for that first year, we didn’t know it was mold. I just knew that my brain was not functioning. I did anything and everything anyone would recommend that I respected. So, transcranial magnetic therapy, which Tim Ferriss was just talking about last week on his podcast. I was doing that five years ago now. EMDR mushrooms, DMT, nine ketamine IV’s, probably seven or eight MDMA therapy sessions.

50:48
Mike Dillard
San Pedro, if you said this might work, because this time I didn’t know it was mold, I would do it. And ironically, in many ways that was phenomenal because it allowed me to process all of the trauma from childhood that I didn’t realize that I had, all of the trauma from the elevation group stuff that had built up. And so it was kind of like this forced spiritual awakening slash therapy session that lasted about five years, which was phenomenal, changed my life. I haven’t had caffeine or alcohol in five or six years now. Totally different relationship with myself and other people. So it was brutally difficult. But I amazingly positive at the end of the day.

51:33
Brad Weimert
So you’ve got, I mean, you have so many different factors that are all working together there. But one of the common critiques I have of heavy psychedelic use. It’s not even a critique. Yes, it is. Never mind. One of the critiques I have is when people do it so frequently and they rationalize it through the lens of it being medicine, and they’re clearly just getting fucked up on a routine basis. What is the frequency of psychedelic use for you now?

52:01
Mike Dillard
Once a year? Yeah. The first three years, it was heavy because the nine ketamine hobbies. I finally found a woman, my friend Christina, who had gone through the same sleep thing that I had. Exactly the same. We met each other at an event that I just stumbled into, and she asked me how I was, and I’d never met this woman in my life. And I told her, and she’s like, holy shit. I went through the same thing, like, four years ago, and that was meeting her was a lifesaver for me because it’s like, okay, here’s someone else who knows what I’m going through. And she made it out through the other side. Hers was heavy metal poisoning, mercury specifically. And she said what had helped her was nine ketamine IV’s.

52:46
Mike Dillard
That’s what she had to go through in order to be able to fall back asleep again. She’s like, sign me up, and trust me, that was nothing, anything that I would do for fun or voluntarily. Ketamine was really difficult, especially the first three sessions where I came out just in tears, frankly, more traumatized than I went in.

53:09
Brad Weimert
I don’t know ketamine doses, but do you know what the.

53:12
Mike Dillard
This was a doctor, you know, I was doing it at a clinic, but still.

53:15
Brad Weimert
Do you have an idea of range? Like, what do people do recreationally?

53:19
Mike Dillard
Medical dose, if I remember correctly. And I don’t know if this is cc’s or milligrams, so don’t. Ketamine is deadly. If you take too much, you die, and there’s no medicine for it to bring you back.

53:31
Brad Weimert
It’s a pretty high dose to kill you, though, right?

53:33
Mike Dillard
I don’t know. I just treated it with a lot of respect and would never do it recreationally. And so I want to say that we start. Your first dose is 70 something. Whether that’s CC’s or milligrams, I don’t know. And then it loses its effectiveness every session. So you go up a little bit more. I want to say by that, my last round was probably up to 120. It was hard. Yeah, so it was really hard. I would start shaking and crying before the doc would put the needle in. By my second or third session because I just didn’t want to do it. And yet, if that’s what was going to get me back to normal, so be it.

54:07
Brad Weimert
At what point did. So you mentioned you found out it was mold about a year in, but you also mentioned this being a five year journey of hallucinogens.

54:16
Mike Dillard
I want to say the psychedelics were the first three years, and finding my medicine, quote unquote, meaning what was beneficial for me and what was not. MDMA therapy was by far the most beneficial thing that provided a tangible, physical benefit from the very first time I did it. And every time after that very first time I did it, I was getting adrenaline spikes, like hot flashes down my legs every 30 seconds. Still living at the bowie, still didn’t know I had mold at the time, and came back from that session, and that symptom had stopped. And so what MDMA is doing is it’s bringing a sense of safety to your nervous system into your brain, where something like ketamine is a true psychedelic, is just allowing it to go off wherever it wants. MDMA is not a psychedelic.

55:07
Mike Dillard
You’re not seeing weird, crazy shit like you would on other substances. It’s literally just dumping all of your brain serotonin. And that provides an incredibly calming effect to the system and creates a sense of safety, which is exactly what my body needed, and that was life changing for me. So MDMA became the medicine and then everything else. I really. I dabbled in five meo DMT. I want to say I did three times over a three year period. The first was incredibly beneficial. The second two were unbelievably traumatic and difficult. And it’s like if you. I think this is important for people to know. If you’re.

55:47
Mike Dillard
If your nervous system and in your brain are in a state of chronic fight or flight and fear, then you do not want to take on board a substance that will magnify that or allow that to be magnified. You want to take those when you’re in a pretty centered place. And I didn’t know that at the time, and so I’m just, again, desperate to fix whatever I was going through and kind of had to learn it the hard way. But after I figured out what worked and what didn’t for me, then I stuck to that for a good three years and then really got all the benefit out of it that I could get. And I has slowed down tremendously since then and really don’t have a desire for it outside of maybe a once a year need.

56:32
Mike Dillard
And I’ll say this, MDMA was very effective in the aftermaths or treating, for us specifically, long Covid symptoms. So long, so really bad Covid, which we had the first two times we got it, would re trigger my nervous system and put it back in that fight or flight state. And I saw a lot of other people would get long Covid symptoms. Chronic fatigue, depression, things like that. MDMA therapy session popped you right out and back to normal the next day.

57:03
Brad Weimert
Wild.

57:04
Mike Dillard
Yeah.

57:06
Brad Weimert
All right. I’m trying to get to kind of like the, some acute info around mold toxicity or heavy metal, because your journey with this was long, six years now, and super intense. But the other thing that I know about mold and metal is that many people don’t have that acute response, but have something that is chronic and lingering.

57:33
Mike Dillard
Yes.

57:34
Brad Weimert
What is the approach to solving the mold problem in the first place and detoxifying yourself?

57:39
Mike Dillard
Yeah. The interesting thing about mold and metals is that they can manifest in two dozen different symptoms. You could have rashes, you know, you could have chronic pain. You could have chronic fatigue, you could have lose your hair. There’s literally dozens of different ways it can manifest in somebody. And so, well, I’m bald and I hurt.

57:58
Brad Weimert
So you think that’s it?

58:00
Mike Dillard
You know, the pain thing could very well be a heavy metal.

58:03
Brad Weimert
I definitely need to get tested.

58:05
Mike Dillard
Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, if you live in the United States or modern western world today, and you’re above the age of 35, your body is absolutely full of toxins. It might not be mycotoxins. Based on where you live, mycotoxins are also determined by whether or not you have a gene mutation. So one in four people have a gene mutation which can be triggered and turned on where I never had it growing up. But at some point, if you have enough toxicity built up, it’ll flip that gene, and you’ll lose the ability to detox it. And so if you’re in a moldy environment or home or office, you’re just going to get sick because your body can’t get rid of it. So you can get tested for that gene.

58:45
Mike Dillard
You can get tested for mycotoxins that are in your system if you come back with a positive result in the reduced spending an ordinate amount of time in your home, your office, or your car, really anywhere that has ac ducts that’s growing mold in it. And the interesting part about mold is that you can’t treat it, especially if it’s really bad for you, for the most part, successfully. You really have to move and I’ll get into that here in a minute. But again, if you’re above the age of 35, you’re living in the United States. You’re going to have heavy metal toxicity buildup, 100%. You might have some mold. You’re absolutely going to have environmental toxins like glyphosate and stuff built into your system, which can cause all kinds of problems as well.

59:33
Mike Dillard
And so it’s not a matter of if you have this, it’s how much do you have in your system? And so those are two things that you absolutely must get tested for. And so let’s talk about what that looks like, because I had to learn this the hard way. The single biggest, I got rid of all, I want to say, 99% of the mold in my system. The last time I took a test six months ago, it was 99% gone, 21,000 down to 18. But I was still not getting better. Still dealing with chronic fatigue, still dealing with brain fog. I was maybe, and this was Brad, six months ago, working one or two days a week. That’s how much capacity I had, and I couldn’t figure out why. And a big part of this was never giving up. Constantly seeking new answers.

01:00:15
Mike Dillard
When I was working with Ann, whom I love dearly, we did a heavy metals test. And most doctors, functional medicine doctors, will give you two oral prescriptions to take, which is EDTA and DMSA. And those are chelators that pull these substances out of your tissues. And then when you pee in the jar, it collects them, and you can test them. Without those chemicals, your body stores all of these toxins in your fat cells. It’s never going to show up in a blood test, and it’s never going to show up in a urine test. It’s like, your body’s like, this shit’s dangerous. We’re going to store it away somewhere where it can’t cause damage to the body. Right? Again, the problem is, the brain is made of fat.

01:00:53
Mike Dillard
And if you have leaky gut where things can get through the blood brain barrier that shouldn’t, like metals and mold, then that shit gets deposited into your brain. And that’s what happened to me and the click in the brain and all of that stuff. And so just five months ago, I was, like, still looking for answers to the problem here. I went and saw a new functional med doctor Philip Oubre, here in town. And he’s like, yeah, you haven’t actually had a real test for heavy metals yet. If you just take the pills, you’re not going to get a real result. So I think when I took the pills, my mercury came back as 2.6. That was medium high, was anything three and above. So it was not anything that were too concerned about. We were really concerned about the mold.

01:01:39
Mike Dillard
And so I never really went back and thought about heavy metals again for the next, like four to five years, until I met with doctor Ub. And he’s like, you have to test for heavy metals in one specific way. And that’s through an IV of the same chemicals, EDTA and DMSA. But we’re going to do that for an hour and a half. We’re going to throw in a bag of glutathione, which helps pull that out of your tissues, and then you’re going to collect your urine for the next 6 hours. So I did that, and that result came back. It went from 2.6 of mercury to 12.6 of mercury, I believe eleven or twelve, way in the red.

01:02:13
Mike Dillard
And the treatment for that is to just go back and do more of those chelation iv’s, pull that stuff out of your tissues, pee it out. By the second iv that I had done, my brain totally came back online.

01:02:27
Brad Weimert
Wow.

01:02:27
Mike Dillard
For the first time in five years.

01:02:29
Brad Weimert
That’s encouraging.

01:02:30
Mike Dillard
I’ve gone, Brad, in the last four months, I’ve done twelve of those iv’s. And each time you do an iv, it’s pulling that stuff out of your system. And so on the 10th session, we retested again. So we did an iv, took a sample, and the mercury had only gone down 10%, which was basically saying that when we collected that urine, there was still an entire full bucket of mercury coming out of my body. This test cannot tell you how much you have in your system. It can just tell you how much is coming out every time you chelate. And ten sessions in, I was still chelating a full bucket in the red. So that meant there was a shit ton of this stuff in my body. Lead and mercury and even a little uranium somehow.

01:03:15
Mike Dillard
And, but even after the second session, man, I got my brain back where now I’ve literally been working 10 hours a day, six, seven days a week over the past four months since that second session. And so it’s like, if I’ve seen that big of a difference after two sessions, what is going to happen when I’ve got all of this stuff out of my system? That was the biggest missing piece of the puzzle here. Unfortunately, it took me four years to figure that out. But it was constantly working with new people, trying new things that allowed me to finally get that piece of the puzzle in place. That’s where I’m at now. Detox. I’ll tell people this because I’ve learned this the hard way as a type entrepreneurs.

01:03:59
Mike Dillard
Once we find the problem, we want to fucking solve it as fast as we possibly can. So I’m like, chelation session every Monday. I’ll see you at 12:00 let’s get this shit out of my body. And that’s not good either, actually. Chelating heavy metals, like mercury specifically, every time you do that, it pulls it out of the tissues, and not all of it’s going to come out of your system, but then it’s going to redistribute into different tissues, it’s going to redistribute into different organs, and that can cause other problems. And so you actually want to do this quite slowly and over time. And you should have an expectation if you have severe mold or heavy metal toxicity in your system, that it’s going to take you one to three years to get all of it out.

01:04:39
Brad Weimert
Brutal.

01:04:40
Mike Dillard
And just to have that in mind. And if you try to do it faster, you can actually do more damage and break other things that you don’t want to have happen. So.

01:04:49
Brad Weimert
So, okay, so you said something that’s interesting relative to this issue, but also the rest of your life, which is to the effect of, I had to focus on it consistently to get the problem resolved. And one of the things that you’ve done throughout a lot of your work is had a mindset component to things. So when I look at sort of the different info products you’ve had and the podcast and education, there inevitably is a mindset element. There’s no question for me, I’ve gone down the Tony Robbins rabbit hole. His work in particular, had a huge impact on my capacity to learn and grow as a human and be a good salesperson and accelerate in entrepreneurship.

01:05:45
Brad Weimert
One of the things that I struggle with today or that I think about is how much energy I invest in making sure that I’m keeping that axe sharp. How much time do you spend today thinking about your own mindset and personal development, et cetera, versus when you were coming up?

01:06:03
Mike Dillard
Honestly, zero. It’s. I mean, there was. I want to say I did 30 years of therapy in three, during those psychedelic years, literally working with therapists and things like that as well. So I went so deep down that rabbit hole out of desperation that I did an entire lifetime’s worth of personal development work in a 36 month period. I don’t know if it’s a stubbornness or what, but it’s like if you have to get something done, you just do what you have to do to get it done. I think a part of that was, in high school, I raced mountain bikes professionally. So I would come home from school and I would get my road bike, and I would ride anywhere from 20 to 50 miles a day, training wise. And then I would go race mountain on the weekends.

01:06:49
Mike Dillard
Actually won Texas state championships years ago.

01:06:52
Brad Weimert
Nice.

01:06:52
Mike Dillard
But it’s very simple. You go out on a bike, ride for 30, 40 miles in the summer in Texas, and you’re halfway out there. There’s only one way back.

01:07:02
Brad Weimert
Yep.

01:07:03
Mike Dillard
You keep fucking going, and there’s no one coming to help you. And it’s 110 degrees on the pavement, and sweat drops off of you onto your bar, and it, like, turns to white salt instantly. There is no stopping. You just keep going until you get home. And I think that’s just the attitude that I’ve always had around everything.

01:07:22
Brad Weimert
Yeah. So I’ve spent quite a bit of time on a road bike.

01:07:27
Mike Dillard
Yeah.

01:07:28
Brad Weimert
Yep. And some pretty intense heat.

01:07:29
Mike Dillard
So I feel you pour the water on you and you’re just like, it’s gone two minutes later.

01:07:34
Brad Weimert
Yeah. And the line of, I mean, running is the same way. The line is once you’re out, there’s only one way back.

01:07:40
Mike Dillard
Yeah. There was no uber back then.

01:07:42
Brad Weimert
No, I have thought about that more recent years, actually. I’m like, yeah, but, of course. Could never do that. No, I couldn’t live with myself if I ordered a fucking Uber to get back from the run midway through. Okay. So, yeah, that’s super interesting to me on a lot of levels, but I think about that routinely because you mentioned the stubbornness element of it. And I think about that personally when I think I used to have these habits and patterns in my life where I was making sure you mentioned our mutual friend Hal, who wrote the miracle morning. And so that is a huge indoctrination in his life. Obviously, he can’t abandon the miracle morning at this point, but I can.

01:08:22
Brad Weimert
And so I think about what the impact was or what it could be if I did it today and whether or not it’s necessary. Do you think that it’s a necessary for young entrepreneurs to focus on mindset and personal development?

01:08:34
Mike Dillard
A thousand percent. I mean, that was the first ten years of my career. Five. The first five, specifically when I was in network marketing, was all personal development, but I was definitely heavy into that for the first five to ten years. And then it’s like once I formed the habits that I needed and the beliefs that I needed and got the results to back that up and build confidence and evidence, then I really didn’t spend much time on that anymore. I think it’s once you embody it and you live it, then the job is done, right, the information is yours, and it’s just a part of who you are and your identity at that point. So.

01:09:12
Brad Weimert
Okay, I’ve got one other thing I want to talk to you about. And then I know we’re coming up on time. One of the things that I see every time I look at anything related to online right now is rich every day and richer every day. At least a part of it is crypto. Crypto, crypto. You started investing in bitcoin in 2013, you bought it at $78.

01:09:38
Mike Dillard
Yep.

01:09:39
Brad Weimert
I looked at mining in 2013 and did the math and decided that I wasn’t going to do it because it was too speculative for me. And the only saving grace for me is that I would make the same fucking choice again today.

01:09:53
Mike Dillard
Yeah, that’s the hard part.

01:09:54
Brad Weimert
Well, because it was a speculative investment and I just wasn’t willing to invest the time to go down that rabbit hole. Now, what I should have done is.

01:10:01
Mike Dillard
Just fucking bought some man. Like 2011, 2012, I could have bought bitcoin for maybe a dollar, right? But the only way to buy it was to send some random person money and then they’re supposed to send this bitcoin stuff back to you. And I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, which is unusual because I’m usually pretty comfortable with risk. But, yeah, I bought 300 bitcoin on Mount Gox in 2013, and it all got stolen because I was on Mount Gox.

01:10:32
Brad Weimert
That was the next question was whether you kept any of it or not.

01:10:35
Mike Dillard
Brutal. Came back in 20, came back in 2017, bought ethereum at $5. Right when altcoins started to come out, Matic had a penny. So, I mean, I’ve done really well with crypto, and a big part of that is what funded my health recovery the last few years when I couldn’t. I really couldn’t work until about a year ago. Specifically, even the last six months, I’d have windows where I’d feel good enough to do it or not. But crypto, thankfully, was hugely beneficial. And it was a huge interest of mine. Still is. Yeah. And yeah, it’s something. It’s the best investment category in class that I understand and know. Like somebody else, like JP would know real estate. I have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours studying crypto since 2017. So what is that, seven years now?

01:11:32
Brad Weimert
Yeah, well, I want to ask you about it. So I just actually recorded with JP a few weeks ago. So we’ve got a good episode with JP Newman around real estate and other. But I gave you my sort of internal narrative and it is also a part of my investment path. Right. If, if something is too speculative for me, then I make a choice to not allocate a huge portion to that.

01:11:56
Mike Dillard
Yep.

01:11:56
Brad Weimert
Now some speculation can be resolved through education, and then it’s not truly speculative, it just requires more to understand. One of the things that I read with richer every day was part of the proposition is that you can find a way to buy the newest assets at their lowest prices before they get listed on the major exchanges. At what point does it make sense to pursue crypto when its brand new versus investing in something like bitcoin or ethereum?

01:12:28
Mike Dillard
Yeah, its a great question. It really depends on your goals and priorities and how comfortable you are with the asset class. And so if you have a long term horizon and a low tolerance for risk, your best bet is to just stick with bitcoin. And especially now that the ETF’s exist and you can use a tax advantaged account, literally just go buy shares of that every week or every month, and average into bitcoin for the next ten years and you’ll be fine. Right. So that’s provided some new opportunities that were really not present before for me. I am comfortable with the approach that I’ve taken to the industry, which is a small amount of bets over a large number of projects. My portfolio right now has 60 to 70 altcoins in it.

01:13:16
Mike Dillard
And the majority of those, I want to say probably half, have been purchased on a decentralized exchange before they are listed on Coinbase or Kraken or Binance. And I’m just taking, let’s just say I have 100 grand I want to invest. I’ll take $1000 to $2,000 and put that into each one at those prices. And the only reason I’m doing that is because I’ve gone through this is now my third cycle. And so in the previous 220 17 and then 2020, 2021, I’ve watched little tokens that I’ve invested in and put $1,000 into and watched that go up to 200 grandd. I know that’s possible. The problem is you never know which tokens are going to do that.

01:14:00
Mike Dillard
The only way to really, in my experience, have a strategy around it is small bets over a large number of projects, and you literally only need three to five to do well. All of them are going to do well in a bull market. The key is to know when to sell. And that was the big lesson I learned in 2017, because I rode that puppy all the way to the top like everybody else, and nobody sold because we didn’t have the indicators, the chart history that we have now, and then the bull run in 2020, 2021, we had the indicators, we had the experience, but nobody believed that 65k was the top, right? Shouldn’t have been. And yet some of the indicators that we used to signal the top said, yeah, this is the top. And I didn’t believe it.

01:14:47
Mike Dillard
So I, you know, I wrote it down probably 40% before I exited, but I still exited many millions of dollars. I think I turned 300 grand into six mil from that. So that’s my strategy. And it’s, you know, from a marketing perspective, there’s a lot of. A lot of information out there on crypto. From a hook perspective, investing in altcoins is not an effective hook. Learning how to invest them before they get listed on the central exchanges is something that only crypto nerds know about how to use. Uniswap and Jupiter and all of these other decentralized exchanges, which are not difficult, but they do require some assistance and somebody to show you how to use them. And if you use them wrong and make a mistake, your money is gone.

01:15:35
Mike Dillard
So there is risk there from user error perspective, and there’s a lot of risk from a scam perspective. Fake sites, connecting your wallet to a fake decentralized application, and poof, your entire wallets drained in a second. If you’re going into the crypto jungle, you got to have a tour guide. And that’s what I try to serve for.

01:15:56
Brad Weimert
Folks love that you might have just answered this, but what’s the worst mistake that somebody can make when they’re getting into crypto?

01:16:05
Mike Dillard
Getting scammed. There’s so many these days. And the moment you start investing in assets off of a coinbase or off of a kraken and hosting them on your own wallet, you start opening yourself up to an entirely new world of potential traps and landmines. And so, I mean, I’ve had really smart friends lose literally millions of dollars making a mistake, and they have experience in crypto, and that’s, for example, claiming a free airdrops. And so they’ll have. I had one of my best friends last month was like, hey, he sent me a text at, like, 02:00 a.m. That I got the next morning, and he’s like, hey, I’m trying to get on this new Tesla token drop, you know, before it expires in an hour. I can’t connect my wallet or I’m doing this wrong. I’m so frustrated. What do I need to do?

01:16:56
Mike Dillard
And I got that text in the morning. My heart dropped because I’m like, there is no Tesla token drop. There’s a fake one every 30 days with fake email. Elon Musk profiles that look exactly like him. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, it would look completely legitimate. And sure, why not? Why wouldn’t Tesla do a token? Here’s a very smart friend of mine about to lose all of his money, and I called him up, and thank God he couldn’t get it to work, or he would have lost his money if he had. But that’s the biggest risk, is people don’t understand what airdrops are or how to connect a wallet or what wallet permissions are or what a hardware wallet is and why you’d want to use that. And you are.

01:17:39
Mike Dillard
If you’re stepping into that world with those tools and trying to use those strategies without a knowledge base, you’re going to get wiped out. So that would be my biggest piece of advice for folks, is keep the majority of your crypto on Coinbase. Just invest there. That’s totally fine for 99% of people. If you want to be a degenerate like myself and go for 300 x gains, then go educate yourself first and make sure that you’re not exposing your entire crypto holdings on a ledger wallet that you connect to the wrong application with, and poof, it’s gone.

01:18:16
Brad Weimert
Love it. Awesome, man. Where do you want to point, people?

01:18:21
Mike Dillard
I would just say mikedillard.com dot. Do we have two more minutes? I want to leave somebody with 100%. Yeah, Mandy. So rich every day is not actually about crypto. I wrote it in 2020 after losing every penny I’d made from the brain injury and the health crisis and what I had learned going through therapy to recover from that, specifically when it came to money and specifically when it comes to money in entrepreneurs. And so what I had realized I had done wrong is I had taken all the money that I made, and I had always invested it in a new business venture. Evergrow or, like, the self made man community? Both. I want to say I invested probably between the two of those $5 million in which, if I had just gone and bought real estate with, I would have been fine.

01:19:08
Brad Weimert
It’d still be there.

01:19:09
Mike Dillard
It’d still be there. It’d be double. And when I would pre producing, you know, $30 to $40,000 a month in passive income. And what I learned going through therapies that I did is that entrepreneurs are wired, I want to say 90% of us, in a very similar way, and that we are wired to take risk. Most entrepreneurs are very comfortable taking risk, which is why we do what we do. Couldn’t do it otherwise. The problem is that we’re also comfortable taking risk with the money that we make in our business. And so that’s what will prompt you to go put it into a venture like evergrow or into bitcoin back in 2013. Right? And that becomes a challenge, because it creates something called the make it, spend it, risk it cycle.

01:19:55
Mike Dillard
So you make it, and you either spend it on a new car or house, or you risk it on a new business venture, whether it’s your own or your buddies or whatever. And that’s a pattern that I saw in myself, but that I’ve seen in nine out of ten entrepreneurs. And this pattern just continues and continues until they get too old to sustain that pattern anymore, or they go resolve the inner issue that is behind that pattern, which is really an addiction to adrenaline. Entrepreneurs usually went through some kind of traumatic event when you were young. For me, it was severe bullying at school, and it creates this addiction to cortisol and adrenaline that feels normal. And when you don’t have that running through your body.

01:20:35
Mike Dillard
My hobbies were mountain bike racing and competitive driving, race car driving, or paintball or whatever, all extreme activities that bring a lot of adrenaline to the table. And business does the exact same thing. So you could consider business as a sport or entrepreneur as a sport in order to give your brain that same cortisol and adrenaline. And when that stops and dissipates, and your business starts to get stable, or it starts to get boring, then entrepreneurs subconsciously start to do shit to blow it up. I need to launch a new product, or I’m bored of this, I need to go pursue a new mission, or start a hydroponic system or whatever to bring that rush back to the table so that you can feel normal again. And the same thing happens with money.

01:21:19
Mike Dillard
Given entrepreneur money, the first thing that most of them are going to do is they’re going to look for a startup to invest in. For me, investing in onnit, investing in jail Blaster, investing in all kinds of tech companies that I’ve written checks for the range here in Austin. The gun range. Right. And. And then it’s gone again. And then you get Piercef. Gotta make it back, right? And it just continues this cycle, and it doesn’t stop. And until you realize that the cycle is going on and that this is an addiction that your nervous system has, that your brain has to those two neurochemicals. And so for me, I realized that my life financially had been driven by subconscious programs and neurochemical addictions. And when I realized that’s what changed everything for me when it came to my relationship with money.

01:22:11
Mike Dillard
So now, outside of crypto, because I don’t really consider that high risk for me. I have a very different approach to money. I don’t have the sports cars anymore. I drive a f 150 raptor and a Tesla. Right? I don’t. Most people will get addicted to just buying stuff. It’s the same addiction that someone has to food or alcohol or anything else. It’s just a form of receiving dopamine. And so the brain will basically, here in western society, our brains are literally addicted. I call it an inverted dopamine response, where we are addicted to spending money in order to get something that gives us pleasure. That could be buying something for dollar 20 on Amazon or buying a pint of ice cream at whole foods or a glass of wine at dinner. It doesn’t matter. Your brain wants pleasure, and it’s addicted to that.

01:23:02
Mike Dillard
And today, in today’s society, pleasure usually requires us to spend money. And so that creates this dopamine inversion that literally keeps you broke. It’s nearly impossible to save money and build lifelong wealth if you have this neurochemical addiction in your brain. And I want to say 95% of Americans have this, then you take someone like Warren Buffett, who doesn’t have this, or Justin Donald, they get stressed out by taking risk, and they get dopamine by saving money and accumulating. So they get pleasure when they save money. I bring crypto to them, and they’re like, no, no. That stresses me out. I don’t want to have anything to do with that.

01:23:40
Brad Weimert
So where I feel like you’re going here is fix your head instead of just creating a new pattern. And maybe it’s the same thing, but I’m very much wired. I don’t know where I am, actually, because I led my whole life, I had this response of, I’m so concerned that the world’s gonna blow up that I need to put this reserve in place. I have to make sure that I will never end up broke and old. And so I needed to check that box first and create that safety net first.

01:24:10
Mike Dillard
That’s great.

01:24:11
Brad Weimert
But now my risk tolerance has changed because there’s a big enough gap where I feel like I cannot blow it up.

01:24:18
Mike Dillard
So it sounds like a super healthy approach.

01:24:19
Brad Weimert
Knock on wood.

01:24:20
Mike Dillard
Yeah. I mean, that sounds like a normal, rational, reasonable approach where I don’t think.

01:24:24
Brad Weimert
I’ve ever been called that, but, well.

01:24:26
Mike Dillard
Compared to me or other entrepreneurs, most people, right, who are wired for extreme risk taking.

01:24:31
Brad Weimert
So that’s the question is, what do you think the pattern should be for an entrepreneur? When do you think you should start building the passive things to stabilize versus dumping the money back into the business?

01:24:42
Mike Dillard
Conclusion that I’ve come to is, if you are solo entrepreneur, let’s just say like I’ve been, you know, for the most part, you’re making magic Internet money from your house. The purpose of that business is not to make money to then go spend, it is to make money to then go buy assets with. So magic Internet money doesn’t last forever. Again, has a shelf life of about 36 months. And so when you’re in it, you think that it’s going to last continuously. When you’ve had the experience that I’ve had, you’re going to realize that it’s not going to be the case. So now the magic Internet money that I make, I used to go buy assets with real estate, whatever it may be.

01:25:22
Mike Dillard
And the goal then is to buy cash flow producing assets that then replace your monthly bills and pay for your lifestyle. So you’re generating 20, $30,000 a month in passive income from real estate that will come in no matter what you do, whether you work another day in your life or not. When you’ve done that, then cool, go take whatever risk you want. But that is literally the purpose of the business. The other type of entrepreneurs, I’m going to call them a real entrepreneur, is someone who wants to actually build a business in a team. Maybe you’re building a SaaS company or a physical product or supplement company where you’re going to expect to have an office and employees, and you might sell that business one day. The people who do that successfully are usually not prone to increasing their lifestyle expenses.

01:26:09
Mike Dillard
They’re usually prone to being very frugal because building up a company like that and scaling requires constant reinvestment. So there usually isn’t excess cash to then go buy the lambo with or whatever, right? But that business becomes a sellable asset and so that’s the best investment that you can make, because your return on investment is going to be higher than real estate or anything else that you can do as long as you’re executing effectively, right? And then you have your exit one day and you make your $20 to $100 million, and when you sell your business, and then you go put that in real estate and you’re done, right? So I think. I think it’s important to understand which kind of business you want to pursue, which kind of entrepreneur you are. I’ve at this point, realized which kind I am.

01:26:51
Mike Dillard
I’m the Tim Ferriss solo guy, right? And I’m very good at that, and I’m. And I like that. And I don’t want to have a team or an office. And so coming to that conclusion and leaning into that, then dictates and tells me, all right, here’s what my investment approach needs to be when it comes to the money that comes into this business. So now I take a launch event that might bring in half a million bucks, and it’s not like, oh, cool, I’m going to go buy a new boat. It’s okay, I’m going to go take 450,000 of that, and I’m going to go literally pay for a single family rental in cash. That’s also going to reduce and offset the taxes that I’m going to have to incur from that income as well.

01:27:29
Mike Dillard
Now I treat every launch as an event to go buy an asset with. So that’s really what Retrovida is about, is the emotional stuff.

01:27:37
Brad Weimert
Yeah, that’s awesome, man. Mike Dillard, I appreciate you carving on time, man. It’s always good to see you.

01:27:43
Mike Dillard
Yeah, appreciate having me, brother. Thank you. Thank you guys.

01:27:45
Brad Weimert
I hope you enjoyed the episode as much as I enjoyed doing it. I need your help. There are three places you can find beyond a million. The podcast itself, beyond a million.com, which has some cool free resources, including a free course. And we finally launched the Beyond a million YouTube channel. I would love it if you would go there and subscribe. And if you don’t want to, you still will probably enjoy seeing the visual content. Check it out. YouTube dot comyondamillion.