0:00 All right. Well, you guys are in for a treat today because you guys are going to see [sighs] probably the best shadow operator to have ever existed. Uh, and he is going to be doing a presentation and breaking down literally hundreds of millions of dollars worth of game, everything that he's collected over the last two decades that he has been doing this. Uh, you know, it's such an incredible uh opportunity for you guys to sit here and uh learn from truly a living legend. So, uh, you know, with all that being said, I know that we have a lot to get through here today. Uh, so I'm going to waste no time and, uh, hand it over to, uh, Mr. Jason Flinland. >> Awesome. Thank you, sir. >> All right, boys and girls, you ready?
0:45 Give me some love in the chat if you are. We're going to get queued up here. We're going to get ready to rock and roll. Um, and if you're good to go, put it in the chat. And I got the got the Is this the live chat right over here? Perfect. It's awesome. Uh, spam some love in the chat for me real quick so I can see it. Let's go. My name is Jason Flatlight. I'm going to take you on a crazy journey today. We're going to go a little bit higher in the clouds and then we're going to zoom down and swoop in at the end. Now, before we get there though, it's going to be you and me on the screen for a few minutes and then I'm going to show you some slides. But I wanted to start something today uh very heartfelt, very personal because if you've known me by now, we do the live Q&As's at the end. You know, I'm pretty I speak what's on my mind and I show up as much of me as I possibly can to really put what's at stake with what
1:31 we are doing here. Um, let's talk about the limited time that we have here on Earth. And this is on my mind and in my heart because my father recently passed away uh Sunday, December 20th, 2025. And I had to fly from Los Angeles to Iowa to see him one week uh before he passed. I was able to get back there and spend some time with him. Um, he had taken a turn for the worst. He was, you know, it was getting to be his time, but it didn't seem to be that soon. But I was in Cape Town with Iman and the boys and I got the call. So, I went from Cape Town, got to LA, went to LA, went to Iowa to see my dad, uh, got back to LA and then I heard the news. And what I realize is looking back on it now as he
2:18 held out, he waited for me to see me one last time before he passed on. And my dad was a bit of a local legend. He was a high school teacher and a wrestling coach. And then when he retired, he became a Hall of Fame mock trial coach. And I had seen my dad as a wrestling coach still beat the [ __ ] out of these 17 and 18 year old kids when he is the age that I am now and he is as slow and as hobble as I am now. Uh and it was crazy. But my dad was a stud. He would run 10 miles every day from the time that I was three until the time that I was 25. I don't ever remember a time of him missing that. And when we would go out, somebody somewhere would stop us
3:05 and they would tell me how much my dad had impacted them or helped them in some sort of meaningful way when I grew up. And a few kids said that he even saved their lives and that he gave them hope and that he gave them purpose. My dad was a huge believer in self-education. I would always see him studying something whether it was juggling or the numchucks or drawing or Japanese calligraphy. Uh when I was 18, I was in a very bad state. I was depressed. I had uh panic attacks that I suffered from on a daily basis. I had tried to go to university at Iowa State, and I was getting good grades, but I just didn't feel right. Uh I was dealing with this trauma. My mom was going to prison. My mom and my dad had split up when I was young. And so I felt very alone. And that Easter
3:50 weekend, I decided to drop out of school. I took two storage bins cuz that's all I owned at the time. And I moved back into my dad's apartment without even asking. And the next day, we're going to Easter and we're driving to see my grandma. My dad turns to me and he says, "When are you going to go back to school?" And I said to him, "I'm not." And he just nodded. And then we never ever spoke about it again. And then I lived with him in this tiny little apartment in this really shitty area uh for the next several years. Uh when I turned 20, I became a monk, a Hari Krishna monk. And my dad just watched me and he thought I was probably insane and crazy. But you know what? He never said a word about it. I'd wake up in the morning and I'd chant and I'd pray and I'd do these elaborate rituals and my dad had to like step over me because the place we were living in was so small. I wrote, I recorded and
4:37 produced a rap album in this apartment that I lived in with my dad. And again, uh, he would just watch me and he wouldn't say anything about it. But then when I started doing shows locally, him and my stepmother would come and they would show up to these shows and watch me perform. I started my first business in that apartment and that was a business that I would grow to many millions of dollars and it was the foundation for what my business has become today. When I visited my dad for the last time in a sudden moment of lucidity, he turned to me and he said, "Son, I am proud of you. I'm so proud of who you are. I'm so proud of what you've done." And he had said similar things like that to me uh before, but I never heard him say it with such conviction as he said it to me that day. Um and man,
5:23 of everything he loved in life, he loved me most. And so if we could put the slides on the screen now. With that said, I would like to dedicate this presentation to that man today, my father. And I would like to offer this as a tribute to him. My dad taught me how to teach. He taught me how to coach. He did everything he could to shape me into the man that I am today. And now it is my turn to pass this wisdom on to you to help you like he helped me to help you achieve success. And hopefully hopefully my friend not just financial success because that's just the beginning of it. It's an important piece but the real value comes when you reach that level of financial autonomy and you
6:09 can choose how you live your life and that's the real mark of success to live your life in a way that can make the ones you love proud of who you are. And my goal is to help contribute to that in whatever way possible. So I channel these very strong and very heavy emotions that I've been going through. And I put my heart into this today to give you my Alevel best. And that's what you're getting from me. And what I want in return is your attention. And I want your sincerity. Attention and sincerity. Can you give that to me? I hope so. Because if I show you anything today that can resonate with you, my wish is that you grab on to it, that you use it, that you do your very best to extract the most value of it possible. And if you're cool like that, why don't you
6:55 drop me a hell yes in the chat right now? Put it in the chat right now. Let's Let's go. Let's go. All right. Now, on to business. I have three insane exclusive bonuses I'm going to offer at the end of my presentation here today. They are only available why we are here live today. They are crazy and only something that I could give you because I am probably the most successful shadow operator on the planet when it comes to the model that we've been jamming on the last four days. Plus, obviously, today I'm going to show you some legit secrets for free. Would you like to know what these secrets are that you're going to get by the end of our presentation today? Well, we're going to talk about why smaller focused audiences routinely out earn celebrity followings and how to tap into a hidden pocket of a
7:40 thousand true fans inside any creator's base. I'm going to talk to you about the 1% conversion rule. How a single yes can permanently change your income trajectory. I'm going to talk about risk removal, not hype, not pressure, not promises. Why risk removal is the real conversion engine. I'm going to talk about the rejection frame that dissolves outreach fear. You're going to love that. I'm going to talk about how a $9.8 million launch in 8 days crushed competitors by over $7 million using my favorite shadow operator framework, which is packaging, positioning, and leverage. We'll break that down. I'm going to talk about the time money trade-off and how to compre compress months of trial and error into days or even hours. We're going to go into the infrastructure shift that removes payment friction entirely, automatic splits and fulfillment, and why this
8:26 quietly multiplies deal velocity. I talk to you about why wealth scales better in the shadows and how to control the deal, not the spotlight. In the exact moment where leverage compounds, how one successful partnership attracts the next, and why growth becomes exponential in this situation, not linear. I'm going to go over this and a whole bunch more and we're going to try to do it as fast as we can. You ready to go? If so, shadow operator, put it in the chat right now. And we got to jam because this is way bigger than Instagram. But we're going to start there because it's the lowest hanging fruit on the planet. Right now, there are over 78 million content creators on Instagram that loosely fit the criteria of who I would suggest you approach. And within that 78 million content creators,
9:13 there's 41 million I am 100% right fit or certain that are candidates for you as a shadow operator. they meet the exact criteria of someone Iman and I would tell you to approach with your risk-free deal to help them monetize their audience to serve their community at the highest level and and get your fair share for bringing in massive value to these creators. And now let me give you some context here because I've been doing this damn near 20 years and I've generated over 250 million in sales and I've influenced some of the biggest names across multiple industries. So when I tell you something, it's not theory. Everything I discuss with you today comes from pattern recognition in the trenches. Here's what I know. If you want to increase the value of something, anything, doesn't matter what it is. If you want to increase the value of
9:59 something, you increase demand while decreasing supply. Every single major launch that I've been a part of, and I've been a part of record-breaking launches from this one, the $9.8 8 million launch in 8 days. That was a shadow operator launch by the way. Uh to the big daddy, the $57.9 million launch in 226 days from scratch, which was also a shadow operator. We will break that down. The number one thing that I look for when it comes to leverage in these deals is this massive demand, minimum supply. And right now we've got 78 million plus microcreators that are desperate and demanding for what you can offer as a shadow operator. But the supply
10:45 the supply of people like you shadow operators who know what they're doing who are disciplined enough to stay with us for 4 days of a challenge. Think about that. Think about that supply. So you are the audience within the audience within the audience of people who started with us. It's slim. So the supply of true blue shadow operators is very small and the demand is massive. See here's the reality. Most people they don't invest in their future self. They won't follow proven structural advice. Most people even don't even know this system even exists. So, you should count your blessings for just being aware. We're on day four right now. We started with over 80,000 people on the first
11:32 day. There's way less than 50,000 of you still here. And that's what success actually looks like showing up on a regular basis. So, if you're here, congratulations. You are doing the things that you need to do to be successful. Now, not all of you have invested yet, though I'm going to plead my case on why you should with some killer bonuses that but but the point is this. The supply for what you do is minuscule. It's a drop in the ocean. Yet, the demand the demand is even bigger than just you and the microcreators that you'll approach. The real value comes from the audiences that these creators are trying to serve. So, 78 million times many millions more. Because here's what these microcreators have done. They've gotten their audience so close
12:18 to what the audience wants without getting them all the way there. Uh if we're talking analogies, this is like driving the ball down to the one yard line in football and then not putting it into the end zone as the clock expires. Guess what? This gets you exactly zero points. Now, I train sales organizations, a lot of corporate sales organizations. They pay me large amounts of money. I've trained uh nine figure sales organizations sometimes even by the way and I always tell them the same thing. I say a cell that is 99% closed is worth exactly 0. A fully grown crop teeming with food will rot and decay into nothing if it isn't picked and it if it isn't harvested. This is why you should study how money moves. you're going to see uh
13:04 people who make a lot of money are often the ones who stand at the end of the chain from when supply and demand start and where money transacts at the end. So all of these audiences that these microcreators can reach, they are this close to being sold something if only somebody would put something in front of them to buy. And if you're at that end of that chain, you deserve this deal flow, right? You deserve the revenue that's at stake. So operators get in at the end, they help the money move and they get rewarded. You feel that? They make massive amounts of money as a result. So my real estate agent, she's uh working with me to sell a multi-million dollar property that I own. And she gets 3% of
13:49 the sale when it happens. Why? Because she can do the one thing that's really important. Put it in the end zone. Close the deal. Right? Some of the richest people in the world are fund managers. I live near some some of them. And these are people you have never heard of. They are true shadow operators. They are silent billionaires. And they get rich because they can get people to give them money to invest. And even if these fund managers lose their clients money, they still can become billionaires simply because they're in the intersection where money moves. You want more money? Get in the intersection of where money moves. They are there. are at the close to the final step where the money lands. I'll talk more about the psychology that you need to step into to truly own this
14:36 position and to feel good about it and to unlock leverage that's actually easier than building an audience which the microcreators done. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about how uh it's easier than all the work that the microcreators have put in. So, not only just to acquire the audience, but to build a relationship with that audience. Okay. But what you do is more valuable even though it's easier. Isn't that interesting? So, you do provide more value even though you will have to put in a lot less effort and time to get that. Now, we'll get back to that in a second. Here's the point. These audience that these micro creators are serving are worse off by not having a properly structured product to invest in. Let me say that again. I re I want
15:23 you to really step into this. They are worse off these audience these micros creators reach by not having a properly structured pro product to invest in. At least 2 to 10% of any audience [snorts] would prefer a paid solution that was properly structured over free information that's unstructured and full of gaps. Let me put it this way. There are people just like me who follow micro influencers all over the world. We're the type of people who pay others to change our oil, pay others to cook our food, pay others to assemble our furniture, pay others to hang our Christmas lights, uh pay others to do the things that would cost us more in time, which we don't have, than it does in money, which we do have. And this is
16:09 who you are going to serve. You're going to give them something they wish they could have invested in sooner. You're going to help the microcreator deliver that. You're going to give them uh you're going to give it to them using proprietary tools like Ghostriter and like Synthesize. And we'll break that down more in a bit, right? So, they're going to get the most value from it. And you're going to help the microcreator truly level up their impact and make their life easier and get that financial monkey off their back because they need to make money to keep going. So, you're going to help them do that while giving the portion of their audience who is desperate to invest the opportunity to buy something greater than the money they're currently holding in their hands. So, here's my call to action to
16:54 you right now, right here. I want you to drop shadow operator in the chat if you're up to that task of doing that, helping the microcreator finally put a structured product to that portion of the audience who is dying to buy it. Are you up for that task? Shadow operator in the chat if you are. All right. There are 41 million microcreators within that 78 million uh subsegment who absolutely desperately need you. They just don't know it yet. There are 41 million microcreators hurting every single day that you delay in reaching out to them. There are 41 million microcreators that represent billions of dollars in shadow
17:41 operating possibility. I said billions with a B. Somebody's going to step up and claim it. Why not you? Now, if it's going to be you, type shadow operator in the chat cuz I want you committed here, right? I don't do this just for fun. I do this for impact. And the impact happens if I can get you to turn what we're saying into a reality that improves your life. Now, here's the best part of all of this. Access to these microcreators has been democratized, my friend. Democratized. it is now easier than ever to reach out to them. Let me explain. See, when I started digital marketing back in the ancient year of 2007, uh the term influencer didn't even exist. Social media of choice was
18:28 MySpace and pretty much only bands, musicians, and like angsty goth teenage girls use that platform. Uh if you wanted to approach somebody of influence, like a real influential person, a creator if you will, there was no easy way to do it. It just was not a thing that was simple. I would find mailing addresses and I would send handwritten notes through the mail just to get uh influential people's attention. Either that or I would do these elaborate Google searches and I would pay fees to get people's personal phone numbers. I would cold call them. I would try to find their email address and I would send them a pitch and I would hope that they would respond. And there were so few creators in the space that you could even reach out to. So
19:16 there was few of them. They were hard to reach out to them. And if you did reach out to them, it was just kind of weird um because we were all living through the platform of what social media was for the first time. Social media was a new thing to everybody collectively at the time and nobody knew what to do with it. There was no normal yet. These days, I have people with 10 million to hund00 million a year businesses regularly sliding into little Jason Fladland's DMs. Right? On the flip side, when I need to contact somebody and I send them a text or I send them an email, they often respond slower than if I just send them a DM, which is insane. The DM is
20:01 the new normal. The direct message is the new normal. And it's just as easy for you to access these microcreators as it would be to reach out to a friend. Now, here's the downside to that. If it's as easy for you, it's as easy for everybody. I get so much DM span that if I got paid a dollar per DM, I'd be richer than I already am. Uh, but you should never let noise stop you. If you have strategy, here's what I mean. If there's a thousand DMs being sent, but you have the proper strategy to send the one in a thousand that gets attention and gets a response, then it doesn't really matter how many other idiots are out there sending really shitty DMs. And over the last few days, we've broken down the strategy of what a really good DM looks like when you're approaching these
20:48 microcreators. Now, we intentionally suggest you go after microcreators because they're not getting DMs like Iman or I am getting. Uh they're getting less than a dozen a week on average. And so, you don't need strategy. There isn't noise. But I also want you to use strategy on top of approaching people where you don't need to actually have much strategy to land your first deal. Now, do you remember what this was over the last four days of our training time? It starts not with an ask. It starts with a give. And not just any give either. A give that has personalization to the microcreator and comes with value. A give that also sets up the deal so it happens smoothly and easily. It's a whole strategy that some of the
21:34 greatest marketing minds that you'll ever come across have developed. Besides, these microcreators, like I said, aren't getting hit up nearly as much as Iman or myself are. They get way less DMs, and they get almost no DMs that understand really good communication strategies like the ones that we have taught over the last couple of days, right? So, with 78 million microcreators out there and a really powerful give first strategy, don't you agree that the opportunity here is incredible to reach out with a give to all of these microcreators to help them take what they know, create a product with it, put in front of an audience, and then everybody wins. All right. Now, this gets exciting when you run it through the greatest equation that most
22:20 people aren't even aware of when it comes to making money. Would you like to see this equation? If so, type shadow operator into the chat right now. We're going to cook, baby. Let me explain. Artificial intelligence is the single greatest invention to mankind. Maybe since fire, I think I would even put it on my tier list. Higher than fire. Higher than fire. I think AI is the greatest mankind invention until it overtakes us all and then the robots rule the world. But I think that's not for another couple thousand years, right? AI truly is science fiction come to life. You have a machine that is better than 99% of human beings at 99% of task. And you're in the adoption period where most people have no clue
23:06 how to use it or how to leverage it. We call this massive opportunity, my friend. Now, I want you to notice we are not using AI to send out the messages to microcreators. No, no, no, no. Because AI is not very good at that. AI totally sucks at that actually. Uh, it'll make you sound like everybody else. And if you sound like everybody else when you're doing outreach, you might as well not even exist. So, we will still use human ingenuity to develop the best outreach to these microcreators. Now, here's how we use AI to assist us with it, which is we use AI to develop personalized game plans. So, when we reach out to these microcreators and we say, hey, listen, there's something I can help you with. Would you be interested in it? And they say yes, we
23:52 give them a personalized detailed game plan. And this is what the AI creates for us. And this is what makes the AI super duper powerful because the specialized AI that we've developed has been trained specifically for the task of crunching a ton of data on a microcreators profile just like you're seeing on your screen right here and then extracts from that data the right key personal information related to them that is most likely to get the creator to respond positively to the DM you send them with their game plan. So you just need to get them interested in the game plan. They ask for it, you deliver it to them, and they say, "Whoa, I now see the potential. If I partnered with this shadow operator, and they help me put together this product, I can see how my audience would buy it." Now, these
24:39 personalized game plans, they used to take hours to create or thousands of dollars if you were to outsource it. And I'd recommend most of you should outsource it instead of create it yourself if you don't know how to create it. But now, you can do them in minutes. and they can be done better than what most humans can do if they had dozens of hours to do each game plan manually. Now, if you can't invest and monetize and this is your only option, this is still worth doing on your own, 100%. But if you're sold on the idea of shadow operating and you want to work with us, then use the AI that we've specifically developed to create these valuable things for free that you're giving to microcreators ahead of time. And the AI is now being used in clever fashion to create value in advance for free, which is normally
25:26 not something you could do willy-nilly. What I mean by this is if you speculatively put forth at your own cost a game plan for each microcreator, there's still a strong likelihood that any individual creator is not going to say yes to it and close a deal with you. So, you can't just go out there to each micro creator and say, "Here's your game plan. Here's your game plan. Here's your game plan. Here's your game plan. Here's your game plan." um even if you could develop them in seconds just like that because most of them are just not going to say yes when you cold outreach to them. That's just just the way the game works. We are playing a game of probabilities where you have to reach out to many microcreators because there are dozens or even hundreds of reasons why a microcreator won't say yes to your deal of you being
26:11 their shadow operator. And pretty much none of these reasons have anything to do with you. Now, pay attention. This is a very important point because I think it's going to help you move forward and release a lot of friction that you're currently holding. Right? Listen, you could have the most fertile se soil on the entire planet with the best seed and you could be the best farmer to exist, but the weather can still destroy your crop. You can't control the weather. So, you counteract this uncertainty with quantity. And there's a saying that sometimes quantity takes on its own quality. What I mean by that is in the past you'd have to be ultra strategic and really intentional to create these game plans
26:57 because you could only create a couple at a time. And you'd have to do it with the microcreators that you think would have the highest likelihood of saying yes because it's going to be a lot of work upfront just to start a conversation with them. And that's like predicting the weather. It's very difficult to do. So instead what we do is use quantity. We can reach out to lots of microcreators and we can develop lots of game plans to give value in advance knowing that most people even after having seen a GL game plan will not necessarily say yes to it. And that's freaking awesome because in this scenario every no leads you one step closer to a yes. You only need one yes to completely change your life. Now more on that in a
27:44 second. Let's talk now about Instagram. In a lot of ways, Instagram is the perfect platform to start off on because it's a short form platform. I don't know if you've noticed this, but Iman and I, we stay [laughter] on here with you for hours every single day, for many days straight. Uh, I'm here at significant cost to my own personal situation. I have to leave my wife, who I love madly. I have to leave behind the kids who I work so hard to provide for. And I have to leave behind Bella, my golden retriever, who's like a fourth kid to me. Uh, and I have to get on a plane and I have to fly 16 hours from LA to Dubai to be on site here for nearly two weeks. And this is the most valuable resource that I have in the world, the time that I spend with the ones that I love. I
28:29 sacrifice that and give it up to be here and share with you for many days, many hours of hard work. And I do it because it's worth it. Because a big part of what gives meaning in my life is to offer contribution and value to you. Long- form content is incredibly valuable, but it's also incredibly difficult. It requires incredible sacrifice. Short form content is awesome because it's short. But the problem with being short is it's hard to have an impact when you speak in sound bites, generally speaking. But on Instagram, it's not a bug. It's actually a feature. Instagram is such a great platform because you can be short form and still have impact,
29:15 especially because of how we taught you to use stories with this 14-day sequence and with this three-phase approach. So when you partner up with a creator and you help them launch their digital product, platforms like Facebook and Twitter, they can be useful, but the strategies there are a little bit more complicated and the responsiveness is not often as ripe as it is for Instagram. So Instagram is the perfect platform to start with. It requires the least amount of effort on your part to have a microcreator communicate with their audience in a way that results in products getting sold, people's lives getting better, and you getting paid. and it has the most microcreators on it of all the platforms and you can reach them the easiest to help them launch their digital product to their audience. And boy are there lots of audiences. I'm
30:02 not sure how you can truly understand what a great time that you're living in right now because you haven't lived through the time that I live through coming up in this digital marketing game. Not only was it impossible to really contact any creator back in the day without going through a lot of effort, but a lot of the platforms we could leverage and use to market on were very difficult to make money with. Many of the platforms had restrictions on the very content that you could use. There used to be a time when I was on YouTube where you could not post any business content. They didn't allow it. It was against the TOS. There was a time when people were scared to buy anything online because they weren't sure that it was safe. I'd have to sell people on the idea of buying things online like this. This was the clothes that I would use. I would say, "Hey, do you go out and eat at restaurants?" And then they would say, "Yes." And I'd say, "Do you give
30:48 the waiter your credit card when you're done to pay the bill?" And they would say, "Yes." And I'd say, "Okay, so you take a complete stranger and you put a physical credit card in their hand that they walk away with and you don't know where they go to." and that's okay with you, but you won't use a checkout link online which is infinitely more secure than that credit card that you're handing to a waiter right now. Uh so what to speak of the audiences that are available right now. So people buy more stuff online than they do offline and you can reach more people online because most people spend their waking hours online more than offline. For better or worse, it is what it is, right? The amount of people that are staring at a screen for six plus hours a day is in
31:35 the billions. That's how many people are online for 6 hours a day or more. Okay? And this has changed significantly over the last 15 years. It used to be more attention and more money was spent offline by a large amount. And now more attention and more money is being spent online by a large amount. So you have more people than ever before in history who are staring at screens. You have more people that you can reach immediately and directly than ever before. And you can reach these people for free, which used to be impossible, used to not even be a possibility. And you're reaching people who buy things online as natural as breathing air. you
32:22 are now able to reach them with this new emerging technology of artificial intelligence too. So, brothers and sisters, if you can't put these pieces in place and make lots of money right now, I don't think you'll ever have a better time in your life to do so. Is that making sense? Like, I hope you truly get it. I can appreciate it because I live through the other side of it, but it's hard to appreciate it if you don't truly understand how valuable it is. And hopefully you can see it's it's so valuable. Now, I'm trying to impress upon you how unbelievably fortunate you are to be at this time in this place right now. Uh, if this is landing with you, put a shadow operator in the chat just so I can make sure that
33:08 we're on the same page because, you know, I've been dazzling you with these big numbers and all this data and and such but 78 million creators that exist out there and billions and billions of dollars being spent online every day and billions and billions of people spending six hours a day online. It's easy to get lost in these numbers. They're big. It's hard to wrap your head around. So, let's talk about a number that's easy to manage. Let's talk about a number that can completely change your life. Let's talk about the number one. One of the greatest books that I I've read in recent history is the book uh Tiny Little Habits by BJ Fog. BJ Fog is a professor at Stanford. And speaking of Instagram, by the way, the guys who created Instagram took his course at Stanford and used his tiny little habits
33:54 framework to develop Instagram, which then became the fastest company in history at the time to reach a billion dollars. And they did this by making Instagram addictive through the concept that BJ Fog taught about how to create tiny little habits. Now, a tiny little habit is an activity that is so ridiculously simple and small that it is harder to not do it than it is to do it. This is why I love this book for forming my own productive habits. BJ Fog gives this classic example in the book of how he wasn't flossing his teeth and he wanted to start that habit. So, what he did was just floss one tooth initially because while the prospect of going from nothing to flossing all of your teeth that may be a lot, anybody can do just one tooth.
34:40 And once you establish the habit of doing something the same time, the same way through repetition, then you get automaticity. And then it becomes easier to add it another tooth to it because it's nearly effortless. And then you can add another tooth to it and then another tooth to it. That's how you build habits. The most effective scientifically proven way of building habits. And having sold over $250 million online, I've noticed success in business is the same way. See, I started selling $4 ebooks that were six pages long because it was such a simple task for me to create and sell these digital products that it was more painful for me not to do it than it was for me to do it. The problem in this space is you see people here and there and everywhere that are making millions of dollars,
35:27 flying private, driving fancy cars, going to fancy dinners, and a few of those people are actually legit. Not everything on the gram is true, but there's a lot of those people out there living that lifestyle um rented or paid for. Then you go and you compare your start to where you think their finish is at. And whether they're legit or not doesn't even matter because you psych yourself out because you can't wrap your head around $10 million or a million dollars or even $100,000 if you're just starting and trying to make your first dollar. So, the challenge we have bringing on shadow operators to interview and do Q&A sessions with you has been difficult for two reasons. One, they operate in the shadows. So, they're not exactly excited
36:13 to come out in public. And second, all of them that we talk to are ballers making lots of money and they're all legit. And Iman and I are sitting here being like, how can someone relate to this if they're just starting the process? This is going to be very intimidating to them. And it's the facts, right? So, is it okay with you if I make it unintimidating? Let me know in the chat because one is the least intimidating number out there. You only need one deal and one deal only to change your life. You only need to have one microcreator say yes in order for your life to completely change for the better. Now, there are two reasons for this. One, you will prove to yourself that it's now absolutely possible. Two, you will see that you can you can just repeat the process again with another
36:59 microcreator. the hardest obstacle I have to overcome to sell you on shadow operating is the fact that you don't believe that you can be a shadow operator because you haven't done it yet. You say things like, "Well, why would a microcreator even respond to me? I'm I'm a nobody who hasn't had any significance." Uh, and you say things like, "Well, why would they trust me with their audience? Because I could screw it up and ruin their whole relationship. They're probably scared that I'm going to do that. So, they're not even going to entertain the idea." Uh, what you're worried about isn't that they're going to say no. You're actually worried that they're going to say yes and that causes you to hesitate and because if they were to say yes, then you're going to have to help them launch a product. And what if it goes completely sideways?
37:45 And what if everybody gets mad? And what if everything what if you know next thing you know they're wishing death upon you? This I'm bringing this up for a very specific reason. And this is the biggest friction that I know that I'm encountering when I'm showing you what's possible as a shadow operator. The no is scary, but the yes could be even scarier when you land these deals in your mind at least because the reality is not that. What I described is not true in reality, but it is true when you're worrying about what could go wrong in your mind. See, all of that though dissolves instantly when you realize that there are no boogeymen under the bed in this model and that the reality is much safer than the nightmare scenarios that really only exist in your
38:30 head. Once you get one deal, you will realize that this is easier than even we make it sound. Once you get one deal, you will realize that this is simpler than hundreds of other activities that you've already done and achieved in your life. This is easier. There's probably 7,000 things in your life that you've already done that are harder than shadow operating. And you've already done them. And you will realize that the way you get to a million dollars isn't going from zero to a million dollars. You get there $1 at a time. You get there one customer at a time. You get there one deal at a time. The greatest secret to success that I've learned that has really helped me in my career is that the big numbers come from doing a few small things. Well, you want large
39:16 results, do a few things, but just do them well. It's no different than how a giant oak tree comes from the seed of an acorn that a child can hold in their hand. The millions come from the initial simple success of making thousands of dollars and then just repeating it over and over again. See, there are 8 billion people on this planet, and you only need a thousand of them to give you $1,000 if you want to make a million dollars. Do you suppose that there are a thousand people on this planet right now who would pay you $1,000 through a microcreator? There's your million dollars. Are you telling me there's no way possible that you can't find these people out there? There's got to be a
40:02 way, isn't there? There's got to be a way. It doesn't have to be you directly, though. It can be you through the shadows or the microcreator. We could easily get a thousand people through a microcreator. And if we put together deals that only made you $1,000 net profit per deal, think about that. That's on the lowest of the low end with microcreators. There you go. Put together one microcreator deal that sold a,000 people $1,000. There's your million dollars. Now, it never works that way, right? It never does. Just let's be straight with each other. It does not work that way. Uh because a good microcreator could easily make you $10,000 here or $20,000 there or $50,000 there. That that's on the
40:49 conservative side. So let's just say each deal makes you only $10,000. Like let's be extremely ultraconservative here and you did just one deal per month [snorts] which again this isn't how this works, but we're just running a thought experiment. If you did one deal per month and each deal only made you $10,000 in one year you would make $120,000. Now, if each microcreator was worth $20,000 to you per deal, then in one year, if you did one per month a deal, that's 12 deals, you would make $240,000. Question, would that be life-changing to you? Would you be willing to strap in and put some focus on this and really implement to the best of your abilities to close
41:34 just one deal a month if it meant nearly a quarter million dollars in your pocket in one year's time? Would you be willing to do that? If so, shadow operator, put it in the chat. Now, again, it doesn't work that way. It's nonlinear because oftentimes one deal blows up. So, you might do one small deal, one small deal, and then boom, you hit the big time, and then the microcreators come to you. But I'm getting ahead of myself because the numbers work out even better [snorts] [laughter] because this is a business that doesn't function from a linear perspective. It becomes exponential. It's really important you understand this concept in your business about linear versus exponential. Once you understand this, you realize that your brain is equipped to interpret the world through a linear
42:21 perspective, but the world is actually exponential. Each deal multiplies from the last deal. Let me explain. Once you get one deal, you're never starting from scratch again. You only have to start from scratch in this business one freaking time. So once you get a deal, you're leveraging the success of that deal to multiply the success of the next deal. Okay? We'll loop back to that in a second. And stay with me here a little longer on the power of small numbers. One deal with one microcreator can put you in front of 20,000 to a h 100,000 followers of that microcreator. And again, having sold hundreds of millions of dollars online, I have a secret that most people aren't aware of. The real value of this audience is not in the 20,000 total followers
43:09 or the 50,000 followers or the 100,000 followers. The real value inside the microcreators audiences is another audience. The audience of a thousand true fans. In 2008, there was an article written called A Thousand True Fans by Kevin Kelly. This article was written for musicians. So, I paid particular attention to it because I was, you know, a rap artist at the time, still trying to run that business, trying to be successful while starving to death in this little tiny apartment. And when I read this article, it was groundbreaking because in it, Kevin puts forth this concept that in order for you to be truly successful, you don't need to sell a million people. You just need to find a thousand diehard fans. Because there's
43:55 a law in the universe that works across all data sets and it works especially true in business and it's called the 8020 rule. Meaning about 20% of your inputs give you 80% of your outputs. So 20% of drivers cause about 80% of wrecks. 20% of criminals commit about 80% of crimes. 20% of investors make about 80% of the money in the market. And in business, 20% of customers spend 80% of the money available in that market. So if you want to So if you reach 20,000 people through a microcreators following, you're not really concerned with the number 20,000. What you really want is to reach that 4,000 members within that 20,000 who are likely to be the hottest buyers. And this is what the Instagram launch
44:41 formula was designed and engineered around and has been automated with Ghostriter OS. The true value of being a shadow operator is that you don't have to assemble an audience from scratch. Instead, what you're doing is leveraging already existing assembled audiences. And from those audiences, mathematically, there's going to be 20% of people within that audience that are already ready to spend money on any product. if there has been no product put in front of them previously. We call this the lowhanging fruit. Now, if you were building an audience from scratch, you can't just go to Facebook and say, "Hey, give me those 20% buyers. Sift and sort them, you know, and ignore four-fifths of the other ones and just give me the best buyers." You can't do
45:26 that. You can't go to Google and say, "Only show my results for the 20% of buyers who are going to spend 80% of the money available." Doesn't work that way. The only way you get the 20% is by having the other 80%. This is what makes these audiences so valuable to you because somebody had to build the whole audience. They had to kiss a lot of frogs before they found a prince. If we use the old dating analogy from the woman's perspective, right? Four-fifths of any audience is essentially worthless. I laugh at it because people think they're dunking on us when we do these launches and I read the chats and they say, "Oh, you started with this many people on day one and on day four you have this many people. VIP started here and now VIP's there." I'm like, "Yeah, that's a mathematic principle." [laughter and gasps] Even Jason, Sir
46:12 Jason of Fladdlin, the persuasion prince is not able to uh override the mathematical laws of this universe. This is just the way this works. You don't do it for the majority who are not going to invest. You do it for the minority who are dying to invest. And this is where you get really really rich off that audience within the audience. But you never know who's going to be the 20% that spends the 80% and you don't know who's going to be the 80 the other 80% who spends practically nothing. And this is an issue that keeps a lot of marketers poor because they'll go out there and they'll reach out to thousands and thousands of people and they won't see any money from it. Unfortunately, however their marketing played out, it never hit those key people in the market that spend the most money. Now, we
46:59 bypass this problem completely because we go to existing audiences that have already been assembled ranging between 20,000 to 100,000 people or 10,000 or even 5,000 to 100,000 people. I'm I'm okay with any of those scenarios. And we know that within those audiences, a majority of them are not going to buy from the microcreator when we help them create the product and launch it to that audience. And that is totally okay because if you have a thousand people who spend a thou spend $100 with you, that's a $100,000 launch. If we just have a thousand people spend $100, that's a $100,000. But even a thousand people is a lot. If we only get a
47:45 hundred people out of an audience following of 50,000 to buy a digital product for $100, then that's $10,000. How much of a difference would $10,000 make right now in your life? I know for most of you it would make a lot of a difference because most of you making the investment in monetize is difficult for you right now. So 10,000 would be completely lifechanging to you, especially if you could make it within the next month. Right now, is it okay if I go a little bit deeper with you here on this? I'm going to break down some further advanced psychology that very few people on this planet understand. And it goes like this. The smaller the audience, the more responsive it tends to be. In one of my legendary shadow operating
48:32 campaigns, we were taking an existing product and we repositioned it. We put it in front of a new audience. And this is actually one of the greatest superpowers as a shadow operator that you do. You get to leverage existing assets that creators have already developed and find new and valuable ways to deploy those assets and get paid lots of money. It's like Viagra. I don't know if you know how Viagra was invented. Somebody was trying to treat uh blood pressure, high blood pressure, and the test subjects were like, "Well, it's not helping my blood pressure go down, but it's helping something else come up." And they're like, "Okay, existing asset pointed to a new market, billions of dollars." So, all you have to do is take existing assets and slightly tweak or
49:18 position what those assets are. And this is something somebody's built their whole life. and you just put this little cherry on top and the money gets going. So, in this particular instance of us doing this, we were competing against one of the biggest names in the history of the financial space. I'm sure you've heard of them and this time I'm going to name a name. It's a guy named Robert Kiasaki. I'm not a fan, right? But Robert Kiyosaki has written the bestselling book of all time on uh financial literacy, which is Rich Dad Poor Dad. So, this book has sold millions and millions and millions of copies. And at the time that we were competing against him, he had an audience of over 10 million people that he could reach. Me, on the other hand, I had access to an audience of 50,000 people that I could access for our shadow operation that we were running,
50:04 just 50,000. And now because Kiasaki and a whole bunch of other people, they were all promoting the same product. Uh we were operating as affiliates in this instance, meaning we're behind the scenes promoting a product that somebody else has already created. This is similar to how you're going to have the microcreator already create a product, right? Have them create a product. Now, we were doing this in a contest environment. So, whoever sold the most got a bonus on top of that and there was a leaderboard. Okay? Now, when you run in these contests as a shadow operator, these these products, they open at a certain time and then they close at a certain time. So, we're all promoting the same product at the same time. So, there's winners and losers here. There's real stake and none of us, it's
50:50 not any of our products. We are all promoting somebody else's product. So, we're competing against hundreds of other people all selling the same product. And here was the results. We made millions of dollars more in net profit than Kiasaki did with his big name out there, with him personally endorsing it, with him front and center to tens of millions of people in his audience. He had way more of an audience that he had access to personal access to than I had access to. And it was a lesson that I learned very early in my career. I had launched a product at the end of 2007 that taught article writers a technique to improve the speed at which they could write their articles. Now, at the time, there wasn't really any social media. Instagram didn't exist. Uh, so I put my
51:35 buyers on an email list, and this is how I would communicate to them. I would send them emails. And what I discovered is if I talked about article writing to these article writers, my open rates and my click-through rates on these emails were insane. But if I strayed for that and I talked about anything other than article writing, then it was like I didn't exist. People would unsubscribe from my email list. So people that were customers of mine yesterday were now upset with me today if I didn't stay talking about the thing that they were most interested in. And what happened is as my audience grew and I had different ways that people could follow me, I ended up with this dilemma. If I talked to one specific subgroup within that large group, I would alienate every other subgroup. So, I'd have to water my message down to try to reach everybody. And as a result, I didn't really end up reaching anybody. Now, one of the
52:22 biggest values that microcreators have is they have this really tight message to this audience that's specifically and only directly um applicable to that specific audience that they can reach. The point I'm making with this is the audience is kind of like the the Goldilocks effect. Not too big, not too small, just right. They're big enough that once we do a deal, there's a lot of money at stake, but they're small enough that the response rate is going to be super duper high. It's going to be way higher than you could get with large mass market styled audiences. Which is why with 50,000 people and that tightly connected uh relationship to that audience, we could beat a famous celebrity personality who wrote a book
53:08 with the president of the United States and had 10 million followers and we could double him in sales. So, these microcreators, not only are they easier for you to access because they're smaller, they have more actual money at stake, more pentup value waiting to be extracted than super big names. Listen, I started shadow operating before Iman celebrated his 8th birthday. [laughter] I've been around this block several times and I've had a massive contribution in the space of shadow operating. And here's what I can tell you with 100% certainty. The shadow operators that I see win the most, and I'm not just talking in terms of percent. I'm talking in terms of actual dollars, always do so through smaller audiences, not larger audiences. So, you
53:56 do not want to do deals with people with millions of followers. I have worked with these celebrities that you follow, and I have done deals with the biggest names in the space, but I have always made more money working with people who have dedicated, loyal, true fans than I ever did with the mass market. We did two launches in the same week. One with Tony Robbins and one internally with a very small client and the one internally with a small client pulled bigger numbers, right? So, it's easier for you to reach these microcreators. It's easier for you to work with them because they're not financially independent and they need revenue to continue creating. And you're going to have a bigger impact and bigger income working with these audiences. And I know that this is a difficult concept to wrap your head
54:41 around right now of why smaller audiences produce larger profits than larger audiences, but at least does this resonate with you at some level? If so, drop a shadow operator in the chat. Uh, and I can see them all. It's in the right corner of my eye. I got the chat rolling right now, so I'll see them when they come flooding in because it's a it's a tough it's an abstract concept, but it's God, if you truly understand this, then I think it's going to make it easy for you to move forward as a shadow operator. All right. And I see them lighting up right there. And hell, since we're on the topic of complicated concepts that are not obvious and need to be unwound, let me just throw another one at you. All right. It's called ego versus money. And this is a big one. It's it's subtle. It's like carbon monoxide poisoning. You
55:26 can't smell it. You don't know it exists. And then it kills you. It's there all the time, and you're not even aware of it. So, let me bring some awareness for you. It's insane how rich you can be if you're willing to take none of the credit. I live in one of the most expensive cities in the world. I live in Los Angeles, California, the Dubai of the West, right? And I live specifically within a suburb of Los Angeles called Prrentwood, right? So like this is the upper crust of the upper crust. Uh the richest of the rich live here. Uh, now when you think of LA, most people think of Hollywood celebrities who grace the big screens and win the awards and get talked about in the news and followed by the paparazzi. While the neighborhood that I live in, there are very few celebrities there because most of the celebrities do
56:13 not make enough money to live in these neighborhoods that I live in and that surround me. When I walk the streets with my wife and the kids and the dog, the houses on the low end are five million and that's on the low low end. And the houses on the high end are a hundred million or more. And you can't turn your head without seeing houses in between 20, 25, 30, 40 million. And you know who lives in those houses? It's not the celebrities. It's the agents of the celebrities. It's the lawyers for those celebrities. It's the producers and directors of the films that the celebrities star in. The celebrities are merely the talent. The real money goes to the shadow
56:59 operators. The problem is because you never see them. You discount the value of this and you think that you have to be front and center in order to be successful. Yet that's the least effective position to be in because it has the most stress. It's the least flexible because as a shadow operator, get this. This is really cool. You can pick and choose who you work with. You have ultimate flexibility. You don't have to be beholden to any one specific market or any one specific position. You can be in several markets simultaneously taking advantage of several different opportunities all at the same time. Write this down. Wealth scales better in the shadows. Let me say that again.
57:46 Wealth scales better in the shadows. The only problem that you have to deal with is this. Are you willing to get little to no credit for your contribution to the marketplace because you're in the shadows? And I am the poster child for this. Many of the people that you follow and look up to, I have directly or indirectly had significant impact on their careers. And many of them have come gone on and become incredibly famous off the backbone of many of the concepts that I initially put into their hands. Without me, most of these people would not be known. And I get very little of the credit for it. Iman knows he knows the receipts that I hold [laughter] and I'm
58:32 okay with it because I have a large stack of money to consult myself with. Plus, and this also is this is actually more important to me, impact is still impact. Whether the impact is credited to me or credited to somebody else, it doesn't take away from the impact. I know the contribution I have on the world still exists. Whether I'm the one who gets the credit for it or somebody else does. So, are you okay with allowing somebody else to take the credit if it means that you make more money than you ever thought possible? If so, give me a shadow operator in the chat right now. Because this is one of the things that people have difficulty with. They have the ego and not the money. I dropped the
59:18 ego, now I have the money. Now, it is insane how far you can take this if you get really good at shadow operating. Like, it is absolutely truly mind-blowing insane. The grandest campaign that I ever shadow operated in was for a launch for a product called The Plant. A gentleman by the name of Dan Hollings, he came to me one day and he asked me to be the shadow operator for his launch, me and my company, Rapid Crush. And 226 days later, we sold 57.9 million. Now, let me show you what those numbers look like. How big of an audience do you think we had to reach in order to sell $57.9 million? It had to be in the millions, right? And the answer is less than
1:00:05 250,000 people. That's it. Now, that's a lot of people, but it's not a lot compared to 57.9 million. Now, only a tiny fraction of those 250,000 souls were directly my audience because I don't have a large audience. You know, I operate mostly in the shadows. I have a tiny audience. Okay. Uh, and at the time I had no social presence whatsoever. It's only been recently that I'm on the Instagram myself. I installed it for the first time as an app on my phone this year or 2025. I installed it, right? All of these audiences that we did this $57 million launch came from other people.
1:00:52 We would go to creators and we would have them promote this product that we published for Dan Hollings. We literally spent less than $1,000 on advertising to generate 57.9 million. This was all done through microcreators. All of the audience we got for this product was through microcreators. Wasn't my product. It was launched in a space I had zero expertise in, but I had strategy. I knew the shadow operator playbook and I played it well. I knew what levers and strings to pull. And in this space, this is still the record to this very day, five years later. Nobody's done more in less time than
1:01:40 this. Okay? This is how powerful shadow operating can be. This is what it looks like at the highest of high levels. But see, Dan came to me 13 years later after we had done shadow operating from Dan previously. So this is why success compounds. This is why success is nonlinear. This is why a million dollars seems infinitely far away from you right now. And then when you close a deal, all of a sudden it appears very close to you and then you realize it is obtainable. Now back to the subject of credit, right? You will never get public credit for the contribution that you make as a shadow operator, but the people that are paying attention will give you credit. [laughter]
1:02:25 [gasps] Oh my god, they will give you credit. So guys like Dan come to me because they find the clues of how other people in their space were able to go from nothing to having these successful launches and making millions of dollars. They follow the clues. So you get a reputation amongst a few highly influential people when you start shadow operating properly. And this is why it doesn't scale linearly. This is why not every deal is going to make you $20,000. You're going to start with these smaller deals and then pretty soon the same effort is going to get you to a $30,000 deal and then a $50,000 deal and then a
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