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Here is the full transcript of the video:
(coming soon)
Jun 152013
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Jun 112013
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Here is the full transcript of the video:
(coming soon)
Jun 042013
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Here is the full transcript of the video:
Hi, and welcome to another edition of Strategic Business Insights. Today we’re going to talk about immigration and how important immigration is for our economy. Here is the United States, people seem to hate immigration. People are always critical of immigration. They blame immigration for all kinds of problems like crime, and they say that immigrants use social services, they use our emergency rooms because they don’t have healthcare, all kinds of problems.
And you know what? That’s not untrue. It’s true. There are higher levels of crime involved with some of these immigrant populations. They do use the emergency room. They do take advantage of social services when they don’t pay into it, many times with tax revenue. A lot of them do but some of course, the illegal ones in particular, do not. So in this video I am not saying that those things aren’t true. But there’s another side to the coin that people don’t give any credence to, and it’s super-important.
So here’s the deal. Consumer spending is the single biggest component of our economy. Here in the United States, consumer spending accounts for 70 to 71% of our GDP, which is our gross domestic product. In other words, all the business that takes place in our economy, 71% goes to people like you and people like me buying food, shelter, clothing, and energy. Food, shelter, clothing, and energy. That is our economy.
So the immigration population, which in this country is 12-1/2%, so 12-1/2% of our population—our population right now is about 320 million, ballpark—so 12-1/2% is about 38 million. Again, the numbers aren’t exact, but you get the idea. Twelve-and-a-half percent of our population are immigrants, and about 11 million are illegal immigrants. So of the 38 million, about 11 million, which is maybe 30% of that population, is illegal.
But the bottom line is, that represents not only 12-1/2% of our population, but by default it also represents about 12-1/2% of our GDP. All of those immigrants, they’re all buying what? They’re buying food, shelter, clothing, and energy. They’re buying gas. They’re paying rent somewhere. They’re buying food.
Granted, some of them may be living at a lower standard of living than some other people, so maybe it’s not 12-1/2% of our GDP but only 10% of our GDP, but it’s 10% of our GDP. If all of those immigrants left, if we could find a way—let’s talk about some of these views of people who hate immigration—if you could get rid of all the immigration in the entire country, just deport the whole group, we would have the biggest recession in American history. We would have an absolute collapse of our economy, because all of a sudden, 12-1/2% of the population, who’s buying food, shelter, clothing, and energy, would just disappear.
So we do not want immigration to go away because it’s our GDP. It’s our economy is defined by our population. People don’t understand that. Population growth is not good for the planet but it’s very good for the economy. It means our economy can grow.
Now, if you look at the population of the world between 2010 and 2050—it’s a 40-year time span—the world population is going to grow by 34% during that timeframe. Now, the population in Europe during the same timeframe is growing by 0%. Their population is stagnant. It’s not growing. That’s why the European economy is struggling so much. There are other problems like debt and entitlement programs, but the bottom line is that their population isn’t growing, which means that their economy isn’t growing. That’s the major problem.
If you look at Russia, between 2010 and 2050—40 years—their population is shrinking by 12%. It’s shrinking by12%. If Russia didn’t have oil in their economy, their economy would be cratering between now and 2050. But it gets even worse than that. In Japan, which is the worst-case scenario in terms of population, 2010 and 2050 their population is shrinking by 17%. Seventeen percent, their population is going down between now and 2050. Their economy is in huge trouble.
Meanwhile, here in the United States, our economy is growing – by 26%. The world is 34, we’re at 26. Why is that? Now, our birth rate is higher than in Europe and it’s higher than in Japan. So that’s part of it. We’re making more babies. We’re making more babies than those other countries. But a huge part of it is the fact that we have higher levels of immigration. People want to come to this country and we’re letting them in, and that’s a good thing.
It’s a good thing. Stop blaming immigration on everything. Immigration is our population, which is growing, and because our population is growing, our economy is growing. It’s not growing as fast as some people want, but it is growing, and a big part of that is because the population is growing. Immigration is good for this country.
Again, population growth overall is bad for the planet but it’s good for the economy, and our population is growing. We’ve got a lot of space geographically. The United States is a huge country, so we’re not overcrowded yet or anywhere close to it. So the fact that our population is growing because of immigration is a good thing.
Thank you for watching this video. My name is Patrick, reminding you to think bigger about your business, think bigger about your life.
May 282013
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Here is the full transcript of the video:
Hi, and welcome to another edition of Strategic Business Insights. Today we’re going to talk about how to get your video to go viral. Now, there are a couple of different categories of videos. Primarily, the videos that do well fall into one of three categories – either they entertain, they educate or they shock. Entertain means they’re funny, they’re entertaining. Education is this type of a video. This is an educational video. And the third one is to shock. Those are the three basic categories.
There are exceptions. Obviously, music videos is a different category. Movie trailers is a different category. But as far as just one-off videos, either they entertain, they educate or they shock.
Entertainment videos have a lower probability of going viral. I mean, guys, I wish this is the type of video that would go viral and accumulate three million views. It’s unlikely. I mean, I wish it were likely. It’s probably a whole bunch of reasons. If I was funnier, better-looking, that would probably help. But the bottom line is that the entertaining and shocking videos have a much higher chance of going viral, but there’s still a whole bunch of other things that have to happen.
Now, the first 10 seconds of a video are super-important. I have a whole other video that talks about the basic mechanics of getting more views on YouTube. I’m going to put the link right up here somewhere, so you can click on that. I suggest that you watch that video as well. It’s a little bit more the mechanics and tactically how do you get some more views for an educational video, but it also applies to the entertainment and the shock videos as well. So check that video out. But as far as getting a video to go viral, viral means people are passing it along, it’s going on its own and it racks up or tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of views very, very quickly.
And the goal is to get momentum. You have to get a lot of views very, very quickly. So as soon as you launch that video, you have to promote the heck out of it right away to get a big spike in traffic, and then what’s going to happen is people are going to start talking about it and there’s going to be energy around that and there’s going to be discussions, and so the whole thing takes on a life of its own.
So how do you get those initial views? Well, that’s what I want to talk about in this video, and there are a couple of different things that you can do. Number one, post the video on a forum. There are forums about all sorts of topics. There are forums about cars, about Internet marketing, like the WarriorForum is a forum that I spend some time on. But there are forums on everything, certainly pop culture, entertainment.
Create a thread about that particular video, and embed the video in the thread and talk about the video. And what happens, forums have a huge amount of traffic, and ideally you’ve got a few friends who are also on that forum, maybe say 10 friends or even a half a dozen, six people that you know who are also on that forum. So as soon as you post it, you can send an email to those people and say, “Here’s the thread. Go at it.” And those people can go and they can comment on the thread, which puts it at the top of the forum so people see it first. That’s the fast water.
That’s what I call the fast water, is the top few threads. It’s like craigslist. The top few postings get the lion’s share of the traffic. It’s like Google – top few listings get the lion’s share of the traffic. Well, the way a forum works is if some other thread gets a comment, then it goes in first position and yours moves down to second. And then some other forum gets another comment, that one goes to first, the second one goes to second, and yours is now third, and you keep going down and down and down until someone comments on your thread, which puts it back up to the top. So you want to keep it at the top.
So if you have a few friends on that forum, they can all start engaging, they can comment on it, maybe wait a half an hour, let it drop a few slots, and then if no one else comments, boom, you can come and get it back up in the fast water. Hopefully, some other people will be commenting, keeping it there, but then maybe it starts to drop again, so boom, you comment again, get it back up to the top, keep it in the fast water. You can accumulate a huge number of views very, very quickly by putting it on a forum and maintaining it in a near-top position.
Secondly, you could do the same thing not on a forum, by getting lots of comments and lots of likes and lots of activity on your video. So maybe you have a bunch of friends, as soon as you post it to YouTube, send an email out to those friends and encourage them, “Please like it, please comment, please cause controversy.” Controversy and the comments, people battling it out, is excellent. Believe it or not, that really gets things going. It gets a lot of comments, YouTube likes, comments – so, activity right away.
And there’s another strategy that I think you should take a look at as well, and it’s advertising on StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is essentially a social bookmarking platform not dissimilar to Reddit or Digg. I mean, Digg’s not really the same as it used to be, but Digg, and there are others. But StumbleUpon actually has an advertising platform where your video can be one of a rotation in a particular category and you can get views for as little as five cents a view. It’s very, very inexpensive.
Now, people on StumbleUpon are known to be very fickle. They’ll get on a website, they’ll be off of it in two seconds, they won’t spend any time, but if your video is good—guys, your video has to be good. If your video isn’t good, this is not going to work. So, priority number one, the video has to be good. It has to entertain or it has to shock, and those first 10 seconds are critical. If you have those two, a good video with a great 10-second opening, StumbleUpon is a great solution, because people will click on it and boom, they’ll get entertained and they’ll stick with it. And the beauty is that they can stumble it themselves. In other words, on Reddit they would be thumbs-upping it. The bottom line is, if they stumble it, then you get organic views that you don’t even have to pay for because it goes into the listing based on that person’s recommendation, not your advertising budget.
So again, if the video is good, those first 10 seconds are good and captivating and compelling, and funny hopefully, then you’re going to get a lot of organic views off of the ones you pay for. So maybe you pay for a thousand a day or 10,000 a day, which wouldn’t cost you that much money, 200 dollars, but you might get 200,000 if people stumble it. So it’s an excellent way to get those initial views.
So if you want your video to go viral, number one, it has to be a good video. Number two, it has to entertain or it has to shock. Ideally it should be funny. And those first 10 seconds are critical. And then, as soon as you post it, you have to promote the heck out of it and get those initial views and get energy going around that video. That’s your best shot at having a video go viral, and if it does, you’re in for the ride of your life.
It can go quick, guys. It can go very, very quick. I’ve heard stories about this. Never happened to me. Never had a video go viral that way, but again, my videos aren’t really in the category that usually does. But I’ve read stories about videos that just go viral, and it’s a ride. So get ready.
Thank you for watching this video. I appreciate it very much. My name is Patrick, reminding you to think bigger about your business, think bigger about your life.
May 232013
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Here is the full transcript of the video:
Hi, and welcome to another edition of Strategic Business Insights. Today we’re going to talk about entitlement spending – entitlement spending here in the United States. Look, here’s the situation. We’ve got huge deficits. Huge deficits.
Now, just a quick definition here. Deficit is the annual shortfall. The debt is the accumulation of all of the deficits that have happened in years past. In other words, how much debt do we actually have? How much money do we actually owe? The deficit is how much more we spent than we made just this year, and we have deficits that are over a trillion dollars in the United States. It is absolutely unsustainable, and if you’re curious what this is going to look like in the years to come, all we need to do is look at Europe, and Greece in particular or Ireland or Portugal or Spain or any of those countries. And in fact, in the years to come, you just wait – Japan is going to be in the same boat. That’s like a bug just looking for a windshield.
Bottom line is those deficits are not sustainable and sooner or later the bond markets are going to force us to pay higher interest rates, which is not just going to affect the money we borrow today but it’s going to affect all the money we borrowed in years past. That is scalably horrible. In other words, the difficulty, the financial strain that that’s going to put our country under, will scale up in the negative direction. In other words, it’s going to get bad a lot quicker.
We have to roll over our debt. We’re selling 10-year bonds, so we’re constantly rolling over debt. We’re retiring old bonds by issuing new bonds. So if the old bonds were issued at 2% and we have to sell more bonds that are paying 4 or 5%, it’s like we just doubled our debt. The debt didn’t double but the interest payment did. So entitlement spending is the problem. We need to reform entitlements, just like they’ve done across Europe, not in all cases but they’re doing it right now. Even Canada, which is where I grew up, Canada has raised their retirement age.
And that’s what we’re going to talk about here – Social Security. People say, is Social Security really the problem? In other words, is the money coming in sufficient to cover the money going out? Well, today it actually is, believe it or not. The amount of money coming in through Social Security is actually more than we’re paying out. So that’s not technically the source of the deficits. The sources of the deficits are things like Medicare or Medicaid. Those are the big ones. But they’re more difficult to solve. It’s a more complex problem.
Bottom line is the government needs revenue. We need revenue to pay for these expenses. Either that or we have to reduce the expenses. So it’s the balance of money coming in and money going out, and I think Social Security is the number one place where we can make some really important transformations and improvements in our economy.
So here’s the deal. When Social Security was first introduced, it was 1935 – August 15th, 1935. And by the way, this is when the retirement age was defined as 65. People are to retire at 65. Do you know what the life expectancy was in 1935? It was 62. The life expectancy was 62. The average person was dead by the time they hit retirement age. So very few—not very few, but the majority of people never got to retirement.
What’s the life expectancy in the United States today between the two sexes, male and female? Seventy-eight. So the life expectancy has gone up by 16 years from 62 to 78, because people are living longer. Meanwhile, the retirement age has stayed the same at 65. That’s the problem.
That’s the problem. It’s ridiculous. Before, people were expected to work until they were basically done. Now, I’m not suggesting that we need to raise the retirement age to 78. I’m not suggesting that that’s the case. But we should raise it to 70. And I’m not saying you can’t do it in one year. You have to scale it—not scale it, but you have to adjust it up over a period of time, so over a period of time the retirement age would rise.
But the bottom line is people are working longer already because we’re still healthy at 70. A lot of people are still healthy and very functional at 70. So should Social Security kick in at 65? No. We have to adjust this stuff, and if we did it would solve the problem.
And again, I’m not saying that Social Security is the problem, but it’s the easiest one to change. Medicare is more complicated. It’s more difficult. There are all sorts of issues that come in with healthcare costs and who’s affected. But retirement age should be a function of old we’re actually living, and to let the life expectancy go up by 16 and keeping retirement age stagnant at 65 is absurd and it’s delusional, and it’s the source of our problem.
So my vote is to increase the retirement age from 65 to 70 over a period of years, and that is going to change the expense part of our annual national budget dramatically. That’s my opinion. You can have whatever opinion you want.
Thank you very much for watching this video. My name is Patrick, encouraging you to think bigger about your business, think bigger about your life.