Cole Hatter On Making $4.5M Off One Deal, Losing Everything & Being a Firefighter | DSH #166

To man, because I see you took a social media hiatus.

So I just kind of leaned heavily into fatherhood and my real estate business.

What was that burnout like?

I've never had it, but I know people deal with this.

Like, did you just shut down completely?

Yeah, so I just started to get resentful.

Like, don't come and ask me more questions.

You just got my time.

I'm not your coach.

Don't is so when I started getting resentful, that's when I had a conversation with my wife.

And I was like, dude, I'm kind of turning into an

Welcome back to the digital social hour, guys.

I'm your host, Sean Kelly.

You're with a great guest today, Cole Hatter.

What's up, bro?

How's it going, man?

I'm stoked, man.

Good to be in Vegas.

It's hot out there right now.

It's 116 degrees.

Yeah.

I don't know if that's normal if you're having a heat wave, but it...

It's actually normal, unfortunately.

But glad to be here nonetheless.

Glad that we're in air conditioning.

Yeah, what you been up to, man?

Because I see you took a social media hiatus.

Yeah, I did.

I got really burned out.

I ran my Thrive brand from 2015 through 2021, and it was so much social energy to continue to book an event of 2,000 people again and again and again to fill my mastermind, to fill all of my events.

We were doing about 16 events a year in the Thrive brand.

And so it was just all day long.

I had three people running my social media.

So it was like a huge investment.

of time, energy, and money.

And I just got so burned out of it all.

My wife and I decided to have another child.

We had a 10-year-old and at the time it was a nine-year-old and a six-year-old.

And we said, screw it, let's start the clock over again.

Nice.

So I just kind of leaned heavily into fatherhood and my real estate business, which has been my core business all along for 17 years.

What keeps the lights on for me is real estate.

Thrive was a passion project that ended up becoming incredibly profitable.

But social media just had to get cut.

But what's interesting is I've turned the corner.

I kind of miss it and was just talking at the event I'm speaking at this weekend to some of the social media guys that are there.

And they're kind of re-encouraging me to get back in.

And I think I've taken a, like you said, two-year hiatus.

I think it's been long enough.

I'm ready.

I still post in my stories, but not any other content.

There's a balance with it, man.

But when you look at all the richest people, a lot of them don't even use social media.

See, that's kind of where I'm at.

And I'm writing a book right now, and I want my book is going to come out in the fall of 2024.

And so I want to re-engage with my audience and get them back there.

So my book will actually sell.

So I actually have a reason.

I think that's it too.

I got burned out mostly more than social media on just the events.

I was doing so many of them that I just needed to step away from that.

And so then there was no need for social media.

My real estate business, my restaurants, my CBD farm, the other things that I do to pay my bills don't need any social presence at all in any way.

It was just Thrive.

And so when I decided to wind Thrive down, I was wondering why I was acting like this jester online, you know, social media posts all day long and just kind of got over it.

So that wasn't you.

You were putting on a persona.

It was me, but not at the volume.

I mean, I am not so,

it's not that that I have so much stuff to say that I need to post 15 times the social a day.

That's just part of the algorithmic game we have to play to stay relevant.

But so it was me.

I was saying things that I'm passionate about and I care about, but it isn't me to need to do it 15 times a day.

I'm happy posting whenever something cool happens in my life.

Yeah, 15 a day, man.

I don't think I could do that.

Yeah, and then you've got to manage your multiple channels too, right?

It's not just Instagram.

Then you've got to be on Facebook and Twitter and all

YouTube and all the different various platforms that are out there.

And so it just became a bit overwhelming for me.

Now, what was that burnout like?

I've never had it, but I know people deal with this.

Like, did you just shut down completely?

Yeah, so I just started to get resentful.

And it was kind of an integral move, not to pat myself on the back, but when people would be flooding my DMs looking for advice.

So, so who I was, my public persona in my social media, was someone who had help.

I was offering business advice and life advice and guidance.

So people would come to me to get help, of course, right?

And when I realized that I started getting resentful towards them, when I would get off stage for, let's just say, an hour-long keynote, I'm speaking here tomorrow in front of 800 people.

When you get off stage, you get bombarded by them.

And at first, that's fun.

And they're like, Can we take a selfie?

It's like, hell yeah, you can take a selfie.

Like, please make me look cool.

But then, when it became where it's like, dude, if you ask me to take a selfie, I'm going to punch myself in the face.

And like, I just gave you an hour on stage.

Like, don't come and ask me more questions.

You just got my time.

I'm not your coach.

Don't just.

So, when I started getting resentful, that's when I had a conversation with my wife.

And I was like, dude, I'm kind of turning into an

where I want to like get to these events the last possible second, speak, leave the second I I get off stage and like not see the people anymore.

I wasn't answering my DMs anymore and I was like, dude, like

the followers that I had garnered at the time deserved better.

And so that was a huge part of why I decided to kind of step back was that I just wasn't willing to show up in the same capacity for the people that needed my help anymore.

And that's what burnout felt like to me.

It wasn't that I cared about being on social media.

It was just the attention that it that it would draw was became exhausting.

Interesting.

You mentioned CBD Farm earlier.

I'd love to hear more about that.

Yeah, so I have a good buddy named Todd.

He bought 140 acres in San Diego, California, and are just expanding.

And I'm an investor in that.

So I started off investing exclusively in real estate and then have diversified and invested in a bunch of other things like restaurants, like startups, and like the CBD farm.

Yeah.

And just fell in love with it.

The farm itself, not so much the business of CBD, to be completely honest.

I don't understand the ins and outs like Todd does and the oils and the chewables and the edibles or whatever.

But invested in it, gave it the capital it needed to run.

And like I said, we have 140 acres down there.

It's a big farm, and we get a lot of oil every single year that we're then distributing to other CBD manufacturers that create products and that people enjoy.

Nice.

And with real estate, there's so many ways to make money with real estate, but where did you find your success in?

So I started flipping houses when I was 21 years old.

I was actually a firefighter prior to that and got into a really, really bad car accident where I was in a wheelchair for a while, had to learn how to walk again.

I was blind in one eye.

I had a traumatic brain injury.

Yeah, I was actually leaving Southern California driving out here to Vegas.

And we got into a rollover car accident out in the middle of the desert.

Holy crap.

Yeah.

And I actually got so hurt in that car accident that they had to shut the 15 freeway down in both directions, land a helicopter, and fly me back to Southern California.

You got airlifted?

Yeah, I got airlifted.

Me and my buddy Steve.

Because, again, we were so injured.

I mean, the speed limit out there is like 75 miles an hour.

So we were probably doing 80, they guessed.

And I don't remember any of it.

But the police report says that we were in the fast lane.

There was a car in the slow lane that started merging into our lane, didn't see us in the blind spot.

Their back left hit our front right, which caused us to flip.

Wow.

And there were three of us in the car, myself, Steve, and Matt.

Steve got ejected.

I got ejected.

So we were both air flight flown back to

Southern California.

Matt stayed in the accident the whole time, and so he got rushed back to Barstow Regional Hospital where he just got some stitches.

And he was a little bit banged up.

He was in the backseat.

You guys were in the front?

No, Steve was driving.

I was in the back seat.

Matt was in the passenger seat.

I mean, I was wearing my seatbelt, but think about it in a car, your seatbelt just covers you from the front, right?

The only thing that holds you from going backwards is the seat itself.

Yeah, but my weight and the velocity of that accident caused the seat to break and lay down flat, so my seatbelt was still across my lap, and it was still buckled.

I just slid out from underneath it and went out the back.

Holy yeah, and so did the seatbelt save you or no?

No, the seatbelt, because the way the momentum of the accident happened, I went backwards, broke the seat, and shot out the back where you would put groceries.

Holy crap, yeah, it was a gnarly accident, And so it was career-ending at that time for firefighting.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's, it screwed me up for a long time too.

Steve passed away in that accident.

Yeah.

Sorry to hear that.

Thank you.

And so, you know, it was, there was a lot of grief of losing my best friend, but there was even more guilt of surviving when he didn't.

And so that kind of really screwed me up.

So back to your question, I was a firefighter from 19 to 21, and I thought that's what I would do for my career.

I just love helping people.

And because of that accident, I had to move back into my parents' house at 21.

i was so hurt that i was in a wheelchair i mean i had to be like carried to the toilet immediately following

had to move back in with mom and dad to be cared for i wasn't married at the time there was no one else there um and it was in that season of recovery of learning how to walk again and healing um literally mentally at a traumatic brain injury like i said so healing that i found real estate and started flipping houses at 21 and um praise god i've had a full recovery i'm 100 healthy and i could have returned to the fire department but i was making more money on every single house flip than I was making in my entire annual salary as a firefighter.

As a rookie, I was making $42,000 a year.

That's often flipping houses in Orange County.

I was making $80,000 to $150,000 every flip.

So I was just like, you know, not that it was just the money, but I figured that I could impact people in a bigger way by having complete financial and time freedom in my life to do whatever I wanted to do.

And so I dove all into entrepreneurship.

So again, back to your question, it started off with just flipping houses and now it's evolved to buying big apartments and buying raw land.

I do a lot of land entitlement right now.

My biggest deal of my career, I'm doing right now in Southern California, a big four and a half acres piece of land we bought.

We rezoned it and now we're selling it and we're doubling our money on it, which is pretty cool.

So how does that work?

You buy land.

What does a rezone mean?

So we bought land that was zoned for houses to be built on it.

It's called residential.

And we changed it to be commercial so that a warehouse can be put on it.

And I don't want to get too far into the weeds, but we have what's called a certificate of use permit.

It took us 18 months and about 300 grand of legal paperwork to get it.

Jeez.

But what that says is, hey, you don't have to build houses here anymore.

You can now build a warehouse.

So then we sold it to someone who's going to build a warehouse and it's going to be a cold storage facility like where groceries go before they make it to the grocery store.

There are these big facilities like massive 100,000 square foot refrigerators for all intents and purposes that hold all of our food before they make it to the various grocery stores.

Interesting.

So I bought the land for $4.2 million cash.

We put $300,000 into the land entitlement and I sold it for $9.5 million.

Whole

doubled our money.

We're going to net after everyone gets paid, after all investors get paid back, after all closing costs, we'll net about 4.7 million on that deal.

And we did nothing.

I didn't even pull the weeds.

We did nothing other than legal paperwork.

That's amazing.

So there's a ton of content your viewers can go and just Google or YouTube, land entitlement strategies, flipping land, and there's plenty of content out there.

But, bro, I've been investing for 17 freaking years and I never knew that that existed.

Yeah.

I've never doubled my money in real estate with as little effort.

I don't know how to do the entitlement.

So I hired attorneys to do it.

That's part of why the 300 grand was as expensive as it was, is a lot of that's just legal BS fees.

But

I just manage those people.

And I will tell you, I spent maybe 20 to 25 hours on this deal, and it's going to make me more money than any other real estate transaction I've ever done.

20 hours for 4 million.

What's the hourly on that?

Yeah.

I don't know.

I can't do math like that.

But it's totally worth it.

That's for sure.

So land is the move right now, then.

Yeah, you can't make more of it.

And in certain markets that are growth, like Vegas is a very hot market for land entitlement.

So is Phoenix, Arizona, parts of California where I live.

uh but yeah you can't make more land and and i didn't realize that when cities planned their like growth of vegas for instance right the old strip was there before summerland or henderson or any of the surrounding market was there uh some people decided where the grocery stores would go where the strip centers would go like the gas stations would go and they decided that probably in like the 40s 50s or 60s

Fast forward, as things actually then start materializing and being developed, sometimes their original idea wasn't a good idea anymore.

Like, hey, this is farmland in the middle of houses.

So we need to rezone it and say, let's not put a farm here.

Let's rezone this for a grocery store.

There are no grocery stores nearby.

And so you can still find these pockets of land that have.

what was the original zoning of the original thought of people who aren't even alive anymore and say hey the way that the city has developed around this there's a much better usage now so let's go ahead and change the usage or change the zoning from what it was originally 40 years ago decided would be here to something that is more needed now in the local market and the local community here.

Like what do these immediate residents need here?

They don't need more houses.

They need a grocery store.

They need a gas station or they need a hotel or whatever they need.

We just change the zoning and then sell the land to the developers that do it.

So I don't build on the land.

I don't develop it.

I just buy the right land in the path of progress, change the zoning and sell it to a developer who does it and print money.

It's literally printing money.

That's brilliant.

I know you just have a team finding opportunities and bring them together.

We've got the marketing, we've got our acquisitions team, we've got our our dispositions team.

And how did you build that team out?

Because that's something a lot of people struggle with.

Just out of necessity.

So I was already investing, as you know, in real estate for 17 years.

So I had somewhat of a team.

We just kind of repurposed their day-to-day routine from finding me houses to finding me land.

Right.

And the dispo team from selling houses to selling land.

And so just kind of...

Had a team meeting and said, hey, guys, there's this thing out there that for 17 years I haven't heard of, land entitlement.

Apparently it prints money and I want to do it.

And so it was just a matter of making that decision making that switch in our marketing and our messaging so that we started generating new leads but my existing team kind of handled those leads and and we were able to scale nice and how do you go about raising tens of millions of dollars with that all through your network uh through my network yeah uh the popular way today and there's a lot of ftc guidance guidance around this and sec i should say guidance around this as well when you're raising private money so advertising it's kind of a no-no.

There's so many disclaimers and disclosures you have to make.

So you really are limited to your immediate network or your network's network.

And just over the years, since I've been doing this for 17 years, I've built a stable of about 500 different investors that will lend anything from $50,000 to like $5 million, depending on who they are.

And depending on how much money I need, I might go to you.

Let's say you're one of my $5 million investors.

I might say, hey, I'm buying this land for $4.2 million.

Do you want to do it all by yourself?

Or if I want to spread the love around, I might host a webinar to my list who are all vetted accredited investors and say, hey, we're raising 4.2.

Minimum investments, 100.

Who wants in?

And let 20 or so investors throw you know 100 250 in etc right and then we create a subscription agreement we have to do a ppm a private placement memorandum right there's there's you know minutiae around doing it legally and then we just raise the money we need for each deal and we pay our investors back their returns depending on the deal they can be monthly returns they could be quarterly returns they could be annual returns uh it just depends on again the asset that we're in and but but i just I have built a reputation.

I don't lose people's money.

And so, you know, if you lent me money and I've paid it back and you lent it to to me again, I've paid it back, you now trust me.

And so it's as simple as a text message.

Hey, Sean, we're doing another deal.

You want in?

Yeah.

I'm in for 250.

And so I don't want to make it sound super easy.

When you start, it's hard to build that network because people are obviously apprehensive of letting you have their hard-earned cash.

Like, what are you going to do with my money?

But once you've built a reputation and have a brand,

people trust you.

And then, and then they start telling their friends about it.

You got to hear about this Cole Hatter guy.

I loaned him 200 grand.

He gave me back $250 a year later.

Like, this guy is crazy.

And then it starts to really gain some momentum.

And then you can raise as much money as you need for any deal you find.

That's true.

When you have the ability to make people money, that's one of the most powerful skills in business, I think.

Most people don't know how to.

And that's not a judgment of humanity.

That's a judgment of our school system.

We're taught the Pythagorean theorem.

I know A squared plus B squared equals

C squared.

You still remember that, bro.

But when's the last time you had to find a hypotenuse?

What is it?

The Optus side of a triangle or whatever the heck that's for.

But when it comes to raising money, that's just a conversation we don't have in school.

And so, you know, God bless these people that wants to learn how to make themselves money outside of a job or take money and multiply it like I do.

I would take your $100,000 or whatever in my deal and multiply that and give you back your return, plus make a profit myself.

It's not complicated, but it's a skill set that you have to...

You have to search for it.

You have to go and find it.

It's not even taught anywhere.

Yeah, it's not really taught anywhere.

It's through mentorship, masterminds, live events like the one that I'm speaking at this weekend, events that you and I have spoken at together, like Dan's Elevator Nights.

You got to to go to places like that to start having these financial literate conversations.

Financial literacy is unfortunately not a part of traditional education, and I think that it should be.

Yeah, they keep it hidden.

So you're not fond of the public education system?

Sort of.

I love the teachers.

I think the teachers are doing their best.

And so for any teachers that are following you, I got nothing but love.

I think that teachers in our society are some of the most important, yet sadly some of the most underpaid, underappreciated people that we have, period.

But they're given curriculums to teach that my parents 50 years ago learned, like the same grade, like the same math problems, not just sort of the same, like literally the same textbooks that just get updated each year so that we have to keep buying them, but the problems aren't any different.

And so, you know, school once upon a time made a lot of sense when we had factory and we were very industrial.

You wanted people to follow directions and you wanted, you know, like school was preparing them for careers that for the most part don't even exist in this country anymore.

And so I think that, and this is a very common conversation, but I think that traditional education needs a revamp.

So I'm a huge fan of education.

and I think that a lot of what we learn in school is valuable.

I think having deadlines and pressure and having to perform at a high level and being graded and measured in metrics is all preparatory for succeeding in life.

But the content, like I used the example of the Pythagorean theorem, who needs to know geometry anymore?

My iPhone can do 99.999%.

Our iPhones have more technology than the entire Apollo 13 space mission to the moon had.

Wow.

Yeah.

And that's a true statement.

Well, at least I've heard it was true.

But so, so, you know, I don't need to know geometry anymore.

I don't need to know world history about what some dictator did 6,000 years ago in some country that doesn't even exist anymore.

I think that they lean too heavy into just making us memorize random facts and then test us on it.

But if you're going to make us memorize random facts, why don't they become relevant facts?

I think that would be my argument.

It's crazy because I used to thought I hated education, but then I started learning about business and stuff I was interested in, and I loved it.

Dude, that's so funny you say say that.

I had that realization.

It was like an epiphany when I was in firefighting school.

I graduated high school, went right into my fire academy.

When I was in high school, I started taking night classes at college and weekend classes at college to do all my prerequisites so that when I graduated, I could go right into the department and beat everyone I was competing against, which worked out.

And I remember my first few classes of learning fire science and learning like EMT, the medical stuff that firefighters need to know, how passionate I was about learning and how I was like the star student and I had straight A's on topics that I cared about.

And I realized in that moment, I thought I was dumb or at least struggled to learn in high school.

But what I realized is I just struggled to learn things I'm not interested in.

Exactly.

I struggled to be tested and graded and to be held accountable on topics that literally have no interest to me.

And especially when I knew I'd be a firefighter and I didn't need to know things like geometry.

Yeah.

Like I couldn't force myself to learn it.

But as soon as I started learning topics that I was passionate about, I was a sponge.

And it turns out I'm not an idiot.

I'm actually kind of smart when it comes to topics I like.

And especially in business, you know, you go and you have mentors and friends that teach you things.

I'm like a sponge, man.

Yeah, 100%.

I felt like I was an idiot too.

So what's the plan with your three kids then?

Are you sending them to school?

Yeah, going to send them.

They're in private school right now, which is really cool.

It's kind of an entrepreneurial-minded school.

They have little projects that they do that they sell and make money.

So it's cool.

I don't know about college.

I don't know if I'm going to send them to college, especially with all the controversy going on right now about like...

propaganda and indoctrination.

I don't know that there's a safe school I can send them to where they're just going to be educated and not groomed to have certain political thoughts and views.

And so they'll definitely go through grade 12 in private school, in schools that I'm choosing for them, where I know the curriculum is something I want my children being indoctrinated with, because that's what school is, is indoctrination.

But you can be indoctrinated to be a good person, to give back, to be kind, and to work hard and have good ethics and have integrity.

Those are the things I want my kids to learn.

But once they get to 12th grade, I don't know, bro.

My wife's also an entrepreneur.

And so my children probably probably will probably want to run businesses and not get jobs.

And I don't know that a four-year degree is the best thing to set them up to go and run a business.

I might take the money that I would have put into college and pay someone like you to mentor my kids on Web3 or something.

Yeah.

You know, so they will get educated.

My kids will have a fantastic education, but it might not be through traditional means.

It might be finding the mentors and putting them into masterminds and things like that.

Yeah.

So every three or four generations, I think it is, money cycles.

Does that worry you at all with your kids, with your grandkids, that they'll

like you lose all the money that your grandfather gave.

So I'm not too worried about it.

I'm trying my hardest to not spoil my children.

I have an orphanage in Mexico that I've had since 2011.

Nice.

It's part of the story of just my recovery from my car accident.

I ended up in Mexico as a missionary and

built an orphanage, still have it to this day.

My kids, some of their best friends are the kids at my orphanage, right?

So I'm trying to keep them humble.

I'm trying to teach them work ethic.

It's hard, And I talked to guys like Ed Milet, who I was just with an hour ago, because he's speaking at the same event, who is a gazillionaire and has children.

Like, how do you raise children within means to still be humble and to still have work ethic and hunger?

Gary Vaynerchuk talks a lot about that.

He says his kids are screwed because he being an immigrant had this chip on his shoulder and this hunger that his own children, being multi-millionaire kids, won't have.

And so that's a huge challenge that I'm facing right now.

And the only thing that I try to do my best is

I don't give my kids money.

They're never going to inherit anything from me other than opportunity.

Wow.

Yeah, I will pay for things like school, college.

My wife and I have agreed that we'll match whatever they save for a car.

So I'm in the position I can buy my cars, whatever, or my kids, whatever car they want, but they have to save and work for it.

And then let's say my little girl saves up 10 grand by the time she's 16, then daddy will throw up 10 grand and match, and she can go buy a $20,000 car.

So we're doing our best to teach our kids work ethics, but the inheritance I want my children to have is knowledge.

I don't want them to be trust fund babies who gets to inherit daddy's money.

I want them to inherit daddy's opportunities, daddy's drive, daddy's work ethic, daddy's even relationships.

I'm happy to make introductions to my daughters in my network and my son, of course.

He's a brand new baby, so it's hard to even think about him doing anything other than pooping in a diaper.

But when my kids mature and grow up and they become passionate and engage in society, and it becomes clear kind of the direction they want to go, I'm happy to open up my role at X and make some calls for them, right?

Nice.

But they will not inherit money for me.

They're going to learn how to make their own money.

So hopefully, if there is that three to four generation economic collapse, it doesn't start with mine.

Now, you could retire today if you wanted to.

So what keeps you going?

You seem to care a lot about family.

Is that what keeps you going?

Yeah.

I mean, I'm still young.

I've got a lot of life ahead of me.

I do have passive income that covers my bills, but I'm way more aspirational than where I am.

So financially, my passive income does exceed my financial obligations.

So I could stop and just wakeboard every day, right?

But I don't think that's what God put me here for.

I am passionate about bigger projects.

And, you know, I grew up in the church, and we were taught to tithe there 10% of your income.

My goal is to live off 10% and tithe 90%.

So I want to get more, not necessarily to acquire more.

I don't need more cars.

I've got nine of them.

I don't need more square feet in my house.

I live in an 8,000 square foot house.

Like, I've been very, very blessed.

I want more so that I can impact more.

I want more income for more influence to influence the world in the way that I want to see it go.

And I think that it's an important time right now.

Society is fragile, I think, right now.

We've got so much polarization with politics and just the nonsense post-COVID.

The world is kind of hurting, especially America right now.

And I think that it would be a shame for people like you and I to just become quiet and go off and retire early when we still have a voice and can make a movement and can help people succeed.

And so I am way more selective of how I make money now.

Everything has to have a cause that I'm passionate about.

And an initiative, and I started something called for-purpose businesses, where they don't just make money, they make impact simultaneously.

Kind of like Tom's shoes.

For every pair of shoes he sold, he gave a pair away.

And so, my businesses by default are impacting the world.

The money they pay me, I get to impact the world.

So, long-winded answer to your very simple question.

I think I just want to impact the world more than I already have.

And so I can't stop yet.

Wow.

And part of that comes from almost dying, right?

With that car accident, I was given a second, and then there's another part of the story I didn't even get to, a third chance at life, right?

I should have been dead twice now.

And when you're given extra time, you appreciate it more, I think.

One of the worst things that ever happened to me were my friends that passed away in the accidents that I was in, because there's another one, too.

But it's also one of the best things that happened to me because it gave me really strong perspective of how precious time is.

My two friends passed at 21 years old.

I obviously have been given more years than 21, and so I just want to make them count, bro.

Do you believe everything happens for a reason?

I absolutely believe that everything happens.

Not something as little as a red light.

Like, oh, if that light was green, I would have gotten T-boned and dead, right?

Like, some things just happen, but some significant things, absolutely.

And like this podcast and our friendship happened for a reason.

Yeah.

So I do believe everything happens for a reason.

Yeah.

And what role does religion play for you?

Were you religious your whole life?

That word bothers me, the word religious.

I'm a Christian, unapologetically, but I feel like religion is like the stand-up, sit-down in church and like all the rules that I'm dying of.

Yeah, and I don't like that.

I do go to church.

I go to a non-denominational Christian church, but I wouldn't.

What's that?

What is non-denominational mean?

So there's like Protestant, Baptist, Methodist.

There's in the Christian religion, there's various spins where theology, they're all the same.

They believe Jesus is the Son of God.

And, you know,

the core beliefs are all the same.

But the methodology of how they disseminate the information through their congregations is different twists, different flares, kind of like genres of music.

You've got rap, you've got hip-hop, you've got rock, you've got country.

That's kind of in the Christian,

I don't know what you'd call it, but the various denominations that there are.

There are probably five or six.

I'm not a pastor.

But the one that I go to is non-denominational, which is just pretty much straight up, hey, here's the Bible.

Here's what the Bible says, and take that information and use it how you want.

And the religious aspects

aren't there, at least in my church that I go to now.

And so I think that religion turns a lot of people off.

And I think that a lot of people get hurt by religion.

I've heard it explained this way, that God is there for relation.

The church along the way created religion to create the rules to try to help us abide by what the Bible says.

And that religion is man-made.

And

that that's not something that I necessarily want to participate in a bunch of man-made laws and rules in the confines that various men and women along the way have created for me.

I just want to believe in God and I want to do what the Bible says to do as best as I can.

And if you read the Bible, I'm pretty sure that cover to cover, it just says to love God, love each other and use your gifts and have a blast.

And, you know, that's something I want to do.

I want to love God.

I want to love my neighbor as myself.

I want to use my talents to the best of my ability and I want to have a great life.

Absolutely.

And I think that's the whole summarization of the whole Bible if you read it cover to cover.

And I'm cool with that.

But then you show up to church and they're like, oh, you can't wear those shoes.

Oh, you shouldn't wear a hat.

Oh, you got to stand up now.

Sit down now, stand up now sit and it's like whoa whoa whoa whoa where is that in the bible so anyway long long good and long-winded answer i have too much caffeine apparently but i just i just don't like the religious aspects i just i just want to love god i want to love people i want to use the talents that god has given me to the best of my ability i want to give back i want to make an impact and when i get to heaven i want him to say in you i am well pleased i love that You had an interesting take on the money part because you have to give 10% of your income, right?

So yeah, the Bible says to tithe 10%.

Yeah, but you're saying you want to give more than that.

I feel like most people are the opposite.

Yeah,

truly.

It's a goal.

I want to.

So what my wife and I decided to do is as we started making more and more money and had the opportunity to continue to increase our lives, we live a great life.

And I, you know, I do spend money on frivolous things that I don't need, like cars and stuff like that.

It's my one vice is cars.

But most of my cars go up in value.

So I can't say I'm necessarily bad spending there.

But she and I decided that we're not going to improve anymore.

We're not going to scale.

We're going to maintain our lifestyle.

So my businesses will still make more money and I will have more revenue at my disposal.

But she and I aren't going to proportionately increase our life.

I've got, like I said, an 8,000 square foot house.

I don't need to go buy a 12,000 or a 20,000 square foot house.

I don't need a 10th car.

I don't need a second boat, right?

Like I don't need more.

So by earning more, if I keep my expenditures about where they are right now and I'm completely happy where I'm at, but I made an extra 10 or 20 million dollars a year, that's all available to use in a way that I want to impact the world, right?

And so I say I want to live off 10% and give 90 away because if I can live the lifestyle I live right now off, and it's only 10% of my income, that means I'm making nine figures in some capacity and using all of that revenue to impact the world in a really cool way.

And that's what I want to do.

And so

by tithing 90%, it would not just be going exclusively to my church.

It would be going to things like orphanages and something I'm passionate about is ending human trafficking.

And, you know, I would be taking all of my financial abundance at that point and just funding these initiatives that are fighting for causes that I believe in.

Love that.

What message do you want to close off with, and where can people find you?

People can find me just at Cole Hatter.

All social media handles are the same: no underscores, no dots, no nothing.

And the closing message I want to say is: don't just make money, make it matter.

And what that means is exactly what we were just finishing off talking about.

We are taught in the world to be consumers, to go out there and earn a living, to then spend it on ourselves.

And that's fine to a degree, but make money matter is about earning a living that, like we just talked about, where you're

got your dream house, got your dream vacations, got your dream cars, but you're still funding something that is bigger than yourself.

You're still a part of a cause that you believe in.

Tony Robbins says the secret to living is giving.

There's this false idea that money can't buy happiness.

And I say money absolutely can't buy happiness.

Go feed a starving person.

Go save a little girl from human trafficking with your money like Operation Underground Railroad does.

And then tell me your money didn't buy happiness.

And so I would close off by saying, go unapologetically pursue wealth and just make your money matter.

Make your money matter, guys.

Thanks for watching.

See you next time.