[Excerpt]

Hunter: If you solve the problems that rich people have, you will likely be able to get rich. If you solve the problems of poor people, it's very difficult to get rich. Not that you shouldn't do it, but that is a place for things like charity and philanthropic stuff. And that's my personal perspective on that.

[End excerpt]

Seth: Hey folks, how's it going? This is Seth Williams. You're listening to the REtipster podcast. This is episode 203. Show notes for today can be found at retipster.com/203.

Today, I'm talking with Hunter Thompson. Hunter is a capital-raising expert who has raised over $100 million in private equity and has revolutionized the way a lot of investors think about generating capital in real estate. Hunter is the founder of RaisingCapital.com and the creator of RaiseFest, a three-day event designed to help you raise more capital.

Hunter is a master of systems and automation and leveraging technology to attract top-tier investors. And today, we're diving into the art and science of capital raising, unpacking his strategies and learning how he has positioned himself as one of the top minds in this field.

So Hunter, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Hunter: Doing well. Honored to be on. I was excited to jump on today and I'm excited for the conversation.

Seth: Yeah, me too. So why don't we just start with your origin story? How did you get into real estate investing? When and how did you discover this business? Tell me a little bit about that.

Hunter: I've been doing a lot of thinking about this just recently because I used to come on here and I'd come on these interviews. I've probably done a thousand interviews in my life or something like that. And I would say, I was always an entrepreneur and I would tell stories about when I was kind of hustling when I was five, six, and seven.

But the reality is, looking back on it, it took me a long time to realize this. I had to accomplish some pretty incredible things to recognize that I had a lot of limiting beliefs growing up because I didn't do well in school. I thought that I was a slacker. I thought that I wasn't talented. If you have a measuring stick and school is the measuring stick and you don't do well, it creates a lot of problems. It creates problems with your psyche; it creates problems with your parents and your relationship.

Using school as a metric, you would assume I wasn't going to make very much money. I certainly wasn't going to accomplish anything incredible, but there were other metrics in my life that were far more applicable to things like making money and doing well in business.

I took running very seriously in cross-country and track. I was also in a band when I was in high school, but those are the things that are much more like business. In school, you're in these 30 to 50-minute classes where you're learning one thing and then you're switching gears.

In the world of business and making money, it's all about focus and intentionality. If you can spend 16 hours learning one thing, that will actually make you far more valuable in the marketplace than being mediocre at chemistry, for goodness' sake.

Seth: No, that's fascinating. When did you graduate from college? What year was that?

Hunter: That was 2010.

Seth: Yeah, I know. That's kind of when I was getting into the real estate world as well; it was in 2009. And just having your first look at real estate was just the bloodbath that was those few years there. Interesting time.

And kind of... I don't know if it's good or bad that that was our foray into real estate because that wasn't normal. And I think it's been, for me anyway; it's been hard to have that be the standard through which I was introduced to real estate. Like a house should cost this much money and its prices just get higher and higher and higher. It's like, am I ever spending right, or is that just the way things are now?

Hunter: Yeah, it's difficult. You have to intelligently participate or you'll be left behind. As an entrepreneur, think about it. From my personal perspective, I started looking at deals in 2010. By 2014, I was seeing deals that were better than the deals I was seeing in 2020. Now, part of that's because the liquidity started to come back a little bit, and deal flow started to increase. But the real reason was that I was able to network and grow my confidence and education faster than the market recovered, even during the most significant market run-up in the history of commercial real estate.

If you just sit on the sidelines—and I don't mean not doing deals, I mean truly sit on your hands and do nothing—I will run circles around you regardless of market conditions. I'll give you a perfect example of this. Over the last 13 months, my business partner and I made a commitment in 2022 to stop doing what we were doing across any other asset class and go all in on Phoenix. We didn't do a deal for 13 months. Now that's like not putting any points on the scoreboard, but trust me, I learned a lot in those 13 months. We developed relationships with brokers, debt brokers, rehabbers, and property managers during that entire time.

You can constantly be doing that stuff regardless of market conditions so that when market conditions change, you can have a big truck to back up. It sounds like you and I got started at the same time, which means that all your mentors were probably telling you, "Hey, it's 2009; back the truck up," and you're like, "Yo bro, I don't really have a truck. I got a bike." It's like, okay, well, you got to start putting in work to make that truck something that can actually hold something. And that's what I did at the beginning of my career, and I'm sure you did the same.

Seth: So I've heard you say that capital raising is like the ultimate superpower in real estate. For those just starting, why do you think this skill is so transformative and advantageous compared to others like deal sourcing or creative financing?

Hunter: So just going back to my story, because I think it tells a perfect picture of this—I was getting started around that time and I met those mentors, like I mentioned, and I found that a lot of the people that were having success were syndicating deals. They were pulling investors together to buy bigger deals, to buy more deals, to buy more quality assets.

And yes, there were fix-and-flippers that were making good money, but it just didn't speak to me. I wanted to be dealing with people that were making or losing millions. They either stood to gain or lose millions of dollars because that attracted people that I felt like I could rely on to execute a business plan day in and day out. When I got into this world of learning about passive investments, I understood that you can pool investors together. Rather than have one investor invest $100,000, you could have ten invest $100,000. Now you have a million dollars for a down payment, or you could create a fund and buy multiple different assets.

When I started to understand this, I realized there are these people that are really good at what they do. We call them in the industry "owner-operators" or "sponsors." They're the ones not just managing the property but overseeing the manager. They're the ones signing on the loan. They're the ones executing the business plan. And I was kind of intimidated by them. I didn't want to try to compete against them. I wanted to partner with them so that I could have; maybe I could find a sponsor in the self-storage business; maybe I could find a sponsor in the senior living business. That was kind of my mentality.

Seth: Could you explain what a fund actually is? Is this like a bank account? Is it a business entity? Is it an end-to-end business where you find the deal, source the deal, underwrite the deal, and manage the deal? What is this fund that we're talking about?

Hunter: To be honest with you, it's a good question because that term gets thrown around a lot and there are a lot of nuances. There are a lot of technical ways that I can answer that question, but I'll put it this way: The main way people use the term "fund" in the world of real estate is to describe an investing entity that can purchase multiple different assets. That's not a technical definition of the word fund, but I'm just saying in the case of most real estate operators, if they say "I have a fund," it means they created an investment entity that has an investment template, and we can buy all the deals that are in that template for my fund, usually over a certain time period, call it 12 months or something like that.

Seth: Yeah, that makes sense. And based on what you were saying previously about working with operators and that kind of thing, it almost sounds like—where does the work of your fund stop? Are you actually finding the deal and working the deal? Or are you just finding somebody else that finds the deal? How far do you go in this process?

Hunter: Good question. I'll just be transparent. I have raised quite a bit of money for funds—tens of millions of dollars. But because my current business model is to buy assets that are around the $20 million range, I actually don't manage a fund anymore. I don't raise capital for my own fund. I only raise money for deals that we're doing, and we do them on a property-specific basis.

Going back to what I was saying about the definition of a fund—in this case, it's like pulling investors together to buy multiple assets. I don't do that anymore. We can talk about some of the reasons why, but one of the reasons you would want to start a fund, from my personal perspective, is if you have assets that are usually in the $100,000, $300,000, or maybe $500,000 range. You don't want to create a new LLC, new legal documents, or new joint venture agreements every time you do a deal. So it makes a lot of sense to create a fund so you can have the economies of scale of using one of all those things to buy multiple assets in one vehicle.

I have found that a fund can be a headwind in your business because, look, if you're trying to raise money, the number one thing most new people struggle with is trust and credibility. If you say, "Hey, listen, man, I've got this fund. It's a black box. I can't show you the exact assets, but trust me, they're going to be good," it just increases the level of trust that's required to get someone to fund. This is even true of someone like myself. I would much rather not make it more difficult for me to raise money.

Seth: So when most people talk about a fund, they're talking about that black box scenario, but what you do is more of a per-property basis, correct? Where there is an entity per property and you're raising funds for that specific deal?

Hunter: Yes. And the reason I mentioned that the properties that I purchase are $20 million is that I'm not so worried about getting the economies of scale of having one LLC. It's worth it for me to have one LLC per property. But for your listeners, let's say you're buying land, which I know a lot of your listeners do—depending on the purchase price of that land, I may or may not be a proponent of you thinking about creating a fund.

I think that once you're talking about buying properties that are like $2 million or more, I'm like, "Listen, man, just eat the cost; create a new entity." But that's just my personal perspective. There's people that have made way more money than me that disagree with me, but I've kind of seen it on the front lines because I teach people how to raise money. Especially for new people, it's very difficult to get new investors to fund into new operators and new funds without big proof of concept and a long track record.

Seth: The ones that you work with, or maybe it's a mixture of both, but do you recommend or see more often the 506(b) offering or the 506(c)? Any preferences or thoughts on that?

Hunter: Okay, cool. So just for context, when you raise money, there's a couple ways to raise money. The easiest way to raise money is as debt, and in real estate, it's commonly referred to as a hard money loan.

So let's say you buy a piece of land and it's worth $200,000. You're like, "I want to buy this piece of land. I think it's going to create a 30% return for me." So you go out to some friends and family members and say, "Hey, I want to borrow money at 8% and I can buy this property."

The property is worth $200,000. You're going to borrow $200,000 at 8%. You're going to buy the property. Then, in the event that you, the borrower, don't pay the person the mortgage or the monthly payment, they can foreclose and take your piece of land. That's what's called a hard money loan because the loan is collateralized by a hard asset, in this case, land.

Now, the next more complicated way to raise money is a joint venture. In this case, you say, "Hey, I think this property is going to produce a 30% return." You go to your friends and family and say, "Listen, there's no loan. You're not going to lend me the money. How about you put up all the money? I'll do all the work and renovate the land or even re-entitle the land. And at the end, we'll split the profits 50-50."

So you thought it was going to generate 30%; you split it 50-50. That person gets 15%; you get 15%. But in this case, there wasn't any debt; there wasn't any monthly payment. They're basically splitting it differently. You can see how the investor in that case is taking on a little bit more risk, but the upside's higher.

The next more complicated way to do this is when you're dealing with a $21 million piece of land. It's a massive subdivision in a prime market. I don't want to force myself to find one $21 million investor. I've got to get like 100 $200K investors. At that point, you do this thing called a syndication. When you pull a lot of investors together like that and they don't have control versus a joint venture where they might have control, you're getting into the world of creating a security.

This is a significant shift in terms of the legal structure that's required. When you're pulling a bunch of people together, it makes sense, right? They're deferring to your expertise to do the right thing to some degree. The SEC and the legal system view that as a quantum shift in the burden of you doing the right thing in the legal documents associated with that.

So when you create a security, if you have something like 20 investors in a deal, usually—or most attorneys would say 10—you either have to go public, which you're familiar with. If Tesla wants to raise money, they have a public offering, or you have an exemption from that qualification. What Seth was asking about is two of the most popular exemptions from going public when you're raising money as a security, which is 506(b) or 506(c).

The benefits of 506(b) are as follows: you can have up to 35 non-accredited investors in your deal. The potential downside, though, is that you can't generally solicit. You can't go on a podcast and say, "Hey, you guys, I'm raising money for this deal." There's a lot more nuance, but those are mostly the sticking points.

506(c), you're able to go on a podcast and say, "We have a deal available right now, and here's the details." But the hurdle is that all the investors have to be accredited, and they can't just check a box saying that they're accredited. They have to have a third party, like a CPA generally, say that they're accredited.

From my perspective, I like being able to say what I want, and I say a lot on a recorded device. So I like to be able to say, "Hey, you guys, I got a deal. It's in Phoenix. It's a $20 million purchase, and we target a 15% IRR." That's not true, but if it were, I have to have a 506(c) in order to do that. If you really want to scale, I suggest you only work with accredited investors in the first place.

So it's not much of a downside to me, but when I got started, sure, I worked with non-accredited investors. You know why? Because when you get started, you got to do what every entrepreneur does—whatever it takes. But if you want to build a more scalable business, I prefer the 506(c). Most of our clients use 506(b), but hopefully later in their careers, they'll probably use 506(c).

Seth: I imagine when it comes down to doing this well, raising money, it's probably somewhat of a numbers game, just getting in front of as many qualified people as possible and presenting information and asking for money. First question, is that correct? And if that is correct, how do you do this at scale? How do you find as many people as possible who are likely to have the money and want to invest the money in what you're trying to do? How do you do that?

Hunter: Earlier, I talked about how my first deal was bringing someone half a million dollars. I kind of glossed over the fact that it really wasn't that easy. I had this great deal, great operator. I'm very lucky to be in Memphis from a family where I knew accredited investors, and I was able to get 30 accredited investors into a room on my first pitch. And I pitched this deal, which was the deal of a lifetime at the best market timing in the history of the United States.

I promised this operator I'd give him half a million bucks. I gave this pitch. People were falling asleep. Not one person wanted to invest with me. And I was totally blown away. It was a great deal—I mean, it produced 10% cash flow from month one. And these are people that are investing in CDs. I was like, "Are you all dumb?" But it's not that they were dumb. It's that they had no interest in this.

I use this example in my book, but if I were to call you and say, "I found a dairy farm that's at a 70% discount," you're not going to look into it. You're going to be like, "I've got other things to do," because you're not a dairy farm investor. For me, that was the thing. They came because they're friends and family and they wanted to be nice to me, but they're not going to send their hundred grand to me.

That's how my career got started. The point is those people all knew, liked, and trusted me. And so you hear this all the time: "As long as they know, like, and trust you, they'll move forward." Not true. They have to be competent. They have to be confident. They have to be excited. There has to be urgency. They have to be comfortable with the knowledge that they have. These people didn't have any of that other stuff that matters way more.

So I decided I never want to pitch in a room with only 30 people. I probably don't even want to do a live pitch ever again, if I'm being honest. Instead, I want to attract people that are already interested in this topic. I don't want to do it on a one-to-one basis. I want to do it on a one-to-many basis. How can I do that?

There's a couple of ways. Obviously now it seems silly because the playbook is so clear now, but when I wrote my book just five years ago, it was not. The playbook is one-to-many selling: podcasts to create, nurture, and educate relationships, lead magnets like eBooks and checklists and downloadable reports to generate leads, follow-up sequences like webinars and educational supplemental information, and then eventually create urgency and scarcity and book calls and close deals. That's exactly what the playbook is today. And that's how you do it at scale.

Seth: Now, did I hear that you use LinkedIn to generate leads?

Hunter: Right now, that has been the best way that our clients have been having success. The reason for that is that LinkedIn allows you to target people based on their title and job description. It allows you to DM them, which is extremely good for connecting. The likelihood of someone opening a DM is way higher than the likelihood of them opening an email; the likelihood of them responding to your DM is way higher than them responding to an email. Then you can send them a video where you can build credibility and build a relationship and then prompt them to book a call.

The fastest way that we've seen people have results in this business now is having a really good LinkedIn profile, creating content that will attract their dream client, DMing people that are capable of investing based on their job description and title, and hopefully a tie-in to your background and where you came from, and then pushing them further along the line. That's kind of something that we've uncovered over the last couple of years. And it's been absolutely awesome.

Seth: So I might just ask, what kinds of job descriptions and titles would reveal the most qualified people? Like, what exactly are you looking for?

Hunter: Well, rather than just say "Look for CEO of Apple," which is like, okay, duh—it's a lot better if you come from a corporate background or have a tie-in to a corporate background because it's going to make their hesitation to answer a DM drop dramatically.

For example, my COO used to work for Deloitte. If he wanted to go start his own thing and become a capital raiser, I would say, "Look, go to middle management and above at Deloitte." Those guys are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That's your background as well. And that's a good thing because what people are doing at Deloitte is, yeah, they're making good money, but they're getting hit hard on taxes and they're not really getting closer to financial freedom.

That message would really resonate with a lot of people at Deloitte. They spent a lot of money on college. They got this great job. And they're like, "Dude, I'm 38, I'm 42, and I feel like I'm 30 years away from my financial goal. What's going wrong?" And then you get this DM that's like, "Hey, let me guess—you're 42 years old and you're feeling like you're decades away from your financial goals." It's like, "Well, yeah." "Well, have you ever invested in real estate?" "No." "Well, watch this quick nine-minute video. I'll break it down." That's a good way to get in there.

Seth: I guess you sort of have to get that information and then use that to sort of come up with an intelligent first message to them. It's not just like a blanket canned thing that you send to everybody.

Hunter: Totally. You can spray and pray, but the issue is that you all see those messages on LinkedIn and you don't ever answer them. The crazy thing about when you do marketing correctly is that it's a magic trick that you don't even know you're at a magic show. Sometimes I'll talk about the strategies that we implement and people will be like, "That's not going to work on me." I'm like, "Why do you think we're at this meeting?" Because it's working. It's just working so well; you just don't feel like it's that.

So the answer is yes. And the more intentional you are, the more you speak to someone's soul, the more likely you are to get a response, especially in today's world where there's so much noise and so much nonsense. You really got to learn how to tap into the pain points that your best clients have, tap into the goals that they have and kind of lead them to where you want them to go, which is investing with you or doing business with you.

Seth: Are you using some special software to send out these DMs or is somebody at the computer doing this manually? How does that work?

Hunter: So we have a lot of software that we use. We actually built one as well. So it is kind of like behind the scenes. I've not really talked about this publicly, but yeah, we have something called raising capital.io, which is like our entire automation machine that basically does what we teach. If you go to the website, there's probably like nothing there because it's kind of behind the scenes, but we do have clients that are testing it right now. And it's absolutely crushing it.

In short, that is kind of like a combination of a lot of things—like an email provider, two-way text messaging, LinkedIn stuff, social media management, reputation management. It's quite robust. And yeah, you should for sure have some version of all of that. That's why we created our own, because we saw that there's a lot of stuff out there and people are paying way too much for all this stuff.

But listen, if you don't have an email provider, if you're not using text messaging in your marketing, you're leaving a lot of money on the table. That's an instant action item right now. Start using text messaging, especially two-way text messaging. And you're going to see again, way bigger open rates, way bigger response rates. And what does that mean? More calls booked, more money raised.

Seth: On that whole note of booking a call—I assume there's some kind of qualifying you have to do with these people on LinkedIn or texting or wherever you're finding them to know if they're actually the right person to be talking to. So how do you qualify them? What kind of information do you need to verify before you take the time to get on the phone?

Hunter: What I've been doing recently is I will do like a nine-minute video, not a personalized one, but one that is generally personalized because I try to cater to very specific people. For example, one of our clients went through a personal multi-seven-figure IPO. And then he did it again with a different company. So he's sitting there; he's got multiple seven figures in a bank account, and he's like, "What do I do with all this money?" Which is a unique problem to have, but that's how he got into real estate because he wanted to turn that cash, that lump sum, into cash flow.

Then he wrote a book about it. Now you hear this and you're like, "Okay, cool. Got it." Well, not many people relate to that story, but the ones that do have a lot of money. And so if you were to do a video and basically—this is going to sound silly—but isn't it a weird feeling and doesn't it feel kind of uncomfortable when you have like $8 million sitting in a checking account, not earning any interest?

If you were to do a video that starts like that, most people are going to click away because they're like, "No, it's not weird. I would die for that." But there's a couple of people; maybe they went through an IPO; maybe they sold their company; maybe they have a very large inheritance or something like that. They're going to watch the first 15 seconds of that video and be like, "Oh my gosh, how is this guy speaking to my soul right now?"

And to have those people with that net worth feel, "Oh my gosh, this person's speaking to my soul"—it's like that can create a very high buy-in client. That's not going to go around and be like, "Oh, Hunter sent me this video, but I'm sure there's like a lot of other hunters around there. Let me Google around." No, he's going to be like, "I can't believe I found you."

A lot of our messaging will do a lot of the qualifying for us. Earlier I talked about how if you're a good marketer, it feels like you're not at a magic show. Well, I'll give you a perfect example. I talk about raising money, right? When I talk about raising money, I use messaging like "never scramble for capital again." I use messaging like, "Are you sick of dealing with friends and family and ready to scale?"

I'm solving the problems of people that are very far along the lines in their customer journey. They're not trying to make their first $3,000 in real estate. They're well along their path. What does that mean? I don't have to convince them that real estate's a good play. I don't have to convince them that they should start doing deals. I don't have to convince them that this is potentially very lucrative. They probably have money. They're already emotionally bought in. They're financially ready to make an investment. And then here we are helping them scale.

If you solve the problems that rich people have, you will likely be able to get rich. If you solve the problems of poor people, it's very difficult to get rich. Not that you shouldn't do it, but that is a place for things like charity and philanthropic stuff. That's my personal perspective on that.

But if your messaging is catering to people that have advanced, late customer journey problems, you'll be able to help them along the way. I'll give you another example. It's kind of silly. If you have a thing for boating and you're like, "Doesn't it suck when you've got two boats and you only have one place to park one?" People are like, "What? No." Well, somebody with two boats can be like, "Heck yeah." And that guy is probably going to have a lot of money.

So it's like those types of things do a lot of the qualifying for you. And of course you can be like, "Just to clarify, I know we're in the yacht club together, but are you an accredited investor? You are? Cool. Click here to book a call."

Seth: It sounds like you're looking for some fairly small elite groups of people out there, like a tiny percentage of the general population. I'm curious, like if you could name the top three or five most beneficial groups to cater to or profiles or avatars or whatever you want to call it of the right person? Like, is it yacht owners or is it doctors or like, how would you categorize these people?

Hunter: So first of all, you're right. And that's what the messaging is suggesting. But what you'll find is that there's so many more people that are not at that level that even if you crank your marketing up all the way, like my friend that went through the double IPO situation—most of the people that opt into his free ebook don't have $20 million. Because almost no one has $20 million, but it's aspirational.

It gives you the opportunity to set the bar very high so that people start making calls with you. And they're like, "I don't know if I can work with you. I only have a hundred K to invest." And you're like, "Well, good news. That's our minimum investment." It just sets the tone very differently.

Think how different it would be if our messaging was like, "Hey, are you sick of not being able to pay your bills? Here's how to make $3,000 in real estate." Who's going to be booking calls with us? We're catering to people that necessarily don't have money and people resonate with that that don't have money.

So it's not necessarily the case that we would only want yacht owners to opt into our free downloadable report about the economy. But it's people that see themselves there in three and five years. And so that way, you can kind of set the bar high. You're never going to do yourself a disservice by setting the bar high in this industry of raising capital.

Another perfect example of this is realtors. Realtors are entrepreneurs. Realtors are self-starters, but there's a lot of broke realtors out there. And there's probably a lot of people listening right now thinking, "Yeah, that's true." So we have clients that want to cater to realtors. I suggest they use "top 1% realtors" or "top 0.1% realtors." And yes, you're going to get a lot of those top 20% realtors, but hopefully the people that are trying to make ends meet aren't going to be opting in.

Seth: And you can search for that just like on LinkedIn? Like you can just type that in and that'll show up or...

Hunter: Not exactly, but let's say someone that's been with Remax for 12 years or something like that, not someone that's just getting started. And another thing would be their titles, right? Are they directors? Are they managers? Are they C-suite? Those things matter a lot, especially when you know the company. I mentioned Deloitte, a very large company. People know how much they make. You can just Google it. And so that'll give you a good head start.

Seth: I'm curious about the psychological aspect of raising funds and getting people to entrust their money to you, especially if you're not even 100% sure about a deal—I don't know if you get to that point where you're 100% sure about the outcome, probably not. But it seems like it would create some stress and anxiety. It's like I've got millions of dollars people are giving to me. They have these expectations I got to deliver. Is there a way to compartmentalize or eliminate any of that stress or anxiety that comes from that? Like, how do you balance that mentally?

Hunter: Jeez, bro. I'll tell you, man. There's a story that I can't talk about yet because we can't—we feel like it would be a disservice to our investors because if people knew what we saw, it'd be hard to create a buyer. We saw something insane that is so widespread in a particular industry that I feel like once we sell the deal, I'll be able to come back on the show and talk about why no one should ever do a deal in this particular niche.

But it created a level of stress in my life that, in all fairness, made me realize I had never been through anything in my life. That's really the key takeaway. It redefined what I thought it meant to go through something hard.

Three years ago, if you'd asked me that question, I probably just wasn't in a position to answer, but I thought I was because everyone has a scale of one to ten. So three years ago, I had the scale of one to ten. It still exists. Now the difference though is that what I thought a ten was is actually not really even on the scale.

When people would tell me, "Oh, I'm going through something difficult," I thought they meant my previous scale of one to ten. Now I'm like, "Was that what they were talking about?" I want to provide some more context here because I haven't really talked much about this for obvious reasons, but I want to talk about kind of what that means.

So I'm a 38-year-old guy. I have lived a great life. Like I mentioned before, I came from a family where we weren't hurting for money. I got to go where I wanted to go with college without there being some massive conversation around budget. I'm very, very blessed for that. But of course I've had difficult things happen in my life. My parents went through a divorce at a very young age, which I think impacted me. I thought I was a slacker when I was growing up. I had a very cranked up risk-return thing when I was 18, 19, 20, 21, and all that stuff.

But at the end of the day, I never really—I've had people pass away in my family, you know, just normal stuff that a normal person has, but none of that stuff ever impacted me. And because that stuff impacted other people, I figured I was just kind of one of those guys that wasn't impacted by much. Like, sure, like I mentioned, the divorce impacted me. It impacted me, but not to the extent—like I don't wear it on my sleeve. It never really deeply got to me.

But I dealt with something over the last couple of years that got to me. To the point of feeling like you're going to have a psychological breakdown, and maybe I even did. This really hard stuff. And now I realize that deaths in the family, things not going well, whatever—that's not really like a triggering event for me. What is a trigger event for me is business. I take this game freaking seriously.

So now I am in a position to know what it's like to go through something. And so now I'm in a position to help someone who's going through something. I wanted to set all that up because I've been talking on the radio for years, talking about, "Hey, what to do when you're stressed out?" I didn't know anything about being stressed out.

So here's the thing. Number one, you got to get your sleep under control. That was one of the things that went early for me. I couldn't sleep. I would wake up and basically throw up because of the anxiety and stress levels. So if it takes breath work, meditation, if it takes pharmaceutical intervention, whatever, you have to be able to sleep to recover from whatever you're going through. I would crank that all the way up on the needs list.

The second, though, is working out. If you aren't sending it in the gym frequently, you're probably leaving success, money and happiness on the table. When you do those two things, when you sleep and when you work out, everything starts to click into place way better.

But I mean sending it meaning like, truthfully, when was the last time you failed on like a squat? Like, I mean failed, like you have to bend over, the bar bounces off the ground, like that kind of thing, or something similar to that. When was the last time you figured out what your max heart rate was? I think people should have answers to those questions because if you don't, you're not sending it.

Hunter: Now, it doesn't mean that as you get older, you're not like running the risk of injury and stuff like that, but you got to figure out what you're freaking made of. Because if you do, and if you know what your max heart rate is and you know what your one rep squat is or whatever metric you want to use—and I genuinely mean that, whatever the metric is, number of stairs done on the StairMaster, number of jump ropes you can do in 20 minutes, whatever that number is—then you did it. The worst thing that's going to happen to you that day, you did it, meaning that you are in control.

And so for me, when I was going through that craziness, every now and then I would hit 207 on the heart rate max. And I know for sure that'll be the worst thing that's going to happen to me that day. And so it doesn't matter what else happens. I'm going to be in control of that situation. And that control, that agency starts to bring control and correctness back into your life.

Plus, when you max out on deadlifts, when you max out on squats, when you go full sprint, you have to recover. Your body demands it, meaning that you're going to eat right and you're going to sleep right. And so now you're starting to build this foundation for what it can mean to get through something tough. Those are some of the things I feel that people need to hear.

Seth: Awesome. Well, Hunter, I totally appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your wisdom with us. It's been awesome to talk to you. If people want to work with you or find out more, if they're interested in this whole funding capital raising thing, where should they go?

Hunter: Instagram is a good place to start, @hunterlthompson_. You can also go to raisingcapital.com, which is our coaching business. If you're interested in investing with us, asymcapital.com.

And then lastly, I usually don't give away all this stuff, but I wanted to make sure people know—RaiseFest is going to be freaking awesome. Seth, you should 100% come and check it out. A thousand capital raisers are going to be there.

Honestly, if you come, the sessions will be amazing, but the network, because people there—I mean, we teach people how to raise money. People that are there know how to raise money. One conversation, one partnership can easily pay for the investment of the ticket and the flight and all that stuff. So I'll see you guys there in Phoenix.

Seth: Awesome. Sounds good. Thanks again, Hunter. Great to talk to you. And hopefully we'll talk again soon.

Hunter: Talk to you soon.

Seth: You bet.