https://youtu.be/Eot60KwZcrg?list=PLVakOKBvbSuimOYNFb1niDHigkn1_s8E3
Good afternoon, our next speaker is Rick Rule who was the Chairman of Sprott US Holdings and he now runs Rule Investment Media to educate and help investors become successful. He has made a name for himself in the natural resources sector and he's passionate about helping young people succeed. He guides them on how to grow their wealth. He wants to talk today about how to pass on the Liberty message to people. The title of his talk is, "Time to fight back: techniques for spreading the Liberty message." Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Rick.
I want to begin by copying my young friend Jay Martin who also puts on conferences -- putting on a conference is really analogous to herding cats, it's unbelievably difficult. Please join me in a round of applause for Jayant for putting on this fine conference. As a veteran speaker, I always try to figure out one way to get an applause. You've all been tricked --you applauded me meaning to applaud for Jayant and Rajshnee. Thank you. Great session this morning with Walter Block, Chris Baker, Jay Martin, Ken Royce, Maxine Bernier -- very high, intellectual tone and a lot of purpose. Now, you got Rick Rule and that's all over.
My assigned speech was to fight back: the techniques for spreading the Liberty message. I've decided to rename it fight back: propaganda for Fun and Profit. How do I say this politely? People like me and you, who would prefer not to mess with other people in return for other people not messing with them, when they look at the world they tend to be pessimistic. So many in the people in the world, even good people, think if I could just make other people think the way I think then the world would be a better place! We look at even well-meaning people trying to control the lives of others and I think it causes us to be too pessimistic when even the people that we like we begin to view as our oppressors. We don't look for the signs of spreading Liberty. One of the reasons why I love the session this morning was because of what's going on in Argentina.
I want to begin by introducing a note of optimism. When I was a young student right here in Vancouver British Columbia -- we'll talk about immigration later, maybe --I couldn't spell libertarian! Now I'm a director of something called Students for Liberty. 160,000 kids came to our lectures last year. The population of Campus Libertarians in 1970 was somewhere between zero and 10. Last year, 160,000 kids came to our lectures. And we are just one group.
Pessimism is, first of all, false. But it's also futile. I'm not suggesting that all of you have any duty to be propagandists for Liberty. I don't want to convey any obligation on you. To the extent that it would amuse you -- to the extent that you want to continue on the work that others have started, then please do so. There have been some changes in society and some changes in the way that information is distributed that makes it more possible today than ever before. Albert Lu is in the room somewhere -- Albert raise your hand if you can. If you had asked Albert if there was anybody in the world less likely to adopt himself to social media, then he would have said the least likely person on the whole planet to adapt to social media was Rick Rule. I've been able to do that because the hard part of social media is the technology part. Albert does that for me. I would suggest to you that the prevalence of social media has disrupted the way conversations are dispersed around the world.
In the 1970s, when I was trying to promote my business broadly I had to cause myself to be quoted in places like the Wall Street Journal and other places. It was very, very, very difficult to get one's message across because there was bottlenecks in the distribution of information. Financial information was controlled by the financial press, or it was controlled by the investment Banks, or it was controlled by the asset managers, or it was controlled by the wealth managers, but that's no longer true.
For better or for worse, there's a whole bunch of discourse that takes place in messy but uncontrolled or at least semi uncontrolled places like Twitter, like Facebook, like LinkedIn, like YouTube. However you might feel about those mediums, there are ways that you can use them for amusement for profit or for propaganda. I'm going to try to talk about all of those in the time that I have left.
What I want to start with is that this bottleneck that used to exist with regards to the distribution of information. Dare I say, the distribution of propaganda is gone. You can access discussions that take place around the world and you can do it from the convenience of your own home. I became aware of the possibilities of this by studying, first of all, one of my mentors -- Doug Casey.
Doug Casey had a wonderful way. He had a great reputation as a Speculator and people were attracted to the work of Doug Casey because of the simplicity of financial copy like this: the world is going to end on Thursday and here's how you can profit. This circumstance where Doug Casey attracted the people who were interested in how they could improve themselves as speculators also, inadvertently, put out propaganda from Doug Casey about free markets. His diagnosis of what was wrong with the world was a very libertarian diagnosis. And his diagnosis, too, about how you could defend yourself from the people in government and out of government that were trying to keep you poor -- or at least keep you from getting rich -- and that was a very, very libertarian message. People subscribed to Doug Casey because they hoped that he would give him a penny stock that would quintuple in the next year and what they got along with that was a very, very, very stout dose of anarco-capitalism masking as self-help. I admired that about Doug.
A little later on through Doug, I met a guy named Bill Bonner.
Bill Bonner is the founder and the largest shareholder of Agora. Many people don't know, but Agora is the largest financial publisher in the world. Substantially larger than Dow Jones, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. And Agora exists in its current form as a consequence of understanding how to market through social media -- how to reduce their distribution cost and how to increase their universe without resorting to display advertising. The key part of that technique, the part that I want you to begin to understand, is how to emulate that today with a product called The Daily Reckoning.
What Agora figured out is that the most effective advertising that you can offer up is advertising that conveys an immediate benefit to the buyer. Not a display ad that says, "buy my shit." Right? Nothing like that. Education -- the "give away" paradigm.
Give away the argument -- even give away the technique.
Once you've established the credibility by giving away paradigm and by giving away technique, you can sell people a branded conclusion.
The Daily Reckoning had between 4,000 and 4500 words a day that had real benefit. They taught real lessons. There was a real cost to produce it. The circulation, after, about a year and a half was over a million people. Now, I'm not trying to say that a million people a day read the Daily Reckoning, but enough people read the Daily Reckoning every day that Bill was able to insert three different pieces of advertising into the Daily Reckoning for his own newsletters. His marginal cost of producing those newsletters for a new customer because they were distributed electronically was zero, which is to say his return on that advertising was infinite. His gross was his net.
This free publication was free to the consumer. In fact, it benefited the consumer. And at this time, Bill was selling about two and a half or $3 million a month worth of products at a 100% margin. And it was that observation that really caused me to begin thinking about social media.
Move forward to 2010-2011 when I had just sold my own business to Sprott. At Sprott, we were doing a lot of soul searching about the fact that our principal line of precious metals was confronted with a dilemma -- most of our customers were dying. Our demographic were old, fat, bald, white guys. The people that had been attracted to gold during the decade of the 1970s. The market was becoming bored. Our Market was literally dying. We were trying to figure out how to reach younger people.
We did all kinds of strange stuff. We actually had focus groups that financial PR firms did with young people. This was insane stuff. We tried various forms of advertising, including the dumbest thing we ever did which was a display ad over Time Square -- advertising gold to all the panhandlers and the junkies and stuff. We did some profoundly stupid stuff.
What I started doing, accidentally, was experimenting with social media because I was trying to figure out a way to more cheaply increase our market share among gold bugs.
I had proven fairly conclusively that display ads didn't work. I thought that I have to look at this new stuff -- this online stuff. It might be that these old folks, who believe like but don't know about our products, would begin to do business with me if I reached them. I was trying to work through an information bottleneck. Working through this information bottleneck and trying to reach old, fat, bald, white guys like myself had a very, very, very unintended consequence. The young audience, that we couldn't figure out how to reach, reached out to us when we met them where they were.
I want you to store this message because the rest of what I'm going to talk about is all about that.
What social media is all about is avoiding bottlenecks and reaching a global market -- a black market, a white market, a brown market, a red market, a female market, a male market, an old market, a young market -- it's all out there and it's all free to access. You can access it for almost anything you want, as those of you who are on social media probably understand.
The part that excites me about talking to this audience is you can do what Doug Casey did. You can use your expertise in something that you're good at and something that you have experience at and something that you can utilize to transmit a message which is useful to other people.
You have to be useful to other people. What segregates your message and what builds trust for you is not advertising so much as informing or utilizing your expertise. It might be that Ken Royce decides to start blogging about firearms and shooting. There's lots of people who care about guns -- many of them probably shouldn't, but they do. The fact is if you utilize expertise that you have in one area where your expertise is both recognizable and useful, then you attract people to you and you become recognized as an expert.
If someone has established credibility in one aspect of their life and people begin to respect them people and begin to trust them, then people begin to listen to them and they acquire credibility in other aspects. As with Doug Casey spreading the message of Liberty in his stock tips.
How do we do this? First of all, if it doesn't interest you then don't do it. Don't set yourself up to fail. If you do have lessons to teach and if you do have information that you can distribute to people they will benefit from directly or feel, then do it on social media.
Engage very broadly. What you learn with regards to this process is that economics gets turned on its head. Often we think that the scarcity is what sells -- that's not what sells in messaging. Ubiquity sells. Engage very broadly. Engage very repeatedly.
Agora learned statistically that the 12th time was the key. It took an average of 12 quote beneficial engagements, where a beneficial engagement is where the reader felt that they benefited from the information that they received. It took an average of 12 beneficial engagements before somebody liked them or trusted them enough to write a check.
They also showed that the third time somebody received exactly the same pitch, the highest response rate. You might think that you're harassing people, but if that harassment conveys a benefit to the customer then you're not harassing them -- you're benefiting them.
The fact that it was only the third time somebody read the same pitch had the highest level of management tells me that ubiquity overcomes lack of familiarity. And ubiquity overcomes procrastination.
Remember ubiquity.
Remember again that you have to generate utility. That's the important part of it.
And please -- I've made this mistake -- don't have your propaganda message too con confrontational or too complex. Often among Libertarians, we lose track of this. Even when we're approaching non-libertarian issues, we try to define ourselves too narrowly -- ancaps, proto-libertarians, paleo libertarian, thick libertarian, thin libertarian. Looking at me, I guess I'm a thick libertarian.
What matters in terms of reaching out to an outside audience is benefit to buyer. Do you want the world to be more free or less free? From my viewpoint, the libertarian message is simple. If you look at the whole sphere of human existence and belief like a 360 degrees sphere -- what separates us, internally, is about 3 degrees of that 360. Worry about the 357 degrees that we don't have before you chop up the 3% that we do have. Everybody with me so far?
This message shouldn't be about segregating the message -- it should be about unifying the message. Get preliminary agreement that everybody in the world is better off more free than less free.
Now, let's talk about techniques. Albert will tell you that I've tried just about every technique on the planet and failed at most of them with regards to this message. There are a few things that my experience in social media has taught me, all of which I should have understood simply by watching Bill Bonner but I had to make these mistakes personally. I had to segregate out what worked for me so that I could continue.
The first necessary precondition of this is that you care to do it.
Second of all, you need some expertise within yourself where you have can teach lessons that have actual value to other people. If you've established that, then you begin by accessing other people's networks. I was able to do this at Agora. At Agora when I started utilizing their distribution channels, they probably had 80 editors. This is back in the days of print newsletters where an editor had to have a newsletter -- they had to have copy ready on about the 21st of the month so that it could be edited, produced, and distributed to readers by the first of the next month. Very often on the 19th of the month, which is to say a day before deadline, the editors didn't have any copy yet, which means that they had to pull an all-nighter. What I learned is that if I could introduce ideas to those letter writers even very thorough ideas, which is to say copy that I wrote and they plagiarized, then my idea would populate their letter. And the same circumstance occurs today in social media.
Many podcasters and many people who are engaged in social media today are content short, but they're audience long. They are content short to the extent that you can be introduced to them as an expert and to the extent that they can borrow your content to distribute, what they're doing is building your audience.
Engage other networks, particularly when you don't have a network for yourself when you're beginning.
Those of you who follow me online know that I will try just about any podcaster or any information distributor that I don't find to be personally loathsome. I have addressed things like student cells in Goma, Congo, and I've had a ball doing that! It's important that you engage other networks to build your own. When I say engage, I mean that. Too often when people are involved propagandizing on social media, they're doing it to vent. They're their opening statement is this F*ing a*hole -- they're doing it to unload on the world. Engage, don't insult. Absolutely engage, don't insult.
The beginning of the message has to invite non-involved participants and even opponents to your point of view. Find a place to agree with them before you persuade them. Don't dissuade them in your opening content.
The next one's really simple. Most of communication is non-verbal.
Audio is more persuasive than writing. And video is more persuasive than audio. A lot of communication is non-verbal. What does that mean? Be understandable. Be likable. Speak slowly. Smile. Invite people into the conversation. Tthis is really, really simple stuff. But if you look at some of the video product online, even if you agree with that person then they're so tedious -- they're so angry or so hateful that you don't want to agree. You don't want to identify with that person! You want to identify with a good person -- a nice person or a likable person or someone you'd like to have a discussion with over a beer or over coffee. Not someone who you'd like to avoid at all costs, even though you agree with them.
Utilize news. News increases viewership. The best at utilizing news are the politicians . I'm not saying that you emulate the politicians in terms of their style, in terms of their message, or anything like that, but absolutely emulate their social media strategies. The prime minister of this country, the president of my country -- I'm not fans of either of them, but their social media strategies are really pretty good. Utilize news and utilize the comment on that news to attract people's attention, but then utilize your own point of view to personalize the news. Utilize the news to spread your message.
Utilize news for engagement, but remember to stick with what you know. Don't try to lecture people outside your area of expertise. Don't try to give speculative information, which could later be held against you. It's all about utility. It's all about demonstrating utility to the buyer and then using that utility to add credibility to your own message.
Utilize slogans and utilize icons.
When I began as a public speaker, a great critic of mine was Doug Casey -- he was wonderful. He said, "Rick, you explained that so thoroughly that you put the whole room to sleep." I guess you speak the way you think you'd like to be spoken to. And you try to defend your point of view so completely thoroughly that there could be no disagreement with you. The fact is if people have chose to listen to you then they already believe you to be an expert. You don't have to defend your credibility, you have to make the point.
An icon is memorable. A slogan is memorable. A 12-minute dissertation is not memorable. When I try to teach people how to be investors in natural resources, capital-intensive, cyclical businesses, I use slogans. I can describe the copper cycle, which Jayant has suffered through in the past, or I can discuss the fossil fuel cycle, and the three or four people who stay awake for those discussions will agree with me. Or I can say, "In resources, you are either a contrarian or you're going to be a victim." That slogan conveys everything that my example was going to convey, but people remember it and they remember it for the rest of time. And should they care to engage more deeply with me in the topic, it's that slogan that frames their understanding of the discussion takes place after.
Is everybody with me so far? I know I'm going through this pretty fast. I'm actually going through 20 years of mistakes in 12 easy lessons. If I go too fast, slow me up.
It's really important that you use slogans. And it's really important to use icons. t's important because that aids people in remembering the message. And it codifies the message, too. It engages and eases memory.
Foster engagement.
Foster engagement, particularly, when people are asking you questions or disputing things. If I have a Libertarian message or if I have an investor message that's difficult for the other person to engage with, then they may utilize the "yes, but..." defense. What they're saying is that they kind of agree with you, but they don't want to agree with you. If they bring up a specific objection, then there are two possible rebuttals. The first rebuttal is the normal one, "you're a moron and you're wrong. This objection that you raised is one in 10,000 and not worth talking about." You just lost somebody that you worked hard to gain. What do you do instead?
How many people here went through sales training? Oh boy, I can tell you guys anything.
The technique for this is called Feel-Felt-Found. You want to establish agreement with the other party. You can always find something to agree with them on. Let's say their concern about libertarianism is that it's unfair to the poor. I would engage with that by saying, "boy, I understand how you feel. There's a billion people on Earth who still, after 40 years of our trying, still don't have access to equality of life that's sustainable. And it isn't just in other countrie -- it's in this country, too." In other words, you're establishing that you understand how they how they feel. Then I say, "For a long time, I felt that objection obviated the point that I'm trying to make. I hear you." And then you spring the trap! "As I thought about what I felt and what you felt, what I found was that poverty was more commonly the consequence of government. Poverty was more commonly the consequence of social control. Poverty was more commonly the absence of self-reliance. I absolutely believe that rather than try and confront somebody, however tempting that might be, that you find areas of agreement and use intellectual jiujitsu to cause them to come to your point of view. Understand that they're not going to come to your point of view in that conversation. You are trying to influence the way that people think so that they come to agree with you over a decade, not over an hour.
The conversation that you're having today is meant to begin to change the way that people think over time.
When I was first hanging out with Doug Casey and his great friend John Pugsley, rest in peace, I would describe myself at that point in time as being a-political or perhaps libertarian. Again, I couldn't spell it. I remember having a discussion with them very early on where I was interested in investing, I was interested in speculating. They were having a discussion about politics and I was feigning interest, but I actually wasn't interested. And Pugsley said to me, "Rick, what are your politics?" I didn't want to offend anybody, so I said I don't really have any. I guess that the equation that I like is if I left you alone then you leave me alone. Pugsley said, "oh, you're a Libertarian." At that point in time, people hung out in the airports with signs that said "kill Jane Fonda" or "blow up whales" -- stuff like that. I thought Jane Fonda was prettier than Lyndon LaRouche and I had nothing against whales. I told this to Pugsley and he understood that he was going to win me over in five years, not five minutes. He gave me a copy of "Economics in one lesson" like a doctor would give you an aspirin. Read this, call me in the morning. Understanding that he wasn't going to convert me in a day or two, he was going to introduce me to a line of reasoning which would cause me to come to his point of view over 5 years. That's what Feel-Felt-Found is all about. You're not winning them in the moment, you don't come away feeling like you conquered a person in a conversation -- what you do is you inoculcate them with the ability to question what they feel at that point in time and change over time.
Remember the benefit to buyer. Too often in social media, the commentator leads with "I" statements. But the buyer doesn't care about you! The buyer cares about themselves. The lead and the point of the conversation is you, we, us -- not I or me.
Too often, people engage in social media to unload or voice their own frustrations. Voicing frustration, as we've seen from politicians, can really work. But if you do that, then you don't talk about "my frustration". You talk about "our frustration" or "your frustration". It's not about you, it's about your audience.
The words that you lead and the whole discussion is we focused on we or. It's all benefit to buyer.
One of the things I've been able to do with this as follows. People are attracted to me as an investor and as a person who's made money as a communicator. When I'm looking to sell both financial self-improvement and liberty, particularly when I talk to younger audiences, I say "if you take nothing else from this, take away four books." By the way, that's a slogan. "I want you to read four books." I want you to read Economics in One Lesson. I want you to do that because that is a necessary precondition of making money. You have to learn about the way things are, not the way the big thinkers want them to be. It also has the benefit of being both good financial advice and good propaganda for Liberty.
And don't just buy the book -- read it.
Once you've gotten through that, I want you to read The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham. I want you to do this. That's an investment book. If you like that book then I want you to read Security Analysis, also by Ben Graham. f you read that book then this is my promise: if you read that book and you actually utilize the technique shown on it, then you will become rich. It's not that you may become rich -- you will become rich. This is very motivational stuff to a young person that wants to get rich.
And then I say to them, "one more book." The most impactful book in my life is a book that talks about why Economics in One Lesson , the Intelligent Investor, and Securities Analysis all work -- if you want to know why it works, not just that it works, then you have to read Human Action. That's where I've sprung the trap.
If a young person reads even portions of those four books and they read each in the context of the other with a goal to improving who they are as a human being and their financial well-being, then I have them halfway to being libertarian. Not a thick libertarian, not a thin libertarian, not a paleo libertarian, not an anarchist, not an anarcho-capitalist, but somebody who is interested in more Freedom rather than less. Somebody who is interested in self-reliance, which is all I'm trying to do.
By the way, this is just my choice . Human Action was an extremely influential book in my life because it codified for ideas like volition and how ow things work. It put the Intelligent Investor in context for me. It's a pretty profoundly libertarian book.
The seventh thing that I've learned is to borrow credibility.
While I have some credibility in some circles, there are lots of people who I can cite that have a lot more credibility. If I'm talking about investing, then I say there's this old guy who's been a pretty good investor over time -- his name is Warren Buffett. You may have heard of him. And then I make my point using a Warren Buffett quote.
Conversely, if I'm talking to a young African-American audience and I have a point that I want to introduce to them rather than using an old quote from an old, fat, bald, white guy then I give him a quote. And I say, who was that quote from? Any guesses? That quote was from Malcolm X. I've borrowed credibility.
Clearly I'm not Malcolm X. Clearly I'm not Warren Buffett. But if you make your point through the voice of others who have credibility, then you have borrowed that credibility. This point is no longer, this is the point of somebody who is clearly competent about what they're speaking and respected by the person that you're speaking to.
Everybody still with me? Am I going to too fast? I'm trying to follow my second thing: speak slowly and smile. B
Cite opponents for affirmation. Use the enemy's own verbiage to make your points. One of the things I've been doing recently on social media is this approach. I follow all these big thinkers on social media. One of the things I've taken to doing is to be very polite and say things like, "Miss Harris, I Googled your comments about President Biden from the period in time in the primaries when you were running against him and you were extremely critical. Were those lies or were you misinformed? Has something changed dramatically in the last four years? Have you ever Googled the information that you distributed about the person that you serve in office with? And, if so, what is your comment?" I think it's very important, where you can, to dispute the information coming from your ideological opponents with their own prior statements. If people were to use Mr Biden's discussions of things like gun control or civil rights and segregation back in the time when he was running in a rural riding that was fairly conservative -- the rationale for his actions then compared to the things he says today are radically different. Rather than disputing him, you're better off letting him dispute himself.
I'll give you a Canadian example. When Mr. Trudeau is saying something about expenditure in Canada, I begin very politely: "Sir, it's interesting to read what you have to say about the distribution of public funds in Canada. When might your budget balance itself?" Trudeau famously said years ago that he didn't care about the budget because the budget will balance itself. I like to use that kind of statement to discredit the author of the statement. I like to cite the opponents for affirmation of my own points.
I like to establish credibility with narrative by using unassailable statistics. I don't like to lead with statistics because they put people to sleep, so I lead with a narrative. But then I use irrefutable statistics to justify the narrative.
When people talk about the American budget, here are some statistics. The on-balance sheet liabilities of the US government exceed $34 trillion. But that's not the worst of it -- entitlements. The off-balance sheet liabilities of the American government, according to the Congressional budget office, exceed hundred trillion. The aggregate liability of Americans to each other exceeds $130 trillion. Our efforts to pay this off are increasing the on-balance sheet liabilities by a trillion dollars every hundred days. Do you get out of a hole by continuing to dig? How is this affordable? This statistic is very useful for dealing with younger audiences because I can place the blame on myself -- my generation has voted ourselves all kinds of cool benefits and we spent all kinds of money on ourselves but we forgot to pay for it, that's up to you. How do you feel about that?
Combining the narrative and the empathy with unassailable statistics is very helpful.
I was engaged in an online discussion not long ago about fossil fuels and nuclear power with a group of actually fairly likable opponents who were talking about the wonderful technologies associated with alternative energies. I kept my tongue for a little. I've invested in alternative energies with not much success, but that not withstanding I've tried for a long time. I want to leave you with a couple numbers. The first number is that there are a billion people on Earth with no access to primary electricity at all. There's another two billion people on Earth with access to unaffordable or intermittent electricity. All those people want to live like you.
The first thing you need to decide is whether or not you think they have the right to. That's the first thing you need to decide.
The second thing is you have to overcome the arithmetic. In the last 40 years on Earth, we have spent now $5.2 trillion on alternative energy generation. And we've reduce the market share of fossil fuels from a high of 82% all the way down to 81%. You have to juxtapose these two numbers a billion people on Earth with no access to electricity that want it, and the fact that a $5.2 trillion investment has reduced the market share of fossil fuels from 82% to 81%. If you can talk me through how to how to do that then I'm on your side.
Narrative with irrefutable statistics.
Polite questions. One of the problems that I used to have with social media when I was somewhat more inflammatory was that my posts would get dropped! They would they'd go to post heaven. They wouldn't kick me off, they would just delete my posts. Eventually, I found thathe exclusionary algorithms don't count questions. I stopped saying Mr. Biden I think you're an f*ing a*hole, which I guess is hate speech, however accurate it might be. If I say, "Sir, might I inquire..." Then, by the way of excessive politeness perhaps bordering on sarcasm I am able to defeat the censoring mechanisms. Try it, it's astonishing.
Since I started framing my criticism as a question, I have never on any social media platform been deleted. I also think that utilizing that technique I've made myself much more palatable to at least the un-swayed masses with regards to the argument.
By the way, I don't discourage sarcasm, I just think that excessive politeness is the most intelligent form of sarcasm . After you've done all these things and after you've accessed other people's network and after you've delivered benefit to buyer, you have to build your own proprietary network. If your network is all on YouTube or if your network is all on Facebook or if your network is all on Twitter or whatever, then it's not your network. It's important that you have to have your own capture mechanism -- your own website. Albert and I have Rule Investment Media. After we have established our credibility with people, we have to give somebody something. We have to have a fulfillment mechanism that causes them to come and leave their data with us and give us permission to continue to comment to them. It might be an article, it might be an invitation to an online seminar.
In my particular case, anybody who emails our site and emails me their natural resource portfolio -- I will grade it. By the way, it is extremely expensive for me to maintain that database. I'll give them that information for free with no obligation and no cost. What I've been able to do then is build a very large community, much like Agora did which is now my community. It's not LinkedIn's community. It's not YouTube's community. it's not Twitter's community it's our community. It's important that you do that.
Let's go over it again.
Leverage other people's community. Understand their need for content. Understand that you're not advertising to somebody, understand that you have to give people something that they value so that they trust you and care about what you have to say and ask you to continue to contact them. After you've built your own community, foster agreeing voices. As an example of building a fairly large audience at Rule Investment Media and the Rule classroom, I give the opportunity for many people who have points of view that I think are useful to my audience to access my own audience. I leverage the community that I've created by allowing other like-minded people to access it. Those of you who heard Albert Lu last give that wonderful lecture understand something about this. If I can help amplify the voices of 50 Albert Lu's as a consequence of having created my own community then I have 50 times the impact I would otherwise have.
Foster agreement. I want to go over this again and again and again. Don't insult your audience. Don't repulse your audience. Use feel-felt-found or some other form of verbal Jiu-Jitsu to establish empathy with your audience so that your audience has the chance to agree with you. Finally, I want to do a little plug for the fact that I'm a director now of Students for Liberty -- the organization that I mentioned at the beginning of the discussion. We managed to reach 160,000 students last year who came to our events. I'm not suggesting that you necessarily support Students of Liberty, although I'd love to see it, what I'm trying to suggest is that there are ways that you can amplify your message. Amplify our message. If it isn't Students for Liberty, it might be the Atlas Foundation. It might be Capitalism and Morality. It's important to understand that in terms of working to make the world safer and more free that you must engage with people who don't agree with you -- offer them value, attract them, and then leverage the community that you've established by amplifying other voices.
Thank you for your attention. I hope this has been fun and profitable for you.
