Successful Musicians Podcast – Episode #49: The Collective Mind: Michael Walker’s Mastermind Secrets

Successful Musicians Podcast Episode 49

Interviewee: Michael Walker

Interviewer: Jason Tonioli

Hey, this is Jason Tonioli. I’m a piano player that grew up believing it wasn’t possible to earn a living and support a family with music. I’ve proven that idea was wrong and I’ve met hundreds of other people who have found success with their music. This podcast features stories of musicians who have found their own personal version of success and fulfillment in both music and life. This podcast is meant to inspire musicians and help them believe in their abilities and motivate them to share their talents with others. This is the Successful Musicians Podcast. 

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Jason Tonioli: Welcome to the podcast today. Our guest is a returning podcast guest, Michael Walker, one of the guys that helped start a group called Modern Musician. He’s a musician himself and he’s quite good. What I’ve been impressed with Michael has been really amazing at bringing a community of people together and just trying to help people figure out how to navigate all of the technical marketing side of things that most artists think, Okay, I just want to play this instrument but they forget about, Okay, well, you eventually have to share it with somebody other than your mom and your family and just a couple of people. I love that you’ve put those processes in place, but welcome back to the show.

Michael Walker: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Jason Tonioli: The reason I wanted to bring Michael back today is we’ve known each other for several years now, but I remember when we first met, we started talking about masterminds. I think both of us had been in some groups or community groups of masterminds. You hear that term thrown around a lot. I think it almost has multiple meanings depending on who the person is talking to. They’re all run a little bit differently. Michael, you’re here probably today because you joined a Mastermind or two Masterminds. Maybe just tell people what do you see as a Mastermind, what’s the purpose of a Mastermind, what is it? Share your story of how you ended up going down that Mastermind path.

Michael Walker: Absolutely. Yeah, I’m so excited for this conversation. We were just talking a little bit backstage about what the topic should be today to Masterminds. Masterminds have completely changed my life and they’ve really helped me find my family. My family, that’s not my blood family. I’m usually passionate about masterminds and I’ve seen the impact that they can have, so I’m excited to talk more about them. Masterminds, I think they originated, and I could be wrong but the first time that I’ve seen it used was in the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. That book is a fantastic book. There’s some magic sauce in that book that I’m actually re-reading right now. I’m about a third of the way through. The last time I read it, I think, was right when I was starting Modern Musician and experienced this pretty big breakthrough year immediately after reading it. A lot of successful people have attributed a large part of their success at some point their journey through reading that book and applying the principles. There’s a lot of good stuff in the book, but one specific concept that it suggested that it really led with was the idea of creating a mastermind group.

04:04 The idea was that a mastermind group is like a collective entity that emerges when you have a group of people that come together with a shared purpose and a shared cause to be able to support each other in a specific theme or specific area. One example of this that comes to mind is Mr. Beast. If anyone heard of Mr. Beast, he is a YouTube phenomenon, and he’s pretty entertaining to watch. Some of the videos are like, wow. One of the most successful YouTubers ever. He described his journey to success on YouTube through creating a version of a Mastermind group where they basically met every day and they just masterminded ideas for ways to grow their YouTube and they geeked out on it together and they shared feedback and ideas. 04:56 The overall idea of the Mastermind group is that when you come together with multiple minds, with the shared purpose and open hearts and minds, you’re looking to support each other, then there’s something that emerges that you have these separate minds, but there’s like a new entity that emerges that you call the collective Mastermind. This Mastermind is really greater than the sum of its parts.

Generally, these Masterminds revolve around members of the group being in the hot seat. The hot seat is generally when one person is sitting in a… It could literally be a seat, or it could just be like they’re on stage or something, but there’s one person and that person is either sharing a specific challenge that they’re going through or a big question that they have or a big opportunity that they’re considering or even just sharing a big win or a big takeaway. Generally, it focuses on this hot seat. There’s this focal energy and the whole Mastermind is orbiting around this hot seat. When someone shares the issue or the challenge they have, what tends to happen is this dialog happens, this conversation happens, and the Mastermind comes together to provide a solution to that problem that wouldn’t have happened on its own but because you have this collective group, something really special happens. That’s the type of mastermind that I’ve really gotten the most value from has been orbiting around that concept.

Jason Tonioli: I think when I was originally, when the whole concept was to me, I can’t remember the book it was in, but the whole idea was like every one of us has an IQ. Some people have the 120 IQ of 130 or some of us are ADA IQs, whatever it is. If you take a circle and you call it, okay, you got this person and this person, there’s some overlapping knowledge that somebody has. Even somebody who has the lowest IQ ever, they may have some idea or different way of looking at things. When you overlap all these IQs and now in a way, you essentially can go from the 120, 130 IQ that the tests say that we all have, that some people have to maybe 150 or 200 or 250 in order to solve problems. That for me was one of those like, oh, that’s why you want to have people with different ideas and to approach the world in a different way. 

When it comes to the Masterminds, I think one of the things also that you were mentioning is this group with a collective purpose, they want to try and solve a problem. As I look at my career in working in the business world and you’ve got a team of people that you worked with. You had some good team members. I think in a mastermind, it’s usually somebody who has similar types of things you do, but it’s not necessarily people you work with. I think organizations can try and put together their own little teams that maybe do a little bit of that but the idea of bringing in outside people with totally different things, products or entrepreneurs with different things they do. If you’re in the music world like we’re in, you got the video people and the audio people and the musician person, and you bring all those people into one little team to help solve a problem, all of a sudden, it’s like, Whoa, you can tackle a lot bigger thing than you may to be would have ever dreamed of solving, right?

Michael Walker: Absolutely.

Jason Tonioli: I know when it comes to masterminds, essentially, somebody could just go and create their own little Mastermind and just have a group of people that get together for lunch every day. That essentially would be like a Mastermind group. but there’s all these other groups that… There’s $10,000 a year. I know there’s $50,000 and $250,000 a year masterminds that people are paying to be part of. I know you’ve been in several of them. I know you’ve been in the inner circle with ClickFunnels and Russell Brunson. You’ve done Jeff Walker’s product launch formulas group. That’s tens of thousands of dollars, too. As you look at your experience, share a little bit about your experience of coming up through that and what you see as the benefits and the difference in those types of masterminds.

Michael Walker: I’ve been in all Masterminds across the spectrum now from free Masterminds that we put together. We were just starting out. The most that I’ve paid for Mastermind group is 50k per year. Right now, I’m a 35k per year Mastermind. There’s a reason that I keep investing in more Masterminds.

Jason Tonioli: I’m sure there’s people that are saying, oh, my gosh, you spent $30,000 to go have a vacation and a party a couple of times a year. Is that what it is? I’m just playing the devil’s advocate here. I know somebody out there is listening to this and being like, oh, why would somebody spend so much money?

Michael Walker: Yeah. Certainly, that is one of the benefits, I would say, the ones that I’m investing in is that you create this horizon experience where you go out of your day to day and some really good things happen. When you have to extract yourself from your business in the day to day to go into visionary mode, to go into strategy mode and surround yourself with people that stretch your mind is extremely powerful. I could share some perspective from across the lines of different types of masterminds. I think there’s a lot of truth to the idea that we tend to become like the five people that we spend the most of our time with. That if you look at the five people and you had a bar chart or a pie chart of who you spend the most of your time with, the top five, if you’ve combined them into one person, and that might look a little bit like you, like the five people you most spend your time with. 

I think that our influences, and whether that’s media influences and news or where we gather our beliefs from have a huge impact on who we become and the types of actions that we take and the risks that we take. I think that it’s incredibly valuable to be intentional about who you’re surrounding yourself with. 

When I first started Modern Musician, I first started looking at how do I transition from touring full-time to starting this coaching company and I had no idea how to do it. I had never started a company like this before. I had just toured for 10 years full-time. The first group that I joined was actually a totally informal thing. In fact, it probably wouldn’t even be allowed now.  I remember that it formed organically after one of Jeff Walker’s product launches, Formula Launches. He did this pre-live training. It was incredible, like it always is. There was this group of people on the Facebook group who were like, hey, guys, we want to start a mastermind group. Is anyone interested? Of course, hundreds of comments are like, yeah, sure, that sounds cool. I remember hopping on a Zoom call with that group that they scheduled and there’s literally like 70 people there. They’re like, well, okay, we should probably figure out how we’re going to do this. What ended up happening is we split up into little mini groups and I don’t even know exactly who organized it, but I put into a group with four other entrepreneurs who are starting out with their online businesses. The leader of the group was a lady named Cara Andretta. She just so happened to be one of Jeff’s case studies and success stories. She ran a cake business and did some very successful launches in the Six Figures. It was really valuable. Basically, we created this weekly meeting where we would meet together, and we would basically do the hot seats and we would go around, and we would share ideas with each other. I think we did that for probably about eight or nine months and built these relationships with these four other entrepreneurs. Eventually, something fizzled out, but it really culminated in an era, really encouraging me to attend the product launch formula live event. 

Jeff does a live event once a year. I think it costs like $500 to go to the live event, so it was a big stretch, but I probably wouldn’t have even gone to that event if it wasn’t for Cara. She encouraged me to do that and then when I was there, it was like I was coming home for the first time. The community was just so warm and loving and entrepreneurial, and the energy was just like vibrating at a higher level. I’m sure anyone here who’s had the opportunity to go to one of these events like either PLF Live or Funnel Hacking Live, there’s an atmosphere and just the energy when you’re there, it’s inspiring. 

At that event, that was where I joined my first coaching program, a $12,000 coaching program for the year. For me, that was a big stretch. It was right at the time that I was reading the book ‘Think and Grow Rich’. I think I was really primed for going all in and just the growth and transformation. I remember even before Jeff made the offer for Launch Club, the first day I had a meeting with one of his coaches and joined the program. Sometimes there are these dots that connect and that Mastermind group that I started with; I wouldn’t have made my way to that event if it wasn’t for the initial connections I made. Also, I learned a ton and had a lot of motivation, commitment and perseverance that probably wouldn’t have had or would have been much more challenging if I didn’t have the support of that group when I was just starting out and none of it was really working when I was initially starting out. It was a lot of trial and error. 

Six years later, the business is doing several million dollars per year, and we built an amazing team and community, and it definitely wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t found mentorship, if I hadn’t gone to that event, if I hadn’t been a part of that initial Mastermind group, which was a free Mastermind group. I do think that you don’t have to start with a $50,000 Mastermind group if you’re just getting started and you don’t have a business yet. If you can swing it and it makes sense for you, I think it’s certainly an accelerator. That was my experience on that end. I know I’m talking a lot here, so let me know if I should come up for air.

Jason Tonioli: I’m just thinking with this really high ticket or the $50,000 Mastermind, I know a lot of those. I look back even at myself, and there was a time where I wasn’t ready. I would not have benefited from the $50,000 Mastermind. I didn’t have the experience or the war stories to be able to just have gone through multiple… I think as entrepreneurs and even musicians, we go through these, I don’t know what we call it, cycling or whether it’s… I think every one of us has got some story where stuff didn’t turn out the way we thought. Unfortunately, most of us have dozens of those. You just go through these cycles, and we learn, and you come back stronger and better for having gone through those. I love your thoughts about it starting out with just a couple of people. In reality you showed up to that Zoom meeting and you had a handful of key people that probably you met and built a relationship with. You can track all of the subsequent successes and go up the ladder in each rung, probably back to a couple of conversations that somebody said, hey, go check out this Jeff Walker book. I’m guessing you probably just went through some really low-priced. Maybe you bought the book and that was it and then you went to the class or…

Michael Walker: Yeah, for me it was the free workshop. 

Jason Tonioli:  It was free. I’ve worked in a lot of industries where I was in the banking world as well as being in the music and now the travel business but I think it’s interesting how a lot of times it just all comes down to whether you’re going to show up and be on that Zoom call that you did weekly and you said some people fizzled and that’s always going to happen. I think the key thing is finding smarter people than you or people that are the next level and hanging around those individuals. Then when there are opportunities to go to one of these events or spend the $500, like you said, to go to that event. It’s funny, as you were telling that story, I was thinking back to my first time when I heard about ClickFunnels. I think I really pushed you down the ClickFunnels path too to do more and just understand Funnels in general back when we were working together. I ended up selling my software company and happened to go down to an event called Traffic and Conversion Summit. Essentially, it’s the biggest, I think it is still the biggest digital marketing conference where ad agencies and they talk paid traffic and there’s just so many different things from the marketing world. I think there were like 5,500 people at that event. While I was there, I mean, there were 100 different booths with everybody trying to sell their software or whatever they did, but somebody told me, hey, you need to go get this book. It’s a group called ClickFunnels, and they’re like, It’s like 30 bucks and it’s the best thing ever. You need to just go over and buy that book.  I had a hundred different places to go and talk to different people, but I had five or six people mentioned, Go get that book from that guy. 

What led me on this path, I’d been in marketing for almost 20 years, yet I ended up buying this… I think it was the Dot Com Secrets and 30 Days book along with this one fun of the way challenge. I went through that little 30-day training program, and it literally took my music hobby, which we’ll call it, which I don’t know. I was doing well in the 30s, $40,000 a year, which is fantastic for most artists. It literally led to a two-comma club award like you see behind me. I’m selling niche sheet music for piano, little spiral-bound piano books but I can attribute it all back to making that relationship and showing up. At that point when I went down there, I couldn’t really afford to be there. I ended up staying in this hotel, which was a couple of several hundred dollars a night, that was where the event was. I stayed six, seven blocks away in San Diego. Later I found out that eight years ago, it used to be like a brothel. I just had a room, and it was a shared bathroom. It was cheap enough that I’m like, oh, and it was nice. I’ve got this funny story of like, Okay, there’s a bar down below us and the room was plenty nice. I had a sink. No toilet, you had to walk down the hall if you needed to go to the bathroom or shower. I got to that event, and it literally changed the trajectory of where I was at. I met a handful of people there that then led me down the path that I’ve been down. Now, just like you, I’ve been in all these dozens of mastermind groups, and whether they’re paid or not, finding good people to share with and ask for advice and serve and help, it’s a game-changer.

I’m curious. About three years ago, you, with Modern Musician, you guys launched your own Mastermind, and I think I was the one pushing you. It took me about a year to get it to happen, but our team down in Costa Rica actually helped you with that first Mastermind, and we learned lots of that. Maybe share a little bit about your experience in doing that. Then you’ve had subsequent Masterminds and talk a little bit about what you’ve learned that makes it a great Mastermind when you’re getting away with people.

Michael Walker: I’ll never forget that first epic adventure Mastermind trip that we did in Costa Rica. The Tarzan swing and the zip lines and the rafting. It was just amazing. I think that as someone who has experienced the benefits of Mastermind groups and been a part of Mastermind groups, I’ve seen how valuable they are. I have never hosted one or done one but like most things that I do, I try to look at people who are either smarter than I am or further along than I am who have done it really well and try to learn as best as I can from them before doing it. A lot of the DNA of what we do with our Mastermind groups has really come from my mentors and it’s come from the lessons that I’ve learned from working with people like Russell and Jeff and yourself and doing Mastermind groups. 

I do think there’s something special that just happens when you create this quote-unquote, horizon experience. There’s a scientific term for it, but as we get older, it’s not just because we’ve been alive for longer that it feels like time shrinks. There’s this experience that as we get older, it’s like time passes by faster. It’s like, wow, another year passed, another 10 years passed. Where did the time go? When we’re young, of course, 10 years feels like forever. That’s in part because it’s relative and it’s like, okay, that’s like twice as long as I’ve been alive but what they’ve also found is that the way that our minds work is that we have these amazing habit machines in our heads that are programmed to maximize our energy output and to decrease the amount of variability and just to be most efficient. That’s part of the reason we have habits and when we do habits, there’s a lot of really good things about it. We cannot spend a lot of time and attention thinking about this thing that we’ve done a thousand times, and now we can focus instead on something else. What happens is if we do the same thing over and over again, then we tend to click into these habits, patterns. Our brain, when it doesn’t have that variety, it just times, feels like it goes faster because we don’t have an experience breaking us out of the pattern.

I think that one of the biggest values of doing a Mastermind group that focuses on you getting away from your day-to-day experience and going somewhere that’s unique or even somewhere exotic that really pushes your comfort zone comes from creating that horizon experience of doing something that is uncomfortable that wakes you up. It wakes you up and it helps you remember it too. A lot of the things that we focus on are things that our brain forgets pretty easily but if you wrap it around this horizon experience where the whole thing is somewhere unique or different, then it really helps us to go deeper and form better relationships and connect with people more. I’ve personally found it really valuable to create space in my own life to extract myself from the day to day and to zoom out and use that opportunity to get a better perspective and look at the next year, five years, 10 years, and really think about where do I want to go? Where is this headed? To be surrounded by a group of people that are ambitious as well and have big visions and goals and can bounce ideas off each other has been insanely valuable. It’s been amazing being a part of those groups and now having actually hosted those events and seeing artists connect with each other. 

For example, most recently we have an artist named Erica Mason who’s in our Platinum Artist Mastermind, and she is super inspiring. She has built her career from scratch to over 2.1 million followers and she and I had a conversation at our Mastermind group in Hawaii a month and a half ago. In those 30 minutes lunch conversation, we talked about an idea for her to create a wellness retreat because she focuses on music as a cross-section between mental health and wellness and her music. That night, she went out and sent an email to her email subscribers and she sold out of 30 spots for $2,000 a piece. It’s like a 60K, 30-minute conversation. That’s like what? $120,000 an hour quality time. We got to do it in Hawaii. We got to really just enjoy being together. That’s been really cool. Seeing the connections between the artists’ meeting in meeting each other and starting to build relationships, it really creates a family culture. I mean, it’s an amazing gift and a blessing to be a part of the Mastermind group. I couldn’t encourage people more if they don’t have that in their life right now to make it. Either make it or find one that you resonate with and be a part of it.

Jason Tonioli: I think the crazy thing is people want to have relationships and friends. The reality is these days everybody’s got their phone and you have these followers and whatever on your social media is. I’m sure Erica would be like, I have 2.1 million followers, but those connections that are face-to-face with somebody are so much different and more impactful when we have those face-to-face moments that you can’t even get over a Zoom. I think we’ve talked dozens of times together, but over Zoom, we’ve only been together a few times, but the together factor of just making the effort to be face-to-face goes so much further. The other thing I think is interesting with Masterminds, and maybe this isn’t with all of them, but the ones I’ve been part of, as soon as that trust factor and you realize that these people are there to help you and not tear you down and put you in an uncomfortable place, when a person, and I’m speaking for myself as well, when you’re willing to be vulnerable a little bit and just share and open up people because I think one of the challenges with, again, if you go back to the phone, the social media side, everybody thinks that life is wonderful and all rosy and no matter how successful you are, there’s crap that happens to everybody.

Having your people, as you were mentioning, I’ve found my people with all my marketing people, with all my music people, there’s something different when you find your people and then can be a little bit more honest and vulnerable about how things really are going. I think your mind opens up more to being willing to listen to feedback and help from others as well in those events. 

Michael Walker: So true. Yeah, it really is like a family. It’s like having a community, a community of people that actually understand you. When there are a lot of people, especially musicians, you don’t necessarily have a group around you that really understands what it’s like to be a musician and especially one that’s just starting out. I know for me and for a lot of the artists that we work with, that’s one of their biggest challenges, is that they have these dreams, and they want to be successful with their music, but they don’t have a role model around them that has done it. The people that they love and that they spend their time with haven’t necessarily seen examples of successful artists as well. It can be incredibly challenging when people around you don’t necessarily believe in the vision or understand the vision as well as you do. Having people around you that not only believe in you and see that vision for you, but actually doing it and living it and can encourage you, is just amazing.

Jason Tonioli: Well, and the reality is I think family and close friends, your normal group of family, they want us to be safe, right? Even most people in general, taking a risk like doing a business or doing something crazy like trying to make a living as a musician, that’s a risk that most people aren’t going to be willing to take, especially your family members that are around you. They want what’s best for you. If Little Johnny comes home and says, hey, I want to play piano and sell sheet music to people, I can guarantee you that the mom and dad, out of the best of intentions, is going to tell them you need to go get a degree and figure out a real job and then you can play the piano on your own at home. I think it’s one of those whereas as an entrepreneur, I look at this and it can be a very lonely road sometimes. As much as your spouse or even your family members will listen to you, they’re probably thinking in their head, Oh, my gosh, Jason’s crazy. You’re going to go do what? You think you can do this thing? 

I think as an entrepreneur, the other thing that I’ve realized is anytime it seems like you want to do something big, it’s almost like we call it the resistance, what I’ve heard Russell’s called it the resistance, but it’s almost like you’ve got people holding on to the back of your shirt or your pants. You’re trying to go this way, but there’s something pulling on you saying, don’t do it. Don’t do it. You can’t do it. Then you have this imposter syndrome. I talk to a lot of people that maybe they go through hard times, and they want to blame themselves and they feel like, well, I’m not worthy of this, or I’m not capable. We self-destruct, I think, just as a human being by listening to all these voices that tell you can’t do it. Back to the whole reason for finding your community or finding this mastermind is, again, surrounding yourself with people who can at least honestly look at the situation, but if it’s not crazy, then they’ll encourage you and motivate you to do it. I don’t know if you’ve got any artists that have come in and worked in your program that you’ve seen that happen with where all of a sudden, they get the support and they push through the resistance, we’ll call it.

Michael Walker: I think that’s articulated extremely well that there’s a natural resistance to change or growth. Even the people that love you and want what’s best for you, when we feel like we know someone, and especially someone that we think that we know well, then we create this model of them in our mind and we know how to interact with them. We know what to say, we know what buttons to press to have these conversations. When you change or when you grow, when you become a bigger version of yourself, then those same buttons that they used to press or the same things they used to say, their model of the world changes with it as well and they have to learn how to relate with you and that can be subconsciously, even there’s a lot of resistance that comes up from that. That’s part of why it’s so important to be around people who they’re there to encourage you and they know that your goal is to transform, and they see the version of you that you’re moving towards that you want to be and they’re encouraging and reinforcing that as opposed to reinforcing the old self.

In order for you to become a better version of yourself, like the old you need to die, the person that you used to be like, there’s a part of you that literally needs to die in order to become a better version of yourself. Being around people that are encouraging you to grow and evolve and be able to contribute more and become that new self-versus someone who is encouraging you to be your old self is a complete 180.

Jason Tonioli: I know you came down to Costa Rica and for those that aren’t familiar with my background, about six years ago, I ended up on a whitewater kayaking trip in Costa Rica and just felt this strong impression that we were supposed to help these guides that we’d met, help them do their own thing. It’s been two hours telling the story, but essentially through a whole bunch of coincidences. There are too many coincidences to call it a coincidence, but we ended up starting a business in Costa Rica that does tours. You brought your Mastermind group down on that trip and we went river rafting and Tarzan swinging and zip lining, all these fun things. What’s been interesting over the last six years is we’ve done that for hundreds of groups. We’re literally running two, three trips a week with the team down there. I have very little involvement in it, but they’re doing this service that literally is impacting everybody who comes down there. It’s interesting that the people that come, when we get the feedback and reviews, they almost unanimously say, you know what? It felt like I was with family and that our team members were like family.

About a year ago, I was on a trip with Jeff Walker and his brother John and a handful of other people. We were kayaking and rafting on the rivers down there. At night, we’d chat. One of the things that came up was this crazy problem that we’ve had if we’ve gotten so busy down there and, in our headquarters, where the team is all at, within about two hours of there, there’s not any hotel that can hold more than about 25, 30 people tops. There are usually half the rooms rented out. If you wanted to do a mastermind group like what we’re talking about, or even bring your group back, there’s not a location where we can do it. We were joking that we should just build our own resort and do it that way. The crazy thing is the conversations that were had around the dinner table with Jeff and the others have led us to a couple of weeks. I ended up down in Costa Rica and we’ve been looking for land. I had Walter, our main guy down there. He’s been looking for months and months, but he found the place and we came back. We brought some investors and consultants with us that have done this multiple times. It’s not like we’re going in blind and stupid, if you want to call it that but the goal was, is how can we create this resort location that would cater to and facilitate better team interactions and masterminds, whether that means some really cool yoga deck where you can all hold hands and talk to each other type of place with a view of the volcano or that type of thing. That’s essentially what is blossoming out of one of my last Mastermind trips that I ended up on. It was almost more of a, hey, this is a joke that we’re going to do this but it’s one of those where I’ve thought a lot about how do you get that grouped bond? 

You mentioned a little bit of this that when you come in, the horizon type of thing, you get people out of their comfort zone. You do the Tarzan swing or zipline or the rafting, and all of a sudden, I think you go into this, I don’t want to call it fight or flight mode to survive, but your brain does something different when you’re in a stressful, we’ll call it a semi-dangerous situation. In your mind, you probably thought, oh, my gosh, I’m going to die. I know you fell out of there. I still remember you falling out of the raft and dumping over when we were on your trip and you’re just floating down the river.  We were laughing about it.

Michael Walker: I loved it. I really enjoyed it. I remember one life lesson that I really liked about this analogy of the guides. The guides were just incredible. I always felt extremely safe just because they’re so good at what they do. I remember when I fell out, one of the pieces of advice was if you fall out of the raft, then rather than flailing around or panicking, just lay down and just put your feet forward and let the current pull you down and come take care of you. I just thought that was an interesting analogy in terms of how it feels like the flow of life itself, it’s functioning in a similar way. Like if we totally panic and freak out and we start flailing, then a lot of times we end up actually hurting ourselves or hurting other people because of that reaction. The same way if you do that in the river, you actually might hit a rock or you might actually get severely injured if you do that but if we get into a position where we’re able to let go and accept where things are at and let the current take us there, then generally that’s a much better experience than flailing around and reacting and getting hit by something.

Jason Tonioli: When you look back on it, usually you can smile about it and be like, that was fun, actually. Even though you were floating down the crazy, some rapids along the way. I’m speaking of different events and the value of those as we’ve talked about doing this resort, again, I’ve looked at it almost like I wouldn’t say it was a joke in my head, but it was one of those imposter syndromes like, who are you? You don’t know anything about building a resort. Who are you to do something like that? Actually, Funnel Hacking Live this year in September when I was in Orlando.

Funnel Hacking Live for those who don’t know, it’s this group of about 5,000 people. They’re all these entrepreneurial people that are successful, some are trying to figure out how to get there along the way, but I certainly wasn’t expecting to be thinking, oh, I’m going to figure out how to do this resort. I’d gone there a little bit discouraged, actually, because we’d started to put together plans and what’s it going to cost to do something like this? The reality is building a resort, or a hotel is going to be multi-millions of dollars.

It’s one of those things so Walter had actually gone to all these banks. I think he went to about nine different banking groups down in Costa Rica asking, hey, we may want to get a loan. We want to build this crazy idea. We’re going to build a hotel and if you build it, they will come because that’s a thing.

Anyway, there’s demand for it, but the banks down there essentially told him, well, it’s going to be probably at least nine months before we can make any decision. There are these hoops that we’d have to jump through. If you’re wanting a couple of million dollars, your interest rate best-case scenario is going to be 16%, but more likely 20%, 22%, 26%. You start running numbers on that. If you’re the banker guy, the spreadsheet guy in me is like, Okay, let’s say it’s $2 million and you get a 16% interest rate on a 10-year loan that you’d get on a hotel like a bank would do. All of a sudden, what the numbers say is, well, $2 million in cash that you have to pay back, plus you’re going to get another $2 million in interest at 16% but then you start going into the 20%, 22%. Now you’re looking at almost $4 millions of interest for your $2 million. Now all of a sudden, it becomes very cost prohibitive. You really got to be crazy if you’re going to try and do something like that. 

As I was sitting in Russell’s presentation at Funnel Hacking Live, he was talking about working with people and getting you going to your people essentially like you’d have with the community. I had it hit me that it’s like, everybody that has traveled with us tells us, well, we felt like family. It was like we were their best friends. We love your people. It just hit me like, Okay, well, if you can’t get money from a bank, where do you go? Will you go to your family? As I’m sitting there listening to Russell’s presentation, I shifted gears and I started penciling out notes and numbers and thought, well, what if we had, what if we invited people to be a part of our family, founding family members in this resort idea? All of a sudden, I figured out, oh, my gosh, we could actually give our favorite people, which is our community, this amazing deal for less than a thousand dollars. Invite them to come. What do you do once you build the thing that they gave you the money for? Well, then you’d invite people to come stay at the house or stay at the resort. That’s exactly what came out of that. Really what it was is me being part of a big old 5,000-person mastermind event where it was totally off the subject, but it hit me and I’m like, Bam.

To the point where we’re weeks away from launching, essentially, it’s a crowdfunding strategy to let people be a member of our family. One of the things we’ll do is we’ll invite them back and they’ll have a free stay with us, but we’re going to have a Wall of Fame where we talk about the power of family and how we’ve crowdfunded essentially this place that’s built for bringing communities and masterminds and people to just get out of their element and really hopefully have that mastermind experience. Yeah. Sounds a little crazy, right?

Michael Walker: Crazy in the best way. Yeah, I mean, we were talking a little bit about it and you’re sharing the vision for it, and I was just like, 100%. I’m completely in. I could be your first family taker; I would put the money down immediately.

Jason Tonioli: I have it almost done. I’ll shoot it for you. I’m going to hold you to that one now.

Michael Walker: Well, I’m seriously interested. Yeah, we talked a little bit about this already, but our first Mastermind trip that we did a few years ago was in Costa Rica, and we just had such an amazing experience there. The whole thing, what you put together was just incredible and everywhere from the actual activities, in terms of stretching our comfort zone of the Tarzan swing and the zip lines and the rafting and also just the guides that you brought there were all incredible and it felt safe the whole time as well. Anyways, we were talking a little bit about a round two for sure. That’s something I’d love to figure out as well.

Jason Tonioli: When you do round two, one of my favorite new things that we’ve done over the last year, there’s a guy that spent 30 years of his career at the university where our hometown is, studying cacao fruit, so chocolate. What he’d done is essentially, we’ll call him a spreadsheet guy that tracked the elevation and the humidity and the temperature of cacao fruit, just like they do for fine wine and coffee, but he did that for cacao. He retired about four years ago. During his career, what he actually solved was for Central America, for anybody who’s a real chocolate connoisseur, the cacao was a Mayan or just chocolate, basically hot chocolate type stuff was a special Mayan drink that was… I mean, the history there is amazing. If you actually dropped any of the chocolate and you spilled any of it when you were the servants that were making it at that time, they’d actually have to, I don’t know if they chopped your head off or what, but it was a dark, scary thing, but it was considered the drink of the Gods. I want to say it was back in the 60s or 70s, the cacao fruit that grows on the trees. You’ve never seen what a football-sized is like. Then there’s these slimy chocolate things inside that they dry out. 

In Central America, about 80% of the fruit crop would have a fungus on it. It made it so that growing cacao anywhere in Central America, you’d have the tree, but one out of every five fruits would be worth doing, and the other four or five would have to be thrown away because it wouldn’t be… It wasn’t a sustainable crop. This guy actually came up with seven or eight different varieties that were disease resistant. Central America now has all of this cacao, but he’s got a mountain top lodge with his cacao farm that he has, and he’s had it for four years. We actually went with a group in February, and he had just barely found out that he was one of three cacao fruit farmers that had won all of Costa Rica’s best cacao, and they were sending it to Europe for whatever… Apparently, there’s an international judging of the best cacao fruit in the world.

Michael Walker: That sounds like my gig.

Jason Tonioli: As he’s sitting here telling us this story of like, okay, this is one of the best cacao fruits in all of Costa Rica, let alone maybe the world. Then he’s passing around these chocolate bars sharing, okay, we put sugar cane because there’s sugarcane all around here. We’ve got this hybrid chocolate that’s a mix of that and Macadamia nuts. It was one of these really cool experiences. Again, totally outside of the norm, but I sat there, and I thought, oh, my gosh, well, I need to be more analytical. Learning about chocolate, I bring that little tidbit of like I learned something like, wow, I need to just step back and say, what can I do differently about? Be a little bit more analytical to make better decisions, essentially. Anyway, the resorts, we’ve actually already picked out land. We are going to launch a founding family member thing. 

One of the things I’m also looking at doing is for the people that want to do a Mastermind, we’ll have a group purchase, but essentially people are going to be able to buy in as a family member for about 25, 30% of the cost of what it would actually cost. We’re going to totally over deliver on value, but it’s going to be fun to see that come. We’ll definitely have to have you bring a group down again. Really, the whole point of this, I just wanted to have people walk away from this interview with hopefully a mindset that you need to, as we go into the new year, is finding a group of people that sees the vision and sees the greatness in you as a person and helps make you grow into the person that maybe you want to be. It’s probably outside of the comfort zone. You may need to travel somewhere. You may need to just go on a Facebook group and put together a group and see if 70 people show up and then figure it out but those things are life changing. I don’t know any final thoughts, I guess, for you guys. I know you guys do multiple kinds of masterminds for musicians, but really, it’s just getting a group of people together. Share a little bit about maybe what you guys do.

Michael Walker: Sure. First of all, thank you for having me on the podcast again. I always love connecting with you, Jason, and I highly appreciate what you’ve built and the background that you bring to you from the business world to musicians. Obviously, it’s very needed so I appreciate this conversation. In terms of community stuff, this year, especially, 2024 for us is about bringing our whole community together in one place and helping facilitate the relationship between artists with each other. In the past, our flagship offer for Modern Musician has been a one-on-one coaching program and that’s been an amazing blessing and a gift and the artists we work with, most of them say that it was the most transformational experience that they’ve had yet in their music career. I do have a lot of respect for one-on-one coaching, but by its very nature, one-on-one coaching is very small with a very small select group. We had to be extremely selective, and we had an application process and we had to turn away 93 % of artists who applied to be in our community. This year, we really wanted to find a way to serve everyone in the community to bring us all together.

One example of that is we launched our Modern Musician Community. This is a completely free community to join where you can be surrounded by like-minded musicians who are looking to grow their music career and reach more fans and create more music and to monetize it and have a healthy business. Every day we go live in that community at one o’clock Eastern and we interview a guest. 

Jason, I would love to bring you back onto the podcast as well and have a conversation. We interview industry professionals, other musicians, and we create this live stage so that artists have access to these industry contacts that they might never have an opportunity to actually meet or ask questions or connect with. We do those live shows every single day. Then we do breakout rooms afterwards where often the guests are coming in and actually coming in and meeting these people and having relationships, answering questions. That would probably be the best resource I could share for anyone that listening to this is like, well, yeah, the Mastermind group sounds really cool, but where do I find those people or where do I connect with them? I think a good place to start if you’re looking for other musicians to connect with that are going to encourage you would be joining the Free community.

Jason Tonioli: That sounds like a perfect place to be able to meet the right people and then plan. Maybe you have a year out or so to plan a trip to Orlando or Nashville or I guess Costa Rica, once we get this resort all done for people, we’ll have you eat some chocolate and do a Tarzan swing and zipline. 

Michael Walker:  I would love nothing more than for everyone listening to this right now to be able to come to our Mastermind in Costa Rica.

Jason Tonioli: It’ll be awesome. Again, I hope people walk away from this just with a renewed resolve to level up this coming year and invest in yourself. Don’t be afraid of investing time but possibly money. Again, most people aren’t going to be ready for a $35,000 or a $50,000 mastermind. I wouldn’t encourage anybody to do that. It’s one of those things that as you level up, you’ll start to recognize, okay, it’s time to invest the $1,000 or the $5,000 or whatever that is. It’s definitely a journey that I think every person needs to go on, but I also think it’s important, like we talked about, to surround yourself with people who can give you that example and don’t just only trust your family who maybe is trying to keep you safe and not do something crazy. At least it seems crazy and stupid to them, but you have to follow your dreams for sure. 

Well, Michael, thanks so much. We should definitely get on another one. We could keep talking for hours, but I think there’s been some really good thoughts to hopefully make some people think. Let’s do this again sometime.

Michael Walker: Absolutely. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Jason. 

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