Hey guys, my name is Graham Stefan. I started off at 18 years old, not having any clue what I wanted to do,

became a real estate agent, bought rental properties, and then ended up starting one of the largest

personal finance channels on YouTube, and I'm one of the passionate for you.

I loved the interview today. I thought, Omar's a fantastic interview. Great speaker. It didn't seem like you had anything prepared, but it was so, like, thorough. I was expecting you to have notes or something off to the side, like constantly reading, because that's what I'll do. I'll ask questions, but I don't remember it in the moment. It flowed flawlessly. I really appreciate it. And I love how in depth you were

able to get on some of these questions and really just getting to the root of like why someone is

successful and how they could build their own business. Hey guys. Welcome to this special

episode of The Passionate View. Today we have on a unique guest as we're in his studio in Las Vegas, none other than serial entrepreneur, real estate investor and everyone's favorite YouTuber, Graham Stephan. Thanks so much, man. I really appreciate it. Yeah, we make it easy on you. We plug in a hard drive. We're good to go. Yes, we're at the famous ice coffee at our table, man. Stoke to have you. Thanks. Now before we get started, I just want to give a quick and huge shout out to our sponsor, MindCore Technologies. See, the truth is, if you're a business owner going into 2023 and you're concerned with either having a cybersecurity breach, the frustration with finding IT solutions to your challenges, or you're just spending too much money on it, well, you're in luck because Mind core technologies can help you with exactly that. I want to find out more. Simply book a call in the description down below for your free cybersecurity assessment and IT audit. So Graham, real quick, can you give the audience a little bit of context as to how big your YouTube channel is? I know you got multiple channels now. Yeah. some some of the audience who, shockingly, may not know who you are, even though a lot of people do. Can you in context as to just how much content you guys are creating nowadays? Gosh, it's a lot. So I don't even know. For YouTube, I think it's five channels. Three of them we post on regularly, if you're not counting like clips channels.

So five channels. The main ones, almost four million subscribers. Second one's 900,000. Third

one's 300,000. That's the podcast. And then we've been going really heavy lately on

Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, and just like repurposing a lot of that content on different platforms.

So it's,

it's pretty massive. And how old are you present day? Uh, 32. I have to think about that

for anything. And how old were you when you started on, uh, on YouTube to begin with?

Uh, 26. Yeah, 20s. It was December of 2016 was when I posed my first video. I didn't really get serious about it until January, though, 2017. And one thing that's super fascinating is you're super transparent online as to how you guys were able to generate money, grow the brand. And I think that's why a lot of people love and respect what you guys do. I know even the ice coffee hour, every episode starts out with, you know, the guests, guessing what the revenue is at. You've been transparent about how you've made millions of dollars online. But take me back. When you were 26 and trying to figure it out, I know you were doing real estate as an agent. You had tried a few different things. Like take me back to where this all began for you where you thought, hmm, like I want to do something bigger with my life. I want to take it to the next level. Well, at 26, I was eight years into doing real estate. And at that time, I think I had purchased four rental properties. Three were bought, like at the very bottom of the market. A lot of that was kind of lucky timing because I happened to have money and I happened to be like, wow, real estate seems like a pretty good deal. You got in real estate when you were 18?

18. Yeah, so I got my license. I was 18 years old, and I worked full-time real estate at that point. Were you broke when you started? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't call it broke, broke. But, like, I had worked throughout high school. So I had maybe, I don't know, four to five grand saved up by the time I was 18. And so I used some of that money

to then get my real estate license by like minor stuff, like some better fitting clothes and just

stuff like that that I thought would be important as an agent. But yeah, I had been working

eight years as a real estate agent. And it had been going really well. And 2015 or 14, so it's like

24, 25. I joined the Oppenheim group. And that was when my income really took off just because it was in a new environment. I think Jason Oppenheim really pushed me to like continue to do better. Yeah, huge shout out to him. But yeah, I just, I always wanted to do YouTube videos. So it wasn't that, you know, things weren't going well as a real estate agent.

I just, you know, since 2009, I think YouTube had been like my version of TV and I had always looked up the people who have made YouTube videos and I thought, oh man, that would be so cool. But I kept doubting myself, like, who'd want to listen to me? At the time, the best source of credibility was like the guys with the Lambo's on YouTube.

I was like, who would listen to me? At the time, the best source of credibility was like the guys with the Lambo's on YouTube. I was like, who would listen to me? Because I don't have a Lamborghini. So, like, people wouldn't take me seriously without a cool car. But after a while, I just thought, you know what? If I don't do it now, I'm never going to do it. And I just posted a video. I filmed it right before Christmas at an open house that was like really slow.

I saw that a video. I filmed it right before Christmas at an open house that was like really slow. I saw that at a house tour. Yeah. Yeah. And it was just, you know, I just talked. Well, no, you didn't see. That video is unlisted. So I made that video private. Because I swore a lot in the video. Like this is, I didn't think anyone would ever watch me. So like every few words is like an F word or like the S word. So now I don't swear. But, but yeah, back then, I was very passionate about how I got started in real estate. And I think that goes to show because a lot of YouTubers, even Mr. Beast and a lot of the big guys is like, you see that, you know, now they have all these videos where people look at them and they're like, oh, I could never create a video like that. But if you go back to their first video, it's usually pretty bare bones, almost every YouTuber. Can you talk about like advice you have for people thinking about getting into YouTube who maybe have the same limited beliefs you did in the beginning? You know, like, I'm not good enough. I'm not a, you know, expert or why would people listen to me or, you know, the quality is not good enough.

...