INTERVIEW | Make Money by Mastering Unit Economics and Scalable Skills with Fred Marshall

Summary

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Travis Makes Money

INTERVIEW | Make Money by Mastering Unit Economics and Scalable Skills with Fred Marshall

Date: May 4, 2026
Host: Travis Chappell
Guest: Fred Marshall

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Travis Chappell sits down with Fred Marshall—pioneer in research-based behavioral patterns of top performers, trainer to over 130,000 people globally, and founder of Quantum Learning. The conversation dives into Fred’s unconventional journey from science to entrepreneurship, the crucial importance of having fun while making money, mastering unit economics, and essential strategies for scalable business success in today’s rapidly changing landscape. The tone is conversational, inspiring, and packed with actionable insights for ambitious listeners.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Early Experiences: Making Money Can Be Fun

• Fred’s First Hustle Story (01:45–04:26)

  • Fred recounts throwing large parties in high school and college, charging “a buck a cup” for entry.
    • “I had a wad of cash in my pocket, like this big. It was so fat, couldn’t fit. I had to break it into two parts and put one in each part.” —Fred Marshall (02:10)
  • Lessons: How scalable, well-marketed events are enjoyable and profitable—“making money can be fun.”

• Reflection on Work & Fulfillment (04:26–05:27)

  • Fred and Travis discuss the trap of “working during the week and living your life on weekends.” They advocate for integrating joy into daily work.
    • “If you’re not having fun—or at least if you don’t enjoy the work you’re doing—you maybe should think about doing a different kind of work.” —Fred Marshall (04:40)
    • “You want to get those two things combined as much as you absolutely can.” —Fred Marshall (05:27)

Mindset, Skill-Building & Lifelong Learning

• On Broad Learning & Curiosity (08:01–09:12)

  • Fred describes immersing himself in diverse topics and being “ruthless” about abandoning books that don’t resonate.
    • “I read ridiculously broadly… but I also immerse.” —Fred Marshall (08:01)
    • “I’m ruthless about abandoning books that don’t work. If something is right and I can tell that it’s good, even if it’s hard, I will muscle through.” —Fred Marshall (08:47)

• Example: Unexpected Knowledge Can Pay Off (06:02–06:53)

  • Fred shares how remembering a Shakespeare passage swayed a $1.5M deal.
    • “He was floored that I knew that passage… It cinched the deal.” —Fred Marshall (06:38)

Career Path: From Biochemistry to Entrepreneurship

• Nonlinear Trajectory (10:00–10:20)

  • Fred notes his background in biochemistry/molecular biology and explains how most of his peers remained in the sciences.

• Early Entrepreneurial Aspirations (10:20–11:09)

  • Fred reveals showing his (now) wife a business plan on their first date—though the original venture didn’t take off, the mindset stuck.

• The ‘Uncle Bill’ Strategy for Career Development (11:24–12:28)

  • Learn in depth by working for two companies you admire, then launch your own improved version.
    • “Take the best from both of those experiences… and then start your own company.” —Fred Marshall (12:20)

• Paid Learning & Timing the Leap (12:53–14:40)

  • Fred advises “moonlighting” before quitting your job to ensure profitable, stable cash flow from your new venture.
    • “Work two jobs at the same time, run parallel, and when your cash flow over here is working, then you quit your day job. And that’s exactly what I did.” —Fred Marshall (13:42)

Essential Business Concept: Unit Economics

• Defining Unit Economics (14:40–16:42)

  • The most critical thing in any business is understanding the math per sale: revenue per customer vs. customer acquisition/service cost.
    • “It’s the revenue that you get per deal… what it costs you to make and ship and service that unit of value. And if that math works, go baby, go. If it doesn’t, either figure out how to make it work, or let it go.” —Fred Marshall (15:41)

• Memorable Elon Musk/SpaceX Example (16:43–17:33)

  • Musk transformed the economics of space by reusing rockets, turning impossible economics into a viable business.

• Front-End vs. Back-End Economics (18:19–19:03)

  • Sometimes initial sales may operate at a loss but can be offset with a valuable back-end or upsell.
    • “It’s not necessarily bad to acquire a customer for $300 if you have an upsell at $2,000... now all of a sudden, the unit economics are working out again.” —Travis (18:38)
    • “I almost call that first sale marketing… but from the customer’s point of view, it has to be value all the way.” —Fred Marshall (19:03)

Delegation, Systems, and Leveraging Technology

• From ‘How Can I?’ to ‘How Can This Get Done?’ (19:37–22:12)

  • Major turning point: stop doing everything yourself—focus on building systems, delegating, and leveraging tech/AIs.
    • “If I try to do everything myself... you become the rate-limiting step. Well, that’s no good.” —Fred Marshall (20:23)
    • “We’re not just delegating to a person. We’re delegating to AI agents, and we’re going to be delegating to swarms of AI agents in the next 18 months.” —Fred Marshall (21:01)
  • Emphasizes seeing technology as an opportunity, not a threat.

• Building Out Functional Domains (22:19–23:21)

  • Every business has unique “columns” (sales, marketing, R&D, etc.), and learning other companies’ structures speeds up your own success.

Advice for Product Innovators & Entrepreneurs

• Rapid Prototyping and the Value of Intersections (23:53–25:43)
  • Today, you can outsource prototype development—even build your own AI-powered physical products quickly if you have the capital.
  • Real innovation comes at the intersection of disparate fields: “Combining things that have never been combined before, including your own skills and talents. That’s a huge opportunity, I think, limited only by your imagination.” —Fred Marshall (25:24)

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Notable Quotes

• “Making money can also be fun. It doesn't have to be this thing that you hate.”
  —Travis (04:26)
• “If you don't enjoy the work, you're doing, you maybe should think about doing a different kind of work.”
  —Fred Marshall (04:40)
• “Every bit of knowledge is useful, every experience is useful. You just never know when it's going to come in handy.”
  —Fred Marshall (06:50)
• “Work for two companies that are doing the same thing that you love to do and learn from them, and then start your version of that in version three.”
  —Fred Marshall (11:24)
• “Unit Economics… if that math works, go, baby, go. If it doesn’t work either. . . figure out how to make it work or let it go.”
  —Fred Marshall (15:41)
• “Instead of thinking, ‘How can I do this?’ think, ‘How can this get done?’”
  —Fred Marshall (19:37)
• “How do you see AI? Is it fear that wells up? … I think it’s important to quickly replace that with, ‘No, no—what’s the opportunity hiding inside this?’”
  —Fred Marshall (21:14)
• “The most exciting areas are at the intersections… AI plus neuroscience or AI plus robotics… including your own skills and talents.”
  —Fred Marshall (25:24)

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Essential Actionable Takeaways

• Leverage early learning and diverse experiences—even seemingly useless knowledge can become invaluable.
• Master the numbers: Always assess and recalibrate your unit economics.
• Embrace scalable skills by learning from established players before branching out on your own.
• Have fun and seek fulfillment in your money-making journey; don’t settle for misery.
• Adopt a delegation and systems mindset—build organizations that can run without you, increasingly leveraging AI and emerging technologies.
• Innovate at intersections of fields and talents for outsized, non-linear opportunities.
• Stay optimistic and strategic about rapid technological change—find the opportunity in disruption.

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Resources & Further Learning

• Learn more or contact Fred: thrivefutureyou.com
• Book: Thrive: The Antidote to Future Shock by Fred Marshall

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Timestamps for Critical Segments

• 01:45 – Fred’s first dollar & party business
• 04:26 – Making money fun & integrating joy into work
• 06:02 – The value of random knowledge (Shakespeare closing the deal)
• 08:01 – Lifelong learning & reading strategy
• 10:00 – Nontraditional path: Science to business
• 11:24 – ‘Uncle Bill’ career strategy
• 13:42 – Transitioning from job to entrepreneurship
• 14:40 – Unit economics definition and importance
• 16:43 – Elon Musk/SpaceX and changing economics
• 19:37 – Delegation, systems, and AI delegation
• 23:53 – Product development advice; innovation at intersections

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Final Words

The episode is filled with wisdom: challenge tradition, obsess over your business math, always be a learner, and don’t let fear stop you from leveraging or creating the next big opportunity. Find the fun—and the profit—in your work.

Transcript

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[Fred Marshall]

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[Travis]

You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by gohighlevel.com for a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet, just go to gohighlevel.com travis what's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Travis Makes Money podcast where it's our mission to help you make more money. Today on the show, I have a new friend, Fred Marshall. Fred is a pioneer in identifying the research based behavioral patterns of top performers and then helping global innovators like Apple, Pfizer and Genentech's scale those behaviors to drive billions in brand growth. He's a recognized expert in change management, launching new brands, and salesforce effectiveness. He's personally trained over 130,000 people in over 14 different countries. And the Quantum Learning team has helped launch 74 new brands in the biopharma space that have generated billions in new growth. So I think, I think, guys, Fred might have a thing or two to say about how to make some more money. So, Fred, what's up, man? Welcome to the show.

[Fred Marshall]

Oh, thanks. So good to be here.

[Travis]

So I want to go back in time, Fred, and I want to know from you, what was the first time you ever got really excited about a dollar that you made where you got paid something and you were like, I cannot believe somebody just paid me money for this.

[Fred Marshall]

Oh, man, this is embarrassing. But, you know, I'll give you the whole story. So I was in high school. I had a date to the prom. She backed out at the last minute and I didn't know what to do. So I decided to throw a party, charge a buck a cup. We got a keg or two of beer. I think ultimately there were three. We went to a park. We told everybody else in the high school what we were doing and we threw a huge party. I had a wad of cash in my pocket, like this big. It was so fat, couldn't fit. I had to break it into two parts and put one in each part. And I thought, this is interesting. We are having a blast making Money. And no problem until the mounted police guy showed up. And so we grabbed the tap and left the keg and ran. The rest is history because we knew the tap was the most important part.

[Travis]

Did you abandon party throwing as a way to make money or did you continue doing that through high school and college?

[Fred Marshall]

I didn't make a living, but I did throw a couple of other big parties. We had a big party when I was in college. Another same story. A buck hopping, two bands. Yeah. Way more people. My parents, My mom moved to another city, so I had my parents house

[Travis]

for a few years. Oh, nice.

[Fred Marshall]

Yeah, right. And you know, I never knew that you could throw beer and actually paint the ceiling with beer. I never. I never thought that was possible. But that was another great story because it's same thing, right? More people showed up than I had ever imagined because apparently I do a pretty good job of marketing and getting people excited. And so anyway, so about halfway through, we were a little bit loud with two bands and the cars were what called the neighbors. Caused the neighbors to call the police. So the police showed up and they said, are you 21? Is this your house? And I said, yes, I am 21, it is my house. But I'm so glad you guys are here because this party is out of control. Can you help me clear this thing out? And they did. And we sent 90% of the people home. And then we just stayed and hung

[Travis]

out and had some money to buy pizza.

[Fred Marshall]

Yeah, yeah, we could buy a lot of pizza for what we did on that party. Those are the big two ones. You know, I think what it taught me is that, you know, I literally have never reflected on this until literally just this moment. I think what I got out of that is that it's fun to throw events that you can scale. I mean, that's the language we would use now to describe it. I wasn't thinking of it that way then, but it was really fun. And I've still tried to do that. You know, when we do workshops for people or we launch brands, we try to make it a party. Yeah.

[Travis]

And that making money can also be fun. It doesn't have to be this thing that you hate, but I gotta do it because the bill's gotta be paid, so I gotta go do work. You know, it's like, well, there's a version of work where you can have fun and make great money.

[Fred Marshall]

Well, I think that, you know, honestly, I think that if you're not having fun and. Or at least if you don't enjoy the work, you're doing. You maybe should think about doing a different kind of work because, you know, eight hours a day times how many years of your adult life you don't want to be doing something you don't want. Love that you don't.

[Travis]

Exactly.

[Fred Marshall]

Yeah.

[Travis]

That's what we talk about on the show all the time, is that, you know, at, at the end you'll hear. You'll hear me sign off at the end here. But at the end we always say money only solves your money problems, but it just makes other problems easier to solve. And this is one of those things that we talk about because it's like, man, if you're. It's. It's just funny to me how people can expect to live this wildly fulfilled and, and, and joyful life when they're spending the vast majority of their waking hours doing something that they absolutely do not enjoy.

[Fred Marshall]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it's a bad Working during the week and living your life on the weekend. But that's a bad model. You want to get those, you know, two things combined as much as you. Absolutely. For sure.

[Travis]

What were you in school for, Fred?

[Fred Marshall]

Biochemistry? Molecular biology. I was sort of a real slacker. A slacker. Yeah. I know. I can still draw all the amino acids, stupidly enough.

[Travis]

Funny how those things stick in your brain, you know, for some reason I can still list all of the prepositions and US Presidents, but. Yeah, but then some more like things that are actually meaningful just, they go in one ear, out the other.

[Fred Marshall]

But, you know, you never know when a particle of insight or information is going to come in handy. So we once in high school, we had to memorize a little passage in Shakespeare. And you know, fast forward 25 years, I'm in this meeting with these guys at Novartis. One of the guys there, his name is Larry. And it's a million and a half dollar deal in the balance, right? And it's us and two other companies. And this guy Larry makes a very, very thin reference to the very passage that I memorized in high school. And I just pulled it out and just laid it out there in the conference room. And he was floored that I knew that passage. Out, out, brief candle. Life is but a walking shadow. I mean, I could still do it today. And it cinched the deal. We just kind of gelled in that moment. So, you know, every bit of knowledge is useful, every experience is useful. You just never know when it's going to come in handy.

[Travis]

Do you still continue to do things like that to this day. Like, are you trying to be well

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[Travis]

studied outside of your area of expertise?

[Fred Marshall]

100%. That's my MO for sure. I read very broadly, ridiculously broadly. But I also, I immerse too. You know, I immersed in neuroscience, I immersed in change management, and I think that's a good combination. Read broadly just the stuff you're curious about. You can't know everything. The stuff that kind of feeds your soul, maybe back to what we were saying earlier, and do that for fun, whether it results in making money or not. And then go deep in the areas that you have good passion about.

[Travis]

Yeah, basically just read whatever is going to make you continue to read. If it feels like you're forcing something, then you're probably not going to get through chapter three. But if you just read something that you enjoy, it's more likely that you're going to pick up the book again.

[Fred Marshall]

Well, and I'm ruthless about abandoning books that don't work. I buy a lot of books, I get them, I open it up, I read the first 20 pages and I go, this is not working. I'm out. Like some people will muscle through. I do not. But if something is right and I can tell that it's good, even if it's hard, I will. I will muscle through something that I know is good. I don't mind it being hard, but it better be relevant and interesting.

[Travis]

What are some of the topics that you enjoy reading about right now?

[Fred Marshall]

Right now I'm taking a second deep dive into Italian Gardens. I just recently got a book that was made of photographs from the 1880s, 1890s of the old gardens of Italy. It's incredible, this book. It's another world. Pre cars. So there are no cars, no telephone poles, no wires. It's just streets and carriages and a lot of carts with oxen. And people lived amazingly well. These villas are just gorgeous and stunning. And I'm thinking to myself, here's this stunning villa, and they build it with, you know, oxen and carts and donkeys and horses. Wow, that's impressive. It's a world that doesn't exist anymore. Yeah.

[Travis]

Yeah, you'd say that again. Okay, let's jump back into your personal story here. So you end up going to school. What is the path for you that ends up leading into entrepreneurship and business? Because I would assume that the majority of people who go to school for what you went to school for probably ended up in the sciences rather than in business.

[Fred Marshall]

That's true. Most of my friends ended up getting PhDs and becoming postdoctoral fellows in some area and did research in some narrow, specific part of the universe. I, on my first date with my wife, you know, we sort of met and. And then we had an official first date. And the official first date would come back to my apartment, and I pull out my business plan and I show her this business plan for Marshall Diagnostics, which, in retrospect, was maybe not the smartest thing to do, but. But I'd been, you know, I wanted. Listen, this is what you're getting, so you might as well know early. Yeah, and. And that was really fun. You know, it turns out that I wasn't ready to start a company, and so Marshall Diagnostics never happened. But. But I've been dreaming and thinking about it for a while.

[Travis]

How long were you in the workforce before you started something on your own?

[Fred Marshall]

Let's see, I was. I was 37 years old when I started Quantum Learning.

[Travis]

Okay. What were the takeaways that you had from working for other people for a length of time before starting your own venture?

[Fred Marshall]

Well, so I had a strategy, actually, and I. I call it the Uncle Bill strategy, though I didn't know Uncle Bill till later. But the Uncle Bill strategy is work for two companies that are doing the same thing that you love to do and learn from them and then start your version of that in version three. And this is exactly what I did. So I worked for one training company called Strategic Management Group, a bunch of guys from Wharton. They're brilliant. I basically got a free mba and then I went to work. But they were very, you know, analytical, technical, classic MBA kind of mindset. You can picture that, if you will, especially the Wharton community, they're very, you know, and then I worked for another training company that did that, focused on the human side of things, and that was really eye opening to me. And so I took the best from both of those experiences. You know, don't do that. But, but this part of what they did was actually really brilliant. And, you know, the second company, it was all brilliant. And then I started my own company.

[Travis]

What's your advice to young people considering both of these paths? At the moment? There, there's almost these two schools of thought where it's like, if you're an entrepreneur, just be an entrepreneur and, you know, screw having a job and reporting to somebody. But it's also like, yeah, but to your point, the, the volume of learning that you get to do while earning a good paycheck for learning that thing is pretty valuable for doing something later on. You know what I mean?

[Fred Marshall]

I do, I do. You know, I, I. So I was talking to my niece about this. Wanted. She and her husband love to grow things, specifically grapes and, and worked in wineries and so forth. And I, I said, you know, work for a couple of wineries and then open up your own or work for a couple of vineyard management system companies and then start your own. And that's exactly what they did.

[Travis]

Oh, really?

[Fred Marshall]

It was very useful for them, too. And they're doing fantastic, I must say. Yes, go for it.

[Travis]

Go, Evan, for the transition period here, which I think is valuable for a lot of people listening, was there, I guess, walk me through that process. Was there a number in the bank that you were looking for before you felt comfortable starting your own thing? Was there cash flow? Did you start on the side Hustle? And once I get it up to this income level, then I can leave this job and do this thing.

[Fred Marshall]

Now, talking about that transition period, that's a great. That's a really important question. I got some good advice from my stepfather, actually, on that. So he said, you know, moonlight, moonlight. Work two jobs at the same time, run parallel, and when your cash flow over here is working, then you quit your day job. And that's exactly what I did. I did that for a year. And what was interesting about it was I was so productive in my day job because I was so fired up about this new venture. It's really true. I was just on fire because I was finally doing my thing, and it was my ideas and all that. And so I recommend that because once I, you know, switched over to quantum learning, we were profitable from day one. And Just like a rocket. But there's something else I wanted to. I was thinking about you in this conversation. I want to get in the conversation at the appropriate point and we can bookmark it now if you like. But is the idea of unit economics, it's one of the most important concepts in business.

[Travis]

Well, let's talk about that now then. Yeah. So tell me, tell me, is there a time that you realized this was. Did you already have this innate in you? How did you figure this out?

[Fred Marshall]

I don't know how I figured it out, but it became pretty obvious to me that some unit economics don't work. So one of the projects I had was selling audiobooks, audio tapes rather. And I was selling them for 249 bucks for a set of 20 tapes. And they cost me about $300 to sell one copy of this $250 audio program. So those unit economics don't work very well. Yeah, people loved the product, it was fantastic. Everybody thought it was just amazing. But the math didn't work. So I had to let that go in the, you know, my company, Quantum Learning, we helped companies launch products and then grow those brands in the pharma space. Well, training the salesforce and the brand team and the medical science liaison community to promote and launch a brand. These are hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit, sometimes millions of dollars per unit. So you can spend, you know, if you have a million dollar project, you can spend $100,000 getting the deal. You can fly back and forth across the country 30, 50, 100 times to get one deal because the math works. And so those are spectacular unit economics. Software as a service has spectacular unit economics. And so I think that's the first question to ask if you're going into unit economics work and just to define what that means. It's the revenue that you get per deal or per sale, what it costs you to make and ship and service that unit of value. And if that math works, go, baby, go. If it doesn't work either, figure out how to make it work. I have a great Elon story about that. Figure out how to make it work or let it go.

[Travis]

What's the Elon story?

[Fred Marshall]

Well, the Elon story was that it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to ship a ton into the atmosphere, into low Earth orbit. And that's too much money because only governments can afford it. So he said our problem to solve is to get the cost per ton into low Earth orbit down to where ordinary companies can put a satellite or something into space. Once he saw that as the problem to solve. Then he said, well, how do we solve it? Well, airplane solved it a long time ago. You reuse the airplane rockets you use once and throw it away. What a waste. So he said if we could reuse the rockets, that would change the unit economics. So he figured out how to get the rockets to land. And we all know that story. We've seen the amazing rockets coming back and landing so beautifully. He solved that. That changed the unit economics. Go, Elon.

[Travis]

Yeah, well, it at least means that you need to go back to the drawing board and figure tomorrow morning is knocking.

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[Travis]

crowd something like even we're talking about the tapes, right? So it's either we abandon this as a line of revenue or we look at it for the back end. What can we, like if it costs us $300 to acquire this $250 customer, it's like, well, that's not necessarily bad to acquire a customer for $300. It's only bad if the 250 thing is the only thing you have to sell to that person. So it can then maybe be like, okay, well what if we opened up this back end thing? That's sort of like the next level of what we sold on the front end piece, and now we can acquire them for $300, but a percentage of those people are going to take this upsell. That's $2,000. And now all of a sudden, the unit economics are working out again. They're starting to be attractive again.

[Fred Marshall]

That's right. And I almost call that first sale marketing. It's really marketing. We're pretending it's a product, but it's really marketing. Yeah, from that point of view. Yeah. But from the customer's point of view, it has to be value all the way. Otherwise people are busy.

[Travis]

Just because you can charge something doesn't mean you should charge something. It has to actually be worth value that you're asking in exchange for, you know. Tell me, tell me about quantum learning. What what is. What's been some of the biggest discoveries or, or points of learning that you've had running this business?

[Fred Marshall]

Well, you know, one of the biggest. I was just talking with a friend about this about an hour ago. One of the biggest aha. Moments that I had was I found something that was attributed to somebody from Harvard. I don't know who it was, but. But it was a little saying. I put it on my fireplace mantle because I thought it was so important. It's. Instead of thinking, how can I do this? Think how can this get done? And that is a small difference, but it's all the difference in the world if I try to do everything myself. And this is the entrepreneur's dilemma, right? We try to do everything ourselves, maybe because we think we can do it better, maybe we can, maybe we can't, or we want to control, or we're, you know, who knows? There's a whole list of reasons why people try to do everything themselves. But the problem is that you become the rate limiting step. Well, that's no good. So, you know, I learned early on that let other people do it and it's not going to be what you wanted. Exactly. And you probably will have to coach and help them and you'll probably have to give feedback and it'll probably take longer initially, early on, but after a while they'll figure it out and then they'll become so effective and nowadays that, you know, you're not just delegating to a person. We're delegating to AI agents. We're going to be delegating to swarms of AI agents in the next 18 months. I know you know that because it's all over the news, but it's really true. We're also going to have robotics in our lives. We're going to, you know, Elon Musk is making this new robot. Brett Adcock from Figure is making a robot that's pretty fantastic. It's certainly 24, 36 months. There are going to be a lot of robots walking around that couldn't be doing things for us that are going to elevate our lives. They might take some jobs for sure, but I don't see it that way. And this is kind of an important point too. It's like, how do you see AI? How do you see technology? What's your first reaction? Is it, oh my God, is it fear that wells up? Is that the first thing? And that's okay if that's the first thing, but I think it's important to quickly replace that with no, no, this. What's the opportunity hiding inside this? And that's a great frame of reference to come to life with, let alone entrepreneurship. But I think very quickly you have to get past doing everything yourself and instead build the systems and the tech stacks to deliver better outcomes than even you could do. That's the job, really.

[Travis]

Yeah, sure, sure. Developing something that can run without you making yourself redundant or not needed.

[Fred Marshall]

Yeah. And build out. I think of it as building out the functional domains of the business and, you know, roughly what they are. But every business is a little different. Like, let's contrast for a minute. You could have, you know, sales, marketing, R and D, operations, you could have that framework. But if you take filmmaking, filmmaking, they gotta acquire the book or the rights to the film. Then somebody has to write the script, okay? That's all early. Then there's pre production. That's getting everything ready before we shoot. Then there's production, and then there's post production and then there's distribution. Those are the main beats of the film business. Well, each one of those, you need to build out and develop the capability in each one of those columns, if you will. Every business has its own weird little columns. And that's why it's good to work for a couple of other companies that are in that business, because you learn what those columns are, you learn what the infrastructure is already, and then you can improve it. Do you see what I'm saying? It can be really powerful and it kind of jumpstarts you and can save you a decade.

[Travis]

If somebody's listening right now and they're thinking that they want to develop some sort of a product, they want to get into the physical product space is obviously something that you've touched on a lot. And in a very complex industry, right. You're not just. You're not just manufacturing a little widget, like a fidget spinner or something like that, you know, like you're. You're having to go through layers of research. It costs a lot of money in R and D just to get to the first version and things like that. What's your advice to somebody who's thinking, like, I don't even know where to start here, but I have this idea for something and I'd love to get a test product out there and see how it works.

[Fred Marshall]

Goes well, interestingly enough, there is a whole sub industry and I just got an email from a guy who's in this world where if you have an idea, they'll build it for you. They'll literally build you, the prototype. And it's, it's a little, it's kind of expensive. It depends on what you're trying to build, how expensive it is. But if you have an idea for a cool new thing, whatever that new thing is, they can actually build it. So if I, this is a silly example, but if I wanted to build a panda bear that was an, had an AI agent inside it that was kid friendly, that could teach kids, you know, fill in the blank, whatever it is you wanted to teach, or just be a companion when they're feeling lonely or whatever, they could literally build that prototype and they'd figure out a way how to get ChatGPT inside it, and they'd figure out a way how to make your own personal foundation model that works with that. They can do all of that end to end. So there's a universe that you can tap into to do those kinds of things. And that's one path. The other path is back to working with people who are already doing in that vertical. You know, the world's changing fast, but a lot of the world's going to be exactly the same 50 years from now than it is today. I mean, it'll literally be the same. Beds are not going to change that much. Right. You still need to sleep. They still, but. And so those are areas of opportunity to innovate. And I think the most exciting areas are at the intersections. So AI plus neuroscience or AI plus robotics or combining things that have never been combined before, including your own skills and talents. That's a huge opportunity, I think limited only by your imagination.

[Travis]

Fred, I appreciate you taking the time to join us on the show today. It's been going by really fast, which usually is a good sign for me. So tell me where, where people can go to get more from you and what you guys are working on these days.

[Fred Marshall]

Well, if you go to thrivefutureyou.com you can take a look at. You can, you know, contact me, of course. But I've written a new book called Thrive the Antidote to Future Shock. It's all about how to thrive in this incredibly fast changing world that we're living in, with AI changing the rules of the game and sometimes putting our jobs at risk and careers at risk. How to navigate that and do it, you know, in a nice, chill, calm, but super strategic way. Yeah.

[Travis]

And remain optimistic rather than pessimistic.

[Fred Marshall]

100. Yeah, for sure.

[Travis]

Thrive future you.com to connect with Fred and pick up a new a copy of his new book, Thrive. I hope you guys take some of these things and actually take some action against them. Fred, I appreciate you taking the time to come on the show. I know.

[Fred Marshall]

Pleasure.

[Travis]

You're a busy guy, so I don't take that for granted. Everybody else listening. Remember, money only solves your money problem, but it's easier to solve the rest of your problems with money in the bank. So let's start there. Here on the Travis Makes Money podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you guys next time. Peace.