209 – A homeschooling dad: Tom interviews Lee Mosler

Episode 209 – Lee Mosler
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody, it's Tom here with episode two hundred nine of Screw the Commute podcast. We're here with Lee Mosler. He's a veteran and we just passed the Veterans Day. And I want to thank him for his service, along with all the other folks that keep us safe. The veteran means he's out of the service, but he's in Hawaii right now keeping us safe from all the bad weather that Hawaii has all the time. So so we're glad that he's with us today. Hope you didn't miss episode 208. That's on gamification. That's where I told you lots of methods of using. It's not it's not about games. It was about using game techniques to get more engagement on all your stuff. So that's a very eye-opening episode there 208. That's one of my Monday training sessions. Now, I hope you grab a copy of our podcast app. It's in the app store and you can also go to screwthecommute.com/app and we have complete instructions and screen captures and everything. Show you how to use all the fancy functions so you can take us with you on the road. Now, also, as a thank you for listening to the show. Grab a copy of our How to Automate Your Business e-book. This book has saved me over seven and a half million keystrokes. Just one of the tips that it allowed me to handle up to one hundred and fifty thousand subscribers and forty thousand customers without pulling my hair out. And if you know me, you see, I got a full head of hair. My dad was 94. He still had his hair. So I got lucky. So grab that over at Screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're there, I threw in an extra bonus of how what I learned after doing one hundred and twenty quality podcasts and now we're up to two hundred nine today. So. So a lot of good stuff in there that people were charging you a lot of money for and you get it for free. All right. Our sponsor is the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia. It's a distance learning school which teaches legitimate techniques to make a great living, either working for someone else or starting your own online business or both. Then Lee's going to tell us a lot about what he's got to offer along those lines too, because he's got this wonderful son that he homeschools and he's able to do it because he makes money online. So that's what we love around here. But my school is something that we also have scholarships available for military, first responders, law enforcement and the special scholarship for military spouses. So if you know anybody that is a military spouse and wants a portable career, the Department of Defense cleared us to give them a special scholarship. So get in touch with us at IMTCVA.org.

[00:03:24] So Lee Mosler is the main event for us today. He's a U.S. Army veteran. He's an entrepreneur and a single father on a mission to bring an entire generation out of poverty and keep parents at home with their kids by teaching the skills needed to create both passive and active income online. Lee, are you ready to screw. The commute. How you doing man?

[00:03:53] I am well, how are you?

[00:03:55] Good. Good. It was good being on your show. I don't know when it's coming out, but it was also good meeting you in D.C. at the at the tribe meeting the vetrepreneur tribe meeting. And that was a great event. Stephen Kuhn, the leader of the Vetrepreneur tribe on Facebook, put us together. So tell everybody what you're doing now and then we'll take you back and see how you came up through the ranks.

[00:04:22] Well, right now, I'm just actually kind of lounging back a little bit because I get to work from home. Like you said, in beautiful Hawaii. But I got kind of excited about MIC D.C. Where we had met because a lot of what you do is kind of the stuff that I've been doing for so long. And when I saw that what you were doing and how long you've been doing it and what you've made from it, actually kind of. Propelled me a little bit harder to push for this. So that's that's what I've been doing since then is just building and building and building and making sure that I stay true to that mission statement and help get people out of a job and and back home with their kids.

[00:05:09] Yeah, that's that's good. Tell us a little bit about the out of poverty part.

[00:05:14] So I live in a state where people are working 60 to 80 hours a week and they're working two and three jobs. They're doing this to make ends meet. They're not doing this to be to have an abundance of money or even any kind of surplus. And one of the problems is everybody's so focused on this working a job idea that they don't stop to think that there are other opportunities out there. My job is to help them understand those opportunities and how to help take hobbies or even skill sets that they've learned on their job and turn those into profitable industries for themselves.

[00:05:56] So I didn't have much luck when I went to Hawaii. I was only there for one seminar. I really wasn't accepted that much. How are you being accepted into it's kind of a different culture over there?

[00:06:12] Absolutely. They know I'm what they call a haole. It traditionally means outsider. But. When you work with them on a one to one basis you use, it's a lot like family, you know. You would never let somebody come in from the outside and tell you what's wrong with you. But if your family member told you the same thing, you'd be like, OK, maybe I should listen to a little bit more. So it's more of a family dynamic here. And I actually kind of like that a little bit more because that means that somebody just walking off the street isn't going to be able to reach the same people that I would be able to reach by working continuously in the community. So it makes it forces me to work harder inside the community than just to, you know, put on a marketing plan and, you know, go after these, you know, this this particular community.

[00:07:08] Yeah. How long you've been there?

[00:07:11] I have been here since. I want to say April or May of 2017 so two and a half years now.

[00:07:19] Yeah. I have a friend of mine that sells real estate over there. She was in Baltimore for a long time and she's had the same thing. It took her a while to crack the market because she was, you know, just the. She was a haole. But she did well after after she was there. You know, she's been there or 10 years now. So it's going good. So. So what kind of program are you. Do you have that's helping the folks stay at home with their kids?

[00:07:49] So. I've had over 10 years of web design experience, and this entire idea came from that I had originally. I wanted to create a platform who that was. Against the the Web design world. Instead of charging, you know, five thousand ten thousand dollars for Web sites showing people that they could do this for a lot cheaper, that way they don't have to go into debt as much. And they can also make sure that. The money that they're needing to spend on their business isn't being spent elsewhere on something that they don't necessarily need.

[00:08:31] You know, that's music to my ears, right? Because that's the way I roll and I actually own the website, I bought it years ago called KillYourWebdesigner.com.

[00:08:45] Yes. That's a really bad problem with my industry, is there are so many people out there that are charging ridiculous amounts of money just because they can. And for the most part, most people don't know exactly what they're getting in web design. So. I said I'm going I'm going to flip this, then I've always been the kind of go against the grain. So why not? I took a idea and I help people now create Web sites in about three to five minutes for forty nine bucks a month, which is unbelievably cheap. Nobody else out there is doing it for that price. And they're not. And they have all the same marketing pieces that you need that all these, you know, high end, multi thousand dollar Web sites have. So you got your on page SEO, your your Facebook ads, all your SEO, everything you need is right there. And. While I was doing this, I was like, well, can I turn this into something else? Is there another avenue for this? And that's when the idea of helping people, showing them how to create online income and active or passive capacity came to came to light. And I put all the tools in place. I was already using most of the tools. And it just became it just started to make sense more and more that if somebody could take a forty nine dollar Web site and create these huge business style websites that they're running their businesses on. Why couldn't you take forty nine dollar Web sites and create an extra thousand dollars a month in active or passive income? And so that's what I'm doing with this platform as I'm actually helping people and showing them what they can do with with their Web site.

[00:10:43] Yeah, and what I liked about you is, you know, even though you have more technical skills that I'll ever have. You still don't act like it. You know, that's that's what makes you successful with regular people. Because a lot of the technical people, they get upset. They're frustrated because you don't know where to click and they get mad at you. And they they they they don't have what I call a good website manner instead of a bedside manner. But that's the big asset for you to work with regular people. You know, they just want to help their kids and help their family. And they're not trying to be tech wizards.

[00:11:23] Right. It shouldn't be that hard, it shouldn't be so hard that you have to break out the manual every time you want to do something, it should be pretty intuitive. And if you're not, then you've actually kind of failed as a web designer. And a lot of ways.

[00:11:38] Yeah, a manual. what's that? So. So let's take us back. Were you an entrepreneurial kid?

[00:11:51] I was not. My dad actually had a business that was more suited to not paying taxes versus making money. So he just basically used it to fuel his hobby.

[00:12:07] I see. Which was what?

[00:12:07] Building computers. Yeah. I grew up in the 80s. My first computer was this massive suitcase style computer with this two by two inch screen screen and took these massive floppy disks. I mean, you could put your foot on and still have room around it. You know, there's a huge. And then we started building of course, we took those apart, but then we started building what we now know as a traditional PC. And actually, before I move back to Dallas, I actually had one of those old one hundred twenty four kilobytes, memory sticks or 128 kilobytes. And looking at today's stuff now, it's like we've come a long way to go through a short period of time.

[00:13:01] Is he still with us, your dad?

[00:13:02] That he is. He's back in Dallas.

[00:13:06] Yeah. I've got to ask him if he knows what a CPM machine. Yeah, that was one of my first ones. It was six thousand dollars. And I mean a calculator. Now and your watch will do more. So. So then what do you go to school, go right into the service?

[00:13:31] I graduated high school, went into the service about two years afterwards. I tried doing the whole college thing. It just doesn't work for me. I can't sit and listen to somebody tell me things I have to actively do. Things went to the army. I spent three years in the army and was medically discharged. I was going career, but that actually kind of opened the door into what I do now because had it not been for that that medical issue, I would not have learned web design and I wouldn't learned the ins and outs of building sites and how they work and breaking them down. I've always been kind of a tinkerer, right? So I always look at the source codes and break things down piece by piece. But after I got out of the army and went and worked a few odd jobs, well, I guess when you're in the military, it's hard for you to sit still and it's really hard for you to take authority from other people who you deem not as bright. And I think that just comes. I think that is an issue with a lot of vets. And it seems it actually kind of helps us in a lot of ways because it makes it to where we are forced to do our own thing. Worked like I said, I worked a bunch of odd jobs. I worked door to door marketing, sold AT&T U-verse. I sold. I also did insurance sales for a little bit right before Obamacare hit that kind of tanked. A lot of the private industry. And then I went to work for the last company I ever worked for. Besides my own, which did race sales, we did the race registration softwares for companies like Iron Man and Tough Mudder, no big these big, massive racing events. We did the software for those and I was pretty good at. And I was doing cold calls. We were doing. I think your average sales around five thousand dollars and in six weeks I broke their record and did half a million dollars. And they had never seen it. I told them I would do it from day one. And they said, can't be done. So I said challenge accepted.

[00:15:58] You should have tied a percentage to it. They would have said yes because they figured you could never do it.

[00:16:11] Right, exactly. But that that actually was the reason why I left is because they didn't want to move me out of that position. They wanted to keep me there because I was quite successful at it. And I no longer wanted to be tied to that. I wanted to teach. And when they said no and they they had promoted somebody else instead who literally left like three weeks later because he couldn't handle it. I was I was done. I didn't want to work for a company, didn't have my best interests in mind, but their own interest in mind.

[00:16:46] But they're regretting that.

[00:16:49] Probably. I I trained quite a few people that was on my team. They were doing pretty well when I left. So.

[00:16:56] All right. So you left then what?

[00:16:59] I created my own web design company. I went for making 100K a year to make it about 20 K, but I was at home, I had a newborn son. Want that newborn who's about a year and a year, year and a half and. I love the freedom. I love being able to wake up whenever I wanted to wake up. I love the fact that I could. Go meet clients in the middle of the day while everybody's complaining about having to go back to work after their lunch break. I'm sitting there having good coffee with a client and helping them understand their Web, their Web site or how they make money online or any number of softwares that you could use to. Figure out, you know, where they wanted to be. And that was that was for me, the point in which I turned this wantrepreneur into an entrepreneur.

[00:17:52] And when was that?

[00:17:59] When I was when I had taken the step back from my job and actively went after clients, and help them build their business.

[00:18:07] What year was it?

[00:18:09] That was a 2015.

[00:18:12] Doing the same thing ever since then.

[00:18:17] It's been a very fast four years.

[00:18:21] And you're home schooling, your son.

[00:18:24] I am.

[00:18:25] I love that I get from that. I love that because I never met a homeschool kid. I did love this. They're just they're sponges for knowledge. They're high achievers, you know, they're you know. I mean, for the most part, parents do this because they want to make their children better. There's a few bad apples that just want to get out of taking their kids to school. But for the most part, the homeschooling community is great.

[00:18:54] Yeah, I absolutely love home-schooling. It allows me the ability to go on a Tuesday morning at 9:00 and take my son to the zoo and let him play and let him learn something about the animals. Or maybe it's a two week vacation in the middle of, you know, what's what's a busy month, February. You know, when all the kids are in school. That's that's something that you don't get when you go to a traditional school. And I love the ability to have that kind of freedom.

[00:19:26] Well, I know you're a smart guy. But how are you going to figure out this new math stuff they're shoving down your throat?

[00:19:31] Oh, I don't do Common Core at all. I actually have a I have a buddy who's a elementary school teacher, and I asked him to show it to me. And he actually had a break out a bar napkin to figure it. I mean, I'm like, why would you need this? I mean, let's be honest, math hasn't changed. You know very much.

[00:19:50] No, it's not. According to the people of shoving that stuff down your throat. They're making fun of it. Well, they're showing a math problem and they're showing the old way to do it. And the new way to do it the new way takes like five times as long.

[00:20:04] And it's it's insane because it's only built around memorization. It's not built around critical thinking. So that's the ideas is to is to know your memorization skills up to 10 or your multiplication up to 10 and then you base everything on on that idea.

[00:20:23] Well, all I know is a lot of this stuff is is created, but what I call highly educated idiots, really, some of the people running the schools that have kids in these schools because of the stuff that they're showing them and they're doing with them. Oh, my God, it's scary.

[00:20:43] Yeah, it's it's it's really bad. And when you have people who they can't do 13 times twelve in their head, it's like there's gonna come a day when you're gonna need that. What is going to come a day when you need basic math skills and the ability to do math on the fly and you're not going to have a calculator. Your phone's gonna be at a, you know, out of battery. You need memorization and you need math. And if you don't have that, then, well, when there's not a bar napkin around.

[00:21:15] Most of the generations wouldn't even believe you. They'd just blow it off like you're crazy because they never had anything. I mean, they came out of the womb swiping this tablet, you know? And they can't read a round clock, you know, because everything's digital. And it used to be this used to be funny when a little baby, little toddler would go up to the TV and start trying to swipe this like it's a giant screen. But now you can do it. So it's not funny anymore.

[00:21:49] So if you really want to see terror in a kid's eyes, put a rotary phone in front of them. Sit back and watch.

[00:21:55] There are some funny videos on that too, on YouTube. So. So we've got to take a brief sponsor break when we come back. We're going to ask Lee what's a typical day look like for him? I'm afraid to hear what that is going to the zoo. I remember that. I remember that rocky thing. Retards like the zoo. You might be too young to remember that. That's what Polly said to Rocky about his girlfriend.

[00:22:25] So anyway, folks, speaking of higher education in the highly educated idiots that are trying to charge you a fortune and making you dumber, I got a webinar I want you to watch. It's at screwthecommute.com/webinars if you have any interest in higher education or if you have nephews, nieces or neighbors or kids that are considering going to college. I mean, that's been brainwashed in our heads. And yes, some people should go to college, but lots of people shouldn't go to college. They're just running up debt coming out with no marketable skills. In this webinar is going to make you mad. There's no doubt about it. It's going to show you how the rates and the tuitions are going up for no reason. It's going to show you how the colleges systematically have been inflating grade point averages. We have the hard, cold facts in this webinar to make it look like they're doing a better job of teaching. Yeah, but the testing is showing that they're actually dumber. And then another study followed two thousand kids over a period of years at many different colleges and universities. And the average kid was spending eight hours total. In preparing for class and going to class the rest of the time was eating, partying and shopping. I sure don't think I'd want to mortgage my house to pay for that. And then they're getting out and trying to compete for jobs at Starbucks. So the online marketing that Lee teaches and that I teach to my formal school and my mentor program are giving people marketable skills. In fact, I wouldn't it got cleared by the Department of Defense for the military spouse program unless my skill was an actual skill that's in demand and portable, which means you can take it anywhere that you can be at the beach at Starbucks. While the the MBA PhD students serve you, you can be making money. So check out the the webinar. You can either download the audio or watch the actual webinar. And this was done by people, not me, just hawking my school. This was done by a lot of high level educators that see what's happening and they're embarrassed about it and they're trying to save you from enormous amounts of debt. So so check it out at screwthecommute.com and click on webinars and you can either download the audio or watch the webinar.

[00:25:00] Let's get back to the main event. We got Lee Mosler here. He's a great dad that does home schooling and he helps people stay home with their kids by teaching them online business. So so, Lee, what's a typical day look like for you and how old is your child?

[00:25:18] My boy is 5, but he'll be 6 in like, I don't know, 20 ish days. It's it's scary.

[00:25:27] So you're able to handle his curriculum at that age. That's not too advanced for you?

[00:25:36] Not yet. Give it. Give it like six months. But no, typical day is is actually pretty nice. We wake up whenever we want to wake up sometime around noon.

[00:25:49] Oh I thought you woke up at the crack at noon or so.

[00:25:53] Oh no I'm usually up working before he is. Okay. And when he gets up I generally start working with him, but I'll usually be up about four hours or so before. OK. Just so I can make sure to get my stuff done. But will we work through his stuff. I have a workbook for his school and then I also use.

[00:26:17] Is that school or is that preschool or what is it considered?

[00:26:20] It's kindergarten. He's learning a of course. Numbers. Basic math. Except this particular one. We don't actually start with traditional additional steps and subtract subtraction. I can't speak to that. And we we actually focus on multiplication. So he knows his twos and he knows this threes.

[00:26:41] Does he know his ABCs?

[00:26:42] He does know his ABCs.

[00:26:45] Well, yeah, but I just heard on TV and I'm not making this up. I'm not making this up. Apparently the ABC song is racist. Did you see that?

[00:26:57] I heard that and they changed the way instead of it being LMNOP they changed that up. And it's like you ever get the look on your face when you. Something you just hear is the dumbest thing in the world.

[00:27:14] Highly educated idiots. Yeah, I get that look on my face every time I turn to TV. So anyway, he's these guys. ABC is working on multiplication.

[00:27:30] Yeah. And he knows all of his he knows the phonetics of each letter. So strong and traditional and. I got to say, I love it because we'll go through. And he'll read a sign and he'll ask me, you know, he'll say, what does this spell. Sound it out?. And so he starts sounding it out and he starts with every letter and then we start putting letters together. And then by the by the end of, you know, 60 seconds or so. He's got the word move. And he's unbelievably smart. And his memory is uncanny sometimes. I really wish he didn't have such good memory because he remembers everything. And it's he'll see a word you'll see or they haven't seen in six months and then just blurt it out and I'll be like, where did you see that? We we you know, it was on the such and such side of the building, you know passing by. I've got to think back. OK, when were we over there?

[00:28:37] That's amazing. It's amazing. How do you work on stuff like like like the term faux pas that doesn't fit into any of the stuff that the kids learning? Oh, we'll get to that.

[00:28:54] Yeah. Well, we'll get to that.

[00:28:57] So there's always exceptions.

[00:28:59] Yes. There's really no the great thing about this is I control the environment. So that's not really that doesn't happen as much.

[00:29:09] So he probably pronounce it fah you 10.

[00:29:18] It's one of those words you have to be like, that's not English. You have to say it differently.

[00:29:21] Yeah. There you go. Good explanation. So. All right. So you work with him and then what? You guys do any PT?

[00:29:32] I'm not really that I'm not really that big of a PT guy. But yeah, so will he. We've got a pretty decent sized backyard. He'll go out and run around. Sometimes we'll go to the park. A lot of times I like to go to the zoo. I like I came to interact with other kids. And this is really good because our zoo here it's small, but it's in the middle of Honolulu. So you get you get a pretty good mix of kids that come through there and they have a pretty decent sized playground.

[00:30:03] Yeah. How about the cat, though? Play with the cat.

[00:30:07] Yeah. If he's not trying to be attacked by the cat.

[00:30:10] You teaching him how to care for the cat and how to care for it.

[00:30:16] Of course. Yes, absolutely. That's one of the reasons why we got animals. Because personal responsibility is as big in my world, especially coming from a military background. Pets are the absolute best way to teach a child how to have responsibility and how to take pride in that responsibility. So, yeah, the cats are big, too. We got two cats. He feeds and waters when they need it. When I was growing up, my dad said I had kids so that I didn't have to mow the lawn. I thought he was joking. Turns out that mowing the lawn is actually pretty good for your kid because it teaches that responsibility. So yeah, the litter box is the exact same thing for him because we live in somebody, you know, we we rent so we don't actually do the yard.

[00:31:13] So what's the rest of the day look like?

[00:31:13] The rest of the day is pretty much a back and forth of, you know, if we if we need to do more schooling, then we will. But for the most part, it's just relax and work on some business stuff. He'll sit behind me as I work on Web sites or he'll sit behind me as I talk with clients or if I need to record something. He's always here. He's always learning and he's always watching. And I think if I think if you can reach a child at his age and show them what they what they can accomplish. At that young of an age, then they I mean, the sky's the limit.

[00:31:56] Exactly. The formative years.

[00:31:59] Exactly. When we're adults, we're learning this right, 16 through 18, maybe even into our 20s. This is when we're learning this. But what would happen if we had 10 to 15 more years? To learn this by the time we're in our 20s. Yeah. Look at Mark Zuckerberg. He was coding from a very early age and turn a basic coding into the world's leading social media platform. He had an extra 10 years to do it.

[00:32:35] Yeah. So I really applaud you for doing that. Any parents that do that, they're really doing right. Because like I said, when I watch the TV, I see some of the stuff that's going on out there. Just I'm glad I'll be dead by the time they're leaving the country. So thanks so much for checking in with us today. So how did people get a hold of you and how did they learn about this platform of a Web site building?

[00:33:02] Well, you can e-mail me directly at Lee@shapingair.com.

[00:33:10] Ok. OK. We'll have this in the show notes so they can just click on it.

[00:33:14] Ok. Yeah. Email me or visit my Web site and contact me through the Web site. Shapingair.com.

[00:33:20] And so is the thing ready to go now? The Web site builder.

[00:33:23] Will be up and ready by the time this episode airs.

[00:33:28] Ok. That that's going to be like in two days. So awesome. And what's what's what's it called?

[00:33:40] It's called An imagined reality.

[00:33:46] All right, so. So thanks so much for talking to us. And can't wait to see that little man grow up.

[00:33:56] Absolutely. Thanks so much.

[00:33:57] All right. Catch ya later.

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