1106 – Don’t Be A Fake: Tom talks Fake It Until You Break It

SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

🎧 Episode 1106 – “Fake It Until You Break It” (Summary)
🔑 Core Message
The common advice “fake it till you make it” often leads people into unethical behavior—fake testimonials, inflated income claims, and misleading marketing—which ultimately destroys trust and reputations. Instead, the real path to long-term success is honesty, transparency, and overdelivering value.
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⚠️ The Problem with “Faking It”
• Many marketers:
o Use fake testimonials (illegal under FTC rules)
o Inflate value (“$5,000 product for $17”)
o Misrepresent lifestyles (luxury images, fake success)
• Some manipulate numbers:
o Show gross revenue but hide expenses (ads, commissions)
o Appear profitable when they actually lost money
• Result:
o Customers feel deceived
o Chargebacks increase
o Reputation collapses → business disappears
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💡 What Beginners Should Do Instead
1. Be Honest About Your Experience
• Admit you're new
• Emphasize your commitment to delivering results
• Customers often prefer honesty over fake expertise
2. Overdeliver on Value
• Give more than promised
• This builds trust quickly in a market full of disappointment
• Helps you stand out immediately
3. Keep Your Job Initially
• Use it to fund your business
• Sacrifice short-term comfort (TV, downtime)
• Invest time and money into building your business foundation
4. Build Real Testimonials
• Offer services in exchange for honest feedback
• Avoid fake reviews at all costs
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🧠 Strategic Positioning
Become a Trusted Authority
• Educate people about scams and misleading practices
• Share insights without directly attacking individuals
• This builds credibility and attracts loyal followers
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📊 Truth About “Big Income Claims”
• Example given:
o $200,000 revenue sounds impressive…
o But after:
 $100K affiliate payouts
 $150K ad spend
o Result = $50K loss
• Lesson: Revenue ≠ Profit
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🤝 The Power of Trust
• Long-term honesty leads to:
o More opportunities
o Greater business flexibility
o Higher earnings over time
• Example:
o Trusted speakers are given more control (e.g., handling payments, accessing leads)
o This leads to significantly higher profits
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🚀 Final Takeaway
• Don’t:
o Fake success
o Mislead customers
• Do:
o Be transparent
o Deliver more than promised
o Build trust consistently
👉 Short-term honesty beats short-term hype—and wins massively in the long run.

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Episode 1106 – Fake It Until You Break It
[00:00:08] 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 1106 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today is Fake it until you break it. Alright, you've heard the old saying fake it til you make it. Well, it can be kind of opposite. And that's what I'm going to talk about today. Fake it till you break it. Hope you didn't miss episode 1105. That was a scheduling all the cool things that your AI will do for you every day or every other day or Monday, Wednesday, Friday, whatever you want to do. It's crazy. There's a whole bunch of examples in that episode. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number. AI Scheduling was 1105. Make sure you pick up a copy of our automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Version 3.0 is the latest. However, one of the things I've been promoting for 100 years, Shortcut keys, is now discontinued as a program, and now it's a browser extension. So if you see me talking about that before I update to episode 4.0, you'll know that it's now a browser extension. All right, check out my mentor program at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. And my school at IMTCVA.org, certified to operate by SCHEV.
[00:01:41] All right. The old saying is fake it until you make it. Well, that's kind of been bastardized into people doing fake testimonials and fake income figures and fake success stuff, you know, standing in front of jets and acting like they're on the beach when they're laying on a pile of sand at a construction site with a close up picture.
[00:02:05] I mean, all kinds of BS like that. The problem is, once you're found out doing this kind of stuff, you're pretty much cooked. And that's why so many of their, you know, you get these sales letters of this greatest program on earth and then then you get it and it sucks. And those people disappear off the face of the earth and they're never heard from again because they faked it. They said something that wasn't true, and they got caught at it, and then they just disappeared. A lot of them, yes, are from other countries rather than the United States, some third world countries. But people are doing it all over the United States, too. You look at Instagram and look at all these people, you know, claiming and showing themselves in these great Situations. And you know, truth be told, most of them can't make their car payment or rent. All right. So so that's not what you want. You don't want to fake it until you break it. A lot of them use fake testimonials, which is clearly against Federal Trade Commission rules, but they do it anyway from people you never heard of. And then again, they disappear, like I said. And then and then you see, well, this is worth $5,000. But today during our lunch, you can have it for $17. All right. And like, come on, you know, so any time you, you inflate and pretend something's valuable and then sell it super cheap, it's going to be questionable and it's probably fraudulent.
[00:03:39] So, you don't want to be in that game. Now, what do you do about this if you're new, right? Even if some of you have been around for a while and still doing this stuff, I've cut off relationships with people because I see him doing these fake things and they've been around a long time, but they get desperate if they're not doing so well and then they just start lying about stuff. I did it. It was happening all the time when I was doing a lot of speaking at public events. The other speakers would just make up the biggest horseshit on earth and then disappear after they got your money. See? And there's so many chargebacks, it looks like they were doing great. But then people would say, hey, you screwed me. We're going to charge back our credit card. So you don't see a lot of that. I haven't had a chargeback. I think I think ever and I can barely remember how to do a refund because I don't do these things that I just told you about. But if you are new. Okay. What do you do about it? G you want to try to make make some money? And I'd say keep your your dreaded j-o-b to help finance your movement into the online world, which is high profit if you do what you're supposed to do and keep your job. But you got to drop some things.
[00:04:57] You got to drop like, you know, coming home from work and oh, I'm tired. I'm just going to watch TV or Netflix all night. No, you got to sacrifice in the short run to get your success in the long run, especially if you're new. So use that money from your job to help finance your movement into the your own business. But anyway, if you're new, here's the thing. Admit it. I'd rather have a new person admit it to me and tell me that they're hungry and they're going to take care of me and then actually do it. Then somebody that's been around for a while that's just I'm just another number. And they, you know, just deposit in their bank account and they could care less if I got my value that they promised me, say, and the, I think the old joke is, uh, at our bank, you're not a number, you're a number and several letters. So? So yeah. Admit it. Tell them that you're really going to take care of them, give them extra value, give them more than they ever dreamed of. And that will start you on a great, great business because there's so people are getting so used to getting, you know, less than they, they promised for and just, oh, okay. But if you give more than you promise, you will stand out very clearly. Nowadays, you can trade your services for testimonials to get those going because those are very important for you. You can refer and expose people not by name, because they'll sue you, but tell them the the kind of things that are happening to them.
[00:06:45] I did that when I came out with the top 20 seminar scams, and then I added to it when there was a couple more appeared and it got a couple hundred thousand views. And, and I looked and I was perceived as the trusted person in the speaking industry. People all the time would say, hey, what do you think about this? What do you think about this? Is this a scam? Look what happened to me. What do I do now? You know? So I became a trusted advisor to people that that got screwed because I exposed it. I was the one that exposed it. Still, there are, you know, really there's sneaky bad people that pretend to expose stuff and then they do the same thing to you. I, I, I've seen that over and over again. And then there's other really, I don't want to say ominous. There's another word for this, but, uh, so, so for instance, they use numbers to, to fake you out and the numbers are real, but they conveniently forget about certain numbers. So for instance, let's say they came up with this promotion. We made $200,000 on this in the in the past two weeks. And that may be true. They may have grossed and brought in $200,000. Okay. But then they leave out all the other stuff. So they probably paid out more than 100,000 in affiliate commissions, and they may have run $150,000 worth of ads.
[00:08:24] And the truth be told, they lost $50,000 on the deal. And they're trying to make it up by suckering you into buying the thing. And if they can sucker more than 50,000, they start making a profit, right? But it all started with a smoke and mirrors amount of figures. And I mean, people are were even photoshopping PayPal things and, you know, just all kinds of things. So you got to be extremely careful, but you don't want to do any of this stuff because as soon as you get found out, word spreads, you're you're cooked. All right. So so don't fake it until you make it fake. Be honest with everything you do and it pays off really, really big in the long run. I'll give you another example. When you speak at these big public events, the promoters absolutely run the credit cards. They do not want you running the credit cards. There's a few exceptions. They always let me run the credit cards because I had such a massive reputation of sending them money after the event. By me following up with potential clients and then sending them their fair commission, they're like, hey, we trust this guy and we, you know, if it's if, if we have to run the credit cards and he's trying to follow up, it's going to be a nightmare. So they let me do it. And they, we all made enormous amounts of money because of it. So that's where the trust factor kicks in.
[00:10:02] People will allow you to do stuff. Another thing is usually they won't let you do a business card drawing because they don't want their their people to get in your database, even if you were the speaker there. So for me, I won't even go unless they do it. But the word spread quickly. Oh my God, he sold so many during the event and then he sold so many more after the event because he followed up with all these people and and the promoters got their commissions. That's all based on the fact that I was trustworthy and had proven it over and over again. And that has meant millions of dollars over the years. All right. So and it's a big contrast to those people that disappear because they're doing fake stuff. Say so anyway. Don't fake it until you break it. Don't fake it till you make it. Just be honest and trustworthy. Give extra value and you can have a massively great business. Uh. Over time. All right, that's my story. I'm sticking to it. Check out my mentor program. Greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. And my school, IMTCVA.org, the only licensed dedicated internet and digital marketing school in the country, probably the world certified to operate by SCHEV, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's quality distance learning. All right. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. I'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.