Paul Zane Pilzer served as an economic advisor to two U.S. presidents, and is world-renowned as a leading predictor of economic catalyst and trends. He is author of five best-selling books including Unlimited Wealth, The Next Trillion, and The Wellness Revolution. His books are published in 24 languages. Pilzer started several entrepreneurial businesses, earning his first $1 million before age 26, and his first $10 million before age 30.

“I believe I am a scientist, as close as an economist can be to a scientist, and I'm realistic. Because, I've certainly called on things that were going to be negative as I did in the savings and loan crisis, which I was one of the first people to write a book about, and predict it was coming in the early 1980s. On the general economy, I'm optimistic and it really comes from fundamental science. I mean all of wealth, if we define it, is based on the physical things we like from housing, food, transportation, cars. All the items we have we might call our wealth.

“Traditional economics is about scarcity. If you remember your first year's economics class, if you went to college or high school and studied economics, the first line is ‘Economics is the study of scarcity.’ There's a limited supply out there, the old economists say or many economists today say, on land, minerals, and wealth, and fresh water, and oil, and how we rob from Peter and give to Paul. I always liked that analogy. But, really how we take the wealth from one country and give it to another, or take from one have and give it—have not and give it to have, that's economics. And whether you call it communism, capitalism, socialism, or any other ism, the study of economics is really the study of scarcity.

“This bothered me so much that I should probably explain why. My parents, Eastern European immigrants, struggled very hard and they tried to make sense of everything they saw in the United States, and really never could make sense [of it]. My father worked all his life, six days a week, 12 hours a day, and never made, you know, he never made a great living for his family from his standpoint but, of course, never accumulated any kind of wealth that he could stop working until the day he passed away.

“He sent me off to school and then I later went to Wharton Business School to study economics to be an economist. Why? Because the people I love the most, starting with my father, that's the answer they wanted. How do you get wealthy? How do we all get rich? When I got to Wharton I said, “This isn't about how we all get rich, this is how we take from someone else and get rich,” because the study of economics is the study of scarcity.

“Anyway, I looked around in my immigrant background starting in the 1950s in United States. Every time I saw vacant land being torn down, you know they took wasteland and built huge housing developments all over Long Island and Westchester, when I was growing up. I was thinking, “No one lived there before; they didn't kick anyone out of their houses.” We moved from a little tenement to a nice house in Long Island and so did all my relatives, and so did everyone. I could see all this wealth being created in United States without taking from someone else.

“Then of course, I started running the numbers and realizing that economics is wrong. The foundation of economics—that it's a study of scarcity—is wrong. We should be studying business theories that explain what really is happening. How we're getting more, and more, and more, and more wealthy as a society every year and more and more people are sharing this wealth. That's why I had to develop, originally in the book Unlimited Wealth, 15 years ago—well, 17 years ago, a new theory of economics based on abundance, based on the ability of technology to give us abundant wealth without any limit.

“So back to it, I'm not really an optimist, I'm a realist. Because all of wealth, and this is an essential equation running through all my books, wealth is the product of physical resources times technology. W = P (physical resources) times T (technology). W = P times T. It's not how much farmland you have, even though the history of the world for 5,000 years is how to kill the people next door and take their farmland. It's how many—how much—food per acre you produce.

“In the United States, in one example, we took the farmland productivity per acre up 100 times from 1930 to 1980. Or, put it another way, we went from 30 million farmers in 1930 barely feeding 100 million people, to 300 million farmers in 1980. It's much less now, feeding over 300 million people and there's 40 to 50 percent more food. Wealth equals physical resources times technology. So, it's not how much farmland you have for food, its farmland times technology, meaning yield per acre.”TextBreak

Randy Gage is a prosperity guru and the author of numerous bestselling books, including Risky is the New Safe.

“We live in the greatest time in human history. There has never been a better time to create success. There has never been a greater time to create wealth. There has never been a greater time to go from broke to multimillionaire or multibillionaire in the shortest amount of time than right now, but millions of people don't know that cause they're buying into the bullshit. You know, they're buying into the—they're watching the news, they're reading the news, oh, did you hear the latest job report, what about inflation?

“Understand, your prosperity has nothing to do with your job, your boss, the economy, any of that stuff. Those things are all factors, but your prosperity is created by how you respond to all of those factors and why I wrote Risky is the New Safe. I want people to really get that, forget the gloom and doom. We live in the greatest time—if you could get in that DeLorean with Michael J. Fox and you got to pick a date to go to, this is where you'd want to go.

“When you look at mobile, mobile apps, the Cloud, social media, artificial intelligence, cloning, biogenetic engineering, what's going to happen in the next 10 to 15 years is more than what happened in the last couple thousand. There will be such opportunity, yes; it'll be challenging, yes; there's going to be people nervous, anxious, upset—I get all that. But every one of those challenges has a corresponding opportunity and this is the moment that you want to be alive, right here, right now.”TextBreak

Bruce Muzik is an internationally acclaimed speaker, author, and an expert on how to use the human mind to achieve success effortlessly. His philosophy blends leading edge physics with practical spirituality, providing real-world success for his students around the globe.

“Maybe the first thing to do is to distinguish wealth from money and I think the easiest way to do that would be with a metaphor. I'd like you to imagine that money is like butterflies. And most people go through life trying to catch butterflies. They go through life trying to make money and they've got a butterfly net and they go through life trying to catch the butterflies and at the end of the day the butterflies fly away and they've got what they got and they have to come back the next morning. But after a while other butterfly catchers have caught on to the fact that there are a lot of butterflies to be caught in this particular area and they come in with bigger nets and very often outperform you and you go home empty-handed without much money left, or without many butterflies having been caught that day. What ends up happening is that the butterfly catchers have to come back every day, chasing butterflies. They have to get bigger nets. They have to keep on finding new, improved ways to catch their butterflies.

“However, wealthy people don't go around chasing butterflies, Joe. What they do is they build a garden and they attract butterflies into the garden. And what wealthy people know is that at the end of the day the butterflies disappear from their garden, but they know they'll be back the next day because they've tended to a garden that attracts butterflies. So, I'm going to use the garden as a metaphor for wealth and the butterflies as a metaphor for money. What most people are doing is that they are running through life going, “I want to become a millionaire. I want to make lots of money.” And they go out there chasing butterflies trying to make money without first having grown a garden, or built a foundation of wealth. So I will use that as kind of a metaphor to introduce this concept and let's talk practically then about what wealth is.

“So, the way Roger Hamilton, my mentor, defines this is that wealth is the intangible things that are unique to you. Your wealth is your network. It's your resources. It's your skill sets. And one of my favorites is it's your track records. It's these intangible—it's a mindset as well—it's the intangible things that you can't see. When wealthy people lose all their money they tend to find that money comes back to them over and over again. They tend to make their money back again.”TextBreak

Rabbi Daniel Lapin is the best-selling author of Thou Shall Prosper. Newsweek once called him one of America's most influential rabbis. He has presented before Boeing, Microsoft, and Nordstrom, as well as the U.S. Army.

“Now you want to build money channels. What you really would like is for pipes to be drilled through that barrier so money can flow through it to you. That's what we'd all like. The trouble is that you cannot force anyone on the outside to drill money channels through the barrier to you so as money can flow through. And so you can do the only thing you can do, which is drill those holes from your end.

“How do you do that?

“By pushing money out from you. And once those channels have been created by you pushing money out—while those channels still exist and money can still flow in—the surest way to create those channels is by giving money away.

“And additionally when you think about it almost nothing produces the same amount of social connectedness as giving money away. That's one of the reasons that the smallest town in America has a Rotary Club and as you get to bigger towns there's all kinds of organizations—the theater and the orchestra have a charity. What are all these things for? You know, when you get right down to it, is this all because everybody really desperately wants there to be an orchestra in Wichita? You know probably some people do, but for a whole lot of other people being on the board of the orchestra is a way of meeting other human beings. Because people recognize that when you are willing to give money away you make connections and that's the key thing. That's why it is.

“So again, whether you accept it from the Bible as I do, it is just darn good advice for human beings to give away more than 10 percent of their income. The way I look at it, is God is terrific. He lets me work on a 90 percent commission. Ten percent doesn't even belong to me. Here's the beauty of it. When I give it away I'm helping myself more than I'm helping anybody else.”TextBreak

Bill Bartmann created seven successful businesses in seven different industries, including a $3.5 billion, international company with 3,900 employees that he started from his kitchen table with a $13,000 loan. He's been named National Entrepreneur of the Year by NASDAC, USA Today, Merrill Lynch, and the Kaufmann Foundation. Inc. magazine cited his companies as being among the 500 fastest growing companies in the United States four years in a row. He has been awarded a permanent place in the Smithsonian Institute's Museum of American History and awarded the American Academy of Achievements Golden Plate Award as one of the outstanding achievers of the twenty-first century. Yet, he was once homeless.

“There is an itty, bitty drill that they can do and all it takes is a piece of paper and ballpoint pen. So this isn't high tech or exotic.

“If they were to take just a sheet of paper—and I'll talk slow and let them run to get one right now—and just draw a line down the center of a piece of paper and on the left hand side write the word, “Failure.” Underneath that word failure, write down every time that you've screwed up. Every time they've made a mistake, every time they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, everything they wished hadn't happened. I'm not trying to make people feel bad or drag them back to old memories and rip open a scab off an old wound. I just want them to list the thing that they think was a really bad thing that happened in their life. And spend a few minutes doing that and people, trust me, they will drudge up a whole bunch of stuff real quick.

“Then I ask them on the other side of that line write the word, “Success.” Write down all the times you've gotten it right. If failing is screwing up, getting it wrong, then every time you got it right isn't a fault, it is a positive. So list all the times you got it right, all the times you made somebody happy, all the times you made somebody proud, all the times you made yourself proud.

“If a teacher ever patted you on the head, or your mom put your report card on the refrigerator, if you ever caught the winning touchdown, if you ever sold more cookies than somebody else. I'm not talking about coming up with the cure for cancer or winning the Nobel Prize, I'm just talking about times you got it right. What will happen every time—and I've done this now thousands and thousands of times—every single time, without exception everyone I've ever done this for has had more items over on the right-hand side than they have on the left-hand side.

“But we're not done. Now, I go, ‘That is a great observation. Look, you have more successes than you've got failures. Shouldn't that say something about you?’ And of course it does.

“Then I say, ‘Let's do something else. Let's go back and look at those failures. How many of those have you overcome? How many of those have you gone through, how many of those have you survived, how many of those really aren't an impediment any more? For all of those, move them over to your success side.’

“Because having suffered through, and in your case being homeless, that is a strength. That is not a negative. You have done something that not everybody can do and that makes you better than some other people. Not better in that your stuff doesn't stink, Joe, but better in that we have suffered through something. And when you can move your failures over to your success side and then finally see yourself maybe clearly for the first time, who you really are, that is powerful.

“The facts are the facts; we can't change them. But it is how we see the facts that change us. So when we look at a negative as a negative, we get all woe is me, I screwed up and I'm not very smart and doggone it. But if we look back at that thing and say, ‘Hey, I survived that one. I overcame that one. Yeah, sure I made a bad decision then, but God, I was 12 years old or 18 years old or 22 years old or whatever. Look I still overcame it.’ All of a sudden you start thinking man, that negative is really a positive.”TextBreak

Gene Landrum is a high-tech, start-up executive turned educator and writer. As a businessman he originated what we've all heard of—the Chuck E. Cheese concept of family entertainment—among other entrepreneurial ventures. After many years of interacting with creative and overachieving personalities, he began writing books about what makes the great people tick and this is where I've become a big fan. His doctoral work, The Innovator Personality, led to many books on the mental and emotional side of success. He also wrote The Superman Syndrome: You Become What You Believe.

“As you know I've spoken extensively about Henry Ford, who went to the fifth grade. He was in Detroit. Do you think he knew what he was doing? No, he actually got himself into some big trouble because the CPA, actually, chief financial officer, quit and brought a class action lawsuit against the guy in 1914 because he priced the Model T below what his cost was and that was a gut thing.

“What we're talking about here, Joe, is that very thing. Sometimes we know too much for our own good. We know so much, and you've heard me say this, Joe, on some of our interviews. I didn't know enough to know I couldn't have a rat delivering a pizza in a restaurant called Chuck E. Cheese and people were saying, “You're nuts man. We kill rats, you can't have a rat.” I tell people I didn't know enough to know what I couldn't do so I did something that happened to turn out really quite good.

“When I was doing the research on Oprah, Oprah Winfrey, she was petrified when she was trying to…she was 20 years old…to go on her first network show and she says, “I don't know how to do that,” and she sat. And a lot of your listeners may be thinking about this, ‘Oh, how do I go in there and do this? How do I deal this and cut this new deal?’

“Well she looked and she thought about it, she's very bright, and she said, ‘I know, today I'm not Oprah.’ And I say this and I talked about this, as you know, in my Superman book a good bit. We almost have to con ourselves and almost go into a mythical fantasy role model, if you will, where you get beyond these fears and not be me. What Oprah did, she said, ‘I know tonight I'm not Oprah, I'm Barbara,’ because years ago Barbara Walters was the number one talk show host, and you know what she did. This is a true story, Joe.

“Your listeners get a handle on this. She actually dressed like Barbara dressed—she was from Tennessee, Barbara's from New York City. She dressed like Barbara. She taught herself to walk like Barbara, and walked out on that stage and acted like Barbara and she tried to talk like Barbara. You know what I find, Joe, so interesting about this motivationally? You know what—she's worth more than Barbara now. She's worth 2 billion dollars.”TextBreak

Arnold Patent has written numerous books, including So, You Can Have It All, which is still out there. Patent has also written The Journey, Money, The Treasure Hunt, and Bridges to Reality.

“That's why I wrote the book The Journey, to explain how is it that our lives are essentially opposite to our natural state. The principles defining, or describing, our natural state and yet we find ourselves experiencing virtually the opposite. And what I was guided to around that, to the coaching that I went through, was when I came up with describing as phase one and phase two.

“Phase one being the intentional creation of experiences opposite to our natural state. So, before we come into this incarnation, we plan out what family we're going to come into, what the belief systems, existence, are and so on. So, it's played out so in order to come into the human experience, we have to give up being who we really are, the power and presence of God, and any memory of that.

“See, we come from the oneness and our whole time in eternity is moving back into the oneness, but along the way, we explore other ways of experiencing ourselves and the human experience. This realm we're in is a very dense realm and one that we can only experience by making our lives opposite to their natural state. Then, like those people listening to this program and others, at a particular point, something occurs within you that says, ‘Wait, there's more to life than what I've been experiencing up until now,’ and that's where the seeking that you did, that I did, where we all did, searching for what's really going on. That's when we start the phase two part, the conscious movement back to our natural state.

“So, what's important about this is recognizing that essentially, each of us is the creator of the phase-one experience. We set out to make our lives opposite to our natural state and being the creator, we can also be the un-creator. I would add one other element to it.

“See, when we talk about creation, there's two levels of power. True power rests with the Divine. We cannot create at that level. We create with a small c, essentially, those creations are made up in our imagination. They're not real and they don't last in the sense, but we can make ourselves believe they're real, which we do, and so that's our human experience.

“Always illusory in a sense, always made up, but because of our creative power to create illusions, we can also create the belief that they're real. When you go into the awakening process, you start to segregate out the difference between our level of creation as human and creation at the Divine level.”