Hello. Hello my friends. Welcome to another episode of Ask Marco on the Passive Real Estate Investing show. I am glad you're here and I do want to make a quick apology for being late on releasing this episode, which is supposed to be out last week. But I was actually in Florida in Fort Lauderdale at a major event that my partners and I were putting on called Aspire. And it's, we refer to the whole event as the Aspire Tour because every month we're in a different major city around the United States on Thursday in Fort Lauderdale we had 1500 people there. Last month in Dallas we had 2000 people in the room. So these were major events and we have some great speakers there to educate and talk about personal growth and money and investing and money movement and so many different things related to wealth and financial freedom, as well as personal growth and personal development.

So we call it Aspire. It's the Aspire tour and, and the website, if you wanna just check it out, it's aspiretour.com. Now, I will tell you that there is a new website that is being launched sometimes soon. I know it's in the works and it's in beta, so it'll probably be released here in the next week or two hopefully. But I was in Fort Lauderdale and it was just crazy. It felt like a mini apocalypse. My flight was canceled, literally coming in to the airport. We ended up circling around the Fort Lauderdale airport for a while before they finally said, we're not reopening the airport, we're gonna send you to Tampa. And so the plane turned around, started heading to Tampa, never made it to Tampa. Ended up landing in Sarasota. When my flight landed, I pulled out my smartphone, went to Expedia, booked a car rental from Sarasota to Fort Lauderdale.

My intention was to drive it one way and drop it off at the Fort Lauderdale Airport when the event was all said and done. So I ended up driving there and drove into some torrential rain. It was unbelievable. I was told that they had one third of their entire annual rainfall happen in one day. And from what I've read, I've heard different stories, but from what I've read, they measured 26 inches of rain at the airport within a 24 hour period. And the majority of that rain, the 26 inches, came down within a 12 hour period. It was setting a record. Previous record for the rainfall in Fort Lauderdale was back in 1979, and that was less than 15 inches, which is still a tremendous amount of rain for a 24 hour period. So when I got to the city, there were cars, quote unquote, floating in the water.

There were pools of water everywhere. Cars were stalled in the middle of the road. People were literally driving on the wrong side of the road, purposely, of course, to get around what they couldn't drive through on the right side of the road. Power was out in different places. It was nighttime, it was raining hard, it was hard to see lots of people walking on the sides of the road and the meridian of the road. It was just crazy. It just felt like a mini apocalypse. It was funny and scary all at the same time. And then I finally got to my hotel. The power was out. It was a nice Hilton on the water, no power, no hot water. Checked in at midnight, finally got to bed at one. Had to use my smartphone for lighting to light my way around the room cuz I couldn't see anything.

There was no electricity, no lights, but it was crazy. After all of that, I was pleasantly surprised and amazed that all 1500 paid ticket holders showed up to our Aspire event the following morning at the Fort Lauderdale Convention Center. It was unbelievable. And it just goes to show that people who have a certain mindset, you know, for success, personal development, growth, even entrepreneurship, and just a business like mind that are aspiring, there's that word again, but aspiring to be something bigger and greater than themselves, or just to grow into somebody that they want to become. It just shows you that nothing will stop you,