Life's Not Fair: 10X Your Business Amidst Life's Challenges with Joe Polish and Dan Sullivan - 10xTalk Episode #225

I had to learn how to utilize the world for my purposes. And I think that there's kind of a fork in the road that everybody faces in being born into the world where you realize that you have to be smart, how you deal with the world because it wasn't designed for you. And I think that if you trace back a lot of people who have trauma in their life, they have a fundamental mindset that thinks we're supposed to be different.

If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to www.gienstruitnetwork.com. hello, this is Joe Polish.

And this is Dan Sullivan.

Welcome to 10X Talk. We're going to be doing an episode where we're going to talk about how life is not fair. However, this could be good news for you or bad news, depending on what.

You do with it or what you think life should be. You know?

Right. What we're certain of, at least I think both me and you are, is that life is not fair. And that's okay for some people, not for others. On the last episode, I started off talking about Stone Soup and then everything's made up. And then we talked about different topics of what's going on in the world and the differences between generations and the lead up to it. I took notes of what you had said. You know, the first one is everything's made up. Second rule is nobody's in charge. And then the third is life is not fair. Is there anything you want to say as a reminder from our previous conversation before we go into the topic of life is not fair?

No, I would say that they fit together. So if everything's made up and nobody's in charge, that means every day millions of people are making up new stuff. Okay? Then anytime you make up something new that is more useful than something before, you just disadvantage the people who made up the previous version. So anytime you introduce a new capability in the world, it's good for some people, but bad for people who had bought into the previous capability that's now obsolete. And in Europe, it kind of tells me that Europe is in for hard times. They have a rule that a lot of the bureaucrats in Europe, which is called the precautionary principle. And the precautionary principle is if you create a new invention, if in any way this can hurt somebody in the future, we should stop that invention now. Well, it's going to make more and more that Europe is a place of the past. Some of my European clients They say, you know, the people in the United States, how do they look at Europe? And I said, it's kind of like a bigger Disney World with more castles and probably some better restaurants. I said, I have to tell you, nobody in America takes Europe seriously. We don't see them as the force for the future. We don't see any new ideas coming from Europe. We don't see any new thought leadership coming from Europe. It's a museum, you know, and part of the reason is I think they just had, in the 20th century was the worst possible century. They had two major world wars and then they had communism come in. And the two wars together plus communism probably killed off 150 million people. And then a lot of people just got up and left and went someplace else. And a lot of them went to North America, Canada, the United States, Mexico. So I would say that anytime you create something new, you just created some new kind of unfairness in the world, right?

Yeah.

Joe, you teach people marketing and if they come to Genius and they learn marketing, it means that they're going to be able to go back and out compete the people who aren't in Genius Network.

Yes, they would.

So every time you make people into better marketers, you're creating some new and kind of unfairness in the world.

Yeah. And some people, you know, even going back when I was a carpet cleaner and I always love using the carpet cleaning example because if you can make it work with carpet cleaning, you can probably make it work in other areas. And I started teaching people how to have way more effective advertising than their competitors and their ads would work better. And again, when I first started doing.

Education based, were hated throughout the carpet.

Industry by the people that were selling stuff that wasn't as good as me. But I was loved by the clients that were buying my tools and using them. And then their competitors that were not hated me because they refused to get, you know, it's like, oh, if you have this device, you know, I'm using that as a metaphor, and it's going to make you more effective and a better business owner. And this person paid for this device and I don't have one, but I don't want to pay for that device even though I could buy it. And it comes with 100% money back guarantee for an entire year that if you tried it, it doesn't work. You don't even have to pay for it. But no, we're not going to do that because God forbid I don't want to, you know, pay somebody any money that could potentially, you know, offer me something because I'm just stubborn or whatever. And so what ended up happening is I would have people say, well, you know, it's not fair that you're going to run an ad like that. One of the first things I did in yellow pages, this was hysterical. I can tell this story now. I didn't used to be able to tell this story, but I started running for myself before I ever started teaching other people in the carpet cleaning industry how to generate more business. I was at first worried that this marketing technique that I had figured out, if I advertised it even too much, let alone teach it to anyone, that a bigger competitor that was maybe better funded than me might take my idea and overtake me. Because certainly that has happened. Someone comes up with, I mean, you know, you take every sort of big tech company, Truth be told, every major big tech company just stole the ship from somebody else, and then they built it. And the entire industry is built around, you know, complete copying and stealing.

Thievery.

Exactly.

Creative thievery.

And so I had this free recorded message concept in this consumer awareness guide idea where I would advertise, you know, warning, don't call any carpet cleaner to you. Listen to this free recorded message. Call anytime, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You know, learn seven questions. Ask a carpet cleaner before, invite him into your home, and eight mistakes to avoid when choosing a carpet cleaner. So I started running those ads, and all of a sudden, a little space ad, they could only before say what I would refer to as name, rank, and serial number. There were no websites. There were no social media. It was literally name of the company, what you do phone numbers, what 99.99% of everyone else was doing. Then all of a sudden, instead of saying, call me and then we're going to sell you, it was like, call and listen to a free recorded message and get educated on how to hire a carpet cleaner. It works like crazy. Even to this day, it still works. A guy that just finished reading my latest book, what's in it for them? Owns an F45 franchise, which is a fitness franchise. Mark Wahlberg is one of the big founders of that company. He's using my free recorded message concept on how to choose a fitness facility, and he sent it via Instagram, he posted it, and tagged me, and it's great. And so to this day, you can use a free recorded message to educate people. So I started running those ads in voila. It just worked for me. I started running ads that said the most thorough Cleaning ever or it's free. And then they would call and listen to a free recorded message or request a consumer awareness guide or you know, free report reveals, you know, how to choose a carpet cleaner. And I would use these headlines and then I would drive people to calls for actions. So when I then started teaching other carpet cleaners how to use it, the very first client, before I ever put together a program which I ended up in the 90s, building as you know, the largest training organization in the world for carpet and street cleaners. I had over 12,000 cleaning and restoration companies that ultimately became members of Piranha Marketing, which was my company. And I still own that company. And so basically I just haven't focused on it that much. I'm thinking about doing a resurrection of so much of the stuff that I've not done for years with another very large service business provider whose company's now valued at a billion dollars. He's one of my genius network members. And so basically everyone would say that's not fair, that's not fair that you should run these ads. So my very first client was a guy named Don Delou who I the time had paid a copywriter when I was not yet had figured out the marketing stuff. I paid a copywriter eighteen hundred dollars on credit card because I didn't have enough money to pay for. This is when I was a Deborah carpet cleaner. This is before I became the, the marketing trainer to the cleaning and restoration industry. You know, I'd met him at a conference and someone was saying, you know, 40% off is the best way to get business. And I was long hair in a ponytail. And I'm sitting in this seminar room and this is in Colorado at the PCUCA Professional Carpet Cleaner Upholstery Cleaning association, something like that. And I raise my hand and I say, you know, I've created this way where people can call a free recorded message and it sifts out price shoppers and I would use the term sift sort and screen the best prospects. And so people call it up and it teaches them what they need to know on how to choose a carpet cleaner. It's super non threatening. No one has any fear of calling because they don't have to talk to a salesperson. And the only people that end up doing business with me are not people that are looking for the lowest price or people that are looking for the best job because I teach them how to do that. And this seminar leader guy who was the big guru in the industry at the time, the guy's a total jackass. I remember, yeah, he said, young man, if that works for you, that's great. But we know that 40% off is the best way to get business. So it just totally tries to shoot me down. So whatever, I'm just trying to help here, you know, I'm freaking pain to be at the seminar to listen to this clown. So during the break, you know, here I am, I'm literally like 25 years old. And during the break, this guy, Don Delu, is his name in. Was it Golden, Colorado or Broomfield? Broomfield, Colorado, I think is where he was based. He comes up to me during the break and he's like, what is that idea that you're talking about with a free recorded message? I said, look, I go, I first had to pay for this and I spent a month of my life teaching a copywriter how to like everything you need to know so I could write a consumer's guide to carpet cleaning. And I paid him $1800 to do that. Then I paid him another $250 to take the consumer awareness guide message and turn it into a script for a free recorded message on the phone. I go, if you pay me $250, I'll give you the whole script. I'll give you everything only if you report to me how it works for you and stay in touch with me and let me know how it works. Because I was trying to figure out how would I actually help other people with this and how do I charge for it, right? So he gives me 250 bucks and he said, you know, can we have a conversation? Because my phone book ad is coming due in the next like week or two and I have to renew and I'm running a half page phone book ad in the Denver phone book and it costs a lot of money. So I scheduled a call with him that we would talk like in a few days. And so when I got back to Arizona, I do a call with him and I took him to an ad from a half page phone book ad down to an ad smaller than the size of a business card that said, warning, don't call any carpet cleaner till you hear this free recorded message. You know, seven questions. Ask a carpet cleaner before invite him into your home. And how to avoid four carpet cleaning rip offs. Call anytime, 24 hours a day and it will phone number in a nutshell, within a year, cut his advertising cost in half. Not just yellow pages, but across the board. Because he was using free record, I had him put it on the side of his Van I had him put it on business cards, I had him put it on postcards, I had him put it on his newsletter, which I got him sending a monthly newsletter. But just from the yellow pages he ended up from a in column ad compared to a half page phone book ad, quadrupled the response from a half page to a tiny ad that said warning. And he paid me $250 for the script. And he was only paying $250 a month for that in column ad in the Denver phone book at the time. Now this is in the early 90s, right? This is like 1993, something like that.

1992, back when people used to advertise in the phone book.

Exactly, exactly. And hopefully there's, if there's young people on here that don't know what a phone book is, that would be very sad. But you can look it up on Google. There's this history of these things. So basically, you know, I was like, okay, I have something here. Then I started teaching other carpet cleaners and you know, within the first year of teaching carpet cleaners and I was 26 years old, I sold a quarter million dollars worth of my courses and training to carpet cleaners on how to build and grow their business. And it's not that I sold that much. Millions of dollars were generated from my advertising that I was just using for me. And here's what happened. I started having people put ads in the phone book that said, warning, don't call up any carpet cleaner to listen to this free recorded message. Then after these ads started working so well, beating everyone else that was running half page ads and phone book ads, some different phone books in different cities are saying, you're not allowed to do this because you can't say something or say, you know, anything like that because it's going to drive business away for someone. And, and I would say to these phone book companies, okay, but this person says they're the best. Okay, but you've got multiple ads that say they're the best, so you're going to start policing. They didn't want the word warning, don't call any carpet. They were even trying to stop them from using free recorded messages because frankly, they didn't want anyone's ad to work better than anyone else's. They all wanted them to look the same. So this is a bad way to say it. We would talk about, it'd be like marketing incest where everyone's doing what everyone else is doing and, and pretty soon everyone looks real stupid and everyone just Copies what everyone else is doing, and they all have the same looking thing. So they had an unfair advantage. That was not fair. According to the phone book, someone should not have an ad that works more effectively than someone else. You know, someone should not go to a genius network or strategic coach because they may learn something, and that's unfair. The thing, though, is I started saying, okay, well, then register your name as warning doing business as. So I had a couple of people that I had them register a DBA as warning, and then it forced the phone book to have to run the word warning because they had a registered thing that they were doing business at. And so I still came up with some ways to do it. So it was really fun. That's my long version of there's all kinds of stuff that you're going to do that other people are going to consider unfair. The question is, if you're stealing from someone, if you're robbing someone, if you're operating, if it's unethical. Yeah. I mean, if you're being a bully, if you're picking on someone, if you are really born as a man and then you're competing in women's sports, I mean, there's certain things that, you know that you can use the word fair or unfair. However. Yeah, I could say more, but I wanted to turn this over to you and have you really speak to the whole topic of life's not fair and how do we think about it and what do we do with it?

Yeah, well, it isn't. I think the first recognition is that the world that I was born into. So I was born in 1944, a couple weeks before the Normandy invasion, you know, one of the great historical events of the 20th century. And I don't know when it was, what age, you know, but I think it was around six years old. I began to realize that nothing I was born into was created with me in mind. The world wasn't created for me. So I had to learn how to utilize the world for my purposes. And I think that there's kind of a fork in the road that everybody faces in being born into the world, where you realize that you have to be smart how you deal with the world, because it wasn't designed for you. And I think that if you trace back a lot of people who have trauma in their life, they have a fundamental mindset that things were supposed to be different.

Right.

You know, their trauma is that you're approaching this with an incorrect thought. If you approach life with an incorrect thought, you will be Punished until you change the thinking, you know?

Right.

And I only have in 79 years, I've only had direct access to one human being. And I have to tell you, it's been a full time job.

Right.

But as a corollary for the thing that life's not fair, but we have an ability within the framework of people we're dealing with to make things fair. We can make up fairness. You know, like, I got a sense that the way Genius Network is set up is really fair. For the people who attend Genius Network, you've got a set of rules and how the meetings are conducted, and there's a structure that if you're going to be in Genius Network, you have to follow the structure and everything. So my sense is that life is not fair, but human beings can make up fairness. Yeah, but not in general. We can't make things fair in general. We can only make things fair with the people that we're actually dealing with.

Right, right.

I mean, you're very fair minded, I'm very fair minded. And there any similarity between the two of us disappears.

Right, exactly. No, I think that's very accurate. And as I listened to you on this, I was like, oh, wow. I don't want to come across that I'm suggesting that you somehow try to power your way or position your way or take something away from anyone. I'm as collaborative and as fair as. No, you are probably more than anyone I even know. And that sounds maybe even arrogant. I don't know.

No, I mean, we don't see each other that often. There's only about five people that have my cell phone number.

Yeah.

One of them is the guy who cuts my hair. The other one is my limousine driver and Babs. And I think maybe some other people have my phone number because I've always hated the phone. I just don't like talking on the phone. I love Zoom, but I hate talking. If I can't see him, I don't like it, you know?

Right.

You're the master of that type of communication. You know, I'm not social at all. You know, like, I don't socialize at all. If Babs goes away, for example, she's been away, you know, with her sisters and she's gone and met with them for three or four days. I don't see anyone else while she's gone. I'm content with entertaining myself and everything else. And yet, right from the beginning, the two of us clicked and I think we were picking up. We both play fair, right? Yeah.

Let me ask you about that, though. There was a period of time that you were not without you and Babs with each other. For gosh. I mean, that wasn't very normal that you were Babs to go off or by yourselves or. You're always with each other.

Yeah, well, that would be even more true. Babs had an accident and she fell and she lacerated a finger and she was overnight in the hospital and then she got sick. We were supposed to go to London last year and I had to go by myself to London for a week. And. And I would say that it was probably five days and then the night she was overnight and that's. We've been together every day, you know, for the last five years. We haven't been apart.

Wow.

Yeah.

Is she not with you right now?

Yeah, well, she's 50ft.

Okay.

So.

Yes. You're in the same household together. That could be a tall house, though. 50ft. Could be.

Yeah.

So if it's. If it's up. Okay.

So we like spending all of our time together, you know, and it's not that we're doing stuff together. We just like being close to each other, you know, we just like being hanging out together. But you would meet more people in 24 hours, new people in 24 hours than I would meet in the next six months.

Yes. Yeah. I do it every day.

Yeah. Yeah. So it isn't that we're similarly natured and everything else, but we both have a sense of fair play.

Yeah, very much so.

Very much so.

Okay. So the message that we're conveying here, life is not fair. So on the. We talked a little bit about this on the previous podcast, the Great Meltdown, and you had the acronym is Things that used to be Cheap but Are no Longer Cheaper. Melt. You know, money is the M. E is for energy, L is for labor costs, T is for transportation, and 90% of all global trade occurs on water. You said it was 1/12 of the cost of other forms of transportation. And all of that is changing. And one of the things that you had written to me, it was 10x your entrepreneurial opportunity. One thing you mentioned was blue collar trade, as big bureaucracies like white collar systems are falling apart. I'd love to have you speak to that.

Yeah. So one of the things, and this is just sort of an odd statistic that I keep track of, that if a 18 year old graduates from high school and then takes a skilled trades course, which is usually sponsored by a community college, or it would be the industry itself, for example, welding, let's just take welding as an example. If at 18, you graduated at the end of May, early June, and then you took a 10 week welding course, by the end of the first year in Toronto or Chicago, you're making $60,000. Five years, you'll be making 100,000 and you'll never make less for your entire life and you'll never be fired. But if you go off to college for four years and you run up a debt of $60,000 to go to college for four years, you will have made no money during that four years. And meanwhile, the 18 year old, now 22 year old, has probably made a quarter million dollars while you were spending four years going into debt. And your very abstract subject matter that you learned in college may not allow you to make money except by saying, welcome to Walmart.

Right?

Yeah. And I think parents and teenagers are starting to put the facts of life together. So in the United States, all the colleges and universities in the United States, there's a couple thousand universities and colleges that people go away for four years. This is not the last year, but it was 2021 to 2022, September to September. The following year, the 2022, there were 4 million fewer college and university freshmen than there was the year before.

Wow.

Wow. Okay. And what that means is that the economy is changing and white collar jobs are not going to be available and they're not going to pay. And my belief that the new use of artificial intelligence will eliminate white collar jobs, but it won't eliminate blue collar jobs. And the United States is industrializing faster than it's ever industrialized in the United States. Factories, manufacturing. I mean, just north of Phoenix, as you go up to cleater, there's a 20,000 employee new TSMC factory. That's Taiwan chip makers, the highest chip maker in the world from Taiwan. And they've just decided the distance from Phoenix to China is more comfortable than the distance from Taiwan to China.

Right, right, exactly.

You feel a little bit more secure. Was that 17 going north? 10 going north, yeah, 17, yeah, 17, yeah. And it's monstrous. I mean, they had 12 tower cranes, you know, I mean, that's 20,000 employees. And think of the building of residences around that area. You know, they're going to have put up all sorts of new residential communities just for everybody who's going to work at that factory. And that factory is going to be there forever, you know, for the foreseeable future. But these are skilled technical jobs. So my sense is that everything we've been told about blue collar Disappearing and everything's going to be white collar. The opposite is just going to happen over the next 25 to 50 years.

Right. I love what Mike Rowe, the guy that originally did Dirty Job, was a.

Voice in the wilderness for the last 25 years.

Yeah, he's been great. There's so many good opportunities and jobs in the trades, and there's not been very good marketing around it where everyone's been wanting to be famous or want to be an influencer or they want to sell air.

Yeah. And this is not fair. You know, there's three or four hundred thousand students who have significant debt, you know, and they were sold a bill of goods by the universities. They were sold that didn't matter how much you went into debt for your college degree. It would be like a mortgage. It would be amortized. The value of what you're learning will go up and up and up. And it's not true. It's not true. But now the universities are really going to be hurting. My sense is, because, you know, the way the universities have gone is that they have twice as many administrators as they have teachers as professors. The woke part of the universities isn't actually the professors. It's the administrators. Like Arizona State is one of the largest universities in the world. You know, if you take, you know, just the campus in Tempe, but then you take all their branches of Arizona State, if you counted up all the faculty, it wouldn't even be half the number of administrators who are people who have meetings to schedule new meetings.

Right, right. And there's a very controversial thing going on at ASU right now with a woman named Ann Atkinson, who's amazing, and she ran the Lewis center, which was fully funded by an entrepreneur, Mr. Lewis, who recently pulled out his funding because the administrators and a lot of the faculty very woke objected to the fact that she was holding an event called Health, wealth and Happiness with the speakers, Dennis Prager, Charlie Kirk, Robert Kiyosaki and a couple of other people. And the students loved it. But some of the faculty threatened the students and tried to warn them to not go to this because it was white supremacists. And I actually went to the hearing myself in downtown Phoenix and sat through it and watch this bureaucratic nonsense of trying to stop free speech. I mean, it's just atrocious. It's gaining traction, though.

Yeah, well, I read the whole article. I read that because it was something happening near you. But there's a lot of signs over the last year that, you know, for every action, there's an equal reaction. It's Newton's third law. And there's a number of things that really tell me that the backlash and the Bud Light boycott was one of the first instance. I've really tracked it. I've got all the videos of the woman, Alyssa, who was the vice president of marketing for Bud Light. And she had this video where she was on TikTok or she was on one of the social media, and she was being interviewed and she said, well, I was brought on to transform this iconic brand. And my feeling was that it was out of touch with where the world is going. And it was sort of old frat guys and out of touch humor. And my job was to enlighten and elevate the brand, you know, And I said, no, that's the beer's job, is to elevate and enlighten you. I said, your entire client base uses the beer to elevate and enlighten them. You've got it backwards here. And they'll just never recover. That brand is dead. They were showing that Fenway Park Budweiser had its own booth at Fenway park, the baseball stadium in Boston. And they just did a time release photo and just nobody showed up at the Bud Light booth to buy beer during a baseball game. And it was the number one selling beer certainly in the United States. And it's just in free fall. And, you know, they just got caught in the crossfire of the culture wars. First of all, they just made the can for this one person. It was the man who says, she's a woman, but there's actually no medical proof that she actually went through. He. She went through transition. But it just died instantly. When this one can was shown on social media, it wasn't even advertised on television. It was just social media, and it just died. And I said, boy, you just got caught in a war. I mean, you just wandered down the wrong street in a war. And they got caught. But it was real indication that the tide has shifted. You know, the tide comes in and you think the tide's going forever, and then the tide shifts and it goes out the other way. And I think it happened sort of at the end of last year. I could feel a real shift in the country against all this stuff. Now Blackstone, which is the largest investment group, they had this, what's it called, ESG Equity. It's got, you know, it's totally woke. And they were saying they will invest no money in any company that doesn't have an ESG on how they're Improving taking essentially political issues and making them part of their mission statement. And all of a sudden people just saying, well, screw you. You know, screw you. We're not going to do that. So I think there's a shift because they're bullies, you know, the woke side. They're just complete and total bullies. Only they have a right to talk. Nobody else has a right to say anything different. And I think we just respond to bullies in whatever form they come. At a certain point, you just punch back, you know. And what I've seen about those people, they're good at throwing punches, but they're not good at taking punches.

Right? Absolutely. Absolutely. I want to ask you this. So you know our friend Tim Larkin.

I know Tim. And if you know Tim Larkin, make sure you're a friend. Yeah.

So Tim has written a couple of great books. We've had him on the podcast. He's been a friend of mine.

We had him in to teach our entire company his techniques. Yeah. Yep.

Target focus training. So he literally trains Navy Seals. Yeah, smart dude. I've known him for 25 years and so I'm gonna.

Violence is the answer.

Yeah. The science of violence. He has this thing where violence is never an option unless it's the only option. So Tim, he sent me a text, I'm on a thread with a group of people, some you know, that are in strategic coach. And he wrote, hey guys, got this from a friend in Texas, Large developer and coaches the finance industry. And the guy had said to him, had a call with the president and CEO of my mortgage company yesterday to talk through some coaching strategies for loan officers. Here are some stats that cumulatively are terrifying them. And so listen to this Dan. And then I want to get your take on this. Student loan debt in an all time high. Covid deferred payment kickback in this month. Home equity line of credit apps at an all time high with more than 50% being declined. Credit card debt at an all time high and 22% higher today than the previous all time high in 2019 before the lockdowns and stimulus money changed consumer behavior. Home affordability at an all time low. With only 32% of dual income households able to buy a home in their current market. It's way better in the Sun Belt and way worse in the coastal cities and mega metropolitan areas like la, Austin, New York, York, Miami, Chicago and Seattle. Delinquencies on all consumer products are rising rapidly. Car loans, credit card loans, personal loans, all suffering from serious 90 day lates. Down payment assistant applications for new home buyers up over 87%. National debt, no news here, at almost 100% of GDP, paints a scary picture. Any thoughts on what, if anything, we should be doing to profit on a likely market correction slash collapse? So what's your take on some of those things? Because talking about life's not fair. Much of that for people, they, you know, they're in the throes of much of that. And then there's people that can create value and can do well and can make money and help people in the process too.

Yeah, well, everything's getting more expensive. So for me, this is an indication that everything is getting more expensive. The other thing is that I went bankrupt twice, once in the late 70s, early 80s, and was because of receivables where I got moved out. Instead of getting paid in 30 days, people pushed me out to 60 days and 90 days and I was too close to the cliff and I fell over the cliff, you know? So in 1984, I said, I'll never have another receivable in my Life. And since 1984, all the money's up front, right? And between the two of us, I would rather me having your money than you having my money. Okay? So we've done that. And people told me back then, well, you can't do that. Nobody will go along with that. And I said, I guess from a marketing standpoint, I just have to find the people who will go along with it. And since 1984, so that's 16 plus 23 years. For 39 years, we found the people who are willing to pay up front.

Yep, I'm in the same boat. I do the same thing.

And no debt. We've never had any debt. Because you and I both have businesses at any given time, we have half of next year's income. So my bank is my clients. So people have thought that they can get away with not being smart about their money, and they've been encouraged to do so because everything was so cheap. So my sense is that this is the great reversal that we're going through. I call it the Great meltdown. And my sense is that this is the end of probably a political approach that started in the Great depression in the 1930s, okay? And it was all based that the United States was going to be more and more interconnected with the world, which was, in fact, the fact that the United States has had involvements and engagements with everybody in the world basically for the last 75 years. But it's been paid for by American taxpayers, and American workers have paid the price for this. But the truth is that the US only trades 10% of its GDP with the rest of the world. 90% of the American GDP is just Americans buying stuff and making stuff and selling it to other Americans. And half of their foreign trade is with the country south of you in Mexico or north of you in Canada. 5% of the US economy is involved with trade with Mexico and they're part of nafta. So my sense is that things are going to be very hard for the next 25 years for people who got themselves deeply in debt or who have never learned how to make money and save money and build money. So I think we're going into a complete reversal, psychologically, emotionally, intellectually, of what people thought the future was going to be over the last 50 to 70 years. That's what I think. And the housing market is really the canary in the coal mine. If anything's going south with the economy, it always shows up in the housing market first because it's based on long term debt.

Right.

The generation that I was born into, which started in the 1920s, 1926, it's the beginning of my generation. My generation is the wealthiest per capita generation the United States ever had. And the reason is because it was smaller than the previous generation. My generation was the first generation that was smaller than the previous generation. Okay. And that was because of the Great Depression and the Second World War. So my life has always been abundance. There were more teachers than the school system needed. There was more jobs in the marketplace than you needed. So I've lived the last 65 years. And if you were born, let's say, in the 1980s, 1990s, I think life's really going to be hard for you. And the first thing to do is accept that as the opportunity. I said the greatest education, the children who are in debt, the students who are in debt. The greatest education is whatever it takes to pay back every last dime. And that'll be their greatest education in their life. You know, if you don't pay back your debt, you're a second class citizen for life.

Right, right. There was a moment of freedom when I went from being deeply in debt to finally paying off every bit of debt. And yeah, I'm debt free and I've been for a long time, and it's fantastic.

That's a great education, is paying off your debts.

Yeah, yeah.

You become a better person by paying off your debts.

I agree, I agree. And there's a certain level of, you know, I have that little sign hanging on the wall in my office, which everyone that comes to Genius Network snaps pictures of that says, my brain has too many tabs open. And there are many tabs that are constantly just a low level anxiety when you have debt. I actually treated it as a game saying, okay, like let's say I'm playing Monopoly here and I needed to figure out how to win the game here and make decisions and I get myself out of debt. And, you know, so even when I was living off credit cards and just totally struggling, you know, working my ass off hard, manual labor, clueless pain, you know, still just struggling, struggling, struggling, that became sort of let me figure out how to do it. Chisel a little bit at a time. And that was a lot of my drive also to read and to learn because I just wanted that monkey off my back. And so, yeah, and you can really take advantage of opportunities when you're out of debt. That while you're in debt, you can never take advantage of. Yeah.

Your whole future is limited. You can't think about a bigger future.

Yep.

Because your bigger past is sitting on your shoulders all the time.

I agree totally. Well, here's what I would say as we wrap up then. My recommendation. I just finished a two day Genius Network meeting. I had my buddy Les Brown, who's, you know, very well known motivational speaker. You know, he's with us. He's still here in town. I actually picked him up this morning and took him somewhere. And one of the things that I had said to everyone and a real focus is one of my Genius Network members is Miss Fitness Olympia Whitney Jones. You know Whitney, and she's currently Miss Fitness Olympia. And she's going to compete again in a few months and hopefully she wins because the second competitor to her, in terms of oldest to her, is 14 years younger than her. Talk about a machine. And someone that works really hard. And she has broken most of the bones in her body because she does crazy gymnastics and backflips and the most insane performances. But she's, she's so smart and she's super cool. Just a really sweet person. And I have two interns. One's 19 years old and another one's 20 years old. Isabella and Parthenon. And then my buddy Pat, who I went to high school with, and then my partner Cherie, and then Jake and Whitney, you know, they're the ones that are kind of like coaching us. And I'm now measuring my macros, you know, the calories, carbs, fat, which I know a lot about fitness, but I never consistently ever measured Macros, and it is eye opening. So I'm in the middle of this physique transformation thing that we're doing, even though back in the day, years ago, I was Bill Phillips's marketing consultant back in the 90s and helped put more people through the largest physique transformation contest in human history, which was the body for life stuff. And I actually referred Bill into Strategic Coach way back when. And had he not joined the only.

Guy who ever came to a workshop with bodyguards. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, That's a funny story. So he sold his company for $300 million back in 1999, which is a lot of money back then. And I absolutely know it was that year in Strategic Coach, the first year, that helped him even set it up to where he could do that. So basically, I told everyone, keep physically fit as much as humanly possible. With all the business strategy, with everything that's going on in the world, I didn't realize that 20 years in recovery from addiction would have been so beneficial to me once the pandemic started. So, man, like, if you are not taking care of your sleep, your water intake, getting sunshine, exercising, moving your body mentally, physically, taking care of this vessel that you are expecting to carry you through, that has to be the number one.

Well, you're in debt to the past.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We could talk about business strategy all day long, but it's like, man, you know, you can't fix the world with broken hands. And if you don't neglect your help. And I'm speaking to the converted in a lot of ways, because I know a lot of people that listen to us are very much into taking care of their health because there's a lot of emphasis on it in both of our groups. But the bottom line is that's the message that I want to say. If you want to 10 times your opportunities here in the midst of life not being fair and stuff is just really take care of your health and then, you know, do an 80, 20 audit of, like, the people, your clients, what you work on, and really look at where do you want to put your time, attention, money, effort, and energy. And if we can help in any way, shape or form, you know, then apply to either Strategic Coach or to Genius Network or come to my annual event this year and see what it's all about. That's@gieniusnetwork events.com so I'll leave you with the last way to wrap up this episode. Dan.

Yeah. One of the things I've learned that everybody who's born had to be Born someplace, somehow, sometime. And there was nothing fair about it the way you were born. And it's your job to make the world fair for you. And what Joe just said is the number one thing is that, you know, there's a lot of talk about the brain. And what they're finding out more and more is your whole body is the brain. It's not just what's a couple pounds of gray matter in your head. You know, it's the whole body. It's your sense of balance, it's your sense of energy. It's your sense. And your brain pretty well takes its cues from your body, what your body is able to do. So I think we're going through some real thought revolutions right now, but I think the fact that we now have the ability to stop our aging, we have the ability to reverse our aging. You know, I'm going, Babs and I three times over the next six months to Buenos Aires, Argentina, because the foremost stem cell practitioner in the world is in Buenos Aires. So three months ago, I had white blood cells taken out and fat cells and that within three weeks was turned into cartilage cells. And so I have torn cartilage for almost 50 years in my left knee, and within the next year, I'll have a brand new cartilage. So there's all sorts of means available right now to reverse past damage and past things, but you better have a reason for being healthier and fit in the future at the same time. You won't have a future if you're not getting fitter and healthier.

Exactly. There you go. Well, I think that says it. So thank you, Dan and everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of 10X Talk. Subscribe if you don't currently do so and share it with anyone that you think needs to hear it. And we will talk to you Next time on 10X talk.com thanks, Joe.

And I'll see you in a couple of weeks.

You got it. 100k. It'll be awesome. Don't miss another episode of 10X Talk. Subscribe today at 10X talk.com forward/subscribe. If you'd like access to the show notes to take action on what was discussed, please visit 10x talk.com 225.