Bringing Superheroes into Web 3.0 | Gareb Shamus, Scott Donnell and Joe Polish

So there's a lot of those kind of lessons, I think, out there in terms of what we're doing, and a lot of it is what helped create the success of the Comic Con platform and the whole kind of superhero world. I think at the time, I never knew it was going to be as big as it was.

All right, here I am with a couple friends of mine. We got Garb, Seamus and Scott Donnell, and I'm Joe Polish. If you happen to hear this, watch this. And you don't know who I am. I've. I have Genius Network, which is one of my companies, Genius X, which is a VR company. Genius Recovery, which helps people with addictions because I myself am an addict that's been in recovery for many years. And I love talking with very smart people that are geniuses and have skills and capabilities in different areas. So by the time you're done listening to us, you're either going to hate me and like these two guys, or vice versa, or you're going to be very inspired and encouraged to go out and think about the world and your business and your life and your work in different ways and also have some fun. Because I can't tell, are you guys entrepreneurs or artists or are those the same things? So let's start with. Tell people that are watching, listening, who you are, what you do in whatever way you want to describe yourselves. Start with you, Scott.

Yes, it's the same thing. Artists and entrepreneurs.

Yeah, they are similar, actually.

I believe we're creators, I guess is maybe the way to put it.

Yeah.

You want an intro or me?

Go ahead.

Yeah, yeah, I'm entrepreneur, an artist and a creator. I've started several companies. Apex Leadership Co was the first one. It's the largest school fundraising franchise in America. Yeah, we just had an exit of that. Recently we served about 6 million families, teaching leadership and fitness and raising hundreds of millions of dollars for schools recently in the biotech world as well, with Happy Technologies.

I'll try to say it right. Happy.

Yeah, there you go. Habi. Or whatever you say. So, yeah, Happy Technology is a biotech company. We took it public in Toronto about a year and a half ago. Also a fintech company called Gravy Stack, teaching kids about banking and how to do money management the proper way. And most recently, and probably my favorite, we are creating the next universe of comics, which turns into NFT Comic Base. It's Hero Maker Studios. We launched it last year through a connection from Lee Richter, who is a dear friend of all of ours.

She connects all of us here Actually.

I stepped down from being the CEO of the public company. Happy. And I had 12 hours from the moment I was going to take a break and a month off to the moment Lee called me and said, you need to meet Garab. The two of you are perfect. He is a hero maker. You are a company maker, and the two of you. She's like, my spidey sense is tingling. He flew out to Phoenix a week later. Yeah, we spent two, three days together and bam, here we are.

Yeah.

So that's great. That's where I'm at today.

Awesome. So that's where the collaboration started. Okay, great. So, Garb, you have quite an extensive background. You've done a lot of stuff. So who are you? How would you describe yourself if you were forced to?

There's no question it's a creative force artist for us. You know, everything that I do stems from the creativity, you know, and what I can do to enhance people's lives, bring them together, build community. And it just so happened that I started in the superhero world. I grew up with three brothers collecting sports cards and comic books, and my mom opened up a comic book store. And then so that developed my love for not only the industry, but also the business side of it, you know, my passion. So, and then I started a magazine literally right out of college called Wizard Magazine. And then within about a year, it just took off worldwide. I mean, it was just incredible, you know, the amount of people that wanted to learn about comic books. And this was in the early 90s, before the Internet was even started.

Right.

So it was really hard to kind of get the word out there. And so there was just this huge pent up demand for people that love superheroes, but they felt like the losers and the loners by themselves. And when wizard came out, because we were literally kids writing a magazine for other kids, we were their friend, you know, and when we had that voice and we would make dirt toilet jokes and all kinds of crazy jokes, and we were self deprecating, but we were also what we would tell our best friend about the things that we liked and encourage people to get involved or participate or read or enjoy. And that's really what kind of catapulted the company to the point where we started five monthly magazines about action figures called toy fair and magazine about toys called Toy wishes and Anime Insider about the anime manga world, Inquest Gamer about the gathering. So, you know, we were just so deep on the cultural side. And by the mid-90s Comic Con, we literally just threw a party for the magazines and everybody showed up, all the geeks and the nerds out there. And it just. That really galvanized the movement. So I've been in the superhero business my whole life, and, you know, it comes to today, and there's a lot more to talk about, but my whole life has been about building community. And yeah, when Lee introduced me to Scott, she's like, garab, you're the multiplier. He's the simplifier. And I was like, oh, my God. That's what I've been waiting for my whole life, is how I can get teamed up with somebody like that. And the one thing that hadn't changed in my entire existence in the geek and nerd world was the comics hadn't changed. They were still paper based, and there were still, you know, as the audience got older, it continued to be male dominated, you know, in the male 30 to 50 range. But what we saw was from the Marvel universe films, how it diversified to a billion people around the world. Girls, boys, men, women, families. And it was really incredible how accepting of these heroes and these stories were for people. But yet the comic books didn't actually reflect what was going on in the superhero world. And that's when we decided to start hero maker. You know, to be able to tell relatable stories about heroes and build community around that and by offering the opportunity to share a lot of these voices, you know, and diverse voices that haven't been heard.

Yeah. Okay. Well, this is great. There's several things that you said that I want to touch on. So you guys created hero makers. I want. In a moment, I'm going to ask you both to define what is a hero? You know, like, what does that even mean? Like hero maker Studios.

Right.

And secondly, when you were growing up, the attraction to comics, superheroes, you know, good guys, bad guys. I'm curious to what you were drawn to and why. For me, I pulled out a box of old comics that my assistant Eunice brought out because we're in my office, and she knew I had these comics and ran them by you, which I know nothing about. I just had to bring this one out because this is like the first edition of Star wars episode one. And the beauty of it is that you were looking at this box of comics before we started this interview, and you're like, well, they're just not in good shape. Right. It was just great to see. Even in that statement, it actually showed me the decades of knowledge and experience and wisdom you have. Just from that you were able to look at something and look at a box and realize, yeah, you got some cool things here, but they're not in pristine condition. And so therefore, the value of them. And again, I've been lugging these things around since I was a little kid while being an addict. You know, as a drug addict in the past. I mean, the fact that I even kept them is a miracle to me that I still have some of these. But, you know, it made me think of, like, wow, when I was a little kid. I don't have a lot of memories as a kid. I had a pretty traumatic childhood, and my mother died when I was really young. And I used to escape into comics because I didn't. I was really lonely. And it was. It was interesting how my favorite was Conan the Barbarian, actually. Later, when Arnold became Conan, it actually ruined it for me. I wish he never would. I wish it would never would have been Arnold Schwarzenegger depicted in a movie. But nonetheless, I loved comics, and it really helped me cope and get through. And so I've started thinking, you know, what you guys are really talking about and what you've done with Comic Con and what you're talking about with communities, it could either bring people together, bring a tremendous amount of connection, which is my thing. Connection and reducing human suffering. If there's two things that I hope to do in my lifetime, to whatever degree I can do, that is to connect people and to reduce necessary suffering. Some suffering like I got in a cold plunge before this today, that's actually useful suffering. You can.

Intermittent fasting things are good for you.

Yeah, certain things that actually, you know, they keep you from being so soft. Right. And they allow you to cope with hard things. But, you know, so I want to really kind of frame our conversation around anyone, you know, how does one connect themselves? How do they take business ideas? I think what started out probably is just a love and a joy. You somehow managed to turn it into a giant business that has impacted God knows how many millions of people.

Billions. Now, he basically incepted all of Comic Con. You've done how many? 180.

Yeah, 180 comic cons. 5 million tickets. Billions of people with the media.

Yeah.

It's incredible how it's impacted people. And I define a superhero as someone who excels beyond their peers. So there's so many people out there that I think are superheroes, and I think everybody's a superhero at something. And, you know, a lot of times we think of people that, you know, are big and strong, you know, but then you have a lot of, you know, you know, whether it's a police officer or a nurse or a teacher or so many people that have these kind of what you think are everyday jobs out there. But I could never do it. Right, Right. And I couldn't do that at any part of my life. I couldn't do what they do. Right. So in their community or to me, they're beyond what I could do. And then you have people that actually do save lives or help people in ways. Yeah. And comic books were always fantasy. Right. So growing up as a kid, whether it was without a parent or being bullied or being picked on or having some sort of ailment or any type of suffering out there, you can turn to these characters that you felt were relatable. They went through something that you went through. You know, Batman didn't have his parents. Right. He was orphaned. Right. Superman was an alien from another place. Right.

So he was the new kid in the class.

Yeah. He came from a place where he didn't have any family, you know, that spoke different languages, that had to grow up with a serie family. Right. So it's, you know, and a lot of people have experienced these things, and that relatability really resonates with people. And that's what brings people together. It's like people having kind of those shared issues that they've been through. And then superheroes have done one of the most extraordinary jobs of that. And I think, you know, because we're also living in an age where I think people feel like there is a lack of leadership, you know, around the world. You know, from whether it's through politics, through politics, or even through corporate governance and things like that, you know, they've turned to superheroes as an alternative way to. To kind of look up to what's going on in the world. And that theme is just taken off like crazy.

One of my favorite reasons why I thought, man, we gotta work together. Cause we talk about this too. I was doing superheroes for kids with Apex for 10 years. We had 350 videos. Tens of millions of people watching our content every year. For our leadership themes for schools. And being able to help kids feel like they can go to a respite. They can go. They can feel a part of a new world. To have that encouragement that is such a powerful thing to people, to want to dive into. It gives them hope and inspiration and encouragement, like they can make it too. There's so many reasons why, how you respond to something. A suffering or a pain or a trauma turns you into the hero. Or the villain.

Right.

And on that same note, the reason why I wanted to work with Gharb is my older sister has spina bifida. She is in a wheelchair and she has, she is a superhero to me. She has taught me more about love and kindness. She is such a sweet human to everyone she knows and meets. Like, she's such a loving person. It's like, it's unbelievable when you meet her. And have you ever noticed that all the villains in traditional comics storytelling have a disability? They're in a wheelchair. They have no ability to sense others emotions. It's just crazy. They have some sort of an issue. And we're sitting here thinking, why are those the villains? Those should be the superheroes. So with Hero Maker, we want to flip a lot of this on its head. We want to be telling relatable stories to the everyman and the every woman that might have the superhero as someone with autism. Right. They just did a huge Stanford or MIT study where they put 10 autistic kids, gave them a coding problem and they matched them up against 40 of the MIT grad students, a difficult coding problem. And they said solve. It took those kids five hours to solve the problem and it took the MIT grad students 40 hours.

Interesting.

You tell me that's not a superpower. People with down syndrome don't have ego. That is one of the greatest superpowers known to man.

So what was it?

We want to flip this on its head.

So what was it that allowed that.

You think their ability to see, like they can see code, they can see patterns. Somebody with that might be on the spectrum might have certain emotional issues, but they have incredible superpower when it comes to seeing patterns and algorithms and recognitions. They were able to solve that in no time. And that's the kind of thing is we want to tell stories that are completely unique and relatable to all these different audiences. Now with the inception and growth of the NFT world, we can create these NFT comics that people can hold and own and resell and be a part of. And we can give them unprecedented access to more things in these universes. They can have a part and a say even in what happens to these comics long term. So it flips the whole industry on its head. And that's why we got so excited about launching this company.

Well, then that begs the question then that I'm going to have to ask. Let me also timeline this. The time that we're having this conversation is early 2022. And the world's been pretty Darn weird. In the last, it's almost been two years since the pandemic started in the US around March 2020 was when I remember having the team meeting, I think it was on the 16th of March 2020. And so this whole NFT world, which I'm a complete novice in, I do own a cryptopunk and a few other things, but I'm still a novice. What the hell is an nft? Okay. Because there's always someone that's gonna like, okay, this NFT thing, you're going to apply it to comics and hero makers. We're going to do that. What exactly are you talking like? Explain that. Because I want to make sure for anyone else to kind of comprehend what the other things you're going to talk about, I want them to not get stuck on understanding.

Right.

So how would you guys describe it?

The best way to describe an NFT and also kind of the whole blockchain world. It's about whether something is being centralized or decentralized. And an NFT is really a contract. All it is is a contract between what you have and what that relationship is. And so what we're planning on doing is to kind of make it easy to understand is we're going to be making mobile first comic books. Right? So comic books today are designed as paper based. So you have to physically go into a store, buy the comic book, read it, the ability to share it or, or translate into other languages, make it available all over the world. It's very difficult. The world is in a mobile place. We're going to do mobile first. So the goal is get the comics into as many hands as possible. But now if you want to physically own the comic book, the way to do that is by offering it as an nft, a non fungible token. So basically you're making a contract with somebody that says you now own this comic comic book and there's only X number made available and you actually own it, it doesn't belong to somebody else. And with that we can now offer you all kinds of other things because we don't necessarily know who you are, but we know that you own it.

Yes.

And we now want to create a contract with you that says now that you own this, there's a lot of things that we could do for you. Right. So if I said to a comic book store, we're only going to sell 5,000 printed comics and then next month when the new issue comes out, you can only sell the comic book through the exact same 5,000 people that bought the first ones, they'd be like, you're crazy. We can't do that. But now all of a sudden we can say, oh, you were the first 5,000 people that owned it, now the next 5,000 people. But we love those people that decided to own that book. And because of that, we can say now we can let you have an experience that's attached to it. Maybe you meet the creator, maybe you get a zoom call with them, maybe you get an exclusive NFT of a trading card, of the COVID Right? So there's a lot. Or maybe only the NFT people get an exclusive story that only the NFT holders get, but not everybody else in the world. So basically it's a contract and it allows you to have this kind of communication with people and a deeper relationship with them through that.

Now, because of these new innovations, what else are you seeing that will allow you to. So blockchain and NFTs have enabled all kinds of possibilities that never existed before. And going back whenever the first nft, the blocks or whatever, the kitties. Yeah, exactly. However many years ago that was now. But just like with the Internet, you were in the magazine printed world, and then all of a sudden the Internet happened, and now we have this web3 and all the metaverse and everything else that will come with it. What are other things that are now possibilities that you believe people really would be well served to pay attention to? Not just fads, not just digital tulips.

But something where the best thing is it's the creator economy, Right? And it's the idea that the people that either create the product or the fans that help make it successful can participate in the upside. Right? So I make this joke all the time that Stan Lee never benefited from the secondary sales of his comic books. And had he gotten, even if it was a sliver of a percentage, he'd be a billionaire. He'd be probably the richest person on the planet because of how many billions and tens of hundreds of billions of dollars comics traded hands in the secondary marketplace. So right now we live in a world where creators don't get the benefit of the secondary sales. In music, people get royalties, and film and television actors get royalties. In the comic book world and also in the fine art world, artists didn't get secondary royalties. Picasso never benefits from a secondary sale. It was always the primary sale. So now all of a sudden, when we do these comic books and we have relationships with the artists and the writers and the creators of the comic book, they now can benefit in perpetuity from the success that they helped create early on. So it incentivizes them to do the best job now because you do a great job now. Think of 5, 10, 50 years from now, the annuities that it's going to help create. And that's just one simple example of things that are going to happen in that world.

Yeah, I think so many. When I look at Blockchain, I see it as a great transfer of ownership.

Right.

We've talked just about artists and creators and even the talent we're partnering with, we've talked about Jim Kwik and we're bringing in some of the most famous, talented influencers, musicians, actors, actresses, brilliant names across the world that have a huge reach, that sometimes just get paid. Here's a check from the big guys to do this and then we're done. But what we want to build is a partnership with each of these talent partners that are helping us create these comics and then get them out, get the word out to their audience, to the world, to tens of millions of people, they actually get to benefit just like the creators and the artists all the way up the chain in the secondary markets through licensing and merch and collectibles and follow ons. And so there's a great transfer of ownership to the people who actually have the audience and the creativity to create. Now this is going to happen in social media, this is going to happen with medical history, this is going to happen with Rolexes. How do you know the Rolex is real? Well, there's an NFT tied to it. It's been verified and validated. You can see how it's come through the supply chain. It's going to happen. Not. I think the misnomer out there is that everybody sees a Beeple as an NFT that gets sold for $60 million and everyone goes, that's quackery, that's crazy. Why the heck would someone ever buy a JPEG for that? And then it gets this mislabel, right? Whereas an NFT is really a smart contract, as Garb was saying. And ownership throughout history is the most important thing to create economies, to create relationships, to create trust with banks. I mean, George Washington sent riders out to the Midwest when we started America and he said, I want you to take riders out and I want you to plot out the country and I want you to plot it down to half mile, quarter mile, 144 acres, you know, all the way down to quarter acres. And then they gave them to the local municipalities and said, now the citizens of our country can own that land. And they can loan against that land to build their businesses. That is how the economy jumpstart. Okay? That is how any economy should be jumpstart with ownership. So I think that is why a lot of the visionaries across the world are getting into the NFT space and they're getting into the crypto world and blockchain. That's my best way of seeing it.

Yeah.

And interesting. George Washington, the only one that wasn't a part of a political party. So what are the ways that people are going to screw this up? Con people, lose money, go into something in this hope. Because a lot of it is NFT flipping right now is a huge percentage of it versus truly sustainable. Developing something that matters, developing a community that's not just an influencer hyping something in order to. Then they can do a dump of their mfts. Everyone makes a profit, but someone loses. Because in the midst of these new innovations and lots of money and lots of enthusiasm and a world of total fomo, I mean like genius recovery with helping people with addiction. I now realize what a petri dish of addiction the whole crypto world is. You know, the whole, I mean I.

Have the coins and the launches, I.

Have very wealthy friends, some that are worth, you know, over 100 million, that cannot stop. They are so addicted to what's going on. And I'm like, and it's interesting to see how this is all going to shake out a few years down the road and what's going to really be, you know, what's really going to stand and what's going to come and go sort of thing.

Can I say something on this then?

You can, yeah, go ahead.

I've been in the public markets, right? We took happy public. We know the small cap and the large cap world and he's taken companies public. We know this world of pump and dump. And a lot of what happens is hype makes a certain amount of. It's like mlm, right? Like multi level pyramid marketing. The people who brought it out says the next biggest thing, they exit right away and all of a sudden they make millions and everybody else gets stuck with the bag. You're seeing some of that happening with certain coins and certain just crazy JPEGs that are going for crazy amount of money in the public market space. The way to stop that is to control float and really control community and make sure that you're being transparent and serving your audience to the best of your ability and making sure that it's organic and that it's one to one relationship building. We're not going to be dropping that many of these NFT comics, for instance, for us. We don't want to go crazy with 100,000 of these. We're going to do a couple thousand at a time and really serve the heck out of the audience so that we know in the secondary markets and the people who invest in us in the beginning, they're going to get a lot of value over the long haul because we're going to continuously do what we said we're going to do and serve them and give more utility and more drops and more services and access to them to be able to keep that community strong. But what's to stop, you know, some of these other communities that are out there selling 50,000 all of a sudden or something, and everyone gets hyped and then they're all stuck with a bag and they spent $500 on something that's worth nothing, absolutely nothing. It's the same scenario with a pump and dump stock, some blue chip or, you know, pink slip penny stock. You really have to be careful and really understand who's behind this. What is their mission? Have they proven a track record so that when you own a piece of what they're doing, you can believe in it for that long term?

I think a lot of this actually even just goes back to what do you eat? You eat what you like, what tastes good. You buy art that you actually enjoy. You read stories and authors and listen to people that speak that inspire you. And I think there's a lot to be said about. When I first spoke to a group of artists before I came up with Artists for Addicts, I said, and people can watch this video online that I did. I don't know when it was, when I think 2015, 2016 at Celebration of Fine Arts. And I said to everyone, I said, look, you know, the confession, I'm not an expert in art. And as far as I know, when it comes to making money, people aren't buying art, they're buying artists. And so how you position yourself. And I said, what? I think a lot of art that's out there is literally pollution that's under this umbrella called art. And that could offend someone to say something like that. Cause you can take any jackass that could say anything. It's art. It's just art. Okay, whatever. That's, you know, and again, that's my opinion. I mean, who am I? I'm no art expert. And at the same time, it's like I look at so much stuff that it's it's like a shit cake. It looks really good on the outside, but you take a bite of it and you go, ah, it's so like, what is real? You know, what is. And so I think a lot of this is just like, what do you actually, like, who do you like, think about, what connects us to something and why?

There's no question. It's. Trust is first and foremost. Right? It's. Do you believe that person? Right. Or that company? Right. Have they delivered for you in the past? Do they stand for the right things? Do you believe in their messages? And if it's worked for you in the past, it will work for you in the future? So to me, that's the first one, right? That's kind of the first kind of green flag or red flag there. And then. And then it's community. I used to say all the time when I was even in the magazine business, it's like, the COVID is gonna get somebody to buy the magazine. The inside is gonna get them to come back. So I can create all the flashy covers in the world, but I better write something inside that's gonna be compelling to somebody. And right now, we're seeing the covers, the JPEGs. Yep. And then once you start seeing the inside, and that's what's gonna bring people back. And that's really actually the biggest part of what Scott and I are doing, which is you have all these. Some amazing JPEG characters that are coming out, these incredible NFT drops. But the only thing that makes them popular is the mechanical side of what they're doing. There's only 5,000, there's only 10,000. We're going to burn this. We're going to do this drop, and there's only going to be limited, and you can only get it if you do this. So they're all very mechanical things. What we're doing is because it's storytelling, it evolves over time. It's sequential storytelling. So things happen, people become popular, people become less popular, you get new people, some people die, some people get married, some people split up, some people decide to fight each other. Right? So over time, these stories evolve and change. And it has nothing to do with how many are out there or how many were burned. And then also, the more fans that are interested in it, the more are going to want to come in. Whereas the mechanical stuff is limited to the people that actually own it. Why would I care about something if I don't already own it? And that's really where we have a tremendous opportunity. And that's really the community building and that's the storytelling side of it.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can simply go to Joe's Freebook and you can get a copy there. Well, you know, well, both of you have built big organizations with lots of humans involved in it. You know, customers, clients, team members, staff. So this requires a tremendous amount of collaboration abilities and a lot of people. I always love people that come up and use the word collaboration and they really just want to do a joint venture and see if I'll pitch their shit to my list. Right. You know, and they're like these marketers that try to act like they're saints or whatever. And when it comes to doing what you've been doing for in your particular case, Comic Con, I mean, it's like you. I asked you this question before we started about local comic book shops that could look at my box of beat up comics and give evaluation on it. And you mentioned a couple names. One that's I'm pretty sure still in business here. And you're like, if they've been around for a long time, they're probably good guys. And as simple as a statement of that is if you've been at this game for a long time and no one's wanted to kill you and you know, whatever. And I say all of this with the context that if you have sold a company no matter what, no matter how nice you are, no matter how caring you are, and this isn't a definitive statement across the board, for the most part, it's an adversarial relationship. Even if you're friendly with each other because you want to sell your company for the most amount of money, they want to pay the least amount of money. Right? So right in there, there's that adversarial thing. I have a friend name Richard that really helped me understand that sort of thing with selling a company. So you certainly have had to go and negotiate and do deals and go to hotels and put on conventions with tens of thousands of people and all the stuff that you do. And at the same time, everything that I know about you, people consider you like a really nice guy and a very caring guy and communities. So what could we share with people that are watching or listening about that, Especially young people? Because if you're not an asshole. You, you know, you get so much further in life. You know, even if you can, you know, short term get more money or negotiate a deal, I mean, there's a huge difference between an opportunist versus someone that sees an opportunity and does the things needed to develop it and have it become a reality. So I'd love to get your, both of your perspectives on that.

So, yes, worked with thousands of, whether it's employees or vendors, third parties, we've had to do pop ups with 500 people working for us. And I believe in abundance. There's so much to go around that you don't have to squeeze every little bit out of everybody out there. It's okay for people to both succeed in the relationship and what we also want to do, especially in our case with our fans, is create an opportunity for them that they would never be able to do on their own and offer that as an opportunity. Right. So the opportunity to meet Chris Evans who plays Captain America, Chris Hemsworth, Thor, Brie Larson, Captain Marvel, Gal Gadot who plays Wonder Woman or Tom Holland's Spider man, you would never in your normal life be able to get to meet them. But we have these resources to be able to do that. So we can bring that to people. But when it comes to vendors or people that we want to work with, you can just create a great opportunity that they want to be a part of it, you know, and you know that it's, you know, so many people that have worked with us over the years, a lot of it is, you know, they just want to be a part of the experience. And it's not about us trying to take advantage of them, you know, to work with us. It's, they want to be there, we need them, we want them to be there. And we're not going to shortchange them on that because, because we have an ongoing business, we want to replicate that experience every time. So we want them to be a part of this. So if we're going to mistreat somebody and we have, whether we're doing three shows a year or 25 shows a year, you know, we want the, not only do we want the fans coming back, but we want the same people coming back. And one of the things that's very, that my brother used to talk to when we would have our staff meetings at the Comic Cons, we might have, depending on the time of year when we were starting the companies, whether we had eight people or 50 people that worked for us full time, I mean, we've had hundreds work for us full time with all the magazine stuff. But we might be sitting in front of a couple of hundred people that work for us for that weekend. And my brother would say, I just want to let everybody know that at this show you are the CEO of this company. Because anybody that's going to walk up to you is going to ask you a question and we need you to know or find out who knows. But that person doesn't know who you are and they're going to think that you run this place and you have to treat them with that type of respect. And it's just been every part of the organization from top to bottom.

So you just instilled that sort of, I guess you granted them with the ability to represent you at that level, which takes a tremendous amount of trust on your part and also empowerment and encouragement on the other end.

Yes. I'm sorry. Because when you're dealing with whether it's 20,000 or 80,000 people or 100,000 people, you can't micromatic, you can't make every decision. It's easier to make somebody happy on the spot and let them go home happy than to drag somebody through, oh, I gotta find this one, I gotta find that one. Just help them out, right?

Yeah. Not getting bureaucratic and whatnot.

And it really is the only way to create a self managing company. Right. I mean this is Dan Sullivan 101. Bringing in people who are doing their unique ability in your company means that they are a batteries included person who is doing what they are loving and good at every single day. And then you don't have to micromanage or babysit that person whatsoever. So with us we have dozens of people in just hero maker now and we're building a group of people who feel like they're in a candy store every day working. We have our tech team in town today in Phoenix for an all day tech strategy meeting and they're down there right now crushing it.

Hopefully they'll be more productive than we are right now.

Yeah.

Hopefully for the sake of your company.

Yeah.

Because this. Who knows what's gonna happen with this?

No clue.

We just wrote it off.

But they're loving it. They literally said right before we left they're like, this is the most fun I've ever had. And when you set up a system like that, I mean we have two rules. I think that we laugh. We have two rules. We have a no asshole policy.

Yeah.

And we've already cut off assholes in the last year and we have A win win policy. We will not do a deal unless it's an absolute win win for both parties. Right. My first job was helping a good friend of mine, Marcus Kershaw, help him buy commercial real estate. And I'll never forget this, his broker was going to make a ton of money on the first buy. It was like an $8 million deal. That broker walked. I asked him, I was like, why he charged one third the price of normal to work with him? Because he felt like that was what was fair for how much work that was put in. And I was like, wow, why did you do that? He said, I am a ten deal guy. I'm not a one deal guy. So when it comes to this ability of thinking, abundance, not scarcity, like Garb was saying, you want to work with win win people who want to have a long term relationship and have long term thinking. And it's pretty easy to sniff out when someone doesn't have that. And we're thankful that we can sniff it out pretty quickly because that's like, that's the litmus test.

If you were to say, these are the things that, you know, was it persuasion? Was it compassion? I mean, any way you would describe it, I'd love to hear that.

Yeah. So, you know, there's a lot of things that went into it. One is, I think, obviously having a good heart, but secondly, it's. It was really about creating a platform for others to succeed. And I think that enabled me to do really well. Right. So when I had a magazine, it was the fact that I can promote up and coming artists and writers and, you know, the more success that they've achieved over time, the more they gave back and remembered, you know, that we were there first for them. Right. So there's that aspect of it.

Can I stop you from. And please keep going. This is really good what, what you just said. I want to kind of put a magnifying glass on because I think it's a really important point. So I had a dear friend, Dave Kekich, that was paralyzed from the chest down. He wrote these credos called Kekich Credos. And he was a great source of inspiration for me because he had such a difficult life. I mean, he was a multimillionaire, lost everything, had a business partner steal a couple million from him. It all happened in a freak accident when he was exercising. So he wrote these credos and. And 100 credos. They're brilliant. And I've done my best to put them out, keep them out into the world. And he died a few months ago. And he said one of his credos is along the lines of, don't focus on increasing your slice of the pie. Focus on increasing the pie. And when you just said, build a platform that others could benefit from, that is a huge, very caring, smart thing to do. And I just wanted to highlight that because if you just think of all the work and I'll look at the camera, all the work you're going to do in your life, all the things you're going to enable for yourself, if you really started thinking, oh, how do I do this for other people? So if I'm benefiting, so are other people. I mean, that is such a different way to operate than just like, I'm going to go make as much of this as I can for myself and no one else is going to benefit. That's what collaboration actually means to me, is when you're doing that and you're including others, and if they benefit, you benefit.

Yeah. Almost every discussion we have at heromaker is, how are our fans gonna benefit? How are the creators gonna benefit? How are the community gonna benefit? How do everybody benefit from it? Because of course, if they benefit from it, we're gonna benefit from it. And to use the power of them to reach their audiences will only help us. But the first and primary is to create something that's really great for other people and cause that's what they need. And I kind of make this joke that as big as these companies are in the world, whether it's the Mattel or Hasbro's or The Marvel or DCs of the world or the video game companies, they used me to build their audiences. They needed me for building their communities. They're big companies, multi billion dollars. All these people that bought their product, but yet they still had to turn to me for my magazines and my comic cons and our websites and all those other areas to aggregate their fans and foster that communication and that community. So that's something that also came very naturally. But yeah, so it's not only the platform, but it's discovery to try to find things that you can now share with other people so that they want to come back to you over and over again because they may have discovered something that you showed them. Failure is a big one. Accepting failure. I know a lot of people have talked about failure, but it's something that you have to be really good and comfortable at. I joke even today is how do you see failure? Popular as I become, or famous as I become, or People want to talk to me about stuff. I still get tons of emails and text messages that go unresponded to. It just happens. But I'm not afraid to reach out to anybody and say, hey, I want to do something, and I'll just work with the people that respond, and that's it. And I'll do a great job with them, and hopefully that'll build something. So there's a lot of those kind of lessons, I think, out there in terms of what we're doing. And a lot of it is what helped create the success of the Comic Con platform and the whole kind of superhero world. Because I think at the time, I never knew it was going to be as big as it was, but these were a lot of the things that we did.

I think, in terms of. I never knew it was going to be as big as it was. I think the flip side of that is that if you knew how difficult some of the things you were going to encounter, you might have been scared enough to do it. And when it does really work, you never realize. But that's the whole sticking to it sort of thing. That's the whole commitment. That's the just showing up and doing the best you can and not being so fixated on the goal. I think what When I say fixated on the goal. Another Cacachcuto thing. I'll bring that up. Since I talked about Dave. He said things are seldom as bleak as they seem when they're going wrong or seldom as great as they seem when they're going, well, lighten up. You'll live longer. It's just bringing a level of joy and fun. That's why my whole criteria is elf at this stage. I put everything through an Elf filter. Is it easy, lucrative, and fun, or is it half hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating? And often hard, annoying, lucrative, and frustrating. Because I've dealt with things that brought in money, but, oh, my God, like the amount of bullshit you pay.

They're not worth it. They're never worth it.

Yeah, exactly.

No asshole policy.

Right. Right.

I feel like. And you know, you are a mentor of mine.

Thank you.

Unbelievable mentor. And one of my favorite things you've ever said is, you can get anything you want in life by helping enough other people get what they want in life.

Yeah. Which is originally Zig Ziglar.

Which is Zig Ziglar. And I feel like that is. There is no. You've arrived. Right. I've probably hit 10 ceilings in the last five years where I thought that's the arrive. And now I've just given up that whole idea of arrive. I want to build myself into the type of person that when I, at the end of my life I look back and say I am so thankful that I continued and I was consistent and I did the right thing and I built grit and I loved people. Well, you have to go through the, the failure and the trying and the attempts and the struggles and the frustrations and you know, the first time someone stole from us, I thought it was the end of the world. The fourth time I was like, eh, been there before, right? Same with lawsuits, same with website crashes. Same with a. We had a shipment full of flying monkeys. 18, 18,000 flying monkeys got lost. A ghost ship from China. We lost all our money in like 2012 for this like school fundraising thing. And it was the scariest thing ever. And that's happened seven times since with other things. And it's like, yeah, we'll figure it out, right? And it's this, it's this elf. It's like, why freak out about something when most of the time you'll figure it out, you'll be fine. Or guess what, maybe you lose and then you just move on and you find a way to win. That's really what it is. Like you just got to keep going. I remember when we started franchising, we're talking about helping other people get to where they want to go. And I felt like I gave up the baby for adoption, right? These were my lessons and my videos in the business and oh my gosh, I can't imagine having somebody else take it and go do what they're going to do. Running their own business from was terrifying for about two days. And then the first person we brought on actually left a 200 million dollar company that they created to come do this. Her name's Kim Fried. She's a local. She's unbelievable. She was our first franchisee and she became a mentor. I just watched her. I'm 26, 27. She taught me more than anyone ever could. And I never imagined it was by helping her become incredibly successful with her clients. And she now has I think 60 employees in that franchise and we now have 120 franchises. We've made 15 millionaires through that process. And I get more excitement seeing these other business owners, franchisees take their lives and provide for their families and their customers. We're in 38 states with that business than I ever would with a dollar a figure that I would take at the end. And yeah, the company became 50 times larger but that is, that pales in comparison to the impact that it made and seeing their families grow and thrive and they love what they're doing. Like, it's just, there's so. It's such a different level of satisfaction and fulfillment, you know what I mean?

Oh, totally, totally.

We try to tell everybody doesn't have money. Making the money is so unfulfilling at the end of the day. Yeah, you might buy that car you like or whatever, but it's so unfulfilling at the end of the day. Don't just do it for the money.

Right. It's what it facilitates too, because, you know, I mean, the thing with money. And I often kind of laugh about some of my friends that find God when they have like money, but they were kind of not quite that way before. And so money can facilitate amazing things. Or, you know, being an addict. You know, I became a millionaire before I was 30 years old. And when you're an addict, you can, money can help buy any sort of crazy vice that your crazy brain can come up with. So you can do very wonderful things with money and you can do destructive things. And you know, the thing is people that say money isn't important, it's like, try living without it first thing. Secondly, you know, people say money can't buy happiness. Well, I buy happiness all the time. You know, money may not buy happiness, you can say, but you know, poverty doesn't buy shit, right? Yep. And so, and one of the best ways to help the poor is to not be one of them. And people that also say money can't buy happiness having given enough of it away. Because when you can utilize that money to help someone that needs medical care, that someone who's distraught, I mean, there's so many things that you can do. And that being said, like a Jim Rohn line, you know, you can't pay someone to do your push ups for you. There are certain things you just cannot do with money. And so when it comes to making money, I think everyone that lives long enough that doesn't kill themselves or doesn't get sick and die or whatever, you're going to go through stages where you're caring and you're compassionate and you're giving and others where you're selfish and self centered and you're desperate. And I've gotten to the point where I realized, you know, when the brain chemistry is not working right, if you're stuck in just a horribly difficult situation, you lose a loved one, you have a breakup, an illness, there's so Many layers and aspects to life. When you take comics, when you take stories, when you take inspiring characters to find those places that you can borrow from. When you're describing this woman that you just described to me, my brain interpret. That's a domino. When I hear him talk about a platform, that's a domino. I think in terms of what are the dominoes in my life that change how I think about things, change how I do things in good ways. You know, there were some incredible dominoes in terms of people in books and things that happened that I never expected that changed the entire trajectory of my life in good ways. Getting raped and molested as a kid was a terrible domino for me. It put me into a life of addiction as a coping mechanism. But it's a mixed bag. You know, there's good, there's bad, there's evil, there's everything in between. And so I think if you. You know, at least in your life, like, what is more important than relationships, Right? Because I don't want to go on a recovery tangent. I will just say silent battles is the hardest battles to fight. You're as sick as your secrets. And if you have pain in your life and you have no one to share it with or disclose with it as a trusted person, and that's different than people that do Facebook confessionals. They'll just go out and tell the world, but then they won't sit down with a trusted person and talk this. Should I really say some of this shit? So there's a big difference between secrecy and privacy. I'm just a big believer in, man, you got to connect. You really have to develop relationships. And if you feel you're unlovable or unlikable, that which feels most private is most public. When you feel you're the only person feeling suicidal and hopeless, I guarantee you there are millions of people that feel that way in the world and just that ability to reach out. So if there's anything that I try to do when I talk with people and then put it out into the wild like this, you know, create a video is hoping that someone that's already inspired and encouraged and wants to do a little bit better gets an idea, they get a strategy, they think about it differently, and they go out and they kick ass more. But there's also that person that's completely hopeless and they happen to stumble across and they feel beat up in life, and they're like, going, you know, Gareb said something that actually makes sense. Scott said something. You know, I relate to that because that's the, the biggest difference that I think that can be made.

There's no question. And that's why comic books has always been that escape. Right? Because it's that feeling that you're reading something and you could relate to that character. Whether they have money, power, whatever, they might have something wrong, you can see yourself in them. And that's really where with Hero Maker, we're trying to address that in a very head on way. Because a lot of what you see, especially in the films today, you know, I'm the biggest fan of these superhero films that are coming out, but they're not relatable like they used to be. Right? Like everything the world is on the line. If they don't fix this problem, it's gonna blow up this or everybody's gonna die. And it's like, that's not your everyday life.

It's so over the top.

Yeah, right.

So, yeah, or parallel worlds are all gonna die in the multiverse.

But yet people have these normal everyday problems. And then there are people that have them that have super abilities to overcome them or to share that with others and to bring them along for that journey to whether it's recovery or to find the right passion or to find like minded people. And that's what a lot of our stories are going to be about. Now, granted, there are going to be extraordinary abilities in there, but a lot of it is going to be very relatable because we want people to read these stories and not feel alone. I mean, when we talked about the first Comic Con that I threw, it was really just a marketing event for the magazines. And when 20,000 people show up, it really galvanized the movement because you had all these disenfranchised people that thought they were alone, that didn't realize there were other people that read comics because they were in their basement at their mom's house or dad's house, and they read comic books by themselves, thinking that they're the only loser out there. And then when they saw friends or neighbors or other kids that they went to school with that were at the same Comic Con saying, oh, I didn't know you were into this stuff. Because it was very closeted at the time. That galvanized everybody. And the first thing it did was it gave people self confidence. And a lot of people that are going through things alone, they lack that self confidence. And when they find that there's other people around them and they know who they are and they start working together and start communicating and building that community, it builds them Self confidence. And once they start having self confidence, then they feel comfortable sharing and then the story gets out and then more people can get involved. And that's a big part of what we're doing.

Yeah, I could even say hero maker, tagline, conduit for confidence or conduit for connection, because that's exactly what you do.

Take the journey.

Take the journey.

Take the journey is really what we're saying.

Be a hero, take the journey. Okay. So, yeah, disenfranchised people. And then they all realize, wow, other people are into this too. But, you know, it's the one that organizes it and brings everyone together. Because how would they know? Yes, how does anyone know?

We're going to cover a lot of those themes. And the beauty is that we're building a whole, what we call a connected universe, Meaning we're building out like, this is the state of what the world looks like, and it's our version of what we think the world is going to look like. And then within each franchise, they're all very independent. They might reach kids, women, guys, all families, everyone.

Coders, coders, anything.

It could be literally anybody that could be interested in these individual ones, but yet they're all still part of a connected world. So they might look like they're independent, but then they all kind of feed in there. And it's going to be really fun to have this kind of world that we're building with all these characters and how they interact and have the fans through the NFTs and through other ways to get involved in how we decide things, how we move forward, how they own things, how they can be involved in a lot of the experiences we create. So it's really our whole imagination come to life.

Think about this for a second. An NFT comic comes out and there's an Easter egg that you never knew you owned. We're building those right now. And all of a sudden, who knows, what if something you own all of a sudden sparks something else in comic number 12 or IP number 12, and you own the NFT? And then bam, all of a sudden you're like, I never had any idea that this was related to that. That's what happens when these things are in the same universe. Right. Nobody saw crossovers before they happen. And that's the beauty of having this ability for fans to own and engage and be a part of these for the long haul.

Hero maker again. So, like, what is the mission? What would you love to have happen with, like, let's say we have a conversation a year from now, what's going to happen between now and then or you would like to see happen? Because I actually think we should. I think it's easy for me to remember this date. We should go back and say what happened, like, so that people could see what is capable of happening in a period of time when you put your, you know, the multiplier and the simplifier together and you enroll a bunch of people and you build community and you do creative stuff, you know what happens, like how many lives are changed, how much money's made, all that sort of stuff. So what do you. Well, we're launching.

We're getting ready to launch our first series of comics NFTs. We're building the community superhero app. Yeah, we're going to. Our goal is to build a big community of people who fall in love with these characters and their development story. And ultimately, we won't tell you too much about the strategy yet, but we want to help. This whole idea of Hero Maker is actually what we want to do. We want people to feel inspired, not just with the comics we launch, but we're building out character development that you, as Joe, could have in the future of this as well. So avatars and creating your own stories and being able to use those and give those to the world. So there's a lot here that we didn't get into today, but the idea is Hero Maker. Take the journey. And so, yeah, a year from now, we want to be off and running with those apps and minting strategies and get our first half dozen out the door and, yeah, build a world of fans.

I love it. And, you know, and I bought a town, too. I mean, I haven't. This is. I guess this video is not live or anything. So by the time we watch it, I will probably have announced it to my Genius Network group. But I bought a town with a couple of other partners in this town. And it's a Skunk Works project. It is literally. I wanted to utilize it to put it in the metaverse with. With Genius X and what we're doing with our app retreat and to fund addiction recovery and let artists come and do amazing things there. And so I have a little bit of a vested. I wasn't even thinking about this till this week, till, like through a text message where I told Garab and he said, oh, we could. So that's. But there's no.

We won't tell the details, but it will make its way into our universe.

We'll just keep it. That it'll play a vital role in the story. In one of the stories we tell.

Yeah, and I hope so because then we can go back and actually kind of reverse engineer. Here's kind of what we did with it. Same with this, you know.

Cause like we could do our next interview there. That would be fun.

That actually is a good point. I like that. Yes. I'm gonna. To my video Rakim, he's gonna. Yeah. Cause he was over there shooting drone videos of this whole thing a few days ago. So Garb, any final things you wanna say then tell the viewers, listeners, where do they go to follow you and how do they sign up into this thing when it's ready, that sort of stuff.

Okay, great. Yeah. Well, first of all, it's very easy to find us on social media, Hero Maker Studios, whether it's on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, you can go to see us on YouTube and then also on Discord as well. So we're making it super easy for anybody to follow us. We're also going to be making our comic books available on every platform. So you're not going to have to just come to us to read the comic books. We're making them available on all the comic reading platforms, but also on all the social. So you'll be able to read or watch it on YouTube or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok.

Awesome.

So yeah, so we're making it so that anybody that wants access to be able to read these stories and enjoy them and to feel like they're part of that community, we're going to make it really easy to do great.

And if you want to own them the NFT side and get all the utilities and the unprecedented access, it's heromaker studios.com. so that's where we're going to be doing our minting and that's where people can collect them. All the episodes and alternative comics as well.

Awesome. All right, well, I'm going to be following this and I have no doubt that you guys are going to create something incredible. It's just awesome and so great talking with you. Amazing.

Thank you.

And you know, I feel kind of weird because this is the first interview that I've done in over a year because I took a one year sabbatical. So, you know, I was like, it's kind of strange.

Yeah, you did a good job.

Well, I hope, I hope so. Thank you.

You're on your own hero's journey.

Oh, totally. And that's a whole other issue. But yeah. Yeah. So for those of you watching, hope you found this valuable and useful and if there's anyone that you think would benefit from hearing this conversation, then share it and tell your friends and family. And, yeah, take good care of yourself. Thank you, guys.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay.

I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that'll be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead. They're over here. Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you. Watch them.