Dr Benjamin Hardy: Why The Top 1% Focus on 10x Thinking

So what's this whole 10 times thing? I'll start with that. Like what, what is this?

Yeah, I mean, what is that or.

Anything you want to say?

I don't.

Yeah, this. This came up first of all from strategic coach experience. So we started the program in 1989 for entrepreneurs. And so around 95, so we had had about six years. I started having examples in the clients that I was dealing with that they had gone 10 times. What was interesting wasn't the result 10 times, but the kind of thinking, because it was a challenge. It's a challenging thing to have suddenly a 10 times increase. And this is revenue. I mean, we're talking about revenue. So I put together a thinking tool which was called the 10 times mind expansion. Because I find if you have a 10 times result but your mind hasn't expanded, it's destructive, you know, it's destructive of how you think about things, it's destructive about your relationships, it's destructive about a lot of things. Okay. So it's actually that. It's what you do with your mind as you have that time of growth. So that's really where it started.

Wait, what year did the 10 times mining?

96, I think it was. So a year before you came?

Yeah, yeah, I started in 1996. You know, it's really interesting that you say that. I mean, I'm just thinking of this right now is that when I first filled that out, my brain at the time was telling me that's bullshit. I mean, I'm not going to go 10 times. I mean, because I was still in that rugged individualist mode trying to do everything. I didn't have any real concept of teamwork and all of that. And it's interesting that you. Because that brought me back. I mean, we didn't have this discussion prior to. This is all like stream of consciousness right now for me, but just thinking about the resistance that my brain had to that concept initially. But that was before I filled it out. And then when I filled it out and started thinking, because the brain cannot avoid a question, right? It starts making you really explore, well, what would have to exist in my life or not exist in life.

My.

In my life in order for that.

To be a possibility.

Which is exactly what I would like to have happen with everyone here today. And many of you have already done this. You're already there. It's just, how do we. Okay, now how do we. 10 times that, right?

Yeah.

Okay, awesome. So let me ask you this first. Ben, you are now translating a lot of Dan's thinking and concepts in the books, putting it out into the world. They're very, very amazing books. I mean, even the intro of the Gap, how many of you have read the Gap in the gain? Okay, the intro, it's so good. So in the process of doing this, what has this been doing for your thinking? Because you have, you know, you've gone through, I mean, you've had a crazy few couple of years. I mean, instant kids, like instant oatmeal and, you know, writing all these books, you were at one point the number one writer in the world on medium.com you've totally transitioned and have a different thing. So you've completely, completely have. I've seen so much growth in you even since you first joined Genius Network and just everything going on. So what's it like to.

Well, one of the reasons, and sorry for my voice, but one of the reasons I like 10 times is for this very reason that when you're at 10 times, it looks fundamentally different, whereas two times you're just trying to do more of the same. And so when I first joined Genius Network, it was all blogs. I was starting my first book. Whereas at 10 times it does look fundamentally different. I'm no longer writing blogs. That makes absolutely no sense. And in this situation. And so I like that 10 times creates transformation. But as far as working with Dan, one of the things I love, so I actually choose the books. I was the one who chose who, not how. And I really, first time I ever read the Gap in the gain, it just changed how I saw everything and I knew who, not how, would be first. But I was. And I also had listened to Dan's talk, 10x is easier than 2x. And I think that we'll explain more of why that's true. But I was asking Dan after who, not how was in place, which book makes sense to go next, Gap and gain or 10x? And his response was, well, there's no point in helping people go 10x if they're going to stay in the gap all along the way. And once you get up to 10x, why stay in the gap? And so it's a fun collaboration. Honestly, it's very much a free zone. I think it makes life easier. I am in my unique ability and it encourages me increasingly to go into my unique ability. So as one example, this is the first book where I've actually gotten a ghostwriter to write this book. I'm applying more who, not how. One of the things that Dan talks about is never show up without a team and I'm increasingly showing up in every situation I have with a better team. And so even with this book, in order for me to go 10x, I need to make my life easier. And it's amazing getting this writer who has written 30 books, she's a much better writer than me. And it makes my life so easy and all of my stress is gone. And so I just love, I love learning. And so it's a beautiful, fun collaboration. A lot of freedom.

Yeah, that's.

Well, you know, let's define a couple of things too when you guys say it, because a lot of people here that are in strategic coach understand, you know, coach talk right in the terminology. But what does free zone mean? How would you define that?

Well, another thing that I notice, clients as they've really become successful, actually, not so much that they've become successful, but they've really become free. Freed up their time, their money, their relationship and their purpose. They stop competing. It's just something I noticed. They stop competing and what they're looking more, more for where it's not about cash anymore, it's about other people's capability. Okay. So I write a lot, actually. When I was 70, I said, you know, what a really neat project would be is to write 100 books in 100 quarters.

Okay.

And they're small books. Anyone who's seen our books, they're, you know, they're about 60 pages. And I'm just trying to think Barnes and Noble was one of the big stories. I can't think of what was the other.

Borders.

Borders.

Borders had a survey of ebooks and they. So ebooks for the first time actually gave publishers a way of measuring when someone started a book, how far did they get in the book. If you bought a book, you know, you got a best selling book, but hardly anybody's read more than 10% of the book.

Okay.

And so what they discovered is that if a book is over 200 pages, 3% finish the book. This is nonfiction. It's not fiction.

Fiction.

If it's a good story, everybody finishes the book. And then if it's 100 pages, only 10% of people finish the book. But if it's less than 60 pages, 60 pages or less, 80% of the people finish the book. So I said, I'll just write books that are copywise less than 60 pages. And a lot of people, if they have a book they've been working on for 20 years and it's got 25 chapters, they would have been better to produce 25 little books. Take a Chapter, make it a book, Take a chapter, make it a book. And especially for entrepreneurs, because you're not writing the books for the money. You make your money with your business. The books are a marketing strategy. So I've done that in 30 quarters. I've written 30 books and what it does. And I didn't realize the value of doing that, but it gave when a capability like Ben came along and I met him at my very first 100k meeting. And Ben came over and he had a break and he sat down with me and he said, I notice you write a lot of books, but you don't write for the popular market. And I said, If it's not finished in 90 days, it's not going to work with me. So I don't take on any project I can't finish in 90 days. You know, like, I just fall off a cliff after 90 days. And I'm sure not going to attend any meetings and I'm sure not going to deal with a publisher. And he said, well, I, you know, I know how to do that. And he's got a great style. I mean, he just has a beautiful, beautiful public reader style, major market style. So when he sat down, something clicked in my brain and I said, I think this is good. And I think. I don't even know if it was a handshake. I don't know if I brought me.

An impact filter the next morning.

Yeah, that's a success. Yeah. But the way we did it, and this is a way of thinking about 10 times how we put the collaboration together. Because you couldn't hire Ben. There's no way of hiring Ben. Okay? You can't get this kind of talent by hiring them. Okay. And we don't have that kind of talent inside the company. What we're looking for right here. And so he knows the entire territory and he knows all the other people who can supply the capability that he doesn't know about. I don't know any of that stuff. So we, what I realized is that at the level we were operating with Ben, and then the other great collaborator on the project is Tucker. Max and Tucker, you know, Tucker is just. Tucker is the map maker for the publishing world. He really knows his stuff. And so originally we thought Ben's agent and publisher would be it, and that turned out to be not true. So we were at a Genius Network meeting and Joe had it on publishing. And Ben was there for obvious reasons, and Tucker was there for obvious reasons, but Reed Tracy from Hay House was there. And I remember I walked into the room in Tempe. I walked into the room and Reid was sitting there. And I said, hi, I'm Dan Sullivan. And he said, I know who you are. And he said, you know, he introduced himself and he said, I followed your stuff for years, but you don't write major market books. And I said, well, that might change. And so Tucker and Ben took readout that night and they essentially had the deal by the end of dinner for one book. And then as a result of the really fast start of the first book, Tucker and Ben worked with Reed. And so we have a 10 year, 10 book contract. And Ben determines every year what the book is.

Yeah, yeah, I think one no, but.

I want to tell you this. So people say, well, what's the financial deal? And I said, well, with a book, there's an advance and there's royalties. And they said, so how do you split it? And I said, well, real easy. I have a real easy split. It's called 100% zero. So Ben gets all the money forever. Ben gets all the money for the book. And people say, you're giving away all the money? And I says, what money? What money are you talking about? There wasn't any money until you put the collaboration together. The collaboration created the money.

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 joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

How do I get paid? Every once in a while, somebody who reads a book signs up for the program. So far, 400. Average lifetime value, $40,000.

Tell me your goal for 2024, but then I want to share a thought on free zone.

Yeah.

Did you want to share your goal for 2024 or no, about the books?

Yeah, go ahead.

Well, he said he wants a thousand people in strategic coach in 2024 through the books.

Yeah, yeah, 2024. So, you know, it grows because when you have a book out there and you put a new book, the new book sells the book that's already out there. Books sell each other, you know, I mean, you know that from fiction.

The best marketing of your last book is your new book.

Yeah, yeah. So anyway, I mean, it's an interesting thing because we know how to make money. Ben knows how to make money. So if you know how to make money, it doesn't have to be about money, but capability acquiring. You know, you can increase your capability by 10 times and the IRS doesn't know it.

You know, there's a couple things I was just giving.

You know, this is in relationship with Garrett. Yeah, Garrett had a great line. You know, Joe always says what Dan said first. I think that was the lineup. Yeah. But Dan doesn't say anything that anybody hears unless Dan knew Joe. So thank you. Just put things in their proper perspective. Yeah.

You know what also is.

And ours is a great collaborator. Oh, absolutely.

No, we have a fantastic collaboration. You know, we don't have an affiliate thing. I'm the highest referring person to Strategy Coach. You're the highest referring person to Genius Network. And we try to refer people and recommend things that we know will make our clients better. You know, if someone joins Strategic Coach as a Genius Network member, I know Strategic Coach is going to do things with them that are going to have them come back as a better Genius Network member and vice versa, you know, so that's how we collaborate. And we're also, all of us are very much long term in terms of thinking, which has always been a weird thing for me because I'm a very spontaneous, impulsive person. And what I do, though, is I stick with things that I see growth and benefit from and for where I feel good, like what I would say, and I've heard this a lot with Genius Network and with Strategic Coach from other people also. You know, half the time I have no idea what the hell is going to happen when I go to Strategic Coach, but I walk out of there feeling better. I just like, oh, I feel more capable.

Right.

And I want people to walk out of here feeling more capable. Like, how many of you feel more capable, to use Dan's words, direction, confidence, capability, and clarity. How many of you feel more of that today than you did yesterday morning?

Right.

So when you put yourself in those environments all the time, that's many of the reasons why we read certain books or we meet with certain people is to do that. And the collaboration between you and Ben did not even happen until you were seven or eight years into Genius Network. Right. Because you started in 2010.

11.

2011.

Yeah.

So, you know, the thing is, what pains me is when I. Oh, it is 10.

It was November of 10.

Yeah. Cause I remember we shot. Yeah, I remember we shot a video in 2010 with a group of us, and at one of the first meetings you came to. And so the point is, like anything that you want in life, it's going to just be more effective if you go deep versus going shallow. And the problem is so many people, let me go to this mastermind or let me go to this seminar and if it doesn't just hit me exactly, you know, I'm going to. One of the funniest things, two things that were very insightful when I started Genius Network to go to this 10 times thinking and stuff, is that I discovered that I did not expect is how many. Because most of the clients I target this to in the beginning were information marketers. Were a lot of marketers. And I've done my best to bring in the best marketers, but also distance myself because some of the greatest marketers in the world are the biggest con artists. And there's a lot of people that were information marketers that would talk about how much money they help people make. And I didn't realize how many people that claim they made a lot of money, didn't have any money, and could not afford to cut a check for 25 grand. That was fascinating to me. I'm like, weren't you just like shooting a picture in front of your fucking Ferrari and talking about how you made a million dollar launch in two days and you can't cut a check, then you're completely bullshitting people about what you're actually doing? That was the first insight. The second insight is there are just as many rich seminar junkies as there are wannabes that just bounce from one event to the next. And they have money, but they just don't stick with anything. They're not, they're, they're very promiscuous with their pursuit of, you know, they don't like monogamy when it comes to groups. You know, let's go to this group and this group. And if you're in like 400 different groups, I mean, how deep can you go with any of them? Right? So, so part of it is in different groups resonate for different people. I mean, I think we've referred more people into different groups than any company that has a group.

Right.

Because some things resonate with different people for different reasons. But the thing is, when you find something that's good, go deep with it. And there are times, because I want to talk about what do you have to give up, if that's even the right word? I mean, what's the sacrifice? Because there are times in this journey all the time, and you all know this, where your business is kicking ass and then a pandemic happens, then your spouse dies, then you have an Employee that rips you off, there's some regulation that's made, some vendor. I mean, there's a million different things that are going to throw you off. And I think the group you go to, the people that you know. Success, in my opinion, is not how much more shit you've learned. A lot of it has to do with your tolerance for bullshit. Like the same treadmill of shit that I was dealing with 20 years ago, it's actually 10 times as amplified tremendously. So the treadmill of shit has never stopped. It's my ability to deal with it and my capabilities and who I turn to and my tolerance of it because of what I learned. The same stuff I deal with every morning would have killed me when I first started my business. Damn near. Well, 1990 was when I started my first late 80, 1989, 1990. And so. And I'll tell you, your thinking was the biggest accelerator for me. I mean, I came into Strategic Coach in one of the. Dealing with one of the most personal crises I ever dealt with. I was, you know, I was in active addiction as a result of something that had happened to me. And I'll tell you, it's one of the few things that gave me the ability to just function in a company when I. When my life was personal chaos, my clients fortunately, still, you know, did well. But I would go to bed many nights, like wishing I was dead. I mean, I had very lot of suicidal thoughts during some of those periods of my time. And coach was, as crazy as it sounds, was more helpful than most of the therapy I was doing.

Yeah, it was interesting last year when Joe was on sabbatical we had about Babs and I, we had sort of a check in with you, but not about business. Just, you know, what were some of the experiences we were having. And I met Joe for the first time in 2008. He had done a year of the program with another coach. And then you jumped.

You mean 1998.

1998, yeah, 1998. And. And I really clicked. I mean, the ones who are really crazy, I feel very comfortable with. It's the ones who sit there like this, you know, that I have a hard time with. And so Joe, you know, Joe, we've become fast friends and we have nothing in common from a personality standpoint. I mean, we have zero income.

It's true. It's pretty obvious if you're not paying attention.

But I think there are some fundamental issues of integrity and that where I think we have common ground. And I was saying to Babs, when Joe started on his sabbatical. I said when I first met Joe, he couldn't have taken a half hour sabbatical. I mean, he would have been squirrely by 15 minutes.

It's true, it's true. Howard, you have to use the mic. He's itching to ask, but I just.

Want to finish this thought before we get started. And that is that it was a beautiful thing to watch last year of just checking in with Joe every month and then actually fully participating in the 100k program during that time. And all sorts of talents just rose to the surface in two ways. The team just got really, really great last. Really, really got last year. So the capability you have in your team has been multiplied over the last year. And the other thing is you found out there were other people who could totally facilitate meetings. And Howard. Howard is one of the, I think two days that we spent with Howard, you know, his agenda and his hand. I think, first of all, it was a huge surprise to me. You know, I was at Howard, you know, and it was just beautiful and, you know, and it was packed, filled with really, really interesting people, including his cousin who's Abraham Lincoln, well known, worldwide known Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln expert. So it was really, really, really great. But when you see that is that without working over the last year, you had two massive capabilities develop, but it was because of who you were over the previous 20 years that those capabilities developed.

No, totally. And that's one of the biggest, best things that came out of the sabbatical is the fact that you, you know, I heard you say it, I heard other people talk about it. I go away for a little bit, but I never take a whole year. And you don't realize how, when your team, you don't know how good your team is until you leave. And I mean really leave.

Not just there to check on them until they. Until they can't call you.

Yeah, yeah.

So until you can't rescue your team, you don't know how good your team is.

And Eunice is an example who's in the. She has. Next month, she'll have been with me for 27 years. And Eunice is amazing. I mean, Eunice is amazing. And I didn't think she could do what she was able to do last year until I left. Her capabilities massively increased. It was incredible.

Well, that's actually one of the biggest keys to 10x is own freedom of time. Right.

It is about freedom ultimately for me.

Well, but freedom of time, yeah. Like most of the people who I've seen Go 10X. Often it's working 50 to 5, you know, and then freeing yourself up.

Yeah, yeah. So if there was one takeaway action step that would produce a 10 times result for the audience from each of you, what would it be?

I think I already gave mine, but it's really that 15 minutes in the morning. You know, get up, do not pass go, do not collect $200 until you've sat down at your kitchen table without the electronics, pen and paper. Sit there and if you have a problem in your life, solve it. If you have an opportunity, take advantage of it. And you can write 500 words in 15 minutes if you're writing a book. And in 10 weeks, that's 30,000 words, 15 minutes at a time. I've done it. I've built businesses doing this. And it's so simple because most people's entire day is reactive. But that's proactive and that's how you're.

Going to get ahead of life.

You know, I know the word vision has come up several times so far in the last two days, and allow me to bring it up for the 20th time now, but oftentimes when you make a vision for your, for your life, for your business, you're making it based on what everyone else around you is doing versus what values you have or what values you think you should have for you, your family, your personal goals. And for me, I learned very quickly. I don't know if I told you, I spent 16 months in therapy about three years ago.

I didn't know the time period, but I. You spent the last decade in there.

Yeah, you would think it should have been the last decade. But the irony there is that towards the end of that, at one of the meetings you talked about the book, the Body Keeps the Score.

Great book.

Bessel Van de Kolt.

Yes, by the way. And he goes on to say that one out of every four people have had some kind of sexual trauma in their life, assault whatever whatever. And one out of every three have had some emotional trauma in their life. So when you look out here in the audience, what are we really doing? And as I sit there with my therapist, and I went to my therapist, by the way, for my anxiety attacks, he taught me four words or four letters. Halt, hungry, angry, lonely, tired. And as it turns out, when you're hungry, angry, lonely, tired, I'm going to go into an anxiety attack. The alcoholic is more likely to go and hit the bottle. The drug fiend is more likely to go and do the drugs. And so I remember. And you've done this before where you're typing. I'm not gonna go pee until I clear out my inbox. Or have you done this? Raise your hand if you've done this. Right? As though it's some magical, virtuous thing, like it's a badge of honor because I'm a badass entrepreneur. What does that really mean? Man, all that means is that's making me angry. And the anger, right? Halt, hungry, angry, long and tired. The anger is about to make me go into an essential tremor or some kind of anxiety attack. And so after working with him for four weeks on that, he goes, hey, is there any other problems we need to. To work on? I'm like, no, I got no problems. He goes, well, how was it with your family growing up? I'm like, look, I come from a communist country. English is a second language for me. You know, it's no big deal. My dad slapped me around a little bit growing up. I go, but what happened to me before that? Being slapped around is nothing. He goes, what happened? And I just broke down crying, and I'd never. And this one. This is just three years ago. This happened with my therapist, and I broke down crying, and he literally walked me through it. And we basically spent the next 16 months overcoming the trauma that I had dealt with between the ages of 4 and 6 of being molested by two older boys in Armenia. And the reality of that is that I had created business upon business upon business. And even in the book the Body Keeps a Score, the author talks about how men who have been sexually traumatized will begin to disassociate, inject steroids to get bigger. And the whole idea is I'm telling myself I want to get bigger and stronger because I like to power lift. In reality, it's to create insulation, to be big and strong so this never happens to me again. I create business upon business upon business to insulate myself from the world. And all I had to do was really deal with the shame, rage, and confusion. And we spent 16 months working on the shame, rage, confusion. I became a better human, a better husband, a better father, a more effective leader in my business. Started focusing on my health more because we are oftentimes have our head in the sand. Think about it. There's what, 300 of us here and, I don't know, another hundred in that room? What percentage of us have dealt with traumas, have experienced traumas, but you haven't processed through that shit? Just like I told Kevin, my therapist, as I'm, you know, snotting up and crying and looking out his window because I couldn't even look at him. I said, whatever. What happened there, Kevin? I've dealt with that. I've dealt with that little boy. I've dealt with. He goes, wait, you dealt with who? I said, I've dealt with that little boy. He goes, bedros, can you look at me? And I looked at him and he goes, you do realize that's called disassociation. That's the first step into creating multiple personalities. Dude, I had no idea, right? I said, oh, my gosh, Kevin, this is scary. Let's take me through the journey. So I don't know what shit has happened to you, but we've all grown up with some level of trauma, likely. Especially if you're an entrepreneur and you're, yeah, we want impact. Yeah, we want income, influence. But you also have some shit to deal with. And trying to insulate yourself with money and muscles and power, just deal with this shit. And then the money is greener. I told Kevin, I said, kevin, the color now is in Technicolor. Sounds are better. Like, I go to concerts and I jump up and down on fist pump. I'd go to a concert and you wouldn't tell if I liked the concert or not. I'm just bobbing my head. In fact, Jay Farouja, a dear friend of ours, he took me to a Jay Z concert. He goes, I thought you liked Jay Z. I'm like, I do. But I was numb my whole life, and I always found reasons to insulate myself. And I'm pleading with you, work on yourself. That's the biggest thing you can do. Do your 15 minutes, but work on yourself. You've got the money. Find a therapist, find the trusted person, do the fucking work, and come out on the other side as a winner. It changed my life, man. It really did.

How could I actually take a sabbatical? And this thought came to me over the last couple of weeks. And then I talked to my buddy David Bach, who's also been in Strategic Coach on and off over the years. And David is a New York Times bestselling author. Many people know him. He wrote books like the Automatic Millionaire, Smart Women Finish Rich. His latest book is called the Latte factor. And in 2013, when he had joined the 10 Times program, he and you presented everyone. How would you. 10 times. Your business or your life, which is the premise of this podcast, different ideas about it. Most people think of it in terms of money. Either gross revenue, net revenue, clients. But he really took it and did it about how could he 10 times his free time. And that's where he came up with this thought, to do a sabbatical. And so I ingenious network. He had given a 10 minute talk on doing a sabbatical in 2015. And I had also introduced him to a guy named Bob Roth, who is really well known for teaching people transcendental med. And during that year, David told me that was one of the most valuable things he'd ever done is getting trained in tm, which, you know, you've been meditating with abs for I think, how many years now?

It'll be about half a century in about 50 years.

Those are kind of like mini sabbaticals.

For people daily, right?

So I've been doing this whole setup and you know, I am a really driven guy and I work with a lot of people that struggle with addiction. And I see that we're on in the middle of one of the greatest mental health crisises in human history with addiction and vice escapism and just mental anguish and depression. And I talk to people on a regular basis that are suicidal because of the work I do with genius recovery. And it just occurred to me, like, man, you know, doing a sabbatical. And since you've been teaching, you're one of the few people that I know that talks about double your business, triple your business, 10 times your business, while also taking free time. Like most speakers, they say it sort of for window dressings. It sounds good because you think that people that are really successful have a lot of time freedom, and many people do not. They may have different types of freedom. And it really occurred to me that, you know, right now, even though I teach ELF in terms of marketing and stuff, it's not been very ELF lately. And the reason is, is I got too much going on. And me and you even did a podcast on this to use your line. You know, entrepreneurs that are too tightly scheduled cannot transform themselves. And I really want to, you know, kind of talk about that and tie it into sabbaticals. And I've thought that, you know, I need to rejuvenate, I need to go step back and really not be so tightly scheduled and cut off a lot of things that are really good because success traps are harder to get out of than failure traps. Right. And I have a lot of successful things in my life and I get so many good opportunities presented to me, as do you, as does anyone that has worked for a long time laying down traps.

And.

And we get opportunity intoxication where opportunities that I used to, oh, my God, I can't wait. If I could only have an opportunity like that, my life would forever change. And I find myself now getting presented with these opportunities. And instead of getting excited, I sigh like, oh, another great opportunity coming my way. And so I've said, if I am going to really do a sabbatical, what would it need to look like? Why would I do it? How does one set it up? There's no better person to talk to about this than you because you've been teaching free days, living free days. You have a, you know, the. The time system for entrepreneurs. And there's a lot of people out there that I don't think they could even wrap their head around it, that they could take a sabbatical. And three weeks ago, that would have been me. Like, how could I ever stop? You know, I have equity in multiple companies. I have a foundation. I have. I have several businesses. I've lots of genius network members. I got literally hundreds of thousands of people that listen to my podcast. There's all this stuff. And so that's sort of the setup. I wanted to say that in the beginning and then kind of go into a conversation about it going back to the line. Entrepreneurs that are too tightly scheduled cannot transform themselves. I wanted to ask you to describe what you think about that, and for the purposes of our listeners, not saying that any, you know, this is not telling you how you should live your life or run your business or whatever. I'm really just talking about the subject of it and how to. How to enter 2.0, whatever phase that is for me, you know, Joe Polish, 2.0, Dan Sullivan, 2.0, or Listener 2.0. For me, I'm thinking in order to get there, a sabbatical seems to be one of the smartest things I could do right now. So that's. That's my thoughts.

Yeah. My answer to it, I think, would be. Would have been different before the pandemic. You know, that. Because first of all, I've got the experience of. I won't say a lot, but certainly dozens out of, you know, 20,000 that we've had in the program. 20,000 entrepreneurs. But I know dozens who've done sabbaticals three months, six months, a year. And, you know, and in some cases, they let me in on it before they did it, so they, you know, they could ask me some thoughts about it. But I think that the current situation in the world is different from what anyone has experienced before this. And I'm 76 years old, and A lot of things have happened in 76 years and I think this is a very different one for from what I've experienced before. And two things I'd like to say about this. You were talking about psychological people being really, really impacted negatively, psychologically and emotionally. And I knew a client who was in the Northbridge, California earthquake suburb of Los Angeles, and he was about two miles from the epicenter and, you know, got a really bad shaking, I mean, everything. And it was quite long, by his recollection and the video sort of supported that. He went through about 15 seconds of shaking. And he said, you know, there's one thing that gives us a sense of security as human beings. The earth doesn't move. I mean, I mean, you're born here and you know, the earth is solid, solid ground. But he said, he tells, he says when it does move and you feel absolutely no control, it unsettles every other belief you have about what's secure and what's not secure. So I think that the pandemic's a bit like a earthquake of that sort. You know, it has, but here it affects everybody because everybody gets intersected by other people's reactions to it. You may be pretty solid yourself, but you're being impacted by other people's turbulence. And it's global. You know, it's probably the first really truly global experience where no matter where you went in the world, meeting a stranger, you could have a conversation with that person and pretty soon you could talk about the pandemic and how it affected them and that would have affected them in some way. The other one is a. It was just a little article I read. People have it mixed up and there's a lot of talk about computers being able to think and where, you know, as they get faster, pretty soon computers will be able to out think human beings and just because they can process information much more quickly than human beings can. And the author, you know, and it struck me as a different, a different opinion. He said, well, we don't process information, we take info, we take raw impacts in like sensations. We take sensations and then we transform them into our own sense of meaning. So he said we, we in fact don't process information like computers do, is that we get senses from all over and there's a belief now that we have more senses than just the five, that the entire human body is a sensing organization and could be that our sense of sight and maybe even picking up on radio signals from other people, but we're constantly processing this and we're turning it into meaning for ourselves. So I think everybody has an absolute need on a constant basis to make meaning out of their experience. And I think that's what we are. We're kind of meaning making creatures. And you're very, very quick at taking negatives and turning them into positives. And, you know, I admire your skill in doing this, especially when it's in public. You're able to shift very, very quickly, but there's probably a price to pay for it in private, you know, And I think you've taken some huge blows just from what you've communicated to me as we've gone. We see each other quite a lot and we talk to each other a lot. And I think one is that probably your system of transforming negative into positive would just like to take a break. Yeah, yeah.

No, you're. Yeah, you're right. You're right.

And it's tired. It's like a muscle. But you've been using the muscle extensively in overdrive almost over the last year. So. And that seems completely natural to me. Everything else gets tired. And when we're forced to continually deal with certain kinds of, you know, certain kinds of experience in a. In a skillful way, but the skill gets tired out.

Right, right. And you know, the other thing too, Dan, based on what you said, even when I've taken some free days, I find myself not rejuvenating or not being able to disconnect because via my nervous system, my, you know, sympathetic parasympathetic system, you know, the heightened state, the fact that, you know, I'm an empath, so I tend to take on the energy and the pain of others. And so it's, you know, it's pretty difficult at times.

And. Yeah.

So I want to take a break.

So, abundance. What the hell is abundance? How did you get in on all this? And how do people think about it?

So I live my life in a very amazing world and community, both at the xprize foundation, where I serve as founder and chairman, and at Singularity University where I'm co founder and executive chairman and all the companies I've started. I'm working on my 19th company right now with my good friend Evan Pagan, which is going to be awesome.

Watch out for him, by the way.

Yeah, I know. But I started realizing that everything that we used to think of as scarce is becoming more and more abundant. And it turns out that technology is the force that takes what used to be scarce and makes it abundant. And we forget as humans what the world used to be like. We've got this Perverse version of the future that was, you know, we make ideal but it's not, you know, we used to be based on an energy economy of like whale oil for lighting, right? Then we discover this thing called petroleum and we start getting after that. And then we have technology that allows us to dig 5,000 meters below the ocean surface and then 5,000 meters sideways get access to more oil. And then all of a sudden we're fracking for more natural gas. And so energy is becoming more and more abundant. And then all of a sudden we realize that there's 8,000 times more energy hitting the surface of the Earth than we use as a species. And there's this explosion of solar production. The cost of batteries is dropping at two to three times faster than the optimist predicted. So we're heading towards a massively all electric economy. And then you think about well, is water scarce? But we live on a water planet. One of our X prizes that Ratan Tata out of India's funding a water abundance X prize is about taking the water out of the humidity of the air and giving a family, you know, 20 liters of clean drinking water. So the question is, what do you think of the science? And I would posit that there is very little that is truly scarce. That technology takes anything that used to be scarce and makes it abundant. You know, Naveen, a dear, dear friend, one of my most successful pupils. I might say he's my older brother from another mother.

But.

We'Re working on the fact that the Earth is a crumb in a supermarket filled with resources, right? There is no limitation. A half kilometer nickel iron asteroid has got platinum group metals a thousand times cheaper than you can get it on the surface of the Earth. And so energy, water, food, health care and education are going to go to zero cost eventually. That's just we're demonetizing and dematerializing that. We can talk about that if you want. And at the end of the day, the only thing that is some degree limited is time. Whether you're the richest person on the planet or the poorest person on the planet, we're all born with the same 24 hours a day, three to 65 days in a year. It's how you use your time that can make it more abundant. My work at human longevity and cellularity is adding 30 to 40 healthy years in a person's life which will make time more available. But it's how you use your time. And Dan, you talk about the importance of free days and how you.

We.

Just it coached in this last session we talked about how do you buy back time?

Yeah. So my approach is very single minded, very single focused. So I have. I'll give you an example that these are two of my great successes because I used to worry about not being connected in the world and I'm not a connector, you know, I really don't have the instinct, you know, to be in contact with a lot of people. And Dean Jackson, where's Dean? Does Dean hear him?

Where's.

Where's Dean?

He's sleeping in.

He's probably drinking and smoking out this.

Can you imagine Dean tying one on? I mean, it really. Anyway, we were just comparing cell phone experiences and we determined in our last podcast that Dean in any two day period has more telephone activity than I had had in the previous previous year and a half and half. My half of my telephone activity was actually with Dean. So I'm not really plugged in. But I look at individuals like Joe and I look at individuals like Peter, like resources. So to go back to the research model, my job is to take a resource called Joe from a lower level of productivity to a higher level of productivity. And when I met Peter, I got a feel of where the center was for Peter and I said, you know, if we could just free him up, the impact on the planet would be a lot greater. So what I look like is individuals that if I can show them how to buy back their time, just get centered on where the real power of who they are as an individual. In other words, where their confidence is and where they feel most abundant inside themselves. And then you can get them focused and you can create a network of very, very skilled people around them. Then you can multiply the impact of this individual 10 times, 100 times. And with technology available today, it can become global in its reach. And day in, day out, that's all I'm interested in, is that one resource called the person with a passion for a particular new thing on the planet who's dedicated his or her life to that. But they've gotten kind of complicated, they've gotten kind of complex in their life and bring them back to simplicity and then build frameworks, help them build frameworks around them so that they can just be doing what they do on the planet all the time. And that's a source of energy too, for the planet. That's, you know, it's the human side of it. So that's really, that's really what I do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, you know, when you just even talk about resources, I mean, are you of the belief that we have plenty of resources in all areas. It's a distribution problem.

It is. We're so the challenge is that we as humans are dematerializing, demonetizing and democratizing products and services. I talk about the 60s, Dan, and I spend a lot of time talking about this. I work with my. The entrepreneurs that I coach in Abundance 360 and Abundance Digital to help them understand how do you digitize everything you have. Once you digitize your products, your services, they enter a period of deceptive slow growth. Then they become disruptive and they, in this sequence, dematerialize, demonetize and democratize. And so the digital camera is not. Example.

Right.

Film photography used to be very expensive and inefficient. Remember when you used to pay for the whole roll of film to get exposed and you hope a picture came out? What a gimmick that was. So then we dematerialized, demonetized and democratized photography. And film photography falls off a cliff. And digital photography grows. Last year, 1.2 trillion digital pics taken and it's exploding onto the scenes. And so there is.

How the hell did they count that?

I think they probably do an average and then multiply by the number of digital cameras.

Just want to make sure you're not making stuff up.

But at the end of the day, well, you know, it is an absolute fact that 27.8% of all facts are made up on the spot. Yeah.

I was going to see if you were going to respond to the audience is laughing or just got to go with it. That was good.

Thank you. I appreciate it. I learned that from you. But there's very little that truly is scarce. And so the job of an entrepreneur, your job as an entrepreneur is to actually find an incredible area that you're passionate about and to make it abundant, to digitize it. And we're seeing this over and over again. We're about to decimate banking industries, insurance industry because of blockchain. Because the fact that. Can I jump into one fun fact?

Yeah.

In 2010, we had 1.8 billion people online. 2010. Today it is about 3.5 billion people connected on the world by 2024. What is that? Six years from now? We're going to 8 billion people connected online. So we're getting about four and a half billion people are going to come online in the next six years. Now for this community in particular, it's four and a half billion new customers who've never uploaded or downloaded anything before, have never had digital Experience before. Think about this. We're doubling the world's population and these people are coming online, not like you and I did at 9,600 Baht on AOL.

Right?

They're coming online at a megabit gigabit connection speeds with access to the world's information on Google and Baidu. They're all going to want health care, education, insurance and banking. They're not going to go to an atm, they're not going to go to an insurance broker. They're not going to go to a school, not going to go necessarily to a hospital. They're going to want all of these things digitized at marginal zero cost and huge markets, huge businesses. Add blockchain on top of that and you get changed the world. And one of the things I realized, we're going to make more wealth in the next 10 years than we have in the entire past century. And I predict that the Forbes 500 list is going to be radically different 10 years from now.

Yeah, well, okay, so talking about making wealth and creating business for the people here in the room, what are the mindsets, Dan, that for all these years are critical for freeing yourself up in order to do it? Because it's sort of an interesting thing, as you said earlier, freeing someone up like Peter. So Peter can be a bigger version of his already pretty super human self.

Yeah, well, and it's Peter connected to a lot of new people that he hasn't even met yet. In other words, there's going to be people. You know, it's a bit like what Naveen was talking about. He just put out that he wanted to make illness optional for people that you could actually choose. And all of a sudden, talent pours out of the walls of people who've been working on something for 10 years, 20 years, but they didn't have a spokesperson, they didn't have a public vehicle for their work. And so, you know, I really talk a lot about mindsets and Peter and I are pretty much totally in agreement that basically mindset either closes doors or it opens doors. And, and I've been thinking, you know, I've been coaching for 43 years and I said, well, if you had just a couple mindsets that would make people more open to taking advantage of everything that Peter's talking about. You see, I've delegated all this stuff to Peter. I used to spend 500 hours a year, you know, on the web looking at, you know, I had files, looking at the artificial intelligence and everything else. And then I meet this guy, I read about him in the Wall Street Journal, I read his review of Abundance, the review of his book Abundance, and I said, man, I said, this is fantastic, what, you know, what he's saying here. And so when I got the chance to meet him, I. I mean, you have your own, you know, your own recollection of that meeting and what it did for you. But what it did is just save me 500 hours a year that he's out there every day. You know, all I have to do is, you know, you know, get him kind of clear, get him kind of focused, and I get his 500 hours. And it's a lot better stuff than I was getting. So anyway, and that. And then Joe, I mean, the thing is, a lot of people have Rolodexes in whatever form they are today. And so I've just got one name in my Rolodex, and it's Joe. I said, I'd like to meet so and so, and it's done. So I've just delegated hundreds, thousands of hours to these two guys. You know what I mean? I'm just happy to be up on stage with these two guys working away. But here's the two mindsets that I think are crucial. One of them, and they're in short supply, I'm noticing in public life. One of them is gratitude. Gratitude. I think if you're really, really grateful, you create an abundance related to your past. That's really what gratitude is, because you're grateful for what has gotten you here. And gratitude is a proactive skill. A lot of people make it a reactive skill in the sense, well, if somebody does something for me, I'm grateful for that. But the word gratitude, being grateful is related to the word appreciation. How many of you say, well, I really appreciate that. And appreciation is a really neat word because it's got that emotional sense, psychological sense, but it's also got an economic sense that things appreciate gold appreciates, land appreciates, stocks appreciate, and what appreciate.

Could we add bitcoin to your list?

Yeah, Bitcoin appreciates, you know, everything Peter's involved in appreciates. I hope so, because I've got. He's got some of my money, you know, I want it all to appreciate, and I appreciate you. Yeah, but what appreciation, what appreciation really means is that you just give value to something. In other words, you say, you know, there's qua Qua sitting right across from me, and I always appreciate Qua. And, you know, and I really appreciate. You know, I can just sit there and think about KWA for a half Minute. And you know, I totally appreciate Babs. As everyone knows, without Babs, I'm just a smart drunk worried about the rent. And I just appreciate. And I think about the people. I appreciate so much what Peter does. And that creates a higher value for Peter in my life. So this gratitude principle is one of them. And the other one is generosity. If you truly believe in abundance, you'll be generous with what you have, not worrying about how you're going to get paid back for it. So I think that the twin and they're related to each other, but one of them is related to the past. It's appreciation because you're giving greater value to your experience up to the present moment. And then generosity is that you're making a bet on the future. See, I'm making a total bet on the future with Peter that it's just going to get bigger and better in every way. And therefore anything that I contribute to that, I don't have to worry about what the return is. There's going to be a big return and I don't have to keep book on it. I can't stand keeping book on things. So I see a lot of people who are super intelligent, but they're not great. I see people who are very successful, but they're not generous. And I said, you know, you've got all the, you got all the hardware, but you don't have any of the software. And you need the software to actually make your way in the world. And you won't have to worry about competing because there's going to be so many opportunities for collaboration.

Do people get how important important that is how? The amount of wealth, the amount of opportunities. I mean, it's an abundance of opportunities that we all have.

Yeah.

And it's a matter of what do you choose to do?

Right.

It's saying no to 99% to focus on the 1%, which is a big problem I have. And I, you know, Coach helps me focus on that.

Can we talk about the 25 years?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Can I also mention.

No, no, please. Can you talk for a little bit now?

No, I just want to highlight.

I'm just being generous here.

You're being very generous because what you just said is exactly how I'm doing my best to curate Genius Network because I want it filled with people that are appreciative and reciprocal and useful and contributing. Yeah. They just want to be in the more I can build a room of these types of entrepreneurs that are high achievers with this, you know, this real focus and emphasis on being a giver. It just makes this community so much better. So I mean you just basically described exactly the goal and objective I have of filling Genius Network up with that sort of person, with that mindset and that behavior. So 25 years.

25 years. Two things important. About 25 years I was again here at Genius Network. I was about to go go on stage. I was talking about my Abundance 360 program which is what I spent all year preparing for. It's 360 CEOs that I coach in Beverly Hills. And Dan says to me as I'm about to go on stage, he says, Peter, you should make the commitment that you're going to do this for 25 years. And it was off the cuff. And so I get up on stage and says, and I say I'm committed to doing this for 25 years because and really I think, I don't know if I shocked you or surprised you, but it was interesting, right? My world changed in that moment when I said I'm committing to doing this event for 25 years and for taking this community of CEOs with me on this 25 year journey. And part of what's interesting about that time frame is that coincides with what my co founder of Singular University, my business partner, many businesses, Ray Kurzweil, calls the singularity. So we're on a countdown, if you would, to the singularity. This is the moment in time when computers are far more intelligent than people and more importantly that things are moving so fast that we're unable to actually predict what's coming next. The analog comes from that of a black hole, a gravitational singularity where light cannot escape. You can't actually see beyond the event horizon. So I palpably feel, I don't know if you do as well, that the speed of change is accelerating. You can graph this and look at it. The only constant is change and the rate of change is increasing. And so I spend, I start about now November, December and January work. I look at what's happened over the last 12 calendar months and I come up with proof of living in 2018. And it's incredible. We as humans tend to accept what is and forget that it wasn't always that way. But when you stop and you look at how fast things are changing, it's mind boggling and for me it's exciting and there's ability to actually put predict the future. Ray Kurzweil is very good. He's got 86% prediction rate and it's really understanding the fundamentals of what's going on in computational power, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, all these things. And we're going to be disrupting every single industry. Healthcare, definitely. Education, for sure. Every industry that you're in is going to be changing dramatically in the next 10 years. And the question is, are you the leaf on the river or are you the river? Are you passive and letting it happen to you, or are you guiding it?

Yeah.

And so I play with time. So I'm a farm boy from northern Ohio, and I noticed when I was probably about six or seven years old, that I could keep myself constant, constantly entertained and really educated because I discovered one day that I had an ability to actually think about my thinking. Okay? So I, you know, I could actually. And I think graphically. So everything that I see in my brain, I see in terms of diagrams and physical patterns. And I could just be by myself for long periods of time. But one of the things that I really zeroed in on is time. And it occurred to me that we live in time. So, you know, we're the fish that swim in time. And humans. I've never met two people who had the same take on time. And I would just ask people about their time references. What's your mindset according to time? Because I've noticed, you know, Einstein had this great ability to take his concepts and really simplify them. And somebody said, could you sort of explain relativity? And he said, yeah. He said he was talking to a man and he says, the woman you love the most is going away for two years, and you have 10 minutes to spend with her before you won't see her for two years. And he says, how long does that 10 minutes take? He says, it's just like that. It just goes like that. And he says, now picture another situation where you've gotten yourself into a situation where your hand is on a hot stove for 10 minutes. How long does that 10 minutes take? And the 10 minutes takes forever, you know. He says, well, well, that's relativity. He says, it's relativity. And what I notice is that if you play with time and one of the 25 year thing, the reason I mention this to Peter, because If Peter spends 25 years, every year going out scouting the planet for all the latest breakthroughs, meeting entirely new networks of really bright people collecting what that year, let's say, from last January to next year, January, all the new capabilities that are coming online. But it's not just that they're individual capabilities. They can be collaborative capabilities. If he can do that each year that's an exponential jump in a one year period. But it's a compound interest. So I had a picture of what abundance 360 would look like in my mind if you stayed with that for 25 years.

It's amazing. Yeah, I mean it's amazing how it's affected me. Right. So I spend, I'm literally on a search for the smartest people, the most extraordinary events. What is the stuff that's going from deceptive to disruptive in this next 12 months?

Right.

And so this year, for example, going down very deep into blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

Right.

Which are, if you haven't followed it, right, we've seen this. It's on an exponential growth curve and Bitcoin is either worth zero or millions of dollars per coin. It's binary. It's not going to be someplace in between. If you believe blockchain is going to be an important part of our ecosystem for large scale logistics management contracts, the case might be. And the other thing is longevity. We spend a lot of time, you and I share that in common. A fundamental belief that we are taking controls of our lifespan. Just because the majority of humans have lived on an average today at 78.2 years, that's no reason to believe that's a preconceived limit, period. You're targeting at least twice that.

Yeah, well, you know, I thought I was really being way out there because I have a goal of living to 156 and I'm not halfway there. I'm going to have a halfway party in 2022 when I'll be 78, which is supposed to be the limit. But then I come across this guy and his number is 700. And I says 700, that's ridiculous. I said, I mean 156, I mean that's understandable. By the way, the world record is 122 and a half. That's documented and everything. But just think about that because that's the biggest time reference that everybody has, you know, and the time reference of how long you're going to live actually has a number attached to it, whether you've thought about the number or not. But I can get people to really redesign their brain in about 15 minutes just by getting them to say what the number is that they have in their mind, you know, And a lot of people, you know, it's according to actuarial tables, you know, it's 78, 85. Family history enters into it. And I said, so tell Me, the year you're going to die, you know how old you're going to be when you die. You know, people say 85. And then I start talking to them about how they want to be when they're 84. And everybody gives me an answer of how they want to be at 84. That doesn't set them up for dying at 85. And I said, well, if you were that way at 84, how many years beyond 85 would you live? And, you know, they add 10 years. They said, well, 10 or 15. I said, which? It makes a difference, you know, they say, well, 15 years. I said, so it's 100. The new number is 100. And the moment they get that hundred, every thought in their brain starts restructuring. Because all the thoughts in our brain are geared to a number. When we've told ourselves that we're going to die. So this is my contribution to the longevity thing is I can get people to think about, about their number because everybody's got one.

If I can hit on why that 700 number for a second. Because it's relevant. I was in medical school at the time. I was doing a joint md and.

You were a terrible medical student.

I was a terrible medical student. Absolutely.

Was from Harvard, right?

Yeah. I made a deal with my. So I was running.

You were a threat to public health, actually.

I actually was. I was running two companies. My fourth year of medical school, my dean calls me in one day and I had one of those large Motorola brick phones. And he goes, peter, your residents are telling me you're on the phone all the time. You're sneaking out of surgery. What is going on? I'm thinking, he's thinking I'm a drug dealer or something at this point. And I fess up, I'm in tears. I'm saying, we're running these two companies and I have to graduate. I promise my mom, my dad, I'm going to graduate. And he goes, okay, I'll make you a deal. You pass part two of the boards and you promised never to practice and I will let you graduate. And he kept his promise, I kept mine. But while I was in medical school, I remember watching this TV show about long lived sea life, whales, turtles, sharks, living hundreds of years. And the theoretical limitation was 700 years. I'm going, why the hell can they live 700 years and we can't? And so it's either a hardware or a software problem and we're going to be able to fix that. And so that's where I hit this ridiculous. Listen if my dear friend Ray Kurzweil talks about longevity, escape velocity, the year, it's a point at which for every year that you're alive, science is adding it more, more than a year to your lifespan. And so he predicts that's 10 to 12 years from now. Not bad. So the question is, how do you not screw up until then? One of the companies I'm proud of, Dan, you've gone through it. I think, Joe, you've gone through it as well. A number of you have gone human longevity down in San Diego. And one of the things that we've done is we've created something called the Health Nucleus. So if you go to the hospital, God forbid, and something is wrong with you, it didn't happen that morning. It's been going on for months or years. And the question is, how do you find out about it?

Right?

Viome is one amazing part of your diagnostic capability. Another part is what we created. The health nucleus at HLI is we digitize you. We sequence all 3.2 billion letters of your life, we sequence your microbiome, we look at the 2,300 chemicals in your bloodstream. We do a full body MRI. MRI, brain vasculature, quantitative brain structure. We look at coronary CT. 150 gigabytes of data about you. And the goal is on A list of 26 leading causes of death to identify if you have anything and then do that every year. And then if you have it, catch it at stage zero, stage one, and treat it right then and there. And the concept that I don't want to know is such bullshit, right? Of course, of course you want to know and you want to do something right about it at that moment in time. And so that's part of it. And then stem cells we can talk about some other time.

Is I'm just curious because both of your rings have lights stemming from them and you must be wearing 4 million trackable devices. What sort of chips do you have in your brain?

Yeah, so I've got my Apple Watch, which I use for mostly a pedometer. This is an orange. It measures my sleep. And on my app I get information about my deep sleep, my length of sleep, my REM cycles and so forth. And it's a great. They're coming out with the next version of it, and I'll be, actually, will be debuting the next version at a 360. You might actually get one. And then I've got a small embedded RFID chip in my hand which has my business card on it. But that's a different issue. But the fact of the matter is, we are not measuring our internal body moment to moment, day to day, but we will be, right? My airplane, my cars, have microprocessors and sensors up the wazoo. We're heading from a world at which we know little about our body to a point at which, you know, we are becoming the CEOs of our own health. All the data that I have is going to be flowing to my AI. My AI is going to be telling me exactly what's right. And these are the conversations that I think are important for us to understand that we are taking medicine into our own hands.

Okay.

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