Fix 90% of Your Emotional Challenges in 30 Days Feat. Brian Tracy

But the thing is. So we have all kinds of advice for young people, and we often dispense it all the time. And in all of the years and all of the wisdom that you have acquired, what would. If you had to say, here's the Brian Tracy operating system to start in your teens and then in your 20s. And if you do these things as you get into your 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and beyond, your life could turn out this way. If you do these things early on, what would those things be?

Well, I've already answered that a little bit.

Yeah.

With it.

With the three.

You know, the. No, I. The triangle was a perfect way to. To mention that. I just want to make sure we.

And it's. And. And, you know, it comes down to responsibility. When I began to study metaphysics, Russian metaphysics, Uspensky and Gorchev, the great teachers of the 1900s, it's when I started to understand the impact and influence of your mind and how the most important thing you can do is to become a very positive and focused person. And the starting point is to accept responsibility, is to eliminate negative emotions. So the most important thing is the elimination of negative emotions. And you do that by saying, I am responsible. Nobody else is responsible. No one else is responsible for it, and nobody else is going to do it for me. It is anything that I want. One of my favorite words I could write a book on that is clarity is just becoming very, very clear about who you are and then clear about what you want and how you're going to get there.

Yes.

One of the major reasons why people are unsuccessful is they're unclear, they're fuzzy about what they need to do to get it. And so if you just take people and walk them through it, there's a very good book written many years ago, the psychiatrist in New York who had. And. And he was a Jewish psychiatrist. And the Jewish people will always tell you that within Judaism there's an enormous amount of negativity and guilt. And so he was brought with a lot of negativity and guilt. And he went to psychiatrists and psychologists, and he read and he studied and he did everything possible, and he was still miserable.

And.

And then he stumbled across principal. And I'm going to try to reach into my memory for it. And he formed a. An organization north of Phoenix in. What is the. What. What is the area?

Glendale.

Pardon?

North of Phoenix. Something in Glendale. Scottsdale.

It's in the mountains. And it's a. It's a. It's. It's a. It's A resort area.

Oh, Sedona.

Sedona, yes, yes, yes. He calls it the Sedona Method and the Sedona, yes. And. And his name escapes me right now. But what he did was he talked about having negative things and holding on to them. You'll know this as soon as it clicks you. You'll be negative and angry and frustrated and so on. And you blame it on someone else and blame it on someone else. And so at the beginning, Jack Canfield told me this when he went, he went there to this two or three day resort. And what everybody did was to think about the thing in their life that makes them the unhappiest, making angriest and so on. So he says, now imagine that this is a pencil pen like this. And it says you hold it in your hand. All right? Now what would happen if you held this pencil in your hand for a few minutes to your hand? Well, your hand would start to tighten up. And you. What if you held it for an hour, right? And then five hours, and you kept holding and you hold it tighter and tighter. What would happen to your hand? Well, your hand would start to get tighter, tighter, and the muscles would tighten up and the joints would tighten up and everything else. So how do you get rid of this negative thing in your life that's causing you all this aggravation? And he said, the answer is very simple. He said, everybody reach out their hands with their. The pen or the pen below them, and then what do you do? You just let it go. So how do you get rid of the negative things in your life? He said, just let it go. And it's called the Sedona Method.

That was Hale Dwaskin is what I pulled up. Right? Hale Dwaskin. He saw, he wrote the book, the Sedona Method. Is that him?

It could be. It could be God.

I remember that from years ago too. I'm glad. No, but there's a famous philosopher, I can't remember his name, that says the last thing that a human being ever lets go of is their suffering.

Yes, yes, I've heard that too. That's right. But the thing is, the key to your success is to realize that this is success only exists because you're holding onto it. Let it go. And that's why I read a wonderful Christian piece of writing. And it said that if Jesus only taught one principle that would rate him as the greatest spiritual teacher of all time, it would be forgiveness. Just to let it go. Just to forgive everybody and everything for anything. Just let it go. And when you let it go, because all what happens is your mind is clear, your body is clear, the stress on your fingers and hands and everything just disappears. And so this is important and it's under your control because only you, only you are holding on to it. And so people are thinking, well, all that has to happen is somebody else has to do or not do something, and then I'll be okay. No, all you have to do is just let it go. Why? Am I upset or unhappy? Whatever it is, just let it go and get on for the rest. And get on for the rest of your life. So that's why forgiveness, if you. If you look at Christian teachings or spiritual teachings throughout the ages, forgiveness runs through them all because you can't, you can't make any progress at all. If you're still mad or if you're still holding it back, just let it go.

I love it. Well, let me, let me. Can I. So here's what I'd like to do. If you're open for it, I would love to interview you on contribution, responsibility, connection, even the whole concept of easy to get into something and hard to get out. That's such an important thing. And then in clarity, which is one of the things you talked about, if you'd be. I'd love to do a part two on that because you, you know, you've got so much knowledge and wisdom, and I would love to help you with any, anything, always that. Because you have so much, you've helped so many people, and you put out so much good work into the world. And even our interviews that I have with you have been viewed so many, I mean, in the hundreds of thousands of times. The interviews I have with you that I've put on, on YouTube, so I know this one will be watched and listened to by many, many people. So in, in the spirit of what's in it for them? What did I not ask you that I should have? Or any final last words? And then I would love to do a part two with you.

Well, you know, what is it that everybody wants in life and is they want to be financially well off, they want to be financially free, financially independent. Because other than that, people think and worry about money all the time. Remember when we were younger and we just sweated bullets about money all the time? We just never had enough. We always had bills to pay. And. And so only when we pass the point where we now have enough money that we don't worry about money, can you really start to enjoy life? Yeah, I would say that probably 90% at least of all the people that will come to you and read and listen. Our people, they worry about money, right? How much money they've got. I'll tell you just a little side thing which when I was, I was single until I was 35 and, and I read a whole lot about marriages and couples and relationships and so on. And one of the things that I read over and over, which you've read over and over, is how many women, their husbands die and the women don't know anything about the finances of the family and they find out they don't have any money and, and they, they have to withdraw and live at a small rented place. They, they have to live with their, their family, their growing children and so on and so forth. So one of the things I decided before I ever got married is that, by gum, one of my goals was good to be sure that if ever anything happened to me, my wife would be financially independent for the rest of her life. She'd never have to worry about money. That's one of my major goals. And I wrote it down and I made a plan and I achieved. Took many years. I made sure my kids never wanted for anything and, and that my wife would be financially independent. And that's one of the things that makes me really happy. What makes you happy is I know that I have taken care of the most important person in my life and my wife is the most important person of my life. And I made it very clear to her and to my children that this was a big focus in my life. I never worried about myself. You and I have had so many difficulties and challenges that nothing can really stop us. I mean, I'm 78 years old and if I lost all the money I have in the world, I go out and get another job. I figure it out. But I just wanted to be sure that my wife would be okay. And she is.

No, so that, that alone, I would say that. So we'll put a button on that because that is great advice is to figure out the most important person in your life, married or husband, wife, friend, mother, brother, sister, you know, whoever that you, you actually take care. Because you know what's in it for them is take care of the people that are most important for you. Like, the purpose of my book is to be a roadmap for how to take the givers of the world and have them be better protected, better held for better boundary givers in the world. Right now, with all of the craziness that has happened pre and post pandemic and all of the leadership in the world right now, that isn't really leadership. There's so much of it that is just misleading. The world needs givers right now. The world needs people that are responsible. The world needs people that, that, that show up with not only asking the question what's in it for them, but demonstrating it. And so you're, you're, you're an amazing human, Brian. You're a dear friend. I love you. I love what you've done in the world and I love how you're, you will be one of these people hundreds of years from now. People will be reading Brian Tracy's work, listening to Brian Tracy, watching Brian Tracy. And you will continue. You've, you've really etched a permanent place in just helping humanity. And, and I hate the fact that I have to jump on another call right now. It's not you, it's me. I have to hop on another session to be the responsible person that I am. But I look forward to speaking with you again. And I just greatly, greatly appreciate you taking the time to share the enormous knowledge you have.

Well, thank you. I'll let you go. You and I, the door is always open both ways for you and I always will be. From the tourist time we met many years ago and it's a long time, 30, 40 years for people that are.

Conditioned with self talk that is extraordinarily negative or destructive. And I of course say this from experience. Being an addict, you usually don't wake up in the morning feeling very serene and very peaceful and very harmonious. You're seeking chaos. And so addicts have as the Guns N Roses first album, Appetite for Destruction. There are some entrepreneurs that are just very destructive. And so there's a lot of unwinding and unlearning because I think unlearning is more important than learning. And so recommendations for reconditioning yourself to not be a blamer, a criticizer.

Yeah.

Stop doing it.

We should maybe just. What's that? Bob Newhart?

Stop it.

Yeah. You ever seen that video? If you just thought, yeah, stop it. It's quite funny.

Well, no, I mean I don't have an office, so at our two headquarters we have a Toronto headquarters and a Chicago headquarters. And I just have a table, we have a cafe and the one in Toronto, we have about 50 seats in the cafe. And I just sit, I'm there all day and people are coming in and out and I'm talking to them. But I have lunch sometimes with clients are in for special. So we have special One day programs that a client deep dive. And one of them is unique ability. And there was a woman there from Georgia and she said, you know, I'm just so hard on myself. And I said, well, stop doing that.

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'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

And then she'd go on and then she'd say, yeah, I just can't find really good people. I'm always dissatisfied with the people around me. I said, well, stop doing that. And she brought up about five things in a row and I said, well, stop doing that. I said, the reason why you have these thoughts and your behavior is because you continue doing it and after today, just stop doing it. Just don't do it anymore. And you know, it seems really funny, but it strikes me from the movie, your documentary by the way, I can picture a situation in the future where we're all gathered here and everybody in the room has a documentary video of themselves by Nick Nanton. You know, we. It's actually a goal of mine to get him 10 more people after you and David Berg and Nick actually threw in. And Divine, by the way, who first of all I'd like to give another hand to Devang because I thought that where is he?

Yeah.

But Devang said since he's come into 10 times, program has gone at least 25 times. He's gone, you know, in about six or seven years. So Devang is real, he's a real player. But what I got, and Nick really caught it last night, was that you were deep into your drug throws and you know, you had your all time. That was like a six star day. The things that you did on that one day. And then you stopped it.

You just stopped.

You just stopped. And then you haven't done it again for 30 years. So stopping things is an incredible ability, you know.

Well, and the thing with recovery, I do it with a lot of support and a lot of rituals and a lot of practices. And I believe that, you know, just, and I'll say this in a way so it is applicable to everyone's life here is in recovery, anything you put ahead of your recovery, you're going to lose. So if someone is an addict and you put your business ahead of Your recovery, you're going to lose your sobriety, you're going to lose your recovery. If you put your relationship, if you put your kids ahead of it, you will lose your kids at the worst stages. And that's a really hard concept to take something like that, that's so important and. And make it your number one thing. And so I see people that are very functional addicts. Like, there are several people in this room that are incredibly functional addicts.

That.

Don'T see it easily. I mean, they may know it, but there's a really hardcore, like, industrial band. Anyone ever remember the band Big Black? Anyone in the room ever heard of Big Black? A couple people, yeah. Like, hardcore band. And there's a song called Bad Houses, and there's a lyric in the song that says, I tell myself I will not go even as I drive there. And so if you have that compulsion, I'm not going to be online past 10 at night, and you're online past 10 at night, or I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to do this thing. I'm not going to have that second drink. But you have the third drink and the fourth drink, you know, if you have any of that. I tell myself I will not go even as I drive there. And that compulsion, and you can't seem to stop it. Well, create the environment, you know. So let's take your office concept, because this applies. So you have a no office concept for me. For you, yeah. And you've. And not saying that everyone should do this. However, I've heard dozens of people throughout the years are like, you know, I gave up my office, and man, I'm just way more functional. Because as you talk about, offices can often be places where entrepreneurs go to escape real work.

Well, they go to hide from opportunity. Most people's offices, you walk in, they go in there, they're hiding from opportunity. Nothing useful can come when they go into their office. They don't make their money in their office. They make their money through creativity and relationships and network. But they go to their office, and I think it's a carryover. They want to see themselves as CEOs, because CEOs have offices. But that's not the world that we live in. We live in the world of taking resources from a lower level of productivity to a higher level of productivity. Do you need an office for that? I don't think so.

Right.

So I just haven't had an office for 25 years. First of all, it's a messy office. If I have an office. And I've seen some people who are actually really good at office, but I haven't found many of them in the entrepreneurial world.

You're a pretty interesting guy. You've written five New York Times bestsellers. Your newest one, which will be at the time we're doing this interview, this is your brand new book called Grow a pair. How to stop being a victim and take back your life, your business and your sanity. But you're known. We're going to talk a lot about the content here. And I'm at the time that we're doing this. I'm only halfway through the book, but I think it's really awesome. And I love your books, I love your videos online, you met on tv. You are a contrarian. You say it like it is. I tend to agree with almost everything that you say. You've got big cojones. You'll describe that this is not just a male thing. This is a male, male and female thing. But what do you really do? I mean, what's your deal? You've written all these books. Like your first one is shut up, stop whining and get a life and we'll talk about other stuff. But who is Larry Wingett?

I wake up every single morning figuring out how many people I can piss off by taking.

Do you get joy out of this or just.

I do. It delights me like none other. No, see, I think that people should be challenged. And if I have a role on this planet, it would be to challenge people's thinking. So I say things that will piss them off, make them think, make them look at what they believe, make them look at all the crap that they're hearing out there from all the motivational bozos and all those happy smiley faced people and say, is that really right? And the way you know whether it's right or not is whether it works or not. And if it's working for you, good, believe it, go with it. But if it's not, stop believing it and start believing something new. And so I try to challenge people into thinking that's really my role. I do that. I speak. I've been speaking professionally for over 20 years. I've done 400 of the Fortune 500 companies. It's hard to believe that companies hire me and pay me a whole lot of money and go on stage.

Do they keep having to come back?

Yeah, they do. Which also surprises me. It's not like I've been unclear the first time. I think they should have gotten it, but they bring me back And I yell at them and say, you people are idiots. Your service sucks. You need to get off your ass and work harder. The reason you're not doing well is nobody's working around here. So I go on stage and say all that stuff. And they love it. I also discovered you can say about anything in the world of people as long as you make them laugh. Anything. If you're funny, they'll get you by with it. By with it.

I've always loved the line. Enthusiasm covers many deficiencies, but it's how you do it, it's how you approach.

So I speak, I write books, I'm on television a lot, work with lots of different television networks.

Talk about some of that, because some people, you know, a lot of times when I'll be out with you. So, like, where have I seen this guy before? But they can't pin where they say.

Well, I'm easy to spot in the crowd first.

Well, of course.

I mean, I wear the shirts.

You sort of look like this all the time. We're going to talk about your attire to you. Do you like my get up here?

I mean, it's very safe.

Well, I brought some props. I was going to see if you wanted. It's brand new, too.

Look at this.

I could tell it still has the tags on it. You might want to keep that hidden. I've been on television. I had my own show on A and E for a few years called Big Spender, where I would go in and sort of interrupt people in the middle of their stupidity. People who'd write wrecked their lives financially. And I would go in and point that out to them. Really? It was a television show about an angry bald man yelling at stupid people until I made them cry like a baby. And it was great.

Did it change their lives, though?

No, but it changed a lot of people's lives who watched. I don't think people really change their lives that much during the show. It's hard to turn somebody's life around when they're really, really in love with their lifestyle. You see, I think people change when they want to, not when you want them to. And so I don't really ever try to change anybody's life. I just point out that it would be very smart for them to want to do that all on their own. They don't want to. I don't care. I'm one of those motivational guys. They'll go on stage and say, I don't care whether you do anything or not. Your life can suck. And I don't care, I'm good with it. What you do in your life has no effect on me. So I don't care what you do. And I have all my buddies in the industry say you shouldn't take tell people you don't care. I don't. It's not I care about my life, I don't care. I don't give a damn what you do. I don't give a damn anybody. My audience does. Not my deal, right? Go fix your life if you want to. If you like it the way it is, you like being broke, fat, stupid, lazy, I don't care. No impact on me.

So what is your primary motive? Like motivation? Because you're called a motivational speaker. I don't know if you refer to yourself.

No, no, no. In fact, I license that I trademark that. I'm the world's only irritational speaker. See, I don't think you can motivate somebody from where they are to a better place. I guarantee you I can make you so irritated with where you are you'll do anything to go to a better place.

Do you think that's a far better process?

Much better. You see, I don't think you can paint this pretty picture. You need to go over there, it's wonderful over there. I think you can say, are you kidding me? Your life sucks. You deserve better than this. Let me prove to you what an idiot you've been. So what I do through all of my work is just try to hold a mirror up to people so they can see how dumb they've been and then show them that they have the power to do whatever they want to do when they decide to fix it. But it's up to them, not up to me. When I get those letters that say, larry, you changed my life, I write them back instantly and say, no, I didn't. I just reminded you that you could change your life.

That's great.

That's great.

Well, you know, when I was, you know, we all have our own stories, however we want to convey them in the business world. When I went into what I do now, which is, you know, marketing and teaching people marketing, you know, I read so many books. I mean, you know, think and grow rich, all the old ones and the new ones. And I've read over a thousand books, most of them business related and a lot of self help, a lot of personal development and I've always had a love hate relationship with it because early on I learned that the best positive attitude in the world is no better than the worst attitude in the world in relation to making money. It wasn't until I actually had a system on knowing how to take a skill and persuade people to give me money and do business with me that how I felt about things had nothing to do with it. Now having a good attitude, of course you're going to approach things differently, but the fact is, you know, I mean you can, you can run around and think positive thoughts all day long or you can get motivation, but if you don't direct it into somewhat something that's going to produce a result, it's usually just completely ineffective.

I'm not a big believer in a positive attitude.

Well, I'm not either.

I'm a much bigger believer in having a negative attitude. I think you have to get negative of your life before you're willing to take positive action in your life. And so what I like for people to do is to get really negative. When I was shooting the television show, if I couldn't make people cry, tie some emotion to their stupidity, then I knew I hadn't done my job. I want people to cry. I want them to go to the mirror, look themselves in the eye and look up to the heavens and cry like Jimmy Swaggart. Really I want them to, I want them to have that Jimmy Swaggart moment where you tears running down their face and they say, oh God, I'm an idiot. When you do that, then you might have a shot at turning things around. But first you have to stop and assess, get negative and then take positive action to create positive results. You don't happy your way to success, you don't think your way to success, you bust your ass and work your way to success.

Okay, so what are your thoughts on the personal development, self help in general? And I will say this, I'll preface this, that I have taken a lot out of it.

Okay.

I've learned a lot from a lot of people. And as you know, I know a bazillion people in the self help world and half of them, well, I wouldn't say half, probably a lot more completely and utterly full of shit. But there's a lot of people that are incredibly smart and really, really helpful and at the same time, you know, I learned early on that if, if you ever invalidate the message because of the messenger, you'll never read another book or attend another seminar because there's a lot of people out there dispensing advice that they themselves do not follow. So what's your take on it?

You like it?

You dislike it?

Unlike you, I came from the self help industry. And I've like, you read a lot of books in the last 20 years. I read over 4,000 books that cover thousands of years of information. Read all the time. Most of my friends come from the self help personal development industry. I was truly a self help junkie. And I think when your life is a mess and you're broke and all that sort of stuff and you go, shit, I need help. You become a junkie. And just like you said, you read everything you can get your hands on, you quickly figure out that most of it is full of shit because it's not working. Especially you can read all these guys stuff and, and you say if you believed it and it worked, you'd be better off than you are. And most of them are not really very well off. But my problem with the whole movement was that I think, and I talk about this a lot in grow up here, is that the, the message got bastardized along the way. It was originally, the original intent was to empower people that you have, you know, Zig Ziglar said you can be whatever you want to be, do whatever you want to do, have whatever you want to have, as long as you believe in yourself. That's a message of empowerment. In my opinion. If you believe you can go accomplish whatever you want based on your level of belief and confidence and so forth, we turn that whole message into a message of entitlement. And so we move from empowerment to entitlement. That's what happened along the way. Self help went from self to help. And so everybody stepped back and say, well, help me, I deserve it. Do nice things for me because look, I'm special and I'm wonderful and I believe in myself. Instead, what they should have said was, I have the confidence in my own abilities to get off my ass and go make anything in the world I want to happen happen if I'm willing to work hard enough to make it happen.

Yeah, okay. So was your life sort of a wreck when you first started doing this? Like a lot of people that I've learned in there, you know, if you want to look at what someone's interested, what the hell do they write about, you know. And I've also learned that sometimes the best messengers of something are also people that suffer the most pain from it. So if someone's going to talk about, you know, how to raise your self esteem, there's a good chance that this person has terrible self esteem and has done enormous research. So much so that they want to start writing about it or making a.

Career out of it.

Some of the people that I've met that are really skilled at writing about time management, they actually suck at managing time. But they're really aware of that condition. So they can articulate it, they can talk about it, they can write about it. So what was going on in your life that caused you to go into this stuff and start doing this? Was this kind of like Larry's version of being a convert of his own system or what?

In a way. I grew up dirt poor and a kid made fun of me when I was 13 years old for being dirt poor in front of a bunch of little girls in the eighth grade. And it just humiliated me. And I made a decision at that very moment. I was going to get rich. Didn't know what rich looked like. I had no role models for rich, didn't know what it took, but I just made a decision. I was going to get rich because no one was ever going to make fun of me for being broke again. So I made that decision. At that time in my life at 13, the only thing I knew I ever had going for me was I could work harder than everybody else. I wasn't smarter than everybody. I wasn't better or bigger or badder or meaner or any of those things. I could just outwork you no matter what. I could outwork you. I could come in earlier, I could stay longer, whatever it took. And that's what I did. No matter what job I ever had, I worked harder and everything everybody else and I did real well. I went to work for the phone company when I was in college and I was a telephone operator when I left 12 years later. I was the area sales manager for AT&T. And so I worked hard to make all that happen. And when I left at the end of during divestiture of the Bell system, I started my own telecommunications company, went out again, just did really well because I could outwork everybody. Built it from just me and found a part time installer. Until soon we had had offices all over Oklahoma and Kansas and we're doing great. And then the corporation commission ruled that what I did was illegal. So I went into work one morning and a rich guy and I went home that day and my company was gone. So I went from rich to bankrupt that quick. Lost everything. And so I turned to my wife and she worked there too because she came out of telecommunications. And I said, you need to find a job because I'm going to go be a speaker. And she said, you don't know what it takes to Be a speaker. And I go, no. But I've written a lot of sales training material for the Bell System over the years, and I can sell this sales training material. And besides, all I've ever wanted in my whole life was an audience. So I got the Yellow Pages out, and I started the DA's in the yellow Pages in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And I called every company and I said, do you have anybody that sells at your company? I didn't care what kind of company it was. Dry cleaners, whatever. They had one person, I wanted to train them and I would teach them how to sell. And I started doing that and found out I was pretty good at it and built a sales training company and was doing a lot of speaking around the topic of sales. Then I found out that they pay you more to make people laugh than they do to teach people how to sell. And people thought I was funny, right?

You're semi funny.

Yeah. Pay me enough, I get real funny. And so I started doing humorous talks, and I was sort of a motivational humorist.

Did you have this whole get up?

Did you wear.

No, no, no. I wore suits. I didn't have earrings or any of this stuff. I wore suits. I look like you're supposed to in corporate America. And about 10 years into that, I was doing really well in the motivational speaking and happy feel good crap that everybody talks about.

So you actually did do that in the beginning?

Oh, you bet. You bet. If Zig could say it, I could say it better, you know? Really? And that's the way a lot of people get started, you know, they're just out there saying what everybody else wants them to say. And everybody wants that message of make me feel good about myself and I'll be okay. They love that message and just fluid in the face of everything. I truly believe I had a meltdown, a typical midlife crisis thing. And I.

At what age?

45.

Okay.

Wow. And just everything fell apart for me. And I went to my wife and said, I don't like you anymore. Went to my manager and said, I don't like you anymore. And I hated my audiences and I hated every word that came out of my mouth. And I just threw it all away. I said, I'm getting in a car and call me. I'll call you. So I drove from Oklahoma to Sedona, Arizona, and I got a big bottle of good scotch and a box of cigars and some good music and a stack of books. And I just sat and I was watching TV one night. There's a lot of Story here, but.

This is very interesting.

I was watching TV one night, and I watched an interview with Dennis Miller. And they were talking to Miller about his career. And he said he used to go on stage like all other comedians. Comedians go on stage to endear themselves to the audience so the audience will like them. Because if the audience likes you, the audience will laugh at you, he said. The problem was, I realized I'm not very endearing. So I gave it up. And when I gave it up, that's when my career really took off. And when I heard him say that, just this light went off in my head. Changed my life that quick. And I said, I'm not very endearing either. I think I'm gonna give it up. And I did. And I called my wife and said, we'll be okay if you'll still have me. I called my manager and I said, the business will be okay, but it's gonna be different. I don't know how it's gonna be different, but it's gonna be different. And I just decided that I would never be inauthentic again. I threw away the suits. When I was a little bitty boy, I used to watch Porter Wagner with my grandma on Saturday afternoons. And Porter Wagner was the original, original king of bling. I said, if I ever get rich, I'm gonna dress like Porter Wagner. And I realized I was. So I did. So I started dressing like Porter Wagner. And I put my earrings back in because I used to take them off before I went on stage.

So you always had this. You just were. You're basically wearing a costume.

Yeah, this is the real Larry. The other stuff was a costume. So I went on stage the next time a couple of weeks later, and a guy heckled me, and I turned on him and said, you know, you need to shut up, stop whining and get a life. And the audience jumped to their feet at that moment, a standing ovation. I went, that is a good line. I think I will keep that shut up stuff whining and get a lie. And so I started telling that story in my speeches, and people really responded. And so I just built this whole speech and philosophy around this Shut up, stop wine, get a lie. And I kept telling people I was going to write a book called that, but until then, I had T shirts, and I'd shut up, stop wine, get of lot a life T shirts. Then I printed them upside down so you could just look down and read it yourself. And sold hundreds of thousands of T shirts and did real well. And then I Wrote the book and I self published 25 books. But a buddy of mine said, you could get this one published. And I said, I don't care. I got a big audience buying self published. Back of the room. He said, yeah, but they'll be in bookstores. And I said, that is appealing to me. My ego got in the way. And so I sold. Shut up. Stop playing Get a life this book for just damn near no money. And the first week it came out, it went to number one on the bestseller list. And when it went to number one on the bestseller list, that's when the agents all started calling, saying, who the hell are you? I said, in your world, I'm not a big deal. In my world, I am a big deal. And that's when they signed and they started getting me more books and all that stuff. And that's when A and E happened to be looking for a host for a TV show. I had a number one bestseller with a sort of a different cover and a contrarian view. And so they looked at me and hired me. And there you go.

Yep, that's it. So going back to when you were watching Dennis Miller.

Yep.

You were obviously ready to hear that sort of message because you were just in a totally fucked up state.

So to answer your question, yeah, my life was a mess.

Does it usually have to get there? You mean you always hear the thing.

About hitting the bottom. The problem is we allow people to sort of hit the bottom and way too comfortable away. And then while they're at the bottom, the whole self help movement again will meet them there and help them wallow in it. And so we don't want you to be too painful down there. So we'll come down there and hug you and we'll hold hands and sing Kumbaya and it'll all be okay. And I think that's exactly the wrong thing to do for people. I think you should say you hit the bottom for a reason. What were those reasons? And no matter what they come up with, it comes down to, you made bad decisions. This is your fault. I can sum up everything I do in one sentence. Life's your own damn fault. Your thoughts, your words, your actions created the life you're living. If it's a great life you caused that, that's your fault. And if your life sucks, it's because you suck. You made stupid decisions. Recognize them, take responsibility for them, take action to fix it. And so I want failure to hurt. We don't allow it to hurt enough in our society. We're too Quick to bail people out. We're too quick to come to the rescue. We do it with our kids, we do it with society in general. We do it with people who buy houses they can't afford. We do it with all kinds of people who make bad decisions. We should let it be painful because if it hurts enough, you'll go, I don't think I want to do that again.

Well, that sounds a little insensitive to some people.

Absolutely.

Now here's. I want to. And some of these I'll just ask as devil advocate questions because I've read in your books and stuff and so I sort of know how you feel about it. Who deserves certain levels of compassion and coddling, if anyone?

People who can't come to their own rescue. There are people who cannot come to their own rescue.

No, I mean, I don't know if you'd ever admit it, but I actually find you to have lots of areas where I think you're incredibly caring, compassionate. I mean, elderly people, people that have injuries, people that were born with mental disabilities.

I mean, yeah, all that stuff. A friend of mine said recently while we were having dinner, he said, you don't really, really care anything about taking care of people. I said, no, I don't. I care about teaching people to take care of themselves. I think that's a much more, again, empowering message. I want to teach people to take care of themselves, but there are people who really can't. More people can than think they can't. But there are people who genuinely.

And I think that's. I think that's a fundamental problem. And one of the things I think you address better than anyone is that, you know, you're not giving people outs when they, you know, so that if they have the ability to make an excuse, you're just not going to tolerate it. You're not going to listen to it. You're going to call them on it. And then I'm going to come to add, because I definitely. We cannot have this interview without talking about that because there's so many people here that identify with distractibility. So how does one change the atmospheric conditions of their life in a positive way? Because we, you know, there's a lot of people running in the world right now that are creating the worst shit storms on the planet. And so I just wanted to get your perspective on that.

Yeah, so the first thing is to recognize that that is a problem now. A lot of people don't recognize it. They keep trying to run away from it. And one way to run Away from recognizing that there's a problem is that you become addicted. So, for example, we did this the first time you spoke. But let me do it with this audience. Okay? I'll give you a definition of addiction that I don't think is controversial. So an addiction is manifested in any behavior in which a person finds temporary relief or pleasure, and therefore craves, but then suffers negative consequences. And they have difficulty giving it up despite the harm. So it's pleasure, relief, therefore, craving, short term, long term, harm, inability to get up. That's what addiction is. I said innate behavior. I didn't say drugs. It could include drugs. Of course it does. Cocaine, heroin, crystal meth, nicotine, caffeine, alcohol. But it could also be gambling, the Internet, pornography, sex, relationship, work. And in this culture, workaholism is rewarded, like my workaholism was rewarded. Shopping, any range of human behaviors. The issue is not the activity. It's the internal relationship, Pleasure, craving, relief, harm, inability to give it up. So I'm going to ask you guys a question here. If, according to that definition, you recognize that sometime or another you had some kind of an addictive pattern in your life, just raise your hand. Okay, again, it's virtually everybody here. Now, the next question I ask is not what's wrong with the addiction, which we know, but what's right about it? What does it give you in the short term? In the short term, what does it give you that you like? Okay, I wonder if a couple of people just raised their hand and then shout out their answer. Okay, what does it give you in the short term or what did it give you? I'm not going to ask you what you're addicted to or how long or when. Just what did you. When you were in it temporarily? What does it give you? Anybody?

Serenity.

Serenity. Okay. Thank you.

Feels good.

So a good feeling. Pleasure. Yeah.

Dopamine. Hit, of course.

Which means excitement. Yeah.

Stimulant. Escape.

Escape. Thank you. Escape from what? Escape from distress. Escape from emotional pain. Serenity. A sense of aliveness. Escape from pain. Are these good things or are they bad things in themselves? The good things are the things we all want. They're the things we all deserve, actually. They're all the things we should have had as children. Which means that the addiction wasn't your primary problem. Your addiction was an attempt to solve the problem. Therefore, to talk about addiction either as an inherited disease or some kind of a choice that people make. And by the way, there are millions of people in jail in this country because of this social belief that addiction is some kind of a choice for which people should be punished. No, it ain't. It's an attempt to deal with life problems such as emotional pain. And so if you want to understand addiction, you have to look at the atmosphere again, as Don woods says, that people grew up under and what they're trying to escape from. So first, we have to recognize that there's a problem and not run away from it. Secondly, we have to accept compassionately all parts of ourselves, all aspects of ourselves, whether we like them or not. Because all aspects of ourselves, whether we like them or not, they came along for a reason. And if we ask the question compassionately, you might do something that you're not proud of. If you ask yourself the question compassionately, why did I do that? What need was it serving? What was my organism trying to deal with? You'll find the answer if you ask the question. So you can ask the question two ways. Why did I do that? Or why did you do that? Do you think there's going to be an answer? No, because that's not a question. That's an accusation against somebody else or against the self. And as one of my spiritual teachers says, only when compassion is present will people love themselves to see the truth. Now, if you ask somebody else, not why did you do that, but I know you're a good person trying to do your best, any idea why you did that? Now, that's a question. And the same with yourself. If you put to yourself, why did I do this? But I wonder why I did this. That's what a compassionate inquiry is. And my belief is that the answers are within all of ourselves. They actually are. And if we are compassionate with each other, which is so much of what you talk about, and if we're compassionate with ourselves, then the answers will emerge. So that's the beginning, is to recognize as a problem and to be compassionate about examining the sources of that problem.

You know, I think what you're sharing right now, both of you, would be so helpful for other people to watch this. I'd like to take this recording of this and ask Genius network members to share it with their communities if they'd like anyone that would find help with it. And I would love to get Stedman your advice. And Andre, anything you want to add to this? For someone out there that's feeling completely hopeless, they don't know what to do. They've lost their job, they've lost their careers. They're really afraid, maybe even suicidal. Both of you guys have endured tremendous stuff, and you've helped so many thousands of others over your careers. You know, with even what you're doing in the prisons, dealing with some of people in the most worst of conditions. What did, what advice that you haven't talked about would you give to people that are out there really feeling this is the scariest, most difficult, challenging thing they've ever gone through, and if you could just share with them anything, what would that be?

Well, probably, you know, if you have.

If you're. The foundation of your existence is negative.

The transformation is always love, regardless of your circumstances.

So you have to believe that. And it's called practice.

The reason Michael Jordan became a great.

Basketball player is because he practiced and.

Practiced and practiced and practiced and practice. And you have to transform.

You have to practice transforming that negative.

Energy because it's the energy that's taking you out.

You know, the circumstances are maybe, you.

Know, they come up, they're going to.

Be tough sometimes, but unless you transform that energy, it's always going to be tough.

Yeah. So you got to work on transforming the transformation.

Everybody in the world is always love.

It's never going to change. Reset now and let's talk about the Turing unit. Did that land with anybody? You get some good idea on that. Okay, good. That's good. I love in the. Whenever we get a breakthrough or you get a thing. Let's go Batman style and put in the, in the comments there.

Pow.

Or kapow or bam or something like that. As we're going, just so I see them randomly popping up, that we know we're in the right space here. Okay, reset it now. And we're going to talk about. We're going to put on our during unit hat. Okay. During unit, we've got two profit activators to work with here. We're starting from the moment somebody says yes, I'd like to. I'd like you to help me. The experience that people go through, we want to imagine that as a guest experience timeline. We want to think about it from the moment somebody says yes till the moment that the transaction ends or you're getting the result that the dream come true result that they want. And the midpoint of that now leading into the providing after sale service in profit activator 6. Now, the two things that we want to look at are, first of all, getting a really great outcome for people. That's the core of it all. We cannot scrimp on that. You've got to get the result for people. But what we also have is an opportunity to get a strategic result from that, not just the outcome, but to get a strategic outcome as well. So I'll use an example that we're all familiar with restaurants because it's a condensed customer experience, a condensed during unit. The during unit of a restaurant begins from the moment someone makes the reservation and ends the moment that somebody leaves after having paid the check. That's the during unit for most restaurants. Now, if we were to outline that in a timeline, that is, we're looking at what are the benchmarks along the way here that make up the experience? So if we look at it from the moment somebody makes the reservation, what next has to happen along that way? Where could it go right or wrong? Where are the opportunities for us to create a wow or create. Oh, and so when you look at it that somebody arriving at the restaurant, what? That's the first opportunity that people have right now, when you look at it, One of the best episodes of I Love Marketing that goes really deep into this is an episode from the Wayback Machine, and it was with Anthony Melchori from Hotel Impossible on the Discovery or on the Travel Channel. And I did this interview with him right before his show came out on. On the Discovery Channel. And it's one of the best episodes. That's deep tracks. There we go. Gina says episode 74. And so I laid out this idea of the timeline, the experience timeline. You can lay out the moment, the sequential timeline of when people. How it works when people start with you and look for the benchmarks along the way. So in a restaurant experience, it could be the arriving at the restaurant, it could be getting in, getting seated, get your order taken, the food comes out, you are happy with that. Maybe you have dessert or coffee or drinks, you get the check and you leave. That's the timeline of everything. Now, you want to fire on all cylinders and remove any friction from that. We want to make sure that people have an amazing experience. And maybe what happens is, if you look at a typical restaurant, the result that we get is Maybe they have 100 people come through the restaurant, they end up with $3,000 at the end of the night. And that's the during unit experience for that day. Now, what could we do if we look at this and see how can we increase the experience that we have for people? Now, if we look at it and we say, what if one thing that we could do is get contact information from people so that we've got the start of an after unit? Because how many restaurants even collect your contact information? Not very many. Right. How many times have you Been to a restaurant, you sit down, you eat, you pay, you leave. And they never know who you are. They never, you never hear from them again. You don't start any kind of a relationship with them. So what if you started thinking, okay, we know we're going to get a hundred people coming through. What if we started a birthday club and we, we were to present that to people when the food is being prepared, when we look at the timeline and we say, when's the best time here? Well, this is, there's a little lull here from we get their order taken and then the food comes out. So we prepare the servers to come out when they're refilling the water. Your food's in, getting prepared right now. If you'd like to join our birthday club, we can celebrate with some birthday cake tonight. And you get a $20 gift card on your birthday and leave four cards for people to join the birthday club. Now if you just do that for 100 people tonight, you've had the same experience. You get 100 people, you get the $3,000 plus you may have 30, 40, 50 people who've joined your birthday club and it's the start of your after unit that now you've banked future business there that who's going to come back? What are these birthday gift cards worth when you invite them to come back on their birthday and they bring six friends with them or they come back because you've been able to invite them to come, or you randomly say, hey, if you look at the weather and it's cold and rainy and you say, hey, the chef's preparing chili. If you want to stop by and pick some up to go home. As a takeout thing, you create all these opportunities. I could tell you so many different ways that you could do this in the thing. One of the best examples that you could do to observe it is to go to the Olive Garden. The Olive Garden is really one of the masterful examples of maximizing the during unit strategically. I mean, they've fine tuned everything to get you in and out as fast as possible. You've got the tablet there, you can pay, you can do, you know, if you can, Instead of getting 100 people in, you could get 120 people in efficiently. That's a great thing. But they also have the opportunity, and this was brilliant is while you're there, you can. I don't know whether they're still doing it, but they were doing that. You could get five dollar entrees to go. So you're sitting Here tonight you're eating dinner and while you're here, would you like to get another entree to go? That's an amazing outcome that you could create for something. So this kind of thinking about your during unit is really about thinking what would be the big opportunities that you could create there. Let me look in my notes because I want to cover a couple of things here. This guest experience timeline. One of the things that you want to look at is how high is high. When you're kind of looking in your during unit, you've got the opportunity to provide the service that you want to provide, to serve the clients that you want to serve. And it's largely based on your ability, you know, and a lot of times people make the mistake of basing their service on what they think people will pay or they've cornered themselves into a situation where they do online courses that are, you know, 400 or $500. And then they set a precedent of what a price is for something like this. I'm going to give you an example. There's, you know, you can set as, as there's no ceiling really on, on what you can do. When you look at the, you look at the marketplace, there's a, there's a company called Richard Mille and they have amazing watches, high end watches. I spend a lot of the summer in Toronto and, and in the Hazleton Hotel where I stay when I'm in Toronto, there was a watch store in the hotel, attached to the hotel in Yorkville that was a Richard Mille watch place. And here it is that the Richard Mille watches, there wasn't a single watch in that store under $120,000. Their average price is $185,000 for watches. This is the Rafa Nadal watch that Rafael Nadal wears that sells for $800,000. But Richard Mille, as an example of what his passion in the during unit is, is he wanted to create the best watch possible. That was his thing. He started it when he was 52. He'd loved watches forever, but his path was let's create the best engineered high perform like most of these expensive, beautiful, complicated engineering feats of watches there. The turbal on watches are very delicate and fragile. You can't, you know, sometimes break if you sneeze wrong. They wanted these to be perfectly engineered and durable. And so his approach was, let's build the best watch first and then let's figure out what it needs to cost. And what an amazing, interesting approach to take for you is what if you took your price tag off of what you do and you said, what would be the most amazing service that we could provide? What's the best thing that I could do for somebody? And then what would that have to cost to make that work? And you'd be amazed at how, you know, when you let people make the decision, you're going to find that you're going to be in a sweet spot of nobody else offering the full solution for people. Right? When you look at what Richard Mill found, there was they were alone in the market at $180,000. There's lots of 50, 60, $70,000 watches. There's lots of million dollar watches that are one of a kind or these, you know, ornamental or decorative kind of art piece watches. But there's nothing in the $180,000 range. And he looked at it, what are, of course, the guy who's got a $20 million yacht, of course he's going to have $180,000 watch. The guy that's got six supercars that he can only drive one at a time, of course he's going to have a supercar that he can wear on his wrist. And they were, they sold $540 million of these watches in one year. And so that's an approach of looking at the market and seeing what could I do that could be a big breakthrough for my service? How can I really provide a dream come true for people? And what in my current timeline could be opportunities for me to take additional things and to take a multiplier mindset. You know, when you look at it, what if every time you did business with somebody, you started measuring what are the opportunities that I have to multiply this relationship, to multiply and turn this piece of business into more business and set it up as a metric for yourself, right? When you look at these, here's an example, this multiplier mindset, One of the things that we look at, I did a lot of work with the mosquito authority that do mosquito control. And one of the things that we established was a yard multiplier index. And so we look at for every new yard that we bring in, what could we do to multiply that so that that 1 yard turns into 3 or 4 yards? Or if you've got assets under management or clients, or, or do every time you take on a new client, what could you do to multiply that relationship so that those people turn into more? So we started thinking, okay, well, the neighbors, the neighbors would be a great opportunity here. And so we did little postcards we started doing postcards and.

Let me move this here so I.

Can see door hangers so that we could say there, this is the mosquitoes looking in at your door. We were staying over in the Linton yard, but they called the mosquitoes authority so we had to get out. Can we stay with you? And then on the back we would offer a free mosquito treatment to get you the experience of having a mosquito free backyard and knowing that once somebody experiences a mosquito free backyard, they're going to always want to keep that mosquito free backyard. And we would send, we offered there, once you sign up as a new client, we would send these golden tickets to you. These postcards that were offering. See the one mosquito talking to the other ones. He's reading the newspaper. We haven't seen the back page yet. Absolutely, positively no mosquitoes in your yard. Guaranteed.

Period.

Guaranteed. That can't be good. So we look at it and on the back we offer the free mosquito treatment there along with a note that sense encourages people to refer their friends. Now you can enjoy mosquito free living wherever you go. Let's face it, we've spoiled you. Once you get a taste of mosquito free living, it's hard to live without it. We've got you covered. Enjoy these golden tickets to give to any of your friends or family so everyone can be mosquito free wherever you go. Now that makes it so effortless for people to refer because they're bearing the gift of value to somebody. They're not saying, hey, you should try mosquito friend. Give a friend is far more powerful than tell a friend or bring a friend is far more powerful than refer a friend. Whenever you get the opportunity to let your clients be a hero and extend some value that they get from for posturing to be able to give to their friends, they get all that psychic benefit of inviting somebody you know to do something that they wouldn't otherwise get to do. Okay, so that's a before or during unit opportunity. So in case we missed it during unit opportunities, we're going to create your timeline. We're going to look for the opportunities to create strategic outcomes. While you're doing that, we're going to extend the level of service that you offer. We're going to maybe reimagine what would be the highest level of things that you do. What are you, absolutely, what are you capable of? What kind of outcome could you produce for people if they would just get out of the way and let you do it for them? Right. If you set that up and put a price on it, so many People are just going to want to take that. Some people want the highest level of anything that you offer. That's. And it's just your brave first little bit of courage to put that out there without a fear of being rejected. When you think, and you live with it and you think when you're coming from a place that is this really offering an amazing value to people, am I certain that this is going to create an amazing outcome for them? Don't be shy, right? Be enthusiastic. Present it out. Give them the opportunity. You don't need to try and sell it or convince people of it. When I said, when I showed you the email, the only email I sent out about working one on one with people was an email that said, hey, I'm going to start working with a handful of people one on one next year. Would you like to work with me? That's all. I didn't have to say, hey, get ready for the best opportunity you've ever had. It's limp. Supplies are limited. And I'm not trying to convince people to do it. I'm trying to present the people who already know that it would be a good idea that it's available. What could you do for people if they knew about it?

Does fame mean to you? And what's the positive and dark side of fame?

You know, when this. We were a band that was on the west side of Phoenix in a garage and trying to learn Beatles songs, trying to learn Rolling Stone songs, and we got good enough to start playing, playing clubs, and that sent us a little further. The strange thing about this band was we had three guys that were four year lettermen, we were jocks, we were milers and two milers across country. We were unbeatable. We were 72, 0, you know, so we were jocks. But we were also in this band called the Spiders. That was like the best underground band in town. It feels like we were a dual personality thing. And when you actually do see your name on a billboard, it doesn't come with a book of instructions. So it's a kid in a candy shop. Especially in the 60s in Los Angeles and you had to pretty much learn how to navigate, not die. Most guys, most bands last about two years in Los Angeles because Los Angeles is built to destroy your band. There's a party every night, there are girls every night, there are drugs every night. And your band just kind of goes like that. You can't find them anymore. We all live together, the band lived together. So we rehearsed every day, every day, every day. And we knew that we were the underdogs. Every. Every single record company turned us down, except Frank Zappa. Frank Zappa saw us and he saw us play. And he goes, I don't get it. And I said, is that good? And he says, well, for Frank Zappa to say, I don't get it. Yeah. He said, I have to sign you guys. Because he didn't understand the theatrics and this. And he says, where are you guys from? New York or, you know, so we're from Phoenix. And he says, now, I really don't get it, you know, because that doesn't make any sense that you would be this far out with these theatrics and be from Phoenix. It's cowboy town, you know. From then, we just kept doing it until we met Shep. Jimi Hendrix actually introduced us to our manager. We were living in the Chambers Brothers. I don't know if you know the Chambers Brothers. We were living in their basement in Watts during the riots. So we would pick our heads up, and there'd be a tank on the front lawn, and they would push us back down. Jimi Hendrix knew them. He would come over. Shep, at the time, was selling marijuana at the Landmark Hotel. He was a young guy. Jimi Hendrix says, shep, you're Jewish, right? And he goes, yeah. He says, you need to be a manager. And he goes, I don't know how to manage you. He says, yeah, but the cops are going to see the fact that you have a lot of money and you don't have a job, so you better. I know a band that needs a manager. So he brought us over there. I knocked on the door. I opened the door, and I couldn't see. I thought there was a smoke machine in the room because I couldn't see from here to here because of the smoke. And then when we got through, there was Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Credence Clearwater. You know, everybody was in this room, and we were a little fly on the wall, you know, we hadn't made any dent at all in anybody. And Shep goes, I'm your new manager. And I went, cool. He hands me, like, a handful of marijuana, and he goes. And I went, this is our manager. This is the greatest thing ever. Because, you know, that was the only thing we did was smoke grass at the time. And it was dangerous to do that in Los Angeles. If they caught you with a seed, you were. The sheriffs were on your butt all the time. We learned that when we started touring. All of a sudden, we started Going, we can't carry anything. We're going to be known as the Beer Band. They can't bust you for beer. Because we were definitely under the microscope, you know, and from then on, it was just. Shep just kept finding ways to irritate parents, you know, he says, you know, what if we could. In London, we stalled a gigantic poster of Alice Cooper half naked with a snake coming out in London in 1971 or 72, at Piccadilly Square Square at rush hour. And it made the front page of the paper.

Right.

We found out that the British loved the Hollywood publicity stunt. And immediately we had two MPs that said, they can't play here, we need to ban them. That was the golden ticket. As soon as we got an MP to ban us, we sold out every record. We went right to number one and sold out every ticket at Wembley because the British were going, how dare you tell us what we can see? And that's how we. We actually broke in England before we broke in the States.

And so you parlayed that. So in a lot of ways, you are a very unique packager of this, of Alice Cooper.

We knew how to put a thorn under the. You know, we said, the more the parents hate us, the more. The more the kids will love us. Which was very true. You know, it was very true. But you had to have the goods. Once they came to the show, then you couldn't just be an average band because you'd be done in a second. You had to have the songs and you had to have the show and you had to deliver. And what happened was we delivered on a level that they weren't expecting at all. It was like, wow, you know, this thing was really. It took off then, you know, it was just. It was like a rocket ship.

Yeah.

You know, because we could deliver.

Taking that champion mindset as it relates to, you know, toxic people and how. What would you say to those people?

Well, the thing is, like, I can't control anyone. You know, if someone's going to be a jackass, they're going to be a jackass. And that's. That's on them. Doesn't necessarily reflect what I've done. And again, I learned this a while ago. I can only control myself. I can. Can only control how I respond, how I behave. What I've seen personally from years ago, as well as what I see all the time, is the problems arise when people respond to it. So someone's just being out of control, rude, whatever, kill them with kindness. Control the way you want don't match that response. If you're not rude, if you're not a jackass, don't be one back. I mean, it sounds more common sense, but it's the matter of practicing it and implementing. Implementing it. So again, if somebody's just giving me hell and it's like, okay, well, have a nice day, you know, we're done here, I can control that. I can put an end to it. Put them away. Whether it's a relationship, just remove yourself. Whether it's business meetings, whatever. I can control how I respond. But the more you're feeding into it, it's only just fueling that fire, you know, and again, escape, pull back. But, but it's not always easy. It's easier said than done to be like, get yourself out of those bad situations. If something's not making you feel comfortable, if something feels off, step away, reevaluate. Maybe it is you. Maybe you aren't giving something an extra chance. Maybe you're putting off a negative vibe and that's their response to it. So you have to do a lot of self reflection. Nobody's perfect. I'm far from perfect. But being able to take a step back a lot of times in most situations that went haywire, I have to acknowledge my role in that. And sometimes there wasn't anything different I could have done to have a better outcome. And that's fine, accept it, move on. But you have to always be focused on the fact that you played a role. And if you can control it, great. If not, then that's on them. And just don't ever associate. At this point, I feel I'm fortunate that I get to choose who I work with. You know, I don't have to just be. Clients come to me and they're just hard to deal with or working with different business partners and different vendors in the industry. I now get to have that privilege of saying, well, we're not going to work out together. This is not going to be a good partnership.

How many of you have experienced some sort of negative review or publicity or okay, all right. How many of you have had that happen and then have it be pretty public, either in the media, or maybe it comes up on page one or page two when people Google you or your company? All right, well, I'm here to tell you that you do not need to be afraid of negative publicity. It will happen to. I hate to say this, but probably everyone in this room will happen to at some point or another. And at some point you will experience negative reviews or publicity an inaccurate review or publicity or jealous competitors trying to ruin your reputation. Now, in my particular situation, what I am teaching people how to do goes 110% against the condition, conventional wisdom. And I teach people how to bypass Wall street to grow wealth safely. I'm showing them how to fire their banker and become their own source of financing. I've made a lot of people very unhappy with me. I may as well just have a huge target on my back. So again I'm saying don't be afraid of negative publicity. And I'm going to show you some, some of the things that we've done to actually turn that to our advantage and the different ways in which we use it. I'll give you four examples. And as you're listening to this, I hope that even if you haven't experienced negative publicity, that you look at how you can use these ideas to generate more buzz amongst your own clients, amongst your herd and your tribe and so on. Because you're going to see some very creative things you can do to get people more involved. By doing these things that I'll show you, we'll be able to educate your clients, you'll be able to involve them more and you will be able to turn prospects into clients and also turn clients into loyal raving fans. So what do you do when a negative review appears? The first thing is something I would tell you, tell you not to do. And that is I wish you would avoid the reputation repair services. Now I've learned from hard experience that although there were a couple good ones a few years ago, now they spam, they scam, they lie and they can get you delisted with Google. Don't use them. Request a rebuttal or a retraction and I'll tell you right now, want to find out how corrupt the media is. It doesn't matter what kind of proof you have, they will typically refuse. So tell them you'll take it to the court of public opinion. Always get legal advice. I get legal advice about making sure that I'm not being libelous or slanderous. And also if I'm going to be doing some sort of contest to ethically bribe people to participate, then I want to make sure that I'm not violating any contest laws and give the facts and educate. So in example number one, it was a negative book review from aaii. That stands for the American association of Individual Investors. You might have heard of them. They have several hundred thousand members. They consider themselves a non profit. They call themselves fair and unbiased, but they're all in the investment industry and I'm telling people, you don't need to invest in the stock market to get wealthy. So they did a book review and they said, bank on yourself is too good to be true. I sent a rebuttal to the editor and I said, I'd like a chance. I'd like you to publish my rebuttal. They refused and I said I'm taking it to the court of the public opinion. And I did a blog post. Is bank on yourself too good to be true? The strategy was I held a client subscriber reader contest. We have about 150,000 people on our list who got this email and I asked them after telling them the facts, did the AAI review of my book twist things or was it fair and unbiased? And this is an exact quote from the blog. I said, we will pick three of the most insightful and or humorous comments and award the posters either a dining gift certificate worth $25 or a personally autographed copy of my Too good to be True book. The result was 82 contest entries on our blog. The readers were jumping all over themselves to post supportive educational comments and testimonials and entries. I didn't ask for any testimonials. You would not believe them. The amount of wisdom that your clients have that you haven't elicited from them is humbling. You can learn so much from them.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new video 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'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

They were selling themselves on the bank on Yourself strategy. We summarized the best points made in a new blog post and we listed the contest winners because. And we, we highlighted them. People loved it. They loved their 15 minutes of fame. They want to be acknowledged. And then we published all the results and all the comments in a second blog post. AAI vs bank on yourself total knockout in round one. The result was skeptics became clients. Clients resold themselves and became loyal fanatic fans. And it builds iron cage retention. This is a really key point that I learned and that is that when you show your tribe how not just to stand for something, but to also stand against something, it takes the whole thing to the next level. An added benefit, when people from our Google Analytics. We know that when they Google AAI review, they want to get a review of aaii. We come up and we get conversions from it. I love it. The blog post itself has a very high page value and conversions as well. In fact, it was so powerful and this was published offline, it never was going to even get picked up online. It was never going to Google. Now what we do is we highlight it on the sidebar of our homepage and other pages of our website. We want people to read this. We want people to know about it. Situation number two, scam.com how many of you have had a conversation about yourself, your company or your product on scam.com only a couple people. I thought you didn't arrive until you're being discussed on scam.com.

Well, for those.

Of you who don't know scam.com, it's a bunch of people who have no life but have a lot of opinions about everything. And google loves scam.com if you have a conversation going about you there, it's going to be on page one almost all the time. People just see it@scam.com, oh my gosh, it must be a scam. So the strategy contest. But entering required listening to our 15 minute podcast because there's this one person that kind of emerged as the chief detractor of me and bank on yourself and he was arguing about how you should just invest in the market. That's how you're going to get wealthy. And someone who is a bank on yourself user started challenging. He said, have you ever actually gotten out your statements and looked at how much you've made in the market? He said, because I just did. And I found out I've made 0% over 10 years. Well, Mr. Chief Detractor decided he'd go look at all of his statements. He went back, he must be like me, a pack rat. He went back for 30 years and he took out how much he contributed and he figured out, what did I actually make? It was 4.5% per year over 30 years. Inflation was almost 4% a year during that period of time. So now he's down to what, a half a percent. And they were deferred taxed accounts. He's got to pay taxes on those. And he said, you know what, she may be right. I am just an average investor. And so I outed that who whole thing. But I made them listen to the podcast for 15 minutes to qualify to get into the contest so that they would be educated about it and it worked phenomenally well as well. We had several hundred correct entries and we picked some winners randomly from it. Skeptics got educated, became clients. Client's decision was reinforced and an SEO advantage on bank on Yourself scam. Financial gurus dismiss the concept. Suze Orum and Dave Ramsey. 99% of all financial gurus say, don't do this. And so after a teddy.

Want to.

Be a fly on the wall. As Susie Orman and Dave Ramsey discuss Bank on Yourself, I have quotes from their books. I show, I parody them. I show how I talk about Dave Ramsey's 12% mutual fund and their endorsements and so on. And as a result, we have 38,000 views and counting on this. And the conversions have been fantastic. People will watch this cartoon before they'll watch a regular video. So these are great strategies. I hope you got some great ideas that you can use to have fun, get customer involvement, and just have more fun. 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 will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead. You're over here.

Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you. Watch them.