Get Whatever It Is You Can’t Get When You Start Doing This Feat. Dr. Benjamin Hardy

Okay, so I'm going to tell you for a minute what I'm going to talk about. I will draw back the curtains. This is what I'm going to cover. How to create the deepest possible human connections, how to create the most lucrative business, how to develop the most innovative collaborations. And also I'm going to teach you a little bit about the magic that happens here at Genius Network and really kind of the magic of Joe Polish. What is all this stuff? I'm going to pull back the curtains on all of this stuff. Stuff, because this is what I've been figuring out, analyzing, studying, brute force learning for the past eight months. So in September 2017, I joined Genius Network. I went to my first 25k meeting, and for about a month and a half before my first meeting, I worked a ton with this guy. I was really lucky. My aunt Jane was actually a member of Genius Network for two years. And she told me when she found out that I joined, before you go to your first meeting, sign up for a 10 minute talk, give a 10 minute talk during your first meeting and work with Joel. That's exactly what she told me. So I worked with Joel, worked with him a ton. And after my 10 after this, this was me after my first Genius Network meeting. Actually, that's not me. That's how I felt. This is what happened. I learned a ton from Joel and also I developed a ton of what I learned about this culture. So I learned a ton. Guy named Dre Redfern immediately helped me to make $10,000 more a month to my business. He had his whole team working with me, helped me for free. All of this stuff was crazy. And so I learned very quickly the rules of this environment, of this culture. Joe says it all the time. Life gives to the giver and takes from the taker. That is the rules in this environment and that is the rules for all of the things that I was mentioning before. Immediately I joined 100k. I said, if I have this many epiphanies and this many experiences, I'm already getting this much. What's going to happen at the next level? My only goal was be helpful. I wrote an article about it on Inc. What happened when I paid $100,000 to help someone? One of the things that really surprised me during my first 25k meeting was one of the first conversations we were having was how do you get a return on your investment of that 25k, I thought that is the most weird conversation. It seems so backwards to this whole focus on being a giver and Not a taker. And then there was someone who said something really brilliant. He said, here's the secret that most people don't realize. You pay someone money and then you help them. This is how you create 10x returns. By the way, that person was Jason Fladlin. He said that at I think 100k or he said at a recent 25k meeting. So here's a really interesting story.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's coming 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.

I don't know who here has heard of Christina. I think it's Tosi or Tosi. Anyone heard of her? One person, that's my assistant. She happens to be one of the most famous pastry chefs in the world. People come from all over the world to come to New York to come to her place. It's called Milk Cafe in New York. It's been all over the place. Internet. Not the Internet, sorry. It's been all over, like the media, the news and stuff. So 10 years ago, she was working at a very fancy restaurant. No one knew who she was. She was working in the back, she was a server, she was doing dishes and stuff like that. She needed a push. Here's basically what was happening. She had a huge passion, a side love for making desserts, for making pastries. She just loved it. It was what she loved to do. And she started bringing those pastries and desserts to her co workers just because she just loved giving those things and it blew their minds. They all, by the way, this is a very high end restaurant that she was working at and her boss was a very famous chef and he begged her for months, please let us serve your desserts at our restaurant. And she wouldn't do it. She was terrified. She was freaked out. She didn't actually see in herself what other people were experiencing. She just saw it as a passion. She enjoyed it and she loved doing it. But she didn't have the confidence in herself. Again, she needed a push. If you've ever seen the documentary Chef's Table on Netflix, please do it. It's one of the most aesthetic, beautiful shows ever. But in her boss's words, I just needed to push her off the cliff because she wouldn't do it herself. And so he One day said, you have three hours, and then whatever you produce, I'm serving, and you're getting credit for it. So if you produce crap, you're getting. That's you. So basically, she freaked out. She took three hours, and she produced a magical dessert. It was a strawberry cheesecake. It got raving reviews. And then she started making the desserts at the restaurant, and way more people started coming, even though this was already a really successful restaurant, because her desserts blew their mind. Fast forward a few years. She's one of the most famous pastry chefs in the world. So she went on to succeed, and she got a gift. That's one of the core components of what I'm calling a transformational relationship, is that you receive gifts and it's something you cannot get for yourself. That's part of this environment. That's part of why you need to be a giver, and that's part of why there are so many gifts in this room, is because there's certain things that you need that you can't get. You may need a push. I recently just published my first book, my first traditionally published book. Willpower Doesn't Work. I was pretty overwhelmed with the launch of a first book. I needed a push. I had a mentor who gave me an enormous gift, something I could not have given myself. So Dan Sullivan, he has defined basically what are the key components of healthy, powerful relationships. And those are the three components that I consider the core essentials of transformational relationships. Basically, there's giving, there's gratitude, and there's growth. If you're not giving, it's not a transformational relationship. If you're not experiencing gratitude, you're not experiencing it because you're probably not giving. You're not appreciating what you're getting. If it's a transformational relationship, you are receiving abundantly, and you should just be blown away. Blown away and humble. And if you're not growing, if you're not being pushed, if you're not transforming, then it's obviously not a transformational relationship. In transformational relationships, there's no keeping score. There's no tit for tat. That's purely a transactional relationship. That's what we're talking about here. And again, that's not where the most growth happens. It's just giving, being humble, being blown away, and being grateful. Also, if you want to create transformational relationships, you have to be the one to initiate it. You've got to discover how to give, what people need, how to be useful, and you can't wait for others to do it for you. You just can't. So one other comment is just obviously you cannot do this on your own. There was a very famous philosopher. He once said something that really gets me every time. He said, self made is an illusion. There are many people who have played divine roles in you having the life that you have today. Be sure to let them know how grateful you are. That philosopher was Michael Fishman. And that's one of the things that I have probably quoted more than anything else. Steve Sims has an entire book on how to create transformational relationships. He's called the wizard of Oz of Business because he knows how to create impossible situations. Whether that's getting his clients on stage with Journey. How does he do it? He finds out what people want, he creates a win win situation, and then he creates impossible situations. Dan Sullivan talks about impossible. He talks about going 100x. We talk about making a 10x investment or 10x return on your investment. Dan Sullivan's like, way above that. He's talking about, how do you go 100x? The only way to do that is when two givers come together who are operating in their unique ability, and they come together and they create transformational collaboration. It's where the whole becomes fundamentally different from the sum of the parts. And what's freaky about transformational relationships is that you don't actually know where they're going. With a transactional relationship, you know exactly what you're getting, and if you're not getting that, you're out. With transformational relationships, there's a lot of risk because you don't actually know what the transformation is going to be. Genius Network and Strategic Coach is an amazing example. Here at Genius Network, this is basically the purpose. It's to bring a bunch of givers together in their unique ability and to create transformational relationships. Again, what are the rules? Life gives to the giver, takes from the taker. We've heard Joe say it, and it's exactly what works. So here are some questions I have for you. Have you 100x'd your investment? How many transformational relationships do you have? Do you initiate? Do you give? Are you radically humbled and grateful? Are you growing? How much are you actually growing? How much are you pushing and how much are you getting pushed? One of my favorite authors is Seth Godin. One of the things he said is art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn't matter, the intent does. Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change. In another. So my question is, are you an artist? You may think of yourself as a businessman or something, but are you an artist like Tim Paulson? And by the way, he has an amazing picture on that other thing, Joe Polish. We consider Joe a marketer or a connector. In my opinion, Joe is an artist. He creates art as a personal gift that changes the recipients. Transactional relationships don't change you. They're not gifts. There's no gratitude required. They're status quo. Transformations are where artists come together in their unique ability. They give their greatest gifts. Extremely generous. There's growth. Here's my call to action. Create more transformational relationships. Even more. You guys would not be in this room if you didn't have any. Create them more in your personal life. Create them with your clients. Give, give, give so much that it blows their minds. And then create them here at Genius Network. It starts with you again. It starts with you, what you're saying about being connected.

I mean, that to me, connection is the most critical element. I'm actually going to launch a podcast called I Love connection. And that's sort of like my code word for helping people with addiction. But you. Because the opposite of addiction is connection. And so when you're talking with someone, you're either in communication or you're trying to escape. I mean, you're either there or you're not. And some people, they aren't very connected with themselves. And if they're not very connected with themselves or a purpose or something, then they're trying to escape out of their own skin. The problem is it's hard to escape out of your own skin because you're there with you even if you hate yourself. And so it's a very interesting thing to see tons of people. And so you're considered a leader in the personal development space. I mean, what's the biggest audience you ever spoke to?

About 10, 11,000?

Yeah, but you're doing this all the time. I mean, you're in front of people all the time. And so a lot of people will look up at a guy like you and say, God, I wish I could do that. I mean, that's, you know, you have to be so talented. Backstage, you know, everyone sees the front stage, but backstage there's a lot of shit involved in running a speaking business. There's a lot of stu. There's a lot of logistics involved in doing events and having done events for many, many years. You know, when attendees show up, everybody does the additions, but no one does the subtraction. You know, they count how many people are in the room, how much money the person's making, this and that, not realizing that there's a lot involved in that. How often do you go up on stage scared or questioning yourself? Even as many years as you've been doing this? I mean, what is like the secret lives of a transformational leader? What really are the challenges for you.

And what you do, you know? Thank you so much for that. I think that's going to be a valuable question to pull the curtain back just a little bit. So, first of all, I think it's interesting to note that I'm not the gregarious one in my personal life. I mean, I like to joke and kid and have fun as much as possible, but I don't seek to be the center of attention when we're at a party. In fact, usually it's my wife that will walk up to me and she'll put her arm around me or something, because my love language is physical touch.

So she'll come over and she'll just.

Touch me and go, you good? And I'm like, yes, I'm good. You know, But I'm more of an intimacy person. So I like to be in a small group of people. And when I'm around a lot of people, yeah. Then I'm not the most comfortable. But the beauty of this is that if that were me, if that's how I went, you know, approached a talk or approached a training for three people or 3,000 people, I'd be done. I'd be done before I began. And that's because I'm making it about me. And so back to yoga. A dear friend, long ago, when I was. I was going to go out to Singapore to speak to 5,6000 people for the very first time. She said, I want you to. We'll work through some yoga together. That's just something you can do to kind of relax yourself a little bit, you know, the day of and all that kind of thing. She said, and I want to share this term with you. And she said, om Na Maha. And she said, loosely, it translates to, it's not about me.

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 so now I will say from that moment forward, as much as I could easily get into my head and my nerves and you know, all the things energetically that could, you know, are not right or could rule wrong. Like you said, there's filling a room. If you're filling a room, it's a full time thing. It's unbelievable. Or you're being invited to someone else's room, you know what they're going through. So the pressure on you is even more so because you know how agonizing it was to get people to freaking take action. You know, getting them to say yes to something, but then to actually show up in their own lives is a major, major thing, right? And more I think it's harder and harder every day, which is something maybe we'll get a chance to talk about. But they show up and now you got to serve them. It's like, well, don't screw it up. Don't be an idiot. So I've heard a lot of stories of people that they trip on stage and they look like a fool and all that kind of thing. And yes, I made a gazillion mistakes on stage and I've screwed up countless different ways. But the difference for me is that when I start, and I always start with Om Na Maha, that it's not about me, that when I screw something up, I don't try to hide it from the audience, I don't pretend it didn't happen. I just go, holy smokes, did you just see what I just did? I mean, I don't even know what to say about that. How about I just start again or whatever? Because they see you totally.

And if you try to act so damn polished, you don't come across as being a real human.

No, I mean, it's good you're not human, right? But that's the thing I really would love folks to know is that even though death and the public speaking are like two greatest fears and all that kind of thing, speaking to an audience of people, large or small, has everything to do with your intention. And so if you're going to give a presentation to your board of directors or to your small mastermind group or whoever it is, or do you know the people you want to ask for money to invest in your business, you got to check in with what's your true intention there. If it's about them and somehow the opportunity is going to impact their lives for the better, you just rise. I get beyond myself.

No, it is true. It actually, when you come at it from that intention, you become a more Caring, capable person. I mean, I really think you do.

It's your true self. Yeah, it's back to that. Who are you really?

And to take people from their lower selves to their higher selves. I actually take it so far as thinking the mechanism to do that is selling. You know, I asked my buddy Dan Sullivan, what's your, what's the definition of selling? Several years ago, and you know, he just said these words and I wrote it down when he said it. He said, getting someone intellectually engaged in a bigger future, that's good, good for them and getting them to emotionally take action to achieve that result. And so I wrote down getting people to engage in a bigger future, that's good for them and get them emotionally engaged to take action to achieve that result. So I even did this video called Is Selling Evil? Which is online, it's been viewed thousands and thousands of times. The 3 minute, 50 second video someone types into Google is selling evil. And it's my whole little spill on selling when I was asked the question is selling evil? During the filming of this documentary. And so it was some B roll footage that never made it into the documentary. And what I talked about is that the key word is good for them because you can get someone intellectually engaged in a bigger future, that's not good for them. I mean, cigarette companies do it, fast food companies do it, Hitler did it. I mean, there's lots of ways that you can persuade people, but it is a sales job. And I've asked audiences if you have a friend that you, you really care about, they're in trouble, they're dating someone that is very toxic, or they're going down a path that you know is going to make them miserable or something that's going to endanger their children or their health or it's just not a really good decision. You know, what would you do? I mean, when you're talking with them, what are some of the things that you would do? Oh, I would ask them questions, I would challenge them, I'd be empathetic, I would listen, I'd be caring, I'd get them this, I'd be supportive. There's all these things that people would do when they're trying to care for somebody. And I said, okay, well, so what you're doing is you're actually selling someone, you're actually persuading them, you're influencing them because you care about them. Now take that into a business environment. When you're operating in that way, you're going to be doing the same sort of thing. Right. And so the question is, how do you actually access all these wonderful qualities when you're trying to influence and persuade someone that you care about? How do you do it? And someone will find, well, you do it by selling. Exactly. So if you're selling, selling, and that brings out these very. Who are you in the best of terms when you're selling, not when you're trying to talk someone into something that they don't want, that isn't good for them, that's manipulative. But when you really care about someone, all these wonderful qualities come out and people. Well, yeah, I never thought about selling that way. And so. Well, if you know that that's going to happen, then how often should you be selling and someone would be like, well, all the time, like. Exactly. But the number one sales job you have to do first and foremost before you can be effective at persuading an audience or persuading someone else, your children, is you have to sell yourself. And so every morning you get up and you either everything that comes out of my mouth, your mouth, anyone's mouth, is either going designed to attract them or repel them. And in some cases, repelling is actually a smart thing to do. There are certain people you don't want into your world. There are certain situations you don't want into your world.

World.

So the question is, how do you do that? And the reason I'm bringing this up is because you don't just get up on stage and talk to people. You actually sell people. I mean, you are there to actually put them into some sort of personal development or some sort of place that's going to hopefully produce a better version of themselves.

The next domino.

Yeah, exactly. And some people that requires certain level of persuasion and a certain level of getting them to see pain and realize that if you don't make this shift, if you don't go into this place, not much is going to change. And so I wanted to actually talk with you about. Because you had to first do that to yourself. I mean, when you go back to the hospital and you walk out and you said, thank you. I mean, something shifted there. And there was, you know, there was some, I need to do something different. And what you had to do is you had to say no to a career that you had been conditioned and learned a lot about and you had to walk away from it.

Yes.

And that's really hard to do. You know, like Jim Collins, you know, good to great is whole. The enemy of the good is enemy. The great is the good. And There. I've always loved the line, be willing to destroy anything in your life that's not excellent.

Yes.

And there are. There are stages where you have to be like, you know, just saying no. Sometimes you have to just blow shit up.

And here's the thing.

I've been in strategic coach since 1997. Me and Dan do the 10X Talk podcast together. Hang out quite a bit over the years with Dan and Babs and even up at their, you know, cottage. And, you know, we spent a lot of time together doing a lot of things. And you have the. You've taught me how to really look at things that I invest in as a cost versus an investment. And you also have done extraordinarily well in Genius Network. And what I really admire the most about you is that you're at a position where it'd be really easy for you to just constantly be the smartest guy in the room or be the quote unquote guru. And you always have a beginner's mind as you approach things. And so even though you've coached more successful entrepreneurs than anyone in the world, you are great at being a student and participating in ways. And a lot of people that haven't even done 1/100th of what you have done, I see a level of they start believing their own PR and they get arrogant and they think they're really cool or they swoop into an event and as long as they're on stage, that's.

They're.

And then they're gone. And so you're not that way at all. And you're constantly learning and you also help other people with how to take that approach. So I've written some questions that I want to make sure I ask you in the right way. What's your perspective and definition of cost versus investment is the first one. But if you want to say anything before that, I just want to make sure we set it up right.

Yeah, I think the.

So.

My focus in any situation that I get into is just what's my mindset going into the situation. And what I try to do is to treat the past as raw material. In other words, that I'm very interested in my past, but I'm only interested in my past as raw material that can be transformed into new lessons for the future. So I'm constantly going back, taking situations for my life. And I was so impressed with your video. And I've been enormously impressed with Joe ever since I first met him. In spite of his best efforts when I first met him, to Seem like he was really odd. I didn't see how odd he was, but I saw this incredible capability in the middle. And so what I say is that one of the keys. And I guess I'm proving it more now for a lot of people, because I over 70. But my number one rule is that you always have to make your future bigger than your past. And that has to do with that. The past is simply there for learning, and the future is there for winning. And so that's my basic attitude. So when I walk into Genius Network, every time I do a little thought process before I come in and I say, okay, we're starting fresh, so what is it that I'm actually looking for when I come to Genius Network? And it's kind of funny because even before we started, we already got two crucial pieces of information. One on an AI program that actually does wonders on your website. And that was just in a chance conversation that we had at dinner the night before. Somebody mentioned this. I said, bingo, there's one. And then the next morning, we were sitting in the restaurant here at the. At the hotel, and this man was sitting at the table next to us, and we said, it's a hi and everything like that. And then we started chatting, and then we invited him over, and we talked for an hour and a half. And from Australia, Jason. Where is Jason here? Anyway, over there. Oh, there he is. So anyway, I have a phrase that our eyes only see and our ears only hear what our brain is looking for. So our number one responsibility is just to tell our brain what we're actually looking for. And then your eyes and ears are out there picking up what you're doing. And then. So I really zeroed in on Jason. And then I knew somebody in Strategic Coach program who would be very interested in Jason. So the first thing I did when I could yesterday, I introduced the two of them, and I said, you two have a lot to talk about. And then when Beau came up, I said, you know, it's time for me to do Beau's course. So I went up to Bo and I said, next year, I'm gonna do your program. So, you know, even before, you know, the first hour of Genius had started, three things that already happened that corresponded to what I was looking for. Right?

Right.

Yeah.

No, and see, one thing that I. When you showed me the impact filter that you did for the 100k group. So Dan joined 100k right when we first started it. And the interesting thing was watching how he thinks about something before he goes into it. So Me and Dean Jackson and I love marketing, we actually teach a model of the before, during and after unit. Because there's three stages of your business. There's the before unit, what you do before you start interacting with a client, doing business. Then there's the during unit, and then there's the after unit. After somebody gives you money, how do you deliver world class service so that they love you, appreciate you, and repeat business and generates referral business. And so as business owners, it's a real simple framework to not just think of, oh, I got to grow my business. Well, do you have to. Do you want to grow. If it's growing the business, the before unit, do you want to do better in the during or the after unit? Because some people are really great at before, but they're not very good at during. Some people are great at during, but they're terrible at after. They never interact with the clients after the fact. So if you look at your business as having three different units. But then I realized by watching Dan with any sort of learning experience, it's what he does. It's kind of like what Robert Cialdini was talking about, pre suasion. It's what do you do before the event? So before every Genius Network event, Genius X event, Dan does thinking beforehand and you don't spend a lot of time doing it.

Yeah.

But what he does is this is great line. Is the juice worth the squeeze? Well, the juice is worth the squeeze to the degree that you are able to squeeze to the degree that you're able to go into it very thoughtfully, very intentionally. And so where's Alex Mendozian? Is he in the room yet? Okay, Alex. I wasn't at the breakfast thing. How was that, by the way? Yeah, thank you. And so Alex held an event called Pathfinders and I went to it, and before the event, I read every bit of the program and made notes beforehand. A lot of times I've not done that in the past, but I do that thinking about Dan because Dan goes into things very thoughtful and it just made a world of difference once I was there.

And.

And so a lot of times people that don't do any sort of thoughtful, intentional thinking before they go to something, then they're waiting for that thing to impress the hell out of them, when in reality it was up to them to create the experience, you know, because the experience you have in Genius Network or here or any sort of environment, as a matter of fact. So it's the same thing with Strategic Coach. But the big thing I want to point out though is the cost versus investment. I'd love to have you speak to that because you've articulated it better than anyone I've ever heard.

Yeah. So what I see is you have a choice and I believe the more that your life going forward is a choice rather than a risk, that things happen to you and then as you say, you react to them. But just using Robert Cialdini yesterday, that it struck me as Robert was talking that the best way to be a pre suader of other people is actually to be a pre suader of yourself. And therefore I don't see Genius Network as any kind of cost whatsoever. You know, because I pre suaded myself that. And can I give you some numbers? I just want to tell you. And I did a form a thinking process that we have in Strategic Coach called the Impact Filter. And it's a way that I prepare my mind for any kind of situation, whether I'm doing a new workshop, whether I'm doing podcasts, whether I'm writing a new book. And I pre swayed myself before what the optimum outcome. And I tell myself the breakthroughs I'm going to have, even though I don't even know what the experience is. And then I just sit back and I watch how these breakthroughs are coming. And they never come quite the way that I've defined them, but they're usually better than I've defined them. And I think the reason is because I persuaded my mind for breakthroughs.

Yes.

And so I was thinking of Robert because I persuade myself continually that I'm going to maximize or optimize any situation that I'm in. But then I just let reality present itself to me. And then I say, well, there's one, there's another one, there's another one, and it works. But therefore I've invested a great deal to set up the situation so that the best possible thing can happen. And it's always a surprise. I mean, it's not like it's predictable. What's predictable is that the experience is going to be a great spirit. And I'll contrast that with what I see with a lot of people. And I even see it in my program. I see it with people, you know, and we're getting big. You know, I've noticed a trend that as we've gotten bigger as a company, we've started to attract companies that are our size or bigger. So we're about 130 team members now. We're in three countries, we operate in 10 cities. But I've noticed people who are incredibly successful come in, but they still have a mindset that I would call a consumer mindset. And I like to contrast the consumer mindset with what I call the transformer mindset. And the consumer mindset is that the world is supposed to do it for you. Okay? And you retain three mindsets. The one mindset is a critical mindset, so you retain the right to criticize what's going on. And number two, you retain the right to complain about what's going on, and then you retain the right to blame. So it's criticize, complain, and blame. And it's amazing to me that entrepreneurs have gotten to such a high level of success with those mindsets. But the problem is nothing's ever good enough for them. Nothing ever matches their ideals. Okay? So I don't have any ideals. What I have is measurement. I have persuasion, then I have measurements of how well my persuasion has identified things I didn't even know I was looking for. The opposite of that is what I call the transformer mindset that you go in and you transform the actual experience that you're having. And there's three mindsets there, too. And the first one is that you contribute. Contribution is just the magic password. You're going to go in to actually create value for other people. Number two, you're going to collaborate with other people. So to the degree that teamwork is available during that period of time, then you can collaborate. And number three is that you create. You just create new things. And so to me, at 74, I'm not trying to get anywhere. I'm just trying to expand my transformer mindset of contribution, collaboration, and creativity. And so I feel that time is actually speaking slowing down for me. It's not speeding up.

Wow.

Well, so you. What. What are your thoughts? Because you're a big fan of Ben Hardy. Of course.

Ben Hardy.

I'm a big fan of Where's Ben?

Did I mention.

Yeah.

Did I. Did I mention that I'm a big fan of Ben Hardy?

You just did.

Yeah.

You just did.

Yeah.

And so. So Ben, you know, with his book Willpower Doesn't Work. And I know he's doing a book with you. Who? Not how.

Who, not how.

And Ben is a great example because people say, why is it that you do certain things with certain genius? Like there's some sort of click or favorism. There is a click within Genius Network, and it's like, well, a lot of that depends on the energy, the collaboration, the contributions of people. It's not Just like, hey, I'm going to single out, see people that I really attach to, single themselves out by just exhibiting great sort of. I mean, you're the same way. That's why me and you do so much together. Because you hear the same thing at coach about me. Like what? You know, like people that don't understand our relationship probably, you know, they kind of have their own story about it. So Ben writes about willpower doesn't work. And he writes about the environment and creating the sort of environment and what you've always been a master at. And I think from the very early stages of strategic coach. Strategic coach in a lot of way is AA for workaholics that are super high achievers. And you bring them in and you talk about free days and focus days and buffer days and that if you want to a lot of your perspectives, that a entrepreneur that is too tightly scheduled cannot transform themselves. Right. And you give people freedom. And a lot of entrepreneurs, if you ask, why are you, what do you want? Well, I want freedom, but a lot of them don't have any time freedom, A lot of them don't have relationship freedom and a lot of them don't have money freedom. Although compared to the average person, you could probably say that they do. And you give them ways to think about freeing that up. But you create an environment and you show them how to actually set that environment up. And then you surround yourself with people that support you in what it is that you want to do. And before I quit rambling here, I remember hearing from you, if you spend a lot of time working on what you're weak at, your weaknesses, at the end of your life, you have a lot of really strong weaknesses. And so your whole thing is focus on your strengths and surround yourself with unique ability teams. So you go to environments where you can tap in the capabilities. So genius network for you, from my perspective is you're coming to find other people that can just. You're not going to spend the time, the money, the energy. You're just going to go and latch onto that and access it and collaborate with it and continue to build and grow yourself. But a lot of this has to do with the environment and how you self select that.

Yeah. And it's a skill. So you know, I mean everything, it starts with mindset and mindset alters your behavior. So when you look at people's behavior, it tells you nothing unless you go back upstream and look at the mindsets that actually determine the behavior. And what I reflected in my description of my first Five years in Genius Network with Babs. And by the way, Babs right here, Bab Smith is my partner. And. And, you know, unless I know Babs, I haven't created Strategic Coach. I mean, we actually had T shirts last year on her birthday that said, no Babs, no Coach. And. And I said, my life is. Has two stages. It's BB and ab, and it's before Babs and after Babs. And if I hadn't met Babs, I'm just a smart drunk worried about the rent, you know, and, you know, and I say that honestly because I really required that collaboration with the person not only who is my partner in my personal life, but my partner in my business life. And I'd gone through a lot of setbacks and a lot of frustration until I met Babs. And then bang, you know, there was just this huge jump and it's gone. You know, we're into our collaboration. We're really into our, like, 35th year, going into our 36th year. But when Babs and I came to Genius Network, the very first thing you said when we started, you said, you're paying 25,000 for this, and if you don't get $250,000 of value out of it in the first year, I won't let you come back. And so I was sitting there And I said, 10 times, 10 times. And we had done a thinking exercise in Coach, which is called the 10 times mind expander, where you go back 25 years to when you were one tenth of where you are, and you talk about the stages of growth that got you to where you are, and we just create a structure. And people say, amazing how I did that. And I said, now you're 10 times where you were when you were 1 10th. But could you have predicted how you were going to get to 10 times back then? And of course you couldn't. And I say, okay, so we're going to do it again. Now, I've given you proof that you've already gone 10 times. And now what I'm going to say is we're going to pick a date in the future when you're going to go 10 times, and then we're going to work on that. But I came up to you after the first. I said, you know, I'm going to create a whole program called the 10 Times Ambition Program. And it happened in the first half hour. And at the first break, I came up to you and I said, I just got my money back. And it turned out that that first insight in the first hour of my first 25k after 5 years had netted a $16 million. 16 million, which turned out to be a 64 times return on investment. And it was just bang. I got the idea. So when I started 100k, so first 5 years going to be a million dollars. I said, we're going to get $64 million. And the very first workshop I was in, I met Ben. And all my career in coach, I've been looking for the writer who just is not an inside writer but an outside writer who just totally gets what we're talking about. And he's got a reputation and he's got an audience and he's got a reach and he's got an agent and he's got a publisher and they have a big budget. And I said, bingo, there's my writer. And so we have our first project. It'll be written during the next year. And then we go. And Ben said, you know, after this book, can we do another book? I said, you bet.

That would be a bad idea.

Yeah. So I sweetened the deal and I said, ben, all the money we make on these books is your money. I just want the customers who come from your books. So just like that. And it's going to be 64 times. I know it'll be plus I've gotten an enormous amount elsewhere. I thought, I mean, I've talked to John Ratliff a lot over the years about his thinking about this packaging your company as if you're going to sell it. And I tell you the two hours yesterday afternoon, you know what it was for me is that that was a threshold, two hours for Genius Network. Because you're now jumping where we're not just consider talking about entrepreneurs, we're really talking about entrepreneurial care companies. And I just felt it was like time for Genius Network. Everybody put their big boy pants on and actually start thinking about companies. And so it's really great. So that's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for $64 million of value every time I come here, which is okay.

So I love that for one.

No, and you just have the intention and then you keep your eyes and ears out because. Cause you don't know where the actual opportunity's gonna come from.

So I come from this small little town where, you know, you'd go down to the butchers and get meat and bring it home. And once a month they'd send the account to your parents. No one ever handed money over the account. It was all trust based. You know to business globally. And the bigger question is, isn't that how business should be? So I mean there's lots of other things I could talk about. For me that's a really big driver. You know, what do we do to make business the most noble thing we.

Do well and look, even the way you talk and I mean it's clear that you have a lot of knowledge and a lot of doing the reps under your belt on how to present right. So and you're very non threatening and you are very much, you come across. We're going to get into drawing so this is cool. I got my iPad here. I'm so I actually want to learn from you about how you, you, you interact with this too. Even, even, even before the filming of this is interesting. You know, just think about the setup and stuff. So I've always, you know, really like the, the whole concept of people love to be sold. They hate to be pressured. Right. So if you do selling in a certain way, it's enjoyable. You're, you're helping lead someone to where they want to go. And I despise the unethical use of marketing and selling. I, I don't know how you would frame this but I will often say to, to people that are early on learning about, you know, marketing, they're like, they'll have, I don't want to do anything gimmicky, I don't want to do anything too hypey. And I'll say, well you know, hype used ethically is massive enthusiasm for what you're selling. Hype used unethically is lying, misleading, bullshitting, exaggerating, saying things that simply aren't true and they're, you know, everything is, involves selling. Everything you do is either going to attract or it's going to repel. And so going back to your whole living in a small town, people knew each other and when you're in a big open sea, a lot of people can get away with fleecing people. They can get away with selling crap in a box. They, they just find a new customer, client, patient, victim, whatever they want to call them and then they go on to the next one. So there are people that are, you know, in the transaction business and then there's people that are in the trans transformation business. Anything meaningful and good in the world, selling was involved like everything. So it's not the selling that's good or bad, it's the methodology. It's the, it's, it's the match to the person if it's a right Fit client, that sort of thing. So all of that being said, how, Let me, let me back up the, the person listening to this. There's many, there's people that are in service businesses. Most of them are just entrepreneurs and founders. They're running their companies every day. Their ability to, you know, make a living has to do with their ability to go out and make sales and to acquire clients. There are investors, there are, there are, you know, I've some people that are, you know, running billion dollar companies, but most of them are just small business owners and they're just looking for ways on how to most effectively present and package what it is they do. So when you go in to help someone, what are the obstacles that you often see that stand in the way for them getting the results? They, they have their business, they have their product, their services and they're just not, they're not effective at selling. What are the obstacles?

Well, I suspect you've heard this a lot of times too, right? I hate selling. Yep. Do you know like, because selling. So foot in the door selling came from the door to door. Vacuum cleaners of salespeople of the 50s and 60s and they used to buy leather shoes where the sole of the shoe was wider than the foot of the shoe.

So they slammed the door.

So yeah, put the foot in the door and then they slammed the door. They can't get the door closing. You keep shouting your pitch through the door, right. And it was, it was an aggressive full contact, I'm just going to wear you down style of selling. Right. And then that evolved into pressure based selling. Gift of the gab. I'm just, I'm just going to, you know, I'm just going to conversationally manipulate you into saying yes. I'm going to get the triple yes pattern set up. I'm gonna find, you know, I'm gonna have 101 closes that I can, you know, pluck out and all this sort of business. And salespeople used to be the purveyors of information. So if you wanted to buy a tv, you went to the shop and you talked to the salesperson, you said, so I wanna buy a tv. And they kind of educated you about what you could have and what was available, right? Well that's gone because everybody comes to you now having researched a bunch of stuff, right? But you, you're no longer a purveyor of information, you're a purveyor of realization. And there's a big difference. Right. And so for someone to realize that they don't just need this thing, but they need you. They have to connect to you in a way that is way deeper than will ever come from. Gift of the gab, foot in the door 101 closes and that sort of thing. They have to connect with you at a profound level. And so what that actually means is that the business owner has to connect with what they're selling at a much more profound level. It's time to draw.

It's time to draw, if that's okay. Yeah, draw something. And then I'm going to ask even how you came about the whole drawing thing, but I want to just have you demonstrate how you communicate.

Sure.

So one of the things we've been. One of the things I spend a lot of time thinking about is if you think about, you know, a company might sell lots and lots of products, but there is some kind of company genius that sits behind all those products. There is a central thread of genius. So if you think about the Virgin brand of companies, right, they do all sorts of different things, credit cards, airlines, like a bunch of different stuff. Right. But there is a core genius that sits behind it that is common to all of them. And what is that genius? And so company genius usually starts with a who, the founder or the originator of the idea of the thinking. Right. And there's three components to that. The first component is what is that person's philosophy about what they do and the people they serve and the competitors in the marketplace and everything else. I'll give you a classic example. I've worked for a lot of years with a company called Austal Ships in Australia. And they're currently a $51 billion company. They're now a Navy ship builder. They're building a reasonable percentage of the US Navy fleet they build for navies all around the world. They're also the number one high speed ferry company in the world. And One of the four guys started it 30 years ago with $20,000 each, now worth 51 billion. And one of the original founder, the main guy, a guy called John Rothwell, at 14 years of age, put an outboard motor on a bathtub and drove it into the shipping lanes. He's kind of obsessed with the ocean, right? But he has a fundamental belief that there should be no lives lost at sea. That's a philosophical view like that. No matter what happens to the superstructure of the vessel, the hull should protect people on board. Right? Now that drives a whole lot of stuff about how you go about doing what you do. And then there's the high story or the history. And these are the wins and lessons. So in life, there's really three things. There's wins, losses and lessons. We get to make a choice about the last two. Do we interpret it as a loss or a lesson? Right. So what are the wins and lessons they found along the way? They started out building aluminium recreational boats, then they started building cray fishing boats. And then he was on a ferry in Hong Kong. It was rocking around everywhere, people getting sick. He said, I could build you a better boat. They said, build one and if we like it, we'll buy 50. So they built one and then they bought 50. When the tsunami hit in 2000, the US Navy had a destroyer sitting off the coast of Indonesia ferrying stuff into shore because the port was full of sunken boats. And one of hostel's ferries were sailing past with the brand on the side. And the captain of the US destroyer said, get me that boat. Because this thing could travel at 30 kilometers an hour, low draft. It was a catamaran, you know, it could carry 100 trucks and all this sort of business. And after they'd finished the work, he said, we could use something like that as a Navy warship. And they went, yeah, we could build you something. Like, it's like one of the wins and lessons and sort of have a go. And then the expertise, what is the formal and informal knowledge that you've acquired? Right. So that comes from the founder, the who. So it's like a triangle, right? And the first side of the triangle is the who, the founder, second side of the triangle is the what, which is the big idea that people go to market with. And that always starts with context, which is, why does this thing even matter? And specifically why with you? Like, what gives you the right to go and offer this who do you think you are? Kind of thing? Why should you actually even matter to anyone that's looking to solve this problem? The why interesting thing about context is that is usually the first thing that leaves the sales conversation. And the moment context leaves the sales conversation, all value has left the sales conversation, which is super interesting. Yeah, People, you know, get into product specification so quickly and the context is gone kind of thing. And so that is exited, right? And then the second thing is concept. So this usually is where we're starting to map out. Here's what this looks like, here's how we do it, blah, blah, blah, like the product spec or the. Or the specification of service. And then the third part of the what, which sometimes people don't want to talk about as consequence. So does it work? Can you prove it? Have you got cases that show that it works? What happens if it doesn't work? What are you willing to do as a company when it didn't pan out? So, you know, I say to clients, you know, I think companies have to take a risk. If you've taken money off somebody, you have a responsibility to say, we are all in until we get.

Yeah, right.

We have your back. So if it takes longer than we thought, it's going to take longer than we thought. But we took your money on the concept, right. So we're all in until we get you, because we're meant to be able to get you there.

That was the deal.

Right. It's a bit like, if you think about. I'll come back to that. But if you think about. One of my favorite models is this futures model that says, if we're talking in the present moment, and let's say I'm selling to somebody, and, you know, a lot of sales use false scarcity and urgency, like only now until the break finishes. Right. Or while stocks last. Sorry. Or while stock last and that sort of thing. The only urgency that matters and the only scarcity that matters is the customer's scarcity and urgency. So I might be selling to someone saying, you know, if we look at the present moment and we, you know, time always wins. Time beats everybody. And so if you look down the track, 12, 24, 36 months, people say you can't predict the future, but we actually can. I know that in 12, 24, 36 months, you're either going to be in a green zone, where you're in an absolute ideal outcome in the context of this thing that you're struggling with, or you're going to be in a red zone where you're probably in crisis and people think the pathway between where they are today and where they want to be is a straight line, but it's not. Time bends everything. Time compounds everything, good and bad. It doesn't care. And so if you drift, which is why that red line occurs, if you don't take action, if you don't make decisions, if you just drift, like if you don't clean your teeth, they're going to fall out of your head, right? I can guarantee that. Right, yes. And it will accelerate as time goes on. Right. You'll be fine for 30 years and then they'll just start falling out really, really fast. Because time compounds everything, but it also compounds the upside. And the only thing that drives that green line heading up is great decisions and Action. The difference between ideal and crisis is the difference between drift and decision. Right. But the problem is people come to you. And you've. You know, if I was selling to somebody, I'd be saying, you've come to me because you feel like you already down the track where the gap is huge between ideal and crisis. You're starting to feel some pain. That's why you've come to me. You know, you're on the red line, but right now, in this moment, we're as close to that green line as we're ever going to be. You can't be any closer than you are right now. Now, in models, just kind of side note, the choreography of the model is as important as the model. I think the thing that I did. Lots of people use models, but I think the thing that I did was I applied stage magic and comedy and the choreographic patterns to walking through a model for impact and lacing punchlines all the way through the model. So right now, you're as close as you're ever gonna be as a punchline. And the idea of a punchline is there's been set up, set up, set up. And then bang, a paradigm shift in a heartbeat that they can't walk back. The moment I go right now, you're as close as you're ever gonna be. You can't walk that back. Cat's out of the bag.

Yeah.

And you've got a decision to make. Are you gonna jump onto that green line and stay there? And here's what I know. And I would draw a version of my genius model.

If this is a company, you're three circles.

I've got a framework that can put you on the green line and help you ride the curve. Cause no one falls at that line. They just behave their way off the line. And so we're going to keep applying that to keep you on that green line as we go up the curve. And here's a really big kind of footnote for everybody. I can't guarantee the outcome. I can't guarantee that ideal outcome. The economy could go bust. There's a whole bunch of stuff, right? But I should be willing to guarantee the pathway. Because I'm saying I can take people there. And it's interesting for people in business, particularly small business owners, right? When you want to put a guarantee on something, particularly if it's a complex sale, a product or a service or a physical product with something else attached or some complexity in it, you don't have to guarantee the end outcome, but you'd better guarantee the pathway, because all people want is a sense of certainty. And if you say, I've taken hundreds of people there before, and if you follow the pathway with me, as long as you don't behave your way off that green line, we'll get there.

Yeah.

Well, let me ask you. So let's just make the assumption that in the perfect world, everybody is able to have a pathway that takes people to a bigger future, as you call it, the ideal here that does help and benefit them. What do you do in situations, or have you been in situations where people have plopped down a good chunk of money to hire you and your team to come and develop the models, help them, and you realize your pathway sucks? I mean, this is not good. I mean, there's a lot of missing parts. I mean, because a lot of marketers and salespeople think marketing and selling solves everything. And I know a lot of people that can make a lot of money, but they have very bad reputations. They've screwed a lot of people, but their marketing and their presentation skills are enormous. So along the way, because before we started recording, and I'll bring you to this, we'll talk about it, is what it does for the teams, the alignment, because we were talking about that before we started recording. I'd love for you to talk about what comes out of this, but what I'm seeing here is, you know, this is great. This is a great model, right? I mean, you have an enormous ability to simplify complex things so people can understand them. And that's a real valuable skill for anyone. The question becomes, when do you match the ability to present this with the deliverable?

So here's the thing. If you're going to challenge somebody, right? And you know, I talk about having a fist in a velvet glove, right? If you're selling something to somebody who has a problem, you can pretty much assume at some point you're gonna have to slap them with love, right? So, you know, you're gonna have to do it. You have to develop the ability to be able to slap someone and have them hug you and go, thanks so much for that, right? It's way easier to slap someone when you're drawing a model because they're looking at. It's not you slapping them, it's the model. We know this model is true, right? I'm. I'm gonna host a whole lot of onboard masterminds in March for We're going to the Antarctic, right, with Peter Hillary, the son of Edmund Hillary, and he's got this, you know, he says, I've got a. There's this line called the experience line. You know, you can get people to move into action if you take them through an experience rather than just talk about it. And so part of the marketing for that, I've been doing some webinars where I'm saying to people, put aside all the agendas and all the labels. Like, forget labels like climate change and global warming and all that. Like, forget all of that stuff. Just put all the agendas aside. If there were two futures for the planet, a green one, where the planet is loved by the human species and is thriving, and a red one, where the planet's abused by the human species and is dying, what line do you think we're on? And 100% of people say, the red one. Right. Well, we should do something about that. So we're gonna go to the Antarctic. We're gonna get a bunch of, you know, about 100 really great thinkers together, and we want to do two things. We want to have great business masterminds. We're on board. And what if you got 100 great marketers and said, if climate change was the greatest product on the planet, how would you market it? Yeah, you almost certainly wouldn't say, go and sit in the road and shut down London. You know, like the Stop Oil protest. You would say, like, we need to sell this thing. Right, right. But the moment you go, is the planet on the green line or the red line? Everyone goes, it's on the red line. And you've just slapped people, like, put all agendas aside and all labels aside. What line are we on? It's really obvious. So. And we know it's obvious because the pandemic cleaned up the planet. Look how fast it healed. Clear skies over China, dolphins in the canals in Venice. Again, like, the planet healed.

Yeah.

In two years of no movement of the human species with planes and things like that. So we know that we are creating a red line without any other science needed because we just stopped moving for two years, and look what happened.

You know, this is. This is so interesting, too. So let me.

Let me.

Let me ask you from a real personal experience here, because, like, so, for instance, you know, rfk, who's an environmentalist, I love his take on oceans and plastics and just, you know, pollution and all that. Also, you know, whenever he's asked about climate change or what, because I think climate change and the people really pushing it, I know I became Richard Branson's largest fundraiser. So, I mean, I've spent a Lot of times, I mean, I've raised millions of dollars and a lot of it has gone to climate related stuff. And there's so much of the climate thing that is a total grift. It is people pretending like they want to help the planet and they're actually worse than the people that they're attacking. They use it as an excuse. It's a grift. It is a veneering freaking virtue signaling nonsense for a lot of it. And so I like Alex Epstein, who wrote Fossil Futures, who I think knows more about energy than almost anyone that I've ever, ever known. And so I've seen arguments on both sides of this. What do you do when you have someone that is so tied into their, like say they're, you know, full blown, you know, the planet, you know, because the planet can defend itself, you know.

Correct.

Now when you go to the model, I mean, the way you framed it, it's great. I mean, whatever, whatever side you're on, you just gave a sort of perspective on doing it. What do you do when you run across someone who's like, okay, the, the climate change thing, it's a total hoax, it's total bs and there's this, you know, it's just being used to exploit and you, you have that sort of. How would you use the model to explain to, to.

Yep. So, so if you think about this model, you know, if you think about it in two parts, there's this, there's this first thing about need to jump onto the green line. Like right now, we're as close as we're going to be. We need to jump on the green line, right? And the jumping onto the green line, and this is true in group coaching programs, it's true in almost all products. Honestly, to jump to the green line is almost always some kind of cleanup or reset or recalibration. So it still links to what you said before. When you know someone really, they're not on the path at all, or they can't even get onto the path and you're going to take them on as a client or whatever, how do you have that conversation with them? We would say to them that jump into the green line is going to be a reset, a recalibration or a cleanup, we need to find your mess and fix it. And because they already know they're on the red line at some subconscious level question has to be, what's the mess you're hiding? Consciously or unconsciously. There's three levels of conversation. In every conversation. The first one is the known conversation. This is the problem they know about and they know you know about it, and we can talk about it. There's the second level, which is the hidden conversation. It's the problem that they know about and you know about it. They just don't want to talk to you about it. And then there's the unknown conversation. You have an insight on it, and they're not even aware that it's there. And that's the hardest one to open up. Right. And so, you know, it's a prospective client who's not even close to ready to work with you. You know, you might say, listen, in your circumstances, we need to find out if we're gonna be able to jump over that reset line when we get to it. And it's just the model doing the heavy lifting. It's not you making a judgment. You're just going, if you wanna get onto the green line, clearly we've gotta reset something. We've gotta clean up, we've gotta recalibrate. If it was the climate thing and someone saying this whole climate stuff is bs, I'd go, so let me draw a model for you. Do you think we're on the red line or the green line? Like, once I get to the end of the choreography, I think we're on the green line, really? Explain how the planet healed itself during COVID when we just stopped moving around. I mean, put all this science aside. Don't. I'm not even going to try and quote any scientific studies or anything else. Watch your reason for how the skies cleared over China and India, how the water's cleaned up globally. You know, when, When. When human impact on the planet significantly reduced, how do you explain that? Right? If you think we're already on the green line. And, you know, sometimes people say, oh, you know, there's this. They can hear it. They know that. They go, yeah, well, I, you know, like, it doesn't matter. We're still on the green line. Now you get to say, does that sound like a really intelligent response? Because the model's doing heavy lifting, and.

I'm just sitting there thinking from the devil's advocate position, from, let's say. And again, because I'm really seeing, like, to what. Where. Where does it break down and how do you address it? Because I know you've had these conversations a thousand to ten thousand times. I mean, you, You've. I mean, you're the world's expert in this area, as far as I know, in terms of this, this method of, of presenting communication through drawings so let's take the COVID example of the skies cleaned up. Well, then you say, well, okay, maybe the sky's cleaned up, but look at the damage to humanity that happened in the process. The oppression, the mandates, the generational psychic trauma. At what point does it, you know, so I'm still not sold that that is a thing. What would you do?

So then I might say, well, maybe there's a third line. This is this whole idea of choreography, right?

Yeah.

You hold back stuff until you need it. Okay, what if there was a line in the middle that was actually an amber line that's just going up and down from highs and lows. So we had good moments and we had bad moments. Is that acceptable? And people go, well, no, that's not acceptable. No, because every low moment, it's just one step away from the red line. And why can't we get from the high moments and get onto the green line? So let me ask you this question. Is the green line a reasonable goal to go after? Because when people are arguing a point, they're usually arguing. So there's this. There's a hierarchy.

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.

I've got a cartoon of a guy lying on the road and a car's about to run over him. And the caption says, encumbered with a low self image, Bob takes a job as a speed bump. Right? And if you said to Bob, what do you do for a living? He'd say, I'm a speed bump. And he's describing his role at the task or activity level. Now, if I'm Bob's new team leader, clearly Bob's not engaged in his job. So I come along, you elevate the conversation by asking people, why, Right. Bob, why would we have you lying on the road being a speed bump? And Bob goes, because I work in the traffic slowing process. Interesting, Bob. Now, I've done this in conference rooms full of people. So then I say to the room, is a speed bump in a traffic slowing process valuable? Everybody goes, yes. I go, not on an autobahn in Europe. It's completely context dependent. So process and task has no inherent value. It's just stuff, right? So then I say, bob, why would we have a traffic slam process now? For about 10 years I facilitated the Road Safety Council in Western Australia. How and that we had set a goal for zero harm by 2020. Every other state said that's ridiculous, you can't hit a goal of zero. We're going, what other goal makes sense like a thousand deaths? Is that a good goal? That's nonsense. Right?

Yeah.

And the three big components of road safety is road design, vehicle design and driver behavior. Right. And so you get to outcome. So we run this process to get to an outcome. Safer drivers or better road design or better vehicle design. Now the proponents of each of those three will argue with each other over which one of them is more important.

Right?

So then you say to Bob Wye, for what purpose do we want to have, you know, better road design? In this case you're a speed bump. And this, there's this line that exists across here. Above the line is problem, below the line is solution. Above the line is what I call compelling self evident value. So I say, Bob, why do we want safer roads? And at that point Bob will probably say to me, I don't know, you're the boss, you tell me. Because people peg out of the conversation about two levels above where they spend most of their thinking time. I say, Bob, 100 metres up the road from where you're lying on the road, we've got a school bus pickup and drop off point and we have to protect kids lives. You know when, you know when they're leaving school and coming to school at the start and end of the day you're not a speed bump, Bob. Your job is to protect kids lives in a heartbeat. His whole view of his job just changed. So he might want to still take a sick day before he thinks he's protecting kids lives. If he's supposed to start at 8am and he wants to take a sick day, he just might not ring in until 9 o' clock when he knows he's protecting kids lives. He still could take a sick day, but he'll call in the night before, right? And here's the thing about this is this is a hierarchy between abstraction and oops, sorry and specificity. And what happens is If I put 100 reasonable people in the room and say what should we do to protect children's. Children's lives? They'll say whatever it takes. None of them will say, well, whatever we can afford. They'll just say whatever it takes. But the moment I put 100 people in a room and start saying, should we focus on Road design, vehicle design, or driver behavior, they'll start to argue. People only ever argue about solutions. They don't argue about problems. And so if I want to talk to people about climate control, my question is going to be, should we pursue the ideal line for planet health where humans, the planet coexist in a symbiotic way that does no harm to either? Should we pursue a green line pathway that offers coexistence without harm? And most reasonable people would say, absolutely. Is it reasonable for us to tolerate an amber line that harms and then doesn't. Harms and then doesn't. And is there anyone that would suggest that we should be okay with this red line where we're existing on the planet, but you know, either humans or the planet have to be harmed for that to happen.

Yeah. You know, it's so interesting as I sit and watch this because I have to kind of remove my personal biases and things that I feel that I know not at anywhere in expert level because I always seek out people that know more about stuff with me and I see more exploitation being done under the guise of environmentalists and save the planet. So I already have this built in bias of distrust and what I don't like about it and I see it being very exploitative of people. And the people that seem to suffer the most of energy restriction are people that need it the most. Poverty stricken people to low poverty. And the ones that complain the most about it and are trying to act like the champions are many of the people that, you know, go and speak at three letter organizations that run the world and fly there in their private planes while simultaneously talking about we got to save the planet. And these are just the biggest con artists. And I'm like thinking, okay, so I could see them using this to get everyone to see, oh, we're going towards the red light while. While they're simultaneously just full of crap.

Yeah. And so I mean these are tools, models are tools, right?

Yeah.

And all tools. The ethic of any tool is attached to the person holding it.

Yeah.

Not to the tool. Like, you know, I can put a scalpel in two different people's hands and one's going to harm and one's going to heal.

You've probably never seen my video as selling evil, have you?

No, I did it.

Oh, it's so funny because you're talking about people would go into stores, they would talk about TVs and stuff. I use an example of a DVD player. Like if anyone types in is selling evil into, you know, Google or Any search engine there pops up a three minute and 50 second video and that I was being filmed for in, I think it was 2010 and it was for a movie, a documentary. And this part never made it into the movie. It was B roll. And one of my team members happened to watch it at the time and he's like, this is really good. Click, uploaded it on YouTube and then it's became this video that's been used in universities to explain selling. And I give my favorite definition of selling, which I'll use this as a segue to ask you about, you know, what people want. You have a great model and I'd love to have you draw it. Where I say my favorite definition of selling came from my friend Dan Sullivan. And I had asked Dan, you know, several years ago, you go, you know, what's your definition of selling? And he just said, getting someone intellectually engaged in a future result that's good for them and getting them to emotionally commit to take action to achieve that result. And then I go on to say, well, the key word is good for them because you can get someone intellectually and emotionally engaged in a future result that kills them. Like someone cigarettes or like watch porn or eat crappy food or harm people or whatever. So in, in order to use selling in, in a way that's not evil, you want to, you know, help people get to a better future that's good for them. That, and, and then I say that, you know, everything that I say, you say anyone says is designed to attract or, or repel. And you can use, you can use marketing, you can use it like a gun, you can use it for self defense, you can use it to rob people, to harm people, to kill people. And so the key is to make that distinction. But I said that, you know, when you go to a store and again, you got to understand the time, it's funny, people watch it now, like, what the hell are you talking about? A DVD player? No one buys DVDs anymore. But at the time, you know, people, I mean, they still sell DVDs, the like, Best Buy and stuff. But in 2010, like, you know, we've still not made that transition. Right? And so what I say is, you know, salespeople are the biggest educational force on the planet. Where do you learn most things about financial services and financial instruments or about anything? There's a salesperson who's incentivized, that does the education. So now the world has shifted, of course, in a lot of ways. And so what, what was you said earlier actually Wrote it down on my iPad. You said, you know, we're purveyors of realization, right?

Yeah.

And so, you know, the, the funny thing is I used the DVD player. I said I would never go and read a manual on how a DVD player worked. How did I learn? There's a salesperson that I was in some store that showed me this stuff.

But here, jumping in on the restaurant one, I just did a podcast with a guy who owns a restaurant in Georgia and same thing, people not coming to the restaurant, but they do Cajun style food and we had them cook up home style things like cook up jambalaya and gumbo and all these things that you can do in a bucket that somebody could come and get to serve over rice to feed their family. And we did video Facebook video ads to in a radius, you know, just of their town there in the thing. Hi, this is Brett. I'm here at the restaurant. We're here right now. We're cooking up some really great home cooked home style meals for you. We got jambalaya here, we got some gumbo here. We've got all these things that you could serve over rice and we're going to be, you know, putting them in these containers so you could just come and pick them up and take them home. And that was like a big hit for the community, you know, because now you've got that asset. But I wanted to talk, going back about the root of what's going on in the restaurant thing because this was happening, the root of it before the coronavirus, before all of that. If we look at what's happened in the last few years of the restaurant world, we've gone from, there was, I remember when it first showed up on my radar, there was an article about a venture funded group in New York that had what they were coining as ghost kitchens and ghost restaurants. The article was, you know, nine restaurants, one kitchen, no dining room. And this group was running nine different restaurant brands from one kitchen that only existed on grubhub and seamless delivery services. So they had a commissary kitchen in a low rent area. They'd cut out the most expensive and unpredictable part of the restaurant business. And that's become now that became a thing. And in the three years or so, maybe four years that all this has been happening, it's evolved to the point now where the Travis Kalnick, the guy who was the founder of Uber, is like has 90% of his Uber stock sold and is in to this thing where he's investing in cloud Kitchens as a service where now you can go. If you have a restaurant idea, you can go and they serve. They're turning storage facilities with 10 by 10 things into commercial kitchens so that you can all get together. There's this line hallway of all of these commercial kitchens with a dispatch sort of delivery center. So if you want to start a restaurant brand, you can just rent this 10 by 10 commercial kitchen by the day, by the week, toggle it on and off whenever you want to show up on the app. This is really the biggest thing that's happening right now is we're on the cusp of this migration from the mainland into Cloudlandia. And in Cloudlandia, there are no limitations. All of the geographic constraints, the friction, the layers of middlemen that it takes to distribute at retail, all of that is gone. And one by one you're seeing this cascading flow of business categories that are being toppled and that are coming and doing dtc Direct to consumer. Where you get. The mattress industry has been disrupted by numerous people. Now, where you can buy a mattress that comes in a box and unfolds and lays there for $1,000. Now you've got ca, you've got purple, you've got Lisa, you've got all of these ones that are doing the same thing. We're going to see unicorn after unicorn after unicorn, meaning billion dollar businesses that happen very quickly on the back of cutting out all of the middlemen and going direct to consumer. If you've got a physical good that can fit in a box and is desirable and you know what it is when you see a picture of it on Instagram or Facebook and you can buy it because you saw some influencer talking about it, you've had the reach to them. We're seeing that just happen and happen and happen now and then you're starting to see the layers of the services that make those kinds of businesses possible. We've seen in the last year, Kylie Jenner has become a billionaire on the back of, in three years, on the back of partnering with a white label manufacturer who does all of the technical, all of the difficult stuff of making the. Making the cosmetics, packaging them, distributing them, doing all of the logistics involved in it. Her mom's business handles all of the administration of it. And she's a billionaire with a team of seven people. And all they do is the creative work. They come up with the idea, what do we want to sell? We want to do lip kits. What colors are we going to do? Are we going to name the colors? All of that stuff handed off to the distribution or the white label partner to do all of the difficult stuff. And then she just lets her Instagram followers and everybody know that it's available and they go directly and buy it, or they go through Sephora or whatever their distribution channel is, but it breaks the Internet whenever it comes out. So we're starting to see all of that. And often when I tell people that story, they say, well, Kylie Jenner, she's got every advantage possible. But then the greatest gift that we've been given in the last year to counter that is Lil Nas X and Old Town Road. Here's a guy with zero advantages. 20 year old college dropout living in his grandmother's, shipping around between his siblings. Found a free beat online on YouTube by another kid living in his parents house in the Netherlands. And he makes this song, Old Town Road and starts pumping it out to the Internet. It gets picked up on TikTok, goes viral, gets on the Billboard country charts, and Billboard immediately takes it off the chart saying, oh wait a minute now, we can't have that on there. And he tweets out, somebody get me Billy Ray Cyrus. Because what's more country than Billy Ray Cyrus? He gets Billy Ray Cyrus involved in the project and it goes to number one in the world. Longest number one song of any song in the history of the Billboard charts. Not a Beatles song, not a Rolling Stone song, not anybody. Nobody's ever had a song on Billboard longer than this song. And that's all happening right now because of our direct access to every single person in Cloudlandia with a one to one connection and zero friction to get to them. So our ability to see those opportunities, to assess what our assets are, because we may have assets that could collaborate with other people, we may have assets that could be in the right hands, a blessing, an opportunity for somebody else too. So you got to look and see do I have. These fall into three categories, vision capabilities and reach. And we have assets in all three. So if we've got reach, if you've got access to relationships like Jay is talking about, to whatever level, you know, if you're a restaurant and you've got access to whoever are your existing clients, you're a hairdresser, you're a, whatever business you're in, you do have reach to your relationships. But then you start to think if you could have access or reach to somebody else's audience, I mean at the core level it's affiliate marketing, it's the, that's the seed of it. But what I'm talking about is something even bigger and more in depth than that is the, you know, the spirit of collaboration is really what it is. It's just, I've been so, you know, just immersed in seeing all the subtleties of what's going on here, and there's so much to talk about. We should do another whole session at some point. Joe, you and I should definitely do a podcast about this too. But I hate to. Sorry to hijack this one, but that's the spirit of what Jay's saying is exactly what's manifesting right now.

You know, we should do, like, all the questions that people have that we probably will not have enough time to get to. We should do it. We'll just corral Jay and do another podcast with. On geniusnetworkinsights.com you can hear the interview that me and Dean did with Jay, which kind of started it all. We could even bring Brian on because Brian can talk forever also and, you know, and then go from there. But there's some fricking awesome comments. Michael Middleton, who's in UK right now, said. Dean, Jay, thank you. I think I might have. I just. I might have my 250k idea, which is great.

That's great.

So, Jay, let me ask you, Boy, there's several things I wanted to ask you here. What are some strategies and tactics business owners should be thinking about using to bring in cash, like right now?

Well, there's a lot of different ways. One of them is most people don't think about barter. I've set up lots of things for people, but if you have something you can create or you own that, you have margin in, or it's sunk cost and you. And it has value to anybody and you can exchange it for anything. That can either be cash, converted, used in lieu of what you buy, or there's another word. I don't get too sophisticated, triangulated. You can. We've done. Geez, I've done 50, $60 billion, excuse me, of barter. And I could tell you some great barter stories the other.

I've been to your house. You have a lot of art and shit there that you've bartered over the years.

I mean, this is. I mean, truthfully, I drive a gt. I got a GTS Mercedes I traded a day for. I got a. And I'm saying this just to demonstrate not to be arrogant. I've got a G Wagon 63AMG. I traded two days for. Christy has a Porsche. We traded for my whole backyard. I traded for but it's understanding value perception. If you have something that you have in oversupply, expertise, for example, and that expertise has high perceived value and you can exchange it to somebody, you can demonstrate needs it or needs the not it because you're not really selling the expertise, you're selling the result, the saving the money, the productivity, whatever it's going to be worth. And you can get anything we used to do with car dealerships, just as an example, we would create barter profit centers. And I'll go through real quick because it's pretty cool. We would basically look at those. People don't know it. If you have car dealers there, they know it there. It's a very huge amount of volume that goes through not just volume of cars, but just buying, purchasing tens, hundreds of millions of dollars. We would go through everything they were buying. Got to keep my eyes focused on the camera. And then we would see what we could trade for instead of purchasing. But when you're trading, you can trade software for hard on different multiples. And I don't want to get too sophisticated, but we would trade a car for two or three times the value in something else that we would normally pay cash for. So let's say we were going to buy chemicals and we needed cleaning chemicals or lubricating chemicals, we would go to that company and we trade them either automobiles that normally would have, let's call it a 15% margin or less, but we would trade it 2 or 3 to 1. So we would get margins of something like literally 60, 70% to our advantage for something we would normally write a check for. We would also trade for things I could liquidate on the open market for a multiple, excuse me, for a higher margin you can trade. I don't want to get too sophisticated. You can JV with people. Again, if you have anything that you sell, you should ask what else do people buy right now, before, during, after. Instead, if it's still being purchased, then the next level is what else are my buyers buying? And if they're buying it from people they don't know and they're just basically trying to find them anyhow. This goes back to relationships, Joe. You have the ability, with the trust, the credibility that has been very hard won by the years you've served your clients or the value you brought your clients, if it wasn't yours to say, look, this is. And by the way, I have a concept that's called the Aikido school of marketing. And the essence, anybody that knows what Aikido is, it's the martial arts methodology that uses the power of the enemy against the enemy. If you use the problem to your advantage, you could say, look, it's a little unusual for me to be introducing you to blank, but I know that you're going to be purchasing or using these services or products now, and you probably don't know who to trust. We've built a very strong relationship where hopefully you trust us and our judgment. We've done a very, very comprehensive job and we found what we think are the best providers. We've negotiated in behalf of all of our clients a preferential price, terms, guarantees, bonuses. And if you don't know who to trust, we would like to very strongly recommend this. You can choose anybody you want, but we're also ombudsman. You can do things like that all day long. And I hope I'm not getting too rogue on you.

No. You know what I like about what you just said? When I was a carpet cleaner back in 1990, one of the ways I came up with a free room of carpet cleaning was I heard a one of your I don't know how many thousands of dollars. You were the most expensive seminar guy in the world back in the 90s when I first started listening to your stuff. I remember listening to one of your first set of J. Abraham tapes in 1992 was the first time. And you had some carpet cleaners and I think back then you were charging like three grand an hour or something and they could not afford you, these two guys that owned the carpet cleaning business. And so they scraped up $2,000 to hire you. And I think you gave them 45 minutes for two grand. And what you told them is you explain lifetime value of a customer and you are great at explaining the whole J. Abraham. You don't know how much you can afford to spend until and unless you know how much a client is actually worth to you. And so you had explained to them lifetime value of a customer and go out, spend a month giving away carpet cleaning for free. Because what will happen is you will develop reciprocity and then they will refer you and they'll do business with you again. And so what happened is they went to churches and trade shows and neighborhoods and just offered like an entire houses of carpet cleaning. And people would tip them and they'd refer them and things like that. And I was like, huh. So I was like, what if I just gave away a free room of carpet cleaning? And so I started doing that and then I created a thing called a carpet audit because I didn't want to do a free quote. I wanted to do something different. And I developed this system for myself. And then I went to a dry cleaner of clothing was my first joint venture, who was already had a developed relationship with people that were bringing their clothing. And I said, can I clean the carpets in your house or your. Or your dry cleaner here to show you the services I do, and if you like it, then can we talk about offering services to your clients? Because I wanted him to see my, you know, my services. And so he agreed to let me do his. The store. And so I cleaned the front entrance. It wasn't a ton of carpet, but it was the front entrance to this dry cleaner. Now, what happened is I instilled reciprocity. But then over, like, the first year, he referred me, and I gave him 10% commission of every job that I did. And he referred $25,000 worth of business to me that year. And what my offer was was a free room of carpet cleaning to all his clients. And another thing that I learned through you is that if you offer someone a gift, even if they do not avail themselves of it, you still get the benefit of the reciprocity by getting. And you genuinely do it. You don't want to do it as a gimmick. I mean, if you are offering something to someone, you give it to them, right? And so what ended up happening was all of these people that stopped going to this dry cleaner. I asked after I did a few jobs, and people reported back, I was like, can I have your list? And I will call them. I will. Physically, there was no Internet back then. This is like, literally manual marketing, right? And putting postcards and signs on his store. I even got him to put little door hangers over the clothing that said, you know, ask us about our free carpet cleaning. But here's the point as it relates to everybody is I then started teaching carpet cleaners to go out and say they're gonna hire a landscaper, a pool cleaner, an electrician, a painter, a pest control company, all of these, you know, asphalt, like, everything, you know, and they're going to. You have a relationship with them, you know, different service businesses. And the fact is, like, why is your interior designer writing to you about a carpet cleaner? Why is your carpet cleaner writing to you about a real estate agent? And all of a sudden, it became this whole joint venture thing. And so every time one of my carpet cleaners wanted to add another hundred grand to their business, I would say, who is the joint venture? Or refer that you can develop and establish a relationship with, they can refer that business to you. And right now, that opportunity, I think, exists in greater levels than ever before because there's this anxiety and there's all these people trying to figure out in many of the comments that people have posted here with these ideas. I mean, I think that's just the way to look at it. And I only bring this up because I was a Deborah carpet cleaner that was just trying to figure out how to learn marketing. Still doing the carpet cleaning myself, and I still manage to build and grow my business doing all this sort of stuff. And now with that level of knowledge and how easy it is with the Internet and the spreading of messages, there's just such a great. And the need of it is such a great opportunity.

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. They're over here. Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you. Watch them.