Hero Makers: How Any Creator Can Build A Community of Raving Fans Gareb Shamus, Scott Donnell, and Joe Polish - Genius Network Episode #178

How do you become a hero? You have to take the journey. You just can't be a hero. Right. You have to. It just doesn't appear right. It's all the journey and you got to take this first step.

If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius Network, go to geniusnetwork.com all right, here I am with a couple friends of mine. We got Garab Shamus and Scott Donnell, and I'm Joe Polish. Tell people that are watching, listening who you are, what you do in whatever way you want to describe yourselves. Start with you, Scott.

Yeah. I'm entrepreneur and an artist and a creator. I've started several companies. Apex Leadership Co was the first one. It's the largest school fundraising franchise in America. We just had an exit of that recently. We served about 6 million families, teaching leadership in fitness and raising hundreds of millions of dollars for schools. Recently in the biotech world as well, with Happy Technologies, also a fintech company called Gravy Stack, teaching kids about banking and how to do money management the proper way. And most recently, and probably my favorite, we are creating the next universe of comics which turns into NFT Comic Base. It's Hero Maker Studios. We launched it last year. I had 12 from the moment I was gonna take a break. And a month off to the moment Lee called me and said, you need to meet Gareb. The two of you are perfect. He is a hero maker, you are a company maker. And the two of you, she's like, my spidey sense is tingling. He flew out to Phoenix a week later. Yeah, we spent two, three days together and bam, here we are.

So, Garab, you have quite an extensive background. You've done a lot of stuff. So who are you? How would you describe yourself if you were forced to?

There's no question it's a creative force artist for us. You know, everything that I do stems from the creativity, you know, what I can do to enhance people's lives, bring them together, build community. And it just so happened that I started in the superhero world. I grew up with three brothers collecting sports cards and comic books, and my mom opened up a comic book store. And then so that developed my love for not only the industry, but also the business side of it, my passion. And then I started a magazine literally right out of college called Wizard Magazine. And then within about a year, it just took off worldwide. I mean, it was just incredible, the amount of people that wanted to learn about comic books. And this was in the early 90s, before the Internet was even started. So it was really hard to kind of get the word out there. And so there was just this huge pent up demand for people that love superheroes, but they felt like the losers and the loners by themselves. And when wizard came out, because we were literally kids writing a magazine for other kids, we were their friend. And when we had that voice and we would make dirt toilet jokes and all kinds of crazy jokes, and we were self deprecating, but we were also what we would tell our best friend about the things that we liked and encourage people to get involved or participate or read or enjoy. And that's really what kind of catapulted the company to the point where we started five monthly magazines about action figures called toy fair and a magazine about toys called toy wishes and anime insider about the anime manga world, inquest Gamer about the gathering. So we were just so deep on the cultural side. And by the mid-90s Comic Con, we literally just threw a party for the magazines and everybody showed up, all the geeks and the nerds out there. And that really galvanized the movement. So I've been in the superhero business my whole life, and it comes to today, and there's a lot more to talk about, but my whole life has been about building community. And yeah, when Lee introduced me to Scott, she's like, garab, you're the multiplier, he's the simplifier. And I was like, oh my God, that's what I've been waiting for my whole life, is how I can get teamed up with somebody like that. And the one thing that hadn't changed in my entire existence in the geek and nerd world was the comic books hadn't changed. They were still paper based. And there were still, as the audience got older, it continued to be male dominated in the male 30 to 50 range. But what we saw was from the Marvel universe films, how it diversified to a billion people around the world. Girls, boys, men, women, families. And it was really incredible how accepting of these heroes and these stories were for people. But yet the comic books didn't actually reflect what was going on in the superhero world. And that's when we decided to start heromaker. You know, to be able to tell relatable stories about heroes and build community around that. And by offering the opportunity to share a lot of these voices and diverse voices that haven't been heard, what you.

Guys are really talking about and what you've done with comic con and what you're talking about with communities. It could either bring people together, bring a tremendous amount of connection, which is my thing. Connection and reducing human suffering. If there's two things that I hope to do in my lifetime, to whatever degree I can do, that is to connect people and to reduce necessary suffering. You know, I have a book that I wrote that's gonna come out later in the year, and it's about how to develop relationships with people that you're aligned with. And it's called what's in it for Them. Cause that's what most people care about, what's in it for them. And if you can help them get what they want, you know, in a lot of ways, that's one of the best ways that people will support you. And one of the things I write about is the difference between character and capability. And it's interesting because we refer to these as characters. But they could be bad characters, they could be villains.

Right.

But there's a lot of people in the world that had enormous capabilities, but terrible. What I would consider characters as humans, Hitler being an example.

Right.

There's people that are really skilled, and they're con artists. They're really skilled, and they hurt people. And so when it comes to the development of characters, I would imagine hero makers is let's actually develop your capabilities. You probably have. I've heard you say that, you know, back in the. I guess the 80s and the 90s, like, words like nerd and geek were derogatory. They weren't, like, viewed as, like, oh, these are great people. And now it's a completely different sort of thing.

Geek chic. And people don't remember those times. But, like, when you think about a hero or a villain, for instance, one of the best ways to kind of think about it or frame it is these are people that were hurt. Right. And people that are hurt can choose to do good based on the hurt, or people that could use the hurt as a way to help people or a way to use the hurt to hurt people. And that's really the difference. When you have Superman or a Batman or a Spider man, any one of these characters that were hurt in their life, lost their parents from a different place, whatever kind of issues they're going through. But yet they use that hurt as a way to benefit and save others.

Yes.

You know, and then you could have people like the Joker and, you know, the Riddler and a million other kind of, you know, villains out there. Those people were hurt too, but they chose to use that hurt to hurt others.

Right.

And that's Just really, that's really where we are in the world, right? And it's, it's what, what can you do with that ability? And everybody can make that decision, right?

It's how you respond. That's everything. We want to tell stories that are completely unique and relatable to all these different audiences. And not just like he said earlier, the white male, 30 to 50, that's walking into a comic book store. We want to be able to tell. Now, with the inception and growth of the NFT world, we can create these NFT comics that people can hold and own and resell and be a part of. And we can give them unprecedented access to more things in these universes. They can have a part and a say even in what happens to these comics long term. So it flips the whole industry on its head. And that's why we got so excited.

About launching this company, this whole NFT world, which I'm a complete novice in. I do own a cryptopunk and a few other things, but I'm still a novice. What the hell is an nft? Okay. Because there's always someone that's gonna like, okay, this NFT thing, you're gonna apply it to comics and hero makers. We're gonna do that. What exactly are you talk like? Explain that. Because I wanna make sure for anyone else to kind of comprehend what the other things you're gonna talk about, I want them to not get stuck on understanding.

Right.

So how would you guys describe it?

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

Yes.

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

It's like you. I asked you this question before we started about local comic book shops that could look at my box of beat up comics and give evaluation on it. And you mentioned a couple names, one that's I'm pretty sure still in business here. And you're like, if they've been around for a long time, they're probably good guys. And as simple as a statement of that is if you've been at this game for a long time and no one's wanted to kill you, whatever. And I say all of this with the context that if you have sold a company, no matter what, no matter how nice you are, no matter how caring you are, and this isn't a definitive statement across the board, for the most part, it's an adversarial relationship. Even if you're friendly with each other because you want to sell your company for the most amount of money, they want to pay the least amount of money. So right in there, there's that adversarial thing. I have a friend named R that really helped me understand that sort of thing with selling a company. So you certainly have had to go and Negotiate and do deals and go to hotels and put on conventions with tens of thousands of people and all the stuff that you do and at the same time, everything that I know about you, people consider you like a really nice guy and a very caring guy and communities. So what could we share with people that are watching or listening about that, especially young people. Because if you're not an asshole, you, you know, you get so much further in life, you know, even if you can, you know, short term get more money or negotiate a deal, I mean, there's a huge difference between an opportunist versus someone that sees an opportunity and does the things needed to develop it and have it become a reality. So I'd love to get your both of your perspectives on that.

So, yes, worked with thousands of, whether it's employees or vendors, third parties, we've had to do pop ups with 500 people working for us. And I believe in abundance, there's so much to go around that you don't have to squeeze every little bit out of everybody out there. It's okay for people to both succeed in the relationship and what we also want to do, especially in our case with our fans, is create an opportunity for them that they would never be able to do on their own and offer that as an opportunity. Right? So the opportunity to meet Chris Evans who plays Captain America, Chris Hemsworth, Thor, Brie Larson, Captain Marvel, Gal Gadot who plays Wonder Woman or Tom Holland, Spider man, you would never in your normal life be able to get to meet them. But we have these resources to be able to do that, so we can bring that to people. But when it comes to vendors or people that we want to work with, you can just create a great opportunity that they want to be a part of it, you know, and you know that it's, you know, so many people that have worked with us over the years. A lot of it is, you know, they just want to be a part of the experience. And it's not about us trying to take advantage of them, you know, to work with us. It's they want to be there, we need them, we want them to be there. And we're not going to shortchange them on that because, because we have an ongoing business, we want to replicate that experience every time. So we want them to be a part of this. So if we're going to mistreat somebody and we have, whether we're doing three shows a year or 25 shows a year, you know, we want the, not only do we want the fans coming back but we want the same people coming back.

Yeah.

And one of the things that's very that my brother used to talk to when we would have our staff meetings at the Comic Cons, we might have, depending on the time of year when we were starting the companies, whether we had eight people or 50 people that worked for us full time. I mean we've had hundreds work for us full time with the magazine stuff. But we might be sitting in front of a couple of hundred people that work for us for that weekend. And my brother would say, I just want to let everybody know that at this show you are the CEO of this company. Because anybody that's going to walk up to you is going to ask you a question and we need you to know or find out who knows. But that person doesn't know who you are and they're going to think that you run this place and you have to treat them with that type of respect. And it's just been every part of the organization from top to bottom.

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

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

Yeah. Not getting bureaucratic and whatnot.

And it really is the only way to create a self managing company. Right. I mean this is Dan Sullivan 101. Bringing in people who are doing their unique ability in your company means that they are a batteries included person who is doing what they are loving and good at every single day and then you don't have to micromanage or babysit that person whatsoever. So with us, you know, we have dozens of people in just hero maker now and we're building a group of people who feel like they're in a candy store every day.

Working, running a business and running a company, it is not walk out on the beach, you've hit success. It is difficult. And the level of responsibility, responding with ability that is required is tremendous. The things that would have killed me when I first started a business I deal with every day on a psychological level. So I often will tell people the treadmill of crap doesn't stop. It's your tolerance and your ability to navigate it that improves. And if you just pay attention to that and you learn and you hire people and you do teamwork and you become a collaborative person and you acknowledge people, the people that become my true friends or I look at people that are more powerful, how do they treat people that are less powerful to them? Do they say thank you to a server? If someone opens the door, do they say thank you? I mean, just simple common courtesy goes such a huge way and people may not notice it in the beginning, but if you do that for several years and you develop a reputation as a person they can count on that cares about them. And if you care about your clients, you don't sell them something that you wouldn't sell your best friend. And I don't know, to me, it's weird because I'm surprised at how many people on the planet do not seem to get that part of business success. There's a lot. I don't think entrepreneurs are made. I think they're born. I think you have this built in thing and you develop it. Right. I've had many conversations with my friend Geno Wickman about that. He wrote a book called Traction. You know, this sort of stuff, Peril Leap. I love that book.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, so, you know, so when it comes to behaviors, habits, skills, capabilities that you think have helped you in the past, in the most ways, looking back when you were in your early 20s, just enjoying this stuff, you know, doing a bunch of goofball things, what. What did you actually really develop that has allowed you to impact in this case, you know, say probably billions of people. Right. If you were to say these are the things that, you know, was it persuasion? Was it compassion? I mean, any way you would describe it, I'd love to hear that.

Yeah. So, you know, there's a lot of things that went into it. One is I think obviously having a good heart, but secondly, it's. It was really about creating a platform for others to succeed. And I think that enabled me to do really well. Right. So when I had a magazine, it was the fact that I can promote up and coming artists and writers and the more success that they've achieved over time, the more they gave back and remembered that we were there first for them. But yeah, so it's not only the platform but it's discovery to try to find things, you know, that you can now share with other people so that they want to come back to you over and over. Again, because they may have discovered something that you showed them. Failure is a big one. Accepting failure. I know a lot of people have talked about failure, but it's something that you have to be really good and comfortable at. I joke, even today, how do you see failure? Popular as I become, or famous as I become, or people want to talk to me about stuff. I still get tons of emails and text messages that go unresponded to. I mean, it just happens. But I'm not afraid to reach out to anybody and say, hey, I want to do something. And I'll just work with the people that respond and that's it. And I'll do a great job with them, and hopefully that'll build something. So there's a lot of those kind of lessons, I think, out there in terms of what we're doing. And a lot of it is what helped create the success of the Comic Con platform and the whole kind of superhero world. Because I think at the time, I never knew it was going to be as big as it was, but these were a lot of the things that we did.

There is no, you've arrived, right? I've probably hit 10 ceilings in the last five years where I thought, that's the arrive. And now I've just given up that whole idea of arrive. I want to build myself into the type of person that when I. At the end of my life, I look back and say, I am so thankful that I continued and I was consistent and I did the right thing and I built grit and I loved people. Well, you have to go through the failure and the trying and the attempts and the struggles and the frustrations. And, you know, the first time someone stole from us, I thought it was the end of the world. The fourth time I was like, eh, been there before, right? Same with lawsuits. Same with website crashes. Same with a. We had a shipment full of flying monkeys. 18,000 flying monkeys got lost. A ghost ship from China. We lost all our money in like, 2012 for this, like, school fundraising thing. And it was the scariest thing ever. And that's happened seven times since with other things. And it's like, yeah, we'll figure it out, right? And it's this. It's this elf. It's like, why freak out about something when most of the time you'll. You'll figure it out, you'll be fine. Or guess what? Maybe you lose and then you just move on and you find a way to win. Yeah, that's really what it is. Like, you just got to keep going. I remember when we, we started franchising, we're talking about helping other people get to where they want to go. I felt like I gave up the baby for adoption. Right. These were my lessons and my videos in the business. And oh my gosh, I can't imagine having somebody else take it and go do what they're gonna do. Running their own business from was terrifying for about two days. And then the first person we brought on actually left a 200 million dollar company that they created to come do this. Her name's Kim Fried. She's a local. She's unbelievable. She was our first franchisee and she became a mentor. I just watched her. I'm 26, 27.

Right.

She taught me more than anyone ever could. And I never imagined it was by helping her become incredibly successful with her clients. And she now has, I think 60 employees in that franchise and we now have 120 franchises. We've made 15 millionaires through that process. And I get more excitement seeing these other business owners, franchisees, take their lives and provide for their families and their customers. We're in 38 states with that business than I ever would with a dollar, a figure that I would take at the end. And yeah, the company became 50 times larger, but that pales in comparison to the impact that it made. And seeing their families grow and thrive and they love what they're doing, it's such a different level of satisfaction, fulfillment. You know what I mean?

No, totally, totally.

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

If there's anything that I try to do when I talk with people and then put it out into the wild like this is hoping that someone that's already inspired and encouraged and wants to do a little bit better gets an idea, they get a strategy, they think about it differently and they go out and they kick ass more. But there's also that person that's completely hopeless and they happen to stumble across and they feel beat up in life and they're like going, you know, Gareb said something that actually makes sense. Scott said something, you know, I relate to that because that's the biggest difference that I think that can be made.

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

It's so over the top, ladies.

Parallel worlds are all going to die in the multiverse.

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

Coders, coders.

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

See, the beauty of it is to use a Dan Sullivan line, make it up and make it real. I mean, that's honestly what we all do as entrepreneurs. We just make shit up and make it real. And then what you said, simplifier multiplier, which is another Dan Sullivan concept, right, that Lee is very big on. A multiplier without a simplifier can drive themselves crazy. It's all visionary sort of stuff. I don't like landing the plane. Peter Drucker used to say there's advisors and there's deciders. If you don't know who Peter Drucker is, he was a management guru of the brilliant guy, wrote a bunch of great books. He talked about advisors and deciders, where advisors come up with many different ideas, deciders decide on one, and I can come up with different things. That's why I run Genius Network. I think that's why I do interviews. I've done over a thousand different interviews with some incredible entrepreneurs on everything you can think of. My brain is a multiplier brain. But without the teamwork, without the collaboration, it's really hard. Both of you could have not done what you're doing if you didn't. And that being said, truth is you'll drive yourselves crazy all the time. That's what happens, is part of the thing. But it's in the crazy, it's in the enthusiasm. If you could channel it where things are actually made. I mean, growing a garden, you're going to have manure. There's a Lot of shit that you're going to deal with, but that's what growth is. And I think oftentimes people, they see only what is portrayed on social media and they don't realize. Whereas I want to tell people, man, this is hard and difficult and painful and depressing. And if you're totally okay with that, because that's what life is. If you're running a business or not, that's just part of the gig. It's kind of what you said earlier about failure. Like if you just realize that like the Wayne Gretzky thing, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take and how many people are sitting there. There's all kinds of things. The phone call you can make, the you could take, the book you can read, the room you can walk into. Everyone has that room they walk into. I think it was Joseph Campbell that said, the cave we fear to enter holds the treasure that we seek. And so who is your own internal hero? Where do you tap into?

How do you become a hero? You have to take the journey. You just can't be a hero. Right. You have to. It just doesn't appear. It's all the journey. And you gotta take this first step.

There's this crazy ass movie where this line is, every passing moment is another chance to turn it all around. And I've often thought when I'm in the midst of complete darkness, every passing moment, you can talk to somebody, you can pick something. Every passing moment is no chance to turn. And you can write a love story, you can write a comedy, you can write a horror story, you can write a tragedy, you can write an inspirational story. I mean, we are all authors of our lives. And I think that's why I read books. I think that's why I try to talk to different people, is because no matter who, where my brain can take me, there's so much enthusiasm and momentum that can come from hearing other people. So all that being said, tell the listeners, how do they engage with you guys? How do they go on this journey with you?

Can I say one thing before you go?

Yeah.

Dan Sullivan's. One of my favorite things he ever said was that the obstacles in front of you are the exact raw materials for success.

Yeah.

Yeah. So the pain that's going on right in front of your face or the, the secret.

Yeah.

Or the suffering, the trauma, the embarrassment, the addiction, the. You gotta talk to your boss, you gotta talk to your wife, you gotta have the conversation because you're really true that. What if that's the exact raw materials for your future success. Yeah, exactly who you're gonna become.

Yeah, Right.

That is something that really has helped me a lot thinking about, I'm in a really big, painful spot. This is an opportunity for me to take that as and use that as the raw materials to change my life around and be better than I could have ever imagined before.

Right, right.

Yes.

So I think that is something that will help. It helped me. It's helped me dozens of times. And I think anyone listening would feel the same way. Like, yeah, I'm in this dark spot. But changing the mindset to, I'm in this spot right now because I can use that as the raw material to make me even better than before. I just have to take that next step to take that journey.

If you can create a mindset that life is going to be difficult, you're going to get betrayed, you're going to have your heart broken. Not that you are wanting to make that happen at a faster or more frequent rate. Just the acceptance of life is difficult. Not all the time, some of the time, but through that difficulty. Dave Kekich, he said, life's easy when you live it the hard way and hard if you live it the easy way. It's easy to sit and eat junk food and to sit and watch TV or a million other forms of escapism. It's difficult to work out and exercise. I don't like working out. I like having worked out. Somerset Maude, my friend Steven Pressfield, who wrote a great book called the War of Art, he actually has a quote from Somerset Maude in the book the War of Art, which is, I don't like writing. I like having written. It's not the writing that's hard. It's the sitting down to write. And so if you take on difficult things, and like you said, there's a spice rack of things in life, and in this spice rack, there's all these failures, there's all these negative things, but it's all raw material. It's all the raw ingredients. Ryan Holiday, the Obstacle is the Way is one of his books. And that is the deal. I mean, the things that seem to oppose our goals are the raw material needed to reach them. And that's on the bottom of Dan's strategy circle. And so there is no hero that doesn't have difficulty. And I will say this, too, because I think it's important to say this to me. So many of the heroes in the world are never the famous people. They're not the professional athletes. Some are they're not the actors and the actresses, although some are. They're not the singers, they're not the wealthy people. They're not the billionaire entrepreneurs, although some of them do, you know, amazing stuff. It's the hospice nurse, it's the frontline workers, it's the single mom. It's a person that was massively abused in a family of abuse, and they have to fight. They're the people that are in countries that are dealing with shit I cannot even comprehend, that will give their life for a cause or will fight and do any. I mean, those are heroes in life. So heroes come in many forms and it doesn't necessarily mean you're famous. And if you're. It's like if your goal is to be famous versus significant, it's a much different thing, you know, I mean, I know a lot of very famous, very wealthy people that are incredibly miserable. And most. The well known, most successful, famous people I know, no one knows that. I know them because I meet them in recovery rooms. I see them in groups where they can't go out publicly to certain meetings because they're too well known. And I started doing that over two decades ago and I got a perspective of like, wow, a lot of the people that the world admires, if you only knew the amount of pain. I mean, you've met a ton of famous people. It's not what it's all cracked up to be. So, I mean, part of it, at the end of your life, whatever that will be, you know, I think just the amount of people you encouraged what you feel good with, you know, and that's. That's things that you earn. I mean, there's so much imposter syndrome. When you talk about signings with all superheroes, they have to deal with a tremendous amount of stuff because the public views them as something. But that person there is a human. Yes, there's a human dealing with all the same shit. They got to eat lunch, they got to use the bathroom.

They do the same thing. Yeah, yeah, we have to do the. They have to get ready in the morning, they're going to have to catch their flight. It's. It's like everybody else.

Yeah, exactly. And also, that being said, you're so much more capable than you could ever imagine if you just go for it. And it's not. And it doesn't need to be some grandiose thing. I mean, there's heroic moments that we could do at any point in time. So hero maker again, so what is the mission? What would you love to have happen. Let's say we have a conversation a year from now. What's going to happen between now and then or you would like to see happen? Because I actually think we should. I think it's easy for me to remember this date. We should go back and say what happened so that people could see what is capable of happening in a period of time. When you put your, you know, the multiplier and the simplifier together and you enroll a bunch of people and you build community and you do creative stuff, you know what happens, like how many lives are changed, how much money's made, all that sort of stuff. So what do you.

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

I love it. And I bought a town too, with a couple of other partners in this town. And it's a Skunk Works project. It is literally. I want to utilize it to put it in the metaverse with Genius X and what we're doing with our app retreat and to fund addiction recovery and let artists come and do amazing things there. And so I have a little bit of a vested. I wasn't even thinking about this till this week. Till like through a text message where I told Garab and he said, oh, we could, you know, so that's. But there's no.

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

We'll just keep it that it'll play a vital role in the story. One of the stories we tell. Yeah.

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

Could do our next interview there. That would be fun.

That actually is a good point. I like that. Yes. So, Garb, any final things you want to say, then tell the viewers, listeners, where do they go to follow you and how do they sign up into this thing when it's ready, that sort of stuff.

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

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

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

Thank you.

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

You did a good job, I hope.

I hope so. Thank you.

You're on your own Hero's Journey.

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

Thank you.

Thank you.

Don't miss another episode of Genius Network. Subscribe today@gieniusnetwork.com subscribe. If you'd like access to the show, notes or resources, please visit geniusnetwork.com 178.