How to Handle People Who Want to Take Advantage of You ft. @NegotiationMastery

You talk about three voice tones negotiators can use.

What are they?

And on a related topic, what is.

An example of mirroring and how is that important?

All right, the three voices are the three default types. You know, in our way of thinking, everybody in the entire planet, regardless of gender, regardless of ethnicity, either falls into fight, flight, make friends. Some people would call that fight flight, mate, but it's the caveman that survived from the caveman days. We saw a threat on a jungle path, we ran from it, we fought it, we made friends with it. And my Harvard brothers and sisters subscribed to the same philosophy. We've tested somewhere north of 2,000 people in all countries, and we believe that to be true. So the three voices are what your natural voices are. And I'm not going to make any political statements in any way, shape or form, but the assertive, the fight type, direct and honest, that's my natural born type, Donald Trump. And if I were to talk to you, we do an exercise called 60 seconds. So she dies, and I do all three voices in the exercise. And if you were volunteering, I look at you and I started with the assertive voice, and I just go, I need a car in 60 seconds or she dies. If you think of yourself as direct and honest, you're an assertive. You got a tone of voice that's combative, it causes problems. There's no way around it. It's not a good voice. My natural born type, I once had a hostage negotiator say to me, dealing with you is like getting hit in the face with a brick. And I didn't take that as a compliment, but that's my natural voice. So that's voice one. Voice two is the accommodator's voice. About a third of us are just relationship oriented. We naturally smile. We're naturally very happy. It's actually ridiculously strategically smart. You're 31% smarter. In a positive frame of mind, if you're smiling, you're hardwiring your mood, you're making yourself smarter. Everybody has something called mirror neurons. If I smile at you, your mirror nons trigger. Even if you fire it, you started to smile back. It's an involuntary response. There are chemical changes in your brain. You're smarter too. That's a smart move. One of the reasons why naturally gregarious people make lots of deals, and they're not always the best deal, but they're probably pretty good.

Okay, so you just said you're 31%.

Smarter when you're in a Positive state of mind. So if you can flip yourself into.

That and become 31% more effective and.

Smarter, that seems to be a pretty good advantage.

Huge. Yeah. And it's actually a hardwired connection. If you force a smile on your face when you feel lousy, the chemical changes still take place. You can override it. And then the third type is what we call the late night FM dj. That's a hostage negotiator's natural tone of voice. I mean, we learn that we drill it over and over and over and over again because it hits the mirror neurons, it triggers a chemical change and it slows the other side's brain down. Now, while we use that about 10% of the time, if we have a term in a contract that's completely unacceptable, that term would often be work for hire. I will not sign a contract that has a work for hire clause. Well, I would, but it has to be for $5 billion. Not kidding around because work for hire takes our intellectual property. I just don't say take it away.

We.

I'll sit down at the table and I'll look you in the eye and I'll say, we don't do work for hire. Late night FM DJ voice. You will feel that that's an immovable term. What I say, what you hear. If I say that's an immovable term, you're going to get mad and want to fight me on it. I don't need that. So I will just take the term and I will lay it out like that. Your brain will slow down, it'll stop when you recover. You'll come up with the answer for me. I also won't say I need you to take that clause out. I need you to volunteer that idea.

That's great.

So I heard you say before that.

When someone says let's make a win win situation, they're usually going to try to. That's an indicator that they're going to.

Probably either try to take advantage here or whatever. And I found it very interesting because.

I have used that term. I'm willing to see that I'm delusional here. I have said it in ways where I really do look out for. I want it to be a win win situation, not use it as terminology to hide dishonesty or hide attempting to be.

And I know the whole thing of.

Like a lot of people that brag about how their integrity is and how great they are and how they want you to win, a lot of times they're the most full of shit. I also know that some people that are the most smooth talking are sometimes wolves in sheep's clothing sort of thing. And when I heard that though, it really struck me as like going, huh.

So.

What do you do when you're really genuinely wanting to create a value for value deal? You're not trying to overly negotiate, if that's the right way to call it, or you're not trying to scam somebody.

But you're giving too much of it.

Away or you're letting people steamroll over you, I guess. Without making this a confusing question, what are some indicators that that should be red flags or warning signs that if someone says this, be careful. And what's the caveat to that?

How could I better.

Describe things? Cause I do want things to be a win win situation for someone.

I mean, like everyone here, they invest.

A lot of money to be in this group. I want them to get a hell of a lot out of it. I genuinely care about my clients and at the same time, I have some people that will try to take advantage of me and they ask for too much or they're just very demanding. And so like, what are words that are indicators? And so I'm asking you two things. You know, one, what are like warning signs that when you hear them, you know, antennas go up, this is something. And then on the other side, how do you protect yourself from getting taken advantage of?

Right, right. All right, so context, let's throw context on this. And contextual intelligence is a part of emotional intelligence. That's really what we're talking about here. We're talking about military grade emotional intelligence, weapons grade empath. How do you like that, huh?

That's actually good.

All right, so context, you should have a win win mindset. If you're in a win lose mindset, that's actually stupid because if the other side loses, why are they ever going to want to make a deal with you again? That's kind of dumb. But a lot of people don't realize that in business negotiation, most people business stories, like, I had them over barrel and they knew I beat them. Every time I hear somebody talk like that, I just shake my head. I think like, you know, you were losing so many deals.

No, absolutely. There's people that are in the transaction.

Business versus the relationship business.

Right, right. So now more context on win win. If somebody articulates it right up front, that's the tell. They're trying to cut your throat. And we talked about this a little bit also, you know, Joe doesn't show up and go like, hey, happy to see you. Let's do a win, win deal. Yeah. You know, you start talking about it further down into the conversation or you feel it or you try to live it. That's completely different than what we've seen over and over and over again. Nearly every single person that right off the bat, we've been in a negotiation with them. And if they articulated let's do a win, win deal in the first three minutes, I know they want to get our stuff for nothing. And now I'm already headed for the door. So, you know, what are the tells? Actually, there's two tells. You got to watch out for people that are trying to cut your throat. What's worse is the people that are trying to pump you for information and never do the deal with you at all. One of the things that is not in the book, which is actually probably going to be much more the focus of the book that we're talking about now, we call Proof of Life of the Deal. And salespeople have a saying. It's not wrong to not get the agreement. It's wrong to take a long time to not get the agreement. That's what's killing you. That's what kills more people and more business. And we shift what we refer to as proof of life, like right up front and then we walk away, which is. It's also, you know, it's been expressed a couple times here. Play the long game, Play the long game. That's when you start being willing to walk away from stuff or also play the percentages game or half. I'm in a conversation with a potentially extremely lucrative client two days ago. I get coached because I was on the phone by myself. And normally we like to negotiate in teams. But I got off the phone and I called one of our coaches and I said, this is my read. They failed the proof of life test. They did some other stuff. I think I need to email this guy back and tell him we're not interested. He's waving a billion company that's going to grow to a billion dollars. They want to change their culture. They got all these problems. He outlined all these problems. I know we have answers. I know they can benefit from us. But I strongly feel like they want us to create a program for us and then they're either going to implement it without or they're going to go to who they want to go with in the first place and they're going to tell them to do our stuff. And I know there's a lot of people out there that are telling Their favorite vendors to do what we do. It's been directly reported back to me. So we get out of those really early on, you know, who are going to be the time wasters. Long way around, though, on, you know, what you get taken advantage of occasionally and look at how well you do.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, be willing to be taken advantage of occasionally.

Yeah, that's one thing that I, you.

Know, I say to people all the time, you know, like, well, you know.

I try to help someone.

Yeah, it's like it's par for the course. I mean, what I try to do.

Is align myself with people that are aligned with me. And when I start seeing disalignment, even.

Though I extend myself, even though I.

Try and they just keep at it, they keep complaining and that sort of stuff. It's like after a point you just, like we're just not aligned. I mean, you just see the world different than I do. And so. But yeah, it's really good to have indicators early up front and be able to bail on it because there's always signs. It's just if you're, what are you looking for?

If you're able to sniff it out.

And smoke it out early enough in advance.

Now, dealing with people that want to.

Kill somebody, you said, like you talk about it in the book and I've watched interviews with you and seen you speak. I mean, you have a great talk at, at Google and where a lot.

Of people, I mean, even Gary Halpert.

Would say that, you know, the problem with dealing with a terrorist is they've got nothing to lose.

But from your standpoint, they always have something.

And so you can, Is there anyone that you simply cannot negotiate with?

You know, I would say, or a.

Situation.

If they're communicating with you. We used to always say you always have leverage. If you're talking to me, I got leverage at all. So we'd have a problem with people that wouldn't talk to us at all. Or we're gonna, we're gonna sniff out early on what they're trying to orchestrate. And we, we would. And we look for indicators. We used to call them high risk indicators. Like if they're, if they're. Where this is going, if they're setting us up. And then you just have to recognize that you're being set up. But if you're talking to me, then I have leverage. And even if you're trying to set us up, if I can figure that out before we get to where you're going, I'll try to Change the destination. And some of it might be by refusing to talk or it might be by calling you out. And we did this publicly. We started ISIS executions from the 2012 timeframe when Jim Foley, Stephen Sotloff, some of the others were murdered. That was Al Qaeda 3.0. It's Al Qaeda in Iraq from 2004. They did the same thing. Abu Bakr al Baghdadi was an Al Qaeda lieutenant in Iraq in 2004. Zarqawi, I think, was the guy's name in Iraq. They started the same thing. And when we sniffed out that they were orchestrating murders, we basically went public with it, and we changed the narrative from they were terrorists to they were criminals, because a criminal will travel the world to go be a terrorist. And that's how they were recruiting. But a criminal won't travel the world to go be a criminal. I can be a criminal here. What do I need to go to Iraq for? So we changed the narrative. And what ended up happening in 2004 when we changed the narrative went from chopping people's heads off in the springtime to. To Nefal Zawahiri, the Al Qaeda number two, actually put out an edict to stop killing people on camera because it was bad for business. Wow.

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. So I guess you can shift extraordinarily.

Violent people if just by changing the. Bending their reality.

You talk about bending reality. So let's.

How does one.

What are some, I guess, tools that.

People can use to bend someone's reality?

All right, so the vast majority of decisions that we make are based on how we're calculating loss. Danny Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in behavioral economics, prospect theory. It's over and over again. They said, lost things twice as much as an equivalent gain. So if you accept that. That your view of loss bends your view of the realism of the situation by twice. I saw an interview that Danny Kahneman gave that said, actually, that's not true. It's not twice as much. It's more like five to seven times as much. My partner Amos and I lowered the number to two because we wanted fewer arguments from our colleagues. So if I know that your view of loss will Distort your perception of reality by five times. Then all I need to do is figure out what loss you have going on in your head and change it. For example, I could say, do this and you'll experience a 20% increase in profitability. Or I can say, don't change a thing and you're going to lose 20% year over year. Each and every day you don't change. And the second one is going to eat at you and you're not going to be able to get it out of your head. And what keeps you up at night, Mr. CEO? It's some sort of a loss. 70% of buy decisions are made to avoid losses, which means you shouldn't pitch value. You should start out by finding out what they see their loss as, which this whole idea is communication approach. I need to get you talking because I need to know what you think the loss is and how you see it. And then I need to use the same set of tools to get you to see it differently on a process that therapists would call guided discovery. But I'm looking for very specific things. And that's why we, in the book, we refer to it as tactical empathy. We know, somebody's asked me earlier about neuroscience. We know so much more about the way the brain actually works because of neuroscience these days. We know so much more about empathy that we're looking for very specific things that if I start talking to you, what I want to know first is what you're worried about losing.

What's a black swan? Your company's a black swan group. Black swans are. You write about it in the book.

It's black swan is the unexpected tiny little thing that's going to change everything. That's sort of the theoretical idea. Now, the real world idea is there's a black swan in every one of your deals. How many negotiations have you approached where you're not hiding cards, where you're not holding information that you're not holding something back you don't want the other side to know? Pretty much every one, right? So number one, you're not holding back unless you think it's important, so it matters. So if you put it out on the table, it'd probably change the negotiation. You just don't feel safe doing it. If it's true for you, it's true for the other side. Now the hard thing to see is where's the overlap on those cards that nobody's showing. Neither one of you have any idea what's in there. So you got to get to a Point where you have a reputation for not hurting people so that then they might show their cards. Also, since there's stuff that's going to matter to you that they have no way of knowing it matters, you got to get them talking. Which is why picking out lies is not enough. Because you only lie about stuff that you know is important. And half of the black swans you don't know are important. So you're never going to give a physical tell. You know, do I look down when I'm hiding or do I look to the side when I'm hiding? If I don't know what's important, I'm not going to give you a physical tell. That's why you also got to get people talking about the whole environment sort of in an unguarded stream and they'll blurt something out. Quick example, an organization is trying to get me to come and speak for free, which I'm not doing. All right, so how, what kind of constituency do you have? How many people? 300. Regional association. We don't have money for trainers. We could buy books. Really. Okay, they can videotape it. Really, I need videotape. But then the killer was. I said, what kind of publication have you got? Well, we don't have one, but there's a national publication.

Really?

What's the national publication got? You interview me, we place it in the national publication. They got to put stuff in their publication. They got 20,000 people that are immediately accessible to get them to put it on the COVID I'll come talk, talk to you for free. National is like, of course we got to put something in the article in the magazine anyway, this is the way we support a regional association to get a speaker that would come in and charge him a bunch of money and he'll come in and do it for free. Yeah, we'll do that. If we hadn't had that extended conversation about where you have access. They didn't know I want to be in somebody's magazine, but it's the access to the people. So we just had to keep talking because they were sitting on assets that they had no idea would matter to me until we started talking about. We're taught that you ask questions to do what? To gather information, you need to find out information. Two thirds of the time, questions are not the best way to get information. If I say to you what's on your mind, that's a good open ended question. We would call that a calibrated question. All your questions should start with either what or how. If you ask calibrated questions, they're very deferential. There's great power in deference. When I'm deferential to you, you're more likely to be honest with me because you feel large and in charge. So a whole bunch of emotional intelligence reasons why that works. But you're still going to give me a fairly guarded answer. We're just. And so you'll answer, but it'll be guarded if, while we're talking, instead of saying what's on your mind? If I say, sounds like you've given us a lot of thought. Sounds like there's something on your mind that's just a verbal observation. We call it a label. It's going to bypass your prefrontal cortex. It's immediately going to re energize what you were thinking about, which brought us to the table. And you're much more likely to give me a solid download of what's going on in your head. It'll come out much more unguarded. So instead of saying to a CEO, I would never say, what's keeping you up at night, Mr. CEO? Because that's just so tired. Not that it's a bad question. CEOs are sick of not being listened to when they give the answer. But I might say it seems like there's something you guys are really struggling with. You probably, you're much more likely to come out with it. So we're going to design in advance two or three things that end up being pretty much really universal. And they're going to work in almost all scenarios. My favorite one, my son, somebody calls him on the phone, business related. They say, how you doing today? And you know what he says back? Sounds like there's something on your mind. And he gets an almost immediate download of information.

That's great. You know, how do you spot a.

Liar and what should you look for?

One of the things we talk about is a Pinocchio effect, which means the more words they use, the more they're trying to convince you. A liar knows they're lying. So they're going to talk at length and they're going to read your body language. They're going to try really hard to convince you. One of the real problems with if I'm telling you the truth and you don't realize I'm telling you the truth, I'm going to talk to you like you are an idiot and you're going to be offended and consequently call me a liar. So a strong indicator of truthfulness is the more concise people get and the more angry they get at you, it correlates more strongly with them telling the truth. If I tell you something, you don't buy it, I go like, well, you're an idiot. I don't even have time for you. I'm probably telling the truth because I haven't taken the time to convince you. So additional words, convincing words, correlate really strongly with people lying. Bob Mnookin wrote a book called Beyond. The first chapter is called the Tension Between Empathy and Assertiveness. Bob Mnookin's the head of the program on negotiations at Harvard. I tell a story about him at the beginning of the book. Brilliant guy, though. And I'm reading this chapter and the title, the Tension Between Empathy and Assertiveness. I realize the title is a red herring because then he makes the case that they're a necessary combination, that there is no tension, but that empathy is required for assertiveness. So I want you to be emotionally, intelligently assertive for them to make a great deal with you. They got to know what you need. You have to assert your own interests. Never stop asserting your own interests. You just don't be a jerk when you do it right. You know, let. Take responsibility for how it lands. Let it land in an emotionally intelligent way so they can hear it, so that they hear what you want them to hear. If assertion without empathy, what they hear is that you're a jerk and you're trying to take them hostage and you're trying to push them around. You're trying to make them lose. Okay? And those are gonna. That. That's just. That's just a tweak. Still be assertive, but still. But be it in a way that actually builds a relationship because they appreciate the fact that you were a straight shooter. Everybody loves straight shooters, right? Who doesn't like a straight shooter? They tell us the truth in an emotionally intelligent way. That's the whole design of it.

Here's one trap I see a lot of entrepreneurs get into, including myself, is if you become very effective at selling.

People or you become very effective at.

Persuading, and there's always ways to be far better. I mean, certainly you, a lot of.

Times can sell yourself into deals you.

Shouldn'T even be in. You know, I mean, you just end up getting clients you shouldn't have. You're always in the.

You know, and I know a lot of, especially marketers that they go into these pitch modes because they've studied so much damn NLP or so much persuasion.

They can't fricking help themselves. And so everything becomes a negotiation and trying to squeeze. And so part of it is like.

You know, I have about six hours.

Of interviews with Arianna Huffington when I was helping her launch her book Thrive a few years ago.

And my favorite line out of the.

Whole thing that she said was the.

Best way to complete a project is to drop it. And there are some things in life.

You just need to unsell them.

You need to negotiate yourself out of the deal.

Right.

So you're really damn good at just.

Saying no and doing it in ways that are very effective.

So advice that you would give for.

Just knowing what to not get yourself involved in.

Well, all right. So the question started out with cutting ties with somebody.

Yeah.

Dishonest, negative, or lazy people and getting.

Them out of your life. Because I think all of those are negotiations also, especially if they're relatives. That's a tough gig for people.

All right, so the hard part about empathy is empathy is their perspective. We're happy to have empathy with people we agree with, but that anybody could do that. So you're going to cut ties with somebody who doesn't want you to cut ties with them. What's their perspective going to be on? You anticipate it and then inoculate it, go farther past it. Because you can't plant negatives with observations. You only plant negatives with denials. So if I was going to cut my relationship with you, my normal gut instinct to try to make it land softer was you're like, look, I don't want you to think I'm a jerk, but we're not going to work together anymore. So that was wrong because I denied the negative. And my smart move is to say, look, I'm going to look like a jerk. I don't want to deal with you anymore. It's that simple. You know, articulate the negative. Just as an observation. And I might even do this all the time. Look, I'm going to seem an unappreciative jerk that doesn't realize your value, doesn't appreciate the amount of time that you put into this, and I'm gonna look stupid and lazy. I don't want to deal with you anymore. What do you got left to throw back at me? You got nothing. And you're gonna think, wow, he was really honest. Your reaction to that, I mean, and that's the really hard part about this. But this is one thing, and we talk about it in the book a little bit, we refer to this as the accusations audit. Since we've been in the coaching, I mean, that's how we're cutting negotiations from 18 months to a week by just we aggressively over diffuse negatives. I mean, extremely aggressive in it, and it's making a huge difference. So the negotiation is to negotiate, to agree to part ways. How are they going to react? Let me preempt it. Yeah, great, great.

The happy client experience. There's basic. I'll just tell you this real quick. So there's. There's three experiences. Everyone has an expectation. So you're here today, some of you for the first time, and you have an expectation of if this is going to be a good meeting or a bad meeting. And so that depends on what happens here, what I talk about, how much you like me or dislike me, whatever.

But.

So you can. An unhappy client, this is what unhappy is. They got less than what they expected. A satisfied client is. They got kind of what they expected. Nothing more, nothing less. It's kind of what they expected. And a loyal or a happy client got more than what they expected. And there's really. Unfortunately, loyalty is a bit of a myth. There's not much loyalty in business. How many, how many people have you ever had say, you're like the greatest business ever, I love what it is you do. I'm going to be a client for life. And then they're there for a while and then they're gone. And you can't think of anything that perhaps, like, didn't create value for them, but they got, you know. So for instance, I run a high level, you know, entrepreneurial group, and entrepreneurs are very promiscuous when it comes to groups and knowledge and information. They bounce around. So they are, you know. Yeah, they're really interesting creatures, these entrepreneurs and these driven minds. And most of you, using Doug Brackman's language, who wrote the book Driven, who's a genius? I remember the majority of this room, probably 90% of everyone in this room is a hunter. You're not a farmer. Hunters are kind of anxious. Hunters have trouble sleeping. Hunters are never satisfied with most things. Hunters. Hunters don't. People well with farmers, they people well with other hunters. And they're tribal, so they like getting in tribes. And hunters that have good boundaries and hunters that have good ethics change the world. Hunters that are poor, boundaried and unethical, they are the tyrants. They are the people that cause massive destruction. And you can see a lot of those people in governments and tech companies and pharmaceutical companies and central banking, and they all go to the World Economic Forum and shit like that, you know. So basically, which is a fantastic organization for tyrants. So let's make sure we get that on video and put it somewhere so I get canceled. So anyway, so going back to this, when it comes to loyalty though, the very best thing you can do for loyalty, like for instance, you know Harley Davidson, a company where the clientele will tattoo the name of the brand on their bodies. I mean that's pretty loyal. But there's a Harley Davidson dealership which is owned by your buddy Bob Parson, the founder of Godaddy's, Cherie's Friends with Bob. And that's a North Scottsdale. Then there's a Harley Davidson and Chandler. And if the Harley Davidson in North Scottsdale doesn't treat you well, but you love Harley, you'll probably go to the dealership in Chandler, that sort of thing. So there is that. So that's a happy client experience. So the bottom line is everything that we could do to create. So if you go to McDonald's, which you should never do unless you like poisoning yourself. And by the way, do you know Dr. Jeff Bland who I'm interviewing at the annual event this year? He's the founder of Functional Medicine, so there's currently 130,000 functional medic and docs in the world and he invented the whole thing. So we're going to have him at the annual event this year and he's awesome. And me and Cherie and Dr. Sachin Patel and his wife Deepa, we were at, we were on his boat for a couple of days in July this year and we had all kinds of discussions about seed oils, about supplements, about health, about, I mean, you name it. One of the interesting bits of tidbit information is that a big majority of the beef at McDonald's comes from dairy cows, which are the oldest, most injected, used up cows because they can get the beef at a much cheaper rate. So if you love eating dairy cows, just go to McDonald's. But anyway, just figured I'd throw that in just to sick at a few of you. But anyway, so if someone goes to McDonald's and you order a burger and they just throw it across the counter and don't even say thank you, it's not like you're like oh my God, this person didn't thank me. But if you go to the Four Seasons and you spend now what, $60 or whatever, 40 buc, 30 bucks for a hamburger, you expect them to say thank you. So we expect a different response depending on the clientele, the way it's packaged, where we're going. So the thing is always focus on having people get more than what they expected. And if you can do that, that's the closest we're ever going to get to loyalty. All right, so that was my little riff on that. So when I went to Dan and Bab's home and I was doing marketing, one of the analogies I would use. And so at the time, Dan Kennedy. How many of you know, grumpy ass Dan Kennedy, the marketer? All right, so Dan Kennedy was writing the majority of my sales copy. He would speak at all of my events that I was doing for carbon upholstery cleaners. I would come to his events and speak at his events because I was like this great story for him, like the dead broke carpet cleaner that built a business. So it was a good sort of positioning thing. And he had this great way of positioning people that you don't have any relationship with versus people that you do. And why you would write sales letters and why would you would do marketing. And back then, the vast majority of marketing was still direct mail. There was very little email marketing. Dean Jackson, who at 1:20pm Is Dean actually online yet?

Yes.

Oh, he is. Okay, wonderful. So Dean's on. So later this afternoon, me and Dean and Alex Mendozian are going to talk for a little bit about marketing. Because at the last Genius Network meeting, we got like rave reviews about the section that we did on marketing and where I talked about pricing and people commented like, okay, now I understand why you raised your prices and Genius Network, that sort of stuff. And people really like the marketing thing. So Dean didn't even invent the squeeze page till 1997. I had my first website in 1996. But even back in 1999, there wasn't a ton of E commerce. Amazon was relatively new. And Dean Jackson, many of you are friends with him and know him, he invented the squeeze page for a book called Stop youp Divorce. And then he created this model where people had to enter their email or their name and email and in order to go to the next page. That ended up becoming the modern day Opt in page, which now you know millions and millions of websites use. How many of you have an Opt in page on your website? Well, the guy who invented it we'll be having a conversation with at 1:20pm today. That's Dean Jackson. Smart dude. So basically Dan Kennedy had this thing where so let's say you have a mountain and over here is where you want if you want to sell something to somebody, even if you're not trying to get money out of them. Let's say Jennifer Hootie, who was recently married, ends up divorcing this kind of bum husband. She has Alex and decides she wants to, you know, have another partner. It doesn't need to be money. It could just be a relationship. It could be whatever you want. I'm saying that jokingly. Alex and Mary Morrissey performed the wedding and she's like the best at performing weddings. She's awesome. So over here. Yeah, yeah. So I could just. There's this dialogue going on between me and Jennifer right now the most. You have no idea what's going. So money, the gold at the end of the rainbow where you want the person to be. So here's a point here, though, where sales and marketing take place. So you want gravity to work in your favor so you don't have to work really hard when things are hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating is where you have to start here and try to convince and talk everyone to get them over here. But if you can put. But marketing is anything you put in front of somebody that gets them over the hill so that you're pulling a string downhill. You're not pushing. Gravity is on your side. So I just drew this graph out at Dan and Bab's house and I said, you can have someone who's either an annoying pest. And this is Dan Kennedy language annoying pest. Or on this side, what would it be?

Welcome guest.

Welcome guest. Exactly. Thank you, Paris. How many of you do not know the name Paris Lampropolis? Like, truly, like, everyone here knows Paris? Okay, no. Paris is one of the top copywriters in the world. Literally, I would imagine billions of dollars have been made from what you have written. So, yeah, so Paris could get up here and do a far better job than I'm doing right now with all this. So you got the welcome. You got the annoying Paris and the welcome guest. And so I shared all this stuff with Dan and Babs. I was like, let's create my version of a consumer guide for carpet cleaning. When someone's like, how much you charge? It's like, well, that's because they have no other criteria on how to make a buying decision. So how do you share things with them in a way to where it kind of walks them up the hill? And I was using 24 hour free recorded messages. And Strategic coach didn't have a 24 hour free recorded message. I said, instead of them talking about, talking to a salesperson, have them call and listen to a free recorded message. On what Strategic coach is misconceptions about coaching, all these different things. The same sort of stuff that I taught Bill Phillips, the same sort of stuff I was teaching my carpet upholstery cleaners, all the stuff that I was doing. And so I shared all this stuff with them about how to get people over here so by the time they talk to a salesperson, it's like, what? Later. Robert Cialdini wrote the book Pre suasion. It's not the selling that takes place. It's what you do in advance. That's what marketing does. So if, like Paris writes a sales letter, that sales letter is designed to get someone who's close to here to just. So you're more in the order taking business than the sales business. Right. So I had created this sort of model for them. 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.

So I do the whole day of consulting with Dan and Babs. I thought it was awesome. They thank me. I go to my hotel. The next day we're having the strategic coach meeting. And I had done the day of consulting with them before my strategic coach class. So when I get there, Dan's like, can we talk? And I'm like, like, sure. And so we go into one of the conference rooms in Chicago and he's like. He goes, you know this chart that you showed us? And he drew it on a piece of paper because Dan's really good at drawing. And he goes, how do you think the day went yesterday? I go, I thought it was great. He goes, well. He goes, so here. He goes, well, you showed this welcome guest into knowing pest. He goes, I'm over here. He goes, I. I loved what you had to say. However, the first thing you said when we started was, your marketing sucks. And Babs runs the company and our marketing director was sitting there, so you just insulted them. And now I have to do a sales job on Babs in order to get her over here because right here, you're like an annoying pest to her because you insulted her. And I never at that point in my life had like that sort of experience because I'm like, I really go out of my way to deliver as much value. You always have. Like, I. I want to do my best to try to impress people with. With what I know, not impress them, but transfer to them so they could actually use it. And I had the track record, like transforming the lives of all of these carpet cleaners in a very short period of time. And then Bill, Phil, like I. And all these other, you know, I had different clients and different consulting I was doing. So I never had like, holy shit. They're like, they're not really taking my, you know, they're not really taking my advice. But, But Dan said something so important, and this is the whole point of this lead up here is he said, he goes, there's two ways that you can influence people. There's two ways you can sell people. He goes, you can tell them what's wrong with what they're doing and how to fix it. And he goes, what happens is you get a lot of resistance, but if you have a good solution, you'll get buy in, because some people will buy what it is you're doing. So you can sell people that way and oftentimes it works. He goes, another way that you can influence and sell people is you can tell them what's right with what they're doing and how to enhance it. And then you get very little resistance and you get more buy in. And he goes, so we already have a 20 million dollar a year company. There's a lot of stuff that you shared that can help us a lot. But because you made us feel bad by saying your marketing sucks, then all of a sudden, Babs and Kathryn weren't able to hear all of the great stuff you shared throughout the rest of the day because you. So when I said, you know, we're gonna film some of you saying some stuff and it can and will be used to enhance you, I'm saying that jokingly, but the thing is, what I've learned over and over again, I sit down with people all the time that want to tell me how to run my business. But they point out how fucked up things are, and I point out how fucked up things are. And I will do that throughout the day. Mostly for people like Mike Koenigs as an example. Really? No, I'm kidding. No. But Mike is. We're disagreeing because he's shaking. So the thing is, there's a way and a timing and there's a tempo and there's a certain rapport. Now I can tell them today that their marketing sucks in different areas because I have trust and I have rapport with them. But at the time, in the beginning, I just didn't have enough trust and rapport to where they took it as an insult instead of me saying, hey, because I have never walked into a business where there is not something that's incredibly messed up if you open enough closets, you know, metaphorically speaking, I mean, and I always love the line that Gary Halbert would say, everything's a clusterfuck until it's as smooth as silk. And so when you're starting almost anything, there's going to be messes. And I believe that all of the opportunities that we have come from the things that are not working. I love the line from Rossi, which is wherever there's anxiety, there's opportunities. So most of the opportunities that we have come from that. But the thing is, if you're trying to help somebody, like, we're going to do a hot seat tomorrow. And if you're trying to help someone, like, listen with your own clients, try this out. Because I've shared this with a lot of people, and it makes a big difference is look at. You know, if you want to. Part of the first conversation I had about this was Steven Kotler, the. The flow guy. I spent 90 minutes on the phone with him a couple days ago, and he's wanted me to help him map out this $250,000 coaching, personal coaching he's thinking about doing with people. And we talked, Mike, a lot about you, about AI because he was at the last 100k meeting, and he's like, I've never done it before. And I go, well, Steve, you're also one of these guys that has this attitude that everyone sucks until proven. They don't suck, right? Everyone's guilty until proven innocent. In his mind, he records the. This great video for me that I didn't even ask him to do based on me telling him that a couple days earlier. And he thinks most marketers are complete liars, which many are. And we have great rapport. I've known him for a long ass time. I've helped him. He writes Peter Diamandis books with Peter. And so Stephen, he's been nominated for three Pulitzer prizes. He's a great author. He's written 14 books. And he's thinking about doing this thing. And I said, okay, hey, you know, he's asking me, how would I sell it? How would I package it? How do I present it? I go, you know, how do you sell something for $250,000? I'm like, well, you know, you got to sell the result. You got to. You got to figure out what the return is going to Be no one. You know, no one's. Not a single one of you wakes up every day and says, I really hope I run into someone selling a $35,000 a year group. Right? $100,000 a year group. You know, I'm really hoping I run into a $250,000 sales, like, every day. We are hoping we avoid salespeople at all costs because someone's going to try to get our money, right? But when someone does, selling right, you don't even know you're being sold. See, people love to be sold. They hate to be pressured. So the question is, how do you position it? How do you package that sort of stuff? And I said, okay, Steve, so what you what? The first thing is not how do you sell a $250,000 thing, it's how do you identify who the hell would even be a candidate for something like that? And how does your methodology help them take that $250,000 and turn it into a million or into 5 million or to 10 million? Or takes their insanely overwhelmed life? Because what he, you know, he's the top flow expert in the world right now. And how many of you have not seen my interview that I recently did with him? Have not. How many of you have seen it? Okay, it's really good. At least I think it is not because of anything I did. He's just a smart guy. I'm just asking him questions. And when you're in a flow state, you're 500% more productive, five times more productive. So if you can get yourself into a flow state, you can get more done on a single day than you could in five days. And if that really could be learned and transferred and developed, that's pretty. That would be very valuable to the right type of person. So what I shared with him is let's identify who these. Who these people are. How do you reach them? And then secondly, you know, because I'm very clever, I said, why don't you take me through the first process so you can teach this shit to me? And then I'll be a poster child for that. Which, of course, is a good benefit to him, too. And so, you know, and plus, it allows me to deeper my understanding. And I'm genuinely interested in everything that he does because it's fascinating stuff. I've actually. I went skiing for the time.

First.

First time in 30 years because of his. His book Nar country with Cherie, who's a far better skier than I am. So anyway, the point is, is I said the big Thing though is you got to shift the way that you approach people. It's not what's wrong with them and how you're going to fix them with all this flow stuff. It's like, let's find people that are already badass and how to make them better. That's the main reason I do Genius Network in order to step into this. Like, I've sold tens of millions of dollars of courses in information products and stuff. And believe me, I'm like the epitome of a self help junkie sort of personality. Like, I was broke, I went to seminars that I couldn't afford. You know, I, you know, I was living on credit cards, I was buying everything because I got fomo, you know, and that sort of gets managed but never fully goes away. So I have Tom's disease, which is terrified of missing. And I've had that, you know, from an early, early age. And so I'm always curious as part of the driven mind. But I, but I applied what I learned and I kept getting better and I kept getting better and I, you know, and I've spent, you know, a couple million dollars on my own personal education. I spend more money on groups and hiring people than I charge anyone in this room for because I, I'm a big believer in parlaying that. But you know, the thing is, is, is it is easier to sell to players with money because they're better clients, they have the financial means, they've already been through the trenches, they already have that sort of stuff. So part of it is, whoever your clients are present, look at all the messaging you're doing, look at what your salespeople are saying to them and if you take the approach of you're already awesome, let's make you more awesome. Even if there's a lot of work to do. And believe me, it's really hard for me to do this in addiction recovery. When I'm sitting down with someone who's, you know, having affairs, they have sexually transmitted diseases, they're in debt, they're possibly stealing, lying, embezzling, or they're potentially going to jail because they have broken a law, it's really hard to like, look at what you're doing right and how to. But if they step, step foot in a 12 step room, if they're even asking for help, that's the first step. And so when you acknowledge that even when someone's in the worst possible states and you can think in your own life, when you've been in your worst possible state, like you're feeling terrible about yourself, you're embarrassed, you've made a bad mistake, you've gotten taken advantage of, someone totally betrayed you. And then someone's telling you, man, your life is really messed up. We need to get your shit together. You're just like, you're already deflated, you're already defeated. And so what, you gravitate towards someone that gives you a sense of hope, a sense of, like, belief in yourself. And it's always there. Like, it's always there. It's just finding it, identifying it. And I think, you know, I think right now the world is so untrusting because the sheer volume of propaganda lies that is constantly being poured at everybody right now. I think this approach is just. I just wanted to share it because I thought it might be helpful. So hopefully that was. What are some effective ways to make friends with or influence skeptical people or prospects? I mean, I know we've talked a lot about that.

Yeah. So it turns out that you have to be a good listener. You have to ask them to state their objections or their opinion about something. Can you tell me what your. What your side of the case is? If there's somebody who has a different opinion and you have to be a good listener, and if you've ever taken a course on being a good listener, there are three things that came out for me. One is you give them your undivided attention. You take notes. While they're speaking.

Right? Yeah, while they're speaking.

And you provide non evaluative questions. Not the questions that. Where you can say, well, that was stupid. It's a question. Oh, you did that. Can you tell me the circumstances surrounding why you did that or why you have come to believe that?

All right.

And that's the way that the research literature suggests. You're most likely then to be able to change somebody in your direction when you present your case. And the reason has always been because if you have been a good listener, if you've shown them that you're open to these sorts of. They like you more. They like that kind of characteristic. I think there's another reason that it's even more primitive. If you've done that, it's their turn. It's their turn, by the rule of reciprocity, to be open to listen to you, to be non evaluative in searching for the rationale behind their. And you get a chance to change them without that, they're not even listening to you. There's a wall up there. There's a brick wall. Your message is bouncing off that Wall. So you have to. It's. It's you. You be a good listener, you be open. And the rule says, now it's your turn. And they do, they do. They're open to you. And that gives you a chance to get your message across. And if it's a good message, then you get some change.

So when you encounter people that rub you the wrong way or that you don't like or have a. Be it a belief system or an attitude that is just very hard to stomach or they're threatening, how do you either handle that or escape that situation?

Yeah. So I'm going to go back to Ben Franklin again and he tells the story of having a rival, a political rival. They did not like each other, but Ben needed to have his. His friendship for moving forward with some initiatives. And so he asked that guy to lend him a book, a book that he wanted to read. And it was in this guy's library. And the guy didn't say no. How do you say, I like the same author that you do? I wonder if you would lend me that book. Lends him the book and then you give it back to him with a book of your own. And you say, can we schedule a time to talk about these books?

Right.

And now you've got to connect. You've got a, You've got somebody who's not an, not an enemy, somebody who shares an interest in these topics. And he said, has it, has an impression. In this case, it was a man of himself as liking you enough to trust you with one of his valued books. Right? Now he's got to change his opinion of you based on his behavior. Right. But the longer lasting thing is that you shared books and you started talking about books together and you found connections and similarities you didn't have before. And in his telling, they became friends and they worked together to get some things done that separately, neither of them would have achieved.

Yeah, that's great. That's great.

As we get into this, why don't you share with me what are you working on and who are you. Who you're helping right now? Because you have like, give us a thumbnail sketch of all your different types of businesses and then what you're working on and who are you being a hero to right now and what are you focusing on? Because I know everyone's going to learn a lot from how you run your businesses.

Well, thank you for asking. Yeah, I do have several businesses, but there are two categories. One is my husband's category, which is veterinary medicine. And I've been supporting him in veterinary medicine for going on three decades right now owning veterinary hospitals and building brands there. Actually, I expanded some of my brands because of the Genius X Group. We've been able to even multiply some of the things we've been doing in the world. And then the other side of my business is in PR and marketing because that's my true love. I love marketing. So it's super fun for me to collaborate with other leaders, global leaders, and bring their voices out into the world. Having so much fun in our strategic Coach group, doing a lot of work with other people that are in the Free Zone Frontier group because we're so like minded that it's a lot of fun to collaborate with everyone in there.

You know, let me Dean, this is a good thing to bring up when it comes to investment. So you've been in Genius Network for a while. Been in my 100k group. You're in free zone frontier. We all pay 50 grand a year to be part of that group. I mean, between us, just like we invest hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in our own marketing education, then when we do something like this, which we don't even charge for, right? The I Love Marketing Meetup group, we turn this into a podcast. We're also sharing whatever we have learned that we think we can pull from that. It's an incredible form of leverage and it's a great way to deliver stuff to people. Why do you invest? You're running multimillion dollar businesses. Why do you invest all that money in these different groups? Haven't you learned enough already, Lee?

You know, a big piece of it is access, right? Access to ideas, access to other brilliant leaders. Access to even knowing how they solve their problems. One of the beauties in our group is when people do hot seats around a challenge and we get to pour into them on ideas on how to solve it. And that shortens my learning curve. That gives me idea and also lets me know which who I need to reach out to to help me with that project. So a lot of times I invest into the community for shortening my learning curve, but it's really access. Just like you, Joe. I mean, how many people have you put in front of me that have changed my business and my life and my perspective just because I had access to them through you or access to people through Dean or through Dan Sullivan that I might not have reached before?

Yeah, yeah. No, I just want to give some context. What would you recommend as a stupid or dumb or negligent way to spend Money on, quote unquote, consultants groups, you know, personal development courses. I mean, because all of us not only have invested in a lot of good stuff, but we've also spent money on things that didn't work out or wasn't really aligned with. And you know, more and more I, you know, I'm just constantly annoyed by the level of marketing manipulation from some of the best marketers that don't have very good characters. They're very good at selling and they're very smart, but they're, you know, it's gotten, it's gotten really bad in some ways. So I've become more and more vocal about, you know, the snake oil salespeople that are also in the marketing world. And when you are in that world, you get thrown into that category, unfortunately. But again, it's all about, you know, operating with integrity and, you know, delivering what you say you're going to do and all that. But yeah, what advice would you have on smart ways to spend money, dumb ways to spend money?

I will say one of the things I do is start people on projects, right? And I might even have a project that I give to three people at the same time and give them the exact same parameters. Maybe a five day sprint. Do this between Monday and Friday, turn in the results on Friday, and with three groups, what I could do is compare side by side, who rises to the top, who followed directions, who's excited about it, and that third person, the one that's most excited about it and really doing the work, take them to the next level and do more. The other two maybe reassign or not use them anymore. But sometimes when you do side by side, you can really see the ones that excel and the ones that do show up and give you the dashboard with the results and they're excited about telling you what they accomplished. My thing that I hate is when I have to go and ask someone, hey, what did you accomplish? I'd rather them be excited and show me before I even ask. So we get into a rhythm and a routine of basically sharing our daily wins, but also setting up our next day for success by outlining what do we do today and what still needs to be done tomorrow. And then we have a working document that the whole team can see and we can see how we can help each other. But I think sometimes starting with two or three people on the same project and seeing who rises to the top allows you to then just work with the cream of the crop.

Here's the thing I really take seriously, that you all spent A lot of Tammy in order to get here. So I've been working on a new book that's coming out in August, most likely. I think the date we have tentatively is August 30th with Hay House called what's Going On It For Them. And we had the whole manuscript completed before I went on my sabbatical, and we were supposed to release last year, but I said, there's no way I want to release a book in the year. I'm taking the sabbatical. And then during the sabbatical, all the time I had to think we redid the whole book, and it's called what's In It For Them. And one of the things that I talk about is Tammy, even though that's not mentioned much in the book. And the final version that I have to completely edit, I have 10 days after this event ends to complete the book. So that'll be fun. But the Tammy is time, attention, money, effort, and energy. Time, attention, money, effort and energy. So you're all spending that in order to be here. Your time, your attention, your money, your effort and your energy. And I work out at. I've, like, a couple of gym memberships, but one of them, they have on the. On the. On the wall at all their gyms. It's a gym called Mountainside. It says effort is your responsibility. Effort is your responsibility. So it's your responsibility to put forth some effort over the next couple of days to meet the people here that are awesome. Many of you are great friends. How many of you? This is the first time you've ever actually even seen me in person. First time you've been at Genius Hour. Okay, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. And I want to meet every one of you. And I know. Well, except for two. There's two here.

I really don't want to be honest.

But, no, I would like to meet all of you. And this is not just a seminar and an event. This is all the speakers, all the stuff we're doing, all my rambling up here, it's truly just an excuse to put a bunch of badasses together and to connect you with each other. Is Jason Flatland in the room? Where's he at?

Oh, right there.

Okay. By the light. It's hard to actually see. He's a very handsome fella. Some of you remember what Jason used to look like when he first joined. Like some vagrant that just walked. I mean, overweight, like, disgruntled. You know, I mean, it was bad. And then he started doing yoga and Kind of cleaned up his act. But Jason is incredibly bright.

You just did.

How big was your launch? You just did. How much? 57 million. 57 million. He's going to give a talk, and he's going to share with you how the hell to do $57 million in a launch or how he did it, not how everyone could do it. Because, frankly, you know, he's. That's another issue. But he came up with the term assembling unicorns. And so that's what we try to do here, is to assemble unicorns. So if you are a farting unicorn, then. And I just saw a meme that had a farting unicorn. I think Howard sent it to me. Yeah. How many of you realize what a demented human being Howard gets? It is. I mean, truly. Yeah. If he explains his childhood to you, it'll all make sense. Okay. It all makes sense. Like, if every one of us explained our childhood to everyone, it all makes sense. Where's Dr. Don Wood? Is he in the room? Right here. You got to talk to this dude. If you don't know Don Wood, we actually met. We were both speaking at the Spartan World Championships in 2019. He helps people with trauma, and he has this great line where he says, if you understood the atmospheric conditions of somebody's life, it would make sense why they are, why they do what it is they do. I love that term. It's great. So the thing is, though, you can actually change the atmospheric conditions of your life, and there's a lot you can do in this world, and it's been really hard. I realize that. Really hard. How many of you have lost someone that you love has died in the last year or two. Yeah.

A lot of you.

And there's several of you in the room that lost wives, husbands, you know, parents. It's been pretty hardcore. So I'm not going to pretend that, you know, Kumbaya. There's a lot of difficult shit going on. So we're going to talk about all kinds of things during this event, and every speaker has been curated to deliver some really great conversations. But this is a connection network. That's what I want Genius Network to represent. So I was looking through some different slides, and this I actually shared at the annual event in 2017. And it's a gaping void. Image is. Where's Jason Corman at? Right back there. Okay.

Smart guy.

Kind of a commodious sort of individual, though. I mean, so very smart, though. So if you can deal with his abrasive personality. He's a really Sweet man. He really is. Because the hardest shells hide the tenderest meat. And he's sitting there right next to Craig. Go figure, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Both those guys do not take a bubble bath with either one of them. It's really weird. Yeah.

Yeah.

I missed. Miss you too. It's great to have you.

It's great.

It's actually. So I'm looking at. You know, this is so weird. I just want to stop because my ADD brain wants to stop and say something. Each person that I see and I have, I have to kind of keep going and. Is Ned Hallowell in the room? Where's he at? Right there. Okay. You're gonna love Ned if you've never seen that. Ned is the top ADD ADHD psychiatrist in the world. He's written more books on it than anyone. The guy's a genius. You're going to love it. And I brought him here today to keep me under control to a degree. No, it's so great. Yeah. I've known Ned forever and he's awesome. And I'm going to do an interview with him. You're going to leave here with a lot of capabilities. You're going to learn a lot of cool stuff, and hopefully you unlearn a few things too, because unlearning is frankly more important than learning. All right, so million dollar racehorse. What's this all about? Many of you have heard us talk about it.

It.

If you had a million dollar racehorse and every time that horse ran a race and won, you'd make a million bucks, how would you treat the horse? You wouldn't shove fast food down its throat. You wouldn't sleep, deprive it, you wouldn't overwork it, you wouldn't over train it. You have the best trainers, the best nutrition, the best of everything. You would take care of that million dollar racehorse. So you are the million dollar racehorse. And I can babble and talk about this stuff all day long, but last year, you know, when I took the sabbatical the year before, what prompted it was I got a. I got a message on Instagram from a guy named Cole Schneider, and I've been friends with his father mark for over 20 years. Mark is actually the one that gave me the term elf. We're on a golf course playing golf and he started talking. And this is a rare thing because like George Carlin would say, I think golf is a waste of real estate. So I hardly ever play golf. I thought one person would find that funny. Shit, man, you take a year off, you just kind of Lose your game a little bit. I have to question my self esteem, which is already bad enough to begin with. But just take a drink here and ponder this for a moment. How would I have said that? The internal voice. It would have been more funny. You know, I think golf is a waste of real estate. Like, is it the tone? Is it what the hell? George Carlin says that people laugh their ass off. I don't the fuck is going on here? Okay, all right, back. All right, back to here.

All right.

It's not that funny. So Mark, we were playing golf and he said, elf, you know, do deals that are easy, lucrative and fun. And Mark, a very interesting guy. Funny as hell, crazy, wacky as hell, entrepreneur. I mean, you know, crazy, right? And I said, I love that term. I go, I'm going to actually turn something. I'm going to do something with that. Because most of the marketing that we do is designed to be robotic and automated so you don't have to rely on, you know, being a salesperson. You could have your marketing do it for you. That, you know. So I started thinking of ELF in terms of marketing. Easy, lucrative and fun. And then we developed it into ELF versus Half Hard and Annoying, lame and frustrating. And you know, for years I talked about it with the first marketing group that I went to, which was Carpet Cleaners, because I was a former dead broke carpet cleaner and I learned marketing so I could survive. And all of my carpet cleaners were using the term elf and we were thinking of elf and it was giving people a framework on how to think about the marketing that we were doing. And then for about eight years, I just quit talking about it.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video.

And I want to let you know that I. A new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. And then one day in Genius Network, I mentioned elf. And then it started picking up again and I was like, wow, people love that. Because my whole Nightingale Conant program, which is for those of you old enough to remember Nightingale Conant, me and Timothy Poulson. I have to say Timothy now because somewhere along the way Tim just decides to say he wants Timothy is. I don't. I don't even know what that is about. So. Timothy Poulson. But we did that program together and it was the number one Selling marketing program in Nightingale, Conan. They still sell it on Audible, and sold millions of dollars worth of that program all on elf. And then I started talking about it again and realizing, you know, ELF doesn't just apply to market, it applies to people, it applies to deals. It applies to a lot of things. So now I put everything through the L filter. So Mark was the one that originally had shared that with me. And his son sends me a message saying, can I call you on WhatsApp? I'm like, yeah. And Mark, I just talked to him two days prior. I had recently introduced him to Paula Abdul, the singer. They were putting together what was going to be a really big deal on this thing that he was working on. And Cole calls me, he says, yeah, we found, I thought in bed this morning, dead. And like, right at that moment, like, what? So Mark was 59 years old. He was worth about $300 million, and he died. And it popped into my head, take a sabbatical. And I didn't even know what that meant. And I was the last person that I would ever think, take a sabbatical. But what I wanted to do is I wanted to reevaluate looking at work because. Because the pandemic had started for us. And when I say us, my company, my team, most of the United States, around March is when it really came in. And I had done a team meeting mid March after filling out an impact filter, thanks to Dan Sullivan and Babs and Strategic Coach, a great thinking tool about how do we handle this thing. And so as soon as it started, since I spend almost daily on talking to one or several people that struggle with addiction. And I've been in my own recovery, which is, you know, for many, many years. And the world was getting really dark, and I had this sense that things are going to get really dark. And there's people trying to figure out, how do you run your business? A few people's businesses immediately, you know, a couple of members we had in travel, their businesses were just decimated. And thinking, you know, how do I think about work? How do I think about life? What the hell can I actually do that would be a useful contribution? You know, what? What, what? You know, what am I into? What am I not into? The serenity prayer, which I've said a million times, you know, God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. And in my codependent way, I get stuck on the wisdom to know the difference, you know, how Many of you think you can change a lot of things that you really, you know, you try to, but. But it's hard, right? It's a difficult thing. And I think we have the ability to change a lot of stuff. But the biggest thing we have the ability to change is ourselves and our perceptions and how we think about things and who we hang out with and where we spend our time, attention, money, effort, and energy. And I wanted to really reevaluate work. So I've had this on my. On the wall at Genius network for a long time. Says, be willing to. To destroy anything in your life that isn't excellent. And there was a lot of stuff in my life that just simply wasn't excellent. I have a great life. I mean, there are people that deal with shit. They're going through stuff. What's happened the last couple years, I cannot even fathom. So please don't perceive anything as I make jokes, as I'm sarcastic, whatever that I'm bitching about, I will bitch. Because I went to the Dale Carnegie course years ago, and there was this one, one, you know, the book is awesome. You know, how to win friends and influence people. But there's one chapter on don't criticize, condemn, or complain. And it's like, I love to criticize, condemn, complain. I mean, there's just some people, it's so much fun to make fun to talk shit about them, right? And so, you know, there's a lot of things in my life that were not excellent, but I do have an amazing, blessed life. So I started to say, like, well, you know, I'm talking about this stuff, but how much am I actually living it? And I think I do a pretty good job. I mean, that's the ego part of me that's trying to rationalize, you know, stuff. But I think I do a pretty good job. And I showed those of you how many of you were here in 2017 at the annual event, okay? So you probably remember this, okay, this is a letter in German, letterhead, written in German on letterhead at a hotel that I. Einstein, was staying at. I think it was 1922. And he had literally written these two letters. And one of them, they sold it at an auction for $1.56 million for that letter. And it's because of what it said. And here's a little bit about it that's kind of hard to read, but those autograph notes in which Einstein offered his thoughts on how to live a happy and fulfilling life sold at a Jerusalem auction house Tuesday for a combined 1.8 million. Now, the first one sold for 240,000. That said, where there's a will, there's a way. And then the one that I just showed you, it sold for 1.56 million. And here's what it said. It says, a calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant rest, restlessness. A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness. And I would always grapple with that saying, okay, I have enough money, and I do currently, unless, you know, someone comes and takes it all or something, or I make some really stupid decisions, which I've made plenty of those in my life. I've pissed away way more money than I would ever want to admit, but I have. And, you know, there's a lot of things that can be done in the world, but is working. You know, I'm a guy that has spent most of my life where I will trade peace, peace of mind for productivity. I will suffer in order to get something done. I mean, working in the world of addiction, recovery is not easy. It's, you know, and I actually pay to do that. I fund a lot of it, but it helps me with my own recovery because there's this whole thing about the worst day sober is better than the best day not sober, you know? And so life is hard and difficult at times, and other times, it's beautiful. And, you know, I really. You know, when I first read this, I was like, what a profound piece of wisdom. But how do I really think about it? You know, I can have a common, modest life and be happy, but who am I doing it for? And so one of the things I learned on sabbatical is that the pursuit of happiness is the cause of most unhappiness. If you chase happiness, it runs away. Have any of you remember, like, when you were first dating and you had someone that you were really into, you really liked them, and you were hoping to go out with them, and the more you pursued them, the more they ran away? Anyone have that experience other than, like, everyone in the room?

Yeah.

Okay. Elko, my man, thank you for coming all the way from. Yeah. You're awesome. You're awesome. Elko is. You should be up here giving this talk right now about this topic. So here's the thing. I had some PowerPoints, but as usual, I wait till the last minute to put them together, and I didn't do a good job to get them to my team. So I just have notes, paper notes. Yeah, I'M only doing this PowerPoint thing for those of you in the bad seats in the back that can barely see. No, don't we switch everyone around, though? There's no bad seats in there. I hope not. Yeah, I mean, these are the worst seats because they're closer to me and God knows what variant I'm going to give everyone in the front row. All right, so here's the thing. So I'm going to. I highlighted, as you can see from my handwritten notes, some of the things that I want to share. So before I went on my sabbatical, I was in pain on the left side of my body, left shoulder. And I know a lot about physical pain. Most pain is not structural, it's psychological. It's caused by repressed emotions, predominantly anger and Rage. Dr. John Sarno did an amazing job writing about that. And I was in chronic pain almost my whole entire adult life until I met a guy named Steve Ozanich who wrote a very exhaustive book called the Great Pain Deception by Sarno based on Sarno's work, not by Sarno. And if you don't know who Dr. John Sarno is and you have any sort of physical pain, knee pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, we have a modern pain epidemic. Most of it is caused by, it's psychosomatic, it's stress, it's anxiety. That's for a much longer conversation than I have right now. Some of you have heard me talk about that. And I know there's at least 20 people in this room right now that were in constant chronic pain until I shared enough with them until they did their own research and that they're now out of pain. And so I was having a lot of pain. And I was like, what the hell is going on? The moment I said, I'm taking a sabbatical, the pain went away. It literally went away. And I had it for nearly two years because prior to taking the sabbatical, I had a breakup that was very difficult. Shawn Stevenson, my best friend, died. Several other friends died. Mark died. I had, you know, I had to deal with some IP theft, all kinds of things. It was a very, very psychologically difficult thing for me, the way that I was interpreting it, life, even though, again, I have a blessed life. And so when I announced I was taking a sabbatical, the pain went away. I was like, what the hell? This is the weirdest thing ever. And then about a month before I started my sabbatical here in this, the gym, at this hotel, I was doing pull ups and the right side of my body, I literally lost, like, the strength was half of what the left side was. And I was doing pull ups. Like, I'm like, what On.

On the other side of my body.

Before I was getting geared up to start part the sabbatical. But it wasn't pain. It was just a weakness. I don't know if it was caused by TMS or what. It never came back. I literally. It underneath the lat in the. In the upper part of the tricep and part of my. The right.

The pec.

The muscle atrophied and never turned back on. And it's something. I'm like, what? The body is so weird. And I just turned 54 years old, so I'm like. Like, part of me. Oh, is it age? You know, whatever. But I kept with it and I started, you know, and where's Nick Sonnenberg at? Back here. Only useful thing Nick has ever done in my life for me. Is he. No kidding. Just kidding. He's done three useful things. So.

Nick.

I'll just take this off. So Nick is a very flawed human being, and we have to. But let's put this jacket over here to the side. Well, thank you, Mr. Asprey. Yeah. Biohacker doorman, whatever you put. Yeah, I like the hair. You're looking kind of. Not too much like Neil Young, though. That's like, not going for that. You got to read the shit that Dave's been writing on Instagram. It's so good. It's so good. How many of you follow Dave on Instagram? It's so fantastic.

Yeah.

So fantastic.

Yeah.

The people that are on the other side are like, fuck, I hate that guy. Yeah. So. All right, so Nick Sonnenberg calls me up. He's like, I'm in town. I'm hanging out with one of my clients. And by the way, where's Chris Voss?

He should be here.

Oh, he should be there. Okay. Okay. That's tomorrow. Okay.

Okay.

All right.

I was going to say something, but that's good. So Nick says, hey, I'm in town. I've got one of my clients I'm doing some consulting with at her plastic surgery clinic. And he said, would you like to go to dinner with us and meet up? And it's the middle of a sabbatical, and if you can remember, back in November, well, different parts in different parts of the world. But it's really hard to go to restaurants. Everyone's wearing masks. A lot of places are closed. And I'm like, sure, yeah. And he goes, well, do you have any suggestions on where to eat? And I'm like, okay, well, so he calls me up to see if I want to go to dinner, but then asks, what should we go to dinner?

And.

Which is fine. It's fine. And I'm like, why don't we just do it at my house and I'll make food. And to make a long story short, he invites this wonderful woman by the name of Dr. Cherie Ong, who's sitting right here. And she comes over with a couple of other people. Jessica Caro comes over and. And Nick. And we're hanging out, and we just became friends. I just really liked her brain. I liked her. She was really awesome. And no thought from either one of us that we would ever, like, start a relationship intimately. That's where people have sex and do weird things. But anyway, her parents are here with her. I just had to say that because I'm trying to. You got to get people used to me. I'm like, weird. Weird as hell. You gotta be slow about it. It's just a different form of foreplay. But anyway, so. So we just have become friends. And, you know, we'd gone to lunch, gone to dinner a couple times. And then we have this wacky friend named Cindy who wrote a book called Everything. Well, she did all the marketing for it. Everything Men Know About Women. Have you ever seen that book? She became a multi millionaire with a book called Everything Men Know About Women. And the whole book is blank.

Blank.

It's just the title. So anyone here saying, I have difficulty selling my shit. I paid $10,000 to come to this event, or I'm in the. You want to mark headlines. Headlines, you know, and so the book is blank. I mean, there's authors that spend their whole life trying to write a book, and they never do anything with it. She becomes a millionaire with a blank book. It's hysterical. You know, I mean, you could do it with, like, wit and wisdom of Joe Biden. I mean, there's a million different. Different strategies, you know, ethical guidelines of the, you know, drug companies. I mean, there's just so many things that you can. You can do with this. You know, there's so many headlines in.

My head right now. I'm just trying to look at the.

Clock and realize, oh, they got a little bit to talk. So anyway, Nick introduces me to Cherie. We hang out. And then Cindy, she comes to me and says, you know, why are you not dating her? And I said, well, there's this other woman I'm actually interested in. But she's in another country and that sort of. That sort of thing. And she's like, well, she's amazing.

She's awesome.

She's got a great heart. You guys really should be. I'm like, I'm not. She's just a friend. And she's like, no, really, she's. And so she plants a seed. And then unbeknownst to me, she's saying the same shit to Sheree in the corner, like at a different, you know, like 10 minutes later or whatever. And then the very last interview for I love marketing. I happen to have Amy chain. Where's Amy? I always say Amy Chan. Amy Chan. Where's Amy? Okay, sorry. Because of the light. She's amazing. She wrote a book called Breakup Boot Camp. And I'm going to be doing an interview with her and Annie Lala on love relationships. Because what we do is we sell people what they want and we do.

Our best to give them what they need. Right?

That's what we do here. So you bedazzle people with marketing and how to make money and how to build whatever your client base is or whatever you're trying to do. And then we smuggle in all of these things related to health and fitness and being a good human being and all that other sort of stuff and then put you together with what I hope is to be the most non narcissistic entrepreneurial group in the genre of marketing that you could find. Because marketers are brilliant geniuses, the ones that really know their shit and have studied persuasion. But they are some of the biggest con artists on the planet. I mean, how many of you have noticed that, right? Really great. They can sell anything, but they will sell their mother. They will do whatever they, you know, for money. So part of it is we want to teach you marketing and stuff, but it's this other stuff that is so much more important. And how many of you were single throughout the sabbatical? I mean. Oh, yeah, that still makes sense. I can still try to make that work. How many during my. No, how many of you were single during the pandemic or they're still single. Yeah, I mean, it's. It's hard, it's lonely and, you know, man, so love relationships. So I did this, this interview with Amy and me and Cherie had just started dabbling with dating. And Amy makes this comment on this interview. She's like, you know, try someone, you know, try going out with someone that you've not gone before. Someone that's younger, someone that's older, someone Has a different personality than you, if you know something along those lines. And she said it way more eloquently than I'm saying right now. And when I interview Amy and Annie, I think you'll agree that you're going to get so much out of it. And it planted the seed in my head saying, okay, I'm going on a sabbatical. I've met this incredible person. You know, I'm already a little jaded from. From past things that have happened in my life. And many of you have met some of my past partners. Right. And I tend to try to not burn bridges and be friends with people and also look at how do I do relationships and stuff. And so Nick is responsible for the introduction. So thank you very much for that, Nick. Now, if this thing blows up and she. That's a whole nother thing. No, but. And by the way, here's the best thing about. Well, there's many beautiful things about Cherie, but one of the best things from a public standpoint is that Cherie is the top vaginal plastic surgeon in Arizona. And I can now talk about vaginas in some way, segue them into every conversation. It somehow becomes acceptable. It is unbelievable. I can just get away with even more stuff that I tried to already because I'm sort of an inappropriate person, if anyone hasn't noticed that. Right. Okay. But she's loving and incredible and awesome. And so it's been an incredible journey. We started the year of my sabbatical on February. February, January 3rd, we went to Florida, and we spent seven days meditating for between four to seven hours a day with Joe Dispenza. And that was really cool. And then went to Hawaii after that. And I didn't do much traveling. This was not an external, internal journey. It was more of a internal one. And so the lessons. I'm just going to go through some lessons real quickly, and then I'm going to show you a couple pictures. And then we're going to have way better speakers and presenters than me for the next two and a half days. And you're going to love it. So here's the ones I highlighted.

All right.

So the people that wanted to. So here's some ahas and insights I got. The people that want to dispense the most advice on how to do sabbaticals are actually the people that have never truly taken one. I cannot tell you how many people are trying to tell me how to do a sabbatical. And you need to do. Have you ever taken a sabbatical? No, shut the fuck up. I listen because, you know, those that can't teach. I mean, there's a lot of good people that teach stuff that never do it. I mean, there'd be no books in the world if that wasn't the case. All right, so. And by the way, I've said this before. You've heard me say it. Every, every person that writes a book is a speaker. Puts themselves out there publicly in a lot of ways. They want validation. They want the world to like them. They want people to like their ideas. Most of them have low self esteem, low self worth, including myself. Not all. Not all. I actually think Dan Sullivan is an example. Has an incredibly high self worth. I tried to, over the years, see if I can get into that sensitive part of Dan. And he seems to be a pretty confident man. So. But we'll see. There's always some area. There's always some area. So what was so valuable in the sabbatical is the realization that I don't need to plan anything, I don't need to do anything. And I had this, you know, this energy that needed to go somewhere and it was really uncomfortable and really uncomfortable. But David Bock, were any of you at the presentation he gave many years ago where he talked about taking a one year sabbatical? Okay. And it's still on Genius Network. You can find it on YouTube. And it's great. And I had really good conversations with David, with Richard Rossi, with Dan Sullivan, with Ben Hardy, with a variety of different people that were really helpful to help me think through. You know, Ben even helped, helped me. He interviewed me, we did some interviews and I really went into this thing wanting to reevaluate work. So here's some of the things I learned. Humor heals thinking. Time works. We need to give ourselves more of it. I learned a lot about cryptocurrency and blockchain and I am still a total infant in my knowledge of it. So crypto, blockchain, NFTs, all very fascinating, very confusing, and will make some people very rich. And some people will totally lose their ass. And they are changing the world. And it may be smart to pay attention to them, try to understand things that are new before you say they are good or bad. Because in a state of ignorance, it's easy to make judgments. So yeah, you know, I got a few NFTs and stuff. I'll show you a couple of my crypto punks if we have time. If not, I'll do it later. Here's some other things that I discovered and learned and some insights. We're in the midst of of evil. They in quotes are not doing this for your safety. Recovery work from a life of chaos prepares you for chaos and uncertainty. It doesn't provide all the answers, but it helps. And by the way, I'm going to put all these into a more laid out way if this is useful for anyone. And I'll send them to everyone. If you don't really know what you got until it's gone, you also don't know all the bullshit you put up with until you step away from it for a while. We're in the middle of a world war unlike any that has ever happened on planet earth. It's a physical, cyber and psychic war. And the weapons are truly different because war is organized murder and you are blind if you're not aware of all the organized murder going on in the world right now. Drug dealers and pimps are truly running the world. They are and utilize as, you know, quoted. They credit Stalin with this. The useful idiots that Stalin referred to as the media. This includes almost all media. The drugs that kill people are legal and the drugs that can save people's lives are illegal or becoming illegal. We don't need a war on drugs, we need a drug against war. There are less givers in the world than what I once thought. But a lot of true warriors people truly are under a mass hypnosis formation. Some of the people that are considered concerned, conspiracy theory people were the early adopters that actually saw much of the truth through the propaganda before most other people have. They were insulted, attacked, called crazy, deplatformed, canceled, sometimes lost their jobs, their freedoms, their livelihoods, and sometimes their lives. Life's easy when you live it the hard way and hard if you live it the easy way. By my friend Dave Kekich, who died a few months ago. Some of you were good friends with Dave and that was such a loss and he was such an amazing guy. But he wrote Kekich credos. It's easy to lie to yourself and rationalize your behavior. There are no rules for sabbaticals. You do what you want. And it's easier to make personal decisions when you're not burdened with business decisions. And then for me, not being on social media was way healthier for my brain than reading inspirational quotes on social media. And yeah, so I've got. I still. I've posted once on Instagram, like a video. But I don't have Facebook, I don't have LinkedIn, I don't have WhatsApp. I don't have any social media things. Twitter on my phone. And during the sabbatical, let's see, I started doing this at the very end with Cherie. That's our, that's our second ice bath we did a couple weeks ago. Where is Michael and Jesse? You guys in the room somewhere? They own a great, a great sort of biohacking place called Optimize. And while you're in town, if you want, if you stay in town, go to Optimize. So Michael is a Wim HOF trainer and these guys are great. And so that's Cherie. She's. See that smile on her face the first time she did it, that was the look on her face. She was hating life and I hate the fricking cold. And during Thanksgiving week we listened to the entire WIM HOF book, the Wim Hof Method. And I'd been doing Wim Hof breathing a couple years ago, but I never did the cold stuff consistently because I hate the cold. And listening to that book and him talking about his wife when she jumped off an eight story building over 25, 30 years ago and committed suicide. And he was left with four kids and no time to grieve. And how he healed himself with a cold and then the way he explained just, it flipped a switch. And one of the best things that I got out of the sabbatical was I started doing this. And so that video that I recorded for you, that was this morning. I spent nine minutes in my pool this morning. I was freaking shivering when I got out today. But it's actually colder at. When you go to Optimize the example, it's between, between 39 to like you know, 40, 42 to 44 degrees. And I've been doing it every day. And then a couple days ago I was there with Jim Quick. And there's Jesse on the left of Jim and. Or yes, left of Jim and Michael between me and. Yeah, sandwiching a couple dudes, you know, and that's. And so we did saunas. We did, you know, all that stuff. So I'll just real quickly show you a couple other things. Divorce court in 2030. Does anyone get that? Does that make sense to anyone? Those are NFTs. Okay. It's the divorce card. So here's one of my crypto punks. The first one that I bought, you just buy jpegs at the time at the price of Ethereum. I think I paid $407,000 for that. And here's one that looks just like me that I just acquired. How fucking awesome is that for me? None of you give a shit, but I actually think it's cool. But I've created. We're going to create a thing called Recovery Punks and we're going to use cryptopunks. We're going to create a whole community about that. But we're going to get to that. I'm going to bring NFT experts in Genius Network over the next year. We got all kinds of cool stuff. Got Jordan Peterson coming to the 100k group in April. It's got all kinds of stuff. I'm going to try to get him to come to another Genius Network meeting. All kinds of things. This little thing above the. That's a picture from my office. My brain had too many tabs open. How many of you feel that way? Okay. I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here.

Go ahead.

You're over here.

Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you. Watch them.