Joe Polish and Mike Koenigs talk about building your perfect “Genius Network,” Visioneering, & More!

All right. How you doing?

I'm doing amazing. How are you doing?

I'm good.

I'm good.

So I know something I wanted to talk about with you briefly, and that is you. And I just got back from spending some time at Visioneering xprize. Visioneering. And there were a couple things that I thought were particularly interesting, especially how they organized the conversations. So I'd like you to talk about that a little bit. And then we're going to talk about Genius Network and the annual event that's coming up, too.

Yeah, yeah. All right. Okay.

So.

So what do I. What are my thoughts on Visioneering? So Visioneering was started by Peter Diamandis. It's part of the X Prize foundation. And that was started many, many years ago when Peter, in his crazy ways, decided to put up a $10 million prize. He didn't have the money yet, so the X Prize, the X actually stuck because it took so many years for them to find a sponsor that was supposed to take over the X, which was a new Shannasari, who funded the $10 million space prize that was won in 2004, which is pretty much responsible for the creation of private space travel, which is not yet civilian yet, but it's very close. So for sure, now they deal with solving all kinds of the world problems. And you know what's great is one of my teams, the team, not one of my teams, but my team won the toxin detection prize that's now going to be created and formulated, and I put in some. A little bit of money into making sure that that prize is created and developed to identify toxins. So any world problem you could imagine in all kinds of different areas, from space to climate to disease to innovations, I'll be presenting an addiction one, and we'll see about getting for addiction recovery. So it's pretty cool, but they're conversations and processes, so they first get people's brains to be thinking about what are these global problems that need solved that bureaucracies and government and entrenched institutions have not yet solved? And in a lot of ways, bringing sort of innovation from an entrepreneurial standpoint or people that, you know, have no background in some of these areas, that they're solving some of these problems. So they. They first look at moon shots and space shots and big thinking, and then they put people in teams and take them through a way to think about how to incentivize it. And if you can get clear on what it is you're trying to solve, you know, then, you know, there's a good Opportunity that, you know, it will be solved. Because who the hell is going to solve some of these problems if it's weird, neurotic, crazy people trying to, you know, and you got to incentivize them. Right. They're just not going to sit around and, oh, yeah, I think I'm just going to tackle some of the world's greatest problems because I want to. Yeah.

No, I'll tell you what I really liked was, first of all, it's the first time I'd been there and how they structured things, which is a couple of lectures, then break off, pick a track. And I don't even remember all the tracks we had. Environment we had. Can't remember what were the four main categories. I suppose I could look.

There was health and longevity. There was. You know, it is funny, our brain. Like this is what also happens to your brain is that having paste and. Plus. Well, I just have to say, as soon as we were done with this thing, we went back to San Diego to visit a friend who's literally going to die in the next, probably the next couple days. It's been a really intense, you know, 24 hours. And so that's. That's how we kind of wrapped up the end of the, you know, the end of the thing. But there's. There's all kinds of different initiatives.

Yeah, here's here. I brought them up, actually. So we had future of food and agriculture. We had future of housing and infrastructure, future of human health and longevity. Then future of waste in the circular economy, which to me didn't sound particularly interesting, but they open up. There's an expert there, talks about a few concepts that they've been. And then people just throw out ideas, they write them down and then democratically vote on what's most interesting, then break into teams and fill out a form, and then we start pitching each other and that gets votes. So it's very democratic. And then from there we go into a room, do kind of a test vote, and then people start saying they're gonna provide money. And you're supposed to go out and ask for money, get money that's gonna provide a minimum of a half million dollars to create the initiative and make it happen. I was just very interested in how that evolved.

Do you know how.

Where the original basis of this came from and how it came to be? Because the structure and format of the event is what I found particularly interesting. I'd never seen anything quite like it before.

Well, that was like my third or fourth X prize that I had gone to and, you know, there's open space technology, which is not necessarily. Maybe there's parts of that is what they're using. And I sat next to a guy named, you know, Jerry, who's an expert in this particular area, who was even teaching me different ways on how to put groups of people together and to, you know, get them to develop ideas and come up with solutions to things. I like almost everything in Peter's world by just this insane. I mean literally insane, passionate desire to try to change the world. You know, I mean, a guy who probably wakes up never feeling satisfied with anything thing and a certain level of uncomfortableness and dissatisfaction and this motivation that gives you a high, be it form of excitement, adrenaline rush. And as Dan Sullivan says, irritated oysters make pearls. Right?

Right. Yeah. I mean, that is. It's like Dan's always about what bothers you. Now, in this case with Peter. So my respect for him increased dramatically when I saw how crazy this is. And it's been going on 25 years. That's something else that I was pretty surprised about. And there's a lot of money in the room. And we had Harrison Ford showed up and talked. Deepak was there. Harrison. This is one interesting thing about Harrison Ford. He plays himself in every role. You know, I've seen him. I've watched him be interviewed before. But he. You know how he just starts snarling and he's like, what is this? You know, and. And gets into it and it's just like watching one of his movies. You. You see Han Solo. It's so funny.

No, he's a character. I actually met him at TED a couple years ago, and he's. I, you know, I don't know him. I mean, just like, you know, run into the guy, right? He's a famous actor and everyone's always trying to mob him. And they, they love him from his. His roles and stuff, which he doesn't seem to like talking about all that much. Right? Not.

Yeah. When Peter want to talk to him about Star wars and Lightsaber, he's just. He, he simply ignored him and moved on. Did not engage.

But here's the thing. So this was at Paramount Studios, and there was a lot of famous people there, right? And I think Peter just has done a great job of corralling all of these influential individuals that many of. Many of the people in that room were extraordinarily wealthy financially, and he gives them something they can rally behind because at the end of the day, no matter where someone's at, they're still bored. As shit. I mean, they really are. I mean, a lot of people. And I say bored as shit. It's not like they're sitting around looking for things to do, meaning mountain climbers, like climbing mountains, Right? And just because they are some of the. They've climbed some of the highest mountains. What do they want to do? They want to climb bigger mountains. So he presents to them a way to do bigger mountain. Bigger mountains, I mean, or tackle mountains that no one's ever tackled before. And I tend to look at everything in my world from my frame of references, a genius network. I think any problem in the world can be solved at the right genius network. Any. And so I think what he's put together is a form of a genius network. And what I mean by that is people that have capabilities and genius, and you put them together, and together any problem in the world can be solved. Any opportunity can be reached, any challenge can be overcome. And even if you can't fully solve a problem, solve a challenge, you're going to at least make progress on it. And so I look at as a form of making progress. And Peter has this great line the day before a breakthrough, it was a crazy idea. Part of it is, come up with all the crazy ideas and let's figure out how to break through them. Let's figure out how to solve them. All of this, to me is just another way to stir your brain, get your creativity going. And because there's competition attached to it. Because I've done lots of competitions in my life, I mean, the beauty of what I like of incentivized competitions is, you know, as you know, I would run those better, your best contests for years. Gave. Would give away cars. This first started my learning on it in physique transformations when I was a consultant for, you know, a guy named Bill Phillips who wrote a book in the late 90s called body for Life. Body for Life. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so Peter's just applied incentivized competitions to the world's problems. And so for anyone listening or watching or however they're going to hear this thing, they should think about how their intensity and their passion and their excitement and their engagement in anything will increase if there is a reason for them to do it. You know, there would think about the Olympics or the super bowl or any sports game or anything if no one could win, if there were no gold medals. I mean, you just have a bunch of people running around, like, doing sports and doing activities and stuff. But the moment you tie something into it, so what he's developed is a way for anyone that has an area of life that they are interested in, a problem they'd like to solve, where they can literally be incentivized in huge ways to do it. And frankly, a lot of the shit's never going to happen, you know, but it's. You got to have a lot of silly thoughts in order to get to the great thoughts.

Yeah, no, that's one thing I definitely liked was the iteration. So let's talk a little bit about your upcoming event.

Well, since we spent all this time talking about Peter Diamandis and plugging his stuff. Yeah, you know, Peter's been.

Well, we want to make this content somehow interesting. At first. That was my.

Before we get to the lesson.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now this boring thing called Genius Network where all these geniuses come together and connect with each other and figure out how to build better entrepreneurs and make their life better and maybe have a little bit of fun along the way. That's the. This is the boring stuff. But since we had the package in the beginning part of it. What now? So, you know, the thing is. And you actually filmed it at the end of X Prize, we went at Paramount Studios. We went behind one of the. Wherever they. I don't know. That's like a.

Basically one of the warehouse office space where all the decision making and all the offices are at Paramount. It's actually.

Well, we're right in front of Forrest Gump's bench. I mean, shot like, like so where he was sitting on the bench. That's where we shot the video. We didn't even make a point of that during the video. But Peter's going to be at this year's annual event, as is our. A lot of amazing people that are going to be there. And in a nutshell, it's funny because we have one of our Genius Network members. This is barging in the little studio right now. Grab a seat as we do this.

Hello. We'll put you on.

How are you? And so she was probably like, what the hell is this guy doing here? Right.

Yeah.

So we're right in the middle of Plugin Genius Network. So we shot a video with Peter because I'm going to do an interview with him and a guy named Tim Chang who's a brilliant genius. The two people that I have met in my world that can explain sensors, network, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, machine learning, investments, stem cells, longevity as it applies to technology in the future are Tim Chang and Peter Diamandis. And so people have all these insane, crazy ideas of where autonomous driving and 3D printed houses and all of these futuristic things that are going to come down the pike. But there's all these entrepreneurs who get excited by ideas. I mean, I'm one of them, right? I love crazy, weird ideas. The question is, how do you integrate that into an entrepreneurial enterprise? So I'm going to do an interview with them on Dancing with the Future. It's something I came up with because I was running an event at Singularity University with Peter and Ray Kurzweil. I was helping Ray Kurzweil with his newest book called Danielle. And I asked him, you know, how do you guys dance with the future? And Ray's like, that's a really great question. And so I started thinking about this and I started, okay, so if you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to run your company, you're trying to build your business, you're trying to deliver products and services, you're trying to juggle the myriad of things that someone has to do, how do you actually engage with it? So part of Genius Network is health, wealth, and elf. That's the theme of it, right? That's kind of how we started last year, and that's where we're going deeper with this year, which is your health is your number one thing. I mean, if you're not the million dollar racehorse in great shape mentally and physically. When I say health, I'm not just talking about telling people how to eat and exercise and all that. I mean, there's a lot of that. It's really, you know, how do you engage? I mean, how cramped are you? As Dan Solomon says, entrepreneurs that are too tightly scheduled cannot transform themselves. And so, although there's so many things going on in the world, you literally got to pick and choose what are the gold coins and versus the bronze coins and the silver coins, because most people spend their time.

Are we talking about Mario Brothers now? Are we talking.

How would you put this into another? No, no, seriously, I know you're trying to be funny here, but you're not. And, no, you're you, actually. And Allison, you want to come in here and just, like, you look. You look very nice today, by the way. All right.

All right.

Yeah, she's gonna be away. Whatever interview you're doing with her is gonna be hell. So basically, think about it this way. Any problem in the world can be solved with the right Genius Network. I mean, I know that's like, whatever I say that, but think about in your life, any problem that you have, if you want to Be in better physical shape. Who are the smartest people? What's the smartest capabilities and knowledge? If you just knew what that was, what an advantage that would give you, an unfair advantage, to use a Dan Sullivan term, Right? If you wanted to be a better parent, if you wanted to make more money, if you wanted to save money, if you wanted to do a partnership, a business structure, a tax structure, any sort of model, there are people out there that know more about this area than you do. And to not avail yourselves of those people is not only disadvantageous, there is a loss. So people come to Genius Network for many reasons. Some people are looking to make more money, get more clients, and if that's your focus, you're certainly going to find it because the brain cannot avoid a question. So if you ask yourself, here's something in my life that I need solved, I, I'm going to go into this event. And even though I'm talking about my event, Genius Network, I think this type of thinking can be taken into any form of the consumption of knowledge, the learning, the pursuit of capability. It's what you do before you come to something that makes all the difference in the world. Like if I sit down today for a couple minutes and say, okay, what is the result I want out of this day? What do I need to look for? What do I need to listen for? What sort of insights? Then there's going to be a thousand things that are going to come into my attention sphere. But if I am intentionally looking for what needs solved for the right person, for the right capability, then I'm going to have a much better likelihood than if I'm just bumbling my way through. And so one of the things that we're going to do at this year's event, and this is happening later on this afternoon, I'm having a conversation with Dan Sullivan and we're going to prepare a questionnaire that we're going to send out to every single attendee coming to the event to think about a million dollar plus project idea thing that they want to do. And we're going to send out a strategic coach tool that Dan only lets me send out to people. And we're going to have people do thinking beforehand and they're going to think about what's the thing they want solved. And then when they come to this year's annual event with all the speakers, from Chris Voss, the top FBI hostage negotiator, to Dave Asprey, our buddy at Bulletproof Coffee, to Robert Cialdini, to Susie Batiste, who Allison's actually had at her event. She's a founder of Poo Pourri. To Brian Scudamore, you know, who's running a 450 million dollar a year company. One of his companies is 1-800-got junk to probably the greatest, the greatest copywriter panel that's ever been, I think put together ever in history with some of the world's leading copywriters about how to message your services to, you know, Dr. Andrew Wall. You know, just a whole mirror to speakers. But all of these speakers are going to be brought in with a focus on how to increase your health, your wealth and elf which is what in your life is easy, lucrative and fun and what in your life is not. And I tell everyone, treat everything like a 12 step group. Take what you like and leave the rest. But if you come into it with the thinking done in advance, then you can engage and dance with all of the talks, all of the people. And at the end of the day it's all a setup. I mean frankly, Genius Network is just a connection network. I'm just bringing badass people together so they can meet each other and bond with each other. Because as you know, Mike, some people are very social, other people are introverted. But at the end of the day, we're either in communication with each other or we're trying to escape. And I want to try to make a comfortable environment to the best of our ability. You know, I mean I never go to events and feel like, oh, I'm totally like a warm blanket is engulfing me and I feel like I'm awkward. I feel weird at a lot of things until I don't and depending on how I engage with stuff and then I feel comfortable. So my whole thing is I want amazing entrepreneurs to come together and help each other and bring their genius and show up as givers. And that's my rap. Wow.

Nice shameless plug. And with that I'm going to put up the lower third which is to learn moreniusnetwork.com you can find out everything you need to know about the event. And I will say that, let's see, I've known you, I think around 15 years. We figured that out. And I've been part of Genius Network now for it must be. When did it start again?

2006.

Okay, so it was pretty close to the beginning. I'm going to guess around 10ish years.

Yeah.

And then I've been to every annual event I'm aware of. Because you haven't been doing them that long.

No, I started the annuals back, I think we. We sort of had one in 2010, which was a big gathering of everyone. And then from that point forward, it. It morphed into what is now known as the Genius Network.

So the bottom line is, for me, Genius Network's been arguably probably the best long term source of my greatest connections, relationships and business.

And.

A lot of the people that I've had on my podcast, for example, I met through that. I just had Susie Batiz on. And I've really learned a lot about building meaningful relationships that extend, if you want to understand intimacy, both business intimacy and personal intimacy, it's a great place just to see it happen. And I've told you this before in another interview we did with Dave Asprey, which was, I think you're the greatest connector. I know you're the best relationship guy. I mean, you're impossible to be around in person, one on one, but in a group environment, you're absolutely fantastic.

Right, Right. No, it's like a nuclear plant. If you're too close to it, you burn up. But if you're far away, there might be some energy that you can derive some usefulness from it. Let me say something to this too, before we wrap up, because you got a way more interesting person that you're going to interview than me. But here's what I would say. Like, I'm going to start making a real emphasis on intelligence, integrity, and respecting people's IP and ideas. Because this year has been a year where people that I've helped tremendously have flat out plagiarized and stolen my stuff. And I'm going to start making statements about this because there's a lot of people in the how to world, the information world, authors that present themselves as these wonderful, caring, authentic people. And frankly, they're snakes and they're full of crap.

Yeah.

And some of them have been people that I've helped and that I thought were actually good friends. And so.

Yeah. Until your head became a stair. Step on a ladder.

Yeah. So I've got a new book coming out next year, and it's about relationships and it's, you know, and I've always loved books like how to Win Friends and influence People. And there's some amazing things out there. And what I'm going to emphasize in my relationship book is not only how to connect with amazing people, because everyone is always asking me, how do you connect with this person? How do you connect with that person? But the more important thing is how do you disconnect from people that aren't aligned with you? How do you disconnect from toxic negative relationships? How do you disconnect from sociopaths and narcissists that are so freaking well groomed that you don't immediately know and identify that till you kind of like in the, in the soup with them? Right? And so it's really been a great year to think about that sort of thing. And it's also been a painful year because we've had some friends that have died. One of our, you know, greatest Genius Network members and one of my dearest friends, Sean Stevenson, who I learned so much from. You know, he passed away earlier in the year. And I mean, it's just, you know, it's like, what the hell are you doing on the planet? You know, what, what are the things, you know, who's really most important? You don't need a bazillion connections and relationships to have success. You only need a few tools in your toolbox and a few key friends. And so one thing that you're giving out, geniusnetwork.com I want to let people know that I learned marketing because I was a Deborah carpet cleaner living off credit cards and I just needed to survive. I never thought I'd run events or teach seminars. And I ended up creating a consumer awareness guide to carpet cleaning. Before the Internet existed, it was like I found one of the most effective ways to sell something to people is teach them all the things that they don't know that they don't know. So I'm about 95% done with the equivalent of a consumer guide to choosing a Mastermind group. It's like how to select Mastermind groups, coaching groups, programs, and even if someone never does business with me, I'm thinking through everything that someone that is out there looking to spend money on something, what would they need to know before they join something? What are the things that will help you make a decision if you're looking to invest your time, money and energy? And so those are going to be available shortly. So I would encourage people just to read that before you even want to see my pitches and my plugs. I'll teach you how to make decisions, how to think about what groups are right for you. Because Genius Network isn't right for everybody. It's expensive, it requires high level people. It's not for takers, it's for givers. And we expect people to participate. And that's what it is. So, you know, and if that resonates with people, great. If not, there's a lot of really amazing Groups in here. You have amazing stuff with what you do. We got Allison Maslin here, who runs an amazing coaching organization. I mean, her events are wonderful to go to. It just depends on what you're looking for right now. And so that's my thing. I appreciate the time.

No, it's great. Well, here's what I'm gonna do. Put up the wrong name here. I'm going to show everyone that. See this? See this right down here?

Yeah, look at that.

And more. And getting in. Get inside Joe's network. First of all, he is awesome. He's one of my closest friends for sure. And, you know, it's. I'm proud of you. We've just spent a bunch of time together and we're mourning a soon to pass friend, too. Which just goes to show the level of commitment you have. You were the first person Sean Stephenson contacted when he had his accident. And I think that just goes to show to your character that you care about people. You don't give a crap about the buck. It ends up being about the relationship. And you live. You walk your walk, and it's why you're successful at what you're successful and why you've got an amazing audience and network. People who care and love. Love you, care about and love you. And you see that and it's reflected in the event, the kind of people show up. So with that, here's what we'll do. We will officially finish this off. This is Joe Polish, ladies and gentlemen. Head on over. Check out geniusnetwork.com, learn more, and I'd love to see you there. I'll be there the whole time. Always am. I know Allison, who's in the background. She's going to be there, too. She's going to be there, and you'll meet some extraordinary human beings. So with that, thank you so much for watching. Thank you, Joe.

Thank you, sir. All right.