The 25-YEAR RULE That Can Change Everything Feat. Peter Diamandis and Dan Sullivan

Here's the two mindsets that I think are crucial. One of them, and they're in short supply, I'm noticing, in public life. One of them is gratitude. Gratitude. I think if you're really, really grateful, you create an abundance related to your past. That's really what gratitude is because it's. You're grateful for what has gotten you here. And gratitude is a proactive skill. A lot of people make it a reactive skill in the sense, well, if somebody does something for me, I'm grateful for that. But the word gratitude, being grateful is related to the word appreciation. How many of you say, well, I really appreciate that. And appreciation is a really neat word because it's got that emotional sense, psychological sense, but it's also got an economic sense that things appreciate. Gold appreciates, land appreciates, stocks appreciate. And what appreciate.

Could we add bitcoin to your list?

Yeah, Bitcoin appreciates, you know, everything Peter's involved in appreciates. I hope so, because I've got. He's got some of my money, you know, I want it all to appreciate.

And I appreciate you.

Yeah, but what appreciation, what appreciation really means is that you just give value to something. In other words, you say, you know, there's qua. Qua sitting right across from me, and I always appreciate qua. And you know, and I really appreciate. You know, I just sit there and think about KWA for a half minute. And, you know, I totally appreciate Babs, as everyone knows. You know, without Babs, I'm just a smart drunk, worried about the rent. And, you know, I just appreciate. And I think about the people. I appreciate so much what Peter does, and that creates a higher value for Peter in my life. So this gratitude principle is one of them. And the other one is generosity. If you truly believe in abundance, you'll be generous with what you have, not worrying about how you're going to get paid back for it. So I think that the twin and they're related to each other, but one of them is related to the past. It's appreciation because you're giving greater value to your experience up to the present moment. And then generosity is that you're making a bet on the future. See, I'm making a total bet on the future with Peter that it's just going to get bigger and better in every way. And therefore, anything that I contribute to that, I don't have to worry about what the return is. There's going to be a big return, and I don't have to keep book on it. You know, I can't stand keeping book on things. So I see a lot of people who are super intelligent, but they're not grateful. I see people who are very successful, but they're not generous. And I said, you know, you've got a of lot, all the, you got all the hardware, but you don't have any of the software. And you need the software to actually make your way in the world. And you won't have to worry about competing because there's going to be so many opportunities for collaboration.

Do people get how important that is? How? The amount of wealth, the amount of opportunities. I mean, it's an abundance of opportunities that we all have. And it's a matter of what do you choose to do?

Right.

It's saying no to 99% to focus on the 1%, which is a big problem I have. And Coach helps me focus on that.

Can we talk about the 25 years?

Yeah, absolutely.

Can I also mention.

No, no.

Can you talk for a little bit now?

I just want to highlight.

I'm just being generous here.

You're being very generous because what you just said is exactly how I'm doing my best to curate Genius Network because I want it filled with people that are appreciative and, and reciprocal and useful and contributing. Yeah, they just want to be in the more I can build a room of these types of entrepreneurs that are high achievers with this real focus and emphasis on being a giver. It just makes this community so much better. So, I mean, you just basically described exactly the goal and objective I have of filling Genius Network up with that sort of person, with that mindset and that behavior. 25 years.

25 years. Two things important. About 25 years, I was again here at Genius Network. I was about to go on stage. I was talking about my Abundance360 program, which is what I spent all year preparing for. It's 360 CEOs that I coach in Beverly Hills. And Dan says to me as I'm about to go on stage, he says, peter, you should make the commitment that you're going to do this for 25 years. And it was an off the cuff commitment. And so I get up on stage and says, and I say, I'm committed to doing this for 25 years. And really, I think I. I don't know if I shocked you or surprised you, but it was interesting.

Right?

My world changed in that moment when I said, I'm committing to doing this event for 25 years and for taking this community of CEOs with me on this 25 year journey. And part of what's interesting about that time frame is that coincides with what my co founder of Singularity University, my business partner, many businesses, Ray Kurzweil, calls the singularity. So we're on a countdown, if you would, to the Singularity. This is the moment in time when computers are far more intelligent than people and more importantly that things are moving so fast that we're unable to actually predict what's coming next. The analog comes from that of a black hole, a gravitational singularity where light cannot escape. You can't actually see beyond the event horizon. So I palpably feel, I don't know how you do as well, that the speed of change is accelerating. You can graph this and look at it. The only constant is change and the rate of change is increasing. And so I spend, I start about now, November, December and January, where I look at what's happened over the last 12 calendar months and I come up with proof of living in 2018. And it's incredible. We as humans tend to accept what is and forget that it wasn't always that way. But when you stop and you look at how fast things are changing, it's mind boggling for me. It's exciting and there's ability to actually predict the future. Ray Kurzweil is very good. He's got 86% prediction rate. And it's really understanding the fundamentals of what's going on in computational power, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, all these. And we're going to be disrupting every single industry. Healthcare, definitely. Education for sure. Every industry that you're in is going to be changing dramatically in the next 10 years. And the question is, are you the leaf on the river or are you the river? Are you passive and letting it happen to you or are you guiding it?

Yeah. And so I play with time, space. So I'm a farm boy from northern Ohio and I noticed when I was probably about 6 or 7 years old that I could keep myself constantly entertained and really educated because I discovered one day that I had an ability to actually think about my thinking. Okay. So I could actually. And I think graphically. So everything that I see in my brain I see in terms of diagrams and physical patterns. And I could just be by myself for long periods of time. But one of the things that I really zeroed in on is time. And it occurred to me that we live in time. So, you know, we're the fish that swim in time. And humans, I've never met two people who had the same Take on time. And I would just ask people about their time references. What's your mindset according to time? Because I've noticed, you know, Einstein had this great ability to take his concepts and really simplify them. And somebody said, could you sort of explain relativity? And he said, yeah. He said he was talking to a man and he says, the woman you love the most is going away for two years and you have 10 minutes to spend with her before you won't see her for two years. And he says, how long does that 10 minutes take? He says, it's just like that. It just goes like that. And he says, now picture another situation where you've gotten yourself into a situation where your hand is on a hot stove for 10 minutes. How long does that 10 minutes take? And the 10 minutes takes forever, you know. He says, well, that's relativity. He says, it's relativity. And what I notice is that if you play with time and one of the 25 year thing, the reason I mention this to Peter, because If Peter spends 25 years every year going out, scouting the planet for all the latest breakthroughs, meeting entirely new networks of really bright people, collecting what that year, let's say, from last January to next January, all the new capabilities that are coming online. But it's not just that they're individual capabilities, they can be collaborative capabilities. If he can do that each year, that's an exponential jump in a one year period. But it's a compound interest. So I had a picture of what abundance360 would look like in my mind if you stayed with that for 25 years.

And it's amazing. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing how it's affected me. Right. So I spend, I'm literally on a search for the smartest people, the most extraordinary events, what is the stuff that's going from deceptive to disruptive in this next 12 months, right. And so this year, for example, going down very deep into blockchain and cryptocurrencies, right? Which are, if you haven't followed it, right, We've seen this. It's on an exponential growth curve. And Bitcoin is either worth zero or millions of dollars per coin. It's binary. It's not going to be someplace in between. If you believe blockchain is going to be an important part of our ecosystem for large scale logistics, management contracts, whatever the case might be. And the other thing is longevity. We spend a lot of time, you and I share that in common, a fundamental belief that we are taking controls of our lifespan just because the Majority of humans have lived on an average today at 78.2 years. That's no reason to believe that's a preconceived limit, period. You're targeting at least twice that.

Yeah, well, you know, I thought I was really being way out there because I have a goal of living to 156, and I'm not halfway there. I'm going to have a halfway party in 2022 when I'll be 78, which is supposed to be the limit. But then I come across this guy and his number is 700. And I says, 700? That's ridiculous. I said, I mean, 156. I mean, that's understandable. By the way, the world record is 122 and a half. That's documented and everything. But just think about that, because that's the biggest time reference that everybody has, you know, and the time reference of how long you're going to live actually has a number attached to it, whether you've thought about the number or not. But I can get people to really redesign their brain in about 15 minutes just by getting them to say what the number is that they have in their mind, you know, And a lot of people, you know, it's according to actuarial tables, you know, it's 78, 85. Family history enters into it. And I said, so tell me the year you're going to die. You know, how old you're going to be when you die. You know, people say 85. And then I start talking to them about how they want to be when they're 84. And everybody gives me an answer of how they want to be at 84. That doesn't set them up for dying at 85. And I said, well, if you were that way at 84, how many years beyond 85 would you live? And, you know, they add 10 years. They said, well, 10 or 15. I said, which it makes a difference, you know, they say, well, 15 years. I said, so it's 100. The new number's 100. And the moment they get that hundred, every thought in their brain starts restructuring, because all the thoughts in our brain are geared to a number when we've told ourselves that we're going to die. So this is my contribution to the longevity thing, is I can get people to think about their number because everybody's got one.

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.

If I can hit on why that 700 number for a second, it's relevant. I was in medical school at the time. I was doing a joint MD and.

You were a terrible medical student.

I was a terrible medical student.

You absolutely was, Bob from Harvard, right?

Yeah, I made a deal with my. So I was running.

You were a threat to public health. Fact. But.

I actually was. I was running two companies. My fourth year of medical school, my dean calls me in one day and I had one of those large Motorola brick phones. And he goes, peter, your residents are telling me you're on the phone all the time. You're sneaking out of surgery. What is going on? I'm thinking, he's thinking I'm a drug, a drug dealer or something at this point. And I fess up, I'm in tears. I'm saying, we're running these two companies and I have to graduate. I promised my mom, my dad, I'm going to graduate. And he goes, okay, I'll make you a deal. You passed part two of the boards and you promised never to practice and I will let you graduate. And he kept his promise, I kept mine.

But.

But while I was in medical school, I remember watching this TV show about long lived sea life, whales, turtles, sharks, living hundreds of years. And the theoretical limitation was 700 years. I'm going, why the hell can they live 700 years and we can't? I said, it's either a hardware or a software problem and we're going to be able to fix that. And so that's where I hit this ridiculous. Listen. If my dear friend Ray Kurzweil talks about longevity, escape velocity, the year. It's a point at which for every year that you're alive, science is adding more than a year to your lifespan. And so he predicts that 10 to 12 years from now, right? Not bad. So the question is, how do you not screw up until then? One of the companies I'm proud of, Dan, you've gone through it. I think, Joe, you've gone through it as well. A number of you have gone human longevity down in San Diego. And one of the things that we've done is we've created something called the health Nucleus. So if you go to the hospital, God forbid, and something is wrong with you, it didn't happen that morning. It's been going on for months or years. And the question is, how do you find out about it? VIOME is one amazing part of your diagnostic capability. Another part is what we create at the health nucleus at HLI is we digitize you. We sequence all 3.2 billion letters of your life. We sequence your microbiome. We look at the 2,300 chemicals in your bloodstream. We do a full body MRI, brain vasculature, quantitative brain structure. We look at coronary CT. 150 gigabytes of data about you. And the goal is on A list of 26 leading causes of death to identify if you have anything and then do that every year. And then if you have it, catch it at stage zero, stage one, and treat it right then and there. And the concept that I don't want to know is such bullshit, Right? Of course you want to know and you want to do something right about it at that moment in time. And so that's part of it. And then stem cells we can talk about some other time.

Is.

I'm just curious. Both of your rings have lights stemming from them. And you must be wearing 4 million trackable devices. What sort of chips do you have in your brain?

Yeah, so I've got my Apple watch, which I use for mostly a pedometer. This is an OURA ring. O U R A. It measures my sleep. And on my app I get information about my deep sleep, my length of sleep, my REM cycles and so forth. And it's a great. They're coming out with the next version of it and I'll be actually will be debuting the next version at a360. You might actually get one. And then I've got a small embedded RFID chip in my hand which has my business card on it, but that's a different issue. But the fact of the matter is we are not measuring our internal body moment to moment, day to day, but we will be right. My airplane, my cars have microprocessors and sensors up the wazoo. We're heading from a world at which we know little about our body to a point at which, you know, we are becoming the CEOs of our own health. All the data that I have is going to be flowing to my AI. My AI is going to be telling me exactly what's right. And these are the conversations that I think are important for us to understand that we are taking medicine into our own hands.

Yeah.

Can I ask you. Because I want to ask about cryptocurrency and blockchain. Just a lot of people here would have interest in what should they do with it.

I mean we.

So here's the way that I think about it. I just recorded a video from my Abundance Digital community this morning. I try and just stream to them my thinking every moment of the day. You've heard of blockchain. So blockchain, if you haven't been following, is going to be becoming more and more vital and useful. It's a distributed ledger. It's a mechanism by which contracts are going to be kept, by which data is going to be kept. GE I'm going to be bringing to A360 this year the woman who heads a blockchain at General Electric who's made billions of dollars of savings in blockchain. So blockchain gets basically maintained by a set of volunteer computational systems around the world that get paid in bitcoin. Bitcoin is the utility token of the blockchain. And so the more that the blockchain is getting used, the higher the value of bitcoin goes. And so if blockchain has a future for humanity, then bitcoin is going to be getting higher and higher in price. And bitcoin is sort of the, you know, the primary cryptocurrency. Then there's Ethereum and a whole slew of other tokens. We're going to go very deep into a 360 on cryptocurrencies and blockchain this year. But I just came back from the Ethereal Summit and the expectation is we're going to have, I would say an infinite number, but a huge number of cryptocurrencies, a huge number of tokens that will be interconvertible. We're going back to a bartering system, except we're bartering with tokens of different types.

Yeah, fascinating.

You know, it is fascinating and the.

Subject certainly to and with Abundance Digital. Jason Fladlin here has been, we've been very involved in the Abundance Digital thing. We'll talk about that before we wrap.

Can I just say a word about that? You know, there's a lot of talk about capitalism and socialism these days. And so my sense is, is that it's kind of missing the point. And that is that the best description of capitalism was really by F.A. hayek. If anyone have read the Road to Serfdom, he was an Austrian born economist and he said, you know, the tragedy of capitalism is that it was named by its enemies. And he said, you know, Marx was one of the prime people there and he said that capital is just a byproduct of the system that's at work there. And he says what capitalism actually is, and I think the proper name is that it's capableism, you know, that basically what is happening is that there's an exponential growth of individual capabilities and cooperative capabilities going on the planet. And that's been going for several centuries, centuries. And the parts of the world that really are expanding their individual and joint capabilities, that's where you're seeing the growth of capital. And he said that capitalism is actually an ever expanding system of increased cooperation among strangers. And my sense is that up until now there hasn't been an accounting system. There's not been a basically a safeguard system to actually protect this constant growth of capabilism. And I think blockchain is actually, that's a beautiful description.

And blockchain is what comes from is.

Actually the accounting system on the planet that completely verifies and completely protects the constant growth of capability on the planet.

Which gives me the greatest expectation that the world is getting better. There's flow far more capability, far more cooperation. And I talk about this a lot, that as an entrepreneur, what is your job? Your job is to find a meaty problem and fix it, right? And your ability to find and fix problems is greater than any time ever in human history. There is nothing you don't have access to. I mean, I really want you to take this in. You have access to all the world's information, right? You have access to more information on Google and Baidu than the presidents and the joint chiefs of staff had 20 years ago. You have access to more computational power as an individual, including a teenager in Mumbai, has access to aws, Amazon web services. You can spin up a thousand processor cores if you want. There is no limitation, right? You have access to more capital than ever before. Seed capital, angel capital, venture capital, crowd financing. You know, I'm in discussions with sovereign wealth funds right now that are coming down in to fund entrepreneurs. There is no scarcity of capital. You have access to all the expertise you need, right? If you want a quantum physicist, you can go and find a quantum physicist or a molecular biologist or someone on blockchain to help you. What is the only thing that's scarce, that's limiting is what is your passion, right? What is your massively transformative purpose? And then within that realm, what is your moonshot? Because once you've chosen that, once you know what drives you on this planet, what lights you up, what gets you up in the morning, what keeps you going at 3 o' clock in the morning, and it's not for your mom or your dad or your friend or your wife or your teacher. It's for you. It's in your heart, it's in your soul. It's why you're on this planet. And once you understand that realm and then where you're gonna go 10 times bigger, where the rest of the world is going 10% bigger. You're unleashed.

Mm.

You're unleashed.

Yeah.

So that being said, I would like to kinda sort of, as we wrap this up, ask you both, what are your moonshots?

Yeah. I'll tell you, I've had, growing up, my moonshot was space. I've started a number of space companies I'm very proud of right now, focused on planetary resources. Our goal is to build fuel depots. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, United Launch Alliance. All of them are depending upon fuel in space. Their entire economy is fuel in space. So we are focused on getting fuel from near Earth asteroids. We have just signed a billion dollar agreement with ULA to provide 1,000 tons of fuel.

Well, I'm an investor in planetary space.

And then extending the human lifespan has been through HLI and cellularity. The moonshot that's the biggest for me is supporting entrepreneurs. So through the xprize, through Singular University, and through now Abundance Digital, my mission is, can I get tens of thousands of entrepreneurs to get clear on their MTP and then pick a moonshot and then support them with access to technology and the thinking and the experts to go big. And I'm so proud to have played a role in my dear brother Naveen's life and a number of your lives here to inspire you to go for those moonshots. Right? So if through my work I can get tens of thousands of entrepreneurs to go and solve the world's biggest problems, that's massive scalability. Right? So the platform that Dan helped me create and you helped me create for a360 now, Abundance Digital. A360, 360 CEOs. Abundance Digital is how do I get to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousand entrepreneurs and support them to solve the world's biggest problems? Now we're talking about something scalable.

Awesome. Awesome.

You, Dan?

Yeah. Well, our Babs, you know, I have to always remind everybody that it's the teamwork between Babs and me. But we're at the point with Coach now. So I've been coaching for 43 years and we're taking a big jump in the spring and that is that I now see the ability to take a growing number of Strategic Coach clients who are in the 10 times program to actually show them that their model is actually a game changer in the marketplace. You know, I'm looking at everything that Naveen said in the previous hour. I've been working with David Berg. Dave, just raise your hand right there. And Dave has actually worked out the practical on the street model of completely transforming the healthcare system in the United States at a practical level, day to day level. And very interesting. The people who are gonna actually profit most by Dave's model are actually people who are making $15 or less an hour right now. He's got the complete model for transforming not health insurance, because it doesn't involve any insurance. It's actually health care for people. And then I look at the other individuals that we just have in the room. You know, I'm thinking about JJ Virgin with her mindshare, mindshare program and Bree, who's Betty Rocker and you know, she's gone from nowhere to 2 million people who watch her every day. And so my whole job is to create the structures, the mindsets, the frameworks by which every entrepreneur who comes into Strategic Coach in the next 25 years will be a game changer of some part of the marketplace and it corresponds to what they're most passionate about. So that's really my mindset right now. What you're doing both with Genius Network and with Genius Recovery are both amazing game changers. And the whole thing is, and I would say this to everybody here, whatever you're most passionate about, commit yourself to staying and developing that as a game changer model over the next 25 years. So why walk out of here? We have hundreds of people in this room and the people who are watching in the lounge. If you take the thing you're most passionate about, build it into an entrepreneurial marketplace model and extend it out 25 years and it corresponds to what you're most fascinated with, what you're most motivated by. Then you will be someone who fundamentally creates new capabilities in the marketplace.

Awesome. Awesome.

And what I will say with the time we have remaining is since we're going to put this out as an episode on 10x Talk, if you're not a subscriber of 10xtalk.com, then go subscribe. Just type in my name and Dan Sullivan's in the itunes, wherever you listen to podcasts, and you will get this and for people that, for strategic coach, strategiccoach.com an amazing program. Now my 20, 20 years into it, 20 years, you have influenced my life in so many amazing ways. And just kind of what you said, even how moonshots and how things restructure how you think about it. I mean, that's pretty much what all of these conversations are designed to do, is to frame what is possible. And so for you, Peter, if people want to become part of abundance digital, what do they do?

A360 digital is probably the best place to go. Is that right, Sydney? Real fun. This year at a360, I'm bringing Astro Teller. He's going to spend the day with us. Astro Teller is the head of moonshots at Google. And so my goal, I focus every year with folks and just to plan what Naveen was saying. We do these five every year I do these five year moonshot plan. Like what is your moonshot five years from now? And you can do this yourself today. What do you have to have achieved by the end of this year to get just. You don't have to get. You're not getting 20% to get 10% towards that moonshot or 5% towards that moonshot. And then what are three things you could do this week that gets you on schedule for that first year? Just to start to think incrementally, a slice at a time. But Asher's going to come and talk with us about how Google creates moonshots, how they fail, how they allow failure, how they measure everything, how they digitize, how they run experiments. How do you get your team to become a moonshot team? These are the kinds of things that are very important because each and every one of us in our hearts and our souls has a moonshot to change the world. And we just need to unleash that.

Let me say this too. Both of you have great quotes and great philosophies that are written down. Dan's got all these danisms. You've got Peter's laws. And I quote Dan more than anyone. And you have a couple ones like the day before Breakthrough. It's just a crazy idea. Another one is the squeaky oil. I mean the squeaky wheel gets replaced. So you have some great ways about thinking of things. And both of you, one thing that I think you both have in common, common is where a lot of the world is scared about shit going wrong. Both of you love shit going wrong because to you, it's all raw material for you to create the future.

Fertilizer.

Exactly. Shit is fertilizer, right? Somehow you use it. So to the people in the room, there's a lot of resources, human resources. Here are some of the greatest I mean, Chip Franks with Joe Volunteer. It's basically taking human resources that want to contribute and in creating a mechanism for people to link them with each other, because so many. So this is a room filled with incredible genius, wisdom, and knowledge. It's a tribe of tribal leaders. So advice on how to build yourself as a better entrepreneur, how to get the most out of this community, because both of you have done a great job with it.

Dan, you go first.

Yeah, I mean, I think I just have a couple insights about. First of all, you have to realize that being an entrepreneur is a life sentence and you can't go back. How many of you know that once you've gone out, you can't go back? So, you know, I mean, you're condemned to be an entrepreneur for the rest of your life. And a lot of people want to play it half and half. I it call could do what I'm doing as an entrepreneur, or I could do something else. And I want to tell you it's not true. You have no other option except to continue on the way you are. So my feeling is make it fun. And so go for the part of your entrepreneurial experience that tells you that you're always energized. And the other thing is, if everybody could just cut off today thinking about their entrepreneurial future as an individual future and start thinking about it as a team future. So I'm surrounded by teamwork. I'm not in control of any one of my work days. I walk in in the morning, and I am controlled and managed by other people from morning till night. I'm told when to show up. I'm told told what to do, but I am in charge, so I'm not in control. So one of the biggest things for entrepreneurs, you have to give up the idea of control and switch over that you're 100% in charge, but other people are 100% in control. Okay. It's like the entertainment industry or the sports industry. The top performers are not in control, but they are in charge. And, you know, and so. And the other thing is, don't try to have a complete life, okay? The notion of bucket list and completing your life and leaving a legacy are all signals to the universe to take the parts back. Okay? I want to die in the middle of eight projects. I mean, if I die, I want it to be a surprise, and I'm in the middle of eight projects, and there's no grieving for the first two or three weeks because people are so pissed off about the mess. Yeah. I mean, this Whole notion, oh, I'm gonna bring my life to completion, you know, I mean, this is a death signal, you know, I mean, you're talking yourself into the grave, you know, let you know, death needs no assistance. Death needs no assistance. And I'm not giving death any assistance. We have fun with Peter and I have really fun with the longevity thing because people, every time we talk about this 156 and 700 thing, the podcast goes right off the charts. Every podcast. People are really interested in this topic. How many of you, if you could extend your active working career for 25 years right now, right at the top, you'd actually make a lot of investment to actually do that.

Well, I want to see who doesn't want to.

Yeah, who. Yeah, who's wrapping it up within the next 12 months, because I'd like to buy a life insurance policy on you and have me as the beneficiary.

So great.

Advice for entrepreneurs. Listen. We are linear and local thinkers. Our brains, 100 billion neurons in our brain, 100 trillion synaptic connections were evolved on the savannas of Africa hundreds of thousands and millions of years ago. And so we have these cognitive biases. And what we do is we take our past and we extend it into the future, and that's a linear extension. And that puts a self imposed limitation on us, on what we can do. And so I'm going to ask you to think about, are you putting those self imposed limitations on your life? Right? Because are you building a business for what used to be possible versus what is now possible? A world of infinite information, infinite computing speed, massive amounts of capital, all of these things. So in that world of it's the best time ever to be alive in a world of near infinite opportunity, in a world of abundance, my question to you is, are you doing the most important thing that you can be doing right? Are you doing something because it's a quick buck because you inherited it, because you have a partner you're obligated to, or are you doing something that gives you joy? I cannot believe the shit I get to do. I feel so grateful, so lucky for being able to dream about opening up the cosmos with planetary resources, saying the lifespan, with human longevity, or the investments I make with bold capital. I'm a kid in the candy store and I'm just excited about life and. And every one of us has that ability. You can make a career out of anything. What did you want to do as a kid if I gave you a billion dollars of cash and said, go make the world a Better place, what would you do with it? That's what I learned from you, Dan, is who do I want to be a hero to? Those kinds of thinking is where your massively transformative purpose is. And so ask. Take a second. One second and answer this question. In your heart and your soul, are you doing right now the thing that is the most important thing in your life that gives you joy? Are you doing what you're doing right now out of obligation? Or is it truly your calling in life that at the end of your life you can look back and say, wow, I'm so lucky to have worked on that? If you're doing the thing that is is your greatest joy and that you feel so lucky to be working on, commit to 25 years. Go 10 times bigger.

Right?

And by the way, going 10 times bigger means letting go of the past. You can go 10% bigger working harder. You can't go 10 times bigger working harder. You have to reinvent the entire business to get 10 times bigger. If you're doing something out of obligation, consider selling it, letting go of it, dumping it, giving it to a friend, and making the white space to live and to live a full life.

What you're saying is there is a massive amount of capabilities that are every day becoming more readily available to everybody, and it's a matter of doing something with it. Now, a lot of people, if they lack confidence, if they lack gratitude, they're not going to see the world through the lens of abundance. And you both are very much viewing the world that way. If someone does not have that perspective, with all of these capabilities and all of these resources available to so many people still, not to some, but to so many people, what does someone need to do in order to, I guess, use, profit from and be in a belief state that, you know, yeah, this is possible, the world is getting better. And I'm playing devil's advocate here.

I guess read the book would be the answer, I think.

Read the book.

Well, see, that was a trick thing, of course. Read the book.

Yeah, I think actually, I mean, if you really want to help the world, buying 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 copies of the book actually is probably the best thing.

No more than 10. It's limited. This is.

There's a line there.

Well, I mean, will they truly learn that from the book? So let's talk about what's. And I do want to talk about the other two, but we'll come back to that. What will people really, really learn from abundance? I mean, how.

Well, I think there's a Lot of different things. And I'll let. Peter's going to talk about innovation and things along those lines. And I think all that is very, very important. But to me, one of the things. I'll start with a really simple example. Over the course of this, writing this book, one of the things I did is I talked to most of the world's leading experts on water, for example, and. And I remember being on the phone with one of the world's leading experts on water, and we were talking about Africa. And he said, well, it doesn't really matter what you do, as long as you have to feed Sub Saharan Africa and they have to grow crops, you're never going to solve this problem. And they're just screwed. And I said, well, what about vertical farms? Vertical farms are an idea kind of dreamed up by a man named Dixon Despalmier. He teaches Columbia. And the idea is you move the farm from big, flat kind of expenses and put them into skyscrapers. Centralizes the problem. Problem. You can grow your food with 70% less water, 80% less.

Pesticides.

Pesticides.

Thank you.

I'd like to buy a noun.

That'S good.

And he hadn't considered it at all. It was a new idea to him. And this was one of the things I encountered over and over and over again. So one of the things we do in this book is we provide a macroscopic perspective. We also show how solutions being developed over here overlay over here. This isn't really being talked a lot about. Experts these days are very, very specialized. They're very, very balkanized. But when you start looking at how these technologies overlay. Peter was talking earlier about Watson and AI technology that's making massive improvements in education. These are not overlaps that most people think about. But when you start to see one of the things that we know is that all our problems are kind of nestled. Population is tied to water shortage, is tied to food scarcity, et cetera, et cetera. The flip side of that is that our solutions are similarly nestled. So once you start solving some of these problems, population is a really great example. Here's an absolutely intractable problem that has scared the hell out of people for a really long time.

It bothered you, too. I mean, when we started this book, one of the biggest issues was, I mean, we battled over population. Honestly. Honestly, you were like, no population's gonna be a huge problem.

And how he won that fight is he kind of bludgeoned me with data coming out of healthcare and education and things like that. And what I started to Realize very quickly is if you want to drop population numbers drastically, the easiest way to do it is to raise child mortality. There's other things you can do.

Child mortality?

Yes.

You need to kill more children. Excuse me, you need to lower child mortality. As child mortality drops, as healthcare improves, there's a direct correlation to population, and it drops precipitously and quickly. Within a generation, Morocco went from having eight babies per woman, roughly, to three. That's very, very fast. That's a massive decrease in population. It happened because infants were living longer, children were living longer, a number of other things. Liberating women helps a great deal. There are a couple other factors here, but what I started to realize is that the solutions are similarly nestled. And it wasn't just I was looking at, oh my God, we've got population here and water here. No, no, they're all really tightly woven together. And the experts I was talking to actually had no idea. So one of the things that we're looking at in this book is how do all these things mesh together in a really, really big way?

Another force that we talk about in the book is the techno philanthropist. So today, more than ever, there is a huge amount of wealth that's been created from people in the technological arena. You know, the proverbial Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and so forth. But unlike the robber barons of 100 years ago, who would spend their money building buildings or institutions, a lot of the techno philanthropists today and the ones that we speak to, have created their wealth and their goal is to solve world's grand challenges. They want to destroy diseases or change the issues around water or food, whatever it might be. And so there is a huge amount of capital available to fund focus on creating a world of abundance. So that is a force. It's independent of governments, independent of political cycles. It's people who say, I see a problem and I'm dedicating my capital and my career to getting rid of it. So a point in case is Bill Gates and malaria.

And Jeff Skoll is another great example of this. These are not. Andrew Carnegie built a lot of libraries, built 2500 libraries. A fantastic thing. Jeff Skoll is going after nuclear weapons. There's a difference in scale here. And unlike the Robert barons of old, it's not just that people are throwing their money at the problem. That's one way of solving the problems. And it made it down. These people are getting actively involved. Bill Gates, the guy who built Microsoft, is now putting his brain, his talent, his minions, also on these problems. It's no Longer, you know, I write the check and then I'm done. Now it's I write the check. And that's just the beginning.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, I was just at the Gates foundation three weeks ago for their annual event. And the people there, the entrepreneurs there, the resources, it's unbelievably amazing what they are actually doing. Bill and Melinda, one of the big.

Things that I'm shocked how people don't get that the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest opportunities.

Yes, yes.

You want to make a trillion dollars, solve health care, education, hunger, water. I mean, these are trillion dollar markets.

Yeah, I'd like to. I really want to go deep with that because I do believe that I have a friend named Richard Rossi who has this great line where he says, wherever there's anxiety, there's opportunity. And if you think about entrepreneurs, quote another friend, Dan Sullivan, he says other people's bad news is your good news.

Sure.

Especially if you sell Prozac.

Well, if you sell anything, I mean, if you're hungry, that's bad news. If you're a restaurant, that's great. You know, if you're bored and you know, that's bad news for you. But if you are a movie theater, that's good news. Everything in life is literally helping people with their bad news. Sometimes it's as simple things, Other times it's incredibly. You know, it could be a fatal condition, it could be starvation. So what you just said, I'd really like you to speak to that.

So a great example is we're here filming this at Singularity University, and we challenge the students here to create what we call 10 to the ninth plus companies, which is build a company, a product or service that can possibly affect a billion people within a decade. And what we teach them about is what are the world's grand challenges? Where are the biggest problems that exist? Because that's where you should be building these companies. We're in a day and age now where you can do great for the world and create incredible profits. You know, Dean Kamen, who's a close friend, he's a trustee at the X Prize, we write about him extensively. In the book, you know, he talks about the fact that people would dismiss water as an area in the world that companies should be involved with, because, my God, these people only have, you know, 50 cents a day they can spend on water. But if you've got 2 billion people spending 50 cents a day, you know, you do the math real quick. That's almost a half a trillion dollar Marketplace. There are very few companies on the planet that can ignore a half a trillion dollar marketplace.

Right.

Well, there's no. And like you say in the book, there's no companies that even make that level of revenue. So there's a gigantic market there. It's just open for.

And he says, you know, is there a need? There is a need for water.

Yeah, there are. Exactly.

Who has something that they would like to share? Because I would like to use the time we're spending together to help you get to where you want to go. Yes, sir. And say your name and.

Michael.

Michael Wanstan.

I'm about to launch a new company.

It's an online Presley B2B company. I'd like it to work. Like it to work. Do you have a company right now?

Yeah.

Okay. Is that company working for a company? Oh, you work for a company.

Very smart.

You gonna quit or you gonna stay at your current company in the. Okay. Does the company, current company you work for know you're going to quit? No. Okay. Do you want us to send this video to them just to give them a heads up?

No matter.

Explain.

No, I'm kidding. I'm totally kidding.

There's a transition period.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, everyone that's going to start a company works somewhere.

You would hope.

I guess the other options are leeching off the government or something in time, but no. So when are you going to. Is the company already started or when are you going to do this?

Let's start it now.

Except it's Christmas, so we're going to wait till what kind of company?

It provides the business to business.

Chat.

Product and some other stuff. Chat products. Okay.

Okay.

All right, awesome. Thanks. Who else? Someone raise their hand over here?

Yes, I'd like to systematize my business and launch it online and actually have a following of 10,000 or more.

A following of 10,000 or more.

Okay.

What are they going to be? Are they going to pay you? The 10,000 people are going to pay or are they going to be free? Is it going to be a blog, a podcast, a video series, YouTube channel? What is it?

It will be a training and development which will be a combination. It'd be basically a blog style, but it'll be a training and it'll go out over 12 months and it'll integrate various styles of training, from video to written to interactive lesson plans.

Okay.

And currently you coach people?

I think one on one.

I do.

I coach people one on one and in small groups currently. And I'd also like that to be an access to much larger groups. So they can come in once a month and do a live training with me.

Okay, and is it over the phone, Skype in person, or all the above?

The above currently. But the live training, I'd like to offer it monthly via some sort of Skype or video offering. And then maybe once or twice a year allow people to come in and do you know Tony Robbins?

Right, right. Big groups.

Yeah.

Okay, who's your ideal target market?

Innovative.

Spirit aligned leaders. So in other words, people that are more likely to follow their heart than their mind. They're not just chasing the money, they're chasing a mission. And they're innovative. They have something that they see is a gap in the market. And they don't need gigantic audiences. They need those markets that they see an opportunity that will better a lot of people just by serving that one market.

Gotcha.

Okay. Yeah, you can definitely narrow it down to women, to specific industry, to religious belief system, to sexual preference. I mean there's a million different ways that you can narrow.

Retail is currently really diverse. But I'm totally willing to like hone in on entrepreneurs if that's the good place to hone into.

But yeah.

Yeah.

Cool.

Is there anyone here that's in the professional cleaning or restoration industry? Which is where I started. One, two. Anyone else? Three. Okay, awesome. What are your guys goals? What do you want to do in the next year?

Just starting up a business. I want it within a year to be turning $100,000 in profits.

Okay, cool, awesome. Thanks. Yes. What about you? And if you guys, if you really don't like being called on, just say I pass. We can act like it's a 12 step group or whatever if you don't want to talk. But I'll about compute.

I have primarily a janitorial business.

From that we've spun off some copper.

Cleaning, air duct cleaning and tile and grout. And we're looking to double our janitorial.

Business and bring on a truck mount system for our carpet cleaning side. Okay, cool.

So when you say double, would you care?

Is it doubling the revenue or doubling the clientele? Doubling the revenue.

Okay, yeah.

Okay, awesome. You double your prices or you can just work twice as much as you're currently working right now. One of the best ways to double your business is just whatever you're working right now, just double it. Well, I'm listening to your 10x podcast. It says if you have a goal of going by 10x, you ought to hit 2x. Yeah, growing 10 times is easier than growing two times because there's more juice, there's more enthusiasm, there's more motivation. And if you think at that level, not just give yourself bullshit affirmations about it, but truly say, okay, what is the setup that I need to have in order to have the conditions of growing 10 times? There's probably much more likelihood that you will do that. You want to share?

Yeah. I'm in my second month of business.

I just started a professional carpet towel.

Got a business and I want to be up to three vans in a year.

How many? Three. Okay. How many of them now?

One.

Okay. How many employees?

Two part time guys.

Okay. Any of you done this before?

I ran another company for about a year.

Okay. I like female owned cleaning businesses because they just have a different. You know, it's funny about carpet cleaners, most of them are male. And those of you that don't know, I started my marketing business after being a dead broke carpet cleaner. A lot of you know my story. I was living off credit cards. I was paying money to actually stay in business. It was costing me more money to have my business than I was actually bringing in. Have any of you been in that situation before where you're actually paying to have your company? It's a really dumb way to get to work because people will hire you and pay you minimum wage, which is better than paying to go to work. But of course I was unemployable. I didn't really want to work for anybody. And I had the entrepreneurial desire to have my own company and all of the things that seem like the benefits of that. And, and I read a Gary Halbert newsletter. So I started learning about the power of words and the power of copy. And so that's how I applied it to this small carpet cleaning company. And I went from $2,100 a month in average gross sales back in 1992, within a six month period, I was doing over 12,000amonth in revenue simply by changing the words and the campaigns and the promotions. But I learned how to successfully sell something nobody wants to buy. And the interesting thing about being in the cleaning industry is that it really helps you learn how to be a better marketer when you're selling things that nobody really wants, when they're kind of resistant to buying it. And it allows you to understand the psychology of influence because selling is influence and marketing is storytelling. So if you want to make more money, tell a better story, if you want to get different clientele, you need to tell a different story. And your marketing is totally contingent upon what you say and who you say it to on. I Love Marketing. Some of you are here for the I Love Marketing. Well, all of you are here for the I Love Marketing meetup group. But it started out of a podcast that me and Dean Jackson, who is just a brilliant guy who I've known For damn near 20 years, he started in the real estate industry and he very similar story to me. He was just a struggling real estate agent and he learned marketing because he needed to make his business work. And we studied the same stuff, read Gary Halbert, Dan Kennedy started applying it because a lot of people read stuff, but very few people actually apply it. And my strategies that my company has shared and sold and offered to people has generated over our ads and promotions and campaigns and processes that we can track has generated over $2 billion in revenue for our clients. I've sold tens of millions of dollars worth of marketing programs over the years and have the highest level mastermind group in the world for marketers. We have 156 people that pay 25 grand a year. Whenever I speak, it's my typical gross revenue that I'll bring in when I speak. Right now, based on the way we're running is about 150,000, 175,000 a day. So I don't do a lot of speaking because most people aren't going to pay me that and I have to fly somewhere. Whereas I can do this stuff in this office, in this room with people that are running multimillion dollar companies. So the benefit is we get to hear just some of the best marketing strategies. Brendon Bouchard's a paying client. Mike hanigs, Jeff Walker, Dr. Daniel Amen, David Bach, Dan Sullivan, Peter Diamandis. I mean, just a whole slew of just JJ Virgin, a lot of health people. So we get the benefit of hearing all of that. However, it all started from, from just needing to figure out marketing so that I could survive. And so marketing was the single most valuable skill that I ever learned. And I think marketing is everything. Peter Drucker, the late Peter Drucker said, how many of you do not know who Peter Drucker is? How many of you know who Peter Drucker is? Just trying to see who's lying, that won't raise their hand whatsoever. No, it's fine. I mean, a lot of young people would have no idea who, who Peter Drucker is, but Peter Drucker is considered probably one of the greatest management minds ever. And he wrote the Effective executive in the 1950s. And I highly recommend you all read that book. It's a fantastic book called the Effective Executive. He was all about creating results and being effective. One of my favorite Drucker quotes is, there's nothing more useless than doing really well that which need not be done at all.

So.

So a lot of you probably do things really well that don't produce any results for you that you're really damn good at and are completely irrelevant to helping you multiply and grow and build your business. And there's other stuff that probably makes all the difference in the world. And are you aware of it? He said primary purpose of business. The primary purpose of business is to create and keep customers. Marketing and innovation produce results. All other business functions are costs. And if you break that down, the primary purpose of business is to create and keep customers. How do you create and keep customers?

Marketing.

Marketing, exactly. And everything else is a cost. So innovation and marketing, that's pretty much how you will build and grow your company. So the whole key is to whatever degree we can answer questions, we can share strategies. I'll share one methodology, a process that we're doing that we've only shared with our 25k members. It's still in the development stages. So I'll just kind of give you guys an idea of how to think about it. Dan oversees a lot of campaigns. I mean, we spent 363,000 on full page ads and Forbes, Fortune Inc. Success Entrepreneur and US Airways magazine last year. And I think we've developed a methodology where we can produce probably 10 times the result for 10% of what we spent last year. And no one's doing it. And you'll be the first group of people that I've ever shared this with outside of people that pay 25 grand to hear this shit. But we'll share that later. And then Dan's running Facebook campaigns and putting together all kinds of stuff that I'm completely oblivious to because I'm sort of an oblivious person and I'm sort of just riding on fumes. I did a few smart things a few years ago. Now I just kind of coast. Just kind of.

Yeah.

How you can create your company's future to be a place that you and your team want to visit. And no need to take notes because at the end of the session we'll send you over a PDF that has the recap of this presentation. So there was a study that was done at Stanford University and imagine there was two students that that were sitting face to face with each other. So one was given a list of 25 well known songs and then instructed to pick one and tap out the rhythm on the table to the other person who was supposed to guess what the tune was. And out of 120 tapped songs, the listener only guessed three right? The person tapping out Twinkle Twinkle Little Star was hearing every note perfectly in his mind. He was surprised to find out that the listener only guessed 2.5% of the time and didn't realize that that person, for the most part, was just hearing these monotonous thumps on the table this study can oftentimes happen to us as visionaries. You may have a crystal clear vision in your mind of what you want your company to look like, but then when you explain it, you hear the sweet sound of music. But unfortunately, oftentimes what can happen is the others listening, whether that's your team or your vendors or your partners are just hearing these random taps, not seeing how the whole vision comes together. And so this really comes from under communicating your vision.

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 the this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can.

Get a copy there.

And so as an entrepreneur, it's one thing for you to see the vision, to have vision, but if you can't communicate it and your team doesn't see it too, it'll get lost in translation and it just becomes another idea. And so if that's the case and done all the time. So a vivid vision may be the exact tool that you need to help take your company to where you want to go. And in addition to that, we found that it helps to recruit top talent to align your current team, AKA create unity, delegate the role of implementing ideas so that you can just focus on what you're best at. Stay focused on your North Star as a leader, have clarity when scaling up and getting key vendors and partners and clients all on board. Like Alex mentioned, this brilliant concept was created by Cameron Herald, one of our Genius Network members, and his phenomenal book Vivid vision. Back in 2015, I was just starting Conscious Copy and Co and I was at a dinner where Cameron was there and I remember in passing he gave me the advice to create my own vivid vision. He said, read the book and do this. And so I created that document and painted a picture of what I wanted my company to look like three years into the future as if it already happened. And there were parts of me that was like, who do I think I am? Because I was fresh out of college, I was a nobody in the space, and I was just starting off this copywriting company. But after I created my Vivid Vision, I started to notice these synchronicities that were aligned to my vision occurring all around me. One of the most important ones happened to be meeting Joe Polish. But in addition to that, I wrote down that I wanted to work with the top leaders in the entrepreneurial space. And I ended up attracting in and getting to work with some of the most amazing clients, many of them which are here. I also wrote in my Vivid Vision that I would love to speak on some of the industry's top stages, like Genius Network and Traffic and Conversion. That became my reality in less than three years. Along that journey, Cameron reached out and said, hey, would you be open to writing some vivid visions for some of our clients? I saw this as an amazing opportunity because I was so enrolled in the concept from experiencing it myself. And so my team and I have written over 300 of these in the last five years. And I found that there are six ingredients to ensure that your vivid vision pops and you really can use it as a powerful tool in your company that is like the heartbeat of the business. So let's dive in to those six ingredients to craft your vivid vision. The first one is to get into a vision state. So your current state in your business has built your current company. And so there may be parts of your business where you feel overwhelmed or frustrated or maybe some anxiety. And if you start writing your vision from this frame of mind, you will build more of your known reality, AKA more of the same. And it's also really important not to write your vision, kind of squeezing it between meetings, because if you're noticing some of the complexities in your business and you jump to writing it, answering that question, what is my vision? Some ideas may come out like, well, for my team to stop asking me so many questions and solve the problems on their own for once, or not to have my business not feel like it's taking over all my time and energy or. Or more profits. Obviously, there's a couple modalities that I found to really help myself and our clients get in a vision state where you feel open, aware, optimistic, and centered. Some of them include breath work, much like the practice that Jason Campbell led us through this morning meditation or even just walks in n after that. It's important to ask yourself the Question, what would I love? I learned this from one of my mentors, Mary Morrissey, who said that this is one of the most important questions that we can ask ourselves because it filters through to the truth of things. A couple years ago, I was leading a vision expander session where we were helping a client to gain clarity of his vision and then our team to write and design it. And I kept noticing him say things like, well, this is what it should look like, or this is what the market's going to do, therefore this is what we have to do. And I paused him and I asked, but is this what you would really love? And he looked at me like a little silly, like, what would I love? But then I shared, you're about to invest three years of your time, your resources, your money, your team, your life into this. Let's make sure that we're not building ourselves a golden jail cell like this, meaning that you arrive, but because it was something that you didn't really want, you end up feeling trapped. So important to ask the question, what would you love? Then from there, you want to make sure to paint the picture. When you're writing out your vivid vision, wake up your five senses. What does it look like? What does it feel like? What does it smell like? If you're walking into your office, what's the buzz around the office? Or how are people collaborating? For one of our clients, when they sent over a draft of their vivid vision and painting the picture of their market, they said, our lead generation is dialed in and we wanted to breathe some life into that and really paint the picture. So we helped come up with, we have a steady and consistent flow of leads, booking calls. By the time our prospects get to a conversation with one of our enrollment specialists, they are pre qualified, pre motivated, and pre positioned to want to do business with us. And we often hear things like, it's like, I've been seeing you everywhere and hearing about you everywhere. Raise your hand if you can see. How you can actually see or experience that a lot more than just our lead gen is dialed in after painting the picture. The fourth ingredient is you want to use present tense language or reflecting back focus into stepping into your vision as if it's already happened. Like Cameron Shares wrote his book, for example, using language like, we have achieved this growth versus we will, or it looks like this when painting the picture of, say, your headquarters versus it's going to look like this. Or over the past three years, we've experienced or achieved these profits versus in the next three years. Then number five is when creating your vivid vision to make sure it pops is you want to use affirmative language. As I was sharing, I learned this the hard way. Where one of our core values at Conscious Copy used to be Aligned Action. It said positive momentum over scattered motion. One of my mentors reminded me that that if I was going to be referring to that my team over and over again multiple times a day and we have scattered motion inside of one of our values, even though that's not what we wanted, then we were going to bring that forth. So we updated the value to we believe in aligned action. We grow with positive and focused momentum. Then finally number six is you want to communicate from where, not how, right now.

So.

This is a photo of Tina who is a CEO at Thrive Health. When she came to me, her and her husband have created this really unique supplement company that has quickly become one of the top probiotics probiotic companies in the health space with a world class culture and eight figure growth in a couple years. But the challenge that she was running into was that with all of the rapid growth, she wanted to maintain company culture while attracting in new hires. And as the founder, she wanted to get really clear of where she was taking the company next. But every time she would sit down to map out what her vision is, she would get stuck and in her head our team interviewed her and she got clear of the vision. But then by having the tool, she was able to use that to make sure that she was recruiting top talent that could help implement the how to Recap the six ingredients to crafting your vivid vision is to get in a vision state. Ask what would I love? Paint the picture. Use present tense or past tense reflecting back. Use affirmative language and think where, not how, right now. And when you do this, you'll have this powerful document of vivid vision and you can really use it as a filter to help discern if an opportunity is aligned to your vision or if it's a seductive distraction. So if you want to create your company's future to be a place you want to visit, it's really important to communicate that vision that you see in your mind.

You are certainly someone that sees the future in ways that others have not. And you've actually not only created the products, created the experience, but you've built a team of people that can help carry that out. So let's talk about the future future of apparel because you're now with your current focuses. Let's talk about what your current companies are doing, where you see the future going, and what are things that people would be. It would be very interesting for them to be aware of. I mean, there are things that, you know, that many people don't know. I'd love to have you share some of your future perspectives on the future.

Well, I live in a world of technology, but, you know, my technology is all fabric and apparel base. So it's a. But it's the same thing as you'd see in what people see as technology. You know, the digital technology.

Why do you call it technology? Explain that. Just because, I mean, I have an understanding because I've really researched it.

Good, good.

I want someone hearing that though, when they hear technology, they may think of computers or wearables or something in Cyclone. What do you mean by technology?

Well, technology and apparel would be like solving problems. Solving problems for people. So I'll give you kind of my idea where I see 15 years out. And a lot of it comes from really looking at octopi and their 137 brains they have in their body and their ability to instantly camouflage themselves with color and their surroundings, even change the texture of their skin. The whole works. If I go back to 1930 and I look back to 2030, I would say that you can see the continuum of people wearing very inappropriate clothing. Non technical, no stretch, probably people keeping warm because there was no heating, very little air conditioning. Clothing had a different purpose technology at that time for what our services were. But now with everything being controlled.

We.

Needed like different solves for how we were moving around in the world. So this, I kind of see that Star Trek outfit from the 1960s where it's all lycra. You wear one outfit for all the time. It doesn't stink, it's antimicrobial, it has UV protection, and yet it's connected. But I think we're going to have an implant in our wrist. It's going to be something like an iPhone. And we'll just talk to it because we'll have two little implants in our ear. But there'll be app for how we want to look that day. So it'll be, you know, oh, I want to look like this. So you'll go to a designer who will design an outfit on an app. You'll click, you'll just hit it or just say what you want it. And the outfit will change to exactly, to look like a tuxedo, to look like, I don't know, a lizard, whatever you want it to look like. And I think that. So I think that's ultimately where we're headed because you got to look at the most functional clothing in the world is probably what gymnasts wear or skiers wear. It's totally lycra, it's totally tight. And I think that we're going to be so in tune with 3D printed food and what to eat and how we're moving around and our health is going to be judged against big data with great medical, that I think people's bodies are generally going to all look very, very good.

Yeah, you know what? That's interesting you even say that about 3D printed food. I envision in the same way that many people will have like a Vitamix or they'll have a microwave or they'll have whatever, an instant pot or some of the current devices that people use in the kitchen. I think we'll have 3D printed containers where food gets shipped to them. They pick the flavorings that they like, and you just, just literally print out the type of food. So you're looking at clothing very much same way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Interesting.

How far out do you think that we are from that? 15 years, 10 years?

Well, if you look at how much tighter people's clothing is now than even like 25 years ago, you could probably extrapolate 15 years. I think we're probably there. I think even for men. I think we're just going to be giving up the societal norm that we can't, you know, sexual, like nipples on women or testicles on men. I mean, men in Europe have been wearing Speedos and tight shorts for, you know, for 40 years. You know what I mean? It's kind of like religion in middle America. Like, they think that that's, that's how all the world is, but that's not how all the world is. You know, things are changing. So I think probably 2033, we're going to be seeing that as probably starting to be the norm.

Do you employ, like, scientists or do you have a research labs or anything based on how you think things will change, that you're preparing for or. I'd love to get an idea of how you look at talent that you bring on that have skills and things to help facilitate getting to that bigger future.

Yeah, and it's a bottleneck. It always has been, because most designers that come out of school, you know, we're doing wedding dresses or, you know, street wear and because schools weren't really set up to talk about technical. So my wife and I and Lou Lemon and The province of B.C. built a school here in Vancouver, the Wilson School of Technical Apparel Design. And so, and then we give scholarships to that. So that was the single biggest bottleneck in changing that. So we've done that with, we've created the possibility in the school to make that happen. But what I really find is that there's people like in Italy making like machines for like a fabric. Either putting the fabric together or I mean weft and weave when you're fibers or actually, or what the fabric does, the thickness, everything else. And then there's the another part which is, pardon me, there's the machine people and then there's the fabric people and the thread people. So they're both working on different technologies and they come together in manufactures mostly over in Asia and they bring things together and they gotta go, oh, this year because I've got this new machine or we've got this new fabric, we can do something entirely different. That's really where the magic happens. And so it's really being embedding myself in that conversation there where it's occurring that I see technology changing the fastest.

Great. You know what's one piece of advice.

You never got but you would have.

Left to have early on?

It kind of goes back to my winning formula. I never asked for advice and that was my problem. It worked for me because I made a lot of mistakes and I had, I was always making just enough money to get through my mistakes. So in some respect like that was really good learning and so but ultimately as I kind of went on in life, it's finding, getting advice from people that are non conflicted. So when my first board at west beach, when it was a private company, I had a board that was, they didn't make any money out of giving me advice. They were just like older gentlemen that were really thoughtful and wanted to help some young kids out. When I went to the Lululemon board I took that same context, but it wasn't like that. Private equity have to get out in five years. They're going to prostitute the company. You got CEOs on three year options. They know they're only good for four or five years. They want to get in and, and you know, make the numbers look good, cash out and go. So there's a. What I needed really and what I continue to have now is great advisors who can help me see where it is I'm going within my growth that are non conflicted in a way that I can take their advice and go, man, that's something I could do something with.

So Chip, let's talk about Amir Sports.

And what is this organization what are some of the different companies that you have as investments or ownership in and what's the goal?

I was going to say that Amer comes out of the American tobacco company because of the Finnish Student union back, I don't know, in the 40s or 50s, was importing American tobacco into Finland. And anyway, that ended up morphing into about 20 years ago into getting rid of tobacco and buying sports companies. So they amassed over a period of time one of my favorite brands of all time, which is arc', Teryx, which is actually here in Vancouver. And when I had Lululemon, ever since 2005, I wanted to buy it, but Lululemon was just too much of a rocket ship and I couldn't take on anything more. Anyway, it ended up getting sold to Adidas and then to Solomon and then one thing and then into the Sammer. But they also own Wilson Sports out of Chicago. Like a hundred year old brands. Beautiful Salomon, which is probably the. They have about 27% of the ski market in the world. And Atomic Skis is another thing that's owned underneath that. And Peak Performance ski brand out of Stockholm. So it's a very global brand. And I bought it with my Chinese partners, Anta, which is kind of. They're the Nike of China. They're the biggest sporting goods company in China. 11,000 stores, if you can imagine that, just for Anta. And they have another 1500 stores. They own the Fila brand in China. So we're combining one to create a global company, but also to bring these brands into China. They have the platform to do it. And of course I love technical apparel and for probably 15 years of my life I did snowboard apparel. So, you know, my ability to understand outerwear is quite strong. So it's a lot of fun.

So you're certainly an achievement oriented entrepreneur, not a lifestyle entrepreneur because you, you know, you've got enough financial success to where I'm sure you can live any, any way you want. And that's the thing that most people don't get. I don't how much of what it is that you do is motivated by building, you know, net worth or money versus the other things that you're trying to accomplish. I'd like to actually speak to what are in all of your business endeavors. What are the things, things that, for lack of a better word, blow your skirt up. I mean, what do you really enjoy? What does the business in growing and building these companies? What does it actually do for you and what does it do for the world?

On a kind of an egotistical validity model. I have this concept about how apparel should be delivered to the customer in a way that they get full value out of it. And I know things have changed from 1998 when I started Lululemon to the E commerce business now. But I mean that all kind of started in 2008, 2009. So I've been in it quite a while. So what's the drive? The drive continues to go back to my vision about who I am as a business person. And that is again elevating the world from a place of mediocrity to greatness through transformational development of people of 20 to 30 year olds. Because I find that that's the, you know, if you can get them at that age, then they become. Their ability to become phenomenal in life is exponential. So that's. And I want to be best in the world at something. So I could have said everybody. But part of being best in the world from the book Good the great is like really focusing in on something. So I find that is what gets me up in the morning, that's what gets me excited. And I'm 64, but I have two 14 year old boys and a 16 year old boy who are still at home. And so I'm cognizant of being somebody that can be, that can mentor them but also not do too much yet until they're in university. So I'm just taking on enough with a couple board of directors jobs and this investment in order to keep my mind busy while they're at school. And then I like to pick them up after school and I like to drop them off in the morning.

Have you ever thought about how old.

Do you think you're going to be when you die?

Yeah. 120.

120.

Yeah. Okay. It was interesting because it was 90 at one time. And then I realized that most goals are self fulfilling. And I thought that if I let my mind think that 90 is what I'm going to live to, then my body will actually respond to that. So then by changing my goal to 120, I believe my body will respond to that.

Let me play sort of like an interesting. It's not necessarily a game because it's not a trick, it's more like a thought process. So my friend Dan Sullivan, who I mentioned, he's one of my best friends, the founder of a company called Strategic coach and he's 76 right now and he believes he's going to live to 156 years old. And of course, of course, he says similar. If you think you're going to die at a certain age, the parts will start, you'll start sending the parts back to the factory is the way that he described it. And then he asked the question, what do you think you'll be doing the year before you die? Say you're 119 years old. What do you envision that Chuck Wilson will be doing during that time?

Well, I feel sure my calendar will be full because I can even tell as I'm getting older that I'm booking things out three or four or five years in the future. I think there's going to be a lot of art in my life, a lot of painting. I think you just did something on that recently. An addict that you had black stars.

The film artistforaddicts.com is the. Yeah, we want to use art as a force for good, to help people that struggle with addiction. Because so many artists are sensitive and, you know, it's very healing for many people.

So, yeah, so I think art, I think being totally available for my grandchildren or children, for any kind of mentorship, babysitting would be critical. And I think the third thing is, what's the big things I'm going to be doing? Giving back to the world. And I say that in a way that I've really got this down now. It's like I think charity and philanthropy is. I look at it from a totally self motivated point of view. Like, I'm not doing anything to be like altruistic. I. Because I go, why are people doing this? And I go, why do I want to do it? And quite frankly, I want to make the world a better place for my children or grandchildren. Right. That's very. And I just want to be totally honest about that. But then I get to it and I go, the only way to make it great for them is I got to make it great for everybody. But I really want to get to the bottom of my self interest in it and not pretend.

Yeah, no, I agree. Because there's so much nonprofit and so much philanthropy that is cosmetic, that presents itself as trying to do good, when in reality it's just a PR campaign.

Right, but it's essential now, isn't it? Because everything we've talked about with the media being entertainment, with social media, anyone be able to say anything? I mean, in my book, I said it that, you know, that woman who said, you know, like Nike's using child labor, you know, that was at the beginning of that whole social media thing too. And it really brought Nike wasn't doing child labor. I've been in the factories, you know, it could have been some 14 year old that didn't, you know, that didn't fit into the school system and was going to starve. And what else do you do with a 14 year old who's working in the factory? So big deal, you know, but, but we're living in a world where you have to market now your do good stuff in order to offset the 100% chance that some nutball is going to accuse you of doing something which you didn't do. And there are lots of nut balls out of there.

No, there are.

And I think there's a lot of. Here's what I would say and this is. I'll probably get even criticism for saying this.

Sure you will. Sure you will.

There's a lot of do gooders that parasitically guilt good doers into feeling bad about their success because they themselves are incapable of producing. So there's a lot of producers that have to be the victims in dealing with the parasites that try to guilt them into oh, you should give money. Like the term give back. I did a whole podcast episode with Dan Sullivan, three part series about social entrepreneurship and about our views on it. And so, so the term give back, it's a weird term and I've tried to stop using it from this standpoint. I'm a big believer in giving, giving back. If I take your shoes, I should give them back. But if I haven't taken anything, there's nothing to give back. I love giving though. And so if you provide jobs, if you create value, I mean, I think money earned ethically is a byproduct of value creation. And if someone is, is willing to just pay you money for it. And there's, there's just this, there's a lot of people that are being guilted into you should give back. It's like, well, what have they taken? You know, now if you really have taken something, certainly you should give back. But it's become this whole thing like, oh, because you're successful, you somehow were obligated to do things. And you know, I, I have certain issues with that. And I'm a guy who's raised a tremendous amount of money for nonprofit and for causes. And I mean even, you know, what I do with the recovery right now, I mean, I won't take money from rehab centers. I have funded several hundred thousand dollars out of my own pocket in the last three years, just building the educational platform for genius recovery. But I Want something too. It's self serving for me. It helps me with my own recovery. It makes me feel good when I reduce human suffering. But man, I don't like when people try to get guilt. People that have had success into thinking that they are somehow obligated to just take care of the world just because. And the people that just do it because they want to, I admire them. I think it's wonderful. I mean, and I'm doing my best to do that. And you certainly are. So from that frame of reference, talk about your foundation and talk about some of the ways that, of what you're doing and what you're hoping because I think it's important to know that.

Well, thanks. And again, I think my wife come from. If we had our choice, we wouldn't. We'd just do it and not have to say anything about it, you know. And we're very conflicted about how we have to, you know, who we have to be in order to kind of offset the world we're in. But I mean, when we went public, my wife said, you know, we want to give something to children education. So we went to Ethiopia because government was putting 50% of their budget into education and it was where we could get the best return on it from a business point of view. And we ran it like a business. We ran it the same way we ran Lululemon. You know, responsibility, no complaining, et cetera. And of course we were doing what a lot of people are doing, building out schools, you know. And then I sat back and I went, God, you know, the population's gone from like 40 to like 70 million in like 20 years. There's just no way we can build school schools fast enough. So like Lululemon then we decided to start developing leaders that would create leaders or leaders that would create teachers so that or people that would build schools so we could exponentially do it that way. And definitely, you know that book by Steve Pinkerton. But you can see because of technology and the way the world's changing, there's going to be no poverty by 2030. I mean, I've seen it like for 15 years now. It is unbelievable how fast the world is changing with cell phones and technology. So then we kind of woke up, okay, we've done our job. You know, we're really starters of things. We're not like, like now, now let's give it to somebody that can really take it from this level and do something. So we merged it with the WE organization out of Toronto. They had lots of other countries in Africa. And it made sense. And then we kind of our advisors, you know, said, you know, do you want to be a little fish in a big pond? Which would be like going over to Ethiopia and putting millions and millions of dollars over there. Do you want to become a bigger fish in a smaller pond? So now that we've done that in Africa for so long, we're back in Vancouver going like, what can we do here? And because Vancouver besieged the last civilized place in the world, probably northwest Australia might be the same because of just how long it took to get here in the mountains and the difficulties, we think there's a great opportunity to buy massive swaths of park. And so that's kind of what we're up to now, creating park to create movement.

So if there's anything that we could say here that would enroll people into what you're doing and help doing what you want to do in that area, what would it be if there was an ask?

Well, we don't want to ask. You know, we really found out. And this is an interesting thing about being successful is we set up our charity, like, imagine one day for Ethiopia. We put our money into it, and it ended up being like what it is with every other charity. You kind of have events, you try to raise money, you try to enroll people. But we found is that every time we went to ask somebody to donate to our charity, about six months later, we'd have to go around and hand the check right back to their charity. That makes no sense to me, especially if I want to, like, prioritize being with my family. So then we just said, no, we're going to do it all on our own. And so I don't ask anybody for anything.

Okay. So all of this is just you taking your own resources and your own ingenuity and just putting it together. And how would you define that you've won or are winning the goal? What would it look like? Meaning, what does success look like?

Well, in Ethiopia, it was really coming to poverty well in by 2030. And that our goal of bringing quality education to every child in Ethiopia by 2030, free of foreign aid, was actually going to occur. So then, even though it's like 12 years out, 10 years out, we've done our job. You know, it's going to happen. So then where do we want to focus next? So our. I would say if. If whatever we did lowered obesity rates, that would. In bc, that would be my goal. So how do we set up parks? How do we set up how the parks are structured how people get to them, how they use them in order. So people are moving. That's. That's what prep too.

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Thank you.

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