The 7 Hidden Rules That Make People Say “YES” Without Realizing It Feat. Robert Cialdini

I'll tell you something, this is an interesting thing. We talk about 25 years that like it was yesterday, because it feels like yesterday that we were at the Wigwam having dinner with Evan and Bobette and hanging out. But I had an experience a couple of summers ago. I had somebody come to one of my breakthrough blueprint events. And she was 30 years old, young, you know, bright young, you know, go getter marketer. And in that moment I realized, you know, she was born in 1990 is when she was born. And I thought, wow, we've got a whole new generation. I bet a lot of the people that are listening, that's even on the zoom here, are, you know, 30ish type of people who weren't around when the first, when Influence first came out. So I think it would be good if you could maybe tell a little bit about the background of your work because it's been kind of defined your life's work since then.

Well, as your very gracious introduction suggested, I started out as a traditionally trained and traditionally practicing academic doing research on my college campus with, with college sophomores pretty much as the students in laboratory settings and recognized there was something missing there. And I needed to get away from those academic constraints into the environment where the influence wars are being waged every day. After all, we're always either sending out influence appeals or receiving influence appeals of one sort or another every day. And there are certain people who know how to do this because their economic livelihoods depend on using the influence process properly and effectively. And it seemed to me that those professions, sales, management, recruiting, fundraising, marketing, advertising and so on, those were the people who really knew what I should be focusing my, my, my thinking on. So I began to invit. I began to infiltrate their training programs with disguised identity, disguised intent to learn what they had done that produced yes from people regularly. And I spent two and a half years in that undercover activity to learn something beyond the college campus where I had been studying this process.

I remember you saying how it was initially because you wanted to learn about these things, not to be a practitioner of them, but to protect yourself from them or to help people protect themselves from the sort of illicit use of those principles so that people could recognize them.

Exactly. Recognize, resist, deflect, defend. But it turned out soon after the publication of Influence, that a lot of people were interested, besides that, in harnessing the process in ethical ways, in morally responsible ways, to move people into positive choices that they could make that they were hesitant to make. They were sitting on the fence, they just were dithering. They weren't thinking through what exactly the costs and benefits might be. The merits of one's case were simply not being presented to them in an optimal way. And so they wanted to know about optimization of the persuasion process for that reason as well.

Mm.

That's what I found when I first started studying it. Like I've always told you, from the moment I read your book, just the understanding was like having a pair of 3D glasses all of a sudden that you see the mechanisms that are at work and why things are turning out the way they are. And this kind of underlying understanding of influence has really helped me in applying the marketing principles then that you can overlay on top of that, when you've got an understanding of why people are reacting, how our brains are responding to things. And one of the greatest phrases that you used in the description is that when these are presented, they trigger this click were pattern that it's just. It's almost like an autopilot thing. When somebody is presented with this, with into the right circumstances, one of the elements of influence, it's almost like instinctual. We can't even. It's not a. They're not reasoning or thinking it. It's just happening automatically.

And you know the thing about the click that you were talking about, the thing that triggers the their response, it can be a very small thing. I like the metaphor of a light switch. Suppose you were in charge of lighting a stadium for a night match or game of some sort or another, and you're down in the bowels of the stadium and there's a switch that you just flick and suddenly everything is illuminated. All of a sudden things are possible that weren't possible before. It didn't take a lot of strength or effort or time on your part. You just had to know how to locate that switch. And then it's just a little bit of effort. And all of the power that's stored in the power system of that. Of that arena flows because of that small thing you did. It goes against the rule of proportionality. There's a belief that in order to get big effects, we need to do big things to change people in substantial ways. It's just not true. There are big power sources inside people and our job is to locate the switch that flicks them on that then drives their behavior.

Now I'm going to ask you. So when Joe Polish and I did our first I Love Marketing conference, it's all about our eight profit activators. And he asked me a question that was just Funny, because he asked me, do I know all the eight profit activators without looking. And I'm going to ask you, just for fun, to just maybe quickly name what the six elements of IT influence are so we can set the context for what we're talking about here.

Sure. Would you prefer that I just label them and how they work or give an example?

Let's just kind of name them first and then we'll pick kind of. And go through some of them because we've got so many stories.

Yeah.

So the first is the rule of reciprocation. People want to say yes to those people who have given to them first, done a favor, a service provided, a gift. People want to give back. So you go into a room where you want to be more influential. Your first question should not be who can help me here? It should be whom can I help here? Whose circumstances can I elevate? Whose outcomes can I increase? They will stand on the balls of their feet wanting to do the same for you. Next principle is liking. Nobody's surprised that we prefer to say yes to those we like. But there are two small things we can do that substantially enhance the feeling of rapport that people feel with us. And one is to point out genuine similarities and the other is to give genuine compliments or praise as warranted. Next principle is social proof. This is a term, by the way, that's used, we coined it back in when with the first edition. Influence. Social proof didn't exist before. I'm so glad because I was thinking of using people proof. Right. What's happened with social media now? Think about social media. I'm so glad that I use the term social proof where the fact that a lot of other people are doing something, especially people like us, is the proof that we should do it too. It's not fact based proofs, it's not scientific proof, it's not logical proof, it's social proof. So that's the other thing, simply letting people know of the others who are around them, like them, them who are choosing or have been choosing. Our recommended step forward.

Robert, what year before you continue, what year did the first book come out?

The first book came out in 1984.

Okay, so this was well before anything with the Internet. I mean it was really okay because I was turned onto it in 1996, as you know. So it already been out for 12 years. But that was just at the very beginning of the Internet. So I'm sorry for interrupting your train,

but no, no, that's exactly the people say to me you know, Bob, your book is called the Bible of Digital Commerce. There wasn't digital commerce. How did you see, how, how did you foresee this? How did you look forward and see this 40 years, 35 years later?

Yeah.

And it was by looking back, right, at what were the factors that have always driven behavior in our species. Look back at the evidence to be able to predict how we as a species will behave in the future.

Yeah, Love it. Okay, so social proof then. Carry on.

Next is authority. If we're uncertain about something, one way to reduce our uncertainty is to see what the experts are saying and what they are doing. And if we have expertise, we have to be sure that the people who we're trying to move in our direction are properly informed of that before we ever try to influence them. Next principle is the principle of scarcity. Right. People want more of those things they can have less of. It's just the way we are.

Right.

So things that are rare, scarce, dwindling in availability, if we properly inform people of those characteristics, they get a little crazy.

I'll tell you what, that's the absolute truth. I've got some. I'm. I'm hyper vigilant of what's going on in my world because I'm, I'm aware of all of these things and so I always kind of observe the situations that I get into and I see how influences at work in my life too. And I'll share a couple of stories with you as we go on, but please continue. Yeah.

Then the next principle is commitment and consistency. People want to be consistent with what they have already said or done, especially in our presence, especially publicly. They don't want to say one thing, do another, or misspeak by saying one thing and then contradicting it the next time. They want to be congruent with what they have already made a commitment to. So asking people to take very small steps in our direction causes them to be much more likely to want to continue to take steps, even outsized steps in our direction in the future. And then finally there's a new principle.

That's what I was going to ask you about. So now this is exciting that you got to the point. That's masterwork of the six. And then in revisiting now, you've discovered a final. A new one.

Yes. And I'm calling it unity.

I love that.

But it has to do really with membership in a particular group.

Yes, right.

A tribe, some in group that defines us. And if a communicator can arrange for us to see him or her as inside that group, one of us, yes. All the influence barriers come down for that communicator. We say yes to those people. We cooperate with them, we believe them, we trust them. We, those people who are of us, become people who we want to favor and follow.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

So what I'm going to talk about today is how to use ethical influence and persuasion to get more people to say yes. And you know, usually when I talk about this kind of stuff, most people are focused on marketing. I teach a lot of people about copywriting and marketing and sales, face to face sales and things like that. But one of the things I want you to know is this is not just about business, which I think is really fitting for Genius Network. These are the kinds of things that you can use in everyday life. And you know, a lot of times when, when I speak, I get people that, you know, they want to know the magic words. I'm an NLP guy, right? It's all about linguistics. They're like, tell me the right sentence to say for this and, you know, this and that. It kind of reminds me of, you know, back when Evan Pagan used to do the double your dating thing. You know, I was an affiliate for his probably 20 years ago, and he would guy, he would get guys all the time going, tell me the pickup lines. What do I say to girls? They make them like me. And he would say, I'm not going to teach you pickup lines. I'm going to teach you how to be a better man. Then you'll naturally be more, more attractive. And that's kind of the, you know, I thought about all the things that I could teach in, you know, 25, 30 minutes today. And that's kind of the tack that I'm going to take is I'm going to go a bit meta on influence and persuasion. And you'll be able to apply this to anything that you do. It's not necessarily about the individual language patterns. There are a lot of them. You can learn language patterns. This is more going to be about how to think about how you speak to people in a way that will get them to say yes in every area of life, every Context of life. So I'm kind of new to Genius Network. You know, my wife Kayla and I, we joined in January. Don't know a lot of people yet, so I'll just spend a second kind of telling you where I came from and how I got here. This is where it all started for me. Back in 1995, I started a company called Liquid Mirror Software. I was what we affectionately called back in the day, a shareware author. Try before you buy software. And I actually got into business for a really weird reason. I was 20 years old. I was fresh off the streets being homeless, and my girlfriend, who I'd only been dating for a few weeks, got pregnant. And I had no ambition in my life. I didn't have a high school degree. I didn't have really any skills other than the fact that I was a hobbyist programmer.

And.

And I knew I needed a career. I knew I needed to take care of this, you know, new human being that was coming into the world who's about to turn 30, which is crazy to me. And, you know, I was a security guard making $6 an hour, which was a lot of money for me. I mean, I think minimum wage at the time was 450. So $6 an hour is like, wow, I was making it, and I knew I needed to do something. And really, programming was the only skill that I had. And this new thing had been coming out called Internet programming. You didn't need a degree to get into it, but everywhere I went, I would give them my resume and they'd say, well, you don't have experience. Come back when you have experience. Nobody would hire me. And after probably 20 or 30 interviews, I was finally, how am I going to get experience if nobody hires me? And I came up with this idea. What if I came up with my own software company and I published my own software title and then put that on the resume. Then. Then I've got experience and people will have to hire me. And I had this little program that I had written. It was called Send to Anywhere. And it was a file utility, would help you copy and move files around in Windows. And I published that out there. And really it was. The only purpose was to get it on the resume. And it took off, and it did really well, and it did help me get my first job. And then that was my side gig for a number of years.

And.

And about a year later, I started getting featured newspapers, magazines, and I started realizing I should really figure out how to market this thing. Maybe I don't have to have A day job, you know. And so that's where I used to get these 3M floppy disks at Comp USA and duplicate them and put the stickers on them. That's where I started. That was my first website back in 1995. That was my earthlink.net free 10 page website that I had there. It was beautiful. I ended up with a better one later. Started one of the very first shareware networks. If you ever downloaded shareware software in the late 90s and 2000s, you probably downloaded from one of my sites called the Shareware Junction Network. Had one of the very first file hosting companies out there. SW Mir years ago. In 1998, everything changed. I was at the county fair in Orange County, California, and my friends and I would go there every year primarily to see the stage hypnotist, a guy named Mark Usick. And I think he's one of the best stage hypnotists on the planet. I was sitting there in the audience and enjoying the show like I did every year. I mean, we would go pretty much just to see him. But I didn't believe in hypnosis. I thought it was all, you know, a put on. I thought the people on stage were drunk or, or idiots are just paid to be on stage or something like that. But I love the show. But at the end of the show, he was selling these tapes and he's going, step right up, step right up. Get your tapes. Three for $20. And all I wanted. I didn't believe in hypnosis. I was super skeptical, very logical guy and, you know, I believed the kind of hypnosis that they put out in Hollywood and cartoon, you know, cartoons where people are sort of controlling others and their eyes spin and stuff like that. But I had 20 bucks in my pocket and I just really wanted to hear what was on these cassette tapes. So I walked up and I said, you know, I'll take it. Slap down my $20 bill. He goes, which ones do you want? I looked down in the case and the first one that jumped out at me was quit smoking. At that time, 1998, I was 25 years old. I was smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. And I was hopelessly addicted to cigarettes from the time that I graduated high school and really got some freedom, you know, being out of the house a lot. I really just started smoking more and more and more. By the time I was 21, I was smoking three packs a day. There was a time where I actually rolled cigarettes and I would smoke filterless cigarettes just to get even More of a rush out of it. And I tried everything I could to quit smoking. Nothing worked. And so I bought this silly little tape about three weeks later at home. I popped it in and listened to it. The curiosity finally got to me and everything changed. I woke up the next morning and never touched another cigarette again. I barely had a thought of a cigarette after that night that I literally fell asleep listening to the tape. And it was so effortless for me to quit smoking that it actually took me three days before I realized that something had changed. And. And it dawned on me that I hadn't had a cigarette in 72 hours. And. And that was the moment when I went down a rabbit hole, that I'm still going down rabbit holes. I fell in love with the subconscious mind and how it works. I started reading everything that I could find on hypnosis. That led me to neuro, linguistic programming, social psychology. And in late 1998, it really began to fuse into my marketing. And I began to play around with these ideas of things like conversational hypnosis and embedded commands and anchoring and using these things in my marketing to such an extent that by 1999, 2000, I was actually writing copy for other people. I'd never been trained as a copywriter. I'd read some books, of course. The Joe Sugarman book, you know, was the one that really got me started. If anybody's ever read that, if you've never read that, it's definitely one of the top books to read on copywriting. The slippery slide principle, right? And, you know, really helping other people as well. And it was great because, you know, working with other people, I could really see the objective change in their results just by adding a few things. Sometimes I wouldn't even rewrite their copy for them. I would just change a few things or put a little embedded command in that that, you know, was almost already there. And I just became fascinated with this. So my. In 2000, I became certified as a hypnotherapist. 2001, NLP. I ran a practice for many years. I'm still a coach till today we run a coaching practice. But my real love, like my passion, is fusing together, you know, NLP and hypnosis and psychology with marketing. Because I really think it's all the same thing. And I think a lot of times people think that marketing is about creative writing, whereas in my mind, it's all about hypnosis. It's all about suggestion. It's all about really getting to the subconscious mind. So today I'm the owner of Transform Destiny, we're the top NLP training company in North America. And also with my wife I co own Transform Destiny and also with my wife I co own Influence to Profit. And that's where we teach heart centered business owners ethical influence and persuasion. I think the most important word of that is ethical because I find that most people who are heart centered business owners, they have something that's going to transform the world in one way or another or at least transform a life, help a person out and they just don't know how to get that message across. And that's what I'd love to do, is to help people, number one, craft that message and then number two, amplify it, teach them how to get that out there. So there's my shock and awe slide. Y' all know you're supposed to have one of those, right? All right, so let's talk about this. And my, my goal today is I'm going to talk for, you know, probably about 20, 25 minutes. I'm going to give you some really good stuff and then I'll open it up for questions. I know Gina said, you know, we should probably have a question and answer segment. If you don't have questions or if you want me to go deeper, I've got more content and I'll go, you know, as long as you want me to. Up until the hour. So here's the problem. We live in a high saturation world. This is, I think in the last two, two and a half years, even ever more so, a problem. Seth Godin predicted this 22, 23 years ago, right. That the Internet was going to change everything about how people consume, about how people learn, that we are so saturated with, I mean just messages, but most of them, it's been estimated that we see between 30 and 90,000 marketing messages a day. Remember the first time I heard that, I thought, well that's ridiculous, we don't see that. And then I realized, well, my computer says Microsoft on it is focused right on my thing here. I've got burgers, bagels on my coffee. We probably do, if not tens of thousands, right? We're continually saturated by information and by choices. People are overwhelmed, they're skeptical and they're cynical. And here's the problem with that. The subconscious mind, which really is the number one player when it comes to getting people to buy things, it takes the path of least resistance. If given two options and one is easier or quicker or you know, has less resistance, the unconscious mind will tend to pick that one and this is where a lot of people's procrastination comes from, right? Is people set up situations where the easier thing to do is to not do what they have to do. And the unconscious mind will always influence you in that direction. The result is this. These days, people's default answer is just no. It is literally the easiest thing a person can say. And it really doesn't matter how good your intentions are or how good your product or your service is. The fact is that most people will probably reject you, especially if you're only trying to sell to the conscious mind, which is what most business owners and marketers do. So the solution is to learn how to ethically influence and persuade people you interact with. Really, I think all business is about influence and persuasion, but more importantly, it's that word ethical, right? And so we do this by learning how to speak directly to the subconscious mind. This is something I've been fascinated with now for 24 years. And I've dedicated, really, my whole life to this. Now, people used to think that in order to speak to the subconscious mind, you had to have a pendulum or a hypno disc, and you had to have a person with spooky eyes that would look at you and, you know, speak in a soft voice like, you know, what was the old Taco Bell dog, right? You're getting very hungry if you remember the Taco Bell hypnosis commercial. And the fact is that's not true, right? Formal hypnosis or formal trance is something that is very useful when it comes to doing change work. If you need to quit smoking, lose weight, drop a bad habit, gain a good habit, let go of fears, any of that kind of stuff. Formal trance is great for that. But in 1951, Milton Erickson, who was one of the greatest psychiatrists on the face of the earth, he was also a hypnotist. He sort of made the announcement that you don't need formal trance to speak to somebody's subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is always listening as long as you know how to speak to it, right? Now, usually when I bring this kind of stuff up, people go, wait a minute, hang on. You're talking about, like, you know, digging into people's minds. And isn't this all just manipulation? Aren't you trying to force people to do things against their will? Well, the fact is this. If we look up the definition of to manipulate, it's a transitive verb. And the definition essentially is to move, especially in a skillful manner. I think all language moves people. Sometimes it moves people Elegantly. Sometimes it moves people sloppily, sometimes it, it barely moves people. But really when we communicate with people we're trying to move them in one way or another. We're trying to move them from one state to another state, from one decision to another decision, from maybe where they are physically in one place to another place. Right? We're always trying to move people when we speak. And wouldn't it be great to do that in a skillful manner rather than what most people do, which is, you know, most people, they learn most of their language between 5 and 8 years old in terms of learning how to speak. Most of that you learn between like 5 and 8 years old. And then beyond that the only thing we tend to do to add to our language is just to learn vocabulary, just to learn new words. Most people don't actually invest time in learning how to skillfully use language which is a very powerful skill.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

But here's the thing. Manipulation isn't the issue, right? What really is the issue is intent. What is a person's intent when using these words?

Right?

When people talk about the word manipulation, usually what they're talking about is a win lose situation. So I think when it comes down to it, when it comes to influence and persuasion, especially intention and integrity is a big part of it. And this is why the ethical part of influence and persuasion is so important. Can these techniques be used to create a win lose situation or what we might call a manipulation of other people? Of course they can. But all language can do that, right? You don't need, you don't even need skill to manipulate people. Just a black heart. There are people who manipulate all the time just with the English language. Right. It doesn't even necessarily require skills. So here's the thing. The challenge with creating win lose situations and there are unfortunately there are people out there who use neuro linguistic programming in win lose ways. Most of us know what their reputation is. Unfortunately they've kind of dirtied the reputation of neuro linguistic programming where there is a lot of positive that you can take from that. The challenge with creating win lose situations is you may get them to say yes but then they Never trust you again. Now I've been in this business that I'm in right now, transform destiny for 22 years. I have people who've been buying from me for nearly that long right from to me. And I'm passionate about what I do. I didn't get into business to make money. I got into business because I love what I do. I go down these rabbit holes and I'm compelled to do this. It's my purpose. And then money is the result of it. But there are some people who are primarily money driven and they try to use these kinds of tactics and techniques, but they backfire because that person will only ever buy from you once and will probably poison other people to not buy. It's not influence, it's just tricking people. So real influence creates relationships that thrive and flourishes as both parties, for both parties, as they grow. And I would even stretch that to say that I think that real influence is leadership. If you truly. And Joe's a great example of this.

Right?

Joe went through his recovery and got well himself and now he helps other people recover. Can you imagine if a person was still stuck in their addiction and charging other people to help them not be addicted? It doesn't work well. And that's not to say that it can't work. And that's not to say that there aren't some people who are, you know, pretenders. We were talking about imposter syndrome. I always find it funny that the people who should feel imposter syndrome don't. And all the people who are really the good, genuine, kind people who really can help people are the ones that feel imposter syndrome. Right. I think that the true influence is about leadership. Right. So that means walking your talk, believing in what you sell. And that of course goes even further into making you a more influential person. When you are fully in 100% congruent behind what you're selling, that makes other people want to follow. So really, in essence, ethical influence makes you an excellent communicator. So if you look at the mind, there's a lot of misconceptions about the conscious mind, subconscious mind. A lot of people say we only think with 10% of our mind. It's actually nowhere near that. If you look at the research and a lot of this comes from knee high chicks. And the conscious mind actually only makes up 0.006% of the mind. It's 6/1000 of 1% of the mind. The conscious mind is the other 99.994%. The conscious mind is logical and analytical, which is how a lot of people try to sell and market. Whereas the conscious, the unconscious mind, or subconscious mind is emotional, organic. The conscious mind is in charge of accepting or rejecting what it encounters, whereas the subconscious mind is in charge of desire. The problem with trying to sell to the conscious mind is this conscious mind is like one of those funny guards that you see. If you've ever been to England and you've been to Buckingham palace, you get the guards. By the way, don't ever touch them. They're badasses. They will kick your ass hard. Other than that, they won't look at you or, or move, but they have permission if you touch them, to really mess you up. The conscious mind is kind of like one of those guards. It's standing guard outside the gate, and it's the gatekeeper. It's the guard that you see at the Royal Palace. Its job is to filter out the environment and to keep out suggestions. That's really the job of the conscious mind, right? The intention is supposed to be a good thing, but often it's not. Very often it's our conscious mind that prevents us from achieving what we want in our own lives, from taking that chance and falling in love, or from buying the thing that we know is going to help us from starting a business or whatever it is. A lot of times it's the conscious mind that gets in the way and rejects the wrong things. And so what we have to do, we have to learn how to bypass that gatekeeper, right? And if you do, you have access to the vast majority of the mind that's in charge of desire, which is where all buying decisions are made. And there are people who go, what if I'm B2B? What if I'm selling to corporations? Well, you're still selling to humans. Somebody said this at the last, the last genius network mastermind, which is, you know, it's still H2H. It doesn't matter if it's B2B or B2C or anything else like that. If you're selling to another human being. Desire is always part of the equation. Now, it may not be the desire of, oh, I want this fancy car, but it may be the desire of I want to make this good purchase decision so that I get praise from my boss. And other people think that, you know, I'm a good worker. So there's always desire as part of the. Part of the equation. So accessing and communicating with subconscious mind is the key to great marketing and sales and really the number One thing is desire. It's the driving factor in all sales and marketing. So what I'm going to present to you now, I'm going to kind of go meta on influence. Instead of giving you language patterns, I want to teach you how to think about what you say so that you can choose the language patterns that you probably already know. And this will help you in your copywriting and face to face sales and your relationships. My, my first, by the way, guinea pigs when it came to hypnosis and NLP were my kids.

Right.

My son was five, my daughter was three. And, you know, using this in my everyday life was how I really began to start to get good at it before I ever even introduced it into business.

I'm going to give you some fundamentals that many of you that have been with me a long time have heard me say over and over again. And I'm going to give you a definition of marketing, and I'm going to tell you what the marketing that we're going to share with you this event is all about. There's this little. We can probably put this up on the screen. Yep. So over here, you know, would be, say, a cold prospect. Over here would be a client. So when they actually become a client and they hire you and they start giving you money. Now, to use Dan Kennedy language, many of you familiar with Dan Kennedy, he's a marketing guy that used to write a lot of my sales copy for like the first nine years of my business. All right, so Dan, really sharp marketing guy. He said you can either be an annoying pest, and I can't spell, by the way. You can be an annoying pest or a welcome guest.

Okay?

And when it comes to selling, imagine this like a mountain, a hill. And right here in the middle is where gravity actually shifts. Going up a hill to sell is very difficult. That requires a lot of rapport building, a lot of things that you do in the very beginning. Frankly, everything that you do is a sales job. But when it comes to selling, though, you want to set it up in order to have an elf business, easy, lucrative, and fun. You want to set it up so that the people that you're talking with and that you're wanting to attract as clients, you're actually spending your personal time or your human time, your staff time on this side of the hill so that gravity is working in your favor. Trying to push a string uphill is hard. Pulling is much easier. So you'll hear a lot of people talk about positioning and packaging and how you set it up and how People call and they're no longer asking how much do you charge? Because when someone calls up and says, how much do you charge? That's the first thing that they ask you. That's because the marketing has not been communicated to them in a way to where they actually have any trust and rapport. Because the number one question in all consumers minds is who can I trust? Okay, trust. And so marketers have to establish trust. And you do that by building rapport so that they not only trust you, but they feel comfortable with you also. So trust is rapport with comfort. And how many of you have a whole bunch of clients that not only trust you, but they're comfortable with you, they give you the keys to their house, that sort of stuff. How many of you have when those clients refer other people to you that you've never done business with because of the trust and rapport that that person already has with you, they've communicated it in advance to that other person. And those people call you up already with built in established rapport. How many of you have that, okay, so that person calls you already over here. You're not like an annoying pest trying to sell themselves carpet cleaning services. You're some person that can actually solve a problem for them because someone they already trusted, knew, referred them, and all of a sudden they call you up and they're like, hey, I hear really great things about you. I'd like to do business with you. That's why referrals are so awesome. That's why we all love them. But those types of referrals for most companies are accidental. It's not strategic. They don't have systems set up that replicate that sort of process. And if they do do it, but they're doing it manually. So there's a lot of manual human interaction. And what I want to do for all of you as much as I can, is I want to give you ways to multiply the effectiveness of every marketing campaign and tool that you're going to do, and all kinds of different ways that you can convey trust in advance. Because what marketing is, and I want you to write this down, marketing is selling in advance. That's what marketing is. It's simply setting it up so that the selling is happening before you even talk to them. Because a lot of people think selling is you show up and you talk to someone. Well, that's part of it. But there's a lot of things you can do in advance. And those of you that are already skilled, experienced marketers, including me, we're always Looking for ways to continually improve our ability to communicate to more people in a manner that has more leads, more clients clients, more prospects showing up that are pre disposed, pre qualified, pre interested, pre motivated. It doesn't matter what order they're in. If these sort of criteria exist, your whole job of building and growing your business becomes infinitely easier. And if you have to do it manually, you have to hire salespeople, you have to get very good at closing. But if you do it with marketing, you actually it's the ultimate leverage. Marketing is the ultimate leverage. There's nothing that can help you delegate better than just really kick ass marketing that works 24,7 whenever you use it and it delivers to you prospects and clients that are pre interested, pre motivated, pre qualified and pre disposed. What would you say is the difference between marketing and selling? Okay, well my whole shtick that I've said a million times is that selling is so what you do when you're on the phone or face to face with somebody, marketing is what you do to get someone on the phone or face to face with you. And if you do your marketing right, sales, letter write, offer write, list, by the time they end up talking to you or your team, or visit your website or go to your order page, they're pre interested, pre motivated, pre qualified and pre disposed to give you money. Pre interested, pre motivated, pre qualified, pre disposed. So it's positioning. Marketing is selling in advance. If you can remember that selling in advance is what you want, then you have to, if you do your marketing right, you don't have to hire salespeople or as many. And if you do have salespeople, you've dramatically enhanced their ability to sell because you're delivering to them. People that have already been put through a process. It's kind of like let's just assume that everyone here is not, not a vegan and you eat like steak. Okay, well, marketing would be a cooked steak, not having any. Marketing would be trying to sell someone a raw steak. I mean, it hasn't gone through the process yet. It would be a different sort of experience. And people, when I read the E Myth by Michael Gerber back in 1997. I'm sorry, 1997. In 1992, he ended up hiring me for consulting in 1996, when I first read that book, it was all about setting up your company like it was a franchise. What if there was more than one? So if you had to have 50 locations or if you had to have 100, and he would use McDonald's as an example of A franchise, a turnkey system. And the whole book was based on systemizing and automating things. And the thing that climbed clicked for me was what if you automate and systemize the most important function of a business going back to Drucker, marketing and innovation produce results. What if you could systemize selling? That's what marketing does. It systemizes and automates selling, but not the marketing that they teach. In most schools they'll teach brand building, they'll teach logos. I mean all of that for small business owners is just nonsense sense. But it's really hard to argue against it because oh, you don't want to have a good brand. You don't want to represent yourself. It's like if you say to someone, don't focus on building a brand. It's almost like they interpret it like you're telling them to be evil or something. It's like, no talk about the benefit. No one cares about your company name. No one cares about anything related to you unless you give them a reason to care about it. What they care about is themselves. People are self interested. There's a couple of books. There's ones like why not Socialism? Which was one of the biggest books pro socialism. And then there was the argument against it, why not Capitalism? And what's said in the book why not Capitalism? It's not that socialism would be bad for the planet. It's just it's bad for people. Human beings are bad for socialism.

It doesn't work.

It's a horrible system. I mean I just did the fourth episode today with we did a four part series of 10X talks about social entrepreneurship and how calling anytime you put the term social in front of something, it demeans it. But people do it so they can dress up like entrepreneurs and get invited to the right dinner parties.

And then

if you're anti social entrepreneurs, people think you're evil. It's like, no, I mean these are just leeches that try to disguise themselves as. Anyway, listen to the podcast.

It's.

It will give you that perspective. One more thing I want to mention before I forget. Price. Do you know how much the formula for? Some of you already know this because you've heard me talk about this or you just know it. Someone that doesn't know the answer. Do you know what the formula is for? How much to charge for something? Any idea? I mean, how have all of you, how many of you have things that you sell and you have a price? How did you come up with the price?

I just kept trying to charge more than people were willing to pay. And eventually as I got more confident, my prices went up and more credibility.

My prices went up.

So now I charge more than most people in my market.

You said something really important, which as soon as I got more confident, my prices. It's all about.

This is all a confidence game.

This is all a confidence gain. And some people are really good at marketing, but they've never been able to get a check for it. They think about it, they read books about it, they tell other people about it, but they never roll anything out. They'll try a little test here and they might spend 20 bucks and they'll make 30 bucks and they don't realize, well, if you spent 2,000, you might make 3,000, and if you spent 20,000, you might make 30,000. And if you spent 200,000, you might make 300,000. And there's a big difference between making 10 bucks on running a small Facebook ad versus getting to the point where you reinvest the profits and you literally start running a multi million dollar business. It does come with confidence. What I believe though is it's generated. It's generated by action. I mean, if you take the most freaking attractive, good looking rich guy who's shy and has trouble asking a woman out, and you take a bald, ugly, smelly bulk Bulgarian who's vulgar and nothing against Bulgarians or bald people or anything. I'm just trying to make an example of vulgar, you know, just. But that person goes out and asks women out, you know, for their phone numbers, for their emails on a date, and the other person just sits around at home watching videos of Evan Pagan or reading the game by Neil Strauss or whatever, Both of which are great friends of mine. I mean, I just spoke at Evan's last event that he's doing in the dating genre. And being a convert of your own system gives you confidence that you're not going to get any other way. So pricing. The thing I was going to say about the formula for how much you charge for something is based on your

ability to sell it.

That is the formula. The better you become at influencing, the better you become at telling a story, the more you can charge. I've said this a million times. If you go out and buy a Timex for 100 bucks, you're buying a watch. If you buy a pebble watch, you're buying kind of a cool techie watch. If you go out and buy a $10,000 Rolex, you're buying jewelry, you're buying status. Going back, I would have focused a Lot more of my energy knowing that there's a segment of the population that does not feel psychologically good unless they spend a lot of money. Because you know where the biggest opportunities are with people that no one hitting up in quite the same way no matter what business. What business are you in?

Heavy construction equipment.

Construction. What about you, sir? Real estate. If you cannot convince yourself that what you're doing is an enormous value, then you sell from your heels. You know what selling from heels is where you kind of like, you ask for the clothes but you're really not into it. You're sort of afraid. And the confidence actually comes from the validation and the edification that you're actually creating. You want to sell yourself on what is it you're doing first. So the question for all of you is whatever business you think you're in when it comes to making money, write this down somewhere, put it on your computer, remind yourself you're in the arithmetic business. That's the business that you're in. And if you can't make the arithmetic work, then, oh well. One of the things that I've done to help professional carpet cleaners is literally get them to raise their prices 10%. So you take the average carpet cleaner, based on banking information of the profitability of an average carpet cleaning company. The average carpet cleaner, not a very high priced one, but not a bait and switch, but a middle of the road average carpet cleaner around the U.S. i had these numbers done years ago by Larry Stymetz who wrote a book called how to sell at prices higher than your competitors. The average cleaning company can raise their prices 10% and they can lose up to 40% of their clientele and still maintain the same net bottom line profit just by a 10% increase.

So I got all these carpet cleaners,

they're charging, you know, X dollars a room or X dollars a square foot. Get them to do a 10% price increase. You think you're asking them to go commit murder. It's like, oh my God, I can't charge 10%. And I have to say, well, do you really think that you're going to lose 40% of your clients now if you do, who gives a shit? Because you're still, as a matter of fact, you're still, to save net bottom line profit, you have less mileage on your vehicles, less gasoline, less chemicals, less equipment, less labor, and you're still making the same net. Now what if you doubled your prices? What if you actually, what if you didn't lose 40% of your business if you raise your prices, three things will happen. Your sales will go up, your sales will go down, or your sales will stay the same. And what usually happens is they typically stay the same. And if your industry is so commoditized that literally you're going to lose the whole slew of your business based on price, then look at another business to get into. But the bigger reason is they don't instill enough value in why they charge what it is they do. So pride of spending is a really great element. So a lot of you here could absolutely transform your business. Even if you didn't learn anything more about marketing, just by leaving tonight and incorporated, increasing your prices by 10 or 20%, it would transform any of your businesses. Yeah. One other way I think I've learned from you of looking at marketing and pricing is it's like field position in football.

In great marketing, you talk about sets

people up so that they're predisposed, pre qualified, pre motivated and pre interested and ready to do business with you.

And so the key is with your pricing and or your messaging or your

storytelling, it's all about that field position. All of us are doing it.

And it's just, are you setting yourself up? You got 99 yards to go or do you have 50 yards to go?

Are you basically at the other goal line ready to put it in the end zone? Lee, how would you define marketing and why do you love marketing?

Well, marketing connects people. And for my companies, I'm always looking for a way to allow people to see what do we do, how do we do it and how we can serve them. So like in the veterinary industry, we have a holistic hospital. So we're looking for that top 5% of people who love their pets so much they will do anything. And they come to us and we teach them proactive care and we teach them how to have a longer, healthier life with their bed and people who want to do better in the world. I just absolutely love supporting them on their journey.

Great. Yep.

So, Dean, we're going to talk about mindset. So wanted to ask Lee, what is your perspective on the entrepreneurial mindset? I mean, what does that actually mean to you and how do you think about mindset? Because we can give people all the different strategies and ideas all day long,

but their ability to do something with

it, I think has a lot to

do with their mindset.

100% starts in mindset. And we actually just did a five day auction online, a five day challenge online. And one of the things that we learned is the Very first day, we brought in a mindset expert to help the entire community have the same frame of reference around how to approach things. And the first thing is, I start every single day in a gratitude circle, sometimes with my team, sometimes with my family, but every single day, I'm looking for the good. I'm looking for the things to celebrate. And I realized that in anything, you could look at a perspective one way or another. You could look at it that it's empowering you and helping you have a better life, or you can look at it that it's hard and a struggle and everyone's going to have things that are difficult and struggles. But how do you convert it to something that's more empowering in your life? Right. A friend of mine, Brandy Gilmore, taught me years ago to look at my stories, whether it's in work or personal, look at my stories. And as I'm telling a story, looking for the piece that's most powerful and most amount of love for myself and stop the story there. Don't continue the story to when something went wrong or something didn't show up or somebody disappointed me. She says, wire stories in your brain so that it's the most empowering, filled with the most love, so that you're carrying those stories forward with you.

Yeah. Great. All right.

So with that, let's talk about something that me and Dean have spent hundreds of hours discussing on I love marketing, which is how to get more customers. So what are some of the best ways that you've discovered in your careers, your businesses, to get more clients?

20 years ago, I bought a veterinary hospital that had already been around for 40 years. Right?

So.

So it was 2001. It started in 1961. When I bought the hospital, it had 3,500 current clients. In the following 10 years, I took that 3,500 and turned it into 25,000 clients who literally came and saw us in person, one at a time. And what I learned is it really is consistent action every day, every single day, we had different ways that we reached out. And in the center of my mind map, it says, attracting new clients. And then we had 13 different ways they could find us. Right? We had a mind map. 13 days, 13 ways. And the reason there's 13 ways is because there's 13 weeks and a quarter. And every deep dive on one of them. One might be networking, one might be JVs, one might be social media. Doesn't mean we ignore the other ones, but each week we deep dive on one and get really crystal clear on our Plan for that quarter and then we repeat it the next quarter. But it started with the mind map I wrote maybe 20, 25 years ago, and I still use that foundation. But in 2008, when the market crashed and veterinary hospitals were empty, they had hallowed halls. They were taking clients and making them part time employees. We were bursting at the seams and the group was wondering, like, how did we always have more clients coming in, even in a down market? And it was because consistently, every single day, we were doing marketing things. Every day, no matter what. Something I would test might be Facebook ads in another city and then count how many new clients we got from that city. But I made it fun for the team too. I will give them ways that they can participate, kind of gamify it at the front desk. How many calls did they close and turn into appointments for the team? How many people came to us from Yelp? And counting it and seeing how they converted it. And the more we gamify it, make it fun for the team and they get to win as well, the more fun it is for me.

Love it. Well, you know, you're quite familiar with elf. Go ahead, Dean, what are you gonna say?

I was gonna say there's a lot like ipower. Like what? Getting your team members involved in the process. Because everybody's got great ideas. You just need good direction by framing the question that's going to elicit the great response. I remember reading there's a great book about Albert Lasker, who was one of the old original advertising men. And when they were selling refrigerators back when refrigeration was brand new, one of the things that people were afraid of is that they didn't want to have something that was plugged in all the time and sucking electricity because they were new to the whole. You had this meter outside your house that you could see it moving, and when that's moving, it's costing you money. So people were weighing the benefits of having refrigeration versus their fear of this bottomless pit of electricity spent. And they said he tasked the entire company. He said, we need some phrase that makes people comfortable with Frigidaire as the brand that they can trust for refrigeration. And somebody who was the equivalent of in the mail room came up with the idea of that every Frigidaire is equipped with meter miser technology. And just those words, meter miser said exactly what you need words to say, to say, it's watching your back. It's not going to take any more electricity than it absolutely needs.

To.

And that was really the thing that made people comfortable choosing Frigidaire over all the others. Because all the others are just money pits. But you better get that meter miser, because that one will save us the most money.

Really big key you said in there, Dean too. And it's Genius, which is coming up with the right phrase that allows your customer to feel comfortable with their decision. They want evidence. They made a great decision. Right. And one of the things I taught my front desk, Joe, which was really important in the shifting closing clients at the front desk, is no matter what the client asks them, the first thing to say is, yes, I can help you with that.

Absolutely.

Then it puts their mind at ease that they have the right person and the right person who really cares about helping them. And just by using that one phrase, even if they have to say, you know what, I have to check on the answer and call you back, it's okay. Because they set up the relationship of I do want to help you. And I think that that's just been really key in my business is that my clients feel like the team sees them and listens and cares.

Hey, Joe, I just saw Evan Carmichael's here too.

Yes, we need to do a shout out for Evan and we. Evan is just a master at YouTube videos. If you don't follow him, follow him on YouTube. He's got 2.6 million subscribers, over 385 million views. I know that because he was just a guest on the Genius Network meeting we just had. And we're going to be doing a jam session with him at the Genius Network annual event November 6th, 7th and 8th because it was such a big hit.

He had a great interview on his channel right now with Kevin O' Leary from Shark Tank. He brilliantly did a two parter with him where it's 1/2 of the interview on his channel, 1/2 on Kevin O' Leary's channel. So it's a great model for collaboration there.

Well, Evan, why don't you pop on and explain what that is and then post it in the link so people can watch those interviews. And if there's anything that you want to say to either make fun of Dean or to ask Lee or mention anything, feel free wherever you're at out there bouncing on his trampoline. I'm sure where you at right now?

I am on my trampoline and I just discovered Dean is a fellow Torontonian. So we can't make fun of him. We gotta only show love. Shout out to Lee and her website too, because I was on and she's got this. If you haven't seen Lee's website, I popped it in the chat and it says epic video across the top of her coaching and speaking and with Oprah and high fiving and it's like, wow, how did she do that? I want to, I got to get these website people on board, but I think that's a great. Joe's on there too. Joe, you made your appearance. You're like right after Oprah on there. The link, I don't know where the link is. I'm sure it's somewhere off my YouTube channel. But Kevin O' Leary is trying to grow on his YouTube channel and he wanted to do something. He wanted to do more collabs and he happens to be in Toronto as well. And he wanted to do something in person because all of his stuff has now been remote and Covid era. And so we connected and we did a two part series. We had two hours or so of time to talk. And what we did was we took questions from both of our audiences. What do you want us to answer? And then we went through about 11 or 12 questions and we put half on my channel and half on his channel. And since I edited it or my team was editing and filming it, we took the favorite, our favorite questions and then gave him the rest. But they're still good on both channels. And one of the great things you can do on YouTube is there's a thing called an end card, which in the last 20 seconds of every video, you can call things out and it's clickable. So that could be your PDF download, that could be your lead magnet, that could be sign up for your email, that could be your website, that could be your offer that you want to send people to. And so what we did was we did a thing at the end where said, hey, if you want to see part two of this interview, go check it out on Kevin's channel or on Evan's channel. And we called the Kevin and Evan show for that day and it's just great to do collaboration. So anybody who's doing YouTube, I always love Genius Network events. They're great, amazing people. Huge warm hearts here. And so I'm looking forward to the annual event and jamming out with all you guys.

Yeah, awesome. Yeah. And there's a bunch of Genius Network members that are here too. So Evan's going to do whole session on just how to really build and grow a sustainable YouTube channel, which is awesome. So Lee, you know a lot about elf easy, lucrative and fun. Running an ELF business versus a half business, which I refer to as hard, annoying, lame and frustrating. What does an ELF business mean to you? Because you tend to have a lot of fun in what you do.

It's true. And that is the actual criteria when I'm taking on a project. Is it easy? Is it lucrative? Is it fun? MIT knows it as well. They run it through the same filter. I actually spoke to 8,500 event planners last month and I drilled this home so much that one of them sent me a gift with Lee Richter. Easy, lucrative and fun. I'm like, well, it's actually Joe Polish, but I just have heard it so much because I think, why make it anything else than easy, lucrative and fun? Especially at this time in my life when I have so many choices. And that is literally the filter I go through first for every project, it has to meet those three criteria. Seems so simple, but there's things that don't meet that criteria. And I cut it out.

Yeah, I love it. And that actually that term was given to me by my friend Mark Schneider, who recently passed away. And you know, it has been a great criteria on not just marketing, because I've actually trademarked ELF marketing. Right. And so, so if you do use it, you have to give me credit

because else we're going to just sue you. Really? No, I'm kidding.

Well, it depends. We may see you. It depends if you totally plagiarize my shit. But I love the term elf and I recommend using it as a criteria, use it as a process, and it's helped me. I used to think of it just as marketing, you know, doing automated robotic types of marketing methodologies. But I now apply ELF to people, projects, anything. Because if it's not money, is it easy, liberating and fun? I even applied into my personal life. So I'm going to take next year as a sabbatical. And so there's going to be a lot of things that need to be just ELF for me that aren't money related, but it has to be liberating. So I highly encourage it as a filter because the genius network members that we have a tool called ELF versus Half, where they list what are the people and the projects and things in their life that are ELF and what are the things that are hard, annoying, lame and frustrating? And really take a look at how do you eliminate the half and how do you get to the elf? So one thing I want to, I have this question I wrote down here and then I'm going to ask Jeff Madoff to ask you a question about pr. How can people utilize tough times? As many people in the world have been going through incredibly difficult times with the pandemic, how can people utilize tough times as a springboard for greater success? And what does that word that gets thrown around a lot success mean to you?

Well, success is that I have freedom of time, and I can make choices on how to spend that time. That's what money buys me, is freedom of choice, period. That's how I see it the way right now. You know what? Looking at tough times, the first thing I did, I remember on March 16, I sat down with my manager, and I'm like, what has changed in our world right now? We wrote a list of 25 things that have changed based on Covid and the pandemic, but immediately turned it into what can we do about it? And then a week later on Slack, they were celebrating how things were actually getting better. But it was because we were identifying the challenge and overcoming it together that they were excited about it. Right? It wasn't. They weren't afraid anymore. And they also knew if any changes happen, they'd find it on Slack, So they didn't have to worry about us making different changes and doing things in the company unless they were included. But I tell you, we have had so many more opportunities come out of this pandemic. Our company's up 31% this year. The team feels essential. They feel excited. They feel like people really need them and want them. And so what I do is I highlight that every Friday, I write, here's 10 things we're celebrating right now. And one of the things I've learned is to share that list with our clients coming in, too, so that they could see the value of the team. And by sharing it not only with the team, but with the clients, they could see we're celebrating the team, but also what we have to overcome as well. Because the clients are coming with their perspective of what they have to overcome, but they're not thinking about all the things we have to do to be there ready for them. And so I think by highlighting that it's now elevated on both sides, the appreciation. The clients appreciate the team work, and the team appreciates their position more. They have seen so many people lose jobs, lose opportunities, and even last Friday was boss's day, and they came in and they wrote me this beautiful card. And each one of them is like, thank you for being a leader and helping us be happy rather than scared. And I think a lot of that is just being consistent Sharing what is the challenge and then overcoming it together.

You know, I have a question I want to ask both of you guys. See if I can phrase this correctly. Where would you put ethics and ethical behavior in. In the world of entrepreneurship or marketing? You know, because a lot of times we think that success equates to unethical behavior. Right. You always see a lot of people that are cheating and lying and so on and so forth. Well, that if you're too ethical, you're out the door. Right?

So.

And I know that you guys each have a real kind of deep take on this. Let me ask you, Dan, start off. Where do you put ethics and ethical behavior in the realm of marketing or success?

Yeah, it's, you know, it's really interesting. And I, you know, I'll. I'll join another word to ethics, and that's morality. You know, that the two go together. Ethics, you know, I mean, morality has to do a lot with your mindset and, you know, the values that you have. But ethics is really about your behavior. How, you know, really the ethics is your morality in action. And. But one of the things I've noticed, I. I read an article once about inner city kids, you know, who are, you know, who could be dead at 8, they could be dead at 12. South Chicago. So part of the year, I live in Chicago because our main US Company is right near o'. Hare. But it's a war zone down there. You know, there's two coastal zones. America is really organized. If you go to any big city, you go to the police, you know, police headquarters and police headquarters. And you want. You talk to the officer in charge of violent crime, you know, in the city. And you bring a map and you give them a marker, and you say, where should I not go in this city? And they always do it by postal zones. And in Chicago, it's two postal zones. Isn't it interesting how Americans organize crime according to, I mean, what a country, you know, and anyway, so those kids do not have enough certainty about life that they can think more than 24 hours at a time. So when there's a possibility of stealing something, their first thought is, can I get into trouble in the next 24 hours? So what I came to is that ethics is a function of your time perspective. Okay? If, on the other hand, you have a time perspective, if I do this now, what's it look like 10 years from now? The behavior that you will exhibit during the next 24 hours will be ethical. And the reason is you don't want to be doing Something today that costs you ten years from now. And so my sense is that ethics is really a function of time, perspective.

Ah, very interesting. One of the things I really admire about both of you guys, Dan, is you guys both have really interesting perspectives on stuff. You know, it's not just the usual that you read in books, you know, like, who else would come up with that? I mean, I think you're absolutely right, you know, but over to you, Joe, what's your. What's your take on ethics in business?

Yeah, you know, it's.

It's considering for even the carpet cleaning industry, which is where I started off. I created a thing called ethical services. And I tried to. I've always tried to use the whole concept of, like, Dan. I asked Dan years ago. Let me start with this, and I'll try to share several different ideas in a little riff that I'll do here. So I asked Dan what's, you know, what's your favorite definition? What's your definition of selling? And he just blurted out, and I don't know how many years ago this was now dan, probably like 15 years ago or something. And he said, selling is getting someone intellectually engaged in a future result that's good for them and getting them to emotionally commit to take action to achieve that result. Now, I have that memorized because I thought about it quite a bit when he said it. Yeah, Dan always has these very interesting quotes that he shares. And let me just say this, too. I probably should have said this early on. Do you know, between both of you, do you know how many, God knows how many hundreds of thousands of people, maybe in the millions range that both of you have inspired, encouraged, have them show up to face incredible difficulties with, you know, maybe not in the funnest of ways, but just the ability to get through life when life is very difficult. I mean, both of you have been such incredible mentors and role models. If you've intended to be that or not. It's just what you are. I mean, by the very nature of. I mean, Jesus, just look at how many reviews the War of Art has. Right. And how much both of you impact people. And so, you know, everyone has something to sell. You know, part of it is a bigger future, though, in a way, to look at life. And so when I asked Dan that definition, I started asking my clients, you know, what do you think are the most important words in the definition? Getting someone intellectually engaged in a future result that's good for them and getting them to emotionally come, commit to take action to achieve that result, people would say engage, they would say action, they would say commit. And most people didn't get the three words good for them. And I always thought you can get someone intellectually and emotionally engaged in porn and shitty food and doing something damaging. I mean, what I've liked about the war of art is it's always about the higher self, not about the lower self. I mean, you can, you know, yeah, you can be a degenerate and you can get involved in vices and all that that does. There's, you know, that, as you say, you know, resistance will give you a free pass on that sort of stuff. And so as it relates to ethics, I always think of, you know, what's good for someone, and would you sell it to your best friend? Would you sell it to your mother or your father with the assumption you like your mother and your father? You know, for someone that you really care about, if you're in a situation where someone's going to go down a bad path or something that could be damaging or it could be rotten or it could be scandalous or not good for them, and you cared about that person, you would try to intervene. You might use words, you might use a challenge, you might use an intervention. You might try to block them from harm's way. And so who are we, in the best of terms, when we care about someone, we're selling, we're being persuasive, but we're doing it with the mindset of we're trying to care for this person and we're trying to protect them. So when it comes to. I think everything in my life is about connecting. Connecting other people with ideas, with each other, with things that make them better, not always feel good. Like, for instance, you wrote the Warriors Ethos, which you recorded in 2011. Everyone would be very. Their lives will be enhanced if you download that book and listen to Stephen read it. It's called the Warriors Ethos. I think it's less than 90 minutes, and it's great. And you talk a lot about, you know, Spartans and you have such this deep knowledge of so much of history. But anyway, you know, there's. The whole goal of making someone better is not always going to make them feel better. It's not always about happiness. Right? And we live in this culture. Everyone wants to pursue feeling, you know, sweet and loving and all that sort of stuff. But the fact is, human progress oftentimes takes enormous effort and in many cases, sacrifice. And so when it comes to connecting, there's true connecting, because you're either in communication with someone or you're trying to escape, you know, and when you are connecting with someone, you care about them, you're operating from a good place. Connecting, though, is when you're conning people and making it look like connecting. So there's connectors that use con artistry, and they con people and they blow smoke up their ass, and they sell crap, and they make promises and they. They don't that they have no intention of delivering on, or they're selling crap on a box, and the very best thing you're gonna ever see from them is their sales pitch or their marketing. But then there's real people that when they sell something to somebody or when they offer something to somebody, they actually really care about that person being better off as a human. So, for me, I don't. There's a difference between situational behavior and situational ethics. I mean, you might tell really crude, dirty jokes to your buddies that you would, you know, were in the military with. That could be vulgar. That could be inappropriate to many people. But you might not say that to, you know, someone's grandma. Most people have drank beer. Most people have gone to church. You usually don't drink beer in church, although I'm sure people drink beer in church. There's a difference between situational behavior and situational ethics. And I like people who understand the distinction and who operate that way, because we've all met people that, man, they just put on a great show. They really act like they care about you, but they're using narcissists or sociopaths or they have just created a value system, you know, that is different than, you know, the ones that we made it adhere to. And the weird thing. And I'd like to ask you guys about this, you know, as I'm rambling here when I'm thinking in my mind, is that I think most people think they're right. It's that saying that, you know, we judge others by their actions, we judge ourselves by our intentions. And I. I first heard that when. I don't know if you. Well, Dan, I know you know Harvey McKay. Do you happen to know Harvey McKay?

No.

Stephen, he wrote a book years ago. His most famous book, he's written a bunch of books was called how to Swim with the Sharks without being Eaten Alive.

I've heard of the book.

Yeah, yeah. Sold millions of copies. And he's now 90 years old, and he's a dear friend of mine. And so Harvey, he was doing the small event that he invited me to. It was, like, kind of a brainstorm with a bunch of, a bunch of business owners. And one guy was, Chris Widener was talking and he said to the, to the group, he's like, how many have ever been ripped off by someone? About half people raise their hand and he's like, how many of you ever ripped off anyone? And no one raised their head and

he said, he goes, huh?

He goes, that's interesting. He goes, you know why? He goes, because you know, the reason you've been screwed by someone but you don't think you screwed anyone is we judge ourselves by our intentions. We judge others by their actions. And, and I thought about that quite a bit and we all like you could intend to do the right thing, but do your actions actually show that? So I think it's takes a deep level of awareness and looking at the byproduct of your behavior and your, you know, because all of us have times where we're loving and we're caring and we're doing well in life. And others where we're desperate and we're self centered and we're tired and we're exhausted and we're maybe taking advantage. And so part of it is not that there's some perfect, you know, angel human that's always operating out of, you know, perfect ethics and morality. It's just being able to set up a way you operate in, way you behave and the way you conduct yourself in your character. Like my whole book is not about capabilities, even though I share a lot of them. It's about character. My goal of my book is to not just build, you know, Hitler had enormous capabilities. I'd say it'd be really hard to say his character was a good character. I mean, look at the destruction that some of these people. You know, when, when Dan, we were talking earlier with Stalin and Mussolini, I mean, they all had capabilities. You don't rule a country. You don't do what these people did without capability. Some of the smartest marketers I know have enormous capabilities, but their character is kind of shit. And so, but that's my opinion because if you were to ask them their intentions, they all think their value system is their value system. So there's a lot of den of thieves. It's, I grapple with this, you know, one person's freedom fighters, another person's terrorists. So you know, what is it? But those are my thoughts. That's, that's at least some of my thoughts about ethics and morality is what's the byproduct of what your life is about and where it leaves people. Does it leave the world and people in, you know, around you in a better place or does it cause destruction?

But I think you would say, Joe, that like, as a, as a marketer or an entrepreneur, that the more, and I'm sure you would say the same thing, Dan, the more good you can do, the better it is for you, for, even for your. Your own selfish interests. Would you agree with that?

I would. I would totally agree with that. And Dan, I'd love to. Love to hear your thoughts on it. And I have more thoughts on it, but I want to, you know, kind of.

Yeah, sure.

Well, I think the other thing is that, you know, that there's a matter of, you know, leading a very complicated life for a simple life. And, you know, I'm a straight ticket Republican ever since I could vote. And in Canada, I'm a straight ticket Conservative. But one of the, One of the presidents that I admire most was Harry Truman. And after, you know, because he's the one that had the big decisions, you know, I mean, so many big decisions. And, you know, and I remember there's a story, it might be apocryphal, but the day after Roosevelt died, of course, he was sworn in as the president. And he met with Roosevelt's cabinet. And he came in and he said, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, you know, you know, here comes Harry, a hick from Missouri. And he said, and you, you're used to Roosevelt, one of the great gods of American politics. But he says, here's the facts of it. I'm as powerful as he is because I'm President of the United States. And guess what? You're still cabinet secretaries, and I can fire you just as easy as he could fire you. And it just put everybody straight because he knew they were going to scheme against him. He knew what they were doing because they schemed against Roosevelt, you know, that they do that. But he's had a great saying. He says, always tell the truth. It's more economical. You only have to remember one version. And I think that ethics is a form of truth, and that is you can be the same person in all situations. And I think that, you know, a lot of people, they have to check out their surroundings to figure out who they're going to be in that situation, or they have to figure out who they've told what. What to make sure that, you know, they're keeping their story straight. And their story is so complicated, it's very, very hard to keep it straight. And I said that all comes at the price of what you're really good at. You know, that comes all that. I mean, if you do that, you're totally non creative. You're a totally reactive human being being. And I think that ethics gives you a very simple, energizing path into the future where you only have to be the same person all the time.

Yeah, I mean, another way of looking, I haven't really thought this one through. I'm going to be blathering as I say this, but another word for it, it seems to me, could be authenticity in the sense of when you open your mouth and you speak, you're really saying what you really think and not what you think is the other is going to create a, you know, favorable impression in somebody else's mind.

Yeah, one of your, you know, in the, in your current book, the book's coming out, you were talking about what your attitude has to be when you're writing and you can't think about, oh, this is, is this a great book? Is it, you know, is it, you know, am I, you know, is this really going to move people? You say, I'm going to throw myself completely in it and I'm going to finish it, you know, and get the book. And I remember Reagan. I'm kind of a Reagan type of writer. And when Reagan, you know, got to governor more, I don't think so much when he was governor of California, but when he became president, people say, yeah, everybody laughs at me because of the movies I was in, you know, what about crappy movies? And he said, well, I have to tell you, back then, they didn't tell us that the movie had to be good. They said they didn't want the movie good. They wanted the movie Tuesday.

Yeah.

And it's kind of like that. And I think that's a copywriter's attitude. I know. In other words, you got a deadline. I mean, people say Shakespeare, you know, Shakespeare. Oh, I could be like Shakespeare. I said, there's two things you have to remember. He did it for money and on deadline.

Yeah, yeah. And Dickens, like Dickens too, that was

writing, you know, install for money. And so my feel, my feeling is that. And Joe brought it up at the beginning. Joe brought it up or you brought it up, Stephen, that the, the best way to be really good at in yourself is have it be for value for other people. In other words, that you have in mind who you're doing this for. And so is it going to make a difference in that person's life and how are they going to feel after, you know, I mean, how are they going to feel about the value that they got from you? If you have your emphasis on that, you're taken care of. You know your friend who is in 24 that you visit with in Sundance, the actor. Glenn Marshaw, and he's fascinating guy, and I have to say that if you looked at his life, you know, he's, you know, Hollywood actor. He does movies, he does TV and everything. I bet he is the most fully employed actor in the history of the United States over the last 50 years. And he was telling Joe, he said, well, you know, he says, you got to look at it from the standpoint of a director. He says, you can't look at it from any other standpoint of the director. And the director needs two or three stars to even get on the board. He said, so I'm not a star. Okay. And then he comes down to about number five. And he said, who am I going to put in number five? And he says, I'm always number five in the directors. In the directors. And he said, I always prepared. I always show up on time. I'm always a great team member. And he said, I'm always grateful and thankful for every role I get. And then he's employed nonstop for 50 years because it is. It isn't about him. It's about the. It isn't about him that when the director gets to number five, oh, we'll put in Glenn, because that's an easy one. And my sense is the other thing is also to know your value to other people, and what can they always count on you for? I spent a lot of time saying

it can be a hard one.

You know, I always show up on time. I'm always prepared. I always come up with something new, you know, and my team just depends upon that. My clients.

By the way, I was going to ask you, Stephen, do you know who Glenn Morshauer is?

No. No.

Yeah. So he's not like Dan said, he's not like some, you know, a list celebrity.

But no, that's why he doesn't. That's why I saw his face.

I'm sure I would know.

But every director. Every director everywhere knows who he. He is.

Yeah. Let me share a story that Dan

knows this one, but years ago, me and. Me and Glenn were speaking at an event in Las Vegas, and it was. I think it was 2009. 2000. Yeah, I think it's around 2009, 2010. And Glenn has been in more military roles than any living actor. And so he's yeah, he was on every episode of 24. Other than Kiefer Sutherland, who was the main star, he was on every episode of 24. And at the time, there were pictures of Kiefer Sutherland on People magazine, I believe, National Enquirer, basically all the tabloid type of magazines on the COVID with him drunk on the sidewalk outside of the Viper Room in la. And I was asking him, I said, so what?

You were asking Glenn, correct?

Yeah, I was asking Glenn, what's the story on Kiefer? He goes, well, now that he's been outed, he goes, you know, I can maybe, you know, say a few things. He said, you know, great guy, super professional, shows up, does a great job. Everyone likes working with him. Awesome guy. And he said, at the end of. You know, at the end of his. Of the day, he finds it sometimes easier to sit and hang around and, you know, drink in his trailer and on set, then go home to his mansion alone. That's. He said. And at this point in Kiefer's life, he goes, his fame is globally inescapable. He said, there's nowhere on the planet that he could go without being recognized. And he said, you know, a single piranha won't do much damage, but a swarm of them will take down a great creature. And he said, if you get into this business, he was referring to the entertainment business, without knowing who you are, it will misinform you. That was the statement he made. And I was like, yeah. I go, that's really interesting. And when I first met him at Sundance, we're having lunch, a friend introduced us, and all these people were coming up to him asking for autographs. And I said to him, I go, does that ever bother you? And he said. He goes, you know, sometimes, you know, if you have to really be somewhere in a hurry, it could sometimes be challenging. He goes, but I am. He goes, I wouldn't even have a career if it wasn't for these people. He's like, I am so appreciative that anyone likes what it is I do. He goes, how would I even do what it is I do without these people that like what I do, like my work? And appreciative. He goes, why on earth would I have anything other than gratitude for these individuals? And he had an incredible work ethic, and he was genuine, and I've seen him in many situations. And he is always loves. His wife, is just a super caring, grateful, appreciative, appreciative person. And therefore, he gets roles and gets opportunities that others do not because he just comes from that place, but he also has done a tremendous amount of work on himself, and he's really quite aware of, you know, don't take yourself too seriously. You know, like my dear friend, you know, Dave Keckage, who unfortunately passed away at 78 years old last year from kind of a malpractice surgery. It was horrible. And Dave wrote, you know, he was my friend who was paralyzed from the chest down for half of his life. And he had one of his credos. He had 100 credos called kekich Credos, Cacaj's Credos. He had an interesting last name. And he said, things are seldom as bleak as they seem when they're going wrong or seldom as great as they seem when they're going, well, lighten up. You'll live longer. You know, just having the state of mind on how you approach things.

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 we can go back and pick up on the ethics, the ethics topic. So I, you know, I looked at your biography. So I looked and I, you know, I got to the end of your biography, and I said, oh, another guy into a university, and these were all the classes he took, all the. All the, you know, the different occupations. You were in the oil fields, you were a fruit picker, you know, and you did Airbnb in your own car or somebody else's car and everything else. So lots of different kinds of people, lots of different kinds of situations, including Hollywood, you know, being in Hollywood and, you know, being in the, you know, movie, writing scripts and writing books and everything else. But from the standpoint is that ethics in one area of life is the same as ethics in another area of life.

Mm, definitely.

There isn't any industry that's more ethical than any other industry.

No. And like. Like you were saying about the actor, your actor friend. I mean, showing up and being ready to, you know, hit. Hit your mark and say your lines and. And not, you know, be shafting anybody else is at least as important as talent, you know, and. Because somebody will.

Somebody will bring you back, you know,

and you will bring them back. You know, that's really like, Joe, you. One of the things you've always said, and this actually comes from Dan, too, that part of being an entrepreneur is not only doing what you want to do, but doing it with the people you want to do it with, you know, and so in order to be with those people, you have to be for them what you want them to be for you. Right. You have to show up for them and deliver the goods for them and be somebody that, you know, that's. That's ethical. Right. That's not gonna throw their buddies under the bus when. When the heat gets applied, you know? Well, I mean, I just want to say this before I forget it. You were talking about how we judge other people by their actions, but our own selves by our intentions. And that one of the axioms in. In screenwriting or also in novel writing, in any kind of story writing, is that the villain never thinks he's the villain. From the villain's point of view, he's doing the right thing. Right. And that's. That's, you know, if you think of any of sort of the great villain speeches like Jack Nicholson's one in A Few Good Men, you know, where he says, you know, you can't handle the truth, and he, you know, he's the guy that, you know, basically, you know, okayed the murder of this young Marine.

Right.

But from his point of view, he goes, this wonderful, great speech that Aaron Sorkin wrote about, we have to stand on a wall. There are bad guys on the other side of the wall, and God damn it, you need people like me on that wall, you know?

No, so it was one of the finest movie speeches of all time, by the way.

Yeah, it's a great one.

Yeah.

But sort of ethics, too, in a crazy way.

Oh, it is.

I'm sure, you know, if we had Putin on the. On that show right now, he would say, God damn it. The worst thing that ever happened was when the Soviet Union broke up. My people were crushed mentally by that and psychological.

Greatest tragedy of the 20th century.

I'm going to bring the USSR back, and I don't care who I have to kill or what I have to do to do it.

Yeah.

And I'm sure that in his mind, he's a saint, and. And to, you know, tens of millions of Russians, he's a saint, too.

Yeah.

Not to the Ukrainians, but to the Russians.

It's.

It's an interesting.

Has to do with anything, but it's just a thought.

No, here, here's.

I mean, I think it's a lot

to ponder about, like what do we believe and why do we believe it? And what are we really trying to do? I mean, I don't. I don't know about you, Stephen, but I've done, you know, in other countries, I. I've done several ayahuasca journeys, and one of the.

Okay.

I would encourage that for both of you at some point.

Okay. I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead. They're over here.

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