116: From Dead Broke to One of the Most Connected Businessmen with Joe Polish

Hi, I'm Natalie Jill, fat loss expert turned high performance coach. When odds are stacked against us, how do we shift and create everything from nothing? How do we level up when we aren't feeling it yet or we've had a big setback? On this podcast, I'll be talking to some of the most inspiring and courageous men and women on this planet who at their worst, learned how to achieve success greater than they ever dreamed possible. Leveling up and creating everything from Nothing. At age 18, Joe Polish was a drug addict. And not just any drug addict. The hard stuff, cocaine, meth, and more. He was suicidal, unhealthy, and he was doing anything and everything to soothe the trauma that he had lived through. He had lost his mom when he was just four years old. He was raped and molested as a child by a man he knew who paid him to keep quiet. And he had a lot of shame around this and suicidal thoughts. But after witnessing a drug rage from one of his friends with lighter fluid trying to burn everything down, Joe woke up. He had had enough. Today, Joe is a master connector of people. He's a marketer, a thriving results leader, and he's the founder of Genius Network, one of the highest level groups in the world of entrepreneurs and Genius X as well. The groups being home to some of the most successful entrepreneurs alive and is considered one of the most influential connectors in the world. Joe's helped build thousands of businesses and he's generated hundreds of millions of dollars for his clients. Some of the points Joe shares on this episode today, that we are asking the wrong questions when it comes to addiction. We need to be asking about the pain that caused it to not why are we addicted, that we are only as sick as our secrets, that there is no failure, we are either winning or learning. And that there is no relationship between being good and being paid. But there is a huge relationship between storytelling, connecting and getting paid. Well, this was a fascinating conversation that I took literally over 50 pages of notes on. Join in today and learn exactly how Jo Polish leveled up and created everything from nothing. I'm so excited for this conversation today with Joe Polish, who I've known over the years through many mutual friends. But this I'm so excited to sit down and chat with him today because his marketing efforts have created billions of dollars. Billions of dollars. And this is so fascinating because he did this from nearly being dead at age 18. And we're going to get into that. His stories fascinate me about his life and what he's overcome. I'm so so excited to have you here on leveling up so I can interview you. So thanks for being here, Jo.

Thank you. Great to be here.

So, Joe, you have so many amazing things about you and what you've created, but I want to go back to who you were years ago, back when you were 18, because I know then you didn't imagine all of this. Who were you then?

Well, when I was a scared, shy, introverted, pained, you know, to get Eckhart Tolle this year. A pain body. Right. And I was a drug addict, so just trying to literally get through life and using methods of numbing myself with alcohol and cocaine and snorting crystal meth and, you know, smoking and just any substance I can put into my body. At the time, you know, I thought I was just, oh, it was entertainment, it was fun, but I was completely out of control and I was.

Okay, back up a minute though, because you just said that so fast and you slid in things like crystal meth, which are just not the normal that you hear. Oh, I tried pot in high school or I did alcohol. So that was normalized to you. You just said that this was part of life.

Yeah, no, totally. I mean, when you're, when you're doing a lot of drugs or whatever your behavior is, you tend to hang around everyone else that's doing the same thing. So that becomes your reality. So my. I mean, there was a time where I actually thought almost everyone got high. That, I mean, everyone. I mean, that was my worldview where people would, they would get high. And that was something that you do. I'll tell you. There was a lot of fun, enjoyable moments of being inebriated and being blitzed out of my mind. However, I had no control over it. In my worst state, When I was 18 years old, I weighed 105 pounds. You're a male and you're 5 10. 105 pounds is pretty damn. I would wake up and I would blow my nose and blood would come out. I would cough up blood, sometimes little chunks of flesh. My whole. The membranes of my nose were just deteriorated because I was snorting a lot of coke, I was snorting crystal, I was snorting speed, I was taking speed, you know, lots of LSD, smoking pot multiple times a day. Now I'm 51 years old, so give you some context back then, I used to actually hide a bong in my locker in high school.

Where was your. Where does your family know this? Like, how does this even come about? Like, I'm picturing my 12 year old daughter right now and I'm thinking like, she doesn't know what any of these words mean right now that you're saying, does this even come about? Like, did you, did you see this growing up? Like, where did this come from?

Well, a lot of it was introduced. Well, let me back up then. So when I was born in El Paso, Texas, my father was a locksmith. I had an older brother who was four and a half years older than me. Mother was a former nun. She'd actually left the convent because she had gotten ill. She met my father in church. They ended up falling in love. They ended up getting married and having a family. Both of them struggling. We lived in trailers half my life and stuff. So we never had a lot of money. But my mother died when I was four years old. She had a type of stomach cancer and she never drank, she never smoked. I don't know what happened to her, but I'm not going to go deeply into it. But a lot of people that go into the church or become nuns, a lot of it's to escape some sort of childhood trauma and go to God, some sort of relief. I have no idea what happened to my mother, but she had something happen. So she died when I was 4. Broke my father's heart. He lost the love of his life. He never recovered from it. So every two years, my entire childhood, we would move to a different place. And so I was a shy, scared kid. My father was traumatized and I never had very few memories of my childhood being joyous. It was a really scary pain.

Stress. Yeah, Yeah, a lot of stress. I'm assuming in depression, your dad and sadness. Did you have brothers and sisters?

Just one brother who was older and, you know, and he was older than me when my mother died. So there was a lot of. There was a lot of pain there. Now with all the moving and all the different places, I won't go into all the horror stories because everybody listening has had their own battle, battle. So this is not like, oh, my life is so, you know, horrible. I will just say that I have a lot of traumatic things, but which makes sense because if you just look at how someone, if they're being very successful or achieving or if they're self sabotaging and self destructive, if you look back through their lives and you piece together, it kind of makes sense. I mean, if you want to just look at people's lives and the decisions that they make and the environment that they're in and their exposure to stuff, and it has a lot to do with how they turn out and so for me, you know, I was raped and molested as a kid between a relative by who? I don't out the person, you know, just for. Because I know this person also had a life. It was a male and it was someone that I knew and it was very manipulative and I was paid money not to say anything.

Wow. All the things that would just mess up that. Yeah.

So I was filled from that moment forward. I was filled with a lot of bad things that happened in church that, you know, to go to Catholic school, growing up for a period of time until I totally rebelled and said, you know, screw this. However, you know, I was just filled with shame and I didn't know how to make sense of the world. And it, you know, I had a lot of suicidal thoughts growing up. And you know, drugs and numbing myself was a way to escape it.

Who was the first one that turned you onto the numbing? So it's like you experienced it in a different roundabout way between your dad and your mom and then this man that did this to you and then you're obviously going through your own suicidal thoughts and sadness. Do you remember the first time this even came up about drugs or when you first had that offer for that?

Yeah, I think the first introduction to drugs probably came from my brother and his friends. His oldest got it. That's. I mean, he was going through the same stuff as me, you know, just he became, you know, he became an addict. People become addicts because of, you know. And let me say this too. When I say become an addict, I believe because I created a thing called genius recovery. So about time now is spent helping people with, you know, addictions to not only alcohol, but to behaviors from workaholism, because work all respection to sex addiction, to gambling, gaming, you know, Internet, you know, performance addiction. I mean, there's a lot overeating, you know. Yeah.

I love that you put that to get all this together because so many people don't. They just, they separate it all. Like one's bad and one's good, but they're all addictions.

Exactly. And you know what an addiction is, is doing something that you want to do or that you don't want to do that has compulsivity, impulsivity attached to it and you're not able to stop and it has negative consequence when someone's like, you know, I have a exercise addiction, but it's good, or I have a positive addiction. Well, I don't ever frame addiction as a joyous thing because what addiction has Attached to it is a lot of suffering and a lot of craving that seems to be way beyond the control of the person. So I don't believe that addiction per se, is a choice. And, you know, a lot of people argue the whole choice argument. You know, the best one I ever heard was from Kevin McCullough, where if someone's shooting heroin and someone puts a gun to their head and says, if you stick that needle into your arm, I'm going to blow your brains out. Well, at that point, most addicts will move the needle away from their arm and they will put it down because they don't want to die. Whereas you can't stick a gun to a cancer patient's head or a diabetic and say, don't have symptoms. It's a different thing. But what people don't take into consideration is as soon as the threat of danger, that gun away from that addict, the element of craving seeks back in. And the only concern is, how can I numb myself?

That's interesting. And if you look at the brain itself, how that functions, it's almost like the reptile brain. Yeah, that's the fear thing. So if it's going to make those choices, but the underneath, all the core stuff is still there. So that addiction is going to take over.

Yeah, yeah. So I believe that addiction is a response to trauma. And so I had a lot of underlying trauma that happened to me as a kid, and that worked its way out by first starting with drug addiction. I did a lot of drugs, and I had never dealt with the underlying trauma. And here's the thing. Addiction is actually a solution. If you're depressed or you're in pain, you have adhd, you have anxiety, you're sad, you're lonely, there's nothing wrong with wanting those painful, uncomfortable, horrible feelings to go away. It's the mechanism you choose to scratch the itch that makes all the difference. And so I chose to scratch that itch the only way that I knew how. When you get high for the first time and you feel good and all of this loneliness or fear or inhibitions or pain, you feel better. Of course you're going to want to keep. It's like just say no is like saying, you know, there was a just say no campaign. It's just not as easy as that. You say that someone who's horribly depressed or not enjoying their life, and you give them a means of smoking a joint or a drug or having sex or watching porn or whatever, and that makes them feel good, of course they're going to want to continue to do it.

So my next question around this then is how are you still alive? Because at 18 you're doing some hard stuff and like you said, you're 105 pounds, you're completely unhealthy doing this. How did you survive? I mean, and were you living at home? Were you living on the streets? Like, what is your, what role? Did your dad know about all of this? Was he involved at all?

You know, I think my dad was. He was on a lot of pain meds because he had, he had a, you know, he was a veteran and he was in constant chronic pain from knee injuries on top of the fact that he just had a stress life. And you know, I feel very fortunate because there's a lot more available personal development and my ability to seek out self help and therapy and 12 step groups and all kinds of stuff that eventually became things that I've done for my own, you know, my own life and my own recovery. You know, he was kind of oblivious to it. He didn't quite know how. I mean, he was in survival mode. And when people are in survival mode, they don't have a lot of awareness of what's going on around them. And so, you know, the way that I survived is I literally had to leave the environment. There was one day where I was living with my brother and one and he had a roommate and everyone's doing drugs at the house. And this guy. This is an interesting story. I don't know if I've ever told this on a podcast. Maybe I know I've shared it like with my genius network, but this guy had been busted for dealing cocaine. He literally was having to go to court the next day to face charges of cocaine possession and dealing. And he, when I got home at this apartment we were all living at together, he was freebasing cocaine, smoking through a glass pipe over a sink in the kitchen. And I was like, man, you gotta go to court tomorrow. Do you really?

You have some logic in you still.

Yeah, I mean, seriously, you could make such an interesting movie about my past life and. Well, actually someone has made a movie about me, you know, Connected. The Joe Polish story. Actually, if someone wants to see the trailer, it's that connectedthemovie.com it's not out.

Yet, but I can't wait to see this now.

Yeah, it's a movie about my life and I go to bed and I get up in the morning and this guy's in a three piece suit still over the sink, freebasing cocaine.

Oh my Gosh.

With a lawyer waiting outside for him to take him to court for cocaine possession. And at that point I was like, going, that's real addiction. I mean, that is not. That is someone who's literally their psyche, their brain, their being just is in stress and they want it to go away. And they're picking the worst possible data sort of thing and that, you know. So about a week later, you know what this. I'm at home with one of my friends watching tv. This same guy bust into the front door. Like, literally the front door, the bus open as if, like, pops are coming in. And he's screaming in hysterics. He has a can of lighter fluid and just starts spraying the lighter fluid everywhere on me, on my friend, like, just in hysterics. And literally I got lighter fluid dripping off my hair. I used to have long hair back then. It was funny.

I'd look like, you guys can't see him right now. But he's bald. So that's why.

It's exactly. I shaved my head. But back then I had bleach blonde hair. I had a, you know, kind of some sort of weird mullet.

I've got to see a picture of this. I'm dying now.

We do have pictures. It's crazy. It's crazy. And so actually you can see him on the trailer of my dog shows me, like, back then. And so he's like, screaming. He pulls out a lighter and he's holding it up. He's like, I'm gonna torch this whole fucking place. You know, I'm just screaming and I'm like talking him down. Like, put the lighter down. And at that point, I was like, if I don't get out of this place, my life is over. And I packed up all my stuff into a piece of crap pickup truck. No, I'm sorry. It was a Chevy Love is a truck back then called a Chevy Love Luv. And they used to make these little pickup trucks. And I drove to New Mexico and moved into a trailer and spent. I removed myself from the environment. Anyone I knew that was doing drugs, I couldn't easily get drugs. And when I got to New Mexico, I didn't go to a treatment center. I spent six months taking Tylenol and aspirin and just the worst headaches and went through these crazy physical withdrawals.

So did you know? Did you. It's interesting because you gave that analogy earlier, earlier about the gun to your head and would you make it. It's almost like the lighter fluid situation. And watching your friend in this rage woke you up in a moment. And were you not thinking, like, because you were addicted? Like, were you thinking, if I move and I pack up my stuff, like, how am I going to get over this? Were you thinking I would just find drugs there? What was going through your mind right then? Were you deciding you were going to heal yourself? Like, what was that conversation you were having?

I think at the time, it's hard to recall every thought. It was all of those things. Probably. You know, it's a combination of. To me it was a survival. I felt like I don't have a choice. I'm going to die if I don't get out of here.

Okay.

I just remember that looking in the mirror and looking like a skeleton and see, you know, I mean my worst state, I weighed 105 pounds on average. I was about 120 pounds.

Okay. But still, that's very small for a 5, 10 male.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, I was eating fast food. I wasn't getting any good nutrition. I mean, what I've learned now is that serotonin and dopamine mean if you don't have enough of the good, happy chemicals run into your system. Drugs are an alternative way to do it. Sugar, the number one killers in America. The first one is sugar because of sugar related things.

Totally.

Second is tobacco, the third is alcohol, and the fourth is opiates. Those are the.

Isn't that amazing? All the talk on opiates and sugar was first.

Oh, yeah. U.S. news & World Report recently interviewed me, a woman that does a whole bunch of articles on opiate addiction. And she was asking me my thoughts on opiate addiction. And people can read this article. U.S. news & World Report. It's online. I said to her pre interview, I said 230 people approximately a day die from alcohol, whereas about 120 die from opiates. Nearly twice as many people are dying every day from alcohol. But opiates are the thing that seem to get most news. But take tobacco, then you take sugar. I mean, it's huge. And then we're not even talking about all the other behaviors that are mixed in with it. So many of my entrepreneurial friends that are high achievers, total workaholics, work again, is the way that they scratch the itch and it's out of control and they can't stop. Or how many people are looking at their phones first thing in the morning all throughout the day at night. I mean, every form of social media has the ability to give you continual random dopamine. Hits. So we are littered with addiction. But the chemicals are the easiest ones to point at. But people don't realize how insidious all these mechanisms are for trying to self soothe. And a lot of the things that people think are the cure are actually the cause.

Yeah. So you leave for New Mexico in this mode of like, I want to live. So you, you kind of snapped out of things for a little bit. You go there, you're not joining any programs you don't know. So you're, you're nursing yourself through the Advil and the Tylenol and the resting. What's occurring to you then in your mind? Are you. Because obviously you're going through withdrawals and you're just feeling a mess, I'm assuming. Were you, did you start to have a vision for a future at that point? Were you thinking you're going to go backwards? Like what was the conversation? Because you've caught, like just to look at where you were into where you are now. There's so much in between. Like I'm. And I want to understand like how this occurred.

Yeah. So I started listening to a lot of Nightingale Conant programs, which programs back then on, you know, cassette tape and stuff. Earl Nightingale and you know, Brian Tracy and all these old school self help people which eventually ended up, you know, Tony Robbins, all these people. I mean, my friends, you know, today, back then I would literally read self help books and I would read, I would just read. And so I found things eventually. Here's what happened. I ended up getting a job delivering newspapers in my truck. Right. That's how they wouldn't have kids on bikes. They would have, you know, adults. And I would, throughout the night I would just listen to these personal development cassette tapes and I would just try to fill my head with personal development. Then I ended up getting a job selling gym memberships at a health club in Las Cruces, New Mexico, because that's where I moved and so called Tom Health Fitness. And I was not working out. I didn't like sports, my desire for sports. I had a sadistic little league coach when I was around 10 years old that would force me to hold the baseball bat in a certain way and I couldn't hit the ball. So I quit the team. And then all the kids were picking on me and bullying me, but I couldn't play the, I couldn't play the game the way that this coach would force me to try to hold the baseball bat. And so my liking to sports, I mean just real crappy childhood stuff. And so I ended up, I never worked out, I never did sports. And so I ended up getting this job selling gym memberships. And here I was, this skinny kid, but selling gym memberships. And I became really good at it. And I would walk people through the gym and I would show them the equipment and I started learning how to sell that. You know, you paint a picture of what their future is going to be like if they're in physical shape. Instead of talking about, here's the equipment, I would really talk to them, what do you want to work out for? It was like this thing about just realizing that people don't really want to work out and lift weights and do exercise. They want the result of that. And how do I paint the picture of this, how your life is going to be? And I ended up becoming really good at it. So in a small town of, at the time, about 80,000 people, I was selling about $30,000 a month gym memberships. And I started lifting weights and I started working out. The issues are in the tissues when it comes to the trauma and stuff. Getting physically active can do so much for you. I mean, a gym membership in some cases could be infinitely better for some people than a therapist. Although in some cases it's not either or it's maybe you do everything you need to do. I started working out and I started exercising. I started feeling my body and I started getting into it and I started eating healthy foods and voila, my brain started functioning better. I started feeling better. Then I met a guy at the gym who offered me a job about a year into this at a mental hospital where I could come and be a mental health tech. I took a job as a mental health tech and I would go to this hospital and I would drive the adult patients to AA meetings, Alcoholics Anonymous, NA meetings, Narcotics Anonymous, CA meetings, Cocaine Anonymous. I would drive the patients there, I would sit in on these meetings while they were doing these 12 step meetings, not realizing how later in life that would become such an instrumental part of my recovery.

Now, during all this is fascinating. It's interesting. I'm hearing this and I'm like, okay, you got your most brilliant marketing and sales training. Really, like during this time in the gym memberships, like teaching, speaking into vision and doing those things, and you're helping yourself. During that time, did you ever have those temptations to go back to drugs, to go backwards?

Oh, yes. Yeah. I still drank a little bit, but I wasn't doing drugs. I had not done drugs for. Yeah, I mean, I literally quit. I didn't have access. And so I could have. But there comes a point in time. And it's weird, too. It's so weird to explain this. Different people have different levels of craving, because some people, they just. Ultimately, I'll share a little bit. What my core addiction actually became was sexual. And I'll talk about that in a few minutes. That came from the abuse that happened to me as a kid. So wherever the trauma occurs to you, a lot of times you use the same wound as a way to try to satiate the craving.

Interesting. I've never heard that, actually.

Yeah. Because everyone has, you know, trauma bonds and they have arousal templates. You know, however someone lives their life out sexually, a lot of it, whatever someone is. Is aroused by can be traced back to the first time they had sexual arousal. And so if you see a woman who dates men that beat her or abuse her physically, mentally, emotionally, if you trace back to early parts, in most cases, she was either raped or molested or abused or assaulted. And so a lot of times this. This arousal template lives its way out. I mean, I have a fascinating interview with Pat Carnes that I did years ago. Who's the top sex addiction doctor in the world. It's on YouTube. Anyone can watch it. And we talk about arousal templates, and we talk about how these manifest themselves. Going back to that, I actually lost my train of thought of what I was going to say. I want to make sure I answer the question you asked.

Yeah, no, you did. I was asking if you ever had those thoughts of addiction, of how did you combat. But it's. Which it sounds like you did, but it sort of changed into something else.

Yes. And by the way, the rumination for people in recovery, I think it's always there. I've never met any addict that doesn't, like, fantasize and have some sort of euphoric recall. I mean, I still remember all of the crazy times. But what I was able to do is I was able to attach more pain to doing the drugs than the pleasure I used to get out of it. Because there was a point in time where I would wake up to get high and I would get high to go to bed. I literally. My whole life revolved around numbing myself and around getting high. And life for a period of time worked. I mean, it did work until it didn't work anymore. I was incredibly shy until about my sophomore year in high school. Then I started getting high, and I became one of the most popular people in my high school because I was party. And it opened me up and it opened up this ability to not have this fear that was.

Well, it gives you confidence, too. Like, the confidence drives everything.

Yeah, it gives a fake form of confidence because without that, you know, I actually felt like, oh, I couldn't function really well. And it was really weird because it just kind of turned on me. I mean, there was a. There's this interesting, like, line about people that do cocaine that says, you know, the. The shortest line is too much and the longest line is never enough. Meaning it. There's no balance in it. And, you know, if you are truly. People say to me, isn't everyone addicted to something? And it's like, you know, I mean, I kind of understand what they're trying to say about that, but I know. I think a lot of people aren't addicted to things. I mean, an addict, a real, Like Las Vegas, which has one of the greatest and manipulative marketing slogans of all time, which is what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Except for guilt, shame and STDs, and, you know, trust and all of these, you know, now some people can go to Vegas, party their asses off, hire a hooker, do some drugs, come back to their life and, you know, go back to some maybe normal behavior. Other people, they can't. They're bingers and they can't stop. And so, you know, there's. There's a lot of. If you even think about the alcohol industry and the manipulation, like, what is the slogan for the alcohol industry? Well, the slogan is drink responsibly, Right?

Yeah.

What is the first word of drink responsibly? It's a command. It tells you to drink. Do they really care someone drinks responsibly? I mean, maybe they try to think they do, but they just want people to drink. Right. So what happens is our brain, and you said the reptile brain. I mean, there's a. You know, the pleasure parts of our brain are. Yeah. I mean, it's fun to look at, you know, arousing images online. I mean, social media couldn't even exist if it wasn't for porn. I mean, think about taking attractive people off of social media. And what are you going to look at? Food and pets? I mean, people would, but it's way more, you know, perpetuates as a result of physical imagery of attractiveness. So there's so much of seductiveness that's tied into addiction. There's so much fantasy that people pursue. The question is, whatever you're doing in your life, is it really something that is expanding you in a way that's healthy and nurturing, or is it, you know, collapsing you? Is it contracting you? And so, yeah, so you.

So you step into more sex addiction. And while you're in that, navigating through that, because I've got some more questions about that. But it sounds like you're also really getting a vision for what you want in your life and you're setting the timeline for what's about to happen for you, I'm assuming.

Yeah. Let me tie some of this together to see how it makes sense what I do today. So today, you know, I have genius network, which a lot of people, you know, consider me, you know, one of the top connectors. I don't ever say that about myself. People say this about me. You know, Joe's a connector. He connects everyone. Well, Johann Hari, who's written a couple of great books, you know, he did this, one of his first books on addiction, Chasing the Scream, the first and Last Days of the War on Drugs. And he's kind of popularized this term, which is the opposite of addiction. Connection. Right. And so it is. And so I was just looking for connection. I grew up a very disconnected kid. I found false connection through drugs and later with sexuality. I mean, I would pay for sex because I was paid money to not say anything when I was, you know, raped and molested as a kid. And it wired in my mind that sex is dirty and it's shameful unless you pay for it. So there was a part where I'm not allowed to have any sort of sexual pleasure unless it's like, I pay for it. And I didn't say this for years. I mean, I live with tons of shame. I even ended up becoming a millionaire before the age of 30 when I. I became very immersed in marketing and very skilled, and I started teaching service businesses how to build and grow their business. Because one of my first businesses was a carpet cleaner. And I was a dead broke carpet cleaner living off credit cards. And I learned marketing because I needed to eat, I needed to survive. And I fell in love with the words that you could put on paper and through advertising. And I transformed this small carpet cleaning business. Then I started selling these courses to other cleaners, and it worked. And I transformed the lives of thousands, I mean, tens of thousands of service businesses all over the world. And I became financially successful. And here's the thing, though. You take untreated traumatic childhood experiences and you give money to a person like that, you can buy pretty much most things that you're, you know, whatever your twisted mind can come up with. So, you know, once I had access to money.

Wow. Yeah.

I didn't know how to connect. And I had really bad betrayals early on with relationships, because when you're in a traumatic place in your life, you find partners whose dents match your dents. And so when you're kind of a, you know, sort of a broken person, you find other broken people. They like. We're like magnets to each other. And when I was in that state, you know, I had a relationship where I was with a woman for a period of time. We ended up having a child together. And a year. I won't tell you the whole long, drawn out story, but I was raising this child with her, and we had separated because, you know, we just could not get along. But we had this child, and I was pursuing sole custody with 50. 50 visitation rights. I was part of a father's rights group, and I was trying to get custody of this child so that she couldn't leave the state. She wanted to leave the state. And I found out five days before this child's first birthday that I was not the biological father.

Oh, my gosh.

Whoa.

Yeah. I can't even imagine.

It crushed me. It was the hardest thing I dealt with, and the only thing that made the pain go away was just to go and have sex. And I was trying now, back then, I thought, what the hell is wrong with me? I'm going out and I'm hiring escorts, and I'm, you know, engaged in fusion, and, like, what the hell is wrong with me? And what I didn't realize was I was just trying to connect, but I couldn't, you know, like, let me say this. My favorite definition of intimacy, which was shared with me by a guy named Wharton years ago. He said intimacy is a mutual exploration of a shared, safe place. A mutual exploration.

I like that. Yeah.

Abuse is anything that takes away the safe place. And addictions are what we do to make ourselves feel good when we don't have a safe place.

Wow. It's powerful. Yeah.

Yeah. And so I just never felt safe from the time I was molested growing up, I never felt safe. So I didn't know how to be intimate. I didn't know how to connect. And. And even the ways, even though it was maladaptive, even though it was unhealthy and dysfunctional, I was simply just trying to connect when people are doing. Bill W. The founder of aa, said, as alcoholics were trying to drink God out of a bottle. And I was just trying. So addicts or people that are pursuing something, even if it's self sabotaging, they're trying to fill a void, they're trying to fill this pain. Like my friend Gabor Mate says, the question is not why the addiction, but why the pain? Why does the pain exist that causes people to do these self sabotaging things? So for you, as an example, I mean, with your podcast, with what you're doing, I mean, you're just, you know, you're trying to encourage people, you're trying to inspire people, you're trying to share other people's stories so that hopefully people can glean some insight and some strategy and some tactics and some mindset lessons and some how do you do this and how do you do that? I mean, I was, you know, I was still pursuing, trying to have a better life. I was just picking the very wrong ways to do it. You know, I was trying to connect. And so, you know, the fast forward now I built one of the greatest connection networks. So much of my life is around connecting other people, first with themselves and then with other people. Because I realized, you know, you can't, you know, silent battles are the hardest battles to fight. You don't want to suffer alone. You're as sick as your secrets. The reason I talk openly about this, very few people in a position like me that will publicly go out and talk about. And since I started doing it, the amount of men and women that come to me after events that they hear me speak of, they're like, yeah, I have a porn addiction, or yeah, I'm having affairs. I've a lot of women, I've sold myself for sex. It's insane. The amount of people that have had sexual trauma, physical trauma, manipulation, gaslighting, dealing with narcissists, dealing with sociopaths. And so part of it is like, wow, there's such, there's such amount of human suffering in the world. So how do I take my marketing skills and not just apply it to running businesses and companies, which I love? I mean, I want to be nurse. It's like, how do I actually. So my goal now is to change the global conversation about how people view and treat addicts with compassion instead of judgment, and find the best forms of treatment that have efficacy and share it with the world. And so I do that through education in the same way that, yeah, we're doing education here to just share people. That's a mechanism people.

It's really brilliant. And it's just so inspiring how you even figured all of this out on your own. It's like you had a lot of things working at the same time for you. Like, you were kind of. You learned marketing, you were learning about yourself. You're walking through addiction all sort of at the same time to bring you to this place, which is really, really powerful and cool. I want to bring back just a moment to the carpet cleaning days, because I know you were dealing with a lot happening right then, but what was it that. Because there's a lot of people listening now that either them or someone they care about is in that spot where they're saying, I'm broke. I don't have anything. I'm in this place right now, or my business just failed. Whatever it is that their money conversation. And that was very real for you. You said you were broke, you didn't have money, took a job as a carpet cleaner. How did you find presence in that and creativity in that to be able to create that marketing message, struggling with everything that you were struggling with. Because there's so many. I know there's people listening that just had that massive failure, and they're like, I can't even get. Get to that place of being excited or being creative. How did you do that?

Yeah. Well, first off, people have to remember that you're either winning or you're learning. Right. How you frame it. You never fail unless you fail to lose the lesson, or if the failure is so severe, it literally kills you.

Okay.

There's always that.

I love that you're either winning or learning, not losing. Learning.

You're winning or learning. And as my dear friend Shawn Stevenson, who just recently died about three weeks ago, and I was with him in the hospital.

Oh, wow.

It was one of the most tragic things. And we lost a guy who just. People knew.

He was incredible.

Human beings. The last thing he said to me, last words from him were, he was in severe pain. He was under. You know, he was on a lot of drugs because he had a hematoma in his skull, and that's what ended up causing him to die during the surgery. And he said he kind of had a lucid moment, and I was there with his wife, Mindy, and I was holding his hand. She was holding his other hand. He said, this is happening for me. And I looked at him and said, what? He's like, this is happening for me. Not to me. And then he kind of went back into a pain state, and I was just like, wow. You know, obviously me and Sean had talked about that, and I've heard other people say that before, but in that moment, it's almost like, you know, even that guy with as much that he's been through in his life, he had that moment. Like, this is still the years of work that he'd done on himself to frame it. I think this is a great way to look at life, that even when you're going through struggles, say, this is happening for you, pain is a messenger. I hated being an addict. I hated my life. I wanted to disappear and be dead so many times when I was in the throes of addiction and feeling hopeless and feeling lonely and feeling pathetic and embarrassed and shameful, and I don't even belong on this planet. And for some reason, there was still that. That part of me inside me that just wanted to survive, that just wanted to get through it. And, you know, I've now gotten to the point where I wouldn't be able to do the stuff that I do today had I not gone through all that shit. So everyone that's going through it, nothing feels good in the middle. You know, if you're like. If you're in the middle of a hard workout and it's an hour long, 30 minutes in, you might be like, oh, my God, this sucks. I can't stand this. But when you've done it, nothing feels good in the middle. So in the beginning, you have to use courage. You have to tap into your own resourcefulness. You have to put yourself into an environment. I had to get away from drugs. There was no Santa Claus that showed up with some magic motivational speech. I literally had to remove myself from the environment, and I had to rebuild. But looking back, if you look at every breakthrough, Natalie, that you've had in your life and most of the listeners, where they've really gone to the next level, I can almost guarantee you there was massive adversity attached to it. And at the time, the breakup where you had your heart ripped out of your chest, someone died, something severe happened. You lost a job, you're in the middle right now of some sort of. You're going to lose it all. I mean, you can transform those things if you find the elegant solution and the elegant answer. And sometimes that literally is getting out of your current worldview and just saying, okay, what is the message here that life is trying to share with me? And this door has closed, but what do I need to do? And, you know, sometimes it's going to just be painful. You're going to go through grief. However, you know, you tap into other people, you listen to other people's stories. It's. You know, I tell people all the Time. Even if they're, they're an anti 12 step sort of person. I'm like, go to a support group. There's they're free, they're available almost everywhere in the world. Even if you don't consider yourself an addict, go to any 12 step open meeting and sit and listen to the people share their experience, their strength and their hope. And that will help you get through the challenging times. I mean, a lot of ways I just read books if I couldn't find anyone today. You can listen to podcasts, you can find things, but it's really the ability to not let the part of your brain that says, you've lost it all, you're a failure, you're a loser. Eckhart Tolle has this great line where he's like, here's a spiritual practice for you. Don't take your thoughts too seriously. When that voice in your head is like, you're a loser, you can't make it. Someone breaks up with you and you feel just, you've lost it all. It's like, well, feelings are not necessarily facts. Just because you feel terrible and life does it doesn't necessarily mean that's the case. And sometimes I believe it's when life is not working is when you have the raw material needed in order to make your life work. Like my friend Dan Sullivan says, all the obstacles that seem to oppose our goals are actually the raw material needed for achieving them. If you think of all of the adversity, adversity is fuel. Adversity is raw material for you to develop the future that you want. And when life feels like, oh, it just sucks and it's awful. Yeah. And now you have some place to go with that. It's all how you frame it, it's all what you do with it. And I would encourage people, don't worry alone. If you're in a situation where you're just miserable, you have to walk out of your house, you have to get away from the computer or whatever it is that's keeping you in that state. You move your body, you know, do yoga, do actually put some healthy food, drink water, get sunshine. I mean, think of yourself as, you know, the million dollar racehorse is what I say to my genius network members all the time because most of my clients are running multimillion dollar businesses and they're very successful. And that's where I make money. And then the rest of the stuff that I do, I give away for free. Right.

I love what you're saying too, because this is what's coming Up. I know this is what's coming up for listeners too. So so many times people that are in that spot will say, well, that's easier because you have. Have money. It's easier because you're making money. You have this. But when you don't have money, how do you create that? They shut it out. And what I want people to hear is that everything you're saying is the reason you have money now. It's the reason because of those beliefs. So it didn't go the other way around. It wasn't that you had money and fixed this before. You had that at the carpet cleaning business, when you were in debt, when you were struggling with. This is when that change occurred. So what you're talking about for listeners, this is relevant now for anybody, because this is not a millionaire's plan. This is. This is what's going to break you through to. That is what I'm hearing too.

Oh, yeah, exactly. And so here's what I would say to give, to even go back to what you're saying. How did I actually. So here I was, dead broke carpet cleaner, living off credit cards. I had a friend I went to high school with that talked me into getting into the carpet cleaning. So I got into this business, had no experience. We never even cleaned our carpets growing up because I, you know, I used to make this joke, maybe we moved every two years my entire childhood because the carpet got dirty. My dad didn't know what to do somewhere else. I never, ever remember my entire childhood ever having our carpets cleaned professionally or go renting a rug doctor or something and doing it ourselves. Never, never happened. And so we would just move every couple of years. And so I have a friend from high school who talks me into starting this carpet cleaning business with him. So I do. And after about two months, this guy's drinking every night, partying, doing everything. And this is after I'd gotten clean from, you know, came back from New Mexico and moved back to Arizona and started this carpet cleaning business with a partner. And it was just not working. I was living off credit cards. I was paying money to actually run this business. I wanted to get into another business. And a friend called me, another friend called me and said, you want to go on a jet ski trip at Saguaro Lake, which is a lake out here outside of Phoenix, Arizona? I said, when you're broke and you don't have any money, you don't have any discretionary time to go entertain yourself, you're just trying to survive and trying to eat and that's what I was just trying to, you know, survive. And he said, well, you know, I go, no, I'm busy, I'm gonna have to work. And he said, well, the guy that owns the Jet Skis is this multi million dollar real estate investor. You may want to meet him. And so that piqued my interest. So I figured out I got to go meet this guy. I don't know what the hell is going to come of it. So I got to the lake and there's my crappy pickup truck, my friend's truck, this guy that had the jet skis. And I finally had a chance to sit on the tailgate of the truck with his, you know, rich real estate investor that I'd been told by my friend Pat. So Pat and this other guy's friend are out on the two Jet Skis. And I'm talking to this guy and I said, hey, I have this small carpet cleaning business and I want to get into another industry where I can make more money. And I hear that you do really well and I'm wondering if you have any suggestions. And he says, well, is there anyone else in your business making money? And I go, yeah, there's a couple companies in Phoenix that do over a million dollars a year. And to me, that's a lot of money. And he goes, well, if there's other people that are making money in your industry and you're not, there's nothing wrong with the business that you're in. There's something wrong with you. And I was like, oh, it's so.

Good though, such good feedback.

And so I immediately said, well, no, I don't do any bait and switch advertising, which a lot of these companies do. A lot of them have been established for a long time. A lot of them do high pressure selling when they're in the home to try to upsell people. And you know, and they've been around for a long time, so they've been established. And I go, I've spent six months getting certified and trained, you know, so I'm really good at cleaning, but it's just a really tough business. And he goes, look, young man, he goes, you're like most people, you think the grass is always greener on the other side. And he said, what's going to happen if you go into another industry? You're going to have to spend another six months, another year, another two years learning the technical skills of another industry so you can go out and repeat the same bad business habits that have caused you to be a failure in this business. And I was like going, shit, you know, that's not the motivational speech I was looking for. He said that to me, but he didn't let me off the hook. I don't even remember this guy's name. I wish I. This was the first, what I would say, most impactful, defining mentor moment of my business, hearing this guy say this. So I drove back from that jet ski trip. I remember I was totally sunburnt, but I was sitting there thinking, I live in America. I've got a lot of personal problems. I'm certainly neurotic as all hell, but I'm driven and I work hard and I care about people and I'm not lazy. You know, other people have figured it out and I haven't. They obviously know something that I don't. And from that moment, I was like, okay, I have to figure out what are people doing. And so I own a URL. I've done nothing with it. So someone can't even go there. But I saw it on the back of someone's shirt years ago and it said, winners find ways. And so I registered that as you. And I thought, you know, people that win in life have found a way to win, find ways also. When I was losing in life and a drug addict, I just found a really great way to lose and make my life not work. And so I started reading, I started studying. And even though I would read books on positive thinking and motivation, I was still broke. And I learned that there's no relationship between being good and getting paid.

That's very true.

Yeah, there's a huge relationship between being good, being good at marketing, and telling your story, getting paid. So I had a friend accidentally give me a newsletter written by a guy named Gary Halbert. Someone can go to the garyhalbertletter.com and they can read all of the newsletters. They've all been posted. Gary was a dear friend of mine. He died in 2006. But I started reading Gary Halbert's newsletter. I then started subscribing. I then started buying, like, video programs that were on VHS tape back at the time there was no Internet. I started applying it to my carpet cleaning business. And I created my first sales letter, which is a consumer guide to carpet cleaning. And I taught people how to choose a carpet cleaner. And I ended up then using 24 hour free recorded messages. And I started using direct response marketing. And I turned this in six months, I went from making 2,300amonth gross, which wasn't even enough to pay overhead. To over 12,300 bucks a month with a total with a single technician. Just because I change the words on the paper.

Oh, I love this so much. And this is the other thing that's really cool about this. So when people hear things like sales marketing, right away they think like scam or what's somebody trying to do. And what I'm really connecting here and I hope people are hearing is that all that is true. Good marketers are really good storytellers and the best storytellers are sharing their authentic selves or sharing their actual life. So there's nothing scammy about that. That's very real. And that's the vulnerability and the intimacy, the buzzwords that we keep hearing that people are trying to be. But when you truly just walk your walk and share your personal truth, that is marketing. And that's what works.

Oh, absolutely. In the carpet cleaning business, I even went on ABC's 2020 with Barbara Walters and the investigative reporter at the time, Arnold Diaz, and we did an anti bait and switch story on how to not get ripped off by a carpet cleaner. And I had them put ethicalservices.com, which is something I set up because I would live. I did five different news stories teaching people, you know, consumers how to not get ripped off by carpet cleaners in service businesses. And I would teach carpet cleaners how to use education based marketing. So my consumer guide is a template. Now, even though we're talking about carpet cleaning, if anyone out there sells anything even remotely more sexy and exciting than carpet cleaning, you can use this sort of methodology of just providing value, because money and people really would be well served to really take this. Write this down or take it serious. Money earned ethically is a byproduct of value creation.

Money. Say that again. Money earned ethically is a byproduct of value creation.

Yeah, it's a byproduct of value creation. So if you go out and create value for people, because what is a business? A business is solving problems for a profit. And if you can go out and solve problems for people, I mean, see, right, A lot of people think of, they think of marketing, you know, they'll associate it with someone that ripped them off or high pressure selling. But think of selling as influence and think of marketing as storytelling, like you said, right. If you are more influential, you're going to be more persuasive, you're going to get more attention. If you tell a better story, you're going to enroll people, you're going to attract people. And so think of marketing as storytelling. There are ways that you can use marketing and selling and see people love to be sold, they hate to be pressured. And so I learned how to provide education. So my first consumer guide to carpet cleaning and I don't have it in front of me, this is all off the top of my head. It said, consumer guide to carpet Cleaning. Read this guide and discover seven questions to ask a carpet cleaner before you invite him into your home. Eight mistakes to avoid when choosing a carpet cleaner. Six costly misconceptions about carpet cleaning. Crawling critters and a guide to the slime, grime and livestock that's seeping, creeping and galloping through your carpet. How to avoid 4 Carpet Cleaning RIP offs, which method cleans best? And how to get your carpet cleaner to 100% guarantee their work. And then they would open up this guide and it said, dear homeowner, choosing a carpet cleaner isn't easy. Why? Because you're bombarded with confusing claims, simply bad information, near worthless methods, unqualified technicians. How do you ever find a qualified, competent carpet cleaner? You first start by reading this guide. And now with this information you can make an informed, intelligent decision. See, and that's it. Because consumer, the number one question going through all consumers minds is who can I trust? So your job as a business owner, as a human is to establish trust and rapport. And rapport is trust with comfort. So people don't just trust you, but they feel comfortable with you. So what I learned is the best and most effective way that I could sell something that nobody even wants to buy is teach them how to make a buying decision. Provide them in advance with valuable information. So even if they didn't choose my carpet cleaning company, I would be the one providing with them. They didn't know there were seven questions to ask until I told them they were. They didn't know the eight mistakes to avoid. They didn't know how to avoid four. So whatever you're selling, if you're an advertising agency, if you're a web designer, if you are a hairstylist, if you're a chiropractor, if you're a graphic designer, it's like what are the misconceptions? How to avoid getting ripped off by people in this industry. And when you provide that information, think about the podcast that we're doing. So a lot of people see Natalie Jo, right? You have all of these things that you offer for a fee because if people don't pay, they don't pay attention. Now a podcast we put out for Free. And a lot of people hear it. If they resonate with it, if they find it valuable, you know, they can get it for free. You're paying for the recording right now. You're paying for your time you're having to organize and get guests on, but you're putting that information out there for free. In a lot of ways, it's education based marketing. And if people resonate and you build rapport with them through your podcast, they may say, you know what, I'm going to take a look at what Natalie has to sell because she's given me so much value for free. Maybe the stuff that I give her money for would. It's like people will see the beauty of what you're doing here. And I do the same thing with my podcast because I have four different podcasts. People will be like, wow, Joe's giving me away stuff he's already paid for. Anything I'm going to give him money for in advance. This is literally providing value in advance to people. It's education based marketing. Now, a lot of people don't call it that. And a lot of podcasters, they don't. They have really. It's all a setup to try to just give a little bit of value and then maybe we're going to try to pitch you on something. But my whole premise is just give people incredibly valuable stuff for free. And they might say, wow, if I get this much value for free, I wonder how good the stuff that they charge for actually is.

And then they see, yeah, also, and I know, I'm assuming you do this too. A lot of what I walk through, like, with this podcast, is my own education. And I'm just sharing. So I'm learning as I like. As I'm interviewing you, I'm learning how you think and are wired and I'm sharing it. And that's also part of problem solving and being authentic and storytelling. All of those things is just sharing who you are, I believe.

Exactly. Let me speak to that because it's such an important point. So I believe there's three ways you learn something. You either learn through the school of hard knocks. You go out and you get bloodied. You figure things out on your own. You have a lot of failures and you're certainly going to learn because every time you fall down or you touch the hot stove, you're like, well, that burnt me. Maybe not doing that.

I'm like the queen of those. I've got. I've definitely. I've graduated with like a master's plus plus Ph.D. i don't know. From School of Hard Knocks.

Me too. Exactly. And honestly, the hard knocks is what makes you who you are today. It's a hard knocks is what, in all the hard things and all the adversity and all the shit that everybody is going through and has gone through is literally the fertilizer for building the life that you want. But you just have to. It's fertilizer and how to use it right in the moment when it hurts the most. It may not make sense, but all of your life experience, at some point, you'll look back and say, wow, that was one of the most difficult things I ever went through, but I'm glad I did it, because I'm able to turn trauma into transformation.

Yes, yes. Love that. And you said there's three ways, so School of Hard Knocks and one of the others.

Second is you learn through the experiences of others. You read their books, you go to their seminars, you invest in their education. You read their. You know, you read, listen, watch what it is they do.

Masterminds going to things like that.

Exactly, exactly. And then that's the second way to learn. And because you want to learn from the giants, right? You want to learn from the experience of others. Now, the third and most effective way to learn is you then teach other people.

Yes.

Interview them. You ask. You know, you. Because when you learn something, then you have to go. So if someone wants to get the most out of this podcast we're doing right now, if they go out and say, okay, let me take five or 10 minutes after I listen to it, don't just jump onto the next. Listen to this. Just sit down and say, okay, let me spend five minutes and think, what was the insight that I got? What's the first action that I could take with anything there? And then who am I going to teach this to? And you go and teach somebody or maybe take a look at something me and you mentioned on this podcast, and then they go and share it with someone else. It just.

Yeah, yeah.

They go very shallow with stuff. And my whole thing is, you're better off mastering one or two books in a year than reading 50 books a year.

Very good point. Yeah. And it makes sense, too, because you think, like, I'll say for sure, I get my best ideas for what I want to teach after I'm listening to other people. And it's like, it's not that I. They gave me and I'm now taking and just putting that out there, but it's triggering my own responses and my own connections and my own learning. And now that's like my best prime time to go teach.

Yes, exactly.

I love this. This is so good. Gosh, this is. I'm so glad I'm interviewing you right now because I'm totally understanding why you're so successful at things. And it's true. It's interesting because I've done. I've done about a hundred, and I've done over 100 interviews now. And there's a theme with everyone. Even though the stories are different, everything is totally different as far as people's lives, the theme is the same. That there was a decision made, there was a vision casted. They taught other people, they found value, they shared their story. It's like the same theme. And I love, like, hearing this from you. It's really the same thing. And I love that you've completely turned all that pain of your childhood and your teenage years and your young adulthood into this complete passion. And it's working.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, see, my thing is after, you know, because I've sold tens of millions of dollars worth of marketing courses and training, and the beauty is I've, you know, I've transformed so many small business owners because they didn't work. I just provided them with a plan and a path that I had learned, that I had discovered. And I'm a curator. I mean, I believe that any problem in the world can be solved with the right gene. Even though I have a company called Genius Network. What I mean by Genius Network, instead of just having a ton of followers and a ton of fans, because I'm not a very big social media presence. As a matter of fact, I kind of shy away from it because I find myself very easily getting sucked into if people. I want people to like me.

Everyone does. Everyone. They can act like they don't care, but everyone wants that at their core.

Totally. It's like this whole craving, pay attention to me, Pay attention at TED this year. Joseph Gordon Levitt. I was there at TED in person. He's an actor and he gave a TED Talk and he said, you know, I'm famous. I'm an actor. And he goes, but what I find is that when I'm trying to get attention versus when I'm giving attention to something happier when I give attention. So the analogy I use is if you love playing guitar, you get into a flow state, or you're into a physical yoga practice or something, art, writing, whatever allows you to connect and you give attention to something like your family, your children, nature, but your beautiful hike, which Used to have tremendous serenity. Now becomes you. Capturing a ton of videos to put on Instagram. Then what?

You're spying on me? I don't sound like my husband right now.

I'm just kidding, by the way.

Look, I'm actually not kidding. It totally is true and it happens.

This is where we're at, everyone, as.

I'm making a post about being present on my walk. You know, it's like the walking contradiction. Totally get it. It's so true.

But think about this though, and see, this is the beauty that you're even saying that most everyone is sucked into this.

Yes.

It's like we are a culturally ADD culture now. And it's like the things that if you love playing guitar, but all of a sudden you now have a camera pointed to you playing guitar in the thing that used to give.

That's in my house too. Yeah, no, it's true. It's all like. It's the angle. Like, what else. Yeah, it's a problem that's in itself is an addiction.

Right, Right. So knowing that we live in that sort of world, the real question is, what connects you and what disconnects you? And there's beauty in all of this because you can connect other people with amazing things as a result of it. But you got to be careful of. Because it's not like it's going away. This is just the world we live in. The question is, it's not good or bad. It's how you engage and how you interact with it. People are like, oh, so are you anti drugs? I'm like, no. As a matter of fact, I think one of the greatest things that's going to help people in the future with trauma, ptsd, depression, anxiety, is plant medicines, things like iOS, ibogaine, mdma, guided therapy. But that's different than someone going to Burning man and thinking they're having a conscious journey when they're getting high in a camper.

Totally. And though, like. And also I want to. You've also turned. You mentioned a couple times, interview. You almost turned your time with drug use into gratitude because had you not walked through that, you wouldn't be where you are today. So it's not that those were good at all, but look. What. Look at the gratitude in it because you. It's made you who you are.

Exactly. And the thing with drugs, like, people like, well, what's the solution? Well, the solution is why I want to help change the global conversation. And how am I going to know when I change the global conversation? That's first the goal to get people talking about it. But it's finding the best forms of treatment that have efficacy and sharing it with the world. Because of this, you cannot punish the pain out of it. And if you are in pain in your life, you can't beat yourself up. You can't be throw someone in prison that's an addict and think in a more stressed environment is somehow going to heal them. And I'm not saying to let people that have committed violent crimes and hurt others off the hook. That's not what I'm saying. The point is, is whenever you take a punitive approach to trying to whip someone into shape or doing it to yourself, I'm really speaking to the individual out there that you know, the man or the woman that's listening to this that beats themselves up because you're not yet where you want to be. That's you. You want to fill yourself with encouragement and inspiration, but you don't also want to not drive yourself and push yourself in areas where it's needed. It doesn't, you know, you're not. Don't wait for the world to discover your talents and your skills and your passion. Do the things that are going to get you discovered. You don't just have self esteem and happiness and money because you want it. You get it because you generate it. So you have to think of yourself as how do I generate confidence? What are the actions that I need to take? Life gives to the giver and takes from the taker. I have a book called Life gives to the Giver that's about to come out. And part of it is you want your life to be better. When I say any problem in the world can be solved with the right genius network. To go back to that, a genius network is a network of people that have skills and capabilities. It could be five people, it could be two people. In order to have a genius network which I have now, I have one of the greatest networks in the world. Ask me how do you, how many.

People do you have in that, by the way?

You've got a lot of about 250 this network group which is my 25 grand a year group. And then I have a hundred K group where people pay a hundred grand a year. And then I, you know, so and then I have a big annual do every early November, every year in Phoenix. And so but I do genius network. I would do it even if I didn't get paid. But the challenge is it wouldn't work if I didn't charge for it because.

No People have to invest in themselves. They have to invest or they don't. They don't pay attention, like you said.

Exactly. So in order to have a genius network, you have to be a genius networker, and you have to do genius networking. So you've seen the term be, do have, right?

Of course.

In order to have what it is you want in your life, in this case, I'm talking about a genius network. You want a group of amazing individuals, you have to be a genius networker, meaning you have to be on the lookout for who has skills and capabilities. And here's the way that I do it. You focus on what's in it for them, not what's in it for you. See, the way that I get anything in my life is I don't ask anyone to do anything for me without creating value for free.

Yes.

And I don't have an entitlement attitude. And I've gone into a lot of conversations with my dear friend Dan Sullivan, with Strategic Coach, because he's helped me with a lot of this thinking. And so part of it is I think to myself, what needs solved? So what do I need solved in my life? So if I want to be in better physical shape, who do I want on my genius network? I want a nutritionist, maybe I want a personal trainer, maybe I want a yoga instructor, a massage therapist. If you want to be a better parent, who needs to be part of your genius network, that's the best persons or people that you know that could give you amazing guidance and direction as a parent, if you want to build a website, if you want to write a book, who do you need as part of your genius network Entourage?

Yeah. You're like, building your own entourage of people. I love it.

Exactly. Right, Right. So I just built a business around it, and I called it Genius Network. And so people come because I bring the geniuses together and I curate it. But anyone could do this outside of their, you know, in their own world. And so, like, when you're interviewing all these people, like you mentioned, you're building your own genius network. You have all these people that are sharing stuff you're learning, and then you're sharing it with other people.

So it's interesting that you said that, because it's. It's very true. Like you said, you approach everything with what can you add value first to them? How can you help solve their problems? And that's the very reason the podcasts that do work, I believe that they do work too. Not just for the listeners, because that's part Two. But like, I think of any guest I've had on here, it was a give and take. Like, I'm asking for an hour or so of their time. They're giving their best information, but there's a give and take on that, like who I'm sharing it with or what. So it's always that. It's always that. And it's interesting that people. That I'll have people frustrated that, like, they can't get the right guest or they can't. And I want them to pay attention to that because there has to be a give and take or you're gonna get a lot of no's.

Exactly. I mean, I literally turned down 50 podcast requests, which I get at least 25.

Sure.

A week. I'll turn down 50 for everyone I'll say yes to. Why did I say yes to you? For one, we're friends. Secondly, you're awesome. And third, you know, you genuinely are out there helping people and stuff. And, you know, I mean, I wish I could, like, say yes to every request I get, but there's a totally. You would never have a life.

It has to be in that. Okay, so I have like 5 million more questions for you, but I'm going to value your time. I'm going to have to have you back on later, especially before you launch that book I just found out you're launching. But I do have a. I ask everyone the same final question, but I'm actually going to switch it for you because I have a better question for you that I'm dying to know. My question normally is, if someone's in their rock bottom spot, what would you tell them? What advice would you give them to level up and create everything from nothing. But instead I want to flip it and I want to know if you lost everything tomorrow. Joe, if stuff just hit the fan, Genius Network is gone, you lose everything. People don't like you tomorrow. I don't know, everything's just a mess. All of a sudden you're back, you have credit card debt again. It's back in the carpet cleaning days. Like, it's just your identity is gone. What would you do? I'm curious.

What I would do is I would go. I would have a notepad, not a computer, not electronics. I would sit down and I would do a thinking time, which is a term from my buddy Keith Cunningham. And it's. I would literally sit down and I would think of what are. I would be as resourceful as I could be, and I would say, what do I need to do? What can I do now? And I would think of what's possible that I could do. And I'm a big visionary possibility thinker, as are many quick start entrepreneurs.

But I would say, what's 3393 over here, by the way?

We're talking about the Colby 5293.

Okay. Five, two. Yeah. We're both a nine. Nine quicks. Our Colby test. If you guys don't know what that is.

K O L B E. Kathy Kolbe, who's a dear friend of mine. So if you ever want Kathy Kolbe on, let me know she's okay.

I might have to add that next. Yeah. So, okay, so you would think what's possible?

Yeah, what's possible, what's probable.

Okay.

Right. And what. And I would say, and who in my life, what is the most elf thing that I could do? Because what I teach people the most.

What thing?

Elf, Easy, lucrative, and fun. Okay, Easy, lucrative and fun versus half hard, annoying, lame and frustrated.

I love that.

So you can have an elf business or you can have a half business. And I will tell you, hardly anything is elf. In the beginning. It's usually half. In order to get elf, you have to put a lot of effort. But you can have a hard, annoying, lucrative, and frustrating business. And I've had moments of those where I make money, but I had to bleed a lot. I had to go through a lot of pain. So I would sit down and I would think, because most of the answers that people want, and when I say answers, you may not know, what's the product? What's the sales letter? What should I sell? What should I do? But your brain is way more resourceful than you give it credit for. In the brain cannot avoid a question. So if you ask yourself, why does my life suck? Guess what? You're going to come up with a lot of answers to reinforce why your life sucks.

And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, right? Like, it's not gonna help you with your future.

Exactly. But if you say, what can I do? Where can I go? So what I would do is I would literally just. I would. I would flesh out of me what you know, where am I? Like, I start every one of my genius network meetings with three questions. Where are you want to go? How are you gonna get there? Now all these people that are selling mastermind groups now are stealing my stuff and they're creating their own tools out of this. But I've been doing this.

I'm an ebook up tonight. As A quick start. I'm just kidding.

No, for like, you know, But I have this tool is like, where are you in your life?

Right?

Where do you want to go? Okay, Are you gonna get there? So if you're down and out, if you're broke, you're struggling, where are you right now? I'm shit storm, man. I've got, you know, I'm a hundred grand in debt. I have to feed my kids tomorrow. I don't have money for it. That's where I'm at. Where do I want to go? I need food. I need this. How am I gonna get there? And you just start in the how you're gonna get there. It's like, what can you do? The other thing is, who can you reach out to that can help you? What call do you need to make? Here's the thing that I think about all the time. I say this all the time at my genius network meetings. Okay, everybody, starting tomorrow, you can no longer charge for what it is that you sell. You can no longer charge for it. The only way that you can get paid is if you produce a result for someone in advance and then you get paid. So if you have to think like that, because there's a lot of people, like, I want to be a thought leader, but, you know, the whole thing is any idiot can come up with a thought. I like people that are result leaders. And so if you become a result leader and you can produce a result, then you can write your own ticket. So the thing is, is start. You're down the path of what is the result that I can produce. I can get any job I ever want anywhere. And most not any job, but most cases, if I if. Which I probably would never do, but if I just lost everything and needed to go get a job, I would pick out who has a company and I would say, let me come work for you for free, for a week, for a month, whatever. Let me come in and just see what I do. And I would go in and I would produce a result. And you know what? They probably offer me a job.

So amazing. This is so brilliant. I love this. I've loved chatting with you. Oh, my gosh. Will you come back on before your book releases? Because I have so many more questions for you.

I'm happy to do it.

I'm having you say a public publicly so I can get you back on this. This is so good.

Only if the people listening actually like me.

They're gonna love it. Where can people find you? Like, obviously tell them where they find Genius Network. Where can they find more about your addiction help? All of it.

Okay. So most everything can be linked from my name, which is Joe E. Joe Polish, like nail polish or shoe polish. So joe polish.com that's my Instagram Facebook handle, that's my Twitter. And I don't do a ton of social media, but they can find out about genius network@gieniusnetwork.com okay. Also, if people type in my name into itunes or Stitcher wherever they listen to podcasts, I have 10x talk with Dan Sullivan.

Yeah, his podcasts are great. I mean, you'll love listening. I've listened to almost all yours. It's incredible.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. And geniusrecovery.com is the educational platform so people that they can find any types of meetings all over the world. So we have links to all kinds of free resources. We have anything there. We have links to podcasts and a bunch of videos that I've done with people like Gabor Mate and Tommy Rosen and different people that are addicts. And there's an open letter to anyone struggling with addiction. So someone goes to geniusrecovery.com, read the open letter, which is kind of letter explaining what addiction is. And if you're struggling with addiction yourself or you have a friend or family member, it gives you ways to how to think about it and how you can actually start going down that path.

And I'm going to link all this up. Thank you so much, Joe. Thanks for leveling up with us today. Please share this episode if you found it helpful so others can join in and don't forget to hit that subscribe so you don't miss out on future shows. And if you would leave me a five star review. I appreciate those so much. I read all of them and it's how I know that I'm giving you information that you find valuable. And come interact with me over on Instagram @nataliejofit. I read all the direct messages and comments over there. Make it a great day. Creating everything from nothing.