From Rehab to Rebrands: The Comeback Story You Didn’t Expect

Joe Polish: Recovery, Marketing & the Business of Being Human

What if the same principles that heal trauma could also build great businesses? Entrepreneur and recovery advocate Joe Polish shares how connection, not competition, drives both healing and success.

He opens up about addiction, shame, and authenticity, then breaks down how ethical marketing works: educate, don’t manipulate. Joe’s ELF filter easy, lucrative, fun, shows how to build trust, design community, and create work that sustains you.

If this shifts how you think about business or recovery, follow, share, and leave a quick review to help others find it.

Chapters

• 0:00 Opening: Nerves, Fame, Intent
• 3:20 The Psychology of Fame and Humility
• 9:00 Trauma, Addiction, and Facing Secrets
• 17:45 Intimacy, Safety, and the Stigma of Sex Addiction
• 24:30 Recovery Principles and Family Systems
• 31:00 From Addiction to Entrepreneurship
• 37:30 Direct Response Marketing 101
• 45:10 The Consumer Guide and Free Recorded Message
• 53:20 Licensing, Case Studies, and Scale
• 1:01:00 Pricing, Packaging, and Pride of Spending
• 1:09:20 Building Communities: From Carpet Cleaners to Platinum
• 1:17:10 Genius Network: Structure, Members, Standards
• 1:25:00 Connection as a Skill: What’s in It for Them
• 1:33:00 Boundaries, Integrity, and ELF vs. HALF

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:05

Okay, so welcome to our podcast. This is a little bit different today because this podcast is a spin-off of our radio show. Okay, so I don't even know how to start because I was telling Ty when I got here, I've interviewed a lot of people, but I'm so nervous about interviewing you. And I'll and I'll tell you why. Because I mean one of the reasons that I met you through Walter, but what happened was you popped up in my world like a year and a half ago. Uh and I got invited to go on a podcast, and I was doing the podcast as a guest, and your name came up, and then I got invited to go to another podcast, and I'm like, and then another podcast. I'm like, who are these people? They're inviting me. So when I go to their podcasts, you're like a guest on these people's podcasts. And your name just kept popping up and popping up and popping up. So I was one day, I was I was just kind of like, I gotta interview this Joe Paulish guy, right? And so then Walter invites me to this charity event, and you know, there's Prince Harry's there, right? You come walking in, and I see your I'm like, that's Joe Paul! Holy shit! I gotta, please, Walter, introduce me. I want to be and I couldn't, and I was like the famous, right? I couldn't. I was like, dude, you gotta come my podcast. Can you come on? You remember that? I was like, yeah. So now here we are. So awesome. Well, I'm scared you did. Yeah, I'm really glad you're here, man.

SPEAKER_01: 1:30

So, what do you want to accomplish today?

SPEAKER_00: 1:32

Well, that's a great question. I want to get to know you. I want to know your story. Because here's the rule I broke, and Walter knows this. I don't like to research anybody. Whether that's that's maybe that's good, maybe that's bad. I don't like to, I just like I always looked at my interviews like I'm on a plane from Phoenix to San Diego. It's an hour flight.

SPEAKER_03: 1:52

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 1:52

You're sitting next to me. We don't know each other. By the time we land, we know all about each other. That's how I've always looked at it. Sometimes that bites me in the ass. Um, but I today or a couple days ago, I I looked you up, and I'm so mad at myself for looking you up because I got in my own head and I was all intimidated by everything you've done.

SPEAKER_01: 2:10

That's interesting because I do my best never to try to intimidate anyone, which actually could be if you're trying to posture or do a status play on people, which uh many people try to do, which annoys the hell out of me, uh, then let me say it this way: the people that become my close friends uh that are in my inner circle. I look at people that are more powerful, how do they treat people that are less powerful than them? How do they treat servers? Do they say thank you when someone opens the door? And the interesting thing about celebrity and fame, which I don't like. I mean, I I've never become famous. I mean, in the marketing world, people know who I am and stuff like that. But for for the most part, like celebrity level famous, I actually think it it I think it messes with people. And I think it it can oftentimes go to their head, or it could bring up some level of insecurity that could show up as arrogance, or they're just people that are narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths, and they're they don't get they don't care about anyone. But I I really want people to feel comfortable around me all the time. Whereas some people, their way of getting things done in life is to intimidate the hell out of other people. True, true.

SPEAKER_00: 3:15

Well, I'm comfortable around you, but I just intimidated, I got in my own head because I saw some of the people that you network with are people that I've looked up to my entire life. I mean, Tony Robbins for one, right? Like, I don't know the story with you and Tony Robbins, but or you you either look up to Tony Robbins or you and him have done stuff together.

SPEAKER_01: 3:31

Well, I like Tony. Uh I've known him for I don't know, I've probably met Tony. Uh first time I met him was in the late 90s at QVC when he was pitching personal power. I have that cassette. Oh, yeah, no, I still have the original cassettes. You know what's funny about those original Tony Robbins cassettes? He at the time he was uh talking very highly about OJ Simpson. They've of course had to edit all that out. Uh, and then Michael Jackson and all these many people that later in life had these falls or ended up having, you know, you know, things happen that uh you know it's just interesting to watch over a few years and a few decades how people that are superstars oftentimes. Right.

SPEAKER_02: 4:15

What do you think that I mean? Given your how you see what what what sort of common issues that they fall into.

SPEAKER_01: 4:25

Well, I guess I uh would go back to my friend Dr. Don Wood, who has that great line if you understood the atmospheric conditions of somebody's life, it makes sense why they do what it is they do. So why do some people keep pursuing a bigger future? And how do some people uh fall? I mean, some of it is uh mental illness, addiction, uh oftentimes fame uh at a certain level can change you because it's very seductive. Uh I like well let me let me say this. Anyone that writes a book, goes on podcasts, goes on stage, which would include all of us, I believe, and I could be wrong, that there is a level of attention that we want. We want the world to like us, we want people to like our ideas. And what normal person or abnormal would not want someone to like them in a favorable way? With that, though, there's a certain level of insecurity because let's prove ourselves, let's get external validation. And so when people are constantly uh getting external validation, they start believing their own PR. And so I think the real key is if you believe your own PR, it can make you go sideways. Uh you familiar with the uh actor Glenn Morshauer? No. Okay, so Glenn, if you look him up, he's you'd probably recognize him because he's been in more military roles than I believe any living actor. But he's not like an A-level uh celebrity, he's he's been on all the Transformer movies. Do you remember the TV show 24 with Kiefer Sutherland? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so um me, I met I first met uh Glenn at Sundance in 2007, I believe it was. And he had all these people coming up to him throughout the lunch, you know, can I have an autograph? Can I take a picture? And he was super gracious, and he was uh he seemed to genuinely enjoy it. And I said to him, and it was a lot, after about the 15th person in the span of, I don't know, maybe eight minutes, I said to him, I go, does is is that ever difficult? Does it ever bother you? He goes, you know, sometimes if I'm you know with my wife and we're trying to eat, he goes, Yeah, but he goes, I wouldn't have a career if it wasn't for these people. I'm so appreciative that they like my work. And he would, he was just a nice guy. And so I became friends with him. A couple years later, I think it was in uh 2009, I guess, uh, we were both speaking at an event at the Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, big event. And I spoke first and he watched my speech, and then he spoke after me. I watched his speech, and then we went to lunch. We ended up spending four hours together just talking about everything. And at that point in time, if you you know, if you're not old enough, you wouldn't remember. If you are, social media was relatively new. The first iPhone came out in 2007, Facebook just became available to the public, not just universities. I think it was like in 2008. And Kiefer Sutherland, uh, who was uh Glenn Moorshauer on the show 24, was the only other actor other than the main actor, Kiefer, who was on every single episode of 24. And he was drunk in front of the Viper Room, which is the same bar that Johnny Dett used to be part owner of, and where River Phoenix died of an overdose. And it was like that famous LA bar where there was always celebrities and lots of ODs and all kinds of crazy stuff. And he was outside of the Viper Room with his shirt off, drunk, you know, paparazzi taking photos. It was on uh Us magazine, People Magazine, National Inquirer, it was all over the news. And I said, So what's the story with uh with Kiefer? And he goes, Well, now that he's been outed, I can kind of talk about it. He said, Great guy, awesome, shows up to work on time, does an amazing job uh, you know, as an actor. When we're done shooting, though, it's easier for him to oftentimes sit around in the trailer and hang out with the other actors and actresses and the crew and drink than it is to go back to his mansion alone. And he said this line to me and I took notes. He said, uh, a single piranha won't do much damage, but a swarm of them will take down a great creature. He said, at this point, Kiefer's fame is globally inescapable. There's nowhere in the world where he can go and not be recognized. So he really never has real privacy because wherever you go, someone notices you. And then he said the line that completely changed the way that I look at fame, the way that I pursue attention. Uh he said, if you go into this business, meaning the entertainment business, he said, if you go into this business without knowing who you are, it will misinform you. And I was like, that's an interesting statement. So you got young child actors. Look what usually happens to them. You know, people would say, Michael Jackson, he's so weird, he got all the plastic surgery and stuff, and I'll be like, Well, uh Michael, and this is not for or against Michael, it's just the reality of the situation. He's the lead singer of the Jackson 5, what, like five years old, famous at five years old, the rest of his life. He can't walk into a shopping mall, and if someone gets wind of it, there's Michael Jackson, then all of a sudden there's a hundred people throwing themselves at him like he's the Messiah when he's a kid. How does anyone grow up with that level of attention and be like, oh, let's just be a chummy person that try, you know, you never know. And so uh Shep Gordon, who is Alice Cooper's uh manager for now over 50 years, who I've I've had on my podcast, uh he you know, he he has this movie that was made about him called Supermensch. And he talks about how he's never seen anything good come out of fame, other than you get rich and famous, right? I guess that is good. Uh, but he says the people that rise the highest fall the farthest. And so I had talked, he he was Janice Joplin's manager early on, and Janice died of a drug overdose. And Janice had this line where she said, I go out and make love to 20,000 people, uh, but then I go back to my hotel room alone. Yeah, it's very lonely.

SPEAKER_00: 10:27

Yeah, well, for me, you intimidate me. So after reading a handful, I mean I stopped reading stuff about you, but the part that got me is I believe you and I, like, we grew up in the same, like I went to Chandler High, right? You went to Dobson. Dobson High School, yeah. I think we graduated the same year. 86. 86. Okay, wow. Like, where'd you go to elementary school? Where'd you go to middle school?

SPEAKER_01: 10:52

Well, I grew up in different parts. I was born in El Paso, Texas. Uh my mother died when I was four years old. And my father was crushed. He couldn't, he never, he never recovered from it. So he lost the love of his life. And every year to two years, my entire childhood, we we moved to different parts of Arizona, New, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. And so I, you know, El Paso, I went to school with uh Apache Junction, Arizona, uh, lived in Demi, New Mexico, uh, yeah, just different parts of the valley. But I've been in Arizona most of my adult life, except when I was 18 years old, I was a a drug addict. So I went to uh Las Cucesas, New Mexico, lived in a trailer uh for a couple of years just to, you know, for one, survive, recover from being a drug addict, and then I came back to Arizona and been here ever since and started a carpet cleaning business in my twenties, and you know, that's a whole story. And you can ask me anything. I mean, I like there's there's nothing I don't think if there's if someone asks me something that I don't feel comfortable with answering, I'll just say I can't answer that. But for the most part, I'm pretty much an open book.

SPEAKER_00: 11:58

So when did you go to Dobson? When did you start that?

SPEAKER_01: 12:00

That was I graduated in 86.

SPEAKER_00: 12:02

So uh It was a new school, wasn't it? Yeah, like 85, 845, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01: 12:06

Yeah, 80 82, 83, 84. Well, so let's see, 83 because I went to um McCaymie Junior High, which is in Tempe, and then uh from there we were I was the first Dobson high school class that had a freshman, uh junior, senior, uh soft, uh freshman, sophomore, junior, senior. See, I obviously am clearly not very educated.

SPEAKER_00: 12:29

Uh well see, that's what I'm getting at. It's like you and I, like I grew up in New Mexico, my parents moved around, I grew up in Arizona. Like I have the same, the same universe kind of as you. Were you a drug were you a drug addict too? I was not a drug addict. I was a cocaine addict. No, I was not, but I I uh I just feel like when I see you speak, I'm like, damn, you're like you're so good. Like like what was the moment? So you said you started a carpet cleaning business, but something had to happen. Somebody had to say, Joe, like who was that? What was that moment that you were like, boom, I'm changing everything.

SPEAKER_01: 13:04

There was no one epiphany person. I don't know what it was because I I've thought about that a lot. Uh and and it's funny too, because I don't I stumble a lot. I don't you I don't know the difference between a noun and an adjective. I ramble because I have ADD uh to a degree. So I I often wish I could say things tighter and and more concise at times. So I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_00: 13:25

But you're speaking like you said you're at that convention in Las Vegas speaking. So do you have uh a speech prepared when you're gonna go speak? Like you know what you're gonna say? You here's what I have.

SPEAKER_01: 13:34

I have riffs that I do today, which riffs are like a musician has the riffs. You can hear certain bands, like ACDC sounds like ACDC, and Led Zeppelin sounds like Led Zeppelin, right? So there's there's different bands that have riffs, and if you learn a skill or a knowledge, uh I will say a lot of the same things that are fundamentals of some of the stuff I teach related to marketing, or like my latest book, which is called What's in It for Them, I actually have a riff list of all of the different chapters of the key points, and I think of things in riffs like a comedian has riffs. If a comedian tells a certain joke, uh I saw George Carlin live four different times. In one of the shows I went to, he was preparing for an HBO special, and he literally had his notes in front of him and he was testing out jokes. So the more you get interviewed, the more you speak, the more you can see, oh, people like this, they don't like that. And what's really funny, and you guys will know this, having spoken a lot, there are things that you think are really important and really valuable and funny, and you'll say them to someone else, and you'll get you won't get like an amazing reaction, and other stuff that you're like, well, I don't think this is that profound, and all of a sudden people like lean in. So I never talk about I don't have a signature speech, not because it's not a good idea, I just don't know how to do it. I am too freaking distractable to actually say the same thing in the exact way. And I do know some speakers that can deliver the exact speech with the same, you know, PowerPointer, keynote presentation, and some that even know how to cry on cue. And I hate that because I think it's fake. Uh it doesn't seem authentic. Uh however, if you practice enough, because you know, you look at actors and actresses, what is the job of an actor is pretending to be someone that you're not? So it's like you can be good at delivering lines. Um, but my I'd rather just be I'd rather be interviewed and not know any questions. People say, I'm gonna uh you want to give me some questions that I can ask you? And I'm like, most of the time this don't want to do any work. But I'm like, no, just ask me anything. Like you can ask me anything.

SPEAKER_00: 15:44

So, how do you go from carpet cleaning to the genius network and networking with all these massive successful people? That story.

SPEAKER_01: 15:51

Baby Jesus really loves me. Okay. The way it started, I never intended to write books. I never thought I would speak in front of anyone. I was super shy and introverted growing up. So the the thought of having to publicly put myself out there was nauseating to me. Uh, this is a true and ridiculous story. I had to give a speech in high school in a psychology class, and I used to get high every day. I back in those days, they weren't there weren't metal detectors like you know there are, which is so unfortunate that so much of how the world has changed. And I had to give a talk, and I was a nervous wreck. And so I got high before the talk in order to give a talk on the dangers of THC in psychology class. I was stoned giving a talk. And I was a mess, you know, and and the reason I bring that up is that the human spirit is resilient. You can be in really dark places and you can turn it around. So I'm not I'm not here to glamorize or glorify that. I mean, there's a certain level of of junky pride that you can tell war stories and all that stuff, but I I was miserable if I was not high. Uh and and I was So why is that?

SPEAKER_00: 17:06

Uh is it is it looking for approval from your father?

SPEAKER_01: 17:09

No, no, unresolved trauma. Yeah, I from mom? No, I mean a lot of abuse in church, a lot of abuse. Yeah, I was I was raped and molested as a kid, and then I was paid money not to say anything about it, and that led to a lot of just internal grief. I had no self-esteem, I had no self-worth, I didn't know who to trust. Uh you know, I had caretakers that you know would manipulate me under the guise of God. Uh, you know, that would, you know, I had some things happen in a in a uh a camp that was a Catholic boys camp.

SPEAKER_02: 17:40

And you're and you're not the only one. Oh, tons of people. That's ever. You know what I'm saying? So what what like isolating that? What do you somebody's gonna listen to this and they're gonna be like that happened to me and they've they've not dealt with that.

SPEAKER_00: 17:53

What well they said he's so open about it.

SPEAKER_02: 17:56

I know, but but what do you how do you for somebody that's gonna listen to this and has got that brewing but has stuffed it down, what what next steps do they take? Well, if I could go back and just rolled off your off your tongue.

SPEAKER_01: 18:09

Yeah, yeah. Let me say this too for anyone that obviously most people don't know who the heck I am and they're just hearing some guys uh you know talk about this stuff. I I have an addiction recovery foundation today. I've written, you know, two books on uh addiction recovery. I've done a tremendous amount of therapy, I've done 30-day intensives, I've done you know, uh plant medicine journeys with highly trusted people in the right environments. I you know, I've I've done a lot of work. And if I could go back in time, I would face my shit a lot quicker because you're sick as your secrets. You know, you you will hear that if you go to recovery groups or 12-step meetings. And I heard that saying, but I had all these secrets that left me with a lot of guilt and shame. And when you're when you're in, when you feel guilty, you regret, you feel bad about something. I feel guilty. Uh shame is I am bad. So the difference between guilt is you feel bad, shame is you fundamentally feel you are bad. And so when you're in shame and you don't love, appreciate, or you may hate the vessel that is your own being, you will find all kinds of ways to inebriate that painful feeling. So addiction, as an example, is one of the ways that I uh dealt with my uh internal turmoil. Uh addiction, though, is a solution to pain. A lot of people view like, let's attack addiction. Well, the war on drugs. Well, the war on war on drugs, the drugs are actually the solution. Not a very good solution. Addiction is not a good solution, it can destroy your life. But in the moment, whatever level of consciousness I was at, cocaine was a solution, marijuana was a solution, uh, looking at porn was a solution, hiring uh a prostitute was a solution. And so when I was paid money not to say anything when I was abused as a kid, it wired in my mind that sex is shameful and dirty unless you pay for it. So everyone into, you know, whatever level of sexuality they have, they have a uh an arousal template. That's a term. I think Pat Carnes, who's one of the top doctors on sex addiction, I have a great interview I did with him on YouTube years ago, and he was the top sex addiction doctor. I think he's the one that came up with the term arousal template. And whatever someone's into, it's their first introduction into sex. So if it was introduced in a healthy way, it completely different than if you were physically abused. So you'll see a lot of women, and I've I've worked with, you know, quite a few people. It's all volunteer stuff, too. I'm not a therapist. Uh so anything I'm saying, you know, I guess I'll give a disclaimer for entertainment purposes only. There's a lot of great people out there that that know how to do this. I, you know, I I didn't know how to interact with my mother died when I was four, my father never remarried, I never saw sex as an intimate act of love and oneness. I just saw it as something shameful and something you you you do to get off. And so it wired in my head that sex is shameful and dirty unless you pay for it. So even though I was a cocaine addict, my core addiction was sex addiction, which is really an intimacy disorder because sex addiction could manifest as like, you know, it could be porn, it could be paying for sex, it could be having uh uh affairs, it could be exposing. I mean, there's Pat Carnes last time I had lunch with him, he was working on a Fulbright scholarship study of linking genetics to uh the way someone would act out sexually. And at that point in time, they had identified 240 different ways to act out sexually. I'm like 200, like I can maybe think of 20, but um the the the point being intimacy is the the issue when it comes to sexual addiction. Some people it's sexual anorexia. There's a lot of people listening to this. No one talks about this stuff, by the way, that their addiction is they can't be sexual with someone that they love. So they may love their husband or they may love their wife or they may love their partner, but they have a hard time being sexual with them based on you know if that person matters to them. And so some people they have a hard time having sex with someone that matters.

SPEAKER_00: 22:20

So they go somewhere else.

SPEAKER_01: 22:21

Yeah, or they look at porn or they live in fantasy, which almost all addiction occurs in the world.

SPEAKER_00: 22:26

But in your case, uh I was not expecting you to say what you said, so thank you for being so vulnerable. But in your case, now did did you ever confront the abusers later in life as an adult?

SPEAKER_01: 22:36

Um that stuff I don't talk about because I do know them, but yes.

SPEAKER_00: 22:40

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_01: 22:41

Yes, yes, and that's very difficult. I bet very difficult. I I have an interview with uh Gabor Mate, who's this great trauma.

SPEAKER_02: 22:48

But but how about the people that that that were co-addicts in that? So you confront the actual abuser, but how about the people that didn't protect you? Because there's all the there's always a circle around that. Yeah, let me let me say this because I'm gonna almost make the barrier harder, right?

SPEAKER_01: 23:05

Yeah, yeah. So so to finish the thought I was gonna say when I brought so I did this interview with Gabor Mate the first time, and I I asked him, I said, because here I am in an audience. I did this live at one of my genius network annual events, which is my entrepreneurial events, and I said, you know, what do you do if you have to be in a situation, family member, co-worker, friends, whatever, and you still have to interact with the person that raped you. And like the audience is like, and he's like, eh, like how do you do that? I mean, there's no playbook on how to do that stuff. You know, it depends on so to go back to uh the family members and the co-addics, there's always um there's always co-addicts in any addictive relationship. I mean, that was figured out back in you know the 30s when uh Bill W and Dr. Bob started, you know, Alcoholics Anonymous. And they it was mostly men at the time, not all men, but mostly men. And the wives, prior to uh AA, you either institutionalized, you lived a life of suffering, you were thrown in jail, or you died, or you recovered, right? Those were the options back then. And they created Alcoholics Anonymous based on, you know, what started as the Oxford group in the 1800s and Carl Young and all this. There's a great history behind it, which is very instructional about addiction, and they created a community where people can come in, it's because of the mutual suffering, and they would uh admit they were powerless over uh you know their alcoholism. Uh and and if you were to ask any of the wives or partners of the addicts back then, do you want them to stop? They would be like, oh my god, this this person, if it was a husband, he's embarrassed, he can't, you know, take care of the family, he can't keep a job, he's an embarrassment to the community. Whatever the issues were, they would do anything to have the person quit drinking. And then what would happen is some of them started getting sober and they became different. And then the wives, in the case of a husband and a wife, if the husband was an alcoholic, a lot of them would start losing their shit. And they're like, why is that? Because they were addicted to the addict, right? And so the co so they created Al-Anon. And and it was a place to get support for the for the co-addicts. So I will have people all the time, like my wife, my husband, my son, my daughter, uh, you know, one of my employees, you know, they're they're they're it's mostly families, but they will be like, let's fix this son, and then you sit and look at the family unit, and you're like, My God, like this whole family's uh messed up. Right. So oftentimes when someone is seeking help and they want to do an intervention, what often gets discovered if they're if the family unit is willing to work together is that they're either enabling or it's this whole the whole atmospheric conditions of that family can often be messed up and a lot of people need help. So it's uh yeah, it's it's it's it's really difficult when uh I don't know why I have put such an emphasis on trying to uh do an addiction recovery foundation because it's one of the most complex things ever. There's no easy answer, but I get tricky.

SPEAKER_00: 26:21

It's giving back. You gotta give back, you gotta give. In fact, that's the one thing I read about you. Uh one of the things I read about you was it what was the quote about giving and not taking?

SPEAKER_01: 26:29

Well, yeah, life gives to the giver and takes from the taker.

SPEAKER_00: 26:32

Life gives to the giver and takes from the taker.

SPEAKER_01: 26:34

Yeah, I even have a giver bracelet that this uh my uh one of my members in Genius Network, uh his daughter uh Danny made this for me last week. It says giver, and I thought it was really cool. That's very cool.

SPEAKER_02: 26:45

Well, the thing that's really amazing, and you you we you first talked about alcohol and cocaine, right? And I and I think anybody, you guys, would have a view of oh, that's that's fantastic. But then you then overlay that in the sex addiction, and that is looked at completely. It's an addiction, and it's very much the same.

SPEAKER_00: 27:05

You gotta watch the Charlie Sheen documentary. Did you watch that?

SPEAKER_01: 27:07

Not yet.

SPEAKER_00: 27:08

It's you hit on all of it.

SPEAKER_01: 27:10

But just way back in the day, I had some friends that yeah, I was uh so I've I've had a I don't know Charlie Sheen, so let me just say that. But I've been involved in certain things in the past of trying to uh assist him when he was off the rails. But yeah, it's uh it's let me.

SPEAKER_02: 27:26

But the but the stigma, I mean, uh and can you address that? Because there's I mean, the sex addiction, the porn, the infidelity is so rampant, and yet people have such a hard time coming out or talking about that because of the stigma that's associated with it. Like you, you're you're you you drink too much or you're an addict, and hey, I'm an addict, I'm gonna go into re-every, oh my god, high five, you're you're doing such a great job.

SPEAKER_01: 27:54

But you you throw that one on there and what's your yeah, there there was what was that one movie that had uh I can't remember the Mark Ro what's his name? Uh it was about sex addiction. Mark Mark. No, no, Mark Ropriello or whatever. The go play the Hulk. Exactly. Him and I think uh Gwyneth Paltra were in the movie, and he was a sex addict. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There it and you know, I've never yet the only movie I've ever seen, not that they're not out there, that's I may not have seen them. The only actual movie that depicts sexual addiction uh accurately is is a movie called Shame. It's called Shame. Uh, and it's not a recovery movie, it's it's not a feel-good movie. It's actually quite a painful movie to watch, but it it they they do a good job. But in the movie with Mark and Gwyneth, um there's a scene where she has cancer, he has sex addiction, but he ends up admitting to her the essay. She's like, you know, why why didn't you tell me, like all angry that he never confessed this to her when he was first starting to date her? He said, Well, because I think it's some some line that where and I may not have this exactly right, he says, with your disease you get sympathy, with my disease you get judgment. Uh and and and that's why people don't talk about it, because it's uh so many people suffer from sexual addiction, but there's a shame and there's an embarrassment, there's a stigma. And so my favorite definition of intimacy was given to me over a decade ago by at the time an 80-year-old uh gay man who devotes I never met him in person. I just had a guy that I had uh helped early on in his recovery who who had met this individual, and and he was this guy who was sponsoring him, and he said, You should really talk to him, he's incredibly wise. And so I had a couple conversations with him, and he gave me a definition of intimacy that I think is pretty uh pretty profound. And he said, intimacy is a mutual exploration of a shared safe place. Uh 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. So intimacy doesn't need to be sexual, but it's a mutual exploration of a shared safe place. So when we got sit down here in the podcast, you're like, I want to get to know you, right? It's like, yeah, you you when you get to know someone and you build rapport and you feel safe with them, great. But some people you talk to them more and you feel unsafe because there's there's something off, right? So dangerous people put out vibes, safe people put out vibes. Oftentimes we misread the vibes, sometimes we notice the red flags, other times we don't. Sometimes we completely don't even know that yellow flags exist. And when people ignore the red flags, they don't even notice the yellow flags half the time. And then you get yourself into dangerous sort of situations. But to go back to uh intimacy, if someone does not feel safe in the world, they're gonna look for a way to feel safe. You could be the strongest, the richest, the most famous, complete badass eight-degree black belt, and not feel safe in the world. And go back and you know, not feel good, so you're gonna, you know, masturbate to porn, or you're gonna snort crystal meth, or you're gonna gamble, or you're gonna do something if you don't feel safe in the world. So ultimately, um that line by Johan Hardy, the opposite of addiction is connection. So uh uh addiction is a connection disorder, and whenever you're trying to scratch the itch through sex or through you know, social media or whatever video games. What's that? Video games. Absolutely. Gaming is a huge one. Uh, you know, cryptocurrency trade day trading, it it all mirrors gambling addiction.

SPEAKER_00: 31:35

So now, can you, after going through all this abuse in your childhood, can you have an intimate relationship with somebody? Yeah. Yeah. Like you're safe, you feel my partner.

SPEAKER_01: 31:42

You know, it's funny, my my current partner is the top it, you know, life's cosmic joke. Um my partner is the top vaginal plastic surgeon in Arizona. And uh, you know, and it and it's funny because I've early on addicts have oftentimes as a defense mechanism a pretty twisted sense of humor. It's one of the ways that you deal with the pain. So some of the I don't know if you've met many comedians off stage, but some of them are just great and awesome, friendly, optimistic people. Some of the funniest comedians are some of the darkest, depressed, and I cannot tell you how many famous comedians I've met in high-level recovery groups. Right. And they're funny though, because they're trying to transmit that pain and angst into humor. Uh but yeah, I I mean it took years though. So to go back to the thing, if I if I was early on, I would have uh gone into 12 steps and done the steps earlier. I would have uh really dealt with the the pain, but you know, I I didn't because my level of consciousness took me to where I'm at. I mean, I I when I'm thinking from my higher self, which is not most of the time, and what I mean by my higher self is when I'm uh when I'm connected with what I think are being present, you know, making good, honorable decisions for myself, forgiveness is giving up the hope that one day you're gonna have a better past. You know, as you gotta forgive yourself. And we take our members to prisons before all of our meetings. Uh, we take our members to the Perryville Women's Prison here in Arizona on a regular basis. Your recovery genius recovery uh and genius network. We take our genius network members. We also started a group called Genius Youth, and we're gonna start taking them to the prisons starting next year.

SPEAKER_00: 33:37

Kind of do a scared straight program with them?

SPEAKER_01: 33:39

No, no, it's actually to just sit and be present with people that their life decisions got them into uh where they're at. And many of the people that sit in prison are doing things that many people that are visiting them did also, they just didn't get caught.

SPEAKER_00: 33:54

Right. That's powerful. Yeah. Okay, so let me go back to your career for a second. So how do you go? How how does Genius Network start?

SPEAKER_01: 34:02

Uh Genius Network started in 2007. Uh to to go back to the early days, I was a Deborah carpet cleaner living off credit cards when I was in my early 20s. And I learned marketing because I needed to eat, I needed to survive, I uh had no intention of teaching seminars or doing it. I mean, it didn't even occur to me. Uh all of I I just needed business. And so I started studying marketing and I learned a type of marketing that is called direct response marketing. That's like the you know, they they come up with different terms today. But um it's it's education-based marketing, it's using powerful sales copy headlines, offers in order to uh like clickbait type of back in the day. You could use direct responses, clickbait, but I never did like cli clickbait. I I guess I became the biggest uh anti-bait and switch person in the entire carpet cleaning industry. In the 1990s, after uh, you know, building up my carpet cleaning business, I then started teaching other carpet and upholstery cleaners and people that do fire and flood restoration how to market their businesses, and I sold a course. But when you said you studied it, what what books did you read this time? Well, Derry Halbert was the first guy that I he he was a marketer. He ended up becoming uh one of my best friends, and I started studying uh all kinds of great uh marketers, uh, especially from back in the early 1900s, like Claude Hopkins, who wrote scientific advertising, and Robert Collier, all these copywriters. So I was learning how to market carpet cleaning services by studying people that were in the direct mail business, and I also had to figure out how to successfully sell something nobody wants to buy. So one of my dear friends to this day, he's actually running his event at my office next month, is uh Dr. Robert Cialdini, who wrote the book Influence. So he's the godfather of influence, he's the OG before you know there was even a term influencer, which I think is kind of funny when I look at influencers today. It's like, what are you actually influencing? So you know, you could be influencing nonsense. But um Robert Cialdini wrote the book influence, and that book, everyone should read that book. And what I love about Robert is the ethical use of influence. So the term clickbait, yes, you want to get someone's attention. Uh I'll I'll make this distinction though. Hype used ethically, if you want to use the word hype, which usually has a negative connotation. Hype used ethically is massive enthusiasm for what you're selling. Hype used unethically is lying, misleading, exaggerating, bullshitting people. So you want to get someone's attention, yes. Uh it doesn't matter how good your product is or uh or your service or what it does until after somebody buys it. So, you know, uh you you want to definitely get attention and anything that you put in front of somebody is uh marketing. And if you put you know, only the hungriest fish are gonna snap at the crappiest bait. So you gotta put something that they want, not what they need, you know. That whole find and eat and fill it, that's kind of nonsense because people need to eat healthier, but many don't. People would be, you know, they they they need to have uh unpro you know not unprotected sex, but protected sex, but they don't. Uh people shouldn't drink and drive, but some people do. And so it's fine to want and fill it. So people are wanting machines, they're looking for feelings, and so the the think of um selling as influence, think of marketing as storytelling. And if you become more effective at influence, uh you'll be more effective at selling.

SPEAKER_00: 37:33

Was you were you doing print? Yeah, print ads. There was no internet back then, right? So that's how you would when you that and so you would put together a print ad and and look, okay, the this word the sale free. You were using buzzwords in your marketing?

SPEAKER_01: 37:46

Well, my first my first uh successful campaign was I hired a copywriter because I heard this term from Gary Halbert that said, any problem in the world can be solved with the right sales letter. And I'm like, is that true? Well, what is a sales letter? What does that mean? A sales letter has a headline, uh, it has compelling copy, it has bullets that talk about you know the reasons why someone should do business with you. Uh, it uh it has an offer, it creates a sense of urgency by having an expiration date. You know, like the old sales rule, ADA, attention, interest, desire, action. Instead of doing that in selling, you do that in print. Because no matter how good of a salesperson you are, you're limited by the clock. You can only talk to so many people in a day. So what selling is is when you're on the phone or face to face with somebody. What marketing is, is get getting someone on the phone or face-to-face with you properly positioned so by the time they're talking to you or visiting your website or coming into your store, they're pre-interested, pre-motivated, pre-qualified, and predisposed to do business with you. So you want to position yourself effectively in advance. What marketing is, is selling in advance, so that you don't have to rely on sales techniques. You don't have to be a pushy salespeople person. People love to be sold, they hate to be pressured. So, how do you present things? So, my very first tool was a consumer's guide to carpet cleaning. I hired a uh a copywriter. Uh I didn't, I wasn't yet making any money. All I had was this carpet cleaning business and credit cards. And so I went$30,000 in debt because damn it, I had this entrepreneurial fantasy that I wanted to build this carpet cleaning business. And so, you know, which that shit is not trained. It's you either got it or you don't. You're either batteries included or batteries not included.

SPEAKER_00: 39:34

At this point, had you already been cleaning carpets? Oh, yeah. So now for two years, like just not making money. In Arizona in the summertime?

SPEAKER_01: 39:42

Yes. I I would I was like I was the very first summer I had in Arizona, and and by the way, I'm allergic to cats. So I start wheezing and I would be going into these apartment complexes because the only place I could get business. I would knock on doors and say, Do you have any? And so they would literally pay me 20, 25, sometimes$30 per unit. Some of the apartments didn't have electricity in them, so it's like a sauna in there. And I had to run an extension cord in my portable steam cleaner until I had the money to buy a truck mount, which are the ones that are in trucks, those are the best ways to clean carpets. But ultimately, like I had this little portable uh steam cleaner to go into these apartments, and then they would pay me, you know, 60, 90, sometimes 120 days later, and I would work my ass off. And later, after I learned how to make things work, you know, never in the moment, but you know, several years later, I would say to carpet cleaners, like, looking back in my early days, if you want to go broke, one of like a way to go broke is watching TV, maybe eating potato chips or something. A stupid way to go broke is doing hard manual labor, cleaning carpets all day and paying money to do that. That's what I was doing. I literally, but I had that fire of like, damn it, I'm gonna figure out how to I didn't want to go work for someone. I wanted to figure out how to make my business work, and I was frustrated with it. And so it's instructional to the listeners. I'll I'll share the most uh profound conversation at the time that changed the trajectory of my life. Because you asked what I was asking. Was it with addiction? I don't know. It was a variety of things. With business, this is what it was. So I had this carpet cleaning business. I'm living off credit cards. I had gotten trained, I'd gotten certified, uh, I knew how to do a good job cleaning carpets. I wasn't doing bait and switch, you know, I was just a caring carpet cleaner, did a good job, worked hard, uh just trying to make it work, and I it still wasn't working. And it was so frustrating. So I was looking at getting my series seven license in series 63 so I could like sell stocks. Because I had a friend I went to high school that had gotten into that business and he was doing relatively well as a glorified you know salesperson over the phone selling securities that he had no qualification to talk people into doing, but he was doing that, and I'm I'm just trying to figure out how to how the hell to make a living, right? And so uh I have a friend named Pat who called me up. He goes, Uh, I have uh gonna go jet skiing in Seguoro Lake, which is you know out here in Arizona for people that don't live in Arizona. And he's like, Do you want to go jet skiing this uh weekend? And I, you know, when you're broke, you have no discretionary money, you know. So I was like, no, I, you know, I got things to do, I got to work. And he's like, uh, you sure the guy that owns the jet skis is this multi-million dollar real estate investor. And that piqued my interest. I'm like, oh, maybe I can go talk to the rich guy and you know get some advice on how the hell to get out of this trap of my carpet cleaning business. So I decided to go and I drive my piece of crap, you know, uh truck to uh um Segura Lake, and there's two jet skis, this rich guy, which I never remembered his name, and one of his friends, and then my friend Pat. There's four of us total. And I have my pickup truck and I'm sitting on the tailgate of the truck, uh, and I finally have a chance to sit down with this rich guy where my friend Pat and this other guy's friend were out on the two jet skis. And uh so I go, you know, I I hear you do really well in business, and I've got a small, you know, carpet cleaning business here in Arizona, and I'm wondering if you can maybe give me some advice on some other business that I could go into because you know this carpet cleaning business is probably something I don't want to do, and you know, it's tough business, and wonder if you had any advice. And he's uh he said to me, He goes, Well, is there anyone else in your business that's doing really well? And I said, Yeah, there's a couple of companies here in Phoenix that uh, you know, make over a million bucks a year, and you know, at that time that was a lot of money to me. And uh, but you know, they they've been around, they're established, and and you know, I'm relatively new and just only been doing this a couple years. And he said, Well, if there's other people that are doing well in your business and you're not, there's nothing wrong with the business you're in. There's something wrong with you. And I was like, Jesus, this is not the motivational talk I was looking for, right? And uh it I go, well, I'm certified. Uh, you know, I carry a lot of these companies do bait and switch advertising. I don't do any of that sort of stuff. It's just a really, you know, tough business if you're not established. And I I was just filled with excuses, but I, you know, they were it was harmless. I I I thought that was the case. I I thought success had something to do with, you know, how long you've been in business, which, you know, people like 30 years experience, like you know, one year experience doing the same shit 30 years straight. But it's um so I said, you know, I was just making, you know, what I thought were reasons, excuses as to why I wasn't doing well. He goes, well, young man, he go, and I told him, I said, I I've gotten trained, I've gotten certified. I told him how long I've been in the business, and he said, he goes, you're like many people, you think the grass is always greener on the other side. He goes, if you're gonna go into another industry, you're gonna spend another six months, another year, another two years learning the technical skills of another business, you can go out and repeat the same bad business habits that have caused you to not be having this one work right now. And I was like, damn it, this guy won't let up on me. And he said to me, he goes, What you need to do, young man, is he goes, you need to learn fundamental business skills. He goes, because once you learn how to make a business work, then you can take that to any other business you decide to go in the rest of your life. And, you know, so I can tell you about other businesses that you can maybe go into, and that may be in answer, you might get lucky, but for the most part, you know, you're not having success in business because of what you know and what you don't know. It's it has nothing to do with the business you're in. And I was like, what the hell? I was and so I drove home that night and I was really summer. That's one thing I remember, and I was thinking to myself, I've got a lot of personal problems. Uh, you know, I just a few years prior, I was, you know, a drug addict and I was a hard worker, I was young, I had enthusiasm, I had no idea what the hell I was doing, but I was like, I live in America, it's you know, for the most part, a free country.

SPEAKER_02: 45:49

Did he give you anything specific?

SPEAKER_01: 45:51

Or no, no, he gave me what he gave me was uh the the insight to quit blaming my circumstances on anything anything other than myself.

SPEAKER_03: 46:01

That was a shift.

SPEAKER_01: 46:01

Oh, huge shift. The epiphany was I am not gonna get out of this business until I figure out how to make it work. And it became a game. All of a sudden, the business I hated that I was trying to figure out how to escape became a Labrad experiment for me saying, I'm gonna learn how to make this business work and I'm not gonna get out of it until I use it as a testing ground. And that's when you hired the copywriter. That's when I had the mind shift change, and then I started reading uh books uh with from a different lens. It's like a new pair of glasses. There's a there's a great book on uh, you know, on for people in recovery, a new pair of glasses that was this old timer. Chuck Chamberlain. What's that?

SPEAKER_02: 46:37

Chuck C.

SPEAKER_01: 46:38

Yes, Chuck, yeah, exactly. And uh it's it's a great frame though. Um like you know, does the world change or does your view of it?

SPEAKER_02: 46:46

You know, the you took responsibility and then you saw it.

SPEAKER_01: 46:49

Yep, yep, and I started becoming a voracious reader and I was cleaning carpets and I could be universal for anybody.

SPEAKER_02: 46:55

Yes, yeah, personal responsibility and yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 46:58

Well, I'll tell you too, though. Part of it along my search though, is I had a friend give me a newsletter on direct response marketing written by Gary Halbert. And that is what really opened my eyes, is that any problem in the world can be solved to the right sales letter. So I started studying this and I learned, well, how do I get a sales letter written? So I hired a copywriter to write my very first sales letter, which was called a consumer's guide to carpet cleaning. And I spent 30 days talking to this guy, multiple phone conversations, paid him$1,800 that I had to get on my credit card, because I didn't have$1,800. It seemed like all the money in the world to pay someone$1,800 to write a letter. But it was like a small consumer awareness guide. It was 1 by 17 paper, folded in half. It ended up being about 10 pages. And it said consumer's guide to carpet cleaning was the headline, title of it. Then it had bullets. It said, Read this guide and discover, because it didn't say read this guide and learn. People don't want to learn things, they want to discover things. That's marketing. So read this guide and discover. Uh uh eight mistakes to avoid when choosing a carpet cleaner, uh, six costly misconceptions about carpet cleaning, uh, crawling critters and crud, a guide to the slime, grime, and livestock that's seeping, creeping, and galloping through your carpet, uh, how to avoid four carpet cleaning ripoffs, um, the difference between value and price, uh, how to get your carpet cleaner to 100% guarantee their work. There was another one then, but I can't remember. Then they would open up the 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 start by reading this guide, and then you know, and you'll learn blah, blah, blah, all the same things I just said. It I repeated it.

SPEAKER_00: 48:42

Were you shoving that mailboxes?

SPEAKER_01: 48:44

Well, yes, yeah. But then it said, and with this information, you can make an informed, intelligent decision. And that's the key. People don't want to make an uninformed, idiotic decision, they want to make an informed, intelligent decision. Because if someone wants what you're selling or needs what you're selling, uh, the only thing that stands in their way of getting it, if they have the money, is fear. And if you remove the fear, they will buy. Even if they don't have money, if someone really wants something, they will figure out how to get it. That's where credit comes in. People will even steal, people will kill to get the things they want.

SPEAKER_02: 49:16

So work right away?

SPEAKER_01: 49:18

Well, no, not right away, but it worked pretty well. So you were saying direct mail. So what I started doing, once I had the guide, I then needed to figure out how do I distribute that guide. Because a lot of it is just distribution. So you may have the best book in the world, the best whatever in the world. Uh, you may be the best in the world, but there's no relationship between being good and getting paid, unfortunately. There's a big relationship between being good, being a good marketer, and getting paid. So I had to crack the code on how do I get people to read it, how do I get people to request it. So instead of running what I back then I would call name rank serial number, name of the company, you know, uh what you do, and your phone number, because there were no websites, there were no social media, there were no QR codes back then. Uh smartphones did not exist. This was literally 1992. Yellow pages. Yellow pages, yeah. Val pack, money mailers, postcards, direct mail, you know, local TV advertising, newspaper ads, Penny Saver. Remember Penny Saver? Um, and so everything about radio. Come on, man. Well, I did radio too. I did radio. You know, it's funny too. Like I did some radio in Phoenix, and Phoenix is a big area. And I lived in, you know, I had a place out in Chandler, and I was getting calls from people out in Glendale, and I realized, you know, you kind of got to identify the target markets because if you're a one-person operation, you don't want to drive an hour to go clean someone's carpet. And there was no uh GPSs back then. We're using Thomas Guide maps to figure out how to drive, you know. So what I did was I started advertising the consumer awareness guide. And I would uh, you know, I I would run ads uh that would uh you know request uh a free can you know free guide to carpet cleaning, um, you know, four reasons, you know, to hire a carpet cleaner, you know, and I list those and then saying, and if you want more information, request this consumer guide to carpet cleaning. So what's funny is that prior to having that consumer guide to carpet cleaning, people would call me up and they would say, uh, how much do you charge? And I would uh talk to them, and sometimes it'd be 20 minutes on the phone, and half the time they're like, you know, let me talk to my husband and I'll call you back. Because it was, you know, 90% of the time it was a female that was making the decision because guys are often slobs and they don't think about the cleansiness of their carpet like a woman does. And so um I I hated that, that they would call me up and ask how much you charge, and then it occurred to me when someone says how much you charge, it's because they have no other criteria on how to make a buying decision. They're just trying to figure out how do I get one of these things or how do I hire you. So if you don't have a system for selling, what it is you're selling, you're always at the uh you're always at the mercy of the consumer system for buying, which is always, they all have a system. It's called price. How much does it cost? So this thing, this applies to dating. If you're running a singles ad, this applies to getting a job. If you're trying to get a job, how good of a job are you marketing yourself? If you have a podcast and you're promoting a podcast, what is the messaging? Who is it for? How well are you? You know, you want a message-to-market match. And so um, you know, and by the way, there's this really smart marketer who's kind of a curmudgeon guy named Dan Kennedy, who for years uh I would speak at all his events, he would speak at my events, we had several niche businesses together where I would take my marketing program and he would write uh the ads and promotions for it. Because after I built the largest training organization in the world for carpet cleaners, within a span of three years, I was the most well-known person in the entire world in the carpet cleaning industry. I was on the, I'd been chosen per now, this never got me dates and bars or anything, but I uh, you know, I was on the cover of a magazine called Clean Facts Magazine in 1997, uh voted by the industry. It wasn't paid for PR, it surprised the hell out of me. But I had impacted so many people because I would write articles for the magazines every month. I put out so much free information, and what I learned is make your advertising valuable. So when I when someone requested a consumer guide to carpet cleaning, even if they never hired me, I taught them how to make a uh how to hire a carpet cleaner. And and people would call me and say, you know, uh, they would say, you know, I'd like to get your consumer's guide to carpet cleaning, but I want to have my carpet clean tomorrow. And I was like, okay, so I back then there's no email, there's no website I could send them to. I'm I'm having to do all this through direct mail. So I was like, what the how do I handle this? So I created a consumer awareness message. So I spent 20 bucks a month and I had a 24-hour day, seven-day a week free recorded message, and I started running ads that said, warning, don't call any carpet cleaner until you listen to this free recorded message. Call anytime, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and learn seven questions to ask a carpet cleaner before you invite them into your home and how to avoid four carpet cleaning ripoffs. So I started running those ads. I started stamping the back of all my business cards, warning, don't call a carpet cleaner until you listen to this free recorded message. Uh, I put it on the back of my van and the side of my van with a magnetic, I would go literally magnetic straight warning, don't call any carpet cleaner until you listen to this message. And people would would take down that phone number. And to this day, everyone's so excited. You know, I own a VR company. I would like right before this podcast, I was on the phone with Nanea Reeves, who has a VR company called Trip. Uh, you know, Kiana Reeves is her is her cousin. And I've a you know, I'm I'm involved with some pretty technological stuff. I have investments in over 35 different companies, AI companies. Everyone driving has a freaking phone on them. And sometimes they're not going to type in your social media handle or your website or a QR code, but they will call a phone number. And so I tell anyone that's in service businesses, put a free recorded message. Warning, don't call a plumber until you listen to this free recorded message. If you're looking for a home and you want to know how to buy in Phoenix, call this 24-hour free recorded message. It still works, but people get so bored. They want new, new, new, new. And what marketing is is applied psychology. You know, the what Steve Jobs said in uh I remember this because I remember dirty jokes and quotes. Um, he in 1997 at the Worldwide Developers Conference, he said, we focused first on the user experience, then we focused on the technology. So technology is important, but psychology is infinitely more important. Now, today, you can create consumer awareness guides. You could take what it is I've said on this podcast and you could feed it into Grok, or you can feed it into Perplexity or Chat GPT or whatever, and have it map out a consumer awareness guide for any business that someone's in. But if you don't understand the psychology of why this matters, you're probably not going to even place significantly, because what I just described here, for anyone that's a business owner, has made several billion dollars for all the clients I've taught this stuff to. Bill Phillips, who built EAS, the sports supplement company, I was his marketing consultant for 13 years. You know, that book, Body for Life, exists because of the work I was doing with him. I gave him an idea to donate money to the Make a Wish Foundation back in the 90s. He became the single largest individual contributor in the history of the world. He was running free recorded messages. I became Richard Branson's largest fundraiser. This doesn't have to be done for business, it could be done for causes. Education-based marketing works, but the biggest problem people have with marketing is they underestimate the value of the importance of it. So they they associate marketing with some scummy uh salesperson or some scummy marketer, and there's many. There, I I really have a love-hate relationship with the people in the marketing business because the entire pandemic was marketing used in the wrong way in the form of propaganda and lies. And so people, rightfully so, do not trust many marketers because there's many that are just simply unethical, and they use methodologies and techniques in order to manipulate people or sell people garbage. But if you have something really valuable and it really helps people, you are doing yourself a disservice if you do not use every form that's legal, uh ethical, and effective in order to highlight what it is you do and how you do it. And it can't be about you, it has to be about them. Brand building, so much brand building is such a load-of-horse shit. Uh, it's like personal brand, build a personal brand. If you do good work, you're gonna build a personal brand for doing good work. Some of the best marketing in the world is not an ad or a promotion, it's actually a really good product that people really get value out of, and then they tell other people about it. So, you know, I I have a different view of marketing than a lot of marketers. Uh, I I would be broke had I not learned marketing.

SPEAKER_00: 58:01

But your pre-recorded message, that's it. It's not leave a message at the end of the tone. Call a number, that's gonna give you information, and it's gonna hang up.

SPEAKER_01: 58:09

Yeah, what do you somewhere else? The the way that I had it is so my first free recorded message started, and there's many iterations of it. I still have people all over the world that use my free recorded message because it in the 90s, uh, every major city in the United States had one or multiple versions of my free recorded message inspired ads running in every phone book. Uh we we licensed my materials to uh pest control, heating air conditioning, printers, painters, florists, jewelers, auto sales, hair and nail salons. Did I say pest control? So I had 10 other industries that were using this um to uh it in in the the the the one for my carpet cleaning business said, hello, my name is Joe Polish. I'm the owner of, and I I had two different companies I I owned. Uh and um uh one was called Superior Carpet Care, the other one was Fiber Tech. Uh I and I sold those companies years ago, and unfortunately, uh one of the people that I sold the company to, uh John Del Favro, he had a weird last name. Uh he ended up ripping me off. I didn't know how to sell a company back then, so I let him pay. They had to learn. Yeah, you know, it's funny. I I've never said the guy's name really, because it's like, you know, whatever, his punishment is his own existence, but you know, it's but uh people that rip you off, that is their punishment. I mean, when people are unethical, you whenever you take from someone, you think you're getting away with it. Karmically, you're never getting away with it. I'm glad you believe that. I believe that too. Yes.

SPEAKER_02: 59:34

And then how did you then segue into Genius Network? How did was that just a was that a natural no, definitely not natural, but I'll tell you the transition.

SPEAKER_01: 59:43

But let me finish the thought on so the first free recorded message was you know, uh, you know, thank you. My name is Joe Polish. My name is Joe Polish. Uh you know, welcome to this free recorded message, which is gonna, you know, teach you how to choose a carpet cleaner. If all you're looking for is a cheap. Brush the dirt off cleaning, then I respectfully ask you to call another carpet cleaner. But if you want to know how to get the most thorough cleaning ever or it's free, then listen to the rest of this guide. So I would say the headline in the beginning, the most thorough cleaning ever or it's free. Um, and I would position that, but then I would go fully into edge, kind of like a sponsorship at the beginning of a podcast, right? You do a little commercial and then you share the information. And so I said, at any point in time, if you would like to talk to us live or schedule a call, press zero. So while they were listening to it, we gave them an option. And then I had people that were air duct cleaners. Uh they they they did you know uh other services, and there would be a menu where press one if you want water damage, press two if you want air duct cleaning, press three if you want janitorial services. So there could be a like a a decision tree, right? Uh back then. And and you know, sometimes it was leave a message if you'd like us to call it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:57

But you're saying that methodology still works today. It's the best one.

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:00

But what about it's one of them. What about price points? Is it's is it in a low-cost commodity business or it spans kind of the universe?

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:08

Doesn't matter. No. Actually, the the higher price you are, the more, the more you tell, the more you sell. Uh, you know, the do you want to know the formula for how much you charge for something? Yeah. Yeah, because a lot of people are like, how much you charge for something? All right, so this is the formula for how much to charge for anything. Louis Vuitton purses, Rolexes, coffee, you know, um asphalt um repair, whatever. The formula for how much you charge for something is based on your ability to sell it. It which is true. So the more effective you are at selling something, the more you can charge. Like we're all wearing watches right now. So there was a book, uh, what was it called? Um uh The Experience Economy, written in the night, I think 1999 by Joseph Pine as one of the authors, and I can't remember the other dude's name. And they were talking about remember Starbucks back in the 90s, like when it was really new. Howard Schultz, who was an employee at Starbucks, then he ended up buying the company and he was in Italy and he saw like the baristas and he saw the social aspects and decided to, you know, transplant, you know, Italian, uh, you know, like the the the uh the model of coffee and in uh into America and now they're the large one of the largest drug dealers in the world. So uh he took a two-cent commodity and he changed the name of packaging from small, medium, and large to I I really don't go to Starbucks.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:32

So Venti, something sort of tall venti uh grande or whatever.

SPEAKER_01: 1:02:37

And so he changed it, right? And then he took a two-cent commodity, and uh prior to Starbucks, you could go into the four seasons and maybe have expensive coffee. Every once in a while you'd have a you know, a coffee house, but you know, you you got Folgers Crystals, you go to Denny's restaurant, you're paying 50 cents a dollar back then for a cup of coffee. He figured out how to charge$2 to$5 for a two-cent commodity because he packaged it differently. So good marketing is unique packaging. And so what he learned is that he could have sold coffee for$2 and$3 and massively expanded the market because the margins were so high, but he still maintained a high price point because there's a concept called pride of spending. And I did my very first general marketing program was with an audio company called Nightingale Conit. At the time, they were the largest audio learning company in the world. And so I did a program for them called uh Piranha Marketing, which is my parent company, Piranha Marketing. Uh, the seven success multiple multiplying factors to dominate any market you enter. And I tell this, they still sell that on Audible, but it's over 20 years old, right? And so um what what I what I talk about with private spending is there's a segment of the population that does not feel psychologically good unless they pay the most amount of money for something. Uh so back then there were no Apple watches. So if someone paid a hundred bucks for a Timex, they're buying a watch to tell time. If you're paying 10 grand for a Rolex, are you really buying a watch or are you buying status? Now, people will logically explain that they're buying a watch because you how do you justify you need to spend$10,000 to know what time it is? Right. It makes no sense. So Louis Vuitton Purses, uh Mer Mercedes, all very high exclusive brands, Richard Mill. Like I'm wearing a swatch right now. Someone gave me a Richard Mill watch as a gift. You know, it's expensive watches. So I I I like I don't like expensive stuff though, because that to me it's it's I I think it's dangerous because someone could want to cut your arm off to get your damn watch, and and and this is an easier watch to put on. But there is quality. Of course. I mean, no, but here's the thing it's what you're into. I'm not here to tell so if you if you love watches or Mont Blanc pens or you know, Italian shoes that cost$3,000, more power to you. You know, if if you create value in the world, quit making excuses as to why you want what you want. People are constantly apologizing for what the only time you like, let's take the term give back, right? I believe in giving. I don't like the term give back, though, because give, I understand what it means. And even when you say it, and and I even use it once in a while in a certain context, it's coming from good intentions. It's like I'm, you know, I I've I've had great things happen. I have, you know, whatever, I've had I've had a blessed life. I don't have I'm not laid up in a hospital, I'm not born in a war toilet.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:25

I know why you don't like give back.

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:27

Well, no, here well, go tell me.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:28

Well, because it insinuates that you were taking. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:31

Yeah, if someone says, like, if I took your shoes, I should give them back. Right. But if I've not taken anything, what is there to give back? So I'm all for giving. I just don't like being guilted into giving back. And by the way, the stuff I do for addiction recovery, people constantly give me compliments and say, it's so great what it is you're doing. And I will say, look, yeah, maybe it is, uh, but it's not because I'm some philanthropic angel. Like it helps me with my recovery. If you want to feel better in life, go help people that are hurting. You know, whenever I'm depressed, if I get all sucked into my problems, my issues, uh, then I don't pull out of it. But if I can go put that effort and energy, which is hard as it sounds, when you are so depleted, sometimes like, oh, you have to go pay attention to someone else. But one of the keys to being a great giver is you also have to be a giver to yourself. You can't, it can't be a one one-way street where you're constantly bleeding yourself. So giver to yourself in what way? Around you. You have to take care of yourself. Yeah, you sleep. Right. Uh, if someone gives you a compliment, don't brush it off. Try to take it in if it's sincere. If it's flattery, I mean you can be nice and you know they're kind of blowing smoke up your ass, but for the most part, flattery even works for most people because people like being complimented. Is your dad still around? No, he died when uh he died in when he was 73 years old in 2002, and I was his primary caretaker for uh a year, the last year of his life.

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:55

Did he see any of the success you had?

SPEAKER_01: 1:06:57

Yeah, he was very proud of that's it's crazy. He was he was proud of it. And my father had we had a we had a tough relationship. Yeah, because my father uh unfortunately didn't have a lot of the resources that I sought out and that were available now back then. I mean, he he he really uh he he really lived a pained life. And he never uh he was a hard worker though.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:20

Did he see Genius Network or he saw the success of you selling the carpet business?

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:23

Uh just the carpet business.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:24

When did Genius Network Genius server sorry 2009? 2007. 2007, 2007.

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:28

Yeah, so I so you to answer your question, how do I go into genius? So what when I started creating kits for carpet cleaners, I started going out and speaking about it and then um uh presenting my I would do these one-day events uh called How to Double Your Business in Six Months or Less. And then I would offer my uh marketing program uh that I was selling for$497 for a basic package and$597 for a gold package. And uh So you were just like a Tony Robbins, selling selling. Yes, except in the carpet cleaning because the the the carpet cleaning industry cannot afford the talent of a Tony Robbins. So whenever you go into uh a particular niche, uh there's always opportunity. So when people are trying to go to the general market, so there's a couple of young people that are sitting here, right? We have my friend uh Justin and Madeline uh Butcher, and he has a new podcast, and this is for like anyone to to better themselves in in in different areas of life, and he interviews all kinds of really smart people. And um if he just did that podcast for financial advisors and it became just about them, it would take on a whole different meaning. And but it's really hard to niche things uh if you're A, not in the niche, B, if you don't uh come from that niche, C if you don't have an affinity with that niche. So my friend Dan Sullivan, who I've been doing, you know, a podcast with since 2012, uh he I've been in his uh he he he started a company called Strategic Coach. And he's one of he's in Genius Network. I'm in his his group. We we're great collaborators.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:01

Is he an author? He sounds familiar. Oh, yeah, that name sounds familiar.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:03

Over 40 books.

unknown: 1:09:05

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:05

I feel like I met his daughter.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:08

Well, they don't have kids. He doesn't have any sure sounds like Dan's yeah, Dan Sullivan. What the hell was I gonna say uh about him? Um I lost my train of thought.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:18

Let me think you speak in his groups, he speaks in your groups.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:21

Yeah, yeah. Oh, okay, I know what it was. Uh who do you want to be a hero to? So he has this great line where if people are trying to find themselves and you're frustrated with your business, you're frustrated with your job, what there's always going to be frustrations. Like for business owners, what a business is is solving problems for a profit. If there's no problems in the world, there's rarely any business. You know, there's businesses that make money by not solving problems, but I could look at almost every business. We're sitting on a couch. The people that make this couch, the problem is if we didn't have any place to sit that was comfortable, where would we be sitting? We'd be sitting on the floor, we'd be sitting on some uncomfortable chair, but we have a, you know, we're t we're talking into a mic right now. If there were no mics and there were no cameras and there were not like how would we distribute this stuff, right? So uh if you break your foot, that sucks. But if you are able to go to a doctor, that helps, right? So other people's bad news is your good news. So uh almost all money in the world is made transforming other people's bad news into good news. So if you are an unethical marketer and you promise that you're going to solve a problem and you you get money from people, you take money from people, and then you don't deliver something that has a reasonable or preferably a more than reasonable chance of helping them solve their problem, then you're taking advantage of somebody. And so with uh I look at everything through the lens of uh what are the problems that need to be solved. So with my uh carpet cleaning, I niched it, right? So I went into the carpet cleaner, I just sold marketing for carpet cleaners, but I did it because I had success in my own company doing it. Like I discovered that I had an opportunity to teach other people how to solve a problem that I solved for myself. So I understood what kept them up at three in the morning. With I used to have this visual of like, if you could imagine someone you're selling something to, and they need to hear or buy or utilize what you have figured out because it will change their life, it will help them. And what keeps someone up at three in the morning with bile coming up from their esophagus because they're so fucking stressed out, and you happen to have something that can give them direction, confidence, capability, and clarity that could help them in some area of their life. And if you have it, how do you communicate that it's available to them? And if you got it to them and they used it, and it would transform their life. So so my the the way I got into the business goes back to that consumer awareness guide and the 24-hour uh free recorded message. So I'm in speaking or attending a car, not speaking, attending an event uh in Colorado uh for a carpet cleaning association. And I had volunteered to be the Arizona director of the Carpet and Fabric Hair Institute, is what it was called. Volunteer work just so I could hang out with people that were twice my age that knew more about running a business than I did. And so here I am at this uh event just trying to, you know, learn stuff from another association because I was the Arizona director of this other association. So I would go to all these learning events. One thing about me, I'm always trying to learn, read, put yourself in in you know, in proximity of people that know more about something than I did. Still do that to this day. Never too cool for school. People that are too cool for school are morons. I mean, they just think they know everything. So um I was at this event, and we're in this this guy's speaking. Uh he was a big wig in the carpet cleaning industry back then, and he was like teaching seminars and all this stuff, and he had this, his name was Matt Clark, and he said, you know, 40% off is the best way to get business. And uh, and here I was running free recorded messages, and people weren't even calling me based on price. They were, you know, uh they would listen to my free recorded message and then they would call up and say, When can you book the job? Because the free recorded message got them pre-interested, pre-motivated, pre-qualified, and predisposed to do business with me. It was no longer about price. So the reason I said prior to spending is this go to the low end or high end, if it's especially high end, the more that you educate and build rapport, the better. You know, Apple didn't just start selling, you know, thousand or fifteen hundred dollar iPhones. Louis Vuitton didn't start just selling three three thousand dollar purses. You know, they had to build a particular reputation. The average small business owner, especially in carpet cleaning, doesn't have the advertising budget of Coca-Cola or Apple or some of these big brands. So they have to do other things. And what we do is we build rapport with people by educating them, guaranteeing our work, doing a good job, that sort of stuff. And so um, so here I was at this event, and this guy says 40% off. I raise my hand, I have long hair and a ponytail back then, and I said, you know, I'm doing this thing with free recorded messages, and I don't price discount my services at all. I just have people call a free recorded message and I teach them what they need to know about carpet cleaning, and they end up, you know, just wanting to hire me because I tell them everything that they need to know and what's the difference between uh and he says he goes, Well, young man, if that works for you, that's fine, but we know that 40% off is the best uh offer you can make, and just totally shun me while I'm sitting in this event, and you know, I was like, all right, whatever. And during the break, two guys come up to me, they're twice my age, and they're like, You were talking about what's that free recorded message thing you're talking about? And I said, Well, I go, I paid a copywriter$1,800 to write a consumer awareness guide for me, and I paid him another$250 to turn that um consumer awareness guide into a um into a free recorded message. If you pay me$250, I'll send you the whole script to the consumer awareness guide and the free recorded message that has cost me over uh two$2,000. Just pay me$250, which is what I paid him the right uh to turn the consumer awareness guide into a script, and then report back to me the results. One guy's name was Don DeLu, the other guy's name was Andy Gallagher. The reason I remember their names is they ended up becoming clients of mine once, you know, within a year and a half, I'm off to the races. So Don DeLu literally is getting ready to run a half-page phone book ad in the Denver phone book, because he lived in Golden, Colorado. And he uh he's like, Can I do a phone call with you? And I go, sure. Uh so now as I do a phone call, he goes, I'm running a half page ad. I don't know what the hell it was costing him. He goes, and you know, and it barely makes breaks even. Sometimes I lose money, but I've been doing it for years. And he goes, Would you run a free recorded message in the phone book? And I said, Yeah, put warning, don't call any carpet cleaner to listen to this free recorded message. Run it as an in-call him ad. I took him from a half-page phone book ad down to an ad smaller than the size of a business card. It quadrupled the response he was getting in the yellow pages. And off of 200, I charge him 250 bucks for the free recorded message script and the consumer guide. And uh he was paying too he went from paying, I don't know, like some several thousand or a couple thousand. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:35

The yellow pages back in the day was a lot.

SPEAKER_01: 1:16:37

Yeah, it was and I took it was it was only 250 bucks a month, is what it cost him. From that free recorded message ad and the yellow pages, way back then, he ended up doing$62,000 in business that first year.

unknown: 1:16:50

Wow.

SPEAKER_01: 1:16:51

And at that point, I was like, I could probably package this stuff up and sell it to other carpet cleaners. And so that's what I did. And he was uh my very first client. The other guy, Andy, didn't do jack shit, which is normal. A lot of people buy your stuff, they shelve it, they don't read the books, they don't do anything, until two years later when I was like now this big, then he bought my whole course. And he ended up, and then I started Platinum, which is a$1,000 a month program, and I started coaching people in 1998, and it was a$247 a month coaching program called 2X Plus One. We would teach them how to double their business and how to take it an extra day off per week. And then in 2001, like Bill Phillips, the Body for Life author, had given me a convertible Jaguar because I helped him make millions of dollars. And I had this Jaguar I was driving around, and I wanted to do a contest for entrepreneurs because I had helped him with his physique transformation body for life contest. And uh, but I was like, I need to take after I drove the car around, I was like, I need to turn this into um some sort of PR event. I don't know what. So I came up with a better your best contest, and I was gonna give away my car, uh, this car that he had bought me to whoever did the best job of taking a three-month uh period from the previous year and a three-month period of the current year, and they could either enter uh, you know, systemizing your marketing or advertising or increasing your net or gross profit. And they had I created a whole contest around this with rules and regulations. To your clients, to my yeah, to my carpet cleaning clients, and then I announced it. Uh, and you know, you can't give away prizes. Back then laws change on this all the time, but you can't just like charge someone to be part of something and give away prizes because you're running a lottery. Right. But if you do a spokesperson contest where they win the spokesperson that could happen to come with prizes, vacations, whatever, that's how you could actually do it. So um what what we did is we uh you know I I put that car up and I I I launched a program called Platinum Plus,$1,000 a month or$12,000 uh$1,000 a month,$12,000 a year, or if they pay in full$10,000. And I announced it and um only three people signed up, which the car was worth$80,000. And I was like, this is not gonna work because that's right there. But we took a month and we called everyone that had attended that event, and uh we ended up getting 35 people to join the first year. And that was my platinum. So did they get uh conference calls with you?

SPEAKER_00: 1:19:16

Yeah, monthly conference calls with with everybody on one call.

SPEAKER_01: 1:19:19

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone on one call, and then um, and then uh we we would meet uh quarterly for a day at a time. And then after a couple years of that, we started meeting three days, two days at a time. So today, Genius Network is an example. They come to three meetings a year. Uh two of them are two days at a time at my office. We do them almost monthly at my house. From all around the country? All over the world. All over the world at the end. Yeah, this last week we had people from uh uh Dubai, um Australia, Netherlands, um you know, many from Canada. Do you have a number? Like how many people are in the program? A couple hundred right now. A couple between my 35k group, which is Genius Network, and between my 100K group, we have over 200 members.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:02

Uh and are the names businesses we would know, we would recognize? Yeah, some. Are you allowed to share those names?

SPEAKER_01: 1:20:07

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Chris Voss, you know, the top former international FBI hostage negotiators in my 100k group.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:12

Oh, I think I've had him on my show before. Yeah. He was on doc, he was on the um I had him in the studio. I'm almost positive. He lives here, right? No, no, he lives in Vegas. Oh, he must. But he's I'm almost positive I had to.

SPEAKER_01: 1:20:22

Do you know Tommy Mello who's here with A1 Garage? Oh, I want to talk to that guy. I love that guy. Yeah, he's in my 100K group. Dan Sullivan's in my 100k group. Uh, Cameron Harold from 1800 Got Junk is Ingenious Network. Uh, 28% of the members are women. Uh we have some incredible uh members. Um yeah, I mean, people can look it up online.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:44

That's fantastic. What a story. You know what? Talking to you and hearing everything, you you I mean, whether you like it or not, I mean, you are a public figure, right? Yeah, yeah, to a degree. I feel that you are.

SPEAKER_01: 1:20:54

Hopefully, most more people like me than dislike me.

SPEAKER_02: 1:20:56

Well, one one thing I know we're we're sort of short on time, but a fascination that I have is your ability to make connections with people and build a network. Can you and kind of walk us through how you do that from I don't know this guy to where I've just met him? What what's what are the things that you do? Because every everybody wants to build a a bigger network, a better so walk us through what what works and them, what what doesn't. And I know a lot of stuff is in your book, but yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:21:29

So so part of it, yeah, I wrote a whole book called What's in It for Them. So it starts with asking the question I bought that book. Thank you. Thank you. Uh have you read it yet? I'm halfway through it. Okay. Yeah. It's I I'm a slow reader. No, I'm reading five books right now. I am. Well, yeah, I'm I'm the same way.

SPEAKER_00: 1:21:43

But I've been reading the same five books for about 10 years. I just added your book now. So now I'm reading six books.

SPEAKER_01: 1:21:48

That's true. I have it on Audible too. I recorded it in my voice. Um, so that's the question. What's in it for them? So you want to position things so that uh it is not about you, but it's about them. Uh there's that famous Zig Ziggler line, you can get anything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want, with the caveat that you can help some people get what they want that not only won't do a damn thing for you, they won't appreciate you and they will abuse you. So part of it is aligning yourself with people that are aligned with you. So making connections is if I could go back in time, uh be a giver, but be selective on people that actually are ethical, people that always lead first. But if people do not reciprocate, meaning they violate the Dan Sullivan referrability habits. Show up on time, do what you say you're going to do, finish what you start, and say please and thank you. If people do those things, then I'm all for, you know, I don't like people that don't appreciate services of others. Uh I don't like people that don't utilize when you give them something useful. Uh I don't work with anything or anyone that isn't elf, easy, lucrative, and fun versus hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating. So I only want elf people in my life, not half people. So I always put everything to is is is this project, this person, this strategy easy, lucrative, and fun, or is it hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating? Definitely has to have integrity, uh, has to be ethical, has to be aligned.

SPEAKER_00: 1:23:18

Have you ever denied anyone in the group?

SPEAKER_01: 1:23:19

Oh, yeah, all the time.

SPEAKER_00: 1:23:20

Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah. Because do you tell them why, or is it your own?

SPEAKER_01: 1:23:24

Yeah, yeah. Uh there there's one time where I actually screamed at someone to kick him out of the group because he was such a horrendous uh narcissistic asshole.

SPEAKER_00: 1:23:32

Like they were in the group in the meeting they had paid.

SPEAKER_01: 1:23:34

Well, I didn't yell at him in front of everyone else.

SPEAKER_00: 1:23:35

Right, but you said you need to get out of here.

SPEAKER_01: 1:23:37

Oh, yeah, yeah. And refund them, or is it just and I I recently gave one person their money back because I looked at all these FTC, uh not FTC, uh, Better Business Bureau complaints. And there were like, and I heard this person's story explaining it, but after digging deeper into it, I'm like, you're not gonna, you're not gonna excuse this one away. I mean, there are large companies where people attack them. And if you're gonna do anything of size, I mean, even Mother Teresa got hate mail. However, you know, there there's a point where it's like, you know, you look at the reputation. So what I what Genius Network is, is it's a connection network. I don't call it a mastermind because way too many masterminds have been polluted by idiots that are unethical, calling them mastermind groups. And a mastermind is a dialogue, it's not a monologue. So a lot of masterminds are like speakers speaking. That's a seminar, that's not a mastermind. And so we do masterminding in the event, but it's a connection network. So to you to your question, how do you connect people? Just be useful, be grateful, be generous, uh, look for what they need solved. Don't just say to someone, how can I help you? Actually do a little bit of thinking and be like, just help them. You know, one way to help them is if you don't have anything to offer them, give them money. If you don't have any money to give them, give them time, attention, effort, and energy, only to the degree that you are actually helping them, not being annoying. Uh, you know, you and and you know, when you're young and you don't know what the hell you're doing, uh, my friend Dave Kekich, who spent half his life in a wheelchair, he's you know, enthusiasm covers many deficiencies. Be a likable person, uh, figure out, you know, it's so easy today to find things about people and companies. Freaking, you know, do an AI search, right? But really don't just do a summary on AI five minutes before you meet someone and then pretend you actually know anything about them. Like, you know, if you're if you're trying if you're trying to get a job as an example, and you know how to you have skills that can produce a result, sales skills are always valuable because there's there's rarely few companies out there that don't want more business, right? So uh if you offer to just work for free for a period of time and prove yourself and then say, and if I can produce the result that you're paying other people to do, then you can offer me a position. And if not, then you won't. Now, if you don't have any money and you have to like pay the rent next week, you may not be able to do that. But the thing is you can you can work, you know, there's this whole don't work hard, work smart. The real thing is work hard on smart things, work hard with smart people. Don't just, you know, work don't work hard, work smart. I I don't know anyone that starts like even elf, easy, lucrative, and fun, it's often very hard in the beginning to build an elf business. You have to build a foundation. You you get paid in the beginning for what you do. If you get really good at what you do, you then get paid for who you are. And a lot of people rest on their laurels because they get paid more for whoing than whating. But never, if you're really skilled and you become famous because you know, you can be Richard Branson and not say anything. You're still gonna have someone give you, you know, half a million dollars to show up and like talk in an event because he's Richard Branson. Uh, however, and I've I've I've interviewed Richard more than most people in the world. I've got I spent six weeks of my life on Necker Island, and I've also interviewed people that are infinitely more valuable with what they share than what Richard does about business, but they hear they don't hear it because he's not they're not Richard Branson. And so part of it is listen to what the person has to say, uh, what sort of skills do they have, and then and lead them into what it is that they want. And oftentimes you just can simply ask them, What do you what do you need solved right now? If you could wave a magic wand and have something happen, uh, what's some pain that you want taken away that if you would really love if someone just came and handled something for you? And if you're a person that can do that, handle it for them. And you know, because think about all the people that are your you're you're gonna get how many text messages or phone calls do you think you'll get the rest of the day? Uh hopefully not a lot.

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:44

I mean, I don't know, let's say four or five?

SPEAKER_01: 1:27:46

Four or five. Okay, we're we're getting towards the end of the day, but let's say in a whole day, how many, how many uh I don't know, 15, 20? Okay. So so uh I I on average get over a hundred to two hundred a day. Jeez. Now now, granted, I'm able to do that because that's my cockpit. I know how to navigate relationships. That's just me though. Some people it would drive them bananas.

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:08

Uh I have like a hundred thousand unanswered emails.

SPEAKER_01: 1:28:10

Oh, well, there you go.

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:11

Like I'm I'm a little yeah, I don't, I I I'm I'm a little different that way.

SPEAKER_01: 1:28:16

Yeah, no, I I know so here's the point. You look at everyone that texts you, you either get woo or you get ah. You know, because what people want is more woo and less ah. And if you're a person that could add woo to some people's lights, not everyone, but you need to know not only who to attract, but who to repel. Because good marketing doesn't just attract who you want, it repels who you don't want. I am not all things to all people. Genius network. Most people that come to my group as an example. There's famous people like last year. I sold the event out three weeks in advance, and I didn't even tell anyone that I was having Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, and Bobby Kennedy come and do interviews with me. They're the first post-election interviews that all three of them had done. Then I brought them to my 100K dinner and did a panel for everyone. We recorded it, but we never distributed that video. But I put the other videos up on YouTube and I surprise people. I wow people, I exceed their expectations. Uh, and you, you know, so I'm always trying to one-up myself. But if you go back in time, I was a drug addict. I didn't know how to talk to anyone, I was scared to ask anyone out on a date, so I never went to prom in high school. Uh, the night of my high school graduation, I was like overlooking uh the Dobson High football field, which is where the graduation was while freebasing cocaine. I was an absolute mess. I've had guns in my mouth and being suicidal and stuff. Life is a series of a lot of ups and downs. So as long as you don't kill yourself, uh as long as you don't completely destroy relationships, you know, you can learn skills. You ambition is a capability. Uh, and so, you know, with Genius Network, people. come to the group not for who's in it but for who's not in in the room. So some people will sign up for things because they want to meet people.

SPEAKER_00: 1:30:07

But do you have functions that non-members go to?

SPEAKER_01: 1:30:10

Or is that the annual event that I do every year.

SPEAKER_00: 1:30:13

And that's the one where you had Tucker Carlson and those guys come in.

SPEAKER_01: 1:30:15

Yeah, yeah. And this year I have other amazing people equally as amazing, but I'm not going to tell people who they are. And then every year they're like, why didn't you tell me they were coming out? And I'm like, well you should have signed up and you would have known.

SPEAKER_00: 1:30:25

You know what's interesting I was going to say I feel like um you're like one of the most authentic public figures I've ever met. Like it's not like you don't there's no bullshit. You know what I mean? It's pretty cool that you're not going to be able to do it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:30:36

People say that to me and it's funny I have a hard time understanding that because I'm just saying whatever I say. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_00: 1:30:42

Like you're not you're not trying to be cool. You're not trying to be whatever you're just you and it's pretty damn cool. Well thank you. Yeah like I'm really glad you said that. I have to ask this though this is so random but your partner that you talked about you said she's an OBGYN what is she's a vaginal plastic surgeon and she's an integrative doc. Okay. So she does like she's expert in peptides uh exosomes uh but she's a vaginal plastic surgeon plastic surgery yeah she does labia plastia okay but here's what I'm trying to figure out because I've gone to her before I do not have a vagina. Well are you sure?

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:21

You might have enough no but she she has uh she has a handful of uh it's really cool that she could have did some of my hair with her did you I don't know I'm trying to remember well she's she's collaborative with other plastic surgeons and she uh she also used to be a trauma surgeon so she does she's done all kinds of procedures she used to do uh breast augmentation and a lot of it was breast cancer reconstruction but it's such difficult work so she now just niches uh no pun intended she focuses on vaginal plastic surgery is the only thing I remember I think she injected my head with like uh growth something because my hair I was losing my hair okay could that be could that yeah yeah it has to be some some sort of uh peptides or something I don't know it was a long time ago okay but when you said that I was like wait a minute that's not I I used it for something but that's entirely possible how long you guys have been together uh five years oh wow yeah yeah I think you're freaking amazing man I've thank you I've learned so much from you like I want to rewatch his podcast immediately well good because there was a lot of information like when you said at the beginning you talk in riffs but you speak your riffs are full of knowledge well good I hope I hope and my whole thing is I hope it's useful for I I try I I go on a lot of tangents and I weave things around but I usually try to close the loop and what I will say so we can wrap this up uh is that uh if anyone's struggling with addiction uh geniusrecovery.org is our uh we don't sell anything uh eventually we'll have physical first aid kits for recovery that are going to be sold in pharmacies and stuff because we can guide people to uh places to get like uh to get help yeah yeah no one recovers though I've written two books on addiction recovery I give more of them away than I sell uh but no one recovers just from a book it's that's a seed it's a starting point it'll help someone start their journey and that's my goal but someone if they're really struggling with addiction you you know you you need a plan so it's there recovery services here that you recommend yeah yeah yeah there and it depends on the situation I even have a recovery clone and if anyone has any marketing questions I have uh askjopolish.com it's my AI clone and currently we don't charge for it people can ask like how do I write a consumer awareness guide because I'm dude I'm gonna be all over that I don't know how to write an I I spend so much money on social media ads for my radio show yeah and I don't think it's working and doing it ask my clone people are writing marketing plans using my AI let's see what it's we'll see what it says then I'm gonna send it to you and you tell me if it's a good idea or not. Yeah and also you don't even know this I own the ghost town of Cleater Arizona with a couple of friends 40 acre ghost town here. Oh really and people can go visit our ghost town it's on the way to Sedona where you exit where it says Bumblebee and we have uh like we have a big event going on there this weekend uh the next weekend we have a uh like Halloween stuff golf tournament oh yeah we'll have Halloween stuff there happening too but we just did a uh HGTV just uh featured us on Zillogone Wild and it won the uh the unique property of the season oh uh award and then uh yeah so so I I do all kinds of wacky sh wacky stuff but ultimately uh everything I try to do is about connection if you need uh ever need help promoting the ghost town events you know it's right up that's up right up our alley I will talk to you about that that would be great wait I want to go back real quick something I know we're wrapping up real quick but I'm gonna go back to Tony Robbins because when you said did you listen to his cassettes in the early 90s yeah because for me when I first started in radio as an intern a guy gave me his cassettes and I listened to those religiously even at night remember the cassette that had the music on it it was a cassette that's just music I would listen to that it's supposed to be subliminal and one day I'm at a restaurant in uh in La Hoya at a restaurant um and this red Ferrari pulls up and Tony Robbins is in the Ferrari and I like shit my pants there's Tony Robbins and he gets up he stands in line to order food and I start talking to him and he was so awesome and I was quoting his cassettes I mean do you remember can I constantly so I'm saying I go can I constant and never ending improvement do you remember that and he goes yes I made that up I invented that kaizan yeah I was doing all that stuff to him right so anyway he invited me he he invited me to go to his date with destiny in Florida and I went and spent six days there in West Palm did you get sick afterwards no what do we have the people get catch cold well you know you know I'm not your guru that movie yeah I was in the VIP section the whole time of the filming and I'm in three very quick scenes I was so happy I wasn't like uh because Derek Hoff and Julia what's her the dancers yeah I just interviewed him last week oh did you okay so I'm dancing with them the entire time in the VIP section at this silly date with destiny event and I'm like going where in the hell is this video footage going to show up it was on the document thank God it's not that it's somewhere but let me tell you that that that documentary I'm not your guru when he jumps into his cold plunge do you remember that he goes cold plunge 57 degrees he jumps in the cold plunge I screenshot I took a recording from another phone I sent it I was I was at his West Palm thing my pool was being redone I said I want this exact same cold plunge so I have the exact same cold plunge that is funny in fact I did it before I came here today. Yeah well so no and I have a cold plunge in my backyard and you know why cold plunges are great? Why and this is for a whole nother conversation like so my friend Anna Lemke who wrote dopamine nation she understands the biochemical aspects of addiction so on mice uh chocolate 55% increase in dopamine cold plunge 150% or no uh sex 150% increase in dopamine cold plunges 200% uh increase in dopamine cocaine 225% methamphetamine is a thousand percent that's why drugs are very addictive for for people uh but cold plunges are actually healthy dopamine unhealthy ways are continuously looking at screens social media so when you do a cold plunge it's not just good for you physically it's good for you mentally how long do you have to be in the cold plunge to get those benefits by the way I'm not a total expert in this although you know I've I have a lot of people that are that I've spoken with um two minutes is is is the magic number that Huberman and and and Wim Hof and you know people that are real experts in this speak to so yeah uh I mean I've spent uh 13 minutes in uh 38 degree cold plunge and that was tough that's that was the most that was the longest I've spent I've spent 20 minutes in uh 50 degrees and I've spent uh four minutes in 32 degrees freezing up to my neck but it if the more frequently you do it and it's not about getting in the cold it's integrating the the breathing uh in the heat and the cold together you kind of get a I do all that stuff I did the sauna and the cold plane before I came here to meet with you I had to mentally prepare that's awesome I wanted to be I wanted to be ready like I was but it's so great to talk to you I'm so grateful that you took the time out of your busy schedule man so thanks man you're welcome okay so welcome to our podcast this is a little bit different today because this podcast is a spin off of our radio show