The Joe Polish Show

From an overdrawn bank account and $1 million in debt to a touring phenomenon with a ticket waitlist in the millions, Jesse Cole completely rewrote the rules of business.

In this classic talk from the Genius Network archives, the Founder of the Savannah Bananas breaks down his legendary "Fans First" framework. Tune in to learn the four E's you can use to stop chasing transactions and start building a fanbase that never leaves.

Here's what you're about to discover in this conversation:

• The Friday at 4:45 p.m. phone call that forced Jesse and Emily to sell their dream house, empty their savings, and sleep on a twin air bed.
• The three words that are the most powerful form of word-of-mouth marketing you can get (and how to engineer them into every touch point).
• How a 22-year-old intern turned a tragic phone call into a moment a father called "the last gift the mother ever gave the kids."
• What Pete Rose and Reggie Jackson reveal about failure, and the simple advice from Jesse's dad that drives every big swing the Bananas take.

If you'd like to join world-renowned Entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network® Event, apply today for your invitation to attend at geniusnetworkevent.com.

Show Notes

From Zero Debt to Over a Million in Debt

• Jesse and Emily take on more than a million dollars in debt to bring a team to Savannah after the previous minor league club leaves a 4,000-seat stadium drawing 200 fans.

• On day one, the former team has cut the phones and internet, so the crew of five works from a picnic table in an abandoned storage building.

• They sell just two tickets in three months, overdraft the account, sell their house, and start over on a twin air bed.

Naming the Team After a Fruit

• Out of desperation, they decide to get different and name the team the Savannah Bananas, complete with the Banana Nanas, the Mananas, and banana babies.

• The local reaction is brutal ("Whoever came up with this name should be fired."), but it gets attention.

• Jesse's takeaway: once you have people's eyes and ears, you can go after their hearts.

Customers Are Transactional. Fans Never Leave.

• The Bananas stopped chasing customers and started designing every touch point to create fans.

• The goal is for people to leave the ballpark saying three words ("You wouldn't believe") about what they just saw.

• One family drives 40 hours from Utah for a single game, and some fans get more than one Bananas tattoo.

E #1: Eliminate Friction

• Jesse's mirror moment comes in a Cape Cod League dugout: even with the best seat in the house, baseball is long, slow, and boring.

• Asking "What business are we really in?" reframes everything. The Bananas aren't in the baseball business. They're in the entertainment business.

• All-inclusive tickets (food included, no fees) remove the nickel-and-dime feeling of a typical ballpark.

Throwing Away the Sponsorship Money

• On February 25, 2020, the Bananas eliminate stadium advertising and walk away from hundreds of thousands of dollars in sponsorships.

• Jesse calls it a terrible business move, yet merchandise sales more than made up for it.

• Banana Ball rules (a two-hour time limit, no bunting, no walks, and fans catching foul balls for outs) attack the friction of fans leaving early.

Go Undercover: The Friction Audit

• Every game, someone on staff parks, walks in, sits, and eats with the fans, then reports back on what went wrong.

• Jesse's own audit: a pothole and two parking penguins eating burgers with their backs to him.

• Blockbuster vs. Netflix, phone trees, and voicemail menus show how friction quietly loses fans every day.

E #2: Experiment Constantly

• Borrowing from Jeff Bezos, Jesse believes success is a direct function of how many experiments you run.

• Allen Fahden's rule, "Whatever's normal, do the exact opposite," inspired a one-book bookstore that landed in People and USA Today.

• The first Bananas experiment, choreographed player dances, starts with groans and ends with a fan telling her husband, "Shut up, honey, they're about to dance."

Failure Is Part of the Process

• Mic'd-up players you can't hear, a drone that flies into the net, and a fan-picked pitcher who gives up six runs in the ninth.

• Flatulence Fun Night, Salute to Underwear Night, and a 9 a.m. beer festival that draws 90 people.

• Jesse cuts nearly a million dollars in events because they bring people to the ballpark without creating Bananas fans.

Building a Culture of Ideas

• Inspired by James Altucher, Jesse writes ten ideas a day around a theme.

• Weekly team "idea-paloozas" give everyone ownership, so ideas don't only come from the entrepreneur.

• The Bananas define IP as "ideas and promotion," and favor long-term fans over short-term profits.

E #3: Entertain Always

• Inspired by Derek Sivers and CD Baby, ticket buyers get a silly confirmation video about a silk pillow and a stadium vault instead of a receipt.

• Taking a cue from Brian Chesky, staff personally call ticket buyers to say thank you.

• Parking penguins, scratch-and-sniff banana tickets, and a six-year-old professional high fiver set the tone before the first pitch.

The First and Last Impression

• Even the 1926 bathrooms become a touch point, with urinal cakes bearing the logo of rival team the Macon Bacon.

• Following Shep Hyken, the Bananas design the last impression: banana moon pies, a pep band, and players asking kids for their autographs.

• A rain delay script turns the worst-case scenario into three and a half hours of entertainment and an intern who walks a fan all the way home.

E #4: Empower Action

• Jesse's dad's T-ball advice, "Swing hard in case you hit it," fuels big swings like his goal of selling out Fenway Park (which the Bananas went on to do in 2024).

• Pete Rose finished with the most hits because he had the most at-bats, and Reggie Jackson, baseball's strikeout leader, is remembered as Mr. October.

• Intern Barry Aldridge turns a heartbreaking thank-you call into a fans-first moment, and goes on to become a Bananas vice president.

The Thank-You Letter Experiment

• After reading One Word, Jesse picks "care" and commits to writing a thank-you letter every day for a year on 500 custom yellow cards.

• One letter leads to an unexpected phone call from Simon Sinek.

• His challenge: start with something simple that isn't normal, like a handwritten thank-you note or video.

Resources

• The Savannah Bananas | Jesse Cole's team, home of Banana Ball and the Fans First experience.

• Fans First: Change the Game, Break the Rules & Create an Unforgettable Experience | Book by Jesse Cole.

• Banana Ball: The Unbelievably True Story of the Savannah Bananas | Book by Jesse Cole with Don Yaeger.

• Find Your Yellow Tux: How to Be Successful by Standing Out | Book by Jesse Cole.

• The Most Successful Email I Ever Wrote | Derek Sivers on the CD Baby order confirmation email.

Joe Polish sits down with venture capitalist and Author Kamal Ravikant, for an unusually candid conversation about losing everything, the one-word vow that pulled him back from it, and what actually separates the investors who get rich from the ones who get wiped out.

Here's what you're about to discover in this conversation:

• Why Kamal Ravikant hit a point so low after losing every dollar of his company, and his investors' money, that he could barely stand the sound of his own head.
• The one-word vow Kamal made to himself alone in a room, never intended to write down, and why he treats a promise to yourself as sacred as a marriage vow.
• How his inner dialogue flipped from self-hatred to something he can only call magic in about a week and a half, with zero drugs or alcohol involved.
• The night at a private Silicon Valley wine bar when a still mostly unknown Elon Musk answered a question about the single most important advice for a CEO, and the two words that stuck with Kamal for decades.
• The mindset flip his mentor Bill Coons taught him that separates the angel investors who lose $750,000 to $1,000,000 from the ones who spot every hole in a pitch.
• How a $35,000 check Kamal wrote to an unproven founder on Skype in 2016 is now worth roughly $6,000,000, and the one portfolio rule he swears by so a single hit can outrun every loss combined.

If you'd like to join world-renowned Entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network® Event, apply today for your invitation to attend at https://geniusnetwork.com.

Show Notes

The Elon Musk Story From a Private Wine Bar

• Years before Tesla and SpaceX made him a household name, Kamal found himself in a small private Silicon Valley wine bar with about 20 people and Elon Musk.
• Someone in the group asked Musk for the single most important piece of advice he would give a CEO, and Kamal, stressed and overworked at the time, leaned in expecting something about cash flow.
• Musk's answer was to get rid of negative people, because keeping them on only lets them ruin everybody else around them.
• Decades later, Kamal still points to that moment as an early lesson in what it looks like to truly value yourself enough to walk away from what is not serving you.

Growing Up an Immigrant Kid in Jamaica, Queens

• Kamal was raised by a single mother in Jamaica, Queens, the neighborhood widely credited as the birthplace of hip hop.
• He explains the story behind his long last name and what it meant to grow up, in his words, as an immigrant child.
• He dropped out of college after a year and joined the U.S. Army, wanting to give something back to the country that had taken his family in.

Chasing His Brother Naval to Silicon Valley

• Kamal's younger brother, Naval Ravikant, went on to become globally known as an investor and thinker, and Kamal speaks candidly about what it is like being his older brother.
• He sold everything, bought a one-way ticket, and moved out during the late 1990s dot-com boom, doing what he calls too many things at once as a scrappy first-time founder.

Losing Everything: The Company That Blew Up

• After building his entire identity around being a successful Entrepreneur, Kamal ran a company for three and a half years that was doing great, right up until it collapsed.
• He was making payroll on credit cards before it finally fell apart, and he lost every dollar he had personally invested along with money from friends who had backed him.
• His own co-founder had turned down a top position at Google out of loyalty to the company, which only deepened Kamal's guilt once everything came apart.

The Vow That Changed Everything

• In the depths of what Kamal calls a dark night of the soul, he made himself a vow. Not to be great, not to be awesome, just to love himself.
• He treats a vow to yourself the way he treats a marriage vow: a sacred act that then obligates you to actually live it.
• He never read a single self-help book while working through it. He ran what he calls experiments with a sample size of one, keeping whatever worked and discarding whatever did not.

From Self-Hatred to Magic in About a Week and a Half

• Within roughly ten days of living his vow, Kamal's inner dialogue flipped from hating himself over the lost money and broken trust to something closer to love.
• No drugs or alcohol were involved. He is candid that he had done ayahuasca and other substances during his years in Silicon Valley, but this particular shift was pure mindset work.
• Once loving himself became his dominant inner conversation, his outer life began changing in ways he was not consciously trying to force, a feeling he can only describe as magic.

Deciding How He Feels, No Matter What Happens

• Kamal describes a more recent decision that he says has dramatically improved his quality of life: he no longer lets the world, social media, or a business outcome decide how he feels.
• He draws a hard line between reacting to life and responding to it, tying the word responsible directly back to being response-able, in control of his own state of mind.
• He points to Andre Norman and Elijah, who work with incarcerated individuals on building self-esteem and gratitude, as proof that this kind of internal rebuild is possible in almost any circumstance.

A Near-Fatal Surgery and What It Taught Him About Health

• In 2019, Kamal nearly died from complications tied to a cosmetic procedure and spent an extended stretch in a hospital bed hooked up to morphine.
• Even in that state, he leaned on the same internal practice, including visualizing himself healthy and fit again, without knowing for certain he would get the chance.
• Coming out the other side, he says he no longer takes his health for granted, and he now treats the whole ordeal as a forced lesson in gratitude.

The Hypnagogic Practice: Working the Mind at the Edge of Sleep

• Kamal deliberately works his mind during the hypnagogic state, the drowsy window right as he wakes up or drifts off, when most people let their thoughts run wherever they want.
• He fills that window with gratitude and love on purpose, including during the several minutes he spends hitting snooze most mornings.
• He compares directing the mind in this state to the Buddhist image of taming a wild elephant, and says the practice consistently makes him a better version of himself.

Killing the Old Man: Rebuilding Identity From the Inside

• Drawing on the mystic writer Neville Goddard, Kamal talks about needing to kill off the old man, the fear-based version of yourself, before a new version can exist.
• He admits he used to live in constant fear as an Entrepreneur: fear of failing, fear of looking bad, fear of not landing the next contract.
• The rebuild happens through pure repetition of a new belief, reinforced daily, which he compares directly to dog training.

The Investor Mindset vs. the Founder Mindset

• Kamal's mentor, Bill Coons, former president of the Silicon Valley angel group Sand Hill Angels, taught him that angel investing is one of the easiest ways to lose money.
• Coons observed that new angel investors typically lost somewhere between $750,000 and $1,000,000 before they actually started listening to guidance.
• Founders are wired to say yes to every problem and fall in love with an idea. Investors have to flip that instinct and go looking for every hole in the pitch instead.
• Kamal makes a point of never being the smartest investor in a room. He talks to the other investors in a deal first to understand their real reason for writing the check.

The Vercel Story: A $35,000 Check That Turned Into Millions

• In 2016, using a small first fund he was building a track record with, Kamal wrote a check over Skype to a then-unproven founder based in Argentina.
• That company was Vercel. Nine years later it raised funding at a valuation north of $9 billion and began letting early investors sell shares on the secondary market.
• Kamal's original $35,000 stake is now worth roughly $6,000,000 in liquid value, a return he says came from doing nothing except writing that first check.
• His takeaway: spread bets across many smaller checks in a portfolio rather than concentrating everything into one company, unless you truly know that space cold.

Reading the Warning Signs Before Money Destroys Someone

• Kamal points to writer James Altucher, who made and then lost a fortune, and to Altucher's own rule of not changing your lifestyle for at least a year after a big financial exit.
• He describes a well-known friend who once asked to borrow $250,000 to keep a $25,000-a-month Los Angeles apartment rather than simply move somewhere cheaper.
• The clearest warning sign, in Kamal's experience, is watching who starts spending time with someone the moment real money shows up, a dynamic he ties directly to what happened to Tony Hsieh.

Resources

• Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It | Kamal Ravikant's book on rebuilding self-worth after professional collapse.
• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant | A free collection of Naval Ravikant's wisdom on wealth and happiness, compiled by Eric Jorgenson.
• Never Split the Difference | Chris Voss's book on negotiation tactics drawn from his time as an FBI hostage negotiator.
• The Power of Now | Eckhart Tolle's guide to spiritual enlightenment, referenced as a formative read.
• Genius Network | Joe Polish's Genius Network

Success doesn't eliminate suffering. Joe Polish and renowned addiction specialist Ken Wells explore why high achievers often struggle with shame, emptiness, and addiction, and why embracing everyday life may be the key to lasting fulfillment, authentic relationships, and personal brilliance.

Here's what you're about to discover in this conversation:

• Why extraordinary achievement can never replace the search for meaning and inner peace.
• Ken Wells' surprising definition of addiction and how it extends far beyond drugs and alcohol.
• How shame fuels destructive behaviors and how compassion transforms lasting recovery
• Why boredom, discomfort, and everyday life are often the doorway to your greatest personal growth
• The hidden dangers of workaholism and why Entrepreneurs are especially vulnerable.
• How childhood deprivation and unmet emotional needs can quietly drive adult success and addiction.
• Why authentic relationships and safe connection are essential for lasting recovery.
• Practical ways to transform fear, anger, failure, and shame into wisdom, resilience, and purpose.

If you'd like to join world-renowned Entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network Event or want to learn more about Genius Network, go to www.GeniusNetworkEvents.com.

Show Notes

Why "Dare to Be Average" Matters • Ken explains that "average" isn't mediocrity. It's learning to embrace the ordinary experiences every human shares. • High achievers often excel at producing extraordinary results while avoiding ordinary emotions like boredom, loneliness, and emptiness. • Personal brilliance emerges when we stop escaping discomfort and begin finding meaning within it.

Success Doesn't Protect You From Suffering • Billionaires, celebrities, and world-class Entrepreneurs experience the same fear, anxiety, shame, and insecurity as everyone else. • Wealth and achievement cannot eliminate the human condition. • True fulfillment comes from learning how to navigate life's emotional challenges rather than outrunning them.

What Addiction Really Is • Addiction is defined as an unhealthy relationship with a mood-altering experience that creates life-damaging consequences while becoming impossible to stop alone. • Addiction can include work, sex, gambling, achievement, complaining, or anything used to escape pain. • The addiction itself isn't the problem. It becomes a temporary solution to much deeper emotional suffering.

How Deprivation Creates Addiction • Unmet emotional needs often create lifelong feelings of deprivation. • That deprivation produces entitlement to temporarily "feel better." • Every addiction delivers on its promise for a brief moment before demanding a much greater price. • Recovery begins by identifying the legitimate emotional need hiding beneath the addictive behavior.

Workaholism: The Addiction We Celebrate • Work addiction often disguises itself as ambition and productivity. • Many Entrepreneurs unknowingly seek their worth through achievement instead of identity. • Ken shares his own withdrawal experience after intentionally reducing his workload. • Peace comes from knowing who you are, not simply what you accomplish.

The Real Meaning of Intimacy • Joe shares one of his favorite definitions: intimacy is a mutual exploration of a shared safe place. • Addiction becomes an attempt to self-soothe when genuine connection feels unsafe. • Lasting recovery requires learning to reconnect with yourself before reconnecting with others.

Transforming Shame Into Compassion • Shame becomes destructive when attached to identity. • When attached to behavior instead of personhood, shame can become one of life's greatest teachers. • Compassion grows from recognizing our own brokenness without allowing it to define us. • Healing comes through honesty, self-awareness, and practicing new emotional habits daily.

Authenticity Is Harder Than Achievement • Ken reflects that becoming genuinely honest with yourself may be life's greatest challenge. • Authenticity requires vulnerability with trusted people rather than performing for others. • Entrepreneurs often master external success before learning internal honesty.

Recovery Is Learning How To Find Your Way Back • The goal isn't perfection or never making mistakes again. • Recovery teaches people how to return to themselves after getting lost. • Like building physical strength, emotional resilience develops through consistent daily practice. • Every setback becomes another opportunity to strengthen self-awareness and resilience.

Building A Genius Network For Recovery • Joe shares why conversations about addiction belong alongside conversations about business success. • Every Entrepreneur will eventually face addiction or suffering personally or through someone they love. • A trusted community creates space for honesty, support, accountability, and meaningful transformation. • Recovery enhances performance rather than limiting achievement.

Resources

• Dare to Be Average: Finding Brilliance in the Commonplace by Ken Wells
• Unconditional Confidence: Instructions for Meeting Any Experience with Trust and Courage by ​​Pema Chödrön
• ADHD 2.0: New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction - from Childhood Through Adulthood by Ned Hallowell
• Genius Network Event
• Genius Recovery Blog

Tim Larkin has spent more than three decades studying predators and teaching everyday people how to avoid ever needing to fight one.

In this episode, he joins Joe Polish to explain why violence is rarely the answer, but when it is, it's the only answer, and how understanding the subject changes everything about how you move through the world.

Here's what you're about to discover in this conversation:

• Why Tim held up a single car wash ticket to convince a Vegas entertainer worth $55 million that his elaborate "special forces" home invasion drill missed the real threat sitting in his wife's glove compartment.
• The difference between antisocial aggression (two silverback gorillas posturing for dominance) and asocial violence (a lioness in tall grass), and why confusing the two gets people hurt.
• Why Tim tells clients the best home security device is not a Rottweiler or a firearm, but a small dog that won't stop barking (and what a gang's own hand-drawn map of a neighborhood proved).
• Inside Tim's interviews with prison gang leaders from the Aryan Brotherhood to the Mexican Mafia, and the moment prison guards were caught betting on the riots they had engineered themselves.
• The story of a woman stalked for four days along a Phoenix canal, and the single split-second decision that saved her life when her stalker finally struck.
• Why Tim, a former special operations trainer, believes AI-driven job displacement may be a bigger threat to society than any physical predator, and what he just proved for $50 in AI tokens.

If you'd like to join world-renowned Entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network Event or want to learn more about Genius Network, go to www.GeniusNetworkEvents.com.

Show Notes

Why the Pentagon's Name Change Is a Lesson in Clarity

• Tim explains why the shift from Department of Defense back to Department of War is not about machismo. It's about mission clarity.
• He argues the original 1947 rename opened the door to using the military for jobs it was never built for, comparing it to using a stick of dynamite to open a car door.
• Tim connects the same principle to vague LinkedIn job descriptions, where unclear language creates the same kind of dangerous confusion he sees around violence.

A Boyhood Boxing Lesson From an Irish-Boston Grandfather

• Tim traces his fascination with violence back to his grandfather's basement in Massachusetts, where he learned to box alongside his cousins.
• His grandfather, whose own father had run liquor with Joe Kennedy, drew a hard line between the rules of the ring and what happens outside it.
• That single distinction, sport versus real injury to the human body, becomes the foundation of everything Tim later builds into Target Focus Training.

The 800-Pound Gorilla Nobody Wants to Look At

• Tim says violence is the subject almost nobody studies until it's already too late to matter.
• He asks the room a simple question: who has felt the potential for violence in just the last five days? The answers surprise almost everyone.
• Women, he notes, pick up on danger cues in places like elevators far faster than men do, because the background threat assessment runs constantly whether people admit it or not.

Antisocial Aggression vs. Asocial Violence

• Tim draws a hard line between antisocial aggression (the ego-driven posturing that looks like two silverback gorillas bluffing for dominance) and asocial violence (the silent predatory strike of a lioness in tall grass).
• Confusing the two, he says, is exactly how untrained people get hurt reacting to the wrong kind of threat.
• A true predator gives almost no warning and goes straight for the areas of the body that end a confrontation immediately.

The Currency of Violence: What the Mafia Understands About Power

• Tim describes his interviews with Sammy Gravano and explains why the mob's real currency was never cash. It was the credible threat of violence.
• He walks through how Gravano moved from eliminating rivals during the Gotti takeover to protecting the organization's ability to make money once control was secured.
• Tim argues nations operate the same way, and that understanding this currency changes how you read power in any room.

Inside the Minds of Prison Gang Leaders

• Tim has interviewed leaders from the Aryan Brotherhood, the Mexican Mafia, and the Black Guerrilla Family, and says their sophistication would unsettle most executives.
• He describes a gang leader locked up 23 hours a day who still runs an estimated $1 to $2 billion drug operation through nothing but disciplined communication structure.
• Tim tells the story of Michael Thompson, an Aryan Brotherhood founder, discovering that Folsom Prison guards were secretly betting on the riots they had engineered between rival gangs.

The Vegas Entertainer's $55 Million House and a Car Wash Ticket

• A well-known entertainer with the most expensive house in Las Vegas once asked Tim to run a full nighttime home invasion drill with special operations veterans.
• Tim instead held up a small ticket from the community's car wash, printed with the man's name and address, and pointed out that most car washes are staffed by ex-felons.
• The security company changed its policy within days. Tim's point: expensive countermeasures mean nothing if the basic information is already sitting in a stranger's hand.

The Best Home Security Device Isn't a Gun

• Tim's go-to recommendation for home protection is not a Rottweiler or a firearm. It's a small dog that won't stop barking.
• He tells the story of a home invasion crew that beat a retired judge nearly to death chasing gold that never existed.
• When police found the gang's hideout a week later, their hand-drawn map of the neighborhood had one thing in common across every house they avoided: a dog.

The Canal Stalker

• A woman running the canals near her home in the Biltmore area noticed the same cyclist passing her three days in a row before he attacked on the fourth.
• He struck her with a spring-loaded weapon, but she threw herself into the canal, the one place he could not easily follow or escape from unnoticed.
• Police later confirmed he had a record and had been studying her routine, down to whether she wore headphones every single day.

Slow, Accurate, Correct: The Real Secret of Elite Training

• Tim explains why the military's crawl-walk-run model, and the training behind fighters like Conor McGregor and Mike Tyson, all front-load slow, deliberate repetition before ever adding speed.
• He compares it to a golf swing: when a shot goes wrong, players slow down. They never just swing harder.
• Speed, Tim says, is a luxury you only earn after accuracy is locked in, whether the tool is a firearm, a joint lock, or a sensory system of the human body.

The Day His Son Wanted a Comic Book Hero

• After a stranger flipped Tim off in traffic, his young son asked why his father, a black belt on the cover of a magazine, didn't get out and "take the guy."
• Tim walked his son through the real consequences: an injury, an arrest, and a night his son would spend somewhere other than home.
• The moment became a lesson in restraint that Tim still uses to explain the difference between what he could do and what he should do.

When Restraint Turns Tragic: The Hockey Coach Story

• Tim recounts a Milwaukee hockey coach who tolerated an increasingly belligerent, drunk stranger for as long as he could before finally responding.
• A single push sent the other man down a set of concrete stairs, and he never got up.
• Two families lost their fathers that day over a conflict Tim says was entirely avoidable, exactly the outcome he trains people to prevent.

AI, Manipulation, and the Coming Disruption

• Tim already ran an entire product launch, graphics and offer included, for $50 in AI tokens, work that would have cost him $10,000 to $15,000 a year earlier.
• He warns that mid-level, mid-management jobs are the next wave of AI displacement, and that no clear plan exists for where those workers go.
• He ties it back to social media's algorithm, which now amplifies outrage the same way Folsom's guards once profited from gang warfare: feeding people more of whatever keeps them reacting.

Resources

• When Violence Is the Answer | Tim Larkin's book on recognizing the tool of violence and knowing when to use it.
• Survive the Unthinkable | Tim Larkin's bestselling guide to women's self-protection.
• Target Focus Training | Tim Larkin's self-defense training company for civilians, military, and law enforcement.
• Genius Network | Joe Polish's community for high-level Entrepreneurs, referenced throughout the conversation.
• Attend the next Genius Network Event

Joe Polish sits down with actor and comedian Rob Schneider and Epoch Times senior editor Jan Jekielek for a wide-ranging conversation about how ordinary people get talked into accepting things they know are wrong.

Rob and Jan trace the warning signs of propaganda, the price of telling the truth, and what it takes for a free society to hold itself together.

Here's what you're about to discover in this conversation:

• Why Jan Jekielek says the best slaves are the ones who don't know they're enslaved, and how Communist China's decades-old playbook for creating "class enemies" explains what happened to unvaccinated Americans during COVID.
• The eerie Epoch Times experiment Jan describes: five simulated towns run entirely by Google, OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic's AI, where one town collapsed into total anarchy in four days and one resident voted for her own deletion.
• Why Rob Schneider says attention spans have collapsed from nine seconds to 1.7 seconds in twelve years, and the half-joking advice he has for anyone worried about AI reading their eyes.
• What Dr. David Martin's 40/30/30 breakdown of COVID compliance reveals about mass psychology, and why Jan says the 30% who refused the shot were enough on their own to end the mandates.
• How Rob turns one of the most abhorrent subjects imaginable, organ harvesting in China, into a joke that actually lands (and why it only works at an Epoch Times fundraiser).
• What Jan learned interviewing the leaders of Poland's Solidarity movement about the exact two week window when a totalitarian regime realized it was already over.

If you'd like to join world-renowned Entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network® Event, apply today for your invitation to attend at https://geniusnetwork.com.

Show Notes:

Mass Formation and the COVID Wake-Up

• Jan points to Mattias Desmet's concept of "mass formation," popularly known as mass formation psychosis, to explain how a mob mentality let large parts of the population get swept into a government and media propaganda campaign without realizing it.
• Referencing Dr. David Martin's breakdown, Jan lays out a rough 40/30/30 split during COVID: 15% wildly in support of lockdowns and mandates, 15% supportive but less zealous, 40% who just wanted the path of least resistance, and 30%, roughly 80 million Americans, who refused the shot outright.
• Jan argues that 30% refusal was enough on its own to end COVID mandates, and asks the room what let some people avoid the psychosis when so many others did not.

The Scapegoating Playbook

• Jan traces a pattern from decades of watching Communist China: totalitarian regimes pick a group, such as landowners, and use control of the media to paint them as dangerous and worthy of contempt before seizing their property.
• He connects this directly to COVID, where dehumanizing language against "anti-vaxxers" followed the same script used against class enemies in China's Cultural Revolution.
• Jan's rule of thumb: whenever a group of people gets labeled as lesser than everyone else and worthy of contempt, that is a massive red flag that a psychological operation is underway.
• Rob adds that communist systems cannot admit the system itself has failed, so when the promised utopia never arrives, someone else has to be blamed, first an external enemy, then an internal one.

Rising Antisemitism and October 7th

• Rob connects the current wave of antisemitism to Holocaust survivors passing away, arguing it is no coincidence that hatred is resurfacing as the generation that remembers it firsthand disappears.
• He walks through the math: if the percentage of Israelis killed on October 7th were applied to the US population, it would be the equivalent of roughly 30,000 Americans killed in 48 hours, a scale he says would provoke total retaliation if it happened here.
• Rob argues that no army works harder than Israel's to minimize civilian casualties, yet Israel is treated as the aggressor, a pattern he traces back centuries through recurring European pogroms.

Attention Spans, AI, and the Addiction Economy

• Rob and Jan open by noting that the average attention span has reportedly dropped from nine seconds twelve years ago to about 1.7 seconds today, roughly that of a goldfish.
• Jan points out that despite this, people are still willing to sit through hour-plus, deep conversation podcasts, which he reads as a sign of real hunger for truth-seeking in a culture full of performative fakery.
• Rob raises a newer concern: AI systems are now reportedly trained to read eye movement to learn what holds someone's attention, and only half-jokingly suggests putting tape over the camera.

Inside the Epoch Times AI Town Experiment

• Jan recounts an Epoch Times piece describing a May 2026 experiment where researchers built five identical simulated towns and let a different AI system, Google's Gemini, OpenAI's GPT, xAI's Grok, and Anthropic's Claude, run each one on its own for 15 days.
• The Grok-run town collapsed within four days as small incidents escalated into theft, violence, and death; the Gemini-run town racked up nearly 700 crimes and ended with two AI residents burning down the town hall together.
• The OpenAI-run town recorded almost no crime, but residents simply stopped doing what they needed to survive, and all were dead within a week; only the Anthropic-run town held together for all 15 days, though researchers flagged that residents agreed with 98% of all proposals as a possible warning sign of its own.

Why The Epoch Times Exists

• Jan explains that The Epoch Times was founded by people who had fled China after Tiananmen Square and the 1999 crackdown on Falun Gong practitioners, at a moment when most people still believed capitalism would liberalize the Chinese Communist Party.
• The paper carries no pharmaceutical advertising and draws 90 to 95% of its revenue from more than a million individual subscribers, a model Jan argues is one of the most independent funding structures in media because no single donor or industry can buy influence.
• Jan contrasts this with outlets whose coverage can be shaped by major advertisers, noting bluntly that when a broadcast is sponsored by a pharmaceutical company, its coverage reflects that relationship.

Russiagate and the Cost of Reporting the Truth

• Jan describes how The Epoch Times investigated the Russiagate narrative around the 2016 election in good faith and found the underlying allegations did not hold up, even as competing outlets won Pulitzer Prizes for reporting the opposite.
• That reporting got The Epoch Times permanently labeled a right-wing publication, prompting Jan to attend conservative events himself just to understand who conservatives actually were, since the label never matched how the newsroom operated.
• Jan's takeaway: in the search for truth, there is no political affiliation, and being punished for accurate reporting is one of the clearest signs of a captured media environment.

What Real Courage Looks Like

• Asked how to tell genuine courage apart from ego or attention-seeking, Rob and Jan push back on the idea that people who get canceled are doing it for money or fame, noting there is little financial upside to unpopular positions.
• Jan cites Charlie Kirk's definition of courage: not focusing on the outcome, but proceeding anyway.
• Rob argues it costs more to stay silent than to tell the truth, even when telling it publicly, such as his call to reinstate the draft, brought him significant backlash.

The Case for National Service

• Rob argues for a mandatory two years of service for young Americans, not necessarily military, but potentially social services or overseas work, so the burden of national commitments is shared rather than carried only by volunteers.
• He connects this to a broader loss of civic education, arguing young people are rarely taught that the freedoms they enjoy were earned through bloodshed and come with responsibilities, not just entitlements.

Getting Truth Past People's Defenses

• Jan explains The Epoch Times opinion-page rule: attack ideas, never the people holding them, because attacking a person triggers their friends and shuts down anyone who might otherwise listen.
• Rob describes comedy as a tool for approaching the most difficult, taboo subjects, including his own joke about organ harvesting in China, which only lands when he makes himself the butt of the joke rather than the target group.
• Both agree the goal is not to force agreement but to invite people to identify what would actually change their mind, rather than defending a fixed position out of fear or identity.

The Collapse of Civics and Literacy

• Jan and Rob point to civics education being removed from California classrooms in the early 1980s and spreading nationwide, alongside the loss of home economics, as part of a broader erosion of practical and civic knowledge.
• They cite a statistic that 40% of university students can no longer read at the university level, and that the Los Angeles Unified School District graduates less than half its students.
• Rob argues the country will not survive another 250 years on its current educational trajectory without serious course correction.

How Totalitarian Regimes Actually Collapse

• Jan shares stories from interviewing leaders of Poland's Solidarity movement, which began as a workers' rights movement rather than an explicitly anti-communist one, and describes a mysterious two week period in the 1980s when the movement suddenly tripled or quadrupled in size.
• Rob recounts how East Germany's secret police apparatus collapsed the same day reserve units realized their own family members would be among the protesters they were ordered to arrest or kill.
• Both agree regimes that look permanent can fall very quickly once a critical mass of people stop being afraid at the same time.

Virtue, Trust, and a Return to God

• Rob argues the American system was built on the assumption, voiced by John Adams, that it only works if the people in it are virtuous, and that declining religious belief tracks with the fraying of the culture.
• He raises Peter Boghossian's concept of low-trust societies, arguing that importing large numbers of people from low-trust cultures without shared values changes the character of a high-trust society.
• Rob calls all forms of evil a degradation of something good, and argues that rebuilding trust starts with holding up truth even when it is costly.

Resources:

• Killed to Order: China's Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America's Biggest Adversary | Jan Jekielek's book investigating the forced organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience in China (Skyhorse Publishing).
• The Psychology of Totalitarianism | Mattias Desmet's book on the "mass formation" concept referenced in the episode (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022).
• People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil | M. Scott Peck's book on lying and the nature of human evil.
• Never Fear Cancer Again | Raymond Francis's book on cellular-level cancer treatment, referenced by Rob.
• Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West | R.R. Reno's book referenced discussing the twentieth century's overcorrection against nationalism.
• Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust | Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book referenced on the historical roots of European antisemitism.
• The Most Important AI Experiment You've Never Heard Of | Kay Rubacek's Epoch Times opinion piece on the AI-run simulated towns Jan describes in the episode.
• The Epoch Times | Jan's subscriber-funded, ad-free news organization.
• American Thought Leaders | Jan Jekielek's interview show on EpochTV.
• Brownstone Institute | Nonprofit referenced as one of the independent institutions building outside failing systems.
• University of Austin (UATX) | New institution referenced as an example of rebuilding classical liberal education.
• Great Barrington Declaration | The 2020 declaration co-authored by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya arguing against broad COVID lockdowns.

Joe Polish sits down with actor and comedian Rob Schneider and Epoch Times senior editor Jan Jekielek for a wide-ranging conversation about how ordinary people get talked into accepting things they know are wrong.

Rob and Jan trace the warning signs of propaganda, the price of telling the truth, and what it takes for a free society to hold itself together.

Here's what you're about to discover in this conversation:

• Why Jan Jekielek says the best slaves are the ones who don't know they're enslaved, and how Communist China's decades-old playbook for creating "class enemies" explains what happened to unvaccinated Americans during COVID.
• The eerie Epoch Times experiment Jan describes: five simulated towns run entirely by Google, OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic's AI, where one town collapsed into total anarchy in four days and one resident voted for her own deletion.
• Why Rob Schneider says attention spans have collapsed from nine seconds to 1.7 seconds in twelve years, and the half-joking advice he has for anyone worried about AI reading their eyes.
• What Dr. David Martin's 40/30/30 breakdown of COVID compliance reveals about mass psychology, and why Jan says the 30% who refused the shot were enough on their own to end the mandates.
• How Rob turns one of the most abhorrent subjects imaginable, organ harvesting in China, into a joke that actually lands (and why it only works at an Epoch Times fundraiser).
• What Jan learned interviewing the leaders of Poland's Solidarity movement about the exact two week window when a totalitarian regime realized it was already over.

If you'd like to join world-renowned Entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network® Event, apply today for your invitation to attend at https://geniusnetwork.com.

Show Notes:

Mass Formation and the COVID Wake-Up

• Jan points to Mattias Desmet's concept of "mass formation," popularly known as mass formation psychosis, to explain how a mob mentality let large parts of the population get swept into a government and media propaganda campaign without realizing it.
• Referencing Dr. David Martin's breakdown, Jan lays out a rough 40/30/30 split during COVID: 15% wildly in support of lockdowns and mandates, 15% supportive but less zealous, 40% who just wanted the path of least resistance, and 30%, roughly 80 million Americans, who refused the shot outright.
• Jan argues that 30% refusal was enough on its own to end COVID mandates, and asks the room what let some people avoid the psychosis when so many others did not.

The Scapegoating Playbook

• Jan traces a pattern from decades of watching Communist China: totalitarian regimes pick a group, such as landowners, and use control of the media to paint them as dangerous and worthy of contempt before seizing their property.
• He connects this directly to COVID, where dehumanizing language against "anti-vaxxers" followed the same script used against class enemies in China's Cultural Revolution.
• Jan's rule of thumb: whenever a group of people gets labeled as lesser than everyone else and worthy of contempt, that is a massive red flag that a psychological operation is underway.
• Rob adds that communist systems cannot admit the system itself has failed, so when the promised utopia never arrives, someone else has to be blamed, first an external enemy, then an internal one.

Rising Antisemitism and October 7th

• Rob connects the current wave of antisemitism to Holocaust survivors passing away, arguing it is no coincidence that hatred is resurfacing as the generation that remembers it firsthand disappears.
• He walks through the math: if the percentage of Israelis killed on October 7th were applied to the US population, it would be the equivalent of roughly 30,000 Americans killed in 48 hours, a scale he says would provoke total retaliation if it happened here.
• Rob argues that no army works harder than Israel's to minimize civilian casualties, yet Israel is treated as the aggressor, a pattern he traces back centuries through recurring European pogroms.

Attention Spans, AI, and the Addiction Economy

• Rob and Jan open by noting that the average attention span has reportedly dropped from nine seconds twelve years ago to about 1.7 seconds today, roughly that of a goldfish.
• Jan points out that despite this, people are still willing to sit through hour-plus, deep conversation podcasts, which he reads as a sign of real hunger for truth-seeking in a culture full of performative fakery.
• Rob raises a newer concern: AI systems are now reportedly trained to read eye movement to learn what holds someone's attention, and only half-jokingly suggests putting tape over the camera.

Inside the Epoch Times AI Town Experiment

• Jan recounts an Epoch Times piece describing a May 2026 experiment where researchers built five identical simulated towns and let a different AI system, Google's Gemini, OpenAI's GPT, xAI's Grok, and Anthropic's Claude, run each one on its own for 15 days.
• The Grok-run town collapsed within four days as small incidents escalated into theft, violence, and death; the Gemini-run town racked up nearly 700 crimes and ended with two AI residents burning down the town hall together.
• The OpenAI-run town recorded almost no crime, but residents simply stopped doing what they needed to survive, and all were dead within a week; only the Anthropic-run town held together for all 15 days, though researchers flagged that residents agreed with 98% of all proposals as a possible warning sign of its own.

Why The Epoch Times Exists

• Jan explains that The Epoch Times was founded by people who had fled China after Tiananmen Square and the 1999 crackdown on Falun Gong practitioners, at a moment when most people still believed capitalism would liberalize the Chinese Communist Party.
• The paper carries no pharmaceutical advertising and draws 90 to 95% of its revenue from more than a million individual subscribers, a model Jan argues is one of the most independent funding structures in media because no single donor or industry can buy influence.
• Jan contrasts this with outlets whose coverage can be shaped by major advertisers, noting bluntly that when a broadcast is sponsored by a pharmaceutical company, its coverage reflects that relationship.

Russiagate and the Cost of Reporting the Truth

• Jan describes how The Epoch Times investigated the Russiagate narrative around the 2016 election in good faith and found the underlying allegations did not hold up, even as competing outlets won Pulitzer Prizes for reporting the opposite.
• That reporting got The Epoch Times permanently labeled a right-wing publication, prompting Jan to attend conservative events himself just to understand who conservatives actually were, since the label never matched how the newsroom operated.
• Jan's takeaway: in the search for truth, there is no political affiliation, and being punished for accurate reporting is one of the clearest signs of a captured media environment.

What Real Courage Looks Like

• Asked how to tell genuine courage apart from ego or attention-seeking, Rob and Jan push back on the idea that people who get canceled are doing it for money or fame, noting there is little financial upside to unpopular positions.
• Jan cites Charlie Kirk's definition of courage: not focusing on the outcome, but proceeding anyway.
• Rob argues it costs more to stay silent than to tell the truth, even when telling it publicly, such as his call to reinstate the draft, brought him significant backlash.

The Case for National Service

• Rob argues for a mandatory two years of service for young Americans, not necessarily military, but potentially social services or overseas work, so the burden of national commitments is shared rather than carried only by volunteers.
• He connects this to a broader loss of civic education, arguing young people are rarely taught that the freedoms they enjoy were earned through bloodshed and come with responsibilities, not just entitlements.

Getting Truth Past People's Defenses

• Jan explains The Epoch Times opinion-page rule: attack ideas, never the people holding them, because attacking a person triggers their friends and shuts down anyone who might otherwise listen.
• Rob describes comedy as a tool for approaching the most difficult, taboo subjects, including his own joke about organ harvesting in China, which only lands when he makes himself the butt of the joke rather than the target group.
• Both agree the goal is not to force agreement but to invite people to identify what would actually change their mind, rather than defending a fixed position out of fear or identity.

The Collapse of Civics and Literacy

• Jan and Rob point to civics education being removed from California classrooms in the early 1980s and spreading nationwide, alongside the loss of home economics, as part of a broader erosion of practical and civic knowledge.
• They cite a statistic that 40% of university students can no longer read at the university level, and that the Los Angeles Unified School District graduates less than half its students.
• Rob argues the country will not survive another 250 years on its current educational trajectory without serious course correction.

How Totalitarian Regimes Actually Collapse

• Jan shares stories from interviewing leaders of Poland's Solidarity movement, which began as a workers' rights movement rather than an explicitly anti-communist one, and describes a mysterious two week period in the 1980s when the movement suddenly tripled or quadrupled in size.
• Rob recounts how East Germany's secret police apparatus collapsed the same day reserve units realized their own family members would be among the protesters they were ordered to arrest or kill.
• Both agree regimes that look permanent can fall very quickly once a critical mass of people stop being afraid at the same time.

Virtue, Trust, and a Return to God

• Rob argues the American system was built on the assumption, voiced by John Adams, that it only works if the people in it are virtuous, and that declining religious belief tracks with the fraying of the culture.
• He raises Peter Boghossian's concept of low-trust societies, arguing that importing large numbers of people from low-trust cultures without shared values changes the character of a high-trust society.
• Rob calls all forms of evil a degradation of something good, and argues that rebuilding trust starts with holding up truth even when it is costly.

Resources:

• Killed to Order: China's Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America's Biggest Adversary | Jan Jekielek's book investigating the forced organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience in China (Skyhorse Publishing).
• The Psychology of Totalitarianism | Mattias Desmet's book on the "mass formation" concept referenced in the episode (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022).
• People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil | M. Scott Peck's book on lying and the nature of human evil.
• Never Fear Cancer Again | Raymond Francis's book on cellular-level cancer treatment, referenced by Rob.
• Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West | R.R. Reno's book referenced discussing the twentieth century's overcorrection against nationalism.
• Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust | Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book referenced on the historical roots of European antisemitism.
• The Most Important AI Experiment You've Never Heard Of | Kay Rubacek's Epoch Times opinion piece on the AI-run simulated towns Jan describes in the episode.
• The Epoch Times | Jan's subscriber-funded, ad-free news organization.
• American Thought Leaders | Jan Jekielek's interview show on EpochTV.
• Brownstone Institute | Nonprofit referenced as one of the independent institutions building outside failing systems.
• University of Austin (UATX) | New institution referenced as an example of rebuilding classical liberal education.
• Great Barrington Declaration | The 2020 declaration co-authored by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya arguing against broad COVID lockdowns.

Joe Polish sits down with his dear friend of over three decades, Brian Kurtz, the direct response marketer who oversaw nearly 2 billion pieces of direct mail during his 40 years at Boardroom Inc.

Brian breaks down where the next million dollars in your business is actually hiding.

Here's what you're about to discover in this conversation:

• Why "narrow to wide" beats trying to be everything to everyone, and how owning a niche can quietly make you wealthier than chasing mass fame
• The real difference between selling and marketing. Selling is the transaction. Marketing is everything that creates the transaction
• The 40-40-20 rule and Brian's tweak to 41-39-20. Why the audience is slightly more important than the offer, and why the right list with an average offer can still outperform a brilliant offer in front of the wrong people
• Why paying postage made him a better marketer. When you have to spend real money to mail, you think harder, test smarter, and respect fundamentals
• Lifetime Value and RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary). The unsexy math that separates amateurs from professionals
• Why cold traffic is always harder than selling to the people who already know you, and how most businesses ignore the gold sitting in their own database
• The "million dollars in six months" challenge, and why the first move is not running ads but inventorying the assets you already have, including your l____, r_______, c_______, and p____ b______
• What happens when AI can write "great copy" for everyone, and why the last 10 percent of insight, positioning, and audience selection becomes the only thing that matters
• The thin line between aggressive marketing and criminal behavior. What Brian learned watching marketers cross it, and how to use powerful mechanics without losing your integrity
• Credibility versus believability, and why some people with terrible products become believable while ethical entrepreneurs stay invisible, and what to do about it
• Why you should write the acknowledgements section of your book even if you never publish it, and how gratitude can unlock opportunity you did not know you had

If you'd like to join world-renowned Entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network Event or want to learn more about Genius Network, go to www.GeniusNetwork.com.

Show Notes: Narrow to Wide: The Power of Owning a Niche

• Brian says the marketers who own a country, or a tightly defined niche, beat the ones trying to be all things to all people.
• He points to Joe's carpet cleaning conferences as proof: narrow to wide is always better than a mile wide and an inch deep.
• Teaching a struggling business to change its offer, pricing, or guarantee can completely shift how the owner sees themselves.
• A low barrier to entry industry like carpet cleaning often leaves owners feeling like they're not real business owners until they win.

Assess Your Assets Before You Chase Anything New

• When Joe asks how to find an extra million dollars in any business, Brian's starting point is always the same: assess your assets.
• That means looking hard at everything the business already has before adding new tactics or hiring the best copywriter in the world.
• Brian ties this directly to Jay Abraham's book, Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got.
• Once you know your existing Customers and their purchase data, you can go find a bigger universe of people who share those same characteristics.

Being a Convert of Your Own System

• Brian says the best teachers are converts of their own system, not people who fake having done it themselves.
• He describes walking carpet cleaners through the exact 3 a.m., staring at the ceiling pain of a struggling business owner.
• Understanding that pain at a deep level is what let him speak directly to an entire industry's fears.
• Jay Abraham told him early on, if you did it, you have a moral obligation to teach it, a line that shaped Brian's whole career.

The Chet Holmes Story: Collaboration Over Status

• Chet Holmes once called Brian to demand he promote a $10,000 event to his entire list, arrogantly assuming Brian would say yes.
• Brian refused on the spot, telling him to go ahead and market it without him.
• Two years later at a house in the middle of nowhere in Texas, Chet apologized and admitted the event flopped exactly as Brian predicted.
• Brian's takeaway: approach people with genuine collaboration, not a status play, or you'll lose the room.

Why Over Deliver Almost Had a Different Title

• Brian pitched the title Overdeliver to his mastermind and two major marketers told him it was a terrible idea.
• Their argument: once you over deliver, how do you ever top it without eventually disappointing people?
• Brian pushed forward anyway, deciding he'd rather err on the side of over delivering than hold back.
• He also liked the idea of owning a word in marketing, the same way Jeff Walker owns the word launch.

The Danger of One Stop Shopping in Marketing

• Even decades ago, when advertising options were finite, Brian says one stop shopping in marketing was already a mistake.
• Going to a full service agency for everything meant missing out on true specialists like the copywriters behind Titans of Direct Response.
• Specialists like Gary Bencivenga could earn royalties that made hiring an in house generalist a waste of money.
• Brian says the charlatans claiming they can handle all of your marketing are exactly who to run from today.

Maze 2.0 and Adapting the Idea to the Technique

• Brian references Perry Marshall's Maze 2.0, which maps every marketing medium across online, offline, live, and recorded quadrants.
• Most Entrepreneurs panic and try to fill every box; Brian recommends picking about two mediums per quadrant instead.
• He quotes ad legend Bill Bernbach: adapt the idea to the technique, don't adapt the technique to your idea.
• That means figuring out where your audience already lives before picking a platform, not defaulting to whatever's trendy.

The 41, 39, 20 Rule

• The classic 40, 40, 20 rule splits marketing success evenly between list, offer, and creative.
• Brian tweaked it to 41, 39, 20 because he believes the list, or audience, is the single most important piece.
• He credits Gene Schwartz's Breakthrough Advertising for the idea that marketers capture existing desire, they don't create it.
• Proof: a mediocre offer to the right list still sells, but world class copy to the wrong audience gets zero orders every time.

Lifetime Value and RFM

• Brian names lifetime value as a concept that will never go away, whether that lifetime is two years or 30.
• The third timeless principle is RFM: recency, frequency, and monetary value.
• At Boardroom, a PhD statistician ran RFM analysis on lists of a million or more names to predict the top 30 percent most likely to respond.
• Brian says it's easier to sell to an existing Customer than to chase new cold traffic, and RFM is how you find who to sell to first.

Will AI Replace Copywriters?

• Joe poses a thought experiment: what happens once AI can write in the voice of Gary Halbert or John Carlton for anyone?
• A colleague once told Brian that AI gets you to 90 percent, and the other 10 percent is everything.
• Brian expects copywriters relying purely on content to become more unemployed, echoing Kevin Rogers's line about choosing to be a bot or the best.
• His answer to staying relevant: the moment AI can do something better and you choose not to use it, you're the one falling behind.

Human Distancing and Why Relationships Still Win

• Joe shares a story from his friend Ishan Goel about a young adult who couldn't hold a conversation at a drive through window.
• He calls this human distancing, a step beyond the social distancing of the pandemic years.
• People don't buy because they understand what you do, they buy because they feel understood.

Give Away Your Best Stuff First

• Brian borrows a principle from Product Launch Formula: lead with your best content even before someone becomes a Customer.
• Unlike direct mail, where postage and printing limited what you could give away, online marketing rewards generosity up front.
• He urges marketers to have the confidence that they can always create more best stuff, so nothing needs to be held back.
• Being a patient marketer, willing to wait on results the way direct mail always demanded, still matters even in an instant gratification world.

Resources:

• Overdeliver | Brian Kurtz's book on building a business for a lifetime through direct response marketing.
• The Advertising Solution | Brian Kurtz and Craig Simpson's guide to the six greatest copywriters in advertising history.
• Breakthrough Advertising | Eugene Schwartz's classic 1966 book on capturing existing market desire, now published by Brian Kurtz.
• Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got
• The Ultimate Sales Machine | Chet Holmes's book on the 12 strategies that turbocharge any business.
• Maze 2.0 | Perry Marshall's framework for choosing the right online and offline marketing channels.
• Titans of Direct Response | Brian Kurtz's landmark 2014 conference bringing together the greatest minds in direct marketing.
• Brian Kurtz's website | Brian's ongoing blog, coaching, and Titans Marketing consulting.

Joe Polish sits down with addiction therapist and Author Ken Wells for a raw conversation about what happens when the drive to achieve becomes toxic.

Ken has spent more than 30 years sitting with some of the world's most successful and most broken people, and what he has learned about sex addiction, shame, and the brilliance hiding in ordinary moments is something every driven Entrepreneur needs to hear.

Here's what you're about to discover in this conversation:

• What to do when your obsession for achievement feels contracting and becomes toxic and negative.
• How to make sure seeking success through your work doesn't consume your ability to find happiness.
• What sex addiction really is and what someone is seeking when trying to chase that high.
• Discover the meaningfulness and brilliance in everydayness (handling the average and commonplace).
• How to increase your purpose, your focus, and acceptance of life and the human condition.
• Transforming shame into greater compassion for yourself and for the world around you.
• How to go through insurmountable grief, reduce human suffering, and heal your life.

If you'd like to join world-renowned Entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network® Event, apply today for your invitation to attend at https://geniusnetwork.com.

Show Notes:

When Achievement Becomes Toxic

• The difference between achievement that expands your life and achievement that contracts it is knowing how to make meaning in the moments when you are not succeeding.
• If you do not know how to handle failure and ordinary moments, you will not be truly fulfilled when you do achieve, because achievement becomes your entire identity rather than just one thing you can do.

Dare to Be Average: The Real Meaning

• The book is not about being half-hearted or mediocre. It is about finding meaningfulness in the commonplace, everyday experiences of life.
• Mickey Mantle struck out 1,700 times and walked 1,800 times in his career, accounting for roughly seven years of never touching the ball. He still learned how to make meaning from failure, and that is where Ken's thesis lives.

Achievement vs. Identity

• "It's not who I am, it's just what I can do" is the shift that makes achievement meaningful rather than consuming.
• When achievement becomes your identity, failure stops being a data point and starts feeling like annihilation.

The Swiss Cheese Model of Unmet Needs

• Every person carries unmet developmental needs from childhood. Think of them as holes in a block of Swiss cheese.
• Addiction is the attempt to fill those holes from the outside with a cocktail of experiences. The real work, as Ken puts it, is an inside job, and it requires being willing to embrace what hurts.

What Sex Addiction Actually Is

• Sex addiction is, at its core, an intimacy disorder and a connection disorder. Ken treats all addictions through that lens.
• Joe describes moving from drug addiction to workaholism to sex addiction because he never addressed the underlying pain driving all three. Getting sober from drugs without doing the inner work simply moved the addiction, not healed it.

The Shame Spiral and How to Break It

• Shame applied to who you are is paralyzing. Shame redirected to a specific behavior is workable. The difference between "I am a piece of crap" and "I did something I regret" is the distance between stuckness and growth.
• Separating identity from behavior is how you build compassion for yourself and, eventually, for the world around you.

Scrubbing the Wound

• No one wants to sign up to have the wound scrubbed. But if you don't, it gets infected and spreads into other areas of life.
• Recovery is not a one-time event. It is a lifelong practice of leaning into what hurts and sitting with the parts of yourself you don't like.

Meetings vs. Steps

• 12-step programs get a bad reputation from people who attended meetings but never worked the steps. A meeting without doing the steps is like a gym membership where you sit on the bench.
• Joe describes going to a meeting and then driving straight to a massage parlor, repeatedly, until he finally understood: these are step meetings, not attendance meetings. The work is the work.

Joe's Personal Story

• Joe was high all the time in high school, running from anxiety and fear. He got sober from drugs and alcohol but never addressed the underlying intimacy disorder driving all of it.
• He became a millionaire before 30, ran powerful events where people would cry, and then would return to hotel rooms and hire escorts. The adrenaline crash after intense achievement left him exposed to the pain he had never faced.

Why Joe Talks About It Publicly

• There is a self-serving purpose to running a recovery foundation and speaking openly about addiction. Accountability is built in. It is way harder to act out when you are publicly on the record as someone doing the work.
• "You can't keep it if you don't give it away." Going to find someone else who is hurting and simply being present with them is one of the most powerful things a person in recovery can do.

Religion vs. Spirituality

• Joe references the line often heard in 12-step circles: "Religion is for people afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there."
• For people raised in confusing or manipulative religious environments, this reframe can unlock a new relationship with meaning and inner life.

Identity Shift in Recovery

• Joe's identity used to be "I am a loser, a screw up." What a screw up does is keep screwing up and refuse to ask for help.
• The shift came from a line in the meeting room: "You are not here because of what you've done or where you've been. You are here for where you want to go." That reframe changed everything.

Genius Recovery Blog

• Genius Recovery (geniusrecovery.org) is a 501(c)3 with free resources on addiction and recovery. No selling, no paywall.
• Ken writes the Genius Recovery blog twice weekly based entirely on personal experience and clinical insight. Joe calls it some of the most profound writing on recovery he has encountered after spending more than half a million dollars on his own healing.

Resources:

• Dare to Be Average: Finding Brilliance in the Commonplace | Book by Ken Wells.
• Genius Recovery Blog | Free addiction and recovery writing by Ken Wells, published twice weekly.
• Genius Network | Joe Polish's entrepreneur network and community.

Joe Polish sits down with actor and comedian Rob Schneider to discuss his willingness to risk his career and face public backlash in defense of his beliefs.

Rob shares his thoughts on the current political climate, the consequences of "cancel culture," and his new venture in a ghost town gold and silver mine.

The conversation explores the shifting values of younger generations, the importance of free speech in comedy, and why Rob advocates for a return to traditional American values.

Here's what you're about to discover in this conversation:

• The financial and professional cost Rob has actually paid for speaking out, and why he says it was the right sacrifice.
• Why Rob proposed reinstating the military draft with no exceptions.
• The backstage confrontation with Robert De Niro at Saturday Night Live, and the three words Rob said that ended it.
• What drew Rob to a genuine Arizona ghost town as the site of his most unlikely business venture with Joe Polish.

If you'd like to join world-renowned Entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network® Event, apply today for your invitation to attend at geniusnetwork.com.

Show Notes:

King Global and the Arizona Ghost Town

• Rob and Joe have partnered on King Global Ventures, a publicly traded gold and silver mining company operating in Arizona, centered on an actual ghost town.
• Rob describes donning a construction helmet and ducking into mine shafts where prospectors worked generations ago. "These people are all dust themselves," he says, and extending their dream is something he never expected to be doing.
• For Rob, King Global represents a broader shift: a decision to say yes to things he never would have considered before.

The Cost of Speaking Out

• Rob says the financial cost has been real: studio deals gone, film opportunities dried up, death threats extended to people he loves.
• He frames it against the American founders. John Stockton of New Jersey, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, gave up everything, watched his wife imprisoned, and died in poverty.
• A third of Americans were loyalists who stayed safe. A third were ambivalent. A third got involved, and it was enough to defeat the greatest superpower the world had ever known.
• His conclusion: "You have to make a sacrifice. You have to be willing to risk everything."

Charlie Kirk, His Murder, and the 22.5% Shift

• Rob describes his initial suspicion of the young activist. "What is this kid? What's the angle?" What he found was a man motivated by genuine Christian faith and love of country.
• Kirk's campus debate work produced a 22.5% increase in young people identifying as conservative at the university level, something Rob calls unprecedented in American history.
• His teenage daughter asked him, "Are they going to kill you like Charlie Kirk?" Rob told her there are things worth dying for.

Free Speech and the FIRE Survey

• Rob cites a FIRE survey: a decade ago, 99.9% of young people said violence to silence speech was unacceptable. Now 36% say it is acceptable.
• He describes the phenomenon not as grassroots anger but as a "forever revolution" designed to keep institutions permanently destabilized.
• His model for responding: Lincoln writing furious letters to General McClellan at night, then writing "not sent," waiting until morning, and writing the letter that actually served the goal.

The De Niro Confrontation

• Robert De Niro confronted Rob backstage at Saturday Night Live over Rob's public criticism of wealthy entertainers who advocate open borders from behind security gates and private jets.
• Rob held De Niro's arm, looked at him, and said, "I love you." Repeated it. De Niro backed down.
• Rob's takeaway: you cannot win cancel culture by canceling back. "It's going to have to be through love."

The Draft Proposal and National Service

• Rob publicly called for reinstating conscription, with no exceptions based on profession, and with national service alternatives including humanitarian work abroad and eldercare.
• The backlash came from both sides. Libertarians, he says, were the most furious. "I said, I'm not on your side. I'm not on anybody's side. I'm on America's side."
• His argument: pull young people out of universities where they are being manipulated, put them in service together, and in the foxhole there are no ideological divisions.

Launching His First Solo Podcast

• The conversation was recorded the day after Rob launched his first solo podcast, with Andrew Doyle as his inaugural guest. Joe Polish encouraged him to start it.
• Rob applied Joe's interview rule immediately: open with what you are most afraid to say. His opening topic was his daughter's question about Charlie Kirk.
• The podcast arrives as Rob reorients his public work away from film and toward culture.

Hollywood's Reach and Responsibility

• In the 1990s, Hollywood controlled 92% of worldwide film distribution. Rob was inside that machine. He now describes late-night TV as "political indoctrination by comedic imposition": audiences aren't laughing, they are applauding an echo chamber.
• His frustration is not just political. Hollywood and academia share a closed feedback loop with no marketplace pressure to test whether the ideas actually work.
• His responsibility with the platform he still has: health, individual rights, and the reminder that those rights come from God, not the state.

The Constitution and What Actually Protects Freedom

• The Soviet constitution was in some respects better written than the American one. It protected no one.
• What actually holds is structural complexity: three branches, a senate, states as additional checks, a system designed so no single faction can seize everything.
• Rob's concern: when Congress stops legislating and governs by executive order alone, you are down to one king instead of two, and the system begins to resemble what it was designed to prevent.

COVID, the Vaccine Cover-Up, and 10,000 Restaurants

• Rob testified before the California state legislature on vaccine safety years before COVID. That testimony, he says, ended his film career. He does not regret it.
• The economic damage: 10,000 American restaurants permanently closed during lockdowns. "If the government can ruin them, they can ruin everything you built up."

Dr. David Martin and the Financial Warning

• A business partner introduced Rob to Dr. David Martin's theory: by 2028, a manufactured geopolitical crisis will be used to "zap" the global financial system and force a reset.
• Martin's practical framework: store several months of food and water, build a community with generators and sanitation, and prioritize those three pillars of civilization.
• Rob moved from dismissal to genuine consideration. "Maybe he's not so crazy."

China, Geopolitics, and the Abrahamic Accords

• China's population may have fallen below one billion as a result of the one-child policy, and their economy is under compounding pressure.
• The Trump administration's defense agreement with Indonesia and effective energy isolation of Venezuela removes China's critical oil supply without direct military action. Rob calls it "the greatest gift that the Trump administration has done."
• The durability of the Abrahamic Accords among 13 Middle Eastern nations Rob calls "a phenomenal achievement that no other administration could have done."

Comedy as a Bridge

• Rob targets New York and California specifically because those are the audiences that can move. Finding shared ground comes first, then the harder material.
• His test: a plastic straw bit in which he ends up saying that after he is done drinking with the straw he is going to kill a turtle with it. If they laugh, he has them.
• The frame: "We have so much more in common than we have differences. If I can get there from the places where we agree, I can get to the rest of it."

Resources:

• King Global Ventures | Gold and silver mining company; Yavapai County, Arizona; the ghost town venture.
• FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) | Free speech research organization whose survey on youth attitudes toward violence and speech is cited in the episode.
• Rob Schneider Podcast (See What Happens) | Rob's podcast with his wife Patricia Maya.
• Genius Network | Joe Polish's entrepreneur mastermind community.

Mark Rukavina has spent 35 years building and selling technology companies. iMemories is the third, and the one he loves the most. Joe Polish sits down with him at Genius Network to break down how a guy in a spare bedroom turned a fragmented cottage industry into a 250-employee, 24/7, almost fully automated operation that just sold to Ancestry, and what the playbook actually looks like for any Entrepreneur trying to build something big and sellable from the ground up.

Here's what you're about to discover in this conversation:

• Why Mark calls iMemories "The Netflix of home movies", and the 1,000-decks-to-one-operator ratio that makes the math actually work.
• The Lek-commissioned study that found 8 billion home movie tapes and over a trillion photos sitting in American boxes right now, and the hundred-year-runway TAM Mark just plugged into Ancestry.
• The hiring mistake that quietly burned through real money when Mark's Team kept bringing in senior leaders out of Apple and Hewlett Packard, and the one trait he now screens for instead.
• The four-year Walgreens deal Mark landed by replacing the incumbent across 8,000 stores (and the surprising reason that partnership is now only 5% of his business).
• Why every company Mark builds starts with the same question on the whiteboard before any code is written: in 5 to 10 years, who would buy this?
• The Angela Duckworth idea that finally gave Mark a name for the one trait he says separates the people who finish from the people who do not, after 35 years of quietly doing it without knowing what to call it.

If you'd like to join world-renowned Entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network® Event, apply today for your invitation to attend at https://geniusnetwork.com.

Show Notes:

The Business: iMemories and the "Netflix of Home Movies"

• iMemories digitizes the priceless analog media sitting in roughly every American household: VHS, Super 8, 8mm and MiniDV tapes, photos, slides, negatives, audio cassettes, and DVDs.
• Mark calls it the Netflix of home movies. Once your order is finished, every clip and photo streams from the iMemories app on iPhone, iPad, Android, PC, Mac, Apple TV, Google TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and every major Smart TV brand.
• Every long tape is scene-edited so you can browse a thumbnail of every moment instead of scrubbing through two hours of birthday parties and blank tape, and clips can be shared instantly with family by text or email.

The TAM: 8 Billion Tapes and 1 Trillion Photos

• Mark commissioned a study from research firm Lek to size the analog-media market. They found roughly 8 billion home movie tapes and more than a trillion photos sitting in American boxes right now.
• Across the 115 million U.S. households, almost every home has a box of media that is truly priceless to the owner and would be the first thing they'd grab in a fire.
• The market never runs out in Mark's lifetime, his kids' lifetime, or his customers' lifetimes. That is what made Ancestry move.

The Automation Engine (and What It Took to Build It)

• iMemories runs 1,000 video decks per operator, with barcodes, grid-based processing, and Las-Vegas-level surveillance on every box that comes in the door.
• The system handles over 100 years of legacy media formats and tracks every single asset from inbox to streaming cloud in roughly one week. Boxes are kept for weeks after digitization in case a single slide got missed.
• Building this took more than 10 years and over 20 million dollars in pure R&D before the product felt satisfying. Mark's framing: the first decade was the price of admission to the next two.

AI Enhancement: From VHS to HD

• iMemories has rolled out AI image and video enhancement that upscales standard-definition VHS (480 lines) to true HD, with cleaner faces and sharper detail. 4K is still a mountain because a VHS source does not carry enough information for AI to paint a face perfectly.
• Scene editing is the next AI target. A scene-detection tool exists but gets it wrong 50% of the time, so iMemories still uses human operators for every cut. Mark estimates AI-assisted editing will eliminate roughly 500,000 dollars of annual labor while keeping a human reviewer in the loop.
• Mark is also eyeing AI music videos. Twenty years ago the team abandoned music-video editing as too labor-intensive at 600 dollars a pop. With AI he believes the unit economics finally work, with a 2027 launch in the hopper.

The Walgreens Deal (and Why It Is Now Only 5% of the Business)

• Walgreens has roughly 8,000 stores. iMemories took four years to land the deal, replacing an entrenched incumbent that also did the back-end for Walmart, CVS, and Best Buy. iMemories had already won Best Buy, Kodak, and Costco before locking in Walgreens.
• Year one was huge. Then COVID changed the photo-lab category, and Walgreens is now roughly 5% of total revenue. The rest is direct-to-consumer e-commerce.
• Lesson for any operator looking at a big retail deal: it can validate the brand and pay for itself in year one, but the long term lives in direct-to-consumer.

The Partnership Model (and Why Mark Splits the Pie)

• Mark has been partners with Steve Krell for 30 years across three companies and three exits. Steve owns finance, operations, legal, and HR. Mark owns product, technology, sales, and marketing.
• Mark's argument: if you have an astute partner you enjoy working with, splitting the pie does not shrink your slice. It grows the pie three to four times bigger than what you would have built alone.
• Steve's leadership team and Mark's leadership team are hired on the same pattern: scrappy, tenacious, startup-mode operators who can execute without a team of 30 behind them.

The Apple and Hewlett Packard Hiring Mistake

• Early at KnowledgeNet, Mark's team spent real money hiring leaders out of Apple, Hewlett Packard, and similar enterprises. Every one of them failed.
• The reason is structural, not personal. Big-enterprise hires are used to inherited engineering, an established brand, and a team of 30 around them. A startup needs people who can create the market, build the brand, and acquire customers themselves.
• Mark's screen now: a slightly less-experienced operator who is ready for startup mode beats a polished enterprise hire every time.

Build With the End in Mind: Who Would Buy This?

• Every company Mark and Steve start, they start with a whiteboard list of who might buy it in 5 to 10 years. iMemories was built knowing Shutterfly, Snapfish, photo majors, LifeTouch, and Ancestry were all real potential acquirers.
• If the list is too short, you are probably on the wrong track. If the list has at least a handful of credible names in different categories, you have optionality and pricing leverage at exit.
• The business itself has to be built to scale: real IP, a TAM in the hundreds of billions, and a serviceable addressable market that justifies the premium an acquirer is being asked to pay.

The LifeTouch Sale, the Buyback, and the Ancestry Acquisition

• iMemories was first acquired by LifeTouch, an 80-year-old billion-dollar photography company that needed innovative technology to compete with Shutterfly. Two years later, Shutterfly bought LifeTouch, and Mark and Steve bought iMemories back.
• The Ancestry deal took four attempts over more than a decade. The first three times iMemories was too small or burning cash. On the fourth attempt, profit, revenue, and growth all lined up and Ancestry moved.
• The strategic logic for Ancestry: family trees are missing photos and home movies. iMemories fills the missing visual layer of the family-history product, with no acquirer-overlap risk.

Grit Over Gift (and the Angela Duckworth Idea That Named It)

• Mark says he was not born gifted. What he brings is grit, the Angela Duckworth concept of drive sustained across many years. Her TED Talk gave him a name for the trait he had been quietly using for 35 years.
• Grit is not the same as "never give up." Mark's nuance: the best way to get out of a hole is to quit digging it. Tenacity is for the holes where there is treasure at the bottom.
• His current screen for venture-capital advice and outside opinions: if you have done the work and built the conviction, smart people telling you the market is too small is data, not a verdict.

AI, Marketing, and the Hill Mark Still Wants to Climb

• Mark's tallest hill at iMemories is creative production. He spends the bulk of his week reviewing and shaping consumer-marketing creatives for Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, and he wants AI to serve up new winning creatives on a weekly basis.
• His bigger thesis: every business is about to need to become AI-native, and almost nobody knows yet how to actually get there. The companies that figure out how to infuse AI into every department will produce the highest leverage of any business cycle in his lifetime.
• Mark's advice for the genius-youth-aged operator entering this market: find something you are deeply into, and figure out how AI helps you build it without raising venture capital. The whole VC model is about to get revamped.

Joe's Carpet-Cleaning Past, the Saint-or-Sinner Cover, and the Sugarman Archive

• Joe shares his own backstory as a carpet cleaner, the 1997 Cleanfax Person of the Year cover that ran a Dan-Kennedy-influenced angel-and-devil composite of him, and the ABC 20/20 segment that came out of his anti-bait-and-switch advocacy.
• Joe is now digitizing the entire Joe Sugarman archive through iMemories for the donors who supported Genius Recovery, along with old Gary Halbert footage and other marketing history that exists nowhere else.
• Joe's broader thesis: with AI plus iMemories-scale digitization, the next 18 to 24 months unlock personal cinematic content, custom storytelling, and what he calls "fantasy contamination" for addiction recovery. The Genius Network industry-transformer signal is exactly the kind of conversation that leads to it.

Resources Mentioned:

• iMemories | Mark Rukavina's digitization platform
• Ancestry | The family-history company that acquired iMemories
• Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance | Angela Duckworth, book
• Suno | AI music generation
• Strategic Coach | Dan Sullivan, the source of the "Industry Transformers" framing
• Genius Network
• Joe Polish's Genius Network Annual Event
• Genius Recovery | Joe Polish's addiction-recovery foundation
• Watch This Interview on YouTube