Can Writers & Coaches Survive the AI Boom?

The industry of publishers and authors and coaches is getting disrupted by AI. There's major shifts happening in this space. Our guest today is Joe Polish, who's an insider in this space, and he knows it pretty well. He's here to tell us what kind of challenges these authors are facing, and if there's a way for them out. People that sell courses today, a lot of them are struggling. It's become a very different world in the last year. And every week it becomes different. I have an AI clone where people can ask questions to my AI clone and get stuff that people have paid me $6,000 an hour to personally teach them that they can now ask my clone and get for free. It's bizarre. And so the question becomes, okay, then what do you sell? Joe, it's great to have you on. Welcome. It's great to be here. Thank you. You know, you have a view into a number of entrepreneurs, especially in the marketing space. You have this genius network. What do you see happening in the economy that's impacting these businesses? Well, let me preface it by saying I'm not an economist. I'm just, I have no higher education degree. I failed owning and operating a small business in Chandler-Gilbert Community College, and I got a C-minus in principles of marketing. I don't think entrepreneurs are made. I think they're born. Now, you can become a better entrepreneur. You can certainly learn skills. However, what I think is going on with the economy, things go up, things go down. There's a great line I'll preface this with, that I have a friend named Richard who shared this line with me. Wherever there's anxiety, there's opportunity. So the people that are going to make the most money in any sort of economy are the ones that can identify the problems that need solved, things that people are looking for, what people actually want. Not what people need. You know, that whole adage of find a need and fill it. It's actually not true. There's many things people need to do, but they don't do. It's like find a want and fill it. People have different wants and different desires. And I think what's going on in the economy right now is uncertainty. To go back to the original definition of an entrepreneur, the first recorded use of the term entrepreneur, I believe, was in 1804, was the first recorded use of the word entrepreneur, which was from a French guy, Jean-Baptiste Say, who said an entrepreneur is someone that takes resources from a lower yield to a higher yield, from a lower level of capability to a higher, to lower resources to higher resources. So wherever there's anxiety, there's opportunity. And if you can identify the anxieties that people have, you can offer a solution to that or you can help with that. Not only are you positioned to make a lot of money, you can actually impact a lot of lives and do it in a great way. And there's always anxieties. In the world that I'm in, a lot of authors, a lot of coaches, a lot of people that are idea merchants, they sell how-to. So now you have AI and you have all of these courses that are now obsolete if someone knows how to get solved what they want solved simply by utilizing whatever AI system they want to use. For me, though, I'm an addiction recovery foundation, which is a 501c3. So I don't make money off genius recovery. I actually do it because it helps me with my own recovery. And I have this weird drive to try to help reduce human suffering because I'm so intimately aware of the pain and the struggle and the angst of addiction, which is a solution to pain. With AI, there's this famous line, I think from the 1800s, where if you invent a ship, you've invented a shipwreck. If you invent an airplane, you invent a plane crash. If you invent AI, you've invented a whole other type of addiction that's going to impact people in a positive and a negative way. Because yes, ships are great. Airplanes are great. AI is awesome. But there's another side to it that's very dark. There's another side to it that can consume things and can disrupt the whole industry and can obsolete so many things. So there's a lot of fear. There's a lot of uncertainty. And so the ones that can bring some psychological safety for people, they have an opportunity to do very well. There's also people that can make a lot of money selling a ticket on the good ship Hope, but it's false hope. And so Hope heals if used in the right way. False hope can send people off in directions that they're hoping for something, but it never materializes. Anything you put in front of somebody is marketing. So only the hungriest fish are going to snap at the crappiest bait. Whatever you put in front of somebody, is it credible? Is it believable? Is it real? And some people are more believable, but they're not credible. Some people are credible, but they're not believable. And there's this dilemma with people that are some of the best in the world at what it is they do and how they do it, but they don't know how to message it in a way that attracts people. And then there's a bunch of charlatans and a bunch of snake oil sales people that people are like following them and thinking what it is they have is awesome because they're really good at presenting or they're making promises, but it doesn't come to fruition. And just follow the source. What are you actually looking for? What do you want solved? Does it actually work? Has it worked for other people? And I always tell my entrepreneurs, if you wouldn't sell it to your best friend or your mother, assuming you like your mother, don't sell it to anyone else because short term, you can make money short changing someone. But if you ever get away with doing something that you know is taken advantage, you never really get away with it. I believe karmically, it's like making a deposit in the bank. You either make a deposit or withdraw with every action, every exchange. You can be in the transaction business or you can be in the transformation business. You can be in the transaction business or you can be in the relationship business. So you're always going to do better making sure that you never sell anything that you yourself are not proud of and know that it has the ability to work for the person. And it also has to be the right fit. You know, you can have a great product selling it to the wrong person or you can have the wrong product selling it to someone that will buy it from you. But that doesn't mean you're going to make them happier, enhance their lives. So I'm very big about taking the ambitions of humans and directing it in a way that helps them get to where they want to go. And it takes enormous amounts of persuasion to get people to do the things they want to do, let alone the things they don't want to do. Like, do you want to walk into a gym? Some people don't want to walk into a gym. Some people don't want to eat healthy. However, if you can enroll them into that behavior and it's going to enhance their life, as long as it's legal, moral and ethical, everything that you can possibly do to help people get into a direction that they want to go and is good for them, I think is doing a good thing. The people that you're seeing in this, you mentioned you're pretty big in the author space, like you have a big network of them. Are they getting disrupted by AI? I think of it this way. So I started out never thinking I would write books or run events, incredibly shy and introverted growing up, doing an interview, speaking on stage, doing anything. I didn't learn how to actually write sales copy. I had to learn how to communicate. I went to Toastmaster meetings, improv classes, anything that could thrust me in front of people because I was scared shitless of talking to people. So there's this fear of kind of putting yourself out there, but I learned to do that. And in the process, I learned that there's three ways to learn anything and get better at it. One is you learn through the school of hard knocks. You just go out and bumble your way around, get beat up in the marketplace, but you figure some things out. You have a lot of failures. Maybe you don't ask for advice, dumb way to learn, but you learn. The second more effective way to learn is you read people's books. You go to their seminars, your podcasts, you go to courses, you go to seminars, you go to therapy. You're going to learn through the experiences of other people. That's a more effective way to learn. I think the way to accelerate even that is you take what you learn and you teach it to other people. Doesn't mean you plagiarize someone else's stuff and present it as your own. You actually credit where you learn things. You know, I'll cite people that aren't even famous that have died as long as I can remember where I learned something from. And then you formulate your own ways of going about doing stuff. You know, that's a more effective way. So I know a lot of people that are in the quote unquote information, publishing, marketing, business space. Half of them are amazing humans. The other half, they're weird. If you've met a lot of... So these are the coaches where they teach you how to flip a home or how to invest or how to... It could be anything. How to do anything. It could literally, you know, how to teach a parent how to talk, how to maintain relationships, how to fix your gut, how to make money and pick a category, you know, on real estate or, you know, how to be an AI consultant, a graphic designer, startups for apps, everything under the sun. It is mind boggling. So I've worked with countless industries. My preferred ones are health, mental and physical health, wealth, not just making money, but not losing it. And then anything that has to do with productivity in what I call health, doing things that are easy, lucrative and fun versus half, hard, annoying, lame and frustrating. So I'm trying to think of like, okay, is this relationship easy, lucrative and fun? So everything to me is about what is connection? How do I connect people with resources and other people that are going to help enhance their lives and reduce suffering? And how do we disconnect from the things we're not aligned with? Meaning I don't want to have any relationships with someone that does not want to have a relationship with me. And I want to feel aligned. You can have... There's not all money is created equal. In the publishing space, there's all these people that make a living dispensing advice. And that comes in the form of books, in the form of coaching. It might be a publishing podcast. It could be video. It could be YouTube. It could be social. There's a variety of different ways in order to get information out. So I'm around a lot of New York Times bestselling authors, a lot of people that run events because that's the world I started in. I learned how to take direct mail concepts before the internet even existed. And I used it to turn my carpet cleaning business around when I was a dead boat carpet cleaner in the early 1990s, living off credit cards. And I fell in love with the fact that you can change headlines or offers or words on paper. And it would influence human behavior because what marketing really is, is applied psychology. Selling is what you do when you're on the phone or face to face with somebody. Marketing is what you do to get someone on the phone or face to face with you properly positioned. So by the time you're talking with them, they're pre-interested, pre-motivated, pre-qualified, and predisposed to do business with you. So it's positioning. So when people put out information into the world, part of it is to position what it is they're doing so that they get respect, so that they can get clients. I give out information for free, but a very tiny percentage of those people really resonate with what it is that I put out and then they want to join a group like Genius Network. Or they want to buy a course. However, I'm more about high quality, low quantity human clients versus selling to the masses. I've helped a lot of people that sell to the masses. I've done that for many years. I mean, the top fitness book in the world in the late 90s was a book called Body for Life by Bill Phillips, who was one of my clients. I was his marketing consultant on and off for 13 years. That book exists because of the work we did together. I gave him a model on how to become the largest individual contributor in the history of the world to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, using a model to distribute a movie that was first published on a VHS tape. And over a million people joined the contest. It was one of the biggest physique transformation contests of all time. And that all came from just simply packaging information on health and diet and working out and everything. He'd write about steroids. He'd write about everything. And there's a ton of people that write books and courses on how to work out. And there's lots of people that have supplement companies. Why is it that someone makes a lot of money with it and another person doesn't? It has to do with their ability to bond with the client and deliver to them what it is they want or desire or are looking for and are willing to pay money for it. People that sell courses today, a lot of them are struggling. It's become a very different world in the last year. And every week it becomes different. You know, like I have an AI clone where people can ask questions to my AI clone and get stuff that people have paid me $6,000 an hour to personally teach them that they can now ask my clone and get for free. It's bizarre. So the question becomes, okay, then what do you sell? If you're gonna commoditize information with things that, you know, an AI system is gonna cognitively be more intelligent. Like my AI won't go on tangents like I do. It won't have these ADD rants that I do. It'll be more specific and stuff. So one could even argue that if you want just a business strategy, you might be better off talking to my AI clone, which I currently make available for free than talking to me personally because my brain is like, oh, what about this? And what about that? But I've loaded over a thousand videos, all of my books, everything into my AI clone. So someone could actually dialogue with it. That completely changes the game on how people access information. So for me, why would someone come to Genius Network when all of the content that they could ever wanna need, I put out for free? Well, because they want context and they want connection. And I think that's, so the businesses that are doing really well are the ones that stay connected. And I have a friend, Dan Sullivan, he's the founder of this amazing company called Strategic Coach. And I've been a client of Strategic Coach since the late 90s. And he's been a client of my company since 2010. And he has this thing called a DOS conversation. And a DOS conversation stands for dangers, opportunities, and strengths. And so in order for anyone to reach their opportunities in business or personally, whatever, they have to overcome their dangers. So an example would be, I used to sell to carpet cleaners and still do. I've many thousands of people throughout the world in service businesses that had become members of my organization. Because once I learned how to transform my carpet cleaning business, I was like, wow, these things that I have used, I could probably offer them to other carpet cleaners and it would probably do the same thing. And I could offer it to non-competitive locations because I wasn't gonna build like a carpet cleaning franchise and take it nationwide. I don't have those skills. I have the skills to teach and share strategies. I built the largest trading organization in the world in the 90s for carpet and upholstery cleaners and then people that do fire and flood restoration. I was like on covers of the magazines which never got me dates or anything in bars, but it helped with my business. I got into teaching different strategies. And so the DOS conversation, I learned this thing, dangers, opportunities, and strengths. So all of them wanted to build a bigger business. They wanted to get more clients. Many of them were single person or smaller operations and they wanted to get off the van. So they had these opportunities to not be the worker, but to be the business owner that would hire and employ technicians in that sort of stuff. And so one of their dangers were, why I need to, I don't have enough money. Well, is that a real danger or is it a psychological danger? Why I'm not good at marketing. Well, that's a psychological danger. You can learn marketing. That's what I sold the course for, right? We would teach people how to do marketing and we would give them the templates on education-based marketing, which was my model. You wanna educate people on how to make a buying decision so that they can make an informed, intelligent decision. And so I would create advertising that taught people how to hire a carpet cleaner. Then I licensed all of that to, at the time in the 90s, heating, air conditioning, printers, painters, florists, jewelers, pest control, hair and nails, salons, auto sales, all these different industries. And it accumulated, generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales for all of the different clients that were using these. And it all started because I was this dead broke carpet cleaner that needed business. And I needed to figure out how to, never thought I would package it up and sell this stuff. So I would think a lot, okay, they have dangers. They have all these opportunities, but they can't reach their opportunities and make the opportunities real until you overcome the dangers. Like if you have an opportunity to buy a house that's $2 million and you really want it, but you don't have the money to buy the house, okay, then one of the dangers is you don't have the money. So how do you learn how to make the money? Or do you find a different house or do you just not get the house, right? So the DOS conversation is you borrow from your strengths, which is dangers, opportunities, and strength in order to give you the confidence and capability to overcome your dangers. So oftentimes we're thinking, I'd really like to go out on a date with that person. I'd like to be in better physical shape. I want to build and grow a business. I want to have a stronger relationship with my kids. I want to be a politician and I want to make impact or whatever. I'm trying to phrase all these in good ways because there's a lot of snakes that their ambitions are like total status pursuit and let's figure out how to be a tyrant, right? I'm trying to frame all this in a positive light. So everyone has opportunities, but you don't reach your opportunities until your capabilities are equal to your opportunities. Meaning if you want to bench press 200 pounds and you can only bench press 150 pounds, you have to build up your strength in order to bench press 200 pounds. Well, same thing. I would tell carpet cleaners, what's your goal? I want to have a million dollar business. What are you currently doing? I'm doing 300,000. Well, you have $300,000 capabilities right now and you're never going to exceed $300,000 until you build your capabilities. So do you need marketing capabilities, financial capabilities, technology capabilities, people capabilities? Can you hire someone that you get to that level? Well, one of the dangers, well, I don't have the money to hire the person. Well, then you need to figure out how to do that. And that's how you build and grow a business. And so what we would do is we would focus on what are the strengths. And I do this all the time to this day. The whole reason I'm explaining this is the marketplace, the economy, where who's doing well, who's doing not has everything to do with the changing DOS of the world. Because the people that are watching your show have dangers, they have opportunities, and they have strengths. And they're not using this language, but they're thinking for, okay, I have these dangers, how do I overcome them? I'm going to listen and what opportunities are going to be exposed to me? What insights and perspectives will I have? How can I take what someone is saying and apply it to my situation to overcome my psychological or real dangers? How can I get motivated? How can I course correct? You know, there's all these weird words that people, like I have a friend, Ben Hardy, who's one of my Genius Network members. He wrote a book on scaling recently. I've had conversations with a lot of people about scaling. Scaling is a big buzzword, just like Silicon Valley. The 10X, yeah. Yeah, exactly, yeah. You know, like I started the 10X Talk podcast with Dan Sullivan in 2012. You know, so we were talking about how to 10X your business, right? And that's become a big word. So based on what you're seeing and your experience, you're seeing major changes happening. But at the same time, you think this is normal in business, right? My official real business was being a carpet cleaner. That was my first, you know, true business. And over the years, 5% of the people make all the money. The other 95% scrape around for the crumbs. And I know that sounds like kind of hardcore. And I really, you know, don't think it's necessary for people if they're willing to put in the time and energy and the direction on what to learn and how to do it. A lot of people just don't know. So I, you know, we try to help people identify stuff. I mean, we even have a group for young people called Genius Youth. The fact of the matter is there's always gonna be a small percentage of people that are the ones that are doing the best. And in any industry, I've never seen it any different. You pick an industry, you know, it could be anything. There's a handful of people that do the best and the rest are just kind of like trying to figure it out and bumble their way through. What do those handful do? You mentioned 5% of the people were doing really well. And what do they do that's different than the other 95%? I think the 5% that do the best are willing to do the things that the other 95% are not willing to do. They study, they learn, they test things, they resource themselves, they learn how to hire talented people. If they learn how to hire talented people, they operate ethically. Not all of them, but a lot of people, they deliver real tremendous value. They create an experience. I had a friend who's passed away. He was like the father of self-esteem, Dr. Nathaniel Brandon. He's the one that actually had an affair with Ayn Rand when he was in his 20s and she was in her 40s. And so he was very big on the objectivist movement and stuff. And he wrote The Art of Living Consciously, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Taking Responsibility. I mean, he was a brilliant guy. And we're talking about going and getting help for psychological issues. And he had made this comment. I don't even know if it was his line, but he had said it where he said, when you go to a therapist seeking help, you're not looking for an explanation, you're looking for an experience. And so I think the people that do the best create some sort of experience. People don't want to just buy a product or service. It's the other stuff that goes along with it. Let me give you an example. So I have this blue box that I brought over here for no other reason. When I was leaving my, luckily you happen to be in my hometown right now, right? I don't live too far from here. And I have this box at my recent Genius Network meeting. I was interviewing a guy named Chris Voss, who's the former top international FBI hostage negotiator and another guy named Jefferson Fisher, who's a trial attorney who wrote a book called The Next Conversation. And Chris wrote a book called Never Split the Difference. And they're both masterful communicators. And I'm interviewing these people because I want to just learn from them too, right? But I just happen to do it for an audience. Like, isn't this a great way to learn stuff? You just interview people and talk to them. My favorite way to learn anything is I have discussions with smart people. So to go back to what are the ones that do the best willing to do, they'll go to lunch with people that are smarter than them. They try to collaborate with other people. They don't leave scorched earth. They don't take advantage of people because you don't build a great reputation by talking about what you're going to do. You actually build a great reputation by doing it. So the people that do the best are doers. They're not talkers. This box here. So I have chicken noodle. And I pulled this out when I was talking to Chris Voss and with Jefferson Fisher. Jefferson has managed to build a following of 6 million plus people on Instagram shooting one minute videos on how to better communicate sitting in his car. No fancy editing, no nothing. So I pulled this out. And so I paid $1.99 each for, here's a can of chicken noodle soup. And this one is tomato soup. And if you're hungry, you know, this was several years ago. So the expiration date, the expiration date on these two cans was in 2022, by the way. So you probably wouldn't want to eat it. But if you're starving, it'll do the job. And this particular can is empty. There's holes in it and stuff. And it's older. But I paid $4,500 for this at an auction because it's signed by Andy Warhol. So the question is, why is this worth $4,500? And this costs $1.99. It's, you know, well, this one's chicken noodle. Well, this is tomato. Okay, same thing. Okay, can't even eat this one. There's nothing in it. But it's, that's not what I was buying. I was buying art. I was not buying soup. I was not buying a can. I was buying something that it represents something. And I never even thought I would use it as an example. I was in the moment where it's like, oh my God, that'd be kind of cool to have a soup can signed by Andy Warhol. And I happened to get it at the auction because, you know, there's only one other person that was like trying to outbid me. But I happened to get it. And that was kind of cool. But the point is, is the formula for how much you charge for something is based on your ability to sell it. And if no one's buying what it is you're selling, then you either need to change the message. You need to change the audience. You need to maybe sell something else. You need to find people that want what it is you're selling. Joe Polish, it was great to have you on. Thank you. Yes, it was great to be here. So I appreciate it.