Mad Genius, with Randy Gage – Episode 123 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Best-selling author, Hall of Fame speaker, and podcast host Randy Gage reveals the lightbulb that clicked on after being incarcerated at 15 years old, “the big lie” for entrepreneurs, talks about the feasibility of human cloning in the coming years, and shares what truly great company cultures do.

About Randy:

Randy Gage is a thought-provoking critical thinker who will make you approach your business — and your life — in a whole new way. Randy is the author of 12 books translated into 25 languages, including the New York Times bestsellers, Risky Is the New Safe and Mad Genius.

He has spoken to more than 2 million people across more than 50 countries and is a member of both the Speakers Hall of Fame and the Direct Selling Hall of Fame. When he is not prowling the podium or locked in his lonely writer’s garret, you’ll probably find him playing 3rd base for a softball team somewhere.

Learn more at RandyGage.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Host
So Randy Gage is in the speaker Hall of Fame. Randy is a critical thinker. You might be offended, you will probably laugh, but you will definitely think differently, and I know that’s what his book Mad Genius is all about. And so Randy, welcome to the show.

Randy Gage
Great to be on with you.

Host
So let’s dive into mad genius.

Randy Gage
Well, at some point in your life, I think if you’re on the right path, you want to move from success to significance. It’s not about how much money you can make or how many cars you can have anymore. It’s about, Am I really making a difference? I wrote mad genius to make a difference. I want to change the way people think it’s a very arrogant concept, right? I had a, I was doing an interview on a radio station, I forget where, and they and they said, Do you really write books to change the world? You know, isn’t that a little presumptuous? I said, Well, that’s not a little presumptuous. That’s a lot of presumptuous. But that’s exactly why I write books otherwise I wouldn’t write them. I write books that I want to read. I write because I have to write because I have things that I feel I need to say. And I look at what’s going on in the world today, all of the entitlement mentality we have, all of the victim mentality we have, and I say, Man, somebody’s got to shake people up and grab them by the throat and say, Stop thinking this way. We’re going to enter the most cataclysmic time in human history. And if we want to survive the challenges we’re going to face, we’re going to have to think at a higher level. This is the manifesto for entrepreneurs, because I believe in the power of free enterprise, I think that’s what’s going to save the world. I mean, people, it’s great. You know, you’re having a protest, and you go around with signs, well, save the rainforest. Okay, great. Well, how many trees did we cut down to make those signs? If you want to save the rainforest, you know how you save the rainforest? You go and buy it. And I support charities that do that, for instance, where they buy acres and acres of rain forest and then deed them into a trust. And that’s how you have to do it you want to be successful. Like, here I’m in Southern California, and they’re like, if you wash your car, they’ll shoot you. If you water your lawn, you’ll go to prison. Because, you know, there’s such a water shortage. It’s not a water shortage. We live on a planet that three quarters of it is water. What there’s a shortage of is desalinated water. But let’s not say there’s a water shortage. There’s really not so how do we solve that? We solve that with free enterprise. We need the technology that makes it and that’s where I think free enterprise comes in. The profit motive there causes people to invest, to innovate, to develop things. Because, of course, the greatest ways to create wealth are to solve problems and add value. And that’s what I’m doing with the book. Is trying to get people to think in ways like an entrepreneur, to say, well, how can I solve problems? How can I add value? Because that’s what’s gonna save the world.

Host
When you talk about free enterprise saves the world. You know, you talk a lot about limiting beliefs, and how a lot of times people think that just to be rich you have to be bad or you have to take advantage of people. And you know, obviously that’s not what you’re saying here, but but your background, you were in prison as a teenager.

Randy Gage
Well, I was in jail at 15 years old for armed robbery and burglary, and I had a father of a girl I had gone to school with before I got expelled, who came in to see me in my jail cell and said, You don’t belong here. You’re you know, I read your files, and you test so high and reading comprehension, you’re at college level, and you skip five weeks in a row, and then you show up and you take a test and you pass it, you’re capable of great things. Nobody had ever told me anything like that. I mean, the thing I heard growing up was, how can somebody so. Smart be so stupid if I heard that once, I heard it 100,000 times. And because this teacher, he was a teacher, the father of this girl, he was actually a teacher. His name was Baxter Richardson, so he came in this jail cell and he tells me, I’m capable of great things. I so desperately wanted to believe him that I believed him, and because I believed him, it was true. You really own it, something like that, and you accept it. If you manifest it, you make it true. And so that changed my whole thought process, and changed the way I approached the world. And then I went out and did the hard work and said, Okay, I’m going to start as a grill cook and work my way up to a manager, trainee, an assistant manager, and then restaurant manager, and get a big ring with all those keys and wear a tie and walk around and say, Well, how’s your dinner this evening, which to me, at that point in my life, was the ultimate level of success, right, if you could, because I was starting as a minimum wage dishwasher, so ultimate level of success would have been restaurant manager with the key ring, you know. And of course, that changed as my vision of prosperity changed my vision of the window through which I see the world. But I can attribute it back to that Baxter coming into my jail cell and seeing something for me before I could see it for myself.

Host
That’s inspiring. And in mad genius, you talk about the big lie. What is the big lie for entrepreneurs?

Randy Gage
Here’s the big lie for entrepreneurs. If you get 1000 of them and you say, just grab 1000 people off the street and say, what is the opposite of success? 999 will say failure, but that’s the big lie, because the opposite of success is not failure. The opposite of success is mediocrity, and failure is actually part of the success process. It’s inherent in the DNA of success that we will attempt things and fail, that we will make mistakes, that we will modify based on those mistakes, that we will learn from those mistakes. We use them as stepping stones to develop character, to learn new skills, to change our approach. And the some of the case studies I’m looking at in the book, whether it’s Steve Jobs at Apple or Richard Branson, or look at people who have done some pretty extraordinary things, and you see a lot of failure along the way, a lot of risk. My last book was called risky is the new safe? Because I really believe that the companies and the organizations and the people that play it safe right now, those are the ones that are going to get run over, because that’s the riskiest thing you can do. Because we’re now entering what I believe this next decade is going to be the most tumultuous decade in in the course of human history. There will be more well, there will be more breakthrough changes that take place in the next decade than at any time because of the accelerated level of growth, we will see the advent of human cloning during this next decade, and we could argue and debate the moral and ethical ramifications of that for decades, And we probably will, but 150 countries could sign a treaty tomorrow to say, Okay, we’re not going to allow human cloning. There will be some country somewhere that says we don’t have diamonds, we don’t have oil, we don’t have natural gas, we’ll be the cloning country. And if they can offer North Korea of 5 million clone soldiers, North Korea might just want to make that offer, right? So cloning, genetic engineering, people going to be able to order designer babies saying, I want the Peyton Manning quarterback gene. I want the Maya Angelou poetry gene. I mean the with transplants, 3d printing, where social media changes the business landscape, where mobile app, mobile will change how we buy, how we sell, how we communicate, how we train, how we eat, how we’re entertained, how we do everything, right? It blows up branding forever. But mobile will change marketing more than radio, direct mail, TV and the Internet combined, right? So we’re in this the at the advance of artificial intelligence, and getting closer and closer to the point where the acquired knowledge of AI is greater than all acquired human knowledge. When that happens, that’ll be the single biggest event in the course of human history, whether you go back whatever your belief system now, if you think we start at 6000 Years ago with Adam and Eve, or go back 13 billion years to the Big Bang. There will be no event more important to human history than the day that the second that artificial intelligence equals and then surpasses one second later, all acquired human knowledge, and that could happen in the next decade.

Host
So what do you do? Like, so some of that’s terrifying. Some of that’s like, Oh my gosh. What do you do to prepare for that?

Randy Gage
That’s the thing. That’s why I wrote the book. People got to understand they’re not prepared for this yet, because there’s nobody on earth who’s prepared for this, and the only way to prepare for it is to accelerate our level of thinking and thinking at higher levels. Uber, Airbnb, here’s the fascinating thing. Uber was created by people who were not in the taxi business. Amazon was created by people who were not in the bookstore business. Dan Burris, futurist, he was speaking to the national booksellers convention, whatever that is, years ago, and he told them, somebody in this room needs to start an online bookstore, because if you don’t do it, somebody else is going to do it. So he had 1000s of people in the convention hall, and none of them did it. Now, why not? Because they say what they said was, well, that’s not how people buy books. People go into bookstores and they browse the shelves and they get recommendations from the clerks. And now we’ve added a coffee bar, and so they come in and they sit down and they relax on a Friday night. And then two years later, Jeff Bezos started in Amazon. So you look at Uber, do we think that nobody in the taxi business ever thought, Well, gee, we could use GPS and track where every car is at every second and send the ride that’s closest to the fair. Do we think somebody in the taxi business might have thought, well, we could develop a mobile app and then they could call when they want to get picked up, and they could rate the driver. Or Did nobody in the taxi business think, well, we could allow them to pay with their smartphone, with Google Pay or Apple Pay or, you know, whatever. Of course, they did, but they did nothing on it, because they were in the space. Because when all you, you know the old cliche, when all you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So the guys in Dan’s audience all like, I’ve got the bookstores and I pay the rent and I’ve got a 25 year lease and 27 employees. How do I their only thing is, how do I get more people to come into my store? Whereas a guy on the outside like Bezos says, Why do we need the store? So the people in the taxi business say, Well, I just spent $50,000 on a new radio system, and I have all these dispatchers who work for me. And this is the way we’ve done it for 30 years, and it’s always worked this way, that’s the thing you got to protect against everybody who’s listening right now, they’re in their business said, Well, okay, well that doesn’t apply to me, because my business is different, and those are the people who are going to get screwed if they don’t wake up. And Steve Jobs. I mean, did Steve Jobs have anything to do with radio stations or record companies, yet he changed the music industry more than any person on earth.

Host
I don’t want to leave without asking you this other question, because there’s a big movement of be an entrepreneur. Have your own business. Be your own guy. But one of the things you touch on imagine is on how the best companies are treating people more like entrepreneurs and so those people don’t have to really be entrepreneurs. They can still be inside of a company. Can you kind of just like, break that whole little piece of the book down?

Randy Gage
Yeah, that’s all…that’s all about culture. I mean, why can you go in and In and Out Burger on a Saturday afternoon with a line 100 people outside the door, 200 cars lined up around the block, literally a traffic hazard. There’s some minimum wage kid cleaning the dining room, keeping the restroom spotless, refilling the ketchup bottle, smiling, sweeping up, greeting everybody. How do they get him to do that? How can you how come you can go into an Ace Hardware store and ask for the most arcane, ridiculous thing that nobody has asked for in seven weeks. And the clerk will say that is on aisle 13, right near the end, on the second shelf from the bottom. That’s culture. You create that culture in an organization, and the biggest thing that’s an impediment to it that I see is this protecting against failure, right? Because nobody wants to make mistakes, because if you make a mistake, you get ostracized, or you get demoted, or you get passed over for promotion, or you get fired, right? Whereas the great companies, they not only allow their people to fail, they expect them and encourage them to fail. I think the great companies, they have this attitude like venture capitalists. So if you take Jason calsenis or Chris soccer or someone, they’re gonna invest in 100 ventures, and they’re gonna know that 97 of them probably aren’t gonna work out but they’re hoping for one or two unicorns in the bunch, and there’s four or five that might now work out there, but they’ll find some breakthrough that’ll help them segue into a different business and a different model that might work out there, and they expect that a bunch of those things won’t work out, but they know that’s part of the process, and companies that are willing to do that, that allow companies to I’m not talking about missing your third quarter stock price by 2% or What I’m talking about allowing somebody to open up a division and have a spectacular failure, the kind of failure Steve Jobs had when they first ran him out of Apple the first time around, and then realized, well, you know, maybe that wasn’t, you know, maybe which was probably the right move for Apple at that point, But just as bringing him back was the right move, because they needed that level of thinking again. And so how do you create that kind of culture? You give your people space to be brilliant, to make mistakes, you allow them to fail, you encourage them to fail, and they know they can fail and not get demoted, not lose their promotion, not lose their job, and know that they’re going to learn that lesson, grow from it, modify Test Track, come back with something better, and that’s where the breakthroughs live.

Host
Wow, well Randy, where do you want people to go to connect with you and learn more about you?

Randy Gage
Alright, so Randygage.com that’s my Starfleet Command main site, and Randygage.com and then, of course, follow me on social media. I’m everywhere, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. I love to connect with people and discuss the work.

Host
Nice. Well, the last little question I have for you, do you really believe that everybody has genius inside of them, and if so, how do they like how do they access that?

Randy Gage
I really do believe everybody has genius in them, and it’s different with every person. When Ray Chen picks up a violin, that’s a certain kind of genius, when LeBron James is on the basketball court that’s a different kind of genius. When Stephen King writes one of his novels, that’s an entirely different kind of genius, and Maya Angelou has hers, and Oprah Winfrey has hers. And we have all got our unique kind of genius, and that’s why I wrote mad genius, because I really do believe that everybody has that, and that’s what my manifesto is about, is to get people to answer the call and step into their greatness. Because I re I really know they have that mad genius inside of them.

Host
Yeah, thank you for making some time here, Randy. We wish you all the best and keeping inspiring people to find their genius.

Randy Gage
Alright, thanks for having me on.