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.

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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.

Great to be on with you.

So let's dive into mad genius.

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.

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.

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.

That's inspiring. And in mad genius, you talk about the

big lie. What is the big lie for entrepreneurs?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

Wow, well Randy, where do you want people to go to connect

with you and learn more about you?

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.

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?

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.

Yeah, thank you for making some time here, Randy. We wish

you all the best and keeping inspiring people to find their

genius.

Alright, thanks for having me on.