EverydaySpy Podcast - A Deathtrap in Disguise

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

The most skilled drivers in the world don't have their photos plastered on NASCAR, F1 or even Rallycross websites and magazines. Instead, they hide in the world of covert ops -- a world ruled by Tier 1 MARSOC Raiders. Join Andrew as he shares a lesson from his Tier 1 MARSOC friend and fellow EverydaySpy instructor about hard lessons learned off the track... Want to experience it for yourself?...visit https://youtu.be/_puaVplCBi8 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Andrew Bustamante, and this is everyday espionage. This week I finished one of my favorite courses that I run. It's a course called Ghost Tactics. And inside Ghost Tactics, I teach all of my students how to drive, how to shoot, and how to use disguise in a very practical, tactical way to essentially go ghost, to disappear from any situation at any time. And this most recent class was a fantastic class. I had four students come through.

And of those four students, I had ultra wealthy that were present. I had highly successful salespeople who were present. I had a crypto millionaire who was there. It was a really cool, strong, diverse group that was just a ton of fun to be with. And during Ghost Tactics, it's not just me that teaches, as much as I would love to teach everybody. When you have guns and cars and high speed turns and craziness like that, you generally want more than one instructor. And my co-instructor for Ghost Tactics is a Marine Special Operations Command, or known as Marsok, a Marsok raider friend of mine whose name is Raul.

And Raoul's a super cool guy, really laid back, I mean, retired Marine Corps tier one operator, and just a fantastic driver. Now, if you don't know what Marsoc is, or if you don't know who the Raiders, the Marine Raiders are, Marine Raiders are essentially the best trained drivers in the entire Tier 1 world. These are the guys who know how to hotwire, steel, X-fil, infill, anything you can imagine that happens on four wheels. And they're used to doing it under active fire and deploying from vehicles to use suppression fire and just fantastically trained drivers.

They know how to push a car to its limits. They know how to leave a car. behind and find a new car and take that new car to its limits. They can do just amazing stuff behind the wheel of a car. And that's why Raul spends his day job now as a retired tier one operator. He teaches new tier one operators how to drive in tactical combat. When he's not teaching high performance driving skills to tier one operators, he's actually an independent contractor who teaches high performance driving skills to professional race car drivers. Professional race car drivers for F1, professional rally car racers, professional performance vehicle racers that

work on track and off track. And that's what I want to share with you today. When I was going through ghost tactics most recently with Raul and with our students, Raul shared this awesomely powerful story that I felt had just immense value to what we were trying to teach our students and what I want to teach you today. So back about two years ago, there was a Canadian racing group, a professional Canadian racing group, a track race car group that sent their top five racers down to visit Raoul. So they spent five days on Raul's facility, three days on the track, two days on the dirt, learning to expand their driving skill. Now the top two racers, the guy who was consistently the team lead and the guy who was consistently number two for the track,

those two are the two that the racing company told Raul to focus his effort on. They were like, hey, this whole five days will be worth it. If you can make sure that these two racers have some kind of massive breakthrough, something that sets them up to race faster, stronger, and perform better for the next year. So that's exactly what Raul do. He structured the entire training experience around these two racers. Now, on the track for day one and day two, the racers performed perfectly and Raoul was even blown away by how good these Canadian track racers were.

The first place guy was always first. The second place guy was always second. And the second place guy was fractions of a second behind the first place guy on every lap and even across the finish line. And it didn't matter how many different variations they put into the paved path itself. These two racers always rose to the occasion and always finished first and second. So Raul knew that there was no way he was going to level them up by letting them continue to race on a paved track. So instead, he transitioned them for two days of off-road driving. Now, off-road driving, sometimes known as rally car driving, is a completely different type of driving.

Instead of steering with a steering wheel, and I'm trying to do this on an audio recording, so I don't know if this is going to come across to you or not. Hopefully, you're visual, because I'm going to explain it in a visual way. When you're driving on a paved track, you drive with your steering wheel. You basically steer your front wheels wherever you want the car to go. But when you're driving off-road at high performance or high speeds, you actually don't steer with your steering wheel. You steer with weight transfer in the vehicle. Meaning if you want to steer to the left,

you have to change the weight transfer in the vehicle to move to the right. When you change the weight of the vehicle to the right, the back end, the ass end of the vehicle, will actually shift. It will slide, it will spin, it will get loose, is the term that we use. But it will get loose and it will swing around the engine block and essentially end in a left-hand turn. If you want to make a right-hand turn on a dirt road, you don't actually steer right. Instead, you shift the weight of the car to the left, which brings that ass end around to the left, and makes for a right-hand turn.

So it's completely different than paved driving, where you have to maintain positive control and positive traction with the paved track. When you're off road and you're driving at high speeds and high performance, you have to use weight transfer. You have to essentially treat the road like it's a fluid, like it's always shifting and it's always loose. That's why you try to train a driver to get loose. So here are these top two Canadian drivers, and they're both paired up with Raul, and he's training them actively on how to get loose in a visual. vehicle. Now here, the one and two quickly broke down because the number one top driver for that Canadian Racing Club, that driver refused to let himself accept a car that was loose. He wanted that positive traction. He worked hard to maintain positive control and positive traction with his all four

wheels on the gravel surface at all times. Now, that meant that he couldn't drive at speed. It meant he had to slow down to take certain turns. It also meant that he really wasn't able to anticipate what the car was going to do when it entered into some turns or when he braked at speed. So he was constantly losing control of the vehicle unintentionally, rather than intentionally losing control of the vehicle in a way that allows the vehicle to get loose. You'll often hear rally car racers and professional drivers talk about off-road driving as controlled crashing. That's because that's exactly what they're doing. They are intentionally letting the car lose its positive control with the surface in favor of controlling the vehicle through that weight distribution, that weight transfer that I was just explaining to you.

Now, the first driver in the league, the first driver for this club was struggling to get into a groove, letting his car get loose, letting the car lose positive control with the pavement or with the tract with the gravel itself. And he struggled for days, not being able to learn or apply these. these racing concepts, these rally racing concepts. The second place driver, who always consistently finished just fractions of a second behind the first place driver, this person really leaned in, really adapted and took on the challenge of learning how to steer with weight transfer, how to perform, how to execute high performance driving techniques on loose gravel and dirt and sand. Now the second racer would let his car get loose. And at first, he really struggled.

He was obviously very accomplished at maintaining positive control with the pavement. But the first few tries at high performance or high narrow steering, he would lose control the vehicle. It would spin out and it would fall off the edge of the rally tracker. It would go into the grass. But it didn't take long before he really got good at loosening his car, letting the car drive through weight transfer by getting loose on the pavement. So what Raul ended up having were these two high-performing students

where one student kept digging into what they knew and not learning something new, while the second student was willing to lean into what they didn't know and go through the struggle of spinning out and falling off the track and losing control of the vehicle as he learned how to master a new set of skills. that skill being getting loose on gravel and dirt on off-road racing. Now, two days of this exercise did two different things to these two racers. The first racer had his confidence shot. He was being battered and beaten down by the fact that he not only was bad at something,

but he was unable to get better at it. So Raul didn't want this guy to have a bad experience, so he actually ended up just taking the race car, taking the rally car away, and giving the dude a no-kitting 1990s-era four-wheel drive pickup truck. And he said, hey, there's a giant patch of dirt right over there. All I want you to do is go out there and gun the engine and get crazy. Do some donuts, you know, steer it out.

Who cares? Don't even worry about whether or not you roll this ancient pickup truck over because it's almost impossible to do that. But if you do, we've got three other pickup trucks that we'll give you next. Even with that freedom, even with that free reign, the driver was unwilling to let himself get loose. He finally felt the spin out and he felt some of the weight transfer, but he wasn't comfortable enough to let himself embrace it and use it and learn from it.

Meanwhile, on the track with the second class, or the number two racer for that Canadian race club, that individual was tapping into completely new levels of confidence, whole new levels of skill on the dirt and in off-road racing because he was learning how to master his vehicle. So they actually moved him from smaller class vehicles to medium-sized vehicles to large class vehicles, all with different weights. So instead of driving a 2,000-pound vehicle at high speed around a narrow turn, he was driving a 5,000-pound vehicle at high speeds around a narrow turn, where he never really had positive traction at all with the gravel. It was literally like driving on ice or driving on water. When you're driving at high speed on gravel, you have no traction.

It's just you're a floating car on four small patches of rubber that never actually touch solid soil. Now, remember I said it was a five-day training. They spent two days on a paved track. They spent two days on a dirt track. Now, the fifth day, they all came back to the regular paved track, the race track, the same professional kind of track that they were going to have to train on. Now, I'm sure you know where I'm going with this story. Because on that fifth day, what they found was that the first place,

race driver still performed as well as he always had. He was still a super specific super professional executor who could drive at high speeds on a on a paved track with positive control and he still finished his laps and his full races in the in almost identical time with just a few microseconds difference. But the big change was with the second place racer who was now finishing almost half of a second in advance of the first place driver. So that means the first place driver was still driving as fast as he always had. But the second place driver was not only driving faster than he was previously driving, but he was now driving faster and more consistently than the first

place driver, which made him the new lead for the Canadian race car team. Why am I sharing this with you? I'm sharing this because what I see whenever I take students through my Ghost Tactics course is the same thing that Raul was explaining with these two race car drivers. People who demand a level of perfectionism, a level of consistency, people who take comfort in their current existing skill sets, when they go up against a major challenge, a challenge like what I present in ghost tactics, they buckle. They buckle because they have become accustomed, they have become comfortable in their superiority, in their skill, in their talent, whether they're running a $10 million business or whether they're racing for a $10 million race club. They are very good at what

they do. But they're not the best at what they could achieve if they let themselves learn something new. If they let themselves get loose, if they let themselves explore what it feels like to be bad at something for a little while, learn from that. and then apply it to something better. About 50% of the people who go through my course, ghost tactics, are entrepreneurs. And they are excellent at getting loose. These are people who have built something out of nothing.

They hit the ground. They hit the dirt. They hit the shooting range. They start wearing disguises with me. And they lean into the experience. And they grow massively. They turn $10 million businesses into $25 million businesses. They turn $4 million worth of crypto.

into $8 million worth of crypto. They do amazing things with just a few days of time on target with me and Raul. But the other 50% of people who come to Ghost Tactics are usually employees. These are people who work for someone else. They don't own anything. They might get paid very well, $150,000 a year, $250,000 a year. But essentially, they are what's known as a wage slave. Now, a wage slave, if you don't know, is an economic turn. That means someone who is wholly dependent on a wage or a salary for their lifestyle. These are people who don't really have enough money in the savings account to be able to sustain them for longer than three months if they lose their job. These are people who, regardless of how much money they make, they don't believe that they have a specific skill set or a specific value that they can leverage into more income.

Instead, they believe that they are only worth whatever hourly pay they are given in their job. It's a completely different mindset than the entrepreneur, right? You've got the person who makes $150,000 a year on the left. This person is a wage slave. They have to work for someone else to get the paycheck at the end of the month. If they don't work for that person that month, they don't get the paycheck. And if they don't get the paycheck, then they end up not having any money at all. Because they have no way of turning their talent or their skill.

or their vision into revenue. On the right, you have the entrepreneur who is not a wage slave. You have the person who's found a way to creatively take their ideas, creatively take their vision, creatively take their talent, and use it as a means to generate revenue, to make money. The wage slave can never increase their wage, not unless they leave their current job, and go to another job where that new job is willing to pay them more. But just because the new job is willing to pay them more, it doesn't mean that the new job is willing to pay them what they're worth. The person on the right, the entrepreneur, that person is not a wage slave.

And if they don't like the money they're making with one client, they can fire that client and go somewhere else and find a new client who will pay more. Just like you can find plumbers who charge $25 to show up at your house, there are other plumbers who will charge you $150 or $300 to show up at your house because they have found a way to establish themselves with their skill or their talent or their vision as worth more, higher quality, more experienced. That doesn't exist in the world of the wage slave, where the wage slave is wholly dependent on someone to pay them their wage.

So just like I said, during ghost tactics, my entrepreneur types, lean into the training, embrace the new thing, learn and apply it to their business and grow. The wage slave employees who come through ghost tactics, who, can afford the $5,000 price tag for the experience, these are folks who have a completely different experience at Ghost Tactics. They walk out and they walk out like that first race car driver. They're still really good at what they do. They still go back to the office and they're still fantastic accountants or engineers or whatever they might be. But they didn't grow. They didn't find a way to make something better because they never were willing to let themselves

color outside of the lines. They weren't willing to let themselves drive off of the racetrack they know so well. These are people who aren't willing to risk losing control just for a little while to learn a new skill, a new way of adding value that puts them in greater control of the rest of the race, of all future races. Essentially, they came in as winners and they left in second place, where just like this Canadian driver who came in, came into the training with Raul, came in as a second place winner. But he left as the new winner of every race for that club. Now, still to this day, that second place driver is still the first place driver for that

group. And that group sends a new batch of drivers down to Raul every year. And they are always looking for the third place driver to become the new second place driver, the fifth place driver to become the new third place driver. and Raul constantly delivers because he's just that good at what he does. Marine Raiders are just that good at what they do. But I keep seeing the same students come through, or I keep saying the same split of my students come through in Ghost Tactics

who are doing the same thing. And Ghost Tactics continues to deliver and grow businesses and grow business owners and business leaders and entrepreneurs into the next level of what they're looking for. And even though we bring in your consistent employees who are these who are stuck in the wage slave cycle, every now and then we have a breakthrough with one of them where they realize they don't have to stay in that role. They don't have to stay a wage slave. They can actually step out and do something different. They can invest in a new business.

They can expand their moonlight business. They can partner with somebody else who's in the same business to start something new altogether. And we see growth. And growth is what it's all about. When you have an opportunity to push yourself into an area that you're not comfortable, where you're not skilled, where you're not the best, I want you to lean into that opportunity. Use that as an opportunity to get loose. To understand that sometimes to get better control, you have to let yourself lose temporary control. Just like those cars on the racetrack perform one way, the same.

car on a gravel path responds completely differently. It's still a high-performance vehicle. You are still a high-performance vehicle. Your job is to learn how to be high-performance whether you're on a paved road or whether you're on a gravel path. Because the way that you drive at speed, the way that you handle sharp turns, the way that you avoid a wreck is completely different between the two different surfaces, but you're still the driver and your car is still the car that's high performance. If you can learn how to master both sides, if you can learn how to apply off-road driving skills the next time you're on the pavement, then that's going to put you one step ahead

of everybody out there who's only racing on one track. All the entrepreneurs, all the business owners, all of your coworkers in your workplace, these folks who just keep investing in the one thing that they're good at, thinking that somehow they're going to do. get incrementally better by 0.01 seconds on the racetrack, that they're somehow going to either continue to win the lead car roll or they're going to somehow keep their job. Risk it all so that you can improve by seconds, 100 times the improvement that they have. Let yourself get loose, get off the track and race your performance vehicle like you know it performs. Don't let yourself be trapped in this mindset of a wage slave. Don't let yourself be trapped thinking that you're only

worth what someone else is willing to pay for you by the hour. Instead, recognize that you can apply any new skill, any new value to what you bring to the table, and all of a sudden you become infinitely more valuable. Just like that second place racer for this Canadian race car team is now the first place racer for the club. All that changed was It wasn't him. It wasn't his car. What changed is that he was willing to take lessons from failure off-road and bring them onto the track.

And when he did that, everything changed. And when you do that, everything changes for you too. And that is everyday espionage. Everyday espionage is dedicated to one thing, educating everyday people. I know that not everyone will listen, but those who listen will learn. If you learned something new today, click subscribe, review, and share the podcast with a friend. Find me on social media at EverydaySpy or on my website, Everydayspy.com. If you are up for a special challenge, visit Everydayspy.com forward slash operations

and join me for an authentic spy training mission. And above all else, remember that knowledge is freedom.