Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Flint McGlaughlin on the Philosophy of Marketing

Episode Date: December 22, 2021

In this podcast, I talk with Dr. Flint McGlaughlin about marketing, which is something he knows quite a bit about. In fact, I’ve known about Flint and followed his work for over a decade now, so this was a treat for me. In case you’re not familiar with him, Flint is an academic and business leader who served as the Director of Enterprise Research for Transforming Business at the University of Cambridge (UK) and is the founder of the MECLABS Institute, a marketing research institute dedicated to figuring out how people make choices and what influences those choices. Not only has Flint written and edited hundreds of articles and texts and won multiple awards, but he’s patented ten offer conversion-related heuristics, conducted large-scale research projects in partnership with companies like The New York Times, Google, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Royal Bank of Canada, and has lectured at conferences and universities around the world, including New York University, Columbia University, Oxford University. He has also delivered keynote addresses for companies such as Cisco Systems Inc., Microsoft, and Google. To put it mildly, this guy knows his stuff, and as you’ll hear in the interview, he’s also an extremely interesting guy. In our conversation, he talks about . . . The concept of "metanoia" or changing one's mind Individuation and becoming who you really are How marketing is the essence of entrepreneurship Why the skill of marketing should be your priority if you want to go into business The blinding power of self-interest And a lot more . . . We also talk about his book, The Marketer as Philosopher, which condenses his findings from 25 years of investigating why people make certain choices and take action. I read the book before the interview, and I really enjoyed it. In fact, it was one of the more enlightening marketing books I’ve ever read, and I’ve read quite a few. So if you’re interested in marketing or business, you definitely don’t want to miss this interview. --- Timestamps: 0:00 - Pre-order my new fitness book now for a chance to win over $12,000 in splendid swag: https://www.muscleforlifebook.com/ 10:16 - Marketing and NFTs 13:02 - Instead of obsessing over doing the thing right, you have to do the right things 15:00 - Concept of individuation 18:41 - First principles approach 20:35 - What is a value proposition? 25:11 - Truth, beaty, and goodness are identical 26:09 - How do you spot “good”? 27:48 - What does “thriving” mean? 32:41 - How do you examine decision making and influence? 40:26 - What are the most destructive common entanglements? 53:45 - Your life is a message and you're the messenger 56:06 - People judge the person and whether they trust them in order to decide if they want the product 56:45 - What is the initial offering that creates trust? 1:00:04 - What is a brand? 1:02:29 - What do you mean by “individuation”? 1:17:34 - Why do you have to experience a conversion and be customer-centric to convince others in your marketing? --- Mentioned on the Show: Pre-order my new fitness book now for a chance to win over $12,000 in splendid swag: https://www.muscleforlifebook.com/ MECLABS Institute: https://meclabs.com/ The Marketer as Philosopher Book: https://map.flintmcglaughlin.com/ Flint’s free online marketing course: https://meclabs.com/course/

First, have you pre-ordered your copy of my new book, Muscle for Life, yet and entered my giveaway of over $12,500 of splendid fitness swag? What? Why the devil not? Do you hate fun? Well, look, if it pleases your grace, go to MuscleForLifeBook.com, MuscleForLifeBook.com now, and pre-order a copy of the book and enter the giveaway. Let's remedy this scandalous state of affairs. And I would counsel haste as well because my big book launch bonanza ends in a couple of weeks and then the winners will be chosen. So anyways, let's shift gears quickly and talk about tracking body weight, which is more fiddly than people realize. Because one of the easiest ways to drive yourself to distraction in your fitness journey is to obsess over daily shifts in your weight, which often have nothing to do with gaining or losing fat or muscle.

So for example, even slight swings in fluid retention, glycogen levels, that's a form of carbohydrate stored in your muscles, primarily in your liver as well. And bowel movements can produce pretty noticeable ups and downs in your body weight. And so a much better way to measure and to track body weight is to look at longer range averages. Those are less erratic and those better register the stuff that we actually care about, which is fat and muscle. Now, if over the course of weeks and months, the averages are moving down, then you are clearly losing weight. If they are moving up, you are clearly gaining weight. And so here's a simple procedure. Weigh yourself every one to three days, first thing in the

morning, naked after the bathroom and before eating or drinking anything, and then record those numbers somewhere accessible, like an Excel file or a Google sheet or the notepad app in your phone. And if you want to take it even further, some people like to graph the numbers in a spreadsheet. And then every couple of weeks, every 10 to 14 days, add your weigh-ins together and then divide the sum by the number of weigh-ins to get your average daily weight for that period, and then record that as well. And so here's how this might look for somebody who's cutting. Let's say on Monday, they weigh 163 pounds. On Thursday, 164. On Sunday, 162. On Wednesday, 161. On Saturday, 161. On Tuesday, 160. So the average daily weight is 162 pounds. We add up all of those weigh-ins, 808 pounds. We divide by six, the number of weigh-ins

for 162. And then repeat that process. And let's say the average is 161, great. If they're cutting, that is a good sign. If it is 163, that is not necessarily a bad sign. It depends what is happening in the mirror, what is happening with their body composition. But if after several rounds of six weigh-ins, the weight is going up and the waist is getting bigger, for example, body composition is not getting leaner in the mirror, then that just means they have to make some adjustments. So that's a simple process. It's a clean process. And if you want more of my wisdom on how to measure and how to improve your body

composition, pick up a copy of my new book, Muscle for Life today, go over to muscleforlifebook.com and pre-order your copy. It comes out on January 11th and then enter the giveaway. Instructions are on the page and you can win all kinds of glorious fitness goodies. Again, I'm giving away over $12,500 of stuff. So go check it out, muscleforlifebook.com. Hello there and welcome to Muscle for Life. I am Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today. And if you haven't already,

please do take a moment to subscribe to the show, assuming you like the show, because then you don't miss new episodes and you will help me because it boosts the ranking of the show in the various charts. Now, this episode is a little bit different. This episode does not have to do with health and fitness, but one of my other favorite topics, marketing. In this podcast, I talk with Dr. Flint McLaughlin, and I talk to him about

marketing, which is something he knows quite a bit about, a lot more than I know. And I've actually known about Flint and I've followed his work for at least a decade now, maybe 15 years ago is when I first came across his mech labs and experiments. He was running conversion rate experiments. And I immediately knew this guy was smart and this guy knew what he was doing and I should pay attention to what he's doing. And so this interview was a treat for me. And in case you are not familiar with Flint, he is an academic and a business leader who served as the director of enterprise research for transforming business at the university of Cambridge in UK. And he's also

the founder of Mechlabs Institute, which is a marketing research firm dedicated to figuring out how people make choices and what influences those choices. And Flint's resume goes on and on. He has written and edited hundreds of articles and texts. He has won multiple awards for his work. He has patented 10 offer conversion related heuristics. He has conducted large scale research projects in partnership with big companies like the New York Times, Google, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Royal Bank of Canada. He has lectured at conferences and universities all around the world, including New York University, Columbia University, Oxford. He has delivered keynote addresses at Cisco, Microsoft, and Google,

and elsewhere. Very, very accomplished and very knowledgeable. And as you will hear in this interview, he's also a very interesting guy. In this conversation, Flint talks about the concept of metanoia and how it relates to changing our mind. He talks about individuation and becoming who you really are, how marketing is the essence of entrepreneurship, why the skill of marketing should be your top priority if you want to go into business, the blinding power of self-interest, and much more. And we also talk about Flint's book, which is called The Marketer as Philosopher, in which he condenses his key findings from 25, if not 30, it might be close to 30 years of investigating why people make certain choices

and take certain actions. And I actually read this book before doing this interview. I really enjoyed it. A lot of highlights, a lot of notes. And in fact, it was one of the more enlightening marketing books I've ever read. And I've read quite a few. So if you enjoy marketing, and if you are not a newbie, it is not a book for newbies. If you have a fair amount of marketing experience, let's say if you are an intermediate or an advanced marketer, the marketer as philosopher, read it. Hey, Flint, thanks for taking the time to do this i i guess you you don't come on many fitness podcasts uh this is probably well that's because i'm uh so unfit yeah right we've been we've been talking about uh you're very into fitness actually but we're not here to talk

about fitness but it actually probably is something we we could we could talk about my workout logs are i've got them going back over 40 years that's great they're um it's funny the one of the guys who first turned me on to he turned me on to energy balance understanding calories in and calories out he his name was steven and he was a longtime bodybuilder and power lifter and he also had i don't know decades of training logs and he of course it was old school pen and paper and for fun he would tell me you know now and then he would just go back through his old training logs just to kind of reminisce uh because he had just just how far he had come, you know? Well, mine go back to trying to gain an inch and a half

reading Arnold's old work on concentric workouts. Nice. And it's interesting because in those days, we didn't understand that some of the people we admired the most were doing things we didn't understand and then suggesting workouts that were so brutal they'd kill you. So I just killed myself. That's Arnold's en encyclopedia i remember when i first got that wow i was like probably 18 or 19 thinking okay it's arnold maybe it's a bit much for me but there's got to be something in here and i remember

even the beginner programs just beating the absolute shit out of me yeah i remember a day and a half where we're supposed to gain an inch and a half with a series of workouts that lasted all through the night and lots of cottage cheese. And the executive producer from my team, Cliff Rayner, who's overseeing the audio on our side of this, he was there with me doing it. And they were brutal. And we tried very hard to look in the mirror and see that inch and a half when we were done. Yeah, especially when you pay that price. I think it's there.

Mostly I saw cottage cheese. No measuring tapes. Let's just tell ourselves that was worth it. Yeah, well, you know somebody. Go ahead. Go ahead. didn't gain the concentration the relentless energy and uh the motivation that drove it was still valuable in the years to come we just had to temper it and you have a cool story to tell not too many people can say they did an all-night workout eating cottage cheese try to gain an inch

and a half i couldn't afford any other way to get my nutrients hey cottage cheese is good i still eat it from time to time it's a great source of relatively low fat and inexpensive protein pretty tasty too yeah but uh but let's segue to what are we here what we're here to talk about and i wanted to talk to you about marketing which isn't isn't a surprise and for people listening flint your your book is not out, right? The pre-published edition is, we actually released 500 copies and we had thousands sold by word of mouth, but we have not done the major release yet

because we were testing, we tested 60 versions of the book. The version you hold, Mike, is sort of the final version, but we're getting ready to release the NFT and then the main publishing event. Oh, interesting. What are you doing on the NFT front? A version of the book. Right now, there are numbered pre-printed editions.

And so those that have the numbered editions, those are already going up in value. I'm not interested. We had a large publishing deal that I turned down because I felt I'm more interested in the right people reading it at the right time. And I remember speaking with a publisher about the book and he said, we need to sell, they go with 500,000 copies the first year. And I said, you're worried about year one sales and I'm worried about year 50. And so it's just a different approach. This podcast- They wanted to go mass market. Yeah. And the book is an experience

you you know it's leather and i'm not selling the book on this podcast but you know you've seen it it's handmade leather is one version and the other is the field edition has another special the way it's all published and printed every detail of the experience when we send it out it's in a sealed envelope with a candle wax yeah i'll show people and uh yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna post the video so that's the cool and then and then the book is here yeah uh i see your yeah i loved it i love the the quality high quality paper um the topography paperback yeah i couldn't do mass paperback for this kind of a book because it's a reflection experience. Our problem, and this goes way beneath marketing, is we're so busy asking how that we never get to the why beneath the how.

And so we never tap into the motivation. And this is true in fitness as well as it is in any aspect of marketing as it relates to persuading or influencing a conclusion. or influencing a conclusion. Until we get to the why, we can't derive enough of the essential force we need to apply the how, which is why so many people start fitness programs they don't complete. We pick up the how,

and with minimal inspiration, we charge. But nothing really changes until we connect deeper with the why. I've spent 30 years in a laboratory trying to understand that. In fact, you know, you could summarize my work in one question. Why do people say yes, but not any yes. The yes that leads to what the Greeks call metanoia, a change of stasis, a conversion, a transformation.

And there's something that you say in the book that stuck with me. And it's this idea that instead of obsessing over doing the thing or things right, you have to make sure you're doing the right things. And I think that that's very true in every domain and activity. I think Peter Drucker saw that in business. I think he said something to that. You got some great quotes from Drucker. I've read some of Drucker's stuff, but I hadn't come across and I made a note for this interview. He's the greatest business philosopher of all time. I think Peter Thiel's a successor in the sense that he thinks deeper and gets beneath it all. But Drucker's book on managing for results, his book on the effect of executive written over 50 years ago. By the way, he wanted to name that book with the word strategy.

And in those days, before the strategy industry, the publisher told him, that's about military matters. That will never sell. But in the end, Drucker was always about strategy. And in many ways, Mike, I think your work is also if you really abstract beneath it all it's the it's the energy and the strategy that produce the result this is true in marketing this is true in building a holistic body that's capable of performing building a life yes there's so many so many things you can do and you can do them well and you can end up with uh not a great life well that is if you're not doing the right things yeah yeah doing things right uh is a seduction

yep you do it and you see that you're doing it right and it's reinforced by your peers and it produces a cultural success but not the internal success that can only come when you're aligned with doing the right thing. And thus, we find ourselves veering off course. And if we veer slightly in the beginning, the more successful we are, the wider that line is geometry. We get further and further off the course. And geniuses like Carl Jung or even Campbell, and there are others, And geniuses like Carl Jung or even Campbell, and there are others, even the hated Nietzsche, who's totally misunderstood, they're after something what Jung called individuation, becoming who you really are. Everything in culture is trying to pull us off course. The industrial food complex, the lie that was foisted on us by those who were overindulging. And I want to be careful about that, but overindulging in drugs to the extent where they gave us a book with exercises, but they were taking so much steroid-based augmentation that you couldn't even duplicate what they were doing.

You couldn't recover from it, let alone progress. And I watched Leg Day by some of these guys, and I remember one of the great well-known bodybuilders took me aside and said flint these guys he took me to a natural bodybuilding magazine and he showed me which ones were on winstroy you can see he showed me which ones everybody was on drugs yeah and we didn't know i joke with natural bodybuilding it's pretty easy to to spot the quote-unquote cheaters because they're the ones who look really good. That's about it. The guys who look natural, you immediately go,

or the guys who are natural, they look natural. You immediately go, well, yeah, he looks good, but you know, not that good. That's the natural bodybuilder. Well, and we have, the world is always lying to us. And you know, you can, there's a wonderful poem called The Lie. You can believe that lie

or you can get beneath it and find out the truth. But when you find out the truth, then you have to face it. And when you face it, you may not like what you see. I mean, the greatest enemy we have when we train or when we market is self-deception. Haven't you seen the guy in the gym

who does not look like he thinks he looks like he sticks his arms out too far when he walks he goes by the mirror wearing the wrong outfit because he thinks you know it makes him look good and you wonder how self-aware is this person how can he not see that that doesn't work but he doesn't and And when I see that guy, unfortunately, Mike, I see myself. How many years, even as a leader, did self-deception distort my understanding of who I was and what I was doing? You know, until we,

the Greek word for wisdom and understanding, there's two words, sophia and synesis. One reminds me of Elon Musk. It's called the understanding of first principles, which is what Elon says is at the root of his success. And the other is right seeing. It's synesis in the Greek. And I've noticed that before we act right, we have to see right. And we just can't see right because of our own deception.

I mean, you've probably been in meetings with other leaders because you're very successful and listened to them and thought, don't you see how wrong this is? I've sat on boards, chaired universities, and listened to them talk and thought to myself, I don't belong here. The way I see the picture is so different than everyone around me. Now, you can say that with an elitism that blinds you again to your own weaknesses because I'm still battling self-deception, but at least being aware of it is a step towards becoming who you should be, who you are, who you can be. In your, speaking of first principles, it's one of the things I really liked about the book, which I don't think I mentioned the title. It is The Marketer as Philosopher. And one of the things I really liked about the book is it is a first principles approach

to marketing that like you've mentioned gets beneath marketing. And I think it really speaks to some of, some of the, the essence of, of just what it means to, to, to exist and, uh, to, to be a human being. And, um, I, I get people who reach out to me fairly often asking for business advice, rarely marketing advice, but business advice. People who have either recently started a business, thinking about starting a business. Maybe they have already started a business and they're trying to get it to the next level. And they ask if I have any general advice or maybe it's sometimes it's- You're very successful.

Relatively speaking. I mean, there's always somebody who has done a lot more. So, you know, I don't think of myself maybe in those terms. I don't also consider myself, I don't care to have attention. I don't consider myself particularly, I don't think about myself very much. Let's just put it that way. That's unusual in the fitness business. And I use success, by the way. That's one of the things I don't like about the fitness. I don't like the fitness. One of the reasons I was reluctant to get into it. If you rewind to the beginning, I published this book,

Bigger, Leaner, Stronger. It goes well. And I was thinking at that time that I would not go all in on fitness because a lot of it doesn't really resonate with me. I mean, just start with obsessing over the body. It doesn't resonate with me. I'm not that person. I'm just not. I wanted to continue writing books and start a publishing company where I'd publish my own stuff and other people's books. But I looked at the opportunity and decided that if I could do fitness in a way that was maybe more in alignment with my personality, so to speak, then that was interesting to me. That's your value proposition, to go back to the book, though. That's where your voice comes from, Mike. The best fits are the misfits.

We call them originals. that's what adam grant calls them and you are an original in your space because you didn't approach it in the way that others do and it's what i didn't read i didn't read uh that was one of grant's was it his last book i don't it's one of his more one of his i know i know what you're referring to but yeah but i didn't i didn't read it i he didn't say quote, but it's a summation of much research I've done in so many disciplines. Warren Buffett was a misfit. Graham, value investing. I could go from discipline to discipline, but the best fits are misfits, at least in the beginning and in the way that culture sees them.

And boy, it's true in marketing. The essence of entrepreneurship is marketing. The essence of entrepreneurship is marketing. The essence of marketing is the value proposition. The essence of the value proposition is something I call the, well, let me change that. I think I missed a principle. The essence of marketing,

of entrepreneurship is marketing. The essence of marketing is the message. And the essence of the message is the value proposition. That's not the way people view it. They run around and buy more traffic. They concentrate on the more instead of the better. So they concentrate on the channel instead of the quality of the message.

And so their average customer value is challenged by their average cost per customer acquisition. is challenged by their average cost per customer acquisition. And you could take that as an allegory or a metaphor for the same problem we have in the gym. In fact, I used to say, I was teaching a group of private equity leaders, I said that sometimes too much capital is like too much steroids. We get bloated and big. We think we look good on the surface, but we're unhealthy on the inside. And you start doing all kinds of stupid

shit in the gym and anything works. So you think you have it figured out. Yes. And then on top of that, and I mean this, I say this carefully, respectfully, but in some of the places where you want to perform your best, such as the bedroom, you can't perform at all. And so what's the point of strutting down the beach, swollen and unhealthy and incapable? This reminds me of the American dream exhibited in The Lust for Scale that builds businesses beyond the scale at which they can be their best. There's a lovely book, old, 20 years old, called Small Giants, that focuses on those businesses.

I think it was Bo or something. Bo Burlington or something. Bo Burlington, that focus on the quality of the enterprise, as opposed, beauty over scale. This is a 4,000-year-old problem. You could say six, depending on how far back you want to go. But if you bring into the fitness business a priority over wholeness, which is a form of beauty, and in my work in philosophy,

for those of you that don't know, my background is philosophy. I trained with the Jesuits, and I'm not a Jesuit, but at the University of London, and then was on the faculty at Cambridge. And not that I'm not a Jesuit, but at University of London and then was on the faculty at Cambridge. And not that I'm a scholar, but the point is beauty is the right prioritization of elements. This is the summation of eight years of work I did on trying to understand beauty. Think about that in fitness.

Symmetry is the prioritization of elements, but internal beauty is more important than external beauty. So within, let's take the health of the whole, the inside of you, your organs, and the way, you know, your circulation and all those components that produce that health, that's even more of a priority. If you don't know that yet, you will as you age.

And yet, within that is an even deeper beauty. And that's at the level of your spirit. And so if I were to take 2,000 years of debate and try to cut through them, I would say that, and this would be my position in an argument that's had many sides between extrinsic and intrinsic beauty, but ultimately beauty is the right prioritization of elements. And I know since, Mike, your work brings some of that prioritization, people feel it, even if they don't understand why they connect

to it, because we all need that beauty. The transcendentals, these are the medieval scholars, they said that beauty, this is really interesting to me, but then I'm weird. They say that truth and beauty and goodness are identical. Think of that. Think how powerful that is. I was teaching at the Harvard Club with a bunch of professors and financial leaders, and I said, what is a good business? And I listened to so much drivel and horrible answers. And then I argued that the good business is the beautiful business. The beautiful business is the true business. And I laid out the argument. And I would say the same can be said of the person

in marketing, but also the person who is pursuing fitness. If you can see it through truth and beauty and goodness as identical, as great thinkers, thousands of years perceived, this keeps you from straying into those things that are actually diminishing your true health, your true beauty. And to look at that, then what's true is also beautiful and good. That's correct. In fact, one of the ways to spot good is to spot true beauty, carefully worded there, because there's artificial beauty everywhere. But if you spot true beauty, you're probably seeing goodness.

And what is that in a business to you? Business is a community of communities. And when all communities are in harmony, that's the vendors, the customers, the employees, the business prospers. If one, in fact, I've written principles, it's like Asimov on robotics. There's two or three fundamental principles that help you can see this, but I'll just touch one.

If one member community thrives at the expense of the other, all of the community suffers. So when Walmart said the customer's always right, Sam Walton, he was wrong. And after he died, they changed that. He had the right idea, though. It was a corrective, like Lutheran works. It was a corrective, and it needed to be there. But it wasn't. Many times correctives are over-corrections, even in training, right? So there was an over-correction. On the other hand, I have seen airlines owned by employees where the service

was abysmal. And I love the opportunity in front of the world to say, I hate how you run your business because you run it for yourself and the customer suffers. So this can be said to think about shareholders. Everybody said shareholder value. Have you ever seen shareholder value become abusive? Yes, we have. And so in every case, I think the beautiful business is the right prioritization of elements, which is reflected in a community of communities where the whole is thriving. When you say thriving, what does that look like? Well, I don't have good English words, and I don't think in English, but I'm going to come to the closest I can think of.

In fact, I was working this weekend through the world, and I'm not trying to sound pretentious or clever, but I'll tell you, there's a scholar named Crispin Fletcher Louis, who is just an absolute brilliant genius. And I was working through his next book. It's not published yet. 350,000 words. And I was looking at these words in all the classic texts in the ancient Greek. And the word he studied, there was the difference between being and becoming. And I won't get into all of that except to say, I think that one way to try and put together an English word that suggests what thriving is, is the word well-being. Being is ontological.

Our life is predicated, and predication is like, think of a sentence. A sentence is the basic building block of all existence. The subject predicates. And when you do that in a way that brings wholeness to the being, then the doing and the being both are good. So I'll simplify that again, because I know it's a bit esoteric.

You know, somebody says that, well, in American culture, we focus on- And sorry, but when you say, just so people listen, I want them to understand, the subject predicates, meaning the subject is the agency, is the agent of action, the subject does. Just like a sentence, the noun and the verb. All of life can be reduced. That's the molecular unit of meaning. It's the molecular unit of meaning.

And by the way, this is how I figured out how to train. So this is very practical in its end. I'll give you an example. Doing cannot be separated from being. We try to say that. We try to say, like, for instance, business is just business. It's not personal.

No, it's a person in the business. Business is always personal. And the doing and the being are so tightly connected that when we do in a certain way, we impact our ontology, our being. And so that sense of well-being means that the doing and the being are aligned. If I could imagine, and this might sound,

forgive me if this sounds patronizing, but when I think about someone like you, Mike, who's growing, constantly growing, hungry to grow, what excites me is thinking how that doing and being become more and more aligned inside until the force that drives who you are is so powerful and so rich, it produces impact everywhere. And in a sense, and by the way, I'm not, you know, I'm not selling books by the, you know, for those of you, you know, I'm not selling books. You know, for those of you, you can get a book.

I'm not, I have no agenda here when I say this. I don't want to flatter you is what I mean, Mike. But I use you as an example because I wouldn't be on most of these podcasts because the energy is wrong. What interests me about anyone who's following the path you're trying to lay out in fitness is if you think about it properly, you're not willing to sacrifice the being for the sake of the doing. And that is the easy way out. And if you walk through a gym, you're going to see it. I often said at a production company in California, I said, you should do a reality show just on a gym.

Why don't you just put up cameras and you could literally entertain the world? Because every gym has the same set of characters. That's true. It's actually, there's probably an idea in there because I think of, I can't say I've even seen these shows, but I know it's a thing where they have like a celebrity chef of some kind, right? And he goes to the different diners all around the country so you could do that in gyms you could find a lot of wacky gyms full of all kinds of wacky shit oh absolutely and i'll tell you something this is a you know the kind of conversation that i like because it's eclectic but marketing for me is understanding how i predicate because to live in a social dynamic,

you must influence conclusions. And the great marketers influence conclusions. As Peter Drucker said, they make sales redundant. If you influence conclusions, you influence decisions. And you do that by controlling the signal sets. You control the signal sets, you influence the conclusion. With the conclusion, you influence the decision. And of course, then the behavior. And I say that to say that you can follow that line in order to accomplish something in society, but you can invert it to figure out what happened inside of you that produced all that self-deception. I have used marketing for 30 years to untangle myself, to understand why I said yes to the wrong thing. I'm not really interested in marketing. I'm interested in the yes that changes everything.

But I realized that most of my yeses were influenced. So how do I go back through the influence to see what's at the essence and live a life that matters? And what does that process look like for you? Is it like something that has been useful for me is if I want to expound on something, for example, is to basically have a conversation with myself and ask myself questions, then have to answer those questions. And then often it's then kind of rebutting my answers with more questions and just going ping-ponging back and forth and and seeing what comes of it it's very socratic of you um you can take it's something that i guess i just found it useful even even even as a writing prompt no it is if i just if i need to start getting my mind going and start putting words down well i was a little boy i began to separate out my thinking styles from learning solving deciding, deciding. There's only about four, but these three I realized were, I engaged in constantly.

So to understand how I was traveling down those trails, I created a little code for a question, another little code for an answer, and then I would question and answer myself in the same way that you said and do it in writing. Now, some people are not writers. You don't have to follow our way. Beware of anybody that tries to be the substitute for your own spirit's guidance. And I don't mean spirit in a sketchy way.

I mean the essence of who you are. But the point I'm trying to tell you is, yes, that is one way to do so, but I think we have to start with negative outcomes in our life. This can happen in the gym. I've seen guys overtrain, overtrain, overtrain. They're constantly getting injured. I've seen people who train for a year and nothing ever changes. These are all examples of negative outcome. Why do I like physiology or athletics? examples of negative outcome. Why do I like physiology or athletics?

I've been in the martial arts 50 years. My dad was a judo champion. That's another form of being able to see into yourself with a dynamic. So a negative outcome can be traced back to a negative decision, can be traced back to a negative conclusion, can be traced back to a negative conclusion. Then you can start to say, how is that conclusion influencing? You might say, oh, my church did that, or my parents did that, or this partner I had did this. And that's when I start to see,

oh, I've been married 34 years, and I'm still old school, so forgive me if you see the world differently, but I've been married 34 years. I'm still old school, so forgive me if you see the world differently. But I was probably married 15 years before I realized I was a complete idiot and did not know how to talk to my wife. I mean, the great, great insight was, Flint, you're an idiot. You studied communication for 20 years, and you say something, and you hear something else, and you're not even following that trail to understand what's wrong.

Now, 34 years later, there's some gold in that relationship. We mined for it. But ultimately, I go back with the outcome I don't want, that trail to the decision preceded by the conclusion, preceded by the influence. And when that happens, you know, it's like pain. If you do something wrong in the gym and it hurts, your body says stop. I don't mean the kind of healthy pain, but I'm talking about negative pain.

You touch a stove, you burn your hands. You don't want to touch a stove again. I live on a ranch in the back country off-grid in Montana. We don't even have power. We built our own roads. I'm near the continental divide. And there's a lot of things if you do wrong there, you will instantly get feedback. Because if you don't fix that feedback, you will die. I like a world like that. And physical training is a version of that. So is martial arts. And so negative feedback is that opportunity in my mind to discover where I went astray. And the tragic truth, I don't say this to feign humility,

the tragic truth is, oh, how I underestimated how many times my conclusions were influenced, and thus my decisions were wrong, the behaviors accompanying them produced the wrong outcome and I was in a bad place in my marriage, in my business. Five years ago, I wrote an article called The Five Biggest Mistakes I've Made as a Leader. I wrote it for my kids and then I thought, you know what, I'll just put it out there because maybe it'll help someone else. It was an attempt to sound humble. I made those mistakes and I'm embarrassed by them. But embarrassment is the price of wisdom. And what are, what's the biggest mistake of the five? I'm curious. I don't know that I can answer that well, but I can give you a reasonable answer that might be correct. I once wanted to write a short story. I do a lot of writing fiction in order to work through. My first work on The Value Proposition,

which I can send you, Mike, was a novella. Interesting. Mr. Smith's One True Talent. And I, anyway, I wrote this, I designed this story, which I never wrote, because I only did it for me. Mr. Smith, I wrote. But this story, which I never wrote, because I only did it for me. Mr. Smith, I wrote. But this story was about a man who was cursed by the gods,

and the curse was, make him good at many things. That way he cannot focus on one. And I worked this whole story out of my mind and let the impact of it hurt me. Until I'm hurting, I'm probably not learning. And I realized that in my life... And by hurting, is it by facing the hard truths? Is that the things that... It sounds so noble when you say it that way. Yeah, that's the second stage of hurting. The first stage of hurting is just hurting. You know, you say something to your wife and you go away inside. You've hurt her and she's hurt you.

And you're just hurting. I haven't faced anything yet. I just feel the pain. Now, I've done that with my kids. My best friend is my dad, who's 88, and my son, who's 27. Really, truly, my best friends. But I use family and relationships because they are my spiritual discipline. But I use family and relationships because they are my spiritual discipline.

I don't need to follow the desert aesthetics or get your relationships right. And that becomes a spiritual discipline, right? So moving back out of that to the broader question, I think in the early years, I tried to do too much because I could. I'm not saying I was greatly talented, but I was interested in all these things, and I diffused my energy. There was a single month, Cliff knows, my best friend, apart from my family, is on the phone 40 years, we met in a fight 40 years ago. I say the phone, you know, this podcast. He's an executive producer, works in my company, we've worked together for 40 years,, we met in a fight 40 years ago. I say the phone, you know, this podcast. He's an executive producer, works at my company. We've worked together for 40 years, but we met in a fight. And then we started training together.

Martial arts, working out, the gym. And of course, the famous cottage cheese, you know. The bonding moment. Cottage cheese, physical turbo boost. Anyway, the reality is that I, in one single month, I resigned. I was the chairman of the board of Westminster Theological Seminary, chairman of the board of SSU, and a bunch of other. I resigned from everything. Boy, that was a good move.

Because until I untangled myself, I couldn't retie the wires right. And we are all tangled. Everything around us is conspiring to tie us in a knot and keep us from that optimal connectivity with who we are and who we can be. What are some of the common entanglements that you see that stand out as maybe the most destructive or at least distracting? Well, I can tell you the common cause. And we can talk about scenarios, but the common cause is the failure to say no. One yes equals 10,000 no's. And the bad news is you probably have to say the no's first.

Now, after you say the yes, that's another 10,000 no's. But I have said yes too many times. And this has left me with a diminished energy for the yes that matters. By the way, that same problem destroys families, hurts lives in many ways, but not just there. In business, it's absolutely the problem. We copy the patterns around us, and thus we get entangled in the same way that others around us are.

Which is why misfits are sometimes best fits, because they just look at everything different and say, why? One of the most important things you can do is take that shovel, that spade, why, and dig down deeper and say, why am I doing this? Because we end up repeating a pattern that already produced a negative outcome. But you see, in the era of social media and celebrity everythings, from politicians to athletes to scholars to professors even, God forbid,

in an era of, we have learned to gloss over the truth and produce an image. That is in itself a lie. And then we seduce a younger generation or someone earlier in the pattern. They follow our pattern, but they don't yet see the negative outcome we are sowing and that we shall reap.

So we need to be careful. Now, this is so true in the gym, by the way. I know this is, you know, we're talking about life, and your audience is probably complex with many interests besides working out. But the gym's a microcosm of the whole world. You know, it is a temptation to pretend to be what you are not, working out. But the gym's a microcosm of the whole world. You know, it is a temptation to pretend to be what you are not, to take the shortcut, which doesn't produce the true result you're after. To take the prioritization of elements that is true beauty and distort it for artificial beauty. I mean, how many times really go to the gym

and see who in there is being true to who they are and finding the way forward to who they want to be? Now, I can only say this because every mistake I'm telling you I've made. You know, that's why they surround you with mirrors. So you can focus on the wrong thing. Which is often the thing that gets them in there in the first place which which is which is good it's useful i'll talk about marketing right uh but but i i at least in my work i i try to move away from that and

acknowledge it it always is is a factor and anybody who who works out regularly is happy to look a certain way maybe because it doesn't necessarily uh have to represent pure vanity maybe it's there there's a i mean talking about beauty right there's something there's something to be said to have a a beautiful body and i think that there's value in that and not not in a again moving away from narcissism but more just in embodying some of this stuff that you're talking about i think actualizing could be individually some of that is gets very physical yeah absolutely but again you i think you put your finger on the important thing when When I walk in the gym, I remember my earliest temptation was this. Am I right now solely focused on producing the results that I came here to produce?

Or is my energy focused on those who are watching me and how I look to them? And I'm telling you, it's so hard. I wonder, could 80% of the injuries in the gym be avoided if we weren't doing the extra rep because someone walked by that we wanted to impress? Or we threw on the weight that we weren't, you know. And by the way, I still love that we're all broken people. That's not popular, but we are. And we're trying to get well and better, and we can. So those people who are coming to the gym, I'm not condemning people who are trying to be seen. We all start somewhere.

And, you know, if quantum physicists are to be believed, your consciousness may go far beyond anything you understand at present. And I'm not talking about Hinduism or the New Age movement. I'm talking about Penrose and some of the great physicists of all time. We're starting to understand that the universe is more complex than we originally gave it credit for. And that consciousness has a higher priority than we can fully grasp. And so I say that to say, you may have a longer time than you realize to grow up. And we all need to grow, especially me.

So, you know, I think it's just as bad to go into the gym judging everyone around you and thinking I'm doing it right and they're all doing it wrong. Remember that prioritization of elements? That's another form of ugliness on the inside. That's a phase that a lot of us went through. I went through. I understand understand and you know what it's it's frankly people often ask me like oh does does it drive you nuts to see so many people doing so many stupid things in the gym and no no it doesn't uh i have reframed that as hey they're they're here and they're trying and that's that's a lot of people

a lot of people can't say that they are not there and they are not that means a lot yep that's teddy roosevelt's philosophy get in the ring right and you know we're in the man in the arena right absolutely and we're we're in a culture right now where it's become very popular to demonize anyone that's different and to differentiate yourself by putting the other party down. And that is at the root of a different kind of insidious evil that will eat a hole in your soul. You may feel this elitism produces something in you

that makes you better than the other person, but in the end, it will get you. And I was being interviewed somewhere, I don't know where, I think it was on one of our podcasts, but I said, you know, the marketer doesn't need to be humble. They need to be honest

and the humility will take care of itself. Because if you're running experiments and you're really trying things, and this is true of life in general. You learn quickly. You have these ideas. You're like And this is true of life in general. You learn quickly. You have these ideas. You're like, this is a grand slam.

And it's down 20%. And you just go, okay. You released this podcast that I'm on right now and 23 people watch it because nobody cares about what I'm saying. It comes down to something that I think we have to do when we're in the gym if we're honest enough about ourselves we won't be looking down at the next guy we'll be trying to work on what's wrong that we can do that's in our own routine and uh you know i've talked so much about i mean i spent 30 years studying that one single yes that produces metanoia, whether that's you, whether that's in marketing and where you become from prospect to customer or in some other discipline where you go from unbeliever to believer or whether in the gym, you tried all these things for years to get, you know, not just the gym, but overall in your life and your diet and so on.

And then suddenly it clicks and you really start to experience transformation. That's what interests me. And I've noticed that it's always preceded by a stark moment of self-honesty. You know, I may not know everything about ultimate truth, but I can sure learn something about personal truth. And the only path to ultimate truth, if there is one, and I believe there is, is through personal truth. It could start in the smallest place. The gym is a good place. And so, you know, you don't have to go in there and think about, well, not looking down on others. You just need to look at yourself honestly, and the rest will take care of itself. There's a lot to improve there for all of us.

There's that idea that if you want to change the world, change yourself. Did you know that right now I am in the middle of a big book launch bonanza for my new fitness book for men and women of all ages and abilities, Muscle for Life, which is releasing on January 11th and is currently available for pre-order over at muscleforlifebook.com, muscleforlifebook.com. And why should you pre-order? Well, to invoke an electrochemical response in your brain and stimulate something approximating joy. I am celebrating the release of this new book by giving away over $12,000 of glorious fitness goodies, including a Bowflex C6 bike. That's a thousand bucks.

A Hypervolt Go. That's 200 bucks. An Instant Pot Duo Crisp Air Fryer. Another 200 bucks. crisp air fryer, another 200 bucks, a Vitamix E310 blender, 350 bucks, a 30 minute zoom call with yours unruly. And that is priceless of course, and much, much more. Now there are several ways to enter to win too. You can buy books, you can spread the word, you can follow me on social media and more. So again, to get all of the giveaway sauce go over to muscle for life book.com muscle for life book.com yeah it's funny i was actually i don't know why i was thinking about this but uh it it's to to your comment about right, it's very trendy to criticize and to join in the – to be a part of the peanut gallery, I guess you could say. And it's interesting, though, that when I – I have a simple heuristic that I've used throughout my life. heuristic that I've, I've used throughout my life. And it's, if I look at someone and I look at,

let's see how well they are thriving or flourishing in their life. And we could look at the, maybe the different spheres that we could judge ourselves and others in. We could look at body, we could look at mind, we could look at, um, uh, spirit in different ways. And then we could, we could look at maybe a little bit further and look at their work and look how they spend their time and maybe what kind of hobbies they have and then look at their relationships and just go outward, right? And so if somebody, if they and everything they encompass is a, if they are just a complete mess, if I were to look at someone and if I were to say, I joke about this sometimes, that if Zeus were to come down right now and he were to say, all right, Mike, you have two choices. One, I'm going to strike you down with a lightning bolt. You're going to die

and you're going to see what happens next. Maybe it all goes black and that's the end. Maybe you go and you're judged by a God and you go this way or that way. Maybe you reincarnate. You'll find out. I'm going to kill you right now. Or you're going to wake up tomorrow as that person. You're not going to remember being you. You're just going to be that person.

Kill me right now. Just kill me. I will take death over waking up as so many people. So if I look at someone and I'm like, I really would not want to be this person. This is just dysfunction everywhere. Then I really don't care about, I basically dismiss all of their ideas.

Like, why would I listen to anything this person has to say? Why would I listen to anything this person has to say why would why would i uh want to model anything in myself after that kind of person mike we've done a research project where we discovered that i'm see i use commercial application to get into spiritual application because you can because life's signatures are sewn into the essential dna of every aspect of existence including the way you write you know your handwriting everything so you know you're constantly leaving a signature and i would just say this when i'm trying to judge a product which i'm not qualified to judge or with, let's say, I don't have enough data to judge it. Do you know what the human being's default heuristic is? They form a judgment

about the person offering the product. Same thing goes for a message, right? Oh, totally. In so many ways, the messenger is the message. And so that, well, that's exactly the point that's why life is predication your life is a message and you are the messenger and so coming from that understanding you know in every sense where we don't know what to think about the doing we think about the being behind the doing and that's really what you think that's a useful a useful heuristic i mean i think it's useful because even my logic is if you miss out on maybe some value that that could come from associating with this type of person or exploring their ideas about how they should live how society

should work whatever we only have so much time and most of it is has produced uh talking about this this uh you know you living in a world where if you mess up you die so you can't that that it's hard to maintain self-delusion in an environment like that right so we're looking at someone all right their ideas their beliefs have led to conclusions and decisions and actions that have produced something that is highly dysfunctional. So I don't want, I'll just, I'll just miss out on whatever little bit of value I can extract maybe. And I want to find somebody where it's the other way around, where I see a lot of harmony. I see a lot of function that I would like to have. And that person, I'm very interested in how they see things and in the decisions they've made and so on and so on. Well, in academic circles, it's very unpopular to connect the individual's life with their thinking.

In fact, you're told, you know, to separate the two. I totally disagree. I can only understand at least the interpretation of your thinking as it's interpreted and translated in your life. There may be independent value there, but I don't know how to separate it, number one. But number two, let's just turn the whole argument in a different way. Your entire enterprise, all that you have produced, whether it's your personal training or I'll brag about you,

somehow, someway, you have something like the largest all-natural supplement business in the country. I've heard something like that. Sports nutrition. You define it, yeah. Sports nutrition as opposed to supplement. And that means the categorization is important, but anyway, you look at it, There's a lot of people that would like to trade places with that success. Here's my point. People coming in from the outside, Mike, they don't know whether your supplements work, sports nutrition works. They're judging it because they have trust in you.

They're judging the offering. They make conclusions about the offering, which we call tentative observations in my research, based on their observations about you. And one of the reasons you've been able to achieve, I would say, critical mass in your business is because there was something about you that people found trustworthy. Trustworthy enough to at least get into what I call a trust cycle, the initial trust cycle with your offering. And that's produced. what is that thing what do you what is that initial observation that makes us inclined to to want to trust somebody because many people they trust the wrong people they see maybe it you know maybe it maybe it is that uh but or maybe it's a it's a negative harmonic of that you know well here's how this works.

You first have an observation, but it's very tentative. It's a series of typical incomplete data points. And from that observation, you draw a tentative conclusion. And from that tentative conclusion, you have to make a decision. This is how we buy things every day online or in a store. That tentative conclusion is followed by a decision. You know, the conclusion drives the decision. There are four behind the purchase of every product.

If you don't understand these four, you're already leaving money on the table, but we won't go there. The decision then comes with an expectation set. So let's suppose I, let's go to your personal training business because it's very practical. Let's suppose you go to the personal training business

and you see some things that you've said on the website, some things you might have read in a book that you've written or seen you on a talk show or something. From there, that tentative set of observations, they draw a conclusion. That conclusion powers a decision. That decision comes with an expectation set. So then that expectation set is what motivates the purchase and they buy something from you. Now, at that moment, the experience of the product replaces the initial observation set. Now they have a better observation set. It's

not as tentative. They're experiencing the product. If you fail to meet their expectations, you fail the trust cycle. And your business, I know it's rough size because we've talked. And my point is it would be a fraction of its current size had you kept failing those trust trials. But what's happened for you, and by the way, this is how a man should become president of the United States. I did an article in Washington Post about this some years ago when that was, I think, Romney against Obama. And I thought Romney was going to lose. And I said so. Here's my point, coming back to the fitness business. Mike, what's happened for you is you've passed a whole series of these trust trials, and they continue to provide an equity, a trust equity in the bank of your customers' minds. And that equity

can be cashed in until you disappoint the expectation set. And when that happens, everything starts to unravel. Now, this is true in a marriage. This is true in a relationship with your children. This is true in a friendship. And this is true in every form of relationship. Business, listen to me, it's not like a relationship. Business is a relationship. And so the rules of relationship apply. And I would just suggest that there's something about some people that produces a natural, sort of organic, pre-trust, tentative trust. And then it's up to you as a human being.

We've all seen people fail to deliver on the expectation they created within us. But if you continue to pass those trust trials, believe it or not, you're building what Ogilvy understood was a brand, but which has now become some abstract way for agencies to generate billions of dollars in useless exercises. Your brand is nothing more than the expectation set created in the mind of those who've experienced or been exposed to the experience of your value proposition. It is the aggregate experience of the value proposition in the marketplace. That's why your nutritional business is growing, because the experience reinforces the trust. Now, by the way, you can scream real loud

and make lots of white noise in the market, but clarity trumps persuasion in the end. People who don't have a true value proposition and can't deliver on the expectation set, they're trying to overcome that by yelling louder. That's why you get so much garbage in your inbox. But when you have something to say, clarity trumps persuasion. And your business is you saying something to the world. It truly is.

And that's how I've approached it from the beginning. And from the beginning, for example, I've written all of the copy everywhere. Actually, every email autoresponder was written by me. Every word on the website was written by me. Originally, the blog was only me. Now I have a couple of people who work with me who also, they don't write for me, they write under their names. And so I've approached it that way from the beginning. And that's just how I'm oriented, I think, as a person, because I like language. I like communication. I like persuasion.

And I generally don't like to talk unless I have something to say, unless I've thought about it and there's something interesting to me, or I'd rather just not waste the breath. I'd rather think a little bit more about it, you know? So, it's interesting for me to reflect on the journey so far through that lens. The interesting thing about you for me, and audience, if you're listening to what we're saying, this isn't about Mike, this is about you. I'm just using Mike because he's the metaphor in front of me. It's reality, but it's also... I'm the dancing monkey. metaphor in front of me. It's reality, but it's also... I'm the dancing monkey. It applies to you. What's interesting to me is that I don't think you can stand to do whatever you're doing for the rest of your life

unless the impact is reinforcing the individuation that you need to experience yourself. And the minute your business diverges from that, you're going to lose interest and you should. It's a safety mechanism. And what does that mean exactly? What do you mean by that? Well, as you use the word individuation, you had mentioned that earlier in the context of young. Yeah. Yeah. As an individual, I remember when they tried to write a biography, he was in his eighties. He says, I don't need a biography, I don't want it. They pursued him, he said, no. But finally he wrote, he said,

I'll write sort of a biography of my thinking, of my spiritual journey. And in the introduction he says, you know, I've become who I am, so I don't need any of the rest of this. And they couldn't get him to do all the things they wanted him to do, because he no longer needed those things, nor did he need them to need him. Now, in your case, as you become more true to the core of what you are about and who you are,

as you're doing your being, get tighter and tighter aligned, you do something he called individuation, from the word individual, becoming not one of the mass. By the way, all this talk about community misses the point. There is no community. There is no unity. You can't have community without individuals. I mean, think about it chemically. It's no longer a collection of united singles, individuals, ones.

It becomes a massless blob of undefined essence. That's not community. So even in the community that you live, in the fitness community, and in the world community, and in the community that you live, in the fitness community and in the world community and in other communities that you participate in, you will serve the community better, not by becoming like the community, but by becoming who you are and uniting with the community.

We need to understand that right now in all of our talks about diversity and racism and all that's hitting the political theater. But I say it to you because I suspect that your business is the dynamo, the force, the energy powering it is growing out of who you are. But if let's suppose you sold a big stake in your enterprise to someone else and they began to twist it into something you're not, you're not the kind of person who can stand that for too long. And that's what I like about you. Others, we try to justify it. Many of you listening to me right now should quit the job you're in. I mean that. Get away from this poison that is slowly polluting

your soul and find a way. Take the risk. Become who you could become, and it's not going to happen when you're in the Borg, assimilated. And all of that was said to say, I think what's interesting about people like you, and hopefully people listening to me, is some of us can't stand to be pressed into a place that isn't who we are. And the world needs you. The world needs people like you to stand up and say, no, no. And in the end, they are always the ones

who produce the impact. They are always the ones. There's a wonderful classic. I was teaching with Theo Harris, Theo Harris at Harvard, the classics, using the book, by the way. We did a course on classics, using the book to predict behavior of characters.

And there's a famous sea captain, and his name is Captain Briarley. And there is a man being charged with cowardice, but he's truly brave. In fact, brave enough to show up for his charges. Everyone wants Lord, his name is Lord Jim in the book. Eventually they called him Lord Jim because he's consigned to an island. The interesting thing is Lord Jim doesn't know it, but he's the bravest guy in the book. Captain Briarley has the bravest reputation on the sea. And he tries to talk this Jim fellow into not going to trial and not standing himself up for the charges of cowardice.

But Jim, who thinks he probably is a coward, will not avoid the trial. Everyone else has. In the end, Briarley commits suicide. I love that scene. And the reason I love it is because you have a choice. Do you want to be Captain Briarley or do you want to be Lord Jim? The fitness world's full of Captain Briarleys.

So is politics and religion, the martial arts. Or are you so focused on the essence of what it means to be who you are that you would rather be tried as a coward? Bravely. That's a hard call. But it's the difference. It's the difference in a life with true impact. And the life that just looks like a life of impact.

What a strange conversation we've had today, Mike. That was a great one. I mean, this is fun. This is fun to me. And it's fun. I know that I have a buddy. His name is Pat Flynn, and I bring him on the show, and we talk. I mean, it's mostly him I'm interviewing, obviously, but it's on the, on the topics of sometimes it's current

affairs. Sometimes it's philosophy. Sometimes it is religion. And so this is, is in a similar vein and I always enjoy it. And I know a lot of the listeners do. I want to be respectful of your time, but before we wrap up, I want to touch on one quick marketing related thing that just is very important because it is something that I have been telling people for some time who reach out to me for business advice. But I hadn't read what I read from Drucker

in your book and from you. That is just how important marketing is that it is, you had mentioned it already in the podcast, that it's the essence of entrepreneurship. And how I would tell people when they reach out to me is, especially if they're just starting out and they want to know what skills should they be looking for, what should they be developing me to kind of reflect on my success and what are the key factors. And I've always went to marketing as one of the most important elements of business. And I would share that in the context of my success and something I've been good enough at, and I've gotten better at, but good enough at to at least reach that point of critical mass is marketing, right? And that's something I've also really enjoyed. And I've told people that, you know, basically what I've told people is if you don't like marketing, you're not interested in it, you try to learn about it, it doesn't click for you, your mind is wandering all over the place. I wouldn't recommend getting into business for yourself. I wouldn't because I just don't, I would just tell them, I don't see how it's going to work. I just

don't see how it's going to work because to me, you have to, and you have to be able to understand people and you have to understand their wants. You have to then be able to come up with products and services that they might want. And then you have to understand how to persuade them to buy the products and services. And all of that comes under, in my mind, comes under the heading of marketing. And so if all of that is, if you don't like that, and because marketing is a creative thing, and I'm kind of rambling here, but I obviously want your thoughts on all of this. I also feel like, sure, anybody can learn the mechanics of it, but like any artistic endeavor, just because you can learn how to move your fingers correctly to play the piano doesn't necessarily mean that you are going to be a virtuoso. It doesn't mean that you are going to be brilliant at playing the piano. And I feel like marketing is similar in that the great marketers that I've known, they love it.

They really like it and they've really pursued it with passion, not just to get rich. They like it for itself. And if somebody doesn't like it, I also have told people, you might be able to figure out how to make some money and make a business go. But I don't know how far it's going to go because of how important I think it is to really be into this. Well, marketing is the single most important force. It's the elegant force that rules the world. It's the key to changing the world. Well, marketing is the single most important force. It's the elegant force that rules the world. It's the key to changing the world. In a social dynamic, especially in a place in a time when choice is multiplied,

the ability to influence choice is a power. Now, you could say, I was on Jeremy Slate's podcast, and we talked about ancient Rome, and I said Rome was not ruled by the legions. In fact, somebody had to persuade the legions to support the Caesars. And often the legions would support them for a year and then double cross them and then sell it again. In the end, the power of the gun is ruled by the elegant force of marketing. It reminds me of the martial arts, that hard style martial art that you see in UFC. There is a soft style, and don't underestimate its force and its power.

In the end, that soft style, like water, is stronger than stone. And marketing is like this. Drucker said marketing is not a division. It's the role, job of everyone in the enterprise, everyone in the business. Because the goal of a CEO, in fact, the job of a CEO,

is to create a customer and keep them. And that's only done with the marketing instinct to fill the value proposition. And by the way, there's a lovely article written on this, and you can read Thomas Kuhn's theory on scientific revolution or you can read some of my work

but even scientific theories are marketed within the academic community our problem is this we let the word container blind us to the essence within the container many words need to be redeemed,

rescued from the connotation in our culture. Marketing is a high and noble art that for one to aspire to is a gift and a rich way to focus your life. a gift and a rich way to focus your life. I think, I think it's, that's the message to end today's interview on. And I completely, I completely agree.

And for people listening again, if you are in business thinking of getting in business, then marketing and the skill of marketing should be, I think, your number one priority. Because again, that encompasses creating products and services that people want and that will meet expectations. It doesn't mean just getting people to buy stuff and forgetting about them and not delivering on promises. A good marketer, like Flint has said, is somebody who creates expectations and then delivers on those expectations right mike i've i took uh 30 years of our work and all of our certification courses and by the way you're not hearing there's no cost involved so i'm not setting up a you know the sort

of the the ending pitch so to speak this is not it but i decided to take all of it make it free underwrite it with my foundation and with my company. And we're offering, you know, our lab is Meclabs, M-E-C-L-A-B-S, like Mary Echo, Charlie, L-A-B as in Bravo, labs.com. But if you just put that in in forward slash course, you'll see that we're putting all of it now for the first time for free. I teach a fast class that's a 40 minutes of video within 10 minutes, 40 minutes of content within 10 minutes. And then we have a podcast and live streaming and you can just go take it. It's free. There's no upsell. You don't even have to register for the class. Somebody said, I don't know how to sign up. I said, why would I want you to sign up?

Why do I need to control you? Take the course, use it if you can. And I say that to everyone on here. If you want to think about your life or you want to think about your business, go to that course and check it out and see if it helps you. If it doesn't help you, don't worry about it. If it's not who you are, it's okay. I don't even get on the YouTube and say subscribe, subscribe, subscribe. It's like people are not sheep. If they want to subscribe, they can subscribe.

And if not, I don't mind. I'm not looking for everybody i can't and you might say that the people who need to be told to subscribe to subscribe not the ones you want that message you don't want them back to you know you know it's like tim ferris who you know i worked with in the early years and helped him with uh brainicken, he recommended that wonderful piece, A Thousand True Followers. We don't need the world. We need the persons in the world we can help. So, you know, some people may listen- That's something that I would say our enemies have understood well as the power of leverage for some time now. You don't need to influence the masses. You just have to influence the key people whose influence trickles down to the masses. Yeah.

And or I'm happy to go down right there at the bottom of the masses and just help the person I can help. Yeah. What you said is very strategic and I value its strategy. I mean that more from, again, in a negative sense of the power centers of the world. Oh, yes. This is something that they've understood as the art of propaganda has evolved to its very sophisticated state today. But they've understood. Oh, yeah. I'm sure you're familiar with Carol Quigley.

Sure. Tragedy and Hope and Anglo-American Establishment. hope and anglo-american establishment and it's something that he um he it was it became clear to me just just reading his work is is how clever some of these people were just influencing the right circles of people talking about academia and finance and and again that they were solely focused on influencing those people they could care less about Joey Bag of Donuts because they knew that if they controlled here at the top, the small circles of people whose influence trickled down to let's say maybe the newspaper,

the source of information that Joey gets his information from, that's the way to do it. That's subversive marketing. This is a superpower. You can use it for good. You can use it for bad. I'm seeking only the seekers. I like those people.

And I don't care how much power you have. I'm going to die. What will I care then? I'm interested in lives that are transformed now. And by the way, this is probably the... Let me close my side, Mike, by saying this. The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer.

If you want to experience in your business or your life maximum conversion for your offering, then first you must experience a conversion in your own spirit. And that's that's contrary to the popular doctrine. And is that because you have to become the type of person

who's capable of that? Well, first of all, we are so blinded by our self-interest. You know, everybody tells me, I want to give you better eyes to, you know, I want to help you see better. I don't want to see better. I need to see with new eyes.

And in business, you need to see with the customer's eyes. Company-centric logic is your enemy. Customer-centric logic is the way. And you can't- We're self-centric. I mean, that's, I've seen- Yeah, it's the same thing. Self-interest is the blind spot. And so without that.

What do I want to say? What do I think about this? Oh, yeah. What do I want them to think? Oh, yeah. And it always begins. We've tested this in our lab, even in headlines. Headlines that begin with what the other person gets outperform the others by 46%. Thousands of them tested, 10 different variations. I could show you how in these little microcosms of real life you see the pattern of life unfolding.

We always begin with us instead of them. Begin with yourself when you're talking about transformation and change. Change yourself. Begin with the other when you're talking about giving. Give to them first, and the rest will work its way out. We're so blinded by self-interest. That's something you talk about in your book that resonated with me and maybe explains, explained to me a little bit of what I've been uh decent at again good enough to get as far as i've gotten you've done well being able to put myself in somebody's in somebody else's shoes

and have some empathy and enter their mindset so to speak and then figure out how to communicate in a way that would appeal to me if I were that person, if that makes sense. Well, that's how you, that's at the beginning, that's the beginning of wisdom in this space. I mean, the goal here is customer wisdom, sustainable competitive advantages rooted in customer wisdom. But I promise not to say more. And I, you're, you're drawing me down another interesting path i know i know maybe another podcast um yeah yeah i would love to do another one this this is uh again very generous with your time i really appreciate it and again for um the the people who are still listening if

you're still listening you're probably going to like the course mechlabs.com uh slash course right and they can they can see where this rabbit hole goes. All right, my friend. And then of course, there's your book too, whenever it is available. You can get it, just type, just go to that course in the store or type it in, but you can only get it from us.

The number, we haven't released it in the major press yet, but you can still get it. We're on our fifth printing. Our little test turned into something else, but you don't have to buy the book. You don't have to take the course. If you feel drawn in that direction, do so. But think deeply about the part of this podcast

that bothered you the most. That might be a starting point into insights. I like that. We'll end on that. And I look forward to the next one. All right, my friend. Well, I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did, subscribe to the show because it makes sure that you don't miss new episodes. And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit,

which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people who may like it just as much as you. And if you didn't like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have ideas or suggestions

or just feedback to share, shoot me an email, mike at muscleforlife.com, muscleforlife.com, and let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about maybe what you'd like to see me do in the future. I read everything myself. I'm always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you soon.