The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - The Manipulation Expert: CIA Spy Reveals You're Being Controlled! "You're Being Manipulated Without Realising It"! Andrew Bustamante

Starting point is 00:00:00 Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

Starting point is 00:00:37 thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. The majority of people, they're still seeing the world through a lens that was built for them. And they want more, they just don't know how to do it. So what I teach, which is what CIA teaches, is how to see the world in the way it really is. Here's what I'm going to tell you. Andrew Bustamante is back, a former CIA officer and founder of Everyday Spy. A company on a mission to help you get anything you want in life with the skills the CIA taught him. We don't know the recipe for success. Our society doesn't teach us the plan, the framework, the process. That's what CIA did for us. They just taught us a simple system. And one gentleman,

Starting point is 00:01:14 one of the frameworks that we taught him helped him get a $32,000 raise. We had one person say, I followed your framework. I won over the interviewer. Now I have this job that I would have never gotten otherwise. But I'm not surprised when they happen because, of course, the recipes work because they were refined in the center of CIA. So first, we have an exercise called Get Quiet. And in a Get Quiet exercise, all you do is just... The reason that we do that is because we have the informational advantage going into any situation.

Starting point is 00:01:41 Interesting. Then there's the four Cs of building influence rapidly. So if you want to build influence, the first thing we have to do is... And now you actually take the action to get what. Interesting. Then there's the four Cs of building influence rapidly. So if you want to build influence, the first thing we have to do is... And now you actually take the action to get what you want. So what about persuasion then? How do I persuade somebody?

Starting point is 00:01:52 Persuasion is a process that's much easier. It really is as simple as... Finally, the secret sauce at CIA that we know that most people don't understand is that now you can do whatever you need

Starting point is 00:02:04 to improve yourself and your life. Andrew, what is it you're doing in this season of your life? You know, it's an interesting question. I actually just lost my grandmother recently in the last week or so. And my grandmother was one of the two women that raised me. I didn't have a father. I mentioned that to you the last time or so. And my grandmother was one of the two women that raised me. I didn't have a father. I mentioned that to you the last time I was here. And it was a moment that struck me

Starting point is 00:02:32 because mortality became very real. It makes everything clearer. It makes you realize what actually matters and what doesn't matter. It shows you that the days that we have aren't actually guaranteed to us, even though we take them for granted every day. I don't know, I don't know if my flight home is going to actually happen. I don't know if I'm going to step out of the studio and get hit by a car. I don't know if my child isn't going to get hit by

Starting point is 00:02:59 a car playing in the driveway tomorrow. Because life is so fragile, and we don't think about it until we watch its fragility dissolve in front of us. We hear about tragedy, but tragedy is always happening somewhere else. It's so real, and yet we don't realize it every day. It's a good thing we don't. That's the truth. That's how it feels right now for me as well. I kind of wish I could go back to being ignorant again. It's that matrix, red pill, blue pill moment where I kind of wish I could go back in and forget that reality and forget that mortality is reality. And so does that change your priorities in life in any way? It does.

Starting point is 00:03:49 Like, the biggest way that it's affecting me right now is really with business. Because, you know, we had a conversation not too long ago where I was very focused on trying to triple the size of the business this year. Because we had been tripling the year before and we had tripled the year before that. And it became this arbitrary number, this scorecard where I wanted to continue having this achievement. And then what I found is that scaling a business is no easy thing. And the struggles that come from scaling were consuming the majority of my focus all the time until this moment happened with my grandmother. And then all of a sudden I realized I have a team of people who can scale the business. I don't have to scale it. I just have to empower the team to do what the team does.

Starting point is 00:04:29 And my job is very different. My job is to enable, empower, encourage, direct, lead, manage their efforts. But it's their job to grow it. I can take some of that time and put it into the people that matter to me, the people that surround me, the people who have made me who I am, the people like the woman on the couch that I was visiting in her deathbed. The business you're referring to is called Everyday Spy, right? Yes, sir.

Starting point is 00:04:54 What is Everyday Spy? What is the mission of that business? The mission of Everyday Spy is to use spy education to break barriers for everyone willing to learn. And what is spy education? Spy education is anything from specific spy skills, cognitive skills, physical skills. It can be breaking myths about what spies are and what spies are not, bursting conspiracy theories,

Starting point is 00:05:16 teaching spy processes and frameworks to everyone from entrepreneurs to business owners and CEOs so that they can use those same frameworks to improve their leadership, to improve their sales, to improve their revenue or their organization. Do you ever have a bit of a, you're a guy that thinks quite big picture about things and sometimes thinks a level above everybody else. Do you think the people you teach these things to know what they're looking for in life? Do you think they actually know what they're aiming at? No, I don't.

Starting point is 00:05:49 And I'll tell you why. Because I don't think that the majority of people who learn from Everyday Spy see the world in the way it really is. I think they're still seeing the world through a lens that was built for them. Have you ever looked through a window in an old cabin or in an old house that's kind of hazy? Maybe it's stained or it's dirty or the dirt is so thick on it that it doesn't wash off. Have you ever seen a window like that? My old shed at home when I was a kid growing up.

Starting point is 00:06:18 So you're inside the shed and you're looking out onto a sunny day and you know it's a sunny, beautiful forest on the other side of the window. You know it is, but that's not what you see through the window. I feel like that's how many of our high-achieving brothers and sisters feel.

Starting point is 00:06:34 They know it's a sunny forest on the other side, but school and university and working for somebody else and growing their business has created this hazy glass. And you can't trust what you see through the glass. You know that what the glass is showing you isn't real. But you also can't prove it because you can't step outside of the glass.

Starting point is 00:06:55 You're inside the shed. So a lot of what I try to do with Everyday Spy is just shatter the glass because you don't need the glass to be between you and the real world. And that's what it felt like for me when CIA trained me how to be a field officer. I don't feel like they took me out of the shed. I don't feel like they cleaned the glass. I feel like what they did is they just shattered the glass. And there I was looking at the world for what it really was. And it all made sense until I started meeting other people who were still looking through the glass.

Starting point is 00:07:25 And there's no way to teach them otherwise, or there's no way to convince them otherwise. The only thing you can do is teach them to break through the barrier themselves. So that I can understand that, can you tell me what your perspective of the world was before and after the shattered glass? When I was growing up, all through high school, I went to the Air Force Academy, which is a military school that you have to get accepted on scholarship to go to, even getting accepted to CIA itself. Every step of the way, I believed that achievement came from doing what you were told better than anybody else so that you could be empirically better than the competition.

Starting point is 00:08:04 That's what I believed. But what I found along the way was oftentimes that was true. so that you could be empirically better than the competition. That's what I believed. But what I found along the way was oftentimes that was true, but oftentimes it wasn't. Sometimes people who had no business being next to me in a race, at the Air Force Academy, on the college teams, at the CIA, sometimes the people to my left and to my right had no business being there. They just were the son of somebody influential.

Starting point is 00:08:28 They were the daughter of somebody important. They had money. They had opportunity. They were a foreigner. Who knows? But it wasn't always merit-based. But everything had always taught me that it was merit-based.

Starting point is 00:08:41 That the best jobs go to the people with the best scores, who go to the best universities. Like, that's what I was taught. But that wasn't really the truth. The richest people weren't the smartest people. The most successful people weren't the hardest workers. And that was when, as a kid even, I started feeling like there's a forest on the other side, but all I see is this picture that doesn't seem to make sense. So then when I got to CIA, and CIA put me through their field tradecraft course, FTC, which is often referred to as the farm, what they did at the field tradecraft course is they said, society is conditioned to believe a certain way because society needs to be a giant economic machine.

Starting point is 00:09:26 We all live inside of a giant machine. We are conditioned through the education process, through the industrial process, through the church process to fall into a hierarchy that we believe is meritorious, that is a meritocracy, so that hard work and obedience and loyalty gets rewarded. Because the only way that the government stays in power of a large group of people is if there's a predictable system. As if they believe there's a system. And since a system is really nothing more than a belief system, all you have to do to step outside of the system is stop believing,

Starting point is 00:10:04 or believe in a different system. So what CIA teaches us to do is find the people who question the system enough that they're open to being taught a different system. And then we teach them the system of espionage or treachery. So they chose you because you were a bit of a defiant personality or thinker? I would say... Or on the cusp of, or potential of being. I would say it differently only because defiance as a term by itself means that you just reject everything. Instead, it was more of like a curiosity. I was still very loyal, very loyal

Starting point is 00:10:39 to my country, very loyal to the idea of some sort of authority figure. I was still an individual that had a history of childhood trauma that turned me into a person that needed external validation, but I also chose where that external validation came from. So it was kind of the right amount of trauma to be able to make me loyal to a specific organization, whereas some people who are truly defiant aren't loyal to anyone, right? They defy everyone. So the CIA told you that the world is... Predictable. But also the way that you explained it made it seem like it was a bit of a conspiracy.

Starting point is 00:11:15 Not a conspiracy, but absolutely a system. You get a conspiracy means that there's some sort of... A conspiracy insinuates that there's some sort of negative intention. There is no negative intention. In order for there to be a society at all, in order for there to be structure and lawfulness, there needs to be a system. And in order to create the system, we have to intentionally, continually repeat and program the system. What is a business? A business is nothing more than a series of predictable,

Starting point is 00:11:48 reinforced processes and systems that yield a predictable outcome. Why do we think a government is anything different? Why would we think that society is anything different? If you really look at what the church does, if you really look at what Harley Davidson does, if you really look at what Harley-Davidson does, it's essentially the same thing. Find people who believe in an ideology, bring them in, give them a framework to believe in that ideology. The church is good and evil, heaven and hell.

Starting point is 00:12:18 Harley-Davidson is freedom and individuality. And then you just give them a system to think about it. One wears crosses. One wears eagles. One meets on Sundays. One meets on Tuesdays at the local road bar. One goes on, you know, civic duty to collect trash. The other goes on multi-hour road trips. But in all cases, they market to the young. They market to the middle-aged. They market to the very old. Their senior members bring in junior members, they have clubs, they have everything, right? They're two separate subsections of society, which is why we call them subcultures. So now I understand that there's a system that I'm part of. And it's, again, it's not

Starting point is 00:12:57 malicious in terms of its intent. It just is what it is. It's how the world functions. It's how the country that I'm in operates. And it's required for there to be stability. Now, there's awareness, but is there any benefit in me doing anything about it? Is there anything I can do about it to make my life better? There's absolutely things that you can do about it. You skipped over the awareness part as if it wasn't substantial. The first thing I would say is awareness of the system is quite a substantial step because most of us are not aware of the system.

Starting point is 00:13:30 I was certainly not aware of the system. I suspected something was different. I suspected maybe there was more than I understood. That's the whole idea of looking through faded glass at a clear forest. You know there's a forest, but you don't know how to get there. And you don't know why everybody else is standing in the shed if there's a forest right out there.

Starting point is 00:13:50 There's just this, there's this discomfort because you're like, there should be something more. I feel like there's something more, but everybody seems so happy right here, except me. I'm looking out this window feeling like there's something more. The reality is most people don't look out the window. What is it that everybody in the shed believes? That's what's so interesting.

Starting point is 00:14:09 I think most people in the shed believe that the shed is a good thing. We need the shed. The shed keeps us warm when it's cold outside. It keeps us cool inside when it's hot outside. It protects us from the rain. It keeps the wind away. We need the shed. That's what most people, I think, start to believe about whatever shed they're born into. I need this church. I need

Starting point is 00:14:31 this neighborhood. I need these friends. I need to be popular in school. Like, because everybody else is after the same thing. I need good grades. Why do you think you need good grades? Because my mom said I needed good grades. Well, we don't question it any further than that. We don't question why do you think you need good grades? Because my mom said I needed good grades. Well, we don't question it any further than that. We don't question why do you think your mom thinks you need good grades, right? And then when you look at the hierarchy of society, there's an actual anthropological pyramid that defines society, right? And it breaks into three levels. Individualism at the bottom level, tribalism in the center level,

Starting point is 00:15:05 and then the state at the top level. Because the most advanced version of society is the state. It maximizes the contribution of each individual by forcing shared policy down all the way from top to bottom. So all people have to obey the state, but in exchange for their obedience, the state provides resources to all people, like clean water and loans and car loans and business loans and police forces and public schools. So we believe that this cabin is needed. It's the best cabin.

Starting point is 00:15:44 It's the only cabin. Is that wrong? I think if you look at the world as it is, there's a lot of different cabins out there. Our cabin is quite different than the China cabin. The China cabin is quite different than the Russia cabin, right? The UK cabin is very different than the American cabin. So if you follow logic, the fact that different cabins exist at all would suggest that there is no best cabin. And then if there is no best cabin, then do we even need a cabin? Or perhaps there's a different option that's better. Is there a different option that's better in your opinion? I haven't found one yet outside of living in a cabin and being the one that understands there's more.

Starting point is 00:16:30 Because then you get all the benefits of the cabin, but you're also the one that knows that sometimes it's worth it to step outside. Yeah. In your analogy, I was thinking, in fact, it's okay for there to be a cabin because I kind of need there to be a cabin because you know what I like? Roads and healthcare and police. But if you can be one of the people that realizes you are in a cabin and that the rules of the cabin aren't actually your rules they're just made up rules then you can bend them in certain ways to live the life that you want to live and i think in many respects entrepreneurship is kind of one of those things because some of the narratives that you described there of thinking grades mattered were the narratives that nearly held me back in my life because I was not doing well in school. My brother's where everyone else was.

Starting point is 00:17:09 And I nearly fell into the trap, which you learn in the shed, which is the people that get A's are going to be rich and happy. This is the unspoken word. And then if you get like an E and a D, you're going to be poor and probably not that happy and probably going to live in a small house. And you're probably going to struggle. And that's like a narrative. And through labeling theory, you can come to believe that as the truth and then play that out in your life. But I always think the biggest harm of, I now, and I had a suspicion back then that the biggest harm of getting like an E in my exam was believing that I was an E. And they're two very different things. Like I can get an E, but it doesn't make me an E. But in the shed, it does make you an E. It's hard to...

Starting point is 00:17:46 Because everybody else labels you by what you perform inside the shed that defines them. And then I self-label. I then start to tell myself in my self-esteem that I am an E grade. And then I show up like an E grade, which they've proven through labeling theory. You can tell someone they're something, or you can remind them of a stereotype that applies to them, and they'll immediately perform worse on a test whatever that stereotype relates to so but entrepreneurship for me was saying do you know what i'm going to drop out of i'm going to get leave school i'm going to drop out of university and i'm going to try and like send a bunch of emails and figure out life myself outside of the system because the system was never going to get

Starting point is 00:18:20 me where i needed to go if i had followed system, I would still be working in the call center that I was when I was 19. And basically have no free time working till midnight at night and just getting shit from a boss that was an asshole to me. And you just described the feeling of 80% of the population. They feel like they've never gone past the call center

Starting point is 00:18:41 that they worked at when they were 19. The vast majority of people out there feel like they stopped developing at about 27. What is the difference though? What is the difference between the people that kind of get out the shed and pursue their dreams and build the business or whatever and the people that are still in the call center? I'm not saying call centers are bad.

Starting point is 00:19:00 I've learned a lot of schools from call centers that I loved, but it sucked compared to what I do now. What is the first thing so the first thing you're talking about is shattering the glass. The first thing is awareness. Yeah. You have to be aware. That you're in a shed. That you're in a shed. And you have to be aware that you're choosing to be in the shed,

Starting point is 00:19:18 right? You can always leave. This is an argument I have so often with people who are trapped in the wrong mindset, right? I don't even know what the right psychological term is because I don't live in a world of academic psychology. But there are people who believe that they don't have a choice. And in the United States, for example, we have 50 states. There are some people in the state of Florida who feel like they can't leave the state of Florida. Because? They think it's because they can't leave the state of Florida. Because? They think it's because they don't have enough money. They think it's because the drive is too far.

Starting point is 00:19:53 There isn't a support network on the other side. The bureaucratic hurdles of trying to change your residency and get a new driver's license is too much. The taxes are too high to pay to move from a non-tax state to a state tax state. So they all have reasons, and the reasons are grounded in fact, but the value that they put on the fact, the value of the challenge is greater than the value of the reward in their point of view, in their perspective. And in reality, it's the other way around. You just reminded me of a video that changed my life. I'm going to play this video for you, okay? It's a very, very short video.

Starting point is 00:20:32 But when you talked about people living in a state or living in a situation where they don't think they can leave, this video came to mind. They just get a man, and you can do this with basically any small creature, and you get a biro or a pen and just draw a circle around it and it will not it will not leave the the circle and i watched this video many years ago of just this ant trapped in the circle and they the guy drawing the circle around the ant just makes the circle smaller and smaller and smaller oh it's left there and it will

Starting point is 00:20:59 basically remain trapped and it was when i watched it i thought you know i'm doing that for myself in my own life so the ant remains trapped they make it smaller, when I watched it, I thought, you know, I'm doing that for myself in my own life. So the ant remains trapped, they make it smaller, the ant won't leave the circle. But what's interesting here, right, is the ant is eventually figuring out that it's just a circle, that it's like just a shed. And when I saw that, the first thing I asked myself was, in what ways have I drawn an imaginary circle around myself? I think the more important question is oftentimes, when did the imaginary circle start? Who drew the first circle?

Starting point is 00:21:32 Because it wasn't you. If you've ever seen a child, if you've ever seen an infant, a toddler, they are limitless. They know no bounds. They don't understand anything about the world around them they they don't know how their body feels so they don't know whether they're hungry or whether they're gassy or whether they're urinating they cry at everything and they're constantly squirming

Starting point is 00:21:55 they have no context so all the context that they gain they gain through absorption we create the context for them we create the idea of this is. We create the idea of this is bedtime. We create the idea of this is what a healthy habit is, brushing your teeth, washing your hands, whatever else. We create this is home. And this is where you can walk around openly. But once you go out this door into the front yard, the front yard is not home anymore.

Starting point is 00:22:21 And now you can't go anywhere you want. You have to stay here. So somewhere, somebody started drawing circles before we ever drew them. All we started doing was then believing that the circles were more permanent than they really were. And the way to understand that it's not permanent is to step out. To step out. But stepping out does two things to us simultaneously. One, it feels uncomfortable. Because nobody else is stepping out does two things to us simultaneously. One, it feels uncomfortable because nobody else is stepping out.

Starting point is 00:22:48 And two, it feels wrong. Why does it feel wrong? Because we've been conditioned to believe we have to stay in the circle. This is why I love my company. This is why I love our mission of teaching spy skills to break barriers. Because everybody loves the idea of a spy. But when you think about what a spy does, nobody actually likes what a spy does. Nobody likes the fact that spies steal.

Starting point is 00:23:22 Nobody likes the fact that spies steal. Nobody likes the fact that spies lie. But for some reason, they still like the idea of a spy. And that's why James Bond and Jason Bourne and spy shows are so popular. what we want and what we're told we're supposed to want clash. Because you know what we really want is an opportunity. And we want an opportunity so bad that we're willing to cheat to get the opportunity. But we don't want to admit that we're willing to cheat to get the opportunity. We want an advantage, but we don't want to believe that our advantage hurts other people. So somehow we want to all move forward with equanimity and everybody does better. And that's just not the way that anything in nature actually works. And what entrepreneurs figure out when they're successful is that you can cheat and you can get away with cheating. And when you get away with cheating,

Starting point is 00:24:24 it just gives permission to everybody else who was too afraid to cheat. And then you have first mover advantage in the marketplace and they copy you. And all of a sudden that isn't cheating anymore. And cheating in the, because cheating can, you know, it's a bit of a loaded word, right? What do you mean when you talk about cheating in the context of business? I'm talking about like an unfair advantage of any sort, right? Think about when, do you remember when MP3s first came out? Yes. Well, I had one when I was a kid. So an MP3 player. Yeah, yeah. So MP3s, as in music files, I remember when they first came out, it was, the market went chaotic

Starting point is 00:25:03 because you could get them off of the internet for free which meant that the musicians didn't get paid for it and that turned into i think it was called nabster nabster yeah limewire yeah yeah there were so many of these different databases where you could just pull free music and it was crazy before that there were cds there was even a brief period where there were mini discs rightiscs, right? People just kept making improvements. We call them disruptors now because we found a way to glorify the word cheat and make it into something good. So now there's disruptors. But all they were doing was taking advantage of something that other people weren't taking advantage of, a new form of technology. Well,

Starting point is 00:25:41 how did they get access to a new form of technology? Because they got investors. Well, how did they get investors? They knew a of technology? Because they got investors. Well, how did they get investors? They knew a guy who knew a guy. They shook a hand. Dad at the golf club, maybe. They had five minutes with the right guy on the right elevator. Who knows? But the people who don't get investors look at the people who do get investors and say,

Starting point is 00:25:59 that's not fair. That's just the way it is. That's the way life is. You know what's not fair. That's just the way it is. That's the way life is. You know what's not fair? It's not fair that some people are born into a house where the cabin, where the shed that they're born into is a $300,000 a year shed. And other people are born into a shed

Starting point is 00:26:16 that's a $30,000 a year shed. That's not fair. Nothing is fair. So once you accept that nothing is fair, that also means there isn't really anything that's unfair. You can do whatever you need to improve yourself and your life. So I'm in the shed and I've just, I've listened to you. So I've realized that I am in a shed and that the rules I've been conditioned to believe aren't necessarily, they're rules, but they're breakable rules.

Starting point is 00:26:43 And I have every right to break them. What do you think is step one beyond that? Beyond the awareness? I'm going to give you two answers because there's the reality of the answer, but then there's my preferred response, right? The reality of the answer is once people, the reality is that most people have already thought

Starting point is 00:27:03 about what I'm saying. I'm just giving words and authenticity and credibility to what they already believe. So they're ready for the next step and they just jump right in. They believe me. I appreciate it when people believe me, but I don't want people to believe me. What I want people to do is my preferred approach, which is to test the information. Test what I'm saying. Learn a framework that we teach at Everyday Spy. Learn a framework that you and I talk about. Put it into exercise.

Starting point is 00:27:29 If it works, you just tested something. Now you can believe something. Now you can change your mindset and change your framework. But too often, people just believe. I appreciate it when they believe me. It makes me feel good, but it's not what I'm trying to teach people to do. What I want people to do is actually test it. test it. Because if they test it, they make it

Starting point is 00:27:49 their own. Here's the problem with every teacher I've ever had, with the exception of two or three. They tell you something is the facts. And then you know that at the end of the week, you have to take a quiz on what they told you was the facts. And then you know that at the end of the semester, you have to take an exam on what they told you was the facts. And then you know that at the end of the semester, you have to take an exam on what they told you was the facts. They don't ever teach you to test or question the facts. And we know at our age and our success level that history is written by the winners, but there's always two sides to history. And then when you think about the political, the religious, the personal ramifications of everything that happens, you realize there's multiple different versions of truth.

Starting point is 00:28:28 There may only be one fact, but there's multiple versions of truth. So how do we, we're not even conditioned to learn to question the truth to find the fact. Instead, we're just taught that the truth that we're taught is the facts. And that's how we end up in a world like we have today, where people can say whatever they want to say and people believe them, instead of testing what you hear to see if it really is worth transitioning or transforming your belief system. It sounds like you're making a distinction between knowledge and belief. What we call information. Information. And knowledge. Exactly right. So information is what someone might say to you, but then knowledge is what you actually know to be true. Correct. There's a flywheel that we have in the intelligence world.

Starting point is 00:29:07 And it's a triangle. And the top of the triangle is information. And then information flows into knowledge. And then knowledge flows into experience. So what happens is you learn information. From that information, you develop knowledge, and then you test that knowledge through experience. And what happens when you go out and take action in an experience? You get more information, which yields more knowledge, which you test through experience, which yields more

Starting point is 00:29:37 information, and you have this very positive flywheel. That's how the intelligence cycle works. But what happens in society, what happens in a state system that requires people to become predictable and obedient and respectful and collegial is they skip the experience part. They say, this is information, this is knowledge, and here's more new information, and here's more new knowledge. And they never give people the opportunity to test the knowledge for themselves. So I'm breaking out the shed and I'm gonna try and test some of this information that I'm gonna learn today and in this conversation. What is a good example of something that you've seen in your practice when working with people at The Everyday Spy has helped someone to change their life, like a framework that typically helps people to

Starting point is 00:30:27 change their life in the most profound way as it relates to business, sales, their career, whatever. One of the ones that jumps to mind right away is it's a simple framework about perspective versus perception. And we may have mentioned this actually in our previous conversation, Stephen. Perception is what you believe to be true about the world around you. Perspective is what other people believe to be true about the world around them. So as I sit here looking at you, this is my perception. My perception is that I'm sitting in the center seat and you're sitting outside of me and everything else is built around me at the center. Well, guess what your perception is?

Starting point is 00:31:05 The same thing. I am across the table from you. You're at the center and everything in this room is built around you. So our perceptions are never going to be the same. So the only way that I can find common ground with you is to stop thinking about what's happening around me from my perception and start thinking from your perspective. Because then I get my perception plus your perception combined. I get twice as much information to think through this specific situation. Can you train that? Can you train someone to have both points of view? Absolutely. So here's how I mentioned that awareness is the first step, right? Really, we have a three-step process at CIA that we use when we teach spy skills to future spies. Because that's all CIA is. CIA is a giant training engine that's constantly creating new spies.

Starting point is 00:31:54 And then spies just go out and spy. But what CIA really does is train spies who then steal secrets and combine and compile those secrets to share with decision makers on the Hill, right? CIA's system of teaching is a system where you educate first, you exercise second, and then you experience third. Remember that flywheel? So you educate, that's your information. You exercise, that's where you turn information into knowledge. And then you experience, and that's where you actually go out and test the knowledge

Starting point is 00:32:26 to see if the knowledge is still applicable in the world that you live in today. So those are the three steps. So whenever you're trying to get anyone to break a barrier, whenever you're trying to get anyone to transform, all you have to do is educate them, help them to exercise, which means practice what they learned in a controlled space, and then kick them out the door to go do it for themselves. It's like kicking a bird out of the nest.

Starting point is 00:32:49 So can you make this very real for me? Because I want to, I want to be someone that can walk through the world and appreciate my perception of a situation, but also the other person's perspective. So if we just put this in the context of me here as a podcast host, how would I be able to implement this to become a better podcast host? Like understand the other person's perspective and the way that you're seeing the world. Absolutely. So we had a whole conversation before the cameras turned on. Yeah. Right?

Starting point is 00:33:10 Can you tell me five things that you remember about me that I shared during the time before the cameras turned on? Yes. Go ahead. Okay. You want me to say them? Yeah, absolutely. It's private stuff, but tell me.

Starting point is 00:33:22 Okay. We're talking about your relationship, things you're going through at home. You said that in the last couple of days everything's changed because of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. We talked about you used to live in an RV for a while, and you've just recently moved across America to a new place. You mentioned your kids as well. Give me specifics. Oh, God. You said that you used to live in the RV with your kids and there's a, they're varying ages. I think one of

Starting point is 00:33:52 them is, did you say three years old? Close. One of them was three years old or something. Five and one. Five and one. It's okay. You did great, right? Those things that you were, that you recalled, you recalled those from what's known as your paleomammalian brain, the back part of your brain, passive learning part of your brain. Because naturally, when you are untrained, when you're untrained to think like a spy, you rely on passive knowledge.

Starting point is 00:34:21 You rely on passive observation to create prefrontal cortex knowledge. All a spy does is when they talk to you, they turn on. They turn on the prefrontal part right away, and they start paying attention to all the details right away. Because the way that you game someone else's perspective is by listening to what they're saying and seeing how they're saying it. Because what happens now when I sit with people, I was just with a client this morning who made a comment on this. When you're trained and you sit with someone, you are always gaining more information about them than they are

Starting point is 00:34:57 about you. When you know how to practice perspective versus perception. Because from the moment that you came in and sat down, you were very much in your world. You're sitting here in socks. You're sitting on your leg. You're very comfortable. You're messing with all of your technology. You're fighting with your technology because it's not exactly the way you want it to be. Like this is Steve's world. And there's not a single thing wrong with Steve's world. But Steve's world isn't as big as the world of Steve and Andy together. Whereas when I came in here, just because of the way I'm wired, I'm paying attention to you. I'm paying attention to your producers. I'm paying attention to the set.

Starting point is 00:35:32 I'm paying attention to the people who I've met from your team in previous calls. Because I'm trying to gain as much perspective as possible before I sit at this table with you and the cameras turn on and we're on a one-way trip. Because I only get one chance. So I want to have as much information on my side moving forward. So you as a podcast host, your original question was, how do I use this information? How do I use these frameworks to become a better podcast host? Every person who sits across the table from you came from somewhere. And every time they leave the table you're sitting at, they're going somewhere. And they're bringing stress and they're bringing pain and they're bringing worries and they're bringing concerns with them. And they're leaving with the same things. I know that your partner is thinking

Starting point is 00:36:14 about babies. When you talk about it, that's how you talk about it. You say, my partner's thinking about getting pregnant. You don't ever say, we're thinking about getting pregnant, which makes me wonder if she's more excited about pregnancy than you are. I'm so fucked. I'm afraid, Lord, she doesn't listen to this. Am I accurate?

Starting point is 00:36:36 So, do I, can I match her excitement levels? She's changed the entire house at home. It's like she's expecting, I don't know, like the entire, like my shampoo is gone. That's like her level of excitement about it. But, and you know, yeah.

Starting point is 00:36:54 So obviously I'm excited about it, but no, of course I can't match her level of like preparation and obsession about it. No, yeah. But I'm paying attention to you and which is, that's the only reason I even have the ability to ask that question, right? Because I'm coming in and I'm trying to live in your shoes. The whole time I'm paying attention to you, and that's the only reason I even have the ability to ask that question. Because I'm coming in and I'm trying to live in your shoes.

Starting point is 00:37:10 The whole time I'm here, I'm trying to live in your shoes. Even as I answer your questions, I'm trying to think, what can I do to bring value to Steve, to the Diary of a CEO, to the audience that's listening? Because this is my only time to talk to you guys. So what can I do to maximize that value? That's practicing perspective. So when you do that to your guests, you're going to unlock a whole new level of podcasting from them. Instead of being frustrated or curious or wondering whether or not they're on track or off track or whether or not they're tired or not tired or whether or not you're going to get the best performance out of them. If you literally just took, I mean, we have an exercise. We have an exercise called Get Quiet at CIA.

Starting point is 00:37:47 And in a Get Quiet exercise, all you do is just get quiet. You stop overwhelming your sensory organs, your eyes, your ears, your feelings, your taste buds, your nose, your olfactory. You get yourself into a place where your sensory organs can take a break. Because what happens when you don't overload your sensory organs is your brain starts to index. And when your brain starts to index, it gives you a higher level of awareness, a higher level of observational skills. So especially before you go into an area where you want to make observations, you want to quiet your sensory organs so that you can go in with fresh sensory organs. It's kind of like cleaning your palate before you try a certain ice cream, right? The reason that we do that is because we want to gain as much perspective information as

Starting point is 00:38:34 possible so that we have the informational advantage going into any situation. Understanding that most people are coming in living in their own perception. Consider applying this to business, right? You are a coffee shop. Well, there's 500 other coffee shops. There's five other coffee shops just in two square miles of where your coffee shop is. So when you think about your own product, you think, well, my coffee is superior. It's from Ethiopia. We roast it here and it smells great and whatever else. Or you think my building is better because we have local artists on the wall and we play local musicians like right like that's what they think that's what the owner of the coffee shop thinks but they don't stop to think about the customer who buys the coffee because the customer who

Starting point is 00:39:19 buys the coffee is coming from somewhere and then going to somewhere. And the coffee shop is just one stop along the way. So if you really want to become the coffee shop that everybody wants to go to, you have to think about life through their eyes, through their perspective. Why are they drinking the coffee? Oh, they're drinking the coffee because they're a new mom. So then what else does a new mom need? What else does a new mom want when she goes to a coffee shop? Maybe she wants other moms to be there. Maybe she wants specials. Maybe she wants to find little things to buy her kids. Who knows what? You can change your shop to fit your customer if you're open to their perspective. Otherwise, all you're doing is

Starting point is 00:40:05 creating your own little circle, your own little shed. So in terms of practical things that you do so that you can really tune into someone's perspective, is the most important one just listening? Yes, but there's a twist because you also have to dig for the information you want. So you have to know how to ask questions and you have to be willing to ask questions. There's another exercise that we have at CIA called windows and doors. In a conversation, people will open windows. Windows in conversation. Which means I might ask you one thing or you might ask me something. And then in my response, I hint at something else. That's a window, right? You started this conversation by asking me, what season of my life am I in? That was a fantastic question to open windows and doors

Starting point is 00:40:52 because you don't know what the answer is, but you're going to choose what you hear to decide where you go next. The same thing happens in a normal conversation, right? You can see windows and doors when they present themselves. When you are trying to cultivate perspective over somebody, you want to choose the windows and doors that you follow through in the conversation specifically to collect the kind of information that you want to gain that perspective. So if I'm trying to sell something to you,

Starting point is 00:41:19 if I'm trying to sell something to you as an entrepreneur, I'm going to follow the windows and doors that open up in conversation that take me to understand better what limitations or challenges you're having as an entrepreneur. So if I'm trying to buy, if you're a car salesman and I'm a customer and I want to buy a car, what kind of questions would you start asking me to? I love this. I love this exercise because I actually just had to buy a car after we moved. And I was shocked at how horrible my car salesman was. Because he did not think this way, right? Why do people buy a car?

Starting point is 00:41:51 I'm going to let you practice your perspective on me. When I moved to Colorado Springs in May, why did I have to buy a car? Because you have kids. Nope. You have two kids. Oh, because you have to buy a car? Because you have kids. Nope. You have two kids. Oh, because you have to, well, you mentioned Colorado Springs, so I guess that's pretty pertinent to your answer, but you have to travel a lot around Colorado because it's quite vast, isn't it? You need

Starting point is 00:42:18 a mode of transportation. That's the only reason anybody buys a car. That's where you have to start because then you have to think, well, why are they here? If you're a Subaru dealership and somebody walks in, you already know that they've pre-qualified a number of things. They must be looking for a Subaru. They must be looking for a two-wheel car. They must be looking for an all-wheel car or else they wouldn't be here. So you can kind of make those assumptions if you practice perspective when they walk in. And then when they walk in, that's when you find out, oh, they're a parent.

Starting point is 00:42:48 So I'm looking for a mode of transportation that's also safe because I'm a parent. I have a family of four. So I'm looking for a mode of transportation that's safe for at least four people. If you practice a little bit of perspective, you learn a lot more about the person that you're trying to close. So now I ended up buying a Nissan Pathfinder, a brand new Nissan Pathfinder. Not because my salesman was any good, but because I went to the Nissan dealership already wanting a brand new Pathfinder, just like you did. But I always go through this experience to see what's the salesperson going to do? Like, are they going to try to sell me something good? Are they going to try to sell me something wrong?

Starting point is 00:43:27 Are they going to understand my specific needs? Or am I going to have to coach them through this whole thing? My company gets hired to give sales training to high-performance sales teams. And what I'm shocked at is how often, even with a high-performing sales team, salespeople don't practice perspective and perception. What they practice is whatever script they're supposed to read. And they practice empirical numbers and they practice the law of averages. And it's like, I need to make a hundred calls to convert 12%. That's what they practice. Instead of practicing something just a little bit more efficient, like changing

Starting point is 00:44:01 your opening line to ask an open-ended question, just like you did. An open-ended question is a question that makes the person on the other side of the phone speak through the lens of their current reality. Do you know what? I've never said this before, but there's a question I ask every guest in the preamble. And I don't know if I asked you, but I ask 99% of guests when we sit down. And it's what's front of mind for you at the moment. And for me, the reason I asked that question is because kind of what you said, because people come here and I assume that there's something that happened

Starting point is 00:44:34 when they woke up this morning or there's something that's bugging them that my research team wouldn't have been able to find on the internet that they haven't yet said in an interview. And it's been so unbelievably amazing when you asked that question. And then there was one particular conversation I had, which was one of my favorite of all time where it was with simon sinek and because i've spoken to simon sinek three times on the podcast i didn't like have research like we've talked about everything so i sat down and i had to sit down

Starting point is 00:44:59 and figure out where the conversation was going to go for the next three hours and so my opening question to him was really broad it was um how how are you? And please give me the long answer. And you have to be honest. And he literally, for the first time ever in his life went, do you know what? I'm feeling really lonely right now. And for him to say that, a guy like that to say that was like, whoa. And if I'd sat down with my, okay, today we're going to talk about management strategies, I totally would have missed one of my favorite conversations of all time. But you have to have a lot of trust in yourself. This is what I've come to learn as a podcaster.

Starting point is 00:45:31 To be able to sit down without any questions written down here and to ask a really open-ended question and then to try and follow them, like wherever they might take you. Well, what's interesting is that one of your superpowers as a podcaster is that you have a plan. But you don't always stick rigidly to your plan. You go wherever the guest takes you. You go where Simon Sinek takes you, right? I've taken you down this long path about living in a shed that I'm sure was not on your agenda. And I'm sure lost a good half of the people that we were talking to early on. But my point with all that is just to say, you, you practice what is called courage and courage is,

Starting point is 00:46:09 courage is a word that is definable and people don't often take the time to really define what courage is. Courage is doing the thing that you're afraid of. That is courage. So going off script and asking a question, coming in unprepared for a podcast, those are things that cause you a little bit of fear, a little bit of anxiety. You're like, I don't know how this is going to turn out, but you do it anyways. One of the major differences between entrepreneurs and aspirational entrepreneurs is that entrepreneurs have the courage to try and aspirational entrepreneurs are always talking about the day that they will have the courage to try.

Starting point is 00:46:46 Trust comes into this, right? Because part of the reason that I can sit down with someone for three hours and not necessarily have a, I've never had a question written down, but not even have an idea of where the conversation is going to go is because I have so many case studies that it's been fine in the past. And it's those case studies that have built up this sort of self-trust that enables me to sit down and go, how are you? And then they go off about loneliness.

Starting point is 00:47:07 And we spend three hours talking about loneliness. But that comes from that initial trust, I think. I think trust is a good word. Self-trust. Yeah, self-trust or confidence. Those are good words to use. But I would almost challenge that what you're really talking about is you're gambling on odds that you've learned are in your favor, right? It's kind of like when you think about a professional athlete.

Starting point is 00:47:30 Professional athletes do some amazing movements. Sometimes they make the score and sometimes they don't. But what happens is when they make the score doing an amazing movement, that's what we all remember. When they miss the shot doing the amazing movement, nobody remembers that. Nobody remembers how many basketball shots Dennis Rodman didn't make, right? They just remember something else about Dennis Rodman. Arnold Schwarzenegger has this famous quote where he made lots of movies. We all remember our favorite Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. But how many of his bad movies do you remember?

Starting point is 00:48:07 Not many. And he knows that too. And that's one of the reasons that he said yes to so many movies was because he learned early on in his bodybuilding career that nobody remembers when you lose, but they always remember when you win. So he had no problem making a bunch of movies because the one or two or three or 12 or 18 that became blockbusters were the ones that defined him, even though he also did Kindergarten Cop. I mean, that's quite a good concept to hold in your mind if you're trying to weigh up any sort of risk in your life, like the risk of leaving the shed that we were talking about. Correct. You're taking a chance. You're taking a gamble.

Starting point is 00:48:44 But here's the thing. We're conditioned in our shed, we're conditioned to gamble on the system, right? If you're going to roll the dice, at least roll the dice that the system gives you, right? Bet on the house because the house is going to win. What we really learn as entrepreneurs is to gamble on ourselves.

Starting point is 00:49:04 Like bet on you. How many people take every dollar they earn and they invest it in a brokerage that's managed by somebody else that is targeting an 8% return on investment? That's what they do with every dollar of their life. My mother-in-law just recently retired about three and a half or four weeks ago. She is, what do you have to be to retire? 69, I think. So she's 67 or 68 years old. She's worked her entire life. Her primary investment vehicles, I shit you not, are CDs. It's a device in the investment world where you basically put your money in for a certain amount of time and it guarantees you a certain yield. And that yield is usually very, very low.

Starting point is 00:49:46 But that was her preferred investment vehicle. So for the 69 years or the 50 years that she's been working, she's been investing in these low-performance certificates of deposit, CD. That is exactly the kind of thinking that was conditioned into her by the generation before her. That's where she learned about CDs at all. That's why she bought her first CD at 16 years old was because mom and dad told her to do that. So here it is 2024, she's retiring and all of the money that she saved is basically in these certificates of deposit, which is not a lot of money. Really? Yes. Because it doesn't grow. Whereas I invest in my company and my return has been 300%.

Starting point is 00:50:27 And entrepreneurs, even entrepreneurs who don't grow quickly, still see 12% return on investment, 15% return on investment, 20% return on investment, which outperforms anything in the market. But you still have these people who don't want to gamble on themselves because they're afraid that the House will win. Who can't be taught the things that you teach in terms of the CIA skills and everything you teach with an everyday spy? There's a lot of people out there who already, who right out of the gates

Starting point is 00:50:57 had a circle drawn around them that CIA is some kind of deep state conspiracy, kills Americans, sells children, steals drugs kind of organization. Are they room? Maybe there was a CIA that did that once. But my point is those people are never going to believe what I have to teach them. There are threads all over the internet

Starting point is 00:51:20 about how I'm a fake and a phony and a fraudster. And there's even, for every one of those threads, there are also threads that talk about how I'm a fake and a phony and a fraudster. And there's even, there's, for every one of those threads, there are also threads that talk about how I'm a plant, how I'm still a CIA officer. I did read that in the comment section. Isn't that funny? Quite funny. So there's like, there's both sides. These are people who cannot, they'll never be open to learn. They're not willing to learn. How do I know you're not still a CIA officer? Doesn't matter. No, it doesn't. It doesn't matter. If you get, if you can take the information and test the framework and get ahead, does it

Starting point is 00:51:49 matter? Well, actually, maybe if the, okay, you're at the right point now. You said, test it myself. Because you could be teaching me things that are going to just keep me trapped in the matrix because, you know. But I don't want you trapped in the matrix. But I don't know that. You could still be a CIA spy. I could be. But the key thing you said is that you're giving them to me to test for myself. So I get the results to check whether what you're teaching me is positive or negative, productive or non-productive. Correct. And that's what really drives me. What drives me is this vision of a future that's good for my children. And the future that's good for my children is a future where the United States

Starting point is 00:52:26 is still the most powerful economy in the world, still the most powerful military in the world. And according to all reports, that is not what will happen by 2035. By 2035, we will be at parity with at least another country, most likely China. And as we reach parity, what that means is you reach equality. As you reach equality, your superpower status goes away. You are no longer a

Starting point is 00:52:53 superpower. You are a near-peer power or a near-peer competitor. It's very different than being a superpower. Why does it matter? Because when there's competition, there's more uncertainty. There's more unpredictability. There's more danger. There's more risk. There's less opportunity. Think about the starting quarterback for a football team. He's the starting quarterback. He is the person. He is the player that will start the game, that will have the football, and nobody questions it. There's a lot of opportunity there for that person. But as soon as they start to be unpredictable, as soon as there's a new star, a new quarterback that comes in and threatens the existing quarterback, now we don't really know who's going to start.

Starting point is 00:53:37 And the team doesn't really the team is going to have two different quarterbacks that swap in and out throughout the entire game. And the whole team performs worse because they don't know how to predict the quarterback because the new quarterback or the old quarterback isn't the one that's always throwing the ball. So there's an uncertainty that comes as competition arises. It's why business owners want to be in a business of one. It's why there's such a thing as a blue ocean marketing strategy versus a red ocean marketing strategy. Because when you're in a blue ocean, when you have no competitors around you, your business will most likely thrive. You have room to make mistakes. You can learn slowly. But when you're in a highly competitive red ocean,

Starting point is 00:54:21 you don't get any of those opportunities. What does history tell us about how changing, the changing of the guard as it relates to world power, what the dangers might be for the average person? It's a great question. And this is where I want to reemphasize my lack of altruism, right? Because... What does altruism mean for anyone that doesn't know? So altruism is this idea that you care about other people or that you care about a common good, right? Because... What does altruism mean for anyone that doesn't know? So altruism is this

Starting point is 00:54:45 idea that you care about other people or that you care about a common good, right? I don't care about a common good. You care about other people. I care about some other people. Your children. Correct. My family, my friends, the people that I think are making a difference. And that's just the way it is. Why will some people not be willing to learn what I teach them? Because they will disagree with my ethics and my morals about how I don't care about all people equally. Well, I just, I prefer, I like the fact that you're honest. So, I mean, that makes me trust you more. So I appreciate that. So if you look at history, Rome was really good for Romans for a long, long time. The fall of Rome was bad for everybody. The transition was bad for everybody. Coming out of World War II, right?

Starting point is 00:55:34 When you were a Nazi in Nazi Germany, things were pretty good, right? But then when Nazi Germany fell, it was bad for a lot of people. There was a lot of war. There was a lot of death. There was a lot of starvation. Multiple countries had been destroyed. There was a war. There was a transition of power. Same thing happened at the fall of the Soviet Union. In that war, I was watching a documentary about it the other day.

Starting point is 00:55:54 It was interesting because I watched both the sort of Soviet Union rush into Berlin and I watched America rushed into Berlin. They kind of, they both took different parts of Germany. And then once they'd taken down the Nazis, they kind of went to war with each other. Because they then were trying to figure out who was in charge of Germany and how they were going to divvy up land. So there was another war, basically,

Starting point is 00:56:12 like a civil war following the fall of the Nazis. And the same thing happened in China. The same thing happened as our Pacific forces kind of worked their way up through Japan. There became conflict in the East as well, right? So transition periods where near-peer countries or where countries become near-peer competitors, that's not, people don't stop competing as the competition increases. Like what's happening in the world right now in Ukraine and Russia and

Starting point is 00:56:38 in Israel with Hamas, with the Houthis and with the Iranians, like what's happening is competition is on the rise. So everything becomes less stable. Things become more dangerous. When there's a clear bully in the playground, there's only one bully and nobody has to mess with the bully. And it's a bad day for anyone the bully messes with. But for the most part, everybody else is good. But what happens when there's two bullies? Shit gets messy. The bullies make posses. The posses have to fight with each other. More people get hurt. More rabble-rousing happens in the playground than when there's just one bully. So for me, the United States is the bully on the playground. And I, as an American citizen, am living in a place where it's pretty good to be on the bully's side.

Starting point is 00:57:25 So for me, pragmatically speaking, if I want the best for my children, what I really need is for the United States to remain the only bully. So then I can have some impotence, some confidence that their future will be secure. Do you think the war in the Ukraine and Russia is a symptom of the changing in power? Because it's kind of like a proxy war, right? You've got Ukraine is actually the USA, and Russia is actually kind of China, to some degree. So I would say it's not kind of a proxy war. It's a full on proxy war. You're 100% right. I don't even know what a proxy war is. I just use that term because it sounded smart. Well, it does sound smart. It is smart. Proxy war is a doctrine. It's an actual military doctrine

Starting point is 00:58:03 that says that you create what's known as intrastate conflict, which means conflict internal to a state. And then external wealth parties fund the conflict in the state. That way, the two external parties that are in conflict don't have to waste any lives. It protects them diplomatically. It protects them socially. It protects them militarily. They're only spending resources in an interstate conflict. The interstate conflict has always been inside Ukraine. Eastern Ukraine and Western Ukraine have always been in conflict. We just didn't realize it until Russia invaded because nobody paid attention to Ukraine.

Starting point is 00:58:36 Same thing in Israel. There's always been conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis. We just didn't really pay attention to it until October 8th. So the conflict that you're talking about is not a symptom, it's a strategy. And the strategy is that the United States can drain Russian resources without draining American lives, which makes it easy for the United States to continue draining strategic resources from Russia. And then NATO's watching the same thing happen. And NATO's the one that has the most to lose if Russia is strong. So then that's why they also pile in support.

Starting point is 00:59:15 That's the strategy. That has been the United States strategy since the end of World War II. Who rebuilt Japan? The United States. Who rebuilt the UK? The United States. Who rebuilt Germany? Who rebuilt Japan? The United States. Who rebuilt the UK? The United States. Who rebuilt Germany? Who rebuilt France? All the United States. Is it any surprise that all of these countries since World War II have then been close diplomatic, political, and economic allies? No. And guess what they all have? They all have very similar sheds because we built their political systems from World War two based on ours

Starting point is 00:59:47 Right. That's the American model. That's been how America has grown economically so quickly all over the world Guess who's mimicking that model now? China the real conflict between the United States and China Nobody can define it Trump calls it a trade war because we have a bunch of cheap Chinese goods. That's not the problem. The problem is that Xi Jinping understands

Starting point is 01:00:13 that what he wants for China is for China to be a net exporter of high technology. Who's the only other high net exporter of high technology? The United States. The United States makes electric vehicles. China makes electric vehicles. United States makes telecommunication. China makes telecommunication.

Starting point is 01:00:32 That's the conflict because what China is doing is giving the rest of the developing world an alternative to the United States. Well, if just like any other business, if I make coffee and you make coffee, we're in competition for the person who wants to buy coffee. So now we're fighting over that person. Whoever wins that person wins more money.

Starting point is 01:00:50 Whoever wins that person wins repeat buyers. And now I might lose my company. My coffee shop might shrink and your coffee shop might grow because this person is choosing your coffee when it used to be only mine was available. So who is better for America, Joe Biden or Donald Trump? Neither. They are both bad for America in different ways. Who is more likely to prolong American dominance? Donald Trump of the two. Donald Trump of the two. Here's what I'm going to tell you.

Starting point is 01:01:25 I had this thought last night, and I was going to make it a video for my own channel, but my channel is nowhere near as enjoyable as your channel. I'll put it on yours as well. There is only one Democrat in the United States who can beat Donald Trump. Only one. Nobody else stands a chance. Democratic Party is struggling to accept that. Nobody can beat Donald Trump.

Starting point is 01:01:45 It's the only one that can win, and that's Michelle Obama. I did think this, because, I mean, I would say Barack, but obviously he can't because he's done his eight years. But Michelle, I do agree, and she doesn't want anything to do with it. She said, she said in early July she wanted nothing to do with it. But what's happened since early July? There's been the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. The assassination attempt turned into this incredible

Starting point is 01:02:09 media frenzy. Now you have this guy with blood on his face and a fist in the air and a flag behind him. You have a Pulitzer Prize winning photo already floating around the internet with this guy on it, right? Everything changed. There's no way Michelle Obama isn't sitting in her room multiple times a day asking herself the question, do I still want nothing to do with this or do I have to step up to the plate to do what I believe is the right thing to do because only I can do it? Think about the questions Barack Obama must ask Michelle Obama. Think about the silence, the pregnant silence around their kitchen table at night. Think about how heavy they must be thinking right now because they know what I just said out loud,

Starting point is 01:02:53 that you knew yesterday. There's only one Democrat that can beat Donald Trump. And maybe in July 3rd, she said she wanted nothing to do with it, but now it's July 20th. And if she really believes in this country, how is she not going to rise to the occasion? How is she going to sit back and let the future of her daughters rest in the hands of somebody she doesn't believe in?

Starting point is 01:03:18 Because the truth is, if she were to run overnight, she would have the complete support of the entire Democratic National Convention. Every donor who has already donated money would let their money stay with her and probably donate more. Women voters, African-American voters, voters that are on the fence, voters that are looking for any alternative to Donald Trump or Joe Biden, they would all get their answers given to them at once. Not to mention the fact that she's brilliant. She's esteemed. She's youthful. Like everything that America stands for is represented in Michelle Obama just as much as what we say America stands for is represented by Donald Trump. So if Michelle Obama is announced at the Democratic National Convention, I'm glad we had this conversation.

Starting point is 01:04:08 Do you think that's possible? Absolutely, it's possible. I don't think it's probable. But I do think it's possible. And I can't help but have the hope in our country that the few who are willing to learn will step up and accept that they have to gamble on themselves. Do you think that Michelle Obama would increase the probability and the length of America's dominance versus Trump?

Starting point is 01:04:32 Absolutely. It would just be in a different way. Donald Trump grows through bravado and brinksmanship. He grows like a bully grows. But what we've learned about the United States is that our bullish strategy, our bully strategy that we've been employing since 1950 is a game of diminishing returns. We invest a lot into it, but we lose influence. We lose global reach.

Starting point is 01:05:00 We lose power. We're losing economic might. They say that China's having an economic recession right now at 4.5% growth GDP. We're at 1.3% growth GDP. Nobody's talking about our recession because our recession has been on so long, it's not a recession anymore. It's just the United States doesn't grow more than really 3%. China used to grow at 5%.

Starting point is 01:05:20 So when it goes from 5% to 4%, it's a big deal for people. Our model is already broken. Our model already doesn't work. So all Donald Trump is going to do is come in and double down on that model because he's only got four years in the House. He's only got four years in the White House and he knows it. So he's not out there to revolutionize America. He's not out there to revolutionize the United States. Like he's out there for Donald Trump. I think he believes he'll do a good job. I think he believes he's best for America. I think he believes that being a bully is the way to go. But that doesn't mean he's right.

Starting point is 01:05:54 That doesn't mean it's going to be exponential return on investment. It could be a continuing game of diminishing returns. Michelle Obama has the opportunity to do it differently, as long as she doesn't come in just parroting the Joe Biden and Barack Obama school of thought. What do you think she would need to say to meet America's ideology right now? I think she could define America's ideology right now. I don't think she'd have to meet it.

Starting point is 01:06:19 I think America is lost. America has been looking down the barrel of the 2024 election for a long time, knowing it was going to boil down to Trump versus Biden, knowing that it was going to boil down to an octogenarian who can't form a sentence from a stage sometimes, or a crazy-ass businessman who, when he forms a sentence, it's a nonsensical sentence. Like, that's what we've been looking at. That's been the choice. It doesn't really sentence, it's a nonsensical sentence. Like, that's what we've

Starting point is 01:06:45 been looking at. That's been the choice. It doesn't really feel like it's a choice anymore. No, because after Trump got shot in the ear, I think, I mean, I watched those scenes as well, and I thought, yeah, this guy's won. He won. And everybody knows it. If you're not willing to admit it, that's fine. Everybody knows he won the election on that day. The day he survived that shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, July 13th, he won the 2024 election unless something even more disruptive happens in the marketplace between now and November 5th. Michelle Obama has the power to do that.

Starting point is 01:07:24 If you were in his marketing team and you were desperate, you would have shot him in the ear that day, wouldn't you? No. No way. The risk is too great. I mean, if you knew it was going to hit his ear and you were in his marketing team,

Starting point is 01:07:37 you would have shot him in the ear that day. Because that was, as we both said, he won the election that day. Yeah. And he won the election because many people will now see him as some kind of hero. So I'll tell you how a CIA officer thinks about this, right? If you wanted to stage an attempted assassination,

Starting point is 01:07:53 if that's what you want to do is stage an attempted assassination, you would never shoot at the person who was the principal. You would shoot away. What's the principal? The principal is the primary target that you're trying to support, right? So Donald Trump was the principal. If I was trying to stage an assassination

Starting point is 01:08:13 to win him popular praise, I would not shoot at him because the risk is too great that the shot would either miss and hit him, possibly hit him fatally, or it would miss him and hit someone in the audience. And then a rally member dies. And now we have to account for why somebody at the rally died. Like people were killed and people were hurt at the Donald Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. If you wanted to stage an assassination, you would shoot 35, 40 degrees

Starting point is 01:08:38 off target, well away from anybody accidentally getting hit. Because what's going to happen? Everybody's going to hear the gunshots. So the gunshots will still cause the panic. The Secret Service would still jump in. They'd still cover him. There'd still be all the same newsworthiness without the risk of killing somebody. And if you really, really wanted to make it like, so it made headlines,

Starting point is 01:09:01 you could even potentially stage some kind of cut that's covered up with a small skin-colored Band-Aid so that when the shots go off, you can wipe off or pull off the Band-Aid, and then there's going to be active red spots, right? You would never actually shoot at the principal. That's what people don't understand about conspiracies, is that when you actually plan to carry out a covert action, you plan to carry out the covert action in the safest possible way.

Starting point is 01:09:23 You don't run the risk of actually shooting the principal. So, but let's play out the scenario that it was a conspiracy. So what could have happened there? And I was in an office the other day, one of the companies that I'm involved with, and there was a group of people gathered around a laptop watching the footage and half of the people thought it was some kind of conspiracy and that maybe he fell down and then like cut his own ear. And then the other half of the people thought it was some kind of conspiracy and that maybe he fell down and then like cut his own ear. And then the other half of the people thought that that was craziness. What side of the fence do you sit on? You think it was a real shooter?

Starting point is 01:09:51 I think it was a real shooter. I absolutely think it was a real shooter. The principles that CIA teaches us about how to analyze a situation are twofold. They teach us how to analyze a situation, but they also teach us how to predict a conspiracy. And conspiracies have a very clear anatomy. They have a very clear process. All conspiracies start with something that is factual. Something really does happen. And then immediately following the factual thing, there's a lack of information. Inside of that lack of information, the third piece of the puzzle is speculation. Now, speculation

Starting point is 01:10:27 and suspicion are very close cousins. Suspicion is healthy, right? You've heard of healthy suspicion. Speculation is not healthy. Speculation is what it takes for you to create an answer to a story that's not based on facts, which is where the fourth element of a conspiracy comes from, a story that closes the loop. Because when there's information missing, it creates an open loop. Well, guess what human brains like? Conveniently closed loops. So we can't handle an open loop very well for very long. So then we start speculating on what might have happened until someone defines for us an answer. And then all of a sudden you have an answer that closes the loop and you have a conspiracy. Conspiracies happen all the time. Conspiracies happen in your own home. Who's the last one that ate the, who ate the last piece of bread, right? Who's the one that drank the last bit of milk? How is there,

Starting point is 01:11:18 how are there no more eggs left in the refrigerator, right? Lack of information leads to speculation. And then we close the loop with a story in our mind. When you look at what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, there's all the elements for a conspiracy. There's facts, a lack of information, speculation, and somebody's closing the story loop. And all these different conspiracies are gaining momentum. But when you look at the factual analysis of what happened, there are pictures, there are diagrams, there's a corpse of a 20-year-old shooter holding a high-powered rifle on top of a roof aimed at the stage. There's reports of local sheriff and local police officers being notified of that. There's bystanders who have reported that. There's technology that's been employed to verify that. There's enough facts there to know that there really was someone who was young by name who took a shot at the president.

Starting point is 01:12:13 That's what we know. Guess what happens tomorrow? We learn more. We don't have to know all the answers today. More information will come. As soon as Donald Trump was shot, I called up one of my friends who's a secret service, a retired secret service officer. And I said to him that from my point of view, from what I understand about close protection, everything was done pretty close to right.

Starting point is 01:12:38 There's always gaps, always gaps at any kind of political rally. That's why they're dangerous. You can't make it 100% secure. That's why there's snipers on the roof. There's not snipers on the roof because they feel like the grounds are safe. There's snipers on the roof because they know that there's gaps. There's not Secret Service on the sides of the stage

Starting point is 01:12:57 carrying guns because they think that they're safe. There's Secret Service on the sides of the stage because they know that there's gaps. Of course there's gaps. You can't manage all risks. The person took a shot from over 400 feet. 400 feet is a long, difficult shot. Empirically, it's a long, difficult shot. Even though the newspapers come out and say it's a turkey shoot or an easy shot or a standard shot or a basic shot, it is not. Any hunter out there will tell you 400 yards is a difficult shot, and you have to have a high

Starting point is 01:13:25 powered rifle built for that kind of distance to shoot that length. So there's all kinds of misinformation that's going around as people try to spin up a story. So for me, it was a real assassination attempt by a real person whose motives are still unknown. I was listening to something, and the person was saying that maybe this, you know, the CIA or some somebody infiltrated this young man and, you know, encouraged him over a period of time to get up there on that roof and all these kinds of things. The heart of the problem here is we don't, we don't, we're quite distrusting and we don't have answers. And most of us aren't informed. So there's basically the small life that we live.

Starting point is 01:14:06 And then above us, we see like billionaires and powerful people. And we hear that they do and or have historically done very nefarious, malicious things. And that becomes our sort of shed, is that we are the average person. And then up there, outside the shed, there's all these billionaires, powerful Illuminati. And they are doing these really malicious things. Now, in part, that's true. But maybe only in part. And we kind of assume this broad strokes approach to anything that

Starting point is 01:14:35 happens. We go government, matrix, conspiracy. And, you know, the CIA does have history of doing things like this. True. True. We're coming into a conversation that's twofold. One, we're talking about a pre-911 CIA. Pre-911, post-911 is important to create a distinction for CIA because prior to September 11th, CIA was a small, highly funded organization with very little oversight. They could come up with crazy stuff like trying to, you know, trying to poison Fidel Castro so

Starting point is 01:15:14 his beard fell out, or trying to create the Bay of Pigs invasion, or trying to do all sorts of wacky stuff from, you know, MKUltra to whatever else. That was a wacky, pre-9-11, unsupervised, Wild West kind of CIA. Post-9-11, the 9-11 Commission, written in 2003, highlighted that CIA failed to do its job for September 11th. So now there's tons of oversight. It's now a very large, very fat, well-funded bureaucracy, whereas before it was a well-funded free-for-all. If it was a conspiracy, which department or which organization would be responsible, in your opinion?

Starting point is 01:15:55 If it was a conspiracy, there would be no department in charge of the conspiracy. So it would be something else. Correct. Right. Because when governments act, when individuals in a government act in a conspiratorial manner, it's not formalized. If it was formalized, it would be a policy. Right? They act independently. And there's all sorts of instances where people act independently from Edward Snowden all the way to Aldrich Ames, right? There are people who actually carried out conspiratorial efforts to try to gain some kind of leverage that worked for them for a while and then worked against them. If that bullet had hit Donald Trump in the head, how do you think the U.S. would be different? I was thinking about this when I was driving down the street yesterday.

Starting point is 01:16:44 It's hard to define that, really. I was thinking we probably when I was driving down the street yesterday it's hard to define that really I was thinking we probably wouldn't be sat here now because there probably would have been quite a bit of unrest potentially potentially I don't know I don't know like it would have I think we would have still been sitting here I was wondering I would have gotten my ass on a plane to come sit with you at least

Starting point is 01:17:00 well I would you never know how these sort of domino effects can happen and people can break out on the streets. And, you know, because what might happen, let's just play out this scenario. Donald Trump gets shot. Then some crazy right wing person comes out and shoots someone else. And then the streets of LA look very different to the streets of LA today than we're sat here in LA. So do you know what I mean? That's kind of the domino effect that's playing out in my mind. There'd be some kind of revenge, right?

Starting point is 01:17:26 Well, I don't know. That's what's interesting. So politically motivated violence is tough. If Donald Trump would have been shot, chances are the shooter would have also been shot. So from the eyes of the American people, and for sure from the messaging that would have come from the White House,

Starting point is 01:17:40 the threat was neutralized, and it's a tragedy that we lost an American, a former American president. Donald or Joe Biden would have come out and would have made kind, caring remarks about Donald Trump. Nobody would be talking about him as crazy or whatever else. He'd go down as a hero following the democratic process for something he believed in. History would have been written a very different way. Oh, I don't know. Because I think if Donald Trump had been hit, I mean, this is just from chilling on Twitter. If Donald Trump had been hit, regardless of whether that kid had been shot, and regardless of whatever, people would have believed that it was some kind of deep state,

Starting point is 01:18:14 CIA, left wing, Hillary Clinton involvement. Even if there was a body, fingerprints, they found the kid's hard drive and he was planning it, there's a group of people that still would have believed that. Because there's a group of people, as you know, that believe anything. Correct. And someone in that group of people would have taken a retaliatory action. And then this starts the stone-throwing that I think. So they might have gone to a left-wing, I don't know, black event, festival, and done something.

Starting point is 01:18:43 And then you have the tit- tat I don't I don't disagree that it's a pot it's a possibility but the question is whether or not a group would have reached critical mass to take some kind of action okay right because I mean think about the alternative the alternative is is the streets of you name the conservative state, Texas, Florida, whatever, Pennsylvania, maybe a giant parade fit for a king, right? Parading Donald Trump through the streets, something that he and Donald and Joe Biden happily endorsing the money a chance to really bring the whole country together and end some of the bipolar division. It could have, there would have still been, just like you said, there would have been a group of people who believed in some sort of deep state action. And there may have been follow-up violence, you're right again. I think all of those things are possibilities. But it is also a possibility that it would have gone in the other direction. There still would have had to be a new candidate identified by the Republican National Convention. So things would have gone differently from that day.

Starting point is 01:19:48 Very interesting. So going back to the shed, the person's come out of the shed, they understand this idea of perspective and perception. What I'm really trying to get out here is I'm trying to help people get out of the life they're living that they hate and closer towards a life that is aligned in whatever way they define alignment as, so that they can live the life they want to live, so they can start to kind of bend the world in their favor. And I use this term, bend the world, intentionally, because it's something that I've come to learn in the entrepreneurs that I've met.

Starting point is 01:20:15 And just the people that seem to have the most power, they understand that the world they live in is malleable. And maybe that's the analogy of being able to break out of your shed. But they understand that they can have an idea, pursue the thing, and kind of convince their way to a goal, bend the world out of their way. And that's kind of what I want to equip the people that are listening right now with, that ability to kind of bend the world out of your way or to the shape in which you want it to be. I've got two things that come to mind, right? The first is there's this lesson that I learned at CIA that I still teach now in my training with executives and individuals and entrepreneurs, where CIA warns us not to get trapped in what's called the perfection paradox is the idea that you keep making incremental improvements to a plan, but you never actually act on the plan.

Starting point is 01:21:10 So you're seeking perfection and you're making genuine improvements, but you're not actually taking action. So the impact of your improvements is not felt. So they warn us against getting trapped in this perfection paradox. Because you can imagine if you're planning an operation for whatever, it's very, very easy to just start, how do we make this 5% better? How do we make it 2% better? How do we make it 1% better? What if tomorrow's intelligence gives us new information? What if intelligence the next day gives us better information? So you get trapped in this paradox. And instead what they tell us to do is engage in something called excellence through execution. Excellence through execution is the idea that by executing, you will make mistakes. And then you will improve upon the mistakes because you will execute again. So your excellence comes from execution. After 9-11, as a simple example, after 9-11, President Bush declared war. People were immediately deployed to the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Starting point is 01:22:13 Immediately. Did they plan an operation? Yes. In about 48 hours. And then they were deployed. And then you had paramilitary people on horseback with mules carrying stuff through the mountains. The only way that's possible is through excellence through execution. Get them on the ground and let them figure it out from there because the stakes are so high,

Starting point is 01:22:37 the impact has to be felt right now. So to your question, how do we give people the ability to bend the rules, bend the world around them? It's understanding that there is excellence in execution and also understanding that there is a paradox with perfection. So if you want to feel the impact, you can't keep planning. You have to take action. And you have to understand that the action you take may only be 20% of what it will be one day. But today, you take the lumps, you make the mistakes, and you get the impact that you need.

Starting point is 01:23:13 The second thing that came to my mind is actually coming from, I have a centimillionaire client that I work with frequently. And he was talking about this idea of- Centimillionaire, I've never had that term before. Yeah. I know what it is. Yeah, yeah. I have a centimillionaire client

Starting point is 01:23:23 who was working with me on a process to try to resolve some of the challenges that he was having from the trauma that was wired into him as a kid, right? And how that trauma has played out in his personal life and his business life and everything else. And he made this awesome breakthrough where he was like, you know, therapists and counselors and spouses, because he's been married more than once, they all tell you to go through your pain, right? It's like, you've got to face your trauma. You've got to go through it. You've got to do the work. You've got to bear the burden so that you can heal. Whereas what I teach, which is what CIA teaches, is why would you ever go through something when you can go around it? So if you're trying to accept or recover or understand and heal the fact that your mom cheated on your dad when you were seven, you can't change it. By working through it, you might come to accept it, but what's the point?

Starting point is 01:24:23 Instead, you can just go right around that pain and you can be like, my mom cheated on my dad. And because of that, this happened. And because of that, this other thing happened. And because of that, I became a self-sufficient, independent person who didn't rely on my mom or my dad. And now I'm very successful because all that matters is what's forward.

Starting point is 01:24:42 I can't change what's behind. And he made this revelation on his own. I thought it was such a powerful visual because we so often think that the point from here to here, if there's all this mess in the middle, you have to go through the mess. When in fact, you can also just go around the mess and you can go right to the point.

Starting point is 01:24:58 And you don't have to heal. You just have to accept, understand, recognize, and move forward. And so what did he do? So he was trying to overcome his trauma. How did he go around it in that specific example? Well, what he was, so in that specific example, it was under, he went back to the traumatic incident

Starting point is 01:25:14 that he experienced. And what he realized is that if his mom hadn't cheated on his dad, then the domino effect that would have come after that would have probably never led to him starting the business that ultimately made him an ultra high net worth. And once he made that connection, he was like, oh, well, shit, I'm glad my mom cheated on my dad.

Starting point is 01:25:33 Because now my daughters are taken care of, my sons are taken care of, my wives are taken care of. I've got 500 employees that are taken care of. I do business in four different countries. Everybody's taken care of. Does that require some time, though, between the thing that happened and where you are now? Because, you know, I was sat here yesterday

Starting point is 01:25:50 with a chap who lost his son, his 18-month-old son, in April. And, you know, it's hard in that situation. Francis Ngannou, who's a UFC champion, hard in that situation to try and find a way around it. It's a couple of months ago. There's no way around tragedy. That's loss that very few of us will ever know, thankfully.

Starting point is 01:26:28 What we don't know is how that will shape him in the future. All we know is what that's doing to hurt him in the present, right? Think about all the famous stories, all the famous inspirational, motivational leaders that you've met who had some kind of tragedy happen in the past. Well, actually, funnily enough, because I mentioned the loss of a son, I had a guy sat here called Mo Gordat, who was the ex-head of Google X, and his son passed away in a routine operation. That should have taken 10 minutes, but killed his son.

Starting point is 01:26:54 And then he quit his job at Google and went on search of what happiness is. And when I asked him on the podcast, I said, would you bring back your son now? He said no. Like, if you could go back and, well, I'm sure he'd bring back his son. I think what he's saying to me is that if you could go back and change what happened, would he change it? And he said no. It's important. Like it's important to understand when you are wired for success, because not everyone is wired for success. A lot of people are wired for mediocrity. A lot of people are wired for basic survival. A lot of people are wired for pain and suffering. But when you are wired for success, you can't regret what's happened to you in the past,

Starting point is 01:27:40 because to erase it or change it would be to make you not the person you are now. And the person you are now is successful. Do you think some people are wired for success? Absolutely. I think people are wired for success. What does that mean in real terms? How do I know if I'm wired for success? I think empirically, there's lots of proof that you're wired for success. But I'm talking about, you know, Dave that's listening to this now or Janet, how do they know that if they're wired for success? So what I have found pretty consistently, not only in clients that I work with, but also in the actual CIA field operations that I've engaged in. compare clients to spies is because what spies are are people who are living in a shed looking through a window and realize there's something else on the other side. You can't find a happy person living in ignorance in their shed and convince them that it's a good idea to commit

Starting point is 01:28:39 treason against their country. You can't because they're very happy. Once somebody is very happy and very like satisfied, they don't aspire to anything. So you can't goad them into telling you secrets or pay them or trick them or force them because they're very satisfied where they are. So a spy is an asset in the field is somebody who believes that there might be something better. A actual client wired for success also believes that there is something better. The difference between the two is that this person can be manipulated. Which person? The spy in the field who's desperate to get out of the shed. That person can be manipulated. Whereas a good client is suspicious and aware that people are trying to manipulate them. So they're looking for guidance. They're looking for something they can test. They're looking for something they can prove, right? So that's why I compare the two

Starting point is 01:29:37 so closely. Both are wired to be successful because they already know that there is more than just the world around them. They already know that there is something limiting them. They already know that there's a barrier. And by being aware that there is a barrier, that makes them want to cross or break the barrier. That's what being wired for success means. It means that you know that there's something holding you back and you want to overcome the thing that's holding you back. So I'm thinking now, I was in a black cab the other day in London. And I have so many conversations with black cab drivers in London because a lot of them, obviously, because of the nature of their work,

Starting point is 01:30:18 they listen to podcasts and the radio and such. And so sometimes they recognize me and they'll say, I was listening to your podcast, I love it, et cetera. And I'm thinking of starting a business and I've got this idea and this idea and whatever. When you talk about them knowing that there's something more out there, but there's something in their way, can you speak to what that black cab driver is feeling in his life?

Starting point is 01:30:40 I'm just using this as a random example, because I really want you to resonate with him so he knows you're speaking to him. So whoever's listening to this now knows that they can, they can, shit, that's me. When you are conditioned, when you're a, when you're a, when you're wired for success, but conditioned in our Western society, especially, then you know that there's more, you want there to be more, but you also believe that there has to be a process, a roadmap, a recipe, a plan to get there. So you've got this, what we call a cognitive dissonance. You don't believe everything you're hearing, but you don't know anything else to believe.

Starting point is 01:31:22 So there's this dissonance, there's this frustration. So if you want to know what that black cab driver feels, they feel frustrated every day because they know there's more. They want more. They just don't know how to do it. Even worse, they have probably tried. Dude, there's this heartbreaking story for me. It's a business heartbreaking story. I was in Portland, Oregon. I was sitting with this 24-year-old kid who worked part-time at a brewery, right? I must have been 38 years old, very young in Everyday Spy. Everyday Spy was two years old at the time. And I was sitting with this kid, and he had no ambition. He worked part-time at a brewery, and he was totally happy to do it. He lived with four roommates. He drank beer every afternoon

Starting point is 01:32:04 starting at two o'clock. Funny fucking guy. Really funny dude to hang out with. But he had no goals, no ambitions, no aspirations. And I was like, what did your parents do? And he was like, oh, my mom ran her own business from our farm in whatever it was, Idaho or something like that. I was like, oh, what did she do? And he was like, well, she only had her own business for a few years, but she would cater to the other families in the other farming families. So she would make five or seven dinners and then sell that to the other farmers' families so they would have extra food so that the wives of those families could take care of their seven or 12 kids or whatever. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. Why don't you want to be an entrepreneur if your

Starting point is 01:32:42 mom was an entrepreneur? And he was like, oh, well, she was really inspiring to me. And at first I thought I might want to be an entrepreneur, but the thing was, my mom never felt like a success because she failed. He was like, my mom only was able to run her catering business for about three years before it failed. And I was like, well, why did you say she was an entrepreneur? And he was like, because to me, she was. She started a business. She ran it for three years, doing what she loved. She was an entrepreneur. But then all that work, she still failed in the end. So his rationale was, why even try? But he still looked up to his mom as being an entrepreneur. So the thing that kills me is that there are so many entrepreneurs out there who are trying and failing. And some of them, after they failed two or three times, they stop trying.

Starting point is 01:33:30 And they just accept the shed, and they accept that this is the circle that's drawn around me, and this is the way it has to be. They don't even realize that one or two or three or four more attempts is going to be when they get their big breakthrough. All they need is a recipe. So I'm just, my goal in every, in life every day is just get one more person to follow the simplest recipe. What is your favorite case study of someone that followed the recipe and changed their life? In my company? Yeah. My favorite case study is me. Yeah. Because I'm the one that reaps the benefits of it every day. I have multiple people who have had some pretty awesome success. I have one gentleman who recently wrote to me who told me that for the first time in his life,

Starting point is 01:34:12 I think he was in his mid-30s, for the first time in his life, he has a six-figure job now. And he was an engineer, and he wrote me to tell me that one of the frameworks that we taught him through our company helped him get a $31,000, $32,000 raise and a promotion to a senior level in his company, where for the last five years, he'd been asking for a promotion, asking for a raise, and his bosses always just told him no, or he wasn't qualified, or he wasn't fit. But then he started practicing one of our frameworks,

Starting point is 01:34:42 and nine months later, was promoted without asking. Which framework? He didn't tell me which framework. Oh, he told me it was coming from our – we have a master course called Operational Thinking. And inside that, we teach many influence frameworks. So it was clearly a framework of influence that he had tapped into. I also recently had – we have this event in Las Vegas called the Intel Edge, where we bring in a number of speakers from the intelligence world. I have an FBI speaker who comes in.

Starting point is 01:35:09 I have a Green Beret who comes in. I have an exercise scientist come in. I even had a, recently I had a great friend of mine who's an Emmy award-winning journalist, an investigative journalist come in. And we teach in Las Vegas. We teach hundreds of people at a time. We had one person who wrote from that Intel Edge event. He was a Puerto Rican guy. His name is Emmanuel.

Starting point is 01:35:30 Emmanuel, if you're listening, I love you, brother. But Emmanuel just had a baby, first baby with his wife. And within the first month of having the baby, his company laid him off. So he had all these life changes, a new baby. He was so proud and so excited to be a dad. And then he was facing unemployment. And he applied our framework, specifically our framework on mirroring and winning the interviewer instead of winning the interview. And about three months after he was laid off, he got a new job in a science lab that paid him more than he had ever earned before. And he came to the next Intel Edge event that we had. So we saw him in, say,

Starting point is 01:36:11 October, and he came back to us again in March, something like that. And he came back and he told us this story. And my whole team lit up. My whole team was like, because we had all seen him when he was showing us pictures of the baby. And then we all saw the email from him that said, my company laid me off. I don't know how I'm going to take care of my family. And then we see him again. And he's like, guys, you'll never believe what happened. Like, I did this thing. I followed your mirroring example. I won over the interviewer. And now I have this job that I would have never gotten otherwise. These are the stories that I'm spoiled by. I have my customer service team and even my executive team, we don't see all the testimonials that we get because we've become a

Starting point is 01:36:54 little bit desensitized to them because they happen so often. And I love it when they happen, but I'm not surprised when they happen because, of course recipes work the recipes work because they were refined in the in the center of cia they've been working for ages they just haven't ever been shared with the public i think the reason why i loved there was two subjects in school that i was really good at or at least that i enjoyed therefore i was better at um i mean for me to be good at something i mean i didn't go to many lessons in school so so I was bad at most things. But the two lessons that I went to were psychology and business. And at a very young age, I think maybe 14 years old, I had this idea implanted into my head that I always have repeated. I'm 31 now. And I think I've definitely repeated this sentence or this phrase 10 times a year since I was 14. And the crux of it is that the only thing standing in my way

Starting point is 01:37:46 of being the world's greatest entrepreneur, philanthropist, salesperson, is just a bunch of people. Like, very early on, I had this seed in my head that the barriers to life, the barriers to riches, to whatever you want, are just people. So if you can understand people

Starting point is 01:38:01 and how to influence them, then you hold the keys to the city, the proverbial city. So when you talked about this influence framework, I thought maybe that's the most important thing to talk about. Because A, do you agree with what I said? There's like a foundational seed in your mind that it's just people. And then B, I'd love to talk about how we influence people. So yes, I agree with you that people are all that stand in the way. And we have to remember that we ourselves are people.

Starting point is 01:38:29 Yeah. So we're part of the problem. Yeah. And influence frameworks are powerful frameworks for getting what you want. I think the place to start, because not all frameworks are simple. Remember how we were talking about there's foundational frameworks, there's two-step frameworks, and then there's 12-step frameworks, right? The thing to understand is frameworks all fit within each other. They fit like nesting dolls, like Russian nesting dolls. So when you learn

Starting point is 01:39:01 any kind of framework that has to do with influence, what you also have to learn are the sub-frameworks inside of it to be able to execute the whole thing. But the place to really start is understand that influence and persuasion are not the same thing. Right? Persuasion is what happens when you actively put energy into changing someone's mind or getting someone to take a certain action with active energy. Influence is what you have when you're not talking. So I can sit here and try to persuade you to come with me to dinner. But that's not influence.

Starting point is 01:39:42 That's persuasion. Influence is what happens when something happens in the world and I'm the one that comes into your mind and you're like, I wonder what Andy thinks about that, which probably doesn't happen, but one day hopefully it will happen if I gain enough influence, right? That's the difference. Persuasion takes energy. Influence is passive. It doesn't happen. It takes a lot of experience. It takes a lot of engagement. It takes a lot of assessment, energy, trust. It takes a lot of effort to get someone to a place where you have influence over them. But there's a framework for that. There are frameworks and frameworks

Starting point is 01:40:15 within frameworks that I'm happy to teach if you want to go through those. Yeah. Whatever you think is most useful for me and my audience. So I'll start with this. I'll start at the lowest possible place, right? And the lowest possible place, if you think of influence up here as an umbrella, there's a sub framework inside of that umbrella, and then there's a third inside of that. So we're going to start with that one first and grow. And that framework is something called sensemaking. Because if I want to influence you or if you want to influence me, we have to make sense of the dynamic of our relationship. Meaning one of us has to be in power and one of us has to comply with the other person's power. That's the whole goal of sensemaking.

Starting point is 01:41:05 So that's why we are starting at that framework. Inside of sensemaking, if you imagine it like a cup, right? Sensemaking is like a cylinder. And just like you fill a cup with water, you'll fill this cylinder with sense. The bottom third of the cup is what we call avoidance. That's where every relationship starts. Every time you meet a new person, you try to avoid that person. It's the first thought you have, even if you don't want to admit it. No, I'll admit it. No, that's very much the nature of my life. That's the nature of

Starting point is 01:41:37 every, that's human nature. We avoid what's new. So the first third is avoidance. So you've got to fill the water. You've got to fill the relationship. You have to put enough time and energy into the relationship to get past the bottom third. Now you're making sense. The next third is called competition. Competition is all about the exchange of information, the exchange of ideas, the exchange of energy.

Starting point is 01:42:01 Because in an exchange, you're building a relationship. Even if you're arguing, even if you disagree, even if you hate the other person and you're yelling in their face, you're still investing energy into that person. Whereas if you really didn't care about them, you would just avoid them altogether. The last third is called compliance. The whole reason that you compete is to have someone come out with compliance, and compliance is the part where the power dynamic is identified, right? So we've invested so much time in competition that now we're not arguing and fighting anymore. Now we're starting to make sense of our relationship. You've heard the phrase, we'll just agree to disagree.

Starting point is 01:42:46 Essentially, that is the top of the sense-making cylinder. You've filled the cup. And where you land at the end is, we'll just agree to disagree, which is kind of a mutual understanding of each other's position on whatever it was that you were competing over. But you're still a unit. You've still invested into a relationship. So sense-making is filling that first cup because now what we know at the conclusion of this phase is that we're in this together. I've poured water in, you've poured water in, and if there's anything that human beings hate to do, it's waste their energy. So I've put all this energy into you, you've put all this energy into me, and now we have a dynamic between us. Once there's sense, once we understand, and remember,

Starting point is 01:43:31 if we agree to disagree, then we've made sense of our relationship as mutual peers on this particular topic, politics. That doesn't mean that we're mutual peers in terms of conversations about family or conversations about business or conversations about, you name it, exercise, right? But we have a relationship enough that now we can talk about those other things. So if I want to build influence or if you want to build influence, the first thing we have to do is not let people avoid us. We have to get past the avoidance. And then we have to compete with them to get them to invest their time and energy into our relationship. And then we have to get with them to get them to invest their time and energy into our relationship.

Starting point is 01:44:05 And then we have to get to a place where there's some sort of compliance, even if it's only the compliance to sit and listen to me when I share my opinion that you already know you're going to disagree with. That's still compliance. That's the foundational framework that feeds up into a secondary framework that we call know, like, trust. Know, like, trust is something that actually exists in the social media world, which was a really awesome surprise to me to find it there. KLT, know, like, trust, starts with discovery. If you don't know something exists, you can never like it because you don't even know it exists once you know something exists you have to decide whether or not you like it well how do you decide whether or not you like it through this this avoidance competition compliance sense-making

Starting point is 01:44:52 process because as soon as you discover something new it's new so guess what you try to do avoid it you see what I'm saying So after you get through the end of the compliance phase of sense-making, you're basically, you like whatever it is or whoever it is that you're dealing with. Maybe you don't like them like they're your best friend, but you've invested all this time and energy into them, so you do like them. The secret sauce at CIA that we know that most people don't understand is that you don't have to like something a lot before you start to trust it. You've heard the term falling in love. There's also a very real term called falling into trust. You just spend enough time, long enough,

Starting point is 01:45:40 and what happens is without even realizing it, you start to trust the person that you're with. That is the beginning of influence. Even if I'm wrong, even if you disagree with me every step of the way, even if the only thing you like about me is going out and having a pint on Friday night, where we debate and argue and bitch at each other about politics, you still like Friday night going to the bar and sharing a pint with me. You still like hanging out with me when we watch our two different soccer teams play or

Starting point is 01:46:11 football teams play. So because you like me enough to be with me, there will come a time where I win your trust in some thing, in some area. Maybe it's trust because I'm the only person who drinks with you. So in a moment, you decide to tell me about how much you hate your boss. And now I'm the only one that knows you actually hate your boss, whatever it might be. You will fall into trust. We all fall into trust. It's one of the things that's natural to human beings that we hate about ourselves is we trust the wrong people. It happens to all of us. So someone can trust you in terms of influence, even if they don't like you. Correct.

Starting point is 01:46:47 Because they will be invested enough into you that they believe something is predictable. Think about somebody that you don't like. Think about somebody you really, really don't like. Yeah. Are there still things about them that you would trust them to do? Maybe not things they would do for you,

Starting point is 01:47:03 but there are certain things that you would trust that they would do i already know that person's gonna you know say something stupid to my kid i already trust that that person is gonna put their garbage can at the end of my driveway so it's fascinating because we usually think of trust as only being a positive term trust is an ambiguous it's, it's a, it's a, it is an agnostic term. It doesn't mean good things or bad things. It just means a predictable outcome. To the lens I was thinking about as you were speaking, I was thinking about randomly, I was thinking about like personal branding and LinkedIn, because I was thinking about

Starting point is 01:47:40 like personal branding strategies. People go on LinkedIn and they have all these hot takes. And I was wondering through the context of what you were saying, does it matter if people like what I'm saying? You know, if I'm going on LinkedIn every day and I'm doing another hot take or sharing my opinion, can I build trust with my audience, even if there's loads of people disagreeing with me? Or is there a certain type of content or, you know, personal brand strategy that's going to ultimately build more influence? I love the question because what you're getting at is a framework that we have called the power of polarity. If you want to create power, if you want to create draw or appeal, which is power,

Starting point is 01:48:19 you have to polarize. You have to stand for something. Because if you don't stand for something, nobody really knows what you believe in. So you have to polarize. So to your point, there's lots of people on LinkedIn, there's lots of people on Facebook, on Twitter, or whatever, who are out there screaming something. They're making a point. And they're being drowned out by all the other people who are out there making a point. Piers Morgan, Elon Musk, you know. Those are people who already have influence. Okay.

Starting point is 01:48:50 But part of how, well, like in the case of Piers Morgan, part of how he's got his influence is by... Being polarity, by being... Yeah, standing for something very... And not being scared of the fact that people are going to tell him that they don't like him. Even better, I want people to tell me that they don't like me. That's even better because what happens is when you drive polarity,

Starting point is 01:49:11 when you drive polar response, you create enemies, but you also create friends. And what do friends do when enemies attack? They defend, right? So when you stand for something, even if only a small group of people agree with you, they still defend you. They still support you. They still invest in you.

Starting point is 01:49:35 That means they're moving from that avoidance, competition, compliance phase into no like trust. And then when they defend you, they can't help but fall into trust because what are they defending? They're putting energy in defending you. So they're going to trust you even more.

Starting point is 01:49:48 And when that group of people trusts you and other non-competitive people, other observers watch that some people are attacking you and other people are defending you, it makes them feel like they have to choose between attacking you or defending you. Is that a way to stand for something correctly? And is there a way to badly stand for something?

Starting point is 01:50:08 And I say this because as you were speaking, I was thinking about my friend. My friend is really, really bad at LinkedIn. And he comes to LinkedIn with like very inconsistent takes on the world. I'm going to give you an example. For many years, for many years, he's had a narrative about alcohol being

Starting point is 01:50:28 bad and he's been sober but then the world cup came around and he was he posted on linkedin the world cup was in the middle east that the middle east should allow people to binge drink and posting against the sort of religious um perspective that says alcohol is bad so he was like people should be allowed to binge drink if they want in the Middle East. But then his other perspective has always been that alcohol is bad, and why do people binge drink? And so the inconsistency has really fucked him up, I think. Well, that's showing why he probably also doesn't have much influence.

Starting point is 01:50:56 Because people don't know where he stands. So there's nothing to stay. Like, somebody who rallies behind him, like, it sounds like when you were telling the story, to certain extent you were like proud of him when he was like originally yeah when he was clear what he stood for but it's every day is a different take i'm like and that's what costs that's what costs your your influence so he diminished his own power by not demonstrating polarity he should have just stood a ground even if the ground isn't popular, even if it's not popular or positive, if you stay in one place and you drive a clear polar message or polarizing message, some people will rally behind you. Some people will attack

Starting point is 01:51:37 you. Either way, you benefit from it. This is one of the things I love about YouTube. I'm sure you've discovered this too. For anybody out there who's trying to make money on YouTube or grow an audience on YouTube or do anything with YouTube, needs to understand the best comments are oftentimes the worst comments. Because somebody chimes in and talks shit about something, it only instigates more people to come in and leave a comment. And guess what? YouTube wantsments. They just want engagement because engagement means people are on the platform. When there's a split between thumbs up and thumbs down, it means there's polarizing content, which means even more people are going to stay on the platform. So they spread it even further and wider. Right. So you can't be afraid of being polarized and you have to lean into being polarizing. The way we use it at CIA is when you're talking to a spy, when you're talking to somebody and you want them to commit treason against their country, you have to be able to ask a polarizing question to find out whether or not they're going to hint that they would be traitors or whether they are staunch supporters and nationalists. But you have to test that barrier if you're ever going to actually develop the kind of relationship, the kind of

Starting point is 01:52:44 power to convince them to commit treason. It made me think about brands as well, because, you know, there's a lot of brands out there that have done really, really well by standing for something, by being polarizing. Okay. And it was Jane Warring on my podcast that talked about her brand, Dermalogica. And she said to me, she said, you have to be willing to piss off the 80% to get your 20%. She goes, you don't need people to like you. She goes, that's not a brand. You need them to love you or hate you because that's a brand. It's genius. It's absolutely correct.

Starting point is 01:53:16 She is talking about polarizing. She's talking about that no like trust process and getting people to go beyond like into love you or hate you. If they love you or hate you, then they are in the trust side of the no like trust process. They either trust what you say or they trust that they're going to hate what you say. But either way, they're in the trust part of no like trust. I was a kid in my bedroom that was building my business all on my own. One of the websites I used religiously was a website called Fiverr. Fiverr spelled F-I-V-E-R-R.

Starting point is 01:53:53 And Fiverr have just released a tool that I think is a game changer for anybody that's looking for quality freelance support when you're building a product, when you're building a company, when you're building a project. And it's called Neo. You can have a conversation with the AI agent called Neo, tell it about the problem you have, and it will help you find the solution, i.e. it will help you find the perfect freelancer to write a brief for that perfect freelancer. And all you have to do is communicate exactly what your needs are. It will select them, them it'll bring you together it'll update the search results based on your conversation as it evolves and a couple of days ago when i needed a graphic designer for a project i used neo and it got me the perfect freelancer in a fraction of the time go and check it out right now go to fiverr.com slash diary and you can check

Starting point is 01:54:40 neo out for yourself so what else do i need to know about influence and influencing other people? You know, you said persuasion is not the same as, what was the other one? Influence? Influence, yeah. Persuasion and influence are two different things. So what about persuasion then? How do I persuade somebody?

Starting point is 01:54:57 Persuasion is a process that's much easier because it's really just a matter of triggering an emotional response and then guiding rational thought around that emotional response. Honestly, persuasion is what exists far more in the world than influence. Persuasion is what happens in advertising. Persuasion is what happens when you watch a commercial. Persuasion is what happens when you try to convince your kids to brush their teeth at night, or one day you will convince your children to brush their teeth at night. That's all persuasion because you are creating an emotional message. It's a, it's a question of messaging and narrative.

Starting point is 01:55:30 You're creating an emotional message. That emotional message is designed to trigger certain emotion, emotional responses in the target that you're talking to. And then you change the message itself, but you hit on the same emotion. And the reason that you do that is because after they've been hit with enough of the same emotional messages, they start to develop a cognitive, rational narrative that they adopt personally. So the narrative of the deep state came from lots of emotional messages about why you can't trust the government. And then all those emotional messages turned into somebody or a group of people thinking, well, if I can't trust the government, what I can do is trust that the government can't be trusted because there's a shadow government, right? So that's how you essentially, that's how you persuade somebody. So if you want to persuade someone to buy from your coffee shop and not somebody else's coffee shop,

Starting point is 01:56:28 you want to persuade someone to buy a Subaru and not a Nissan, you want to persuade somebody to buy from your sales funnel immediately instead of wait until your third email in your welcome series. It's all a matter of being able to set up a series of emotional messages that drive a rational narrative that they decide for themselves, that brings them to a place where they take an action that you want them to take. Give me an example. Okay. So let's say that you and I are trying to sell. What about this whoop on my wrist? Hashtag add a hashtag investor, hashtag sponsor. What about this whoop on my wrist? Allhtag add, hashtag investor, hashtag sponsor. What about this whoop on my wrist? All right. You understand how a whoop works?

Starting point is 01:57:08 What is it? Tell me what it is. It is a fitness tracker, but it's a sleep tracker. It's a stress tracker. Tracks my heart rate variability. So it's bio data. Yeah. It syncs your bio data in one convenient place.

Starting point is 01:57:22 Yeah. And I can see my friends' bio data as well if they accept. So we can kind of compete a little bit ah so it gives accountability and yeah and a sort of shared mission yeah and community etc yeah right so if you want to persuade people to buy your hashtag sponsor hashtag product hashtag investor what's it called whoop whoop. Whoop.com. So, so. Slash D-O-E-C. Perfect. So if we want people to buy a whoop, we don't tell them buy a whoop because it's an awesome bio tracker that tracks your heart rate and tracks your sleep and tracks your body temperature. We don't tell them that because that's what, there's other tools that do that. What we have to do is give them some kind of emotional message, right?

Starting point is 01:58:07 So first, we're going to choose an audience that we want to create an emotional message for. We're both, we both love the women that we're with. So let's talk about people who are in a serious relationship or a committed relationship. I very much care whether my wife is healthy, whether she's sleeping well, whether she's got high stress. So now I want to craft an emotional message about how Whoop will help me make my marriage better because I'll be able to see what my wife is feeling without having to ask her. Oh, God. What every man wants to be able to read her mind.

Starting point is 01:58:40 Now people are feeling something, right? Sales. That's amazing. Say that again. I'm a guy. So let's come up with another message, another emotional message for the same reason, right? I really don't like bedtime because at bedtime my wife always melts down and yells at the kids. And she melts down because she's had a rough day.

Starting point is 01:59:03 And I'm coming home from a rough day, and I have no idea how rough her day is. And it doesn't matter because now it's bedtime. So if I had a whoop, what I'd be able to do is call my wife on the way home and say, hey, babe, it looks like you've had a rough day. Thanks to your whoop. Why don't you take 30 minutes, go take a bath, do your whole self-care routine first, and I'll deal with the kids and I'll make dinner so that you can calm down and then you can swap out and help me and we can be a team, right? Whoop makes married couples a team again. So you can, now what we're doing is we're, we're messaging to make husbands and boyfriends feel a certain way about, I love her already. I want her to succeed, and I also secretly know that if she succeeds, I succeed, because guess who goes to bed with her at night, right?

Starting point is 01:59:50 That's what we're making them feel. So if we did four, three, four, five messages like that, even if they were bullets on a sales page instead of a phone telecom team, right? If we were to do that, what's the logical, rational outcome that any male in a serious heterosexual relationship is going to land on? They'd take the 30-day free trial. That's exactly what they're going to do.

Starting point is 02:00:13 That's exactly what they're going to do with high probability that is empirically sound, that you can measure through clicks, open rates, and view time. Because you've crafted a persuasive message and what do people typically do they typically brands will typically come out and say something like oh it's a they'll sell it on its features successful successful brands which is the only kind of brand that really exists because you're not a brand until you've had success successful brands will do what we what you and i are talking about but they won't systematize it they'll let it be accidental you've you've had success. Successful brands will do what you and I are talking about, but they won't systematize it. They'll let it be accidental. You've heard of like,

Starting point is 02:00:49 I'm shocked how often advertising agencies create failed ads, like bad ads, because they're just throwing spaghetti at the wall. They're not following a system. They're not following a process

Starting point is 02:00:59 like what we just talked about. Create a series of messages and then create a rational response that's high probability and then find a way to measure it all and then systematize it. And then scale your ad spend to match the thing that you just built, right? That's not what they're thinking. They're thinking, what if we just talk about this? What if we just talk about this? This just happened in the news, let's talk about that. So they're not using a system. The place where most people go wrong

Starting point is 02:01:22 isn't with brands, it's with young entrepreneurs. It's with young entrepreneurs who become so myopically focused on their product that they forget that there's four Ps for marketing. Product is just one of the four, right? There's also price. There's also place. There's also promotion. Promotion is the one that I would say should be swapped with persuasion. Because if you can promote something in a persuasive way, it doesn't really matter what you price it at, doesn't really matter where you put it, and it also doesn't matter what the product is. People will buy it because there's a market for everything. So the place where people go wrong isn't that they're not trying. The place where people go wrong is that they don't realize that talking about the benefits, talking about the rational benefits of the product, is not persuasive. Persuasion starts with an emotional message. How do you translate that then to an interpersonal relationship context

Starting point is 02:02:16 where I'm trying to, you know, convince a, you talked about interviewing earlier. You said that one of your case studies is a guy that kind of learned how to interview. How do I translate that so that if I walk into any interview ever, I'm going to walk out with the job? What do you think every interviewer is looking for? Someone, well, okay, so I've got two answers to this. A, someone to do the job, and then B, someone they like. That's really what they're looking for, is someone they like. I do a lot of interviewing. I spend a lot of my time interviewing. When I'm not doing this, I'm basically interviewing people. So I've come to learn my own biases in that regard a little bit, but you're so right. It's heavily about if you like the person.

Starting point is 02:02:56 Well, guess what? I just taught you a framework for how to get through getting someone to like you, right? So without a doubt, we agree. Well, that was to get me influenced. The framework wasn't it? Know, like, trust. We went through the sense-making framework so that you could go from know to like to trust. So at the top of sense-making, that's when you're in the phase where people like or invested in you. What interviewers really like isn't people that they like it's people who are alike the interviewer really so i guarantee you that the people that you have liked interviewing the most i'm even willing to bet that you will admit in this conversation at some point we'll put that on

Starting point is 02:03:37 the line that a big portion of your hiring is because you see elements of yourself in the people that you hire. I mean, like, I don't consciously know that, but I totally believe it. Because when you see someone who reflects elements of you, you immediately go through the sense-making process and you flip to like and trust. Interesting. So we need to clarify this because when you say elements of myself, there's parts of myself that I'm like, I'd never hire. Correct. But that's not the part of you that you like. Yeah. It's the part of you that you don't like. You trust that part of you to not be good at the job. Yeah. But there's other parts of you that you trust to be good at the job and

Starting point is 02:04:18 that's what you shoot for. Yeah. Right. I'm also willing to bet that there's people that you hire because you know that they're good at areas that you know you're bad at. Yes. So that's all interviews. All interviewers everywhere, what they dream of is that they walk into an interview and across the table is someone almost exactly like them. Who they enjoy talking to, who they can relate to, who they feel instant connection and chemistry with, because then it becomes an enjoyable interview. Because what every interviewer hates is walking into an interview that is draining and terrible and hard and painful. That's what they don't like. And most of the time, the people interviewing are not actually the people who will be the supervisor for the person

Starting point is 02:05:02 that gets hired. Oftentimes, they're just an intermediary interviewer. So all they really want is to just find somebody who meets the qualifications technically, but has some sort of common ground with the interviewer themselves. So how do I make sure I'm that person? You know, what can I do to make sure that, say that you were interviewing me, or say that, let's do it the other way around. I've got the job that I'm looking for, looking to fill, and you've come for an interview today. So I'm going to do, I'm going to go through the sensemaking process. Okay. Right?

Starting point is 02:05:35 As soon as I get on this call with you, I'm new to you. So what does that mean I know? I know that you don't want to be on this call with me. True. Avoidance, I can assume coming in. So what I have to do is I have to keep investing enough to get on this call with me. True. Avoidance, I can assume coming in. So what I have to do is I have to keep investing enough to get through the avoidance phase. Well, what am I going to talk about?

Starting point is 02:05:50 How am I going to invest in this conversation? I'm going to pull as much as I can from verbal and nonverbal cues that you give me. I'm going to look at the decorations on the wall behind you. Whether it's in person or whether it's virtual, I'm going to try to pull from my environment. I see that you're using an iPad. I see that you actually like to write on your iPad. I see that you use

Starting point is 02:06:07 different colors when you write on your iPad. I also see there's a journal under your iPad. I can assume that inside that journal are handwritten notes that are actually done in pen and ink, right? There's certain things that I can start to observe. You have a very clear, you put clear effort into the way that you shave your face. You have a very handsome look to your hair. You keep things short. Thank you so much. You've got the job. You've got the job. You've got the job. No, I don't need to hear it. It's yours.

Starting point is 02:06:30 But I'm going to pull from all of this for the competition phase of the sense-making process. Because all I need to do to get you to comply with my wishes, my wishes are to get the job. What I need to get you to comply with the wishes, I need you to engage in a conversation with me that is competitive, meaning you will invest in me and I will invest in you. Think about how, don't think of competition like a zero-sum game with a winner and a loser. I hate competition. I hate arguing.

Starting point is 02:06:57 That's what most people hear. Most people think of competition as zero-sum game. Somebody wins, somebody loses the competition. Think of it more like a scrimmage in your favorite soccer team, where the red shirts play the green shirts, but it's still the same football club, right? They have spring training for baseball in the United States. It's all the Yankees, but they're just playing the Yankees to practice with each other. What are they doing? They're competing.

Starting point is 02:07:27 They're honing their craft through competition. They're investing in each other, right? They're pitching and batting and trying to strike each other out and trying to catch each other at the bases, but it's all for themselves. It's all to improve the whole of the team. That's the competition that exists in the sensemaking process. I want to invest in you with my thoughts and my ideas and my questions, and I want you to invest in me with your thoughts and your ideas and your questions.

Starting point is 02:07:50 And yes, sometimes they will be different, but in the difference, we will find the similarity. And regardless of whether we find differences or similarities, we are filling the cup of investment to get towards compliance. Okay, so give me a specific example of how you might get me to go into that competition with you. Okay, so I'm going to start in an interview. Most interviewees expect that the interviewer will ask most of the questions. Yeah. I would challenge anybody going into a job interview, ask more questions than the interviewer. Really? Ask more questions than the interviewer. Because when you ask questions, especially open-ended questions, it makes the person you're talking to

Starting point is 02:08:25 feel like they're interesting, feel like they're important, feel like they're special. And guess what's not going to happen with any other interview that day? Nobody is going to ask them questions. So if you were interviewing me for a job and we met on the phone,

Starting point is 02:08:39 I would say, Stephen, thank you very much for making time to talk to me. How's your day today? It's been great. Thank you. I'm really excited for the job. But one of the things I have a question about right away is when I look you up online, it looks like a lot of what you do is marketing. But I don't know if it's like social media marketing or if it's more like an internet marketing,

Starting point is 02:08:59 like advertising. How would you characterize the core function of the business? It's kind of both. We do all of the above, paid marketing, all kinds of marketing. Which one is your favorite? My favorite's probably social media marketing, I think. Is it because social media is so dynamic and always changing, or do you like social media marketing for some other reason? Yeah, and also I just think it's very much the future in many respects. So I think it's the fastest growing medium.

Starting point is 02:09:22 So that's kind of where we focus. I also think it's the future. And I spend so much time on social media and my family spends so much time on social media that I really feel like if you want to connect with somebody, you have to be in the social media world because it feels like a simulated relationship. I completely agree. So, and then I'd start asking the questions. And you would ask a question and then I would answer your question, but I would still continue to show investment into you by asking questions. And what does that do?

Starting point is 02:09:49 So I come away from that interaction, and you've asked me a lot of questions. What do I come away feeling? You tell me. What does it feel like when people ask you questions? Feels like you're building a relationship. Feels like you care. Feels like you've thought critically before you came here. Yeah. Feels like you're prepared. Feels like you care. Feels like you've thought critically before you came here. Feels like you prepared. Feels like you're curious. And the opposite, well, there's two

Starting point is 02:10:10 opposites. One opposite is I just pepper you with questions and then you leave. And the other opposite is that someone that just talks the whole time, like you pepper me with questions. I was in, I've had a couple of interviews and two, I remember two last week. Part of my feedback was I basically didn't say anything. And it's funny, I actually said to my chief of staff, I said, oh, God, the interview was an hour long, and I go, gosh, I didn't say anything in the whole hour. And do you know what I came away feeling? I came away feeling that if that's what the job working with them

Starting point is 02:10:42 is going to be like, I don't want to work with them. Because for one hour I sat there and this person just like, at me. And now you say it. Now I kind of understand why I felt that way. Because you do want people to ask you questions. And you, it's, I think it's that, but also part of me was worried that every day

Starting point is 02:11:02 this person is going to just like kill my eardrums. Or is it just the ego part where I'm just like, be interested in me? I don't know. Or is it both? Well, first of all, I am not advocating peppering with questions. So I want to make sure that we don't give anybody the mistaken idea that rapid fire questions are the way to go. Yeah. I was giving short answers. This is the problem. It's all good. Because what the core thing to understand here is you didn't like being spoken at. They were talking all the time, which means they weren't asking you questions. They asked me, we're in our interview, they asked me zero questions. And when I said to them,

Starting point is 02:11:37 have you got any questions you'd like to ask me? They asked me one, but that was actually just teeing them up for another 20 minutes. I walked away and logically I rationalized it to my team. I was like, I think that person would be quite difficult to deal with because I think they'd be quite distracting. And this particular role is working with alongside me personally every single day. And I just thought, gosh, I'm not going to get anything done. But maybe that was a prefrontal cortex. I think that your decision was 100% correct. But what I want to do is I want to juxtapose that process against the person who would have asked you questions.

Starting point is 02:12:11 Which I experience a lot. So if people ask you questions, how do you feel at the end of those calls? I feel like the person, I feel like they're more thoughtful and I feel like they're smarter because why the hell would you come to an interview and not ask the person questions?

Starting point is 02:12:27 You're also making a commitment for your entire life to this company, this job, to this person. You want to make sure it's correct. So a smart person would be interviewing me as well because they value themselves. So if I wanted to win you as the interviewer, and I wanted to win that by making you feel like you and I were similar people. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. What you just said is why the hell wouldn't you ask a bunch of

Starting point is 02:12:51 questions? Which makes me think that what you believe is if you want to work for a company for the rest of your life, you want to go in there asking a bunch of questions. Yeah. So when somebody comes in asking questions to you, that checks the box of this person is thoughtful. This person is committed. This person is responsible. This person is committed, this person is responsible, this person is doing what I would do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that means on the sense-making, no-like-trust framework,

Starting point is 02:13:12 you're going to fall into trust for that person much faster than you're going to fall into trust for the person who comes and word vomits on you. And that's all we're doing. We're not saying that every employer is going to be the right employer for you. But what we're saying is if you want to take your probability of winning an interview from, I don't know what my probability is, to you have a solid, predictable 30% chance of winning this interview, it really is as simple as going in there with the idea to

Starting point is 02:13:43 win the interviewer. Read their body language. Listen to their verbal cues. Hear the things they talk about. Reflect and mirror their behavior and their terminology, their tone of voice, how fast the cadence of their speech. Reflect that back to them. And then use this process of asking questions, open-ended questions that give you more information that you can turn into knowledge, that youended questions that give you more information that

Starting point is 02:14:05 you can turn into knowledge, that you can ask questions about to create that flywheel of information, knowledge, and experience that we talked about. This framework that you call RICE, reward, ideology, coercion, ego. After you said that, I started to kind of see it everywhere in my life. And even in the context of an interview, I notice it sometimes now. Can you explain what the framework is before we start talking about it? Because you're better explaining it than I will be. So R.I.S.E. is a framework that we use to understand the core motivations that exist inside of all people.

Starting point is 02:14:37 And it's an acronym. R stands for reward. I stands for ideology. C stands for coercion. E stands for ego. And the idea is that the core motivation of all people to do anything that they would ever do, the motivation, not the manipulation, but the core motivation is tied to one predominant of those four core motivators. And the other three

Starting point is 02:14:59 are always still present, but at a lower level. So just like you said, once you recognize that all people are motivated by these same four core motivations, you do see it everywhere. So in terms of strength, you said to me last time that ideology was the strongest. Correct. I think you then said that ego was the second strongest. Correct again, sir. You said reward was the third strongest and coercion was the weakest. Yes, sir. I know this because I did a tour, and I played you saying that in every country that I went to on stage for about two minutes. So I know this really well. My memory is not that good.

Starting point is 02:15:32 I've been talking about this to about 35,000 people in Australia and everywhere. I am flattered to have traveled with you all over the world. Well, yeah. I've got some photos I'll show you later. But as part of that, I really started to see it everywhere else in my life. So I'd come to an interview with a candidate and the candidate would turn to me and I would hear them repeating back to me things that I've said in my book or things that I've said in an interview. So people know that I'm very pro like experimentation, for example. And I use this like increasing my rate

Starting point is 02:16:00 of experimentation, increasing my rate of failure, terms that I use, 1%. I use this term all the time to describe marginal gains and this sort of marginal process of improvement. And so I would come to interviews and I started to notice that people were like repeating my ideology in business back to me in those interviews. And it fucking worked. Even though I knew it.

Starting point is 02:16:21 And one of the things I did actually is I went back through my own personal history and I looked at key moments where my life had changed. So in the first email, this is the email that got me my first investor, which took me from being this broke shoplifting student to being a business person and then sent me on my mission. And then this is the email that got me the camera equipment, which helped me launch the marketing of my business. It got me 10,000 pounds, about 10,000 pounds worth of free camera equipment. And these were both cold emails that I sent. And with your framework in mind, I went back to kind of try and understand where I deployed

Starting point is 02:16:54 these elements of reward, ideology, coercion, MIGO. And I think they're quite present in my emails. So here's what I'm going to do. I've got the email in front of me. So anyone that's watching this on video can take a look at this email if you want to see what I was like when I was that age. I want you to tell me how good I did in terms of reward, ideology, coercion, and ego. And I'll put this on the screen. If you want to, because it is screen recording, you can circle the parts you're referring to so everyone else can see.

Starting point is 02:17:23 Hello, sir. My name's... So my name's... Did I spell it wrong? That is awesome. So my name's Stephen Bartlett, and I'm... You definitely... I can see why you are struggling academically.

Starting point is 02:17:42 Yes, I can't spell. I'm an 18-year-old guy from the UK with an entrepreneurial head on my shoulders. I have ran several small businesses since I was 12 and made relatively decent amounts of money doing so. Last year, I was featured on a BBC program here in the UK for being a young entrepreneur, and I was given a few nice things along with that, but that doesn't really mean much to me. This is embarrassing.

Starting point is 02:18:02 For the last four months, me and a friend have been working tirelessly on an exciting new project that I want to share with you. This is really sweet to see the 18-year-old you here, man. I've been tuned into your blog for a long time now, and I'm familiar with your story, so I would love your opinion of what I'm doing. So this is really good stuff. Your blog, your story, your opinion. It also shows that you were researching him in advance, which makes me feel like the only reason you're reaching this person and reaching out to this person at all is because you already know that your story mimics his story. Correct. He actually had started a pretty similar student website in the same city. It had gone so well, it had been sold, and he now lived in Monaco and was like a super rich millionaire.

Starting point is 02:18:55 Was this person also, did they also struggle in school? I actually don't know. I don't know that much. So that's super interesting to me. Okay, I'm going to keep going. All the designs attached in the document are my own. That's interesting, too. You're basically giving away IP up front and showing that you prepared more than just writing an email, which is, again, feeding into some of the ego and the reward because this person is whatever they see in that document they're going to benefit from it i made i made on publisher and at the moment i have no expertise in web design whatsoever i'm at the stage now where i'm looking for a mentor investor to guide me in getting the website

Starting point is 02:19:36 live so please let me know what you think this was super smart not asking for an investor but asking for a mentor because what that did is it deloaded the pressure. So if they had read this far, if they got to this place, you weren't asking for money. You were potentially just asking for some attention and some guidance. Let me know what you think. Although we have had a few cheeky offers from local venture capitalists, we are still looking for the right person.

Starting point is 02:20:03 And after reading through your website, I believe you are that person. Kind regards and thanks for your time, Stephen, Steve, Bartlett. So it's interesting to me because you made a very strong ego play with referencing all of his success. Yeah. The ego was the strongest thing that you leaned on. Showing that you were aware, showing that you knew the person, knowing that the story was going to resonate with him.

Starting point is 02:20:31 You may have accidentally also, honestly, man, seeing the typos that are in here, you may have accidentally triggered a response inside him that was reciprocity. Either somebody gave him a chance when he didn't know if somebody would give him a chance, or maybe he struggled in school, or maybe he has a son or a sister or a brother who struggled in school, because your typos are really quite significant. There's no way somebody would read this and think that you were a well-educated 18-year-old. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah. So you may have really struggled. You may have accidentally stumbled

Starting point is 02:21:03 into something awesome. I don't know if you're still in contact with this person, but I would ask that question. We've got four core motivators. Ego is very clear. Every time you talk to them or this person about them, you're stroking their ego. And you're not doing it in a glaring way. However, ideology is the strongest of the motivators.

Starting point is 02:21:23 When I see you say that you are an 18-year-old guy from the UK, what goes through my head is the ideology of who doesn't want to give a brave kid writing them an opportunity? What millionaire out there, what decimillionaire or centimillionaire or ultra high net worth, if they get the email at all, who doesn't want to at least give this 18-year-old brave, brazen kid a chance? Because you know what? I would have done something like this when I was 18. Right? And now you could be tapping on ideology without even knowing it.

Starting point is 02:22:00 Well, he did. He did. He started a student website in the same city at roughly the same age. So there you go. You already knew that there were going to be commonalities between the two of you. You were winning the interviewer

Starting point is 02:22:13 just as much as you were leveraging the Rice framework. What about the other email? So there's another one on that, which is here. Just take a look at it if you could. Okay. This one, yeah. So this was the email that I sent. I sent 10 of these emails out to every camera company I could,

Starting point is 02:22:31 Samsung, Panasonic, et cetera. And within 48 hours of Panasonic receiving that email, a guy called Lee at Panasonic, I literally just, because you were coming, I went on his LinkedIn to see where he now works. So thank you, by the way, Lee, that used to work at Panasonic, for giving me a shot. Lee from Panasonic responded to that email that you have in front of you and said, what kind of cameras do you want?

Starting point is 02:22:52 We've got some returns. I'll send them to your doorstep. Within 48 hours of that email, a big box of cameras, like they were brand new to me, brand new spanking cameras came to my doorstep, multiple of them. And that allowed me to do the marketing for my business at the very early stage. Again, it was just a cold email. That's amazing, man. All right.

Starting point is 02:23:10 Hello there. My name is Stephen Bartlett. I'm a 19-year-old student. And I'm part of an upcoming exciting student website. So in March last year, I began developing an idea I had that focused on bringing together the student community. Several months later, I have the backing and support of all the universities in the Northwest who are working with us every step of the way. I'm going to circle that for sure because you're triggering a little bit of competition. You wait till the end.

Starting point is 02:23:45 Which is really smart. And you're showing credibility with the backing of multiple universities. All right. Our team includes media journalism students who have media and journalism students who have a passion for producing media content. It also includes our web developer who loves building cool websites. It includes the universities and the university unions who are supporting us constantly. And it includes our mentors who are social media and web experts. You are really hitting reward high here because you're basically saying all of these people are going to know that you're helping. Like all these universities,

Starting point is 02:24:20 all these students, media and journalism, guess what they both need? Cameras. So you're really leaning hard into the reward here. And it's pretty awesome. You are also hitting on ideology because if it is a competitive business, it wants to compete. It doesn't want to be second to Subway or Domino's. It wants to be side by side with Subway and Domino's, especially in 2012 when both of those companies were pretty strong leaders in the industry. This is going to be a national student website and one feature of our website involves us producing our own video content from the student community. This can range from students interviewing famous people, students reviewing student events, to student reporters covering news events. In order for this to be the case, we are in need of an HD video camera and wanted to

Starting point is 02:25:03 know if Viho would be kind enough to donate one. In return, we would feature Viho on our website as a sponsor. We would also promote the camera and Viho at the end of all videos that we make. As a young group of students, this would really mean a lot to us, and we would be sure to show our appreciation in every opportunity. Ideology, again, talking about students and talking about the youth there's no real coercion in this for sure and i would also say that ego was was not really you focused on reward rather than ego because you didn't know who lee was so it was a bit of

Starting point is 02:25:38 coercion in the one that i sent to the investor wasn't there because i said um we've had some offers from venture capitalists, which is kind of saying that I have other offers. Kind of, but that's not coercive. Coercion means that you are leaning into the shame, the guilt,

Starting point is 02:25:55 some sort of negative feeling. Competition is not a negative feeling. Oh, really? Competition is how we build trust. Okay, so me mentioning that I have other opportunities isn't coercion. You should always mention that you have other opportunities, even if you don't. Okay. so me mentioning that I have other opportunities isn't coercion. You should always mention

Starting point is 02:26:05 that you have other opportunities, even if you don't. Okay. Always. It's one of those areas where you always have other opportunities. You could always take the opportunity

Starting point is 02:26:15 of stop trying. So there's other opportunities always. Is there ever a place for coercion, which is the C in the Rice framework, in emails like this? Yes, there's a place for it, but you have to use it gingerly. Because the problem with coercion is once you use it, you violate the trust that you've built. Okay, so you can basically use it once. Or if you,

Starting point is 02:26:40 you, once you employ it, you essentially have to continually use it because once it's no longer useful to you, then the person that you're coercive, the person that you're coercing is free again. Coercion, if you think of coercion, it's like a cage. So you get somebody into the cage and then you have control over them in the cage. But once you open them, open the door of the cage, they're going to run out and never get back in the cage. You talked about these four Cs of influence. Have we covered that? The four Cs that we're talking about are the four Cs of building influence rapidly, specifically building influence in a workplace environment, right?

Starting point is 02:27:18 It's consideration is the first C, consistency, collaboration, and control. Those are your four Cs. When you consider consideration, consideration means I put myself in your shoes. I consider what life is like for you. You're my boss. You're my coworker. You have a family. You go home. You have, you're trying to exercise. You're trying to make a living. You're trying to do all the same things I am. So if I consider your point of view faster than you consider my point of view, I have the advantage. That's what the first C is, consideration. That's really perspective again, right? It's perspective again, exactly. Consideration is technically a legal term. So attorneys and lawyers all know what consideration is, but it's the rest of us who have not gone to law school

Starting point is 02:28:02 that don't recognize that consideration is another word for perspective, but it's also a legal term that stands for the same thing. Consistency is the act of being consistent. What's powerful is that very few people are actually consistent. Most people are inconsistent. Think about the friend that you were talking about on LinkedIn who can't even have a consistent message, can't even have a consistent opinion about alcohol, right? The fastest way to burn influence, the fastest way to burn your persuasive ability and burn your sense-making relationship with people is to be inconsistent because nobody wants to invest relationship into an inconsistent person. Inconsistent in your perspectives, your values, your beliefs. Your actions, what you say, in your perspectives, your values, your beliefs.

Starting point is 02:28:45 Your actions, what you say, what you do, what you spend your money on. Like, consistency is what breeds comfort and confidence in people. It's what builds influence. Because when the rubber hits the road, when bullets start flying, when all hell breaks loose, you want to know that the person that you believe will be there will be there. And a consistent person is somebody that you believe will be consistent. Even if you don't like them. Even if you don't like them, right? The third C is collaboration. Collaboration becomes really powerful because what most people are doing is they're trying to find some sort of compromise. And a compromise really just means you don't get what you want and I don't get what I want. And we

Starting point is 02:29:24 find something in the middle that neither of us wants, but we'll both accept. That's a shit deal. What we really actually want is not compromise. What we want is collaboration. Collaboration means you bring your idea, I bring my idea, and together we create a third better outcome

Starting point is 02:29:42 for both of us. That's what collaboration is. That's what makes collaboration different than compromise. What we want from our government is a collaborative government, not a government that compromises with each other. And yet what the popular public narrative is, is that we need a government that compromises. Well, shit, a government that compromises is always losing.

Starting point is 02:30:02 A government that collaborates is always gaining. So the third C is collaboration. If you find somebody who is considerate, who is also consistent, and also collaborative, do you see what we're building here? We're building influence. And then the fourth C is control. And control is the one that is super important. And control is the thing that people drop all the time when they're trying to build influence. Control means that you capitalize, you execute on all the social benefit that you've

Starting point is 02:30:31 built with these first three C's and now you actually take the action to get what you want. You ask for the cameras, you ask for the opportunity, you ask for the interview, you ask for the favor, right? Or you interview. You ask for the favor, right? Or you go out and you tell the boss, I'm ready to be the one that gets promoted to the manager job. I'm the one that gets to go on vacation for Christmas. I'm the one that gets to do this.

Starting point is 02:30:54 And then you cycle back to the fact that you've done the other three Cs, right? And you're doing it in a way that exercises your control over the situation. The four Cs are the tool to build influence in a professional environment because the actual thing that you're building, the term that we use, we don't call it influence inside the walls at Langley. We call it social capital.

Starting point is 02:31:19 Where's Langley? Langley, Virginia is the headquarters for CIA. Okay. So we call it social capital because just like real currency is capital, when you engage in the process of building influence using the four Cs, what you're actually building is a savings account of social capital. You're building reciprocity. You're building leverage. You're building favors. You're building IOUs. So when you have this pile of money, the only thing that you can do with a pile of money

Starting point is 02:31:51 is spend it. So you have to spend it to get what you want. And that's what the control is. That's what the C is in the four Cs of building influence through social capital. Is that what great leaders do? What great leaders do is they find either they're taught a process similar to this, or they learn the process over time. But essentially, what the dark side to leadership that people don't like to admit to is that very rarely are leaders well-liked. Leaders are respected, leaders are trusted, but leaders are very rarely liked. They might be liked 100 years later like artists,

Starting point is 02:32:34 but usually in the moment they are not well-liked. And it's because they know how to exercise control. Nobody likes to be controlled. Nobody likes to feel like they are under control. Nobody likes to feel leveraged. Nobody likes to feel sold. Nobody likes to feel pressure. But when you have that pot of social capital, when you have the leverage, when you have the power, you have to exercise it to prosecute the vision that you're trying to build. So if you're the type of leader that does all these other things, they're super considerate of other people, they're collaborative, they're consistent, but you never exercise control. You're not a leader.

Starting point is 02:33:13 What are you? You're an assertive follower. You're a reliable partner. You're a peer. You're a good friend. Are you a coward? No, I wouldn't say that you're a coward because remember,

Starting point is 02:33:30 cowardice is the opposite of courage. And courage is defined by showing courage or showing, doing the thing that you're afraid of. I mean, it takes a bit of courage to exercise control. Absolutely. But not everybody wants control. There are lots of people out there who don't want to be a leader. If you are a leader, if you want to be a leader and don't exercise control over the leverage and the social capital that you've built, you are not a leader. You are an aspiring leader. You are a developing leader. You are a hopeful leader. But you are not a leader.

Starting point is 02:33:59 Because a leader has to be able to take action that inspires others to follow. Even if they don't like you. Even if they don't like you. Even if they don't like you. Because here's the reality of it. A leader is not what you claim to be. A leader is what you demonstrate to be. Because a leader who leads an army of none is not a leader. And someone who is leading an army but doesn't call themselves a leader, still a leader. What do you think make other sort of core components of a great leader? You go to a lot of companies, you speak to a lot of executive leaders. What are the ones that you respect the most, whether they're clients of yours or people you've seen within history? There's an element of honesty that's critical to a leader.

Starting point is 02:34:46 Like you have to be honest and you have to be objective about what you see, what you feel, what you experience. Because true leadership means that you have to execute against a vision and you have to inspire people to follow you. If you're not honest about why you do what you do, if you're not objective about the current reality, then there's no way that you're going to be able to create, to cast a vision that's realistic and ignites an audience of people to follow you towards that vision. So honesty is critical. Objectivity is critical. Leaders also have to have an incredible amount of courage because they're always doing something that they're afraid of. They're always taking the next risk.

Starting point is 02:35:35 They're always challenging the misbelief or the incorrect information. They're always upsetting their spouse. They're always missing out on time with their children. They're always stepping on the toes of half of their company. They're always upsetting somebody. You can't be a leader without having the courage to hurt 80% of the people that you talk to.

Starting point is 02:35:58 Because if they're not completely in line with the vision that you're trying to lead towards, they need to be brought in line with the vision that you're leading. And that sometimes that means you're going to tell them bad news. Sometimes that means you're going to slap them over the back of the head. Sometimes that means you're going to cut them off and let them float. So you have to have courage, which specifically means doing the thing that you're afraid of to be a leader, which is why, I mean, to me, the most important component of being a leader is accepting that you will be lonely forever. That's the unfortunate fact of being a leader. It's lonely at the top.

Starting point is 02:36:40 And every general has talked about it. Every president has felt that there's a reason presidents go gray. Michelle Obama will look very good when she's gray. But you have to be willing to be lonely. If you're not willing to be lonely, then you're not courageous enough to be lonely. Then you're not fit to lead. You walk through life like seeing people,

Starting point is 02:37:02 be honest, as kind of puppets. Not puppets, no. Not puppets. I do walk through life like seeing people, be honest, as kind of puppets. Not puppets, no. Not puppets. I do walk through life seeing people as worthy or unworthy investments. Interesting. Where, because, especially like, to kind of bring it in full circle back to losing my grandmother, we only have a certain number of minutes, seconds, breaths. So I feel like I was blessed and privileged to get the skills to rapidly identify the people who are worth my breath,

Starting point is 02:37:38 the people who I can invest in with my words and my thoughts and my actions and my time. And those people will create an ROI that doesn't pay me back, but pays back my children and my children's children. Because the people who learn and who apply and who support the work that I'm doing are the people who will make the future, the world of tomorrow. And the world of tomorrow is not for me. The world of tomorrow is not for me. The world of tomorrow is for my family. So I feel like, unfortunately, that is what a lot of my relationships boil down to. And the people that I... Transactional. But all relationships are

Starting point is 02:38:16 transactional. We just don't like to admit it. For me, I feel like because I already know all relationships are transactional, I now cultivate the transactions that yield the most rather than transactions that just happen where so many people are trapped in relationships where they don't have any return on investment from that relationship. Or even worse, they keep investing in the relationship and it's a money pit and it just keeps taking and taking and it never gives back. And they don't know how to get out of that relationship or they feel trapped or they feel lost or they feel abandoned. If I had to pick between being somebody who literally looks at everybody as a win or lose transaction or being a person who's constantly investing in the wrong person, I'm very happy to be where I'm at on this fence. Does that change your life in some respects? Because if I looked at every real,

Starting point is 02:39:10 what people will be thinking, they'll be thinking, oh God, Andrew, that's a sad life. That's a sad life just to see everything as a transaction. It's not a sad life. When seeing things as transactions is not the same thing as accepting that everything is a transaction. I don't see everything as a transaction. I don't see my children as some sort of return on investment. I don't see time with my wife as some sort of return on investment. I don't see it as a transaction, but I accept that what it is is a transaction. They want love. They want attention. They want affection. In return for that love, time, attention, and affection, they will give love, time, attention, and affection. And we will build

Starting point is 02:39:52 positive memories for the future. It's transactional. If I want my wife to be okay with me taking a 12-day work trip, I have to put a little bit of time and effort into the 12 days before the 12 days that I leave because I have to build some goodwill. Like, we understand that this is how it works intrinsically. We just don't want to accept that what we're talking about is a transaction, going to the bank and saying, I'm going to take a loan in a little while, so I need to fill out my paperwork and get pre-approval. Like, it's the same concept. It's the same process. It doesn't mean I see everything through a lens of cold, hard transactional relationships. I see a lot of life that way, but I don't see all of life that way. And the parts of life that I do see as transactional,

Starting point is 02:40:37 I leverage that perspective so that I can maximize my investment in the relationships that I do not see as transactional. It's so true. I think the big takeaway for me and all of that as well is just thinking about the relationships that are really doing nothing for you. I've got a couple of relationships like that, that really probably aren't doing anything for me. And it sucks. Even at our level, it sucks because you still see yourself doing it. Yeah. Like, why am I doing this? Like, shouldn't I know better by now and inevitably like you come back it's like getting drunk i guess you don't know what it's like to do that most people know what it's like i used to get drunk you get drunk you get sick from being drunk and what's

Starting point is 02:41:15 the next thing you tell yourself i'm never getting drunk again it happens again and you feel like an idiot it happens it happens in business. It happens in life. It happens everywhere. Some people do really waste their entire lives just, like, entertaining relationships that are doing zero for them. They, like, go for lunch and brunch and, like, the two-hour phone call and the small talk on WhatsApp just for nothingness. They're pouring all of their life into these nothing relationships, these sewers, these leeches of relationships. If they don't recognize that it's a transaction.

Starting point is 02:41:49 And they ask themselves continually, what is this doing for me? Correct. And then you can't feel guilty asking yourself, what is this relationship doing for me? That is just you being objective. That is just you being focused on accountability and honesty like any good leader should be. When's your book coming out? You've got a book, your new book that you told me last time was on the way, but the CIA weren't approving it. Correct.

Starting point is 02:42:12 They have still not approved it. We are actually expecting by end of month this month to get their formal approval. Once it happens, I will let you know for sure. Because trust me, my publisher is also very nervous about when CIA approves the book. So the book is called Red Cell. Red Cell. Probably going to be released in summer 2025. But pre-orders will be available maybe by the time this episode comes out.

Starting point is 02:42:36 If that's the case, we'll link it below. Oh, that would be exciting. The pre-orders. Absolutely. Very exciting. What is the book about? The book is finally my wife and I get to release the details of our operational history together. And that is what The Red Cell is about.

Starting point is 02:42:50 Oh, wow. It's about what we did together in the field as a tandem clandestine couple, how we operated, how we worked together, how we managed our marriage and our operations and the team that we built around us. It was all very unique at the time, and we're very proud of it. But it's sensitive, and CIA does not like telling sensitive stories. For anybody else that wants to check out where you can support them in the meantime, Everyday Spy is the key place to go to the website, everydayspy.com. Absolutely, everydayspy.com. You can also find us on YouTube on the Everyday Spy podcast.

Starting point is 02:43:22 And of course, you can find us on social media everywhere at Everyday Spy. I love your channel. I really love it. I appreciate it. I really love all the work that you do. And I think it's so important because you're so honest. And there's very little bullshit with you. There's very little virtue signaling,

Starting point is 02:43:42 which means that we can just be grownups and talk about the reality of things. We don't have to fluff around things. So it's really, really, really great to talk to you all the time. And I think that's also why you're so resonant because people, they trust you. And it goes back to what we were saying. Even if they don't like me. Even if they don't like you, they trust you. I think people like you, people love you. People in our comment section, obviously you get the conspiracy theory lot. I think you're still like part of the CIA or whatever, but side of that people are so so so um happy and they do appreciate

Starting point is 02:44:10 the work you're doing because it really it does help people change their lives because as you said so many people are trapped in that shed and as you said they know that there's something out there better but and they've tried a bunch of shit and they they're still in the shed. And you give them a rubric, a framework, to start to run tests in their life to see if there's a way out of the shed. And it's not going to be simple, and it's not going to be easy, because if it was, it wouldn't be worth it. But there is a way, and that hope alone, I think, can really get people off the sofa and towards the life that they deserve.

Starting point is 02:44:41 So thank you, Andrew. We have a closing tradition, where the last guest leaves a question for the next. Question left for you is, presumably, you either do or don't lean toward believing in an afterlife or something after death. If your belief were proven definitely wrong, how would it change your behavior today?

Starting point is 02:45:04 So which one do you believe, I guess? I believe in an afterlife. Interesting. I believe in an afterlife. I don't think I can conceptualize what that would be, but I believe that there is something after we pass. And if that was proven definitively wrong, you know what's really fucked up

Starting point is 02:45:24 is if that was proven definitively wrong, I know what's really fucked up is if that was proven definitively wrong, I would probably still challenge the proof. It would be hard to let that go. It would be hard to trust the proof. You know, I guess the answer then to the question is, how would my life change? I would spend a lot more time thinking and challenging the belief that I currently spend no time reflecting or thinking about. Does that make sense? So yeah, you'd spend more time challenging the belief that there's an afterlife. Yes, which is kind of crazy. I would spend more time and energy challenging the proof that proves my fundamental belief wrong. I would spend more time in that thought process than I spend in that thought process now. Why? To try and change it? it would create such a sense of dissonance in my head because I've believed it for so long

Starting point is 02:46:28 and now it's definitively proved wrong. It's not like you can just flip a coin and be like, oh, I was wrong, moving on. But in this example, you would basically be there. You'd be proven. I know. So you'd be convinced. So you wouldn't actually be interrogating it

Starting point is 02:46:40 because that's what you would believe. So I guess you're right. If the question is assuming that as soon as the proof comes out i accept the proof and i accept the new reality yeah i can i can that's a fair question too that's a fair interpretation um i think i would probably be that much more cautious and careful with the life that i have to know that there is no second life. There is no second. There's no after chance.

Starting point is 02:47:08 There is no coming back and visiting your children in their dreams. There is no meeting them in heaven. There is no nirvana. There really is just black after you pass. Would make me that much more invested in the moments that I have now. Because it's all I got. Would it change any decision you've made? In the past?

Starting point is 02:47:30 Yeah, just like the day-to-day decisions. Would you? Damn, it would. Hold, this question sucks, man. Good question, shitty answer. If I knew that and I had to go back, I would change all sorts of things. I would take less risks, like less physical bodily risks. I would have never learned how to ride a motorcycle. I would have never skydived. I would have never learned to free dive. I would have never learned to sail.

Starting point is 02:47:54 I would have never joined the CIA. If I knew there was no chance that this is the one chance you get, I would probably live a very dull, boring, and conservative life. Do you know what's interesting? I don't think there's an afterlife. And I skydive. And I think I take risks. But I'm okay with the fact that I don't think anything happens after I die. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:48:21 Because I think I was totally okay. Someone said, I think it was Ricky Gervais said this once. I was, how did you feel a hundred years ago? I want,

Starting point is 02:48:32 I want us, I want us to have a beer six weeks after you have a baby and talk about this question again. Can we put that on a calendar? I guess we can't put that on a calendar yet or else, or else you have a much happier partner.

Starting point is 02:48:48 Because children change everything, too. Children change everything when it comes to your tolerance for risking yourself. I know you're telling the truth, A, because I believe you, and B, because my brother, who's a year older than me, has three kids

Starting point is 02:49:05 and he said something very peculiar to me one day i said jason why don't you fly to london and he goes steven and he's a and he's i think he was an investment bank for 12 years actuarial scientist so literally his job was to like assess probability probability super genius at maths and he was like i know this makes no sense, but I don't want to get on a plane if my kids aren't on it. I love this. I had a similar conversation with somebody recently, and they were shocked when I said almost the same thing.

Starting point is 02:49:44 Because they were like, why would you want to get on a plane if you're afraid of getting on a plane without your kids it's because you're afraid the plane will crash and i was like correct well then if you're willing to get on a plane with your kids aren't you afraid it will crash and for me i'm like of course it could still crash but now i'm i can be with my kids to comfort them in that moment rather than they have to live a life without dad's comfort and without dad forever. I don't know why it makes sense to me, but I know that it makes sense to me, and I know that half of the people I explain that to think it's really fucked up. Maybe people that don't have kids, but that's what my brother said to me,

Starting point is 02:50:21 and I sat there because he's such a logical, smart guy, and he knows the probability. He said that because I know the probabilities of planes. I know they're safe because this makes no sense. But this is how I feel. I don't want to get on a plane and come to London

Starting point is 02:50:32 unless my kids are on the plane with me. And I thought that makes no sense to me. And the way you've explained it does help me to understand. So maybe six weeks after I have a kid, maybe I will be a bit more attached to some kind of afterlife. Or maybe not.

Starting point is 02:50:46 I mean, and I'm not saying the afterlife. I'm saying that the reckless, like the fact that you take, yeah, you're not afraid of death right now. Yeah, I'm not afraid of death. No. I feel like when you have children, it changes because now it's not just your life that you're impacting. That's so crazy. That's so interesting. And I know that there's so many parents that are about to DM LinkedIn me, Instagram me, and also you and say exactly that they're going to agree with you.

Starting point is 02:51:15 So Andrew, thank you. It's been such an honor. I really, really enjoy speaking to you. So thank you again for coming to do this. And thank you so much for the value you brought to the audience because, you know, you're very much in every sense of the word, one of a kind. So I appreciate you. Stephen, I appreciate being here And thank you so much for the value you've brought to the audience because, you know, you're very much in every sense of the word, one of a kind. So I appreciate you. Stephen, I appreciate being here. Thank you very much for the friendship and for the opportunity.

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The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - The Manipulation Expert: CIA Spy Reveals You're Being Controlled! "You're Being Manipulated Without Realising It"! Andrew Bustamante

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