0:00:04 We were in deep trouble at Netflix and we had losses of about 50 million dollars
0:00:07 We have got to sell this sucker fast
0:00:14 Mark Randolph is an American Tech entrepreneur the co-founder and first CEO of Netflix with a career panning numerous startups and ventures
0:00:21 Mark’s expertise in innovation leadership and business strategy is unparalleled. August 1997 Netflix was founded
0:00:25 Yes, and the reality is the idea was ridiculous. It didn’t work
0:00:33 Nobody would rent DVDs by mail, but with over 40 years of being an entrepreneur. I’ve learned every idea is bad
0:00:35 We just don’t know why they’re bad yet
0:00:40 The important thing is how clever can you be to come up with a quick and cheap way to test it?
0:00:43 For example, we thought let’s just have a subscription and no late fees
0:00:47 It was a ridiculous idea, but when we tested it people loved it
0:00:55 The Netflix DVD service has changed the world you explored selling Netflix to Amazon two years after you’d launched for probably
0:01:01 $10 to $15 million. That’s not a bad return for 12 to 18 months work
0:01:06 But I thought it was much more interesting to take the shot and see what Netflix could become
0:01:10 But all of a sudden in a matter of a week or two in spring of 2000
0:01:16 We were gonna go broke being successful. We tried going to blockbuster for months, but they weren’t gonna save us
0:01:19 They were gonna compete with us. Netflix wouldn’t have survived
0:01:24 But there’s a story which has not really been told which took one of Netflix’s biggest
0:01:29 Competiments and turned it into one of its biggest assets. So
0:01:40 In this season of your life
0:01:47 If you could consolidate your mission and the work that you’re doing across the content you produce the people you speak to
0:01:52 Your professional endeavors if you could consolidate that into a singular focused mission
0:01:56 What exactly would that mission be in this season of your life?
0:01:59 For me at this point in my life, it’s all about mentorship
0:02:06 You know, I’ve done seven startups. I kind of recognized quite a while ago. I do not have
0:02:12 The appetite to do another one. It’s that seven by 24
0:02:15 Focus that I
0:02:20 Don’t want to do anymore. I have other things that I would love to have spending time on
0:02:22 But you can’t turn it off
0:02:26 I’ve also realized that over 40 years of being an entrepreneur
0:02:31 I’ve learned a few things about how to actually play this game. And so
0:02:36 My mission now is how do I pay that forward? How do I help other people?
0:02:43 Either have a shot at it like I did or if they’re already playing the game. How do I try and increase their odds of success?
0:02:48 You wrote this book called that will never work. Why?
0:02:54 Books are painful and hard to write. What is it that you want someone who gets to the end of this book to walk away with?
0:02:56 I’ve come to believe
0:02:58 that
0:03:06 Almost all of the information that people receive from the general media about entrepreneurship is wrong
0:03:09 It glorifies
0:03:15 Entrepreneurship and what I think is a damaging way. You watch these movies that are about entrepreneurship
0:03:21 And it’s all about driving around in the fast cars and having the parties and that’s not it
0:03:22 It’s a very lonely profession
0:03:28 so in a simple answer the reason I wrote the book is I wanted to give people a true story of
0:03:34 What it really means to come up with a crazy idea that everyone thinks is never going to work and
0:03:37 the struggle to make it real and
0:03:43 If someone reads that book and gets to the end and goes this sounds great
0:03:47 Then that’s the exactly the right person who should be an entrepreneur
0:03:51 If someone goes this sounds a lot harder than I expected well
0:03:57 Then I’ve done a service in that way as well, which I’ve kept someone from getting into this for all the wrong reasons
0:04:00 when you when you look back on your your journey to
0:04:03 Netflix
0:04:06 do you you know, I remember hearing Steve Jobs speak about the
0:04:10 Decisions he made in hindsight
0:04:12 That in when he reflects on his life
0:04:17 Resulted in him starting Apple and the decisions he made with an Apple
0:04:20 So obviously, you know things he’s famous for saying is that he went to a typography class
0:04:24 He dropped in and he started learning about design and typography and that shaped him
0:04:29 What are those early sort of experiences that in hindsight fed into the creation of Netflix?
0:04:32 probably the meta
0:04:34 thing was the fact that
0:04:37 Most of these endeavors were entrepreneurial
0:04:44 so for example, initially my first foray into direct response marketing was when I
0:04:50 Asked if I could run the mail order division of
0:04:57 This sheet music company that I was working for and so what it meant to run the mail order division was every day
0:05:00 You got the mail and if you found someone’s asking for a list of great songbooks
0:05:06 You’d make a copy and you’d mail it out and then if an order came in you’d go to the warehouse and pick pack and ship it and
0:05:15 That spoke to me and I began experimenting and said okay now. What happens if I do two pages or it wouldn’t color
0:05:18 What happens if I mail it out and I built this
0:05:23 Mail order division into a real mail order company. So it was this combination of
0:05:26 direct response, but more importantly it was
0:05:34 Building something it was creating a company inside a company. So there are certainly those preparations
0:05:36 from the
0:05:40 Direct response side hugely formative for at least Netflix
0:05:47 Because if you think about it, what direct response marketing is about is all about testing. It’s all about analytics
0:05:54 And when the internet came along and I saw what the internet was
0:06:01 What immediately popped in my head was oh my gosh, this would is the power to do direct marketing, but on steroids
0:06:06 This is so much more positive. I’m doing this personalization
0:06:08 but it’s very
0:06:16 Brute force personalization. I mean, it’s it’s dear Steven wouldn’t your friends at 17 questions serve
0:06:21 It’s like this ridiculous personalization what the internet. Let me do is personalize every web page for one person
0:06:24 but one of the direct response
0:06:28 Devours that I did was I was a circulation director for a magazine
0:06:33 We we launched a magazine and that’s subscription and so you go, okay
0:06:36 Well, look at this you have someone who’s doing direct marketing and there’s someone who’s doing subscription
0:06:41 And then all of a sudden they’re trying to figure out how to do video rental better
0:06:47 It’s not that big of a leap to say, okay, it was subscription and it was direct response on the internet
0:06:51 So yeah, these things were pretty formative so interesting
0:06:54 So you on one hand you had this business where you were physically sending things in the post
0:07:01 And then you got involved in another business where you were doing subscriptions and these kind of I guess plant these sort of seeds in your brain
0:07:06 Two industries that you start to understand and it’s funny because when people think about creativity
0:07:11 I heard someone say before that creativity is essentially collecting lots of different clouds and then connecting them in new new ways
0:07:16 So getting lots of different points of inspiration in life and then connecting them in new ways
0:07:21 Which create a new thing and that kind of sounds like what you’re describing there. It is and the thing is at the time
0:07:23 You don’t necessarily know
0:07:32 You’re in the right place at the right time because I certainly wasn’t the only person who said wow the internet could be a powerful force for selling things
0:07:35 Jeff Bezos was
0:07:41 One of the first people to recognize the power could have to sell things when did Amazon which at the time was only books
0:07:43 but
0:07:45 There were a lot of different
0:07:50 Models we could have looked at and so in terms of Netflix going into video rental and doing video rental by mail
0:07:57 That was entirely driven by the fact that I had worked for so long in a catalog business
0:08:04 Where I had mailed things in boxes and I had seen I knew a lot about all the shippers and I knew a lot about
0:08:08 fast shipping I mean I had this huge
0:08:13 Repository of information and experience and I didn’t know how it would be used
0:08:20 But all of a sudden you’re looking at a problem and you’re kind of in your mind going through how I could I possibly solve this in different ways and
0:08:25 One of the things that comes up is something you’ve experienced in the past. You launched this company integrity QA
0:08:33 Between sort of 96 and 7 and that’s ultimately acquired by Reed Hastings by pure at risk by Reed Hastings company
0:08:37 Yes, and that’s where you and Reed Hastings met. Yes, correct. Who’s the other co-founder of Netflix?
0:08:40 What was that like?
0:08:42 That first meeting with Reed Hastings
0:08:48 Meeting Reed was like this instant junction of two like minds
0:08:52 We both recognize something in each other
0:08:57 One is that we both approach problems very differently. I
0:09:02 Was very emotional about it. I don’t mean emotional like I’m running crying from the room
0:09:05 I mean empathy that I’m a marketing person
0:09:10 When I put something out there, I can almost intuitively sense how someone’s gonna respond
0:09:17 Reed his background is mathematics and computer science much more logical
0:09:24 Much more methodical and we kind of realize as we begin solving problems together how well those two integrated
0:09:28 But at the same time as having these differences and approaches
0:09:32 We were very similar and that we both shared this a
0:09:34 commitment to
0:09:35 honesty
0:09:38 Not because we both swore an oath just was our nature
0:09:47 That life was too short to shade the truth that if you had something to say you say it and you say it in a respectful way
0:09:50 In an empathetic way, and you don’t have ulterior motives
0:09:56 And we both were like that and it allowed us to have these really intense interesting
0:10:01 Conversations where we were trying to find the truth out of something
0:10:05 but pushing each other and challenging each other and
0:10:09 It ended up being a very very powerful way to solve problems and
0:10:17 We were only at pure atree together for seven or eight months and then lightning happened to struck again
0:10:20 We’re pure atria was now being acquired
0:10:23 And this time
0:10:31 Both Reed and I we’re gonna lose our jobs. They already had a CEO. They already had a senior VP of worldwide marketing
0:10:33 so
0:10:34 We were gonna be out of a job
0:10:37 We had six months and Reed was gonna go back to school
0:10:40 Get a higher degree in education
0:10:42 I was gonna start my next company and
0:10:51 Reed wanted to keep a finger in the pie here and we came to an agreement that I would start the company
0:10:58 He would be my angel investor and he’d be my board chair and all we needed was the business idea
0:11:04 And all you needed was a business idea exactly and only that
0:11:12 Yeah, just this that small manner of needing something to do and thus began this process which went on for months of
0:11:18 Reed and I kind of searching for a business idea and we had a methodology
0:11:21 so don’t don’t think this was random and
0:11:24 Reed and I happened to live in the same town
0:11:32 we lived in Santa Cruz, California together and we had gotten in the habit many months earlier of commuting to work together and
0:11:36 So once we knew we were selling the company once we knew we were losing our jobs
0:11:43 We still were commuting to work, but now the conversation in the car shifted and what would happen is Reed would pick me up at my house and
0:11:49 We’d barely be out of my driveway and I gave okay, Reed. I’ve got one for you
0:11:53 personalized shampoo
0:11:55 You’re gonna cut off a lock of your hair
0:12:02 You’re gonna mail it to us and we’re gonna have a team of hair scientists who are gonna formulate a custom blend
0:12:04 and people are gonna subscribe to it and
0:12:10 The same thing would happen no matter what I pitched is there’d be silence
0:12:14 we need to be staring out the window just steering the car and
0:12:19 You’d think he hadn’t even heard me, but I knew that kind of behind that
0:12:25 Stoic face all the calculations were taking place like you know the risk and reward and the
0:12:30 Cost and the benefits and it might take five minutes ten minutes of silence
0:12:33 But then eventually he would turn to me and go that will never work
0:12:37 And he would lay into me with all the reasons such a bad idea
0:12:42 But of course I could come prepared and I’d come right back in and with all the research
0:12:46 I had done all the reasons I was sure it was a good idea and we would do one of these
0:12:50 arguments all the way to the office and if need be all the way home and
0:12:58 Until we either decided there was promise or no promise and almost all of the time there was very very little promise in these ideas
0:13:04 But next day I’d have another one. I cook a read personalized pet food
0:13:10 Customs sporting goods vitamins. I mean I pitched all those ideas
0:13:12 We I pitched them one
0:13:17 Video rental by mail people are gonna come to the website. They’re gonna pick out a movie
0:13:22 We’re gonna mail them the movie and they’ll keep it for a week and then they’ll mail it back and
0:13:24 at the time though, this was
0:13:27 1996
0:13:28 97
0:13:33 Video rental you may remember it was on VHS cassettes
0:13:39 so they were too big and too heavy and too expensive and so that idea got trashed exactly the same way that
0:13:42 the dog food and the personalized shampoo did and
0:13:51 Kept on searching and then the breakthrough if there was one came one morning or read picked me up and I’m on my way out the door
0:13:59 Driveway I got one for you and he stops me and goes. I gotta tell you about something. I read about there’s this technology that came out
0:14:06 It’s called the DVD. It’s this little disc. It holds a movie and it’s thin and it’s light and
0:14:12 We brainstormed that a little bit and realized this could be the unlock
0:14:18 for that old video rental by mail idea we had talked about six or eight weeks ago and
0:14:21 Then we did this
0:14:25 Quintessentially entrepreneurial thing which is mid commute
0:14:32 We turn the car around and drove the car back into Santa Cruz to try and validate this idea
0:14:37 We did not go to the office and do a business plan. We did not work on a pitch deck
0:14:42 We tried to collide the idea with real people that day that day mid commute
0:14:47 Turned the car around went down into Santa Cruz tried to buy a DVD
0:14:51 Couldn’t find one settled for buying a used music CD
0:14:56 Same size same weight then went two doors down and bought a little envelope
0:14:59 Look you’d put a greeting card in and put this CD in the envelope
0:15:02 address it to Reed’s house
0:15:04 bought a stamp and
0:15:06 Dropped it in the mail and went to work
0:15:15 that very next morning when Reed picked me up he held up a little pink envelope with an unbroken CD in it that had
0:15:17 Got into his house in less than 24 hours
0:15:19 for the price of a stamp and
0:15:26 That was probably the moment. We said this actually might work. We can use the post office
0:15:33 And that shifted everything and that’s the point we began saying this could be the idea
0:15:36 That we do together so many entrepreneurs
0:15:42 And aspiring entrepreneurs are at that exact phase where they want to leave their corporate job
0:15:47 Their brain everywhere they go now because they’re what they’ve wired themselves to be looking for an idea
0:15:51 It’s finding lots of random ideas their dog will like throw up and they’ll be like oh new dog food
0:15:56 Whatever and they’re going through that process and I I think it’s so important to just pause there and try and interrogate
0:16:05 What the framework is for knowing if you if you’ve got a winner or not like how how did you because presumably you had got yourself passionate about the
0:16:08 shampoo idea
0:16:12 So like how do you know when to drop an idea and how do you know when to commit to an idea?
0:16:16 What was the framework you’re using the framework is that every idea is stupid
0:16:21 There is everyone you know listen you probably haven’t had a corporate job yet in your
0:16:27 Yes, thank God is right because there’s this thing in corporate
0:16:32 I’ll say corporate America corporate world and it’s the brainstorming session
0:16:39 And they put everyone in a conference room and they go we’re gonna brainstorm and try to come up with an idea for whatever it is
0:16:43 And he goes but first some ground rules for the brainstorming
0:16:48 Rule number one. There is no such thing as a bad idea and
0:16:51 I call bullshit
0:16:56 There’s plenty of bad ideas. In fact, there’s no such thing as a good idea
0:17:00 Every idea is bad. We just don’t know why they’re bad yet
0:17:07 And so the framework I approach I assume all these ideas are ridiculous. I assume none of them are going to work
0:17:11 But here’s the difference the reason I start from that
0:17:13 that
0:17:20 position is I don’t want to commit the single worst thing you can do as an entrepreneur which is fall in love with your idea and
0:17:26 You’ve talked what the person who sees the dog throwing up and they go I’ve got a great idea and then what happens?
0:17:32 Nothing they go home and they go this is a great idea and they tell their partner and their partner goes
0:17:35 Oh, that’s brilliant. I’d buy that and so they go
0:17:41 Okay, and they begin working on a business plan and they write this 10-page business plan and they’re dreaming about how
0:17:47 They’re for how amazing it’s gonna be just think about we have this line of we can do cats too and then giraffes
0:17:52 You know, they’ve they’ve built this incredibly or innate business in their head
0:17:57 All based on this feeling that this must be a good idea
0:18:02 And you’ve got to nip that in the bud and the way you nip it in the bud is you try
0:18:10 Rather than dreaming how amazing this idea is the first thing you think about the only thing you think about is
0:18:15 How can I quickly cheaply and easily collide this idea with a real person and?
0:18:20 Find out is it in fact a good idea or a bad idea?
0:18:23 How can I do some kind of hack?
0:18:30 That will allow me to quickly find out whether customers actually would want this or not and
0:18:35 Almost always you build this quick cheap down and dirty. I don’t mean minimal viable product. I mean
0:18:43 Unviable something you can quickly do like turn the car around and mail a
0:18:45 CD to yourself
0:18:52 Just to find out the board the basic premise of can I actually use the US mail to send
0:18:57 Movies back and forth because if that had failed well, great on to the next one and
0:19:07 That’s such a critical critical step. That’s the framework that everyone has to have it is not about having a good idea
0:19:10 Having ideas is easy and trivial
0:19:17 The important thing is how clever can you be to come up with a quick and cheap and easy way to test it
0:19:23 Why because I know you and me understand this but I didn’t understand this when I started my career
0:19:27 So I know that there’s a lot of people listening right now that are probably right in the moment
0:19:31 You’ve described they’ve spent a year building up this thing in their bedroom
0:19:36 For no one that can’t see he’s got his head in his hands. They spent a year in their bedroom building and working on this project
0:19:42 Why is that a terrible idea? It’s such a waste of time because what happens is two things happen
0:19:48 One is this or an idea becomes so large and ornate and complicated in your head
0:19:52 That you go, okay mark. I didn’t need to get started
0:19:57 I need to raise five million dollars because it’s going to have to hire all these people to to build this thing and
0:20:02 They’re probably building the absolutely the wrong thing
0:20:07 You can’t you can’t just go ahead and based on what you think is going to happen
0:20:13 You’ve got to start from a position of real information listen, perhaps the cleanest way since we have a bit of time
0:20:17 is to give you an example I do a lot of work with university students and
0:20:26 I was meeting with a young woman who at the university and she goes, okay mark. I’ve got this idea
0:20:29 What I want to do is
0:20:31 Peer to peer clothing sharing
0:20:36 In other words, I’ve got all this clothing in my closet that I never wear
0:20:43 Or I don’t wear very often and I know my friends have a lot of clothing in their closet and other friends have clothes in their closet
0:20:49 It’d be great if we had this website and we could all post what we have and we could borrow each other’s clothes and
0:20:55 I’m going. Okay. That’s interesting. What can I help you with? She goes. I’m trying to figure out
0:20:57 Should I drop out of college to do this?
0:21:04 How do I raise the money to hire a team to build this for me and I went whoa, you know slow down here
0:21:07 Okay, interesting idea
0:21:12 But let’s figure out if we can come up with a quick and cheap and easy way to collide this idea with the reality
0:21:15 I said, do you have a piece of paper?
0:21:20 She goes. Yes smart ass. I’m a college student a piece of paper. I go great. All right
0:21:25 You have a magic marker. She’ll have marker. You a piece of tape. She goes got a piece of tape
0:21:27 I got all right. I want you to write on the piece of paper
0:21:30 Would you like to borrow my clothes?
0:21:32 knock
0:21:37 And I want you to tape that to the outside of your dormitory room and
0:21:44 We’re gonna find out in the next 24 hours whether the very very first principle behind your idea is real is
0:21:50 Anyone gonna knock because if nobody knocks well, you’ve learned something very important right there
0:21:52 This thing you think is so attractive
0:22:00 Might not be but let’s let’s be optimistic. Let’s assume a bunch of people knock great
0:22:05 You’ve learned something, but you’re also gonna learn the next thing which is are there problems with fit?
0:22:11 Are there problems with style? Are the people who knock and look at your clothes actually gonna want any of them?
0:22:15 All right, let’s be even more optimistic. Let’s say they do find out ones
0:22:21 They want to borrow well, you’re gonna find out the next piece. How do you feel and your favorite blouse comes back stained or torn?
0:22:24 You’re gonna find out about the cost of doing dry cleaning
0:22:29 You’re gonna find out all of these things and you’re gonna find out about all of this
0:22:33 For a piece with a piece of paper a tape and a marker
0:22:40 None of this raising money dropping out of school and doing any coding. You’re gonna do something very simple now
0:22:46 Is this scalable? No, is this repeatable? No, but that’s fine
0:22:50 You’re gonna do it all with three by five cards or on a pad
0:22:54 You’re gonna do it manually and you’re gonna start losing your mind
0:23:02 But when you finally get to the point where you are ready to go and maybe raise money or drop out of school
0:23:09 You’re gonna know what you’re dropping out of school for you’re gonna know what you’re raising money for you’re gonna be able to tell someone
0:23:14 Here’s my acquisition cost. Here’s my lifetime value. Here’s my cac
0:23:19 Here’s my you’re gonna know all of these metrics. You’re gonna know the complexity
0:23:26 You’re gonna be tried all these different things. You’re gonna know what demographic and you found out all of that for nothing except for your time
0:23:29 That’s what I mean by
0:23:31 figure out some way to
0:23:33 validation hack and
0:23:37 That is the key to being an entrepreneur. You have an idea
0:23:41 Quickly cheaply easy test it find out it’s ridiculous
0:23:47 Abandon it go on to the next one. It’s funny cuz I’m a dragon on dragons then which is basically a show like Shark Tank
0:23:52 Where we see a hundred pictures a year from entrepreneurs and what I observe in some of those pictures
0:23:56 Especially when they’re a little bit early on and they haven’t got product market fit quite yet
0:24:00 There hasn’t been evidence that the market actually cares is a huge amount of delusion
0:24:03 To the point that you could give someone some feedback
0:24:09 But because they’ve spent one two years of their life and maybe mortgage their house and invested it into this business
0:24:17 They’re they’re now in the sunk cost fallacy, which is that sort of cognitive bias where you’ve invested so much in something that you’re basically
0:24:21 offending your bad decision at all costs and you can’t see the light of day and
0:24:25 Um, and that’s you know, my first business was the death of my first business
0:24:30 But for many entrepreneurs that I meet it’s quite clearly the death of them because if they don’t have that humility if they’ve got romantic
0:24:33 They can’t take any feedback, which is a con
0:24:42 Conflict with what they want to believe. It’s it’s at your Steven. You’re absolutely right. It is the single biggest reason that
0:24:46 Either they don’t start because they’ve built this thing up in their head
0:24:53 And it’s so big and complex that to get started is almost impossible or they are so far along
0:25:02 They can’t stop it’s it’s tragic in a lot of ways that it’s just why you have to start from the belief that your idea is a bad one
0:25:09 Because that makes it easier to walk away from it as soon as you realize you were right
0:25:17 But what happens if you can get this discipline of taking your idea and immediately trying it is it almost always takes you in a new direction
0:25:25 Yes, your original idea was terrible, but oh my gosh. Did you see how this person did? Let’s try this. Oh, that doesn’t work
0:25:27 let’s try this and
0:25:31 That is entrepreneurship. It is this leaping from the back of one
0:25:39 Alligator to the next and there those alligators just how long enough to before they sink or before they bite you and you jump to the next one
0:25:43 I think I found two sort of species of entrepreneur and
0:25:45 the real distinction between them is
0:25:51 How long they’ve been doing it and one species of entrepreneur that I know they care entirely about being right
0:26:00 Which is their initial hypothesis being correct and that’s typically the young entrepreneur and then the other more seasoned entrepreneur cares entire entirely about
0:26:06 Being successful regardless of whether it’s via their initial hypothesis or not
0:26:13 They care entirely about like saving time and being successful not being right and I think it’s interesting that
0:26:18 Ten year as an entrepreneur seems to determine which camp you sit in. It’s also your personality
0:26:21 jumping back to our conversation earlier about what
0:26:27 Attracted read and I to each other was that both of us were in that camp that said we don’t care whose idea it was
0:26:30 we just care about getting to the right answer and
0:26:36 part of this culture that we had with each other and we built with other people was
0:26:42 You could argue like cats and dogs and eventually you all arrive at what you think is the right way to go
0:26:45 And as soon as that happens you all fall in behind and no one
0:26:52 Says I was right. I was wrong and you don’t even remember who was right and who was wrong. It’s a big piece August 29
0:26:57 1997 Netflix was founded by yourself and read Hastings
0:26:59 from from
0:27:00 That day onwards
0:27:05 Did did you know at the moment that Netflix was going to ever become what it went on to be?
0:27:07 What were you thinking it was going to be? I
0:27:13 Am completely astounded and
0:27:17 Amazed at the direction that Netflix has gone
0:27:24 Never in a million years could I have dreamed of the company that exists now being the same one that
0:27:26 We were thinking about
0:27:29 Yeah in August of 1997. It’s
0:27:37 Stounding to me what’s happened and it’s the nature of entrepreneurship. You can’t predict where these things are going to go
0:27:43 That wasn’t the point though. It wasn’t like read and I were in the car going
0:27:50 Okay, when do we enter the streaming war and when how do we deal with China?
0:27:58 No, this was a very very simple straightforward problem a video rental in the United States is eight billion dollars a year
0:28:07 It’s very unpleasant that the person the company who has the lion’s share of that market is doing things which customers hate
0:28:13 There has to be a blockbuster. There has to be a better way. That’s where it starts from
0:28:16 that’s the problem you’re trying to solve and
0:28:19 Trying to solve the problem is this dual thing
0:28:24 Which is how do you do something that a customer might want to solve the problem for the customer?
0:28:27 but also how do you make a business out of that and
0:28:34 That’s all consuming. I remember we had a company meeting
0:28:40 Early on maybe you were two or three months in and I remember getting up in front of the
0:28:47 Company and laying out what I thought was going to be this big and hairy audacious goal for us
0:28:54 Someday we’re going to be one of the top ten largest video chains in the United States
0:29:05 In retrospect was a ridiculously trivial, but from where we stood then it may as well have been saying we’re going to ride our bicycles up Mount Everest
0:29:08 What a hubris
0:29:15 Because even the tenth largest chain was many many many millions of dollars a year bigger than we were at the time
0:29:22 But something to aim for and we actually passed that one way faster than we thought and then you set your goal
0:29:27 You know eventually we’re going to be as big as blockbuster. In other words
0:29:34 If you were to set your goals to be what Netflix is now, I would be locked up
0:29:40 I would have been this most ridiculous a flight of fancy hallucination
0:29:44 You can imagine they would have thought you had psych on psychotic or something if you’d ever
0:29:50 Did a presentation saying Netflix would be as big as it is now you um for people that don’t know because the world has
0:29:55 Moved on so much and this generation of people that are listening to this conversation right now that probably don’t even know what a
0:30:02 Like a vcr and a cassette player is but you launch the business at a time when blockbuster was the big incumbent and
0:30:08 Blockbuster was a store where you went to a physical location. You rented a cassette vcr
0:30:11 What do they call it like a VCR a VHS VHS tape
0:30:18 You took it home and then you brought it back the next day and your real innovation was that you were going to send these DVDs to people in
0:30:20 The post yes rental basis
0:30:25 That was the that was the crux of the business right that was the crux of the business
0:30:29 And in fact when we originally started there was not a lot of business model innovation there either
0:30:32 You know there was due dates and there was late fees
0:30:39 The innovation was it was one centralized store on the internet that served the entire country
0:30:45 So that we could have every single movie that was available on DVD
0:30:47 We had perfect inventory
0:30:56 And unlike a video rental store where you can picture it being like a supermarket with rows of shelves
0:30:59 Each movie could be placed in one place
0:31:05 You could either put it in the mystery aisle or in the Alfred Hitchcock aisle or in the new release
0:31:07 You’ve had a pick where it was
0:31:13 Whereas on the internet you could have that same movie listed in 30 different places based on finding movies
0:31:16 We thought finding movies would be easier too. We had a bunch of things
0:31:23 We thought will allow us to take on this incumbent this huge huge huge company
0:31:28 But yes, it was very very focused. There was no streaming if you wanted a movie
0:31:32 We mailed it to you. We mailed it to you on a little plastic disc
0:31:37 It’s funny because in hindsight when I think about a lot of these big breakthrough ideas that ended up changing their industry
0:31:44 You you learn in hindsight that there was some big macro factors that caused the timing to be right
0:31:48 And I think about in the case of your business Netflix
0:31:54 There’s a bunch of big macro things that you’ve already described things like DVDs the internet
0:32:00 Is there is there any other sort of big macro factors that made the timing right for Netflix?
0:32:07 Those were the two big ones right is that the internet was certainly the big one was that all of a sudden there was this way
0:32:11 To have a single store which served the entire country
0:32:13 before
0:32:20 For a bricks and mortar as we call it business you want to serve the entire country you’ve got to build 9,000 different stores and
0:32:25 Blockbuster did just that they had 9,000 different stores
0:32:32 And then you have to staff those stores and they had 60,000 employees and we served the entire country with one
0:32:40 Inventory and with us group 12 15 people so that was certainly one big shift
0:32:43 The DVD was a bet
0:32:49 Which is at the time DVD was just getting started and if the DVD had
0:32:56 Not worked if it had not reached a full household penetration this whole thing and have what it worked
0:33:00 How many people were watching DVDs at the time when you launched Netflix?
0:33:08 There was fewer than 250,000 DVD players sold that was that total addressable market was
0:33:17 250,000 DVD players. So is that like 1% of America or something? Yeah, there’s a hundred and thirty million households in the United States
0:33:23 so and of those 130 million households a hundred and twenty nine point nine of them had
0:33:26 The ability to watch a VHS movie
0:33:33 So this was a real bet that they’d eventually be willing to buy this whole new machine to play a whole different type of movie
0:33:41 But it was tiny there. It was really it created all kinds of interesting marketing challenges of how do you launch a company when?
0:33:43 There’s so few eligible
0:33:52 Customers in September 99 you explored selling Netflix to Amazon, which is which is shy of two years after you’d launched
0:33:57 What was was that the first time you met Jeff Bezos? Yes
0:34:01 And how does that come to be? You know because he’s he at the time
0:34:03 I guess was was fairly early in the Amazon journey as well
0:34:10 But yeah, he was and at the time to show you how early Amazon was in its journey. They were only a bookseller
0:34:13 So they sold nothing else. They were a bookstore
0:34:15 but
0:34:22 Jeff had made no secret of the fact that his aspirations went way beyond that that he was going to be the everything store that
0:34:28 The things they had found about how powerful it was selling books and the internet applied to everything else
0:34:35 And it was pretty clear his next two categories. We’re gonna be music and movies and
0:34:39 We got a call from
0:34:42 the CFO at Amazon
0:34:45 Basically saying hey Jeff would love to meet with you
0:34:49 how about coming on up to up to Seattle and having a little sit down and
0:34:55 Read and I didn’t need to think too long to understand why they might want to meet with us
0:35:01 It was pretty clear they were going to be entering video and this was going to be a make versus buy analysis
0:35:06 Would buying Netflix accelerate their entry into video?
0:35:11 Because we had done a tremendous amount of work about building out the content and making those things work
0:35:14 So there was some value there not to mention the people
0:35:17 and so we all flew up to Amazon and
0:35:20 We’re ushered into this building
0:35:26 Which it was pretty hard to imagine that this was the headquarters of this
0:35:30 World-changing e-commerce company because it was a mess
0:35:35 You know people were jammed in under stairs and in closets
0:35:41 And there was pizza boxes every place and dogs running around and the desks were all the same
0:35:51 they were all made from doors that had been supported by four wooden posts at each corner that everyone sat at these doors and
0:36:00 And in comes Jeff Bezos and we begin to have this conversation about what is Netflix and what’s it all about and
0:36:06 Went went pretty well and as the CFO was showing us to the door at the end of the meeting
0:36:11 She said I just want to set your expectations
0:36:15 That in the event we decide to do something our offer is probably
0:36:21 going to be in the low eight figures and and we
0:36:26 guessed that was probably going to be 10 to 15 million dollars and
0:36:31 at the time we had launched in April of 98 and
0:36:38 So we were still pretty young and I remember Reid and I kind of looking at each other and going
0:36:43 That’s not a bad return for 12 to 18 months work
0:36:47 But at the same time we felt we had already
0:36:50 Solved the big problems
0:36:57 We had built a functioning e-commerce website. We had managed to source every single DVD that was available
0:37:02 we had figured out how to make movies go out to customers and bring them back and
0:37:08 We weren’t quite ready to let Jeff Bezos take over
0:37:13 and so in some ways it was less about us going up and
0:37:18 Deciding whether to sell or not it really ended up being kind of like a commitment ceremony
0:37:25 Where Reid and I look at each other on the eyes and said we can get out if we want and I think both of us decided no, let’s
0:37:29 Let’s go for this with that money have changed your life at that point
0:37:34 1999 getting you know
0:37:39 That’s a hard to say it. This is not like I was
0:37:42 You know living in a trailer
0:37:48 And deeply in debt and you know, I I’d been working. I was in my late 30s
0:37:55 I’d been working in Silicon Valley for a while and I’d had a number of startups, you know
0:37:57 I don’t go through IPOs before
0:38:00 So I I had I was comfortable
0:38:02 Don’t get me wrong. This would have been nice
0:38:07 But I’m not sure this would have dramatically changed my life in some profound way
0:38:13 I thought it was much more interesting to take the shot and see what Netflix could become
0:38:15 then to
0:38:20 Walk away. What was Jeff like? What do you remember in 1999?
0:38:23 Extremely unpolished
0:38:31 If you see him now, I mean, he’s really buff and he’s really thoughtful and someone has definitely worked on his laugh
0:38:33 It’s it’s now very controlled
0:38:41 Back then it was this almost hysterical hyena like bark and you could hear it from all over the building
0:38:43 I’m not going to try and imitate it
0:38:51 but he was tremendous enthusiastic like this bundle of energy and I remember that
0:38:57 The two of us were just going back and forth on all this early startup stuff
0:39:00 and one thing I remember we had in common is that
0:39:07 At our launch, we had rigged up a bell to ring every time an order came in and I was telling him that he’s going
0:39:13 Ah, we do we had a bell that was ringing and we had we shared those things and then we were also talking about names and
0:39:17 Netflix had started out with a strange
0:39:24 Name which was kibble kibble and he was saying. Oh, yeah, we originally were called Kadabra
0:39:34 Which he meant to sound like abracadabra like magic, but their lawyer said that Kadabra sounds a little bit too much like cadaver
0:39:38 And so therefore Amazon, but in other words, it was this really interesting
0:39:44 Us going back and forth and I don’t read was very impatient. He’s kind of wanted to get down to business
0:39:51 Finally, okay, read read. Let’s talk to the what we’re really talking about here enough enough a startup
0:39:56 Is the next big milestone in the netflix journey the dot-com crash
0:39:59 for you
0:40:06 Because there’s a there’s a probably a more profound moment for me that happened
0:40:09 before that
0:40:12 and
0:40:15 That was this trend that was this leadership transition at netflix
0:40:20 And that was because the dot-com crash was in the spring of 2000
0:40:25 and this was probably in late 1999 and
0:40:35 Netflix was still young and as I mentioned at the beginning the
0:40:42 Grangement that read and I had was that he’d be the angel investor. He’d be the chair. I’d be the CEO
0:40:44 I’d start and run the company
0:40:47 And I did that and read had a day job somewhere else
0:40:51 and one afternoon
0:40:54 Late that year read
0:40:59 Pocus said in my office late afternoon and said mark you have to talk
0:41:04 And as you probably can imagine that never bodes well
0:41:08 when someone says we have to talk and it was right and he came in and he had a
0:41:17 PowerPoint slide show and he sat across my desk and spun his computer around and began walking me through a slide show
0:41:21 About how he felt that I was doing as CEO
0:41:24 strengths, but
0:41:27 Perhaps a little bit disproportionately weaknesses
0:41:32 And I was a little taken back by this and I kind of stopped him and go read
0:41:37 I am not gonna sit here and let you pitch me on how much I suck
0:41:43 And I think he was taken back by that as well. And so we closed the
0:41:47 Computer but then proceeded to lay out that he was concerned
0:41:49 that
0:41:55 He had seen minor errors in my judgment that he questioned some of the hires I had made
0:41:59 I mean he had seen a lot of the other things I had done that were good, but his point was that
0:42:07 We have to execute flawlessly and we’re at a point now where things are beginning to accelerate and if there’s
0:42:10 smoke at this level
0:42:13 he was worried there was gonna be fire later on and
0:42:16 Eventually he got to his point, which is that
0:42:23 he wanted to come back to the company full-time and be CEO and
0:42:32 For a moment, I thought he was firing me because Reed had more equity than I did since he was the
0:42:35 original investor and
0:42:42 But as I understood what he was proposing it wasn’t that he was proposing that he come in as CEO
0:42:47 that I stay as COO and that we essentially run the company together and
0:42:52 I remember as he finally he left the office and he
0:42:55 quietly closed the door and I was so
0:43:03 Shocked that even though the Sun was going down. I sat there in the dark like the strength to the lights on and
0:43:06 Just kind of crushed
0:43:11 And all I could think of the time was this is so unfair. This is my company
0:43:18 You know, I started this was my idea. I hired the people. I got us going and how dare you, you know
0:43:20 All of a sudden take this from me
0:43:28 But as I thought more about it, I kind of realized that there was another dynamic at work here and
0:43:31 like
0:43:36 Most entrepreneurs when we started Netflix
0:43:42 I had this dream of being a successful CEO of this big successful company
0:43:47 And I think as I sat there, I began to realize that maybe this wasn’t one dream
0:43:53 You know, this was two different dreams and that the dream of the big successful company
0:43:59 Might be a different dream than the one of me being CEO and I had to really say to myself
0:44:05 Does Reed coming in full-time as CEO increase our chances that happening?
0:44:10 and it was really hard for me to argue with myself otherwise and
0:44:13 I’m not saying this was an easy decision
0:44:18 And I you know, I went home that night and sat outside in the porch with my wife and we finished a bottle of wine
0:44:23 And I think by the time I went to bed that night. I kind of concluded that
0:44:29 He was right that if we really wanted to give ourselves the best chances of being successful
0:44:37 That I should move over I should step down as CEO and let Reed come in as CEO and we should run the
0:44:39 company together and
0:44:46 Looking back now, this was 20 some odd years ago
0:44:49 That decision
0:44:57 To kind of put my ego aside for a bit was probably the smartest decision I ever made the entire time
0:44:59 I was at Netflix
0:45:04 Because those years after that when Reed and I did it together. That was the renaissance at Netflix
0:45:08 So many the things that shaped what the company became
0:45:15 Over the next bunch of years came during those years and certainly looking at what Reed has done with the company since then
0:45:20 since I left the company was even more astounding and
0:45:24 It’s funny because one of the roles of a CEO is
0:45:27 You’ve got to make sure
0:45:29 The best people are in the right seats
0:45:36 Which means saying goodbye to a lot of people you’ll have someone you who came it that we started the company
0:45:41 And they were your head of marketing and they worked tirelessly. They worked weekends. They worked nights
0:45:43 They did everything you asked
0:45:49 But as you get to a different scale you recognize that person is not the right person for what we have to do next
0:45:54 But you never think you’re gonna have to turn that lens on to yourself
0:45:58 and I think a lot of
0:46:03 Founders need to ask themself that question all the time
0:46:08 I’m the right person for yesterday. I might even be the right person for today
0:46:16 But am I the right person for tomorrow and the number of founders that I can think of and I’ll bet you
0:46:19 You will echo this when you think about all the founders you’ve spoken to
0:46:23 who are great early-stage entrepreneurs and
0:46:29 Great late-stage entrepreneurs. It’s a very very small set
0:46:33 and in my case I
0:46:38 Was very very comfortable recognizing that this was the right thing to do for the company
0:46:46 When you when you think back to that moment and that conversation with read where he comes into your office with your hindsight and wisdom now
0:46:49 Do you think there’s a better way that he could have approached the situation?
0:46:52 Of course
0:46:59 Read as I mentioned before what made read and I work so well together as we were left brain and right brain and
0:47:02 That’s not reads strong suit
0:47:10 That’s my strong suit, you know, I pitch I know how to frame things in the right way. I know how to deliver bad news
0:47:12 I know how to
0:47:18 Communicate effectively and I can intuitively know what’s gonna upset someone or not upset someone. That’s not what reads great at
0:47:21 but what read has and what
0:47:24 We share is he cares
0:47:27 read was doing this
0:47:34 Not with some ulterior motive this was not I want to push mark out and become CEO
0:47:44 This was he genuinely believed this was the right thing for the company and because we had this extremely strong relationship based on trust I
0:47:47 Heard him that way and
0:47:52 Indominally that’s way more important than the style in which the message was delivered
0:48:00 What was it that he thought he had that would suit the company in the next phase of the company’s journey that he felt you didn’t have
0:48:05 He had already taken a company through an IPO
0:48:08 he had already scaled a company from
0:48:16 To employees up to a thousand employees from a local company to a multinational company
0:48:19 He had
0:48:21 He had already shown that he could hire
0:48:24 Extremely talented people to work for him
0:48:31 He wasn’t saying that he didn’t think I it was impossible of me to do this
0:48:34 And who knows would have happened?
0:48:41 This was all about what increases our odds for success and then perhaps if you want to drill down to
0:48:47 Something which in the big scheme of things is small, but in the time was large
0:48:49 is we had to raise money
0:48:58 Netflix was a very very expensive company to get started. We required large amounts of venture money and
0:49:07 Reed had this reputation of someone who had already made a ton of money for some VCs because of taking his prior company public and
0:49:12 They would bet on him whereas I was a little bit more of an unknown
0:49:20 One of the things you talk about in your book that he said to you in that conversation is you don’t appear tough and candid enough to hold strong people’s respect
0:49:24 Yeah, it’s um
0:49:26 I’m better at that now as I count
0:49:30 It is the empathy I
0:49:34 As I said what makes
0:49:36 Direct marketing
0:49:42 Marketing in general is an interesting discipline because it requires you to send something out and
0:49:47 You’re not going to ever see the person’s face as they react to it
0:49:53 You’re not going to be there as they’re reading this and either getting confused or excited
0:49:59 You have to imagine those things and as you’re writing a direct response letter you’re picturing
0:50:05 How is someone going to react when they read these things? How are they going to react when they’re watching this direct response television commercial?
0:50:14 That’s a it’s it’s a gift in some ways and it’s also a gift when it comes to salesmanship and negotiation is
0:50:16 Before I say something I
0:50:22 Know how it’s they’re gonna react and I can cater that but what it does mean
0:50:25 Is that when something’s gonna really hurt somebody?
0:50:31 It’s really hard for me. It’s very painful for me to deliver very bad news
0:50:39 I’ve never considered that before but it does appear to be completely true that people who are great marketeers
0:50:43 Have therefore have empathy and therefore struggle more with
0:50:49 Delivering bad news because they just have a better ability of putting themselves in the other person’s shoes. You feel it
0:50:53 You feel it, you know, I’ve and like I said, I’ve gotten way better at it
0:50:56 I’d say I’m good at it now
0:50:58 I can be a complete
0:51:01 Ass when I need to train that muscle
0:51:06 Is there a way to go, you know, if you think about how you went from where you were with that to where you are now
0:51:13 Is there anything that’s helped you stop being I guess a bit of a people-pleaser or carrying a little bit about people’s
0:51:18 Feelings when there’s a I’ve stopped searching for a way to do it that doesn’t hurt
0:51:22 And
0:51:27 As as with most decisions a lot of times people get caught in this paralysis
0:51:31 They’re trying to come up with some solution. That’s an optimum solution
0:51:37 And this is one more example of that is that you go this is gonna hurt. It’s gonna hurt me
0:51:43 I have to just do it anyway. There’s no way to avoid this and for example, you know, jumping way ahead
0:51:48 There was time after this dot-com layoff, which we will talk about in just any dot-com crash
0:51:54 Which we’ll talk about maybe in a moment. We had to lay people off and I cry with every single one of them
0:52:00 But I bring them in and I’ve gotten very very good at telling people
0:52:02 It’s time to go
0:52:05 But doesn’t mean that I don’t hurt
0:52:08 Hardest thing
0:52:12 Let’s hope that if you’re a manager, that’s the hardest thing you ever have to do
0:52:15 Have you
0:52:18 forgiven Reed for
0:52:23 That that moment that day the way he delivered what he said a hundred percent
0:52:28 This is gonna sound silly, but it came from love
0:52:31 it didn’t come from
0:52:34 Madness or jealousy or anger
0:52:41 It as much as it was possible for something to hurt Reed in delivering bad news
0:52:43 That’s gotta have been one of the
0:52:49 Toughest things he’s had to do is have that conversation with me
0:52:55 And I have so much respect for the fact that he had the courage and discipline to say
0:52:57 I’ve thought of something like
0:53:01 He could I thought a way to mail the DVD is more inexpensively
0:53:03 I’ve got a way to make the no he goes
0:53:07 I’ve thought of a way to make the company more successful, but it’s really gonna hurt
0:53:14 What is it about Reed then that makes Reed successful because I asked you the question about yourself
0:53:21 But now to turn that on Reed. What is it that makes him so unique see you used the analogy for creativity earlier in our
0:53:24 conversation about having all these clouds of
0:53:30 Information these clouds of connections and seeing that there are these interconnectivities between them
0:53:33 Reed sees that stuff
0:53:36 so well I
0:53:41 Considered myself really good at that. He’s even better than I am
0:53:46 he will have a very complicated problem with many moving pieces and
0:53:50 He’ll jump immediately till we can do this and
0:53:57 I won’t see that until a little bit later and then even and then what else sees it
0:54:03 It’s just an amazing ability to see how things might shape out and which one is the right path to take
0:54:08 Extremely analytical
0:54:11 Extremely non
0:54:17 Emotionally driven can make very very hard decisions because
0:54:21 Less
0:54:23 Driven by that by the emotional piece of it
0:54:30 He’s he’s a he’s he’s remarkable. What about hard work? Does it matter?
0:54:44 Well, since you ask it so simply I’d say no or it certainly is not the most important thing in fact I
0:54:47 Think hard work
0:54:49 Leading to success is a myth
0:54:51 that and let me
0:54:55 Let me give you two examples, okay?
0:55:00 The first is to qualify what I mean
0:55:02 I
0:55:05 Work with a lot of as he spoke earlier before we actually began the
0:55:07 session
0:55:14 about how younger people are different places in their life than older people especially with career and how they think about it and
0:55:23 Earlier in my life, I used to do triathlons, you know the races that combine swimming and then biking and then running and
0:55:30 Back when I used to do them. They don’t do it quite the same way anymore. It would be a mass water start
0:55:36 You have four or five hundred people who the gun sounds and all five hundred of them plow into the water
0:55:42 Simultaneously not a phase start and as you can imagine it is a shit show
0:55:47 You mean you’re getting kicked and your goggles are being knocked off and you’re being held under water
0:55:54 And you quickly realize that if you want to be able to survive in this mass start, you’re gonna sprint
0:56:02 For those first four or five six hundred yards to get yourself far enough in the front of the pack that you have open water
0:56:04 and
0:56:08 In my opinion work life is kind of like that when you’re younger
0:56:14 When you don’t really know what you’re doing when you have to go down a lot of false ends
0:56:18 Because you’re not sure the productive you better work your ass off. You better sprint
0:56:21 You better work three times harder than everybody else in the company
0:56:24 So it’s essential
0:56:26 But ideally
0:56:29 You get yourself far enough ahead
0:56:35 That you recognize if I can’t go at this pace for the entire tea of the triathlon
0:56:40 I needed to to get myself some breathing room, but now I can back off
0:56:42 So yeah at certain points in your career
0:56:48 You need hard work at certain points in the trajectory of your business. You need hard work your fundraising
0:56:52 You can’t say, oh, we’re closing the round. I’m taking vacation for two weeks
0:56:59 We’re doing M&A. I’m gonna be I’m only gonna work a couple hours. No, you’re gonna have to grind it
0:57:01 but
0:57:05 That’s not the answer. All right one more little story, which is part two to this
0:57:07 Which is why I say that it’s a myth for hard work
0:57:13 So it during one part of my career. I lived in Europe
0:57:19 I was doing the international marketing for a big software company. We had an office in Paris
0:57:22 and I lived in Paris and
0:57:28 But I was meeting every week with the marketing people in our other branches
0:57:31 So probably four days out of five. I was flying
0:57:39 Flight at Copenhagen one day then I’d fly down to Milan then I might fly to London then I might fly to Madrid in one week
0:57:42 so I spent a lot of time at the airport and
0:57:45 I’m
0:57:47 Because I’m sometimes not that organized
0:57:55 I’d be late and you would find me just sprinting down the concourse in my in my blazer and my
0:57:58 woolcoat trying to desperately make the plane and
0:58:03 What I found out was that probably
0:58:11 49% of the time I’d pull up to the gate and the plane was delayed and I’d
0:58:15 Have to wander on to the plane. No problem at all. I could have made it on crutches and
0:58:21 Instead I’d sit there marinating in my sweat for another hour before the plane took off or
0:58:26 The other 49% of the time I’d come sprinting down the concourse and you’d see the plane
0:58:33 Halfway out in the runway about to take off and what I realized is didn’t make a difference whether you ran for a plane or not
0:58:37 That you either gonna make it or you weren’t gonna make it and that running
0:58:45 Didn’t make the difference and I vowed then and there. I’d never run for a plane again and I never have
0:58:53 And I’m telling you that story because it’s a metaphor and that so many entrepreneurs spend all this time running for planes
0:58:56 They are up all night
0:59:04 Polishing their deck. They’re reviewing the work of people to make sure the spelling is correct. They’re double-checking every detail
0:59:06 They are working so hard
0:59:10 But I know from experience that it’s like running for the plane
0:59:13 Most of the time
0:59:14 Doesn’t make a difference
0:59:19 You don’t lose the deal at 2 o’clock that morning because you didn’t check the fonts
0:59:23 You lost that deal four weeks ago when you didn’t have some fundamentals, right?
0:59:28 Or you just weren’t the right company to begin with no matter how hard you worked you weren’t going to change the outcome and
0:59:37 That is the key to having some balance in your life as an entrepreneur is this recognition
0:59:40 That if you’re smart about the things that you choose to focus on
0:59:48 You make 99% of the difference and that all that extra work does not really change the outcome any
0:59:56 And in that analogy running for the plane is the is the key thing to have just better prepared further upstream
1:00:01 I you know if we stick to the analogy just have made a better decision to leave the house at a better time
1:00:04 Yes, it does absolutely. I mean if you want to make the plane
1:00:06 you know you leave earlier and
1:00:11 Again, it’s not sometimes listen. You’re gonna stroll down the concourse. You’re not you don’t need to run and
1:00:17 If if the plane left on time running is not going to make the difference if the plane’s late running didn’t make the difference
1:00:24 Either way you made it or didn’t make it the matter of times that running for it was the gating item between whether you made it or not
1:00:30 It’s like infinitesimal. So what’s the point of running and that’s a set and I really fundamentally believe that is that
1:00:35 If I can be really smart about my
1:00:38 Which problems I choose to focus on?
1:00:44 I’ll make the difference. I do not need to get everything right because most things don’t make a difference
1:00:51 Some things do some things do and some of the small things that made a difference to your business seem to have been discovered through a
1:00:55 Process of sort of experimentation and failure when I look back through your story
1:01:01 You try to get sort of Netflix to work and get product market fit you referenced it a second ago this idea of
1:01:04 No late fees seem to be quite pivotal
1:01:06 Idea you had to remove the late fees
1:01:12 I find this interesting because there’s gonna be entrepreneurs that build their idea and then bang their head against the wall
1:01:18 And it doesn’t work and then I hear so often whether it’s from Brian Chesky at Airbnb or from someone else Daniel at Spotify
1:01:20 That there seemed to be this one
1:01:26 Change that was quite pivotal to their business at some point. So my question becomes like, how do I know?
1:01:33 How do I find the thing? So can you explain to me why there’s no late fees thing and and any of these other small changes that change the game?
1:01:36 And how what was the system that led you to them?
1:01:42 You know, we’re talking about really finding product market fit
1:01:46 product market fit if I have to give a definition is when you recognize you finally have
1:01:55 Something that customers actually do want and it’s recognized because all of a sudden the momentum of your business
1:01:57 automatically shifts
1:02:04 All of a sudden things go into high gear all of a sudden acquiring customers is so much easier all of a sudden. They’re sticking around
1:02:08 It’s just this instantaneous. Oh my god. We found it and
1:02:13 up until that point it is this constant
1:02:19 struggle of trying one thing after another trying to increment your way closer and closer and closer
1:02:25 You know when I mentioned that um, you know at the beginning there wasn’t a lot of business model innovation with Netflix
1:02:30 We you order them a disc we mail it to you. We charge you a dude. I give you a due date if you missed the due date
1:02:32 we had late fees and
1:02:37 The reality is the idea was ridiculous. It didn’t work
1:02:42 Nobody would rent from us and if you did rent from us once you didn’t rent from us again
1:02:46 And we kind of had this realization that okay
1:02:51 We got to begin figuring things out and thus began this year and a half long
1:03:00 process of trying to figure out some way to get people to rent DVDs by mail from us and
1:03:03 we tried
1:03:05 almost everything you could think of
1:03:10 hundreds of things and I kind of talk about this a bunch that I
1:03:15 Had no shortage of ideas
1:03:21 I mean I had lots of things I wanted to try and if there was any if there was a problem that I had it was that I was a
1:03:27 Bit of a perfectionist back then and so all these tests that I’d want to run. I’d want them to be perfect
1:03:35 So we would you know lovingly argue over every word of copy and we would do custom photography and we would
1:03:41 Check every link and we’d stress test the site and it might take us three weeks or a month to prepare for this test
1:03:46 And we test this new idea and then it would not work
1:03:49 We wouldn’t do anything and we’d kind of look at each other and go we just wasted a month
1:03:56 So, okay faster when then we do a test in two weeks and it would still fail. Okay, okay faster
1:04:00 And we do it in a week and faster we eventually started getting to the point
1:04:04 we could do a test every day or multiple tests every day and
1:04:07 It turns out that
1:04:11 Once you go that fast things get very very sloppy
1:04:19 So we would have the wrong image or it would have the watermark on it or the pages we had greaked would still be Greek to you know not
1:04:27 We’d have bad links we’d crash the site and then but that was such an incredibly big insight for us
1:04:30 because it turns out that
1:04:33 It didn’t make a difference
1:04:36 That if it was a bad idea
1:04:41 Even spending a month crafting this perfect test wasn’t going to make it a good idea
1:04:48 But if it had even an inkling of being a good idea no matter how bad the test was it’s shown through
1:04:53 Customers would immediately perk their head up. They’d raise their hand. They would fight to do it
1:04:55 They’d call us they’d reboot the site
1:05:02 It was this incredibly loud signal that there was something there and it goes back to what we said before
1:05:06 Which is that it’s not about having a good idea
1:05:14 it’s about building this whole process and this culture and the system to try lots of bad ideas and
1:05:23 We got really really good at trying lots of bad ideas one after another hundreds of them each one
1:05:25 informing us to some little
1:05:28 some little bit about what the try next and
1:05:34 Eventually we got to this point where we had these two big ideas left and one of them was
1:05:37 at that point
1:05:39 Netflix was pretty big
1:05:44 We had probably in our warehouse several hundred thousand DVDs
1:05:49 And I remember one day we were read and I were in the warehouse and looking at all these DVDs and going it’s such a shame
1:05:55 That all these DVDs are here in the warehouse where they’re not doing anywhere any good
1:05:58 I wonder if there’s a way to store them at our customers houses
1:06:04 Let them keep them and then when they’re done they mail it back. We’ll just replace it and
1:06:10 Rather than having them have to pay each time they replace it
1:06:15 Let’s just have a monthly fee a subscription and they can rent as often as they want
1:06:19 There’s no due dates and no late fees and it was a ridiculous idea
1:06:22 But when we tested it
1:06:27 It was that mythical product market fit it it worked people loved it
1:06:34 They couldn’t get enough of it. They told their friends. They did not cancel their subscriptions
1:06:36 What part of it worked and why did it work?
1:06:44 God knows. Yeah, but in retrospect what it did was it took
1:06:47 One of Netflix’s biggest
1:06:52 Impediments and turned it into one of its biggest assets
1:06:59 You know, we referred to my book. It’s called that will never work and there was two reasons
1:07:01 It’s called that’s one of work
1:07:07 It’s because that’s what every single person told me when I pitched the idea and they had two reasons why they said it
1:07:10 and one of course was
1:07:15 Streaming they said, oh, it’s a digital medium
1:07:21 It’s just a matter of days before everyone’s streaming these who needs DVDs and we realized that was not the case
1:07:24 It was inevitable, but it could be years
1:07:27 But the other reason was was blockbuster
1:07:33 Why on earth would anybody want to order a movie have it mailed to them get it three days later
1:07:38 And then keep it a week and mail it back when you can drive to a blockbuster in
1:07:42 20 minutes and have the movie immediate gratification and
1:07:49 What happened when we did the no due dates no late fees is it shifted?
1:07:54 Because before with an all-accurate system, you would order it. Yeah, you get it three days later
1:08:00 Or you drive to blockbuster in 20 minutes, but now when it was no due dates no late fees
1:08:07 You could order your movies. They’d sit on top of your TV. You keep them as long as you want when you want to watch a movie
1:08:09 This lag time is zero
1:08:16 Compared to 20 minutes to go to blockbuster because you could order a couple I imagine you three you could order three
1:08:22 Okay, and so you always had something to watch when you’re done you put it in the mail and instantly, you know
1:08:29 Two days later another one replaces it. So all of a sudden we weren’t two and a half days slower than blockbuster
1:08:32 We were faster than blockbuster
1:08:35 And I think that
1:08:41 Was the convenience and the thing is that when we did the analysis at the beginning about blockbuster is Achilles heel
1:08:44 It was the late fees. Everyone hated them
1:08:51 That was the single biggest thing that people would say about blockbuster
1:08:56 I hate the late fees and by being able to get rid of that was a huge competitive advantage
1:09:00 And it was baked into the blockbuster business model. They couldn’t easily
1:09:02 Get out of it again
1:09:06 So for someone that might not be aware of blockbuster the late fees are if I didn’t bring back this
1:09:13 Tape of this movie. I would get charged per hour per day or something. Yeah, it’s usually three or four dollars a day
1:09:17 Okay, which is a lot of money for a DVD. It’s a huge amount of money for that
1:09:19 but it was also this feeling of I
1:09:23 Was okay paying the initial fee to rent the movie
1:09:28 Because they want but now I’ve watched the movie and I just couldn’t get it back in time and now oh my god
1:09:31 Now I got to pay more just to return it. It just felt like this
1:09:34 unwarranted
1:09:40 Pleasant punishment for the customer. I was thinking about something that Daniel Kahneman the famous sort of psychologist
1:09:45 talked about in his paper when he wrote about loss aversion and
1:09:50 The TLDR of it the too long didn’t read part of this is that Daniel Kahneman discovered that people have a real
1:09:54 disdain for feeling like they’ve lost something and in his studies
1:10:00 He shows that if you drop ten dollars on the floor, you don’t need to find ten dollars to make up for the pain of losing 10
1:10:02 You’d actually need to find 20 or 30
1:10:08 And so he has this wonderful graph where he talks about that we just lost to us is so much more painful than a game
1:10:13 So in the case of blockbuster a late fee is is is money
1:10:18 I literally lost for the nothing right so it’s not losing four dollars in the context of it
1:10:23 It’s actually losing like twelve dollars. It’s that painful exactly it was it
1:10:28 It was a really really hated aspect of the video rental experience back then
1:10:30 And also made me think about the peak-end rule
1:10:35 Which is you remember the which uber discovered in their labs where they say that people remember the peak in the end of an
1:10:39 Experience and so if my end of an experience with blockbuster is getting charged
1:10:47 Getting punished that’s really interesting. I’ve never heard that before but that fits entirely. It was the perfect in a month to
1:10:52 Having an experience with blockbuster is to go in and have someone say thanks for turning your movie now
1:10:56 You owe us eight dollars or twelve dollars just like a horrible end experience
1:11:00 It is and that’s why I think a node no due dates no late fees
1:11:03 was so
1:11:09 Profoundly game changing for us and it marked the beginning of that that was it. That’s what
1:11:14 the company became for the next five or six seven years and
1:11:20 It was more than just no due dates a late fees, but the transition to a subscription business
1:11:24 Was huge and this is you know now
1:11:29 Everything’s a subscription business every piece of software you buy is a subscription
1:11:33 Everything’s subscription back then that was not the case
1:11:40 There was book clubs, which are subscription there was record and tape clubs. There’s subscription. There was magazines and
1:11:42 that’s all and
1:11:50 In some ways when you look back at what some of the huge Netflix innovations were one of them was demonstrating you could apply
1:11:53 Subscription to something which is reasonably
1:11:55 unintuitive and
1:12:00 It came from this fact again this disconnected little piece of my past
1:12:06 That I happened to have had a year and a half of experience really understanding
1:12:13 Subscription economics when you were looking forward. So I’m so fascinated by this test that you did which which changed
1:12:15 Netflix’s fortunes. There’s a couple of them that you’ve described
1:12:20 But when you did you know looking forward that it would have that much of an impact and I’m saying this because
1:12:26 That helps me to understand whether I should just conduct a lot more tests
1:12:31 Or I should do what I think most companies do where we sit in a boardroom and we spend hours and hours trying to find the
1:12:36 Perfect test is the game just conduct more tests if I didn’t have to sit behind the microphone
1:12:39 I get up and hit you upside the head for that comment
1:12:41 God
1:12:47 No, you should not be sitting in the boardroom debating what to do you should be running more tests
1:12:50 You should always be running more tests. You don’t know if you don’t know shit. I
1:12:56 Mean you don’t your customers do but they even they don’t know what they want and the only way to figure it out
1:12:59 Is to throw all kinds of things at them and see what?
1:13:01 directionally
1:13:03 they’re interested in but
1:13:10 So did I have any idea the subscription was a big thing? Absolutely not and once it began to work and it worked like crazy
1:13:17 We still had no idea how to optimize it and we Netflix still 20 plus years later
1:13:23 Spends on godly amounts of time on testing all kinds of things about
1:13:26 Subscription dynamics
1:13:33 What does it take to get some of the do it? What does it take to get someone to stay? What influences these? It’s unbelievably complex, but it’s
1:13:36 unbelievably important, but subscriptions
1:13:41 There’s a reason why it’s it’s eating the world. It’s an incredibly compelling business model
1:13:48 And the fact that we stumbled onto it and that it worked so well just was a very very positive
1:13:51 Thank you. It’s interesting on the testing point just to close off there
1:13:58 Embodying the position of most companies or employees or founders listening to this the reason why they don’t want to run tests
1:14:05 Or don’t have a culture of it is because it involves failure and failure that in most companies results in blame and blame makes people feel bad
1:14:09 So it disincentivizes them, but creating a culture where failing is a
1:14:16 Positive and it celebrates it is quite a challenge. I guess it certainly is it’s it’s a career for me
1:14:23 I mean, I I do a lot of public speaking keynote speaking all over the world and it’s a lot of them are big companies
1:14:30 Who are going our whole world’s being turned upside down our whole workforce is risk-averse
1:14:35 Mark get in here and help us figure out how to make everyone a bit more risk tolerant
1:14:37 but
1:14:39 You know, what do they do?
1:14:46 They’ll go okay mark your theme today is what we’re trying to get everyone to be bigger risk takers to take chances
1:14:48 We want to celebrate risk
1:14:56 So but before you go on we’re gonna celebrate the sales leaders and bring them up and reward them for the trips to Hawaii
1:15:01 It’s like you said you have to let people know that filling is not only okay
1:15:05 It’s expected and it’s a good thing and we found we’ve learned from it
1:15:12 And I don’t even because it’s not even considered failures. They’re not failures. They’re tests that didn’t necessarily
1:15:16 Work but they worked in the sense that you learn something from them
1:15:22 And you just keep doing those over and over again and as again if you go back to this my first principle is
1:15:27 How do you learn how to do tests which are quick cheap and easy?
1:15:29 You can do as tons of them
1:15:34 Talking about giving speeches there just a week before the dot-com bubble burst
1:15:38 You gave a speech in New York City and your dad was there. Oh, yeah
1:15:41 My dad was the anti-entrepreneur
1:15:45 He was
1:15:48 Extremely risk averse
1:15:52 He was an investment advisor. He worked for a
1:15:58 Managing money for people in a company whose whole principle was
1:16:04 Fundamentals long-term value. He had no clue whatsoever
1:16:11 About why I was doing what I was doing in this whole venture world. It was just completely made no sense to him
1:16:15 But that speech in New York City was actually fairly
1:16:20 Interesting because what I was doing was speaking to the DVD
1:16:27 Manufacturers Association, I think it was but what we learned about more effective ways to expand their business
1:16:31 And on one hand, I think my dad was extremely proud to see
1:16:35 That all this stuff that I’d been saying which he thought was all a bunch of hooey
1:16:38 Was actually
1:16:41 Important and interesting to people but unfortunately it was also
1:16:49 He happened to be in New York that time to get treatment for a brain tumor which he had just realized he had and
1:16:52 So it kind of was this
1:16:57 Beginning of this my dad understanding for the first time
1:17:03 What I was good at at the same time the end of
1:17:10 Not our relationship, but it marked the beginning of this saying goodbye to him
1:17:14 So it was kind of this very very bittersweet bittersweet time
1:17:17 in
1:17:20 2000 at 42 years old when you were 42 years old
1:17:25 He just just one week before the comm crash your father passes away, right? I
1:17:28 mean the timing is is
1:17:36 Is extremely unfortunate, but also just the impact that must have on one’s perspective to lose their father at that
1:17:42 That’s in that season of life. Yeah, I guess it’s part of you go. Well, what else can go wrong and
1:17:45 you find out plenty
1:17:48 but
1:17:49 The
1:17:58 Tragic this is gonna sound silk trite, I suppose but one of the tragic things about my father dying before the dot-com claps is
1:18:00 He missed seeing that he was right
1:18:05 He missed seeing that in fact this was a lot of hooey
1:18:07 that
1:18:09 this apparent
1:18:11 defying of gravity
1:18:17 by all of those dot-com companies commanding these ridiculous valuations with no revenues and
1:18:20 Even even less profit
1:18:26 Which he thought he could not understand how this could possibly be real
1:18:30 well as we all found out a week later it wasn’t real and I
1:18:34 Think he would have really loved seeing that in fact he was right
1:18:37 Um
1:18:43 But it was kind of this double hit for me, you know reeling in fact from the death of my dad and then all of a sudden
1:18:47 having to worry now about the death of my
1:18:50 Company
1:18:54 Did it change your perspective losing your father on what matters in life?
1:19:03 I’m gonna say no because
1:19:06 because
1:19:12 What was great about my father was that he was very true to himself
1:19:17 he was very comfortable being an iconic last about
1:19:20 Holding different opinions
1:19:25 Even as we just mentioned with the dot-com bubble
1:19:33 When everyone else was saying this was the next big thing and he’s going this makes no sense whatsoever and he held to it and
1:19:34 and
1:19:36 he lived his whole life that way and
1:19:44 so in some ways when he died there was this sense that it is possible to be
1:19:53 True to yourself and and be fulfilled that you do not need to chase the trends
1:19:56 Was reminding me that that
1:19:59 Can happen
1:20:02 When I started my first job when I was like
1:20:05 And I was probably 22
1:20:08 My first real job were actually had to go sit in an office
1:20:11 my dad called me into the den
1:20:13 and
1:20:16 tore a page off of a yellow pad and
1:20:19 On the page he had written in pencil
1:20:22 the Randolph rules of success and
1:20:29 He goes this is this are the things that I have learned over my career as a business person
1:20:34 And I think I want you to see these as you start your career as a business person
1:20:37 And I wasn’t quite sure what to expect as I was looking at them
1:20:42 And what was interesting was that these were not business rules
1:20:48 This wasn’t like you know buy low and sell high or happiness is positive cash flow or anything like that
1:20:54 These were basically rules that said it’s possible to be a decent person and still be successful
1:20:57 And it was simple things like you know do 10% more than you’re asked
1:21:00 it was
1:21:02 Be prompt
1:21:03 It was
1:21:07 Don’t knock don’t complain stick to constructive serious criticism
1:21:09 it was
1:21:15 Don’t express opinions about things that you don’t have the facts for
1:21:18 mean
1:21:21 That’s who my dad was that he
1:21:27 Felt that those were the important things to communicate to me which is mark
1:21:30 Be a match
1:21:32 Then the dot-com bubble happens
1:21:39 Most of us can’t remember. I think I was how old was I must have been seven or seven or so seven years old
1:21:42 So I can’t really remember what happened. Yeah, but I know it was bad
1:21:46 Well, it’s especially bad for us I
1:21:54 We were talking a moment ago about subscriptions and how subscription economics are amazing and what makes them amazing
1:21:57 Is that you acquire your customer?
1:22:00 And then that customer gives you money for months afterwards
1:22:03 Ideally for years afterwards
1:22:08 But because a subscription customers willing to give you money for years afterwards
1:22:11 You can invest more in acquiring that customer
1:22:14 You can spend a hundred dollars
1:22:19 To bring that customer on board with the confidence. They’re going to give you ten dollars a month
1:22:23 Month after month after month after month, but it means in month one
1:22:26 You spent a hundred and you made ten
1:22:30 So when you have a subscription business, which is booming
1:22:38 Which is going crazy when customers are flooding in the door. Well, money is flooding out the door the cash required
1:22:42 Service those bring those customers in for their first month
1:22:50 Huge the revenue from them not so much not to mention we had a first month free policy and
1:22:58 That wasn’t a problem in March of 2000 that was the era of irrational exuberance
1:23:02 That was where you had these companies where had no revenue
1:23:05 No real business model worth hundreds of millions of dollars
1:23:13 Where I could go out on the highway with a green flag and wave it and a dump truck of money would pull off and back up to
1:23:18 My driveway and I just need to come out with the wheelbarrows and bring the money in it was
1:23:24 Ridiculous until the dot-com crash and all of a sudden in a matter of a week or two
1:23:29 Completely dried up and all of a sudden having a dot-com on your name was no longer
1:23:32 The road to riches it was the scarlet letter
1:23:40 And we were in deep trouble we were basically going to go broke being successful and
1:23:46 When that happens as you’ve seen with other entrepreneurs you do something
1:23:50 called pursue strategic alternatives
1:23:54 which is code for we have got to sell this sucker fast and
1:24:02 We had an obvious strategic alternative, which was blockbuster. How were you losing money at that point? Oh my god. Yes, how much
1:24:11 At that point we had accumulated losses of about fifty million dollars and what were your revenues?
1:24:19 Five million dollars and you you were you accumulated losses. What was your sort of annual yearly burn rate? How much money were you burning every year?
1:24:20 Well
1:24:24 There we were only in business for we’d only been a business for two and a half years
1:24:30 So it most of that 50 had been in the previous 12 months. I mean that’s I
1:24:34 Mean on paper. That’s not a good business. Well, not just on but yeah
1:24:41 It’s a terrible business, you know, they they say that one of the goals of any startup is to see a repeatable scalable business model
1:24:45 That is not what we mean by repeatable scalable business model
1:24:47 it’s disastrous and
1:24:54 You have lots of businesses which go we’re gonna make it up in volume or once we just get that get the eyeballs
1:24:56 Then we’ll monetize it later. So
1:25:02 It’s it when all of a sudden the opportunity for all those things goes away. It’s disastrous
1:25:08 We’re just completely upside down our economics. Did you go to blockbuster? Did they come to you?
1:25:11 No, we tried going to blockbuster for months. We tried reaching out to them
1:25:17 But this was at this ultimate and we listen we were doing five million a year. They were doing six billion dollars a year
1:25:22 Okay, so you and we had 150 employees. They had 60,000
1:25:28 That we were like a net, you know to them to an elephant that you know, the tail flipped around
1:25:35 What’s this thing buzzing? No interest in us whatsoever. It took months and finally we got the call and
1:25:40 As luck would have it we got the call when we were at a corporate retreat
1:25:43 At a place called the Alasall Ranch
1:25:51 There’s a city called Santa Barbara on the coast of California pretty rural Alasall Ranch is way back in the mountains
1:25:53 It’s a dude ranch, you know horses
1:25:59 So we’re on retreat and you also know that in Silicon Valley that were pretty casual
1:26:05 And when you’re on retreat you have to work at it to be even more casual. So all I had with me was shorts
1:26:07 T-shirts
1:26:13 Thong sandals, you know, that’s that’s all I had with me and that’s when blockbuster calls goes
1:26:15 We’ll like to see you tomorrow in Dallas
1:26:19 And I’m trying to read and going there’s no way
1:26:26 We can’t fly nonstop out of Santa Barbara. The time zones are different. We can’t possibly get to
1:26:34 Dallas by tomorrow and so we did the prudent thing you do when you’re 50 million dollars in the hole and we chartered a corporate jet
1:26:37 A rounding error. I think they call that
1:26:40 We fly to Dallas
1:26:49 Go up to in the 27th 28th floor of this massive glass and steel skyscraper into this huge cavernous conference room
1:26:51 It was a big
1:26:53 hardwood
1:27:00 Table made of I’m sure out of some endangered Amazonian hardwood or something was horrendous the whole thing and I’m there in
1:27:03 shorts and a t-shirt and your thong sandals and
1:27:09 Sandals and Reed I was jealous. He had a Hawaiian shirt. He had buttons
1:27:15 Anyway, in come the blockbuster guys and we make our pitch. We go will combine forces
1:27:20 You’ll run the stores. We’ll run the online business. We’ll build a blended model
1:27:24 which our research is shown is a game changer and
1:27:31 Everything I’ll work out and it was going good, you know, they’re asking good questions. They’re leaning in there and we’re going
1:27:38 Okay, this is this is rolling and then they asked the big question, you know, how much and of course we rehearsed on the plane
1:27:41 and we figured we’re 50 million dollars in the hole so
1:27:44 50 million dollars and
1:27:49 there’s this silence in the room and
1:27:52 I’m looking at
1:28:01 Blockbuster execs trying to piece together what the reaction is and it finally dawned on me. They’re trying to suppress laughter
1:28:05 They’re trying to keep a straight face at the hubris
1:28:13 That this little company 50 million dollars in debt at the trough of the meltdown could possibly be worth 50 million dollars
1:28:16 So as you can imagine
1:28:18 Meeting goes downhill pretty quickly after that
1:28:25 long quiet ride in the cab back to the airport even quieter ride on the jet back to Santa Barbara and
1:28:30 I so profoundly remember sitting there on the plane
1:28:34 Just my head down like not talking
1:28:39 Just thinking, huh, I was so
1:28:47 Confident that if we just got the meeting that this blended model was so self-evidently great that they’d save us
1:28:52 But now they weren’t going to save us they were going to compete with us and we were in
1:28:55 Trouble did they make you an offer?
1:29:01 no, they just rejected the 50 million dollar offer and
1:29:07 You know my dad one of the things he sometimes would say to me is like, you know
1:29:12 When I was struggling with some particularly nasty problem and came to him for this illusion
1:29:15 He’d go, you know, sometimes the only way out is through
1:29:18 that you got to take these problems and just
1:29:23 Go right at them. There’s no way around and this was such a classic case of that
1:29:29 There was no easy way out of this. The only way we were going to survive was be to compete with them that and we had to put
1:29:36 Ourself at a position we could do that when we laid people off. We dropped entire lines of adjunct little businesses
1:29:42 completely focused it in and and survived and eventually, you know as eventually
1:29:45 past blockbuster and
1:29:47 eventually
1:29:49 Blockbuster went into bankruptcy. I
1:29:54 Don’t know how blockbuster couldn’t have just looked over and seen your business
1:30:00 Succeeding at some point and gone, okay, we’ve got six billion revenue a year. We’ll just destroy them
1:30:06 We’ll just you know overpower them with advertising or something. It’s a big piece of innovators dilemma
1:30:09 in their case a
1:30:12 Couple things going on
1:30:14 number one
1:30:21 Imagine you were the CEO of blockbuster. Okay. I called John wasn’t it John Antioch. So you’ve got six billion
1:30:24 dollars coming in through your standard business model which is
1:30:31 Serving these bricks and mortar stores all over the world six billion dollars and someone comes to you and goes
1:30:38 We need to build an online component and you John goes. Well, what do you think that could do in revenue the first year and you go?
1:30:40 two million dollars
1:30:43 So would you say?
1:30:47 Okay, take our very best engineers. Let’s put them on this project
1:30:51 No, you go
1:30:57 Okay, figure here’s a hand figure it out and you can put the the B team is on it and of course it doesn’t
1:31:03 Netflix wasn’t a movie company. It was a software company. I mean we had Silicon Valley. We had
1:31:08 People who had spent their whole life building software. You can’t compete with that
1:31:11 Even with their a team it would have been challenging
1:31:16 They put the B and the C team on it and they did that a second time and then a third time and finally each time
1:31:18 we’re stronger and stronger and stronger and
1:31:26 Eventually they go we gotta fix this and they pick a team they resource it adequately. They say get out of the building
1:31:29 Go across town
1:31:34 Set up here’s the money come after these guys and it’s one of the story
1:31:39 Which has not really been told very well, but they came really really close to taking down
1:31:42 Netflix
1:31:46 They were in they that blended model which we knew was a killer
1:31:50 Which a blended model means you can rent from
1:31:55 Blockbuster and you can either return it in the mail or you can return it at the store
1:32:01 Or you can go pick it up at the store or you can have it mailed to you and we couldn’t compete with that
1:32:03 we didn’t have the stores and
1:32:06 it really really came close to
1:32:14 Taking Netflix down until all of a sudden they had all kinds of unrelated corporate shenanigans
1:32:21 That made them decide change CEOs. We’re gonna de-resource this online business and walked away from it
1:32:27 What was I saw you talk about this on your Instagram recently and when John quit the business
1:32:31 John was the CEO of Blockbuster and him quitting the business
1:32:38 For a variety of reasons is much of the reason that you think Netflix actually ended up not getting killed by Blockbuster
1:32:44 Correct, can you explain that so and I’m not gonna get this entirely right, but they’re basically were
1:32:46 People who are corporate raiders
1:32:52 Who would buy large amounts of a company stock and take seats on the board?
1:32:59 Take multiple seats on the board and begin to try and dictate things to make a company more short-term profitable
1:33:02 that happened to Blockbuster and
1:33:10 One of the acts they did was deny John and he’ll close bonus. He was the CEO of Blockbuster. Yep
1:33:16 And he said you can’t do that and they go well, we need to we’re gonna know
1:33:21 We’re not gonna pay you the bonus that we you were promised in your previous agreement and so he goes well in that case
1:33:24 I quit and
1:33:31 then they went to find a replacement and they brought in a person who had all of their experience at
1:33:34 retail stores at convenience stores and
1:33:38 His vision was we have
1:33:47 1,000 stores in almost every community in the country in the world. Why aren’t we selling gum and clothing and
1:33:53 What are we wasting money on this digital stuff and
1:34:00 There’s a this is super movie geeky so I pardon me for the segue
1:34:08 Steven Spielberg who I’m sure you’re familiar with his film school project
1:34:15 Was a movie about a robot and the robot operates kind of on a cost
1:34:18 benefit analysis and
1:34:19 There’s the penultimate
1:34:24 See in the movie where the robot is chasing somebody and he’s getting closer and closer and he’s closer
1:34:32 And he’s just about the robots to reach up and grab the person’s ankle and you see the sunk cost of the robot’s time
1:34:38 Get to break even and he stops and walks away an instant before he grabs the person
1:34:40 That’s what blockbuster did
1:34:42 They were within
1:34:44 Seconds of grabbing us by the ankle and yanking us off the ladder
1:34:52 When something happened unrelated to that and they just turned and walked away and we just scampered to safety. They lost focus
1:34:54 Yep
1:34:59 So that’s there’s a lot of reasons Netflix blockbuster didn’t go down because of Netflix only
1:35:04 but blockbuster went down because they had a business model which was
1:35:06 very very difficult to change and
1:35:14 They didn’t have the courage and the persistence to be willing to do the things that would have made it change
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1:36:17 You left the day after the IPO in May 2002
1:36:24 The IPO happens the company is valued at a big number and I guess your life has changed
1:36:28 indefinitely from that point because it’s a lot of money
1:36:30 for someone to have
1:36:34 And you go on, you know leave the company for the reasons you expressed earlier
1:36:40 And you go on and do other things and I think at that point really the streaming war has been has been now won by
1:36:46 By Netflix and how many others as we sit here in 2024, but at that point was really when you know blockbuster are
1:36:50 Effectively dead. I think they went on they went bankrupt for eight years after the idea. Yes
1:36:56 Those wars rage for a while. Okay, so you go public in 2002, right?
1:37:03 They continue pursuing you. Yeah, but ultimately they they run out of steam eight years later and go bankrupt in 2010
1:37:09 You leave Netflix you leave Netflix. You’re a wealthy man. You’ve achieved success that
1:37:16 Almost everybody on planet Earth will never see in terms of business at that point
1:37:18 What matters?
1:37:20 What matters in life?
1:37:29 The day of the IPO, I remember he left the trading floor where we had gone public New York City my young my son
1:37:31 Who actually with me today?
1:37:36 Oh, yeah in the back was was with me. He was a young very much younger man and
1:37:41 I remember the two of us sitting in the in the taxi going downtown in New York
1:37:47 We’re going to get pizza because I figure he’s a California kid. He had better experience New York pizza
1:37:50 And I was sitting there going my life has changed
1:37:53 you know, I I do have
1:37:57 The option if I want to do not have to work again
1:38:03 and I mean in the cabs seeing all these people who were going about their lives and going am I different or not and
1:38:07 Part of it you then you realize I like what I do. I
1:38:13 I’ll take the day take a day or two, but I’m gonna be going back to work. I still have problems to solve
1:38:15 We still have to make this company
1:38:18 Successful and I did I went back to work and it was not
1:38:26 It wasn’t as profound that my life changed like the IPO is held up as this be all end all
1:38:28 But it’s just one more
1:38:35 Milestone along the way. You know Netflix still had a lot to do and it it still has a lot to do
1:38:43 The the more profound thing was was actually leaving and realizing that I could begin as I mentioned before
1:38:50 Could now begin spending my days doing the things that I really loved doing and I have I’ve been incredibly lucky to do that
1:38:55 You know since leaving Netflix. I do get to spend every day working with other early-stage companies
1:39:00 I did start another company after Netflix, which did really really well
1:39:02 I
1:39:07 Have a great life and I still get a chance to spend time with my family and I still get a chance to get out and do all
1:39:09 the outdoors things that
1:39:17 Make me whole was there grief associated with leaving and that’s what if the months after you leave is there a grieving process because you
1:39:19 It’s surprisingly
1:39:21 No, there’s uncertainty
1:39:24 you know, I
1:39:29 Spent most of my professional career in Silicon Valley and as most people there do I know
1:39:35 Dozens if not hundreds of people who have economic outcomes there
1:39:39 That would allow them to not work another day in their life if they wanted to
1:39:45 but it if you do a simple survey of the friends of yours who’ve been put in that position the
1:39:47 vast majority of them
1:39:50 go back to work they start another company and
1:39:58 You realize that we are entrepreneurs not because we have to do it to earn a living
1:40:06 We do it because we love that process of solving problems. We love that process of making and building a company
1:40:14 We love that process as I described earlier of sitting around the table with really smart people solving really interesting problems
1:40:22 and if success is nothing else, it’s the ability to be able to do the kind of things you want to spend your time doing and
1:40:27 Doing another company is the most thrilling thing in the world and if I get a chance to do that
1:40:31 Why wouldn’t I want to do that? So in that period after leaving I
1:40:36 Didn’t say I’m retiring. I didn’t say I’m starting another company
1:40:42 I said I’m gonna take some time and think about it and in my case. I decided I didn’t think I had any me to start another company
1:40:46 I was gonna spend my time helping other people do it
1:40:53 It turns out that I was wrong. I got sucked in to starting another company. That’s a whole another part. Yeah, yeah, but uh
1:40:55 This whole thing is not about
1:41:00 The IPO. It’s not about success. It’s not about money
1:41:06 The thing that makes this the best job in the world is how cool it is to take something
1:41:10 which hasn’t been done before and figure out how to do it and
1:41:15 I just feel blessed and I imagine you do too and the people you speak to we’re all blessed that we are
1:41:18 Allowed to spend our days doing that
1:41:27 One of the things that always inspired me and that I’ve mulled over for many years is the culture that was created in Netflix because it was so pioneering and it’s so
1:41:31 Sort of spat in the face of the way that we were told things were supposed to be done
1:41:36 You know because when we when I started my first business it was all about family and all of this stuff
1:41:40 And then I remember that day that I read Netflix’s sort of culture handbook
1:41:44 Which is quite famous and viral now called freedom and responsibility and it was everything
1:41:49 That I it was the opposite of everything that I thought a business was supposed to be
1:41:55 You know, it was this radical freedom that people were given but then there was a really high bar
1:41:58 And I want I’ve always been curious like
1:42:06 A where did that come from B? Is that for every company? Is that the right way of company culture?
1:42:10 And I guess see what is that the unknown part because we all saw the deck
1:42:17 But we don’t get to see the actual so I’ll take your middle part first, which is this for everybody and the answer is no
1:42:24 Culture as I often say is not aspirational
1:42:27 culture is observational
1:42:33 Culture is not something that you dream up what you want it to be that you aspire to it to be
1:42:40 It’s not brainstorming what our culture should be and now let’s print up 40 posters and put them in the break room
1:42:46 That is not what culture is culture is how you as the founders behave
1:42:49 It’s how you as a senior executives behave
1:42:56 People are watching you and they’re modeling off of you. That is what culture is that’s where culture comes from
1:43:02 So if you aren’t a certain way you can’t have your culture be that way and
1:43:05 It’s perfectly okay to say that
1:43:11 We’re a family if that’s really the way you behave and want to
1:43:18 Build your company. It’s entirely appropriate. That’s not the way I wanted to behave or build my company
1:43:21 So I never said that but I’ll get to that in just a minute
1:43:29 But it comes from this so this whole radical honesty thing at Netflix that just came from the way read and I always treated each other
1:43:35 And the way we treated our employees and the way we wanted to help them accountable to treat their employees
1:43:39 So it has to come from how you genuinely are
1:43:44 You can police that you can hold each other accountable
1:43:49 You can say we want to hear from everybody and then have
1:43:53 Your HR person pull you aside after the meeting and go
1:43:55 Mark read
1:43:58 You are always saying you really want to hear from everyone in those meetings
1:44:05 What percentage of the words do you think came out of your mouths and then close your right Patty?
1:44:08 We’ll do better next time. I mean you want you want your
1:44:14 Actions to match your words. So that’s the core thing of culture is it can’t be something alien
1:44:20 It means you have to be accountable to it because it spreads beyond you
1:44:28 That the culture of the first 10 people is modeled off first two of you the next 90 is off the first 10
1:44:34 The next 900 is off that first hundred and so on so if you let it slip if you say
1:44:38 Our most one of our principles is no assholes
1:44:47 Unless there that our best salesperson or the replaceable CFO. Well, then then it’s different. No, you’ve got to be consistent
1:44:52 Because everyone sees that anyone with kids knows kids don’t model what you say they model what you do the other piece
1:44:55 This whole freedom and responsibility thing is not
1:45:01 Novel it’s almost every early stage company has this
1:45:07 Because there’s just aren’t the resources to do otherwise you have let’s say 10 people
1:45:11 But you have the work of a hundred there is not time to say, okay, Stephen
1:45:16 Here’s what you have to do and here’s it. Here’s you have to do and check you can’t do that
1:45:19 You just go all right. Here’s what I need. You see that mountain over there
1:45:23 I’ll meet you there in two weeks and I need you to have this finished
1:45:30 Here’s what you need two weeks meet you there and then I’m not gonna talk to you for two weeks
1:45:35 And you’re gonna have to struggle and figure things out and overcome obstacles based on what you have to accomplish
1:45:38 There’ll be different things and this person has to accomplish
1:45:45 But I trust that you’re gonna get to that mountaintop with the stuff done in two weeks
1:45:50 That’s the responsibility part, but I’m giving you the complete freedom how to get there
1:45:52 So that’s an easy thing when you have 10 people
1:46:00 It’s a little harder when you have a hundred. It’s really hard when you have a thousand and the reason is that there’s an innocent thing that happens
1:46:02 so
1:46:04 get to a point and
1:46:07 You’re at the mountain and someone shows up like three or four days late
1:46:10 And you go, oh
1:46:16 This isn’t good. I can’t have this. Okay from now on I need everyone to give me a daily status report
1:46:19 So I know in advance of this problem is that every person goes oh
1:46:22 status reports
1:46:27 Okay, and now everyone shows up on time, but then someone shows up and they spent too much money and
1:46:33 You go, oh, I can’t have this. Okay everyone. I need to pre-approve all expenses over $5,000
1:46:38 And all these people who you’re counting on to be responsible
1:46:40 You’re treating them like an infant
1:46:45 You’re going I’m giving you this you have a 10 million dollar quarterly sales nut
1:46:51 But I don’t trust you to make a decision about what kind of a hotel you can stay in
1:46:54 Or what money you can spend to achieve
1:46:56 Come on
1:46:57 Treat me like an adult
1:47:02 That’s freedom and responsibility is I I’m going to treat you like an adult
1:47:05 What most companies do is they put these guardrails in place
1:47:09 To keep people from making errors of judgment
1:47:17 And the netflix experiment is simply is rather than building guardrails to protect ourselves from people with bad judgment
1:47:20 Let’s build a culture
1:47:25 Where there are no guardrails and only hire people with good judgment
1:47:28 And
1:47:30 That’s it in a nutshell
1:47:35 And you know, I’m sure you’ve seen the deck, but you know, you know what the travel policy is there there isn’t one
1:47:38 You know what the expense policy is
1:47:39 There isn’t one
1:47:46 You know what the vacation policy is, you know, there isn’t there aren’t any policies the policies are all summed up as use your best judgment
1:47:50 That’s freedom and responsibility now
1:47:55 That only works if someone has the judgment to be treated that way
1:48:02 So you have to be diligent about saying if you don’t have the judgment to be able to make decisions
1:48:04 effectively
1:48:06 You shouldn’t be here
1:48:08 But it turns out there’s a magic to this
1:48:14 I worked for a big multinational software company back when I was doing direct response marketing
1:48:16 and um
1:48:21 We had a big competitor with like microsoft and we had a big corporate campus
1:48:26 And it was beautiful had tennis courts had squash courts. It had a big health club
1:48:29 really wonderful cafe
1:48:31 and olympic swimming pool
1:48:33 and a hot tub
1:48:40 And one day myself and patty mccord who was the hr person at netflix we’re walking back from lunch
1:48:44 And we saw some of the engineers in the hot tub
1:48:50 And we swung by to say hello and as we got close to the hot tub we could tell they were all bitching about the company
1:48:54 And we thought it’s pretty funny that here they are
1:48:56 Sitting in this magnificent
1:48:58 hot tub at the company
1:49:01 complaining about it
1:49:03 but it triggered this conversation which is
1:49:08 If it’s not the amenities that make people want to work someplace
1:49:10 What is it?
1:49:14 and the answer is it’s not the fireman pole and the nap pods and the
1:49:21 kombucha on tap or any of the other ridiculous thing that people throw at it’s they want to be treated like adults
1:49:26 They want to have agency in their life and in their jobs. They don’t want to be
1:49:31 told what they can and can’t do they want to be given a clear
1:49:35 Responsibility and given the freedom to achieve it
1:49:37 and
1:49:41 That is such a huge unlock for netflix. It’s
1:49:46 More important than how much you pay someone. It’s more important than almost anything
1:49:47 I have been through this
1:49:52 So I my first business started with the same set of policies and rules, especially as it relates to like holiday
1:49:56 So we’ve always had unlimited holiday even in the company that you’re in, you know
1:49:58 You’re a part of now the 40 people that work for the Diary of a CEO now
1:50:04 We have unlimited holiday what I came to learn interestingly over time is that the reason you end up changing these rules
1:50:06 is because
1:50:08 five percent of people
1:50:13 It’s really like just a few people that don’t exercise the judgment you’re talking about
1:50:16 So what you end up doing is going okay. Well, I have to change your rule for everybody
1:50:23 because of this small group maybe three or four people that can’t seem to execute really great judgment
1:50:27 And and that’s funny because I found myself at one point several times over my career going right, okay
1:50:29 we have to get rid of the unlimited holiday because
1:50:32 Tom and Dave and Nigel
1:50:36 Of 200 people in an office can’t make fed and responsible judgment
1:50:41 And it’s kind of just dawned on me as you were speaking what what I actually need to do is just address the three people
1:50:44 I need to fire those people
1:50:48 You’re gonna you’re gonna go the opposite way. You’re gonna start looking at all the other policies you have
1:50:50 and go
1:50:52 I’m gonna take get rid of those two
1:50:55 I’m gonna get rid of it and little by little
1:51:02 But again, it’s only if that’s you it has to match how you want the company to feel it can’t be artificial
1:51:10 No, it is it’s always been because I even the reason why I’m an entrepreneur is because I’m impossible to employ because I’m
1:51:12 I hate jobs
1:51:15 So I tried to create a company where I would want to work in
1:51:19 Which means that if you show up late good because I’m probably going to be late too
1:51:24 And but the maybe the reason I was late is because I was working late on something and that actually doesn’t matter
1:51:28 So what time you arrive doesn’t matter. It’s you know, because responsible people someone like jack
1:51:31 You haven’t got to tell jack when to work jack is so
1:51:36 focused on the mission jack will figure out when he needs to get how and when he needs to get his job done
1:51:40 Um, and you don’t end up making the rules for people like jack the job at netflix for you
1:51:44 Yeah, but he’s one of those people because he’s like a founder here. He like founded this thing with me
1:51:50 So we have that kind of mentality, but yeah, you’re right. You end up making it’s so interesting. It is it’s it’s all about
1:51:54 taking down the guardrails and and what happens is
1:52:01 Taking the guardrails down great means those three people can’t work here, but it makes the other 97
1:52:05 Really want to work there. It makes other people
1:52:09 Because most places don’t do that. It’s like
1:52:13 It doesn’t make it. I don’t care when you work. I don’t care what hours you work
1:52:15 I don’t care whether you’re home or in the office
1:52:21 I do care that once we’ve agreed what responsibilities you have that you achieve get those things done
1:52:26 And if you can do it in six hours a week because you’re so smart and talented
1:52:30 All power to you the last thing I wanted to talk to you about is actually
1:52:33 Something that I read on on linkedin which went viral
1:52:38 Which was you talking about your relationship with your wife and your commitment to date night on tuesdays
1:52:41 Right the post went viral because I think it struck a chord with a lot of people who have
1:52:46 Really burnt themselves out because of their job. What is that principle you have with your wife and how long have you kept it for?
1:52:50 So right when I was you know in my late 20s
1:52:51 I was working like a dog
1:52:57 I was working all the time nights weekends and not because I had a slave dropper boss because I because I loved what I was doing
1:53:00 I just was totally into it and
1:53:05 I was in a relationship at the time with the woman who’s now my wife
1:53:09 And it kind of slowly dawned on me perhaps a little bit of help from her
1:53:14 That this wasn’t as satisfactory for her as it was for me
1:53:21 And it kind of made me realize that if I really wanted to have a sustainable long-term relationship
1:53:24 I had to uh
1:53:27 Figure something out and
1:53:32 That I realized that I had to have more balance in my life
1:53:40 Uh, and we began this policy of saying I am not I’m going to prioritize my relationship with my girlfriend
1:53:43 And who’s now my wife?
1:53:45 And that has taken a lot of forms
1:53:47 But the one that I referred to
1:53:53 Was I had this policy uh at netflix before netflix after netflix that every tuesday
1:53:56 Uh, I’d leave work at five o’clock sharp
1:54:03 My wife would get a sitter or before we had kids. We just go out and we’d spend the evening together at a date night
1:54:04 and
1:54:06 This was sacrosanct
1:54:09 That I don’t care what’s going on. I’m leaving at five
1:54:14 If there’s a crisis we’re going to wrap it up by five if you have to talk to me
1:54:17 Well, we’re going to talk in the way to the car, but I’m leaving at five
1:54:20 and um
1:54:24 It was kind of remarkable because after a while
1:54:31 Crises stopped happening after five o’clock on tuesday and all of a sudden people were able to solve their own problems
1:54:34 After five o’clock on tuesday
1:54:39 But there was a secondary benefit which is that I did talk a lot about the importance of balance that I didn’t want
1:54:46 This to be all encompassing that there were other aspects to what was important to everyone’s lives and by modeling this
1:54:48 I was walking the walk
1:54:50 I was showing that in fact, um
1:54:54 You could run a company and
1:54:59 Have the relationship. It wasn’t easy. This is a startup
1:55:02 So a lot of times, you know, I’d have date night
1:55:06 We get back late and I’d have to go back and into the office at 10 o’clock
1:55:10 Or a lot of times I’d come home have dinner with my kids
1:55:12 Go back and work for a couple hours
1:55:15 But I carved out the time to be present
1:55:21 And do those things and in my life, um, it’s maybe even a bit more challenging a
1:55:25 startups are hard and I have a family
1:55:32 But I also have this passion for outdoor stuff. You know, I love backcountry skiing and climbing and
1:55:36 Kayaking and mountaineering all this stuff that’s really hard to do
1:55:40 Between your five o’clock call and your seven o’clock meeting
1:55:42 so
1:55:46 I had a really structure in my life in a way that I could have
1:55:49 Meaningful time in all three of these areas of my life
1:55:55 And it’s been really really hard. Was there a risk of losing the relationship at some point?
1:55:59 Yeah, probably when I was in the right that that point when I was 29 30
1:56:03 Where am I I was coming clear if she was going? I’m not going to put up with this
1:56:06 You know, if you’re not going to be here for me
1:56:08 What’s the point? How did you take that?
1:56:11 at first
1:56:18 Very sobering. I mean it really makes you think how important is this to me
1:56:23 Um, and I know some people might say it’s not that important that my what up my work is
1:56:27 The most important thing. It’s the only thing that’s important to me. I decided otherwise
1:56:29 that um
1:56:35 That having a relationship was important to me and more importantly that I thought it was probably possible that I could do both
1:56:42 Um, again, it’s part of the running not running for planes. It’s saying I don’t need to be there all the time
1:56:44 I can prioritize well. I can
1:56:48 Uh distribute work to other people
1:56:53 I can make this work and not only that not only can I do the work and have the relationship
1:56:55 with my wife and my family I can get out and
1:57:00 Do outdoorsy stuff which is what I need to make myself whole
1:57:04 And this is a great way for me to wrap this in a way, but you know
1:57:12 I’ve had an amazing entrepreneurial career as I you know, I’ve had six seven companies depending on how you count it
1:57:14 I’ve had
1:57:18 three IPOs, you know two multi-billion dollar companies. So
1:57:21 Proud of that
1:57:24 But um way more proud of the fact that I managed to do all that
1:57:27 While staying married to the same woman
1:57:31 While having my kids grow up knowing me and as best I can tell liking me
1:57:35 Um, and still getting out to backcountry ski mountain bike
1:57:39 And all the things that I need to make me whole and that
1:57:42 I’m proud of
1:57:44 In the grand scheme of your happiness
1:57:50 You’ve got your business endeavors. You’ve got your fantastic relationships with your wife and your family. What does matter more?
1:57:54 Oh, it’s a trick question. I mean
1:57:59 So I guess I’ll answer in the counterintuitive way. You need all three
1:58:05 You know, I I think had I said had my wife said some ultimatum like I need to quit and
1:58:10 You know, you were going to move to montana and you’re going to be a mailman and and we’ll have a great
1:58:13 I would have been unhappy
1:58:16 And I mean I had a great relationship, but she knows that
1:58:20 She knows I can’t turn this off. I can’t turn it off
1:58:23 It’s something about seeing problems wanting to fix them
1:58:25 and
1:58:29 Having to pick one and say that’s all I’m going to do. That’s no life either
1:58:36 Um, that’s why I think, you know, again before we started you said, what do you what’s your big focus? And I said balance
1:58:40 Uh, I think about it every day. I think about it every week
1:58:44 They’re all important and I do what I have to do to make that happen
1:58:48 Mark, we have a closing tradition on the podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest
1:58:52 That’s not knowing who they’re leaving it for and the question that was left for you is what in your life
1:58:55 Were you most wrong about and what did you learn from it?
1:58:58 uh
1:59:01 So one of my big regrets is
1:59:05 I mentioned before that I had all this magazine subscription experience
1:59:08 uh
1:59:10 I knew circulation. I knew the subscription business
1:59:17 And it took me more than almost two years to figure out that maybe we could use this stupid thing for Netflix
1:59:24 And I think of all the time and all the money that we wasted because I never even occurred to me
1:59:27 To try that
1:59:32 And god, I wish I could kick myself and go back and say for god’s sake try this sooner try this sooner
1:59:37 Hindsight’s a wonderful thing. It is isn’t it and it fills you with wonderful lessons and wisdom
1:59:40 And all of that wisdom has been encapsulated in this wonderful book
1:59:44 That will never work in various ways as you go through the journey of founding netflix
1:59:47 But also the life that’s lived in amongst those pages. It’s one of the most interesting fascinating
1:59:53 Timeless books I’ve read because it’s about true principles the true principles from your father from your journey
1:59:58 And from everything you’ve learned along the way. So thank you so much for writing such an incredible book mark
2:00:03 Um, I’ll link it down below. It’s called that will never work the birth of netflix and the amazing life of an idea
2:00:09 And thank you so much for the work you do for entrepreneurs across all your social channels across your your work and your mentorship because it really is
2:00:15 Looking back down the ladder in helping pull other people up with your wisdom and that’s an incredibly incredibly generous thing for you to do
2:00:17 So, thank you so much mark. Thanks, Stephen
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0:00:05 The majority of people, they’re still seeing the world through a lens that was built for them.
0:00:07 And they want more, they just don’t know how to do it.
0:00:13 So what I teach, which is what CIA teaches, is how to see the world in the way it really is.
0:00:14 Here’s what I’m going to tell you.
0:00:20 Andrew Bustamante is back, a former CIA officer and founder of Everyday Spy.
0:00:25 A company on a mission to help you get anything you want in life with the skills that CIA taught him.
0:00:27 We don’t know the recipe for success.
0:00:30 Our society doesn’t teach us the plan, the framework, the process.
0:00:32 That’s what CIA did for us.
0:00:34 They just taught us a simple system.
0:00:39 And one gentleman, one of the frameworks that we taught him helped him get a $32,000 raise.
0:00:43 We have one person say, “I followed your framework. I won over the interviewer.
0:00:45 Now I have this job that I would have never gotten otherwise.”
0:00:48 But I’m not surprised when they happen because, of course, the recipes work
0:00:51 because they were refined in the center of CIA.
0:00:54 So first, we have an exercise called Get Quiet.
0:00:58 When you’re going to get quiet exercise, all you do is just the reason that we do that
0:01:01 is because we have the informational advantage going into any situation.
0:01:02 Interesting.
0:01:05 Then there’s the four C’s of building influence rapidly.
0:01:07 So if you want to build influence, the first thing we have to do is
0:01:10 and now you actually take the action to get what you want.
0:01:13 So what about persuasion then? How do I persuade somebody?
0:01:16 Persuasion is a process that’s much easier. It really is a simple as.
0:01:21 Finally, the secret sauce at CIA that we know that most people don’t understand
0:01:27 is that now you can do whatever you need to improve yourself and your life.
0:01:37 Andrew, what is it you’re doing in the season of your life?
0:01:39 You know, it’s an interesting question.
0:01:42 I actually just lost my grandmother recently in the last week or so
0:01:45 and my grandmother was one of the two women that raised me.
0:01:48 I didn’t have a father. I mentioned that to you the last time I was here.
0:01:56 And it was a moment that struck me because mortality became very real.
0:02:00 It makes everything clear.
0:02:03 It makes you realize what actually matters and what doesn’t matter.
0:02:08 It shows you that the days that we have aren’t actually guaranteed to us
0:02:10 even though we take them for granted every day.
0:02:15 I don’t know. I don’t know if my flight home is going to actually happen.
0:02:17 I don’t know if I’m going to step out of the studio and get hit by a car.
0:02:21 I don’t know if my child isn’t going to get hit by a car playing in the driveway tomorrow
0:02:26 because life is so fragile and we don’t think about it
0:02:31 until we watch its fragility dissolve in front of us.
0:02:35 We hear about tragedy, but tragedy is always happening somewhere else.
0:02:42 It’s so real and yet we don’t realize it every day.
0:02:44 That’s a good thing we don’t.
0:02:48 That’s the truth. That’s how it feels right now for me as well.
0:02:51 I kind of wish I could go back to being ignorant again.
0:02:55 It’s that matrix red pill, blue pill moment where I kind of wish I could go back in
0:03:00 and forget that reality and forget that mortality is reality.
0:03:05 And so does that change your priorities in life in any way?
0:03:10 It does. The biggest way that it’s affecting me right now is really with business
0:03:14 because we had a conversation not too long ago where I was very focused
0:03:16 on trying to triple the size of the business this year
0:03:19 because we had been tripling the year before and we had tripled the year before that
0:03:25 and it became this arbitrary number, this scorecard where I wanted to continue having this achievement.
0:03:29 And then what I found is that scaling a business is no easy thing
0:03:37 and the struggles that come from scaling were consuming the majority of my focus all the time
0:03:40 until this moment happened with my grandmother.
0:03:45 And then all of a sudden I realized I have a team of people who can scale the business.
0:03:49 I don’t have to scale it. I just have to empower the team to do what the team does.
0:03:51 And my job is very different.
0:03:58 My job is to enable, empower, encourage, direct, lead, manage their efforts.
0:04:00 But it’s their job to grow it.
0:04:04 I can take some of that time and put it into the people that matter to me,
0:04:08 the people that surround me, the people who have made me who I am,
0:04:12 the people like the woman on the couch that I was visiting in her deathbed.
0:04:14 The business you’re referring to is called Everyday Spy, right?
0:04:15 Yes, sir.
0:04:17 What is Everyday Spy? What is the mission of that business?
0:04:25 The mission of Everyday Spy is to use spy education to break barriers for everyone willing to learn.
0:04:26 And what is spy education?
0:04:31 Spy education is anything from specific spy skills, cognitive skills, physical skills.
0:04:34 It can be breaking myths about what spies are and what spies are not,
0:04:41 but bursting conspiracy theories, teaching spy processes and frameworks
0:04:44 to everyone from entrepreneurs to business owners and CEOs
0:04:48 so that they can use those same frameworks to improve their leadership,
0:04:52 to improve their sales, to improve their revenue or their organization.
0:04:57 Do you ever have a guy that thinks quite big picture about things
0:04:59 and sometimes thinks a little above everybody else?
0:05:05 Do you think the people you teach these things to know what they’re looking for in life?
0:05:07 Do you think they actually know what they’re aiming at?
0:05:08 No, I don’t.
0:05:14 And I’ll tell you why, because I don’t think that the majority of people who learn from Everyday Spy
0:05:18 see the world in the way it really is.
0:05:23 I think they’re still seeing the world through a lens that was built for them.
0:05:29 Have you ever looked through a window in an old cabin or in an old house that’s kind of hazy?
0:05:34 Maybe it’s stained or it’s dirty or the dirt is so thick on it that it doesn’t wash off?
0:05:36 Have you ever seen a window like that?
0:05:39 Yeah, my old shed at home when I was a kid growing up.
0:05:43 So you’re inside the shed and you’re looking out onto a sunny day
0:05:46 and you know it’s a sunny, beautiful forest on the other side of the window.
0:05:49 You know it is, but that’s not what you see through the window.
0:05:54 I feel like that’s how many of our high achieving brothers and sisters feel.
0:05:57 They know it’s a sunny forest on the other side,
0:06:02 but school and university and working for somebody else and growing their business
0:06:08 has created this hazy glass and you can’t trust what you see through the glass.
0:06:11 You know that what the glass is showing you isn’t real,
0:06:16 but you also can’t prove it because you can’t step outside of the glass.
0:06:17 You’re inside the shed.
0:06:22 So a lot of what I try to do with Everyday Spy is just shatter the glass
0:06:26 because you don’t need the glass to be between you and the real world.
0:06:30 And that’s what it felt like for me when CIA trained me how to be a field officer.
0:06:32 I don’t feel like they took me out of the shed.
0:06:34 I don’t feel like they cleaned the glass.
0:06:37 I feel like what they did is they just shattered the glass.
0:06:40 And there I was looking at the world for what it really was
0:06:46 and it all made sense until I started meeting other people who were still looking through the glass
0:06:50 and there’s no way to teach them otherwise or there’s no way to convince them otherwise.
0:06:54 The only thing you can do is teach them to break through the barrier themselves.
0:06:55 So that I can understand that.
0:07:02 Can you tell me what your perspective of the world was before and after the shattered glass?
0:07:05 When I was growing up all through high school,
0:07:10 I went to the Air Force Academy, which is a military school that you have to get accepted on scholarship to go to.
0:07:21 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
0:07:25 so that you could be empirically better than the competition.
0:07:27 That’s what I believed.
0:07:33 But what I found along the way was oftentimes that was true, but oftentimes it wasn’t.
0:07:44 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,
0:07:47 sometimes the people to my left and to my right had no business being there.
0:07:49 They just were the son of somebody influential.
0:07:51 They were the daughter of somebody important.
0:07:52 They had money.
0:07:54 They had opportunity.
0:07:55 They were a foreigner.
0:07:56 Who knows?
0:08:02 But it wasn’t always merit-based, but everything had always taught me that it was merit-based.
0:08:07 That the best jobs go to the people with the best scores who go to the best universities.
0:08:10 That’s what I was taught, but that wasn’t really the truth.
0:08:12 The richest people weren’t the smartest people.
0:08:15 The most successful people weren’t the hardest workers.
0:08:25 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.
0:08:34 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,
0:08:42 what they did at the field tradecraft course is they said society is conditioned to believe a certain way,
0:08:46 because society needs to be a giant economic machine.
0:08:49 We all live inside of a giant machine.
0:09:00 We are conditioned through the education process, through the industrial process, through the church process to fall into a hierarchy
0:09:07 that we believe is meritorious, that is a meritocracy, so that hard work and obedience and loyalty gets rewarded,
0:09:15 because the only way that the government stays in power of a large group of people is if there’s a predictable system.
0:09:17 As if they believe there’s a system.
0:09:24 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,
0:09:27 or believe in a different system.
0:09:35 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,
0:09:39 and then we teach them the system of espionage or treachery.
0:09:45 So they chose you because you were a bit of a defiant personality or thinker?
0:09:46 I would say-
0:09:48 Or in the cusp of, or potential of being?
0:09:55 I would say it differently, only because defiance as a term by itself means that you just reject everything.
0:09:57 Instead, it was more of like a curiosity.
0:10:03 I was still very loyal, very loyal to my country, very loyal to the idea of some sort of authority figure.
0:10:11 I was still an individual that had a history of childhood trauma that turned me into a person that needed external validation,
0:10:14 but I also chose where that external validation came from.
0:10:21 So it was kind of the right amount of trauma to be able to make me loyal to a specific organization,
0:10:24 whereas some people who are truly defiant aren’t loyal to anyone.
0:10:26 They defy everyone.
0:10:30 So the CIA told you that the world is…
0:10:32 Predictable.
0:10:35 But also the way that you explained it made it seem like it was a bit of a conspiracy?
0:10:38 Not a conspiracy, but absolutely a system.
0:10:43 A conspiracy means that there’s some sort of…
0:10:47 A conspiracy insinuates that there’s some sort of negative intention.
0:10:49 There is no negative intention.
0:10:57 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.
0:11:04 And in order to create the system, we have to intentionally, continually repeat and program the system.
0:11:06 What is a business?
0:11:14 A business is nothing more than a series of predictable, reinforced processes and systems that yield a predictable outcome.
0:11:17 Why do we think a government is anything different?
0:11:20 Why would we think that society is anything different?
0:11:27 If you really look at what the church does, if you really look at what Harley-Davidson does, it’s essentially the same thing.
0:11:35 Find people who believe in an ideology, bring them in, give them a framework to believe in that ideology.
0:11:39 The church is good and evil, heaven and hell.
0:11:42 Harley-Davidson is freedom and individuality.
0:11:45 And then you just give them a system to think about it.
0:11:48 One wears crosses, one wears eagles.
0:11:53 One meets on Sundays, one meets on Tuesdays at the local road bar.
0:11:59 One goes on civic duty to collect trash, the other goes on multi-hour road trips.
0:12:04 But in all cases, they market to the young, they market to the middle age, they market to the very old.
0:12:09 They’re senior members, bring in junior members, they have clubs, they have everything.
0:12:14 They’re two separate subsections of society, which is why we call them subcultures.
0:12:17 So now I understand that there’s a system that I’m part of.
0:12:20 And it’s not malicious in terms of its intent.
0:12:23 And it just is what it is. It’s how the world functions.
0:12:29 It’s how the country that I’m in operates and it’s required for there to be stability.
0:12:34 Now, there’s awareness, but is there any benefit in me doing anything about it?
0:12:37 Is there anything I can do about it to make my life better?
0:12:40 There’s absolutely things that you can do about it.
0:12:44 You skipped over the awareness part as if it wasn’t substantial.
0:12:48 The first thing I would say is awareness of the system is quite a substantial step.
0:12:50 Because most of us are not aware of the system.
0:12:52 I was certainly not aware of the system.
0:12:55 I suspected something was different.
0:12:58 I suspected maybe there was more than I understood.
0:13:03 That’s the whole idea of looking through faded glass at a clear forest.
0:13:06 You know there’s a forest, but you don’t know how to get there.
0:13:10 And you don’t know why everybody else is standing in the shed if there’s a forest right out there.
0:13:16 There’s just this discomfort because you’re like, there should be something more.
0:13:20 I feel like there’s something more, but everybody seems so happy right here, except me.
0:13:23 I’m looking out this window feeling like there’s something more.
0:13:26 The reality is most people don’t look out the window.
0:13:28 What is it that everybody in the shed believes?
0:13:29 That’s what’s so interesting.
0:13:33 I think most people in the shed believe that the shed is a good thing.
0:13:34 We need the shed.
0:13:38 The shed keeps us warm when it’s cold outside.
0:13:41 It keeps us cool inside when it’s hot outside.
0:13:42 It protects us from the rain.
0:13:43 It keeps the window away.
0:13:44 We need the shed.
0:13:49 That’s what most people, I think, start to believe about whatever shed they’re born into.
0:13:51 I need this church.
0:13:52 I need this neighborhood.
0:13:53 I need these friends.
0:13:58 I need to be popular in school because everybody else is after the same thing.
0:14:00 I need good grades.
0:14:01 Why do you think you need good grades?
0:14:03 Because my mom said I needed good grades.
0:14:06 Well, we don’t question it any further than that.
0:14:10 We don’t question why do you think your mom thinks you need good grades.
0:14:18 When you look at the hierarchy of society, there’s an actual anthropological pyramid
0:14:20 that defines society.
0:14:22 It breaks into three levels.
0:14:28 Individualism at the bottom level, tribalism in the center level, and then the state at the top level.
0:14:33 Because the most advanced version of society is the state.
0:14:43 It maximizes the contribution of each individual by forcing shared policy down all the way from top to bottom.
0:14:51 All people have to obey the state, but in exchange for their obedience, the state provides resources to all people,
0:14:59 like clean water and loans and car loans and business loans and police forces and public schools.
0:15:04 We believe that this cabin is needed.
0:15:05 It’s the best cabin.
0:15:06 It’s the only cabin.
0:15:07 Is that wrong?
0:15:11 I think if you look at the world as it is, there’s a lot of different cabins out there.
0:15:13 Our cabin is quite different than the China cabin.
0:15:16 China cabin is quite different than the Russia cabin.
0:15:20 The UK cabin is very different than the American cabin.
0:15:29 So if you follow logic, the fact that different cabins exist at all would suggest that there is no best cabin.
0:15:37 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?
0:15:39 Is there a different option that’s better in your opinion?
0:15:46 I haven’t found one yet outside of living in a cabin and being the one that understands there’s more.
0:15:52 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.
0:15:53 Yeah.
0:15:57 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.
0:15:58 Because do you know what I like?
0:16:02 Roads and healthcare and police.
0:16:09 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 laws,
0:16:15 they’re just made up rules, then you can bend them in certain ways to live the life that you want to live.
0:16:19 And I think in many respects, entrepreneurship is kind of one of those things.
0:16:27 Because some of the narratives that you described there of thinking grades mattered were the narratives that nearly held me back in my life.
0:16:28 Because I was not doing well in school.
0:16:29 My brother’s where everyone else was.
0:16:36 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.
0:16:38 This is the unspoken word.
0:16:44 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.
0:16:46 And you’re probably going to struggle.
0:16:52 And that’s like a narrative and through labeling through it, you can come to believe that as the truth and then play that out in your life.
0:17:01 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.
0:17:02 And they’re two very different things.
0:17:04 Like I can get an E, but it doesn’t make me an E.
0:17:06 But in the shed, it does make you an E.
0:17:07 It’s hard to…
0:17:11 Because everybody else labels you by what you perform inside the shed that defines them.
0:17:12 And then I self-label.
0:17:17 I then start to tell myself in my self-esteem that I am an E grade.
0:17:20 And then I show up like an E grade, which they’ve proven through labeling through it.
0:17:27 You can tell someone they’re something or you can remind them of a stereotype that applies to them and they’ll immediately perform less on a test, whatever that stereotype relates to.
0:17:30 So, but entrepreneurship for me was saying, do you know what?
0:17:31 I’m going to drop out of…
0:17:32 I’m going to get a leave school.
0:17:39 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.
0:17:41 Because the system was never going to get me where I needed to go.
0:17:46 If I had followed the system, I would still be working in the call center that I was when I was 19.
0:17:54 And basically have no free time working till midnight at night and just getting shit from a boss that was an asshole to me.
0:17:59 And you just described the feeling of 80% of the population.
0:18:03 They feel like they’ve never gone past the call center that they worked at when they were 19.
0:18:11 The vast majority of people out there feel like they stopped developing at about 27.
0:18:12 What is the difference though?
0:18:19 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?
0:18:21 I’m not saying call center is a bad lesson.
0:18:26 I learned a lot of schools from call centers that I loved, but it sucked compared to what I do now.
0:18:29 So the first thing you’re talking about is shattering the glass.
0:18:30 The first thing is awareness.
0:18:31 Yeah.
0:18:32 You have to be aware…
0:18:33 That you’re in a shed.
0:18:34 That you’re in a shed.
0:18:39 And you have to be aware that you’re choosing to be in the shed, right?
0:18:42 You can always leave.
0:18:49 This is an argument I have so often with people who are trapped in the wrong mindset, right?
0:18:54 I don’t even know what the right psychological term is because I don’t live in a world of academic psychology.
0:18:57 But there are people who believe that they don’t have a choice.
0:19:00 And in the United States, for example, we have 50 states.
0:19:05 There are some people in the state of Florida who feel like they can’t leave the state of Florida.
0:19:10 Because they think it’s because they don’t have enough money.
0:19:13 They think it’s because the drive is too far.
0:19:15 There isn’t a support network on the other side.
0:19:20 The bureaucratic hurdles of trying to change your residency and get a new driver’s license is too much.
0:19:26 The taxes are too high to pay to move from a non-tax state to a state tax state.
0:19:36 So they all have reasons, and the reasons are grounded in fact, but the value that they put on the fact,
0:19:42 the value of the challenge is greater than the value of the reward in their point of view, in their perspective.
0:19:45 And in reality, it’s the other way around.
0:19:48 You just reminded me of a video that changed my life.
0:19:51 I’m going to play this video for you, okay?
0:19:55 It’s a very, very short video, but when you talked about people living in a state,
0:19:59 or living in a situation where they don’t think they can leave, this video came to mind.
0:20:03 They just get a man, and you can do this with basically any small creature,
0:20:11 and you get a buyer or a pen and just draw a circle around it, and it will not leave the circle.
0:20:14 And I watched this video many years ago with just this ant trapped in the circle,
0:20:19 and the guy drawing the circle around the ant just makes the circle smaller and smaller and smaller.
0:20:21 And it will basically remain trapped.
0:20:25 And when I watched it, I thought, “You know, I’m doing that for myself in my own life.”
0:20:28 So the ant remains trapped, they make it smaller, the ant won’t leave the circle.
0:20:35 But what’s interesting here is the ant is eventually figuring out that it’s just a circle.
0:20:37 That it’s just a shed.
0:20:39 And when I saw that, the first thing I asked myself was,
0:20:44 “In what ways have I drawn an imaginary circle around myself?”
0:20:48 I think the more important question is oftentimes,
0:20:51 when did the imaginary circle start?
0:20:53 Who drew the first circle?
0:20:54 Because it wasn’t you.
0:20:58 If you’ve ever seen a child, if you’ve ever seen an infant, a toddler,
0:21:01 they are limitless.
0:21:03 They know no bounds.
0:21:06 They don’t understand anything about the world around them.
0:21:08 They don’t know how their body feels,
0:21:13 so they don’t know whether they’re hungry or whether they’re gassy or whether they’re urinating.
0:21:16 They cry at everything, and they’re constantly squirming.
0:21:17 They have no context.
0:21:22 So all the context that they gain, they gain through absorption.
0:21:24 We create the context for them.
0:21:27 We create the idea of this is bedtime.
0:21:32 We create the idea of this is what a healthy habit is, brushing your teeth, washing your hands, whatever else.
0:21:36 We create this is home, and this is where you can walk around openly.
0:21:42 But once you go out this door into the front yard, the front yard is not home anymore.
0:21:44 And now you can’t go anywhere you want.
0:21:45 You have to stay here.
0:21:49 So somewhere somebody started drawing circles before we ever drew them.
0:21:55 All we started doing was then believing that the circles were more permanent than they really were.
0:21:59 And the way to understand that it’s not permanent is to step out.
0:22:00 To step out.
0:22:04 But stepping out does two things to us simultaneously.
0:22:08 One, it feels uncomfortable because nobody else is stepping out.
0:22:11 And two, it feels wrong.
0:22:13 Why does it feel wrong?
0:22:16 Because we’ve been conditioned to believe we have to stay in the circle.
0:22:19 This is why I love my company.
0:22:24 This is why I love our mission of teaching spy skills to break barriers.
0:22:33 Because everybody loves the idea of a spy.
0:22:40 But when you think about what a spy does, nobody actually likes what a spy does.
0:22:42 Nobody likes the fact that spies steal.
0:22:44 Nobody likes the fact that spies lie.
0:22:50 But for some reason, they still like the idea of a spy.
0:22:55 And that’s why James Bond and Jason Bourne and spy shows are so popular.
0:23:05 What’s happening is we come into this place where what we want and what we’re told we’re supposed to want clash.
0:23:14 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.
0:23:18 But we don’t want to admit that we’re willing to cheat to get the opportunity.
0:23:25 We want an advantage, but we don’t want to believe that our advantage hurts other people.
0:23:31 So somehow we want to all move forward with equanimity and everybody does better.
0:23:36 And that’s just not the way that anything in nature actually works.
0:23:43 And what entrepreneurs figure out when they’re successful is that you can cheat and you can get away with cheating.
0:23:49 And when you get away with cheating, it just gives permission to everybody else who was too afraid to cheat.
0:23:53 And then you have first mover advantage in the marketplace and they copy you.
0:23:57 And all of a sudden that isn’t cheating anymore.
0:24:02 Because cheating can be a bit of a loaded word, right?
0:24:05 What do you mean when you talk about cheating in the context of business?
0:24:08 I’m talking about like an unfair advantage of any sort, right?
0:24:12 Think about when, do you remember when MP3’s first came out?
0:24:15 Yes, well, I had one when I was a kid.
0:24:16 So an MP3 player?
0:24:17 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:24:19 So MP3’s is in music files.
0:24:27 And I remember when they first came out, the market went chaotic because you could get them off of the internet for free,
0:24:30 which meant that the musicians didn’t get paid for it.
0:24:33 And that turned into, I think it was called Napster or Napster.
0:24:34 Yeah, Lime Wire, yeah.
0:24:39 Yeah, there were so many of these different databases where you could just pull free music and it was crazy.
0:24:41 Before that, there were CDs.
0:24:44 There was even a brief period where there were mini discs, right?
0:24:46 People just kept making improvements.
0:24:54 We call them disruptors now because we found a way to glorify the word cheat and make it into something good.
0:24:55 So now there’s disruptors.
0:25:01 But all they were doing was taking advantage of something that other people weren’t taking advantage of, a new form of technology.
0:25:03 Well, how did they get access to a new form of technology?
0:25:05 Because they got investors.
0:25:07 Well, how did they get investors?
0:25:09 They knew a guy who knew a guy.
0:25:10 They shook a hand.
0:25:12 Dad at the golf club, maybe.
0:25:15 They had five minutes with the right guy on the right elevator.
0:25:16 Who knows?
0:25:23 But the people who don’t get investors, look at the people who do get investors and say, “That’s not fair.”
0:25:24 That’s just the way it is.
0:25:25 That’s the way life is.
0:25:26 You know what’s not fair?
0:25:35 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.
0:25:38 And other people are born into a shed that’s a $30,000 a year shed.
0:25:39 That’s not fair.
0:25:40 Nothing is fair.
0:25:46 So once you accept that nothing is fair, that also means there isn’t really anything that’s unfair.
0:25:51 You can do whatever you need to improve yourself and your life.
0:25:56 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.
0:26:04 And that the rules I’ve been conditioned to believe aren’t necessarily their rules, but their breakable rules.
0:26:06 And I have every right to break them.
0:26:10 What is, what do you think is step one beyond that, beyond the awareness?
0:26:18 I’m going to give you two answers because there’s the reality of the answer, but then there’s my preferred response, right?
0:26:25 The reality of the answer is once people, the reality is that most people have already thought about what I’m saying.
0:26:30 I’m just giving words and authenticity and credibility to what they already believe.
0:26:33 So they’re ready for the next step, and they just jump right in.
0:26:34 They believe me.
0:26:38 I appreciate it when people believe me, but I don’t want people to believe me.
0:26:42 What I want people to do is my preferred approach, which is to test the information.
0:26:44 Test what I’m saying.
0:26:46 Learn a framework that we teach everyday spy.
0:26:48 Learn a framework that you and I talk about.
0:26:50 Put it into exercise.
0:26:52 If it works, you just tested something.
0:26:54 Now you can believe something.
0:26:56 Now you can change your mindset and change your framework.
0:26:59 But too often people just believe.
0:27:01 I appreciate it when they believe me.
0:27:05 It makes me feel good, but it’s not what I’m trying to teach people to do.
0:27:07 What I want people to do is actually test it.
0:27:08 Test it.
0:27:11 Because if they test it, they make it their own.
0:27:16 Here’s the problem with every teacher I’ve ever had, with the exception of two or three.
0:27:19 They tell you something is the facts.
0:27:23 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.
0:27:27 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.
0:27:30 They don’t ever teach you to test or question the facts.
0:27:34 And we know at our age and our success level, the history is written by the winners.
0:27:36 But there’s always two sides to history.
0:27:41 And then when you think about the political, the religious, the personal ramifications of everything that happens,
0:27:45 you realize there’s multiple different versions of truth.
0:27:49 There may only be one fact, but there’s multiple versions of truth.
0:27:55 So we’re not even conditioned to learn to question the truth to find the fact.
0:27:58 Instead, we’re just taught that the truth that we’re taught is the facts.
0:28:05 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.
0:28:13 Instead of testing what you hear to see if it really is worth transitioning or transforming your belief system.
0:28:16 It sounds like you’re making a distinction between like knowledge and belief.
0:28:18 What we call information.
0:28:19 Information.
0:28:20 And knowledge.
0:28:21 Exactly right.
0:28:24 So information is what someone might say to you, but then knowledge is what you actually know to be true.
0:28:25 Correct.
0:28:29 There’s a flywheel that we have in the intelligence world and it’s a triangle.
0:28:37 And the top of the triangle is information and then information flows into knowledge and then knowledge flows into experience.
0:28:42 So what happens is you learn information from that information.
0:28:48 You develop knowledge and then you test that knowledge through experience.
0:28:58 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 information.
0:29:00 And you have this very positive flywheel.
0:29:03 That’s how the intelligence cycle works.
0:29:17 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.
0:29:19 They say this is information.
0:29:21 This is knowledge.
0:29:29 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.
0:29:36 So I’m breaking out the shed and I’m going to try and test some of this information that I’m going to learn today and in this conversation.
0:29:45 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.
0:29:52 Like a framework that typically helps people to change their life in the most profound way as it relates to business, sales, their career, whatever.
0:29:57 One of the ones that jumps to mind right away is it’s a simple framework about perspective versus perception.
0:30:01 And we may have mentioned this actually in our previous conversation, Stephen.
0:30:06 Perception is what you believe to be true about the world around you.
0:30:12 Perspective is what other people believe to be true about the world around them.
0:30:16 So as I sit here looking at you, this is my perception.
0:30:24 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.
0:30:26 Well, guess what your perception is?
0:30:27 The same thing.
0:30:29 I am across the table from you.
0:30:32 You’re at the center and everything in this room is built around you.
0:30:36 So our perceptions are never going to be the same.
0:30:46 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.
0:30:51 Because then I get my perception plus your perception combined.
0:30:55 I get twice as much information to think through this specific situation.
0:30:56 Can you train that?
0:30:58 Can you train someone to have both points of view?
0:30:59 Absolutely.
0:31:02 Here’s how I mentioned that awareness is the first step, right?
0:31:09 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.
0:31:16 CIA is a giant training engine that’s constantly creating new spies and then spies just go out and spy.
0:31:26 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?
0:31:35 CIA’s system of teaching is a system where you educate first, you exercise second, and then you experience third.
0:31:36 Remember that flywheel.
0:31:39 So you educate, that’s your information.
0:31:43 You exercise, that’s where you turn information into knowledge, and then you experience.
0:31:49 And that’s where you actually go out and test the knowledge to see if the knowledge is still applicable in the world that you live in today.
0:31:50 So those are the three steps.
0:31:55 So whenever you’re trying to get anyone to break a barrier, whenever you’re trying to get anyone to transform,
0:32:01 all you have to do is educate them, help them to exercise, which means practice what they learn in a controlled space,
0:32:03 and then kick them out the door to go do it for themselves.
0:32:06 It’s like kicking a bird out of the nest.
0:32:08 So if I – can you make this very real for me?
0:32:16 Because 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.
0:32:23 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?
0:32:27 Understand the other person’s perspective and the way that you’re seeing the world.
0:32:31 Absolutely. So we had a whole conversation before the cameras turned on, right?
0:32:37 Can you tell me five things that you remember about me that I shared during the time before the cameras turned on?
0:32:38 Yes.
0:32:39 Go ahead.
0:32:40 You want me to say them?
0:32:41 Absolutely.
0:32:42 It’s private stuff, but tell me.
0:32:43 Okay.
0:32:46 We’re talking about your relationship, things you’re going through at home.
0:32:52 You said that in the last couple of days, everything’s changed because of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
0:33:01 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.
0:33:03 You mentioned your kids as well.
0:33:04 Give me specifics.
0:33:05 Oh, God.
0:33:11 You said that you used to live in the RV with your kids and there’s a – they’re varying ages.
0:33:15 I think one of them is, did you say three years old?
0:33:16 Close.
0:33:17 One of them was three years old or something.
0:33:18 Five and one.
0:33:19 Five and one.
0:33:20 Shit, yeah, five and one.
0:33:23 You did great, right?
0:33:33 Those things that you were – that you recalled, you recalled those from what’s known as your paleo mammalian brain, the back part of your brain, passive learning part of your brain.
0:33:42 Because naturally, when you are untrained, when you’re untrained to think like a spy, you rely on passive knowledge.
0:33:47 You rely on passive observation to create prefrontal cortex knowledge.
0:33:51 All a spy does is when they talk to you, they turn on.
0:33:56 They turn on the prefrontal part right away and they start paying attention to all the details right away.
0:34:05 Because the way that you gain someone else’s perspective is by listening to what they’re saying and seeing how they’re saying it.
0:34:10 Because what happens now when I sit with people – I was just with a client this morning who made a comment on this.
0:34:18 When you’re trained and you sit with someone, you are always gaining more information about them than they are about you.
0:34:21 When you know how to practice perspective versus perception.
0:34:25 Because from the moment that you came in and sat down, you were very much in your world.
0:34:27 You’re sitting here in socks.
0:34:28 You’re sitting on your leg.
0:34:29 You’re very comfortable.
0:34:31 You’re messing with all of your technology.
0:34:35 You’re fighting with your technology because it’s not exactly the way you want it to be.
0:34:40 This is Steve’s world and there’s not a single thing wrong with Steve’s world.
0:34:44 But Steve’s world isn’t as big as the world of Steve and Andy together.
0:34:50 Whereas when I came in here, just because of the way I’m wired, I’m paying attention to you.
0:34:51 I’m paying attention to your producers.
0:34:52 I’m paying attention to the set.
0:34:56 I’m paying attention to the people who I’ve met from your team in previous calls.
0:35:04 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.
0:35:06 Because I only get one chance.
0:35:09 So I want to have as much information on my side moving forward.
0:35:14 So you as a podcast host, your original question was how do I use this information?
0:35:17 How do I use these frameworks to become a better podcast host?
0:35:21 Every person who sits across the table from you came from somewhere.
0:35:24 And every time they leave the table you’re sitting at, they’re going somewhere.
0:35:29 And they’re bringing stress and they’re bringing pain and they’re bringing worries and they’re bringing concerns with them.
0:35:31 And they’re leaving with the same things.
0:35:36 I know that your partner is thinking about babies.
0:35:39 When you talk about it, that’s how you talk about it.
0:35:42 You say my partner is thinking about getting pregnant.
0:35:44 You don’t ever say we’re thinking about getting pregnant.
0:35:48 Which makes me wonder if she’s more excited about pregnancy than you are.
0:35:51 I’m so fucked.
0:35:56 I’m afraid the Lord doesn’t listen to this.
0:35:57 Am I accurate?
0:36:02 So can I match her excitement levels?
0:36:05 She’s changed the entire house at home.
0:36:10 It’s like she’s expecting, I don’t know what you, but like the entire, like my shampoo is gone.
0:36:12 That’s like her level of excitement about it.
0:36:14 And you know, yeah.
0:36:19 So obviously I’m excited about it, but no, of course I can’t match her level of like preparation and obsession about it.
0:36:20 No, yeah.
0:36:25 But I’m paying attention to you and which is that’s the only reason I even have the ability to ask that question.
0:36:28 Right, because I’m coming in and I’m trying to live in your shoes.
0:36:30 The whole time I’m here, I’m trying to live in your shoes.
0:36:39 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?
0:36:42 Because this is my only time to talk to you guys.
0:36:44 So what can I do to maximize that value?
0:36:46 That’s practicing perspective.
0:36:52 So when you do that to your guests, you’re going to unlock a whole new level of podcasting from them.
0:37:02 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.
0:37:05 If you literally just took, I mean, we have an exercise.
0:37:08 We have an exercise called get quiet at CIA.
0:37:14 And in a get quiet exercise, all you do is just get quiet.
0:37:23 You stop overwhelming your sensory organs, your eyes, your ears, your feelings, your taste buds, your, your nose, your olfactory.
0:37:27 You get yourself into a place where your sensory organs can take a break.
0:37:32 Because what happens when you don’t overload your sensory organs is your brain starts to index.
0:37:38 And when your brain starts to index, it gives you a higher level of awareness, a higher level of observational skills.
0:37:46 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.
0:37:50 It’s kind of like cleaning your palate before you try a certain ice cream, right?
0:37:58 The reason that we do that is because we want to gain as much perspective information as possible so that we have the informational advantage going into any situation.
0:38:03 Understanding that most people are coming in living in their own perception.
0:38:06 Consider applying this to business, right?
0:38:08 You are a coffee shop.
0:38:10 Well, there’s 500 other coffee shops.
0:38:14 There’s five other coffee shops just in two square miles of where your coffee shop is.
0:38:20 So when you think about your own product, you think, well, my coffee is superior.
0:38:21 It’s from Ethiopia.
0:38:24 We roast it here and it smells great and whatever else.
0:38:31 Or you think, my building is better because we have, we have local artists on the wall and we play local musicians like, right?
0:38:32 Like that’s what they think.
0:38:34 That’s what the owner of the coffee shop thinks.
0:38:38 But they don’t stop to think about the customer who buys the coffee.
0:38:48 Because the customer who buys the coffee is coming from somewhere and then going to somewhere and the coffee shop is just one stop along the way.
0:38:58 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.
0:39:00 Why are they drinking the coffee?
0:39:03 Oh, they’re drinking the coffee because they’re a new mom.
0:39:06 So then what else does a new mom need?
0:39:10 What else does a new mom want when she goes to a coffee shop?
0:39:12 Maybe she wants other moms to be there.
0:39:13 Maybe she wants specials.
0:39:17 Maybe she wants, she wants to find little things to buy her kids.
0:39:18 Who knows what?
0:39:24 You can change your shop to fit your customer if you’re open to their perspective.
0:39:28 Otherwise, all you’re doing is creating your own little circle, your own little shed.
0:39:37 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?
0:39:42 Yes, but there’s a twist because you also have to dig for the information you want.
0:39:46 So you have to know how to ask questions and you have to be willing to ask questions.
0:39:49 There’s another exercise that we have at CIA called windows and doors.
0:39:55 In a conversation, people will open windows, windows in conversation,
0:40:02 which means I might ask you one thing or you might ask me something and then in my response, I hint at something else.
0:40:04 That’s a window, right?
0:40:08 You started this conversation by asking me what season of my life am I in?
0:40:14 That was a fantastic question to open windows and doors because you don’t know what the answer is,
0:40:20 but you’re going to choose what you hear to decide where you go next.
0:40:23 The same thing happens in a normal conversation, right?
0:40:26 You can see windows and doors when they present themselves.
0:40:34 When you are trying to cultivate perspective over somebody, you want to choose the windows and doors that you follow through in the conversation
0:40:38 specifically to collect the kind of information that you want to gain that perspective.
0:40:43 So if I’m trying to sell something to you, if I’m trying to sell something to you as an entrepreneur,
0:40:53 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.
0:41:01 So if you’re a car salesman, I’m a customer and I want to buy a car, what kind of questions would you start asking me to?
0:41:08 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
0:41:10 because he did not think this way, right?
0:41:12 Why do people buy a car?
0:41:17 I’m going to let you practice your perspective on me.
0:41:22 When I moved to Colorado Springs in May, why did I have to buy a car?
0:41:23 Because you have kids.
0:41:24 Nope.
0:41:25 You have two kids.
0:41:27 Oh, because you have to…
0:41:38 Well, you mentioned Colorado Springs, so I guess that’s pretty pertinent to answer, but you have to travel a lot around Colorado because it’s quite vast, isn’t it?
0:41:40 You need a mode of transportation.
0:41:42 That’s the only reason anybody buys a car.
0:41:46 That’s where you have to start because then you have to think, well, why are they here?
0:41:53 If you’re a Subaru dealership and somebody walks in, you already know that they’ve pre-qualified a number of things.
0:41:55 They must be looking for a Subaru.
0:41:57 They must be looking for a two-wheel car.
0:42:02 They must be looking for an all-wheel car or else they wouldn’t be here.
0:42:06 So you can kind of make those assumptions if you practice perspective when they walk in.
0:42:08 That’s when you find out, oh, they’re a parent.
0:42:14 So I’m looking for a mode of transportation that’s also safe because I’m a parent.
0:42:20 I have a family of four, so I’m looking for a mode of transportation that’s safe for at least four people.
0:42:26 If you practice a little bit of perspective, you learn a lot more about the person that you’re trying to close.
0:42:31 So now I ended up buying a Nissan Pathfinder, a brand new Nissan Pathfinder.
0:42:39 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.
0:42:44 But I always go through this experience to see what’s the salesperson going to do?
0:42:46 Are they going to try to sell me something good?
0:42:48 Are they going to try to sell me something wrong?
0:42:52 Are they going to understand my specific needs or am I going to have to coach them through this whole thing?
0:42:57 My company gets hired to give sales training to high-performance sales teams.
0:43:05 And what I’m shocked at is how often, even with a high-performing sales team, sales people don’t practice perspective and perception.
0:43:08 What they practice is whatever script they’re supposed to read.
0:43:12 And they practice empirical numbers and they practice the law of averages.
0:43:15 And it’s like, I need to make 100 calls to convert 12%.
0:43:17 That’s what they practice.
0:43:25 Instead of practicing something just a little bit more efficient, like changing your opening line to ask an open-ended question,
0:43:32 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.
0:43:33 Do you know what?
0:43:37 I’ve never said this before, but there’s a question I ask every guest in the preamble.
0:43:43 And I don’t know if I asked you, but I ask 99% of guests when we sit down.
0:43:46 And it’s what’s front of mind for you at the moment.
0:43:52 And for me, the reason I ask that question is because kind of what you said, because people come here.
0:43:59 And I assume that there’s something that happened 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.
0:44:01 That they haven’t yet said in an interview.
0:44:04 And it’s been so unbelievably amazing when you ask that question.
0:44:09 And then there was one particular conversation I had, which was one of my favorite of all time where it was with Simon Sinek.
0:44:14 And because I’ve spoken to Simon Sinek three times on the podcast, I didn’t like have research.
0:44:16 Like we’ve talked about everything.
0:44:22 So I sat down and I had to sit down and figure out where the conversation was going to go for the next three hours.
0:44:24 And so my opening question to him was really broad.
0:44:27 It was how are you and please give me the long answer.
0:44:29 And you have to be honest.
0:44:32 And he literally for the first time ever in his life went, do you know what?
0:44:33 I’m feeling really lonely right now.
0:44:39 And for him to say that, a guy like that to say that was like, whoa.
0:44:42 And if I’d sat down with my, okay, today we’re going to talk about management strategies.
0:44:45 I totally would have missed one of my favorite conversations of all time.
0:44:47 But you have to have a lot of trust in yourself.
0:44:54 This is what I’ve come to learn as a podcaster to be able to sit down without any questions written down here and to ask a really open-ended question.
0:44:58 And then to try and follow them like wherever they might take you.
0:45:06 Well, that’s 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.
0:45:10 You go wherever the guest takes you, you go where Simon Sinek takes you, right?
0:45:15 I’ve taken you down this long path about living in a shed that I’m sure was not on your agenda.
0:45:19 And I’m sure lost a good half of the people that we were talking to early on.
0:45:28 But my point with all of that is just to say, you practice what is called courage.
0:45:31 And courage is a word that is definable.
0:45:34 And people don’t often take the time to really define what courage is.
0:45:40 Courage is doing the thing that you’re afraid of.
0:45:42 That is courage.
0:45:49 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.
0:45:53 You’re like, I don’t know how this is going to turn out, but you do it anyways.
0:46:00 One of the major differences between entrepreneurs and aspirational entrepreneurs is that entrepreneurs have the courage to try.
0:46:06 And aspirational entrepreneurs are always talking about the day that they will have the courage to try.
0:46:08 Trust comes into this, right?
0:46:12 Because part of the reason that I can sit down with someone for three hours and not necessarily need to have a…
0:46:16 I’ve never had a question written down, but not even have an idea of where the conversation is going to go.
0:46:19 It’s because I have so many case studies that it’s been finding the past.
0:46:25 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?
0:46:29 And then they go off about loneliness and we spend three hours talking about loneliness.
0:46:31 But that comes from that initial trust, I think.
0:46:33 I think trust is a good word.
0:46:34 Self-trust, I’m trying to…
0:46:36 Yeah, self-trust or confidence.
0:46:48 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?
0:46:51 It’s kind of like when you think about a professional athlete.
0:46:55 Professional athletes do some amazing movements.
0:46:58 Sometimes they make the score and sometimes they don’t.
0:47:03 But what happens is when they make the score doing an amazing movement, that’s what we all remember.
0:47:07 When they missed the shot doing the amazing movement, nobody remembers that.
0:47:13 Nobody remembers how many basketball shots Dennis Rodman didn’t make, right?
0:47:15 They just remember something else about Dennis Rodman.
0:47:19 Arnold Schwarzenegger has this famous quote where he made lots of movies.
0:47:24 We all remember our favorite Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.
0:47:27 But how many of his bad movies do you remember?
0:47:29 Not many.
0:47:30 And he knows that too.
0:47:40 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.
0:47:50 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.
0:48:01 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.
0:48:02 Correct.
0:48:03 You’re taking a chance.
0:48:04 You’re taking a gamble.
0:48:06 But here’s the thing.
0:48:11 We’re conditioned in our shed, we’re conditioned to gamble on the system, right?
0:48:16 If you’re going to roll the dice, at least roll the dice that the system gives you, right?
0:48:20 Bet on the house because the house is going to win.
0:48:27 What we really learn as entrepreneurs is to gamble on ourselves, like bet on you.
0:48:38 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.
0:48:41 That’s what they do with every dollar of their life.
0:48:46 My mother-in-law just recently retired about three and a half or four weeks ago.
0:48:49 She is, what do you have to be to retire, 69, I think?
0:48:51 So she’s 67 or 68 years old.
0:48:53 She’s worked her entire life.
0:48:57 Her primary investment vehicles, I shit you not, are CDs.
0:49:04 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.
0:49:07 And that yield is usually very, very low.
0:49:10 But that was her preferred investment vehicle.
0:49:20 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.
0:49:26 That is exactly the kind of thinking that was conditioned into her by the generation before her.
0:49:28 That’s where she learned about CDs at all.
0:49:31 So why she bought her first CD at 16 years old was because mom and dad told her to do that.
0:49:33 So here it is 2024.
0:49:39 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.
0:49:40 Really?
0:49:41 Yes.
0:49:43 Because it doesn’t grow.
0:49:48 Whereas I invest in my company and my return has been 300%.
0:50:01 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.
0:50:09 But you still have these people who don’t want to gamble on themselves because they’re afraid that the house will win.
0:50:15 Who can’t be taught the things that you teach in terms of the CIA skills and everything you teach within everyday spy?
0:50:29 There’s a lot of people out there who already, who right out of the gates had a circle drawn around them, that CIA is some kind of deep state conspiracy, kills Americans, sells children, steals drugs kind of organization.
0:50:30 Are they room?
0:50:35 Maybe there was a CIA that did that once.
0:50:38 But my point is those people are never going to believe what I have to teach them.
0:50:43 There are threads all over the internet about how I’m a fake and a phony and a fraudster.
0:50:52 And 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.
0:50:53 I did read that in the comment section.
0:50:54 Isn’t that funny?
0:50:55 Quite funny.
0:50:57 So there’s like, there’s both sides.
0:50:59 These are people who cannot, they’ll never be open to learn.
0:51:01 They’re not willing to learn.
0:51:03 How do I know you’re not still a CIA officer?
0:51:04 Does it matter?
0:51:05 No, it doesn’t.
0:51:06 It doesn’t matter.
0:51:11 If you can take the information and test the framework and get ahead, does it matter?
0:51:16 Well, actually, maybe if the, okay, you’re at the right point now, you said, test it myself.
0:51:22 Because you could be teaching me things that are going to just keep me trapped in the matrix because, you know.
0:51:24 But I don’t want you trapped in the matrix.
0:51:26 I don’t know that you could still be a CIA spy.
0:51:27 I could be.
0:51:30 But the key thing you said is that you’re giving them to me to test for myself.
0:51:36 So I get the results to check whether what you’re teaching me is positive or negative, productive or not productive.
0:51:37 Correct.
0:51:38 And that’s what really drives me.
0:51:43 What drives me is this vision of a future that’s good for my children.
0:51:52 And the future that’s good for my children is a future where the United States is still the most powerful economy in the world, still the most powerful military in the world.
0:51:58 And according to all reports, that is not what will happen by 2035.
0:52:05 By 2035, we will be at parity with at least another country, most likely China.
0:52:08 And as we reach parity, what that means is you reach equality.
0:52:12 As you reach equality, your superpower status goes away.
0:52:14 You are no longer a superpower.
0:52:19 You are a near peer power or a near peer competitor.
0:52:21 It’s very different than being a superpower.
0:52:22 Why does it matter?
0:52:27 Because when there’s competition, there’s more uncertainty.
0:52:29 There’s more unpredictability.
0:52:30 There’s more danger.
0:52:31 There’s more risk.
0:52:32 There’s less opportunity.
0:52:37 Think about the starting quarterback for a football team.
0:52:38 He’s the starting quarterback.
0:52:46 He is the person, he is the player that will start the game, that will have the football and nobody questions it.
0:52:51 There’s a lot of opportunity there for that person, but as soon as they start to be unpredictable,
0:52:56 as soon as there’s a new star, a new quarterback that comes in and threatens the existing quarterback,
0:52:58 now we don’t really know who’s going to start.
0:53:00 And the team doesn’t really know who’s going to start.
0:53:05 And then for all we know, the team is going to have two different quarterbacks that swap in and out throughout the entire game,
0:53:09 and the whole team performs worse because they don’t know how to predict the quarterback,
0:53:13 because the new quarterback or the old quarterback isn’t the one that’s always throwing the ball.
0:53:19 So there’s an uncertainty that comes as competition arises.
0:53:22 It’s why business owners want to be in a business of one.
0:53:29 It’s why there’s such a thing as a blue ocean marketing strategy versus a red ocean marketing strategy,
0:53:35 because when you’re in a blue ocean, when you have no competitors around you, your business will most likely thrive.
0:53:36 You have room to make mistakes.
0:53:42 You can learn slowly, but when you’re in a highly competitive red ocean, you don’t get any of those opportunities.
0:53:50 What does history tell us about how changing, the changing of the guard as it relates to world power,
0:53:55 what the dangers might be for the average person?
0:54:02 It’s a great question, and this is where I want to re-emphasize my lack of altruism, right?
0:54:03 Because…
0:54:05 What does altruism mean for anyone that doesn’t know?
0:54:10 So altruism is this idea that you care about other people or that you care about a common good, right?
0:54:12 I don’t care about a common good.
0:54:14 What about other people?
0:54:16 I care about some other people.
0:54:17 Your children?
0:54:18 Correct.
0:54:23 My family, my friends, the people that I think are making a difference, and that’s just the way it is.
0:54:26 Why will some people not be willing to learn what I teach them?
0:54:31 Because they will disagree with my ethics and my morals about how I don’t care about all people equally.
0:54:35 Well, I like the fact that you’re honest, so that makes me trust you more.
0:54:36 I appreciate that.
0:54:43 So if you look at history, Rome was really good for Romans for a long, long time.
0:54:47 The fall of Rome was bad for everybody.
0:54:49 The transition was bad for everybody.
0:54:53 Coming out of World War II, right?
0:54:59 When you were a Nazi in Nazi Germany, things were pretty good, right?
0:55:03 But then when Nazi Germany fell, it was bad for a lot of people.
0:55:06 There was a lot of war, there was a lot of death, there was a lot of starvation.
0:55:08 Multiple countries had been destroyed.
0:55:10 There was a war, there was a transition of power.
0:55:12 Same thing happened at the fall of Soviet Union.
0:55:14 In that war, I was watching a documentary about it the other day.
0:55:19 It was interesting because I watched both the Soviet Union rush into Berlin, and I watched America rush into Berlin.
0:55:26 They both took different parts of Germany, and then once they’d taken down the Nazis, they went to war with each other.
0:55:27 Correct.
0:55:30 Because they then were trying to figure out who was in charge of Germany and how they were going to divvy up land.
0:55:34 So there was another war basically, like a civil war following the fall of the Nazis.
0:55:35 And the same thing happened in China.
0:55:40 The same thing happened as our Pacific forces kind of worked their way up through Japan.
0:55:43 There became conflict in the East as well, right?
0:55:50 So transition periods where near-peer countries or where countries become near-peer competitors,
0:55:55 people don’t stop competing as the competition increases.
0:56:03 Like what’s happening in the world right now in Ukraine and Russia and in Israel with Hamas, with the Houthis and with the Iranians?
0:56:06 Like what’s happening is competition is on the rise.
0:56:08 So everything becomes less stable.
0:56:10 Things become more dangerous.
0:56:16 When there’s a clear bully in the playground, there’s only one bully and nobody has to mess with the bully.
0:56:21 And it’s a bad day for anyone the bully messes with, but for the most part everybody else is good.
0:56:23 But what happens when there’s two bullies?
0:56:25 Shit gets messy.
0:56:28 The bullies make possies.
0:56:30 The possies have to fight with each other.
0:56:35 More people get hurt, more rabble-rousing happens in the playground than when there’s just one bully.
0:56:40 So for me, the United States is the bully on the playground.
0:56:46 And I, as an American citizen, am living in a place where it’s pretty good to be on the bully’s side.
0:56:54 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.
0:56:58 So then I can have some impotence, some confidence that their future will be secure.
0:57:05 Do you think the war in the Ukraine and Russia is a symptom of the changing in power?
0:57:07 Because it’s kind of like a proxy war, right?
0:57:12 Ukraine is actually the USA and Russia is actually kind of China to some degree.
0:57:14 So I would say it’s not kind of a proxy war.
0:57:16 It’s a full-on proxy war. You’re 100% right.
0:57:18 I don’t even know what a proxy war is. I just use that term because it sounds smart.
0:57:20 Well, it does sound smart. It is smart.
0:57:28 Proxy war is a doctrine. It’s an actual military doctrine that says that you create what’s known as intra-state conflict,
0:57:36 which means conflict internal to a state, and then external wealth parties fund the conflict in the state.
0:57:41 That way, the two external parties that are in conflict don’t have to waste any lives.
0:57:45 It protects them diplomatically. It protects them socially. It protects them militarily.
0:57:49 They’re only spending resources in an interstate conflict.
0:57:51 The interstate conflict has always been inside Ukraine.
0:57:53 Eastern Ukraine and Western Ukraine have always been in conflict.
0:57:56 We just didn’t realize it until Russia invaded because nobody paid attention to Ukraine.
0:58:00 Same thing in Israel. There’s always been conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis.
0:58:05 We just didn’t really pay attention to it until October 8th.
0:58:13 The conflict that you’re talking about is not a symptom. It’s a strategy.
0:58:20 The strategy is that the United States can drain Russian resources without draining American lives,
0:58:27 which makes it easy for the United States to continue draining strategic resources from Russia.
0:58:29 Then NATO is watching the same thing happen.
0:58:35 And NATO is the one that has the most to lose if Russia is strong, so then that’s why they also pile in support.
0:58:40 That’s the strategy. That has been the United States strategy since the end of World War II.
0:58:47 Who rebuilt Japan? The United States. Who rebuilt the UK? The United States.
0:58:51 Who rebuilt Germany? Who rebuilt France? All the United States.
0:58:57 Is it any surprise that all these countries since World War II have then been close diplomatic, political, and economic allies?
0:59:02 No. And guess what they all have? They all have very similar sheds,
0:59:08 because we built their political systems from World War II based on ours, right?
0:59:15 That’s the American model. That’s been how America has grown economically so quickly all over the world.
0:59:19 Guess who’s mimicking that model now? China.
0:59:24 The real conflict between the United States and China, nobody can define it.
0:59:28 Trump calls it a trade war because we have a bunch of cheap Chinese goods.
0:59:40 That’s not the problem. The problem is that Xi Jinping understands that what he wants for China is for China to be a net exporter of high technology.
0:59:46 Who’s the only other net exporter of high technology? The United States.
0:59:49 The United States makes electric vehicles. China makes electric vehicles.
0:59:52 The United States makes telecommunication. China makes telecommunication.
0:59:58 That’s the conflict, because what China is doing is giving the rest of the developing world an alternative to the United States.
1:00:07 Well, 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.
1:00:13 So now we’re fighting over that person. Whoever wins that person wins more money. Whoever wins that person wins repeat buyers.
1:00:18 And now I might lose my company. My coffee shop might shrink and your coffee shop might grow,
1:00:22 because this person is choosing your coffee when it used to be, only mine was available.
1:00:30 So, who is better for America? Joe Biden or Donald Trump?
1:00:34 Neither. They are both bad for America in different ways.
1:00:40 Who is more likely to prolong American dominance?
1:00:44 Donald Trump of the two. Donald Trump of the two.
1:00:49 Here’s what I’m going to tell you. I had this thought last night, and I was going to make a video for my own channel,
1:00:52 but my channel is nowhere near as enjoyable as your channel.
1:00:55 You put it on yours as well.
1:01:00 There is only one Democrat in the United States who can beat Donald Trump. Only one.
1:01:05 Nobody else stands a chance. Democratic Party is struggling to accept that. Nobody can beat Donald Trump.
1:01:08 It’s the only one that can win, and that’s Michelle Obama.
1:01:13 I did think this, because I mean, I would say Barack, but obviously he can’t because he’s done his eight years,
1:01:16 but Michelle, I do agree, and she doesn’t want anything to do with it.
1:01:23 She said, she said in early July, she wanted nothing to do with it.
1:01:27 But what’s happened since early July? There’s been the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
1:01:30 The assassination attempt turned into this incredible media frenzy.
1:01:34 Now you have this guy with blood on his face and a fist in the air and a flag behind him.
1:01:39 You know, Pulitzer Prize-winning photo already floating around the internet with this guy on it, right?
1:01:42 Everything changed.
1:01:51 There’s no way Michelle Obama isn’t sitting in her room multiple times a day, asking herself the question,
1:01:59 “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?”
1:02:03 Think about the questions Barack Obama must ask Michelle Obama.
1:02:07 Think about the silence, the pregnant silence around their kitchen table at night.
1:02:15 Think about how heavy they must be thinking right now because they know what I just said out loud that you knew yesterday.
1:02:19 There’s only one Democrat that can beat Donald Trump.
1:02:25 And maybe in July 3rd, she said she wanted nothing to do with it, but now it’s July 20th.
1:02:31 And if she really believes in this country, how is she not going to rise to the occasion?
1:02:39 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?
1:02:48 Because the truth is, if she were to run overnight, she would have the complete support of the entire Democratic National Convention.
1:02:54 Every donor who has already donated money would let their money stay with her and probably donate more.
1:03:00 Women voters, African-American voters, voters that are on the fence, voters that are looking for any alternative to Donald Trump or Joe Biden,
1:03:03 they would all get their answers given to them at once.
1:03:09 Not to mention the fact that she’s brilliant, she’s esteemed, she’s youthful.
1:03:19 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.
1:03:25 So if Michelle Obama is announced at the Democratic National Convention, I’m glad we had this conversation.
1:03:28 Do you think that’s possible?
1:03:33 Absolutely, it’s possible. I don’t think it’s probable, but I do think it’s possible.
1:03:46 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.
1:03:52 Do you think that Michelle Obama would increase the probability and the length of America’s dominance versus Trump?
1:03:55 Absolutely. It would just be in a different way.
1:04:00 Donald Trump grows through bravado and brinksmanship.
1:04:02 He grows like a bully grows.
1:04:14 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.
1:04:18 We invest a lot into it, but we lose influence.
1:04:23 We lose global reach. We lose power. We’re losing economic might.
1:04:29 They say that China is having an economic recession right now at 4.5% growth GDP.
1:04:32 We’re at 1.3% growth GDP.
1:04:36 Nobody’s talking about our recession because our recession has been on so long, it’s not a recession anymore.
1:04:39 It’s just the United States doesn’t grow more than really 3%.
1:04:45 China used to grow at 5%, so when it goes from 5% to 4%, it’s a big deal for people.
1:04:52 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.
1:04:56 Because he’s only got four years in the House. He’s only got four years in the White House and he knows it.
1:05:01 So he’s not out there to revolutionize America. He’s not out there to revolutionize the United States.
1:05:03 He’s out there for Donald Trump.
1:05:08 I think he believes he’ll do a good job. I think he believes he’s best for America.
1:05:14 I think he believes that being a bully is the way to go, but that doesn’t mean he’s right.
1:05:18 That doesn’t mean it’s going to be exponential return on investment.
1:05:20 It could be a continuing game of diminishing returns.
1:05:30 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.
1:05:34 What do you think she would need to say to meet America’s ideology right now?
1:05:39 I think she could define America’s ideology right now. I don’t think she’d have to meet it.
1:05:41 I think America is lost.
1:05:49 America has been looking down the barrel of the 2024 election for a long time, knowing it was going to boil down the Trump versus Biden.
1:06:05 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.
1:06:08 That’s what we’ve been looking at. That’s been the choice.
1:06:18 I don’t really feel like it’s a choice anymore, 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.
1:06:26 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.
1:06:42 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.
1:06:44 Michelle Obama has the power to do that.
1:06:51 If you were in his marketing team, and you were desperate, you would have shot him in the ear that day, wouldn’t you?
1:06:54 No. No way. The risk is too great.
1:06:59 I mean, if you knew it was going to hit his ear, and you were in his marketing team, you would have shot him in the ear that day.
1:07:07 Because that was, as we both said, he won the election that day, and he won the election because many people will now see him as some kind of hero.
1:07:21 So I’ll tell you how a CIA officer thinks about this, right? If you wanted to stage an attempted assassination, if that’s what you want to do, stage an attempted assassination, you would never shoot at the person who was the principal.
1:07:29 You would shoot away. You’d shoot up in the sky. The principal is the primary target that you’re trying to support, right?
1:07:36 So Donald Trump was the principal. If I was trying to stage an assassination to get to win him popular praise,
1:07:44 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,
1:07:51 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.
1:07:55 Like, people were killed and people were hurt at the Donald Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
1:08:04 If you wanted to stage an assassination, you would shoot 35, 40 degrees off target, well away from anybody accidentally getting hit, because what’s going to happen, everybody’s going to hear the gunshots.
1:08:10 So the gunshots will still cause the panic. The Secret Service would still jump in. They’d still cover him.
1:08:16 There’d still be all the same news worthiness without the risk of killing somebody.
1:08:26 And if you really, really wanted to make it, like, so it made headlines, you could even potentially stage some kind of cut that’s covered up with a small skin-colored bandaid
1:08:32 so that when the shots go off, you can wipe off or pull off the bandaid and then there’s going to be active red spots, right?
1:08:41 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,
1:08:47 you plan to carry out the covert action in the safest possible way. You don’t run the risk of actually shooting the principal.
1:08:52 So, but let’s play out the scenario that it was a conspiracy. So what could have happened there?
1:09:00 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,
1:09:05 and a half of the people thought it was some kind of conspiracy, and that maybe he fell down and then like cut his own ear,
1:09:11 and then the other half of the people thought that was craziness. What side of the fence did you sit on? You think it was a real shooter?
1:09:20 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.
1:09:27 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.
1:09:34 They have a very clear process. All conspiracies start with something that is factual. Something really does happen.
1:09:39 And then immediately following the factual thing, there’s a lack of information.
1:09:47 Inside of that lack of information, the third piece of the puzzle is speculation.
1:09:52 Now, speculation and suspicion are very close cousins.
1:09:58 Suspicion is healthy, right? You’ve heard of healthy suspicion. Speculation is not healthy.
1:10:03 Speculation is what it takes for you to create an answer to a story that’s not based on facts,
1:10:09 which is where the fourth element of a conspiracy comes from, a story that closes the loop.
1:10:16 Because when there’s information missing, it creates an open loop. Well, guess what human brains like? Conveniently closed loops.
1:10:22 So we can’t handle an open loop very well for very long. So then we start speculating on what might have happened
1:10:29 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.
1:10:36 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?
1:10:41 Who’s the one that drank the last bit of milk? How is there, how are there no more eggs left in the refrigerator, right?
1:10:45 Lack of information leads to speculation, and then we close the loop with a story in our mind.
1:10:51 When you look at what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, there’s all the elements for a conspiracy.
1:10:57 There’s facts, a lack of information, speculation, and somebody’s closing the story loop.
1:11:00 And all these different conspiracies are gaining momentum.
1:11:05 But when you look at the factual analysis of what happened, there are pictures, there are diagrams.
1:11:13 There’s a corpse of a 20-year-old shooter holding a high-powered rifle on top of a roof aimed at the stage.
1:11:18 There’s reports of local sheriff and local police officers being notified of that.
1:11:25 There’s bystanders who have reported that. There’s technology that’s been employed to verify that.
1:11:33 There’s enough facts there to know that there really was someone who was young by name, who took a shot at the president.
1:11:38 That’s what we know. Guess what happens tomorrow? We learn more.
1:11:42 We don’t have to know all the answers today. More information will come.
1:11:49 As soon as Donald Trump was shot, I called up one of my friends who’s a retired Secret Service officer.
1:11:58 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.
1:12:04 There’s always gaps, always gaps at any kind of political rally. That’s why they’re dangerous.
1:12:08 You can’t make it 100% secure. That’s why there’s snipers on the roof.
1:12:12 There’s not snipers on the roof because they feel like the grounds are safe.
1:12:15 There’s snipers on the roof because they know that there’s gaps.
1:12:19 There’s not Secret Service on the sides of the stage carrying guns because they think that they’re safe.
1:12:22 There’s Secret Service on the sides of the stage because they know that there’s gaps.
1:12:29 Of course, there’s gaps. You can’t manage all risks. The person took a shot from over 400 feet.
1:12:34 400 feet is a long, difficult shot. Empirically, it’s a long, difficult shot.
1:12:40 Even though the newspapers come out and say it’s a turkey shooter, an easy shot, or a standard shot, or a basic shot,
1:12:44 it is not. Any hunter out there will tell you 400 yards is a difficult shot.
1:12:50 And you have to have a high-powered rifle built for that kind of distance to shoot that length.
1:12:54 So there’s all kinds of misinformation that’s going around as people try to spin up a story.
1:13:01 So for me, it was a real assassination attempt by a real person whose motives are still unknown.
1:13:09 I was listening to something and the person was saying that maybe the CIA or somebody infiltrated this young man
1:13:15 and encouraged him over a period of time to get up there on that roof and all these kinds of things.
1:13:22 The heart of the problem here is we’re quite distrusting and we don’t have answers.
1:13:27 And most of us aren’t informed. So there’s basically the small life that we live.
1:13:30 And then above us, we see billionaires and powerful people.
1:13:37 And we hear that they do or have historically done very nefarious, malicious things.
1:13:41 And that becomes our sort of shed, is that we are the average person.
1:13:45 And then up there, outside the shed, there’s all these billionaires, powerful, illuminati.
1:13:47 And they are doing these really malicious things.
1:13:49 Now, in part, that’s true.
1:13:52 But maybe only in part.
1:13:55 And we kind of assume this broad strokes approach to anything that happens.
1:13:59 We go government, matrix, conspiracy.
1:14:05 And the CIA does have history of doing things like this.
1:14:06 True.
1:14:07 True.
1:14:10 We’re coming into a conversation that’s twofold.
1:14:14 One, we’re talking about a pre-9/11 CIA.
1:14:19 Pre-9/11, post-9/11 is important to create a distinction for CIA
1:14:29 because prior to September 11th, CIA was a small, highly funded organization with very little oversight.
1:14:33 They could come up with crazy stuff like trying to, you know,
1:14:36 trying to poison Fidel Castro so his beard fell out
1:14:38 or trying to create the Bay of Pigs invasion
1:14:43 or trying to do all sorts of wacky stuff from, you know, MK Ultra to whatever else.
1:14:50 That was a wacky, pre-9/11 unsupervised, Wild West kind of CIA.
1:14:58 Post-9/11, the 9/11 Commission written in 2003 highlighted that CIA failed to do its job for September 11th.
1:15:00 So now there’s tons of oversight.
1:15:06 It’s now a very large, very fat, well-funded bureaucracy.
1:15:09 Whereas before, it was a well-funded free-for-all.
1:15:15 If it was a conspiracy, which department or which organization would be responsible in your opinion?
1:15:20 If it was a conspiracy, there would be no department in charge of the conspiracy.
1:15:22 So it would be something else.
1:15:23 Correct.
1:15:24 Right.
1:15:31 Because when governments act, when individuals in a government act in a conspiratorial manner,
1:15:33 it’s not formalized.
1:15:35 If it was formalized, it would be a policy.
1:15:36 Right.
1:15:37 They act independently.
1:15:45 And there’s all sorts of instances where people act independently from Edward Snowden all the way to Alder Games.
1:15:51 There are people who actually carried out conspiratorial efforts to try to gain some kind of leverage
1:15:54 that worked for them for a while and then worked against them.
1:16:01 If that bullet had hit Donald Trump in the head, how do you think the US would be different?
1:16:04 I was thinking about this when I was driving down the street yesterday.
1:16:06 It’s hard to define that, really.
1:16:12 I think we probably wouldn’t be sat here now because there probably would have been quite a bit of unrest, potentially.
1:16:13 Potentially, I don’t know.
1:16:14 I don’t know.
1:16:17 I think we would have still been sitting here.
1:16:18 I was wondering.
1:16:21 I would have gotten my ass on a plane to come sit with you, at least, for sure.
1:16:27 You never know how these sort of domino effects can happen and people can break out on the streets.
1:16:29 Because what might happen, let’s just play out this scenario.
1:16:36 Donald Trump gets shot, then some crazy right-wing person comes out and shoots someone else.
1:16:41 Then the streets of LA look very different to the streets of LA today than we sat here in LA.
1:16:42 Do you know what I mean?
1:16:44 That’s kind of the domino effect that was playing out in my mind.
1:16:46 There’d be some kind of revenge, right?
1:16:47 Well, I don’t know.
1:16:48 That’s what’s interesting.
1:16:50 Politically motivated violence is tough.
1:16:54 If Donald Trump would have been shot, chances are the shooter would have also been shot.
1:17:01 So, from the eyes of the American people, and for sure from the messaging that would have come from the White House,
1:17:06 the threat was neutralized and it’s a tragedy that we lost a former American president.
1:17:12 Joe Biden would have come out and would have made kind, caring remarks about Donald Trump.
1:17:14 Nobody would be talking about him as crazy or whatever else.
1:17:18 He’d go down as a hero following the democratic process for something he believed in.
1:17:20 History would have been written a very different way.
1:17:25 Oh, I don’t know, because I think if Donald Trump had been hit, I mean, this is just from chilling on Twitter.
1:17:31 If Donald Trump had been hit, regardless of whether that kid had been shot and regardless of whatever,
1:17:38 people would have believed that it was some kind of deep state, CIA, left wing, Hillary Clinton involvement.
1:17:42 Even if there was a body fingerprint, they found the kid’s hard drive and he was planning it.
1:17:44 There’s a group of people that still would have believed that.
1:17:47 Absolutely, because there’s a group of people, as you know, that believe anything.
1:17:48 Correct.
1:17:54 Someone in that group of people would have taken a retaliatory action and then this starts the stone throwing that I think.
1:18:05 They might have gone to a left wing, I don’t know, black event, festival and done something and then you have the…
1:18:07 The tit for tat.
1:18:14 I don’t disagree that it’s a possibility, but the question is whether or not a group would have reached critical mass to take some kind of action.
1:18:15 Okay, yeah.
1:18:17 Right, because, I mean, think about the alternative.
1:18:26 The alternative is the streets of, you name the conservative state, Texas, Florida, whatever, Pennsylvania maybe.
1:18:31 A giant parade fit for a king, right, parading Donald Trump through the streets.
1:18:42 Something that Keith and Donald and Joe Biden happily endorsing the money for it to happen because he’s an ex-president and because that’s showing like unity and nationality.
1:18:48 It could have been a chance to really bring the whole country together and end some of the bipolar division.
1:18:53 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 of action.
1:18:55 And there may have been follow-up violence, you’re right again.
1:19:00 I think all of those things are possibilities, but it is also a possibility that it would have gone in the other direction.
1:19:06 There still would have had to be a new candidate identified by the Republican National Convention.
1:19:08 So things would have gone differently from that day.
1:19:09 Very interesting.
1:19:12 So going back to the shed, the person’s come out of the shed.
1:19:15 They understand this idea of perspective and perception.
1:19:28 I’m really, what I’m really trying to get at here is I’m trying to help people get out of the life they’re living that they hate and closer towards the life that is aligned in whatever way they define alignment as so that they can live the life they want to live.
1:19:30 So they can start to kind of bend the world in their favor.
1:19:35 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.
1:19:40 And just the people that seem to have the most power, they understand that the world they live in is malleable.
1:19:43 And maybe that’s the analogy of being able to break out of your shed.
1:19:49 But they understand that they can like have an idea, pursue the thing and kind of convince their way to a goal.
1:19:51 Bend the world out of their way.
1:20:00 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.
1:20:02 I’ve got two things that come to mind, right?
1:20:17 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.
1:20:20 And the perfection paradox is not the same thing as perfectionism.
1:20:30 The perfection paradox is the idea that you keep making incremental improvements to a plan, but you never actually act on the plan.
1:20:37 So you’re seeking perfection and you’re making genuine improvements, but you’re not actually taking action.
1:20:41 So the impact of your improvements is not felt.
1:20:50 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.
1:20:52 How do we make it this 5% better?
1:20:54 How do we make it 2% better?
1:20:55 How do we make it 1% better?
1:20:57 What if tomorrow’s intelligence gives us new information?
1:21:02 What if intelligence the next day gives us better information so you get trapped in this paradox?
1:21:10 And instead what they tell us to do is engage in something called excellence through execution.
1:21:20 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.
1:21:23 So your excellence comes from execution.
1:21:29 After 9/11, as a simple example, after 9/11, President Bush declared war.
1:21:35 People were immediately deployed to the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan immediately.
1:21:37 Did they plan an operation?
1:21:38 Yes.
1:21:40 In about 48 hours.
1:21:41 And then they were deployed.
1:21:46 And then you had paramilitary people on horseback with mules carrying stuff through the mountains.
1:21:52 The only way that’s possible is through excellence through execution.
1:22:00 Get them on the ground and let them figure it out from there because the stakes are so high the impact has to be felt right now.
1:22:07 So to your question, how do we give people the ability to bend the rules, bend the world around them?
1:22:15 It’s understanding that there is excellence in execution and also understanding that there is a paradox with perfection.
1:22:19 So if you want to feel the impact, you can’t keep planning.
1:22:26 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.
1:22:32 But today, you take the lumps, you make the mistakes and you get the impact that you need.
1:22:37 The second thing that came to my mind is actually coming from, I have a centimillionaire client that I work with frequently.
1:22:39 And he was talking about this idea of…
1:22:40 Centimillionaire.
1:22:41 I’ve never had that term before.
1:22:42 I know what it is.
1:22:55 I have a centimillionaire client who was working with me on a process to try to resolve some of the challenges that he was having from the trauma that he was wired into as a kid.
1:22:59 And how that trauma has played out in his personal life and his business life and everything else.
1:23:08 And he made this awesome breakthrough where he was like therapists and counselors and spouses because he’s been married more than once.
1:23:11 They all tell you to go through your pain, right?
1:23:14 It’s like you’ve got to face your trauma.
1:23:15 You’ve got to go through it.
1:23:16 You’ve got to do the work.
1:23:20 You’ve got to bear the burden so that you can heal.
1:23:28 Whereas what I teach, which is what CIA teaches, is why would you ever go through something when you can go around it?
1:23:37 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.
1:23:39 You can’t change it.
1:23:42 By working through it, you might come to accept it.
1:23:43 But what’s the point?
1:23:49 Instead, you can just go right around that pain and you can be like, my mom cheated on my dad.
1:23:52 And because of that, this happened and because of that, this other thing happened.
1:23:58 And because of that, I became a self-sufficient independent person who didn’t rely on my mom or my dad.
1:24:03 And now I’m very successful because all that matters is what’s forward.
1:24:04 I can’t change what’s behind.
1:24:06 And he made this revelation on his own.
1:24:14 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.
1:24:18 When in fact, you can also just go around the mess and you can go right to the point.
1:24:20 And you don’t have to heal.
1:24:23 You just have to accept, understand, recognize and move forward.
1:24:24 And so what did he do?
1:24:26 So he was trying to overcome his trauma.
1:24:29 How did he go around it in that specific example?
1:24:36 So in that specific example, he went back to the traumatic incident that he experienced.
1:24:48 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.
1:24:54 And once he made that connection, he was like, oh, well, shit, I’m glad my mom cheated on my dad.
1:25:02 Because now my daughters are taken care of my sons are taken care of my wives are taken care of like my I’ve got 500 employees that are taken care of.
1:25:04 I do business in four different countries.
1:25:05 Everybody’s taken care of.
1:25:09 Does that require some time, though, between the thing that happened and where you are now?
1:25:19 Because, you know, I was sat here yesterday with a chap who lost his son, his 18 month old son in April.
1:25:27 And, you know, it’s hard to in that situation, Francis Ngane, he’s a UFC champion.
1:25:31 Hard in that situation to try and find a way around it.
1:25:33 It’s a couple of months ago.
1:25:37 There’s no, there’s no way around tragedy.
1:25:42 That’s that’s lost that very few of us will ever know.
1:25:45 Thankfully.
1:25:50 What we don’t know is how that will shape him in the future.
1:25:55 All we know is what that’s doing to hurt him in the present, right?
1:26:03 Think about think about all the famous stories, all the famous inspirational motivational leaders that you’ve met who had some kind of tragedy happened in the past.
1:26:06 Well, actually, it’s funny enough because I because I mentioned the loss of a son.
1:26:12 I had a guy say he called Mo Gorda, who was the ex head of Google X and his son passed away in a routine operation.
1:26:15 That should have taken 10 minutes, but killed his son.
1:26:18 And then he quit his job at Google and went on search of what happiness is.
1:26:25 And if when I asked him on the podcast, I said, would you would you bring back your son now?
1:26:26 He said, no.
1:26:29 Like if you could go back and run, well, I’m sure he bring back his son.
1:26:33 I think what you’re saying to me is that if you could go back and change what happened, would he change it?
1:26:35 And he said, no.
1:26:36 It’s important.
1:26:47 Like it’s important to understand when you are wired for success because not everyone is wired for success.
1:26:49 A lot of people are wired for mediocrity.
1:26:52 A lot of people are wired for basic survival.
1:26:54 A lot of people are wired for pain and suffering.
1:27:04 But when you are wired for success, you can’t regret what’s happened to you in the past because to erase it or change it would be to make you not the past.
1:27:08 To make you not the person you are now and the person you are now is successful.
1:27:10 Do you think some people are wired for success?
1:27:11 Absolutely.
1:27:12 I think people are wired for success.
1:27:15 What does that mean in real terms?
1:27:17 How do I know if I’m wired for success?
1:27:20 I think empirically, there’s lots of proof that you’re wired for success.
1:27:23 But I’m talking about Dave that’s listening to this now or Janet.
1:27:25 How do they know that if they’re wired for success?
1:27:37 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.
1:27:51 It’s important that the reason I 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.
1:28:01 You can’t find a happy person living in ignorance in their shed and convince them that it’s a good idea to commit treason against their country.
1:28:03 You can’t because they’re very happy.
1:28:08 Once somebody’s very happy and very satisfied, they don’t aspire to anything.
1:28:16 So you can’t go them into telling you secrets or pay them or trick them or force them because they’re very satisfied where they are.
1:28:25 So a spy is an asset in the field is somebody who believes that there might be something better.
1:28:30 A actual client wired for success also believes that there is something better.
1:28:34 The difference between the two is that this person can be manipulated.
1:28:35 Which person?
1:28:40 The spy in the field who’s desperate to get out of the shed.
1:28:49 That person can be manipulated whereas a good client is suspicious and aware that people are trying to manipulate them.
1:28:51 So they’re looking for guidance.
1:28:53 They’re looking for something they can test.
1:28:55 They’re looking for something they can prove.
1:29:00 So that’s why I compare the two so closely.
1:29:06 Both are wired to be successful because they already know that there is more than just the world around them.
1:29:10 They already know that there is something limiting them.
1:29:12 They already know that there’s a barrier.
1:29:23 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.
1:29:27 It means that you know that there’s something holding you back and you want to overcome the thing that’s holding you back.
1:29:40 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, they listen to podcasts and the radio and such.
1:29:45 And so sometimes they recognize me and they’ll say I was listening to podcasts, I love it, etc.
1:29:51 And I’m thinking of starting a business and I’ve got this idea and this idea and whatever.
1:30:01 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?
1:30:07 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.
1:30:11 So whoever’s listening to this now knows that they can shit, that’s me.
1:30:32 When you are conditioned, 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.
1:30:36 So you’ve got this what we call a cognitive dissonance.
1:30:42 You don’t believe everything you’re hearing but you don’t know anything else to believe.
1:30:52 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.
1:30:54 Even worse, they have probably tried.
1:30:58 Dude, there’s this heartbreaking story for me, it’s a business heartbreaking story.
1:31:14 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 and every day spy, every day spy was two years old at the time.
1:31:19 And I was sitting with this kid and he had no ambition.
1:31:22 He worked part-time at a brewery and he was totally happy to do it.
1:31:31 He lived with four roommates, he drank beer every afternoon starting at two o’clock, funny fucking guy, really funny dude to hang out with, but he had no goals, no ambitions, no aspirations.
1:31:34 And I was like, what did your parents do?
1:31:41 And he was like, oh, my mom ran her own business from our farm in whatever it was, Idaho or something like that.
1:31:42 I was like, oh, what did she do?
1:31:49 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.
1:31:59 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 twelve kids or whatever.
1:32:01 And I was like, oh, that’s interesting.
1:32:04 Why don’t you want to be an entrepreneur if your mom was an entrepreneur?
1:32:14 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.
1:32:19 He was like, my mom only was able to run her catering business for about three years before it failed.
1:32:22 And I was like, well, why did you say she was an entrepreneur?
1:32:25 And he was like, because to me, she was.
1:32:26 She started a business.
1:32:29 She ran it for three years doing what she loved.
1:32:30 She was an entrepreneur.
1:32:34 But then all that work, she still failed in the end.
1:32:37 So his rationale was why even try?
1:32:40 But he still looked up to his mom as being an entrepreneur.
1:32:45 So the thing that kills me is that there are so many entrepreneurs out there who are trying and failing.
1:32:55 And some of them, after they failed two or three times, they stopped trying and they just accept the shed and they accept that this is the circle that’s drawn around me.
1:32:56 And this is the way it has to be.
1:33:03 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.
1:33:04 All they need is a recipe.
1:33:12 So my goal in life every day is just get one more person to follow the simplest recipe.
1:33:17 What is your favorite case study of someone that followed the recipe and changed their life?
1:33:18 In my company?
1:33:19 Yeah.
1:33:20 My favorite case study is me.
1:33:21 Yeah.
1:33:24 Because I’m the one that reaps the benefits of it every day.
1:33:27 I have multiple people who have had some pretty awesome success.
1:33:34 I have one gentleman who recently wrote to me, who told me that for the first time in his life, I think he was in his mid 30s.
1:33:37 For the first time in his life, he has a six figure job now.
1:33:39 And he was an engineer.
1:33:52 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.
1:33:56 Where for the last five years, he’d been asking for a promotion, asking for a raise.
1:34:00 And his boss has always just told him no, or he wasn’t qualified or he wasn’t fit.
1:34:06 But then he started practicing one of our frameworks and nine months later was promoted without asking.
1:34:07 Which framework?
1:34:08 He didn’t tell me which framework.
1:34:11 Oh, he told me it was coming from our math.
1:34:13 We have a master course called operational thinking.
1:34:16 And inside that we teach many influence frameworks.
1:34:20 So it was clearly a framework of influence that he had tapped into.
1:34:28 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.
1:34:30 I have an FBI speaker who comes in.
1:34:32 I have a Green Beret who comes in.
1:34:34 I have an exercise scientist come in.
1:34:39 I even had a recently, I had a great friend of mine who’s an Emmy award-winning journalist and investigative journalist come in.
1:34:43 And we teach in Las Vegas, we teach hundreds of people at a time.
1:34:48 We had one person who wrote from that Intel Edge event.
1:34:49 He was a Puerto Rican guy.
1:34:50 His name is Emmanuel.
1:34:52 Emmanuel, if you’re listening, I love you brother.
1:34:57 But Emmanuel just had a baby, first baby with his wife.
1:35:01 And within the first month of having the baby, his company laid him off.
1:35:04 So he had all these life changes.
1:35:05 A new baby.
1:35:07 He was so proud and so excited to be a dad.
1:35:10 And then he was facing unemployment.
1:35:18 And he applied our framework, specifically our framework on mirroring and winning the interviewer instead of winning the interview.
1:35:27 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.
1:35:30 And he came to the next Intel Edge event that we had.
1:35:34 So we saw him in say October and he came back to us again in March, something like that.
1:35:37 And he came back and he told us this story and the whole, my whole team lit up.
1:35:43 My whole team was like, because we had all seen him when he was, when he was showing us pictures of the baby.
1:35:47 And then we all saw the email from him that said, my company laid me off.
1:35:49 I don’t know how I’m going to take care of my family.
1:35:51 And then we see him again.
1:35:53 And he’s like, guys, you’ll never believe what happened.
1:35:54 Like I did this thing.
1:35:56 I followed your mirroring example.
1:36:01 I won over the interviewer and now I have this job that I would have never gotten otherwise.
1:36:04 These are the stories that I’m spoiled by.
1:36:09 I have my customer service team and even my executive team.
1:36:13 We don’t see all the testimonials that we get because they’ve,
1:36:17 we’ve become a little bit desensitized to them because they happen so often.
1:36:22 And I love it when they happen, but I’m not surprised when they happen because of course the recipes work.
1:36:28 The recipes work because they were refined in the, in the center of CIA.
1:36:30 They’ve been working for ages.
1:36:32 They just haven’t ever been shared with the public.
1:36:37 I think the reason why I loved, there was two subjects in school that I was really good at,
1:36:40 or at least that I enjoyed, therefore I was better at.
1:36:45 I mean, for me to be good at something, I mean, I didn’t go to many lessons in school.
1:36:49 So I was bad at most things, but the two lessons that I went to were psychology and business.
1:36:54 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.
1:36:56 I’m 31 now.
1:37:03 And I think I’ve definitely repeated this sentence or this phrase 10 times a year since I was 14.
1:37:11 And the crux of it is that the only thing standing in my way of being the world’s greatest entrepreneur, philanthropist, salesperson.
1:37:13 It’s just a bunch of people.
1:37:20 Like it was 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.
1:37:29 So if you can understand people and how to influence them, then you hold the keys to the city, the proverbial, proverbial city.
1:37:33 So when you talked about this influence framework, I thought maybe that’s the most important thing to talk about.
1:37:36 Because A, do you agree with what I said?
1:37:39 There’s like a foundational seed in your mind that it’s just people.
1:37:43 And then B, I’d love to talk about how we influence people.
1:37:48 So yes, I agree with you that people are all that stand in the way.
1:37:50 And we have to remember that we ourselves are people.
1:37:52 So we’re part of the problem.
1:38:02 And influence frameworks are powerful frameworks for getting what you want.
1:38:07 I think the place to start, because not all frameworks are simple.
1:38:12 Remember how we were talking about there’s foundational frameworks, there’s two step frameworks, and then there’s 12 step frameworks.
1:38:15 The thing to understand is frameworks all fit within each other.
1:38:18 They fit like nesting dolls, like Russian nesting dolls.
1:38:26 So when you learn any kind of framework that has to do with influence,
1:38:32 what you also have to learn are the sub frameworks inside of it to be able to execute the whole thing.
1:38:38 But the place to really start is understanding that influence and persuasion are not the same thing, right?
1:38:46 Persuasion is what happens when you actively put energy into changing someone’s mind
1:38:50 or getting someone to take a certain action with active energy.
1:38:56 Influence is what you have when you’re not talking.
1:39:01 So I can sit here and try to persuade you to come with me to dinner.
1:39:04 But that’s not influence, that’s persuasion.
1:39:09 Influence is what happens when something happens in the world and I’m the one that comes into your mind.
1:39:13 And you’re like, I wonder what Andy thinks about that, which probably doesn’t happen.
1:39:17 But one day hopefully it will happen if I gain enough influence, right?
1:39:21 That’s the difference. Persuasion takes energy, influence is passive, it doesn’t happen.
1:39:27 It takes a lot of experience, it takes a lot of engagement, it takes a lot of assessment, energy, trust.
1:39:32 It takes a lot of effort to get someone to a place where you have influence over them.
1:39:34 But there’s a framework for that.
1:39:38 There are frameworks and frameworks within frameworks that I’m happy to teach if you want to go through those.
1:39:42 Yeah, whatever you think is most useful for me and my audience.
1:39:46 So I’ll start at the lowest possible place.
1:39:53 And the lowest possible place, if you think of influence up here as an umbrella,
1:40:00 there’s a sub framework inside of that umbrella and then there’s a third inside of that.
1:40:02 So we’re going to start with that one first and grow.
1:40:05 And that framework is something called sense making.
1:40:09 Because if I want to influence you or if you want to influence me,
1:40:14 we have to make sense of the dynamic of our relationship.
1:40:20 Meaning one of us has to be in power and one of us has to comply with the other person’s power.
1:40:22 That’s the whole goal of sense making.
1:40:26 So that’s why we are starting at that framework.
1:40:31 Inside of sense making, if you imagine it like a cup, right?
1:40:35 Sense making is like a cylinder and just like you fill a cup with water,
1:40:38 you’ll fill this cylinder with sense.
1:40:42 The bottom third of the cup is what we call avoidance.
1:40:44 That’s where every relationship starts.
1:40:48 Every time you meet a new person, you try to avoid that person.
1:40:51 So first thought you have, even if you don’t want to admit it.
1:40:53 No, I’ll admit it.
1:40:56 No, that’s very much the nature of my life.
1:40:58 That’s the nature of every, that’s human nature.
1:41:00 We avoid what’s new.
1:41:02 So the first third is avoidance.
1:41:04 So you’ve got to fill the water.
1:41:05 You’ve got to fill the relationship.
1:41:10 You have to put enough time and energy into the relationship to get past the bottom third.
1:41:11 Now you’re making sense.
1:41:14 The next third is called competition.
1:41:19 Competition is all about the exchange of information, the exchange of ideas,
1:41:25 the exchange of energy because in an exchange, you’re building a relationship.
1:41:29 Even if you’re arguing, even if you disagree, even if you hate the other person
1:41:33 and you’re yelling in their face, you’re still investing energy into that person.
1:41:38 Whereas if you really didn’t care about them, you would just avoid them all together.
1:41:42 The last third is called compliance.
1:41:47 The whole reason that you compete is to have someone come out with compliance.
1:41:53 And compliance is the part where the power dynamic is identified.
1:41:59 So we’ve invested so much time in competition that now we’re not arguing and fighting anymore.
1:42:03 Now we’re starting to make sense of our relationship.
1:42:06 You’ve heard the phrase, we’ll just agree to disagree.
1:42:10 Essentially that is the top of the sense making cylinder.
1:42:15 You’ve filled the cup and where you land at the end is we’ll just agree to disagree.
1:42:21 Which is kind of a mutual understanding of each other’s position on whatever it was that you were competing over.
1:42:25 But you’re still a unit, you’ve still invested into a relationship.
1:42:34 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.
1:42:41 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.
1:42:47 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.
1:43:01 Once there’s sense, once we understand and remember this is, if we agree to disagree, then we’ve made sense of our relationship as mutual peers on this particular topic, politics.
1:43:09 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.
1:43:13 But we have a relationship enough that now we can talk about those other things.
1:43:18 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.
1:43:25 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.
1:43:32 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.
1:43:34 That’s still compliance.
1:43:44 That’s the foundational framework that feeds up into a secondary framework that we call no-like trust.
1:43:53 No-like trust is something that actually exists in the social media world, which was a really awesome surprise to me to find it there.
1:43:57 KLT, no-like trust, starts with discovery.
1:44:03 If you don’t know something exists, you can never like it because you don’t even know it exists.
1:44:07 Once you know something exists, you have to decide whether or not you like it.
1:44:14 Well, how do you decide whether or not you like it through this avoidance, competition, compliance, sense-making process?
1:44:18 Because as soon as you discover something new, it’s new, so guess what you try to do?
1:44:20 Avoid it.
1:44:22 You see what I’m saying?
1:44:33 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.
1:44:40 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.
1:44:50 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.
1:44:52 You’ve heard the term “falling in love.”
1:44:57 There’s also a very real term called “falling into trust.”
1:45:05 You just spend enough time, long enough, and what happens is without even realizing it, you start to trust the person that you’re with.
1:45:09 That is the beginning of influence.
1:45:18 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,
1:45:22 where we debate and argue and bitch at each other about politics.
1:45:27 You still like Friday night going to the bar and sharing a pint with me.
1:45:33 You still like hanging out with me when we watch our two different soccer teams play or football teams play.
1:45:42 So because you like me enough to be with me, there will come a time where I win your trust in something, in some area.
1:45:46 Maybe it’s trust because I’m the only person who drinks with you.
1:45:52 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.
1:45:53 You will fall into trust.
1:45:55 We all fall into trust.
1:46:01 It’s one of the things that’s natural to human beings that we hate about ourselves is we trust the wrong people.
1:46:03 It happens to all of us.
1:46:07 So someone can trust you in terms of influence, even if they don’t like you?
1:46:13 Correct, because they will be invested enough into you that they believe something is predictable.
1:46:15 Think about somebody that you don’t like.
1:46:17 Think about somebody you really, really don’t like.
1:46:21 Are there still things about them that you would trust them to do?
1:46:27 Maybe not things they would do for you, but there are certain things that you would trust that they would do.
1:46:31 I already know that person is going to say something stupid to my kid.
1:46:35 I already trust that that person is going to put their garbage can at the end of my driveway.
1:46:40 So it’s fascinating because we usually think of trust as only being a positive term.
1:46:43 Trust is ambiguous.
1:46:47 It’s an agnostic term.
1:46:50 It doesn’t mean good things or bad things.
1:46:52 It just means a predictable outcome.
1:46:54 Do you know the lens I was thinking about as you were speaking?
1:46:56 I was thinking about randomly.
1:47:01 I was thinking about personal branding and LinkedIn, because I was thinking about personal branding strategies.
1:47:06 People go on LinkedIn and they have all these hot takes, and I was wondering through the context of what you were saying,
1:47:09 does it matter if people like what I’m saying?
1:47:13 If I’m going on LinkedIn every day and I’m doing another hot take or showing my opinion,
1:47:17 can I build trust with my audience, even if there’s loads of people disagreeing with me,
1:47:28 or is there a certain type of content or personal brand strategy that’s going to ultimately build more influence?
1:47:34 I love the question because what you’re getting at is a framework that we have called the power of polarity.
1:47:41 If you want to create power, if you want to create draw or appeal, which is power, you have to polarize.
1:47:49 You have to stand for something, because if you don’t stand for something, nobody really knows what you believe in.
1:47:51 So you have to polarize.
1:47:57 So to your point, there’s lots of people on LinkedIn, there’s lots of people on Facebook, on Twitter or whatever,
1:48:00 who are out there screaming something.
1:48:05 They’re making a point and they’re being drowned out by all the other people who are out there making a point.
1:48:07 Pierce Morgan, Elon Musk, you know.
1:48:09 Those are people who already have influence.
1:48:15 Okay, but in the case of Pierce Morgan, part of how he’s got his influences by polarizing.
1:48:17 Being polarity, by being polarizing.
1:48:22 And not being scared of the fact that people are going to tell him that they don’t like him.
1:48:26 Even better, I want people to tell me that they don’t like me.
1:48:35 That’s even better because what happens is when you drive polarity, when you drive polar response,
1:48:40 you create enemies, but you also create friends.
1:48:43 And what do friends do when enemies attack?
1:48:46 They defend, right?
1:48:51 So when you stand for something, even if only a small group of people agree with you,
1:48:55 they still defend you, they still support you, they still invest in you.
1:49:00 That means they’re moving from that avoidance, competition, compliance phase into no-like trust.
1:49:04 And then when they defend you, they can’t help but fall into trust because what are they defending?
1:49:09 They’re putting energy in defending you, so they’re going to trust you even more.
1:49:15 And when that group of people trusts you and other non-competitive people, other observers watch
1:49:18 that some people are attacking you and other people are defending you,
1:49:23 it makes them feel like they have to choose between attacking you or defending you.
1:49:26 Is there a way to stand for something correctly?
1:49:29 And is there a way to badly stand for something?
1:49:31 And I say this because as you were speaking, I was thinking about my friend.
1:49:34 My friend is really, really bad at LinkedIn.
1:49:39 And he comes to LinkedIn with very inconsistent takes on the world.
1:49:41 I’m going to give you an example.
1:49:50 For many years, he’s had a narrative about alcohol being bad and he’s been sober.
1:49:55 But then the World Cup came around and he posted on LinkedIn, the World Cup was in the Middle East,
1:50:01 that the Middle East should allow people to binge drink and posting against the sort of religious perspective that says alcohol is bad.
1:50:05 So he was like, people should be allowed to binge drink if they won in the Middle East.
1:50:07 But then his other perspective has always been that alcohol is bad.
1:50:09 And like, why do people binge drink?
1:50:12 And so the inconsistency has really fucked him up, I think.
1:50:16 Well, that’s showing why he probably also doesn’t have much influence.
1:50:19 Because people don’t know where he stands.
1:50:21 So there’s nothing to stand.
1:50:25 Like somebody who rallies behind him, like it sounds like when you were telling the story,
1:50:28 to a certain extent you were like proud of him when he was like…
1:50:31 Originally I went when he was clear what he stood for.
1:50:33 But every day is a different take.
1:50:36 And that’s what costs you your influence.
1:50:41 So he diminished his own power by not demonstrating polarity.
1:50:43 He should have just stood a ground.
1:50:47 Even if the ground isn’t popular, even if it’s not popular or positive,
1:50:53 if you stay in one place and you drive a clear polarizing message,
1:50:57 some people will rally behind you, some people will attack you,
1:50:59 either way you benefit from it.
1:51:01 This is one of the things I love about YouTube.
1:51:02 I’m sure you’ve discovered this too.
1:51:04 For anybody out there who’s trying to make money on YouTube
1:51:07 or grow an audience on YouTube or do anything with YouTube,
1:51:13 needs to understand the best comments are oftentimes the worst comments.
1:51:17 Because somebody chimes in and talks shit about something,
1:51:20 it only instigates more people to come in and leave a comment.
1:51:24 And guess what? YouTube wants comments.
1:51:28 They just want engagement because engagement means people are on the platform.
1:51:31 When there’s a split between thumbs up and thumbs down,
1:51:33 it means there’s polarizing content,
1:51:35 which means even more people are going to stay on the platform,
1:51:37 so they spread it even further and wider.
1:51:40 So you can’t be afraid of being polarizing.
1:51:42 You have to lean into being polarizing.
1:51:45 The way we use it at CIA is when you’re talking to a spy,
1:51:49 when you’re talking to somebody and you want them to commit treason against their country,
1:51:52 you have to be able to ask a polarizing question to find out
1:51:56 whether or not they’re going to hint that they would be traitors
1:51:59 or whether they are staunch supporters and nationalists.
1:52:01 But you have to test that barrier
1:52:04 if you’re ever going to actually develop the kind of relationship,
1:52:07 the kind of power to convince them to commit treason.
1:52:09 It made me think about brands as well because, you know,
1:52:12 there’s a lot of brands out there that have done really, really well
1:52:14 by standing for something, by being polarizing.
1:52:19 Okay, it was Jane Warren on my podcast that talked about her brand Demologica
1:52:20 and she said to me, she said,
1:52:25 “You have to be willing to piss off the 80% to get your 20%.
1:52:30 She goes, “You don’t need people to like you.”
1:52:33 She goes, “That’s not a brand. You need them to love you or hate you.”
1:52:34 She goes, “That’s a brand.”
1:52:36 It’s genius. It’s absolutely correct.
1:52:38 She is talking about polarizing.
1:52:42 She’s talking about that no-like trust process
1:52:47 and getting people to go beyond like into love you or hate you.
1:52:48 If they love you or hate you,
1:52:52 then they are in the trust side of the no-like trust process.
1:52:55 They either trust what you say
1:52:58 or they trust that they’re going to hate what you say.
1:53:02 But either way, they’re in the trust part of no-like trust.
1:53:07 I was a kid in my bedroom that was building my business all on my own.
1:53:10 One of the websites I used religiously was a website called Fiverr.
1:53:13 Fiverr is called F-I-V-E-R-R.
1:53:17 And Fiverr have just released a tour that I think is a game changer
1:53:20 for anybody that’s looking for quality freelance support
1:53:22 when you’re building a product, when you’re building a company,
1:53:24 when you’re building a project.
1:53:26 And it’s called NEO.
1:53:29 You can have a conversation with the AI agent called NEO.
1:53:33 Tell it about the problem you have and it will help you find the solution,
1:53:36 i.e. it will help you find the perfect freelancer
1:53:39 to write a brief for that perfect freelancer
1:53:42 and all you have to do is communicate exactly what your needs are.
1:53:44 It will select them, it will bring you together,
1:53:48 it will update the search results based on your conversation as it evolves.
1:53:51 And a couple of days ago when I needed a graphic designer for a project,
1:53:56 I used NEO and it got me the perfect freelancer in a fraction of the time.
1:54:00 Go and check it out right now, go to fiverr.com/diary
1:54:02 and you can check NEO out for yourself.
1:54:06 So what else do I need to know about influence and influencing other people?
1:54:12 You said persuasion is not the same as what was the other one, influence?
1:54:13 Influence, yeah.
1:54:15 Persuasion and influence are two different things.
1:54:17 So what about persuasion then? How do I persuade somebody?
1:54:19 Persuasion is a process that’s much easier
1:54:23 because it’s really just a matter of triggering an emotional response
1:54:28 and then guiding rational thought around that emotional response.
1:54:32 Honestly, persuasion is what exists far more in the world than influence.
1:54:34 Persuasion is what happens in advertising.
1:54:36 Persuasion is what happens when you watch a commercial.
1:54:39 Persuasion is what happens when you try to convince your kids to brush their teeth at night
1:54:42 or one day you will convince your children to brush their teeth at night.
1:54:48 That’s all persuasion because you are creating an emotional message.
1:54:50 It’s a question of messaging and narrative.
1:54:54 You’re creating an emotional message that emotional message is designed
1:54:59 to trigger certain emotional responses in the target that you’re talking to
1:55:04 and then you change the message itself but you hit on the same motion.
1:55:08 And the reason that you do that is because after they’ve been hit with enough
1:55:11 of the same emotional messages,
1:55:20 they start to develop a cognitive rational narrative that they adopt personally.
1:55:26 So the narrative of the deep state came from lots of emotional messages
1:55:28 about why you can’t trust the government
1:55:33 and then all those emotional messages turned into somebody or a group of people thinking,
1:55:36 well, if I can’t trust the government, what I can do is trust
1:55:41 that the government can’t be trusted because there’s a shadow government, right?
1:55:44 So that’s how you essentially, that’s how you persuade somebody.
1:55:48 So if you want to persuade someone to buy from your coffee shop
1:55:49 and not somebody else’s coffee shop,
1:55:52 you want to persuade someone to buy a Subaru and not a Nissan,
1:55:59 you want to persuade somebody to buy from your sales funnel immediately
1:56:02 instead of wait until your third email in your welcome series.
1:56:06 It’s all a matter of being able to set up a series of emotional messages
1:56:11 that drive a rational narrative that they decide for themselves
1:56:14 that brings them to a place where they take an action that you want them to take.
1:56:15 Give me an example.
1:56:21 Okay, so let’s say that you and I are trying to sell…
1:56:23 What about this “weep on my wrist” hashtag?
1:56:25 I had a hashtag investor hashtag sponsor.
1:56:27 What about this “weep on my wrist”?
1:56:29 You understand how a “weep” works?
1:56:31 What is it? Tell me what it is.
1:56:34 It is a fitness tracker, but it’s a sleep tracker.
1:56:35 It’s a stress tracker.
1:56:38 Tracks my heart rate variability.
1:56:39 So it’s bio data.
1:56:40 Yeah.
1:56:42 It syncs your bio data in one convenient place.
1:56:43 Yeah.
1:56:45 And I can see my friends bio data as well if they accept.
1:56:47 So we can kind of compete a little bit.
1:56:50 So it gives accountability and a sort of shared mission.
1:56:52 Yeah, and community, et cetera.
1:56:53 Right?
1:56:58 So if you want to persuade people to buy your hashtag sponsor, hashtag product, hashtag investor,
1:56:59 what’s it called?
1:57:00 “Woop”.
1:57:01 Yeah.
1:57:02 We want people to buy a “Woop”.
1:57:03 “Woop.com”.
1:57:04 Yeah.
1:57:05 So…
1:57:06 Slash-D-O-E-C.
1:57:08 Perfect.
1:57:15 So if we want people to buy a “Woop”, we don’t tell them buy a “Woop” because it’s an awesome
1:57:21 bio tracker that tracks your heart rate and tracks your sleep and tracks your body temperature.
1:57:24 We don’t tell them that because that’s what there’s other tools that do that.
1:57:27 What we have to do is give them some kind of emotional message.
1:57:28 Right?
1:57:32 So first, we’re going to choose an audience that we want to create an emotional message
1:57:33 for.
1:57:36 We both love the women that we’re with.
1:57:41 So let’s talk about people who are in a serious relationship or a committed relationship.
1:57:46 I very much care whether my wife is healthy, whether she’s sleeping well, whether she’s
1:57:48 got high stress.
1:57:52 So now I want to craft an emotional message about how “Woop” will help me make my marriage
1:57:57 better because I’ll be able to see what my wife is feeling without having to ask her.
1:58:00 What every man wants to be able to read her mind.
1:58:04 Now, people are feeling something.
1:58:05 Right?
1:58:06 Sales.
1:58:07 That’s amazing.
1:58:10 Say that again.
1:58:15 So let’s come up with another message, another emotional message for the same reason.
1:58:16 Right?
1:58:21 I really don’t like bedtime because at bedtime, my wife always melts down and yells at the
1:58:22 kids.
1:58:24 And she melts down because she’s had a rough day.
1:58:28 I’m coming home from a rough day and I have no idea how rough her day is and it doesn’t
1:58:30 matter because now it’s bedtime.
1:58:34 So if I had a “Woop,” what I’d be able to do is call my wife on the way home and say,
1:58:37 “Hey, babe, it looks like you’ve had a rough day thanks to your “Woop.”
1:58:41 Why don’t you take 30 minutes, go take a bath, do your whole self-care routine first
1:58:44 and I’ll deal with the kids and I’ll make dinner so that you can calm down and then
1:58:47 you can swap out and help me and we can be a team.
1:58:48 Right?
1:58:51 “Woop” makes married couples a team again.
1:58:52 I love that.
1:59:00 So now what we’re doing is we’re messaging to make husbands and boyfriends feel a certain
1:59:03 way about, “I love her already.
1:59:08 I want her to succeed and I also secretly know that if she succeeds, I succeed because guess
1:59:10 who goes to bed with her at night?”
1:59:11 Right?
1:59:12 That’s what we’re making them feel.
1:59:16 So if we did four, three, four, five messages like that, even if they were bullets on a
1:59:19 sales page instead of a phone telecom team, right?
1:59:20 Remember to do that.
1:59:28 What’s the logical, rational outcome that any male in a serious heterosexual relationship
1:59:29 is going to land on?
1:59:32 They take the 30-day free trial that we’re going to do.
1:59:34 That’s exactly what they’re going to do.
1:59:38 That’s exactly what they’re going to do with high probability that is empirically sound
1:59:45 that you can measure through clicks, open rates, and view time because you’ve crafted
1:59:48 a persuasive message.
1:59:49 What do people typically do?
1:59:56 Brands will typically come out and say something like, “Oh, they’ll set it on its features?”
2:00:00 Successful brands, which is the only brand that really exists because you’re not a brand
2:00:01 until you’ve had success.
2:00:05 Successful brands will do what you and I are talking about, but they won’t systematize
2:00:06 it.
2:00:08 They’ll let it be accidental.
2:00:15 I’m shocked how often advertising agencies create failed ads like bad ads because they’re
2:00:17 just throwing spaghetti at the wall.
2:00:18 They’re not following a system.
2:00:21 They’re not following a process like what we just talked about.
2:00:24 Create a series of messages and then create a rational response that’s high probability
2:00:29 and then find a way to measure it all and then systematize it and then scale your ad
2:00:31 spend to match the thing that you just built.
2:00:33 That’s not what they’re thinking.
2:00:35 They’re thinking, “What if we just talk about this?
2:00:36 What if we just talk about this?
2:00:37 This just happened in the news.
2:00:39 Let’s talk about that.”
2:00:41 They’re not using a system.
2:00:43 The place where most people go wrong isn’t with brands.
2:00:45 It’s with young entrepreneurs.
2:00:50 It’s with young entrepreneurs who become so myopically focused on their products that
2:00:53 they forget that there’s four Ps for marketing.
2:00:55 Product is just one of the four.
2:00:56 There’s also price.
2:00:57 There’s also place.
2:00:59 There’s also promotion.
2:01:03 Promotion is the one that I would say should be swapped with persuasion because if you
2:01:07 can promote something in a persuasive way, doesn’t really matter what you price it at.
2:01:11 It doesn’t really matter where you put it and it also doesn’t matter what the product is.
2:01:14 People will buy it because there’s a market for everything.
2:01:21 The place where people go wrong isn’t that they’re not trying.
2:01:25 The place where people go wrong is that they don’t realize that talking about the benefits,
2:01:30 talking about the rational benefits of the product is not persuasive.
2:01:32 Persuasion starts with an emotional message.
2:01:38 How do you translate that then to an interpersonal relationship context where I’m trying to
2:01:41 convince a … You talked about interviewing earlier.
2:01:44 You said that one of your case studies is a guy that learned how to interview.
2:01:49 How do I translate that so that if I walk into any interview ever, I’m going to walk
2:01:51 out with the job?
2:01:55 What do you think every interviewer is looking for?
2:01:58 Someone … Well, okay, so I’ve got two answers to this.
2:02:02 A, someone to do the job and then B, someone they like.
2:02:04 That’s really what they’re looking for.
2:02:05 It’s someone they like.
2:02:06 Yeah.
2:02:07 I do a lot of interviewing.
2:02:08 I spend a lot of my time interviewing.
2:02:10 When I’m not doing this, I’m basically interviewing people.
2:02:14 I’ve come to learn my own biases and that regard a little bit, but you’re so right.
2:02:16 It’s heavily about if you like the person.
2:02:17 Well, guess what?
2:02:20 I just taught you a framework for how to get through getting someone to like you.
2:02:21 Right?
2:02:23 Without a doubt, we agree.
2:02:26 Well, that was to get the influence, the framework, wasn’t it?
2:02:28 No like trust.
2:02:34 We went through the sense-making framework so that you could go from no to like to trust.
2:02:39 At the top of sense-making, that’s when you’re in the phase where people like or invested
2:02:41 in you.
2:02:48 But interviewers really like, isn’t people that they like, it’s people who are alike
2:02:49 the interviewer.
2:02:50 Really?
2:02:53 So I guarantee you that the people that you have liked interviewing the most, I’m even
2:02:58 willing to bet that you will admit in this conversation at some point, we’ll put that
2:03:04 on the line, that a big portion of your hiring is because you see elements of yourself in
2:03:05 the people that you hire.
2:03:10 I mean, I don’t consciously know that, but I totally believe it.
2:03:18 Because when you see someone who reflects elements of you, you immediately go through
2:03:21 the sense-making process and you flip to like and trust.
2:03:22 Interesting.
2:03:26 So we need to clarify this because when you say elements of myself, there’s parts of
2:03:28 myself that I’m like, I would never hire.
2:03:29 Correct.
2:03:31 But that’s not the part of you that you like.
2:03:32 It’s the part of you that you don’t like.
2:03:36 You trust that part of you to not be good at the job.
2:03:39 But there’s other parts of you that you trust to be good at the job and that’s what you
2:03:40 shoot for.
2:03:41 Right?
2:03:43 I’m also willing to bet that there’s people that you hire because you know that they’re
2:03:46 good at areas that you know you’re bad at.
2:03:47 Yes.
2:03:48 So that’s all interviewers.
2:03:53 All interviewers everywhere, what they dream of is that they walk into an interview and
2:03:59 across the table is someone almost exactly like them, who they enjoy talking to, who
2:04:05 they can relate to, who they feel instant connection and chemistry with because then
2:04:06 it becomes an enjoyable interview.
2:04:12 Because what every interviewer hates is walking into an interview that is draining and terrible
2:04:15 and hard and painful.
2:04:17 That’s what they don’t like.
2:04:21 And most of the time, the people interviewing are not actually the people who will be the
2:04:24 supervisor for the person that gets hired.
2:04:26 Oftentimes they’re just an intermediary interviewer.
2:04:32 So all they really want is to just get, find somebody who meets the qualifications technically
2:04:36 but has some sort of common ground with the interviewer themselves.
2:04:40 How do I make sure I’m that person?
2:04:42 You know, what can I do to make sure that?
2:04:47 Say that you are interviewing me or say that, let’s do it the other way around, I’ve got
2:04:52 the job that I’m looking for, looking to fill and you’ve come for an interview today.
2:04:56 So I’m going to do, I’m going to go through the sense making process, right?
2:04:58 As soon as I get on this call with you, I’m new to you.
2:04:59 So what does that mean I know?
2:05:02 I know that you don’t want to be on this call with me.
2:05:03 True.
2:05:04 Avoidance.
2:05:05 Assume coming in.
2:05:09 So what I have to do is I have to keep investing enough to get through the avoidance phase.
2:05:10 Well, what am I going to talk about?
2:05:12 How am I going to invest in this conversation?
2:05:17 I’m going to pool as much as I can from verbal and nonverbal cues that you give me.
2:05:21 I’m going to look at the decorations on the wall behind you, whether it’s in person or
2:05:23 whether it’s virtual, I’m going to try to pull from my environment.
2:05:25 I see that you’re using an iPad.
2:05:27 I see that you actually like to write on your iPad.
2:05:29 I see that you use different colors when you write on your iPad.
2:05:30 I also see there’s a journal under your iPad.
2:05:33 I can assume that inside that journal or handwritten notes that are actually done in
2:05:35 pen and ink, right?
2:05:37 There’s certain things that I can start to observe.
2:05:41 You have a very clear, you put clear effort into the way that you shave your face.
2:05:43 You have a very handsome look to your hair.
2:05:44 Thank you so much.
2:05:45 You’ve got the job.
2:05:46 You’ve got the job.
2:05:49 No, I don’t need to hear him.
2:05:50 It’s yours.
2:05:55 But I’m going to pool from all of this for the competition phase of the sense-making
2:06:00 process because all I need to do to get you to comply with my wishes, my wishes are to
2:06:01 get the job.
2:06:03 But I need to get you to comply with the wishes.
2:06:09 I need you to engage in a conversation with me that is competitive, meaning you will invest
2:06:11 in me and I will invest in you.
2:06:16 Think about how don’t think of competition like a zero-sum game with a winner and a loser.
2:06:17 I hear competition.
2:06:18 I hear arguing.
2:06:19 That’s what most people hear.
2:06:21 Most people think of competition as zero-sum game.
2:06:25 Somebody wins, somebody loses the competition.
2:06:30 Think of it more like a scrimmage in your favorite soccer team.
2:06:37 They’re like the red shirts play the green shirts, but it’s still the same football club.
2:06:40 They have spring training for baseball in the United States.
2:06:45 It’s all the Yankees, but they’re just playing the Yankees to practice with each other.
2:06:46 What are they doing?
2:06:47 They’re competing.
2:06:50 They’re honing their craft through competition.
2:06:52 They’re investing in each other.
2:06:55 They’re pitching and batting and trying to strike each other out and trying to catch each
2:06:58 other at the bases, but it’s all for themselves.
2:07:01 It’s all to improve the whole of the team.
2:07:04 That’s the competition that exists in the sense-making process.
2:07:08 I want to invest in you with my thoughts and my ideas and my questions, and I want you
2:07:11 to invest in me with your thoughts and your ideas and your questions, and yes, sometimes
2:07:17 they will be different, but in the difference, we will find the similarity, and regardless
2:07:21 of whether we find differences or similarities, we are filling the cup of investment to get
2:07:22 towards compliance.
2:07:27 Okay, so give me a specific example of how you might get me to go into that competition
2:07:28 with you.
2:07:30 Okay, so I’m going to start in an interview.
2:07:34 Most interviewees expect that the interviewer will ask most of the questions.
2:07:35 Yeah.
2:07:39 I would challenge anybody going into a job interview, ask more questions than the interviewer.
2:07:40 Really?
2:07:43 Ask more questions than the interviewer, because when you ask questions, especially open-ended
2:07:47 questions, it makes the person you’re talking to feel like they’re interesting, feel like
2:07:51 they’re important, feel like they’re special, and guess what’s not going to happen with
2:07:54 any other interview that day.
2:07:55 Nobody is going to ask them questions.
2:08:01 So if you were interviewing me for a job, and we’ve been on the phone, I would say,
2:08:03 “Steven, thank you very much for making time to talk to me.
2:08:04 How’s your day today?”
2:08:05 It’s been great.
2:08:06 Thank you.
2:08:11 I’m really excited for the job, but one of the things I have a question about right away
2:08:15 is when I look you up online, it looks like a lot of what you do is marketing, but I don’t
2:08:19 know if it’s like social media marketing, or if it’s more like an internet marketing
2:08:20 like advertising.
2:08:23 How would you characterize the core function of the business?
2:08:24 It’s kind of both.
2:08:27 We do all of the above, paid marketing, all kinds of marketing.
2:08:28 Which one is your favorite?
2:08:31 My favorite’s probably social media marketing, I think.
2:08:35 Is it because social media is so dynamic and always changing, or do you like social media
2:08:37 marketing for some other reason?
2:08:41 Yeah, and also I just think it’s very much the future in many respects, so I think it’s
2:08:44 the fastest growing medium, so that’s kind of where we focus.
2:08:49 I also think it’s the future, and I spend so much time on social media, and my family
2:08:51 spend so much time on social media that I really feel like if you want to connect with
2:08:57 somebody, you have to be in the social media world because it feels like a simulated relationship.
2:09:01 I completely agree.
2:09:02 Then I’d start asking the questions.
2:09:05 You would ask a question, and then I would answer your question, but I would still continue
2:09:09 to show investment into you by asking questions.
2:09:10 What does that do?
2:09:14 So I come away from that interaction, and you’ve asked me a lot of questions.
2:09:15 What do I come away feeling?
2:09:16 You tell me.
2:09:19 What does it feel like when people ask you questions?
2:09:21 Feels like you’re building a relationship.
2:09:23 Feels like you care.
2:09:26 Feels like you’ve thought critically before you came here.
2:09:27 Feels like you’re prepared.
2:09:29 Feels like you’re curious.
2:09:30 Well, there’s two opposites.
2:09:35 One opposite is I just pepper you with questions, and then you leave, and the other opposite
2:09:40 is that someone that just talks the whole time, like you pepper me with questions.
2:09:44 I had a couple of interviews, and I remember two last week.
2:09:50 Part of my feedback was I basically didn’t say anything, and it’s funny, I actually said
2:09:55 to my chief of staff, I said, “Oh, God, interview was an hour long,” and I go, “Gosh, I didn’t
2:09:59 say anything in the whole hour,” and do you know what, I came away feeling, I came away
2:10:04 feeling that if that’s what the job working with them is going to be like, “I don’t want
2:10:11 to work with them,” because for one hour I sat there, and this person just like at me,
2:10:12 and now you say it.
2:10:15 Now, I kind of understand why I felt that way, because you do want people to ask you
2:10:22 questions, and I think it’s that, but also part of me was worried that every day this
2:10:28 person is going to just like kill my eardrums, or is it just the ego part, where I’m just
2:10:30 like, “Be interested in me.”
2:10:31 I don’t know.
2:10:32 Or is it both?
2:10:36 Well, first of all, I am not advocating peppering with questions, so I want to make sure that
2:10:41 we don’t give anybody the mistaken idea that rapid-fire questions are the way to go.
2:10:43 Yeah, I was giving short answers, this is the problem.
2:10:47 It’s all good, because what the core thing to understand here is, you didn’t like being
2:10:52 spoken at, they were talking all the time, which means they weren’t asking you questions.
2:10:57 They asked me, we’re in our interview, they asked me zero questions, and when I said to
2:11:01 them, “If you’ve got any questions you’d like to ask me,” they asked me one, but that
2:11:05 was actually just teeing them up for another 20 minutes.
2:11:09 I walked away and logically I rationalized it to my team, I was like, “I think that person
2:11:12 would be quite difficult to deal with, because I think they’d be quite distracting,” and
2:11:18 this particular role is working with alongside me personally every single day, and I just
2:11:22 thought, “Gosh, I’m not going to get anything done,” but maybe that was a prefrontal cortex.
2:11:27 I think that your decision was 100% correct, but what I want to do is I want to juxtapose
2:11:31 that process against the person who would have asked you questions.
2:11:32 Which I experience a lot.
2:11:37 So if people ask you questions, how do you feel at the end of those calls?
2:11:45 I feel like they’re more thoughtful, and I feel like they’re smarter, because why the
2:11:48 hell would you come into an interview and not ask the person questions?
2:11:52 You’re also making a commitment for your entire life to this company, this job, to this person.
2:11:57 You want to make sure it’s correct, so a smart person would be interviewing me as well,
2:11:58 because they value themselves.
2:12:03 So if I wanted to win you as the interviewer, and I wanted to win that by making you feel
2:12:11 like you and I were similar people, what you just said is why the hell wouldn’t you ask
2:12:12 a bunch of questions?
2:12:14 Which makes me think that what you believe is if you want to work for a company for the
2:12:17 rest of your life, you want to go in there asking a bunch of questions.
2:12:22 So when somebody comes in asking questions to you that checks the box of this person
2:12:26 is thoughtful, this person is committed, this person is responsible, this person is doing
2:12:29 what I would do.
2:12:34 And that means on the sense-making no-like trust framework, you’re going to fall into
2:12:39 trust for that person much faster than you’re going to fall into trust for the person who
2:12:42 comes in word vomits on you.
2:12:44 And that’s all we’re doing.
2:12:49 We’re not saying that every employer is going to be the right employer for you, but what
2:12:55 we’re saying is if you want to take your probability of winning an interview from I don’t know what
2:13:01 my probability is to you have a solid predictable 30% chance of winning this interview, it really
2:13:07 is a simple as going in there with the idea to win the interviewer, read their body language,
2:13:13 listen to their verbal cues, hear the things they talk about, reflect and mirror their behavior
2:13:18 and their terminology, their tone of voice, how fast the cadence of their speech, reflect
2:13:23 that back to them, and then use this process of asking questions, open-ended questions
2:13:27 that give you more information that you can turn into knowledge that you can ask questions
2:13:32 about to create that flywheel of information, knowledge and experience that we talked about.
2:13:39 This framework that you call rice, reward, ideology, coercion, ego.
2:13:43 After you said that, I started to kind of see it everywhere in my life and even in the context
2:13:46 of an interview, I notice it sometimes now.
2:13:49 Can you explain what the framework is before we start talking about it?
2:13:51 Because you’re better explaining it than I will be.
2:13:56 So rice is a framework that we use to understand the core motivations that exist inside of
2:13:59 all people and it’s an acronym.
2:14:04 R stands for reward, I stands for ideology, C stands for coercion, E stands for ego.
2:14:08 And the idea is that the core motivation of all people to do anything that they would
2:14:16 ever do, the motivation, not the manipulation, but the core motivation is tied to one predominant
2:14:22 of those four core motivators and the other three are always still present, but at a lower
2:14:23 level.
2:14:27 So just like you said, once you recognize that all people are motivated by these same
2:14:31 four core motivations, you do see it everywhere.
2:14:35 So in terms of strength, you said to me last time that ideology was the strongest.
2:14:36 Correct.
2:14:38 I think you then said that ego was the second strongest.
2:14:43 You said reward was the third strongest and coercion was the weakest.
2:14:47 I know this because I did a tour and I played your, you saying that in every country that
2:14:49 I went to on stage for about two minutes.
2:14:51 So I know this really, this shit really well.
2:14:52 My memory is not that good.
2:14:56 I’ve been, I’ve been talking about this to about 35,000 people in Australia and everywhere.
2:14:58 I am flattered to have traveled with you all over the world.
2:15:02 Well, yeah, I’ve got some photos I’ll show you later, but as part of that, I really started
2:15:04 to see it everywhere else in my life.
2:15:08 So I’d come to an interview with a candidate and the candidate would turn to me and I would
2:15:13 hear them repeating back to me things that I’ve said in my book or things that I’ve
2:15:15 said in an interview.
2:15:20 So people know that I’m very pro like experimentation, for example, and I use this, I like increasing
2:15:25 my rate of experimentation, increasing my rate of failure terms that I use one percent.
2:15:28 I use this term all the time to describe marginal gains and this sort of marginal process of
2:15:29 improvement.
2:15:33 And so I would come to interviews and I started to notice that people were like repeating my
2:15:40 ideology in business back to me in those interviews, and it fucking worked.
2:15:41 Even though I knew.
2:15:46 And one of the things I did actually is I went back through my own personal history
2:15:50 and I looked at key moments where my life had changed.
2:15:54 So in the first email, this is the email that got me my first investor, which took me from
2:15:59 being this broke shoplifting student to being a business person and then sent me on my mission.
2:16:02 And then this is the email that got me the camera equipment, which helped me launch the
2:16:03 marketing of my business.
2:16:07 It got me 10,000 pounds, about 10,000 pounds worth of free camera equipment.
2:16:09 And these were both cold emails that I sent.
2:16:15 And with your framework in mind, I went back to kind of try and understand where I deployed
2:16:18 these elements of reward ideology, coercion, me go.
2:16:20 And I think they’re quite present in my emails.
2:16:22 So here’s what I’m going to do.
2:16:24 I’ve got the email in front of me.
2:16:27 So anyone that’s watching this on the video can take a look at this email if you want
2:16:30 to see what I was like when I was that age.
2:16:35 I want you to tell me how good I did in terms of reward, ideology, coercion and ego.
2:16:39 And I’ll put this on the screen if you want to, because it is screen recording, you can
2:16:43 circle the parts you’re referring to so everyone else can see.
2:16:45 Hello, sir.
2:16:47 My names.
2:16:48 So my names.
2:16:51 Did I spell it wrong?
2:16:53 That is awesome.
2:17:00 So my name is Stephen Bartlett and I’m, you definitely, I can see your, I can see
2:17:01 why you are struggling academically.
2:17:02 Yes, I can’t spell.
2:17:06 I’m an 18 year old guy from the UK with an entrepreneurial head on my shoulders.
2:17:10 I have ran several small businesses since I was 12 and made relatively decent amounts
2:17:12 of money doing so.
2:17:16 Last year I was featured on a BBC program here in the UK for being a young entrepreneur
2:17:20 and I was given a few nice things along with that, but that doesn’t really mean much to
2:17:21 me.
2:17:22 This is embarrassing.
2:17:26 For the last four months, me and a friend have been working tirelessly on an exciting
2:17:29 new project that I want to share with you.
2:17:35 I’ve, this is really sweet to see the 18 year old you here, man.
2:17:39 I’ve been tuned into your blog for a long time now and I’m familiar with your story,
2:17:42 so I would love your opinion of what I’m doing.
2:17:46 So this is really good stuff.
2:17:51 Your blog, your story, your opinion.
2:17:55 It also shows that you were researching him in advance, which makes me feel like the only
2:17:57 reason you’re reaching this person and reaching out to this person at all is because you already
2:18:00 know that your story mimics his story.
2:18:02 Correct.
2:18:11 He actually had started a pretty similar student website in the same city, it had gone
2:18:12 so well.
2:18:13 It had been sold.
2:18:15 An email lived in Wanaka and was like a super rich millionaire.
2:18:19 Was this person also, did they also struggle in school?
2:18:20 I actually don’t know.
2:18:21 I don’t know that much.
2:18:22 So that’s super interesting to me.
2:18:24 Okay, I’m going to keep going.
2:18:28 All the designs attached in the document are my own.
2:18:29 That’s interesting too.
2:18:35 You’re basically giving away IP up front and showing that you prepared more than just writing
2:18:41 an email, which is again feeding into some of the ego and the reward because this person
2:18:48 is whatever they see in that document, they’re going to benefit from it.
2:18:53 I made on publisher and at the moment I have no expertise in web design whatsoever.
2:18:56 I’m at the stage now where I’m looking for a mentor investor to guide me in getting the
2:18:58 website live.
2:18:59 So please let me know what you think.
2:19:00 This was super smart.
2:19:07 Not asking for an investor, but asking for a mentor because what that did is it deloaded
2:19:08 the pressure.
2:19:13 So if they had read this far, if they got to this place, you weren’t asking for money.
2:19:17 You were potentially just asking for some attention and some guidance.
2:19:18 Let me know what you think.
2:19:21 Although we have had a few cheeky offers from local venture capitalists, we are still
2:19:23 looking for the right person.
2:19:28 And after reading through your website, I believe you are that person.
2:19:32 Kind regards and thanks for your time, Steven, Steve Bartlett.
2:19:41 So it’s interesting to me because you made a very strong ego play with referencing all
2:19:43 of his success.
2:19:47 The ego was the strongest thing that you leaned on, showing that you were aware, showing
2:19:51 that you knew the person, knowing that the story was going to resonate with him.
2:19:55 You may have accidentally also honestly, man, seeing the typos that are in here, you may
2:20:05 have accidentally triggered a response inside him that was reciprocity.
2:20:09 Either somebody gave him a chance when he didn’t know if somebody would give him a chance
2:20:13 or maybe he struggled in school or maybe he has a son or a sister or a brother who struggled
2:20:16 in school because your typos are really quite significant.
2:20:20 There’s no way somebody would read this and think that you were a well educated 18 year
2:20:21 old.
2:20:22 You know what I’m saying?
2:20:23 Yeah.
2:20:24 So you may have really struggled.
2:20:25 You may have accidentally stumbled into something awesome.
2:20:28 I don’t know if you’re still in contact with this person, but I would ask that question.
2:20:30 We’ve got four core motivators.
2:20:31 Ego is very clear.
2:20:37 Every time you talk to them or this person about them, you’re stroking their ego and
2:20:39 you’re not doing it in a glaring way.
2:20:44 However, ideology is the strongest of the motivators.
2:20:50 When I see you say that you were an 18 year old guy from the UK, what goes through my
2:21:00 head is the ideology of who doesn’t want to give a brave kid writing them an opportunity.
2:21:01 What millionaire out there?
2:21:06 What decimal millionaire or centimillionaire or ultra high net worth?
2:21:12 If they get the email at all, who doesn’t want to at least give this 18 year old brave,
2:21:13 brazen kid a chance?
2:21:14 Because you know what?
2:21:18 I would have done something like this when I was 18.
2:21:20 Now you could be tapping on ideology without even knowing it.
2:21:21 Well, he did.
2:21:22 He did.
2:21:27 He started a student website in the same city at roughly the same age.
2:21:28 So there you go.
2:21:32 You already knew that there were going to be commonalities between the two of you.
2:21:40 You were winning the interviewer just as much as you were leveraging the rice framework.
2:21:41 What about the other email?
2:21:44 So there’s another one on that, which is here.
2:21:46 Just take a look at it if you could.
2:21:47 So this was the email that I sent.
2:21:54 I sent 10 of these emails out to every camera company I could, Samsung Panasonic, et cetera,
2:22:00 and within 48 hours of Panasonic receiving that email, a guy called Leah Panasonic.
2:22:03 I literally just, because you were coming, I went on his LinkedIn to see where he now
2:22:04 works.
2:22:08 So thank you, by the way, Lee, that used to work at Panasonic for giving me a shot.
2:22:12 Lee from Panasonic responded to that email that you have in front of you and said, what
2:22:13 kind of cameras do you want?
2:22:14 We’ve got some returns.
2:22:15 I’ll send them to your doorstep.
2:22:21 In 48 hours of that email, a big box of cameras, like they were brand new to me, brand new
2:22:25 spanking cameras came to my doorstep, multiple of them, and that allowed me to do the marketing
2:22:27 for my business at the very early stage.
2:22:29 Again, it was just a cold email.
2:22:30 That’s amazing, man.
2:22:31 All right.
2:22:32 Hello there.
2:22:34 My name is Stephen Bartlett.
2:22:39 I’m a 19-year-old student, and I’m part of an upcoming exciting student website.
2:22:42 So in March last year, I began developing an idea I had that focused on bringing together
2:22:43 the student community.
2:22:47 One month later, I have the backing and support of all the universities in the Northwest who
2:22:50 are working with us every step of the way.
2:22:51 We are now a few months from launching the website.
2:22:56 We have received so much support from companies such as Dominoes and Subway that we are now
2:23:00 hoping you guys at V.Ho will be kind enough to help us out.
2:23:04 I’m going to circle that for sure, because you’re triggering a little bit of competition.
2:23:05 You wait till the end.
2:23:09 Which is really smart.
2:23:12 And you’re showing credibility with the backing of multiple universities.
2:23:13 All right.
2:23:17 My name includes media journalism students who have media and journalism students, who
2:23:19 have a passion for producing media content.
2:23:23 It also includes our web developer who loves building cool websites.
2:23:27 It includes the universities and the university unions who are supporting us constantly, and
2:23:30 it includes our mentors who are social media and web experts.
2:23:37 You are really hitting reward pie here, because you’re basically saying all of these people
2:23:39 are going to know that you’re helping.
2:23:43 All these universities, all these students, media and journalism, guess what they both
2:23:44 need?
2:23:45 Cameras.
2:23:48 So you’re really leaning hard into the reward here, and it’s pretty awesome.
2:23:55 You are also hitting on ideology, because if it is a competitive business, it wants
2:23:56 to compete.
2:23:57 It doesn’t want to be second to Subway or Dominoes.
2:24:03 It wants to be side by side with Subway and Dominoes, especially in 2012 when both of
2:24:07 those companies were pretty strong leaders in the industry.
2:24:10 This is going to be a national student website, and one feature of our website involves us
2:24:13 producing our own video content from the student community.
2:24:16 This can range from students interviewing famous people, students reviewing student
2:24:19 events to student reporters covering news events.
2:24:23 In order for this to be the case, we are in need of an HD video camera and wanted to know
2:24:26 if Veeho would be kind enough to donate one.
2:24:30 In return, we would feature Veeho on our website as a sponsor.
2:24:35 We would also promote the camera and Veeho at the end of all videos that we make as a
2:24:37 young group of students.
2:24:40 This would really mean a lot to us, and we would be sure to show our appreciation in
2:24:42 every opportunity.
2:24:46 Ideology again, talking about students and talking about the youth.
2:24:50 There’s no real coercion in this, for sure.
2:24:55 I would also say that Ego was not really…
2:24:58 You focused on reward rather than Ego, because you didn’t know who Lee was.
2:25:01 It was a bit of coercion in the one that I sent to the investor, wasn’t there?
2:25:07 As I said, we’ve had some offers from venture capitalists, which is kind of saying that
2:25:09 I have other offers.
2:25:12 Kind of, but that’s not coercive.
2:25:18 Coercion means that you are leaning into the shame, the guilt, some sort of negative feeling.
2:25:20 Competition is not a negative feeling.
2:25:21 Competition is how we build trust.
2:25:22 Okay.
2:25:25 So me mentioning that I have other opportunities isn’t coercion.
2:25:29 You should always mention that you have other opportunities, even if you don’t always.
2:25:34 It’s one of those areas where you always have other opportunities.
2:25:37 You could always take the opportunity of stop trying.
2:25:39 So there’s other opportunities always.
2:25:43 Is there ever a place for coercion, which is the C in the Rice Frame framework, any emails
2:25:44 like this?
2:25:45 Yes.
2:25:50 There’s a place for it, but you have to use it gingerly, because the problem with coercion
2:25:56 is once you use it, you violate the trust that you’ve built.
2:25:57 Okay.
2:25:59 So you can basically use it once.
2:26:05 Or once you employ it, you essentially have to continually use it because once it’s no
2:26:11 longer useful to you, then the person that you’re coercive, the person that you’re coercing
2:26:13 is free again.
2:26:15 Coercion, if you think of coercion, it’s like a cage.
2:26:20 So you get somebody into the cage and then you have control over them in the cage, but
2:26:24 once you open the door of the cage, they’re going to run out and never get back in the
2:26:25 cage.
2:26:26 Okay.
2:26:29 You talked about these four C’s of influence.
2:26:30 Have we covered that?
2:26:33 The four C’s that we’re talking about are the four C’s of building influence rapidly,
2:26:39 specifically building influence in a workplace environment, right?
2:26:46 It’s consideration is the first C, consistency, collaboration, and control.
2:26:49 Those are your four C’s.
2:26:54 When you consider consideration, consideration means I put myself in your shoes, I consider
2:26:55 what life is like for you.
2:27:02 You’re my boss, you’re my co-worker, you have a family, you go home, you’re trying to exercise,
2:27:04 you’re trying to make a living, you’re trying to do all the same things I am.
2:27:09 So if I consider your point of view faster than you consider my point of view, I have
2:27:11 the advantage.
2:27:13 That’s what the first C is, consideration.
2:27:14 That’s pretty perspective again, right?
2:27:16 It’s perspective again, exactly.
2:27:20 Consideration is technically a legal term, so attorneys and lawyers all know what consideration
2:27:24 is, but it’s the rest of us who have not gone to law school that don’t recognize that consideration
2:27:30 is another word for perspective, but it’s also a legal term that stands for the same thing.
2:27:34 Consistency is the act of being consistent.
2:27:39 What’s powerful is that very few people are actually consistent.
2:27:41 Most people are inconsistent.
2:27:43 Think about the friend that you were talking about on LinkedIn who can’t even have a consistent
2:27:47 message, can’t even have a consistent opinion about alcohol, right?
2:27:54 The fastest way to burn influence, the fastest way to burn your persuasive ability and burn
2:27:59 your sense-making relationship with people is to be inconsistent, because nobody wants
2:28:03 to invest relationship into an inconsistent person.
2:28:06 Inconsistent in your perspectives, your values, your beliefs.
2:28:11 Your actions, what you say, what you do, what you spend your money on, consistency is what
2:28:13 breeds comfort and confidence in people.
2:28:19 It’s what builds influence, because when the rubber hits the road, when bullets start flying,
2:28:24 when all hell breaks loose, you want to know that the person that you believe will be there
2:28:25 will be there.
2:28:30 A consistent person is somebody that you believe will be consistent, even if you don’t like
2:28:31 him.
2:28:32 Even if you don’t like them, right?
2:28:35 Third C is collaboration.
2:28:38 Collaboration becomes really powerful, because what most people are doing is they’re trying
2:28:40 to find some sort of compromise.
2:28:44 A compromise really just means you don’t get what you want and I don’t get what I want,
2:28:48 and we find something in the middle that neither of us wants, but we’ll both accept.
2:28:50 That’s a shit deal.
2:28:53 What we really actually want is not compromise.
2:28:55 What we want is collaboration.
2:29:01 Collaboration means you bring your idea, I bring my idea, and together we create a third
2:29:04 better outcome for both of us.
2:29:06 That’s what collaboration is.
2:29:08 What makes collaboration different than compromise.
2:29:14 What we want from our government is a collaborative government, not a government that compromises
2:29:19 with each other, and yet what the popular public narrative is, is that we need a government
2:29:20 that compromises.
2:29:21 Well, shit.
2:29:22 A government that compromises is always losing.
2:29:26 A government that collaborates is always gaining.
2:29:27 The third C is collaboration.
2:29:34 If you find somebody who is considerate, who is also consistent and also collaborative,
2:29:36 do you see what we’re building here?
2:29:40 We’re building influence, and then the fourth C is control, and control is the one that
2:29:43 is super important, and control is the thing that people drop all the time when they’re
2:29:45 trying to build influence.
2:29:52 Control means that you capitalize, you execute on all the social benefit that you’ve built
2:29:57 with these first three C’s, and now you actually take the action to get what you want.
2:30:00 You ask for the cameras.
2:30:02 You ask for the opportunity.
2:30:04 You ask for the interview.
2:30:09 You ask for the favor, or you go out and you tell the boss, “I’m ready to be the one
2:30:11 that gets promoted to the manager job.
2:30:13 I’m the one that gets to go on vacation for Christmas.
2:30:15 I’m the one that gets to do this.”
2:30:20 Then you cycle back to the fact that you’ve done the other three C’s, and you’re doing
2:30:24 it in a way that exercises your control over the situation.
2:30:29 The four C’s are the tool to build influence in a professional environment because the
2:30:36 actual thing that you’re building, the term that we use, we don’t call it influence inside
2:30:37 the walls at Langley.
2:30:40 We call it social capital.
2:30:41 Where’s Langley?
2:30:44 Langley, Virginia is the headquarters for CIA.
2:30:51 We call it social capital because just like real currency is capital.
2:30:55 When you engage in the process of building influence using the four C’s, what you’re
2:31:00 actually building is a savings account of social capital.
2:31:02 You’re building reciprocity.
2:31:03 You’re building leverage.
2:31:05 You’re building favors.
2:31:08 You’re building IOUs.
2:31:12 When you have this pile of money, the only thing that you can do with a pile of money
2:31:14 is spend it.
2:31:16 You have to spend it to get what you want.
2:31:17 That’s what the control is.
2:31:22 That’s what the C is and the four C’s of building influence through social capital.
2:31:24 Is that what great leaders do?
2:31:30 What great leaders do is they find either they’re taught a process similar to this or
2:31:35 they learn the process over time.
2:31:41 Essentially, the dark side to leadership that people don’t like to admit to is that very
2:31:45 rarely are leaders well liked.
2:31:51 Leaders are respected, leaders are trusted, but leaders are very rarely liked.
2:31:55 They might be liked a hundred years later like artists, but usually in the moment they
2:32:01 are not well liked and it’s because they know how to exercise control.
2:32:02 Nobody likes to be controlled.
2:32:06 Nobody likes to feel like they are under control.
2:32:07 Nobody likes to feel leveraged.
2:32:09 Nobody likes to feel sold.
2:32:15 Nobody likes to feel pressure, but when you have that pot of social capital, when you
2:32:21 have the leverage, when you have the power, you have to exercise it to prosecute the vision
2:32:22 that you’re trying to build.
2:32:27 If you’re the type of leader that does all these other things, they’re super considerate
2:32:33 of other people, they’re collaborative, they’re consistent, but you never exercise control.
2:32:34 You’re not a leader.
2:32:35 What are you?
2:32:36 You’re an assertive follower.
2:32:38 You’re a reliable partner.
2:32:39 You’re a peer.
2:32:41 You’re a good friend.
2:32:42 Are you a coward?
2:32:47 No, I wouldn’t say that you’re a coward because, remember, cowardice is the opposite of courage
2:32:52 and courage is defined by showing courage or doing the thing that you’re afraid of.
2:32:55 I mean, it takes a bit of courage to exercise control.
2:32:58 Absolutely, but not everybody wants control.
2:33:01 There are lots of people out there who don’t want to be a leader.
2:33:07 If you are a leader, if you want to be a leader and don’t exercise control over the leverage
2:33:11 and the social capital that you’ve built, you are not a leader.
2:33:13 You are an aspiring leader.
2:33:15 You are a developing leader.
2:33:21 You are a hopeful leader, but you are not a leader because a leader has to be able to
2:33:27 take action that inspires others to follow even if they don’t like you.
2:33:30 Even if they don’t like you because here’s the reality of it.
2:33:34 A leader is not what you claim to be.
2:33:42 A leader is what you demonstrate to be because a leader who leads an army of none is not
2:33:49 a leader and someone who is leading an army but doesn’t call themselves a leader, still
2:33:50 a leader.
2:33:53 What do you think are the sort of core components of a great leader?
2:33:57 You go to a lot of companies, you speak to a lot of executive leaders.
2:34:00 What are the ones that you respect the most, whether they’re clients of yours or people
2:34:02 you’ve seen within history?
2:34:07 There’s an element of honesty that’s critical to a leader.
2:34:14 You have to be honest and you have to be objective about what you see, what you feel, what you
2:34:22 experience because true leadership means that you have to execute against a vision and you
2:34:24 have to inspire people to follow you.
2:34:29 If you’re not honest about why you do what you do, if you’re not objective about the
2:34:34 current reality, then there’s no way that you’re going to be able to create, to cast
2:34:41 a vision that’s realistic and ignite an audience of people to follow you towards that vision.
2:34:45 Honesty is critical, objectivity is critical.
2:34:52 Leaders also have to have an incredible amount of courage because they’re always doing something
2:34:53 that they’re afraid of.
2:34:56 They’re always taking the next risk.
2:35:02 They’re always challenging the misbelief or the incorrect information.
2:35:04 They’re always upsetting their spouse.
2:35:06 They’re always missing out on time with their children.
2:35:09 They’re always stepping on the toes of half of their company.
2:35:12 They’re always upsetting somebody.
2:35:19 You can’t be a leader without having the courage to hurt 80% of the people that you talk to
2:35:23 because if they’re not completely in line with the vision that you’re trying to lead
2:35:28 towards, they need to be brought in line with the vision that you’re leading.
2:35:31 Sometimes that means you’re going to tell them bad news.
2:35:33 Sometimes that means you’re going to slap them over the back of the head.
2:35:38 Sometimes that means you’re going to cut them off and let them float.
2:35:43 You have to have courage, which specifically means doing the thing that you’re afraid of
2:35:49 to be a leader, which is why, to me, the most important component of being a leader is accepting
2:35:55 that you will be lonely forever.
2:35:58 That’s the unfortunate fact of being a leader.
2:36:04 It’s lonely at the top and every general has talked about it.
2:36:06 Every president has felt that there’s a reason presidents go gray.
2:36:13 Michelle Obama will look very good when she’s gray, but you have to be willing to be lonely.
2:36:17 If you’re not willing to be lonely, then you’re not courageous enough to be lonely, then you’re
2:36:21 not fit to lead.
2:36:24 You walk through life like seeing people, be honest, as puppets.
2:36:26 Not puppets, no.
2:36:27 Not puppets.
2:36:33 I do walk through life seeing people as worthy or unworthy investments.
2:36:34 Interesting.
2:36:43 Because especially to bring in full circle back to losing my grandmother, we only have
2:36:49 a certain number of minutes, seconds, breaths.
2:36:56 I feel like I was blessed and privileged to get the skills to rapidly identify the people
2:37:02 who are worth my breath, the people who I can invest in with my words and my thoughts
2:37:04 and my actions and my time.
2:37:12 Those people will create an ROI that doesn’t pay me back, but pays back my children and
2:37:18 my children’s children, because the people who learn and who apply and who support the
2:37:23 work that I’m doing are the people who will make the future, the world of tomorrow.
2:37:25 The world of tomorrow is not for me.
2:37:27 The world of tomorrow is for my family.
2:37:33 I feel like, unfortunately, that is what a lot of my relationships boil down to.
2:37:34 The people that I —
2:37:36 Transactional.
2:37:38 But all relationships are transactional.
2:37:40 We just don’t like to admit it.
2:37:44 For me, I feel like, because I already know all relationships are transactional, I now
2:37:52 cultivate the transactions that yield the most, rather than transactions that just happen
2:37:59 where so many people are trapped in relationships where they don’t have any return on investment
2:38:00 from that relationship.
2:38:04 Or even worse, they keep investing in the relationship and it’s a money pit and it just
2:38:07 keeps taking and taking and it never gives back.
2:38:10 They don’t know how to get out of that relationship where they feel trapped or they feel lost
2:38:12 or they feel abandoned.
2:38:17 If I had to pick between being somebody who literally looks at everybody as a win or
2:38:23 lose transaction or being a person who’s constantly investing in the wrong person,
2:38:26 I’m very happy to be where I’m at on this fence.
2:38:29 Does that change your life in some respects?
2:38:32 Because if I looked at every real — what people will be thinking, they’ll be thinking,
2:38:34 “Oh, God, Andrew, that’s a sad life.
2:38:38 That’s a sad life just to see everything as a transaction.”
2:38:41 It’s not a sad life.
2:38:47 Seeing things as transactions is not the same thing as accepting that everything is a transaction.
2:38:48 I don’t see everything as a transaction.
2:38:53 I don’t see my children as some sort of return on investment.
2:38:55 I don’t see time with my wife as some sort of return on investment.
2:39:01 I don’t see it as a transaction, but I accept that what it is is a transaction.
2:39:05 They want love, they want attention, they want affection.
2:39:10 In return for that love, time, attention, and affection, they will give love, time,
2:39:15 attention, and affection, and we will build positive memories for the future.
2:39:16 It’s transactional.
2:39:23 If I want my wife to be okay with me taking a 12-day work trip, I have to put a little
2:39:27 bit of time and effort into the 12 days before the 12 days that I leave because I have to
2:39:29 build some goodwill.
2:39:32 We understand that this is how it works intrinsically.
2:39:35 We just don’t want to accept that what we’re talking about is a transaction, going to the
2:39:40 bank and saying, “I’m going to take a loan in a little while, so I need to fill out my
2:39:42 paperwork and get pre-approval.”
2:39:45 It’s the same concept, it’s the same process.
2:39:50 It doesn’t mean I see everything through a lens of cold-heart transactional relationships.
2:39:55 I see a lot of life that way, but I don’t see all of life that way.
2:40:01 The parts of life that I do see as transactional, I leverage that perspective so that I can
2:40:06 maximize my investment in the relationships that I do not see as transactional.
2:40:07 It’s so true.
2:40:11 I think the big takeaway for me and all of that as well is just thinking about the relationships
2:40:12 that are really doing nothing for you.
2:40:16 I’ve got a couple of relationships like that that really probably aren’t doing anything
2:40:17 for me.
2:40:18 It sucks.
2:40:20 Even at our level, it sucks because you still see yourself doing it.
2:40:21 Yeah.
2:40:24 Like, “Why am I doing this?
2:40:26 Shouldn’t I know better by now?”
2:40:28 Inevitably, you come back, it’s like getting drunk.
2:40:30 I guess you don’t know what it’s like to do that.
2:40:32 Just people know what it’s like.
2:40:33 I used to get drunk.
2:40:37 You get drunk, you get sick from being drunk, and what’s the next thing you tell yourself?
2:40:40 I’m never getting drunk again.
2:40:43 It happens again, and you feel like an idiot.
2:40:47 It happens in business, it happens in life, it happens all over.
2:40:52 Some people do really waste their entire lives just like entertaining relationships that
2:40:53 are doing zero for them.
2:40:59 They go for lunch and brunch and the two-hour phone call and the small talk on WhatsApp
2:41:04 just for nothing that said pouring all of their life into these nothing relationships,
2:41:07 these sewers, these leeches of relationships.
2:41:11 If they don’t recognize that it’s a transaction and they ask themselves continually, “What
2:41:12 is this doing for me?”
2:41:17 Correct, and then you can’t feel guilty asking yourself, “What is this relationship doing
2:41:18 for me?”
2:41:20 That is just you being objective.
2:41:26 That is just you being focused on accountability and honesty like any good leader should be.
2:41:27 What is your book coming out?
2:41:31 You’ve got a book, your new book that you told me last time was on the way, but the
2:41:32 CIA weren’t approving it.
2:41:33 Correct.
2:41:36 They have still not approved it.
2:41:40 We are actually expecting by end of month this month to get their formal approval.
2:41:44 Once it happens, I will let you know for sure because trust me, my publisher is also very
2:41:47 nervous about when CIA approves the book.
2:41:50 So the book is called Red Cell.
2:41:53 Probably going to be released in summer 2025, but pre-orders will be available.
2:41:57 Maybe by the time this episode comes out, if that’s the case, we’ll link it below.
2:41:58 Oh, that would be exciting.
2:41:59 Just the pre-orders.
2:42:00 Absolutely.
2:42:01 Very exciting.
2:42:03 What is the book about?
2:42:08 The book is finally, my wife and I get to release the details of our operational history
2:42:10 together, and that is what the Red Cell is about.
2:42:11 Oh, wow.
2:42:16 It’s about what we did together in the field as a tandem clandestine couple, how we operated,
2:42:21 how we worked together, how we managed our marriage and our operations, and the team
2:42:22 that we built around us.
2:42:28 It was all very unique at the time, and we’re very proud of it, but it’s sensitive, and
2:42:31 CIA does not like telling sensitive stories.
2:42:34 For anybody else, that wants to check out where you can support them in the meantime,
2:42:37 Everyday Spy is the key place to go to the website, everydayspy.com.
2:42:38 Absolutely.
2:42:39 Everydayspy.com.
2:42:44 You can also find us on YouTube on the Everyday Spy podcast, and of course, you can find us
2:42:46 on social media everywhere at Everyday Spy.
2:42:47 Your channel.
2:42:48 I really love it.
2:42:49 I appreciate it.
2:42:54 I really love all the work that you do, and I think it’s so important because you’re
2:43:02 so honest, and there’s very little bullshit with you, there’s very little virtue signalling,
2:43:06 which means that we can just be grown-ups and talk about the reality of things.
2:43:10 We don’t have to fluff around things, so it’s really, really, really great to talk to you
2:43:13 all the time, and I think that’s also why you’re so resonant, because people, they
2:43:14 trust you.
2:43:16 And it goes back to what we were saying.
2:43:17 Even if they don’t like me.
2:43:18 Even if they don’t like you, they trust you.
2:43:19 I think people like you.
2:43:20 People love you.
2:43:21 People in our comment section.
2:43:22 Obviously, you get the conspiracy theory lot.
2:43:29 I think you’re still part of the CIA or whatever, but side of that, people are so, so, so happy,
2:43:32 and they do appreciate the work you’re doing, because it really does help people change
2:43:36 their lives, because as you said, so many people are trapped in that shed.
2:43:41 And as you said, they know that there’s something out there better, and they’ve tried a bunch
2:43:46 of shit, and they’re still in the shed, and you give them a rubric, a framework to start
2:43:51 to run tests in their life, to see if there’s a way out the shed, and it’s not going to
2:43:55 be simple, and it’s not going to be easy, because if it was, it wouldn’t be worth it.
2:43:59 But there is a way, and that hope alone, I think, can really get people off the sofa
2:44:02 and towards the life that they deserve.
2:44:03 So thank you, Andrew.
2:44:06 We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next.
2:44:14 Question the few is, presumably, you either do or don’t in toward believing in an afterlife
2:44:16 or something after death.
2:44:25 If your belief were proven definitely wrong, how would it change your behavior today?
2:44:26 So which one do you believe, I guess?
2:44:28 I believe in an afterlife.
2:44:29 Interesting.
2:44:30 I believe in an afterlife.
2:44:36 I don’t think I can conceptualize what that would be, but I believe that there is something
2:44:39 after we pass.
2:44:45 And if that was proven definitively wrong, you know what’s really fucked up is if that
2:44:49 was proven definitively wrong, I would probably still challenge the proof.
2:44:51 It would be hard to let that go.
2:44:56 It would be hard to trust the proof.
2:45:00 You know, I guess the answer then to the question is, how would my life change?
2:45:09 I would spend a lot more time thinking and challenging the belief that I currently spend
2:45:14 no time reflecting or thinking about.
2:45:15 Does that make sense?
2:45:20 So yeah, you’d spend more time challenging the belief that there’s an afterlife.
2:45:22 Yes, which is kind of crazy.
2:45:29 I would spend more time and energy challenging the proof that proves my fundamental belief
2:45:30 wrong.
2:45:36 I would spend more time in that thought process than I spend in that thought process now.
2:45:37 Why?
2:45:38 To try and change it.
2:45:45 I don’t think I think it’s because it would create such a sense of dissonance in my head
2:45:50 because I’ve believed it for so long and now it’s definitively proved wrong.
2:45:55 It’s not like you can just flip a coin and be like, oh, I was wrong, but in this example,
2:45:56 you would basically be there.
2:45:57 You’d be proven.
2:45:58 I know.
2:45:59 So you’d be convinced.
2:46:04 So you wouldn’t actually be interrogating it because that’s what you would believe.
2:46:06 So I guess you’re right.
2:46:11 If the question is assuming that as soon as the proof comes out, I accept the proof and
2:46:15 I accept the new reality, that’s a fair question too.
2:46:18 That’s a fair interpretation.
2:46:23 I think I would probably be that much more cautious and careful with the life that I
2:46:26 have to know that there is no second life.
2:46:27 There is no second.
2:46:28 There’s no after chance.
2:46:33 There is no coming back and visiting your children their dreams.
2:46:34 There is no meeting them in heaven.
2:46:37 There is no nirvana.
2:46:43 There really is just black after you pass would make me that much more invested in the
2:46:46 moments that I have now because it’s all I got.
2:46:50 Would it change any decision you’ve made in the past?
2:46:51 Yeah.
2:46:54 Just like the day to day decisions, would you damn it would hold?
2:46:56 This question sucks, man.
2:46:58 Good question.
2:47:03 The answer, if I knew that and I had to go back, I would change all sorts of things.
2:47:08 I would take less risks, like less physical bodily risks.
2:47:10 I would have never learned how to ride a motorcycle.
2:47:12 I would have never skydived.
2:47:13 I would have never learned to free dive.
2:47:15 I would have never learned to sail.
2:47:22 I would have never joined the CIA if I knew there was no chance that this is the one chance
2:47:23 you get.
2:47:26 I would probably live a very dull, boring and conservative life.
2:47:33 Do you know what’s interesting is, I don’t think there’s an afterlife and I skydive and
2:47:40 I think I take risks, but I’m okay with the fact that I don’t think anything happens
2:47:41 after I die.
2:47:42 Yeah.
2:47:46 Because I think I was totally okay.
2:47:47 Someone said that.
2:47:48 I think it was Ricky Gervais said this once.
2:47:52 How did you feel 100 years ago?
2:48:02 I want us to have a beer six weeks after you have a baby and talk about this question again.
2:48:03 Can we put that on a calendar?
2:48:09 I guess we can’t put that on a calendar yet or else you have a much happier partner.
2:48:13 Because children change everything too.
2:48:18 Children change everything when it comes to your tolerance for risking yourself.
2:48:24 I know you’re telling the truth, A, because I believe you and B, because my brother, who’s
2:48:30 a year older than me, has three kids and he said something very peculiar to me one day.
2:48:35 I said, Jason, why don’t you fly to London and he goes, Stephen, and he’s an investment
2:48:41 bank for 12 years, Actual Scientist, so literally his job was to assess probability, super genius
2:48:42 at maths.
2:48:48 And he was like, I know this makes no sense, but I don’t want to get on a plane if my kids
2:48:50 aren’t on it.
2:48:52 I love this.
2:49:00 I had a similar conversation with somebody recently and they were shocked when I said
2:49:06 almost the same thing because they were like, why would you want to get on a plane?
2:49:09 If you’re afraid of getting on a plane without your kids, it’s because you’re afraid the
2:49:11 plane will crash.
2:49:12 And I was like, correct.
2:49:16 Well then if you’re willing to get on a plane with your kids, aren’t you afraid it will
2:49:18 crash?
2:49:20 And for me, I’m like, of course it could still crash.
2:49:27 But now I can be with my kids to comfort them in that moment rather than they have to live
2:49:32 a life without dad’s comfort and without dad forever.
2:49:35 I don’t know why it makes sense to me, but I know that it makes sense to me and I know
2:49:40 that half of the people I explain that to think it’s really fucked up.
2:49:42 Maybe people that don’t have kids, but that’s what my brother said to me and I sat there
2:49:45 because he’s such a logical smart guy and he knows the probability.
2:49:48 He said that because I know the probabilities of planes, I know they’re safe because this
2:49:50 makes no sense, but this is how I feel.
2:49:53 I don’t want to get on a plane and come to London unless my kids are on the plane with
2:49:54 me.
2:49:55 Wow.
2:49:56 And I thought that makes no sense to me.
2:50:00 The way you’ve explained it does help me to understand.
2:50:05 So maybe six weeks after I have a kid, maybe I will be a bit more attached to some kind
2:50:06 of afterlife.
2:50:07 Or maybe not.
2:50:10 And I’m not saying the afterlife.
2:50:16 I’m saying that the reckless, the fact that you take, yeah, you’re not afraid of death
2:50:17 right now.
2:50:18 Yeah, I’m not afraid of death.
2:50:19 No.
2:50:23 I feel like when you have children, it changes because now it’s not just your life that you’re
2:50:24 impacting.
2:50:25 That’s so crazy.
2:50:26 That’s so interesting.
2:50:31 And I know that there’s so many parents that are about to DM LinkedIn me, Instagram me,
2:50:36 and also you and say exactly that they’re going to agree with you.
2:50:37 Andrew, thank you.
2:50:38 It’s been such an honor.
2:50:39 I really, really enjoy speaking to you.
2:50:41 Thank you again for coming to do this.
2:50:44 And thank you so much for the value you’ve brought to the audience because, you know,
2:50:46 you’re very much in every sense of the word, one of a kind.
2:50:47 So I appreciate you.
2:50:48 Stephen, I appreciate being here.
2:50:51 Thank you very much for the friendship and for the opportunity.
2:50:54 And you always come so well-prepared.
2:50:57 It’s easy to have a good time with you.
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