L.O.G. 196 Clark Dever

All right. Well, good morning, Greg, and good morning to our guest, Clark Dever. I really appreciate you hopping on here. Newest member to the Arcanum Cognorati Advisory Board, awesome guy, and thank you so much for for reaching out and coming up with this great idea for the show.

Oh, thank you, Brian. Thank you, Greg, for hosting me. You know, long-time listener, first-time caller.

Okay, that's great. There we go. I've known Clark for a long time, and I'm in love with his brain, and I want to make love to his brain. So it's going to take a long time to get out all of those incredible ideas that you have, Clark. You know that I'm a huge fan.

Thank you, sir.

So, actually, our listeners have probably heard the Braid Babes podcast. That was actually an introduction from you, Clark, another one of your amazing introductions. Clark, you have a ton of great entrepreneurial business background. You have a tech background, and you've done work in VR and AR and all kinds of stuff. You're a super smart guy. We got introduced a while back, and then you actually came to one of our courses. We love hanging out with you. Then, of course, you accepted our invitation to be part of the Advisory Board and all the new big stuff we have, which made us suspicious.

Yeah, at that point, both Brian and I were really worried about that. We were like, why would this person like us? I don't believe in general intelligence. There's the main intelligence. I'm smarter on a few things. You guys are definitely smarter in your domain.

I was going to say, to return the love a little bit, when I attended your course, it was so eye-opening for me because it was strategies and tactics and things that I had learned over my career, and it was just formalized, and it had a language around it, and it got me so excited. That's what turned me into a big fan. It was interesting because I do have some defense experience as a contractor and working with some special operations folks, but I was never in the military or law enforcement. So, coming from a civilian background and learning the way that you guys think from a pattern recognition and analysis standpoint was just really eye-opening for me, and I'm grateful for it. I hope that today we can kind of cross the streams, if you will, like Ghostbusters.

Yeah, let's do it. I appreciate that, and that's why we loved when you reached out with a bunch of questions and an idea for the show. So, I will kind of let you start off here and go ahead with some of the questions and what you brought up and what you were thinking behind it, and let you go down the list if that works.

Yeah, that works for me. So, what I wanted to bring to the audience was the idea that these ideas of establishing a baseline and looking for anomalies, then detecting patterns, and coming up with what's the most likely and most dangerous course of action, all of those things are applicable in the business world. I use them both from recruiting and hiring to management, to looking at partnerships and deals and all those sort of things. One of the first interesting points that I wanted to bring to the team, because I don't put words in there about Brian, but one of the things that always struck me was, people are always communicating; they're always broadcasting.

So, one of the first tricks that I learned early in my career during the interview process was, basically, I am more likely—I'm biased—to hire people who bring notebooks with them. Especially if I met you not in an interview, like we met for coffee, and you had a notebook, that is a giant signal for me. I think one of the things that it shows is that the person you're speaking to understands the fallibility of their brain, and that it's just this mushy potato that sometimes holds things momentarily but not very well. And then they have discipline and process orientation, right? I know that I have this shortcoming as a biological creature, so how can I use tools to augment that and build a process around it that's repeatable?

The last thing that it indicates to me often is that they're creators. Most of the world is consumers of information, but I find, again, looking at it from a pattern recognition standpoint, people who take notes tend to be the builders and the doers because they're constantly absorbing the information around them. Then, if they're kind of next level, they synthesize that, and that's what drives a lot of their creative process.

I would agree, and I would say this, though, Clark, and I'm not trying to build consensus, I'm just trying to say what I've seen. If you're letting your note-taking material get in the way, I've seen people that were so fastidious that they were down and in writing and missed the gist of what you were trying to say because most people speak in parables or stories or allegories, right? And here we are starting to speak, and the person goes, "That was a great one!" And you could see them come down and start writing it down.

Brianisms, Gregisms, Clarkisms, we joke, we each have certain things that pop into our head, and we want the three on the call to just say those things. And when we're around other smart people, we don't hold back. So now, if you're one of those people that carries very detailed notes and you write in size six Helvetica, even in your Moleskine, then you might miss the rest of the world. So come up for air sometime. But I completely agree with you, and I think it can be used like one of Harry Potter's magic items because when we were at the ranch, Shelly and I owned the Powderhorn Guest Ranch, south of Powderhorn, north of Lake City, for 13 years. It was an incredible time because we kept all the balls in the air—all of our training, all of our trips, all of our journeys—everything was going while we entertained guests from Sunday to Saturday in every adventure that you can imagine.

The problem is that sometimes I bite off more than I can chew, evidenced by my endomorph (referring to his body type). Also, the only place on the ranch that we could eat food that was being cooked was at the ranch house, which is at the center of the ranch. So I'm in charge of the ranch hand; Shelly's head wrangler. We've got a bunch of things going with the guests, and I had to wake up, get from my house all the way down to the ranch house to get some breakfast, and then go on my day. So I came up with the clever scheme of a clipboard. If I had the clipboard and I had my phone—now, understand that the phone didn't work for 36 miles in a circle; there was no phone coverage or whatever; we had to buy an FM radio station to communicate with like the Jeeps and the rafting and everything—so I would hold my cell phone up (pretends to hold up a flip phone) oh, that's precious, and I would write on the clipboard, and I would walk right through the crowd, and nobody would interrupt me. It was all a dodge. There was nobody on the phone. It was a flip phone, for the love of God. Somebody would have seen through that.

So I would say a couple of things. I would say one, you're brilliant. Two, I do have a bias for organized people. But I would say three, make sure the fix isn't in, right? Make sure they're not using urban masking or social camouflage just to act a lot smarter. I would look in there and make sure they're not reading Vanity Fair. And then the last part of that is don't take such fastidious notes that you're tuning out the speaker. How do you feel about that?

Yeah, sorry. Greg, go ahead.

No, please go ahead and respond to that, Clark.

I was excited. I was excited because you brought up social proofing, Greg, and this is just like from the social engineer's toolbox. This is the other thing: when we start talking about cross-domains in business, a lot of social engineering falls under the marketing channel. So, one of the ways that we think about that is, at a point in my career, I was a commercial photographer, and I shot a lot of bands, very famous bands in the scenes I was in, and I referred to my camera as my VIP pass, right? Because I had five thousand dollars worth of camera hanging around my neck, and if you've been in the scene, like you know, whether it's someone's digital Rebel hobbyist or it's the real deal, and I could walk past any security guard without a VIP pass almost any day of the week. If they checked me, I would just go into this mode where I would just be like, "I got to get back there. They're waiting for me. They're trying to go live." Most security in those situations are minimum wage workers, and they just don't want to get yelled at. I would just say that the boss is going to come, so you got to let me through. And nine times out of ten, they would.

Clark, where do we allow photographers? Between us and the game on the floor, right outside of the parquet floor where the people are playing and the guys wiping up the sweat, and guess what? They disappear to us. We don't even pay attention to them after a few seconds or a few minutes of them being right in front of us and getting in that political meeting and all that other stuff. We tune them out. So that's brilliant. That's a great strategy. If you're a terrorist or a criminal, please don't use that TTP.

Yeah, or if you do, credit to Clark and the Arcanum security.

Yeah, don't fall for that. Follow the rules and make sure that they have a pass and don't let them if they don't have a pass. No, that's a good one. It's funny because I've almost used that to cruise at, was that the hotel, The Chateau Marmont, up in LA, in Hollywood there, and almost buffaloed my way in there by doing the, "No, no, I'm not on the... I work for," and I could see the name of the company that had the event list on there. I said, "I work for the company. My name's not on the list. I help make the list." So I was doing that, and I almost had them going, but they took... I mean, I was like 21 or 20, I mean, so I was not passing. My buddy's there too. They're kind of looking at us, and they saw the short haircuts because I was still in the Marine Corps, and they're like, "You? Yeah, I don't think so." But, he was thinking he didn't want to lose his job, "Oh, this is like one of the guys that organized the event." So it's kind of funny.

But the note-taking, Greg hit it, and I agree. Let me throw this one at you, right? When I do it with the notes and stuff, like I always make sure, if you read my notes that I take, you'd be like, "What the F?" Like, it wouldn't make any sense to you because they're for me. So, like Greg said, I got to get in what are you trying to say, and then I'll write down stuff that I remember or I need, versus some people that just, like, "Hang on, how do you spell that word?" And I'm like, "All right, we're never going to get through this conversation."

No, no, but listen, talk about writing and drawing. All three of us write and draw. We write notes, and then we draw little explications, and then have arrows connecting different ideas because we understand how chaotic our brains are. But that drives what you just said, Brian, you brought up something great that hit on Clark saying about creativity. People that carry notebooks are creative. I've got yellow pads at every corner of the house because I don't want to forget something. And here, later in the game, I've got them next to the bed because some of the greatest thinking, I wake up in bed, and I go, "Holy crap, that's a good idea," and I write it down. Now, there's an equal number of Napoleon Dynamite ideas from that, but I don't sort them out in the moment; I wait and let them germinate into the creativity.

Brian, the reason that you were drawn to buffaloing your way through that is because we love challenging our environment. Now there's the type of buffaloing that a person turns on to rob you or rape you or break down your defenses, but creative people fall on both sides, right? Good, bad, dark, light. And what happens to us—I mean, good and evil, and not some veiled reference to some other stuff—but the idea is that when you come into a room, I'm constantly trying to out-think everybody else in that room, and I'm staying quiet enough because I know I'm not the smartest person in the room, so I'm letting you transmit. Give me a body of work. Tell me where you're coming from. Now, Clark, you've seen me in action too, so you know that I've got rocks that I throw on the pond, and the entire idea is to elicit responses so then I can jump on those. But I think all creative people are like them. Brian, I think yours started very early on the street.

Well, to show what I have to do now is literally, I'll show you guys. So my yellow notepad (holding up a yellow notepad) is for my, like, our business side meetings, anything that I'm doing throughout the day on our calls. The white notepad (holding up a white notepad) right here is just for podcasts. So anything we're recording a podcast, I use the white notepad. And then I've got green Post-its (holding up green Post-it notes). All right, no, these are my personal, like, "to-do" things, like taxes, you know, pay the light bill, those kind of things. Orange one (holding up orange Post-it notes) is for, you know, a list of, "Oh, make sure to email so-and-so, follow up, follow up, my daily tasks." And pink (holding up pink Post-it notes). Guess, Greg, what the pink one is for? Things near Home Depot. Things I got to talk to Greg about.

I love that. Oh, my God, they're pink. Yes. I wasn't smart enough to pick it up.

I'm surprised how small that is because that forces me because if I don't do that, I won't, you know, I'll wake up in the middle of the night, go, "I got to go do this," and then I'll have to get up and go do it because I won't get back to sleep because I forgot about it.

Both of us, and Clark, I bet you're the same way. The other night, Brian and I have been on the road. We just got back late last night, early call this morning. You know how it is, and you're fatigued, right? And your mental juices aren't as good. So, last Friday night, before traveling out on an early Saturday flight, it was probably two in the morning, and Shelly says, "What's the matter?" I said, "I got to go down and write that thank you note." So I went down and wrote a thank you note to two folks that we dealt with in Pennsylvania and told them how amazed I was at a meeting that I had with one of their minions earlier in the day. And Shell said, "That's great. I'm glad that you did that because it's been bothering you." What bothered me about it is I put myself in their shoes and I said, "You know what, we did that meeting was Friday, and we haven't heard anything from this ass. Let's make that extra..." You know, I think we still write notes. I think we still write thank you cards. I think we make sure that we take the time. I'm not on social media, so I do email, but I answer every email, and I know, Brian, you do that. Clark, how do you feel about that?

So a couple things. I think that process orientation is important. One of the things that I've been working on personally is, if I have that late night anxiety about an action, I try and document it. So the tool that I've been using, and it's not pen and paper, but it's called Obsidian. It's obsidian.md, if you want to go check it out. It's great. It's like my second brain. So if I get up and, if I'm having anxiety in the middle of the night, I can pull out my phone, I put a little to-do in my note for tomorrow, and then that's great, and then I can go to sleep. So offloading and breaking those open loops that you're just cycling through in your head is very important. And along with that, I recommend to anyone who doesn't meditate, spend some time.

Oh, yeah. Or bourbon. Bourbon's good for you. And now fentanyl. But listen, Clark is the same age as I am. Just look at the benefits of offloading some of that information through process orientation and doing yoga. Yeah, I'm screwed because I didn't get to any of that. Do you think on the late '70s, early '80s? Yeah, Opera in Detroit? Yeah, yoga was a guy we were chasing. You know the call sign for the suspect. Come on.

We're never going to get through this list, but it's a great list.

Yeah.

Well, let's jump, jump to the second one, Clark. Go ahead.

Well, there were a couple more points I wanted. Okay, we're talking about hiring. Along with the notebook, one of the things that I hire for, so I think of technical threshold, cultural objective. I view employees as a three- to five-year time span that we're most likely going to get together. That's the ideal for me. So in three to five years, I can't change your personality as a human. And so, but I can teach you a ton of tactics and procedures and things like that that'll make you better at whatever the technical component of your job is. So I bias very heavily towards making sure this is someone I want to work with, regardless of if they're a rock star or not. Do I want to spend 40 hours a week with this human?

One of the ways that I do that, Greg mentioned, is throwing rocks in the pond. So early in the interview process, I will break down social stigmas. I will drop curse words. I will say whatever because I'm the hiring manager, right? I don't have to be on good behavior, and I see how they calibrate and respond. I'm not looking for them necessarily to curse back, but if they do, how do they do it? Is it comfortable? Is it uncomfortable? What are they? So I'm looking at the behavioral, the body language, and the way that they are communicating and their level of discomfort because that's how I communicate in my world. It is very openly and freely, and I'm always looking for people who are willing to beat up ideas but not each other because I think that there's a good, a great benefit, to having diverse teams that attack the idea to create the best thing for the company.

One last little tip for how I hire is one of the interview questions I ask is, "All right, so you're an accountant. Do you love what you do?" "Oh, yeah, I love what I do." "Cool. What are some personal projects where you've used your skills?" It doesn't matter. Usually with engineers, I can talk about software and code, and they all, the ones that I hire, build stuff all the time at home out of the love. But even, I say accounting because you'll be like, "What's an accountant do?" It's like, they volunteer at their church to do it. They work on their kids' soccer league's books or whatever. People who really love their practice do it outside of the office, and it's a great, like, band-pass filter for the type of hiring that...

No, that's great. And Brian just told the person this on, I have no idea. It's Friday, so it would have been Thursday, probably Wednesday afternoon. It's specific that we had just met these people. They were talking about problem-solving and sense-making, out of order, not sense-making problem-solving, but problem-solving sense-making. And they had confronted a big problem. Brian stepped in and said, "Look, you're making this about the person. Don't make it about the person; make it about the problem." So you could turn that to what you just said and don't make it about the person; make it about the process. So you're trying to unpack that human by ways of their demonstrations of intent rather than just the words because people are going to tell you... Look, it's like the first date. It's like the first few dates. They're going to tell you what they think you want to hear. But then you're going to be sadly mistaken if you don't unpack that a little bit and say, "Okay, let's go into a greater level of detail." And those behavior-based stuff are great.

And sometimes it's even going wrong. I've been in an interview process before, and it was, "Give me a time when you were put..." And it's like, okay, that can be a really easy question to answer, or it can be a really, really difficult one. And they're not really clear, but I think for that interview, it's kind of part of the point of it. You're trying to see what you're going to bring up, but it also gives you the ability to have a really canned response. And I don't, I don't like canned responses if I'm really trying to get to know someone.

So I'll take, sort of, the opposite side. If you're talking about interviewing someone, so I know someone, I'm just trying to keep it, you know, scrub any details in my mind here as I'm telling the story, but they're in a hiring process for, like, say, a program management type position, but they didn't have any experience in this specific industry. And the company kind of understood that, and they were actually internally thinking of doing the right thing, of, "Why don't we just hire people with these sort of attributes and qualities, and we'll train them to do this specific job?" So they're in the right mindset, which I love. I love when people do that. They're like, "Hey, we can train you how to do this. I'm just looking for these key qualities."

And so the person being interviewed, who I know, is like, "Okay, you know," and they're saying, "Well, you know, you don't have this, but you could tell this is like their third interview with these people, so they, they wanted him for something, right? They knew they liked what it was." So then he started asking questions, learning about, "Well, you know, what did you have in mind? What is your vision here? What are your policies and procedures surrounding these issues? What you guys..." And he asked several questions, and no one could actually answer them, meaning they didn't know. They didn't have answers. So guess what that turned into? They went, "All right, we're going to give you a call back in a couple weeks." So they created a position to onboard him, basically as like a six-month sort of probationary thing to get that program management job. But guess what his first role is? To find out what all of those things are for the company so he could write the standard operating procedures and come up with these policies. And it was just an amazing thing where, you know, both people had the wherewithal to go, "All right, well, yeah, I understand." Everyone knew where they fit in in the situation, right? And everyone was honest about where they were at, you know, as a company and as the individual applying, and it turned into what I think is going to be an, I'm super excited about it for that person, but because that's such a cool role. So when you get into those behavior-based stuff, when you're the person being interviewed too, you can ask that and find out, you know, are they just trying to fill an immediate need because they have a line item that they can charge for, and they need to put someone in that position, or is this going to lead to something bigger? What are the expectations there? And you being interviewed can kind of find that out from that hiring manager, and you'll get a lot of information by asking those type of questions to them too.

Yeah, Brian, I think that's true, and actually, again, a lot of people don't think about this way, but as the interviewee, the person coming in for the role, you should consider behavioral based questions to verify and validate the stuff that you know about the company.

Precisely.

So, I'll point it myself. I didn't do proper due diligence on one of my jobs in my career. I took the word of a friend that it was an awesome place to work, and it ended up going really badly. And if I had done just a modicum of due diligence or asked these behavioral-based questions, you know, "Can you give me an example of your cultural value X, and how you reinforce it through your operations here?" A good manager should be doing something around that, and they should have a story on the tip of their tongue.

Yeah. And if they don't, it means it's probably a lot of lip service.

Exactly. Or it's so out of their ken that they're not going to normally deal with, and it's not the right person to be interviewing you anyway, right?

I love that. That's good. Yeah. I had a good one, too. The other thing that...

Sorry.

No, I was just a funny one because it was someone being interviewed, and that horrible, like, they're like, "Yeah, they have horrible ADHD, and they have all these issues with it." And so the guy asked them, like, "Well, what's your biggest strength?" "Well, I actually work really well under pressure." And I said, "Okay, well, what's your biggest weakness?" "If I don't have pressure, I literally can't get anything done, and I don't work."

As a hiring manager, one of the tactics, kind of along those lines, is during those behavioral-based questions, try and keep them open-ended. And then there's this, there's this move that I've heard called the "baby nod," and it's a slight yes and no motion with your head, and it's not "yes, I agree"; it's "yes, I'm following you," but it gives energy into that equation, and they keep going. And we've talked about kind of taking the pause and just leaving the silence in the room, and people want to fill that silence. Everyone has this desire to make the noise start again. And so, if you can just nod and then pause, you'll get so much more detail. And the nod, the nod to people who aren't attuned to it, oftentimes they interpret it as agreement, and they will just dig deeper and deeper into that hole. I've had people say, you know, you asked the question like, "You've had a disagreement with your co-worker, how did you handle it?" And they're going down, and you're just like, "Wow, I've never hired you again," but you're just smiling and just nodding gently and just...

Exactly, exactly. It's the Austin Powers, "I like what you've done here."

So, two things on that. One, the self-same things that we're discussing now, folks, if you happen to be in law enforcement and you're conducting an interview of a suspect before an interrogation, or you're in the interrogation, number one cardinal rule, after you've set up and done the background exactly what everybody's talking and set up the room, is shut up. Once you've asked that question, allow that person to go, and then give the Brian (raises eyebrow), and then they'll go talking, and that's where you're going to learn it.

And Clark, I would tell you about due diligence. I would tell you that we've worked with companies and for companies that were our clients where we came in, and they had no idea why they wanted us, and the person they assigned to show us around had no idea who we were. Those never work out well, and we'd never hear from them again. Now, we've had others where it was just hand in glove, and it was like, "Wow, I'm reading your mind," and we're still friends with them decades later. One, a major airline, let's call it, or train company, because I don't want to get sued by people in the backyard that you don't know, Brian was up in front speaking, and Brian was making a couple of comments on, "You know, how do you embody the logo, literally the logo art, of your company?" And Brian talked about shapes and colors and everything else. And we took a break, and the lead dogs in the sled, the strategic layer, came over to Brian, "That was amazing. How did you find that?" And he said, "It's on your website, literally under our mission." You know, Brian pointed to where he got it.

So don't have lip service. People will resent it. People will think less of you. I tell you what, if you don't know, come up and, you know, the old "knowing what we know now," if you come up and you say, "Hey, listen, I'm not, I'm not sure, but I'll look into that," I will have better respect for you than if you start going down the rabbit hole and creating stuff as you're moving along. It's just not a fan, not a fan of that dancing your way off stage like Snagglepuss, "Exit stage left."

Yeah, that's hilarious. Yeah. No, the "go on" is always a good one with "go on." And then, Clark, it was funny because you're talking about like the nod. Like, we do that in class, kind of teaching a lot, because we're trying to keep it positive, and, you know, there's certain times we play with electrochemical neurotransmitters. You've seen it where we get people upset and then happy and laughing and then, "Oh, man, that's really sad." But that's all kind of designed that way. And we had one student, and Greg was up there teaching, and he kind of asked a question in the class, and this kid would, oh, he just shouted out just a horrible, "I see where you're going there, but what if it's this?" And it was the exact opposite of what he said, but it allowed him to not feel like, you know, he just got told, "You're absolutely wrong, please shut up."

And he was hanging on every word, Brian. He was literally hanging on every word. And so you try to get the group thing going and go, "Look, we have to solve for X," and he was just screaming answers. We loved that kid.

For the audience's benefit, this is actually a story about me. They're telling me. That's great. That's great.

I want to throw in one, sort of, a sidebar, and we can answer it in kind or just leave it hanging like Chad. I think there's a difference between hiring and recruiting. I think not just the published definition, and I think one of the projects Brian and I are working on now is for a part of the Department of Defense, Marine Corps, and helping them align their recruiting in a manner where they're getting the best out of it, more efficient, more effective.

Yeah.

You know, and saying, "Hey, these three kids are likely to follow up, so let me put most of my calories and energies there." And I think that, I think business is not unlike the military, and I think police work and law enforcement needs to be more like a professionally run business. What are your thoughts on it, Clark? Am I way off the mark?

No, and I think one of the things that I tell startup founders is, recruiting and hiring is the most important job for you. As the person at the top of the organization, you shouldn't be mired in the day-to-day. You should be the culture carrier, and you should be spending most of your time finding the best people on the planet to solve the problem that you're trying to solve from their domain of expertise. And so it really comes down, from a recruiting standpoint, to figuring out how to target those individuals, which I think is again can bring some of the skill sets that maybe people have from law enforcement or the military to bear, right?

I do a lot of work on LinkedIn, parsing through people's connections, looking through their work history, trying to find the person who literally just left the job that I want to hire them for. So if you're a software-as-a-service business that makes, I don't know, a CRM for dog kennels, you want to go find someone who just finished, who just exited, building a CRM for cat cafes, and you want to bring them in because they know the industry, they understand how it works, and that's really the game. So using that analysis and then using those connections, the value—I mean, when we talk about open-source intelligence—it's amazing what's out there and what's available and how long we've been using it for without that name, OSINT, without assigning that value and saying, "This is a new thing." The data mine, smart people, then use it for a long damn time.

Right, right.

Oh, yeah. I mean, to incriminate myself, I got a BlackBerry my senior year of undergrad, which was like 2007, and I was at parties looking up people's Facebook profiles so that I could see what bands they liked that I knew so I could go in and just randomly start talking about that.

That's awesome. So I've used, I've used my knowledge of social media to get a restraining order against Emily Bowman from Braid Babes. Now, the reason I got the restraining order, she wouldn't know me from Simon, right? She would not know me if she fell on me. But the idea is that I could show people like, "Oh, yeah, man, she's, she's constantly, you know, on transmit sending me messages and stuff. She's so wonderful."

And that whole Braid Babes connection, there's a few, I hate to use the word influencers because I really don't know what it means, but there's a few people that influence how I see LinkedIn. You're definitely one of them. Shout out to Rena Friedman Watts, because she has... Rena Friedman Watts likes to come in, tip over the gosh damn apple cart, let the dishes go scattering, and go, "So, there, an answer post." And you got to dig a little deeper, and you got to go, "What's up? Who is this person?" And I love those kind of people. You know, there's the ones that I pass all the time. Like, you did a quiz the other day. I actually saw it on there, not a quiz, a poll, whatever they're called. But there's one guy that does them all the time, and it's useless stuff just to keep the numbers up, just to keep the algorithm going. And, you know, come on, you know, it's like, so I love what you do because you're so much smarter than people. You could be intimidating them, yet you motivate them to be their best them. I'm not that smart so I can't do that. So I usually do it with a whip and a chain. I'm sort of the stick, stick, not the carrot stick. And then Brian has no soul or emotions. Science. Brian does it literally with his choice of wardrobe and his hair products.

We can go through an airport, and I've never been with Brian in an airport where three or four people didn't stop and go, "Hey, where'd you get those pants?" Or, "Hey, what do you use to get that, you know, that coiffure?" So you're like, "That, that's in the classes." That's the, that's what I know I'm in. That is in the classroom, special operations, type A personality guys in the class because they're always like, "Hey, man, where'd you get those pants from?" I'm like, "That's the quest. I just, I just ran my mouth for 47 minutes, 27 photos, and 30 different things to write down, and that's your question? All right, I got them here." You know?

Well, it's because everyone attends your class only knows to buy pants from 5.11, so they're wondering where what Brooks Brothers is.

But aren't you right? You know, can you concealed carry in them?

We were up at a place that shall remain nameless in the northern part of California working with operators, and you guys both know what Dickies are, right? The pants, the company? So our first pants for class because we had a very casual thing, polo shirt and pants on, this red long-sleeve shirt on range day. Why? So I can find you. Everything made sense. Everything was very simple. And the Dickies? Why? Because we're very demonstrative in class, and you're kneeling down and jumping on stuff and crossing tables. So all of a sudden, we started noticing all the other contractors did it, and we were like, "You bastards!" You know, the ones that attended our course. So we went out, and 5.11 was just starting out. 5.11 had been golf, sporting goods, police work only kind of stuff. And so we went out, and we got those. Well, then everybody was a 5.11 Cowboy. So we, not wanting to build 5.12, then we went to corporate. We said, "Okay, everybody with slacks and, you know, collared shirts and suit coats." And they go, "Greg, you've never worn a suit coat in your life." "That's the point. That's the point. It's, it's almost a joke on itself. Now, you're not going to learn anything from our class by dressing like us." You know, but they didn't, they were so shallow, they didn't understand that. It's the boots. They're wearing new boots. And we'd laugh and laughed. "Bastards."

I, I, well, we're telling funny 5.11 stories. I was at the SHOT Show (Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade Show) a decade ago, and I was there with a Master Chief, and we went up to the booth, and he's talking to one of the reps, and he's like, "Hey, can we get these bags in anything other than black because when I roll through with a platoon full of SEALs, it's kind of obvious, but we all have the same bag." You know, like, is perfect because how many people actually know what it stands for? None.

None of them. That's what SHOT Show is. I show up in Iraq, and it was my first trip into kinetic Iraq, and I've got my orange bag and I've got my orange notebook. I went to pink because back then you couldn't get a lot of pink, and now pink is available everywhere, and I love pink. So everything has orange and orange tape on it. And all these people that I'm embedded with are all going, "You're going to get us killed. They're going to target in on that orange." Yeah, yeah, they are. Okay, no problem whatsoever. Where I was, what I was doing, it was so I was first off the plane, and I, I could always see my stuff. So operationally, I'm not saying go on patrol and wave around your orange stuff, but most of us value, like, Under Armour, most of us value stuff that we're never, ever going to use, or Teva sandals. You remember the Teva sandal? You have to have the security of the sandal because they'll get sucked right off of you when you jump out of a plane. Who's jumping out of a plane with Teva sandals? I'm just asking. It's just stupid stuff that people do because they want to be a member of an elite club that they would never be allowed into any other day, or they're really in the club, and they don't think that they're on transmit, right? There are some people that are massively into the club, and they don't think that we're in the public place. They're going to stick out like a sore dick. Black is not always the best color to buy your stuff. And I would agree.

So let's pivot back a little bit to, yeah, to kind of LinkedIn and other OSINT tools. So again, here's a, here's another little software gem. If you haven't played with it, there's a piece of software for OSINT called Maltego (a data mining software). I'm probably saying it wrong, but M-A-L-T-E-G-O, and it allows you to quickly, like, create social graphs and then pivot around them, right? So you can build the old copper murder board with, you know, yarn and photos, but you're doing it all digitally. It makes it easy to transmit.

Yeah. And you can, for instance, like find a social profile, and then when you're going through that social profile, maybe their email address has a username, and then you can pivot on that username and see if it's used anywhere else in social media. And that's a tool, like it sounds like something I'd be doing in an investigation, but it's a tool that I've used as part of a due diligence process when hiring people because you can go look for their alt accounts and see, are they a good human, right? Like, is he a part of a knitting club or some secessionist movement?

New decapitation photos are probably a good, you know, bellwether moment when you find those. And you, you're bringing up, you know, the greater point in all this, no matter what detail you go into, like, you have to do some sort of due diligence and, like, you have, you know, I mean, like into who you're hiring and what you're doing, and, and, you know, where you're going or what company you're working with. I mean, you're bringing up these great tools, but, like, you have to start somewhere. You have to look. I mean, we've been to places where all of a sudden someone wanted to question, like, who we were or whatever, and I'm like, "Hey, man, like, if, if you haven't done that already, and we're already here, you're, you've failed miserably. Like, this is not, like, our stuff is all out there; you can vet us however you want."

Or the other thing is, when someone does that, "Well, yeah, can you send me some references?" It's like, "Yeah, I can, but let me just tell you what they're going to say right now, right?" I'm not, I'm not going to send you someone that says that I suck, you know. So, no, but OSINT's been around forever. So it's just how we process information. So when Friedrich Nietzsche said, "Beware, when you look under the abyss, the abyss also looks into you." That's OSINT. So everything that you're transmitting out there can be received by somebody, and everything that you're receiving out there, somebody can know that you're receiving it. They can spam the net. They can do a bunch of different things. But I like your point because we have that wall, even though, you know, I don't have a Facebook. I don't have any of the social media stuff. But, you know, I, I have things that are important to me. When, when I come to class, I hang them on my PowerPoint where I have them duct-taped to my luggage, you know, my family or my dog or my kids. And we don't think that sometimes with that also comes different things, like guns and booze. You know what I'm saying? And Brian and I were laughing recently where somebody that was in the, the, the executive and dignitary protection hub of LinkedIn was saying, "Look, even if we don't take your application, we'll look you up and check out the photos that are on your site. If you've got any photos with clients, any photos with guns, any photos with airplanes in the background, we're going to ban you for life. You're never, ever going to get a job with our company." But that's a great message because in that realm, you shouldn't be doing that stuff. You know, we, we talk a lot about where we're going on Patreon, so we can get more people at the class, but we don't talk about, you know, we just got back from St. Louis until we just get back from St. Louis because we also don't want to have that, you know, that our type of entourage doesn't carry cameras, if you know what I'm saying. They'll be carrying sticks and clubs and torches and pitchforks.

There was a, there was a moment at the after hours where I was talking to one of the attendees at the class, and the sentence, "I could kill you with any object in this room," came out of his mouth at one point. So, so I could verify that.

That's so funny. Oh, my God. Yeah, that. And the, "Well, I won't go into that." Brian, let's get back to that list because Clark, you really took time with the list, and I really love it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, you know, you're, this is kind of leading into, actually, I want to hit that next one, the third one, about you, you asked about, you know, how do you build cross-functional teams that repeatedly innovate? Yes.

So, I, and I know cross-functional teams have a couple different definitions out there that I've seen. But, you know, we, we talk about it from how do you get one group to work with another and in that interoperability. And we like to use sort of the analogy. Greg always talks about, you know, you got to be like Velcro, so we come together, we got this really strong relationship or really strong team ethic, but I have to be able to separate from your team, Clark, and go attach onto someone else sometime, right? And so what we look at is, you know, in a structure of a business or military law enforcement, it is what it is. You know, they're typically some sort of hierarchical structure. Some of them might be a little bit more flat in design, and people have more autonomy, but you still have some sort of chain of command and different levels, right? And, and so, you know, everyone tries to define them. We got like the tactical level, we got the operational level, we've got the strategic level. And they're the, you know, the real issue is they're not always clearly defined, or your roles may overlap. So we look at it almost as like pieces of the puzzle. So your team is one puzzle piece. And typically, what we see is that team usually gets really good, right? You're going to work together, you're going to be really high functioning, you're moving fast. But the problems arise is those seams and gaps when you have to go connect with that other team because the puzzle piece doesn't always fit together neatly, right? So, so we say, all right, look, hence the phone. Most, most, you know, especially like, you know, you got a military Special Operations team or like, you know, a team, you know, that of entrepreneurs or, or tech guys that like really, or girls, whatever, but, but that are really hard working and love what they do, they're going to innovate, and they're going to work together really well, and they're going to get a good process going, right? So what typically we have to work with them on is like, you're fine internally. It's turning around, looking outboard where those seams and gaps are. What are those connection pieces? And that's when it gets into the communication and how you articulate things because that's where all problems arise. It's when I have to go figure out a problem with another team or another person, right? So, so that's kind of how we look at it. But, you know, to get your questions about how do you repeatedly innovate? I mean, you're by consistently getting challenged, you know what I'm saying? So innovation comes out of necessity, right? Innovation is, is, you know, it's in our DNA as humans because we've had to innovate to stay alive. So everyone innovates in some way. Maybe it's a very low organized, low, low sophistication way, but, but typically people will find ways to make their life or their job easier, and that's sort of an innovation process on its own. So you kind of have to let people do that, right?

I would add one more gating mechanism to Brian's comment, Clark, before I turn it over to you. And that's this isn't our first rodeo. We've done vulnerability assessments for years and years and years with a lot of different companies. Some very high functioning, very lean forward companies, and some that are just broken and are never going to be fixed. And the common thread when we interviewed those teams is, "We've got it going on, but that team, they're the ones that are holding this down. Can we go talk to that team?" And they go, "Hey, we're the most innovative and resilient team here, but those guys back there, yeah..." And they never want to shine the lens in the mirror. They never want to look at themselves first. So we're very interested in how you would see that. Or as Taylor Swift would say, "I'll stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror." Wow.

How do you repeatedly innovate? It is, you know, removing barriers and allowing people to do that, right? As long as I have a clear understanding of what the mission is, what we're trying to accomplish, what we would call the commander's intent—whoever is in charge, "Here's what I want you to do. Here's my intent behind it"—people will innovate. And depending on how they are, how creative they are, what they think, or, you know, and their their experience is, what they'll do. But at a minimum level, like most places you can walk into, and any employee will tell you what the problems are, right? They might not offer solutions or they might not know the big picture, but they can tell you in their in their world what the problem is.

Yeah.

"I could get more done, but here's the thing: every time I got to interact with this part over here, I got to fill out extra paperwork, and then I got to file that, so I never end up getting to this part over here. So it's not an issue of me working harder. I just can't go do that until I get approval from this person over here who's a," you know, and they'll, they'll tell you what it is. Now, to come up with a process or fix it, it's going to be, it might be very difficult depending on how complex the issue is, but at least having, you know, listening to those team members, listening to people in the organization to see what the barriers to their success are. And especially as a leader and a manager, it's just about getting rid of those. If you just get rid of those, because then what you do is you'll see, you'll see who the performers are. They're going to work their ass off, that really want to go after it. And you'll see the people that are just going to do the bare minimum or always come back to you for help because they're not figuring it out. So it really allows you to kind of gauge where everyone's at, if if that makes sense. So I kind of want to answer the question, but it's, it's a tough question to ask without, like, sort of a specific kind of case study. I don't know if that that makes any sense to you.

Yeah, definitely, definitely. I mean, I can talk about it from my approach in the business world is, when I talk to people about innovation who aren't in the, we'll say, startup world or community, they think of it as building a better mousetrap and inventing it from whole cloth. When really, the vast majority of innovation in the world is taking a known solution from a problem domain that is adjacent to yours and copying and pasting over and then sanding off the rough edges. And so, when we talk about repeatedly innovating as a team, there's a process to it: research. What are similar problems in other domains, and what are their solutions? Talking to the people that have implemented those at their companies or in their field office or whatever, and figure out how that was applied. And then creating a rough draft that is probably 80 or 90% from someone else's solution, and then going and testing it or putting it out in front of your customer and getting that feedback. Because a lot of people who don't work in the innovation space, they follow this kind of waterfall method where it's like, "We're going to do all the requirements gathering, then we're going to design it, then we're going to build it, then we're going to test it, and then," you know, and this ends up being like a two-year process, and you get to the end, and you realize that your requirements were off or your design was bad out of the gates, and now you have an unusable solution.

So a lot of innovation is this iterative process of, to your point, Brian and Greg, is like feeling the pressure. I always tell folks, "If you are proud of the first thing you shipped, you waited too long." You should be embarrassed of the product that you're putting out on the street when you start because that's how you achieve product-market fit. You put it in front of them, they tell you what sucks, you fix the thing that sucks, you put it back in front of them, they tell you what sucks, rinse, repeat, and that is how you innovate. And as you're doing that, document it along the way, and keep going. So another key mistake that I see is people try and ideate in the group. Any design process that I run, everyone who attends the design meeting has homework pre-work before the meeting, and they have to come with their own ideas. And that meeting session is about documenting those ideas in front of everyone and getting any iterations or spin-ups that people have when they see your ideas. "Oh, that's a great idea, what if?" And then trying to down-select. And there's another process that we use where we take all the requirements and we weight them. We say, "Out of 100 of our points, this requirement's worth 30% of those points." And then hide that weighting and then go score everything on another like one to five scale, where does this fall? And then you end up with these answers to like, what is the best solution across our weighting as opposed to what do I feel good about? And it doesn't mean that you have to execute on that, but it gives you a good lens to have a discussion. A lot of times, you know, like all humans, I'll just back my gut check with data that I find, even if I went through this whole process. But what it forces you to do is have a discussion and think of like, why is it, why do I feel so strongly this way if my data shows a different answer?

Yeah, I love that. So, so I'll go back to the street for the listeners that aren't as smart as Clark and Brian and give you some tangible examples that I found just in stuff like team selection. So I'll give you a quick example: in our teams that had to be fully functioning six-person teams, go anywhere in the world and just hit it and go. So we were given challenges every day by our owners, let's call them, in managers back then, because they would just throw the team together like Plinko and say, "Go." And so I'll give you a perfect example. You got Jimmy Choo and Shelly, two people that you may know or you may not know, that are the best drivers I've ever seen in my entire life. The problem is that Jimmy Choo, even when we're driving from the hotel to dinner, always drives at top rate, you know, precision maneuvering and everything else. And when you get there, you're always like, "Holy crap," you know, hanging onto the vehicle. With Shelly, it's exactly the opposite. She always measured and tempered, and you know, she does this. So if you don't have that right mix, you show up sweating.

Then we go to a place and we're giving very simple advice to a client, and we recently had somebody tell us the key to clients, and I'll have Brian tell you that, because they just sized it up perfectly. But we went to a company, and there were three glaring abnormalities we noticed. First, and I noticed this everywhere we go, smokers ruin your security screening net because smokers will prop open a door at the most secure location because it's close and they can see the cash register and everything, and all stand there and smoke. And that's your win. If you have access, you have way. And then we tell people that. The second thing was, in this company, everybody carried box cutters on their belt so that it was very routine to leave their open box cutter laying on a desk somewhere. And you know what? That's asking for trouble. Those are items that can be used as weapons or impact weapons, those type of things that if they're in your environment, they got to be controlled because if not, there's that one day that everything else was going right, but then you have the argument, "What's the first thing you covet, Clarice?"

And then the final thing was that we made the simplest observation at one company. From two o'clock in the afternoon till 3:30 in the afternoon, the light for the receptionist was at such an angle coming through this big crystal cathedral thing that was in the front that she got a permanent tan, and she couldn't see the people that were coming in the door that she was supposed to security screen. So on the one, we told, "Put the box cutters away." And the second, we said, "They make these wonderful screens you can put up there that go up and come down for the sun." And in the third, we said, "Don't prop those doors open." We might as well have told those people, "Kiss the fattest part of my ass," because they bucked back. They were coming like, "Well, you don't know our team, and you don't know the inner workings, and we can't tell our folks not to do that." Look, welcome introspection. Welcome somebody from outside taking a look at how your team functions because if not, you're headed for a fall, and you're riding for a fall if you're a cowboy because what happens is you get so tied in to your team and who does what and who functions that you think you're interoperable, but you're not. That day that person doesn't show up, the minute that that thing goes horribly sideways, you don't have any more critical thinkers, Clark. And I see that from the ground perspective. You guys, you guys are really smart, and you can like, you know, Hoberman and spin the wheel. I'm not that smart, so I got to really step on it or bite it, right? Or, you know, bend the nipple with my tooth to see it, but I see it happen over and over again. Too much faith in your team, not enough forward thinking or resilient people in your team. And, and, you know, you should spend as much time on team selection, just like dojo selection. How long should you spend on picking the right martial arts dojo? Your entire life, you know, because that's, that's what we've got to be. So I'm sorry to go long, but when you guys are talking in my brain, I'm thinking functioning with six people at the highest level isn't an easy task, and they're certainly not making it easier.

So a couple, couple things, you know, maybe build on but also push back just slightly, and it's not even against what you said, it's just how it ends up coming out in the sauce, right? It is, one, I think it's for innovative teams, it's important to build diverse teams, right? People from different backgrounds, different experiences. A lot of times when you look at these highest performing teams, they tend to look like a monoculture, right? And so even if you can't, you know, and I know in the military there's selection courses and things like that that provide some sort of bias, but there's also, we have to look at ourselves always as an organization, we are biasing the hiring process as well, right? We as humans like people that look like they're part of our tribe, and so it's very important to put in, like, there's statistics, and, you know, I'm going to make them up because we're on a podcast, but like if there's, you know, zero women on a hiring panel, there's about a zero percent chance you're going to hire the female candidate. If there's one, it increases to like 50. If there's, you know, and it gets like, so it's just like making sure there's representation. And, and I've had to work with this with some of my engineers, I, you know, very male-dominated field, and I'm always trying to bring in these, these different viewpoints, and I've had hiring selections where I was like, it's going to go to the female candidate, and all of a sudden they bring me the male candidate, and I'm like, why did you do this? Like, what, what, what did, what does this person bring that the other person doesn't? I have to literally like go through all of our requirements that we set out prior to the hiring process and score them against each other and talk through the candidates' response with them. And they go, "Oh, she, she was the better candidate." And I go, "Uh-huh." You know? Yeah. But that's, that's built in. Like we have biases and you have to understand that.

So the next thing that I want to talk about with that, that idea of the model culture is, again, in these early stage teams in a company, when you're people bringing people together, there's this feeling of, "We should all have the same ideas and value systems. We should all work the same way." And that's also very dangerous. When I think of culture on a team, it's not what it is; it's what it should be, right? So creating a little matrix of high and low and then figuring out where you have gaps, right? So a lot of times on early stage teams, the bias for the group tends to be towards optimists, right? Because the people who work on creative and processes oftentimes believe in the impossible. So I'm always looking for the capable Devil's Advocate, who is the curmudgeon that always thinks everything's going to fail, but can do it in a way where they're attacking the idea and not the person. And I, I try my hardest to slot them on an early stage team because what it does is it brings us back into the realm of the real, and, and I think that is, is really, really important.

And the last thing, and this goes, you know, this is a call back to earlier conversation, but Brian was saying most of the failures happen at the interfaces, and I completely agree. And that could be inside your own organization, right? Accounting to program management, program management to marketing. But it can also be with your partners, and it could be within, like, you know, sometimes I, I build product, right? So we'll have hardware design, human factors, software, you know, and these are the teams within the teams. Now, one of the biggest takeaways I took from Stan McChrystal's book was, give up your best to the other team, right? And so it can, it can, it can't be the manager. It has to be like the team lead. Like the person who is the rock for your team has to go attend whoever, wherever the friction is right now, has to go be in their meeting, right? Because we need a representative who is the best communicator, who understands the concept at the highest level, and, you know, can represent the, the organization, or their organization, their team within the team, the most fluently. And I think those are keys to, to having this innovation process.

And the last thing with the, as a manager or a team leader within an organization, realizing that there's different behavioral characteristics. Like some people are quick on their feet and will zip back with a response, and that will bias again your selection process because other people think slow, right? Or they're not as willing to throw their idea out on the table. And so making sure you take time. Again, I'm always sitting there kind of with the notepad. "Hey, Cheryl hasn't said anything in this meeting. I'm going to make sure that I carve out two to five minutes at the end of the meeting for her to talk after she's processed, thought through it, and been asked to engage by the facilitator, right?" And, and that makes a huge difference as well because otherwise you're losing all this value just because it's outside of someone's comfort zone, and, you know, even though they want to contribute.

So let's talk about a real-life application of what you just talked about, Clark. Both Brian and I, in one way or the other, have worked under the General in some capacity because he was a leader of the task force when both of us were in. And one of the things is, he was very efficient and very effective. But I will tell you, it's against every human nature to send your best and brightest. What you want to do is you want to look and say, "Brian is my best and brightest, but I can't send him because I rely so heavily. And Clark is my second best and brightest, but I can't send him because he's got all these projects in here, and who's going to do him for him?" So I look and I go, "Well, I don't want to send that second team lead because that team is really just building a group. So I end up sending some E5 or E6 that's nominal at best, and I send them routinely to this stuff, and I'm not getting the feedback I want, and I don't see that I failed by not, you know, sending somebody that was going to to prosper not only for that other team and give them the best, but then come back and give me a, you know, when I asked somebody to read the tea leaves, if I ask a nominal person to read the tea leaves, I'm not going to get all the information out of that, out of that meeting." And you're, you're the second point there is the second foot falling. You can't attend everything yourself. As much as you'd like to be on every Zoom and be at every meeting, you know, and be the integral part there, you can't. You got to let the process work, and if the process says it's fundamentally sound, then you're going to be able to draw reasonable conclusions on the stuff they bring you.

Totally agree. You, you brought up a number of good points, and, man, you could unpack everything you just said on an entire episode, really, because you, you know, you get into, especially what people call culture, and a lot of these issues, you know, it's really comes, and you can boil everything down almost to leadership and, and how you do that. Like you just said, you brought up, "Well, you know, we all have different biases. We, and we all have different perspectives." And so diversity sometimes can't always be, um, you know, articulated in a nice and neat way. "Okay, we need a female who's within these ranges. We need a male who's within this from this." But it's like you can't, you can't do that. That's not how that works. And so you have to look at what, what diverse backgrounds, where did you come from? What is your age, and where you grew up in those things? How you approach problems. You know, there's different ways to, to define what that is and, and, and how and let it influence the culture, um, you know, in a positive manner because, like you just said, if, that culture is defined too by the by the leader, right? I've seen, you know, people who were just really, really, really good leaders, and just implicitly and explicitly, even if they didn't, couldn't articulate it, everyone just fell into line because they knew that person was fair, they were tough, they were demanding, but they were supportive. They, they had all of those things they did, and it none of that stuff mattered because they had people working for him that understood that, you know, it's like I said about removing barriers and everything earlier. There's like, if you set the grounds for for the, you set the conditions for, for where you are if you're in charge, and then it's up to those people to take, pick up the ball and run with it, and most people will.

And so when you, I love what you're talking about there, too, is because it goes back to how we teach organizationally about human performance and human behavior. It's, "Hey, you might have to send, you have to give up your best person to go over there and fit and figure that out because that's more important." And if that person is really good, well, their team can probably handle things for a while on on their own because that person's so good. They set their team up for success and knows what, no, they know what they have to get done, right? So we were, like you said, we're not good humans in general are not good at, since, you know, probability and statistics is like a foreign language for every human being on the face of the Earth, right? So we don't ever put the right solution in or we don't pick the right thing because we don't see if it's not right in front of us. We can't see how big a problem is sometimes. And goes back to that interface, the interface that seams and gaps when they come together, that API is everything because it pulls all the information together, all the people. And that's what makes it successful. That's why you have entire industries and, and companies that just do one little thing to connect dot A to dot B, and they just, they master that that pathway right there, and that lets everything open up at the other end to be this large funnel to let all the information go through. And, and that's the beauty of it. And if you just look at it from that process standpoint of how you're going to build it, man, I got to build that, that bridge has to last. I have to build that bridge to last, and it's got to be able to hold a lot of weight, right? Doesn't matter what's coming across or what's on either side. I can have shaky ground there, but at this connection point, that's the most important point. And, and I think you kind of sum that up in everything you said. So, so I love it. But, um, there's so much when you add to...

Wouldn't you add, though, listen, let's be realists, and this goes back to my Seattle Seahawks image: you also sometimes have to play the hand you're dealt. So as much as intelligence preparation of the battlefield is essential, and as much as predicting in, in forward thinking, is sometimes your sense-make is going to be obstructed because somebody hands you a team and says, "Here is the team you're going to war with." And so I, I just think we all need to, you know, make sure that we're not too big for our britches, that we acknowledge the fact that sometimes our choices are made for us, and you can still influence and innovate and pivot in the moment. You don't have to be beholden to that and just ride that that ride till it ends and get off and then say, "Now I'm going to start again." You can influence in stride.

Yeah, um, so I want to, you got, oh, you, you brought up a lot more stuff on here. You have a few more questions, Clark, but and I, I'm almost thinking that like we could, we could do an entire another episode on some of this stuff and, and, you know, you, I want to because the next part of your questions sort of get into how we take a training changes behavior approach to everything, right? You can train your way out of a situation. If you don't have the skills or attitudes or aptitudes or abilities, you can get them. And, and then that team, like Greg said, suddenly your hand, it gets a lot better. It's the same people, right? But you, you now know how to use it better. You know how to implement processes better and understand humans and what they can and can't do. And that's our big thing because that's, you know, it's, it's a training is a force multiplier. It gets you better, right? Without adding weight to your rock. And I, I think, you know, we could get into that. I, I didn't, we also don't want to rush it.

Are you bringing up such great ideas and that's fomenting an incredible conversation that I'm sure people are listening to, and so, you know, if you would come back, Brian, I, I think that's a great thing too. There are incredible questions there.

Yeah. So, yeah, so Clark, I definitely want to hit, I want to hit, you know, all of these other you brought up a bunch more points, and then everything you talked about right now, I think we could do a second, a second episode on that and get into some specifics and maybe do a case study as an example of how you walk through that almost like, in this situation, this is how we apply that. And, and so, you know, I did, though, want to understand your, your last question with your Harry Potter reference about Professor Snape. Here we go. Social engineering. I, I kind of want to get, I kind of wanted to see where you're going because if you're listening, Clark goes, you know, his one of his questions was, "What does Professor Snape have to do with social engineering?" And I was like, "Well, my Harry Potter knowledge is only run so deep, so I obviously know who Professor Snape is, and I know about his behavior and his attitude and how he treats Harry Potter, but, but I, I wasn't even sure what you were getting at with the question at first." So I do, can, can we at least answer that one, Greg, maybe, or get...?

Hey, I love it. I'd love to hear it. Well, I want to hear Greg's take and then, okay, I'll give you my response. So here's my take. I've grown up my entire life in the shadow of my older brother, Brian. He's one of the smartest human beings I've ever met in my life. And although he projects himself as being the James Dean in every situation, and everybody loves him, he is so introspective as to be a closeted nerd hiding in the basement surrounded by his items. And Brian, you've seen his room, so you know what I'm talking about. The only thing it doesn't have is a safe door. But he will go into a room and own the room and have these friends. All his friends are the same as he is. They would play Red Star, White Star late at night with a candle with their, you know, nine-sided dice and stuff that I don't know about and come up with these great theories. So, so I have a, sort of a bifurcated view of Snape. One, I couldn't get past that Snape was Hans Gruber (referring to Hans Gruber from 'Die Hard'). I mean, you know, so he used my favorite Christmas movie ever, even though he irons his hair now, and it's down to his shoulder. But the idea was that what always drew me to the books and to the movies that I saw waiting on a flight line somewhere was that Snape didn't want to be the potions leader. He was wanting to run the whole division on the Dark Arts, and that's why I loved that character. He was kind of behind the scenes, kind of quiet guy that knew all the answers and everything that you would put him into, but he was like, "Just give me the guillotine; I'll handle your HR." I like that part of him. So, I don't know, I'm probably way off base, but that was my, my name.

You nailed it at the end there, right? So, so I think, Professor Snape is an example, right, of Defense Against the Dark Arts. Like if you want to be the good, the hero, the, you know, and be able to cast these spells and save the world, like you have to know what the OPFOR (opposing force) does, right? And how they attack, right? So, so teaching social engineering to your team, to yourself, is very important because then you can see when someone is attacking you, right? Because it's the whole context behind it is that these are subtle things that are built on, you know, evolved behavioral responses and cultural behavioral responses. You're exploiting the cultural code to escalate privilege.

And so, for those who don't have a background or understanding of social engineering, it breaks down into a couple things. At a high level, there's pretexting, which is creating a false identity or a scenario to gain trust and access to sensitive information. There's manipulation, which we're familiar with, right? Using psychological tricks to manipulate individuals into divulging sensitive information, maybe performing actions that compromise security. There's the concept of authority, right? And that's leveraging someone's perception of authority to get them to comply with the request, right? Interrupting a police officer or something along those lines. Urgency, right? This is a big one. This gets used a lot, and I'll make another nerd reference to this, but creating a sense of urgency or pressure to get an individual to act without fully thinking through the consequences of their actions. So this is my second nerd reference: when someone comes up to me with high urgency and a high rate of dialogue on the street, I think to myself like Captain Picard (referring to the Star Trek character), I say, "Shields up," right? And "shields" gives me mental time and space and slows down, and I shut down all of my trained cultural behavioral responses. Like they'll come up talking to me, and they'll shove out their hand for a handshake, and, you know, I put my hands up like this, right? In a non-aggressive but defensive posture because I know that they're trying to escalate privilege. We shake hands; it means that we're friends, right? On a subconscious level. So, anyways, that's urgency, right? Slow things down. Think through it. It's probably not real.

Scarcity: making an individual believe that an opportunity is limited or that they'll miss out on something valuable if they don't act quickly, right? False scarcity is used in marketing all the time. "Only two left! Get them now!" "Buy in the next five minutes!" Social proofing, right? We talked a little bit about this earlier, but using the actions of others to influence an individual's behavior, right? Like if you go to my website, the first thing I have right below my photo is all of the different articles and publications I've been in, right? Because I've had the opportunity to be in some, some large ones. And so that's social proofing. I'm drafting off of their brand value, right? And so people do this in a lot of different ways, and you have to be aware of it.

And then empathy, right? Building rapport or trust by understanding and addressing the needs and concerns of the target, right? So, you know, helping, helping you, right? And you see that a lot in abusive relationships and things like that where people start out with empathy and then they become the aggressor. And then the last one, and this is the most blunt one, but is fear, right? Creating fear, anxiety in individual to comply with a request or take action, right? So, you know, in this case, it's someone calling you on the phone and saying, "Hey, I need you to do this right now, or I'm going to get fired, and you're going to get fired, and blah, blah, blah," right? And they create both that sense of urgency and that sense of fear to get you to comply with the request. So, you know, this is a deep, deep well, but I wanted to at least cover some of the top operations.

But this is stuff that I'd like to unpack in the future episode as well because what you just talked about, yes, we would take that and write it on acetate and put it over the Tyre Nichols Caper, or put it over the Uvalde school, or put it over the Dairy Queen that closed in Gunnison a couple of years ago because their profit margins didn't meet a statistical analysis. All of this works. This is how humans are. And so those examples were tangible examples, but I think it would give a bunch more and really deep dive some of that. So it's a great topic.

Yeah, and I also love your metaphor. You know that I use television and movies because I grew up on TV and movies, and I really loved that, love reading some books. You know, we each use a metaphor, and Snape is, is like a perfect metaphor because many, many people have either known about it or at least know enough about the series where they can, where they can get into it. That's a great question. No, that, all right. Yeah, that, that's a, that's a huge one to unpack. I think that that might be a great starting point, too, for the, for the, for the next episode because we will all dress like Snape, like a YouTube site.

Well, because you know everything you brought up, can't someone can use each one of those in their own, and, and you can, well, and they're, everyone does it sometimes naturally without knowing it. Like, it meaning sometimes people do that, but there's no intent behind it. They're just, that's who they are as a person. And, and all of those things that you brought up are great indicators that people can pick up on and go, "Wait a minute, is, is this really urgent like you just said, or, or is this, is this person trying to make me think it is?" Because once you get good at identifying them, you can also, you can tell two things: you can tell the person that's trying to kind of scam you or get something over, and, and you just tell whether that person's just almost being honest, and they're just, and then you want to address their needs because it's someone that you have some sort of relationship with, right? So it's great for all of those things, and, and, uh, and, you know, that, that's something that we could, we could really go into detail about. So I love the reference in the Harry Potter reference. And, and, well, and, and, you know, Greg does the hero versus the anti-hero stuff all the time, too, and, and say, "Hey, you got to be, you know, you, you can't be Darth Vader, you got to be Luke Skywalker," right? When we teach you this stuff about...

I've never used those words, but you're exactly, that's exactly what it is.

You know, so it's, it, and that's the idea is like, you're going to, you're going to use this and understand it and then use it for for good. And also, it's funny because when you bring that stuff up, and if you get good at identifying that, you can tell when someone's literally trying to manipulate you into doing something, and then you get to call them on it and watch them turn into the Porky Pig (referring to the cartoon character).

I want to add one, one thing there, you know, and this could be my point that I wrap on, but I think that it's very important as a leader to realize that no one is the antagonist in their own narrative, right?

Here. Love it.

So, so learning to realize that this person, from their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it and you think they're the problem child right now, they believe that they're the protagonist. They're doing the right thing. And so as a leader, it's very important to listen and unpack that and try and figure out the solution, right? Great leaders sit in every chair around the table and look at the problem, right? You know, and look at it in the problem of the perspective of the person that they're observing.

Two, two things on your point, Clark, and then I'll shut up and let the smart people end this and bring it in for a landing. One, we say that in every course that we teach people: "You're not John Wick (referring to the movie character), but you see yourself as John Wick in the film that you're watching." Nobody ever pauses it and goes, "You see that guy back there busting the table across the street at that French place? That's me. I bought tables." Everybody puts them as the key players in the movies. And something you said about 45 minutes ago that really struck true with me, and I'd love to bring it up to Brian next time, is you saw, talk about everybody's going to build a better mousetrap. Well, as a company, Victor, that built one in 1897, that son of a gun still works perfectly, you know? It's a low level of sophistication, a highly organized tool, and by God, it works every day. So I'm that guy. I'm that street guy that likes to to reach back, you know, into the end of the box rather than just abandoning the box. It's been a pleasure talking to you, Clark. I know you and Brian talk all the time. You never get to talk to me because I'm the old slow one, but it's been a pleasure just talking to you and unpacking some of what you know.

Yeah, we appreciate you coming on, man. Yeah, this is, uh, I'm looking forward to part two, so we're going to have to, we're going to have to schedule that and get you back on to go into detail about some of this and answer some of the questions, too, because a lot of with the teamwork stuff, you know, we, we love, we love talking about organization as well. So I appreciate you coming on, man. Thank you so much. This is, uh, this is awesome.

Our favorite C-suite executives, yeah, both of them are listening right now. But I hope I hope that they they gain something out of this. I gained something out of every episode, and, you know, I'm available. You can find me on LinkedIn, my website, you know, I'm the opposite of OPSEC. Like if you want to test my phone number, you can find it right now. So, you know, I'm out there. I'm available, but I know Defense Against the Dark Arts. I think I'm not, I'm not dropping a challenge.

That's great. And, Brian, that's all going to be in the episode. Yeah, I'm going to put all that in that little details so they could, they could, uh, link up with you and, and get a hold of you. And, and I love your, your, uh, five-sentence email format that you got going on. You know, I, that, that's great. Everyone's got to check that out for brevity and understanding. I, I love that because that's a haiku. That's me. It's like, "Look, I'm, I want to do three to five lines on this email to explain specifically what I need because then the other end, there's no, there's, there's no other interpretation of what I mean." So I'll put all that in there so people get a hold of you. But I really appreciate you coming on, Clark. And thanks everyone for listening. You can always find out more on our Patreon site, and, oh, don't, please don't forget that training changes behavior.