504 – One of my few idols in this business: Tom interviews Mark Joyner

Episode 504 – Mark Joyner
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with Episode five hundred and four of Screw the Commute podcast, I'm here with an old old buddy of mine, Mark Joyner, and I got to tell you my favorite thing about this guy is that he is the only person on this Earth who can send me a broadcast email, and he's so good at right in the subject lines. I think it's personal and I open it up. I say, Oh man, he got me again. He's really, really, really brilliant. And they call him the father of digital marketing because he was in it way at the beginning. And that must make me the mother of something because I was in it around 93 94. I get called mother a lot, but I'm not sure they're they're referring to digital marketing, but he knows some of the people I know. I mean, my first teacher was Cory Rudl, and we all knew what was going on in those days, but he was the beginning, and I'll tell you more about him later. Hope you didn't miss episode five? Oh, three. That was Dan Janal. He's a guy not quite as prolific as Mark and writing a book in a day, but he's a editorial development editor and there are development side. I don't know. I never heard the term until he told me.

[00:01:37] But anyway, it's a kind of editor helps you get your book going pretty fast. And Mark's got books in one day. I got a book in four hours that's brought in three point sixty five million dollars as of this morning. So. So we are all about speed around here. Get it done for the for the world changes on you. All right. How'd you like me to send you big checks? Well, if you're in my referral program, just I can send you checks. Oh man. Anywhere from eight dollars and fifty cents that you can blow at Starbucks to in excess of five thousand bucks for a speaking engagement, which kind of reminds me I was at one of mark speaking engagements two or three hundred years ago in Los Angeles. I remember that that vividly. He's been a big guy in my life the whole time. And anyway, email me at Tom@screwthecommute.com. If you'd like to know about the referral stuff now, make sure you grab a copy of our podcast automation book and our business automation book. We actually figured it out a couple of years ago that it saved me seven and a half million keystrokes. Just the simple. That was just one of the tips in this book. We sell it for 27 bucks, but it's yours. Free for listening to the show, and you can ethically steal customers from people because you're lightning fast at getting back to people.

[00:02:59] So grab a copy of that at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. It's helped me handle up to one hundred and fifty thousand subscribers and sixty five thousand customers without pulling my hair out. So grab a copy of that. And while you're at it, grab a copy of our podcast app. It's screwthecommute.com/app, so you can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. Now usually tell you about my school now, but I want to delay that and talk about this legacy program. In this pilot program, I have to help with persons with disabilities. I've always thought that my training and my school, which is the only licensed dedicated internet marketing school in the country, probably the world is perfect for persons with disabilities because not only can they legitimately learn from home, they can legitimately be hired from home. And if there's one silver lining in this stupid pandemic is people are saying, Oh, we can work from home. I didn't know that, you know, but you know, the mark and myself have been preaching that for twenty five years. So help us out with this. So we're really going to change these people's lives. I've been involved in lots of charity saving animals and little kids and all kinds of stuff, but I want to change these lives permanently. And once I get the pilot program and prove the concept, I've been taking a grant writing course.

[00:04:25] I'm going to roll it out really big and help tons of people. So. So check it out at IMTCVA.org/disabilities and of course, all this and all Mark's great stuff will be in the show notes. And check out the Go Fund Me account, and we're using some of the money to hire persons with disabilities to help run the program. And it's something you can really be proud of that you assisted in. So check it out.

[00:04:49] All right, let's get to the main event. Mark Joyner is an author, inventor and a serial entrepreneur. He's currently serving as founder and CEO of Simpleology, a web application that helps people and teams get more done faster. That's what we love. Fast. He started as the first, not a first, the first e-book publishing company. I got to find out what year that was, the first online ad tracking company, the second pay per click search engine when those, you know, goofballs from Google, we're still in college. And he invented the tracking pixel, which you've heard me talk about all kinds, and I didn't even realize he had invented it. And he also started a website called Start Blaze that went to number thirty six globally within six weeks of launching with zero dollar ad budgets. So he is just an amazing guy, author of a tons of books in twenty five languages. Universities use them. Mark, are you ready to screw? The commute?

[00:05:57] You know the well, the commute.

[00:06:00] Yes, the commute, right? Just because just because you're in Thailand,

[00:06:05] You know the great Will Smith says. If you stay ready, you ain't got to get ready. So. So I came pre shaved and I'm I'm talking about my cranium.

[00:06:13] That's right. Yeah, I was going to say yes.

[00:06:15] Yeah, but that use your little comedic technique and use the pause there. So.

[00:06:19] So Mark, you're in Thailand right now, which is one of my favorite countries in the world. The people are just so sweet there. And and what are you doing lately? I've been a long time since I talk to you.

[00:06:32] Well, man, I've been doing so much, and it's great to talk to you, by the way. You and I do go way, way back and you're one of my favorite folks in this in this space. And lately I've been focusing on, you know, the primary company, Simpleology. But what's really had me excited is a new book that I wrote last year, which is all about futurism and why that's important for entrepreneurs. So I think most of us are not really aware of what's going on in the world. It's not like you can turn on the news and find out what's going on in the world anymore.

[00:07:06] Oh, sure, you can. If you turn on 800 channels and and look at 15 layers deep of what's going on, maybe then you can have some type of perspective. But for just the average person?

[00:07:18] Yeah, yeah. Even even then, you're still not sure. Right. So this this book was all about asking the question Well, what can we know with a relatively high degree of certainty? And once we have that, what are the decisions that we need to make based upon that information? And I would say in this era of not really knowing for sure what's actually going on. It's an extremely important question to ask, and it's something vital for everybody's survival. So that's that's had me quite excited over the last couple of years.

[00:07:51] Well, and how does it manifest itself? Is it a training course? I mean, it's a book, but I mean, you're always going to take it bigger than that.

[00:07:59] That's right. Well, you know, it starts out with a book and then, you know, all of your folks are marketers. So, you know, we follow a model where, you know, everybody reads the free downloadable book. It's three hundred and forty seven pages, but most people read it in a sitting or two because there's lots of cartoons in it and big type, and it's written to be easy to understand. It's very high level, deep information, right? But it's written so that you can understand this rocket, as Robert Heinlein said in Stranger in a Strange Land. So you can really, really deeply understand it quickly. And then at the end of that, you know, we give people an opportunity to go to a free webinar. And then at the end of that, we tell people, Hey, here's a here's a group that we're putting together. If you want to join this so that we can help you design a business around the techniques that we're talking about in there. Let's all get together and do it. That's the that's the basic business model there.

[00:08:55] Now I know that you didn't really hit it off real well in the in the formal education system. Is that is that they're saying they are an understatement?

[00:09:07] Well, you know, man, you're you're one of the folks who really knows the real deal about me. I mean, there are things I mean, I'm not I'm not quiet about these things. I tell these things, but most people don't really. You can say things a thousand times and it doesn't register with people. Yeah, I never really went to school. You know, I would go to school. I would leave. My parents were never able to mine to force me to go. So I didn't. And I educated myself in libraries. And, you know, we didn't have the old inner tubes back then. So, you know, when I was around the time where I thought, Well, maybe I should go to university, I realized, Oh, well, you've got to have a high school diploma for that. So I tested out of that and I scored higher than they give you a ranking on that. And I got I scored higher than like ninety nine point nine percent of the graduating seniors. So I thought, Well, that's good. No, nothing lost there since I didn't go to high school and then I quit, quit university, joined the military and used independent study. The military has a great educational opportunities, and I was able to sort of piece together an independent study degree through some of the programs there and that that suited me a lot better because I don't really like classrooms. I would love to be in one of York. I don't know if you still do your but camps, you do. Yeah, yeah, I would. I would love to be in an environment like that. But most school environments I have found to be excruciatingly intolerable. So I'm very largely a self-educated guy.

[00:10:30] Yeah, and I actually bought the domain name recently. Mark highly educated idiots.

[00:10:38] Outstanding. Excellent. I think I would. I would be at home there.

[00:10:42] Well, the thing is is, I sit here, you know, I work from home, of course, and sit here all day. And let's take the COVID. For instance, I'll be watching TV all day and 10 highly credentialed doctors will be on during the course of a day. Yeah. Four of them say one thing. Four of them say the exact opposite. And two of them say, Oh, I don't really know. Yeah, what's the person supposed to think?

[00:11:12] Yeah, I would trust the I don't really know guy.

[00:11:14] Yeah, exactly

[00:11:16] The the other eight guys are propagandists, right?

[00:11:18] Exactly.

[00:11:19] Yeah.

[00:11:21] Tell, tell us about the the the the term astroturfing. Explain that to everybody.

[00:11:28] Oh man, I love this already. Yeah, you're going into the good stuff. So astroturf is something that's actually been going on for a very long time, but it's only become better known in the last few years. In fact, you know, back in the early days, in the early nineties, when you and I were starting to mess around with this stuff, it was happening back then. But basically, the idea is this if you know, I used to work in the intelligence community that was part of my job in the military and the U.S. Army. And you know, we had it's all grouped together under an umbrella called information operations, right? And basically, if you can control the flow of information, you can control what people believe. And if you can control what people believe, you can control their behavior. And astroturfing is a way of owning all of the ways that people can find information. So, for example. I one of the and I'll be careful to phrase this in a way that's not going to get people's political hackles up too much, I want to speak to all of the humans in the room. So, you know, something that we can all agree on probably is that if we're being deceived, we should. We probably have the right to know that right? And governments, interest groups?

[00:12:49] Well, that's right. And the ability is two different things. Yes, right, to know that you're being deceived.

[00:12:56] Well, we so this topic here is going to help grant people part of the ability. This is the beginning of an education that needs to last everybody's whole life, and this is what will enable people to be able to correctly get information now or at least to know what to think of the information that they get. So if you go to Google and you type in a search, you would think, Well, OK, Google is going to do their little magic secret source algorithm and sprinkle some truth just on everything. And the result that I get is going to be right. But that's not the case because there are people out there deliberately manipulating the results of the search so that if you try to find a particular answer, you know it will lean in a particular direction. And I'll give I'll give an example that goes way back in history that will not were considered to be, Hey, maybe OK, right? There was an effort to control the information about the dangers of cigarettes put forth by Shocker the tobacco wing. Yeah, right, right. And you know, some of us who are old enough may remember the congressional testimony where they have all of these doctors there. Nothing really, you know? Yeah, yeah, the cigarettes cause cancer. No, absolutely not. Next, doctor. Absolutely not. That was an early form of astroturf because they knew that the primary way that people were getting information was through the news. So now an astroturf campaign will control news sources. It will control magazine articles. It will control search results. It will control Wikipedia. And it's exceedingly difficult to find information that disagrees with a particular point of view. If the people who benefit from that point of view are putting money into controlling all of these sources of information, and it's exceedingly effective in brainwashing people.

[00:14:48] Yeah, and it's I wonder what the derivation of the word is like blanketing something or what?

[00:14:55] Well, it's like from, you know, when you're on a football field, they don't use real grass anymore. We use this stuff called astroturf, right? So it's like, Hey, let's lay down this this fake grass on the turf everywhere, right? Let's cover the whole field with this fake grass. And it's kind of a beautiful metaphor because it is largely fake grass that they're that they're laying out.

[00:15:18] One of my favorite things is when somebody gets exposed and and I'll use Monsanto as it in Roundup The Weed Killer. So the guy won two percent. Yeah, they were saying, Oh yeah, you could drink this stuff. And so they had the CEO on it. Did you ever see that clip? It's on. It's on. I sure did.

[00:15:38] He said, Well, I hey, I've got some right here. Well, I'm not an idiot.

[00:15:43] Oh, just we are for listening to you is how it is.

[00:15:46] That's right. Exactly. Well, that guy, by the way, he's a professional propagandist. He's not only the user, right?

[00:15:55] Well, he so he is actually. He's been hired by a whole bunch of other people to be a mouthpiece for four different forms of advocacy. That's the really funny thing about this and these these people are pretty brazen, you know, like Monsanto will, you know, I know there are people out there who are probably like, Oh, you know, I heard some scientists say that GMOs are perfectly safe and you're an anti-science zealot if you don't believe that. Well, dig a little bit. But that's not the science.

[00:16:24] I mean, jeez.

[00:16:25] That's right. That's right. And unfortunately, we have an environment right now where if you do question these things, part of the astroturfing campaign is convincing the people who believe that the journalism of today is real journalism, that anybody who disagrees is some kind of an anti-science, uneducated rube conspiracy to be shunned from society. Yeah, it's a conspiracy theorist. Yeah. And by the way, that that that term, if you just think about it, is absurd. Their history is a history of conspiracies. You know, you don't you don't have a war without a conspiracy, you know, so that the fact that that phrase is a pejorative should be a pretty red flag to any thinking person.

[00:17:09] Well, yeah, I saw a T-shirt the other day. It says it says I need more conspiracy theories because all the ones I had came true.

[00:17:18] That's right. Well, that's the funny thing. Yeah. And there's a tremendous amount of truth to that. There's so many things that were anathema to believe 20 years ago that we all kind of know for

[00:17:29] An hour, 20 minutes ago. I mean, one thing you know, that couldn't possibly come. Oh, I heard this one guy who's the head of something, the NHS or something, and they manipulate the figures, he said. Oh yeah, this one thing is three times worse than this other thing, except they were one was zero point zero three and one was zero point zero. Nine out of a million people. So he says, yeah, it's three times worse out of an all, still almost nothing. And he, well, you know, just crazy stuff.

[00:18:04] Well, Twain said there are lies, damned lies and statistics, and another great quote is, you know, give me a an idea and I can find the statistics to support it. Right, right, right. And here's another thing I was actually going to do a little cartoon about this today. In fact, know people say, well, the science says, and that should be an immediate red flag. Because if you know anything about science, the science is not some monolithic quorum where all of the scientists get together and go, Yep, this is the truth. Let's all agree. No, I mean, you've got different people doing different forms of research, and there's evidence that has different levels of quality. So the science is rarely, you know, in lockstep agreement. In fact, you know, there's only a few things that we can have that level of certainty about. The Newton's laws are probably about the only thing, but we even know context now where Newton's laws, Newton's laws don't apply. So when people say the science says, you know, it should be shields up because the propaganda photons are inbound.

[00:19:11] Yeah, and yeah, you said Newton's laws, that's the physics stuff, but I mean, even the the parts of the world, the periodic table, you know, maybe there's two or three behind it somewhere? I don't know.

[00:19:23] Well, check it out. So it's funny you say that. So there is this is one of the things that I talk about in your roadmap to money in the twenty twenties. You know, there is a revolution going. So let me ask you this Tom. So have you heard of something called graphene?

[00:19:38] Yeah, because it can make a bulletproof vest out of it.

[00:19:43] Nice. Ok, so you're you're one of like one out of about ten thousand people that knows what graphene is. Ok, so this is this is kind of a great Segway into the top. What I think is like the grand topic of the day, right? And so graphene is actually a small slice of a larger phenomenon called the nano material revolution. And it actually is exactly what you're talking about. We know now that behind the periodic table, like you can peel that back and there's another one and another one and another one and another one. So I mean, so and just so people know people who don't aren't familiar with graphene. It's basically pencil lead and it's not lead. As such, it's graphite, which is carbon. And if you take carbon down to a single atomic layer, the behavioral properties of that component that we call graphene are totally different from everyday carbon. And it's one hundred times the tensile strength of steel, one tenth the weight. It can be a room temperature superconductor of electricity, which is enormous. And this is going to transform everything. Graphene is starting to make its way into commercial devices. And this is something that's changing the very fabric of our existence. And the average person, like really literally one out of ten thousand people even know that this is happening. And the larger phenomenon here is that the information explosion is so intense, is so fast paced and is so vast that we're experiencing a paradigm shift almost every day now. And these paradigm shifts are occurring and you can't be aware of them because you don't have time to keep up. This is a really, really serious problem.

[00:21:25] Well, yeah, I mean, people think, you know, the old stuff was, yeah, you got stuff in your hand that's more powerful than the Apollo, you know, spaceship, but I mean, that's times 10 million now or a trillion in the short time that that quote came out.

[00:21:44] That's right. That's right. Well, and that the rate at which those things are improving is speeding up as well. You know, and the way I like to kind of dumb all of this down and I don't want to dumb it. I'm not saying dumb it down because people are dumb.

[00:21:56] You should, because we don't. We're not big thinkers here like you.

[00:22:00] Well, you know, I think every everybody doesn't have the time to think. I mean, you know, you've got to wake up and do what you got to do to to to to work whatever your work is. And then you've got to take care of your family and do all of these.

[00:22:15] Even if you did nothing all day, you couldn't keep up. If that was your job to keep up. You couldn't. Absolutely.

[00:22:22] You know, so you know, I'll give you a really interesting something to put this in perspective. So to two points that I would like to make. It should give everybody like a kind of a holy crap moment. And so the first one is so I mean, what's a paradigm shift, right? I mean, to give people an example of a paradigm shift in how enormous that is when we discovered or invented agriculture that change the very fabric of our existence. So people would say that without agriculture, there would be no civilization. And do you think about it? If you look at the Latin root of the word civilization, it comes from Key West, the Latin word key west, which means city. So without agriculture, we don't have cities because there's no way for people to to settle down and to to organize like that. Now that's. Think about that. We went from being hunter-gatherers to, you know, forming cities, and those cities turned into what we now know of as civilization.

[00:23:18] We're experiencing some of them, not all of them.

[00:23:21] Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah. Some remain uncivil or they're going back to being uncivilized.

[00:23:29] That's right. That's right. Yes, some are depressing, right? Yeah. And some some may be digressing, but under the guise of progress, right? Right. But but you know, if you think about that right, you know, we're experiencing paradigm shifts every single day and we don't even know that they're happening. So, I mean, really, really think about that, you know, the world is changing so fast that there are fundamentally life changing discoveries or inventions happening every single day. And you can't even keep track of how many of these things are happening and to really to put this in terms that everybody can understand. Simply, everything is getting what I call the big five phenomena right faster, smaller, more powerful, more available and cheaper, faster, smaller, more powerful, more available and cheaper. And here's so here's the sort of the crescendo that I want to build up to. So if that's happening in every industry, what makes you think that's not going to happen to weapons technology?

[00:24:32] Yeah. I just want everybody. Printing nukes pretty soon.

[00:24:37] Well, boom, you see, this is why I love talking with you Tom here so fast, right? I mean, that's in fact one of the one of the big points that I make in the book is like, OK, we have 3-D printable automatic weapons now. And by the way, the governments say the way we're going to handle that is is outlaw that. Yeah. Good luck with that, pal, because that works so well with the outlawing of pirated digital content. And so, yeah, we have three dependable automatic weapons. How far will it be before we have 3D printable weapons of mass destruction? I don't think we're that far away. And I think we really need to be seriously thinking about that.

[00:25:11] Well, there's some politicians I would give them that that coin them with that term right now.

[00:25:18] Weapons, yeah, right. There are weapons

[00:25:20] Of mass destruction. I mean, and most of them see the problem is, is some of this, you know, all this stuff that we have to keep up with. People with bad intentions can slide in things when we're not looking, you know, and do a lot of bad things.

[00:25:37] Absolutely. Absolutely, and that's what we have to understand is that at the end of the day, if we don't deal with the the will to cause harm to other people. On some fundamental level, I mean, it's only going to take one really unhappy, disgruntled dude or do debt to blow the whole thing up if you've got three to be printable weapons of mass destruction. It really comes down to that, and that's these are the fundamental questions that we should be thinking about, but the news media has us thinking about all sorts of inconsequential things, most of which are not even true. So we really need to rethink how we're organizing ourselves right now, I would say.

[00:26:24] Yeah, and people are afraid and a quote that you said at some point in your life or some book fear is not a good state of mind, but ill preparedness isn't either.

[00:26:37] Hmm. Absolutely. Well, you know, there's this thing called the Stockdale Paradox. Admiral Stockdale was a fighter pilot in the Vietnam War. He got shot down. He was a P.O.W. and he made this really interesting paradoxical observation about the behavior of POW. And what he found was that the guys who were surviving the P.O.W. camps had this paradoxical combination of optimism and realism. The guys who were the pure optimist didn't make it. The guys who were the pure realist didn't make it right. The pure optimists couldn't solve the problems in front of them because they were just like, You know, I'm just going to click my heels and wish I was back in Kansas. And that, of course, does not work. And then the realists who don't have the optimism, they're like, Oh, this is horrible, I got to get out of here. And then they would like, I got to make a break for it and then they'd get shot, you know? But the guys who had that combination of optimism and realism tended to be the guys who survived that, you know, just horrific situation that they were all in. And I think that that's what we need.

[00:27:40] Stockdale was a what a general or something.

[00:27:43] Well, he ended up becoming an admiral. He started out when he when he was a P.O.W., he was, I think, a Navy lieutenant. But then, yeah, he went on to become an admiral and he was actually Ross Perot's running mate for for president.

[00:27:58] Yeah, I always wished Ross Perot or at least a businessperson would have had a chance way back to just see how it goes. And then we had one. Yeah, they ran him up out of there.

[00:28:09] Well, it's funny, you know, I mean, you know, you'd want to put people who actually know how to run things in charge of running things.

[00:28:16] Yeah, exactly right.

[00:28:18] Yeah, yeah. Now we've got these high level intellectuals. You don't really know much of anything, highly educated idiots.

[00:28:25] That's what I said. Highly educated idiot that a lot of them.

[00:28:28] My my favorite general quote is Mad Dog Mattis. I think it's be polite and be professional and be ready to kill everybody you meet.

[00:28:40] Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, you know, I'm a pacifist in a way like, I, you know, there's an old saying that nothing nobody hates war more than a warrior, you know? And I, you know, I've seen ugly things and I would never want to inflict violence on anybody. But at the same time, I'm not operating under the illusion that there are people out there who do not mean well. And you know, if you're not ready to handle that, life is going to kick you in the teeth. So you've got to you've got to prepare yourself.

[00:29:11] Yeah, it's getting worse in many, many cities with the Defund the Police movement. And again, I told you before we started, I could take a any farmer from my little hometown and put them in in a city council or something, and they'd make better decisions than these high muckety mucks. I mean, OK, take take all the police away and then see what happens to crime. Oh, it's going to rise. Oh no, it won't. It'll be. They'll they'll love each other. We'll give them a psychiatrist and they won't shoot them.

[00:29:43] That's right. That's right. I don't I don't think our psychiatry has evolved to that point, right? Yeah, it would be nice. I mean, it's a it's a lovely notion.

[00:29:52] They should get one of those Havana machines you hear about, you know, the that thing. We're no well, people are all these. People in the government are getting these headaches and disoriented. Yes, when I think it's called the Havana Project or something like that, but yeah, that's what we need to get that just get a big riot, hit him with one of those everybody, you know, trips and falls and then we drive on. You don't have to run. Well, you know,

[00:30:23] I've got a family who's pretty high up in government and military. And you know, when I was in McClain, Virginia, you know that city? I mean, that's where I live today. Yeah, OK. Right. So, you know, you know what McClain's all about, right? I mean, basically, it's like, you know, like that's the highest concentration of high level folks, right? You know, in terms of the power structure of the United States. And I talked to some folks who were like, Yeah, I know somebody who suddenly came down with these headaches. And I mean, that was a real thing. Yeah, it's weird, man. I mean, who knows who or what, who wasn't. And now all the the UFO stuff is coming out now and say, Oh, yeah, we've known about this for a long time. All these pilots were afraid to talk about it, but that's coming to light. And I think it's my opinion is awful, arrogant to think that we are the only life form and how pitiful that is if we are. Because when you said that arrogance is really a recurring theme, isn't it? Yeah, because there is this arrogance that that we are presented by the people in power that we are supposed. We're expected to crowd out to kowtow to and just bow to and believe, and they make so many arrogant statements like, Hey, this is the fact this is what science says again, which is a tremendously hubristic statement to make. And most people, I don't know, I don't really know that it's most people, but it seems that many people are conditioned to just accept that truth, and it goes back to a powerful psychological principle that's really well supported in the scientific literature. And that's this phenomenon of obedience to authority. We use heuristics shortcuts to make decisions when we're faced with overwhelming information, and one of the shortcuts we use is just to obey authority figures. Because I mean, hey, they're they're in charge.

[00:32:25] They use social engineering like that. All the fraudsters do, they can. They can. They can put a clipboard on and walk into a secure building because everybody thinks they ought to be there, you know, or they could put a brown uniform on and oh, they must be delivering a package, you know? So that's right. It's yeah, and it's based in that and not that that's an authority thing, but it's a symbol of something that it's called functional fixing this. You think one thing is one thing and it could be any number of other things?

[00:32:57] Well, give it another whirl. An interesting example of that. I know you know this in some of the audience may maybe not. But if they don't, this is super good to have in your mental furniture.

[00:33:08] Stanley Milgram is not IKEA. This is not IKEA where you got to put it together. This is not IKEA.

[00:33:14] Yeah, right? Well, yeah, furniture is probably not the best metaphor. It should be in your toolkit, right? You can. You can whip this tool out and use it in any number of ways.

[00:33:24] Yes, I love whipping my tool. Absolutely.

[00:33:26] I do, too. I do, too, I must admit. So, you know, Stanley Milgram conducted this experiment where, you know, in scientific experiments, we have what are called confederates. These are people who are pretending to be something that they're not. And sometimes the test subject doesn't know that he's actually a test subject. He thinks that he's participating as a Confederate in the experience when actually he's the subject, right? And they put a guy in a room in front of a whole bunch of buttons. It was a control panel. And then in the other room, you know, there was a guy who was strapped up in something that looked akin to an electric chair.

[00:34:06] Oh yeah, this is yeah, you've heard this one, right?

[00:34:09] Yeah, of course. And it had it had buttons that go from one to 10 and then X Double and Triple X. And these were administering electric shocks and then a guy would come in in a lab coat with that, you know, the clipboard in the lab coat. You know, that official looking thing. And he would say, Hey, I'm going to ask the test subject and experiment. And if he gets the question wrong, I want you to administer an increasing level of electric shocks. And you know, the guy would keep administering electric shocks until it got to a point where it was quite clear that he was about to kill the guy and the the the fake doctor in the lab coat with the clipboard would say, Hey, we take full responsibility, just administer the shot. And I think something around 60 to 70 percent of the people would actually administer the clearly fatal electric shock to the person in the other room, just because the authority figure told them that it was OK and they were taking. Possibility that that should make everyone take pause.

[00:35:05] Well, you know, I was it was actually a psych major in college, and I think they kicked me out of the program because I really liked those kinds of experiments. But yes, let do.

[00:35:18] That's right. That's right. Well, as marketers, now we get the license to experiment on everyone.

[00:35:22] So that's yeah, so. So you've developed a concept of nine great threats. Can you give us a couple of them and how they apply to us?

[00:35:35] Oh, OK. Awesome. So so Tom has gone through your roadmap to money in the twenty twenty, so. So the threats are so to put it in context, we we really need to understand that that the threats as we as we think of them usually are not the way most people would think about them, right? You know, when most people think of threats, what we think about is we think about like, OK, there's going to be war, there's going to be

[00:36:08] This or I got to go to the gas station. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Keeping up with the U.S. news over there in Thailand, I am.

[00:36:18] I am. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got to make sure I don't get knocked out by the knockout game, right? That's right. Well, you know, now my biggest threat that I'm afraid of is I've got to turn on the news. Yeah, yeah. So these these threats are. They're a little bit subtle, some of them, right, so one of the threats that I think is the most probably the fundamentally most important to understand is this grand choice that we have between the centralization and decentralization of power. And the framers of the Constitution were were very, very prescient in the way that they structured things. And what they seemed to understand was that when you centralize power, it can be a great thing. I mean, imagine if you were to centralize all of the power of the world. One could say, Well, hey, that's going to end all World War. Well, that's that's true. But we've got to understand that demo side. That's and that's, you know, death by government has killed more people than all wars, by orders of magnitude. If you look at the greatest mass murderers in history and in order, that would be Mao, Stalin and Hitler, right? Mao and Stalin killed far more than Hitler. Most people are not aware of that. Most of these deaths were not the extermination of the enemy. Most of them were killing their own people. Most of the people that Mao killed were his own people. You know, people know about the history of the Cultural Revolution.

[00:37:54] That was a pretty, pretty ugly, bloody thing. And that was, you know, citizens instigated by the government to go kill other citizens because they demonized other people and any resemblance to things going on in the world today. I take no responsibility for it. So we have to decide, are we going to centralize power? Are we going to decentralize it? And the U.S. Constitution said, Hey, we're going to have different individual states. These were not provinces, these were states. They were actually considered to be sovereign nations of their own right. And these individual states should have if we're going to use the Constitution the way it was intended to be, you know, more or less total control over how they organize themselves and the federal government should be a loose confederation of these states that gets together only when an existential threat. Demands it. So if we if we're to centralize power completely, this amplifies everything and, you know, humans make mistakes that will amplify the mistakes that we make. And right now there is a grand push to centralize everything. And that should scare the crap out of everybody because historically speaking, every time we have had higher and higher degrees of centralization, we have had higher and higher degrees of corruption and destruction. So this is this is a very fundamentally important choice that we've got to to face right now. So that's one of the big nine threats is that the the term monopoly of force is that what that applies to?

[00:39:43] So we're not exactly so well, monopoly of force is part of it, right? So right now, governments have a monopoly of force and that actually is kind of a nice segue into one of the other threats. You know, it's something that I call the transition tribulation is what we were talking about before with the rapid proliferation of high powered technology. Right now, governments of the world have a monopoly of force because they own the most powerful weapons. They control the largest users exercisers of force in the world. But what happens when we have a black swan technological event that puts something tremendously destructive in the hands of everybody at a low level? That monopoly of force no longer exists in the hands of government, and that can be good in some sense when we have corrupt governments. This is why the Second Amendment is in place. Most people are not aware that the Second Amendment is is they're primarily not so you can hunt, but so that you can take down a corrupt government. So removing the monopolistic monopoly of force is good. But if the monopoly of force enables more destructive forces in a decentralized way, that can create chaos as well. So these are these are not easy challenges to solve. All right. That are thinking of the past is not going to solve these, these new threats, but that's where the monopoly of force comes in. And that's the ninth of the nine threats, by the way.

[00:41:17] Yeah. Yeah, I can't wait to hear about the rest of them. So we've got to take a brief sponsor break. When we come back, we're going to ask Mark to tell us a little bit how military concepts can affect our marketing as he's he's been deep into the military arena when he says military intelligence. I always kind of snicker a little bit, but but you know the oxymoron thing. But yeah, he's got some very interesting ideas on how military concepts can help us in marketing. Of course, that's what we want to do, so we can screw that commute. So, so my I just want to remind everybody again about this program I'm so excited about because the people in it are three people so far. Out of the five we're putting through are just making great progress and two of them are blind. If you want to cry the Blues and say, Oh, you know, I can't get any success. Go watch their update. videos that go fund me and see what people that are blind are doing with internet stuff. You could. It's just very inspirational. So we have the the chance to help these people that kind of got handed a dealt a hand that most of us have not had to deal with. And it's just very inspirational and you can be part of changing their lives forever and really, really would love to have your help with this. So visit IMTCVA.org. Maybe we'll get Mark to gather up, you know, put out a tin cup out in Thailand and grab some bought and throw it over here. That's not bot, by the way, folks.

[00:42:58] Yeah, that's right.

[00:43:01] But anyway, IMTCVA.org/disabilities and they go over and watch their videos. That'll really inspire you.

[00:43:09] All right, let's get back to the main event. Mark Joyner's here. He's one of the most I would say my idol and everybody's idols on the internet that have got half a brain because he started a lot of the things that we enjoy and use today. I don't invent anything. I never had an original thought. My whole life. And this guy, he's I just use this stuff that the guys like Mark invented. In fact, Facebook uses something that Mark invented. Google uses something Mark invented, and he's the real deal. So in this military thing, though, you were in a compartmentalized part of the intelligence community. I guess I don't know if you heard about this some guy just and his wife were selling Russian or selling them submarine technology to the FBI. And just they're there. They won't see them. They won't see the light of day for a while forever. But tell us a couple of the the military concepts that we can apply to our marketing.

[00:44:15] Well, I want before I even answer that, I want to just kind of applaud you for some of the things here, you're asking such great questions. You're you're researching. You obviously research your guests. And while you and I know each other quite well and you're asking super intelligent questions, and I love that you have this philanthropic angle of the stuff that you're doing. And I think this is how we need to be showing up as people. You know, most people don't realize that the well-being of everyone is kind of a an international security issue at this point, you know? And if we think about this big five phenomena and about how they can apply to weapons technology, we've really got to take the notion that, hey, you know, people who are really hurting can be a serious threat to everyone we can't really turn. It's not. It's no longer an option to turn a blind eye to people that are suffering anymore, and you seem to get that. So I just want to give you the hat for that.

[00:45:10] Thank you. And was that a hidden pun there? The blind? Which one? The blind? The two people are blind in the eye.

[00:45:22] That was not intentional. I know I might get canceled for that.

[00:45:26] Not by me.

[00:45:28] Yeah, I know, right? Yeah. Certainly not by you. So, you know, so it's man, it's such a great question about these military tactics. You know, I wrote about this in the book Mind Control Marketing years ago. And, you know, most people remember the psychological principles. Most people don't remember the military principles. They're both equally important and interesting as far as I'm concerned. One of the ones that's really interesting that I think is easier to grasp for folks. Is this thing that came from the the art of war? We in English, we call them Sun Tzu and Chinese, it's actually synthesize how you pronounce it. So in Korean is how they say it on the the students up in the Sun Tzu's Art of War. One of the things that he talks about is this notion of types of ground upon which a battle can occur. And one of the types of well too that are very interesting for marketers. Our heavy ground and deadly ground and deadly ground is the absolute worst place upon which a battle can occur. And in fact, this is what most people think of as combat. But in the art of war, it would be considered to be a leadership failure to allow such a battle to occur. In fact, most people don't know the art of war is really about winning without blood, if you can possibly do it. And again, nobody deplores war more than a warrior. And if you're a good, responsible combat commander, you want to be able to subdue the enemy with the least amount of bloodshed. So deadly ground is when two forces. Meet on a battlefield from which there is no escape. I would ask you Tom, and ask all the listeners to consider who do you think is going to win such a battle? You know, if you've got two forces that meet on a ground and there's no way for them to escape and the only way to get through this thing is to fight. Who do you who do you think is going to win?

[00:47:35] Oh, I know the answer. Well, Taliban.

[00:47:43] I love it. I love it. Well, I mean, you're you're a guy who studies this stuff. Do you understand this right? I mean, you know, the the guy that it's going to tend to be the case. Ninety nine times out of one hundred the person who has the most power. Right. That's the most strength, the most skill. The best combination of that is going to win that right? If you've got equally trained troops and you got three hundred on one side and 10 on the other, you know, the three hundred, yeah,

[00:48:09] Is going to win. Except don't tell that to George Washington.

[00:48:13] Yeah, that's right. Well, so that's the thing, right? There are there are exceptions to this, but one would say that when like if you look at the movie, three hundred. Right? I mean, those those are soldiers who were probably better trained. They also had a greater motivation. They were using terrain in ways that were very advantageous. So they had some strategic advantages, but it only gave them an edge for so long. Right? You know, so but I mean, all things other, everything else being equal, the more powerful force is going to tend to win. This is why in the military, by the way, in the U.S. military, we tend to want to have a three to one advantage before we even bite off an engagement. And if we're being smart, we use different ways to prevent that engagement from occurring in the first place. So deadly ground is highly undesirable. You want to be able to train to fight in deadly ground, but you don't want to fight in deadly ground if you can avoid it at all. So another ground upon which a battle can occur is something called heavy ground, and that's where you you go deep into enemy territory and you launch a surprise attack. And of course, that's going to give you an enormous advantage, this is, you know, the special operations guys are really, really good at sneaking in and just like surprise.

[00:49:32] You know, you're going to wake up and all your toys are gone. Yeah, you won't wake up or you'll wake up to find that all of your toys are gone and that you don't really have a chance and you'd better surrender, right? And to give it a nice metaphor about this, I mean, imagine what a three year, three year old girl tries to fight on, and this is a horrible, horrible metaphor. I apologize. But a three year old girl tries to fight Arnold Schwarzenegger, right? And this is this is not going to get really crass and ugly here. But but it kind of makes the point clear. You know, clearly, Arnold is not going to have much of a problem with that, but any three year old kid with a gun can sneak up on Arnold Schwarzenegger and take them out. That's the difference between deadly ground and heavy ground. I mean, you don't have to be the bigger foe to win. You've got to. This is what the art of war is all about. It's figuring out ways to find advantages that are not obvious. Now for and I apologize to everybody for using such crass metaphors, but you know, it makes it unforgettable.

[00:50:32] They know me, so they won't even notice.

[00:50:34] They won't even notice. Yeah, right, right. We can go there, right? This is the Dave Chappelle of Education. So now we can use that metaphorically. And by the way, I never studied marketing. When I first got into business, I was just using what I learned about psychology and about military strategy and tactics metaphorically to to formulate these things. And I created a playbook that worked. And that was it was kind of cool. And so one of the things that we can think about is this if you imagine who has more power between a salesman and a consumer, right? You know, clearly the consumer has more power. He can always just very easily say, no, you know, so we have to get an asymmetric advantage. We've got to think like a guerrilla warrior. So if we go right in front of somebody's face and we say, Hey, I want to sell you, it's going to be very, very hard to sell because the consumer has more power. So one way that we can apply this metaphorically, is if you look at advertorial as a format and we see this, we see hybrids and variations of this in modern marketing now. But advertorial is kind of like a heavy ground attack because people read it and they feel like they're just reading an article. And you know, that article starts to get deep into the territory of their unconscious mind. They've let their guards down before you launch the surprise attack of Hey, here's the offer. Right? So advertorial, depending on the context, of course. Eugene Schwartz has lots of, you know, counterexamples to this right. But more often than not, an advertorial is going to tend to outperform a lot of direct sales messages again, depending on context, because you're you've got the the consumer letting their guard down first.

[00:52:31] Yeah, I mean, I was taught that in 1996 I took a I don't know if you remember. I know you remember Cory Rudl, you know, he died in a tragic racing accident, but he was my first mentor. And he looked at one, you know, I have this wake him up professional speaking system. It was like, I don't know, a thousand fifteen hundred bucks. And I had this big picture at the top of the page and and he looked at, he says, Tom get that picture the heck off the page. He says, you're a smart guy. He says, is it better to show them the benefits and get in their head before you show them an expensive product where they're going to scroll to the bottom of the page and say, Oh man, I don't want this for $500 and leave. And so I wrote an advertorial under his direction and I wrote and I left the regular sales letter with the picture. The advertorial sold four times as many thousand products as the the one with the picture. They didn't even know what they were getting until it showed up on their porch, you know, so absolutely very powerful.

[00:53:34] Absolutely, yeah, that's a great example. You know, I talked to Corey like three days before that happened. Oh God, man. Yeah, yeah, what a what a great guy he was. He made so many great contributions to this field.

[00:53:47] So, so that's military concept to go to the heavy ground manner and stay out of the deadly ground because your chances are a lot slimmer.

[00:54:00] That's indeed indeed. Yeah.

[00:54:02] Well, gee, Mark has been so great catching up with you, man. How did they find all your stuff?

[00:54:08] Well, so, you know, I'm the kind of guy who I never liked to give more than one call to action, and by the way, that's a really good. And there's so many things I would love to share with everyone,

[00:54:17] And that's because he knows how to sell stuff in three seconds. He's got a book on that irresistible offer. So I. Oh, excuse me, excuse me, three seconds or less or less?

[00:54:29] That's right. That's right. Oh, that's a whole other conversation. That's a lot of fun. And you know, the one thing that I would direct people to do, which I think is probably, you know, if you don't check out any of my other stuff, I would just implore everyone to read your roadmap to money in the twenty twenties, which you can find at your roadmap to money, your roadmap to money because that information in there is going to help you know what's going on in the world right now with a level of depth that almost no one has but desperately needs right now to not only survive as a business, but to survive. I mean, really as a human being, I think the information in there is stuff that if we had an unbroken educational system, this is the kind of stuff that we would be teaching to kids. And it's the kind of stuff that the media would be talking about, but is not talked about at all. And it desperately needs to be understood and again know it's very easy. Even though these are some high level concepts, I make them very easy to understand with metaphors and diagrams and all of that, and it's a breeze to go through, and I would just encourage everyone to really take that seriously, take the time to sit down and read it because it will equip you to survive in ways that the rest of the world is not equipping you right now.

[00:55:51] Yourroadmaptomoney.com. And what do you mean? The educational system is broken. They're teaching martial arts MMA classes and having matches it at board meetings now.

[00:56:03] That's right. That's right. Yeah. Well, you know, we've got trans people teaching three year olds reading them stories now. And, you know, not that I have anything against trans folks, but I dunno if we should have them, you know, teaching three year olds reading stories.

[00:56:18] Well, the big, the big thing, the big fight and Loudon County was that a trans person raped a nine year old girl and then the father gets arrested. And then now the school boards are saying, we got to get the Patriot Act after these people that the school boards from that one incident, you know, so it's crazy. I'm glad I don't have any. I don't want to say dogs in the fight. I but but I don't have any kids.

[00:56:46] But yeah, I don't either.

[00:56:47] I don't need to bring a child into the world nowadays. But as long as you're around to figure everything out for us and you know, because you've been so good at predicting the future, I think you should just start a nine hundred line. You know, like, that's Madam Madam Marker or

[00:57:08] So I have. I heard a funny joke about that. We can end this, you know, the psychic friends network. Yeah, how come they didn't? How come they didn't know they were going to go bankrupt? Exactly.

[00:57:19] So folks, I know this has been a little bit different episode, but you were talking to like the one of the most respected marketers in the world. And then we also had mark on to that perfect setup. But really, I wanted you to hear some of the the deepness that he's able to go and and it's helped. So I mean, literally thousands of marketers around the world with his teaching. So there's plenty of stuff that will help you in your business. So go over and grab that your roadmap to money. Mark, Hey, why don't you come back and we'll talk about the irresistible offer one of these days?

[00:58:02] I would absolutely love to you, man, you're a great guy, and I want to advise all of your listeners, keep listening to this dude. You're listening to one of the one of the only real deals out there, all kidding aside, so to keep tuning in.

[00:58:12] All right. Thanks, everybody. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.

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