Secret Agent (Evy Poumpouras): Never Be Yourself At Work! Authenticity Is Quietly Sabotaging You! - Evy Poumpouras

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/8b4c4c9501eb517c

Don't bring your authentic self to work.
I want your professional self. You can bring authentic self to Thanksgiving meal with your family if you'd like to. Your authentic self is about who?
Me, me, me, me, me. Everything is what's happening to me. What's in it for me. Do you know that you impact other people, you affect other people's lives, you make the work environment easier?
Or more taxing?
So I've been around former SEALs, US Secret Service, presidents, and I learned a lot about communication, reading people, confidence, and I'll share these things. So first of all, Ebi Pomporas is the former U.S. Secret Service agent. From guarding presidents to reading liars, she now reveals the strategies she used to make anyone respect you, trust you, and give you what you
What I've been around very confident people and they had a really good circle around them inner circle because if you're exposing yourself to people in environments that are not good for you, that will actually impact your life negatively. You know, I always say be careful who you try to save, some people will drown you. And then the other thing I would see presidents do is they were very good at delegating, so they didn't need to know everything.
Because confident people are okay with not knowing all the information. So your brain is like a bathtub. The bathtub can only hold so much water. If you keep putting water in the bathtub, it's gonna overflow. That's your cognitive load. My bathtub only holds the water it needs to hold in. And another thing that the Secret Service taught us is that it's really important to use your hands. Because when people don't see
See hands, it's a sign of untrustworthiness. Like you can't trust them. So when you see hands, open hands, I'm no threat.
And then there's communication skills, manipulation tactics, and a strategy to make good decisions. And I will go through them. But the two most important things are
Just give me thirty seconds of your time.
Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us, and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place.
But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started.
And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the twenty four percent of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app.
Here's a promise I'm gonna make to you. I'm gonna do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're gonna deliver the guest that you want me to speak to, and we're gonna continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show.
Thank you.
Uh
What is the overarching theme of why people you think are drawn to y your particular message and
What part of that message are they drawn to?
I get
Bombarded.
On all social media platforms.
and an email and it's always like every I have this problem
Please help me, and it can range from
I have a problem communicating to I'm in an abusive relationship, to my brother was murdered.
And they're saying it's a suicide, it's not. So I get everything.
And I think what I'm seeing is
There are a lot of people that are not doing well.
It seems to me that
That people are tired.
Of being told that they have no control over the outcome of their lives and no control over the relationships. Cause when you tell people it's not your fault this happened to you.
And it's okay that you're this way, which it is
I think people
Don't want to stay there anymore.
And so
People look to I don't have to
I don't have to be weak.
all the time. Or I don't have to feel weak. You can have a weak moment. It's not the same thing with feeling fundamentally weak.
or insecure or insignificant all the time. And then looking at a moment
Or a situation or moments in your life and saying, I'm this way now because of all these things that happened, and I think for a while.
That worked.
I think for a while people were buying it.
Because it's like it's not your fault like you're like this. Now this happened to you here. It's not your fault that
You don't trust people, this happened to you here.
And so
Because that theme's been going on for so long, what it does is it renders you powerless.
Because it's saying you're this way because of all this other stuff and
And it's not your fault.
And that translates to I have no power over it. I'm
I'm a result of what's happened to me and
And that's a powerless state to be, which all it does is keep suppressing you down. So you just stay there.
Instead of saying
You know, it happened to you.
Okay, now to where do we go from here?
consultations and mentor sessions for window of time, and I would only do either one
Or three.
I wouldn't do more than that.
Because what the most important thing I didn't want people
It's like I'll come in and I'll give you some guideposts.
And but my goal is not to make you reliant on me to keep coming back to me.
Three was the max I would do with someone, no more than that. Three sessions. Three sessions.
Three sessions.
Because my goal is if I keep you coming back to me, then I'm not helping you.
All I'm doing is
is reorienting you to come to me, I'm gonna fix it for you. My goal was always no, you have the ability
I might need to kinda shift things around or shake things up a little bit in your mindset, but in the end, you're
You are very well capable.
Most people are
They just don't learn
Ди часто гадамсь.
You talked about how
Using the past to diagnose your current self by saying, This happened to me, so I'm this way
Is almost
It's like a short term friend in the moment because it kinda helps you feel heard and understood and it justifies
the way that you are, but it ends up being a long term enemy in a context that
You're then stuck with the results.
Of
Who you are, for better or for worse.
And I was thinking about myself, I was thinking all the ways that I've like justified who I am today, using something that happened in the past. And actually, whenever I do that, it makes that behavior, even if it's
the byproduct of it is making me unhappy. Really hard to change.
Like it's very hard to change. Like if I say
This happened when I was a kid and my my
Dad was unorganised or whatever and messy, so I'm a m messy person.
It's almost like etching it into cement or something. It it you know.
Can I ask you a question? Why does it matter?
I don't I don't understand why we have to psychoanalyze everything we do.
I feel we waste so much time.
And trying to figure out I'm like this today because of this, this and this
Sometimes
I have found there's no clear reason why.
There's no there's nothing to to to make sense of.
Even sometimes when people try to assess like why does this person treat me this way? Why that? What did I do? Why this? Sometimes there are reasons and sometimes that person's just an asshole.
There's nothing analyze.
There's nothing to figure out. There's nothing to dive deep on.
That person, you just happen to fall on an asshole.
And that's okay.
Let's move on.
So there's moments where that exists too, but I feel like we try so hard.

that we do more damage and you know, like I
Your brain is like a bathtub. Your cognitive load is like a bathtub. Think of this as a bathtub.
If you have a bathtub, the bathtub can only hold so much water.
If you keep putting water in the bathtub, right?
It's gonna overflow. That's your cognitive load. So if I have my cognitive load in my bathtub and I keep putting water, water, water, it's gonna overflow. It's the same thing when you put stuff in there. I'm gonna add more stuff and more stuff and more stuff. Your cognitive load
is overflowing. It's maxed.
You're inefficient, you're sloppy, you're not getting things done right. If you are, you're just barely getting there. You're everywhere, you're stressed out, you're frazz frazzled because you're maxed out. You're beyond maxed out. So everything I do, and I will tell you I learned this from watching presidents, I keep my load light.
My bathtub only holds the water it needs to hold in.
So it protects you from
Overextending your f yourself.
Stressing yourself and it also keeps you
From making bad decisions, you make good decisions. There's something called decision fatigue.
Where the more stuff I add we think
The busier I am, the better I am.
I'm I'm moving, I'm hustling, I'm doing all this stuff. Look how maxed out I am.
Just because you're busy, it doesn't mean you're being productive. Those two things are not synonymous.
So often people think
Leaders keep adding, adding no, you know what's
good leaders do, and this is what again I w I've learned, they take out of that bathtub.
They take out.
What can I do less of?
So I can be
Exceptional at the other things I do.
Really great example. This is public knowledge, so I can share it. President Barack Obama.
He had
Thirty of the same suits.
Why?
Why do you think?
Thirty of the same exact suits.

So he didn't have to make so many decisions every day?
Yeah.
He didn't wanna sit and figure out what he's gonna wear.
It's a decision he didn't have to make.
That keeps his bathtub light.
Think about all the decisions he had to make every single day.
I want a light bathtub.
Oh.
Take that thing out.
Lighten your bathtub. So when you're overthinking and over analyzing and trying to process all the stuff
You are maxing out that bathtub, so how can you perform?
You don't have infinite resources. You do not have an infinite cognitive load, and you do not have an infinite
Emotional load.
Don't keep adding your job is to take out
So that the things you do do
You do exceptionally well.
And you're much more emotionally stable.
I think maybe one of the reasons why people
are tempted to go back is they think that if they go back into their history and understand things,
then they can change something in the present that's gonna change their future.
So they think you know if I can figure out why I I'm low confidence.
What happened to me.
Then I can do something today which is gonna change tomorrow.
So I guess I would say and again I would see this from I've done hundreds of mentor sessions
I would tell them
Where are you right now?
What do you do now?
And what do you want to change now? So I'm I'm low confidence. I
move through the world as if I'm trying to not take up too much space.
I feel like people are
Rude to me, and I c I I just have bad luck.
I have bad luck with men.
I'm I'm pretending I'm a woman. I'm I have bad luck with men.
Um
And I just feel like people don't respect me enough. And also I just feel like I don't get the credit I deserve. I see everyone around me, every
Getting
More credit for doing less work.
Okay.
So this is great. So this is probably a person that you cannot help, number one.
'Cause'cause everything's bad.
Everything is bad.
And you'll get those from time to time. You get those.
Everything's a problem. And if any everything's a problem
Right now, if you get that persona, which it does exist, it's it's
You get'em.
That person doesn't want a solution.
Really? Nope.
What do they want?
They want me to validate how they feel.
That's what they want.
They don't want a solution. If everything's a problem, think of it this way, if every bar I go to I go to, I get into fight.
Into a fight. It's not
It's not the
It's not the bar.
So
When someone's like I have this problem, this problem, this problem, this problem, this problem
They're they're so set.
And h who and how they are, they they wanna stay there. Often people do want an audience. Often people do wanna be told, I'm so sorry, I'm so I feel so bad that happened to you. Sometimes too, when bad things happen to us
We get
a lot of attention as a result. Let's say something really horrific happens, and I've seen it with somebody maybe you had a a severe illness or lost a loved one.
When you're dealing with something like that, what happens, right? Immediately people come to you. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. They're there to support you. So you get this bombardment of attention.
You feel good.
But then eventually people move on with their lives.
And then you get addicted to
Where do all that attention go?
I want some of it, so what do I do?
I look for something else to be a problem so I can get more empathy, more sympathy, more attention. And so there are people that get
stuck in that cycle. Good people. I I know good people.
Who gets stuck in that cycle?
But I'm also aware of them.
Because every time I speak to them.
Something's not right.
I can't help them, I don't even bother trying to help them. One, they don't really ask me.
And so I'm very aware I don't give unsolicited advice.
It's wrong.
It's not my place.
And if they want it, they'll ask.
And then even then I'm always very aware.
Is this even gonna land on this person? Because
I'm coming back to meet my bathtub's full.
So I can't really invest all that energy in you.
If it's
I don't mean it to be cold, but if it's a a waste of time.
There's two personas that I'm thinking about. One of them's personal to me and then one of them's personal to one of my friends.
And before we started, you said one of the things you like is very specific examples. So here's a specific example.
There's someone I know very well, extremely well.
I've known them pretty much my whole life.
And
When they came to the UK, they experienced a lot of racial abuse because they came to the UK in like nineteen ninety-four. They lived in an area that was all white.
And the abuse they experienced was very, very real.
The UK the p part of the UK they lived in became more diverse.
Um over the years. They've been there for twenty, thirty years. And now the race racial abuse has pretty much gone away.
But you wouldn't you wouldn't think it.
Because when you if you met this person who did go through this abuse
So much of their identity became formed around
that abuse. So even though they now live in an area where there's no abuse
They still find
A perpetrator.
They find perpetrators everywhere.
And actually I I've come to believe with this particular person who I know very well that that identity depends upon it. And that's kind of what I was hearing in what you're saying is there's
I don't think this person could survive.
If
They didn't have a perpetrator anymore.
And so much so
that they've started finding perpetrators in their own family. And their whole family has now
almost cut this person off because
Yeah, th their identity as being a survivor
It like a hero heroic survivor.
And now that the enemy has gone.
So much depends on that identity that
You know, this person's
At war at home.
And they don't speak to their kids, their grandkids and they've lost all of their family because they've now convinced that
the stepmother's racist and the other step you know, the other m um daughter in law's racist and this person said this thing, which is racist or or is abusive towards me. And you see this in a lot of people that, you know, maybe they did go through something, but now they need that thing.
To hold their identity in place.
So you reminded me of a story which I'll tell you, but
Here's the thing, if you're looking for a problem
You will always find one.
You will always find a problem, and that's the thing. So it's the mindset.
What do I do about
that person if I'm a bystander.
Nothing.
Really.
Nothing. No, because
Did he
Did he or she ask you?
No.
Don't do it.
Why?
Because they're not they don't want it, and you might end up upsetting them anyway. They might get even angrier.
fr um from it. Because they're in a space where they're so emotional and self focused and they want to live there. Do you know too, when you sit and you ruminate
Like you
You it activates parts of the brain that make you feel alive. Think of it this way, you get like
You get hit.
You know how you get dopamine hits, I feel good from certain things? Well you get a hit
When you even when you're angry or upset, you ever f get so upset or angry you get worked up? What do you adrenaline hit? Your your cortisol's going up. What do you do? I feel alive.
I'm here, I'm there.
That feels good too.
Mm-hmm.
It's
It's a different type of feel, but I feel present. I feel this. I feel like
I feel something.
So
Unless somebody comes to you and I've learned this lesson.
And says Stieven, I want your advice.
I wouldn't give it. One, you're gonna be exhausted. You're doing so many things.
You don't have that ability to the person's not
They're not there to hear it.
So
You also have to have someone who wants your
your guidance or advice. So even when I did mentor sessions or consultations, there were probably like several times where I knew
I was like, this is a waste of my time. I'm like
You know what?
I'm gonna give you a full refund.
I'm not for you.
Because I understood I'm like this person isn't
They're not registering. There's
You did remind me of a story I remember once.
I was doing a a news story.
Um and I went and I interviewed somebody.
Who is
Part of the cleanup efforts for nine eleven.
September eleventh clean up efforts. And uh he was doing all the stuff
to you know, present day to help victims of nine eleven today. So I go with my camera person or the producer can't remember, we go to set up to interview this person. So now I have my own I've had my own experience with nine eleven. I worked at the World Trade Center, that's where New York Field office was, I was there on that day. I lost colleagues and friends, but
This person knows nothing about this, so I show up.
And I'm getting them ready.
And uh we're talking and there's this big
Yeah.
Tower tattoo. The towers nine eleven tattoo as I'm micing up the person.
The towers there was a room in the ho home that had
All is nine eleven.
uh memorabilia. Like a whole room.
And
I remember being there thinking
Okay, this person must have had some
really serious trauma or exposure, and I'm not trying to minimize. So I spoke to them
This person.
And
He had some kind of injury as well.
And I said oh
Tell me about it. Well I was there
And um I was injured when I was welding, something kind of fell on my foot.
And as a result, I had to go on some kind of disability. And I said, What happened to your foot? And it was uh I think he had lost like his toe or something, his pinky.
And I said, Okay.
And I said, How long were you there?
Three days.
I said, were you there for the day of the event?
No.
So you went out there for the day of the event. So your exposure
Deny eleven.
Was three days.
And then you got injured.
Yes. Okay. So I'm clacking this internally to myself.
His whole life
was centered about
Around
The drama the the the trauma the
The overcoming nine eleven. Everything was nine eleven, nine eleven, nine eleven.
And it was such an identity space. He was so
It was all like such a horrible thing for him, and I'm thinking
It wasn't to minimize, but I'm thinking
How
Did you build your whole livelihood present day around that?
small event, but that was his identity. I felt I remember thinking I'm like, I did the interview and I had to go. I was like, I can't be around this.
Because he was just so self focused on
How bad that experience was that everything he did and who he was to the point where you have tattoos on your body.
of the World Trade Center. And I'm thinking
How is this?
Helping you
Move forward.
This is
concept in psychology called um secondary gain that I was I was writing a book about I'm writing this book at the moment, so I was I wrote a chapter about secondary gain and it basically says exactly what you're describing, which is
There's
always a secondary gain from
Pain?
typically there's like something you benefit from it. And the problem is people can get addicted to that. And sometimes it's like safety or comfort that you get from it. Sometimes it's identity and sometimes it's remuneration. You know, it might be money or other rewards. The other example that I was going to say in terms of personas that I'm aware of.
is the kid who is in his bedroom and can't leave his bedroom because he says, you know, there's something wrong with him, he might be
clinically obese or have some kind of other issue.
And his family around him are his support network.
And I I actually know someone in this situation where they just don't leave their bedroom.
And the mother
I think she's also getting her identity.
From being the mother with that child.
Hm.
She's propping up.
And it was it was interesting that in this particular case with one of my best friends who lives in the Middle East
When she stopped
Doing that when she actually heard something on this podcast and stopped propping this person up.
Enabling. Enabling them.
This person got better.
Very very quickly.

Because she basically said I'm not gonna I can't help anymore and also don't
Talk to me about this. I don't have the as you say, like the cognitive energy anymore. This person got better. And it made me realize that, you know, sometimes two people can
Keep one person trapped.
He can.
I'm the mother, I'm the saviour that is protecting my child who is unwell.
And the child is being the
Cared for.
Um and both of them are getting love and attention and affection from that.
Sort of
Abusive, unhealthy relationship.
A lot of people find themselves there.
Well think about sometimes the attention you get. I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry that happened to you. That's so sad. That can g become addicting'cause you're constantly looking for it.
But again I
I've come to accept people as they are. I also look at who am I to tell you to be different.
If this is where you like to live and how you like to live, live it.
I think where it becomes a problem for folks is when it bleeds into your own life. So like with the mom where she had that moment she's like, I don't want to do this anymore because it's impacting my life
Then I can understand that'cause she's like, I don't wanna participate.
In this
But
I just have found like
I want you to think of it this way, like uh it's like think of a
An iceberg. Think of an iceberg. You see the top of the iceberg
the little blip at the top of the the the water and then the the b the big part underneath, which is the vast majority of what makes an iceberg. We're like that. When you see another human being, I want you to think of like got this huge bottom portion of this iceberg that you don't see. And it's who makes them what they are. So
One
The things that make you who you are today are all the things that have c accumulated over the entire time span of your life.
Family's a huge one.
Did you have family, were they good family? Did you have one parent, both parents? Did you have any parents?
Right?
A friend. Who are your friends growing up? Who are your friends now?
Your experiences, your dramas, your traumas, all those things make you who you are, your values, your belief systems, your personality. Do you know that personality
and a human being forms an infancy.
So all these things make you up, even your age, who you are today.
Is probably va vastly different, Steven, than who you were five years ago versus ten years ago, versus fifteen years ago. That's somebody's iceberg. So when you take all of that, you have that iceberg
Do you think you're gonna roll in?
And within what?
couple hours or couple of conversations, you're gonna get them to what shift?
That's what you're up against. So often people become very upset.
Because they can't change other people and that's where I'm like, accept what you had. I give a keynote.
Literally this week.
And a woman came to me in tears at the end. This was a at a business conference. So this was for business, for communication and
A very different thing, but she she came up to me afterward
She said, I really want a guidance from you. I said, Sure, what is it? Are you okay? She said, I have a husband.
And he's very overweight.
And I've done everything I can
uh to try to get him to change and I want to try to use these influence strategies on him to change him that you talked about. Could you help guide me? I said how long have you been dealing with this? She's like, Oh a long time, years. I said, Does he want to change?
No, she's like, but I try and I don't want to give up. I said, Did you see that park where I taught the part where I talked about the iceberg?
Remember I showed you the iceberg and I said
Accept people as they are
I said
He's the iceberg.
I said
It's not him that's the issue now, it's you.
You're not accepting what you have in front of you.
That's what he is.
Unless you accept you can't adapt, so what you're doing is you're not living in truth.
You're living in what I hope he would be, what he has the potential to be, but not where he actually is now.
When you accept where he is now, this is who he is, he's who he wants to be. The next question is
Can you adapt to that meaning
Are you okay with that?
Adapting to his lifestyle and staying with him.
That's the thing. What she's trying to do is change him, make him fit.
So that she can have what she wants.
Wrong
She's trying to solve the wrong problem.
He's not changing.
This is it. This is what you've got.
The question now is I accept my problem, I live in truth
This is how my husband wants to be.
Can I adapt my lifestyle so that I can still stay with him? Or is that a big of a deal breaker where I have to pull away?
She was asking the wrong question.
Because she's scared of
The potential answer.
Yeah.
Because she's not seeing the truth in her problem, meaning
This is who he is fundamentally.
You've been trying for years to change him.
And you're trying to make your life better to the point where you're emotionally upset. Like she was so upset about it.
And I said but
You're trying to solve something that you can't solve. This is a whole other person. This iceberg, this bottom part.
She's not
He doesn't want it.
He's fixed.
What's happening is
P this is called adaptability.
We want to adapt to our problems. She's not adapting to her problem.
She's not accepting what her problem is.
The problem is this is my husband.
This is who he is, and this is who he wants to be.
But I might be worried that he's gonna die or something if he's he very well will.
And
You know, if you see someone that's about to die, one should intervene, no?
But can you intervene?
And does he want you to intervene?
He doesn't want her to intervene.
And so what matters to you most, do you want to keep doing this all day long?
'Cause that's what she's doing to the point where she's crying.
When I'm coming off stage.
Or do you accept
This is him.
This is him. I love him.
I can't change him. I accept him as he is. Now am I willing to adapt.
to the truth of what my relationship is and stay married and be okay.
Or not?
She's the one who needed to adapt, but she couldn't adapt because she wasn't living in truth. It's like look at it this way, your partner's cheating on you.
And you don't wanna know, you don't want to hear it.
Right.
And but you're unhappy you're having all these issues.
Part of the reason you're having these issues is'cause you can't accept the truth. The majority of people struggle, ninety nine point nine percent of people
are not adaptable because they don't live in truth. What's the true problem you have?
Accept it,
Then decide okay now where do I go from here?
But people don't accept the truth. It's
How I wish it could be, how I would like it to be, how it was, how it could be.
No.
What am I dealing with?
Right now doesn't mean you have to like it, and this is not agreement. She doesn't have to agree with his lifestyle.
But it's accepting.
This is who he is.
Now my choice is
Do I stay?
Or do I go how
How
Much of a pain.
Is this for you?
So you think you should never try and change?
Someone.
I think it's wrong.
To do that to people.
Especially if they're showing you repeatedly.
I don't want you to do this. Leave me alone.
And you also to Steven whether you agree with people's lifestyle choices or not?
It is their life, it is not yours.
And so I think that there's also something a bit
Arrogant when we think we're gonna roll in, and let me tell you how I should live. My values and your values could be vastly different.
So who am I to impose how I think you should be?
Who says I'm right?
Who sa who says I'm right? I say I'm right based on my own value system. But people are vastly different.
How people see things and what they think is right or wrong.
It it's not the same.
So I
I accept people as they are and I respect them. I may not want to hang out with them.
because it's just not the circle of people I wanna be. But I also
Yeah.
How narcissistic of is it of me to think I'm gonna roll in and change you? It's kinda like
I did interviews and interrogations
On terrorists.
And
When I walked into an interview or interrogation, I di was not delusional to think.
that I'm gonna walk in and I'm gonna tell this person, Hey, I'm I'm part of the good guys.
I I
I just want, you know, to protect people and America, you know, we're really just trying to do the right thing. This is a person his iceberg is.
That was said.
For years.
He's thought a certain way. He's
He developed who he was to
Thirty, forty years old, whatever it is.
This is who he is, and I'm gonna roll in what?
And get you to change your whole mindset?
I knew who I had.
I accepted who I had.
I didn't try to change the narrative. Oh no, I'm this. Oh no, I'm that. I didn't do any of that.
But my goal was what am I trying to get to? I was like, Well, I need information on the next attack. I need to know where the next weapons are coming in, I need to thwart this, so I need to get him
Talking.
And that's what I'm looking for. I'm not trying to change his value system.
I'd be there all day and all night. Weeks. It would never work.
That's what we do. We try to fundamentally change who people are.
I have people I care about very much and love, and I have tried too. There are times where you love somebody so deeply and you're like, please, especially if it's something that
Harms them.
But I've also learned
They don't want it. And the ironic is sometimes the more you try, the angrier they become with you.
Who are you?
Right? You're imposing yourself and your beliefs on somebody else. And they're right.
Who am I?
Just because I think
Life should be lived this way.
It does not mean
That they believe life should be lived this way. They're probably thinking, What's wrong with this?
Nothing's wrong with this.
It's interesting. When I was going through our previous conversations, Evi, and I was looking at the moments that people re re replayed the most or enjoyed the most or cut the most or sent to their friends the most.
The overarching thing I learnt is that there's a lot of people out there
He
Don't feel very strong.
They fit they don't feel seen, they don't feel respected.
They themselves, I think, feel like they're low confidence and they look into a world full of other people who seem to be more confident and have everything figured out and they can't relate.
And they feel
At some level some of them.
um a little bit unappreciated. But I think the the bigger point here is about confidence and strength.
And feeling like
Yeah, feeling feeling like I can I can get what I want from life.
Okay, we're gonna break this down, but I wanna ask you a question if it's okay. Yeah.
How do you build your confidence, or what's something you do that builds your confidence?
Oh that's a great question. Um
When I was twenty years old, I
Think I thought I was confident.
But I don't think I was.
And I only kind of figured this out in hindsight because this is a I don't think I've said this before, but between the age of eighteen and twenty
Every
Go.
That I was interested in.
And would get some way down the line with would eventually reject me.
And then from about I know people go, Yeah, because you made a million dollars. No, listen, it wasn't that even when I had the money, I was still having
I was still being rejected by women and then some point around like
Twenty
Five to thirty.
Everything changed.
And so I always say to my friends, I said to one of my friends the other day, I was like
I don't know why, I don't know the science of this, but what I do know is that it's very, very hard to fake confidence because I think it lives in a thousand micro expressions. I was doing everything the book said.
And I still wasn't getting the results in terms of romantic context. It was like these women could just like figure out at some deeper level that I wasn't it.
And I never knew what I was doing'cause I guess I can't see myself.
Maybe I was texting back too fast. That's kinda what you think. Maybe the way I was standing. But I it it taught me over time that actually
You should aim at real confidence. And the real confidence came when the story in my head about myself
Was that
I was of high value.
And I'll share a story.
So th the reason I said this to my friend literally two weeks ago was because he was dating someone
And she turned around to him. She's a very young girl. He's
Thirty five.
five. She was twenty five.
She turned around and said, Do you know what I don't think I want to have kids
They've known each other for months.
And his response to that.
was like really, really insecure. It was like, I really want to have kids, I wanna have kids. And she ended up dumping him a week later.
And I remember I s I said to him, Do you know, my current girlfriend said the same to me when I was thirty. She turned around to me and said, I'm not sure if I want to have kids. And in my head, the first th thought that came in was
If I'm being completely honest, was
I I'm not sure I want to have kids with you yet either. You're still on trial. Like I'm still dating you to figure out if you're the right person. So my response, even though I didn't say anything out loud, because I just kind of shoulder rolled it, was
Because I valued myself.
My immediate response wasn't to be insecure.
It was to think, doesn't matter, I'm still trying to figure out if I want to have kids with you.
And I didn't say anything. I just carried on with the you know carried on with my day.
And it made me think that like, yeah, it's a thousand tiny things. Confidence is a thousand tiny things, but it exists, it like comes out of this central source of who you think you are.
And I think the to answer your question, the reason why thing that gave me confidence in my life was
I did some things that convinced myself
That I was someone worth respecting.
I'm gonna get to the conference thing in a moment. I'm actually curious because you said something and I'm wondering
Do you think
These women, like your girlfriend and his the girl he was dating
Do you think they genuinely meant it when they said it?
No.
My girlfriend's literally told me I've been with her for seven years now and we're ha we're
Planning on having kids right now. She was test she didn't know she was. Yes. This is why I said to him on the fucking plane. If we were flying on a plane, she didn't know she she was.
It was a test. She didn't know she was testing me though. And when people hear it was a test, people will think it was a conscious thing that she'd written down and she planned it. No. She'd been through a bunch of stuff with a bunch of guys who had taken away her freedom. And so she was her subconscious was testing.
whether I was one of those guys that was also gonna try and restrict her or control her. But throughout her whole relationship I was aware of this. So when she those moments where she said, You know what, I think I might want to fly back to Bali, I said, Babe, at any time when you feel like you want to go back to Bali
You go and I'll help you I'll help you go back to Bali. You don't have to be in London.
You go wherever makes you happy. I'd say it's all the time. I'd say you go wherever makes you happy. And you know what?
I would need it.
Because why would I want to be with someone that wasn't happy?
And this is ultimately what meant that she felt safe, secure, free.
And then it.
Flip.
But that would never have happened if I was like my friend.
Hm.
Literally feels like
He's up against a clock to find a woman.
And he needs to find one A S A P
Because
He's actually thirty thirty thirty he's nearly forty now, and he's single.
He's like, Steve, you don't understand. I don't have the time.
So he's trying to rush people down the aisle. Yeah.
So it's it's it's always when you said that and his circumstance, but you always wonder why would
And some people truly don't want to have kids and there's nothing wrong with it. Yeah. But I have found'cause I've seen it too.
When somebody says it.
Why are you saying it?
And do you genuinely mean it?
Or you saying it to see the other person's reaction? Are you saying it because
You wanna feel better,'cause I know some people who maybe
did want or do want to have kids and they can't or they can't find a good partner. And so a way that they make peace with it too is they say that and everybody
makes peace with things uh things your own way, or some have had past relationships where
The other P you know
their potential partners were turned off by especially
There's like this thing, and I don't know if it exists now, but
where some guys may be turned off because they think women want a guy who just wants to have kids, so
I don't wanna put off that vibe, so I'm gonna say this to you so you don't think
That I'm I'm that way. So that's why I always wonder when people say it
What are they really saying?
So in her case her sisters
have never been able to leave their hometown. Her six sisters
because all of them had kids super young. And he actually told me this a couple of months earlier that
She's a little bit unsure about the kids thing because she thinks it'll her freedom. So six months into their relationship, when she comes out with a statement like that.
Honestly, what I said to him I said, Bro, like
You're six months in.
Just let it ride. Just bloody hell. Just carry on like do whatever you were doing in that moment, just carry on doing it. And say, That's interesting, keep it moving.
'Cause it you know, but but going back to the point.
Because there's this internal insecurity in him.
As much as you could coach someone like that, or they could read the books, et cetera.
They're gonna be tested in a thousand ways.
So he's fear based.
So he's his decisions are being made because he's afraid
He won't find someone. So he's dealing with something it's not confidence it he's dealing with. He's insecure.
But
His
His decision is
I need to be find somebody now because I'm afraid I won't find somebody, or I'm afraid I won't get married, or I've I'm afraid I won't have kids. So everything is fear based with him. It's like when you make a decision
Yeah.
I I can't quit my job because I'm afraid I won't find another job. I can't leave this bad relationship because I'm afraid I won't find somebody else.
Those are fear based decisions, so everything he's doing is
pushed and promoted by fear. So him dating trying to find someone
It's not because he truly
Does he want to find somebody yes.
But the bigger drive is I'm afraid.
I'm not gonna find somebody, so I'm trying so hard. I so all his decisions are fear based. So that's why his response were fear based. Being fear based is not a great place to be. We all visit it, and it's okay to have fear. Fear is an emotion, but when it becomes your identity and it sticks around a lot.
That means every decision you're made
is is throttled by fear. And so his dating
Is throttled by the fear that I won't find somebody fast enough.
You feel it, you feel you feel it.
You feel that energy.
Right? And it does does it repel people?
Yeah.
So he had this very emotional reaction, and what did she do? She's like I don't want any part of it. She disappeared.
Because his fear, which he couldn't control, and that was more self regulation on his part.
Not confidence. Self regulation. Self regulation is I control my emotions.
So he felt something, he felt panic.
Mm-hmm.
And he couldn't manage that.
He couldn't like his governor
We all have a governor who manages our emotions. His governor
Was out to lunch. Yeah.
And so he completely released. So self regulation is your ability to regulate your emotions. So even though you're panicking, you're afraid, you're angry, you're sad.
There has to be a governor.
That says I know you're there.
Keep it quiet.
That's how you regulate your emotions. That's self regulation. So because he's so highly fear based
He's very
poor at the moment at self regulating his emotions. Can someone learn to be a better self regulator of their emotions so that they don't ruin their life by reacting to things all the time? I did. I was very hot headed growing up. I was just like my father. I'm Greek. I'm New York. I mean it was I just had nothing going for me.
Ah I had to learn.
And I learned in the NYPD.
I was very young.
And I was very fortunate to be around
Very premier people. We were talking about your hiring process before how it's slow and drawn out.
That hiring process is very slow and drawn out. They kinda they pluck you.
Because the idea is if we put you in here
You better fit well.
Because just one person's gonna muck up the whole thing. We don't want we want efficiency.
And so
I so with that I was around very highly regulated people, highly intelligent people. And so
Because I was around very highly regulated pe people and instructors who kept me in check.
Uh.
I clocked it in, so that's how I was able to manage myself.
So who's around you? If everybody around you is a loose screw.
Do you still have the
amygdala, um like explosion. They're like do you still have the mental

surge of emotion.
But you just on the
outside sort of have learnt to keep it in.
Externally I can do it very well. Sometimes at home with my husband, who's also he's also Homeland Security special agent, US Secret Service.
I sometimes it's nice to put it down.
Because it's hard to be on all the time. It's hard to self regulate all the time. And so there's moments where he'll be like
Somebody's a little emotional right now.
And so I'll check myself, but
There are those safe people that once in a while you
I think it's important if
To have
But even with him, you know, you don't want to do that to people because then you make people your dormat.
Someone came up to me actually the other day and talked about a previous conversation which is somewhat linked to what we're talking about now. They said, um
Hi, Steve, you had uh that incredible woman on your podcast and she talked about how you shouldn't bring your
Authentic self to work.
And she asked me about that.
And that's kind of what you're describing there, which is you're a d gonna be a different person at home. Don't bring your authentic self.
To work.
I don't want your authentic self to work.
I want your professional self.
I want your respectful self.
I want
Your empathetic self.
I want your competent self.
You can bring your authentic self to Thanksgiving meal with your family if you'd like to.
Does that make sense?
Use secret service are like, come in, everybody be your authentic selves. You don't get high performers, you get sloppiness. Everybody's doing their own thing. That's not a team.
If you're team oriented
You leave your authentic self h here, and you bring your genuine self, who genuinely cares about the mission, who genuinely cares to do a good job, who genuinely knows that it's not about you, it's about the collective team. That's who you bring.
Your authentic self is about who?
Me
I'm all about me.
In teams
Nobody cares about
I don't mean in a me, they don't care about you personally.
Who who are you what are you bringing? Are you bringing value? Are you bringing are you bringing solutions? Are you getting things done?
My authentic self could you imagine if I brought my authentic New York self to every interrogation I did?
I would interview people who committed crimes against children.
I'd one case through a little girl.
She says
About the person who was babysitting her, which was a sixteen year old.
Young man.
Young man.
He touched me down there. Three year old little girl. So they call me in
To do this interview.
Um, on this young man.
This little girl saying he touched her down there. They're three, they're not really able to communicate. Can you talk to him? So I'm sitting talking to him this interview.
And I'm trying to find out what happened.
Well, as I'm talking to him, you start to reveal more and more.
He did touch him down there, and he did other things, to the point where he confessed he had full on sex
With this little girl between the ages of three to four.
Of her age. He's sixteen.
Could you imagine if I brought my authentic self into that room?
What would my authentic self say?
What are you thinking?
How could you?
It's a three year old.
No, I brought my professional self.
Okay.
Tell me what happened.
Tell me more. Non judgment.
Poker face. You know why? Because what I think my authentic self is irrelevant.
What mattered?
Getting information, getting a confession so I can find out what happened, so that investigators could figure out what to do so this little girl wouldn't be victimized again.
That's what I mean by your authentic self. Don't come in and be phony.
Nobody wants a phony.
But
Authentic self has become
Me everybody check me out. It's me. I was irrelevant.
Personally, it was what I was contributing, what was my goal, my task. That's what I mean by authentic self. So when you show up to work, wherever you work,
What are you bringing to bring value?
To the whole team.
'Cause your authentic self could be I'm bringing my problems, I'm bringing my opinions, I'm bringing my judgments
Honestly, nobody cares.
I am
have lots of different leaders across my different companies. And when I look at the best leaders
One of the things they have in common is you do feel like they are being
Honest with you.
Are they bringing their full authentic self and all their baggage to work? No, but you feel like you're dealing with
The honest version of them.
And I think some of the worst leaders, the ones that really, really struggle.
you can see that the team that they're leading
Just feel like
maybe they're manipulating them a little bit, or they're they're not being
straight with them or there's something going on, they're acting, you can kind of feel it. So I'm wondering how this kind of
sits with everything you've just said there,'cause you're going into these interrogations
And you're winning them over to some degree because you're building trust. You're building trust.
But you're not acting.
That's a different thing.
I'm not being disingenuous. How do you square all of that? You're like not you're are you acting, but you're not acting?
I'm listening.
Cause I'm not there for me, and I'm not there to pass judgment.
The quickest way to shut people down even in business is
You want to know what's going on around you.
All the time.
If people are too afraid to say things or don't tell Steven
Well you don't know how he's gonna react or he's gonna get mad, his this
That's a problem. The problem is
They're gonna be too afraid to tell you things. You want people to come to you and to give you the bad news, to tell you when things aren't going right, because you wanna collect intelligence. You're collecting intelligence because when you have the right intelligence, then
You can make the right decisions.
But you must need to know what's going on around you. So when you pass judgment and you're telling everybody your opinion and you're bringing your authentic self, people filter information.
Because they're bringing versions of themselves that they think
You want to hear.
We don't want that.
I was very neutral. I'm a neutral slate. Even to this day. I try to be neutral in that
I allow people to come to me and
And people are very open and they share and it works
Well for me because I get a good read on people and situation so I can make good decisions.
But I don't do a lot of the talking.
The Vaj a good interviewer doesn't say anything.
Good end of yours says less.
Don't make it about you. Don't try to guess where people headspace is. Ask them. You seem a you seem like you're
I something I said before is upsetting to you. Could you tell me a little bit about that?
Uh explain to me what it is that you're worried about right now. Describe to me what you're concerned at. We used to call it T E D. Tell me, explain, describe. It's just a way great way to get people talking. Just get them talking.
But
It
Going back to what you're saying, it's just
Everything is very ball mi. We've become so identity based.
That we don't really
We're not connected to the community around us.
and how we impact others. Everything is what's happening to me. What's in it for me.
Me, me, me. It's like do you know that you impact other people? You touch other people, you affect other people's lives, you make other people's day.
Better or worse.
You make the work environment easier.
Or more taxing?
You
You do that.
But everything has become
Myself, and we've lost that balance of
The world does to me, but I also do to the world.
To be effective when you're dealing with these m monstrous people that you dealt with, whether it's terrorists or people that hurt children or whoever else it might be.
Is the did you have to kind of step outside of
But it do you ha do you have to detach
At some deeper level and do you have to s see everybody as uh
Just a human being.
'Cause I'm I'm wondering how you navigate those spaces when these people have done horrific things. Are you do you did you teach yourself to just
Be more empathetic, dare I say?
You could be empathetic, so all
Different crimes b have different types of
Characteristics. So somebody who's a terrorist, let's say, that's more of an ideology.
And they were
Typically.
raised from being very young to feel a certain way.
So I understood coming into a room and
That I'm dealing with someone who's been groomed from a very young age to see the world a certain way.
So that's why I did not bother wasting my time.
Trying to change the
That that that
That person's viewpoint.
But what about that kid that hurt that little girl?
So with him,
That specific one, I spent a lot of time speaking to him.
And I did bring empathy. So empathy does not mean I agree with you, I'm trying to understand you. And what turned out with him is he had been sexually abused.
Himself.
When he was young.
And so all that stuff came out.
And it did not excuse his behavior or what he did.
But
It was genuine.
I was genuinely curious. I was genuinely asking him.
Um and at the same time
I needed to find out the truth. Look, there were some times I would have somebody across from me and I'm thinking
They did it.
And then
Afterward I'm like
They didn't do it.
There there's s there's times where you clear people and that's really important. So that's why when you would
At least when you talk to people and even to this day
I I
We're all biased, but
But I try not to come in and project that. I really try to give people a fair chance to show me.
What's happening instead of coming in with prejudgments.
And so you're better
At reading their behavior too.
um when you're talking to people.
So with him.
He revealed a whole bunch what had happened to him, and
It was sad.
was empathetic. It did not clear him from what he did. They eventually actually with the confession I got
He was eventually tried as an adult.
And you know, that was very detrimental obviously to
his life, right? It impacted his life.
But
But I I could have genuine empathy in that moment. Empathy is like I'm just trying to understand where you are and how you feel.
That's not sympathy.
Who's better at spotting lines, women or men?
There's no research that shows one is better than the other.
Because women seem to have a sixth sense.
And people joke about it in like relationship context, but I generally feel like
I feel like women have a high heightened sensitivity. And actually when you look at some of the studies
For example
Women can smell
I think it's testosterone, but men can't smell.
certain the same or certain ha hormones on women. So like from a physiological standpoint, women do seem to be more
Sensitive.
to especially to like
H
Um to men. There was that study they did where they got
Um
T shirts off man.
after they'd been for a run, and the women went down and smelt them.
And then they I think they had to guess which one was the most attractive, and they all point at the one that had the highest testosterone in it.
So there's things that are going on that we can't see and feel. So I just wondered if your experience men or women were In my experience, no. And I will say and this is just a a
a lot of men were very good at assessing one of the reasons w um look the vast majority of
Polygraph examiners were male.
There were some women and they were very good too, the vast were male, and
W males men
Are good at being more rational.
It's actually there were d there's a they were trying to figure out if there's a difference in the brain between men's brains and women's brains
And
There's not much. The one thing that they saw is that women have more discernment. So a a female brain tends to activate a little bit more
And they tend to think about something more than the male brain. A male brain may be a bit more impulsive.
Right, more action based and the female brain may be a bit more
Let me talk to you. Let me try to understand. And actually, if you look at the data for uh female cops versus male cops,
Female cops have less complaints against them.

And they tend to think'cause they're better communicators.
They have less complaints. Cause when you're a cop, you're gonna get a complaint. There's no way. You're gonna get them like all you're gonna just get them. Um
But women tend to have less female officers tend to have less complaints and they think that they're just better at
Dialoging and de escalating.
On this point about confidence then, you said it didn't sound like my friend had a confidence issue.
Do you think confidence is the thing that
The people who do feel like they're not respected in the world.
need to be aiming at
And in your experience, what what can one do to build the
Confidence.
Let me say this first. I've been around very
Steady people, confident people, I suppose.
I've never seen anyone or heard anybody talk about it.
Ever.
I've never heard anybody in the circle of where was whether it's
Former seals.
Uh US Secret Service, the P the that that
I've never heard anyone talk about it.
And I think one of the secrets is
They don't talk about it, they don't think about it, they don't give it that much life.
They just
I just am. I just are.
So
I think that's one secret.
Where people try to
They think about it so much and I think it goes back to what we're saying initially, like
Стоп овер анализін, дж піс час бію.
Just do.
But now if you're if you're looking at confident
People with
Things that I notice traits amongst
Confident.
people or steady people, uh I they have a strong they have a good circle around them, meaning they're very
aware and meticulous of who's around them and who they associate with.
If you're around insecure people it it bleeds on you. Like you're gonna absorb what other people are.
And if y you know, if you're the most confident person in the room
It's probably not a good thing.
It's it's not a good thing.
You wanna be around people you learn from. It can't just be you're at the top and everybody's looking to you. Your bath sub's gonna crack, number one.
The other thing I learned about confidence
Research shows long people in law enforcement are perceived to be highly confident.
And one of the reasons they believe it is because they're decision makers. You make decisions on the spot, every day life and death decisions. And there's nobody to turn around to be like, Hey, can I ask you your opinion on this? What do you think I should do with this guy wielding this knife?
Should I shoot? Should I not?
Should I pull out the pepper spray? I mean, what would you do in this moment?
You'd be dead.
So when you're used to making decisions, whether right or wrong
But when you're used to making those decisions and believing in yourself and trusting in yourself that you're making the best decision you can with the information you have at that moment.
That builds confidence. Be a decision maker.
I think those are the two most
Important things.
Having awareness. And honestly just show up.
Just show up.
Don't worry about being confident, worry about simple things. Show up on time.
I was reading this study about
confidence in the victim mindset. It was a study done by Ugov.
in twenty twenty five in the United States.
And it said women rated themselves much higher on trustworthiness.
Honesty and empathy.
The men.
rated themselves higher on self awareness.
Sense of humor.
And confidence. And the gap between
self reported confidence between men and women was quite significant. It's about fifty percent of men
Consider themselves confident.
Well, it's only about thirty.
five percent of women that consider themselves confidence.
I'll tell you this, I've never heard a
I've never heard anybody like from field of work I came for s
It came from say I feel like I'm an imposter.
You know that whole imposter syndrome. I've never had that.
Again, I didn't hear till after.
I left the service. Like it's wild'cause all these things
I had no awareness of them because they were never discussed in the circle that we were in.
the so I also think sometimes when we sit and discuss these things to such extent
That they actually start to plant seeds of doubt. I'm not saying we shouldn't study and have self-awareness, but I think when we over-evaluate to such a degree,
I n we never did that.
And you know, how do you how do you build confidence in I I think about training.
Training
There was nobody cheering you on.
There was no way like, hey Paul Purse, good job, good job, girl.
Good job. They were ha they were trying to get me sent home. You had to fight, you had to claw
Your way you had to claw your way
To get that job.
And then
Prove that you should be there. They did everything they could to wean you out, to kick you out.
Ансо
I think when you're determined that
Like you stick.
You just stick it out, and you're just there's days where I'm like, I don't know how I'm gonna get through today, or even runs. We would do runs, and one of the things they would do just some mess with you.
They take you on a run.
For miles and miles, and you never knew when it was gonna end.
That's the worst. At least if you know, hey, we're gonna run from here to here. It's gonna be two miles, three miles, five miles, ten miles, whatever. Tell me what I'm looking at.
But it was it wouldn't tell you. So you'd start running
And then you'd hit a point like
And you think, at least I would, I think
Oh my God, how am I gonna do this? And you know what I would do? I would go and I'd be like, just make it to that tree, which is five feet ahead of me.
I made it to the tree.
Make it to that mailbox.
I made it to the mailbox. Just make it to the next tree.
And and
That's how you do it.
W what's right in front of me?
But if you look at that whole picture of how am I gonna be all of this
It's so overwhelming.
And so
It's just so hard. It's just gonna
it's gonna kill your confidence whether it's like I wanna do this, what's the first thing I need to do? Then the second thing. I would think and I'm asking you, when you build your businesses, right, or your company
Did you just put one foot in front of the other and just try to do it? Or did you stop and say, You know what?
Steven
Let's have a conversation. I need to be confident before I do this. I need to build my confidence.
Did you sit and do that and once you checked off that confidence bit, then you're like, Okay, now I'm ready to do this.
Yeah, one of the most incredible things is I I actually didn't know what the word entrepreneur was. I had no idea what it was. So I had this idea
And I
Started
Trying to figure out
how to make the idea happen, which looked like three months on Google scrolling down, searching the word web developer, clicking onto people's links, and then emailing them saying, Hey, can you build websites? Like I So it was this long drawn out process of stumbling forward. And had I known
I think a lot of entrepreneurs and founders say this, had I known what it would have taken.
Had I known how difficult it was, had I not been so ignorant and naive, maybe I would have been
demotivated or demoralized to do it? But I was eighteen, left university, had an idea
Didn't know what the word entrepreneur was, didn't really even know how you you established a company.
and try to use the internet to make that idea happen. In like three to four months trying to figure out how you name a company.
Just by like Googling stuff.
So very much one foot in front of the other. We what did you just say? I was ignorant and naive. Yeah, it was useful. It was p phenomenally useful. Cause I think if if I was informed, it would have been like standing at the foot of Mount Everest.
But I couldn't see the mountain in front of me, so it felt much more easy to climb.
And this is in part why people get you know, I spoke to Nir Ayell, who's a
An author of a book called
Undestractable.
And he said a phrase to me which I've always remembered, he said
Procrastination.
Is
The avoidance of psychological discomfort.
So when you have that big essay to do.
what you end up doing is taking the path of least resistance, which might be I'll just clean the house.
And the house gets really tidy. Because psychologically, that essay
Feels like Mount Everest.
You don't know where to start, you're not well researched on it, so you clean the house instead.
And so procrastination is the avoidance of psychological discomfort.
And so had I known how big that mountain was when I was eighteen,
I probably wouldn't have done it because the psychological discomfort associated with the knowledge would have been so overwhelming, I would have just cleaned my house.
And so sometimes yeah it does help.
It goes back to a lot of the stuff that we're saying that sometimes
Overanalyzing and trying to make sense of things.
Does you
A disservice
Where sometimes if you just let things be and you just move forward to try to execute
The goal is to execute and do.
Because if you sit and try and analyze everything, how should this be done or that be done, or if you look at the big big pic bigger picture of what it's gonna be like,
It's
It can be it can
kill you. It can kill your confidence. Training? I had no idea what training was gonna be like.
Absolutely none. I went in there completely blind, completely clueless.
I actually thought it was gonna be like college. Haha.
I learned my lesson the hard way.
But this
I think
We need to be a bit more present.
And focus and just start
Executing and making progress. Progress no matter how small is progress, as long as you're moving in that direction, but thinking about something, ruminating over something is
Playing that C D over and over again.
procrastinating just start just go
I spoke to Sir David Brailsford, who's the guy that turned the British cycling team around, and he told me that
When he went in there and those players, those cyclists were like down and out and depressed and winning nothing, one of the first things he did was ban them from thinking about the podium.
And so I always I came up with this phrase called pedals over podium, based on everything he said to me, which is he got his riders to think about the pedals in front of him, just the rotation of the pedals, and not whether they were far w cycling fast enough to win the gold or needed to speed up. And he said to me when he did that.
It was almost like the riders would get to the end of the track.
And they would get off the bike and they could not recall the cycle.
because they were so present, they'd almost been in like this hip hypnotic state, but they ended up producing their best times. Because what they've done is they removed the amygdala, all the emotion, the fear, the you know, which burns a lot of energy as a cyclist, I imagine if you're thinking too much. And that produced their best times. They went on to become the most successful cycling team of all time, I believe, and won five out of the six Tour de Frances.
And that whole idea of like, Yeah, just be present, just focus on the next as you say step.
Along the way.
I think it's difficult for people because
Sometimes that first step is so small.
So small that it's it's sometimes a little bit embarrassing.
You know, the first step to change your life, the first step to confront an issue in your life is so or sometimes so small that it feels like that can't possibly be the right step to take.
Because it's hard.
Because it's uncomfortable.
What's that like they call it exposure therapy?
It was Jordan Peterson that said to me. He was like dealing with a guy in the he wouldn't leave his bedroom. And instead of getting him to like go outside and stuff, he just got him to move the Hoover
Ten centimeters closer today, and that was today done.
And then the next day he got him to like turn the hoover on, but then turn it off. That was that day done.
And Jordan said to me, he said the problem with people
with change is the first step is often so embarrassingly and shame shamefully small that people like don't want to do it.
That's like embarrassing to do something so small?
Because it's a myth, we've been fed a myth.
That's a makeup
Big change in your life, you have to make
do big decisions. You have to bake make big movement.
And the big change you create in life, it's through the small movements. You just reminded me of a story of my buddy Don Saladino. He's like the he does training um for all the You ever watch a lot of those
a Marvel movies or the D C movies uh with all those characters, he trains a lot of them.
To get them physically fit for the movies.
And he was telling me he had a a story of a I think he was telling me he had a client and who he was just trying to get'em to work out.
And the client was overweight and having all these issues. So what what the client did what what they they did is the client just tried to create progress. So
The first day what he did was he took his sneakers and he just
Put them in front of his bed.
And that was it. And then the next day he took his shoes and put them outside the door of his bedroom.
And then the day after that he took the shoes and put them in the kitchen.
And then the next day he took the shoes and just put them on.
And then the day after that he took the shoes, he walked outside and put them on outside.
Then the day after that he took the shoes and just went to the corner.
And then came back.
And then he went from being
A severely obese.
And having the
Um being very unhealthy to running marathon.
And that's how he did it.
You've seen
Some of the most consequential people ever make decisions.
These presidents.

Maybe you can't answer this question, I don't know if you can, but who were the best decision makers and why?
That you observed.
I'm gonna say this to be the president of United States.
It's no small thing, so for you to get to that place, it's
You
You are exceptional.
I I just I say this in a n in a neutral way. People get very personal or biased and I I don't just because I served under various. Didn't matter what the party was.
And I learned
So much from all of them.
But as far as making decisions,
There are a couple of things. One, they had a really good circle around them, inner circle.
Like everybody didn't have access to the president. There were layers around the president, so everybody didn't have access to them.
That was really important. But the circle around them was a circle that was there to support them. Everybody around them was steady.
I never saw
I never saw anybody go cry at the White House.
I never saw anybody lose their mind. I never saw anybody get emotionally dysregulated. I never saw this.
And that was important because
That kept them steady. The other thing was they were very good at delegating, so they didn't need to know everything.
But they would find people who knew more than they did, and

To help make decisions.
And they would just make decisions. The other thing I saw and I witnessed
They worked very hard, and
They worked I would see presidents
Sit up.
I mean
I think it's okay to say this. I really don't talk about the people I protected out of out of respect.
You know, there's a Greek saying everybody loves the
Everybody loves the treason. Nobody loves the traitor.
And so I'm just always careful not to say but I would see presidents, like I remember
But Bill Clinton he'd be up till very late hours of the night studying.
Reading, preparing.
Just reading.
But in Barack Obama, I mean I'd work midnight shifts sometimes and
He was up.
Studying sitting at his desk, reading, preparing. They would study
They would spend time studying. So all those things collectively help you feel like I'm inf as informed as I can be.
By studying myself, by surrounding myself with people who are informing me, who are also study, and then I make the best decisions I can with the moment the information I have and
in front of me now. One of the things we do and we all do this, we do a disservice to us when things don't go
Or work out the way we thought they would.
We beat up on ourselves. I should have known this, I should have this, I should have that.
And
Anytime I start to do that or I have somebody and I always say I'm like
My husband used to say this too, he's like, You made the best decision you could with what you knew in that moment.
Don't go back.
And make yourself feel like shit.
Because you feel you should have chosen differently.
I've heard Obama say that, so.
Just like I said it.
Pretty much.
N close. He I I heard him talk about this whole idea of making decisions at fifty one percent certainty.
when he spoke at this conference I was speaking at in Sao Paulo a couple of years ago.
And he's talking about the big decisions in his career like going in and getting Osama bin Laden, didn't have a hundred percent certainty.
He said sometimes in life you have to make
Make a decision.
with the information you have and be at peace with the fact that you made the best available decision.
With the information you had.
And move move on.
Confident people are okay with not knowing all the information. Yeah.
They're okay. I don't need to know all it doesn't have to be a hundred percent right because
And here's the other thing.
Because we're so scared of making the wrong decision, and unless you're the president of the United States or and you're in law enforcement and you may shoot the wrong human being, which I get.
But overall most decisions
Not life or death.
Make a decision and then
Feel okay with it being wrong and
If you're so insecure that you're terrified you're gonna make the wrong decision
Why?'Cause you're gonna look dumb, you're gonna feel dumb?
Confidence you don't care how you look or how you eat. You're not sit and you're not quantifying
He's gonna think I'm done, she's gonna think I look stupid, they're gonna think this. And even for yourself.
Like you don't tally that, you're okay with making the wrong decision. It's like
I'm gonna make my choice.
I hope it's the right one. I did the best I could
But I'm comfortable with that, but if you're so worried about it's the wrong decision
Then don't make one.
And that's that in and of itself.
That the confident people don't do that.
So the other thing I would see
Presidents do they had
They had time to themselves.
Meaning like you would see them, they would have time where they would be alone.
And they would think they weren't they weren't always exposed
or surrounded by people.
George W Bush he would go to Waco to the ranch.
That was his roots. That was his place to like
I need to kinda find my roots.
Present Barack Obama, I spent every holiday in Hawaii.
He went home.
George Bush Senior.
He would split his time between Kenny Bunkport
And
Texas.
Shocent.
So that was another thing. They'd all go
Hm.
It all go home.
I hear from a lot of very successful people that I interview that they all have some kind of meditation practice.
And even when I look to the
life of someone like Steve Jobs and how he was able to continually see round corners and remove the keyboard and remove the stylus and remove the the iPhone jack and remove Java from our phones and do all of these things that at the time were like crazy talk.
But
That's someone who was motivated by
Money today.
would not have done, but someone that could see the future tomorrow could have done.
And um
you come to learn that he was basically like a yogic, like he was he was a meditator.
And what you described there made me think of that, which is okay, all these successful people seem to be
have some kind of practice where they get out of the trenches and like into the
Intuition.
Or into
The clouds.
Alone.
So they have space.

The painting so they can see the full picture.
Do you know what they all also do?
I can't speak for all of them, but a lot of them worked out.
Like their workout was built into their schedule.
Uh, President George Bush
uh junior, he would bite. He used to actually be a runner. He was a very fast runner.
Um'cause they would ask for agents to run with them and you when you run when when you would run, you have to run with your gear on.
President Clinton was a runner.
Tem bush.
Which started biking.
So you had to be a good biker.
Where can they run?
Well
President Bush would run
the trails.
when we'd go to Texas or Wago. You're not gonna run
the streets of Washington D C. So they have the White House has its own internal gym.
But they did they did run. They were very athletic. President Barack Obama every morning.
Jim.
So

Integrating the body into the mind is key. I saw them all do it.
And I think that plays a role. It can't just be we separate the mind and body
You
When you physically take I've just seen them all do it, and I learned it also as an agent. Like you're
You had to work out.
And you had to m use your body because
Also when you use your body and you're moving it and you're you're working it out, you're taking care of it.
You feel good. You feel like you're doing something.
powerful and positive for yourself and that in and of itself
Builds confidence and strength.

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I was trying to understand what it feels like to have true a true lack of confidence. Like how does it feel inside your body?
And the research I did showed there's really four areas that you feel it. The first area is in your body physically, like the tightness in your bod body, which could be clenched jaw. It could be like that fidgeting you see, heart racing, all the like fight or flight responses. The second way you feel it is in the mind, self doubt.
asking yourself always, am I good enough?
kind of double guessing yourself, running through worst case scenarios, r ruminating on your past mistakes. The third way is in your emotions.
Which is this feeling, this insecurity that you might be exposed
At some point.
Um, avoiding speaking out too much or holding yourself back.
The and the last way is in behavior, which is speaking softly.
Rushing your words, avoiding eye contact.
And apologising.
Too much.
I feel that's such a waste of time.
Like
To spend to sit and analyze yourself. Now if you're not a good speaker
I look at it as
I want to work on my speech. It's paralinguistics, it's called.
Right.
Uh I wanna try for my
Uh the best tone I can so that I can speak with authority.
Research shows that it's not what you say.
People sometimes sit and memorize like what they're gonna say, the words they're gonna use, when in fact the research shows
What you how you say it impacts people more than what you say.
So the way that you speak is clearly resonant with people.
Are you aware?
of what it is about the way you speak.
That is making my viewers show up every time you come here in the tens of millions.
To hear you speak.
When I speak
I own my voice.
So
There's paralinguistics there.
And I learned this
From doing the news.
Because if I don't sound like
I know what I'm talking about, then does not matter what I say.
It's what I sound like.
So
If
Yeah, even
Using the
The right part of my voice, my my deeper
A tone my authentic tone.
You know, it's very different. Hi, I'm Evie, how are we doing? Okay. One of the things I really make sure in front of my daughter not to go in a really high pitched voice because I don't want her grown up talking like this.
I wanted to ha t grow up having a stronger, deeper tone voice because the research shows when you own your voice
People respect you and they see you as an authority.
And so I just don't wanna
Inadvertently.
Give her that high pitched voice, which doesn't mean it's her natural voice. It's the voice that I've helped cultivate and groom for her to have.
So let's just put that right there.
So
Those are little things that I also have awareness of. I don't want to tell her, hey, speak speak this way. I'm gonna show her to speak and she's gonna
She's gonna mimic that.
So when you look at how you present yourself to other so as far as like when I come here
I come here and I look at it this way. This interview is not about me. You've invited me here what, third time? Thank you, I'm super humbled.
But this isn't about me, it is about them, the audience.
Right?
I don't matter. I'm irrelevant. You're irrelevant.
We're two people who are trying to share information that maybe hopefully make the world a better, more wise, more just place. Maybe it helps make
People's lives a little bit better.
That's what matters. They matter. We don't.
And so when you bring that in and you put all your energy on the person you are speaking to because they want to hear it.
And if you put that there, then they feel it.
As you said all of that, I was analysing the way that you were speaking.
And you do a bunch of really interesting things. One of them is that you take silences that most people would not take.
Okay, I'm gonna don't be offended, I'm gonna try and I'm gonna try and show show what I mean.
Are you there for you?
Or are you there for them?
Most people wouldn't have taken that silence.
There's a certain selfish because silence is
Taking something from some
Someone.
In a w in a interesting way. It's like you've taken some time from someone. And people, you know, as it says in these studies that are low confidence.
They rush because they know that
I don't wanna waste your time. I'm not that important, so let me hurry through this. Yeah. So I don't I don't'cause you
'Cause you you're more important than I am. A hundred percent right. So you w I will give kudos to this. I watch presidents speak. Barack Obama
Again, this is something I shared publicly and I think it's okay. He was brilliant at this. He would
Watch his speeches.
He would speak, and he would take his time, and
He would do emergency, you know how they would interrupt T V shows or something, emergency, you know, message or breaking news from the White House, whatever.
I never saw him rush through anything. I never saw him
No say to himself or think I better hurry up through this
You know, I'm disrupting Gray's anatomy, people want to get back to the show. No, I'm the president of the United States, I have something relevant to say, and I'm gonna say it.
I'm gonna own my time and my voice. I'm not gonna waste your time. I'm gonna get to the point. I'm not gonna belabor the point. That's different.
But I'm getting to the point and I'm gonna pause, I'm gonna own my time.
Товеню спік.
Again, this is it's how you say it, not what you say.
You also want to give people time to absorb what you're saying, to feel what you're saying. When you slow down, also as a presenter, I am less likely to make mistakes.
I am less slightly less likely to say the wrong thing live on camera.
When I do the news.
I'm less likely to do these things, and I'm more likely to able to think, process, and share.
And you're right, how many times do people do presentations
And when I do communication for companies, I always tell them, when you're doing your presentations, please don't do this. All right, guys, just one other thing. Let me put this in here. I don't want to waste anybody's more time or take up any more time. Just really quickly.
What did I just do? I just told you what I'm about to tell you really isn't that important.
So don't even listen.
Why do we do that?
I'm here, I'm speaking. What I have to say if I'm saying something of value
If I know I'm saying something of value because I'm trying to share
And make
The whole system and the process better.
Then pause. I'm gonna pause, I'm gonna speak.
I'm gonna share, but if I'm talking for myself.
Because I'm insecure, I want people to see me, everybody needs to know you're sitting at that table.
Right? Make yourself known, make sure they can hear you, make sure they see you at that meeting.
You just made that about you.
You shouldn't be at that table.
That's the difference. Command your voice also.
the scientist those'cause I know you like science and research
The more we speak the
Мін іфат із Аладворд,
We are seen as less trustworthy.
And people value h uh they people will assess how competent and confident you are in the way you speak. Get to the point.
Say it with less words?
And be impactful. Command what you say. So I think what we're trying to say is
I command what I say.
I'm not as worried in my head, am I wrong, am I right? Am I gonna say the wrong thing from time to time? Sure.
Who isn't?
But
I'm owning my voice.
And I think people are so afraid to own their voice. Own your voice. And if you're wrong
If your intention is right and you've prepared and you're doing your best and you're being genuine, not authentic
You're being genuine.
And you genuinely care.
About the people you're speaking to the audience.
Then it's all okay.
You use your hands a lot as well, which is I think is a trait of someone who is

your attention and space and respect.
Because it takes up room.
Two.
And as you were doing that, you were using
A good
You know.
fifty centimeters either side of you to make the point. But it's also just in more engaging to watch because you went
And most people wouldn't a lot of people you know, it's kind of like
It's So there's a couple of things. So it's really good that you brought that up. One, I'm Greek, so that plays a role. So I try not to be so they're called illustrators when people use their hands. But yes, there is a strategy to it. One, I learned it from what doing television. When I first began doing the news, which I knew nothing about. Again, I went from a a job where you were supposed to be
Not in front of the camera, actually out of the camera,'cause the camera's supposed to catch the president, never you.


When you're on camera, just so you know, the camera sucks.
Like twenty five percent of your energy away.
It takes immediately twenty five percent of your energy out. So when the person is watching
You look flatter. You ever watch Zooms, you ever do a Zoom and it looks like everybody's bored out of their mind and you're thinking, What's going on?
It's not them, it's the camera.
It takes energy. So if you're trying to engage people
One of the things you can do, first of all, when you speak, people hear forty nine percent of what you say.
So when you're talking
If you're able to keep their attention, they're hearing half of what you say, and that's if they're connected to you.
So think about that. Now I'm trying to speak.
And
When you speak, you're also telling a story.
So I can sit like this.
Which side note
Um when you sit on your hands it's considered uh some people say it's a considered sign of um
Deceit?
I'm hiding my hands.
Uh I'm a liar.
Mm-hmm.
Um, so when you you people don't see hands
It's a sign of untrustworthy uh
untrustworthiness. Like you can't trust them. When you see hands, open hands, I'm no threat. It's kinda like an
psychological thing for
Prehistoric time pre historic times. I see no weapons in your hand, I can trust you.
So that's something I learned.
as a technique as well in the polygraph room. Always have your hands out, always be open.
I'm open. I'm here for you.
And so I've I've learned to
roll that into
how I present because I learned I it's really important to use your hands and you are storytelling.
Um and you are commanding your voice.
So all those things combined you're
You're trying to keep also people's attention. So you I also look at it, I'm trying to keep you engaged in the conversations. So I can't be lazy.
And that I have to work hard to keep you engaged. You're you're also people kind of like they ping pong. Even if somebody you ever go to a conference and you're like, I'm really gonna pay attention, I'm gonna really focus, and five, ten minutes you're in there.
And you lose people.
It's not their fault. W what am I gonna eat later? Where am I gonna go for lunch? Did I send that email? Oh I have to pick up my dry cleaning later. People ping pong. So it's especially today where you're competing with all this noise and there's so much noise out there.
You really are trying hard to keep pi people engaged, so you don't have to be long winded.
Speak
Engage, show them that you're there, own your space.
And command your words.
One of the things I learned from
watching Mr Beast make content, but also from doing this podcast and sitting with guests that get really high retention. Cause like the audience don't know this, but when every guest comes on the show
We get a graph.
Back from YouTube and the other places that the podcast appears. That shows
How many minutes people listened for?
And
Sometimes there's like big swings.
There
Between the lowest performing guest and the highest performing guest on YouTube.
There's a
One hundred percent gain.
in retention.
Thinking back over the last month.
The lowest performing guest in the diary in terms of how long people listened for.
is let's say just get arbitrary number.
People listened for one hour.
The highest performing.
They listened for two hours.
And that's the the range that we see. And when I look at why that is.
It's often because it's well, it's always because of the way that they speak. You're one of the people that has extremely high retention.
Because of the way that you speak.
And Morgan Housel's another one. And I was watching Morgan Housle the way he delivers his message. And he basically always starts it with a
Curiosity gap.
Or a promise. And Mr Beast does the same. Mr Beast's videos don't start with hey uh hiya Mr Beast, welcome back to my channel. He immediately shouts a promise in your face, which is like I've put a thousand people in that circle, the last one to leave wins five million dollars. And immediately there's this curiosity gap, like I wanna see the answer. And I just noticed that in great speakers, even on stage when I go to conferences.
Is they they leave me.
Hanging on something.
That they haven't yet given me.
Somebody once when I began doing keynotes or speaking
There's this other speaker.
And he said to me, he's like, Let me give you some advice, kid.
I was like sure, I'll take it. I don't mind.
And it and he hadn't heard me speak yet. It was just he was just trying to impart wisdom. He said, Just because you're an expert,
Doesn't mean you're interesting.
And it always stuck with me.
Because there's people, Steven, that are probably smarter than I am, have more years or time or experience in the US Secret Service than I do.
There's always somebody that that's better, smarter, faster, whatever.
But a big
Part of what plays a role is
How you present
And how are you sharing that information and are you doing an effective job?
Right.
It's not about let me tell you how smart I think I am.
It's about being able to relay that information in a way that people can understand and that it's digestible. It's how they
It's how they process information. Do you know I even learned to do that in the interview room when I would mirandise people?
I was trying to assess where they were linguistically.
And so I could speak to them in a way that resonated with them. So one of the things I would do is I had Miranda. I never read Miranda verbally. Miranda writes in the United States before you interview anybody, and I would do this whether they're an applicant, a suspect, a v a victim,'cause you never knew how things were gonna go. I would Mirandize everybody.
You know, you have the right to remain silent, all that. So I had a piece of paper.
And I would hand it to them.
And I would say please read each sentence out loud.
So the first sentence would be and I would have them hold it, they would read out loud loud
I have the right to remain silent.
And I would ask them, Do you understand that? I wouldn't read it, they would say it.
I would listen to them.
And I wanted to hear their speech, how they you know
Like how the how it resonated, the l there were language skills. Then they would sign it. Then we'd finish it.
And then I would ask them.
Questions that I already knew the answer to. What's your name? What's your date of birth?
Where are you from?
I had all of this. I did not need it.
But it was a way for me to assess their speech.
And then based on that, I would meet them where they weren't.
I'm not gonna speak the way I normally speak. I'm going to adapt my speech there's adaptability in a way that's going to
Resonate.
With you the most.
So using big hefty words, speaking super fast, especially I'm from New York, like I said, I'd go to the south, they speak slower. I would have to slow down so I could meet them where they were. So I could speak to them in a way that resonated with them. It's the listener that matters.
I am irrelevant, we don't matter. They matter.
Where is that person I'm going to meet you there? Also, even when you write, do you uh one of the things I learned in journalism school, New York Times writes at an eighth grade level.
To keep it simple.
So that people can actually finish the article or even a book, my book. Do you know how hard it was to write the book? Not for the content, but
But to write it in a way that
That was easy for people to read, and
Not for people to read a chapter and be like I need a nap.
Hm.
Because it's a co it's too cognitive heavy. You wanna do things that people can absorb and they don't have to use all their
All their brain power. If it's too hard, if we te speak too smart or too complicated, people get tired. So the delivery mechanism in which you give information really matters. You're talking so that they can understand, so that it's not hard for them to follow you.
So that they can follow you easily, they can stay connected with you, and they're not needing a nap after you're done.
You speak for them not for you, but
A lot of people, especially I think podcasters sometimes
Like to use bigger words because it makes you sound smarter.
The research shows that actually people see you as less competent.
When you use simpler words.
And you get to the point.
And you l you you use less words in the vocabulary, it actually shows that you're deemed as more competent, more confident, and more trustworthy.
I realized this a couple of years ago when we I was running my New York office for my old company and uh there was this young
Young lady in the team.
Well, cool.
Mine to Sarah. I'll call her Sarah. And Sarah in meetings would um
When we were doing like creative brainstorms for clients, we had Uber as a client. I remember being sat in the Uber brainstorm.
Um
She would kinda think out loud.
And so she'd say, What about if we did I don't know, maybe we could do something like um maybe we could do like a pop up and then we could and she was thinking out loud. And then there was this other guy who I can name called Cachel.

And he would never speak, but the minute he started speaking, it was like the the room fell silent.
Because he spoke so infrequently, we all knew that he was taking the time to think about what he was saying.
And what he was saying was about to be really, really valuable. And I would witness with Sarah
People literally.
Ha ha off.
They would even

before she had said a word, like the first two words out of her mouth.
They would immediately assume
That it was not worth paying attention to.
Because she had developed what I would later call a bad contribution score.
Which is kinda like your credit score.
But you hurt it when you
Contribute.
Beyond
Value, if that makes sense. Yeah. Well she's not you know what is she's so engrossed and it's not to
Make
to throw d you know, d d judgment at her, but that's what happens when you're so engrossed in what you're thinking
That you lose
You lose sight of there's ten other people in this room.
And
This is when if you're gonna open your mouth, open your mouth, use your pauses, use your silences so that you can make sure your message is impactful and you're not running through
You know, you're not vomiting everything out, which also makes you look nervous and
Lacking confidence?
But
If you're gonna speak.
Then
Command what you say.
Speak with conviction and
And don't waste people's time.
You can think of people in your life, right? If you think about all the people you work with, there's ones that overtalk and there's ones that definitely undertalk, and then there's ones that like hit the balance just right.
And what is the
Can you like tell me about these people and how and if that's even true, what I just said.
It is true.
I think it depends who it is. If it's someone I'm working with, I'm always kinda like, Can we just you know, in my head I'm like, land the plane, land the plane. Like I just I don't I have to have like ten more conversations like these. It's not to be mean, you know, be but as you go higher up
As you're doing more, you have
Less empathy, ironically. It's not because you become meaner, it's just I
I don't have the ability.
And

I'm gonna
Can I ask you a question actually? Sure.
Do you tend to draw people
That want to work
With you
Who think
They see the persona Steven h here.
And you're
You're guiding people, you're helping people.
You're in some way mentoring people, do you find that people c want to come to work
For you because they think you will do that for them. Do you tend to draw those personalities? Of course.
How do you know you have that?
This is a good question.
Usually in the interview process
The orientation.
Towards why they're here.
will be too much about Steve about too much about me. And it'll be highlighted when they meet my executives, my team, my chief of staff, my CEOs, whatever, they'll say they'll always come to me and say, I think this one's a little bit too interested in you and not the role. And so when I get to meet this person, I'll ask them a very simple question, which is explain to me exactly why this job appealed to you.
And they should be ab and in that moment, they all their answers should be about
The work at hand.
Not I read your book and I thought love your puck you know, it should never be that because
As you know.
From working with very interesting people.
That stuff will fade.
And when we go into the trenches, it won't matter whether you liked my book.
Like we're here to do work and you have to like love the work.
Yeah, it has to be the th the work has to be the thing you're thinking about in the shower.
Not my podcast.
And if that if that's the case, then you'll you'll be fine here.
When I did the hiring for the US I did the polygraphs. Now I know you can't polygraph people, but they would
We would polygraph people. So I was like the last line of defense. They'd go through the whole
hiring process, right? Interviews, um, panel interviews, exams, there's m you know, uh tests you would have to take. Anyway, so you pass all this stuff, right? And then you get to me.
And so I was kind of the last line of defense.
And one of the things I would ask them during the interview
I would ask them
Kinda like what you said.
Why do you want to be a C US Secret Service special agent?
And I typically get two types of answers. Oh, I think it'd be a really interesting challenge. I want to see if I can do it.
You know, it'd be really you know, I I wanna see what you know, if I'm able to do it.
And then the other
Answer I would get typically.
would be you know I wanna serve my country.
I want to help protect people. I want to do something bigger than me.
Do you know who made it through the hiring process?
These guys.
These guys who are I me, I wanna learn, I wanna challenge, I wanna see I can do it.
Because they were so self focused
They they they w not only would they not make it through the hiring process, they want to make it through training.
Yeah.
Because these guys were focused on the bigger thing.
The role.
And then these guys were focused on themselves, what they could get out of it. So when people are interviewing with you, what can they get out of it? I get to be around
Stephen
Me.
There it is.
Yeah.
This is also just a really good
Piece of advice for what to
Which is not to aim at
The labels, the flashy things, the
The ephemeral. The things that will fade after
A week, a month. Actually this goes back to what w a problem my friend has with he goes for people that look really good on the outside.
That's part of the reason he's he's still single. He really cares about what it looks like. And I remember one day him saying to me, You know, I've just started dating this girl, Steven, but I I'm not sure because you know, I just think if I walked into a restaurant w with her on my arm
then I I just don't know how it would look. I remember thinking to him, Bro, you're so like, if that's what you c you care about.
You are
You're gonna struggle.
And people care too much about how it looks. How they look. How the job makes them look. How the situation makes them look.
Yes.
Yes. Although I will say to my husband sometimes, I'm like you're lucky you're hot when we fight. You're lucky you're a good looking hot man,'cause I don't know if we would have survived. So there's moments, Steven.
Truth be told, while I'm looking at him like you're looking you're a good looking man. Otherwise I don't know.
So the there's moments where that'll save the relationship. But I digress. I forgot what you asked me because I took you in a different
Direction because
I was really just curious to see.
You know
Because I would see it with like high
presidents and I would see with certain people.
And I experience it myself too. Sometimes you get this
Yeah.
And
I would think you would get it.
A lot and that's a really tough thing I would think
I would say though some people that have been extremely successful in my company, they were also
Big followers of the show. I'm thinking of you, Christiana.
is our chief revenue officer. She told me she's listened to every episode ever, ac actually in her application.
She used um
in the subject line, s like chapter nineteen of my book and then in the email there were several things that I'd written in my books. She's an unbelievable performer because actually her career and her life
And her passion is also
The work.
So it can be both, but it can't be just
As you said, you can't just be Oh, I just want to see what the challenge is like.
It c you know what I mean? It can't just be an uh
Surface level.
Any is there anything else that it that is really pertinent on the point of You know that guy backstage that said to you that gave you that advice, which was kind of a little bit patronizing? It sounded like that. You said it wasn't, but it kind of It didn't take it like that. But I'm also
I also don't get easily offended.
To me I looked at it like
Like
You have to really say something pretty offensive to me to be offended. So I I think I think my offensive levelness is probably
Is that a good thing?
Yes, because
In the job that I came from you couldn't get
You just couldn't get impacted with people.
As easy. Like you have to think of it this way, like it it would be something stupid, Stephen, like I
President Barack Obama, he went out to dinner and I had to tell somebody standing by the restaurant, ma'am, you know, sir, could you please c just cross the street and stand there'cause we had to clear the area.
And people lose their minds. You're violating my rights. Phones come out. They're yelling at you in your face.
Now
The New York me or the the
The heavy meat wants to just like
Punch'em in the throat. Go across the street. Like I don't I don't have time for this.
She can't do that.
So when you
You have a job where people
Dislike you because you're law enforcement.
And they're in your face and
when you're telling them to do something, they automatically you have something called reactants. Nobody likes to be told anything.
They nobody likes to feel like they don't have control over their lines you their lives so they have
Reactants, which means immediately
they're gonna push back. A really good example is Covid. People losing their minds, you know
when they were forced to wear masks. And a big reason it wasn't really the mask, it was that
They felt that they had no autonomy. You're telling me what I have to do, and I feel like I have no control. So in law enforcement, you're typically dealing with this often.
Where you can't offer people a choice typically, it's I need you to do this. So when you have people really escalating and getting in your face, and in many situations,
Wanting an altercation.
They wanna put on y wanna put it on YouTube. You wanna put on social media
You have to manage yourself. Also, in my mind, I'm like, you're not gonna get that from me.
So you do have
A higher threshold.
To tolerate a lot more nonsense.
So if I was someone who was really disrespecting you when you were doing your job and I was
shouting in your face, you told me to get across the street and I started cussing you out and being very personal and trying to
sort of exacerbate the situation.
What would be going through your head?
At that exact moment.
I'm now screaming in your face, I've got my phone out, I'm telling you, you're live on Instagram.
What what's what is actually going through your head?
Versus what you're displaying externally.
Or Sir, w whoever it was.
Like
I
Appreciate you frustrated.
However, I'm not able to have you stand here. Could you please go across the street?
How many times I'm gonna say this before I force this person across the street before I put handcuffs on them? That's what's happening in my head. So in my head I am doing mathematical equation. How many chances do I give this person before I throw on handcuffs? Have you ever had someone
Insult you.
Yeah.

You know And does does it offend in inside even if you don't show it?
Don't want to say you get used to it, but
You don't take it personally'cause they don't know me.
Also, when you're in law enforcement, you're
You're seeing people at their worst, said
You are seeing the worst of humanity.
That is one of the toughest jobs. Even when
And even with military, military too, they go to war war, that's atrocious. But you go, you do your tour and you're out.
Then maybe you go back, but you get reprieve.
Law enforcement?
You doing this for your entire career. Every single day you are seeing the worst in humanity. People are lying to you and
They're um committing crimes.
Like you really could lose a lot of faith. You really could become really cynical. It's actually a common trait in law enforcement, so you have to be really careful.
To not become overly cynical, because you're seeing the worst of people. And they're also bringing out their worst behavior for whatever reason.
People are not their best the best version of themselves. And again, you're also
Typically not dealing with
The good citizen.
You're dealing with people who
Are
Consistently com
committing crimes. If you look at crime in general, the vast majority of crime it's committed by the same group of people.
And the majority of arrests, if you look at the arrests, they're misdemeanors, meaning
Driving while intoxicated. They're smaller things.
Felonies, really serious crimes, these are people who typically violate the law.
Consistently.
So when there this is happening
I we would memorize uh
What the US Secret Service did is they taught us to fight with facts. I fight with facts. So we actually memorized the title codes.
Like eighteen, title eighteen, USC th was it thirty fifty six?
That gave me the right, said
To um do what I needed to do to secure and protect the president of the United States. And if you were interfering with that, then the law gave me the right.
To
Arrest you if I needed to. I don't want to arrest anybody, I didn't care.
But the law gave me that right'cause now you're impeding in my ability to do my job. So one of the things I would do is I would say, ma'am
Uh you are right now.
Impeding with Title eighteen, thirty fifty six, and I would say the title of what it was, Rich says that.
I have to do X, Y, and Z. So
Here's the thing.
I don't want to arrest you.
But you do need to move across the street. You can move across the street, and I can get somebody to come talk to you.
Or, you know, it's gonna escalate. It's up to you. Most people, Steven
Most
Listen, but a lot of people like theatrics. You said it's up to you. That's giving them an element of control, which is good. It's up to me. Look, at the end they have to do it because I have to do my job.
Right, but the majority of time
But you've given them the choice'cause you've said you can either screw or this. Yes, but sometimes you have to repeat it like fifteen times.
To people.
Before you actually do it.

The last thing you want to do is put hands on people. The minute you put hands on people
So
Everything breaks bad.
They're gonna freak out. Somebody's gonna get hurt.
You're gonna
It it's it's not a good thing. The majority of people I would arrest after I would arrest them, I'd have to take them to the hospital. Not because I did anything to hurt them.
But my heart hurts. I'm stressed. I have I don't know what's happening. I have a headache. I don't want him to die on me, and the majority of the time I would take him to the hospital. Or they were faking it.
I've had people fake heart attacks'cause they thought I'd feel bad and take the cuffs.
And I'm like
Okay, are you having a heart attack? Let me put the cast on. We're going straight to the hospital. Now we'll take him to the hospital. So there's a lot of tactics people would use
To also get you to stop.
Manipulators, which people can do the average person, not in this way, but ways people can manipulate you to stop.
Whatever it is you're doing.
Let's say you're trying to find out the truth of something or you're in you're trying to get to your
Asking questions and a person doesn't like it, they may start crying.
People would cry when I would arrest them as a way for me to feel sorry to stop. So often people will use things to get you to feel bad to leave them o alone. Let's say you're gonna fire somebody'cause for something they did, and you're asking them questions and they start crying in the office instead of asking the questions.
Right?
That's a way to deflect to get you to feel bad to stop your line of fire.
Of questions.
To get you to stop. Very common.
Very common crying. It's a manipulation tack tactic. And there's other things people can do. So people will use certain things to get you to stop what you're doing.
And sometimes people fall for fall for it.
Well, they'll say things to you. You're only doing this to me because I'm
A woman, or because I'm this, is
And
Those sometimes
Not that they're not true, but a lot of times it can be used as manipulators to get you to
back off.
In that scenario, you're being met with emotion and it appears that you're
Returning.
Logic.
Because you're talking about the title code.
And you could, I guess, return a motion, but it
No.
No.
You own your emotion. Nobody should provoke you.
Nobody
You're Stephen Bartley, daughter of CEO. Nobody provokes you.
You own your response.
You can go in that back room and motherfuck somebody to you know, like d do it in the mirror.
But nobody nobody owns that. Nobody should take that from you.
Who are they to take that fruit from you and who are you to surrender it?
That's the way I look at it.
You're gonna be dealing with people people are evolving door of all their stuff and I do think we see a really heightened
emotional state with people.
Like people cannot post stuff on social media. Like everybody has to give their opinion on something. And sometimes I'm like Stop.
Like everybody doesn't need to know what you're thinking.
Like stop posting, we put so much noise out there'cause we think people care.
They don't.
І цей івенню спік.
I look at social media the same way.
What are you contributing to the world?
Are you?
Post it. If you're not
Don't post it.
Don't put more noise, your contribution points even in your posts.
And the things you share with the world. But I look at it this way
You're at a point I understand when you're young. Up until you're twenty five years old, I give you a free pass'cause that frontal cortex of yours is not developed. You're not emotionally regulated, but then there comes a point
Well you have to own your emotions. I had to because I would lose my job.
How do I become unprovocable?
Is there a way?
Or is it just by repetitions? It's repetition.
If enough people get in your face
Over time.
You learn to manage your emotions, but if you spent the whole time avoiding people getting in your face, I'm not telling you to go look for problems, but you shouldn't go out of your your your way to avoid conflict to such a degree.
Or you're willing to do anything and whatever because you don't want conflict. I don't want conflict. I don't like it.
But if it shows up in my face.
I'm gonna be there.
Yet you can also handle people non emotionally with facts. Okay, earlier on you said X, Y, and Z. Could you explain that to me?
Even sometimes when s people tell me, you know, I feel like I'm not valued at work, or I think my boss doesn't care about me, or I believe this.
And then I wanna go talk to my boss and I'll tell them.
I'm fine with you going talk to your boss when they would ask me for advice,'cause I never give unsolicited advice.
I'm fine with you going in there.
But do not go in there and say I think, I feel, I believe.
Go in there and say, Hey, I did this project, I spent X amount of hours on it, and I made X amount of money for this company, but
You know, I I'd like to put in for a higher position or I'd like to put in for this other project. Go in with the facts.
Facts win because it's harder for people to refute facts. I think I should get this. Well I think you shouldn't.
I believe, you know, you're treating me this way. Well I believe I'm not.
But if you say
We had this meeting, during this meeting you said this and this and
Could you explain that to me because it seemed as though
You didn't trust me in that meeting, or it seemed as though you were upset with me in that meeting. But I'm telling you specifically what I did.
So I'm bringing y back to that specific fact a moment versus now
I feel that you treat me this way. It's so vague and ambiguous. When you go in with very specific things
That's harder to argue. You want to not that I want you to win an argument, but you really want to make your point and get results.
Be very clear and specific. And you know what, if you're nervous, write it down.
I always tell people write your stuff down.
Walk into a meeting, if you're having it with your supervisor, Sir Boss, I don't know if people say Sir anymore, I guess I have to say sir. Sir, I just I took some notes down, so I hope you don't mind. I'm just gonna look to it just to make sure I
I I speak clearly and I don't make any mistakes.
And then go through the points.
I actually asked a a colleague of mine who
was in a similar situation, who wanted to have conversation with me and their slightly younger colleague
Of mine.
Um
In their early twenties.
They said they wanted to speak to me about something?
And

My advice to them was actually to write it down in a memo.
As if you were writing a story,'cause I love narrative memos.
And
I did that because I wanted them to
to properly think about what they wanted to say.
Because I knew what would happen is they'd come in, they'd start sort of like falling over their words a little bit. They might not not not fully
give me all the context. And I often do that now, which is in all my meetings um that we do. We kinda stole this from Jeff Bezos Amazon, is I'll have someone write it into even if it's a two page memo.
Which says like this is the situation.
This is why I'm bringing you this thing in this meeting. This is my proposed solution. This is the decision I need.
You know?
Super, super clear. Because in business you often find what
you know, where you have two kind of sides of things. Either someone walks in in freestyles with their voice and they stumble in the the moment, they don't get things out properly, or someone comes in with like a hundred page PowerPoint presentation, which is like
vague pictures of things and bullet points and I hate a fucking bullet point. Cause a bullet point is open to interpretation. So is a picture.
Whereas these narrative memos, which is what Amazon and Jeff Bezos
Take it out.
They leave no room for ambiguity and all the context is there. And actually sometimes it actually means that they can just send it as an in an email.
And then you don't have to talk about it.
Dude, it's funny you say that when I did cases
I would always ask and again not because
I knew to do this, I was trained to do this, but really good interview is
Get people to write not a memo but a statement.
Before you even interview them.
You know, and if it was like the date of the crime, for example, tell me what you did
From the mor time you woke up on this date till the time you went to sleep.
And it would be a memo.
Of what they did that day. Or tell me what you know about blah blah blah blah. And I would read those statements
And I would know often who was my suspect, who wasn't. I had one case where
Baby was a few months old.
Baby had a broken arm.
And it was between the dad and the nanny.
The police were looking at.
And police weren't sure which one it was.
We think it's either the nanny or the dad. Now, in a criminal case, you always want to talk to them the most likely suspect. You don't build your way up.
I go to the person who I likely think did it. I'm going straight to the person, right? I don't wanna go to the person I think maybe did it and then build my way there. I want the one I want the person that I truly believe is my suspect, my offender.
So I get the statements.
And I read them both. I read dads.
And I read Nanny's.
I read dads and I'm like
It's not dad.
I knew from the statement it wasn't dead.
I read nannies.
And I knew right away after I read Nanny's sta statement, she did it.
Now you're gonna say, How did you know?
The nanny
Opened up her statement by telling me about her morning, how frustrated it was, how she was running late. She had two little kids of her own. She was trying to get them out. She was a single mom.
She was stressed out, then she shows up to work to put
Um
Take care of this baby.
The baby's fussing, the baby's crying, I did this, it didn't work, I did that, it didn't work.
So as she's telling me the story, she's telling me
How hard her day was, and then she turns into how frustrated she was with this baby.
I did everything I could to get this baby s to stop crying. I think the baby was is either three or six months old. I'm just I can't remember. And the baby was this and the baby was that.
And then she gets to part
Where it says
Then I gave the baby Tylenol.
And it went quiet.
And I was like, there it is.
That's when she broke the baby's arm.
Who says I gave the babinol and it went quiet?
In that moment
Her language had changed so much, I was like
That's the moment she snapped that baby's arm and the baby passed out from the pain.
And so
When I get the statement I call I call up the the
The law enforcement entity was the state police,'cause they were the ones that asked me to come up and I said, I wanna talk to Nanny.
Not the dad.
And sure enough, Nanny comes in.
Hour and a half later I had a confession. I didn't even have to give her a polygraph.
What was interesting is in her statement, it sounded like she was actually self justifying her behavior. She was.
She absolutely was.
I was reading about this thing called cognitive distance that you just mentioned and th this idea that we don't like the the gap between the way we're behaving and who we think we are or want to be. And when I think about
Myself and you know.
bad habits that I have or bad habits that my friends have. We all like justify
Justify. I'm too busy so I couldn't go to the gym.
Or there was nothing else that I
That I could grab so I
Ate the cookie in the mini bar.
Like we have to find a way to justify it.
And then some of us I think we like build our lives around kind of believing our own
Justifications.
Of course we do. And then we're trapped.
Because in the presence of these crazy justifications.
What we're doing makes sense and it's okay.
I think sometimes it's
I'm not telling people to feel
permanently bad for what they do,'cause you don't wanna like we said, you don't wanna live in the past and beat yourself up and man, I messed up and I did this.
You will, but I do think it's important to say that
I did something I shouldn't have done this.
At least to yourself.
How do you stop believing your own bullshit?
Well do you.
I think
So I'm very lucky I have a husband who makes sure that I don't.
Yeah.
He is um but he's a very steady good soundboard, but he's also a former special agent.
both in US Secret Service and Homeland Security and he was swat
So this is a super
Steady person
Lost his father when he was young. I'm only sharing this'cause you're asking
I guess what I'm saying is so I have someone in my very inner circle
Who will tell me hey?
Chucklehead.
You might want to think this through. He may not say it like that.
But he will call me out on things people that
Care about you will typically call things out on you.
Um now there's ways to do it and ways not to do it. And there's maybe times where I'm not really keen on the way he does it.
But
Because I he has good contribution points, good credibility with me, I know if he's saying something.
That there's validity to it.
If he's gonna pause and say, Hey, I would like you to think about this
It's coming from somewhere.
So he's built enough trust. I've built enough trust to know that he does that. Now if you have someone who's always critiquing you
'Cause that does exist. Everything you do is wrong.
Then that person's not gonna
You know.
They're not gonna resonate.
So I think having people
That actually call you out on your stuff or help point it out.
That can do it.
And that you also have to be okay with listening it. So I'm mature enough
And I hope to be I try to be humble enough
To say look, tell me the truth.
Or there are times too where as much as a
Strategic decision maker I like to be.
There's times where Stephen I'm seeing red.
Someone'll do something and all I see is red.
And I will go to someone
that can either either I trust or can help me make a decision with something
And I'll say, you know, it could be my agent, it could be a work thing. I'm like, Hey, this happened, I'm seeing red
How would you handle this scenario?
Because
I'm in an emotional state, I'm not gonna make a good decision.
Can I have your guidance advice?
And so I will go to people I trust who will guide me.
So that's the biggest thing. I think call yourself out.
On your bullshit, the minute you start getting emotional
And I think there's a pattern.
If everything offend you.
If everything upsets you.
If you're getting triggered all the time.
If you're upset with people or angry with people, or you feel the need to let everybody know through social media or posts or texting,
You know?
what's going on in your life, I want you to pause and say, Why am I doing all of this?
What is going on within me?
that I am feeling that I need to that I see the world this way. It always starts with us.
It's always within.
So I think that's the thing. It's like what's going on within me. And if you have the ability, the maturity, and you're in a space where you can do that and you want that.
You can call yourself out on your own bullshit.
Do you have a lot of friends?
No.
I did growing up.
I was Miss Social Butterfly.
Um no.
And just so you know, the research shows, Steven, that as we age,
Our inner circle gets smaller and smaller and smaller. I have a lot of acquaintances who
And I'm friendly with a lot of people.
And I network with a lot of people, and I like these people.
But when I hear the word friends
I could count my friends on one hand.
Do you have a lot of friends?
Mm.
You might'cause you might still be at an age where you're kind of in the middle there.
For me, I've got like five best friends.
But then I've got all these other people who I've become friends with.
Predominantly through work.
Okay, so I define friends as
People you would give pretty much unconditional trust to.
Unconditional, I trust you I'll tell you whatever.
More or less.
How many would those be?
I reckon ten.
Ten.
Unconditional trust.
Jack's one of them. Jack over there's one of them.
Known him for seven years now.
I wouldn't
Trust him with.
So that would be
Legitimate.
Yes, that would be a friend. Right?
Consistency, length of time.
Trust.
No betrayal?
Mm-hmm.
That would be a friend.
Quality versus quantity game, do you think, the inner circle?
Yeah.
Can why do you need all those people?
It's it's it's one thing to have connections and and network and and meet people and hang out.
But who you bring into that inner circle
I think
And I would think even for you
You want to be selective and careful.
Because you also want to make sure
People
If Steven wasn't Steven
Like
What quality friend would they still be?
Because sometimes it's also what the package is and people are drawn to us. And that's okay if
But I guess what I'm saying is
Its quality are they genuinely good friends?
Like if something bad happens and you're like, I need your help and they're like, Let me would they be like, Let me go get my shovel?
Where we meet?
You know.
I think that would be
The gauge of a friend. But I think sometimes people think a lot of friends are good.
And a lot of friends.
are noise. You can have acquaintances, but you're like your friend is really somebody who influences you.

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You've used this term low vibration before.
Yeah.
What is what is
What does that mean to you to be low vibration?
Can think of it this way. Like there's some pe
I think look at low vibration adds when you're around people and
It's just
You don't want to be around them. They make you feel bad, not because they said not something necessarily to you
But
They're maybe in a victim mindset. They're always bringing problems, they're always bringing drama, everything is wrong, if nothing is right, the
They're all low vibration. Can you be low vibration around because you're
Live vibr around live vibration people.
Yes, because you
Adopt their habits.
you adopt and are influenced by people, doesn't matter who you are, you can be
You can be Steven Bartlett, diarrhea CEO if you surround yourself with low vibration people.
Eventually, slowly, it's gonna bring down your vibration. It's easier for
If you're up here, let's say higher vibration, I'm doing really well. I'm
I'm I'm
And
Excelling in the way I think, emotionally stable. You you kind of
You're doing really well in life and you're up here.
And you're around people like down here.
And you're thinking, Oh, I'm gonna help pull this person up, right?
It is actually easier for them to pull you down than
Than it is.
For you to pull people up.
You know, I always say be careful who you try to save, some people will drown you.
It's like when we would do uh rescue, search and rescue, they would tell you when you go out in the water
The most dangerous thing isn't the water, it's the person who's panicking in the water who could kill you.
Because as you get closer to them to save them, what are they doing, Stephen?
They're panicking. They're flailing. Then they see you, what do they do? They grab onto you so they can stay afloat. And you know what they do?
They push you down.
You're there to save them.
But in their panic and in their loss and in their chaos, what do they do?
They push you down.
People are the same way just in relationships.
So all I'm saying is I'm not telling you not to be a person who's going out there to help others, but be selective in how you do it and who you help.
Because then
You fall into that
That that space of I'm I'm such a
I'm just trying to be a good person. I'm trying to do this. I'm trying to do that. No, you're exposing yourself to people and environments that are not good for you.
and that actually impact your life negatively. And so it's not on them. It's also we have a responsibility to ourselves, Stephen.
To make good decisions.
And where we go.
what relationships we enter, who we're dealing with and what we're doing. We have a responsibility. So if somebody screws us over, I get it, every once in a while you come across an asshole and it happens.
But if it's a consistent thing.
It's also what did I do? What did I allow myself to do?
That expose me to this volatility, that exposed me to this stuff. It's like crime. If I walk home every night in a sketchy area with the the lights are dark and there's no lighting and I know there's high crime and it's an abandoned area,
That choice I'm making to walk through that n neighborhood versus taking a taxi.
That will make me more likely to be what? A victim of crime.
But if I take a taxi
I'm less likely to be a victim of crime. I avoid this bad neighborhood. I avoid this bad area. I guess what I'm saying is
You also have a responsibility. We have a responsibility to navigate
The environment we're in.
and how we engage with people. And it can't just be
He or she screwed me over.
It's like what decision did you make?
Not blame, but what decision did you make
That exposed you and made you more vulnerable to

'Cause typically, maybe not all
But the majority of times
There are signs that we choose to ignore or
Or we think everybody's our friend and we give them unconditional trust.
And then something happens and we think why did that happen?
Well you gave unconditional trust like it was nothing.
Your trust should be something people earn.
You don't have to tell them you need to earn my trust. You don't have to say it, but internally
It's kinda like
You need to earn this.
'Cause it means something to give people trust. You shouldn't you shouldn't just automatically surrender it to you. So Jack, what's up, Jack? Jack over seven years.
Earned trust.
Consistently and over time, and that's why that relationship's the same way. But you are responsible. We are each responsible for ourselves. So if you keep exposing yourself to low vibration, to chaotic areas
Chaotic people.
Then
You are playing a role.
In the problems that you have.
We live in a culture though where people are do complain a lot. They complain that things aren't fair, that they're not equal, that they're not, you know, not being treated like they should be treated.
Excetera, et cetera.
And there's there's a lot of that in the
The corporate world
I think it's okay to meet people where they are sometimes and listen to them. I think it's valid.
But
It's also
When you bend so much, the
You're also doing a disservice to them because you're helping make excuses for them. They're not delivering. And it hurts the work culture. And I think you really have to be careful because
A person who comes in with poor performance can really impact the rest of the team. And I've had it. Like I don't have
as many as employees as you have, but when I have people that work with me, I'm very aware of how their vibration comes in and impacts the other team. I want high performance and if you're coming in with your low vibration and your problems and your dramas.
It doesn't belong at work.
What is the defining
sort of attitude trait of a low performer.
Just if you just had to pick one, the first thing that comes to mind that pisses you off.
It doesn't piss me off, but
But when people start telling me about their personal affairs
And it's not that I'm a sensitive person. There's a time and place
So
If you start telling me about how your weekend was with your grandmother or whoever,
I'm sitting there, I'm like
It's not that I'm insensitive, but it's
We're at work.
Like I asked you about something specific and you're telling me about this whole story about
So you're making it about you and I think that there's a little bit of like did you not pause to think like
I'm talking to my supervisor or my boss.
She's super busy.
She's expect ex excepting expecting something from me.
Let me share it with her. You know
When you do that to another person
You take from them all the time.
How's that fair to them?
At the start of that you said they'd come and talk about themselves, et cetera, and it reminded me of something you were talking about in your TED talk where
One of the key ideas is that
You're not that special.
What do you mean when you say
You're not that special.
You're not that special is
When we make ourselves so self important, which in Western culture
We have. It's very much about the person, the identity of the person. You can do anything. You can this.
I think that's great.
But what happens is when we get so focused on the singular person and we forget other people
І за спешо.
That
It's just us and then the rest of the world revolves around us. We're the sun and then everybody else revolves around us.
And
When you think you're special.
It's not that you become a narcissist or anything like that. That's not how I mean it.

If I am special, then
What also that says is my problems are special, my pain is special, what I'm going through is special, and you meet those people where
It's like oh no no no this is
This is just happening to be, that mindset.
And when you are there.
You are alone?
And there's nothing that anybody can do to help you, even when they give you advice.
Because
You are the exception to everything, said
When you have that mindset, at least when I had that mindset, all my problems faded away.
As bad as they were, the
Or whatever h hardship I was going through, I'm like, I'm not that special.
There's other people going through it far worse than I am. It doesn't minimize what I'm going through, but it reorients you.
You also talk about walking with conviction.
Because
Predeces can spot prey.
Yes.
Did you see that through your career that
Predators, narcissists.
Would go for certain people.
Yes, but even
Yes, but in even in regular relationships, how do some people end up with a bad partner all the time?
Or an abusive partner all the time.
Why?
Don't throw me under the bus, you say.
But why? Because we tend to at
Draw to us.
Those folks
Because we th we we look like we're easier targets. We look like they're people they can
Then mold or manipulate.
And we we trust too easily. I'm not telling you not to give trust, but there're certain traits that they look at.
They're not gonna go after
An alpha type personality. You know
It it's
If you look like you're an easy target, if you look like you're easy to take down, if you look like you're easily
gonna be thrown off.
People see that, they they pay attention, but if they look like you're a competitor
If they look like you're a counter predator and you don't even have to be that extreme, but if they look like, hey, this person's gonna push back
I'm gonna be careful. Even with some people you talk to I bet employees, there's some employees that you're probably more comfortable telling something to, because they're more easily
They're easier to
tell it to, they're softer in tone, maybe they're not gonna push back. They're easier. And then there are other employees where
Like I have to think about how I say this'cause this person's a
А с Тронг Алі, а
I have to approach them a little bit differently.
Now
People are the same way, we give off cues, we give off vibes.
And to some people we can look like
Easier targets?
Even in qu i crime. Crime.
They
Pick their targets.
They don't want fair fights.
They want I want someone who's gonna go down easy. Kids are the most um
Overly abuse population, why?
Is it kids?
They're the easiest to target. They're the most vulnerable.
Why? So if I'm such a strong predator, why am I going for kids?
Or next elderly.
Why am I going for elderly?'Cause they're easy for me to conquer. They're easy for me to take down. Predators are not what you think they are.
Even if you look at recent events, if you look at recent shootings we've had.
When you look at the people that have carried out some of these shootings, there was one recently this week with Charlie Kirk. Look at that shooter. Does he look like a predator to you?
I don't mean it in a cold way, I just as you look it. There was one before that here in the United States. It was the Minneapolis school shooting. Did you see that shooter? Does that look like a predator to you?
These predators that we envision in our head that we think are these ruthless
Scary looking people.
They tend to not be that.
They
They themselves are not strong, but
They look for weaker targets because it's easier easier to take out and manipulate.
Predators are not these it's not like what you see in the movie.
the movies. Like you think you're gonna see the scary looking dude. And I'm not saying you're not gonna see that from time to time.
But these people who do certain things who take advantage they don't
look like predators. And you have to be careful because you inadvertently attract
People.

I can manage her.
I can do that.
I can mold that, I can shape that.
And in the context of worker relationships, if there's my
My boss is
shouting at me and constantly berating me, or my partner is shouting at me and berating me, and I just feel small.
I can't
necessarily call for backup. So aga is it's as simple as saying my choice I just should just leave? Or is there what if it's a situation where I can't leave? Like it's like
Family.
Yeah.
Sometimes in work, you know, you you have to stay
Because you need to pay your bills.
Uh
there's you know kids involved and I'm married to this person. So okay, so you're saying you cannot leave. If I couldn't leave.
I f always feel like there's a choice. It may not
be the choice you want to make, but you always have a choice.
Um
Because in those scenarios
If you've got let's say
And I've had a lot of people come to me and they're truly abusive relationships.
There is no
Advice I can give you to fix that.
that person is just going to abuse you, let alone from you assaulting them back and then now you're having like
God forbid, like somebody's dead?
Which does happen.
I I can't fix that.
I c what I can do is
For a person like that.
And most people don't leave abusive relationships. The the research I've talked to a lot of people that work with abuse victims, they find that even when they do leave,
The vast majority go back.
So I think that's a scenario. If you have someone like that in your life, the best thing you could do for them is listen.
And just try to keep them as safe as you can. I don't think
There is nothing
I can do what are you gonna do?
Get a gun. And then what? You're gonna use it?

If you they they they almost want you to help them
Stay in that situation, but change the situation. No, change the person. It's the iceberg we talked about. They're not accepting the truth of who they have in front of them.
We don't accept the truth. I have this person, and this person is horrible to me. They're abusive to me, they're vile to me, and I think if I could just get them to not be like that, it
Everything would be okay, but
Okay, of course it would.
But that's not the truth. You're not living in truth. You have somebody
Who is horrible to you?
Now, if it's an intimate personal relationship like a companion, that's a big thing because you live with that person, there's no getting away from them.
Typically, like if you have a companion or you get married, like you're what? Typically, unless you divorce, you're tied to that person. That's really rough. Now let's say it's a parent.
Or a kid,'cause kids can be just as abusive to parents.
Actually, d you know the research shows at least uh
Here in the United States, I can't remember the most recent year I looked at, it was a uniform crime report, I believe. It showed there was more abuse.
From child to parent
Than parent to child.
Relationship wise.
I don't mean a five year old hitting their parent.
I mean
It can be an adult child.
Being abusive to a parent.
But let's say you have a scenario like that.
Now
there's a point at it some degree where you can remove yourself, either from the parents' house. Let's say you live with your parents, I get this sometimes a lot. My parents are like this or they're like that to me and I'm like
How old are you?
You're over the age of eighteen and you can work
You have the ability.
find ways to remove yourself. You don't have to cut them out of your life because sometimes for people it's really, really hard.
They love their family, as messed up as they are, they
You can love your family, but you don't have to like them.
Those are two th different things.
I had a scenario like that where there was a certain member of my uh extended family who
Was
Being inappropriate.
And um
I was the first this was when I was younger, I was like eighteen. I said to my siblings, I said, I know you guys are gonna stay and tolerate it and you're gonna justify it in your own way. That's not the approach I'm gonna take. I'm gonna cut them off.
And funnily enough
This person treats me the best.
They treat me the best. And I think it's because they realise that my tolerance is so low and I'm willing to walk away and that I don't think family
means that
You are bound to this person for life, I do think you still get to choose.
I think like all relationships in your life, there's it should be a certain standard that they have to meet whether they're family, friends, a stranger, or a team of whoever it is, that they have to meet like a minimum standard. And family for me just don't get a pass on that. And funnily, it meant that my relationship with I've never fallen out with this person. The only reason I said that was because I see them falling out with everybody else.
But and and this was again before the podcast and whatever else, like before my my businesses. I was a broke student. But I just
I for whatever reason, probably some trauma related reason.
Felt no obligation.
To keep you in my life just because
We have the same genes.
I didn't for me that's like not not a not a high enough bar.
And they treated me so well.
That's so interesting because you stood your ground.
Yeah.
And this is where
Sometimes we talk about the b you know, are we talking about the bad things that have happened to us and we carry them through
It's one thing to go through something bad and then you move through it, right? You moved on.
But when you stay in something bad, so like if you if you're in a relationship and there's continual trauma
There's no
You can't move through that.
'Cause you're staying there. It's not it's not it happened to you and you're staying in this victim mindset. It's like
You're still in it.
Yeah.
Chronic
abuse, chronic trauma, chronic what however you want to define it, and abuse can look in
differently or chronically having somebody bully you, that's really bad.
That's really bad. There's no strategies, there's no skills. And I would get those folks and they're like, can you help me be more confident, be more this? And they would come out in the
discussions I would have that they had somebody that was in their life that he was bully bully or abusive, and I would tell them there are no skills I can give you.
That can help you
G be more confident because
I can't
I can't counter that.
You have someone who is consistently
Demolishing you.
And so you think what? I'm gonna tell you to what, do a power pose?
And that's gonna fix it.
Do you feel like you have
And I don't know. I'm asking out of humbleness. I don't know. Do you feel that growing up you had a lot of people that
around you that were
Either
You know.
Had a lot of issues.
Or struggles and like th that it was something that you had to
Push through or climb out to get to where you are?
Yeah, I think I think it really only takes like one person.
That's close enough.
Especially if the
Above you.

And in my case, to make
My
Tolerance level extremely low.
Think people can relate to that because I hear people say this all the time. Like it only takes one parent that did X, or one parent that did this, or you know, an uncle or an auntie or whatever, that you go, I'm gonna tolerate zero of that.
So another thing in my relationship with my partner
is neither of us shout. And I grew up in a house where shouting was the background noise of every day. Like from morning till night. And so with me and my partner,
Been together for seven years.
We talk like this.
It's not to say we don't argue.
Or we don't have disagreements, we don't get upset, whatever. But there's never shouting.
Because I just have zero tolerance for that.
I would just leave and frankly my previous relationship
When the shouting began.
I would literally
Just disappear from the space.
And I'd be in my car driving on the motorway.
That was my response. Because I just because I grew up in a house where that was and my siblings are all the same. None of them shout, all very, very calm.
Or very softly spoken because we grew up in an environment which was the opposite.
Funny.
That's interesting too because it could have gone the other way.
It does.
You talked about the abuse, you violence often comes from violence. But sometimes like
Peace comes from violence.
It's true. This is also why when you said earlier that looking back at your past and trying to figure out what happened is not necessarily useful because
Two kids in the same environment can turn out entirely different.
And you see that across siblings.
There's something interesting you were saying a second ago about
We were talking about explicit
gradual small exposure therapy to change your life for the better, moving the shoes closer to the bed. But then you also just talked about the gradual exposure therapy.
of someone breaching your boundaries and becoming an abuser and how it's like it's like
They just every day just move the shoes a little bit closer to the bed.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah, it's interesting. It goes both ways in that regard.
You know, with my inner circle, like even with people I work with, if I start I really pay attention to behavior or if if like
And I don't know if you're the same way.
But like if if you work with me or

Well
You work for me.
And I send you an email.
And you don't respond till four days later.
Massive red flag for me.
And I won't say anything to you. I'll wait.
And then I'll test it out again.
With something else and again. And as soon as I see that in my head I'm like, We're done.
I may not tell you anything, but I'll find a way to let you go.
So there's a certain things because and that's a little bit like the moving the shoes closer away from the bed
Where
You'll see people you'll see
I'll see somebody do something, and I'm like, is it a fluke?
Mm-hmm.
Did they truly miss it?
Or is this kind of this relaxed attitude, Oh, it's Evi, she's so
Well I don't know if they think I'm nice, but
You know, after I do these podcasts like oh she's so scary, but
But
You know, sometimes people will
get too relaxed and comfortable and so it's in a different way
And so I'll test it out and when I see that, I'm like no no I'm not
You know, if it's someone I really want to work with, I may address it, but sometimes
I don't wanna say I don't invest the time and energy and effort, but sometimes I know
I know when to invest that time, energy, and effort and when to say no, and I pull out.
Earlier on we talked about
Charlie Kirk.
This week, uh lo what week are we in? We're on Sunday. So yeah, this week he was assassinated, um
while on a college campus as part of a tour that he was doing called Prove Me Wrong, where he went out onto college campuses and debated his ideas with the college campus students and a shooter
Um who has now been
Found.
And uh I believe is i in prison currently awaiting.
Jell, yeah. Their first appearance I think in court on Tuesday of this week.
um shot him in the neck from
Several hundred yards away.
As a former secret service agent whose very job was to
Ensure that didn't happen.
to someone to ensure that someone didn't assassinate them, harm them, to keep them safe, et cetera.
What did you think and feel when you you heard
The news.
So I have been covering the Charlie Kirk assassination in in from the news perspective.
So you're asking me like what assessment can I give you as a former secret service? So I'll give you something I'll I'll s I'll share with you what I've been covering and if you have a a specific question, feel free to ask.
So here's the thing.
This is truly unique and exceptional.
And this is why people calling it a political assassination, right?
It is and it isn't. Here's the difference.
А президент Унідати Стайс
Is a politician, he's
It's understood that things like this will happen, right?
And he has protection.
A political appointee like a member of Congress, correct?'Cause right now members of Congress in the United States and I think in many parts of the world are very afraid right now because their threats have also increased. So even here in the United States, they're looking to increase the budget.
On people of Congr in Congress.
for safety impr uh
Protection.
It is to some degree understood that these things will happen over time.
to people in who are political f elected figures.
Charlie is uniquely different.
He talked about things, but he wasn't a political figure. Nobody voted for him. He was honestly, he had his own didn't he have his own podcast? He had a podcast.
He was out there, he spoke?
He did talks, he shared his opinion,
So he's no different in a sense than you and I in a sense.
And so what that
Assassination.
Means
Is it is
Fair game now on anybody who has a platform.
That's the difference here.
So it's different. You're not dealing with presidents now, heads of states, or people in Congress. You're dealing now with people
Who if they share in
An opinion that you don't like.
And I perceive it as a threat then now.
I have the ability to

This is this is gonna open up the door to copycat.
Because to try to get certain people like a president of the United States or a member of Congress or politician or certain people, those are hard targets, those are hard to get. They're secure.
But now this means
Anybody who's out there that I don't like and I don't agree with
I can take that target.
And
And
Cause harm to those people.
We're moving into a space now where
Everybody is fair game.
Where I have a voice, um even on social media, I would actually sit and go through X before I would go on air just to get the news updates, see what else was happening, and I ha would have to sit and filter through
All the hateful comments people were writing and
Everybody to each other and then
Every other five comments was I'm getting death threats. People are threatening me.
'Cause people were expressing their opinions online and other people were threatening them.
This means that
It means you can go after anybody and whatever
А на с сай а вот, бомі з ассиф.
Because it means now everybody is extremely vulnerable. And now we're looking to targeting people
Who have shows, who have platforms, who maybe do the d's, who share opinions. That is why this is a bother.
This is why people should be concerned.
You said
Copycats. Is is that something that you actually saw when you're in the secret service that if one incident happened it would be hundred percent. All it takes is one person to do it, another person be like, Oh
He can do it?
I can do it.
He executed his mission, I'm not agreeing with the mission, but that shooter was able to do what he needed to do, and he was successful, sadly.
Right?
So someone else is gonna see it and they're gonna get that idea. I'm speaking at a university on Tuesday.
So maybe i somebody hears something I say on a podcast, they don't like it.
They might get that idea. But also there's a lot of people out there that are just not wild.
I mean
No.
They're not well.
I'm gonna be very transparent.
People are not well.
When
So in the U Secret Service we had a a unit, it was called the Protective Intelligence Unit.
In that unit.
is where we would track people who were presumed to be threats um against people we protected.
So how did they get on your radar?
They would write letters,
They would show up at multiple events, they would make phone calls, right?
There was ways to do that.
Then you have the introduction of social media.
So now people are more
Are they able to now make threats and say things?
From the safety of their own home.
And that is afraid. It's it's it's a h it's a
It's a more detached way to attack somebody.
And now you have to follow those leads. And now there's thousands of these things that come in. And even if they even hit your radar. And so everyone's inundated with tracking people. Now at the time initially
Those who were looking to cause harm to our protectees
Typically, typically had
severe mental health issues. And from time to time, it wasn't often the secret service would
work with the courts to involuntarily commit somebody if they thought they were that much harmed.
With social media now.
The
The playing field has changed. One
It allows people to say things that they would never say to your face.
It's
allows people now when you absorb w the content online, the majority is very negative, even though we're talking about this event.
Everything is typically very ugly online and
And so people escalate and
And
Mm.
We've also noticed that there's a lack of empathy. We are less empathetic.
the more we have exposure to online stuff because when people text hateful things, it doesn't become as a big of a deal anymore.
Whereas if somebody said it to you, it's a bigger deal. So
There is a severe
Mental
Issue
with
People and there's also
When you look at behavior, typically the things that keep you in check.
seem to be a little bit more absent today
Which also causes people to behave a little bit more
inappropriately. So like and this is again just for the research, not based on my personal opinion, family.
Uh when you have strong social bonds to certain structures, you're less likely to
Cause others.
So family is one one social bond that keeps you kind of like
into place. Like I'm not gonna do this'cause it would embarrass my family or hurt my family.

i religious institutions, whatever that religion is, that typically keeps people kinda steady. Uh certain institutions like having a
a a strong bond to a maybe a school or a certain institutions, there are certain things that keep you less likely
From behaving this way.
And
We do see
A little bit of an erosion in those areas and I think that leaks into people's
mental cognitive uh issues.
One of the things that I don't think people realise as well on when they're on the internet is that they are
In an algorithm?
And the algorithm isn't the real world, but it's actually just the things, the way that the algorithm works is it shows you more of the things that you've expressed interest in before. So my first sort of ten years of my career was working in social media. So all of the major social platforms we bought, one of the most um disruptive social media companies at the time.
So I have a deep understanding of how the algorithm works. In fact, much of our job was to figure out how it how it works to help our big clients globally.
Reach more people.
And I think I think about like my my
My gr my grandfather.
My grandfather will like look at his phone.
And he'll think what he's seeing is the world, but he doesn't know that dwell time is a huge factor in what he's gonna be shown tomorrow.
So if he dwells a little bit more on a particular post, the algorithm will go ooh.
Mr Bartlett.
Grandfather Bartlett is interested, so next time you log in.
We're gonna share more of that.
And I I learn this really starkly when one of my older relatives
Downloaded TikTok.
And um
I got a like an emergency call.
from their partner saying, we need your help.
She's downloaded TikTok and it's like making her crazy. Like it's making her insane because she's seeing now all of this like vitriol and hate and
racist stuff and she thinks the world is like that and she's like preparing to protest.
So I had to funny enough get her password of her partner and hit this button in the back end of TikTok, which refreshes your algorithm, just wipes out all of your your history. And I what I would do is I'd hit that button every single week and eventually she stopped using TikTok. She found it boring.
Because it was all now like X Factor. America's Got Talent videos, people singing, people dancing. And I'd go on her phone and I'd watch these like music videos and I'd like like them and bookmark them and save them because I knew that that's what she would see next time she logged in. I know this sounds crazy, but that's like people don't realize that what they're seeing.
is they're pulling something towards them.
And that's how the algorithms work. You pull towards you what you've been historically interested in. So if you're scared about brown people crossing the
The border w in dinghy's all it's gonna do. It's gonna pull you more of that stuff, and you're gonna start thinking that the world is
X, Y, or Z. Yeah.
The other thing too, when it shows you that stuff, it's almost like being how I said, when you're in law enforcement, you're expos exposed to the worst of people and you have to be really cared not to become cynical. Yeah. And one of the ways it's you're also protected is'cause you're with other officers, so there's that

Team camaraderie, everybody helps each other. So now this is the same way. I'm on my phone.
And I am exposed to the worst of the worst and I'm consuming it, here's the difference. I'm by myself. Yeah.
And there's nobody there to tether me to be like, hey, so I look at this stuff and whatever it is I'm looking at that I'm afraid.
Because it depends who I am and what I resonate with. Is it am I afraid of
People crossing the border? Am I afraid of school shootings? Am I afraid of this other group?
Right. It's just
What and everything is fear based, and
They're tapping into your fear and they make you afraid this other thing is going to harm me.
And there's no ability either, I've noticed through social media
There's no middle ground. It's either you're all the way over here and you're all the way over here. And they feed on people's fears, these algorithms. So this is a graph I found, which shows
The rise in um
School shootings.
But it's rising.
It's increasing.
One of the things to keep in mind with this, with the school shooting, and then we don't know this based on this one.
Are these mass shootings or just shootings in general? So school shooting is
I show up to school, I don't like you, Steven. I pull out my gun, I shoot you.
Technically.
That's a school shooting.
A mass shooting is
Like what we saw the week before.
Minneapolis
Um
And we had that person who showed up to school and who just started shooting randomly. So there's two. So when we look at shootings
Let's look let's look at mass. Let's look at mass because if you look at school shootings one on one, those are a bit different and they have to do with the city. But if you look at mass shootings, what can we tell from mass shootings? So some of the data shows us typically
Um
That person tends to have some kind of association to the place they go to, the school they went to, typically there's some type of connection.
Usually at that point where they commit to shooting, something in their life happened.
Right? There's some type of moment, maybe they broke up with a partner, they lost their job. Something that offset that moment. Now over time historically they were building up to having all these issues.
Those issues don't go away.
But something typically happens where they decide I'm gonna do this.
The other thing is they're planned, so they either
They sit down and decide to plan this out and they communicate it to somebody in some way, or they do it through social media. Another thing that's really interesting, they happen typically in the mornings.
They typically handing happen in the mornings.
That person wakes up and says, Okay, today's the day I'm gonna do it. I've got my plan in place, and they execute it earlier on in the day. The other thing with mass shootings, mass shootings, not just regular school shootings.
In almost all of them, if dare I say all
All of them.
All those individuals
had a history of mental health.
Issues.
Or mental illness.
The other thing too that we see is they had access to weapons.
So they were either able to go get a weapon, they knew somebody who had a weapon, and they were able to get that weapon.
One of the things you said a second ago about um how this is
might become more
Frequent sadly.
had me thinking about why that would be and what's changed in the world. And one of the things that has changed in the world is that
Media is now increasingly people.
People like us.
that have microphones in our kitchens. I mean, we're sat in what used to be my kitchen.
recording this conversation. And once upon a time to reach this many people you had to be CNN.
C's a logo.
It's hard to shoot it.
But in a world where much of the media is like creator led or host led media.
It's much easier to have a
A target.
And I was it just made me think about I was like, Oh yeah, of course.
Course, you know.
But sometimes to the target you if you're looking at mass shootings, now if you're looking at a target like this Charlie Kirk thing we were talking about, right?
Sometimes it's done because they want notoriety. It's a big thing.
So with um
this specific shooting Charlie Kirk, it's come out now that the individual was actually on Discord
After he did the shot,
Talking about it with other members on Discord, according to what law enforcement said. Again, I'm just updating as I know it. It could change.
But he was saying
He was basically talking with her people
Um basically saying like he did it and laughing about it.
He was admitting to doing it.
Yeah, they were like, We think you did this He's like, Oh, maybe I did it, ha ha ha ha
So
There's
It's become for whatever reason
In that world
It's seen as a
That is an acceptable thing to do.
a way to create significance in otherwise. I want attention. I want to create significance. And also here's the other thing.
What's happening is
We are vil villainizing people very easily.
We are calling people names?
We are villainizing them and it goes back to
social media clips people are making, even even
Things that are our w our words are our most powerful weapon and we don't realize that when you open your mouth and you say something
And it's what's happening is people aren't saying something because most people are cowards. They text it and they post it.
Because they would never say it to your face.
And they post it.
And that what that does is all these
These negative things, these these attacks we make towards people
So if
All I see is negative stuff. This guy's bad, this guy's this, this guy's that.
I start to think it's true, and if you villain somebody
To such a degree that
I think well I
I'm gonna be a hero if I do something about this. Look what a horrible person this is. I heard this quote once.
Uh the bigger the hero, the bigger the villain.
I have to make you such a villain.
So I can feel like a hero and this is what happens. When you villainize people to such a degree, you create a justification.
Well I had to do this. Look at how horrible this human being was. Look at all the horrible things people are saying about them.
I am doing the right thing. You just justified it and sold it to yourself. It's the right thing to do. But today with social media
I can't solely blame them because social media posts and the things people are creating and putting out there is giving justification to other people to do this stuff.
Did you say that you're
husband was a sniper.
He was counter assault.
So you and him are both
Former secret service agents. Correct.
So when you see something like
The Charlie Kirk.
assassination happen.
I'm I'm so curious as to the conversations in your house about that because
you must be looking at this from so many different perspectives from like how that person could have been
more protected, I guess, or how that set up could have been to
mitigate the chances of something like that happening.
So with Charlie Kirk
There's nothing they could have done, let alone
Put snipers on the rooftop.
Okay.
There's no and there's no way anybody would have done it. That's what I said. Like if you're a president or person of Congress or some VIP like that, you're gonna get those assets. A person like Charlie Kirk, like you or me, we're not gonna get those. Who's gonna pay for that? So he had security, but it was on the ground with him. They're thinking
Their type of security thinking, and this is private security, and again, it's not to to knock them, because this is something new. This is new. They're thinking I need to protect Charlie from the guy standing at the podium asking a question. All these people pushing up against the rope line who want to talk to ch Charlie. So they're looking at it from this physical sense.
It's like it sounds terrible, but it's almost like a meat shield.
I'm the meat shield between you and them. They're not thinking high ground problems. Nobody thought who would have thought
Maybe a secret service agent would have.
But who would have thought
I need to have
Snipers on the rooftops or counter snipers on the rooftops to protect from a sniper shooting Charlie Kirk.
He was wearing a bulletproof vest, wasn't he? That's what I've been told.
I'm not sure I don't know if it's a hundred percent true, so I don't wanna say yes or no.
I say that because in several of the videos when he's on campus, you see that there's clear when he's wearing a T shirt, you see
Um vest marks here.
And I I noticed this many weeks, many many weeks. It might be true. Yeah.
Just because it's never confirmed I'm hesitant, so I don't know. It's very possible
And uh again it's not a
So a v a vest like that
It's gonna
It's gonna stop around from
A pistol typically, and maybe a shotgun round. Rifle round
Usually like our counter assault teams in the secret service, they actually had an extra ceramic plate.
To help prevent those. So you really need
like a different type of exposure to protect from a rifle round. Now in this scenario with him
The shot
You see it go straight to his neck. And that's the thing with vests.
They protect you here.
Right? They protect your vital organs. And and even when I would wear mine it was
You lived in the reality of
If I get one to the head.
I'm done. Is that your worst nightmare as a secret service agent, that?
Something like that happens to the person you're protecting. Correct. It is the worst,'cause it means you've failed.
It's horrible.
It's horrible. I mean when you would do protection stuff and the person you're protecting, whoever it was, because you would protect
I protected everybody from the president of the United States to former presidents to first ladies to their kids.
I had Barbara Pierce Bush, who which was
President Bush's daughter had her for a while.
uh to the Secretary of Treasury, to the Secretary of Homeland Security, these these are all USS Protectees and Foreign Heads of State. When the Prime Minister of the U UK comes to the United States, they get prot he gets protection. We we work with the team'cause you don't want anybody getting assassinated on US soil. So you protect
Russia when he comes Putin.
You you gotta take a bullet for him too.
So it's more the mission, so
But the thing is it's your responsibility.
And so
The whole time I don't want to say you're on edge, but the whole time you're on. You're aware. Your mind's moving. Where's my threat? Where's my threat? Where's my threat?
Where's my problem? And then we would have sometimes they would have what they call like wheels up parties, which means your protectee is up, they're wheels up in the plane. And that's when people were just like
Yeah.
'Cause the stress is so high, you're so on
You're always looking for the threat.
There's no
We work in shifts, but there's days where I work sixteen, seventeen hour days, eighteen hour days, depending on what my assignment was.
It's a lot.
What is the most important thing?
For the person who clicks on this podcast because they
Are looking for something in their life.
They want to be
more effective in the pursuit of their goals, whatever their goals might be. It could be professionally, personally
Could be, you know, maybe they want to be an entrepreneur or something.
What is the most important thing that we should have talked about in that regard that we didn't talk about?
I think.
I don't know what that to say to that. I guess what I would say to them is
I think the message is that there they are
Extremely capable.
And no matter what society is telling, no matter what's happened to them, no matter what excuses people make for them or maybe they make for themselves, they are much more capable. And so that maybe when they see someone like you,
Or myself and they think, Oh, look, they've got it all figured out. It's like
We figured it out the same way everybody else figured is it figures it out. So I think Steven the most important thing is like
We're not that special.
And that means that they can do
and achieve what they want. I think that's the biggest thing. Like you're absolutely capable.
Even if you feel inadequate, even if you lack confidence, even if you've had horrible trauma in your life.
Whatever it is, despite all that, you are absolutely capable
And it is your choice.
Heavy.
We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest.
Not knowing who they're leaving it for.
And the question left for you is, what brings you the most joy in life?
And what are you the most scared of?
The most joy in life.
Is my daughter.
I think the biggest joy in my life is her.
Because I think
That was something I always wanted to do and to to be a mom.
And so
That's the biggest joy, and then at the same time, it's my biggest fear.
because I want her to be well and healthy and okay, and I think
A consequence of the work I did.
And even still do because I'm in media and news and I I cover crime.
I've seen what humanity can do. I've seen the good in humanity, but I also have seen the bad things people can do.
And so it's hard sometimes. I've
I w
you want to protect your child, but I also know that
Um
I can't always shield her.
I won't be able to shield her in life from everything.
That's scary.
Thank you, Evie.
I was saying to you before we started recording that everywhere I go, people come up to me and they talk about you. In a way that's atypical.
So like, you know, obviously do a lot of episodes meet a lot of great people. Is that really true? I've I swear on I don't want to swear on anyone's life'cause that's uh probably shouldn't do that. But I swear to you the amount of times I've used you as a case study for
What do I use you as a case study for?
For
How important
It is
H effect like effective communication is.
Because it's
Because people come up to me all the time and mention you. So obviously I then do that. I'm like, why are people always mentioning Evi?
Like, I get it, you know, you're very, very successful. You've lived this incredible career, but obviously I speak to lots of people that are successful. But what so why are they always coming up to me and talking about you and asking, you know, me to speak to you again, et cetera?
I think it's all the things you said. I think you meet them where they are.
And I think you do that in both your communication style. I think
The nuance
Of your
message is is is spot on while also being high conviction in certain areas.
And your relatable
They think you're a you're a badass.
And
I guess that's it.
It's it's something you learn from doing these podcasts. You just have certain people
Who people just
They just click with
that you put on the show. And even as the host, you can't r you in hindsight you're trying like figure it out.
Yeah. But there's something.
And much of the questions I ask you today are oriented oriented towards finding out what that something is, but
Listen, a lot of it exists in your book as well. You talk
So eloquently and so excessively in this book, Bulletproof about
the nature of the human condition and what we need to understand about the human condition to be more effective in our lives and our relationships and our work. So I highly recommend everybody goes and checks out this incredible book.

Becoming bulletproof life lessons from a secret service agent.
Incredible. Thank you so much.
I appreciate you, Steven.
We launched these conversation cards and they sold out. And we launched them again and they sold out again. We launch them again and they sold out again. Because people love playing these with colleagues at work, with friends at home, and also with family. And we've also got a big audience that use them as journal prompts. Every single time a guest comes on the door of a CEO, they leave a question for the next guest.
in the diary. And I've sat here with some of the most incredible people in the world. And they've left all of these questions in the diary. And I've ranked them from one to three in terms of the depth. One being a starter question and level three, if you look on the back here, this is a level three
becomes a much deeper question that builds even more connection. If you turn the card over
and you scan that QR code, you can see who answered the card.
And watch the video of them answering it in real time.
So if you would like to get your hands on some of these conversation cards, go to thediary.com or look at the link in the description below.
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Thank you so much.