The Spy Quiz That Drove Millions of Leads with Andrew Bustamante | #Marketing - Ep. 87

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Do you have a funnel but it's not converting? The problem 99.9% of the time is that your funnel is good, but you suck at selling. If you want to learn how to sell so your funnels will actually convert, then get a ticket to my next selling online event by going to sellingonline.com/podcast. That's sellingonline.com/podcast. This is the Russell Brunson Show. Hey, what's up everybody? This is Russell. Welcome back to the show. Today I've got something and someone very special and interesting I'm excited to have on the show. It's somebody who I've had a chance to— I actually, it's kind of a funny story. I saw you online all over the place. I kept seeing your face, seeing your face, seeing your face, and had no idea there was any connection at all until Jeremy messaged me and you. And then he said, yeah, like, oh yeah, this guy read your books. You should, you should, you know, connect with him. And I opened up Instagram, actually. You can't share this. I opened up Instagram to message you and there was a message from August 19th, 2021 that you had sent me.

And you read that message?

Yeah, already. It says so. So 2021. So this is Russell. I'm the first ever ex-CIA officer to launch an information product via digital marketing. I'm nowhere near as successful yet as I will be, but of all this, my successes to date has come from what I've learned, what I've learned from you. I'm sure you don't read these messages, but I hope that somehow this message finds its way to you. You're still changing lives today like you have ever since you started, and my family of 4 thanks you.

P.S.

Is there anything I can ever do to support you or amplify your message? Just let me know how. Andrew Bustamante. So I saw that, I was like, I felt so bad that I didn't message you back then, first off. But, but then I was like, man, I'm so interested to hear so much about your story. This podcast will be fun because for my listeners who don't know yet, you know, he's ex-CIA. He's got a bunch of really cool things. We're going to get deep into— we're talking about some psychology and some, some, some brain stuff. But also, I want to talk about his actual business. I'm assuming you don't get to talk—

I don't get to talk about my business, which is so frustrating, man, because nobody, nobody understands how much of a passion it is for me.

Yeah, right.

It's the, it's the current mission.

Yeah. And it's the driver behind getting your message out and everything else. And so we're gonna talk about some of his stuff and then also going behind the scenes to talk about his business and his funnels and everything.

So I'm gonna interrupt you. I have to interrupt you because, because it was one year after I sent you that. That was August of '21, right? Uh, was it August or April '21?

It was, uh, August 19th, 2021.

One year after that is when I went viral for the first time.

Really?

And the whole strategy that I implemented to go viral is documented right here in your Traffic Secrets. The whole— everything you talked about with earned media Everything that you talked about with, with capturing like a message and getting other people to amplify you and guesting on other podcasts. Like that's just, if anybody actually tries to dissect my strategy, which isn't that hard to dissect, if you, if you look at it online, it's really just major platform to major platform to major platform, millions of views at a time on other people's podcasts with a single link that drives them to my funnel. And it was just once it, once it worked, I, I just replicate it and start, start running and it gets easier and easier every time because once you go go viral for one content creator, every other content creator wants you.

Yeah.

And then the algorithm starts to reward your name. So like my actual name, if— I mean, your name is like this, and it's been like this for a long time, but like you've got hundreds of thousands of searches for your name per month. And that's, that's a selling point on its own.

You had to pay for that? You didn't have to— any of those kind of things?

To this day still, my company has $0 in ads. Really?

Well, maybe I'll convince you today to buy some ads.

I'm hoping you will pitch me something because I don't know, ads are like the future for me.

What should we sell them, guys? What do you got for We'll figure out something. That's so cool. So how did you— the transition from CIA to info business, like how— I'm curious how that happened. What, like, when you had the idea, did you leave first and then come into this world or vice versa? How did it all work?

So it's really funny because I didn't realize this until much later after leaving CIA, but CIA is an information business. That's what CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, their job is to steal secrets that are of value to a customer. And the customer are US policymakers. And if that customer doesn't want the secret, there's a secondary market because we sell our secrets to foreign governments too. So primary and secondary markets.

This is— okay, really? That works?

That's insane. That's how it works. And that's how— if we don't have secrets, guess where we get our secrets from?

Buy it back from them.

We buy it back from somebody else. That's why Israel and the United States are so close, because if we don't have information on something, we just buy it from Israel. That's why we have the Five Eyes partners in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. If we don't have insight into you name it we'll just buy it from somebody else. And it's not the same as a commercial transaction, it's different. We, we buy things by buying, by selling training, or, or selling merchandise, or, or borrowing units. That's why we have American troops that sometimes sit in foreign countries, that they're trading for some information they need.

That's insane.

Yeah, so that's, that's the larger global marketplace, and it's not that different from the actual commercial marketplace.

So the CIA's goal to just literally to gather information to be able to broker, broker, trade, sell. That's the core focus of it.

No, the core focus is American national security. Honestly, the core focus is actually something called American primacy— maintaining the United States' role as the single, ultimate, only superpower in the world. That is CIA's mission, is to do that, is to complement that through the collection of secrets from, from foreign sources. Anything that we do in an effort to maintain American primacy is essentially justified by the actions that we take, which is why people don't always agree with our actions. But at the end of the day, if you can, if you can justify the ends with the means, and if the ends are American primacy, then it kind of meets our bailiwick.

Interesting. That's why it's so confusing for people like me who don't understand politics as well. We watch Rogan or watch whatever the podcast and stuff, and, and it's like, this doesn't make sense, why are they doing that? And it's like, we have no idea the games are being played behind the scenes to actually make the things happen, right?

So when I— interesting— I, I— it took me time to realize that CIA was an information, uh, trading place, right? An information marketplace. When you're inside CIA, you very much get fed the lines, like, you're the, the best of the best, you're the elite, you're the tip of the spear, you're making a difference, you're changing the future, you're shaping history. The list goes on and on.

Build a beautiful identity.

Exactly. So you believe all this stuff, and you believe that you matter, and you believe that you're important. But as you grow in rank and you grow in responsibility and you actually start to take on operations that are like legitimately dangerous, you come back and you ask yourself some hard questions like, why the fuck am I doing this? Pardon my French. Why am I doing this? What's the point if at the end of the day, my kids lose their dad, my wife loses her husband, my mom loses her son? My mom didn't spend her whole life raising me so that I could throw it away in pursuit of rice negotiations with Thailand. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

So I had to get some space. So when I left CIA, I was still undercover. There wasn't really a process for leaving CIA when I left in 2014. Nobody really had quit that place. Usually you retire and then you come back as a contractor like the next week.

How long have you been in CIA?

I was undercover for 7 years for a total government career of like 13 years. But when I left, I needed to find work because I needed to— I had a 1-year-old son. My wife was also CIA along with me, and I had convinced her to leave also. Because of what I had seen happening to both of us. So we had to rebuild a life, but we were still technically and legally under a cover identity with the US federal government. So the federal government was in charge of our resume. The federal government was in charge of what we could and couldn't say. So every time we needed to talk to somebody or like submit a job application, we had to go back to CIA to get approval. They had to actually be the ones that submitted stuff. It was a nightmare.

You still deal with that now? Like, do they check your podcasts up? Like, what are you saying?

That we don't have to deal with the with relying on them for everything, but they check on everything.

Now, CIA knows who I am. Like, I'm in trouble.

Oh yeah, potentially. Yeah. I mean, you're not in trouble, but—

until I ask the right questions.

They knew who you were when I sent you that Instagram message.

They're watching. They're always— are they always watching?

So nervous now. Yeah. No, that's, that's the connection. The connection is just— it took me, it took me a few years in the corporate sector, and I kind of unfortunately cheated my way into a job after I left CIA. It was the only way to get a job, but I cheated my way into the corporate sector.. And in the corporate sector, I got the time and the space to realize two things. To realize, one, that CIA was an information business, and then two, to realize that the skills I had learned at CIA were applicable in the real world. I always thought they were only applicable at CIA. Whenever somebody quits a job, I think that we all think of quitting a job kind of like we think of quitting a relationship, where I don't like you, so I'm gonna date someone who's 180 degrees different than you.

Delete all of our pictures on Facebook and Instagram.

Yeah, right? That's what we do. My wife, when my wife had a 7-year relationship before she was with me, and after that relationship was over, she burned all the pictures, right? Well, now the 45-year-old version of my wife is kind of like, I burned some important pictures. Yeah, just because it had this guy, right? The same thing is true with careers. So we quit careers, we do something 180 degrees different. So when I left CIA, I assumed whatever I did next was going to be completely different. I never I was never expecting that so much of CIA would overlap with everyday life. And that's what kind of brought me to the idea of how do I sell what I learned at CIA to people who are trying to make a better life for themselves? And that was what put me on the collision course with you and Expert Secrets.

Did you see other people doing it first? Like, oh, I see someone doing this and doing this, or like, or did the idea just come in your head? Like, I could sell this, you know what I mean?

So we were previously talking about Agora Publishing, which is a financial, information newsletter, right? If I'm a financial information company and I saw it happening on the financial front, I saw— even when I was at CIA, I had friends who were day traders and trying to make money, trying to make money on the stock market and currency exchanges and whatever else. Well, I learned while I was in the corporate sector, I was like, there are people out there selling information about how to sell stocks and how to do trades. So clearly there's a mechanism for selling an intangible product, for selling just information. And as I started looking down that road, I came in contact with a parallel, a competitor to Agora, and one of their kind of chief quantitative analysis consultants. And that guy, that quant, was an avid reader, like incredible, incredible dude. His name is Josh. And he was the one that was like, have you heard of Russell Brunson? Really? Yeah, Russell Brunson is like, leading the charge on this idea of how to market information products. And I was like, well, let's see, let's see how that works. And as I dug into your content, and this is 2019, as I dug into your content in 2019, I started feeling like I was back in the farm. The farm is where CIA trains us. So much of the concepts that you teach, which you attribute to Kennedy and people before you, so much of what has been refined in the marketing space is the same psychological principles used to steal secrets from foreigners. So I realized I had a lot of what you were already talking about. What I hadn't done is put the right vocabulary and the right action around it to make it scalable.

Yeah, interesting. We actually, uh, working on a VSL right now. We got back from Agora and I wanted to make an Agora-style VSL. And so, uh, which if you've seen Agora's videos, they go back and find these big ideas or these big concepts to lead with to pull people in and eventually, you know, comes back to like buy their newsletter. Um, and so the, the, um, basically the entire VSL is about, uh, Sigmund Freud, who, you know, the father of the subconscious and unconscious and learning that, and then his his nephew Bernays, who found out about it. Then he gets hired by the government in World War I to convince the world that we need to be in this war. So he uses all of Freud's propaganda on the American people and shifts the entire nation in months to convince them that we need to go to this war. And so the government paid him. Then after the war was done, then he got hired by these companies. And so the whole VSL is like telling the story of Freud to Bernays to Dan Kennedy to me to like, but the whole thing, but it's, yeah, it's the same, the same principles that that again, Bernays, who's, you know, he wrote a book called Propaganda. He was the father of propaganda, and he was doing it initially in the governments and then in corporate business. So it's like the same principle, same psychology. Um, I never thought about that, that that's what they were actually doing, like, in the CIA and like deeper levels of, of the government.

So fascinating. What CIA, what CIA has learned over time, and keep in mind, CIA wasn't the first intelligence organization. CIA just learned what it learned from the British MI6 units that we helped during World War II. Right after World War II, the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, was created. From the OSS came the CIA in the 1960s and '70s. So as, as impressive as it might seem because of movies and media, it's young. And what it learned, it learned from the Brits. And what the Brits refined, the Brits largely refined from the Russians. Right. The North Koreans learned what they learned from the Chinese. The Chinese learned what they learned from the British because China was an ally to the United States and the UK during World War II. It's a big incestuous pool that's basically based in, in medical psychological studies. It's not, it's not witchcraft. It's actually based in science. The difference now is when a scientific research discovery by UCLA or MIT or, or University of Chicago, when it comes out, the government now can fund its own research.. And when somebody funds the research, they control its distribution. So when a major breakthrough comes out from the University of Chicago that's funded by the US federal government, they can literally just take it off the market. And now we have intellectual property that nobody else has in the world of tradecraft.

So when you got in the CIA, is there like a, I don't know, training course, a seminar, an event, a process for, to like teach you all these things? Or how do, or is it more you learned it throughout the time on the job? You know what I mean?

How does it all work? Yeah, there's, we have a school actually. If you look up, CIA University. It's almost all CIA email addresses come from CIAU. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a, it's a formal university that we have inside CIA that's only available to CIA officers.

Dang it. I was all about to like, I don't like college or school, but I was like, I would actually sign up for that.

That'd be so cool. And, and we go through, when you, when you come on board with CIA, you go through a lot of, you go through a pretty robust interview process, you go through a testing process, and then you start day one is actually something called in-processing, just like college. And it's the most boring 2 weeks weeks of your life because it's health insurance, medical insurance, how you apply for health insurance benefits undercover, your cover identity, your, your secondary cover identity for your administrative cover whenever you're inside, because inside CIA you have an administrative cover, and then outside of CIA you have a cover provider, and then you yourself are your real person, and you have to learn how to manage these two identities all the time. So all this really so cool, but it's all sticky and administrative, and it's just, it's not, not as cool as it sounds.

It sounds like you're 007.

Yeah, no, you're No, no, no. I'm like 007's secretary. That's what I am at first. But then after that, you go through about 3 months of on-the-job training. And on-the-job training is literally like any other job you've ever had where you go office to office and they teach you about here's how you submit a file and here's what these different positions mean and here's what a director is and here's what a deputy director is and here's what a group chief is. And, you know, you're stamping and collating and filing shit. That's, that's what you're doing. But then after your OJT, if you make it through 3 months where, where different people say, yes, this person's ready for training, yes, this person meets the minimum criteria to work in the building, then they send you to what is known as the farm, or the Field Tradecraft Course, FTC. And that is a multi-month, completely isolated experience. You're on a retired military base that's fully classified. It's got its own its own economy, its own community, its own infrastructure. And you live like in a different place for many, many months. And that's where you literally go to school until noon learning a skill. And then from noon until about 10:00 PM, you're out in the real world practicing the skill. It's a process called just-in-time learning. And it's, it's as literal as it sounds like in the morning, they teach you how to shoot. In the afternoon, you go shoot. In the morning, they teach you how to lie. In the afternoon, you go lie in front of a lie detector. In the morning, they teach you how to, you know, carry a secret, do a dead drop, do a covert signal, whatever. And then in the afternoon you go and you do it actually in the field under observation. It's wired all the time. It's got every, every person there that isn't you is a trained instructor observing you. And it's, it's very intimate.

Do you have a high-ticket program that sells a version of that? It would be insane to come out for like a week and like, we're going to shoot one day, we're going to beat lie detectors the next day.

Anyway, I've wanted to develop it for a long time, and now I know what we're going to talk about.

Off camera. I'd buy that. So it'd be amazing. Neil Strauss, but he, he, you know, he's written so many amazing books, but he had one on like, I think called Emergency. So like, if the whole world falls apart, what are you going to do? And he took his mastermind out and he was talking to the guys because we did the thing together with him. I was meeting his guys and they'd done that like 3 months earlier. And he's like, yeah, they took it. They took us out and they like put a cover over their head, took them to the city. Zip tied him and left him somewhere. And it's like they had to figure out how to like break the zip tie, get out. And there are people trying to capture him. It's all role play in the city, like downtown LA or something. And he was telling us the whole thing. I was like, that would be so much fun. And like, uh, to kind of have a chance to live that part of it a little bit where you don't have to worry about getting shot, but you still like feel like you're running from people who are going to shoot you, you know.

Well, and what's nice is we like, we have the tools that you can shoot somebody. Oh yeah, you can shoot somebody, just not with like a lethal round. Yeah. And, and we did something similar. I actually did host, uh, I did a kind of a test event called Urban Escape and Evasion where I hooded people and, you know, we, we, uh, put them under arrest and we pulled them out of their beds in the middle of the night and put them outside and then put them in all these stress poses and then, uh, uh, actually interrogated them with a trained interrogator under the flashlight and under the hot light and everything. Waterboarded them. I mean, I have waterboarded somebody and it's on YouTube. Is that right? And he, he asked for it. He's a pretty big podcaster and he asked for it. And then after it was over, he didn't ask for it anymore. He's like, we're good. It's not great to be that guy, but, you know, some people get a phone call when they're like, hey, will you come over and have dinner and watch a movie? I'm the guy that's like, hey, will you come over and waterboard me and shoot me with a rubber bullet? And I'm like, oh, sure, our friendship isn't going to get closer, but I'll come do my best.

We'll do it. Is that crazy that people like me would actually pay you to do that for— anyway, so, well, so it's fun.

The life-changing benefit is, is real. What my company Everyday Spy is really just me trying to give people 2% of what CIA gave me. CIA really did change my life. They, they validated the way I thought about myself in positive ways, not in negative ways, because prior to CIA, I had all sorts of negative head trash about myself and about how I thought and how I saw the world. And like, I used to think that I was just like a flawed person, a flawed person that was pretty good at school. And then I go to CIA and they're like, you're not, you're not flawed. You just see the way it really is. And you can see why it is the way it is. Because when you understand human motivations and when you understand human emotions and when you understand human survival instinct, when you understand it naturally, you don't fit in. You don't fit in because everybody else out there believes the lie and you see something else. And it was just putting vocabulary and putting science around what I was seeing that helped me to understand what was happening. Because just like you were saying earlier, The propaganda of yesterday is still the propaganda of today and will be the propaganda of tomorrow, which means the marketing of yesterday is still the marketing of today and will be the marketing of tomorrow.

Yeah. So cool. All right, let's talk about your business a little bit. So what I've seen, and again, I haven't gone deep into your funnels yet. I was going to wait till after this to do the quiz. Ben on my team took the quiz though. And so on a lot of podcasts and interviews, I see the initial call to action is for them to go take the spy quiz to find out what kind of spy they are. Is that the Is that, I'm curious if that's something new or was that one of the first things that hit when you were putting content, being interviewed, all kind of stuff?

When did that come into it? So the spy quiz idea came not long after I sent you that message actually in 2021. It was the very first, dude, oh my gosh, I can't, like this is how business works sometimes. The very first version of the spy quiz was just completed within 24 hours before I had my first viral interview, right? All of my like little, and it was, man, it was, I was so small. I had friends of friends helping me actually like code things into ClickFunnels 1.0. And I was like, oh my gosh, it was such a nightmare. And I was like, I gotta get it done. I gotta get it done. 'Cause I have this one big interview tomorrow.

And if it works, we need to capture these leads.

We need to capture these leads and we need to put them into a funnel that works and we need to find a way. So anyways, so it all really came about in 2021 or 2022, excuse me. Um, but the idea was born in 2021 and the idea was really How do you, the whole challenge with traditional marketing is this problem-solution framework, right? 'Cause like you teach, and I'm gonna geek out, dude, and you just tell me if I'm going too far geek, okay? You've got the people who are problem unaware, the people who are problem unaware, people who are problem aware and problem unaware, solution aware and solution unaware. How do you, what I was discovering is that I was interesting. Spies are interesting. They're not problems.

And they're not— You're not coming up like, I have a problem that I need a spy to solve for me.

We miss that. And nobody thinks of CIA stuff as a solution to anything. When my company first started, it was actually called Everyday Espionage. But then I learned that the word espionage is too unpredictable. There are people who don't know that word at all. And then there are people who don't know what that word actually means.

And then there are people—

It's uncomfortable. Yeah, who just immediately assume that espionage is evil or bad or negative. So then we changed it from Everyday Espionage to Everyday Spy. And just that turn completely changed the attitude because spies are cool and spies are popular and spies are something everybody wants to be. To be, but nobody wants to commit espionage.

Yeah, right.

Interesting. So, so from this, I was like, okay, the big problem here is we're getting leads, but we're not getting qualified leads because everybody's signing up to learn about Everyday Spy just because it's interesting. But nobody's, nobody's entering our sales funnel. And we're watching it because of ClickFunnels 1.0. We're literally watching them land on the first page and drop off before the second page. They're not even looking at it. So then I came up with this idea of a quiz, and I wanted to make the quiz based off of the psychological exam at CIA because that psych exam was the first big thing for me that, that was life-changing. When I got my psychological battery results back— funny story, a little personal, so I'm glad that we're close enough that this is going to be uncomfortable for you. Perfect. So you go through this like half-day psychological battery, and during this battery, there's a question, one question that came up out of the hundreds of questions that said, do you identify as a sexual deviant? And I looked at that question and I'm like, this is my application to CIA. And everybody would have the same— what do I say? Do I say yes or do I say no? And in my mind, I'm like, it's better to be overly honest than to run the risk of lying, especially knowing that there's a lie detector at the end of this thing. So I just click on yes. Yep, sexual deviant. Here I go.

Submit.

There's the end of my career. After that, the psych eval is turned in, it gets automatically correlated, whatever else, it gets scored, and then you go talk to an actual psychiatrist who evaluates you personally off of your psych evaluation test. And you're sitting about this far away, and he was this old, crotchety, like, bolded, gray-haired guy with like a beard and big Freud glasses. And he was like, "I noticed that you marked yes on sexual deviancy." I'm just like— This is awkward. Here we go, this is the end of my career before it's even starting. And he's like, Can you please explain to me what that means?

I was like— You're looking at your dad or your grandpa like, how do I explain this to my dad?

This is horrible. This is horrible. So then I explained to him like, well, I've always wanted to have a threesome, and I really do like the idea of like, you know, girls rubbing oil on themselves and, you know, all this other stuff that I think in my 24-year or my 27-year-old former military, trying to do my best to get into CIA stuff. I'm like, this must be sexual deviancy. And he just looks at me and he's like, son, that's not deviant sexual behavior.

He was like, there's levels and it goes way weird.

That's called being a man.

And I was just kind of like—

and all of a sudden I see this old guy and I'm like, I know what you watch on Pornhub. So, so that— but that psychological evaluation was so powerful for me. So I was like, how do I create something like this for everyday people to take for free as, as a high-quality lead generator, right? And then the other thing that was so valuable is that inside that psych evaluation, it's a filter also. It's there to filter out people who are actual sexual deviants. It's there, it's there to filter out people who actually can't handle the job. So I was like, how do I create mine to also be a filter so I get qualified leads instead of just interested leads. So that's when I came up with this idea of basically paralleling a personality test into the quiz. So my quiz is a big echo chamber that uses personality testing tools inside of a veiled spy quiz that then can assess people's personality. And all I do for the results is tell them essentially, this is your personality and these are the strengths and weaknesses of your personality according to a CIA-style clandestine test.

So whoever Ben is, Ben, what kind were you? Ben was the mastermind.

Accurate or not accurate?

I do not really know. He's not sure. He second-guessed himself.

But that solved all—

How many different— how many different profiles are there?

There's 5 different profiles inside the quiz, and we have a very high success rate, not only in terms of accurately identifying the person, because a lot of times when people come back and say, I'm not sure if it was— if it was real or not, I don't know if I trust it. They realized that they misanswered some of the questions. So remember how we were talking about the challenges of email off camera? One of the challenges of email is that people use these throwaway email addresses. That's what we call them at CIA, an email address that you create only to send junk mail to. We have that problem with our company too. People sign up with a junk mail address. How do we get them to give us their real email address? Well, they take the quiz the first time on their junk mail address, and then they're like, well, I kind of threw the quiz a little bit. So let me take it again with a different email address. So now all of a sudden we'll get 3 or 4 email addresses and get to the real email address where they'll answer the questions the real way and then get their real results. You get the perfect, yeah, interesting, highly qualified lead. That's just, they just made 48 micro-commitments on their way to giving us their email address. That's a person that converts. And then we converted about 70% to our front end.

Okay. Um, what's the price point? The front end? Okay. So take the quiz, $11 front end. Um, I want to go back a little. Um, okay. So, uh, so in the timeline, you're about to go viral. You don't know this yet. You create the quiz. Where's the link to the quiz?

People can take it. We'll put it in the notes.

Everydayspy.com/quiz. Okay.

Everydayspy.com/quiz.

You guys go take the quiz, find out what kind of spy type you are. Cause we're recruiting special spies.

If you're in the right category, you're going to get hogtied and dropped off in LA.

Make sure you choose correctly. So you get the quiz out there and then whose podcast was that? What was the reason it went viral? Something you said or something happened or just the person or what was the—

So the first podcast to go viral was with Lex Fridman in August of 2022, right after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And I think there were probably 2 or 3 reasons that that went viral. First, it was, yeah, timing was big. Ukraine was, on everybody's mind. Um, Lex was very pro-Ukraine. I was very pro-practical, and I was just kind of like, let me tell you what's going to happen here. The U.S., the West, and the U.S. are going to give up on Ukraine. Like, it's going to lose popularity, the funding is going to dry up, we're going to have presidential elections, Russia's just going to keep on pressing. Like, this is just the way Russia works. And of course, Lex was adamantly opposed to that, and I was just kind of holding my ground back and forth. And people liked the debate. I guess a lot of people who go on Lex's podcast don't often debate Lex. He's a brilliant guy, and I wasn't trying to debate as much as I was just like, I appreciate your point of view, but this is, this is what my experience at CIA tells me. That has gone on to have almost 20 million views. It's the number one Lex Fridman podcast still to this day. And I mean, that on its own created millions of leads for us.

Were you able during that to, to push the quiz or just, or did people—

That was the, that was the first time the quiz was launched.

And you said they just during the interview you dropped it and said it.

No, I didn't even get to say it.

It was just like people started Googling you afterwards and found it.

And then the link is in the description. It's one of the first links in the description, the spy quiz. And and it just took off from there.

That's so cool. And then after that, then you start going and you're just hitting tons of— so I'm curious because obviously in Traffic Secrets, I talk about this and a lot of people read the book and a lot of people still don't do any. It's always blows my mind the, the breakage between someone who reads something and actually does something like it's so, so interesting. And I get a lot of people are like, well, that's cool, but I'm not you, Russell. I can't get on podcasts or shows like that. I'm curious how you—

how—

I mean, obviously you get one or two hits, it gets easier and easier. But how were you out there? Was it you just messaging them, people messaging you? Both that, how you get on shows.

So I want to, I want to go from before viral to after viral, because before viral, I mean, you're— if somebody with 5,000 followers talks to you, they're like, you say yes. That's 5,000 people. That's 5,000 people, right? So I said yes to all— I was all over the, like, the podcast circuit for low-level small podcasts, audio only, audio and video, 100% remote, like all the crappy stuff nobody wants to create. But again, going back to your stuff, I was like, I got to create the crappy stuff because one day it won't be crappy and people will want to go all the way back and see my crappy stuff. So if you go to my— I currently have, I think, 650,000 subscribers on YouTube. If you go back and put my videos in order of oldest, you're going to see all my crappy stuff, right? Like it's, it's got to be there. Yeah. So, so cool. So I did the same thing. So I was all over small podcasts. I think I got I got one decent-sized podcast of like 250,000 people. It was like a conspiracy podcast that was in Largo, Florida. A guy called Danny Jones, great podcaster. He's grown since then too. But Danny Jones had me on his show with like 250,000 subscribers. And then a protégé of Danny, a guy named Julian Dory, invited me to come on to his show in New Jersey, which was like 100,000 people less than Danny Jones at the time. And somehow between those two, making clips and making shorts and making reels, they had some really successful reels with me. And that's how Lex found me. And then everything Lex touches goes, goes big. And then from Lex, it became Modern Wisdom, uh, it became Sean Ryan, it became Jim or Tom Bilyeu. It just, just kept going up, right? All Steve Bartlett. And now I have like a Rolodex of people. You made this comment once about selling your phone because the people who are on your phone. Yeah, it's unbelievable, the people who are on my phone. It's unbelievable, the people I get to just chat with and text messages. Yeah, I get questions from people about what's happening in the world, and I'm Like my wife made fun of me the other day. Steve Bartlett, Steve, if you're watching, if you're watching, Steve, keep watching. 'Cause Russell's awesome.

Can I tell you Steve Bartlett's story? It's the same thing. He messaged me on Instagram years ago before he blew up. And I didn't see it 'cause I have people anyway. And so then he starts blowing up. So I go to message him and there's a message from him. He's like, hey man, I love your stuff. I'd love to have you on the show. I messaged him back and no reply. I'm like, dang it. I missed my, I gotta start checking my DMs more often.

Anyway, so, no, but, uh, but Steve Bartlett was, was messaging, texting me the other day and, and I was talking to my wife and I was researching something for my wife and his, his little, his, his DM came up and I was like, oh, Steve Bartlett just messaged you. And I swiped to the left to keep researching for my wife. And she just looks at me and she was like, you just swiped that guy, you just swiped Steve Bartlett off your screen. I was like, well, I'm trying to find whatever. I'm trying to find the right pair of shoes for you or whatever it might be.

You're the most important person in my life. He's number 2, but you're number 1.

Oh, I should have said that. That would've, that would've been way smarter.

Brownie points. Um, man, that's so cool. Um, okay, so now someone comes in, so they're senior content, they go through the quiz funnel and then watch. So the first offer is $11. Walk me through then the process. Now you're turning them into buyers. Like, what does it look like beyond that part of it?

So I'm gonna, I'm gonna answer your question, but I want to go back to one thing just to plant the bookmark in case it's valuable to you later. We still, the problem solution thing was a real issue for us. So what we had to do was create a problem in the results of their SPI quiz. So what we did is, um, when we made the SPI quiz and we knew it was a— it was based in science, we knew it was based in personality testing. We also know that all personality testing actually delivers two results. All personality testing really delivers your strengths and your weaknesses. So I came up with the idea, what if we introduce the weakness for free as part of the squeeze? So hey, you're going to get your strengths, but we're also going to tell you your weakness. And then we give two different options, two different buttons they can click, something that says boost my strength or improve my weakness. And then we can track literal clicks and we can track funnel behavior in both of those two different deviations. What we saw was all the activity, everybody got their test results, everybody saw their strengths and weaknesses. In hindsight, I am learning, when they see their strengths, they're like, yeah, obviously.

Of course I'm amazing.

But when they see their weakness, they're like, yeah. Now there's pain. Now there's pain, yes. And then they click on that and then they go into that And then boom, like 5x to 1 in terms of sales behavior, click behavior, read-through behavior, follow-up. Like, it's just incredible. So we've really leaned into the fact that when people, especially high-achieving people, when they're faced, when they're confronted, that their weakness isn't secret. If I can find your weakness in 12 questions, if I can find your weakness in a 3-minute quiz, what does that mean about all the people who are actually close to you? What about, does that mean about your boss and your girlfriend and your kids? Like, they all see it too. They already know, yeah. So then that's, that, that pain is what drove people forward. And then it was just about giving them training, giving them educational resources through Everyday Spy that improves their weakness. And what we found is we can massively increase people's weakness. We can, we can get them past the things that they think are holding them back by giving them spy skills, which then they come back and they keep consuming. 'Cause now they're like, well, if you can do that with my weakness, what can you do with my strength? And it takes off from there as well. Interesting.

So the $11 offer, is it based on, Is there one for each different core weakness?

Right, there's, there's one for each different personality result because what we've, what we found is that there's predominantly 5 results that people fit into. And then based on those results, they have different strengths, they have different weaknesses. And then we know even in order of what's most popular, we know Mastermind is the most popular. We know Analyst is the second most popular result, people who are very analytical. And we have it all the way down for all 5. So after the $11 offer, the $11 offer is a basically a package of 3 or 4 special reports that are, that are tailored to your strengths and your weaknesses. And then as people go through the funnel, the next step after that, they start getting actual SPY training that's still in written format with a video option. Because go back to Expert Secrets, if they bought something to read, they will buy something else to read. But we need them to get to the place where they start consuming video because our highest automated products are video-based products. So we need to start training the audience. And that's a lot of what we do inside our funnels. And a lot of what we do inside our training programs is really preparing our customer base to buy the next higher level of service, but be familiar with the way that we deliver that service, whether we deliver it through live online webinars or whether we deliver it through books, through instructional videos, through something else. So we kind of have to seed that earlier in the,, ascension ladder so that it's not unfamiliar when the time comes to purchase.

Yeah. So cool. So what does the rest of the, the value ladder ascension look like after, after the original?

Yeah. After you go through, um, the $11 offer, of course we have 2 bumps. Both of those bumps are $27 bumps. Um, very high conversion rates on both of our $27 bumps.

This is the first podcast you talked about bumps.

I bet this is exciting. Oh dude, bumps are the, are magical.

It's like free money every day.

It's free money every day. What's wild is you can actually, like, I remember we always had one bump and then I was like, let's add a second bump.

Make twice as much free money.

Let's just see what happens. And then it really does. And the conversion rates are so like clockwork, right? 25 to 45% conversion on the bumps constantly, even with two. And the bumps are twice the price of the front end anyways. It's magic. It is magic. It is magic. And then after people kind of go through that front end and they go into our mid-tier, our mid-tier is a daily intelligence brief. That's what's called the daily intel brief. And it mimics the daily presidential brief, because the president gets a brief from CIA every day. So now we have essentially a training newsletter that costs $35. $35 a month, a year, or one time? One time $35 payment to get 365 newsletters that are trained every single day as a training point, right? Here's what you do, and here's, and here's how you go out and use it each day. That daily intel brief is also a marketing letter. It's, it's super rich content with just a simple PS line at the bottom. It's a soft sell, like, hey, if you like this, you're gonna love this other thing. So that's our mid-tier. That goes from there to our backend. Our backend is a monthly membership, $97 a month. So a big step from $35 one-time to $97 a month to get people into our Skunk Works program at the base level. And inside that Skunk Works program, you get monthly calls, you get access to a whole slew of our best stuff, you get custom training platforms or custom training programs that are just for the Skunk Works group. And you get access to our Safe House. Our Safe House is our personal app. And once you're inside the Safe House, you're meeting other people who are also Skunk Works members and people who are Skunk Works Operators, which is the second tier, and Skunk Works Elite, which is the third tier. And then there's a whole community of people who are cheering you on all over the world.

So cool. And then do you have anything beyond that?

Any— And then everything gets very custom and tailored beyond that. So we do have, we have live events that we sometimes host for anywhere from $997 to $3,000. $3,997 in terms of price point. Uh, we have a surveillance training program, we have a live tradecraft training program, we have an urban escape and evasion program, we have a 3-day crucible, we have a 3-day, uh, ghost tactics program. These are all $4,999, $4,997 up, so $5,000 and up. And then we have, we get tons of, uh, of leads for corporate stuff too, to come in and train corporate executives, to come in and do TV stuff. I actually just got an email this morning. They want me to come like Discovery Channel has a show or Hulu has a show that they're running in L.A. and they're like, we need you to come in, teach a bunch of celebrities body language in like 10 days. Can you do it? Here's what we're willing to pay you. And I'm like, sure, let's, let's go teach a bunch of celebrities how to read body language and how not to touch their face.

Yeah.

Oh, crap.

Last week we were all watching clips and sending them back and forth to each other. So I sent Brandon a clip about touching your face. We were all like, self-consciously, don't touch your face. So it's always, it's always interesting, like, talking to someone who knows body language really well. It's like the first time I met Tony Robbins and like he's analyzing you and like he can like read your soul and, and like I'm just like the whole time like, what's he thinking? I'm so scared. And so the same thing. It's just like, man, he knows if I look uncomfortable, awkward, what's happening.

Anyway, I actually shared a stage with Tony 2 weeks ago in Orlando. So he, he, he and I had keynotes on opposite days for this big dental sales conference. And it was the first time I had a chance to meet Tony Robbins and it was really cool. Because it was exactly like you described, only he knew I was doing it to him too.

And so they scan each other up. All right, we know each other.

He's like a giant and I'm just like a normal-sized human. So as we're standing there next to each other and like his hand is wrapped around my whole forearm—

because yeah, those are— he's not just— is he tall? He's huge. Like his head's like the size of 4 of our heads. Like his hands are— yeah, like, so it's, it's not like not just a tall person, he's a huge person.

Yeah, he's a huge, huge man. And you can tell that he's used to using that like in his favor. So as I'm sitting there in this like You're like, this awkward moment where I'm like, Tony, you did a good job. And he's like, yeah. And I really, I'm sad I missed yours and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm just sitting there. I'm like, I can, I can see what you don't want people to see. And he's looking for things in me. And I'm like, I'm an open book, brother. You can see what I've got a perm, whatever, whatever you want to say.

That's so funny. The battle of wits begins.

You guys walk in together. But it was also like the old cartoon with the big dog and the little dog. Yeah. I couldn't help but feel like that. And I was like, this is this is a part of your magic, is everybody who stands next to you already feels small. Yeah. Yeah.

Tony's an interesting character because of that. Like, he's got so much presence and like, it's— I've been in rooms before where he'll walk in and like, you don't see him, but you'll feel like something shift and you're just like, oh, all right, something's different. Like, you know, like his presence walked into a room.

It's, it's true. And then I'm curious if you sense this too, as a result of that, his posture changes the energy in the room. So when he walks in with his hands in his pocket and his shoulders like hunched forward everybody like relaxes. Yeah. Like, oh, and then when he gets excited and he pulls his shoulders back and he gets his arms big, then everybody sits up.

Everyone wants to mirror match him at all times, even though they don't know it consciously.

And they're just like, please don't touch me. That's what they're all thinking.

Just please don't, don't pick on me.

Don't notice me. Don't hit me.

Don't eat me. But my first time, uh, my wife and I went to an event, Tony had us up front in his thing and, and he's like doing interventions with people and grabbing them and then like spending an hour like going deep into their soul. And, and Klutz is like, like, we need to go hide. Let's go in the back. Like, if he calls on me, I'm running. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna be part of this. I'm like, oh, Tony, please don't call on us.

That's funny. So I know you are an open introvert. Is Colette also an introvert?

My wife, if you do the test, she's like 50/50. So she's right on the line. And so when she's in a group, she'll be more extroverted if she feels comfortable. In the entrepreneur world, she struggles because she doesn't understand the business at all. So she gets more introverted in this world. So I have to be more extroverted in this world. But then like we flip roles, like we go to church and it's the opposite where she knows everybody, she's hanging out, I'm in the corner just like, you're reading my book, hopefully nobody notices me. So it's like we, we take on the personas on the opposite side.

But yeah, that's funny. Yeah, the official term for that is cusp.

Oh, cusp.

Cusp. Yeah. And you can be cusp introvert and extrovert. We, uh, the primary intelligence or the primary personality test at CIA is called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, MBTI.

You know I'm obsessed with personality profiles, right? We have a company that just does it, so I love Myers-Briggs.

Yes. So Myers-Briggs is the one that's used by the federal government. It's the one that's used by the intelligence services of the world. World because it's operationally useful and it's quantitatively comparable. So MBTI is what my Spy Quiz is based off of. And MBTI, I know that there are lots of other options, but when it comes to what, what do elite services actually rely on, they rely on that.

Do they use any of the other ones? They use DISC, Enneagram, Strengths, and those kind of things?

Or they do, they use them, they use them in like leadership, secondary leadership courses. So for example, If you, if you— CIA is just a giant business. So every year, 200 to 400 new operators come on board, and they all get MBTI assessed. So we know the personality, the MBTI personality type of every officer at CIA. As they grow and they become, you know, a division chief or a group chief or a branch chief, these lower level of leaderships, then they might go through a DiSC profile or an Enneagram or something else as they kind kind of ascend. But the, the most important element is the MBTI, because that's the thing that every leader above in CIA wants to know, the MBTI of their officers. Before you assess somebody for an operation, the first question you ask: what's their Myers-Briggs?

Yeah, it's funny because we do the hiring the same way now. We used to hire based on resumes, and we get crap people because people had resumes, versus— yeah, like, we know the, the profile of the, of the role, and then we we do the test and then we just pull the right profile and then interview those people.

It's changed everything. That is CIA's model. Exactly.

Oh, like I'm doing CIA stuff all the time.

Exactly right. Isn't that awesome? Isn't that awesome? So CIA is an— it's a microcosm of society. You've got analysts, you've got linguists, you've got, uh, salespeople, because that's what a field officer, a case officer, is essentially— a salesperson. You're just selling treason, which is a hard sell.

It's a hard sell. I sell treason.

That's your t-shirt. That should be a t-shirt. But, uh, um, so, but you have, and then you have like linguists, and you have everything from like logisticians, and you have, uh, couriers. You have all these skill sets, and, and literally every one of them ties back to an MBTI of success. And you just slot the MBTI in with all of these, all of the new applicants that come in.

Yeah, I wonder where I fit based on my Myers-Briggs and CIA.

Take the spy quiz and you'll find out, 1 of 5.

Okay, I'll find out where I'm— I'll let you know after I take it. Okay, I want to move. I actually had some real questions I want to ask you other than geeking out on the business stuff, which I'm excited by.

Why.

But, um, I want to ask these questions because obviously you know my world, but like, I'm, uh, like, what I'm really good at is one-to-many selling, right? And the reason why is because I can't— one-to-many selling, as you know, we can't just have a conversation, I figure out your DISC profile, and I can sell you based on exactly who you are. And I do think the tech is close. That's why we built the personality profiling company, is just to get a huge database of profiles so I can feed into funnels. So when you opt into a funnel, I can be like, oh, he's an INFJ, rewrite the headline for someone that said, you So that's where I'm going with my whole— anyway, my world. But prior to that, we can't do that, right? Like if I'm in a room speaking to 1,000 people or 10,000 people to sell them something, or I have a webinar with 5,000 people that I don't know who they are or whatever, like I've got to figure out the profile of the audience as a whole, right? And then figuring out like what are the false beliefs that they have as a whole and like, and all these kind of things. And from that, we reverse engineer, build a presentation that's going going to try to attack as many things as we can, rewrite false beliefs in a 90-minute presentation that hopefully hits as many people as humanly possible, right? Like, that's, that's the world that I've been in for the last 20 years, um, with one-to-many selling. And, uh, again, this last week we watched probably a dozen, uh, or more of your interviews. It's been fun. And so there are parts that— some things you said in other words that were interesting, um, because like you guys are doing that, but you're doing it on like, like a target, like a person. Like you're trying to figure about exactly who that person is. I'd love to know more about just when you guys are doing that, focusing on target, like some of the things you're trying to understand about them believing, 'cause it all ties back to beliefs, right? Like the things we have to get them to, we have to understand about them so we can figure out the beliefs we need them to have to be able to persuade or to move.

Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned this because this is one place where I deviate from your Expert Secrets. When I first read Expert Secrets and I saw your kind of your webinar profile and all of your great sketches about the, the epiphany bridge and, you know, the, the opportunity shift, there were elements of that. I was like, this is gold. Opportunity shift, gold. The epiphany bridge, I was like, that's, that's not been my experience because in CIA, when we're in the field, we don't want to change someone's core beliefs. The more you try to change someone's core beliefs, the more you push them away, the more you force them into a situation where they have to choose you or themselves. And people will always choose themselves. It's inherent in their in their psyche. It's a survival instinct. I have to put myself before anybody else. So rather than build a bridge that kind of makes them ask the questions that are uncomfortable for themselves, we try to build a bridge of commonality. And then after they join you on the commonality, after they make the commitment to come with you because you're like them, then they're more receptive to changes that they need to make for themselves, right? So in the field, you do that by essentially, you assess a person their personality, yes, but their values, their beliefs, their vocabulary, their body language, their verbal language, their intonation.

You, you do this in real time or something you're prepping before you?

And both, because you get a profile for a person, you get a dossier in advance, so you kind of get some rough, rough edges of what the person might look like. And then when you're actually with them in person, because dossiers can be wrong, when you're with them in person, you get a better sense of who they are. And as you learn who they are, what you actually want to do is you want You want to echo back their beliefs, echo back their values. You don't have to say something that isn't true, but you want them to feel safe being who they already think they are in that moment. So when we host our webinars, when we talk to people online, whenever I'm selling, I am very much trying to create an echo of who they already believe they are so that they feel safe with me. And then once you have that, once you have that kind of anchor into them, now there's an avenue, there's a bridge age for you to present them uncomfortable truths because they see so many truths that are already there. And if you really want to lead— because CIA knows that the best secrets don't exist with treasonous people. The best secrets live with patriots. They live with loyalists. They live with people who are faithfully dedicated to the cause. Well, how do you get a patriot to become a traitor consistently and in a predictable period of time. You know how long it takes to turn a patriot into a traitor? 9 months. Really? 9 months. 9 months of meeting with them once to twice a week over the course of 9 months, and you'll get them to turn coat against their country. That's a person who's built a whole career, a person who's built their whole life trusting their country, and their country trusting them to the point where now they carry the president's secrets. They carry nuclear codes, they carry scientific secrets. And they're willing to trade those for something else because they trust you with the secrets that they've been trusted with, right? So we try to use that same model, not as a replacement to your epiphany bridge, but as like a precursor to it.

That's really interesting. I know there's a guy in Australia, he's a great speaker, and when he speaks at an event, he said the first thing he tries to do is he brings in universals everyone believes true. So he's like, hey, Hey, let's say it's Friday. Say, hey, happy beer on this Friday afternoon. And everyone's like, yeah, it's Friday again. And you know, it's crazy how sunny it is outside. And he's like, all these universal things that are true for everybody is like the more of the universals we get, then we're all like have perfect rapport before we give me transition to other things. He's trying to get everybody to feel that same way. So it sounds very similar, like how you're doing all your presentations.

It's true. And one of the things that I also try to do is I try to give people vocabulary, my vocabulary, right? I don't want your vocabulary. I want you to understand my vocabulary. And universal truths are a piece of that. But what we do is we draw this parallel just like I'm doing with you, right? When you were talking about your wife is in between introvert and extrovert, I was like, we call that cusp. Well, now you and I are on the same page with this term cusp, but subconsciously it's my term. So if you use my term subconsciously, you are already aligning yourself with me. Well, now when you're talking about one-to-many selling, whether it's through an automated funnel because it's written on a piece of paper or whether it's a video or whether it's a podcast, people are subconsciously aligning themselves with you, which in the human brain, because human beings are a tribal creature, we're a pack animal, we're always subjecting ourselves or, or pushing ourselves to be somewhere on the hierarchical ladder. So every time you accept somebody else's will, every time you accept somebody else's instruction, every time you accept somebody else's vocabulary, You are putting yourself lower on the subordinate line, which means where they take you next, you're more likely to go. So with one-to-many selling, we do a lot of here, I'm going to give you some vocabulary. I want to make sure that you're understanding what I'm saying so that I don't lose you. And I want to make sure that you have a whole new vocabulary for success in the future. So let's talk about these words. And you do it in these books all the time, which is why you have such faithful followers. But it's also when you talk about those people who, who read but don't apply. The people who read but don't apply haven't adopted your vocabulary. If they can't even adopt your vocabulary, there's no way they're going to adopt your steps, your actions. But the people who adopt your vocabulary are 100% in.

It's interesting. In Extra Secrets, we talk about status a lot, you know, like status decrease, increase. What we're talking about is that it's like you have that— your interest in vocabulary gives them a status decrease, which gives you an increase. But then it's also like Yeah, it's fascinating. Then as you're moving, they want to move toward— if you do it correctly, then they want to move towards you and with you versus like just separating, like, I don't like this anymore. And some do, some do separate, and that's fine too.

Yeah. And it's, it's hard. You want to make it as hard— you want to make it as easy as possible for them to subordinate themselves and as hard as possible for them to leave. Because once you've kind of fallen, that's why, that's why grade school works. The whole reason middle school and high school work at all is because grade school works, because we all subordinate ourselves to school starts here, school ends there. That's what a bell Teacher tells us when lunch starts. Teacher tells us when lunch ends. Teacher tells us the assignment. Even mom and dad subject themselves to the teacher. What's the first thing they ask you when you get home from school? Do you have any homework? Well, who the hell gave— who gave us homework? The teacher. So mom and dad are subjecting themselves to the teacher. So all of a sudden we learn, don't question the teacher. And the teacher just gets replaced by the boss and the supervisor and the college professor. And we never realize that we're just reliving grade school all the time. Well, we don't need to change the way that we work, or we don't need to change the way that other people work. We just need to be the new, the new teacher because they're already subordinate to a teacher. Yeah.

Interesting. There's something you talked about on your podcast that was interesting about developmental periods of people's lives, like 0-7, 7-13, 13-25, 25+. I'm curious, because kind of going back into elementary school and things like that, that. Explain that concept and how that fits into you as a leader trying to persuade and move people as well.

Yeah, so it's such a good question. There are 4 developmental periods, just like we just talked about. And as a quick recap, 0 to 7 is the first developmental period. And during that period of time, it's defined— cognitively, it's defined as a period where everything is learned. Everything is learned. Everything they hear, everything they see, everything they taste, everything they touch. From 0 to 7, it's all given equal gravity, right?

It's the best age too. Kids in that— that's like the—

how old are your kids? I have an 8-year-old and a 12-year-old. Okay. Yeah, I agree completely. 0 to 7 is the best. Absolutely.

That's why people keep having kids. That's why we had 5, because we're like, we need another one of these. And then they all code out, and then it's like, what were we thinking? Anyway, I should have said I love all my kids. You're all great, but you were the best during like 3 to 6 or 7.

Anyway, it's so true. I say 5 to 7. 5 to 7 is like magic. So much fun, yeah. Magic. But in that period of time, everything's equal. Mom and dad are equal. You know, whether they see something that's true or whether they see something that's false, it doesn't matter. To them, it's real. From 7 to 13 is the next developmental phase. And this is a hard developmental phase because everything they hear, they still absorb it. They can't reject it yet. They still absorb it. But now they apply priority to what they absorb. So I really like science, I'll pay more attention to science. I don't really like math, I'll pay less attention to math. But they can't resist it. Absorbing it. So that's why we may have all hated learning about the Revolutionary War, but we still remember it. We couldn't resist it. So from 0 to 13 is this phase in a child where they simply can't resist learning. But from 13 to about 25, you learn how to resist. You still have this incredible capacity for absorption, but now you not only can prioritize, you can also reject information. And that's why we have such a hard time with people between 13 and 25. Because if they don't want to listen to you, they just learned how to not listen to you, and they're gonna keep practicing that skill over and over again. And similarly, when they do get their teeth into something that they like, whether it's Eminem or whether it's, you know, some video game, when they're into it, they are literally dedicating resources to this thing that they're interested in, and they, they might even struggle with how to pull themselves out. This age This age is also defined by a high tolerance for risk because they don't understand repercussions. So from 13 to 25, almost all of us, when you think back on the stupidest things that you've ever done in your life, what window did it happen? It was probably that window because you couldn't assess risk. You, you never thought you might fall off the motorcycle. You never thought you might crash the mountain bike. You never thought for a second that maybe it's a bad idea to speed in the rain. You don't even think about it, right? And then from 25 on, all of your beliefs beliefs, all of your values, all of your, all of your mental habits are set. There's still something called neuroplasticity, which means you can still change the way you think, but you no longer have the ability to absorb everything, and you have learned how to control both your prioritization and your rejection sides of your cognitive brain. So you can prioritize what to learn, when to learn it, and you can reject things that you don't want to learn. The problem is is that for the vast majority of people after 25, they don't think any differently than the way they thought at 25. They just stay in the same groove forever. They have neuroplasticity, but they never exercise it. And this— the, the small group that actually discovers that they can change the way they're wired, they can change the way they think, that group goes on to have exponentially more success than the average bear. So those are the 4 developmental groups. And the reason I think those are so valuable is because if you're trying to Well, for me, my target is nobody under the age of 25. It's completely out of my control under the age of 25. If they're interested, they're interested. If they're not interested, they're not interested. And there's nothing I can say, nothing I can do, no content I create that's going to change it. So why even target them? Why not just do what I do and let 25 to 0 essentially be free leads, free money, free whatever else, assuming they even have a credit card. So I target above 25. Even more than that, I target 10 years after 25. I don't want a customer between 25 and 35 because the vast majority of those people haven't yet learned how to change the way they think.

They haven't gotten enough pain yet to want to. Yeah, I, I, I similar thing. If you've been at 25 to 35, like they are in a state of sedation. Most people where they're like, they've got the job, they got the thing and they're stuck in that, that thing. And most people don't break out of it. But the ones who do break out, like that's the sweet.

And they may not even realize they're stuck. They think that they're succeeding. Thing. Oh yeah, how many 28-year-olds have, you know, an $80,000 a year job and they're like, I'm, I'm doing really good, and you're like, just the train's coming, buddy, train's coming, you just don't know it yet. Yeah. So I really look for that, that ideal customer for me I already know is between 40 and 55 because that's where life is painful. Multiple kids, aging parents, mid-career to late career. Uh, if you were successful when you were 28 or 32, your rate of success has significantly declined by the time you're 40. Very few people are succeeding more after 40 than they were before 40 if they're successful, high-performing people. So they're looking for a level up, and they have already demonstrated to themselves that they can follow process, they can follow systems, they can follow concepts. And that's exactly what I need them to have success with SPI processes and SPI frameworks, because always teach us frameworks. Thank you. If we want them to have success with our frameworks, they have to believe in frameworks. And I— it's much easier for me as a startup, it was much easier for me to teach people who already believed in frameworks rather than try to teach people to trust frameworks.

So my world, um, my path, my customers seems very simple because I'm like, you don't have a business, you create a business, you launch a business, you scale a business, and you have these, these trackers. Your audience seems like it could be so diverse. Someone's coming in and they could be be not business people, all like become, you know, athletes or corporate people. Like, what is— when someone's coming into your world, what's the end? Is there an end goal or end state, or who you're trying to help them to become? Is it inside of their own thing or something different? I'm curious what the— what that looks like for you in your mind.

Yeah, so our business, our business mission is very simple, right? Spy education that breaks barriers. All I want to do is break a barrier. We break barriers in 3 categories, 3 categories that CIA taught us to recruit people the three categories that you lay out in Expert Secrets, right? Health, wealth, relationships. That's it. All of CIA operations are there to identify whether a traitorous target wants better health, more wealth, or better relationships. That's it. So it was so— it was such, such a simple analog comparison for me. I was like, holy smokes, this is the national security. You should hire me to come teach them some stuff.

If they haven't reached out to you, they really should, but They're in complete disarray right now, but, but they have unlimited funding, so they should definitely reach out.

I'd be willing. Just kidding. I will negotiate a special expensive rate for you in the, in the current government shutdown.

Oh yeah.

Soon as they open those doors back up and the money starts flowing, let's go. But yeah, so, so I, I look at the same thing as, as health, health, wealth, and relationships. So we have essentially front-end offers in all three. We have, uh, breakthroughs, uh, attainable breakthroughs that take take less than an hour in all 3 because we want someone to have a break, a break a barrier using a SPY skill. If we can just get them to break a barrier using a SPY skill and see that it works, they'll, they'll be in for the next step. They'll continue to go up the ascension ladder. And now when we need 2 weeks of their time before they break a barrier, they'll commit that. If we need a half a year of their time before they break a barrier, they'll commit to that.

Because they've seen the result earlier. Correct. Uh, of the 3 categories where Do you skew heavier one direction?

Are they all pretty even? So I never would have guessed it. I never would have guessed it was the last one that we built. And it is by far the most popular front end is health.

Oh, that— I thought business for sure. And I was like, no, it's going to be relationships.

No, no, no. Yeah. So I always thought it would be relationships, but it's health. And I think it's— in hindsight, I think it's because with my target demographic, right, 40 to 55, they all feel health pain every day. They feel pain when they wake up. They feel pain when they try to poop, right? They feel pain because they don't eat enough. They don't get to the gym enough. They don't have enough energy for their kids. Like, they don't have enough energy for sex. They lose their hair. They gain their belly to help them, because CIA teaches us how to be fit and deal with stress and, and how to eat diverse diets because we travel all over the world. Like, they teach us all sorts of fitness hacks, mental health health hacks. They teach us this stuff all the time. So, so all we do is we teach people a little bit about how to, how to drink water and have a, have a nighttime routine before they go to sleep to improve their sleep. And it changes people immediately. It's amazing what— it's as simple as this is, right? Like 500 milliliters of water will literally change the way you feel in less than 15 minutes. I think we all know that, but I'm the one that, like, my company actually put it on a page and called it a challenge.

And now all of a sudden, drink some water challenge.

Yeah, right. And now people are like, oh, this, this sounds like fake. And they drink 500 milliliters of water at 8 o'clock in the morning, and then by 8:15 they feel really good, and they're like, wow, it's not coffee or caffeine, or just— exactly right. So, so what we found is like, we have all these breakthroughs with people on the health side so fast. And then because they see what a little bit of what strawberries in the morning can do for them, they see what water in the morning can do for them, they see what, uh, what 5 minutes of a walk can do for them before they drink a cup of coffee. They make these huge, I mean, these are monumental changes to a person's routine. Drink a glass of water, have a bowl of berries, and go for a walk before you drink a cup of coffee. All in, that's gonna be 10 extra minutes in your morning. We're not taking your coffee away, we're just saying try this. And then by the time their coffee is done brewing, they actually wonder if they even need their coffee. That's such a monumental change to ask for somebody. When it comes to saying, hey, now pay $97 to join this once a month group, they're like, oh yeah, that's easy.

Yeah, you see the value of that really fast. Um, that's so cool. Do you— when— because if everyone's coming on Spike was initially, where do you— where do you separate health, wealth, relationships? Is that further down the funnel, or how do you get people to raise their hands for this?

Yeah, we have to teach them, just like you were saying. So people are not aware that there's these 3 different areas of their life. I think they subconsciously realize that life doesn't all fit in one channel, but they don't know how to name those channels. So we essentially take our entire audience, everybody who comes in as a lead, that's who I consider the audience, right? Everybody who comes in and doesn't squeeze to the lead, they're not ready for us yet. They'll come back to us in the future. They can't resist. You can't resist when you, when your algorithm feeds you me all the time.

You keep popping up like, fine, I'll take the quiz. For about 20 times, I'm in.

I'm going to do it. For real this time, for real this time. But we break our entire audience into people who are on the Daily Intelligence Brief and people who are not yet in the Daily Intelligence Brief, because the Daily Intelligence Brief, that mid-tier offer that gives them one piece of content every day that's training content, that's where they start to learn through one email, less than 500 words a day, how to think like a spy. And that's where we teach them spies break their life into 3 categories, and here's why we do it, here's what category 1 is, and here's what category 2 is, and here's how the national security infrastructure uses these 3 categories, and all this cool stuff. It's like 70% cool, 30% education, because nobody wants 70% education, 30% cool. So we teach them all this through this constant ongoing newsletter. The open rates are out of this world. The click-through rates are fantastic. And we know it works. That's our core audience. Then that's the audience we can cultivate. Everybody else who's not on that list is either— they either haven't gone past the $11 front end, or they, they don't have the money to go to the Daily Intelligence Brief, or the offer is not attractive to them. And if they're not attracted to a daily training, there's no way they're going to be attracted to a 6-month training.

Um, your, your year-long 365 emails, is that pre-written, or do you guys—

are you generating them It's evergreen. Every day? It took me 2 years to write it. So for the first, from 2021 is when I started writing the emails. And it was because I learned from the financial marketplace of Agora and our actual seed, the first company to ever find us and start putting money into us as a consultant was a company called FinMC, Financial Marketing Company, I think FinMC in Jacksonville, Florida. And right away, 'cause they were all, they were a company that specialized in financial information. They saw that we were putting out espionage information and they were like, we want you to come and be like our current events person so that you can speak to our audience about current events and how they're going to impact the marketplace. And I was like, yeah. And they put me on like a $4,000 a month retainer. And I was like, this is the best thing since sliced bread, right? So I go and I start helping them and I learn so much about, about how that works. But the, The point with all of that is I was writing, they write financial information newsletters, write original content every day, multiple times a day. And I was like, I don't have an editorial team, I can't do that. So I would create one rich content email that was written in evergreen fashion and I would post it that day. And then the next day I would write another email. And I learned this process at CIA, 'cause at CIA your career is developed by how much intelligence you create. Create. So I started to learn that most case officers, most field officers, only create 2 to 3 intel reports a week. So in a 7-day period, they only create 3 intelligence reports, and that's average. So I wanted to hack the system, and I was like, how do I get to be a good intelligence officer without actually collecting more intelligence? It's like, oh, why don't I just take my 3 reports and spread them out over the course of 7 days? So then I will publish a report every single and it just absolutely jump-started my career at CIA. So I was like, I'm already used to writing 800 words a day. Yeah, let me just do it again. And this time I'm doing it for, for money instead of for a promotion. And I just got into this process, and after a year I had 220 dedicated emails just because the way it turned out. And then after the second year, I got through another 220 emails, and then I took 440 emails, hired them up in the autoresponder, and I hired hired a copywriter who was more qualified than me, and I was like, pick the best out of these. Here are my open rates, here are my click-through rates, here's the, uh, here's the deliverability for all of these. And then we nailed it down to basically 320 that were, that were significantly better than the other 140 or 160. And, and, and just did it all empirically. And now that is the automated daily intel brief.

Yeah, that's the paid one, right?

Yep. Yeah, $35. And you get, and you get what is essentially the best of 2 years worth of daily training emails.

Yeah. Dang, you gave me an idea. I appreciate that. I have a really cool idea actually tied to that for the actual ClickFunnels brand. So anyway, very cool.

That makes me feel good. That makes me feel good. ClickFunnels has done so much for me.

I'm glad I can do something for you. That's awesome. Okay, so man, this has been so fun. I appreciate you being here and sharing these things. I would love just Again, I have people come to my world and I've been doing this a long time, I've been doing this like 25 years. And when I first started doing this, everyone thought what I was doing is a scam. Just like, in fact, I remember this is the worst story in my life. It was my first Thanksgiving, my wife and I, we just got married. I'm at her parents' house and we're sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner and my mother-in-law is like, hey, I Googled your name and there's a video of some guy saying that you're a scam artist. Are you scamming people? And I was like, you know, newlywed. I'm like, oh, so like I sneak away during dinner, I Google and like, sure, if a guy made a video saying like— and it took a long time for like all the stuff that we're teaching now for people even think it was legitimate. And then eventually it's been adopted and it's been more legitimized. But it's always fascinating to me that like when it gets outside of like, um, I don't know, like, like the entrepreneurs, the dreamers, these kind of people, but like people who have real businesses and real— like someone like you who's working in the government doing these things and they most of them, when they see what we're doing, they reject it. Like, ah, this isn't a real thing. So I'm curious, like, I love you just even talk to them, like, helping people understand, like, like this business, this industry, and like taking your information and how you can change people's lives and how it's— I'm sure affected you just seeing how this skill set you had that you didn't even realize was commercial for everyone else, how many people's lives you've had a chance to change because of it. Because I think they understand that how real this can be and how it can change people's lives and how fulfilling it can be for you as as a person, I think more people would be interested in being part of it.

Yeah, absolutely. And, and I, I am talking to you, I am talking to whoever's watching, but I really wanna tell you because like you touched my life. There are 3 people in my family, my wife and my 2 kids, and their life is completely different than it ever could have been because of what you built with ClickFunnels. Because you took that question from your mother-in-law and asked you if you were a scam artist and you You didn't shy away from that, right? So I genuinely want you to know the work that you did in 2019, the work that you did in 2013 until 2019 is what made me take the action I took in 2019 and what keeps us on the ClickFunnels train even to this day, even as competitors try to pop up to outperform you and even as competitors pop up to try to compare themselves to you, I'm like, they can do whatever Whatever bugs exist in ClickFunnels 2.0 are gonna be fixed eventually, but there's no way I'm leaving ClickFunnels because of what you did to start this revolution, right? Human beings are all wired the same. We all, regardless of our skin color, our age, where we went to school, what language we speak, what God we follow, it doesn't matter what country we live in, we all are made of the same organic matter. And that includes our brain. And CIA teaches us that the human brain is the most consistent part of the human body. So everywhere in the world, every human being that ever has existed and every human being that ever will exist, they have the same brain within a neural— a neurotypical model on a bell curve, right? We can't compare people who are chemically imbalanced or people who actually have a physical ailment with their brain. The vast majority of the bell curve, 80% of human beings alive today, day have the same brain organically and chemically, which means that they assess information the same way. It's only what they're nurtured with that changes how they view information. Otherwise, they process it exactly the same way. All you've done with ClickFunnels, all you've done with this whole— with this book series and the work that you've continued to create— is given the code to that existing computer that exists in 80% of brains. If we change the language, we'll reach more people, but the message doesn't even have to change. If we change the size of the font, we'll reach different age groups, but the message doesn't have to change. And the process is so repeatable, so scalable. It's why one-to-many selling works. And to your point about moral obligation, if you have created something that helps other people and you believe in what you have created, you don't have a choice. You are morally obligated to do everything you can to spread that message as far and as wide as you can. Everyday Spy is my moral obligation. CIA changed my life. It changed my wife's life. It gave us a whole different way of viewing the world. It was a blessing that I cannot describe. Traveling the world undercover, operating with my wife in foreign lands, keeping Americans safe— absolutely a blessing. And it does not compare to the way that I get to serve people now. I serve people thousands of leads a day, thousands of leads a day with no ad cost. They find me, they reach me, they learn about our content, they choose for themselves. That's their, that's their choice, right? We have hundreds of, hundreds of conversions a day with no ad costs and, and all evergreen marketing content. We do this not because we knew what to do, it's because you programmed the pink matter between our ears. And I was like, this is what CIA taught us to do with treason, and now we get to do it with something that builds the world instead of something that tears the world down. We've touched millions of lives. I have touched more than a billion lives online alone. When you look at all the content we've created and you— can you summarize all the views together? A billion people have seen my content. Content. And I never put an ad dollar behind it. And it's because of Traffic Secrets. And it just— I mean, Russell, I don't know what to tell you, dude. As soon as, as soon as I had the chance to reach you— Instagram didn't work, so I tried to find other ways to reach you, and those didn't work. But finally, Jeremy Miner was like, let's just send him a real quick message. I'm gonna play pickleball with him this weekend. And I was like, I gotta tell this guy the truth.

Oh man, I'm so grateful you did. And, um, yeah, so fun to hear your story and so proud of what you've done. And Um, yeah, it's, it's— and you know this from your own work too, it's like the most rewarding thing you do in your work is seeing somebody take it and do something with it. And so it's just, uh, so fun for me to be able to see that and see what you've done and all the lives you're changing. And, and you're just getting started, man. You're at the very beginning of this whole thing. Sooner you're going to convince them to start buying ads, and then imagine what's going to happen.

Terrifying. Oh, it's terrifying.

From a billion to 10 billion. That's so awesome. But yeah, I appreciate you, man. Thanks for doing here. So everyone, your next step on the podcast is go take the quiz.

EverydaySpy.com/quiz.

Yes, sir. Right. Go take the quiz and I'll, I'll take mine as well. Let you guys know what mine is and then see how many guys are similar to me. And then, and then, uh, yeah, it'd be awesome. We'll build a spy team. Oh, I like where this is going. Funnel Hacker spy team. That would be fascinating. We did our next event, have everybody take it and then like break them into groups and there's probably something magical we could do with that.

Oh, but there's all sorts of cool stuff we could do that. Not to mention like bolt-on challenges at the end of a Funnel Hacker or on the second day of a Funnel Hacker convention. Yeah.

And then we'll hogtie them all and throw them in the middle. Yeah, it'll be awesome. So cool. Thanks for being on the show, man. Thanks for flying to Boise. I know.

I mean, you're super busy and I will be here anytime you want.

My podcast is not like the biggest ones you've been on, but I'm grateful for you being willing to come out here and just, you know, come hang out with us.

Labor of love, man. Anything I can do to help. I told you that in 2021 and I meant it.

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, thanks, man.

Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for being here. Absolutely.