Trust Your Gut? The Science of Intuition feat. Sunil Godse

Your intuition is never wrong. Your intuition actually starts working in as little as 33 milliseconds.

How does this apply to a business owner?

I've got a 5-step process called Intuitive Branding. The first of the 5 steps is what I do is I look at your past good and bad business decisions and I get you to understand what the 4 types of intuition are and strengthen them. Once you strengthen all 4, then you take that into a leadership role and say, okay, if you want to scale your business, you have to have a brand story where you have a vision, you've got a mission, and you've got core values that employees can intuitively intuitively want to join you when they resonate with what you're trying to do as a business. Then you make sure that they're set up for success and now you've deepened their trust. And then steps 4 and 5 focus on the customer to say, where's your messaging? And the messaging has to touch all 4 types of intuition that attracts them to the brand. And then the 5th step is expanding your products and services that intuitively align with what you have. And then they're going to buy more when they trust your brand. They buy more even if those services are priced higher. And there's your revenues.

Hello, future billionaires! Welcome back to another episode of your favorite podcast. Got a really interesting episode today. This one was really fun for me. Brought on a guest, his name is Sunil Gadsy, and he is an intuition expert. What is that? Well, you'll find out. And what he talks about is using intuition to help make better decisions. All the time we're getting these signals from our intuition. I call it a gut feeling. These are signals that our brain and our body are trying to send to us to help us make better decisions. And so he takes his framework that he's built out, he's established 4 different types of intuition that we receive, and using these signals to make better decisions when investing. And what I've found so many times in talking with investors is when doing due diligence and figuring out who to work with and who to invest with, it's so difficult to get to that trust level, right? How do you actually know if these people are trustworthy? And what is my intuition saying? A lot of times people stuff down the intuition or the gut feeling because they think it's not legit, it's not real, it's just my emotions or whatever. But he actually says there are over 120,000 studies and research papers on this area of intuition over the past few years, way more than I thought. It's becoming a more well-understood area of science. And so I think you're really gonna enjoy this. He really brings some great golden nuggets on one of the four types of intuition, how to make sure and how to use intuition against your inherent biases, cognitive biases that we have, and also how to use intuition to spot Ponzi schemes. "Oh man, this is really good stuff." So be sure to check out this episode. You're going to love it. Listen to the whole thing. It's a really good episode. Thanks so much. This is the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast where we uncover the alternative investments and strategies that billionaires use to grow wealth. The tools and tactics you'll learn from this podcast will make you a better investor and help you build legacy wealth. Join us as we dive into the world of alternative investments uncover strategies of the ultra-wealthy, discuss economics, and interview successful investors. Welcome back to another episode of the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast. I'm your host, Ben Fraser, and today I'm bringing on a very exciting guest. His name is Sunil Godse, and very excited to have him on and talk about intuition. And the science behind it, how to make decisions, how to improve your decision-making. And you might think, what does that have to do with investing? Well, from my perspective, it has a lot to do with investing because what I've found in talking with a lot of investors and myself included, right? We are attracted to the potential that we see in the investment opportunities that we're looking at in the private alternative space. But one of the biggest challenges is lack of transparency. And in trust, being able to understand how can we, you know, have confidence in our decision-making in that big, big factor of trust and intuition. And so Sunil, super glad to have you on the show. Really excited to break this down. I think this could be really helpful for our listeners. So give us a little bit of your background and what kind of got you into this whole area of intuition and decision-making and what you do now.

Yeah, absolutely. So for those who are watching or those listening can't see, I'm South Asian. And so typically, you know, when you come from a South Asian family, you know, my dad used to say, you can pick any career that you want as long as it's doctor, lawyer, engineer. And so I picked door number 3. And I always had this feeling that it just— this wasn't the career path for me. And this— and we all have this sort of— everybody talks about this gut feeling. And it was just gnawing at me saying, you're not supposed to be an engineer. In fact, you're probably— I was best suited to be an entrepreneur. And the best piece of evidence is when I was 5 years old, I raised $200 for some video games that my dad thought was too expensive. And I remember this voice telling me, Sunil, you got to go door to door to raise money. And that's what I did. And that's how I raised $200 and $100 went to my dad. He was shocked. I wondered, like, where did you get this? And the other $100 for the charity. So, and throughout my whole life, it's been very entrepreneurial. I bit the, you know, the East Indian bullet and became an engineer. And 3 years in, there's at the 3-year mark in Canada, there's a point where you get a license. And so if you're going to say yes, you're an engineer for life. And in my case, I told my dad, no, I'm going to be an entrepreneur. And I never spoke to him for 12 years after that. Wow. Yeah. And, and, but the very, very first venture that I got into was a Mexican restaurant chain. And we brought a big, uh, a fancy chain, uh, uh, up to Canada. Um, and it was called Señor Frog's. It's a big, big Mexican restaurant chain. It was the first one in Canada. And we were making $2.5 million my first year, uh, $4.5 million third year, uh, $12 million the third, uh, sorry, third year, second year, $4.5 million. And then I bowed out. We expanded to Las Vegas and Edmonton. And then I started moving onto some of my own ventures with a wholesale clothing company, retail clothing company, pop-up event company, raised about, made about $20 million in revenues. And then started working with some of the bigger companies like Citibank, Rogers Wireless up in Canada, SAP, Western Digital, some of the bigger sort of tech-focused companies. And so I had this sort of entrepreneurial spirit and I had the, so the big Fortune 50 and I found my sweet spot intuitively by right in the middle where I've got people who own businesses that are at about $500,000 to $1 million and they're looking to get to the next level. And so, that kind of got me to really kind of understanding, you know, what was this thing, you know, that gut feeling that I sort of wasted a career in doing this. And I think one of the pinnacle moments is when I was reflecting back to the times I ignored that gut feeling. Obviously, one was my career. Another time I went down to work for another tech company and my intuition's gnawing at me saying, you know, you shouldn't be going, the contract terms are changing. And sure enough, I ignored that. There was that signal that I ignored. We'll talk about intuitive signals. It was very unique. And I said, don't go. And I went and the company never paid me. And I came back to Canada with like 23 cents in my bank account. And perhaps the biggest one that got me to really kind of shift my focus to say, I really need to study this is I had a friend of mine when I was in engineering, I was doing some coaching and she was desperately trying to get my attention because there was someone stalking her and she wanted my advice on how to get, you know, how to deal with this guy. And again, I had this, it was a different signal altogether than the ones I heard before and ignored it. And, you know, I just said, I need to, 'You know, go and have some beers with my friend. Can we meet maybe a couple of days later?' And she being the good friend she was, she says, 'Yeah, absolutely. Let's meet a couple of days later.' And the very next day, she was shot and killed by that guy. And I just said, 'There's no way I'm going to ever, ever, ever let this happen again.' And so, I really need to take a deep dive into understanding, okay, why did I ignore my gut feeling? What were these signals that kept changing. Everybody talks about gut feeling, but that didn't happen for me. I had a voice, the back of the hairs in my neck stand up, I lose my peripheral vision. Why is it so unique? And why am I the only one sharing these signals? And when I trust those signals, you know, I get into ventures, you know, my personal life becomes much happier. So, there's a huge correlation to trusting these signals that intuition sends you and ignoring them. And so that got me down a deep hole in, first of all, learning about failure and why do businesses fail, because I had a really big entrepreneurial bend. So I said, why do people in business fail? And so that got me writing my first book called Fail Fast, Succeed Faster. And when I went back to the audio recordings, you know, because I thought it was all about stories of failure, and if I give stories of failure, people will want to, they'll be able to succeed faster. And going back to the audio recordings, 80 to 90% of them said, I ignored my intuition. And I said, wow, like, what is this thing called intuition?

Interesting. Yeah.

And when I looked at the science, I looked up, there's over 120,000 research articles on intuition. And I took a deep dive into it, looked at some MRI studies. And what I realized is that your intuition is never wrong. And it's in a subconscious area of your brain, like, which is called the limbic system. And it, not only is it consists of 4 different types, which is even more complex, it's divided into positive signals, which tell us to go ahead with the decision and negative signals, which tell us, that warn us to take a step back. And each one of these signals is unique to each one of us because, you know, your experiences are different than mine. So, the way your signals pop up are going to be very, very different than mine. So if I hear a voice, it could be, you know, make— when I'm making a marketing decision, you may also hear a voice, but it could be when dealing with your family. So even though it's the same signal, it's different situations. And one of the key pieces of information that I found out is that your intuition actually starts working in as little as 33 milliseconds. So, wow, when you're about to make— in this case, it's an investment decision. Or considering a real estate deal or a hedge fund or any other kind of investment vehicle, your intuition starts acting in 33 milliseconds to see, okay, let's take that investment risk or that portfolio or whatever that investment vehicle is. We're going to filter that through the 4 types of intuition, and based on what each one of the 4 types of intuition comes back and evaluates, uh, and we'll get into what those 4 types, what, how they evaluate it, from what perspective they look at, it's going to send you, each one of those 4 are going to send you a positive signal, say, yep, this is right for you, or negative signal saying, uh-uh, this is not the right vehicle for you. And that happens within 10 to 14 seconds. So between 33 milliseconds and 10 to 14 seconds, you have a pretty good idea that this investment is worth at least taking a look at. And then there's always, it's like a camera, you know, on, on, let's say, so your intuition is always looking. So if someone who's managing the fund, the portfolio changes, or there's something that the words don't match the actions, or the investments inside change and shifts and you're not really happy with it, or the real estate risk changes because maybe the interest rate changes, that changes your risk profile or your risk ratio. And one of those 4 types of intuition is going to evaluate that. And say, okay, is this still right for you? And then it's going to send you a positive signal, say, yep, you know, just because the interest rate changed, it's still a good investment for you. Or no, that 1.5% increase in percentage, that's a bit too risky. And then one of the 4 types is going to say, no, I think better back down. And the problem is if you don't know what your signals are, you're going to ignore it. And now you're down a path where you're making a series of bad decisions. And when it comes to investment, that's where you lose your money.

Man, that's so crazy. So you hear the first impressions are really important, but you're saying it happens way, way, way faster than anybody even thinks. Yeah. What was one of the stats you mentioned, which was kind of shocking to me and was actually going to be one of the questions is, you know, how much science or studies have there been around this area? Because we all have heard of, you know, that gut feeling. We've heard the concept of intuition. We all, experience it, right? Because we said earlier, like, it could be a physiological, uh, response, right? The hair standing up back your neck and the goosebumps, like hearing those voices, those kind of subconscious, and just those feelings, right? Like the, the overarching, like, I don't got a good feeling about this, right? So we all know what that is, but it seems like pseudoscience, or it seems like, oh, that's, you know, that's just, you know, I ate something weird for lunch, right? But you're saying there's 120,000 studies on this? Why haven't we heard of this more? I mean, this is shocking to me cuz it's, it's something everyone experiences and there's been obviously a lot of, of sci— science that stays around it, but I mean, I haven't heard much about that. What, what's, what's the, what's going on?

Yeah, so there's a lot more research now that, so a lot of that research was not really kind of mainstream. And in fact, even when I looked at it back in when I was writing my second book Gut, which looks more at the scientific part of it, back then when I started my research, which is 2012, a lot of the stuff around then was, you know, sort of woo-woo and, you know, manifestation. And that was where a lot of the intuition was coming from. And, you know, certainly if you believe in manifestation and if you believe, you know, it comes voices from God or signals from, you know, the universe, to me, it doesn't matter how you define it. My job is to say, okay, you recognize that there are signals. You can define how you, where it's coming from. That's not my job to define that for you. It's your experiences. My job is to tell you that don't ignore that. And in fact, my, one of my very first interviewees for the intuition and my gut book and the whole project on intuitive branding, which I've just now ventured into, this was a friend of mine who was an investment banker. And I sat down with him and I said, I want to talk about intuition. And he says, you know, Sunil, come on. Intuition doesn't exist. What are you talking about? And so, I said, listen, I'm doing this. Please give me some time. He said, okay, I'll give you an hour. We'll talk about this woo-woo stuff for about 5 minutes and then we'll just catch up, you know, latte. And he said, oh, great. This is going to go well. So, I sat down, I turned on the cameras and he's really struggling to try and introduce the concept of intuition in the video. I think I'm not sure, perhaps. You know, we had some people who had some unique signals like ears getting hot and someone seeing omens behind his right shoulder. These are CEOs running multimillion-dollar firms. And he says, yeah, I wish I could meet those people, but that's not how it works. But as I'm educating him on the 4 types of intuition, what they actually mean, it resonates with him. And he says, yeah, well, you know what? I do remember that feeling when this happened. And would that happen? And yeah, you know, perhaps it is intuition. And at the very, very end, the last, very last story he talks about in that interview is that this guy was making probably $3 to $4 million as an investment banker. And he said intuition, now he's using intuition, said intuition told me that it's just right. This is the time. And he traded that all away. To run a tiny, almost bankrupt little restaurant. That restaurant that he started happened to be Eastside Mario's location number 1. And he grew that from zero to over $2 billion, from one location to over 1,000 before he retired 20 years later. And he said, that's all based on, it just felt right, which is a signal. It felt right. Passing $3 to $4 million away. To run something bankrupt, like, because it felt right. That's the power of intuition when you believe in it.

It's so interesting because, you know, I've told investors all the time, and, you know, I've tried to create education around how do you make better decisions, how do you, you know, do better vetting, do better diligence. But one of the things I've said, and honestly without really knowing the science but just from my own experience, is I, I've said, you know, I think most people underestimate their gut instincts, right? Your gut instincts are very powerful in this because there's an element of trust that is involved in all these decisions. And the, the subconscious things you pick up in interactions and what you're saying, this kind of ongoing, uh, uh, review of every little data point that's— that you're trying to match. Is it coherent? Is it congruent? Right? And that's something that a lot of people, I don't I think pay attention to. And it's interesting to hear you kind of corroborate this a little bit because it has been my experience as well. And, you know, we can all chalk up to be different things. And yeah, I'm a man of faith, so I probably think it might be different with someone else. But I think the experience of it is kind of undeniable for a lot of people, but it's— you want to just shove it down because you think it's, it's not important. So, so talk a little bit about the 4 types. You mentioned 4 types of intuition. Break it down for us a little bit 'cause I've not heard of these and really curious.

Yeah, absolutely. And let's pick, we'll look right at some, let's say we're looking at a real estate portfolio and let's say from that perspective and then we can use that experience. This is actually right up the alley with John McDonald, John Rochelle, who tossed his career aside. So if you're looking at a real estate portfolio, there's one of the first of the types of intuition is called experiential intuition. And what that looks at is that if you're looking at investing in some kind of real estate, or let's say hedge fund as an example, it's going to look at the experience that you've had in the past in investing in these types of strategies. So if you invested in real estate before, and it could be, let's say, single townhomes, and now you're getting into a commercial A, B, or C grade, that's a bit different. So your experiential intuition is going to say, You've never invested in something like this before because you don't have the experience. You better get someone you trust and get his or her opinion on that and whether it's a good one or not. So that's experiential intuition. And if you're going to go ahead with that, you or somebody you trust has had to have experience saying this is a good investment. The second one is called relational intuition, and this one is going to look at the people involved in that real estate deal. So who are, who, who's, who's heading it? Is it a corporation? Who told you about it? Did you go to a marketing seminar? And you're all looking for trust clues. And trust clues are things like body language, tone, watching words match the actions. And there's 7, there's sort of 7 body twitches, facial expressions that you can't change. Even sociopaths can't change. Your intuition is able to pick up on that. And when it picks up on that, it says, there's something wrong here. I don't believe what this guy's saying. And that's going to trigger a negative signal saying these guys can't be trusted. So what happens is when you get that first negative signal, it's going to tell you to take a step back and reevaluate. So it doesn't mean if you get a negative signal, it doesn't mean that the deal is done. It's just that you need more further evidence that you can trust the people involved. And if you can find that evidence, Excellent. Then that negative signal will turn into a positive one, and then your relational intuition is saying, go ahead. So now you've got the experience, the people involved. The third's the situation. So the situation is that where's that real estate located? Is it in a city that you're familiar with? Do you know the real estate location and what are the interest rates? What kind of square footage does it have? Does it have traffic access? If it's a commercial property, do you have end cap investors or real estate people. If it's townhomes, what type of income level area is that in? What are the quality of the tenants? All those things are called situational intuition. It's kind of like the situation that that real estate investment is in and see whether that's a situation you want to get into. So perhaps you want to get into real estate investment and you don't like low-income housing areas. And if there's something that pops up that's juicy that somebody says it's in this area that's pretty slow income, your situation is going to go, hmm, not sure. So for John Rothschild, you know, when he grew East Side Mario's, one of the primary areas they looked at was where are we going to put these restaurants. So he's looking at traffic patterns, he's looking at, you know, future development, um, and because that's going to attract people to his locations. And so, and McDonald's does the same thing. McDonald's is a real estate company, right? Right. And so they look at the same thing, traffic patterns, That's McDonald's team using situational intuition to locate a McDonald's or any other franchise location if you're doing it the proper way. And then the last one's called creative intuition, and creative intuition looks at the risk level. Okay. And so if you're looking at how risky is that investment, if I invest in it, do I take debt financing? Am I taking my savings out? How risky is that? And if you have a partner, you know, how risky is that for your partner and can you come to some kind of agreement? If the interest rates are slated to rise, if we're in a recession, if inflation's gonna go up and you believe these kind of things and it puts you in sort of a more of a risky situation, your creative intuition's gonna let you know whether that risky situation is right for you no matter what anybody else says. You know, like my wife and I are two different people. My wife is very less risky. I'm very risky. So, for her, it may not make a really good business decision, but for the money I control, it's a great decision and I'll get into that investment. And that's why she has more safer funds. I have more risky, you know, mining. I'm into more mining and high-tech kind of investments, whereas my kids are more into, you know, Boston Pizza and, you know, Disney and all those kind of things. So that's where creative intuition takes a look at that risk. That some people are more risky and less risky, and that's okay. but your creative intuition saying what's the right level of risk for you. So, what's the experience? Who are the people involved? What's the situation in that investment? And what's the risk level? And all 4 of those have to be positive for you to make that. Any one of them is negative, you gotta back away to get more information. And if you cannot get information that satisfies that one particular intuitive type, you gotta back away.

Interesting. So, you mentioned within 33 milliseconds you're getting feedback and your body is taking in all this information, these kind of 4 different areas, and it happens so fast. How do you kind of have the awareness to like take a step back and parse through, okay, what am I feeling? What, what bucket is this? I don't feel good about something. Which bucket is it in? Like, is there a process that you kind of take to kind of evaluate your own internal kind of, you know, gut check of what's going on to evaluate what do I need more information on, right? Because what you're saying is it's not necessarily a hard no, right? Because sometimes there's more information needed and it's more of a, there's a yellow flag here, you need to go do more investigating, do more research. But if you're not in tune with that, maybe you don't even know what to look for, what the next step is, right? So how do you How do you actually have that perspective to be able to know the next steps in that process to evaluate it?

Yeah, so the easiest way to do this is to look at your past decisions that you made, where you made some good investments and where you've made some bad investments. Okay. And so on a sheet of paper, what you would do is across, you know, at the very top, you can put what was the investment that was good and what was the investment that was bad. So you'd have two sheets of paper and you have four columns. And each of the columns represents one of the types of intuition. So, if you look at your good investment decision from an experiential intuition, why was that a good business investment for you? What was the experience behind it? And similarly, relational intuition, why did you trust the people involved? Situational intuition, why was that situation great for you? And then risky, risk, creative intuition, why was that risk level right for you? And so, when you think about each one of those columns, you're going to sense a signal because those signals never go away. And so, what you need to do is record that signal. And normally, when it's positive intuitive signal, it feels like a flow. There's no resistance. So, for me, it's a really good— it's a gentle pulling. For me, the dots connect. I feel calm. And those are my positive signals. And when you take— when you actually go ahead with those decisions from each of the 4 types, they'll send you even stronger or louder signals to confirm that you're on the right track. So that's interesting. Good Decisions. And that helps you not only understand the 4 types of intuition, now you also understand your positive intuitive signals that are both subtle and louder. So that's fantastic. And that's usually step That's step 1. Step 2 is you do the same thing for negative intuitive decisions. And so, you take a bad investment decision you had before. Right. Same thing, 4 columns. And so, now the thing with bad decisions is that all 4 types of intuition do not have to send you the initial negative signal. So, let's say there's one where that same low-income high-income scenario. So let's say I made a bad investment in the past because I went with a low income versus a high income. I'll use that as an example. From my experiential intuition, I've invested in real estate, so that's great. So from an experiential intuition, positive signal. From a relational intuition perspective, the investment group's the same. I've dealt with them, I've had positive investments with them and made some great returns. Positive intuitive signal. Situational intuition is saying, hold on, this is low income and you wanted sort of high income. That's not part of your investment portfolio. Negative signal. And from a creative intuition, it's saying the risk-reward ratio is fine, it's okay. Positive signal. So now you've got one intuitive type sending you a negative signal. And when you actually go, when you went ahead with that, you probably might have had some bad tenants. You had, could have had some squatters. Perhaps the investment you thought was right wasn't very good. The vacancy rate all of a sudden shot up. Whatever the case is, it ended up in a bad investment decision, all because you ignore your situational intuition. So you need at least one of the four sending you a negative signal. And so now what you've done is you've confirmed the positive signals and now you've learned about your negative signals. So when these signals pop up, the next time you make an investment, you know what your signals are and you know the bar types of intuition. And so if you go through that process for any investment decision you make, again, within 33 milliseconds, you'll know. And then What you do is, let's say with your situational intuition where it gives you that negative signal, the next step is say, okay, how can I change that into a positive signal? So what you would have to do is, what is it? What's stopping me from going from high income to low income? And if you can rationalize that, and perhaps the opinions look good, the things on paper look good, I trust that things on paper. There's going to be some great development. Maybe some high-end restaurants are coming in that area. Perhaps there's a new, you know, theater coming in that area. It's going to bring some more middle-income people towards that area. The situation changes in the future, then you might, that situational intuition will say, yeah, that makes sense now. So perhaps that it's not so bad. And so perhaps the quality of the tenants will get better over time. Now you've changed that negative signal into a positive signal and you go ahead with that.

Yeah, makes sense.

Yeah. And so, and so it's really kind of— there's, there's the, there's the, uh, the limbic system, which is your ration— that's your, you know, uh, fight, flight, or fear. So anything you've done in the past which is negative, it's going to evaluate. And now you're actually using logic and rationality because you have to use both head and heart, uh, limbic system, frontal lobe. That's where the science is. You have to match the two. And once they're on, on board, that's a great investment decision for you. Interesting.

So, so talk a little bit, I want to kind of tease this out a little bit because, you know, I've, I've done a little bit of research and nowhere probably close to you on heuristics and biases, right? Because we, the other kind of side of this is we all have these inherent biases that are created because our brain has to create simple fact patterns for us to process all the information that we have. But sometimes those biases might not be accurate, right? Because our brain is trying to create a shortcut. So, Examples are recency bias. So we tend to overrate our more recent experiences versus older experiences or survivorship bias. Like we only, we overweight the winners because they're the only ones that survived, so we can't contrast them against the losers. All these other kind of biases that kind of come up. How do you sort through if a lot of these intuition and gut signals are based on a past experience, how do you make sure it's not a skewed signal from maybe a bias that you have, or how do you have awareness of that at least?

Yeah, so whenever you have any kind of bias, whether it's recency bias, survivorship bias, those are very highly emotional type of decisions. And so those decisions are based on high emotions. And what happens is when you make an emotional decision, you have not allowed the rational part, the, you know, the frontal lobe to come in and actually rationalize that. So, what happens is when you go through the process that I have, that I was just explaining before, you get the chance to really outline it and put it on paper and take a look at it from a very sort of 30,000-foot view area so that the emotion is controlled. And when you control that emotion, and you'll know where you're forcing a decision emotionally because you're going to get a negative signal, or you're not going to get a positive signal. So if you've done the work to figure out what your intuitive signals are and the positive signals are just not showing up, there's a bias there that you're pushing. You're pushing a narrative, a personal narrative, and that's going to get you in trouble because you're—

Interesting. So you're actually saying your biases might not actually inform intuition that could be in contrast with it. And if you're going along with your biases, you might actually have a gut intuition kind of pushing back against that because there's an emotional element that you're not confronting. Is that kind of what you're saying?

That's one. And don't forget, you've got 4 types of intuition all working together. So even if you're trying to mask one of the biases that, you know, in let's say experiential intuition, which is, you know, recency bias perhaps. Or relational intuition where you're forcing yourself to trust an investment group because perhaps you like the numbers on their marketing presentation, your creative intuition is going to be screaming at you saying, this is risky because there's two other types of intuition giving you negative signals. You're not listening to them. So I'm going to send you a negative signal, say, listen, buddy, you better back off. So that's how they work. In unison. And so you can have the bias, you can try and force yourself on one of the four, two of the four, even the three of the four. You can't fool the fourth one ever, ever.

Hey, so what, what about like trust, right? So from my experience, a lot of times I can be getting good signals, I, I feel like, hey, this feels right to move forward, but then you're, as you said earlier, you're always kind of continuing to take in more information. And maybe there's a— the first kind of signals were good, like the first impression was great, right? But then over time, some things start to be mismatched. Or what I've kind of found too, it's difficult to understand how people are going to react in a difficult situation. But to me, that's the true revealing of character, right, is how someone acts when something's difficult. And that's hard to do in, in a, you know, if you're not in that experience and seeing how they actually act. Um, because sometimes people can put on a front that's different than maybe their underlying character, or maybe they, they think they have that character, but they get in that situation and they don't. They, they, you know, are, you know, do the wrong decision or cowardly and whatever. And so how do you kind of reconcile maybe this initial intuition with kind of an ongoing intuition as things evolve and change and, um, kind of create a good feedback loop to make sure, you know, you're again not using biases to just gloss over things that maybe are now becoming negative signals.

Yeah, so in that case, you just take that same— let's say if it's a person, uh, and whatever his or her actions are, take them to the 4 same 4 types of intuition, right? So this is really tough, especially if you have a really close relationship. If you have a friend at work or a friend who's in an investment group, for example, and you know, it's a buddy, you go for beers with them or coffees if you don't drink. And so, maybe that's their bias and you want to get out of, you know, maybe a situation where they're recommending something, you don't want to hurt their feelings. But if you take that same thing to the 4 types of intuition, I have businesses do this with their employees. If the employee might have the right skillset in terms of experiential intuition, they may be very charming in the interview, that's the relational intuition. But if their resume and they can't speak to the skills that you need, the situations that you need to get them to get into in the role and responsibility, and they're um and ahhing, we've got a negative signal there. And perhaps they've done some risky things in the past, they've gone, they've passed through the failures, which is creative intuition. But that one type of intuition is still screaming at you saying there's an issue. And so, when you're looking at trust, a trusting, trusted relationship, one of the things that if you is, if you don't look at learning the 4 types of intuition, if you don't strengthen those 4 types, like we're all naturally strong in one type because of our past education experience. So, we always make decisions based on that one lens. And what we forget is that we've got 3 other lenses that are also looking at that situation, especially in this trusted area. So, if we're always trusting someone and we're forcing that trust, there's 3 other types of intuition that are trying to send you warning signals, but because you're weaker in them, because you haven't done this exercise to strengthen them continuously, that's when you miss your negative intuitive signals. And, and that's when your life starts taking a turn for the worse. And I'll give you a case study. There's a, a fellow by the name of Bin Zhang, and in 2016, this guy was on 80 stages. Around the world, speaking to over 100,000 people, professional career on a high. And he said, I just, I knew my intuition was screaming, saying, you're in a crappy place. And so this guy's making, you know, 6, 7 figures a year. And his intuition is saying, stop. And he does. And he goes away to New Zealand. And he starts writing these values on his wall. And he says, you know, this is what my manager wants, my wife wants, it's what this person wants. Where am I? Like, what do I want? And ultimately he goes back to, this is in Australia. He says, I'm going to move to America. And he does move to the US. And the big problem he had was that his relational intuition was saying that you're hanging around a lot of really bad people, materialistic people that happened to him before. He came back renewed saying, I'm going to listen to my intuition. And he ignored the signals and he went back to that same routine when he moved to America. And it said his family came up from Australia and he said in Vietnamese, he said, there's a saying in Vietnamese that when you hang around squid, you're going to get ink on you. And his mom basically says, you're hanging out a lot of squid. This is not my boy. And that's when he said, I need to listen to all the signals my intuition is telling me. He got rid of the Mercedes and the high end where he was staying downtown LA, got a van, moved out to the suburbs, and he's never been happier. And his life's a lot more simpler. His career took off. He's now very, very popular. He's making waves on YouTube. He talks about the 88 keys of keyboard and how that informs you in presentations. And he's just—

Wow, that's cool. That's a cool story. Okay, I have another kind of— is I could talk about all this, it's so fascinating. But another thing that's really interesting to me is like in our space, Ponzi schemes, right? These people that a lot of times they're high narcissistic personality, right? And very charismatic. And from my perspective, I haven't interacted with a lot of these people, right? But, you know, watching documentaries and hearing people's stories that get sucked into Ponzi schemes, you know, a lot of times these people are so high EQ they can kind of maybe send false signals. It seems like that, maybe not, but it seems like they can kind of, uh, uh, be able to hijack some of the intuition because they're so good at it, right? And they're, they're so intentional, potentially manipulative. Um, what's been your experience in, in their research around, you know, these kind of NPD type personalities or damaging personalities that we can just be more aware of, because especially in this space, right, where risk of loss is really damaging and avoiding Ponzi schemes is very, very important. There's not a lot of them out there, thankfully, but what are some things you could say to someone that is to avoid working with someone like that?

Yeah, so there's a couple things. So there are some very professional people out there that, that are really slick, uh, but there's one thing that the science definitely shows that there's 7 facial expressions that you cannot, you cannot change.

Okay.

And so once you're in tune with your intuition and you read— when you read a lot of people, you get to see that there's, there's something off. There's like, the presentation is great, and a lot of these, these, these slick people work on some kind of— they're looking at, there's an emotional need that, that they're feeling that you have. So there's that urgency to be rich, to be famous, to wear the Rolex, to get a private jet, to be financially free. And so there's that emotional component that they're really feeding off of, and that gets you hyped up. And what you're really doing, again, we were talking about the emotions, is that you need to subside those emotions, take a step back and say, before I invest in these people, What am I missing? Why is this such a great investment? So a lot of times if you go on the, like, if I get any of these types of, uh, types of requests, uh, or it's a great investment, you know, or it's too good to be true, uh, you know, the internet is a great place to take a look at problems. Um, if they've had any legal issues in the past, again, situational intuition to say, are these guys for real? Um, your relational intuition is obviously playing already, uh, looking at their their facial expressions. And so if you didn't pick up on the facial expressions, it just means that you're not strong in relational intuition, which means that from here on in, you need to read people and just continue to read people, even if it just— if it feels weird, you need to protect yourself. So there's something that one of the 4 types of intuition, or more, obviously are going to pick up, and those are all red signals. And then if it's, again, it's too good to be true, you back away. And again, there's a difference between your emotional need or want versus your intuitive signals. They're totally different. So, you really need to spend your time figuring out what your intuitive signals are because you consistently avoid these Ponzi schemes. And then, once you figure out the pattern, it's all pattern matching, you'll be able to sense this in 33 milliseconds. That's a Ponzi scheme. That's a potential Ponzi scheme. That's a potential Ponzi scheme. You'll know right away. And I can tell. I've been pitched some of these as you have, you'll be able— I'm sure you'll be— you're able to— the 33 milliseconds, you know, nope, I know exactly where this is going. And that's your intuition, right? And so, yeah, someone who is not as educated or, you know, getting into these Ponzi schemes for the first time, that's where they need to go through this exercise to really think, is this my emotions or is this really something realistic? And one of the 4 types of intuition, all 4, will tell you.

Yeah. So I'm assuming you hit all those kind of 7 body language things in your book and kind of things to learn about. 'Cause it's like you said, it's a skill you can learn to develop. I mean, it's interesting. I watched a documentary, I think it was on Netflix with Bernie Madoff, right? And it hit this whole story about, I don't know if you've seen it, but it's wild because not only did he fool people for decades and kept it going, he also fooled the SEC, right? Which their whole goal is to go and identify Ponzi schemes. And he was slated to go be like the next head of the SEC. And, and, uh, it was so interesting how he was so able to manipulate that. But what you're saying is he's playing off— in, in these, these usually high-end PD people can have the ability to read what the need is of the people around them because they're high emotional intelligence and can feed into that and maybe kind of stunt the maybe the negative intuition signal that's coming. If that's— I'm hearing and understand what you write to where it's blocking something because they don't maybe clear in that and it's being the need that they're wanting is being met, whether that's, you know, good returns, whether that's feeling important, whether that's, you know, whatever it is. Right. And so being able to be in tune with that is so important. And yeah, it's just, it's fascinating to understand some of these you know, really crazy personalities, you know.

Well, if we look at the Bernie Madoff example, in fact, there was— I forget the fellow's name. He was running UBS Securities in the UK.

That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. Looked at the returns on paper and he said, this is too good to be true. I got to trust my intuition. And he actually went to New York.

Exactly right. Yeah.

And he told them, if you're not going to pull— if you don't give me the information I need right now, I'm pulling my assets, which he did. He advised all his people. I mean, ultimately, your investors have to make the decision to pull out or not. All these investors stayed in because they got that sweet tooth of a beautiful financial return, even though this fellow advised them, there's something wrong, I advise you to pull out. So it, you don't even need someone like that trust. That was, that's the, again, that's your situational intuition. That's one, because the return was too high compared to, you know, similar basket of securities. And creative intuition number two is saying, if you don't pull out of this, something's not going to work. And that's your creative intuition. And then when he goes to New York, now he's got Bernie Madoff not giving him this information, which is relational intuition. And experiential intuition is now saying, this is too good to be true. You got all 4 types of intuition now saying, no, get out.

Interesting.

And that's exactly what he was advising.

Yeah, great point. No, I forgot about that point. He was the one that really drove the whole issue home and ended up kind of getting him convicted. So that's a great point.

So exactly.

Very— oh, this is so cool. Kind of the last segment here. Talk a little bit about what you do now for as your business consultancy, right? Because we've been talking a lot about investors and how to use these tools and we'll link to the books, these things in the show notes, people can get them. But how does this apply to a business owner, right? How do you use these concepts to help businesses kind of take it to the next level and using intuition to make that better decision-making as a business owner?

Yeah, so I've got a 5-step process called Intuitive Branding. And if you go, people go to intuitive-branding.com, they can see what the 5-step process is. And there's a bunch of testimonials of people who've gone through it. But one of the first of the first, the 5 steps is what I do is, is exactly what we were discussing here is I look at your past good and bad business decisions and I get you to first of all understand what the 4 types of intuition are and strengthen them. Because as I mentioned earlier, you're always strongest in one, which means you're weakest in the other 3. And so once you strengthen all 4 by evaluating your past business decisions, now you know what your positive signals are and your negative intuitive signals are. Then you take that into a leadership role and say, okay, if you want to scale your business, you have to have a brand story because it's all about branding and trust, where you have a vision, you've got a mission, and you've got core values that employees can intuitively want to join you. So that's the influential part. And so when they resonate with what you're trying to do as a business, because we all start a business for a reason, and you need to articulate that from the 4 types of intuition. So I take people through taking that vision through and make sure it crosses all 4 types of intuition. Because don't forget, just like you have 4 types of intuition, so do your customers and so do your employees. Yeah. So once you have a vision, mission, values that your employees resonate with, then in the third one, which is intuitive hiring, you make sure that they're set up for success and now you deepen their trust. And then you, from the, and then steps 4 and 5, focus on the customer to say, where's your messaging? And the messaging has to touch all 4 types of intuition that attracts them to the brand. And then the 5th step is expanding your products and services that intuitively align with what you have. And then they're gonna buy more. And the science shows that when they trust your brand, they buy more even if those services are priced higher. And there's your revenues. And when your employees are super productive because they intuitively want to work with you, your expenses go down. There's your profits. And that's how you scale. So that's a 5-step intuitive branding process. Typically takes 12 months. The worst I've had so far was someone going from $900,000 to $1.6 million. That's my worst client. Best client went from $400,000 to $13.5 million. Wow.

Over what time period?

That was 2 years, 2 and a half years.

Sheesh, man, it's amazing. Okay, we'll definitely put that link in the show notes for our listeners that are owners to check out. Sunil, thank you so much. It's really, really interesting. I love this discussion and this kind of area of focus, and definitely I learned a lot today, so I'm sure our listeners will take some good nuggets. Again, tell us the best way to learn more about you and about your branding agency. And we'll put all these again in the show notes.

Sure. Yeah, so you can go to intuitive-branding.com for that side. There's sunilgodse.com for the books and my speaking if you want me to come to your event or your corporate event. I'm on all the socials, and, you know, we'll be putting out a lot of, a lot of content coming out in force here. So we're working on a lot of YouTube videos, kind of about a month or so, and we're going to hit the, hit the social media waves with tons of stories of trusting intuition, ignoring intuition, and the things that happen when you do both. It works out if you trust, obviously, and if you don't, boy oh boy, watch out.

Awesome. Well, Sunil, thank you so much for coming on. This was really, really fun. Well, uh, thank you. Excited to get the word out here. This is the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast where we uncover the alternative investments and strategies that billionaires use to grow wealth. The tools and tactics you'll learn from this podcast will make you a better investor and help you build legacy wealth. Join us as we dive into the world of alternative investments, uncover strategies of the ultra-wealthy, discuss economics, and interview successful investors.