How To Manifest And Amplify Opportunities In A Post COVID World

Welcome to Capability Amplifier, the show for business owners and entrepreneurs who want high performance upgrades for their brains, bodies and bank accounts. All right, welcome to another episode of Capability Amplifier. This is Mike Koenigs. I'm here with my good friend, Mr. Dan Sullivan. I was so excited for this one is because in our previous episode we talked about COVID and how it's affecting and how it affected business and business as usual and at Strategic Coach and how you're not only prepared, but able to respond and react to it and also find great opportunities and increase the capabilities of the organization, but also the entire client base. But then what we promised next is we're going to talk about how do you amplify the possibilities of the potential, increase your luck, see the possibilities and potential both on a local level as well as on a global scale. And we're going to talk about some of the big ideas that you see and I see coming out of this cycle that we're seeing one of the most disruptive opportunities in human history, One of the biggest payouts of, we'll call it socialized money redistribution that's ever occurred in United States history. And how you can find the opportunity, accelerate the opportunity, create massive leverage, and use some of the tools that come from the arsenal of Dan Sullivan and Strategic Coach and myself as well. So how's that for a starter?

Well, it'll sure get us started. Mike, you and I spoke of an individual who's an author and he's actually a geopolitical strategist. So he takes into account the whole world and then has a great website. It's called Peter Zion, last name is spelled Z E I H A N. Author of some very provocative books, of which I have twice bought 600 of two of the books I bought 600 to give out to the 10 times strategic coach clients, those who are in the 10 times program and those who are in the Free Zone program. And I had the opportunity to meet personally with Peter in February, and I asked him because it was now being openly discussed that we might be in for a bad spell of virus. And I said, what impact does this have on your predictions? And he said, speeds everything up, he says. Everything's going to happen faster than I was predicting. So that's really interesting. One of the things he's predicting is that this is officially the end of the Second World War. And what he meant by that is that at the end of the Second World War, there was only one country that had the military power, the financial power to kind of organize the rest of the world and allow the rebuilding of a lot of places that had been destroyed and at the same time protect against a major threat in terms of the Soviet Union. So that country was the US and for the last 75 years, basically the supervision. It was one country essentially supervising and protecting the rest of the world. But it got to the point where when the Soviet Union suddenly dropped out of the game, nothing changed. And everybody wanted the US to go on supervising and protect. Not supervising so much, but protecting and especially financing the rest of the world. And that became a big political problem in the US because significant number of American voters said, why are we paying for any of this? So that's where we are right now.

Yeah. And so let's look at that again through the lens of time and what's changed. So that was a materialized world. And back In World War II days, bombs were dropped, cities, bridges.

This was not a virtual war. This was right.

So I always like to look at everything through the lens of imagine for a moment that aliens were observing the earth at a moment in time, paying attention to the behaviors and what's going on. That irrational, the rational and trying to make sense out of it with no basis. In other words, you wouldn't have. What do they call those things? It's like a decoder stone. Rosetta stone.

Rosetta stone. Yeah.

Yeah, the equivalent of that. So nothing to start with, just observing. And right now, if they were watching, they'd be like, huh, something's going on. There's a little bug and a bunch of people are dying. And again, I'm going to get strangely minorly, almost political here, but a lot of those people are. The numbers are probably the same as what's been going on for a long time. Maybe there's a shift or an ebb and a flow, but those who are sick and old and practicing bad behaviors, meaning not taking care of their physical bodies, are dying a little bit faster. But it's a blip in the grand scheme of things. And again, just to not be tone deaf to those who may have lost loved ones during this crisis, I'm not trying to make a value judgment. It's just, I think at the end of the day, sometime in the future, when we look at the numbers, we'll see this as a statistical anomaly in the grand scheme of things. I'll go on record of predicting that and saying that much of this was politically motivated behavior, Power and money in some way, shape or form, who knows? But with that in mind, what is interesting is the opportunity that exists is to Rebuild the world inside your mind and think about instead of building bridges and infrastructure is what needs to shift and change to both prepare for this kind of thing in the future and be more resilient and stronger for the inevitable changes that are going to happen inside our environment, however or whatever that's controlled by and to be more prepared mentally to turn and innovate and manifest and create and also collaborate. Which goes back into, if you just think through the lens of Dan Sullivan and the free zone frontier of creating competition, free zones through collaborations that operate outside of regulation. And that's another thing that's going to happen as a result of this. I believe that the power struggle that's been going on, the massive power grabs are going to be manipulated and used to create more regulation. That probably will not be pro business and it will not be pro growth. That's my gut, I could be wrong there. But I think historically when you see where power is absorbed and created by fear mongers and leadership. But our goal is to see through that garbage and see the positive and create courage capabilities, amplification and more leverage and, and also be able to interpret maybe what Peter and other economists observe both locally and globally. So with that, now we've got a little slate to draw our formulas and do some predictions on where do you see some of the greatest opportunities to amplify capabilities and also where things are going to blow up and be destroyed. I always say what's on the mass extinction list and where are the opportunities that flower as a result of that?

Well, the big picture in here, these are, I mean I've been studying this, but this is not my thesis, so I'm interpreting someone else's thesis. And you know, I'm avid reader and I'm a reader rather than a watcher or listener. So my main source of information tends to be reading, but mostly Internet reading. And it's articles, articles and there's great sites where you can get really, really great articles. And the thing that I find is there seems to have been a trend that went very, very different when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. This is the greatest land empire in the history of the world, 11 time zones wide. And nobody predicted it. You know, people can go back and said, well I kind of knew this was happening. No, there was no prediction. Even within the Soviet Union itself they have a feeling one day nobody believed in the Soviet Union anymore and it collapsed. You know, the problem was that the world was set up that there would be this divided world between those who were on the side of the United States and those who were on the side of the Soviet Union, there was bipolar world, and they had kind of worked out where it could be really stable. And then one day, one side in the struggle just basically gave up. But people had made an enormous amount of money off the world the way it was. And so a lot of people, including people in the United States and in Europe and everything else, pretended that there had been no change to the game that had been set up. You know, following the Second World War, it was going to be all global. There was going to be like global government, and everybody can trade with everybody else. All the trade routes would be protected, energy would be made available for everybody, food would be available for everybody, and that's the way it's going to go. But all that globalization depended upon the agreement of one country, and that was the United States. And since the Soviets collapsed, a lot of Americans are saying, hmm, why are our troops overseas? Why do we have troops overseas? Why are we paying for most of the defense of Europe? Why are we paying for most of the defense of Southeast Asia? Why are we involved in the Middle East? We don't have any interest there. There's no future for us there. I mean, besides writing checks and getting involved in wars that we shouldn't be in. And so I think there's been a shift over the last 30 years, you know, and I'm someone who served in the army during a war. You know, I served during the Vietnam War. So, you know, it's not like I'm anti military or anti war, but I am anti waste of money, I am anti waste of lives, and very, very pro, kind of taking care of your own house before you get too worried about other people. That's why I see here. And I think the US has fundamentally made a decision, and I think it was made 30 years ago, but nobody could talk about it publicly until the current president was elected. And he won the election base because he was saying things openly, which a lot of people believe. He's disadvantaging a lot of people who were making money because nobody was talking about this. So that's the current political issue. But I would suspect that within five years, the US will have basically withdrawn almost all of its troops from almost everywhere except countries that the US really likes and really gets along with. And there'll be agreements, there'll be country by country agreement. I think NATO will disappear. And I think a lot of organizations that were put together to put the world back together, Americans are looking that UN is one thing they said, why do we even have a un. You know. You know, think of what that real estate property would be worth on east side of New York City. You know, Trump would think about that because he was a real estate developer. So my sense is that the US for basically 75 years, has been a seller where they were selling other people on the big deal that kept the world safe. And I think the US Is becoming a buyer, and they're basically saying, make us an offer. And I think if I could take world affairs and bring them back, and I can explain Covid in relationship to this, I can explain terrorism, drug addiction, drug dealing, and everything else, that those things only worked as long as the US Was willing to pay the bills and provide the police, and US isn't interested. So that's how I look at the whole thing. And I've been aided greatly by Peter Zion.

Yeah. That establishes at least, we'll say, a rule set and a behavior.

Well, it's one scenario. I mean.

Right, okay.

I'm a great believer that everything that happens when humans open their mouth is storytelling. And that's one story.

Yes, agreed. But it's backed at least with, you know, a perspective and some data that would support it. So, again, I always look at it and say, okay, so where's the opportunity inside of this? Because this is my interpretation as a kid who grew up from the 60s on, and now I've, you know, I'm in a different phase in life. My wife and I, and we talk about this kind of thing all the time. So you look at right now the big forces that exist. So we've got China on one hand, Russia on the other. Both, Peter would say, on the verge of collapse.

Well, Russia are just disappearing because they're not having babies. They have a rapidly declining population of actual Russians. They have lots of other kinds of people in their neighborhood, you know, who would take over. But the actual Russian Russians, you know, who are basically Northern Europeans, they're not having any babies. And that's been going on for a very long time, a very, very long time. And you reach a certain point when you're not reproducing that it collapses economically, it collapses politically, it collapses politically. And they're very close to that, probably 10 years. The Russians will reach a point of collapse just because of population. And China, except for exports, there's nothing in their economy that actually produces a profit.

Okay, I want you to say that again.

You know how subprime worked? Yeah, yeah. Well, the Chinese are like probably 200 million people who can create anything they want and the government will give them unlimited credit. Okay. So the entire economy is in a state of subprime. You know, I mean, the credit of China, the credit bills of China is 24 times their GNP.

That's something that Peter does talk about.

I remember seeing 80% of all the credit that was issued in the world over the last two years was to Chinese individuals by the Chinese government.

Yeah, which is backed up by what.

Belief that they really are governing wealth. So shaking that belief, which is shaken right now.

Yeah. And Trump certainly contributes to that. And now it's just a matter of whether or not to drive the nail in. Is that good or bad for the rest of the world?

Well, it's bad for the rest of the world. That depends upon China. For example, to give you an idea, the US is as big as it is and as massive as their spending is volume wise. Just in terms of total dollars, it's the number one trading country in the world. Okay. But if you take the amount of trade that the US does against their GNP, you know, the total economy, they're the number 100 country in the world in terms of the amount of trade you do in relationship to your GMP. As a matter of fact, 10% of the whole US economy is involved in foreign trade, either exporting or exporting.

Only 10%.

10% out of the total GMP is with trade. The other 90% of Americans just making stuff and selling stuff to American customers who are buying it. Americans are just the biggest, most adventuresome consumers in the world. You can create anything and Americans will likely buy it if it's got decent marketing and decent service and everything like that. Now let's take the 10% of trade. 60% of the total trade of the United States is with two countries, Canada to the north and Mexico to the South. The US's trade with the rest of the world is 4% of their total GDP. And people say, well, you know, Chinese have loaned all the money that what if the Chinese pull their loans? Other countries would like the Chinese to sell all their US Treasuries because there's a lineup of people who want to buy U.S. treasuries. Because if you buy a U.S. treasury, you aren't guaranteed a big return on your investment, but you're guaranteed the return of your investment. I just want to tell people, because there's a lot of myths about how important China is. Not important at all. It was important under the deal that the US did with rest of the world, but once the deal's over. China isn't important to them at all. As a matter of fact, they make a good enemy. The US has been wanting people to audition to be the big bad enemy. And for some reason, China is doing everything that possibly can to get the role US really likes. The Big enemy focuses American attention.

And that is, I think, Americans, our mythology just requires cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians or whatever, however that surfaces and shows up in the cultural form.

Yeah, I just want to say this, that if you just understand that the US has changed its mind about the whole thing and almost everything that's not understandable in the world becomes understandable, is that basically the check writer and the cop change their mind.

I think that is a very, very important baseline. I know I've been talking to a variety of people on both sides. I'll call them the hard left, hard right on a regular basis. I love asking questions that cause a provocative response that, again, I love to see. Where's the opportunity inside of all of this stuff? So through your lens, then let's look at the global opportunity side of things, and then let's look at the local. And I also want to look at it through the eyes of Strategic Coach and then to, let's say, the customers, the clients of Strategic Coach. So let's put together a toolkit, an opportunity toolkit for them, given this new circumstance, the new rules. But we've got baseline hard, also the places, because it's.

Because becoming geographic all of a sudden.

Precisely. And so to me, there's always an opportunity for amplification and opportunity creation and also creating more value. And that's as a result of positioning. It's better stories result in more income and a perception of premium products.

Okay.

And then also having an environment where you can speed that up and you can accelerate it. Okay, so where's the leverage and the key three things we always sell? I don't know if I've ever told you this one before. I don't remember who I got it from. But whatever you're ultimately selling, you're either getting paid, getting laid, or living forever. The decoder ring there is making more money, having more sex, more attractiveness, and that goes on all levels. Or living forever is better quality, quality of health and longevity. But everything. You can boil it down into one of those three things, whether it's buying a car, getting a watch, prestige or whatever.

Gee, Mike, I gotta have to go back and look at all my plans from your new structure there. I know the third one. I'm pretty Clear about right on.

In a way, when a business sells and delivers all three strategic coach does that. It's more money, it's prestige, it's being more attractive business wise. And then lifestyle is all about actually having good relationships. Yes.

So you have the time for the people who mean the most for you. And actually the pandemic's actually worked out really well. The amount of time that coach entrepreneurs have been spending with their spouse and with their children is at an all time high. They're taking better care of their health, they're thinking seriously about their health. Yeah.

And for the other side of the world that doesn't live with a quality discipline and rule set, you're gonna have more divorce and more drug addiction than.

Ever before, as well as a natural byproduct, more violence.

Yeah, no question.

Peter Zion said that we basically suspended history for 75 years and that this is just a return of history, that the pandemic was what history really feels like. I was reading an interesting article, Shakespeare. I'm a big fan of Shakespeare. And Shakespeare lived from. I know the dates 1564-1660. 52. And that was a good age to live to in those days. 52. The average lifespan then was probably, you know, 25, because infant mortality, violence, starvation, disease. Anyway, in his lifetime there were five plagues that lasted at least a year in Britain, you know, where he spent all his life. And he wrote 31 plays. And it was considered such a normal thing that not once in his 31 plays did the plague ever figure in. Part of the plot that tells you how normal it was for disease to get out of hand and lots of people to die and everything like that. So that's kind of the history world, you know. My mother told me that she was quarantined with her family for three months in the Spanish flu epidemic, which, by the way, conservatively killed 50 million people when the world population was one and a half billion. In other words, less than 20% of the current population. And 500 million people got that flu. So one third of every person living in. In 1920, 1921, had actually had the flu that killed 50 million and they quarantined. And this is for your point, Mike. I spent three weeks vacationing with my mother in Europe when she was 75, since 1985. And I said, you know, when you spent the three months cooped up in your home, nobody could leave, nobody could come in for three months. And I said, there were any changes in your household after that? And she said, yeah, we immediately Got a telephone. We had never thought it was necessary to have a telephone. We got a telephone, and she says, we added more electricity to the house, we needed more lights, and we started listening to the radio a lot more. We got better radio and listened to it. So if you take that, you know, that's how people responded. And then I went and I looked in Wikipedia, and you could see the change in the numbers of people who had telephone electricity after the Spanish Flu. So it obviously affected people enormously. Very interesting. People always respond technologically. That's why I've noticed about almost any crisis, at least for the last 200 years, that when there's a crisis, one of the responses is expressed technologically.

Yeah. And now, again, when we live in the world of imagination. Super, super fascinating. Which I think will be another exciting episode that we'll do our next one. We can talk a little bit more about technology. I have a lot of opinions on that right now and a couple trends that I see occurring. Because one thing that tech hasn't solved until recently. There's some smart people working on it is how do you manage an audience inside of this and make it still.

Feel like the audience was changed? For us over the last three months, the reason why we weren't moving ahead faster with Zoom is because so few of our strategic coach clients actually use Zoom. You know, someone would want to have a conference with me, and I said, I'll do it if we can do it on Zoom. And they said, I don't know how to use Zoom. And I said, well, anything I would tell you in the conference would include that you should get Zoom. So I'm giving you your first piece of advice from the conference right now. Go get Zoom. But they didn't do it. They bypassed a meeting with me because they didn't want to go through the effort of getting Zoomed. So that's all changed in three months. Radically transformed audience.

Yep. And that, again, goes back to. Forcing the hand is great. You know, you think about if suddenly the world were without oil, how rapidly we'd figure that out. If we suddenly lost the grid, for example, you know, and you look at, again, this is a tiny example. And I know we could shred this with stats and numbers, but one of the things that Musk has been working on is a mechanism where you can turn your car into your home battery. The electronics required to allow that to happen aren't that great. We are in the brink. It just takes the best crisis to make the best hardware. And if you need proof of this, look at guns and airplanes, okay? They're simple, they're elegant, they last a long time, and for that matter, watches.

And they work. They work great. Even the idea of them works.

Yeah, that's true. Very much. I'm amazed. Like, if you want to see the best and simplest machine that is perfect, it's a gun, Very few parts, extraordinarily effective, and look at how long they last. Doesn't take, you know, anyone can. It's just like, it's perfect ergonomics, everything about it. It's an evolutionary masterpiece. Take away any emotional attachment on one side or the other that you may have. You just have to look at it for its sheer beauty. So, once again, let's wrap up this episode and get prepared for the next.

And I'd like to talk about, if the US does this, what happens to other countries? You are ideally positioned where you are sitting right now, because one of the great investable countries in the next 25 years is Mexico. And you're how many minutes to the border from where you're sitting right now?

Right now, it's 10 to 15 minutes to go back and forth. I have a friend who went down there for dental care. He says it's the best ever. I'll tell you as a Californian, former Minnesotan, and the funny thing is, I don't know if I regard myself as an anything. And despite the fact that I live in the People's Republic of California and I despise everything about its regulations and government, I don't want to live anywhere else because it's just a great place to be. And I love the access to Mexico. You know, it's literally from my door, I can be across the border in 40 minutes. And this weekend, two hours away, we're in the mountains. And I love the traffic right now, man, it's so great. It was so easy just getting around. But, yeah, let's go down the path of opportunity and also technology in our next upcoming episodes. How does that sound to you?

The reason I'm interested is because our clients in Strategic Coach right now, I think we're 32 countries. So we have 32 countries. And people have been asking me, you know, about. They know that I'm a junkie of, you know, geopolitics and politics and economics. So they're, you know, they private conversation. They always say, can you talk to me a little bit about how you're seeing this? So our podcasts are heard by our clients around the world. So I just want to give some thought to them. About what they could do.

I'm all in. I think it's a great idea. And as usual, I've got some opinions and some observations on what I see and where where there's opportunities and also the culture down there which is ripe for this conversation. Let's do that in the next episode. Will you head over to itunes right now to rate the Capability Amplifier? Show every rating and review helps spread the message and create more empowered entrepreneurs like you. And if you've already done that, please share this episode with a friend who you know can benefit from Capability Amplifier. And if you have any any questions or suggestions, head over to capabilityamplifier.com there you can leave us an audio message and Dan and I listen to every single one of them. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you soon.