Taking Evergreen Content to New Heights | Christian " Boo" Boucousis | 525

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Christian Boubakochios, and I hope I pronounced his name right, but if not—

You're near enough.

Momentarily. There we go. Christian's a really interesting guy. He is the Currently the CEO at Afterburner. He is an author, he's a speaker, he's a former fighter pilot. If you Google him, you'll find out all sorts of interesting stuff. But let's just, given that we're here, let's just talk to him. What is up, Boo? What's going on?

Oh, settling in. You'd be Pete in Australia, not Peter, because we abbreviate everything. Pete, we are just 6 weeks into settling into beautiful Miami, starting to find our feet and You know, embarking on the next life chapter. Don't, don't ever be in a hurry to get to the last chapter in your life book.

Yeah. Well, and you've had several chapters, right? So the current one is sort of the culmination of lots of things, right? So the early career fighter pilot, speaker, crescendo, the crescendo.

Yeah.

So I wanna talk now about, you know, you, you've been, you're one of the few folks that have been on sort of both sides of the house, meaning as the talent. Creating thought leadership, delivering it, being a keynoter, et cetera. But now that you wear the CEO title at Afterburner, you know, there's a business, a big piece of the business side of the, the, the hat that you have to wear, which not all thought leaders wear well. So how has that crossover or integration maybe been for you?

Yeah, look, I mean, fundamentally I consider myself, you know, a businessman, a, a, a business founder before I before I got into thought leadership. I didn't even know what it was until I'd been speaking for about 2 years and I saw this thing called the Thought Leadership School and I'm like, I wonder what that is. Now I understand what it is, but at the time, you know, I didn't start speaking until I was in my 40s. I was already a business owner. I founded a humanitarian business in the Middle East, which grew to a phenomenal size in a very short period of time. I was a property developer, built a hotel, set a record for a vertical structure, a 17-story hotel, a publisher, bought a publishing business and grew that and digitized it from a paper publishing business. And about, oh, 10 years ago, I saw this event run by a company called Afterburner. A very good friend of mine in Australia was a fighter pilot. He was presenting to one of our biggest insurance companies. And as he was delivering his keynote, I sort of watched it and I was like, oh wow, that's really interesting. It's a whole bunch of fighter pilot ways of working and the way that we think translated into the business world. And I saw the reaction in the room and people were just wrapped by it. And I also, it resonated with me because the big part of my career that is almost a footnote these days was I was a fighter pilot for 11 years as well. And it wasn't until that point in time I kind of realized the value of the training. You know, I saw it probably the way everyone sees a fighter pilot and everyone sees Afterburner, which is what, you know, it's a bunch of guys and girls in green suits that run around and fly at a million miles an hour and, you know, play volleyball with their shirts off, Top Gun style. But in that moment, I had this kind of aha feeling where I was like, it's not the flying that is the fighter pilot thing. It's the way of thinking. And, and we're just equipped with this incredible fast agile mindset, which, which had been codified over the years. A fighter pilot called Jeff Sutherland created Scrum and created the, the origins of agile. And, you know, a lot of fighter pilots sprinkled around, around the world doing some, some pretty amazing stuff. And I bought Afterburner earlier this year, uh, the whole group, because I thought what an incredible platform to distribute what I believe is some fundamentally sound intellectual property.

Well, but so, so stay, stay there for a moment. So, so the acquisition of Afterburner, so if you go back and if you don't know Afterburner, look them up because it's a fascinating organization. So old school Afterburner, the model was here's a bunch of fighter pilots and there's a new crew coming out every year into retirement or whatever the case may be. And Nobody became famous individually because it was really about the Afterburner model, right?

Correct. Yeah.

And they would go up, travel around various groups delivering, in essence, you know, corporate keynote speeches, right? That was the business model. And I don't know how old the firm is. I'm gonna guess 20+ years old. Yeah.

27 years now.

Yeah. Okay. So I wanna talk a little bit about the transformation that you've taken and you've seen that business go through because it's not, obviously we had this little thing called COVID. Where if you're in an event-based business, probably not the place you wanted to be. How does Afterburner deliver value now where it's not 100% dependent on, we'll come to your city, talk to your event and, you know, talk to your people and whatnot?

Well, I think like everyone, we just pivoted into, no, I don't really like that where we evolved into virtual delivery and Zoom was great for us where we, We were first movers on Zoom. We adopted the breakout rooms on Google and Zoom, like literally the day they were launched. We ran it, you know, in a very sophisticated format. We understood that during COVID there was lockdown in different states and different, everyone had different rules. But because we were a distributed model, unlike other thought leaders, we had people in every state in the US, every country around the world. So we We could be live in some areas and virtual in others and hybrid all at the same time. So we actually—

So you had to question some basic assumptions that were fundamental. And I would say, and tell me if I'm wrong, that some of the old school or older assumptions about Afterburner was it's the Afterburner experience. It's being live in a room watching these amazing people that have done things that most of us will never do. Get up and look you in the eye and tell you the story. And I know lots and lots of speakers were like, geez, does that translate remotely? Like, you know, you know, sitting at home in their underwear or whatever. We don't control the music. We don't control the theatrics. We don't control the environment of the room. We don't control, you know, there's so much less control that you have over this, this sort of visceral experience. How did you make sure that you were able to deliver such impactful and powerful content?

Well, first of all, that was a perception and a belief system from speakers, which was, which is ultimately flawed. You can control what you can control. And one of the great things about being on a computer screen and people with headphones on is you can actually create really immersive TV shows and movie-like experiences. So we just really leaned into 4K video. We had wires hanging off the roof and jury-rigging, how do you get sound from that camera through this sound? You should have seen the stuff that we were coming up with to try and get a high-definition video playing with someone. Now, that's all old hat now. You've got OBS platforms. There's so much to support it, but the 2 weeks leading up to it was amazing. And look, don't underestimate happenstance. And most of my life is really serendipity and happenstance. In that I had a publishing company that I had just sold to a big digital publishing powerhouse and I became really great friends with the owner of that and he was also on the same journey. So together we would just sit in his studio while everyone else was in lockdown as essential workers and just pull apart PCs and together we created this model and we, yeah, it was a pretty dynamic time actually. But I think we did a pretty good job. We operated independently from the US at the time out of Australia. And we, I think we kind of jumped ahead a little bit there in terms of how we adapted to that.

So stay with me for a minute here. So then, you know, the, the radical change in terms of the modality, the format, the adoption of technology at a rapid pace and speed, et cetera, that had to be done or there's no business, right? But I would then say, but what has not changed? What is evergreen? What is universal? Are some of the key core messages that Afterburner delivers around teamwork, around collaboration, around courage, around risk, around all those things. So sort of square that for me.

Well, it's evergreen content. It's actually created in a global network of fighter pilots that work for us and still fly. So it's constantly validated in, in the real world. And what we codified, we don't, we don't call it plan, brief, execute, debrief. In the Air Force, it's just what you do. It's, it's, it's the, it's the way you live. Or as they say in The Mandalorian, you know, this is the way. So we just had to codify that into something that was, was workable. So, and the way that we do it as fighter pilots really hasn't changed since the Vietnam War era when Top Gun was created. This is when all these systems, systems were created. So, you know, my opinion of thought leadership is, is intellectual property is one thing, And distribution is a completely different, there's thought leadership in distribution of IP. So you just have to, you know, and everyone connects differently, even post-COVID, some people still prefer the experiences virtually than live. We say live is important because you gotta, you know, even though as fighter pilots you operate, you're not in the same room, you could be hundreds of miles away from each other in a coordinated fashion. You still kick things off together. You plan together, you brief together, right? You execute individually and you come back and debrief together.

If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL. And share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. Yeah, interesting. So, I mean, I think that live piece, whether you have a personal preference or even quantitative or quantitative data that says, you in person is better. I think the reality is it kind of doesn't matter if the market says, well, there's a big piece of the market that will now be delivered not live because, you know, we've done the math and we've seen what travel costs and this is, you know, we want things on demand, et cetera. So go, I, I wanna touch on some of the changes in not just the modalities, but like 27 years ago when the organization was started, I would argue that attention spans were longer.

Oh, right.

I would like that.

5 years. That's in 5 years we've noticed the change.

Right. So talk about this, Adoptive, because a lot of thought leaders struggle with, oh geez, you know, nobody reads the book anymore. Nobody wants to go through a long thing or, you know, I'm forced into the short-term, pull it down, you know, on demand instead of, instead of pushing content. A lot of things are pulling on demand. And my, you know, sort of reaction to that is, Well, you have a choice, you know, you could remain, you could do it your way or you could be relevant, right? And a lot of it is adopting two different formats, right? And adopting two different expectations. People don't want to read an entire book until they're convinced. You got to give them a little nibble of something that says, ooh, that might be juicy. Let me try a little more and a little more, a little more. So how do you see that?

Yeah, look, I mean, we have this concept called situational awareness as fighter pilots. It's fundamental to our success, just an awareness of what's going on all the time. Another way of saying it is there's information, knowledge, and wisdom. So information is noise. Knowledge is information that allows you to make good decisions, and wisdom is information you pass on to support others in their decision making. So, so when you're a thought leader, that's what you're asking yourself is, am I, I'm offering information? So is it, is it just, is it just noise? And it's a bit clickbaity. My knowledge is my book. So now someone is, is interested in consuming my book, but equally your book should be a YouTube channel, which you should have multiple videos of that content because if you're looking at a gen— you know, 25 and under, they don't read books, they just consume video. So, and then the wisdom is your coaching, mentoring, and your engagement and experiential works. So it's— I think what happens is thought leaders is, and I'm guilty of as much as anyone else, is you just get all caught up in it all and you have these great ideas and you're like, I think the more you do it though, you more realize Is it a great idea or just an idea? Because every one of those needs to end up as wisdom, right? Not, not just as information.

Well, and great idea by what standard, right? So I like that framing that you've got because ultimately you want to get to a place where you're accumulating wisdom for the purpose of passing it on to others, right? So that they can make decisions, do things differently. They don't have to accept at face value everything that you give to them and say, here is wisdom, right? They can beat it up, they can punch it up, they can add to it, they can take away what they like, et cetera. What are the other things that you're seeing in the marketplace? Because I think a lot of people think that the creativity as it relates to thought leadership comes in the creation part, not meaning the ideas, the ideation and all that, not in the formatting, the packaging, the marketing, the distribution. And I would argue they should be at least equally weighted, maybe more weighted sometimes towards the latter.

Yeah. And I guess it's the equivalent of a medical journal versus a bestselling book on the same subject. You could have really rich content that's very well researched and fully supported with logic, but for most of us, we can't deconstruct it. Yeah. Marketing's a funny one. And to me, just when you sort of have it figured out, the whole thing changes again. Yeah. I would say 3 years ago, just before COVID felt like we're in a pretty good rhythm. There was still like brokers and bureaus and it was still human to human. Then it flipped on its head and now what we're in is just this cyclone of content. I mean, we, you just have to, but what's, what's happened in the last 3 to 6 months is the commodity of information is better serviced. Now you can get videographers now that can churn your video around in less than an hour into multiple formats. That didn't exist even 6 months ago. So I guess that, you know, as a thought leader, you should be infinitely curious. And to your point, I guess you can't just be curious about your domain excellence or your field. You need to be curious about how you communicate that to as broad a church as possible. And that's, I think, where a lot of people fall short.

I think it's also the willingness to experiment, right? Because most thought leaders are not used to being wrong as it relates to their work. They are in, in many instances, the world-renowned expert on X, whatever X might be. So whatever they've done must be working and how they create, how they develop, how they deploy thought leadership. So when you tell someone who is a great author, meaning they're a really good writer and that's their, that's their canvas, that's what they do to say, you know, you should play with short-form video because we're missing a whole generation. They freak out.

Yeah.

What do you mean? The first is to resist the change. Well, they should read. Okay. Whether they should or shouldn't isn't the point. The facts are they aren't as much as previous generations did. You wanna reach them where they are and have the courage to try something that may feel uncomfortable. Like we, we, we don't have the beginner's mind anymore once we reach a level of expertise. I think you have the courage to, to to fail and have that blank slate. How do you think about that? Yeah.

And I think also there's a fear of the work that's involved as well. I mean, you could write a book and that was kind of it. The book was finished. You could take a break, you know, go to the quickly do the speaker circuit for a year after, go into Bermuda, in the Bahamas for a while, write your next book and away you go. Your book launch is lost in the noise within a week. Yeah. So you are, you've gotta constantly keep pushing that out to your network. And I think what, what's challenging for people that, that maybe have a, a more, oh, I guess sophisticated view of the world is some of the, some of the stuff you gotta put out there has to be a little bit, a little bit grabby. You know, it has to, you, you have to appeal to a belief system. And I think what, where we're lucky with Afterburner is an element of great intellectual property is people believe what you say. And when you talk about performance and you're in a green suit and you've got another pilot with you on stage or on a virtual presentation, we don't have to spend a lot of time, I guess, building a platform of credibility before we deliver the intellectual property. So we can accelerate. So part of being, I guess, a thought leader is what is that? Like, what is that thing that immediately establishes trust and credibility and means people pause on a feed and engage in that 1-minute video.

Well, and there's a fine line on that pause piece between being clickbaity and really being a thought leader, right? So that I think is a real challenge because we're living in, in a world where the, the scarcest commodity is undivided attention, right? That is the rarest of rare. So we have to break the trance and do this stuff. And a lot of the tactics that work for many, again, clickbaity, the 5 things to whatever, just don't really work when it comes to high-quality thought leadership. And if you try to sort of lower the bar, it could dilute the brand. If you stay too sort of highfalutin, nobody's gonna listen. So you have to do it in a way that I, you know, my personal recommendation is like, it's gotta be authentic. You don't wanna become the person that, that makes you cringe when you see them on your feed, but maybe it's a different style than you're used to. So it's a—

I, I went through this journey in, in a publishing business, a highly credible aviation journal, the biggest aviation magazine in the southern hemisphere, one of the top 4 globally. And it was a very credible— that's what we built its whole reputation on for 40 years. But then social media hit, and then digital hit, and all of a sudden it's just was tanking. Yeah, part of, part of rebuilding it was, was having that balance. So if we posted an airplane almost crashing off a runway or some sort of spectacular flight maneuver on social media, we get 1.5 million views. Yeah, put an article on there, we might get 4,000. But, but the point was it was the balance of both, because that's how humans work. None of us want to sit and watch a documentary for 8 hours. We want to watch a documentary, right? We want to have a little bit of a laugh. So if you capture the audience with on theme with both, so your comedic or fun side still resonates. So if you're a thought leader on human performance, fail videos and people underperforming, and we can still draw a lesson from that, right? Like the optimism bias or the planning, the flawed planning bias. You know, there's always a lesson you can draw. So I think clickbaity can be contextualized entertainment or infotainment is, I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but it is a fine line. You can't just, you know, have Kim Kardashian's, you know, with a popping out of a bra by accident on a red carpet.

Yeah.

I think that that's gonna, that's gonna resonate, right? If you're a bra maker, it probably would. So that's the key.

No, but I, but I like what you said in terms of, you know, it could be fun. I think sometimes when we are in delivery mode, we're like, okay, we are serious. We are the expert. We need to deliver this in a very, sort of academic way. And I think that obviously, you know, Afterburner has proved this, that there is a fun and dramatic and engaging, almost theatrical component to it. What does that do? That increases the level of engagement and lean in, and therefore quality, or maybe, maybe the speed of the consumption, right? Because if you took that same work and transcribed it and had somebody monotone delivering it, you know, yeah, well, that's— it's not going to be as sexy and engaging.

Yeah, I mean, we remember what we feel. We don't remember what we see or hear. And that's why you have to invoke some emotion that's connected to the message. And we've completely, you know, after Bernard had a keynote in the last 6 months, we've completely redrafted it. It's completely different now because it has to be more entertaining. It has to be relatable to the people in the room. And whereas at the end of a keynote, you know, 8, 7, 8 years ago, people would remember 4 or 5 key points. I think if you get 1 to 3 now, you, you've done a good job in, in a keynote.

Yeah, I think 3 is probably the, the, the top of the upper limit there. Alright, as we start to wrap, I'll ask you something I've asked folks before because I like the question, uh, which is someone out there now or several people out there now listening are where you are 10 or 15 years ago., right? They're on their journey as a thought leader and a business person in the thought leadership space. What would you— advice would you give them? What would you tell them?

I would say if you've got no idea what you're doing, hitch your wagon to a thought leader academy, a thought leader school, a community that understands what you're trying to achieve. I did that even 5 years into doing key— I was already doing keynotes for 5 years, but there's definitely a formula to it. And there's knowledge. So I think that's really important. And if you don't really know what your intellectual property is or you have a rough idea, just buy into some intellectual property, Brené Brown or someone or a Tony Robbins. Just find someone who already has some great intellectual property. And then as you learn and get your own feel for it, then start to go on your own way. But I think writing a book, I wrote a book which was really, really hard. In fact, it was ghostwritten. I didn't do it myself. My next book I'm writing, That's probably the best thing to do to actually give yourself some rigor around your intellectual property, understand who else is doing it, where you, where your point of difference is.

So, you know, I think no, no one else has answered that question that way in, in, in terms of basically licensing someone else's IP, whether it's Brene or Maxwell, or, I mean, there's, there's, there's probably a dozen other options there because you're able to deliver immediately to the marketplace stuff that is deliverable and high quality. And then you could figure out, well, what might you wanna do differently? What could you learn from that? What would be the nuances? Not, not from necessarily exactly that strain of intellectual property, but the delivery side, the business side, etcetera. I love, love that. Great stuff. Well, been great talking to you today, Boo, and I appreciate your time and your energy and wish you the best.

Thanks, Pete. Really appreciate the opportunity. Take care.

To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter@thoughtleadershipleverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.