Christian "Boo" Boucousis: A Fighter Pilot's Perspective on AI and Business

Speaker 1: 0:08

Hi boo, hey man, welcome to the show. I'm excited to talk to you.

Speaker 2: 0:12

Hey, greg, happy to be here. Thanks for having me on the show, mate, very excited for this conversation, even though we kind of almost ran a full podcast before jumping on. I know, I know, I know.

Speaker 1: 0:20

Well, you know, it's funny, we were talking just before we went online. You were talking about this Harvard Business Review article about this kind of this idea between the art and science of decision making. And I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about sort of this idea between, you know, gut feeling or, you know, intuition versus data driven decisions. And I was working at this company we were talking about before online eventscom, and had a great product team and our head of product there was like an academic almost, but she was unbelievable and we would want to make a little feature change or whatever it was. And she would come into this thing with like this well, we'll start our user research and we'll gather the data and then we'll go ahead and do testing, and then we'll go through this process and in like four to six weeks we'll have this new feature done.

Speaker 1: 1:05

And you just want to be like, hey, do we need to really do that much testing? Like can't we just look at this and be like this isn't good, right, like we got to have some gut feel and some intuition. And you know, I know, as a fighter pilot, you know that's a, that's a big component of what you do. You know, maybe I'll let you just continue on kind of your, your thoughts there.

Speaker 2: 1:24

It's interesting, I think. I think we're in a new era of humanity or on the precipice, and that comes from you know. I've got the opportunity to work with large enterprise, from from C-suite to frontline and everything in between, and there's this large unspoken fatigue. I guess as a fighter pilot, we're trained to manage fatigue and keep an eye on each other and a squadron, because one of the challenges with fatigue is you're not aware of it yourself, you don't really. You go by the time you feel like I'm tired, it's too late, you're overly fatigued, and I call it the confluence of two tsunamis. One is speed of life and the other is the amount of information that we create. And if you look at the data on on data or data, we've created more information in the last two years than in the entirety of humanity, and that's an exponential curve, right. So we used to live in an era of information was power, where we had time to make decisions and you were really quite successful in life when you knew how to work a library and the Dewey Decimal System and you could find, you know information in the past that had application in the future. Now information is democratized and commoditized. What we're in the era of is knowledge and wisdom, and the challenge is, when you've got speed and information coming together, you're a road knowledge and wisdom, because we don't invest the time and effort to understand what's of value and what's noise, what I've certainly. You know I have a bias right. I have a way of thinking that was codified into me as a fighter pilot. So from the age of 19, every, every Air Force trains everyone to be a fighter pilot and then they take, you know, the top performers and I'm certainly not top performer. I think of the six pilots that got jets in my course, I was number six. The what they do is is everyone's put through that system and it creates really how well you make decisions.

Speaker 2: 3:25

And one of the interesting things about being a fighter pilot, it's not making decisions that are good ones, it's also making decisions that are safe decisions also. And if you look at, if you look at any sport you know I was watching the Formula One on the weekend and when a Formula One driver makes the decision to overtake or not, it's a split second decision and it's always a degree of risk with it. If you look at a tennis player, whether they make a decision when someone's mid-core to hit a drop shot or a lob. You know, every one of these decisions is the result of years of training, or the 10,000 hours of practice as well as understanding what's actually going on in the moment. And one of the things I think, as a fighter pilot, we're trained to do is we're always thinking of what's the next decision I need to make, and the current decision is a byproduct of that.

Speaker 2: 4:15

We call it staying ahead of the airplane, knowing the consequence of what happens now, in the split second in the future, but equally how far back we go. So we don't sit there and look back and say, oh, what happened yesterday or what happened six years ago. We're interested in what happened in that last decision I just made. Was that a good one? Did it create knowledge for me that I can now make better decisions? Am I more confused now? And if I'm going down a pathway of being more confused, it's like turn around, get out of the fight, disappear. Sit on your hands. We have a saying, which is if you sit on your hands, you're not going to touch anything and do the wrong thing until we build what we call situational awareness again, and situational awareness is the environment that creates great decisions.

Speaker 2: 5:02

If you have lower awareness of your environment, you don't make great decisions. If you've got great awareness of your environment, you make great decisions. And we're taught how to create situational awareness, how to create environment that allows us to make better decisions than it always going to be great than you would normally. The beauty of this way of thinking is if you take it from an environment where you're looking at two airplanes heading towards each other at 3,000 miles per hour, where you're making second by second decisions but you take the way off thinking, and then bring it back to an environment where you're making decisions day by day, week by week. You've got this enormous amount of time in which to make good decisions. But the flip side of that is you've got an enormous amount of time to just add more noise, to create more distraction away from decisions. And in the Harvard Business Review, what they talk about is the whole issue of the fall additions about decision making and chaos. There's always been chaos. If you look at physicists, the world tends towards entropy. We're always tending towards chaos. To not be chaos requires an effort. So there's always been chaos, but we're more aware of it now because chaos sets upon us much faster. And if you look at neuroscience. What that's creating is it's creating a passivity, a passive mindset in people where it's just like look, there's no point making a decision, there's no point doing anything now because in about five minutes something's going to change and therefore we become slave to the notifications and alert on our phone and we become reactive. And the challenge with being reactive is you don't do quality work. When you don't do quality work, you create more work, you become overloaded and, over time, more passive. Why work if there's no point in it? So what we're on now?

Speaker 2: 6:56

I think where the world's going with AI. Where you used to get paid to process a stamp at a bank right, you used to be paid to process payroll. Now this is all being automated and we have this entire worker class and this entire entry point in humanity that's just disappearing and disappearing very, very quickly. Even we're talking earlier. How you're on the phone. You're a lawyer. Even lawyers, a lot of their drafting and documentation is being outsourced. You can create and I just did this the other day with our business we're looking at creating a license agreement. You can literally type into chat, ai, chat, gpt, your jurisdiction, what you're trying to achieve out of a legal document and it will create 80% of what you would pay a lawyer 100 hours of work to do, or maybe 50 hours of work to do. So you think about that for a minute. I mean, that's 15,000 billable hours $15,000 worth of billable hours that you, as a business, can save.

Speaker 2: 7:57

So we've got all this great opportunity, but humans aren't designed to identify or understand when these great opportunities come around. We're more wired to look at the bad things, right? So what happens is, I think, with AI is we look at it with a degree of fear and we look at it in terms of what's going to take over the world. Here comes Skynet and he's going to be walking around the street anytime soon. But really, we've got to put it in its box and understand what its value is.

Speaker 2: 8:25

And that comes down to fundamentals around situational awareness. Situational awareness is asking this question, which is what is the point? What is the point of what I'm about to do? And I guess you know Simon Sinek calls it why. Why is it vague for the average fighter pilot? We want to.

Speaker 2: 8:41

You know, I was trained and I haven't been a fighter pilot for 17 years, right, I've been an entrepreneur and founder.

Speaker 2: 8:46

I was discharged with a medical condition which goes into the athletic side of what I can and can't do. But you know, when you look at situational awareness, it's not saying, oh, ai is great, it can do all this stuff. It's coming in the other way and saying what do I need? What do I need to achieve? How does this tool help me get there? And you'll know that from being a software engineer, and building software is so. Often the business has this vague idea of what it needs to do and you try and create this system, this technology, and then all of a sudden you just end up with this oh, that wasn't what I asked for and it was what you didn't explain yourself. And you end up with this kind of chaos that self created. It's not the world, it's you as a team that create the chaos because you don't spend the time and effort understanding the scope, chunking the work down in the sprint, you know and going from big dreams down to small, discreet chunks of execution.

Speaker 1: 9:41

Yeah, I mean I have. My background is in software and engineering and I've done a lot of work. Earlier in my career I was on the professional services side, so working with, like you know, the IBM type companies and we would go into these companies and this is really, you know, I guess, kind of the you know, 2006, 2007, 2008 era. Everybody started to realize that they had these gold mines, as they were calling up data and we would work with organizations and they were spending tens of millions of dollars with the idea of how do you make actionable, actionable decisions right, like our actionable data? With the idea of well, we have all this data. It's disparate, you know. We have customer service sites, we have our consumer facing websites, we have our finance systems, we have our accounting systems, we have our procurement systems or order management systems, and there's all this data but none of them talk and the data isn't normalized. We want to create these data warehouses and we want to take all this data. We got to normalize it, we got to put it in a place and once it's in a place, we need to figure out a way to write reports or do analytics on top of it so that we can give leaders and executives, you know, you know the real time data that they need to make decisions, and I mean they were just abject failures in most cases. It's so absolutely difficult to do that.

Speaker 1: 10:56

I agree with the point there. I do think, because I'm very heavy in the AI stuff right now I think AI has an opportunity to be a real game changer from that perspective, because AI can digest that information and can start to create context around it in order for an executive or a leader, whoever it is, to be able to ask questions right. The same way, we asked chat GBT. Now chat GBT is great. I use it all the time. It does a lot of unbelievable things. Chat GBT doesn't know your business, right, it knows jurisdiction and it can create a contract for you, but it doesn't know your customers. It doesn't know your product, it doesn't know your voice, it doesn't know your finances and it's lagging at the moment, like it's all data, it's not.

Speaker 2: 11:42

It's not 2021.

Speaker 1: 11:44

Yeah, Correct. I think the big next push here and this is you know we're doing some work in this space is the ability to take proprietary data. Now this isn't going to a public model, right, these are going to be proprietary models that are owned and run by these organizations. But to be able to take all of that proprietary data real time data, be able to feed it essentially into an LLM and now, as a CEO of a company or the head of your sales organization, you can ask it questions, the same way we own chat GBT, but now it's giving you answers based on your existing business and your customers, and I think once you empower a leadership team with that type of power, it's going to be really, really interesting.

Speaker 2: 12:23

And that's. But that's the challenge with situational awareness, right, and if it was easy, companies would never go out of business. But the average lifespan of a company is down from 40 years to 15. And the challenge you know, the challenge with everything when it comes to strategy, to execution, is it's all in the future and nothing. There are no time machines and there's no crystal balls. So even AI as a tool is always looking into the past.

Speaker 2: 12:46

And this is this is where I think a fighter pilot has a different mindset, which is we're always looking into the future. But the future has context. A little bit of it is the past, a little bit of it is because we, all the simple things we know off by heart, and we, we, we don't want to get in the airplane every time we go flying, go, what does that button do? So we do a lot of study and we do a lot of research, but we are always looking one step ahead and that is not the way the human brain works. And we know that because it's why it takes $15 million to train a fighter pilot to not do that. And we know, when we put a person into an airplane and they don't know what they're doing. They're completely reactive to what the button's doing and what the information is giving them. We call it performance flying and these, these stories are what you align into a business, which is. You would have seen it yourself If you looked at 100 decisions in a week in any organization, how many of those would be a knee jerk, reactive decision versus a properly deep thought, anticipated decision? And if you're looking at less than 80% of the decisions in a business, you know being or not being knee jerk. You're doing really well. Most, mostly now, because of, again, the speed of analytics and the speed of life, most of the decisions are knee jerk decision, which, which aren't, which isn't good, right? So what we have to do is we have to, we have to slow the system down in order to speed it up. So I'm the CEO of an organization called Afterburner, and Afterburner codified the fighter pilot mindset in business, right, and it has, I guess. It has four steps and it's plan, which is what everyone does, right, everyone understands planning.

Speaker 2: 14:26

But if you go to your story about AI, which is it can automate, it can find your lot of information and again, in aviation we have this automation where it used to be pilots that flew airplanes into the ground. Now it's airplanes flying airplanes into the ground on automation, because the pilots aren't paying attention. And the challenge, when you outsource wisdom to a machine and you don't check it, is you just believe it right? So, even as we look at AI, it's always going to require what we call a red team, and that's the difference with fighter pilot planning and normal planning is, hey, let's just before we go out the door, let's just unhook all of our biases here. It's someone that isn't involved in it, didn't design this or wasn't involved in the project, and just have them check it for us and ask us a few salient questions. And they talk about it in the HBR, which is, you know, the importance of having constructive conflict and inviting challenge. But again, if you don't have a structured way to do it, it just feels like challenge and criticism. If you codify it and you create a system that invites it, then it's decompressed, it's not subjective, it's not opinion based. So these are the nuances around it, around planning.

Speaker 2: 15:38

So when you go from planning to execution, there's a step in between and that's that's the, what we call the brief, which is a very brief, contextualized conversation to say we spent the last two weeks planning this. In the last 24 hours, nothing's changed. Or look, there's a few changes, so we're going to tweak it and let's go out and do it today. So if planning has a longer horizon, briefing is your today horizon. It's like here's the three things we're going to do today. It still lines up with what we're trying to achieve. We have the day to day context of the problem. It's raining outside, so therefore we can't go out and race the cars because we don't have wet tires.

Speaker 2: 16:13

Or you know, in a business environment, the the internet's down, that old chestnut. None of us can log in. So it's like, okay, right, well, we're going to sit around our arses all day till it's fixed. Or what do we do when the internet's down? Right, let's do housekeeping chores, let's fix up all those other tasks that aren't time, um pressure, like for me in COVID, as a speaker, as a, as someone that was out doing events when it all stopped, I thought well, you know what? I've got one year here to get all my admin squared away, all the little jobs, the legal agreements, all the details that was never done before. I'm going to invest time and effort doing that.

Speaker 2: 16:47

So so planning is the future, brief is the transition from the future to today, and then execution is what we do right now. And the problem with execution today is everyone just gets distracted. Right, like we start off fresh, you know exactly what we're going to do in the morning and then it's just absolute carnage. You know, knee jerk, uh, tasks, confusion, data comes in that we weren't expecting, and the problem we never expect the data. Because this is what this is. What does my head in when it comes to planning and execution is data comes in. That's not the plan, and everyone panics and it's like, well, hang on, the plan's just the future. It doesn't even exist. Why would it? Why would you just have this expectation that it was going to be met? You don't know.

Speaker 2: 17:31

And they talk about um, uh, unhappiness is all about expectations unmet right, and happiness is about meeting an expectation. So we constantly have these biases that create unachievable plans and we never achieve them. So we're never happy. That's in life as well as as well as in business. And when you're never happy, you put it in the context of sport yeah, a lot of people want to run a marathon or a half marathon, or they want to lift. You know, they want to bench 200 pounds and then they try and do it on the first day and they give up because it's like gosh, that's much harder than I thought and what we're not very good at is chunking it down, testing and adjusting. Yeah, I think it's amazing when you look at all these new um uh apps that help you train and they allow you to say, oh, that was a bit hard or I couldn't get the last two reps out, and this thing just learns about you. And then over time you start to win, you start to lift more and you're like I'm actually enjoying it now. Um, so, so execution is about uh is about expectations met, but also about not being distracted. I was.

Speaker 2: 18:33

Some study came out of London around mobile phones, right, and you know, everyone knows that they're constantly trying to find their phone. Yeah, and everyone knows they spend too much time and everyone's screen time is too high, but that's only the time you spend physically engaged with your phone. This research demonstrated that those conscious thoughts of engagement with your smartphone are replicated three times more subconsciously. So even when you're trying to focus on a task with your phone away from you, subconsciously you've conditioned your primal brain so well that it is also subconsciously distracting away from you. So what happens? We get to the end of the day, we feel like we haven't achieved much. We're exhausted because the poor old brain is is chewing up so much energy now that we're mentally tired. And when you're mentally tired, that manifests itself in feeling physically tired. So you don't exercise, you don't work out, you've got nothing left in the tank, and that's a spiral right that, just that that your mental health suffers and and the way we go.

Speaker 2: 19:37

So I think the elegance of the fighter pilot is we create this fourth step called a debrief, or I call it a do loop. It's just a way of you know, instead of looking at life as A to B, that everything is here I am and there's my marathon. It's just every day just looping back and saying what was my expectation? Did I meet it? No, why not? And what can I do tomorrow? That can often mean reduce my expectation or lift my load or increase my performance, but no one does that except fighter pilots. I mean, I've been doing this fighter pilot stuff in business and sports teams.

Speaker 2: 20:14

Afterburner itself worked with over 14 NFL teams. We helped the New York Giants go to the Super Bowl and win it in 2012. Because even in the NFL and high-performance sport, they don't debrief, they review, they reflect, they critique. But the challenge with the debrief and it's really important for athletes is not what you did wrong today, it's what tangible action. Not objective, not future state, not plan, but what's the actual thing you can do tomorrow? Just one or two things that will shift the knee at all a little bit. And this is how we start to see people getting in the championship mindset. Where a tennis player is off their game, they're worrying about 20 different things. We're really it's just debriefing that last shot, just the one thing that we did.

Speaker 2: 21:04

Even in athletes, we're taught positive psychology. Think positive thoughts, manifest a victory. That's all great, but the brain's not stupid. It wants to see you in action as well. If we think positively but we continue to underperform, doesn't matter what we say. Our brain kind of goes all right. Now you're starting to bullshit yourself. So, as we bring that expectation down and we start to understand what we did wrong and what we're going to do about it and it's okay not to know what to do about it, that's what a coach is for is we incrementally start to get this internalized intrinsic motivator going on which is like oh, I fixed that shot, oh, I'm starting to improve, I got rid of that slice. But what happens is, because of the human attention span is we have one or two efforts to try and fix something. It never gets fixed, we move on to the next thing and we just have this rolling kind of we get better, but not as fast as we need to.

Speaker 2: 21:59

And there's a saying which is anyone can be a fighter pilot, but we have 12 months to train this one. That's all we've got. That's the budget. That's the real. So if you can't, if you can't get on the learning curve, you're out.

Speaker 2: 22:11

And athletics is the same. Right, you've got a learning curve, you've got. You've got your peak capability, both physically, before your body starts to deteriorate, and mentally, where you've got to get on that learning curve, because you fall off the end of it. And then, as for athletes, you've got another learning curve, which is post professional career, just like I had to as a fighter pilot. I was very good at being a fighter pilot, I understood that system. But your next learning curve is how do you do normal life without the institutional structure, without the rigor that you had as an athlete. So yeah, and those four steps keep you pretty. They keep you pretty, pretty sane, they get you out of a funk. And if you want to look at it from from a a clinical psychology perspective, it's the same kind of technique that they use cognitive behavioral therapy, which is which is using a logic to kind of outthink your emotion and subconscious.

Speaker 1: 23:05

Yeah, I mean, there's so much there, so many, so many thoughts came in my mind as you were, as you were going through all of that. You know, when I, when I, when I kind of first came up with this concept of the athlete entrepreneur or really drove me was this, was this the parallels that I saw between, you know, high level athletics and entrepreneurship and, I do think, and my, my business partner, in a venture that I'm with, I use a 20 year Hornet pilot as well, flew with the Marines, just retired, you know, last year, over, you know, 2,500 hours in a in a Hornet.

Speaker 2: 23:41

Cool, we've talked a lot about it. Is he on the West Coast? Need some speakers? He?

Speaker 1: 23:45

is he's on the West Coast. He actually he's in San Diego.

Speaker 2: 23:48

He's in San Diego.

Speaker 1: 23:49

So if you, if you do come out here, he'd be perfect for you and, anyways, unbelievable guy. And I always hesitate to compare military with with sports, because the truth of the matter is we are not really risking our lives and I think that there is. There is a level of danger that's inherent in in what the military does every day, so I I always want to give that respect where that respect is due. Bye. The similarities are you know, becoming a fighter pilot is a dream that isn't that much to similar to being a professional athlete, right? I mean, you know, I know your story a little bit. You had a dream of being a fighter pilot as a teenager, right? That was something that you set a goal for yourself, or that's something that you wanted to do. Very similar to all those kids that are sitting around thinking to themselves that they want to be professional football players or baseball players or basketball players or whatever. It is Highly competitive. You mentioned that you were six out of six, but I'm sure there were, you know, hundreds of others that had that same dream, that weren't able to make the cut. And then you know, obviously, when you get in there, the high level of competition.

Speaker 1: 24:53

It is similar to being successful as an entrepreneur. Like you know, you mentioned that the average you know lifespan of a company went from 40 to 15. Well, what is the? What is the failure rate of new companies in this country? It's got to be still 90% plus.

Speaker 1: 25:07

People all dream about becoming successful, wealthy entrepreneurs that build businesses, but very few are able to fulfill. On that. There is a certain amount of just perseverance and dedication and hard work and maybe a little bit of luck along the way to be a successful entrepreneur. That, I think, probably is parallel to what it takes to be a fighter pilot or to become a high level athlete. So those were always the parallels I saw. But I think what you're talking about is really interesting because it's it's a little bit more about the mentality of actually doing it and you know, I think being an athlete does differ from being being a fighter pilot and some of those things that you had mentioned. I guess the question I have and you know, based on that is so and I love this idea of the debrief right, and it reminds me a little bit in software development we have like iterative development or agile development. It's sort of this feedback cycle.

Speaker 2: 25:58

Yeah, you know why? Because agile was created by a father pilot.

Speaker 1: 26:02

Was he, I was it, I had no idea, you're ex-otherman, yeah. So how do you materialize this? Like what is? You know, you go into a company, you go into McDonald's or VMware or ZR, whoever it is, and you're you're meeting with a team. How do you get them to embrace this concept of debrief? It's?

Speaker 2: 26:19

it's a good, it's a. It's a good question, but I'll just go back to what we we mentioned before about fighter. Pilots are different athletes. Athletes are different to business owners, but there's some common ground. I'll tell you right now there's one thing everyone has in common and we're all human.

Speaker 2: 26:32

All that changes is the goals. What you want changes, how you get there is exactly the same. I mean, I've worked with over 400 companies and thousands of people and over the years I've become more convinced of that. And in the difference between where you are and where you want to be is your own bullshit. Everything in there is you. There's nothing else. There's no other, there's nothing. The world is going to throw stuff at you, but the difference between wanting to be an NFL player or not is is really up to you, and that we see that all the time.

Speaker 2: 27:04

We, we, we watch on ESPN, netflix documentaries on on the athletes that should never have made it. You know the, the, the, the six foot tall basketball or the, the 190 pounds NFL athlete, and they're they're exceptionally good at what they do. So we create these artificial barriers and that's when I work, when we work with the company and we go in there and we talk about strategy, the execution. The immediate thing we do is start dismantling all the myths, because they create stories and that's why when you go to six software companies that do the same product, there's six different stories. Now, those stories, no one gave them a script, they created those stories and this is what we are. We are the product of the stories we. We tell ourselves. Toxic cultures of the product of a toxic story. Aspirational cultures of the product of a of a aspirational story, or led by aspirational people, or toxic people. And when you go in there and you look at that, the biggest you know that we have over 200 cognitive biases, which is, again, just psychologists and neuroscientists guessing at 200 parameters in what drives our decision making. They're still they're still just guesses, but but they're pretty good if you think about you know when a piece of information comes in and you make a decision about it.

Speaker 2: 28:28

And I speak with a lot of universities and schools about kids wanting to be fighter pilots and at the end kids will come up to me and go, oh, that was, that was a really great story. I never thought I could be a fighter pilot and like no one said that to them, they just created that belief system and I joined the Air Force straight out of school. I did my last year of high school twice. I have ADHD, so I shouldn't. I only found that out a couple of years ago, but it explains why I struggled at school but why I excelled at anything I focused on, and the Air Force was great because of the structure it brought to that, that ADHD mind.

Speaker 2: 29:06

But you know, even if you have a physical limitation, there is something that that you can do. There's. There's no point having a life purpose or something that you want, that there's a physical or genuine constraint, like it's impossible, right. But I think purpose is quite clever. I think purpose finds you. You don't find it.

Speaker 2: 29:28

And I wanted, I was going to be a fighter pilot. From the age of five, I was just convinced that was my, that was my job. Even now, when I post on Facebook or catch up with my mates at school 30 year anniversary, they're like, yeah, dude, you're the only person at school that knew what they wanted and got it. You know you're. And they remember me as the pilot kid, the weird pilot kid, so so that's really NFL players. You know NBA, major League Baseball yeah, when you're gifted with that purpose from a young age.

Speaker 2: 29:58

That's there's a element of luck with that right Cause that's you spend so much time and effort conditioning yourself for your environment. By the time you get there you've got a bit of a jump ahead. But there's never a time in life where that's too late. You know, I achieved fighter pilot at the age of 21. I wanted it when I was five, so that's 16 years. So let's just say, at the age of 30, you decided you found something purposeful. You've got to the age of if you use my metric, the age of 46 to make it happen, and I'm two years past that date now, and that's plenty of time. You know, if you're 40, you've got till 56, that's plenty of time. But don't, don't force purpose, don't think about it. Just feel like you know. You know what it's about, you know, you know it. You're just putting your own limitations in front of you to stop going for it.

Speaker 1: 30:48

Well, you brought something up earlier in the conversation that I I talk about a lot because I do deal with a lot of ex athletes who have gone on and done different things. Is that transition Right? And you know you just talked about you know how long you had this dream of being a fighter pilot. So from five to 21, you become a fighter pilot. I know you flew for you know a decade plus and then all of a sudden it ends right. And now it's like what do you do next?

Speaker 1: 31:14

And I know with athletes similar you know so much their identity was tied up in being an athlete. In many ways that's all they've ever really known how to do and now they have to move on. Probably the difference between an athlete and a fighter pilot is I'm sure you didn't retire with, you know, $50 million in the bank, like a lot of athletes do, right. So how was that transition for you? I mean, you've obviously gone on. You become a highly successful entrepreneur, speaker, author and all these amazing things that you're doing. What was that first year like and how did you approach it in order to kind of get you on this path?

Speaker 2: 31:54

Excuse me. It's a good question and it was a simple answer, which was I don't know what I'm doing. I have to go somewhere where what I do is valued, and as a fighter pilot there's nothing really. There's no civilian fighter pilot. It can go be an airline pilot, but you know, I was diagnosed with a disorder autoimmune disorder called ankylosing spondylitis, so effectively all the soft bits between your bones start to fuse up. So it's not very comfortable as a fighter pilot.

Speaker 2: 32:21

And at that point in time it was post-Iraq and Afghanistan. I thought, well, they're probably only the two places on the planet that need more help than people are willing to give. So my best mate and I jumped on a plane and we found that a company called CTG Global and we were just a humanitarian projects company with a bit of HR. We set up a mortuary, we repatriated anyone that was killed on behalf of the embassies that were there. We did all sorts of stuff, but we just did what was needed and that grew rapidly to a multi-million dollar business like very quickly. So again, you know, I didn't go into from being a fighter pilot to saying I want to be the top real estate agent, I want to have my own office and sell houses in Beverly Hills. That was just a bridge too far. Like who am I? What credibility and value do I bring to that conversation? And that's why I'm not a huge fan of evolution or change sorry, of transition or change, because they both sound fast. I kind of like evolution and if we're constantly evolving, there's always these ebbs and flows.

Speaker 2: 33:31

Like you know, I'm in the States now. I've been in, lived all over the world, had a really nice business in Australia. Everything was doing. I've gone backwards to come and take over a company that needs to be rebuilt, re-engineered, move into a digital future of created work. Is this afterburner? Yeah, this is afterburner. I've created work. I'm earning less, I'm in a new country with a two year old and got a lot of family stuff going on, so I've created a lot of pain for myself that I didn't need to.

Speaker 2: 33:59

But at the same time, it's exciting. It's an opportunity. You're rebuilding, you're creating something, creating something new, and I know what good looks like and I'm confident to get there because I've done it. I've done it four times before, you know, and the challenge was getting comfortable in the old position, in the old business, and everything was kind of yeah, there's, it's enshrined in the US Constitution.

Speaker 2: 34:23

You're entitled to the pursuit of happiness, not happiness itself, and that, to me, is the pursuit of rebuilding a business. The pursuit of evolution is what is inherently motivating when humans are not designed to get to a steady state, and that when we get to a steady state, when we have everything we want, that's where we start to not feel as great about ourselves. So it's this real yin and yang, this real balance between having a dream and trying to get there too quickly and giving up and accepting what you have. And you know, if you just don't know, just grab the book on time, on target or flawless execution, just read it and that'll give you like a real simple system to get started. The way I talk about it is this Everyone knows how to drive a car, but if you hire a car or rent it, get a car rental and you go to an airport and you've never driven it before, you spend the first five or 10 minutes trying to figure out how to drive that car, whereas with your own car you're in it, you're out the door in five minutes.

Speaker 2: 35:26

So when it comes to life, if you have a system, something where you know where the button is, you know how to turn it on, you know where the windows are, you know how to accelerate, you know how to turn the GPS on, you can connect your phone, you get your Spotify going, boom, boom, boom. Then you're driving your car much better. When it comes to wanting something and not having it yet, we approach every day as if it's a new car because no one has the system in place to close the gap between want and have as quickly as possible. So when you build that system and every day you hop in your car, which is your life, all of a sudden it becomes much easier driving around rather than putting original thought into routine, ideas into routine actions.

Speaker 1: 36:13

So I know, afterburner, I know you work with a lot of other fighter pilots, obviously bringing that fighter pilot mindset into corporations. So you guys do speaking, you guys do consulting. Who do you guys work with? Who should reach out to you?

Speaker 2: 36:29

Yeah, it's an interesting question. We would say you know, we'd love to work with everyone, but we probably work. A 2014 study into high performers of 638,000 high performers basically dispel the myth that performance looks like this that there's super high performers, then everyone's average and then there's low performers. Here it's actually a declining rate of return, in that there's few high performers and then it just drops off. And those high performers generally in an organization there's 10% of an organization, over 25% of the output, and the bottom 25 deliver 10%. So that's who we would target, because they get it, they're curious, they understand that the way of thinking is important. The middle section just doesn't. Let's be honest, they're not there yet in terms of their own situational awareness and self-learning.

Speaker 2: 37:28

So that was who we target, and normally those people have managed to get themselves into fairly senior roles their business owners, not really entrepreneurs because we help unlock potential of everyone around you, not just your potential. We believe there's you, we and us, and you as you. We is the people that can reach out and touch, and us as the rest of the world. So, yeah, so for us it's typically historically very large, billion-dollar enterprises, a lot of software and tech businesses as well, but we are now reaching out more and more to SMBs because we believe that is the future is to empower family businesses small medium enterprise to be able to use some of this mindset to scale up and compete with the bigger end of town. It's healthy to have competition. I think we're talking about it before it's when you look at the homogenized nature of business and these enormous hedge funds that are just hoovering up everyone. We've got to bring in competition from the grassroots and I'm really excited, as an entrepreneur, to start expanding our reach into those groups as well.

Speaker 1: 38:40

Yeah, and you got a podcast. The Few with Boo.

Speaker 2: 38:43

Yeah, it's called the Few Podcast. It's about the few, the 10%, what makes them different and anyone's allowed up there. Don't get me wrong, it's not a gate. Well, you're not born into 10%.

Speaker 1: 38:58

Yes, right.

Speaker 2: 38:59

Yeah, right, right yeah.

Speaker 1: 39:02

And you're dealing with high achievers, people who have kind of overcome the odds, people who have built themselves in the 10%, and I'm assuming it's a little bit of an examination of the habits and the practices that these people have done to get to that point.

Speaker 2: 39:17

Absolutely, and what people call military discipline, and they say, oh you guys, it's just good habits, discipline is just habits. That's what it is. The war is outside the military you have a choice, inside you don't. And what you learn is, when you don't have a choice, you have good habits, you get things done. Yeah, so for us, often when we talk with private enterprises dispelling some of those rumors and changing the language a little bit, and also as a fighter pilot, we look at the war differently. Like most of the time, the generals plan the war and the soldiers go and do it as pilots. We plan the war and we do it.