RPE: Let's do it. Let's fire it up.

JLD: RP is a CEO of Ergo, an intelligence advisory firm and four rivers, an Asian-focus investment firm. He's a former US national security official and UN diplomat and co-author of Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes. RP, take a minute to fill in sometimes gaps from that intro and give us a little glimpse of your personal life.

RPE: JLD, I'm excited to be here. And congratulations, 1707 episodes, amazing. And congratulations for everything you do. I've love reading about you, listening to your podcast, but you're doing a great job helping other people meet their potentials and that’s a hell of a service.

JLD: Thanks RP.

RPE: Thank you. My background, you got it, I was a national Security Council director. I was the US diplomat, UN diplomat and I had a – it's a real privilege of doing all those things for about ten years. Then I started with eventually with some partners they're from Ergo. We're global intelligence business. We help people answer hard questions, things that other companies simply can't answer. And then we've also begun to invest in Burma, Miramar, and we're building a 18-story office building there, Class A office space in the fastest growing economy in the world.

And then finally, with a guy named Richard Clarke, who a lot of your listeners will be familiar with, and Harper Collins, we have written a book called Warnings: – you mentioned the title – Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes, prevent catastrophes, and, you know, I'm happy to talk about that, too. So, personal life, three kids, three great boys live in Greenwich with my extraordinary wife and I'm a really blessed guy.

JLD: I can remember being in India back in 2008, and wanted to go to Miramar and getting a lot of people saying, you just don’t want to go there, and they would give a cacophony of reasons. Were they just being a little over dramatic back in 2008?

RPE: They were totally right. This country who says the craziest thing. So, this place, 60 years ago, had the most PhDs in Asia. It was the wealthiest per capita economy in Asia, maybe the wealthiest, period. It had the best AG production. It was unbelievable tourist spot. I mean, the place was on fire. It was the place to be. It had a long history of education and everything. And then this Hunta took over and said, You know what? We're just going to take this whole country, this extraordinary culture and just drop it in carbonite like Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back. Just, boom, freeze it, we're done. There were a lot of human rights violations. It was a pretty horrible place to be. And then this extraordinary Nobel Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, who had been in house arrest and different types of arrest for 30 years was finally allowed to run and she won the election and the country’s now a full-fledged democracy. It's totally extraordinary transformation.

JLD: And what year did that transformation start?

RPE: It's about four years old at this point and it's become real durable. And it's really off the radar screen for most Americans, but it's a great story of transformation. It's a great story of hope and now we believe it's going to be a great story of economic growth.

JLD: Yeah, totally. Well, RP, I'm curious because I think you probably have a few areas of expertise, but just drill down into one for right now and share with our listeners, Fire Nation, who are entrepreneurs, small business owners, something that we should know that we probably don’t know about your area of expertise.

RPE: Look, this doesn’t fit totally perfectly with entrepreneurs. When entrepreneurs mean you're leaders, that means you're thinker and that means that you're out there trying to do something new and different, and that’s critical for the fate of the nation, right? The fate of anywhere is to have people like you. In fact, when I was a diplomat, we used to talk about the entrepreneurial class. And we didn’t mean people who go out and start new companies, per se, we meant people who are leading the nation in new directions and with growth.

So, first of all, you and you listeners should understand that to be an entrepreneur means you're also part of something extraordinary about the growth of a nation and not just your business. And if you don’t have entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial class, a country goes nowhere. So, because of that, I will give you a broader view than here's how to do social media exploitation or whatever, right? I want to talk about the fact that in this world, in this life, we've had catastrophe after catastrophe where someone had said very clearly, Hey, Katrina’s going to happen and levy seven, 12 and 15 are going to break, made off as a fraud and here's why. Fukushima, a nuclear reactor diachi means to be higher because a tsunami is coming. And so, you go across, you know, the Challenger is going to explode because the o-ring is faulty.

All these different warnings of catastrophe have come to us very clearly by educated experts with data, and they’ve been ignored. So, here's the lesson. These people walk amongst us. These folks who know. These folks who need to be listened to and we should not ignore them, and we do so at our own peril or we discover them to our great benefit. So, every entrepreneur, every leader needs to understand that you are rife with human biases – We can talk about this some more later – that prevents you from listening to certain people.

So, if you can understand that, if fact, yes, the guy down the hall with dandruff on his shoulder, the abrasive attitude and the bad breath who keeps telling you, you shouldn’t use this chemical in your product, or you shouldn’t hire that person, or you shouldn’t enter that market. They're not always just naysayers, they're often correct. And sometimes what they're warning you of is much bigger than small things like that could be actual catastrophes.

So, that’s what Dick and I discovered really in this book, that there are people out there who can foretell disaster we need to listen to. And we call them Cassandras. That comes from a Greek mythological story about a woman who foretold disaster and was ignored. And she foretold the sacking of Troy by the Trojan horse, and she said this is going to happen. She saw it in fiery detail and she, like everyone else, in Troy burned to death because no one listened to Cassandra.

JLD: RP, let's shift to a story of your life. And you’ve had the ups and the downs that’s all business and entrepreneurs have had. But what would you consider your worst business moment to date that you’ve experienced. Because we could learn a lot of lessons from that, too. So, take us to that story.

RPE: Here's one that’s kind of fun. So, I had this really terrific privilege of being a director at the National Security Council at the White House during President Bush’s admin – excuse me – President Clinton’s administration. And I was a baby. I was much too young to be there, but I was there nonetheless. And so, one of my jobs – and you can imagine this is very early on in my time there and I got this scut work – was to write the letters, the personal letters from the president to foreign leaders. So, these weren’t the official demarches or communiques, this would be if a president wrote him a letter, he had to write back personally. So, I got to write those letters.

And I been there just long enough that I was feeling a little conference in my job. That was mistake No.1. I'm already prone to be a bit of a goofball, mistake No.2. And I now had this boss at the time named Richard Clarke, my co-author of my book who I just thought was the greatest guy, and I still do 20 years later, and he's a funny guy, and I thought it'd be funny to play a little joke on him. And I thought solely, he would be the only person to see the joke and we’d be fine. So, again, I'm at the National Security Council, I'm sitting in the building adjoining the White House, I have to write a letter from the president of the United States to a foreign leader – I'm not going to say who it was.

In the letter, I wrote the letter, just straight and fine, and then I put a PS on the bottom and I wrote a little joke about the president doing something sort of inappropriate in the blue room. I apologize for doing this. I understand your bodyguards will be returned soon. You know, sort of, really silly, really goofy, only wanted Dick to see it, right? So, I wrote the note, I put it in his folder, and his folder I put it in his inbox. It sits there with his fantastic secretary Beverly. I kind of wait outside the room waiting for him – waiting to hear a laugh in his office. Don’t hear a laugh. So, then I kind of go in and I say, Hey, did you read the letter? He goes, Yeah, yeah. I read it. And I say, Well, what do you think? And he says, Great, I sent it on to the National Security Advisors office, the National Security Advisors office. I was like, What! I'm like Ahh!.

So, I now have to run out of my building, across the street, over to the White House into Tony Lake’s office, he's the National Security Advisor of the president. And he's got a secretary, famous secretary there, who actually is Fawn Hall’s mother. It's a big part of history from Oliver North. But I run in and I say, Where's this memo, where's this memo from Richard Clarke’s office? And you know, again, I'm a baby. It's the middle of summer. I'm now sweating profusely, running all over the place. I'm in big trouble. And I – Where's this letter, where's this letter? Oh, it's – National Security Advisor Lake has already looked at it. It's on its way to the Oval Office. What! So, now I have to run down the hall to the Oval Office. Betty Curry is President Clinton’s secretary, another extraordinary woman, and I need this memo, I need this memo. And she says, it's in his office, in President Clintons office on his desk to be signed right now.

So, in the history of the National Security Council, no memo has ever moved this fast. These things usually take days and days. For whatever weird bend of history, this thing flew through the whole, you know, White House in hours and now it's sitting on President Clinton’s desk. And if he sees this PS on the bottom, I'm fried. So, I'm sitting there, I can't charge into his office. I'm sitting there and I'm now just sweating profusely. I'm sitting at Betty Cur – I mean, as I tell you this story, I'm shaking. I was so nervous and this is 1995.

JLD: Yeah.

RPE: Finally, the memo comes out in a folder and it's signed. He hadn’t even read it. I'm like Oh, my god. So, I now have it back in my possession. I've somehow bee miraculously saved. I go back to my office with this piece of paper and I'm just – I'm just so shook up and I sit at my desk and I'm like, I'm basically in tears. You know, Dick’s office now knows I've acted like an idiot. Tony Lake’s office now knows I've acted like an idiot. Betty Curry in the Oval Office knows I've acted like an idiot. They don’t know precisely what happened, because no one read the thing, but Whoosh, I mean, I figure I'm done.

So, I'm sitting there, just completely beside myself and a guy who shares an office with me right next door is – his names Peter and he's a captain in the Coast Guard, and he's like, RP, what's wrong? And I said, Oh, Peter, I've just, I blown it, I blown it. He goes, What happened? I've just done the biggest mistake that I can imagine. I can't believe this. And he's very concerned and he comes over and says, Buddy, what happened, what happened? And so, I'll tell you. So, I tell him a story and he starts laughing. I'm like, Why’re you laughing? He goes, Hey, man. I'm a Coast Guard captain. When you tell me something bad really happened, that means like bolts broke off of boilers in the bottom of ships and five-ton boilers are rolling around inside hulls and ships are about to sink and men are about to die. You know, writing a silly memo is not a catastrophe. And it was a real lesson for me that how to put things into context but also not to be too much of a goofball. So, I would say that was one of my darker moments.

JLD: Well, thank you for taking us back there because that was quite the entertaining story, and I think it's a super, super valuable lesson. Because things happen in our businesses every single day Fire Nation. In fact, something happened to me this morning, literally, that while you're telling the story about the perspective at the end, I'm like, Man, put things in perspective JLD, and it's so true that we just blow these things up and then we let them dictate and potentially even ruin our day, our week, our month. And sometimes our business because we don’t put them in the correct perspective. So, I do love that and –

RPE: You were saying you were in India at one point, right?

JLD: Four months backpacking.

RPE: So, talk about perspective, right? So, people listening to your podcast right now who've never been in poverty and there's horrible poverty in this country and in Europe, we're seeing the destitute poverty in the emerging markets. If you don’t have that perspective, it's very easy to get wrapped up in where we are. But when you do get that perspective and you see that there's people out there dying and holding their children as their dying of lack of clean water, disease, it's really easy to remember how silly a lot of what we worry about really is.

JLD: So silly. RP, you're a great storyteller. So, I kind of want to hear another story, but this one’s going to be more focused on an Ah-ha moment on one of your greatest idea that you’ve had. The day that you’ve actually been able to put into action and then get a great result from. So, take us to the moment that you had that idea and kind of walk us through what that looked like.

RPE: As you say that, this will be 30 seconds. The biggest Ah-ha moment I had in my life was when I opened my door on 77th St. and saw my wife walking across the street before I met her. That was the biggest Ah-ha moment in my life. So, that was a great success story. But I won't bore you with that one. But if she listens to that and I don’t mention that, I'll be in trouble. So, and it happens to be true.

Dick Clarke and I, and you guys have to research who this guy is, he was the greatest counter-terrorism leader in the history of the US Government and he led counter-terrorism from Bush 41 through Clinton, through Bush 43, he was the man who said we've got to get Bin Laden. He was ignored, ignored, ignored. Unfortunately, he was right – this is pre-9/11 – and he was my boss, my mentor and is one of my dearest, dearest closest friends. He and I wanted to write a book together, and Dick said, Look, I think there's something about people who foretell disasters are ignored. And I was like, Oh, boring. Like not interesting to me. But we talked about it some more and some more.

And we had a lot of time hashing this out and the Ah-ha moment – there were two – One was, wait a second, there really is this horrible history of catastrophes being totally predicted by people and those people are ignored. Like, it happens over and over. And so, when you start listing, just the list, just writing that first list with Dick, sitting on a patio a few summers ago, drinking whatever we were drinking and start listing out – Geez, these disasters actually do happen and they are predicted, right? I mentioned, said before, Katrina, Fukushima Madoff, the ‘08 collapse. That was a big Ah-ha moment. And we said, Alright, wow. There's a story to be told there. That’s Ah-ha No. 1.

Ah-ha No. 2 was, alright, well okay, great. Are we just going to write, you know, seven or ten stories of horrible things happening that we failed to predict and people are going to read that and go, You know, this is really sad, thanks so much. Or is there a lesson here? And as we looked at those stories, and we didn’t know. We had no idea that there would be lessons in commonalities. It turns out the commonalities amongst those – Remember Cassandra’s, those people who foretold disasters and were ignored. The commonalities are overwhelming. And it was a massive Ah-ha moment, and here is the one thing that really got us.

We interviewed seven to ten Cassandra’s, right? And I mentioned the disasters. Every single one of them even used the same sentence with us. They all used the same sentence which was, Yeah, we would look at the decision-makers and we would say to them “Why are you ignoring your own data?” So, we were like, my god, the commonalities are so profound that it's down to them all saying the same thing to people who are ignoring them. So, that was a big Ah-ha moment we've cataloged in this book. The things these guys and gals have in common, the commonalities amongst them and it's really –

I'm really proud of it and I feel like we really discovered something pretty important here that is actually somewhat understandable and easy for decision-makers and leaders and entrepreneurs to read to say, Wait a second, if I'd see these characteristics in someone who is warning me of something, or I see these characteristics in the actual warning they're giving me, et cetera, et cetera, I better look twice, ask the next question. So, that was a big Ah-ha moment for me.

JLD: So, Fire Nation, Warnings, Finding Cassandra’s to Stop Catastrophes, May 23rd, 2017, this book went live. So, as you're listening to this, you can head it over to Amazon or, you know, wherever you want to pick up this book because it's got some great stories in there, but, you know, just as RP said, it has some great lessons as well. And RP, you shared one, but let's maybe kind of get into, what was another surprise that you encountered. You know, that one sense that everybody shared, you're like, Wow, that’s kind of interesting that they're all using these words. What was something else that surprised you in creating this book?

RPE: Here's what surprised me, and it shouldn’t of. When you think about a challenge – So, take it back to the entrepreneurs and the businesses that we all run, when you take it back, you think of any challenge, it's often seductive or one of the simple aspects of our brain is just to look at one aspect of the problem and think we're seeing the whole picture, right?

I think the lesson I learned, to put it simply, and it was just in stark detail writing this book, is we just tubes of meat walking around, illuminated by biases, right? We are such bias-driven organisms. I don’t care who you are and how enlightened you think you are, you are living your life based on heuristics and biases. Heuristics and biases. So, heuristic means a series of lessons you’ve learned over time that actually help you. So, I'm being supporter non-scientific here, but when you drive to work, you don’t have to consciously remember gas, brake, turn signals, steering wheel and left, right, left, right turn, you kind of get there automatically. And often people will say, I got to work today and I kind of forgot driving there. That’s because you're on autopilot, you're in that heuristic. You're in a program and you got there. That’s positive. When your heuristics lead you to improper decisions because of biases, or because of innate failings you're making in your decision-making process, that becomes a bias. And a bias, turns out, we are just riddled with biases.

And so, writing this book, I was just shocked and look, this doesn’t do anything with book, per se, I was just amazed how bias-riddled human-beings are. So, I'll give you a very simple one. This last election, the most divisive, maybe, we've even had, the presidential election. The – And look, we don’t have to get into it and we shouldn’t. But the degree of divisiveness in this country is unbelievable, and what was interesting on both sides of the media – So, let's just say Fox on one site, MSNBC on the other, whoever you want to use, Breitbart, whatever – A lot of the media, they were reporting a lot of the stories they were telling, fake news or not, fake news being a better example, were things that made us scared.

So, if I'd tell JDs family, JLDs family, the Dumas family, you know, here's a bunch of really, really bad news. You as a family, you as a cohort, you and your sort of tribe are going to pull in closer and closer to yourselves. So, one bias we have is when presented with fearful or scary information, we revert to type, we revert to our own group, back to our own tribe. That, to me, is an interesting bias, and there's so many of them. In this book, we talk about erroneous consensus or a whole variety of things where we think we have things figured out, we just don’t. So, what does that mean? Recognize that you are full of biases, go to Wikipedia, read the list of biases that'd be great, list of biases in there. Or buy a book and understand some of the biases you have and don’t forget that as you make your decisions. You're making decisions based on your monkey brain, not on your actual creative human brain.

JLD: Love that, and Fire Nation, you're going to love the lightening round. So, don’t you go anywhere because we're going to take a quick minute first to thank our sponsors.

RP, are you ready to rock the lightening rounds?

RPE: Let's do it.

JLD: What was holding you back from becoming an entrepreneur?

RPE: Financial fear, nothing. Nothing exciting. Just financial fear, getting out there and being on my own and not having a trampoline underneath me.

JLD: What's the best advice you’ve ever receive?

RPE: A big disclaimer. Just because it's the best advice I've ever received, doesn’t means I follow it all the time, and I follow it nearly enough, but it's very simply, you know, three ways looking at it. The Golden Rule, do unto others as you'd hope them to do unto you was also taught to me as I am third, which is the idea that my god comes first, others come second, I come third. I apparently have to learn things or hear things a lot to really learn them. I have to be taught things over and over to kind of get into my thick skull.

So, that same message, Golden Rule, I am third was also taught to me at a school I went to, a school called Groton, and a Latin phrase, Cui servire est regnare, to serve is to rule, or he who serves is real. And that’s a weird complex idea, but what it basically means is service to others is the best thing I can do and it's self-benefiting. There's no such thing as a non-selfish act, but when you tell an eighth grader or freshman that if you serve others, you become a ruler or that’s a positive thing for you, that’s a great way to get the message into me. And that there's a whole theory around this whole thing. David Halberstam wrote a great book called The Best And The Brightest, it's a fantastic book about American foreign policy leadership. He talks about that actual motto at Groton, Cui servire est regnare, and he talks about it as understanding that you have immense privilege and that look, Hey, if you had such thing, if you have such privilege, you might as well use it to good and be aware of it.

So, that was a big lesson for me. I was an extr – I'm an extraordinary lucky person. I've been given extraordinary privilege and if I don’t use that to do something, let alone, serve others, then I think that’s a real failure. That would be the biggest lesson I've ever been taught.

JLD: What's a personal habit that contributes to your success?

RPE: Find time to think, period. There's your sentence.

JLD: No, I love it. And actually, I have one word every single year. So, my 2017 word is Think. I think it's so important that we give ourselves that time to just step back, release from all the noise and just think. So, that’s perfect.

RPE: And remember, we talked about biases before. Biases are when you are not thinking.

JLD: Autopilot.

RPE: Autopilot. Get out of autopilot and question, question, question. You know the idea of the five Whys, right? If you're talking to someone, ask five times, why, why, why, why, why. You're thinking about something. Ask five times why, why – Literally say five time. Ask the question why, five times. And when you're done with that, you may be broke out of your bias.

JLD: RP, I want to end it today on fire, brother. So, give us just one parting piece of guidance. The best way that we can connect with you and then we’ll say good-bye.

RPE: There we go, ask the next question, five Why’s. Don’t sit there and be on autopilot. Don’t let your biases take you over. Understand that there are people out there who are truly able to see things you can't see. Don’t let your ego get in the way. Don’t let the fact that they are off putting. Don’t let the fact that you don’t understand the complexity or the technology that they're describing to you mean that you ignore them. Be unbelievably curious. Think, ask the next question and realize someone on this podcast right now, JLD, is going to, at some point, be in a position of leadership or someone is going to come to them and say, Hey, we've got a real problem. And it might mean that you're supply chain has something poisonous in it or it might mean that you're a leader and there's a dam that’s going to break, but that person who's coming to explain to you that there is a disaster coming is worth you asking another question. Ask the next question; don’t let your biases get in the way of listening to an important warning. Please help save us all.

JLD: And how can we connect with you?

RPE: We think Cassandras are very important and we've got to get out there and find them. So, we've started an award and a foundation. We're going to give $10,000, this is a non-profit, to the person nominated this year who is possibly predicting a catastrophe and needs to be listened to. And we want everyone on – everyone who hears us to go online and go to findcassandra.com and simply input, Look, here's a person I think you need to think about. And when we find that person –

We have an extraordinary group of judges including General Michael Hayden, former Head of CIA and NSA. And Master Frank Wisner, our greatest living ambassador, Richard Clarke, who I mentioned. David Cohen, he used to run the CIA operations. We have an extraordinary group of people, including Cassandras, themselves who are going to judge these submissions. So, go to findcassandra.com and fill out the form, nominate a Cassandra and tell us who's giving a warning that we're ignoring. And when we pick that person, we're going to give them a $10,000 gift, non-profit. We're going to have a big press release and we're going to try to focus more attention on that person and the disaster that they're foretelling in the hopes that we as a world can avoid that disaster. And your listeners can help by going to findcassandra.com and telling us about who that person is.

JLD: Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people that you spend the most time with and you’ve been hanging out with RPE and JLD today. So, keep up the heat and head over to eofire.com. Just type Eddy, that’s E-D-D-Y in the search bar and RPs shows will pop right up with everything that we've been talking about today. These are the best show notes in the biz. They're time-stamps, links galore. Of course, head directly over to findcassandra.com to check out all the awesomeness that is going on there. And the book Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes, go check it out, it's available on Amazon as we're speaking. And RP, thank you for sharing your journey with Fire Nation today. For that we salute you and we’ll catch you on the flipside.

RPE: JLD, your extraordinary. Congratulations on great, great work you do. Thanks so much.