Jason Hartman goes on a rant at the beginning of the show. He talks about salespeople claiming to be gurus with all these promises but never actually deliver. After, he brings on Jeremy Heimans, co-founder and CEO of Purpose and author of New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World – and How to Make It Work for You. They have a discussion on movements in the new world and the shift of power being more and more concentrated.
Jeremy Heimans 0:00
So far I haven’t had any issues in the sense of with the turnkey vendor or the management company. The management companies have been exceptional, you know, responsive, quick, professional. It’s great. You know, for somebody who’s really busy, this is a great way to invest. Now, I have to say that being a skeptic, we went outside of your network. We did go to another turnkey vendor. We went to, you know, the place where they did their work. They had this beautiful binder with pamphlets, and they looked at it, and then they went to show us the houses. And it was not what I expected. You know, the thing that scared me is we went to an older house like this, this is a great investment property. They went into the basement, and there was literally a electrical junction box with four wires coming out and one of the side hanging in midair, hanging in midair. So at that point, it was well, we’re not doing anything with this team of people and we went back. We went back to organizations because I hate this I’m a commercial, but they’re just quality people.
Jeremy Heimans 1:03
Welcome to the creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You’re about to learn a new slant on investing some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world’s most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine self made multi millionaire who’s actually been there and done it. He’s a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who’s owned properties in 11 states had hundreds of tenants and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason’s footsteps on the road to your financial independence day. You really can do it. And now here’s your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.
Jason Hartman 1:53
Welcome to Episode 11 61,160. This is your host, Jason Hartman. Today we have a 10th episode show where we will be talking with a very well known author very popular book about the new power in this is an interesting concept to me. And I think it goes in fairly well with a very short, but it should be longer rant that I’m going to share with you. So after our meet the Masters weekend, we had a venture Alliance days as we always do a sort of a debrief after the event, and we met for breakfast and masterminded for a few hours. Then we went to lunch at the super swanky fig and all of restaurant and had like a two hour lunch. So it was a great time, but I went on a bit of a rant there, and I don’t think I’ve really shared this with you on the podcast. But I think it’s worth noting and we should go into this in more depth later. But you know, have you ever heard that old song by Bob Seger Feel like a number. Okay? And it’s all about, you know, how you’re just processed, you know, and I when I used to train realtors, in how to be more successful, I used to talk about how sewage is processed, food is processed, water is processed, all these things are processed, but people don’t want to be processed. Thankfully, I know I don’t. And it just makes me wonder where have all the craftsmen gone? Where have all the technicians gone? Do you feel this way as I as do I sometimes, you know, I’ll give you one of many examples I see all around me. We used to work with and I had him on the show several times this attorney and we recommended him for a couple of years and you know, things were fine in the beginning and then we started hearing some complaints and I was a customer as well and frankly, I was dissatisfied with the service because Cuz he just wanted to go out and glad hand people and be on the speaking circuit and all this kind of stuff, right? And who is the person that actually sits at their desk and does the work anymore? It is amazing to me how this has just transformed our world in a bad way, by the way, you know, in a sad way. You see it all over the place, just start thinking about it and being conscious of it. In the Bob Seger song he says, You know, I feel like a a number you know, I feel like just another spoken of a great big wheel like a tiny blade of grass on a great big field to workers. I’m just another drone to Marbella. I’m just another phone. I’m just another statistic on a sheet to teachers. I’m just another child to the IRS. I’m just another file. I’m just another census on the street. This is the kind of sad service we are facing in today’s culture where Guru if you will. And listen, I can make fun of this industry because I am one to some extent. The Guru will go out and glad hand everybody the Rainmaker, bring in the business, they’ll sign you up on their subscription program. They’ll never let you out of their subscription program, even if you try to cancel a million times. And then they’ll hand you off to these really poorly qualified, Super Junior people, maybe even people in foreign countries, many times, and it’s just mind boggling to me that I really wonder who actually does the work anymore? Does anybody sit at a desk and actually do technical work? We were talking about CPAs. We were talking about lawyers. We were talking about all of this and how it is just evaporating. You know, where everybody’s just out in the public right there on social media. They’re, you know, doing all these like public facing things. And they think that you can hand these people that put their trust in you to these minimum wage people that just know nothing about it that read scripts. It is disgusting. It’s almost as bad as leaf blowers. And let me tell you, leaf blowers should be considered a tool of terrorism. Okay, but that’s another topic another rant for another day tangent alert. But be mindful of that when someone wants to sign you up for their Uber expensive coaching program and then put you on a subscription and hand you off to these really just script readers. One of the best weird compliments I got from Gary Pinkerton, who you heard on the show before, he’s a longtime client of ours. He said to me one day, and by the way, he was talking about that, that attorney, I was just mentioning, and accounting firm this person was in both businesses is legal and accounting. And he said Jason The one thing I love about you and your company, is you have resisted the temptation to get big. And I thought, Hmm, I don’t know if I should feel good about that compliment. It’s kind of a backhanded compliment, in a way. Okay, so I’m small. And that’s what’s good. He said, Yeah, you know, you have actual high quality people that do work for you. And they’re highly paid high quality people and they know what they’re doing. It’s not a bunch of script readers and order takers and fulfillment people, you know, these are like, actual professionals. And it’s just amazing to me how the technician, the Craftsman has just disappeared from society. It is just notice this, I want you to notice this. You may have never thought about it before. But now that I’ve mentioned it, I want you to think about it. I want you to think about it. For those of you who bought livestream tickets, we had a little bit of a problem here with The replay of the live stream the live stream seems to have worked fine throughout the event last weekend. But a little bit of an issue with the replay. And we are getting that fixed. I think it’ll be fixed by the end of the day today, or tomorrow, if not, by the end of the day today. So stay tuned on that your investment counselor will reach out to you directly. But just wanted to mention here too. We got a couple of fun things coming up, folks. You know, I want you to plan on spending all your vacations with me and my team. So the next thing in May, we’re going to Savannah, Georgia, with the venture Alliance. If you’re not a member, you can come as a guest one time guests, and we are going to center that venture Alliance retreat weekend in Savannah, Georgia, around the subject of tax lien and tax deed investing. I have a good friend who is an expert and she has agreed to come in and speak to the group. We’ll do our normal stuff too, but there’s always kind of a focus of the event and that’ll be the focus for May Before I skip to the next event going in chronological order here, there probably will be another event announced in here maybe a property tour or something. Not sure yet, but we don’t have that on the calendar. So let’s move all the way up to November 6, November 6 of this this year, where we already have our first registrant for our Cuba and Grand Cayman cruise on Holland America lines. That’s going to be awesome. That’s the best ship that does that cruise so far as I can tell, that is coming up November sixth go to Jason hartman.com slash crews to see our two crews events or two at sea events coming up. Then the next one is meet the masters at sea which I hope to do we’ll see if we can pull that off. If we get enough people who will register that’ll be next March. So check those out. Jason Hartman comm slash cruise and hopefully you like cruising as much as I do. I Absolutely love cruising, I love going one place and not unpacking again for a week. It’s just the best way to travel ever invented. And it’s great. You know, the other thing is one of the things that I would really love to do at our various conferences that we hold every year, I would love to be more relaxed and spend more quality time with you. Because it would just be awesome. That’s what I do with the venture Alliance. I do a much better job of that there. Because it’s not as crazy as an event like meet the masters. And I think I’m going to be able to pull that off on week long cruises where you know, we have some learning sessions and then we just relax and have a good time and go on excursions and do special things like that. So I’m really excited about this new focus on cruising, and I hope you’re just as excited as I am. We announced that last weekend that meet the master So Jason Hartman, calm slash cruise, check it out. And by the way, you will love our prices they are It’s really good, extremely reasonable. Actually, they’re better than reasonable. They’re a bargain. So check it out. Okay, without further ado, let’s talk about the new power.
Jason Hartman 11:22
It’s my pleasure to welcome Jeremy hymens. He’s the co founder and CEO of purpose, a global organization headquartered in New York City that builds and supports movements for a more open just and habitable world. He is the best selling author of the new power, how power works in our hyper connected world, and how to make it work for you. Purpose has advised organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google and UNICEF. He is co founder of get up in Australia and political organization with more members than all of Australia’s political parties combined. His book is very interesting. I either read or listen to it. I can’t remember several months back and wanted to get him on the show. So Jeremy, welcome. How are you?
Jeremy Heimans 12:07
It’s great to be here. Good.
Jason Hartman 12:09
So the new power. This is interesting. And I think it’s timely. Given the world in which we live, everybody’s so connected. What in a nutshell, is the new power? What is the what is the thesis of that?
Jeremy Heimans 12:22
New Power is really a method of the mindset that thinking about power differently, right? So Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher define power as the ability to produce intended effect. So really how you get things done in the world, and our argument is that there’s a new way to do that. So let me give you a simple example, the difference between what we call old power and new power so for all power, think of Harvey Weinstein, right. So how did Harvey Weinstein for 14 years in Hollywood managed to kind of rule the roost, despite the fact that he was committing this spree of abuses that was really an open secret And now he did that because he wielded own power. He lived in power as currency, he understood that if he hoarded that power out and spent it to punish his enemies to reward his friends that he could maintain that position. Now, you think about the me to movement, which of course was an important part of the demise of Harvey Weinstein. And you see very different dynamics at work. So we think the me to movement is an example of new power. Now new power is less power as currency and mobile power as current. So it’s a surge of energy that gets stronger, the more people participate. And if you’re trying to harness new power, you know, you can’t hold it up and make it your own. The way that Harvey Weinstein used all power, you have to learn how to channel its energy to shape it without being able to fully control it. It doesn’t go pal that changes as it moves. And that’s also a very different thing.
Jason Hartman 13:52
Right? Right. So new power doesn’t have a leader or a typical hierarchical structure does it
Jeremy Heimans 13:59
right. So the forms of new power that we talk about, depending on on how pure the manifestation is, can often not be leaderless, but being leader full. So you think about a movement like me too. And you know, you can’t knock on the door of me to and say, you know, I’d like to speak to the head of me to centralize Yeah, yes. But there are many leaders. Yeah. And those leaders emerge and, and exercise all different forms of authority, shaping the norms that these crowds, but what we argue is it’s just a very different skill leading a crowd than leading the people on your payroll. And there’s a set of skills associated with leading crowds that everybody needs to learn in the 21st century.
Jason Hartman 14:37
Sure, sure. Okay. Very interesting. So would it be fair to say that, you know, new power kind of depends if it’s going to be a big new power, a big movement, if you will? It depends on virality. It depends on an idea that somehow kindled that spark that turns into a fire, right.
Jeremy Heimans 14:57
Exactly. No, I mean, it is about things that That spread sideways. And it’s a very different mindset. So most organizations and most leaders are kind of steeped in an old mindset, which is, you know, you drop your ideas down on people. And that’s how you communicate. But really now the things that are spreading better and worse I will things that I carried forward posts into person that are kind of allowed to change and metastasize as they move. And so you know, that can be both very positive and very negative. So you think about a very negative manifestation of that. You think about ISIS, the way the ideology of ISIS spreads is person to person, right? It is an idea that is dropped down from Central Command. And it kind of adapts itself to the different audiences and geographies that that ideology moves. And that’s how it should have been fixed people who didn’t get radicalized the same way. I mean,
Jason Hartman 15:50
you know, you could easily say al Qaeda was kind of that way too, right. Al Qaeda didn’t really have, you know, it had cells it didn’t have like, here’s the commander And you know, everybody, you know, it’s not even have a general for that army, right? You had a bunch of cells and they were, you know, autonomous, right?
Jeremy Heimans 16:08
Well, that’s right. And I think there’s a difference between Qaeda and ISIS. They both had that kind of decentralized organizational structure. But ISIS added this element of really the ideology, the ideas, the memes, those horrific visuals that was very much transmitted by early person to person as well, which is why you got the individuals who are radicalized and acted on their own, but but nonetheless, under the broader umbrella of this idea that the Islamic State represented. So it was, in many ways, even more kind of new power and its mindset and methods that I’ve kind of even though both, of course, were advocating for this medieval theocracy, basically. Yeah, right. It’s a funny irony.
Jason Hartman 16:51
You know that that’s a very good point. It is a total irony, right? They had this right, they had this sort of modern power distribution network. That was very contemporary yet they’re, they’re advocating for this really oppressive. Right? That’s totally weird. Yeah, talk about I read
Jeremy Heimans 17:09
is that it’s actually kind of you see that a lot. You see, some of the most authoritarian players in the world today are actually using a new power sort of toolbox to spread their ideas. And that combination is quite dangerous. We call them in the book, the CO opted was a sort of CO opting this energy in ways that said, Okay, so someone is listening, and they want to start a movement of some sort. How do they do it? What are the skill sets, they need to do it? They’re very different than the old fashioned thinking, right? So there’s some skills you need the movement building, and I think the first lesson that we always offer people is it’s not a movement unless it moves without you. So the idea that you can sort of declare you’re starting a movement and it’s all about you, and it’s all about your brand and the millions of people are going to follow behind you is not realistic. Core strategic. So you have to think about movements in terms of things that people can really aren’t, they can have a sense of agency around. And that can move with that. You also need to find what we call your connected connectors. These are people who are connected to each other and connected to the world. So the company I run, it’s called purpose. We do movement building around the world. And we’re involved with starting a movement on gun safety with Michael Bloomberg called every town that connected connectors, that movement, we’re moms, they were moms who started around the country protesting the NRA and protesting, you know, the sort of the lack of gun safety in the country. They formed a network where they were connected to each other. But as moms, they had incredible power as messengers. So they were connected to the world. And they help to spread that idea to a much larger group of people than just the original moms that formed the nucleus of that movement. Okay, okay. So how do you know who these connected connectors are? I mean, I think identifying them is pretty hard, right? Like everybody wants to get some lucky break from an influencer for whatever it is they want to sell or promote or, you know, whatever they want to do, right? But that isn’t like one influencer. It’s a bunch of moms. And you’re that example. How do you know which mom? I mean, there’s a large portion of the world is is moms right? How do you know which ones to go to? Well, I’m you have to be very careful in your observation, right? So a lot of it is is not something where you form a top down strategy. And you say, Well, sort of inductively we can imagine that these are the people who are going to be most active, you have to look and see where the energy is, and then you have to cultivate it. What’s interesting about the NRA, the the arch rival of those moms, is the NRA are actually very good at doing this. So they have a whole ecosystem of passionate gun rights people, and they don’t really get in the way of those people that don’t try to say, well, you have to, you know, this is the official message, carry the message. What they actually do is They scan the landscape and they see where some initiative is getting heat. And then they come in and they pour energy and resources on when they see that bubbling up by amplify at that moment. So there’s a skill set involved in getting out of people’s way, looking to see where that community is bubbling up, and then adding some of what we might think of as old power to kind of get something over the line.
Jason Hartman 20:25
Okay. Do you have any more examples other than the moms? I mean, you started with like, me, too. That was interesting what you said there. But if you could just give a few more examples, because I know I’m kind of struggling with this. Like, I think other people might be too, because that’s a huge part of it, right is in that initial kind of core group that you know, becomes interested in the cause. Right?
Jeremy Heimans 20:49
Right. So cultivating those people requires giving them a degree of trust and faith. That may feel anathema to Many organizations and leaders, I’ll make a contrast between two businesses that I think do this very differently. So we talked about this. So Uber has a kind of acrimonious and mistrustful relationship with its drivers.
Jason Hartman 21:14
And its and its passengers. And Uber is a boy.
Jeremy Heimans 21:20
Sure, his testimony, right. So basically, Uber doesn’t want its drivers to network with each other or talk to each other refuses to allow that contact, because it’s afraid that its drivers will turn against it will unionize. Some of them are doing now. There was a moment, a few years back where Uber announced a price drop, which of course can fall straight to the driver gets less money. And they just dropped this news on a Friday and they say, Well, there you go, Suck it, lift, have to do the same thing because when your competitor does it, you have to match the price. But they did this whole thing where they actually engage the drivers around Okay, we have to do this, but one of the ways we can make up words One of the benefits we can provide one of the ways we as a community can make this better. And so they created a collaborative process. So while Uber drivers were picketing it lift drivers were having pics that were encouraged by company. So this is just two very different ways to treat a community. I’m thinking that we argue what we really break down in the book is like, here are the skills of building that kind of faith and trust with your community, no matter who that community is,
Jason Hartman 22:27
any of those you want to share, like any of those skills, or did you already share them and what you said, thinking about it, you know, it’s not hierarchical, you know, you don’t have control of your brand, you know, thinking about a different reward those the skills that you’re talking about, or was there something else?
Jeremy Heimans 22:42
Well, I think there’s a whole bunch, right. So how does the leader of platform in this case something I clip, what signals are they sending to their community, that it’s okay to participate? Because the signals really matter. You have to create an environment where people feel like they have enough power that you can actually Please speak up and your voice will be taken seriously. So there’s a piece of work around signaling is a piece of work around what we call structuring, what are the structures you put in place to make that participation work? So in this case, it was how are these drivers going to get together and work together to develop solutions in response to this price drop one of the structures in which they’re going to coordinate they’re going to idi? And how are we going to then respond to those ideas in a meaningful way. And finally, there has to be something that we call shaping going on. And shaping is really where you want people within the community to start acting like leaders, right? So the shapers have become the kind of Guardians of the norms and values of the community. So what you’d want to see as some drivers emerge as the champions within the community, who actually have fitting norms for the community, not lift the company. And so unless they shape his image, it’s hard to sustain this kind of new power. So and most effective online communities you see shape has emerged. You think about it. platform like Wikipedia, and those most active editors, they’re not just involved with editing those pages. They’re really setting the norms about what kind of platform we can pay the Rins and how people should behave on that platform.
Jason Hartman 24:13
Hmm, very interesting. Very interesting. You know, I’m curious, what kind of developed your thinking on the new power, you know, maybe some of the books you read or some of the, the thought leaders you follow to sort of, you know, help you germinate these thoughts, because they’re, it’s very interesting take, you know, I would think that like Malcolm Gladwell tipping point would be one of them, maybe some Seth Godin books. I have no idea just it’s interesting to ask a musician, you know, What music do you like?
Jeremy Heimans 24:42
No, no, absolutely. Well, look, I mean, goes it I could debate that we side at the end of the book that we really admire. He’s done a lot of really interesting thinking. It’s everything’s Yokai Benkler, he’s at Harvard and Yokai is one of the leading scholars of networks and have had That applies to commerce and culture. He wrote a book in 2006 called the wealth of networks, which has influenced us a great deal. And it talks about sort of production. So what are these platforms where people are voluntarily producing things within a platform and creating economic value by doing it platforms like Kickstarter, etc? What are the dynamics within those platforms? And then, you know, what are the risks of those platforms get co opted by others. And, you know, what we’ve seen really, in the last kind of 10 years, is a lot of concentration of power. Even when initially we thought that many of these trends were going to decentralize power. So one of the distinctions that we often make is more participation does not necessarily mean that power is more decentralized. And that’s a really important distinction to understand.
Jason Hartman 25:46
Okay, very, very interesting. And it seems like it has to be a topic area that affects a lot of people. Otherwise, you know, can you do this in a small way? I mean, when you look at movements, anything that you Chair study, the business example. Those are two giant companies. You know, the other movement example Me too, right? You know, that’s a big movement affects potentially half the adult population. Can it be done in a smaller way? Like, I mean, you know, any thoughts about it just in a community or an interest group? I mean, you know, we live in this world of long tail, and there are so many very niche oriented groups and interests in the world nowadays. And the internet’s all enable that, of course, can it be done in smaller waves? Yeah, look, I mean, the book describes many examples that are very small scale. This doesn’t just apply to big phenomenon. When we were writing a book we thought often about an imaginary dentist, right? a dentist whose job it is to get his patients to improve their health practices, right, the oral health.
Jeremy Heimans 26:51
Well, in order to do that what she or he needs to do is have the patient’s themselves peer to peer spread that message Because the brochure in the waiting room, as we all know, does not get enough people to floss. And so there these techniques are relevant to anyone who is building a community, or anyone who is leading, for example, a team of people in an organization who needs to change the power dynamics within that team and those organization and anglish, the agency of the people that you serve, or that you manage or that you lead. And this is, I think, also very relevant to small businesses. We tell the story of lots of small businesses and entrepreneurs who have used these techniques and created much larger businesses. There’s a story of a group of guys from Scotland, who created a beer brand called brewdog. So they basically create this brand, which is craft beer, and associated pubs. And they build the crowd into the entire model. So they they raise money for the brand through crowd equity. They called the people who’ve given them that money equity punks. They involve the equity punks in the manufacturing of To be in the design of the the labels in the marketing, and then they have a big annual meeting where all of these effectively the shareholders come together for a huge party. That’s also an exercise in collaboration and community building. So it’s sort of an example of an end to end model that has scaled enormously that now a very valuable company in the UK. But using that mindset, right, we actually care about who these people are, you actually want to give them a role. Their role is more than just consume. Their role is participate. For businesses. That’s a really different mindset. But it can be very liberating. It can be very powerful when you do it. Well.
Jason Hartman 28:38
Sure. Yeah. Very interesting. You know, so be collaborative, be engaged, be social. How much equity do those punks have usually is it like a little sort of Kickstarter kind of campaign concept where people can put in 25 bucks Well, that’s not we don’t get equity on Kickstarter, but you know what I mean or significant equity. shareholders with, you know, minimum investment of 2550 grand
Jeremy Heimans 29:03
more than for my small contribution. So I think I can’t remember the exact number from my head with brewdog. But you could buy into brewdog for you know, 100 bucks, something like that, that order magnitude. So basically, you got to stay. Now remember that this the behavioral economics of this is that when you buy in even at a small level, you feel a far greater sense of connection and ownership. And that that thing gets in doubt and built upon. So what they did is they took people who might have given them $100, and they really made them feel connected to the company. And then those people became the marketers, but also they were the brain structure the company, and that is a really interesting model when you can get it right.
Jason Hartman 29:43
Very interesting. Very interesting. Okay, what else do you want to share about the new power before we wrap it up to give
Jeremy Heimans 29:49
folks a little bit of a sense of the material we cover in the book, you know, we talk about the workplace and how this plays out in a workplace context, where you’ve got this collision. of people with new power values, operating within very old power structures. I think we do some really interesting thinking around Well, what what does it look like to manage in a new power world? How do you manage beyond your payroll? How do you handle the sort of crowds that are often at your gate? When these new power movements arrive? We talk a lot about the transition from old to new power, like how do you know when to use new power? Right? When do you turn to the crowd? And when Is that likely to backfire? And how do you roll out these kinds of new power experiments within a within a more traditional structure? So that’s sort of some of the train we cover. We talk a lot about movement building and spreading ideas, which we’ve already covered, I think quite well in today’s conversation.
Jason Hartman 30:39
Yeah, very interesting.
Jeremy Heimans 30:40
give out your website. You can learn more about the book at this is new power.com. And the book is available around the world. It’s now in many, many countries in many languages. So depending on where you’re listening, you can you can find it by the website and all of those places.
Jason Hartman 30:55
Jeremy, thank you so much for joining us.
Jeremy Heimans 30:57
It’s a pleasure although this
Jason Hartman 31:00
Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don’t miss any episodes. Be sure to check out the show’s specific website and our general website heart and Mediacom for appropriate disclaimers and Terms of Service. Remember that guest opinions are their own. And if you require specific legal or tax advice, or advice and any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. And we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to iTunes or Stitcher Radio or whatever platform you’re using and write a review for the show we would very much appreciate that. And be sure to make it official and subscribe so you do not miss any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.