#60 - YC Demo Day Startups #2, Importing Foreign Innovations & Collaborative Copywriting

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, everyone, we have Jordan Harbinger on, and I'm going to tell you why. So we get a lot of people asking us questions on how to do different things that we talk about in the podcast, and that's great.
And we do the same thing, Shaan and I. And one of the folks we turn to on a regular basis, I'm texting him all the time, is Jordan Harbinger. So Jordan, he's had podcasts for 13 years now. He's been in the top 100 for almost that entire time. And he's got a great pod called The Jordan Harbinger Show where he talks about social engineering.
In particular, he teaches Navy SEALs how to do social engineering. He teaches intelligence agencies, special operations. It's incredibly fascinating. He dives deep with his guests to learn how they think, why they think, and it's really, really, really fascinating. And it's something that I've been listening to for years. But he has one episode that's incredibly fascinating to me. And that's about the guy from Catch Me If You Can, Frank Abagnale. Is that his name, Jordan?

**Jordan Harbinger** (0:49)
Yeah, Frank Abagnale. He's a fascinating character. He came on the show and we spent a long time talking about the psychology behind how he was able to trick so many people. So to refresh people's memory, he posed as an airline pilot, which is kind of terrifying, a doctor and an attorney. All of these are pretty specialized. Look, if you're just pretending to know how to stock shelves at a grocery store, that is something where somebody who does that for a living could probably catch you, but a normal person might not have any idea. Now, when you're pretending to be a doctor, the stakes are pretty high, man.
Law kind of trickier to pass the bar exam, that kind of thing. So, the airline pilot, of course, is the really takes the cake.
He did this all in his 20s, and we spent a ton of time on the Jordan Harbinger Show discussing and dissecting the concepts behind why people believed him. These same concepts work even now. He's told us that it's actually easier now for fraud, scams, con men to operate than it was back then. Because you'd think, oh, now we have computers, we can verify everything. Back then, they didn't have that. The communication took longer.
Now, though, people trust the machines too much. So you can trick people and you can trick machines. Things just got even more complicated. And that's what he does now, is teaches law enforcement, FBI, and citizens like you and I how to avoid common scams and fraud, all of course, while dissecting the psychology behind it. So I loved this episode. It's one of my favorites.

**Sam Parr** (2:15)
I remember watching this movie years ago, and then I immediately read the book.
And I was fascinated. I'm a schemer. And I like building businesses and just like what I call scheming. I like doing things. And whenever you see someone doing something like this, I mean, they romanticized it and made it sound like, like it was kind of cool to go and become a pilot. And so he got to use it a little bit for evil. But what are some techniques and tactics and strategies that he used to persuade people that you think people now should capitalize on?

**Jordan Harbinger** (2:44)
So something that he used that I actually, to a certain degree, also used in my 20s, is the element of fear, and now, look, I don't mean you're scaring people and pulling guns on them and making them freak out, but for example, I used to talk my way into concerts before I could afford to go to them.
And the way that I did that was I would show up and say, hey, I am from this magazine, from this German website or whatever. And people would say like, well, I don't have anything on, I have no reservation for you.
And I would say, oh, well, that's okay. What's your name? Juliana, okay, I just wanna make sure because I'm gonna go home, go back to my hotel and get some rest, but I don't wanna get in trouble from my editor. So I'm just gonna be like, yeah, Juliana didn't have my reservation on her sheet. And she'd go, hold on a second because nobody wants their name pinned to a failure in a business. So she'd go get her manager, I'd give him the same spiel, and then the guy would go, you know what, he's doing the calculation in his head, right? He's going, either I don't let this person in and possibly the owner gets mad at me because this media guy came from Germany and was supposed to be doing this thing and it didn't happen, or I just let him in and it's no skin off my nose. So they can do the calculation in their head. Now, an amateur person will try to explain and force you to do that calculation by explaining it to you and being explicit. If you can get people to think it's their idea and that's how they solve the problem, then that's the security hole, right? It's kind of like sales, except for you're trying to unsell them on a certain idea and then you get them to push the issue forward. Now, that's simplification, but that's essentially what he did in many ways in order to pose as a doctor, a lawyer, and an airline pilot. He learned jargon so that he sounded more believable and we can find we can do the same thing. If you know how to talk in the language of the target, you are going to have a huge advantage in terms of being believed.