Ian Bremmer

they're giving you the most valuable thing they have, which is their time.

It can be 20 minutes.

It can be an hour.

But the fact that they're giving you that needs to be understood and respected by you in that meeting so that you're already in a deficit when you enter the meeting and you need to be providing value in return for what they've given you.

And so the first thing is, do they find you someone that is useful to engage with?

Secondly, I think it's important that they don't really see that I have a driving political or commercial agenda.

I'm not doing comms work or lobbying work for an organization.

And I'm really trying to understand the world.

And that's something that a lot of these leaders, they love the macro, they love the big picture conversations, but they don't actually have much time for it because they spend so much of their time on very high stakes,

very, very specific short-term decisions, many of which are domestic and political, many of which are international, but they're not where the world is going.

They're not what my legacy is and how I fit my country, my company, my organization into a radically changing planet.

So it is a content set and a topic set that they like.

So those are a couple of things starting off.

And then I've also, I've been writing my own little weekly update that goes to those leaders for 28 years now.

And yeah, if they're reading it carefully, they will occasionally find things that certainly reflect

or are informed by conversations that we've had, but never in a way that would bring it back directly to that person, not by quoting them, not by saying something that could only come from that conversation, not at all.

it's kind of like when you have a clearance, like you have a top secret clearance and suddenly you get a whole bunch of information, all of which is almost like 99% of which is in the public sector.

But suddenly the fact that you know that that is what the real actor collecting the intelligence knows means you can go back, find it in the public sector, and now it is a filter that is extraordinarily valuable knowledge.

The same thing is true for conversations with people that are decision makers.

for these global issues.