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00:01:34.600 | Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading

00:01:44.480 | your life, money, and travel all while spending less and saving more.

00:01:48.280 | I'm your host, Chris Hutchins, and I am excited to have you here.

00:01:51.480 | Okay.

00:01:52.480 | So today I'm talking to Sunil Gupta.

00:01:55.440 | He's the bestselling author of Backable, a really amazing book about the

00:01:59.320 | surprising truth behind what makes people take a chance on you.

00:02:02.520 | He is also the founding CEO of the nutrition coaching app Rise, which was

00:02:07.440 | named App of the Year by Apple before selling to One Medical.

00:02:10.920 | He later ran for U.S.

00:02:12.640 | Congress, served on the faculty at Harvard, and is currently an emissary for

00:02:17.840 | gross national happiness between the United States and the kingdom of Bhutan.

00:02:21.720 | I'm not even sure what that means, but it sounds pretty cool.

00:02:24.840 | And in this conversation, we'll dig into his background and the research

00:02:28.800 | that uncovered seven surprising changes that course corrected his life and

00:02:33.480 | his career by letting him go from being embarrassed to speak inside team

00:02:37.440 | meetings to confidently pitching ideas inside the offices of people

00:02:41.600 | like Michelle Obama and Tim Cook.

00:02:43.440 | We'll learn what it takes to have a seemingly mysterious superpower that

00:02:48.200 | lies at the intersection of creativity and persuasion, something

00:02:51.560 | he calls becoming backable.

00:02:53.200 | Why is this important?

00:02:55.080 | Because we all have a brilliant idea tucked away somewhere.

00:02:57.880 | Yet most of us are afraid to share it and have it be dismissed.

00:03:01.400 | So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Sunil Gupta.

00:03:04.640 | Sunil, thank you for being here.

00:03:08.600 | Chris, it's great to be here.

00:03:10.440 | Thanks so much for having me.

00:03:11.360 | Yeah, I want to start with a fun story.

00:03:14.000 | I don't know if I've ever shared this with you, but back in 2009, I also had

00:03:19.400 | my own face of failure story.

00:03:21.520 | And I got laid off and I started a conference called Laid Off Camp.

00:03:25.200 | So I was doing everything I could to promote this conference.

00:03:28.760 | I was just hoping that someone would write about it.

00:03:31.360 | People would learn about it.

00:03:32.720 | And I kept striking out.

00:03:33.920 | And so one day I got this email from a reporter who asked if I

00:03:38.280 | could participate in a story.

00:03:39.520 | And I was so excited.

00:03:40.600 | After the interview, I called a friend of mine who knew everyone in tech.

00:03:44.080 | And I said, "Hey, this reporter from TechCrunch reached out to me.

00:03:46.840 | I did this story.

00:03:48.080 | I'm so excited."

00:03:49.040 | And he was like, "Who was it?"

00:03:50.760 | I talked to him and he goes, "Yeah, that person doesn't work at TechCrunch."

00:03:53.600 | I was like, "What do you mean?"

00:03:54.520 | We searched online.

00:03:56.160 | There wasn't ever a story that had been written by this person.

00:03:58.920 | And we concluded that I got totally punked.

00:04:01.040 | So my excitement was like, turned south.

00:04:04.600 | And the next morning, a story actually came out on TechCrunch, written by Lena

00:04:09.840 | Rao, who also happens to be your wife.

00:04:12.200 | So that's my connection to your family from way back and my story

00:04:17.240 | of kind of recovering from failure.

00:04:20.240 | This interview has already started out at a very, very meta level.

00:04:24.240 | It's unbelievable.

00:04:25.360 | Yes.

00:04:25.840 | I mean, I love that story.

00:04:28.640 | And I think my failure story is that I was out there pitching my company Rise.

00:04:35.160 | I was getting rejected by every investor that ever took a meeting with me.

00:04:39.680 | And, you know, I'd started a couple of companies before that, too,

00:04:42.960 | that didn't do all that well.

00:04:45.200 | And then I joined Groupon, which had a little bit of a moment and

00:04:48.760 | then sort of crashed, as we know.

00:04:51.280 | It lost 80% of its market value within a few months.

00:04:54.120 | And so I get a phone call one day from a conference organizer.

00:04:58.360 | And she's like, "Hey, would you like to be a keynote speaker at this conference?"

00:05:02.360 | And I said, "That sounds wonderful.

00:05:04.640 | What's the name of the conference?"

00:05:05.760 | And she says, "FailCon," which stands for failure conference.

00:05:09.680 | And so I'm literally asked to be a keynote speaker for a conference on

00:05:14.080 | failure, and I do it, and I didn't realize that there was a reporter from

00:05:17.880 | the New York Times in the audience.

00:05:19.400 | And fast forward to this full-length article on failure with my face as

00:05:27.080 | the cover of this article, and I don't know what happened with that TechCrunch

00:05:30.920 | article that Lena wrote, but for this, I mean, Chris, it was crazy how viral it went.

00:05:36.640 | And this was like early 2014.

00:05:38.920 | And I think failure, like the idea of failure was just starting

00:05:42.920 | to come into the zeitgeist.

00:05:43.880 | We were talking about it a lot more, especially in places like Silicon Valley.

00:05:47.560 | And so there was a moment where literally you could have Googled the

00:05:51.560 | word "failure" and my face would have been one of your very top search results.

00:05:56.440 | I have to imagine that was, that's not like the moment you want.

00:06:00.640 | Like if you could dictate what your search results are,

00:06:03.360 | that's probably not the ideal one.

00:06:04.960 | How did that evolve to a place where you're now, you ran for Congress, you

00:06:10.600 | wrote a book about becoming backable?

00:06:12.400 | Yeah.

00:06:12.800 | You know, a good friend of mine gave me a piece of advice and I'll never forget it.

00:06:17.080 | And this is going to sound very sort of Buddhism focused, but, you know, the

00:06:20.920 | parable that he shared with me is that when you feel pain in life, you feel

00:06:25.440 | embarrassment, there are two arrows that are fired.

00:06:28.440 | One is the arrow that punctures your skin, right?

00:06:31.400 | It's the, it's the arrow that actually causes you the pain.

00:06:33.840 | And, and there's not much you can really do about that arrow.

00:06:36.520 | But the second arrow is, is, is the meaning that you ascribe to that pain, right?

00:06:42.560 | What do you actually do with it?

00:06:44.360 | And for me, you know, I was, I was embarrassed by, by all this and I, and

00:06:48.360 | yeah, I thought to myself, gosh, I've spent all this time trying to establish

00:06:52.520 | myself as this sort of face of success.

00:06:55.400 | And now every time somebody Googles my name, failure, a list of my failures

00:07:00.000 | is going to be the first thing they see.

00:07:01.720 | But you know, what I decided to do with it as I started reaching out to all of

00:07:05.880 | these people who I admired from celebrity chefs to Oscar winning filmmakers to

00:07:12.480 | leaders of big iconic companies.

00:07:14.240 | And I would, I would basically write an email, Hey, as you can see from this

00:07:17.240 | link, from this article, I have no idea what I'm doing, but would you be willing

00:07:21.680 | to grab some time with me?

00:07:23.400 | Would you be willing to give me some advice?

00:07:24.800 | And I was just astonished by how many people said, yes, I will, I will spend

00:07:31.440 | some time with you.

00:07:32.240 | And I was also astonished by, I think people's willingness to talk about their

00:07:37.280 | failure, especially in these private conversations, because when you look at

00:07:41.080 | their bio, you look at their LinkedIn, you're not, you're not seeing that side

00:07:45.160 | of the story.

00:07:45.760 | You're not seeing all the misses.

00:07:47.040 | You're just seeing all the wins.

00:07:48.400 | And so a couple of things really occurred to me during that conversation.

00:07:52.800 | Number one, we don't rewind the clock enough and see how failure wasn't

00:07:58.520 | necessarily the opposite of success, but failure was a pathway to success for most

00:08:03.920 | of the people that we find to be successful.

00:08:06.680 | But the second thing is that people who change things, they didn't just learn how

00:08:12.040 | to cultivate a new idea.

00:08:14.000 | They learned how to sell a new idea.

00:08:16.320 | They learned how to make themselves backable.

00:08:18.960 | And that was a key thing that continued to come up over and over again, because

00:08:23.040 | you can have a brilliant idea and you can still be dismissed, right?

00:08:27.680 | That happens all of the time.

00:08:29.320 | And sometimes the paradox, the trick of it is that sometimes the more unique your

00:08:33.880 | idea, the less obvious it is, sometimes the harder it is to get people to buy in.

00:08:39.000 | And so it puts us in a bit of a weird situation, especially if you are somebody

00:08:43.120 | who's trying to create change.

00:08:44.360 | And that can be as an entrepreneur, that can be inside your own company, which is

00:08:47.600 | that oftentimes we are striving to do things that are different, right?

00:08:52.320 | I haven't talked to a single CEO of a company who isn't like, we want to be

00:08:55.360 | doing things differently.

00:08:56.280 | We want to shake things up, but we rely on different.

00:08:58.720 | We need things to be different.

00:08:59.720 | And yet different ideas are also the hardest to sell.

00:09:03.720 | And so you have to, in some ways, again, not just learn how to come up with these

00:09:08.360 | kernels that are going to change things, but you also need to learn how to get

00:09:11.640 | people to buy into those things.

00:09:13.160 | And you mentioned a couple examples of people with ideas, entrepreneurs, you and

00:09:18.680 | I have both been on both sides of that table as investors, as founders, but it

00:09:23.320 | came to me that this isn't just about learning how to get people to back your

00:09:28.240 | startup with dollars, that this could really have lessons outside of that,

00:09:32.920 | which apply to anyone.

00:09:34.000 | I completely agree.

00:09:35.280 | You know, I mean, you know, you and I both are fathers now.

00:09:39.120 | And I think about sort of what am I telling my kids based on my experience?

00:09:43.720 | What am I trying to share with them?

00:09:45.120 | And what's the outlook that I want them to have?

00:09:47.200 | And I have two daughters.

00:09:48.160 | And oftentimes we say to our kids, you can do anything you want, right?

00:09:52.200 | That's like the thing that a parent will sometimes say.

00:09:55.040 | And I, and I've catch myself sometimes saying that, but I feel like I, knowing

00:10:01.000 | what I know now, I feel like I need to be more nuanced about it.

00:10:03.720 | It's not, you can do anything you want.

00:10:05.840 | It's, you can do anything you want, but remember that no one ever does it alone.

00:10:10.240 | Right?

00:10:11.360 | No, no, no successful product, project, political movement, career trajectory

00:10:18.080 | that was successful ever happened through one person just saying, I'm going to go

00:10:22.160 | do that and doing it alone.

00:10:23.920 | It was always the people along the way that invested in you, that hired you, that

00:10:28.800 | took a chance on you in some way, shape or form.

00:10:31.040 | And yeah, that could be an investor for your startup, but it could be a hiring

00:10:34.520 | manager who says, you don't meet all the qualifications of this role, but I, but I

00:10:38.720 | like your energy and I'm going to take a chance on you.

00:10:40.920 | It could even be friends and family, no matter what we're trying to do.

00:10:44.000 | And in our communities and our careers and our companies, we always need to have

00:10:48.600 | those people taking a leap of faith on us.

00:10:50.360 | And so how do you do that?

00:10:52.720 | Yeah, that's awesome.

00:10:54.040 | And if you think about people who just have jobs, they're not looking to get a

00:10:58.040 | new job.

00:10:58.560 | Are there some examples of how you can use these kind of back ability traits

00:11:03.520 | to get things done at work?

00:11:04.960 | Yeah, no, absolutely.

00:11:07.080 | I mean, I know you had a Tim Ferriss on the show a few weeks ago, and one of the

00:11:10.920 | most important things that I think sort of surfaced in the book was, was what I

00:11:14.880 | call casting a central character, casting a central character.

00:11:18.080 | And the way that this came up for me was when I was, when I was actually pitching

00:11:22.120 | my idea, though, I think that this is, this is something that can be, you know,

00:11:24.880 | used inside companies as well.

00:11:26.360 | But I was pitching Tim on my startup Rise, and what Rise did was one-on-one

00:11:30.960 | nutrition coaching.

00:11:31.840 | And I had all of the sort of, I had the classic like Silicon Valley pitch deck,

00:11:37.640 | right?

00:11:37.880 | It was like all the numbers, all the sort of trend lines, you know, I talked about

00:11:42.600 | the rising rates of obesity and hypertension and diabetes and, and how big

00:11:47.040 | this market was going to be.

00:11:48.560 | And then literally during like Q&A, Tim and I started talking, and the story of

00:11:54.040 | my father came up.

00:11:55.400 | And the story of my father is that when my dad was in his early 40s, he had, he

00:12:00.800 | had a triple bypass surgery, emergency.

00:12:02.880 | He was rushed to the hospital.

00:12:04.240 | He, he almost lost his life.

00:12:05.680 | I mean, it was, it was, it was a really close call.

00:12:07.720 | And what I remembered most about the experience and what I was sharing with

00:12:11.280 | Tim was that when we went to go pick him up and, and brought him home, they had

00:12:17.160 | given us a folder of paperwork.

00:12:18.840 | And I remember sitting in the backseat of the car, I was nine years old, and I'm

00:12:21.840 | flipping through this paperwork.

00:12:23.040 | And one of the pieces of paper was how to eat, right?

00:12:26.680 | And then it had things like eat broccoli, eat Brussels sprouts.

00:12:29.160 | And I remember thinking to myself, like, we don't, we don't eat broccoli.

00:12:33.480 | We don't eat Brussels sprouts.

00:12:34.360 | Like we're Indian, like we eat Indian food at home, right?

00:12:37.600 | That's not, just not part of our diet.

00:12:39.120 | And I remember thinking to myself, like, I don't think this is really going to stick

00:12:42.960 | for my dad.

00:12:43.920 | And it didn't.

00:12:45.720 | Like he was, he was back in the hospital within 60 days.

00:12:48.760 | And so it was when we went back to the hospital that they gave us the help of a

00:12:55.000 | nutritionist.

00:12:55.760 | Insurance kicked in, helped pay for the cost.

00:12:58.120 | And I believe that my dad is alive today, over 25 years later, because of the help

00:13:04.480 | of that, of that nutritionist, because she was able to customize something that was

00:13:08.800 | able to make, you know, it really stick and work for our lifestyle, for who we are

00:13:13.280 | and how we ate.

00:13:14.560 | And so I remember telling Tim that story.

00:13:16.920 | And he looks at me and he's like, why wasn't that part of the pitch?

00:13:20.760 | Like, why was that?

00:13:21.800 | Why was that like a footnote in all of this?

00:13:23.960 | And what I realized is that oftentimes when we walk into a meeting and we're trying

00:13:29.720 | to persuade people, we come in with the numbers.

00:13:32.320 | And that's especially true, I think, in places like, you know, Silicon Valley or in

00:13:35.880 | New York, when we can be incredibly numbers driven.

00:13:38.720 | But sometimes we miss the story, the story of that one, that one, one person.

00:13:44.120 | Right.

00:13:44.600 | And what we found when we looked at the most successful pitches, both for

00:13:49.440 | startups or inside companies, what people tend to do is they tend to take us into

00:13:54.600 | the, into the shoes of that one person that they're trying to serve.

00:13:57.880 | Right.

00:13:58.440 | And then they zoom out and talk about the millions of people who are sharing that

00:14:01.800 | one person's story.

00:14:02.520 | So in the case of Arise, in case of my company, I would walk in and tell the

00:14:06.240 | story of my dad, right?

00:14:07.480 | I would tell them, I would tell investors that story.

00:14:09.480 | And then I would talk about the millions of people who are going through their own

00:14:12.240 | version of that same story.

00:14:13.680 | Central character, casting one central character and marrying story with

00:14:18.480 | substance is, I think, one of the keys of a backable person.

00:14:21.960 | Like stories bring us in, but substance keeps us there.

00:14:25.680 | And so is that something that applies more throughout?

00:14:30.440 | Do you start with the story?

00:14:31.640 | Do you have the story embedded throughout everything you're talking about?

00:14:34.400 | Is it more of the narrative?

00:14:36.000 | How do you, how do you actually apply that?

00:14:37.760 | Yeah, I think you can try different.

00:14:39.480 | I think you can try different ways and there's not a fixed formula as to

00:14:42.440 | sequence.

00:14:43.120 | I don't think the story necessarily needs to come first.

00:14:45.680 | I personally do.

00:14:46.880 | I like the idea of walking into a room and saying like, let me, let me introduce

00:14:51.520 | you to this one person.

00:14:52.560 | Right.

00:14:53.000 | And let, let me bring you in in that way.

00:14:55.200 | And then let's talk about the substance.

00:14:56.920 | Let's talk about all the numbers that support all of this.

00:14:59.360 | And I think that that tends to be the way that, that most, I think successful

00:15:03.920 | pitches go.

00:15:04.920 | I mean, even if you just look at like, let's, let's, let's zoom out of startup

00:15:07.600 | world for a moment and just look at like journalism, right?

00:15:09.760 | Like a great story that's written a journalist that wants to bring light to

00:15:13.920 | what's happening in a certain part of the world.

00:15:15.520 | What they'll typically do is they'll start with one person's story, right?

00:15:18.560 | This so-and-so and they'll put you right there and then they'll zoom out and

00:15:22.240 | they'll talk about the, the, how the magnitude of, of, of the story, right?

00:15:27.400 | Like it's not just this one person, but how many people are suffering from the

00:15:31.160 | same thing.

00:15:32.080 | I think it's a very powerful way to, I think, start with story and then roll

00:15:35.440 | into substance, but you can try it both ways.

00:15:37.360 | You can start with the data and the numbers, and then you can tell a story

00:15:39.960 | too.

00:15:40.200 | But I think the key is that you do both right.

00:15:42.880 | Great story.

00:15:43.640 | Like, I think we talk a lot about storytelling in the world of business

00:15:46.680 | today and it's become kind of an in vogue sort of term, but storytelling in

00:15:50.120 | business isn't, isn't sort of getting up in front of a room and saying once upon

00:15:53.080 | a time, it's, it's, it's story plus substance.

00:15:56.920 | You need both.

00:15:57.600 | Yeah.

00:15:58.880 | And we're talking about an example where you're already ready to tell your

00:16:02.840 | story.

00:16:03.400 | What happens before that?

00:16:05.280 | How do you, I know the first step in the book was to convince yourself.

00:16:09.080 | And I think you mentioned something that I thought was really surprising, which

00:16:12.520 | is, you know, you think about someone in your mind who's kind of falls into this

00:16:16.160 | criteria of backable and I think charisma is something you think of and you pointed

00:16:20.800 | out that conviction is really more important than charisma.

00:16:23.680 | So where did you kind of come to that conclusion and how do you apply it?

00:16:28.520 | Yeah, because when I first started writing the book, I thought that I was

00:16:32.240 | going to find a certain style to backable people.

00:16:35.080 | Like they were all going to speak with, you know, great enunciation.

00:16:39.080 | They were going to have great hand gestures and pacing and eye contact and

00:16:42.800 | just all of like the classic communication things that we learn and, you know, a

00:16:46.080 | Toastmasters or a Dale Carnegie.

00:16:47.760 | But that just didn't, that, that wasn't the case at all.

00:16:50.000 | What I found was that there were certainly some people who were highly

00:16:54.080 | charismatic and that were backable, but there were plenty who were not.

00:16:56.960 | And, you know, if you want just a quick example of that, go back and watch the

00:17:00.960 | original iPhone launch, right?

00:17:02.960 | 2007.

00:17:04.080 | And we, we remember that as, as a, as an epic, epic speech.

00:17:08.560 | And it was, it don't get me wrong.

00:17:10.920 | But if you look at Steve Jobs' communication style, it's not, it's not

00:17:15.320 | the poster child of charisma.

00:17:16.720 | Like he uses the word "uh" over 80 times in the speech.

00:17:20.840 | He spends a good deal of time sort of staring at his feet.

00:17:23.560 | Like he does a lot of the things that if you were, if you were to go see a public

00:17:26.160 | speaking coach, they would tell you never to do, but it was, it was an

00:17:29.160 | incredible, incredible presentation.

00:17:31.040 | It changed the world.

00:17:31.760 | And there are plenty and plenty of examples of that.

00:17:34.560 | What I found is that backable people, it's not charisma that I think makes a

00:17:39.040 | person backable, it's conviction.

00:17:40.640 | Backable people, the common denominator is that they take the time to convince

00:17:46.280 | themselves first, and then they let that conviction shine through with whatever

00:17:51.040 | speaking style it is that feels most natural to them.

00:17:53.720 | So, I mean, if you're a charismatic person naturally, don't change that.

00:17:56.520 | But if you're, but if you're not, like you're more, you're more shy or you don't

00:18:00.280 | have some of these classic techniques, what I would say to you is don't spend

00:18:03.760 | your time trying to develop those techniques.

00:18:06.160 | Instead, go to, go to the conviction that you have in the idea.

00:18:09.800 | And so one of the mistakes that we see sometimes is that people will spend a lot

00:18:14.240 | of time creating very slick, you know, sophisticated PowerPoint decks or keynote

00:18:19.800 | decks for their meetings, right?

00:18:21.320 | They'll come up with an idea and they'll immediately go to the design and to the

00:18:24.720 | aesthetic of how they're going to present it, but they don't spend enough time

00:18:28.280 | actually thinking about like, why do I believe this is true?

00:18:31.120 | Like what, what, what are the, what are the potential holes in my thinking?

00:18:35.000 | What answers do I potentially have for those holes?

00:18:37.440 | And again, what we're talking about here, again, whether you're your startup or

00:18:41.320 | you're talking about inside a company, these are new ideas.

00:18:44.080 | And so every new idea is going to have holes and it's okay to have that.

00:18:48.280 | But spending the time to understand why you're convinced and also knowing what

00:18:53.120 | you don't know is you're going to be much better off spending your time doing

00:18:57.760 | that than creating a PowerPoint deck with a bunch of bullets, but then getting into

00:19:02.600 | a room and not really having the substance underneath those bullets.

00:19:05.480 | And what do you say to someone who's, you know, maybe on one end of the spectrum

00:19:11.040 | where they have ideas and they're really good at picking them apart and kind of

00:19:15.320 | ultimately abandoning them.

00:19:16.600 | And I think that kind of is me.

00:19:18.320 | I think part of working in venture capital is saying no a thousand times.

00:19:21.840 | And so every time I have something I want to do, one option is just like, wait, and

00:19:26.400 | if you're still really excited about it for, you know, three days, five days, 10

00:19:30.000 | days, keep going.

00:19:30.840 | But I feel like I've probably had ideas that I picked apart too much and didn't

00:19:35.800 | build the conviction in.

00:19:36.800 | Yeah.

00:19:37.760 | Yeah.

00:19:38.200 | No, I mean, I think that that's definitely, that's definitely the paradox

00:19:41.000 | of, of, of being smart in a particular area, right?

00:19:44.080 | As an investor, you started to see the holes and ideas, and then you apply that

00:19:47.960 | to yourself.

00:19:48.480 | I, I was talking to an investor the other day who was like, he comes from a FinTech

00:19:52.400 | background and he's like, I've, I've passed on every single great FinTech deal,

00:19:57.240 | every single one, right?

00:19:58.720 | Because I just knew too much.

00:20:00.880 | And, and, and so I do think that sometimes we can be sort of, I think more rigorous

00:20:07.000 | on ourselves than others might be, which is why I think that it is important to, to

00:20:12.320 | get out there and get feedback from other people.

00:20:14.680 | Right.

00:20:15.160 | And I think that, I think that for you, I mean, you know, look, look at how, look

00:20:18.880 | at how far this podcast has come.

00:20:20.880 | Right.

00:20:21.240 | And, and where you are right now, I think that potentially back in the day when

00:20:25.960 | you were thinking about starting this, right, one of the things that might've

00:20:28.120 | been on your mind is like, why does the world need another podcast?

00:20:30.800 | Right.

00:20:31.120 | And you definitely could have gone down the path of like looking at the numbers

00:20:34.080 | and saying like, why is this different and all of that.

00:20:36.360 | And maybe you would have abandoned the idea.

00:20:37.960 | But my guess is that you probably started talking to some folks and they said,

00:20:41.320 | yeah, like this is, this is pretty good.

00:20:43.000 | And so I, I think it's a combination of a couple of things.

00:20:47.560 | I think number one is, I think the number one is, is, is starting to build what we

00:20:50.920 | call in the book, this backable circle of people who are around you.

00:20:54.240 | And we can talk a little more about that.

00:20:56.120 | There are four different types of personalities that we found that people

00:20:59.280 | have in this backable circle that they could, they could always go to.

00:21:02.560 | And, and, and the, and I call those the four C's.

00:21:05.440 | So the first C is your collaborator.

00:21:09.000 | And that's the person who, in your case, when you have a, we have a podcast,

00:21:12.480 | you're like, look, I, this is my podcast idea.

00:21:14.880 | And this is somebody who's going to build on top of it.

00:21:17.240 | And they're going to be like, yeah.

00:21:18.120 | And what about this?

00:21:18.960 | And they're using language like, yes.

00:21:20.160 | And, and you almost feel like you're in a musical jam session with them.

00:21:22.840 | This, the second is your, is your cheerleader.

00:21:26.040 | And it sounds a little sappy, but we all kind of need that cheerleader in our

00:21:29.720 | lives, right?

00:21:30.520 | It's, it's somebody who can, who can, I think, give us that bit of juice that we

00:21:34.080 | need, even if, even if it's not a perfect idea, they're kind of like, you know,

00:21:38.560 | look, you're going to be able to, you're going to be able to figure it out.

00:21:40.920 | And what we found is that people, people who are, I think, the most backable,

00:21:44.760 | extraordinary people, they all have cheerleaders in their corner.

00:21:47.840 | The third is your coach.

00:21:50.280 | And your coach is different than your collaborator, because your collaborator,

00:21:55.000 | while your collaborator is thinking about whether your idea is going to fit the

00:21:58.080 | market or fit the company that you're in or fit the team, your coach is really

00:22:02.480 | thinking about like, does this idea fit you, right?

00:22:05.160 | Is this something that you are going to want to run with?

00:22:07.160 | And it kind of gets to your question, Chris, which is like, I don't think any

00:22:10.960 | new idea is going to, is going to be without holes.

00:22:13.720 | Like if it, if it, if it didn't have holes, it probably wouldn't be a new idea.

00:22:17.760 | But you know, the question is, do you, do you have enough emotional juice to get

00:22:23.600 | through the rejections, to get through all the setbacks that are inevitably come up

00:22:28.400 | along the way?

00:22:28.960 | Right.

00:22:29.440 | And you're only going to do that if, if the idea makes you come alive.

00:22:33.920 | And one of the things that a good coach does is they know us intimately well

00:22:38.120 | enough to say, yeah, this is something that you're going to want to run with and

00:22:41.880 | keep getting back up every time you get knocked down, because you love this.

00:22:45.800 | Like, this is what you do, right?

00:22:47.520 | Like for me, as a writer, I, I love, I love to write, but when I went, when I,

00:22:53.600 | when I went to my wife and I was like, look, I've got ideas for these books.

00:22:57.360 | She wasn't like, Hey, all these ideas are like home runs.

00:23:00.360 | But what she said is like, I know that you love to write, like this stuff makes

00:23:03.640 | you come alive.

00:23:04.400 | And no matter what happens, like you're going to, you're going to like want to

00:23:06.800 | fight through that.

00:23:07.520 | And you need a coach who knows you intimately well enough to be able to do

00:23:10.400 | that.

00:23:10.600 | And the fourth, the fourth C is your critic, but I like to call this your, your

00:23:16.440 | cheddar.

00:23:16.920 | And I call this person your cheddar, because if you've ever seen the movie

00:23:20.880 | eight mile, Eminem is surrounded by a circle of friends in the movie, and

00:23:25.920 | they're all kind of building him up.

00:23:27.320 | But there's one friend named cheddar who's constantly poking holes in Eminem's

00:23:32.160 | ideas. And we, you know, we, we find throughout the film is that it's really

00:23:37.320 | cheddar that gets Eminem ready for the stage.

00:23:40.640 | And, and I, and I think it's the most underrated member of our circle because

00:23:45.280 | we tend to sort of push the cheddars out of our lives, right?

00:23:49.320 | They can be kind of annoying.

00:23:50.440 | The no one likes there.

00:23:51.680 | No one likes people who poke holes in their ideas.

00:23:53.480 | But what we found is that backable people tend to embrace their cheddar because

00:23:58.000 | they really find that it's cheddar.

00:23:59.240 | Who's going to bring them, you know, get them ready for a big moment.

00:24:02.440 | I mean, it's funny, as you walk through this example, I think of my wife, who's

00:24:05.720 | probably like the, I was like, Oh yeah, she's the collaborator.

00:24:08.400 | Oh no, she's that.

00:24:09.000 | Oh, she's the coach.

00:24:09.880 | Yeah.

00:24:10.280 | I was like, can, can the same person fill multiple roles or do you need four

00:24:15.120 | distinct people?

00:24:15.960 | No, the same person can fill multiple roles.

00:24:18.160 | But I, I think the, the key is you want to be clear with people about what it is

00:24:22.560 | you need before, before you go in and talk to them.

00:24:26.280 | So if you're about to go give a pitch or if you're about to go to a big meeting,

00:24:32.040 | you don't need cheddar moments before that, right?

00:24:35.240 | That's the last thing that you need in that moment.

00:24:37.560 | You need a cheerleader, maybe you need a little bit of a collaborator.

00:24:40.280 | So the key is that if you have one person who can play multiple roles, you say to

00:24:44.840 | them, look, all right, you know, let's take the reverse example.

00:24:47.760 | You're early, early on an idea, right?

00:24:49.960 | And you're trying to get, you're trying to become aware of what are all the blind

00:24:54.120 | spots of the idea.

00:24:54.920 | Well, then you call a friend, said, look, I need you to be a critic right now.

00:24:57.800 | I need you to be a cheddar.

00:24:59.280 | But if your moments before that big moment, you want to call somebody and say, I need

00:25:02.840 | a cheerleader right now.

00:25:03.800 | And so just be very clear with people about what you need.

00:25:06.000 | Yeah, I'll, I'll go and say this actually applies to so many things.

00:25:10.800 | I, uh, as many people listening know, I have a newsletter and I remember the first

00:25:15.080 | time I asked my wife for feedback, I said, Hey, can you give me feedback on this

00:25:18.040 | newsletter?

00:25:18.520 | So I sent it to her and she comes back and there's all these comments about all the

00:25:22.160 | grammatical mistakes I made.

00:25:23.520 | And I was like, Hey, I really appreciate you helping me because I made a bunch of

00:25:28.840 | typos and edits and all that.

00:25:30.480 | But I really just wanted to know if it was a good idea to write about this topic.

00:25:34.880 | And so I, I, you could take that lesson and apply it far beyond just ideas that

00:25:41.680 | become backable and that whatnot.

00:25:44.120 | Totally, totally.

00:25:45.640 | Yeah, no, I mean, same, same thing happens to me, by the way.

00:25:48.480 | I had to be like, I'm, I'm working on a new book right now.

00:25:51.400 | And, and, and it's very, very rough.

00:25:53.240 | We're like in rough shape stage right now.

00:25:55.440 | I'm writing very, very shitty first drafts.

00:25:57.920 | And so I'll tell my wife and like, and she's a writer, as you know, and, and

00:26:01.880 | she'll say, I'll say to her, look, skip all the stylistic stuff.

00:26:05.720 | Like, don't like, don't even touch that.

00:26:07.120 | Just like tell me, like, does this thing flow?

00:26:08.960 | Does this thing even make sense at all?

00:26:11.160 | It seems like with every business, you get to a certain size and the

00:26:16.240 | cracks start to emerge.

00:26:17.960 | Things that you used to do in a day are taking a week and you have too many

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00:29:17.880 | I know there are a few other things that you highlight in the book, but

00:29:20.960 | before we get there, I want to jump back to how you learned all of this.

00:29:24.320 | So yes, you reached out to all these people where I'm not even sure if you

00:29:27.920 | were thinking about writing a book at the time, but what, what kinds of people

00:29:32.000 | wrote back and what were kind of some of the lessons that were themes amongst

00:29:36.320 | everyone?

00:29:36.760 | Yeah.

00:29:37.680 | Yeah.

00:29:38.160 | I mean, I started to put it into practice myself immediately, and I

00:29:42.160 | naturally am just a, I'm a note taker.

00:29:44.800 | And, you know, I, I, I tend to sort of take, you know, when I'm in a meeting

00:29:48.400 | with anybody who I'm learning from, I just take copious notes and, and I'm

00:29:51.880 | pretty disciplined about that.

00:29:53.120 | And I would, I would leave every single one of these meetings.

00:29:55.040 | And, and it was a broad range of people.

00:29:56.800 | It was, it was, it was military leaders.

00:29:58.960 | It was, it was celebrity chefs.

00:30:00.680 | It was, it was people who were producing films.

00:30:03.000 | It was a lot of people inside Silicon Valley who were on both sides of the

00:30:06.160 | table, founders who had done well and investors who invested in founders.

00:30:09.840 | And so I was taking my notes and I was compiling them and I was starting to

00:30:13.920 | realize that a, I really loved having these conversations and wanted to have

00:30:18.000 | more of them.

00:30:18.480 | And so I did, I just continued to do that.

00:30:20.440 | But B as I was putting these things into practice, like it was working, it was

00:30:24.920 | working for me.

00:30:25.680 | And I started to share some of the nuggets and some of the wisdom that I was

00:30:29.760 | getting in these conversations with other people, people who were starting

00:30:32.440 | companies, people who were inside companies that were trying to get their

00:30:35.560 | ideas made and it was working for them too.

00:30:38.760 | And so I, I, it took a while.

00:30:40.760 | I mean, I, I started this process in 2014.

00:30:44.000 | I didn't start writing the book until 2017 and the book didn't come out until

00:30:49.440 | 2021 and so it's been a long time in the making.

00:30:53.680 | The, the way that I sort of themed the book was I really tried to put a tight

00:30:58.480 | filter on like the obviousness.

00:31:00.760 | Like there were a lot of obvious things that came out of these conversations

00:31:03.600 | too, right?

00:31:04.320 | You need to do your research.

00:31:05.720 | You need to be prepared.

00:31:07.000 | Like there are all the sort of obvious things, but I tried to just filter all

00:31:10.360 | that out because we already know that.

00:31:12.520 | And I tried to really search for what was not obvious.

00:31:15.160 | Convincing yourself first to me, even though now I look at it and I'm like,

00:31:19.360 | yeah, that makes sense.

00:31:20.320 | It was one of those things I never really, I never really did.

00:31:22.880 | And I noticed that a lot of other people didn't either really taking the time to

00:31:26.200 | build that conviction.

00:31:27.120 | And you know, in the book we go through very specific things that people do to

00:31:31.360 | actually build conviction.

00:31:33.200 | You know, one of the, one of the, one of the things that I, uh, one of the other

00:31:37.120 | themes that came out of the book was this idea of playing exhibition matches,

00:31:41.160 | playing exhibition matches, which I thought was, I think I still think today

00:31:44.960 | is, is a really, really important one, which is that like, you know, when we

00:31:49.160 | studied backable people, one of the things we found was that they tend to almost

00:31:53.960 | have this improvisational style about them, right?

00:31:57.680 | Like when they speak, it's almost like they're speaking like they're off the

00:32:01.840 | cuff, but the reality is that that actually is the product of lots and lots

00:32:08.040 | and lots of practice, right?

00:32:10.080 | And in fact, the average backable person that we studied was practicing about 21

00:32:16.360 | times before they got into a big moment.

00:32:19.240 | So with any type of new content, any type of new presentation, new idea, it was 21

00:32:23.880 | practice rounds before they, before they got into the real thing.

00:32:28.080 | Now, like a couple of things to keep in mind.

00:32:30.160 | Number one is like, these practice rounds can be with anybody, you know, like Chris,

00:32:33.520 | I'm sure like your wife would be on that list.

00:32:35.400 | Mine, mine would be on mine, right?

00:32:36.840 | My daughter, my daughter, my nine-year-old daughter will, we'll do an exhibition

00:32:40.440 | match with me every once in a while, right?

00:32:42.160 | I just need somebody to kind of listen.

00:32:43.960 | And it's really important to, I think, do this over and over again.

00:32:47.400 | Now the number one, the number 21 might seem like a lot because it did to me.

00:32:52.720 | And I thought to myself, like, isn't that going to make you sound really scripted?

00:32:57.240 | Isn't it going to make you sound like robotic if you practice something that

00:33:00.400 | much, but what I found is that the opposite happens because once you've

00:33:05.880 | actually mastered material at that level, when you sort of understand what you're

00:33:11.360 | talking about at that, in that way, what it allows you to do is it allows you to

00:33:15.600 | drop your script when you walk inside a room, right?

00:33:18.960 | You no longer are sort of married to the outline where you're like, yeah, I'm going

00:33:22.680 | to say this and I'm going to say that.

00:33:23.920 | And I'm going to say that, which is, it tends to be how most presentations are

00:33:26.840 | sort of given very linearly.

00:33:28.400 | When you have mastered your material at that level, what it allows you to do is

00:33:33.240 | be fully tuned in, fully present and adaptive to what's happening inside the

00:33:37.960 | room.

00:33:38.240 | If something's resonating a little more, you can double click on that.

00:33:41.200 | If you find that there's a look of confusion on that person's face, well,

00:33:44.280 | then you can take the pause at the right moments and you can start to adapt and

00:33:47.360 | you can start to flow.

00:33:48.320 | Then what we find is that backable moments never really happen when somebody

00:33:53.320 | walks into a room and like reads a script and then like drops the mic and

00:33:57.200 | leaves like that doesn't happen, right?

00:33:59.000 | It's a series of interactions.

00:34:00.560 | It's a back and forth.

00:34:01.720 | It's a, it's pausing, it's jumping around where these like really productive

00:34:06.320 | meetings tend to happen.

00:34:07.960 | And so mastering your material at that level allows you to have that kind of

00:34:11.640 | flexibility and fluidity.

00:34:13.040 | Uh, one of my favorite quotes from the book is from Charlie Parker, who's this

00:34:16.920 | great, who's great jazz musician.

00:34:18.520 | And, and he had just, not only was he just a great, great musically, but he had

00:34:23.240 | this incredible stage presence to him.

00:34:25.400 | And so one day somebody asked him, they said, they say, Charlie, like, how do you

00:34:29.680 | have such incredible presence on stage?

00:34:31.680 | And Charlie Parker says, well, you got to learn your instrument and then you

00:34:37.440 | practice, practice, practice.

00:34:39.840 | And then before you get up on stage, you forget all of that and you just wail.

00:34:44.680 | Okay.

00:34:45.840 | And what we're really trying to do, Chris, I think is we're trying to get to that

00:34:50.520 | point where we feel confident kind of just forgetting it, like forgetting all

00:34:54.400 | the stuff that we had been, where we committed to memory and just like going

00:34:57.800 | in there and just being able to wail.

00:34:59.160 | Right.

00:34:59.680 | And the only way we get there is through lots of practice.

00:35:02.640 | Yeah.

00:35:03.920 | Two things that come from this that, that I'll share.

00:35:06.320 | One, I always, if you look at a slide deck of any presentation I've ever given, a

00:35:12.680 | stark contrast to many others is that I try to put almost nothing on the slides.

00:35:17.280 | Right.

00:35:18.000 | It's, it's an image or a word or maybe three words or, or something, but I don't

00:35:23.360 | have a lot of bullets and I've never really been able to articulate why.

00:35:27.520 | I always see people's presentations and I'm just like, cut it out, cut

00:35:30.000 | it out, put small things.

00:35:30.840 | But now I feel like I can actually articulate it based on what you said,

00:35:34.960 | which is if you know the content well enough and you want to read the room to,

00:35:39.920 | you can't have a script sitting behind you or you're kind of forced into a

00:35:44.480 | specific conversation and so when you drop a lot of that, it gives you the

00:35:49.360 | flexibility to go wherever you want.

00:35:51.440 | Yeah.

00:35:52.000 | But it at least hones you to say, I'm still going to make this one macro point,

00:35:56.840 | but I can make it in whatever way I want.

00:35:58.440 | So I appreciate you sharing that because I now, I now could articulate

00:36:03.320 | why I do this thing I do.

00:36:05.000 | Well, I'll add to that too, cause I, I, I love that.

00:36:08.280 | And part of the, one of the things that I think that, you know, backable people

00:36:11.880 | like yourself tend to do is that they tend to share what something could be,

00:36:17.360 | but not exactly how it has to be.

00:36:19.600 | They share what it could be and not exactly how it has to be.

00:36:23.000 | And so by having sort of a high level theme, what you're, what you're

00:36:26.320 | inviting is a discussion as well.

00:36:28.800 | And it may be that off that one sort of meta bullet that you have on that, on

00:36:33.200 | that slide, instead of the seven bullets, what you're going to do is you're going

00:36:36.960 | to prompt the room to start, to start contributing to the conversation.

00:36:41.200 | And, and that, and that's when just like the best things happen.

00:36:44.360 | One of the chapters in the book is called flip outsiders into insiders,

00:36:48.080 | flip outsiders and insiders, right?

00:36:49.880 | You want people to ultimately feel like they're an insider in your idea.

00:36:54.200 | That's, that's when people get interested.

00:36:56.240 | That's when they get excited.

00:36:57.440 | You know, what Salman Rushdie, who's one of my favorite authors had this quote,

00:37:01.960 | and he said that most of the decisions that happen in our lives, most of the

00:37:06.880 | decisions that affect us happen when we're not even in the room.

00:37:11.840 | Right.

00:37:12.160 | And I love that because it's so, it's so true, right?

00:37:15.800 | You go in and give a pitch, like you were on the investing side, right?

00:37:18.240 | At Google ventures, when people came in and pitched you, even if you love the

00:37:22.000 | idea, your next step was to go talk to other people at GV, right?

00:37:25.840 | You had, you had to start representing the idea.

00:37:27.720 | So now all of a sudden, this, the outcome for this founder is somewhat in your

00:37:33.440 | hands, right?

00:37:34.120 | They're not in the room anymore.

00:37:35.280 | You're the one representing their idea.

00:37:37.320 | And the point is that oftentimes we sort of treat these situations as we're trying

00:37:42.480 | to sell that person, almost expecting like that's the final outcome.

00:37:45.720 | But no, we're not just looking to create people who like our idea.

00:37:49.920 | We're trying to try to create people who advocate for our ideas, right?

00:37:52.920 | They have to go out and they have to sell their other people to sell their

00:37:55.920 | partners or their fellow colleagues or other members of the leadership team or

00:37:59.320 | whatever, whatever it is.

00:38:00.560 | And we can only do that if they feel like they are, they have almost founder level

00:38:05.440 | passion over the idea, even if they didn't come up with it themselves.

00:38:08.480 | Yeah, I love that.

00:38:11.040 | And it's something that if I look back fundraising, I tried to do, but I'm not

00:38:15.600 | sure I, I did it as well as I would.

00:38:17.440 | If I tried again, I want to go back really quickly and just point, point out

00:38:21.640 | something that I know you kind of conveyed, but you didn't title one of the

00:38:27.560 | chapters, you need to do some research and prepare for meetings.

00:38:31.600 | It was play exhibition matches.

00:38:33.720 | And what I took away from that, that was maybe subtle, but also important is that

00:38:39.080 | the type of preparation that you should be doing is very similar to the type of

00:38:44.600 | action you're going to have.

00:38:45.880 | So if you're giving a presentation, give the presentation.

00:38:48.840 | And that is different than reading the slides.

00:38:52.240 | That's different from writing out the notes and practicing the notes.

00:38:55.320 | So I just wanted to highlight, unless I got it wrong, that it's really important

00:39:00.040 | to match that medium and not just prepare, but actually do the thing you're going

00:39:04.720 | to do.

00:39:05.000 | Yeah.

00:39:05.920 | Yeah.

00:39:06.320 | It's such a good, such a, I mean, I I'm glad you brought it up because like

00:39:09.240 | sometimes I forget how important this is and it was impressed upon me many times

00:39:14.360 | from all of the people that we studied, which is like, don't give the director's

00:39:18.840 | commentary when you're doing these exhibition matches, when you're, when

00:39:21.680 | you're giving these practice sessions, give it as if you're in the actual room.

00:39:25.320 | Right.

00:39:26.000 | So you're not saying, Hey, so here's what I'm planning on doing.

00:39:28.400 | I'm going to say this to them and I'm going to say that to them.

00:39:30.320 | You're just giving the actual thing because what you're doing is you're, is

00:39:33.720 | you're building the muscle memory that you're going to need when you're inside

00:39:38.200 | the real, the real situation.

00:39:39.680 | When I was studying for, um, the GMAT, I still remember my, I was speaking and

00:39:44.480 | talking to my older brother, who's like a whiz at, at like the standardized tests.

00:39:48.320 | And I was like, dude, how do you do this?

00:39:50.160 | Cause I suck at standardized tests.

00:39:51.440 | What do I, what do I need to do?

00:39:52.760 | And he's like, listen, what time is the test that you're taking?

00:39:58.040 | And I was like, I was like at 3:00 PM.

00:39:59.800 | He's like, all right, every day from here until the test at 3:00 PM, you take a

00:40:06.200 | practice test every single day.

00:40:08.520 | Right.

00:40:09.400 | And I, I, I never would have done that.

00:40:13.240 | Like I never would have done that.

00:40:14.360 | I mean, it, it, it, it elevated my game.

00:40:17.000 | I mean, it was the best, it was the best standardized test I have ever taken.

00:40:20.120 | Like I did way better than I thought I was going to.

00:40:22.200 | And it was only because every day at 3:00 PM I took that test.

00:40:26.400 | And so like applying that to like the world that we're in, if you are, if you

00:40:30.160 | have a big meeting coming up with, with the leadership team or you're pitching

00:40:33.640 | investors, whatever it is, right.

00:40:35.040 | What time is that meeting?

00:40:36.240 | Is it at 11:00 AM?

00:40:37.440 | Well, then at 11 AM, start giving these exhibition matches, start

00:40:40.880 | doing these practice sessions.

00:40:42.040 | Like give a practice round every day at 11 AM between here and there.

00:40:45.920 | And you start conditioning your mind.

00:40:47.880 | You start getting it ready for the, for the real moment.

00:40:50.800 | And again, like, like you said, you want to do the, you want to do the real thing.

00:40:54.440 | The other thing that I, that I completely sort of, I, I, I am terrible at doing is

00:41:00.440 | like, I always ask the question after I give a practice session to somebody, I

00:41:04.640 | always ask them the question, what did you think?

00:41:07.480 | Like, what did you think of that?

00:41:08.880 | Right.

00:41:09.360 | And what I realized is that backable people never asked that question because

00:41:15.040 | it's just, it's such a low signal question to ask.

00:41:18.400 | You're not going to get the feedback that you need because typically if you ask

00:41:22.120 | somebody like, what'd you think, they're going to be like, yeah, it was pretty

00:41:25.160 | good, you know, like, yeah, I liked it.

00:41:27.440 | And that doesn't really give you the information that you need to be better.

00:41:30.480 | And so, especially if you're talking to somebody who is informed, the better

00:41:34.360 | question to ask is what part of all that stood out to you the most, right?

00:41:40.560 | Cause now, now they actually have to put some thought into like, they have to

00:41:43.680 | stack rank, like here's what the best stuff was.

00:41:46.360 | And it may turn out that like some of the stuff that you wanted to be the best, the

00:41:50.120 | point that you were really trying to make, didn't actually make that cut.

00:41:52.960 | And that's really good information to have.

00:41:54.920 | Or the other great question that I love to ask now is how would you

00:41:58.760 | describe this idea to someone else?

00:42:01.600 | Right.

00:42:03.040 | And that's something that I do now is as I, especially when I was thinking about

00:42:06.000 | new book topics and I sort of have my, you know, two page proposal proposal

00:42:10.360 | written is I would hand it to somebody and I'd say, can you read this?

00:42:13.400 | And then they'd be like, yeah, it's pretty good.

00:42:15.160 | And I'd be like, well, how would you describe this idea to a friend?

00:42:17.600 | Right.

00:42:17.800 | And what I've found is that oftentimes some of my friends would describe my

00:42:21.880 | idea in a way that was much better than I ever could.

00:42:24.560 | And that ended up being the way that I ended up framing the book.

00:42:27.120 | Yeah.

00:42:28.440 | Is there a question that you can ask to find some of the stuff that's not good?

00:42:33.760 | Right.

00:42:34.000 | I think that, that helps you rephrase and highlight what, what worked and I'm

00:42:38.640 | asking specifically, cause I usually ask guests at the end of this, after we stop

00:42:42.600 | the recording, I say, I want to know what I could have done to do a better interview.

00:42:47.320 | And, uh, you know, I sometimes ask, like, is there a question I should have

00:42:50.440 | asked or what question did I ask that really stood out those things?

00:42:53.720 | But I'm like, what could I have done better?

00:42:55.680 | Like, what did I do wrong?

00:42:56.800 | It's like, I'm, I'm always craving me.

00:42:58.880 | What did I do wrong that I could do better?

00:43:00.720 | Yeah.

00:43:01.480 | Well, I mean, I love it.

00:43:02.360 | I love that you do that.

00:43:03.240 | I mean, one of the things that really impressed me, this is, let's answer your

00:43:06.320 | question is like when we were selling Rise, we sold Rise to a company called

00:43:10.160 | One Medical and one of the things that really impressed me from the beginning

00:43:14.320 | about One Medical and the founder, a guy named Dr.

00:43:16.880 | Tom Lee was that he had sort of run his brick and mortar, you know, business in

00:43:22.600 | the, in the very beginning, it was like literally just him inside a clinic and

00:43:26.800 | he was serving every role.

00:43:28.120 | He was the doctor, he was the nurse, he was the phlebotomist, he was the front

00:43:31.720 | desk, he was everything.

00:43:32.720 | The, one of the things that he did when he was starting out is every time a

00:43:35.680 | patient would leave the experience, he'd say, Hey, look, on a, on a scale of, on

00:43:39.600 | scale of one to 10, yeah.

00:43:41.160 | How would you rate this experience?

00:43:43.160 | And if it was anything other than a nine or a 10, he would ask, what could I have

00:43:48.520 | done that would have made this a nine or a 10, right?

00:43:51.880 | And I think that that's just like a very positive sort of way, I think, to, to ask

00:43:57.680 | that question, but what was really cool about his story is like, because he was

00:44:02.080 | serving all roles, he would literally take that feedback and he'd roll it right

00:44:06.320 | into the next patient visit.

00:44:07.520 | So he had this just like, you know, almost like product development, iteration

00:44:11.600 | style clinic that he was running.

00:44:13.640 | And he continued to sort of fold this feedback in over and over and over again

00:44:16.680 | until he finally refined this process that he felt like it was ready, ready to

00:44:20.240 | scale.

00:44:20.720 | So, yeah, I think, I think just asking people that, what, what would, what would

00:44:23.800 | it have taken to make it a nine or a 10?

00:44:25.240 | Yeah.

00:44:26.400 | And that's like, it's so funny.

00:44:27.720 | It's a classic thing that, yeah, companies do.

00:44:30.680 | I'm sure everyone here has gotten a survey after buying a product online.

00:44:33.960 | And the promoter score.

00:44:34.880 | It's the NPS score.

00:44:36.160 | And it's so crazy, but people don't actually use that same, if it's the best

00:44:40.200 | question that business is used to ask, why are we not using it in our personal

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00:47:10.560 | I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show.

00:47:15.680 | Your support is what keeps this show going.

00:47:18.760 | To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you

00:47:23.360 | can go to allthehacks.com/deals.

00:47:26.440 | So please consider supporting those who support us.

00:47:29.880 | I'd love to jump quick back to what you were saying about bringing people in.

00:47:33.120 | And I'm curious if you have tactics for bringing people into your idea or your

00:47:38.120 | project.

00:47:38.680 | I think you, you've convinced me of how valuable it is, but how do you actually

00:47:42.960 | do it?

00:47:43.320 | Yeah, I was kind of the person who would, you know, come into an hour long

00:47:48.400 | meeting and I would have like 40 minutes worth of content, right?

00:47:51.880 | Like I would have a, I would have a pretty exhaustive slide deck and then I

00:47:55.480 | would use that 40 minutes to, to sort of like go through it.

00:47:58.120 | And then I'd use 20 minutes for Q and A.

00:48:00.480 | And what I found is that that, that tends to kind of be sort of how most of those

00:48:04.880 | meetings go, that 40, 20 split.

00:48:06.760 | And what I now do is I, I reverse that.

00:48:09.760 | I walk in with 20 minutes or less of content, like just very, very high level

00:48:15.160 | and then open it up because I think these backable moments happen when you can sort

00:48:21.520 | of get people involved, right?

00:48:23.640 | And so that means sharing counterintuitively.

00:48:26.360 | It means sharing less upfront than you might otherwise share, right?

00:48:31.040 | It means, it means just really kind of like setting out what the high level vision

00:48:34.520 | is, having a few of the details, but then having the, having the rest be in, in

00:48:39.360 | backup, like be ready, be prepared to have the discussion.

00:48:43.040 | You know, one of the misnomers I think that people have is like the misconceptions is

00:48:46.840 | that, that it takes more time to prepare for a presentation than it does to prepare

00:48:51.000 | for a productive discussion.

00:48:52.200 | That's not true.

00:48:53.640 | It actually takes a lot more preparation to prepare for a discussion because with the

00:48:57.280 | discussion, you have to be able to ask the right questions.

00:48:59.600 | You have to be able to pull out the right sets of information.

00:49:02.000 | You have to do a lot of research on the other people who are in the room because

00:49:05.000 | you know that they're all bringing certain perspectives in and you're looking to tap

00:49:07.760 | into those perspectives too.

00:49:09.200 | And it sort of bring people in, in a certain way and start weaving all of that

00:49:12.840 | together.

00:49:13.320 | I think it takes a, I think it takes a higher level of preparation.

00:49:17.000 | And one of the stories that I really enjoyed was I studied a designer who was

00:49:21.560 | remarkably effective inside big companies, companies like Microsoft and Google.

00:49:26.160 | And that's hard sometimes as a designer because you are, you're really trying to

00:49:31.120 | steer lots and lots of people.

00:49:33.040 | And especially in bigger companies, when there's lots of red tape and lots of

00:49:36.560 | decision makers, kind of be a frustrating role.

00:49:39.120 | Um, but this guy was remarkably effective at it and I wanted to understand like,

00:49:43.440 | what was his process?

00:49:44.360 | What was it like?

00:49:45.160 | And one of the stories that he told me was that when he was starting out, he would

00:49:49.240 | always take these really pixel perfect designs into, into these meetings and he

00:49:53.800 | would present his vision.

00:49:54.800 | He put them up on the, you put them up on the wall and people would sort of tear it

00:49:58.240 | apart.

00:49:58.600 | They'd be like, well, I don't like that and I don't like that.

00:50:00.320 | And it turned out to be these very unproductive, frustrating meetings for

00:50:04.360 | him.

00:50:05.240 | But one day, almost by accident, he, I mean, he forgot his backpack and so he

00:50:09.080 | didn't have his laptop, but the meeting was already scheduled.

00:50:12.280 | And so he literally walks into a room, but he's not able to project these designs

00:50:16.160 | because he doesn't have them with him.

00:50:17.280 | So instead he, he literally goes up to the whiteboard and he begins to draw his

00:50:23.280 | design up on the whiteboard.

00:50:24.880 | So now instead of pixel perfect colors, he's, he's black and white, right?

00:50:29.880 | And what he said was that people for the first time ever, like got up out of their

00:50:35.360 | seats and they like stood behind, stood with him at the whiteboard.

00:50:38.880 | They started drawing with him and he's like, we got more done in that one hour

00:50:43.920 | than I had in like the previous few months trying to get this design done.

00:50:47.880 | Because like I was, I was, I was going to them and I was trying to get their buy in

00:50:52.200 | rather than sort of bringing them in.

00:50:54.040 | There's a, there's a classic, classic story of Betty Crocker in the 1940s.

00:50:59.520 | And in the 1940s, Betty Crocker introduced instant cake mix to the market.

00:51:04.400 | And they were so excited about instant cake mix because they'd done all the

00:51:08.160 | research, they'd done all the focus groups and they felt like this was going to be a

00:51:11.720 | hit product.

00:51:12.440 | And so they, they, they put a ton of marketing dollars behind this.

00:51:15.920 | They get instant cake mix on grocery shelves all around the country.

00:51:19.480 | And then they wait for the sales numbers to come in.

00:51:21.360 | And when they do, they're shocked because they find, they find out that nobody is

00:51:25.320 | buying this instant cake mix and they cannot figure out why.

00:51:29.320 | And so they hire the psychologist, a guy by the name of Ernest Dykda to go out into

00:51:33.560 | the field and start interviewing customers.

00:51:35.480 | And what Dykda comes back with it like is shocking to the people at Betty Crocker.

00:51:39.760 | He says, I think you have made the process of making a cake too easy, too simple.

00:51:46.120 | Because when a customer removes the cake from the oven, they actually don't feel any

00:51:52.000 | ownership over it.

00:51:52.880 | They actually don't feel like they actually made the cake.

00:51:55.320 | So Dykda is like, I have a recommendation for you.

00:51:58.480 | Why don't you remove one key ingredient and just see what happens?

00:52:02.240 | And so they do, they remove the egg.

00:52:04.720 | So now as a customer, you have to go out and you have to buy fresh eggs, you have to

00:52:08.840 | bring them back home, you have to crack them into the mix, you have to stir it in, and

00:52:11.800 | then you pop it into the oven and sales completely take off, right?

00:52:15.520 | Because now when the cake comes out of the oven, customers actually felt some

00:52:19.360 | ownership over that, over that cake.

00:52:21.600 | They felt like they had made it themselves.

00:52:22.800 | And look, I mean, this has been, this has been proven out over and over again through

00:52:26.400 | different psychological tests.

00:52:27.760 | There's a group out of Harvard that calls this the Ikea effect, which basically says

00:52:32.320 | that we place up to five times the amount of value on something that we help build

00:52:36.840 | than something that we simply buy off the shelf because, because we made it ourselves.

00:52:41.080 | And so there's a lot of, there's a lot of people out there with poorly made futons

00:52:44.520 | and furniture, and they're never going to get rid of it because it's like, no, I built

00:52:47.920 | this, I made it with my own two hands.

00:52:49.760 | And so what does this have anything to do with what we're talking about?

00:52:53.840 | I mean, I think that we oftentimes come in and we treat people like buyers instead of

00:53:00.320 | builders, right?

00:53:01.520 | What people don't want to be buyers, people ultimately, even if their job is to be an

00:53:06.040 | investor, their job is to be a producer, even their job is to green light ideas inside a

00:53:09.560 | company, people want to be builders.

00:53:11.320 | They actually want to feel like they're part of something.

00:53:13.560 | And so your job is to figure out a way to turn them from a buyer into a builder.

00:53:18.200 | So by the time they leave the room, they actually feel like they have some ownership

00:53:21.240 | over this as well.

00:53:21.880 | They were able to crack their own egg into the mix.

00:53:24.400 | Yeah, well, first off, I'll just have to say thank you to Betty Crocker, because I, my

00:53:30.320 | wife and I love to bake and she's, she's much better baker than I, but I just don't think

00:53:34.960 | you can make a cake as good as cake mix.

00:53:36.760 | Like it's just, it always tastes so much better.

00:53:38.720 | So first off, just going to give a little thank you there, but I totally love this theme

00:53:42.880 | of if you're anything you're doing, whether you're giving a presentation, whether you're

00:53:47.000 | building a product, kind of taking a little bit less out of not trying to do the whole

00:53:51.480 | thing for the room, for the partner, for the buyer and inviting them in.

00:53:55.960 | But I'll highlight, you said something and I have a tactic to share, but still being

00:54:00.920 | prepared for that discussion.

00:54:02.440 | So when I was out fundraising, when I was out fundraising for my startup, I had a really

00:54:08.920 | short deck.

00:54:09.480 | But what I did was I thought of every question that I could possibly get asked.

00:54:15.400 | And my co-founder, every time someone asked a question that we hadn't thought about, wrote

00:54:18.840 | it down.

00:54:19.480 | And for the next pitch, we had a slide that addressed every single question.

00:54:24.920 | And this wasn't as easy, but I went and memorized the order of all the slides.

00:54:29.000 | And I did an episode a few weeks ago about memory.

00:54:31.640 | If you want to kind of improve that, check that out.

00:54:34.040 | And so someone came and would say, this was about financial advice.

00:54:39.480 | They'd say, "Well, how do financial advisors spend their time?"

00:54:42.040 | And I was like, "32."

00:54:43.480 | Boom, slides up, answer there.

00:54:45.160 | We can have a conversation with data.

00:54:46.920 | But I didn't walk them through all the questions because I wanted them to be a part of asking

00:54:50.680 | and answering and thinking through whether this was a good idea.

00:54:53.240 | And the interesting thing I learned was that if someone asked me a question and said, "Do

00:54:59.640 | people really want to pay for financial advice?"

00:55:02.040 | And I answered, "Yes, they do.

00:55:04.360 | And here's why."

00:55:05.160 | You know, they kind of bought it.

00:55:07.800 | But if there was a slide that had my answer written on a screen, people were like...

00:55:12.600 | They bought the answer more.

00:55:15.160 | And all it took was me thinking of every question, writing it up.

00:55:17.720 | Same answer.

00:55:18.360 | There wasn't more data.

00:55:19.800 | It was just written as if it was prepared.

00:55:22.280 | And by being prepared, it was like, "Yes, this is certain.

00:55:25.160 | This person's not just giving me the answer I want to hear.

00:55:28.040 | This was the answer they were going to give no matter what."

00:55:30.440 | They're not ad-hoc-ing.

00:55:31.560 | They're not BS-ing me.

00:55:32.760 | And so I always tell people, "Take that Q&A."

00:55:36.360 | And you might not use 75% of the slides.

00:55:39.160 | But write up a slide for every question you might get.

00:55:41.880 | And it just makes the answer you give people so much stronger.

00:55:44.920 | Yeah, I love that.

00:55:45.720 | I love that.

00:55:46.520 | It's great.

00:55:47.400 | Yeah.

00:55:48.120 | It was actually the only use case for the...

00:55:50.600 | Apple, for like a while, had this touch bar.

00:55:53.080 | And it was like I could slide through slides and try to find them.

00:55:55.880 | But it's a useless product.

00:55:57.160 | They got rid of it finally.

00:55:58.440 | In the conversation of meeting people and trying to bring them in,

00:56:01.560 | one of the things I think I and probably many people struggle with is...

00:56:06.760 | Yeah, if you schedule a meeting, it's really easy to kick off that meeting.

00:56:10.760 | But what about when you are at an event,

00:56:13.160 | and you see someone, you're like, "This person could add value.

00:56:16.280 | I'd love to bring them in.

00:56:17.400 | I'd love to bring them in to be an insider in what I'm doing.

00:56:20.200 | But I don't know them.

00:56:21.160 | And I'm walking up to this person."

00:56:22.680 | And some people have the ability to walk up to anyone

00:56:25.800 | and start a conversation and bring them in.

00:56:28.600 | And I know running for Congress, you did this thousands of times.

00:56:33.240 | Going up to complete strangers and trying to build that rapport really quickly.

00:56:38.200 | What advice do you have for someone who's, let's say, at a conference,

00:56:41.480 | sees someone much more senior to them, maybe runs another company,

00:56:45.320 | very successful, could add a lot of value?

00:56:47.400 | How do you walk up and engage that person?

00:56:50.280 | What are the backable traits of people that do that well?

00:56:52.680 | It's a great question, Chris.

00:56:55.640 | Even after doing it thousands of times, I don't know if I've mastered that.

00:57:00.040 | I feel like I've never quite been great at small talk,

00:57:03.800 | which is not great if you're running for political office.

00:57:07.160 | But what I would say is that I think that asking good questions

00:57:11.960 | is such an underappreciated art, right?

00:57:16.600 | And I think that one of the things that we tend to do is we tend to sort of, you know,

00:57:21.080 | we use those precious key moments that we tend to have with somebody,

00:57:26.040 | kind of just asking the same old stuff sometimes.

00:57:29.240 | Like, "How you doing?"

00:57:30.040 | Like, "How's it going?"

00:57:31.320 | And I think that there are oftentimes much more precise

00:57:36.040 | things that we can ask people.

00:57:37.400 | And I think that anytime that you are interested in getting somebody involved,

00:57:41.720 | rather than going out and immediately pitching them,

00:57:45.000 | one of the things that I try to do is I try to put myself in information collection mode, right?

00:57:49.880 | Like, "What are they up to these days?

00:57:52.840 | What are they most interested in?"

00:57:55.960 | And so, one of the things I try to get from people is like,

00:58:03.960 | you know, "Hey, what are some of the things that you feel like are working the best right now?"

00:58:08.920 | Like, if it's an investor, for example, like,

00:58:11.000 | "What are some of the things in your portfolio that you're most proud of right now?"

00:58:13.800 | Right?

00:58:14.040 | Like, what do you...

00:58:14.760 | And potentially even asking like, "What do you feel like, you know,

00:58:17.720 | you thought was going to happen and surprised you?"

00:58:20.280 | Right?

00:58:20.600 | "What were the biggest surprises this year?"

00:58:22.840 | is a question that I might ask somebody.

00:58:24.680 | You know, but I really am trying to use those few moments not to sell myself,

00:58:30.440 | but really try to get some signal on who this person is, right?

00:58:34.200 | That's one thing.

00:58:35.800 | The second thing I would say is that oftentimes we go in for the kill too quickly, right?

00:58:40.520 | And like, even like running for office, like, I saw people who were like,

00:58:46.840 | "I'd love your vote."

00:58:47.960 | Right?

00:58:48.200 | Like, they'll walk up like, "I'm running for office.

00:58:49.880 | I'd love your vote."

00:58:50.600 | And it's like, it never works.

00:58:52.680 | Like, it's like, it's too soon.

00:58:55.720 | And what you want to do is you want to get to know this person.

00:58:59.640 | Who are you?

00:59:00.120 | Like, I'm talking to a voter.

00:59:01.400 | Like, what are the things that you care?

00:59:03.080 | What do you care most about?

00:59:04.360 | What is going to be the thing that matters most to you when you end up voting in November?

00:59:10.520 | Right?

00:59:11.000 | And questions like that are questions that let me understand who this person is.

00:59:15.320 | And I think that we need to sort of evolve from like going in for the kill

00:59:18.520 | to more of the thing like the one-two punch,

00:59:20.680 | where it's like phase one is really learning everything you can about this person.

00:59:25.800 | And then phase two is setting up a follow-up meeting.

00:59:29.560 | And saying, you know, "I'd love to share this with you."

00:59:32.200 | But then the thing that I think is like most important and almost never done

00:59:35.880 | is like as soon as you go home or like go off to the side

00:59:39.640 | and like write down everything that you just learned.

00:59:42.520 | Right?

00:59:42.760 | Like literally pull out a note on your phone

00:59:46.360 | and write down like the four or five things that you've learned from that conversation.

00:59:49.960 | Because when you go back and talk to that person,

00:59:51.960 | you want to make sure that you're weaving those into the conversation.

00:59:55.480 | Like you're reacting and responding to the information that they've given you.

00:59:59.080 | - Yeah, I always get the email.

01:00:02.040 | And I don't think I always write the notes down.

01:00:04.040 | And three days later, you're like, "Gosh, what were we talking about?

01:00:06.840 | I met so many people."

01:00:07.880 | So I love the idea of I leave the email in my draft,

01:00:10.920 | but I should go back and just add a few bullets beforehand,

01:00:14.040 | even if they're not what I'll actually send.

01:00:15.640 | - I think people, no matter what, at all levels, no matter who they are,

01:00:19.800 | I think at the end of the day, we all want to feel heard.

01:00:22.360 | Right?

01:00:22.600 | We all want to feel heard.

01:00:24.280 | And it's just so universal.

01:00:26.120 | It's so primal.

01:00:27.000 | And oftentimes, we just don't show people that.

01:00:31.720 | We might actually even hear them,

01:00:33.240 | but we don't actually show them that we heard them.

01:00:35.560 | You know, like the people who I studied inside bigger companies

01:00:40.040 | that were just amazing, amazing at navigating

01:00:42.680 | and like corralling people around them.

01:00:44.440 | One of the art forms that they were able to sort of really get down

01:00:48.280 | was that even if they disagreed with people,

01:00:53.880 | they would always sort of let them know that they had considered their feedback.

01:00:58.440 | Right?

01:00:58.680 | Like, for example, there was an executive that I sort of shadowed,

01:01:02.600 | who what she did is she would, every time people had feedback for her,

01:01:06.040 | she would write it down.

01:01:07.400 | Right?

01:01:08.120 | And then when she was coming back into the follow-up meeting,

01:01:11.320 | what she would do is she'd start the meeting by putting all that feedback up.

01:01:15.800 | Right?

01:01:15.960 | Like she would literally project all the feedback.

01:01:17.880 | And she'd say, "Here are all the things that I heard during our last meeting.

01:01:21.240 | And here's what I ended up doing with that feedback."

01:01:24.360 | And it wasn't always like, "I responded to it.

01:01:27.240 | And now it's part of the new idea."

01:01:29.080 | But it was like, "No, sometimes I didn't respond to it.

01:01:31.720 | But I want you to know that like I tracked it.

01:01:33.800 | I heard it.

01:01:34.760 | Like you have been heard."

01:01:35.960 | And yeah, it doesn't make people feel 100% when you've shared an idea

01:01:39.320 | and it wasn't used.

01:01:41.160 | But it sure as hell feels a lot better than someone saying,

01:01:44.040 | "Huh, that's interesting."

01:01:44.920 | And then doing nothing with it.

01:01:45.960 | - Yeah, absolutely.

01:01:48.280 | Yeah, I think it goes back to when you emailed people for advice

01:01:52.280 | and you got such a great response rate.

01:01:54.120 | Obviously, you kind of got to show this,

01:01:56.280 | "Hey, look, The New York Times called me a failure.

01:01:58.200 | Have some pity on me."

01:01:59.480 | But I do think the message that probably worked

01:02:03.080 | and drove people to answer is you weren't saying,

01:02:05.720 | "Can you do me a favor?"

01:02:06.840 | You were saying, "Can you share your learnings or your..."

01:02:09.800 | I always, when I write those emails, ask people to share their wisdom.

01:02:13.080 | Because I feel like wisdom is like a word that's like,

01:02:15.160 | "Hey, I think you're smart.

01:02:16.520 | And I'd love to learn from you."

01:02:18.120 | And so I go back and think that that's probably

01:02:21.080 | why you saw such a high response rate

01:02:22.760 | is because people want to be heard.

01:02:23.880 | - I think that's totally right, man.

01:02:26.200 | I think that's totally right.

01:02:27.080 | And I think people want to share their story as well.

01:02:29.800 | And I think that if you're coming across as somebody

01:02:31.880 | who doesn't necessarily have an agenda,

01:02:33.240 | I think that's really important.

01:02:35.720 | I think there's a story in the book

01:02:38.040 | that I wish I could have brought in sooner, right?

01:02:42.360 | Because it ended up making the last chapter of the book.

01:02:44.360 | And so I feel like sometimes people don't finish books.

01:02:46.280 | And so it probably may have gotten lost in the shuffle.

01:02:48.920 | But it's the story of a guy named George Schaller.

01:02:52.120 | And Schaller was this primatologist

01:02:54.360 | who was just amazing at what he did.

01:02:56.440 | And part of the reason he was amazing at his work

01:03:00.360 | is that he was able to get closer to mountain gorillas

01:03:03.640 | than really anybody else.

01:03:05.160 | Like the way that he would approach them,

01:03:07.480 | they somehow let him in,

01:03:09.480 | in a way that they wouldn't let other people in.

01:03:12.440 | And so Schaller is at this conference one day,

01:03:14.920 | and he's presenting his findings.

01:03:17.000 | And finally, somebody in the audience gets up,

01:03:18.520 | and they're like, "Listen, Dr. Schaller, I don't get it.

01:03:20.760 | "Why is it that these mountain gorillas

01:03:22.520 | "are allowing you to get so close?"

01:03:23.800 | And he says, "Look, it's simple.

01:03:26.760 | "I never carry a gun, no matter what.

01:03:31.480 | "I never carry a weapon."

01:03:32.600 | And that confused everybody.

01:03:35.400 | Because they're like, "Well, okay, well, all right.

01:03:37.640 | "We carry weapons, but they're in our backpack.

01:03:39.960 | "And we're not like waving it around or anything like that.

01:03:41.960 | "It's like, it's tucked away.

01:03:43.400 | "It's out of sight."

01:03:44.920 | And Schaller's theory was, "Look, you can hide your attitude.

01:03:48.360 | "You know, you can hide a gun,

01:03:49.480 | "but you can never really hide your attitude around a gun.

01:03:52.360 | "And if you have it, and it's in your backpack,

01:03:54.680 | "you're always gonna behave a little bit differently."

01:03:56.440 | And there's that little bit of difference,

01:03:59.560 | that little energetic shift,

01:04:01.000 | that these gorillas can pick up on.

01:04:03.720 | Because it's just, it's so primal for us.

01:04:06.040 | And I think about that a lot,

01:04:07.960 | because oftentimes, when I catch myself

01:04:10.680 | trying to sound smart,

01:04:12.360 | or I try to catch myself trying to come off it,

01:04:14.440 | like with an agenda, a hidden agenda,

01:04:16.200 | I realize that there's an energy that comes with that.

01:04:20.760 | And to become pure about it, like in your case,

01:04:23.800 | "Look, I just really just wanna learn from you,"

01:04:26.040 | I think is why people are responding.

01:04:27.640 | And I think you're getting some really great guests,

01:04:30.280 | myself not included, but some really great guests,

01:04:32.200 | like Johannes Marlowe and Tim Ferriss.

01:04:33.880 | And it's really been an amazing show.

01:04:35.560 | - Thank you.

01:04:36.520 | Yeah, I mean, we covered so, I mean, first of all,

01:04:39.160 | everyone, there's so much more on each of these in the book.

01:04:41.720 | And I actually made it through the whole book.

01:04:43.800 | You're welcome.

01:04:44.440 | I didn't make it through the appendix yet.

01:04:46.920 | But yeah, the one thing that we didn't touch on

01:04:49.320 | that I had a question on that I wanna jump to,

01:04:51.480 | and you shared, it's about finding an earned secret

01:04:55.160 | and uncovering the information that's not obvious that,

01:04:58.520 | and you just mentioned the questions people don't get asked.

01:05:00.680 | And you shared a great story

01:05:02.440 | about how you use that to get a job.

01:05:05.000 | But my question is,

01:05:07.160 | do you have any tips for finding those secrets,

01:05:09.880 | uncovering those things,

01:05:11.480 | and maybe give a little bit more context on the chapter?

01:05:15.080 | - Yeah, sure.

01:05:16.200 | I mean, one of the people that I studied for this book

01:05:18.920 | was Brian Grazer.

01:05:20.120 | And Brian's a legendary Hollywood producer.

01:05:24.280 | He has over 130 Emmys.

01:05:26.280 | He has dozens of Oscars,

01:05:27.560 | but he also runs large teams, runs large companies,

01:05:31.000 | and he invests in technology companies as well.

01:05:34.040 | And so it was interesting when I went to go see him,

01:05:37.000 | this is before the pandemic,

01:05:38.520 | and I'm in his waiting room in Beverly Hills.

01:05:42.200 | There are people there ready to pitch him

01:05:44.920 | on all sorts of things,

01:05:46.120 | from films to technology to apply for jobs.

01:05:50.840 | And you could just tell that like,

01:05:52.600 | it was really anxious inside that room.

01:05:55.240 | Like people were really nervous.

01:05:56.840 | And so when I went back to see him, I said,

01:05:59.080 | "Look, Brian, if I could have given everybody out there

01:06:02.200 | one piece of advice before they showed up here today

01:06:05.640 | on how to prepare for a meeting with Brian Grazer,

01:06:08.360 | what would that piece of advice have been?"

01:06:10.760 | And he thought about that for a moment.

01:06:12.120 | And he said, "Give me something

01:06:13.960 | that I can't easily find on Google.

01:06:17.720 | Like give me something that's not obviously Googleable."

01:06:21.320 | And I thought that was so interesting

01:06:23.000 | because the more that I talked to gatekeepers,

01:06:26.280 | decision makers, people who are classic backers,

01:06:29.720 | what I found is that like great meetings

01:06:32.120 | tend to be based on an insight

01:06:34.680 | that the person who's doing the pitching

01:06:37.640 | went out and found themselves.

01:06:39.720 | Like they didn't just sit behind a desk,

01:06:41.320 | but they went out and like found something

01:06:43.160 | that may have been just a little bit like less obvious.

01:06:46.680 | It doesn't have to necessarily be watershed,

01:06:48.920 | but they really put themselves into the story

01:06:51.560 | and found something that maybe they wouldn't have found

01:06:54.200 | had they just done sort of the classic research.

01:06:57.000 | So that could be test driving a competitor's product.

01:07:01.400 | That could be going out to, you know,

01:07:03.640 | like literally attending a show or attending something

01:07:07.000 | that like maybe other people wouldn't have attended.

01:07:09.640 | It's like just taking, like thinking to yourself,

01:07:12.280 | I like to kind of almost do a two-step approach to this.

01:07:15.080 | I think to myself,

01:07:15.800 | like what would most people do to prepare for this?

01:07:18.680 | And then how do I put myself

01:07:21.240 | just one step further into that story?

01:07:23.640 | Like what can I do to go one step beyond that

01:07:26.680 | that takes me from behind Google

01:07:28.680 | and into the real world in some way?

01:07:30.600 | And it could just be call,

01:07:31.640 | it could literally just be calling a set of customers

01:07:33.800 | and asking them what they think about this.

01:07:35.560 | When I was talking to somebody the other day,

01:07:36.920 | I know we've been talking a little bit

01:07:38.680 | about like applying for jobs.

01:07:39.960 | And I was talking to somebody the other day,

01:07:41.560 | and this was after my book came out,

01:07:43.080 | and she called me and she told me this story.

01:07:44.680 | And the story was that she was applying for a job.

01:07:46.760 | She was a mom and, you know,

01:07:48.600 | she was returning to the workforce

01:07:50.280 | and she was applying for a job at a social media company.

01:07:53.080 | And the trick of it was like, she didn't use the product.

01:07:56.600 | Like it was very much like a Gen Z focused product

01:07:59.160 | and she doesn't use it.

01:08:00.520 | And so, and she's like, she's like,

01:08:02.840 | so I was trying to figure out like what to do

01:08:06.280 | to prepare for this meeting for this role.

01:08:08.520 | And I was doing all my research.

01:08:09.880 | I was coming through the site and reading people's bios

01:08:13.640 | and doing all this stuff that we typically do.

01:08:15.400 | But then she's like, you know,

01:08:16.280 | I need to do something more than this.

01:08:18.120 | So what she did is she decided to interview

01:08:20.680 | every single one of her daughter's friends.

01:08:22.600 | Every single one of her daughter's friends,

01:08:24.840 | she interviewed them and like,

01:08:25.640 | what do you like about the product?

01:08:27.160 | What do you not like about the product?

01:08:28.520 | What do you wish would be different?

01:08:29.880 | All this stuff.

01:08:30.840 | And she accumulated all this research.

01:08:33.000 | And then she goes into this interview,

01:08:34.520 | which is over Zoom during the pandemic.

01:08:37.400 | It's over Zoom.

01:08:38.360 | And she literally like starts like dropping

01:08:41.400 | all this like research onto this person.

01:08:43.480 | Now, I don't know how much of it was different,

01:08:45.160 | how much of it that they didn't already know,

01:08:47.320 | but the fact that she had gone out there,

01:08:49.560 | like and done all this research

01:08:51.160 | and all this stuff that like people typically don't do.

01:08:53.320 | This hiring manager was so impressed

01:08:56.280 | that not only did she get the job,

01:08:57.720 | but right in the middle of the meeting,

01:08:58.760 | he actually patched in one of their UX designers

01:09:02.360 | who's like, "Hey, like you need to meet this person.

01:09:04.920 | And I want the two of you to spend time together after this

01:09:07.400 | because she collected a bunch of stuff

01:09:08.920 | that might be useful to you."

01:09:09.880 | So I just think that taking yourself

01:09:13.080 | one step beyond what most people would do

01:09:15.960 | to try to find something that might be

01:09:17.720 | a little less obvious.

01:09:19.000 | I mean, it just, it does wonders.

01:09:20.280 | - Yeah.

01:09:21.480 | I mean, find something that might not be obvious

01:09:23.640 | or even just do something that other people don't do.

01:09:26.520 | - Yes, exactly.

01:09:27.800 | I've had people, when I was hiring,

01:09:30.280 | that it's amazing how few people do that.

01:09:34.120 | Like the amount of effort you have to put in

01:09:37.000 | to stand out as a job applicant,

01:09:39.720 | as a presentation giver,

01:09:40.760 | it's low because so many people just do the minimum.

01:09:44.280 | And so I made a presentation.

01:09:46.040 | It was funny.

01:09:46.520 | I wanted this job at this hot startup back probably 2010.

01:09:50.440 | And I made a presentation.

01:09:51.880 | They were in the location space.

01:09:53.320 | And I made a presentation about location services.

01:09:56.280 | I looked back, right, and I got the job.

01:09:58.280 | And I've looked back now and I was like,

01:10:00.120 | "That presentation was horrible."

01:10:01.960 | I took some dumb market research report

01:10:05.080 | that had no relevance to what we were building.

01:10:08.040 | And I put it in a slide deck

01:10:09.880 | and I made some slides that were kind of silly.

01:10:11.800 | And like, it was a terrible presentation

01:10:13.720 | that added no value to the company.

01:10:15.480 | But the fact that I made it gave them some knowledge

01:10:19.240 | that I actually cared about the company

01:10:21.000 | because I wouldn't have taken the time to do this.

01:10:22.840 | - So they didn't ask you.

01:10:24.840 | They didn't ask you to make the presentation.

01:10:26.360 | You just made it.

01:10:26.840 | - No, no, no.

01:10:27.320 | I was like, instead of saying, "Hey, I want to work here."

01:10:29.960 | I said, "Hey, I made a presentation

01:10:32.600 | about the industry you guys are in

01:10:34.200 | and I would love to share it with you."

01:10:35.480 | - Yeah, love that.

01:10:36.200 | - And I want to work here.

01:10:37.800 | Now, the funny thing is,

01:10:39.160 | there were no unique insights in this presentation.

01:10:42.120 | The unique insight was maybe that

01:10:44.120 | here's a person who cares about your company.

01:10:45.880 | So if I could have found a unique insight,

01:10:48.040 | it would have been even more valuable.

01:10:49.560 | I'll just say that even without the unique insight,

01:10:52.760 | going above and beyond can add a ton of value.

01:10:54.680 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:10:55.560 | I mean, one of the reasons I think investors

01:10:59.640 | started to lean in on my idea for Rise

01:11:04.280 | was when they found out

01:11:05.240 | that I was going out to Weight Watchers meetings

01:11:07.960 | and I was standing outside of Weight Watchers meetings.

01:11:10.280 | And when people were walking in, I'd be like,

01:11:12.360 | "Hey, I've got this prototype for a new app.

01:11:13.880 | Could I give you a demo?"

01:11:16.040 | And look, the vast majority of people said no,

01:11:17.960 | but every once in a while, somebody would say yes.

01:11:20.520 | And I never really shared that story

01:11:22.680 | because it was kind of embarrassing for me.

01:11:26.120 | And also, it's not one of those sophisticated

01:11:29.880 | sort of Silicon Valley ways of acquiring customers, right?

01:11:32.520 | I was a guy on the street.

01:11:34.760 | But somebody asked me in one of the early meetings,

01:11:39.080 | somebody asked me,

01:11:40.120 | "How did you find your first customers?"

01:11:41.960 | And so I told him the story.

01:11:43.400 | And that turned out to be the part of the pitch

01:11:45.160 | that he loved the most.

01:11:45.960 | He's like, "I love that."

01:11:47.480 | And so I started playing that up.

01:11:49.080 | And yeah, and that turned out to be the part

01:11:50.840 | that investors love the most

01:11:52.280 | is putting yourself out there.

01:11:54.280 | There's a story in the book about this publisher

01:11:56.440 | named Jonathan Karp,

01:11:57.720 | who really wanted to get Howard Stern to write a book.

01:12:00.840 | And I talked to Jonathan and he was like,

01:12:03.240 | "I had been pursuing Howard Stern for 10 years

01:12:06.360 | to write a book and he never would."

01:12:09.160 | And his answer to me was,

01:12:10.920 | "Look, I already have a couple of bestselling books

01:12:12.840 | and writing a book takes a lot of time.

01:12:14.520 | I don't want to write another book.

01:12:16.040 | Leave me alone."

01:12:17.240 | And finally, Jonathan Karp was like,

01:12:19.400 | "Look, what do I need to do

01:12:20.920 | in order to get him to say yes?"

01:12:23.000 | And he thinks about it and he's like,

01:12:24.200 | "The vast majority of what Howard Stern would write about

01:12:27.880 | is actually kind of already out there right now.

01:12:30.840 | It's in his interviews, right?"

01:12:32.760 | Because what he would probably do in this book

01:12:34.280 | is he'd probably be writing about

01:12:35.320 | like the most interesting people

01:12:36.920 | that he's interviewed for this show.

01:12:38.360 | And so what Jonathan Karp did

01:12:39.720 | is he literally took transcripts of all these interviews

01:12:42.600 | and personally called those down

01:12:45.160 | into something that was very readable

01:12:47.320 | and then put them in a leather-bound cover

01:12:49.640 | and he shows up at Howard Stern's apartment

01:12:51.880 | and Howard Stern's like,

01:12:53.080 | "Look, I told you I'm not going to write this book."

01:12:55.080 | And Jonathan Karp's like, "Well, here's the book."

01:12:56.760 | Like literally hands it to him.

01:12:58.040 | And what Howard Stern said is like in that moment,

01:13:02.120 | he was so intoxicated by the effort

01:13:04.840 | that Jonathan Karp had put into the process

01:13:07.640 | that he could not say no.

01:13:08.840 | - That's amazing.

01:13:10.360 | Maybe one day I'll get there

01:13:11.640 | and somebody's going to write my book for me

01:13:13.240 | and just hand it to me.

01:13:14.040 | That would be, you know,

01:13:14.920 | that's how you know you made it

01:13:16.200 | when someone out there writes a book for you.

01:13:18.040 | - Well, in the meantime,

01:13:18.840 | we're looking forward to you writing your own book, Chris.

01:13:20.600 | - Yeah.

01:13:21.400 | So I feel like that story comes back to where we started

01:13:24.120 | about having the conviction to get out there

01:13:26.680 | and believe in your idea and get in front of other people.

01:13:29.320 | I want to wrap with a few things.

01:13:33.080 | Is there a story that didn't make it in the book

01:13:35.400 | that you wished it?

01:13:36.120 | - Yeah, there was a theme

01:13:39.640 | that I had been really playing with

01:13:41.800 | and I really wanted to make it work,

01:13:43.880 | but I felt like it wasn't ready.

01:13:46.360 | But today I definitely do feel like it is,

01:13:48.360 | which is that when we walk into a room,

01:13:51.160 | we are a combination of both the information that we bring

01:13:55.480 | and the energy that we bring.

01:13:57.400 | And oftentimes when we prepare for a meeting,

01:14:00.920 | we're preparing for the information,

01:14:02.360 | but we're not really preparing for the energy.

01:14:04.600 | One of the things I think about

01:14:07.240 | before I walk into a room now

01:14:08.360 | is how do I want people to think?

01:14:10.360 | What do I want people to do?

01:14:12.520 | But most importantly, how do I want them to feel

01:14:15.400 | as a result of this meeting?

01:14:17.160 | What's the feeling that I want people to have?

01:14:20.200 | Because I think Maya Angelou said it the best,

01:14:22.120 | which is people will forget what you said,

01:14:23.960 | people will forget what you did,

01:14:25.400 | but they will never forget the way that you made them feel.

01:14:27.480 | And the reason that I think this is important

01:14:30.760 | is that we are living in such a back-to-back world now,

01:14:34.680 | especially for those of us who are working remotely,

01:14:37.400 | it can be very easy to sort of just jam your schedule

01:14:40.920 | with meetings and go back to back to back.

01:14:43.560 | But I think it's become so, so important

01:14:46.920 | to just take a few minutes in between these meetings,

01:14:51.320 | to literally just schedule 55-minute meetings

01:14:53.480 | instead of 60-minute meetings

01:14:55.880 | in order to give yourself that five minutes that you need

01:14:58.760 | in order to reset,

01:15:00.200 | in order to kind of reset your energetic state.

01:15:02.440 | Because we know the information

01:15:03.800 | we wanna bring the next meeting,

01:15:05.080 | but if all we're doing is compiling

01:15:06.840 | sort of like the energy decline,

01:15:09.560 | then by the time we get to

01:15:10.440 | some of our most important meetings or moments,

01:15:12.600 | we might actually be bringing the wrong energy

01:15:14.280 | into the room or to the space.

01:15:15.720 | And so what I think is extremely important right now

01:15:20.440 | is to have what I call rhythmic recovery.

01:15:23.240 | And again, the way that I think about that

01:15:25.640 | is like for every 55 minutes,

01:15:27.960 | I take five minutes to just like recover energetically, right?

01:15:31.080 | And that could be doing a breathing exercise,

01:15:33.240 | that could be doing pushups,

01:15:34.760 | but just something to kind of reset my energy

01:15:37.080 | so that what I'm bringing to my next meeting

01:15:38.760 | isn't just like accumulation of like the negative stuff

01:15:42.120 | that's been happening throughout the day.

01:15:43.320 | - I love that.

01:15:45.000 | I'll add one interesting thing

01:15:47.080 | that someone told me once is,

01:15:48.280 | you might be in a situation

01:15:50.280 | where you just have to bring

01:15:51.080 | the negative energy to the meeting.

01:15:52.360 | You're 10 minutes late,

01:15:53.480 | your last meeting was horrible,

01:15:54.760 | you gotta go.

01:15:56.520 | Someone once, I can't remember,

01:15:58.280 | there was kind of like a stoplight methodology,

01:16:00.280 | but it was basically when you come into a meeting,

01:16:03.000 | if you have negative energy,

01:16:04.520 | call it out.

01:16:05.160 | And sometimes that can change the dynamic.

01:16:08.760 | You could say, "Hey guys, I just wanna let you know,

01:16:10.520 | my last meeting was really terrible.

01:16:12.120 | I'm not in a great mood,

01:16:13.560 | but I'm really excited to be here.

01:16:15.400 | So if that comes across,

01:16:16.920 | just know that it has nothing to do with this meeting."

01:16:19.480 | And you can kind of, I use this a lot,

01:16:22.040 | even in presentations,

01:16:23.720 | call out the thing that might be a problem.

01:16:26.280 | Hey, I don't have data

01:16:28.520 | on whether my customers will do this,

01:16:30.280 | that you use this product.

01:16:32.440 | If that's a problem, I can just stop now.

01:16:34.680 | And you kind of like shove aside,

01:16:36.040 | whatever it is, negative energy,

01:16:37.880 | or a part of your business

01:16:39.960 | or your proposal that doesn't work,

01:16:41.800 | and lay that out at front.

01:16:43.240 | So people kind of get to take that off

01:16:45.960 | their kind of mind throughout the conversation.

01:16:48.440 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:16:49.320 | No, I mean, Reid Hoffman told me a great story.

01:16:51.960 | He's founder of LinkedIn

01:16:53.240 | and he was telling me about how in 2003,

01:16:56.440 | he was, he's pitching the company,

01:16:59.400 | but this is like shortly after

01:17:00.440 | the dot-com bubble had burst, right?

01:17:02.200 | And now he's got this company

01:17:03.960 | that isn't making a dime of revenue

01:17:06.040 | and all investors want

01:17:07.400 | are companies that are making money.

01:17:09.160 | And so he's out there

01:17:10.440 | and he's pitching LinkedIn.

01:17:12.200 | And one of the things he said

01:17:13.960 | that really saved him during that time

01:17:16.280 | is that he would steer into the objection.

01:17:19.160 | He steered right into the objection

01:17:20.840 | of not having, not making money.

01:17:23.000 | So upfront, he would say,

01:17:24.920 | "Listen, before we move into like all the strengths,

01:17:28.200 | all the reasons I think you should invest,

01:17:29.800 | I want you to tell, I want to tell you upfront

01:17:31.640 | that we're not making revenue right now,

01:17:33.560 | but, you know, further on,

01:17:35.160 | I'm going to talk about three ways

01:17:37.160 | in which I think we might be able to

01:17:38.840 | over the next few years, right?

01:17:40.120 | I'm gonna share three, three ideas I have."

01:17:42.680 | And so these three ideas were not bulletproof.

01:17:45.560 | They, they, they weren't, they weren't,

01:17:46.840 | they weren't completely solid.

01:17:48.200 | But what he said is just by sharing that upfront,

01:17:50.280 | by steering into the objection,

01:17:51.720 | what that did is it bought him a lot of credibility, right?

01:17:55.960 | 'Cause he was willing to sort of put that out there himself.

01:17:59.000 | And then to your point, Chris, like because he did that,

01:18:02.200 | that objection stopped nagging at them, right?

01:18:06.280 | Because if he hadn't said that,

01:18:08.120 | then like the idea that they weren't making money

01:18:09.720 | would have nagged at them the entire time.

01:18:11.240 | So he could have been talking about the cool product,

01:18:13.080 | the cool features, all the cool things they want to do,

01:18:15.240 | the network effects.

01:18:16.200 | And yet at the same time,

01:18:17.160 | like they would have been nagging at them the whole time.

01:18:18.920 | And now that he already put it out there,

01:18:20.760 | they could actually tune into

01:18:21.800 | the stronger parts of this pitch.

01:18:22.960 | - Yeah, that's fantastic.

01:18:26.360 | Okay, I feel like if you want more content like this,

01:18:29.560 | just read the book.

01:18:30.520 | I'm not gonna dig any deeper.

01:18:31.880 | It was fantastic.

01:18:33.240 | I actually listened to it.

01:18:34.440 | I heard you were the narrator,

01:18:36.360 | which was, it's a little weird.

01:18:37.800 | I'm hearing you tell stories.

01:18:38.840 | I'm like, "Man, I've heard this story."

01:18:40.120 | But no, it's 'cause I heard you read the book,

01:18:42.040 | not 'cause we talked about it.

01:18:43.240 | So I just wanna know, you wrote the book.

01:18:46.040 | It came out earlier this year.

01:18:47.640 | What's next?

01:18:48.360 | What are you spending your time on now?

01:18:49.720 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:18:51.000 | I mean, the next book that I'm working on

01:18:53.240 | with Harper Collins is all about energy.

01:18:56.120 | It's all about how do we get more energy?

01:18:59.400 | And I'm trying to do the same thing

01:19:00.760 | that I did with Backable,

01:19:01.800 | which is like skip the obvious diet, sleep,

01:19:06.200 | and start going into sort of

01:19:07.880 | what are some things that are hidden?

01:19:09.640 | And what I'm finding is that it's taking me

01:19:11.640 | not only into just modern science,

01:19:13.640 | but it's also taking me back to ancient wisdom,

01:19:16.680 | things that we have lost along the way.

01:19:19.640 | The art of what we might know as chi

01:19:22.440 | or what the Hindus call prana.

01:19:24.120 | There's a lot of things that we sort of

01:19:27.000 | have just kind of lost that we,

01:19:29.640 | I think in a busy society, we don't think about,

01:19:31.880 | but there are certain people

01:19:33.320 | who I think have become just masters

01:19:35.320 | at being able to manage their energy,

01:19:38.440 | not just their time, but their energy,

01:19:40.440 | that have done incredible things for the world.

01:19:42.440 | So I'm studying those people.

01:19:43.880 | I'm studying these techniques.

01:19:45.480 | I'm studying the science.

01:19:47.000 | And the idea is to bring it all together

01:19:48.760 | in one coherent book that anybody can use

01:19:51.720 | and how to boost their energy.

01:19:53.320 | - That's amazing.

01:19:55.640 | You know, you said last time

01:19:56.600 | you started doing these interviews

01:19:57.960 | and it was years before the book came out.

01:20:00.040 | How long might we have to wait to read this?

01:20:02.520 | - This one's going to be a little quicker.

01:20:03.880 | This one's going to be a little quicker.

01:20:04.840 | I mean, it's something that, yeah,

01:20:06.760 | I've been thinking about for a very long time.

01:20:08.520 | And I sort of just, even while I was writing Backable,

01:20:11.320 | I was collecting research.

01:20:13.240 | It's just, it's always been a fascinating topic for me.

01:20:15.720 | You know, especially, I mean,

01:20:16.840 | I don't know how you feel about this, Chris,

01:20:18.200 | but I certainly feel like I have less energy

01:20:22.200 | than I did 10 years ago, right?

01:20:25.640 | And yet the demands on my energy are so much more, right?

01:20:29.400 | And I think most people feel that way.

01:20:30.760 | If you ask most people, like,

01:20:31.800 | "Hey, do you feel more energy or less energy

01:20:34.040 | "now than you did 10 years ago?"

01:20:35.000 | Most people are going to say less energy.

01:20:36.280 | But then you ask them, like,

01:20:37.640 | "What about the demands on your energy?

01:20:39.080 | "Are they more or are they less?"

01:20:39.960 | And then they're more, right?

01:20:41.160 | And so it's no surprise that people burn out very quickly.

01:20:44.760 | And it used to be that you hear about people

01:20:46.680 | who burnt out in their 40s and 50s.

01:20:48.440 | And now it's like people are burning out

01:20:50.440 | in their teens and 20s and it's happening much sooner.

01:20:53.640 | And so I think we just need an answer to this.

01:20:57.720 | And so there's urgency.

01:20:59.080 | So I want to get it out there.

01:21:00.440 | Obviously do the real work and go really deep.

01:21:03.720 | But the idea is get out there next year,

01:21:06.520 | if not early the year after.

01:21:07.640 | - Awesome.

01:21:09.240 | Well, I can't wait.

01:21:10.280 | Is there anywhere people can follow along

01:21:12.200 | as to what you're working on

01:21:13.240 | and what you're up to until then?

01:21:14.440 | - Yeah, you can go to my website.

01:21:16.360 | It's just suneilgupta.com or check me out on social.

01:21:20.120 | I'm @suneilgupta on Instagram, @suneil on Twitter.

01:21:24.040 | And I'll see you there.

01:21:24.840 | - Awesome.

01:21:26.120 | Well, there's going to be a lot of show notes for this.

01:21:27.880 | So please check those out.

01:21:29.160 | And thank you, Suneil.

01:21:30.440 | Thank you so much for being here.

01:21:31.640 | - This is great, Chris.

01:21:32.600 | Thanks so much for having me on.

01:21:33.480 | - That was so fantastic.

01:21:36.360 | Thank you so much for listening.

01:21:37.880 | I can't wait to start using some of Suneil's tactics

01:21:40.760 | as I keep growing everything I'm doing with all the hacks.

01:21:43.640 | If you have thoughts, questions,

01:21:45.080 | or just want to say hi, I'm chris@allthehacks.com.

01:21:48.600 | And please check out the newsletter

01:21:50.360 | at allthehacks.com/email.

01:21:52.840 | That's it for this week.

01:21:53.960 | See you all next week.

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