What about when you, when you don't know someone, you know, there's, there's practicing for a conversation, you know, you're going to have, and then there's, I'm going to a cocktail party. I'm going to a conference. I don't know who I'm going to meet or who they're going to be.

Is there a way to just build repetition or, or get your reps in for practicing conversational skills without any person that you know, you're talking to that makes sense? I absolutely do practice my question techniques in private. When there's somebody that I meet and I don't think I'm ever going to meet them again.

I just throw out a question approach to see how will they respond? I try to direct them, tell me what you were doing this weekend instead of, so what were you doing this weekend? I try it and see what happens. If I try it on someone in person and it doesn't feel awkward and I don't see a distance in the conversation, I think it's a good technique.

Keep it in my, in my Google doc full of techniques for having better conversations. Tell me what else is in the Google doc, right? You've got starting with, tell me you use pausing and interrupting people saying, because let them continue. What other tactics work really well in this conversational flow?

The one that started the whole thing for me was I, for years felt really bad because I asked Jason free, the founder of base camp, how, how he failed when he failed. And he just kind of looked away. I still see him right now, as we're talking in my head, looking way and going, well, sometimes we just don't have any setbacks.

Some things just don't have that. And then the more I push, the more he just acted, or I felt that he acted like I was an idiot who always failed and couldn't understand that sometimes people don't just, you know, fall on their face when they're just trying to walk to the other end of the room.

Anyway, that ate it ate away at me that I asked him about his setback and he didn't give me an example and I kept pushing. And the more I pushed, the more he resisted. So I hired an interview coach and I gave him that specific example. I said, look, Jeremy, before we talk about anything else, I have to tell you about this one problem.

And I told him, and he goes, Oh, my therapist had a situation like that, but tell me, goes my therapist had a technique called join the resistance says my therapist would have these men who would come into her office and she would say, Okay, tell me about the problem you and your wife are facing.

And the husband would go, I don't have any problems, but you're clearly in here because you have a problem. There's an issue in the relationship. It's not me, it's her, I don't have any problem goes in. What are we doing here? I don't know. She made me come. And the more the therapist pushed, the more the person put up a resistance and then like sidestepped the whole problem.

So Jeremy's therapist said she decided to join the resistance. If she said, tell me about the problem you and your wife are having and the person said, I'm not having any problem, you would say, Oh, must be good. You know what? All I hear that people have problems must be good for you to just have an easygoing life without any problems.

Congratulations. And then the person will go easy. All she does is she keeps complaining to me and I don't know when we could spend time together because my work is now taking up a whole lot of time and I've never had to work this many hours, let alone this late in my career.

Now they were off on a conversation that mattered. And so Jeremy, my interview coach said, join the resistance. Whenever you put, whenever you ask a guest a question and they resist, stop fighting with them. Join the resistance. Say something like, well, it must be great to have an easy, easy business.

Everyone else is struggling. It must be great to have an easy time building your company when the rest of us are working really hard. When I say that the person will immediately lash out at me and go hard. I mean, you think this is easy. You don't know. Last night we were up because the servers were down and then somebody a week ago was complaining to me about the way that we are interacting at work and I, I'm trying to get work done, not talk about what their, what their interpersonal issues are.

Now we've got a real problem we can talk about. So anyway, because the coach said, join the resistance and he gave me that phrase, I wrote it down in a, in a Google doc with that phrase and I said, Oh, I'm going to remember this because it has a name.

And so I started to, whenever I would have a new technique, I would give it a name and I'd add that technique to a Google doc. I saw the list in the book where there's like a flow charts, the wrong word. It's like a directory of tactics. So there are plenty more for anyone listening who wants more than we'll get to today.

But how do you think those techniques work when you're, you know, you talk about building yourself up, not making yourself seem needy and asking questions when you're interviewing for a job, or maybe you're doing references with someone's previous manager. Can you still use those techniques to get people who are kind of more guarded with information to share?

I use it with people all the time. I think sometimes people are guarded because they're modest because they're not jerks. So one technique that I had, I shared this when I had a, I used to in San Francisco have entrepreneurs come over for scotch at my office and they would just ask me all these questions and someone say, how do you get people to give you their numbers?

And I said, well, what I do is I give them a dramatic low ball. I said, what do you mean dramatic low ball? I said, I had this woman on, she wouldn't give me her, her revenue number. So I said to her, and I knew that it was in, it was at least 10 million.

I said to her, do you think you'll hit a million soon? She goes a million, we're doing at least 10, 20 times that we're not trying to reach a million. So anyway, I said that at scotch night and the guy goes, oh, that's such a good technique. If you go dramatic, low ball, people feel insulted enough that they have to come back at you.

Anyway, we started talking about other things and one where it's scotch night at my office, we're tasting different scotches, talking about what we're into. And then at one point we got into running and the guy said, so how much do you run? I said, yeah, I run as much as I can here and there.

And the guy goes, Andrew, do you think you'll get to run a marathon sometime? He, and I go a marathon sometime. I've run more marathons than I can count. Literally. There was one time in Washington DC, my wife left me at the top of rock Creek park and I just ran all the way down.

That was over 30 miles and there was no other way for me to get home except to run back to the house. So a marathon is nothing for me. And then he was smiling and others around the scotch table were smiling too. And I couldn't understand why they were laughing at me.

At first I thought maybe they were laughing at me because that's not that much to run. And then I realized he used dramatic low ball on me. And so this works everywhere. Yes. It works in interviews. Yes. It works in private conversations.