SPEAKER_01: how about you what's the most embarrassing thing you can you can remember everybody's flying out SPEAKER_00: from la to sundance but i said you know what guys i'm gonna meet you there i get on the flight i got a middle seat i go i'm exhausted my friends are already there private jet blah blah blah put my SPEAKER_02: bag up i sit down in my middle seat and i feel a weird sensation like a crunching sound then i feel wetness and then i feel heat and then i jump up and i look down and there is a giant starbucks cup SPEAKER_03: and black coffee steaming in my seat oh my god and the woman in the window seat looks at me and goes SPEAKER_08: oh were you sitting there and i said where your coffee was in my seat and then i feel my ass is on SPEAKER_10: fire but the plane is taxiing like now at this point i run to the bathroom i drop my drawers i see out of the corner of my eye my pasty white irish ass is red this is hot coffee ass SPEAKER_15: this week in startups is brought to you by linkedin jobs a business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters go to linkedin.com twist to post your first job for free terms and conditions apply mantle the ai powered equity management platform designed for modern founders and operators get your first 12 months free at with mantle.com twist and hubspot if you're fundraising be sure to check out the million dollar pitch competition from hubspot for startups and hubspot ventures apply now at hubspot.com million dollar pitch all right everybody welcome to this week in startups SPEAKER_19: we've got a delightful guest back on the show charles duhigg is here you of course know him he's a SPEAKER_20: writer at the new yorker he's got a new book out super communicators and uh his first book uh he came on episode 751 of this week in startups a lifetime ago uh for the power of habit right that was the the SPEAKER_24: book we talked about back then yeah yeah a while ago how many welcome back to the show how many copies of that book so that's got to be a million seller hundreds of thousands oh yeah no um it's like i think SPEAKER_25: it's like uh 12 million across 12 mil yeah yeah no i've been very very lucky it's been great so you SPEAKER_29: return in that case you return the advance which never happened yes yes no i was i was um yeah no it SPEAKER_34: was great it was great it's really um i feel i'm very lucky to have had that happen and and even bet SPEAKER_35: more like i think the fact that that many i'm sure you've experienced this as well that when you when SPEAKER_36: you're lucky enough to sell that many copies you just hear from a lot of readers who say things like look i found this book at exactly the right time in my life i've been drinking for years and this David Sacks: helps me figure out how to get to aa and change my habits and that's always like super satisfying SPEAKER_40: and rewarding and that was it got picked up in the in the startup in the business community in a major way because in the world i live in startups people are addicted to efficiency and if a book comes out about efficiency or communications that's our wheelhouse and so you've got a big audience i think SPEAKER_44: in the startup community yeah yeah no absolutely and that's actually one of the reasons i wrote about SPEAKER_36: i wanted to write about communication for super communicators is because is because i was hearing from a lot of like startup folks i was hearing from a lot of managers saying you know i i have an mba SPEAKER_35: from harvard business school like i would hear from a lot of my classmates who would say like look like technical skills are no longer valuable to us what makes all the difference is our ability to communicate with other people because no matter how good an engineer you are if you cannot communicate SPEAKER_48: and manage other engineers it doesn't matter yeah a hundred thousand a hundred percent communication SPEAKER_45: is the wheelhouse and when you look back on the the power of habit the core thing to take away from that is the systems you set up the process is more important than your goals or your hopes and dreams SPEAKER_35: and aspirations correct if i'm that's exactly right that's exactly right that if you pay attention to these cues and these rewards in your environment your habits almost change automatically yes and so and SPEAKER_36: and and it but it does mean focusing on those things that oftentimes it's easier for us not to focus on SPEAKER_44: right like like we get into the habit of having the same thing for lunch every day we get into the SPEAKER_35: habit of either exercising or not exercising and yeah and it and it can feel very um pedantic to focus on these small things and yet you know it doesn't matter what you eat today but it does matter what you SPEAKER_20: eat every single day right yes yeah and this is where you know if you want to eat healthier uh you you have to create the systems process by which this will happen i did this i just taught my housekeeper how to make a french omelet because it happens to be one of my favorite things to eat for breakfast if not the my favorite thing and i just tell her you know what just put it SPEAKER_58: outside my office it's three or four eggs if i happen to skip it that day it's not the end of the SPEAKER_24: i'll give it to the dogs three eggs but i i don't go look in the refrigerator for food for breakfast SPEAKER_36: food i just get those three eggs exactly and we actually have a bunch of apples like i love apples and i find that as long as i have enough apples around me i will never eat anything unhealthy right because because you're just you're looking for something you're in the flow you're doing work you're thinking about stuff you don't you don't want to interrupt that with having to make a decision SPEAKER_68: and so just make it easy to do the right thing you know i i took a lot from the book um in my SPEAKER_20: venture capital firm so um as but one example of this i just said you know our business is based on how many founders we meet with and then our decision making process and there's another book um super forecasters i don't know if you know that yeah yeah yeah pretty uh you know basically the premise there is um record how you make a decision so you can make better decisions in the future SPEAKER_19: that's exactly right it would be the equivalent of like videotape steph curry shooting threes in a game play the the video back and you can learn something from it or draymond green setting screens SPEAKER_24: you get the idea so i just went on a uh systems process inside my venture firm and said how many applications for funding can we get how detailed can those how many questions can we get founders to answer and then how many of them we can we meet with over zoom and sure enough we and then how do we qualify to make a decision making process and what i found was i'm now seeing many more of the highly qualified startups and founders that i want to meet with SPEAKER_45: because i built a system to do it not just a random you know i i'm going to try to do more meetings today i'm going to try to do more meetings this week i hired you know three or four SPEAKER_24: frontline people to just do the first meeting with these founders and qualify them across a couple of actually 13 variables and so that's the system or process i set up and then you know the outcomes take care of themselves if you eat the apple you eat the omelet that's exactly right and what's interesting SPEAKER_35: to me is that so there are these things that we can assign metrics very easily right like how many meetings are we taking how many are we getting to the next step how many are we investing in and i think that's really really useful and really important but there are also a set of soft skills that we can systematize where the metrics are harder and so as a result what we tend to do is and again conversation is a great example of this right we tend to rely on our impressions like was it a good conversation was that not a good conversation did i get across what i wanted do i understand them and in in many ways when we press to squeeze that to give us a metric or to give us more information is when we start to learn because our own intuitions have to be trained against something objective SPEAKER_80: right otherwise we think that we're genius hey founders hey startups when you're hiring for your small business you want to find quality professionals who are right for the role but i understand it can be tough to find the time and resources to find that perfect hire that's why you want to check out SPEAKER_82: you guessed it linkedin jobs linkedin jobs gives you the tools to find the right professionals for your team faster and for free and linkedin isn't just some simple job board it helps you hire professionals that you cannot find anywhere else there's over a billion members on linkedin now and they're in more than 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linkedin.com twist to post your job for free parameters and conditions do SPEAKER_58: apply tell me about the types of conversations uh that you know you're going to confront in your life SPEAKER_45: because you've really started to organize as you tell through uh as you do in your books a series of SPEAKER_51: anecdotes and individuals and heroes who are involved in this process i won't give all that up because i want you to buy the book in fact pause right now and just go over to audible and buy it or buy it over at amazon or your local bookstore whatever your jam is we'll be here when you come back from the pause super communicators uh and if you if you have a power habit buy both um okay got the plug out of the way i love both of these books so that's all you need to know go buy it books are the greatest SPEAKER_87: deal ever by the way i just want to give a shout out really are oh my gosh yeah how many years you SPEAKER_90: suffer for this book tell me three years i spent i spent three years writing this book and and like i think about this all the time i'll go buy a book for like twelve dollars yeah yeah and i'll read it in a day and a half and i'm like oh man that author spent four or five years like writing this novel and i just it's a great it's the arbitrage there value for dollar is ridiculous in books because SPEAKER_58: also you can give the book away then to somebody that's like you and you tell them like hey i got a lot out of this book and you give it to somebody now you get all that goodwill or you sell it resell SPEAKER_45: it for six or seven bucks now you're down to pay it's paying six bucks for six hours of listening or six hours of reading it's a dollar an hour pack with knowledge i mean shout out to books that are SPEAKER_58: high quality and i mean i've only written one and i'm working on two now it is just such a large amount of work to get this and you took the approach of finding people you studied the history of communications and who were some of the best communicators in the world yeah turns out the job i was going to go for little known fact i was going to go in the police force new york city police out of high school but then i decided i wanted to be an fbi agent so i was going to go to john jay criminal justice and get my master's in psychology and forensic psychology i i wound up getting into the internet and i went the different direction but fbi agents turn out to be super communicators um so let's talk about uh you can take it either way you want the type of conversations we have or maybe a bit about what you learned about the history of people getting really good at SPEAKER_35: communications yeah absolutely and and it's not just fbi agents right there's this great um story about felix sagala this fbi agent who is kind of a super negotiator but it's also the cia one of my SPEAKER_65: favorite stories is about this guy jim lawler who's a cia officer and when he goes to the farm to do his training what he realizes is that it's basically a communication school right your job in the cia is to communicate with other people in a way that you can create trust and empathy and that you might SPEAKER_35: bring them something and say hey look we're hearing this out of syria can you tell me if it's true or not right it's basically a communications job and so he goes and does the training and then they send him over to europe and it turns out he is terrible terrible recruiting spies like literally so bad that he'll go to parties and he'll start chatting someone up and they're like i think you're trying to recruit me for the cia if you don't stop right now i'm going to report you to the authorities and get you deported and he's just he's he's and so like and he had wanted his whole life to be a cia officer he'd worked so hard to get this job and eventually he meets this one SPEAKER_104: woman um uh yasmine who is from a middle eastern nation she works in the foreign the foreign minister's SPEAKER_35: office and she's in town in europe where they all are and and he takes her to lunch and he gets to know her and he asks her like would you consider working for the cia and she just freaks out and says absolutely not and he tells his bosses and his bosses are like you're gonna get fired like you're terrible at this job like you you've been here a year you've recruited no one and so he calls SPEAKER_65: up yasmine and he's like will you have one more dinner with me and she says yes and he goes and he has dinner with her and she's super glum and and he keeps trying to cheer her up and it's not working right because and then and then at some point he just gives up and he's like look this isn't going to happen and he just starts being honest with her he starts telling her about how disappointed he is in himself and and how frustrated he is that he's not good at this job and that's when SPEAKER_81: for the first time she could hear him and she says i want to help i can do this and she becomes the best asset in the middle east over the next 20 years and okay so if we read into that interaction SPEAKER_20: there's a little bit of vulnerability there's a little bit of pacing so i happen to know a little bit about this from my psychology background and as from being a journalist because as a journalist SPEAKER_19: our jobs like fbi agents uh or an interviewer on the podcast is to get information out of the host the subject make them feel comfortable and even pace them which i'm doing right now with you in this interview trying to pace your level of energy and i always tell people like the person's slow slow SPEAKER_00: down if the person's fast go fast so maybe you can talk about what the cia fbi learned about vulnerability sharing uh empathy deep listening there's there's a lot there and pacing there's a SPEAKER_65: ton of skills yeah yeah and and super communicators the book is really about these skills right because what we know is that no one is born a great communicator there's no personality type that makes you great communicators just a series of skills that you can practice and make into habits and and so one of the first things that happened when we look at that jim lawler that cia example is you're exactly right one of the things he did is match her he matched he matched this woman she was feeling glum and so he let himself match her emotional state and what's interesting about this is that when researchers have looked at communication and we're kind of living through this golden age of understanding the neurology of communication they found that we tend to think of a discussion as being about whatever we're talking about about like one thing right but actually every conversation is every discussion is made up of different kinds of conversations and those kinds of conversations they tend to fall in one of three buckets there's these practical conversations when we're solving problems or making plans punchless conversation right exactly exactly and then there's emotional conversations where i might tell you how i'm feeling and i don't want you to solve my feelings i want you to empathize and then finally there's social conversations which is about how we relate to each other and how we relate to society and what i think jim lawler the cia officer recognized during that meal is she was feeling down and he was trying to solve her problem she was in an emotional mindset having SPEAKER_104: an emotional conversation and he was being super practical he was like oh no you don't have to be worried like let's just um you know let's feel good let's remember all the places we went together SPEAKER_65: yeah and it's only when he matched her and he got emotional himself that they were able to hear each other and within psychology as you know this is called the matching principle that you have to have the same kind of conversation at the same moment to connect yeah and this is where connections SPEAKER_00: happening we have these mirror neurons there's a whole physiology to this absolutely all you really need to know is that as humans primates we mirror each other we imitate each other and when we're in sync in some way a connection is formed when we experiencing things together this is why like SPEAKER_19: you can fall in love with you know there's this uh hero syndrome like the the emt who saves you or the firefighter who saves you from like the fire burning building they fall in love SPEAKER_00: kind of thing it's a super intense moment in time you connect on a very high level but it happens actually in every conversation and every conversation is this moment to either deepen a relationship SPEAKER_124: or to damage a relationship that's exactly right and it's known within neuroscience is known as SPEAKER_65: neural entrainment oh what's interesting is that now what we can see is we can actually watch people's brains when they're having conversation and we can see that as people connect they actually start to think alike their neural activity becomes more and more similar yes which actually makes sense when you think about it because if i tell you about something i'm feeling you actually experience that emotion a little bit right or i tell you about an idea you experience that idea our brains are becoming SPEAKER_127: entrained and the goal of a conversation is to achieve that entrainment because we are hardwired to feel closer to each other more trusting of each other we're higher hardwired to feel happier when we SPEAKER_20: achieve that entrain because we're social animals this is exactly why we went to the top of the food chain and the species has done so well we have this incredible desire need to connect and the way we do it SPEAKER_00: is through conversation so okay sometimes you and your spouse you and your team at work or you and a friend have a task list of things you got to get done you got to get the house clean you got college SPEAKER_20: applications done you're planning a trip with your friends whatever it is at work you're going through SPEAKER_19: whatever project x is then you have emotional conversations hey you and i uh we became friends and we're both gen xers and you're struggling with something with your kids your teenagers i'm SPEAKER_24: struggling with one and we rely on each other we have this emotional conversation but i don't want SPEAKER_58: you to solve my kids problems i just want you to put your hand on my shoulder and say yeah exactly SPEAKER_134: yeah and acknowledge what you're feeling right be like look it's hard it is hard to be a parent SPEAKER_104: you're going through like something that's tough and like you're doing great but like it's just hard SPEAKER_58: right that feels so good yeah what's the next one you said there is your three times social the SPEAKER_104: social which is about which is about how we relate to each other in the context of society right like so so and it's and not every conversation every discussion usually has a practical and an emotional part not every single one has a social part but actually there's a lot that do that we don't realize it so if we're talking for instance about if we're gossiping about someone who's not SPEAKER_140: here right or yeah we're not gladwell let's talk about that guy right exactly malcolm look at him he's he's doing blue apron commercials now he's talking about blue apron on his podcast come on SPEAKER_144: malcolm hey man we know you're not doing blue apron come on you gotta pay the bills i know when i said SPEAKER_145: malcolm glad we'll do a blue apron commercial i was like i love it podcasts are killing journalism yeah SPEAKER_02: that's exactly right i mean just think about what happened to our profession i i convinced sam harris to do a podcast like years ago and my book agent uh brockman was like what have you done he hasn't he won't submit a book he's making too much money from this goddamn podcast SPEAKER_149: i was like sam the world needs you to publish a book stop with the goddamn podcast these are SPEAKER_81: good problems to have i mean it's a high class problem so when you're talking about sam or when you're talking about like like how do we think about this issue we talk about society all the time right SPEAKER_104: like like you and i we both live in the bay area and when we talk about san francisco right and and and the problems that san francisco has i'm also i'm still kind of bullish on san francisco because i just love SPEAKER_81: it the city so much like that's actually a social conversation because one of the things we're talking about is how our how our perceptions are a little bit different and the goal is not to SPEAKER_104: convince each other right i don't i don't want to convince you that i'm right and you convince me SPEAKER_65: but to share that to acknowledge those differences and learn something from it that's often a social SPEAKER_119: conversation got it not a debate where somebody has to win no and in fact both a good conversation is SPEAKER_104: never a debate right or very infrequently like the goal of a conversation is not to convince the other person that i'm right and you're wrong or i'm smart and you're dumb or you should like me or you should SPEAKER_65: you should respect me the goal of conversation is just to understand how you see the world a little bit yeah to speak in such a way that you can understand how i see the world if we've done that SPEAKER_157: we have succeeded and the way to do that is to show people you're listening and to ask a follow-up SPEAKER_00: question i think that's for me without knowing how you rank them in the book to be able to have the person feel like you've truly deeply listened to what they said yes and that and then to ask a follow-up question and and this uh which i do as an interviewer and i do it with friends or whatever SPEAKER_24: i will just repeat back to them something they said and then i think what is the most for the audience i think what is the question the audience most wants to hear the answer to or that i can come up with a question that they would be really interested in the answer so it's either their question or it's SPEAKER_45: my question but they get some great value out of it yeah and so in this case i'm doing that right now SPEAKER_163: look business leaders face a maze of tasks today we all know that creating and managing your company's ownership shouldn't add to your stress well meet mantle this is the ai powered equity management platform for modern founders and operators it's going to simplify your strategy and save you a ton of time mantle's been built from the ground up by founders for founders and they've spent 12 years building and scaling successful companies themselves and they've seen every mistake in the book and they've solved for it you can model your price round you can update your equity documents you're going to understand your dilution and it's designed for ease of use across all stakeholders power by mantle ai assistant man it's fast for example you just drop in your term sheet and you watch the platform generate a pro forma cap table for you in seconds this used to take oh my god you would ask your attorney it take a week and then it was wrong and now it just gets done instantly and this will allow you to focus on the things you need to focus on and not worry about your cap table so here's a call to action visit w-i-t-h-m-a-n-t-l-e.com twist to get your first 12 months free and you're going to lock in an exclusive rate of a hundred dollars a month after your first 12 months that's with mantle.com twist for your first 12 months free see why hundreds of founders SPEAKER_58: are switching to mantle right now in a social situation what is the the role of humor laughter and joking and there's different types of joking obviously but i'm curious where in our in these communications um and these styles of conversations does the act of laughing about life and you know humor play a role because oh it's kind of my superpower people tell me is that i make the conversations funny and i drop a joke in once in a while and i get invited back to more dinner parties SPEAKER_45: once in a while i get too far i don't get invited back we got to do some damage control but i was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about the role of humor and all absolutely and you're SPEAKER_127: exactly right that proving that we're listening and asking questions and asking the right kinds of SPEAKER_170: questions and we can dig deeper into both of those because there's a lot of science about how to do that how to do that better and how to do it right but to answer your question about humor so one of the things we know there's a guy named um uh a researcher named provine who used to be at the university of rhode island he's now passed away he spent his whole career basically studying SPEAKER_104: laughter and one of the things that he discovered is that eighty percent of the time in conversations when we laugh it is not in response to something funny right both of us have laughed and this this gets to your superpower is that both of us have left in this conversation neither of us have told a SPEAKER_172: joke no we're not doing so this is not uh we're not in the cat skills right now exactly SPEAKER_104: exactly and and so what's happening when we laugh when we laugh we're showing the other person that we want to connect with them and when they laugh back they're showing us that they want to that SPEAKER_19: they want to return it that they want to connect back and that's neural entrainment is the fancy SPEAKER_104: word for this exactly exactly and so what's interesting is my guess is a lot of those times SPEAKER_65: at those dinner parties what you're doing is you're bringing levity to the conversation by laughing about something yes that someone else might say the same thing or hear the same thing and not like but you're bringing this levity you're showing everyone hey i want to connect with you yeah and then they laugh back and we all feel connected to each other and that's really important SPEAKER_179: now if you actually tell a joke and it's genuinely funny that's even better right SPEAKER_02: sure absolutely or anecdotes i mean i think you know when i think about techniques SPEAKER_68: um there are devices you and i use as writers you're a much more successful writer than i am SPEAKER_149: but uh you to your admission socket communications you said the reason you wrote the book is because SPEAKER_177: your conversations suck and are falling flat in your life and in your business life they totally SPEAKER_02: were they totally were and that's exactly why did you how could this is perplexing to me i'm gonna ask a question on my behalf how could somebody be a transcendent top 0.1 percent writer and be SPEAKER_90: horrible at communicating in person with words you're good at words you know a lot of journalists and you were a journalist and still are kind of a journalist so yeah so you know the answer i know SPEAKER_104: the answer to the question a lot of journalists are terrible at it right so so i found i what i think it was was that i was overconfident so i was working at the new york times and they made me a manager and i was really good at like strategy and planning and stuff like that but then people who are working with me would come and talk to me about problems and i would instead of hearing them as emotional conversations i would try and solve their problem right away and they would get way disgruntled right or they would bring to me something that was practical and i would think that they were just complaining about like some emotional thing and and then the same thing happened SPEAKER_65: at home right i'd be i'd come home from work after a long day i'd complain to my wife about my day she would offer me some good advice like why don't you take your boss out to lunch and get to know him better and instead of being able to hear what she was saying i would get even more upset and then she would get upset because i was upset with her good advice and it's because we weren't having the same kind of conversations at the same moment right once we learn and there's a couple of techniques for this so one of them is asking questions you brought this up and this is a great one super communicators ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person and many of the questions they ask are a special kind of question that's known as a deep question which asks about our values or beliefs or experiences which can sound kind of intimidating but it's as simple as if you meet SPEAKER_104: someone who's a doctor instead of saying where do you practice medicine saying asking something like what made you decide to go to medical school what do you love about practicing medicine was there SPEAKER_193: something in your childhood that led you to not be good at communication sorry that is that that is SPEAKER_00: definitely a deep question that is a deep question but putting it aside um i could yeah i could see i think i know the issue that you were also you were you you had a blind side and i see this with a lot of people who go to a certain get a get a master's degree from a certain university with certain initials SPEAKER_02: hbs you went to hbs now for people who don't know harvard business school is absurdly hard to get into David Friedberg: they accept people you graduated 2000 or something 2003 okay i dated somebody who went to hbs i hung out SPEAKER_149: with hbsers i've spoken there three or four times this is the most confident yeah competitive SPEAKER_02: problem solving group of lunatics on the planet it's like taking the smartest kid in class who answers SPEAKER_10: the question before the teacher finishes it and doesn't raise their hand and then putting them all SPEAKER_205: in the same building and then telling them exactly right you're going to change the world yeah and i went SPEAKER_124: to by the way whoever answers the question fastest is going to get super duper rich so you should SPEAKER_10: definitely practice answering it as fast as you can correct whoever figures out general ai whether it's sam altman or elon you know or somebody else they're going to win a big prize so you were part of the SPEAKER_58: fast problem solving group the problem is you went into a group of people who don't um that's not how SPEAKER_10: they solve problems they solve problems by discussing it meditating on it and brick by brick bird by bird SPEAKER_03: you know building a mental framework and then they don't have the courage to just go right to the SPEAKER_00: answer it's as if you were a chess player with a 1600 rating playing with somebody who's learning the pieces you know or is an 800 rating you're just going way too fast for them and then that makes them feel small you made those people feel like they weren't smart and that sucks when your manager does SPEAKER_212: that is that what happened i think that that was an aspect of it but i actually think the bigger thing SPEAKER_65: is that it's it's like someone bringing you a checkers board or a backgammon board and insisting SPEAKER_104: that we play chess where they would they would bring me a problem an emotional problem and i kept on insisting that it could be solved practically god and it just can't that's what happens with my wife right like yes like when we get into this thing with her when she mentions something that she's feeling to me and i try and solve her feelings oh you shouldn't feel that way or here's what you can do SPEAKER_65: yep it's not it's not so much that she feels little or scared it's that she feels like i'm actually not listening to her and she's right she wants to play backgammon and i'm like nope we only SPEAKER_104: play chess in this family that's all we're going to do and that's frustrating right it was a book SPEAKER_68: men are from mars women are from venus or something let's get into it let's let's let's let's talk about gender differences you do this massive research and uh we won't say these are our personal opinions as far as we're going we have no opinion on gender and communication differences but what do the SPEAKER_225: experts say well you and i've been married and have kids and yeah we have our own thoughts on gender SPEAKER_102: differences i'll tell you what actually the data says what does the data say yeah so what the data says is that there's actually very few differences okay how genders communicate it with a couple of SPEAKER_65: exceptions okay the first of which is what do you feel comfortable in so everybody has this need everybody has this craving for neural entrainment everybody has a deep questions proving that we're SPEAKER_104: listening that works with everyone but then the question is from a cultural perspective where are you comfortable where are you habituated and for many men we get habituated into practical conversations right into problem solving got it and for a number of women again they get habituated they they it's more acceptable or it's or it's pressed on them to be more comfortable having emotional conversations and so SPEAKER_65: when we say men are from mars women are from venus it's actually not true it's that everyone's from earth but men might spend more time on mars and women might spend more time on venus but that doesn't mean it's something about our brains it doesn't mean it's part of our character interests simply that we've been inculcated with it right the same thing is true across different cultures so SPEAKER_104: if you if you were to go to you know there's a question that i ask whenever i give speeches which is turn to the person next to you and describe the ask and answer the last time you cried in front of another person and people love this exercise it's a famous exercise by this guy nicholas epilette university chicago in asia in japan that does not work like people are not comfortable talking about the last time they cried they are comfortable talking about the last time they saw their SPEAKER_65: parents cry ah whereas whereas in the us that actually might feel kind of like a betrayal right yeah yeah and so but that doesn't mean that like we have a different tolerance for intimacy it means that we are these cultures teach us different norms and part of being a good communicator is SPEAKER_170: just recognizing those norms just recognizing this is the norm i'm steeped in this is the norm you're SPEAKER_68: steeped in but we're not bound by them fascinating so and i wonder because i've heard this uh from some SPEAKER_00: enlightened friends of mine who've had long lasting marriages is that the style difference that we're referring to here men are sent to mars women are sent to venus but we both could go to either planet which just maybe society pushes us there in america now we're forced to be constantly in problem-solving mode as men and women are being told or pushed into or subtly navigated towards SPEAKER_19: emotional or conversations with more resonance um you put those two things together those are the exact polar opposite conversations like the techniques that work in one the styles that work in one and the SPEAKER_68: goals of each of those is completely different as you've just explained the goal of the emotional one i think is to feel heard to know you're not alone and to experience in this you know mirroring etc the goal of the punch list one is to feel like you made forward progress and that one i guess being SPEAKER_00: shorter would be better and for the emotional one longer would be better is the duration of the SPEAKER_238: conversation matter no it really doesn't because if you think about it like i'm sure you in your vc SPEAKER_104: firm you guys have practical conversations that go on for weeks right should we make this investment should we not like like that's not and there might be some emotional aspects to it but it's primarily practical conversation so the duration doesn't matter quite as much as just once we are aware of SPEAKER_65: these three conversations and we learn to look for the signals of what kind of conversation we're in we can almost automatically overcome the challenges that it presents it's just in a matter of awareness and the reason why is because if you think about it you mentioned this before communication is homo SPEAKER_104: sapiens superpower right yes it's the thing that has allowed our species to be so successful so as a SPEAKER_65: result our brains have evolved to be really really good at communication if it's given the right inputs so what happens is that when when you hear there's three kinds of conversations here's some ways to try and recognize which conversation you're in your brain will actually make that into a habit very very SPEAKER_244: quickly so you're back to the power of habit back to the power when you get into a communicate when you SPEAKER_00: get into a conversation step one this is a social conversation we're chewing the fat everybody's looking to explore ideas get to know each other are we having an emotional conversation hey i need to give you empathy i need to understand what you're feeling or are we doing the punch list are we doing SPEAKER_157: a practical conversation here and then you can come into it with a different expectation and technique SPEAKER_170: and here's my favorite example so you're sitting in a meeting right and you're waiting for the meeting to start and the guy next to you just turn to him and you're like hey how was your weekend SPEAKER_104: and they say something like oh i went to go see my kids graduation it was great right now the most the practical mindset could be like oh congratulations okay let's get down to the agenda but the the super communicator is going to say oh man that sounds amazing what did it feel like to SPEAKER_127: watch your kid walk across that stage like was that was that awesome and he's gonna that your friend is going to answer for 15 seconds and then you can be like oh man that sounds really cool thank SPEAKER_65: you for sharing that okay let's get down to the agenda right when somebody signals to you what kind of mindset they're in and they might do it subtly just by saying like i went to my kid's graduation SPEAKER_127: it was great then if we match them if we ask a question particularly a deep question how did you feel about that what we're doing is we're giving them an opportunity to align with us and for us to SPEAKER_65: entrain with them and it doesn't have to be super time consuming it doesn't have to be super intimate we don't have to be weeping on each other's shoulders but when we do that we both feel connected David Sacks: to each other and that's going to make that practical conversation a lot easier to have yeah SPEAKER_20: uh what role you know this is like so great to have you on here because i get to ask my own SPEAKER_251: personal questions here what role do anecdotes storytelling i mean i understand metaphors analogies SPEAKER_00: have a certain importance in communication it's pretty obvious what they are they help you understand something faster or in a deeper way but i notice um and i noticed in my life when i for some reason maybe it's the irish and the greek in me storytellers both i would i i and i i grew up listening to anecdotes right i'd sit around the table my irish uncles aunts grandparents cousins everybody be telling stories the greeks do this particularly well as well uh just over different beverages and SPEAKER_03: libations what role did like telling anecdotes and sharing these like stories have and then self SPEAKER_00: deprecation same question what are the roles of anecdotes and self being self-deprecating because i've been self-deprecating for a long time which sort of was a funny comedic device and also it was something SPEAKER_19: i learned on the stoops of brooklyn because we used to break each other's chops and so if i could SPEAKER_02: tell you i was a fat greek bastard before you could tell me i was a fat greek bastard or you know as a drug irish you know whatever i could cut you off at the pass you know and during our insult battles SPEAKER_51: uh in my youth but maybe we touch on those two yeah absolutely so it's a great question so so SPEAKER_254: anecdotes i think anecdotes are important for two reasons number one is if you think about what i SPEAKER_104: was saying before so every conversation is made every discussion is made about different kinds of conversations you might start emotional go to practical go to social go back to emotional the great thing about a story a story is like a little package of all those different kinds of conversations right i'm going to tell you i'm going to tell you i'm going to set up something and then i'm going to tell you like man i got to the party and i was feeling really really down but then jim came up and he handed me this drink and i didn't know what was in it and and then later on that night like i found myself in bed with susie right when i'm telling you that story what SPEAKER_65: i'm actually doing is i'm helping you through all these different kinds of conversations i'm telling you about my emotional state i'm telling about you some practical stuff there's probably a SPEAKER_104: lesson that i'm expecting or that you'll carry away from this which just might be like don't drink SPEAKER_65: stuff that people hand to you there's a social element because we're talking about other people so a story is a perfect little way of having these three little conversations in a very clear manner but in addition what we know is that if you ask people tell me about a conversation you had a week SPEAKER_104: ago yeah and you ask them what did people say they will almost never be able to remember what SPEAKER_65: anyone said they will remember the topics that were discussed kind of they'll remember who was in it and they'll remember kind of how some people were positioned in it but they won't remember anything specific but if you ask them tell me how you felt during that conversation they'll be able to tell you the emotional journey they were on we remember fascinating we remember how other pe we SPEAKER_127: remember how other people make us feel we don't remember what they say quite as well this is something SPEAKER_65: i have yeah good keep going well a story gets around them right a story is a way of taking an idea SPEAKER_262: and embedding it in some emotion so that you remember that story and therefore you remember the idea SPEAKER_68: ah see it's fascinating so this is why i think storytelling and anecdotes are so much fun SPEAKER_82: calling all seed and series a startups be sure to check out hubspot for startups and hubspot ventures for their million dollar pitch competition wait what a million dollars yes that's right applications are officially open for a limited time apply to be one of six founders flown out to hubspot's flagship inbound conference taking place in boston this september when you get there you're going to get a chance to pitch on stage in front of one thousand folks and a panel of vcs and execs not only will you get invaluable feedback to help your business grow but you also will be considered for an investment of up to one million dollars again you heard that right two commas one million dollars submissions are open until midnight eastern time may 17 2024 so let's get those applications in folks this is a huge opportunity to showcase your startup's unicorn potential so get your submission in and don't miss your shot here's the call to action super simple get ready to enter hubspot for startups and hubspot ventures million dollar pitch competition apply now at hubspot.com million dollar pitch hubspot.com million dollar pitch all one word no spaces no dashes the link will be in the show notes and good luck i hope you win a million dollar investment at the million dollar pitch competition SPEAKER_85: what's the most embarrassing thing that ever had to do to me yeah i'm genuinely asking you this story SPEAKER_149: yeah yeah i did by the way when you told the story about how much you sucked as a manager i think you sell 10 times as many books right there because you're being honest like you wrote this book because you're struggling with how you speak to your wife and emotional conversations i think you just sell 10 times as many books when i just said that and recapped it because you know what it's authentic right SPEAKER_24: it's authentic and an hbs guy who sold 12 million copies of a book has got a problem i mean many many problems my friend i know but for somebody who's a great writer to be a communicator it's like the best SPEAKER_274: you know way to present the book um so i'll tell you i'll tell you um i'll tell you when i was most SPEAKER_104: embarrassed and then i want to ask you the same question oh no so there was a d so i i went to like this this thing with my kids i was taking them to like a game and i had been there was another dad there i really liked this dad we would talk on the sidelines as the game was going on and i was like jim you know this is like i love looking forward i always talk to jim i looked forward to look talking to jim every time i saw him it'd be hey jim what's up and five games in he was like by the way i just SPEAKER_279: needed to let you know my name is steve i am such a dick wow yeah that is yeah that was i was i was SPEAKER_01: somewhat red-faced at that moment how about you what's the most embarrassing thing you can you can SPEAKER_266: remember i it's it's it's not just the most embarrassing it's the most painful yeah yeah it was SPEAKER_68: physically the most painful i think i've ever been in and the most embarrassing so i uh i sold my second company weblogs inc which was the producers of engadget you probably remember that blog it was the number one blog in the world for a while auto blog so i'm like in my early 30s is 20 years ago and i sell the company we sold the company for 30 million dollars i i went from being broke to being SPEAKER_19: rich overnight and uh it was just this incredible success story 18 months from start to finish mark SPEAKER_68: cuban's the investors yeah it's incredible so i get the wires and everything my partner and i SPEAKER_00: champagne boom we're rich my friend uh is going to sundance uh because his movie's premiering my SPEAKER_03: friend david sacks is premiering the film thank you for smoking and my other friend just make this a complete crazy name drop elon musk is a producer of that film and he has a cameo in it and his plane SPEAKER_19: at the time the falcon has a cameo and so david's also got a plane everybody's flying out from la to SPEAKER_00: sundance i have to go to a closing dinner with all the bloggers who work there and and give everybody SPEAKER_293: their bonus checks but i really wanted to fly on the private jet that would have been great right to SPEAKER_00: fly to sundance on a private jet but i said you know what guys i'm going to meet you there so my wife my friends their wives everybody's flying out to go to sundance i'm going to meet them there on southwest i go by the southwest ticket there's no flights left because it's sundance from la right right SPEAKER_149: i'm like god damn it there's one flight 505 a.m i'm like i didn't know they had flights before 6 a.m SPEAKER_00: 5 a.m you might as well stay out i mean so i got to get there a 405 for a 505. i am dead tired i get on the flight i got a middle seat um i go i'm exhausted my friends are already there private jet blah blah blah put my bag up i sit down in my middle seat and i feel a weird sensation like SPEAKER_02: a crunching sound then i feel wetness and then i feel heat and then i jump up and i look down down and there is a giant starbucks cup and black coffee steaming in my seat oh my god SPEAKER_03: and the woman in the window seat looks at me and goes oh were you sitting there SPEAKER_08: and i said where your coffee was in my seat and then i feel my ass is on fire SPEAKER_10: i but the plane is taxiing like now at this point and like the woman's trying to or the plane's about to taxi everybody's seated i run to the bathroom i drop my drawers i see out of the corner of my eye my pasty white irish ass is red and i realized i may have to go to the hospital so i start pouring this is hot coffee s is the name of this story i start you know how you can get like a little bit SPEAKER_08: of water out of that yeah yeah i start putting that on my ass little scoops of water and they're SPEAKER_149: banging on the door sir we have to take off you have to come out of the bathroom i'm like my ass is on fire i can't get out of this bathroom so i start taking my pants off i take my underwear off i i cool my ass down now there's like three or four people around the back of the air but do you need an ambulance do you need whatever because now the flight attendants know what's happened i mean starbucks coffee's hot yeah it's very hot especially when you don't have milk in this with black coffee this woman's drink so i take my underwear off i put my khakis back on my khakis destroyed my ass is steam i take but my my ass is still burning so i take some of the seafold napkins SPEAKER_58: and i wet them and i paste them to my butt so i have coolness on my butt because i know i gotta get the temperature down i put that up i got that under my white tidy whiteys are black but i can't SPEAKER_307: put them on and so i get out of the thing and i'm holding it and i look the whole plane is looking SPEAKER_310: looking at you i got the whites i walk back to see the woman has her magazine book whatever like SPEAKER_312: this she does not want to make eye contact with me for this does she ever does she apologize she says nothing for the rest of the flight nothing oh my gosh for her and i i said to her don't worry SPEAKER_58: like it's like only first three burns it's not like my ass isn't blistering whatever i get there to sundance i i'm freezing my ass off literally as you know it's cold i'm getting in my suv and my wife wants me to pick her up uh get back to the house whenever i get changed so i got this SPEAKER_315: underwear so i just tuck it into the side of the console you know between the scene i go pick SPEAKER_106: everybody up i got everybody in the car now david sachs everybody uh and like my wife pulls the SPEAKER_316: underwear out in front of everyone what's this oh my god and i said i had an accident on the plane SPEAKER_319: technically true i didn't have an accident technically technically true technically true SPEAKER_130: of literally the most embarrassing twice twice embarrassed yeah yeah it's good times though SPEAKER_193: right it's like it's a great memory yeah yeah i also thought there's something humbling about this like you've finally the kid from brooklyn became a millionaire always feared being poor and now i'm a SPEAKER_02: millionaire finally i got my dream and i still gotta take this 5 a.m flight yeah and i still burnt the SPEAKER_68: out of my ass and you know what doesn't matter how much money you have you're gonna sit on a hot you're gonna get hot coffee at some time it's gonna happen i life has a very it does a very good job of SPEAKER_104: um of forcing us to recognize our limitations and keeping us humble if we're not so you had asked about self-depreciation so i think one of the things yeah yeah depreciation yeah so i think one of the SPEAKER_81: things that the re i think one of the reasons why that's so successful is because because it's very SPEAKER_104: authentic right so one of the things that we know is that people's brains are very good at detecting inauthenticity like we've always we've all been at that party and someone asks us you know where uh where'd you go on vacation and we recognize like three seconds in they don't care where we went on vacation they just want to tell us about where they went on vacation right tell us about the yacht they they rented yeah so our brains have evolved to be very good at detecting this and i think one of the SPEAKER_81: things that happens with self-depreciating stories is that is that we tend it's a it's a way for us to be authentic right without without without having to um without having to fake it oftentimes like if the story is true and you genuinely kind of look like you know and that's the the butt of the the joke right if you have a so yeah exactly then then i think what it does is it it conveys that authenticity it makes other people trust that everything we're going to say might might be authentic SPEAKER_00: because we've been willing to share something vulnerable when people have an ask they want something from the other person this is a certain dynamic of conversation you want the job you want the promotion you want the investment from the venture capitalist you want the customer to sign on the line you want to get your book signed you want to get your book approved and you want to get a publisher there's a there's an imbalance there there's an asker and there's the person who can give uh it's not a sorry negotiation that's a separate category but in those conversations are there best practices there that you learned about how to frame them and how they should go down for the goal SPEAKER_58: of getting what you want the investment the book deal etc yeah so let's talk about like if you're SPEAKER_104: applying for a job or you're you're talking to a venture capitalists group and i'm curious if you would think that this is good advice as a vc yourself so oftentimes we go in thinking our SPEAKER_127: job is to impress this person right my job is to impress them that i'm a great hire or my job is to impress them that i'm a great investment but again a conversation is successful if we understand each SPEAKER_104: other at the first outset and so if i go in and i say like here's why you should hire me i'm fantastic and i never ask you a question and i never get a sense of like what you're actually looking for how you're thinking about this problem then then i'm not trying to understand you i'm just trying to force you to understand me and so i think one of the best things you can do during job interviews for instance is to go in and say you know they they ask you interviews in the question to say like look do you mind if i ask you a question like i i'm wondering like what do you think makes someone successful or not successful in this position like what it beyond what you've written down what is it that you've seen that what have you what are you looking for that you've seen in the past help someone succeed in this role right at that point exactly at that point it becomes a conversation and i think that i you can tell me i'm assuming during pitches that the folks you end up investing SPEAKER_127: in they probably ask you questions right they're trying to understand how you see the world not so much SPEAKER_20: you would think that's interesting yeah but you you have to understand you're dealing with two of the uh yeah and you you do understand this having uh gone to hbs which produces a lot of venture SPEAKER_68: capitalists and a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of management consultants sadly also known as a wasted SPEAKER_02: life um have you watched what's happening to management consultants since chad gpt came out no it hasn't but it's probably it's like if you want gibberish we got you covered anything into chat David Friedberg: and we will put words on a page that seemingly are important that nobody will read anyway it's like my SPEAKER_02: my premise is chat gpt is basically like a mckinsey consultant they're buying people out they're like SPEAKER_00: please let us buy you out because people are not hiring them because if you want a bunch of words and gibberish uh to give you some strategy it actually turns out chat gpt that any of these are really good SPEAKER_238: at that but you're just going to tell me yeah yeah so you're dealing with these two groups that are both SPEAKER_00: like so on the venture capital side um you have like a range of people who are some of them are very SPEAKER_68: thoughtful and ask a lot of questions who are in the michael moritz from sequoia journal previous journalist and myself would be like and not that i would ever compare myself to him as an investor but i both of us are journalists oh malik comes from that school where you're you're good at asking SPEAKER_24: questions and reading people and understanding the next question to ask you know and seeing if the person's thoughtful on the other side and then you might have somewhere just completely arrogant lunatics um who just because they're the ones writing it they're kind of like studio heads or SPEAKER_58: something giving a green light to a picture right so they're just high on their own supply of lunatics and who knows why they invest you know there's a whole bunch of reasons fomo you know whatever um and then on the other side you have entrepreneurs who have so much enthusiasm and they're so effervescent they're so maniacal you can describe it positively or negatively um about their idea that they just SPEAKER_02: cannot stop talking about it they cannot stop filling the air at every moment with everything they're so SPEAKER_00: contained about right and if they did ask more questions i think they would do better but since i know that this is the group you're dealing with which are people who if they're going to be successful SPEAKER_20: are difficult people cantankerous people but effective people so there was a famous moment where uh the founder of sequoia capital drew a uh four quadrant diagram agreeableness disagreeable SPEAKER_254: continent correct 100 correct it turns out SPEAKER_02: you know steve jobs yeah bill gates like zuckerberg these people are not easy to get along with at SPEAKER_58: times yeah and you know travis from uber you know he's got his own vision of how this is going to go but highly competent you you make money on competent agreeable people too just not probably not going to be the outliers so when confronted with a disagreeable person like a founder who might say like why should i have you on the cap table or that's a stupid question like i've had a founder say that's a stupid SPEAKER_81: question think about the level of hootspa that takes totally totally but it's actually what's interesting about that is that that doesn't mean it's a bad question so like someone who said or SPEAKER_104: something to say right because because i think what i'm hearing you say and tell me if i'm getting this wrong yeah is when someone is a disagreeable person what they're also doing is they're being very authentic to themselves right so they walk into that room and they're not asking you a question just because they want to impress you that they're the kind of person to ask questions rather they're telling you like if you ask me a dumb question i'm gonna let you know it's a dumb question yeah and if and if i ask you something like why do you belong on this cap table it's i'm actually asking you why you belong on this cap table i'm asking you the most authentic thing that i can that i'm curious about at this moment yeah so i don't know for me i love it i SPEAKER_19: i think it's great i i love people but it's the brooklyn in me who just get right to the point and who ask the hardest question because life is short everybody has options so let's just get to it let's see if this is going to work or not i i like to go fast but um i do think asking a vc a couple of questions is a great idea um and i always tell them like go ask other founders what they think of SPEAKER_24: the vc tell me about a difficult conversation you've had with them like we call them dark references or backdoor references there's a bunch of different terms for it but don't tell the vc you're doing it SPEAKER_58: just go look at people they've invested in and say hey how's jason calacanis as an investor can i SPEAKER_170: ask you another question so one of the other things that super communicators do in addition asking questions that's really important is they prove that they're listening like and there's actually a technique for this known as looping for understanding uh which is that you ask a SPEAKER_374: question preferably a deep question you repeat what the person said in your own words to prove to them that you're you're processing and then you ask them if you got it right so funny you say this SPEAKER_10: i literally have in our training manual for new associates and the firm researchers make sure you ask SPEAKER_20: people um can i repeat your vision this isn't a 20 minute meeting the last thing they have to say to SPEAKER_00: the founders may i repeat back to you your vision for startup name so i make sure i understand it completely and i wrote that language yeah and i make sure everybody says it every meeting because then that person when they leave we ask them to rate our firm with the nps score you know how likely are you to recommend launch to another founder we get incredibly high scores because SPEAKER_68: when i started getting reviews back from founders the number one criticism was i jason didn't SPEAKER_03: understand my vision yeah i was like am i arrogant am yes okay sure uh am i not listening no i'm SPEAKER_00: listening well why do people feel that way and then when i realized we say no to 199 out of 200 meetings if somebody says no it's very easy for the person who to frame it as well they didn't understand SPEAKER_134: if they understood my brilliance exactly they would have green lighted my movie they didn't hear what i was telling them telling them really listening yeah so i created a device to cut them off at the SPEAKER_104: path yeah i think it's really really smart and and what we know is that again hardwired by evolution into our brain is that if i believe you are listening to me i'm more likely to listen to you yeah so my question to you is when when you're evaluating a potential investment how much do you care about whether that that entrepreneur will listen to you like how much of that is a is a factor in in how SPEAKER_20: you make decisions that's interesting um i think that you have to understand um if you want to be great at venture capital that your returns which is how you'll be judged ultimately um are completely dependent on you hitting a company in the power law a great outlier i was lucky enough to be the third or fourth investor at uber made my career but then i did it with robin hood and a couple of other SPEAKER_00: companies com other great companies and it turns out missing a company omission is the is the big sin and so and the great founders do not need help from their venture capitalists this is the big secret that's interesting the whole venture capital industry is predicated on this patina of we're here to help you and you know it's going to be like this mentorship and this you're going to be there by your side and it turns out a lot of times the founders just run off with it and you're lucky along to be on the rocket ship like you literally got on the rocket ship what is the passenger on the rocket ship what is their impact nothing they lit the candle the candle went to the moon that's it it got SPEAKER_19: to escape velocity so people kind of over index or maybe overthink how much impact a vc themselves can SPEAKER_24: have so i do like somebody who i can have a a vibrant discussion with but they don't i don't like somebody who changes their vision based on a question i ask so sometimes i'll ask people a question so should this be a consumer product or should you be selling to enterprises and they're like well i just presented a consumer product to you but do you think it should be enterprise um because we could SPEAKER_40: make it enterprise i've literally had people change their business model in the room and i'm like uh SPEAKER_10: i was asking you to get your opinion on why it's not enterprise but i don't want you to switch it i i actually asked that question in good faith like i don't know the answer like how did you come to consumer versus enterprise right so i guess i like somebody who can battle it out and debate stuff i SPEAKER_45: don't care if it's quietly over sms over email you know doing a walk and talk or on the phone or screaming i don't care i care about the outcome but i don't like somebody who is willy-nilly and will flip their vision based on a question i asked well and i think that's exactly that gets at the heart of SPEAKER_104: like why conversations work right because if a conversation is one way then it's not a conversation it's and and and one way doesn't mean just that i'm monologuing and you're listening it can also mean you're not bringing anything to the conversation i'm asking you a question and you're assuming that i have already made up my mind you're not actually listening to what i'm asking you yeah and showing me that you're listening by responding and saying actually let me tell you why we're going consumer rather than enterprise because enterprise is the stupidest thing on the SPEAKER_170: face of the planet right yeah and and that is that authenticity is that at the end of the day there's a study that was done by harvard um called the harvard study of adult development i'm sure you've heard of it it's like one of the largest and longest studies they've yeah they followed SPEAKER_104: people around for 80 years now thousands of people trying to figure out what makes you happy and healthy and successful however you define success at age 65 what they found is that the only thing that basically predicts that is having a handful of close relationships at age 100 yeah and that the way we create those close relationships is not simply by calling people up and following their lead it's by leading together right that if you say something authentic i'm going to say something authentic too if you say something revealing i'm going to reveal something about myself you know that doesn't mean i'm going to agree with you it doesn't mean that we're like the same person but it does SPEAKER_65: mean that we're going to feel connected right and that's and the people you love and the people i love are people we don't agree with all the time yeah they are but they are people who know how to connect with us despite the fact that we disagree about this i think that study is so profound by the way SPEAKER_20: the one you're bringing up um yeah because at the end of the day the conclusion i've come to and i lost a couple of friends over the last couple years um tony shea uh you know from delivering happiness and zappos died tragically um and dave goldberg goldie um died as well you know there's two guys i SPEAKER_03: play poker with all the time and i realized wow you know i have a collection of memories fossil conversations with those two gentlemen and at the end of our lives what do we actually have we have a collection of memory yeah with certain people and and to your point earlier in our conversation and how those conversations and moments made us feel we may not remember the entirety SPEAKER_58: of those but we remember how they made us feel and this is why when i was a young buck editor i made people feel terrible i was like a hardcore person and i then started to think about how i was making people feel and i incorporated a lot more levity while still delivering hey we have a standard to hit we're in a competitive space you gotta you gotta work harder um and or you this product is not SPEAKER_368: acceptable as delivered um where i used to just kick people out of a meeting like my god this is garbage get the out of the meeting you know literally would kick people out of an editorial meeting come back SPEAKER_19: when you have something to contribute you know uh now i would just say hey that's this is not the standard we're going for um please uh you know give it another shot and uh we're better than this aren't we because we're not going to do well totally if we produce this so i don't know if you need some SPEAKER_253: help with this or you can run it by but let's give it another shot and try to level this up well and SPEAKER_254: goldie i think is a really good example of a super communicator because when i was covering so i met him SPEAKER_170: when i was covering the music industry for the la times before i went to launch.com and yeah exactly SPEAKER_48: exactly my venture is launch.co by the way oh nice because i always love launch and i always love that SPEAKER_170: name which i got from gold so we would we would go to till breakfast and lunch pretty regularly and i SPEAKER_104: i honestly don't remember anything we talked about but i remember how humble he was how genuinely he SPEAKER_170: cared about like my success and other people's success how honest he was and i remember walking away from SPEAKER_104: those conversations feeling like this is one of the greatest guys like it just and feeling good myself right like feeling feeling like i was smart because and that's the thing he super communicators are not the most charismatic people they're not the biggest extroverts they can they can be charismatic and extroverts but they can be curmudgeonly introverts yeah super communicators succeed because they show you that they want to connect with you yeah and that that feels special yeah yeah yeah and he and right he wanted to connect if he was having a conversation with you he was genuinely present in that conversation he wanted to connect with you yeah he did not want to impress you that he was the i actually didn't even find out who his wife was until like i had known him for three months David Sacks: yeah and i was and i was like how do you how do you afford this life of yours he's like well SPEAKER_419: you know my wife works she got she got on the right rocket ship as well yeah yeah the actual rocket ship quote is from cheryl um oh is it really yeah she said if you get a seat in a rocket SPEAKER_40: ship in silicon valley taken yeah because it's very rare that the rockets you know take off and you SPEAKER_00: gotta get to be on one but yeah goldie you know in our poker group you know with me and chamath and other folks you know we were all these crazy narcissistic lunatic you know trying to impress everybody and and hit certain goals and he was just the most thoughtful guy who would talk to you SPEAKER_20: about how you were doing and mentor you how are you doing in your life and uh they got a word for SPEAKER_03: that uh mensch and he was a super mensch it turns out super communicator super mensch they're probably adjacent basically the same thing yeah yeah yeah it's not that could be the same thing listen i've SPEAKER_19: kept you for over an hour this has been amazing everybody go buy the book charles you know we should have just we should chew the fat and have you on the pot again like every year absolutely i would love that we should just talk shop because yeah you got a lot of great insights and i think we're both genxers SPEAKER_03: yes yes come to you sometime we'll go surfing absolutely for sure you know i don't surf i ski and i i've gotten more into skiing but you surf out down there with the shark you got it so i didn't SPEAKER_104: i didn't start surfing until like 10 years ago when i was 40. it it is a way easier than people think it is not easy but like it's more approachable it's also so fun i it is i am not a graceful person i'm not an athletic person i feel like i am living poetry on a surfboard i never i don't look that SPEAKER_58: way but i feel it that is uh what you're experiencing is flow right yeah where the whole world disappears when you get up on that board and you are connecting with that wave there is SPEAKER_10: nothing else in your mind and that's what i get from downhill skiing i got a place in tahoe after tony i never shared this but since we're having this like super communication moment when tony shea died i was like i was talking to a friend i said what do you do for fun you know i was really depressed SPEAKER_20: uh if i'm being honest about his death um and i was like we're talking about happiness and how much happiness he brought people and so i said uh you know like i work i invest and you know i take my girls over here you know and they're like oh that's things you do for other people jacal i'm like SPEAKER_435: okay yeah i play poker with my friends like okay yeah that's something what else uh i was like i couldn't SPEAKER_20: come up with anything i did for myself you know when you become a dad and you've got 400 investments and you gotta do three podcasts a week just your life as you become an adult gets filled up and you're not doing anything for yourself essentially you're just a mule uh this is what happens to men specifically of a certain age i think you become a mule and i think moms are have a different type of experience they have and yeah they also can become mules and so i said you know i like skiing how how often do you ski i was like i go like three or four days every other year or something and then i did two years two seasons back to back 40 and 39 days oh my gosh yeah we did more skiing in two years SPEAKER_254: incredible life-changing did it yeah did it feel like were you happier on the days you weren't skiing SPEAKER_388: like what did my happiness and my brain chemistry went 5x in terms of my happiness when i wasn't and when SPEAKER_00: i don't ski for an extended period of time i get sad i'm sad in the summer because of skiing so i got to pick up surfing in the summer surfing you got to come do it i need a slow experience because i i don't and i i had it this summer last summer i went um have you ever done an efoil these uh boards are they SPEAKER_24: cool yeah i've seen them so i did the efoil i had instructors on a lake which makes it super easy and you climb on the board and then when you get your balance first you ride the board just like laying on SPEAKER_58: it and you have a remote control and you just hit the button and and then you lean back a little bit and the foil that's under the water with the blade when it angles up it lifts the board up out of the water so now you're the board comes off the water and you're just on the foil and it's the closest thing to flying i've experienced but it's very analogous to skiing and i've skied very fast the last couple years like over 50 miles an hour on diamonds with really really great skis and just that feeling of you have to start to have this flow experience and then you're popped up on the board and then you lean back and the board pops out of the water and you lean forward and it goes down and you lean a little left right it is the most magical experience when you figure it out and SPEAKER_104: i think it's what happens to people when they catch a wave yeah that's exactly the same thing yeah because it's so hard and it's also like you're so in touch with nature right you have to pay attention to the ocean and as somebody who like spends most of his time on a screen yeah like when you are close to something natural like in a kind of intimate way like you have to pay attention to it yes and it actually feels very redemptive i think it's the same thing falling going down the mountain right yes it's it's not just the speed it's the snow it's the sound it's the quiet around you yeah it's SPEAKER_03: the gravity of it right like i think it's magical and there's something also about speed and being in the moment where it requires 100 focus because i've had moments where i'm drifting off and i was SPEAKER_10: like oh just listen to a podcast while i'm skiing nope i can listen to music while i'm skiing and i'll SPEAKER_439: listen to a podcast or an audio because you're going to bite it and you're going to destroy yourself SPEAKER_388: and biting at 50 miles an hour on a diamond no bueno not good not especially not 53 you know SPEAKER_00: something's not going to go well season over and man i had so many profound moments um and it's SPEAKER_19: great for writing too i suspect when you get off surfing a writing session must be great yeah yeah no SPEAKER_134: it's definitely it's definitely like i love it anyways come down come down what's your favorite SPEAKER_459: book on writing by the way i'll end on that because i know writers like books on writing uh my favorite SPEAKER_104: book on writing is probably actually this book by jim stewart james stewart the who's at the the he's a columnist of the new york times now but he also used to write for the new new yorker and still kind of does it's called follow the story if anyone wants to learn how to write jim stewart's follow the story is a great great book but i don't know this oh it's a great book it's a great book i'm gonna get it right now right now like a non-writing book that i think teaches you a lot about writing SPEAKER_137: is a visit from the goon squad by jenny egan ah what's the premise um so it's it's about it's it's a SPEAKER_104: series of vignettes about these interconnected characters in the music industry it won the pulitzer prize a couple years ago it's a great book just so much fun looking at it right now oh so it's SPEAKER_467: non-fiction that's fiction it's fiction it's fiction it's fiction yeah yeah visit from the gun squad is SPEAKER_104: fiction and the thing is that like when you read really good writers one of the things that they're SPEAKER_58: doing is they're teaching you how to write 100 yeah this is why i you know i always loved um michael creighton i don't know if you've read michael creighton oh my god i love michael creighton SPEAKER_10: it's the easiest reading but it also there's something about the writing you and i do about business about you know non-fiction writing he was a non-fiction writer putting a layer of fiction on it where he's like hey you want to understand dna let's talk about dressing park oh you want to understand aviation airframe most people haven't read that but he he really like and the story never SPEAKER_104: stops it just moves so fast he's respecting you as a reader he's taking care of you right he's like i want to teach you something but i promise i'm not going to make it spinach i'm going to like SPEAKER_262: i'm going to reward you for learning it's great my two favorite on on writing stephen king's on SPEAKER_108: writing have you read no i haven't read it but people have recommended it to me i should just listen SPEAKER_19: to it or read it it's a great like if you're just going for a walk to listen to he really talks about like writing cujo and other moments and so it's auto it's his autobiography but it's about SPEAKER_02: writing and his love of writing and like doing cocaine while writing cujo nose bleeding like so evocative like he's like and i had two tissues up my nose because my nose was bleeding because i'm doing David Friedberg: so much cocaine while writing cujo and we're like we've seen the movie it's definitely a cocaine SPEAKER_310: driven movie yeah dogs are like chasing you everywhere we know stephen we believe it's so SPEAKER_480: great we believe you i'm gonna go by that today and then anne lamont has a book bird by bird yeah David Friedberg: which is a bit more of like a practical warm you up to writing book so i always just tell people like and then if you just want to get inspired um born standing up i love that book it's so beautiful it's SPEAKER_238: so he is and like have you watched the there's there's this documentary that just came out there's SPEAKER_104: a netflix documentary out now yeah yeah or i think it's apple i think it's apple tv yeah the first episode is better than the second one because the first episode is about how when he was young and like SPEAKER_65: the thing is that none of us realize is that steve martin was the biggest celebrity in the world SPEAKER_81: like this is before we were born right in the 70s he was he was like bono he was like he was bigger SPEAKER_10: than robin williams he was bigger than everyone he was selling out not arenas like dave chapelle not like the staples center he was selling a giant stadium he was selling football arenas and people SPEAKER_65: were crazy about him there were contests all over america to imitate steve martin so just watching that and being like wow like because we all have a relationship to steve martin but to see him SPEAKER_181: before we were born is actually really interesting and you know he wanted to do other things too SPEAKER_00: which is the thing i really respect about him he got into banjo he got into plays he got into writing SPEAKER_493: novellas which i think means a short novel and collecting art right and like oh i didn't know SPEAKER_494: that yeah he's a huge art collector i didn't know that yeah watch i think you'll like that i can't wait SPEAKER_326: to watch it i think that's just like for me on the biography tip those two are just so transcendent SPEAKER_00: because the craftsmanship they both have in their work they care exactly and i just tell people like you you have to really want it but you also have to like want to learn the techniques yeah you know SPEAKER_149: shout out malcolm glaive will give him more time about his blue apron ads but also like the 10 000 SPEAKER_254: hours which like is you have to love the activity like yeah like the thing is if you're doing it for the SPEAKER_104: money you're you're never going to be great at it like but if you're doing it because like this is what you would do because you're just obsessed with it which is how i feel about writing honestly SPEAKER_137: like so jealous of you as a full-time writer it's fun so jealous you know i just i mean you must have SPEAKER_10: this thing where you're drowning in opportunity because people must want you to write screenplays or SPEAKER_45: do tv shows or do journalism how do you say no to all the inbound speaking you must get like crazy SPEAKER_150: speaking fees and everything how do you say no to all of it it's always like a balance right i talked SPEAKER_104: to my wife about it a lot so during the pandemic i'm sure i'm sure you had a similar experience like i was probably doing 30 speeches a year before the pandemic and that's like 60 days away from home right yeah it's two full months and and then the pandemic came in and all shut down and my life got so much better i would like the level of stress went down by 20 absolutely i said to my wife i had no idea that traveling was bringing this much stress into my life so it's something we think about a lot like how do you balance because it's not just the money it's also like the like you want if you're SPEAKER_216: a public intellectual you like you want to you want your ideas out there you want to be talking about SPEAKER_501: them yeah but i mean also efficiency i how do you say because i i'm getting these like your fees must SPEAKER_02: be higher than mine but i regularly get 50 75k one hour speech gigs and i'm like whoa whoa whoa that's like a year salary for everybody else totally how do i say no to that and i'm saying SPEAKER_254: no to them now yeah i think you have to i think you have to like you have to you have to say like SPEAKER_104: at some point i'm making decisions every time i've made a decision just for money i've ended up usually thinking like it wasn't a great decision right and so and so i think part of it is that you have to be able to to have a criteria beyond those dollars to say like does this bring me into a town is it an audience that i'm really interested in and i want to talk to does this bring me into town where i have a friend who i haven't seen in a long time yeah is this right is this something where i can feel good SPEAKER_170: about i got an invitation to go talk to this um about i'm not i actually ended up saying no because i'm not an expert on this but it was like dei in a community that's very anti-dei and i was like i'm not a dei expert i i can't i don't know that i'm going to add much but but things like that that are SPEAKER_368: mission driven yeah are very that's a fascinating discussion the dei one yeah save that for when we do another episode i love it you and i are pretty natural in conversation i like i like talking SPEAKER_58: another one i think the audience is going to want a part two of this i love it yeah listen uh everybody just go buy both books right now stop what you're doing uh i mean books are like honestly books are the best deal in town just like podcasts you know and some authors can do both charles you're such a SPEAKER_10: great guest thanks for sharing so much and putting yourself out there and i i think i got to get down there santa cruz and get on a wave this summer anytime anytime we'll see you all next time on this week of stars bye-bye