The power of super communication with Charles Duhigg | E1938

35:38Then if we match them, if we ask a question, 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 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 to each other and that's going to make that practical conversation a lot easier to have yeah uh what role you know this is like so great to have you on here because i get to ask my own personal questions here what role do anecdotes storytelling i mean i understand metaphors analogies 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 and 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 libations what role did like telling anecdotes and sharing these like stories have and then self-deprecation same question what are the roles of anecdotes and self being self-deprecating because i've been self-deprecating for a long time I mean, sort of was a funny comedic device.

37:03And also it was something I learned on the stoops of Brooklyn because we used to break each other's chops. And so if I could tell you I was a fat Greek bastard before you could tell me I was a fat Greek bastard or, you know, as a drunk Irish, you know, whatever I could cut you off with the pass, you know, during our insult battles, uh, in my youth, but maybe we touch on those two. Yeah, absolutely. So it's a great question. So, so anecdotes, I think anecdotes are important for two reasons. Number one is, If you think about what I was saying before, so every conversation is made, every discussion is made about different kinds of conversations.

37:36You 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 then later on that night, like I found myself in bed with Susie, right? When I'm telling you that story, what I'm actually doing is I'm helping you through all these different kinds of conversations.

38:08I'm telling you about my emotional state. I'm telling you about you some practical stuff. There's probably a lesson that I'm expecting or that you'll carry away from this, which just might be like, don't drink 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 ago. Yeah. And you ask them, what did people say? They will almost never be able to remember what anyone said.

38:38They 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 people make us feel. We don't remember what they say quite as well. This is something I have. Yeah. Good. Keep going. Well, a story gets around that, right? A story is a way of taking an idea and embedding it in some emotion so that you remember that story and therefore you remember the idea.

39:17Ah, it's fascinating. So this is why I think storytelling and anecdotes are so much fun. Calling all seed in 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 1 ,000 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$1 million.

39:56Again, you heard that right. Two commas,$1 million. Submissions are open until midnight Eastern time, May 17th, 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 slash million dollar pitch hubspot.com slash 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 what's the most embarrassing thing that ever had to to me yeah i'm genuinely asking you this story 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 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 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 embarrassed and then i want to ask you the same question oh no so there was a so 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.

41:46Every time I saw him it'd be, hey Jim, what's up? And five games in, he was like, by the way, I just needed to let you know, my name is Steve. I was like, I am such a dick. Oh, I'm such an idiot. Wow. Yeah, that is. I was somewhat red-faced at that moment. How about you? What's the most embarrassing thing you can remember? It's not just the most embarrassing, it's the most painful yeah yeah it was 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 was the number one blog in the world for a while auto blog so i'm like in my early 30s 20 years ago and i sell the company we sold the company for 30 million dollars i i went from being broke to being rich overnight and uh it was just this incredible success story 18 months from start to finish mark cuban's the investor yeah it's incredible so i get the wires and everything my partner and i champagne boom we're rich my friend uh is going to sundance uh because his movie's premiering my friend david sachs is premiering the film thank you for smoking and my other friend just to 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 at the time the falcon has a cameo and so david's also got a plane everybody's flying out from la to sundance i have to go to a closing dinner with all the bloggers who work there and and give everybody of their bonus checks but i really wanted to fly on the private jet that would have been great right to fly to sundance on a private jet but i said you know what guys i'm gonna meet you there so my wife my friends their wives everybody's flying out to go to sundance i'm gonna meet them there on southwest i go by the southwest ticket there's no flights left because it's sundance from la right right god damn it there's one flight 505 a.m i'm like i didn't know they had flights before 6 a.m 5 a.m you might as well stay out i mean so i gotta 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 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 and black coffee steaming in my seat oh my god and the woman in the window seat looks at me and goes oh were you sitting there and i said where your coffee was in my seat and then i feel my ass is on fire 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 draws 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 ass there's the name of this story i start you know how you can get like a little bit of water out of that yeah yeah i start putting that on my ass little scoops of water and they're 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 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 this was black coffee this woman's drink so i take my underwear off i put my khakis back on my khakis are destroyed my ass is steam i take but my ass is still burning so i take some of the seafold napkins 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 on i got that under my white tidy whities are black but i can't put them on and so i get out of the thing and i'm holding it and i look the whole plane is looking looking at you i got the lights i walk back to see the woman has her magazine book whatever like 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 like it's like only first degree 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 uh my wife wants me to pick her up uh get back to the house whenever i get changed so i got this underwear so i just tuck it into the side of the console you know between the seat i go pick everybody up i got everybody in the car now david sachs everybody uh and like my wife pulls the underwear out in front of everyone what's this oh my god and i said i had an accident on the plane technically true i did have an accident technically technically true technically true literally the most embarrassing twice twice embarrassed yeah yeah it's good times though right it's like it's a great memory 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 millionaire finally i got my dream and i still gotta take this 5 a.m flight yeah and i still burnt the 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 as sometime it's gonna happen i life has a very it does a very good job of 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 things that the re i think one of the reasons why that's so successful is because because it's very authentic right so one of the things that we know is that people's brains are very good at detecting inauthenticity.

48:32Like we've all been at that party and someone asks us, you know, 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 rented. So our brains have evolved to be very good at detecting this. And I think one of the things that happens with self-depreciating stories 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 i speak like yeah exactly then then i think what it does is it it conveys that authenticity and it makes other people trust that everything we're going to say might be authentic.

49:26Because 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 of getting what you want the investment the book deal etc yeah so let's talk about like, if you're applying for a job or 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.

50:23So oftentimes we go in thinking our 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 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 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 ask you interviews in the question to say like, look, do you mind if I ask you a question?

51:06Like, I'm wondering like, what do you think makes someone successful or not successful in this position? Like, beyond what you've written down, what is it that you've seen that, what are you looking for that you've seen in the past help someone succeed in this role? Right? Flip the script. Exactly. At that point, it becomes a conversation. And I think that you can tell me, I'm assuming during pitches, that the folks you end up investing in, they probably ask you questions, right? They're trying to understand how you see the world. Not so much. You would think. That's interesting. Yeah. but 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 capitalists and a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of management consultants sadly also known as a wasted life um have you watched what's happening to management consultants since chat gpt came out no i haven't but it's probably like if you want gibberish we got you covered anything into chat gpt and we will put words on a page that seemingly are important that nobody will read anyway it's like my my premise is chat gpt is basically like a mckinsey consultant they're buying people out they're like 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 any of these are really good at that but you're just dealing with two but tell me yeah yeah so you're dealing with these two groups that are both like so on the venture capital side um you have like a range of people who are some of them are very 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 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 some more just completely arrogant lunatics um who just because they're the ones writing it they're kind of like studio heads or something giving a green light to a picture right so they're just high on their own supply 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 cannot stop talking about it they cannot stop filling the air at every moment with everything they're so 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 are difficult people cantankerous people but effective people so there was a famous moment where uh the founder of sequoia capital drew a four quadrant diagram agreeableness disagreeable ineffective effective competent incompetent whatever and they just said to the younger uh vcs at sequoia where do you think we make our money in those four quadrants agreeable people disagreeable people competent people incompetent people which one would you say is the big outliers in the power law well i i'm guessing that what the vcs the younger vcs said is they said agreeable competent and it's actually disagreeable continent correct 100 correct it turns out like you know steve jobs yeah bill gates like zuckerberg these people are not easy to get along with at 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 question think about the level of chutzpah 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 something to say right because because i think what i'm hearing you say and tell me if i'm getting this wrong is when someone is a disagreeable person what they're also doing is they're being very authentic to themselves.

55:41Right? 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 going to let you know it's a dumb question. Yeah. 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. And so I don't. So for me, I love it. I think it's great. I love people. it's the brooklyn in me who just get right to the point and who asks 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 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 just go look at people they've invested in and say hey how's jason calacanis as an investor can i 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 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 i literally have in our training manual for new associates and the firm researchers make sure you ask people um can i repeat your vision this isn't a 20 minute meeting the last thing they have to say to the founders may i repeat back to you your vision or 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 when i started getting reviews back from founders the number one criticism was i jason didn't understand my vision yeah i was like am i arrogant am yes okay sure uh am i not listening no i'm 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 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 past yeah i think it's really really smart and what we know is that again hardwired by evolution into our brain is that if I believe you are listening to me.

58:26I'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 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 companies 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 to escape velocity so people kind of over index or maybe overthink how much impact a vc themselves can 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 can make it enterprise i've literally had people change their business model in the room and i'm like uh i was asking you to get your opinion on why it's not enterprise but i don't want you to switch it 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?

1:00:44So I guess I like somebody who can battle it out and debate stuff. I don't care if it's quietly over SMS, over email, 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 ask. Well, and I think that's exactly, that gets at the heart of like why conversations work, right? Because if a conversation is one way, then it's not a conversation. 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.

1:01:19I'm asking you a question and you're assuming that I've already made up my mind. You're not actually listening to what I'm asking you 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 face of the planet, right? Yeah. 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 and they've yeah they followed 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.

1:02:11It'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. And 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 mean that we're going to feel connected, right? And the people you love and the people I love are people we don't agree with all the time. Yeah. But they are people who know how to connect with us despite the fact that we disagree about things. I think that study is so profound, by the way, the one you're bringing up.

1:02:42Yeah. Because at the end of the day, the conclusion I've come to, and I lost a couple of friends over the last couple of years. Tony Hsieh, you know, from Delivering Happiness and Zappos died tragically. And Dave Goldberg, Goldie, died as well. You know, there's two guys I play poker with all the time. and i realized wow you know i have a collection of memories fossil conversation 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 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 acceptable as delivered um where i used to just kick people out of a meeting like my god this is garbage get the fuck out of the meeting you know literally would kick people out of an editorial meeting come back when you have something to contribute you know uh now i would just say hey this 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 help with this or you can run it by but let's give it another shot and try to level this up well and goldie i think is a really good example of a super communicator because Because when I was covering, so I met him when I was covering the music industry for the LA Times before I went to the LA Times.

1:04:30Launch.com? Yeah, exactly. My venture firm is Launch.co, by the way. Oh, nice. Because I always love Launch and I always love that name, which I got from Golden. And so we would go to breakfast and lunch pretty regularly. And I honestly don't remember anything we talked about, but I remember how humble he was, how genuinely he cared about my success and other people's success, how honest he was. And I remember walking away from 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.

1:05:08They'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. 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. Yeah. And I was like, how do you, how do you afford this life of yours?

1:05:42And he's like, well, you know, my wife works. She got on the right rocket ship as well. Yeah, exactly. The actual rocket ship quote is from Cheryl. Oh, is it really? Yeah. She said, if you get a seat in a rocket ship in Silicon Valley, take it. yeah because it's very rare that the rockets you know take off and you get out 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 hit certain goals and he was just the most thoughtful guy who would talk to you about how you were doing and mentor you how you're doing in your life and uh they got a word for 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 kept you for over an hour it's been amazing everybody go buy the book charles you know we should just we should chew the fat and have you on the pot again like every year absolutely i would love that you should just talk shop because yeah you got a lot of great insights and i think we're both gen xers yes yes come down to you what are you sometime we'll go surfing together 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 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 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 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 they said what do you do for fun you know i was because i was really depressed uh if i'm being honest about his death um 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 okay uh i play poker with my friends like okay yeah that's something what else uh i was like i couldn't 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 it's 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 often do you ski i was like yeah 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 incredible life-changing did it yeah did it feel like look were you happier on the days you weren't skiing like what did my happiness and my brain chemistry went 5x in terms of my happiness when i wasn't and when 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 i think you got to come do it i need a slow experience because i i don't and i i had it the summer last summer i went um have you ever done an e-foil these uh boards are they cool yeah i've seen so i did the e-foil i had an instructor i was 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 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 it sounds amazing and 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 then it actually feels very redemptive.

1:10:38I think it's the same thing going down the mountain, right? Yes. It's not just the speed. It's the snow. It's the sound. It's the quiet around you. It's 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 like, oh, just listen to a podcast while I'm skiing. Nope. I can listen to music while I'm skiing and I'll listen to a podcast or an audio book. Because you're going to bite it and you're going to destroy yourself. And biting at a 50 miles an hour on a diamond.

1:11:09No, when I'm good, especially not at 53, something's not going to go well season over. And man, I had so many profound moments. And it's great for writing too. I suspect when you get off surfing, a writing session must be great. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's definitely, it's definitely like, I love it. Anyways, come down, come down. What's your favorite book on writing, by the way, I'll end on that because I know writers like books on writing. Yeah. My favorite book on writing is probably actually this book by Jim Stewart. James Stewart, he's a columnist of the New York Times now, but he also used to write for the New Yorker and still kind of does.

1:11:45It's called Follow the Story. If anyone wants to learn how to write, Jim Stewart's Follow the Story is a great, great book. I don't know this. Oh, it's a great book. It's a great book. I'm going to get it right now. I'm going to get it right now. A non-writing book that I think teaches you a lot about writing is A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jenny Egan. what's the premise um so it's it's about it's it's a 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 non-fiction it's fiction it's fiction it's fiction yeah yeah visit from the gun squad is fiction and the thing is that like when you read really good writers one of the things that they're doing is they're teaching you how to write 100 % yeah this is why you know I always loved Michael Crichton I don't know if you've read Michael Crichton oh my god I love Michael Crichton 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 Jurassic Park oh you want to understand aviation airframe most people haven't read that But he really, like, and the story never stops.

1:13:05It 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, I'm going to reward you for learning. It's great. My two favorite on writing, Stephen King's On Writing. Have you read? No, I haven't read it, but people have recommended it to me. I should go read it. Just listen 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 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 so much cocaine while writing cujo and we're like we've seen the movie it's definitely a cocaine driven movie yeah dogs are like chasing you everywhere we know steven we believe so great we believe you i'm gonna go buy that today and then ann lamont has a book bird by bird yeah 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 oh i love that book it's so beautiful it's so he is and like have you watched the there's there's this documentary that just came out there's a netflix documentary out now 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 the thing is that none of us realize is that steve martin was the biggest celebrity in the world like this is before we were born right in the 70s he was he was like bono he was like he was bigger than robin williams he was bigger than everyone he was selling out not arenas like dave chappelle not like the staples center he was selling a giant stadium he was selling a football arenas and people 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 before we were born is actually really interesting and you know he wanted to do other things too which is the thing i really respect about him he got into banjo he got into plays he got into writing novellas which i think means a short novel and collecting art right and like i didn't know 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 to watch it i think that's just like for me on the biography tip those two are just so transcendent because the craftsmanship they both have in their work the 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 shout out malcolm gladwell we'll give him more time about his blue apron ads but also like the 10 000 hours which like is you have to love the activity like yeah like the thing is if you're doing it for the 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 like so jealous of you as a full-time writer it's fun so jealous i feel lucky i mean you must have this thing where you're drowning in opportunity because people must want you to write screenplays or do tv shows or do journalism how do you say no to all the inbound speaking you must get like crazy speaking fees and everything how do you say no a lot of it's always like a balance right i talked 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 that's two full months and and then the pandemic came in it 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 a public intellectual you like you want to you want your ideas out there you want to be talking about them yeah but i mean And you get also efficiency.

1:17:13How do you say, because I'm getting these like, your fees must 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. How do I say no to that? And I'm saying no to them now. Yeah. I think you have to. I think you have to. You have to say 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. And so I think part of it is that you have to be able to have a criteria beyond those dollars to say like, does this bring me into a town?

1:17:50Is 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? Is this something where I can feel good about? I got an invitation to go talk to this about... 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 can't i don't know that i'm going to add much but but things like that that are mission driven are very that's a fascinating discussion the dei one yeah save that for when we do another episode i love it are pretty natural in conversation i like let's do 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 great guest thanks for sharing so much and putting yourself out there and i i think i gotta get down there santa cruz and get on a wave this summer anytime anytime we'll see you all next time on this bye bye