Body Language Expert: STOP Doing This, It’s Making People HATE You! | Charisma On Command

Bevel: Try one month for FREE at https://www.bevel.health and use code ICED! Gusto: Try Gusto for FREE for 3 months at https://gusto.com/ICED ZocDoc: Go to https://www.zocdoc.com/ICED and download the Zocdoc App for FREE Shopify: Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at https://shopify.com/ich Follow Charisma On Command Here: On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/user/charismaoncommand On Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/charismaoncommand/ His Website - https://www.charismaoncommand.com/ Add us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jlsselby https://www.instagram.com/gpstephan Apply for The Index Membership: https://entertheindex.com/ Official Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeBQ24VfikOriqSdKtomh0w For sponsorships or business inquiries reach out to: [email protected] For Podcast Inquiries, please DM @icedcoffeehour on Instagram! Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:02:38 - Most charismatic person alive 00:03:36 - Why Trump is charismatic 00:06:14 - Are people born charismatic? 00:10:08 - Why charisma is so important 00:13:13 - Charisma vs confidence 00:14:55 - Advice to be more charismatic in 24 hours 00:16:16 - Sponsor - Bevel Health 00:21:24 - Underrated and overrated charisma tips 00:24:44 - Is posture important? 00:27:57 - What ruins charisma 00:33:43 - Is it better to be liked or respected? 00:34:37 - Most overrated charisma advice 00:34:42 - Sponsor - Gusto 00:42:35 - Most important change he made to become charismatic 00:50:24 - Improv classes to improve confidence 00:06:36 - Sponsor - Shopify ← FIXED BELOW 01:06:36 - Sponsor - Shopify 01:08:11 - Sponsor - Zocdoc 01:09:22 - Is charisma inherently manipulative? 01:11:10 - How do you know if you are charismatic? 01:12:30 - First impressions 01:16:31 - Designer clothing and charisma 01:21:56 - Wearing suspenders lol 01:25:33 - Openers 01:27:57 - How his business has developed over the years 01:42:58 - Where he invests his money 01:59:47 - Charisma tierlist *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan is part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 03

  One of the things that is most effective for influence is conviction. We live in a sense of uncertainty. And so, a lot of people are looking for something that seems stable.

• 0:41Speaker 04

  He's trying to convince the public to have a recession. Let's have a recession.

• 0:45Speaker 03

  It is the degree to which you believe and can subcommunicate with your tone, your body language, that you are internally aligned with the things that you are saying.

• 0:54Jack Selby?

  So if you were to simply define charisma in one sentence, how would you define it? And then, why is it important?

• 1:00Speaker 03

  It is the gate. It's how your energy, words, and body language all align in a way. So people think, I want to follow this person. I believe in what they believe in.

• 1:10Speaker 06

  We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

• 1:17Speaker 03

  It builds trust and it turns ideas into movement. And if someone wants to be more charismatic in 24 hours, how do they start? Dude, yes. So.

• 1:32Jack Selby?

  Charlie Hoopert, thank you so much for coming on the Iced Coffee Hour podcast. You are the owner and creator of one of my favorite channels on YouTube, Charisma on Command.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  Aw, thank you, man. So good to be here with both of you. Can I tell you a story real quick?

• 1:45Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  When I met Jack, and I also met you at VidCon.

• 1:49Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 1:49Speaker 03

  I didn't know that Jack was associated with Iced Coffee Hour, but I remember one of the first things that I thought about you and I commented to my co-founder, I was like, that guy is super charismatic. And the way you handled it, we can talk about it perhaps on the podcast, left a lasting impression on both of us. I don't know if I ever told you that.

• 2:03Jack Selby?

  That's unbelievable.

• 2:04Speaker 03

  What did you do?

• 2:06Jack Selby?

  I have no idea. You've mentioned that to me before, but I still don't know what I did. I wish there was camera in the room when we met, so I could study that and like, reenact it.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  I can tell you a little bit. Chris Williamson has the same thing. So. You came in, a lot of people in those settings, and you've experienced this, I'm sure, too, Graham, where you get somebody and they're like a super fan. So they come in and they're complimentary, and it's nice at first, and then it's too much. And they're sort of following you around the event. They've got a trillion questions. They're like, hey, remember that video that you did on XYZ topic? And then it just keeps going. Then there's another type of person who is too cool. They don't want to let you know that they admire what you do. So maybe they've seen 100 videos, but like, oh, I think I've heard of that. And you were like this perfect balance of familiar, friendly, complimentary about the thing, but also not seeking my approval or trying to win me over. And then you beat my ass in poker and like, we're not, did not go easy on me or anything like that. That's funny.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  Which is very rare in an event like that. It's very rare because the other two are so much more common when people see someone that they've recognized from the internet or something like that. That's interesting. So aside from me, then, who would you say is the most charismatic person alive? Alive? Yeah. Honestly, and I have to give it to Donald Trump. Really? I don't think that he could have won the presidency based on his track record or, you know, there's a lot of other people with a lot of money. The thing that won him the election was the way that he handled the media. Now, granted, I'm not saying that he's going to walk into a room and he's going to make 100% of the people there like him. But if you look at the spending that he did in both the elections that he did

• 3:39Speaker 03

  win, he came in hundreds of millions of dollars less than the Democratic candidate. And so the ability to get the news cycle on him, make the both elections about the things that he wanted to. So the wall, for instance, was not at all a topic. He, yeah, he defined culture and has defined culture for about 10 years. So not my style of charisma, but in terms of people whose personalities have just catapulted them to stardom, fame and power. I mean, I have to give it to him. What makes him so successful at that, though? So good at that? Yeah, there's a number of things. I think he came up in a time period. Where everyone collectively was, what was the phrase that he had at the time? Politically correct.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  So we had a huge social change where everyone, you're not allowed to say these words. You can't do these sorts of things. Colonialism, bad. Like, there were all of these sorts of cultural shifts happening and a lot of people weren't on board with it, but they didn't have the courage in their workplace or their friend group to say it. They whispered it across the dinner table. He had the guts to come down an escalator and just yell it into a microphone. So not that thing in particular, but the willingness to say what other people won't state that is present in the room. There's like six core charismatic mindsets that I talk about. That is the sixth one. The willingness to go there first. And that was something that he did. And then he defined the election and the everything.

• 5:06Graham Stephan?

  Now, here's what I'm curious about. How does some people get away with that and others can't? There's a very clear distinction.

• 5:12Jack Selby?

  Do you think you get away with it or do you think you don't?

• 5:14Graham Stephan?

  No, no, to that degree, absolutely not. I get away with some, but if you told me I have to do that, I couldn't get away with it.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think it's about, this is another charismatic mindset. It's, it's internal integrity. So like, is every piece of your psychology on board with what you're saying? Cause one other thing, if you look at a good comedian versus a bad comedian, it's not that the good comedian immediately makes you laugh. It's that they tell a joke, the audience doesn't react, but they're not checking with the audience. They're doubling down, they're adding tags and they win the audience over time. So if you listen to Dave Chappelle, it's not just a laugh fest throughout his stories. But he's patient enough to get the audience there. If you gave someone else Dave Chappelle's material and they said it word for word, they'd rush through it, they'd look to the audience desperately hoping that they'd laughed, they'd

• 6:03Speaker 03

  adjust course and try to change for them because they're not internally behind the story and comfortable and confident enough to say it. So in your case, I imagine that you might say something that you believe, but then see that other people react like, eh. And then pull back on it or say, ah, that's not exactly what I meant. And it's actually that wavering that is the thing that makes people fall off. Versus Donald Trump, I mean, certainly a lot of people don't like him, but the thing that he does activate that is admirable to a lot of his core fans is the fact that he has such power and conviction to say what he thinks, stick with it and not adjust even in the face of glaring evidence to the opposite.

• 6:43Graham Stephan?

  Now, do you think he's born like that? Because some people just have this natural ability where they just come out of the womb and they're just so charismatic and they just got that thing.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Hmm. I see, I look back at his old interviews and I can see the same sort of bravado there. I think that there's a lot of early childhood experiences that define how people respond in social circumstances. And I think, and I don't know the details of his life, but I think probably pretty early on, he learned that the way to get through life was to stick by his own internal sense of things and force reality to conform to him versus other people. And I put myself in this category, learned that the best way to get by is to pay attention to how other people are responding to you and try to massage or like make sure that everyone else is feeling good all the time. Donald Trump is not trying to make anybody feel good.

• 7:30Graham Stephan?

  The one that I thought was incredible, did you see the video with him and Mom Donnie?

• 7:34Speaker 03

  Oh, I saw a little bit of that, yeah.

• 7:35Graham Stephan?

  At the White House, where he taps him on the back, yeah, it's okay, yeah. That was incredible in terms of just the way he stood, the attitude he had. What was your take on that?

• 7:48Speaker 03

  What I noticed about Donald Trump is that there's, again broadly, and I've studied a lot of different people over the course of these years, there's two different types of ways that people handle language. The first type tries to make their language as precise and accurate to reality as possible. These are like people like me, philosophy majors, and I try to be truthful and that is a higher order. Then there are people who use language to create change in the world. Donald Trump is that kind of a person. So you see it in a lot of ways, like him declaring that he won the 2020 election and declaring and declaring and declaring. It's not because I don't, I don't think he's oriented towards what the facts on the ground are. I think he's oriented to what Works. So similarly, when somebody says something mean about him, the question isn't,

• 8:33Speaker 03

  oh, my God, has this person offended me and they've ruined it? It's how is this for our alliance? And so when he's standing next to Mamdani and you see how Trump will, in a race, this happened with Hillary or it happened with Marco Rubio, who now works with him, all the guys that he destroyed in the Republican primary, he had the worst things to say about. Lion Ted, you know, little Marco, like it was, he just shredded these guys. And then as soon as he won the primary, it was, we have to come together as a party. We're all one. And it's because he's not using language to create a truthful representation of his inner world. He's using language to create change in the world around him. So before Zorin wins, he's the worst thing that could ever happen in New York.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  He's going to destroy the entire town. We're all ruined. Then he's won. Well, now we got to be allies because he's in power and, you know, we can, you can say whatever you want about me. It doesn't matter as long as we make the changes that I want to have happen on the ground a reality.

• 9:30Jack Selby?

  So to sum all of that up, it sounds like it doesn't matter what you say. It just matters how you say it. That?

• 9:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:38Jack Selby?

  Is that everything?

• 9:39Speaker 03

  It's not everything, but again, having studied a ton of people, made 300 plus videos, I would say unfortunately, and I don't love this as a philosophy major, but one of the things that is most effective for influence is conviction. It is the degree to which you believe and can subcommunicate with your tone, your body language, that you are internally aligned with the things that you are saying. Because so many of us, we live in a sense of uncertainty. We don't know what we're doing with our lives. Like, we all know that internally, we have a ton of doubt. And so a lot of people are looking for something that seems stable. And so when a woman, for instance, sees a guy who seems very comfortable talking to other women, she's not judging, oh, is, does he have all the things that I need?

• 10:23Speaker 03

  She says, oh, he thinks that he has all the things that make him appropriate or worthy or whatever. And we're judging how people seem to subcommunicate that they feel about the things that they say and how they feel about themselves. So that's why conviction is such an important aspect of charisma of influence.

• 10:39Jack Selby?

  So if you were to simply define charisma in one sentence, how would you define it? And then why is it important?

• 10:44Speaker 03

  So I would, there's a couple of ways and it's shifted over the years for me. I first defined it as influence. Like charisma is anything that is leadership in a group of people. And I exempt from that. Beauty, wealth and competence are the main things that I just don't include. Because we all know that if someone is really beautiful or really wealthy or extremely competent, they can have a personality that's a dud and people will still be influenced by their product, do what they say to do. But outside of that, you have everything within the realm of personality that makes someone want to follow you, that sort of a thing. I would say as I've gotten older, that is a more external facing view of charisma. It's about how people respond to you. And we all, you know, this is what Riz is for the kids today.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  The, the internal facing thing is how aligned you are with the deepest part of yourself. And it, I've been on a little spiritual journey these days. We don't have to go super deep into it. But I think as you get older, your sense of identity deepens. And so when you're young, your identity is I'm my achievements or I am all of these things. As you get older, it becomes something more profound than that. And charisma is how clearly and fully you are inhabiting what you know yourself to be in essence. And I know that can sound.

• 12:00Jack Selby?

  That's really interesting because from like, I know this, we're getting a little out of danger right here, but like the spiritual readings I've done, it's not good to align with strict identities. But charisma is something I feel like is objectively good. If you can influence people, which is the reality of charisma. But at the same time, the, the things you identify with are the things that are effectively a weakness.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Dude, yes. So the things that we identify with over the course of our life, we've gotten pretty deep pretty quick. So you tell me if you want to go this way. When we're young, we tend to identify as like, I'm smart or I'm cool or I am these things. And you're right, these forms of identity become cages. They also become super helpful because if I think, oh, I'm the shit. I'm a really cool guy. That helps me have the conviction to go up and apply for the job that I don't belong in or to talk to the girl that somebody else might disqualify themselves from speaking to. But those become cages because then you have to be cool. And the moment that you're not smart, you start to beat yourself up. So as you get older, it's not just, I am cool, I am smart, I am my achievements, but it's more a sense of. Identifying with your soul or your spirit,

• 13:06Speaker 03

  or this ineffable yet persistent aspect of yourself. And that's the part that I think the great spiritual teachings of, whether you're going with Buddhism or Christianity or anything, if you go to the mystics in any tradition, they do identify this eternal aspect of oneself. And the people that identify, and if you want to go, who's the most charismatic people of all time? You have to give it to Buddha, to Jesus, to these people that have completely reshaped the planet, essentially, because they were deeply aligned with something inside of themselves. And the way they conducted themselves was so inspirational that they bent the course of history around them.

• 13:44Graham Stephan?

  What's the difference between that, though, and confidence?

• 13:47Speaker 03

  An early stage of confidence, any confidence, if you look at the word like confide, the etymology of confidence is trust. So when we think about self-confidence, it's really self-trust. And the question is, how deep is your trust? So all of us are very confident that if we had to, for a hundred dollars, we could tie our shoe effectively. And that confidence comes from the fact that we've done it a trillion times, or however many times we've had to tie our shoes in our life. But then the question is, how come some people are confident in domains that they've never experienced before? This is the first charismatic mindset, which is this is not confidence that I know how to do this. It's going to go well. This is confidence that no matter what happens, I'll be okay. I'll figure it out. So it's a more profound confidence.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  Whereas that first confidence is only in domains where I have experience because I know I can make it go good. There's a deeper confidence that no matter what happens, I will be okay. And that is a sort of a deeper charismatic pose that one can take. But even beyond that. So let me step back. We are comparing confidence to charisma. I think that at root, they become the same. And then it's...

• 15:00Speaker 03

  But at the surface level, one of the things that can shift is that you can be deeply confident, but not be received as a charismatic person by others. Like, I can be super confident in my ability to conduct this podcast, but everybody watching it might think that it's going terribly, or something like that. So confidence is about an internal sense of alignment, and charisma is how that internal alignment translates, both internally and to the people that are experiencing you.

• 15:26Jack Selby?

  And if someone wants to be more charismatic in 24 hours, how do they start?

• 15:31Speaker 03

  I would focus on the areas that are going to come up every single day. So unfortunately, what a lot of people do is they decide they want to be charismatic when they land a date with the person that they're most interested in, or they have a job interview coming up for their dream company. It's a little bit late at that point, you can still prep. But if you want to do it today, the thing that is almost certainly going to happen, no matter who you are, is that you are going to meet a stranger or a person that you already recognize, and you're going to say, "How are you doing?" And they're going to say, "How are you back?" So when I start with people, I start with first impressions. The first entire week of our course is about this stuff, but basically what I would recommend is, when somebody says, "How are you doing?", find a way to be better than good. And so the most common response that I would give is, "Yeah, I'm fine, how are you?", or "Busy?", or "Good",

• 16:15Speaker 03

  and then the entire conversation just deflates at that point, because now you're into, "Did you see the Dodgers won? Crazy weather we're having lately", right? All the dreaded small-talk conversation we all have. If you can inject more energy at that onset, when somebody says, "How are you doing?", you can be phenomenal, or tell a crazy story that you just had, "You're not going to believe what just happened to me out there", the entire arc of the conversation shifts. So that would be the simplest way to do it. You said, "In 24 hours", that would be where I would start.

• 16:43Jack Selby?

  What if you're not doing good?

• 16:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, great question, great question.

• 16:47Jack Selby?

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• 17:53Speaker 03

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• 18:04Jack Selby?

  What if you're not doing good?

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, great question. Great question.

• 18:10Speaker 03

  There's a bit of calibration required. So if it's a cashier and they say how you're doing, you're like, let me tell you. Not appropriate. But we've hung out a couple of times. So if I wasn't doing good and I came in here and it's just the three of us, I think it's very charismatic to lead with some vulnerability in those closer relationships. In fact, that is how loose acquaintances become close friends a lot of the time, is there is some experience of either shared victory or shared vulnerability. And so if I wasn't doing good and I rolled in, you're like, hey, what's up, man? You're like, how you doing? I was like, dude, I just broke up with my girlfriend. I'm kind of having a hard time, which is not the case. Now we at least are talking about something real. But if I fake it at that point, I'm like, good. You know, smiling through the tears, the crying clown.

• 18:54Speaker 03

  That also is going to create an issue. So I'm glad you asked that question.

• 18:57Jack Selby?

  Yeah, you can tell not every cell in your body is aligned.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  Correct. Correct. It's that lack of coherence and conviction.

• 19:04Jack Selby?

  But if you're trying to build a loose acquaintance, let's say, and she asks you how you're doing, or he. Eat it all.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:10Jack Selby?

  Do you, do you lie if you're really not doing well? Or do you just always be like, you know what? I am, you be honest with yourself.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  So there's, you could imagine there's so many ways to tell the truth. Let's say like, stuff is going on in your life, but it's not that I am bad. It's that there are challenges, there are things that are going crazy, there's things I'm confused about. The way that you bring it does not have to be consolidated into a single word. You'd be like, honestly, this has been the craziest week in the last year. That's an interesting way to start a conversation right there. So it's not that you are forced into depression or enthusiasm. It's that if you can find a way to share it with someone in a way that is engaging and we can go into storytelling and all these other sorts of things, that is also better than a flat, fine or good. So I would say preferable.

• 19:58Jack Selby?

  What about vocal tonality? How much does that matter?

• 20:02Speaker 03

  Tremendously, but I don't encourage people to focus too much on these things. So there was a time in my charisma career, if you will, I was very shy and didn't know what to do. And I would go in and be like, okay, today I'm going to work on this gesture.

• 20:16Jack Selby?

  Are you serious? What is this?

• 20:17Speaker 03

  Two that, well, the one thing that I saw wasn't that is I, I remember some guy told me a story. He had very firm fingers when he did it. I was like, that was really captivating. So then for the next several days, I was like, holding my fingers more firmly. I think that level of.

• 20:31Jack Selby?

  So would you go out and fully just try to observe the way people spoke?

• 20:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was, I was a wallflower. That was, I think, why I got into this work was primarily, I had experiences where, and I've told this story many times, but it's apocryphal and true. I was visiting my co-founder as he was studying abroad and he had, me as his best friend from high school and he had his college best friend. So I went in, I was like, I'm not going to like this guy, we're going to have issues. And he came in and his demeanor was so immediately friendly and disarming and I felt included. And he asked me out, so immediately I liked him. We were in a group of six guys and at one point I was like, hey, who's hungry? We should go out to eat. And I didn't know these guys and I got no response. And about 35 seconds later, he goes, I'm feeling hungry. Who's, who's ready to eat? And everyone's like, yeah.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  And I watched for the rest of the day that happened, it happened twice. It was once with food and once I told a joke and he just repeated it. And I watched, no one care when I said it and everyone get behind it when he said it. So like these, these moments were defining for me in terms of recognizing that this is something that I wanted to focus on because I realized if you looked at a script, there was nothing wrong with my words. It was the tonality, the rapport that I hadn't built with these group of people that I needed to focus on. So I was watching all of this happen.

• 21:48Jack Selby?

  So through trial and error with a litany of, you know, stuff like this, or you know, your famous like open eye contact. What are the most underrated and overrated tips and tricks for increasing your charisma?

• 22:01Speaker 03

  Underrated is the, the one that I've already told you is, is how you initiate conversation and the level of enthusiasm that you bring to it. Underrated is preparation versus in person. We've all been there frozen in an interview or in a conversation or anything. The thing that helps the most is priming and people don't do this. Or they sometimes do it, but it's unconscious where you listen to the music that you love on the car ride over to the event and you're like fist bumping and you're pounding and you're singing out loud. I used to do this with my co-founder walking into a club. A lot of guys, because we were young dudes and we wanted to flirt and talk to girls. A lot of guys think it's showtime when you see her and you walk up to her.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  It's showtime when you're getting ready. It's showtime when you're in the cab on the way there. It's the doorman. Every single interaction you have there, the level of energy and enthusiasm that you bring to it sets it up so that everything that happens after that is easy. And it's true in interviews as well. I remember going into the job that I wound up working at. Everybody sits in that little lobby with the secretary and they sit quietly with their little leather pad and their resume there and they don't talk to anybody. And instead I talked to the doorman at the building and then I spoke with the receptionist. I made small talk with the other people that were applying for the job. So by the time that I landed in the interview and he said, tell me about yourself, I wasn't going in cold. There was this, uh, there was a depth of quality to my voice. So it wasn't like, hey, how are you like frozen?

• 23:31Speaker 03

  That priming is deeply, deeply underrated.

• 23:35Jack Selby?

  That's fascinating and I always apply what you're saying and internalize it and think, how have I tried doing something similar in my own life? And what I always love to do is every time I get into an elevator. Everyone's dead quiet.

• 23:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:49Jack Selby?

  We're all, you know, going somewhere. We don't want to talk. Everyone's heads down or they're on their phone. And every time, it's my favorite thing to break the silence.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  Because you fart.

• 23:58Jack Selby?

  Yeah, I just rip one. Yeah.

• 24:00Speaker 03

  Awful.

• 24:01Jack Selby?

  Sorry, guys. No.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  He blames it on the other guy.

• 24:03Jack Selby?

  If you break silence in an elevator, first of all, it's very challenging because it's super outside of, you know, what we consider to be normal. And it's easy because everyone leaves the elevator and goes to their own place. So like, there's a clear light at the end of the tunnel. If your joke falls flat, or if no one wants to talk, it's fine because we're all separating anyways. Whereas if you're like, sitting down in a lobby and you want to strike up conversation with someone, and then they don't want to talk, it's like, well, when do I walk away?

• 24:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:28Jack Selby?

  But in an elevator, you're always going somewhere. You're just priming yourself to go out and talk to people.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  I think that insight is so true of modern society broadly. A lot of the fears that we have are because evolutionarily, we grew up in tribes of 150 people. And if you got weird with like 15 of them, it was a huge issue. We're just not wired for that experience of you get this practice chance. Everybody's going to disperse and disband. It doesn't matter. And this happens constantly in our lives. We have it elementary school, then we go to a middle school that's different. Or we leave states. You get so many chances to play around with this stuff and reinvent yourself and try new stuff. It's kind of a hack that people haven't fully internalized of the modern world is how low stakes most social environments are compared to how they feel internally. And if you can get that, it's a game changer. What about posture?

• 25:17Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 25:25Speaker 02

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• 25:48Speaker 03

  They say, sit up straight and like, you know, have your shoulders back a little bit. The thing that I try, and I've, you know, I've done this in the past and I've got poor core strength and all this stuff. But what I, what I try to pay attention to, the only thing that I keep in mind with posture is... Is to try to have open body language, not even so much that the other person likes it, but because there's an internal feedback loop. Like, if I were to sit here like this and speak more quietly for a few minutes, it wouldn't be long before I felt shy and uncomfortable around you guys. But if I open up my body language, I show you my palms, I let you see the insides of my elbows, I lift my chest and my chin a little bit, that sends a feedback loop to me that says, hey, you're safe. There's no arrows being thrown at you.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  You can expose your vulnerable spots, which makes you much more comfortable. And a brief story about this is, I, way long time ago, when I had a job, I had screwed something up pretty badly. It was my fault on a Friday afternoon. And on a Monday, I got the phone call of like, the guy started the call with, "You really shit the bed on Friday." And I had the, I was, I was in the, my friend's apartment at the time, because I was living with him on the floor. And I remember purposely, I knew this call was coming, so I was sat in a chair, and I purposely opened up my body language to just sort of like, let myself ground and calm down. And through that, and saying, "You're right, I did do that.

• 27:15Speaker 03

  I understand that that was not cool for you guys, and that it put you guys in a bad position, and I apologize for that." It was a minute or two of him just like dumping, venting a little bit before it's like, "It's all right, man, I'm gonna tell the, I'm gonna tell the higher up boss that, you know, it's all okay, and we made it work, and so don't sweat it, it's totally not a problem." Versus if I'd been defensive about it in my body language and in my demeanor, he definitely would have kept drilling in, attacking, and we would have been on opposite sides, and it could have gone far, far worse. So that open body language is, it's about the only thing that I pay close attention to, in my own body language. How important is eye contact? Deeply, very. It's also another one that's like, now that I'm conscious of it, it's like, oh, I have

• 27:56Speaker 03

  to, look, it's, it's really tough, because when you become conscious of it, it distracts from your ability to, to be yourself, a lot of the time. So I would practice body language when I went out. It makes a big difference. Like, if, if you've ever spoken to someone who's telling you a story and they won't let you go, one, it can feel, I'll do it to you for a little bit, it can feel a little bit uncomfortable, but it has that tractor beam level quality. Bill Clinton is one of the best that I've ever, ever seen at this. I did a video, it was my first ever charisma video, that, where he is in a town hall, woman asks a question, and he just lasers in on her. With the squinty eyes, he's smizing at her the whole time. And you can tell that he's just got her because this is the feeling of presence. Nothing communicates that I'm with you like eye contact.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  It's why in the more hippie circles, they'll do eye gazing stuff. Cause that's simple act of sitting with someone and looking them sustained in the eye is just, it's a powerful experience of presence with another human. If you develop the capacity to do that, not as a gimmick, so, so powerful, incredibly.

• 28:59Graham Stephan?

  And what do you think ruins charisma?

• 29:01Speaker 03

  I think what, there's many things that ruin charisma. I think paradoxically, it's this weird, if you try too hard. So one of the things that I'm always battling when I'm explaining to people that, yes, this is a skill that you can develop, but if you over obsess about this, you're going to go down. So thinking too much about yourself will make you self-conscious. So generally, you only want to have one thing that you're working on at any given time. It should be easy, it should be a set it and forget it. Let me use this phrase once at the beginning of conversation. Let me focus a bit on eye contact or cut out filler words for a portion of this conversation. But if you overload yourself with stuff that you're supposed to do,

• 29:44Speaker 03

  which is really what a lot of shy people are subtly doing when they're at a party or an event, that they keep thinking about what they ought to be doing, that will crush your charisma internally.

• 29:53Graham Stephan?

  Is that why nice guys finish last?

• 29:56Speaker 03

  Nice guys finish last for a multitude of reasons. It's because nice is actually not nice. It's often a people pleasing strategy to get what you want in an indirect way. So the nice guy cliche is really what he wants is a girlfriend or to kiss her or something like that. But he's going to pretend that he's available for a genuine friendship instead. So the reason that that nice guy is finishing last is because he's not behaving in a clear, honest, direct way. And he's not asserting himself in a way that could possibly be perceived as confident or high conviction. And then he thinks to himself, oh my gosh, I've given her everything and these other guys aren't even nice to her. Why doesn't she like me?

• 30:38Speaker 03

  And it's because, well, you're, you're deeply insincere in the way that you're engaging with her.

• 30:42Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, but in terms of insincerity, it seems like that also flips. The bad guy get all the girls, being completely insincere about wanting a relationship or anything and that, and that works.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. So.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  The thing that tends to work with the bad guy, if you will, is that he activates the part of herself that doesn't feel good enough. So what's going on in those situations where she's chasing the guy is that she has had wounding with her dad or with men at a young age where she feels like, if I can get the person who isn't being kind to me to be kind to me, then I'm gonna be enough. And men have this too, right? We like, look for the person that is least, we'll have all of these people who just treat us well, don't need to be coached or trained or anything, but we, we focus on the one person who seems just out of reach because that's what we're familiar with from childhood. And so I actually think that the reason that these quote unquote, bad guys, in that case, the insincerity of the bad guy, the reason that that is appealing is because it's actually

• 31:40Speaker 03

  a familiar pattern for a lot, unfortunately, of men and women, based on how they grew up.

• 31:44Graham Stephan?

  Have you seen Homath?

• 31:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:47Graham Stephan?

  What are your thoughts on that? Cause he has the entire breakdown of what triggers attraction. And what was it? There's like a dark-

• 31:54Speaker 03

  Triad?

• 31:55Graham Stephan?

  A dark triad of personality traits that is highly attractive to the opposite sex.

• 32:01Speaker 03

  Well, I think that a lot of that is targeted at young twenties men and women and is, is true of the experience of being a young twenties guy or girl. I think that there's a whole, and I've spoken to him, I think he would acknowledge this, there's an entire field of love that is not accounted for in any of the diagrams or the ones that he typically references. But I do think that those types of things are broadly attractive, particularly in our society. And I think this is the other thing is that a lot of those dark triad traits have a light side to them. So I'm not sure what the three are, but there's like psychopathy, narcissism and something else.

• 32:44Graham Stephan?

  It's like Machiavellian.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  Machiavellianism. There is a conviction, and we've spoken about conviction already, that is often associated with those sorts of traits that comes through. And I think that is the piece that is attractive. But if you're high conviction, but not psychopathic, not narcissistic and not high Machiavellian, I think you'll do really, really well. It's just that people, women will tolerate that if it comes in a package of, he's got other things that she wants, hypervisioning, he talks about, he talks about good looks, you know, there's, there's a height, the ability to protect and defend, muscles, all that kind of stuff adds as well. I think the thing that I would say about that broadly in my experience is that

• 33:27Speaker 03

  there was a phase of my life where I was trying to optimize for being liked by women writ large. And I understand it. I don't think that it's a bad phase, but I think that it's incomplete. I think that there is a significant amount of value towards finding what is most authentically you and being that and accepting that you are going to have fewer people from the pool interested in that, but way more higher, way more, way higher. Quality? Yeah, way higher, higher quality connection. Yes. Versus if you make yourself broadly appealing to a lot of people, you actually have a lot of noise in there. And I think Homath would acknowledge this. You wind up attracting people that don't make

• 34:10Speaker 03

  good relationship partners. Versus if you leave, there's, there's an argument that people have of should you leave with your best foot forward? I often advocate, once you've done the work on yourself, lead with your most average foot forward. Because you don't want to take her to the restaurant that you're only going to be able to take her to once every two years on the first date. Take her to the place where you're going to be able to go whenever you go out, right? Like be the person that you intend to be six months in, two years in. Because that is how you have a more successful relationship. If your only goal is to get her attracted to you for a moment. Yeah, whatever. Lead with your best foot forward, but it creates problems down the line. And what do you think is more effective for status, being liked or respected? Respected, for sure.

• 34:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I think essentially, status is a measure of if associating with someone improves, and this, this is if you really break it down to like evolutionary psychology. If associating with that person improves your survival and reproductive chances. And so, respect is that person has a skill or a quality that I admire or that I has helped them get. Is earned usually. Yes. And so, yeah, you look like who's higher status? Well, clearly Donald Trump is not broadly. He's liked by a lot of people, but not by everybody. But there's a lot of respect that is paid to him. Like his, his ability to change the world demands that even people like.

• 35:31Speaker 03

  Soren Mumdani, or even Zelensky had to come and pay him respect even if he wasn't feeling it, even if he didn't like him.

• 35:39Graham Stephan?

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• 35:59Jack Selby?

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• 36:17Graham Stephan?

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• 36:28Jack Selby?

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• 36:39Graham Stephan?

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• 36:50Jack Selby?

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• 37:05Graham Stephan?

  Again, that's gusto.com/iced with the link down below in the description. gusto.com/iced. Oh, and also I just want to sneak this in here, but I've been using Gusto for years now and I actually really like them a lot. And so if you're looking for a payroll software like this, highly recommend it. They get the thumbs up from me.

• 37:23Speaker 03

  The most overrated charismatic advice.

• 37:26Jack Selby?

  Huh. I think it's the enthusiasm. I'm sorry.

• 37:29Speaker 03

  Go ahead.

• 37:29Jack Selby?

  I have to disagree with that because I think that enthusiasm is sort of contrived in the same way that I'm a firm believer that if you're unwavering, that's the most thing that you could do. But if I'm like going up to a barista and I'm like, I'm having the best day ever. She's like, ugh, like this guy's trying too hard to come across in this sort of way and I can see right through it.

• 37:50Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 37:50Jack Selby?

  And I think that as long as you're just like very much yourself, the enthusiasm is, it can be off putting if it's a dangerous and fragile strategy.

• 38:00Speaker 03

  You know what I think it is? I think it's social calibration and awareness. And every person's going to be a little different. Like someone could really hit that enthusiasm and just like love it.

• 38:10Jack Selby?

  Hmm.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  And you could tell pretty quickly within like a split second if they're into it or not.

• 38:14Jack Selby?

  Well, do you consider yourself enthusiastic, Jack? Yeah. Yeah, I took Jordan, I took Jordan Peterson's personality test and I think I got like a 96 on enthusiasm.

• 38:24Speaker 03

  The way you just entered the conversation was super high enthusiasm and I was like, oh, that is, he's probably right.

• 38:30Jack Selby?

  It's the coffee.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  Well, and I think so, I think enthusiasm can be misconstrued for endlessly positive. Like you just came in and disagreed with something that I said, but you did it with a ton of energy. Like I actually think that's enthusiasm and that's engaging and interesting. Now you weren't kissing my butt and you didn't come in like, hi, swell ziggy doo Charlie, you know, like. So I, I hear what you're saying and I think that beneath the semantics, we probably agree on this one. And that if enthusiasm is understood as the things that animate and activate you, but doesn't have to be endlessly positive.

• 39:05Jack Selby?

  Hmm.

• 39:06Speaker 03

  Then I full stamp it. And if, and if how you're understanding it is it's this positivity and even when it's fake. It's like, yeah, that's not, that's not it.

• 39:16Jack Selby?

  That's fair. I'm trying to, I want to come up with like a devil's advocate.

• 39:20Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 39:21Jack Selby?

  Reason to disagree. Also, let's just say conversely, someone asks you, a close friend, how's your day? It's the worst day I've ever had in my entire life. Is that attractive? Is that charismatic to someone that you know well? Or do you have to have that social comprehension to be able to like, you know, navigate? I think that's kind of the root. And then whatever comes out of that is the, you know, do you choose to be enthusiastic? Do you choose to exaggerate?

• 39:48Speaker 03

  These are, these are interesting questions because I really do think, once it's important to learn tonality, body language, skills, eye contact, like this is where I started, and it's important. And broadly, there's things that work better than others in most cases. The longer I live, though, I do see that authenticity is just for so many reasons, the better choice to make. And I'll give you a little short story about this. In college, there was a night where the girl that I was seeing and I broke up. And I found out at like midnight, I was out on the popular college street where everybody was drinking and partying, and I wasn't drinking. I just got this message that we were going to break up. We were in like a long distance thing. And, or was it, gosh, did we break up in an alley? It's been a long time. We broke up and I was crestfallen about it. So I'm walking down the street and I was

• 40:33Speaker 03

  very unhappy, low energy. And I was stunned because multiple women walked up to me and started talking like, hey, what's going on? Are you like, it was weirdly drawing. It happened several times on the walk home. And I was like, should I break up with someone every night? Like, what is going on? But I was not in the mood to talk. It was an authentic, real thing that was happening right there. And it was early and I didn't know what to do with it or make anything of it. But as I've gotten older, and this is not always true, there are people that are going to be completely put off by any sort of authentic expression. That's important to recognize because every guy's gotten the advice, just be yourself, tell her how you're feeling. And then people run away from him. But I think that there's enough people in the world that if you

• 41:16Speaker 03

  Are able to own your experience and let it move through you in an adult way, which is to say if you're having a bad time, it doesn't mean that you yell at other people, but it does mean that you can wear that a little bit. I think that's, I think that's the most attractive quality, particularly in adults. Kids, teenagers are still sorting out, who do I need to pretend to be in order to fit in in my middle and high school? But I think as an adult, yeah, it's all about.

• 41:43Graham Stephan?

  At what age should you have that figured out? Like, I understand if you're 15, still, you know, trying to find your way, but like at 30, like at what age should people really get it together?

• 41:54Speaker 03

  You know, should is an interesting one, but I, what I'll tell you is there's a lot of adults that are still developmentally children, right? You, you, you see this on the internet, you see this in your life, you see the way that they handle conflicts. So ideally, what would happen is that in your teens, you experiment and you start solidifying this ego identity. In your twenties, you begin to live it out. You define yourself as I am this type of a guy. I am not the type of guy who is inefficient and I am productive and I get all these things done. And then Carl Jung, who is, I think, one of the most brilliant psychologists ever, but certainly of the 21st century, says that at about 35, there is a shift that occurs in people.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  And it's the shift from your ego, which you've spent your entire life building up to that point. This is the part of you that says, I am this type of person. I am not that type of person. I have succeeded in these ways. I like these things and I don't like these other things. All of your self definitions, that that gets, that is who you are in your twenties, but it gets de-centered around 35. And then what starts to happen is your soul comes in and that becomes the center that you live from. And you become far more about, rather than how can I make money? Or how can I get people to like me? Or how come they're not laughing at my joke? It becomes authentically, how can I serve other people, right? How can I give back to the world? I, I am now capable of taking care of myself.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  What I want to do is give, share and offer myself to a larger cause. So I think developmentally, that's ideal. That's often not how it goes, though. We have parents that behave like children and enmesh with their own children and create codependencies and all sorts of issues. And yeah, that's, that's not very common that it breaks that way.

• 43:37Jack Selby?

  So now I think we could all confidently agree that you're very charismatic.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you. I struggle sometimes with that.

• 43:45Jack Selby?

  I imagine you put in clearly a lot of work to become this way. What would you say was the most important change you made?

• 43:53Speaker 03

  So it was early where the big changes, it was, I'll go very concrete. It was leaving the town to go to college that I was in. I think it's incredibly hard to transform oneself with the eyes of people who already know you around you. And you guys, I'm sure have experienced this. Everyone on the internet has experienced this, which is the people that are the least supportive are often those that have the most to lose if you transform. So if you are in any point of your life, trying to make a transformation, you're trying to start a business, you're trying to do something else. Certainly there might be a handful of friends or parents or family members that are encouraging, but you probably need to go somewhere where you are unseen by the majority of your hometown in order to successfully pull that transformation off. So that would be probably the biggest

• 44:38Speaker 03

  thing that I did was study abroad at a place where nobody knew me. So I could have those elevator experiences where it doesn't count. I could just try a hundred different things over and over again. I got to do that for a year and a half in college and then I came back and people were like, who is that person? Like it was shockingly different.

• 44:55Jack Selby?

  Okay. So what are the directly applicable or actionable things then that you struggled with the most that like a lever you pulled it and then all of the sudden you're this charismatic person?

• 45:04Speaker 03

  Okay. So concretely, it would be.

• 45:15Speaker 02

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• 45:39Speaker 03

  It's way harder today, but actually there's advantages. Do not use your phone for things that other people can help you with. So if you like, I went to this new town studying abroad. And at the time, there were no smartphones. But today, what everyone would do is they would go to Yelp, they would go to Airbnb. They would find a way to get all of their needs met without ever having to communicate with another human being. Far better is to walk down the street and say, hey, perdón, you know, no hablo español pero. Do you know any restaurants around here that are really good? And I did that for months. Where are the good restaurants? Where I don't know how to get to my class. Do you know a good spot to learn salsa dancing? Like we're just constantly asking questions. And some of those people just said, no, I don't know. Some of them showed me cool things and others wound up being like, what are you doing here? And they became friends.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  So the willingness to put yourself in situations where you are communicating more with strangers is so important. And what I often tell people is say one more sentence than you need to. So the elevator is a great example. You need to say zero sentences, just say one thing. Say anything in the elevator. You're checking out at a cashier, paper or plastic, cash or credit. Okay, normally that's what you say. Say one more thing. How's your shift going?

• 46:51Jack Selby?

  I would love if we could reset the norm in elevators. If elevators could then become a conversation pit. Every time you get in, what's someone gonna say? What are we gonna talk about today, guys? That would actually be a funny opener. What are we talking about today, everybody?

• 47:06Speaker 03

  So, thank you all for coming.

• 47:08Jack Selby?

  All right, if you're a listener right now and you get in an elevator today, tomorrow, the next day, who knows when? Please start a conversation.

• 47:14Graham Stephan?

  Tell them to subscribe to the Iced Coffee Hour podcast. Hey, did you see that episode of the Iced Coffee Hour?

• 47:20Speaker 03

  That, by the way, would be an incredible opener. Because I think a lot of the time we fall into like, what should I say? And it can be a very logistical, what's practical? But it's, you don't need to be literal or serious at all. Like I, that for anybody out there, ask people if they like Iced Coffee Hour. Tell them that you heard on this podcast that you're supposed to talk to people in elevators. When they say why, tell them you don't really understand.

• 47:38Graham Stephan?

  I don't get it.

• 47:39Jack Selby?

  I don't, I don't get it. I don't know.

• 47:42Jack Selby?

  I don't know, I'm drinking Athletic Greens and doing what I'm told.

• 47:46Graham Stephan?

  Now, what about for people who have social anxiety? Where they just feel like going and talking to strangers, they get that like rush of just adrenaline.

• 47:55Speaker 03

  That's me, 100% hyper introverted. This was, what about them? Like, what should they do?

• 48:01Graham Stephan?

  What should they do? How do they overcome this? Because it seems like that's an additional barrier that they have to conquer just to get to the first step.

• 48:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, yes, yes, it is, for sure. For me, what made it worth it was recognizing the limitation in my life. And it was experiences like the one I described where I'm saying a joke and everyone else is following the other dude. Or like, I've had a crush on this girl for a year and then some other guy asks her on a date and now they're dating. So I hate to say it, but early in your journey, becoming conscious of the pain that you're putting yourself in by choosing to coddle your own fears and your own anxieties is really important. Like, this is true of any sort of change, where you gotta recognize what it is costing you. The second thing that I would say is, there's hard leaps and then there's easier steps to take.

• 48:51Speaker 03

  So I've tried in this conversation to give very easy steps. Like, I could have given way, way harder stuff for people to focus on. Like, go do stand-up comedy or join an improv class and perform in front of a room. Those are incredible ways to develop charisma. You will become really good, really fast. They also are going to terrify you and stretch the people with social anxiety. But quite frankly, if I was asked to give not the easiest prescription, but the most effective, it would be stand-up and improv comedy classes would be the things that I would recommend to people. Stuff like that is so powerful.

• 49:27Graham Stephan?

  What's that like? I've had so many people recommend improv.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  Improv is poorly named, well, it's honestly named, but it is a skill that is completely portable for everything. So I, it's something that people don't often follow through, but I'll make a pitch for it. It's like the best way to get better at speaking, flirting, interviews, friends. Because what it trains you to do is to be present in the moment, to yes-and in interaction, to find a way to make a situation that is completely unreal, extend further and be fun. That's a tough lift. And then you do it in front of an audience who is sometimes laughing, sometimes not. You're worried about it. Those skills are totally portable to life. So if I could, I would just tell everyone, go do improv comedy.

• 50:16Graham Stephan?

  We should do that.

• 50:17Jack Selby?

  I was literally just thinking that.

• 50:18Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, I was just thinking that too.

• 50:19Jack Selby?

  We could do that as a team.

• 50:20Speaker 03

  Bro, it's

• 50:20Graham Stephan?

  I would do that.

• 50:21Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 50:21Speaker 03

  So powerful, so powerful. And they have places all over the world. I just don't say it because people don't do it.

• 50:27Jack Selby?

  Oh, I would do it.

• 50:28Graham Stephan?

  I would do it, okay?

• 50:29Jack Selby?

  I would do it.

• 50:30Speaker 03

  They're great.

• 50:31Jack Selby?

  All right, what about this, Graham?

• 50:31Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 50:32Jack Selby?

  If, we need to make a bet. There needs to be stakes on the line.

• 50:36Graham Stephan?

  Sure.

• 50:36Jack Selby?

  So we'll do an improv class. And if we don't in the next, what, two weeks?

• 50:42Speaker 03

  Two weeks is tough. I would say in the next, well, we're gone. We're traveling so much. I would say realistically, the next three weeks.

• 50:49Jack Selby?

  By January 31st.

• 50:50Speaker 03

  How about this?

• 50:50Graham Stephan?

  January 31st?

• 50:51Speaker 03

  No, no, pause, pause, pause. I've got it. So these things are cohort based. They're not always available. Sign up for one in the next two weeks.

• 50:58Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  Sign up for one. Now, it might not start till January. But

• 51:02Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 51:02Speaker 03

  You can do that for sure.

• 51:03Jack Selby?

  Okay. Well, sign up for improv.

• 51:05Speaker 03

  Sign up for improv. They often start with like level zero. You're not going to be in front of an audience until the very end. If you want, it's playing, it's games. That is very good. Now, the only thing is some of these classes for you guys, and I saw the speed with that you jumped in, are catered to people who like want to be even more coddled. So they're going to take it slow. You might even want to see if you can jump into like a level one or two class.

• 51:29Graham Stephan?

  I would be fine in front of an audience, honestly. It wouldn't bother me.

• 51:32Jack Selby?

  I wouldn't do that.

• 51:32Speaker 03

  You might want to, you might want to be like, level zero is really about making people comfortable in it. And a lot of people don't feel it. But you guys could ask to do a level one or two.

• 51:41Graham Stephan?

  I'm just curious what type of person we're going to see at an improv class in Vegas? What type of person is going to be signed? Like, is it going to be like 50 year old guys? Is it going to be like

• 51:52Speaker 03

  They're there.

• 51:53Graham Stephan?

  20 year old? Like, I have no idea.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  I saw a lot of 20s and 30s, but I did it in New York. And that's where people are looking to develop, yeah. Their acting chops. I did it in, where was the other town? I think I did it in Vegas was the other town.

• 52:05Graham Stephan?

  You did?

• 52:05Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 52:06Graham Stephan?

  What is it like?

• 52:06Speaker 03

  Was it Vegas?

• 52:07Graham Stephan?

  So walk us through the process. Like, how do they get you to like maybe role play or something?

• 52:11Speaker 03

  Correct. So level zero is you come in for a couple hours and it's all games. You won't even do a scene to start. So like, we'll play this game, zip zap. You don't know what zip zap zap is?

• 52:21Graham Stephan?

  No.

• 52:21Speaker 03

  Okay, so. A lot of these games, and by the way, these can be ported to interviews or things. They're about creating verbal fluency and freedom in the thing. Cause we're often, so we're gonna play very briefly. Cool. It's the easiest improv game. It doesn't even create that much freedom, but it's how you start because it's a low lift. The game is zip zap zap. If I start, I have to point at one of you and say zip. Then you who received it has to point at someone else at me or at Graham and say zap. And then whoever gets it has to say zap and you do that several times. The idea of the game is to add a little flavor to it. It's pointless. So I'll be like zip. Zap.

• 53:04Jack Selby?

  Zap. Zip. Zap. Zap.

• 53:10Speaker 03

  You were zap. Did I fuck it up? I said zap. I said zap. You said zap. That was a zap.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  So I lost zip zap zap. So do you leave then and then it's just slam? So you can't, you gotta get out of here, buddy. How do you win? No, so the idea of the game is you keep it going quick and you, the entire idea is you just break the part of you that says I'm being weird. Like there's always this little voice, it's like, that was weird. He said that in a strange way. You're just trying to keep moving through the experience of awkwardness. That's the game. That's it. And so there's a lot of games that are like this. Yeah. And there, there are people that, you know, practice this before they go to interviews, practice before they go out at night. My friends would do it before we went to a bar. It is really good for just chilling out and not taking yourself so seriously. And what's the next level? The next level, let me recall the types of things that they would do.

• 54:01Speaker 03

  They would do all sorts of short, short scene exercises. So one of them, this is a bit more advanced, is that, and I remember this is, a lot of times when we storytell, we try to make it interesting. And so we try to pick our best story. We put pressure on the story and then we don't tell a good story. So what they would do is they would have one person stand in and everyone in the audience, just, which is just the other people in the class, would shout a word at them. You would pick one word out and you would say, so, uh, well, does anybody wanna try this? I'll try it. Okay. So. I'm feeling adventurous. Think of a random word and on the count of three, we're gonna shout it at Graham. Okay. One, and then I'll tell you the next step. One, two, three. Spine. Spine and tree. Okay, so pick one of them.

• 54:46Graham Stephan?

  Doesn't matter. Tree, got it. So here's what you do. Tree reminds me of something, reminds me of something, reminds, and say, reminds me of something until you find a story and then tell us the story. Tree reminds me of dirt. And when I think of dirt, I planted three trees in the front of my house. And I thought it was going to be really easy to plant these three trees. What I didn't realize is that when you dig below like six inches or so, you have this hard clay. And so I had to take the shovel and just beat away at this clay to try to like chip it apart. And then I probably spent half a day, this is a true story, actually, I probably spent half a day chipping away at this clay in front of the house.

• 55:28Graham Stephan?

  And then I realized when I got to the clay, I couldn't put the tree in because under the clay was concrete. And they had concreted below this thing. And there's no drainage for the plant anyway. So I ended up planting these trees, I compacted them down. And then they all died because there was no drainage. And so the trees, I guess, like rotted on the, on the underside. I didn't know that. So we actually had to go and place irrigation, like these little holes at the bottom that drained out to the other side of this like wall. And now the trees are there and they're alive. Very good. That's the type of exercise that you do. Yeah. And then it's not like, there's no like feedback at the end of it. It's not, you, you could have done this better.

• 56:09Graham Stephan?

  It's all of the early levels are about developing freedom. And the truth is, in life, people don't tell enough stories. They, they often operate very literally, question, answer, interview style. And these story breaks are the things that let your listener sit back, relax. There's about 5% of the populations that needs to talk less. They need to tell fewer stories, they need to ask more questions. That definitely exists. But the type of person who's going to listen to this podcast, almost guarantees, needs to speak more, needs to bring more of themselves to the interaction. So those are the types of things that they do in improv. See, I would be hard pressed to do like random stories. Yeah. Or make something up or riff. Riffing is, is, I just don't do that well. Yeah. Unless I've had like a drink or two, I just have a problem

• 56:53Graham Stephan?

  just that back and forth of just like making up some scenario. Interesting. So you mean?

• 57:00Speaker 03

  Making up scenarios where people do like build a comical absurd world with one another?

• 57:04Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, like, whose line is it anyway? Like, that's, I love that show. I could never be like as quick and witty as, and they just come up with these things on the spot.

• 57:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:14Graham Stephan?

  That, to me, is like a superpower.

• 57:16Speaker 03

  It's so, okay, so those are, those are some of the best in the world they got on the show. But wherever you are today, you, you take a couple of levels of improv, you'll be blown away by your ability to do that. It is a skill. It is not an innate thing. Getting to the elite, elite levels, that's, that's a combination of talent and birth and all that kind of stuff. But you can get way, way better at all of that. Improv is a great way to go.

• 57:38Graham Stephan?

  Do you think, though, you said that, you know, with, with practice, you're gonna get better. But don't you think with AI, people are just gonna have less contact with each other? And it's, it's just gonna get worse.

• 57:49Jack Selby?

  And it'll just make it easier to be more charismatic.

• 57:52Graham Stephan?

  Yes, but I think more people just don't have to interact with anybody. Like, you're talking about going to the store, like, talking, asking for directions. I'm thinking like, well, now at McDonald's, they have that kiosk and you just go up to the kiosk and you press your order. And it just, someone's like, just places it on the counter and it's done.

• 58:09Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 58:09Graham Stephan?

  Or Starbucks now, they're, they're, they're coming up with these AI things. You don't need to talk to a person anymore.

• 58:14Jack Selby?

  Door dash things, too.

• 58:15Graham Stephan?

  Or you just, you just click a few buttons.

• 58:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:18Graham Stephan?

  So where do you think the future is headed in terms of talking to people? Cause isn't it now more important just to have like good texting skills? And like just being good over, you know, online?

• 58:30Speaker 03

  Well, if you assume, well, if you assume that the entire relationship is gonna be conducted online, then sure. You know what I mean? Like that.

• 58:37Graham Stephan?

  No, but, but the relationship could build entirely over text message. And then it skips all the sort of like informalities in the beginning.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  My experience with that, and I've seen other people, is that then there, there inevitably is an encounter of not just people on a screen, but two nervous systems coming into contact. Oh, that guy can't make eye contact with me. He's really uncomfortable. He's shaking. Now we're kissing and he's trembling or whatever. So I totally agree with you. The arc of technology is that it has allowed us to become more atomized. And I even, when I was in co- Costa Rica, the first time I didn't have a phone. Now I have the option to use Yelp instead of asking a person for a restaurant. So yeah, you're going to be able to exist as an economic unit without ever talking to anyone. And that we're already mostly there. The price that you'll pay, I think in terms of life satisfaction is going to be very, very, very high.

• 59:30Speaker 03

  And then in the inevitable case where you do want to have a relationship, your nervous system, I don't think will be very prepared for it and you'll struggle eventually. But if people don't experience that, God bless. I know I feel that way, like after years of doordashing, I finally am like moving in and I'm dealing with people. And it's a shock to the system to talk to a stranger again.

• 59:50Graham Stephan?

  I've gone through periods where I've worked really hard for like a month, give or take. And I just don't go out.

• 59:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:55Graham Stephan?

  The only people I talk to really like Jack and Macy and podcast guests, that's it. And then when I go out, I feel so rusty.

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:00:03Graham Stephan?

  It's just like, I don't know how to, it's like I've forgotten how to talk to people.

• 1:00:06Speaker 03

  Totally. I felt that way after COVID. I was like, do we shake hands, do we?

• 1:00:10Graham Stephan?

  I didn't know how to do it.

• 1:00:10Speaker 03

  So yeah, it's like the gym, which is if you've done it once, you know, you can do it. You built the muscle back faster. But if you don't go for six months at a time, like you're, you're, you're going to lose it for sure.

• 1:00:23Graham Stephan?

  And how do you address situations? Let's give some examples here. If someone talks over you constantly.

• 1:00:31Speaker 03

  So there's a number of ways to address this. If someone talks over you constantly, there's all fundamental questions, which is like, why are you in situations with people that, that need this level of parenting or correction? So, so there's, there's, there's the concrete thing to say, which is like in the moment, everybody likes to know what phrase to say, which is there's, there's people that have better ones on me that I won't, I won't trip their lines. But I think Jefferson Fisher has a good line. There's other, there's other people out there in this world. But yeah, my thing is it would be more curiosity around how you wind up in a situation where people are constantly talking over you. And if there's a more structural change that we could make to get you into situations where that's not the case.

• 1:01:11Jack Selby?

  So you're saying you could have already done something wrong?

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  You could be trying to fit in with a group of people that don't care for you or are low empathy. Or, and it's just like, the answer to this is not to change the circumstance, find the right phrase. The answer is to leave this situation and go start a better one. It's kind of like if my boss treats me like crap, how do I get him to stop? You could just get a different job would be a one way to approach it.

• 1:01:34Jack Selby?

  What if someone's just droning and they're talking and talking and you don't wanna talk to them? And then like, what are you supposed to do in that situation?

• 1:01:42Speaker 03

  Is this a podcast question?

• 1:01:45Graham Stephan?

  I've seen where you just keep talking.

• 1:01:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Graham Stephan?

  And it's just you finish your sentence and if they talk over you, you just continue on.

• 1:01:52Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:01:52Graham Stephan?

  And you just over talk them and get a little louder. And if they get a little louder, you just kinda have to one up, but it might not end.

• 1:01:59Jack Selby?

  At a certain point, Graham and I, we have but uh, we have a few, you know. Graham knows who I'm talking about. Like, we were in conversation with this guy.

• 1:02:08Speaker 03

  Say his name.

• 1:02:09Jack Selby?

  And between, between everything he would say, but uh, and then he would go on to the next thing.

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 1:02:15Jack Selby?

  And so, like, you know, you can finish a point and just end on a period. Or you can say but uh, and then go on to the next thing.

• 1:02:22Graham Stephan?

  It was, it was crazy. We started laughing mid-conversation because you would just see, he would twist something into something else into something else. We would like, talk about this cup and then like 10 minutes later, he'd be talking about like, riding a camel in Egypt and what like the tour guide was telling him. And then he'd circle back to like a Christmas gift he got like, and it was never ending and it was constant to see like, okay, where's this guy gonna lead next? But everything was but uh, yeah, so then I did this. But uh, and then then, and at this, we just stopped talking.

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:59Graham Stephan?

  And enjoyed our, what we were doing.

• 1:03:05Graham Stephan?

  Because it's just like, it is pointless. It's pointless to say anything. It's funny.

• 1:03:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think there's, there's, do you wanna be a saint in these situations? Or do you wanna extricate yourself? If you wanna, which is totally fine to wanna extricate yourself. I think the, whenever I wanna get out of a conversation, I just announce what I'm going to do next. Like, okay, I'm gonna go to the bathroom, but, you know, or, okay, I'm gonna go get in my car and I'm gonna drive off. It's just a weird, yeah, I'm gonna go meet my friend. I'm gonna go call my dad.

• 1:03:31Jack Selby?

  Like, I just, I just.

• 1:03:32Graham Stephan?

  We couldn't do that. Dinner had just been served.

• 1:03:34Speaker 03

  Okay, so you're locked in in that sort of a situation.

• 1:03:37Jack Selby?

  Locked in, waiting for food to come in.

• 1:03:39Speaker 03

  Okay. So then the other, the other thing, which is not your responsibility, but I have started to try to do is, there's all kinds of difficult personalities. You just described one. There's the person who trauma dumps. There's the person who won't stop talking. That person, I've begun to learn, developed that habit because they struggle to be present with other people. They don't know how to let other people in, they don't know how to communicate with other people, and it's an acutely painful experience for them. So I try to drop into compassion in those moments and curiosity. And I'm not excellent at this, but the type of thing, I would try to pay attention to the story and listen for what is he really trying to tell me here?

• 1:04:23Speaker 03

  You know, my, the camel did this, and like, what is he trying to say? Is he trying to get me to understand that he's a cool guy who travels a lot? Is he trying to get me to understand that we should hang out sometime? And I will try to speak directly to the thing that he is deeply trying to communicate, but struggling to say. So, and that would just be, yeah, it sounds like you really get to travel a lot of places and have a pretty interesting life. Like, I try to, I try to pull out of them the thing that they are talking around, which is why they're saying so many words, because they're not able to just express the emotion and the need that they have in that conversation, which is to be seen, recognized, understood, appreciated, whatever. There's so many times I wish that I could just say, hey, listen, I'm just not enjoying this conversation.

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  That's a, you know, I think- I'mma leave. I, see, that, I would, I would advise against maybe that. I know. There's something good close to that, that is great, though. I just don't wanna listen to this, I just don't wanna talk right now. Yeah. Can we, you know- In the most polite way possible, like, I'm kinda done with this. I see as people get older, they trend in that direction, and they can get really harsh in that direction. I think there's a, I don't know the exact phrase, but I think there's really something powerful there, which is, yeah, I don't know, I'm just not that interested in this topic. What else is going on in your life? Or like, like, like, keep the door open to connection with that person? I don't know the exact phrase, but I think it's, that's authentic, right? This, I don't wanna do this. Can we do something else? It's an interesting way to approach it.

• 1:05:52Speaker 03

  There's been a few times I've just said I've zoned out for like, the last few minutes. Great, great, yeah.

• 1:05:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:58Jack Selby?

  And I think people appreciate it too.

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:00Jack Selby?

  Because then like you're kind of breaking through that barrier and they see that you're just like, hey, look, I can trust this person that they're going to be authentic with me.

• 1:06:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:08Jack Selby?

  And say how they truly feel.

• 1:06:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And worst case, they, you know, they freak out, you don't do it. Okay, that, that relationship is over. You're never gonna have to sit there and listen to them again. Best case, this person had a barrier up, you stopped being fake and you pull them out of their weird spiel that they have and actually connect with them as a person and then you're engaged. I think, I think a lot of people be like, oh, I'm not interested in other people. I think they are, but they haven't learned how to elicit the interesting parts of other people in conversation. So they let other people go wherever they want and they sit bored on the sidelines type of the thing.

• 1:06:42Jack Selby?

  So how do you end a boring conversation?

• 1:06:44Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. Well, you can try to make a boring conversation an interesting one, which is the first thing, which is to get to values, generally speaking. So the, the things that make, there's fun, values, and I call it news. News is like, yeah, so you know, we got a new crib for the baby, we're moving in, her mom's gonna visit next. It's just, you know, and please, I don't care. That's where a lot of people live. Values is the things that you actually care about, are struggling with, are creating friction, conflict, tension. I find that stuff interesting. So if somebody were to tell me instead, yeah, you know, her mother's coming to town, I got in a big fight with her the last time she was here, she actually, like, now I'm invested. So I'm trying to share my values in conversation

• 1:07:26Speaker 03

  when I'm talking about the topics in my life with other people. And I'm trying to listen for their values and pull them out of them and steer the conversation in that direction to make a boring conversation have depth and be interesting.

• 1:07:41Jack Selby?

  But let's just say you don't wanna have a conversation at all, but you want to excuse yourself in the best way possible without.

• 1:07:50Graham Stephan?

  Maybe making the situation uncomfortable.

• 1:07:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I don't know exactly where you are, but for me, it's generally I say, "Awesome, I am going to..." Awesome, nice talking to you, I'm going to X, Y, and Z. I'm gonna head out now, I'm gonna give my father a call, I'm gonna go explore the party a little bit, I'm gonna go to the bathroom, whatever, and just, that's it.

• 1:08:10Graham Stephan?

  And really quick, I just want to say that when Jack and I started the Ice Coffee Hour, we had to figure out everything ourselves, from the best cameras to use, the best editing equipment, how to get guests. It was fun, but every day was also challenging. That's why if you're starting or running your own business, you know how valuable today's sponsor is, and that would be Shopify.

• 1:08:29Jack Selby?

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• 1:08:46Graham Stephan?

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• 1:09:02Jack Selby?

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• 1:09:15Graham Stephan?

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• 1:09:21Jack Selby?

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• 1:09:43Graham Stephan?

  Thanks again Shopify for sponsoring this episode.

• 1:09:45Jack Selby?

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• 1:10:56Jack Selby?

  Would you say charisma is inherently manipulative?

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  No, I would not.

• 1:11:01Jack Selby?

  Do you think that it is? I think it probably depends on how you reflect your charisma. But I do think if you're trying to get yourself to come across a certain way, to then have people react to you a certain way, just effectively, you know, changing yourself to get a desired response from someone else, that could be. Unless if, you know, you define charisma as being authentically yourself, unwavering, and figuring yourself out and becoming the best version of yourself and just displaying that.

• 1:11:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I totally agree. No, I think, I think the superficial aspects of almost anything that people work on themselves for, like, it's manipulative to go to the gym to sculpt your biceps and your abs to get a particular reaction from a particular person when it's fully understood that that's why you're doing it. You're not expressing your own natural health. You are carving a body that you have predetermined will get a response from. Like, you're trying, and end, if you don't get the response, you will change your gym routine until you do get the response. Like, that is, and by the way, you can put a negative or positive or neutral valence on all of that, but it's It's a manipulative behavior. You're trying, you're not. The activity in itself is not having unintended consequences.

• 1:12:16Speaker 03

  The consequences are the whole point of what you're doing. And so I totally agree with you that a lot of the superficial ways of engaging with making money, getting in shape, getting people to like you are manipulative. And then, as you hopefully progress and develop and get older, they are natural outgrowths of you being yourself. And with whether people like you or not, whether they like your body or not, whether they're into your, like, all of that is let go, I think, at further stages of development. How do you know if you have good charisma? Well, I think certainly an aspect is how people react to you. But you can still misinterpret the way that they react to you. Of course. There are ways that are just concrete, you know, like, look at a certain number. A number.

• 1:12:59Speaker 03

  Something that will tell you if you are charismatic. No, no, it's, it's, it's an interpersonal experience. And it does, like, show me where charisma exists in the universe, right? Like, let's go mine charisma. It doesn't, it's, it's an interpersonal, subjectively but broadly felt experience. But take the most charismatic person, whoever you want to call him. I said Trump at the beginning, but obviously that's not a universally felt thing about him. So it doesn't exist independently of the feelings that people have in interaction with one another. So there is no, there's no device, there's no measure. There is only, I think what matters is, are you satisfied with how your relationships add to your life and how you add to the relationships in your life?

• 1:13:44Speaker 03

  And if you step back and you see that you have friends, colleagues, that seem to get much more out of that aspect than you, then there's something to work on. And if you look back and you go, no, I'm deeply, I feel really good about my wife or my husband. I feel good about my work relationships. I feel good about the opportunities that sort of fall into my lap, then great. There's, you know, probably not an area you need to focus on. How important are first impressions? I mean, how important are first impressions? When you think about the amount of people that you're going to come into contact with in your life? And then how many of them you will only meet once? And if that goes well, there's an opportunity for second, third, fourth. It is the gate that it's kind of like saying, how important is your storefront? Or how important is your thumbnail on YouTube?

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  It's the thing that determines if the inner goods ever get experienced. And as you guys know, on YouTube, you get a 3% click through or 4% click through. That's a huge difference in the experience that you have of are you making money? Or are you losing money? So deeply, deeply important when it comes to.

• 1:14:54Speaker 02

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• 1:15:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, connecting with people. But I think more important is not that you have, everybody likes you, but that the right people are connecting with you. So it's bringing yourself consistently into interaction so that the person who would vibe and would connect with you knows that. And then you can form a friendship or a partnership or something like that.

• 1:15:34Graham Stephan?

  And what does that perfect first interaction look like? We're going to an event tonight for Spotify.

• 1:15:40Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:15:40Graham Stephan?

  We're going to be meeting some people.

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  I'm coming.

• 1:15:43Graham Stephan?

  Do you want to?

• 1:15:44Speaker 03

  We'll talk after. I might be able to.

• 1:15:46Graham Stephan?

  Okay. What does it look like, though?

• 1:15:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:49Graham Stephan?

  When you first meet somebody, what's the best way to lead a great impression?

• 1:15:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so again, I will say, there's the broad, objective, more universal way of doing it. And then there's, what do you hope to get out of this event? Because for you, maybe all that you want, and this could be different, maybe, and I'm making this up, Jack just wants to meet a girlfriend. And the only first impression he cares about is, do I get the women that I like to like me back? And for you, it's like, you're looking for a business deal or you're looking for a friend. The first impression qualities are going to be different in each of those circumstances. But so it's important to know what you're wanting out of a situation. But broadly. The if you if the other person has these three experiences in this order, it's a great first impression. So the first one is fun.

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  If the sense that they get from you is that you are an enjoyable presence, that's the important piece. You come in super high energy. I don't know. I disagree. Like it's fun. It's fun. High energy is more fun than low energy. You can crack a joke. This is something that I've talked about ad infinitum on all the podcasts I've done. But if somebody says, where are you from? And you make up a silly joke, you're like, I live over there in the broom closet. Yeah, just they just let me out for parties, you know, like that's fun versus, well, I live here and I do this. Right? So, okay, you get a chuckle or a laugh. Check. You've done fun. That's all that it takes. Trust. Trust can come in a number of ways. This is where a friend says, hey, have you met like instant trust, right? When somebody M sees you or somebody says, oh, you should meet this guy.

• 1:17:19Speaker 03

  That's why a assist, when it comes to a first introduction is so valuable. That immediately buys you five or 10 minutes when somebody says, you should talk to this person. Other ways to build trust is mostly nonverbal. It's eye contact. It's your handshake. It's, I mean, you guys are sort of established. There's trust that is going to be there for you guys because you're at this event. But that is something that other people generally need to communicate via nonverbals. And then the last thing is respect. So respect often comes through. It can be nonverbal, but eventually everybody says they're trying to locate you in the hierarchy. It's like, so what do you do? Or do you live around here or this? Cheap and easy ways, not easy, but if you have it is like, oh, you live in the expensive neighborhood. You've got the cool job or you know, the guy who's throwing the party or this, that, and the other thing.

• 1:18:04Speaker 03

  But it's even if you're not that, back when I was a consultant and I wasn't too proud of it. The way that you talk about what you do, your ability to bring values and lead the conversation in interesting ways. The fact that there's somebody over there who gives you a high five. Well, you're like, hey, what's up, man? Like, all of this contributes to a sense of I mean, we're monkeys, right? Like, that this person is in the hierarchy, alliances, all that kind of stuff is felt palpably, and it creates a sense of respect.

• 1:18:35Graham Stephan?

  This is an interesting one. What do you think about people who wear designer clothing? Like, expensive Louis Vuitton, head to toe, they drive a really nice car, they pull up in the Ferrari. How does that play into all this in terms of making a good first impression?

• 1:18:51Speaker 03

  Well, it's clearly intended to create desire and respect or that. And there's a subset of the population that it works for. Like, a lot of people tell you to buy these cars, and the only people who look at them are other dudes, right? But it does have that effect some of the time. You might remember, like, probably 10 years ago, there was these pranks where these guys would roll up in Lamborghinis or something.

• 1:19:13Graham Stephan?

  Oh, the gold digger pranks, right?

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, the gold digger pranks, right? The idea is that people see that and they treat you differently. So, it impacts a subset of people one way. It also alienates a subset of people the other way. Who are you trying to engage with? And I would say, again, if you're getting a car to get people to like you, you're going to attract the wrong kind of people. You're going to attract the kind of people who want to use you for that car. But if you're a real, like, I know that you love cars, and you just love them, and you would love them if nobody liked them, you just want it? If it's an expression of that and who you are, go for it, 100%. And it's the same thing with the clothes. Like, if you love this clothes and everybody else hating it doesn't mean a thing to you, it just happens to be designer, wear it. But if it's, if your love of the clothes is completely contingent on what other people

• 1:20:00Speaker 03

  say, then...

• 1:20:01Graham Stephan?

  But what about, like, the Adam Sandler sort of style? Where he's just walking around New York with just dressed kind of...

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  That's Adam Sandler.

• 1:20:09Graham Stephan?

  But I'm saying, but he has that confidence to be able to pull it off, and with him, it's cool, but some other guy does that, it's like, yo, you should really, you know...

• 1:20:18Speaker 03

  Okay, so you're comparing Adam Sandler and some other guy? Well, I promise you, I promise you, people told him 20 years or 25 years, hey, man, you can't dress like that. Hey, man, you can't dress like... Like, when he was just the guy on SNL, I was like, dude, wear a suit. But he just kept doing it, and now it's him, and it's fine. I mean, I'm not dressed particularly nicely. I wear my black t-shirt, but if you had, you know, Alex O'Connor, he would be in a suit right now. They create different impressions. They, they, one is not better than the other. And the question is, which attracts the type of person that you're most interested in? And which feels the best for you to do? I don't think that one is better than the other, though.

• 1:20:57Jack Selby?

  So there's no optimal, sort of like, you should dress this way to get like, the best outcome? It's really just whatever you feel more, most comfortable in?

• 1:21:04Speaker 03

  So, there is, I had a phrase, and I don't live by this anymore. But if you're really trying to optimize.

• 1:21:10Jack Selby?

  Sure.

• 1:21:10Speaker 03

  Every day is Halloween. And what you'll experience, if you have ever had a Halloween where you had a killer costume, makes it really easy to meet people. Like, there was a year where we were in Brazil. This is before they had shipped those Velcro morph suits out to Brazil. So, nobody had seen them. And me and my other American friends dressed up as the Five Power Rangers. And we went out for both that Halloween and the following carnival. And it was the most celebrity experience I have ever had in my entire life. Constant people coming up, "Oh, my God, Power Rangers!", like, taking photos. It was the most fun I have ever had. Now, to be clear, carnival is not an event where you're supposed to dress up like a Power Ranger. But, you know, people wear headdresses, so, and we were foreign. I experienced this in New York, where I was a single guy.

• 1:21:55Speaker 03

  I was trying to get, talk to girls, and have a ton of other going on. So, I wore suspenders. And I tried everything. I tried the boa, I tried the top, you know, I wore everything once. And the suspenders reliably would have women come up and, yeah.

• 1:22:08Jack Selby?

  So, but you wouldn't do it on a first date?

• 1:22:10Speaker 03

  Like, when would you? I would do it all the time. Yes.

• 1:22:14Jack Selby?

  So, wait, does that still work?

• 1:22:16Speaker 03

  I don't know. It's, but yes. It's, like, everybody would say, and by the way, the reaction that I got from you guys, all the dudes would roll their eyes. And it just works. It just works. I don't know what to tell you.

• 1:22:30Jack Selby?

  But walk me through this, because I am actually gobsmacked that suspenders work. So, are you just putting these suspenders on and walking on the street, striking up conversation with someone, and then they go and they snap it? That's it? And are you, because you can displace suspenders in many different ways. The two main ones being...

• 1:22:47Speaker 03

  Look at me, I'm wearing suspenders, I'm the guy, like that sort of a thing? Or is it like, I look good in suspenders? Which one is it? It was a combo, cuz my, uh, my co-founder would do it too, and he had like, he was bigger and stronger and just kinda looked funny on him. I was like more lean, so it worked for me, certainly, but I, we ran this experiment with a number of friends, and they had the same experience, which is people, girls in particular. Do you wear a belt with suspenders? No, I wouldn't, but these were clip-ons, and here's what I'll tell you. Good. Okay, so, when you're, cuz you're a younger guy, you're out in a public event, like a bar or a club, the thing that guys don't realize is that we all, but women especially, are clocking everyone in that room. Everyone in that room, and most guys are wearing their normal guy suit.

• 1:23:31Speaker 03

  I have a collared shirt and a solid color thing and a whatever, and it's easy, like, maybe you're strikingly handsome, maybe, you know what I mean? It's like, look at us, like, maybe you're super tall, maybe you're like known from the internet, whatever, but you just blend in. And then one dude has full-sleeve tattoos, or, this was the easiest, clip-on suspenders. That guy is just noticeable, and if she has any reason that she wants to speak with you, which could be she likes your look, could be she saw you talking to other people, you looked like you were having a good time, it gives her this easy way to initiate conversation. So, when they ask, why are you wearing the suspenders, what do you say? Okay, this would've been a long time ago, so, I'm 38 now.

• 1:24:10Speaker 03

  What would I have said? So, these were questions that people always ask, like, I didn't drink at the time, and people say, what do you say when people? I'd say, I like them, or, cuz they're awesome. You know, like, just, like, it's not about the phrase. I would've said, belts are too expensive. Great, great, it's, like, you can say, eh, that's in you. They were out of belts. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they were out of belts at the belts, whatever, literally anything. The thing that will, the wavering is the doubt that you shouldn't be. Like, the fact that you maybe feel that you need to have justification. Like, if somebody came up to you and was like, why are you wearing a black v-neck? Like, you would never prepare for that sort of a circumstance. Like, if anyone asked you about your clothes or how you behaved, similarly, you just, you don't need to prepare for that, you just...

• 1:24:53Graham Stephan?

  So is this just peacocking then? It's about doing anything to stand out?

• 1:24:57Speaker 03

  Not anything, not anything. Cause I tried, I tried the stuff that they wrote in the game and I tried the boas and I tried the top hats and I tried all that and they do create different things. This was like fashion forward. I had a T-shirt and the cool khakis with my clip-ons. Like it's somewhere on my Instagram, you could find it. And it, yeah, it was effective.

• 1:25:16Jack Selby?

  So what about hand lines for openers? Explain what a canned line is.

• 1:25:20Speaker 03

  Okay, this is all, this is all blast from the past for me. So a canned line is, every guy knows the experience of you see a woman that you're struck by, you'd like to speak with her and your mouth goes dry, your hands go frozen and numb and you don't know what to do. And all of a sudden, the fact that you could talk to somebody else three minutes ago doesn't matter at all. You don't know what to say. A canned line is something that you can say in that situation to get yourself moving, to get yourself out of it so that you can engage in conversation. I found that it was generally helpful to have a handful of these at most and to make sure that they were lines that would just be true in almost any situation. So the one that I used when I was a younger guy, um, going out, single, trying to meet women was, "Hey, I don't think I've met you yet.

• 1:26:06Speaker 03

  I'm Charlie." That one is very, very powerful because it, without saying it, subcommunicates, "I'm the type of person that knows a lot of people at this event." Now, I didn't say that, but it's sort of in there. Like, "I don't think I've met you yet" is, is baked into that.

• 1:26:22Speaker 03

  Again, I tested a bunch of them. That was the most versatile and the easiest. Now, it doesn't make her fall in love with you. Like, everyone thinks they have to have, "You've been running through my mind all day," you know, type of a thing. You're just talking and you haven't creeped her out. That's, that's where that line gets you.

• 1:26:37Graham Stephan?

  It's interesting for the canned lines, cause I watched the YouTube videos, Steven Shapiro.

• 1:26:41Jack Selby?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, Steven Shapiro.

• 1:26:42Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, and he's-

• 1:26:44Speaker 03

  It's the young generation, I don't know these guys.

• 1:26:45Graham Stephan?

  He's just able to deliver these funny lines and no matter what he says,

• 1:26:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:51Graham Stephan?

  they're always receptive. And I'm sure, listen, he could also edit out all the bad ones, but in fairness, he could go up and say the lamest pickup line.

• 1:27:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:01Graham Stephan?

  And you just see- It just lights up her face, but he says it with such confidence. And like a very, he's, he's not attached to the outcome and seems just having a good time.

• 1:27:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. Pickup lines are training wheels. Like they're, they're for the person that doesn't know yet how to ride the bike. And so they can lean heavy on a pickup line and not fall over. When you see, I don't know this guy, but I imagine when you see someone like that, he's not even leaning on the training wheels. He doesn't need them. He knows how to ride a bike. So he can say whatever he wants. You can give him challenges. You can give him hard things to say. He would probably be able to start a conversation just fine with something that you thought would explode the interaction.

• 1:27:38Jack Selby?

  You said a canned line in a podcast I was listening to, it might've been Diary of a CEO where someone asked, oh, do you live in this building? You say, no, I'm just casing the place.

• 1:27:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:46Jack Selby?

  I actually thought that was hilarious. Geez.

• 1:27:49Graham Stephan?

  Jack's gonna steal that.

• 1:27:50Jack Selby?

  That's so good. It literally made me laugh. I'm still thinking about it because it's so just like clever. So I don't know. It makes me think like, geez, maybe it'd be a good idea. And not even for like dating or getting a girl's attention, but just like for flirting with the world, as you say, like it'd be good to have some kind of go to things. I'm curious, did you ever have a canned line that you thought was fire? But it was actually really, really bad and you just like overused it.

• 1:28:13Speaker 03

  I, I, none of, I'm sure I did, but not one that I use more than twice because once they sort of.

• 1:28:20Graham Stephan?

  Really? That's, that's your whole test is like two interactions.

• 1:28:23Speaker 03

  Three, four. I mean, you know, okay. So if I have to answer this question, here's what I'll say. In the book, The Game, which was like the original thing that I read that was so made that I could learn how to talk to women. They had these canned lines and very early on I copied some from that book. And the one that they use is like, did you see the fight outside? So I remember.

• 1:28:43Jack Selby?

  Oh, I remember that.

• 1:28:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. It was like going up to people like, did you see the fight outside? And then of course they're interested, but there was no fight outside. Now you're like talking about this thing that never happened. You're like, yeah, it was crazy. Uh, and so I discovered very quickly that any canned line that was based on something that wasn't reliably true. Like, hey, I haven't met you yet, you know? It wasn't worth doing, but that was, so we picked that up pretty quick, uh, early on.

• 1:29:08Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, I remember the other one from like, this is the late 2000s. The, hey, can I get your opinion real quick?

• 1:29:14Speaker 03

  The opinion opener.

• 1:29:15Graham Stephan?

  Uh, my sister wants to get a tattoo of her boyfriend, but they've only been dating for three months. She says she's the one. What do you think of that?

• 1:29:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:23Graham Stephan?

  I remember that was the one.

• 1:29:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, we, I'm sure I did that a handful of times. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And those, those were just, they're not true, you know? Like, and now we're talking about a tattoo that doesn't exist and a boyfriend that doesn't exist. And it's like, so what's going on with your sister? It's like, uh.

• 1:29:38Graham Stephan?

  What sister?

• 1:29:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, yeah, threw those out pretty quick.

• 1:29:44Jack Selby?

  So the last time we had you on the podcast, it was what, three years ago?

• 1:29:47Speaker 03

  And I think it was only three years?

• 1:29:48Graham Stephan?

  I think so.

• 1:29:49Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 1:29:50Graham Stephan?

  I think it was four.

• 1:29:51Jack Selby?

  It could have been four.

• 1:29:52Speaker 03

  Okay, four-ish.

• 1:29:53Jack Selby?

  But we titled it, Meet the Man Who Makes Like A Million Dollars A Year.

• 1:29:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:58Graham Stephan?

  That's right.

• 1:29:59Jack Selby?

  Cause at the time, what was your involvement? What was, what was your involvement with the business?

• 1:30:05Graham Stephan?

  That's right.

• 1:30:05Speaker 03

  It was low. It was low. Yeah, like I wasn't making videos at the time. I'd made the first group of videos and my co-founders, I think at that time, making videos. And I was like, working on a Dungeons and Dragons thing that wound up costing me a bunch of money and not getting any views. Yeah.

• 1:30:18Jack Selby?

  But you were making really solid money off this business. You'd put in, sure, the front end work on, but you kind of sat back and you were just collecting this check. How has your business developed since then?

• 1:30:28Speaker 03

  Developed? Devolved. Devolved.

• 1:30:30Jack Selby?

  How has your business devolved? So you're no longer making a million dollars doing nothing.

• 1:30:34Graham Stephan?

  So you can't do nothing forever and make a million dollars? Ran that experiment.

• 1:30:38Speaker 03

  I forgot we did that title. Meet the Man Making A Million Dollars Doing Nothing. I was like, what do we title this? So it, oh, I don't know how much we've had a chance to talk about, but I'll give you the rundown. So at the time, my co-founder was making videos and the business was still doing well. He and I had a falling out. It was a personal falling out that then became a business falling out because the basis of the, the business was the shared friendship. And once that wasn't there, it was like, okay, now that we're business partners, how does this work? And so there was a period of time where I said to him, I was like, look, you're going in a direction that I don't want to go with this channel. I'd rather you just not make any videos. I understand that that could have a negative impact on income, but like, I think it's for what I hope to do and the brand, I actually think it's, I don't want to keep making videos.

• 1:31:22Speaker 03

  There was a year, over a year, where nothing happened on the Charisma On Command channel. So it was just a 7 million subscriber channel that just stopped posting and went quiet. What happened with the business, as you can imagine, was like, that's not good. So it was a slow, impressively steady decline from month to month. The amazing thing about YouTube, as you guys know, that there's a back catalog and stuff that we'd made five, six years earlier was still feeding our funnel, which was still selling our course and people were still getting access. We still had all the support services in place, but we weren't driving new leads and we weren't building brand engagement. So eventually we fished that pond out and the business is now down, I don't know,

• 1:32:05Speaker 03

  80% from its top, 75% from its top. And so, yeah, you can't do nothing forever. And then we really did nothing. And I then purchased the business from him last December. And so I'm now the sole owner of this business and came back and made videos and basically found like, I am operating with a pond that is not stocked. It was like, when I think about when, like, look at Alex Hormozi. When did Alex Hormozi make the $100 million? Was it in two days when he sold his third book? I would argue no. I would argue that was when he collected the $100 million. He made the $100 million over the preceding five years.

• 1:32:48Speaker 03

  And so it's the same thing in our business, which is like, when do we make a sale? Well, we've interviewed customers. The vast majority of them have known about us for over a year, if not two. So once you're not making content, you're not getting new fish in that pond, if you will. You fish it out, it's just depleted. So now I've got this really cool channel that I love, that it still has my heart. I've got, and we've spoken a lot about charisma, but even in the ways you can hear, it's like, this is not, I'm not wearing the suspenders. I'm not saying the lines. I'm not doing this kind of stuff anymore. I've got to figure out, which I'm excited about.

• 1:33:22Speaker 03

  What to do with this thing because the answer is not more of what I was doing. I played around with that, doesn't work for me. And it's like, it's not what the audience wants anymore. I put up a video two or three weeks ago that would have made legitimately hundred to $200,000 back in the day. And it did a 10th or a 20th of the views that it would have gotten back then. And I know the caliber and the quality. It's just like the, the meta has shifted. The attention is changed. It's just a different thing. So, which is good because also my attention, it was like a dating video. And like I said, I've had a girlfriend for a long time. I'm just not there.

• 1:33:57Graham Stephan?

  How much was it to buy the channel?

• 1:34:00Speaker 03

  Hmm, I knew you were gonna ask this question.

• 1:34:01Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, curious about like how you were able to finance this.

• 1:34:05Speaker 03

  I was thinking about this. I've, last time we talked, I was on camera. He was, he was right off. He didn't want to talk about his finances. So I'm not going to say the exact number because it's what I spent, he received.

• 1:34:15Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:16Speaker 03

  But I can tell you about the conversations that led up to it was there's, you know, you're looking at how much cash is in the business. You're looking at monthly cash flow, but mostly it's an emotional decision, you know, with some math behind it of like, he worked on this thing for a long time. What is it worth for him to part from it? And he wanted more than the free cash flow that he would have gotten just by sitting on it. And so it was a protracted negotiation. It started, I think I made my first offer like a year before we actually closed it. So the interesting thing about the negotiation is it wound up, I learned a ton about negotiation, but really that it's especially with stuff like this, it's like highly emotional stuff. It's not just a calculator math problem.

• 1:35:01Speaker 03

  So we can talk about that if that's.

• 1:35:04Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, why not just like sit down over coffee or drinks and just say, hey, by the end of tonight, we're gonna hash this out.

• 1:35:12Speaker 03

  Hmm. I think, well, so we, early on, we had a number of conversations about the friendship. And we had several where it was like, what's going on with us? That we were unable to resolve in a way that felt good for me. And then it was like, we're taking, I was like, I need time and space from the friendship. And then it became, oh, wow, as I got Simon, this is not to say that he's a bad person or anything like that. I've had people that are malicious actors in the business, had a guy who stole money. This is not him. Like, we, we had a, uh, different values driving us in different directions in our life, I think.

• 1:35:51Speaker 03

  But when we, we eventually were able to sit down, but it was like of the emotions and the intensity had to cool for a lot. So eventually, when we did close it, it was these conversations of like, very frank, what are you looking for in a deal? What do you want? He then had, by that point, had a kid and it was like, look, my priority is for him. He was like, I want to get cash to put into investments and the bank so that I can spend time with my family. I was like, well, that's good because I want to get a project that I can pour myself into and work on. So it was fairly clear that I was going to be the buyer, though we did go back and forth. I was like, look, I'm willing to sell. Um, but we did have that conversation.

• 1:36:33Speaker 03

  It was just not, there was way too much other emotional relationship stuff to have it early. In fact, we probably needed to have it around the time that I was on the last podcast. Like, it needed to be done in 2020 or 2018 or something like that.

• 1:36:48Graham Stephan?

  What would you have done differently, looking back?

• 1:36:51Speaker 03

  Oh, so much. I would have had a frank, I think, we were best friends first. The business came second and we, in an attempt to stay close to one another, I think, avoided a lot of conflicts that needed to be had. One of them, though there were many others, was there was a significant period of time where I was like driving the business. And that was why I was doing nothing at that point is because I had carried it up until that point.

• 1:37:20Speaker 03

  I think other conversations that needed to be had, and then he did make the videos at that point, were about. Real, honest conversations about what we were in the business for. And I don't think one is right or wrong, but I think for me, it has been a vehicle for creative expression. And so I have a particular set of things that is meaningful to me. And for him, that was, it was important, but it was more like providing a lifestyle for him and his family and those sorts of things. And they just create different, different things that you want to do with it. And I think having the two of us in 50/50 ownership with that level of fundamental, what are we doing here? Like, he would have done something very different than I would have done or am going to do with

• 1:38:05Speaker 03

  it, I think.

• 1:38:06Graham Stephan?

  What's your advice to Jack and I? Are you guys 50/50?

• 1:38:10Speaker 03

  Pretty much.

• 1:38:12Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:13Speaker 03

  It sounds, I spoke to Jack about this. Have the conflict early. Like, it is better to yell at each other and say a mean thing four years earlier than to be kind, polite, work it out. Because we were inadvertently, in an attempt to be kind to one another in the best way that we knew how, burying problems that then became intractable at one point. And I've spoken to Jack and he said that you guys have had discussions about like, what's, are we contributing fairly? And what's your role versus my role? Like, that these things continue to be spoken about in ways that are high conflict is actually really, really healthy, I would say. And we sort of prided ourselves on being very low conflict.

• 1:38:56Speaker 03

  Like, we just got along and agreed and sort of smoothed over anything that wasn't self-evidently going to resolve itself in a single conversation.

• 1:39:05Graham Stephan?

  Now, what about in contracts for valuation? Because it seems like that's a very arbitrary number where you could say, oh, it's valued at X, when really, it's like, okay, if you, if you have a buyer, they're going to pay a fifth of that.

• 1:39:19Speaker 03

  Sure. So this is... This was the big issue was when I made the pitch, it was like, well, I think it's about worth this where it actually moved. This was, I gotta give Joe Hudson credit. He offered me this suggestion is I had wanted to buy the business. I like, I looked at it and was like, I, for me, my sense, and I think he would agree at this point, is that his creative energy was really going to his family and my creative energy was going into some sort of business or project. And it just made sense for me to be the buyer and him to be the seller. But what actually moved it was when I said, hey, I'm actually willing to sell this thing. How about I've been making you offers. You tell me it's not high enough. Do you make a counter? I say that's too much. We're not able to work it out. Why don't you

• 1:40:01Speaker 03

  buy it from me and make me an offer to purchase it? So when he did that and he looked at it and he really went and he sat on the other side of the table and he was like, okay, what is this worth? The numbers came way, way more close. So he made me an offer that was legitimate offer. He's like, I would do it at this price. And I said, I'll pay you 20% more than that. And we can close and that was it. That's a great way to frame it. It was a great way to frame it. It's like the thing that I had to let go of was, hey, maybe I am selling this thing, you know, maybe I'll go start a new channel. And we each had clauses, which is like, you get a shout out or I get a shout out. Like we had a, we, we agreed on the broad structure of the deal of like, this is what it's going to look like. And then it was, I'm willing to be on either side of this. And that, that got us to a price

• 1:40:46Speaker 03

  that was, we just saw it very, very similarly at that point. And how is your relationship today? It's much better. We had a period of time where we weren't talking. When I say better, it's like we're, we were best friends for, for 20 years, almost, about 20. And where we are now is we are, I have well wishes for him. We're friendly. We're cordial. We are cool. Every now and then we catch up on the phone and have a long conversation. He's got a young family. He's got like two little kids that are, you know, anytime to talk to him is like, okay, I just got one down for a nap. Like that sort of a thing. It's, it's much better. My, my big regret is that

• 1:41:28Speaker 03

  I think we were going to wind up here. He was going to end up with a young family not working on this sort of a thing because that was what was important to him. Now, I was going to wind up at this stage in my life without a young family, working on this project. I wish that we could have had conversations earlier about, not even the business, the friendship, because really what was going on that created the business problem is we were codependently altering who we were in order to try to make the relationship work. So just for instance, like, he was living in California and not marrying his girlfriend and not having kids because I wasn't doing those things. And there were ways in which I was sort of being more like him in ways that didn't feel comfortable to me to try to maintain this closeness.

• 1:42:13Speaker 03

  As soon as we split, it was like he started doing his thing all out. I've been doing my thing all out. And I think unfortunately, the closeness that we were trying to protect wasn't allowing us to grow into the people that we honestly were. So how's the business doing today then? What is your definition of how? No, I mean, I told you, the revenue is off 70 to 80% off its top. The, you know, we had an offer that, from somebody else to buy, that would have enabled me to retire in just about any place in America, maybe not Los Angeles, in the place that I currently am. But it is, it feels like a really fertile ground, honestly.

• 1:42:55Speaker 03

  It feels like I have the opportunity to come in and do what I did in 2015, which is to find something new. When I came in in 2015, there weren't any other charisma coaches. There was no charisma breakdowns. It was a fairly innovative thing on YouTube at the time. And now, which is cool, there's all these other charisma coaches and they're on podcasts and they're doing fine and they have phrases to say in these situations. What the business needs now is like, it's actually in a competitive industry. And it was, and I don't like being in competitive industry. I want to do my own thing. So what it needs, I think, is a year or two of R and D and development of deeper internal work, which is reflective of the stuff that I've been doing for the last decade, and we can chat about if it makes sense, but uh...

• 1:43:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's revenue down, hope, sky high. Why not just do a new channel? I love, I love this too much. I love the name and so this is. Couldn't you still do the same name or no? Yeah, so this was when I, when I was thinking of, I was so protective. I wanted to buy it and I was like, oh, I could just sell it. I can just do a new channel. I could just take those, those proceeds, roll it in. I think what I really want to offer to someone.

• 1:44:05Speaker 03

  When I was 18 and you know, it sounds like you had a similar thing, like trying to learn to talk to girls. I didn't have a big brother. There was no one that I was able to go to and ask that question. And I uncovered the game and I was like, oh my God. And then as I grew out of it, like I couldn't stick with the author Neil Strauss and get, I didn't like, you know, he didn't have the next phase of how to be a dad or anything like that. And so what I really want to offer someone is a place where they can drop in as a 16 year old or 17 year old and stick with the company through their 30s and 40s, through the different life stages. And for that reason, I want the back catalog. I like everything that we talked about today. It's just not what interests me as a 38 year old guy, right?

• 1:44:43Speaker 03

  So what I want to talk about is the inner work and self-esteem and, and all of those, like those more fundamental pieces. And I think it'd be really cool if those were housed under one company so that someone knew it was like almost a vertically integrated self-improvement company. That you could, wherever you enter, there's going to be something for you in five years that is different from where you are today.

• 1:45:04Jack Selby?

  But you're still clearly making money with the business and you did mention when we weren't filming that Bitcoin was the best investment you ever made. I'm curious, where are you investing your money today?

• 1:45:14Speaker 03

  So I'm actually, so this is, this is maybe we'll get into it here, Grant.

• 1:45:19Jack Selby?

  Are you gonna buy a house?

• 1:45:20Speaker 03

  No, no, absolutely not. I don't know if you, so I am not, I've realized it's taken me to 38 years old. I don't like doing the practical thing and we discussed this because you're like, dude, you could take that rental money and you could buy a home instead and you could get value out of it. And I have made decisions that are seemingly from a math perspective, very foolish. One of the things that I think I'm gonna do, because it just feels good is I was, I had money that I put into a retirement fund. For like, you get a 401k, you get the, the SEP IRA. I want to take it out and take the penalty just because I don't. When I, I want my investments to be a reflection of the things that I'm betting on and the world that I want to exist in.

• 1:46:03Speaker 03

  And having a retirement fund there that is like, I can't touch this till I'm 59 and a half years old. That's not a world where I succeed in business, right? That's a world where I'm like counting on a nest egg. That's more like my parents that were, you know, they had careers and they had fixed incomes and they knew what they were going to be making. So I'm actually pulling a lot of my investments out of the market. I'm going to leave some in the S and P and putting it into hiring, firing, like investing in the business again in myself.

• 1:46:31Jack Selby?

  Money do you need in the business, though?

• 1:46:33Speaker 03

  Well, it's, it's the other thing. It's not even about the business having money. It's just, I just don't like it in a retirement fund. It just doesn't feel.

• 1:46:40Jack Selby?

  But you're going to need money later anyway.

• 1:46:43Speaker 03

  It doesn't feel aligned for me. And I know that might sound crazy.

• 1:46:46Jack Selby?

  But there could be investments that align with you.

• 1:46:49Speaker 03

  Sorry, having an IRA, having a fund that I am not allowed to touch.

• 1:46:55Speaker 00

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• 1:47:55Speaker 03

  Self-control. It's discipline. Yes, yes, but I can't spend it on myself, right? I can't, I can't spend it on the business. I can't spend it on a home. I can't spend it on anything. It has to go into a public equity.

• 1:48:08Jack Selby?

  Maybe instead you decide what you're going to spend it on first.

• 1:48:12Speaker 03

  Sure, sure.

• 1:48:12Jack Selby?

  Before you pull it out.

• 1:48:13Speaker 03

  Here's what I would.

• 1:48:14Jack Selby?

  If you pull it out just to throw in an individual account and then you're paying a fee to have.

• 1:48:19Graham Stephan?

  I think I'm gonna do that.

• 1:48:20Speaker 03

  I think I'm gonna do it anyway.

• 1:48:21Graham Stephan?

  No, no, no, let me tell, I'm gonna talk you out of this.

• 1:48:23Speaker 03

  But then you're just having a smaller sum of money that's compounding and so.

• 1:48:25Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, I'm gonna talk you out of this. Okay, you're gonna, you're gonna have to pay, I think, I believe it's a 10% penalty.

• 1:48:31Speaker 03

  10%.

• 1:48:32Graham Stephan?

  And then you're also gonna have to pay tax.

• 1:48:33Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:48:34Graham Stephan?

  In the state of California.

• 1:48:36Speaker 03

  So I'm looking at like 55.

• 1:48:38Graham Stephan?

  As ordinary income.

• 1:48:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:39Graham Stephan?

  So you're gonna pay, uh, my guess, probably in what, the 30 something percent bracket? You're gonna pay another 10% to the state, 43, and then you're gonna pay another 10% in penalty, 53.

• 1:48:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:51Graham Stephan?

  Like, okay, so you're losing half of your money. So if you have $200,000 invested, which would, you know, for retirement money, you know, is gonna be, I'm guessing on the higher end, you're gonna have 100,000 left out. You would be much better off just keeping it in the account and working harder and making an extra 100,000 doing anything else other than cashing out.

• 1:49:09Speaker 03

  Okay, so I'll give you the other, the, the flip. And I don't know if you've felt this way, but there's been a number of times in my life where, uh, where I've done dumb things that don't make sense, but because I put the bet on myself, something internally in me changes. So like, when I quit my job, a lot of people would have advised, hey, have a second thing lined up before you leap. I have found that this habit that I have of burning the boats and just being like, I'm doing.

• 1:49:35Graham Stephan?

  I got an idea, dude.

• 1:49:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:37Graham Stephan?

  If I could buy your 401K.

• 1:49:39Speaker 03

  Maybe.

• 1:49:39Graham Stephan?

  If I'm able to take that over and give you cash up front.

• 1:49:42Speaker 03

  This is perfect. I love this.

• 1:49:44Graham Stephan?

  I don't know if there's a way I could do this, but I'm telling you, right now, I would buy it.

• 1:49:48Speaker 03

  And whatever your pre-tax value is.

• 1:49:50Graham Stephan?

  Don't do deals with this guy.

• 1:49:51Speaker 03

  Why?

• 1:49:52Graham Stephan?

  He's gonna be like, okay, so you're at 200, you're gonna end up with 100, I'll give you 102.

• 1:49:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:57Graham Stephan?

  And you're gonna make it complicated for 2 grand.

• 1:49:59Speaker 03

  I look at the compounded value of this over time. Why wouldn't I be able to take that over?

• 1:50:04Graham Stephan?

  All right, if you wanna sell it, then also sell it to me, because whatever he's paying, it's gonna be pennies on the dollar. I'll have a better offer.

• 1:50:10Speaker 03

  I would give you whatever you'd be left over with after tax.

• 1:50:13Graham Stephan?

  I don't even know if such a thing is possible.

• 1:50:15Speaker 03

  I don't know if it's possible. I would love to be able to buy people's 401Ks if they need cash. I'll buy your 401K.

• 1:50:21Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, what?

• 1:50:22Speaker 03

  I'll buy your Roth IRA.

• 1:50:23Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:23Speaker 03

  Give it to me.

• 1:50:25Graham Stephan?

  And, and maybe we work something out, because if you're gonna cash out anyway.

• 1:50:29Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:29Graham Stephan?

  What do you want? The government to get the money, or you want Graham to get the money? I think I would do way more with that money. When I'm 59 and a half and compounded that, like 10x from where it is today. Then what's the government gonna do? They're gonna blow it. They're gonna spend it.

• 1:50:45Jack Selby?

  This is, this is where we need to get most conversations.

• 1:50:47Graham Stephan?

  Am I, am I incorrect?

• 1:50:49Jack Selby?

  You're absolutely incorrect.

• 1:50:50Speaker 03

  Well, so what's interesting is, so, so, okay, just stepping back. This is always interesting to me. You clearly are passionate about finances. You know what I mean? It's not just intelligence, it's emotional wisdom to you, to like behave in certain ways, you know? It's like, it's not just, oh, that's, that's a foolish way to approach it. It's like, it activates you. There is, I'm, I feel similarly, but in a different direction. Like, I get turned on when I make bold, daring decisions where I bet on myself, and it unlocks something inside of me. So like, something where you benefit and I benefit, great.

• 1:51:25Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, but you could do the same thing. All you have to do is open a credit card and max it out.

• 1:51:29Speaker 03

  I don't want to do that. I just don't want a retirement account. That's it. I actually don't want a retirement account. Like, that's, that feels really good for me to say and do, because I only did it, I did it unconsciously. I did it because I was told to by some financial person without an understanding of the implications, and I just want out.

• 1:51:45Graham Stephan?

  It doesn't make it automatically bad, though.

• 1:51:48Speaker 03

  Not bad, just not for me. I don't, I'm not advising anybody to do this, but I don't want it.

• 1:51:53Jack Selby?

  Okay, but I will say, here's me trying to speak your language.

• 1:51:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, hit me, hit me.

• 1:51:58Jack Selby?

  Not Graham's language.

• 1:51:59Graham Stephan?

  I see, I've gotten Graham, I've gotten Graham activated.

• 1:52:01Jack Selby?

  It's your language, you've gotten activated, that's one word for it. No, for your language, I would say, you are confining yourself to a certain identity, a person that needs to have the, the boats burned in order to...

• 1:52:17Jack Selby?

  Invoke action.

• 1:52:18Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:52:19Jack Selby?

  And I don't think that's the case. I think that you can relinquish the identity that you want to hold to yourself.

• 1:52:25Speaker 03

  I hear that.

• 1:52:26Jack Selby?

  Just say that you're not that person. You are whoever you want to be, whenever you want to be that person. And then prove to yourself that, you know, that you are not the type of person that needs to be held slave to these ideas that you have about yourself.

• 1:52:38Speaker 03

  No, so there's a totally hear you. There's, you know, I was a philosophy major and one of the things that I've always been is like, I have to rebel against a thing, right? But if you're rebelling against a retirement fund, you are still a slave to the retirement fund, just in a different direction. Like the person that has to do it because everyone else is doing it is a slave to public opinion, but the person that can't do the retirement fund because everyone else is doing it is also a slave to public opinion. So I hear you there. I will not lock myself into it just because I have an old identity. It'll be a practically informed, real time thing. I'm gonna look at all the implications and, and, and dig into it. I'm not gonna.

• 1:53:15Jack Selby?

  Just be, just be, have some sort of reasonable justification.

• 1:53:18Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 1:53:18Jack Selby?

  Aside from burning the boats.

• 1:53:20Speaker 03

  And, or, or like, I want to make this in this higher that I'm absolutely betting on. And I trust it.

• 1:53:24Jack Selby?

  Yeah. Because then it'll even feel better and it will motivate you even more than just like, why did I even do that?

• 1:53:29Speaker 03

  I totally agree.

• 1:53:30Graham Stephan?

  If you want to burn boats, two things you could do. One is there's something called a hardship withdrawal on the 401k. If you get down so low that you need that money, I believe there are certain conditions that if you meet them, you could waive that 10% penalty.

• 1:53:44Speaker 03

  I don't think it would be there, but yeah.

• 1:53:45Graham Stephan?

  Okay. The other one though.

• 1:53:46Jack Selby?

  Can find a way to put you there.

• 1:53:47Graham Stephan?

  Yeah. Yeah. The other one though, we're getting there. The other one though, is if you want to like burn the boats, you make a bet with me. And then you say, hey, if I don't do X, Y, Z, by this time, I give you 50,000 dollars.

• 1:54:00Jack Selby?

  That's it? That's it? That's what you're, that's what you're cooking up. So wait, so it's just, I'll give you money. I like, yeah, I hope you realize.

• 1:54:08Speaker 03

  Is it all right?

• 1:54:09Jack Selby?

  I hope you realize.

• 1:54:09Speaker 03

  If I do that to charity instead of you?

• 1:54:11Jack Selby?

  Yeah. What are you gonna do with it, dude? Literally nothing.

• 1:54:15Graham Stephan?

  I'm gonna put it in my 401k.

• 1:54:17Jack Selby?

  It's insane what this guy does. And he does this for his friends.

• 1:54:20Graham Stephan?

  It's motivation.

• 1:54:21Speaker 03

  Look, I'm fine with it.

• 1:54:22Graham Stephan?

  It's motivation. He doesn't want to, see, Jack doesn't want to pay me.

• 1:54:26Speaker 03

  Look, I want Graham to have it, Jack. Can you just let me give Graham $50,000 for no reason?

• 1:54:30Jack Selby?

  I really don't want Graham to have it. Like, so badly don't want Graham to have it.

• 1:54:33Graham Stephan?

  Cause Jack wants it himself, that's why.

• 1:54:35Speaker 03

  I, well, if I made it.

• 1:54:36Jack Selby?

  No, no, no. Literally give it away. Give it to anybody except Graham and I. Anybody. Any.

• 1:54:42Speaker 03

  Well, so this is such an interesting thing. And maybe we don't need to go deep, but it's so obvious to me that how emotional money is. And I experienced this in negotiation with my co-founder. Like, you have enough money. You don't need my $50,000.

• 1:54:53Jack Selby?

  Well, maybe I do.

• 1:54:54Speaker 03

  And Graham having $50,000 doesn't mean shit to you. You know what I mean? Like, at a lit, and to me, I'm fine. I don't need to take my money out. It's, it's all these like deeply emotional decisions that I think get dressed up rationally. You know? And that is the part that I find exciting about money is to use it as an emotional trigger rather than as this thing that I'm just trying to have more of. So.

• 1:55:17Jack Selby?

  But, but there also is such thing as reality. And at a certain point, you have a girlfriend, you guys are moving in together. You might want to have kids. I don't know if you do, you might want, you might not want. And you don't know what you'll want at some point in the future.

• 1:55:28Speaker 03

  Oh, let me, let's, I want to argue this with you. Yeah. So this all presumes, and I think it's important, look, analysis, you see, I'm a pretty heady guy. I can do analysis. I've talked to ChatGPT, I'm aware of the 10% penalty. These are not, this is not news to me. This last eight years has been about letting go of living from this, my ego knows what to do. Oh, well, in five years, I'm gonna do this. All this like math in the head of why I did this. That's living from an analytical ego infused mind. But there is this other way, which you could argue is a more feminine perspective, which is what feels good right now. And I know that is anathema because you guys talk to a lot of people who do that and they're impulsive with their credit cards. Or Caleb Hammer talks to these people and they like, you know, are making horrible decisions based on momentary feelings.

• 1:56:12Speaker 03

  I have found that there, for me, when I align myself with my own deeper intuition, even if it doesn't make sense, even if I take a hit in the short term. The ripple effects in my life are just so much more positive. And instead of optimizing for what my brain thinks is gonna get me the most money, maybe it puts me in financial hardship. And maybe as a result of it, my girlfriend's business takes off. Which, by the way, that is not because of me, but like, she's shocked me with what she's capable of. And if I'd made her a stay-at-home mom, she wouldn't have the successful business that she has right now. So the idea that I'm gonna math it all out in my head, I don't really subscribe to anymore. I'm like a much more analytically informed but intuitive decision-maker these days, and I'm happier as a result.

• 1:56:56Graham Stephan?

  There are plenty of other ways that you could get rid of that 401k. I'm just saying.

• 1:57:00Speaker 03

  I hear you.

• 1:57:01Graham Stephan?

  There are plenty of other ways than just giving it to the government.

• 1:57:04Speaker 03

  I love that. I love that.

• 1:57:06Graham Stephan?

  I'm gonna make sure you don't just, poof, it's gone. I'd rather you pay taxes when you're 59 and a half in a lower bracket without the penalty.

• 1:57:14Speaker 03

  Maybe it'll help him deal with the next fire, you know, if I give him a little bit more.

• 1:57:18Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, listen, what's funny about taxes that people don't realize is that you could always pay more. So if that motivates you.

• 1:57:25Speaker 03

  So if I feel bad about it next year, I'll just, yeah, I got you.

• 1:57:27Graham Stephan?

  You know, believe it or not, they have a fund that you could send money to pay down the national debt.

• 1:57:32Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:57:32Graham Stephan?

  Yes.

• 1:57:33Speaker 03

  I don't want to, but I get it.

• 1:57:35Graham Stephan?

  You could, you could literally do that, and you get a deduction for it. So if you want to help pay down the national debt, do everyone a favor. You could just send your money into this black hole of spending, and it's just gone.

• 1:57:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:57:47Graham Stephan?

  You could fund the next second.

• 1:57:53Speaker 03

  I don't even know about that. And then I'm just gonna go around and be like, hey, that one was on me, everybody. For all of you, all of you?

• 1:57:59Graham Stephan?

  Yesterday, 3:01 PM, and 15 seconds, that was me.

• 1:58:04Speaker 03

  That was your point. Honestly, I might do that if I can buy a second. I'm gonna look into it.

• 1:58:09Graham Stephan?

  That would make a great YouTube video. I paid down the national debt for one second.

• 1:58:13Speaker 03

  Bro, to have everyone in America indebted to you for one second, almost worth it.

• 1:58:18Graham Stephan?

  If you want the math here, here's the math on how much we spend every single second as a country. We spend $7 trillion a year to run the United States. The deficit, meaning we spend more than what we take in. The deficit's $2 trillion. But if we take the $7 trillion that we spend every single year overall, divide that by the number of seconds in the year, that comes to roughly $222,000 spent every single second.

• 1:58:46Speaker 03

  A second?

• 1:58:47Graham Stephan?

  A second to run the United States.

• 1:58:50Speaker 03

  I was thinking about it, but I take it back. Maybe I'll buy a tenth of a second.

• 1:58:53Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, so if you wanna run the United States, you send them $222,000 and your second could be owned by you.

• 1:59:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:02Graham Stephan?

  You could fund the government for a second.

• 1:59:04Speaker 03

  You know, there's people that like sell stars and that kinda stuff. Or like those, I wonder if this could be like a thing.

• 1:59:10Graham Stephan?

  Name the second that you just paid for?

• 1:59:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, and you could get a, you put your name on it.

• 1:59:15Graham Stephan?

  This is even crazier. Per minute, the government's spending $13.34 million. A minute. So just in the time it's taken to say this, we've spent $13 million.

• 1:59:29Speaker 03

  Crazy.

• 1:59:29Graham Stephan?

  Where does it go?

• 1:59:32Speaker 03

  I don't know. I kinda know, I could look at the chart, but anyways, I hear you guys on the retirement thing. I hear you on the mis, the poor decision making in the government and the dislike for just forking over all the money. I'm not opposed.

• 1:59:46Jack Selby?

  It makes me wonder, like, what was it, $13 million a minute? If every minute, they're just like, okay, $13 million goes towards building, you know, actual affordable housing in some location. $13 million goes to repaving all of the streets in this city. 13 million, like, if you were to just like isolate it, like.

• 2:00:01Graham Stephan?

  It would be fun as like a slot machine, where someone's like, cha-ching, and it's like, oh, we're gonna fix this road. Cha-ching, oh, this person gets something.

• 2:00:09Jack Selby?

  It would be allocated way better than whatever, god knows what.

• 2:00:11Graham Stephan?

  I want it to be random. And you know what would be cool? Is just every minute, just a random person in the United States that has a social security number.

• 2:00:18Jack Selby?

  Build a bridge somewhere.

• 2:00:19Graham Stephan?

  No, just gets a million bucks in their account. Why not?

• 2:00:23Speaker 03

  I think if they gamified it, they could get a lot more engagement, that's for sure.

• 2:00:26Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, but just like every day you just check your bank account and be like, was I the lucky one who got that million dollars? And it's just, it's a shing.

• 2:00:34Speaker 03

  Populism gone wild.

• 2:00:35Graham Stephan?

  But there's so much money out there that why, why not? Why can't they have fun with it? If you really think if they just did that every day, cost 365 million dollars, not that much money in the grand scheme of things.

• 2:00:45Speaker 03

  That's thinking like a social media marketer. Because that's like, what's Mr. Beast gonna do compared to that? Like, you make a video about it?

• 2:00:51Jack Selby?

  Oh, you're gonna, you're gonna win whatever present to you, whatever thing you're running for.

• 2:00:54Speaker 03

  You're gonna smash YouTube.

• 2:00:55Graham Stephan?

  The funny thing is, when you look at that budget, like 365 million dollars a year for the government budget is, is a rounding error. The Pentagon loses more money than that, probably on like a weekly basis. And if you're talking about giving 365 people a million dollars, one new person a day just wakes up and it's in their account, that would be awesome. Cause they, they, they balance the budgets in, in hundreds of billions. And so to take not even like a hundredth of that and just give it back to the people at random.

• 2:01:28Speaker 03

  Well, what's interesting, I mean, there's a lot of issues, obviously, with the federal government, but one of the things that you're making me realize is with a budget that large, to have such poor brand association is really pathetic. Like, imagine if you had all that money to spend, you had to sell a movie or get someone to your YouTube channel, like, you'd figure out a way to have positive brand association. But I guess because they're also taking all the money, but like, man, to be spending all of that money.

• 2:01:55Graham Stephan?

  A lot of it, a lot of it is social security, Medicare, healthcare. I think that works out to be about two trillion dollars of that. It's just like one segment. And then there's the military, and then there's interest on the national debt. And then just in those categories, you're at four trillion dollars a year. And then three trillion dollars has to get allocated elsewhere. So, yeah.

• 2:02:19Speaker 03

  This is for conversation for, for McCruze.

• 2:02:22Graham Stephan?

  Very, it's expensive. It shouldn't, it shouldn't have to be. You know, I, I think the private sector would do better. Just have everyone.

• 2:02:30Speaker 03

  I believe you believe that.

• 2:02:32Jack Selby?

  We've been going over two hours. And now, don't get Graham on the private sector, man.

• 2:02:37Speaker 03

  I think the government's got some problems.

• 2:02:40Graham Stephan?

  You know, when I was in ECHO.

• 2:02:42Jack Selby?

  In the life of Graham.

• 2:02:44Jack Selby?

  No, I think most people here agree with you. If you don't, leave a comment, guys. We are so curious to know what you think about this subject. We have one last thing for you, Charlie. So we've curated what we call a tier list. And you're gonna go through it and rank everything from the perspective of charisma.

• 2:03:02Speaker 03

  Oh, I've seen you do these, yeah.

• 2:03:03Jack Selby?

  Okay, so it's S tier, all the way down to F tier.

• 2:03:06Speaker 03

  Okay, and I'll announce it to you guys.

• 2:03:09Jack Selby?

  Well, just kind of hold.

• 2:03:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, do whatever you want. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow, this is cool. I want to get this. Tiermaker.com.

• 2:03:15Jack Selby?

  Yeah, it's free.

• 2:03:17Speaker 03

  Okay, I'm gonna do it. So, I'm gonna, just to be clear, none of this is an endorsement of the person or saying that I believe they did or didn't commit the crimes that they're accused of. This is how effective this person is at influence writ large, okay? Donald Trump, two-time president, no governmental experience beforehand. He's gotta go S tier, like I said. Just undeniable. I don't think we'll ever see anyone talk themselves into the White House the way that he did. Andrew Tate, okay, another easy one. Wildly, wildly charismatic.

• 2:03:59Speaker 03

  I mean, I could break him down a number of ways, but in terms of high conviction, like, got it, he can talk, he knows what he's doing, that's an S tier. Who is this next one?

• 2:04:09Jack Selby?

  Let me see. Nick Fuentes.

• 2:04:13Speaker 03

  I know of him. I don't know a lot about Nick Fuentes. I mean, you're giving me, and now I'm on here? Shit.

• 2:04:21Jack Selby?

  It's not only people, it's also like things.

• 2:04:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, so I don't know a lot about Nick Fuentes. I know that he's got a huge audience, that he's built without the backing of like corporate media and that sort of stuff. Can you give me some context?

• 2:04:35Jack Selby?

  No, I would just say if you don't know, just skip it.

• 2:04:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, just skip it. I'm gonna skip. Elon Musk. I'm going off charisma here. I think Elon Musk is a great example of someone with insane amounts of power, insane amounts of horsepower, capital, vision, if vision counts as charisma, he definitely, and I'm gonna give a caveat here, like, his ability to get people to follow and work for him is very impressive, but I also, from what I understand, he doesn't retain and keep people. Like, they're interested in the vision and then he burns through them and tosses them. So from a charisma perspective, he's got some of the worst. I'm gonna put him in D tier.

• 2:05:14Speaker 03

  Gavin Newsom, don't know a ton about the guy. These are tough ones.

• 2:05:20Speaker 03

  Should I rank them or just like, I would guess B or C? Biebs, Biebs I know a little bit about.

• 2:05:26Speaker 03

  Young Bieber had

• 2:05:29Speaker 03

  A level charisma, like the guy who got picked up by Usher was just like such a radiant young kid. Mid Bieber, the guy who is now on the Jimmy Fallon show, was some of the worst charisma I'd ever seen. Like, he, he had the thing that it sounds like you have, which is so many people came up to him and had, "Oh my God." That he just became so low energy, didn't want to engage with anybody. And now I've actually seen him, he's got that low energy, but he is, um, he's way more authentic. And from the stuff that I've seen, he started streaming lately, so I am going to put him with a generous B, but it's probably more like a C or C+. Me. The S, no.

• 2:06:11Jack Selby?

  Next.

• 2:06:12Speaker 03

  I give myself a stronger B than Bieber.

• 2:06:17Jack Selby?

  So then you'd put it to the left of him?

• 2:06:19Speaker 03

  Okay, I'm gonna put it to the left of Biebs. Being attractive. So I wouldn't count this as charisma, I would count this as a separate category, because we see all these people that are hyper attractive and, you know, they're duds and that sort of thing. But if I had to like compare the power of being attractive to like, where would that like, how, how does that fit? I think that being attractive is, let me see if I,

• 2:06:46Speaker 03

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna put it in B, but it might even go up to A. It's, it's, it's very important. People respond very differently, but I've also seen people that are super attractive just completely ruin it. So it depends on like relative to average, relative to as, as bad as it can get. Like, these are the sorts of questions that I would be curious about. Crying in front of people. Look, I'm all for expression of emotion, the way this is phrased, this is,

• 2:07:15Speaker 03

  like, I cried on my Diary of a CEO podcast, I cry all the time. This is just phrased in such a way that it's not.

• 2:07:24Jack Selby?

  That's how Graham phrases it to me in the drive over here.

• 2:07:27Speaker 03

  Crying in front of people. No, but if it was like being vulnerable, okay, I'm gonna give it an A or an S, but you know, just crying in front of people with no description, I'm gonna put that as a T.

• 2:07:38Speaker 03

  Eye contact when shaking hands. This is, this is a C. It's like important, but is not gonna, you know, break the bank. Fame. In terms of influence, it's S tier. There are a few things that get people to respond differently than fame. We've all felt it. Like you see that person and if they're hyper famous, just they get basically a pass. I don't love it. I didn't make the rules. I don't advert. I think there's a lot of issues with fame, but that is what it is. Handshake firmness.

• 2:08:12Speaker 03

  I think when done wrong, it goes bad and I think it can go really, I'm gonna give it like, if you have a bad handshake, we're talking like C minus, D plus level. If you have a good handshake, you're just a C, so I'm gonna put it in C.

• 2:08:26Speaker 03

  Humor, that's A plus or S tier, I would say. That's like very, very, very high.

• 2:08:36Speaker 03

  And I'm gonna compare it to fame. I mean, I've seen funnier people be more liked than famous people, but I'm, fame is incredibly powerful. Money.

• 2:08:45Speaker 03

  If people don't know, I mean, in terms of getting responses from people in the world, like how am I, how am I to understand this? Like you're like walking out.

• 2:08:52Jack Selby?

  You could be flashy.

• 2:08:53Speaker 03

  Flashy, you know, throwing money around at bottle service, that sort of thing. Okay, I wanna, or just have a lot of money. I mean, again, it's like, do I have a million? Do I have 10 million? Do I have a billion? I'm gonna put it in lower than, just because it's not as visible a lot of the time. And so, and again, how much money, all these questions matter, but I'm gonna put it in B tier. It, it really matters. Like if you have, if you're a billionaire, I, my brother worked at the club in Las Vegas, like there are ways to spend money that get people to do insane shit and reactions and you can, you can shape the world with money, but just the word money, like some of it, I'm putting in B tier. Mystique, way overrated. F tier.

• 2:09:35Speaker 03

  Mystique is not worth it. All this, like, there's this idea that you're gonna like go to a, a bar and stand on the wall and look really cool and everybody's gonna be like, what is, what's going on? Nothing's going on. Nobody cares. Name dropping. Done lightly?

• 2:09:51Speaker 03

  Actually, oh, done two, three, four times, you start to hurt yourself. So, given that it's called name dropping, I'm gonna put that in D tier because you're hurting yourself. Never apologizing. Okay, so this is a complicated one. Donald Trump never apologizes. Andrew Tate never apologizes. As much as I hate to say this and don't acknowledge it, there is a way to be that is incredibly effective in terms of getting people to follow you that is never apologizing. But it has a ton of downsides and I don't know them personally, but I think what goes on internally with Andrew Tate and Donald Trump is not desirable. So, I'm gonna really put it low. I know that I just said that it's effective, but I don't want people to do this.

• 2:10:34Speaker 03

  And, uh, and also there's so many ways to do it poorly. Like, there's a lot of, like, for most people-

• 2:10:40Jack Selby?

  More ways to do it poorly than-

• 2:10:41Speaker 03

  There's more ways to do it poorly. So I'm gonna put it in F tier. Like, to do the Andrew Tate, Donald Trump, make it work for you is more likely you're just gonna ruin your marriage and ruin your friendships by never apologizing. So that goes F tier. Posture. So this is like, am I saying good posture or bad posture?

• 2:10:58Jack Selby?

  Just how important is it?

• 2:10:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, how important is posture?

• 2:11:01Graham Stephan?

  If it's not as great posture, they would be in, you know, whatever tier.

• 2:11:06Speaker 03

  I'm gonna give, I feel like, B, no, C. It's just not the most important thing, C. Vocal volume, this is more important. I'm gonna put that. That's like high B, low A. And then we've got two guys that I don't really know. Frentzen and Newsom at the bottom. There you go.

• 2:11:25Jack Selby?

  Cool.

• 2:11:26Speaker 03

  Thank you, guys. I hope I got these right.

• 2:11:27Graham Stephan?

  Thank you. Really appreciate you coming on. And thank you, by the way, for showing up to the index.

• 2:11:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was so fun. Thank you, man. I was inspired.

• 2:11:35Graham Stephan?

  Really?

• 2:11:36Speaker 03

  Have you shared about that on the pod?

• 2:11:37Graham Stephan?

  Briefly. What's funny is that quite a few of the people, not that you met, came from a mention I did on the podcast with Alex Formozzi. At the very end, we only talk about it at the end of the podcast. But I talked about it, this group with him, and we've ended up getting a few people who inquired from that episode.

• 2:11:56Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:11:57Graham Stephan?

  But yeah, it's just, it's a small group of really like, high-level entrepreneurs, investors, business owners. We're at like 20 people. I don't think we're gonna grow it much beyond this point. But every meetup, we try to bring on like some new guest.

• 2:12:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12:12Graham Stephan?

  And so the last one, we had Chris Camillo. We had Jeremy, who we're gonna be posting soon. So, you know, stay tuned on that. You came for our first one.

• 2:12:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12:21Graham Stephan?

  Which is really cool.

• 2:12:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. Thank you for the invite. I mean, what inspired me about it was it was so cool for you to have this group of people together and to see that you were an attraction, but you weren't the main attraction. It was like they getting to connect with themselves and one another was the main attraction. And I see so many people who are in this space who it's like, you gotta be the guru and you gotta be on stage for eight hours and do all the thing. And it was so cool to watch these people get a ton of value by connecting with one another. And that made me want to do the same thing.

• 2:12:49Graham Stephan?

  Well, they're mostly more successful than I am.

• 2:12:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:52Graham Stephan?

  And so like, I'm looking to them. I was like, what would you guys do? I mean, there are people in the group that, you know, manage hundreds of people or have sold companies. And like here I am, just like making YouTube videos.

• 2:13:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:13:03Graham Stephan?

  And so it's cool to be able to talk to them and get their opinion outside of YouTube without any, like, there's no ulterior motive. It's just, you know, you get their advice and they have nothing at stake. And so they'll just give you, you know, whatever the truth is.

• 2:13:19Speaker 03

  You got to be, uh, this is something that I talk about with charisma is you, you set yourself up as the hub instead of a spoke on a wheel. So you got to be the person that brings everyone together, which means you don't have to be the most impressive person in the room. You're the person who gathers everybody.

• 2:13:33Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:33Speaker 03

  So I was like, oh gosh, I know this. I have to do this more.

• 2:13:36Graham Stephan?

  Well, we're doing a meetup tonight if you, if you can go.

• 2:13:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, we'll chat. We'll see if I can make it. Cool.

• 2:13:40Graham Stephan?

  Cool. So, oh, by the way, if you're interested, we do have an application in the description. There is a waitlist at this point, but just submit your info and we'll be in touch and that's it.

• 2:13:47Speaker 03

  All right. Thank you, boys.

• 2:13:49Jack Selby?

  Charlie, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Really means a lot. Super, super excited for this dinner, this Spotify meetup. I'm excited to practice these new skills we just talked about. So hopefully there's an elevator there. Thank you guys for watching.

• 2:14:03Graham Stephan?

  If not, you're in trouble.

• 2:14:04Speaker 03

  All right.

• 2:14:04Jack Selby?

  Till next time.

• 2:14:05Graham Stephan?

  Yeah. And then how much is your 401K? So I could buy it.

• 2:14:17Speaker 08

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