Be ARTICULATE and Speak SMARTLY: Communicate Like A Pro

My new book Own Or Be Owned is out now! I wrote Own or Be Owned to answer one question: How do you make more money, less miserably? I broke it into the 12 Profit Levers… The 12 levers I've seen determine whether you print cash or hate your life. Check it out: → https://contrarianthinking.biz/oobo_bigdeal What do you say when your mind goes blank in a high stakes moment? Why do some people choke under pressure, while others sound sharp instantly? How do you organize your thoughts fast enough to respond with clarity and confidence? This episode answers all of that, and gets into so much more, including: Why your brain flips into survival mode and how to stay in control when it does How to use simple frameworks like PACE to respond clearly without rambling What actually makes someone sound confident on the spot and why pausing beats filler words every time How to structure your answers so you sound sharp, not scattered How to build a mental library of stories, frameworks, and opinions so you’re never caught off guard If you’ve ever thought of the perfect response 40 minutes too late, this is the fix. Structure creates speed. And once you have it, you stop freezing and start owning the room. Start your newsletter today with beehiiv! Head to https://beehiiv.link/ihss0e and use CODIE30 to get 30% off your first 3 months. See how owners uncover hidden cash without growth or chaos in my upcoming Masterclass → https://contrarianthinking.biz/4cEHuZI ___________ (00:00:00) Introduction (00:01:13) Why Your Brain Betrays You: The Science of Freezing Under Pressure (00:03:53) The Warren Buffett Framework: How Mental Models Replace Fear (00:05:41) Fast Thinking Is a Myth: The PACE Method Explained (00:09:08) Build Your Mental Assets: The Lattice Work Technique (00:13:40) The Power of the Pause: Why Silence Signals Confidence (00:14:59) Kill the Ramble: The Three Point Rule and Constraints (00:15:41) The Jeff Bezos Brief: Control the Frame Without Speaking (00:18:49) Real-Time Thinking Hacks: Five Tactical Techniques (00:22:57) Train Like a Pro: Compression Drills and Your Story Bank ___________ MORE FROM BIGDEAL 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@podcastbigdeal 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bigdeal.podcast 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@big.deal.pod MORE FROM CODIE SANCHEZ 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@codiesanchezct 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/codiesanchez 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@realcodiesanchez OTHER THINGS WE DO 🌐 Our community: https://contrarianthinking.typeform.com/to/WBztXXID 📰 Free newsletter: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3XWLlZp 📚 Biz buying course: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3NhjGgN 🏠 Resibrands: https://resibrands.com/ 💰 CT Capital: https://contrarianthinking.biz/4eRyGOk 🏦 Main St Hold Co: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3YfGa8u Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 0:29Codie Sanchez?

  There's a moment we've all had at least once. You're in a high stakes environment. Someone challenges your idea and the whole room turns to look at you and your mind just blanks. And then 40 minutes later, you're in the elevator and the perfect response just hits you. That's what we're fixing today because thinking fast isn't about being smarter. It's about structuring your thoughts under pressure. So we're going to bring data, experience from the best in the world so that you can build any skills, just like speaking, step by step. I'm Cody Sanchez and this is the Big Deal Podcast. Let's go.

• 1:04Codie Sanchez?

  Okay, really quick also, before we start, my producer just pulled me aside and told me three quarters of our regular big deal audience aren't subscribed. So I'd like to ask you something personal. If you've ever learned something or changed your perspective or had a realization because of this podcast, please do me a personal favor and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Subscribing is the single best way to help us grow the show. And I have to say something exciting. Last week, this channel just crossed 500,000 subs. You know, a year ago, we were at 37,000. So I still can't wrap my head around that fully. I just want to say thank you and let's get into it. So I got some stats for us. Why does your brain betray you in those moments? Let's start with the really uncomfortable truth.

• 1:47Codie Sanchez?

  You don't freeze because you are not smart. You freeze because your brain is overloaded. There are actually three things happening instantly when you're on the spot. The first is called cognitive overload. Like you're trying to understand the question, think of an answer, judge how you sound, predict how they'll react. That's four processes at once. Your brain literally wasn't built for that. And the second is stress overload. You know, when pressure hits, your brain shifts actually from the prefrontal cortex, that's like your thinking brain, to the amygdala, your survival brain. And I see this all the time in execs and people who work in my companies. So I want to help you get better at it because you make more money and you get more of what you want out of life if we can help you respond better, including me. There's actually an amazing 2005 study that was in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

• 2:32Codie Sanchez?

  And they looked at performance under pressure and found that pressure reduces working memory capacity. So basically, your ability to hold and manipulate thoughts in real time, well, that gets severely impacted when you're under stress. So that's the killer. You start thinking, actually, how do I sound smart? What's the perfect answer? What if I'm wrong? Or maybe that's just me. And instead of speaking clearly, you stall. Let me tell you how this can hurt you in business and life. How many times have you sat in a meeting with a group of other people and you had a brilliant idea? And that brilliant idea was at the tip of your tongue, but you couldn't kind of get the balls up to say it. And so when they asked you what you had to say or contribute, just said, oh, you know, nothing, I think, oh, let me just add on to her point.

• 3:17Codie Sanchez?

  I think that was a good point, just add on. That happens to me all the time. And I remember one time in particular, I was early in my career, I had a company called Vanguard. And there was a group of us, we were in the accelerated development program. And I had talked last night with one of my friends, Ian, about a brilliant idea in my mind, a brilliant idea I had that was what we should do as a group in our like next basically mission set. And my idea, you know, was that we should build something out in Spanish and for Latin America, because this company hadn't done anything there yet. Now, I actually speak Spanish, I've done business in Latin America even back then. So this was like my idea. And I remember paddling it back and forth with Ian and the night before.

• 3:58Codie Sanchez?

  And then when they came around to ask us our questions, I felt like other people had better answers than I did. So I kind of like waited till the end. And so they were like going around, who wants to go first? Who wants to go first? Bam bam bam bam bam. What do you think happened? Well, they went to Ian first and all of a sudden Ian talked about their Spanish expansion that they should do. And so this is actually normal. It's not just you and I. Like Warren Buffett was actually terrified of public speaking in his career early on, which is crazy. And he wasn't just like bad at it. He says he was terrified of it. This is a billionaire, one of the richest men in the world. He avoided classes. He didn't do presentations. And then he realized something.

• 4:38Codie Sanchez?

  His fear wasn't about public speaking. His fear was really, are you going to judge me while I'm thinking? So he trained to have a structure to think. That's why Warren Buffett actually kind of got famous for mental frameworks, which is fascinating. If you know Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, they're very famous for frameworks. So they'll talk about inverse thinking. They'll talk about killing complexity. They'll talk about a reverse to do list. All of that is because he forced himself into situations where he had to develop his public speaking ability. And because he was still too scared, he had to come up with frameworks to help him speak better. And so it's kind of fascinating because he later volunteered to teach at University of Omaha,

• 5:22Codie Sanchez?

  just so he could overcome this fear. And then soon, you know, his signature, what is now old timey sense of humor was like everywhere. You know, his keynotes became marquee moments in culture. And his Berkshire Hathaway, that's his company, his conferences that he holds, it is a stock conference, you guys. Those things are so boring. They usually have to pay people to attend them. This one is like a rock show. So for a man that used to hate to speak publicly, used to be scared of how to respond, to now run a rock concert for a stock conference is fascinating. But the thing is, his confidence came after he made structural adjustments to the way he thought. So if you don't perform well under pressure, yes, you need to put yourself under pressure frequently,

• 6:06Codie Sanchez?

  but you also need to figure out the core skills on how to structure your thinking. Hot take, fast thinking or being quick on your feet is actually a myth. So I think what you're really seeing is fast structuring. So all the research that we've been doing shows the best communicators aren't improvising. They're slotting ideas into frameworks they use hundreds of times. So when you see them sound smart, fast, it's really just like their recall, recall, recall. They're not thinking on the spot. So the golden rule is kind of like, if your thoughts have structure, your speech will have speed. Structure equals speed. There's a great phrase we're going to teach you today to help you. When in doubt, pace it out. Okay, this is cute. P is for point, as in make your point. A is for add context. C is concrete example.

• 6:51Codie Sanchez?

  And E is end claim. So here's an example of the pace method. Let's say you're asked a question. Why do most people fail financially? Why are most people broke? A bad answer might be like, well, you know, I think it's about bad decisions and people don't do budgeting. A good answer to that using the pace method would go like this. Most people fail financially because they spend before they invest. That's the point. That creates a cycle where money never compounds. Add context. You see it with high earners living paycheck to paycheck. Reckless businessmen. Concrete example. If your money isn't working first, you're already behind. End claim. Now, why does this work?

• 7:32Codie Sanchez?

  Put simply, it's fast, it's substantive, and you're reducing thinking into one idea, one explanation, one example, one conclusion. So your brain actually like, it treats it like a filing cabinet, basically. And your brain can handle that under pressure. Fun fact, did you know that this is also how they train politicians? I've become friends with a lot of, do I want to use the word friend? I've become acquaintances with a lot of politicians. Because I think they control our world and we got to work with them one way or the other. And it's fascinating. I was sitting in a room, actually, last week with some of the leaders of the free world. I'm not allowed to talk about where I was. I'm not allowed to talk about that I went. I'm not allowed to talk about who was there. You know what I can talk about?

• 8:15Codie Sanchez?

  I sat in a room where these couple of guys literally brought in governors from different states, sat the governors down, listened to the governors, get peppered with questions. And then in the end, they circled around, I don't know why they let me in here, you guys, we should talk about that. They, at the end, they looked at each other and they just said, should we run him? I felt like it was like a diabolical, you know, but what, what did they mean? You know, they meant run him for president. They were like literally prepping presidential candidates now for next run. And so. Why was one governor considered good or bad? They used the pace method, or they didn't. Now, think about even a less diabolical one would be like Steve Jobs. So he didn't speak quickly. He spoke with massive intention.

• 9:00Codie Sanchez?

  And it's the reason we have so many incredible quotes from this guy. Like, one of my favorite books is actually the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. And he has this one line, which is basically that people think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. It actually means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. He also talked about being a yardstick for quality. Or how some people aren't used to the environment where excellence is expected. Or your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. That one's my favorite. He used very few words, but he had a pretty big impact. And I think the secret to basically thinking quickly is this preloading of your brain. So that's your first cheat code.

• 9:45Codie Sanchez?

  You don't have to rely on thinking fast in the moment. You need to prep. So how do we prep for these high stakes conversations? I like to think about it like building mental assets. So high performers don't memorize answers. They prep these frameworks, collecting stories, analogies, and they always seek to reduce to first principles. Why? Because your brain can retrieve faster than it can create, right? It's kind of obvious. Like, how fast can you grab a book versus how fast can you write one? In fact, Charlie Munger had a mental framework for this. He says, "I carry a latticework of mental models in my head." So good. But what does he mean? He means like, in his head, he has all these things he can throw back to. And sometimes, you guys, like, not to toot my own little horn here, but when I'm on

• 10:29Codie Sanchez?

  a podcast, people will say, "Well, you talk in tweets, or you have a high signal to noise." You know what I'm doing? I'm just going to, in my head, I have a series of ladders on which I can climb to get to different points that are just sort of stacked. I'm not solving the answers to these problems from scratch in real time. Neither is Charlie. If you memorize isolated facts, that's not going to help you solve problems at scale. Instead, what do you got to do? Construct these interconnected networks of key ideas from multiple disciplines. And you use those to interpret the world. And that's actually really the job of a CEO. If you want to figure out what the job of a CEO is, it's communicate well, get other people to buy into your dream, and understand how to solve complex problems using a series of unrelated disciplines or networks.

• 11:14Codie Sanchez?

  You know what the job of a CEO is not? Memorizing thousands of individual facts. That's not going to do it for you. Here's an exercise for you to build this skill. You guys, you want to do this live with me so we can all, you know, make more money, become better people, get what we want out of life? Here's what I think we should do. So I want you to pick any topic you care about. Build three frameworks, three examples, three strong opinions. We call these spiky points of view. You'll be surprised how often these mental models will become useful. Right now, I'm interviewing people. Let me know in the comments if any of you guys are looking for a job right now. One, we're hiring a bunch of people. Also, I know it's miserable out there, so I'm sorry if you are. A lot of people interviewing right now are fucking awful at interviewing, with so much love, so bad.

• 11:59Codie Sanchez?

  You guys might be really good, but you're really bad at interviewing. And so let's have a topic you care about, such as why you should hire me because I'm a stud. I want you to build three frameworks. And so what would those look like? It might be like, what does every boss want? Work hard, you know, I care too much, you know, I do too much, whatever. Those could be your three frameworks. But the frameworks might be like, my number one core value is the day isn't done until the job is done. You know, I believe in completion in things because I think that's what makes people successful. Oh, bosses are going to love that. Two, if we go, um, I care too much. I believe that how you do anything is how you do everything. What does that tell them? Oh, they're going to be really detail oriented.

• 12:44Codie Sanchez?

  Three, uh, I believe in constant learning. If you were to scroll through my Twitter or my Instagram, you would find it full of X that we do at this job because I'm obsessed with this game. You're going to have to drag me out of this industry by my cold, dead fingers. Great, you've got three frameworks. Then I want you to find three examples. One, when did you do something really hard in your career, they might ask you. So your first example is going to be like, um, my last job, we had, like, just pick a project, any project. We had to ship this video out by this date, and if we didn't get it done, we were going to lose a $50,000 sponsorship, and I worked the job until we got it done. Right? Just give me three examples like that. And then three strong opinions.

• 13:28Codie Sanchez?

  One strong opinion may be, I only like to work with A players. Uh, my goal is to be on a team of other people who want to succeed. And the one thing that is a downside to me is if the team is full of B players. That's a strong opinion. Also, a good aligned opinion. Second strong opinion could be like, I want to work on companies that are using and interested in AI. I think the future is going there. And so I'm curious for you, how are you guys using AI in your business right now? Turn that question around on them. You will be surprised at how often mental models are useful. Because now your brain is not actually answering their questions. It's just selecting the idea. Also, we talked about this in my three to one episode on speaking. You should go back and listen to it after this one, if you want to get better at speaking. But we talked about the power of the pause.

• 14:12Codie Sanchez?

  Here's it a different way, which is if you don't know the answer, shut the fuck up for a second. Give your little brain time to catch up. It's actually totally fine because it's a signal of confidence. So that two second gap, am I going to give your little, my little monkey brain at least time to catch up, could do the same for you. And you know, when I think that I feel uncomfortable and it's too much, I go back and I watch Barack Obama. He is like one of the most famous pausers of all time. He uses the pause all the time. He's so famous for pausing that there are entire compilations online of him pausing to collect his thoughts, and he's a smart guy. Is it hesitation? I don't know, but it looks like control. There's actually a great paper that was written in 2025.

• 14:56Codie Sanchez?

  And it was called organizational behavior and human decision processes. And it basically found that brief pauses in speech increase positive listener responses. Whereas when you do fillers like, yeah, uh huh, that actually decreases their responses. Okay. So moral of the story, pausing is okay. Don't freak out. It also reduces that cognitive load we were talking about, making it easier for whoever you're talking to, basically to process what's going down. Now, the opposite of this is rambling, which is, it's the great vibe killer of all time. So what is rambling? That's just you not structuring your thinking. And sadly, it signals incompetence and dishonesty, even if it really is not that.

• 15:41Codie Sanchez?

  But we fix it by giving ourselves some constraints, which I kind of think of like bumper lanes on the bowling alley to how we speak. So we only hit strikes, right? I like the three point rule. So instead of leadership is like a lot of things, great leaders do three things. They set direction, make decisions, take responsibility. Right? Now you're in control. The idea is that the three ideas gives clarity and that clarity signals intelligence. One of my other tricks is if you can't speak well, write well. So how do you control the frame? Let's say you're just like, Cody, I'm just an introvert. I don't want to talk too much. Set the frame in a meeting. You know, one of my favorite stories about a founder insisting on clarity is Jeff Bezos banning PowerPoint presentations at Amazon

• 16:25Codie Sanchez?

  and mandating a brief at the beginning of every single meeting. So you could do that. If you're like, I know I'm not going to be able to get my stuff out as clearly as I want right now. Send a brief, control the beginning of the meeting and say the first five minutes, we're going to read the brief. You control the frame without even having to say anything. And this makes so much sense to me because he was actually annoyed that his pre-meeting memos were getting ignored. And he realized, he was like, all right, I'm going to carve meetings, uh, time into my meetings for the team to get on the same page. And so that alignment process meant no PowerPoints because you could say a bunch of stuff and it could take forever. And he would, you know, find that people in slides would do a bunch of graphics or, you know, images, and it would hide bad thinking.

• 17:10Codie Sanchez?

  And so instead, you know, Bezos would say, a PowerPoint is kind of like a sales tool. And internally, the last thing you want to do is sell. You're truth seeking, you're trying to find the truth. So he made sure that actually all his leaders wrote a page of well structured narrative text that everyone would read silently at the beginning of every meeting. And once they had finished, the meeting began. So why don't you try that? Like structured writing equals structured thinking equals structured speaking. And if you don't feel confident enough in your speech, write that bad boy down. Cause I think actually Bezos figured out something that most newsletter writers, for instance, still haven't. When he banned PowerPoint, he solved a meeting problem by doing structured writing,

• 17:51Codie Sanchez?

  which made his thinkers think better, which gave them better outcomes because garbage in versus garbage out. The memo doesn't just communicate the idea, it is the idea. So the best newsletter writers understand this, you know, they're not just publishing, they're building an asset. And the gap between a newsletter that stays a hobby and one that becomes a business usually isn't the writing, actually. It's the infrastructure underneath it, which is why I use Beehive. Like last year Beehive publishers sent 28 billion emails. Isn't that crazy? And they reached more than 255 million unique readers. And like, that's super interesting, but I think the only reason they got to that level was the tools. Like the analytics don't just tell you open rates, they tell you who opened, what they clicked, where they came from.

• 18:34Codie Sanchez?

  So every issue you send is a little sharper version of the last one. The referral program also turns your existing readers into a growth engine. The ad network brings brand deals to you, like no pitching, no back and forth. Beehive handles the reporting and the invoices and the paid subscriptions, all built into the dashboard, not bolted on. So if you're already running a newsletter somewhere else, this is the time to move. The analytics are insane. They answer the right questions. The revenue tools are really revenue driving. Beehive is worth a serious look. For newsletters launched on Beehive in 2025, the medium time to first dollar was 66 days. Head to Beehive.com/Cody and use code Cody30 for 30% off of your first three months of Beehive.com.

• 19:19Codie Sanchez?

  So let me give you some of my hacks for getting tactical about real time thinking, so that you can push off a few seconds to get a good response. One of the ones I like the best is rephrase the question. What does this do? It gives you time, it allows you to kind of clarify your thinking because you're clarifying the question. So let's say that they ask you a question and you understand the question. You might just reframe it and say, so you're asking why people struggle with X? Now your brain catches up, right? They usually will reframe the question and they'll do more than just one sentence response. They'll give you a little fluff room. That's your time to think. Two would be thinking opposites. So if you're stuck, flip it. So say somebody asks

• 20:01Codie Sanchez?

  you, "Why do people fail?" Do Charlie Munger thinking, just invert it. Think, "Why do people succeed?" This is a classic conversion technique. By inverting the question, you're introducing an anti-signal that helps make your signal clearer. And as we learned earlier, clarity wins. So for instance, "Why do people fail?" Maybe you don't know the answer to that. Well, you do know the answer to why people succeed. Okay, great. Now you run with it. Number three, default to first principles. So I want you to strip complexity out of this. Some of the ways you can do that, you can start with sentences like, "at the core," or "this comes down to," or "ultimately," or "the immutable laws of physics tell us that." Like, whatever

• 20:44Codie Sanchez?

  you can do to just strip down all the extra layers, and you're signaling to us that you're at the core. That seems more grounded, it seems more clear, and it seems more data-backed. Four, I like using simple analogies. Analogies are like thinking shortcuts. You know, Elon Musk loves to use these. He would take something incredibly complex, like rockets or batteries, and he would ask NASA, not, "Why do you build these really expensive, overly complicated rockets that have XYZ, and you know, 1, 2, 3, and all of these mechanisms?" He would just ask, "Hey NASA, why do you build rockets like Ferraris for every launch when Honda Accords would do?" Ah, it's great. It's basically saying, "We only need something

• 21:27Codie Sanchez?

  simple to do this. Let's stop making it so expensive." He also has this other line where he says, um, he describes factories as "the machine that builds the machine." And so that's a way to help his engineers decide on machine layouts and product flow. Like, how many times have you guys worked with somebody? They're like, "Oh yeah, we're operating that," or "We have a process for that." You're like, "Yeah, you do. That process is awful. That's a terrible process." Okay, you still got it, but the process, which is highly complex and has all these components, but doesn't output anything? No. So he describes the pain of entrepreneurship also, great line, "as eating glass and staring into the abyss." Which I've been there recently. And why do I like that? Memorable, easy to understand. And if you've ever felt it, that feels visceral.

• 22:12Codie Sanchez?

  You can also ask a question back. I think this is really underutilized. Like if you're unsure, ask back. Like, do you mean from a business perspective or a personal perspective? Do you mean in absolute terms or relative terms? You know, do you mean an immediate outcome or a long-term outcome? This is letting you buy time. It's also allowing you to narrow the scope a little bit, which might help you figure out how to answer. You know, I have a background in journalism. And as a journalist, I was forced to learn how to think and speak on the spot. This is really important when you want people to tell you things they probably shouldn't. And so a common technique we use to ask better questions is called the D O S method. So one of the most important things as a journalist is like, don't bullshit. D is for direct. Just be clear.

• 22:57Codie Sanchez?

  O is for open-ended, like get depth. Don't ask yes or no questions. And S is for short. Don't give them fluff. Let them tell you the fluff. If you can train yourself to ask questions that are direct, open-ended and short, you also train yourself to communicate that same way back. So now you know the steps, you gotta do the reps, right? I think the only way that any of this changes for you is if you take a minute, you can even write your questions in the comments and we'll respond back to you. Cause I want you to train like a pro. Like one little training drill you could do is like, see if you can answer things in 60 seconds all day today. Like anytime somebody asks you something, look at like your watch sort of nonchalantly.

• 23:39Codie Sanchez?

  Look at your phone and see if you can give them an answer in 60 seconds. What you're gonna have to do then is use structured thoughtful responses. Also, you're gonna be shocked at how many more conversations you can have in a day. Another one you can do is compression training. Like, once you nail the 60-second answers, explain something in 30 seconds, then 10 seconds, then one sentence. It's also really scary to do that. So for instance, I was just in a room with our product team and we were talking about one of our products, which is called topprompt.ai. Actually, I'll give you guys free access to it. If you want to figure out a way to have AI build you things, but you don't know the right way to ask questions to it and you want to do what's called a one-shot, like one question to a result of a product,

• 24:22Codie Sanchez?

  a script, anything you want to build with AI, Top Prompt will help you do it. So anyway, I was building this tool that I use daily and telling my tech team like, hey, I need something different on Top Prompt. I want to do this different component. By the way, I'll put Top Prompt down in the link below in the show notes. So you guys can play with it. But what I realized is that I was over explaining. And so instead with compression training, I just said, I want five sections, no more in top prompt. So it's really easy to understand. And then in my compression training, I wanted to get to that one sentence. And I just said, what if you could ask one question and get five prompts back? Really simple. Great. One of the ways to see if you're any good at this or not is record yourself.

• 25:07Codie Sanchez?

  I learned so much like from myself on being on this podcast. I watch it back, which is, whoa, that is stressful. Uh, the first couple of times you do it, it's still stressful sometimes. We all hate the sound of our own voice, but you'll notice your filler words, your weak endings, your rambling, where you have weird intonation in your voice. And then you can start building out this story bank. So like today on Twitter, actually, I was, this is such a good idea. Uh, I thought this guy was talking about how he has a, let me find it. What do you call it? Yeah. He was saying that he has a huge swipe file of inspiration clips from movies. And he's like, I like this because you can 10x the quality of your videos by like, oh, I remember that one scene from Marty Supreme.

• 25:51Codie Sanchez?

  Okay. I've got that. Remember that one scene from Fight Club? And because he, he creates videos all day, he has this swipe file of videos he can steal from. Well, what if you have a swipe file in your head? Like build like five go to stories that your husband or your wife is going to fucking hate by the end of this because they're going to hear it so many times, but it's going to get laughs. This is your go to, this is your first date. This is your hottest story you got. I like to think of them in varying subjects, like what's your failure story? What's your big lesson story? What's your, I'm so proud of myself. I could have built me a damn statue, AKA your win story. What's your turning point? Oh man, my life was this and then what's your insight story? Wow. Do you know this is happening in the world right now? Now you've always got material. You're like the comedian, ready to go, baby.

• 26:36Codie Sanchez?

  You think they do that every single time? Brand new? No way. So to sum it up, get structured. The people who win in conversations, they're not the smartest. They're usually the ones that have a database, a system to pull from. And once you install this like database, you actually stop fearing questions. You stop overthinking answers and you can almost respond to just about anything. And then people will listen to you. I'm Codie Sanchez and this is the Big Deal Podcast. I'll see you on the next one. Will you guys tell me if this was useful? Also, tell me if you love Top Prompt. I do. I use it a lot.