Story telling is an art, every marketer must master| The AskAviArya show

The shortest distance between two human hearts is always a story.

The big mistake that some people make when they first start doing graphic design is everything is so dense, everything is so packed. Your eye doesn't have any place to rest. It doesn't have any place to actually discern what the full design is because of the negative space around it. Right. Is that they are afraid of getting started, but they're actually not afraid of getting started. They're afraid of failing once they do.

Hey, guys. This is Avi Arya, father of two girls, six dogs, husband to a superwoman, a streetcar racer turned hotelier, now social media marketer and founder of Internet Moguls. Welcome to my channel. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to another episode of the Internet Moguls of the World, where we travel and now virtually to find experts on who have leveraged the Internet to find their voice and amplify it and change other people's lives. Our guest for today is David Lawrence. David, I always say one thing to my audience before we start. I say the shortest distance between two human hearts is always a story. You tell a perfect stranger a good story and you win hearts for life. My story, David, is what I'm going to tell you in the next 10 seconds and then I'll request you to tell us yours. My name is ABHI Al Aria, father of two girls, six dogs, husband to a superwoman, a streetcar racer turned hotelier, now social media marketer and founder of Internet Moguls. David, over to you.

I'm an actor. I'm a storytelling coach, and I'm a technologist. And occasionally on your television and on your movie screen, I am a creepy, evil villain.

Lovely. David, storytelling is where it's at. It's at the heart of it. Right? And no better person than you to tell our audiences how the storytelling, how did it become. Become your passion?

I remember laying on the living room floor in my house in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and watching a movie where the actor one of those rare movies where the actor doesn't have any lines because he was playing a deaf mute. And there were parts of the movie that were making me laugh hysterically. There were parts of the movie that were making me cry. There were parts of the movie that made me question humanity. And I was like seven. I mean, I didn't understand how all of this was possible without words, without somebody saying, here's what we're going to do next. Just simply watching the story unfold. I also really loved radio. When I was a kid, I used to fall asleep with a transistor radio under my, under my pillow. And I would listen to stations from far off cities and listen to baseball games from teams that I'd. I didn't root for because they weren't in my town. And I just became aware very early on in my life that people will sit there and become enraptured if you can tell them a good story. I noticed right away that commercials on television were tiny little stories. And the best commercials were the ones that told a whole lot of story in a very small amount of time. You know, stories are all around us, and I was fortunate enough to recognize stories being told and the power that they had very early in life.

Lovely. So, and I love the way you told us that story of how you were lying on that floor. So you just took me back there. So, David, tell us, whenever a marketer, an entrepreneur, uses any of his or her social media channels to tell a story, to connect with people, what would be your advice to people, to these entrepreneurs who are listening? Like you said, lying on that wooden floor? I say, I remember walking into my dad's office as if it was yesterday. There was a red carpet on a wooden floor. We were these two landline phones. You know, the phones which had wires coming out from the wall, they were off the hook. There was a smell of incense. My dad had just finished his prayers. My dad's hair was ruffled and he was visibly nervous. So taking people back to that scene creates all the difference. And I saw you do that right off the bat. So tell us a little bit about that. How can entrepreneurs use that to define their own story when they're meeting people?

So I think the first thing to remember doing business storytelling, which is what an entrepreneur will do most often, always be of service. You know, there's strategy and then there's tactics. And the strategy of business storytelling is to always be of service, whether you're telling one of your own stories or whether you're curating someone else's story to illustrate something that makes sense to you and is of service to your tribe, your family, your followers, your group of people that you're trying to influence. The tactic is to drop them right in the middle of the story as if the story was already happening. So what you did was you described the senses. You described what it looked like, what it sounded like, what it felt like, what it smelled like. You remembered different tiny details that would help the person to whom you were telling the story visualize and feel absolutely a part of that 360 degree world that you're in. And you'll see once, by the way, once you see people doing this in novels and hear them doing it in audiobooks and watching them do it on television, you're going to notice it. And it may take you out of the story for a bit, but just notice that, notice that, accept that, and know that you're growing. And then you'll drop back into the story eventually, because a good storyteller always arrests your attention. But the point of storytelling in business is not to sell somebody something. The point of telling a story is to connect and share information that solves a problem in that person's life. If you can do that and if you can explain why your product or service is going to be their best choice for solving that problem. If you're paying attention to the problem and the solution, the story takes care of itself. You know, when we hear people who have purchased your product or service before tell their story, AKA a testimonial or a kudo or a reference, you are automatically taken to that point where there was a problem and it got solved. And that example that people are modeling for somebody listening to the story you're telling is obvious, oh, it worked for them. Well, maybe it'll work for me. And that doesn't happen by you saying, buy my stuff, buy my stuff, my stuff is the best. You should buy my stuff. That's not a story. That's somebody walking around yelling. A story really illustrates why you understand what the person is going through, how you connect with them and you relate to them, and how your product or service is going to help them solve that amazing problem. They wouldn't even be in front of you for this story if they didn't have the problem and wanted to solve it. Right?

Right.

So just know that your whole goal when telling a business story is to connect with somebody's needs, with their desires, with their wants, with their problems, and help them achieve and solve those things respectfully.

Lovely. So, David, you're saying that when somebody tells the story you don't sell, you talk about the pain or the challenge and you show how you have, in the past, resonated with it or somewhere connected with it. And because of your genuine connection, you've been able to find a solution. And you're presenting that solution with telling a story of a third party. Maybe, like, if I'm talking about, I.

Don'T feel like I'm telling you something you don't know already. Right?

Right.

You connect with this. I know you connect with this because I've watched your podcast I've heard you tell your hero story, not horror story, but hero story.

Right.

Dozens of times.

Sure.

And even when you were arranging for this interview with me today, you sent me an email with your hero story in it. So it's clearly something you're very proud of and it's something that others can connect to. You know, I was on this path to destruction and then something happened in my life that gave me purpose.

Right.

And gave me a desire to do something more with what I had. You know, I think being a street racer would have been great. And maybe now you can. Maybe now you can do it for fun. I don't change, but to change people's lives. When I sit down with somebody who really, really, really wants to be an actor, either on camera or on microphone, they just, it's just so inside them to let that out, to let that, that, that, that desire to be a performer and to tell people stories and to make them laugh, make them cry, make them think, make them change when. When they just can't help themselves. You would not, you would not believe the joy it gives me to help them do that, to help them connect with the tools and the processes and the truths as well as the myths of our business, to help them not spin their wheels trying to figure out how to get that done.

You know, David, for people who can't see my face right now, for the last 9 minutes and 51 seconds, I'm. I have a smile on my face and, and I'm. And I'm. I'm sorry. You are so poised. Your pauses are so, they command so much respect. I. It's just so much fun talking to you. My. My grandfather, who was a major general in the army intelligence, a 6ft 4 inch gentleman, used to speak, write, read Cantonese, Mandarin amongst 14 other languages.

Wow.

And he always said, And I, and I just. This memory of what he said just came back to me. In the 10 minutes I'm speaking to you, he always said, pause and you will command respect. And when in the last 10 minutes, for so many. When I said something or whatever, you pause so many times and I'm like, did I pause it? Did I say something? I should be listening more. It's just that I love the way you pause. Is that learned over time?

It is, it is. Absolutely. And in fact, it takes an awful lot of energy for some people to understand that the pause in delivery of speech, in delivery of acting, of doing work, is kind of the same thing as negative space or white spaces in graphic design. The big mistake that Some people make when they first start doing graphic design is everything is so dense, everything is so packed. Your eye doesn't have any place to rest. It doesn't have any place to actually discern what the full design is because of the negative space around it. Right. And we are brought up especially, I'm going to say you were in a family that maybe you had brothers and sisters.

Right.

And maybe at the dinner table you had to struggle a little bit to be heard. If you didn't get heard, maybe you didn't get as much food as somebody else did, or you didn't get enough attention or. And this is not uncommon, Right.

Other than you have a message and you want to say something.

Right. Maybe other than in China, where they have now they've raised the limit by one to the number of children the government lets you have. You know, there are big families and there's competition for attention. And so as we grow up and we start going to social events and we watch people have kind of conversations with us, like we'll be standing at a party. And I'm sure you've experienced this before. The person you're talking to is pretending to pay attention to you, but they're actually looking over your shoulder to see if there's anybody more interesting at the party that they can talk. Oh, hi. You know, you always feel like I have to arrest their attention or they're going to leave me. They're going to abandon the story that I'm telling them. And the truth of the matter is, when you start to feel that and you start to fill in those moments of silence, those pauses, with what are called vocalization bridges, you know, so like. Yeah, yeah, you start to make these little bridges so that they don't lose your attention. Right. Or they don't. You don't lose their attention. If, on the other hand, you pause, that sounds so weird, they'll stop looking around the party and check you to see if you've had a heart attack. They lean in. The whole notion of the dramatic pause or the dramatic moment or the beat between a line landing and letting the audience understand what just happened and then moving on with the rest of the scene is one of the pieces of art that is sometimes a little difficult for actors, voice talent, etc. To capture and then to creatively use. Right.

Awesome.

We have this fear that people will stop listening. They won't.

Lovely. So, David, you know, I teach and train entrepreneurs how to make micro videos to get known, to get leads and to get sales without having to leave Their home with just a smartphone and a strong Internet connection.

How long are your micro videos?

Anywhere from 90 seconds to five minutes.

Great. Can I share something with you?

Please do.

I used to work at a company called America Online. Are you familiar with it?

Oh, yes. Those were the first places I got my emails from. You got mail.

You got mail. Exactly. So I worked there. And when I worked at America Online, it was in the 90s. We used to do a lot of research as to how people used the service. And one of the things that we used to research was how long it would take them to become distracted, to get interrupted by something else in their life, either other technology or another human being or some sort of social event while they were using the service. And that time consistently over the seven years or so that I worked at the company and the 28 years that I was the voice of their recorded tech support lines was 5.5 minutes. That's how long it takes. And today it's likely less than that, given how many distractions our mobile devices give us, how we've sort of personified the devices around us, and the Internet of things has created all of these little Alexa and other types of devices that are enabled to interrupt us. And so when I first did my podcast, and I've done over 12,000 episodes of podcasting, I was doing podcasting before podcasting was a thing.

Thing.

I actually, totally by accident, discovered the same thing, that making shorter and more numerous episodes of a podcast has all kinds of Advantages over making 1 hour long weekly podcast. It gives you more opportunities for advertising. It gives you less opportunities to be interrupted in the viewer or the listener's day. And they can fit you in to all of the different things that they want to. That they want to consume easier because you're not taking up an hour of their available time. You're taking up five minutes.

And ladies and gentlemen, brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you all for watching.

Bye. Bye.

I get your point. I get your point. Sorry for that.

Now, now, I'm not saying that what you're doing with this isn't worth it, but I get sometimes stories take longer to tell than five minutes.

Sure.

Right.

No, but I totally get it. I totally get it. It's not the end. Plus, if you leave a cliffhanger, I have them coming back for more and more, you know, a weekly show. Why does it have to be, like, consume my entire Netflix 20 hours by the end of today? Because tomorrow Amazon is going to come up with another show. So you don't need to be as desperate. I totally get that, and I totally agree with that. David, tell us these audiences who are listening. Like I said, these are entrepreneurs. About 8,100 entrepreneurs are paid members of this community. And then we have 126,000 people who have subscribed to this. But these 8,100 people are here who show up every week, thrice a week, to listen to everything, every guest, meet everyone. So your message to these entrepreneurs who are making videos, and sometimes they don't get enough engagement. Sometimes their mind is racing to say, let me get to the sales, let me get to the call to action, or when I create something for my website, I'm talking to an audience. But David said, tell a story. I'm able to tell a story, but should I tell a story of who I am? Should I tell a story of what my client went through? And between all of that, Avi says, finish your video in 90 seconds to 5 minutes. How should I break it down? It's just too overwhelming.

So I'd love to answer that question. May I go backwards a little bit in the process and answer something else? Okay, please do. I would imagine that of your 8,100 people, and by the way, congratulations on having that big of a community. That's great.

Thank you.

I would bet that more than half of them have never done a single podcast episode.

100%.

And the reason for that is that they are afraid of getting started, but they're actually not afraid of getting started. They're afraid of failing once they do. I would imagine, and I'm asking you as a listener, viewer, not Avi, but you, do you feel like everything has to be perfect before you get started? All your pencils sharpened and lined up and put in a row, and everything's nice and neat, and you have all your tech set up and, oh, my gosh, if I haven't chosen the right tech, I gotta choose the right tech, because you never know. Can I give you some advice? Please stop stopping yourself. Just do it. No one is going to remember your very first podcast episode. They're just not. And the good news is, unlike in school, there is no permanent record.

Right?

You can always pull down that first episode if you really don't like it. I say leave it up because it shows you how far you've come once you get going. But it's not like if you make a mistake that you have to go to the assistant principal's office and be disciplined. That's not what happens here. Right. What will happen is if you do get started. You'll get better and better and better, but you can't get better if you don't get started. And that was my main message coming here today. We talked about this ahead of time with you and your crew. This notion of just simply taking that first step and overcoming that fear that if you don't get everything squared away perfectly and use exactly the technology that David uses or Avi uses or whoever your favorite influencer is uses, what kind of camera do they use? What kind of microphone do they use? How do they get their lighting to look like this? What? You know, I got to get all that done before I can actually. No, no, no, no. You need to start right now with whatever you've got. It's going to suck. Just know it's going to suck. You don't know what you're doing. You have no experience doing it. You're using whatever materials you have available. But it's not going to suck as bad as you think, and you're not going to have failed. You will have succeeded in doing that. Now, your question was, okay, I've only got 90 seconds. I've only got five minutes. I will tell you something, and I don't want you to take this the wrong way, because I know it's part and parcel of how you tell your story. You spend a lot of time reminding people of your hero story.

Right.

And that is anathema to Hollywood stories, to film stories. What you want to do with a story is drop the person as close to an open loop as you possibly can. I want you to know, and I'll explain what that is. When you imagine a book, you go to the airport, go to the library, go to a bookstore if you can find one, and you open up a new book, do they start at the very beginning with the story, or do they drop you in as the murder is occurring and leave you at the end of that intro or preface or first chapter or Right at the point where you don't know who it is.

Bulb on moment for me, right there.

Right. The open loop that occurs at that point. Well, who was it? Who did it? Why'd they do that? What? Wait, who are these people? What's going on? All of these questions are driving you toward reading the rest of the book.

Right? Right.

So if you can, minimize the unnecessary details that you have at the start of what you do and just get to the good stuff. Right. Get to the stuff that connects and is adhesive and draws people to you and drops them right in the middle of the Story, for the most part, people tend to have intros that are way too long. You know, they have lots of great music. You know, I listened to a podcast the other day. There's a show on HBO here that just ran through its run called Mayor of Easttown. And I was so excited about this show because it was Kate Winslet. And I was so excited about this show. And I started listening to a podcast from a couple of show business writers on a magazine called the Atlantic.

Yep.

And they opened their podcast with a 30 second instrumental theme. And yes, it was the theme of Mayor of Easttown, but they let it play for the entire 30 seconds before they started. And that doesn't sound like a long time, but if you're doing a 90 second podcast, that's one third of the available time, you have got it. So getting to it, getting on with it, leaning forward into the content and moving with the appropriate amount of speed and acceleration, and then coming to a stop and doing so with certainty and with brevity leaves people maybe not thinking overtly. Well, he didn't take up that much of my time. Or she didn't take up that much of my time. Boy, I enjoyed that. I want to. I want to listen to that again. People don't think that way. They just go, huh? And then they move on to whatever else they're doing. Right. But this notion of being spare about the mechanics of your storytelling is what really good writers do. At least modern writers go ahead.

I just wanted to. So, just to get it clear for myself, and I really appreciate it. I mean, if I love to, I'm here to learn, you know, it's a selfish interest. My audience will love to learn from you. I saw your videos, I saw your things from afar. But for me, this is like a masterclass that's happening. I'm. I'm very ready, and I want to tell the audience as well. If you see my hero story shorter, if you see my hero story disappear, if you see me doing something very different. It happened because I got a bulb on moment about 90 seconds ago. But I just wanted to fine tune this for myself and the audience listening. So how I'm picturing this in. In the last 25 minutes is that you're saying, I parachute the audience, they're going in, they're going on a nice Air Airbus 747. And then I take them and I say, you parachute down into a war zone and, Or, Or. Or just parachute down into a village. It's a peaceful village or a war zone. Or. But into my world where I'm already in the middle of a challenge, and you're like, oh, my God, where am I now and what's going to happen? And then I tell you an existing story of what's happening to maybe somebody just like you. And then David, do I then bring in my story after that, saying, this is what happened and all of that, and this is what David is going through. And so, guys, my name is Avi Arya, father of two girls, Exhaust. And if you go along with me, then the story, you'll find out how David beat Goliath and this is what happened.

Sure. I think a couple things. First of all, you're very proud of your story. I am. And that is commendable. When you don't give everyone all of your story at the very beginning, you then have the opportunity to create a cliffhanger. A question right at the start. If you were to say, I'm Avi and I didn't die in a street race when I was a teenager, I didn't die because I found something higher in my life to have as my purpose. People are like, wait, what? What? He was street racing. He was trying to do what? Why didn't he die? What did he possibly die? When you are able to set up questions in the listener or the viewer's minds and they want to know how this happened, what happened, why did they, why did he, and why did he say it that way? And by the way, I'm not trying to change how you do your show at all, because clearly it's very effective. And the people that follow you, you may have tapped into something that I don't know about yet. I'm just telling you what happens when you watch your favorite stories on television, when you watch episodes of television, when you watch a film, there is a hook at the beginning. This is a standard change. There's variants all over the place. There is a huge hook at the beginning, and then there's the titles, and then you find out about the characters and you find out about how. How many times have you watched an episode of television or a film? And, and you've seen the opening, then the titles, and then you see a title that comes up that says three years earlier.

Right. I love that.

You know, you're. You're where you are at the story when they start. And it's your choice as a storyteller as to where you start. Right.

This is.

So if you were to say, if you were to say, I'm just like you, which is a very common Story to tell the story of parallelism. When somebody like I sell, I sell to my customers a service. I train people how to do voice work, how to do audiobooks, how to do commercials, how to do animation, how to do interactive voice response, the recordings that you get when you call companies. I teach them how to do all that and build a business doing voiceover work as well as teach them how to do on camera work like this. And when I sell them that story, one of the. Or sell them that service, one of the things that I tell them is I was just like you. I didn't know what to do. I knew I wanted to do this, but I didn't know how. I didn't even know where to start. And I'd like to save you that trouble. I'd like to share with you how to do this, where to start, what tools to use, what systems to use, and so on. Because just like you, I wanted to be an actor. I wanted to be a voice talent. I wanted to be a radio personality. And here's how I did it. Maybe it'll help you do the same thing as opposed to buy my stuff and you'll be successful overnight in your underwear. So many people take the approach of, if I just inspire people to make quick, easy money, they'll buy my stuff. And if your stuff is revolving around making quick, easy money, you make a. You may make a little bit of quick, easy money, or you may fool enough people to make a good amount of quick, easy money, but your reputation will be in tatters.

100%. Yeah, 100%. David, just a quick segue. What mic? I don't see you on a mic, but you sound fantastic.

Yeah, So I use a shotgun mic, which is what people use on television sets. It's not actually over my head. It's actually pointed straight at me from under the camera. I'll tilt it up into the frame so you can see it briefly. There it is. And then it's gone. Now, what I just did there was. I broke the fourth wall and I ruined an illusion. But we're all friends here. We're all learning here. That microphone is pointed straight at me, and it picks up what's in front of the microphone and rejects what's behind it. And it is. How much do you think that microphone costs? If you were to put a number.

$240 at least.

Okay, there are people. It is a microphone that is similar to the very expensive microphones that are used in sets. You may have seen them hanging toward people talking and so on. And when I'm working on set, I'm also miked with a lavalier that's hidden, usually in a tie or under my collar. So they pick up the sound a number of different ways. The microphone right There is a $40 microphone.

No way. We need to know which one this is.

It's the 86550 from Audio Technica. I use Audio Technica microphones because they are awesome. I use, I have, I have on the shelf a $3,800 microphone, the Neumann U87. I bought it in the early 2000s. I used it for a few years. It was great. It was fine. But it was finicky. It was very finicky. And so now the microphone that I use is actually for doing my voiceover work. Not for doing videos, excuse me, like this. But for, for doing voiceover work is this microphone. It's the AT 2020 USB Plus. And yes, it's a USB microphone. And voiceover talent will tell you that you should never use a USB microphone. And I just say to them, okay, thank you. I know, I know what microphones can do, and I know how to work microphones. And that particular microphone is a unicorn. It is a USB microphone that uses the same electronics that's used in the interfaces that are used with studio microphones. And the pickup in that microphone is an amazingly high quality pickup. So altogether, in a $150 microphone that I use for voiceover, I get the same amount of work, the same amount of payment, the same amount of process. In fact, I have a video in my course that says, okay, I did this audiobook with the Neumann U87 at the studios of a big publisher. And I did this audiobook with my @2020 USB+. I'm not going to tell you which audiobook was which. You listen to both and you tell me, and it's a blind test that half the people get right and half the people don't. What were you going to ask? I'm sorry, I interrupted you.

No, that's all right. I just have so many things to ask. But, David, have you always managed to get a lot of female attention because of the way you speak?

That's very embarrassing, Avi.

I'm just. Because you, it just. What? You, you are just so amazing.

Look at me with this beautiful face and this amazing physique. Oh, my God. I'm fighting them off with a stick. No, I, I, I, I, I'm, I think my voice. I've been very fortunate to have some people model to me. Good Use of their voice. I've. I have a. I have. Let me share this with you. Let me back up one more step. I have a definition that I've used my whole life, a definition of success. Can I share that with you?

Please do.

My definition of success is very simple. Do more of what works and less of what doesn't. The trick is figuring out what really does work and what doesn't work, because sometimes things that don't work at all masquerade as things that do work. So what I feel my superpower is, is sharing with my clients the things that I know work, even if they're counterintuitive, and sort of moving them away from the things that don't work when I know they don't work. But I've been modeled by various people in my life, especially growing up really loving radio, on the ways that work for me in terms of speaking and the ways that maybe don't work for me in terms of speaking. And so my voice was developed saying, okay, that works. Let me try that. Okay, that doesn't work. I'm not going to do that anymore. And then over time, if you do that enough, if you hone and refine what you're doing, do more of what works and less of what doesn't. You can't help but be more successful.

Lovely.

So in my case, I did more of what worked with my voice and less of what doesn't. And I will tell you to talk about a story. Imagine me sitting in a very fancy restaurant in New York City. It was called the Brasserie, and I could smell the prime rib that they were bringing around to all the tables. I was sitting by myself at a table waiting on a blind date. And I'd waited right up until the appointed time, maybe five minutes later, and a woman walked in. I saw her talk to the maitre d, and the maitre d pointed at me, and she walked over to the table. And as she walked toward the table, I could see her face change from a smile to a concerned frown. And she looked at me when she got to the table, and she said, wow, you weren't kidding, were you? I can't do this. And she turned around and walked away. Three days earlier, she had called me at the radio station I was working at, telling me how in love with my voice she was. And she had to meet me. And she couldn't wait to put a face with the voice. And I told her at the time, I don't look how I sound. I'm sorry, I don't Know what you're thinking about in your head, but it's likely not what you're going to find if we were to meet. So why don't we not? No, no, I have to. I have to. Let's meet at the brasserie, have dinner. And that's what happened.

I loved how you took me back three years from there. Masterclass in short storytelling. Three days.

Yes, three days.

Three days, right. The masterclass in short storytelling. I love that. I was like, what happened three days ago? How did you meet her? Did a friend introduce you? Okay, I get it. David, I have one last question before we hit the 40 minute mark. For our audiences who have been have had multiple bulb on moments like the ones I had. I cannot, I always, for the rest of my life remember that I have to drop the audience in the middle of something that's happening and then either take them three years, five years ahead or back. Like this is now going to be my format. I do a 2000 person webinar every fortnight. There are 2000 new human beings who come from different parts of the world to listen to me, my story and how I teach. This is going to be my new format and I'm going to make sure I announce in every webinar that I learned this at the end of it from David Lawrence. Thank you so much. I deeply, deeply appreciate what I learned today. David, for everybody else who would love to work with you, what's the best way to get in touch with you?

So I don't know. I see on my screen that davidoheroes.com is being shown. I don't know if that's being shown in the recording, but you can reach me@davidoheroes.com and let me hone a little bit. Let me refine what you just said. Make sure that the moment that you're dropping people into is either just before or just after a moment of transformation. Because it's the moment of transformation that is most valuable to your clients and your students. If you can show them how to transform what they're doing now into something that is more successful, that's what's of value.

Drop people into the story before or.

After the moment of transformation, Just before or after. Because you're setting them up at a point in the episode, at a point in the story where they really want to know what's going to happen, what's going to happen, what just happened, what is. Wait, wait a minute. My mind is blown. What's going on here?

So what would be, what would I do for myself when I tell people I was overweight, I was underconfident, I used to stammer. My mom took me to, you know, she forced me to do a few speeches. My fear started breaking. I started being more confident. And today I'm India's, one of India's highest paid social media speakers.

Hold on, you. You went right past it. You went right past it. What was the moment when your mom forced you to get on stage and speak in public and you were scared to death you were going to die, right? But you didn't.

Right?

You didn't die. Maybe you didn't do your best. Certainly you're better now than you used to be. But something changed. That transformation occurred. I didn't die that day. I actually did a lot better than I thought. And I want to show you how to do the same thing.

Oh, my God. This is fantastic stuff.

I'll send you a bill.

Thank you. Please do, please do. And I will make sure that at least, if not the 126,500 people who we are very proud of, building this community over, our community just ramped up during the. I did 75 webinars in 75 days from 15th of March, the day lockdown was announced. In the last year, we've got this audience, you know, because everybody was captive. I did non stop webinars, 1, 2, 3 day sessions and people just kept coming in and today they're like, bring in international rock stars. And I'm always, always. We spend one Friday every week researching amazing human beings like yourselves and, and then keeping our fingers crossed and hoping that you'll say yes. And so, David, you did. Yes. So thank you so much. Yes. Sorry, you were saying something.

I did the same thing in 2019, before the pandemic. I wanted to up my game in terms of my look and my sound and my lighting and all that stuff. I did a new 5 minute to 10 minute video every.