The host uses Netflix's "The Push" documentary, which shows how someone can be manipulated into committing murder in 90 minutes, to argue that understanding persuasion psychology matters for pitching investors and closing deals. He recommends Oren Klaff's Flip the Script and emphasizes that successful negotiations hinge on emotional dynamics, not just numbers.
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Hey, welcome back to the show. So today we're going to talk about the power of persuasion. When pitching investors, pitching partners, pitching other people to join you. And I want to bring this up is last night me and my wife watched the most incredible show on— I think it was on Netflix. It's called The Push. If you've ever heard of this show, we heard it. We were recommended by a friend. They were telling us about it. And essentially what this show is, there's a guy, he's very good at social experiments. So he goes out and he'll set up these experiments where There's 20 actors and 1 person in a public place and all the people will turn and or do something and they want to see if the person will follow just to be socially compliant, to comply with other strangers around them. So he sets up all these experiments and all this stuff and in this show, this documentary, the premise is he is trying to in 90 minutes take a person from 0 to commit murder. In 90 minutes and to see if they'll comply with rules and it's called The Push because they're gonna push somebody off a ledge in 90 minutes and it's set up so it's, you know, the person that gets pushed off the ledge, there's a net below and they get caught but the person doing it thinks they committed murder and that's the premise of the show and so they start out and so I heard about the show, I was like this is right up my alley, I gotta watch this show, right? And so we start watching this show and he'll start the show out with these small little things to get them compliant. He'll say, hey, can you grab that bag for me? And it's not him, sorry, he's directing it, it's another actor. He's hired hundreds of actors that are all in this scene, this scenario to persuade the one person that isn't an actor to eventually commit murder and so they're all working in cahoots together and they set up this event and so the one guy, the one actor is, oh, could you help me grab that bag? And he gets them to do these small little acts and over time they do bigger and bigger things of compliance Where he wants to impress the guy he's with and all this stuff and eventually, it leads up to the moment and they've held all these lies, they've now entangled and people have seen them doing these wrong things and it's all pulled together where he's gonna push this guy off the ledge. This show is incredible. If you haven't watched it, go watch it tonight. It's called The Push, it's on Netflix. They do it to 4 people. 3 of the 4 actually push the guy off the ledge and they are crying after in tears like, I can't believe I did that, and then he comes in and says, hey, it was all fake like This is all a social experiment, come look over the edge. Like the guy, he's safe, he's in a net, you know, but they think they committed murder. So this is something I geek out on psychology. I love social experiments, stuff like that. Pretty cool show, and I honestly believe it's legit. The way they've set it up, I don't think it's faked or staged. I think this is a legit show, reality TV show kind of a thing. But the matter of the fact is, the reason I want to bring this up is that you can pretty much convince somebody of anything in 90 minutes with just the right tools, the right techniques. The right social conditions and pressure, you can essentially— he's proven you can convince someone of murder in 90 minutes and I've had a lot of people reach out to me like Bridger, I can't pitch investors or I can't find the partners don't want to join up with me, I just don't have a good job persuading people and now I don't condone, I don't think we should be using all of these social tricks or techniques, whatever you want to call them, to get someone to commit murder but there's some truth in that of we can sharpen the axe. There are things that me and you can do to be a better salesman essentially, to be better pitchmen or pitchwomen, to be able to get in a room and help someone warm up to the idea of partnering with us or taking a deal. If you look at most deals that happen in our industry, you'll see this whole game that's going on. Hey, we want your best offer and then we want your best and final offer and we got— oh my gosh, we got 2 or 3 bidders left. We want your best terms or we— this whole negotiation process is all a game and a lot of it is not just Zeros and ones. It comes down to emotion. We're as humans, we're all emotional beings, and the better we can understand the psychology behind ourselves and others, the better we can persuade people to take a deal at 10% discount or to buy our deal at a 10% premium, right, or to have partners come in and join us. Some people naturally have this gift of charisma or persuasion, whatever you want to call it, natural sales gene, and some people really have to work on it, and that's something I've been thinking about a lot lately is I need to sharpen the axe. This is something I need to get better at. And one book I'll tell you that's incredible at teaching this, especially for how to raise money, is Flip the Script by Oren Klaff. It's a yellow book. If you want to write that down, Flip the Script, Oren Klaff. I've mentioned this before in this podcast. It is incredible, this book, on how he goes out and will pitch people. He's a professional pitchman. They will fly him to Europe or to Asia or to California, wherever, to do professional pitches. To get people to land $20, $30, $50 million deals for their company and they pay him a premium just because he is so good at persuading people to do something they already want to do but just helping them through. I think true salesmanship isn't pulling, dragging a person into a sale, it is convincing people or persuading people to do something they already want to do. I think that's true salesman is just— is you're a guide, you're essentially a consultant, you're helping consult the person on what's the best course of action for their future, and sometimes people just need someone to walk them through it, and that's what a salesman's there for. And so that book is incredible, Flip the Script. I think just in general, we can do better when pitching, when finding partners and investors. We can always sharpen the axe. Don't let yourself off and just say, I don't have the sales gene. I'm just not naturally good at that. I can't persuade people. If he can convince somebody to go from zero to murder in 90 minutes, I think both of us and you can do a lot better on how you pitch, how you present things, how you present a deal or a closing. It's, man, it's impressive. It's 1 hour long. I mean, it's pretty cool. Flip the Script is the book that I highly recommend. I'm actually going to try to get Oren Klaff on this podcast, by the way. I'm going to reach out to him, see if he's available. That would be amazing to have him come on. So anyways, love you guys and I will see you on the next episode. Peace. Bye. Bye.
