The “Talent Stack” Strategy

Welcome to Capability Amplifier, the show for business owners and entrepreneurs who want high performance upgrades for their brains, bodies and bank accounts.

Hi, this is Dan Sullivan and I'm here with Mike Tanix and this is our next episode of Capability Amplifier. And just to talk to you that over the last seven months, we've been going through the pandemic, we've been going through the lockdown, but this is one of the greatest opportunities in your lifetime, my lifetime, Mike's lifetime, to actually amplify your capabilities with a concept called Talent Stack.

All right, so there's a whole bunch of ways of thinking about this, but I'm going to give you a real life one. But it'll require a little bit of pre framing first. And maybe to cut to the chase is imagine if you had the ability to stack value in a way or package it. So you give your customer, your client, what feels like to them, more choices. But in fact, what you're doing at the same time is putting them inside a container or a box so they only can choose you. Okay, so that's part of this. The other way, it's a way of thinking about your talents through the perspective of how do you take value, put it in a container or a package and then label it and position it so you can charge 10 times more for what you're doing by just changing the way your prospect thinks, again, you're putting them inside of a container. So here's the backstory. I worked with a client this past week, really fascinating guy who designs supplement ingredients. Okay. So part of what he does is if you want more energy, he can help with that. And he creates proprietary patented ingredients as well. Which in that world, if you get someone to use your ingredient, you get paid royalties, you get paid for the materials themselves. There's multiple ways of getting paid and the volume that can happen. In his case, his products have been in billions of dollars of different products and services. So I'm not going to mention his name right now. But he came to our team with a unique problem. One of them is he was doing too much stuff, spread too thin, and literally driving himself crazy. He makes plenty of money. That isn't his problem. But it took a little while to really figure out what he really, truly wanted. So what? The story that I want to share with you today, Dan, and with everyone else is how to make someone's dream come true by being able to create stacks of value that have higher perceived value than you could ever imagine before. And then hopefully we'll just explore and wonder our way through this and invent crazy, chaotic stuff in the meantime. So the net net here is after talking to him for a little while and trying to figure out, like, what's going on and what do you want? What do you need? I always ask people, what is the feeling or emotion you want to experience today and all the time, what's most important to you? Now, in this particular case, he brought his wife with him as well. And I asked her because she's very integral. And like most entrepreneurs, if the spouse isn't active, they certainly can steer the boats. And there's always a certain amount of conflict that exists inside every entrepreneurial relationship. Someone's needs or feelings or word isn't getting fulfilled. So we always do this little exercise to get in a mindset. And then I ask the word. Now, for him, his word that he wanted more than anything was play. Okay? Hers was simplicity. And clearly when people choose their words, they're not getting what they really want. My word is elegance and simplicity. I always like elegant. That's one of my favorite words. So I'll cut to the chase and tell you what wound up happening. That wasn't revealed immediately, but later on. But this guy has been scheduled to be on the Joe Rogan podcast. So for anyone who isn't familiar with the size of this guy's platform, right now he's got about 10 million subscribers on YouTube, hundreds of millions of downloads. It's in the top, usually 3 of all podcasts in the world right now.

And he's great. He's great. I can kind of savor him for hours at a time. There's this famous quote by Sam Goldwyn, who's the G in MGM in Hollywood. And he said, you know, in Hollywood, the most important skill is sincerity. That once you can fake that, you.

Can get away with anything.

But I think with Joe Rogan, it's real. I think he's just sincerely interested in having his guests actually show themselves off at their best. And it's across the spectrum. I mean, politically, culturally, philosophically, he's across the spectrum, but he's just a darn, darn good podcast interviewer.

Yes. And he's changed the game. And talking about this I think is.

Valuable because I'm really saying deal changed the game with Shopify.

Spotify. Spotify, yeah, Spotify.

Not Shopify. Spotify.

Yes.

Together we're always right, Mike.

Yeah, exactly.

I was going in the right direction, but I was taking a right hand turn. It should have been a left hand turn.

We know the logo was green. Either way. And here's something else that I love about Joe is he truly does make it look easy. I don't think Howard Stern makes it look easy because Howard Stern is also a phenomenally talented interviewer. But Howard has an agenda. He still can't separate himself from his old agenda of being a shock jock and asking questions and pulling stuff out of people that they simply wouldn't give up without him being clever about how he angles things. With Joe, there isn't an agenda. And he has perfected the long format interview in ways no one else has. And he just did Kanye west, for example, which I gotta tell you, that guy is bat shite crazy. He's interesting, but he's running for president, and this was his conversation, and Joe wanted to say, hey, look, here's a guy who's. He's going to present himself, and you walk into it going, no way. And you still walk away going, no way. But he did it in a very elegant way. And I think that's what's important, is he can talk to hardcore scientists, crazy comedians, crazy celebs, and like you say, pull out the very best. I think the evolution of broadcasting, interviewing, podcasting, and content, Hollywood content in general, is being advanced by the stuff he's doing. Not to mention some of his visions he has for comedy in Texas.

The other thing, Mike, you know, I've taken a lot of my cues from you on this. That the biggest thing that people. And I'm just talking about zoom here, the biggest mistake, you think it's a broadcast medium. It's not a broadcast medium. It's an interactive, creative medium. And to the degree that as a watcher, you're acting like you're watching television, you come off badly. And if you think that you're a presenter, like you're on television, you come off badly. If you don't make it interactive and organic and kind of back and forth creativity, it doesn't work for you. And I, I have to tell you, I've got a line. And I said, you know, if you love Zoom, zoom loves you. If you don't like Zoom, zoom doesn't like you. However you are with the medium, it will treat you that way. It'll show you up that way. But Joe really loves the medium. You can tell he really loves the medium. He loves, you know, he loves the environment that he creates. It looks like he's in his basement. You know, I mean, maybe that's where he started. You know, it's kind of utilitarian setting. He treats people respectfully.

He does. I've spent an enormous amount of time studying him. And I'll give you an example of how this study turned into what, for me is a transformational way of thinking that I had never processed before in this format. So here's what wound up happening. So client says to me, I'm gonna be on Joe Rogan. And I'm like, holy crap. You understand that this will change your life forever? And he said, I really want to know what I should do. And I said, well, it just so happens I've fantasized about being on the Joe Rogan podcast myself many times, and I know quite a few people who have been on it. I'm at least a person away, and I know some comedians who are friends with Joe. But Joe's a guy who's very specific, and he doesn't want more friends in his life. He wants great guests. But you've really got to earn your way into his world. And some of that has to do with having shared experiences, shared relationships, and shared values. So those are three big things that are necessary at first. And so I was sitting with a whiteboard and writing this stuff out. And then what I did with the client, and I already had an agenda. I knew what I wanted to do with him, but I wanted him to arrive at my conclusion his own way. So what I said, we're gonna do right now is we're gonna watch some of the best episodes that have something to do with personal development, personal growth, food, nutrition, that sort of thing. And what are also some of the highest rated, highest viewed episodes. And I said, you can just watch this, and anytime you see something pop up that you think is significant, just shout it out and I'll document it. In the meantime, I filled up white page after white page about what was going on psychologically throughout the interview. That would captivate the audience, but also keep high degree of engagement what was happening. So after doing that, you know, we collaborated and I circled a few key things, and I said, I'm going to share with you some ideas, and I'm going to make introductions to make your appearance perfect and super ultra unique. And one thing that happens on Joe's podcast with a great guest is they come in with props and gifts. There's a friend of mine who I've actually introduced to the world of coach. His name's John Rulin. He calls himself a giftologist, or he has a book called Giftology. And I said, the first thing we're going to do for Joe is we're going to order Him a custom set of knives. So each knife is going to have a really interesting, unique quote that Joe has said on it. Because Joe's a hunter and he eats his own meat that he shoots himself. Elk, in his case. That's is one of his big ones. So one big idea is if you go in, this is a shared experience, shared value, and also something that really registers for him on. I would go so far as to say hunting for him is a spiritual experience.

Well, the other thing is you've done some homework on who it is that you're going to be in teamwork with. You've done some homework, you know, I mean, shows interest.

Exactly, exactly. So that was one which is a unique gift, but then there's a deeper, deeper, more significant concept, and it's an artifact. So before I go to what it was specifically with him, there was one guy who's a paleontologist who went on Joe's show not long ago and he showed up and he said, well, I brought a gift for you. And I actually didn't watch this episode on YouTube. I listened to it, but it was just, you know, my mind painted the picture. And he said, what is this? And he goes, well, it kind of looks like it could be a saber toothed tiger bone or something. Something, something. Well, he's like, okay, getting there, getting there. It ended up being a walrus penis bone, prehistoric one. And of course, well, it certainly is unique and it certainly appeals to the poopy potty humor that runs on the program. And as a paleontologist, it was significant.

Sure.

So being able to give someone a meaningful artifact is also. So I said, here's the next thing that you're going to do with Joe. And if you watch a YouTube special with Joe, his table is filled with gadgets and statues and things, you know, that have meaning to him. So one of the things that John does is he has custom mugs made that are artifacts. So it'll have symbology on there. So we wrote down everything that I think is significant. So the Joe Rogan kind of psychedelic face is on one side of the mug. On the other side will be a microphone. Another one will be the heads of his top five most viewed and best friends comedy friends that'll be on the mug. Also a symbol of hunting. So it'll be an elk head. And then also very likely something that might have something to do with the psychedelic world because he often talks about psychedelics. And we're still working on a couple of the other things. So the whole idea behind this artifact, what John has found in the past is that people who might have a fire happening in their home will go and grab that mug before they'll grab personal belongings. So if you've got something embedded and think about it. I learned this lesson years ago from a friend of mine named Merlin Quiggle. Short story was, I call him up, what are you doing? He says, I'm buying Rolex watches to give away to some friends. And I'm like, holy cow, how much is that costing you? He's like, about 12 grand a piece. I said, why are you giving these away? And he says, these people have been responsible for giving me work for the past 20 years. So selflessly, it's an acknowledgement, recognition, and a thank you. Selfishly, who do you think they're going to think of every time they check the time? So a mug, for example, is something you use all the time. But now I'm going to get to the stack and the stack is this. So this guy is in the business of creating different kinds of supplements, nutritionals, products that you consume. Like he's got a replacement for caffeine, for example. That doesn't give you the jitters, that absorbs better. And caffeine is more than a $250 billion a year industry by itself. You get a fraction of that, you're wealthy beyond all recognition. So that, that's an example. So what we designed were a whole bunch of stacks that are good for, you know, like, let's say you have a longevity stack, you might have a gamer stack. So we came up with a few that are meaningful to Joe. He's going to walk in with a box that has super fascinating containers, and in there are stacks designed for Joe that aren't available anywhere else. So what we tickle Joe with and the audience with is exclusivity. Something that is uniquely engineered for his life and his lifestyle. And we wait for Joe to say, what are those things? Before he pulls them out. So it naturally shows off this guy's talent, his skill set, his world. It creates a deep bond and a connection with Joe, and it's hyper personalized and packaged in a way that will be meaningful as well. And done in a way which is really important to this guy is he's not there for the money, he's not there for the fame. He truly has a goal to improve the quality of mankind and to develop a relationship with Joe that is not manipulative or yucky. He wants to be asked back someday, right?

Yeah.

And Joe's good at sniffing A fraud. And this guy's really solid. So I'm gonna stop there because I've been yapping this whole time, but I'm let you throw in whatever. And then there's a few more lessons about using stacks because it's a metaphor, it's a symbol for something much bigger.

Yeah.

Well, first of all, your friend, the person that you work with, is not trying to be someone. He's already someone. And, you know, has networks that span the planet of people who are in the supplement world, people who are in the health world. One of the things, it's just that these are, in a certain sense, he's probably as big a deal in his world as Joe Rogan is in his world.

To a degree. Yeah. I mean, he's one of these guys who no one knows except the people need to know.

Well, he's a backstage genius and Joe Rogan is a front stage genius. But in their own realms, they're as good at what they do probably as each other. The whole question is, how do you create a resonance between these two individuals? And one of them has to take the initiative. I'm sure Joe Rogan has talent scouts now, you know, with his empire, and they're looking for interesting people to bring in. That is true, but the talent scouts aren't going to find more than a half of 1% of the really interesting people that might be very, very good. And to a certain extent, you have to take the initiative to be noticed and you have to go out of your way to do something special. You know, he does homework. You know, you find out what the person likes and everything like that. And the other thing is that what do you get for the person who can buy anything, can buy anything, can buy anything. And that's always the question of gift giving. You know, it was very interesting. My team won Christmas because they give Babs a present. They give me a present and they gave me the complete big version of the Oxford English dictionary, which is 20 books this thick. And I love it because it's not really a dictionary as you would find on Google or on anything. It's actually a history of words. So you find a word and it will give you the complete history of that word, where it was first used, what other languages does the word come from, how it was used, how the meaning has changed. So I'll go in there and I'll just look up a word and I'll spend an hour. Because everybody knows I'm passionate about history in almost any kind of history. You know, I'm just interested where things come from, you know, and to give you an idea, there's two volumes just on the letter S. There's just a lot of words that start with S. Each book is about this thick, you know, and it's continually updated. It's a paper product, and they still produce it. You know, they update it, and they include two or three hundred new words every year that come along. And these are now words because of usage. They're now words. You know, it's just really fascinating, but it really touched me. And every time I go into the basement, I see those. The Oxford English Dictionary. And I get this warm feeling about my. My team, because it really touched a nerve. Here's the thing. I would never buy this for myself, but now it's so dear to me that I would make sure that it goes wherever I go. So there's an emotional hitting the center about, you know, the approach that you're talking about here. But it's a series of things. You stack them. It isn't just one thing. You know, it's his career, it's his interests, it's, you know, who he is as a person. You're stacking a whole lot of values right there.

Yes. And here's where I'm going to get into some of the definitions of stacks for a moment, because one stack, what you just talked about, is a bonding stack, okay? That was a gift for the person who can buy anything and may have everything. The notion of creating an artifact, okay, which is art. Now, again, it can't be about you, because I've been given art before, and it was clearly about the artist, and their art sucked. Okay? Clearly, nothing about me was embedded in there. And it's sort of like that thing didn't make it on the plane. So that'll be an important thing. So bonding. And then there's artifact, another one, which is the story stack. And that is something I've been really paying a lot of attention to. And when I'm helping people develop their sales stories, I always say, no one argues with the story, but they'll argue with stats. They'll argue all day long, and they'll say, someone's got an agenda or whose data did this come from? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No one's gonna argue with stats or with the story. So I think it's. If you embed the right kind of stories. Now, in this particular case, going back to the stack. So the notion of the stack was I needed to find a way to package his talent, his intentions, his Greatest stories inside the product, and then turn that into something meaningful to the audience. Now, this is some mental gymnastics that you have to go through, and it does require some thinking and some studying, but there is a discipline to get there. In one of our very first episodes, Dan, you and I talked about the Civitas moment, which is the one word offer when Julius Caesar stood up and shouted one word and won the audience over and prevented a war in Rome. Our goal is always, what's the shortest story you need to say for someone to raise their hand and say, I've been looking for someone just like you. And that's a powerful notion. But what's a powerful stack of stories of artifacts and bonding that can happen that make you personally memorable, your brand memorable, and something that they think of you whenever they have a problem? You are top of mind. And to become a legend is the ultimate stack. And that, again, is worth spending some brain cycles on. And giving it is to have legendary status in your audience's mind. So that's where some of the stacking came from. But again, I'm curious what your take on it is now and. And how else it can be used, because I have one other big idea.

You know, if I'm looking at my.

Own interest in this, and I have some people that I admire immensely, and one of the things that counts for a lot in my stack is consistency and longevity, you know? Yeah, yeah, there's a focus.

So, you know, and maybe other people.

Have different criteria of what you would consider a legend. For example, we were having a conversation one night about who would you say are. If you had to take American popular culture from the 20th century and you had to narrow it down to four individuals, who would you choose? And we thought about it, and everybody talked about it. It was kind of interesting because I gave my four, but I said, if I could get a dream concert, none of the four would be at the dream concert. I'd have two other people. So my four for who I thought. You know, I said, look, I said, this is everybody's take on it, so I'm just giving you my take. But I said, I think Frank Sinatra is one of them. I think Judy Garland is the second one. I think Fred Astaire is a third one, and I think Louis Armstrong is a fourth one. But the one thing they all have in place is an enormous longevity and consistency. At a minimum, it was like 40 years. They were stars for 40 years, and they had a certain style, they had a certain way of presenting themselves, you know, and everything like that. So I said, that would be mine. And then I got to the point. But if I was offered my dream concert, it wouldn't be any of those. It would actually be on stage together. Roy Orbison and Patsy Clang. That would be my dream concert. Oh, yeah. Roy Orbison and Patsy Clang going back and forth and sometimes singing together and everything. I said that would be my dream concert, you know, because they never did. They never did. And they were a little out of whack with each other time wise. So, you know, I said Roy Orbison. You know, I think it was Elvis Presley who said about Roy Orbison, he says, you know, you have a feeling that everything that you've done, Roy could sing it as well or better, but you couldn't sing anything that he could sing. Yeah.

I went down a giant Roy Orbison rabbit hole years ago. I listened to him nonstop for probably seven months. I went through a variety of artists.

And is like Brian Wilson. Yeah. Who listened to be my baby 10,000 times, then went officially crazy after doing that. He couldn't get over Phil Spector's wall of sound with the Be My Baby, you know. But Roy Harvest, you know, when he was with the Traveling.

Yes.

Everybody said he's almost like a mystical character. I mean, he's just a really nice person, but you get a feeling that he's got a foot in another world that you don't have.

I agree. Yeah. He pierced the membrane between the divine and the physical worlds and oscillated between the two like a great monk would.

Yeah, he's kind of like his own genre, you know, Katie Lange, who did a duet album with him, she said he could start an octave below me and he could finish an octave above me. She said he had to kind of tone down a little bit to make me useful.

Yeah. So many great artists talk about how so and so sucked the air out of the room. And you and I have spent time talking about that. I'm.

But bring it back.

Yeah, let's bring her back.

Yeah, let's do it.

Value stack. But what I'm saying is that it's natural for human beings to stack things. Unless you're kind of a boring one trick pony type of thinker or something. You just have one thing that you talk about, you know. But I think we combine a lot of things and each thing that we put in an exterior stack has a resonance with something inside of ourselves.

Yeah.

I think, you know, that's kind of the strategy for the person going out. I mean, he's Already going to be on the Joe Rogan Show. That's already an achievement. But the question is, does it go any further than that?

Is the question.

Right.

So this was years ago when I worked with Ariel Ford, who is a master publicist. She represented Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, Neil Donald Walsh, a bunch of people. Louise Hay from Hay House, the founder of Hay House and many others. One of the reasons she left the industry, she said, I got tired of dealing with these authors who thought they were the next big thing. They had mortgaged their entire worlds. They, their house. Everything was on the line. They're going to be on Oprah. And they had no back end. So they showed up. They're super popular. There's nothing to buy except for the book. They fizzled out and were broke and never recovered from it mentally. And she says, I hated telling people that they were already screwed or they didn't have what it takes. And so in his case, we have built a back end. Now, some of it is he's got a book coming out and all that. But getting back to here's the next important thing. So, again, just reviewing the basic stack, what your goal is, is to have multiple choices, design solutions. Each solution has a story and appeals to an aspiration, a transformation that that client, that customer you're targeting, truly wants. As you would say, who do you want to be a hero to? And what is the journey? What's the hero's journey? They want to be on as the star in their own movie, you know, with you or your product as their guide. That's sort of the Joseph Campbell way of thinking about things. And if you have a stack of them, you have multiple choices. In this case, it's like the concentration stack of the longevity stack, whatever, but with a story behind it that feels as though it were composed for Joe. Again, we created a few stacks that, just for the sake of this, I can't mention them. I'm going to wait for the episode to come up. But they're very unique to Jo. And so here's the last part, the thing to think about, which is what leverage actually is. And oftentimes we think of like, I want leverage. I want to be able to replicate this. And what people fail to think about is the size of the fulcrum, okay? Not just the length of the lever, it's how high can you go? And that is the missing component here. So that has to do with the reusability, the depth in this particular case, something that can work beyond the Joe Rogan Show. So he's going to be on Good Morning America. He's going to be on a whole bunch of shows. It's an idea that the story extends and literally can become the platform. So in his particular case, the stacks are the book, the stacks are the speech, the stacks are his identity. And his big fulcrum has to do with the fact that he's actually partnered with a manufacturer that creates all this stuff. So his platform becomes a mechanism for elevating the status of the manufacturer and for bringing in billions of dollars of potential product sales. So if I were gonna do one last thing, which is tie it to our previous episode, the who, not How. Something to think about is if you could create the right collaborative partnership with someone that could benefit from your platform stack, who might that be and where could you provide so much value that that part of who you are is worth 100 or a thousand times? Because this literally is a multi, multi billion dollar opportunity. It could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars over the long haul just. Just by thinking and changing the thinking differently.

Yeah, I mean, I've thought about that.

You know, I have probably the ideal connector in Joe Polish. Cause if I pointed out anyone like that, Joe would do it. But I'm thinking about it from a different angle, and I just want to include this. So in the last quarter, I introduced an idea called Intellectual Shortcut. You know, and that was in my three levels that you have three levels of value creation in. The first one is intellectual shortcuts for people at a C level and then a B level and then an A level. And so where my mind is going with this is I'm taking people's experience. And I said, the problem with your experience is that other people take it more seriously than you do. I said, I talk to you and I listen to you for 30 minutes, and I come up with seven or eight really neat things you've done that I think are really important, but you don't think they're important. And I said, you create intellectual shortcuts. So if you think of a stack that there's a stack of intellectual shortcuts you make. And this is unique, you created it because of who you are solving a problem for someone else. And you created something new, and then.

You put it on the pile, and.

Then you did it again, and you put it on the pile. But you never look at the piles. You never go over and say, hey, this is really neat. I'll give you an idea. One of our Free Zone clients, he's created a fund that is very Flexible in a way that other funds really, really aren't. And it's a guaranteed fund, so there's a 7% guarantee to it. And he calls it my flexi fund. He says, it's my flexi fund approach. I said to him, what is that? And then he told the story. And I said, so to link up, what I'm bringing in here is an extra thing, is that until you have an intellectual shortcut, you don't have a story. You don't have a story because people will say, well, that sounds interesting. What's that? And then you tell them the story. But if you went in and told the story, they would say, next. You know, like that stories have to have a catcher oral how, not how. People say, well, who? Not how. What's that? And then I tell the story. Or free focus and buffer days. And they say, well, how's that work? And then I tell a story. So what I'm saying is that the Free Zone people, they're not trading intellectual shortcuts. So I want each person to get a stack of 10 intellectual shortcuts. And when you come to Free Zone, you share your intellectual shortcuts. And it's like baseball cards. I've got a Babe Ruth here, but I'm missing a Ty Cobb. Can you give me a tie? I've got two Babe Ruths. I've got young Babe Ruth, I got older Babe Ruth.

I'm willing to trade one of them.

For a Ty Cobb. And the thing is that right now we have about 50 in the program. We have 50 stacks of 10 intellectual shortcuts. And when you come to a Free Zone meeting, they do it. And eventually it'll be 10,000 free zoners. And they're all trading their intellectual shortcuts. And where's the $15 trillion come. I said, I don't know. 15 trillion shortcuts. I really love what you're doing here.

Because you can't make up something about Joe Rogan and think it's going to impress him. Right. It better ring home or you're out of there. I mean, that's the last time you'll ever be on Joe Rogan. If he smells any contrivance, you're out of there, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, it has to be an invitation. I think he's a real good judge of human nature, you know, I think that's what makes him such a good interviewer, is that he can be in the other person's seat and actually see through the other person's eyes of the experience. You know, and I think that's what makes a really great interviewer, is that they can get out of themselves, go over to the other person and then ask questions about the experience that the person's actually recounting or talking about.

Yes. And I would say here's the other beautiful thing, which is a great challenge.

Which he, I mean, he still has to be a good guest. He can have all the gifts in the world, but if he's not a good guest, you know, if he doesn't show in being a guest the legitimacy of his gifts, then he.

Well, we did a bunch of mock interviews. So that was part of what I did, is I media trained him, we practiced, we tested this out and it felt good.

Yeah.

And one thing that I, I'd regard as one of my best skills is I know how to become the mind of the audience or the individual and inhabit multiple brains simultaneously. But here's what I was going to say that I think is really, really interesting about Joe that I really love. And he's always been this way, but more so now he doesn't know, need anything from anyone. Okay. Which makes him so impervious. However, the promise that you could come in and give him a couple things that he wants more of which is more consciousness, more time, and to be better at everything he does, that is a true capability amplifier. And so I think when you can give someone more of what they already are, more, more of what they already want to be and make that so brain dead simple to understand, that is where the stack concept really works. I'll continue to build the framework for this so I can have a simple exercise we can explore deeper.

I mean, you're going back to the. Communication is a Latin word and it means common ground. That you've established common ground and he's establishing common ground.

I have my own thoughts on the election and I have my own thoughts. And I said, you know why I think that the establishment, they're afraid of him? Because I think that Donald Trump has spent more time on construction sites than the entire Democratic leadership put together. And he sat there for hours talking to blue collar workers. And he speaks working class. He's got an ear for working class. Do they care about his policies? No, they, I mean, I mean, some people do, you know, but they're in the rare. But most people say he kind of gets me, you know, he kind of gets me or he doesn't get me, you know, I mean, that's the whole thing. And I think that the number one thing for communication is the feeling that the other person gets you, you know, just. There's just something about him. I just. I feel that they kind of know who I am.

Yeah, no, I. I get it. I'd like that to be another episode altogether. I'd love to weave that.

You know, it's like Napoleon. You know, if you look at his history, it's kind of inexplicable. He was from Corsica, which was barely a part of France. He was 5 foot 3. He didn't have any family that he came from or anything like that. And he became the emperor. I mean, he was a big deal, really big deal. But he had an imperial guard of roughly about a thousand, and they were all big. Like, he was five foot three. And one of the traits that he picked them for is for tallness. But he knew each of their names. And he'd walk up and down the line and say, jean Pierre, what's going on today? How's your daughter? You know? And he'd spend an hour going through the lines, and he would know stories about where they came from and down. You died for a guy like that.

Yeah, I know. Again, this will open up a deeper hole that we don't need to go into right now. But Bill Clinton was known to be very similar, too. He wouldn't have someone whispering in his ear. He remembered details about people and had. That sucked the wind out of the room. Charisma. And he remembered every little minutia detail about people and just on command. And that is an unbelievable.

I think he was a natural at it. I don't think he necessarily. Yeah, yeah, totally. Said, you know, if I'm going to be president someday, I got to have this skill. I think it was just a skill that he had. You didn't have to do homework to get good at that skill. You had to do people work, you know, like, you actually had to be interested in people. You know, I saw an interview once with Newt Gingrich, and Newt Gingrich was a powerful force. Right at the time, Clinton was. From a congressional standpoint, he's one of the more significant just in terms of what happened when he was speaker of the House. And one day he just got a call and he says, the President's flying to Los Angeles, and he just wonder if you'd like to come along for the trip and we could talk about things. And he said, when I got to Los Angeles, I didn't walk down the stairway. I just floated. I floated on the air. After being with Bill Clinton for three or four hours, he Says, oh, God. And he says, I walked up the stuff, hating the guy, and he says, I walked out. And I says, oh, what a marvelous experience. I wonder if I'll ever have another experience like that, you know, because he just said that, you know, something new every day. I just think about how important you are, you know, and, you know, we're kind of. Sometimes we're at loggerheads here, but the work that you're doing right now is really important, you know?

Right.

I remember the first time I worked with Tony Robbins, the first time I saw him, and then the first time I worked with him. That kind of charisma. I call it proximity, personalities. Because you're the most important person in the world to that person while you're there.

Yeah.

And then while you're not. I mean, they don't have the mechanism to support that level of intimacy in any other way. Usually their lives, their personal lives are in shambles because they're spouses despise them for giving themselves away to others, and so do their children. And if, you know the wreckage in the streets that lie behind, you know, that is precisely what goes on. But, yeah, that's.

Yeah. Uniquely talented and uniquely flawed.

Yes, totally. It just goes back to the packaging and maintaining the illusion of which one is actually the real one.

Well, it's really interesting, and you've experienced this, and I have, but it's what I would call the celebrity thing, that if people haven't met you, but they've known about you and heard about you for the longest time, or they've read books or they've watched videos, they build up in their minds a much larger creature than you can possibly live up to. I was telling the staff, I said, you know, it's not something that I aspire to, but the longer we go, the more I become, you know, when people meet me for the first time, I mean, I've been out there for 30, 40 years, and I said, they will make a celebrity out of me. But I said, here at Coach, you can't do that. If you're a team member, you can't do that. I'm not a celebrity. I'm a team member with specialized skills. I have some specialized skills. You have some specialized skills, and what we're doing is putting them together. So I just want you to know that it's not the way I see myself, but I realize how things work in the world, you know, And I think it's natural, you know, that you make the person bigger in your imagination before you have any Reality to actually check out what you're thinking is that. So it's an interesting thing, and it'll become more so now that we have virtual multipliers. True, though. I mean, Dean Jackson was telling me about these two young women who are. I think they may be barely out of their teens, they're influencers. And one of them has 90 million people who follow her daily. Another one's in the 60 millions, you know, and they can just say, well, you know, I tried out this new thing and I really love it. And whatever it is, the sales go off the chart. So it's going to be interesting watching them, because they better just accept that as a really, really interesting capability. And don't start believing that, you know, in the digital world, somebody has to be the number one person. I mean, in any new development, there's going to be one person. Who's the number one person? Why are they number one person? It's because there had to be a number one person. And guess what? You're in like Joe Rogan in podcasts. There had to be somebody who was the first podcaster to get $100 million contract. Why him? Because there had to be a first one and he happened to be it. And you got to accept that with a little bit of gratitude.

Yeah. Fame and celebrity are endlessly fascinating, which I'll leave you with.

They're also crazy making, you know, they're crazy.

Making chaos is a necessary component of it. No question about it.

Crazy making famous, crazy. Making wealth is craz crazy. Making power is crazy making, you know, we got all these things that make us crazy. How do you maintain connection with reality when you have these magnified. I mean, we're selling this on our podcast here. Mike, what happens if you get really amplified?

Well, here's something I want to pose as an episode that we'll do in a future episode, which is the notion of leadership crazy and celebrity. Because if you look at, like, look at the leader of Brazil, look at Boris Johnson in the uk, look at our president, you can go around the world right now.

Look at our Prime Minister.

I don't find him particularly nuts or off the wall or out there, but I'm just talking about, like, truly batshite crazy off their gourds. And then I have a couple things for you to just explore. One of them is the Kim Kardashian interview with David Letterman. I don't know if you watch My next guest needs Nick. No introduction. It's a fascinating show on Netflix. David is a very, very good Interviewer. It's excellent. And he interviews Kim Kardashian, which I would have normally not watched, but someone said, I got to check it out. And after I watched it, I was like, damn, that was good. Joe Rogan, of course, interviewed Kanye West. Fascinating as all hell. And then I think Dave Chappelle is probably not probably. I think he's the best comedian alive right now. He has a unique way of seeing the world and communicating it and doing it unapologetically. He's an exquisite wordsmith, and how he holds his energy, how he moves, everything he does is extraordinarily well planned as well.

I think the other thing, he's got a unique seam that he's created himself, you know, where you have political correctness. He just seems to have worked out his own private highway down the middle of all this stuff, and he'll even make jokes about that thing. He'll even make jokes about political correctness. You know, the thing is, people can only make you feel guilty if you are guilty.

Yes, yes.

And we're just for that.

Oh, yeah, I'm going to write that one down.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the whole. The point is, all they're doing is saying, we know how you look at yourself. You know, you feel guilty. And we're just saying, you know, but what if you don't feel guilty? And I'll have an explanation of the buttons that Trump knows about that the left doesn't know that he's pushing. He's pushing some buttons, and he knows he can blow their heads off anytime he wants. He can blow their heads off, and they don't know what it is. And it has to do with that. People who are morally righteous don't have a sense of humor.

Yes. And that goes on both sides. No question about it. But he's definitely learned the activator. And I've always said, you know, it's clear I don't have a dog in this hunt, so to speak. I find all parties insanely repulsive. But back to the Dave Chappelle. What I really love about him is he knows how to craft an exquisite narrative, and if you haven't watched Sticks and Stones, pick it up. Because one of the first things he does, his reflection of social media and cancel culture, is exquisitely genius. And how he builds up his jokes. And if you really spend some time thinking about his thinking. I've studied him for years and years, and now, to me, it's a science. I just love his. His skill set. And he is about as rare of a bird as they come on this planet these days. So. Well, I'll tell you what, I love this episode.

This was great. This was great. And I think the stack thing, you know, I think has a lot of what I would say transferability to all sorts of different situations.

I'll see if I can't turn it into a worksheet or an exercise that you can share, Dan, because it definitely.

Well, one thing that I'm doing, you might be interested and I've just started it and I'll report on it as we go along. I'm asking, I got about 15 team members that every month we would be involved in some sort of project of one kind or another in the company. And I'm saying, would you tell me.

The three things that you know you can absolutely count on me for? So I just got the first one in and it's from the person who runs the entire video operation. Videos and suv. Yeah. You know, and we've worked together for five or six years and she's really gotten very masterful at what she's doing. And I said I appreciate it, you know, three little paragraphs of what I know I can always count on you for being. And then I'm going to get 15 people and I'm going to see where the Venn diagram is in the middle between all of them. And I said this is really good to know because not what am I going to do but what are they counting on me to be? And what it does is it. It's not about me, but I'm being counted on for something and you know, I'm committing for another 25 years or 24 years. And I said this would be a very stabilizing piece of knowledge when I get the collected.

Yeah, well, that's the beauty of having some longevity, having a team and being able to have that level of trust and consistency.

Right.

And one of the things that you do so well is you're always future focused, not past focused and not fault focused. Which someone would say, well, what should I work on? Or what should I be like? That's not your vocabulary and that's an unusual mindset and point of view in my opinion. Anyway, it's like so yeah, I think if you combine the Venn diagram of what you know and believe and want your unique ability and your superpower to be along with those things, well, how's it showing up?

In other words, you know, over a six year period, what do you know that you can count on me for? You know, it's not that I was trying to impress you with these things because probably in every case, there's probably a hundred different experiences or anything. But what do you know that, you know, Dan will show up and do a good job on these. He'll always show up. And I think it's useful because it's how it's seen through the eyes of other people. But it's not random people. As you said, in our company, we have 70 people who have been with us for more than 10 years. And I've got 20 who are into their 20 years now. And Shannon and one other person will be 30 years next year.

Right.

And there's an institutional wisdom that can't be instantly created. There's that which can be written down, how we operate, but there's another level of wisdom. Yeah. But, you know, if it's an emergency and things have to happen fast, you know, flipping from in person to virtual. In about 10 days, we made the shift both backstage and front stage. And I think you couldn't have done it with people who are with you for six months, you know?

Right, Yep. Yeah, no doubt about it.

Yeah. So anyway, these are interesting, you know, it's endless. It's endless.

Yeah. What never ceases to amaze me is the incredible complexity of the universe. And that's what makes it so fascinating to be here. So.

And we created it. You know, we created the universe.

Totally.

You know that.

I do, I do. I've really settled into that because we.

Gave a name to it. We called it the universe didn't exist. It was just a bunch of stuff before that. And then one day somebody comes up with world universe, and there it is. You know, it's first skill in the Bible, naming things.

Yep, I am. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you.

That's great. Let's bring the IM to the launch pad here. This has been capability amplifier. And if you've enjoyed this, please make sure you share it with someone you know and like it. Comment? Visit capabilityamplifier.com Leave Dan and I a message. And Dan, what would you like to say as we sail the ship home?

You know, the big thing here, the different ways that this new concept, which I don't know how long it's been around, but the idea of stacking things, that it's the overall power of the stack, it isn't the individual significance of any one of the pieces, it's how they all together. And I think that this is not.

A subject that would have been discussed before the technological capabilities abilities of the last 20 years grew up. I think that this is the digital universe concept of stacking things, because you can modularize and segment things so easily on digital. It's a fascinating concept. I think both of us have really interesting stacks. A fascinating idea. All right.

I'm curious how your brain processes it between now and the next time. And in the meantime, if you got big ideas that you want Dan and I to ruminate about, roll around with, head on over to Capability Amplifier. Leave us a message and we'll definitely talk about talking about it. So we'll let you go. Thanks so much for being here with us and see you in the next episode.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.