Why Connection Beats Achievement Every Time

I have a Google Sheet. First column is the person I'm speaking with. Second column is who referred them. Third column is my energy after the call. This comes from Brandon Fong and Mark Fujiwara, a thing called the plus 2 idea. Is it plus 2, meaning that I feel like I had a cup of coffee? I feel even more amplified and energized and exponential than when the call began. If it's a plus 1, it means you get a little zing. Maybe they could be a plus 2, but you just didn't get enough time with them, but you don't know. Maybe they're a zero. You need a little more time to assess that. So that's a plus 1. 0, net zero, you forgot them. -1 means like there was something off. You're probably not ever going to get another call with them. Maybe if hell froze over you might do another call, but there's something off with that person. Maybe they complained a lot, maybe there was taking energy. -2 is like—

Welcome to the Speakeasy Mastermind Podcast, where the real conversations happen behind closed doors with the boldest entrepreneurs, creators, and growth minds in the game. No fluff, No filters, just the raw strategies, personal stories, and mental models that move the needle. I'm Eric Berman. Now let's get into it. In today's episode of Inside the Speakeasy, I'm so excited to bring Jennifer Hill, a recovering asshole, as she says, but now she's completely the opposite. An incredible, incredible human being and leader, and one of the biggest connectors with an incredible heart who has an uncanny and insane ability to understand the human potential and actually the human connection and what motivates people, what brings people together, is at the forefront of technology when it comes to how to match people and the why behind that is going to drop some incredible nuggets of what we could all be doing to improve our relationships and connections with each other. Welcome to the stage, Jennifer Hilt.

Oh, thank you, Eric. It's so great to be a part of this community.

Thank you so much. And gosh, having just met you and I think about community and what we're trying to build at Speakeasy Mastermind. And here I found and met somebody who is like, oh my God, we speak and breathe the same language. You understand the power of networking community and you've been sort of dubbed the queen of community out there for what I've seen and thrown in your community. Oh my God. The amount of people, you know, and connect with just, it just blows my mind. And I want to dig into all that stuff and how you've been able to meet so many incredible people. But I mean, give me a line here. Let's start with your background and, you know, in the world before we got into the blowing communities and some really cool new SaaS you have for matching people together, and we're going to talk about that. You were doing some cool stuff in business before. Walk me through a little bit of your background.

Yeah, thank you, Eric. So we should probably start at the beginning. Yeah. When I was a little girl, to me it was like, you got a book on how to be a human and he and she got books on how to be a human. And when I opened my book, it was blank inside. So when I started to get into adolescence, it literally felt like, what are these weird humans and why are they saying one thing and doing another? And people made no sense to me. It's like I had this blank book on how to be a human and I was just making crap up as I went, right?

What year? I mean, how old are you? What town?

I don't think I fully started feeling like an oddball weirdo. I mean, I was called every name, chicken legs, weirdo, anything you can imagine. Cause I was kind of the savant kid where I was put in all these, they call them GATE classes and At one point I was offered— this is where I think things started to go sideways. My parents had an opportunity to send me to study in a castle with some Rhodes Scholars, with the two other smartest kids in the school.

Oh my gosh.

This is embarrassing to share. I don't normally share this, but they chose the three of us. They handpicked us out of the class and they're like, okay, come study with Rhodes Scholars so you can go out to find a cure for cancer or whatever it is. And this is when I'm about 11 or 12 years old, right? I think it was Chris somebody or other and Suzanne Jenkins were the two other kids they picked. And so they invite us to all go study in this castle and my parents turn it down. I'm like 11 or 12 and they're like, no, it'll be better for her to, you know, get the exposure of being in normal junior high. And that's when shit went sideways if we're being totally honest.

Oh my gosh.

I just couldn't figure out because my brain, whether it was being in classes, well, I'll give you a great example of this. I was 13 years old in Mrs. Ferguson's English class. I only got diagnosed as being on the spectrum in my late 30s. Actually, ironically, the same year I sold my first company and went through a divorce that was like a 1, 2, 3 punch in 2018. So I didn't know I was autistic. Women only started getting diagnosed as being on the spectrum the last 10 years or so, really. So at that time I was very literal. Like if you told me something, I took it literally. So this young woman in my class, Diana, says, oh, you're such a good singer. She hears me singing Janet Jackson's Again, but I didn't know it was American Idol before American Idol. She was being facetious and making fun of me, but my autistic brain couldn't understand cuz my brain just worked in a totally different way. So she not only, Eric, encourages me to start singing in front of the class, she gets 300 people with security guards, gets me to sing in front of all of them, and I didn't realize they were all laughing at me. So that then went not long after that into spiraling into, you could call it a dark night of the soul. I wound up leaving high school and going straight to college at 16, graduating college early, and then I was planning to go to law school and through a series of serendipities and different things like that, I actually was planning to go to law school, but my, you cannot make up my life. Like you couldn't write a script about my life and have it be more interesting than what's actually happened. MTV almost made a movie about my life and that'll be the opening of story. I'm talking to a publisher now of a book I'm writing called The Recovering Asshole. And so fast forward, here I am like 20 years old, graduate college early, and I get a phone call 4 or 3 or 4 months after graduation and it was my school and they said, Oops, you didn't graduate. It was like something out of a nightmare. Like literally, if you've had a nightmare about it, it's probably happened in my actual life at some point. You know, it's all made me who I am, so I don't regret it or have any, you know, sadness about it. I'm very grateful for the path that's led me to the woman I am today. So fast forward, they're not kidding. They're like, you literally are missing a class from high school because I left high school early and had only taken AP European history and all AP classes. They're like, you're missing US History 101. We can't give you your diploma. You have two choices. Come back to school for a semester. It's like a, you have to laugh about it. You either laugh or cry, right? So they're like, you can either come back to school for a semester and take the class and pass it, or take a 2-hour oral exam, pass or fail, with the associate dean of social sciences. And I'm like, well, shit, I can memorize stuff. So I take the 1,000-page book, memorize it, pass the exam, but I couldn't apply for law school that year. And it wound up being the best gift ever because I posted my resume on Monster. I got 3 job offers, Eric, to be an enterprise rent-a-car manager, to go into lending, and to become a recruiter. And I wound up going with the recruiting job. And within a few years, I had made a huge career in it, broke every company record at this company I worked for. And by the time I was 27 or 28, I was like, I'm going to go be a famous thought leader. No plan, no experience running a business, never taken a business class in my life. And I failed my first go. I went from making hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in my 20s to quitting to open up J Hills Career Consulting Services. Epic failure. Went from like $200,000 to $5,000 the next year. Realized I needed to get my business hat on, went to consult. Somebody brought me in as a partner at their recruiting firm, worked for them for a few months, and then, you know, we just weren't aligned on a few things. And my ex-husband at the time says, why don't you just go open your own company? You have more clients than you know what to do with. And then that led me to building and selling my first, my second company technically, if you count the failure of the first one that was the LLC. But wound up selling that in 2018 and then also discovered I was an asshole in between. And now I do everything I can to not be an asshole.

Oh, we're gonna, we're gonna peel that on you a little bit. Okay. So when you said your second company, so that one, you walk me through that company again and let's talk about the asshole bit.

So first there was the company that was J Hills Career Consulting Services. I think I actually, it's technically the first company 'cause I think I had the failure that was the consulting company. Yeah. Yeah. I thought I was gonna be like an overnight success, world thought leader, speaker. Yeah. Yeah, this is before social media had really taken off, like circa maybe 2008 or '09. Epic failure. And then I rolled that company I had built then into now instead this staffing company that everybody— we had a great brand. We worked with the top law firms in the world, top corporations, and then an accounting firm asked to acquire us out of the blue about 7 years, 6, 7 years into business. Sold that. And that company is now— they went through a $2 billion merger and now building a new company.

Amazing. So how are you feeling at that point? And tell me about the asshole bit. Like, how did you, I mean, you have this whole recovering asshole from the book and everything else. Walk me through that.

Remember how I said that my brain worked differently than other people? And God bless my now co-founder of my current company, who was a business coach who helped me sell the last company, Julian Adler, saved my life because in 2000, I think it was like '89, thereabouts is when I opened the staffing firm that wound up being sold. And I didn't know how to manage myself. I had no— when you're autistic, it's really critical to know how to regulate your nervous system. I had no sense of how to regulate my nervous system. I was drinking. I don't think I was doing drugs at that point, but I was doing anything I could just to find some sort of normalcy in this crazy brain of mine that was just thinking in different ways. So fast forward, all the people I worked with at the first job, the real only job I had working for somebody else, started to beg to work for me. They're like, Can we please come work for you? Because they saw all the success I had. So one by one they start to come over to my company, but I don't know how to manage them. And this is what I— people are like, what do you mean you are an asshole? Because I spend 2 hours a day now in prayer and meditation and all the things that I'm deeply spiritual. They're like, no, but you could have. I was like, no, really, this is because my brain thought everybody else was misbehaving because I run circles around people. I could do 40 hours of work in 2 days. Then I didn't understand why everybody else wasn't performing at the same level. So here's an example. This is so terrifying to share publicly, Eric, but this is an actual email that I sent probably when I was 28, 29, opening and running this first company. I literally sent an email, all caps, all in the subject line, are you all a bunch of fucking morons? Why are you not working harder, faster, smarter? I made Devil Wears Prada look like a kitten.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

I couldn't imagine getting away with that these days either. But even back then, I mean, how'd the response to that go?

Not great. Let's be honest. Not great. And the funny thing is I do leadership. Just like an hour ago, I was doing a training for a team. Like, I get brought on to speak and do leadership trainings, and I'm like, here's what not to do. Like, don't call your employees names. Don't call your team names. You know, praise in public, give feedback in private. And it's ironic that now, of course, I teach this to executives and entrepreneurs and corporations around the world. But yes, I don't do what I did. And that's why the book. So embarrassed right now.

No, I appreciate you sharing. And this is great. I mean, it's, we've all probably sent that email out. We regret saying now, I don't know if they could top that one, but that sets up on the, gonna be on the list. So I guess maybe that you'll make everybody feel slightly less bad for that. I want to go back to earlier childhood because, and, you know, maybe some others could share or feel something similar. I mean, you had a gift that you look back on now. Back then, there's probably a lot of confusion on, you said, you know, you're sort of in a different group of people go to the castle. When did you like, you know, through family, through friendships? And then I had the second question on the next sort of transformation. When did you realize like you were different in that? And obviously it was a gift ultimately, but when did you realize that and discover that and how did you handle that?

I think one of the first earliest things, remember when you used to have, what was it like Encyclopedia Britannica? Was that where they had like the 50 books? Do you remember? Oh yeah. Where they had like, that's what you used to research before you had Google. You had like the 50 encyclopedias.

Yeah.

So I was a voracious reader and I remember I must've been about 11 years old and I was like, oh, I'll write a book. And this was the premise of the book. 11 years old, keep in mind. The premise of the book, it was called Bloody Roses, and it was about a man who had dissociative identity disorder, otherwise known as multiple personality disorder. So the theme of the book was a man has his father who was murdered by the psychotic killer, and his father was a cop. So he goes on to be a cop to avenge all the horrors in the world. And in this, there's a serial killer he's tracking throughout the book, and this killer's awful. He literally takes strychnine. So I was like researching all of this using encyclopedias back in the day. Oh my God. Google back then, strychnine was not traceable until like the early 1990s or mid-1990s. So this killer would inject strychnine into the roses and then would kill his victims by puncturing their wrist, and that's how they would die. And so the whole story follows this guy, this police officer who's trying to track down this killer, and you get to the end and he's the killer because he took on the personality of the guy who killed his dad, but he doesn't know he's chasing himself. So that's when I realized that maybe my brain doesn't work in the same way as other people.

Jesus. Okay. Thank you for sharing that.

I've never shared that publicly.

Wow. And then let's go to the next transition. So you go from being the asshole and you sold and you realize, well, wait a second, maybe I need to lead a little bit differently here. This isn't normal behavior from leaders. How did you discover that? When did you learn that? And what changed?

Julian saved my life really in so many ways. We were just on a call earlier. I love and adore that man. He's like a brother to me. So Julian came to me when I think it was probably 3 or 4 years, maybe 3 years into the developing of my first company. And he started teaching me, Jen, they're not misbehaving. They're not being jerks. They're actually designed differently than you. And he introduced me to human design. And as we were discussing before we got on the call, I literally have 183 tools to keep me sane at any given time now that I teach other entrepreneurs and other things. And it ranges from human design to Sedona Method to Kabbalah to meditation to heart-focused breathing by HeartMath. So now I use this mixture, if you will, of tools for self-regulation such as heart-focused breathing, meditation, things like that, and actual scientific tools and tools that are behavioral. And just like the one we developed, it's all about understanding ourselves. And this is why all humans are fighting with each other. This is why we have wars. This is why people are in fights and marriages and business partnerships. Is because we're not relating to each other in a way that works. I just gave a talk about this yesterday to another group called Return on Intimacy. And I was talking about all of us are talking at each other. Nobody is talking to each other anymore. And number one, it's our amygdalas that are running the show. We have a bunch of upset 4-year-olds and 5-year-olds running countries, running businesses. Nobody's tending to the little boy or girl within them, that's angry, frustrated, scared, and we're all out there trying to run businesses, but we're not connecting to ourselves first. So I call that the golden triangle of connection. When we can have deep intimate connection to self and self-awareness that allows you to have deep intimate relationships with others of all sorts, romantic, business, friendship, you name it, then that finally allows us to fill the pyramid with relationship to purpose. But if you're missing that connection to the self, the rest of it collapses like a house of cards.

Love it. Thank you for that transition. Cause I want to get into the amazing work you're doing now. And even just that example, let's start with that example. Then we'll go into the work. So dig a little bit deeper into the connecting with yourself. So how do you mean by that? Give me some examples.

As I mentioned, 2 hours a day, I spend, he would laugh. Oh my God. If you really want to laugh, I don't know if people can, people see this as well as hear it.

Some on the YouTube. Yeah. Otherwise we'll have to describe it.

So if you want, this is worth it to look on YouTube. If I were to show you, you're going to laugh. This is my list of things I do every day that are non-negotiables. So it ranges changes from scan, so hard, Kabbalah prayers, pray, mind movie, set intentions, David's podcast, weekly energy boost, paint, do vocal awareness, Ho'oponopono for at least 5 people, qigong, meditate, scrape tongue, journal, push planks, crunches, jumping jacks, backbend, Vision Espresso. About 5 affirmations I could go through with you. Inner child work, daily declaration, heart-focused breathing, Psych-K, Healy, count miracles, make grateful list. Spiritual accounting. Let's see here. Sometimes Gene Houston and putting on an energetic wetsuit so I don't pick up other people's energy. So that's just a typical day for me.

Wow. Oh my gosh. I love it. I mean, we, I think we all have to come up with our list. I don't know if we can, anybody could beat that.

We could share a list, but I don't know how else I'm like, because autism, because I love lists. I like to organize things. Yeah. It helps me because I would realize some days that I would forget to do something. I'm like, oh, I really love that practice. Like Qigong is one of my new favorite things to practice every day. But going back to your to your earlier question without being cheeky about it, Eric, about how do you connect yourself? Really meditation, inner child work, heart-focused breathing. Those are the secrets. I can't tell you how many executives I've worked with and entrepreneurs who have had deep wounds. I mean, so many successful men and women who have had wild amounts of success, and yet they still feel lonely, disconnected. You hear it all the time. Billionaires, celebrities, powerful people, No matter how much money or power or success, right, that you have, or friends that you have, if you don't fill that hole inside of you from the inside out, suffering will continue. So when you fill yourself up, I tell everyone, you become the sexiest human alive. Everybody wants to do business with you, you know, work with you. And that's part of the secret is fall in love with yourself, love, cherish, and accept yourself. In fact, one of my best friends, when I was going through that divorce in 2018, gave me the best feedback I've ever gotten. She said, Jen, you deserve to find someone who will cherish you, though first you need to cherish yourself. And that's my advice to every human being. Go out there and cherish yourself.

Brilliant. And lots of tools to do that. Obviously you shared that. Love that. And I think it's so important. And you're right. I think so many of us, especially the entrepreneurs, forget that. And there are so many examples of people are just miserable. And then you hear the stories of something that takes their lives, unfortunately. Like, they seem like they're so successful, but they couldn't do what you're talking about right here. And I wish they had learned from you probably before they did that. But let's, can we talk a little bit about, you got some really cool tech going on and talk about the ability to, I know one of the things we talked about is, you know, you have the ability to predict who you would do business with, fall in love with, or become friends with. I mean, how do you do this?

So my gift, Eric, after I stopped being a jerk and started learning and studying myself and others and human behavior, thanks to Julian and many other wonderful teachers, I've had David Guilliam, go look him up. He's brilliant as well. And what I started to do is research, like, what is it that motivates people? I can cold read people again, because my brain is constantly calculating things. And so I would meet person A and person B, and I can normally effectively predict about 90+% who's going to feel natural alignment with each other. So after we sold the first company in the recruiting space, Julian came to me and said, Jen, why don't we create an algorithm based on your intuition and based on what you've learned in 20 years of recruiting on motivation? We'll productize it and turn it into a scalable SaaS algorithm and tools that can help humanity. And I said, shit, can we do that? I'm not a tech person. And thank God Julian is a mathematical genius and brilliant. And so he came up. I was just telling you, I was like, Jules, I brag about you on every podcast because he's like the behind the scenes genius guy who's doing it. So Julian and I spent with another one of our original co-founders, Moon, about 8 months coming up with questions based on what I intuitively do when I meet somebody. I'm calculating all of this just simultaneously the moment I meet somebody. So we spent 8 months testing or creating the questions to be able to measure what I'm doing in my head, a year and a half testing it with Typeform to test the variability of the answers, the drop-off of where people dropped off, to bring in medical advisors to be sure that they were psychiatrically sound questions, there were no biases in them. Then I was originally creating like this little marketplace of healers, of 100 healers and therapists, and that's how we started vetting it and got to an 87% satisfaction rate. And I'll always remember the first investor I pitched in summer 2022, Charlie out of Brooklyn Ventures or something like that. And I'm pitching him about this great marketplace and how effectively we're matching people in it. And he is like, I don't give a shit about your marketplace, but if you're as good as you say you are at matching, you need to make this available for all of humanity. And a CEO I was mentoring at the time happened to be on that public pitch that I was doing. And he messaged me, he said, Jen, I can develop that for you and I'll do it at cost. You've been so instrumental in mentoring me. And then next thing you know, we had developed the software around it and now we get, we've been used on Necro Island 4 times. Mindvalley's brought us to their events. We get used in corporations, communities, many different masterminds will use us at a variety of different ways because it's all about self-awareness.

So let's, can we dig a little bit deeper there? So if these people are hiring you to use this app and this tool that, that you develop, what would be a real case study? So they have what, a bunch of members and they're trying to figure out what?

Yeah, I'll give you 2 different examples of how it gets used. This was my favorite business example that we started off when we first started getting used in business use cases. So my husband has a venture capital firm and he invests in a lot of different startups. And there was a startup he was working with and they were at each other's throats. They were about ready to kill each other. So they were at about like 10, 15 people at the time. So we went in, we had everybody on the team answer the matching questions and we call it our LAMP assessment. So anybody can go, it's free to test the, you know, free version. You'll get a complimentary report. It's just not white labeled and doesn't have matching functionality, but you'll get a report of how you're motivated. It's ohm.app/survey. And so we go in and we analyze the whole team. So lychee, apple, mango, pear. Lychees are motivated by achievement, apples are motivated by information, mangoes are motivated by fun, and pears are motivated by other people's needs. So this was the assessment I would calculate in the back of my mind when I'd be matching people on the recruiting side of things. So fast forward, we are working with this company and you have the CEO and the CTO. Well, what was interesting is Apples being motivated by information tend to be more along the engineering type. Like if we were to survey 1,000 people who were all engineers, I'd be willing to predict that about 90% or more would probably test higher, either average or above average on what we call apple or being motivated by information. So this is exactly what was happening in the company, except it was the CEO who was motivated by information and the CTO was not. So this is— Holy CEO had 20 points variability. So this is why we call it fruits. It's like one person speaking apple and another speaking orange. Even if you both speak English, it's like, wah, wah, you literally can't hear it. So there was a huge breakdown in communication. So the way we started off working, once we realized this, we first taught the CEO and CTO based on their motivating styles, how to better speak into each other's motivation. Taught CTO how to better speak apple with his CEO. We taught the CEO how to better speak Mango and Lychee, which is achievement and fun, with the CTO. Once we got that hammered out, then we started to teach the CTO how to better communicate with his Apple team members. And we started creating dotted lines to the CEO where there would be greater psychological safety. Because it turns out that, for example, what's it called? Google did a study called Project Aristotle in 2012. They studied 38,000 people, Eric, across 180 different teams, and they found the number one factor in team success, psychological safety. And so this ties into our work dramatically because what we found is if my motivators are here and your motivators are here, if we have more than 10 points variability in multiple areas of motivators, that creates what I termed an accidental adversarial relationship. You can't explain it, but you just punch the person in the face. You're like, ah, just wanna punch them or hang up on the call, right? And so what if, number one, we could start to understand how to speak one another's language? And I might want to talk to you in a certain way. What if I could talk to you in a way that you could hear me as the leader? This is what I do a lot of leadership trainings with teams. Number two, over time, we actually eventually flip-flopped the roles. We realized that as much as we were creating these dotted lines to the CEO, that the better move here, because the CTO was a perfect match for the sales team, the biz dev, because he was sympathetic with them based on his motivators. So, we flipped their roles. So, the CEO became the CTO and the CTO became the CEO. And now, they're having much greater success. So, in the business case, I get brought in to do consultancy around things like that. On the community side space, we have communities as large as 10,000, as small as 50 people. And what it does is our matching algorithm will automatically take anybody in a certain group. We, you know, give them a white-labeled version of it. They can send it out to their community and it'll automatically tell you who the top 5 or 10 members, depending on the size of the community, are for that group. So when Mindvalley used us, we did that for their event. Every, you know, their top, I think we gave, I can't remember if we, I think we gave 5 matches is what they wanted and people loved it. I actually have a new friend who's like flown out to Lisbon twice. She was one of my top matches at Mindvalley and she and I are still hanging out. She flies out like once a year, might even be moving to Lisbon. And that all came out of our algorithm.

Amazing. I mean, first of all, congrats. It's so impressive what you've done. I'm a huge believer in what you've done, just even touching the surface back in, you know, in my companies, you know, playing with, let's say, Myers-Briggs or others. I mean, just realizing, you know, having an awareness that we're all different. Yes, you say that and it's obvious when you say it, of course we're all different, right? Just on the surface. But when you really understand what that means and start to dig in, okay, well, no, truly we're different and what we think and feel is going to be totally different and motivating somebody else totally different. And the quicker you could discover what it is, I found my life has just gotten so much better. I mean, whether, you know, my wife to business relationships to my partner, I always now almost look at personality types and say, okay, well, this is why I might be frustrated. And it's almost like you got to go to that first and say, well, why am I frustrated? It's not like you have to first understand who you're talking to. Right. I mean, is this a big part of what you're talking about? I assume.

Yes. And I'm going to adjust one thing if you don't mind here, because this is what we've studied and we found. In fact, my business partner, I think, is going to get a doctorate in this theory of motivation. Nobody's ever studied this before. It's not personality. That's the secret. Everybody Myers-Briggs and a lot of other stuff measure with personalities. And this is the analogy I use. Julian and myself, my co-founder who helped me sell the last company and this one, we have different primary motivators. His is Apple information, which makes sense 'cause he's the tech guy that loves to dive deep into things. I'm achievement, shocker, you know, lighty. That's my main motivator. But we overlap perfectly in terms of motivations. Now, Are we alike personality-wise? We couldn't be more wildly different. He's hipster Santa Claus. I'm business Barbie. We're like completely opposite to each other personality-wise. We're opposite, but because our motivators align and our CEO, David Sullens, for example, has worked with Julian for 12 years too. All 3 of us are extremely complimentary, even though we have slightly different primary motivators, just a few points above or below each other. That, that allows for synchronicity and symbiosis. But it's not personality. So I think that's where we found the secret sauce is we even developed a nonprofit called Om Horizons where we're raising a quarter of a million and working with one of our medical advisors out of Columbia, Dr. Martha Shay Cedar, to do research on this for patient therapist matching to help humanity because nobody's ever studied this. If you've ever tried to find a therapist, imagine you go and it might be life or death. I was bulimic, I was suicidal, I tried to take my own life. I could never find the right therapist. Until I was in my late thirties when I met the man who diagnosed me the first time of being on the spectrum, Dr. Mark Goldstein, who was a very famous thought leader and passed away a few years ago. And Mark, I've never been so nervous in my life, was an advisor. So he was one of our medical advisors. And one day Mark, while he was fighting cancer, he is like, Jen, I really wanna help you. Why don't I answer your matching questions? I haven't tried it yet despite being an advisor. So I'm sitting there and I'm like, oh my God, this man is like a dad. He's like been my saving grace. I've never had a therapist that had been more influential or that I had even been able to work with. And you cannot make this up. So in the olden days, our system used to send you an email that would say, these are your top 3 matches. I was his number 3 match out of 1,000 people, and Mark lost his mind. But imagine what if we could bring this to medicine? Like, it's limitless what we can do with this.

That's brilliant. I'm going to unwrap that because you and I were on a call recently as well, and you were talking about one of your big-ass things you're looking for is raising money for this charity. Is this what we're talking about? Right?

Yeah, exactly. It's OM Horizons, omhorizons.org. And we just got our first $1,000 in donations. We may be able to help us as well. And our goal is then to publish the study in a journal and to proliferate this. What have we been looking at life all along? And what if it's our motivations that have us feel psychologically safe and think of the impact that can have across medicine? I mean, even doctors-wise, I've always been so lucky to have fabulous doctors I've gotten along wonderfully with. And I hear so many people complaining about their doctors, their therapists, their this, their that.

Just make sure I get this because it's so fascinating. I wanna make sure I understand the concept here, but you're talking about on the, on the medical side for people that do need the therapy. I assume others have this sort of thought process. Well, they're a therapist. They just must know everything because they're a therapist. They come in there and we assume, but now that you're sort of saying it this way, you're opening my eyes up a little bit to say, wait a second. Yeah. They have their book of knowledge on what to do and the sort of playbook. But if you were to be able to match with somebody who really truly can resonate with you, that understands you, and like you said, is matched from all the, you know, the data points, you're saying that engagement and the ability for them, the patient to get helped by somebody there, it just goes up tremendously in that example.

Eventually. Yeah. And I'll give you a great example. You hit the nail right on the head with that. So years ago when we were building that first platform to test it, where we had 100 therapists and I think we had 700 respondents and 144 completed sessions, you know, you obviously have to vet therapists. So I was vetting the therapist and obviously I'm not going to get along with everybody. I'm very motivated by achievement. I am by no means in the middle range. In some ways I'm a little bit in the middle, but I'm also high in one of the categories, which means I don't match. If you're middle, what we call a harmonizer in our types, if you go to ohm.app/survey, it'll tell you if or harmonizer, lychee, mango, whatever. I'm less middle. The people in the middle are easier cuz they can get along with people above them and below them cuz they're kind of more the mean score. I'm not that person. I'm higher in one of the categories always. So fast forward, there was this lady who I liked socially. I had met her out socially. We had never spent like quality time, but we knew each other through Clubhouse and she really wanted to be on our platform. What's interesting, Eric, it, it wasn't confirmation bias cuz I didn't have her data. So we go to get on the call the day I'm doing a session to vet her and be sure she's a good therapist. Therapist, I wanted to poke my eyeballs out and roast them over hot fiery coals. I was rocking back and forth like a rape victim by the time I was done because it was the most painful hour of my life. And I'm just trying to keep my composure as CEO of the company and not be a dick, cuz I know I've been a dick and I'm trying not to be a dick. So I don't wanna, and I can tell the lady is a good therapist who's well-meaning, but the way she's going about it is like nails on a chalkboard. I'm like, what is 'What is wrong with me? Am I a horrible human? Why am I having such a visceral reaction to this lady?' Right. Make this up, Eric. 2 days later, she finally gets around to answering our matching questions. We say that the average person can tolerate 5 points, sometimes 10 points variability in one category. Sometimes 2 is what the average person can tolerate. You know, there are some extraordinary people. The Dalai Lama can probably tolerate everybody, right? So this lady and I had 10 to 20 points variability in all 4 areas. Our assertiveness. So we were literally adverse to each other. So it required so much energy for me to even meet her where she was. And this is why so many of us are.

Well, I mean, back to your idea and you're saying, you know, luck of the draw on who you get matched with when you're getting therapy.

It's like superficial matching. This is the problem.

Yeah. This, maybe they'll work for me. Great. Then next thing you know, as soon as that chalkboardness is happening, forget it. Your mind's shut, your eyes are closed. You're not going to pay attention to anybody that's giving you the therapy and the advice and you're probably going to get worse. So it's amazing what you're doing. I mean, let's talk more about the future. I mean, the cool things you're doing. I mean, and also getting a couple of tips here for, so I'm a big believer in what you're doing, certainly. What could, you know, somebody listening or watching today, where's a simple place for them to start to say, look, you got to look at what you're doing in all areas of your life and start to think about understanding the human, you know, the different ways that we all interact with each other and how to start to fix maybe some of these things. Where would you start? I mean, I know you have your program. Is there others out there that are as well?

Yeah, absolutely. So some of my other favorites, you and I were chatting about human design before this, literally brilliant. Now with AI, you don't even need a specialist. I invite you all, go to jobianarchive.com, click on get your free profile, drop it in, take your free profile, drop it into ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever your favorite one is, and then ask it to interpret how can I interact with my kids better based on their design? How can I interact with my staff better based on their design, my design? Jovian, I believe it's J-O-V-I-A-N Archive. And yeah, the human design, there's plenty of places give you a free human design chart. So it's not rocket science.

I think you could just actually put in your main things into GPT. Like, you know, you probably even do it now.

You might not even have to take that extra step. It actually could probably— that's a fair point. Now you probably don't even have to take that extra step. You just put it right into GPT. But yeah, I love that one. I love Gene Keys. My other favorite one is I love numerology and understanding people. That's a little bit more esoteric. You have Enneagram, you have all these different things. I also love Kabbalah. Go check out my favorite teacher, David Guillaume. He changed my life. I've had many wonderful, incredible instrumental teachers like Julian, Arthur Samuel Joseph, and David Guillaume, Jocelyn Herman Satchio. Any one of their work is going to be prolific. Arthur was the vocal coach who trained Tony Robbins how to speak. Pierce Brosnan and Sean Connery. Jocelyn, you know, taught personal development for years and was in a girl band that beat out Whitney Houston for number one and like teaches personal development. She's my business coach now because obviously I can't have my co-founder be my business coach.

You know, pick your poison kind of thing. Like pick one of these, doesn't matter, but take your top, you know, 4, 5, 6 relationships in your life right now and have yourself and other person that just do the thing, do the test or, you know, go through the program.

So I'm recommending, 'cause I wanna clarify this, there's a little nuance here. Start with the information, start with the facts, start with your human design, start with your gene keys, OptiMatch, whatever you prefer. Start with any of these to understand yourself. Then step 2 is study some sort of discipline, whether it's Jocelyn's Unmissable work, Arthur's vocal awareness work, David Guillaume's work with Kabbalah. The next step once you do that is to actively be learning. There's never, you saw the list of things I do every day. I spend, I don't watch TV. Like I like to watch a movie. I'll watch maybe 1, 2 movies a week. But if you catch me with downtime, I'm painting, dancing, doing qigong, or learning something new.

Yep. Amazing. Great. That's some great advice. I love that. The community building. I mean, you have this incredible ability to, you know, as we kind of wrap into a couple last things here, you have an incredible community you're building. Let's talk about how have you been able to amass such a huge network? Great, incredible people. I mean, if anybody's lucky enough to get in your tribe, I'm shy.

You're gonna make me shy.

Talk me through that. I mean, from one community builder to another, it's very impressive.

Oh, I'm very humbled by that. Thank you, Eric. Well, the kudos really goes to my friend Johan. So, in— what happened was, we'll backtrack. Charles Berg gets the first kudos. Do you know Charles? Great angel.

I know Charles Berg. Of course.

Yeah. So, Charles was really the catalyst. I didn't even know what a super connector was. I'd always kind of in the back of my mind introduce people and obviously run recruiting, and I've always enjoyed it. So I remember Charles and I met at Baby Bathwater in Croatia probably 3 years ago, and he introduced me into this idea of referral parties. So then I start practicing my little secret. This is my little life hack. It doesn't require any special tech. You could probably create your own custom GPT, but I just have a very simple old school method, and this was inspired by Charles. I have a Google Sheet. First line, first column is the person I'm speaking with. Second column is who referred them. Third column is my energy after the call. This comes from Brandon Fong and Mark Fujiwara, a thing called the plus 2. Idea. I rate my energy after every call. Is it +2, meaning that I feel like I had a cup of coffee? I feel even more amplified and energized and exponential than when the call began. That's somebody who's a +2. That's where I spend and play in all my space is +2s. Is it a +1? If it's a +1, it means you get a little zing. Maybe they could be a +2, but you just didn't get enough time with them, but you don't know. Maybe they're a 0. You need a little more time to assess that. So that's a +1. Zero, net zero, you forgot them. Minus 1 means like, eh, there was something off. You're probably not ever gonna get another call with them. Maybe if hell froze over, you might do another call, but there's something off with that person. Maybe they complained a lot. Maybe there was taking energy. That's a minus 1. Minus 2 is like talking at you, just taking, and you feel drained. You never respond to minus 2s again. They say via email you might respond. I don't even know if I would respond via email. Them because it's just energetically draining and you don't wanna invest your time there. And then the last tip for the Google spreadsheet I have is I make notes and I use it like my own version of Google of anything that somebody's lit up, passionate about what they're working on. And then if somebody ever needs that resource, I use it like my own database and I just put in there mental health or community or whatever. And then it tells me, and then I always track who gives me my best plus 2 referrals. And then I invest as much time back Giving back to them as possible.

Damn, that's genius. I love the way you're— I know I see your mind in action here. I could see it all together. I just throw this little spreadsheet, does this. I'm like, that's genius though. I mean, what a great way. I mean, ultimately, you know, find the plus twos and what you said there is like, who brought you the plus twos? I want more of them. I want, you know, that's somebody you're gonna invest in.

There's a last little secret. So remember how I said I say about 5 affirmations every day? I'll give your listeners 2 of them. Here's one of them. That's also the secret to building a great network. You ready for it? Yes. I call this the anti-asshole prayer. You could be atheist and say it, but it still works. So universe, whatever you say, you could, if you're atheist, I don't know what you would say, but you could say whatever you want. So universe, God, whatever you believe in, please remove anything or anyone who is not meant to be in my life. Give me the wisdom to know what's happening from my gut and draw the right people and resources towards me. I say that before every party I throw. I say, universe, please remove anything or anyone who is not meant to be in the party. I say it every day for the tribe. Please remove anything or anyone who is not meant to be in the tribe. Give me the wisdom. And you have to be willing to let people go. Most people live their lives in a constant state of attachment and suffering, but when you get to non-attachment, there's no suffering. And so when people leave, I'm like, sometimes I'll notice I'll get a little zap and I'll be like, ooh, that hurt. And then I'm like, oh wait, that's one of those people that was meant to be removed. Now, the second fun one, this is a more fun affirmation, is I say every day, universe, please give me something today to surprise, delight, and amaze me and the wisdom to recognize and appreciate it. So this is just kind of the flow state I live life Oh my God, that's so brilliant.

I love both those things. And I think my head is just spinning right now because I'm thinking about when you're doing this exercise, you're saying it the way you're thinking about every relationship. And it's almost like you're making it so tangible. Your life just is probably getting so awesome because you're just, it's, you're just repelling it. You're repelling the negative people and you just have this radar to know how to like, just, you know, in a nice way or not nice way, you just, okay, I'm not going to respond and move on. And you don't, and that's like, this gets repelled because you got this positive going. And the negative just pops off. They might try to slip in for a second and they just get spun right out.

I literally joke, people say to me all the time when they come to our parties, any party I've ever thrown, but particularly the parties I throw in Lisbon, they'll be like, I've never met so many wonderful people in one room. I was like, that's right. Because if you're an asshole, you get zapped at the front door. You literally can't walk through.

I think as we wrap, last sort of thought I'm thinking about with all this incredible work you're doing on just the human you know, the human psychology of the matching. And, you know, and then we have this world of AI. Where do you see things going right now?

I think that trust and authenticity and human connection is going to be the currency for the future. And I think whichever AI company learns how to humanize AI and to use it for good is going to win this AI race.

Brilliant. It's funny because I've asked that question a couple of times and it's a similar answer we got in the past. We really like that. Some plus twos I think that I can connect you with later, but I love it. Well, I guess any last words at all? Anything else we could share? How can we help support you out there? I mean, I know we have the charity, you have your amazing app.

Anything else we can, uh, yeah, I mean, I think the, oh, I have a newsletter. So if you want more tips, you can go to Inspired Living Tools. Just Google it. It's on LinkedIn. You can subscribe, it gets sent to your inbox. And I'm constantly like, I just came up with an interesting one the other day called A Taking Ship. Are you in a taking ship or relationship? So I'm always loving just, and it's often real life experiences. In fact, 100% of the time when somebody's going through a struggle, whether it's a friend, a client, somebody in the tribe, and somebody's sharing it, I'm like, wait, we're gonna turn this into an article right now. And all of a sudden I'll start narrating an article and then it just comes out. So I love sharing that because it's real literal inspired tools that come to me while I'm in conversation with people. And the last thing I'll just leave your listeners and viewers with, and the other members of the community and those, you know, here with us is that, I know I've given you a lot of information, and if there is one thing that I could ask you to consider to take away from our time together today is remember that every choice you make is the right choice. I was just in a meditative experience the other day and I was torn something with a business, right? Do I go right? Do I go left? And often we agonize over the choices. And what if we could just trust that even if we make a choice and it feels like it was the wrong thing and we made a mistake, What if even that choice was the right choice? It's like that old Chinese proverb, Eric, where the man who's a farmer in China has a strong strapping son. They're like, you're so lucky to have a strong strapping son. The farmer says, maybe. And then that strong strapping son is one day out plowing the field and the horse kicks his knee and blows his knees out. And now the man is wheelchair bound. And they said, oh my God, you're so unlucky. And he says, maybe. And then a war breaks out. And then his son is not drafted because he got kicked in the knees and the story goes on and on. It's always maybe. So what if there was no right or wrong choice and you could trust that whatever choice you've made or choices you've made to get you here is exactly the choices you needed to make? I love it.

I love it. Well, thank you for that. And speaking of that, hopefully those listening are happy with the choice they made to listen today. And I'm certainly happy the choice I had to bring you on today. And yeah, thanks for your time. It was wonderful to get to know you better and I look forward to our continued journey Me too, Eric.

Thank you to the whole Speakeasy community. I'm so happy to be here with all of you.

And that's a wrap from the Speakeasy Podcast. If something sparked for you, don't keep it to yourself. Share it, review it, and pass it to the one person who needs to hear this right now. Want in on the Real Mastermind? Tap the link in the show notes to apply. Until next time, keep scaling, stay sharp, and don't be the smartest one in the room.