Future Forward Thinking with Robert P. Locascio

Foreign. Fascinating dude. Coming up in a few moments in the Todd Hartley Show. But first, what in the world is this show all about? I grew up struggling miserably with attention and learning disabilities. And if I didn't develop the skill to identify mentors and then use their blueprint to help get myself to the next level, I would be, like, lost. But my career took off because I've identified people who are doing things well and then leveraged their template, which I like to call their blueprint for success, and deployed it where appropriate in my life or in my business. And none different than today's episode. I want to talk with you about Rob Locasio. Rob is going to be joining us in just a second. Rob is the founder and chief executive officer for Live Person. He's been running this company since inception in 1995. He's actually the inventor of online chat for brands, and he is a brilliant entrepreneur. We started working together at the very beginning of the pandemic, when Rob had me train him on how to get on camera and use video to develop his personal brand so he could start influencing people. As we were all locked down inside of our homes, Rob used that time to get himself to the next level. This is a repetitious trend you're going to get from everybody that I interview, because there are people that I want to emulate because in their career, they're always way ahead of the curve. How do they get ahead of the curve? Well, you'll hear I'll pry that out of him in the conversation, but I want you to look for what his strategies are and how you can use those strategies like a blueprint to advance your career. And sometimes that means handling setbacks, sometimes that means dealing with the pressure of being being a business leader and having to reinvent your wheel in order to get it spinning again. But sit back, listen to an excellent interview with somebody that I admire tremendously. In fact, there have been times where I felt like I was up shit creek without a paddle. And I called Rob and he set me straight, like, quickly. Like only a rock star entrepreneur can do what? Wait for the blueprints. Leverage them in your life, and you'll be surprised how quick you accelerate to your next level. It's worked for me. But first, a quick word from our sponsors. This podcast is brought to you by the Wirebuzz team. Now, if that name sounds familiar, it's because I've spent the past decade growing Wirebuzz into a digital marketing powerhouse designed to maximize clarity in complex sales processes so we can help accelerate revenue. And we do this in three phases. Phase one, we transform your website to function like your best salesperson and then also incorporate persuasive on demand sales videos. Now your entire team is aligned on messaging and they're injecting massive clarity into your prospect's head. So your site looks great, but it also has engaging content that helps your team sell on demand. 24. 7 the next phase. Phase 2. We train your sales and marketing teams to sell remotely or in person to expand the impact of your sales team. And the third phase is we develop and run targeted ads to your prospects. Scale those ads to help you achieve more business results. Sign up for the Wirebuzz Company newsletter to learn more about effective and simple ways to improve your company messaging, attract more digital attention and ultimately make more sales. Rob, thanks for joining me on the Todcast.

Thanks for having me, Todd.

You know, when I see you, I'm, I'm. I always get fired up. But what I really see is perseverance. Like that's something that I've seen from you from since the very beginning when we first started talking. Can you do me a favor? Start where you are right now. Tell people about live Person and the role that live person plays for online brands.

Sure. So Live Person today we just won the number one AI company in the world by Fast company. But it's interesting, I mean I originally I invented web chat back in 1997. So from web chat to AI. But it's really around the same perspective that conversations power commerce. And so for the largest brands in the world, the Delta airlines and the T mobiles of the world and Citibanks and Home Depots and stuff like we provide the technology platform when you're messaging with them, when you're having these conversations both with human agents and also with now AI automations, I have this vision that one day all of us will have our own personal AI in our life and that'll help us solve our most important intentions. That's my vision. But it's been about 26 years in the making.

The personal AI would operate a lot like an enterprise level AI where when people wanted to reach out and interact with me, the AI could sort them, schedule them and give me more leverage in my day so I could be more profitable.

Yeah, I mean the biggest problem we have today is most of the places where I'll say we get care in connection with, with whether it's in retail, health care. It's like there, I always say there's kind of like this. You're for it's like millions of people forced into a single door. And. And it's called cues. So you're always queuing up in life. I'm queuing up to see a doctor, I'm queuing up to ask a question from a customer service rep, and I'm being put on hold. And when you think about it, the majority of the people on the other side, the bottleneck that you're queuing for, the knowledge that they have, is coming from a system. And that knowledge can be shared, and it doesn't need to be shared with by another human, it can be shared with a machine. And so the power is that I could really get more control over my life and my time, because we waste an inordinate amount of time on queuing up for questions of important things in our life, especially healthcare. Like we're doing some cool stuff in health care now. It's just the idea of a doctor interpreting the data from my body. You know, I take a blood exam, let's say, or it's kind of silly, to be honest, a machine.

And there's a more efficient way that a machine could provide that and probably do it with a lot more accuracy than a human could.

Well, this is the problem, is that. This is the other problem, is that the amount of innovation that happens in every industry is massive. Let's take. I'll go back to healthcare. Like, the amount of science that's being developed and validated every day is extraordinary. And if I'm a normal doctor and I'm running on that now, I'm running, I gotta bill insurance and I'm doing like my 10 patients, I just. Half an hour, I don't have time to see what's going on in the world. So technically I could take all that information and we can use that as a pattern to then apply to what's happening in my body. And I don't need a human interpreting that right now. It is. We're relying on the fact that a doctor may or may not be up to speed on the latest in science and what's happening in someone's body. And that's a, that's a problem. So AI and what we can do with AI, especially in these concepts of healthcare, we can, we can really change. It's called precision medicine. We just bought a precision medicine company. It's about understanding through testing what my data is in my body, my blood, my genomics, connecting all the dots and giving me path forward.

You know, I spent a vast majority of my time in precision medicine and my clients, maybe 90% of them, are in life sciences. And so the path in precision medicine to providing better patient outcomes is something that I'm personally invested in. And I've also been able to witness it from a patient perspective when my wife was battling breast cancer and how that precision medicine enabled us to make treatment decisions to that a decade before weren't even available to patients and helped her get the best outcome. And I'm super excited about those things. And the role in which AI can play in that is phenomenal. Rob, I want to go back in your story to when you were at Loyola University Maryland, and you were a senior and leaving college. You had started a kiosk, an interactive kiosk company called Icon. What need did you see in the marketplace that your young entrepreneurial brain all of a sudden was like, I can fill that need. And what was that like for you?

Yeah, I mean, I remember this. I got out of college and actually had a job for about six months. Then the company was. I got fired because they laid off a bunch of people. And it was an Australian company. And then I was thinking about, what do I want to do? Well, I just came out of college, and I was like, I thought at that time. Now, this is back in the early 90s, college marketing was all about paper. There was posters and newspapers, and the computer was there, but it was being used for content. There was no Internet. And I had seen these kiosks, like a touchscreen kiosk at the World Financial center in downtown Manhattan. I said, man, this. Why don't we do. Why can't you have this in a college campus? And then you look at all this, I don't know. And I just came out of college, so I was like. And so I pursued it, went after it, and learned how to do technology, learned how to program, because I didn't have those skills out of college. And I basically got my first kiosk up and running about a year, year or two later from when I had the concept of the kiosk. But. And it was a pretty, you know, proud moment to do that.

But I imagine that you spend time daydreaming about where the road is going. And that might be one of the things that's intangible is your ability to envision what isn't here now, but where the need is. Is that. Am I accurate?

Yeah. I mean, everyone, you know, what's. What's strategy like, the goal of the leader, whether you're two people in a room. I was one person when I started. Now there's 1700 people, so it's different, but it doesn't matter. You know, Wayne Gretzky said, you know, strategy is skating to where the puck's going to go, not where it is. And so that is basically the biggest thing. Where is the market going, where is the world going and will you be there? And so, you know, I made a pretty big pivot out of chat about six years ago to messaging. And I envisioned a world in which people be messaging, like their message, their friends and family to brands. And we, you know, made a big pivot and we intersected with the demand and the company's done very well with that. So you always have to be sort of thinking a little bit out of where, where the puck is going to be going. Yep.

Love that Wayne Gretzky quote. And something tells me that when 1995 happened and you were starting to get the concept and the ideas about live person, you were also skating to where that next puck was headed and filling that, that need at the very beginning. What was online chat? Automated online chat within, you know, AI backbone. What was that like in 1995? I can't even picture it though. I was getting out of college that year.

Yeah. So I started the company in 95. So my, the kiosk company, I ended up, it ended up going under because I saw the Internet in 95 and I'm like, talk about skating to the puck. I had a kiosk like a physical unit inside of a student union building. People have to go touch the screen. And here I, here's the Internet. And I'd seen the Internet in 93 and I kind of laughed at it because it was a bunch of links. We were doing digital video and graphics and stuff. So we had a lot more content, the quality of the content. But the Internet had this, the reach. And so when I saw the Internet, I was like, I got to get into that. And I ended up shutting down the kiosk business. And in 95 I started building websites. And then in 1997, because I was building these small e commerce websites for small businesses, I was like, the biggest problem I saw was like, you can't talk to the people at the place. You had to send an email in email. And it was phone. And I said, this is kind of a pain. Plus back then there was dial up. It was a dial up connection. So you'd have to hang up, get on a call, go back to the website. I said, well, why can't you chat? And that really led me to inventing web chat in 1997. So I invented was web chat for customer care. Filed the first patents in 99 and then raised some money, about $3 million in 99 and then went public in 2000. Off that small concept.

Yep. Now it's so fascinating to me because not only do I use web, you know, online messaging or conversations, but when I was working with you at the beginning of the pandemic, you guys were setting up Chipotle for this online ability for people to, from the convenience and safety of their car, place their order and then have all the. And then that same week that I met you, I had just used the Chipotle system to not go into the store. And now I'm like talking to the people that are behind the technology that allowed me to get the extra guac. My burrito. It's pretty pervasive right across multiple industries. What industries is live persons serving today?

I mean the top three are telco, banking and healthcare. Those are our top three. Then we've got automobile. We got a big business on the automobile side. We have a big business in retail. So we have some of the biggest retailers in the world. So that's kind of how it plays out today. But you know, pretty much everyone needs it. If you're running, if you're. If you have customers and you have your B2C, you definitely need to communicate with them, stay connected and voice telling people to pick up a call in 2022. It's not valid. What we want is we want a message and we want to stay asynchronously connected to the brand. We want to message with them and we want to be able to go back there when we want to and under our convenience and not be forced into a phone call. You know, I've always felt the phone call is the evil of all of this stuff. You know what I'm saying?

Yep. You kidding? I just dealt with an airlines and they don't call you, they won't call you back for another four hours or so. But now I'm. It's the time for me to be in bed and that's when the phone call comes through. So I mean like most of this is unscalable, but what live person provides is incredibly scalable and allows people to have their needs met. And so I'm fascinated. So this works in B2C really well, but it feels like there's a lot of use cases in B2B especially in medical, life sciences, biotech, diagnostic, that a healthcare provider could be getting their results back through an AI form or finding out where their tests are in the diagnostic process. Am I accurate?

Yeah, I mean it's actually interesting. We were in the testing business, the COVID testing business for the last two years and so I saw the inside of that world and we're still working with testing providers. We have a joint venture with one of them right now to build like a B2B platform around testing, strangely enough, and then bring the conversational AI rails to it when it comes to getting the data and stuff like that. So yeah, I think there's definitely many applications around the world. The way I look at it is that right now the current Web2 format is a website and it's HTML static content. Most of the time it's just text on a page. Humans, before we read, we spoke. You know, our first mode of communication was speaking, not reading. And it's unnatural for us to read versus speak when it comes to like getting information. I'm not saying we don't read, I'm not saying that. What I'm trying to say is that every one of our customers, the largest brands in the world always tell me the same thing. Everything that people call us about or message us in customer care is on the website. They said all the time, like actually most information's there, they can find it. Why are they calling us? I see, you know, some things that's related to a specific like information around account. So maybe like. But usually now in this day and age, if I'm a bank, someone logs into a banking system, sees their account, sees all the things they bought, you know, but there's always these questions and so they say like people call us and I don't get it. And then they keep trying to change their websites, they reinvent the website, they hire another new head of marketing comes in, spend million dollars on a website, another one comes in. And the reality is people don't read. Like they don't because it's not that they don't want to read. We read books, read magazines, barely now because we're on social media to give you an idea of what people are really how they ingesting media. But the reality is people need to converse to get trust. There's something in the brain that when I ask a question and get a response, I feel like it's being personalized to me and I have a greater trust on it. Then I'm broadly looking at a page of text on a website and saying is this applicable to me? You know, and that, that's, that's really why conversational user experiences can be everywhere.

It's pretty awesome. And yet at the same time, on the other side of the coin, it's pretty uninspiring how poorly we read when we do read. I just built this chair over here that I got on Amazon and I shipped it back because it was missing a part. And then they sent me the new box and I opened it up and it was the same exact missing part. But all I did was miss one word when I was reading. It was a gas can cover. And I was looking for the gas can. And so I sent it back saying there's no gas can in here. And all they were giving me was a cover. Right. I just misread it. But people misread all the time. And yet in conversation we're able to evaluate on the other end if they understand it's part of a, a human checks and balances that take place. And I'm sure with AI there are opportunities for identifying disconnects that happen all the time that are missed when people just skim down the page and they poorly read like I do. Now, Rob, in your business you've had, I'm willing to bet, dozens of moments of inflection since 1995 when you started Live Person. I'm in a moment of inflection right now with my business. And it's an exciting period. But yet at the same time, moments of inflection show you your own internal frailty. When you've gone through them, what do you, as you're approaching a moment of inflection, how are you one, identifying it? And then the second part, how are you motivating, inspiring yourself to push through and persevere?

It's a great question. I'll unpack. I think a couple of things you're saying is that if you're growing, if you're growing, you're going to hit these moments. And they usually happen every five years, at least for me. Every five years there's a moment of inflection. Every ten years there's a. There's like this whopper. And then I guess I've got a 20 year one. Now I'm hitting my 20 years and I've got one I'm dealing with right now that I had one 20 years ago. That's like even. It's like almost existential threat. It's a very interesting scene. So depending on the threat level, you know, some are existential threats, some are just like. But. But they're all the same thing. What is it about? It's about this Change that's happening in your life that because you're growing. And the hardest part to deal with is the fact that the change is happening. And it's, it's happening which seemingly seems outside of your control. Is it, it's it. That's a lot of times, every day you're making change, you go to work, you're doing something you're doing, you go out, you sell something, you get a new customer, that's change. Hire a new employee. It's very in your control. But there's these things that, there's these moments in time where they feel very out of control. And it's actually not that. And what you tend to do is you go inward and say, I'm a fuck up. You know, I, I something, I'm. And it's, and what you're, what you're now exposing is the gap between where you are and where the business wants you to be.

Yep.

And that is a gap. And now the goal is to close that gap as quick as you can. Get new skills, do new things, step outside yourself and find your way forward. But I think a lot of people retreat into I'm a failure and retreat into the cynicism of it. And that's not helpful. It's just neutral. It's changed.

But life begins at the end of your comfort zone. And so part of going through those inflection moments and reaping the benefits of the change and the adjustment, the pivot that's taking place also breathes new life into you as the founder and new life into the company when the benefits start to be seen. I've noticed this multiple times. Have you witnessed something similar?

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, what you get is, I call it like a newfound love for, for the company that you're building. And every now and then you need to renew your vows. You know what I'm saying? And a company, you know, company means. Company came from the Latin word corpus, which means body. So company is a. I look at company not doing it for 26 years as a living thing. It does. It's felt that way for a very long time. That it's in itself and its own being. We inhabit it and we're stewards of it, working at the company. But in itself, it has its own life force. And that life force is pushing us to move forward. It needs to grow and then it needs everything that's inside of it to grow. It needs good nutrients, needs to work out. Every time you up your health, you're Like, I need to eat better. I need to like, work. So the body, the company itself is its own living being. You have to accept that it's kind of outside yourself. And that's hard to accept, you know.

But something I've noticed about you, and I brought this up to you before, but like, when confronted with one of the biggest changes in your, probably the biggest change moment in your career, the beginning of the pandemic, I remember you had off the top of my head, so bless me if I'm off track. 1300 employees and million dollars in leases a month in real estate all over the world for these employees. And the pandemic started. And if there was ever a bigger freakout moment, you did something that most successful, wildly successful individuals do not do. And you started learning again. So instead of sitting on your couch, taking a bong, hit Netflix and chilling, like, you leaned in and learned new skills. And we started working together. But what, what was it, what is it about you, dude, that made you not pull up on the couch and coast through it when everybody else was well?

And I mean, look, during those events, these are macro events that happen. I've been through the financial crisis, I went through dot com. Like, these are the moments in time where you have to be actually so present even more. And I'm present. I'm a present CEO. Like I'm running the company. I'm not like out playing golf. I'm here every day. I'm working with customers and people in the company. And I'm an active, an active leader. But at that moment in time, you have to be a different type of leader. People are looking for some sense of stability. They're looking for your calming force. They're looking for that, especially in the face of people are dying. And we lost a 23 year old employee at the beginning of the pandemic. You know, you have to make sense of Lyle Atlanta, so you take on a different role. So I think for me at least then it's kind of natural for me because I guess I've been through so much that during that time, you have to lean in on a different level emotionally and physically. Even though we couldn't be together physically, for me to be present with the employees to say, like, we got to make it through this, we have to make it through that. That's what's the most important thing.

So you've been through it enough times that when you recognize this was another crucial moment, like the dot com bubble, you realized I need to actually accelerate, lean in, be more present. Be a calmer influence and start learning things that might be outside of the purview of the team that I have so I could help support them.

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. You just, I learned that, you know, I just learned because I, I've been through these things before. You know, it's experience kind of brings you to, been through it before. So that, that's kind of naturally I was like, this is probably what's going to happen.

So, so I've, I've seen this twice in my career where wildly successful people lean in instead of go and hit the golf course. And you know, I've got, I've had the ability to watch Tony Robbins up close. And that is my like, big takeaway is he's been doing this for 45 years, but his level of preparation is way off the charts. And when I step on the stage right after him, because I come on moments after he steps off, I step on his notes. His personal handwritten notes that he wrote that morning are on the ground in front of me. And I don't know anybody who's been crushing their game for 45 years that isn't mailing it in besides Tony Robbins. And look, I'm going to just pull up a photo, Rob, so you could see this is what a world class leader in an industry does. Here's. So here's me walking onto his stage right there.

Yep.

But let me zoom in to right below the camera are his personal notes.

Yeah, well, you can't be at his level. It's a. Yeah, you can't be at this level. Like when you're playing at a certain level, you got to play like a professional. And you know, the professional athletes don't show up on the court and be like, they didn't do practice for like the last, you know, 10 weeks or 10 months or whatever.

Right. Even the best, they come prepared, they come to dominate. And that starts with preparation. As you are. Okay, I gotta ask you this question. You know, as a entrepreneur, like, how do you possibly stay up in the pulse of your company on a regular basis to be able to, as the company gets larger, feeling the pulse is significantly more difficult. How do you manage that and be able to provide really actionable guidance as the company has grown to levels that you've never seen before?

It's much harder now. I mean, I used to being in an office, like just walk the halls and I would sit with certain groups and get a real pulse. It's harder now. I gotta tell you, I don't think I've mastered the new game. I'm working on it. You know, I stay connected. I'm definitely out with different groups. I'm actually like our sales groups now. Like I'm on there, they have to do weekly calls. I go and I want to sit on the calls, listen to what's happening. So. But it's important for me, at least physically, to be connected to people. And the more I'm connected, the better I can make decisions about the future of the company. But I think in this world that we're living in, it's harder to do that. And I still think like I have meetings with my team, I have meetings with other people, meetings with our customers. You know, I just, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta overly do it because normally just naturally happened that you're walking around an office, you're like, hey, let's grab lunch. Or you go sit. I every, like when we had the offices every Friday, I'd go sit next to our sales team. It was our mid market sales team. I'd sit next to him, just tell me like, what's going on? They'd be like, lead flow sucks today. I'm like, okay, why is that something that I go, Then I go ask, find out, maybe there's something about the lead. So now it's more like you. We got to account for systems. Like we're doing much more on the systems system side right now to look at the business and a lot more running of the business through systems than you would naturally when you have more of an interpersonal connection that's happening in offices.

Yeah. Okay, super cool. So less spontaneous interaction of walking down the hall, more intentional putting yourself in certain places so you can extract the info and guide them. And I find that super. I find that super fascinating. Now you're in an inflection moment again and a lot of it is up here. What type of mental prep do you have to do in order to be the, you know, that peaceful, loving leader that's going to guide people through inflection moments? What's that like for you? Yeah, I mean.

I guess the most important part is being authentic. You know, Like I, I think there's. When you listen to a really good preacher, I love this guy, TD Stokes or TD Shakes. I know he is extraordinary guy. Like every does a Sunday mass and I usually listen during the week when I'm working out. But he opens up the sermon by asking God to speak through him. And so what you, it's one way to look at is that you're a vessel. You're a vessel for something greater, and you're just a channel to bring that through to other people. So I remember I'm friends with Deepak Chopra and that he's an amazing, amazing man. And I, I'd seen him, I'd seen him get up and do a one hour, one hour talk. No prep. Yep. And I was like, floor. I said, how do you do that? And he's like, I just, I let it flow. So there's a lot of prep I do when I talk publicly. Like, a lot of prep. Because just flowing and like winging it, I don't think it's the way to do it. But the inspiration of that should come through something from above. You know, you have to be a vessel to talk about the inspiration of what you're doing. And you lead people through inspiration. You lead people through, you know, clarity about where they're going.

So it's funny you. You bring up sermons because probably starting in 2019, I decided to get rid of. Of news on the radio when I'm driving. And I leaned 100% into listening to Joel Osteen on satellite radio. And I found like, motivational inspirational faith through listening to that. But it also changed the dynamic in which I arrived at the location if I was showing up for a meeting. My theory is how you drive is how you arrive. And so by doing that, and now you're like, you're saying that you're working out to it, and I'm working out to it. And I find, like, it's a much healthier approach than me listening to Howard Stern or listening to the news. Two things that I just religiously lived on for years. And once I eliminated those things, my life became a lot simpler. And I could really be that type of a leader that I always wanted to be, but I didn't know how to get there. But I just wasn't giving myself the preparation time in order to do it.

Yeah, I mean, when I, like I said, you. I learned a lot. You know, public speaking, I've been taught a lot of, you know, a lot of things about it. And it depends on the format, by the way, too. So depending on what format. Format you're speaking in, like, if I'm on tv, like, I. I'm very prescriptive on what I'm doing, and I have to. I'm getting a message, like one message out, right?

You have like, super sound bitey. Right?

You have five minutes, you know, you have five minutes. You gotta get across and, and stuff. Like that if, if I'm doing something more long form, then you can be more, you know, I think, inspirational. But either way, like, when I do my customer custom, we just did a customer conference. I did about a 20 minute talk. And, you know, there's a lot of practice that goes into it, and I, you know, I think practice makes perfect and you got to repeat. And we're professionals, you know, if you're a professional, you have to act like a professional, you know?

Yep, absolutely, man. I actually am doing a training for Tony Robbins tomorrow and just finished my slides this morning. And now I'm just going through the repetition so when the moment happens and the bell rings, I can serve that audience and lift them up. And I love the preparation as much as the execution because I know that if I get the preparation time in, I'll be rewarded in public for what I practice and refine in private. And that for me is super cool. But listen, I could be talking to Rob Locasio all the time because, one, he's an incredible mentor in my life and he's a trailblazer in the tech space. But more than that, you can really see this whole, like, warm, human side of Rob. Very thoughtful. Rob, where can people, besides going to live person, where can people go to learn more about you as their guru, their thought leader? You know, kind of like I've been following you and learning about you over the years. Where can people follow you?

Yeah, I mean, I'm on all the social media channels, but I have a podcast called over the Wall that I put out there. And, you know, I interview all sorts of interesting people. Deepak Chopra and Suze Ormond and Ed Norton, the actor, and, you know, a bunch of people like. And I just, I pick people that I also think are doing something interesting in the world as entrepreneurs. And I think it's really a hard. It's hard to be an entrepreneur. It's hard doing. I often say it's very hard doing new things. It's easy to copy. My grandfather, my grandfather said, you know, never be a follower. Since I was a kid, he said, don't be a follower. And he used to just drill that into me. And it's easy to be a follower, and so it's hard to be a leader. So I think, you know, there's this constant striving for that. And I created this podcast to kind of go through, you know, what it's like being a leader, what it's like being out there. Because it can be lonely. It has its challenges. I call it over the wall. Because you're constantly going over these walls every couple of years and they have a certain amount of pain to them. But the pain is instructive. You know, that's the other thing. Like, it's one of things I talk about the podcast. Like the pain is instructive. It always will be instructive.

I'm a listener and a subscriber. I think Ed Norton is one of the great, greatest actors of our time and I'm a super fan of his work and I love the episode. But I also, you know what, what you just said in closing, that triggered so much in my head, is when I have the opportunity to get on stage and I've got material, but I've got a longer amount of time, I can allow the universe to speak through me. And those are easier for me than the short little sound bitey ones that you do on cnbc. That I see you up there crushing it. Those are more difficult because the sand in the hourglass drops really, really fast on those. And that's precision. You prep for those with the same level of intensity, don't you?

Yeah. I had the funniest, I'll tell you the funniest thing. I was going to be on Kramer for the first time in my life and it was remote because I was at a conference in Spain at the Mobile World Congress conference. And I'm on the plane, nighttime flight 11 o' clock at night, took off from JFK. And I'm practicing on the plane the whole way. You know, I had an eight hour flight or whatever. And because it's my first time on Kramer, it's like, you know, it's, it's like, whoa. You know, I've always wanted to do that. And I went to the bag, I go to the bathroom and the lady, the stewardess says, she goes, are you on the phone? Are you on, Were you on the phone? Like, she started on some phone speaking over the WI fi go, no. She goes, why are you talking to yourself? We've been all looking at you for like the last two hours. You know, they were all up in front because everyone's asleep. And I'm, Yes. And there are the people work there, they're all up in front, you know. And she goes, we just been watching you talk. We're like, we were gonna come over until you stop talking on the phone or whatever. We didn't know what's going on. I said, no, I'm practicing. I'm gonna be on a TV show. And they're like, they were Laughing. So, I mean, this is what it was. I was like, I want. Even on the plane, I'm like, I'm gonna. I need eight hours of, like, repetitive shots because he's like. He's quick, you know, he just throws at you. And I did it. You know, I was very proud of that.

Repetition is the mother of skill. So the more times you get to do it, the more it comes out flawlessly. And people just think, damn, Rob Lacasse is brilliant how he just came up with that. And. But that's. That goes right back to Tony Robbins and the preparation. So when the bell rings, you can jump into the ring and win your fight. And fewer winning the fight better in a more loving way than Rob Licasio. Rob, thank you so much for joining me on the Todd cast. It's always an honor to spend time with you, my man.

Same here, Todd. Thank you for having me on the show.

Yo, that was a powerful episode. And from what we just learned, it should be obvious how you can now implement these lessons in your life to get to the next level. Now, before you bounce, I just have three quick thoughts. First, thank you for taking me on your incredible life journey. Second, if you receive some value from me and you want to pay it forward, it would mean the world to me if you left an honest rating and review at Apple, Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen, I'd be incredibly grateful. And lastly, if you share this episode, whether it be a screenshot or a photo from where you're listening, anything via Instagram stories or LinkedIn, Facebook, or any of the social media sites, just tag me and the guest. I'll repost your content and I'll reply back in the comments because I love mixing it up. In fact, I'd love to share your shoutouts in my feed, too. Not only are these shoutouts really good for you and for me, but they also help us book more amazing guests because they'll be able to see the reach that you're helping to cultivate. This is a way for you to help contribute to the show. So thank you again for listening, and I look forward to earning a regular spot inside that ear of yours. Let's grow. Sat.