Creating Group Flow At Scale - Elliott Bisnow & Jeff Rosenthal | Flow Research Collective Radio

We've got Jeff Bezos, Jessica Alba, Mark Cuban, Ray Dalio, Ray Kurzweil, Craig Venter. I mean, the breadth is just nuts. And yeah, it's super impressive.

I mean, the path to getting to those people took many, many years, and it's probably not a good idea for people to try to cold call or reach out to people like that. I mean, we certainly weren't getting those people on day one.

What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting? Nothing is ever the same again.

Breakthroughs.

Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your The boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Doris, and together with bestselling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Elliot Bisnow and Jeff Rosenthal, welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. It's great to have you both here. Stephen and I have been looking forward to this. It's going to be fun.

Here we go.

So the new book, which is absolutely phenomenal, we're going to be talking a lot about it. It's got the great title Make No Small Plans. Lessons on thinking big, chasing dreams, and building community. Stephen and I both read it. We both loved it. We've been raving about it. There's a quote in that book at the beginning in the intro that says, the strength of our organization stems not from its 4 founders, but from the hands of the remarkable community connected by a common insatiable desire to create, to share, and to nourish their best selves. And before we even describe what Summit is and how you both ended up building it, I would love to hear some things top of mind that contributed to Summit creating such an incredible and rare community and what you both attribute that to.

Jeff, you want to take it away?

I think that assuming some cursory knowledge of Summit being a global community of entrepreneurs and innovators, gathered together at flagship events and all over the world for the past decade plus, as well as Powder Mountain in Utah and other manifestations 13 years on since founding it. I think that it was an idea that came at the right time. And I think generationally, there's these communities that come together that are the heart and soul of a particular discipline or art form or industry. And I think that in the 2010s, all of the silos were ready to break together in an interdisciplinary fashion where they were valuable for one another in a way that I don't think was necessarily true 10 years prior. And we also had the good fortune of having some inspiration from conferences like TED and music festivals and parties And so the idea that thought leadership events could both be fun and engaging and really inspirational and high level, and that of course extended to many other areas of interest and focus in the way that we produce flagship events. But yeah, I guess where we don't take as much credit is that I think we were the first at a time where that hadn't happened yet. These worlds hadn't collided and started interacting.

Do you give all the credit to timing, Jeff?

This is—

I don't believe this.

Well, there certainly was, you know, an emergent era, Steven. You know, after the iPhone launch, you had this platform where suddenly any person starting in, right, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, basically for the first time ever, anyone could create an app. Anyone could cheaply and quickly build a business. And the millennial generation really rocketed up there. That's when they started building. And when I dropped out of college, I was the first person in the history of my high school to ever drop out of college. And when I started my first business, I didn't even know that you could raise money for a business. I didn't even know there was such thing as venture capital, because those things were pre-2008. And you have this era where all these incredible companies that we know today were all started in this window from like 2006 to 2010. And none of those people got invited to anything. They didn't get invited to any conferences, they didn't get invited to any gatherings. There's a good analogy. Imagine the 10,000 islands in Florida, and you know there's 10,000 islands, but you can't see any of them because there's no elevation. And so on your little island, you're all alone. And I think it turned out to your great, great question to open this, that our idea worked because we needed a community, and therefore it was obvious that others needed a community, right? Like we were all completely siloed. We didn't know anybody, and these other incredible founders didn't know anybody. And so when it came to timing, I do think there was a lot of luck that we launched Summit in a perfect moment in time. Like you couldn't have launched Summit 5 years later, because there wasn't kind of this desperate group, like filled with entrepreneurial energy, but that didn't have any connections.

That makes a lot of sense to me. Was there a point, an event, a conversation or whatever, where you started to realize that this, the interdisciplinary world that you guys built was gonna be one of the things?

Jeff, you wanna take it?

Yeah, I think that, you know, as you hear from what Elliot was just breaking down, it was very entrepreneurial and business focused. For the first few, 3, 4 years of Summit. And there was a sprinkling of the arts and music and food and entertainment and government and, well, 8 astronauts. I wouldn't say it was a science festival. And I think that the idea that the more diverse the inputs, the more complex and impactful the outputs, the way that I think that this sort of like 10,000 islands of entrepreneurs wanted to better themselves in all these different directions, We are insatiably curious, and we were 24, 23 years old when we founded Summit, and we all of a sudden had like, you know, not to use an overused phrase, but a tribe of mentors. And we were smart enough to know at a basic level how lucky we were to have all of these incredible guides. So, you know, I think that Summit became more diverse, the experience became more diverse as, you know, we grew up. But when you hear us sort of like say, oh, it's timing, oh, it's other people, it really is for us. It's like we had this incredible triangulation of goodwill. And yeah, I think we're pretty good at gathering people.

There was an accidental moment, Stephen, on our second event that had 60 people. And the accidental moment was that there were 3 speakers there, Tim Ferriss, Scott Harrison from Charity: Water, Tim Ferriss from 4-Hour Workweek, Scott Harrison from Charity: Water, and Blake Mycoskie from TOMS Shoes. And they were there as attendees, also speakers. But that was the first merging of different worlds at Summit, where suddenly people building tech businesses were listening for really the first time ever to a very relatable story from Scott Harrison, who was running a charity attempting to serve millions of people with clean water, or for the first time seeing one of the earliest businesses that attempted to have a double bottom line with Tom's Shoes, right? For everyone you buy as the customer, we're giving something. And then hearing for the first time, I think for almost all these 60 attendees, the first time ever hearing a life hacker in Tim Ferriss, right? Like so many of us grew up with the retire, in your 60s and it's all about profit-focused businesses and making money. And then suddenly it's like, life is about giving, life is about having a double bottom line, taking weekends off and spending time with the people you love. So that has always stood in my mind as like a moment we all latched onto. And from there, as Jeff described, like we basically sprinted toward that for 12 years, realizing like, if that's what the impact 3 diverse thinkers can have on a community, imagine what happens when you exponentially increase the diversity of thought.

I just want to give people a quick sense of that by doing some name dropping on your behalf as well. So you guys had, as creators involved in Summit, we've got Jeff Bezos, Jessica Alba, Mark Cuban, Ray Dalio, Eckhart Tolle, Ram Dass, Bill Clinton, Kendrick Lamar, Kobe, uh, Ray Kurzweil, Craig Venter. I mean, the, the breadth, uh, is just— is nuts. And yeah, it's, it's super impressive.

I mean, the, the, the path to getting to those people took many, many years, and it's, it's probably not a good idea for people to try to cold call or reach out to people like that. I mean, we certainly weren't getting those people on day one. And when people like Tim Ferriss or Scott Harrison or Blake Mycoskie came, who today are quite famous, Tim Ferriss had just published "The 4-Hour Workweek," and TOMS had only given away 10,000 pairs of shoes, and Charity:water was literally celebrating their first anniversary. I think today they're approaching their 15th. So a lot of the people we had became better known later, and also as we built relationships and we built trust with the community, The community, our best source of referrals and speakers by far was introductions from people who came to Summit, saw the quality of what we were putting on, built trust with us, and then they would introduce us to other people and say, hey, I think you may like to meet, and that list you just shared, I think you may like to meet people like that and that they could benefit from what you're doing. So it took a long time to get those people.

Just so everybody listening can have a little context of why you guys are on Flow Research Collective Radio, to all you know, first of all, I go way back with both Jeff and Elliot. And early on in the flow work, we held one of our first flow events at their Malibu mansion way, way back in— is that 10 years ago now? Something like that. So there's a lot of history. There's a lot of connection, but The thing I want to start with is Summit events have gone farther than almost any other event that I can think of, with the possible exception of Burning Man, to try to create group flow at scale and make it really useful. More than— and this, I think, is more than Burning Man, where the group flow you were creating was very focused on driving forward social entrepreneurship and those kinds of ideas that were very, very important to you. Can you talk a little bit about that? I know that was there a little bit from the beginning, 'cause I remember having conversations with Jeff about group flow 10, 12 years ago at this point, but how did that mature for you? What did you learn all along the way? What were the greatest flow triggers and what were the greatest group flow blockers? All those kinds of flow-related questions.

I'll start by saying that we are all, I don't know if we're flow state addicts. I don't know if it's something that we, as soon as we—

Junkies is the appropriate word. Retirement.

Is that what you say?

Okay. Yeah.

You know, we always— we all bonded in our love for, uh, skiing. Um, you know, all of us played sports our whole lives. We all, you know, um, surf or aspire to surf. Um, uh, and, and I think that, you know, with the way that we, you know, we're finding success in the early days of Summit, um, you know, as you start to get on a roll, that, that metaphor people understand. But to connect it to flow and to feel it in different, you know, whether it's jiu-jitsu or surfing or, you know, your relationship with your loved ones, you know, you can get into this 1 1 3 environment that you can feel and not think as much, right? So I think that for Summit, you know, we did get into a flow where we saw the manifestation of live event, for instance, as this, art of social sculpture. How do you use the people and the place and the narrative and the music and the experiences and peak experience moments? And if our flagship events are over 3.5 days and they're choose your own adventure, but there's these different times where we'd make sure that people got a particular message or people had a particular experience that would stand out ideally for their lives. Like we're trying to give people the best, musical experiences, the best friends, the best, most insightful conversations where they can really learn or take away meaningful info. I mean, like if you listen to a podcast, you go to a talk, take away 2 things, 3 things that you remember, I think that's like incredible. So for us, we were always thinking about how do we deepen the arrows? How do we enrich the experience? And how thoughtful are we with people's time? You know, the more that we respect the fact that these are really exceptional people who are the busiest folks on the planet, they don't have enough time for the people they love, and they're going to come and do your thing. Um, you know, we also got this great pattern recognition because we were meeting 1,000 entrepreneurs from 1,000 different disciplines and seeing what they all needed and being able to, and to be able to match both, you know, people and personalities, mentors and mentees, professional services, capital to projects, overlapping interests. And I think that that is the currency that we most seek, frankly. Like we get more pleasure out of seeing our friends thrive than we do when we have our own wins. And that's how we're wired. And I think that that's really important if you're gonna be a real community builder and experience creator.

One of the chapter titles that I loved, which goes back to what you were emphasizing, Elliot, maybe you can speak more to this, was A Single Connection connection can be exponential. And I'm curious how you guys saw that exponential wave take place with respect to, as you said, the first event with Tim and Blake, all the way up to Bezos, presidents, and the most kind of well-known people on earth.

I think one of the challenges with watching online content is while you can learn a lot, it inherently lacks the ability to immediately connect with people around it. You know, there are ways, but when you go to content in person, you know, there's a self-selecting element of the people in that room. And when the talk ends, that's really when the work begins, right? Because rather than leaving a talk with some ideas in your head, what actually happens is like we would create a lot of space, sometimes up to 45 minutes after the content sessions. So like the worst thing is, you know, you're in high school, the class ends and you're running to the next one because like class is starting. And like we would create these like incredibly, like incredibly spacious events where you would just have time after the sessions to connect with people. And, you know, when you're self-selecting into a talk, whatever the talk is about, and you know that the dozens or hundreds of other people in that talk are searching for the same thing, suddenly that room you're in or that amphitheater, it literally becomes like, it just becomes like a basket of people that you should meet and be friends with. I always thought that Summit was for all the people you should have been friends with, right? And then within each individual content session, now there's even more people who are just like everyone in the conversation on prison recidivism, is passionate about that. Everyone in the music talk is passionate about the music publishing industry. Everyone in each of these talks is passionate and they're all connecting. What happens when you make one connection, and the reason one connection can be exponential is because you can work, simply put, as hard as you want, 12 hours a day, and either be going in the right direction or the wrong direction, but one person who can steer you in either the correct direction or can make— can open a door that just levels you up like 4 steps can truly exponentially change your business. And we've just seen that over and over and over again. So we're big believers in like when you come to an event, like the greatest thing you can take away is even half a dozen relationships where each one has the potential to impact your personal life or your business.

One of the things that It's really this to me, we were talking a little bit before we started about this. The thing that's clearest to me in reading the book, which I have to second Ryan's opinion, it's wonderful, super fun. You keep at every, whenever you're faced with any kind of question test for the company, anything like that, your response was always go bigger, go bigger, go bigger. And I'd seen that Peter Diamandis sort of was, is the incarnation of that. I think I learned it so much from being around him a little bit. That's a hard lesson for a lot of people to learn. A lot of people get scared off by scale. They get scared off. You guys took it all the way to the end too. We're going to buy a mountain. And at which level, like what level up was the scariest for each of you? You know what I mean? Like which step forward was it and why? And how did that become such an instinct for you? Because I know it's an automatic habit at this point, but it wasn't always. So I'm curious about that process of where that much ferocity became a habit and how it developed into a habit for you guys.

Well, I can share one funny story because you had mentioned earlier that we lived in a Malibu mansion. What it really was, was a dilapidated, very large house. And, you know, when it comes to leveling up and thinking bigger, we came to a crossroads in our career, in our journey, where we had about 20 people working at our company, and we realized we needed to locate the company in Los Angeles. This is around 2010. But we could not afford to all get houses in Los Angeles. We couldn't afford office space. And we certainly, we really needed to, you know, keep building the community, and we realized We certainly couldn't afford to do dinners at fancy restaurants. And so we decided to rent this 35,000-square-foot house in Malibu that was— I mean, it had orange carpet. It was literally— it was so similar to the broken-down castle in Beauty and the Beast that it had a rose garden out front. And for us, and when we think about leveling up and making no small plans and Thinking bigger, going bigger, there are very practical thinking bigger steps to take that don't cost much money or take much risk. Like you should not, if you've played hearts, every few years you can kind of shoot the moon. You should not shoot the moon every single hand. Because if you don't, in hearts, if you fail to shoot the moon, you lose everything basically. And so, For us, a lot of our leveling up was these decisions where we need to go to Los Angeles. So how do we make this big power move of moving our company to this big city, moving our team there, building a community there, but not raise tons of capital, get some fancy office. And so what we did was we found this dilapidated mansion, and then we learned this trick that you can take any crappy space, and if you turn off all the lights at night and just put lamps and candles, it looks amazing. So we would do that trick 2 nights a week and have like 50 people over to dinner. And it kind of became this lore that you could drive down the PCH past where all the nice houses are, you know, where Larry Ellison has his house on Carbon Beach, drive about half an hour past that, and you'll see this, this big house, and you'd come in and would be totally dark except for uplighting and candles. We started putting on these unbelievable dinners. And I think that really was the beginning of when we started creating just this wild energy and spaces. But I came to this story, Steven, just because it was a big risk on the outside, but it was a risk we took without basically any financial risk, without any reputational risk. And when you think about how did you buy a mountain? That was many, many, many years into our journey. And it was methodically, we methodically thought about it for many years. And so, I'll end my answer and pass it to Jeff by saying, most big risks you take, there is a path to take them without actually taking much risk.

Definitely not the case with the Clinton talks. The Sachs auction.

I will come back to answer the Clinton talk after Jeff goes. I will tell you why I believe the Clinton talk was actually less risky, even though we had a quarter million dollars on the line that we didn't have. I will tell you why I think there was actually less risk than someone would assume there was. Jeff? Okay.

All I would say is that, you know, we— you don't see, uh, if you're, if you're seeking— like, we were on like our Blues Brothers mission from God at a point. There's so much confirmation bias. It keeps working. And when we had all of these remarkable, and I think we're really lucky to have some great partners and we all work together really well and debated ideas really well. So instead of it just being one of us, it was the four of us plus a really incredible team of people in the early days and continued on until today that truly do build Summit with us. It's a fallacy if people think that it's just us and our leadership, but I do think we were blessed with a really, really great team in those early days.

I'm just saying that if you are searching for treasures, you'll find them.

And if you're looking for amazing opportunities, you'll find them. You have to be methodical and have a process and be patient and have trusted friends that will poke holes in your ideas before you decide to take a big bet. But you don't get anywhere taking small bets. That's why the book's Make No Small Plans. That was the flow state we were in and like the, you know, people that we had surrounding us that we could ask for help and our willingness for to ask for help and to be in the business of relationships and experiences, not in a transactional manner. You know, it was really about trust and friendship and fun and mutual aid, um, you know, not, you know, making money off of one another or extracting value from one another. So I think it put us in a position where, you know, we would definitely egg each other on. We weren't hucking cliffs and taking stupid risks, but when we, you know, heard Powder Mountain was quietly for sale, it sounded insane to us too. We didn't think it was real, but did we get on a plane? Yeah, of course we got on a plane, you know, and like, did it seem insane when we were driving up to the top of the mountain? Yeah, it still was like there's no possible way we're gonna buy this mountain, but you know, would it make the movie? You know, like, can we leave it unturned? And then once you're, you know, inspired and you feel it, and we saw the sunset over the Great Salt Lake and we were like really considering, okay, wow, like, can we actually do this? Is this a real possibility? Is it worth our time, our life's path, our, you know, what we've built so far underneath us? I mean, the amount of, like Elliot mentioned that, The ideas after dinner, ideas late at night, time together, the spiral dynamics of living and working together in that way, professionally and personally, I think that that led to us always taking that big bet, but in a way where we had cycled through 100 big bets that we didn't take.

Give our listeners a little bit of context around the Clinton talk and what it was, because it was To me, the quarter million dollars on the line is the craziest part.

So we, as we were building Summit, we would have these opportunities to get big luminaries to speak. And we had a chance to get— we had a chance to get President Clinton to speak. And the issue with getting— was getting President Clinton was that he would do the event, but he would not confirm a long time ahead without us giving a donation to his charity, right? So it was, yeah, sure, you know, we could give you a few days' notice when he's in New York City or in DC, and he'd love to come. But if you want to book him, you know, months ahead of time and be able to promote him, like, you need to make a donation. And so we realized, like, we really need to get President Clinton, and it was a quarter million dollar donation to his foundation. And like, we didn't have— like, we were making like a couple thousand dollars a month each. And we were literally sharing beds with a pillow between us. And we had moved to a 2-bedroom condo for the Fork Summit co-founders, and we walked into 2 bedrooms, 2 beds for 4 of us, and we literally looked at each other and said, "This is the best opportunity of our life. This is incredible." So what happened with President Clinton is that on the surface, we committed to paying him a quarter million dollars and we didn't have the money, But I think in reality at that point, what was actually happening behind the scenes is that we had sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in tickets to our events. And we knew that if we had President Clinton booked, that there were, you know, a few dozen people who would pay in the $5,000 to $10,000 range to come to an event of that caliber. And so yes, we took this big risk, but it's very different, you know, If I were to sign a big contract to do a real estate project and I didn't know anything about real estate, or I signed a lease for an airplane, but I don't actually have an airline. For us, we were booking Clinton, but we knew that on the back of booking him, we would be able to come up and sell tickets. And so I think just going back to risk, I do think if one of the— and to flow state, when you have a team, And they're always ideating. Like the, the best thing that happens is just the amount of ideas that come out. Like when it's me and Jeff and Brett and Jeremy, and every single night we're just throwing ideas all night, dinner ideas, after dinner ideas, late into the night ideas. And it was just basically like that Malibu house, Steven. It was just like nonstop idea flow all the time, constantly challenging each other, constantly pushing each other. It was the opposite of going off to a room by yourself and saying, I need to be in silence for 4 hours and I'm going to solve this thing. It was just like us in a flow state, all pushing each other.

You've thrown a lot of big events. I've been to a bunch of them. Was there one that was the least— well, I want to know about the least flowy event you threw, where it didn't work and why. And the corollary, the the flowiest event you think you threw and why?

Yeah, I'd love to answer. I mean, the least flowy events by far are events in cities that last for an evening, right? Because there's just no time to get into a flow. And so the least flowy events that we've done, you know, we did plenty of at the very beginning and realized there was no flow, so we'd stop doing them. We're just city dinners. Like, there's just, it's very difficult to make a city dinner, a dinner in a city, super flowy. And of the big events we did, right, like the first event was 19 people, 60, 120, 250, 750, up until thousands of people. You know, we would spend a year planning these and the events were 3 days and 3 nights. And when you have an experience that immersive, with that much effort going into it, where people have to, you know, they have to literally make a pilgrimage to get there. They have to get on an airplane, basically, you know, for almost everyone. They have to check into a hotel. I mean, they're very bought in. You are— the harder it is to get to an event, right, the more bought in someone's going to be. It's why Burning Man is so difficult to get to, and you have to wait in line. I mean, that is the ultimate test of a self-selecting event, right? That any person on the planet can actually go to Burning Man, but you have to self-select in to wait in this insane line and roll in Playa dust, you know, if it's your first time ever. And I think for our events, we had that same experience, you know, that same experience, but the Summit way, which is, you know, you're coming to an event that, you know, is 24 hours a day. It doesn't, it doesn't stop, right? You're coming to an event where It's packed with content sessions where people are challenging your ideas. And so, you know, I think the events got, Stephen, also got progressively much more flowy as we understood, you know, what would put people into a flow state. And I'll give one example and pass it to Jeff, but there's, when you want to get people into a flow state, you kind of awkwardly need to do icebreakers either before the event or in the very beginning of the event. And a funny story is that Summit at Sea in 2011, in order to check into the boat, the check-in, we got them to move it earlier. So to check on the boat, you had to go through the equivalent of like customs, TSA, and the check-in was from 9:00 AM to midnight. And we assumed like everyone would come all throughout the day. And what actually happened is everybody arrived basically at 4:00 PM. Because they slept in or they met interesting people the night before. And when Jeff and I got to the lobby to greet the few hundred guests that had all arrived, they were in this like 90-minute-long line. And these people were furious. We said like, well, how are you? And they're like, horrible. This is the worst event experience I could possibly have gotten. Like, your event sucks and it hasn't started because I have to wait an hour and a half to get in. And I think like we realized in that moment, like, how could we flip this? And so we literally got on our phones and walkie-talkies. We had one of our DJs come down, we dimmed all the lights in the port. We brought all the food we had on the ship down. And since it was only the first couple hundred people there, the next 1,200 people that boarded, they arrived in the port, literally to a party at the Port of Miami. Like imagine getting to an airport with all the lights off and a DJ outside of TSA. Right? And then you're just— they— the next group of people that came in, they said like, this is the best check-in I've ever had in my entire life. This is the greatest thing that I've ever seen. Um, and we're like, all right, go tell that to the first time.

I remember that line from the second year, or the second summit.

That was— so what happened is we started realizing, we started learning how to put people in flow state. Like, it never feels good to wait in line. You just— it gets you off, it gets you on the road. It's like getting out of the wrong side of the bed. Like, What sucks you out of flow state more than like having like super bright lights and not feeling like you're welcome into a place versus like you said on the second year, we actually planned ahead and made the DJ party at, you know, customs and, you know, customs at the Port of Miami, like an actual thing. Like, and people were like, no, I don't want to check in yet. I want to, I want to hang at the customs party. So like our flow state kept getting better and better and better. And maybe Jeff, you have some funny stories of events that you feel like, what are things that put people into a flow state, whether it's like a powerful opening keynote where we would have like a ton of depth, or it could be, we would have jam rooms where people, one minute are in an office and then they're coming in, they're literally at a music room, like jamming with attendees. We're big in like putting workouts in the center of the lobby.

Our greatest hit is probably, uh, the long table dinner at Summit Outside.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, and you know, Summit Outside was a 3.5-day event that we threw on top of Powder Mountain kind of as a like unveiling party before we had built any roads or infrastructure on top of the mountain. And so we had to berm and build platforms for 750 tents and teepees and domes And we brought 1,000 people for a 3.5-day camping experience where we literally like mulched the trails and brought 5.5 pop-up tent restaurants and built stages in the forest and lighting installations and had pirate radios and pop-up, you know, chow mein carts at 2:00 AM. And, you know, an unbelievable, unbelievable event that we like had the paint drying on when people started showing up and it sort of broke our event confirmation bias where behind the scenes, it was like too insane. What we, what we bit off 90 days ahead. We were like, sure, of course we can produce an event with no infrastructure on top of this mountain. But experientially, it was quite amazing. As sort of like the capstone moment on the last day, you know, everybody met in sort of the campsite area and we walked them about a mile. It was a little too far, but I think it was good that it was a little too far. And, you know, a pretty unknown Jon Batiste and his band And Elliott's brother Austin Bisnow and his band Magic Giant led like a procession of, you know, 800 people down this mountain road around this corner that they hadn't been to yet. And the campus in general was too big because we planned it when there was still snow on the ground. So we were literally like in snowmobiles being like, this should go here. We had no idea how far it was to walk. Um, so, so anyways, they had never seen this and they get around this corner and there's this quarter-mile-long dinner table. And each picnic basket that every 5 people got had like charcuterie and wine and cheese and their cutlery. And it had a little FM pirate radio tuned to the right radio station. And we sat like 1,000 people at this dinner. We had to serve the courses with ATVs because there was no way to get—

we had like the pop-up restaurant at the top.

And I think that when you participate in an experience like that, the self that you bring, the shared experience. Like, if you could, like every, I don't know, it's like at this point in our history, the level that we're playing at, these are a lot of people that have like the most amazing experiences around the world at all times. And if you put the right people in surreal, thoughtful, intentional, beautiful experiences, and you can use all these different mediums, the narrative of which I just explained to you, the music, the food, that camaraderie, the last day versus the first day, all of these things like build up to that, that peak experience moment. So I do think that like, you know, that's sort of our, our, our, our superpower as a, as an organization that we really, that we really tried to hone over our history.

I think there's something— ego blocks flow, right? Gets in the way, you get your prefrontal cortex turns on. I always thought there was something really fun about making people clear their own dinner plates and clean up after themselves at your big fancy dinners, right? You guys served the food family style, so it was everybody just pitching in, and you made everybody clean up after themselves. And I like that. I think that sort of like, it reminds people that, hey, you're a human being, you have to clean up after yourself. You know what I mean? It like despecializes you. I always thought that was a nice touch.

I think, Steven, you know, in the world that we live in, where you used to have total access to information. So it doesn't matter who you're sitting and watching give a speech, just like you've already heard them. So just by definition, by definition, every famous, successful, brilliant person, you've already heard them and everything they're going to say. So there's just only so much you can get out of sitting in a speech. Right, and I think if I were to look at, you know, what are the things that, you know, Summit has done over the years that have really been different, I think to your guys' points, letting people co-create the events, you know, painting walls, painting structures, serving the dinners, cleaning up the meals, anything that's participatory, you know, starts to flip things upside down. And the other thing is surprises. Again, just living in a world where there's so much communication and nothing's really a surprise, and especially successful people, like everything's all planned out at special places. And so doing real surprises like our events, you know, we've had, you know, secret passageways into content sessions that weren't on the schedules, or like Jeff said, secret buses hidden in the woods. Where we just don't tell anyone. There's just— we tell 2 people, hey, at 2 AM to 5 AM, there's going to be this food truck in the woods. And on the first night, only 20 people go. And then the second night, 100 people go. And on the third night, 500 people go because they all find out about it. So those are 2 of the big themes, just like constant surprises. Like Jeff said, that dinner, we didn't tell anyone what the dinner was. All the only instruction was, you know, wear boots and show up at this point. And then they didn't even— they showed up an hour before dinner. So first there was, you know, a half an hour, you know, dance-a-thon with Jon Batiste and his band. And then the band started walking and everyone just started following. And a mile later, which took 20 minutes, they looked and there was a— they couldn't even tell what it was because the table was so long. And then when they got to the seat, it actually took another 20 minutes to walk to the end of the table. And so just like constantly surprising people has been a big— and bringing people into the product where, you know, you're part of a march, you're part of a dinner, you're part of the service. Those two things have really moved the needle for us over the years.

Every couple of years you guys have leveled up and done something bigger, something weirder, more interesting. So like, how do you How do you continue to do that if you already bought a mountain?

There's a good, there's a good story in our book, um, that after we did Summit at Sea, we realized we were growing the community so quickly, like what we actually wanted to do was a smaller event. And so we did. We went from an event that was about 1,500 people back to an event that was 850 people. So it actually— what would be more surreal, you know, wouldn't just be more and more and more, but it'd actually just be a tighter experience. And I think I think with your question, what do we do to top a mountain, would be to make the mountain really incredible, to actually build out— now you own it, now we have approaching 50 homes that are completed, building out the lodge, building out the amenities, improving the ski resort, building great communication between all the neighbors. I think we took a lot of time the last 2 years to write a book that in many ways isn't building anything forward. It's like, I basically describe it as taking the craziest 5 years of our life and these dozens of lessons we learned and actually packaging it so anybody can read our story. And so I think a lot of the last few years have been about taking the things we feel really fortunate to have, having Powder Mountain, being able to build it out, having stories, being able to package them. I mean, we launched another company called Summit Junto, which we frankly wanted to do for half a decade. Which is almost the inverse of the big event. And it's getting small curated groups of 6 people, just, and building people their own advisory boards and having those groups meet for a couple hours once a month. So I think in many ways it was looking introspectively to tighten up the things we want. It wasn't add more community members, like the community had grown so large. It was, pull back, focus on the values of the community. Is everyone who's part of the Summit community truly good, kind people? Are they all excitable, energized, entrepreneurial people? Are we serving the community in the best ways? Should we do smaller events, which is what we did this past fall of 2021? We did these very surreal small events in rural Colorado and on Lake Powell. Are we giving the community like a chance to deeply connect with each other? Okay, let's launch SummitGento, our forum. So I think that's the answer to your question, how Jeff and I and the team have looked at it the last couple years. And, um, you know, maybe Stephen, now that we've looked internally, it's time to go bigger again.

Summit on the moon, folks. Summit on the moon.

Yeah, that'd do it. Um, By the way, I have a few friends in Junto who absolutely love it and rave about it, guys. So I'll throw that out there and mention that to anyone who's listening as well. Summitjunto.com, is that the URL?

Yeah, just summit.co.

Summit.co, okay, and then Junto as well. So, Elliot, you mentioned one of the reasons behind writing the book was so that people can learn and then create their own communities. And I'm curious if you guys were gonna start to build a community again from scratch, What would be the sort of play-by-play breakdown that you would approach to create something big and impactful like you have done?

Well, I think the most important thing is doing something different than exists in the world. And I think there's a great quote, you know, the riches are in the niches. So whether that's, you know, the riches as in, you know, money, or whether it's, you know, the metaphorical riches of success. I think there's really something to niches. And I think Summit's core being is about serving the entrepreneur in all of us. And being an entrepreneur is glamorized, but as anyone knows who's entrepreneurial in a company, or they are an entrepreneur having started their own nonprofit or band or business, it's really hard day in and day out. And so at its core, Summit is actually pretty niche. You know, Summit is not designed for anyone to come to, and it's designed that way not to be exclusionary. It's actually designed that way to attempt to include as many people as possible who are entrepreneurial, right? And so we've always thought that like a really powerful niche can truly service people who need that niche. So I'd love to set this up for Jeff But my first takeaway is focus on something niche. Don't focus on, I'm going to build a community for millennials, or I'm going to build a community for people interested in real estate, or like you need to build something really, really niche. And look, we live in a big world, and when you service a niche, people will self-select into it. In a way that is more mind-blowing than you could ever imagine.

Jeff, I, I think you're talking about like who— it's almost like a super user, um, you could call it product-market fit, but you're talking about servicing the person that's going to be totally ecstatic about what you do. Um, I don't know that we had that in mind. Like, we didn't have any outcome we were seeking really with Summit out the gate other than we knew it was amazing for us just to meet all these other, you know, wonderful entrepreneurs, and we saw how valuable that was to them. So if you, you know, it's hard to service something that's not a need, especially if it's your first time. Like, you need to be afflicted by the thing so you're passionate about it, so you do it over dinner or late at night, or it's fun for you. Because if it's not, like, somebody's probably gonna smoke you at your own game because it's fun for them, they're passionate about it. It's very rare where you just have a proper operator that can be the best in the world at something, or at least good enough to break out. Forget being the best in the world at anything, just successful, just independent enough with your own business to choose to work versus need to work. I mean, that's a lifelong battle for even the most successful entrepreneurs. So I think that what Elliot's describing in terms of niche is like, you know, flow state, for instance, Stephen. You're, you know, you get overwhelmingly into this particular, you know, idea in a way that is like psychotic, right? That's the definition of like—

thank you, Jeff.

That's what it takes.

That's true.

Us too, we're like, we're thinking about like how to arrange the chairs around the dinner and, and how we do the box to make you clean your plate. I forgot about that until you told me, but that was the, that was the thinking, was like we really were. Um, and, and over the top with it, and, you know, completely engaged in it at all times. And then I think that, you know, in terms of like building community, not having an outcome that you're seeking for yourself is really important. Like, you need to be thinking about giving value to those that you're trying to bring together in a way that's differentiated, just sort of repeating the same thing Elliot said, and, you know, my own words. Otherwise, it's probably not worth their time.

When we arrived at Powder Mountain the first time, I mean, it couldn't have been farther from any place we'd ever been. I mean, the town only has 4,000 people and it's in rural Utah, an hour from the Salt Lake City airport. And we drove up the mountain and on the original building from 1972, this is real, on the original building from 1972, there was a sign from the founder, this guy, Dr. Cobabe. He'd started Powder Mountain in his mid-50s and he was like 98 at the time. Time, but there was a sign on the original building and it said, welcome to Powder Mountain, where you're only a stranger once. And I think we all just thought, wow, like this is, we're in a totally different, you know, place than we've ever been. We don't, I don't know how much we have in common, you know, with Dr. Kobabe and with Powder Mountain. And they have that view of community. Because Powder Mountain is the ultimate place that self-selects the people who ski there, or the people self-select to ski there. It's not Park City, it's not Aspen, it's not filled with fancy shops and amenities. It's for the people who really love the outdoors and they want to look each of the lifties in the eye and say hi to the fellow skiers. When you're at the restaurants, It's annoyingly friendly.

It's like oddly friendly.

It's oddly friendly. Yeah. And I think we just saw that and we thought, wow, like that's how you build community. Right. And like, I think there's just, you can build community with millions of people, right. Who come to a place, right. You can, you know, there's like anyone who skis at Powder Mountain considers themselves, you know, um, you know, they consider themselves part of that community. And so that, that's something when you apply to any community you're building, like that's how a community should feel. Like when you, any community should feel that as soon as someone becomes a part of it, they're no longer a stranger. There was a good quote of another community I saw that actually like Burning Man had been based on, but the quote of that community was, "You may already be a member." Right? And the idea was that the community was a mindset, right? If you care about helping the next generation of students in America, well, you may already be a member. If you care about, you know, a certain subset of music or music genre, you may already be a member. And I always thought, you know, that was funny. And I'll just end this by saying, you know, the best, like one of the communities that's the best to study and understand is Burning Man because it's cheap to attend. Anybody can go. There is no membership, yet everyone considers themself a member. Why? Because there's these couple things you have to do that only the people who are so passionate about these ideals would go, and everyone else thinks it's insane, right? You have to be into radical self-sufficiency and you have to be into radical self-exploration. And if you're not into those things, you will never, ever, ever go to Burning Man. And if you're into those things, you will shout to the world that everyone who's into those things should go. And so look, Jeff and I and our team, we've spent a lot of time thinking about communities. And you know, you've built a great community. And it's, look, it's very— when you're running, leading a community, you're a steward. You are stewarding a community, right? Like, it is not your community. And as soon as you realize that all you are is a steward of the community, You know, I guess then your journey starts.

And I love this. I would just add on, I would say most, if not, you know, not all, but most amazing thought leaders like to mentor and they want to give to those that, you know, can receive their knowledge. It's such a pleasure for the receiver and the giver. And, you know, like that, I think should demystify, like you don't only have to go for the highest level person. That's not why people came to Summit was just to meet like the titans of industry. It was the diversity of thought. It was like people that were exceptional, but perhaps 27 years old and hadn't had their breakout hit yet. You know, like we were reading it based on the work ethic and the energy. Sure, we didn't have 100% read on the ideas, especially business and technology. Like, what do we know about 99% of stuff? You know, it's really about the person. And then you can see some of like the writing on the wall. Like, you know, they say the ball doesn't lie, right? You can check the scoreboard. Like, if they build dope shit on a regular basis, if they're scaling an enterprise, if they're like an amazing CEO, if this is their third thing, like, guess what? You got a gangster on your hands. Like, this person's a proper player. So I think that that was the thing that we were always optimizing for. We didn't chase celebrity. We didn't chase any particular cheat code. We were more interested in like your favorite rapper's favorite rapper. And that's how you get me and Elliot to show up at your thing. Surprise us with somebody that we already love that we didn't think you knew about.

Your favorite rapper's favorite rapper. That's a great way to sum it up. I love that. Love that, Jeff. I want to ask you guys about group flow between the four of you because the four of you have just written a book together, which means you're all presumably on decent terms. And Elliot, you were mentioning the idea flow. Jeff, you were kind of emphasizing almost this egging each other on to think bigger and entertain ideas like the mountain. And so I'm curious what the contributing factors were to the success within the four of you and the group flow that you four obviously experienced as well.

Well, let me, let me take you back to the time the book takes place. So this book is a story from when we had zero connections, zero resources, zero success, two college degrees between the four of us, zero entrepreneurial success. And it's a story from that point until the day we buy Powder Mountain. And it's about 5 years. And in those 5 years, there's a great line in the quote, a great quote in the book about how we came together. We were not exactly the Beatles. It was like, first I met Brett at this really sad networking event. I was selling real estate ads for my dad's newsletter. And Brett, like, couldn't get any jobs after college. So he got a commission-only real estate job, not even selling real estate, selling land. And he got the job in the 2008 real estate crash. So like, he never even sold a piece of land. And I met him at the saddest event. It was like an Urban Land Institute local chapter event that nobody else had showed up to. Like, there was only like 12 people. By the way, it would turn out that when we needed to buy Powder Mountain and none of us knew how do you buy land, since Brett never made any sales, he just spent 2 straight years learning how to buy land. So what goes around comes around, which is pretty funny. And then we met Jeff who had just finished American University, and he was unhappy in his job at Macy's. And then Jeremy was in a band, um, you know, living on $8 a day. And I, I asked him, I said like, Jeremy, how do you, uh, how do you eat on $8 a day? And, uh, he was like, well, we go to the grocery store. And I'm like, right, but like, what can you buy for $8? He's like, no, no, you know the, uh, like where the nuts are, you can just scoop. Um, we just do that for like half the meal, and then the $8 covers the rest. So it was like, we were a real sad ragtag bunch of guys. And like what happened immediately is that we all moved in together. And we all, I think Jeff said it earlier, like we all started pushing each other. And then we immediately divided up the roles. Like you can tell that like, I'm kind of the off-the-deep-end excitable one of the group. Like, you know, Jeff is incredibly thoughtful about the culture of Summit, the brand of Summit, you know, what kinds of speakers we want to book, like what's next. Like we always prided ourselves in booking famous people, booking who's next, just like a music manager would discover who's next, right? Like Brett got really into music and Brett would lead the charge, you know, with our musical acts. Brett was always really into building the funnel to build a community. And so he would lead kind of our sales and community efforts. Like, you know, Jeremy was the one who would lead our technology and our website development and you know, getting our registration pages built. So it's like the 4 of us came together, uh, and immediately just got into a flow state together, like living together, breathing together, eating together, dividing up the work together. Um, and we did that for 5 years. And I think like our main takeaway is it's mind-blowing how much we did in 5 years. Like it's, it's almost overwhelming. Because every day, it was like each day had like, you know, at least 3 days in it. You had like the period from 7 to 2 PM, you had the period from like 2 to 8 PM, and then at 8 PM, you're just getting going on the brainstorming sessions till 2 AM. So it was just like, I don't know. I mean, Jeff, I'd love you to chime in. It's maybe a good question to end on, but it was total flow state, like constantly challenging each other, constantly asking each other like positive, challenging questions. Um, you, you want to take it away, Jeff?

Yeah, we wouldn't— there is no man left behind in terms of like the personal growth and the experiences, um, and the knowledge sharing. I mean, we'd go out, take meetings, and we'd come back home and everybody would tell each other about their day, you know what I mean? Like, we would, we would share the learnings. We were inspired by the learnings. We are insatiably, you know, curious in all these different directions. Most of the time that has no applicable overlap to our businesses. So it was kind of like kids at a candy shop, a bunch of ADHD kids that didn't really do well in college. You know, Brett's pretty smart in, in a normal way, but, uh, you know, the rest of us I think are abnormal learners, and we need to like do it and be taught. And, and we'll, we'll wait until we can get an expert to guide us. And so, you know, that's what we hunt for in like every aspect of our lives, whether it's wellness or music or, you know, content or real estate. You name the discipline, that was And if you make— if you go big, you know, then you get people that would otherwise not be interested to be a part of the thing that you're doing. You know, like it's inspiring for them too. It's valuable for them too. So also, ran shit is just not going to break through. It's that straightforward. And it takes a lot of, you know, passion and introspection and experience. Like, I think it's more important to be prolific than to be perfect. Especially if you're trying to, you know, get into a flow and create from flow versus from, you know, immaculate, um, you know, realization. You're not going to be Nikola Tesla walking in the park, be like, oh shit, this is how, this is how current should work. So, um, I, I, I'm a firm believer that you like, you know, lay the, the Great Wall brick by brick, and it just takes 30 years to be a proper player, you know. Like, it takes 30 years to get value out of a relationship, so who cares, like, who wins on the deal. So long as everybody's happy and wants to play again, then we can keep going. And I guess that we sort of demystified these big bets to ourselves because we would talk a ton of shit, we would joke about it— sorry for my vulgarity, but now I'm excited about the conversation— and we'd be like, this is the big dream. And then the real challenge would be like, how do you wake up and then apply sort of like the tools that we were building as executives, as entrepreneurs, as, you know, community builders, as strategic advisors and partners in a real and meaningful way. So we can then, you know, it's not reciprocation, it's like you give somebody the opportunity to help you, people want to help you, you know, especially when they're getting a lot of value and inspiration from the relationship and the experiences that you provide for them. So we sort of just like, I don't know, I guess we kind of hacked the system for ourselves so we could We were kind of forced to go off the deep end in a way.

Super, guys.

Love it.

Yeah. Appreciate the time. This was a blast. And I just want to emphasize to everyone to get the book. I don't think anyone's going to be disappointed reading it. Make No Small Plans: Lessons on Thinking Big, Chasing Dreams, and Building Community. And then summit.co.co. And then Summit Junto, which is at, I think it's summit.co/junto. J-U-N-T-O. It's definitely worth checking out. For everybody as well. So thank you guys a ton. It's been a blast.

Thank you, guys.

Jeff, Elliot, pleasure seeing you guys again.

Thank you both.

And love the book.

Thanks. See ya.

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