Why Matt Mullenweg Is Fighting for the Future of Open Source | Lenny's Podcast - EP.100

Matt, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

I'm a longtime fan. I've been wanting to get you on this podcast for so long. And this is such an interesting time to be chatting with you. There's a lot going on with Matt and WordPress these days. So, it's a really interesting, it's almost good that we waited a little bit to talk. So, we're going to get into a lot of that stuff, but I want to start with just what is it that you do, Matt? What are all the things you're involved in? Give people a sense of just the things you're working on.

I want to talk about that but go on.

Wow. Okay. You said too much. I get it now. Jazz club I was not aware of. I got to check this out. It's called Keys.

Okay, cool.

Amazing. Okay, that was new. That was news to me. Going back to Automattic, I think people don't get the scale of this thing. So, just to mirror back a few things and even add to what you've said, 1,700 people work there, 90 different countries. Also, you didn't share this stat. Something like 43% of the internet of internet websites are built on WordPress, run on WordPress.

Right, we're like at 4% I was looking at that list.

That's unreal.

Awesome. Okay. And then there's a few other things you didn't mention. I want to get to this later but I'll just mention now you guys own Tumblr. You bought Tumblr which I don't think a lot of people necessarily know.

Okay. A couple more fun facts before we get into some other stuff I want to chat about. Fun fact number one is you're super involved in the Bay Lights project. I didn't know this. For people that don't know what the Bay Lights, if you're in San Francisco, you definitely know what the Bay Lights project and I'm sure you love it. For people that don't know what this is about, what is this project and how have you been involved? Why have you been instrumental into making this a thing?

I first of all thank you for doing this. It's like if you live in SF, you're like, 'This makes the city better.' Just having this around. I didn't realize you were involved in like helping come up with the idea itself. I knew that you did the mortgaged your house to make it possible.

Yeah. Okay. And the other funny thing you said is about they were worried about the angle of the lights distracting people. What's funny is when I drove across the bridge, you can only see it when you're driving towards San Francisco looking backwards. So I'm like looking in my rearview mirror and the mirror turning around to look at it and that feels more dangerous than the lights shining in my face.

Yes. So back as they say on Twitter. Okay. Someone very close to you told me that you're an excellent rapper. I'm not gonna ask you to rap, but if you ever want to answer any questions in rap form, feel free.

Okay. So, I want to get into all the drama that you're swirled in right now, but I want to first lay the foundation of how you got into this and where this all came from. So, let's talk about just the origin story of you and open source. You've been more than half your life you've been working on open source. You've been working on WordPress, specifically WordPress is such a core community within the open source community. What was kind of the origin story of you becoming obsessed and I don't know, open source pill?

It feels like a lot of people are coming around to exactly your worldview. I was just watching a video of Jack Dorsey talking about how we're just controlled by algorithms and we don't know how they work and we're not in control of our lives. Have you seen that video?

Yeah, it's so interesting. I just had the Community Notes team on the podcast and that's an amazing example of community of open source Meta is adopting it from Twitter. Speaking of open source, one of the interesting maybe most common ways people hear about open source these days is AI and AI models. And there's a couple areas here. One is you wrote this really interesting post where you talk about how Meta talks about Llama as an open source project, but you called it a false prophet. What is it about Llama that isn't open source? What are people missing when they see Llama and they're like, 'Oh, yeah, Meta is amazing open sourcing everything.'

And also feels it's important to you to I don't know open source washing like avoid people using the term when it's not true and it's interesting in this case the like the thing that makes it not truly open source is the limit. There's a limit where you can no longer use it the way you want. Is that the issue?

Something else that I think is really interesting when it comes to AI and open source, you wrote about this and it blew my mind. Such a good point that the code that these models were trained on was open source code because that's all they have access to. They don't have like Windows code. They don't have Shopify code. And what a cool I don't know another success story slash I don't know I guess how do you feel about that that all these AI models are trained on code you wrote in code in open source community.

Say someone wants to actually do this. Where do they go? What do they how do they do this? Do they just like pick a project, go to wordpress.org and like here's how you contribute? What's like a next step there?

This also made me think about AI agents are coming around Devon and all these AI-driven coding agents. You have a prediction when most of the code contributed to the open source projects will be Devon and AI agent such type projects. I think Google talked about 25% of their code or characters committed are now sort of AI assisted. And they're probably on the bleeding edge. I don't know how much of WordPress's code right now is AI assisted or something like that.

I love this book on maintenance. There's a my sister's partner had this quote that I've always come back to. Life is maintenance. You basically like everything you acquire and deal with like you get a generator for your house, you have to maintain that forever. Now you get like this backpack, okay, now you have to like maintain this thing, make keep a nice jacket. Like everything is maintenance. Everything in your life is just maintenance. And I wonder if that's what the book's about.

That sounds like excellent work for your for this AI agent of the future that's coming soon. There's one other area I want to mine and that's community. Community building, building this ecosystem that you've created around WordPress. It might be the most one of the most successful biggest communities on the internet. I'm curious just what lessons you've learned about what it takes to build a successful community online especially. This is probably influenced by economics and jazz, right?

What a segue to all of this drama that's swirling around you these days. I think a lot of people do feel like there's devil horns that have appeared. And so I'm excited to dig into this stuff. I think I find that every time you go on a podcast these days, if we don't get into this, everyone's just like, 'Why is Matt not answering these questions? Let's get into the hard stuff.' So, I have some I'm going to ask you some hard questions. For people that don't know what the hell's going on, they're like, 'What are you even talking about?' Or just have a sense something is swirling with WordPress and Matt. I don't know what's going on. Well, it's just like the high level over what's going on.

But those are really big deals at the time.

No, these are things that, yeah, I was involved in school names.

So you mentioned this talk you gave at WordCamp and you said at the beginning of the talk like I'm, oh no afterwards you're like I was really nervous to give this talk and I obviously you can see why. Just like what finally convinced you this was time? Was it just to go as you described scorched earth nuclear? [laughter] Was it like WordCamp is coming up and this is the moment to go public with this? Was there something else that kind of crossed the line?

So if I could mirror back the issues that you ran into, and I want to go through this a little bit more. The problems you had with WP Engine in this case. One is they were using the trademark both WordPress and WooCommerce without license and they're just abusing it, confusing people. A lot of people thought WP Engine was actually Automattic and WordPress official. They weren't contributing to the project. They were just making basically a bunch of money and not doing the work to off this company they bought and they're just kind of hollowing it out as you described. And then they were also cutting corners making the product worse and that kind of reflects on the whole brand of WordPress.

Awesome. I'm curious just like which of those three or is it something even else that most bothered you about this? Like what's just like this is the thing that's eating me? And if I had to guess, it'd be like damaging the legacy potentially of this thing you've worked on for most of your lives. Maybe it's that. Maybe it's just taking advantage of the community. Just like what's the thing that you think is the root of this just like it just this needs to stop?

Obviously as you can tell on socials, a lot of people are just really upset and a lot of people blame you. There's just like, like I said, every time you're on a podcast or in Twitter, people are just like, 'Matt, what about this? Why this sucks? Why are you doing this?' And I want to go through some of those things, but just not many people go through like, I think you were like a 100% beloved hero of open source and internet and now you're like in this a lot of people don't like you just as a human. Just what is that? How do you work through that? How do you deal with that? What's that been like?

Yeah, the internet can be brutal. Let me go through a couple specific things that people have pointed out because I think you've been on a lot of podcasts and people haven't asked you these questions and I think a lot of people are just like but Matt, what about this? This is really bad. So, let me just ask you a couple things here. One is there's just like a frustration in the community around the instability that this has just caused in the WordPress community. I'll read you a couple quotes. Real people are receiving fewer projects in the WordPress on WordPress because suites are seeing WordPress as unstable because of this feud. And I work in enterprise and we're very concerned about the stability of this platform and our project. Your thoughts on that and the impact that has had on the community?

Okay. So, another one of the most common frustrations I've seen on the internet, people complaining is around the trademark. I don't know all the details, but my understanding is there's kind of a you move the trademark to be owned by the foundation and Automattic had exclusive rights to use the trademark and I think people are like, 'Oh, was it I thought it was the foundation owned it, but maybe Matt still owns it.' And then you're trying to monetize it through this agreement with WP Engine. Is there anything you can share there that'll make people feel and see your side of the story?

Wow. Okay. I get why it's complicated. I get why people would be confused. This makes me think about OpenAI had a really strange structure and that got them in a lot of trouble and it feels like when you're 21 you're like oh this makes a lot of sense. What a great concept we've come up here and then all this complexity just adds to a lot of confusion around what's going on. So thank you for addressing that. Another there's a kind of a related question I've seen a couple times is just why don't you let the .org be run by a community? Why not just like give that up to someone else and not just you? Thoughts there?

This makes so much sense to me. That's one of the themes of the podcast just the power of a singular visionary and leader. Founder mode as we've all heard as a trending these days. I'm famous. Yeah,

And one of the things I think we've tried to demonstrate with WordPress is actually there's kind of like a open-source side and a nonprofit side and a for-profit working in concert. So, and one of the things people don't necessarily appreciate as much about why WordPress has been so successful is because of Automattic and things like Akismet doing anti-spam or WordPress.com having a free version of WordPress that has introduced, you know, over 100 million people to the software in a way that you could just sign up for free. You don't have to pay for hosting or download it yourself or things like that. So that kind of for-profit nonprofit open source working in concert I think is a really interesting model that we're starting to see a lot more companies do. It's actually very exciting to me that some of the things that were controversial when we started like open source or distributed work are now the default for so many exciting new startups and there's whole ecosystems of like really really cool like open source like cal.com for open source Calendly or there's so much cool stuff out there that actually there's a whole generation of like younger entrepreneurs that I find very very inspiring because they're also bringing like modern design and web development everything to open source which is very neat.

There's one other thing I want to address. I haven't seen you talk about this. It comes up a bunch. It's around this is like very in the weeds, but I think it's really important to people and there's something here for a lot of people. The way you guys forked Advanced Custom Fields. So I think what happened here is you guys forked an existing plugin, I think somebody else's plugin, and then kind of push people to this plugin versus the original plugin. What can you share there?

So I'm hearing essentially you block WP Engine as a part of this. We're just going to simplify WordPress, reduce confusion, they're being bad actors in the space, so we're going to block them. And in that block, there's like a dependency where people couldn't do a thing that they needed to do. So, you're like, and that's and as the one that exists, there's a problem with it. So, we're going to make that dependence like release a version that you can actually use and fix the security issues.

Okay. Okay. Great. So maybe just the last question. We talked about just like a lot of people see you with devil horns these days. They think you're doing a lot of you're doing bad things and they don't like the approach you're taking. You talked about there's this WP Engine spending a lot of money on PR and hiring this agency. I guess is there anything else that like why do you think so many people are looking at you as the bad guy? Is it mostly that you think? Just like where do you think it's coming from? Why are like comments always so negative? And we talked a bit about it but anything more there?

You know I imagine people are going to be like Lenny you didn't ask him this thing. Here's the thing he said that I want to learn more about. I'm sure I missed some stuff, but from an outsider's perspective, this all makes sense. There's a company like I'm not I don't think PE companies are bad innately, but their job is buy a company and make it run more efficiently and then oftentimes sell it for more. So, it makes sense that they buy a company, make it more efficient, cut some corners, don't put a lot of effort into making it awesome, even though sure there's awesome people working in there trying really hard to make it great. And like basically what I'm feeling is you just they got to a point where this is hurting the ecosystem. They're feeling really dishonest with working with you and there's just there's a stalling technique and so makes sense to me why you just have to stand up and fight back and it's hard it's hard to do that. Is there anything else along this thread before we move on to a different topic? Anything else you want to share before we close out this chapter?

I remember at the end of your WordCamp talk you're like any questions after this big controversial talk and [laughter] I'm curious how it felt like every all the questions initially were nothing to do with this. It's what it felt like. You're just like oh they already had these questions they didn't even know what you said maybe and I bet you were just like wait does anyone did anyone hear what I just said? Did it feel like that?

Yeah. Okay. I want to talk about all the companies that you're bought and have are will buy in the future. It's kind of like you're building a little Berkshire Hathaway. I think you've described it that way. It's kind of what it's feeling like. And, Tumblr is really interesting. I didn't like until I started prepping for this, I didn't even know you guys own Tumblr. And I haven't heard the story. What's just Why did you guys buy Tumblr? What is going on with Tumblr? Right. It was like a big deal back in the day. What is where's the current state of Tumblr? What is the story there?

To you or to someone else.

Right. Right. Tumblr

Oh wow.

What a deal. 3 million. [laughter]

Wow, sounds like a lot you took on with this acquisition. I love that you said you ran it initially. So, this is a good segue to maybe my last question. I'm curious where this goes. Let me zoom out. There's a lot of people these days that are excited about rollup businesses. I'm gonna buy a bunch of companies, make them better, make them awesome, save money, and then just keep building this holding company sort of thing. You guys are doing that and it's working well. What do you look for? How do you decide a company's right for Automattic? What are the factors that are like, we should buy this, we can turn this around and turn that into a big success?

Speaking of that, actually, you haven't shared the revenue number. I know it's public, just give people a sense of Automattic's revenue. Can you just share those numbers because I think it might blow people's minds.

Incredible. Okay, I have a question for you. It's kind of a hot seat question. As you talked, I wonder, I feel like people are thinking, so you've been talking about PE companies being often bad. You're buying Tumblr. You talked about laying off a bunch of people, turning it all around. How's that different from a PE company, Matt?

Yeah. Well, because their customers have realized, hey, this isn't WordPress. This isn't you.

Matt, we covered so much, everything. I asked you all the hard questions and more. Before we wrap up, is there anything else that you want to leave listeners with? Any last thoughts, comments, insights, stories?

Yeah, this feels like a reason to be doing your approach to Berkshire Hathaway, is just stay active in early stage stuff and not just optimize established things. Says beeper.com by the way, awesome domain name. Photomatt, what's the story? Are you into photography, I imagine is the story.

You forgot to mention your website, your blog, your WordPress site itself where you blog, ma.tt is the domain, which is amazing. I will point people to one of my favorite rituals you have on your blog, which is you share what's in your bag. You talk about how you travel all this, and I think every year you're like, here's the gadgets I use most and bring with me everywhere, right?

Surprise. And you need an Amazon just buy everything button. Yeah, because basically you're just trying to optimize for the least weight and most utility, right, out of all these gadgets that you're bringing with you on your trips.

Oh my god. Okay. Anyway, we'll point you to that. Matt, thank you so much for doing this. This is awesome.

What roles are you hiring for most and where do people find these roles?

All right, if you made it this far into the podcast, you should definitely apply. Matt, thank you. Thank you for being here. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennispodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

People tend to get into a public speaking voice. We'll be in a class and they'll be chatting normally and look super normal. And then we'll say, okay, now just a timer. I'm just going to give you a speech. Just speak for 60 seconds. So we get a baseline. And I click play and suddenly they say the important part about doing this and they enter into a different version of themselves, a professional version, whatever that would mean. It's so much more freeing, powerful, connecting, and effective to speak conversationally. So the cue I often give people is... Today my guest is Tristan de Montebello. Tristan is the co-creator of Ultra Speaking, which is the best public speaking workshop I have ever come across. In 2017, Tristan became the fastest competitor to reach the finals of the World Championship of Public Speaking and based on that experience built a very unique course that helps you quickly build the skills to become better and to become more comfortable speaking in public and especially speaking on the spot. I like to spend time on this topic on this podcast because becoming a better speaker is such an accelerant of your professional life. And in this episode, we delve into a bunch of tactics and also misconceptions about how to become a better speaker. And to make it even more fun and interesting, we go through a few of the exercises that Tristan and his team have developed live on the podcast. He goes through them, I go through them. It was a lot of fun. I'm excited to hear what you think. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Tristan de Montebello.

Tristan, thank you so much for joining me and welcome to the podcast.

Thanks so much for having me.

So, I took an abridged version of this speaking course that you teach called Ultra Speaking and it immediately made me feel more comfortable public speaking, which I've never felt doing any other course. Public speaking is something I just like is very scary to me as it is for a lot of people, but it's just something I really dread. Like even doing these podcast episodes, every time I get nervous before doing these things, as much as it may not seem that way. So, this is not my natural habitat. Speaking in public, like it may not seem that way to people, but it's true. And the way you approach this stuff is so unique and worked for me. And because of that, I thought it'd be awesome to just bring you on this podcast and basically try to teach people the stuff that you've learned about how to become a better public speaker. I know we're not going to do your course here, but just like what are some very tactical things people can immediately start to apply? And also, I want to make this super interactive. So, we're actually going to do some of the exercises that you use in your class. So, that's what we're here for. How does that sound?

That sounds exciting. I'm in.

Okay, so let me first ask just kind of a broad question. What do most people get wrong about public speaking? What are some of, what's maybe the biggest misconception about how to become a better public speaker and how to be good at it?

I actually think that the biggest misconception with tackling your speaking is that people grossly underestimate just how transformative it could be to your life. And the reason it's so transformative is because speaking is not a specialized skill. It's a meta skill. That means that the better you get at speaking, the better your life gets. So an example of a meta skill is fitness. For example, if you were to start saying, okay, I'm going to transform my fitness. And you start lifting weights, and you start going on runs. Obviously, your muscles are going to get bigger, you're going to get more in shape, and your cardiovascular system is going to improve. But that's actually only a sliver of the impact it's going to have on your life because you're going to start feeling more energy and you're going to start having these nice hormones, these endorphins flowing through your body and you're going to feel better about yourself. And when you walk in front of the mirror, suddenly you're going to have a boost in confidence. So naturally, everything else in your life is going to start to improve as a result of you focusing on your fitness. And for speaking, it's the same thing. This blew my mind when I went on my own speaking journey is when I started making breakthroughs in speaking other things started to feel different. So as you get breakthroughs how you feel at work feels different. How you feel in your group of friends feels different. How you feel in a group of strangers especially how you feel in your family can even be impacted. So this seeps into everything else in your life. But the thing is because there's so much self-consciousness that goes with speaking, we often feel kind of constrained under the layers of overthinking and anxiety that come with speaking. So, it can be hard to realize that underneath these layers, you actually have this extraordinary superpower because as humans, we're evolved to speak. This is what we are. So, you don't need to teach a baby how to speak. It will learn by itself with no formal education. So, what that means is we all have this incredible hardware. The thing is over the course of our life because of all these little situations that happen we start getting bugs in the software and we're not really upgrading our software. The moment you get the bugs and things start working, we start avoiding and suddenly it's like we're not upgrading our software anymore. So we're stuck on old buggy software. But the reality is let's not forget that we have incredible software that we're evolved for this. So all we need to do is some debugging and some upgrading of the software and suddenly your entire life can change. So that's really what I want to impart on anybody listening like you have it in you. You already have what it takes.

Okay. Okay. So, kind of building on what you just talked about, some of this insight of your life can improve and how you kind of have to unlearn stuff. One of my favorite, maybe core insights and tenets of the way you approach teaching people to speak is you talk about how if you don't enjoy speaking, you're doing it wrong. And that really helped me because you kind of encourage, you kind of remind people, try to have fun as you're doing. Could you just talk about that insight and why that's important and how that helps people become better?

Well, I think that's very tied to what you were saying. I see enjoyment as a barometer. Like if I'm doing things right, I'm probably enjoying myself. If I'm doing things wrong, particularly with speaking, because again, this is something we're naturally evolved to do. So if we're naturally evolved to do it, it's not something that we dislike doing. It has to be something that rewards us. So, as soon as things start not feeling enjoyable, it's a sign, hey, I'm probably doing this wrong. There's something here that I'm doing that is making this unenjoyable that's probably not helping me. And I think you mentioned that, in those people who can hold an audience who are really good communicators in business, it looks like they feel very comfortable. It looks like they feel like themselves. And if you think about speaking when you're talking with your kids or with your partner or with your best friend, your childhood friend, your parents, we all have environments where we feel completely like ourselves. And when we do, communication is extraordinarily enjoyable. It's just a means to connect with other people, a means to share what we have on our mind. And it's very, very empowering and it feels very good. Then I take the same person with the same skill set and the same ability and I bring them in a business setting and suddenly I don't feel like myself anymore. And because of the pressure I start trying to speak differently. So people start having I'm going to try to think really hard of what I need to say and I want to control the words that are going to come out of my mouth before they come out of my mouth so I make sure I don't make a mistake. And you basically loop in this thing that is so counter what communication is which is just a natural subconscious skill. So using speaking as a barometer of hey if this is not feeling good I'm probably overthinking I probably need to relax and try to just feel a little bit more like myself. But this also applies to practice where in your practice because this is not an overnight thing. You can't just snap your fingers, read a book, and be a better speaker. Your practice has to be enjoyable as well because otherwise, two weeks in, you're going to quit just like a shitty fitness journey or diet, right? You have to find joy in it, and it has to be structured in a way where it rewards you as well, so that you get more energy and you get more enjoyment while you do it.

Awesome. And we're going to show people how you do that. You do these games. They're like games that you play that help you actually learn these skills. So before that and also I want to get into actual tactics that we can just give people to become better public speakers. But right before we get there are there any other core insights or principles or lessons that are fundamental to the way you found that it works to become a better public speaker that kind of inform a lot of the stuff we're going to be talking about?

The day I understood that speaking was a subconscious flow-oriented process and not a conscious process completely changed the way I approached it. So instead of thinking tactics and frameworks and adding more to the outside of the things I need to think about, when I realized when I speak best I'm actually not thinking about speaking. It's the last thing I think about is the speaking part. I'm completely in tune with whatever it is I'm trying to convey to my audience or to the person in front of me. And the goal is to get into a flow state and stay in that flow state all the way through the finish line. That's what really changed my mindset about speaking because then it changes all of the exercises you want to do. It changes how you can think about speaking. And one of the ways that changed how I practice was instead of focusing on the symptoms of speaking, I started to try and figure out well what are the root causes that create these symptoms and can I address those? So instead of counting my filler words if that's something that's annoying to me, I'm going to go back and try to figure out well what's the root cause of that? Well, the root cause of having lots of filler words or racing in your speaking is that you probably struggle to feel comfortable slowing down, relaxing, or even pausing when your mind is racing and you feel pressure. Solve that. And not only do the filler words take care of themselves, but the racing takes care of itself and you suddenly have more mind space. If you feel super constrained in your speaking, very monotonous, then maybe you feel boxed in and you're struggling to allow yourself to be all of what you are under pressure because there's probably a lack of certainty, a lack of trust in hey, if I let myself be more intense or if I let sudden emotions pop out or if I take time to gather my thoughts, is everything going to unravel or is that going to work for me? And if you haven't proven that to yourself, then you're just going to go for safety. And so you're going to be very monotonous and constrained. And that's what creates monotony. But if I can solve that, suddenly I have freedom. So thinking through this and understanding that the goal here is upgrading the software and it's really taking all the bad habits away and putting in new habits so that I can just stay in this flow state without getting pulled out, that really changes the game.

That is a really interesting insight and I love that you actually demoed that in the way you answered this question where you took time to get into that state and not just get... pause. Yeah, that was a really beautiful example of that. Okay, let's get into a few tactics just to give people something they can actually change about the way they speak this week. What are two or three things that you can recommend people tweak in the way that they do public speaking, in the way they speak in meetings and presentations, whatever?

I actually thought about this because once you think about speaking being much more about the root causes, like play the games that are going to change you at the root. Don't focus on the symptoms. Then you find yourself sharing much less purely tactical advice and frameworks because we're trying to get out of our brain into our subconscious. So when I thought about it, I thought of three things I wanted to share. One makes you look better, one makes you sound better, and one makes you feel better. So the first makes you look better. Now, this is super basic and very crunchy, but it's a bad habit that a lot of people have that when I am trying to gather my thoughts or think, people tend to look down. And if you're looking down on Zoom, it's three times as bad because it looks like you're looking at your phone or looking at notes if you had any. But even when you're in person, it doesn't look very confident. And so you're suddenly giving off that vibe of this person feels a little bit uncertain here. And maybe it's going to look like you stopped speaking and you might get more interrupted. If instead you switch that up and you start thinking up. I think up and to the right, but you can think in any direction you want. But as long as you're looking up, you actually look thoughtful by default. So suddenly you're looking thoughtful, that means you look more confident because anybody who'd be willing to pause in their speaking is somebody who's confident. And as a result, you're much less likely to get interrupted. So, it's a small tweak, but makes a real difference. The only thing is if you're not used to doing this, if this is not your habit, then it's going to feel a little bit awkward the first time you do it, and you probably won't think about doing it. So, I recommend writing think up on a post-it and putting it on your computer so that it's there for you. And then once you've done it a few times, this will become the new normal and by default, you'll look more confident.

I'm gonna do this as you talk. I have a poster right here. Think up.

Oh, nice. Think up. Okay, great. What else? Look more confident. Now, how to sound more confident. This is a really important one. And this concept is called ends strong. And we had to bring this up because most people tend to end weak. And why is that? They put freestyle rappers in an fMRI. And what they found out is freestyle rappers have to enter a deep flow state. So, if you're freestyle rapping, you have a beat, you don't have any lyrics, and you have to get into the beat and invent the lyrics and the melody and everything on the fly. So, there's no choice but being completely present. What happens is, you can see their brain and it's lit up in a very specific place that shows that they're in flow. And when they get to the very end, the brain just blows up before they finish. They start getting pulled out of flow. And this is the same feeling of like you're running at school and you see the finish line and just a few yards before you start slowing down. It's just, I don't know, we're built that way. And in speaking it's the same thing. People tend to give a great answer and then either they kind of taper off at the end which doesn't leave you with a good impression or they'll actively say the doubts that are coming up in their mind of maybe they'll be giving a great answer and then suddenly they say I don't really know if that made sense.

I do that all the time. That's very relatable.

Yeah. And but the thing is what happens when you do that? When you do that, it's like you're forcing this lens on your audience where now even if they had the best of experiences with your answer. Now they're looking at everything you said through the lens of, oh, this person was kind of uncertain. So it's like you had a very smooth flight across the Atlantic and your landing was absolutely horrible. You were bumpy when you're coming up and then when you hit the landing you bounced three times and you thought you were going to die. You're not going to remember the smooth flight. You're going to remember the ending. So, a simple tactic here is anticipate that as you get to the end of anything you're saying, you're going to naturally start regaining consciousness and you're going to start being a little bit more self-aware and some of those uncertainties are going to pop up. Know that it's coming and make sure you land the plane. So, what that looks like is either you just make your ending sound like an ending and then leave it at that or you can prompt your brain. You can use summary prompts. This is incredibly powerful. It just means you say the beginning of a sentence or the beginning of a sentence and your brain's going to fill in the gap. You're prompting your brain and your brain will always deliver. So you get to the end you're like okay I got to wrap up now and so you'll say so to wrap up and your brain's going to fill in the gap or in summary. So my point here is so what I want you to remember and you just place those words and your brain's naturally going to do the work of closing it for you. But make sure you don't let go of the gas pedal at the very last moment. You need to land that plane.

Awesome. I could definitely get better at this. Great tip. Yeah, nice. I'm gonna try to do that as we talk. And guess what else we got? I'll be paying attention to that.

Okay, the third one is staying in character. And these go hand in hand. And what's really powerful is when you start doing these, there's a beautiful feedback loop that happens that gives you a lot of confidence. So staying in character, I said, is the one that's going to make you feel more confident. What's staying in character? So, it's related to end strong in some sense in that people tend to self-sabotage a lot. I'm speaking and obviously as I'm speaking all of my senses are really, really heightened. So, I'm aware of everything. If a word comes out a little bit weird or if it's not the word that I was expecting to hear come out of my mouth, I'm going to be very aware of that because I was expecting something and something different happens. But that happens all the time when speaking. I'm starting to not make as much sense or I feel like I'm rambling going a little bit too long. All of these create insane noise in the back of my mind. The insecurities. And you have a choice there because I can tell you right now, nobody can tell. People cannot see what you feel. Even though it feels that way when you feel really, really strongly, but people can't see it. You're just looking like a normal speaker, competent and confident. But internally, it feels like everybody can see. So, you're feeling all this insecurity and it feels like there's an elephant in the room. And so, what most people do is they self-sabotage. They start leaking and they break character and they'll say, ah, man, I'm not making sense right now. Or they'll laugh nervously after saying a word that came out weird. Or they'll keep letting all of the insecurities and doubts come out when people didn't see it in the first place. So again, it's like I'm forcing these filters onto my audience and now they can only see me through that light. So one analogy I love for this is again a flying analogy. You're on the plane, everything's smooth, you're having a great time watching your movie, and suddenly you're interrupted by the pilot who picks up the intercom and says, ladies and gentlemen, so I just had a red light start blinking here in the cockpit, and I'm not sure what this is. It could be really bad, honestly. But I don't know. So, don't worry, please. I'll get back to you soon. First thing that's going to happen if you experience that is you're going to think, I wasn't worrying in the first place. But then you start thinking, wait, something probably is going wrong. And now the smallest noise, the tiny little bit of turbulence, a creak, you're going to start thinking, oh no, we're going to die every time. So you're going to make any little mistake, any little imperfection, you're going to turn that into something big. That's what happens when you speak. If you start leaking and letting the insecurities come out, people are going to start thinking this person doesn't really know what they're talking about, it's like a leader who isn't clear in their direction. Suddenly, I'm thinking, wait, I think I have to second guess everything here because I'm not sure about this person. And the good news is the solution is very, very simple. The solution is just don't share your insecurities. Put your best foot forward and stay in it the whole time. Stay in character from beginning all the way through past the ending because you go all the way through your speech. Then you got to end strong, which is a form of staying in character. And then let it be. And that's so important. Just let it be. And you're going to notice something incredible. If you're the type of person who would break character a lot, start staying in character. And the cue I use for myself is stay in it. And the worse it gets, the more I'll say to just stay in it. And what happens is you stay in it. And you expect everybody at the end to say, oh my god, you looked so uncomfortable. What was happening? But people can't see that, you look confident. So they're just going to give you the reaction that a confident person would get. And you're going to notice, oh wow, I am coming off as confident and that's going to make you feel more confident. And so it's a very reinforcing cycle. If you start staying in character and ending strong, naturally, you're going to be reinforced by this behavior. And you're going to realize, oh, I didn't need to break character. I didn't need to hedge every time I spoke. And that's going to give you much more confidence. And you're going to start realizing people just look confident by default. This is a crazy thing. I want everybody to walk around the world and look at people and think, most of the people I'm looking at are actually nervous right now. You're going to look at them and you can't tell. Most people speaking up in meetings are feeling a level of nervousness, but you can't tell unless it's through the roof.

I love this and it's something I'm extremely guilty of. And I think the reason I do this and the reason I think a lot of people leak, which I love that term of just you feel something's not going right. The reason I do it is I feel like me being clear upfront, I know this isn't great, makes it okay, but in reality that's hurting you. Because I think it's like when I watch standup comedy when the comedian's like, oh, sorry that bombed. If he didn't say that or she didn't say that, I just forget about it and we move on to the next thing and it brings all this attention to, oh, I see. Okay, it's not going great. Otherwise, you're just like, all right, whatever. I didn't like that joke. So yeah, I guess any thoughts on just why people do this?

Well, I think that's exactly that. It's because you're convinced that everybody can tell. And so, two things will happen. Either they could tell because it was a big thing and everybody could tell, but you shining light on it is literally that. It's like, hey everybody, you're driving a train. Everybody's in the train. You're the driver as the speaker. Everybody's going with you. So, if there's a crash on the side of the road, you can keep going and they'll not be looking at the crash a second later and they'll be looking at the next landscape. Or you can stop the train and tell everybody, hey, let's look at this crash here real quick. I'm so sorry about it. When you keep going, people will forget it in a second and they're not going to pay attention to you. And with the peak end rule, what we were saying, people remember the end of experiences more than they remember the beginning of experiences. So, you're going to be left with that feeling at the end. The other piece is because most people won't notice it in the first place, they'll be in their own minds. So, when you share this, you're popping their bubble. And so I see people speaking all the time where I'm super in tune with the feeling I'm getting when they're speaking. I'm just listening to the energy. I'm listening to everything that's happening. So I can try to understand like what state are they in right now? So when I get woken up from that state of somebody's saying, oh man, can I go again right now? That really sucked. It's even more visible for me. And I'll often have to say, hey man, I was so into what you were saying. And I'll pull the audience. Is anyone surprised? And everybody every time is like, no, I thought that you were doing great. I was completely with you. So that's the case most of the time. But because we're convinced that people can tell, we want to break that fourth wall. Or because something happened and we know people can tell, we want to acknowledge it. So it doesn't feel like I'm the only one in the room who can't tell that something went wrong here. But this habit of saying no, I'm going to be confident. I'm leading. I'm going to keep us going in a certain direction is extremely powerful and very self-reinforcing.

Okay. So let's actually show people what this looks like by actually doing some live games. I know one of your principles for Ultra Speaking is you can't learn to speak by not speaking, like you need to practice speaking to get better at speaking and these games are a way to actually do that in a really fun way. So maybe first of all just why games? Like when I did this course it was just like, huh, it's a bunch of games but I thought this was a public speaking course. So maybe talk about just why you approach it through games. Everything you do is a game in this course.

Yeah. Well, the first piece of the puzzle is what you were saying that you can't get better at speaking without speaking. And intuitively you could think, everybody knows that if you want to become a great cook, you can't just read a hundred cookbooks. You actually have to spend most of your time in the kitchen refining your intuition, testing things, experimenting, learning new recipes, and building your timing and everything that goes with it. But in speaking we tend to do the opposite probably because it's a little bit scary and because there aren't that many options out there to practice the speaking itself. There aren't that many environments where you can do it right now. So we're kind of left with nothing. So okay, I'll just go read an article or watch a YouTube short and hope that's going to make a difference. But the maybe the bad news is you have to do it.

Ask yourself, am I going to be serious about taking on speaking and making a difference here? And if you are, then you're going to have to do the thing. You have to practice speaking. But the good news is it's only the outside that's scary. As soon as you get started, you're going to get rewarded. And then the better you get at it, the more enjoyable it becomes. So why games then? Well, games number one are fun to play. And as I was saying earlier, if your practice is not fun, you're going to stop. So you need intrinsic reward with what you're doing. But what all of the Ultra Speaking games have in common is that it's short deliberate practice. Like short reps followed by feedback followed by another rep. So that was more important than the idea that it was a game at first. When we started coaching with Michael Gendler, my co-founder, it was just him and me in my backyard with somebody in front of us testing things out. And we would give him a speech title just to get a baseline. Okay, what's the most incredible invention in the world? And we'd watch this person go into their mind and start like freaking out. Okay, and they'd think the iPhone. And then like, I don't know, the iPhone. That's pretty recent. So maybe it's fire. Is it fire though? Was there a bigger, maybe communication? I don't know. Wait, maybe we've evolved for communication. And the longer they spent thinking, the worse their answer tended to be and the more their confidence tended to go down as they were speaking. So then we said, well, we got to get this person speaking right away. So we'd say, 'I'm going to ask you another question, but just start speaking.' And so I'd ask them another question, and they couldn't start speaking right away. So we just tried to compress it more and more and more to turn it into something where then it was like, 'I'm just going to say a word, and you have to say something about it.' So, horses, horseback riding is fun because you can go places. Cats, cats are crazy because if they were bigger, they would eat you. And I just like almost like word association. Let's get words out. Then we started developing different games for everything. Every root cause we were seeing, every symptom we were seeing, we'd figure out the root cause and we'd create some sort of a way to get the person into it as quickly as possible. And it's just one day, six months in, that we realized, hey, did we just create a game? Like this feels like a board game. And then we created, I have this, we created 'Speak Before You Think,' a game for people who think too much, and this is a bunch of cards with all of our games, and then COVID hit and we turned it into online games.

The magic of games. Yeah. The magic of games is short reps, immediate feedback. Practice, feedback, practice, feedback, and it's enjoyable. You get rewarded. You get to adjust as you go. And what's changing is your internal feeling as you're going. So, you're learning lessons, but you're internalizing. All of the practice is happening through speaking.

Nice. Were you actually coaching them? Like how were you walking them through the different games?

Conductor, maybe.

So, I'll read the title as soon as it pops up.

That was so fun to watch. And I'm seeing the numbers. If you're on YouTube, you can see what's going on there. If you're not, basically, there's different numbers that give Tristan the different energies to be at. And that was masterful. I think we saw, what did we see? We saw like a six. It went up first, six, seven, then it went down a three, then we saw I think a two, a one, then a breathe, and then it went back to a five. How about you give it a go and then we chat?

What do you think, ladies and gentlemen? Let's see this. Here we go. The title is the greatest puzzle.

Nailed it. It's funny at the end you were like you didn't even see there was a six that came up and then when you looked up it had already gone away. That's a good warm-up. It's funny because what it looked like to me is that, well, you just didn't let yourself play the game. You were more focused on I want to make sure this works well, this looks good, or I don't make a fool of myself. Then let me just play the game. So, switch your mindset from that. Like back in the creator cohort, you didn't really care because if you failed, it didn't matter. So, you just played the game. And this is the same idea. Just let yourself play the game. The game will do good. But that was actually really interesting. I feel kind of similar, which is cool, except I didn't know where it was going. But that feeling of all of these puzzle pieces and suddenly when I hit Ultra Speaking, it's like, oh wow, there are no more gaps. That's really cool. Okay, here we go.

Lenny, you ready? Ready. Here we go. Integrating new cultures.

Yeah, that was awesome. I'm practicing not leaking. All I think about is how much better it could have been, but now I'm leaking as I say that. See, catching... The point of all of these games is to create turbulence. This is going to be the theme of this podcast. I'm going to share only flight analogies. But if you think about a pilot, a flight simulator, you can think about these games as the flight simulator. You don't put a pilot in a flight simulator and waste those precious hours having them just cruise at 30,000 ft in clear skies. You're going to say, 'Okay, you're going and now, hey, you've lost your captain and you have to do something,' or 'hey, your motor just broke,' or 'you're going into crazy turbulence.' So, the game here is always, every one of these games have in common that we're creating turbulence for you. So, it's on purpose that like, ooh, that's interesting how I tend to want to leak, to want to break character. Wow, it's interesting how at the end, ending strong is not just an automatic habit that I've built for myself. So, what we want with the turbulence is that it highlights areas that we want to work on. And you can go again and see immediately because you have that same pressure every time. There's no way you can prepare for conductor. You can do just a ton of reps and get to become the person who can just navigate the turbulence really gracefully. Which reminds me of a Kevin Kelly quote that I love where he says, 'Pros are just amateurs who've learned to recover gracefully from their mistakes.' And this is what we're trying to do here. If you know that you can recover from any mistake gracefully, then you're going to have confidence in any speaking scenario. And most of the scenarios you're going to be in are spontaneous, are ones you can't prepare for. So, it's that much more important. So, tell me, what do you remember from going through conductor in the creator cohort or specifically here? Like what was coming up and what were some of the things that popped into your mind?

And it's just like a lot of fun to just get an excuse to just go wild and high and then just like get low. I love that part of it. And let's get into the next game, but just one other insight I had is that you shared with me when I did it the first time is just people have a strength. They're either, and correct me if I'm wrong, they're strong at the highs and just like very uncomfortable at the lows or the opposite. And for me, I thought I was going to, oh, obviously I'll be more natural at the lows because that's like introvert world. And you're like, no, you're actually like super energized at this high end and then it's hard for you to access the low. And that was really insightful for me.

Yeah. You'll notice it pretty quickly once you jump in, especially with a friend. It's cool. It's cool because when you get to see, oh, I'm much more comfortable going up than I am going down or vice versa or I'm stuck in the middle and I'm only comfortable when I'm not in the extremes. It's just telling you something. This is what we want. We want a mirror in front of us so I can know like, okay, what's happening here? I'm not very much a fan of actually watching yourself on camera on video because again this is an inner game not an outer game. So when I watch myself on video I see the outside which can be useful for certain things but the fundamentals are inside. But so getting a mirror of I play this game and I feel a certain way. Oh interesting, it was easy to go up. So, I can muster energy pretty quickly and I'm willing to take risks of jumping into a different energy stage, which might mean changing the direction of where I'm going. But slowing down means I need to be willing to take up space. I need to be willing to just be while everybody's looking at me and I'm using up their time, but I'm going to take up space and I'm going to take a moment to go inside and be introspective and really ask myself, okay, what do I want to say here? And so that's a reflection of, well, what does that mean if I struggle to do that? That's why speaking is such an interesting skill set.

All right, let's do another game. This next game is called triple step. And triple step is a game for people who tend to struggle to stay on a single thought or get very easily put off their game or distracted. If you're the type of person where you're speaking and suddenly somebody yawns and you just start freaking out thinking I'm so boring and things are horrible, I must be terrible. Not they probably have a baby and they didn't sleep last night. Pen drops and you start losing your ability to stay on track. This is a game for you. Also a very fun one. The principle of the game is pretty simple. Similarly to conductor, we're going to start with a random speech title. So I have no idea what's going to show up. Then as I'm speaking in this setting here, I'm going to speak for a minute. There will be six random words or series of words that are going to pop up as I'm going through my speech. And my goal is to integrate the words into the speech as seamlessly as I can as if they were part of the speech the whole time. So in theory, if I do a perfect job, if you're listening, you should struggle to pick out which words were actually the words that were popped up. The likelihood in one minute of me being able to do that is low. But let's see if you can do it. So if you're listening, you're not going to see the words. We'll tell you afterwards what they were. See if you can pick up on them. But otherwise, my goal is just to choose a strong direction and stay on that direction as naturally as I can. Here we go. The title is, how would your friends describe you? I've been described as a Labrador by my friends. And I think the reason people describe me as a Labrador is because I am so easy to excite. It's like if you give me a box of French fries, I'm going to go nuts and it's going to be the best French fries I've ever tasted in my life. But if the next day I get a massage, I'll be completely in that experience and the massage is going to be the best massage and then I'm going to think I need to get a massage every day. I'm going to start daydreaming about massage as my natural day-to-day. But the problem with being a Labrador is that Labradors get kind of excited. So, I may be doing cartwheels one second and the next second, I'm supposed to be working and so I'll be on my computer, but then I hear the microwave ding and I think, 'Oh, maybe I should go get some food next.' And so, there's a beautiful trait to being the Labrador that allows me to like explore all of what it's like to be human. Like, I always have access to the internet inside me. But there are definitely some drawbacks as well.

Okay. So, the words that you had to integrate are French fries, getting a massage, daydreaming, cartwheels, a microwave, and the internet. Yeah. And so, you might notice that some of the words I'm integrating literally and some I might integrate more metaphorically, like the internet of my mind. It's like I have access to the internet. So you can give yourself as much leeway as possible. The whole point here with triple step is you want to be that tree in the storm that is not so rigid that if the wind is too strong, it's going to break in half, but not so flexible that it's going to swing every which direction as soon as there's a gust. So you want that firm, solid grounding, which is in choosing a clear direction, that one thing off the bat. And then you want to make the words work for you. So stay focused on that one thing. And as the words come in, the more focused you are on that groove you've created for yourself, the easier it will be to let the words work for you. Okay? And again, the skill this builds is to be more comfortable with things not going perfectly and being distracted. It's, I would say this one can be used for two other things. Number one is resiliency, right? Because this one will make your brain go crazy. And if you can stay composed within it with all of these things happening, it really builds this ability to say, well, man, if I can do triple step on hard mode, I can do anything. Like, why would anything else scare me? Why would an interview question scare me when I can throw these kinds of things? I can always navigate my way through, right? We're trying to lower the likelihood of a mistake really hurting you. And then the other piece is this is a game, this one and a game called rapid fire analogies are games that are really, really nice to use as a way to warm your brain up. So you could use it before a podcast, you could use it before a job interview, before a meeting. When you want to be on, do a few reps of this and your brain's just going to be completely lit up because it's pulling on so many different parts of your brain that are necessary for communication.

If you're already practicing, you're already leagues ahead of everyone because most people aren't practicing. They're trying, you know, you're trying to learn from a video or a YouTube short or an article. You can only go so far with that. But if you are practicing, there are kind of two suboptimal ways that might show up. One is what you're saying. You're just doing talks and you're speaking up more but you're not really practicing what you're, it's kind of as you're saying it's broad strokes. The other one is you're in a choreography and so it's like learning how to dance but you only learn choreography. Well, that's all you know how to do. So if I ask you to do, I say okay now just, I'm going to put music on just dance. You're kind of stuck because you only know how to do the moves you were doing. So, we're trying to get people outside of I have to be in my mind or I have to do things that I've memorized how to do and come back to trusting your natural ability to communicate. So, that's what we're doing here. You can feel like when you don't speak, when you struggle with speaking, you're stuck in this box and everything around you is tiny and you can feel the sides of the box. And we're expanding the range. We're playing around with all kinds of different tools, and all of them have specific meaning. But even if they didn't that much, you still would be able to, oh wow, you're pushing back the sides of the box. And now suddenly, hey, I can move around. I feel comfortable moving my arms and moving my legs and going to the right and the left and up and down. And just that act of making you feel more comfortable and more at ease is going to unlock your ability to communicate because you already know how to do a lot of this. So, we're tapping into these different skill sets and we're doing brave.com/lenny to get started. That's brave.com/lenny.

Yeah, we'll go. It goes how it goes.

Okay. And I'll say the title. The best thing about pain.

But here's what I noticed. What I noticed is you were letting the word, the word was the beginning of a new thought, right? So, you say another thing is beers. Another thing is, right? So, you're kind of finishing your thought and then you're moving on to the next one. Try to hold on to one direction. The one direction is like approach your fears head-on. And then so then when you see a puzzle, it's like look, this doesn't have to be a hard puzzle because now I know that if it's scary I do it and it's like having kids which I thought was so scary I just jumped in and now I'm moving forward and it could, and right, and so it's like I'm growing my beard without caring what other people think just because it might be scary. Or maybe I cut my beard because that would be something scary, right? So, you're holding on to the line.

With four, it's going to be a little bit easier to integrate them.

Ready?

Social.

Amazing. That works. That's really good. That's really good. What? Well, tell me what, because again, right, the games are meant to put you in a state of turbulence and find out what was easy, what was hard, what am I noticing, and now you know what you want to work on, right? It's the, if you did a rep and it went perfectly, then you're learning nothing. A really easy rep is not worth much. The only reps that are worth something are the ones where you feel an edge.

Oh, yeah. The first one was the stock market, then a newspaper, which you brought in really, really well. Then running a marathon, and then the toilet.

That's why taking on this journey of speaking is so empowering because speaking is a high performance skill. So taking on a high performance skill and starting to tackle it and getting kind of good at it is very addictive. It feels really, really good. If you get good at tennis, if you get good at golf, if you get good at anything, you know, product management, it's addicting. It's exciting. And as soon as you get good, there's nuance to it. And that it's energizing in and of itself. And because we have such awesome hardware as humans, we've been speaking all of our life. A lot of us have a pretty decent level to start out with. So you really quickly, you're getting to like, oh, I'm getting some results here. This actually feels good. So there's something really energizing about jumping into it. It's the thinking about doing the exercise that's scary, but as soon as you're in it, it's energizing and empowering.

We have a whole series of games and you could probably even invent other games, but some people will play triple step and we'll say, 'Wow, that's so hard.' And then they'll go and play conductor and think, 'Wow, this is my game. This is so easy.' But other people will play conductor and think it's impossible. And then come play triple step and they'll be like, 'Man, this is my jam. I can get this one very easily.' So it again, it's just a mirror of where you're at and it's what's beautiful about this is you start playing around with these games you're very, very quickly going to see okay this is my edge, here's, and where your edge is as you were saying with your quote is often where the gold lies. So that's when you, if you can spend some time there and learn what it is underneath the struggle, what's actually holding you back. When you unlock that, whatever's holding you back in triple step or in conductor and any other game is holding you back elsewhere in your life. So when you unlock it there, it kind of unlocks the other things which is really nice like a set of gears. And it's interesting like as we're talking like where my mind keeps going is like I just want to say how I didn't feel good about my performance but I'm internalizing the lesson of don't leak how you feel and that's a really powerful lesson is just like it's really hard not to just be like oh that was not good like I really wanted to say that after every time I tried this and I am, I'm making myself not and I imagine from your perspective you're like no it's fine it's like whatever.

Yeah, absolutely. I actually think I bet a lot of people watching you do that would think, 'Wow, I don't think I could do that.' That would be their first thought. So, absolutely. And again, this is a habit. And the noise doesn't completely disappear, but it goes down to being almost imperceptible. So, what we're trying to do is we're trying to internalize all of these habits to the point where I don't need to consciously think about them. So, it's like a gymnast who's doing their tumbling routine and jumps into the air. As they're flipping, they're not consciously trying to think of how to do a flip. They've done it a thousand times. They know how to do a flip. The only thing they have that they may be thinking of, all of their attention is on being completely present to what's happening, relying on your body and your subconscious knowing what to do. They have kind of like listeners, like in programming keyboard listeners, you have something that's there that is just listening for anything out of the ordinary and it's very, very fine-tuned. So, as I'm speaking, for example, I might think to myself, 'Oh, I may be rambling right now. Maybe I'm going a little bit too long.' And it's a little listener that's going to just gently, nicely say, 'Hey, warning. I don't know if you're aware of this.' And as I hear that, I might say, 'Oh, okay. Let me wrap it up.' Or maybe it's saying, 'I'm not sure if you're being clear, or can you be more precise here?' Whatever it is, it's just a gentle listener in the background. So as you get into the habit of staying in character and if you had an audience here we could have asked them right away well how did you feel about this? You would probably have gotten really good feedback, really positive, which would have kind of jarred that feeling of wow I didn't think I did that good of a job and people are saying hey I thought that was pretty good. So as you get that reinforcing pattern the voice starts going down more and more.

Nice. Okay, let's do a game.

Cool. Let's do a last game. Last one of these practical games. So, this is actually a game from one of our courses that I'm pulling out. It's not a standalone game. It's one that's inside of the courses, but again, if you wanted to replicate this yourself, you can very easily do it. So, what we're going to do here is we're going to work on conviction prompts. So this comes back to this idea of entering a state or changing your energy to impact the words that are coming out of your mouth. So what's going to happen here is similarly to triple step I'm also going to get a random topic that I just have to start speaking about. But now instead of getting a word that I have to integrate into my speech naturally, I'm going to get a prompt. So, it's going to be the beginning of a sentence that I have to say out loud and I have to find a way for my brain to just complete the sentence. And the sentences are specifically chosen because they're going to put you in a state of more conviction. So, it's going to force me to care more about what I'm saying basically. And this is a game for executive presence. If you think about somebody who you feel has like great gravitas or great executive presence, they usually have, there's something about them that's saying this person really believes in what they're saying. And what this game is showing you is that hey, there's a way to fast-track myself to that place. If I want to have more executive presence, let me bring a little bit more conviction to what I'm saying. Most, there's a small caveat, maybe 10% of people in the workforce need the opposite. They need, hey, you need to maybe question what you're saying here. But the reality is the vast majority of people actually are not truly standing behind their words and their ideas. And what that does is that the people who speak a lot and feel a lot of conviction, their ideas go through more often than the others. And you'd want ideas to stand for themselves, but that's just not reality. So for most people listening to this, if you can bring more conviction to your words, then your ideas are going to have a better chance of being seen equally to those who are already doing that. So this is what this game's about.

Okay. Here we go. The title is saying no.

Love it. That was great. These words are tough.

Let me read the phrases real quick just so folks know. So the phrases you have to integrate is 'this matters a ton,' 'I genuinely believe that every idea is awesome,' and 'game changer.'

Oh, got it. Okay. 'I genuinely believe that' and then 'game changer.'

It astonishes me when... and I'm so eager for you to go through this and for anybody listening to try this for themselves. Even if you know what's coming, like if you want to do this for yourself right now, write the words, the prompts that Lenny just shared and choose any title and just speak for a minute and see if you can integrate those in because you're going to notice how if you bring conviction, these words naturally bring that out of you. And so interesting to watch the content change as a result of the state you get into and what you say. So it's really powerful to discover just how incredible your brain is. So same intention for you I think is choose a strong direction from the beginning. This is always in speaking in general. The stronger the direction you choose in the beginning the more ideas you're going to have. The more everything gets easier when you choose a strong direction.

Okay let's try it. But the goal here is as it says, advocate for an important idea related to the speech title. Ready?

Yes, that was awesome. That was so cool. So you had the title was space exploration and the words were in fact the entire world. Then we cannot forget that. Then it astonishes me when and finally life-changing. So what was that like? What did it feel like getting...

Yeah. Well, that's we're going to hopefully we get to talk about the accordion method, one of the most powerful methods I have and which is very close to this, but this is often a prompt I tell people when they're speaking. I say because people tend to get into a public speaking voice, right? So they'll be in a class and they'll be chatting normally and look super normal and then we'll say okay now just a timer I'm just going to give you a speech just speak for 60 seconds so we get a baseline and I click play and suddenly they say the important part about doing this and they enter into a different version of themselves, a very like a professional version whatever that would mean. It's so much more freeing, powerful, connecting, and effective to speak conversationally. And so the cue I often give people is don't think about us, just think out loud. And that's really what we're doing. Most people have a skill set that's up here and a mindset that's down here. And so if you can just change the mindset to match the skill set, you've already made a giant leap. And you do that by reducing the stakes in your mind and by just speaking. And as you do that, when you're thinking out loud, you have these moments of connecting things in your mind and then naturally it pops out. And if you're doing it well, and I love there's a really cool Naval Ravikant interview on the Joe Rogan podcast from many years ago that's phenomenal. And at one point he talks about communication if I'm not mistaken. I think it's on that podcast. But he says something along the lines of one should discover the words they are saying at the same time their audience is. And this comes back to thinking out loud like if I'm really in my mind I'm making connections and suddenly the words are the consequence of it. So using prompts, poking your brain, giving these cues naturally creates things that you couldn't have anticipated otherwise.

I love that. Before we segue to a couple of these methods, the accordion method is one example. I want to ask about when people hear this, they may feel like you're just helping people make stuff up and why do we want that? Talk about just how this isn't just like you're not going to actually give talks like this necessarily. This is building a skill so that when you actually want to give a real talk with prepared, they've prepared you better at it. But yeah, just thoughts on just like that potential element.

Yeah, I think that's an important question and it's a question I hear a lot because we all know a bullshitter and that's the person who masters the skill of communication but doesn't have anything to show for it. And so this thing happens is that I see a bullshitter and I think to myself, I really really don't want to become that person. And what happens is it becomes an immune response where the desire not to be that person and the feeling being around that person gives you is so strong that now if I take even the smallest step in that direction of speaking freely, sharing my thoughts out loud, bringing more conviction or confidence to what I'm saying, not leaking, then there's this immediate response like an immune response in my body that's just too strong that's saying uh-oh you're becoming the bullshitter, alarm bells, alarm bells, go back to that safe little corner you were in. The reality if you're thinking that then you have no chance of becoming a bullshitter because if that thought is even popping into your mind then you're the type of person who has developed a very acute skill set of noticing when people are bullshitting and you have that same skill set for yourself. So, it's just going to be now it's just too loud. So, as we go through this practice, we want to match, hey, I want to match that bullshitter's level of communication except I'm going to have the ideas to back it up. I'm going to really put effort into my craft. So, but I'm going to be able to show them in the best possible light. And what we want to be able to do is notice, okay, if this is a big thing for you, the bullshitting, and you're noticing a big reaction, just even listening to us, not even playing the games yourself, then you definitely benefit from calming that voice down. So, spending time learning these skill sets because you're most likely atrophied because you're staying away from it. And you're going to have this very powerful listener in the back of your mind that's going to ping you. It's like, hey, you're at the limit right now. Stay true to what you know and it's going to be a very good compass for yourself. It's going to be there and you can trust it because you've developed this capacity.

Awesome. That's really helpful. Okay. So, so far we've shared a bunch of techniques, things that you could just start doing today. We've done all these fun games that you could play online. If nothing else, just learning from the techniques these games teach you, I think, is really helpful. You've shared a bunch of principles of just like here's how you actually get better public speaking not this way but that way. I know you have a couple also methods just like that people can implement that help them develop talks that I found really helpful. So maybe just as a closing we talk about these two methods the accordion method and I think it's the bow and arrow method.

Awesome. Let's talk about the accordion method. We did this in the class briefly and it was really helpful and I've been explaining it to people of just like a really cool way of making your talk better. So talk about how that works and how people might be able to implement it when they're trying to develop a talk.

Now, I'm biased when I'm going to say this, so take this with a pinch of salt, but I think the accordion method might be one of the things I'm the most proud of in my entire life because it's almost revolutionizing the way we should prepare speaking. So, up until now, we've talked about spontaneous speaking mostly. And that's going to be the vast majority of your speaking. Probably 80% of your speaking is stuff that you can't prepare for. But there are going to be situations where you know you have a deadline and you're going to have to speak. And either you have to speak because it's a job interview or you're talking to your CEO or maybe you're presenting to your whole team or an audience of a thousand. The old way I think is shitty. I think it's broken. And I haven't found anything out there that is innovating on this. And it drove us crazy with Michael. And that's what gave birth to the accordion method. What's the old way? The old way is I have a talk coming up. So, I'm going to dump all of my ideas on a piece of paper or multiple pieces of paper. Then I'm going to try rearranging those ideas. And as I'm rearranging the ideas and trying to make them in a talk, I have more inspiration and I think, oh, maybe I could say it this way. And I don't want to lose that other thing that I said in the beginning because maybe I would use it. And you start just creating this alien stack of paper with all of your ideas of what your talk might be. And then you're left with 10, 15 pieces of paper. And now, as the deadline comes closer, what do you have to do? Well, you have to go through the excruciating pain of turning 10 pages into a script so that you don't forget all of those brilliant lines that you spend so many hours editing. And they're still in writing mode. They're not in your mind. So, now that I've created that script that I've spent a lot of time editing, now I have to memorize it. And memorization is pretty shitty. We're not good at memorization. Robots are good at memorization. Humans are not. And memorization is like a chain where you just have all of these links very linearly. And everybody knows the feeling of going through, you know, reciting a poem as a kid and suddenly you miss one verse and you're lost and now you're a deer in the headlights. So what we're doing with the accordion method is instead of preparing our talk by writing, we're going to prepare our talk by speaking. And we're going to do so in a very specific way where we're going down the accordion to create extreme clarity and to understand what the essence of our talk is and then back up the accordion to bring back in intentionally just the right pieces. So I was thinking of an analogy for this and one that I really like is imagine you're redecorating your living room. The old way, the like writing 10 pages and memorizing it is I'm gonna look at my living room and I'm gonna rearrange things and like put stuff in a corner that I might need later and then I'm going to bring some new things that I thought could be really nice and I'm going to struggle to like make something work. The accordion method is saying and imagine this were easy to do with furniture. I'm going to take everything out of my living room except the most essential pieces that make my living room. So, I might be left with that one couch that I really love, a pillow, a beautiful light that I bought three years ago, and one or two other small things. And as I look at that, I'm going to have clarity on the vision I want for my living room. And then very slowly, very intentionally, I'm going to go take certain elements that were already there that I might want to bring back in, and I'm going to bring new elements that now I see make sense. And so by the time you finish with your beautiful living room, it's going to be this beautiful minimalistic room that has a very clear design choice. And every element there is there because you chose it. It's there because you did it very intentionally. So, how does that work with the accordion method? What we do is you can go through the first step, which if you want, you can write all of those ideas on paper just to get them out of your head. That's totally fine. But from this moment on, there's no more script. And I'm just going to give an example of times, but you can change these time constraints slightly. We're going down the accordion by using time constraints. So, for example, you would say, I'm going to speak for 3 minutes. So, you're going to put a timer and you have two rules. I have to stay in character the whole time and I have to end strong. So, you must make it to the end of the three minutes. And it doesn't matter how bad it sounds, how many mistakes you make. The only point here is I'm trying to get my ideas out into spoken word, right? So, I'm starting to like populate my mind with everything and seeing where am I actually at. Then after the 3 minutes, you think of, okay, what did I like? What didn't I like? Then you go to 2 minutes and you put a timer and you do two minutes again. And you're very strict with those two minutes because we're just trying to learn something every time. Doesn't need to be perfect. So, at the two-minute mark, you do the same thing. But now, you had to shave a whole minute out of that content. And as you do that, well, that means getting rid of the noise, getting rid of anything that doesn't feel right. Then you go down to one minute and you're going to go down all the way to 30 seconds. So you started at a three minute speech and you make your way down to 30 seconds. By the time you make it to 30 seconds, you're going to have only the essential pieces like that couch and that lamp in the living room. When you have the essential pieces, you're going to have a clear sense of what your talk is about. And it might have changed as you were going down the accordion. And then from that place on, we're going to do another 30 second rep and then we're going to go back up the accordion. So you do another 30 seconds and then you do 1 minute, 2 minute, and all the way back up to 3 minute. And every step of the way, you go from 30 seconds to a minute. Initially, a minute felt hard. Now that's double the time you just had. So you can intentionally bring in something that's aligned with the talk you want to share. And then two minutes, same. And then when you get to three minutes, one of my clients once said that it felt like he had a football field in his mind. So much space. And now whatever talk you have left there is a very clear intentional talk. And not only that, and this is why this is such an incredible method, your talk is now internalized. So, you're at the stage of I've written a script that I've painfully edited in the old way that you now still have to memorize. And it's a written speech that you're going to have to pretend to give in a spoken way. In this case, you're there, but it's already completely internalized. Not even memorized, it's internalized because you have these pillars. You know where you're going. And by the time you make it through the accordion method, you're basically ready to go give it on stage. But you could even give it in one minute, two minutes, three minutes, five minutes. It's very plastic. You're going to be able to navigate different time frames. It's not going to really matter if you make a mistake because you have a deep sense of what your speech is. It's not memorized, it's internalized. So, not only have you gotten clarity and built out your speech in a very intentional way, but by the time you get to the end of it, you also actually know it and you're ready to perform it.

I can't say do it exactly a week or two weeks or what? It really depends how familiar you are with the content. If you have an all hands and this is something that you've been hashing with your executive team over the past two months you probably know it really really well and you have a lot of clarity and now it's just about organizing it nicely. So in that case maybe you want to do a rough go through the accordion a week ahead of time so you have a clear sense of what is it that I want my audience to remember and what are the pillars that I know I like to hit that feel really good. So you can think about these as like the foundational pillars that support that one thing that you're sharing or bookmarks that I know I have to hit. And then what I would like to do and so that's what I would write down. I wouldn't write a script. I'd write those down. And then before the all hands, maybe the day before, maybe even the morning of, depending on how important this is or how comfortable you feel, then you might go through just one or two reps of it. But now you already know it. So it should come back very very quickly in your mind.

Before a talk, I might have four things written down. My one thing, and we'll talk about this in the bow and arrow. My one thing, the one thing I want people to remember, and then the three bookmarks or pillars that I want to hit. And these are kind of like cues or reminders that are going to send me into that part of the speech. So, for example, if I'm talking about the accordion method, like what I just said, if I go back and I think through the pillars of this one, well, my one thing would be, you know, the accordion method is more powerful than memorizing and then doing it the old way. And then my bookmarks might be number one describe the old way. Number two, the new way or the accordion method. And then number three might be like internalize don't memorize. That'll be kind of the takeaway. And if I have that in my mind, if I have 30 seconds, I can say the old way sucks because you have to work so hard and memorize everything and you're memorizing written stuff. The accordion method is much more powerful because you are going to compress it and go down and then open it up and then I'll say and then I'll explain that in a second and then I'll say so you're internalized not memorized. What I realize right now is actually funny enough though those were the bookmarks there so that sent me down that path but actually I would say bookmark number two is probably the living room analogy. So it would be the old way sucks, the living room analogy, and then describe the accordion method.

And it sounds like maybe the best use of this method is if you have a talk all of a sudden short term like it's coming all of a sudden you have to give a talk somewhere. There's a really powerful method to come up with a great talk like that's maybe tomorrow. What should you expect?

When I say I love this, I use this for myself. I use this with every single client I work with regardless of if it's a five minute talk, a 20 minute keynote. We're using the accordion method. And you can use this at the macro level or at the micro level. So you can use it for the whole talk, but you can also say, hey, let's hone in on this part one that you're struggling with or part two and let's use the accordion to get clarity there. So you can use the accordion as almost like a brainstorming way like I just want to see where I end up here. And it takes maybe 15 minutes or something to go through a full accordion. It depends the time constraints you give yourselves. Sometimes I'll just do 2 minute, 1 minute, 30 seconds. That's even shorter. But I'll go through it for one piece of the puzzle. Or it's like, hey, we're almost there. Let's really internalize it. Let's clarify this. Let's get it really, really tight. And then I might say, okay, now let's do the whole thing through the accordion. So your 20-minute talk, I want to hear it in three minutes. That gets really really interesting.

Amazing. Okay. Anything else along the accordion method before we talk about the final technique before we wrap up?

We have a full self-paced course on ultra speaking on the accordion. I think it costs like 30 bucks or something like that to access all of the games and all the platform. A bunch of them are free, but I think this one's behind the paywall. But we also put together a resource where we describe all of the accordion method, the bow and arrow, staying in character, ending on a free email course that we put together. That's ultraspeaking.com/lenny. So, this is shameless self-promotion, but if you wanted to go grab it there, you can grab it there. And then the bow and arrow is going to tie into the accordion method as well.

Awesome. I'm glad you mentioned all that and we'll point people to that URL in the show notes. Okay, final topic is the bow and arrow technique. Let's talk about what that is and how folks can use that to give better talks.

The bow and arrow starts with a mindset shift that most of us are in the weeds. So, we're very sensitive and familiar to all of the content that we're working on. If you're in data, then you have all of the data. If you're sharing ideas, you still have all of the ideas. And the mistake that most people do when they're preparing a talk, a presentation, an all hands, a meeting, whatever it is, is we tend to focus more on what we want to say than what we want our audience to remember. So the mindset shift here is stop focusing as much on what you want to say and focus more on what you want your audience to remember. What we found out is if you think about your last all hands, the last big meeting, the last talk you saw on YouTube or in person, you probably don't remember much. In fact, I'd wager you might only remember one thing from that talk. And that's what this is all based on. We call it the bow and arrow technique because we think you can only remember one thing out of a talk and that it's very powerful to go through that framework or that kind of thinking when you're building a talk and the one thing is your arrow. And so when you have that one thing to me I say it's literally a single sentence that is the only sentence your people would remember if they left your talk. Would you be satisfied with that sentence? It takes some times to get to a good one, but if you have a good one, it unlocks everything. It's like you having a north star or a compass in your pocket. You can always pull it out. You always know where you're going. It gives you a lot of clarity. It's also giving a lot of clarity to your audience, obviously. But you can't just throw an arrow at somebody's face. You need to notch it in the bow and pull the bow back. And so to pull the bow back, you need to add in weight to that sentence. And that often comes in the form of an interesting anecdote or a data point that's going to support that or a story that's going to add emotion or illustrate it. So you want to find ways in which you can give weight or pull back the bow so that your arrow has that much more impact. So usually the process of clarifying what your arrow is is a back and forth between the bow and the arrows. So if you're going down the accordion method like after the first one you might write or before the first one you might write a tentative arrow. Here's my one thing and then the next one you say okay actually my one thing might be a refined version of that. And so you might rewrite it a little bit and then you might tentatively put in what you think the bow is. I like the anecdote I used here. I like this data point that I thought was powerful and maybe I can end on this story or this call to action. Then you'll put that in. And then you go back in and you give that a try. And that's you're starting to simplify in your mind. And as you go, usually one informs the other. By the time you finish the accordion, for example, you should have a very clear arrow and those clear bookmarks, which is the bow. But really, the thing to remember with the bow and arrow, if you could only remember one thing, is switch your mindset from what I want to say to what I want people to remember and limit whatever that is you want them to remember as much as possible. That's going to give you extreme clarity.

Exactly. And again, similar to the accordion method, this works in the macro and the micro. So if you have a talk where you're using slides, use it for the whole talk, but then for every single slide, ask yourself what is my one thing and you might have some support there as well. But if you don't have a one thing for each slide, either the slide shouldn't exist or it should be multiple slides, right? The symptom of not having a one thing is usually having a slide that says way too many things. Like I don't know what data point I want you to remember. So I'm going to put all of it on that slide. I'm not sure which piece of information is more important. So I'm going to write down all of my thoughts and I'm going to go through all of them or hope that you go through all of them and extract what you think is interesting. But the reality is people are just going to zone out if you do that. So, if you do that slide by slide, you're going to gain incredible clarity. And again, you're going to need less preparation and less memorization.

I love that. Sweet. Tristan, we've been on a journey. This was a really unique experimental episode. I had a good time even though I did some hard things. You made me do hard things that are good for me. Is there anything else you want to share before we get to our very exciting lightning round? Is there anything else you want to leave listeners with or a nugget you want to...

I hope people found value. I really mean we did. This was really a group effort and I really appreciate you working on the agenda like really bringing in the games and trying to make this as practical as possible. I think the only thing I want to leave people with is again this idea of how transformational tackling speaking can be. And the more constrained you feel with your speaking, the more transformational it will be to your life. So I just want to give this encouragement. It's much much much more enjoyable than you think it will be. It can actually be exhilarating and energizing and you feel like you can take over the world once you're on this journey. It's beautiful. And so I just encourage everybody take the first step and start practicing your speaking.

Tristan, with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

Let's do this. Lightning round. Here we go.

Here we go. First question. What are two or three books that you have recommended most to other people?

I was given a book by my first coach Nathan Seawward seven years ago called The Big Leap by Gay Hendrix that I've recommended so many times. And it's based on this idea that we tend to self-sabotage ourselves when we experience too much success or too much happiness. And that's linked to I think five things that would happen to us when we're growing up. Like one of them is the tall poppy syndrome or something like that. Like the tallest poppy is the one that's cut first. So if you shine in a family of siblings, then anytime you shine too much, we're going to say, hey, that's not cool for the others. So that's going to be internalized and hardwired in your body. And as an adult, as soon as you start shining a little bit too much, you're going to do the same thing to yourself. So the idea is going from having this point above which you can't be happy to turning it into, he calls it an upward-facing spiral with no upper limit. It's a really exciting and empowering book.

Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed?

I haven't watched much very recently. But I'll say my favorite TV show, one of my favorite TV shows of all time is The Peaky Blinders, the English show with Cillian Murphy. I'm absolutely obsessed with that show. I think it's a true masterpiece. And I recently rewatched, so I'll qualify this as recent. I recently rewatched The Nice Guys with Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe and I think it's just a brilliant comedy. Brilliant. Like another masterpiece, I thought.

Do you have a favorite recent product that you have discovered that you really love? Could be an app. It could be something physical.

I have a physical product actually right in front of me that was gifted to me by my business partner Michael Gandler, co-founder of Ultra Speaking. This is called an ember mug. And this keeps whatever you have in it warm. And it's extraordinary. Whether you're a coffee drinker or a tea drinker, you know the feeling of pouring this and wanting and sipping it and by the fifth sip it's cold. This keeps it at whatever temperature you want it to for however long you want and I absolutely love it. I've been using it basically every day.

I think we're too future focused as a species or as a society. And as a result, we're always looking for the next thing. So the motto I share with my friends and my business partners and my family the most I think is these are the good old days. And I remind myself and like I'll tell you right now for you and for whoever is listening like I mean think about the podcast. It's never going to be this young. It's never going to feel like it feels right now. And it always feels like these things are eternal. But truly one day you're going to look back and you're going to think, man, those were really the good old days. And so I say it right now, enjoy because these are the good old days.

Yeah. Well, the journey lasted almost seven months and it was the craziest journey of my life because I went into that with no experience whatsoever speaking. And so really just a random amateur and I just climbed the ladder by outworking everybody. The story that came to mind right away was six days before the semifinals. So I'm six days before the semifinals and I've qualified for the semi-finals two and a half months ago. So I'm nobody now. Now I'm going to the semi-finals of the world championships of public speaking. So my mind really is struggling to compute and I had finally unlocked a speech that I thought was worthy of giving on the final stage because you have to show up there for the semi-finals with one speech and then the next day if ever you win you're going to the finals and you have to have a brand new speech, a completely different speech that you're going to give on that stage. So, you need two speeches ready to go and both of those speeches have to be in theory world class. I'm six days before I was struggling at that. Really, really struggling to get that speech together. I finally got something and Michael managed to get me... I was flying I think two days later to Vancouver for the semis and Michael managed to unlock this one opportunity to speak in front of 50 people to give it a try. And so, I ran there. I give the speech and as usual we film... I filmed every single speech. I gave more than a hundred speeches over those seven months and I filmed every single speech and we get home we'd ask everybody for feedback and I get home and I'm thinking man something is wrong. Something is wrong. I was so pumped. I wept. I genuinely wept as I wrote the speech because it was so moving. It was all about my life. It was something that I was so connected to. I don't know, probably the emotion of the pressure as well, but that's how much I believed in that speech. We get home, we put the speech on the computer, and as I get to the most important part of the speech, I see two things happen. So, this is the moment where like I'm expecting people to pull out their tissues. One person pulls up the agenda for the event that they're at and is starting to look at the agenda. Another person pulls out their phone. Another person starts going through their purse and I'm looking at this and suddenly I realize, oh, this speech, nobody cares about this. This is not a good speech. This is terrible. And then I go through all of these feedback... I have 50 pieces of feedback and all I'm getting is like, good luck for the semi-finals. It's going to go great. I thought it was good. And I'm like, this is... I'm going to humiliate myself. This is terrible. So, I had waves of anxiety. I threw my speech away. And in five days, from the ground up, I rebuilt a completely new speech that was basically the best of everything I'd explored, everything I'd experimented with over the course of the three months leading up to that. Like the jokes that worked the best, like a standup comic would build my special and I focused on different areas like all of the transitions. And right before the semi-finals I gave the speech to one person like I was in Vancouver trying to internalize my speech and memorizing it like in a plaza where I delimited the size of the stage and I'm just giving my speech out loud to get over the nerves so I'm ready for the pressure to see if my brain will remember it and things. Anyways, I gave it in front of one person who was our district director at Toastmasters and this is a speech meant for 500 to a thousand people, not one person. So, I was scared it would flop, but in the middle of the speech, which is a completely different one, like I saw a tear roll down her cheek and then she just hugged me and said, you got it. You did it. You did it. And I walked out on that stage and I made it and I won the semi-finals with that speech. And I think to me that was really the... it showed me that everything I'd done was worth something that it actually worked. If I was able to build a speech in five days that could get me a win at the semi-finals at the World Championships, that was kind of the ultimate wow I won. So when I walked into the finals, to me, I felt like I had already won.

If you go to ultraspeaking.com/lenny. So ultra like u-l-t-r-a ultraspeaking.com/lenny. We put together you have five emails that go deep into a bunch of the things that we've talked here. You can also just go to ultraspeaking.com where you'll get access to a bunch of the games for free and you can check out everything else that we do. If you want to follow me or hit me up or ask me questions about this podcast, you can do that on Twitter at Montabelloo. M-O-N-T-B-L-O. And how can listeners be useful to me? Well, first of all, if you made it to here, then I really appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you for being here with us. And what I would love for you to do is to apply this. We said in the beginning you can't get better at speaking without speaking. And another piece of that puzzle is you want to do the thing that you're trying to get better at. So if you're nervous speaking in front of people, you want to speak in front of people as part of your practice. So the way you could be useful to me is introduce these games to somebody else. Try them for yourself. Practice them with somebody else. Go through the accordion method with a friend. Try conductor. And when you succeed and when you have an awesome experience, then you can tell the world that ultra speaking helped you do that. And that would be huge.

Thanks honey. It was an honor. It was my honor, Tristan. Bye, everyone.

Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennispodcast.com. See you in the next episode.