From Zero to World-Class: Tristan de Montebello on the Art of Public Speaking

[00:00:01] This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show. I am honored to have as a guest the finalist of the World Championship of Public Speaking, Tristan de Montebello.

[00:00:27] He also has courses about public speaking. If you go to the website UltraSpeaking, that's UltraSpeaking.com slash James. And we even played some games that I thought that were on his site that I thought were fascinating to improve my own public speaking. And you should give it a try to see how you do. But Tristan de Montebello, such a fascinating conversation about public...

[00:00:52] Because the thing about public speaking, it's not just about, oh, how do you give a good talk? To be a good speaker, a good communicator, you have to dive deep into who you are and what you stand for. I mean, I've been doing public speaking for about 25 years and probably more intensely the last 10 to 15 years.

[00:01:15] For me, I always really focus on how can I improve? How can I give better talks? How can I communicate better? Because ultimately, the only way you're able to share your ideas with others is through the medium of storytelling and public speaking and writing.

[00:01:36] So between public speaking and writing, these are the key ingredients to how you help create a world that you view as a better world. And that sounds overly idealistic and optimistic relating your own skills in public speaking and communicating to making a better world.

[00:01:57] But I truly believe this. And it was such a fascinating conversation to dive into the whole mindset of public speaking, as well as the specific techniques that Tristan had to encounter on his way towards world championship success. And, you know, again, ultraspeaking.com slash James. So here's Tristan. We have a great conversation. And I hope you enjoy.

[00:02:21] And if you like this, by the way, if you think you know anybody who would like to be a better public speaker, please share this episode with them, because I think this is really valuable. So thanks for listening. I am really excited to learn about this.

[00:02:45] So from zero to finalist in the world public speaking championships, Tristan DeMontebello, welcome to the show. What does it even mean? Is there what is the contest? I've never heard of this world championship contest. Yeah, I didn't know about it before I started this ultra learning project as well. It's within the Toastmasters organization.

[00:03:09] And so there's about 30,000 people from 100 and I think 142 countries that participate each year. And it starts at the club level and then it's a sudden death. So it's only the winner that gets to move on to the next step. And then the winners of each clubs compete against each other. And then it just keeps going, keeps going. And then you win. It's either you get to like a district level or national level, depending on the population around you.

[00:03:35] And then they fly in the top 100 for the semifinals and the finals to wherever they're having their conference. And that's where the real world championship happens. Do you speak about the same topic each time since it's a different audience each time? Yeah, so that's really up to you. The only thing they enforce, so there's no, you can choose any topic. It's prepared speaking in this case.

[00:04:02] And the only thing they enforce is that if you do make it to the semifinals, you're not allowed to use the same speech for the semifinals and the finals if you were to win the semis. And they're one day apart. So you have to have two phenomenal speeches ready to go once you get there. And there's no PowerPoints or things like that. It's just straight public speaking. Straight public speaking, yeah. And with the initial judging, like at the club level, it's got to be subjective.

[00:04:31] So everybody knows who you are. Is there a little bit of a popularity contest there? How do they judge? That's a great question. I think it's definitely hard to get away from the subjectivity of speaking. And there's an interesting conversation there. They have a ballot. And that's the first thing I did. I took the ballot. I looked at every little piece of the ballot. I broke it down and I made a plan for each piece.

[00:04:58] But they bring in outside judges is the short answer. So for your competition, you'll have outside judges that'll come in. And the higher you go in the competition, the more judges they bring in. And you don't know who the judges are necessarily. If you're in your club at the first level, you probably know because they're the only outside people. But otherwise, yeah, it's just you're in a club. You have no idea in an environment and you don't know who you're talking to. You don't, I mean, necessarily, you don't know who the judge is. So you can't really pander to them. And then they have a few rules.

[00:05:27] You know, you can't, there's no timer, but you have seven and a half minutes. And if you go over even one second, you get disqualified. Wow. And they'll show you five minute, a five minute mark, a six minute mark and a seven minute mark. That's all you know. So you have to be managing all of that in your mind as you're going. What if you go four minutes? Is that bad? Yeah. Four minutes disqualified as well. I think the minimum is four and a half minutes.

[00:05:52] But if you analyze any of the top speeches, they all end up in between seven minutes, 15 seconds and seven minutes, 20, 25 seconds. That's where the sweet spot is. Is there a reason for seven and a half minutes? Like, is that kind of assumed to be the ideal time to speak because that's people's attention spans or is that just random, seven and a half? I think it's kind of random. I think it's short enough that you can run a few and long enough that it still feels

[00:06:21] like you have quite some time. And when you're writing, I mean, you know, you're with standup comedy. When you're doing seven minutes, it's actually an eternity. Every sentence count. Every word counts. There's so much you can pack in that amount of time. Well, and speaking of which, and I'm curious, I'm going to get into more of the details of what you did and how you did it. But how important is the role of humor, in your opinion, as a world champion finalist? Very, very important. I think it's very important.

[00:06:49] I'll tell you in the competition itself, the vast majority, more than nine out of 10, probably 99 out of 10 out of 100 of the last speakers use humor in their speech or probably every single one. So there are a few things I was looking at when we were competing, but it's not just in competition. I'm looking at, okay, how do you, how do you win this thing? How can I reverse engineer the world championships?

[00:07:18] Well, number one, you, if you don't make people laugh, they're not going to like you as much. Or if you don't make them laugh, but everybody else does, then you've kind of already lost. If you don't hold their attention from beginning to end, you've also already lost. If they get bored at any given time, they're going to remember that more than anything. So you need to tell stories and it needs to weave together really, really nicely. And then there's all kinds of other things that about, you know, how you show up.

[00:07:45] But those two are, I believe, absolutely mandatory. And they're just an incredible for connection as well. Yeah. What do you mean incredible for connection? Well, I think, I think naturally when you walk up on a stage, there is a gap between you and your audience and your role as a speaker. And this applies whether you're on a stage or you're in a meeting or you're chatting with a bunch of new friends at a networking event.

[00:08:13] I think your role is to allow people to seep into each other, allow the bubbles that we have around ourselves to start becoming permeable. And in my opinion, humor is an incredible way to do so because humor does two things. Number one, it loosens everybody's nervous system. So it makes everybody feel a little bit more comfortable.

[00:08:37] Number two, it's actually a vulnerable act in that you, to be funny, you kind of have to show yourself. You have to take a little bit of a risk. And in doing so, same thing. It lowers people's barriers and people's defenses because they realize, oh, if they're showing themselves, they're feeling a little bit comfortable and they're giving me, extending me an invitation. And then lastly, I think it allows you to feel more comfortable in your skin.

[00:09:05] So I see humor as well as like an anchor for myself. If I can crack a joke or if I can say something kind of unfiltered that pops through my mind, I get to feel more like myself. Oh, that's what I feel like, not what my professional self feels like. It's what I really am. And in doing so, I also get to relax myself and step into myself, which is, I think, the key to exceptional communication.

[00:09:32] And then storytelling is obviously very important because as opposed to just reeling off facts or an argument, telling a story gives people an image that they could, you know, storytelling has been used to transmit information for the whole lifespan of human history. So clearly there's something almost biological about a story versus, it's one thing to say, you know, don't go over the woods. It's, it's, don't go into the woods. It's dangerous.

[00:10:00] As opposed to saying, you know, two little kids got killed in the woods last year. Like that's going to get people much more. So, so, so what was the, what were one of the first things you spoke about in, in this contest and, and what techniques did you use to kind of perfect, perfect your approach? My, the first thing I did, I was just looking for something because I, I kind of fell into this competition by accident.

[00:10:29] And then on the tail end, created a company by accident. All of this happened kind of by accident. And so when I jumped in, I was, I think 10 days before the qualifiers and you have to get five qualifying speeches in order to compete. And I had nothing and most people in that organization will take six months to get their first five speeches out. So I had to find something immediately to get out there.

[00:10:54] And I had written a blog post on basically my fear of other people's opinions. And I took that post and I turned it into a speech. And that was the, the beginning of what I did. And then over time, it turned into this kind of epic story of my, my grandmother picking me up from school on her motorcycle and running me through what I called the, or what she called

[00:11:19] the fear Olympics, which is these, all of these kind of challenges that she, that she had me do in front of people in order to allow myself to feel like more like myself and overcome my fear of other people. So that was the centerpiece. Like what did she do? Um, she took me, well, it went from, you know, doing karate moves in the park and looking

[00:11:44] ridiculous all the way to singing in the subway, like a singing a song with my guitar in the subway and, um, in Paris. And did it work at making you feel less caring about what other people thought of you? Yes. Yes. I, I think every, anything you do that's at the edge of your comfort zone, particularly

[00:12:07] one that requires you to trust in yourself versus put that onus on other people's minds is going to get you a step in the direction of freeing yourself from other people's opinions. And I think it's, I think it's a fundamental skill in life. It's a very important one. Otherwise you're, you're bound as you go through life by what other people, what you think other people think. And this is a great topic for a speech because a hundred percent of the people can relate to it.

[00:12:38] It's an opinion, but it's not an opinion that anybody would disagree with, you know, that it's good to not care what other people think of you and it's good to figure out ways why. So it's kind of like a perfect topic for a public speech. It's not like you're saying, you know, America is bad. Here's why. Yeah. Or some, you know, really, you know, uh, polarizing topic. Like that would be a bad idea. And it's vulnerable.

[00:13:07] You're sort of saying right up front that you do care what people think about you. You're admitting it. And, and, and then here's this quirky story, your grandma on a motorcycle, you know, kind of giving you, she's like, she's like the karate kids teacher, you know, it's giving, it's like this classic, it's almost like a movie, you know, you could see a movie script written kind of like that where grandma moves into the house and, you know, little Tristan

[00:13:33] is scared, is being bullied and cares what other people think about him. And grandma kind of takes over and teaches everybody a new lesson. And then at the end, grandma's sick or something. And now Tristan's turned to help her. I don't know. I'm just making it into a movie script. But that's very much what it, what it is. And we, so I, the, the company I started after, uh, my ultra learning project called ultra

[00:14:00] speaking was I started it with Michael Gendler, who I saw speak within the first week of one of my speeches. I think it was the second day I joined this organization and I saw him speak with no script. So extraordinarily well that I couldn't believe he didn't have a script. He was just given a topic and he just created, crafted something in the moment that was so impressive. And I asked him if he would coach me during this competition.

[00:14:28] And so we did everything together. And one of the main, our main training tools was watching the best movies out there and just breaking down what is it that makes a great story? Why am I so compelled to watch this? So I think a lot of what came out in my speeches was very much extracted from trying to reverse engineer storytelling through movies in part. And part of it, what you're saying is the, I think the vulnerability upfront.

[00:14:58] Um, one of the, the sayings that we pulled out of this, uh, this crazy journey was never be the hero of your own story. I think this is a mistake that we, we all tend to make when we tell our stories is we will tend to want to paint ourselves as the centerpiece. But if, when you do that, you, you kind of throw people off.

[00:15:25] So there are all kinds of ways this is described in storytelling, but it's so funny. Cause I'm talking almost 20 years ago, I was writing for some finance platform and a friend of mine who also wrote on there, uh, he said, why are your store? Why do people seem to love you and not like me? And I said, well, let's look at your most recent article.

[00:15:50] You talk about how you would jump a four foot vertical and basketball, uh, when you're in college and no one wants to hear about that. It's like, you're bragging. They want to hear about problems you have. They don't want to hear, even though you're writing about stocks and you're supposed to be perfect, still nobody wants to see you as perfect. And, and vulnerability is, is, is the currency of storytelling basically.

[00:16:16] But when you say the hero of a story, I think of to myself of the hero's journey, you do want to be the hero in the hero's journey sense. Like, so in your example, you know, you, you, you care what people think, but you don't want to, you know, initially you don't want to put in the effort to do the embarrassing things that will teach you to not care what people think. You don't want to do it because it's scary.

[00:16:44] So, you know, you meet your, your, your, your, your ally, your, your mentor, like your grandma in this case, and she takes you on a journey and it's the hero's journey. And so you do want to be a hero in that sense. You, you want, you are the main character. Yes. And you become the hero through all your trials and tribulations. The key, so how do you do it tactically is you find the mentor. It's the mentor.

[00:17:12] So you come in and you say, Hey, look, I didn't know I was making all the mistakes. And I, and he, and this is the skin, the cat kind of idea of that you, you allow the audience to identify with you. And then you meet someone who says, Hey, you're, I'm going to help you on your journey. And so the mentor is the person who holds the wisdom. And then you get to share the same wisdom, but instead of saying, Hey, I have the secret to life. You're saying, I met this person who has a secret to life and here's what they taught me.

[00:17:42] And here's what it took for me to implement this. So now everybody's learning with you on the journey. Instead of you saying, I have it all figured out. Here's the secret to life, which as you're saying, throws people off. Ah, you know, I never thought of it that way, that the role of the mentor is not necessarily to teach you, but to give you an excuse to point to someone else other than yourself. Yeah. Because like potentially you could learn it through trial and error on yourself.

[00:18:10] Um, which by the way is a Bible method and some people do that, but, um, but having the mentor really, it's like rich dad, poor dad, that series of books. And yeah, and of course, star Wars is the classic example. Uh, what, what are, what are some other ones? What are some other classic examples? I had so many when I was doing the competition. What were some of the movies you and Michael went over? What are some of the stories? One of the, the, one of the main stories actually we went through is finding Nemo.

[00:18:40] Okay. Interestingly, uh, for two reasons. One, it's just like, it's a perfect arc of the hero's journey. And two is that the, uh, the storytellers spent a lot of time breaking down how they actually thought about the story. So there's some great content online. It's probably still accessible. This was a while ago. Oh, I'll take a look at that. Eight years ago, but yeah. What about though in stories where like, have you ever seen the TV series Mad Men? Yeah.

[00:19:10] So, so, so Don Draper kind of learns about himself obviously throughout the series, but there's no one mentor. It's kind of like, and he's actually really, because he's always sort of, you feel like he's always hiding. He, he, he is afraid to be vulnerable to anybody else and, and to learn from anybody else. It's, it's basically life around him is what's teaching him. So what do you do when there's not really a real mentor, but you are learning from life experience?

[00:19:37] You were learning, you have greater troubles maybe because you don't have a mentor, but, but that also gives you learning. Yeah, that's a great point. I guess in this case, you're, you're meeting an established character. So you do get to see, uh, you do get to see him fumble in all kinds of different ways outside of the moments where he shines. But really you're not, if he were to walk on a stage and say, hello, everyone, I'm the best ad man in the world.

[00:20:08] Then everybody's going to sit back and be like, oh, oh yeah. Show me. Prove me. Now you're, you have a, you have them on the wrong foot. So, so I think. Would he have to start off? Is it wrong? And I'm sorry to interrupt. I mean, you're, you're an expert here and I want to learn, but, but I want to just pose the question and see if I'm right. Would he have to start off? Um, I deserted from the army. I was, my wife didn't even know my real name. I sort of swindled my way into the ad business.

[00:20:36] And I was, I was every second at risk of being caught at risk of being fired one client away from just ruining my career. And I had to, I had to figure it out in a room full of like rich, you know, established people that were judging me. Like, so if you have to just start off super vulnerable. Yeah. I love that. It reminds me a lot of your writing, actually. I think you do a masterful job at doing that. Oh, thank you.

[00:21:06] I discovered your writing a long time ago. And I remember just, I had sent you an email saying something like you're writing or your blog feels like a maze because I would open one article and start reading it. And I just couldn't not continue reading because these were the kind of intros you would make. And then in, in between you'd say something, you know, like in this case would be, I deserted from the army, but that would be a hyperlink. And I click on that one and it opened another tab. And then when I get to that one, it had an insane start that was also vulnerable.

[00:21:36] Intriguing, interesting. And that, that painted you as, oh, I'm about to learn some big life lesson. Something crazy is going to happen to me. And so I just, I just ended up having just way too many tabs and spent all day just reading your blog. Oh, thank you so much. Yeah. And that, and that was by intent, you know, in there, in the mid nineties, nobody knew what the internet was going to be. And I sort of viewed it as this giant hypertext piece of writing. And so that's how I basically just did all my writing around it.

[00:22:04] But it has helped me for public speaking like that approach, but, but now, okay. So, so go on. We know humor, vulnerability, by the way, with the humor part, you can't, it's very hard to calculate humor. How do you know you're getting humor in to a talk? That's wow. That's probably one of the hardest things to do. Because there's, here's the thing.

[00:22:32] The vast majority of our speaking is unprepared speaking. Probably 90%, if not more, of the moments we're speaking in our lives are not moments where we had time to script out what we were going to say. So we're talking about two very different worlds. And in fact, today, most of my attention is on everything that is unscripted. But that's kind of a different thing because when it's unscripted, to bring humor to spontaneity

[00:23:01] in a spontaneous environment is very different to how do I bring humor in a scripted, pre-prepared way. The way I did it when I was competing is I just approached humor exactly the way a stand-up comedian would. So I, and all of my speech, I thought, so I was starting the competition with zero experience competing against people who'd been doing speaking or competing in this competition for 10 or 15 years sometimes. So I had to compress time.

[00:23:31] And I just thought, I'm going to out-speak everybody. I'm going to out-work everybody. So I just got a virtual assistant online and they booked me as a guest speaker in all the clubs that I could find. And every day I'd have a new speech in front of a new audience, just like a comedian would go to a new club. And I just tested things out. I'd meet Michael in the morning. We'd brainstorm ideas, brainstorm jokes. And then I'd go out there.

[00:23:59] I'd test out my ideas, test the joke, record everything, ask every single person in the audience for feedback. And then I'd go home. I'd review everything. We'd meet again the next morning, review it all, watch the video, cringe incredibly hard in my case. And then take what worked, throw away what didn't and iterate on what we could. And I just kept that going over and over and over. And I think that's how you do it.

[00:24:24] Because until you test it in front of an audience, you can't really know how it's going to land, if it's going to be funny. Because the delivery is a huge part of how you share a joke as well. Yeah, it's like 95% of it. It's surprising. And recording, so you did so many things that were correct. Like recording your talks. So this way you could look and see, well, did you um and ah, like how was the audience really reacting? Did they react how you think they were reacting?

[00:24:54] Of course, asking for feedback is good. And the other thing is about particularly when it comes to humor is that if a group of people laugh one time, chances are another group of people is also, they are also going to laugh. Like this is how you focus group a joke. Like Chris Rock would famously start off each year with a blank slate. He'd go to a local club and he would just read off of a notebook his jokes, like with no delivery at all. Incredible. And to see if there was any reaction.

[00:25:25] And that was the first kind of focus group to see if these jokes had any legs on it. And then he would develop from there. Always testing until he was ready to, in his case, to shoot a special and go on tour and so on. So what should we do like one a year? So, okay. So this is humor, kind of the picking the story, the vulnerability. Then as you get into the deeper, you know, part of like what makes a great public speaker, what were some of the things you learned?

[00:25:56] I was having a conversation with a professional pianist recently, just like a month ago. And he shared something that I thought was really interesting. He said that one of his masters teaching him in France always said that the audience was empathetic. And what that means is when they sit down, they're a blank, total blank slate.

[00:26:23] But they're here receiving on every level you could possibly imagine. So if you walk up on stage and you are anxious or what you're conveying is insecurity or anxiety, then they're going to feel that. And they're going to start feeling anxious and insecure. So what do you do about that? Same, the opposite is true.

[00:26:51] If you walk up on stage and you feel very secure, very confident, or at least that's what you're the energy you're projecting. And I'm talking, I'm not talking about the fake confidence, the I'm pushing hard to try and look confident. I'm talking about actually being grounded in that energy. And that's what people will receive. And then they get to relax. And then you can feel that they're relaxed. And then you start to relax. So what do you do with that information?

[00:27:21] I'll share another anecdote because at the same, in the same conversation, I had a professional pianist and I had a clown, which is fascinating. Somebody who's going through clown school. Yeah. People underestimate what a clown is and what clown school is about. If I could go back and go to any school on the planet, it would be specifically the clown school that's right outside of Paris. Nice. Yeah. The French are very, this is crazy because I had no idea as well.

[00:27:51] I one day ended up being neighbor to a clown and I didn't even know it was. I just thought a clown was somebody goofing around. It's actually a very serious profession that is very, very interesting when you look, when you dive deep. It's not Bozo the Clown. It's really deep. No, it is not Bozo the Clown. I mean, this is so funny because I'm telling you yesterday, my daughter is just finishing college now. I told her she should consider going to clown school. Wow. So I love it. Yesterday I had that conversation with her.

[00:28:18] People will consider improv and now it's become part of the zeitgeist. And they'll say, oh, I'll go do improv. I know it'll help me. But clown school is not yet there. And clown school is that pushed to a really interesting extreme. So tell me. Yeah. So the clown was saying, play whatever you have. That's what his teacher was telling him, which means if you show up and you don't want to be there, then they should feel that you don't want to be there.

[00:28:48] Play the fact that you don't want to be there, but play it with confidence. And so there's something about what great speakers, and I think what's interesting about this idea here is that it works in prepared speaking as well as all of the other areas you're going to be in. What people will tend to do is they're going to show up in any environment and they will start leaking. They'll start leaking all of their insecurities.

[00:29:17] If they were hoping they would feel confident and they show up and they don't, or like a word comes out of their mouth wrong, they start fumbling, something happens that was not supposed to happen, everything internally is going to break down. But what if instead, you could keep those insecurities inside? So plug the leaks, stay in character, and play whatever it is that you are experiencing. Like use that energy to, in a confident way.

[00:29:47] We call it like it's staying in character. It kind of looks like conviction. And what that does is it sends the message to your audience that they're okay and you're okay. Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It means so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at alcatra at gmail.com

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[00:31:15] Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. That's linkedin.com slash altature to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Let's say you say that one wrong word or the audience didn't laugh when you thought they were going to laugh and so now you're crumbling inside.

[00:31:44] So what does it mean play what you had? Should you acknowledge that didn't go well or like how do you stay in character? There's always two, you always have access to two ingredients. It's kind of like the two wolves. You have the, there's always some insecurity that's going to be predominant and always something that you're confident and you know is the truth. Like insecurity is hedging

[00:32:12] and the other side is the truth. So say you, say you're in a normal conversation, like a business meeting and you're trying to explain something and it comes out wrong. The insecurity is saying, oh my God, sorry, that's coming out wrong. I must be losing you. And suddenly you're forcing a lens on your audience that now they have to see you as somebody who is insecure. Somebody, okay, this person doesn't really know what they're talking about

[00:32:42] and they're not very confident. So that, you can't just go with whatever's happening. But in that same moment, there's that insecurity, but there's the, there's a little bit deeper. There is a confidence of, no, no, no, I do know what I'm talking about and I really want to get this across. And say you're struggling to get it across in that moment. Then the confident version of yourself would say, instead of, oh my God, I'm so sorry, I'm messing up,

[00:33:12] would say, hey, this is a little bit harder than expected to get out. Bear with me. Or, right? It's like, it's hold, stay with me guys. This is going to make sense. And so you're, you're playing this, you're playing the moment that, hey, this isn't working well for me right now. But you're, what you're projecting is confidence. In many cases, it can look like just not mentioning it at all and just continuing to convey

[00:33:42] the natural confident self that you have. So those are kind of two different stories. I'm trying to understand what the clown friend of yours said, which is, you know, play what you have. Yes. So what do you have in this case? You have the confidence? You have the knowledge that you know the truth about something? No, in this case, what you have is, wow, it's taking me, it's harder to get this thought across than I thought it would be.

[00:34:13] That's what you had in that moment. And so in that moment, can I be in that? So if you're a clown, you're trying to find humor in it. So you might say, okay, this is going to be super laborious. Like you can tell that my brain's not working today. So you could, you would lean into that side of it very, very strongly and try to find the humor in it. Whereas if you're in a business meeting, it might be that, hey, bear with me. This is going to make sense. So it's kind of,

[00:34:42] it's two approaches to this same idea of what I have here, what's happening in the moment is that I'm not expressing myself with the clarity I wish I had. The way, the example he gave was much more, what's much closer to what might happen in a, in, as a clown. I think his example was, say you show up and for whatever reason, you absolutely do not want to be there that day.

[00:35:10] You're hating what's happening or something happened in your life. Then that's the energy you're coming from. The whole, your whole act will feed on the idea that you don't want to be there that day. But it's a, it's a choice you're making with confidence and conviction. So how do you do that? There are two types of confidence. There's the confidence that comes from a thousand reps

[00:35:40] that you can't replace. You just have to have put in the reps. And when you show up, you say, you can feel that level of confidence. And then there's the confidence that acts like a switch. And the one I'm talking about is the confidence that you can turn on or off. And that's the one of the insecurities. Because if you don't want to be there, you can retract within yourself. If you say something, if you fumble, you can think, oh man, everybody's thing can tell that I'm not making sense

[00:36:09] and they must think I'm so stupid. And you can let yourself go down that route. That's mindset. So it's just a decision. In the moment, you can say, no, I'm not going to give any weight to this negative thinking in the back of my mind. I'm going to stay in character. I'm going to bring my attention back to where I was going. And I'm going to plug all the leaks. I'm going to make sure none of these insecurities that I have in the back of my mind are coming out.

[00:36:38] So I'm going to show up completely as I desire to show up in the first place. And so I'm just trying to think of like a practical example. Like, so for whatever reason, I don't want to be there. I'm up on the stage. Something happens that triggers some insecurities. What's my gut reaction? Like, how do I react right now to the audience? So I think, I think it's a little bit different. So, because we kind of have two, two things here.

[00:37:07] One is the predominant, fundamental feeling you're experiencing in that moment. And one is a fleeting moment. So what you described feels more like a fleeting moment. It feels more like a fumble. And if there's a fumble, it makes more sense to not draw attention to it and to stay in it if it's a small fumble. Then just stay in it, keep going, and people will have forgotten it four seconds later. They probably didn't even realize

[00:37:37] it was a fumble in the first place. But showing up after a day where everything has been going wrong and you're just in that energy, you're in a funk and you can't get rid of the funk, then that can be the dominant energy that's coming out. But you will, does it make sense? Yeah, it does. I'm just trying to figure out how to describe it. Like, so I'm there. I'm in a bad mood. Normally, I'm in a happy mood

[00:38:05] when I do this talk or act or whatever. How am I just, I'm on stage. How am I acting? Like, how am I taking that and bringing it with me on stage in a positive way? Well, it doesn't have to be positive. You could be negative. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Well, what would you do? Say that's the situation. You show up today and it's like, everything's been wrong. The business deal you wanted to get, it looks like it was green light, now it's yellow. And, you know,

[00:38:35] you stubbed your toe in the morning. It's like one of those days where everything is shitty and the last thing you want to do is walk up on a stage and do comedy. Because all you want to do is go home, fix your problems, or go home and sleep. What's a way in which you can be in that energy, but confidently? Yeah, so let's say you're doing the normal crowd work. Oh, where are you from? What do you do? You could say, you know, where are you from? You know what? I don't even care. I don't give a shit.

[00:39:05] Yes, exactly. What you do, I can guarantee you do something super boring and I'm on stage and I could care less what you want to do. Every comedian feels the same way. Nobody cares about you. Yeah, I don't even want to be here. To be honest, I had the shittiest of days. I'm just here because I'm on this route. I'm going to get through this and you're going to sit here and you're going to listen to me all the way. Right, and by the way, I'm not talking to you anymore. Your girlfriend's much prettier. I'm talking to her. Exactly. And so now

[00:39:35] you've transformed something that was shitty into something you can work with. You know, it's funny. It brings back so many memories because people often think comedy is about the joke telling and coming up with jokes and to be fair, it is, of course, a lot about that. But what comedians talk about, what I would talk about countless hours with, let's say, my peers at that time would be situations like this. Like, how do you deal with this type of audience? How do you deal when you're in this kind of mood? You know,

[00:40:04] we would tell ourselves things like, you know, it's my party and the audience is just invited if they want to. Like, I don't give a shit. Like, you have to always get this mindset and that's like a key to comedy which of course is a key to public speaking. So, this is all very important stuff. It truly is. I mean, after the competition, I found myself, so I was on top of the world. I made it to the finals of the world championships.

[00:40:33] World is perfect for me. I just can't, my mind is completely blown. I had no idea. Scott had no idea. Nobody had any idea that this could actually happen and I had worked so hard so I was very, very proud of all the work I'd put in as well. But, just a few weeks later, I find myself in a small online mastermind and the guy running it says, hey Tristan, would you give us a little speech? Just teach us something. In five minutes, you'll give us a speech. Teach us something. You have three minutes and I had five minutes

[00:41:02] to think through whatever this was while listening to the others and I mean, that should have been so easy to me and it was, I remember feeling everything I had felt on day one of the competition. I felt anxiety. I felt imposter syndrome. I felt like I was, I didn't even know where to start. I didn't know how to do anything because what I knew how to do, what I had trained was a very deterministic skill. I knew how to sit down,

[00:41:33] write a script and then go test it on many, many, many audiences while editing the script and watching the video and testing all these things and then after a while, I'd feel really, really confident overacting it on stage. That's what I knew how to do for this competition. So suddenly, I'm asked, hey, can you be a human being? I don't want to see a rehearsed speech. I just want you to be a human being but I also want you to be clear, concise, impactful and inspiring

[00:42:02] and I was just like stuck in front of this camera and I remember I was probably at 170 beats per minute the whole time. I was freaking out and that kind of cued me onto a mission of trying to figure out, okay, well, what is it? What do you need? What are the skills that are going to impact everything else in your life? Because it's nice to break down storytelling and to get all the frameworks and tips

[00:42:29] but until you find a way to learn how to show up completely as yourself in any given moment in a way that where you feel confident, nothing else matters because if you break down then you can't think about the storytelling tips and the frameworks. You don't have time to structure your thinking. You're just in the moment and you have to flow and so Michael and I started trying

[00:42:59] to figure that problem out. We'd figured the world championships out, the prepared speaking and now it's like well, what is the what's the other side? What's the true meta skill of speaking? Communication is something we do all the time. What are the habits we need in order to feel comfortable everywhere and what are the bad habits we have? What are we doing wrong? And we started trying to figure those things out and what we found out as we were working with people and training people on these skills is that

[00:43:29] a huge amount is mindset. Almost all of it is mindset actually because everybody's speaking all the time. So we all we're all you know 2000s in chess. Everybody has a pretty high elo when it comes to basic communication. Credit for understanding the chess rating system. Yes, credit for thank you. But we're all showing up as 800s because everybody's shooting themselves in the foot all the time because

[00:43:58] I don't feel like I have a seat at this table. I'm unsure that what that this is going to work or as soon as the environment changes I don't know what to do with all of the feelings that are going through my body. I think I'm a fraud and all of these things these thoughts come into play and suddenly we shut down. I was doing great talking to my best friend I'm 2000 and then I'm asked to speak up in a meeting

[00:44:27] and I'm 800 and I just fumble and break down. A lot of our approach to training communication today and how we run all of our pedagogy is very much around the fundamentals that play on mindset. I love that this is what you guys were talking about because this is the only thing that matters as the foundation and then all of the small tactical things you build on top of that but if you're missing the bottom part you're

[00:44:57] missing the base of the pyramid then the rest doesn't matter as much. it's interesting because what you said earlier about what the pianist said that the audience is very empathetic so the way we would

[00:45:27] talk about this let's say in the comedy world is to say you have to always address the elephant in the room so in was a finalist for the world championship about and you suddenly find you can't talk so that's the elephant in the room and so I'm just again I'm asking you if this is the

[00:45:57] right way to and now you have to address that problem before you do anything else and then you could say what you just said to me which is that you train for X this deterministic thing

[00:46:26] but you see that if you extrapolate the core concepts I need to tell you a story about public you would just say what it is you would just lay it out there it's the clown's version of what he said about you got to bring it all with you on

[00:47:04] I should kill it at this but I'm going to flub it you're hedging this is just an insecurity that's coming out you're not writing something confidently so the easiest thing to do because we all have these kinds of thoughts we all have the man I'm a VP of this I should know what I'm talking about oh man I'm the engineer I'm the person who's in charge of this project I should be able to answer this question

[00:47:35] everybody there's always an equivalent of that in your mind when it's your turn to speak if you come out and say oh I'm sorry I'm so unprepared or I should be so much better than I'm about to be you're just turning on a negative cycle and instead we want to show up

[00:48:05] and say no no no no no I am confident I can I can do a good job of this I'm just doubting myself that's what's happening in the back of my mind and instead I'm going say I'm not going to put any attention on that part and I'm just going to go through with this I'm going to find a way to convey confidence I'm going to try and convey confidence that will happen naturally as long as I don't share my insecurities because humans

[00:48:35] just look confident by default so what would you do in that situation now so in this situation I would not say anything that would hurt my chances of having a great first impression and I would just jump in as if I were confident as if I done this 50 times well in this case my I was asked to

[00:49:08] I was asked to teach something and I was close to my backyard and I had a slack line in perfect perfect representations of what learning a hard skill looks like because if you put your foot on a slack line and try to stand up it

[00:49:37] will immediately feel impossible like actually impossible your foot's going to move from left to right and everything's going to feel unstable and it's going to feel like this is just not a skill for you you you not somebody who's supposed to be slack lining but having a slack line in my backyard I've taught probably 25 people how to slack line and I can do it in 30 minutes within 30 minutes I have people with no hands walking five steps over the slack line so how is

[00:50:07] it what can we do about that and that was kind of you weren't feeling you could speak with confidence about slack lining and

[00:50:37] from there you made an analogy each step of the way to public speaking I love what you said slack lining is a line that's pulled between two fixed posts and you walk on it with no hands you just walk on a string basically it's almost like the guy who crossed between the twin towers it's that except you don't have anything in your it's like a tight rope but you're not holding a bar or anything like that so it's a little bit thicker but

[00:51:07] I love what you said you weren't feeling confident about public speaking because that's exactly it and I think that summarizes so much of what people struggle with and what people confuse when they struggle with speaking in general and communication is that they confuse I'm not confident with my content and I'm not confident with the speaking and so in my case I was not confident with the speaking because I didn't have all the things that I

[00:51:36] could rest all my confidence on I hadn't given a hundred speeches completely impromptu spontaneously so I didn't know what was going to happen there was huge doubt in thinking about what that meant for learning I had done hours and hours of so what I decided to do is one of them is an illusion and that's the speaking part

[00:52:06] and I'm just not going to allocate any bandwidth to thinking about that I'm just going to plug that leak and I'm going to bring all of my focus on what I know about the slack lining and so suddenly one side of me the illusion side the unconfident side is kind

[00:52:52] I do think analogies is one of the communicator it's incredibly valuable we do a bunch of training like that to help people build analogies so that is something I think I probably got better at during the world championships that I used there well if you think about it analogies is a critical part of comedy because you're basically finding two situations that are roughly analogous

[00:53:22] but somehow there's like a they're not as analogous as people think so like I remember hearing a joke by Andrew Schultz in a comedy club and he basically just said why do people who I'm not going to do it between countries

[00:53:53] who mistreat their women and good food and so he just plays with that he's like no one ever says hey let's go out for some Canadian tonight it's always like Chinese Middle East Chinese food and so you think oh this is interesting this analogy works but it's like a weird funny kind of analogy so yeah and so analogies are like a critical skill in stand up as well well I really like that and I think there's something this funny because

[00:54:22] since I'm in your world it reminds me of your concept of idea sex of taking two things that are seemingly unrelated and finding the overlap and I think that's what makes humans interesting what weird overlaps that we see and I think that's why vulnerability done in the right way not from a place of insecurity but showing like humor is vulnerability it's saying

[00:54:52] hey I saw the world this way that's very inappropriate in many ways to look at to say that kind of an analogy but you saw it and just putting it out there is interesting or funny and you can build on that so there's so much there yeah there really is like and this is one of my favorite Louis C.K. jokes I just have to share with you because it's also somehow using an analogy but it's he basically was saying he was playing with his little

[00:55:22] five-year-old or six-year-old daughter and but he was saying she is not a five-year-old is not emotionally prepared to deal with the darkness of Monopoly like at some point in the game she's not good at it she sucks at it at some point in the game I'm going to say to her okay now here's what's going to happen next I'm going to take all your money I'm going to take all your property and you're not playing anymore the game is over for you and

[00:56:00] he and that's all his jokes that's what he plays with so it's just interesting so what would you do if you felt like you're speaking in front of an audience and you felt like the audience was kind of biased against you for some reason let's just say the political thing is you're a Democrat and you're speaking in a room full of Republicans you can do one of two things because

[00:56:31] it's hard for me to give you a blanket statement on this because you can do one of two things one is you can play that and you can say whatever you're feeling in that moment that is not your insecurity you can put out there and be like okay I know every so basically one strategy is breaking down all of the bad things they probably think about you in that moment and saying I know you probably think that I am this this this and that everything I'm going

[00:57:01] to say is this this this and you just put out all of laughter you were saying that a joke if a joke works on one audience it's likely to work on another audience if it's a good

[00:57:31] joke I noticed that as well having spoken in front of probably 100 different audiences over the course of the competition and trying out like testing out jokes in well here's here's the actual example I went to speak at Raytheon

[00:58:01] so I'm in a with a group of you know like hardcore hardware engineers and they fit the they fit exactly what you imagine they looked like and I'm there and I know by this time because I was pretty advanced with this one speech I was giving I know exactly when people are going to laugh in my speech and I know exactly how much they're going to laugh

[00:58:31] now I don't know and this is where it becomes interesting I don't know let's say a roarish laughter where people are clapping because they don't even know how to express how funny things are let's say that's a 10 the only thing I know is

[00:59:14] that the one that would have been a two would probably not even be laughter would be maybe a smile in this group I show up and I throw out my opening joke very confidently and I don't even get a smile I get nothing just total crickets and I'm 30 seconds into a 7.5 minute speech and I know that

[00:59:44] every single one of my next jokes are not going to land because this is my reference so now I know everything is going to be at a minus something it's negative and I had a choice there I could say something I could say wow tough audience and try to catch it up kind of maybe the way a stand up comedian would but not all cases I've heard people just run through their act

[01:00:15] character so I chose no leaking so I just kept going as if they had laughed and I still told the other jokes in the same way I would have expecting them to laugh even though they didn't and it was very painful but by the time I got to

[01:00:45] said exactly this he said first of all before I give you any feedback I gotta say that was one of the funniest speeches I've ever seen I swear I wanted to punch that guy in the face it's like why I told him I'm like why didn't you guys laugh it was so it was so hard for me but what I'm saying here is that it's actually hard to read an audience so say you're at your example and you're a Democrat speaking at a Republican

[01:01:16] event or vice versa if you're looking at the audience they're incentivized to look mad at you and it's very hard for one person to start saying yeah preach because everybody is going to look at them and be mad same way in this group of super introverted engineers if one of them laughed they knew they would stick out of the bunch because that's not the culture there probably and so it's risky to do that

[01:01:45] so in that situation there's also the argument to say hey you can just go through your speech and say it as if you had an audience that was really receiving everything you're saying because there probably will be a bunch of people who will be resonating with what you have to say they're just not going to show it

[01:02:27] and they all have top secret clearance they don't let their emotions maybe be seen so you could have been doing it's like if you're going to maybe a northern European country they don't tend to laugh out loud hysterically as much like Sweden or Norway but they still might think something is very funny so you have to have that confidence as well let me ask you a question I'll describe a technique

[01:02:57] I've used and I'm curious if it's good or bad so there was one point I was speaking at a conference where I had a feeling some people or some group of people in the audience didn't like me for whatever reason and what I did was I said look I could talk about one I could talk about two different things so I want you guys to pick which topic I'm going to talk about and clap

[01:03:27] for the topic so I gave topic A and I gave topic B I knew they were going to choose topic A but I wanted to give them and that was really the only talk I had come prepared for was topic A but I knew I sort of pushed them on topic A but I made they think they have chosen the topic and I think that worked

[01:03:56] that is brilliant that is actually I don't know you probably didn't do it I don't know which one came even first but that is a parenting advice that I got that was really interesting is many times people are your kids will be resistant by default just because you're imposing something on them so just give them a choice and one of the choices could be choice A choice B or I choose for you so even if you're the one who ended

[01:04:26] up choosing it was their decision to that kind of thing it's been so overused that is everybody here tonight are you excited and say it again you're just that thing of trying to get people

[01:04:55] pumped up in a way that's has become a little artificial what you did is very genuine in the way it comes across so I love it well and you know in the other example you gave of what you would do like when the Democrat Republican thing is you gave an example where you sort of list all the reasons why they might not want to see you and then you kind of describe well this but this is why I want to talk to you and it reminds me actually of the famous

[01:05:25] scene in the movie 8 Mile where Eminem is battling the other rappers and he's like and you know it's a whole black audience he's white he's rapping against you know he has no reason to think he's in the same you know group the in group with the audience and the people he's rapping against and so he says basically everything they could say against him he's white he lives in a trailer park he went to a prep school yeah he

[01:05:55] didn't go to a prep school but the other guy fooled around with his girlfriend they all beat him up and whatever so he kind of listed everything they could possibly argue against him but then this is why he was there is because he really is one of them and the other guys aren't so he used this in group out group bias quite a bit and that's what you did in your first example with the Democrats Republicans you kind of explained why you might be out group but how

[01:06:25] you really in group because this is why you want to talk to them and I think that's a powerful technique too what I love about these you

[01:06:58] can't predict it right you don't know how you're going to feel maybe you have a huge stomach ache before a very important team meeting and now you're showing up or you had planned to prepare and you were taken away into another meeting now you don't have time to prepare you're given twice the require you to be resilient in the moment

[01:07:27] require for you to have very quick mindset shifts they're almost like choosing a path instead of following a framework following a framework in the moment I find to be very difficult particularly if the stakes are high but choosing a path with no return is much easier so in this moment you're in front of the audience and you're thinking okay I have two choices I can and that's all

[01:07:57] you have it's like oh either I say it out loud or I just

[01:08:52] you are coming out. You're discovering the words at the same time as your audience is if you're doing it right. You should be almost surprised by some of the words that are coming out of your mouth. If you know what's coming out of your mouth before it does, then you're not speaking, you're writing, you're editing in your mind. And that's not a flow state and that's much harder to do. That's fascinating. I've never thought of it that way. It makes sense as a flow state because there's so much adrenaline and so much dopamine coursing through you at the same time that that

[01:09:22] can easily trigger kind of this altered chemical state where you're in flow. And it's true, really, the best times... I'm not saying, by the way, I'm great or even as a good comedian, let's say over the course of six years of doing it every night, I got good enough that other clubs around the country could ask me to go and I wouldn't embarrass them most of the time. But I was by no means like

[01:09:49] good in the really good sense. I was like, let's say, let's say using the chess rating system, maybe best case 2,000 to 2,200, but not like, let's say Louis CK is 2,700, 2,800. So Chris Rocks, solid 2,700. So, um, but, uh, now I'm forgetting what I was, what point I was making other than bragging about my comedy skill. Well, you were talking about, uh, what you got at,

[01:10:19] we're talking about flow state and then what six years of comedy, uh, taught you about that or something like that. Yeah. Oh, is that, that would happen. That sometimes you get into this flow where you don't even know what you're saying and everyone's laughing and it just feels, that's what feels really good about all of these things, whether it's public speaking, comedy, writing, programming, any, you know, playing the piano, all these things that can lead

[01:10:46] to a flow state feel really good if you do it right. And part of it does come though, with a lot of experience. I think people don't realize that like these, these decisions, like when you've described, you have to make, you're in a difficult situation. You have to decide between two paths you're going. That's kind of your decision in that moment is going to come from having done it hundreds of times. Exactly. Experience is really going to, there's no avoiding putting

[01:11:11] in the hours, unfortunately. Yeah. And the reason why is because it's, it's too risky. Otherwise, like flow is a state of no return is a state of, uh, lesser awareness. So, or more awareness, how are you going to see it? But what I'm trying to say is when you go into a state of flow,

[01:11:36] 99% of your bandwidth and of your being is inside of that state of flow. So the, the, the, there is no space for self-doubt, for criticizing yourself or second guessing yourself, for all of those things don't exist when you're in a state of flow. The moment they come in, if you give them attention, you're just pulled out of the state, right? So when you're in a state of flow, what feels so incredible about it? There are many, many things that make it feel incredible. But one of them is

[01:12:05] I'm not downing myself. I'm riding this thing and it's amazing. And I'm trying to stay in it as long as I can. It's like surfing a wave, right? It's like, I just want to keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going. So why can't I just jump into a state of flow in, in, in comedy when I show up on stage the first time, because I've never done it. So if I do that and I go down the wrong route or I get lost, I'm going to fumble too many times basically. And when I fumble, I'm not going to

[01:12:34] know how to recover. So that means I'm going to be pulled out of flow and I'm not going to know how to go back into flow. So our whole philosophy, the way we think about training people in speaking is very much, I was saying in the beginning, it's very much about mindset. Another way of seeing it is it's very much about flow. How do I get into a state of flow? And how do I get back into the state

[01:12:59] of flow over and over and over every time I make this a small mistake or suddenly I'm rambling and I don't know how to catch myself and that's creating more thoughts. And now that's pulling me out of flow. How can I come back into it? And so a lot of what we do are tons and tons of reps. We have basically everything we've created are games. We found that that's just the best way to teach speaking is by gamifying it. So it's a series of games that are small reps that all teach you,

[01:13:27] I'll make you fumble in some way and teach you how to stay in and come back into a state of flow. That's a great way to look at it. So what are you measuring in that game? What do you mean, what am I measuring? Like what's the score? Like you're gamifying it. Like are you gamifying how many times you picked up when you fumbled? Yeah. So it depends on the game. This way you don't take it so personally. It's a game. It happens. Bad things happen in a game.

[01:13:57] The other team gets a goal. Now you have to get a goal. And you don't feel horrible about it necessarily. Yeah. Well, you want to play one or two of the games with me? I can show you. Yeah. Let's do it. I can show you an example. Okay. Awesome. So if I'm looking over here, it's because the games are over here. But let me show you. I think you're going to like this. Let's see. Here you go. Okay. So if you can't see, we're on a page on UltraSpeaking that has a bunch of different games.

[01:14:28] I'm going to choose some of the games. So all of them teach you different skill sets. And as you're saying, how do you know that you're going to win? Well, each game is winnable in a different way. I'm going to choose rapid fire analogies because it's a fun one that I think you're going to enjoy. And by the way, if you're listening to this, how could someone find this so they could play for themselves? Good question. If you go to UltraSpeaking.com, you're going to have access

[01:14:56] to all these games. In fact, we put a free email course together that gives you the breakdown of a bunch of these techniques and philosophies at UltraSpeaking.com slash James. And that'll give you the link and access to all of the games and everything. So if you go to UltraSpeaking.com, just like you would pronounce it, U-L-T-R-A-Speaking.com slash James, and you'll have access to all this. Excellent. Most of the games we're going to play, they're all accessible for free.

[01:15:25] So this one's called Rapid Fire Analogies. And it's the game that started everything for Michael and I because it's the game about leaking and staying in character. And it's made to make you fumble. So the way what it looks like is random words put together. Becoming a billionaire is like toilets because. And banana is like a lion because. And you have mere seconds to complete the sentence.

[01:15:52] So you have to read it out loud and then complete the sentence. Wow. I've never even seen anything like this. This is really great. I could see the benefits of doing this. Oh, I love that you can already see it. A surprise party is like breathing because you have to pause. You can, whatever it is that comes through their mind first is what has to come out. And here's where the game becomes really interesting. So we'll, let's each play some reps. This is an easy one to

[01:16:18] listen to even if you can't see. Just know that everything before the word because is written on the screen and we're reading it out loud. And then we're using our brain's autocomplete function and we're just stream of thought, letting our brain fill in the blank. So the goal of the game, level one of the game is just saying something for every rep. So it really genuinely does not matter that you say

[01:16:45] something meaningful as long as you say something and you say it with care, with, uh, with confidence. So no leaking. Okay. So anytime you fumble, you're going to be tempted to leak. I'll try. Yeah, that's good. Okay. Ready? Yeah. Here we go. Blue cheese is like running because both make me sick. The internet is like social distancing because in both cases you're far away from people.

[01:17:09] A broken finger is like daydreaming because it's blah. I don't have it. Honesty is like an omelet because I can eat it all day. Playing tag is like entrepreneurship because I'm always trying to tag money. Cartwheels are like learning a language because I can't learn any language. I'm flipping over and over all the time. Wow. Okay. Really good. There are a few things that I'm impressed by.

[01:17:34] One, when you said, you know, blah, I don't have it. You said it. You did say it in flow. You said it with some confidence of like, I don't have it, but I'm already focused on the next one. It's like, you know, doing a golf swing, missing one golf swing. And then your whole game is messed up because you're living in the past or, Hey, I messed that one up, but the next one is brand new. That's the first thing. The second thing you did really well, um, in addition to getting some

[01:18:02] really interesting connections is the last one, the timer went off and you were not done and you still found a way to complete it. And what they found putting freestyle rappers in MRI machines is that as they got to the last verse or the last line of the last verse, the, um, rappers would get completely pulled out of flow. Cause when you get to the end, you're processing power. Your, your brain has already processed everything. So what were the words we're hearing are the after effect of something.

[01:18:32] And when we get to the end, we tend to get pulled out. So you did a really good job of even as you were feeling the tug of being pulled out of flow, you found a way to still land the plane. That was really cool. Tell me about your experience. It was fun. I did get on the blah. I did get for a split second nervous, you know, cause I didn't know. I also was pleased with one of my first answers. I felt the analogy was so dead on. I both make me sick. Uh, that was very cool. The running. Yeah.

[01:19:01] Right. So I felt like, boom, that was a good, a good quote unquote answer. And then the problem with that is the next one was not as good. So that made me almost for a split second fall out of the, the, the, the feel of it. Uh, but yeah, I think, I think it's a really good exercise. So isn't that interesting, right? Because that is exactly what speaking is like. That's what life

[01:19:26] is like. If you expand this at a meta level, we are always going to have moments where we kill it and moments where we don't. So what if we trained our ability to treat both the same way? What if you could, what if you could let that feeling of, Ooh, I really knocked that one out of the park kind of permeate into the next one. And that one, when I train people on this game, um, sometimes when

[01:19:54] people, I, I really can't get people to not break character, to not leak. So a lot of people when they leak is if they do somewhat, some wrong, they'll be like, ah, or they'll show it with their face. They'll, they'll give you a little grimace of, Ooh, I really missed that one. And, uh, I'll say, um, I'll have them go and I'll have everybody in the room or in the virtual room. Turn their volume off. And I'll say, Hey, I want you to watch. And by the end of it,

[01:20:23] I want you to tell me if it looked like they lost confidence on any one of them. And it's so interesting because now that the words are not landing in anybody's ears, you're still doing the same thing. You're still trying to connect these things together, but you can show up in a way where, sorry, where it looks confident for every single rep. Yeah. That's fascinating. And when you're doing that, you can, you can, you can notice what you're training, right? Like what would happen if you got,

[01:20:49] it became a master at something like this? Well, also you could isolate the different skills. So you can isolate the showing up with confidence as opposed to the answers. And then you could isolate the answers as opposed to the confidence if you want. So like, for instance, this is, this is normally considered bad advice, but like my daughter was going to try standup and, and she ended up doing improv and things like that. But the advice I gave her,

[01:21:15] most comedians would never give it. I told her for your first time at an open mic, steal a bunch of jokes, only do stolen jokes because you know those jokes work. So you're not going to try to practice every skill, like being on stage, being in front of an audience, writing a good joke, you know, the jokes work. So just try to deliver them well. And then people will laugh because they're, they're a hundred percent. They work. It's Louis CK's jokes. It's Amy Schubert,

[01:21:41] whoever is your favorite comedian. It's their jokes. By the way, nobody will really know that you're stealing their jokes unless they're super familiar. And I've even seen, by the way, Jerry Seinfeld steal jokes. Like none of these guys are immune to it, but then you isolate. Okay. In this case, she can isolate her delivery and performance as opposed to also trying to isolate writing a joke because then you know what's going wrong when something goes wrong. So it's, so it's brilliant. It's important to do those isolations.

[01:22:08] But, and what's funny is we do that with everything else, right? You're going to, if you're learning a, like a physical skill, you're obviously going to look at somebody who does it well and try to take their swing or do the thing they're doing or copy somebody's opening. You're going to, you're always going to be copying. And I think that's a mistake not to try and find somebody to mimic when you're starting things off. And so oftentimes if I'm struggling,

[01:22:35] if somebody's struggling with this, I'll try to explain to give them a cue here or there, but if they can't get it, then I go, I say, okay, I'll go, or I'll have somebody else go, or we'll go back and forth and I'll do two, you do two. I do two, you do two. I do two, you do two. And that way, and I just say, Hey, feed off my energy. Just try to do like I do. Try to copy, not what I'm saying, just my energy. And I raise my energy a little bit and I bring a

[01:23:00] little bit more like extra energy, extra intensity because that helps you stay in that state. And then it works. And then I get to sit back and they can do tons and tons of reps at it in a row. Yeah. That's really important because mimicking is, is key. Like before I would go on stage, I often, by the way, even like I'm thinking 15, 16 years ago, before I would go on a date,

[01:23:27] I would even watch standup comedy right before the date because then your mirror neurons are, look, they're the best public speakers as standup comedians. So, and they're using their body, they're using the stage, they're using the audience, they're telling jokes. So your mirror neurons kick in and just for like, it's like you get a temporary dose of like comedy superstar for, for the date or for a talk or whatever. Like I think that kind of feeding off that other

[01:23:53] person's energy is, is very good. And by the way, in some, in some games like chess, for instance, it's a basic part of the game that you're going to copy the people who came before you, like just the openings. You're going to study, you're going to learn like, you know, all the best chess players know a bunch of the masters games, then they've, they could play them in their mind. They have played them and imagine what would I be thinking? And what is it? The common one that I,

[01:24:16] I really love this one. This advice is you start the game of a master and you stop. And then you, you pretend you're in their position and you say, okay, what would be my follow-up move now? What would be my candidate move? And then you think about it for as long as you can. And once you have your candidate move and you have your, the thought process behind it, you try to find, you go look at what, what did they actually do? And then you get to confront those two ideas.

[01:24:42] And then let's say it took you five hours to do a hundred of those. Now the key is do the exact same hundred, but in two and a half hours. Then the key is do the exact same hundred, but in half that time and then half the time and then half of the time until you do it like as quickly as possible. Cause then it just becomes part of your, your, your gut reactions. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:25:15] So all of these techniques, obviously we're talking about public speaking, but they're about meta learning in general, which, you know, Scott Young with ultra learning and you with ultra speaking. This is, this is the whole idea is that these are meta learning techniques. I have a question. What's the role of voice in public speaking? Like, do you think about, do you make your voice deeper at points? Do you make your voice a little lighter at points or higher?

[01:25:44] This is something I've, I've given a lot of thought to because what's interesting is very quickly. Uh, I started having people who would reach out to us and say, I need help with my voice. Like my, I either, I don't like my voice or I'm too, uh, monotonous, which is the most common. I just come off as monotone. Uh, so I need, there's something broken basically

[01:26:12] in my voice. What do I need to do? And we've tried all kinds of things with that. And we found that except for some exceptions, there are some exceptions that people who genuinely have an underdeveloped instrument and in their voice, almost everybody, I would wager that almost

[01:26:38] every single person listening to this and every single person I've seen, they have a beautiful organ in that they can be serious and they probably have a certain tone of voice. If they get mad at someone and they start yelling, they can go up to a 10. They can go down to a one. They can be intense, introverted, extroverted, like all of the natural musicality that makes a human being

[01:27:02] is within them. So you don't necessarily need to go see a voice coach and learn how to do all the voice exercises to change your voice. You need to figure out what is the state I need to be in in order for different sides of my voice to show up. And the game we use for this, because we have a game for all of these fundamentals. And this is one of the fundamentals is called conductor. All right, let's see. Conductor might be one of my favorites.

[01:27:31] So I'll show you how it works. Conductor, you're going to get a random topic that shows up and then you start speaking. And what you see on the screen is a number. So you might see right now it's a five and that's just the normal way I'm speaking. And I'm going to see a number between one and 10. And in this case, I see a two. So I have to, but if I see an eight, like right now, I have to find a way to immediately boost my energy to match the eight. And if it's a nine,

[01:28:00] I have to find a way to bring even more energy. But this is my way of bringing energy. Somebody else might bring a three in a different way. And it might not even be volume that you're playing with. That's interesting. As I see a one, I let my nervous system calm down in order to hit this one. And then you see, you finish at a five and the five is back to baseline. You wrap your speech up and then you're

[01:28:28] done. And this is a game of exploring all the different states and all the different emotional ranges you could tap into and get to get comfortable with them. And that expands your overall range. But I have a question though, knowing when to use the different numbers seems to me to be perhaps a learned skill. So for instance, let's say you're telling the story of your grandma

[01:28:53] picking you up in the motorcycle and you're giving your talk. So you're like, and then my, my, my grandma, it was so embarrassing. She picks me up in the motorcycle. Everyone's like, who's that freak? Okay. So that's that part of the talk. And then you're ending, you know, and then by the time my grandma was done with me, I no longer care what people think. Like you, you get more, you get deeper when you're concluding the story and you're concluding, you're cementing your conclusion

[01:29:22] with a deeper voice. And so I'm wondering, that's something somebody had to tell me to do that. You know, I wouldn't necessarily naturally do that. And so I'm wondering how much of a voice is, you know, the rhythms of a, of a talk, you know, you have to be told. So I think there, there are two parts to it. There's your vocabulary. And, and I don't mean that by

[01:29:48] words in this case. I mean, your vocabulary is your range is that, uh, I have an ability to tap into anger and hold that energy. I have an ability to tap into excitement and hold that energy. That's a high energy. I have the ability and the familiarity with like deep thoughtfulness,

[01:30:14] reserved thoughtfulness, and I can tap into that energy and hold onto it. I can hold onto sadness. All of these are, are, you can imagine it as your vocabulary, your emotional vocabulary and your range. So you do need to develop that because if you only have six words, it's going to be hard to write a novel. I see. So no matter what, you still need to develop the range. Exactly. The range gives you the ability of, oh, all of this is possible. And it feels like this when

[01:30:41] I'm in these different areas. Then you want to find out, um, you want to, you might need a little bit of awareness of, Hey, this would be a moment where you want to push, but oftentimes it's not pushing. Like if I'm telling a story, what I've noticed in training a lot of this, the effect of it is not necessarily that in my mind, I'm seeing numbers and I'm like, Oh, I should raise my energy.

[01:31:08] Oh, I should lower my energy. It's more of a, um, say I'm riding a horse and I'm holding the reins. What I'm doing is I'm just letting go of the reins or I'm tugging them in. And so if I'm, if I'm feeling an excited, cause I'm getting to an, a point that's very exciting to me cause I'm interested in this idea. I noticed the excitement come into me. And unless I'm in that

[01:31:35] moment, I'm rambling like crazy. And I'm that that's a moment where I'm trying to wrap up. If it's not, then I'm going to let go of the reins and I'm going to say, Hey, run, run, run. And I'm going to let the energy overcome take over. And because I've trained it, I know that I'm not going to lose control. I'll be able to rein in whatever I want at will. But then, Hey, there's a moment like this, this excitement moment is over and something happened.

[01:32:02] And say, I'm, I was telling you about, you know, this crazy adventure. And then suddenly we, we make it to a refuge and we were freezing cold and we make it up there. And we're thinking, finally, we're going to have heat. We're going to survive. And we walk in and there's, we realize there's no, there's no, uh, fireplace. There's going to be no heat tonight. I can't stay in that excitement. So there I would want to rein in. And the mistake would be to consciously think, let me lower the volume. Let me do all of these,

[01:32:32] um, conscious steps. Instead, I'm going to say, Hey, and there's, there's no fire. And suddenly we realize, Hey, we could die tonight. And then I'm going to stop speaking because I want to let that statement and that energy and the emotions that go with it. I want to feel it all. So I'm going to stop. And I, I know for myself in a moment like that,

[01:32:57] I would feel prickles all over my body. I would feel the contrast of that exciting energy and the, the silence. And it would overwhelm me. It would, I would feel all kinds of things in my body. And from that state, I'm going to pick back up and it's going to feel like something you're going to everything I went through. You're going to feel an equivalent of your own version of. And when I

[01:33:24] pick back up, I'm going to be solemn. And it's going to be because I'm genuinely in that energy. And because I'm in a different state, I have access to different content. So the words that come out of my mouth are actually just a consequence, a symptom almost

[01:33:47] of many things that happened upstream. So if I'm very excited and I'm in that high energy, it's almost like I have access to a set amount of folders in my memory and in my memory bank. And in those folders, I have certain stories and anecdotes. And in those stories and anecdotes, I also have access to kind of a dictionary of words. And the way I'm going to tell that story, if I'm in a high energy is very different than if I'm in a solemn energy. So when I'm in that low

[01:34:15] energy, I'm it's different words. It's different. Everything is different in the way that it's going to be experienced by my audience, but I'm not focused on the output. I'm only focused on what's upstream. And that's what we're trying to train with a game like this that looks just super fun to play with energy. But actually, what we're training is what I just described.

[01:34:41] So interesting, because like, I'm thinking specifically of like the end of a talk where you're making a conclusion. It seems like that's when you're going to want to have like a deeper voice. But and yeah, for me, I have to sort of train myself to kind of like, okay, start to slow down the excitement about what I'm talking about. I'm going to reach the conclusion. Or let's say I'm in a sales meeting, I'm going to reach the cell like this is why you need the toaster or whatever.

[01:35:10] And, you know, so then it's almost like I do have to like consciously remember, okay, now I got to lower my voice, I'm making the sale. But so that's interesting, because maybe lowering your voice in your mind could be seen as a cue. If you're genuinely just lowering your voice in the volume, it can work. But it's I would argue that it's, you know, it's like the the analogy of the horseshoe, where you can do something genuinely,

[01:35:39] or you can work really, really, really hard to fake it. And you're going to get pretty close to the real thing. You know, like the the authentic person and the scammer, if they're really good, they look very similar, but there's still a deep difference. It's just the horseshoe that comes pretty close. So in the same... Yeah, go ahead. It's interesting, because I always feel like I have a very hard time asking people for anything. So that's why to ask for the sale, it's very hard. I have to sort of play act a little bit.

[01:36:10] Exactly. So it's hard for me to be authentic. Yeah, exactly. So that's the root of it. The root of it is, I don't feel worthy in this moment. Yeah. I don't... And if you were to solve that, then there would be no issue. I see. I've never thought of it that way. But there is a... It's interesting. So now we're touching on something a little bit different here.

[01:36:38] Yeah, it's like therapy. This is like psychotherapy right here. Well, a lot of what we do here brings up a lot. That's what's interesting. It's because, hey, if I can't stop speaking, if I can't pause when I'm speaking, it doesn't mean I'm not capable of not speaking physiologically. Everybody's able to not speak. We do it all the time. What it really means is I'm able... I'm not able to take up space without feeling like I'm adding value

[01:37:06] in the moment. Or I feel like I don't have a seat at the table, so I'm going to be interrupted if I stop speaking. So it's very... It is very much tied to worthiness. And part of the training of learning these fundamental skill sets, the foundation of communication requires you sometimes to look in the mirror and realize, oh, I have a worthiness problem. And what's nice is you get to immediately

[01:37:35] apply what you learn. So what I found frustrating at the beginning when I started, when I had a coach, is that I would have these insane insights in the moment. I'd think my life was changed. And then five days later, my life would be completely normal again. I'd be doing all the mistakes that I'd been doing prior. And it felt like nothing changed. And so I thought, I don't understand. I thought I had

[01:38:00] understood this. I thought I had solved it. But really, it was just an intellectual spark. I had the knowledge, not the wisdom. And the reason why games are so interesting is because you do this, just like you said, and you think, oh, I get it. There's a worthiness thing. Or I'm bringing down the volume, but actually, it's not the volume. I have to tap into a deeper state. And from that state, my volume will naturally

[01:38:26] come down. You have the insight. But if you don't apply it right away in your next negotiation where you have to make the sale, nothing's going to change. This is a really good point. And this is a point about all meta learning. I had a chess coach who would label, he'd explain a concept to me, and I would understand, of course, what he was saying. But then a week later, we'd be looking at one of my games. He's like, I told you this concept a week ago. And so I would have to write

[01:38:55] it down and basically just keep reviewing it over and over again. Because it's like you said, I understood it as wisdom, but it really wasn't built into how I did things yet. It wasn't really part of me yet. And so it is fascinating, all this stuff. So you have to drill it very quickly after, like very specifically. So if it were taking

[01:39:21] your chess analogy, whatever it was, say it's like recognizing a tactic in a game, then you need to have 100 reps of that same tactic show up in a game where it's planned or something like that. But then you have to take the conscious learning part away and you have to then go play 30 games without thinking about the tactic and see if naturally you recognize it when

[01:39:48] it arises. So you need those three steps. You need to learn the theory, then you need to consciously apply it through drills, and then you need to let go of it and see if it's stuck. Because if you forget that step, then you just keep looping in the other two or you forget it. So for example, I'm curious to see if you still have a little bit of time. Sure.

[01:40:11] I'd love to see you play Snowglobe. So Snowglobe is about pausing. And this one's also, I'm just going to turn it on so we can describe it when it happens. And I've noticed you pause very well. You do pauses very well. Thank you. You're comfortable with your pauses. Yeah, I've learned to become comfortable with the pauses. And because it's that on stage, I think that's one of the most powerful things you can do. If you just don't speak,

[01:40:38] people freak out. It's very powerful that you genuinely draw them in. So for those who are not watching the video, what we just saw is you have kind of a full circle. It's like a pie. And then at one point, the pie starts reducing. So you can see like, oh, I have five seconds before I'm going to have to stop speaking. And your goal during the game is to wrap up what you're saying within those five seconds. So you have to stop at the end of this. You have to find a way to wrap it up.

[01:41:06] And then when you're pausing, it says breathe in and breathe out. I want you to actively, I'm going to do it right now, actively breathe in and breathe out. And then when it picks back up, it turns back on, you can start speaking again. And the point here is to use the pause as a way to change your state. So we're not trying to use the pause to actively think about what we're going to

[01:41:35] say. That was the end of the timer. What we're trying to do is we're trying to just change our state. So that's why the breathing in and out is the most important. And it's the out breath that's the key because it turns on your parasympathetic nervous system, right? It relaxes you naturally. You can't fight an out breath. So when you breathe out, it's so interesting because even that breath

[01:41:59] felt like a super long time. Yeah. It felt like, and for me, it feels like seven times as long. For me, I lived an eternity during that breath. Now, when we train, we always want to exaggerate things. We want to make everything bigger than it needs to be because the very fact of being a beginner on any

[01:42:23] skill is we have no nuance. We do way too much. So when things have to be big, just like if you're learning how to surf, you need a very big board because you're going to make so many small mistakes that if it were short, you would, you would just be in the water. And the equivalent of being in the water and speak in pausing of falling down is freezing instead of pausing. So if I'm speaking and I stopped speaking, but I'm not changing anything in my state, I'm just freezing like this.

[01:42:55] And then when I pick up, I'm saying exactly the same thing. I didn't do anything. What I want when I pause is I want to stop everything and I want to let my mind and my body just relax. And the length of a pause is however long it takes to cut to the new, to the next insight. And so when you train, that could be very long. I've had some clients that I've worked with where

[01:43:22] I've had them pause, like that was the instruction and they've paused for 20, 30, 40 seconds in training just to get to that, to be able to relax their body. But once you get it, then you know, oh, this is what I'm trying to get to. Then you can start compressing time. And then a pause can be even half a breath in between two sentences. So if you're down, I'd love for you to give this a go. So you're going to get a random title and you're going to speak for one minute. And just remember

[01:43:50] when it starts counting down, try to find a way to wrap up. Even if you're not complete, try to see if you can close the vignette you're in. Before the breath, it starts counting down or? Before it says breathe in, breathe out. So when that pie goes down to zero. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Here we go.

[01:44:10] When was the last time you yelled? You know what? I don't yell at all really because A, I'm afraid that you can't recover from a yell. But it happens sometimes. And the whole point

[01:44:38] is perhaps I'm insecure about when I yell. I don't feel, I feel people will hate me when I start to yell. So whether it's children or, or Jay, my podcast producer, I'd like to yell at him occasionally, but I don't. Or my wife sometimes, but I know yelling is just not going

[01:44:58] to solve the problem. It never does. It never will. And so I guess in conclusion, I try to figure out other ways to express myself, to get the message across that I might be disappointed, to try to come up with a solution so that when I do need to be firm, I'm done.

[01:45:29] Yes. Very cool. You really got the, you got into it after that first one, it caught you. Yeah. It felt like it caught you a little by surprise, but then you really got it. I'm so curious. What, what did the pauses do for you? The pauses forced me to figure out what is it that I'm saying that now I can say it in a more concise form in a sense of conclusion. Yeah.

[01:45:53] And the first time you're right, I was off the first time. Like I, I, I got, I couldn't figure out what I was saying, but then, you know, the second time I started to have an idea and then each breath made me kind of hone in a little bit more on what I was trying to say. And so then I was able to sound more conclusive. And, and I think actually my voice went naturally deeper as a result.

[01:46:20] Absolutely. Like I didn't have to think I need to make my voice deeper. Yeah. Because the way I see speaking is a series of segments and gaps. The segments are all the, are the moments where you like are on a roll. You have a thought and you've, or you've caught onto a thread and you're pulling the thread and it's just coming.

[01:46:45] And boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. It's so easy. There's, will always be a moment where the thread ends and suddenly you're on uneven ground again. And those are gaps. And the thing, the mistake most people make is that they treat gaps as if they were still on a segment. So you never really slow down and you just try to cram more inside of your working memory and your brain and your processing power to try and find a way out. But the reality is if you were to slow down or even

[01:47:14] stop and just treat a gap as a, as a gap, then you get to relax your body. You get, it's like a, that's why we call it the snow globe. When you're speaking, you're shaking the snow globe. When you stop, the snow comes down and you get to see your creation and you get to have an insight. And then you get another thread and you're like, Ooh, actually I'm going to go this direction. And you slightly change direction and to, to, to, to, to. And you just jump from clarity to clarity

[01:47:40] instead of being in this kind of a mess of a jungle. It's so interesting. The difference between a breath pause and a freeze pause because a freeze pause isn't always necessarily bad. For instance, if you're making, telling a story and you suddenly get clap, you know, clapping or laughter or whatever, you freeze because you're going to continue exactly where you were. That's what people are rewarding you for. But, uh, uh, but the pause, when you say something impactful or

[01:48:08] meaningful, or you're drawing to a conclusion or whatever, it does really change how you're, you're, you're the state of your mind, the, the, the breathing pause. Yeah, it does. But I, you said something that I want to, I want to challenge here because, um, we all, we have in common that we're huge Louis CK fans as a comedian. He, he actually said something that he learned from someone else. Um, because what I'm challenging is this idea that you would freeze during laughter.

[01:48:37] Freezing is literally, um, like stopping the energy in my opinion. Whereas what, what Louis CK was told is if people laugh for whatever reason, you, uh, ride what that energy is. So it's, it's almost coming back to the clown idea of work with what you have. He says like, if you were super mad and people start laughing at that, then you ride the, the, the, you, you, you have to stay in the mad and

[01:49:05] you're like, yeah, I am pissed off at this and you keep it going. So you might stop. You might let the, you, uh, sorry, you give space for the laughter, but in that pause and that reflection, I would actually think you would let the, the anger ride up. You would let it take over even more so you could ride it even more rather than hold yourself in that space. Does that, is that the case? That's true. Like sometimes you can ride it. Sometimes though, you might just be like mid

[01:49:35] sentence. Oh, and maybe, maybe though you're right. Maybe always is the case that you should acknowledge that something different is happening, but sometimes you're just like, you said a funny word or just a funny way of saying something. So people are laughing, but you still want to, the joke is still at the end of the sentence. So you want to take that energy and just extend it into the finish without changing the state. But I think, I think that's right.

[01:50:01] I know. I know what you're saying. Like Louis CK is doing that. By the way, when Louis CK does that, it's prepared, right? Because he already knows which jokes are going to have the laugh. So he's already says, Oh yeah, that's, that's right. That's a Mexican. And so he's, so it's as if he's responding to the laughter, but he's already planned that because he's experienced that laughter so many times when preparing that joke. And, uh, uh, you know, so it's interesting.

[01:50:26] It's just sometimes every now and then, like I was on a news show the other day and I said something that I knew people were going to clap at. And I just held it just to finish my, I held the clapper, the clapping so that, uh, uh, but, but I still wanted to finish my point in the exact same way as in, as if there was no interruption. That makes a lot. So that,

[01:50:52] and that's beautiful because what that is, is, uh, it's conviction, it's confidence. That's not, that's the right. That's staying in character and saying, no, no, no, I'm still holding the same energy. Uh, but I, and I'm aware that this is the right energy to hold. So I, yeah, I, that's awesome. And I, I do think we should bring a clapper as part of, in the dictionary. That's awesome. That's such a good word. Well, cause sometimes it's like people are laughing and clapping. Yeah. It's, it's not necessarily a good or a bad thing. Like some, some, some people don't like

[01:51:22] that. Like the clapping seems like fake laughing, but it is a valid thing that happens. Yeah. To me, it's just like, I'm, we're laughing and I just can't, there's, I want to laugh and hoot and holler and there's, there's nothing left to express just how much, how good this is. So you have to add something on. Yeah. I love it. So, so look, this has been so interesting. It's one of my favorite topics. I've, I've considered myself a public speaker for 20 years. I don't necessarily

[01:51:50] know if I'm a, I think I'm pretty good, but I'll tell you learning some of these skills or learning like the comedy skills in particular, 10 X my public speaking, but I'm sure following up and learning, I'm going to take this ultra speaking, you know, I'm going to play these games and whatever else do whatever else is on your site. Like these skills are so important and communication is such an important skill. And it's so pleasurable to give a good speech and talk. I actually wish I did

[01:52:19] talks more often. I, I don't really do them as much as I used to. Uh, and I don't do comedy anymore at all. I'm just since the pandemic, but, um, you really got me inspired. And then it's such a pleasure talking to you about all these things. And so where can people find your, your courses and learn more from you? Thank you. Thank you so much, James. Uh, ultra speaking.com slash James is the best

[01:52:43] place to go. Go there because, um, you will, we have a, I think it's a five part email course where we run through some of these fundamentals, but also we have a, I think it's day one or two or email one or two. Uh, we described something called the accordion method, which is a way to prepare content with zero notes or memorization. And just through speaking. It's amazing. Honestly,

[01:53:08] it's my, my favorite, uh, tool that we've developed. And, but we also, uh, we'll also invite you or whoever signs up for, um, at this, on this email course to, to test out these games. So what we, we run every once in a while, we'll have like a free tester of our courses because we run a series of courses on these and you can come in and actually like go into breakout rooms with other people who are also going to be mostly beginners like you. Um, or like beginners, I mean, in the

[01:53:37] ultra speaking games. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a beginner. Always testing and playing with help. Yeah. And, uh, and I'd love to extend an, an invitation to you actually, James, if you want to come, we run also a creator cohort, but this is for, uh, this is private, very small group. It's for people who have over a hundred thousand, uh, followers. So we, we bring a small group of really interesting people together and we run a small training as well, but yeah, ultra speaking.com slash James.

[01:54:06] Yeah. Well, I would love to do that as well. So, so look, uh, Tristan de Montebello, great name, uh, ultra speaking. You could just, if you forget all these URLs, just Google all just speaking or ultra speaking.com slash James. Thank you so much, Tristan. Such an amazing episode. I really hope people listen to this and share this with their friends because, you know, it's the scariest thing in the world to do public speaking, but also me, you know,

[01:54:32] highest risk, highest reward. It's such a, uh, a valuable skill to have and a pleasurable skill to have. And I can see how taking these courses and taking your course could, could really be valuable. So thank you so much for coming on the show. Great episode. Thank you, James. I, I speaking because we have so many people who come because they have anxiety, they stress. It's something that they, they dislike have been avoiding. But as soon as you unlock just a few things, it doesn't take a lot. You realize, wait a second, this is actually a really,

[01:55:01] really fun thing to do. We're evolved to speak. And if you just take the blockers away, it's one of the most enjoyable acts you can do as a human being. I love it. It's great. Really great. Well, thank you again, Tristan. Awesome. Thanks, James.

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