Leadership & Human Connection in the AI Era. Stever Robbins Interview

Arthur (0:01): Hello. Welcome everybody to another episode of Arthur's Roundtable. Super grateful for everybody who's paying attention and sharing. And so just again, thank you for paying attention. We are indeed in the attention economy.

Arthur (0:14): So thank you for paying attention to us from time to time. Steve or I don't know each other, Steve or Robbins, but we've had a chance to get acquainted real quick and we immediately booked him because of his background and you'll find out more in a minute. Hope you enjoy it. Thank you. Steve or thanks for doing this.

Unknown Speaker (0:30): Please, please start at the beginning.

Steve (0:34): Well, at the beginning I was raised in a traveling new age polyamorous hippie commune.

Unknown Speaker (0:38): So good.

Steve (0:39): And we lived in a 23 foot trailer. We went around the country starting psychic growth centers. It turns out most places do not want psychic growth centers, which was why we ended up traveling a lot because we would get kicked out of one place and go to another. And in those circumstances, well, eventually my parents got a divorce. My, my mother wanted to stop traveling for a while.

Steve (1:00): She married a man who worked for a defense contractor. And he brought home, this was way back long, long ago in prehistory, he brought home something called a computer terminal, which was basically just a typewriter and a roll of paper. It was a printing thing, not a screen. And you would connect it with the computer to this thing called the ARPANET. And the ARPANET was this tiny little network of 80 computers.

Steve (1:24): And in fact, you didn't even need passwords on several of them. So as an 11 year old, I was able to just log in and use these computers. And I made a bunch of friends at this school called MIT in Boston and decided that I wanted to go be with my friends. So when it was time for college, I applied to MIT, was informed that it was pronounced MIT. And I was like, great.

Steve (1:45): Thank you for correcting me before I got there. And the rest, as they say, is history or prehistory in

Arthur (1:50): my case. Would you say that having early access allowed you to get to the level where you would actually be admitted to MIT, having access to the arc net or whatever it was called? Yeah.

Steve (2:05): You know, I, I think so very much. When you're a kid, don't understand. I mean, there's no way for you to even know how unusual or typical your experience was. For all I knew, everybody traveled around the country starting psychic growth centers. And I, I, I stumbled into using the ARPANET.

Steve (2:26): Just because I had gotten interested in computers because my, my junior high school had one for like two weeks, this rotated through every school in the, in Albuquerque. And I just thought it was a cool thing. So, you know, and again, I think of it like I was 11 and I did this. I just walked down to the university of New Mexico, which was walking distance from our apartment. And I went into the computer center and I said, I use this computer in seventh grade.

Steve (2:51): I want to learn how to program computers. And God bless whoever the person was who I walked up to because they saw this 11 year old walk in and they were like, sure, can use our computer here. And that computer was connected to the ARPANET. Or there was someone who was one of the administrators. I don't remember exactly what the linkage was, but basically that was where I met the people who introduced me to the ARPANET.

Steve (3:14): And by the time I was ready to go to MIT, I still had no real perspective on how unusual this background had been. But I also moved away from home when I was 15. My wanted to keep my father and stepmother wanted to keep traveling, and like my mother had, I wanted to stay put. So they moved away and I stayed. And I was somehow responsible.

Steve (3:35): Like, didn't I stayed, but I didn't go wild at the age of 15 in my own apartment. And when it was time to apply for MIT, and I've also also looked young for my age. Right? So this this 17 year old kid who looked 12 wanders into the interview and sits down and says, I grew up in a traveling commune. I've been using this worldwide computer network to teach myself programming in a day and age when, you know, this was the nineteen 1970s.

Steve (4:01): No 11 year olds did not do this. And I moved out when I was 15 and became an emancipated minor because I didn't want to keep going around doing all that spiritual stuff. I am fairly sure that I didn't, am fairly sure that by the time I got through that much of the story, the admissions interview was like, okay, fine. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker (4:21): Like you might fit in here.

Steve (4:22): Right. Exactly. Yeah. And, you know, and it was actually similar when I got into Harvard business school. I applied to Harvard business school because I wanted to learn about business.

Steve (4:32): And I had been with several high-tech companies that had the best product on the market, but were going out of business. And I went to my manager and I said, I, Nancy, I don't understand how can we have the best product on the market and be going out of business. Like, that makes no sense. Like, shouldn't the best product always win? Isn't that the whole point of the market?

Steve (4:49): And she said, she was very sage. She said, ah, Steve. For you to understand that you must understand marketing and strategy. And I said, great. Where can I find out about marketing and strategy?

Steve (5:01): And this was again, this was like, at this point, this was the eighties. There weren't a lot of books on this. The, the business press was not yet something that was like up and running kind of for the pundit class. So she said, to get that, you'll have to, the only way to get that experience is to have gray hair or an MBA. Well, that was forty years ago.

Steve (5:19): I still don't have gray hair. So I said I have no desire to go back to school. And she said, well, you know what? Why don't you just go sit in on a class and see if you like it? And I happened to live down the block from Harvard Business School.

Steve (5:32): So I literally just walked out my front door, went down to Harvard Business School, sat in on a class said, oh my god, this looks like so much fun. I wanna do this, and I'll learn all the stuff I wanna learn, and won't it be cool? The fact that Harvard Business School was the west point of capitalism and possibly the most influential institution in the world literally did not cross my mind. I'm sometimes slow on the uptake. And when I applied, it was a similar story.

Steve (5:58): I got halfway through the story of my career and my upbringing, and he the interviewer said, hang on a second, and he left the room. And he came back about ten minutes later, and he said the admissions the admissions committee was meeting in the next room. I just told them your story. You're in. But you're not allowed to tell anyone until we officially announce admissions two weeks from now.

Steve (6:18): Wow. I had to keep mum about it.

Arthur (6:21): So what after you thought about your upbringing, mystical, woo woo, whatever it was, the universe had your back. Let's just call it that. Right?

Steve (6:30): Yeah. You know what? What's interesting? So after you've gone through eight or nine different spiritual disciplines by the time you're 18, well, I can't speak for other people. Having gone through eight or nine spiritual disciplines by the time I was 18, I ended up largely an atheist and an agnostic.

Steve (6:45): I'm like, okay, there's so many different ways here. I don't know what's true or what isn't. I've never really believed in the whole universe has your back thing. This is a very important qualifier. Every time I have taken a leap of faith in my life or career, it has worked out better than I expected.

Steve (7:06): So I always think like, wow, if only I had listened to that little voice sooner and done the thing. You know, I mean, look how well it worked out, but it can take me many, many years to convince the loud voice that drowns out the little voice to chill out enough to let me take that leap. And yeah, so don't know if don't. Yeah, that was great.

Unknown Speaker (7:28): No, there's a little delay. I apologize. What's the, you were about to say something. Don't what?

Steve (7:34): I was gonna say, know, don't make my mistake. If you can hear your little voice, give it a shot. And on the off chance the universe really is somehow sentient and looking out for you or for me, accept it.

Unknown Speaker (7:46): Accept it.

Steve (7:47): Like, don't, don't go like, oh my gosh. People who say things like, oh, I can't, I can't, you know, use my inheritance as, as my startup capital. I must prove it on my own. I'm like, don't do that.

Unknown Speaker (7:59): Yeah. Don't do that.

Steve (8:00): If what you want to do is prove that you're, that you're capable of doing great things. If you are lucky enough to be starting from some position where you have resources that other people don't, don't, don't reject the resources. That's that's just dumb. But take the resources and say, okay, given that I have these resources, what is the great thing that I can do that other people can't do because I have these resources available to me? You know, and basically just raise, instead of rejecting where you come from, your sights as to where you want to, where you believe you can get to and the kind of person you want to be and the effect you want to have in the world and stuff like that.

Arthur (8:36): Yeah. I mean, we could talk forever about the advantages of privilege or whatever the woke class wants to call that. But it's really interesting. I was sitting down many years ago doing my first estate plan and we were talking about all the things you talk about when you do your estate plan. The lawyer said to me, my parents had money.

Arthur (8:58): I wish they told me they had money because I would have started a business instead of being in this terrible time and billing model. Like what a, what an awful way to make a living. I mean, this is him saying this. And of course we know it's a way to make a living because there's only a thousand hours or whatever the number of hours there are in a year. And so you're, you're capped at how much money you can make.

Arthur (9:21): But anyway, what it was it relevant to mention the company that had the best product in the marketplace, but was going out of business?

Steve (9:30): Oh, mean, I, I can actually it's, it is weirdly has a, has an echo through the ages with the world today. The company was called Symbolics. And in fact, was the first .com domain in existence, symbolics.com. I was steversymbolics.com, just to be clear. And they made artificial intelligence workstations.

Steve (9:49): So at the time artificial intelligence was pursued with computer language called LISP. And these were compute, these were, were workstations that actually had hardware support for LISP. So they built the programming language into the hardware itself. And they had the most advanced development environment of any computing platform that existed at the time, and they were incredibly flexible in a lot of ways. And in fact, a lot of the stuff that those machines could do in 1987, we still don't have that.

Steve (10:20): Like, we've lost that a lot of those capabilities. We still don't have machines that can do them today in today's world. With my hindsight is twenty twenty, and now I actually have a business background and can re reexamine through the lens of my business knowledge. When I look back at Symbolics, in fact, the mistakes they made were largely around marketing, marketing and strategy. They also, they also had special purpose hardware, which was very expensive.

Steve (10:51): That was, so this was 1984 to 1989 or so was this period of time. The first really luggable PCs were just coming into being in around 1989. You could get a laptop computer. It only weighed about 15 pounds, which was remarkably light at the time. At business school, we would actually carry them around on little shopping carts like you know, the, the shopping carts you use at a grocery store.

Steve (11:16): But the world was shifting towards smaller, lighter, cheaper computers. Yeah. And we weren't, we weren't following that trend. So that was one mistake, but the other one was just the marketing because there was not actually anything that we would call AI today didn't really exist back then. However, the environment that they had created to be able to develop the AI applications was just a phenomenal environment for developing software of any sort.

Steve (11:43): And these machines had been, had been created. And again, this was in the mid 1980s. They had been created with the ability to use the internet. In fact, better than you can currently use it today. So you could have files all over the internet and to your machine it appeared they were all just part of your own file system.

Steve (12:00): So you could have one program that distributed its data all over the world and you never, you as the programmer never knew. It was just built into the system and the user could just say, Oh, here's where my data is. And they could give the name of a machine in Japan and boom, they would have just as much access to that as they would to, you know, if the machine was a file server in the next room or their local hard drive. It was a really well done system.

Unknown Speaker (12:22): Wow. Probably learned from that. So what, what happened next?

Unknown Speaker (12:28): You went to Harvard business.

Unknown Speaker (12:29): You went to Harvard and then what?

Steve (12:32): Well, so there were a few things in between here. So I also helped co found a company called FTP software, which again, co found I'm, I'm really good with the reasons, right? Well, the reason for founding FTP was that me and 12 of my friends did not want a job where we had to wear suits. And back in the mid 1980s wearing a suit to work was pretty common. So we went around this table and just said, does anyone have anything that you've been working on research wise that we can sell?

Steve (12:59): And what we settled on was, had a software package that would enable any personal computer at the time, which they were all Intel based, Intel based windows machines. Actually windows hadn't been invented yet. So this was MS DOS machines at the time. It would let them access the internet. Now, again, remember this was before this was ten years before the internet took off.

Steve (13:16): So no one had ever heard of

Unknown Speaker (13:17): it.

Steve (13:18): So there was no competition. And we produced the software that if you connected a PC to the internet between 1986 and 1996, it's probably about a one in two chance that you were using software that I helped write. And that was FTP software. Went back to business school At the after business school, I went out to Silicon Valley, which had not yet exploded the way it is today. Silicon Valley was the big hardware mecca of the 1980s, which is why it was Silicon.

Unknown Speaker (13:45): So that was where Silicon

Unknown Speaker (13:46): comes from.

Steve (13:48): And the internet revolution in the Bay Area didn't start until 1996 with the IPO of Netscape. That was the thing that really sparked. So I was there right between those two. And I worked for this teensy weensy little company that had, I think there were about a 100 people at the company when I was working there called Intuit who had a checkbook program. And the program, the particular thing that I was working on at Intuit is, is they were like, you know, wouldn't it be a great idea if we could have credit card statements delivered directly into people's Quicken register?

Steve (14:19): Now, the internet wasn't popular yet. Like, like this was just no one had ever tried anything like this before. Well, we did it. And you would either get your bank statement emailed to you, not emails, definitely not emailed, physically mailed to you on one of those little three and a half inch floppy disks, three and a quarter, five and a quarter, three and a half inch floppy Or it would get uploaded to the CompuServe computer

Unknown Speaker (14:43): And then

Steve (14:43): you're Quicken would dial into CompuServe and pull down your statement. Now in retrospect, this was literally the world's first electronic financial statement. Something that is now so ubiquitous that we think it's unusual if someone has paper statements. This was the very first one. So that was, you know, again, I was there for a first, had no idea at the time that this was going to amount to anything.

Steve (15:05): Was just like, oh, this cool project. Let's do this fun sounding thing. And then my mother came down with cancer and I left into it and basically went and took care of her until her death. And then got involved with a number of different startups in the Boston area. When the internet bubble happened, I think I did I was with two startups during the internet bubble, left the second one in frustration because I was seeing them make all of them the same mistakes that I had seen in the previous few startups I had been with.

Steve (15:40): And they had no interest at all in listening to somebody who at least was physically older, but definitely wiser. And I said, you know, guys like, like there's actually a solution to this problem we're dealing with. We should sit down and spend five minutes implementing the solution. And they were like, no, you don't understand how startups work. And I was like, excuse me, this is my fifth startup, like literally my fifth.

Steve (16:01): And none of you have ever been in one before. So maybe I do understand how startups work. Long story short, I left in frustration. They raised a $100,000,000. Two weeks after I left, They blew through the $100,000,000 and did chapter, went chapter seven, eighteen months later.

Steve (16:16): But meanwhile, I discovered this profession called career coaching or not, sorry, not career coaching, executive coaching, leadership coaching. And in my case, I started off specifically doing entrepreneurial coaching. So all of those lessons that I had learned five times over and realized that entrepreneurs really needed when they were starting stuff, I'm like, wow, now people will actually pay me to listen to me instead of me having to fight to be heard. Then since then, I've been through a variety of different, a variety of startups, mostly in between between larger gigs. I spend my time as an executive and a leadership coach.

Steve (16:49): And then I've had two unusual side journeys. One in the mid nineties when Harvard Business School was redoing their curriculum. They were redoing a complete redesign. It was called the leadership and learning curriculum redesign. There had been a professor at Harvard Business School who I had grown very close to.

Steve (17:08): And when I was out working at Intuit, I sent him this stream of faxes. For those of you 40, a fax is like an email, but on paper.

Arthur (17:16): Do you remember Quip? Remember the Quip thing? A Quip what? So before faxes, there was this thing where you'd put a piece of paper and then it would roll and roll and roll and roll and roll and then it would is like the old mimeograph machines.

Unknown Speaker (17:32): Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Arthur (17:33): Remember that? And then it would it would struggle to get the fax through, but that was the precursor to facts anyway, which is for the side.

Steve (17:44): But I had sent him this whole series of faxes saying, Look, here's what I'm encountering in the real world, and here are the ways the curriculum didn't prepare me for this. Like, you taught me this idealized version of business, which I understand you want this idealized version to be real, but I'm not coming to you for the ideal version. I'm coming to to learn how the world works so that I can go out and start successful businesses. So when that professor was put in charge of the curriculum redesign, he called me up and he said, so would you like to put your money where your mouth is and come help redesign the curriculum? And I said, what's in it for me?

Steve (18:19): And he said, well, an 80% pay cut, everything you do that works, someone else will take credit for everything. Anyone else does that doesn't work. They will blame you for. And I was like, Ray did persuasive sales pitch so far.

Unknown Speaker (18:31): And, Leah, sign me up quick.

Steve (18:33): Right. And he said, however, you will also get to help determine the skills, capabilities, values, and mindset of the next generation of Harvard MBAs. So I said yes. And I spent two years learning everything I could about human learning, about psychology, behavior change, mental mindset change. And of course Harvard had the, HBS has these, has specific competency models of here are the competencies that we believe comprise a general manager.

Steve (19:01): And that got me interested in the, how do I help somebody else become a powerful general manager? Since I was already interested in psychology, know, my career has consistently had those themes that I'm always, I'm always reading the latest neuroscience and I'm always figuring out how to apply that in a business context, in a leadership context, in a way where it's not just things written in a book or that someone figured out in a lab, you know, but I'm like, look, if we know the three things that trigger trust in someone, then why don't we teach managers to use them to build stronger teams? And that comes with a caveat, which is that one of the foundations of trust is you have to be trustworthy. So if you use these things that build trust and then you betray the trust, you will have a harder fall than you did before. So only build trust if you're prepared to be trustworthy.

Steve (19:51): That's important. So that anyway, so one thing led to another. Right now at the moment, I'm doing a few different things. The primary one is leadership coaching. I help people understand their leadership style, the leadership style of the people below them, above them, around them.

Steve (20:06): If they're third party constituents like investors or operating partners, or you have to have, what's wrong with consulting companies who you routinely work with, whatever partners, partners in the operational sense. And it's really, I call it how to become connected and respected. And it is about those two broad categories of things. How do you connect to other people in a variety of different types of relationships? And how do you do it in a way that garners their respect and creates relationships that are respectful of you and of them under the theory that if you are connected and respected, that isn't going to lead anywhere, somewhere good.

Unknown Speaker (20:43): So

Arthur (20:44): that's super cool. I have to admit that there's an endless amount of people who seemingly come with a skillset to help executive coaching or coaching in general. You know, it just seems that there's a plethora of those people. Right. And I'm not trying to be disparaging.

Arthur (21:01): I'm just trying to understand it. And I will also admit that I learned an enormous amount at the beginning of my business career from a guy that manufactured envelopes and he wrote a book, What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School.

Steve (21:15): Harvey Mackie.

Arthur (21:16): Yep. Harvey Mackie. And so early on in my business, very early on, I read that book and it really, even though I sort of had a natural ability of how to connect with people, it was sort of part of my makeup, that opened up lots of doors for me just because I exercised on that guidance. So the reason why I bring it up is that, is it true that there are, like you said, there are certain things about trust that we know, and so why don't you do them? Is it true that there are fundamental pillars about being an executive coach and doing the things that you do that can be taught that aren't necessarily intuitive to an executive.

Steve (22:00): Sure. So in others, are there skills that I teach or are there?

Arthur (22:04): Yes. You approach something and say, look, you gotta, you, like when you go work out, have to fundamentally know you've got to have a good form. You've got to do it the right way. You know, are there just foundational things that are really important?

Steve (22:17): Yes. Okay. Well, so first of all, I actually have never really liked calling the profession executive coach or leadership coach. And frankly, I'm totally open to alternatives if anyone has some good ones, because the word coaching is a methodology. It's not a content area.

Steve (22:34): Like you can coach someone in anything. I can coach you in flower arranging. Yes. So just saying coach doesn't actually mean anything. So I'll tell you the things that I'll tell you, first of all, what I believe separates someone who calls themselves a coach from someone who calls themselves a consultant.

Steve (22:49): And which is the reason I call myself a coach, not a consultant is that consultants are often thought of as the product is information that I want you to go do a research report. I want you to produce a plan. As a coach, my product is capability, right? Tiger Woods' coach, or actually he's a bad example these days.

Arthur (23:07): That's okay. We still like him. Right. We still respect his athletic ability. Yes.

Steve (23:12): Tiger Woods' coach doesn't just give Tiger a mimeographed heed saying, here's what to do with the golf swing.

Unknown Speaker (23:18): It's the information.

Steve (23:19): Actually make sure that Tiger has whatever resources he needs to be able to physically embody that behavior. And that's why I call myself a coach because I am not interested in giving people information. I'm giving, I'm interested in giving people actual demonstrable skill and behavior change. So to me, that's the difference between coaching and consulting. What I, what I do in particular, I am neurodivergent in some fashion.

Steve (23:44): I don't exactly know which I have certain neurodivergent traits, which I always thought were just due to my weird upbringing. I was like, oh, I don't have the same cultural references as other people because of my upbringing. So that's why this thing is confusing. And in the last year, actually, this is very recent, I've discovered actually, no, even independently of my upbringing, there are certain things that my brain doesn't process, which is new for me, you know, but I'm like, I actually have blind spots, and I never saw them before because they were blind spots. How would I see them?

Steve (24:14): Now, the reason this is germane is that not only do I, is that, is that when you have a blind spot, you compensate for it by overdeveloping other things. Surely coincidentally, was not planned. I did realize that I had lousy social skills early in my twenties. And so I took hundreds of hours of training in human communication, in psychology, in actually in therapy, in hypnosis. I tried like wacky new age things, but not as wacky as the stuff my parents did.

Steve (24:45): And my criteria was always the same. I'm looking for the things that are effective mainly because I want to be able to have good social skills. And I found a whole bunch of them. Now, much later I had found out most people do all of these things I learned intuitively, but I had to learn them all, which means I know step by step how all of that works. So when I'm working with somebody, I can watch them and listen to them talk, like maybe to their, you know, to subordinates or to their team.

Steve (25:14): And I will notice weird things like you always talk in terms of verbs and what needs to be done. And your team always talks in terms of nouns and outcomes. And you never link, you never link your verbs and your actions and your activities to an outcome. So they don't understand because they don't process languages the same way you do.

Unknown Speaker (25:34): Interesting. Right.

Steve (25:35): Yeah. And yeah, so I'm essentially just kind of, I come at my relationships with people from such an unusual angle that I pick up on things other people don't, you know, and I do, I can use assessments and things like that. But a lot of what's special about me is I have a technology background, so I have a very, very deep one. When I was a programmer, I did super complicated system software stuff. But then when I got to HBS, I threw myself that deeply into business, business strategy, understanding operations, and kind of how everything works together at that generic enterprise level.

Steve (26:09): And then when I got into psychology, I did the same thing with psychology. So I have this very strange and unusual combination of skills where I can actually integrate and I'm working with somebody and I can go, wait a minute, this person is missing the following business models for how business works. They don't have any concept of strategy. They only have, they only think in terms of operations. This other person, they can do operations, they can do strategy, but they don't understand competition.

Steve (26:37): And then this third person, they get competition and they get strategy. However, as soon as they start talking, everyone in the room's eyes goes blank because they have no people skills, no presentation skills. So I can meld all three domains and most people can't do that. And that's what makes me unusual, I guess.

Arthur (26:53): Yeah. Disdictive. And interesting. And I have no reason to suck up to you, but it's, You know what I've and everybody relates things to their own situations, so forgive me for doing this for a minute. A long, long time ago, I had a job, and it was after I had exited and made some money.

Arthur (27:13): And I went into an environment that was corporate meetings, all the nonsense, To me it was nonsense because I had built company as an entrepreneur. And I went into, this environment and was responsible for developing business. So it was more, it was in the right lane for me because I'm business development, right? Sales, all that kind of stuff. And so I would sit down with this group of people.

Arthur (27:43): And I had really not had the opportunity to have a lot of people reporting to me, but I had a lot of people where I stepped in and now I was their boss. And so I said, okay, let's go do this and come back in two weeks and we'll see how it goes. When they came back in two weeks, I was telling them to do something else. To a person, they all said, wait a minute, you told us to do two weeks ago, else. And I said, did it work?

Arthur (28:10): And they go, no. And I said, well, that's why we're talking about something else. So to me, it was like results was everything. So to them, they were task oriented. And I had problems, aside from being in a corporate environment, which was an anthema to me, I had problems relating to them and trying to get them to get to results driven type things rather than task driven type things.

Arthur (28:38): So in that example, my question is, when you see people's blind spots, is it really how difficult is it to get them, first of all, recognize you're there and then teach them to not, to address that blind spot?

Steve (28:54): So it depends on what the blind spot is. Now people don't come to me unless they're willing to address the blind spots.

Unknown Speaker (29:00): Right.

Steve (29:02): Right. And, and you're not going to seek out a coach if you think you have everything you need and you can, you know, you can teach yourself. The trainability really depends on what the blind spot is. Some things are very amenable to training, right? If you want to learn to be a professional presenter, you can do that.

Steve (29:15): I really believe anyone can be taught. Now your style may be different, like the style that works for you, but the key things about presenting, about being comfortable on stage, about being able to hold an audience's interest, of those things are trainable. You have to work at it. Mean, of the critical things is you're not going to develop any new skills or new ways of being without doing the work with it. Right.

Steve (29:36): But there are some things, the way that I've described my own situation is, and this, this is a new description. It's less than a week old is that there are certain things that like certain outcomes that I want to produce. And I can see them. They seem like they're 10 feet away that, wow, wow, this outcome is just 10 feet away. And I go for it and I hit a wall, but I don't see a wall there.

Steve (29:58): And I feel like I'm trapped in a glass maze where the goal line is right there, but I can't get there. Whatever it is that's stopping me, I can't tell it's invisible. It's glass. I don't know if I'm at a dead end or if I need to turn left or if I need to turn right, or even how far to turn, whether it's, you know, whether it's a little piece in the maze that goes like this or like this. And this was a metaphor that I came up with after I started learning about these neurodivergent traits and realizing that like, oh, that, that probably was what responsible for this thing in my career fifteen years ago, that's always puzzled me.

Steve (30:32): If it's a true blind spot, which is something that for whatever reason your neurology can't process or produce or understand, then the solution to that is not to try to train you to do it. The solution to that is let's find compensatory mechanisms, whether they are work or whether it's hire a person. Right. Yeah, basically. And so part of the determination is understanding what it is that's going on and which things are lack of training, which things are lack of, like innate lack of being able to detect the right things in the environment.

Steve (31:03): And then there's a third category, which is sometimes you don't want to spend your time overcoming that weakness. You know, could I learn, could I learn to play piano? Well, I practiced eight hours a day, I am sure that I could. I am sure that I could learn to play piano. Well, you know what?

Steve (31:18): I'll just hire a pianist if I need piano music. Yeah. Because I'm just not, there's a three, there's a brief model. If you want to decide whether or not to do something, it's win worth want. And if you have this thing, will you win if you get it?

Steve (31:33): Do you actually want to have the thing? And is it worth the amount of effort, time, sacrifice, resources that it's going to take for you to be able to get it? And if all the, if all three of those aren't present, then don't do

Unknown Speaker (31:43): it. Don't do it.

Steve (31:45): Find a way to go across it. Time is limited. And of course you look like you're substantially over 17 or 18. You might even be as old as 29 or 10 or 30, and you will learn someday that there comes a time when suddenly the amount of time in front of you is shorter than the amount of time behind you. And at that point you start thinking like, wow, I have limited resources, limited time.

Steve (32:06): I need to just focus on the things that are going to give me, give me the joy, the meaning, the connection, whatever, whatever is important to me, because I don't have time to do all of the things and all of the busy work as well. And so that's the worth it. Is it worth the sacrifice or the effort to do the thing?

Arthur (32:22): Very wise words being on that other side, being discerning with your time. I chuckle with some annoyance when I get somebody on LinkedIn saying, it only takes fifteen minutes of your time to have a call. I'm going, you just asked for the most valuable thing you and I both have. It's not me, it's you. Now, because I'm older than you probably, then I have less time than you.

Arthur (32:52): But it's really interesting how people miss that chip or they just don't care. I mean, a lot of

Steve (32:57): times I'll they tell you a funny thing that I did recently, which I did this as a joke. I haven't had anyone take me up on it yet because I get pitched all the time on LinkedIn and it drives me nuts. And I realized, wait a minute, you know, it's valuable for someone to pitch me. Right. They, I mean, they believe the expected value of that fifteen minutes is greater than zero or they wouldn't, you know, ultimately they wouldn't be doing it.

Steve (33:20): So I just put up a page on my Calendly, my booking page. I have a special booking page. If you go to stevercalendar.com/pitch, and it has a little video of me explaining this. And I say, Hey, if you want to pitch me, that's because you believe it's value. It's a valuable use of your time to pitch me.

Steve (33:35): So let me walk you through how to do an expected value calculation. You decide what the expected valuation, expected value worth it is to you of pitching me. I will not only will I listen to your pitch, I will actually seriously consider it. And, and I'm serious about that. I will add, if someone wants to pitch me, however, it's going to cost you $500 to pitch me.

Steve (33:57): So I will listen to and consider your pitch for $500. And by the way, if it's not actually worth $500 to you to pitch me on an expected value basis, then either your sales skills need improving, which case you should just hire me flat out. Right. Or what that means is it really would be a waste of both of our times. So, know, like, you know, I'm sure that people aren't interpreting that that way.

Steve (34:21): But if you consider that little pitch structure objectively, it really is a genuine, like it weeds things, it weeds out opportunities, sorry, weeds out non opportunities on both sides. Because why would you want to waste your time if I'm not going to be a valuable enough client for

Arthur (34:35): Yeah, totally makes sense to me. I love that. I've done that and many others have. There's a couple of these programs where, you know, you put your bio up and you know, for X amount hour phone call. So there's businesses in Silicon Valley that are developing these things.

Arthur (34:56): And it's, it's, it actually has interesting implications as lead generation. But your your point is really good is if it's not if you're not trying to sell me something or you want to pitch and you think that you haven't done the calculation on both sides, then someone taught you in sales 01/2001 that if you get somebody on a phone call and your persuasive skills are so great that you're likely to get them to a place that you want. I mean, that's really why people come out and say, you know, if I get them on a phone call, I can probably convince them. Right?

Steve (35:33): Right. But, you know, but the other thing too, and this is this has to do with sales and sales skills, right, is that it is true. You might be able to convince someone to do something in the short term. But there's a difference between convincing someone to sign on the dotted line and pay you a check and actually delivering the kind of product or service or experience where someone is genuinely going to turn into a raving fan and really want to keep interacting with you. I'm not that interested in having lots of one off transactional relationships in my life.

Steve (36:08): I mean, you know, it's, it's, there's a, there's a profession in which you do that. That profession is the world's oldest profession. And in fact, now it's automated and you can sign up on OnlyFans and voila, you've, you've, you can have lots of transactional relationships. I'm interested in if someone wants to connect to me to share ideas, actually, which very few people do, like, you know, that's not how most people do prospecting. But just this week, I had somebody send to me a thing on LinkedIn and he said, you know, I really like your ideas.

Steve (36:37): I saw this thing you wrote. I have no, no economic agenda. I genuinely just want to have an interesting conversation about this. And here's what I bring to the conversation. Here's the, here's the unusual things that you'll get out of it.

Steve (36:50): I was like, great. We talked for an hour yesterday. It was a great conversation.

Arthur (36:53): So, that, that taking on the responsibility of constructing the conversation that way is so rare, right? That just doesn't happen. There's endless amounts of people that will stand in line to waste your time. It's endless.

Unknown Speaker (37:08): Yes.

Arthur (37:09): Right? And the preponderance of them are trying to get your attention to sell you something. And I've actually had recently one of those where somebody was trying to, you know, research something and get my insights on what family offices are doing. I just flat out said, Oh, yeah, we have lots of insights about that stuff. Right?

Arthur (37:34): That's the project and it starts at $5,000 and so that they immediately went away, you know, which is okay. I'd rather have them go away just like you. I don't need a bunch of transactions.

Steve (37:48): But however, right. Let's say, let's say that, and this is actually a particular category that at one point I was considering pursuing was working with, working with ultra high worth, high net worth individuals who have kids, who want to be prepped for the family business, want to be able to step into a position of extreme responsibility and very high leverage. And I don't mean financial leverage, but right. This is one of the things that people forget is, a lot of people don't forget it, but if you're going to take your kid and make them the CEO of your company, one wrong decision on their part could have a ripple down effect with hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people, which then magnifies to tremendous economic or financial or pollution, whatever. Choose the dimension you care about.

Unknown Speaker (38:30): Mosquito, right?

Steve (38:31): Yeah. Yeah. So, I was originally thinking, not originally, but at one point I was thinking maybe this is a specialty that I want to get into, is working with the children of ultra high net worth individuals to grow into the roles that they're being groomed for, you know, or whatever. Let me tell you if that were going to be my, if that were going to be my niche five and you could give me your insights for $5,000 I would go, Are you sure? Can you come down a little on the outside?

Steve (39:00): And on the inside I'd be thinking, 5,000? Jesus Christ, this man does not know. Once done pitching him on selling me the report, I'm going to pitch him on understanding the value of what he has, but only after I've paid for the research.

Arthur (39:14): Right, exactly. It's Yeah. Since you brought up what often had happened in the past, I'm sure it happens now, but I just not that dialed into it, is that that family who's grooming the offspring to go and operate this massive business, whether it be a family office or something else, they would be so well connected in the business community that they would say, okay, go work for Goldman Sachs and learn on them, make all the mistakes with them and learn. Right. And also get a Rolodex that you wouldn't otherwise get without their brand and then come.

Arthur (39:52): Right? And that is something that happens very often, and it works, right?

Steve (39:58): Yeah. Well, and this is, as I mentioned before, I think of my business as around helping people become connected and respected. There was this thing they said to me when I was a child, and it took me until my feet to really notice that it was true, which is it's not what you know, it's who you know. Or even more accurately, it's who knows you. And I realized I was, I was talking to someone who, who helps me distill a lot of my knowledge into the concept of connecting and respect it, and like using that as my umbrella.

Steve (40:27): He said to me, he said, you know, you're one of the most well connected people I've ever met. And I was like, no, I'm not. And he looked at me and he said, giraffe trainer. And I was like, see, I, oh, actually I met this. And I thought about it and I was like, okay, in the last month, I've spoken with a congressman, a senator and two members of parliament and a fortune 500, two fortune 500 CEOs.

Steve (40:52): And I'm like, I guess most people don't have those conversations. And I, when I was a kid, if you had told me I would have those conversations, I wouldn't have believed you. But I don't even think about it now because these are all my friends. Every one of them is someone who I met at a conference and we hit it off because we had common interests. And I only later found out what they did for a living, or they were like a friend from business school who advanced up into an area.

Steve (41:16): And I was looking at this going, wow, this really is one of these situations where the access and the knowledge and the opportunity does not come. I mean, I need to have a minimum level of competence to do what I do. And I like to think I have a maximum level of competence. However, it doesn't matter how competent you are. If you can never get in the room with that person.

Steve (41:37): You know, if you're, if you're fundraising for your business and you can't actually get the appointment with the investors, it doesn't matter how good the business is, and it doesn't matter how good the presentation is, etc. Right? And that's of course the current criticisms of Silicon Valley is that ten years after the first study on distribution of venture capital came out, women are still receiving less than 2% of all venture capital, etcetera, etcetera. And a lot of that, I don't actually think it is explicit discrimination. Like, I don't think that there are people sitting around saying, Oh, those are women.

Steve (42:08): We shouldn't give them money. But it's the, you know, having seen a lot of these things in action, it is literally, oh, I can get you an interview with Kleiner Perkins because my roommate in college is now an associate at Kleiner. I'm a male. My roommate is a male and I'm talking to a male. And there's not a woman in that same position because there are current

Arthur (42:31): circumstances. Circumstantial. I mean, there's some influence, old boys club type stuff, but it's often circumstantial, I would argue. You know, it's interesting. One of the businesses I have is the, the, the thing that we do is we catalyze the nexus of connectivity to hard to get to people, family offices.

Arthur (42:52): That's what we do, right? Because it's difficult. And if you can get yourself into the door, then you have some chance of demonstrating value, right? But if you like you said, if you're not getting into the door or the right door, you know, it's problematic.

Steve (43:14): And I'll tell you something. This is something that worries me a great deal is is with all of the AI stuff that's going on right now, forget the argument over whether or not AI is genuinely replacing a lot of jobs, because I've heard that if you actually look at the numbers, that's, that's a story that's being told, but it's not clear that story actually is of the magnitude that, that the people who profit from that story would have you believe. However, I do know that AI is being used to do writing and idea generation and packaging of ideas for lots and lots of people. It's not it is genuinely being used as an as an augmentation of their job. Well, what that means is that the truly unique and original voices are going to become rarer and rarer in the sea of all of the stuff that's being done with AI assistance.

Steve (44:01): For about the first month or two that I started using Claude. Cause I'm, I'm a huge Claude fan. I was using Claude to do some writing stuff. And then I started to notice that my natural writing voice was drifting towards Claude's, not the other way around. And I said, you know, I really do believe that ten years from now, assuming that, that the AI companies don't all implode, because I do understand the economics of the business.

Steve (44:22): And right now there's no viable path to profitability, but assuming they stick around in some form, I'm sure they will stick around in some form. What's going to make me stand out is that I have stuff that clearly wasn't written by. I either have to have ideas that you can't get anywhere else, or I have to have a voice that you can't hear anywhere else. And I'm, I'm working on projects right now to do that because for better or worse, you know, you talked about selling your time and selling your hours. Despite knowing that that's a really crappy business model, that's always been what I've done because that's just the modality that I like operating in.

Steve (44:57): I'm sitting here going, If I am going to build a body of work or something other than a product, if I'm going build a body of intellectual property that I want to outlive me, it's got to be unique and it's got to be in a voice that can't be duplicated and easily generated out of ChatGPT in order for it to have any asset value at all. So I am swimming uphill, swimming uphill in a world where, where fish don't have bicycles. I'm not quite sure why my brain was going do that way, but it did. That's a metaphor.

Arthur (45:26): But I think that that's what you said is one of the things that will create exponential value on that unique voice, right? It's basically reading back what you said, but that, that unique voice and IP will become exponentially more valuable in the sea of slop. Now we use them all, Claude and chat, TTP and perplexity, and they've been huge. For example, we take some of the podcasts, drop the text in, have it categorize different topics, and it's all augmented and we admit it. It's the transcript that creates the newsletter.

Arthur (46:12): Interesting. If we had to do that independent of AI, we'd never do it. It just wouldn't happen. Right. Way too much work.

Unknown Speaker (46:21): Way

Unknown Speaker (46:21): too much work. Yeah.

Steve (46:23): The, the right, the, the market economics in terms of the market for ideas. Right. The problem of course is that you're doing that. I'm doing that. All these people are doing that.

Steve (46:33): So how is your voice? So even if you have the unique voice, people have to find it and stop long enough to pay attention to discover that it's unique. So, you know, and this again, you know, my, my fear is that this is going to fall back to connected and respect that I will be able to get my voice, not even platformed, just heard at all, because I'll call a dozen people who I know, and I'll say, you know, you love my writing. Could you please send me out to your mailing list? And I'll gradually be able to build that up.

Steve (47:01): But people who have great ideas, who don't have those 10 friends who are willing to do that boosting, you know, they don't necessarily have an easy way to do that. And, you know, I feel for them. At the same time, I don't have a general, a general solution to that. It's a very, it's a hard problem.

Arthur (47:18): Think you do, because you said it, it's about who you know and what they know about you. So, in your coaching business, I mean, let's say that sort of table stakes is, maybe I've got a skewed view on this because of my generation and also living in New York City for twenty seven years. That's all we did. We went and had cocktails, right? Yeah.

Arthur (47:43): It was just an and New York City is truly a unique place because you go sit at a bar by yourself and have a sandwich and the person next to you was Malcolm Gladwell, Right? You know, so the natural cohort of people were just exponentially more interesting to sing. And I'm going to pick on Kansas City just because it sounds good. Then if you sat in a bar in Kansas City, right? It just, it was amazing.

Arthur (48:12): And

Steve (48:14): people need to understand that. The way that I think about it is I think luck so first of all, I think that luck is much more responsible for a lot of people's success than they give it credit for because any given idea, there's probably a dozen people working on it. Like, you know, I've been a judge for the MIT and Harvard Business School business plan competitions for a couple of decades. I mean, there aren't that many new ideas. There are a lot of new ideas, but you know, I see them come around every X number of years.

Steve (48:42): Who, but who has, who has the luck and what does the luck end up consisting of? Well, you can take one of those ideas to market. Well, some of it is literally just timing. Yeah. Another weird first I had, if you ever heard of Coursera, Coursera, the course platform.

Unknown Speaker (48:55): Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Steve (48:57): Right. They, they, they take college, real college professors from leading schools and, and package their courses online. The average person can take them. My friend, Alec had that idea in 1997 and it was called university access. And in fact, there is an exhibit in the Smithsonian about it as the very first elearning company ever.

Steve (49:15): And I was an angel investor in it. And when we were putting it together, we were talking, we were like, okay, the big strategic bet that we're making is that the marketplace is ready for a streaming course service and that we can convince the professors to sign up for it. And back in 1997, there were no intellectual property models for how a professor could take their content and distribute it more widely. And also there was no broadband yet. So you couldn't do the kind of streaming video you can.

Steve (49:45): We had a great idea, right idea. Our timing was off by about five years.

Unknown Speaker (49:50): Yeah. Timing. Yes. Very interesting.

Steve (49:52): So luck consists of timing and it consists of the ability to have the deal flow or the resource flow happening around you and on you having something to offer to get yourself into that flow. One of the key pieces is having that flow around you. In New York, it comes with the city.

Arthur (50:11): Totally. Yeah. I'm, I'm paying attention. I'm just looking for, I've just blanked out his name, but timing, right? Who is the guy that is on Rogan and has set up exactly the same type of thing as Coursea, but with friends of his as a subscription service?

Unknown Speaker (50:28): You're going to know what I'm talking about.

Unknown Speaker (50:29): Is it Nebula? No. No, I imagine this is not a market that I've stayed in.

Arthur (50:37): Yeah. Anyway, just it's new. So the timing might be good or bad. I can't remember. It's just striking out on the name anyway.

Arthur (50:48): Timing is everything, sadly, on some level, but, so,

Steve (50:52): know, go ahead. Was going say, right. So if you want to be lucky, first of all, just look at are you hanging out in places and in cities where luck manifests, right? If you want to be lucky in the entertainment industry, if you want to be in theater, a theater or television, well, is kind of both coasts, but, but theater, you want to be in, want be in New York or Chicago. If you want to be doing it in the entertainment, the movie or TV, you want to be in LA.

Steve (51:18): Why? That's just where the opportunities are. And you might, you might get lucky somewhere else, but those places will increase the density of your possible, of your possible opportunities to step in and say, I have a great idea.

Arthur (51:31): Yeah. So who's in, in the context of your coaching business, who's, who's your ideal client? Like, I don't have to tell me who they are, but like the profile of your.

Steve (51:44): Yeah, I usually work. I usually work with people who are being groomed to take over. Well, not, not necessarily to take over, but who are being groomed for advancement up to a VP or executive level. So a lot of what I do with people is the shifts between thinking as an individual contributor and shifting to thinking in terms in kind of a larger level terms, because every level of an organization has bigger and broader things, right? A C suite thinks in terms of what markets to be in, what products to have, what companies to acquire and sell.

Steve (52:14): Directors don't think about that. Directors think, how can I optimize this region? If it's a sales director or operations, etcetera. So one is helping people move up those levels and developing the operational skills and the personal skills. And then the other, which is something that I have done a few times is in working with CEOs has been interestingly kind of the opposite level down.

Steve (52:36): They have an executive team that isn't performing the way that they want and they don't know what's causing it. And I've come in and worked with the team and the CEO. And that combination is important because sometimes the problem is how the CEO is communicating with the team. You kind of need to see the whole dynamic in action in order to work with it. And I don't really have an optimum size of company because the issues are the same regardless of how big the company is.

Steve (53:02): It's just, you know, do you need to get 20 people in the room or 100?

Arthur (53:05): Yeah, it might be just because the natural audience of our group that there's a lot of good work that's been doing, been done in and continues to be done in the next generation leaders in the family offices. There's a lot of signal, a lot of noise and little signal in that business because everybody thinks that family offices are the golden pot. Right. And they are in some level, but there's a huge amount of work that's been done in a good way for family governance and more and more of it being done because people are the technologies advancing the next generation is getting in charge and there's lots of room. What's the biggest room in the world?

Arthur (53:53): A room for improvement, right? And so there's lots of room for improvement there. So it's my hope for you that people would listen to this and say, look, we understand where you operate. And you did mention that you might want to work with the next generation as a, you know, at some point. But I, my hope for you is that you'll get some, some feedback from the group.

Unknown Speaker (54:14): Well, can, can I give a quick little pitch for that concept?

Unknown Speaker (54:17): Please do. Yes. By all means. Yeah.

Steve (54:19): So the man who hired me to help redesign the Harvard, the Harvard, modules in the 1990s, first came on to become chief operating officer and vice chairman of a fortune five hundred company. Then he left that and became the president of Babson College, which is the number one school for entrepreneurship in the world. Although interestingly, it's the, if that's the case everywhere in the world, but most people in America aren't even aware of it. They assume that Stanford is, but, but Babson is considered the number one. And when he made that move to go be president of Babson, I had him over for dinner and I said, why in the world would you choose to go be president of this tiny little college in Wellesley, Massachusetts, when you, you were just running an 80,000 person multinational blah, blah, blah.

Steve (55:05): And he looked at me and he said, you know, steever, the world has a lot of really serious problems right now that are global level problems. Do you think the answer is going to come from the fortune 500? And I was like, well, no. And he said, do you see any evidence that the governments are addressing these problems? Nope.

Steve (55:22): I was like, Nope. And he said, well, you know what? We need to create a generation of young people who are equipped with the tools to be able to think across borders, across sectors, across functional areas so that they can solve the kinds of large complex problems that we don't currently have good solutions for. And he said that, and I said, count me in. So if there is anyone listening who is going to have a younger person take over and you are concerned that you're a younger person be able to tackle large complex world spanning problems, give me a call.

Steve (55:52): I'm there. I can't say I've done it before, but I've given a lot of thought to it. And I've given a heck of a lot of thought to how to enable people to do it. And it's the ultimate connected and respected because you've got to change many things, many places in the world at once. And that's to I be done

Arthur (56:06): think that's super encouraging. I don't even mind talking about, and I'm not asking you to, but maybe I am, you know, we've had problems that have manifested themselves in higher education, the Ivies of kind of twisted thinking about the world problems. I mean, it doesn't matter what your politics are, but people are coming out of these universities and they're like, it's perplexing to think that they are really on that far extreme of some issues and that you can't help but blame the professors for getting them there. Right? So

Steve (56:52): I actually think it's more complicated than just the schools. I think it's sort of the interaction with social media and the schools. Think social media pushes us towards more extreme reactions. And the more extreme we are, the more we take things and really polarize them. So once I'm in school now, I'm going to be really polarized about things.

Steve (57:13): And of course, this then can reflect depending on who the faculty is. Some faculty is highly polarized, but some faculty is not.

Unknown Speaker (57:19): Is not, of course.

Steve (57:20): You know, but if anything they say is immediately taken by somebody who only pushes things to zero or a thousand, you know, and they say, know, well, I think we should have Bologna for lunch. I, you know, and what the class hears is either they hear there is no food except Bologna and, this is evil. We should the pasta lovers of the world, you're trying to exterminate us. And then the other half of the class hears like, like, you know, he said maybe, which means never. So he hates Bologna and all he wants is pasta.

Steve (57:53): And you know, and I'm just sitting here going like people, I'm a black and white thinker for the most part. That's part of my neurodivergence. But I've learned that sometimes you have to use little black dots surrounded by white and what you end up with is a shade of gray. And if I can learn to think in shades of gray, me, then yes, trust me, you know, we need to teach this, but we need it to be supported by, you know, by every like I actually think social media is one of these scourges of mankind for that reason.

Arthur (58:21): I think what you said is really insightful, and I hadn't really thought about it that way in the context of higher education, but I think it was very wise. Yeah, the social media thing is just, it's horrific. It's not like we're just making it up. It's evidence that it's pretty horrific.

Steve (58:37): Yeah. But know, but maybe that's part of the training that future leaders need to have, is turn off your social feed. And, I'm, I'm currently involved in running a little 501c3 that I accidentally co founded three months ago. And we are up to 190 people in it, all volunteers. And I would have to say that my number one biggest cause of stress is dealing with the tendency of so many people to catastrophize everything that happens.

Steve (59:09): And there are some things that genuinely are problems, right? Like, like we put out a statement yesterday that was intended to heal a rift in the community And we were tired and we didn't carefully proofread it. And we actually said something that made things worse. If the people who were upset about it just came to us and said, hey, know, you put this statement out this right. We would have we would have said, oh my gosh, we were tired and overworked and we don't get paid for this.

Steve (59:38): So, know, we've been trying to do this, you know, you are right. We need to issue an apology. Could you please an apology and like fix the statement, could you please help us do this in such a way that it comes across right? Which we're attempting to do now. But the amount of stress and literally yelling and screaming, I had someone call me up and yell at me for forty five minutes.

Steve (59:57): And I'm, you know, I caught my breath after I hung up, was just like, like, whatever happened to the world where we call some up and just politely say, you know, I think that what you posted was very wrong, and I want to talk about it. And I would say, Why did you think it was very wrong? And they would say, Well, read sentence number five. And I read sentence number five, and they would say, Do you understand that that comes across the following way? And I would go, Oh my God, you're right.

Steve (1:00:25): It does. And that was, you know, that was not our intent at all. But they didn't do that. And so instead now it's this giant, giant thing, and it's all being held on social media on a Facebook page. And I'm just like, could we please not do the social media thing and talk like human beings for a little while?

Arthur (1:00:43): So don't you think that person who's independent of how bad that sentence was, don't you think that person took forty five minutes of their day to scream at you because there's something else in their life that's wrong?

Steve (1:01:01): Well, except that there were about 10 people who did it. Okay. All right. I think I think the sentence itself and and by the way, I actually agree with them. When I've gone back and reread it and I'm not sleep deprived and I'm not in the middle of a negotiation and so on, I'm reading and going, Yeah, I totally understand how that was the wrong thing to say.

Steve (1:01:19): I understand that in fact it even said something that I would not sign without modifying the wording. You know, if I were as conscious then as I am right now, I would have suggested that we edit the language somewhat. Sometimes it is the transference thing that you're talking about where people are upset at all kinds of things. They were just having an argument about the best milk to feed their pet, know, pomeran was it a pomeranse? Whatever those cute little dogs are with the long hair.

Unknown Speaker (1:01:50): Pomeranian. Yeah, yeah,

Steve (1:01:51): Yeah, yeah. And they were so upset that someone else wanted oat milk and they know that it's really, you know, granola milk and they just turned around and took all of that wonderful emotion and just right. Exactly.

Arthur (1:02:05): I'm not sure that well, that usually the extremists are not to be listened to. Right? But have you ever done the human design process on your personality?

Steve (1:02:20): The name is familiar it's, but I don't, I've never done it, whatever it is. Cause I've,

Arthur (1:02:25): I don't have any skin in the game, but I have proclivities. Like you say you have neuro genital virgin. Many years ago I did this process that's very popular. It's called human design. And it basically is a little woo woo, probably more like what your parents would have done, but it actually put, you know, how you think of things, then you read a book and you go, holy shit.

Arthur (1:02:48): That's exactly what the situation was. I'm glad somebody put it in words and it helps me in some way. Right? Yep, absolutely. So the human design, it basically evaluates what, what you're, what, how you're constructed, way you make decisions and it assigns descriptions.

Arthur (1:03:09): Right. And so I'm a manifest generator. So there's all kinds of different things. I'm just, I'm only mentioning it because like I said, I have no skin in the game, but it was super helpful for me to read it. And after going through the process and saying, well, that's why I'm this way.

Arthur (1:03:25): You know, that's why what you said earlier is like when I run into the glass, the transparent glass, and I can't get to the objective that's right there. Learned a long time that I don't want to do any of that stuff. First of all, I'm not good at it. Secondly, I'm no interest, and I'd rather just pass. Right?

Unknown Speaker (1:03:45): So, but anyway, it's a

Steve (1:03:49): I'll tell you, I've had people ask me before if there's any particular of those kinds of inventories that I would recommend. And I've done it. I haven't done that one, but I've done a lot of lot of these. You know, I've done Myers Briggs, I've done Enneagram. What did I just did?

Steve (1:04:04): Oh, I just did disc for the second time and was surprised. The first time I did was twenty years ago and I had forgotten my results. And I looked at the results this time and I was like, Oh, that's interesting. And it's really true. I think a lot of the value of any of these instruments is not which specific instrument you use, but it's in the way they help you understand that other people can be different from you.

Steve (1:04:28): And you're like, oh, wow. Okay. So I am a D with a little C. That's my disc type. It's not so much so much that it's it's more important that I know that I'm a DC versus being a Myers Briggs INTJ, which is my Myers Briggs type.

Steve (1:04:42): It's that either one of those descriptions enables me to understand something about how I'm different from other people. So with the DC is I'm like, oh, I'm a DC. What that means is that I am more task oriented and process oriented than I am people oriented. So there are other people who are very people oriented, but not great with task and process. And just knowing that gives me one of those frameworks that I can use when I meet someone to think, is this person task oriented or people oriented?

Arthur (1:05:13): Super insightful. Yeah. Yep. I think that's exactly its value. Like I said, it explained a lot of things to me that just were put in the context of saying, Well, that's why I do that.

Arthur (1:05:24): Right? It didn't give me an excuse for the behavior. Just said, That's why. Right?

Steve (1:05:28): Right. Yeah. Well, and then, know, again, then you can compensate for it if you need to, or bring someone else in. I mean, the whole reason that I got on the, the, you know, I neurodiverse kick was because I hired a marketing person and we were working together. He was having me do some market research for my business on how to bring myself to market.

Steve (1:05:47): And I would ask people questions and I would come back to him and I would say, I didn't get any useful information. And he would say, give me the transcript because I would record these and I'd give him a transcript. He would be like, there's a ton of useful information in there. And he would say, okay, you tell me what you think this says, and I'll tell you what I think it says. So I wrote down the description.

Steve (1:06:03): Here's what I think were the themes. And he looked at that and he said, no, he's like, these are completely wrong. Here are the themes. And then he wrote what he thought the themes were. To me.

Steve (1:06:13): It was the exact same things, just rephrased slightly. And I looked at him and I said, I don't understand this. You just reiterated what I said. You just put it in your own words. He said, no, these are totally different.

Steve (1:06:25): And I'm sitting here thinking bullshit. So I'm well connected. I picked up the phone and I called a friend of mine. Who's this, you know, crack absolute crack marketer. And I was like, Ellen, I'm going to give you two lists of things.

Steve (1:06:38): I want you to tell me your impression of them. These are the results of market research. And I gave her the two things. Didn't tell her which one was, which she looked at mine, she's like, this is complete crap. This is like, what is this?

Steve (1:06:47): Toss it. And she looked at his and said, this is deep wisdom. This is brilliant. This is and so this started me down this journey of going, why can't I tell the difference between these things? And I really liken it to color blindness, is that if you can see the blue two inside the green circle, if you can see it, you can see it.

Steve (1:07:06): If you can't see it, I could teach you where the two is. You still wouldn't actually see it, you would just have memorized which dots it is. But then if I give you a blue three in a green circle, you're totally lost again because you genuinely cannot see the number. And that's what that was the experience that started to get me to realize there I am actually, I mean, it's not color blind, it's like it's a type of language blindness, but I genuinely have this kind of blindness, which makes me sad because I want to know what it's like for people who don't have it. I'm like, you know, they have a very rich, different experience than I do.

Steve (1:07:40): But on the flip side, and this I'm pretty confident of, are things that to me are as natural as breathing that I pick up on when I talk to people that other people can't detect. So, you know, I'm not going to say it's a superpower because a lot of people who are neurodivergent, you know, they want to say, oh, you know, it's the way that I, it's also my superpower. I'm like, I, you know, I don't know. I don't know if it's worth, I don't know if it's, if it's worth trade off, maybe I'd rather see the blue too than, than, you know, see their, see the red mysterious infrared number. But I will say it does make me different.

Steve (1:08:11): It sets me apart in a way that I can be really useful to people because I can solve, I can't solve some problems that for you would be trivially easy because you would immediately look at the situation and you would go, oh my gosh, this is an emotional conflict of this sort. These are how these people are feeling. You need to do that. I can't solve that kind of problem very easily. However, there are other problems that you can't solve easily that I can walk in and take one look at it and go, Oh, you need to tie the tent together with these four knots, which together form a simple machine that enable you to use leverage to keep the tent from blowing over 60 mile an hour winds.

Unknown Speaker (1:08:44): And you would look at me and go, how did you know that? And I'd be like, well, isn't it obvious? You know, I just have to look at it. And it just, it's just, you know.

Arthur (1:08:52): It's just, it's not the same thing, but it's kind of like the big industrial equipment thing not working. And the guy walks in and hits the pipe at the exact right place with the hammer. And they say, thanks for doing that. Everything's working fine. They get you know, here, what's your bill?

Unknown Speaker (1:09:08): It's $130,000 But wait a minute, it took ten minutes and one hammer. He goes, yeah, but it took me twenty five years to know where to hit it. Right. And

Steve (1:09:16): you know what? I am thrilled to be able to say, I had that literal experience. Our hot water heater came out and we called our plumber. We have a plumber who installed it and he's been a great friend of ours for years and years. He came out, he listened to this thing.

Steve (1:09:32): He looked around it for about twenty minutes and he got, it wasn't a hammer. It was a screwdriver. He got out his screwdriver, found one screw and turned it an eighth of a turn. That was it. And suddenly everything started working.

Steve (1:09:44): And I went to him and I said, Nick, I need to pay you for this. How much is it now? See, he hadn't heard the story before. So he said, he said, all I did was move screw an eighth of an inch. I said, it's, you know, he's, he's like, you pay me $20.

Steve (1:09:59): And I paid him like 150 or something. And I said, I said, Nick, I need to teach you. I need to teach you a story only instead of the, you know, the story is going to be about how you need to build yourself because you may have, you knew which screw to turn and which direction to turn it. And no way in hell would I ever have been able to do that. You know, I would have disassembled the thing in the process by accident.

Unknown Speaker (1:10:19): And yeah.

Unknown Speaker (1:10:20): So. Well, have to tell you, this has been super enriching for me. Thank you, Steve. I really appreciate Sure. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker (1:10:27): Thank you for having me.

Arthur (1:10:28): Yeah, it was really, really good. Thank you. And I'm sure the audience will enjoy it too. We'll share everything with you. And if you don't mind sharing it, that would be awesome.

Steve (1:10:39): I would be delighted to actually. Can I, can I make clips?

Unknown Speaker (1:10:43): So what we're gonna, if you want, you can have the file and you can make your own clips, whatever you want.

Unknown Speaker (1:10:48): Yeah, that would be great.

Unknown Speaker (1:10:49): Yeah, let me stop this while we're chatting.

Unknown Speaker (1:10:51): Hang on. Bye everyone.