Steven Cardinale_mixdown.mp3

Steven: [00:00:00] I was talking to somebody the other day and I said, What are you selling because I'm selling media coverage for football teams? I'm like, OK, great, you know, because all football teams need people to know where they're at. Nothing but what are you really selling? Well, I'm selling it to mostly the high school teams, and really what I'm selling is, you know that parents can see their kids and media coverage. Great. What are you selling? It took him a minute and goes, Well, I'm selling the fact that parents are spending money to be have their kids on a football team. They want to see their kids names in the newspaper. So now we're starting to understand something a little more interesting.

Harpreet: [00:00:40] What's up, everybody, welcome to the artists Data Science Podcast, the only self-development podcast for Data scientists. You're going to learn from and be inspired by the people ideas and conversations that'll encourage creativity and innovation in yourself so that you can do the same for others. I also host open office hours you can register to attend by going to Bitly.com/adsoh forward slash a d s o h. I look forward to seeing you all there. Let's ride this beat out into another awesome episode, and don't forget to subscribe to the show and leave a five star review. Our guest today has been studying innovation, business startups, entrepreneurship and leadership in new ways his entire life. He studied economics at UCLA and went on to earn an MBA from the highly prestigious Wharton School of Business. He's worked with some of the largest organizations around from Eli Lilly, IBM to TWC. He's founded, operated and successfully navigated the mergers and acquisition exit processes for his own SAS company, which has given him [00:02:00] insights from every angle of the success and innovation spectrum. Today, he's here to talk to us about his book Synaptic Alchemy and how we can think intentionally and act decisively. He is here to show us that it's not just about thinking different. It's about thinking with awareness and converting those thoughts into actions. Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcoming our guests today, a man who is always interested in exploring the curious, creative and oblique sides of life and ideas. Steve, Kardinal, Steve, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to be on the show today. I really appreciate having you here.

Steven: [00:02:40] I am so excited to be part of your show and to be able to express kind of these new ideas and new concepts to your listeners and hear you ask me some interesting questions that I'll keep you on my toes.

Harpreet: [00:02:51] Yeah, man, I've really, really enjoyed the book. As you could see here, I've got a nicely highlighted and nicely tagged cover

Steven: [00:02:58] Geared and it's all torn apart. It's awesome.

Harpreet: [00:03:00] Well, as a writer, you want people to mark up your books and then and really try to get intimate with the material. So before you get into your book, let's let's learn a little bit about you. Talk to us about where you grew up and what it was like there.

Steven: [00:03:14] So born and bred in Los Angeles, California, was an entrepreneur my whole life, even though I didn't know it right? You know, it's one of those kids who when I was head a bike route, I would put little cards in. The newspaper said I would fling through my bike around to have people come and call me so I could clean their car or do something interesting. But as I grew up, what's interesting? I started to live someone else's story, and that would be my parents story. So they decided and I completely swallowed that hook, line and sinker that I was going to be a doctor. So when I started at UCLA, I started in biochemistry and did that for a couple of years and realized this is not for me. And what most kids do when they have no clue what they're doing in college is they go study [00:04:00] money because they think they're going to be rich, which, by the way, is not true. All right. So I started saying economics and fell in love with it, and you actually see the story that in the book, and I can go into that in a little detail. But my dad was a teacher. He was an artist, so he taught fine art. He was an actor. My mom was in publicity, and so both my parents were in the entertainment field. But I'm not an entertainment guy. I'm a, you know, tech and strategy guy. So there was an interesting collision of minds between my parents, what they wanted me to do, go be a doctor, what I wanted to, which I had no idea at the time and what their lives were about, which was the fine art field.

Harpreet: [00:04:41] And how did you figure it out then? How did you how did you make that connection? So first of all, let me ask you this because I mean, this is a question. I've been struggling myself as a Data, as a gainfully employed data scientist, I'm still asking myself this really what I want to do is this who I really am? Is this the Jaguars still want to have? How did you figure out that for yourself? And are you still trying to figure it out or?

Steven: [00:05:01] Yeah, it took a long time, and I

Steven: [00:05:03] I would really recommend

Steven: [00:05:06] To everybody. So if you look at the book Synaptic Alchemy, it actually has two sections. One is called Know

Steven: [00:05:11] Thyself, which

Steven: [00:05:12] Is the hardest piece. And then there's something called the alchemical transformation, which is how do you turn lead into gold, knowing thyself, knowing who you are and knowing what you want? I only started to figure that out when I was 40 years old, you know, maybe fifteen years ago. Until then, I was bumping into things, bumping into doors, trying to figure out, OK, well, I'm not going to go to med school and I like computers, but I got an economics degree. I didn't do computer science, but I know I'm. Really good software engineer and software architect, and so I gravitated to certain things, but I it wasn't intentional and until I was like 40 years old and I started to really understand, I need to understand who I am and what kind of questions do I ask and what really lights me up? I think you'll bump into things a lot, and when you bump into things, it's like trying to go through a door. And I [00:06:00] think men, on average, we tend to do this more than women. We try to ramrod through the door, we try to go through the door with our heads. We don't use the doorknob, so we don't start to figure out who we are. And one of the things and we'll talk about this is kind of your primary to your core of who you are. That took me a long time to figure out and I use personality tests and an understanding that everything that you use has both a, you know, a value to it as well as a dark side. So the personality tests tell you who you kind of are, but not always right there, just kind of guidance. It kind of our preference, but it really helped me start to understand who I am and what I do. But that took me, yeah, until I probably went to grad school, you know? So I started to understand who I really wasn't what I liked.

Harpreet: [00:06:47] I think that's one thing that really resonated with me with the book early on was that finding out yourself that know thyself component because, you know, like, I'm I'm turning 40 in a couple of years. I'm kind of going through maybe midlife crisis. I don't fucking know what's going on with me, but but but I'm having those type of same feelings that you were describing in the book, and I actually had I took the big five personality test, the paid version of it as well.

Steven: [00:07:10] Awesome. That's good,

Harpreet: [00:07:11] Right? So I haven't thought I did this and I've done through work. I did like the disk assessment and it's on my to do list to kind of really parse through these and really take bits out of there and see. How I could better understand myself, so I really, really appreciate seeing that, and like you mentioned, we'll get into some of this a little bit more in detail. But before we do, I just I really like that you had this two definitions of entrepreneurship in your book. You had the traditional dictionary definition, then you had your definition. Yeah. So talk to us about what your definition of an entrepreneur is.

Steven: [00:07:44] So it's interesting because the dictionary definition is kind of, you know, someone who takes on risk to secure a profit.

Steven: [00:07:51] And I think that

Steven: [00:07:53] Is a very limiting definition, really. I think entrepreneurs are looking at and I say this all the time are [00:08:00] looking to pull something from the heavens and instantiate it on the ground in terra firma, in real life. That's what we do right now, whether that we're successful at it and we execute well and whether that idea is a really big idea or a small idea and a, you know, micro change in something. But taking something that doesn't exist and instantiate it on the ground today is really what I think an entrepreneur does. And what do they do that for themselves? Or they do that inside a company or they do it inside a project? That mindset of something over there doesn't exist yet. There's some that the alchemical transformation, we're going to talk about that, but something over there needs to go from lead. It's kind of this heavy, low value thing and I can turn it into gold. And whether it's a new way to do software and a way to do AI, a new way to do retail, a big idea like Amazon, that's what I think an entrepreneur does. And they have some traits. So they have some Wild West traits, right? They take risk. They look to convert things from low value to high value, even if they don't know that they're doing it. And then there's a piece that I think once you're an entrepreneur, you go, OK, I'm going to convert something from that, take something from the heavens and create it in real life. And then there's the the gap and the step to becoming an alchemist. And I call it a synaptic alchemist because guys like you and me and your audience, we're creating things out of the synapses in our mind.

Steven: [00:09:21] We're not, you know, on average, we're not taking commodities of lead and really turning them to gold. We're coming up with some idea. And to do that, two phrases that I use in the book that I think are really important is you have to think intentionally and act decisively, and that's what I think an alchemist does. So an entrepreneur instantiate an idea from the heavens into real life, and an alchemist thinks intentionally and acts decisively. So here's what I want to do, and here's the path to get there. And there's a great quote by I think it's Eisenhower who talks about how plans are worthless, but planning is invaluable, and I think that really hits the think intentionally [00:10:00] and act decisively piece because I'm going to say we're going to go do this and I'll be wrong. But the idea that I have to come up with it and come up with a plan to do it is what is really valuable. And that's what I think really makes a difference in which you know what your audience is doing. So when they think I want to go and do something really becoming super intentional about what is that thing and then taking steps to do it, success or not fail. You know, one of the statements I say all the time is fail forward fast. I'm sure you guys have heard this before. You know, I love failure. Failure is awesome because if we knew how to be successful, we'd all be pressing the Google button all day long and say, I know how to do this right.

Steven: [00:10:37] We don't.

Steven: [00:10:38] So, and I think that's one of the most interesting things about business is that you have to make decisions under uncertainty because all your inputs are uncertain. And that's really what drives me. And that's something that gave me the how do you know thyself? Did that answer it?

Harpreet: [00:10:51] I know. Absolutely, man. I love

Steven: [00:10:53] That. That was a really,

Harpreet: [00:10:54] Really enjoy that because that is exactly what we do as data scientists like, we take lumps of coal in the form of data and turn it into gold somehow. You take ideas, right? Maybe we can try to create a model that can do this for some particular feature. Deploy it. See what happens if we experiment and we fail fast and learn all that stuff like everything you talk about in your book, super applicable to the work that we do as data scientists, that's always so super excited to have you on.

Steven: [00:11:21] Yeah, if you think about a data scientist, you guys are alchemists, people who work with, you know, the big data lakes and the uncertainty of data and then convert it into a decision that is the essence of alchemy.

Harpreet: [00:11:34] Yes, absolutely. So let's dig into a little bit deeper. So synaptic alchemy, if you were to give us like the thirty thousand foot in the air, you know, synopsis of what this is? How would you quickly describe that? And then we'll dig a lot deeper into it.

Steven: [00:11:49] So Synaptic Alchemy is titled the book. The subtitle is the art and Science of Turning Ideas into Gold. That's we're going to do. We're going to turn the things between our ears and our heads into gold and [00:12:00] the

Steven: [00:12:01] The synopsis of what synaptic

Steven: [00:12:03] Alchemy is. It is the alchemical transformation of turning low value inputs into high value outputs. And we're going to talk about the alchemical transformation, and it's really three steps. It's super

Steven: [00:12:14] Simple. Yeah, sorry.

Steven: [00:12:15] It's easy. It's not. It's simple. It's not easy. It's hard to do in advance, but it's really a simple concept under. So synaptic alchemy is taking a an idea that you're going to pull from the heavens and intentionally driving it through a three step process until it gets to the end. That's really what it is.

Harpreet: [00:12:34] Or we can get through that three step process. You talk about this concept that we're talking about a little bit earlier touched on at the Prima Materia in the Philosopher's Stone. You know that somebody that's myself who absolutely loved Paul Qualys. Book The Alchemist I loved. I loved seeing these references. But but the talk is like for those of us who may have not heard of this term before, like, what are these things and how is it that they fit into this three step process?

Steven: [00:13:04] So the prematurity and the Philosopher's Stone I segmented out into kind of the know thyself.

Steven: [00:13:09] And if you don't know

Steven: [00:13:10] Who you are, like, I'm good at accounting, right? I'll go. Wharton MBA I'm good at accounting. I hate accounting, so I will put it off.

Steven: [00:13:19] And I didn't know this

Steven: [00:13:20] Until, you know, a decade ago. I put it off. I'll give it to other people. So finding people who to do my accounting for me is super important because I need

Steven: [00:13:29] That understanding

Steven: [00:13:30] In my business. And that's part of the know thyself, which is the primary and the Philosopher's Stone. And then the second piece is the alchemical transformation. So we're going to sit in the know thyself. I think it is critical that people and entrepreneurs understand who they are because you'll end up spending a lot of time chasing things and doing things that don't really express yourself, often authentically. Right. So if I go in, for example, I did work for pWt. It's an accounting firm. I was decent at it, but meant that I had [00:14:00] to put a lot of energy into it. So private materia is.

Steven: [00:14:02] Who are you in your personality, right?

Steven: [00:14:06] So for me, for example, I'm a big picture guy. I'm I'm not terrible at details, but that's not where I go to immediately. If I'm talking with someone and I want to know, how are we going to make a billion dollars? How are we going to save all the kids? How are we going to put out the fire? I want the big picture. If I don't understand the big picture, it's really hard for me to get into the details. So when someone gives me a tax return and I have to do this, let's say for PDF see, and I don't understand, why do I care? Oh man, is it hard? And I didn't understand that at the beginning. So prematurity is really based on your personality. So things like Myers-Briggs or the Big Five or any of these personality tests the help you start to understand who you are.

Steven: [00:14:46] And there's a story in the book,

Steven: [00:14:47] And I give you a real clear example, and I took the big five one and the big five. For anybody who doesn't know it has its a personality test that has five letters that you decide who you are. And the five letters are ocean OCN and the A stands for agreeableness. And I've been told I'm one of the most collaborative executives that people have met. And then when I took the Big Five Test, my agreeableness was down really low.

Steven: [00:15:10] I'm not agreeable

Steven: [00:15:11] Because as entrepreneurs, we come up with an idea, we come up with an opinion and then we drive that opinion because we think we're right now. Is that good? Is it

Steven: [00:15:18] Bad? I don't know,

Steven: [00:15:20] But I know that if all I have to do is to be a yes man to my boss, I'm going to get fired really quick. So you're premature, is your personality. When I got done with my MBA, I was talking to my buddies and I said, All right, that's it. I'm going to go to Wall Street and I'm going to run Wall Street. And they said, You're going to go to Wall Street, you're going to get fired at Wall Street. And I said, Why? And they said, Because you're not agreeable. I'm like, Oh, damn it, you're right. I could have

Steven: [00:15:42] Gone to Wall Street and spent a

Steven: [00:15:44] Lot of time not knowing who I was, not knowing how my personality was, and it would have been terrible for them and have been terrible for me, right? So knowing who you are. Knowing your material will present itself. It's this amorphous thing that is you your personality, and you can see [00:16:00] it through some of these personality tests, right? You know, I don't know, like your personality. I don't know if you're a big picture guy. If you're a detail guy, you know, where does that sit?

Harpreet: [00:16:08] I could tell you I took the test, so it was only like 20 bucks. It was worth it. And this is like, like I mentioned, like, I'm really trying to figure myself out like, no myself. I'm going through the midlife existential crisis. So, so my core patterns came up as the resoundingly to the biggest slices. There's the empathetic idealist. So that means I use insight and creativity to help others think about how the world could be a better and more beautiful place that sounds like me, and that I'm also an analytical thinker. Given that I'm a data scientist, makes sense, solves logical problems with rational, complex analysis, and then thinks about innovative

Steven: [00:16:44] Ways to improve systems.

Steven: [00:16:46] Yeah, that's great. So for me, so my business partner, my last company, he was very much empathic, right? I'm all about systems. Very first thing I look at is how does a split into Tang, a fit into slot B and a process slot C and later on way later on, I started thinking about how does that affect people? And that's, you know, it's neither here nor there. But I needed someone to be able to be empathic when I was building the company because I needed to be able to make sure that we were being, you know, not just, Hey, we have the right solution and we're going to ram this down your throat, Mr. Customer, we have the right solution. And here's how it affects you, Mr. Customer. And so. We actually did productive parents, so when we went into customers, you'd be like you and I would go in together and you would see something that I wouldn't see. And I would go, Oh yeah, OK. Or I would see a system. I go, Yeah, these systems are not going to work together and go, Yeah, but they really enjoy it and go, Yeah, but no one cares. So we would be able to complement each other. So knowing who you are. Knowing your private material the way things operate is super important for you. If you go into a company and they are not empathic and

Steven: [00:17:47] They're cutthroat, let's say

Steven: [00:17:49] Wall Street, you probably wouldn't be very happy, right? You'd probably be. Oh man, this sucks. They have to. I have to do a transaction that doesn't really work for being empathic with customers. So that's [00:18:00] the private material.

Harpreet: [00:18:01] And I mean, it's such a like like it is an amorphous thing to think about, right? This know yourself. What is it that you truly want? And I like that we can use this as a tool to help us really achieve success in life. And I like how you kind of laid out some some steps there. How about if if we wanted to just ask ourselves, maybe somebody doesn't want to go out there and take the big five personality test? Like what are a couple of questions that we can reflect on to help us find out what our prima materia is?

Steven: [00:18:30] Yeah. So although Myers-Briggs has got, you know, kind of been not debunked, but it's kind of had its legs cut out from underneath, it actually is really helpful again. It's not that plans are important, but planning. It's not that Myers-Briggs itself is important, but Myers-Briggs doing a personality test is important. And Myers-Briggs actually is a real good if you want to spend the time to figure all this stuff out has a real good framework. So one of them is, are you about story or Data? And I'll give you a real clear example. When my son was young, my ex-wife had to take him, had to go on a trip and I had to take him to his swimming class. He's only like five years old, right? And I sat down and my son is swimming in the pool. This is the first time I take the class, and this very nice coach came up to me and he shakes my hand and he says, Your son is doing, you know, seventeen point eight strokes per minute and fifteen point five kicks per second. And I was completely couldn't care less because what I wanted to hear was the story. So does this mean my son's going to be an Olympic swimmer? Does this mean he's going to get a scholarship? I needed to hear the story. And he was giving me Data, so I need to understand story first. So I had to stop and go. So what does this mean, you know? And he goes, Well, it means he's five years old and he's swimming, OK? I'm like, OK, great.

Steven: [00:19:39] He's not, you know, an Olympic athlete. Great. I understand. That's my kid. That's good. So understanding whether you are, whether you're triggered by Data or whether you're triggered by story, what really lands to you is a real good point. And I'll give you a real clear example. My VP of engineering at my at the last company I started, he was all about Data [00:20:00] and I'm all about story. So we used to clash like crazy. So I would ask him, you know, I'm going to go to the store and buy some peanut butter. And I would say, what does that mean to you? He goes, You're going to buy just for recess, and it's going to be between two and four dollars a jar and it's going to be peanuts. And I said, Great for me, it means God, there's cashew butter, there's almond butter, and this can be twelve dollars a jar and goes, you're flying by the seat of your pants. And I said, you're being too uptight. So we used to talk to each other and I would say, Hey, I'm going to come in and I'm just going to talk story. You don't have to go into the details. I just need to bounce ideas. And he would come back to me and go, OK, you know, later on, he would come back and go, Hey, you know, story number two. I really thought about that in the details that really got some legs. So understanding whether you're really drawn towards story or drawn towards kind of the details is one of the best places to start.

Harpreet: [00:20:51] I'm a data scientist and I think I'm all about the story at the Data.

Steven: [00:20:54] There you go. So it's all right. So now you go, Well, what the hell do I do with that?

Harpreet: [00:21:01] Yeah, I'm just thinking about that example you're talking about. Yeah, may I go through some of the stuff with some colleagues that I work at, software engineers and stuff that I work at to get my ideas into reality seem to have conversations like I'm thinking big picture and how to benefit, and they want the nitty gritty like they want to see lines of code and stuff. I'm like, All right, well, it's there, but you know?

Steven: [00:21:19] Right? Yeah. And being able to understand kind of that, that interface, that membrane between you and other people, you go, Hey, you know, and I can talk offline. And there's all sorts of tools that I use at my company to help do this. But it was, you know, I would walk. I would walk into my bpm engineer and I would say, I just need to talk story for half hour. And he would relax and go, OK, right? But it took us a long time to start to understand that dynamic and the interface between someone who's story and someone who's Data. You got to put energy into that membrane. So that way you can get your story across and they can get their data across and everybody can be fulfilled. And you know, just that in and of itself is, you know, a big game changer when you start to work in teams and you start to work like if your boss is [00:22:00]

Steven: [00:22:00] About Data, you got to walk in

Steven: [00:22:01] And have Data ready to rock and roll. For me, I'm about story. You got to walk in and have bullet points for me. Tell me about the bullet points and then I expect you to have the Data because in case I need you to back it up, you've got to be the data scientist to back it up. And I go, OK, show me the data. I only want to see it for about five minutes, so I trust you, right? And then I go, OK, great. Let's go do. Let's go this way. You told us to go this way.

Harpreet: [00:22:21] This exercise of knowing thyself, do you think it can help us know other people a little bit better, too, if we if we take the time to? Yeah.

Steven: [00:22:29] So I'm going to give you a story about empathy. So I had a customer and we were doing for my for my last company and we're doing software for health care, we're doing software for insurance companies and it's real tactical stuff. And she asked me, she came in and she, you know, told me as a vendor, she said, I want you to outsource my nursing department. They cost a lot of money. They're hard to manage. Watch it outsourcing. I spent a whole week, whole week figuring out how to outsource and get rid of four eighty five nurses. I went over to her and I gave her the proposal. She flipped through it and like three minutes and gave me all the reasons why it wasn't going to work.

Steven: [00:23:03] I was like, Damn.

Steven: [00:23:04] All right. So I went back. It's been another 40 50 hours rejiggering the proposal and give it back to her within three minutes. She flipped through it and gave me all the reasons wasn't going to work. So I talked to one of my mentors and I said, she's never going to buy this. She asked me to sell her something that she can't buy. And he said, Yeah, what's her personality type? And in this case, in Myers-Briggs, she's an f, right? So she's a an empath. And I said, Well, she's an empath, 100 percent. And he said, you're going to make an empath sit in front of eighty five people. She considers friends and fire. Eighty five of them, she'll never do it. And I'm like, Oh, you're right, she'll find all the reasons why I can't do it. So my variant, my third cut was Keep all your nurses. Move them to a different part of the company. Give them jobs they'll really enjoy. Not this tactical admin stuff. Let our software do the tactical admin stuff. You'd probably be able to pay them more. Your company will do better. They'll be very happy. We close the deal. So understanding [00:24:00] my customer and I say this all the time, it's never about you. It's never been about you. It's never going to be about you. It's either about your spouse or your partner or your kids or your customer. So understanding someone else, understanding their premature how they see the world is vital. You can have a happy marriage. Understand how your wife sees the world. My fiance is an empath. I got to understand it. Or I'm going to be in real trouble.

Harpreet: [00:24:23] Yeah, absolutely. 100 percent agree with you on that one. So we know ourselves, what's this Philosopher's Stone like? What, what? What is this all about?

Steven: [00:24:32] So the Philosopher's Stone is how you present yourself to the world. So I know myself, I'm a big picture guy and I use young and psychology, so I use archetypes and my archetype seem to be the

Steven: [00:24:43] Magician, which

Steven: [00:24:44] Is how do I present myself to the world? So I know that I'm a big picture guy, but what I want to do is I want to take stuff apart, see how it works, and then put it back together again and do something different with it and make it seem like magic, because I understood the fundamentals, right? That's how I express myself to the world. I go, Oh yeah, let's understand the details so we can make something really cool. And then there's big picture you hear that so primal is how I how I consume the world. Philosopher's Stone is how I present myself to the world. You can present yourself like as an outlaw, right? So you'll see this like Harley-Davidson presents themselves as the outlaw. Be free, be, you know, be wild, right? If you cross someone's archetype, right? So if they happen to be an outlaw, if your boss happens to be an outlaw and he's constantly trying to push the boundaries. But I I am someone who just really wants to follow the rules. We'll have a lot of friction, right? So understanding how people express themselves in the world, those are the archetypes and understanding how they consume the world. That's your primary material. If you can get those

Steven: [00:25:45] Two things and it only took

Steven: [00:25:47] Me, I don't know, 40 years or so to figure that out. You'll be a great team leader. You'll be a great team member. If you're going to create a company or expand a project, you'll really be able to grow it because you understand how people [00:26:00] work, both how they consume and how they produce in their personality.

Harpreet: [00:26:05] Absolutely love that

Steven: [00:26:06] In the book Synaptic

Harpreet: [00:26:07] Alchemy, which you guys should check out. He had all these different character types and there for for the Philosopher's Stone. There's a couple sure to you. Yeah, the sage, for sure. Really. I think that's what it's called the sage with the Yoda character. You have the picture of that and some elements of the of the hero. But but definitely the sage is what really stuck out to me. I was like, Oh man, that that definitely sounds like, yeah, right?

Steven: [00:26:31] And so, you know, and being able to tell someone, tell your significant other, Hey, this fits with me. So the sage is very much the teacher, right? So if I give you likes, it's very much a Yoda character.

Steven: [00:26:41] You imparts wisdom, right?

Steven: [00:26:43] So if you and I were working together, I would definitely go, Hey, could you show me and explain to me a little bit about so-and-so? And that would fill you up and you go, Yeah, I like working with Steven because I get to be this. I get to play the sage, right? And for me, you'll go, Hey, you know, let's take something apart and then put it back together in a different way and watch the world go. I'll go, Oh yes. You flipped my switch, dude.

Harpreet: [00:27:06] And the reason is so much with me because like a mentor for a mentorship platform program and I do these things like this, this podcast and I host these office hours and I actually used to be a high school teacher for a little while. It's true. And some of these to call them archetypes, characters, how do

Steven: [00:27:24] You define archetypes? Oh, so they're young and archetypes. So, you know, I didn't just kind of come up with this stuff out of my head. So the business stuff comes from business management innovation, Clayton Christensen, who is a Harvard Business School guy. Geoffrey Moore, who wrote Crossing the chasm. So there is. I took these things and I make I consume books and podcasts like yours voraciously, so a lot of the stuff flows through me. But then I also I have the academic underpinning to understand how it works. And then I put it on the ground and went from two employees to 700 employees in my last in company, right? So actually implementing this [00:28:00] and really understanding how all these things work and you notice you, you do the sage stuff, whether you knew that's what you called it or not. Right? And it's a young, young archetype. So Carl Young created these archetypes and Joseph Campbell and all these psychologists have taken these archetypes and really kind of fine tune them. So I just took it and said, What does it mean for entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs or guys who are, you know, trying to build something cool, whether it's inside a company or outside of company? And so understanding, you know, one of the things we did in my last company is we actually went through and we had teams and everybody kind of figured out which archetype they were and gave themselves a name, right? So the the anthropomorphize kind of name that I have is the Eagle because I get I want to fly high, I want to look at things, and my director of operations is a detail guy and I would fly high and I'd go, Let's go over there, and my director of operations would go, Who's a detail guy if we go, there's a hundred million landmines between here and there, and I'm like, Yeah, but let's go over there.

Steven: [00:28:58] And he's like, We're going to blow up, so stop doing that. Understand not getting mad at him and going, Oh, he's got my back because he's doing the detailed work that I, you know, I overlooked really allowed us to work well together.

Harpreet: [00:29:11] That's right. Doesn't say I really enjoyed about the book was the fact that you took these two disconnected things and smashed them together into something, right? The alchemy, you know, this practice of alchemy with business and entrepreneurship collide them together. And it just I love it. I love things that happen like that, that just collide particles of different, different disciplines together.

Steven: [00:29:32] It was it was pretty fun to be able to go, I'm going to take all these things. And then I got to put it in some way that is fun to understand and memorable. So, you know, if you look at alchemy, there's like everything from three steps to 50 steps and it gets complicated and personality Typekit know. Let's just simplify this because I got to go to work tomorrow, right? Yeah, it's got to be easy enough to understand that I can actually consume it,

Harpreet: [00:29:56] And we'll get into the three steps of alchemy that that credo [00:30:00] of Play-Doh, you know, I'll do, and it'll be better. Yeah, we'll get into those, but

Steven: [00:30:06] Got to create scale something he's understand because you've got to be able to go to work tomorrow because you're going to forget all this stuff.

Harpreet: [00:30:14] Exactly. So before you jump into that, then we got one more piece for that, that kind of know thyself puzzle. And that's this operational land. So we've got we've got our prime, we've got a Philosopher's Stone and now we have people this operational lens, what's this all about?

Steven: [00:30:28] So that's really just kind of slamming the two things together and seeing what your how you actually operate in a in a holistic fashion, right? So for

Steven: [00:30:38] Me, it's,

Steven: [00:30:40] You know, when I'm working on a team, the lens through which I see the world is through big picture and I express myself through systems, that's the magician and then be able to take that and go, OK, that that works. So when I have to do detail, I got to do it in advance. I want to I need to be able to give it off to other people. So the operational lens is really just taking these things and then will go, How do I, how do I operationalize this right? And if you think about,

Steven: [00:31:06] You know, how people do

Steven: [00:31:08] Things. So, for example, musicians see the world through music, right? Bakers see the world through ingredients, right coders. We tend to see the world through, you know, bits and bytes and, you know, coding constructs. So how do you operationalize

Steven: [00:31:22] Your area and your

Steven: [00:31:25] Archetype and actually express yourself? So I'll give you a clear example. I went to this restaurant one time and the chef was astonishing, and he came out and he was talking to me and I started to realize he's a detail guy. He wants to know eight grams goes into this thing of this ingredient and 12 grams of that ingredient. I'm like, OK, he's his premature as detail oriented. And how does he express himself kind of as a magician? He takes all of these ingredients. He understands that, Oh, I need some sweet over here and some salt over here. But really, what he's amazing at is baking. [00:32:00] So his desserts were phenomenal because they're very, very precise. So he operationalizing his perimeter of detail and his magic of understanding what tastes good on my tongue and creates a his operation lens is baking as a as can probably operationalize

Steven: [00:32:18] That world because his

Steven: [00:32:19] Meats and everything, they were good. They were. Spectacular, he's a chef, but they weren't out of this world. The desserts. Yeah, you fall back in your chair into a coma and happily be in a coma because of his desserts. So it was very interesting.

Harpreet: [00:32:31] I like that. I really helped make it concrete. Thank you very much. Yeah. This is going to appreciate that because we were talking about some really interesting abstract ideas that really helps gel everything together. So thank you for that. So, all right now, we're ready. Now we're ready to go through the three steps of the process for four synaptic alchemy here. And I guess talk to us like what are these three steps at a high level? And then we'll dig a little bit deeper on a couple of them.

Steven: [00:32:58] So this is what I call the alchemical transformation. These are the three steps you have to do to go through and convert anything, any idea into something valuable. Every single idea that is successful has gone through these three steps, whether they called it the alchemical transformation or not. And we'll use Amazon because that's one we all kind of know as the stereotypical piece to this. The first one is called well, it's called Negrito. So I took the the language of Alchemy, which is this medieval kind of fun language. It's kind of this D&D language and engraver was about blackening, so it's really destroy an old idea. And if you think about what Amazon did when they started right, Jeff Bezos said the old idea the old way of doing

Steven: [00:33:41] Business is you

Steven: [00:33:43] Have to buy books at a bookstore. I'm going to take a torch to that. I'm going to destroy that idea. And that's that's the first piece. That's the great come up with an old rule that no longer really works or is inefficient. And you probably see this every day of your life. When you're going around, you probably see, [00:34:00] you know, if you think about Elon Musk, I can go to the gas station and put my guests gas into a car. And Elon Musk said, no gas and cars. Oh, that's an interesting old idea. You're going, you're going to destroy gas. Yeah, I think I am. Wow. If you can do that, you're going to win. And he has right and he can do everything from giant all the way down to very small right. You can destroy an old idea. So Negredo is take an old idea, an old rule that no longer works or is no longer efficient, that you could deconstruct and say, we're going to take a flamethrower to that. That's step one. Step number two, albedo is the white name, and it is create a new rule, create something

Steven: [00:34:40] That replaces that.

Steven: [00:34:41] So in Amazon, we said, you know, Bezos said, you no longer have to go to a bookstore to buy a book. Right? Well, what do you do? You can get any book you want to your doorstep in two days. And if you kind of read up on Amazon, I think the largest bookstore, some of these big box bookstores and Barnes and nobles had like one hundred and fifty thousand SKUs in them. Amazon was 10 million SKUs. When you're never going to hold that in a bookstore because you're not going to sell the one book on bass fishing, you know, with lasers, you know, you're not going to find room for that. But he said, any book you want and I don't remember the name of the book, but the very first book that came out from that was bought by Amazon, as this was a super technical book that you couldn't find in bookstores. So old rule. Books are sold in bookstores. Destroy that new rule. Go on this cool internet thing and it's hard to pay for things. You know, when Amazon started, it wasn't as easy as it was now, but new rule.

Steven: [00:35:36] Whatever book you want any book on the planet that's ever been written, I can get it to your doorstep in two days. Wow. Do. And of course, he applied that to e-commerce in general. And then the third step rubato is. You have to breathe life into these ideas because the first one, the first two, are just rules. All the rule gets replaced by new rule. Then the third one is scale it. How do I do something that actually create a business around this or create a project [00:36:00] around it? And the language I have around that is make something so simple that anyone can do it. Amazon did that through the web. Right? And so accessible that everyone can get their hands on it. Well, the web makes it as accessible as possible. And Amazon obviously creates an app where it's more accessible for mobile. So you've got old rule. Destroy it, new rule. Come up with it. And then the last one scale it. Has to be as simple as possible for every for anyone to get their hands on it and easy enough that everyone can get their hands on it.

Harpreet: [00:36:34] So why do we have a step like the very first step is? Just destroying something, what's what's that all about now?

Steven: [00:36:43] So it's very interesting, yeah, it's very counterintuitive that you go the very first thing I want you to do is go tear something apart, because if you think about Joseph Schumpeter, who's an economist who really talked about creative destruction, all creativity comes from destroying the status quo, and the status quo could be something as simple as you know. You know, back in caveman time, we used rock for people over the head, let's come up and use rocks for creating a wheel so we can move stuff around, right? I think that's because as humans we have, we set ourselves up to be very status quo oriented. So once something starts, it has a lot of inertia and a lot of momentum. And to really get it to change, you have to destroy that inertia. It's all going in this direction and you're going to make it go an oblique angle that direction.

Steven: [00:37:29] You've got to stop

Steven: [00:37:30] It from moving in this direction. So it does feel counterintuitive that you have to destroy something to create something, but creating something in and of itself.

Steven: [00:37:41] Think about Steve

Steven: [00:37:41] Jobs in the iPod. He destroyed the idea that you're going to have a Walkman and you're going to have one cassette tape and you don't have to have your entire musical library with you. That idea evaporated when the iPod started, right? Bring your entire musical library! Spotify said. Forget about your musical library. Bring every [00:38:00] song on the planet that's ever been recorded on this cool device in your pocket.

Steven: [00:38:04] Right? And the idea we had

Steven: [00:38:06] Before that was why do they need 10 tapes? I need a mix tape for those ideas no longer exist, right? If you tell a young kid, Hey, I got a mix tape for you to go, what's a mixtape? Don't have access to everything, ever. Yeah, you do.

Harpreet: [00:38:20] Back in my days, I used to have to sit by the radio with an empty cassette tape, and at the hit record, if I wanted to get a tape, if I wanted to have a song to listen to later

Steven: [00:38:32] And hope that the DJ would shut up. Yes, fast enough. You want to ruin the song?

Harpreet: [00:38:37] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Not like that anymore.

Steven: [00:38:41] Not like that anymore. So I also think that they're so I use a and you won't see this in the book, but I use a three frame kind of concept to this, which is called problem, which I call problem pain symptom. And this is the thing that we have to destroy. The problem is, for example, the problem is I go to McDonald's and too many hamburgers and french fries, and I got

Steven: [00:39:01] 70 extra pounds on me, but I

Steven: [00:39:03] Don't suddenly become a health nut because I have a problem, right? So the old rule is I eat McDonald's every day. Right? Then the next thing that happens is the pain who? I'm winded going up and down the stairs. I don't become a health nut yet, right? Because I'm still kind of stuck in that old inertia of being a, you know, someone who's not healthy and they're eating. When I feel a shooting pain down my arm and my jaw is on fire and I got to call the paramedics and I'm in the ambulance and they're taking me to the E.R. the symptomology. Suddenly, I become the world's biggest kale enthusiast, right? I'm talking to God and telling God, if you get me out of this, I will eat kale the rest of my life, right? So the problem? Paine symptomology, the symptom is what ignites the destruction of the old behavior, right? So you go, Oh, OK, yeah, I'm having a heart attack. Rule, eat McDonald's. Every day I got a night that guy on fire. He's got to go away. But [00:40:00] it took a symptom to get me there, right? So that's why it's hard because we have to move through that symptom. All of that pain, that problem pain, symptomology, triad before we start to destroy stuff like that.

Harpreet: [00:40:10] A lot. Thank you very much. So the second stage, then the libido stage. Mm hmm. What's so unique about this stage? Yeah.

Steven: [00:40:20] So that's the create something. Create a new rule that replaces the old rule. And what's interesting is that if you look, if you go into onto Google and you type in, why brainstorming sucks, you'll get a ton of articles. And it's because, you know, and you get them from big company, you get them from McKinsey, you'll get them from professors, you know, Harvard professors. And what they'll say is a lot of times we go into companies and we go, OK, we need some innovation, we need some creativity. Let's brainstorm stuff, right? And what we do is we go, OK, let's put wings, you know, and let's make it gold and and we brainstorm things that will never get accomplished. So al-Bayda was designed to have a new rule that replaces that fills the void of the old rule. And you know, and there are certain steps that you can go through to come up with a new rule concept. There's you know, how do you pollinate? How do you germinate? How do you socialize? So the book kind of walks you through, how the hell do I do this right? But the albedo is really, you know,

Steven: [00:41:17] It's the state within the

Steven: [00:41:19] Old rule context. I destroyed something. I destroyed the idea that everybody has to, you know, doesn't want their entire music library on their person. Now everything we do from that point forward has to solve the old, the old rule that we're destroying, right? So it's not just as free for all, it's a how do we create something from the ashes of the destruction, the destruction? And that's where alchemy actually was really kind of neat as I was playing around with this. You start looking at this, you go, you start realizing, Oh, they pour acid on it things and they they deconstruct jazz, which is really what they're doing, which is what the destruction is about is to get rid of the form, but keep all of the elements. And then they go, Oh, we got all these cool elements. [00:42:00] What do we do now with all these things? And actually, Elon Musk talks about this with. First principles, right, so if you think about Space X, right, when he started Space X, he was thinking about, OK, let's send a rocket, and he's like, How do I? How much is a rocket, like $70 million? And he starts to deconstruct, starts to destroy. And he goes, Well, why is it $70 million? And he starts to look at what the cost of the actual components are. And it's a couple of million bucks to the actual components. So where's the other sixty eight million dollars kind of come in and go, Well, it's R&D costs and it's overhead. He's like, Yeah, screw that. I'm just going to buy the product itself, build my own rocket and create a whole new company called Space X. So the the destruction led to the creation. So it's creative destruction. It's Joseph Schumpeter, which is if you're an economist, you'll know that name, you know? And there's all sorts of good and bad with it. But the reality is. As humans, we walk through that problem, pain, symptomology all the time, and we destroy the old rule that got us to the symptom we didn't like, and we create a new rule from some of the ashes of the old stuff.

Harpreet: [00:43:03] He talked about the kind of the recipe for the later states that pollinate, germinate and socialize. So if I'm understanding you correctly, pollinate was just all about getting the ideas kind of into the head, writes just reading, researching, just exposing yourself to a bunch of of new information

Steven: [00:43:24] And information that's not within a given domain. If you go, I'm going to take music and physics and smash them together. That's a pollination of some sort.

Harpreet: [00:43:34] Talk to us about how you've kind of pollinated like in your life to to kind of create some of your businesses now.

Steven: [00:43:41] So I'll give you a real clear example. In the last company that I created, so called CIT Management, we took operational management concepts and software development concepts and smashed them into health care concepts for one simple reason. I'm not a health care guy. I don't know squat about health [00:44:00] like I do now, but I did when I started the company, and so I took ideas from one

Steven: [00:44:05] Flower and

Steven: [00:44:07] Pollinated another flower with it. And people come up and say, You can't do that. And of course, my first reaction is why? What's stock me?

Steven: [00:44:13] Oh, there's a regulation.

Steven: [00:44:15] Ok, well, let me go and take a look at the regulations. Actually, the regulations not stopping me because I can actually do this as long as I follow these steps and I follow the law of regulation. So the pollination is what spurs this creativity of what's the new idea, right? You know, if we didn't have the internet and we didn't have the web and Amazon came around, Jeff would have figured out some way to sell books to everybody on the

Steven: [00:44:38] Planet would have been harder.

Steven: [00:44:39] Right? It wouldn't have had such traction,

Steven: [00:44:42] But he would have

Steven: [00:44:43] Figured out, You know what? We don't need these warehouses called bookstores anymore. So a lot of space that we're paying for and I still can't get the book I want, right? How do I change that, right?

Harpreet: [00:44:53] And then once we do that, we move into the germinate stage. So what's that? Is that kind of just like a word sounds like we're just letting the ideas sit and simmer and combine and congeal what's happening in the

Steven: [00:45:06] Kind of right?

Steven: [00:45:07] But you're also getting them to grow.

Steven: [00:45:09] So you're putting if we're going to use kind of the flowering, which is kind of what this recipe is, you're putting the fertilizer and the, you know, the ingredients that you need to see which one of these things is going

Steven: [00:45:21] To grow in your

Steven: [00:45:22] Environment, right? So I'll give you a clear example. There was a bunch of guys at a bank and they were doing again, this kind of this, this fantastic brainstorming without any constraints and they're coming up with, you know, the bank wants to be more profitable and they were coming up with all these things. But the reality was that the bank was not going to change regulations. The bank was not going to go up against the government to get things changed. The bank wasn't going to spend more than $50000 on any idea, and you had to be profitable in the first three months with whatever your new idea was. So they came up with one hundred new ideas, all of which their environment, their soil, that these ideas are trying to grow up and died on the vine. So they wasted a lot of time listening to ideas that actually could [00:46:00] germinate in that soil. And that soil was what are my constraints? Because you think about soil, soil really does have constraints. You go, Oh, this soil has got a lot of nitrogen in this soil is great for coffee. You know, this climate is terrible for wine, so you really have to let these ideas germinate in the environment in which they're going to grow and see which of them actually, you know, get some lakes, build some roots and you, OK, now maybe I have something right? If Steve Jobs didn't have small enough chips and cheap enough memory, it was not going to build the iPod, right? So but he did right, and that was part of what allowed him to start to germinate.

Steven: [00:46:36] Yeah.

Steven: [00:46:37] How much stuff can we put on this? This little device, right? Or the phones what you know, radio frequency antennas are good enough that I can stick them in a small form factor. Hmm. Ok, so now I can start to germinate this idea in this in this world again, a lot of the stuff is easy to see in the rearview mirror. You know, ex post seen it in advance a priori. If you see something big enough in advance, you'll be a visionary and we'll be seeing you on the cover of the next magazine, right? But you can do it anything from gigantic visions all the way down to the smallest slice in your team, right? Here's a here's how I'm going to take some new ideas and see how that germinate in my team, in my company, right? You know, for example, I've got a buddy who works on Google Ads and super smart guy, and one of the things he was telling me was because Google Ads is so big. Any idea you have had better move the needle by billions of dollars?

Steven: [00:47:31] Or I won't get

Steven: [00:47:32] Any oxygen because this is such a big ship that if you want to have an idea, you better move this ship and to move this ship, you've got to move it. Moving it a little requires billions of dollars worth of revenue. So if you've got a really cool idea, but it's just

Steven: [00:47:45] A little bit forget it, you will

Steven: [00:47:47] Get no oxygen and your idea won't germinate. It will die.

Harpreet: [00:47:50] Yeah, at that point, just start your own thing, right? Like, break off from Google. Bring some of your friends

Steven: [00:47:54] Stuff right, right, or realize it's not going to happen and only look for big wins, right? It's like being it's like being [00:48:00] an entrepreneur in a pharmaceutical company. Most of the things you got to come up with had better start with $10 billion in revenue plus, so if you're in a big pharmaceutical company, that's what they need. If not, go to a

Harpreet: [00:48:11] Startup and then the final stage of the libidos, the socialization part of this. Talk to us about that.

Steven: [00:48:17] Yeah. So lots of times, entrepreneurs. So I follow stoicism as a as a good example for how to build your life, how

Harpreet: [00:48:26] To run my life. My philosophy of life as well.

Steven: [00:48:28] Yeah, it's great, right? And the daily stoic by Ryan, which his name holiday.

Harpreet: [00:48:32] Think Ryan holiday? Yeah.

Steven: [00:48:33] Yeah. Is a great site. Your listeners should absolutely go to that site. It's free to get the email. And one of them is Ego is the enemy. That's one of the principles of stoicism. So when I say it's never about you, it's never been about you, it's never going to be about you. If you're an entrepreneur, most of us go, No, but I want as soon as I hear the word, I go, Your ego is fully engaged and we're human. So I'm not saying it's good or bad. And I'm, you know, nowhere near having consumed this, you know, completely. But if to socialize requires you to get away from yourself and requires you to get into the AIs of either your customer or your team

Steven: [00:49:11] Or understand

Steven: [00:49:11] You, oh, it's a great idea, but you didn't talk. You didn't socialize with the legal team. And then in my world, it happened to be. It's a regulated industry, so I had to socialize this with my legal department and with my customers legal department, and they would tell me all the ways I couldn't do it, and I had to figure out ways around that.

Steven: [00:49:27] So as entrepreneurs or

Steven: [00:49:28] Entrepreneurs, we tend to believe that our point of view is the point of view socializing. It requires us to step out of ourselves and get it to somebody else and look at the world for somebody else's eyes. If you can't do that, you'll have a great idea and it won't germinate because it'll die on the vine

Steven: [00:49:44] Because somebody will kill it. Cfo will

Steven: [00:49:47] Kill it. You know, somebody will kill it somehow, right?

Harpreet: [00:49:50] And like when we're moving through these three stages, like, do they happen sequentially, concurrently, all over the place? How long should we be spending each?

Steven: [00:49:59] The answer is [00:50:00] no. Yes, maybe, right? The answer is, yeah, they're happening all over the

Steven: [00:50:04] Place because you're not just

Steven: [00:50:06] Doing this in one bubble, for example, as an entrepreneur, I'm doing this when I'm financing my company, when I'm building, when we're doing product development, when we're doing sales. I'll give you a real clear example. One of the things we did with my company, the snappy alchemy of our sales department, was, you know, everybody tells you when you're building a sales team that you have to have quotas, you have to tell you you guys got to sell a million dollars a year. And I was trying to figure out that doesn't make any sense to me. So in my company, we the negrito piece, we burn to the ground. No sales quotas. My sales guys had a hard time. Like what? You don't care how much they sell, but when you're on commissions, you get a piece of what you sell, so you probably care how much you sell the albedo piece was. You know, what we're going to believe in is not sales quotas, but sales process. Got to talk to your customers. You got to. You have to do these things. We all believe that these things will generate sales, right? And then we put it in a real simple way for them to understand it. So that became the rubato piece. So it happens all the time, everywhere in different ways, right? Because it's really hard to see the future. And there's a great quote that is if you want to know what the future holds, the best way to know what the future holds is to create it. And you're creating it all the time. You know, if you're in a team, you might have four or five product ideas that you're going to run through the alchemical transformation. And some of them are going to die in certain points and you're going to have to go back and go, Oh, I thought I could destroy this idea, but I can't. Maybe I can just write part of that idea. It is an iterative cycle. It's very agile. If you're in the software development, it's an agile scrum type of concept. It's not. It's definitely not waterfall.

Harpreet: [00:51:43] And one part that I really, really enjoyed was just coming up with better questions because I feel like this is something that I've heard from my mentees. They really struggle with is like, they don't even know why questions are important, let alone how to even come up with better questions. So [00:52:00] can you share some tips on how we can do that in our work? Yeah.

Steven: [00:52:02] So in my last company, we used what I call CI AIs Commander's intents, and that comes from a book called Made to Stick. It's a great book. You should all read it, and it actually comes from the military. So Commander's intent is essentially just a soundbite

Steven: [00:52:16] That people

Steven: [00:52:17] Can consume, and then they don't have to ask the general away at the top Hey, should we go and chase this city? So we had about thirty seven sound bites, essentially that ran my last company, and it allowed me to do things to really scale my capabilities. And one of them was

Steven: [00:52:33] The following soundbite.

Steven: [00:52:35] A better question is more important than the right answer, because usually the right answer to the wrong question. And that and my CEO would constantly come in and goes, I have the answer to this and I go great. And he'd say, it's in front of you to your left by 10 degrees that go great, but the questions behind you by about 180 degrees. It's like, Dammit, I solved the problem. So as soon as you have a solution, you know that you're not asking a question anymore. You are making a decision, right? So one of the things that I'll do all the time is I will ask the same question five times. This is an old kind of a, I guess, a leadership trait. So I'll say, for example, you know, what are you selling? So when I ask you, what are your listeners want to listen to on your podcast, I'll go, what do they

Steven: [00:53:19] Want to listen to? And you'll give me a

Steven: [00:53:20] Response, and then I'll sit and I'll go, OK, great. I understand what they want to listen to, but what do they want to listen to? I want you to get deeper, and what you're trying to do is get to the point where there's no ambiguity in what you say, right? You go. What I'm really selling for and I'll give you a clear example. Talking to somebody the other day and I said, What are you selling? Because I'm selling media coverage for football teams? I'm like, OK, great, you know, because all football teams need people to know where they're at and everything. But what are you really selling so well? I'm selling to mostly high school teams, and really what I'm selling is, you know that parents can see their kids and media coverage. Great. What are you selling? It took [00:54:00] me a minute and go, I'm selling the fact that parents are spending money to be have their kids on a football team. They want to see their kids names in the newspaper. So now we're starting to understand something a little more interesting. So by repeating this questioning, you can do it all different levels finance project. What are you selling? What are you doing? What is your customer want? Why are you here? Whatever the question is and really getting out to first principles where you can't break it any further? That's a better question.

Harpreet: [00:54:29] Absolutely love that. I actually love that. So it's not hard to do, but it's not easy at the same time, because like when I when I started digging in more and more why I just feel like I sound like an asshole. I just keep asking this guy, right? It's a matter of how to how to phrase it right.

Steven: [00:54:45] And yeah. But, you know, kind of that

Steven: [00:54:49] Phrase you said, you know, might be an inappropriate. The answer is, what is the other person looking for? If you're looking for a truth? So one of the things I will do is I will dial up situations to see where the edge cases are. So you say, OK, we have to build this thing. So that way, this machine learning answer will give us back the answer. Ok, great. How much confidence we have to have the answer. Only 70 percent. All right. So on the seventy one percent, that's OK. So you can start, you can start to go. What do you want if you want me just to tell you, Yeah, your idea is fantastic. Go. Ok, great. You know, I'll give you it's you're more than welcome to have me blow smoke, right? If you really want the truth. We're going to push. Harp to the end, where we stop having things that have assumptions built into them, and we're going to get to truth. And it's going to be hard and you're going to be wrong lots of times. But once you get to truth. Truth is truth.

Harpreet: [00:55:42] And this finally leads us to the rubato mindset. And how is this different from the other parts that we've discussed?

Steven: [00:55:51] So the negrito is a mindset destroy an old rule. The al-Bayda is a mindset. Create a new rule. Ribeiro is breathe life into [00:56:00] this. And actually, how are we going to create it right? So that's it becomes much more tactical. And the reason it's called rubato is actually an alchemy. It's the reddening. It's putting blood into, you know, actually breathing life into your idea, right? So you can go, I'm going to go from lead. We're going to destroy the lead, make it black and we're gonna have pieces of atoms and we're going to take it and we're going to kind of rearrange the atoms. It's going to kind of look like gold. And then we're going to boil it to a point where you go, that's gold. I can pour that into a mold. I can make rings out of it. I can make jewelry out of it. I can make pieces out of it. So the rubato is, can your concept become easy enough for anyone to use and accessible enough for everyone to get their hands on? That's the question you're going to ask a thousand and one times, right? And for example, in Rubino, one of the pieces is friction. So talk about friction a lot. Lots of people. Let's look at Clubhouse. Clubhouse has a high friction now. Will that work? Will it not work? I'm not quite sure, but they're using it as kind of fear of missing out. The only way I can go get access to Clubhouse is to find someone else who's got access to Clubhouse and get me an invite, right?

Steven: [00:57:08] I'm not on

Steven: [00:57:09] Clubhouse for a real simple reason. I'm not going to go through the hassle of going to find someone to give me an invite.

Steven: [00:57:14] I don't care enough.

Steven: [00:57:15] They've increased the

Steven: [00:57:16] Friction, so I don't know if

Steven: [00:57:18] They're going to make it past that rubato

Steven: [00:57:19] Stage.

Steven: [00:57:20] Facebook used to have that right. It used to be that you had to get invited

Steven: [00:57:23] To Facebook

Steven: [00:57:24] When they started to grow. What's the very first thing that Zuckerberg did remove that anybody who cares can get on to Facebook, remove the friction, make it easy enough that anyone can

Steven: [00:57:35] Get their hands on?

Steven: [00:57:36] So the rubato piece is answer the following question Is it simple enough that anyone can use it? And is it accessible enough that everyone can get their hands on it? And so it's a real it becomes much more tactical, right? It's not ephemeral like the first two are. This is really, oh wow. Is this easy enough right now? Google, for example, one of the things that I know for sure that they're constantly pushing on is, [00:58:00] is it faster? Is it fast enough? Are we our our search results fast enough? Dude, it's one hundredth of a second. I know. Get it down to one thousandth of a second. Why? Because we want to make it so easy that anyone can use it. So it feels almost like it's in your head. That's the reason they're pushing. That's the reason they've won. Right?

Harpreet: [00:58:19] Yeah. So it's all about going from ideas to systems, right? So. Mm hmm. So, so how do we stop, I guess, thinking about the creation? And start thinking about the process of producing the creation.

Steven: [00:58:35] Now it's it's literally answering those two questions, so you've got a new rule and then you go, is it as simple as I can make it and you'll see it in the book, there's a bunch of ways of talking about Did I increase friction?

Steven: [00:58:45] Did I make it

Steven: [00:58:46] Harder for people to use this right? You know, is it three clicks instead of two, right? When I'm designing the app, right? When you're sitting in a design

Steven: [00:58:53] Session, what's an

Steven: [00:58:54] Extra click? Who cares? I care. Right? You consistently ask those questions over and over and over again until you either have every customer or right. So if you think about Amazon, Amazon, ask that question over and over and over again. When he got down to e-commerce, I aim to sell not just books, not just I need to sell everything, everything, and then I got to get it to your door now. Right? Essentially, instant as close to instantaneous, and that changed the way they did their operations models. So it's literally answering those questions. It's no longer thinking about the, you know,

Steven: [00:59:30] The answer to

Steven: [00:59:31] How to how do I create a new rule? It's how do I implement? And the two questions you're going to answer is, you know, those two questions that I said, and then you're going to do that by reducing friction and by, you know, kind of walking through the there's a recipe in the book that talks about that.

Harpreet: [00:59:44] Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much. And the book Synaptic Alchemy, guys, check it out. It is good. So I mean, I really enjoyed reading it. It's almost 400 pages. It is. There's a massive book, a lot of great stuff in here that I went through voraciously. I probably read [01:00:00] it in about a week. Just I loved. I loved it a lot. It was really good.

Steven: [01:00:03] But I'd like to give you one of the things I'll be doing, and I haven't done it yet, but I'll be creating a course at the end of this year. If your readers buy the book and send me the receipt to Pod at Synaptic Alchemy dot com. The course which I'll probably charge two hundred bucks for, give it to them for free for all of your readers.

Harpreet: [01:00:20] Oh absolutely, man. We'll definitely include a link to that in the in the show notes. But like, how do you how do you keep like the moving parts? Like How do you remember this all? How can. What are some tips you can share with us for how to use and implement these ideas that you talk about? Because like, I'm forgetful, like guy. But you've been wrestling with these ideas for quite some time. How do we? Yeah, how do we implement this? How do we do?

Steven: [01:00:43] Yeah, I try to keep it as simple as possible. Three steps, right? Destroy something. Create something, you know, scale something, and then you've got to go back to the darn book to figure out what the hell did he say on Page sixty five right about this? So I really do try to simplify things. So when it comes to Myers Briggs, for example, I actually simplified that down into four different categories because otherwise you've got to become an expert on stuff. So I'm big on simplify, simplify, simplify. Right? And that's really kind of for me, that's the, you know, the way you got to do it and then you just got to do it over and over and over again. So once you see the world through a synaptic alchemy lens, you will never see it again in any way. Other than that, you'll see cars. You go, Oh yeah, there's Negredo over there, there's the destruction over there, there's the creation. Oh, and they're going to when I like, I said, when I talk about Clubhouse, Oh yeah, they might trip on the third part, that scale part because they got a lot of friction, right? And they're going to have to remove that. You'll start to use it over and over and over again. So I do a lot of martial arts and with martial arts, you got to you. Do you punch and block one hundred thousand times to get till it gets into muscle memory? Before you go into the ring against an opponent who's going to knock your block off, you do it with it, you know, with the teacher who goes right, punch with your left hand, punch [01:02:00] with the right hand block, right? So for me, it's repetition, but it's super simple basics that are repeated over and over and over again.

Harpreet: [01:02:07] So encourage you guys to all check this book out. I really enjoyed it. Hundred percent endorse this one. So last formal question before we jump into what I call the random round, and that is it's one hundred years in the future. What do you want to be remembered for?

Steven: [01:02:22] Yeah, that's a great question. It's a hard question,

Steven: [01:02:25] But I think the the

Steven: [01:02:27] Answer is being able to teach it kind of fits with your stage, being able to teach as many people as possible that everyone has the ability to do phenomenal things. And it's not as hard as you think. And here's you know, and this is my first book, my last book, my 20th book whatever, right? That's really what I want to be able to teach. I want to be able to go. Everyone has the ability to be extraordinary, and it's not as hard as you think.

Harpreet: [01:02:54] Absolutely love that. Absolutely love that. Thank you. So first question out of the random round here. When do you think the first video to hit one billion views on YouTube will happen? What's it going to be about?

Steven: [01:03:09] Wow, that's hopefully it's about the next company I'm investing in that they're hitting a trillion views. They're knocking out of the park.

Steven: [01:03:16] So if you think about

Steven: [01:03:17] Youtube and you think about so we got what, seven billion people on this planet, how many of them are using the internet? And let's say, you know, two, two and a half billion kind of watch a video, what? Eighty times? To get to a trillion mark. It's definitely going to have to be about entertainment. It's either going to be entertainment or it's going to be something that has scarcity to it. So if you were to look at, for example, when the challenger blew up back in the U.S. at the 80s, right, there was one video of that right. So you couldn't go and see one hundred different matches. You watched one video and you might watch it 70 or 80 times because you said it's that video is scarce. So I think it will either be about entertainment or it will be about an event that is scarce that someone captured that will want to see over [01:04:00] and over again. And there's only, you know, it's almost like an NFT if you think about it in cryptocurrency terms, right? There's one, you know, Mona Lisa and you go and you see it a million times because it's worth seeing. I think unfortunately, it could be about something that is problematic with our society. Right. So we just heard about the verdict that came out with the ex police officer in George Floyd, right? So that VIDEO I don't know how many times that video has been watched, but I'm sure it's a lot, right? So it could be something scarce because it's problematic and we want to see it because we're kind of a a society that wants to look at things that are problematic or it'll be entertainment. Or maybe it's a combination of the two. It's a, you know, a costume malfunction like Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl, and there's only one of them. You're going to watch it 80 times. Right?

Harpreet: [01:04:47] That was probably like the most scientific type of answer I've gotten. Most people just like, Oh, it's going to be some cats or something. Oh yeah, I like that. Definitely my favorite answer to that, to that question. Thank you. So you mentioned you are a voracious reader. So what are you currently reading?

Steven: [01:05:02] So I will reread stuff. So I'm currently reading right now is actually I'm rereading that. So it's principles by Ray Dalio.

Steven: [01:05:11] I've read it

Steven: [01:05:12] Before. He's a very

Steven: [01:05:15] Concise thinker, and he talks

Steven: [01:05:17] About first principles he gets down to, you know, really what's at the bottom? He'll make you ask that question five times what is my investment thesis? Why am I investing? Why am I at this job? Why am I with this person? Why am I acting? Why am I eating a hamburger versus working out right? So he forces you to get to principles. So that's what I'm reading.

Harpreet: [01:05:37] Yeah, absolutely love that book about the it's like a I don't want say it's a children's book, but it's an animated book version of that.

Steven: [01:05:43] It's awesome, right? It's spectacular.

Harpreet: [01:05:45] Super thing. I got that from my my son. He's he's one year old, so I'm looking forward to reading about of the animated video that goes with that.

Steven: [01:05:52] So if you think about that from a rubato standpoint, easy enough that anyone can understand it, right? And, you know, simple enough, anyone can understand it and easy [01:06:00] enough that anyone can get on the internet. It's a children's book, right? You know? You know, people who are not in economics can read it so you can flip through it super quick. Yeah. Ray, you nailed it, right?

Harpreet: [01:06:10] Yeah. Absolutely. What songs do you currently have on repeat?

Steven: [01:06:14] So what's the name of the song during it? So there's a band I love that I actually saw in L.A., and I think the lead singer passed away. I don't remember 15 or 20 years ago called Bebe Chungking and the Screaming Buddha Heads, and now they're just called the Buddha Heads and there's a fantastic song. So if you go onto Spotify and just take on Buddha heads, if you like blues based rock and roll, right, you like Stevie Ray Vaughan or Clapton? Got to listen to these guys are awesome. And there's this song called Thinking No More

Steven: [01:06:40] Dues, and it hits me

Steven: [01:06:42] Real hard because I think as business people are an entrepreneur, you know, I feel it on my shoulders. There's dues to pay, right? And he talks about that moment in life where you are free enough after you go. I've paid all my dues. And that song really hits me. And so, yeah, that one I'll have on replay a thousand times and I'll be, you know, working on my computer and I'll have a tear coming down. I am like, Wow, you hit me again. So B.B. King and the screaming Buddha heads go, listen to him. They're awesome.

Harpreet: [01:07:09] Definitely be checking that out, man. Thanks for that random question. Generator time. All right, here we go. What's your go to dance music?

Steven: [01:07:18] So that's a great question. My sister is a well, was a professional dancer when she was young. She danced in Madonna videos and stuff like that. And so she's

Steven: [01:07:26] Done salsa her

Steven: [01:07:27] Whole life. I'm not a dancer on a martial artist, but a couple of years ago I said, I've got to go understand what my sister finds out about this. So salsa. So I took some salsa classes and it was awesome because you get a dance with a partner. And then if you want to go to a club, there are salsa clubs and it's super fun. So salsa

Harpreet: [01:07:43] Is awesome. What is one of your favorite smells?

Steven: [01:07:46] Oh wow, that's good. My fiance's perfume.

Harpreet: [01:07:50] And which one is it? Because my wife's birthday's coming up?

Steven: [01:07:53] I'll send it to because I'm not quite sure I'm ahead

Harpreet: [01:07:58] In your group of friends. [01:08:00] What role do you play?

Steven: [01:08:02] Oh, that's a good one. Lots of time. I'll play Sage. But I also depend upon the dynamics of the group. I will sit back and I will shut up because, as you can tell, I can suck all the air out of a room. Pretty quick, right? I've got a big personality, so sometimes I'll be super quiet and people come and go, what you want to say about this? And then if they ask me my opinion, I will tend to to do it, and I'll tend to deconstruct things and push on the edges and go. So it tends to. Be kind of provocateur. But in a thoughtful way, so thoughtful provocateur would be the role.

Harpreet: [01:08:35] I think I like that like that pet peeves.

Steven: [01:08:39] Oh, that's good. People who violate boundaries. So people who are not, who don't reciprocate, right, you know, you do something for them and then they just continue to take from you. So if you think about what is it, Shel Silverstein, his book The Giving Tree, How the Tree gave and gave and gave and gave until there's nothing left. So people who take, take, take, take until there's nothing left. Who does that piss me off?

Harpreet: [01:09:00] Yeah, yeah, no. I feel you. We'll do one more from here. And that is what's the best piece of advice you have ever received?

Steven: [01:09:08] Oh, interesting. The best piece of advice I've ever received. Probably the one that gave me that question. I mean, that statement, which is a better question, is more important than the right answer, and it actually came from a very dear friend of mine. He pushed me and said, Stop thinking you have all the answers. And I was young. I was in my twenties and I'm like, Yeah, and ask more questions, because as soon as I think I have all the answers, I'm done. I've closed off all the options. I'm like, Damn it. So his statement of stop thinking, you have all the answers, ask better questions.

Harpreet: [01:09:43] I absolutely love that. How can people connect with you? Where can they find you online? Where it can get? Look at.

Steven: [01:09:48] Yep. So the book is real simple, right? Amazon, Barnes Noble, Apple. You know, you can get the Kindle, the digital version, and you can get a physical version. You can get a paperback, so just go anywhere. Like I said, if you send me your receipt to [01:10:00] pod at and mi.com, when I do release my course, I will give you that course for free. You can go to Snapchat and you'll actually that's where you'll find information about the book and you'll find some know some free chapters and you'll hear me talk about it. My personal LinkedIn just go search for me, even card NLP on LinkedIn. I don't use Twitter as much as I probably should, but you can find me on Twitter as well. And then if you go to Facebook slash synaptic alchemy, you can find me there. And that's where the kind of the cohort for Snapchat Alchemy. So a lot of it is, you know, either through synaptic alchemy or individually LinkedIn. And sometimes Twitter.

Harpreet: [01:10:35] I'll be sure to link to all of that in the show notes. Stephen, thank you so much for taking time in our schedule to come and talk to us about your book. I really appreciated it. Take care and have a good rest of the evening.

Steven: [01:10:47] Thank you. It's been really fun. I appreciate it.