BigDeal - #133 Be ARTICULATE and Speak SMARTLY: Communicate Like A Pro

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Starting point is 00:00:30 There's a moment we've all had at least once. You're in a high stakes environment. Someone challenges your idea and the whole room turns to look at you. And your mind just blanks. And then 40 minutes later, you're in the elevator. And the perfect response just hits you. That's what we're fixing today because thinking fast isn't about being smarter. It's about structuring your thoughts under pressure.

Starting point is 00:00:50 So we're going to bring data, experience from the best in the world so that you can build any skills, just like speaking, step by step. I'm Cody Sanchez, and this is the Big Deal podcast. Let's go. Okay, really quick also, before we start, my producer just pulled me aside and told me three quarters of our regular Big Deal audience aren't subscribed. So I'd like to ask you something personal. If you've ever learned something or changed your perspective or had a realization because of this podcast, please do me a personal favor and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Subscribing is the single best way to help us grow the show. And I have to say something

Starting point is 00:01:28 excited. Last week, this channel just crossed 500,000 subs. You know, a year ago, we were at 37,000, so I still can't wrap my head around that fully. I just want to say thank you, and let's get into it. So I got some stats for us. Why does your brain betray you in those moments? Let's start with a really uncomfortable truth. You don't freeze because you are not smart. You freeze because your brain is overloaded. There are actually three things happening instantly when you're on the spot. The first is called cognitive overload. Like you're trying to understand the question, think of an answer, judge how you sound, predict how they'll react. That's four processes at once. Your brain literally wasn't built for that. And the second is stress overload. You know,

Starting point is 00:02:09 when pressure hits, your brain shifts actually from the prefrontal cortex. That's like your thinking brain to the amygdala, your survival brain. And I see this all the time in exacts and people who work in my company. So I want to help you get better at it because you make more money and you get more of what you want out of life if we can help you respond better, including me. There's actually an amazing 2005 study that was in the journal of experimental psychology. And they looked at performance under pressure and found that pressure reduces working memory capacity. So basically, your ability to hold and manipulate thoughts in real time, well, that gets severely impacted when you're under stress. So that's the killer. You start thinking,

Starting point is 00:02:50 actually, how do I sound smart? What's the perfect answer? What if I'm wrong? Or maybe that's just me. And instead of speaking clearly, you stall. Let me tell you how this can hurt you in business and life. How many times have you sat in a meeting with a group of other people and you had a brilliant idea? And that brilliant idea was at the tip of your tongue. But you couldn't kind of get the balls up to say it. And so when they asked you what you had to say or contribute, just said, oh, you know, nothing. I think, oh, let me just add on to her point. I think that was a good point. Just add on. happens to me all the time. And I remember one time in particular. I was early in my career at a company called Vanguard. And there was a group of us were in the accelerated development program.

Starting point is 00:03:29 And I had talked last night with one of my friends, Ian, about a brilliant idea in my mind, a brilliant idea I had that was what we should do as a group in our next basically mission set. And my idea, you know, was that we should build something out in Spanish and for Latin America because this company hadn't done anything there yet. Now, I actually speak Spanish. I've done business in Latin America, even back then. So this was like my idea. And I remember Padilla led it back and forth with Ian and the night before. And then when they came around to ask us our questions, I felt like other people had better answers than I did. So I kind of like waited till the end. And so they were like going around, who wants to go first? Who wants to go first? Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. What do you think happened? Well, they went to Ian first. And all of a sudden, Ian talked about their Spanish expansion. that they should do. And so this is actually normal. It's not just you and I. Like Warren Buffett was actually terrified of public speaking in his career early on, which is crazy. And he wasn't just like bad at it. He says he was terrified of it. This is a billionaire, one of the richest men in the world. He avoided classes. He didn't do presentations. And then he realized something. His fear wasn't about

Starting point is 00:04:39 public speaking. His fear was really, are you going to judge me while I'm thinking? So he trained to have a structure to think. That's why Warren Buffett actually kind of got famous for mental frameworks, which is fascinating. If you know Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, they're very famous for frameworks. So they'll talk about inverse thinking. They'll talk about killing complexity. They'll talk about a reverse to-do list. All of that is because he forced himself into situations where he had to develop his public speaking ability. And because he was still too scared, he had to come up with frameworks to help him speak better. And so it's kind of fascinating because he later volunteered to teach at University of Omaha just so he could overcome this fear. And then soon, you know, his signature,

Starting point is 00:05:26 what is now old-timey sense of humor was like everywhere. You know, his keynotes became marquee moments in culture. And his Berkshire Hathaway, that's his company, his conferences that he hold, it is a stock conference, you guys. Those things are so boring. They usually have to pay people to attend them. This one is like a rock show. So for a man that used to hate to speak publicly, used to be scared of how to respond to now run a rock concert for a stock conference is fascinating. But the thing is, his confidence came after he made structural adjustments to the way he thought. So if you don't perform well under pressure, yes, you need to put yourself under pressure frequently, but you also need to figure out the core skills on how to structure your thinking.

Starting point is 00:06:11 Hot take. Fast thinking or being quick on your feet is actually a myth. So I think what you're really seeing is fast structuring. So all the research that we've been doing shows the best communicators aren't improvising. They're slotting ideas into frameworks they use hundreds of times. So when you see them sound smart fast, it's really just like they're recall, recall, recall. They're not thinking on the spot. So the golden rule is kind of like, if your thoughts have structure, your speech will have speed. Structure equals speed.

Starting point is 00:06:39 There's a great phrase we're going to teach you today to help you. When in doubt, pace it out. Okay, this is cute. P is for point, as in make your point. A is for add context. C is concrete example and E is end claim. So here's an example of the Pace method. Let's say you're asked a question. Why do most people fail financially? Why are most people broke? A bad answer might be like, well, you know, I think it's about bad decisions and people don't do budgeting. A good answer to that using the Pace method would go like this. Most people fail financially because they spend before they invest. That's the point. That creates a cycle where money never compounds. Add context. You see it with

Starting point is 00:07:20 high earners living paycheck to paycheck, reckless businessmen. Concrete example. If your money isn't working first, you're already behind. End clean. Now, why does this work? Put simply, it's fast, it's substantive, and you're reducing thinking into one idea, one explanation, one example, one conclusion. So your brain actually like it treats it like a filing cabinet basically. And your brain can handle that under pressure. Fun fact, do you know that this is also how they train politicians? I've become friends with a lot of, do I want to use the word friend? I've become acquaintances with a lot of politicians because I think they control our world and we got to work with them one way or the other. And it's fascinating. I was sitting in a room actually last week, some of the leaders of

Starting point is 00:08:08 the free world. I'm not allowed to talk about where I was. I'm not allowed to talk about that I went. I'm not allowed to talk about who was there. You know what I can talk about? I sat in a room where these couple of guys literally brought in governors from different states, sat the governors down, listened to the governors, get peppered with questions. And then in the end, they circled around. I don't know why they let me in here, you guys. We should talk about that.

Starting point is 00:08:32 At the end, they looked at each other and they just said, should we run him? I felt like it was like a diabolical, you know, but what do they mean? You know, they meant run him for president. They were like literally prepping presidential candidates now for next run. And so why was one governor considered good or bad? They used the pace method or they didn't. Now, think about even a less diabolical one would be like Steve Jobs. So he didn't speak quickly. He spoke with massive intention. And it's the reason we have so many incredible quotes from this guy. Like one of my favorite books is actually the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. And he has this one. And he has this one. line, which is basically that people think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. It actually means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. He also talked about being a yardstick for quality or how some people aren't used to the environment where excellence is expected or your time is limited. So don't waste it living someone else's life. That one's my favorite. He used very few words, but he had a pretty big

Starting point is 00:09:37 impact. And I think the secret to basically thinking quickly is this preloading of your brain. So that's your first cheat code. You don't have to rely on thinking fast in the moment. You need to prep. So how do we prep for these high stakes conversations? I like to think about it like building mental assets. So high performers don't memorize answers. They prep these frameworks, collecting stories and allergies. And they always seek to reduce to first principles. Why? Because your brain can retrieve faster than they can create, right? It's kind of obvious. Like, how fast can you grab a book versus how fast can you write one? In fact, Charlie Munger had a mental framework for this. He says, I carry a latticework of mental models in my head. So good. But what does he mean? He means, like,

Starting point is 00:10:23 in his head, he has all these things he can throw back to. And sometimes, you guys, like, not to my own little horn here, but when I'm on a podcast, people will say, well, you talk in tweets or you have a high signal to noise. You know what I'm doing? I'm just going to, in my head, I have a series of ladders on which I can climb to get to different points that are just sort of stacked. I'm not solving the answers to these problems from scratch in real time, neither is Charlie. If you memorize isolated facts, that's not going to help you solve problems at scale. Instead, what do you got to do? Construct these interconnected networks of key ideas from multiple disciplines, and you use those to interpret the world. And that's actually really the job of a CEO. If you want to figure out

Starting point is 00:11:04 what the job of the CEO is, it's communicate well, get other people to buy into your dream and understand how to solve complex problems using a series of unrelated disciplines or networks. You know what the job of a CEO is not? Memorizing thousands of individual facts. That's not going to do it for you. Here's an exercise for you to build this skill. You guys, you want to do this live with me so we can all, you know, make more money, become better people, get what we want out of life. Here's what I think we should do. So I want you to pick any topic you care about. Build three frameworks, three examples, three strong opinions. We call these spiky points of view. You'll be surprised how often these mental models will become useful. Right now, I'm interviewing people.

Starting point is 00:11:46 Let me know in the comments if any of you guys are looking for a job right now. One, we're hiring a bunch of people. Also, I know it's miserable out there, so I'm sorry, if you are. A lot of people interviewing right now are fucking awful at interviewing with so much love, so bad. You guys might be really good, but you're really bad at interviewing. And so let's have a topic you care about, such as why you should hire me because I'm a stud. I want you to build three frameworks. And so what would those look like? It might be like, what does every boss want? Work hard. You know, I care too much. You know, I do too much. Whatever. Those could be your three frameworks. But the frameworks might be like my number one core value is the day isn't done until the job is done. You know, I believe in completion

Starting point is 00:12:28 in things because I think that's what makes people successful. Oh, bosses are going to love that. Two, if we go, I care too much. I believe that how you do anything is how you do everything. What does that tell them? They're going to be really detail-oriented. Three, I believe in constant learning. If you were to scroll through my Twitter or my Instagram,

Starting point is 00:12:51 you would find it full of X that we do at this job because I'm obsessed with this game. You're going to have to drag me out of this industry. by my cold dead fingers. Great. You've got three frameworks. Then I want you to find three examples. One, when did you do something really hard in your career? They might ask you. So your first example is going to be like, my last job, we had, like just pick a project, any project. We had to ship this video out by this date. And if we didn't get it done, we were going to lose a $50,000 sponsorship. And I worked the job until we got it done. Just give me three examples like that.

Starting point is 00:13:26 And then three strong opinions. One strong opinion may be, I only like to work with A players. My goal is to be on a team of other people who want to succeed. And the one thing that is a downside to me is if the team is full of B players. That's a strong opinion. Also a good aligned opinion. Second strong opinion could be like, I want to work on companies that are using and interested in AI. I think the future is going there. And so I'm curious for you, how are you guys using AI in your business right now? Turn that question around on them. You will be surprised at how often and mental models are useful. Because now your brain is not actually answering their questions. It's just selecting the idea. Also, we talked about this in my 3-2-1 episode on speaking. You should go back and listen

Starting point is 00:14:07 to it after this one if you want to get better at speaking. But we talked about the power of the pause. Here's it a different way, which is if you don't know the answer, shut the fuck up for a second, give your little brain time to catch up. It's actually totally fine because it's a signal of confidence. So that two-second gap is my little monkey brain, at least time to catch up, could do the same for you. And, you know, when I think that I feel uncomfortable and it's too much, I go back and I watch Barack Obama. He is like one of the most famous pauses of all time. He uses the pause all the time. He's so famous for pausing that there are entire compilations online of him pausing to collect his thoughts.

Starting point is 00:14:47 And he's a smart guy. Is it hesitation? I don't know. But it looks like control. There's actually a great paper that was written in 2025. And it was called organizational behavior and human decision processes. And it basically found that brief pauses in speech increase positive listener responses. Whereas when you do fillers like, yeah, uh-huh, that actually decreases their responses.

Starting point is 00:15:16 Okay. So moral of the story, pausing's okay. Don't freak out. It also reduces that cognitive load we were talking about, making it easier. for whoever you're talking to, basically, to process what's going down. Now, the opposite of this is rambling, which is, it's the great vibe killer of all time. So what is rambling? That's just you not structuring your thinking. And sadly, it signals incompetence and dishonesty, even if it really is not that. But we fix it by giving ourselves some constraints, which I kind of think of like bumper

Starting point is 00:15:46 lanes on the bowling alley to how we speak. So we only hit strikes, right? I like the three-point rule. So instead of leadership is like a lot of things, great leaders do three things. They set direction, make decisions, take responsibility, right? Now you're in control. The idea is that the three ideas gives clarity and that clarity signals intelligence. One of my other tricks is if you can't speak well, write well. So how do you control the frame? Let's say you're just like, Cody, I'm just an introvert. I don't want to talk too much. Set the frame in a meeting. You know, one of my favorite stories about a founder insisting on clarity. is Jeff Bezos banning PowerPoint presentations at Amazon and mandating a brief at the beginning of every single meeting. So you could do that. If you're like, I know I'm not going to be

Starting point is 00:16:32 able to get my stuff out as clearly as I want right now, send a brief, control the beginning of the meeting, and say the first five minutes we're going to read the brief. You control the frame without even having to say anything. And this makes so much sense to me because he was actually annoyed that his pre-meeting memos were getting ignored. And he realized he was like, all right, I'm going to carve meetings time into my meetings for the team to get on the same page. And so that alignment process meant no PowerPoints because you could say a bunch of stuff and it could take forever. And he would find that people in slides would do a bunch of graphics or images and it would

Starting point is 00:17:09 hide bad thinking. And so instead, you know, Bezos would say a PowerPoint is kind of like a sales tool. And internally, the last thing you want to do is sell, your truth seeking. You're trying to find the truth. So he made sure that actually all his leaders wrote a page of well-structured narrative text that everyone would read silently at the beginning of every meeting. And once they had finished, the meeting began. So why don't you try that?

Starting point is 00:17:34 Like structured writing equals structured thinking, equal structured speaking. And if you don't feel confident enough in your speech, write that bad boy down. Because I think actually Bezos figured out something that most newsletter writers, for instance, still haven't. When he banned PowerPoint, he solved a meeting problem by doing structured writing, which made his thinkers think better, which gave them better outcomes because garbage in versus garbage out. The memo doesn't just communicate the idea. It is the idea. So the best newsletter writers understand this. They're not just publishing. They're building an asset.

Starting point is 00:18:07 And the gap between a newsletter that stays a hobby and one that becomes a business usually isn't the writing, actually. It's the infrastructure underneath it, which is why I use Beehive. Like last year, Beehive publishers sent 28 billion emails. Isn't that crazy? And they reach more than 255 million unique readers. And like that's super interesting, but I think the only reason they got to that level was the tools. Like the analytics don't just tell you open rates. They tell you who opened, what they clicked, where they came from. So every issue you send is a little sharper version of the last one. The referral program also turns your existing readers into a growth engine. The ad network brings brand deals to you, like no pitching, no back and

Starting point is 00:18:46 forth. Beehive handles the reporting and the invoicing and the paid subscriptions all built into the dashboard, not bolted on. So if you're already running a newsletter somewhere else, this is the time to move. The analytics are insane. They answer the right questions. The revenue tools are really revenue driving. Beehive is worth a serious look. For newsletters launched on Beehive in 2025, the medium time to first dollar was 66 days. Head to beehive.com slash Cody and use code Cody 30 for 30% off of your first three months of Beehive.com. So let me give you some of my hacks for getting tactical about real time thinking so that you can push off a few seconds to get a good response. One of the ones I like the best is rephrase the

Starting point is 00:19:30 question. What does this do? It gives you time. It allows you to kind of clarify your thinking because you're clarifying the question. So let's say that they ask you a question. And you understand the question. You might just reframe it and say, so you're asking why people struggle with X, now your brain catches up, right? They usually will reframe the question and they'll do more than just one sentence response. They'll give you a little fluff room. That's your time to think. Two would be thinking opposites. So if you're stuck, flip it. So say somebody asks you, why do people fail? Do Charlie Munger thinking, just invert it. Think why do people succeed? This is a classic inversion technique. By inverting the question, you're introducing a

Starting point is 00:20:13 anti-signal that helps make your signal clearer. And as we learned earlier, clarity wins. So, for instance, why do people fail? Maybe you don't know the answer to that. Well, you do know the answer to why people succeed. Okay, great. Now you run with it. Number three, default to first principles. So I want you to strip complexity out of this. Some of the ways you can do that, you can start with sentences like, at the core, or this comes down to, or ultimately, or the immutable laws of physics, tell us that. Like, whatever you can do to just strip down all the extra layers and you're signaling to us that you're at the core. That seems more grounded. It seems more clear and it seems more data back. Four, I like using simple analogies. Analogies are like thinking shortcuts. You know, Elon Musk loves

Starting point is 00:21:02 to use these. He would take something incredibly complex like rockets or batteries. And he would ask NASA, not why do you build these really expensive, overly complicated rockets that have X, Y, Z. and, you know, one, two, three, and all of these mechanisms, he would just ask, hey, NASA, why do you build rockets like Ferraris for every launch when Honda Accords would do? Ah, it's great. It's basically saying, we only need something simple to do this. Let's stop making it so expensive. He also has this other line where he says, he describes factories as the machine that builds the machine. And so that's a way to help his engineers decide on machine layouts and product flow. Like, how many times have you guys worked with somebody? They're like, oh, yeah,

Starting point is 00:21:43 yeah, we're operating that, or we have a process for that. You're like, yeah, you do. That process is awful. That's a terrible process. Okay, you still got it. But the process, which is highly complex and has all these components, but doesn't output anything, no. So he describes the pain of entrepreneurship, also, great line, as eating glass and staring into the abyss, which I've been there recently. And why do I like that? Memorable, easy to understand. And if you've ever felt it, that feels visceral. You can also ask a question back. I think this is really underutilized. Like, if you're unsure, ask back. Like, do you mean from a business perspective or a personal perspective? Do you mean in absolute terms or relative terms? You know, do you mean an immediate outcome or a long-term outcome?

Starting point is 00:22:30 This is letting you buy time. It's also allowing you to narrow the scope a little bit, which might help you figure out how to answer. I have a background in journalism. And as a journalist, I was forced to learn how to think and speak on the spot. This is really important when you want people to tell you things they probably shouldn't. And so a common technique we used to ask better questions is called the DOS method. So one of the most important things as a journalist is like, don't bullshit. D is for direct. Just be clear.

Starting point is 00:22:57 O is for open-ended. Like get depth. Don't ask yes or no questions. And S is for short. Don't give them fluff. Let them tell you the fluff. If you can train yourself to ask questions that are direct, open-ended, and short, you also train yourself to communicate that same way, back.

Starting point is 00:23:15 So now you know the steps, you got to do the reps, right? I think the only way that any of this changes for you is if you take a minute, you can even write your questions in the comments and we'll respond back to you because I want you to train like a pro. Like one little training drill you could do is like, see if you can answer things in 60 seconds all day to day. Like anytime somebody asks you something, look at like your watch sort of nonchalantly, look at your phone, and see if you can give them an answer in 60 seconds.

Starting point is 00:23:43 What you're going to have to do then is use structured, thoughtful responses. Also, you're going to be shocked at how many more conversations you can have in a day. Another one you can do is compression training. Like once you nail the 60 second answers, explain something in 30 seconds, then 10 seconds, then one sentence. It's also really scary to do that. So, for instance, I was just in a room with our product team, and we were talking about one of our products, which is called top prompt.aI. Actually, I'll give you guys free access to it. If you want to figure out a way

Starting point is 00:24:12 to have AI builds you things, but you don't know the right way to ask questions to it. And you want to do what's called a one shot, like one question to a result of a product, a script. Anything you want to build with AI, top prompt will help you do it. So anyway, I was building this tool that I use daily and telling my tech team like, hey, I need something different on top prompt. I want to do this different component. By the way, I'll put top prompt down in the link below in the show notes so you guys can play with it. But what I realized is that I was over explaining. And so instead, with compression training, I just said, I want five sections no more in top prompt. So it's really easy to understand. And then in my compression training, I wanted to get to that one sentence. And I just said,

Starting point is 00:24:56 what if you could ask one question and get five prompts back. Really simple. Great. One of the ways to see if you're any good at this or not is record yourself. I learned so much from myself on being on this podcast. I watch it back, which is, that is stressful the first couple of times you do it. It's still stressful sometimes. We all hate the sound of our own voice. But you'll notice your filler words, your weak endings, you're rambling, where you have weird intonation and your voice. And then, you can start building out this story bank. So like today on Twitter, actually, I was, this is such a good idea I thought. This guy was talking about how he has a, let me find it. What do you call it? Yeah. He was saying that he has a huge swipe file of inspiration clips from movies. And he's like,

Starting point is 00:25:45 I like, I like, I like, remember that one scene from Marty Supreme? Okay, I've got that. Remember that one scene from Fight Club? And because he creates videos all day, he has, this swipe file of videos you can steal from. Well, what if you have a swipe file in your head? Like, build like five go-to stories that your husband or your wife is going to fucking hate by the end of this because they're going to hear it so many times, but it's going to get laughs. This is your go-to. This is your first date. This is your hottest story you got. I like to think of them in varying subjects. Like, what's your failure story? What's your big lesson story? What's your, I'm so proud of myself I could have built me a damn statue, aka your win story.

Starting point is 00:26:24 What's your turning point? Oh man, my life was this. And then what's your insight story? Wow. Do you know this is happening in the world right now? Now you've always got material. You're like the comedian, ready to go, baby. You think they do that every single time brand new, no way. So to sum it up, get structured. The people who win in conversations, they're not the smartest. They're usually the ones that have a database, a system to pull from. And once you install this database, you actually stop fearing questions. You stop overthinking answers. And you can almost respond to just about anything. And then people will listen to you. I'm Cody Sanchez, and this is the Big Deal podcast. I'll see you on the next one. Will you guys tell me if this was useful? Also, tell me if you love top prompt. I do.

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BigDeal - #133 Be ARTICULATE and Speak SMARTLY: Communicate Like A Pro

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