The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Decide and Conquer: 44 Decisions that will Make or Break All Leaders by David Siegel

Episode Date: March 4, 2022

Decide and Conquer: 44 Decisions that will Make or Break All Leaders by David Siegel Success boils down to one thing: making good decisions. Learn the right framework now that can make all the difference later when faced with terrible options, deep anxiety and fear of failure. Access the decision framework David Siegel used when he took over as CEO of Meetup, the world’s leading platform for making connections and finding your community. Let David’s success during one of the most tumultuous times in his company’s history help guide you on your own path. Decide and Conquer helps all leaders navigate the big decisions that will impact their future and make their organizations a success. David outlines the 44 challenges leaders face when starting a new position, then shows you the decision framework he applied to overcome challenges in his own role. David takes you on an epic journey of corporate and personal survival that includes industry titans like Adam Neumann, Barry Diller, Jack Welch, Bill Ackman, and other leaders. In Decide and Conquer, you will learn to: Apply principles like open communication, transparency, and kindness to inform great decision making. Set yourself up to succeed, even before you start, by removing potential roadblocks before they become a problem. Be a bold and decisive leader and not succumb to fear. By applying the principles he had learned in previous leadership positions, David was able to make the many critical decisions that would mean life or death for Meetup when WeWork decided to sell the company. From deciding to accept the position and negotiating terms to managing a seemingly endless series of crises during the sale and global pandemic, Decide and Conquer walks readers through the key decisions they will face with invaluable advice for each one.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from thechrisvossshow.com thechrisvossshow.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast who knew who knew another podcast we've been doing it for 12 years, and yet we did it again. What is that, like a Britney Spears song or something?

Oh, crap. Oops. I got to pay her. Oops, I did it again, which is probably what I'll say in my old age of my diapers. Anyway, guys, remember, the Chris Foss Show is the family. Where did the diaper joke come from? The Chris Foss Show is the family that loves you but doesn't judge you. So that's what makes us the best. And the

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So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies.

I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book where refined books are sold. As always, we have these brilliant authors that come on the show. They call me up and they go, hey, can we get on the show, Chris? And I'm like, damn right. We're going to learn some stuff and get some education or something. I went to public school. We have today on the show, Chris? And I'm like, damn right. We're going to learn some stuff and get some education or something. I went to public school. We have today on the show, I believe David Siegel, if I was pronounced, name pronounced correctly. David, do I have that name correct? You totally nailed it.

Okay. Sorry. I usually check that at the beginning of the show. His new book is Decide and Conquer, 44 Decisions That Will Make or Break All Leaders, coming out March 8, 2022. If you order it now, you can be the first one on your block or book club to take in or read it. So that should be pretty darn amazing. He is also, notwithstanding, the CEO of Meetup.com, the largest platform for finding and building community. And of course, he's the author as well. He was the CEO before Meetup of Investopedia and before that, president of Seeking Alpha. WeWork acquired and who sold the company during the pandemic. We'll get into some of that experience that he had with the WeWork founder, Adam Newman. 20 years of experience as a technology and digital media executive, leading organizations through innovative product development, rapid revenue growth, and digital traffic acceleration.

David is available to comment on the news of the day regarding a lot of different things, and he's here to comment on those today. I'll just round that out. Dave, welcome to the show, man. It is so great to be here. Anytime you can have an introduction talking about diapers, like who doesn't want that right before you start, right? Yeah, I think that's a first on the show i don't think i ever introed out we improv the front because i feel bad for my listeners so they have to sit there and they have to go seriously the youtube channel again but we always pick up new people and grow so you

got to make sure those guys get in on the action so welcome you hit that high note really well that's all i have to say i do i do it's funny we started that as a joke for a week like 10 years ago and i and it was actually a rip-off of uh howard stern's nbc the nbc and it was a it was a homage to that and after a week of doing it as a bit i quit doing it and people started writing me and calling me literally from countries going hey, why do you stop doing that? We love that. And that's why I shake my head a little bit when I do it. But now people run up to me at events and they go, the Chris Vaughn show.

And you're like, security. So welcome to the show. Congratulations on the new book, David. Give us your plug so we can find you on the interwebs and get to know you better. Okay. You can find the book on DecideAndConquerBook.com. You can find it on Amazon. Ultimately, the book is about how to make smarter and better decisions in prisons and in life.

So let's get to it. You didn't want to do a book on how to make 44 worst decisions? Yeah. I mean, that could actually be even a better book because you actually learn a lot more from failures and mistakes than you do from actually successes. So that will be my next book. We'll decide and unconquer. And 44 worst decisions. And we'll start with maybe this podcast. Who the heck knows? Don't decide and unconquer. Yeah, it's the worst decisions ever. I mean, I think I could run an encyclopedia series on that. So what motivated you?

There you go. Well, how long have you been with meetup.com, by the way? Yeah, so I joined in 2019. WeWork had acquired Meetup in 2018. So I joined about six to nine months after WeWork acquired. Only 27 interviews between WeWork and Meetup. And I became the first CEO in the company's history after the founder. So, you know, simple 27 interview process. There you go. And so what motivated you to want to write this book?

What fired you up and says book time? Yeah. Okay. So I've always been obsessed with decision making. I've always been like cognizant of the fact that we're making like thousands of decisions every single day. And one of the quotes that I read, I remember years and years ago, it was by Theodore Roosevelt. And it said, number one is make a great decision. Number two is make a bad decision. And number three is make

no decision. And I know so many people in business and life, they're just like stuck and they're afraid to make decisions. They don't have like the right framework and the right values around decision-making. So I've always been obsessed with it, but I didn't want to write like a boring business book. Cause like all these business books are boring. It can be summed up in like two pages and who the heck means any half of them i went for like a kind of crazy story and fortunately i got to work for we work and we were going crazy kind of go hand in hand so there were so many insane stories about being part of we work about the we work sales process of meetup during a pandemic and then running meetup during a pandemic when you couldn't actually meet up in person that the book kind of wrote itself. And I just kind of vomited the book out.

Don't worry, it got edited and cleaned up quite a bit. And now we're here, book coming out. There you go. Well, this is pretty awesome. And I guess Meetup is now on its own. It's separated from WeWork or is it still a part of WeWork? No, WeWork actually sold Meetup in March of 2020 during the pandemic. And the story about how we got sold and who bought it is pretty interesting. It goes back to the person who acquired it is someone who I've known for over 20 years. He was the CEO of DoubleClick, if you remember DoubleClick back in the day, got acquired by Google. His name is Kevin Ryan. He was my mentor in kind of life

and business for 20 years. And at one point I said to him, Hey, would you ever consider acquiring Meetup? He did when kind of everyone was leaving because they thought Meetup was going under and wouldn't exist anymore because of the pandemic. And it's just kind of an interesting story about how a 20 year relationship can then turn into, he kind of came in and he sold Meetup from kind of going away. And he's been the founder of Business Insider, MongoDB, Zola, Gilt, and a whole bunch of a 20-year relationship can then turn into, he kind of came in and he sold Meetup from kind of going away. And he's been the founder of Business Insider, MongoDB, Zola, Gilt, and a whole bunch of other successes. So we've been independent for a little over, for about two years now, almost exactly. There you go. So what, is the book filled with Adam stories and WeWork,

or is it just, is that kind of mostly in the introduction? Yeah, most of the introduction, and there's some fun Adam Neumann stories, because I think it gets people excited to hear about what it's like to kind of work directly for and interact with Adam Neumann over a period of time. And Adam is just right for just really entertaining stories that you just kind of hold your mouth out and you're just like, you can't make this stuff up kind of thing. But a lot of the book is related to running Meetup, coming in as a CEO, taking over for a founder who had ran the company for 16 years. And what do you do when you're faced with 250 people that you're about to stand up in front of? You don't know anything about the company and they're all looking for your entire direction. And how do you kind of pivot a company that was losing $20 million a year

to be sustainable and hopefully successful? So it's practices around what kind of framework you need for decision-making to ultimately drive business success. We talked in the green room before the show about the introduction that I was referring to, of course. And there's a line in it here. Your first, I guess you're having your first one-on-one

or an early one-on-one with Adam at WeWork headquarters. And he's telling you what to do with the company. And then there's some sort of craziness going on to play the greatest showman in Surround Sound. And then a critical call about a samurai swords. I'm reading from the intro, paraphrasing from it. And then his wife, Rebecca, enters the room, promptly took off her shoes and asked me who I was. She was the

WeWorks chief brand officer. And she says, who are you? And you said, the new CEO of Meetup. And she says, what's Meetup? That didn't feel very good. Yes, correct. 20-year-old company. We acquired Meetup a year ago, Adam said. And she says, we own Meetup. What do they do? And this is the chief brand officer of the company. I mean, I don't know. No nepotism there, you know? Yeah, I mean, I think everyone knows.

You got to finish the story. Chris, you got to finish the story. Okay, well, let's see. So you're sitting there thinking the brand officer at WeWork doesn't even know who we are and why they own us. And then they start telling you, yeah, I'm sorry, you are correct. This is the funnier part. Rebecca says to you, you should change the name of the company. It's terrible.

And you're like, well, Adam says they built the brand for 18 years. But, yeah, we should definitely talk about changing the name. He just kowtows right to his wife. And you're just sitting there thinking, what the hell did I get into? I mean, meetup.com. I mean,

what a great name. I'll pay you $5 for it if you don't want it. Hell yeah. And we coined the term to meet up. That's what meetup is. It's the brand. It's the brand. Exactly.

It's the brand. Meetup is a terrible name. There's some sort of, they didn't like, they didn't like they didn't like they're all vegetarians and vegans and in fact being part of we don't we work you weren't allowed to expense any meat at any point in time so maybe the meetup thing she thought it was about meat and that was the problem that would make sense that would make sense this whole thing sounds

like that scene in don't look up where the scientists are meeting with the president lady and they're just like jerking off into the wind with crazy stuff. That's the whole thing of what this sounds like. So let's move past that and get into some more of the book and what's going on. What are some of the pieces of advice and tips that you give in the book? Yeah, sure. Okay. So I go through kind of a number of values in making smarter decisions and I'll share two or three of them and we could figure out where it goes from there. So one value that's really important is disagreement when it comes to making decisions. As a leader, as a person, if you don't surround yourself by

people who are constantly disagreeing, if you're not creating a framework for people not to be defensive when people are around you and disagreeing, then you're not going to make a smart decision. That's the bottom line. Even if you're in a room and every person in the room kind of agrees, one of the things that we do at Meetup and one of the things I've always said is just take the opposite side and start disagreeing. We create Google Docs before every meeting and put points of view in the Google Doc. And the only person that could actually usually show up to the meetings is if they've shared their point of view and where they agree and where they disagree. And don't talk about the areas of agreement. Make it all about disagreement, because that's how you drive alignment. And also prevents the worst thing in the world,

which is passive aggressiveness. Passive aggressiveness kills relationships between people. It kills companies. So kind of one principle that weaves throughout the book is kind of the importance of disagreement and not having yes, men, yes, women, yes, people kind of around you. That's one principle. And I could go into kind of other principles in the book as well. I was taught that by a CEO when I was, my last CEO taught me everything that I needed to know to complete my ability to go start my own company successfully. And he said to me, he goes, Chris, I think we were talking about one of the guys on his board who was always the negative guy.

He was always the disagreeable one. Whatever the problem was, whatever the solution they were working on, he knew what was wrong with it. Everything was wrong. And he said to me, I said, why do you put up with that guy? And he's always like the negative one. And he's like, Chris, when you make a board, the worst thing you can do as a CEO is be surrounded by yes men because they will take you off a cliff. And they'll be like, yes, oh, you're a wonderful leader. Everything.

Blowing up your ego, right? Who needs that? Yeah, blowing up your ego, and you'll go right off a cliff. And they'll go with you. Or they'll just sit at the end of the cliff set and go, well, he made some bad decisions. They'll feed you right to the wolves. And so he says, always have one guy on your board who's that negative Nancy, who's that naysayer.

And so I like what you've said. Plus, it sounds like your meetings don't have those things where everyone's asleep and I'm going, oh, would I have to be here? Yeah, I think complimentary skill sets is so important. Most founders of companies tend to be very optimistic and optimism is great because it's more motivating. It's exciting to be around people optimistic, but you know what? You have to temper that with that person on the other side, that's going to be looking at you and be like, huh, I'm not sure if that's going to work. And that's who you end up making smarter decisions. So people that are founders and engineers, make sure they hire someone who's a salesperson. If you're an executive, if you're a leader, make sure that people around you in your

executive team really compliment your skillset. And actually in the book, one of the things that I talk about around it is that there's oftentimes when a new leader joins, they change out the entire executive team. It's like, why do they have to do that? Well, the reason is because oftentimes an executive team complements the strengths of a CEO founder. So Scott Heiferman, who's the founder of Meetup for 16 years before I started it, it was his baby and he's an absolutely amazing person in terms of mission and vision. He wasn't as strong and operational savvy. So the people that were kind of on the team were very like operational oriented. And then I came with a different set of skills. And oftentimes you need different people that could surround your skills and compensate for your weaknesses as well. And it's just an important message around life generally. And that's why you'll oftentimes see in marriages,

even one person will be one way, one person will be another way. And then hopefully the kids end up somewhat normal. Yeah. The compliment of stuff. I'm glad you recognize that as a leader. And I really like how you're a really energetic leader. I mean, that's usually how CEOs need to be because they need to fire up the emotion and stuff. I wrote about this in my book last year on leadership. But also one of the things I discovered last year writing my book on leadership was the be no do principle of the military. And there's a whole deep aspect that I couldn't even get into with the book because it's amazing in leadership. But one of the aspects of the be no do concept

is as a leader, and in the case of the military, as a military leader, you're supposed to figure out where your weaknesses are in your cache of strengths, and then use your leadership position and people around you that you surround yourself to help fill in those blanks as you, of course, are also expected to develop them. So that's a brilliant way to look at the leadership. I think the perfect example that I always like to highlight is Abraham Lincoln, who Team of Rivals was his cabinet. And there's a great book called Team of Rivals. And he built the people around him were all the people that disagreed with him, the people who ended up being part of his inner cabinet. And ultimately, I think they made some important decisions for the country. And I think the cool thing about B&O too, is it starts with B

also. It starts with, like you said, you have to embody who you are. You can't fake it. Everyone can tell. Everyone knows if I'm faking my enthusiasm right now, or like I genuinely am enthusiastic about Meetup or the book or just you, Chris. So I feel special now. You can't fake it. You have to be it. I totally agree. People can tell.

Most people think I'm excited, but they just realize it's just the coffee, really. It's the devil's mountain high. Highest caffeine. I have zero caffeine in life because if I do and someone ever sees me on caffeine, no one wants to be around me. I'm just way too energetic then because there's a line in energy. I'll have what he's drinking. No, you bring up Lincoln, which is a really good point. We have CNN's and the Daily Beast's John Avalon on Monday.

I love John. Yeah, he's really brilliant. We both worked at IAC together actually. Oh, really? Yeah. Invest We both worked at IAC together, actually. Oh, really? Barry Diller. Yeah. The Bestopedia is owned by IAC. So John and I presented even at executive meetings together and to the board.

Yeah, he's great. Holy crap. I'll give him a shout out in the green room. His new book, Lincoln and the Fight for Peace, has a lot of interesting stuff of what you referred to, of how Lincoln was really trying to save the country and probably some good leadership that we could use at all times with better bipartisanship and getting along. What are some other aspects you want to tease out on the book you think people would like to see? I think that leaders oftentimes mistake the difference in making a decision between being

kind and being nice. And they think that their job is to be nice. And what I mean by that is they don't want to offend other people. They don't want to upset other people. They don't want to fire someone because it might make them feel bad. They don't want to give them the critical fee. It might make them feel bad, but that's not kind. The kindest thing that you can do oftentimes is to say to someone, I don't think you're happy. I don't think this is working out. Maybe you need to find something else. Or here's some very constructive feedback about something that you need to change. And let's talk about whether or not it makes sense to do so. Focus on being kind, because if you try to be nice, you could end up actually not helping the person in the first place. And I think that wimpier leaders or less experienced

leaders who are just afraid to offend are people who are ultimately not going to be able to make the right bold decisions that's kind of required in the world we live in today. And that's a differentiation I like to kind of call out. That's really important. I went through the arc of having to do my first firings and almost crying at him. And I probably sounded like that guy who, who's that tech guy who got in trouble recently for talking about it. I think from better.com. Yeah. And I went from that to being just cold and calculated to where I just fire people and I just don't give a shit. But no, you're right.

It's better to be kind because there does need to be a firmness to it. Because if you're too weak, then you just create problems and you get passive aggressive kickbacks too. Where they're just like, and I've had that happen. I have some really funny stories. In fact, that should have made the book. I just remember a story that should have made the book where that happened. But it could be a lack of clarity. Like you said, if you're overly nice and you're beating around the bush, that's not helpful. You have to let someone go. The first thing you say is this is going to be a very difficult conversation. And today's going to be your last day. You don't start saying things like, well, I want you to know this is really hard and

person's wondering what's going on. No, cut to the chase, do it the right way and do things as thoughtful as you can. But unfortunately, we had to do quite a few layoffs at Meetup. But the key is how we did them. So for example, after we let people go, we developed a big spreadsheet where we shared people's resumes with hundreds of other companies and people to help them to find the next job. We gave people appropriate preferences. We actually had a couple of different recruiters from companies in our office that we gave people the option to be able to meet with. Oh, wow.

Yeah, to help them to kind of find the next steps for themselves. Because ultimately, you have to cater in a good way, both to people that left, but also to the survivors who stayed. And they'll see how you treat their people. And because Meetup is so focused on community, our employee population was so community oriented. How we treat people in the times of crisis, in times of stress, is really kind of where you're measured against. And to me, that's particularly important. Yeah. I was talking about this with, I don't know if it was the better.com people or if it was somebody else recently who did a mass layoff on one day and they were talking about, it was on LinkedIn. They were talking about how I'm trying to stay in touch with my family. I can't remember

the company off the top of my head, but they kept calling it the family. And I said, I had this discussion I posted on LinkedIn. I'm like, companies need to really quit using this family language. Family, because you don't just throw out family. I don't just go up to my mom one day and said, yeah, you got to go, man. Sorry, bye. Here's a pink slip, bye-bye. And so they're choosing this dualistic strategy sometimes of like, yeah, we're a big slip, but buy. And so they're choosing this dualistic strategy sometimes of like, yeah, we're a big family, but we don't give a fuck about you. No, it's BS to use that word. And it's just inappropriate, frankly. And people see through it. Like you said, we said earlier, people know, so don't fake it. And the whole not faking thing

is another axiom of mine, which is kind of obsessed with transparency. Meaning, so at IAC, the person on the board mentioning IAC earlier, someone on the board of IAC was Jack Welch, the famous Jack Welch from General Electric. And when he left, it was the largest market cap company actually in the world. He won the manager of the century of the 20th century. So I actually got to sit down with him once, one-on-one at a big IAC Barry Diller kind of retreat that we had. And I said, you're the manager of the century. What's the one piece of advice that you would tell me to be like a more effective manager? He said, all that matters is building trust with your people. And the best way to build trust is

to be as transparent as possible, to share the good, the bad, and the ugly at all times. And that's it on one foot. Yeah. Okay. I highly agree with him. In fact, I think trust is the number one thing in my leadership principles in my book. And yeah, transparency is really big. Telling people, if people understand the vision, if people understand the importance of what they're trying to do,

because you can't just give marching orders to people, go over there. It's not the military. That's what the military is kind of designed to do. You're not winning hearts and minds. And I could tell a WeWork story related to that if you'd like. Sure. Yeah, please. Why not?

So if you don't have, as we said, people's trust by being honest, then you lose them. So one of the things that happened is we saw WeWork's valuation going from $47 billion to $40 billion to $30 billion to $20 billion to $10 billion and just falling apart. And we knew something's going to happen with Meetup. We knew this is not good for us. All of our employees only own WeWork stock, for example. And I got a call from my manager and he said, you know, at some point we might end up selling meetup, but don't worry. I'll give you the heads up beforehand. You have nothing to worry about. I'm like, okay, good. Because I cannot have my people finding out the wall street journal that their baby meetup is now getting sold and they don't know about it. I get a call saying, our article in the Wall Street Journal is about to come out in 30 minutes.

Where are you right now? And I'm like, oh. So quickly, we send a Slack message to every employee, get down to the big conference room so we could make an announcement. I was wondering what the heck's going on. And I called my manager, asked him to come over. So we're there together. I kid you not, within a minute of starting to say, we work at selling us. And then of course, a woman in the back screams, yes. With the minute of saying we work at selling us,

every single person's phone is just buzzing like crazy because the article came out, all the friends are like, do you still have a job? But the reason I tell the story is because I was so fixated on making sure that they find out from me versus finding out from someone else. Because if they found out from someone else, they will assume correctly that I knew that it would happen. I just couldn't tell them yet. And that I would have lost their trust. And that meant that now every other thing that I would happen. I just couldn't tell them yet. And that I would have lost their trust. And that meant that now every other thing that I would tell them about anything, they wouldn't believe. And if they don't believe, then like you can't lead a company.

It's over. Either you have to leave or like every other person has to leave. So it's an example where just push really hard to make sure to share kind of the good, bad and the ugly prior to them finding out from somewhere else. Yeah. Because they're going to find out. I mean, you can't hide stuff like that, especially when the Wall Street Journal is up to stuff

or New York Times or whatever. So that's very interesting. It sounds like the team kind of knew too that they wanted to be out from under WeWork because they're probably seeing all the craziness. There was major cultural clashes. I mean, beyond. We were, it's just opposite cultures.

Meetup was all about like a about almost like a nonprofit mentality, very mission-oriented, which I love, about building community and making the world a better place, et cetera. WeWork kind of said that stuff, but in reality, WeWork is really about growth, just unmitigated growth as fast as possible, regardless of kind of the consequences. And when the meetupers kind of, at one point, one of our KPIs that WeWork had set up for the previous CEO was, what's the maximal number of people that you could hire as quickly as possible? That's not a KPI. That's not making something better for our organizers or our members that's just creating chaos so it was quite a significant number of cultural differences and i and most and we had a number of people that quit simply because we were owned by we work even though we didn't have

that much to do with them quote-unquote like day-to-day so it was a relief for a lot of people as well i thought what we works thing was just cocaine off the backs of strippers. That was more marijuana, but both, I guess. It was marijuana off the backs of strippers. There you go. Those backs make great rolling paper placement. Anyway, I used to live in Vegas, and we'll be going back there after the coronavirus. So it might be some personal experience.

Stays in Vegas. Stays in Vegas. Yeah, I have a Spirulina tattoo somewhere. Anyway, it's a Vegas life. So these are great tips, man, on leading a great company. And I'm sure you had to go through some things. Number one, you come on to meetup.com. You've got a different manager.

You're used to whatever the prior founder had. You then have to deal with the WeWork fund. And then you get kicked out from WeWork and you've got to make things work as a standalone. And I think you've done a great job with it so far. And it's working for you. I'm excited to see what Meetup does now that hopefully coronavirus is over and we can go back to meeting each other as human beings again. Yeah, I mean, the goal is that the 2020s is going to be the roaring 20s again. And just like 100 years ago when people got out of the Spanish flu and World War I they finally started like having parties and going out and living the Gatsby life, etc.

In the 2020s, we're seeing it now in our numbers. Like our numbers are just going up like crazy, especially, by the way, in Florida and Texas and some of the red states where there's even more openness regarding kind of masks and those other things. But it's really interesting seeing how different states and different countries are getting more in person. But we believe that people have this deep pent-up need to get back out and to just connect with people in person. And it's different than the online experience, bottom line. We'll have both. We're ultimately about in person. That's where the magic happens. It really is. There's a pent-up demand for it. I was so excited to finally go out and start having lunches with people.

And I just run around now and just lick people on the side of the face, lick glass walls. No, I don't. It's coronavirus. Coronavirus still isn't over. But that was the joke I had during coronavirus. So when this is over, I'm just going to run around and lick everything and rub my face and everything. Just be careful.

If it's freezing cold outside and you lick one of those white lampposts, you might have to have a little surgery on the tongue to remove. So we don't want that. Well, we've already been through that as children. The Christmas story revisited. So what are some other tips maybe you want to touch on, tease out before we go out? Yeah. Okay.

Sure. So I would say when it comes to decisions, make decisions faster than you're usually comfortable. Too often people are just deliberating analysis paralysis. They don't realize that the analysis itself is a decision to delay. And that delay, unfortunately, oftentimes decreases the number of options that you have available to yourself. One of the principles that I talk about in the book and give examples around is kind of thinking about optionality. Does a decision open up lots of options for yourself, like for you, having a podcast, for you, writing a book, for you, doing all the things you're doing? Think about those options that have been created.

Or does a decision close out lots of options? It's like a trapdoor decision that because you did this specific thing, you now can't do a whole bunch of other opportunities. And kind of thinking about what's called optionality as it relates to a key decision is really important. And the reason why is because the more options that you have going on, the greater the chance that lucky things could end up happening to you. And I actually think that smart decisions can result in a higher probability of lucky things ultimately happening in your life. And that's what you want, the serendipity of lucky things happening. And you could actually engineer that.

So it's a numbers game, right? Very much so. So it's very much. I'll give an example. Let's say I'm a college student. I love finance. I could either decide that I'm going to become a trader and probably make a lot of money by being a trader. That's great. But then the next job I

can get is another trader because you're trained to be a trader. It's very specific. Or I could become an investment banker, let's say, and everyone wants to hire someone two or three years out of investment banking. You become an analyst, a general manager. There's a million different options that you could have from that type of an opportunity. So that one decision could either create lots of options for yourself or minimize options for yourself as well.

And like you said, also, so much of things is a numbers game. When we look to sell Meetup, I reached out personally to over 100 different companies and hundreds of different people to try to get the right acquirer for Meetup as opposed to the to get the right acquirer for meetup as opposed to the person or the group that we work wanted us to necessarily have as an acquirer and um and it

ended up working out nice nice well this is really good advice that people have in your book let me ask you this about meetup.com because i'm interested to possibly start testing it again. At one point, I controlled, I think, 12 groups with four different emails. And we, I mean, I was having regular stuff in Las Vegas with meetups. It wasn't at Spirit Rhino, usually at Pizza Parlor. There's lots of tech people because I was in the tech business, but a lot of it I was using to promote the Chris Voss show at the time. But when we had a real good podcast group, radio meetup group, is there any sort of thing you guys have done for, sometimes there's a, what you might call squatters on meetup groups where

they own the meetup group, they're paying the monthly payment, but they don't do anything with it. It just sits there. Yeah. We call them zombie organizers and it's terrible because you can have a group with like thousands of members in the group that are just a zombie. They don't do anything. And that's just a terrible experience because then people could join the group and nothing ends up happening. So yeah. So we have a trust and safety organization and we have actually kicked out tens of thousands of organizers and hundreds of thousands of members if they're not doing right by the platform, not doing right by their communities. Because ultimately it just leads to a bad experience for people to be part

of a group that's just nothing's happening. And we don't want that. And it's just not a great experience. It doesn't help us in the short, medium or long term. So what we do is we reach out to people in the group and we see if someone's interested in stepping up to become the organizer of the group, to put that energy back into that group and to get community kind of going back into building again. And interestingly, close to 50% of groups where those things are happening and end up having someone that's willing to step up and say, hey, I want to take this group over. I'm going to take this to the next level. And it's a big difference. What I used to do is I had this trick where I keep forgetting the name of the service. You had to start paying for it. So I quit them, but they were around for about 10 years and they

send you a notification. It's the IFF, IFTT people, whatever it is. But I had a setup to where once I got an email from meetup saying this person is quit paying their bill and they're going to be resigning soon. Do you want to step up? I could grab that thing because it would always come in like the middle of the night about 4am or something. And so it would ring my phone and let me know and I'd scoop up the groups. And so I was loving it, being able to create groups and communities. There's a bunch of, I think, films that we have that I would film, take GoPros. We'd film the events and we'd host dinners and different things, lunches. And so it was really to have everyone get together and network. So I'm going to play with it again.

I know a lot of times, sometimes I would email who the leader was of a zombie group and they weren't answering their emails. No, it's something that we've done a lot to fix on the platform and check out our app as well. Because I think more and more people are using our iOS and Android apps. And they're just, I mean, the desktop experience is great. Web experience is great. But I think apps is just an even better, more meaningful experience as well in terms of just being able to scroll through things faster and have more dedicated kind of experience. So definitely check it out. We have 57 million members and 200,000 plus groups.

So anything you want to find in any city, you'll find it on Meetup. I'm going to dig around and push around. Meetup was always great too. Whenever I moved to a new city, it was great to make new friends, get to know new people. If you're people that were looking for jobs, it was good for job seekers and stuff.

So I'll definitely get playing with it and stuff. So awesome. There you go. Well, it's been wonderful to have you on the show, David. Thank you very much for coming on and sharing your expertise, knowledge in your forthcoming book. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the show, David. Thank you very much for coming on and sharing your expertise, knowledge, and your forthcoming book. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs.

Okay. So you can go to Amazon, Varsanova, wherever you want to get the book. If you want to find me, you can look at me at Twitter on David Mayer, M-E-I-R, Siegel. You can find me on LinkedIn. I don't have quite as many followers as the Chris Voss Show, but, you know, 30,000 is okay, too. Find me on LinkedIn. And you can also find me on Meetup. You can even send me an email, david at meetup.com.

We always like listening and learning from anyone interested in community. So please reach out. And one last thing I'd say is that the audio version of our book, Decide and Conquer, is actually particularly good. It's not me talking in a nasally voice, but it's just a fun, enthusiastic listen. So if anyone is interested in that, go for it. I really love your energy as a leader and a CEO, man. I really do. You seem like you're a fun guy at a work front.

I'm a fun guy. Fun guy. Yeah. Yeah. And people like that. You've got to, you know, no one wants to go to work where it's a freaking morgue. I think a lot of people like it. I think it's important to recognize not all people like it and to be cognizant of the fact that sometimes if energy isn't matched, you need to be cognizant of that as well.

And you don't want to create too much of a fraternity type environment because WeWork had done that. And look what happened there. Yeah. We try. We definitely try. Yeah. Thank you. My friend Dan Lyons did that book.

What was it? Disrupted or Undisrupted. I don't know if you remember that book, but he never got to the WeWork people, but that could have been a whole volume of his books. But yeah, him writing that book on all the unicorns is crazy. Anyway, thank you for being on the show, David. We certainly appreciate it, my friend. Thank you so much. There you go. And guys, go order the book. You can get it early, March 8th, 2022. It'll be coming out. Decide and Conquer 44 Decisions That Will Make or Break All Leaders. Learn how to be a good leader. Remember, you don't have to be a CEO to be a leader. You can be a leader whether you're a parent or someone on the street

or anyone could be a leader in their own little sort of field or area. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. Go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. See the big group on LinkedIn. Also go to goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss and our newsletter on LinkedIn. All the groups. See us everywhere.

The Chris Voss Show is everywhere except for Snapchat for the obvious of reasons. Thanks, guys, for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you. Stay safe, be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time.