The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Experiential Intelligence: Harness the Power of Experience for Personal and Business Breakthroughs by Soren Kaplan

Episode Date: January 22, 2023

Experiential Intelligence: Harness the Power of Experience for Personal and Business Breakthroughs by Soren Kaplan Get the Free Toolkit with book purchase (visit author website at sorenkaplan.com for details). First we had IQ to predict success. Then Emotional Intelligence (EQ). Now, Experiential Intelligence (XQ) expands our understanding of what's needed to thrive in today's disruptive world. Experiential Intelligence reveals how our past experiences impact our present success and future opportunities in ways we often don't recognize. While you can't change what's happened to you or how you've responded to it, within your unique stories are hidden strengths waiting to be discovered. Do just that by uncovering your Experiential Intelligence—the mindsets and abilities gained from your personal and professional life experiences. Just as memorizing facts doesn't give you a high IQ, your Experiential Intelligence (XQ) isn't merely what you've learned over time. It's how you perceive challenges, view opportunities, and tackle goals. XQ is your unique internal fingerprint. Leverage it to: Become a better leader Increase collaboration, innovation, and results Hire and develop talent using more strategic criteria Transform your organization's culture Experiential Intelligence reveals the psychological, sociological, and neurological forces that make us tick. Learn how to uncover your hidden assets, remove invisible barriers limiting peak performance, and amplify strengths to achieve breakthroughs for yourself, your team, and your organization.

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. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. 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. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate you coming by the show and being with us today. As always,

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Today we have an amazing intelligent brain. We have an intelligent brain. And notice that I say there's only one, and it's not me. And he's written three books. So he's here with this third book to tell us some of the amazing, brilliant things that we're going to do. And if I use the word amazing one more time, sue me. The book is out January 24th, 2023. Experiential Intelligence, Harness the Power of Experience for Personal and Business Breakthroughs. Soren Kaplan is on the show with us today. He's going to be talking to us about this amazing book. I just did it again. Amazing is going to become a callback joke during this show, I can tell. Soren Kaplan is a best-selling and award-winning author and speaker, columnist for Inc. Magazine, founder of Praxi.com,

and an affiliate at the Center for Effective Organizations at USC's Marshall School of Business. He is advised and led leadership development programs for thousands of executives and organizations globally during Disney Visa or globally during? Who's reading this? Who wrote this crap? No, I'm reading it wrong. It's me. It's always me.

Including Disney, Visa, Colgate-Palmolive, PepsiCo, Cisco, Philips, Wells Fargo, eBay, Medtronic, Kaiser Permanente. I always thought that was a weird name. Kaiser Permanente, AARP, and many others. Oh, AARP. I'm 55 on the 26th, actually, two days beyond this book. I don't know why I'm segwaying into this. Business Insider in the 50s had named him one of the world's top management thought leaders and consultants, and they

have not named me. So it's obvious why we have Soren on the show. Welcome to the show, Soren. How are you? I am doing well. Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thank you. We're just having a ramble through your fucking bio at this point. Really. I have no idea what to think about this after that.

Well, we do info entertainment, so that's what we're all about. So, Soren, give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. It's my name, Soren Kaplan dot com. S-O-R-E-N K-A-P-L-A-N dot com. There you go. So, Soren, this is your

third book. Let's talk a little bit about what motivated you to write this book. Well, you know, I've worked with a lot of small businesses as well as large companies. I've seen kind of a trend in first we thought success was driven by how smart you are, how, you know, how high your IQ is. You know, let's get the smartest people in the room. I'm proof that isn't true. It is not true.

The second thing we started thinking in the late 1990s was, oh, we need emotional intelligence. We need to be in touch with our own emotions and kind of empathize with other people. I think that is true to a certain extent in terms of kind of personal success and leadership. But these days, we haven't really packaged up how to think about people's experiences. It's not just about kind of what's on your resume and kind of your list of jobs that you've had. Your experiential intelligence actually is real, like smarts. Think about street smarts. We all have street smarts. The question is, how do we understand what makes us us in terms of our own kind of ability to navigate this crazy world we're in? And if we're running a business, how do we

hire people? How do we recruit people that really can contribute in a meaningful way in terms of how they think, their mindsets, the abilities that they're bringing, as well as just kind of the basic skills they have. Sometimes it's not what you think. And so experiential intelligence is just a way to really understand the role of experience in today's world and kind of how to leverage it for yourself as well as your business. There you go. I love this because this is the, you know, I never went to college, clearly. People in my audience are like, yeah, you never went to college.

And no, I started my first business at 18. I was supposed to go to college. I had a Pell Grant. My family was poor. And I said, well, we're going to put the Pell Grant off because I'm making, you know, pretty good money. My first little business here. Back then, it really wasn't an entrepreneur mindset world. It was a brick andar world, unlike now.

But I love this experiential thing because, you know, I've never been brilliant. I don't have a high IQ. My audience is like, yeah, we know that. 13 years we've been putting up with this guy. And then the emotional intelligence thing that kind of got pushed by, I think, an emotionalist movement. You know, we all need to be huggy bears. And I'm still seeing that, actually, from some of the leadership books that I see, where it's the proponent of, well, if we just all kumbaya and hug each other and rub each other's back, and then HR is not liking that at all. We wonder why we have these massive uh lawsuits

of people being a little too emotional in the workplace that's my opinion um but i love this experiential thing because this is what made me successful street smarts uh that that whole sort of thing i mean i built an empire of companies just with moxie and and uh learning on the fly and and uh you know having a very small toolbox. Some of the greatest business people out there don't have a college degree. And these days you've got other big companies like Google and Hilton and some of these others. They're not requiring a college degree for an interview

because they've sort of clued in on the fact that like you can be, you know, you can be successful without all of kind of, you know, the formal testing and the degree and all of that. Everyone has experiential intelligence. You develop it early on. I'll just give you a quick example, you know, just in terms of myself and how this, how this works. So I had, I, you know, you said you grew up kind of in a, you know, probably with not a lot of resources, you had a pellegrin. I grew up in a tough environment to my mother had a mental illness. My father was hardly ever around. I moved 16 times before I was 15. So, you know, it was rough. And I learned to, you know, I had to kind of heal from a lot of the trauma.

But I also learned to live with a lot of uncertainty, make decisions kind of at the last minute with limited data, and, you know, kind of navigate kind of a lot of ambiguity so I can, you know, see patterns and kind of ambiguous situations. I can kind of grow startups because I've done a few startups because I'm really good with living with that uncertainty. So if you look into your past and look at the things that happen to you, to you is also what you've created, you've grown. And the question with the experiential intelligence is we all have it. So sometimes it gets built from tough situations. Sometimes it's built just because we have opportunities and we practice something or we have mentors. But we can all look at what happened in our past lives and extrapolate what are our strengths from that. And very few people are doing that, and very few people are organizing kind of how you look at people's contributions in hiring and kind of building teams beyond just that formal resume.

And that's really what experiential intelligence is all about. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for

speaking engagements if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcasting, corporate stuff. With over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as a CEO, I think I can offer a wonderful breadth of information and knowledge to you or anyone that you want to invite me to for your company. Thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you listening to the show. And be sure to check out

chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com. Now back to the show. I really love this. I think you've really hit the nail on the head and you've hit what the future is coming. Because like you say, employers now are realizing, and one of the factors is,

is that men aren't going into college anymore as much as they used to. In fact, women are outpacing them at college and also outpacing them in college debt. Um, and, and I think, I think one of the airlines, uh, even announced that they're no longer going to require college for, for, uh, for, uh, pilots. I think it is. Um they're considering that, one of the two. And I think we're entering a new age. You're kind of seeing this with colleges. Colleges are dropping their enrollment rates or their enrollment costs.

They're realizing that what people are paying for college, people are waking up the fact that what they're paying for college to memorize facts, as you mentioned in your book, isn't doling out to be the return on investment for a lifetime of stuff, you know. And so I think college is definitely going to be on the ropes here coming up soon, if not already. Actually, smaller colleges are already signaled this year that they're making changes to their

format and their costs. But, you know, like you mentioned in your book, memorizing book, memorizing facts for your college tests doesn't make you smart. And the good analogy I love about that is as a musician, one thing I've found is people say, well, can you play like, I don't know, Enter Sandman by Metallica? No, I can't. I don't learn other people's stuff. I write my own stuff. And great musicians write their own material.

But you'll meet people that are like, hey, I know how to play Mozart's whatever, Beethoven and whatever. And then you go, well, that's great. You've got that perfected. Do you got any music of your own? Do you write anything of your own? No, I just memorize this thing and how to do it. And so to me, there's a real difference in the mindset or brain set of someone who can make something out of nothing and someone who can just memorize stuff and repeat it. Am I being too mean?

You're a musical entrepreneur and the other person is kind of a musical executor in terms of like they might have knowledge and skills of how to read music or you know kind of play something but their ability to weave together the creativity the you know kind of composition that's required to kind of create music they may not have it so you know on the one hand you know they have certain skills they have certain you know, on the one hand, you know, they have certain skills, they have certain, you know, they can practice and they can have kind of some level of experiential intelligence. But if you're really looking at kind of that musical domain, you may have higher experiential intelligence in that space because of, you know, how you think. Your mindset is, I want to create and I want to, you know, hear new, I want to contribute new things to the world.

And your ability around composition allows you to do that. And you just happen to have also the skills and the ability to play, which a lot of people do, but they don't have those other things. So it's your knowledge and skills, base level abilities, higher order mindset, which really allows you to take that leap to the next level. There you go. I love what you're talking about here. Um, this, this actually connects a few dots for me. And right now it's on the cusp of what, like I say, what's happening, what I'm seeing in the industry market where people are going, Hey man, um, it's not, it's not about college degrees anymore. You know, know that that's what we're talking

about really seems to separate um what you see in businesses where people just go they do the functions i was watching an interesting video on tiktok and you know not that you should probably use that as an intellectual format but it's a it's interesting dipstick of of logic and i saw a video uh i think it was yesterday the the day before, this gal talked about how a lot of people in business, especially working for big companies, they're just doing redundant tasks. Most of them, it almost seems like a game of like, how many employees can we have and say that we have on the balance sheet, when really a lot of those employees are questionable as to how much work they're actually doing, how much production they actually do.

And I'm not being mean. I'm just saying, you know, we all know those people who slough half the week and, you know, watch my videos most of the week. I see that on YouTube. I'm like, you guys are consuming a lot of data on your workday. So, well, what's going on there? I mean, you know, like you'll see like it's like Monday that everyone does all the work and Tuesday everyone does the work, returns emails, and then the rest of the work everyone kind of messes off. So I think it's kind of interesting where, you know, and you see proof of that when you see the huge layoffs when they take out middle management.

They're like, let's cut the fat and people we know that aren't maybe that you're just passing the buck around doing the repetition, as you mentioned in your book. So you talk about this thing called experiential intelligence. You call it XQ instead of IQ. Let's talk about what that is and what can that internal fingerprint bring to you as you state in your book? Yeah, well, you know, we've known IQ has been sort of important. I think it's a lot less important just in terms of kind of practical day-to-day ability to navigate the world and make a difference if you're an entrepreneur or in business. And so the idea behind experiential intelligence

is you have opportunities to look at the experiences that shaped you early. We all have experiences from the moment we're born. So a lot of those experiences that actually shape how you think happen kind of early on. So we get into business and we want to ignore those, but they actually can crop up in terms of how they've influenced us and how we think. Maybe we have an opportunity type mindset. Maybe we don't. If you look back at kind of those experiences, you can decipher what were the self-limiting beliefs that might have been instilled in me that's holding me back. Or what are the kind of abilities that I gained?

I gave you some examples of my kind of tougher childhood. I gained certain abilities even from the difficult things. Now, there's also, you know, you can look at the positive things, too. You might have had an amazing teacher or a mentor or maybe your parents helped you kind of explore, you know, certain areas and it really gave you assets. So, you know, the goal is to really look at all your experiences, the tough ones and the good ones, and extrapolate for yourself and understand for yourself mindsets, abilities and kind of your know-how that you gained from that. That's at the individual level. And you can really leverage that as a leader also kind of your know-how that you gained from that. That's at the individual level. And you can really leverage that as a leader also kind of individually. If you're in a workplace or you're a manager of a team or you're running a business, you want to be able to kind of look at your talent base,

whether you're hiring or you're growing people or you're building a team and not just in terms of their kind of what's on their resume. You want to understand their life experience. You want to understand kind of how they think and you want to kind of stack your team and your organization with these diverse experiences, not just kind of diverse, you know, kind of resume, you know, job descriptions on resumes and kind of what people are saying. A lot of people bring a lot to their work and, you know, kind of their contributions that go far outside what they actually are putting on the resume because a lot of people aren't even aware of their experiential intelligence. You kind of have to kind of dig it up a little bit.

So let me ask you this. Do you find that most people – you know, there's some people that learn from their experiences and some people that don't. Like to me, I've always been a story collector. I've always used it for education. that's why i do the show i love collecting people's stories i love hearing their stories i love hearing their their life pass what brought them to this point what made them this way what what shaped them and and and um so it's always interesting to me how people go through life and you know most people we have on

the show are very introspective uh andive, I suppose, about their lives because they've written a book about it. You know, they've examined, life examined. There's a quote that's coming to mind about a life examined is a better life or something along those lines. I don't know. Someone can pull it up. But there are some people that go through life on on robotic mode i mean they don't maybe about 40 or 50 they kind of wake up have a midlife crisis and realize they've been on robotic mode uh i saw that in my life very young the the midlife crisis crap and

i'm like i never want to go through one of those so i'm not buying whatever everyone else is selling in the societal pre-construct. I'm going to question everything. And it's interesting what you talk about how, you know, we grew up in a hard sort of life. And sometimes I've been reading recently, psychologically wise, especially with young men when they grow up in environments where they have to make a lot of their own decisions and choices in a survival mechanism because the family unit's broken, they develop these skills. And you see skills like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg or who are some other people who didn't go to college?

I think that, I don't know if the CEO, I think the CEO of Google went to college, but he was born on a dirt floor in India in a hut. You see a lot of people, Steve Jobs never went to college. You see a lot of people that, you know, and honestly, I wrote about this in my book. I mean, I'm just a guy who has a toolkit and figured out how to work. I have like a little system that I work for my business. I have a little system that I work to keep it profitable and operable. And I kind of, you know, I kind of rely on that. I go back to it as a basic strategy.

And most of us, I think, that are successful entrepreneurs, we kind of have like this little thing that we do and we kind of know what our things are that work and what doesn't work. But we're very introspective. We're very, you know, we look inside of ourselves or inside of our business and, you know, we're constantly going what's wrong and what's the best? But are there some people that are on autopilot or am I just being mean? No, I think I'm going to make a pretty bold statement.

I think we are all on autopilot in some respect related to whatever we're doing. And what I mean by that is as we grow up and as we kind of have the experiences we're doing. And what I mean by that is as we grow up and as we kind of have the experiences we're having, we all develop those street smarts to navigate whatever street we individually happen to be on. And sometimes those street smarts can really support us and enable us, like

you just talked about, like you're leveraging the hell out of your street smarts. And sometimes our street smarts can outsmart us later in life because what worked previously as we were growing up and as we were kind of making shit happen in our lives might not work 10, 15, 20 years later as we're kind of in a different context. And so we want to really make sure that we understand what's driving us. That's that deeper kind of experiential intelligence is about psychology and sociology and neurology and that combination of what's driving us, whether we're aware of it and sometimes we're not.

That's what we're trying to get at here. I love this. It reveals the psychological and sociological, clearly I didn't go to college, and neurological forces that make us tick. And so if we read your book, we dig into it, we can use some of the data and what we've experienced in our XQ to become a better leader, increase collaboration, hire and develop talent, and transform your organization's culture.

How can we use it to be a better leader? What's a tease out? Yeah, I mean, I think what I've tried to do in this book, I mean, there's a bit of kind of, there's research behind all this stuff, and there's the big idea of experiential intelligence, but it's really about how do you apply it to your life? So as a leader or in an organization, it really boils down to three things. And I've got, you know, kind of these tools and templates that you can kind of fill out and kind of be introspective. And, you know, also, you know, get a little vulnerable and share with other people your thinking to get kind of a reflection back.

But, you know, the essence of it is you look at your life experiences. Which ones are the most poignant for you? And then think about what attitudes and beliefs were shaped by your experiences that you can apply to your goals. Like, okay, I need to do this thing. What abilities did you develop from your experiences that you can leverage in creative ways? And then what knowledge and skills did you obtain that, you know, you can kind of apply to, you know, kind of whatever you're doing right now. And so the really the yes, it's not rocket science. What are those experiences that shaped me? How do they shape how I think? And what skill sets and abilities I developed from them that I can leverage.

And sometimes you can do it yourself. But sometimes it's helpful to kind of create a draft and then share it with somebody who knows you really well because usually you'll get some good feedback and reflection and you'll take that insight to the next level. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. There's other ways you can kind of, you know, I've got assessments and all that kind of stuff, but really that's the essence of it.

Yeah, when I ask for other people's feedback, they just go, you're a moron. And I'm like, well, I mean, you have a point there. I noticed it's interesting. I just downloaded this on your website and signed up for it. You have a free toolkit. I talked about my toolkit earlier with a book

purchase where you can go on to your website, sorencaplin.com and you can have a free toolkit. Tell us a little bit about that. Well, people learn and change because they have experiences, not because they necessarily read a book. I mean, the book might kind of give you ideas. And so experiential learning is how change happens at the individual level, as well as a kind of a group level. So based on that, in my book, I have a QR code at the top of every chapter.

It is a video that provides the backstory of every chapter. I love that. So that's just part of inherently in the book. But when you get the toolkit, you get all those videos, you get an assessment. So you can kind of measure how high is your experiential intelligence. There's a discussion guide you can use in a book group or with your team. There's a PowerPoint presentation. So if you need to communicate, like, what is this thing, experiential intelligence,

I've got all the graphics and tools and templates from the book in there as well. So it's kind of like a little resource kit in order to grow your experiential intelligence. And part of growing it is to help others kind of understand it for themselves and amplify it for your team and organization as well. So I even have like a 360 team assessment process in it to help people kind of work together more effectively. So not only as a leader, I need to kind of start looking at my people, my team, the people I surround myself with, the people that we hire. We start looking at them from an experiential intelligence. And I love this idea because, to me,

someone who has a sort of reflective, introspective sort of thing about their life is really important in having people around me. Because not only from an experiential or being able to execute, but also from a behavior and relationship thing. who's reflective and maybe done the work at going, you know, what are my childhood traumas or, you know, why am I an asshole? Which is constantly what people ask me. Uh, the, uh, you know, it gives you feedback and you go, well, why am I, I'm an asshole. And then I realized that it works for me. So I go with it. Um, anyway, but, uh, do you see like, uh, recruiters, um, making this change over? I feel like we're in this time, and part of it was from COVID, where we have this whole database of employees that now want to work remote. And there's this big struggle there.

But also, like we mentioned earlier in the show, the colleges are in decline. People are realizing that maybe college isn't everything, or at least college debt isn't everything. They're realizing they're not getting their return on value. Like we mentioned, a few companies now are interviewing without college degrees. It seems like we're entering a new model era. I think you may have put your thumb on it and hit the button with this. Are you noticing companies or recruiters? Because recruiters are the very base.

They're all over LinkedIn, and HR departments need to really adopt this. 100%. So a couple stats. The percentage of jobs requiring a college degree fell from 51% in 2017 to 44% in 2021. Wow. That is a huge drop um and then gallup reports that the percentage of u.s adults age 18 to 29 who view college education as quote-unquote very important dropped from 74 to 41 recently wow so the world is shifting to basically saying it's not about

test scores it's not about test scores. It's not even about that degree because that degree doesn't tell you that you're really qualified for your job. It doesn't. Experience. And recruiters should be embracing that. And if they're not, they're lagging. Recruiters need to embrace it. Companies are starting to embrace it, like I mentioned, Google and others.

And we need to recognize experience is real intelligence. And we all have that experiential intelligence. How do we get in touch with it? And how do we communicate it to those who are hiring us and interested in kind of what we can offer to the workplace? Because job descriptions also and job roles, those are changing by the day. Like what you're hired for, you're not going to be doing three years from now. It's going to change. So we need a much

more dynamic model to understand talent, hiring, job success. And I totally agree with you. And I hope that this is the cusp of a new sort of thing thing and it kind of has to go that way if you understand what's going on the social dynamic of our thing oh you know we have less young men going to college than ever before they usually are look men are usually look to in hypergamy is as upscale you know the women date up you know and so these women they're going to colleges they grow on one of the men who went to college and earn more and earn enough money to provide for families. Families are the building block of our government, our society. We're seeing countries like Japan, this is happening too. So companies are going to have to adapt whether they like it or not without these men going to college. They're going to

have to find a way to put them to use. And so I think every, you know, the whole model is just getting thrown out the window. You know, it's like buying an office lease for 30 years. You know, I've seen people complaining about how they're being dragged back to, clawed back to office because the owners signed a 30-year lease on the office building. And, you know, now employees are having to deal

with this whole, well, if we don't do 50-50 remote or 100% remote, the employees are going to go to somebody who does. And it's really interesting dynamic where our world is kind of shifting and turning upside down. You know, I think one other aspect of it, I was just reading recently, we've finally become a nation of renters, as I predicted in 2008, when the banks I consulted with used to get what we called a jingle mail. It was a jingle mail? Yeah. We get the keys that people would send in mass back for their homes to be repossessed, or not repossessed, foreclosed upon, but you get jingle mail. And so you get these bags from the U.S. Postal Service and you shake them, And it would just be all the keys that people had sent back in,

abandoning their homes in 2008, the 2008 crisis. And so I was reading recently, this is, I think, from the CEO of Redfin. On LinkedIn, he was saying that we're becoming a nation of renters because a lot of the people that bought the homes, a lot of people that bought the homes at those low interest rates, they're not going to give up those homes. They're not going to move anytime soon. But everyone else is going to be stuck renting, which means we have a more mobile society than ever. We have more of this society that we've had since COVID where people are like,

hey, I used to work in San Francisco and I worked for a San Francisco company, but I moved to Milwaukee because the rent's cheaper and the life quality is better when it comes to monetary return on investment, but I'm still working for the San Francisco company. And so I think we're going to have more of that where this nation of renters is going to do that. But this is really interesting. So how do we,

do we need to change the resume model in your, in your research? You know, because the resume model for me for, for me, for centuries, it's the most dumbest thing in the world. I hate it. Yeah, I agree. I think the resume model, we kind of have certain... So let me kind of back up. What you just described are a whole bunch of different business models, whether it's real estate, education, hiring and talent management. These are all models that have been and continue to be disrupted because of digital

technology and because our society has changed and we need to catch up with how life really works. So no, that's kind of the frame. Yes, we need to figure out how do we screen for how people think and their broader set of abilities beyond just, you know, kind of keywords and resumes. Now, you can screen in people perhaps in a broader way, but, you know, like you take an example would be Google. They have these career certificates. You can take a class on Coursera for a hundred bucks and then you're qualified for a job at Google.

So what the goal is, is to provide opportunities for people to demonstrate experience and to have experiences that get them to a place where they can fill a job that didn't exist a year ago. And so what we want to do is we want to create a mechanism to engage people who don't seem to be a fit that actually are, and then allow both growth and also demonstration of experience to whatever that kind of job is you're looking for, but in a way that's much more strategic, that's much broader and accepting of kind of diverse experience rather than pigeonholed experience in a college degree kind of thing. So that's what we need to get to. Yeah. One of my problems I used to have with my sales corporations was I would, I tried hiring people out of college for sales and it was a bust. It was a total fricking bust. Now I realized that if you're Merrill Lynch or somebody, you know, who's got piles of money, you can put people

through training and you can eventually get, you know, some guy who went to MBA college. But most guys I had were just guys who, you know, got a sales degree and came out. And nine times out of ten, those guys couldn't sell their way at a paper bag if you held a gun to their head. Like they just could not sell. And they would, they're like, well, I memorized everything in school and I repeated it. And, you know, guys, the street smarts, I mean, I used to joke with my, I used to joke with my vice president, my business partner. I'm like, you know what? The best sales training I ever got was spending a year at a car dealership and then

going and hanging out with the used car salesman. That's an experience. You want to learn sales, go do that for three months. And I used to joke about how I would love to spend three months to have anyone who worked for us go to work for three months at a used car salesman. We paid them, right? You know, go learn to sell. And the biggest guys that I had that were the most, they made the most money, 20 grand a month, these guys would pull. You know, sometimes I'd have 50 grand of their money sitting in my bank. I'm like,

you really need to get, take out this money. But you know, they had, sometimes they had issues where they, you know, too much cocaine or something. They're like,

just hold on to the money, Chris. Cause if I get it, I'll spend it. Um, but you know, it's my best salesman in the world. Never had college degrees,

but they had Moxie, man. They had life experience just like you're talking about. Well, let me give you a practical example. So in addition to writing books and doing leadership development, I started a company called Praxie.com. P-R-A-X-I-E.com. And it's really about creating software that's best practice in terms of business processes for marketing and strategy and innovation and HR and stuff like that, based on experts from around the world. But we were looking for, I was, you know, kind of literally, I was in a bar and with my wife, and we met some

friends and one of the friend's daughters, she's like, I need an internship. I'm at UC Davis, and I'm a sophomore and I need to get an internship. I'm like, well, you're how old are you? She's like 23 or 24. I'm like, why are you a sophomore? She's like, well, I took some time off and I lived in Israel and I joined the army and I was in the army for two years and I was a commander and I had like 20 people under me. I'm like, so now you're in college. She's like, yeah. I'm like, so now you're in college. She's like, yeah. I'm like, well, how did you, when you moved to Israel,

you're like, you know, in middle school, how'd you figure out how to, you know, kind of assimilate? She's like, well, I just kind of did it. And then I'm like, well, how'd you figure out how to lead a battalion of 20 people? She's like, I had to figure it out. Like, whoa, okay. So I brought her on as an intern and within a very short amount of time,

she was managing a global team who was in Asia and Africa and the U.S., building software programs for best practices, and she applied what she knew how to do in terms of building teams in the Israeli military to software. Now, nothing on her resume said software experience. Nothing said team building. But she was able to apply that experiential intelligence to her job, and now she's like one of our all-stars so like though if you just need some insight into how to think about and look at the abilities you need the mindsets that you know you want to have in that role and then look for kind of those adjacent experiences that will clue you

in that there's a fit there yeah and you bring up bring up a good point. One of the problems I have, I have a lot of military friends is, is, you know, these folks are trained, uh, by the military. They're trained to be leaders.

They're, they're operating billion dollar, you know, planes and helicopters and stuff. And they come out of the service and no one will respect the experiential knowledge that they have, especially their team building. I mean, people, the loyalty and team building that goes on in the military is extraordinary.

The band of brothers, I know there's females working there, but there is a loyalty. There is a code. There is a humanhood, I guess I'll call it, since there's females working there. There's a brotherhood-ish sort of thing where it's a thing about loyalty. It's about watching each other's back. It's about building team. You know, you're getting, these people aren't operating like, you know, paperclips.

These are billion-dollar systems, billion-dollar computer systems, billion-dollar planes and everything else. And we throw them away. You know, we have this high suicide rate of veterans. And we've had authors talk about this on the show because they can't be utilized or they're not being utilized and not being valued for their experiential knowledge. I know we mentioned earlier I wanted to fall back to Google. Google did have some weird questions they used to ask people on interviews. And I think that was kind of more of an attack to try and get to experiential intelligence, was it? Or just maybe some analytical sort of intelligence?

Yeah. I mean, analytical intelligence, I mean, you can take an IQ test. I mean, that'll tell you how smart somebody is, but it's the application of that analytical intelligence to some real world problem or some theoretical problem that shows you you can do what you want to do another example um i have been kind of coaching um he's a younger guy he's probably just graduated college he's looking for a job right now san francisco-based media company he's applying to um and he was looking they basically asked him to give he's going to be selling kind of media right so kind of out of the gate they said create a couple page powerpoint presentation like we are you know kind of the the client and the company and give us the pitch so

he had to like scour the web and look at all their media and create a two-page kind of marketing document and then give them the pitch on their own business back to them. So that's a great example of kind of demonstrating kind of how you're assimilating all of your experience to do something that represents how you might show up later down the line. So I think that is getting to what you talked about. It doesn't matter what that experience was. If you can deliver that pitch, create the PowerPoint, and demonstrate that, you can have military experience, you can have no experience, and just other life experience. It really is about figuring out what do you bring into the party and how do you

demonstrate that? The thing about entrepreneurs is we work to a gun to our head. There's no guaranteed paycheck at the end of the week. There's no guaranteed paycheck. There's nothing guaranteed actually at all. In fact, there's one thing that's guaranteed is failure because

I think the numbers have changed, but when I grew up, it was 99% of businesses failed in the first two years. I think the numbers have changed but when I grew up it was 99% of businesses failed in the first two years it seemed I think the numbers have changed maybe it's 70% or something people always argue with me when I quote that but in the first two years is the key factor of that and and the you know the ability to operate with the gun to your head solve problems during the 2008 crisis recession it wiped my whole empire of little companies out my little empire out. And I was starting so many different businesses and trying so many different things just to try and find something that would work. So that way to hit and operate.

Cause you know, the economy came to a standstill and, uh, my one friend turned to me and he goes, Chris, I've seen you start so many things and try so many things and you're. You're just doing everything possible to finally get a business to click in this new fucked up world. He goes, if it came out on the news that you'd become an international arms dealer, he goes, I wouldn't be surprised because you're just trying like everything.

But you've talked about how getting people to put stuff together and sometimes under immense amount of pressure, like the military, you're under a lot of pressure. Because not only do you have to meet what's going on, you know, sometimes you kind of have a quote unquote gun to your head. You know, it's a life or death situation. If you don't perform well, the Russians are going to blow your head off. You know, the world that I grew up with, the USSR hiding under a desk. So, you know, it's life or death. And that's kind of what that whole humanhood or brotherhood is about, is knowing people have your back. But do we need to, do we need, what do you think about the world? Because what you're talking about is the massive experience that you have makes all the difference.

One of the things that makes me mental, and I've watched a lot of startups crash that have been funded millions and millions of dollars by Silicon Valley stuff. And they'll always put 20-year-olds in because they know they can work their ass off. They know they won't demand a lot of money. And they can live on Doritos. And they can make the most amount of profit return on those guys. But one of the problems is, I think it's called gentrification, where there's a bias against old people and older people like myself. And clearly, I should be biased because I'm an idiot, biased against because I'm an idiot. But there are some smart people out in the world.

A lot of my friends are very smart Silicon Valley types that grew up in Silicon Valley and the environment there, but now can't find jobs, the younger people are vaulted. And I've watched so many startups where I'm like, dude, if you would have had me at least on the board, if you would have had me involved, you'd have the billion-dollar startup that you was a unicorn and now it's hit the wall. And you need some people that have some age and know what they're doing in there and experience. So I don't know.

Do we need to value older people because they have a larger, of age and know what they're doing in there and experience. So I don't know. Do we need to value older people because they have a larger, faster experiential knowledge or am I just being my own self-interest here? You're not. There is research that says that if a startup is founded by someone, I think it's over 45 or 50, it's four times more likely to succeed. Really? Yep. But the other piece of what you're talking about, though, is sort of about mindset. And so, you know, you look at someone who is older, and if it's kind of like their first

startup, or they're kind of fresh into the startup game. There may be less of a risk tolerance. Somebody who's 20, like, what do they have to lose? If something doesn't work out, like, try the next thing. And that has been kind of the Silicon Valley mentality. Now, the question is, how do you take that experience that you might have with all of the wisdom you might have from your experiences and marry it with the mindset of risk-taking you might have with all of the wisdom you might have from your experiences and

marry it with the mindset of risk-taking and fast iteration and moving quick and high energy as well. And so, you know, yeah, young, young founders, you know, there, there's a lot of debate about, you know, you just want somebody who's kind of young and fresh and we hear the stories of, you know, Zuckerberg and, you know, kind of Facebook and like no real experience other than starting in this thing at Harvard. Well, those are anomalies. And even that, you get the investors and you got some pretty seasoned folks who are providing input. really have an opportunity to do when you're just talking about the startup world is kind of marry the risk-taking fast-moving mindset with the wisdom of how do you really scale and grow this thing and then you know the vcs if you're doing that kind of traditional route will oftentimes

bring in you know they advise and they kind of bring in the networks and stuff like that so you know that's kind of the best of the both worlds but you know if you're really you know really, you know, looking at, you know, you're a small business owner and you, you know, got to make, got to make shit work and you have a limited amount of time and you talked about the gun to your head, like you, you want to be able to tap into those other people, whether they're on your team or they're part of your network that you know can contribute to your blind spots like you've got certain experiences well you might not have experiences scaling some new business model well go find a partner or find an advisor or whatever who who has that experience and so you want to basically look at that network of experiences that you think are going to be

important to whatever you're doing and bring that into whatever you're trying to achieve. So that's, I think, the general principle that's helpful here. That's one of the reasons that I love stories. It's a great way to educate yourself on life. There's no life manual. And so I've learned to love stories. And I told my niece and nephew when they graduated high school, I said, be a story collector. Collect stories. That's how you learn. That's what everything is about.

Movies, TV, everything we consume, everything we use to entertain ourselves is really storytelling. You know, Shakespeare is storytelling about life lessons. And this is how we learn. This is why I love my show because I have brilliant minds on the show and they educate me. And I learn their life lessons and their stories and everything else. And then, you know, we have those data that we can process. And so, yeah, it's great where even if you're like a young person, you can learn, uh, so sort of experiential intelligence from other people's experience. If you, I suppose if you pay attention to it. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And I think there's

one huge gap that exists in what you described, because what you described is absolutely an opportunity. We don't take enough time to learn from our own stories. Meaning, like, let's look at, just think back, like, what are all the experiences that really shaped you, Chris. Like think about a couple of tough ones, a couple of really positive ones, and then decipher what did they give to you? How do you think? You've got a great sense of humor. You're very self-deprecating. You create really kind of a trusting environment because there's no judgment. I'm talking about how you're an idiot.

I mean, facts are facts. I'm sorry to interrupt you. It creates, you've got this skill, you've got this ability to set a tone, and those are things you developed over time. Now, maybe you developed them because you saw role models doing it. Maybe you developed it as a defense mechanism

because there was something tough and you had to be lighthearted about it. Whatever it was, you're now leveraging it and using it to be successful. And if you just go back, I bet you can trace forward the experiences you had, the assets you gave, you gain from them.

And now what you're doing today to be successful. And there's a line of sight, but not all of us always do that. And there's a line of sight, but not all of us always do that. And there's a real opportunity to do that for yourself. Yeah. That's the one thing I love about being an entrepreneur is you have to be, there's a real self-accountability thing that you have to be. You have to be very self-accountable to be an entrepreneur. And there's a lot of introspective, retrospective, and a lot of things going. You're doing everything you can to get the wheels to work on the widget and stuff. But people can do this in their own lives.

And so I love the future of What This Spring. We could probably talk forever. We want to tease out the book so that people can just get a word of the book. But there's a lot of materials you give on the website to do. But I love this experience. We should value people more. We should throw out the whole resume model and try and figure out. One other question I had for you.

People's experiential intelligence, I think sometimes a lot of it comes from how we move through cathartic experiences. When I met people that have been through a lot of shit in their life, you know, a lot of bad things have happened to them. And, you know, we talked about some of our childhood and traumas and different things and the toolbox that we've kind of used to process that and try and survive, almost survivalist. That's really what this universe is. It's a survival game when you really think about it.

This world is trying to put everybody down and kill everybody off, and species die all the time. We're in a survival game, whether it's with business ideas or whether it's just surviving life. We're all just human beings trying to make our lives work and trying to find value for ourselves, but also I think finding value in our own lives is contributing to other people's lives in a positive way. So, you know, what the, the, a lot of us have trauma and have

set, have had setbacks and struggles, and sometimes we bottle it up and we ignore it, but it'll crop back up as self-limiting beliefs or just barriers that we're not aware of. The opportunity is to really kind of be a little more introspective and vulnerable with ourselves. And so that we can see what's kind of driving us. Maybe we're on autopilot in certain ways, but also it's not just about like, you know, psychobabble,

like let's fix my, my issues. it's about let's look at the strengths that i gained from whatever those experiences were and how do i leverage those to create you know kind of you know create the kind of future i want to create and if you're vulnerable and you share your story with others and then have a dialogue about what do you see that they, it gave to me? What do you see? How do you see me showing up either positively or maybe that is getting in my way? And let's, let's explore that a little bit. Then you can kind of overcome some of your baggage to then leverage your strengths. And that's what experiential

intelligence, when you really grow it, it's all about. Yeah. And I've seen people that have been, you know, some people go through a cathartic experience or, you know, some sort of life crisis and they don't really learn through it. Sometimes they just start wearing a victim badge and they just, you know, it becomes something that just kind of disables them. So I imagine that's kind of a factor. If we look at people, what sort of crisis they've been through, there's a mental game to some of this when you go through a cathartic experience. I'm not trying to diminish what trauma does to us, because in my book I reference a number of research studies and so forth,

that if you have a trauma, especially like PTSD and, you know, if in early childhood or even in like war, your body gets wired, you're, you get wired neurologically to have certain physiological responses to future events that remind you of that trauma. So you, you, you really, there really, there's techniques like it's called EMDR, eye movement desensitization response, and it can rewire you if you've got that level of trauma. Now, so I'm not diminishing, we might need to heal from things and kind of work on some of our challenges. And you might, you know, feel like a victim because you're physically wired to have certain responses that are really difficult to control so emdr and meditation and other things can help with that and at the same time as you heal the flip side

of healing and the other side of the coin is growth. There's research that's also called post-traumatic growth. It's about you have a trauma and it creates a total shift in how you view yourself, the world, what's important. A lot of people who have had cancer or who kind of have undergone kind of pretty significant life, you know, kind of traumatic experiences can have post-traumatic growth and it changes their life. Now the question is how do you get that kind of level of shift and change maybe without the

trauma and experiential intelligence is an opportunity to kind of be introspective about what your experiences are and kind of leverage that as well, but not minimizing trauma, but there are also, you know, things you can do to kind of heal from it at the same time and use that healing to then find growth as well. That's interesting. You've just welcomed me in several new terms over this podcast. Growth After Trauma, the American Psychological Association. I just pulled that up. You know, it's like you mentioned.

We learn from the experiences we have in life. And I was going to actually mention someone with cancer. I mean, someone with cancer who survived cancer, the head game that they've had to do with their head is very different than someone who's maybe not had cancer. There's a whole different thing that you go through. People that have been through trauma go through a different head game. And it's interesting to me. I mean, the multiple authors we have on the show and the multiple things we discuss on the show, trauma, childhood trauma,

seems to be one of the core building blocks of people's lives. And I'm not sure that it's a building block that should happen. But it seems like, I mean, we all go through cathartic times. We all go through challenges. I mean, I don't know anybody who goes through a perfect life without any sort of challenges that make them grow. And it seems like those are the things that make us grow and develop. So just more and more people need to recognize this, especially in the business environment, like you've talked about in your book. Yeah.

In the business environment, we have a business culture. And it basically says you leave yourself at home and you show up and you do your job. The reality is if we're carrying trauma with us and we're carrying our self-limiting beliefs or even kind of the little traumas, I call them big traumas and little traumas, if you carry those with you, you're carrying them wherever you go. You can't just leave them at the office door or your home office door. They're going to come with you, you're carrying them wherever you go. You can't just leave them at the office door or your home office door. They're going to come with you. So in business, we have to recognize

our people, our talent are bringing all of them to work. How do you help people overcome some of the challenges from a wellness standpoint? And how do you look at the things that they brought that might not be on the resume that they can contribute both sides. And so like we really need business to wake up in terms of kind of really seeing people as people and all we're bringing to the workplace. Definitely. Definitely. I mean,

cause I mean you either, you have that people that, I mean to me, someone who can think for themselves, somebody who's introspective, retrospective, somebody who understands their operation of their minds. You know, some of my best employees had trauma around them. I remember one of my best employees was an older lady that she would work her butt off for me, but she had a son who had, what's the personality disorder where you hear and see things talking to you? It was the Beautiful

Mind movie. Schizophrenia. She had a son who had schizophrenia. She worked her butt off. She was a great employee because nothing compared to what it was like to try and raise her son and the trauma that would go on and the stuff that would go on there. I think it made her a better person. I don't know.

That's the theory I have. The mental illness that my mother had was schizophrenia. And so I had, I had some really, you know, very difficult experiences growing up where, you know, she'd get me up out of my bed in the middle of the night and tell me some people were coming to get us and take me somewhere. We'd hide in the bushes for a while and then somehow my father would find us. But those experiences totally had to heal from them and kind of address them. But you learn a way to get through life and solve your own problems. I learned at seven years old, I was realizing I had to kind of decipher reality for myself. And I had to be super aware. And I had to really understand my environment. I had to kind of decipher reality for myself and I had to be super aware and I had to really understand my environment.

I had to read people's faces and I had to kind of understand how to navigate the world in a way that most seven year olds don't. Well, today I can facilitate a meeting with a hundred people in the room and read the room really well. I can kind of understand, you know, do a bunch of interviews with executives and kind of see the patterns and get the business issue really fast. And so, you know, I, yeah, there's healing and

then there's leveraging what it gives you. And so, you know, it's, it's again, we, we need to be supportive of people's process from a healing standpoint. And at the same time, like this woman, you know, the, co-worker you had like she has incredible assets because what she had to go through and how do we appreciate those and how do we kind of amplify that and highlight that so that she can be successful in doing what she's doing and contribute to your your own success at the same time and really celebrate all that there you go uh you know one of the things that did shape my life was I was born and shape my entrepreneurism,

I believe was I was born into a religious cult and they were trying to force everybody, you know, think a certain way. And, you know, so early on, somehow I had this brain that would question everything.

And I'd be like, well, why do I, this doesn't make sense here. These two dots don't connect. And they'd be like, you just need to have faith. And I'd be like, well, why do I, this doesn't make sense here. These two dots don't connect. And they'd be like, you just need to have faith. And I'd be like, no, I really want to know what's going on. Why don't these two dots connect? And so I would, I was constantly asking questions and saying, you know, why does this make sense? Why don't these two dots connect? Or why isn't this logic? Oh, you just have to have faith. You just have to believe.

And, well, that's great for religion. It didn't work for me. And that helped me in my entrepreneurism because it'd be like, okay, how can we make this better? Why does the widget not work? It was working for the past 10 years. It's not working now. And so constantly questioning authority and all that sort of introspection that I was doing

as a child trying to figure out how to survive with that actually shaped me to be a better entrepreneur, I think. So Chris, we need some offline time because I was born in a spiritual cult as well. In the East Bay in California of the Bay Area, there were about 400 people and they all had this teacher and it would, they followed kind of an Indian spiritual guru. Um, and you know, a lot of what I took away similar to you, you know, the negative things were like, I took away, you know, my father was really focused on the community and not me and kind of wouldn't do things with me. So I took away, like, I'm not, I'm not worthy of attention and, and recognition. Like kind of, that's, that's kind of wouldn't do things with me. So I took away like, I'm not, I'm not worthy of attention

and recognition. Like kind of that's, that's kind of one thing I took away. Now, what it gave to me was I needed to, I wanted to excel and be successful to get recognition and to get the accolades I didn't get growing up. Well, you know, on the one hand that helped me succeed on the other. I didn't have a lot of balance for many years. I was a workaholic, that kind of thing. But, you know, your own experience, like you took that experience and then you figured out, like, I need to question norms. I need to question, you know, kind of how things are told to me they work.

And I'm realizing they don't work that way, and if I push those boundaries, I can create something new. Hence the entrepreneurship that you've got. Yeah. I wrote in my book about the nine-dot experiment. I don't know if you've ever seen it. It's the out-of-the-box nine-dot experiment. And it's something that really made me recognize

what I was already doing in life. And like you said, I was challenging the norms, and I still challenge the norms to this day. I go, wait, I don't care that society does this. What does it really mean? Why do we do this? Well, everyone else does it, Chris. Why do we do this?

I used to go into companies and solve problems with companies and even my own company. I'd be like, why do we do this? I don't know, Chris. We've been doing this for five years. Well, it's stupid if you look at it from the outside. It doesn't make any sense. You could take at least three

segments of your process here and probably be more efficient and less costly. And they're like, I don't know, man. We shouldn't change it. So we've always done things. And a lot of companies operate that way. On one hand, you go, hey, there's my trauma. On your other hand, you go, how can I use this as a tool and as a thing to become successful?

That's right. And, you know, and as you move through your own professional journey, you're going to have, and you probably already have, many opportunities to mentor other people, to coach other people. And if you can open up, I mean, you already did globally with this story live. But, you know, if you can help others see the line of sight from your experience to now what you're doing, you can help them do the same for themselves. And it's really empowering. You know, you talk about kind of the victim mindset and all that, you know, an opportunity is to see how we all have agency, how we all are able to look at whatever's gone on in our lives, and then see what that gave us in some way. And your story is spot on, it gave you something. And if you brought if you bring that to life, then other

people have an opportunity to see what their strengths are. And agency is about recognizing we are empowered to do something. So your story is a wonderful one to give others agency. Yeah. And reading your book is going to help people identify maybe their stories better and their trauma and their experiential intelligence and what they know. I really want this because to me, someone who has a, who has an examined life, I'm trying to remember the quote,

but examine life where they understand their lives and what they've, and they've learned something from it. And then they, they're constantly trying to prove themselves, which a lot of entrepreneurs do. And I think a lot of people try and improve themselves. I hope they do. I don't know. I can't

speak for them because I only have the six other personalities in my head that I have to deal with. Sybil. All six want to improve themselves. Well, except for the one who says kill, kill, kill all the time. That's pretty much the one that the judge says they

can't listen to anymore. I'll get the parole off the bracelet off soon. Anyway, guys, no, there's not a criminal record, people. It's a joke. It's just comedy. So it's been wonderful to have you on the show, Soren. We could talk about this forever. I'd love to have you back anytime you want.

And it's great for leadership principles too as well. Give us your parting thoughts, anything we want to throw in there to tease out the book. Well, you know, I think everyone has experiential intelligence. It's our unique internal fingerprint. The question is, how do we get in touch with it? And then how do we leverage it to really achieve our personal and professional goals? So if you want the first chapter, no cost, you just go to sorenkaplan.com, S-O-R-E-N-K-A-P-L-A-N.com. You get the first chapter,

you can check it out. If you get the book, there's an entire toolkit to basically kind of walk you through with videos and templates, everything we've just talked about. There you go. I love it. I love it. And hopefully this world is changing for the better because I hate the resume thing. You know, it's, it's basically, It's basically what we talked about. What did you memorize? Memorization is not experiential intelligence. You can learn from people's

stories. What did Washington do that was successful or something like that? It's so harder to apply unless you've been through that sort of thing. We need to value people more. Throwing away old people is stupid. You know, their experience of life is expansive. I mean, at 50, I look back on my life and go,

God, I wish I knew. People ask me, they're like, would you go back to being 20 again if you could? And I'd be like, as long as I can keep everything I know, I'll do it. Because God knows I was an idiot at 20. You know, what you just said struck a chord. I've worked internationally, Asia, Australia, Europe.

Our culture is one of the few that does not value age and seniors who have such a depth of experience. And we're missing that as an opportunity just culturally, but even in the workplace, bringing back people who are retired or there's various ways to leverage that wisdom that we have in our world, in our society, in our relatives and others. And so what you just said completely resonates. And it's a real opportunity just to change the acceptance and the love we have for those around us. Yeah. I mean, to me, I learned a long time ago as a CEO, uh, I, you know, I thought I

was kind of brilliant there for a while cause I was creating profit companies, one on top of each other, but I learned very hard very early on that I'm not the, uh, I'm not the well fountain of all the greatest ideas. And then I've got to have people around me that are smart or smarter than me. Uh, and, and I never know where the best idea is going to come from when you're problem solving or building companies. And so having people around that have that sort of mindset are great. It's been wonderful to have you on the show, Soren. Like I said, we could probably talk about this forever, but I hope leaders, CEOs, and HR people and recruiters, this is going out on LinkedIn. So hopefully those people are listening and changing the model or

will change the model because I think it's going to have to change. I mean, what's going on with our society and young men not going to college as much as they were? In fact, it's a huge decline. I think, you know, we need to value people differently and go, hey, man, what can you know? How are you? How good are you at operating with a gun to head like the military folks? I mean, it's just extraordinary to me. If I had a business, I would always hire military folks.

So they were some of the best employees I had. They know leadership. They're taught this through a gauntlet. You know, it's not easy being in the military and learning all this stuff that they do. And you're doing it technically, quote, unquote, with a gun to your head. Anyway, thank you very much, Soren, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. It's a pleasure, Chris.

Thank you. There you go. Order up the book, folks, wherever fine books are sold. Stay on those alleyway bookstores. You might get shivved in there or, you know, pick up some. You need a tetanus shot. I stepped on a nail on one the other day. Wherever fine books are sold, experiential intelligence,

harness the power of experience for personal and business breakthroughs. Available January 24th, 2023. And Soaring Capital has been on the show with us today. Thank you to my audience. We always appreciate and love you being here. Always subscribe to the show. Subscribe to it on Apple iTunes and all those different places. You go to youtube.com, for instance, Chris Voss.

Google.com or goodreads.com, for instance, Chris Voss. LinkedIn, all the different crazy places on LinkedIn. You can find us. There's three or four different things we utilize over there to promote the show, uh, and all the other places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other,

stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time. Brilliant discussions.