The Mello Millionaire with Tommy Mello - What you can learn from the greatest businessmen of all time (with Carmine Gallo)

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

Carmine Gallo is a bestselling author, Harvard instructor, keynote speaker, and one of the world’s foremost experts on business communication and storytelling. A former CNN correspondent and journalist, Carmine transitioned from broadcast news to advising some of the most influential leaders and companies in the world through his firm, Gallo Communications Group.He is the author of multiple Wall Street Journal best-selling books, including Talk Like TED, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, The Storyteller’s Secret, Five Stars, and The Bezos Blueprint. His work has been translated into more than 40 languages and has shaped how leaders communicate, present, and persuade in the modern business world.Carmine has worked with executives at 7 of the world’s top 10 most admired companies, helping them refine their messaging, elevate their storytelling, and turn ideas into influence. Through his research, he has studied iconic communicators like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos, uncovering the principles behind some of the most powerful presentations and business narratives ever delivered.Check Out My Social Media:Tiktok ⟶ https://www.tiktok.com/@officialtommymelloInstagram ⟶ https://www.instagram.com/officialtommymello/Facebook ⟶ https://www.facebook.com/thomasmello/My other podcast:Home Service Expert ⟶ https://open.spotify.com/show/4WHQ3ldGThHsP1cfzNF33GLive Q&A submission form:https://homeserviceexpert.com/questions

Most businesses fail. And most people just don't have the tenacity. And everywhere I look on Instagram or TikTok, it's like, go start your own business. And I'm not trying to talk people out of it. So that's why I always say, Tommy, you can have the greatest idea in the world. But if you cannot convince enough other people to buy into your idea, you won't be nearly as successful. Carmine Gallo has spent over two decades decoding the secrets of the world's most influential communicators, like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and other hugely successful businessmen.

A former CNN correspondent and Emmy award-winning journalist. Carmine knows better than anyone what separates average entrepreneurs from extraordinary ones. If you want to increase your EQ and improve your communication skills, this one's for you. All right, guys, welcome back to the Mello Millionaire. Today I'm shooting from the house, and it's a beautiful Saturday. I've got Carmine Gallo here. He's the author of the Bezos Blueprint, the presentation. secrets of Steve Jobs. The storyteller's secret talk like Ted, one of the world's leading experts

on business communication and storytelling, former CNN correspondent. I'm really looking forward to this. So do you just want to start out by giving me and the audience a little bit more about you? What made you come up in business and where you're at today? Yeah, absolutely. Hey, thanks for having me on. Congratulations on your success as well. So my background is communication in all of its forms. I was a business journalist. And then I started making this transition into coaching executives and entrepreneurs on how to be better communicators.

Then I began writing about it. And like you said, maybe it has to do with my ADHD, but I've written 10 books. I just released an audio original through Macmillan Audio. And we can talk about the difference between audio books and audio originals. And I write for Forbes. Inc. Harvard Business Review, and I teach, along with a co-teacher named Vanessa Gallo, my wife, we actually co-teach classes in executive education at Harvard. So we get to go to campus

a couple times a year and connect with global executives. So that's a lot of fun too. But I'm obsessed with communication in all of its forms, and I enjoy talking to people like yourself, too, because I'm always learning. I love it. So, was there a moment when you first realized the power of storytelling and communication when you were younger? When I was younger, I do recall, let's go back to high school. As early as high school, I was reading biographies of incredible leaders. And many of them were amazing storytellers and communicators. And I remember reading like speeches from Winston Churchill or listening to the speeches of Winston Churchill.

And I'm sure you're very familiar with that history. So in 1940, he's rallying the British people with speeches like, you know, we shall fight. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight in the hills. And we shall never surrender. And I'm like, oh, my God, this is, I want to fight too. I want to go fight.

I don't know who I'm fighting, but I'm going to go fight. How does that happen? Like, how do words inspire us? to dream bigger, to be more ambitious, to do more things. That's what I really started to understand. There's some power here. I don't know what to do with it, but it's interesting. And then I went to UCLA.

I got a master's at Northwestern. I got into journalism. Words, journalism, current events. Let's see where this goes. And I became a broadcast journalist. But that wasn't satisfying enough for me. I really wanted to start getting more of a deep dive and write. about this topic and helping others become better communicators.

Who are your top three communicators and storytellers? We've got to start with Steve Jobs. Let's just start with one. Steve Jobs, in my opinion, is still the greatest corporate or brand storyteller of our time. I haven't met or written about anybody who captures the whole package like he does. number two in my opinion, and this could be just only because I've been studying him recently. We have to talk about Jensen Wong, who was the CEO of Nvidia, the first $5 trillion company.

He is a deliberate storyteller. And in fact, he was quoted in Wired magazine saying that we pitched Nvidia, not on a pitch deck. We pitched it based on our story. That tells me, that's a signature. to me, this guy's a storyteller. And when I watch him, I've written a lot about him, when I watch him, he takes you through the hero's journey, which again is another topic we'll get to, that a lot of films use, a lot of great novels use.

In my opinion, a deliberate communicator. And I'm very fond of Richard Branson, who I've had the pleasure of interviewing in person three times now. He is genuine and authentic and uses the stories of his failures and his struggles to build and to show lessons of how any of us can improve. So he, too, is a very deliberate storyteller. And in fact, Richard Branson once told me, storytelling drives change. Storytellers drive innovation. And it's interesting if you think about that, Tommy, Because if you can get people involved in your idea and convince them to come along with you on the journey, you won't be nearly as successful at building your enterprise since you're going to need that support. I love it because for some reason, I remember, I think every human being remember stories.

I can remember, I'm kind of a joke teller I used to bartend. So I probably could tell you, if you told me a joke, I'd remember 20. And then I realized it's the little details, this is the subtleties, it's the pauses. And it's the passion. And when it's done correctly, I've got a buddy with a software company, and he was one of the top guys at Facebook that built part of the AI framework

they use today, a meta. And he's hiring people at $150,000 when they were making a million. And I said, how is this possible? He goes, because they don't feel like a call on a will, and they want to become part of this story. Yeah. Interesting the way that works. Yeah.

What I thought was really interesting is your father was a Italian immigrant. In World War II, he was a prisoner of war for five years. Yeah. And he returned, but he was still in Italy. So when the British took over, Italy, they took all of the young men of fighting age and sent them to camps across the way. deep into Africa. He was in a prison of war camp and never forgot, but it also built his values and resilience and everything that he is.

And thank goodness that him and my mom decided there's a better life for us in America. That's fascinating. How do you think those stories and just your grandpa, how did that shape your life in invaluable ways? and in many ways, that's a good question. If you've spent five years in a prison of war camp, and now you're living in sunny San Jose, California, where they eventually, you know, made their life,

every day is good. Every day is good. So he kind of had that attitude. He was one of those guys. And resilience. Here's a guy who probably didn't have, I don't think he had a high school education because he was rounded up at the age of 15.

And, but he was resilient and he always wanted to learn and he knew that he could, he could do anything, especially here in the U.S. He could be anything. That's a mindset. I think that's why I wanted, and my wife, we wanted to build our own business because it's just a, it's a mindset that you can do anything. You put your mind to. So why not build a brand that we're passionate about and where our talents lie? You know, I just put out a video that had a lot of controversy. I'm kind of a hunter, you know, the DNA, the chromosomes.

It's like one of five percent of the population, one out of 20 really. And most businesses fail. And most people just don't have the tenacity. And everywhere I look on Instagram or TikTok, it's like, go start your own business. And I'm not trying to talk people out of it. But what I will say is the pressure. and the relationships, and there could be a lot of suffering for a lot of years. What's your take? Do you advise everybody? Listen, go out and take a chance.

No. No. Not at all. It definitely takes a certain type of mindset. And like you said, a lot of pain, a lot of struggle. Jensen Wong over at Nvidia loves telling these stories of how him and his friends started their company at Denny's. And I went to the Denny's. I posted a YouTube on this. I went to the actual Denny's. There's a booth. And above the booth, there's a little plaque. And that's where they started their company because they couldn't afford the office space. And he has been asked multiple times if he hadn't do it all over again, would you? And he said, no, no, he wouldn't because he said it's an overnight success story that took three. years to get here. But if you are going to try to build anything yourself, you're going to have

years and years of pain and suffering. So if you're not built for that, don't try it. You know, don't try it. But it's that pain and suffering, just like, you know, Tommy, kind of your story that I've heard several times, but it's through the failures, it's through the pain, as through the suffering, that you learn things and you become more innovative. What's your take on, I guess, experience versus education? Well, this is why I focus on communication skills. I recall working or consulting at one of the biggest tech companies in the world. That was Intel, the company that really started Silicon Valley.

And I worked with Intel engineers for many, many years, helping them communicate better. So one day, true story, this was very kind of early on in my career when I was starting to be more of a coach going from writing to coaching. One of the organizers who had brought me in, senior executive, we were passing a hallway. There was a meeting going on. And he said, you see that guy? See that guy in the front row? I said, yeah, yeah, I see him. He should be running the company.

He's the smartest guy in the room. But he hasn't gone anywhere. He's not going to be promoted. He doesn't really know it, but because he cannot explain what he does to people to get them to buy in, even within people within Intel, didn't understand him. He was so dense, so technical, and he didn't understand the difference between having that IQ. I think he invented something like the USB.

I mean, it was like he invented something that we all use. So high IQ, but not the EQ and the communication skills are what we call the soft skills, which I hate that word, but that's what people use, the soft skills to convince other people to buy into his ideas. So that's why I always say, Tommy, you can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you cannot convince enough other people to buy into your idea, you won't be nearly as successful. And then that's for all fields. And how important do you think Netflix hired a CEO of content to make the CEO stand out,

not only for recruiting great talent, but to be able to stay ahead of a lot of their competition? Oh, that's, yeah, that's, I think I had heard that. And nothing, that doesn't surprise me because a lot of what I don't talk about a lot, because I write about other people. but I have I have worked directly with senior executives and CEOs who run some of the largest companies in the world. Seven of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies I've worked with senior executives there. These are growth mindset leaders. They, I think they've reached that level because they know what they don't know.

And so when it comes to visibility and the ability to build a brand and have a public persona, they understand that that may not be their strength, that may not be their background. And so they'll bring in someone like myself to help them improve their communication skills. But what I learned is that they reached the top for that reason because they have that growth mindset, constantly learning, always striving to get better. And it's a, you know, public speaking and communication like you know is a skill. And like any skill, it can be sharpened. It can be improved.

I recall, I've got a good relationship with the founder of Sandisk. Sandisk is the flash memory company that makes the camera cards. They go into cameras. But they also make flash memory. So I've got a great relationship with the CEO, former CEO. He started the company. He's a nuclear physicist. Yeah, a physicist.

And I remember saying, okay. His name is Ellie. I say Ellie. You've got hundreds of patents. You're doing pretty well. You know, I knew how much, how many stock shares he was selling every quarter. You're doing really well. Why am I here?

You know, it's kind of one of those private conversations. Like, why am I here, Ellie? You're doing great. You don't need me. And he said, Carmine, at that time, he said, for every dollar that our stock goes up or down, it meant like $90 million of valuation. And I remember that. And I remember thinking, oh, yeah, of course, of course, if you can explain it better, if you can explain it more clearly and a more compelling way, you're not only going to attract partners and employees are going to

stick with you because they like the story, the vision, attract customers, come across on the media. They're going to want you more on CNBC, not just once in a great while. thought leadership. So yeah, it gets so much bigger than just I'm trying to improve my brand internally. It's, no, this is important on a grand scale. Yeah, we can get back. I want to talk a lot about Steve Jobs and the Steve Jobs method, but I've got a couple questions I ask during every podcast.

What's one piece of game-changing advice you wish that you knew and honed in on in your 20s? Oh, in my 20s, okay, there's, as you can imagine, only one. Now, we can talk for hours on this, but if there was, I'll give you a personal one and then I'll give you a communication related one. How about that? Personal success would be Warren Buffett's great advice that he's been giving for years now. If you want to be successful, hang out with people who are better than you and you'll move in their direction. It's like the simplest piece of advice you can have. He said associate. Sometimes he says

hang out, but he says the same thing. Associate with people who are better than you and you will move in their direction. Set aside the jealousy, set aside the ego, learn from people who are better than you. What is just a great piece of advice for any field, both personally and professionally. And professionally, as a communicator, I think the best piece of advice that anyone can take away from this entire conversation today is something that I learned when I was doing researching and interviewing scientists for a new audio original. It's called viral voices. It's a cross between a podcast and an audiobook. So I got to interview all these amazing people. It's all about persuasion and communication.

A top neuroscientist said, Carmine, if there's only one thing, your listeners should take away, it's this. And of course, I'm already leaning and going, what? What do is it? The brain doesn't pay attention to boring things. If that's all you know, you will be a significantly better communicator in everything you do, whether it's sending an email or doing a podcast or giving a presentation. The brain doesn't pay attention to boring things. Oh, okay. So you start thinking about this.

A long email. That's boring. Too many bullet points on a PowerPoint slide. That's boring. Short, concise, brief, visuals, use metaphors, use images. That's not boring. So if that's all you know, the brain doesn't pay attention to boring things, it'll answer a lot of your questions about communication.

Why am I not being more persuasive? Why don't people buy into my idea? Maybe because it's boring. You know, a good friend of mine, I got to know him and his wife very, very well. And there's probably nobody I like spending time with more. He's in his mid-80s now. His name's Robert Chowdini. Because when he talks to me, he says, listen, Tommy, we did a double-blind study of 500 people.

And he always brings the facts. It's never speculative. He's like, and here's the interesting thing. thing and his voice and he'll smile and it's just like he comes alive and we're having dinner in the other room and i'm just smiling the whole time looking at him going man this is so much fun to be part because he just spent his whole life as at as u as a professor but really a student absolutely the other question i have for you is what's the biggest professional dream for you at the moment.

I, a lot of dreams, because I feel like, even though I've established a global reputation, there's also 7 billion people on Earth who have not heard of me. So it's all about how to scale now, how to take these ideas and concepts that I have literally obsessed over for two decades and scale. And that doesn't mean just speaking and coaching, but. somebody brought up the idea not too long ago. How about the Gallo Institute of like advanced communication studies? I said, awesome.

Where? They said, well, there's different universities that might want a partner. Okay, all right. So I have to like put that out in the universe and think about how best to scale all of this knowledge. So it's not enough just to have built that a global reputation among some people, but how to reach those other billions of people. who I think are going to need this, especially in this age of AI. So I've spent part of the research on this new audiobook talking to scientists,

AI experts, neuroscientist. You know, it's a real threat and it's going to displace a lot of people, but it's also an opportunity to amplify your authentic voice and to differentiate yourself. So it's going to be a real challenge for people and I think a lot of people need to understand it. You've done a lot of work on Steve Jobs. We talked about it a little bit earlier, but what did Jobs understand about storytelling that most executives still miss? That there's a difference between a presentation and a story.

Tony Fidel, who worked side by side with Steve Jobs, he is considered the father of the iPod. So he created a lot of the hardware that Apple introduced, and then parts of the iPhone. as well, he left Apple to start Nest, which he sold to Google for like $3 billion. So he's doing pretty well. Tony Fidel was on a podcast a couple years ago. And someone asked him, what did you learn from your mentor, Steve Jobs, your former boss, Steve Jobs?

He did not say design. He didn't say supply chain. He didn't say any of those things. Instead, he said, storytelling, storytelling, storytelling. Because if you can't tell the story behind your idea, your product, your service, this applies to all of our listeners. No one's going to buy in. Like John Medina said, the neuroscientist, the brain doesn't pay attention to boring things. It's got a lot of other things to do and it's going to move on.

So if you can't grab someone's attention and show them how your product, your service is going to improve or enrich their lives, you're going to lose those opportunities. Steve Jobs intuitively understood that, and probably from his design background. He understood that in order to attract customers to get people to buy in, you have to connect with emotions, not just logic.

I always, as a communication expert, I always thought that was sort of communication 101. I don't think it is. but it's something that anyone can do. You just have to be aware of it. Steve Jobs was just intuitively aware of this very, very early on, well before anybody else. You know, it watches presentations. Some of his, the most famous Apple presentations are still online.

And you'll notice that he didn't, he never had bullet points on a slide. It was images, images or text. Why is it then that we go into these boring, corporate presentations or on Zoom, and people have slides with 100 words on them. I can't read any of the words. That's cognitive overload. Steve Jobs understood this intuitively. He was the storyteller.

The slides would complement the story. That's what I learned from the research. I also learned that Steve Jobs was a deliberate storyteller. He understood the hero's journey better than anyone. So if you watch the 2007 iPhone presentation, which is one of the, the most famous business presentations of our time. It tracks what's called a hero's journey. There's a setup. There's a conflict. There's a resolution. And I know this is a fact because I spoke to the people who worked on the presentation with Steve Jobs. The setup, here's the current world

as it exists today. Here's the problem with the status quo. And here's the resolution, which is a great pitch formula for any entrepreneur or anyone who's selling an idea to somebody else. Here's the world as it exists today. Here's the problem with the status quo. If you buy into my idea, here's how we're going to solve that problem and live happily ever after. There's something else here now. Something new. From exclusively on Paramount Plus, it's the series Stephen King calls Scary as Hell.

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How important is humor in being able to tell a story, making people smile and laugh? Again, this kind of gets back to like brain rules. You have to, the more you understand about how we process information, the more successful and the more effective you will be at all forms of communication, which is why over the last few years, I've just been immersed in the world of neuroscience and talking to scientists who understand the brain, neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists and scientists. They do a lot of research into this. Um, so one guy told me something fascinating. He said, Carmine, a lot of people are focused on their PowerPoint. We were talking about PowerPoint. Why is PowerPoint so boring? He said,

well, because a lot of people are too focused on the PowerPoint instead of what they should be focused on themselves. Uh, okay. Um, I'm not, well, what do you mean by that? He said, When you first launch into a meeting, let's say you do bring up a PowerPoint, the first thing that your listener's brain or your viewer's brain is going to say to itself is, oh, I'm already bored because I've seen this before and it's boring. I've seen a thousand examples of boring PowerPoint. I'm already bored. So in other words, if you start with your PowerPoint slide, you turn people off. He said the brain in the first few seconds, all of us, evolutionary. It's Wayne.

Is this person friend or foe? Do I trust this person? Do I like this person? You know, basic stuff, Tommy. But people don't think about that. It's all about like my slides or the content. So he, this neuroscientist said, if you want to get people to like you the best way, tell them a little bit about yourself.

or start with a short story. That's relevant. And humor, yeah, absolutely. That is part of why we like somebody, especially people who don't take themselves too seriously. So I was talking to the author James Patterson once. And, you know, Patterson said he starts his speeches by saying, you know, I'm the second best author in the world or something like that. He makes a self-deprecating joke that's related. to something Stephen King once said about James Patterson, you know, that wasn't like the,

the most admiring thing to say. So I forgot exactly how he started it. But he said, you know, you got to start with a little self-deprecation. And I said, why do you do that, James? And he said, because then instantly people, you're not just like this international author. You're, you're someone that people can have a conversation with and they seem to like you because that self-deprecating humor goes a long way. So they're thinking, good communicators and good writers like James Patterson think very deliberately about how to connect with people. But the more you talk to neuroscientists like I have, the more you realize that we're

all just the people who are likable or who we consider inspiring communicators or good communicators are actually people who just are connecting with the way our brains are wired to connect, which is why we get back to storytelling. Tommy, have you ever read Sapiens? Yeah, I just, I'm probably like four chapters in, but it's pretty incredible. You can look up on YouTube, Carmong Gallo, and you've all know a Harari, and you'll see my interview with him. So he said, storytelling is our superpower. Because the reason why, sapiens became the dominant species in the world, even though we are not as strong as other species or as big as other species, is because we had a unique ability to use language to create stories that attracted people to cooperate with each other. How are corporate cultures built around myths and origin stories and common visions, a common story of what we're trying to.

to achieve. So we were able to cooperate. He said the secret to getting people to cooperate in mass is to tell a story. So storytelling, and it's probably in the first part of Sapiens, you'll see it, is our superpower. What a great way of looking at it. And AI cannot tell a story. It's really interesting. AI, AI, I talked to a lot of experts on it. AI can generate work. It cannot create meaning. So that took me a little wild unpack. So I started talking to scientists about it, and they all use the same word. It's a predictive machine.

It's a prediction machine. Have you ever heard of that AI's prediction? It's a prediction. Okay. Again, what does that mean? It said it looks for things that are common. So one of the examples that they actually use in computer science is this. peanut butter and

how would you finish that sentence peanut butter and jelly that's right because that is it's going to predict jelly because that's the most common way of ending that sentence so when it when you ask it to like help you create a story

it'll tell you a story but a story that's common based on data points at scale you know millions of millions of data points of data points. But it's not original. It's not imaginative. It's the same story. I, so I was talking to Richard Branson, and he was telling me all these incredible stories of near-death experiences, like when he tried to cross the Atlantic on a hot air balloon, broke the record for crossing the

Atlantic, but almost died when the balloon crashed into the Irish Sea off the coast of Scotland. And he penned a note to his family. You know, I love you because he thought he only had two minutes to live. But then he like kicked into entrepreneur gear. And he said, you know what? Let's, how would I solve this problem? Okay. Let's go through the steps, you know?

And so he took the lessons that he learned in this near death experience and turned them into lessons that he can use to motivate other people and to teach other people. AI can't do that because AI does not have a lived experience. And we connect to people emotionally, whether we know it or not, through trust and building trust. And we build trust if we know that you have lived a unique experience and you're telling me the story of that experience. That's how we can build trust with each other. And that makes me want to follow you. If you asked, so I did this experiment, it was fascinating.

I went to three different pro-AI models that you pay for, three different ones, and I asked it to tell me a motivational story. If my team is facing uncertainty, I was thinking of Branson, my team's facing uncertainty, what motivational story can I tell them to help them face this uncertain path that we're on? everyone, every model told me a form of the same story, a form of the same story, which they all had the same elements. The same elements were a ship or a boat on the ocean or in a bay or on the sea gets lost in the fog. And there's always a compass and there's always a captain. and the captain says we have to trust the direction.

We have to trust our vision, even though we can't see it, because if we trust the compass, we'll get to safe harbor. Safe harbor was a word that came up a lot. That's okay. It's not an authentic lived experience. And then I asked scientists, why did they all come up with the same story?

And they said, because they're pattern matching. They're not creating a story from their unique lived experience. or from imagination. It's pattern matching. Motivation. A lot of what's out there recently, or a lot of what's out there on motivation has to do with a compass. Okay. What would the next logical thing be? A boat gets lost in the fog. So compass fog, captain, it's looking for what's familiar. And if you want to stand out as a communicator and as a leader or an entrepreneur, or you can't communicate in a way that people have heard a million times. You have to differentiate yourself and only a human has human imagination and lived experiences.

This is super fun. I love watching comedians too. One of the most pivotal things they do on a stage is they relate to like almost everybody in the audience. Like how many people here have been on a flight or been to an airport? Of course. everyone there. And so one of the stories I was telling stage is the origin story about how my mom, I couldn't trust anybody. What do you do when you don't have trust? You call mom. So, you know, for me, it's people always come up to me. This happened two days ago. They're like, man,

like a lot of people, they were like, that story that you talked about with your mom, that really hit home. And it related because, like, my mom lived her whole life in Michigan since 1954. And then she had me on the day she turned 29 March 4th. And, you know, she told me no matter what, my mom's the type of woman that if I, something bad happened and I went to prison, she would sell her house and move right next to that. That's a really bad example.

And I always like to make fun of myself. I'm like, I'm not going to prison. But, you know, that's the type of woman she is. And she picked up her life and said, I'm going to come help you because you're my only son. And I make fun of it. I go, look, mom, I'm your only son. She's like, I don't know if I can leave my whole life.

But I just, I do love stories and how some people say, all I could think about was my mom when you were talking. And that's all you're trying to do. Yeah, that's really interesting. That is really interesting. And that's my obsession, frankly, is what is it about a person? So if I hear about someone like yourself and then I hear from an audience member saying, oh, that was really inspiring. And you know where my mind goes. Why?

What did they do? How can we break that down? Is there a template I can follow? But there is, there is. And what I've learned is that over 2,300 years since Aristotle first wrote the rhetoric, which is all about persuasion, he's called the father of persuasion, the human mind hasn't changed. We haven't changed in 2,000 years. So if you understand how the brain processes,

information, you'll be far more successful as a communicator. The tools of communication have changed. You talk about nine secrets of the world's best speakers. That's in my book, Talk Like Ted, yeah. Talk like Ted. So let's just jump into some of those. Well, let me give you a summary. All the nine fall into three buckets. And this two goes back to Aristotle, but with a little fresh twist. In order to be a persuasive speaker, there are three elements that need to have, you need to have, that need to happen. Persuasive speakers are emotional, novel, and memorable.

Now, within each of those three buckets, you can spend years learning these skills. Emotion, we've talked about that. Neuroscientists to a person have told me that AI doesn't have emotion. It can simulate human conversation. It can even identify human emotion if you show it pictures. It doesn't have human emotion.

So the only way to connect with people and to have that emotional resonance, which is the only way to trigger action, and this goes back to Daniel Kahneman and a lot of psychologists and a lot of influential thinkers, The only way to connect with, to drive action is to connect emotionally. How do you do that? Storytelling is one of different elements, but it's the main element. So you have to connect with people emotionally.

You have to be novel, which is really interesting to me. Novel means different. How do you get people to pay attention to you? It has to be a little different. It can't be something that they have heard or seen before over and over, which is why, if you are creating some new marketing campaigns for your company or your startup, don't go to AI and delegate it and ask it to come up with something. It'll come up with something that sounds like everybody else.

How are you different? What is the one differentiator? And that takes a long time to figure out. I know that when you were starting A1, you went through a lot of branding and marketing and there's a lot of meetings. It's hard to do that. but what is a differentiator? I think you ended up differentiating

like on speed and service. Fine. But the point is, what is your differentiator? Novelty. You have to break a pattern. And the last one is memorable. And there's a lot of tactics. We can do a whole next hour just on the tactics

of how to keep things simple, memorable, engaging so that you have a conversation with people and they're not going to forget it. But novelty is interesting. Jim McKelvey, who is the billionaire co-founder of Square. So for this audio original, he told me a fascinating story. I'll end with this story because I think it's really cool.

And it says so much about communication. He said that when they were pitching the idea for Square to add in Silicon Valley because they needed investment money to get all the engineers and all that, he said, I created, he manufactured a square reader, a credit card reader that was really big. It was very large, but it worked 100% of the time. But he decided him and Jack Dorsey, by the way, who went on to found Twitter later. So him and Jack Dorsey went in and they decided we're going to use a tiny reader, a small one that can attach to you like your cell phone.

Because that, no one had ever seen anything that small. And he said, here's the thing, Carmine. It only worked about 80% of the time. But it caught people's attention. Everybody in the room, but they passed it around. They wanted to see this. And then we did something that caught them off guard. Instead of starting with a PowerPoint slide, we said, we took their money, literally took

their money. They gave us a credit card and we ran it and we would take out like a dollar. Okay. They were shocked. They're like, what just happened? You took my money. Yes, we did. And we want to show you how simple it is to do that.

But he said the point was it was so different that it caught people's attention. And they started talking about it. And they started sharing. Did you see that presentation from those square guys? That was really interesting. So people sometimes don't even know why they're attracted to you or your idea or your message. Often it's because you did something just a little different because the brain is looking for similarities, looking for patterns. As soon as it sees a pattern, it says, I'm bored, I'm out.

Oh, that's different. Oh, let me lean in a little bit. I hadn't seen that before. Hadn't heard that before. So emotion, novelty, and tactics, obviously, to make things memorable. Like sticking to the rule of three, three things. Give me three reasons that I should hire A1 garage repairer and installation. Give me three that I should book this today, not 28 reasons.

This works for everything. Job promotion. You're in a job interview. Three reasons to hire you. Not 32. Because this is something else I've learned over the last few years from scientists. There's something called the presenter's paradox, which means you know too much. You know too much about yourself, your background, or your experience or the product.

And when you start giving people more than like three points to remember, it doesn't add to the argument. It actually detracts from the argument. Three is stronger than four, five, or seven. Anyway, we can spend hours on this, but yeah, communication is, it's fascinating, but you have to have that learn at all perspective and mentality, that growth mindset. you can always get better. And if you go in with that mindset, you're going to learn something new. Carmine, if somebody wants to reach out to you

or get some help from me, what's the best way to do that? If you can remember a good Italian name like Carmine Gallo, you can reach me. Go to my website, carmine gallo.com. We have a newsletter that goes out every week,

but I'm very easy to contact. I'm on LinkedIn. I think I'm the only Carmine in Calo. I could be one of the few carmines in California. So if you just look up Carmine Gallo on LinkedIn or Carmine author, California, that's me. Send me a message. Tell me you heard it on the podcast and I'll get back to you. I love it. You've got a lot of good books. I've read several of them. I'm going to get, I'm going to buy them all. Finally, you know, maybe there's a question they didn't ask you or just maybe something that you want to leave the audience with. So I'll let you finish this up here.

grab your audience's attention and be significantly better as a communicator. Focus on the one thing. One thing. I call it the log line, which I got from Hollywood. Hollywood script writers call it the log line. That's when you go on to Netflix in one or two sentences, it gives you a description of the show. Otherwise, you're not going to watch the show. That's called the log line.

Watch Netflix. See how they get you intrigued in the show. They give you just a little hint of something. But in a professional setting, what is the one thing you want people to take away from your presentation? So you can't walk into a presentation and say, I've got 20 minutes of material. What's the one thing? It's hard to do. But if you don't go in there with the one thing, because that's what we're locked into,

we want to say, what's the differentiator? Then you're going to get stuck in the weeds and you're going to get boring. high level first, then you can support them with maybe three or four points. But everyone's looking for one thing. One, a billionaire venture capitalist told me, Carmine, think about it this way. Engineer the email. I said, what the heck does that mean? We engineer the email.

He said, if you're pitching an idea, that investor is going to go back to his team and send out an email and say, we should invest in this company because of what? What's that sentence? That takes time. That's hard to do. But if you just take a little extra time before your next meeting, before your next Zoom meeting, what is the one thing you want people to remember? That's going to change everything. It's going to change how you present.

It's going to change the structure and the order of the information you present. So if there's one thing you can do to make your next presentation much more effective, it's focus, spend a lot of time focusing on what is the one sentence or the one key message that you want people ultimately to remember from the entire conversation or presentation. Phenomenal. Thank you so much. Listen, this is, it's been a blast. And I think we could have gone for five hours. And next time I want to be in person. So I really appreciate you coming on today. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. Like always, We're going to close it out with the Tommy Truth,

which is a little slice of wisdom from me to you that can help guide you in whatever you're striving towards right now. How do great leaders think about risk? They love it. Risk is great because the greater the risk, the higher the reward. But how am I sure that this risk is going to tilt in my favor is the question? Is it the people on my team? Is it the software?

Is it the brand? Whatever it is. Quite frankly, we fail all the time. The greatest need is in the world. We fall forward. We learn from our mistakes. We don't have the same mistake twice. so we're pulling the risk out of it and we're getting much, much bigger rewards.

And that's it, guys. We'll talk to you next week.