[Scott] We had a guy who was talking about coming on as an investor, and he was really stringing us along. And so I just ran our conversations through the system, and I just showed him. And I was like, “You’re stringing us along, and you are not committed.” And he said, “What are you talking about? Of course, I’m committed.” I was like, “Well, then either my system is wrong and you shouldn’t invest, or my system is right, and you’re not going to invest.” And I just showed him the charts, and he goes, “All right, yeah, I do want to invest, I just don’t have it right now.”
– [Jason] You know your business can change people’s lives, but you don’t yet have the right words to inspire them to take action. Imagine the changes you will create in your business as you tap into the secrets of ethical influence and positive persuasion, to not only better serve your clients, but also to supercharge your financial freedom. I’m your host, Jason Linett, and welcome to The Hypnotic Language Hacks podcast.

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I help entrepreneurs and business owners just like you to close more premium sales. And no, this isn’t about tricking or manipulating people. Not at all. It’s about helping your prospects to appropriately sell themselves into your products or services. Please hit Subscribe and get all the episodes now at jasonlinett.com. It turns out if you break down communication, people have different models of doing this, but very often they tend to agree it fits into one of two categories. There’s one model of communication that talks about verbal and nonverbal. There’s what we say, and then there’s what our body communicates. Another school of thought talks about conscious and unconscious communication. Which to kind of combine the two in one example, have you ever asked somebody a question and they answered yes, yet, if you watch them carefully, they were actually shaking their head no? And inside of hypnotic communication, like what I teach inside of my program,

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Business Influence Systems, we talk about surface structure and deep structure. There’s what people say or even, careful with this phrase, what they think they’re saying, but there’s often when you unpack their communication, what they’re really saying. It’s where if you listen extra carefully, you can start to unravel what their decision-making strategies are, what their values that they’re making these decisions based upon. Even in fact, if you listen extra carefully, whether they’re moving toward pleasure, or whether they’re moving away from pain. And once you have that content, this is where you now become flexible on the fly to better custom design the conversation, which will eventually lead them to now taking part in your business, your product, your service, whatever it might be. Think about this for a moment. What if there was a way to instantly and automatically harness the secrets of influence, persuasion, conversational hypnosis, and good old-fashioned active listening to better understand someone

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else’s priorities, their strategies, and their potential commitment level? What if there was a piece of software that could help you to do this even easier? Imagine this situation, you’re about to get on a call with a potential client. And even possibly before you’ve even spoken with them, you have some insights as to how their brain works and how they make decisions. That’s what this week’s episode is all about. This is Episode number 20 of Hypnotic Language Hacks, simply titled, “Influence Through Artificial Intelligence,” with Scott Sandland. Now, Scott, and I actually go back a whole bunch of years as part of both of our origin stories is that we were both hypnotists, hypnotherapists. Though technically speaking, he is about a year and a half older than I am, and he did get started sooner, which is where he’s got the bragging rights of at one point being the world’s youngest hypnotherapist. Scott Sandland got that one.

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However, a few decades later, as here we are now he’s the CEO of Cyrano.ai, which focuses on artificial empathy and strategic linguistics. He’s been featured in numerous peer-reviewed journals. He’s been featured in magazines like Psychology Today, Forbes, and Entrepreneur Magazine. And you’re about to hear the story of the software that he’s the CEO of the company of Cyrano.ai. It’s a software solution that uses artificial intelligence to help people get out of their own way. And full disclosure, this is a tool that I have used in my business. And in fact, as Scott shares in this conversation, it’s an AI solution so impressive, he was recently invited to travel to the United Nations and speak about this software. You’re also going to hear this incredible philanthropic aspect of Cyrano.ai and the fact that it’s for sale, of course, for people in business. But that’s to help finance it, so now it can be given to some very worthy organizations at practically no cost.

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Now be sure to visit the show notes for this specific episode of Hypnotic Language Hacks. Go to Jason Linett, one N, two T’s, no extra letters at the end, J-A-S-O-N L-I-N-E-T-T/20. That’s this week’s episode, that’s where you’ll find the show notes for this week’s episode. Now, while you’re there, there’s going to be a big purple button to get a very specific bundle that Scott and his team has put together exclusively for the Hypnotic Language Hacks community. Which when you go there, run the math, for about the same amount of money you’re already investing in the tools that Cyrano integrates inside of, you get those same tools plus Cyrano on top of it. This is amazing, this is inspiring, this is incredible. So head over to jasonlinett.com/20, that’s where you’ll find the resources, the transcription of this episode, and that link to grab that bundle. While you’re there, too, click at the top of the page for Business Influence Systems.

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That’s where you can get an on-demand free workshop that’s going to teach you a specific method you can use to better grow your business through video to become even more influential even before you get on the phone or the Zoom call with your clients. So let’s jump in, here we go, this is artificial intelligence with Scott Sandland. Before we get started today, if you want to easily grab people’s attention, naturally build authority, and organically have your prospects wanting more from you even before you’ve made an offer, I’ve created a step-by-step program to help you to do just that. It’s called Business Influence Systems. And this is your opportunity now to visit jasonlinett.com to get a free behind-the-scenes tour of the exact hypnotic persuasion strategies that you can ethically use to better start up or scale up your business. If you want a proven framework to boost your confidence, attract premium clients,

[00:06:58]

and inspire more people to take action with you, get Business Influence Systems now at jasonlinett.com. So I want to kick this off with the question about looking at building a following in one industry and then realizing there was a need to take part of the messaging somewhere else. For those that you’re new to, could you briefly talk about that idea?
– Sure. So you know, you and I have known each other for many years now, I don’t know, eight years, nine years, and you and I both came from that world of hypnosis and hypnotherapy. So at one time, I was the youngest hypnotist in the world, and then built a private practice that was, you know, very successful. And then I built a different tool, which was a thing called hypnothoughts.com, which was, at its time, the largest online resource for hypnotists in the world. So it was a place for continued education, online community, all that, before Facebook groups really became a thing.

[00:07:59]

And then I turned that into a clinic, a school, and a conference, and built all those out, and they were all pretty darn cool. And really what it came down to is one day in our clinic, and we had signed a bunch of contracts with a bunch of drug rehab centers. So we were working…it was right when Obamacare had pushed all these drug rehab centers and given them funding. And so there was influx of need for high-quality practitioners there. So I built out a clinic, hired about 10 hypnotists, and psychotherapists, and life coaches, and all sorts of people. And we were seeing a lot of people in group sessions a lot, we would do, you know, 1,000 people in group sessions every week, on a busy week anyway. And one day I walked into the clinic… and Richard Clark, who you know, was the clinical director. I walked into our shared office, and there was a group session going on in our group room, and he and I just sat down. I looked at him, I said, “I feel like the best-paid

[00:09:00]

garbage man in town.” And he said, “What are you talking about?” And I said, “By the time we get to these people, we’re just picking up trash.” And what I’m not saying is those people are garbage. I’m saying their lives had become garbage, and the stuff we were picking up, we were just getting there way too late. And so I was looking at how can I help people? How can I help people? And prevention is way better than treating the problem. If you can get in front of it, that’s way better. And I realized my career for 20 years had been about picking up pieces after the fact. And that…like, it was this existential crisis moment for me where I said, “Oh my gosh, I need to get on the prevention side of this equation.” And so I’ve been making that shift for a couple of years now to exclusively go on to the prevention side.
– So then looking at that shape, again, where as much as there was the staff, as much as there was a bigger community around it, kind of reverse engineering.

[00:09:58]

It’s where back to the hypnosis industry, there were a lot of people who would say, “I work with kids because it’s so much more rewarding, they respond faster.” But also exactly what you said, we can help to prevent some major issues in adulthood by building that adolescent to be even stronger. Though, clearly, you went in a very different direction of kind of reverse engineering how to go about resolving that problem. Can you take us to the next step of that, then?
– Yeah, so I looked at it, and like you said, I scaled out, right? I thought, “Okay, I’m going to teach people hypnosis,” or, “I’m going to bring on my own people and have a staff of, you know, 8 to 10.” And I thought that was the way to scale my ability to help others. And that was the way for me to transition out of seeing people and into, you know, being a business owner, but it wasn’t the impact I wanted to have. And so what I looked at is technology. And I’ve always been a nerd and a technologist. And I looked at how artificial intelligence works.

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And I looked at the best chess player in the world is a computer. And that will always be true for the rest of time. There’s a 0% chance a person will ever be born that is better at chess than a computer. And that’s strategy, that’s complex nuanced strategy that’s changing all the time. And I said, “Okay, if a robot can be that good at strategic intervention on a two-dimensional board, can I create a system that will be that effective at strategic intervention in a turn-based conversation?” And that was the beginning of me looking at how can I create a tool that has effective communication skills, that has soft skills, that has empathy, that does all the things that a great therapist or hypnotist would be good at? How much of that can I build programmatically? And so I’ve spent a couple of years working on doing exactly that.
– So then let’s do this in a slightly reverse order because typically,

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it would be the chronological game of what did you do next? And what came after that? Let’s start with the end in mind, just so everybody who’s listening to this can now understand what the user experience is. Whether this is someone talking to a computer, a tool that’s informing the therapist, what’s the result now, where are we now in terms of the project?
– So ultimately, I want to have an AI that’s a fully autonomous therapist that goes on every phone in America and helps every teenager. Because teen suicide is the second leading cause of death in America. Over 3,000 high school kids attempt suicide every single day. And this is really what drew me to this because I was looking at all these teens and adolescents who are addicted to drugs, dropping out of school, and all these problems. And you know, some of them are really bright kids from really great families. So it’s not the socio-economic story of just, you know, some slacker loser, it’s wonderful kids that are getting screwed up. So ultimately, I want to build an AI and be able to give that to all the schools,

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and all the school systems, and whatever, give it to all the kids. Where we are right now, is we have a tool that works on Zoom, and it works in email, and it works in text messaging, and it works in your calendar system. So what happens is you have a Zoom conversation, and the system listens, and it just gives insights to the humans about how to engage in each other better. That’s it. So it listens deeply to the strategies, the linguistic strategies that you and I are both employing, and understanding based on those linguistic strategies, what mental states are in play, what emotional states are in play, commitment levels. And then what to do to help that person follow through on the stuff that’s being talked about, how to deescalate, how to mentor the person. It creates all these different strategic insights so that the human knows which chess pieces to actually move.

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So that’s what we have today. – I’m trying to think back to one of our first conversations because, again, we go back a bunch of years. And you had talked about this to me a while ago when it was still kind of in some of the inception phases. And I’m trying to remember if I just outright guessed the name of it because the obvious metaphor for anyone who’s some sort of theatrical nerd, as I once was, of…could you explain the name in the background?
– Yeah, you’re right. And it’s funny because people who’ve studied the humanities and theater, just intuitively get the name, but the computer scientists we deal with don’t. And it’s Cyrano.ai is the name of our artificial intelligence system, and it’s named after Cyrano de Bergerac. And if you don’t know who that is, there’s a Steve Martin movie where he’s got a big nose, and he falls in love with Daryl Hannah…
– Roxanne.
– Roxanne is the movie. That is, you know, the Steve Martin adaptation of the original play, Cyrano. And the idea is I want to just whisper in your ear what you should say.

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So you still own the relationship, the person, the customer, the client falls in love with you. I’m just going to tell you what to say then you get to say it. That’s what our customers really like about us.
– Which that’s a classic scene from that play then into that movie. I believe they’re making a new movie of it with Peter Dinklage, that he did it on Broadway a while ago.
– No way. I know it happened on Broadway, I didn’t know they were going to do it as a movie. That’s fantastic.
– In the works, which likely means 2034. But it’s the scene that we’ve seen repeated on television programs and all sorts of other movies, where it’s just this classic premise where here’s the person who is speaking to someone else, and there’s the person in the corner whispering in, or the idea of the earpiece. So walk us through the user experience of this that now, whether it’s Zoom, you said text message, even phone call, how does this now play out for the user?
– So the beauty of it is, is there’s no live interface.

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We’ve built live interfaces, we found those to be distracting, which is often what happens in the movie. There’s this comedy of errors where they have an earpiece in and they don’t know what to say. You know, I think Arrested Development did it wonderfully with Dave Osborne being the surrogate over and over. But it’s the same idea where if you try to interrupt the flow of a live conversation, it’s that thing where you’re tapping someone on the shoulder while they’re on a phone call, going, “Now say this, now say this,” and that annoys everybody. So what we do is we make it asynchronous, we give you the feedback afterwards. We could do it live, but we just found people don’t want that, it’s a distraction. And so after a call, you get an email, and it just shows up, and it says, “Here’s what you need to know about the call you just had. Here’s graphs that show the commitment level, here’s what their values and priorities are, here’s their communication style, here’s how you work with them.” And it does all that, and it can do it based on a Zoom call. And it can do it based on historic emails, and then it goes into your calendar.

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So you can say, “Hey, you’re going to have another call with Jason in 10 minutes,” you know, that 10-minute warning we all get on our calendars. “Here’s a couple of little bullet points. Remember, do this, don’t do that. Make sure you connect on processes, facts, and figures, and don’t talk about emotional relationship.” Or, “Make sure you talk about ego and instinct, and don’t talk about process and structure.”
– Yeah, so let’s break down some of those measurements in terms of, again, for the end-user, what are some of those feedback mechanisms? What are some of those scales that it’s now acquainting on?
– So we’re measuring based on word choice, we’re not measuring based on volume, or pitch, or tonality. There’s other companies that are doing that, and it’s really relevant, but we want to be everywhere. So we want to be in text message, we want to be in email, we want to be in Facebook Messenger, we want to be in Zoom where we are with tens of thousands of users. We like that, and so we like that we can be anywhere and measure all these words,

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and really, it’s the strategic option value of the words. So what words you use betrays how you feel and how you think about the things being discussed. That’s the point of communication. And our system is just the best listener we can make. And I always flashback to this one client. It was the first client I ever had that was overwhelming. And it was a young girl, you know, 15 years old, who had a lot of really bad things happen to her all at once. I mean, really, really awful, tragic stuff. And I remember sitting in the office, and I was across from this 15-year-old girl who was just ugly-crying, you know, just openly weeping, about tragedy and just horrific stuff. And I remember having this moment, saying, “Oh, my God, this girl needs help.”

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And then thinking, “Oh, my God, that’s supposed to be me.” And then thinking, “Oh, my gosh, I’m thinking right now instead of listening to everything she’s saying.” Like, there was this moment of, I’m doing the best I can, and I’m still caught in my own internal monolog. And I definitely had clients where I’m thinking, “Oh, they’re making great progress, but I know we’re running out of time in our session, what do I need to do to move them along?” Or “I’m hungry,” or, “This reminds me of a previous client, and this is the session I did,” or whatever things… – “Have I done this technique with this person?”
– Yeah, “I’ve done…” “I know the exact technique to use,” or whatever it is. All of that gets in the way of being present. All of that gets in the way of really listening. And the idea of, like, a true guru, like a sage that you would want as your ideal therapist, is a person who is completely present and without ego. That is just receiving what you’re saying and remembers everything you’ve ever said. And so that’s what we built, we built a tool that can do that and have

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the most effective communication and the most effective listening possible. Because it cares about your emotions, it cares about your feelings, it cares about your mental states, based on the words and phrases you use in context.
– Which, branching off of, again, the metaphor that’s now the name of the product, Cyrano, this idea that there’s the character in the corner kind of feeding you the right understandings. But this is not quite giving you the exact words, it’s helping to build that insight as to how this person now makes decisions. how this person makes discoveries, how they sort of view the world around them. That everything that we’d ever talk about in terms of hypnotic influence context around rapport is not really from the mindset that if I sit like you, if I use your words, you’re going to like me. The origin of that rapport work was instead about how can I better step into your model of the world, to build a better connection with you to better understand what it is that needs to happen to resolve this problem.

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So from a similar mindset, being able to go in, which correct me here because it is asynchronous, this is meant for that ongoing relationship so that now you’re connecting with that person after, let’s say, an email, after initial sales consult, to now actually meet. And you’re going in with this ethical secret weapon in terms of, based on their language patterns, this is how they make a decision, this is what’s important to them. Is there a story that comes to mind of whether it’s you using the system yourself, or one of the clients who’s using it, something that it’s opened up for them? – A lot. You know, like I said we’ve got tens of thousands of users now, and we’re generating, you know, millions of minutes of conversations a month. And we get a lot of feedback. And the first thing that we get back from almost everybody is how creepy it is. Because they’re like, “How does it know this about me? How can it possibly know these things?” Because that’s the point of communication, is to tell people about yourself,

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and so that’s what it’s just picking up on. But there’s examples where we had a guy who was talking about coming on as an investor, and he was really stringing us along. And so I just ran our conversations through the system. And I just showed him, and I was like, “You’re stringing us along, and you are not committed.” And he said, “What are you talking about? Of course, I’m committed.” I was like, “Well, then either my system is wrong, and you shouldn’t invest or my system is right, and you’re not going to invest.” And I just showed him the charts. And he goes, “All right, yeah, I do want to invest, I just don’t have it right now.” And I was like, “See, there it is.” And there’s a bunch of examples that are financial incentivizations. You know, we did some stuff with a car dealership where they used our tool, and they increased sales by 26% in 44% less time, over 120 days.

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Like, we just split tested the store, and it sold the crap out of Hondas, which was just where we decided to start, was just in sales.
– Yeah, let’s talk about this because this is a project that I know has been in the works for quite some time. And all of a sudden, here we go, it’s March of 2020, and there were rumblings in the news about something, and then suddenly, most every bit of business had to then go online. What effect has a pandemic had, in terms of data, in terms of tracking, in terms of improving the system?
– Yeah, I mean, it required a major pivot because what we had built was working in person. And we were talking with large companies like, you know, we were selling Hondas. Like, the idea was…I’ll even back up. The idea was we wanted to start in business before we went to…and like, commercial applications before we went to social good. And the reason for that is ethics because I want to train my system to be excellent, but I don’t want to train it on suicidal teenagers. I don’t want to train it on anxiety-ridden adolescents.

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I want to train it in a space that there’s less ethical hurdle to overcome. It’s more peers, and nobody is vulnerable. That’s commercial application, B2B and B2C sales.
– Whether they buy the Honda or not is not to…
– We’re all going to be fine. And so if we find out my system didn’t work at all and sales went down because my system was broken, okay, I could emotionally deal with that. And so we were doing that, and we were building up the commercial applications, and we were finding models. And we were doing pilot programs, and things were kind of going… We had just gotten traction, and then the pandemic hit. And a lot of our contracts, just about all of our contracts actually just dried up. And everyone just said, “We still think your stuff is great, but we’re trying to wrap our heads around, you know, the stuff that we already have out in the world, we’re not adding new projects right now,” which is totally reasonable. But then it allowed us to say, “Okay, well where is everybody?”

[00:25:01]

Everybody is on Zoom, maybe we should be on Zoom. And so it had been an idea on a whiteboard somewhere of, “Oh, and someday we’ll be doing Google Hangouts and Zoom, and they’ll be able to use our tools there.” To, “Oh, my gosh, everybody is there, we need to build that next.” So it meant we had to build things out of order and get ahead of ourselves a little bit. But it turned out to be easier than we thought. So we built the tool in a couple of months and got it out, and, you know, we’re on the Zoom marketplace, we’re an official Zoom partner, and got into the hands of, like I said, tens of thousands of users. And it has absolutely accelerated everything we’ve been doing. The amount of feedback we’re getting, the amount of data we’re receiving that trains our system, the amount of inbound interest we’re having is way better than we had in, say, February of 2020.
– Yeah, it suddenly proved market viability of something that, you know, people kind of offered it as a side benefit.

[00:26:00]

“Hey, if you can’t travel to me, we can also meet online,” and then all of a sudden, now, this is the second time this has happened in my career. A client who I’ve now been working with, if I look through the window blinds, I can see your house. Yet with a long-term illness, she is someone who’s very, you know, much appropriately protective about going out right now. And just goes, “Hey, this seems like a good time to get over this fear.” So for a one-to-one coaching, if not therapeutic process, we’ve been working online. And to look at now having the ability that here’s this…I want to use the term of that ethical secret weapon. And I especially can appreciate that map of let’s verify this with business first. Because in that one…I say this as someone with a Honda minivan, which we took photos of this morning, did not do the sports car photos, but the minivan swagger. To have the opportunity that now we can track in real time that because I was able to go…and correct me on this, I’m able to go into that second call

[00:27:00]

with somebody, and now, I know their decision structure, I know [crosstalk 00:27:05].
– And it’s really about that lifetime value of that relationship. It’s not about, you know, just the transactional relationship, and it’s not just about one conversion. It’s about once you have a person’s trust, once you have that rapport, once you understand what makes a person tick, it improves your ability to communicate with that person in their language, not in yours.
– So then, this AI aspect of it, I imagine where it’s constantly learning from itself, it’s constantly improving itself, right?
– Yeah, well, in batches. So you have to be really careful with AI. A lot of people just think of AI as this computer that just keeps getting smarter and smarter. You have to be really clever in how you design its feedback loops, and how you label wins and losses.
– So how would you correlate…talk to us about that from a correlation

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of, let’s say, working with somebody one to one where there’s this constant game of what we call calibration. This give and take of communication, like you said, that if I’m in my head thinking, “Oh, no, this person needs help, oh, wait, that’s me. I don’t know what to do.” You know, I had a mutual friend of Marie Mongan, who wrote the book Hypnobirthing, and it was her quote that’s forever stuck in my head about some of the happiest people you’d ever meet are completely out of their minds. Because they’re just in the experience, they’re just in the moment. So to be able to build a system that’s now learning from itself, can you explain what you mean, in terms of batching that?
– Yeah, what we do not do is, every time there’s a phone call, or a Zoom call, or an email, give the system a…start over, go again, add this one. What we do is we curate. So every interval, let’s call it every two weeks, we have all the data that

[00:28:58]

says, “Okay, these are the outcomes that came to these conversations,” and from those outcomes, we can derive this strategy. I’ll make it a metaphor that makes it make much more sense. If you want to build an AI that plays “Pac Man” and you don’t tell it anything at all, you just say, “High score is good, game over is bad, play “Pac Man,” it takes most of the first day for it to consistently get off the start screen. It’s really not very good at it at all. But six or seven days later, it will beat “Pac Man” over, and over, and over forever without ever losing life. So it takes about seven days. But if on Day 0, you say, “Hey, don’t touch the ghosts. And those big dots in the corner are pretty interesting, you should pay attention to those.” Just that. Just stay away from the ghosts, the big dots are special. It becomes unbeatable in three days instead of seven. So that’s dramatically different, you know, it’s a 50% reduction,

[00:30:01]

and that’s a very simple game. The same thing is true in chess, you don’t teach an AI to play chess by giving it books on chess strategy, you give it examples of chess strategy, and you have to label the parts. And this is really what comes down to what our system does, it labels the parts of the game, which are words. So if you label all the parts and understand this piece can do…you know, attack diagonally, this piece can, you know, move up and over, you have to label all the parts so we can reverse engineer the strategy and say, “This results in a win, this results in a win, this results in a loss.” So the AI can do all the possible move combinations to figure out what the next best move is. Our system does that, and we just batch thousands of games with their outcomes at a time so the system can start finding those patterns.
– Which let’s draw a correlation between that and, let’s say, marketing, that one of the biggest flaws that I see in people’s thinking around marketing

[00:31:00]

and advertising is that they do something once, and it works, therefore, they label it and go, “This works.” Or they do something once and they label it and say that doesn’t work.
– And it’s based on very corrupted data, right, like, you don’t know necessarily why it worked. You know, you got that sale because the guy liked you anyway, but now you’ve decided that that play is the winner, right? So and then it just becomes your lucky underwear that really has no connection with what you’re actually doing.
– Which is where we now reveal that one of the times at your conference…actually several times, there was a pajama party late in the evening to which I wore full-body pajamas covered in dollar signs.
– Yeah, I have a pajama party.
– Which are here at the office right now, I filmed a video with them this morning. And it was a choice to not put it on for those of you that are watching on the jasonlinett.com website.
– And maybe not the right choice, I think…
– Images coming later, check the show notes. So let’s make this tangible, though, because I know you and I can nerd

[00:31:59]

out on the technology of how here’s what it delivers, here’s what it does, here’s how we can serve someone better. Let’s talk about one of the segments that I know listens to this podcast, people in financial services, whether it’s the accountant or the financial planner, let’s get tangible there. What is it that they could be doing differently with a software like this?
– Perfect. And so, like I said, our stuff is designed for commercial application, and financial planning is a wonderful example. That and real estate are two of the easiest applications to point this at. When you’re talking about a financial planner, obviously trust matters and communicating the right values to that person. So what a great financial planner already does naturally is says, “Okay, this person is really focusing on their tax basis,” or, “This person is focusing on setting up their family for the future,” or x, y, and z. Our system can tell you which ones of those are true, and it can do it

[00:33:00]

with multiple people at the same time. So you’ve got a husband and wife who come in the room, your system will know when you’re talking to the husband, talk like this, and when you’re talking to the wife, talk like this. My wife and I, when we switched financial planners a couple of years ago, and my wife is a numbers person, and I’m a feelings person. And so I’m good with money, I’m fine with it, but the two of them are black belts, right. And so there was a moment in the conversation where all of a sudden, I was out of my depth. And it was not a secret to anybody in the room that they were talking about complex financial planning stuff that the two of them are totally qualified to talk about, and I got nothing. And so there was just this moment where I had to just say, “All right, the grownups are talking, and I’m just going to be over here.” And I was okay with that because obviously, I trust my wife.

[00:34:00]

But I also trusted this financial planner because she had done a great job connecting with me initially and asking what my values and priorities were. And making sure that it would tie to what was being discussed. So if we can say, “Here’s the commitment level of this person,” the likelihood…by the way, we can score with 91% accuracy the likelihood that the person is going to buy or not. And we’ve proven that on B2B and B2C, we can tell you if the person’s going to follow through. And where they are in a sales cycle. And strategically which thing is missing that you need to add. So we can just give you that data and say, “This person is like a 70% conversion likelihood. And the thing you need to give them so that they follow through is facts and figures, or you need to make sure that they are x, y, and z.” And we have all of that built, and the system just tells you. So then on your subsequent calls, you can make sure that you’re speaking to that person’s values and priorities.

[00:35:01]

And then they know, “Okay, this financial planner hears me, this financial planner understands me. I can trust this financial planner.” And then all sudden, conversions go up, and the duration of the call goes down because you’re only talking about the things that matter to them.
– So correct me on this because there is a phase of let’s just call it calibration, where there needs to be…and I may have this wrong, so jump in. There needs to be some communication first for the system to then feed back the information. And it’s, correct me, by the second call that we’re then able to put that to use, or do you have systems to recommend around that?
– If you’re just talking about our tool on Zoom, that is true. But now what we have is email integration as well. So your email, calendar, and Zoom can all combine together, and other, you know, channels as well. But you can just say, okay, here’s your intake forms if you’re a practitioner, we can run your intake forms through the system.

[00:36:00]

Or even a financial planner, you know, you kind of fill out an intake form with them as well, and you can take that information or the emails you’ve been going back and forth with. – I mean, the standard thing nowadays is the application funnel that the world of, again, the phone rings, and it’s the “Why are you calling me?” Or even if I’m texting with a potential student or coaching person, it’s the game of, “Oh, yeah, text me when you’re available, and then I’ll call you back.” That somehow the world of just calling somebody doesn’t really exist that much anymore. – I have not checked my voicemail in two and a half years. – I transferred an 800 number that I don’t use anymore to a different provider just because, hey, it was cheaper, and why not, it works on my phone now. And to look at, you know, the example of this is something that I’ve taught for years, the ability, that by the time they get to me on the phone, they’ve already filled out an application, which I know you integrate, too, with Calendly, right?
– Yeah, we integrate with Calendly.
– So to have the ability, they fill out the application, which, I mean,

[00:37:01]

I learned this growing up watching my parents who were wedding photographers. And by the time which…this is high-tech, as they were, it was an index card that I was the one who cut on the paper cutter into quarters, high-tech. But because someone had written in where the ceremony was going to be, where the reception was going to be, and who their officiant was if they had already hired one, my father would be the one going into the archives, the different albums, and showing them the photos of “Oh, yeah, this is where we do that photo, this is where we do this one. Oh, Father Jim, here is photos of him at the wedding.” Even into all the different ethnicities, all the different variations that could be there, parents together, step-parents. And this way, we can go into our sales conversation with some knowledge. But now, based on some of the reports that I’ve looked at that you’ve sent me, to be able to go in with even further knowledge of that meeting. – I mean, really, what it comes down to is our system allows me to know more

[00:38:01]

about you than you know about yourself. – I love that component because anyone who, you know, goes through, let’s say, even a Myers-Briggs, any sort of personality assessment, they start to have those moments of how did it know to say that, you know? And it’s not for the sake of what’s called a cold read, something that’s extremely broad. This is extremely specific, and here’s the science as to where it came from.
– And it is similar to a cold read in that when it hits, it feels like magic. And they’re just like, “How could anyone possibly know this about me?” It’s like, well, because I’m standing right in front of you, and I’m listening to you talk. And most people who are great at sales are just naturals at that. And so what we’re doing is just we built a system that does the best salespeople do, it just has the ability to show its work. And now you can copy off their homework. So I really think copying off the homework is a good metaphor for this, you know, similar to Cyrano.

[00:39:00]

Where if you could have the best salesperson at your company listening in on the call, and then they gave you advice on here’s exactly what to do to close this person, that’s what our system does. But it’s better than the person at your company because it was listening to every word and comparing it to every other possible conversation it’s ever heard, which is something no human can do. So that’s what our system does.
– Beautiful. There’s two things I want to chat with you about, too, while we’re on here. One would be that in a previous workshop, I’ve heard you talk about the value of just pacing. That so often people in a therapeutic context or even in a business context, they’re focused on, “I need to find the ultimate and objection crushers, I need to find the best sales close.” Which I talk about this just in terms of strategy feedback, in the Business Influence Systems Program. The strongest influential language are the words that the person is already using.

[00:39:59]

And to just simply feed that back already starts to create a breakthrough. Can you elaborate on your take on that pacing concept?
– Yeah, everyone wants to know… Like, I did a podcast with loanDepot a couple of months ago. And the guy, Alec Hanson, is a great guy. And he said, “Okay, so what are the words that I need to use so that we get more conversions?” right. “What can our listeners…what words can you use?” I was like, “This is the wrong premise behind the wrong question. It’s what words do I need to be listening for, not what words do I need to be saying. And the more you can pace, the more…and for those people who don’t really understand what that is, the oversimplified answer is people like people that are like themselves. That’s why, you know, warpaint exists, historically. It’s why, you know, if I’m wearing a Lakers, I got a Laker’s thing behind me, if I see somebody else in a Lakers, Jersey, or a Lakers hat, I’m like, “Oh, we have a thing, I like that thing about you already.”

[00:41:00]

And then they say something terrible. And I’m like, “Oh, you’re an awful person, I’m wrong about this, I need to rethink this.” But there’s just that moment where, I think, we are similar, therefore I like and trust you. That’s why people watch the news from the same place over and over because familiar feels safe and feels right. It’s a very primal pack instinct that we want to feel familiar and liked. And so in pacing, what we do is we build the ability to feel understood and heard, and that’s it. Everyone is looking for what cool sentence, all you need to do is generate a feeling within that person of, “They’re really paying attention.” That’s the best part of pacing. That’s it. You don’t even have [crosstalk]…
– It’s the easiest strategy to do that, is to first of all, genuinely listen. And second of all, find something that was meaningful in what they said, and just simply feed that back.

[00:42:00]

The beauty of this becomes is that again, we’re not having to be the wizard coming up with a really creative language, it often just opens that person up even further. I did this on a call this morning with a new client, someone jumping into the coaching program that I offer, where he’s explaining, “Here’s what I’ve been doing.” And he kept coming back to the phrase of “But nothing’s been working.” And I just simply mirror back “Yeah, but nothing’s been working.” “Yeah, but I tried this other program, and here’s the issue, and I just got stuck.” “Oh, so you got stuck.” And finally, on his own, just by mimicking back his language, he finally hits this emotional breakthrough of going, “You know, the issue is not these programs that I’m signing up for, I’ve got this stuff going on inside of me that I got to get rid of.” “So you need to get rid of it?” “Yeah, that’s going to get me there faster.”
– Right. And all you’re doing is…like, it’s a very lazy parenting back, it’s not extremely difficult.
– Let’s go with efficient.
– Let’s go with efficient, it’s a much nicer word. But I mean, you don’t have to be great at coming up with interesting questions if

[00:43:02]

you’re great at listening. And effective listening is, I think, one of the most valuable things in the universe, and I really mean that. So the number one most valuable thing in the universe is oceans made of water, it’s the thing we care about. The second most important thing that we’re looking for is the ability to listen to communication. That’s it, that’s number two. And the reason we’re able to look outside of our planet is because we’re able to listen to each other on this planet for, you know, hundreds of thousands of years. And so, if you just say, all we’re doing is taking the most human thing, effective communication, it’s the thing that separates us from all the animals, it’s the reason we run a planet, is effective communication. And we just say all we’re doing is using technology to increase that and to make it even easier to communicate. And that’s what you and I are doing right now, you know, whether it’s a tech

[00:44:01]

platform like Zoom, or Facebook, the most valuable companies are the companies that tie into that aspect of humanity, that we all want to feel heard. We all want to share ideas. We all want to learn from people who’ve done things that we want to know about. That’s why YouTube is so amazing. And so that is what the entire company is built around, is we all intrinsically love that feeling.
– Which that concept of pacing fits into the whole context of, again, here we are in a program called Hypnotic Language Hacks, we’re very often highlighting specific language patterns and active listening strategies, but also highlighting tools and people who can help do that even more good or better, as we’re talking about the importance of good language there, to say it politely. – I talk good.
– Yeah, exactly. You talk pretty. – I do. – I’d be curious to also… – I look good, I talk good.
– One of the things I often want to highlight whenever there’s a guest on this program is that major life changes, major transformational moments,

[00:45:02]

we often think about that whole thing that it takes 30 days to install a new habit, a new behavior. To which I would say those people might not be using the best of methods. There’s very often on any business podcast, a large selection of people who are out there who are kind of just at that cusp, just at that point of maybe leaving behind the “safe career” to go out and do something on their own. But just as much as that, there’s many people who are massively successful at what they do, and there’s the fear of the pivot. Which I’d love to hear your thoughts on that because here was a practice of seeing clients, here was an office with staff. Here is, as you and I have called it, the largest hypnotic conference in the universe. We’ve checked the numbers. And where things were at their peak to now pivot. Talk to me about some of the thinking of that?
– You know, and there have been days where I’ve regretted it. Because all of that was set it and forget it, I had no homework, you know,

[00:46:02]

I walked to work, and I got to do a phone call on the way there and on the way back. And then when I was home, I had nothing, you know, the income was predictable, things were great. And then there was two things I heard. One was I heard Bill Burr, who’s a comedian you and I both have talked about and like. And what I’ll say is appropriate, I promise. Have to disclaimer on that. He talked about being 30 on a futon is not a failure. Not being on the futon and wishing you had been on the futon when you’re 40, and looking back at 30, going, “Man, I wish I’d been on that futon and been struggling because I wish I had chased that dream,” that’s failure. And so I had that sentence of…you know, that idea. And then actually, you and I were on a panel together at HypnoThoughts, and you said a sentence, it was from your story because you left the theatrical world into hypnosis.

[00:47:02]

And you were talking about that, and you said, “Just because you’re really good at something, doesn’t mean you need to keep doing it, you don’t owe that to people.” And I felt that way, for a long time. I felt I’m a very good practitioner, I am, I’ve been doing it for 20 years, I’ve had great mentors, I’m great at it. And there was a part of me that said, “I can make good money, and I can help people.” And that’s easy to defend, that’s easy to rationalize and just say, “That’s good enough.” But then there were a couple of moments, like the one you said, like that moment where I felt like a garbage man, there were a couple of moments where I just said, “I need to be doing something different. I need to be doing something that I believe has the potential to help way more people at scale, in a larger variety of arenas.” And so that shift is scary. It really is.

[00:47:59]

And fortunately, I’ve got a great team at Cyrano, and my co-founders, and business partners, and our staff are really great at what they do, and so I don’t have to know how to do everything. I only have to know how to do what I know how to do. And so to the people who are at that cusp moment, who are afraid, the key is to remember you don’t have to know how to do everything. And to really make your world small, like make that universe of information tackleable. And so, “I have to know how to do all of this stuff.” No, you don’t, you just have to, like, really make the world small, and go step by step. And that’s what I’ve been able to do.
– Yeah, thank you for mentioning that, too. Which I look at it from the perspective that…there’s a phrase that I keep coming back to. And there’s unfortunate language inside of this around whoever sets the frame and maintains at the strongest wins the influence.

[00:49:01]

And the flaw of that is the use of the word win. It’s the best choice of words there, but it’s not that there’s a winner, or there’s a loser. But I’d share here are people who I’ve worked with in the last, you know, 9 or 10 months at this point that were holding on to the story that, let’s say, in their business, COVID killed their business. When no, it was really that COVID gave them the opportunity to look at something they have been meaning to do for quite some time and now approach it from a different angle. To suddenly take what was already there and embed it inside of your story was the fact that there was the scalability in terms of the helping. You could continue to hire more staff, you could open up another office, when now you are reaching and helping tens of thousands of more people on a daily basis that we can’t do in a real-time component. So by maintaining…
– [crosstalk]. – …that story and just changing the frame around it makes it even easier to grow.
– And that is the thing, it’s complacency, it’s it feels safe, it feels easy,

[00:50:00]

it feels nice to just be like, okay, there’s less chaos now. There’s more order, there’s more systems, I understand the patterns, I see where the challenges are going to come from, and I can see them coming in slow motion. This is great. But yeah, I think a lot of people with COVID, they use that as, “Oh COVID killed my business.” I know a lot of people who are doing better because of COVID. I’m one of them. You know, Cyrano is way better today because of COVID. And that may…
– Everybody went online, yeah.
– Yeah, it’s a good thing. And I’ve talked to people in restaurants, in the restaurant space, who are better today because of COVID, Who are making more money. In the world of restaurants that have been shut down, they’ve been able to create virtual brands for delivery, and they’re selling way more food all over the place that they could have never done if they had to hire, you know, 30 waiters. But because they only have to do delivery through DoorDash and Grubhub,

[00:50:59]

they’ve been able to make way more food concepts and serve way more customers. And I could go on with other examples. But yeah, I mean, there’s always challenges, there’s always hard stuff, and it’s how you respond to that, and how you pivot, and how you pay attention to what resources you actually have makes a difference.
– Yeah. So where can people check out Cyrano?
– So what we’ve done is at cyrano.ai/bundle. What we’ve done is we’ve put together a bundle with some partners of ours. So because we’re an official Zoom, partner, us and Calendly, all three of those products bundled together for $20 a month. And you’ll get the highest level of Zoom with the greatest level of encryption and recording and, and, and. So for 20 bucks, Cyrano.ai/bundle, and you’re getting a crazy good deal on really useful software.
– Which to say it simply is I joined the program a while ago to go, “Well, I’m paying, what is it? 12 bucks to Zoom

[00:52:01]

for this little bit more, it does everything even better.”
– And actually what you get in that bundle is the $20 version of Zoom. So you’re getting the business tier, the highest level of Zoom that’s normally 20 bucks, you’re getting that level of Zoom, and then you get the Calendly, and the meeting insights from Cyrano, basically for free in that bundle.
– So in terms of action steps, consider the idea of, again, creating that application funnel, so now we’re getting that data in advance, maybe some sort of email exchange. And now we’re on that call, we’re going in, and we’ve got that secret voice that’s now informed us this is how those decisions are made.
– Yeah, exactly that. And it’s easy bullet-point sentences. We originally had, like, paragraphs and, like, pages about the person. – I saw those. – …and nobody wants to read those. Now we have icons and bullet points, and it’s digestible.

[00:53:00]

– Yeah. This has been great to have you on here and especially to share this message with an existing audience, with a new audience as well. And the inspiration that sometimes the greatest time to metaphorically throw the wrench into the systems and say, “Let’s see what happens,” is when things are already at their best. Any final thoughts for the listeners out there?
– Well, it depends on who the listeners are, right? To those who know us and who are hypnotists, you know, finding ways to be more present with your clients is the thing we all need to be better at and to get away from. It’s not just about scripts and techniques stuff but to be present and to, like, really be here now. And then to people in sales, it’s people buy from…especially now, all the information is out there on the internet. People buy from people they like. They’re choosing who they buy from more than they are choosing what they buy. And so be the person they want to give money to is better than having

[00:54:00]

the better product.
– You have been listening to the Hypnotic Language Hacks podcast with Jason Linett. Please stop everything, and start exploring jasonlinett.com for even more business influence and persuasion resources. Make it a priority right now to subscribe to this program and listen to every episode because the next one may reveal that one hypnotic influence secret to massively scale your success. Change your words, change your business, change your life. Get even more at jasonlinett.com.