Some years back Steli signed up for a series of workshops. One of these workshops taught the audience about hypnosis and Neurological Linguistic Programming. Steli has mentioned this on and off during the podcast and our listeners have shown an interest in the subject. So Steli is going to tell us about his lessons from hypnosis and NLP.

Many people see hypnosis as a party trick and a “magical power” over people. But as we discuss on today’s episode, none of that is true.

We learn these things about hypnosis and NLP:

  • How hypnosis is a daily state
  • What is stage hypnosis
  • How to read a crowd
  • How hypnosis has helped Steli
  • Associated communication and Disassociated communication

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Steli Efti:  Hey, this is Steli Efti.

 

Hiten Shah:  And this is Hiten Shah on The Startup Chat.

 

Steli Efti:  And in today’s episode, we’re going to talk about hypnosis.

 

Hiten Shah:  Yeah, and I know nothing about it except the voodoo I see on TV. Maybe there was like a night rider episode about hypnosis that I recall. So that’s the last thing I recall about hypnosis. I also—it related—I do know some people who consider themselves healers, so I think that’s kind of somewhat related in some ways. But, I’m supposed to talk to you about it because I want to learn all about it. Tell us about hypnosis, Steli.

 

Steli Efti:  So, here’s why we’re talking about this in this episode. A bunch of people have asked about this because in prior episode, I’ve mentioned it at random times contextually that I have studied hypnosis in the past and that, you know, I know a thing or two about it and people just were curious about this and, you know—Hiten was like “we should talk about this one day because I want to know more about it,” so this is what we’re doing.

 

Hiten Shah:  So this is hypnosis 101 from Steli straight up and I’m just going to bug him the whole time.

 

Steli Efti:  From Steli Efti. There you go. So, okay, let me give maybe a 2-minute version of how I got involved with it and my quick summary of it and then I’ll let you drive the conversation and whatever your curiosities are. Hiten has the most evil look ever on his—he’s just so happy to talk about this. I don’t know. You should see his look on his face. The other thing is Hiten has an awesome shirt on today. He’s so—he’s a very sexy, very handsome man, I have to say.

 

Now, he only has to make me one promise after today’s episode is that all the other T-shirts—so he lost all this weight. He looks great. All the other shirts that don’t fit anymore, you have to throw them away.

 

Hiten Shah:  Yeah, I’m working on that.

 

Steli Efti:  Throw them away. Okay. So, hypnosis. So I was never—I never had an attraction to hypnosis. I always thought of it as I think most people do like the stage hypnosis, the “you are chicken now, pok-pok-pok” and— you know. I never thought about it too much, never knew is this true or not or what is it, but I was not fascinated by this topic at all.

 

Hiten Shah:  So how did you get into it?

 

Steli Efti:  I got into it because I got fascinated for a while on the topic of neurolinguistic programming which is kind of a psychology, language changing people and their minds type of a deal.

 

Hiten Shah:  Yup, I have a friend—2 friends actually that have gone through formal education on that.

 

Steli Efti:  Year, me too. I mean I officially went through even having the—you know, you do the practitioner, the master and the trainer and there was a—

 

Hiten Shah:  Oh, you did?

 

Steli Efti:  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did the whole thing.

 

Hiten Shah:  [0:02:45][Indiscernible]

 

Steli Efti:  Yeah. And I did that with a mentor, Richard Bandler, the guy that started the whole thing back in London. So, I had met a guy in Berlin—this is actually how I met Ramin who’s working with me at Close.io but also is kind of—

 

Hiten Shah:  He helps a lot with The Startup Chat.

 

Steli Efti:  Yeah. So, shout out to Ramin. He’s made a lot of this happen. That’s how we met. So I met this trainer in Berlin that was really a fascinating character and he was able to do things with language that I quite couldn’t understand but I was fascinated by. And I bought like a whole package which was like 9 months’ worth of like workshops and things he was doing. I was like, “I’m just going to buy everything because I want to learn everything this guy knows.”

 

And one of those workshops was a hypnosis workshop and I was like, “Yeah.” This was the only thing I was not interested in, funny. I was like “Why—well, whatever. I bought the whole package, you know, might as well go to this thing.”

 

Hiten Shah:  And I’m sure the other content was great.

 

Steli Efti:  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The content was great.

 

Hiten Shah:  But your expectation on quality was high but, you know—

 

Steli Efti:  But I was not that—

 

Hiten Shah:  You know what I know about you? Like if something bothers you should do it.

 

Steli Efti:  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

Hiten Shah:  It’s like in your hindsight you’re like “it bothered me” and I’m like “Oh, Steli is going to do it.”

 

Steli Efti:  Year, yeah, yeah. So, of all the workshops, this was the one where I was like “Nah, do I really need to do this?” But, whatever, I booked it so I went. And it definitely, you know, was one of the most powerful things I did in the whole thing, one of the most valuable things. So, here is my quick summary on what hypnosis is and what it isn’t because a lot of people have asked me this in the past, and then we’ll dig deeper.

 

So, hypnosis is really just the—a very instructional form, a very deterministic form to get you to change your kind of mental state of mind, right? So, there is full awakeness and alertness and then there is you’re sleeping, you’re completely unconscious. There’s a big range between these 2 states that we all experience during the day. We’re all in—most of our days we’re not fully alert, right? We’re somewhere between alert and being asleep, right? And—

 

Hiten Shah:  I’m sleeping right now.

 

Steli Efti:  Yeah, there you go. Driving a car is a beautiful—

 

Hiten Shah:  See, you’re boring me.

 

Steli Efti:  Driving a car—I’m just going to ignore this guy—is a state where you’re not fully alert most of the time so you’re in some kind of a—you know, some kind of a trance because—

 

Hiten Shah:  Yeah, yeah, like the feeling you get when you drive somewhere and you get there and you’re like “How did I get there?”

 

Steli Efti:  How did I get there?

 

Hiten Shah:  Yeah, I get that a lot. Yeah.

 

Steli Efti:  Watching a movie, you have to, by definition, be in a trance to enjoy it because if you were fully alert of the environment, the television set, yourself, the feeling of the couch on your butt while watching this, you would never emotionally get completely sucked into the movie. What happens when we watch a movie is that we get into a trance where everything blurs out and we actually live with the character, the story, the highs, the lows that’s why we’re sweating when it’s like action and we get all tense. When it’s a romantic moment and somebody says something stupid, we get embarrassed. It’s because we’re in a trance. We forget about everything and we live the story with the protagonist.

 

So, there’s many, many different versions of not alert and somewhere being in a different state that we’re just not—we don’t study that typically, so we’re not even aware that we are going through all these different phases of consciousness or levels of consciousness during the day.

 

What hypnosis is is nothing else that learning to be aware of these different levels of awareness and consciousness and being able to do things with it, right? So you use language and you use a lot of other techniques to get somebody in a very relaxed, very deep kind of state where you’re not asleep but you’re not fully alert and awake and in these states, the mind is capable of accomplishing certain things at a much higher, you know, efficiency or productivity than in other states. It has some practical applications.

 

So, when it comes to—now, my last thing and then we’ll go deep is what is stage hypnosis now? Can you make somebody do weird, funny, shitty stuff against their will?

 

Hiten Shah:  Yeah, let’s get that out of the way, yeah.

 

Steli Efti:  Let’s get that out of the way because that’s how everybody thinks about hypnosis.

 

Hiten Shah:  Yeah, that’s right.

 

Steli Efti:  I get you to close your eyes and then I have full control over your body, soul and mind, right? That is not fully accurate, although it’s not a lie either. So what happens in stage hypnosis, it’s something super fascinating, which is that—so when you’re in a deep state, you’re never gone. It’s never like you are totally gone. There’s always something in you that’s still there because you’re not fully like asleep or something.

 

Hiten Shah:  You’re still aware to some level.

 

Steli Efti:  You’re still very aware to some level and you have control over what you allow and what you don’t allow to happen. Now—and there’s one of the biggest hypnotists that ever lived and the guy that brought hypnosis from the like circus to the clinical space for instance was Milton H. Erickson, who was paralyzed, and he actually ran a really large experiment where he tried to make people do things that he thought would be against their moral context in deep sessions. And he would basically do these test studies where he would say, “this person would never steal and I think this person would steal,” and then he would in their psychological sessions just drop a suggestion like “when you walk out of the session today, there’s going to be lots of space for you to do things and you might see something you want and maybe why not go for it,” right? Like this is very suggestive. This is how you would speak to somebody in a deep trance.

 

And then they would walk out and there would be this beautiful golden whatever pen and without feeling— everybody that he made that suggestion to, would stop—they would have video recorders—and contemplate stealing it. Everybody would pick it up and look at it. Everybody would flirt with the idea, but only the people that he had actually said that he thinks in their moral compass they would do it, only those people would steal it. The people that he thought wouldn’t do it, they thought about it but they ended up not doing it. So you can influence people but not to do things that are completely against their will or moral context.

 

So, in stage hypnosis what happens is—a lot of times what happens before the hypnotist comes on stage is that there is somebody else that comes before that main act and that person sometimes is just “a comedian,” for instance, or a storyteller or whatever. That person will come out and that person will tell funny stories and warm the audience up and do all these things that are setup. They seem to be completely unrelated to the hypnosis show but what he is doing is he is basically reading the crowd, and he will drop these—he will tell these stories that seem totally unrelated but they’re actually giving the crowd—they’re actually eliciting reactions from the people in the crowd they’d want to be on stage.

 

So they’ll tell about—he might tell a metaphor story about, you know, people that are always kind of never getting out of themselves and then they did and he’ll read body language, which is another fascinating topic. You can read micro-reactions and body language and go, “Okay, row A, seat Z is a person that wants to get on stage, wants to be hypnotized, wants to do something crazy,” right? They might not know it but they came today because they want to—

 

Hiten Shah:  They’re primed.

 

Steli Efti:  They are primed for this. So then when the hypnotist comes out and picks up some random people, these people are not random.

 

Hiten Shah:  So that person has informed him or her about the—

 

Steli Efti:  Yes, yeah. Here are the people that came today, they might not know it but they secretly wish to be on stage and do something that’s crazy or adventurous. So the hypnotist will pick these people, right? And then they will do these crazy things like being a chicken or something because subconsciously they want to do something crazy, they want to experience that.

 

If you’re like “I absolutely don’t want that,” it’s not that it’s impossible, but it’s very improbable that the hypnotist will be able to do that. The people that are great at hypnosis, they will only get you to do things that you don’t want consciously to do by charming you into it in the sense of like making it feel so good that you go, “Oh, okay, fuck it. I’ll do it,” but not if you really don’t want to do it. You can’t make people to completely act like zombies or anything like that. So, there’s a lot of setup for the stage stuff that’s going on.

 

Hiten Shah:  Cool. Good to know. That’s huge.

 

Steli Efti:  All right. That’s it. That’s the episode.

 

Hiten Shah:  Okay. So, I didn’t know that—I didn’t realize that the hypnosis stuff that you kind of got exposed to came from NLP.

 

Steli Efti:  Yeah.

 

Hiten Shah:  Right? And that stuff because I think NLP is super interesting. So, I guess what I want to know because you’ve mentioned it many times is like how has that either helped you or changed you?

 

Steli Efti:  Yes. So, in a number of ways. I mean many, many, many small things. Number one, I think it exposed me more directly to my subconscious mind, like the kind of states I can get into. And you can get to that through meditation. Meditation could get people to very deep states that are not—you’re not asleep but you’re not fully alert and awake. You’re somewhere else. Hypnosis is more directive, like hypnosis “I’ll get you to that state in 5 minutes and then I’ll do things with you. We’ll work on something. We’ll get rid of the fear. We’ll work on something.” It’s very directive versus meditation is just absolute non-directive. The whole point is not to try to do anything.

 

But the end-result oftentimes can be very similar. You can get into very deep states. So, experiencing the variety of states that you can be in created for me at least a wider awareness on what my state is in everyday life, just even knowing right now—like sometimes like the other day—2 days ago, I was in a state where I could not productively do the thing that I wanted to do and I was just fucking around. And the more I was fucking around, the more tense my body got and eventually I was in this like destructive zone of just like tensing up more and more and doing more and more like random bullshit.

 

And I realized the state of mind I’m in and I was like, “Okay, there’s no way for me to turn this around right here and right now,” so I walked out. I went on a 10-minute walk. I sat down. I meditated for 5 minutes. I came back and I got this thing done. And it’s not that you need to learn hypnosis to be able to do that, but it helped me at any given time be more aware and more in touch with how alert and awake and how much in some kind of a trance am I, and is this trance benefiting me right now, is this helping me or is this not helping me.

 

The other thing is I learned a lot about language, like the beauty of hypnosis is that it is kind of—you utilize the little—

 

Hiten Shah:  Based on language.

 

Steli Efti:  It’s based on language. And you will learn— like I learned about, you know, linguistics to a very specific area and like the surface structure and the deep structure of language and how—like every sentence to a certain degree. The way communication works to a massive degree is that there is very little content at every sentence we speak and there’s an insane amount of adding information and adding context and doing a shit ton of work from the brain to make sense of it all, right? So even if I say “I bought a house,” that sentence makes perfect sense. It seems to be logical, but there’s a shit ton of information missing.

 

Hiten Shah:  What kind of house? How much did it cost?

 

Steli Efti:  What currency? What currency? From whom?

 

Hiten Shah:  Yeah. [0:14:08][Indiscernible] What’s the address?

 

Steli Efti:  All that shit you’re bringing at it. You have—you thought dollars. You thought the owner. You added information to make sense of that sentence, but I didn’t give you that information.

 

Hiten Shah:  No, you didn’t.

 

Steli Efti:  So, hypnosis actually realizes that the brain does that and takes advantage of it, right? So hypnosis a lot of times, the language you use can be very ambiguous by design. You’ll be very ambiguous to make the brain act certain things because you don’t know these things.

 

Hiten Shah:  For itself.

 

Steli Efti:  For itself, right? So that’s why the example that I brought before, Milton H. Erickson would not tell people “and when you walk out, you will steal the pen.” That’s not the way. He was saying, “and when you walk out, there’s going to be space and time and why not do something for you, why not take a chance, take a chance and treat yourself because nobody is going to worry or care anyway.” And that’s all like—

 

Hiten Shah:  It’s just opening up the mind to the possibility [0:15:05][Indiscernible].

 

Steli Efti:  To the possibility, but I do influence it. So I’ll say, “Take the chance.” I might even—if you have like master hypnotist, they might highlight certain words and the brain picks up on that and will make like—it could be that the sentence, I highlight the word “take.” I highlight the word, you know, “pencil” 3 sentences later and that might take the—highlight the word “door” and your brain notices these little things on the subconscious level, but consciously you don’t even pay any attention to any of that.

 

So, there’s a lot that can be done with language and I think that when people are like, “Well, isn’t this manipulative? Isn’t that making people do certain things?” I think that people at the beginning of their excitement when they learn these techniques, I think they are very manipulative. Just like I think that when people learn about different psychological types and they take like a test, they walk around being fucking assholes and going, “You are blue type. You are green type. You are this and this type.” Shut the fuck up. You’ve met me for 5 minutes. You don’t know anything, right? You need to—it doesn’t mean that that knowledge is useless, but it’s used, you know, in a fashion that’s not really—

 

Hiten Shah:  Yes. And manipulation is more either abuse or just somebody who’s naïve about it, something like that.

 

Steli Efti:  I think it usually is abused and it usually is like overly eagerness of like being too in love with “Oh, I can do this, all these crazy things.” But the matter of fact is that every day, we are communicating with each other and influencing each other in very subconscious ways and hypnosis to me has helped me influence—be more aware of the way I influence people with language and therefore, take more control over doing it positively.

 

And I’ll give you one simple example of this, is that—and I never knew this before hypnosis. There is an associated way of communication and there’s a dissociated way of communication. So, I can talk in the “I” form, you know, when “I” did this and this, “I” really loved it and “I” was excited about it. Well, I can say, “You know, when you do this and you really get excited, you really love this feeling,” right? One is a dissociative. I talk about you. The other talk about “I” although in both examples I might be talking about myself.

 

Hiten Shah:  And that’s association from you.

 

Steli Efti:  Yes.

 

Hiten Shah:  But then both of those is the opposite for the other person.

 

Steli Efti:  Yes.

 

Hiten Shah:  Right? Like if you say “you,” you’re associating to me.

 

Steli Efti:  Yes.

 

Hiten Shah:  You say “I,” I’m associating to you.

 

Steli Efti:  Exactly.

 

Hiten Shah:  In fact, even when you started going “I,” like I’m not used to you doing that, it’s like—like it already tweaked my brain, and I’m like “He never does that.”

 

Steli Efti:  Yeah, yeah.

 

Hiten Shah:  You’re always a “you,” not the “I.” I mean just typically in your case.

 

Steli Efti:  Yeah. So, here’s the deal with this. The reason why we choose associated or dissociated has often to do with is this a pleasurable thing or not. When it’s something that we don’t like, we much more default to disassociated communication because then we’re not in the feeling of the situation. We kind of dissociated because we—you know, when you had a really bad day, right? So that’s kind of very common thing.

 

Hiten Shah:  No, I don’t know.

 

Steli Efti:  Yes, exactly. So—

 

Hiten Shah:  I’m having a great day.

 

Steli Efti:  Exactly. So, the problem with this way of talking is that I want to disassociate from the shitty feeling, but I’m now making your brain associated.

 

Hiten Shah:  Dissociating it on me.

 

Steli Efti:  Yes. And you don’t know. We all had conversations with people that you hang up and you feel horrible and it—

 

Hiten Shah:  Yeah, you’re right.

 

Steli Efti:  It was all about that problem. Why do you feel horrible? Because they communicated in a way that made you associated with all that problems really, really heavily and they didn’t know that. All they want is communicating in a way that disassociates from that.

 

Hiten Shah:  Actually, you know what’s funny? Like I’ve never studied this stuff. I know a few people that have including yourself and what’s interesting is when people start using, “you know this, you this, you that,” I’m like “wait, wait, wait, is that what you’re dealing with right now? Because you’re saying it like—you’re saying it like everyone’s got this problem.”

 

Steli Efti:  Yes.

 

Hiten Shah:  You know, and I’m like “What if—no, you have this problem.” So it’s kind of interesting, right? It’s almost like it is deflection.

 

Steli Efti:  Yes. Absolutely.

 

Hiten Shah:  Yeah, makes sense.

 

Steli Efti:  And, you know, you can use that so—in clinical hypnosis and like hypnotherapists, like when they sit down for instance with people that have gone through trauma like really horrible situations, when they try to work with them on that, they will create therapeutic sessions where there’s like a second, third or fourth degree of disassociation. So, they’ll do a session where they’ll tell the person to imagine themselves sitting somewhere watching on television how the thing happened, right? Because it’s so traumatic you can’t relive it.

 

Hiten Shah:  And then it’s like “describe it to me.”

 

Steli Efti:  Yes.

 

Hiten Shah:  Right? And then they can share everything probably without feeling associated to it and emotional.

 

Steli Efti:  Reliving the emotions as intensely.

 

Hiten Shah:  Yeah, makes sense.

 

Steli Efti:  Right? So, when you know these things, you pick up on how people influence you negative to a positive independently if they want it or not, right? And take more charge of that but also pay attention on how you influence people negative to a positive.

 

Hiten Shah:  So it’s really like what you put out words-wise even body language and then what you’re taking in. It sounds like just to summarize this for myself, the hypnosis and NLP stuff you studied has helped you essentially understand communication better—

 

Steli Efti:  Yeah.

 

Hiten Shah:  –understand how people’s words impact you and how your words impact them.

 

Steli Efti:  Yeah, absolutely.

 

Hiten Shah:  Cool. Awesome.

 

Steli Efti:  And we’re right about—

 

Hiten Shah:  I want your tips though like I don’t have any—

 

Steli Efti:  Yeah.

 

Hiten Shah:  –except that like I think this stuff is super important and I nit-pick people’s words especially when I’m giving them advice and again always been attracted to this and I totally believe that there’s a lot of science, you know, on how they figured all this stuff out, right? Especially with the psychology. But like it’s starting to add up to me also why, you know—I can—I don’t do sales like you do, but I could tell a salesperson how to do their job better than they know how to do it especially when it comes to what do you tell a customer, right? It’s like a specialty I have. I don’t know why I have it, but I think it has a lot to do with the words. So then that’s making me think that like a lot of the advice you probably give around sales has something to do with this type of stuff too.

 

Steli Efti:  Definitely— I mean it’s a big blend, so there’s things that I’ve learned and been influenced by through hypnosis or NLP, but many, many other things as well. I’ve studied all kinds of things and, you know, at some point you pick and choose and you create your own version of things. And today, many things that I’ll say if I look back at how I said them, I can tell why that is, you know, wisely chosen. But in the moment, I don’t choose what to say and how to say it.

 

Hiten Shah:  Yeah, and neither do I.

 

Steli Efti:  Right? I just go, but it’s also a lifetime of coaching, training, paying attention, improving that now you’re just being yourself but you’re still—you know, you are doing certain things a certain way without having to think about it.

 

Hiten Shah:  Yeah. I have this problem myself where it’s like I actually don’t want to learn these things and I’d rather learn them from somebody that knows them instead of trying to learn them myself. One, cause I’m lazy. But two, it’s like—I worry about abuse and then I also worry about—and I love what you just said but I also worry about leaning too heavily on one way, one system, one tactic. So if you just lean too much in NLP, you might miss a bunch of stuff, right? For example—

 

Steli Efti:  And I’m sure that from the listeners that will listen to this episode, they’ll go “NLP, that’s horrible. That’s da-da-da-da.” And there are some horrible things and there are some horrible people.

 

Hiten Shah:  Agree. There’s horrible ways to do it.

 

Steli Efti:  That’s like “hypnosis, that’s all bullshit,” and there is a lot of bullshit, right? And there’s like, “oh, meditation, it’s not as great.” Anything and everything, I think there’s abuse and also what hypnosis has done because it was a thing I didn’t want to study and I had like very clear “This is not going to be practical. I’m a business person. What should I do with this?” It helped me like become more open-minded and going, “you know what, maybe I don’t fucking know what’s going to be useful or not. Maybe I just need to experiment and experience more things and then decide what’s good or not,” right?

 

Hiten Shah:  That might be one of the biggest lessons here, right? Which is like just be open to things even if you think they’re terrible, bad or even like not for you and just try to get some exposure. Like I just got exposed to hypnosis. I got exposed to NLP probably for the fourth or fifth time and there was someone explaining it to me. And for me the disassociation and association and the thing you already said about the “you” and “I,” it really aligned with like what I picked up on people, right? And like what energy—for lack of a better word—I’m getting from them and it has a lot to do with how they think about it and the words they use, so that’s—I don’t know. I think everyone should study this stuff to some extent. Maybe you can write a book on it.

 

Steli Efti:  Who knows? I don’t think so. I’m not going to—I’m not like—I haven’t practiced hypnosis in the sense of like putting people into trance and things like that in many, many years. But—

 

Hiten Shah:  But for me it’s a practical application. It’s a daily life application. That’s what I really like about how—about this conversation and how you described it.

 

Steli Efti:  Yeah. So, okay, so this is the tip. I’ll add one last thing and then we’ll wrap it up, which is because you just said something that made me think about this, is just—like how many times in my life I had a very strong opinion about something that I had a very little knowledge about and then when I was exposed to it, I was like “Oh, now I feel totally different about the way I judge this.” And just recently— one example—I was telling this to my wife a few weeks ago—was one of my brothers wanted to have a—to do a real like amateur boxing match 2 to 3 years ago. And he trained for it for like 4 months and then it didn’t happen. The guy dropped out and he was like “fuck it, I’m not going to do this again,” and he’s now like a boxer of many years. He just had to say— It was on his bucket list, right?

 

Hiten Shah:  Sure.

 

Steli Efti:  I remember, those 4 months, I was dreading that. I was so afraid for my brother. I was feeling so unhappy that he chose to do—

 

Hiten Shah:  Yeah. “Why does he want to do this? He could get hurt, blah-blah-blah.”

 

Steli Efti:  I was afraid and I was so happy when it didn’t happen. I can’t even tell you. Today, now that I’ve like studied a little bit of martial arts myself and done this, “I would want to do an amateur fight.” And I’m like “I can get it. It’s not a problem. It’s not that dangerous. It’s not a problem” because I have some knowledge about it. Now I feel totally different about like how risky it is and how dangerous, and it is—

 

Just one of these examples was like when you don’t know a lot about something, the way you judge it, the way you think about it and I’m wondering how many other things are there in the world where I have opinions about where I would say, “This is bad. You shouldn’t” and I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about and it comes out of ignorance, not out of knowledge that I’m making these judgment calls. And just a good reminder that we all need to keep being more open-minded because it makes for, you know, a better life and a better human being and better decisions at the end of the day. And, yeah, hypnosis was one of those things I didn’t want to have anything to do with but I was like, “Ah, I might as well go. I paid.”

 

Hiten Shah:  Now we did a whole episode on it, you know. You don’t need it anymore.

 

Steli Efti:  Well, 13 years later, we do a whole podcast about it, right? So, here you go, that’s the lesson learned.

 

Hiten Shah:  So I’m going to end it with a quote.

 

Steli Efti:  Okay.

 

Hiten Shah:  And it’s super related to what you said.

 

Steli Efti:  Nice.

 

Hiten Shah:  And it’s not my quote. I don’t know where it’s from, but it’s basically—I’ve always found the advice of—have strong opinions loosely held that’s kind of applicable here in my mind, which is like, yeah, you might think hypnosis. You might have a strong opinion about it. But it should be loosely held because if you get different new data, then you should change your opinion.

 

Steli Efti:  Yeah, yeah, I love that. I love that quote. That’s actually what we tell people on the culture of the company like we want people strong opinions that hold them loosely, right?

 

Hiten Shah:  Awesome.

 

Steli Efti:  All right. That’s it from us. Make sure to go to thestartupchat.com/fb for Facebook and join the Facebook group if you’re not already part of it. If you enjoyed this, please go to iTunes and give us a rating, let your friends know about this and we will hear you very soon.

 

Hiten Shah:  Bye.

 

[End of transcript]