Morgan Friedman: Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Client Horror Stories. I’m excited to have the one and only Eric Gee with me today. How are you doing, Eric?

Eric Gee: I’m doing great. Thank you for having me tell some horror stories. I don’t know how I feel about it. I’m a little tense, but I think that should match, right? The horror aspect of it.

Morgan Friedman: We’ll get into it because the vibe of the podcast is we’re just two friends hanging out, having a drink. I’m having my coffee with alcohol. And what are you drinking today?

Eric Gee: I’m drinking a bit of hoji cha or something out of my mate gourd here. It’s actually hoji cha, which is smoked green tea, which I know is not technically mate, but I love drinking out of this gourd.

Morgan Friedman: So I’ve never heard of hoji cha before, but I appreciate the touch of Argentina with your mate gourd and bombilla.

Eric Gee: I love that you have alcohol in your drink. I should have put that. I should have had a hot toddy out of this mate gourd. I don’t know if anyone’s ever drank a hot toddy out of a mate gourd, but you can start a whole new pattern of putting alcoholic drinks in mate. It could catch on like wildfire.

Morgan Friedman: They have specific drink canisters for Moscow Mules, right? Those brass copper ones.

Eric Gee: Yeah, why not?

Morgan Friedman: We’ll add that to business idea number 1,267 on the list of businesses. That’s my next career. I’m transitioning into alcoholic mate drinks. That and alcoholic boba drinks. That’s the other thing that’s always been in my head. Why don’t they have alcoholic boba drinks? That would kill. But I’m in Los Angeles. I think that really would kill here.

And with that prep and my Irish coffee in hand, tell us all about your wildest client horror story.

Eric Gee: I don’t know if it would be called a client horror story. I owned my own business for about a decade, and the advice that I can give people is: do not go into business with your friends if you can help it.

When I started my business initially, I started with a friend, and it was an education company. I think when people don’t have experience working with kids, then that can cause a bit of a problem.

Morgan Friedman: Before we jump in, I’ll add two things. First, it’s so high-risk to start a business with your friend. But when you’re young, just out of college starting something, you don’t know any better. You want to do it with someone because it’s hard and lonely, and splitting all the work with your friends is the most natural thing. So it’s very counterintuitive.

Eric Gee: Your observation, but true. And I also want to say before I start that we are still friends, regardless of what happened. We took about a year off from being friends after this instance, but we’re still friends.

Morgan Friedman: And we’re going to continue drinking more and getting more hyped, so by the end of the episode you’ll be jumping off walls.

I also want to point out that even though we’re Client Horror Stories, I’d say only 80% of the episodes are technically clients. The other 20% are business partners or sometimes franchisers, for example. And there are a lot of client-ish relationships because it’s the exact same dynamics and issues. It’s the person you have to be accountable to, so the dynamics are the same. Which is why it’s a great episode, and I’m excited to hear the story.

You started an education business with your friend.

Eric Gee: Yes. And my friend did not have any education background in terms of teaching kids and working with kids.

I’ve worked with kids ever since I was actually, strangely enough, like 11, even though I guess I technically was a kid then. But when I was 18, I did a lot of volunteer work. I did a lot of coaching. I was a Scoutmaster for a Boy Scout troop. I volunteered teaching. Is that a word or combination?

And I had a lot of experience working with kids, and I know there are certain things you do and there are certain things you don’t do.

My friend, his whole experience was owning a massage business. And I know people are like, “Uh-oh, this is already going south,” when they hear the word massage.

Occasionally I would send him out to interact with clients. We owned this whole education company where you go into a child’s home and talk to the parents, have a conversation with them, and then set up the tutoring schedule for us to bring a tutor in.

Now, I was definitely not going to have my business partner, who had no education experience, being a tutor. But I was like, “Okay, well, you can do the processing and the interviewing of the parents and all that kind of thing.”

And through the course of this interaction with three young female students, somehow a massage was offered to the oldest of the students.

Morgan Friedman: Oh, yeah. And I’m sure any teacher listening here is like, “What is going on?”

First, I need to ask: how old were the students?

Eric Gee: These were high school students. I should say one was in high school and one was in junior high.

Morgan Friedman: Even worse. I was wondering if college might be a little bit different, but college is not a felony. It’s just inappropriate and unprofessional.

Eric Gee: Right. Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: So now we’re getting into felony land, where I’m thinking liability. And in fairness to my business partner, he just did not know. He had no thought. He was like, “Oh, well, this is what I do professionally,” because he did own a massage business. He was still working as a massage therapist.

So how old were you guys, by the way?

Eric Gee: We were 27 at the time.

Morgan Friedman: So, pretty early. At 27, you should know better.

It’s different if you’re 21. You’re in college, you’re 20, you’re like, “Hey, I just graduated high school. Let’s start a business tutoring people two years younger than me in high school.” But at 27, there’s enough distance.

Eric Gee: Yeah. It’s just one of those things. He has one of those personality types where social understanding of social etiquette and social rules just doesn’t click, and then of course that can lead into a lack of common sense.

When I heard about this, the kids were not offended. It was obvious he did not give this massage. I don’t know how I heard about this. I think it was my tutor who came in to follow up, and they said, “Oh, by the way, the kid said that the person giving them the test offered them a massage.”

And I was like, “What?”

So I heard about it maybe two weeks later, and obviously I came down hard on my business partner. I was just like, “Look, this is unacceptable. What are you doing? Are you trying to get us sued? Are you trying to go to jail?”

I just could not understand it. But he’s a business partner, so technically he’s an equal. And I think that’s why I always recommend that if you get into business with someone, it’s really hard because sometimes it feels personal.

Morgan Friedman: So I have a question.

Let’s try to unpack his mind. Let’s try to model his personality, and having modeled his personality, try to understand or predict that behavior.

Because I’m trying to think: at 27 years old, I kind of think 100% of 27-year-olds I know or knew when I was 27 would know that it’s so obviously inappropriate.

It’s so obviously inappropriate. And we’re also assuming your business partner is a great guy, a good guy. It was done out of naivety and ignorance.

I’m trying to understand: how could you not realize that?

Eric Gee: There’s a little bit of that. And there’s nothing wrong with this, but sometimes I think when there’s an aspect of being on the spectrum and just not knowing—I once mentioned social etiquette and not only not knowing but not necessarily valuing it and thinking it’s important.

Again, other people have different priorities. I’m not saying social etiquette should be your number-one priority. But I think when you devalue it, then you don’t even try to learn and be aware of it.

And then certain things take over, and you’re like, “Oh, I’m a massage therapist. This is what I do professionally. She said that her shoulder was really hurting. Oh, let me help her. Let me offer this to her,” while her sister is taking the test.

We would have our students take a test to process them and find their tutor. And I think that’s just what went on in his head. I know that’s what went on because that’s what he told me later.

And I don’t think he understood why I was so upset. I kept saying, “You can’t do that.”

He’s like, “Yeah, but that was my job.”

And I said, “No, it’s not your job there. Your job is as a business owner and to process them through this test. Your job is not as a massage therapist.”

Morgan Friedman: Okay. So I’m going to continue to try to model his mind.

I find this very interesting because usually in these sorts of episodes it’s about, “Oh my God, the person I work with was a bad person.” Some people are just bad.

But here it’s different because he’s actually a good person—a good person not realizing something that is so obviously inappropriate. It’s a very interesting personality to try to understand.

So here are some possible hypotheses I could put forth.

I kind of grew up in a sheltered bubble of overachieving, really smart, Jewish nerdy kids with zero touching of the real world in any possible way until basically I graduated college.

So I grew up a bit out there.

Just think about myself in my college years and my friends, who also, if we were 25 years younger, might have been considered on the spectrum. But 25 years ago those phrases didn’t exist, and people didn’t think about things that way.

So maybe it could just be growing up so incredibly sheltered that you don’t even realize the sexual nature of massages and therefore the inappropriateness of offering it to teenagers.

Eric Gee: Yeah, I think it was definitely a lot of that. I’d say 95% of that, because his parents are both teachers, so you think that they would have told him that, because any teacher knows.

But, you know, it’s kind of like—I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie Weapons, but in the movie Weapons—and owning an education company, I’ve experienced this with teachers too—there’s this sense of, “Oh, maybe I shouldn’t do this, but I really have to do this because I feel like I should because I’m being a good person by doing it, and I don’t want to let social rules rule the day.”

And I think maybe there was a little bit of that as well.

Morgan Friedman: And I think it’s fun to dive into this. So part of it is a little bit on the spectrum, as you said.

Another contributing factor could be growing up in such a bubble, in your own intellectual world, that you don’t even realize these basic human things—like the fact that massages can have a sexual connotation.

I’ll confess: I feel empathy and sympathy and I feel connected to your friend. I was embarrassingly old when I learned what a “happy ending” at a massage meant.

I would always hear that and remember people joking about it. “Oh, that’s fine. It finishes in a really enjoyable way. That’s nice.”

But after I learned it, I had to rethink and reconsider conversations from ten years earlier and be like, “Oh, that’s what they all meant.”

So at least you didn’t get yourself in trouble not having that understanding.

Eric Gee: That’s right. It reminds me of this game I was playing with a friend, and I had to explain to her what a fleshlight was because that was the word I was trying to get her to guess in charades.

I’m like, “Oh, this is perfect. I got a great charade for this. This is going to be super easy now.”

I’m not going to do the charade here, but I was like, “This is so easy.”

And then she was just like, “I don’t understand. What’s going on here?”

And I had to explain what it was.

Morgan Friedman: So I think we can have more to really understand his personality.

I think there’s a third contributing factor, again hypothesizing based on zero information other than your two-sentence story.

Do you know the saying that when you have a hammer, everything’s a nail?

Eric Gee: Yeah.

Morgan Friedman: I think it’s a very powerful insight. If you’re really good at something, you have this human instinct to just do this thing all the time.

I know some people who are really good at logical, rational thinking, and no matter what happens in their lives, they approach it like it’s a logical problem that a formula can solve.

People go to their strengths when they don’t know what to do. They say, “Oh, I’m good at this thing,” and then you apply that thing to everything.

So another factor could be: what is your friend’s strength? Giving massages.

Therefore, when you have the hammer of massage, everything becomes an opportunity to use your hammer.

Eric Gee: Yeah. I mean, when he meets adults—obviously we’re still friends—and they say, “Oh, you know, I’m hurting,” and so forth, if it’s in a social situation, he’ll almost always offer massages.

“Do you want me to work on that for you?”

By the way, I will say the massages he gives, because he’s worked on me as a friend, are not sexual. Not even close to sexual or sensual massages at all. They’re the physical-therapy, “I’m going to rip your muscles into shreds” kind of massage.

So that also probably goes in his head, where it’s like, “This is painful and not any bit of a stroking massage at all.” It’s almost like getting worked on.

Morgan Friedman: I only go to male masseuses when I want a massage because with a female masseuse there might be—it’s harder to avoid inappropriate things. And guys are stronger too.

Eric Gee: Yeah, in general guys are stronger, especially masseuses, so they can really work tight.

Morgan Friedman: But yeah, you know, I do personality theory. That’s one of my things, one of my jobs my whole life.

There’s a personality type which my friend is a part of that is, funny enough, the same personality type as Einstein.

You mentioned logic and reason and rationality. And the problem—and my friend knows about personality types—is he’s always saying, “Yeah, the problem is people think our personality types are always geniuses because Einstein’s one of ours.”

But we’re like, “No, we just like information and we get really nerdy about stuff and really insular in our own world about specific things.”

And he’s like, “I am not a genius. All I know is a lot about massage therapy and fantasy football.”

And those are the two things that you were saying: when you’re a hammer, everything’s a nail. I think people just go, “No, this is what I know.” They might not even know that they’re just so insular that that’s what they see.

Eric Gee: That makes sense.

Morgan Friedman: By the way, for your friend’s personality type, in your favorite personality schema, is there a label or a name or a description for this type of personality?

Eric Gee: We’re discussing the Einstein type.

In The Power of Personality, I go through my methodology and I use 16 animal types because animals are really easy to remember.

For that Einstein personality type, and my friend’s personality type, we refer to that type as the owl.

As you can think, owls are bookish, nerdy, gathering information, but also kind of hold up there and don’t necessarily get that much experience out in the world, except at night when everyone’s asleep.

So yeah, that would be the owl personality type.

Morgan Friedman: By the way, I have not read your book, but I’ve seen many variations of Myers-Briggs that use animals for this. Is this a Myers-Briggs variation, or do you have your own axis?

Eric Gee: It is Myers-Briggs. Myers-Briggs trademark.

Morgan Friedman: Trademark. I don’t want to be sued.

Eric Gee: We love you, Myers-Briggs.

You know, it is an evolution. I call it “Since They’re Animals of Myers-Briggs.” I studied MBTI, and then after MBTI I studied a man named David Keirsey, who developed Myers-Briggs even more. From there, I just started evolving my own.

So yes, I do have 16 types. Anyone who knows MBTI will go, “Oh, 16 says Myers-Briggs,” but if you read the book and really get into the details, it’s very, very different.

I don’t really believe in introversion and extroversion. I mentioned that in the book. I think it has to do with context, and this just comes from years and years—decades—of talking to people and teaching them this stuff and then getting arguments back.

People are like, “Well, that’s stupid because I’m extroverted in this situation, but I’m introverted in this situation.”

And you start realizing that’s true. So really, that’s the determining factor in people’s personalities.

It’s different than what MBTI uses, is what I’ll say. But if we were using MBTI terms, he would be an INTP.

Morgan Friedman: An INTP. Okay.

Eric Gee: Trademark. We love you, Myers-Briggs as much as we did three minutes ago.

Morgan Friedman: By the way, I’m a Myers-Briggs nerd. I’m always borderline INTJ and INTP.

Eric Gee: I was going to guess.

Morgan Friedman: I love guessing.

Eric Gee: I would have guessed in that realm.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah, I’m an INTJ on the border of INTP.

Eric Gee: I can see that. I was going to guess somewhere around there.

So in my personality methodology, I put people into four packs first—four major packs—and then within those four packs there are four animal types.

If you share a pack with someone, there are going to be a lot of similarities and you’re going to have the same values and priorities. You may go about achieving that priority differently than other animals within the pack, but when you meet someone who’s in the same pack, you think, “Oh, this person is exactly like me.”

Then you realize, “Oh no, they’re not exactly like me, but kind of similar.” We feel similar.

So INTP and INTJ are in the same pack. In my system, you would be an owl or a spider.

The way I would determine the difference between those two has nothing to do with J or P, which I think is what Myers-Briggs uses, right?

Morgan Friedman: Judging, perceiving, structured, organized?

Eric Gee: Yeah. The difference is—I call them the Smith personality pack. Smiths are always looking for information and tools. They think of information as tools.

A spider would seek out information that they can use. They’re very pragmatic. They’re like, “Okay, what’s the stuff that I’m learning?” But they only want to learn the stuff that they can use.

And an owl would be on the other side where they’re just like, “Oh, I don’t know. That’s cool. I like it. Let me just learn about this.”

Does it have any meaning? I don’t know. I just think it’s cool to learn about fantasy football or massage therapy or etymology.

That would be the big difference between the two.

Morgan Friedman: That’s a difference that Myers-Briggs does not capture. So I appreciate that.

I see for myself there are things I studied thinking, “How could I use it?” And there are other things where I’m like, “Dude, this is cool.”

Eric Gee: I know.

Morgan Friedman: No, I’m curious. What is it?

Eric Gee: A parliament of owls.

Morgan Friedman: A parliament?

Oh, I like that. It’s genius. It’s genius as the actual word in English. I love it because owls are associated with wisdom, and a parliament, the Senate, is like the wise old men making decisions.

So now every time I see a group of owls at a zoo or wherever, I’m always like, “There’s the parliament making their decisions.”

And you say that as loudly as possible so people can hear: “There’s a parliament of owls there!”

And people are like, “What?”

Eric Gee: And let me explain to you. Let me just tell you what I know, because owls are wise.

Morgan Friedman: Do you know what a group of chimpanzees is called?

Eric Gee: I actually don’t.

Morgan Friedman: So I’m just curious about your personality because you definitely seem more like an owl. That answer was where you were like, “Some things I just say, ‘Cool, I’m just going to learn that.’” That’s really how owls think.

And you seem very—not to say that spiders are tight, but they can be a little drawn in and reserved and serious, at least seemingly at first. But you seem very open and very loose. And that’s definitely much more like an owl.

But the other animal that you might also be is a chimpanzee.

And the Myers-Briggs equivalent would be the ENTP. You might be like, “But I’m not extroverted. I don’t want to be outgoing.”

But that’s not necessarily my methodology.

The difference between an owl and a chimpanzee is that when you’re dealing with information, owls process their information by observation and listening. Chimpanzees process their information by experimentation and modeling.

They’ll throw themselves into situations or try different things or just say maybe offensive things to people. Not that they intend to, but they’ll just say, “Oh, I’m going to say this,” and then see how people respond. Because how they respond gives you information about that person.

So I don’t know. You might consider yourself a chimpanzee.

Eric Gee: Okay. A few things.

I love your methodology, and you’re revealing different axes that aren’t captured in traditional Myers-Briggs or the others that I know. So I think this is awesome.

Next point: before I answer your question about myself, I’ll make a relevant observation that might help you understand me a bit more.

I’m what is sometimes called an extroverted introvert. By my nature, I just want to be alone. I hate humans.

Humans try to do things with me, they lie, cheat, steal. They’re not nice. They take advantage. I just hate people.

However, I’ve realized over the course of my life, and decades ago—since I was a kid—the importance of doing things on a team with other people and working together.

So I’ve developed these extroverted skills, and actually I can be wildly good at being extroverted. It’s fun for me meeting people. I go to conferences. I own the whole conference. I tell jokes in the groups around me.

So many people think that I’m extroverted, but it’s because I’ve mastered the art of it. I’m really good at it.

But because it’s not natural to me, I don’t especially enjoy it, and it freaking exhausts me. I’ll be at a conference and then I’ll go back to the room at 8:00 p.m. after being there all day, and I’ll fall asleep in three seconds for 12 hours.

Eric Gee: That’s all sounding very chimpanzee, and I know I’m just solidifying my own hypothesis. But it does sound very chimpanzee because that’s why I love my own methodology.

It has nothing to do with introversion and extroversion, and even how you said you’re an extrovert-introvert, the way you describe yourself is so chimpanzee-like.

Morgan Friedman: Interesting.

Eric Gee: And then my final comment would be on whether you process information by listening, reading, processing, or by experimentation.

Morgan Friedman: I’m extreme on both of those.

Eric Gee: So maybe a way to put the methodology is 50/50.

Morgan Friedman: But I’ll point out that this goes to one of the things I don’t like about these personality tests. I’m an uber-nerd of tests. I’ve been studying all the personality tests for decades, so as a semi-insider of that space, my criticism would be that it’s always comparing you against yourself.

It just turns out that some people are more competent than other people. Some people are better than other people.

So these two sides, compared to any other human, yeah, I’m a bit more this one, a bit more that one. But if it turns out, on a more objective way of looking at it, I would say from my unbiased perspective, I’m just extremely high on both of those.

Eric Gee: No, that’s a fair statement because once again you’re part of the same personality pack.

And not only are you part of the same personality pack. What I do is there are four animals within each one, and then within those four animals I split them up two different ways.

Both the chimpanzees and the owls would be in the separate group that prioritizes information just because it’s fun.

But I will say, when you said, “That just sounds cool,” generally people who refer to information and stuff like that as “cool” are saying something very chimpanzee.

It would be the difference, if you watch Game of Thrones, between Tyrion Lannister and Varys. They both get along really well because they understand each other. They seem almost exactly alike, but then they’re very different in some things.

Tyrion is clearly the chimpanzee. Varys is clearly the owl.

And in general, when you’re saying, “Oh, I like being around people, but then I go back,” it’s kind of like Tony Stark too.

Tony Stark is a chimpanzee because at the end of the day, where would he want to be most of all? He’d want to be by himself in his laboratory or workshop, working on things.

But when he’s around people, he’s full of energy because what he’s doing is talking to people and gaining information by talking to people.

My dad was a chimpanzee, and he would say stuff that I’d be like, “Wow, that was really offensive.”

And he’d be like, “Oh yeah, but look, see how they said this now?”

And I’m like, “Wow. Was that worth offending them?”

Maybe. I don’t know. Sometimes you just do stuff to get a rise out of people.

And once again, that’s kind of how chimpanzees are too. They’re a bit mischievous, and they like to have fun.

Morgan Friedman: Interesting. Thinking, processing, and thinking about it while you’re talking.

My refined version of the answer to your question is this: I’m 49 years old, and I think over time your personality changes. It’s not static.

I feel like by my human nature, when I was a kid, I was entirely an owl. But since basically starting college, around 18 or 19, continuing until I’m 49—so 30 years now—I’ve been on this process of semi-mostly unconsciously, but semi-consciously, transforming myself more and more into a chimpanzee.

So now I would say I’m an adapted chimpanzee because now I enjoy doing this, experimenting with this, trying this.

My whole career since right after college has been me experimenting with this kind of marketing idea. At 21, I just started. I knew nothing. Boom, huge success. Then another, then another.

So it’s like life put me in this universe to just try things.

I was so nerdy I couldn’t meet people in college. Afterwards it was so awkward. I was like 21, thinking, “I want to talk to girls and so on.” I’m like, “I’m just going to go up there and start talking to them.”

And I’m like, “Oh, I’ll try different things and see how they respond.”

So life has forced me to develop these chimpanzee skills.

Now I would say I’m more a chimpanzee, but that’s an adapted version. Naturally, I’m more an owl.

Eric Gee: I’m curious because owls and chimpanzees are, for lack of a better term, what I call minority types. They only make up about 2% of the population.

And you know how I mentioned there are four different packs?

Morgan Friedman: Yes.

Eric Gee: One pack I call the gatherers.

If you’re a minority type and you grow up surrounded by a lot of the other types, you would be more likely to go into your shell a little bit.

Which makes sense, because then when you get to college, you start seeing people may be a little different. Especially in college, there are going to be a lot more chimpanzees and owls just by the nature of the personalities. There are a lot more abstract thinkers in college based on their percentage of the general population.

So maybe that was your almost, “Oh, okay. No, I can be myself. Let’s try this.”

And the fact that you said, “Oh, I’ve been put on this earth to try things,” I will say that is such a chimpanzee thing to say.

Not that an owl wouldn’t say that, but an owl would definitely be more cautious about jumping into situations.

And obviously I believe that people mature. As we mature, we get better and more confident in who we really are.

I was kind of in the same boat. I actually, this is sad coming from someone who studied personality so much, at a certain point in college I thought I was the introverted version of my actual animal type.

And it wasn’t until I started learning more and more that I realized, “Oh, you know, it’s actually I am this type, but I just lost confidence.”

Morgan Friedman: Which is your animal type?

Eric Gee: I am a baboon.

Morgan Friedman: And that is not in the Smith pack.

Eric Gee: It’s in what we call the Shaman pack, which is also kind of a minority pack.

Morgan Friedman: Wait, it’s in the what pack?

Eric Gee: The Shamans.

Morgan Friedman: Shamans?

Eric Gee: Yeah. I wanted to call them witch doctors, and then someone told me, “Yeah, you can’t do that.”

And I’m like, “Oh, really? I kind of thought that would be cool, being a witch doctor.”

But anyway, yes. That pack prioritizes self-discovery, like self-knowledge, versus the information that Smiths do.

Within that pack, there are four different animals. I’m a baboon.

The MBTI version of my pack or my type would be an ENFP.

Morgan Friedman: So very similar to an ENTP.

Eric Gee: Exactly. Funny enough, if you study MBTI, you’d be like, “Oh, ENFP is really similar to ENTP.”

On the outside they really are. They seem very similar.

Growing up, my dad thought I was going to have the same personality as him. He was like, “Oh, okay. My kid’s the same. Then I’ll do these irrational things that made no sense at all.”

And then he’d be like, “Wait a minute. What? Why is my kid so irrational? That doesn’t make sense. Why would he do that?”

And so he started seeing differences.

That’s why I’m a big believer in the pack system versus just 16 random types, because I would have more in common as a baboon with another person in my personality pack than me having in common with a chimpanzee, even though in the MBTI scale we’re only one letter apart.

Morgan Friedman: I appreciate the subtlety of your approach.

I love our 15-minute tangent on personality types. I’m a little addicted to it.

And as you pointed out, you wrote a book on it. The Power of Personality. Amazon link in the notes below. Have a good time. Leave a great review if you can.

Amazing tangent.

And also, let’s go back to the original story because all I know is there’s already the horror, because I think we’re able to have this fun tangent because the horror happens like three minutes into the episode.

A 27-year-old professional offering a massage to girls he’s tutoring.

I see everything.

My background is in screenwriting, and they always teach you: go early. Put the murder early. Put something in the first five or six pages.

So I wanted to go, “Bam. Offer a kid a massage.” That’s in the first three or four pages.

Eric Gee: It’s an interesting narrative technique you chose for Client Horror Stories because sometimes the slow burn is also fun.

What’s going to happen? Someone a little bit on the spectrum, organizing tutors, going to houses, building up the mystery until the big moment.

But you went right for it up front.

And there was a bit of a slow burn, because the really horrifying part for me was eventually I had to force my friend out of the company.

Morgan Friedman: So let’s talk about that. You discovered he had been doing this. You confronted him, and he was just like, “Oh, okay. I didn’t know.”

And then he was trying to argue. He was trying to say, “Oh, but give me logical or rational reasons.”

And I’m just like, “No. This is a non-starter. Do not do this again.”

So were you able to convince him on the internal level why that was messed up?

Eric Gee: No, I don’t think so.

And that was always a fear point for me. It delivered so much anxiety as I was sitting there.

Not that if I told him not to do it, he wouldn’t do it again. He’d be like, “Okay. I disagree because I think it’s fine for me to do this, but if you’re telling me not to do this and you say that I’m not supposed to do it, then I won’t do it.”

But once again, if you don’t agree internally, then that could affect other decision-making things in this realm.

Morgan Friedman: Correct.

That is a subtle point I just want to call attention to for our listeners.

Often when people you work with or clients do bad things and you confront them, they’ll often agree and understand, but they won’t internalize it.

And if they agree and understand but don’t internalize that understanding, there remains the risk that they’ll backtrack at some point and repeat the behavior.

Eric Gee: Right. If someone doesn’t think something is important, then they won’t try to learn more about it and develop it.

It doesn’t mean you can’t make mistakes, but you have to know that there’s something important so that you can get better at it.

And he was not going to get better at that because he just didn’t, like you said, internalize it.

And it happened again—not that that did not happen again—but there were all these little things where I had a student, and this was my fault because I should have known better.

This happened before, even though I knew he wouldn’t offer him a massage.

This student was a football player, so it wasn’t leading to a massage. I should have just set it up so that people wouldn’t think, “Oh no, another massage.”

But I couldn’t make my scheduled session with him. It was a late session, maybe like 8:00 p.m., which is pretty late.

And I said, “Hey, but I got a sub. He can take it just one time.”

I talked to the mom and she was like, “Yeah, sure. No problem.”

And I get this phone call later that night saying, “Hey, Eric, you know, I think I messed up.”

And I was like, “Oh no. What happened?”

He’s like, “I think I made him cry.”

I’m like, “What? How do you make a 15-year-old kid cry?”

And he’s like, “I don’t know. I don’t know what I said.”

I’m like, “What exactly did you say?”

And he couldn’t remember. Or he said a lot of different things and he couldn’t pinpoint it.

So the worst thing about that was that I had no idea what he did exactly. I just knew that it was something inappropriate that he said—not necessarily in that massage-inappropriate way, but just something you don’t say to kids.

And yeah, I lost that student.

I obviously called the mom, left a message, and never heard back.

And I’m like, “How?”

That was a kid I had taught as a client for maybe six or seven months at least.

And I was so frustrated. I was like, “Oh my gosh. You made me look bad because it really was my decision.”

So in a sense, it was my fault.

And that’s when I realized, “You know what? If I’m going to be responsible for all of this, then I’m going to be responsible for all of this.”

And that’s when I made certain business moves to move him out of the company.

Morgan Friedman: On that second story, the worst part is you never know what actually happened.

Because when you don’t know the actual cause, it’s hard to define processes or do things in order to minimize the risk again.

Instead, it’s just, “Oh no, there was this loose cannonball floating around.”

Eric Gee: Yeah. I figured the mom—I was hoping to talk to the mom so that she would say, “He said this,” or “He did this,” or “My son complained about this.”

But no. She never did.

Whatever it was, it was definitely a, “Nope, we’re good. We’re never going to go back there.”

And it was really unfortunate because I really loved working with that student.

I was saying “furious” is maybe an understatement for all these things.

And I realized I didn’t want my emotions to be so much a part of this, so I let it sit for a while.

And I think just the mental side of it, like you said, like a loose cannon just floating out there firing shots, was not something that I could tolerate anymore.

Morgan Friedman: Okay. Step back.

Other than the different learnings that have come out over the course of our conversation, have these experiences resulted in your changing approaches, thinking about things differently, different processes?

Share some ways you’ve grown.

Eric Gee: Yeah. The number-one thing is that you should always—I mean, we did have a mission statement for the company to start, but I think the key is having everyone buy into the mission statement.

You don’t have to value the same thing. You can value different things, but you have to know that you guys are all running after the same objective.

They can go about it in different ways, but I think it’s important to have the same vision and direction.

That was something I really learned.

I kept that in mind because that was maybe the first year of my company, and at that point we were still quite small. We maybe had 100 or 200 students.

Morgan Friedman: But how does that connect to the massage and the problems that happened? Him being inappropriate? I don’t see how that relates to having different missions.

Eric Gee: “Oh, my mission was to get more massages.”

Morgan Friedman: Oh, well—

Eric Gee: I think not necessarily a different mission, but a different mindset.

He just didn’t have that mindset of, “Oh, this is—I want to learn more about educating kids,” because our mission, of course, is to educate kids.

We had a mission statement, and I don’t think necessarily that he was fully committed to that.

I think he looked at it as a business investment, which I guess would have been fine if he wasn’t relied on to do certain things.

So I guess that would have been okay if he just invested some money in the business and didn’t have such a hands-on role.

But he wanted a hands-on role, and thus that’s what happened.

And so, yeah, I held on to that.

I ran that company for another nine years, and I had a great director. We were really on point. In fact, she had a lot of the ideas that helped that company grow quite a bit.

So I do think that’s why it’s so important to find someone—and that was a friend of mine too, someone who I knew personally.

Even though I started this saying never get into business with someone that you know, I knew her really well and trusted her, and that worked out perfectly.

So really what it comes down to, what I learned, is you can get into business with someone that you know, but make sure you have the same vision of where you want to go.

They’re going to be committed.

I need to know that he was committed to being good at educating kids and following the rules, and he clearly was not.

Morgan Friedman: Interesting.

So I have two comments on that.

First, this learning feels like the converse of the point that I made trying to model your partner’s personality about how, if you have a hammer, everything is a nail.

It feels to me like it goes back down to your personality types.

Maybe your six types capture this, where there are some people that see something and want to fix it and apply what they know or what they have.

I happen to have a hammer in order to fix it.

While there are other people who see that same nail, and maybe they have a hammer, maybe not, but they say, “Okay, before I do anything, I really want to understand that nail. Is it really a nail? Is it a soft or a hard nail?” and so on.

So it seems like what you needed for this type of business was a partner who would want to really get to the bottom of the maleness of it all.

Eric Gee: Yes. Instead, you had a partner that just wanted to hammer away.

Morgan Friedman: Right. Like, “No, I’m just going to fling this hammer around,” without thinking, “Hey, maybe it’s not even a nail. Maybe it’s a screw.”

Eric Gee: Maybe I should have used a different tool.

Morgan Friedman: Exactly.

And if that’s the case, maybe it is a screw, and it doesn’t mean that I have to use this hammer. It doesn’t mean I’m restricted to this hammer because, like you mentioned before, we can grow, we can mature, we can develop our skills.

Maybe I’m not capable of using a screwdriver right now, but if I work at it, then maybe I can.

And thus, once I can, then I can work with this student appropriately versus just throwing my hammer around.

Eric Gee: Interesting.

Morgan Friedman: I love it.

My second observation would be: if you promote your own book, I can promote my own book.

I’ve written a bunch of books as well. One of my books, Beloved by Clients, is all about the topics of the same sort of issues that we deal with in Client Horror Stories: how to work with people in a way so they love you.

And by the way, I’ve recently started doing daily social media videos with the social media handle TheProfessionalizer on these same sorts of issues about how to work in really serious, intense ways but healthy ways, including how to deal with very, very difficult people and lots of stress.

Something that I write about and work about, and part of what I do, is you just need to find people that you are compatible with. You just need compatible work styles.

In fact, Beloved by Clients purposely uses the word “loved” because what I do is take a lot of the dating metaphors and how you think about relationships and just apply that to business partners and clients as well.

They’re both relationships, just technically different types of relationships. One involves more clothing than the other type.

But because they’re both relationships, the rules of healthier relationship management apply.

Often part of my methodology is to think about business and client work by saying, “Okay, let’s take the same situation in a dating context. How would you behave?”

And it elucidates what to do every single time.

Eric Gee: Thinking about that in the context here, and also your interest in the 16 personality types and your book The Power of Personality, there’s probably a more formal version of what I do that kind of applies your methodology.

It could be, for example, “Okay, it turns out if you’re a chimpanzee and you work with a baboon, that creates these types of risk factors.”

So just like having a more granular understanding of—you want to start a business with this person. Well, if you’re a chimpanzee, what are your personality types?

Because if you’re a chimpanzee and he’s a baboon, here are the types of business risk factors.

In fact, thinking about it, I have a couple of books I wrote that I never published that one day I’ll clean up and publish.

One of them I call Founder Prenups.

I have a whole theory that, and I do this with my own investments, before you start working with someone, you need to figure out all the ways it’s likely to break down and minimize those beforehand.

And I have a whole section on making sure you’re compatible personality types.

Morgan Friedman: Thinking about it out loud now in real time, your methodology and your story here could add substance and granularity to that as well.

Because, yeah, I know he’s a bit more of a thinker than a doer.

Do I really want to partner with a thinker?

But if you turn to a methodology, wow. That’s really powerful.

I love that dating metaphor because it really is partnering, right?

And I think when we think of relationships, we do accept differences.

I don’t think you should always work or partner up with someone who’s the exact same personality as you.

Not that it’s always going to be super bad, but your strengths are going to overlap, and you’re not really getting the most out of it.

It’s kind of like having a basketball team full of shooters. Everyone’s going to shoot, and no one’s going to do anything else.

Not everyone gets to shoot in a basketball game.

And I think it’s the same thing where I ended up pairing with the director I had, who’s also a friend. She was a spider, and we had mentioned the spiders before.

And that actually worked perfectly. We blended really well because spiders are very pragmatic. They love information and love trying new things as long as they know how to use it.

And as a baboon, my strength is communicating that and pushing it and persuading and motivating and advocating for those things.

So I would handle taking the structures and systems that she would create and pushing them to our tutors and employees.

That was my gift: I could persuade them and motivate them to use these things.

And I was also very open to trying anything that she wanted to try out, and she loved that because she was always constantly thinking of new ways to make things more efficient.

And I think that worked perfectly together.

Morgan Friedman: Interesting.

A couple years ago I was considering starting a company, and I asked myself, “Should I start the company alone or with someone else?”

And I said, “Well, what did the great tech entrepreneurs do?”

So I did my own little analysis of how many founders each great tech company had.

And it turns out every single one had two founders.

Even the ones that you think had one founder really had two.

You think about Mark Zuckerberg, but there was really Eduardo, the Brazilian Jewish guy that he kicked out.

You think about Steve Jobs, but it’s really Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

So I thought, “Okay, two is the right number.”

But then I dived into it even more. I was like, “Okay, okay, is there a difference between them?”

And I realized that actually very consistently one of them is the more salesy, extroverted, visionary type, and the other is the more—

Eric Gee: More technical?

Morgan Friedman: Exactly. More technical. More analytical.

One is out there selling everything to the world, and Wozniak was the one who figured out how to build these crazy computers.

So even among the co-founders of a company, there’s this very clear sort of personality divide.

It might make sense to take that into account.

Eric Gee: Oh, yeah. I found that right away.

If you have two people like you had mentioned—how about a baboon and a chimpanzee partnering up? Not to say that wouldn’t work.

They would be great at ideas and throwing a ton of stuff on the wall and brainstorming. They’d have tons of different visionary ideas and crazy ideas.

Are they ever going to get them out there?

No.

Because they might start talking about the greatest taco truck that they found the other day, and then the meeting goes haywire.

I’ve done meetings with all personalities like that, and then there’s one person who’s a little bit more structured and organized who’s like, “Okay, guys, this is great, but can we write some of this stuff down?”

And so it is important to have someone like that.

And vice versa. You can have all people who are super structured because they might not take initiative. They might not try new things. They might not just go for it.

They might even have an idea, but they might not have the wherewithal to go, “Yeah, just let’s do it. Let’s do it. Why not?”

So I think it’s good to have that balance.

Morgan Friedman: I love it.

Eric, this has been such an interesting episode. So many insights and ideas came out.

And I also think this might be a record in all the Client Horror Stories, or almost at 100 now, because I think it’s the first one where I actually talk about me.

You’re analyzing me and my personality. It’s never happened before.

I used to spend all my time analyzing the other person because it’s usually your horror story. How did it break down? What happened?

So there’s a lot of analyzing the other person, but you cleverly turned it around.

Eric Gee: I like to ask the questions.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah. And I love personality too.

I definitely think that sounds very chimpanzee-like.

Again, I’m just patting myself on the back because all these are just like, “Ding, ding, ding.”

Definitely not a spider.

And I love spiders, but don’t get me wrong. I do really well with spiders.

In the book I mention that obviously it’s a very nuanced structure and methodology, but since I’ve been doing it for so long, sometimes it just feels like this person feels like this, and you don’t feel like a spider.

But yeah, I think my conclusion on myself would be: I am a chimpanzee, but I’ve changed.

I think at 19 I was an owl. At 49 I’m a chimpanzee.

And who knows what I’ll be at 79?

Eric Gee: Very true.

Morgan Friedman: Stay a chimpanzee. Chimpanzees are cool.

I’m enjoying the chimpanzee life, but I still feel that inner calling of the owl.

I’ll say it like this: all of life is kind of putting on an act, but you put on so much of an act that at some point it becomes you.

And I feel like I’ve put on Anthony the Chimpanzee for so long because I needed to succeed in many ways that I’ve become it.

But I still have that inner calling of the owl.

Eric Gee: You’ve got to just find out what a group of chimpanzees is called as opposed to a parliament.

Morgan Friedman: I actually don’t know. What is a group of chimpanzees called?

Eric Gee: A barrel?

Morgan Friedman: That would be hysterical.

A lot of them are funny, like a murder of crows. What does that even mean?

Eric Gee: Kind of dangerous. They feed on corpses.

Morgan Friedman: Yeah. But collective nouns are just a weird, obscure corner of the English language.

And my owl side likes it.

And by the way, utterly useless. Utterly useless. Not even really used anymore.

But my owl side enjoys it.

You know, chimpanzees and owls are funny in the obscure knowledge they know.

I always think of Sherlock Holmes, who’s a chimpanzee, and how Watson always gets on him.

He’s like, “Wait, so you know ten different types of deodorants or something”—I forgot what random knowledge he had—“but you don’t know that the Earth revolves around the sun, and it’s not important to my daily life.”

“I don’t need to know that.”

Like, they only want to know a lot about the things they know a lot about and care about, and the stuff that someone else tells them is important, maybe they ignore it quite often.

Eric Gee: Interesting.

Morgan Friedman: That makes sense.

Eric, it’s been fun having you on and getting to know you. And to all the listeners who have made it this far to the end, we hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as Eric and I have.

I’m sure you did. I’m modeling your personality. I think you enjoyed the conversation too.

Thank you, and until next time.