Jon Davids - The Influence Game

Support the show:
https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US

Buy Grow kit:
https://modernmushroomcultivation.com/

Aloha listeners,

Today, I’m thrilled to introduce a guest whose entrepreneurial journey is nothing short of extraordinary. Jon Davids is a purebred entrepreneur who has mastered the art of hijacking demand on the internet, a skill that not only changed his life but also revolutionized how brands connect with their audiences.

Let’s rewind to 2004: Jon, while still in college, built an online magazine that thrived on digital ad revenue, eventually selling it to a major publisher in 2009. But this was just the beginning. In 2011, he ventured into the then-nascent world of YouTube influencers, unlocking millions in revenue for brands through this innovative channel.

In 2015, Jon took a bold step forward, founding Influicity, one of the earliest influencer marketing agencies. Though the early days were a grind, Jon’s vision and determination paid off. Today, Influicity boasts a client roster that includes industry giants like Toyota, Walmart, and Bank of America, offering a full spectrum of marketing services across seven countries.

Beyond his business acumen, Jon is a passionate educator and author, reaching an audience of 2 million people each month with his insights on building $100 million brands through community.

Join me as we delve into the mind of Jon Davids, exploring his journey, his challenges, and the wisdom he’s gained along the way. This is an episode you won’t want to miss.

Welcome, Jon, to the show.
http://linkedin.com/in/jondavids
http://jondavids.com/

Support the show:
https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US

Check out our YouTube:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Grow your own:
https://modernmushroomcultivation.com/

Creators & Guests

Host

George Monty

My name is George Monty. I am the Owner of TrueLife (Podcast/media/ Channel) I’ve spent the last three in years building from the ground up an independent social media brandy that includes communications, content creation, community engagement, online classes in NLP, Graphic Design, Video Editing, and Content creation. I feel so blessed to have reached the following milestones, over 81K hours of watch time, 5 million views, 8K subscribers, & over 60K downloads on the podcast!

What is TrueLife?

Greetings from the enigmatic realm of "The TrueLife Podcast: Unveiling Realities." Embark on an extraordinary journey through the uncharted territories of consciousness with me, the Founder of TrueLife Media. Fusing my background in experimental psychology and a passion for storytelling, I craft engaging content that explores the intricate threads of entrepreneurship, uncertainty, suffering, psychedelics, and evolution in the modern world.

Dive into the depths of human awareness as we unravel the mysteries of therapeutic psychedelics, coping with mental health issues, and the nuances of mindfulness practices. With over 600 captivating episodes and a strong community of over 30k YouTube subscribers, I weave a tapestry that goes beyond conventional boundaries.

In each episode, experience a psychedelic flair that unveils hidden histories, sparking thoughts that linger long after the final words. This thought-provoking podcast is not just a collection of conversations; it's a thrilling exploration of the mind, an invitation to expand your perceptions, and a quest to question the very fabric of reality.

Join me on this exhilarating thrill ride, where we discuss everything from the therapeutic use of psychedelics to the importance of mental health days. With two published books, including an international bestseller on Amazon, I've built a community that values intelligence, strength, and loyalty.

As a Founding Member of The Octopus Movement, a global network committed to positive change, I continually seek new challenges and opportunities to impact the world positively. Together, let's live a life worth living and explore the boundless possibilities that await in the ever-evolving landscape of "The TrueLife Podcast: Unveiling Realities."

Aloha, and welcome to a world where realities are uncovered, and consciousness takes center stage.

ladies and gentlemen I hope your day is going beautiful I hope the birds are singing I hope the sun is shining and I hope that you are excited for an incredible show today because I have with me ladies and gentlemen the one and only and let me just say that I'm thrilled to introduce a guest whose entrepreneurial journey is nothing short of extraordinary. John David is a purebred entrepreneur who has mastered the art of hijacking demand on the internet, a skill that not only changed his life, but also revolutionized, how I pronounce that there, how brands connect with their audiences. Let me just go ahead and rewind to 2004. John, while still in college, built an online magazine that thrived on digital ad revenue, eventually selling it to a major publisher in 2009. But this was just the beginning. In 2011, he ventured into the then-nascent world of YouTube influencers, unlocking millions in revenue for brands through this innovative channel. In 2015, John took a bold step forward, founding Influicity, one of the earliest influencer marketing agencies. Through the early days were a grind. John's vision and determination paid off. Today, Influicity boasts a client roster that includes industry giants like Toyota, Walmart and Bank of America, offering a full spectrum of marketing services across seven countries. Beyond his business acumen, John is a passionate educator and author, reaching an audience of 2 million people each month with his insights on building 100 million businesses. 100 million dollar brands through community. Join me as we delve into the mind of John Davis. John David's exploring the journey, his challenges and the wisdom he's gained along the way. This is an episode you won't want to miss. John, thanks for being here. Welcome to the show. George, that was awesome. Thank you so much. I got a lot to live up to now over the next little bit. So thanks very much for the intro. Man, I'm stoked to have you and you're very welcome for that. It's always interesting to get to see someone who has found a way to carve the path. You know, it's like, Finding your way sometimes is the most difficult thing. So when you find someone who's found their way and they're willing to help, it's magical, man. Thanks for doing that. You got it. You got it. Yeah. And I'm excited to talk to your audience today and have a chat with you about the journey and the lessons and kind of what I'm up to now. Yeah. Well, you've got this awesome new book coming out called Marketing Superpowers. And I want to... there it is right there so marketing superpowers is that like I was it's kind of like a double entendre a little bit like marketing superpowers like do you have superpowers in your marketing home or is it marketing superpowers you know I hadn't thought about that that's actually that makes a lot of sense yeah marketing superpowers you know I don't know why I've been using that term for a long time it's just kind of a term that I've been using in my copywriting and you know uh in like what do you talk about what do you do well I help brands unlock their marketing superpowers, or we have marketing superpowers. And people talk about, especially in the world of entrepreneurship and startups, the phrase, what is your superpower? What do you consider your superpower to be is so common. And so I thought to myself, marketing superpowers, kinds of rolls off the tongue, but it's also something that people can immediately understand. Marketing superpowers, what I'm trying to do in the book, and I'll talk about what it's all about in a second, But what I'm trying to say is, you know, here's a recipe in the modern day and age where you can give your brand what feels like marketing superpowers or the closest thing to it. It's amazing to me. I've been watching a lot of your videos and I read the first chapter of the book and people should go and check out your website where they can download the first chapter for free. It's really cool and it's got some great information in there. But when I see what you're doing, I'm like, this guy's a master at behavior. You know, marketing is one thing, but behavior... I think maybe that's the foundation of marketing is understanding behavior. Where does that come from, man? It seems like if you had this way to do this in college, like you were already sort of being able to understand behavior at an early age, man. Where did that come from? That's a great observation. And by the way, if you want to get the first chapter, it's just marketingsuperpowersbook.com. First chapter is there for anyone to read. The idea of marketing and what fascinated me about it, and I didn't come to it early. I didn't take a marketing course until my third year of college. And it was only because I had to. It was like a mandatory course I had to take. And what I found was that there is so much overlap between marketing and human psychology and understanding incentives and reciprocity and influence and all these different things that mesh together to create what we now call marketing. And it's even beyond that. In the book, I talk about product. I talk about the product ladder. How do you get somebody who's spending $200 to spend $2,000? Figuring out the product, the distribution, the placement, the people, all the different things that come together to actually make a business run is what I call marketing. That's sort of all together. And the idea of human behavior is a big one because there's what people say they want and what they actually want. There's what they say they're going to do and what they actually do. And I think if you can focus on what people, again, what they actually do, what they actually want, not what's best for them, but what they're going to take, not what they should want, but what they are actually going to go for. And we see this all the time also, like one of the examples I give in the book is people To have a marketing superpower, you need to essentially build a movement of some kind. And any time you look at something that takes over our culture, in some way, shape, or form, there's a movement involved. And I talk about the movement formula and how you create a movement. But one of the facets of it is creating a unifying belief. And what I say is think about the unifying belief as almost like a mission statement. But instead of a mission statement, which is from the perspective of a company, we want to be the greatest company that does X. It's from the perspective of the customer. It's what is the customer really want? Not what your product is. Forget about that. What is their desire? Do they want to lose weight? Do they want to have a better relationship with their kids? Do they want to make more money? Do they want to live in a bigger house? What is that thing they want? And one of the things I say there is not what they should want. Don't worry about what they should want, what's best for them. What do they actually want? Because if you can't hook on to that very initial seed of what drives human desire, you're not even going to get out of the gate. That's deep. How do you notice the difference between... what someone really wants and what they're saying they want? It's a great question. That's a great question. I could probably write a whole book. You totally could. You totally could. Yeah, so I think it comes down to, so I like to keep things simple. I talk about the three core human desires, and I didn't create this. This has sort of been around for a long time. So people generally will chase health, wealth, and love. And when it comes to health, that encompasses everything from not getting sick and feeling good and looking good and maybe having energy or losing a few pounds. That's sort of a health bucket. The wealth bucket is all the things we do from great experiences to making money to having a nicer house to having a more comfortable seat on the airplane. That's all the wealth stuff. And then the love stuff is kind of all of humanity. So it's friends and family and neighbors and good relationships with your colleagues and, you know, peace on Earth and not having wars. And so those are the three general buckets that humans will move towards. And if you can kind of figure out what is the overlap between the solution I'm selling, so whatever that thing is, maybe I sell candles or I sell pet toys or whatever the product is, where does that fit into the general buckets of what people want? And if you can find that overlap, that Venn diagram of here's what I have and here's that primal desire that they're going to be going after, That's a good starting point. You know, that's what I'll say. That's sort of the starting point. And from there, you want to just go down a natural path. You know, one of the problems I think about is people will say things like, I want to sell pizza or I want to sell, you know, some maybe it's an environmental product. And they look at they almost make the assumption that their customers are selfless, that their customers will make a move that's either against their self-interests or maybe has nothing to do with their self-interests. And I think that's just a twisted way to go about it. Not because people are bad or because people are evil or no one wants to help. But it's just you're making you're playing on hard mode. You want to make it easy on yourself. You want to find a way to say, hey, this is something that's maybe good for the planet or good for people or good for charity. That's fine. But you still have to ask yourself the question, what's in it for the person I'm selling to? Is it an ego play? Is it a moral play? Is it a guilt play? And if you find that pocket of, okay, here's what I'm trying to do. And here's how I'm going to wedge myself into someone's desire. That's how you got to start. That sounds crazy. You want to wedge yourself into someone's desire. Like I get that. That totally works. But when I think about wedging into desire, I think of like a Fortune 500 company that talks about saving the planet whose business model is built on excess consumption. You know what I mean? On some level, like it's like, hey, wait a minute. I see what you're doing here. You know what I mean? And I think that that's where maybe someone that maybe they need a new marketing team in there when that happens. It's like they've lost. They've jumped the shark there. You know what I mean? Yeah. And like not not every brand, you know, I mean, some brands are brutally honest. You know, I just read this book about about LVMH, the world's biggest luxury conglomerate. And you can make the argument that everything LVMH sells falls into the wealth bucket and maybe it falls into the status or the ego or the style play. It's somewhere in there. And I don't know enough about their marketing strategy in particular other than the cultural and the brand element of it. But I'm not sure they're trying to say that anything we do is saving the planet or anything we do is making the world a better place. They know where they fit, and they're staying in that lane. But then there are other brands who, as you say, what they're selling is – a food that clearly is not healthy for you. They're selling burgers, they're selling soft drinks, they're selling something and they're trying to say, oh, it's part of a balanced diet or it's, you know, it gives you energy. And I think that's where people can kind of see right through the BS. And that doesn't really work today. is what we're seeing. It's so fascinating to be alive today and see this world of individuals competing with corporations on something. You have an incredible team around you, I'm sure, but there are incredible marketing teams that you work against or whatever. Is it a sign of the times and maybe that... is sort of just this passing of the torch, like we're moving from these giant corporations that have huge marketing teams in different parts of the country to influencers and an influence city in some ways. That's it, man. And that really is the crux of the book. So one of the big themes I talk about is if you look at the most powerful brands over the last 20, 30, 50, 100 years, it really is moving towards the individual and people want to follow individuals. It's no wonder the fastest growing chocolate brand in the world today is run by Mr. Beast. The fastest growing, you know, women's undergarment brand is run by Kim Kardashian. And there are so many other examples in this, you know, from energy drinks and from coffee and from vitamins and supplements and, you know, finance brands. There are categories. And we're moving to a world where what I call the main character in the book, the term I describe as the main character, is so important because people want to relate to somebody and to some brand in a way. They don't want to feel like they're buying from a big, faceless, nameless corporation who they know is just trying to manipulate them. The thing that an influencer can do, and I use that term very broadly, I just mean whoever is the face of your brand. It doesn't have to be a social media influencer. But the thing with those people is they can authentically say, hey, here's what I believe and here's what I want to give to you because I think this will help you. not because I don't make money. I do make money. I have a profit incentive here, but you know me, you know, you've watched a hundred of my videos. You've listened to my 200 podcasts. You know that I actually walk the walk and talk the talk. So this is the thing I think that would be best for you. And here's all the reasons and here's all the rationale behind it. And that makes a lot more sense than me seeing a 30 second spot and deciding that I should get that thing because some, again, faceless brand says I should. Yeah, that's really well said. It's interesting. It's almost like you can see it changing in real time. And I'm sure for you, like you can see strategies change. You can see people's attitudes change and you can see demographics changing the way that they look at stuff too, right? Is that fair to say? Oh, yeah. I mean, you can see the power of a brand that has a single creator and a single movement and a single marketing strategy sort of targeting that one customer. And with the advantage also today of D2C and being able to sell online and the removal of barriers, it's a complete... We used to say the democratization of X. Today, you really have the democratization of everything. look at what you and I are doing now. We're having a conversation. People are tuning in. We don't need to get the permission of radio stations or television stations. Like we can do this in the same way somebody can launch a product, launch a business and not need anybody else's permission to access the consumer. And because of all that, Consumers are not dumb. They understand, hey, I have options too. So just because I used to go to Walmart or Target or Nordstrom and get this product 20 years ago, now I have a lot more options. I don't need to be beholden to this one retailer or to this one brand. So it creates a very competitive environment on one hand, but it also completely democratizes. So it's the best brand wins, the best product wins, and the best strategy wins. Man, I'm picking up what you're putting down. This idea of permission and its relationship to creativity, man. Permission just stifles creativity. You know what I mean? It's like you have to ask for permission to make that move. No, I'm just going to do it and watch this. Maybe it fails, but maybe it ends up stupendous. And that's this explosion of creativity. You don't have to ask for permission. You can grab a mic. You can get on camera. You can start asking people to be on your show. And you can create right now and Everybody, not everybody, but most people could do it, man. It's kind of beautiful. But what's your take on this relationship between creativity and permission? Yeah. I mean, we're living in a pretty permissionless world, I think, as it is. The reality is, in the last 10 years, the ultimate is crypto. I mean, you look at Bitcoin and what that was able to do and really seep into the culture. And it started as a protocol by an individual or a crew or whoever it was, and it really seeped in. And if you think about something like that, And put aside the technology aspect of it wasn't around 20 years ago, that's fair. But just the idea that it could seep into culture and catch fire as it did, and then seep into the mainstream to the point where you actually have real businesses and real banks taking part in it. So you look at what's possible in culture, and then it extends to everything else. It extends to fashion. It extends to consumer products. It extends to media and what we watch and listen to. And I think that the players that are able to win today are have have tapped into the as you said the permissionless way of doing things so it's not like you have to uh go through any existing channels you can create the channels for yourself as long as you understand who your consumer is yeah and that is tricky I think that I know I find myself there sometimes one thing I've learned john is that when you're in a dark cave or a dark room and you get the flashlight the first thing he's like oh I could see there's a path pretty soon you become aware of how much darkness is around you. And you realize, I don't really know anything. I just have this one beam of light right here. But I think that's what the, at least the first chapter that I got to read from your book, marketing superpowers is like that X, Y axis kind of thought, I made me think of that analogy of the light in there. Like you don't, when you start, you don't know anything, man. Yeah, yeah, it's so true. And I can't wait for you to read the introduction because it really is my experience figuring out the X, Y axis. So let's give the listeners some understanding here. So the first concept in the book that I talk about is called the axis of influence. And basically what it is, is I talk about the X axis and the Y axis. And you essentially have two things. You have how much reach you have. So that's like, what's the megaphone? How loud is your voice? When you talk- Do you reach five people? Do you reach 10 people? Do you have a big account on LinkedIn so you reach 100,000 people? Maybe you have a podcast, you reach 50,000 people. So you have to figure out how big is my megaphone today. And everyone starts off with a megaphone of zero, right? Nobody has any megaphone when they start. And then the other thing you have to look at is what I call KLT, known, liked, and trusted. So you have to have reach, and then you have to be known, liked, and trusted. Why do you have to be known, liked, and trusted? Because there's a lot of people who have reach, but no one knows them, no one likes them, no one trusts them. If I'm the guy who calls the letters at the bingo game, I have a lot of reach. I have 1,000 people listening to me, but no one knows who I am. No one knows my name. No one's going to buy a product because I want them to buy it. So when you have those two ingredients, you have reach and you have KLT. And effectively, that's the foundation of influence, and that's the foundation of every great brand that exists today. It's how known, liked, and trusted you are, and then how big is your reach. And then in the book, I get into the analogy of sort of the four quadrants and where you fall on the quadrants. And so just like every axis, you've got a top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right. I won't get into all the detail now, but I'll just say where you ideally want to be is in a place of either niche influence or mass influence. And these days, you can be a big, big, big brand and have niche influence. Because if you think about it, the software that you use at work, the apps that you use on your phone, maybe the artist that you listen to, the show you're watching on Netflix, those could all be really, really big things, but actually just have niche influence. Because if you went to some stranger on the street and said, hey, do you use this app also? Or do you watch the show also? There's a pretty good chance they don't because we're so splintered these days. So we've moved to a world where if you can even have niche influence, you can have a very, very successful business. Yeah, it's mind blowing to think and it kind of makes me wonder how you see the future playing out a little bit. We spoke a little bit about the way in which sort of the dinosaur media and sort of some large corporations are no longer being successful by buying up the small ones. Instead, it's the small people creators kind of coming up and not asking for permission and taking some market share away. Do you see that trend continuing to happen as we move further down this timetable? I see a couple of things. So the idea of, first of all, the dinosaur media, like right now what's playing out with Paramount, you know, Paramount might sell, who knows if it'll sell, all the players with the over-the-top streaming services, the Netflix of the world, Disney+, that really is still a wait-and-see scenario of kind of what's the mass media going to look like in the next 5, 10 years? And when I say mass media, I'm not even sure what that means anymore. Right, right. Is it fair to say that CBS is mass media? Probably not. I mean, Facebook is bigger than that. So what is sort of traditional media going to look like? And I think there's a lot of wait and see there. But I think where we're going to see a lot of growth is on individual, small niche things that find an audience and snowball. And they're not all going to be powered by real people. I don't think that we're in a world where you have to be an influencer. I think AI is going to have a big, big piece of it. So I can see a world and it's already happening now, but I can see a world where effectively an AI person or an AI character could be a cartoon character, could be some kind of GIF, whatever that is, actually starts building resonance with an audience. and grows into a brand. And if you think I'm crazy there, you know, it would have been crazy 60, 70, 80 years ago to say people are going to follow a cartoon mouse. Well, people did follow Mickey mouse. Uh, you know, P people do follow the Simpsons. So, so we, we do have precedent that people understand that the folks they're following are not real and, but they still feel some affinity towards them and they're entertained by them, or maybe they're getting some enjoyment or they're laughing. And so I could see a world where media and AI have a lot of overlap. I see a lot of individuals growing and becoming their own little personal media brands, and hopefully they'll figure out how to monetize appropriately. And I don't know, we'll see what happens with kind of what we think of as the mass media. It's always interesting to me to get to talk to people with such an exponential growth curve or just people that are growing in general. And it's fascinating and I love to see it. And I like to ask the question of, can you take us, it almost seems like different dimensions open up when you become aware of what is possible in your life. And it seems to me, you've probably had a lot of those things happen, like starting off with a magazine in college and coming up with this deal. You might've been like, holy cow, I got this $300,000 deal. Like, can you walk us through, like, what is that mindset like now? Was it at all possible? And then when it was possible, something bigger became possible? Or maybe you could talk about growth and mindset and how that looked for you and maybe for other people. Yeah. So in my experience, and I'll just speak for myself here, at every point in my career, I have always... had a goal and then thought that that goal was going to be sort of, you know, the goal. Like when I can do that, I've made it. Or when I can do that, I've solved it or whatever that looks like. And the reality is when you do that, you immediately get to the point, the minute you get 1% above that goal, you realize how much higher there is to go because you're exposed to those people. You're exposed to those environments. You're exposed all of a sudden to a world that you just didn't see. The example you gave before about the flashlight. Right. You're in a dark cave. You pull the flashlight out. You start looking around. It's like, oh, my goodness. I thought the whole world was just this tiny little cave. Turns out I'm in one of 100 caves. And then if you kept going, you'd find 1,000 more caves. And so the minute you hit that goal, not only do you realize there's a lot more to go, but it also is a bit of a – it breaks your frame of reference because all of a sudden this reference point that you thought was going to be the point of making it, whatever that means to you, is just something that becomes ordinary. And so the example you gave, like the $300,000 deal, I'll give you another example. I remember the first deal I did, 2004 or 5, that time frame, I had a marketing agency give me a call and say, hey, we want to run ads on your website. Our budget is $10,000. Send us an insertion order. That's a formal term for a contract. And we'll send you a check. And I remember I was like 18 years old, and I remember thinking, wow, $10,000. Here, my previous frame had been you work and you make $8.15 an hour. That was my frame. And now I just made $10,000 in a phone call. And then a couple years later, it was a similar phone call, but instead of $10,000, it was $100,000. And that became my new frame of reference. And then we started doing deals for a quarter million dollars. And all of a sudden, when you start to accomplish these things, everything that you thought was hard or impossible becomes possible and then ordinary. And then really, at a certain point, it's almost easy. And I say this with all humility. We closed $10,000 deals like no problem. And when I say we, I mean my team. We're very good at it. And if you had told me 15 years ago that that's where I was going to be, It would have been mind-blowing. So I think that that's been my own journey, and I'm sure people have their own versions of that. I think that it's always important in life to move forward and try to break your own frame of reference because otherwise you're stagnant, you're not growing, and you really are not going to reach your true potential. Thanks for sharing that. It's awesome to hear. It brings up this other question, though. It seems to me, at least in my history, sometimes when you break your reference point, you break the previous relationships that you've had. And that can be hard sometimes. Like maybe you have a reference point of these are all my friends from school, or maybe this is the group that I'm in. And then you break that and you realize as you're moving up, you're leaving all these other people behind on some way. Have you ever had that happen to you? Or what's your take on that? Oh, man. Have I had that happen? Of course. That's life. That's true life, as the podcast says. Well said. Yeah. I mean, you... And everyone deals with this differently. So, again, I'll give my own experience. The experience there is... People, you have friends in high school, you have friends in college, and sometimes you have friends, and I can think of a few of them myself, where they're your friends for life. I've had the same two or three close, close friends since I was 12 years old, and I'll be friends with them forever. Because what we have totally is outside of work or family. It's just a personal bond that's always there. But there are definitely people that you encounter in high school and college who maybe you're on the same wavelength with them at that point or maybe not. Maybe you're just friends with them for convenience because they're nice to party with or they're a good hang. Right. And so you're buddies with them. But I do believe that who you surround yourself with is who you look up to and who you ultimately kind of become like. And that works both ways. It works to the positive and it works to the negative. So I never had, I want to be honest, I never had people in my life that I thought were very bad. I never hung out with people that were trying to get me into drugs or stealing or anything like that. And I'm sure there are people that have those experiences. And I'd imagine the faster you can get away from that, the better off you'll be. But then on the sort of if you're luckier in life and you're around generally good people, you'll start to find that there are people that you mesh with better and people that you just don't mesh with as well. And maybe you grow apart because they've gone one way and you've gone the other way. And so I'm definitely a believer in leveling up your friends and being kind and being thoughtful. But the reality is, as you get older, as you have a family, I have two kids, your time is limited anyhow. So it's not like even if you have a great time with somebody, you're not going to be able to see them and hang out with them that often. Maybe it's once a month or once every six weeks if you're lucky, and you might send some texts back and forth. So the people that you really do spend the bulk of your time with, you know, your five closest friends, your 10 closest friends, those are people who ideally are a few steps ahead of you and where you want to be, where you want to get to, or they have the same energy. And even if they're not maybe keeping up with you or they're having a rough couple of years, that's totally cool. But their energy is there. If you start hanging out with people whose energy brings you down and when you hang out with them, you just don't feel quite as good as when you walked in the door. That's not a good place to be. yeah it's it's interesting to to hear it from that angle and I agree wholeheartedly it reminds me of that old saying you can't serve two masters and sometimes when we look at um Some of my family investigates corporate security fraud. And when I look at some of that, that thing's happening there, like you see this old mantra of you can't serve two masters. And sometimes whether it's corporate security fraud or it's people just running their dream, maybe if you say they're running their dream, you leave things behind or some people leave things behind. Like you get so rolled up in your business, you're growing, you're crushing. Yeah, I did this, I did that. And then you realize, I miss my kids' recital. Man, I haven't even been a husband around lately. And they start, you know, like, so that idea of you can't serve two masters, what are some strategies people can do to maybe to mitigate that, that balance, man? What do you think? Yeah. So it's figuring out balance for sure. And it's trying to have everything, although not everything at the same time. I think there are seasons. So I'm a big believer of if you're a young man or a young woman and you want to get your career on track, It's much easier to do that when you're single, no kids, no commitments, no responsibilities. I was very lucky that I had that. And it was conscious. I was dead set on my career all throughout my 20s and for a good portion of my 30s. And then even when I met the woman who eventually became my wife, she knew that too. Um, but you know, I, I also was able to put that five, 10, 12 years in to get myself to the point where I said, okay, I'm, I'm good here. I'm solid. And so now I can make room for something else. And again, that found the right partner, probably the most important decision you'll make in your life is who your life partner is. Uh, it certainly was for me. And you can create that scenario where you're able to have as best of whatever worlds you want. Are there days where I'm maybe a better dad than I am a business owner or I'm a better business owner than I am a dad? Yeah, that happens. And every day I'm looking back and I'm saying, you know, did I spend enough time with my kids today? Did I, you know, should I have responded to those three emails a bit earlier? So that struggle is always there. But ultimately, what it looks like sort of in the broad scheme is, as I said, you can have everything. You can have all the things you want. You just can't have them all at the same time. People, maybe they say to themselves, oh, well, I want to have balance and I want to have wellness, but I also want to be in the top 1% of earners. I want to be making $600,000, $700,000 a year because I'm the smartest and I went to this great school. Right? but I also only want to work six hours a day and I want to work remote and I want to take Fridays off at noon. Okay, good luck. That's not going to happen when you're 26, maybe when you're 49, but you've got to think about it in seasons. Really well said. It makes me think of communication. First off, congratulations on having an awesome family, man. I'm so stoked when people have that because I think that that is one of the true flowers in life is having this garden of family around you that's just there and beautiful. So congratulations on that. By the way, on that point, I do think family is a life hack. And I'll tell you why it's a life hack. Because all the time, I think about downtime a lot. And I think about, OK, so if I'm not going to work on a Saturday, what am I going to do? The lovely thing about having a family is my brain is off. My wife fills our calendar. It's amazing. My kids are always up to do games and fun and whatever I want. They're young, so I'm lucky I'm in that wonderful period where they're always up to hang out with me. And so it is a life hack in the sense that while I'm thinking about during the week, okay, what do I do to get that next deal? How do I buy that next company? How do I get that next, whatever that next goal is? I know that the downtime is kind of taken care of for me. So in that sense, it's a life hack. That's awesome, man. Thank you for sharing that. It makes me think my daughter, when I watch my daughter growing and I see the way in which she's at school and all the things she's doing. And at our house, we have this rule about screen time. And there's a different set of time for creating stuff online as there is consuming stuff online. And when you start talking about what you're doing in your family. I feel like our kids are learning to communicate in a more meaningful way. Even though a lot of us online, like it seems to me with all these tools, they're finding a way to communicate more meaningful. I'm wondering if you think that the future of communication might be more meaningful. Yeah, that's a great point. And I struggle often with the idea of, you know, as you just said, screen time. So screen time, I agree with you. And we, you know, we keep we have they all have iPads, iPads, but we take them away and we put limits on them. But then I kind of wonder to myself if my daughter is watching a YouTube video where she's learning to count. All right. That's screen time technically, but it's also kind of school. So I don't know if I should count that, you know, the same way I count Bluey or I count, you know, Cocomelon. So I do struggle with that. I think that communication in general is something that this next generation, anybody who's Generation Alpha, but even the next generation after Alpha, they're going to have a whole different perception of communication. Yes. The way they communicate is completely different. And humans are a very adaptive species, obviously, been around for thousands of years. And so here we are in an age where we were in person and we were communicating, you know, five days a week in the office and you spend a lot of time with the people you work with. Well, now we will have an entire generation where maybe they don't spend a lot of the time with the people they work with because they work remotely. And so they're actually not rubbing shoulders with their employee, with their fellow employees, but they're rubbing shoulders with their family or the person who happens to work in the same coffee shop they do because they work out of a coffee shop. You know, I see my barista at my coffee shop more often than I see my employees because we're mostly remote. And so I actually, it's kind of a funny way to communicate. And then in terms of the screen time and the WhatsApp and all the kind of messenger systems, in that sense, I think the communication is actually taking on a whole new method. But I do think that there's a learning curve where when we look back at this in 10, 20 years, We're going to say, yeah, the new generation communicates quite differently, but it's no different than the communication that would have changed with the invention of the printing press or when the telephone came around or with a personal computer came around. There's always going to be these big changes. I think it's funny when you're going through it and when you're living through it, you're sort of pinching yourself saying, wait a minute, is this really a step change? I think this is. This is certainly as big, you know, AI and screens and communication, certainly as big as the invention of the printing press. I mean, that completely changed humanity, and we are living through a time that will totally change humanity as well. Man, that's so well said. I'm a huge fan of Marshall McLuhan, and he wrote this book called The Gutenberg Galaxy. And in that book, he talks about how the printing press gave us ideas like exact repeatability. We didn't have exact repeatability until the printing press came out. And he just goes way down this rabbit hole of digital feudalism and the way in which we're aware of different things. I might have a copy of it. I'll send it to you, man. Yeah. But, you know, and on that note, I love that, by the way, repeatability is a great way to think about it. My wife and I were just talking about this the other day. What's going to happen? You know, I've got a five year old and she's going into grade one next year. And we think about, you know, I'm a huge chat GPT fan. I use it every day. I use it constantly for all kinds of things. I'm finding new use cases every 20 minutes for it. And I think to myself, okay, so when she's going into grade one, what happens when she's in grade six and grade eight and grade nine? What is an essay going to look like? What's a book report going to look like? Having her do a book report like I did a book report in 1998, It's going to be kind of silly because she could literally get that done in 13 seconds by putting a prompt into chat GPT. By the way, we're talking about a decade down the line. So who the hell knows what's going to be possible then? So what does our education system look like? What do people even have to know? Like what's important to know if all of the if all the world's information itself is a commodity? Then what's important for humans to know? And the analogy there is, you know, 100 years ago or whatever, 500 years ago, it was really important for me as a man to know how to kill a deer. Well, I don't know about you, but I haven't killed a deer in a very long time. Right. And I eat just fine. So the skill sets that humans need to learn today and in 10, 20 years is just I can't even comprehend what that's going to be. it's mind blowing to think of. And I, I think it comes to creation. I think people are becoming creators. Like if you look at the way history is falling away, you know, like we're beginning to, and maybe it is because of screen time, like screen time changes your awareness. As I do a podcast, when I'm talking to you, I'm right here right now. And the more time I spend on live interviews, live streaming communication with a, It changes my awareness. I'm only aware of this moment because I care about what you have to say. I want to learn and I want people to be stoked on it. Like that changes the way you see time. That's a fundamental change in time. And the more kids are on the screen and the more they're focusing on the now, the more that they're going to be inviting in that creative spirit. Because, you know, I can say blah, blah, blah. I'm going to start mumbling or something. But the creative spirit comes out of you in the now. And I think that it's changing time on some level. Is that too crazy? Yeah. No, you're 100% right. It changes time, it changes space. It also just changes going back to this idea of human interaction. The fact that you and I are, you know, I don't know how many hundreds or thousands of miles apart. And here we are talking in real time, as though you're in the same room as me. And after this, I'll go upstairs and I'll have dinner and I'll be like, hey, I just had an awesome conversation with George. It was great. But you were never here. And I was talking to a screen the whole time. But it feels like real life. And so I just think a lot of that, again, if we were having a conversation about this to someone who lived in the 1800s, they'd say, what the hell are you talking about? You guys are crazy. You guys are insane that this feels real. But it does. It feels completely real and authentic. And maybe, by the way, here's an interesting thought experiment that just came to me now. What if there wasn't the introduction of television in the middle? So if you think about going from people talking, the only way you can talk is person to person. But then in the middle there, you had telephones, radio, broadcast television, satellite television, satellite radio, internet. And now here we are with like Zoom, Google Meet, et cetera. Imagine we didn't have any of that stuff in the middle. And we went just from like face-to-face talking to now you can talk over screens. I wonder if that would be so much of sort of a crazy thing that we couldn't even get there. It's almost interesting that it happened in that kind of step-by-step format. Okay. That's a beautiful thought experiment. I think it's necessary. I remember my uncle Bruce, and we probably all had an uncle that would talk to the TV. Those people were ahead of their time. Hey, he's in the back. They were already ahead of the time. They knew it was coming. They knew it was going to be here. Have you ever found, okay, so this brings up a really interesting point. As someone who has seen both worlds, sort of the emerging of the digital and played a role in that emerging and beforehand, if you're going to close a big deal, would you rather be in the room with someone so you can get the pheromones and you can slap them on the back, you know, or can you get everything you need by being in a closed Zoom room with like the right ambience? That's a great question. I've thought of that a ton. We actually talk about that in our sales meetings. Is it worth a trip? Is it worth a visit? And what's funny is, and this isn't my own preference because you also have to think about what the preference of the buyer is. And so my own preference is I will default to, of course, if you're in the room with somebody, you have a vibe, you have, as you said, you have pheromones, you have the human experience and And not only that, but you have small talk before and after, and you have, where are you going for lunch? Where are you staying? What are you up to tonight? There's sort of just a vibe that builds as people are together because of the time and the space involved in that. And you don't get any of that on Zoom. But what you do get on the remote conversations is you get... direct access to anybody without the limits of time and space. Time and space don't exist. I took a sales call the other day in my car on Friday. I was in my car. One person piped in from Vancouver, one person piped in from LA, one person piped in from Toronto, and we were on with seven minutes notice. OK, so get away from time and space and that deal will probably close. And so that's an example of like, hey, not only could I not have could we not have done it together because even the buyers were in two different cities, but also the time that wasn't there to allow it. I think in general, in the ideal world, I do like being in the room with somebody. I do make an effort to try to get out and see our clients whenever I can. But honestly, every day, week, month that goes by, those walls are kind of breaking down because people are getting more used to having conversations like this on the phone. And so I think, again, if we asked our kids this in 5, 10, 15 years, they would say, well, we don't even know what's the benefit of being in person. You can do everything on the screen. And I think it'll almost be... a novelty to actually be with somebody will actually be kind of a special experience because so much of it will just be through the screens. It's really well said. I'm hopeful that it makes people, I think on some level, let me throw this out here and get your opinion. I think it might make people nicer. Like even though it's easier to be mean on screen in a chat room, like when you find, after you're on Zoom or you're live streaming, it's really nice to be in a group of people and I'm thankful for it. I'm like, oh, hey, how's it going? Like I genuinely want, I want to slap someone on the back or like I want to be around them. I want to be in that room. Hey, how's it going, everybody? Because I want to be around people. And I think when you're isolated a little bit and sometimes conversations, even though we're talking in person, there is still like this slight shade of isolation because I'm in my room, I'm over here by myself. But I think that just like a float tank, that isolation makes you more aware of the things that you really kind of want to have in your life. What do you think about maybe the isolation making us nicer? Yeah, isolation might make you nicer. I also think that there's something to be said for, like you just said, you want to have human interaction. You know, there's probably elements of human interaction that are completely outside of communication, of verbal communication. So as you said, when you see somebody, you slap them on the back, you ask them a question, you see something, you say, hey, did you notice that? I think that there's more of a bond that creates. It's very hard to create a bond, a true bond over a screen and over any kind of an artificial relationship. I noticed like with my team, for example, We'll get together. I make a point of us getting together at least once a quarter. Probably, I mean, we try more often, but that's kind of our minimum, once a quarter. We get together. We'll do a fun activity. We'll go for drinks. We'll go for dinner. And there's always something that we leave that with where I feel like I'm closer to those people in that two, three-hour time span, even though I'm talking to them on the phone, on Slack, on Zoom anyhow. But the other thing is that the two or three days or the week after that meeting, that residual kind of feel good relationship bonding experience kind of rolls over. And so we still kind of feel like, hey, you know, remember last Friday when so and so we were bowling and that person got that strike. The experience itself creates some camaraderie and it creates something outside of the day to day grind of the work that you can actually relate to somebody on. I'm stuck on the word bonding. I love that whatever it is in Mercury that makes it find itself and come together, that's in us too. You know what I mean? We're bonding. It's true. It's so true. There's something to be said for that. The actual bonding that people do when they're in the room with each other. Although I wonder if there's some way and maybe someone's already working on this, that that that that can happen through screens or if that's just something that that because of nature is not going to change or maybe it'll change in a thousand years, but not in any of our lifetimes because there's just something about human to human connection. So, OK, I think there's a parallel to marketing here. You know, when you go out like we go out and we have drinks and you realize you see yourself in that person like, man, this person gets me. You know, I see myself in them. And that's sort of this recognition of your part of something bigger. That seems to also be a very successful strategy for a marketing campaign is getting people to see themselves in the product or see themselves in the service. Yeah, a hundred percent. And that's, that's something I talk about going back to the main character. So if you think about a brand and then you think about the main character of that brand, there's a whole bunch of ways to do this. So you could have in an owner operated company, you know, the owner operator can be the brand. It could be the, the main character rather. It could be somebody like a spokesperson. It could be an influencer. It could be a made up character, a cartoon character mascot. And it could also be the customer themselves. So if you think about brands that put the focus on the customer or on the outside community, they're the ones who are featured in the ads and featured in the content. And that's also very main character driven. And there's a whole checklist I go through of how do you pick your main character for a brand. And a couple of the things I talked about are you want to have somebody who is relatable to the target customer that the target customer will either look up to or they will feel like they're on the same playing field. Like, oh, that person is just like me. I go through the same things they do. And in some brands you want to have or in some categories, I should say, you want to have someone who is an expert. So, for example, if I'm selling medical products or I'm selling health and wellness products, maybe the main character is somebody that I aspire to be like or that I look up to or that I believe in because they've got advice that they're going to give me. And so if you think about it from that context, you've got this ideal of relatability. And we see this with influencers all the time on YouTube, on Instagram, on TikTok. It's very easy to watch somebody who talks about a problem they're dealing with. and then say, oh, I'm dealing with the exact same problem. And all of a sudden, you feel that bond. You feel that energy between them because you feel like you can relate to them on this one thing. And it's very possible that there's a whole bunch of other stuff that you wouldn't relate to them on, but you're relating on one single thing. I'll give you an example that happens all the time in real life. It's funny, people like this is an old cliche, but like if you meet somebody in an elevator or passing by in a lineup or a lobby, you might say something like, hey, it's getting colder out there. And right away, the other person can can relate and say, oh, it's so cold. And can you believe it? It was supposed to be warm right now. It's already summer. And all of a sudden you can have this this moment of relatability. If you break that down, like why is it that you can relate to that and why do we defect to the weather? Because we know that that person there in that physical place, 100% can relate to you on that thing because everybody went outside that day, right? I know you went outside because you're here and I'm here. And so you know that it's cold and I know that it's cold and the deeper you can get into that. So like the weather might be super high level. Then we could talk about something like sports. Okay. Well, I don't know if you're a sports fan, but if you are, maybe we can have that conversation. Maybe you're a parent. Maybe you're a health junkie. Maybe you really are into this band. And so I went to this concert and I want to talk to you about the concert. So anytime you can find that sliver of relatability, you're immediately going to have an opportunity to create a bond with somebody. And that's what brands do all the time. That's what social media influencers do. And you've got to think about what's that common thread that for the purposes of a brand and a product that I'm selling, what's that common thread that maybe we can connect on and start to have a conversation? I like that. It's fascinating to me. I got an awesome comment here from the one and only Clint Kiles. He's got the Psychedelic Christian Podcast. Everyone should check him out. He says, my teacher told me I wouldn't have a calculator at all times. That's so true, Clint. It is true. And that maybe goes to the idea of AI, you know, artificial intelligence, the whole idea of like, yes, all the information you have at your fingertips on ChatGPT, sure, but you might have to know it as well. So I do buy into that, you know, like we can look, we can fast forward and say, is Neuralink going to have a chip in our brains? And so we'll be able to compute it. But that future, put that aside. It's not coming anytime soon. I do think that having fundamental knowledge, it is important. And yeah, you're not going to have a calculator. You're not going to have an AI at your fingertips at all times. Yeah. Maybe it speaks to the idea of skills atrophying. Maybe even though it... I guess the other side of the conversation we were having about Zoom and live streaming and the podcast, like, well, it is a great asset. On some level, maybe it does... become a little bit detrimental for young kids trying to date or something like that. You can't put your arm around a girl. You know, if you're on this side, you might be able to say something nice or funny, but that real physical sense of touch is the one thing we're missing. And a lot of things happen in touch. You know, you hear stuff like, oh, they touched my heart or they reached in and they touched me. You know, like that, that actual feeling of touch goes back to that idea of relatability with your team you were talking about. Yeah. Online dating is something that I, I, I, I want your take on this also, but online dating for me, you know, I, I, I tried, like it was big when, when I was, you know, in, in my, in my dating years and I met my, I met my wife in real life. Um, and I never really had any success with online dating, but the reality is, I think if I was single today, um, I would for sure do online dating because there's just so many more options and people are much more into it these days. But I don't know, to your point, I feel like the selection mechanism, if you're looking at somebody on a phone and all you can see is their picture, is very different from being at a restaurant, at a party, at a club, and being able to use whatever else you might have. If I'm really witty or I've got a great charisma, a great energy, how do I get that across on Tinder? you know, with one swipe, like it almost disadvantages half the population that you actually might be attracted to. What do you think about that? Man, that's, it's great. I came up, I met my, I was a UPS driver for 26 years. I met my wife on my route. And yeah, I'm almost 50. So when I came up, online dating was coming out with like AOL. And one of my first friends found this girl and I'm like, you found a girl online, sucker. You know, like I would make fun of them and stuff. And nowadays I, It does seem, if you're really attractive and you have the illusion of having a lot, I think that you can pass a lot of smell tests. And I use that realistically. Like in the real world, if you're a young woman or a man, your partner should pass the smell test. And what I mean by that is you should... You should smell them. Like there's something about the pheromones next to people that gives you an honest opinion of like, there's something doesn't, this smells fishy. It doesn't smell right. There's something rotten in the state of Denmark. Like we have all these things for a reason, I believe. And when you're physically with somebody. You can see the way like they have a little sinister smile when they're mean to someone. Hey, that's a red flag. I don't like that. Like that was mean. Why would you do that? And if you just if you have a few Tinder dates or you have this online dating thing, you might not catch wind of that until six months in. And then you were going to write it off because you got this relationship half in. You got the cup half full already. But that's my take. What do you think? You I mean, I think I think you nailed something there, which is that people can curate their online identity. People do curate their online identities. We all know that Instagram is a highlight reel of your life like that. That's not a mystery. And so and people don't even try to hide that. Like, of course, I'm going to post, you know, I look good from this angle. I'm on vacation now. So you can completely orchestrate the look and the feel of that. And again, if we're talking about something mundane, like I just like watching this person because I like their health tips. Okay, I don't really care that this is a highlight reel. Maybe that's what I want. But if I'm going to date somebody, like you said, maybe in those first moments and that beginning early stages of the relationship, I want to get to them as fast as I can and away from the highlight reel. So if I was going to do it, now we're giving dating advice out. If I was going to do it, I would try to get offline as fast as I could, but I still think the selection bias is not there. I don't know. Half the girls I dated or half the girls that dated me probably did it not because they saw a photo and, oh, he's the best-looking guy in the world, but it was more like... Oh, look at that guy. He's having fun. He's a funny guy or he's talking to the crowd or he came up to me. Everyone was kind of minding their own business. He had the guts to come up to me. And so there's all kinds of other things that are attractive to people other than just some pixels on a screen. I love it. What's your take on rejection and resilience? You know, as a young guy coming up, you have to get rejected a lot. You say, I said a lot of dumb things and I did a lot of dumb things. I got rejected a lot and rightfully so. But I think rejection builds resilience, be it in business, be it in weight training, or be it in becoming the best version of yourselves and finding someone who is someone that should be with you. But rejection and resilience, what are your thoughts? Rejection, resilience, pain. Yeah. All the stuff like the great analogy of you lift weights for the sole purpose of exhausting your muscles such that you break them, and then in a rest state, they can repair and come back stronger. That is an analogy for everything in life. The greatest thing I did when I was 16 years old is I sold bathroom remodelings door to door. I mean, you can't even imagine how many doors I had slammed on me. People said, you know, get off my lawn. Don't come back here. And by the way, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I wasn't very good at selling bathroom remodelings anyhow, but I still did it and I got rejected. And yeah, that muscle fiber. I mean, you, I took that into entrepreneurship. I took that into sales. Entrepreneurship is 90% just sales. It's all you're doing all the time. Selling customers, employees, vendors, suppliers. You're just selling everybody all the time in entrepreneurship. And so having the muscle memory and having the resilience to have things... I'm Teflon. Things just roll off me. I can communicate with somebody. I can ask them for something. I can try to make a sale. I can try to ask for a favor. I can do all these things. And the worst case scenario, the worst thing that can happen... is they say no. They say, I'm not interested. Get out of here. Don't call me. Cool. That's fine. That's the worst case scenario. And I think the more of that, the earlier, the better you are. And yeah, there's obviously been, I'm sure people will have different takes and what does that do to mental health and what does that do to all this other stuff? I I don't know, but I think early, early on, you don't even realize how resilient you are until you are thrown into the lion's den and you come out and you're scratched and you've got bites and bruises, but you say, you know what? I'm actually okay and I can do that again with a bigger lion next time. And that's how you grow. I love it, man. Could you imagine if... After your kid started walking for the first time and he fell, you're like, well, it looks like he's not going to walk anymore. We might as well throw in the towel right here. Or they tie their shoes. Like we are taught resilience at a young age. This kid's going to keep trying to walk until he figures it out. Like, I think that we are born resilient. And if everybody can just look back to that time when you remembered how to walk, you may not remember, but just think about like you accomplished it. You can accomplish anything, but you have to be willing to take the hits. You have to be willing to be told no. And you have to be willing to maybe take some of that like, yeah, maybe I should chew a breath mint before I talk to this girl. Man, what's going on here? You know, or like maybe I should be. putting more time in the library. Maybe I should be putting more time in the street, but maybe I should be working more on myself. But yeah, resilience is something that I think we could foster in ourselves to truly become the best version of ourselves. Resilience and learning how to fail and make 1% improvements. Failing and failing and failing. And every time you fail, you say, okay, what's something I could do 1% better? And then you do it again with a total expectation that, hey, I may very well fail. And if I do, that's okay. I'll make a 1% improvement. And the more you can do that and the more you can sort of fall in love with that process, you can accomplish a lot. There's that saying, you will probably overestimate what you can do in one year, but you'll underestimate what you can do in 10 years. And that process is just about failing and getting 1% better every single time. Here's something people will probably not know about me. Here I am with a published book that's already an Amazon bestseller. It comes out June 18th, and it's already number one on Amazon in some categories. I could not write an essay when I was in high school. I was a D student in English, didn't know how to write an essay, couldn't put two sentences together, was not a fast reader, bad student all around. Not that I didn't try. I did try. I didn't do well. And when I decided to start putting content out into the universe back in 2020 or 2021- First thing I did was started writing and I wrote and wrote and wrote. And for seven months on LinkedIn, I put content out on LinkedIn and nobody cared. Nobody liked it. Or the two or three likes I got were my mom, my sister and my best friend. And they were, you know, they were mercy likes. And nowadays I'll put a piece of content out there. It'll get seen 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 people. And that happens all the time now. And people will say that I'm a very good writer. And that was all practice. I wasn't born with any of that. None of that was innate to me. That was just work and desire and being okay with failing over and over again. Writing is a fascinating process. On some level, I feel like when you write something down... You schedule it to happen. And a lot of people write stuff down before it happens in their life. Is there a certain thing that you did when you wrote? Like a lot of people I talk to that have written books are like, oh, this thing's sort of flowing through me, or they have this creative ritual that they would do. Is there anything unique to the writing process for you? Yeah, the writing process for the book specifically was a lot of writing as much as I could, knowing that I could edit later. So my key to writing, and I'm a completely self-taught writer, my key to writing is all the magic happens in the editing process. So I'll write for short form for LinkedIn, I'll usually write and it's the posts are maybe two to 400 words. And I'll start with maybe a thousand words and I just trim, trim, trim, trim, trim. And that, that's all I do. The book was the same. So I probably cut out, you know, it's 300 or show pages, 290 something pages. And I probably started out with like over 600 pages and I just trim, trim, trim. So that's, trimmed topics out that I didn't think made sense or I didn't think were necessary, trimmed sentences down. So took, took sentences that might be 12 words long, figure out, Hey, how can I say that in like six words? How can I say that in four words? Because more pointed, more sharp, more memorable sentences are better than sentences that drag on and, and say things in a longer way than you need to. People are going to forget. They're going to get lazy. And so the writing process for me is about probably like 20% writing, 80% editing. And the editing process is just rewriting, trimming, optimizing. And the more you can do that, the more patient you can be. And I had the luxury of not having a deadline. So I took like seven, eight months to write the book. Having that luxury really gave me a finished product that I'm really happy with. But if I go back and look at that first manuscript, I think I have eight manuscripts on Google Docs, eight different files. If I go back to that first one, wow, it was a mess. And the last one is awesome. You've been in the game for a long time. I'm curious to get your thoughts on, I think it was Samuel Clemens who said that the written word is the carcass of the spoken word. But for someone in the world of influence, what are some similarities and what are some differences in influencing people through the spoken word and the written word? Yeah. The spoken word, I think, is the... I mean, the genesis of the spoken word is the written word in terms of how you think about things. So if you can... I think communication in general for me is all about brevity. How can I make a point in as few words as possible? And I can always expand on it to those who care to listen. But if I can't get a point out clearly, briefly, quickly... I'm either being lazy with my language. I'm not thinking about what I want to say clearly enough because when it's super clear to you, you can make that point in one sentence. And then from there, it's about understanding how to communicate, how to use words, how to use language in a way that will appeal to your end customer or your end audience, I should say. But I think the written word for me is a way to clarify. And the more I write, the better I understand, the better I learn. So writing the book, again, was a process that not only did I go through to get my knowledge out there to other people, but also to understand my own process better. One thing that we've done, so over at my company, Influicity, I like to say everything I write about in the book is everything we do all day at Influicity. So if you read Marketing Superpowers, you're basically getting the thing that we charge clients $100,000 to do. You can do it yourself. It's all in the book. It's not a secret. Our execution might be a little better because we've been doing it for a long time, but the recipe is in the book. And when I wrote the book and put those lessons down and put those tactics down, I started to understand them a lot better. And I found myself going to my team saying, hey, guys, I just wrote this chapter on, you know, here's the best way to get customer reviews. Here's the best way to get testimonials. Here's the best way to think about your competition and how to build your product in a way that you can sell more than the competitors. And I'd write that chapter and I'd go back to my team because I would have learned something through the writing process that I didn't even realize before. So writing is a very clarifying exercise to do. I recommend that even if you never intend to publish a piece of work or post something online, just write things out and you'll find that you learn them a lot better. Another thing that I see, something different that you and your team are doing, and I liken this to like a rite of passage in a way, and I'll tell you why, is that when I read through the website and I check it out, you guys are offering just not the book, but people can go to the site and then there's interactive content that they can use there. And then one of the reasons I really like that is because I think you're giving away some really powerful tools, and there's an ethical line there. Like you're not responsible for the tools you give people, but when you give someone this incredible mindset that that – That particular tool for influencing people could be used in a nefarious way. So I see that the tests and the stuff that you give them, it's almost like a rite of passage. Here's the right way to use it. You know what I mean by that? Like when people call in, maybe you could speak to the idea of ethics and using it that way. Yeah. Yeah. That, that, that's definitely, you know, one of the things, and I learned this, you know, I've done sales courses and marketing courses and all kinds of stuff. And I remember there was one sales trainer who once said to me, I'm going to teach you guys something. You have to make me one promise though. You'll only use it in ethical ways because this is so powerful what I'm going to teach you. And it was this great lesson on, on, on, on how to, on, it was a, basically a lesson in persuasion. I think anytime you're teaching persuasion, you're teaching influence, you're teaching Human psychology, you are by nature getting into ways to convince people to do things. And on one hand, I believe that people are not going to do things that they weren't going to do anyways. It's not like you can convince someone to do something that they're completely morally against. They're not going to do it. but can you convince them to buy a product that they might not otherwise have bought? Or can you convince them, going back to the idea of, we talked earlier about the idea of luxury goods. So I have something I sell, it's an $8,000 bag. It serves the same function that a $5 bag does, but it's $8,000 and there's status involved. And somebody might go ahead and buy that thing because they're convinced to do so. And maybe they have some buyers remorse afterwards. And so There's definitely ways that you can push people over the edge to get them to do something that they're not totally bought into. I also think that, especially when it comes to, we're in the service business. When we work with somebody, we're working with them for a long time. We're providing services to them. One thing I say to my salespeople is like, I know you guys and gals are talented enough to sell this to almost anybody. But be careful, because there's also a downside to selling this to somebody who is not the right buyer. Because what's going to happen is they're going to buy it. They're going to have maybe a bad experience. You're going to have to work with them and probably they're going to find some way to fizzle and get out of the contract. And then you're going to have somebody out there who's spreading negative messaging about you because they don't like your product because they weren't the right fit in the first place. And we should never have sold to them in the first place. I think anytime you're in kind of a business setting, it's actually very hard. To to to make it your business strategy that we're going to sell this thing to somebody who is not right for because ultimately you're not going to be in business very long. You're going to be kind of a one and done type of player. And then, yeah, I think I think in real life, I mean, the most nefarious way this get this happens is really in politics. Anytime you're in government or in politics. You can be a very charismatic speaker. You can say things that rally people and rev them up. You can be on the left or the right. You can say all kinds of things that tap into people's emotions. Ultimately, is that the best thing for them? Is your message or is your solution or is voting for you really going to help them? You know, the answer could be no, but this happens all the time and it's happened all the time since the beginning of time. People have motivations that are maybe self-serving and they get others to buy into it. And so it's a reality of life. Yeah. I'm always fascinated by like Cass Sunstein or Caldini or the people that are running like the messaging behind them. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's both intoxicating and incredible. And it's just, for me, it's fascinating to watch the way in which they can wield these tools, like a, like a bullfighter almost with like a cape, you know what I mean? Just making people run. And it's fascinating. I want to, I know we're kind of got a little bit of time. What, what, The podcast is such a beautiful vehicle, and I see so many people using it like a Swiss army knife. Some people do some interviews. Some people use it for marketing. Some people just use it to build relationships. But let's talk about the podcast for a minute. How do you see the world of podcasting emerging, and how do you use your podcast? Yeah, the world of podcasting is amazing because there's 5 million podcasts in the world right now. And by the way, for people that hear that number, because we make a lot of podcasts for a lot of brands, 5 million podcasts also include podcasts that are abandoned, podcasts that have one listener. So it's not really five podcasts. If I make three episodes and then I abandon my feed, it still counts even though it's effectively not a podcast anymore. But there's a big number of podcasts and there's a lot of people doing them. I think that podcasts are really great for getting a message out there to a very, very fine and splintered audience. They're a great tool for that. And you could have a podcast with 100 listeners, but if those 100 listeners are directly in your audience base and that's exactly who you want to hit, that's awesome. You don't need to have some huge market because it's a very low cost service. medium to have, you don't need to have a lot of cameras, you don't need to have a lot of production staff, you need a microphone, and maybe a computer setup, and you're good to go. So I think the world of podcasting actually has huge opportunities. I also think it's giving people a voice who never would have had a voice before. And it's great for long form conversation. So my podcast, I'm a big podcast listener, and I find I listen to maybe five or six shows on an ongoing basis that are so niche and so interesting to me, but wouldn't be interesting to the broader public. And so I love it from that respect that we're not all forced to listen to the same podcast. you know, the same radio station. Like I don't listen to the radio anymore because the radio is trying to please 3 million people. You know, the podcast I listen to is trying to please 10,000 people and I'm just one of the 10,000. So it's a much, much smaller number. So I love podcasting in that sense. I think from a monetization standpoint and from, you know, why are people doing them or what do they hope to get out of them? I think that's pretty complicated. But as someone who does a podcast yourself, I'd love to know what was your inspiration and what do you think about doing it? man thanks for throwing it back I i used to listen to so many different podcasts and I i found them fascinating and like you I found these I found these little niches like I found some podcasts that only did like 10 episodes and they quit and I was like why did that person quit it was so good I love what they were doing in there and then you would go and look at their stats and you know they probably had like 50 50 people and maybe like 120 downloads and I'm like god that person would have just kept going they would have crushed it it was so good at least to me and i I did a lot of, as a UPS driver, it was for 26 years, I would just listen to audio books. And like, I feel like as a vessel, as a vehicle, sometimes we fill ourselves up with so much stuff, pretty soon it starts coming out. I'd be on the route talking to my customers who were screenwriters. And I'd be like, so why did you actually set up that relationship between Moana and the rock? Why did you guys say that though? And we would get into these deep philosophical talks about different books and dialogue and like, what are you doing driving this truck, George? You know, and I just... I love talking. I love learning. And so when I was a truck driver, I said, I think I can start a podcast. And I started one up and it just was me talking to myself for a while. And then a PR firm reached out to me and was like, hey, we have some authors. We have an author from Georgetown University, Joseph Sassoon, that wrote this book. And I'm like, what? Yeah. I want to talk to him. Are you kidding me? I'm going to talk to this political philosopher. Yes. I read his book and then it just kind of snowballed in this direction where, and I realized it's a bridge. It's a bridge to build relationships. Relationships are the currency and you could talk to so many cool people and you can learn stuff and other people find it fun to listen to. It's, That's what I think it is. It's a bridge. That's how I see it. You found the hack because one of the reasons I love doing a podcast is it gives me an opportunity to have conversations with people in a way that is completely non-threatening. There's no motivation. So I don't have to reach out and say, hey, I want to talk to you because of this. I can just say, I want to have a conversation on my podcast. I have nothing to sell you. I don't want to buy anything from you. I just want to talk. And people are very willing to say yes. And a hundred percent, it's a great relationship hack for sure. And by the way, speaking of numbers, uh, for people should know the biggest podcast in the world, the Joe Rogan podcast, when he first started, he was getting 1500, 2000 listeners an episode, and he kept going for over a decade. And of course now he's at 10, 15 million listeners an episode, but you got to remember, even Joe Rogan started with just a couple thousand listeners. Yeah, and I think it makes you a better listener on some levels because you experience time different. In the beginning, when I was a podcaster, I would find myself holding an idea in my head that I wanted to say, and I realized how damning that was. I was cutting the person off from the conversation 100% because I'm trying to hold on to this thing. And then that allowed me to have better relationships. I took the skill in podcasting. I applied it to my wife and my kid and my friends and my family. And I was like, wow, I'm becoming a better communicator. So I think it's a self-help tool in a way. Yeah, I mean, listen, you've got a lot of uses for it. No, for sure. Like, you know, it's therapy, it's relationship building. It's also just getting your thoughts into the world on a certain topic. And you'd be amazed how many people are actually interested in that topic, even though you didn't think so. Even though, hey, I'm really interested in the history of Italy. Okay, cool. But you know what? There are podcasts people listen to that are on such mundane topics. And the funny thing is, if you go and ask somebody else, hey, what's your podcast listening diet? Most of the time, I think I know one or two people who actually listen to the same podcasts that I do. Most people have a whole different podcast diet and they love their podcasts and they feel close to the host and they feel like they're learning a whole bunch. And these are podcasts I've never even heard of. So I think the world of podcasting is actually still very nascent, even though there's 5 million. There's opportunity for people to go out there as long as it's a good quality product. And as you said, stick with it because it does take time to build. Let me get your thoughts on this, the resume of the future. It seems to me in this changing world that we talked about, maybe our kids' resume is going to be like, what have you built online? It seems to me like that could be something. We just applied for a new school, and in the new school, I showed them my daughter's podcast, and they're like, what? I've got a podcast and, you know, but it was a cool tool for them to see. And it just showed me like, maybe that's the resume of the future, right? Wouldn't you want to see what people have created too? If you're going to hire a creative person. It's interesting that, that, well, certainly if you're hiring a creative person, I'm looking at what they're creating online on Tik TOK, on Instagram, on, on Reddit and, That's a big sign because what people do in their playtime, they're going to do really well in their work time if you actually enjoy it that much. The other thing is, certainly if you're creative and also if you have any desire to be an entrepreneur or a leader or somebody who has to do a job where you take charge, one of the things I look at is people who are entrepreneurs or who want to work in an entrepreneurial type role where they're going to be leading a team. Looking at what they did when they were kids. So when you're 15, 20 years old, are you flipping shoes on eBay? For me, when I was 13 years old, I was hiring. Here's what I would do. I'd go around to the houses in my neighborhood in the winter. I would get the contract to shovel their driveway and then I would some contract that out to the kids in the neighborhood. That's what I was doing. So even even at 13 years old, I was thinking about labor and I was thinking about about how I scale this snow shoveling business because I had more demand and supply. I was you know, I could only shovel three or four driveways a week. Uh, but I had all my friends who were going to do it. I could just take a 20% commission from them. So the point I'm making is I was doing that when I was 13. Anybody who saw what I was doing when I was 19, when I was 22, which you shouldn't have been surprised because look what I was doing when I was 13. And I think the same exists for people who are creative when you're, when you're 22 years old. Cool. You want to be a creator. Were you a creator when you were 12? Because you could have been. And if you weren't, maybe it's not your calling per se. Not to say you can't get into it later, but it's certainly a telltale sign, hey, this person was meant to do this. Now you're talking back to like a philosophical education where the leaders came around, looked at the kids and were like, what is this young genius gifts right here? You know, like you can see them on some level, man. John, I know we're kind of coming up on time here and you have an incredible person to go be around and I want you to do that. But before I, let me just drop this last question on you right here and then you can talk about where people can find you. But this last question is, what do you want people to get out of this book? Yeah, and just so people know, it's my kid's third birthday, so I got to go blow some birthday candles after this. So the book, Marketing Superpowers, marketingsuperpowersbook.com if you want to grab it. What I want people to get out of the book, so the way I thought about the book was, A, I want it to appeal to people who are starting a business, small business owner types, and also appeal to the kinds of clients we have at Influicity who are CMOs of 100, 200 person plus businesses. And the reason is because the book itself is I don't get so deep into I do talk about strategies and tactics and I get into like, here's what you should do. I actually get more into that in the bonus material because there's a whole bunch of bonus stuff you get with the book. But the core strategy in the book is the way you build a brand today and make that brand so good that getting customers feels like magic. is you build a movement around what you're selling, what you're doing, such that you don't need to worry about running ads. You don't need to worry about interrupting people. You don't need to worry about having the best salesmanship. Instead, creating a brand that has magnetism and pulls people in. And the analogy I give is if you look at entertainment brands, because these are the easiest ones to look at. Look at maybe an artist you love, like Taylor Swift, or you love a rock band, or you love a show on Netflix, or you love a sports team. Maybe you're rooting for the Yankees, you're rooting for an NFL team, or maybe you are really into a movie or something like that. How hard do I need to convince you that you should watch that game or that you should go to that concert or you should listen to that band on Spotify? I don't have to convince you at all. If you just even found out, hey, this artist is coming to my town, I'm going to buy a ticket right away. Well, why is that? versus a brand of water or a brand of toothpaste that has to work their butt off to try to get you to buy what they're selling. Well, the reason is all the stuff I go into in the book of having a main character, having a movement, having a belief, having faith drivers, having action steps, and all the stuff I go into in the book, it's because these brands, these entertainment brands have tapped into something that makes them magnetic, that makes you want to go out and beat a path down to their door to get the thing that they're selling. And that essence of what they're doing is available to every brand. You just need to think about doing it differently from the beginning. And so that really is what I want people to get out of the book is understanding that whatever you're selling, I don't care if you're selling toothpaste or band-aids or you're selling home renovation services or whatever, there's a way to build it in such a way that people are really drawn to what you're doing and you can bring them in with ease versus having to do what I call the messy marketing math. How can I spend a dollar to make $3? How can I spend $5 and make $15? Get rid of that. That's like an old way of marketing. Build a brand that people care about and where they're drawn to you. Man, that's so well said. I think it speaks to the idea of someone with lived experience explaining how they got there, man. Where can people find you? What do you have coming up? What are you excited about? Well, right now, it's all about the book. So you can get me at johndavids.com. Follow me across LinkedIn and YouTube. I put out YouTube videos every week and the podcast. You can get all of that at johndavids.com, J-O-N-D-A-V-I-D-S. And the book, guys, so free sample. Go to marketingsuperpowersbook.com. A few free chapters right there. And also, I'm doing something really fun. I've got this big mailing list. And every week I'm just dripping more and more content. So the book comes out June 18th, but between now and then, if you're on the mailing list, you're getting free samples, you're getting bonus content, you're getting all kinds of stuff so that when the book does come out, hopefully you're going to be really excited about it. And you're going to have a lot of, a lot of stuff. Thanks so much, Clint. I appreciate that. Checking out the podcast. Absolutely. Well, hang on briefly afterwards. John, I just want to talk to you shortly afterwards, but everybody else, thank you so much for hanging out. I hope you have a beautiful day. Go down to the show notes, check out the book. I've read the first chapter. It's amazing. And you can see from this conversation, he's got a great podcast. Go check him out. That's all we got for today, ladies and gentlemen. Aloha.