Jeniffer: Well, hello there. This is Jennifer and. Hello, Chad.
John: Hello.
Jeniffer: Welcome to the premise.
John: It's good to be back.
Jeniffer: It is good to be back. And, Yeah, we're ready to rock
and roll. We've got mister John M M. Jennings on the line
with us. Hey, John.
John: Yo.
Jeniffer: How you doing?
John: I'm, Rocking.
Jeniffer: You're rocking it. You're ready to rock it.
John: Rocking and rolling in. Rocking and
rolling in the loo, which is what we, those of us in St. Louis
sometimes call it.
Jeniffer: I like that. In the loo. It's also what we call the
bathroom, so that could be weird.
John: But, yeah, there's some confusion
sometimes. You know, we used to spend a.
Jeniffer: Time in the loo, John.
John: Yeah, I'm going to. I'm going to the loo. Yeah, exactly.
That does happen. But, you know, it's. It's all in good fun.
Jeniffer: Well, let's tell people a little bit about you. So, John M
M. Jennings is president and chief strategist of
St. Louis Trust and family office, a
$15 billion wealth management
firm. What?
John: With a b?
Jeniffer: With a b, 15 billion. I said
that correctly? You heard me right. He's an
author and speaker. He's a leading voice in the space of wealth
management, as you would imagine, and
leadership. His book, the Uncertainty Solution, is an
engaging dive into investing philosophy,
best practices, as well as an authoritative and
accessible guide for anyone who feels inundated
with financial news and data. It's a must
have addition to anyone's reading list, says
Charles R. Schwab.
John: Wait, like the Chuck?
Jeniffer: Yeah, the real the Chuck? Yeah, Chuck Schwab.
Right, right.
John: John, it's the real Chuck Schwab. That's
a pretty good Charles. founder of the Charles
Schwab Corporation. Never heard of it.
Jeniffer: When you landed that endorsement, that must have made you kind of
happy.
John: Yeah, like, it was. It was incredible. And I was
like, this is like the best endorsement. And
I'd asked, like, some Nobel Prize winning economists.
John: To endorse my book, and they actually responded no. So I was glad to get
the,
Jeniffer: That's actually nice of them. Right?
John: Yeah, it was great. I was, like, so thrilled to get, you know, emails back
from Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler. Daniel Kahneman, who died,
you know, a few weeks ago, unfortunately. But, then when I got Chuck
Schwab and I told my wife, and she's like, that is so much better than
Nobel Prize. The average person, they
know who these people are, and they don't want to read a
book that's been endorsed by an economist, but
something endorsed by Chuck Schwab. I mean, come
on, this book's gonna fly off the ship.
Jeniffer: You're gonna sell so many copies. I know we're gonna get
to that. So there's more, folks. There's more. Jennings
is also the author of the highly
acclaimed ifod blog.
That's interesting. Fact of the day, for those of you
who don't know yet. He's an adjunct
professor at Washington University's Olin business
School and he writes a wealth management column for
Forbes. He has finance and law degrees from the
University of Missouri there in the loo, and a
professional certificate in decision making and behavioral
finance from Harvard. Now, on a more personal note, and
this is according to John, he is of median height, a big
fan of coffee, a lover of indie music, he's a vegan
and a ravenous St. Louis blues fan, as you would
imagine. You can connect with John and read his
interesting fact of the day blog, which I highly
recommend at johnmjennings m.com
dot.
So John, again, a very, very warm welcome to the
premise.
John: Thank you. I'm excited to be on the premise.
Jeniffer: I'm excited to have you. We've kind of been talking about doing this for a
while.
John: longtime listener, first ah, time
caller.
Jeniffer: Nice. I like that. I like that. And I gotta say,
dear listener, full disclosure, I had the pleasure of working
with John during the lead up to the publication
of his book. we worked on his brand and his website. So
John's not only an author, he's also a client. And
today we're not just going to talk about his book again, the
Uncertainty Solution, which is, by the way, it's a great
book. I absolutely loved it. Who knew I would love reading a
finance book.
John: Who knew?
Jeniffer: But I did. It's a fun book and we're going to talk a little bit about it.
John: And to be fair, you felt obligated to read it. Like you're,
this is going to be a chore. I have to read it.
Jeniffer: Totally.
John: It's a client. M maybe you even reconsidered, take me
to taking me on as a client once you found out the topic.
But there you go, you dove in.
Jeniffer: Anyway and I put it off a little bit and you were like, jennifer, you have to
read my book, dammit.
John: You had to help me.
Jeniffer: And I did, and I flew through it. It was such a
well written, fun, entertaining book. And I learned
so much that I was like,
wait a minute. Okay, it's not just a finance book.
And I needed to read it, to understand that, because that was part
of your brand. Really?
John: Yeah, it totally is. And it's got to be broader than just me
telling you that my mom liked it.
Jeniffer: Well, Charles, Chuck Schwab liked it.
John: So my mom and Chuck Schwab
and.
Jeniffer: Jennifer Thompson, very
important reader here.
John: Yeah. Yeah.
Jeniffer: So today we're gonna, you know, we're gonna get to the story behind the
storyteller, as we do on the premise, but an
even deeper way. We're not just gonna talk about John's book.
We're gonna talk about his publishing journey, the good, the
bad, and the ugly. Bom,
bom, bom.
John: I'm ready.
Jeniffer: Okay, so here we go, John. I was sitting in a
parking lot a few weeks back, listening to the BBC on
my local NPR station, when the
announcer says something along the lines
of, the biggest lottery winner. I think it
was, out of Portland. I think it was
1.326 billion in the
Powerball jackpot. And I was just getting ready to get on my car,
and I was like, oh, wow, that's interesting. Right? So I paused.
My engine's running. And then he says, you know, most people
think that when you win that much money, it's going to ruin your life. And I
thought to myself, yeah, yeah, I've heard that before. And he goes, and here to
tell us if this is true is
the author of the uncertainty solution,
john m M. Jennings. And I'm so proud.
That was a pretty cool moment.
John: and you texted me, and, you didn't know it was live, and I
didn't have my phone silenced. So if you listen to the recording, you
can hear the ding of your text to me, like,
oh, my God, you're on the BBC or NPR or whatever you
said. Actually, you. Isn't that great?
Jeniffer: Oh, I have to go back and listen to that. I'm on. I'm on the BBC.
John: What have we learned? Silence your phones, people.
Yeah, silence your phone.
Well, you know, I didn't have silence because they actually called me on my
phone, right. So I was like, oh, and they're gonna go. They were like, oh, we're
gonna call you between this time and this time. You know, it's like this 30 minutes
window.
Jeniffer: I can't believe you only got one text, though. I can't believe everyone
wasn't like, oh, my God. So the BBC doesn't have
as many listeners as I think I. Yeah, yeah.
John: I got a few.
Jeniffer: Okay. So. But my mom
listened, and Chuck Schwab. Wait, is he
alive?
John: Yeah, he's still alive. He's still chairman of the firm.
Jeniffer: I'm terrible. I didn't know that. I, want you to answer the question.
Does it ruin your life to win that much money?
John: it could, but usually it doesn't.
Yeah, that's like the short answer. So. So the story behind
that is that they actually, found a Forbes article I
wrote on that topic. And it's because, two
years ago, I got this, text and then
this call from somebody that I didn't
remember his name, quite frankly. It was kind of embarrassing
now. And then I realized that, oh, I went
to college with him. He was a fraternity brother. And, I'm m trained as a
lawyer. He was a year behind me in law school. And he
said, I have this emergency and his name's John. Also, I have this
emergency. Please give me a call. And it's on a Sunday
at noon or whatever. So I call him back and he
said, you know, my wife's aunt
just won Powerball. Just found
out and she is completely freaking out. And they
called me because I'm a lawyer. He goes, but, like, I'm a litigator. I don't know what to
do. And, you know, I read your blog and I, you know, I
read your Forbes articles from LinkedIn, and so I thought I'd give you a
call. And so my initial reaction was,
you know, we really need to help this person
because winning this much money is going to ruin her
life.
Jeniffer: You thought that?
John: Yeah. And our firm, you know, you mentioned we have, you know,
we oversee $15 billion for our clients, but most of our clients have a
hundred million plus. So it's like all our client families have. It's like
they've all won after tax and payout. Like, you know, Powerball
or mega, mega millions. So, you know, this, this
client is. The math is kind of interesting. sorry I just said that
sentence, by the way, but this is really interesting. You know, she
won, I think it was like $96
million. And, you know,
she took the, the lump sum payout instead of the annuity
payout. And we ran the numbers on that and you know why that makes sense?
And in the last 15 years, every single Powerball and
Mega millions winner has taken the lump sum path. So you can either
take. You could take $96 million paid out
over 29 years, or you can take a
discounted amount based on current interest rates in a formula.
So we did that because it made economic sense. But that's
$47 million.
Jeniffer: Wow.
John: And then when you take the taxes off of it. She ended up
with about $29 million.
Jeniffer: So it was originally 96 million.
John: 96 million, yeah. So the hundred or, the
$1.3 billion, you know, amount ended up
being, you know, you know, something like 500
million or whatever it was. So it was 4
million after tax, even like 300 and something million.
So, yeah, when you hear the headline number, it's a lot
bigger than most people actually get because of taxes. But
anyway, I researched, no, is this going to
ruinous her life? And there's
studies out there on this, and there's reasons why
it's kind of widely, thought that
winning a lot of money ruins your life. But it turns out there's
studies on it and usually it doesn't. And
it sort of makes sense because if
you go from having very little money to a lot of money, it opens up all sorts
of things. Like you can do activities that, are more
fun, you have less money, stressed, you can do things for other
people, you can take better trips, better vacations.
There are some downsides to it, but in general, the
studies have shown that, people that win, lottery are
happier a year and two, and even some
cases ten years, later. But these studies
weren't on people that won $1.3
billion. They were more on single digit
millions on average. it could be
different if you go from not having very much money at all
to having hundreds of millions.
It's like being an, an
immigrant into a different culture. You go from being like a
normal, totally right american to now I
am a very wealthy american. So it does change things. There could
be an inverted you where
it's better to have more money, but at some point you can have
too much money. Maybe winning $1.3 billion is too
much money.
Jeniffer: You once said something to me, a couple years ago that stuck
with me and basically was like,
imagine what you would do if you won the
lottery, a large amount of money,
and if you wouldn't change
most of how you live. Right then
you are wealthy.
John: Absolutely.
Jeniffer: Like, wealth is very subjective.
John: It totally is. And yeah, so think about like if your
income doubled tomorrow, if your, your amount of assets doubled, not even
winning the lottery, and if mainly what you would do is just
save more.
John: You know, I like to, yeah, take better
vacations. You know, you change a little bit, but if in general your life
stays the same, you're like what I like to call in the
gravy and you're wealthy. And, you know, I know people that have a
lot of money that I don't consider wealthy because they're still wanting for more,
they're still striving. And I know people have pretty
modest net worths. Like, I have a friend that in his
late thirties, retired. And it's not because he had a ton of money, it's
because he's really frugal, right?
And he loves being frugal. And if all of a sudden,
you know, his modest wealth doubled, he'd be like,
nothing changes. Whereas, you know, I know people that have
tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that wish they had more because
they would do different things. You know, maybe instead of, you know,
chartering a private jet, they would own a private jet, you know,
and, you know, they'd buy a yacht, they would buy
their third house or, you know. So it's,
fascinating. And in fact, my next book is
about wealth and happiness. So part of my looking
at this lottery, win or it's a happiness. It tells
us a lot about what money does to us in terms of
happiness. And having more money is
slightly positively correlated with happiness
and life satisfaction. So, you know, as you
gain more money, it does
slightly, on average, make people happier
and more satisfied with their lives.
Jeniffer: But there's.
John: Isn't there a point where it kind of inverts, though?
Yeah. So what's fascinating
is there's not really studies on
the super wealthy when it comes to this. There's only two that
I've found, and one is by, is actually
from 1985. And what it did is it
surveyed, there's this list called the Forbes 400 of,
the richest Americans. And now to be on the Forbes 400,
it starts at like, your number 400, at like $2
billion or something. But back in 1983, when they
surveyed these people, it was like 125 million to be on the
Forbes 400. So this, this researcher, Ed,
Diener, who's also known as Doctor happy, he's, he's
passed, but he was at University of Illinois. He sent out a
survey to all 400 members of the Forbes 400,
in 1983, and something like 85
of them responded and actually answered his
survey. And so then he took, these, he surveyed
people in the same zip code, just as random
controls. And he found that the people that were
in the Forbes 400 were a bit happier
on average, and had a bit more life satisfaction than
the controls. But there was overlap. There was some percentage of
these. You can now think of them as billionaires. Back then, it was
100 millionaires mainly. There was some percentage that
were less happy. But in general, they were a bit
happier, but it wasn't like night and day. And then there's
another study, more recent from Harvard from, I think it was 2018,
2019, that surveyed a bunch
of multimillionaires. So there were people that had single
digit millions, but most had over $10
million. And they found that as
you had more and more money, that the
happiness and life satisfaction
again increased and continued to increase
slightly. But importantly, there's a difference
between if you made the money yourself
or if you were a beneficiary of the money. Even a
spouse has less life satisfaction. So
if you inherited the money or if it was your spouse that made it, you
have less life satisfaction around the money than if you made it
yourself. And if you think about it, that makes a lot of sense, right?
Jeniffer: Yeah, it really does.
John: You know, if you probably built a business or had
an incredibly successful career that you've built, you know, all this
money, you can imagine how that add to your life
satisfaction and compared, to, just
inheriting it and then working with the clients that I work
with. Yeah, there definitely
comes a point, and a lot of our clients
have reached this, where the money ends up
being somewhat of a burden.
Jeniffer: Right.
John: But it's also great.
Jeniffer: So it's, they just need to hire someone like you so that
they don't have to deal with that.
John: I buy powerball tickets or mega millions tickets
on occasion, and it's really just to take stock of my
life. But I've kind of reached the point where, like, I don't want to
win.
Jeniffer: M I really do want to win now. Hey, wait a minute. Let's
go back to that. You said you buy powerball
tickets to take stock of your life. What did you mean by
that?
John: In fact, I did a blog post on ifod on this years
ago. so I asked myself, like, what
would I do differently in my life if I had that
much money? And I think a lot of the things that people would
do, they could do anyway. So if I were like, well,
I would quit my job, and I wouldn't, but I think I wouldn't,
but if I would quit my job,
well, then maybe you should find a new career.
Jeniffer: Exactly.
John: It was like, you know, I live in Missouri. If I was like, oh, I would move to San
Diego, because I hear that's a great place. Well, I could move to San
Diego anyway, right? or, you know, I would start
a charitable organization or do more charitably. Well, maybe I should
do more charitably anyway. So I think a lot of the things you could
do anyway, and then also think about, like, the issues
that you have in your life that wouldn't be changed by
the money. So, you know, there's the University of Michigan
surveys, people on all sorts of things in this particular survey,
and one of the questions they ask, and the last data I saw was from
about five years ago, but they ask
what one thing would make the biggest
difference to make you happier in your life. And
72% of the respondents, their number one thing was more money.
Right. And I, you know, I wonder about
that. I mean, definitely for a certain slice, like, if you're, you know,
working two jobs, you're hand to mouth and you have a lot of money stress. Yeah, no
doubt. Like, I'm sure having more money would help, but if you're,
you know, you're doing okay, you're, like, you put it, Jennifer.
You're taking vacations and, you know, kind of
getting through life. You know, I really questioned that if having a
lot more money would make that big of a difference.
Jeniffer: it's not about having more money. It's how you would live if you
had more money.
John: Yeah. How would you live if you had more money? And.
And, you know, there's ways you can use money to
enhance your sense of happiness, and there's ways that you can use money
that's more, you know, destructive. And, you know, I
think that using money to enhance happiness, you know,
the things that you do is if you buy experiences rather than
things, is a huge one. And, you
know, using money to deepen relationships. So,
like, I have all sorts of clients that take their
extended family or friends on all these fabulous trips, you know,
that's great, great. Some money, if you use
money to buy time, you know, so if you're like, oh, I hate doing
yard work, hire someone to do your. Your yard work or your
housework or, you know, go to dinner
with your spouse or, you know, whatever you don't like to do.
Jeniffer: Right. Yeah, I like this. It's. It's almost like a self
help book, you know?
John: Yeah. Yeah.
Jeniffer: How to live a better life by analyzing what you're doing and how
you can do differently. Do it differently, rather.
John: Yeah. So this is all the topic of my next book, which I'm, you know, at that
point, Jennifer and Jadwick. I'm just in
Struggleville, so it's great.
Jeniffer: It's fun.
John: It's part of the process.
Jeniffer: Well, let's talk about your current book, the uncertainty
solution. Yeah. Just so our
listeners know it's not really a book about
how to invest, although there is some of that. It's more of
a book about how you can't really know what's going to
happen. I mean, as the title infers,
uncertainty and the solution. It's about
knowing what you can control and how to manage
uncertain situations. Maybe it's about expectations.
and letting go of anxiety, I think, goes a lot
into that. Like, stop trying to predict what you
cannot predict. but what can we know?
John: Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, the premise of the book,
is really we as humans, we don't like most
uncertainty. And the way we react to it, especially in the
investment realm, is largely
counterproductive. And the best thing to do is to
accept uncertainty, sit in our discomfort of
uncertainty. But really what you can do is you
can create mental models. So this was
championed by Charlie Munger, who died in
the fall at nearly age 100, the business
partner of the famed Warren Buffet. But he really championed
this concept of mental models, where you create
models in your head of how the world really
works, and then you fall back on these
mental models to help you make better
decisions, especially when faced with uncertainty. So
that's what the book really gets
into, is these different mental models that all
apply to investments, and most of them
apply to just life in
general.
John: Really what I wanted to do is spread
wisdom that I've learned over the years as I became a student of
how to better handle uncertainty. There's
just a lot of uncertainty and we feel better in the
investment realm or, when we hear a confident
expert predict what they think is going to happen in the stock market or the
economy or geopolitically or whatever,
and they just really don't know.
They just don't. I go in depth in my book about they just don't know. But they're
going to predict anyway. And we feel better because it
gives us a sense of certainty if we believe this expert. But it's
better just to say, hey, an expert's not going to be able to predict
what's going to happen around the bend. I
mean, who predict what happened in Israel with
Hamas, or the Ukraine war,
or a lot of things that have happened in the
stock market. I mean, yesterday Gamestop,
rose by 78% because some
person tweeted an image,
and it was the guy that started the Gamestop, you
know, the 2000% rise back in
2021. So a bunch of people were like, oh, let's jump onto GameStop. Like,
how do you predict that?
Jeniffer: Right?
John: Everybody part of the Reddit forums, I guess,
right? Yeah, totally. It's a Reddit forum, sort of
thing. And, you know, back in, the fall of
2022,
Bloomberg surveyed economists, and there was the
economists they surveyed put a hundred percent likelihood
of a recession in 2023,
and it didn't happen, you know, and on and on and on and on.
So the part of the premise of the book is, you know,
how to, how to be a better investor or just make better decisions in
your life, by not chasing false
certainty and falling back on what you can, you
know, actually truly know you're going to.
Jeniffer: Make yourself crazy if you're chasing them. Right?
John: Yeah, yeah.
Jeniffer: Speaking of chasing things like trends.
John: Like trends, you know? Yeah, yeah.
Jeniffer: Like chapter seven in your book, the trend is not your friend.
Tell us more. John M. Jennings.
John: Yeah, yeah. So, really this chapter
is in response to
clients coming to us and saying
either a, why didn't you see this trend that
we could have made a lot of money in? Or b, we think we see a
trend and we want to pour a bunch of money in it.
And so really it's not predicting
what trends are going to be big, but how to think about
trends. And a key aspect
of, the difficulty of spotting important
trends is that there's, you know, we as
humans, don't grasp exponential growth
and important trends that
have exponential advancement. So, I mean, you can
look at what's going on with electric vehicles. I mean, the sales
of electric vehicles in the US growing exponentially. I
mean, they made up an incredibly tiny percent ten
years ago. And, in 2023, EV's and plug
in hybrids made up just under 10% of sales. Again,
it's still minority, but it goes from ten years ago,
them being novelties, to these days,
probably everybody listening to
this episode knows somebody that has an EV, or
they drive one themselves. So this is
expanding rapidly. And we have a client that we started
working with like seven or eight years ago. And their family owns
an energy company. Basically they own a bunch of gas stations
and distribution of like,
commercial, oils, but also gasoline.
Right. And I remember saying to them seven or eight years ago,
you know, what are you going to do about electric cars? And they
said, oh, that's so far off. that's something for our grandchildren to
worry about.
Jeniffer: Wow.
John: And so then I talked to them about the nature of exponential growth, that, ah,
yes, it's not moving the needle much yet, but it's growing exponentially.
And so you may be thinking, well, there's
all these problems with Ev's you know, there's range
anxiety and there's not a great charging network out there. And
like, if you live in an apartment or condo or a place that doesn't have a
garage, you know, you probably don't have a charger. So,
yeah, there's a lot of impediments, so maybe it doesn't continue to
exponentially grow. But also I get into the chapter
about how a lot of these other technologies had a lot of
impediments as well, and they continue to grow.
So a lot of things on understanding and
appreciating trends. again, not telling you
what trends to invest in, but really how to think about
investing in trends. and AI is another
huge one that's going crazy. So a lot of when I wrote
the book, it was before, you
know, it was published after, but it was, written before
chat, GPT was launched to the public. but the
same thing is there's, all these mental models in the
chapter about how to think about things like the rise of
AI.
Jeniffer: I Loved reading, like,
looking at trends and looking at how, like, you know,
bell graphs and, statistics.
I read about statistics, and let me just tell you, listener, I'm a
writer. I was told there'd be no math, but
I really enjoyed actually reading about the statistics
because in a way, you know, when I was done
reading the book, I had this sense of hope. I was like, okay, you
know what I mean? And I think the biggest takeaway
and something I was a little maybe proud of myself about is, the best
investor is one who acts like they're dead.
John: Yeah.
Jeniffer: don't touch it. Just leave it alone. And Chad and I are good at that.
We just. We. Yeah, you know what little we invest, we leave
it alone. And if the stock market's crashing, we don't care
because we're not going to touch it. It doesn't matter. One of
the takeaways I got from you is like, stop worrying about it.
John: Yeah. I mean, I kind of worry about it.
Jeniffer: No, you do.
John: Yeah, it's hard not to worry about it, but, yeah, people are better off.
They don't.
Jeniffer: I don't, I don't really worry about it. I'm like, yeah, what's the
matter right now? It's gonna come.
John: Well, I'll tell you.
So, so this coming August, I will have been
married 30 years to my trophy wife.
Jeniffer: Congratulations.
John: Thank you.
Jeniffer: And she is absolutely lovely.
We've met. Your trophy wife. I'm glad to say we have.
John: Yeah, I like her quite a bit.
Jeniffer: I like her quite a bit.
John: Yeah, I do. I still like her. We still got it going on,
but, So we, So, she changed her
name. Her last. Her main name was Simmons,
and she changed it to Jennings, like, on her driver's license and even
her passport and, you know, things like that. But she has
never changed it with the Social Security administration. It has
literally been on her to do list for going on 30
years.
Jeniffer: I was gonna say 30 years. Yeah.
John: Yeah. Ah, 30 years. And, I don't know, like, 15 or 20
years ago, like, she had this, you know, Ira account with
the Charles Schwab corporation. Thank you, Chuck.
And, they locked the account
because the, Because her Social Security
number and the name on the account did not match. I mean, it kind
of makes sense. It's like, okay, is there some sort of, you know,
terrorist funding going on with the Tammy Jennings, you know,
Ira? And again, it's. It's not,
you know, it's not a huge account, but, yeah, it's, you know, saved over the years,
and so, like, we couldn't tinker with
it. So I was like, tammy, like, you gotta go get this
changed. And she still hasn't, by the way. So we can unlock this account.
We can see it, but we can't do anything. So it's like this time
capsule from, you know, 1518 years ago, how we invested.
And it's in, like, you know, four funds, like, three index funds and one active
manager, and I've not been able to tinker with it, and
it's done. Awesome.
Jeniffer: I knew you were gonna say that.
John: It's done so good. It has done so good. And
fidelity did this study of a ten year study
of all their accounts, and, you know, who were the best investors? And
it was of dead people, unlocked accounts. So there's your dead person.
Jeniffer: There it is.
John: Yeah, maybe. It's embarrassing. And
again, I brought up to Tammy recently, like, are you going to get
that change? Because we have to file our tax returns under her
maiden name. And if we get a refund, it's like, how do we
deposit it, right? Not her name. Yeah. So we
have those sort of issues. So it's, fortunately, we almost never
get a refund. So there you go.
Jeniffer: I'm really glad to know that your life isn't, like, totally,
like, locked down and everything.
The rest of us who aren't doing it perfect. Hey, it's all good. Even
John.
John: Oh, you know, it's like I'm a duck I look calm
on the surface, but there's a lot going on underneath.
Jeniffer: Right.
John: There's a lot of, There's a lot of scrambling underneath.
Jeniffer: So, I have a question for you.
What can toilet paper teach us about investing?
John: Oh, my gosh. So you remember
back in the pandemic when people were hoarding toilet paper?
Jeniffer: Yeah.
John: So it was. It was kind of crazy. So, Like, who
knows why it started? Like, why did the first
person.
Jeniffer: Yeah, who was it?
John: Who was that person who said, I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go buy, like, four
shopping carts of toilet paper?
Jeniffer: Patient zero. Yeah.
John: Yeah, exactly. There was.
Jeniffer: And it was.
John: It was probably in, like, des moines or something, and then it, you know,
spread.
Jeniffer: I think it was patient.
John: Yeah, that's probably where. A lot of preppers up there.
Jeniffer: Yeah, there's a lot of preppers up there. I know.
John: Yeah. But they produce some great people in northern Idaho, though,
right?
Jeniffer: That is true. You know, it's funny, I have to pause for just a
minute. I'm dear listener. I
grew up partly in northern Idaho and eastern
Washington, and, a friend of mine was telling me he was going on a date
with. With a gal from Idaho. And I said, oh, ask her where
she's from. And I said, oh, never mind. She's from Boise. People
from northern Idaho never leave. And he
looked at me. He's like, what? I'm like, no, it's totally true.
And I said, later, where's she from? He's like, boise? I'm like, of
course. Yeah, of course. So, okay, we
don't know how it started, but, yeah, people were, and I.
John: Have to admit, so, you know, it spread. And
on a system wide level, it was
completely bonkers. But an individual level, it
was completely rational. So, you know, if you started, you
know, you put on your mask and you made your way to, you know, target or
Walmart or Walgreens or CFS, whatever, and they didn't have
toilet paper, right. And you're trying to order on Amazon or whatever, and it's
like, oh, you know, we'll get it to you in six weeks. So,
you know, basically what happened is, as people bought toilet paper,
it created a shortage. And I'll tell you, I thought, you know,
I was immune to, you know, more than I am to
irrational behavior. But, like, six weeks into the pandemic, I go to
Walgreens and, you know, we have plenty of toilet paper. Tammy Jennings is
just amazing at, you know, having us stocked in,
like, everything, you know, like, we have
plenty of paper. Towels, plenty of toilet paper. Great. I go
into Walgreens, and there's one package of toilet paper on the shelf, and I bought
it. I tell the clerk at checkout, I'm like, you
know, like the clerk, she's behind, like, glass, and she's wearing, like, three
masks. I'm wearing a mask, you know, you remember this time? And I'm, I say
to her, I say, I'm so sorry. I'm buying this toilet paper. It's your last,
your last package. I actually have plenty at home. I know I'm
being part of the problem and not part of the solution, but on an
individual level, I think it's rational.
And she just, like, looked at me like, you know, get your, you know, potential
Covid breath away.
And then I bought it. But this is how the
stock market and the economy and a lot of things in life worked,
because you have intelligent actors, people
or firms, everybody's watching
everybody else, and we do things based on their
actions. It's like we just mentioned with GameStop. I mean, the reason why people pushed
up GameStop by GameStop stock yesterday by nearly
80% is they said, oh, well, this guy just
tweeted, which means other people are going to want to buy it. So I'm going to get
in and buy it, and I'm just going to assume I'm going to sell out in time,
right? So that's how the
stock market works, is we're all looking, and the economy, we're all looking at
everybody else, look at everybody else. And then the way we act
actually changes the real world and creates
feedback loops. And this is why it's
so hard to predict the economy and the stock market is because there's all
these moving parts and people change and they learn.
And there used to be this strategy,
back in the sixties or seventies, I don't remember the exact time period, called the
dogs of the Dow. So you take the Dow Jones industrial average,
which is 37% stocks, when they
quote the Dow, if you
invested in the five, or maybe it was ten
worst performing stocks of the Dow.
So the dogs of the Dow, then you would outperform
the other stocks over time.
People would do the strategy, and it was like, oh, my gosh, this
is great. It's working. But then what happened is enough. People
started doing it, and then it just blew up and it didn't work
anymore. this is the history of investing.
People in the two thousands poured into
hedge funds because they did so well during the.com
crash, and they did well in the nineties and the
hedge fund industry went from having a few hundred billion in
assets to three or 4 trillion. And then once
everybody poured money in, it changed. There weren't enough
investments that were great that the hedge funds could buy, but they still took the money
because they wanted to make the fees. And then hedge fund returns were
horrible. And know we're, bad and we just see
this over and over and over, that how we act in the
world actually changes the world we live
in. Right.
Jeniffer: Yeah.
John: So. And then it destroys the
ability to predict what's going to happen.
Jeniffer: It's like any good algorithm. If you figure it out, it's going to
change.
John: Yeah, absolutely.
Jeniffer: In a nutshell. Right?
John: It is. Right, right.
If everybody knew the exact Google algorithm.
Jeniffer: Yeah.
John: Then everybody would do it and it lose its relevance.
They have to play the shell game of changing around stuff. Right.
Jeniffer: Which is why they'll never share the algorithms with it.
John: Yeah.
Jeniffer: so here's, a statement. You once said, wisdom is
taking the data, information and knowledge
and shaping behavior. And that's really kind of what you're talking
about here, right?
John: Yeah, yeah. So you think about it. Data is just like
raw, facts and figures and not
very helpful. And information, you take it and you arrange it
in a way that makes sense. So, like, data would be, for instance, in terms of
the economy, it would be something like housing starts. So you just get all this
raw data. Here's the housing starts all over the US. And
information, you would arrange it. So maybe you arrange it by
zip code or single family versus
multifamily home. You might do it by
the price of the house, less than 100 grand, less than 250, less than
a million, 2 million, whatever. And that would
start telling you something about what's going on
in the economy. More than just having the raw
data. The knowledge is taking that information,
pairing it with other information to say. You might be able to
say something like, okay, here's ish
where we think we are in the economic cycle, based on
housing starts and unemployment claims and
inflation and interest rates and GDP, all these other
things, it looks like we're solidly in
our recovery. Right? So that's, that's knowledge.
And that's where a lot of things stop.
And that what wisdom is, is then knowing what to do with
it. And you know that, you've heard wisdom, especially
in the investment realm, if it's simple,
but it's not necessarily easy. Right? So
wisdom would be knowing, even though
we're getting, you know, maybe the economy is really heating
up. Wisdom is knowing, but I'm not going to be able to
tell when it's going to turn
right. Someone to be patient or its wisdom is things like what
Warren Buffett said about investing, that to be
successful, you should be fearful when others are greedy and
greedy when others are fearful. So that's incredibly
simple, but, that is, like, the hardest thing to
do in investing. But if you just did that, you'd be
incredibly successful as an investor. Right. But that's so
hard. So when everybody else is going crazy and making all these
returns or, their business is booming, it's hard then to
say, I'm going to be the fearful one. And it's even harder when I.
And everything is falling apart to say, now I'm going to be
greedy. But that's what Warren Buffett has always done, and
that is. That is true wisdom. And it's, again, it's simple, but not
easy.
Jeniffer: Well, I think this is a good point for us to turn our
conversation, away from investing, although it's
fascinating and
ish. Ish? Yeah. Sometimes I'm like, wait, what? My head is sort of
spinning. but the takeaway is good. let's
talk about your publishing journey. I
want to ask you a bunch of questions. I want to know what
worked, what didn't work, what you would do
differently, what advice you have for
authors, what you learned, expectations. where
do you want to start?
John: I want to start with my therapist.
Jeniffer: Okay, let's do it.
John: Doctor brog. I worked with my therapist for
well over a year to get where I could write this book, because
we all have our own brand. So, really, a brand is
what somebody says about you when you're not
around. I mean, there's other definitions, but that's kind of my favorite one. I
felt like I built this brand, right? So I, you know, I've
networked, I give speeches. I teach at a,
you know, prestigious university. I write a blog. I write for
Forbes. So I'd done all these things where I felt like I've created this brand,
and the brand was the, you know, I'm relatively
intelligent, sort of funny, sort of curious, whatever. But, you know, I felt
like it was this positive brand, and I'm 54 years
old. I was kind of, you know, call it 50 when I was
really talking to Doctor Brogg about this, maybe 49. But I feel like I've spent my
whole career creating this brain. I was like, what if I write
this book and it's not good and it
detracts from everything? That I've done, you know,
I just had this fear and I don't, you know, at least then I didn't
identify myself as a writer, even though I'd done a decent amount of writing
and, you know, just wasn't really part of my identity. And basically, Doctor Brog,
I'll give you like a year's worth and, you know, thousands of
dollars of therapy. He basically was like, stop being such a wimp. You know,
like, if your brand is being this person that's kind
of out there and you want to have, you know,
the, you know, certain things known about you, there's no
better way to do that than then do a book.
And you just have to have confidence that. That you can
do this and especially if you have the right partners and,
like, you and Chad are part of that ecosystem of partners. So. Thank you.
but it. It was then sitting down
to write. And then, then I was on this, webinar. I was like
this, on this panel, like in the middle of COVID It was like, you
know, spring of like probably like may or
some end of 2020. And this person like pinged me on
LinkedIn afterwards and she's like, I really enjoyed your comments
on that panel. It seems to me like you have a book in you.
And I was like, well, I do. I've been talking to my therapist for a year about
a book. So she's a book coach and an
editor. So, you know, I hired her
and we kind of went into this process
of, you know, outlining and diagramming
the book. And then she was my first editor, so I.
She kept me on track mostly. And I'd give her
chapters and she'd edit it. And really she was an a plus,
book coach and an ok editor. So then I hired a second
editor because I'd give her like a 6000 word
chapter and it'd come back at like 5800 words
and I'd be like, I'm not that good of a writer. So
I had this other guy that, mostly retired
and then I'd give him the 5800 words and he'd come back at like
4200 words. And I'm like, now we're talking.
So it's all about cutting. He's like, oh, you know, he'd tell me all the time, john, you got to
kill your darlings, you know, and you got to
streamline it down and think about what the reader needs to hear,
not what you want to say. And, you know,
that was really hard. But I decided. I decided to use a hybrid publisher
and not go traditional route. because the
main purpose of the book is for our firm to use
it in gaining new clients and
we work mainly in kind of the 50 million and up family
range. So we wanted to use it as a
way for me to get speaking engagements, which
has gone incredibly well. We
have probably given away like 2500 of them.
I just gave a speech this morning, to a group on
the book and have a prospect out of that. So it's been
really good for that. We've had some inbound
prospects, so that was the main purpose of the
book. And so we decided to do hybrid,
because I, we, the company, we
completely own the rights to the book and we can do whatever we want to
it with it. We buy it for, I think they cost
us like $4 apiece and we can give them out.
I can use whatever I want from the book and publish
in Forbes, I can use it in my blog, I can
use whatever. So that's what we decided
to do. I thought the publisher was really good. The
book looks great, it's really high quality. It looks as good
as anything that comes out of the, the big five
traditional publishers. but it definitely
was expensive. And I'm very fortunate that my company paid
for it because again, it's mainly been a great
thing for my company's brand and my brand, and I'm kind
of one of the main faces of the company. So it's been
a phenomenal journey. I've been on I don't know, 30 plus
podcasts. I've been on all these radio interviews, the
BBC, the BBC,
some really big podcasts. hm. So all
that has been fantastic. I've spoken,
you know, even overseas on the
book in front of, you know, all the right crowds and audiences and it's,
it's, it's really gone well. in terms of the main
goals for the book, you know, in terms
of actual sales though, it's on one hand
done great, on the other hand, I'm incredibly
disappointed both at the same time.
Jeniffer: Yeah. So why is that?
John: I, well, it has, you know,
and it's one year mark. I don't know, it's a few weeks past the one year
mark. It was published April or excuse me, May
2 of 2023. And so we're now in kind of
mid May.
So, you know, about two weeks ago is its one year anniversary.
As of its one year anniversary, if you take print,
audio and ebook together, it sold about
3400 copies. So on one
hand, that is terrific because
if you look at all the stats of books and a lot of the stats that came out of
the Simon, Schuster and, Penguin Random
House antitrust trial, which has just been a treasure
trove of stats about the publishing
industry, that's really good. That's
better than 90% of the books out there.
So on one hand, that's really good. On the other hand, it's
disappointing because,
we spent a lot of time, money and effort on promoting the
book. I wrote a blog post on this a
few weeks ago. Actually, on the anniversary when it came out,
I was on a podcast this summer.
My podcast had 90,000 downloads.
That was another that had 30 or 40,000 downloads. I
had someone a few weeks ago that sent out, basically
to his 50,000 subscribers on his
newsletter, all about my book and a
recommendation to buy it. I have
somebody that was a book influencer that both
tweeted out and instagrammed out to his over
500,000 people
a glowing recommendation of my book.
And so you're thinking about like, okay, we're getting hundreds of thousands of
people that have seen or heard about a book and it's sold
3400 copies.
so that is disappointing. But the good
news is that the purpose of the book was never
sales. And it's kind of like going back to the question of, you
know, wealthy. You know, if you doubled
your income or your assets would much change. You know, if my
book, instead of selling 3400 copies, if it had
sold 34,000 copies, copies, I don't think it
makes a bit of difference in terms of what the book is for
or quite frankly, how I feel about it. because
I do think it's a really good book. I'm proud of it and it's
enhanced my brand and my firm's brand
and people that have read it. I've
gotten almost
100% overwhelming feedback. I mean, I've gotten the one or two
one star reviews, which I love
on Amazon, but I'll get, you know, I'll get people
that I don't even know that email me and just like, oh my gosh, this book is
amazing. It's like, you know, cross between Malcolm
Gladwell and Michael Lewis and I bought copies for all my
kids. And, you know, I've had some people that I really
respect that have, you know, read my book and
then, have emailed me or even called me or have met in person and
they've just said, you know, your book is fantastic. And
has changed how I look at the world. So what I had to train myself
is it's so easy to look at your book sales
and let that define what success is because
it's so easy to measure that. Right. My
publisher every week updates on Thursday afternoons
what all the stats are. And really from
the get go, I don't look at those.
I kind of had an ish what my book had sold,
the first time I really looked at it in depth, was really on its one
year anniversary. Because kind of like not looking at your stock
portfolio because it leads to bad behavior. I really said to
myself, I want to focus on what matters
and book sales are so easy to measure, I
think I'll fall into that. And I did know
enough, I know that it wasn't like, the print run on my book
was 5000 copies and
there hasn't been a second edition yet or second
printing yet. So I knew it wasn't to that point. But I think
it'd be really easy just to focus on sales as
success or failure when it's done all these
other things for me and been this overwhelmingly
positive, positive
experience. But yeah, the sales are disappointing to me.
Jeniffer: Sure. Yeah. that makes a lot of sense and
it's hard for us not to judge the success by
book sales. But then also
3.5 million books were published
last year. And 1% of
books, one to 3% of books, maybe one
to 5% of books, they make all the money. So even the
big five traditional publishers don't expect all books to
sell. And you know, they.
3500 is pretty high for
a lot of those books.
John: and I think, and basically hybrid, which is a form of self
publishing as well because I found from the publicity,
firm that I use, they were like, you know, this is
going to make it more challenging getting some of the
media and some of the reviews and some of the things that will maybe
move the needle some, because you didn't run the gauntlet
of getting an agent and doing the book proposal
and getting a publisher to
plunk down their cold, hard cash in terms of advance.
So I didn't do any of that. So,
it is harder, at least according to them, and I think it's
true, to maybe gain some of the sales
success with a self published or hybrid published
book as opposed to a traditional publisher.
Jeniffer: Yeah. So there is some stigma
around this idea that your book wasn't vetted
by the traditional publishing industry,
but it is changing. It's absolutely changing.
John: Well, I was at this conference recently. I was on this panel with, these two other
authors, and they were both traditionally published, one by a university press. He
was a professor, and the other by, you know, Wiley, which is,
you know, a well known, like, business book publisher.
And the, the professor was, was, you
know, very gracious about the fact that I used a hybrid publisher. The Wiley
guy, like kind of threw me some shade.
Jeniffer: Wow.
John: Like, oh, you know,
you're self published or you know, whatever. I was like, oh, yeah,
whatever. So anyway, my book,
fucker. Anyway, well,
this is going to sound really, really petty of me, so I ended up buying a
copy of his book. I haven't read it yet. It's kind of like
on, something that's financier, economicy. So
we'll see if I read it. but when
I bought Amazon, I noticed it was published like three years ago
and he has twelve reviews.
Jeniffer: Oh, wow. That's really, that's actually kind of
shocking. Yeah.
John: so you know that, you know, there's not, you know, I'm
sure there's different algorithms out there, but like, with twelve
reviews, he probably hasn't sold that many books.
Jeniffer: He's not selling. Yeah, absolutely. Well, that is a huge
tell, actually. And it, I will also
say it is harder for self published and
a lot of hybrid published books to get
reviews because Amazon will
accept them. In fact, we had a client who got so many
reviews that Amazon actually shut it down and
was not allowing more reviews because they said, well, there's too
many, so we don't believe they're real.
However, if a Wiley book or a Simon and
Schuster book is released, it's going to get thousands of reviews and
Amazon's not shutting that down. So the playing field
is still not exactly fair.
John: Yeah, well, and I think for my first book, doing the hybrid
publisher was great, especially, again, I have to just reiterate, my company paid
for it.
Jeniffer: Well, I was, you went with, and I'm just, is it okay if I say
who your publishers? So Greenleaf Publishing does a great
job. I mean, their packaging is wonderful, you know, and
Chattanooga package books. So we can really appreciate good design. They win a
lot of contests. they do a great job, but they
are really expensive, so you were really
expensive.
John: And I'll tell you, I think for my next book, I'm probably going to go the
traditional route. And one of the main reasons is
I have this sense of guilt about my company paying for my
first book because it was such a passion project for me. And again, it's been
great for our. It's been great for our company. It's, like, been worth,
every dollar that we've spent on it. And my business partners,
they all agree. But I kind of feel for this
next book, I want to not have my
company, even though wealth and happiness and whatever
it's arguably would help with our company as well.
I just really feel like it's so personal to me to
be writing these books and that I feel really guilty
that I had the company, do
this.
Jeniffer: You know what my sister says about guilt? She says
guilt is the playground bully for
adults.
John: That's great.
Jeniffer: well, no, I see your point, though. I see your point. But, I think you
should try and seek
out an agent, and I think you have built a brand, and
that's part of it. Building the brand, building the platform, getting
the visibility, getting on the BBC.
John: Getting on the BBC.
Jeniffer: And then you go seek out an agent, and now you proven yourself,
right. I loved your book. I really,
really did. And so when I look at it, you know, I feel a
little heartbroken about it myself. And we work together on your
brand, getting, And you.
You got some great press. You really did. I feel like
wonderkind is. Wonderkin was your
publisher or publicist. I hope it's okay that I am. Of
course they did. They do such a good job.
John: They did an amazing job.
Jeniffer: And, you know, so what. How do we parse this?
Like, why didn't we sell more books? Why didn't you sell more
books? And there's just. There's really actually no way of
knowing. There's been situations where an author
has come out with a book. I have an example. An
author wrote a book about, Oh, my gosh. Sarah
Palin didn't m do great. You
know, it sold maybe a thousand copies.
And then, of course, what happened? she became the VP,
and then the publisher. Nominee,
nominee, maybe nominee. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm moving too fast in
my head. And you know what happened? The book went crazy.
Like, you never know what's gonna happen in the media that's
going to affect or in politics or, you know, anything
that's going to affect your book sales. And publishers know
this. well, I have a friend that.
John: Wrote this amazing book called the Watermen, and it's about kind of
the. There was this guy named Charles Daniels
that was America's first swimming champion. He helped invent
what's known as freestyle style, the crawl. And
at one point, he owned every swimming world record
in every distance.
John: Amazing. So, like, he competed in the 1904 Olympics, so that
far back, which, by the way, was in St. Louis, but,
Jeniffer: In the loo.
John: Exactly. So. But it's like,
it's kind of like reading boys in the boat or, you know, one of these, you
know, sort of not quite unbroken, but it's like one of these really
just amazing, amazing stories. Like, the
book is so good, I devoured it's, you know, like
350 pages, and I devoured it in a day. Like, it's so.
It's so good. And I don't know exactly what it sold, but,
you know, it's not, you know, I thought this thing was gonna be a
bestseller everywhere. And, you know, I think, you know, I'm
pretty sure you see, a, division of Penguin, random,
random house, like Riverside books or something.
Jeniffer: Okay.
John: So, Yeah, so, no, it's an amazing book.
Jeniffer: And I.
John: And, you know, I don't know what his advance was, but I've heard from friends that it was, you
know, really, really solid advance. So, And I
don't know exactly what it's sold, but I would be surprised if
it's probably sold over 10,000 copies. But I don't really know.
But it's called the waterman. It's so good.
And I'm just stunned that it's not like,
just everywhere, because it's so good. Well, he had
written a prior book, I don't know, like 15 or 20 years ago or something.
That's a work of fiction that's about, It was
centered around in Door County, Wisconsin, kind of a resort
area. About this shop that catered to, like, you know,
irish, sold like, irish stuff or whatever it's called, all
things irish. And I read it and I thought it was fine. But, like, waterman is
like, amazing, right? But all things irish.
I think, like, he told me what he sold, so I'm not going to share it,
but it told. It sold a shit ton.
Jeniffer: A lot of books.
John: A lot of books. And it was because somebody, I forget who it
was, but somebody, some big irish figure,
died. Like, right around the time that the book was
published, there was this kind of,
Jeniffer: People are looking for it.
John: People were looking for it. Kind of like what you mentioned with the Sarah Palin
book, and it sold a ton. And again, it's a good book. I don't mean
to, like, cast aspersions on that first book because
it was good, but, like, his second book is amazing and
has sold nowhere near that thus far.
Jeniffer: Right? Well, something I was gonna say too.
the number one thing that sells your first book is your third book.
John: Yeah.
Jeniffer: And that's proven over and over and over again. And there's a reason for that,
because you're building your brand, you're developing a relationship
with your readers, and you're getting better at promoting
yourself. Right.
John: Yeah.
Jeniffer: Building that visibility and connecting the dots of your success and
all of that. so while 3500 books
may not be an exciting thing right
now, I do believe your second book will do better
and then your third book, which we don't know what it is yet,
but that could be the breakthrough.
So for me, it's like, follow your
heart and publish the book that you need to write.
And it's a long tail journey, folks.
It's looking down the road and not, you know,
the first 90 days of the first year of a book's release.
And you never know. And this is true of music, too. Look at
Kate Bush.
John: Yeah. Took her, what, 30 years to get a number one hit.
Jeniffer: Yeah, exactly. Because her song was featured on
stranger things.
John: Is that what it was?
Jeniffer: Yeah. yeah, we just never know. But.
John: So I'm a big fan of Steven Pressfield, who, of
course, wrote the war of art, which is amazing.
And, you know, he really came into prominence, ah, with the
legend of Bagger Vance, which, of course, was made into a mediocre movie, but
great book, and I'm a big, big fan of his.
And, you know, he worked for
decades as a writer and wrote
all these books that weren't published until
he really had his big break. I think he was probably in his fifties when
the legend of Bagger Vance was published and became this big
hit. And he's written all
these other great books kind of about how to write. So, like, he
has this great book, called no one wants to read your show
shit. And, like, for anybody as a writer
out there that's listening, go, go read that book. I mean,
read the war of art and then read. No one wants to read your shit. It's
just fantastic. But we have the war of art.
Jeniffer: That'S on our bookshelf somewhere around. Yeah, Chad bought it for me.
Yeah.
John: Oh, it's so. It's so good. It's a great book. But, like, just his
insight on, you know, all his
struggles, as a writer and,
you know, just kind of the torture and exhilaration of it
is just, I, found an incredibly
inspiring. And again, it took him decades, and I'm
sure after the legend of Bagger Vance, people
went and read his other works.
Jeniffer: Nice. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's
awesome. Yeah.
I'd like to tell our listeners that John has a great reading
list. I'm so envious of you that you make the time to
do this, because I always think I will. But you
list all of the books you read, and you don't necessarily review
them, but you. You give a little bit of a review. Yeah.
Yeah. And then you can go back and remember all the books you've read,
and people can see your reading list, and it's fantastic. Both fiction,
non fiction. and that can be
found@johnmjennings.com.
before we go, I want to
ask you to talk a little bit about the I fod. And
actually, I'm going to talk about it before you do. So again,
interesting fact of the day. And while it's not daily, it is, in
fact, interesting. Here's some topics that you've written.
John: Was that it used to be daily, and that was. That was some more work
with my therapist to make it not daily.
Jeniffer: You're like, okay, this isn't tenable anymore. So,
the surprising reading habits of adults. resilience.
Rule number two. Why less is more when making life changes.
These are topics how a fictitious town became real
and then disappeared again. I have to say, I love that one.
Beefcakes. versus dad bods.
Decoding female attraction to male
masculine masculinity and the
cruel curve of forgetting. We rapidly lose most
memories, but we can fight it. So, I mean,
your topics run the gamut. Where do you get these topics from?
Tell us about them.
John: Well, if you viewed the world as. I need to
produce a blog post. One or two. It's like one or two times a week
now, on something that's interesting.
If you viewed the world that way, then you'd start seeing these things
pop up everywhere. And so I
read a lot of fiction and nonfiction and then just kinda kind
of stay up on the world. And then I email to
myself ideas or articles. And then
I have this queue of. I don't know how long it is now. It's probably
1500 topics because I started writing this on
Groundhog's day 2017. So it's been over
seven years. but so I have this huge
queue, and what I will do is I'll just kind
of scroll through it. I'm usually writing on more
recent things, but I'll tell you, like, for instance, one of the things in my queue
from a few years ago was about y two k.
And it's you know,
I have a good story.
Jeniffer: I have a good story.
John: It was this huge deal, and then, like,
then, like, the millennium turned, and then, like, nothing happened. So was it
overblown?
Jeniffer: Yeah.
John: Or did we just actually prepare? And there's, there's a lot
of learning there besides just y two k, because it's like, this,
this thought. And, my blog post, I'm gonna write on why I've
written it, but I haven't published it yet. It's gonna be tomorrow.
But, like, I start talking about the movie Kingsmanda, the M
Secret Service, starring Colin Firth. And so, basically, it's about the
secret organization of spies, and they
basically, thwart terrorist attacks and
rogue governments and crazy billionaires
played by Samuel L. Jackson and
Colin Firth. his main character's name is Harry Hart.
He has in his office all these front pages
of, the sun newspaper over in the
UK of, just normal, unremarkable
headlines. And
the aspiring agent asked him, he was like, what are all these headlines? These
are boring. He's like, these are the
headlines the day after
I stepped in and stopped a huge
disaster.
Jeniffer: Oh, so,
John: They're a reminder. They're a reminder
of what I accomplished, because there was no big
headline that day about what happened the prior
day. And that's kind of like, so it's kind of like y two k. And
you can apply this to all sorts of areas for life. Like, y two k
ended up not being a big deal because people stepped in and
did something. I mean, worldwide, somewhere between
300 and $500 billion was spent mostly by private
companies to fix the y two k problem before
it happened. And then afterwards, people were like, well, that was just media
overhype. It was ridiculous. And there was all these people
lambasting it. But that's what happens a lot with
preparation. And I, have this coworker that calls it something
similar. The paradox of the clean house.
Like, you know, people will notice
if your house is dirty, but
often don't notice that there isn't a mess.
Jeniffer: Right, right.
John: Yeah. This applies to
all sorts of areas of life, of, not noticing
bad things that were prevented. I mean, think about all
the wars or potential nuclear attacks or terrorist
attacks that were prevented that none of us know about, of
course.
Jeniffer: Well, I mean, it's like going on a road trip, right? You remember the ones where the car
breaks down when things go wrong. You're more likely when
it's right.
John: It's all, it's all right. You know, the fact that, you know, dad got the oil changed
and whatever. But anyway, I'm writing about
y two k because I watched for, mother's day,
we watched a bunch of old home videos that we had digitized
a few months ago. And, one of them, my oldest
child, was born in 1999. And on one of her
videos of when she was an infant, the date
displays very old camcorder. But it said January
2, 2000. I was like, look, kidde, we survived
y two k. And my kids were like, who are
now 25 and 22. They were like, dad, what are you
talking about? What is y two k? Oh, my gosh.
So that's why I'm writing on y two k, because I knew that I
had saved this from a few years ago. So it's just stuff like
that. I just view the world as, what
can I write about?
Jeniffer: Well, and it's always something that
most people are going to have, will have thought about this. At one
point I'm like, oh, that's interesting. But who goes out and
actually researches it and then write about it? Well, I'll tell you who,
John.
John: Yeah. And so what's, what's been fascinating about the blog is like the
growth of my subscribers kind of grew pretty well.
Like, I started with like 100% subscribers, I think about 3000
now. But I would have thought with, with
all the promotion I did to this book and all these speeches and everything, that my, my
subscriber base would continue to grow. And it's like
basically where it was a year ago. So I'm like, well, why, why have this
topped off? But, you know, it's a flat.
Jeniffer: Line thing though, right? You get new ones and old ones.
John: Yeah. So my new ones and my old ones are my birthday.
Deaths of subscribers is, kind of,
in a stasis, but it's pretty fascinating. I
get somewhere between 15 and 30,000
page views a month. And the vast
majority of the page views are now of old blog posts.
So if somebody researches,
it's mostly from Google, but somebody
researches, why do competitors often put their stores next week each other?
Like, you know, I get 30, 40, 50,
60 clicks on that a day
because, you know, that's a very specific
question that I actually have the.
Jeniffer: Answer to now, the BBC, when you
were on talking about the lottery, was that a result
of them finding you? how did that.
John: Yeah, but that was, that was one of my Forbes articles. Yeah. Okay, so Forbes has
a huge reach and so, like, I'll publish a Forbes article and,
you know, maybe get 400 page views, but others of mine have
gotten 70, 80, 90,000 page
views. And it's just because Forbes is
such a talk about SEO. It's just this
traffic website that has a huge amount of
credibility with Google, 100%. yeah,
so that traffic's well, but
it's been fascinating to see, both with my iFOd blog and the
Forbes articles, things that I think are really interesting that just don't
end up getting clicks and other things that I just think, you know, are sort of
stupid that I write, you know, like my most clicked on
blog post is what can 16 year olds legally do? And it's
when my company turns 16, you know,
years old six years ago. And, and
I get all these 16 year olds, I guess, turning 16,
wanting to know what they can do legally, that is. And my
comments are just full of just these angsty 16
year olds, you know, asking, asking
questions like, you know, am I old enough that I can,
you know, they don't put it this way, legally emancipate from my
asshole parents.
Jeniffer: You know, oh my.
John: And they're like, they're asking this and I reply and I'm just like,
you know, I don't think so.
Jeniffer: And you reply to all of them. I think that's great, that's great.
John: Yeah, I love the 16 year olds, but, yeah, like, what a
dumb blog post. And it has, I don't know, like Hun,
probably like 200,000 page views or something. It's like ridiculous.
Jeniffer: You never know, you never know what's gonna hit. And
that's the thing, you gotta pay attention because if you're paying
attention to the engagement, then you can and
more accurately create
content that people are interested in, right?
John: Well, yes, but I kind
of try not to pay too much attention to the engagement.
Jeniffer: Yeah, you just do what you want.
John: Like, I have enough traffic that I get contacted
literally every day now by somebody that wants to pay
me for them to do, a paid post
or for me to backlink to the, you know, link to their
product or their website or whatever, or even people reaching
out offering that I'll get all this money if
I advertise, maybe I will. I mean, but
I don't want to do any of that. Yeah, so
like this blog has never been about ever
making money off of it and so
it actually really doesn't matter how many clicks I
get. But it is kind of weird because like,
but with your and Chad's help, you know, more than your help. I
mean, my, my blog website is now
a lot about me and my book and again,
3400 copies. I mean, over the past year I've
probably had, I don't know, like
200,000 page views
and still 3400 copies, so.
Jeniffer: Yeah. Right. Yeah.
John: Crazy. Crazy.
Jeniffer: Well, we are coming to the end of our time with you, John.
Is there, any advice you'd like to give people? Whether it's about
publishing, how to spend money, how to be happy, how to
be wealthy, how to invest. What do you got for us?
John: Yeah, I'd say with respect to books and publishing,
as you're writing the book, and especially as you're
publishing the book, write down
what your measures of success are.
And hopefully they're other than just sales.
Sales are nice and it's great if you make money off of your book.
If that's the number one, so be it. But write down what all
your measures of success are and some of them are going be more
intangible and harder to quantify. And if the
sales aren't going well, which for the vast majority of books,
they don't, be able to have these other
sources of success
that you can focus on other than just how many books you sold.
Jeniffer: Absolutely. Well. And, you know, for a lot of people,
especially non fiction, your book is your glorified
business card. It's an authority builder. So you're speaking and,
you know, you're making money in other ways.
but it's your authority builder. So that's very, very good
advice.
Thank you. John. We really appreciate you joining us today.
John: Thanks for having me on. It's been a great discussion. I could talk to you guys, as I
have before, all day.
Jeniffer: Absolutely. And we love it. And we'll have to have you come back
after your next book comes out, which I hope is getting
close. Is it getting close?
John: No, no, no. So I have written
the introduction, which I know to do last, so it was kind of a
throwaway. And it's horrible. It's horrendous. And
I basically have all the concepts I have the book outlined, but
my problem is I can't really
move forward on it yet because I don't have the concept
and the theme and the audience pared down enough. It's still
all too broad and I'm still in the version of. I
know. I've done so much research, I have so many examples, I have
so much to say which will just produce this
horrible word vomit that will just. If anybody
read it, it would just completely waste their time.
so I'm still in that. I'm still in
that phase and I'm tortured on a
daily basis by not being able to
succinctly express what the hell this book's about.
Jeniffer: So either you need to go back to your therapist or your book coach.
John: But one of them, you know, I'm going back to my book coach. She's on
vacation in Europe for another two weeks, but we're starting up here
in a few weeks.
Jeniffer: Nice. Nice.
John: And doctor Brog's been helpful, too. He's great.
Jeniffer: Well, thank you, doctor Brog. So, John, thank you so much
again. We really appreciate it. you can learn more about
John at johnmgennings
m.com. and do yourself a
favor. I mean, really buy his book, the Uncertainty
Solution, and subscribe to the I five. It's a great
blog. It's again at johnmjennings m.com.
and do John a favor and post a review once you've
read the book, even part of the book, wherever you get
books. And remember, if you do win the
lottery, John Jennings is your man.
John: Oh, totally.
Jeniffer: He's got you. This has been another
episode of the premise. You can visit us
online@thepremisepod.com
and subscribe and rate or review the
premise wherever you get your podcasts. Those
reviews really help us get the word out and increase our
subscriber base, and we really appreciate it. You can also
follow me, your host, here, on the premise on
Instagram enifergrace, or follow me on
Facebook at jenniferthompsonconsulting. Until
next week, thanks for listening. Goodbye.
John: Goodbye. Bye.
M.