I first “met” Noah a couple of years ago when he asked to interview me on one of his podcasts. I wasn’t familiar with him but he was very personable and I liked his interview style. The session went extremely well.

And the next day my numbers blew up on social media.

Turns out that Noah Kagan has a kijillion followers, some of whom are on other planets, that’s how extensive his “reach” is. He’s been at the startups of some of the most famous internet outfits, and been fired by most of them! He’s created eight-figure businesses and frankly admits, “I wanted to make money to prove I was successful.”

When I asked how he knew a woman he was dating wasn’t attracted to him merely because of his money he said, “I don’t really care, whatever!”

More recently he invited me to be on a wonderful series of videos he hosted on “retired millionaires in their 80s.” I only meet one of those three criteria, but there I was amidst inventors and astronauts, and to this day people write me telling me how much they enjoyed that show and my contributions.

Noah doesn’t use much of a biographical sketch (Noah Kagan was #30 at Facebook, #4 at Mint and has since created four multi-million dollar businesses. He founded AppSumo.com—daily deals for entrepreneurs—and has a popular YouTube channel for startups, Noah Kagan Presents), which is appropriate for a brilliant guy working very much in the present (and future). He’s exciting, innovative, and quite frank.

Which leads me to comment that this discussion contains significant profanity. To edit it out would be to alter the nature of the discussion, and it’s a very honest discussion.

In Conversation with Noah Kagan

I became aware of Jonah Berger after reading his books Invisible Influence and Contagious (and later, The Catalyst). Somewhat ironically, he was and is a distinguished professor at the Wharton School where my very first book in 1988, The Innovation Formula, was on the curriculum. (He may not have been born then!)

His current book, Magic Words: what to say to get your way, is fascinating.

Jonah spoke at one of my events and mesmerized the group with his expertise on persuasion and influence. He’s studied how very slight word changes can make a profound difference in results. For example, by using a justification—e.g., “because”—people are far more likely to grant you a favor or permission, even when the justification is weak. For example, “May I stop you from making copies and make some for myself because I need these copies,” actually was effective in controlled experiments.

He identifies six basic areas for language improvement, from easiest to most difficult. An example of an easy one is saying:

I’m a writer instead of I write.
He’s a runner instead of he runs.
She’s a singer instead of she sings.
And the opposite can also be created:

They are losers instead of they lost.
You can see the subtle but very meaningful distinctions in these minor language adjustments. And he also talks about confidence, and telling stories, and the willingness to ask for help as a strength.

Jonah is one of the most dynamic and effective intellects I’ve come across. He doesn’t teach. He’s a teacher.

And his example at our conclusion of someone who represents excellence in using Magic Words may just stun you.

A Conversation with Jonah Berger

We are in the midst of the largest transgenerational shift in wealth in the history of the country. Part of this are the maturing retirement funds created under the Reagan administration, and part is the succession of small business owners from founders to the second (or third) generations.

Barry Banther has worked with hundreds of family businesses, from $50 million to $500 million in revenues. He creates strategies for continuity and succession, from family ownership to outright sales with proceeds going to the family. He distinguishes between family-owned and run businesses and family owned but not run businesses (run by professional executives employed for that reason). 

He's worked with some of the most well-known families in the country whom we can’t name here but whom you would recognize instantly, as well. He talks of the three major factors involved in positioning successful family businesses, and of the sometimes incredible factors overlooked (trusts, wills, successions plans, etc.). He points out the dangers in having a family member serve as a trustee.

Barry has run his own business independent of this one, and works with his clients typically for several years in order to position them for success. He’s currently finishing work after 17 years with a company that was at $60 million and will now be sold for a quarter billion.

Small businesses are the largest creators of net new jobs in the country. The smart and longest-lived ones listen to Barry Banther. Perhaps you should, too.

A Conversation with Barry Banther

The Second Smartest Guy in the Room

Bonanza: A situation or event that creates a sudden increase in wealth, good fortune, or profits.

It was also a TV show in the heyday of westerns, and ran from 1959 to 1973, second only to Gunsmoke in longevity. It’s still shown in reruns on a variety of cable channels.

By accident, I happened to see one the other day with a disclaimer on the screen, citing racial stereotyping on the show and to be aware of it. My first reaction was that this racial and gender stereotyping was all-too-common in the past. My second, however, is that wouldn’t a viewer know that and understand how far we’ve come and how far we still may need to go? (I don’t readily recall stereotyping on Bonanza, although maybe their Asian cook was the problem somehow.)

I believe we’re all adults above a certain age, imbued with intelligence and judgment, which allows us to hold jobs, drive cars, and feed ourselves. (If a child were watching that rerun, somehow, would the kid understand the “trigger warning”?)

Is this a legitimate warning or is it just more virtue signaling, like signs and flags on lawns? Those represent to me people trying to convince you of their virtue without necessarily behaving with virtue. (I’m all for stopping at a “stop” sign for everyone, but for me a “rolling stop” is okay.) After all, the station doesn’t have to run Bonanza at all. (CVS has taken tobacco out of its stores but not sugary candies and processed foods.)

My feeling is that we learn from the past, both in our victories and our defeats, in our honorable behavior and in our sins. That’s the only way to improve the future, not by eradicating the past, or shouting opposing views down on campuses, or demanding we all take loyalty oaths to whatever cause. (Don’t laugh, they’re required in some universities for newly hired professors. You have to sign a diversity or inclusion oath, or the offer is rescinded. Remember when we were proud of having Communist professors speak their peace?)

The media today are full of derivatives (a new “Frasier” with some new characters, appropriately diverse, which is not going to equal the original); new takes on “reality” shows (a 72-year-old “golden bachelor”); celebrity game shows (Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy) where the questions are either easier or the answers are hinted at. 

Let’s be honest about the past and optimistic about the future. Revising or eradicating the past doesn’t improve the present and pretty much undermines the future.

Bonanza

According to Google, the average college/university tuition in the US is $26,000 a year, but they range up to nearly $90,000 per year.
We know this, these are statistics.
Philosophy majors in the US make an average of $62,000 per year. The same for history majors. English majors average $56,000. All teachers in public schools average $65,000 (private schools $50,000). We know this, these are statistics.
Apart from a very wealthy family supporting you, how much debt can you incur and pay off (while paying for housing, insurance, raising a family, etc.) in what amount of time given your loans and your intended occupation?
If you can’t make those numbers work without defaulting on loans or begging the government for help that others didn’t receive, maybe you need to rethink college. Or, at least, private schools.
And, of course, maybe the government needs to rethink a ridiculous system in the public sector, at least, before it implodes.

Higher Education

Why do people immediately leaving a church service proceed to cut you off in the parking lot or, immediately before it, park in “no parking” fire zones?

Don’t you think Bernie Madoff’s entire family figured out he was crooked and simply ignored what they knew? Politicians curry favor with popular positions but then feel free to change positions once elected and safe. The pandemic was, I believe, dishonestly manipulated by politicians and the medical community which led to more illness than necessary, harsher restriction than required, and more public acrimony than would otherwise have been the case.

Learn here examples of why both John Denver and Nancy Pelosi have been inauthentic. 

False praise is far more harmful than honest, negative feedback. If you lie enough on your resume, you eventually begin to really believe the lie, which is why business executives, military leaders, and academicians often face humiliating ousters late in their glorious careers. President Biden has been caught in lies about awards he claims to have received and his class ranking in law school

People blame third parties rather than being true to themselves. “It was the officiating.” “It was the weather.” “It was cheating.” 

Being true to yourself requires that you know who you are, and not pretending to be someone else, better, different. Are you attentive to others or self-centered, true to yourself or painting a false picture, creating fiction? 

Finally, learn about the institution that I think is the most hypocritical university in the country.

True to Yourself

The opposite of evolution is devolution. Merely moving forward in time chronologically doesn’t guarantee higher standards, better performance, or improvement.

Our speech has declined. People support this, claiming that speech must “evolve.” But does evolution include mindless, ubiquitous profanity, unintelligible statements, and confusing grammar? 

The arts haven’t made great strides, and on television and in the theater we see a procession of diluted revivals and low quality spinoffs. Athletes showboat over a tackle when their team is down three touchdowns.

Service levels in most hotels are down, as they are on most airlines, and the latter fly smaller and smaller jets on longer and longer flights to make money despite passenger discomfort. Traffic is terrible in most large cities—incomprehensibly bad in LA— and if you replace every single internal combustion car with an electric car tomorrow, you’d still have the same number of cars on the roads with the same traffic jams!

 Civility is lower than ever, with polarization creating terrible name-calling and an overall casualness, where clerks call customers by their first names and people wear ripped jeans and hoodies to upscale restaurants. There is an entrenched belief that a privileged few in government and in the media somehow have the right to dictate to the rest of us how to live our lives.

And we’re trapped in identity trumping talent, where merit and ability take a back seat to making sure gender, race, and ethnicity are “fairly” represented. (Yet this doesn’t occur in sports, where owners, players, and fans simply want the best talent available to win, no matter who that talent may be.)

Devolution

Have you ever wondered about how other people might see this society? The proliferation of “tip jars” when virtually no service is performed; the intense scrutiny of head injuries in football, while players who make great plays deliberately bang their heads together; cars that can go almost four times the speed limit, manufactured and sold despite it.

Why do we smuggle dogs into restaurants, refuse to merge in traffic, and think AI will become sentient and rule us when we still have to unplug and replug electronics as the primary repair principle? Laugh tracks, scripted reality shows, “influencers”: Why do we kid ourselves with this stuff?

I wouldn't mind Wolfgang Puck giving me advice on menu selections, but I resent my life trickling away while a waiter tells me his or her favorite dishes. Why do tennis and golf professionals require total silence, but quarterbacks, basketball players, and boxers do not? Why do we talk too much and too loudly in public areas, but we’re mute in elevators?

My guess is that people who borrow $300,000 to pay tuition to major in philosophy or history, which pay on average about $60,000 a year IF they can find a job, should really take more math courses. Why does an auto DUI not trigger a search for a boating or plane license? Can I lose my driving privileges at noon and take off in my Cessna for dinner?

Does the advice “don’t take this medicine if you’re allergic to it” really help if you’ve never taken it? Do we have a right to complain about uncomfortable seats on an airplane taking us cross country in six hours for $100? 

What the hell is an “influencer”?

And then there’s kale….

Cultural Curiosities

I find the use of profanity is the last resort for the inarticulate. It’s supposed to be “daring” and “shocking” but it’s actually just lazy. I sometimes surf through the comedy channels and hear standup comedians simply repeating m…..f….. over and over. There is no intellect there, and intellect and pain are actually the basis for almost all real comedy. Putting profanity on a book cover is boring, but it beats trying to come up with an appealing title.

But most alarmingly, it’s simply entered the vernacular as adjectival alternatives. I hear parents in restaurants and at home over meals say s..t at in front of their kids. WTF is used by the more delicate, but it’s profanity nonetheless. Teachers and the “elite” often use it to show they’re “hip” and “down to earth,” which is the absolutely last thing they are. At my gym, where we have personal trainers, the music is very often rap with profound profanities, n….. for blacks, and “bitch” or far worse for women, yet there are black people there as well as women.

This is simply the communication evidence of an uncivil age, a greedy and self-centered age, where people want shortcuts to success with no restrictions placed upon them and no concern for a contribution to the society and well-being around them. Everyone is entitled, and if their entitlement doesn’t work out, then they’re oppressed, and then they protest for more entitlements.

This way lies madness.

As an optimist I believe we’ll recover. But I’m the eldest of the Baby Boomers, my father fought in WW II. We can send carrier groups to the Middle East and apply economic sanctions globally. We can use drones, missiles, and remote weaponry.

But we could never win the equivalent of WW II with our contemporary society because no one would want to make the sacrifices at home that were required.

They would simply say, “Fuck that.”

Profanity

•The American Council on Education reports that 33% of universities and colleges have female presidents. 
• In the Ivy League it’s six of eight. Several for the first time ever.
• The three women in front of the congressional committee were clearly over their heads, ill prepared, stunned, and soon reversed some of their testimony.
• We’re focused on identity, not talent.
• Boards used to seek academic excellence and a track record of outstanding leadership. 
• Now they want the first woman, or minority, or trans person, or whatever.
• When Biden promised a black, female Supreme Court nominee, he found Ketanji Brown, by all accounts an excellent jurist.
• But he had reduced her to the “best black female” available, instead of the “best candidate available.” That’s demeaning.
• The Boston Association of Female Marketing Executives. Why me? Best role model.
• Your freedom stops at my nose, I think John Jay. 
• When you advocate the mass murders of 9 million people, already attempted to begin with beheadings, rape, murder, and kidnapping, that’s well beyond my nose and yours.
• And it won’t stop there. It didn’t with the Nazis, or the Russians, or the Chinese or the Khmer Rouge. It doesn’t stop with any corrupt “ism.”
• A letter writer on a university faculty claimed that students know which professors will involve them in political indoctrination before they register for the course. This is the worst kind of sophistry.
• Students pay absurd tuition to understand how to learn and evaluate differing points, not to hear absurdist, Marxist views from people protected from consequences by tenure, another ancient artifact.
• The question is who’s running the asylum?
• Oh, and by the way, after the University of Pennsylvania president was forced to resign after her failure in Congress, over 500 Harvard faculty members signed a petition supporting their president. What does that tell you?
• It tell me she doesn’t have the spine to interfere with their provocation and indoctrination.
• The “safe zones” on campus certainly aren’t intended for Jews these days, are they?

Lowering Higher Education

When you have a great talent on stage, do we really need dancers, other singers, flashing lights, and magic tricks? What does Starbucks gain giving us all those choices in its own strange language?

Have you ever noticed how visitors from Europe are astonished at the size and number of our restaurant dinner courses? Have you ever tried to quickly find something in a car’s owner’s manual? Can you read all the menu options at Dunkin’ Donuts drive through window before the person in the car behind you becomes homicidal because they haven’t had their coffee?

Do you love being “pitched” to buy credit cards on airplanes (which probably all lower your credit score)? Can you really decipher the bond issues you’re asked to vote upon with their triple negatives and boiler plate language? 

We tend to provide so many options to appear as if they raise the overall quality of our offerings. Or the lawyers insist we cover all the ground we can and leaver out nothing. Maybe the customers are at fault—do we need instructions that include “turn bike light on at night” or “do not eat or consume any of these pool chemicals”?

We don’t recycle all that wasted food. People bring home prodigious amounts, which they don’t finish there, either. Maybe we need to look at quantity in a new way.

To quote Miss Piggy, “Never eat anything you can’t lift.”

Overdone

• Cut your expenses: virtual assistants, subscription software, subcontracting (even in the Philippines).
• Move work to the client.
• Focus on advisory work, not project work.
• Increase number of sales.
• Increase amount of sales.
• Increase duration of client relationships.
• Increase solicited referrals.
• Create community evangelism.
• Produce new products and services for existing clients.
• Reduce marketing expenses.
• Reduce time waste (internet).
• Stop overdelivering/providing what wasn’t requested.
• Track your time in a journal.
• Get paid in advance.
• Never tolerate delayed payments.
• Focus on total days to cash.
• List and evaluate all possible expenses (e.g., office rent at home, medical).

How to Improve Your Profits

• We’re seeing huge changes in healthcare.
•  About 25% of patients used telehealth last year, far exceeding the 5% who accessed care this way before the pandemic.
• Pharmacies with physicians present (like pet stores with vets present)
• Physicians in private practice greatly reduced.
• The share of doctors who worked in practices wholly owned by physicians fell from 60.1% to 46.7% from 2012 to 2022.
• More people seeing nurse practitioners 
• From 2016 to 2021, the number of primary care physicians billing Medicare declined each year, from 142,000 physicians in 2016 to 135,000 physicians in 2021. 
• Physicians tell me that the paperwork, reimbursement bureaucracy, and corporate demands are terrible. Example: 5-8 minutes allowed for patient questions during visits.
• Some exceptions: dermatologists have modestly increased. There are no midnight emergencies for dermatologists.
• Faith in the medical establishment has been undermined by the conflicting medical and political decisions during and after COVID. 
• Religious institutions, education, and medicine have all suffered damage to their integrity.
• Patient costs are rising in terms of copays and over coverage denied by insurers.
• The limited government data available suggests that, overall, insurers deny between 10% and 20% of the claims they receiver
• When I consulted with RI Hospital it started every year in the red by $14 million because they were required to provide care to indigents.
• Recent studies of medical errors have estimated errors may account for as many as 251,000 deaths annually in the United States, making medical errors the third leading cause of death.
• Sepsis is a leading cause of death in hospitals.
• Emergency room waits can be 12 hours and worse.
• It wasn’t all that long ago that doctors were not washing their hands between seeing patients!

Healthcare

If you want to see writing exhaustion, this is the series. After two pretty decent seasons, the show devolved through the ensuing six as if the writers had become deprived of oxygen.

Every time someone knocks on a door, the response is, “What are you doing here?” It’s not, “Good to see you,” or “How can I help you?”, or “Are you lost?” People discussing matters in a private office are interrupted with a solution or dramatic new information by a colleague simply traipsing in from the halls.

There are continuing confrontations and apologies, prefacing further confrontations and apologies, between and among the same people, often multiple times per show. People hard to reach are ambushed in the streets—outside their offices, at hot dog carts, in public garages—as if they were on a schedule and could easily be found. Similarly, people barge into private offices in other buildings without bothering to go through security or secretaries or assistants. And the person being accosted says, of course, “What are you doing here?”

All the women, from the stars and supporting cast to the extras wear stilettos all day long. I’m assuming the producers have a fetish about this. (And the clothing is out of Vogue and hugely out of place as office attire.)

I’m told they’re trying to conjure up a ninth season. If this appears on any of my streaming platforms I’m going to ask, “What are you doing here?”

Suits

One of the major issues with a lack of success is that people don’t hold themselves accountable. They fail to meet deadlines, fail to fulfill obligations. 

They put more work into making excuses than they would have doing the actual work. The old “dog ate my homework” is now “there was traffic,” “we have child care issues,” “my internet was down.” There are no consequences for our failing our own accountabilities, and no rewards for meeting them. I’ll get around to it, unless I decide not to.

Symptoms include lateness, unpreparedness, seeking last minute help or replacements, begging for more time. If you don’t think this is systemic as well as individual, think of Pearl Harbor (or 9/11, when flight schools had Muslim pupils who wanted to learn how to take off, navigate, and fly, but not land).

We are unorganized and rarely penalized for it. We are able to blame others or the system of the deep web or some conspiracy, somewhere. Occupy Wall Street, Soak the Rich, down with Big Pharma.

And, eventually, these people justify their lack of discipline by pointing out they can’t achieve anything because they’re not getting a fair shot. That’s what happens, of course, when you’re a dollar short and a day late.

Discipline

Isn’t Starbucks just a tad affected when the have “baristas” and sizes like grande and venti and trenta and Huey, Dewey, and Louie? Is it possible not to want to body slam a “barista” who informs you they don’t like to put whole milk in a cappuccino because of “poor frothing”? I saw a couple enter a diner for breakfast carrying takeout Starbucks coffee. That level of self-absorption can cause implosion.

When it’s ten degrees with a wind-chill of minus 15, why do women in skirts and dresses have bare legs? Is that really comfortable or just a concession to fashion that can cause serious illness? When I buy shoes, I can wear them right out of the store. Women, a year later, are still complaining about the pain (and apparently some hire other women to “break them in”). 

Talking to the movie screen or to performers on stage in a theater is not a cultural manifestation. It is simple unbounded rudeness.

Trying to pay a dinner bill proportionately (“We didn’t have an appetizer and I only had one drink”) is the hallmark of a scarcity mentality. If you can’t afford to simply pay an equal share, don’t go to dinner. Eat the dog’s kibbles.

I’m not impressed by a picture of an empty hall where you will be speaking. I’m impressed by a picture of a full hall while you are speaking.

Revving your engine or playing your radio at jet-take-off levels is not a sign of masculinity, but rather a lack thereof.

Learn of the former presidential candidate who drives me into the shower.

Irritations

How do you create a million dollar idea and begin earning on it in one weekend? 

Noah Kagan is one of my buddies and a guy I greatly admire. He’s founded and sold several multi-million dollar enterprises—and readily admits to his share of failures, as well—and he’s put together an approach, summarized in Million Dollar Weekend, which is a clear recipe for success. I know about how to make millions of dollars in consulting, for example. Noah has accelerated that process for most of you.

He makes fascinating points about quantity winning over quality, in that quantity tends to find many more powerful solutions. He talks about how the Rule of 100 will get you started, and stresses something we all know but don’t practice nearly enough: You don’t get if you don’t ask.

So join us here as he explains how he simply asked people to board their private jet, and wound up flying to Boston without any luggage or plans and then was terribly disappointed in flying home again commercially! Listen to what he says about making your first sale immediately, over that weekend. 

We talk about the internet as the “great equalizer” today (neither of us had its benefits as we built our businesses), and the traits that people need to genuinely accept his counsel and make rapid progress. (Resiliency is mandatory.)

Listen to the only person ever to appear twice on The Uncomfortable Truth, and for good reason, and also find out how to access more of his smarts and this book.

A Conversation with Noah Kagan II

I’ve met Rudy Giuliani. We belonged to the same cigar club in New York (which has since lost its lease). Those were the days when he was still in the afterglow of “America’s Mayor” from the way he led after 9/11. And those were the days when crime in New York was way down. He and the police commissioner, Bill Bratton, instituted tough approaches to “minor” violations, believing they would lead to arrests and halting of major violations. So there were penalties for blocking intersections (today in Manhattan, city buses block intersections with impunity), for jumping turnstiles in subways, for the guys who tried to wash car windshields at red lights. And crime greatly diminished.
Today, we have district attorneys and other highly progressive politicians who have either made “minor” crimes acceptable or have refused to prosecute them. Here’s the simple math for those of you who never majored in math (I certainly didn’t): When shoplifters steal from stores without any worry about being prosecuted, fined, or jailed, the store ownership decides to close those stores in such areas because they can’t afford to conduct business at a loss. So the pharmacies, local retail shops, clothiers, and so forth close up or relocate. Instead of walking for a few minutes to pick up drug prescriptions it then requires a 20-minute drive or public transportation for 40 minutes to a store that’s in a safer neighborhood.
Activists demand that laws be passed preventing the chains from closing local stores, rather than laws preventing the “free” looting of local stores. Now ain’t that poor math?
And who’s most hurt by those pharmacies that close? The elderly, the disabled, the people without personal transportation, single parents, and so forth. If you don’t want stores to close, stop the cause: crime. And to stop crime, stop ALL crime. Once you forgive the “small stuff” people move on to the larger stuff. Have I mentioned that auto theft in the US and Canada is on a severe upward trend?

Rudy Giuliani

Jeff is the publisher of Performance Magazine which has featured interviews of and articles from people as diverse as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Shaquille O’Neal, Sir Richard Branson, Joan Rivers, and Larry King, among hundreds of others.

In this conversation we talk about the effectiveness, and lack thereof, of the media; the major issues on the minds of executives post-pandemic; how to convince people to accept an interview even if they haven’t heard of you or the publication; and why Jeff, living in Vegas with plenty of Super Bowl invitations, will be on an airplane heading to a National Guard operation in New England to work with the leadership.

Jeff is controversial (he will not pursue an interview with the current occupant of the White House) and outspoken. He feels that the pandemic, even now, has caused a seismic shift in global business and leadership, and that promotions are based on being seen frequently in order to be known. One of his clients says, “If I don’t know you, I can’t promote you, and if I don’t see you, I can’t know you.”

We talk about whether or not there’s a generation gap, and what talent is really all about. And we hear the story of a cabinet member appearing in Jeff’s magazine because he saw a copy on another cabinet member’s coffee table with that person’s picture on the cover, and wanted to do so himself!

A Conversation with Jeffrey Magee

The pandemic is a milestone event. Even if the medical effects have been ameliorated (which is debatable), the social impact is huge and continuing. Some of the evidence:

• Some people continuing to wear masks, which also serve as a “warning” to others, and is an extreme behavior if one isn’t otherwise medically compromised. Covid transmission interpersonally would require someone in very close proximity for an extended period of time. Also, masks prompt people to keep touching their faces, which can cause further disease spread.
• “Live” business meetings have been hugely reduced, from conventions of thousands to conferences among a few people.
• Business travel has been commensurately reduced with remote meetings preferred.
• People are suffering from mental health issues being in isolation in their homes, even with family, because of the inability to have lunch or a drink with co-workers.
• Work pressures have mounted as leaders try to figure out how to assign and measure productivity among people who are not physically present. This has ranged from many tech workers never coming into an office to Elon Musk demanding that his SpaceX workers show up physically for 40 hours a week.
		
People are more isolated than ever, and more despairing than ever. Add to the increasing automation and AI integration and the trend worsens. Once upon a time a driver could chat with a gas station attendant about politics, sports, the weather and so forth. Now, most gas stations are self-serve, attached to a mini-mart. (The gas pump, however, does talk to you, since it’s programmed to play advertisements.)
		
We’ve made some progress in dealing with business needs and travel needs since the pandemic, with supply chains and international trade, but not so much with emotional needs. Our ability to express ourselves to colleagues and acquaintances, to learn whether our positions are supported or resisted, to share a laugh or a celebration are severely reduced. 
		
It’s true that people continue to gather in large number for sports and entertainment events, whether locally or remotely, but these aren’t frequent and far from intimate. A million people might gather for New Year’s in Times Square, but they’re only sharing some moments in time and not personal sentiments. (Is there anything so superficial as an entertainer telling the audience that he or she “loves them all”?)
		
We’ve actually made more emotional progress, however, socially than we have professionally and in business settings. Coffee shops are still jammed in the mornings, restaurants are overflowing, golf courses and pickleball courts are filled. Most people in these venues know each other and continue the relationship, and newcomers are usually welcomed.

The Post-Pandemic Blues

I send out
	• Daily video
	• Monthly video
	• Weekly podcast
	• Monthly newsletter
	• Weekly newsletter
	• Blog 7 days publicly
	• Blog 7 days to community
	• Post on X 7 times per week
	• Post on LinkiedIn 3 times per week
	• Send out monthly promo piece

That’s 1,651 potential contact points with clients and prospects annually

That’s why I receive unsolicited referrals and purchases

People can always unsubscribe, I’m never offended

How long does this take me: Total is three hours a week or half a day.

I don’t self-edit or cover up mistakes

I use self-effacing humor

I tackle some tough issues

I have a huge net, so I only pull out the fish I desire

I have offerings at various levels for everyone

I market before I create content

I rely on external resources  for technology, etc.

I’m faster at both quality and quantity than ChatGPT

Does this really work?

Well, you’re listening right now, right?

Quantity Over Quality

We’re going to need tens of millions of electric charging stations to satisfy goals for electric cars in six years set by the government. It looks like we might have 500,000. 

Electric cars might represent zero carbon footprint improvement. The mining of lithium is dirty and expensive and requires a lot of energy. Disposal of the batteries presents similar problems. Fires are a danger and are harder to extinguish. 

Hertz is returning or cancelling orders for a thousand electric vehicles because they are not in demand for rentals and are hard to maintain. Ford has pulled back investment in battery plants. Toyota has committed solely to hybrids. 

I’ve driven in them and driven them myself. Meh. Not a big deal, and still limited ranges. 

We’re going to have to overcome our own hubris and realize that climate change isn’t going to be reversed and maybe not even halted. We can’t build (and insure) housing on the water’s edge or in forests. We can’t expect to ban internal combustion engines, gas stoves, and gas leaf-blowers (which is ludicrous). 

What we DO need in the US is energy independence (which we once had and can easily have again with our huge reserves), control of the southern border to permit legal immigration for white and blue-collar jobs, and a vast improvement in educational equal opportunity.

Otherwise it may be “lights out” for reasons other than insufficient electrical power.

Electric

Some things we can control, some we can influence, and some we can neither control nor influence. It’s important to understand the differences, and it’s vital to never cede control nor underestimate our abilities to control.

Facing a prospect for the first time, what do you think you can control, influence, or affect neither? (Listen to the podcast to hear the examples.) Do you tend to surrender control because the prospect is powerful or wealthy? Do you sacrifice personal time, change important personal appointments, and inconvenience your family over client issues that the client could easily change?

You can control where your kids go to school, what kind of insurance you carry, where to go on vacation, and how to deal with colleagues. You can certainly influence the boss, clients or prospects, or suppliers, a lot more than you think (or currently are). 

If nothing else, consider this: language controls discussion, discussion controls relationships, and relationships control business.

The larger and more diverse our vocabulary, the more we can use metaphors, analogies, metonymy, hyperbole, and so forth, the more we can influence. When someone objects to my fees I point out that my fees are less than they pay to plow the parking lots, mist the plants, and compensate for spillage and spoilage. Where is the best ROI?

You best ROI, of course, is listening to and heeding this free podcast!

Control

Do you need shoes that you can put on without touching them, without bending down, without even sitting down? Barring those whose illnesses or conditions prohibit bending, just how lazy are the rest of us becoming?

Skechers sells some shoes which have a patented device near the top of the heel that allows you to slip into them without manipulating the shoe: no shoehorn, no wiggling, no close proximity at all. (Of course, you have to have the mental capacity to know your toes go in first.) I can understand this if you’re, say, 90. But they’re advertising this for everyone. How lazy are we becoming?

Our luggage has wheels these days. People can gamble on their smart phone apps and talk into their wrists. We may think that garage door openers and TVs “must” be remote, but why fireplaces? You no longer build a satisfying fire any more, you program one. How lazy are we becoming?

Vacuum cleaners now self-clean, and lawn mowers self-mow. Cars can self-park. Gym trainers assist their customers in lifting weights. Siri keeps interrupting intelligent thought to see if she can be of further annoyance. People try to cut turkeys with electric knives, which is like using a blowtorch to light up a cigar. How lazy are we becoming?

One of my cars “hands” my seatbelt to me, and the car manuals are six hundred pages because of all the automatic features. Meanwhile, I haven’t used cruise control, which has been on every one of my cars, in 25 years. 

And now we have those Japanese toilets….

Skechers

The more pressure you feel, the more your talent is “masked” and the worse you perform. You control pressure.

You can’t allow yourself to feel “judged” every time you speak, write, or perform. And when and if you do need feedback, never accept it from unsolicited sources, which is always for the sender’s benefit, not yours. Seek solicited feedback from trusted people you respect.

It’s fine to feel anticipation and eagerness to proceed, which should heighten your performance, but not fear and dread which will diminish it. The greatest athletes are who they are not because of their everyday performance, but because of how well they perform in championship games, under maximum pressure from the other team, the media, and fans.

Maintain perspective. No one is shooting at you. You should fear a tornado in Kansas in a storm, but not a question in a conference room during a meeting. 

We too often create pressure on ourselves by comparing our intended performance against great performances we’ve seen, and therefore fear being seen as inferior to them. In fact, we need simply to prepare well, do our best, and then go home. Our lives are greater than a single event or a single day. 

When you’re afraid to post on social media, or have to rewrite or re-record something six times, you’re simply creating your own tornado. And this isn’t Kansas anymore, Dorothy.

Pressure

Not just about the government or the banks or big Pharma, but even sports when YOUR team loses! “The refs were crooked, it was rigged.”

9/11 was an “inside” job, and we never landed on the moon.

Key elements: belief in a pattern underlying the event; provocative and deliberate plans; coalitions or groups are involved, even disparate ones; there is a clear and present danger; secrecy that is hard to justify or believe by non-conspirators. Groups blamed are typical targets: wealthy, politicians, business leaders (especially bankers), historically stigmatized minorities, such as Jews or Roma.

Conspiracists defy pragmatism and evidence, e.g., “Princess Diana actually killer herself or faked her death.” 

The threat of lack of control forces insecure people to find cause and effect outside of their control that explains their fate. (THEY are out to get me/us.) Paranoia is a key element, involving perceived victimization, social isolation, and the refusal to admit that others succeed by their talents and hard work. Paranoia generally starts individually but then lends itself to “groupthink.” 

Conspiracy thinking, or the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories, shares several characteristics with paranoia. Both involve ideas that harmful outcomes can be attributed to malevolent agents rather than to more benign or non-agentive causes. Other similarities in concept are notable, for example, both paranoia and conspiracy thinking represent suspicions that can be hard to falsify and may concern events or theories that later emerge to be true, for example claims about pandemic demands by the government that, scientifically, were incorrect and ineffective.

In an increasingly volatile age, without confirmations of power and control, people default to these “settings.” This will become worse.
Perhaps paranoid to begin with, see this as a conspiracy, though I doubt that Trump ever did.

Conspiracies

Primary and secondary

1 End the “warehousing” of children
• Chronology is silly and hundreds of years old
• Socialization is important, but not at this cost
• Move kids as they learn
• Measure learning by outcomes: application, tests, etc.

2. Stop defaulting to college educations
• Prepare for a range of employment opportunities
• I sat next to too many duds in college
• Teach life skills: civics, account management, do-it-yourself repairs (remember shop and home economics)
• Growing tendency to hire competence and not credentials

3. End the teachers’ unions control of schools
• Introduce carrots and sticks for teachers
• The Rubber Room in New York City
• Albert Shanker’s quote
• Randi Weingarten’s $600,000
• The customers are the parents and kids, not teachers
• Make the job rewarding and also demanding
• Recreate school “open houses”
• End the mainstreaming of behavioral problems
• End the inclusion on non-English speakers
• My experience with Tourette’s Syndrome
• Teachers have lowest grade point averages and attend the worst academic schools
• Former president of URI: People with poor finances and/or grades go to inexpensive and mediocre schools
• Get rid of failed progressive nonsense like “new math”
• Allow for school choice of all kinds with vouchers

4. Change school financing
• The affluent/tax/attraction/more tax trap
• Pool money within the state for equal distribution
• Create true equal opportunity with equivalent resources, quality, teaching across the state

5. Enforce discipline
• Assistant principle might go to jail for stopping a female, black student from heading for a fight, she claimed he physically abused her in doing so. She had threatened the fight.
• Mandate school officers. Anyone who says that children are fearful of uniforms and police should understand they’d be more fearful of being beaten up or shot at.

6. Apply common sense and avoid political correctness and the woke
• Teachers may not involve themselves with personal, sexual, gender, and similar issues without involving parents, including names kids use, how they dress, and how they want to be addressed.
• Teachers’ personal politics, gender beliefs, and religious beliefs are not permitted in the classroom.

How I'd Change Education

Al McCree is a former fighter pilot who has flown 196 missions! He is an executive in the music business and has managed all kinds of talent. He’s also worked with top business executives.

We talk about the differences and similarities of combat flying and the competition of the music business and the challenges of changing hearts and minds in a business setting. Ironically Al thinks music can be a distraction at work, even though we see so many people with ear buds in all kinds of workplaces. 

I challenge Al a bit on his belief that DNA and genetics are important for success. We both reflect on the wonderful, developmental feedback we obtained at the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation (and why he can play a musical instrument and I can’t, authoritatively validated). 

We fondly recall Jeanne Robertson, a brilliant speaker and storyteller who, in a beauty contest, enthralled the judges with her “talent” of twirling an invisible baton, which she lit on fire and had it descend on the judges’ heads. 

The role of luck is analyzed in any pursuit, and Al feels it’s a stronger factor than might be realized. But what is luck, really? And before we end we discuss how to exemplify what will make your kids successful, especially if they’ve led a privileged life and may not have the parents’ “hunger.”

A Conversation with Al McCree

I was required to engage in a “liberal arts” education at Rutgers. That meant that I had to have credits in languages over two or three years, science every year, history for two years, and English for two years. Although I majored in Political Science, because I thought I was going to law school (!), these other classes were required.

The length and amount of education is far less important than the quality and depth of education. A lot of people attend school (sometimes for far more than four years) and simply get their “ticket stamped.” I sat next to a great many students who were no better off leaving school than they were entering it except that they had more job prospects.

In these times, with competence more sought than credentials, that might no longer be true. Airlines are looking for qualified pilots whether or not they have a college education. We have a shortage of air traffic controllers. Do they need college educations? An electrician doesn’t.

We tend to focus on business books and the “idea du jour.” I had a client who wanted to change her Fortune 100’s organization every time she went to a new seminar or read another book. 

It is okay to be the smartest person in the room—someone has to be. It’s not okay to try to be the second smartest. You’ll earn what that means when you listen to the podcast.

You’ll also hear my two key criteria to determine intelligence. See if you pass my test.

A Great Education

How suffering has become the proof of existence and why we all need to reflect back on Descartes.

Episode 38: I Suffer, Therefore I Am

Alan Weiss's The Uncomfortable Truth® is a weekly broadcast from “The Rock Star of Consulting,” Alan Weiss, who holds forth with his best (and often most contrarian) ideas about society, culture, business, and personal growth. His 60+ books in 12 languages, and his travels to, and work in, 50 countries contribute to a fascinating and often belief-challenging 20 minutes that might just change your next 20 years.

Alan Weiss's The Uncomfortable Truth®

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