Podcast appearances and mentions of david i'm

David: So today I'm talking with a pastor Benjamin.  What's your full name and what your role at Kijabe Hospital? Benjamin: My full name is Pastor Benjamin Kioko Mutuku.  My role in Kijabe Hospital is being the staff chaplain in the department of chaplaincy, dealing with the staff in the hospital - spiritual, psychosocial needs.   David: I don't think this role exists, very much, in America. I don't think it's normal.  Usually when people think of hospital chaplains, they think of what your teammates do - visiting with patients and visiting with families in crisis.  But, a lot of your work is with staff members.   Benjamin: Yes, yes.  David: I assume probably a lot of that work is in crisis, maybe some of it is during peacetime.  Benjamin: Yeah, one of the main things that I think the hospital had in mind when they advertised for the position, was the realization that the staff get so much fatigued. While we have chaplains who talk to patients and chaplains who are assuring in relatives and praying with them, no one does that with the staff. And so that's how the role came up.   Coming in, it was interesting, it was one of those difficult things, that you don't know that exactly where to start. It was a new office. I came in with my senior, Reverend Ndivo, who was coming in as a manager. For both of us, it was new.   What year was that?  Benjamin: It was 2014 and we were...  David: So, we came (to Kijabe) together. . . Benjamin: Yes, we are growing old. Yes, so the has been several years of a lot of the experience. I think I have learned a lot being in in this office  David: Maybe it's such an obvious question is that it’s silly to ask, because I know most people listening this are medical, but what are the challenge or challenges for being a staff, a medical person, in this environment? Benjamin: One of the greatest challenges is trying to understand people in their context.  A lot of times the things that people struggle with at work, they carry them from home.  So, its. . .that people have baggage they're carrying, and that affects their productivity. Secondly, us being a Christian institution there's always the question of how we integrate my faith and break the sacred/secular divide.   My faith and a profession. How integrate them? So that I'm a Christian throughout and not just one in a while David: Yes, you're not here for eight hours being one thing and then home being another. I feel like this got me. Something I had to do for friends of Kijabe, they wanted a donation to be used only for secular purposes, but there's not a delineation between secular and faith-based in Kijabe, A CT scan is not a Christian CT scan or a non-Christian CT scan.  It's a CT scan, and its part of the whole process of giving somebody healing.  There's not such a clear delineation between somebody's body and their mind and their spirit.  Benjamin: Exactly.  David: And that's what you guys are trying to address.  Benjamin: Sure.  A Christocentric approach life is ideally the mentality that we are looking at.  That every staff who comes to Kijabe hospital realizes that everything we do, we want to do it to the glory of God. Yet, they come with marital issues.  They have the baggages of relationships, they have baggages of families breaking up and economic issues.  A lot of times you meeting people here, and you're asking yourself, "So we exactly where do I start?” I think one of the refreshing facts around my experience, I realize that I am not and end.  I have the responsibility of pointing them to Christ.  That makes the difference, and I think that has helped my work be a bit easier.  Someone comes with an issue that is affecting their productivity, affecting their delivery. I want to point them to Christ as a solution to their issues.  Another person who comes - the doctors, nurses have had a bad outcome and they need debriefing.  I’ll need to come in and help with debriefing them and also supporting them, psycho-socially, psycho-spiritually.  All that has been happening around on this office and it's quite an interesting. . . adventure, I’ll call it.  David: So, pretend I'm a doctor and I just made a mistake, or I have done something that led to a bad outcome.  What would you say to me? I would want you first to appreciate your limitation as a person, as, actually, a gift that points you to God.  You realize that you are not one who owns all knowledge, it is owned by God.  I think one of the most important things is when you give your best, at times it's not even the best there is, that can ever be given.  Even sometimes, your best will not always be the best.   I want to help you come to that realization and I want to walk you through your mind.  What exactly is going through your mind?  What did you expect from yourself? And do you think that you had greater expectations of yourself than you can actually do, or did you rely on the knowledge of God.  Are you getting to a place of self-blame?  I just want to walk you out of that thought process to a place you can actually say that, it's okay, at times, to not know and be okay with it. I think what I want to bring out of your mind is the fact that you are not the solution to people's lives.  You are a vessel that God uses.  Together as you are doing the work you are doing to help people, you are pointing to His sufficiency, not your own.   David:  Wow.  That’s really, really important. That was actually a huge part of Arianna’s journey before we even came here, was getting some advice that the control that somebody has, as a doctor, is limited.  They can do their best they can do the extent of their knowledge, but this person does not actually hold the keys to life and death. Benjamin: That's right, exactly.  David: Sometimes a person does their best and it doesn't work out, and sometimes they make mistakes and the patient is fine.  Benjamin.  That’s the truth.  Exactly.  Yes.  You make mistakes that you are really sure are actually mistakes you're wondering how this patient is surviving.  And they’re doing very well.  The sovereignty of God out of the whole situation stands out.   David: Alright, so imagine I’m. . . who should I be?   This time, I want to be a new College of Health Sciences clinical officer. Let’s say I just finished my clinical officer training and I’m hired on at Kijabe Hospital.   Who do you want me to be in five years? And then what steps? Or how do you guys get involved in moving somebody toward what you want them to be? Benjamin: One of the great designs that I’ve realized works is that every person who comes in, we make the assumption that they are growing Christian, because they have professed their faith as Christians before they come here. And, so we want to build them, to see the theology of medicine and understand it.   Now, I call this ideally, practical theology, where you're trying to apply theory into daily issues. And so, even for journalism, for anything that you get to do, I believe there is a theology, there's God’s perspective of that. And so, there must be a theology for security. There must be a theory for all the disciplines, including clinical medicine. Ideally, we want to help people learn, “What are the basics of theology around suffering, and what is God’s perspective on suffering?” Right there we see it in Genesis all the way through Revelation.  We want these people to see the world in the context of scripture rather than doing it the other way ‘round.    We want people to have that mindset, so we take people through discipleship that helps them learn their place before God and learn who they are and how to grow in their faith, but have very important conversations is all this goes on, conversations that include:  Why do people suffer?  Why do good people go through hard times?   Why is it theologically correct for people to actually expect bad times and hard times?   You want this person to be able to see the world in the eyes of God.  You bring enough disciplines into it.  You have ethics, you have Christian ethics, you have theology, you have medicine and you're trying to see all that in the face of “what does the Bible say about all these things?”  So that, at the end of the day, when the clinician sits back and they're watching and they're looking at a patient five years after, they have all this information amalgamated in their minds and they are able to process.  This person, beyond the cure and everything, they need to hear about the love of Christ. That’s the big goal, the big goal we have.   David: It's interesting, the theology of medicine. I've been thinking about this week, this week, because I don't... I think, again, in the secular versus sacred, I think some of this is lost. A lot of the framework for medicine is based off of Christian theology of suffering, of compassion. The story of the Good Samaritan is pivotal in medicine.  We definitely practice this in Kijabe, right? Anybody who walks through the door, we care for and treat, no matter their background, no matter where they came from. It’s the idea of loving our neighbor, whoever our neighbor is. That's a fundamental, fundamental aspect of medicine, that you treat without judgement.  You don't withhold mercy from anybody.  I do think that's a concept that emerged out of Christian tradition.  Benjamin: Yeah, one of the main things that Christ talks about throughout. . . and it's interesting, when he's talking about what is going to be happening when he's separating the goats and the sheep.  he's talking about, at the end of the day, he’s going to be saying, “I was sick, and you never cared for me.  I was in jail, you never came. . .”  The ministry of mercy and compassion.  Out of that, he’s going to tell people, “depart from me ye workers of iniquities.” It’s very interesting that he gives that story to talk about how he's going to separate, which means that these things are very important.  Not just to the world that we are in, but in the Christian faith, they are a manifestation of who we really are. If Christ is in us, then we will desire mercy.  If Christ is in us, if he’s the one working in us, we will give grace, even when it doesn’t seem logical.  We will do more, and Christ will work in us to achieve this in us. That’s very, very, very important. David: That's fascinating, and I think there's something so compelling about that.  There’s such a divide between what people say they believe and then any kind of good action.  There are so many examples of people talking and talking and talking, then doing bad things. But then I see these people come here and I think it's very refreshing for them to realize, "Oh wow, there are people who are actually just doing things motivated by faith.” Rather than. . .faith is used as a weapon, oftentimes.  But here, it's used as, for lack of a better term, a bandage.  It’s used to bring healing and its used to bring wholeness.  Benjamin:  Two things, I’m thinking at the moment about the source of morality and absolute morality.  One of the writers of African theology talks about Africans being notoriously religious.  You know, even before the missionaries came these guys would just walk through the forest and find this very big tree and someone decides that, “if someone can make such a big tree, then there must be God, and this must be his home.”  And so, they will start making shrines around such places. And so, they believe that there is a God who is the source of morality, right and good and all that. On the other side, I think we have a lot of relativism that has come out. What do you believe is a source of morality, why you do the good that you do? Are you're doing good because you believe in the right thing to do? Or you doing good so that good is done to you?   And so, a lot of the people who come here, including Mslims. . .there is actually a narrative among the S_mali, and most of the M_slims who come around, say that “God lives in Kijabe.”  They believe that the Christians in Kijabe are actually Christians who manifest the living God.   We usually have, in the waiting areas, some preachings that are given, and the M_slim family members that have been keeping a relative here realize at the pastor is supposed to come to preach there around 12:30 has not come, so they go to look for him. They will find him and say, “I did have not see you today. What happened?  We are waiting for you. We're waiting for you to come and share.”  That just shows you there is a great expectation of the people who come here.  There is something very fascinating about Kijabe. So how better would you do that then support the staff who are supposed to be the vessels that God is supposed to use. David: It's interesting, I've had patients say that to me before. I’ll say, "Why are you here?” And they say, “Because you will pray for me. Doctors here will pray for me.”  That’s a big deal. Benjamin: I have been involved in interviews and a lot of people keep talking about that. “I've had heard about Kijabe, even before you start a surgery, they pray for you, they encourage you.”  I want to be part of such a team. Keeping and encouraging such culture is one of our greatest responsibilities. David: You answered one of my questions - How do you endure?  How do you personally walk through challenging situations? It sounds like your (approach) is just realizing this is not, “This is not my responsibility to fix it.” “It’s my responsibility to, to listen and share and to...but to point. . . Benjamin: to Christ. I like music though.  Oftentimes in the evening, I go find my guitar and write. I write things that looked like abstract, but I know what they mean. Just trying take it out. I think you'll come through difficult times and you get to a place, where you're totally alone in the world, and just to cry at just take it out when you feel like it's just too much. One of the things that we need, a lot in the hospital is a clinical psychologist. We have faced a lot of our people or students who are in need of that.  We’ve tried to collaborate with guys who are able to manage such people. And I've gotten to the point where I think, I think I should just do it.  I also need that to understand exactly, “How do I manage in all these things, and how do I also help the staff?”  We are getting to places where people can get disorders.  Mental health is something that nothing much has been done around. And so, one of my greatest goals this year is to heighten awareness around the mental health. David: When you say nothing is done around (mental health), that’s in Kenya, not just in Kijabe,  Benjamin: I don't know the statistics right now, but we hardly have a Clinical Psychologist here. So, you'd actually give advice you'd share with people, and you cannot manage you cannot prescribe, you can’t do anything. So, we end up sending them to Kenyatta... Some of them are students, some are our staff.  I wish I knew more.   I keep reading much about that. I've been reading much about theodicy, ethics and trying to use all that knowledge. I think I've got into that place where I just need to just go ahead and do it... Because I think it would add great value, not just for the staff, but we also get even patients we get patients who come having tried suicide and you can already tell that they are actually in disorders - borderline disorders and all kinds of disorders, potential and you feel you don't have the capacity to deal with this.   David: That’s an important framework that should not be a given here (in Kenya) because I think in a lot of churches, answers have always been spiritual to mental health problems.  Maybe they are sometimes, but a lot of them are an actual medical condition that that I need a medical answer. That's not to the detriment of something spiritual but it's just a realization of "This is something happening in somebody's brain. . .” Benjamin: And it's a process that needs to be worked on.   Yeah, so this actually the... What has happened to me, there is a feeling that is the belief that is attached to it, but there is actual pain that needs to be processed.  At times that whole process is ignored.  At the end of the day, the rates of suicide are going really high. At the end of the day, we see a lot of depression getting to people, and they don’t know that it is even depression.  So, hopefully, if God gives us the grace, we would be able to heighten the dissemination around such issues.  People should not keep to themselves, there is actually a way that we can deal with our issues.  David:  It is something that will happen, just not soon enough, I'm sure. I've heard with the new interns the government is requiring them to do some psychiatry rotations.  The problem is I think there's only three psychiatrists in the country.  What do we have, 47 million people? It’s the chicken and the egg problem.   Benjamin: It’s a big problem.  I know every theologian cannot be a medic, but we can do what we can with what is at our disposal.  And I think the most important thing is for me every day to go home feeling that I gave my best.   David: Kabisa.  You said a word, a minute ago I wanted to come back to a seminary word, theodicy. What is theodicy? Benjamin:  The concept behind theodicy is the theology of suffering.In it carries a lot. It carries God’s justice, it carries God’s righteousness, it’s about how God has spoken around something through scripture.  What light are we supposed to cast on it?  Our worldview as Christians.  I think that it's one of the most important things, I think should be every Christian institution.David: I'm trying to think about my own perspective on suffering. I’ll be curious what you think of this.  Where I’ve personally come to is: I will never fully understand why, but the suffering is very real, but our call to action seems fairly clear.  Our call to action as people of faith, is to step into it, is to go towards suffering with whatever gifts or talents or abilities, or resources to. . .Benjamin: to make it bearable. David: Yeah, that's a good way to phrase it - and try to carry somebody's burdens. Yes, because there are many things we can't eradicate, but presence is a big deal in suffering.Benjamin: It is.   I have a friend of mine who is an atheist.  We went to high school together, and those are actually some of the things that made him walk away from the faith.  He believes that religion is the cause of all pain that is in the world.   Scripturally, we see a different cause of pain.  We see sin entering into a magnificent world.  At this point a lot is happening against humanity that was never supposed to be. But whose choice was it?  Who is responsible for the pain and suffering?  It's actually more of a wage that we’re getting, of course, because the wages of sin is death.  And sin entered all the way since Adam.  When we are looking at pain, our human minds teach us to look for someone to blame.   You meet a lot of patients who have found the person is they want to blame.   "You can’t say that God cares about me when I lost my ninth pregnancy."  "There’s no way you can say God cares about me when I have never owned a child that alive."   "I’ve undergone 30 surgeries, how do you say that God loves me?  What is it that I did against him?"  So, there’s a lot of pain that we are going through.  The greatest premise that we need to be around is the fact that we are in a fallen world.   Evil and pain happens because we are part of a fallen world.  At times we think we are not responsible for it, but think about Adam and Eve.  It’s very easy for us to throw the blame, but given the chance, I don’t think we would have done better.   David: There was a really good line in a new song that just came out recently. It's re-written as if Adam had said... “Eve, put the apple back on the tree, we have everything we need.”   I feel like the answer there is no answer. Yeah, the lady who lost a ninth pregnancy, that's a perfect example. What she needs in that moment is not a sermon, she needs somebody to love her and to say, this is to say You, you didn't cause this. It’s not a fault with you.  It happened.   Benjamin:  It happens and it could have happen to anyone. We are in a fallen world, we're in the presence of pain. David: Yeah, and the opportunity to love somebody through that, is probably the only way for them to experience some kind presence of God, I feel like, in that in that bottom, lowest situation.  Benjamin: Exactly, just that presence, the ministry of presence, as they call it.  And also trying to listen to them knowing that you are not called the answer to every question they have. God knows how to answer his questions.   David: Ooh, that’s a good one Benjamin: It may be today, maybe two years after, 20 years after. . .Eventually, he knows when and how to say it best.   David: I think that's the thing I'm struck by with this conversation, you're overwhelming trust.  You have a huge level of trust.  That’s a big deal. Benjamin: I think the one who's been forgiven more, loves more.  I have been this guy who's grown up through my teenage life - and I was a real teenager.  I have seen God walk with me.  In times God has taught me lessons that are really, really painful...the hard way.  Talking about my life, the last 34 years, it tells you I am growing old.  It's been a work that I have seen God involved in, throughout.  For instance, this past year, we have had a lot of issues around spirituality and mental health, just trying to walk with these people made me feel I need first to halt have been doing my Master’s degree in leadership and management, and see if I can do a clinical medicine so that it answers the questions are asking and helps people deal with their real issue. And so, at some point, I get to that part where if it's not adding value to the people I am serving, that I don't need it. David: That’s actually a big deal to put a professional thing on hold for the people you're doing. Actually, I had a similar experience this year, I was coming for an education program that I think would be really good.  But I had to stop and think, “Is this actually helping me help the people I care about, is it helping me serve the people I here to serve?”   At the end of the day, it would be fun, it would be interesting, but as a distraction for my actual work. And I need to stop, and I need to focus. For me, actually, a lot of times, focus in just having time and energy to be available and be present.  Too walk around the hospital and at the run into somebody, to have a conversation, and connect.   Benjamin: And that brightens people’s lives greatly.  There’s nothing great as someone who doesn’t even know me or where I come from, but they actually care about me.  I don't think there's a greater way to point people to Christ.   I remember a guy who went to seminary, ahead of me.  After class, if he didn't have a class, and he was not in the library, he would be away evangelizing around the community.  Throughout, that was his life. And so, we called him evangelist.  Three months after his graduation, he passed on. It was a great testimony to everyone, because everyone felt that he has done his part. I mean, he put his priorities right. Getting academic accolades is great and getting a lot of them, it gives a lot of titles and makes you feel important.  But you have not realized your importance until you have lived a significant life. I think significance is about what value you add to people.  That’s the most important bit, and I think God quickens our hearts towards this.   David: That would be a great billboard, significance is what value you add to people.  Significance is not what you get, it's what you give.  Benjamin: It’s what you give. I heard John Maxwell once talk about significance.  Significance is the place you leave legacy around.  Success is when you add to yourself.  But, significance is when you add value to others.  You actually leave a legacy at significance, not at success.  Success has all been about you.  Significance has been about what you have been to others.   Christ, I think, looking throughout his life, if we choose to be Christocentric, it’s about what we give, not what we save for ourselves.   So, at the end of the day, the question is “How do I become more effective and efficient in what I give, so that it has a lasting influence in people's lives?” David: Wow.  That's really wise the way you just said that, “How do I become effective at that?” Because it's not just to give until there's nothing left of you.  That can be selfish, “I'm just giving, giving, giving, until I have nothing left and look at me.” But giving in a way that actually helps the people you're trying to serve might be different from abjectly pouring yourself out in a not effective way. There's still logic and still a lot of purpose to it. Actually, I think giving a healthy ways. . .sometimes you're pouring yourself out completely, but I think if it's in line with your gifts and in line with what God has given you, it can be very fulfilling personally also. Benjamin: That’s how you find that is a should at the end of the day, that's how you find the satisfaction in a calling.  That’s how you find peace. You may actually not carry a lot home. At times, you may not even have enough for yourself and family.  But the fact that you actually are living your purpose is great.  Christ was purposeful in everything that he did, including the last breath he gave out. He was purposeful.  I think that's the calling.   David: How do you mean, the last breath he gave it out? Benjamin: It was all to the glory of the Father.  He first talked to the Father and said, into your hands I hand over my breath.  He didn’t breathe last purposelessly.  He breathed it out into the hands of God the Father, so that God would use it to bring redemption around here.   David: Okay, this goes back to seminary also.  I didn’t go to seminary, I narrowly escaped.  But, the Hebrew word for breath and spirit or the same word, right? Sometimes it's translated as spirit, but it's the same thing. “I give you my life, I give you my spirit, I give you my breath,”  Benjamin: Yes, interesting.  It all goes back to the fact that God created man and put in him. . .what breath?  The life-giving breath.  It came from God.  Whatever comes from God has to go back to him in value.  God is a good investor.  He does his thing wisely.  So, when Christ is giving back his life to the Father, he gives it back with a world saved. . .a whole redeemed world.  Ideally, it is finished.  Christ gives it back to God full of value.   I think everything that we give, even smiles, should be purposeful, should be right from the heart, should have the concept of bringing good fruit back to God.   David: Wow, that’s amazing.   One other question I have for you.   A lot of people who would listen to this are people who come out of short-term visitors, some people who come into the hospital.  Is there anything that they should know just about what it's like to interact with hospital staff as somebody coming in from outside for a short time? Benjamin:  I think that that's a very important question. Because a lot of people come to Christian institutions thinking that it's next to heaven.  They forget that these are normal people who have their own struggles.  Each one of us are different places when it comes to sanctification. All of us are growing. And so, one of the most important bits is - they should always come with the question of “What value can I add to the lives of these dear ones.  And what value can they add into my life?” I think that's one of the greatest questions that they can keep asking throughout. David: That's a great perspective. Actually, it’s making two assumptions. It’s both, I have something to offer, and I have something to learn. Having both of those attitudes simultaneously, I think that's a really good attitude toward life in general.   Benjamin: It builds trust amongst people, because people cannot work together unless there is trust.  But with that openness to learn open heartedness.  As for someone who's coming here, you want to carry a very objective (view) that this people all made in the image of God as I am in the image of God.  That means there is a lot for me to take from them, there is a lot for me to take from them in terms of learning.  So, it’s mutual, and that calls for trust.   Trust has to be from a very objective kind of understanding.   Also, the people who are on the receiving end, need to realize that these people are not coming here because they have everything they need, they are also looking for opportunities to serve.  These are a great foundation for them to carry the right perspective.   A great question to ask is, “Why has God opened this opportunity for me?”  Because probably it's a smile I need to share with someone, and that may be all.  It may be “insignificant,” but it may mean everything to someone.   David: I feel like there's really, really great value in noticing people. There are these universal principles, right? Somebody being noticed and feeling valued.  It's just huge for somebody to think, “Wow, this person from, whether it's from Kimende or whether it's from Atlanta, this person is genuinely interested in who I am.” Exactly, I think that is such, that's a powerful. . . Benjamin: Yes, it’s quite an intentional approach to people, and I think that's how God wanted to be for us.  When I'm talking about death, a lot of times, I ask people what is death, according to them.  I think death is a separation of the physical and non-physical.  I’m dark right, and you are white, right?  But, that person speaking in me, have you ever met him, leave alone this body?  You have never seen him.  Are you able to tell his complexion?  Do you know his height?  Let’s assume you’re a surgeon, where does he hang inside this body?  I don’t think you will find his home, I don’t think you are able to see him.  This is what we call a “tent,” and there’s a real person.   We have tribes, different ethnic groups, we have different citizenship and all that. But that person speaking in me is the human person that I am.  The truth is, that person probably has no complexion, no gender, that is the real me.  If we can learn to look for that person in every person we meet, then we would realize that people are dignified, and people are the same.  At the end of the day that is the person who God breathed in this body and he lived.  At the end of the day, that is the image of God in us.   We will learn to see beyond complexions, we’ll learn to see beyond tribes.  We would learn to see as God sees, and that’s wisdom.   David: Wow, thanks Benja!  That’s a good way to close.

An unwelcome conversation Uma conversa inoportuna Excuse me, may I sit down? Desculpe me, posso me sentar? Please do.Thanks very much. Por favor. Muito obrigado. Ah that's better! My name's Brian Sellers. Ah, assim é melhor! O meu nome é Brian Sellers. Oh, very interesting. Oh, muito interessante. Yes, I work in London. Do you work in London too? Sim, eu trabalho em Londres. Voce trabalha em Londres também? Yes, I do. Have a cigarette. Sim, eu trabalho. Pegue (tenha) um cigarro. No, thank you. This is a non-smoking compartment. Nao, obrigado. Este e um compartimento para não fumantes. Oh, do you mind if I smoke? Yes, do! Oh, você se importa se eu fumar? Sim, me importo. I'm cold. Are you cold too? No, I'm not. Eu estou com frio. Você também está com frio? Oh, you have a paper. I don't like reading. I prefer talking. Oh, voce tem um jornal. Eu nao gosto de ler. Eu prefiro falar Yes, I see. Oh, deu pra ver. (estou vendo) No, you hear. Ha! ha! ha! Nao, deu para ouvir.(está ouvindo) Ha! ah! ah! Goodbye sir. Oh! goodbye. Adeus, senhor - Oh adeus. Do you mind if I smoke? Você se incomoda se eu fumar.? Mind your head. Cuidado com a cabeça. He's cold; he's hot; Ele está resfriado.(com frio) ; ele testá com calor (esta quente) he's unlucky.. Ele não tem sorte. A polite conversation Uma conversa cortês David and his wife are at a party. David e sua esposa estão em uma festa. David is talking to a tall, good-looking woman. David está falando com uma mulher alta e atraente. Hello, my name's David Wilson. I'm Susan Price. Olá, o meu nome e David Wilson. Eu sou Susan Price. What do you do, David? I'm a journalist. O que você faz, David? Eu sou jornalista Oh, how interesting. Do you write forthe "Times"? Oh, que interessante. Você escreve para o "Times"? No. I work on the "Daily Wail", but I hope to change soon. Nao. Trabalho no "Daily Wail", mas eu espero mudar em breve. And what about you? E você ? Oh, I'm an author. Oh, eu sou escritora. I'm writing a book about British painters. Eu estou escrevendo um livro a respeito dos pintores ingleses. Have we got any? Nós temos algum? Don't be silly Of course we have. Não seja ingênuo (tolo, bobo). Claro que temos. people like Constable, Turner and so on . gente como Constable, Turner e etc. But it's taking a long time because the information is difficult to find. Mas leva muito tempo porque e dificil de encontrar a informação. May I read it when it's finished? Posso le-lo quando você terminar? With pleasure. Com prazer. Oh dear, my wife's looking at me. I better go. Oh Deus a minha mulher esta olhando para mim. E melhor eu ir. What do you do? I'm an author. O que e que voce faz? Sou escritor. What are you doing? O que você está fazendo? I'm learning English Estou aprendendo inglês. Fully booked Esgotado (Totalmente reservado) S01 : Good evening. Welcome to "The Twenties". S01 : Boa noite . Bem-vindo ao "The Vinte" . S02 : A table for two, please. S02 : Uma tabela para dois, por favor. S03 : Put us in the non-smoking section. S03 : Coloque-nos na seção de não-fumantes. S04 : We want to be not too far from the door S04 : Queremos ser não muito longe da porta S05 : but near the kitchen and close to the waiter! S05 : mas perto da cozinha e perto do garçom ! S06 : I'm sorry, sir, but we're fully booked this evening. S06 : Sinto muito , senhor , mas estamos totalmente reservado esta noite. T00 - TRANSLATE: Exercício T01 : Good evening and welcome. T01 : Boa noite e bem-vindo . T02 : I want to be close to the kitchen. T02 : Eu quero estar perto da cozinha. T03 : The restaurant closes at weekends. T03 : O restaurante fecha aos fins de semana . T04 : We're fully booked this evening. T04 : Estamos totalmente reservado esta noite. T05 : Sinto muito , estou atrasado . T05 : I'm very sorry I'm late. A terrible restaurant Um terrible restaurante S01 : Simon and Cathy can't find a free table anywhere, S01 : Simon e Cathy

JC Kids Pastor, David Carpenter, gives a word pushing us to not go back to the way we were, but to push forward. Tell the devil, "I said NO!" Join your Junction family online @junction.church or jcfbc.org or in person Sunday 9, 10, or 11.

This week we begin our new sermon series, "God of the Underdog" as we look at the stories of the unqualified and unworthy people that God used to do amazings because they chose to submit to him.

Blair asks David to make some predictions about the new year, and then they discuss some ways that businesses can prepare for and react to (God forbid) an economic downturn.   TRANSCRIPT BLAIR ENNS: David, predict the future. Coming year, the year ahead ... It doesn't matter when people are listening to this or when we've recorded it, but in the year ahead is it going to be a year of abundance or is it batten the hatches, we've got trouble? DAVID C. BAKER: I think it'll probably be right in the middle. I think it'll be- BLAIR: Oh, come on. Make a guess. DAVID: Oh, no but that is a real prediction. BLAIR: Don't you love driving through these small towns and rural parts of whatever country and you see these fortune tellers that read the cards or whatever? And they're all in these shitty little offices. I'm just wondering, how does that work? DAVID: How come they're not in palaces? BLAIR: Yeah. Right. Or the 49th floor of some high rise condominium. DAVID: You talk with your clients, a lot of them every week, and I do as well, it'd be interesting to see what you're feeling right now. What they're feeling right now. My sense is that there's quite a bit of uncertainty, like the stock market wasn't great through last year, and unemployment is still low, and there's some political uncertainty. The world feels a little bit fragile. But really that's kind of in our heads. DAVID: The actual business results have been pretty good for almost everybody in the marketing field. There are a few isolated examples of firms that have struggled a lot. Often because they lost one big client or something like that. But it's generally, firms have been doing really well, and there's thinking okay, is this next year, is this year, 2019, going to be as good as last year? DAVID: I don't think it will be better. I don't think it will be a whole lot worse. I think we'll be lucky to have a similar year. But what do you think? BLAIR: For context, we're recording this on December 21st, 2018. So Happy Solstice by the way. So we're going into 2019 wondering how things are going to shake out. And the stock market, see I don't pay much attention to the stock market but I just noticed that all the gains for the year have been wiped out in the last few weeks. So the market is down. There is discussion within the broader financial markets about whether, or not we're headed for another 2008-ish crisis. There is the global political unrest and uncertainty. BLAIR: But in the face of all that, if you ask me to make a prediction of the year ahead ... this has nothing to do with reality, I realize as I was thinking about it. And only to do with whatever is going on inside of me. But I always believe my future is bigger than my past, to steal a phrase from Dan Sullivan, from Strategic Coach. So I'm an eternal optimist. BLAIR: Now it doesn't mean I think that the market conditions are going to improve next year. I actually don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about this. That's why I'm going to interview you on it. Because you've spent some time thinking about it. And this can't be right, but it's a great way to go through life. I actually think it really doesn't matter what the markets do. BLAIR: If I'm running a well run business, I will be able to survive anything. So, that's the way I think about. And then how I think about a bad year, looking back on it, might be entirely different. But I go into it with this, you might call it naiveté, around what's going to happen. But you should hope for the best and prepare for the worst. Is that the saying? DAVID: Yeah. That's a really interesting perspective. And by the way, you are so messed up in the head. BLAIR: I know. I acknowledge that. DAVID: You think I wouldn't be surprised anymore by the stuff you say. BLAIR: What surprised you? DAVID: Well, you said something really powerful, that I don't want to pass up. I want to make sure that people don't miss it. And that's that from a personal performance, or a firm performance standpoint, next year will be better than last year. And that's separate than what the marketplace might bring us. I think that's really, really smart thinking. DAVID: I want to clarify having, in that broader context, that yeah, I absolutely believe that too. Every one of my clients is going to be running their business better in 2019 than they were in 2018. But what will the marketplace bring them? And I think that's just brilliant the way you just separated those two things. BLAIR: So I've spent a lot of time contemplating the question of, is there such thing as free will? Do we human beings have free will? Then one day I realized, you know what, it's kind of a stupid question. Because the answer is it doesn't matter. You should live your life like you have free will and you have total control. And I feel the same way about business. BLAIR: You should operate your business like you have complete control over what happens. Because I think in those moments when we feel helpless and out of control; and if we have a tendency to blame the market, really most of us we're running businesses that can survive a downturn in the market. If we're making correct and courageous decisions and preparing ourselves appropriately, it really doesn't matter what happens in the market. BLAIR: Now there are some exceptions to that. Maybe we'll get into that. Because some vertically specialized firms in particular are more susceptible to an economic downturn. Is that right? DAVID: Right. For sure. I think of this as ... so you, the people listening to this, are the captain of the ship. You're standing on the deck, and you can't control the winds that are going to come your way, but how far out should you look so that you can take corrective action if you see an iceberg coming. That's kind of your job as the captain. You can't just rail at the winds, assuming that you're going to change them. But you can get your crew ready. You can think about the decisions you need to make, as far in advance as possible. Think about the culture of the crew and all of those things. DAVID: So it's a unique balance that nobody else at the firm has to think like you do with a finger firmly on the immediate pulse, but also looking far ahead, and making those smart decisions that way. BLAIR: Okay. Let's begin by talking about those things that our listeners can do to prepare before a downturn even hits. So if you suspect, or if you're worried about the economic conditions in front of you, wherever you are in time, what are some of the things that you should do to prepare yourself? DAVID: Well, one of the things that you might do is think about, rather than building a much more expansive, slash expensive, amount of money going to people, you could give somebody a one time bonus, instead of building that amount into their usual salary. Because it's very difficult to take money away from somebody, so that would be one thing that you could do. I don't mean a Christmas bonus. I just mean, instead of an annual bonus, maybe you'd give them just a one time bonus, rather than raising their compensation. That'd be one thing to think about. DAVID: Obviously if you've been doing the opposite for a long time that's going to raise a few eyebrows, but it also might just be prudent thinking, and say, "Hey listen. You've kind of maxed out within the salary range that we set for your role. But you've been a fantastic employee. I don't want to build a whole lot of fixed, higher money going to salaries, but I do think you deserve something. So here it is." I think that might be the first thing you probably think about. BLAIR: I think that's a great way to phrase it. Because as you were describing it I was thinking, well how do you communicate this? So you communicate it by saying, "I want to acknowledge your good work." I guess this is my question. Would you acknowledge nervousness about the market? Because of the market et cetera, I don't want to build in higher, fixed salaries. Or would you always come back to, you've kind of maxed out in the salary band. Is it appropriate to communicate to your people, I'm doing this move because I'm concerned about the larger economic conditions? DAVID: Not unless not mentioning it would strike them as odd. So if they are feeling the same thing, because of what they're seeing in the news, and what you're talking about. And if you don't acknowledge that potential for something right around the corner then I think you're going to look kind of stupid. But if saying that feels more like an excuse to them, then I wouldn't say it. So just sort of acknowledge what is widely viewed in the marketplace. I think that's how I would view it. BLAIR: So preparation point number one is to consider bonusing people rather than building salary raises into fixed compensation. What else should people do to prepare? DAVID: I'm really just working down the income statement thinking about where most of the money goes. Right? And most of the money goes to people. Where does it go next? Well it used, and this is kind of changing a little bit, because of how expensive benefits are for people. But where it goes next is facilities. DAVID: So this is not the time to sign a 15 year lease. Right? It might be as long as you have some outs. And those outs are the ability to sublease to somebody else, or the ability to give them six or twelve months notice at any point in the lease, and walk away from it at that point. Or maybe if you're providing a personal guarantee for the entire term of the lease, that personal guarantee is capped at some certain amount. DAVID: So when you think about how you might need to adjust the size of your firm, other than people, facility is the next thing to think about. So just really careful about some of those long term decisions that you're making. BLAIR: Okay. That makes total sense. What else? DAVID: This is one I want to talk about together. And it's just this notion that lead generation, if done well, is this massive fly wheel. Where I grew up we had to supply our own electricity, and there's this diesel generator. I remember how slow that thing would start. You'd have to crank it over by hand and it would go ... little faster, faster. And then once you turned it off it would take forever to slow up. You could lose a hand if you put your hand in there too quickly. That to me is what lead generation is like. It takes so long to spin up. DAVID: So if you don't have your own lead generation plan well in place, before some sort of downturn hits, then you are screwed, my friend. Because it just takes so long. People are always asking me, after we fix positioning and lead generation at a firm, and you're doing the same kind of work as I am, well what results should I expect? How long should this take? And the answer isn't the same for everybody. But frequently it sounds something like this. "Well, if you do everything right, you should expect to land the first right fit client in about six months. And then about every three months you're going to land another one." And they look back at you thinking, that is not what I expected to here. DAVID: So you've got this downturn that hits and then you decide to get your act together. Sorry friends, it's too late. You know. What do you think about how long this kind of stuff takes to spin up? BLAIR: Well, and both of these issues, positioning, and lead gen in particular, they also affect how you see the new business position. So if you don't have the flywheel, the lead generation flywheel moving already, by creating content, building a reputation, et cetera, putting stuff out there that positions you and drives inbound inquiries. If that's not happening and then you hit an economic downturn ... and let's say you've got the new business seat is empty, and you decide oh we need new business, we have to fill it. You're going to look at the new business seat as you want to feel it with somebody who does lead generation the old fashioned way. The outreach, the cold outreach way. BLAIR: And when times are good and your lead generation flywheel, to continue the metaphor, is turning with little effort, then most small to midsize independent firms, probably don't need a business development person who is its salesperson. They need somebody who is actually good at navigating a sale to a close. BLAIR: Just very quickly, if you need your new business person to generate leads for you, rather than navigate the leads that marketing is generating for you, than you want somebody who has got a very high competitive drive. Who's rejection proof. Who goes, goes, goes. Who talks people into things. When leads are coming from marketing then you tend to think of a salesperson as somebody who is a little bit more patient and consultative, who's good at navigating. Is a little bit more discerning, so they have a lower competitive drive. And they're good at navigating opportunities through to a close. And in a lot of firms that can be the principal or another senior person. BLAIR: If your lead generation flywheel is turning you don't need that kind of old school typical new business person, who's out there smiling and dialing. DAVID: Right. BLAIR: But as soon as the downturn hurts and you realize that you haven't done the hard work on the lead generation flywheel issue, then you're going to panic, and you're going to go looking for a salesperson, lead generator, who's going to smile and dial and try to talk people into things. DAVID: I always picture those people driving a Taurus for some reason. BLAIR: Why? DAVID: I don't know. They drive 300 mile max trip and it's usually a dark colored Taurus, and they're wearing a polyester suit. Maybe I'm a little prejudiced about those sales people. BLAIR: Yeah. Maybe you are. DAVID: Yeah. Maybe. BLAIR: Okay. So we're talking about preparing for a downturn. You've talked about trying to keep your fixed comp lower by maybe bonusing people, rather than raises. You've talked about being careful about signing long term leases. You've talked about do your positioning and lead generation planning and work in advance, so that the flywheel is still spinning even in a down economic period. What else? Anything else on the preparation list? DAVID: Last thing maybe would be just to pay down as much as possible, the debt that you've already incurred from either ignoring operational issues that you should have solved in other ways, or maybe from the last downturn, or whatever. Get that off the books. Because when you are looking at reducing your monthly outlay there are some things that you simply can't touch. One of those is the debt. So if you have debt, still on the books, in a downturn, you have to cut the people side even deeper than you would have wanted to. You can't cut the facility. You can't cut the debt. So you have to cut the people side deeper. DAVID: So you really want to focus there, and in particular you want to focus on any debt that's personally guaranteed. Which for any smaller firm listening, almost all of it is. Even the credit cards. That would be like a term loan from a bank or a line of credit. Sometimes in the bigger firms, it's not. If there's a distinction there and some of the debt is personally guaranteed, and some isn't, then focus on the part that's personally guaranteed. So that if there's a really big disaster and we have to walk away from the firm you won't be as harmed personally outside of the corporation, that is the business. BLAIR: Yeah. This in a previous episode we talked about the idea of steady pressure and a pulse of something hitting. So the steady pressure in this case might be debt. You're carrying an unnecessarily high debt load, and then the pulse is rapid economic downturn. You've talked before about how ... I don't know if you abhor debt, but you can correct me if that's wrong. I think you've got a great line about how debt covers up some other issues. Right? It hides things. Is that right? DAVID: Right. Right. Debt is okay in some cases. I personally hate it for anything except for appreciating assets. But where I particularly hate it is where it's just covering up sins that need to be solved in other ways. Whatever the reason for the debt that's on the books, get rid of it as much as you can before a downturn. Then of course if the downturn does hit you could borrow again. I don't think you should. You could borrow again. But mainly it's about giving yourself the flexibility of not cutting more people than you would have otherwise done. BLAIR: Yeah. If you're carrying a lot of debt in good economic downturns, the likelihood of you surviving an economic downturn is not good.   BLAIR: So let's move from how to prepare to how to react. So let's say, God forbid, the market keeps dropping. Other things happen. And we get something close to what happened in 2008, and a big part of the economy kind of takes a big hit. Or freezes outright for a little while. I think you're a big proponent of having a plan. Right? Essentially having a plan, in writing, that you enact at the appropriate time. Is that fair? DAVID: Yeah. Because it's very emotional when it hits. So whether it affected the world around you, and you weren't being singled out, or whether it was just you losing a big client. Whenever that happens it tends to freeze you. It's emotional. You don't know exactly what to do and the best way to prepare for that, I found, is for you as a management team to get together before it happens, and put two plans together. One is the adjustment plan. One is the survival plan. And you put it in a folder. I mean, maybe it's not really a physical folder, where somebody could find it. Maybe it's just in a folder on your computer, or whatever. You just pull that plan out. It will still need to be modified a little bit. But it's a fantastic starting place. DAVID: The adjustment plan would say, "Okay. We probably need to get rid of this one administrative person. We're going to need to slim down and have two fewer account people. Whatever." Then the survival plan is much deeper than that. "We are going to sublease half of our facility. We are going to stop our cooperation with this other firm that we've been doing. We are going to put off this particular purchase. We are going to draw down our line of credit, up to this amount but not a penny beyond that. I am going to cut my salary." Whatever all of those things are. You just pull out the appropriate plan. The adjustment plan or the survival plan, and then you put it into place. DAVID: If you haven't done that then you're typically going to lose two or three weeks worth of very valuable time in reacting the way you probably should. BLAIR: Okay. So I'm imagining, it's a little bit of war planning or just scenario planning. You have these two folders. Here's what's going to happen when things go bad. But I also imagine that that subjective measure of when things go bad, changes as things are going bad. So you probably should have some objective measure that says, when this happens or when revenue or AGI per FTE, or when this client leaves. Or a client of a certain size leaves, or whatever. Is that what you're saying? And if so what would those objective measures be? DAVID: That isn't what I was saying but I really like adding that. Because otherwise, you just don't know when ... so if we were part of the military planning in the U.S., we might say, "Okay if North Korea launches this missile, this is what we're going to do." That would be very easy to measure. But if we say, "Okay how do we measure our relations with that country getting worse, and so on." DAVID: So one of the things that I've seen some firms do is that when they add generous benefits ... so they say, "Okay we're going to pay for everybody's parking now." That makes sense. A lot of firms say that. But what they don't do is they say, "We're going to pay for everybody's parking now, because now our fee billings per full time equivalent employee are above X. And by the way, if they drop below X again, then we will no longer be able to do that." So they layer the generosity, and they tie those individual layers to specific performance metrics. DAVID: The ones that they would particularly pay attention to would typically be the fee billings per full time equivalent employee. Or it could be net profit. That net profit frequently would need to be indexed so that if the principal pays themselves less money to help get through a downturn, we recognize that. And say, "The net profit lower would be a whole lot lower if I hadn't lowered my compensation." So, that's what I mean by indexing that. DAVID: But I like that. So we're going to go to this folder if we lose this client. Any client that represents more than 25% of our billings. Or we're just going to go to this folder if we have two quarters in a row with less than five percent net profit. Or something like that. That's how I would think about it. BLAIR: So I think our listeners need to go out and buy one orange folder and one red folder. DAVID: One red folder. Right. BLAIR: Okay. What else should we be thinking about in terms of our reaction plan? DAVID: You know when you work with a firm, and I work with a firm, and we're sitting there looking at their situation for the first time, it's really obvious to both of us that the roots of what they're struggling with came about many years ago, or many months ago. Then you stop and say, "How did that happen? What led to that?" And frequently it's when they began to chase cash instead of chasing profit. DAVID: So they had these people that were working for them. They didn't want to lay them off. So they said, "Okay I know this is not an ideal client but at least it's something for them to do. We're not going to make a lot of money, but we'll make more money than if we didn't take work for them." And that's fine if you want to do it. But what you don't want to do is lie to yourself here and say, "And then when things get better we'll convert them into the good client that we had hoped they would be at the first." That is simply not going to happen. It's very unlikely that that's going to happen. DAVID: What you want to do is not necessarily, you wouldn't be able to drop this edict on yourself and say we're just never going to chase cash. We're really going to chase profit only. That's probably unrealistic. But at least be honest with yourself and say, "We are going to take this client. We're not going to make much money. But at least it's going to cover our overhead. We know that as soon as we are able to we are going to replace them with a client that will deliver profit to us." So just being honest at the very beginning and recognizing when the switch in your head flips, and you chase cash instead of chasing profit. BLAIR: That's a really important point. And you wrote something years ago, and I quoted you again within the last two weeks on the subject. I think the article was titled, it wasn't the title it was the point of it. Most cashflow problems are profitability problems. DAVID: Right. BLAIR: And somebody said to me the other day, "Oh yeah, we're going to do X. It's just an issue of cashflow." And I probed deeper into that to try to determine whether it was a cashflow problem or a profitability problem. But the interesting idea there is some people know it's a profitability problem. We're just not getting validation from the market that what we do is actually worth something. And others are somewhat delusional about it. So they might know it and they might be spinning a story to you. Others might be spinning a story to themselves. BLAIR: So you're saying, be honest with yourself. First of all. About whether or not we're talking about cashflow or profitability. But in this specific situation, I really like how you said it, it's unrealistic to say never take something for the cash. Because there are times when you've got good people sitting there with nothing to do, and along comes a project that isn't profitable, and you think, 'yeah, what's the harm. It will keep them busy. Maybe they'll enjoy it. There's no profit in it for us but allows me to keep those resources around.' So you're saying that perfectly valid. Just be honest with yourself, and maybe your teammates or your leadership team about what you're doing. DAVID: Yeah. Exactly. And when you mask a problem and say it's cashflow, what you're really saying is this is a problem with my clients. If you said profit, that's really a problem with the way you're running the business. So it's easy to deflect some of the decisions you're making around that. DAVID: You know the other thing I would do too, working down this list, is just about, do you really want to continue this business? In the past it never seemed to be an option to just close the business because there was so much stigma attached to that. But I don't see that stigma in the marketplace anymore. I don't see the stigma of failure like I used to. In fact, I see more stigma associated with people who stick it out, and they really shouldn't. Instead the courageous decision is not to stick it out. The courageous decision is to just stop it. Right? DAVID: But you want to make that choice for yourself. Like every professional athlete, they want to chose when they stop. They don't want their contract to not get renewed, or get shuffled down to a minor league team or something. Just deciding, making a good decision, early on, and not just bleeding all of the money that you do have out to fix this thing that in the end never gets fixed. BLAIR: Now you work with about 50 firms a year. How many times a year are you advising your clients to shut their businesses down? DAVID: About, probably two a year. So four percent or so, of those firms. BLAIR: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What else is on the list of how to react to a downturn? DAVID: Maybe you need to get rid of that partner. Maybe this is the right time to do it. The firm will never be cheaper if you need to pay them out. This is going to be the cheapest you'll ever get it. That would be one way to look at it. BLAIR: So I'm imagining a firm of two partners, and both partners are listening individually, and they're both thinking, 'Yeah.' DAVID: Yeah. BLAIR: I'm going to get rid of that other partner. DAVID: And they're trying not to flinch as they listen to betray what they just thought of. Yeah. BLAIR: Okay you're both in the car together. You're not making eye contact. This is getting really awkward. You better stop for coffee. Or switch to country music. DAVID: Surely it's not that bad. We don't have to go to country music. BLAIR: We can stop right now. We're done. This podcast will not get any better. DAVID: It probably won't. Why do you not get through a tough time, if you do have a partner? You would think that having a partner would make it easier to get through a good time. When in fact sometimes it's just that you're not on the same page. You're not pulling the oars in the same direction. I often think that, oh there's a great opportunity to adjust your partnership. Especially if this highlights how one of you is just not carrying your share of the weight. BLAIR: Insert awkward silence here. We just stirred up a whole hornets nest, didn't we? Anything else on your reaction list before we get to things that we don't dread about a downturn? DAVID: No, that's about it. Those are the big things. But if you get those you've covered almost all of it. BLAIR: Okay. So I'll just recap. So it happens, you've got to have two folders. One is like things are going bad and when things are really bad. You want to have objective measures where possible. You want to know who you're going to layoff because as you've pointed out, that's probably the easiest part of your overhead to deal with, is the personnel. Don't chase cash instead of profit. Unless you're honest with yourself about what it is that you're doing. Think about shutting it down if it's appropriate. If you're thinking of getting rid of your partner, now is a really good time to do it. Probably financially as well. Okay. BLAIR: So you and I have talked about this before, in private conversations. We have each talked about this from a stage, or written about it. But a downturn isn't all bad, is it? Why? Why isn't it bad? DAVID: No, and I'd want to hear what you have to say about this because you have a very strong evolutionary way of thinking about this. Right? BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: You see animals killed where you live and you realize it's a part of life. Maybe firms dying now and then is a part of life. It just sounds so cruel when we say it, right, but thinning the herd is okay. If maybe you don't survive, maybe you didn't deserve ... did I just say that? Maybe you don't deserve to survive right? BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: And if you do survive than tomorrow you're going to have fewer competitors. And it's kind of sad for them, but it's kind of a good time, too, right? Oh that just sounds so awful saying it. BLAIR: Well first let's put it in a larger context. Because I think for most of listeners here, let's just acknowledge, we're all very fortunate to be born when we're born and where we're born. And to be running businesses. And if our business fails what's the worst that's going to happen? If we've been successful entrepreneurs to a point, and our businesses fail, then we will regroup and we'll be fine. We will start another business, or we will go work for somebody else, and we will put those skills to bear. BLAIR: A small number of people, for whatever reason, whatever else they're dealing with in their lives, it's not going to be so easy. So let's just acknowledge that there's always some human suffering. But as we talked about in one of the podcasts a couple of episodes ago, the worst case scenario really, for most of us, isn't all that bad compared to most of the population on the planet. BLAIR: So with that greater context, the idea is that a downturn is like a disease running through an animal herd. It kind of kills the sick and the weak. And in some ways it's a horrible ... well it's a ruthless metaphor. It's not horrible. But in the end it makes the herd stronger. There have been times when I've heard you say, you know if you've opened a design firm in the last ten years, and you haven't made money, then you're an idiot. Because the economic times have been so good that all you had to do was- DAVID: Did I really say it like that? BLAIR: Yeah. Maybe on paraphrasing. But you've essentially said, times are so good that it's really hard not to make money. We have to make exceptions for the exceptional situations. Like when you're young, you're just starting out. You're highly leveraged debt wise. Taking all this risk when you're just starting out. I'm a big fan of those people. And other things, you care for a sick loved one, et cetera. There are all kinds of extenuating circumstances. But generally speaking there are some firms that continuing with the ruthlessness streak, that the world's just not going to miss. DAVID: Right. BLAIR: If they go out of business. Because the honest to God truth is they weren't creating value in ways that other firms, that may have been somewhat similar to theirs, were creating real value. So if you're not creating real value in the world, and an economic downturn hits and your firm gets wiped out, you can feel sorry. You can say, "Oh the odds were stacked against me." But statistically the odds are probably that your business isn't going to be missed. DAVID: Yeah. BLAIR: So what does that do to the profession? It makes it stronger. At least in theory it does, doesn't it? DAVID: It does. And even though it does sound callous I concur exactly with what you're saying. So if you are running a firm right now, and you know how well you're positioned, you've got this lead generation flywheel spinning. And you've got good people, and you don't have a lot of debt. What if next year is bad? In the world around you. What if the environment does take a turn for the worse? In some ways you ought to be rubbing your hands together, and saying, "Oh man. This is going to clear my head. I can't wait to make sharper decisions and to think more clearly about this. And to not tolerate some of the poorer performers that I have. And to use my time more wisely. It's okay." DAVID: So as we face some of the uncertainty that's coming up, I hope the people that get nervous are the ones who should get nervous. And they get off their asses and start fixing their lead generation problem, mainly. That's the big one. I know you've got some events coming up. I've got some events coming up. People need to take that sort of stuff seriously. Or if they just know what the answer is, then they just need to get off the couch and start doing things. Those are the people I want to hear this and just really implant this sense of excited, not urgency, but excited about the future. Excited about taking their firm a little bit more seriously. I think is a message we want for people. BLAIR: You wrote to me an economic downturn is like a breath of cold, fresh air, on a cold winter day, in the mountains. What the hell did you mean by that? DAVID: You just can't ignore it. You just climb out of the tent and ... oh my goodness. It opens up your lungs in a way that it doesn't. And you feel alive, like you're never going to feel alive in an apartment in a city somewhere. Right? BLAIR: Yeah. When I read that I thought some of us our wartime CEOs. When there isn't something wrong, when we're not under attack, by say a competitor or a larger economy, then we are not at our best. When you see threat on the horizon that's when, you know it's like that bracing cold air. It's like, all right. I recognize that in myself. I don't know if you see it in yourself. I recognize it in some of my clients. BLAIR: There's nothing like a little bit of threat to reinvigorate you about your business. And that's what I was when I read your line that an economic downturn is a breath of cold, fresh air, on a clod winter day, in the mountains. DAVID: Yeah. And I didn't mean that as a Hallmark card either. I meant it as a terrifying, sort of invigorating statement. BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: This has been fun. BLAIR: It has been fun. So let's just leave our listeners with this. We hope an economic downturn is not in your immediate future, but if it is we'd like you to think about it, like a breath of cold, fresh air, on a cold winter day, in the mountains. Okay. Thank you David. DAVID: Thank you Blair.

Introduction Universal Windows Podcast – Episode 92 You can enjoy us on Spotify and iHeartRadio now – great for streaming! We are starting up our regular cadence – look for podcasts on a weekly basis (we mean it this time) Word of the Week Enjoy a sip of your favourite beverage each time either of us says "David". Feature of the Week OneNote Audio News of the Week  Microsoft's Q1 2019 earnings Windows Phone: Why Microsoft built this E Ink second screen for its Lumia 640 Is the October release of Windows 10 the "Worst Windows 10 version ever"? 1.5 billion Windows devices More than half of Windows devices in the enterprise are now on Windows 10 Microsoft is positioning Always-Connected PCs as the future of business devices Samsung's Galaxy Book2 with Snapdragon 850 IBM Buys RedHat $34 Billion Care of your new Surface Rant and Rave Microsoft should just stop adding features to Windows 10 Outro Call for your help with the podcast, please… Follow and Re-tweet @SurfaceSmiths Listen www.SurfaceSmiths.com Email Podcast@SurfaceSmiths.com Whisky of the Week The Macallan 18-year-old   Episode 092 - Just A Rounding Error - Transcription Courtesy of WIT.AI Windows Microsoft MVP Insider Surface Phone 2018, The Surface Smiths Podcast Universal Windows Podcast http://surfacesmiths.com David and Colin Do Stuff Transcript [0:00] Hello I'm Cortana welcome to the universal windows podcast the show about everything Windows such a surface Xbox phone and the windows Insider program, here are your host the surface Smith on Colin Smith & Smith welcome to episode 92. 34344 3 feet out the one that we were part of the quality was awful. I don't know either way we have one called Catch and Release catch-and-release no one would have been alright so this is the show all about Microsoft stuff and we got stuff to talk about 10:20 podcast in a year and more than that, dogs just look at the stats and we've done $0.20 about the September of last year. Hey guys what about the word of the week, chose the where the week last week i did and you know what that was a big room why what's the whole concept that would the week that we have a drink every time someone says the word that we cancelled and we chose, the word of the week last year as last week sorry as. [1:20] Hello. On the recording we want me to start that again I didn't need to clear what was the word of the week last week it was it was vote vote and we didn't use the word vote yet we're using the word vote this week so. People that were thirsty or left I'm right now it was holding day so you shouldn't drink before voting, old we're allowed to drink okay anyways i go pick a word that you do by gonna go with david for the week is david to make up for two well guess so every time you hear the word david, take a drink, okay alright to let's move on what else we got if you got a feature the week David I do I do and I had one but then I switch to the last minute so it's a. It's a one note feature, and in one doubt there's an audio button and you can easily record whatever you want in your notes, in there for the aunt that's terrible so that comes up to a little bit later are rant and rave for we talk about a new feature that you go while, that's there I'll start using that I've used that I taught people how to use that back in. [2:30] Biggerstaff classes I talk about you that no one no future okay so in OneNote, if you go to the where is it there's the web version there's the light version and then there's the Office 365 or office 2016 2019, okay built into what you ask maybe that's why you haven't seen it because in the version that's part of office it's been there forever for that version. [3:05] Maybe not everywhere in LED OneNote MVP can tell you when it was released okay OneNote audio alright anything else to move on. [3:15] Let's move on. New story of the week news David so first news story today is what's the date today it is in last week Microsoft among other. Tech Titans released earnings and their q1 earnings were 29.1 billion they beat the street. Amazon did not beat the street, I heard that potentially Microsoft was worth more than Amazon for a little. Of time but also Microsoft commercial cloud is far outstripping Amazon's commercial cloud in what measure, sales revenue okay but that's been going on all year, early in or q one and of continue to do so and base and have a gonna compensate, Microsoft they should be continuing to do that, yes yes of course so if you want to take a look at the Microsoft commercial Cloud I think it was what 76 or 76% growth wow, this quarter over la, set Lobster same quarter no no no no. [4:37] And your Enterprise Mobility which is in tune and things like that 88 million seats. Can you believe that I like the number two player nobody ever hears about Entune everyone knows mobileiron an air Watt, I literally never hear from it from the customers I work with which is hot right now this is sold seats right so anyways. And windows only am growing three percent so hundred and fifty five million commercial office get three hundred twenty five million subs. Tumors so roughly speaking let's just round that up to two hundred million. That is a lot. That's what 15% of no wait wait some weird math there a hundred fifty-five million hundred 55 + 32 is 887 if you want the exact number .5 but. That's almost 200 million subscribers that's that's awesome that is. And those are paid those are page and like things like Yahoo mail, I don't know I sure at some point in time was much higher surface Revenue grew 14%. [5:56] Valley last year they had this big Surface Pro for the North Avenue devices that quarter, are the surface go in the summer but then the laptop and the new, remember this artist porosis quarter ending end of September that's right so the goal was in there but that's not a big rubbing you think I don't like one or two rights August so this is based on previous there's a sleeper 33% not sure why. [6:26] I have a god damn connection learning and linda and i'm gonna have to break that down as a gender change from. A person's female name to, can learning and list better but anyhow alright so that's great for microsoft earnings those of us all microsoft's stock and you microsoft past the eight hundred billion dollar mark and pull back with the rest of the dow today and I'm not sure if they've surpassed out and check today whether there they surpassed Amazon or not, the heater on track for being actually another company of this system number though it is just a number alright. [7:08] So This is not really news but it was leaked and i kinda like that i want to cover it and bullshit perm the rumors but well that was real work microsoft was working on. Pink second screen and into first lumia the whole idea behind this was that the. And leap now microsoft was going to. [7:32] Release this could have gone with any of its Windows phones the idea being that people want some Dynamic content stuff at updating all the time and there's things that they want to keep just candy, you're getting on the plane and using any ticket if that's what you want available there but you don't want to have your phone on all the time it would be a great feature wouldn't that there's my ticket, set the. Wow that is fantastic four tickets but that was one of the things they're working on end. She's a few things that you might want to use eating for so that's a neat little new story there I wanted to include in today's news, we talk more about it it's kind of for quite some time so. Lots of rumors around dual-screen devices and it was talking about Andromeda and Samsung having a deals cream coming out so through old bendable all those exactly. And. [8:41] What's next on news leyva what is the worst Windows 10 version ever. [8:48] We don't know i would imagine that this the one that hasn't released in october, well you know they've always had the opportunity to being late and they've always messed up sorry nothing but, summit and eighteen tennis five don't think that the end product itself will be bad it's just that they kinda messed up a couple things about, deleting people's Files video drivers also Intel drivers can do all sorts of things so perfect storm of bad windows we'll come back and we'll talk about I don't think they taking this much advantage of the windows Insider to test if I think I take advantage while they're taking advantage of them I don't think they use them as best as they can all right so that's a little bit of a downer we can anything else you want to talk about that or two okay some other news I don't know if it's good news or bad news but Windows is now running on 1 and 1/2 billion devices what are they used to be. [9:52] Something less than that buu could be more notes and that's more than ios. So really yes. I don't think Apple's of has the ship to more than 1.5 billion iPhones and iOS devices iPods and iPads. The real key here is that, prom 2016 I have an article that says it was 1.0 billion right though it's growing so that meat thing is it's, the number to platform for modern devices definitely Android will be dying Android over 2 billion. [10:36] Yeah one of the issues with Windows phone and being with Windows as developers not what I develop for it because aren't they didn't have that Marketplace sure they didn't think they could get that that they couldn't monetize their called with 1.5 billion devices. The different story was 1.44 last year I mean nothing's really is really changed but it is it's big and as people move off of Windows 7 and we'll talk more about that later. [11:07] Others no opportunity there so. What are things we talked about last week was the EU, back in July but I know what that means for Google right, but maybe that's an opportunity for Microsoft as well now and we'll talk more about why a might be the perfect time Microsoft bring back, Windows 10 mobile I tweeted that today we got a lot of retweets alright next new story David more than half of the devices and prices on Windows 10 that's interesting commit last week were talking about how many were out there and we're wondering how that is it starting to tip i'm doing a lot of work around windows ten projects people have to get off its what four hundred days away now yeah, something like that to general fourteen twenty twenty and you know the last. Half hopefully she go quicker for some organization some organizations for example will start that will be a good stop getting in faith my customer struggling all. [12:02] Don't talk about that later okay they're struggling because some of the tooling for upgrading from Windows 7 is not working as expected, and they're having a goal with a wipe and reload when they have been killed piloting and testing for an In-Place upgrade which is the way of Microsoft really wanted people to do it but some of the cooling system, it has expected what a lot of the machines will fall off and be replaced church so they're certainly like a fifth via machines you can count on for that, so half of the machine so how many is that in percentage is David. [12:39] And half the machines developer how much more than fifty six fifty point one and it that you're quoting mary jo fully of the article there and so. Okay let's just go with it we're definitely crackerjack reporters 5 billion and 700 million machines it's almost the exact same number. When students i think. [13:06] .5 million Windows machine PS 100 million seven hundred million windows. Machine it was like a texts also have fifty percent no to hot slightly below fifty percent of that that's half it's the right its a fifty percent but if that is half of one point four billion. Yes it's a thousand hundred million it's not that much, it's almost half it had all the David I'm glad in your world a hundred millions of rounding error. Right so here's something i've been talking about for a long time, and the microsoft is positioning always think a pc is the future of business devices so you know for me, live in three big feet big things that hard drive me towards any machine that been waiting for the usb c for everything. I charging all of that. [14:16] LTE Lots the always-on and everything's liabilities I've got some strange, comic is shares a tooth all well there's lots of reasons we can talk about lap ability separately but for me that's that's an issue ninety touch and all that we think that we have a lot of those up ability is device by device, thing but LTE on there's a lot of advantages here one yo. You always let it we're not searching for you not using Starbucks hack Wi-Fi or airport hacked Wi-Fi or security. [14:53] Availability there's way more available than there is Wi-Fi. For the most part yep reduced-cost reduce class because organizations don't have to maintain their own Wi-Fi necessarily the people who are mostly out of the office when they come in the office there's no reason for them to be connecting to anything in particular. And then you could start moving to other other systems like Branch offices and continue and continue until, you really have only networks in your attitude Center carriers, probably start to offer some kind of a private network, on top of the lt or five g or whatever. Texas Method there they're providing that time but I think there's definitely going to be a push towards that. And it's going to come from the carriers as well not just Microsoft and then cuz they're not really a Sim provider Bugatti symbol that's about it. And device manufacturers of course have to get on board. [15:59] So here's the next news item that kind of ties into that okay because when we talk about arm chips, I'm chips of typically yo when they do the sock the the system-on-a-chip kind of thing is almost always had. [16:18] Lt motor built in fact write the kind of would have to order them without it for says yeah packs are to get it so one talk on another device, we talked about it very quickly last week but it's a Samsung Galaxy book to with guess what David. What. [16:46] It's there is now actually a Hands-On review from neowin and we can talk a little bit about that. The interesting thing is if you take a look at it it is almost the same as, surface keyboard with very similar Pro it's got the kickstand it's almost the same dimensions and their lost device didn't ever fix and that was just awful to keep writing so. [17:18] It Sucka gpus wall around Reno 6:30 Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 it's a 12in display 2160 X 1440 which is very similar to a Surface Pro 2, yes pc. I thought MicroSD and nano SIM how come Microsoft can't put 01 in butt out that's good and. Come to the pain that comes with keyboard. [17:49] And the thousand dollars us which is quite a bit less than yeah surface pro it is about the cheapest of pro. Expense in the chips from. [18:00] Yes I'm sure but not when you include the keyboard in the month and it comes with type S. [18:11] So Thai password Windows Windows SS home. This is a car and you can switch its regular Windows 10, for no charge last 10 home in S Mode yes it's not Windows RT that you can switch out it's when it's an s in it, alright well. They've got it thanks could work out really bad Okay so. [18:49] We've got more Microsoft news you got some other news you want to Microsoft news. [18:58] Color hair care feeney surface with but it what's i got this little article in my funeral newsfeed and was care free to service the house while this is going to be really la barba color bead where the kids happy to do dot drop my new surface. So they start off with. Basically gentle caring cleaning which is kind of a don't drop it say that the important do not apply liquids directly to your surface hey you know those who don't know that already are in trouble and no power cord you don't route the power cord up to tight you know, or I do next and Alcantara material if your keyboard don't let it dry before you clean it off yeah I think it's Rob silly little things that really but they mentioned battery health so don't don't, do them stop from with this crack and they also say you should at least once a month you should this charge it totally. Store in a cool dry rooney not using it is there like a white cell we're office for the air heating broken guess so anyhow so a lot of them are really simple things that you that. Right that you don't put liquid sunscreen fine we all know that but once a month drain it fully 50%. [20:16] Oh okay just half way okay let's is it true earths surface go and start the cold rush face i think they really mean is don't store in your car. Okay it's just charge the battery in the week we used to always do this back in the day with phones and all that other stuff and people stop doing that. And the Battery Technology really you would like to do. Okay so that's it for Microsoft news and we've got one last piece of music not if not directly related Microsoft, okay sure is more directly related to add say to other companies. [20:55] And i be am i bm bought red hat, 433 billion so first time I heard 34 billion it's only hundreds of millions different so I think it's the same number, okay that is a huge amount of money even for a large company like idea. A positive minus a hundred thoughts and it's still alive. [21:24] What do you think of it why did why did ibm do all that really why effects of the they both needed it and its a desperate measure so right now test for measured thirty three billion tell you what okay the IBM and redhead are not talked about in the big player face, you talk erratically google that but apple id but amazon but facebook it when occasionally microsoft and microsoft will my spouse of their items here here's the thing. [21:54] IBM has become non-relevant, devices perspective cuz they got out of the Lenovo unit right sure they still have them. Okay I saw the PC side Lenovo right and then they kept their server-side. Play in the club right so become less relevant there the still of them as the mainframe business but again known to maine for the month of the cloud weather not real writing a new mean for, hey because the team somewhere but maybe they still have their mid-range like they're a S400 and stuff like that but again whose, was last time you saw anybody working asked 400 right 2 weeks ago Wednesday night trying to do a refund it was a green screen I asked him what it was he said it was a S Finder i don't always have the answer right quick tips fingertips with the subject alright so alright so the hear my ibm's can less real than what does ibm have the whole Global Services large footprint of it professionals many many of them are Microsoft certified but that's beside the point what does redhead have. [23:07] They've got a decent OS that got a decent, virtualization stack some argue more performance than the and we're really okay they have this, openstack their their openstack player there they are peripherally a Cloud Player they like to think that they are but they're not but but IBM don't have a cloud doesn't really work Labs stock, they've had their data centers you could friend for ever yes, but they don't have a full stack no solution they have to park and have to partner if partner and red hat has a partial club stock they don't really have the data center, IBM does that why didn't have a footprint so together, they are three big players in Cloud are Microsoft and my number one that's enough in Revenue in Revenue Microsoft Amazon and Google, and help vmware's been cozy, IBM's blow Google oh well below well below. [24:11] And the support of us to work, like the both of us, he's becoming less and less relevant in the cloud space because the other day why do people want redhat versus any other product I thought the only reason was because you had support support, is there any other reason why I missing something. [24:38] They had better Cooling and things like that compared to other lennox's maybe better support for third-party tools and stuff like that right everybody supports redhat yeah but take a look at the. [24:52] Badger badger sound like 30% of all the VM thing running Asher are Linux VM and red Hat's a first-class citizen there. And so if you're running Red Hat what's the right why would you not maybe run Santa's. [25:14] Yes because you're not red hat if you're running your own data center because you want to make sure it works at your HP servers are your Dell servers or your was that other coming to make server so IBM, if you're running in the cloud somebody else's Hardware if they're going to support center state-supported for you that's part of it I sent Racino who makes sent us. It's community-based it's totally worth RedHawks is just an addition to the sentence I'm not a Linux guy so I'm going to make some things out of a shirt but work with me though. [25:50] Red Hat has the fully supported first class citizen red hat and red hat Enterprise Linux whatever works interrupt to then they have this other thing that's free called Fedora which Trails behind usually a few game free version and then there's a community in Denver that is Cintas which is community supported which is 50 binary code compatible, to Red Hat Enterprise Linux likes a bit but not as far back as Fedora and put or just have some things that are missing and then there was the selinux that was originally created by, oh I can't some US government organization maybe. That they that they created a secure secure version of Linux track that they gave to Red Hat as the custodian, those are the versions that are out there i'm on the server. Talk about red hat very very few people use read how does a desktop OS. You could but so that puts IBM, in a position that it's a bit of a desperate gamble but to stay relevant so if they're going to they went so high for price that really how much LinkedIn go 427. [27:13] True true and it's okay it went for. Hey Google I don't know what the financials were so I know that IBM stock dropped and red hat stock went out. Makes red had a little bit more credible basis um i think it might end up being a bit late oracle with the try to do everything on their own and no because he recently partnered up. But I think they have their own version of Linux they have the other bots on then they killed it so the crow, right who hasn't yeah so it happened sometime for Microsoft your son was oracle's Nokia. [27:56] Okay as if you were an Enterprise with lots of Red Hats would you see this is a positive thing, I don't know because I probably already had a strategy for either on pram or cloud already with a cloud provider I just got to make a compelling to me though so if you were already going with that you were seeing the advantage of with the free lennox vs having to pay for red hat you might only gonna wear like it's still my red hat workload stash or amazon yeah amazon's a little bit different but i lose their tools from right have to move to either them. So now it's going to have to be to potentially at IBM data center Mitchell for that we just don't know I would imagine there is yeah but. [28:40] We shall see is it too little too late that's what I'm worried about. The different Cloud providers already have staked out their markets Microsoft is the, S&P 500 crowd Amazon is the born in the cloud startups and those that want to build their own passport in the classroom, stop it look companies like Netflix and Facebook that are building huge application that are going to build their own fabric now they're on Amazon, yeah so that means companies that use both and that's going to be the case here what does that mean one-size-fits-all you pick the one that makes sense for you Microsoft is also got the pass massage market right with their Office 365 and other services or you're not going to go to IBM and get your Office 365, Android. And then Google is really staked out that way I know that. [29:42] Geography base types to give. It wouldn't global positioning system type enabled software that they all have that but can't get were google play ball things if when you go on integrated google maps and things like that applications like that sir ch. So what's what's your phone saying that David it's, it to start searching when you set okay if i have to wiggle. OK Google, yeah doesn't listen to me but listens to me so I don't know what we're going to stake out a different territory babe I got to go after Financial Services b****** with the IBM and so strong again or something like that. [30:25] Music. [30:33] What is Microsoft Microsoft stopped adding new features to Windows 10. [30:43] I don't know here's here's kind of what I was thinking when we talked about this. Customers or customers in general are struggling with the Cadence are Microsoft already went down so I can only do it twice a year so one time it was more than that, organ of two releases a year first one was about four months apart yeah yeah and, they tried to make it stable and then now their struggles with their October release around the quality what if they just press pause, and just fix stuff that wasn't working or made it better end when you think about it what new feature of Windows 10 matters to your customers. Set the consumers will my customers der all about. Creating more efficiencies right if so if they have less service desk calls less things break but they would like that easier to deploy and you can say easier to the play could be a feature. Are so will pick it the one picking last feature in windows ten that you really got excited about. [31:55] Was there one was hoping that I can finally get around and text messaging from my phone and my laptop okay but it doesn't seem to work yet in Canada. So then I'm okay with that cuz I have doesn't other ways to do it if I need you so most of the week you found today yeah it's been there forever so most people don't and it wasn't even windows and most people don't even notice new features so, I say your press pause are commode. Press possible i feed is a higher contracts easier to read the people dies but that's beside the point okay go lets go with windows as a service pack well. There's always the percentage of improvements to security perform since touch the driver in the cumulative updates or are in the semi annual releases. Make that a higher percentage for making the new features a lower percentage. How to speak baby every now and then you take a breather it's like every other could be every other was like Farmers that let their fields go follow just good for the Earth but they're going to need some feature sometimes like they bring out a new this and it needs to be out of this a feature, to support OEM server Denver. But maybe every now and then just press pause and you know what guys we're just fixing all this stuff. [33:21] We have to whisper because it's Alexis was born okay so yeah because it is because, sensor crazy so they could do it just the percentage thing or they could just to every other. You know in the fall they do features in the spring they do performance security and so from a consumer point if you I don't think it would really matter you would just update and it wouldn't really matter what about primacor 4.01 what they'd apply. So here's the thing Microsoft broken up their Windows 10 team into the, guys are building the future and the future and the team that's patching and fixing and I think these all need to get together, the best of helpers the ones building the new features and an increase volume is insulted alot of people yes but it. Oh that's why is whispering so i hope none of them wants to get to stab you what that be said. Let's get them all together what kind like what microsoft said you know what work were security first everybody just took that on that's consist of a bug bash party and get everybody on board you know it might be that they've other than the features for while. [34:51] If they told us this when windows ten first came up there's where whole bunch of user interface stuff things really have missing but now they've gotten so mature in that. Lotus Notes noticing what, catch up with everyone now it's not like someone else is gonna if they don't innovates somebody else is going to. Allows case on Windows phone for sure right they lost they lost. They're not really there way have feature wise and when they lose its because chrome os is user to administer. User whatever so if people are good by max because my max anyways ince, because a feature Windows 10 data that's not there no no it wouldn't say that you're wrong, they like the mac they wanna go to mac right so good then it's the hotel that if there was a feature with. What would feature really get you excited Windows 10. [36:10] Longer battery life faster gesture interface yeah but not every knows that. [36:17] There's nothing else I can do this this is all these silly things that people don't even use like was last time you did 3D paint. Set the. [36:33] Right so this is the stuff that you use like all the time you want to work customer struggle with things like hello and Biometrics and stuff like that they're there, struggling to get that implemented so what are they relying on an older version of Windows 10 and I never really, sometimes I noticed the occasional feature about being able to cast to display or something like that but so did they replace the built-in password manager with a real password manager, i use last pass regulators across the laces but no microsoft toasted that for me like the kind that do for your yeah they kinda do with your m sa with your microsoft account but the bill to windows ten built in password manager just is not I see you the password manager on the underneath the keyboard I see that also notes at the most people right so, do they orthopet OneNote whatever. Yeah and then regret it exactly what is Microsoft stopped adding feature to just fix things for a while I think that would be cool not sexy but cool. [37:51] Teachers are really sexy so some dollar. Number of sexy holmes was now was letting me sesame walking a hole in the wind but it wasn't a feature. What kind of Windows 10 supported hololens. I think we are good we are good so the show is over. Los amigos keep stick on the ice thanks for his here are some lazy support and interact with michelle like to show on facebook at surface. [38:29] Follow the show on twitter at surface minutes email dish of. [38:35] Check out the show notes and leave a comment on www. [38:42] Help others find out about the show by leaving a review on it. [38:46] Music. [38:55] Welcome to the rest of the week my fingerprints you was gonna be with the week but they still haven't delivered it really really from the surprise is canada post what they have one government institution working with the government institution why would I not expect it to be working official today get to regular mail there on time and they're in the right house or no but now there's two addresses are pretty similar anytime that there's any time they're doing an Amazon delivery date a celebrity has arrived yet so, how can you mark something delivered every having delivered it yet, boston market with or their little ppts social android devices and it has a gps and it's gonna record where it delivered it is in my amazon package tracking showed delivered and it doesn't show up for a day, well then that they're supposed to not do that. Bracket shouldn't do that okay okay I finally got your pasted into the show notes what I think this is a profile type picture for you it's a good one alright so, best part of this show the after party yeah is we drink whiskey now the fact that we switch to a new book gives us the opportunity to do some repeats. Okay this is something we had before but it's one of my favorites it is truly truly spectacular whiskey I don't think we've ever had a problem with. No because we don't repeat stuff we don't like. [40:21] And the one time repeat something that we weren't so sure about it takes a better second time that you sometimes could be a particular person rules yeah and this is clearly got a rule that you have of know about archer tv alright so. David it's the 12th or the 18th the 18th and 18th in the new book okay 12 Macallan 18. Matured select Sherry Oak casks from Juarez Spain. [40:52] Haha what do you fuck it is a very well area where it's color. [41:01] And it doesn't need water anybody gets dissed it's. Candy for me so I like it so what we can talk about we're going to talk about bringing back windows phone and I didn't write the article but it was just interesting, okay with the, the antitrust ruling against Google in the EU and all the fractured stuff around Android and people are now saying that no one's even here lots of people saying it's nothing like phones that excites them anymore, and also the Microsoft is sexy again they're almost a trillion-dollar true when you drop a phone, poet called they look at their services it's not broken are very excited about new phones sure but there's not sure of that now yeah exactly exactly so what years by the way here's. [42:03] Who were the mike. David beast but here's the thing. So maybe sister yep people are just going to want it because it's different. This packet switching off of iOS just because it's different so Microsoft, but we're different, but their profile also the company they're so is betamax it's different bombers gone so I just cleaned house a bit Microsoft her dog has been on a tear of their eating Android there you can Google Cloud business they're eating Amazon's Cloud business they're actually. Not an ulcer and they're they're actually leaders in a few questions so maybe they could do a limited release sir, either they would bring out some sort of you know for insiders only soda speakerphone. They should do they open source the bootloader. [43:16] Which bootloader the Windows 10 bootloader is an open-source okay suck it up okay. Cute weeks there and you can do a Homebrew cuz a Homebrew phone or just want to do is add the telephony pieces back into Windows 10 code they know we know to have them somewhere. Haven't left that's or something so I think they should open source. [43:40] But that's what I mean by insiders is that no no no no no no, so homework so he buy yourself an Android phone you use the window part XYZ they don't support Samsung but they support whatever you whatever, and you homebrew your ira android phone to use windows ten ml and becomes like sent us community supported, or like member xp mc or things like that number of use hack their x boxes to right next bmc yeah i did that, will it be. So what would Microsoft came from that. Point five years there's a one billion devices up closer my student id floral. But it keeps it cost nothing open source cuddling kind of. And unless the only unless they really want to do something with it may have a plan for it because I thought maybe open-sourcing that would open up a lot of their code. But lot of stuff that need in there. [45:00] But just maybe the telephony pieces people of the on the sort of thing with sheryl people shamed ec windows ten and other devices. And they shamed other things out of the Artis and things like that it looks like 5 or something like that somebody did. That was on the phone or something they did they can help with that they could make it so that some modules precompiled but you then could start a string it together and, esther shim windows ten on the new at the top left any pieces to make a phone yeah sure. If you think about the arm code but the arm code may require so it won't work, old Android phones, great for 2850 now there's different 850s though right some don't include x86 ability. [45:59] Hung up yeah but i think he a couple years america will have. And not all phones have any 50 in them, very few phone seven eight fifteen eight fifty is not really designed for phones is that most of the forty five ft same thing yeah the forty five is more phone base chipped the eight fifty was designed specifically for tablet and. [46:28] Are the visit Burien specifically for tablets anyways we're running x86 outside BND. [46:36] I think I'll pass but you'll do a Kickstarter on this no no it's totally a home brew beer kit. [46:45] Okay so I had to new internet put in my house today, no fiber you got the got the gigabit and. $300 in the next three months if I don't cancel. [47:09] What they pay you 300 cancel what do you mean they skipped credits. Okay so in outside that's fine it's whatever it's faster and it's lower latency I think so you know I don't have really any chances that's it yet but I'm sure it'll be fine it's less expensive than I was paying before cable. Faster but no big deal but I was decided that since it was less expensive I give them money and get some sports channels cuz I have a little sports fan at home right so they have this in a box that goes behind your TV. Don't have to put a wire between your tv and your and your access point they do this by giving you wife i'd, are these wife i access point so laughs what's so odd the on the access point in the basement there's one that cable comes out and goes into this to transmit up to the phone and then to the TV and then one in the TV that goes to the ethernet cable on the back. [48:09] And it's like you think they would buy their devices with built-in Wi-Fi instead having to buy the all these external devices. [48:17] It works so what are you paying for months now. Just for that just for the internet 7373 says 9:40 but I haven't got 9:40 yet what are you getting. Like 700 still more time Kenny Biggs and then they put it onto a whatever Channel or whatever they would call it. And he says laws of three people. But they just literally bury the cable and my and my neighborhood so i also ask them what are they gonna do with your old phone lines, hey cuz you think that will be a lot of work to maintain those when they put some new they try to push people over, it really that much to see if your with some of my tech savvy your these third of resellers they leave them for tactical reasons or maybe not protect the reasons on the copper. Eventually just going to get rid of one of these a minute seems like a lot of effort to maintain the old system. [49:22] On the making money thing sold it i guess i guess because it much most people bothered switch. And member it now this is it totally to built in throttle for their back will not work, cuz if everybody was on gigabit their back Burns their back bones than saturated sister the built-in filter for the backbone and then people who each of a gig, or do you have to get your ass off again today, set up, taking plugged into right its Upstream right. It's fast once you get to the backbone at things will slow down. Yeah so it's just a little office in my neighborhood and the Beast labs and then, but anyhow it's interesting that these list of the Surfside DSL access manager. They end up with 1:35 different devices they put in my house. [50:41] A lot of a lot of Hardware okay. [50:48] Teacher i never thought it have a peavey are waiting on pier cuz they include that that's your channel's because i got channel that's your cable so i can get a sports. You stream sports well i suppose i suppose but he can't expose you can do them some of the for twenty dollars a month. To get all this for my biggest and you can record that I'm happy to pay for it I just wish it were more convenient. [51:14] Suppose i get some sort of online service now they have a pal account i could probably just rim of many were now cant so i don't really need any of this she's come to my fire got the stick will not even that, what does what are using for display for your dumb TV a dumb TV okay that's, they put in three boxes. So there's a few want sports sports sports is the only thing I watch I watch live. [51:53] Super Bowl commercials I don't know why you would record it, but this ticket comes it's the way it is I don't really want to court a baby I want to pause it maybe want to start a little later when I get home and fast forward it through it or whatever but those are incredibly minor I want to watch sports live. Yeah I like the way we watch the hockey game last week better beer, fluid and mrs casey like at the rings got the arena that's just all old school techno stupid three extra boxes of my house and if they just give me an account that hurt that work to their app which they probably did yet then why would i, I'm commercial because I have business at home so it's it's the same price or less that they give different boxes so once I get back from Australia puppy switching. I'm on freenet I like freenet good service etcetera free that doesn't let you switch what do you mean. [52:50] They'll stay on your existing copper. Now you can become a free night member for free. That's what the whole concept was but back it up i expect at some point they will allow the. Resellers to sell fiber as well but I'm not the first one to ever get fiber so I assume they're just delaying it so they. Don't have to buy a buddy of mine office next door he got income fill for 5 months ago right so. [53:33] They're just delaying as long as possible I'm sure it's for technical reasons. Okay this is again from the hundred and one are you shouldn't track milly should fired one whiskeys to tie to tie before you tried okay a quick glance around the shells it any decent specialists retail were confirm. There are quite a few different mccallum's mcallen's is that the one and not the other mcallen's okay color. [54:13] Dramatic dark mahogany Richmond. The. [54:34] There's definitely a penis taste. Powerful Sherry yes absolutely why not some smoke very very little smoke chewy Vanilla Fudge shirt spicy glazed I mean definitely the Sherry really does come up, that'll just, but it comes up very well to me you can definitely tell this is Sherry cask, enjoy that okay you know we should have that kinda late now which is videotapes recording this show no one ever gets mission cappy more in two minutes so i pick two minutes of it and it, very round and consistent some smoke hints and classic take notes. [55:18] Trike fruitcake having that food taking us to it, this is an expensive bottle is now because they were victim around success so they ran out basically and they took all this is from not available in our Market. Play put it in New York L A Las Vegas few other markets London Tokyo where people will pay exorbitant price of quadruple the price because it is it is i could other than that there other whiskeys has good the coastline as it has good butter yeah so, it's not like 50 or shot in Vegas basically yeah. [56:09] Alright that's all I got that's all that's all that is an awesome Whiskey on the Rocks we will talk to you later by the way my name is Dave so drink. These are the days I know I know.

On this episode of Manga Mavericks, we only meet halfway on the promises of last episode as we don't just record another news only episode, but didn't have time to release all of what was promised. The good news is that we have another great Jump Start discussion with good friend of the show, Maxy Barnard, of Friendship Effort Victory! As we discuss the beginning chapters of two new gag manga in Weekly Shonen Jump entitled Teenage Renaissance David and I'm From Japan! Are these the two new additions to Jump's lineup that will satisfy Maxy's desperate need for comedy in Jump, or will they be two series doomed to capture the audience's (as well as Colton's) attention and fail? Join us next time as we discuss some My Hero Academia goodness including our thoughts on the All Might Rising prequel chapter, as well as our experience seeing Two Heroes in theaters! Until then, enjoy the episode! PODCAST BREAKDOWN: 00:00 - Intro 03:13 - Teenage Renaissance David 22:48 - I'm From Japan 45:47 - Wrap-up Enjoy the show, and follow us on twitter at @manga_mavericks, on tumblr at mangamavericks.tumblr.com, and now on Youtube! You can also follow the hosts at @sniperking323 and @lumranmayasha. If you’d like to help support the show financially you can donate to Colton’s Ko-fi here and LumRanmaYasha’s Ko-fi here. Don’t forget to also like and subscribe to us on Youtube and iTunes and leave us reviews to help us curate the show and create better content! We take your suggestions and feedback very seriously and want to figure out more ways to reach out and interact with you guys, so please leave some responses!

On this episode of Manga Mavericks, we only meet halfway on the promises of last episode as we don't just record another news only episode, but didn't have time to release all of what was promised. The good news is that we have another great Jump Start discussion with good friend of the show, Maxy Barnard, of Friendship Effort Victory! As we discuss the beginning chapters of two new gag manga in Weekly Shonen Jump entitled Teenage Renaissance David and I'm From Japan! Are these the two new additions to Jump's lineup that will satisfy Maxy's desperate need for comedy in Jump, or will they be two series doomed to capture the audience's (as well as Colton's) attention and fail? Join us next time as we discuss some My Hero Academia goodness including our thoughts on the All Might Rising prequel chapter, as well as our experience seeing Two Heroes in theaters! Until then, enjoy the episode! PODCAST BREAKDOWN: 00:00 - Intro 03:13 - Teenage Renaissance David 22:48 - I'm From Japan 45:47 - Wrap-up Enjoy the show, and follow us on twitter at @manga_mavericks, on tumblr at mangamavericks.tumblr.com, and now on Youtube! You can also follow the hosts at @sniperking323 and @lumranmayasha. If you’d like to help support the show financially you can donate to Colton’s Ko-fi here and LumRanmaYasha’s Ko-fi here. Don’t forget to also like and subscribe to us on Youtube and iTunes and leave us reviews to help us curate the show and create better content! We take your suggestions and feedback very seriously and want to figure out more ways to reach out and interact with you guys, so please leave some responses!

Blair offers seven mindsets that any seller of expertise needs to master so that they can behave like the expert in the sales cycle.   Links "The Jedi Mindset" by Blair Enns McClelland's Human Motivation Theory, also known as Three Needs Theory, Acquired Needs Theory, Motivational Needs Theory, and Learned Needs Theory   Transcript DAVID C. BAKER: Good morning, Blair. You are in London. I'm in Nashville. BLAIR ENNS: Yeah, it's my afternoon, and it's your seven AM. DAVID: And don't tell me you've gotten a lot more done today already, because that's just a time change thing. Has nothing to do with productivity. Today we're going to talk about the seven masteries of the rainmaker, choke, choke. BLAIR: You're choking on the word rainmaker, are you? DAVID: Well, a little bit. I'm also, it's like seven. How come it's not six or eight? Seven sounds quite biblically, almost like we need to take an offering at the end of this or something. BLAIR: Let's do that. DAVID: I'm more choking on the idea of the rainmaker. Do you hear that term much anymore? I don't really hear it. We know what it means, though. BLAIR: No, but there was a time when you heard it often. In fact, if an agency were running an ad looking for a new business person, probably a health percentage of those ads would have the title rainmaker wanted. DAVID: Yeah. BLAIR: I've never liked the term rainmaker. It's a little bit funny that an agency principal would be looking for an individual who essentially has magical powers, the ability to make it rain. DAVID: Right. It's dry. The crops are going to die. All we can do is just rely on magic. So let's call on the rainmaker. We have no idea how he ... it was always a he back in those days, but we don't know how he or she does it, but this is our last resort. BLAIR: We have no positioning. We have no leads. We have no prospects. We have no formalized new business process. You absolutely need somebody who can make it rain, yeah. So I've kind of used that term tongue in cheek, but the idea of seven masteries, it really stems from the notion of mindset. Because you can master behaviors. You can master all kinds of things. And when I originally wrote about this a few years ago, I had come home to the idea that I was teaching people sales process and people were learning, so they were onboarding and understanding what it is that they knew to do in specific situations, but yet, they still couldn't bring themselves to do it. BLAIR: So I kind of went deep into the subject and realized well, the things that I'm asking them to do, because my approach, the Win Without Pitching approach to selling to new businesses is a little bit contrary to the conventional way it's done in the creative profession. So the things that I was asking them to do were contrary to their overall general pattern of behavior. And then you ask yourself, well, what sets somebody's general pattern of behavior, and the answer is it's really the thoughts in their head, the mindset. BLAIR: So I kind of arrived at this model, this idea of the seven masteries of the rainmaker. These are the seven things that are concepts that an individual needs to master in order to put themselves in the mindset, the mindset of the expert. I sometimes refer to it as the Jedi mindset, so they master those concepts. So they're in the proper mindset. Then they can begin to behave, generally speaking, across the pattern of general behavior, they can begin to behave like the expert, and then they can start to take onboard these very specific things that we teach client does x, you do y. BLAIR: If you learn those specific points of sales process, what to do in the sale, in certain situations, but you're not already operating or behaving like the expert, then they're not going to work. So this whole idea was about getting to somebody's mindset. DAVID: Okay, so we're going to go through the seven, but before we do that, let's assume that I want to embrace this way of thinking. What specifically, almost mechanically, are you suggesting I'm going to do with these seven things? Do I just write them down, and I chant them to myself? No, you're not talking about that. It's more I analyze my behavior against this list. What am I going to do with this after we get through going through the seven? BLAIR: As I walk you through the seven, you'll think about where you are on that spectrum, and in the first mastery, just ask yourself, hey, are you mastering this now, or do you have some homework to do? And then I am going to get you to chant something funnily enough. DAVID: Good luck with that. BLAIR: After we get through four of the ... I think I said to you, this is either going to be really fun, or it's going to be a complete disaster. DAVID: Right, yeah. BLAIR: So we'll just see how it goes. As I explain the mastery, you just ask yourself, well, is this something I have mastered, or do I have some homework to do? And then once we get through four, the first four, which I consider to be the foundational masteries, then I'll actually talk about stringing them all together in a little saying or a mantra that you can say to yourself, and I don't mean to say that you're like Buddhist guru here or something. DAVID: As you laugh and talk about that, right. BLAIR: We're going to get you to say it out loud and then you'll see that when you do this properly, this becomes the conversation that you're having yourself with, and it sets you up to go into a situation where you're behaving properly. And even if you don't remember the specific things I tell you that you should be doing in the situation, it won't really matter, because you'll be thinking the right things. Therefore, your tendency will be to behave appropriately. You will behave like the expert. And then you can forget all of the nuance, and you'll still probably do pretty good. DAVID: Okay. All right. So let's dive in then. The first one is focus, right? So talk about that. BLAIR: Yeah, so mastering focus, it begins with the subject of focus. When you go in and do a total business review with a firm, I don't know this for certain, but I would expect that one of the very first things that you look at is the firm's positioning. Once you do an assessment of where the firm is and how they need to improve, I suspect that's kind of the foundation of where you start, or one of them. It certainly is in my business. DAVID: Yeah. In fact, I'm doing one today, yesterday and today. And as I was driving to where I'm talking with you now, I was just thinking, you know, I love this work. There's so much science and art around positioning, and it sets the stage for everything, right? How can you have all these other conversations without that? And that's what you mean focus, power in the sell comes from deep expertise, which comes out of that focus. DAVID: So when somebody's listening to this first one, and they're thinking, okay, do I still have homework to do, that question is is my firm focused enough to give me power or leverage in that relationship. BLAIR: Yeah, are you focused, or are you the individual benefiting from a focused firm. And the benefit of focus is when the firm narrows its focus in terms of the types of problems it solves or the types of clients it works for, usually a combination of those two, when it narrows its focus, it allows the firm to build a deeper expertise. So if you're an agency principal, and you have a dedicated new business development person, just ask yourself, are you arming this person with the benefit of focus. So we're going to build a four statement mantra. BLAIR: And the first statement is I am the expert. I am the prize. And that comes from this notion, this idea that I see myself as the expert practitioner in the relationship and not a vendor. I have some power in the relationship because of the depth of my expertise. Therefore I have a sense of being in control, but this idea that I am the prize, I am the prize to be won. I and the firm, we are the prize to be won in the relationship. And it's not the client is the prize that I am trying to win. BLAIR: So again, that's a mindset thing. Do you see yourself as this deep expert and representing a firm that has deep expertise that is desirable to the client, and do you see yourself and the firm as the prize to be won in the relationship? DAVID: That is so powerful, even though the words are so simple. It's the opposite of being a supplicant. It's not an arrogance, though. It's more of a quiet confidence that I've seen this before, and I'm eager to help, but we should talk about whether this is a right fit. I don't have to have this. I keep thinking of all these statements that emerge from what you were just talking about on the focus side. Even though we're kind of skipping, we could unpack this notion for weeks. We could talk for weeks, just about what focus means. But that's how it all starts. I love the fact that ... obviously, it has to be on this list, but I love the fact that it's also the first one. DAVID: So I am the expert. I am the prize. So that's focus. Second would be purpose. So talk about what that means, because we're still talking about very foundational things. How does purpose relate to this as a second one? BLAIR: Yeah. So after you master focus, you build deep expertise. The second, master a sense of purpose. And by purpose, I mean kind of a higher mission or calling. So most well-positioned firms can express their positioning in some fairly standard, almost formulaic language, and I don't mean to denigrate the language by calling it formulaic. I think first, you actually have to express your positioning in a formulaic language before you get creative with the language. BLAIR: So most specialized firms can say we're experts at helping this type of client solve this type of problem, or this discipline for this market. And that's just the beginning. Once you have that nailed, you want to go off in search of a higher purpose. Now, what purpose does for you in the sale is it gives you moral authority. It gives you the moral authority because you're driven, not to sell something to the person sitting across the table from you, and you're driven, not to help them sell things to their client. By tapping into purpose, you're tapping into something that's bigger than you, and even bigger than your client. And that gives you some moral authority in the sale. BLAIR: I'll give you an example in my own business. So Win Without Pitching, I can express our positioning as sales training for creative professionals. So the discipline is sales training. Creative professionals is the market. But my mission based positioning is we are on a mission to change the way creative services are bought and sold the world over. So there are different reasons. It starts to get into this Simon Sinek, tapping into your why thing. But there are certain moments when I will say that statement to myself, or if I'm being introduced to give a speech, I'll hand that language to the person who's introducing me, and that helps me get through maybe a slightly anxious moment and tap into something bigger than what I'm trying to accomplish in the moment. BLAIR: And when you're thinking bigger, when you're thinking past the transaction that's in front of you, and you're thinking past even what your client's objective is, to something even bigger than that, that steals you, gives you this moral authority, it contributes to your confidence, and it allows you to kind of ... gives you more ... I don't want to go back to the power word, but more confidence to navigate through the situation, through the sale, acting like the expert. DAVID: Yeah, and what I'm going to say next, I don't want it to take us too much off track, but I couldn't help but thinking of something as you were talking through this. Part of what we're doing at the beginning of a transaction like this or a possible transaction, or relationship, I guess would be a better way to say it, is to gather some control in that relationship, set ourselves up for that, not, though, so that we can misuse the power, but to use it for the benefit of the client, and sometimes it looks like a mistake. It looks like a power trip. It doesn't make sense sometimes from the outside. It's like if you saw somebody holding a child down, and it was through a glass window, and it looked cruel, and then the next thing you saw is that they were giving the child a shot, or they were dressing a wound or something like that. So we're doing something where we're exerting control to help the client, not to abuse the client. And we're reminding ourselves of that during this purpose discussion. DAVID: I love the example of getting up on stage, picture you've traveled a long time, you're tired, maybe something has happened that's shaking your confidence just a little bit. And you say this to yourself that I am on a mission to help. I guess that's the second phrase here that we're talking about. The first one, I am the expert, I am the prize. The second one, around purposes, I am on a mission to help. All of a sudden, it settles everything down. It reminds us why we're here and what we're trying to do. BLAIR: Yeah, well said. DAVID: So the third one is leadership. This is also a foundational statement. These first four are very foundational. So leadership is the third one. BLAIR: Yeah, let me just build where we are so far. So focus, I am the expert, I am the prize. Purpose, I am on a mission to help. And leadership, the line that goes with that is I can only do that if you let me lead. The idea of mastering leadership speaks to the notion that the sale is the sample of the engagement. So for you to do your best work in the engagement, you need to be able to lead. I use the word power, and I tend to overuse it, and as you point out, I don't mean power for the sake of power. I don't mean overusing it, but I mean, the client letting you assume the expert practitioner position and lead them through the engagement, rather than them relegating you to the vendor position and having them drag you through the engagement or dictate to you how the engagement is going to work. BLAIR: You're being hired to help solve a problem or capitalize on an opportunity. And for you to do your best work, you need to be allowed to lead in the engagement. Now, if you're not leading in the sale, then you won't be allowed to lead in the engagement, because the roles in the relationship are established well before the engagement begins. They're established in the sale. That's why you need to behave like the expert. You need to behave appropriately. BLAIR: So this third mastery of leadership is simply recognizing that for you to do your best work in the engagement, you need to be allowed to lead the client. Therefore, it's your job or a requirement that you assume the leadership position in the sale before you're hired. Again, I refer to the battle for leadership or power or control as the polite battle for control. And it should never feel to the client like you're dominating them or lording anything over them. They should feel the way it feels to you when you're hiring an expert practitioner yourself. They're calm, they're collected. They're clearly in control of where things are going or what the appropriate next steps should be. BLAIR: But they're also quite consultative with you, and they make you feel like you have input and you're not being dragged along. So that's the third mastery is leadership. DAVID: I can't help but think about the notion of process as well, because many clients of the folks that are listening to this podcast, those clients are sometimes going to question the process you want to take them through, and it's pretty important to not only have a reason for the process, but to also stick to your process as the expert. Now, if it's not a good process, you don't need to stick to it. I guess that was obvious. BLAIR: It's funny. I was thinking that, too. I'm sure you've seen this, too. There are a lot of agencies out there that kind of manufacture this, I'll call it process, the Canadian version. They manufacture it, and they lead their clients through it, and I come along, or you as a consultant come along and look in and go oh, it feels a little bit hollow and empty, and it's needlessly long, and it's not as fruitful as the client might think. So I think we can laugh about it, but there's actually some fairly hollow processes out there. DAVID: Right. But assuming that it's a good process and it really is a core part of how you're going to lead the client, then this begins to be a part of how you conduct this conversation. It's like you've hired me as an expert. The way I've done this in the past many, many times is to follow this process. I don't mean the hollow process. I mean the good process. It's allowed me to find the truth more reliably and more quickly. And that's a part of leadership. Leadership is not just the advice I'm giving a client. Leadership is also the process that we go through together to arrive at that advice. That's more the point. So focus, purpose, leadership. And the fourth one is detachment.   DAVID: Let me go through and repeat these phrases again. So on focus, we have I am the expert, I am the prize. On purpose, I am on a mission to help. On leadership, I can only do that if you help me lead. And then third is detachment so walk us through that. BLAIR: Yeah. Fourth is detachment, and the line that goes with it is all will not follow, and that's okay. There's really two things you want to master about detachment. First of all, you want to detach from the outcome. So we're talking about the mindset you get into right before you go into the sales interaction. And you layer in all these masteries, focus, purpose, leadership, and this idea of leadership, I'm going into the exchange, and one of the things I'm looking for is I'm looking to take the lead, and I'm looking to see if you will let me take the lead. Do you recognize me as an expert, and are you willing to let me lead in the engagement? If you are, you'll let me lead at least a little bit in the sale. And the fourth mastery here, detachment is letting go of the fact of well, if they don't, that's okay. BLAIR: Your business is bigger than any single one interaction or any single one opportunity. You are this focused expert. The idea is if this person or this client or account doesn't come with you, if they don't let you lead, if they don't hire you, et cetera, that's okay. So you detach from the outcome. That's number one. You focus on the mindset and the behavior, and you detach from the outcome. So again, if you imagine when you hire or work with other professionals in your life, if you end up saying to a lawyer or accountant or solicitor or whoever the most vaunted expert is in your life, if you decide kind of not to go with them, they're not pleading for you to please, please, please give me your business. Because they're this recognized expert who have, you imagine that they have all kinds of opportunities available to them beyond you. BLAIR: And that's essentially what you should be thinking to yourself and then communicating to your client, and just let go of the outcome. So that's the first point on detachment is just generally focus on the mindset, focus on the pattern of behavior, and let go of the outcome. Don't be tied to the fact that this person absolutely must buy from you. BLAIR: There's a lot rolled up in this idea. The idea of not over investing in the sale is tied to it. It's easier to detach when you haven't over invested in the sale. But the second part of detachment is each of us personally tends to have something, and it's usually one recurring thing that we want from the other person in the sale. BLAIR: And I'll go back to this model of motivation known as McClelland's needs theory of motivation or the three needs theory that says people are motivated primarily by one of three different things. It's the need to win versus others, the need to orchestrate others, and the need to connect with others. So if you're a high competitive drive, and you have a high need to win, then you really need to detach from, before you walk through the door, just let go of the need to win this opportunity. If you have high power needs, you have the need for authority and respect, that's probably a good thing, because you and I and have been talking about that. You want to occupy the expert practitioner position, but some people can be in danger of having too high a need for authority and respect. BLAIR: And that's me. So I need to let go of the need to be the absolute authority on something, and other people have high affiliation needs. What they're concerned about in any social interaction, even in a commercial one like this is the need to be liked by others, the need to connect with and be liked by others. So in that situation, they would be telling themselves something like all right, this person doesn't need a friend. They need an expert practitioner. So I will detach from my need to have this deep, personal connection with somebody. There's some more nuance there. You don't want to detach from that completely. But you do want to recognize essentially what a big motivator is and recognize that you tend to go to this too often, and in the situation you want to let go of it. BLAIR: So the idea is that all will not follow speaks to this notion that you don't need to close every deal, and then there's this secondary detachment of what is it that you personally need. Identify it and let go of it. DAVID: Because we should not need constant affirmation that we are an expert in the relationship. We should enter that potential relationship. Every once in a while, it's on a rocky ground, but believing generally that we are the expert, and there's a lot of evidence for that and that many, many clients over many years have paid us a lot. And then after the engagement, we've heard that it made a difference for them, whatever business our listeners are in. DAVID: I love talking about this notion about how much we care or what we care about. I have this theory that has zero scientific underpinnings, just to make that clear. BLAIR: Those are the best theories. Go on. DAVID: All of a sudden, you're interested now. The idea is that we have 200. Now the number might go up or down, obviously, but we have about 200 instances in our souls where we can care a lot more than the client can. And every time we deeply care more than the client does about something, a little part of us dies. And then we have 199 left. So you want to use those very carefully. They're like little tokens that are not going to be replaced. Caring about the wrong things, it just kind of kills you slowly, right? BLAIR: Yeah, you've punched all the holes in your care card. You're out. DAVID: Exactly. Where's my free card? BLAIR: Clearly, you've punched yours years ago. DAVID: I don't even know what a care card looks like anymore. Okay. So what's this mantra that you're going to try and get me ... you say it, and I'll repeat it. And this rolls up the first four. BLAIR: I am the expert. I am the prize. I am on a mission to help. I can only do that if you let me lead. All will not follow, and that's okay. You try it. DAVID: Okay. If I say that is, will you let me lead the next six episodes of the podcast? BLAIR: Yes. DAVID: Okay. BLAIR: You can have whatever you want if you say this. DAVID: Okay. I don't believe that. But I am the expert. I am the prize. I am on a mission to help. I can only do that if you help me lead. BLAIR: If you let me lead. DAVID: If you let me lead. All will not follow, and that's okay. So obviously, I messed it up. I have to practice this some more. Okay. So those are the first four, and you've wrapped them up. The next three masteries are different, though. They're not foundational. They're more specific situation masteries. And we sometimes get these in as well, today. BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: So what's the first one? Silence. BLAIR: You're looking at the list. You tell me. DAVID: Ah, you were pulling that on me. You just did that to me, and I fell right into it. BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: Okay, I'm a sucker. BLAIR: The fifth mastery is silence, and I think we've talked about this a little bit before. I think mastering silence is the single biggest little thing that you can do, if that makes sense, and it does make sense, the single biggest little thing you that you can do to become a better sales person. Nature abhors a vacuum, and when a buyer and seller are talking, any time there's a pause in that conversation, there's an impetus on both parts to fill it, and if you're the seller, you tend to fill a pause in a sales conversation with some sort of concession. You don't even have to master silence. You just have to learn to be more comfortable in silence than the other party. Because if you can be more comfortable, then the client is likely to fill the void with a concession or they will give you really valuable information. BLAIR: So we always teach that any time you raise an objection or place kind of a hurdle in front of the client and ask the client to jump over that hurdle, or you ask for a behavioral concession, after the statement or the ask, you just be quiet. So if you put forward your proposal, and it's got a price on it, and you're putting it forward orally, and you say and the price is $200,000, then you just stop and say nothing. And it's hard to do this initially, but it's actually very easy to get good at this. And if you can just kind of not be the person to break the silence, and you let the client fill the void, then you'll get all kinds of information on where the client stands, on how much power you have in the relationship. And you might even get some concessions, whereas sales people like to fill a void in that moment. The price is $200,000, silence, and then the sales person can't stand it, and says, oh but we could do it for less. DAVID: Yeah, and the panic rises so quickly. It's like yeah, maybe they just need to pull out Fortnite and start playing it or check their email. You're not suggesting that. BLAIR: I would say count to 10 under your breath. DAVID: Yeah, okay. All right, so silence is the first of the three after the foundational ones, and the second one is directness, say what you're thinking. We've talked a lot about this one, but it fits in the system, right? So just remind people, if they haven't heard that episode. BLAIR: I was just working with a firm earlier this week, and we were just doing some role play scenarios where I was on the subject of saying what you're thinking. So I was just throwing out some scenarios. And I was saying okay, here's a scenario, you're talking to a prospective client. You're thinking oh, they're probably too small. They probably can't afford you. What do you say? And I was really surprised at how people ... and I've been doing this for years. I continue to be surprised at how people struggle with finding the language to actually politely say what you're thinking, because we are not conditioned to do that in this business. In the creative and marketing firm business, we're taught that we're in the service business. The customer's always right. We're taught to nod and smile yes, even when we think the answer is no. BLAIR: But an expert would never do that. If you've got an opinion that's contrary to one that's been stated by the client, including an opinion on what the next step should be in the path to determining whether or not you're going to work together, you should say it. So be direct. Put it on the table. So I say there's a slight pause. As soon as you get the thought, the contrary thought, you have an obligation to state the thought, and you pause long enough so that you can think of a way to say it with kindness. So we talked about before, the subject goes by the name kind ruthlessness. So you're kind in your language, but you're ruthless in your standards and your behavior. By that I mean, you're being direct, you're saying what you're thinking. If you think the client's assessment of their problem or their opportunity is wrong, then you should say so. BLAIR: If you think there are flaws in the way they're proposing to hire a firm like yours, then you should say so. If you think the client is making a mistake in the engagement, then you should say so. Any expert worth their weight would confront politely with kindness the client with the mistake they think the client is making. And we, almost universally ... it's not universal, but it's almost universal. We don't do that. We need to learn to get better at doing that. So you master this idea of directness of saying what you're thinking. DAVID: I'm picturing somebody taking the oath of office or being sworn in before they give testimony. There needs to be something like that for experts, a commissioning service for experts where they raise their hand and say, I pledge to do it politely but to be honest and to state the truth with the clients who deserve that from me. They deserve that leadership from me. This is very powerful. BLAIR: I love that idea, our equivalent of the Hippocratic oath. DAVID: Right. So silence, directness, and the last one is money. So master your own wonderful relationship with money. That's one of the things we got with another couple or some friends or whatever, and we can talk about sex. We can talk about all kinds of ... we can't talk about how they raise their kids, and we can't talk about money sometimes, and that carries over into how we conduct these early relationships and sales studies as well. We can't really talk about money for some reason. BLAIR: Yeah, and that's why it's the seven and the last mastery. I like the idea that if people were just to read it, you have to master money. Some people would be repulsed by it, the idea. And those are the people that I'm really speaking to here, because we're not mastering the accumulation of money or the spending of money. What I mean by mastering money is mastering our own relationship with money. I believe, and I think we've talked about this before, that most of us have a dysfunctional relationship with money. BLAIR: In my book, Pricing Creativity, the last chapter, I think it's titled the last obstacle is you, and I talk about the mental barriers ... we've done a podcast on this ... the mental barriers to profit. And that's what I'm talking about is not getting hung up on money, and all of the personal emotional things that we were taught or we learned around money, all of the baggage ... baggage isn't fair, because as you pointed out, in social situations, the rules around talking about money are actually quite different than they are in a business situation. You say you've got friends where you can talk about sex, you can talk about politics, you can talk about things. But you can't necessarily talk about money. There's only a small number of people in my kind of personal life, where I have an open relationship without the subject of money, where we've agreed that we're going to talk openly about money, and there's really nothing off limits. DAVID: Yeah. BLAIR: I'm really talking about mastering the subject of the hold that money has over you or the idea that the subject of money is somehow holding you back because you don't feel it's worth it. I got an email two days ago from a client, who said ... he forwarded an exchange that was happening in his firm. He said, oh you're going to love this. He said read down and start from the bottom. So this is a firm that's recently moved to value-based pricing. So they still scoped it based on hours. Somebody internally said, well, it should take this many hours. The client wasn't buying hours, but they sold it for way more hours than it took to deliver. And two people internally were saying this is unethical. We cannot do this. BLAIR: So the principal at the firm and I are kind of laughing back and forth about this, because if you think it's unethical to create extraordinary value quickly, then you have a dysfunctional relationship with money. DAVID: You also have some other issues that are coming around the corner, too. This is such a great topic. I'm not at the point where I'm going to start chanting this. But I do ... I really do like this. So the foundational four, focus, purpose, leadership, detachment, and then the three masteries that are more for specific situations which you might use in certain specific cases would be silence, directness, and money. Blair, this was fantastic. Loved our discussion today. BLAIR: Yeah, thanks. It wasn't nearly as weird as I thought it would be. DAVID: Thank you, Blair. BLAIR: Thanks, David.

Listen Here: iTunes | Overcast | PlayerFM Keep up with the North Star Podcast. My guest today is Michael Nielsen a scientist, writer and computer programmer who works as a research fellow at Y Combinator Research. Michael has written on various topics from quantum teleportation, geometric complexity and the future of science. Michael is the most original thinker I have discovered in a long time when it comes to artificial intelligence, augmenting human intelligence, reinventing explanation and using new media to enable new ways of thinking. Michael has pushed my mind towards new and unexpected places. This conversation gets a little wonky at times, but as you know, the best conversations are difficult. They are challenging because they venture into new, unexplored territory and that's exactly what we did here today.  Michael and I explored the history of tools and jump back to the invention of language, the defining feature of human collaboration and communication. We explore the future of data visualization and talk about the history of the spreadsheet as a tool for human thought.  “Before writing and mathematics, you have the invention of language which is the most significant event in some ways. That’s probably the defining feature of the human species as compared to other species.” LINKS Find Michael Online Michael’s Website Michael’s Twitter Michael’s Free Ebook: Neural Networks and Deep Learning Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science Quantum Computation and Quantum Information Mentioned In the Show 2:12 Michael’s Essay Extreme Thinking 21:48 Photoshop 21:49 Microsoft Word 24:02 The David Bowie Exhibit 28:08 Google AI’s Deep Dream Images 29:26 Alpha Go 30:26 Brian Eno’s Infamous Airport Music 33:41 Listen to Speed of Life by Dirty South Books Mentioned 46:06 Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig 54:12 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut People Mentioned 13:27 Rembrandt Van Rijn’s Artwork 15:01 Monet’s Gallery 15:02 Pierre Auguste Renoir’s Impressionist Art 15:05 Picasso’s Paintings 15:18 Paul Cezanne’s Post-Impressionist Art 25:40 David Brooke’s NYT Column 35:19 Franco of Cologne 56:58 Alan Kay’s Ted Talk on the future of education 57:04 Doug Engelbart 58:35 Karl Schroeder 01:02:06 Elon Musk’s Mars-bound company, SpaceX 01:04:25 Alex Tabarrok Show Topics 4:01 Michael’s North Star, which drives the direction of his research 5:32 Michael talks about how he sets his long-term goals and how he’s propelled by ideas he’s excited to see in the world. 7:13 The invention of language. Michael discusses human biology and how it’s easier to learn a language than writing or mathematics.  9:28 Michael talks about humanity’s ability to bootstrap itself. Examples include maps, planes, and photography  17:33 Limitations in media due to consolidation and the small number of communication platforms available to us  18:30 How self-driving cars and smartphones highlight the strange intersection where artificial intelligence meets human interaction and the possibilities that exist as technology improves 21:45 Why does Photoshop improve your editing skills, while Microsoft Word doesn’t improve your writing skills? 27:07 Michael’s opinion on how Artificial Intelligence can help people be more creative “Really good AI systems are going to depend upon building and currently depend on building very good models of different parts of the world, to the extent that we can then build tools to actually look in and see what those models are telling us about the world.”  30:22 The intersection of algorithms and creativity. Are algorithms the musicians of the future? 36:51 The emerging ability to create interactive visual representations of spreadsheets that are used in media, internally in companies, elections and more. “I’m interested in the shift from having media be predominantly static to dynamic, which the New York Times is a perfect example of. They can tell stories on newyorktimes.com that they can’t tell in the newspaper that gets delivered to your doorstep.” 45:42 The strategies Michael uses to successfully trail blaze uncharted territory and how they emulate building a sculpture   53:30 Michael’s learning and information consumption process, inspired by the idea that you are what you pretend to be 56:44 The foundation of Michael’s worldview. The people and ideas that have shaped and inspired Michael.  01:02:26 Michael’s hypothesis for the 21st century project involving blockchain and cryptocurrencies and their ability to make implementing marketplaces easier than ever before “The key point is that some of these cryptocurrencies actually, potentially, make it very easy to implement marketplaces. It’s plausible to me that the 21st century [project] turns out to be about [marketplaces]. It’s about inventing new types of markets, which really means inventing new types of collective action.” Host David Perell and Guest Michael Nielsen TRANSCRIPT Hello and welcome to the North Star. I'm your host, David Perell, the founder of North Star Media, and this is the North Star podcast. This show is a deep dive into the stories, habits, ideas, strategies, and rituals that guide fulfilled people and create enormous success for them, and while the guests are diverse, they share profound similarities. They're guided by purpose, live with intense joy, learn passionately, and see the world with a unique lens. With each episode, we get to jump into their minds, soak up their hard-earned wisdom and apply it to our lives. My guest today is Michael Nielson, a scientist, writer, and computer programmer, who works as a research fellow at Y Combinator Research. Michael's written on various topics from quantum teleportation to geometric complexity to the future of science, and now Michael is the most original thinker I've discovered in a long time. When it comes to artificial intelligence to augmenting human intelligence, reinventing explanation, or using new media to enable new ways of thinking, Michael has pushed my mind towards new and unexpected places. Now, this conversation gets a little wonky at times, but as you know, the best conversations are difficult. They're challenging because they venture into new, unexplored territory and that's exactly what we did here today. Michael and I explored the history of tools. This is an extension of human thought and we jump back to the invention of language, the defining feature of human collaboration and communication. We explore the future of data visualization and talk about the history of this spreadsheet as a tool for human thought. Here's my conversation with Michael Nielson. DAVID: Michael Nielson, welcome to the North Star Podcast. MICHAEL: Thank you, David. DAVID: So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do. MICHAEL: So day to day, I'm a researcher at Y Combinator Research. I'm basically a reformed theoretical physicist. My original background is doing quantum computing work. And then I've moved around a bit over the years. I've worked on open science, I've worked on artificial intelligence and most of my current work is around tools for thought. DAVID: So you wrote an essay which I really enjoyed called Extreme Thinking. And in it, you said that one of the single most important principle of learning is having a strong sense of purpose and a strong sense of meaning. So let's be in there. What is that for you? MICHAEL: Okay. You've done your background. Haven't thought about that essay in years. God knows how long ago I wrote it. Having a strong sense of purpose. What did I actually mean? Let me kind of reboot my own thinking. It's, it's kind of the banal point of view. How much you want something really matters. There's this lovely interview with the physicist Richard Feynman, where he's asked about this Indian mathematical prodigy Ramanujan. A movie was made about Ramanujan’s mathematical prowess a couple of years ago. He was kind of this great genius. And a Feynman was asked what made Ramanujan so good. And the interview was expecting him to say something about how bright this guy was or whatever. And Feynman said instead, that it was desire. It was just that love of mathematics was at the heart of it. And he couldn't stop thinking about it and he was thinking about it. He was doing in many ways, I guess the hard things. It's very difficult to do the hard things that actually block you unless you have such a strong desire that you're willing to go through those things. Of course, I think you see that in all people who get really good at something, whether it be sort of a, just a skill like playing the violin or something, which is much more complicated. DAVID: So what is it for you? What is that sort of, I hate to say I want to just throw that out here, that North Star, so to speak, of what drives you in your research? MICHAEL: Research is funny. You go through these sort of down periods in which you don't necessarily have something driving you on. That used to really bother me early in my career. That was sort of a need to always be moving. But now I think that it's actually important to allow yourself to do that. That's actually how you find the problems, which really get, get you excited. If you don't sort of take those pauses, then you're not gonna find something that's really worth working on. I haven't actually answered your question. I think I know I've jumped to that other point because that's one thing that really matters to me and it was something that was hard to learn. DAVID: So one thing that I've been thinking a lot about recently is you sort of see it in companies. You see it in countries like Singapore, companies like Amazon and then something like the Long Now Foundation with like the 10,000-year clock. And I'm wondering to you in terms of learning, there's always sort of a tension between short-term learning and long-term learning. Like short-term learning so often is maybe trying to learn something that feels a little bit richer. So for me, that's reading, whereas maybe for a long-term learning project there are things I'd like to learn like Python. I'd like to learn some other things like that. And I'm wondering, do you set long-term learning goals for yourself or how would you think about that trade off? MICHAEL: I try to sit long-time learning goals to myself, in many ways against my better judgment. It's funny like you're very disconnected from you a year from now or five years from now, or 10 years from now. I can't remember, but Eisenhower or Bonaparte or somebody like that said that the planning is invaluable or planning plans are overrated, but planning is invaluable. And I think that's true. And this is the right sort of attitude to take towards these long-term lending goals. Sure. It's a great idea to decide that you're going out. Actually, I wouldn't say it was a great idea to say that you're going to learn python, I might say. However, there was a great idea to learn python if you had some project that you desperately wanted to do that it required you to learn python, then it's worth doing, otherwise stay away from python. I certainly favor, coupling learning stuff to projects that you're excited to actually see in the world. But also, then you may give stuff up, you don't become a master of python and instead you spend whatever, a hundred hours or so learning about it for this project that takes you a few hundred hours, and if you want to do a successor project which involves it, more of it. Great, you'll become better. And if you don't, well you move onto something else. DAVID: Right. Well now I want to dive into the thing that I'm most excited to talk to you about today and that's tools that extend human thought. And so let's start with the history of that. We'll go back sort of the history of tools and there's had great Walter Ong quote about how there are no new thoughts without new technologies. And maybe we can start there with maybe the invention of writing, the invention of mathematics and then work through that and work to where you see the future of human thought going with new technologies. MICHAEL: Actually, I mean before writing and mathematics, you have the invention of language, which is almost certainly the most significant single event in some ways. The history of the planet suddenly, you know, that's probably the defining feature of the human species as compared to other species. Um, I say invention, but it's not even really invention. There's certainly a lot of evidence to suggest that language is in some important sense built into our biology. Not the details of language. Um, but this second language acquisition device, it seems like every human is relatively very set to receive language. The actual details depend on the culture we grow up on. Obviously, you don't grow up speaking French if you were born in San Francisco and unless you were in a French-speaking household, some very interesting process of evolution going on there where you have something which is fundamentally a technology in some sense languages, humans, a human invention. It's something that's constructed. It's culturally carried. Um, it, there's all these connections between different words. There's almost sort of a graph of connections between the words if you like, or all sorts of interesting associations. So in that sense, it's a technology, something that's been constructed, but it's also something which has been over time built into our biology. Now if you look at later technologies of thought things like say mathematics, those are much, much later. That hasn't been the same sort of period of time. Those don't seem to be built into our biology in quite the same way. There's actually some hints of that we have some intrinsic sense of number and there's some sort of interesting experiments that suggest that we were built to do certain rudimentary kinds of mathematical reasoning but there's no, you know, section of the brain which specializes sort of from birth in solving quadratic equations, much less doing algebraic geometry or whatever, you know, super advanced. So it becomes this cultural thing over the last few thousand years, this kind of amazing process whereby we've started to bootstrap ourselves. If you think about something like say the invention of maps, which really has changed the way people relate to the environment. Initially, they were very rudimentary things. Um, and people just kept having new ideas for making maps more and more powerful as tools for thought. Okay. I can give you an example. You know, a very simple thing, if you've ever been to say the underground in London or most other subway systems around the world. It was actually the underground when this first happened, if you look at the map of the underground, I mean it's a very complicated map, but you can get pretty good at reasoning about how to get from one place to another. And if you look at maps prior to, I think it was 1936, in fact, the maps were much more complicated. And the reason was that mapmakers up to that point had the idea that where the stations were shown on the map had to correspond to the geography of London. Exactly. And then somebody involved in producing the underground map had just a brilliant insight that actually people don't care. They care about the connections between the stations and they want to know about the lines and they want some rough idea of the geography, but they're quite happy for it to be very rough indeed and he was able to dramatically simplify that map by simply doing away with any notion of exact geography. DAVID: Well, it's funny because I noticed the exact same thing in New York and so often you have insights when you see two things coming together. So I was on the subway coming home one day and I was looking at the map and I always thought that Manhattan was way smaller than Brooklyn, but on the subway map, Manhattan is actually the same size as Brooklyn. And in Manhattan where the majority of the subway action is, it takes up a disproportionate share of the New York City subway map. And then I went home to go read Power Broker, which is a book about Robert Moses building the highways and they had to scale map. And what I saw was that Brooklyn was way, way bigger than Manhattan. And from predominantly looking at subway maps. Actually, my topological geographical understanding of New York was flawed and I think exactly to your point. MICHAEL: It's interesting. When you think about what's going on there and what it is, is some person or a small group of people is thinking very hard about how to represent their understanding of the city and then the building, tools, sort of a technological tool of thought that actually then saves millions or in the case of a New York subway or the London underground, hundreds of millions or billions of people, mostly just seconds, sometimes, probably minutes. Like those maps would be substantially more complicated sort of every single day. So it's only a small difference. I mean, and it's just one invention, right? But, you know, our culture is of course accumulated thousands or millions of these inventions. DAVID: One of my other favorite ones from being a kid was I would always go on airplanes and I'd look at the route map and it would always show that the airplanes would fly over the North Pole, but on two-dimensional space that was never clear to me. And I remember being with my dad one night, we bought a globe and we took a rubber band and we stretched why it was actually shorter to fly over the North Pole, say if you're going from New York to India. And that was one of the first times in my life that I actually didn't realize it at the time, but understood exactly what I think you're trying to get at there. How about photography? Because that's another one that I think is really striking, vivid from the horse to slow motion to time lapses. MICHAEL: Photography I think is interesting in this vein in two separate ways. One is actually what it did to painting, which is of course painters have been getting more and more interested in being more and more realistic. And honestly, by the beginning of the 19th century, I think painting was pretty boring. Yeah, if you go back to say the 16th and 17th centuries, you have people who are already just astoundingly good at depicting things in a realistic fashion. To my mind, Rembrandt is probably still the best portrait painter in some sense to ever live. DAVID: And is that because he was the best at painting something that looked real? MICHAEL: I think he did something better than that. He did this very clever thing, you know, you will see a photograph or a picture of somebody and you'll say, oh, that really looks like them. And I think actually most of the time we, our minds almost construct this kind of composite image that we think of as what David looks like or what our mother looks like or whatever. But actually moment to moment, they mostly don't look like that. They mostly, you know, their faces a little bit more drawn or it's, you know, the skin color is a little bit different. And my guess, my theory of Rembrandt, is that he may have actually been very, very good at figuring out almost what that image was and actually capturing that. So, yeah, I mean this is purely hypothetical. I have no real reason to believe it, but I think it's why I responded so strongly to his paintings. DAVID: And then what happened? So after Rembrandt, what changed? MICHAEL: So like I said, you mean you keep going for a sort of another 200 years, people just keep getting more and more realistic in some sense. You have all the great landscape painters and then you have this catastrophe where photography comes along and all of a sudden you're being able to paint in a more and more realistic fashion. It doesn't seem like such a hot thing to be doing anymore. And if for some painters, I think this was a bit of a disaster, a bit of dose. I said of this modern wave, you start to see through people like Monet and Renoir. But then I think Picasso, for me anyway, was really the pivotal figure in realizing that actually what art could become, is the invention of completely new ways of seeing. And he starts to play inspired by Cezanne and others in really interesting ways with the construction of figures and such. Showing things from multiple angles in one painting and different points of view. And he just plays with hundreds of ideas along these lines, through all of his painting and how we see and what we see in how we actually construct reality in their heads from the images that we see. And he did so much of that. It really became something that I think a lot of artists, I'm not an artist or a sophisticated art theory person, but it became something that other people realized was actually an extraordinarily interesting thing to be doing. And much of the most interesting modern art is really a descendant of that understanding that it's a useful thing to be doing. A really interesting thing to be doing rather than becoming more and more realistic is actually finding more and more interesting ways of seeing and being able to represent the world. DAVID: So I think that the quote is attributed to Marshall McLuhan, but I have heard that Winston Churchill said it. And first, we shape our tools and then our tools shape us. And that seems to be sort of the foundation of a lot of the things that you're saying. MICHAEL: Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, on the other side, you also have, to your original question about photography. Photographers have gradually started to realize that they could shape how they saw nature. Ansel Adams and people like this, you know. Just what an eye. And understanding his tools so verbally he's not just capturing what you see. He's constructing stuff in really, really interesting ways. DAVID: And how about moving forward in terms of your work, thinking about where we are now to thinking about the future of technology. For example, one thing that frustrates me a bit as a podcast host is, you know, we just had this conversation about art and it's the limits of the audio medium to not be able to show the paintings of Rembrandt and Cezanne that we just alluded to. So as you think about jumping off of that, as you think about where we are now in terms of media to moving forward, what are some of the challenges that you see and the issues that you're grappling with? MICHAEL: One thing for sure, which I think inhibits a lot of exploration. We're trapped in a relatively small number of platforms. The web is this amazing thing as our phones, iOS and whatnot, but they're also pretty limited and that bothers me a little bit. Basically when you sort of narrow down to just a few platforms which have captured almost all of the attention, that's quite limiting. People also, they tend not to make their own hardware. They don't do these kinds of these kinds of things. If that were to change, I think that would certainly be exciting. Something that I think is very, very interesting over the next few years, artificial intelligence has gotten to the point now where we can do a pretty good job in understanding what's actually going on inside a room. Like we can set up sufficient cameras. If you think about something like self-driving cars, essentially what they're doing is they're building up a complete model of the environment and if that model is not pretty darned good, then you can't do self-driving cars, you need to know where the pedestrians are and where the signs are and all these kinds of things and if there's an obstruction and that technology when brought into, you know, the whole of the rest of the world means that you're pretty good at passing out. You know what's inside the room. Oh, there's a chair over there, there's a dog which is moving in that direction, there's a person, there’s a baby and sort of understanding all those actions and ideally starting to understand all the gestures which people are making as well. So we're in this very strange state right at the moment. Where the way we talk to computers is we have these tiny little rectangles and we talk to them through basically a square inch or so of sort of skin, which is our eyes. And then we, you know, we tap away with our fingers and the whole of the rest of our body and our existence is completely uncoupled from that. We've effectively reduced ourselves to our fingers and our eyes. We a couple to it only through the whatever, 100 square inches, couple hundred square inches of our screens or less if you're on a phone and everything else in the environment is gone. But we're actually at a point where we're nearly able to do an understanding of all of that sufficiently well that actually other modes of interaction will become possible. I don't think we're quite there yet, but we're pretty close. And you start to think about, something like one of my favorite sport is tennis. You think about what a tennis player can do with their body or you think about what a dancer can do with their body. It's just extraordinary. And all of that mode of being human and sort of understanding we can build up antibodies is completely shut out from the computing experience at the moment. And I think over the next sort of five to ten years that will start to reenter and then in the decades hence, it will just seem strange that it was ever shut out. DAVID: So help me understand this. So when you mean by start to reenter, do mean that we'll be able to control computers with other parts of our bodies or that we'll be spending less time maybe typing on keyboards. Help me flesh this out. MICHAEL: I just mean that at the moment. As you speak to David, you are waving your arms around and all sorts of interesting ways and there is no computer system which is aware of it, what your computer system is aware of. You're doing this recording. That's it. And even that, it doesn't understand in any sort of significant way. Once you've gained the ability to understand the environment. Lots of interesting things become possible. The obvious example, which everybody immediately understands is that self driving cars become possible. There's this sort of enormous capacity. But I think it's certainly reasonably likely that much more than that will become possible over the next 10 to 20 years. As your computer system becomes completely aware of your environment or as aware as you're willing to allow it to be. DAVID: You made a really interesting analogy in one of your essays about the difference between Photoshop and Microsoft Word. That was really fascinating to me because I know both programs pretty well. But to know Microsoft word doesn't necessarily mean that I'm a better writer. It actually doesn't mean that at all. But to know Photoshop well probably makes me pretty good at image manipulation. I'm sure there's more there, but if you could walk me through your thought process as you were thinking through that. I think that's really interesting. MICHAEL: So it's really about a difference in the type of tools which are built into the program. So in Photoshop, which I should say, I don't know that well, I know Word pretty well. I've certainly spent a lot more time in it than I have ever spent in Photoshop. But in Photoshop, you do have these very interesting tools which have been built in, which really condense an enormous amount of understanding of ideas like layers or an idea, different brushes, these kinds of ideas. There's just a tremendous amount of understanding which has been built in there. When I watch friends who are really good with these kinds of programs, what they can do with layers is just amazing. They understand all these kind of clever screening techniques. It seems like such a simple idea and yet they're able to do these things that let you do astonishing things just with sort of three or four apparently very simple operations. So in that sense, there are some very deep ideas about image manipulation, which had been built directly into Photoshop. By contrast, there's not really very many deep ideas about writing built into Microsoft Word. If you talk to writers about how they go about their actual craft and you say, well, you know, what heuristics do use to write stories and whatnot. Most of the ideas which they use aren't, you know, they don't correspond directly to any set of tools inside Word. Probably the one exception is ideas, like outlining. There are some tools which have been built into word and that's maybe an example where in fact Word does help the writer a little bit, but I don't think to nearly the same extent as Photoshop seems to. DAVID: I went to an awesome exhibit for David Bowie and one of the things that David but we did when he was writing songs was he had this word manipulator which would just throw him like 20, 30 words and the point wasn't that he would use those words. The point was that by getting words, his mind would then go to different places and so often when you're in my experience and clearly his, when you're trying to create something, it helps to just be thrown raw material at you rather than the perennial, oh my goodness, I'm looking at a white screen with like this clicking thing that is just terrifying, Word doesn't help you in that way. MICHAEL: So an example of something which does operate a little bit in that way, it was a Ph.D. thesis was somebody wrote at MIT about what was called the Remembrance Agent. And what it would do, it was a plugin essentially for a text editor that it would, look at what you are currently writing and it would search through your hard disk for documents that seemed like they might actually be relevant. Just kind of prompt you with what you're writing. Seems like it might be related to this or this or this or this or this. And to be perfectly honest, it didn't actually work all that well. I think mostly because the underlying machine learning algorithms it used weren't very clever. It's defunct now as far as I know. I tried to get it to run on my machine or a year or two ago and I couldn't get it running. It was still an interesting thing to do. It had exactly this same kind of the belly sort of experience. Even if they weren't terribly relevant. You kind of couldn't understand why on earth you are being shown it. It's still jogged your mind in an interesting way. DAVID: Yeah. I get a lot of help out of that. Actually, I’ll put this example. So David Brooks, you know the columnist for the New York Times. When he writes, what he does is he gets all of his notes and he just puts his notes on the floor and he literally crawls all around and tries to piece the notes together and so he's not even writing. He's just organizing ideas and it must really help him as it helps me to just have raw material and just organize it all in the same place. MICHAEL: There's a great British humorist, PG Boathouse, he supposedly wrote on I think it was the three by five-inch cards. He'd write a paragraph on each one, but he had supposedly a very complicated system in his office, well not complicated at all, but it must have looked amazing where he would basically paste the cards to the wall and as the quality of each paragraph rose, he would move the paragraph up the wall and I think the idea was something like once it got to the end, it was a lion or something, every paragraph in the book had to get above that line and at that point it was ready to go. DAVID: So I've been thinking a lot about sort of so often in normal media we take AI sort of on one side and art on another side. But I think that so many of the really interesting things that will emerge out of this as the collaboration between the two. And you've written a bit about art and AI, so how can maybe art or artificial intelligence help people be more creative in this way? MICHAEL: I think we still don't know the answer to the question, unfortunately. The hoped-for answer the answer that might turn out to be true. Real AI systems are going to build up very good models of different parts of the world, maybe better than any human has of those parts of the world. It might be the case, I don't know. It might be the case that something like the Google translate system, maybe in some sense that system already knows some facts about translation that would be pretty difficult to track down in any individual human mind and sort of so much about translation in some significant ways. I'm just speculating here. But if you can start to interrogate that understanding, it becomes a really useful sort of a prosthetic for human beings. If you've seen any of these amazing, well I guess probably the classics, the deep dream images that came out of Google brain a couple of years ago. Basically, you take ordinary images and you're sort of running them backwards through a neural net somehow. You're sort of seeing something about how the neural net sees that image. You get these very beautiful images as a result. There's something strange going on and sort of revealing about your own way of seeing the world. And at the same time, it's based on some structure which this neural net has discovered inside these images which is not ordinarily directly accessible to you. It's showing you that structure. So sort of I think the right way to think about this is that really good AI systems are going to depend upon building and do currently depend on building very good models of different parts of the world and to the extent that we can then build tools to actually look in and see what those models are telling us about the world, we can learn interesting new things which are useful for us. I think the conventional way, certainly the science fiction way to think about AI is that we're going to give it commands and it's going to do stuff. How you shut the whatever it is, the door or so on and so forth, and there was certainly will be a certain amount of that. Or with AlphaGo what is the best move to take now, but actually in some sense, with something like AlphaGo, it's probably more interesting to be able to look into it and see what it's understanding is of the board position than it is to ask what's the best move to be taken. A colleague showed me a go program, a prototype, what it would do. It was a very simple kind of a thing, but it would help train beginners. I think it was Go, but by essentially colorizing different parts of the board according to whether they were good or bad moves to be taking in its estimation. If you're a sophisticated player, it probably wasn't terribly helpful, but if you're just a beginner, there's an interesting kind of a conditioning going on there. At least potentially a which lets you start to see. You get a feeling for immediate feedback from. And all that's happening there is that you're seeing a little bit into one of these machine learning algorithms and that's maybe helping you see the world in a slightly different way. DAVID: As I was preparing for this podcast, you've liked a lot to Brian Eno and his work. So I spent as much time reading Brian Eno, which I'm super happy that I went down those rabbit holes. But one of the things that he said that was really interesting, so he's one of the fathers of ambient music and he said that a lot of art and especially music, there will sort of be algorithms where you sort of create an algorithm that to the listener might even sound better than what a human would produce. And he said two things that were interesting. The first one is that you create an algorithm and then a bunch of different musical forms could flower out of that algorithm. And then also said that often the art that algorithms create is more appealing to the viewer. But it takes some time to get there. And had the creator just followed their intuition. They probably would have never gotten there. MICHAEL: It certainly seems like it might be true. And that's the whole sort of interesting thing with that kind of computer-generated music is to, I think the creators of it often don't know where they're gonna end up. To be honest, I think my favorite music is all still by human composers. I do enjoy performances by people who live code. There's something really spectacular about that. So there are people who, they will set up the computer and hook it up to speakers and they will hook the text editor up to a projector and they'll have essentially usually a modified form of the programming language list a or people use a few different systems I guess. And they will write a program which producers music onstage and they'll just do it in real time and you know, it starts out sounding terrible of course. And that lasts for about 20 seconds and by about sort of 30 or 40 seconds in, already it's approaching the limits of complex, interesting music and I think even if you don't really have a clue what they're doing as they program, there's still something really hypnotic and interesting about watching them actually go through this process of creating music sort of both before your eyes and before your ears. It's a really interesting creative experience and sometimes quite beautiful. I think I suspect that if I just heard one of those pieces separately, I probably wouldn't do so much for me, but actually having a done in real time and sort of seeing the process of creation, it really changes the experience and makes it very, very interesting. And sometimes, I mean, sometimes it's just beautiful. That's the good moment, right? When clearly the person doing it has something beautiful happen. You feel something beautiful happen and everybody else around you feel something beautiful and spontaneous. It's just happened. That's quite a remarkable experience. Something really interesting is happening with the computer. It's not something that was anticipated by the creator. It arose out of an interaction between them and their machine. And it is actually beautiful. DAVID: Absolutely. Sort of on a similar vein, there's a song called Speed of Life by Dirty South. So I really liked electronic music, but what he does is he constructs a symphony, but he goes one layer at a time. It's about eight and a half minute song and he just goes layer after layer, after layer, after layer. And what's really cool about listening to it is you appreciate the depth of a piece of music that you would never be able to appreciate if you didn't have that. And also by being able to listen to it over and over again. Because before we had recording, you would only hear a certain piece of music live and one time. And so there are new forms that are bursting out of now because we listen to songs so often. MICHAEL: It's interesting to think, there's a sort of a history to that as well. If you go back, essentially modern systems for recording music, if you go back much more than a thousand years. And we didn't really have them. There's a multi-thousand-year history of recorded music. But a lot of the early technology was lost and it wasn't until sort of I think the eighth, ninth century that people started to do it again. But we didn't get all the way to button sheet music overnight. There was a whole lot of different inventions. For instance, the early representations didn't show absolute pitch. They didn't show the duration of the note. Those were ideas that had to be invented. So in I think it was 1026, somebody introduced the idea of actually showing a scale where you can have absolute pitch. And then a century or two after that, Franco of Cologne had the idea of representing duration. And so they said like tiny little things, but then you start to think about, well, what does that mean for the ability to compose music? It means now that actually, you can start to compose pieces, which for many, many, many different instruments. So you start to get the ability to have orchestral music. So you go from being able to basically you have to kind of instruct small groups of players that's the best you can hope to do and get them to practice together and whatever. So maybe you can do something like a piece for a relatively small number of people, but it's very hard to do something for an 80 piece orchestra. Right? So all of a sudden that kind of amazing orchestral music I think becomes possible. And then, you know, we're sort of in version 2.0 of that now where of course you can lay a thousand tracks on top of one another if you want. You get ideas like micropolyphony. And these things where you look at the score and it's just incredible, there are 10,000 notes in 10 seconds. DAVID: Well, to your point I was at a tea house in Berkeley on Monday right by UC Berkeley's campus and the people next to me, they were debating the musical notes that they were looking at but not listening to the music and it was evident that they both had such a clear ability to listen to music without even listening to it, that they could write the notes together and have this discussion and it was somebody who doesn't know so much about music. It was really impressive. MICHAEL: That sounds like a very interesting conversation. DAVID: I think it was. So one thing that I'm interested in and that sort of have this dream of, is I have a lot of friends in New York who do data visualization and sort of two things parallel. I have this vision of like remember the Harry Potter book where the newspaper comes alive and it becomes like a rich dynamic medium. So I have that compared with some immersive world that you can walk through and be able to like touch and move around data and I actually think there's some cool opportunities there and whatnot. But in terms of thinking about the future of being able to visualize numbers and the way that things change and whatnot. MICHAEL: I think it's a really complicated question like it actually needs to be broken down. So one thing, for example, I think it's one of the most interesting things you can do with computers. Lots of people never really get much experience playing with models and yet it's possible to do this. Now, basically, you can start to build very simple models. The example that a lot of people do get that they didn't use to get, is spreadsheets. So, you can sort of create a spreadsheet that is a simple model of your company or some organization or a country or of whatever. And the interesting thing about the spreadsheet is really that you can play with it. And it sort of, it's reactive in this interesting way. Anybody who spends as much time with spreadsheets is they start to build up hypotheses, oh, what would happen if I changed this number over here? How would it affect my bottom line? How would it affect the GDP of the country? How would it affect this? How would it affect that? And you know, as you kind of use it, you start to introduce, you start to make your model more complicated. If you're modeling some kind of a factory yet maybe you start to say, well, what would be the effect if a carbon tax was introduced? So you introduce some new column into the spreadsheet or maybe several extra columns into the spreadsheet and you start to ask questions, well, what would the structure of the carbon tax be? What would help you know, all these sorts of what if questions. And you start very incrementally to build up models. So this experience, of course, so many people take for granted. It was not an experience that almost anybody in the world had say 20 or 30 years ago. Well, spreadsheets data about 1980 or so, but this is certainly an experience that was extremely rare prior to 1980 and it's become a relatively common, but it hasn't made its way out into mass media. We don't as part of our everyday lives or the great majority of people don't have this experience of just exploring models. And I think it's one of the most interesting things which particularly the New York Times and to some extent some of the other newsrooms have done is they've started in a small way to build these models into the news reading experience. So, in particular, the data visualization team at the New York Times, people like Amanda Cox and others have done this really interesting thing where you start to get some of these models. You might have seen, for example, in the last few elections. They've built this very interesting model showing basically if you can sort of make choices about how different states will vote. So if such and such votes for Trump, what are Hillary's chances of winning the election. And you may have seen they have this sort of amazing interactive visualization of it where you can just go through and you can sort of look at the key swing states, what happens if Pennsylvania votes for so and so what happens if Florida does? And that's an example where they've built an enormous amount of sort of pulling information into this model and then you can play with it to build up some sort of understanding. And I mean, it's a very simple example. I certainly think that you know, normatively, we're not there yet. We don't actually have a shared understanding. There's very little shared language even around these models. You think about something like a map. A map is an incredibly sophisticated object, which however we will start learning from a very young age. And so we're actually really good at parsing them. We know if somebody shows us a map, how to engage, how to interpret it, how to use it. And if somebody just came from another planet, actually they need to learn all those things. How do you represent a road? How do you represent a shop on a map? How do you represent this or that, why do we know that up is north like that's a convention. All those kinds of things actually need to be learned and we learned them when we were small. With these kinds of things which the Times and other media outlets are trying to do, we lack all of that collective knowledge and so they're having to start from scratch and I think that over a couple of generations actually, they'll start to evolve a lot of conventions and people will start to take it for granted. But in a lot of contexts actually you're not just going to be given a narrative, you know, just going to be told sort of how some columnist thinks the world is. Instead, you'll actually expect to be given some kind of a model which you can play with. You can start to ask questions and sort of run your own hypotheses in much the same way as somebody who runs a business might actually set up a spreadsheet to model their business and ask interesting questions. It's not perfect. The model is certainly that the map is not the territory as they say, but it is nonetheless a different way of engaging rather than just having some expert tell you, oh, the world is this way. DAVID: I'm interested in sort of the shift from having media be predominantly static to dynamic, which the New York Times is a perfect example. They can tell stories on Newyorktimes.com that they can't tell in the newspaper that gets delivered to your doorstep. But what's really cool about spreadsheets that you're talking about is like when I use Excel, being able to go from numbers, so then different graphs and have the exact same data set, but some ways of visualizing that data totally clicked for me and sometimes nothing happens. MICHAEL: Sure. Yeah. And we're still in the early days of that too. There's so much sort of about literacy there. And I think so much about literacy is really about opportunity. People have been complaining essentially forever that the kids of today are not literate enough. But of course, once you actually provide people with the opportunity and a good reason to want to do something, then they can become very literate very quickly. I think basically going back to the rise of social media sort of 10 or 15 years ago, so Facebook around whatever, 2006, 2007 twitter a little bit later, and then all the other platforms which have come along since. They reward being a good writer. So all of a sudden a whole lot of people who normally wouldn't have necessarily been good writers are significantly more likely to become good writers. It depends on the platform. Certainly, Facebook is a relatively visual medium. Twitter probably helps. I think twitter and text messaging probably are actually good. Certainly, you're rewarded for being able to condense an awful lot into a small period. People complain that it's not good English, whatever that is. But I think I'm more interested in whether something is a virtuosic English than I am and whether or not it's grammatically correct. People are astonishingly good at that, but the same thing needs to start to happen with these kinds of models and with data visualizations and things like that. At the moment, you know, you have this priestly caste that makes a few of them and that's an interesting thing to be able to do, but it's not really part of the everyday experience of most people. It's an interesting question whether or not that's gonna change as it going to in the province of some small group of people, or will it actually become something that people just expect to be able to do? Spreadsheets are super interesting in that regard. They actually did. I think if you've talked to somebody in 1960 and said that by 2018, tens of millions of people around the world would be building sophisticated mathematical models as just part of their everyday life. It would've seemed absolutely ludicrous. But actually, that kind of model of literacy has become relatively common. I don't know whether we'll get to 8 billion people though. I think we probably will. DAVID: So when I was in high school I went to, what I like to say is the weirdest school in the weirdest city in America. I went to the weirdest high school in San Francisco and rather than teaching us math, they had us get in groups of three and four and they had us discover everything on our own. So we would have these things called problem sets and we would do about one a week and the teacher would come around and sort of help us every now and then. But the goal was really to get three or four people to think through every single problem. And they called it discovery-based learning, which you've also talked about too. So my question to you is we're really used to learning when the map is clear and it's clear what to do and you can sort of follow a set path, but you actually do the opposite. The map is unclear and you're actually trailblazing and charting new territory. What strategies do you have to sort of sense where to move? MICHAEL: There's sort of a precursor question which is how do you maintain your morale and the Robert Pirsig book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He proposes a university subject, gumptionology 101. Gumption is almost the most important quality that we have. The ability to keep going when things don't seem very good. And mostly that's about having ways of being playful and ways of essentially not running out of ideas. Some of that is about a very interesting tension between having, being ambitious in what you'd like to achieve, but also being very willing to sort of celebrate the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest successes. Suddenly a lot of creative people I know I think really struggle with that. They might be very good at celebrating tiny successes but not have that significant ambitions, but they might be extremely ambitious, but because they're so ambitious, if an idea doesn't look Nobel prize worthy, they're not particularly interested in it. You know, they struggle with just kind of the goofing around and they often feel pretty bad because of course most days you're not at your best, you don't actually have the greatest idea. So there's some interesting tension to manage there. There's really two different types of work. One is where you have a pretty good goal, you know what success looks like, right? But you may also be doing something that's more like problem discovery where you don't even know where you're going. Typically if you're going to compose a piece of music. Well, I'm not a composer, but certainly, my understanding from, from friends who are, is that they don't necessarily start out with a very clear idea of where they're going. Some composers do, but a lot, it's a process of discovery. Actually, a publisher once told me somebody who has published a lot of well-known books that she described one of her authors as a writing for discovery. Like he didn't know what his book was going to be about, he had a bunch of kind of vague ideas and the whole point of writing the book was to actually figure out what it was that he wanted to say, what problem was he really interested in. So we'd start with some very, very good ideas and they kind of get gradually refined. And it was very interesting. I really liked his books and it was interesting to see that. They looked like they'd been very carefully planned and he really knew what he was doing and she told me that no, he'd sort of come in and chat with her and be like, well, I'm sort of interested over here. And he'd have phrases and sort of ideas. But he didn't actually have a clear plan and then he'd get through this process of several years of gradually figuring out what it was that he wanted to say. And often the most significant themes wouldn't actually emerge until relatively late in that whole process. I asked another actually quite a well-known writer, I just bumped into when he was, he was reporting a story for a major magazine and I think he'd been working, he'd been reporting for two weeks, I think at that point. So just out interviewing people and whatever. And I said, how's it going? And he said, Oh yeah, pretty good. I said, what's your story about? He said, I don't know yet, which I thought was very interesting. He had a subject, he was following a person around. But he didn't actually know what his story was. DAVID: So the analogy that I have in my head as you're talking about this, it's like sculpture, right? Where you start maybe with a big thing of granite or whatnot, and slowly but surely you're carving the stone or whatnot and you're trying to come up with a form. But so often maybe it's the little details at the end that are so far removed from that piece of stone at the very beginning that make a sculpture exceptional. MICHAEL: Indeed. And you wonder what's going on. I haven't done sculpture. I've done a lot of writing and writing often feels so sometimes I know what I want to say. Those are the easy pieces to write, but more often it's writing for discovery and there you need to be very happy celebrating tiny improvements. I mean just fixing a word needs to be an event you actually enjoy, if not, the process will be an absolute nightmare. But then there's this sort of instinct where you realize, oh, that's a phrase that A: I should really refine and B: it might actually be the key to making this whole thing work and that seems to be a very instinctive kind of a process. Something that you, if you write enough, you start to get some sense of what actually works for you in those ways. The recognition is really hard. It's very tempting to just discount yourself. Like to not notice when you have a good phrase or something like that and sort of contrary wise sometimes to hang onto your darlings too long. You have the idea that you think it's about and it's actually wrong. DAVID: Why do you write and why do you choose the medium of writing to think through things sometimes? I know that you choose other ones as well. MICHAEL: Writing has this beautiful quality that you can improve your thoughts. That's really helpful. A friend of mine who makes very popular YouTube videos about mathematics has said to me that he doesn't really feel like people are learning much mathematics from them. Instead, it's almost a form of advertising like they get some sense of what it is. They know that it's very beautiful. They get excited. All those things are very important and matter a lot to him, but he believes that only a tiny, tiny number of people are actually really understanding much detail at all. There's actually a small group who have apparently do kind of. They have a way of processing video that lets them understand. DAVID: Also, I think you probably have to, with something like math, I've been trying to learn economics online and with something like math or economics that's a bit complex and difficult, you have to go back and re-watch and re-watch, but I think that there's a human tendency to want to watch more and more and more and it's hard to learn that way. You actually have to watch things again. MICHAEL: Absolutely. Totally. And you know, I have a friend who when he listens to podcasts, if he doesn't understand something, he, he rewinds it 30 seconds. But most people just don't have that discipline. Of course, you want to keep going. So I think the written word for most people is a little bit easier if they want to do that kind of detailed understanding. It's more random access to start with. It's easier to kind of skip around and to concentrate and say, well, I didn't really get that sentence. I'm going to think about it a little bit more, or yeah, I can see what's going to happen in those two or three paragraphs. I'll just very quickly skip through them. It's more built for that kind of detailed understanding, so you're getting really two very different experiences. In the case of the video, very often really what you're getting is principally an emotional experience with some bits and pieces of understanding tacked on with the written word. Often a lot of that emotion is stripped out, which makes can make it much harder to motivate yourself. You need that sort of emotional connection to the material, but it is actually, I think a great deal easier to understand sort of the details of it. There's a real kind of choice to be to be made. There's also the fact that people just seem to respond better to videos. If you want a large audience, you're probably better off making YouTube videos than you are publishing essays. DAVID: My last question to you, as somebody who admires your pace and speed of learning and what's been really fun about preparing for this podcast and come across your work is I really do feel like I've accessed a new perspective on the world which is really cool and I get excited probably most excited when I come across thinkers who don't think like anyone who I've come across before, so I'm asking to you first of all, how do you think about your learning process and what you consume and second of all, who have been the people and the ideas that have really formed the foundation of your thought? MICHAEL: A Kurt Vonnegut quote from his book, I think it's Cat's Cradle. He says, we become what we pretend to be, so you must be careful what we pretend to be and I think there's something closely analogously true, which is that we become what we pay attention to, so we should be careful what we pay attention to and that means being fairly careful how you curate your information diet. There's a lot of things. There's a lot of mistakes I've made. Paying attention to angry people is not very good. I think ideas like the filter bubble, for example, are actually bad ideas. And for the most part, it sounds virtuous to say, oh, I'm going to pay attention to people who disagree with me politically and whatever. Well, okay, there's a certain amount of truth to that. It's a good idea probably to pay attention to the very best arguments from the very best exponents of the other different political views. So sure, seek those people out, but you don't need to seek out the random person who has a different political view from you. And that's how most people actually interpret that kind of injunction. They, they're not looking for the very best alternate points of view. So that's something you need to be careful about. There's a whole lot of things like that I enjoy. So for example, I think one person, it's interesting on twitter to look, he's, he's no longer active but he's still following people is Marc Andreessen and I think he follows, it's like 18,000 people or something and it's really interesting just to look through the list of followers because it's all over the map and much of it I wouldn't find interesting at all, but you'll find the strangest corners people in sort of remote villages in India and people doing really interesting things in South Africa. Okay. So he's a venture capitalist but they're not connected to venture capital at all. So many of them, they're just doing interesting things all over the world and I wouldn't advocate doing the same thing. You kind of need to cultivate your own tastes and your own interests. But there's something very interesting about that sort of capitalist city of interests and curiosity about the world, which I think is probably very good for almost anybody to cultivate. I haven't really answered your question. DAVID: I do want to ask who were the people or the ideas or the areas of the world that have really shaped and inspired your thinking because I'm asking selfishly because I want to go down those rabbit holes. MICHAEL: Alright. A couple of people, Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart, who are two of the people who really developed the idea of what a computer might be. In the 1950's and 60's, people mostly thought computers were machines for solving mathematical problems, predicting the weather next week, computing artillery tables, doing these kinds of things. And they understood that actually there could be devices which humans would use for themselves to solve their own problems. That would be sort of almost personal prosthetics for the mind. They'd be new media. We could use to think with and a lot of their best ideas I think out there, there's still this kind of vision for the future. And if you look particularly at some of Alan Kay's talks, there's still a lot of interesting ideas there. DAVID: That the perspective is worth 80 IQ points. That's still true. MICHAEL: For example, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, right? He's actually, he's got a real gift for coming up with piddly little things, but there's also quite deep ideas. They're not two-year projects or five-year projects, they're thousand year projects or an entire civilization. And we're just getting started on them. I think that's true. Actually. It's in general, maybe that's an interesting variation question, which is, you know, what are the thousand year projects? A friend of mine, Cal Schroeder, who's a science fiction writer, has this term, The Project, which he uses to organize some of his thinking about science fictional civilizations. So The Project is whatever a civilization is currently doing, which possibly no member of the civilization is even aware of. So you might ask the question, what was the project for our planet in the 20th century? I think one plausible answer might be, for example, it was actually eliminating infectious diseases. You think about things like polio and smallpox and so many of these diseases were huge things at the start of the 20th century and they become much, much smaller by the end of the 20th century. Obviously AIDS is this terrible disease, but in fact, by historical comparison, even something like the Spanish flu, it's actually relatively small. I think it's several hundred million people it may have killed. Maybe that was actually the project for human civilization in the 20th century. I think it's interesting to think about those kinds of questions and sort of the, you know, where are the people who are sort of most connected to those? So I certainly think Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay. DAVID: Talk about Doug Engelbart, I know nothing about him. MICHAEL: So Engelbart is the person who I think more than anybody invented modern computing. He did this famous demo in 1968, 1969. It's often called the mother of all demos, in front of an audience of a thousand people I believe. Quite a while since I've watched it and it demonstrates a windowing system and what looks like a modern word processor, but it's not just a word processor. They're actually hooked up remotely to a person in another location and they're actually collaborating in real time. And it's the first public showing I believe of the mouse and of all these different sorts of ideas. And you look at other images of computers at the time and they're these giant machines with tapes and whatever. And here's this vision that looks a lot more like sort of Microsoft Windows and a than anything else. And it's got all these things like real-time collaboration between people in different locations that we really didn't have at scale until relatively recently. And he lays out a huge fraction of these ideas in 1962 in a paper he wrote then. But that paper is another one of these huge things. He's asking questions that you don't answer over two years or five years. You answer over a thousand years. I think it's Augmenting Human Intellect is the title of that paper. So he's certainly somebody else that I think is a very interesting thinker. There's something really interesting about the ability to ask an enormous question, but then actually to have other questions at every scale. So you know what to do in the next 10 minutes that will move you a little bit towar

David and Blair compare each other's competitiveness, and then offer some specific ways principals can actually collaborate with their competitors as a part of building beneficial business relationships.   TRANSCRIPT BLAIR: David, today we're going to talk about how to crush your competition, is that right? DAVID: Instantly I got very excited about the concept, that's really not what we're going to talk about, but I love that idea. Oh my God, I'm just too competitive, but that's actually the opposite of what we're going to talk about I think, unless you want to switch it at the last minute. BLAIR: No, I was with a bunch of guys the other night, and had this little men's night retreat thing, and maybe more than half of them were entrepreneurs. One guy was winding down a business, and he was saying, "I'm not sure if I'm competitive enough to be in business." I didn't say anything, but I thought, I suppose that's vital for you to be competitive in your nature to succeed in business, would you agree with that? DAVID: Yes, I would, but there's something wrapped around competitiveness that is just as important to me, and that's risk-taking. BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: It does seem like the two of those are related, that's why I quit doing a few things outside of work, because I realized I was not as competitive as some of the young fools that were willing to sacrifice their body, and I wasn't. It's not that my body is so precious, it shouldn't be sacrificed, it was more I was allergic to the pain. Yeah, there's something about competitiveness and risk-taking yeah, for sure. I'm competitive, do you think of yourself as competitive? BLAIR: I've measured my competitiveness and your competitiveness, and you're more competitive than I am. I'm as competitive as the average person, but the makeup of that competitiveness is a little bit skewed. You can break down competitiveness into different forms, so I think of myself as average competitiveness. DAVID: Okay, this is more about how do we tame or tamp down some of our competitiveness for our advantage, and for the advantage of the world really. BLAIR: You really want to talk about this idea of collaborating with your competitors, is that correct? DAVID: Right, yeah, and it's something I've learned in my own business life, but I've also tried to coach my clients to do it as well. It's been really interesting, it's a concept that strikes us like, did he really just say you should be more collaborative with your competitors, or did I mishear him? No, that's really what I mean. BLAIR: Okay, so we think of being in business just like my friend said the other night, we think of it as business is highly competitive, and we need to be cutthroat, and we need to always have an eye on our competition. We're trying to best them, I'm fond of saying that positioning is an act of relativity. You position relative to your competition, and in endeavoring to position your firm against your competition, you're trying to kill them. BLAIR: Now that's an overstatement, but that's the prevailing view, right? The competitors are there, people that ... It's your job to beat, it's your job to win against them, and you want to fly in the face of that a little bit, so where did this idea come from? DAVID: Well it's been rooted really in 20 plus years. I did something a little crazy back in the late 90s. I wanted to start an event, and that was obvious to me, I wanted to start an event. Okay, so what kind of an event would it be? Well it needs to be an event that's going to attract a lot of people. How do we do that? Well, the content has to be fantastic, it's like okay, then I just stopped in my tracks, because I'm thinking, well if the content's going to be great, then I've got to invite a lot of my competitors there. DAVID: We don't see eye to eye on everything, but I need to have them there, because they're very smart. People are going to come and want to hear from them as well, like what kind of a stupid conference would it be where I'm the only one speaking? That's not a conference, that's like your own personal platform. I was faced with a decision, do I really want to give my competitors a platform? DAVID: I was nervous about it, other people were a lot more nervous about it than I was, they thought I was crazy to be doing that. I thought, this is a worthwhile experiment, and maybe there's some value in being the person who organizes the conference, and does the programming for it. There turned out to be that value, but it was a wonderful experience. It opened up my eyes entirely to the fact that I don't have to make somebody else lose in order for me to win. DAVID: That I can let my guard down, and it actually translated into the way I run events now. People come to an event for the first time, and they're surprised that within about an hour, an hour and a half of the start of the event, people are starting to share stuff that they would not have thought they'd see themselves sharing at the beginning. They're much more transparent about it, and it's just sort of that style that I like to have, it fits with this notion of competitors. DAVID: Recently what struck me, and then I'll shut up for a minute, because I know I'm taking a long time to answer your question. I was listening to the Dan Patrick daily talk radio sports show, and he was talking about interviewing Kobe Bryant one time. They were talking about how do you get yourself up for a game that doesn't really matter? In other words, maybe you're out of the playoffs already, or you know you're going to beat this team, because they're not good. DAVID: What Kobe Bryant said, was at the end of the game, I want my competitor to question why they even got into the sports game. I want them to question why they even became a basketball player, right? I thought, well that's kind of funny, but it's really not the kind of spirit I want as a collaborator. BLAIR: Even when he's playing in a game that they're almost certain to win in, he's still thinking about crushing the spirit of his competitors. DAVID: Right, yeah, what's the point of that? BLAIR: Do you still have a page on your website that lists your competitors? DAVID: I do, right? I do. BLAIR: Am I on there? DAVID: I don't know, I know you don't want to be, so let's just say you're not. BLAIR: Yeah, I think you had me on there, and I called you out, I said, get me off that list. DAVID: Right. BLAIR: I don't know why that is, okay, so you conceived of this idea, this event, and you had a partner in this event, can we name the event? DAVID: Yeah, it's MYOB, Mind Your Own Business. BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: The how people, were the financial partners and the marketing partners, and I did the programming. BLAIR: That's where you and I first met in 2003. I reached out to you when I started my business somewhere in 2002, and you invited me to speak at this thing. DAVID: Yeah, and look at how much good has come from that, right? BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: You and I have become friends, we do a podcast together, we share a lot of clients. Here's the biggest thing, I learned so much by having you there. I mean the very first time I heard you speak, I learned so much. It made me such a better advisor, and the same could be said of the other folks, not everybody, but most of the other folks that I invited. It's like, oh wow, it made me a much better advisor by listening to them in that kind of a setting. BLAIR: Let's walk through how somebody can, once they get their head around this idea, how they can put it into practice. First, I can imagine what the objections are, right? When you're talking to somebody about this idea of be more open to your competitors and collaborative with them, what's the first thing that comes up objection wise? DAVID: Well it comes up a lot too, and it's like, "Oh, that's a good idea, but I can't put that on my website, because what if my competitor's see it?" It may be something like our new focus, that's usually not as big an issue, but things like client criteria, or some unique way we have of going about solving problems for clients, or a case study, or something like that. They envision these competitors in the wee hours of the morning sneaking onto their website and furiously copping things down and grabbing screenshots, and then reinventing their own firm, as if they're really doing that. DAVID: That's the objection, I don't want my competitors to see that. I don't want them to copy me. Do you hear that, or do you see it in other ways? I'm curious if it's just my clients. BLAIR: I'm not sure if I hear it a lot, but I sense it a lot, and I've experienced it myself too. My own experience has been, if you're really carving out a path of leadership in something, it means you're constantly, by the reinventing your business, or coming up with new IP, with new ideas, and by the time somebody's adopted something that you've ... Let's call it stolen, stolen something that you've put on your website and made it their own, you should be somewhere else, right? You should be off into the distance. DAVID: Right, and that's part of your practice, part of my practice, part of what we urge clients to do is to reinvent themselves frequently every couple of years maybe. While this may work beautifully for you now, it's not going to be the thing that you're doing down the road, reinventing. Let's talk about the whole positioning thing, how many competitors does Win Without Pitching have? BLAIR: It really depends on how you frame the question. If you look at sales training for creative professionals, I don't actually know of any other organization that frames their value proposition, the discipline in the market, the combination of discipline in the market that way. That would be ridiculous for me to say there's no direct competitor, so that's at the very narrowest, who else says we just do sales training for creative professionals? DAVID: Right. BLAIR: Our real competition is any new business consultant to the creative professions. DAVID: Right. BLAIR: Anybody who's selling sales training. Most sales trainers aren't specific to a market, so anybody in the sales training business, any new business consultant. DAVID: If somebody popped up, let's say you just heard through a client of yours or something, and they said, "Hey, have you seen [inaudible 00:09:14], it looks a lot like yours?" Pretend that you have this conversation with them, and you look at the website. It is the same positioning, sales training for creative professionals, or creative entrepreneurs, what would your reaction be? BLAIR: My reaction would be, I would gird myself for a fight in the most positive sort of way. I love a challenge, if somebody was using that same language, I would just steel myself and whip my team into a frenzy, and run out into the battlefield. DAVID: I'm picturing this movie scene, yelling to this guy. BLAIR: Yeah, Braveheart. DAVID: Right. BLAIR: Somebody would have to be using very specific language, very specific to me. One of the things that I've seen over the last few years, is when I started my business back in 2002, when I was a new business consultant, there were very few new business consultants. Whoever was out there, the Internet was still a relatively new thing, right? Web browsers were about seven or eight years old in 2002. BLAIR: If there was a lot of competitors out there, I wasn't aware of them, I was really aware of two or three. Nowadays there's rarely a week or a two week period that goes by where I'm not made aware of a new business consultant. I made this conscious decision a couple of years ago to just quit thinking about them as competitors, and just to think about them as my future distribution network. BLAIR: I recently put out a call on LinkedIn saying I want to forge a closer relationship with the world's best new business consultants. I know I met a lot of consultants out there who say, "I give your book, the Win Without Pitching Manifesto to all of my clients." What I said in this post on LinkedIn, I had about 30 inquiries from it, is if you're already preaching the principles, and if you're already teaching the Win Without Pitching way, and you're interested in formalizing the relationship, then reach out to me. BLAIR: I had to see somebody else doing that, and somebody else talk about the benefit of it just the way that you're doing it now. DAVID: Yeah. BLAIR: For me to just have this switch in my mind. You've been very good at this, and you've been a very good role model for me in this, in being a generous competitor, and it hasn't been in my nature. I'm the person who loves a fight, so something has shifted in me in the last couple of years, and I look around at the people I know in business, and some people that you and I both compete with. They are such open, generous, sharing people, even though we are fairly direct competitors. DAVID: Right. BLAIR: I've just decided that these are going to be my role models in that front too. Now, I'm mellowing in my old age or something, because something's definitely changed. DAVID: Yeah, it is really interesting to see. I'm doing an event shortly, and I've invited ... You'll be speaking there, it's really important to me that you speak there to address the whole sales training process. I'm just unqualified to even speak to it, but I feel like the people coming need to hear that. Then, I think four of my competitors will be there. They won't have a platform, but I will introduce them, they're coming for free. DAVID: I invited them, and I plan to put in the work. We're going to split up into groups, and we're going to try to apply these positioning principles to the individual firms. These competitors know what they're doing, and so the evil side of somebody might hear that and say, "Well, wouldn't someone just hire one of these." It's like, well that's fine, because in my mind feeling like you have all these competitors is really misunderstanding the fact that it's not just about what you do, but it's about how you do it. DAVID: I have a very specific style, and whenever I try to cross the line and be somebody that I'm not to a client, like more of a coach or something like that, I am doing a disservice to them, and I'm doing a disservice to me. I find it really wonderful to have these other folks who are very good at what they do, who have a more appropriate style for a certain client. When I think about living in a world where I couldn't recommend other options for my clients, it's a little bit sadder to me, because I do want my clients to get help, even if it's not with me. DAVID: Now what's interesting though, is we have different approaches to this when we're not as busy. BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: We tend to be a little bit less generous when our businesses aren't run well, when we don't have a steady stream of opportunity. That's just another argument of 100 arguments to run your firm well, so that you're not paralyzed by not enough work, or thinner margins, or something like that.   BLAIR: I was going to play devils advocate here a little bit, and push back and say, well it's easy for you to be magnanimous this way, you're the worldwide leader in your field. You've got all the work you want, I think most people from the outside looking in would see that, so it's easy for you to just say, "Well there's plenty for everyone." If you're running an independent creative firm, you've got a dozen people, you're not seen as meaningfully different, do you think the principle still applies? DAVID: No, I don't, and I think the solution there is to have a positioning where it's so much clearer to you and to your prospects where you're a perfect fit. If you haven't nailed that positioning equation yet for your firm, then I think this is a very dangerous thing to do, right? Now you could still be generous in some other ways, like you could be generous in sharing contractors with other agencies, or even some employees. In terms of clients, I think that would be a dangerous thing to do, if you haven't ... DAVID: Well, a couple of things, not just positioning, but also having this lead generation process in place. You and I have talked quite a bit about this, how we have a simplified plan that's driven by discipline, so if you don't have the positioning and lead generation in place, then it's a pretty dangerous thing to be this magnanimous. The way to fix that is not to be selfish, the way to fix this is to fix your positioning and lead generation. BLAIR: Do you find that your generosity towards your competitors is returned? Are you referred business or other similar invitations from these competitors? DAVID: In some cases I am for sure. I think about Tim Williams for instance who I think does really good work. I've sent work his way, he's sent work my way for sure. I think about Carl Sachs, I think about the folks at Newfangled. I think about Philip at the Consulting Pipeline podcast. I think about Drew McClellan, I hate mentioning names, because there's going to be a bunch of names I've left off, but in general yes, absolutely. DAVID: Even at the beginning where they're taken aback by the generosity, they'll soften up over a few years, and discover that it's real. I'm really trying to help them, I'm not trying to hurt them. That started years ago, like you write a new book, or you have a new program, tell all your competitors about it in a gracious, respectful way. Hey, this is where I'm headed, just want to let you know, and oh by the way, here's a copy of the book, hope you're doing well. DAVID: You see an article that's really helpful that would benefit them, you send it to them. I tell you, a big one is speaking engagements. BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: If I've been on the platform somewhere, and I talk with the program person, I say, "Listen, this was fantastic, I loved this event. I appreciate you inviting me, do you want a couple of suggestions for people who are also would be a really good fit for this?" That's a perfect opportunity to extend that graciousness to one of your competitors. I find that you're not hurting yourself in any way, you're simply helping everybody in the process. DAVID: I've found that to be very effective, and I've had a lot of my competitors do the same for me, where they've introduced me to a speaking opportunity, and it's been very, very much appreciated. BLAIR: A guy I know who does over a million dollars a year in speaking fees said to me, the number one lead source for speaking engagements is other speakers, right? They get approached and say, "Well, I can't do it, but you might want to think of this other person." He said it's important for you to cultivate relationships with these other speakers, and that means you start referring speaking opportunities to them. DAVID: That's interesting. BLAIR: Two weeks later I was invited to speak in Dubai when I was in another part of the world, and I referred to my new friend. DAVID: Yeah, because you didn't want that long travel, yeah, absolutely. BLAIR: Let's talk about some specific ways agency principals can collaborate with their competitors. I think I've got a list here of some things that you've identified. At the top of the list you've got learn how to run your firm from each other. Do you want to unpack ... Oh, I just said the word unpack, do you want to peal that apart? DAVID: That even sounds more pretentious than unpack. BLAIR: Like an orange. DAVID: Let's just say unpack, okay? BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: Yeah, what's the possible benefit in not helping another principal run their firm well? Hoping that they'll fail? Well, that seems pretty evil, right? The one area where it seems like there's the most benefit for everybody, is to learn how to run your business well. You've learned some principles about key metrics you want to look at, or how to hire the right person, or how to run a meeting better, or how to have the best relationship with your bank, or there's 100 things we could list there. DAVID: Those are the kinds of things that I would put at the top the list, because nobody enters this field with the business management training that would really benefit them. They're all starting from some other skill path, not a role path, and so they come into the business, and they have to learn everything either from somebody that they worked for, and often that's the best place to learn it. DAVID: A great example of a principal that you worked for before you started off on your own, or they learn it from maybe an advisor, like a paid advisor, or maybe they learn it from another principal. That would be the first area I would suggest collaboration, it could be informal or formal. I find that most principals have three or four people that they're friendly with, they can just shoot them an email, or get on the phone and say, "Hey, I'm facing this noncompete situation, what have you learned? Can you introduce me to a lawyer?" Something like that. BLAIR: Oh, that's great, including on here help find good employees. I was thinking about there's an agency principal in Australia you and I both know him. I've done a bunch of work with him. He's told me some stories of when he's had to fire people, they don't say fire in Australia or UK, they sack them, which always sounds extra harsh to us in North America. He's told me stories of he'd bring somebody in who isn't working out, and says, "You're not working out, I'm letting you go, but I think you've got great skills in these other areas, so I've lined up two interviews for you today." DAVID: Wow. BLAIR: Yeah, so he's ruthless when it comes to correcting hiring decisions, but he's very kind in how he goes about it, and he recognizes that everybody's got strengths, and he's got good relationships with his competitors. He's very clear about why he's letting that person go, and why he thinks his competitors should think about bringing that person on, and usually in a different role. DAVID: Right, yeah I think that's great, like if it's for the right reasons, there could be something about the style of this firm that wouldn't be true of another firm. It's not like they're a bad person, they're just not a good fit for this particular role. BLAIR: Is there a line that there's the danger of crossing? The first word I wrote down when you sent me notes on this was collusion. DAVID: Yeah. BLAIR: At some point can you get too close to your competitors? Does it cause some sort of problem, or the perception of problems maybe among clients, or maybe even regulators? DAVID: Yeah, well in the US that would fall under the jurisdiction of the FTC, Federal Trade Commission. Where collusion is very clear, and you can get your hand slapped pretty quickly would be around pricing. BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: Not so much which opportunities to pursue, although you could get in trouble there, like hey, if I don't pursue this one, can you not pursue that one, that would be collusion. The main area would be on pricing, like how about what's your price on this? There have been some specific lawsuits, the handbook of pricing and ethical guidelines was one example that had to get rewritten, because of a lawsuit as I understand it. DAVID: That strikes me as evil, and I don't think we're talking about that so much. It's more like here's an example, so let's say you're going to respond to an RFP, okay? I know, don't shriek on me here Blair. You're going to respond to an RFP, and you know that another agency has been through an RFP process with them. You might just call them up and say, "Hey, what was that like? Is this even worth it?" Most of the time it's not going to be worth it, but that would not be collusion, that would just be simply sharing public information. BLAIR: I hadn't heard the story around pricing, I was doing a talk on pricing about 18 months ago to an industry group slightly tangential to the creative professions. There was a lawyer in the room, and he kept warning about collusion, he did not like the idea that the competitors were in the same room talking about pricing. I thought he was being ridiculous. DAVID: I think he was being ridiculous, where it can be collusion, is if we're talking about a specific instance. It's not about for instance, the labor law allows you to band together against a common enemy so to speak, that's not collusion. Collusion would be a specific instance related to pricing usually. BLAIR: Gotcha, all right, so let's say somebody's listening to this, and they're warming up to the idea of being more collaborative with their competitors, but they don't currently have relationships with those competitors. How do they go about it? Where do they find these people? Maybe they're so highly specialized, or poorly specialized, they're just not sure who their competitors are, how do you go about it? DAVID: Yeah, if you're poorly positioned, most of your competitors are the ones in your locale geographically. You know those, because they're there, and you share employees, and so on. If you're well-positioned, your competitors are more known to you, even though they're not close to you geographically. These are the names that keep coming up when you are competing for work and so on. DAVID: That would be one way to identify them, obviously Google's our friend here. Another way to identify them, is going to trade conferences. Trade conferences are almost always vertical, or they could be more demographic oriented conferences, horizontal conferences, where you keep seeing the same people there, not so much exhibiting, but you just see them there, they're speaking and so on. DAVID: You notice that these are the folks whose articles are appearing in the same places that yours are, so just connecting with them through your contacts, within a particular focus would be a good way to connect with them. Another might be a common mentor, I get this question a lot, like do you know of somebody that's doing this that I could talk with and so on? I don't connect people who aren't clients of mine, but if they are clients of mine, then I'll try to find somebody to connect them with. DAVID: I actually put round tables together, which are specific attempts to do this, that's not really the subject of this podcast, but that's an example of what a paid advisor might do. Sometimes a common mentor, so like if you're getting advice from an older woman or gentleman in your town who's coaching you on running a good creative business, because they've been in that field, and they've slowed down a little bit, they usually are going to know somebody else that would be a good fit for you. DAVID: I am talking about cooperating with folks who are definitely otherwise competitors of yours. I'm not talking about people that you might meet in a YEO, or YO kind of a context, I'm talking about people that you'd compete with normally. BLAIR: Okay, are there instances where this can go wrong? Obviously, I wouldn't ask you to name names, but I'm sure there has to be situations where you started being magnanimous towards a competitor, and then at some point realized this is a one-way relationship where this person is taking and not giving, and your idea about them ended up changing. DAVID: For sure, yeah, I can think of an attorney actually in New York that I was referring lots of work too, and it turned out that not only did they never share generously, but they kept asking, kept asking, and it became annoying. I just basically shut them down, they still do good work, so I haven't done anything to hurt them at all. If somebody is actually out to hurt me, then we come into the Kobe Bryant crush them phase, which is actually the evil side of this, and it's kind of fun. DAVID: You have to do that once or twice a year, right? Otherwise, I was just wondering if people are still listening at this point. Otherwise, it just doesn't happen, because who are the people that are going to hear the worst things about me as an advisor? It's going to be my competitors, right? If my competitors hear about me, but their experience in working with me is not at all matching, they're going to pause the conversation and say, even just to themselves, you must not be a good client, because that's not how I've experienced him. There's so many advantages here to make this work well. BLAIR: Yeah, it strikes me as this is going sound a bit corny, it's a bit like love though, right? The more you give, the more you get, and the more open you are, and more gracious you are with your competitors, the more likely you are to get back. Even if it's not a full reciprocation, there's still that feeling of you helping others, of yourself worth, etc., it's got to escalate. DAVID: Yeah, for sure, and there are many times when somebody does great work, and you've sent them lots of work, but they're not sending you work. That's okay, because they might be at a different place on the referral chain. In other words, by the time they hear of a client, they're past their need for you, whatever you happen to do along that chain. DAVID: It can't be a tit-for-tat thing, it's really just about surrounding yourself with people who are generous in life in many ways. I find that, that's a very satisfying experience, almost regardless of the outcome. BLAIR: Well, you've convinced me, I'm going to start thinking about maybe referring a piece of business to you. DAVID: Yeah, it's about damn time honestly. BLAIR: Thanks David, this has been great. DAVID: Bye Blair.