408 - Editor in Chief Entrepreneur Magazine: Tom interviews Jason Feifer - Screw The Commute

408 – Editor in Chief Entrepreneur Magazine: Tom interviews Jason Feifer

Jason Feifer is here with us and let me tell you first why I don't like him. The guy is such a great storyteller, he sucked me into watching or listening to a 42 minute podcast on elevator history. He sucked me in. I couldn't couldn't stop listening to it, but he is the Editor in Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. And he's the host of the podcast Build for Tomorrow, which I think was the podcast he sucked me in on, which is about the things from history that shaped us and how we can shape the future.

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Screw The Commute Podcast Show Notes Episode 408

How To Automate Your Businesshttps://screwthecommute.com/automatefree/

entrepreneurship distance learning school, home based business, lifestyle business

Internet Marketing Training Centerhttps://imtcva.org/

Higher Education Webinarhttps://screwthecommute.com/webinars

[04:45] Tom's introduction to Jason Feifer

[09:00] Writing a novel with his wife

[13:32] How do family businesses fair in this

[19:34] “This is impossible” are the three most dangerous words

[24:41] Mixing story telling with the past and future

Entrepreneurial Resources Mentioned in This Podcast

Higher Education Webinarhttps://screwthecommute.com/webinars

Screw The Commutehttps://screwthecommute.com/

entrepreneurship distance learning school, home based business, lifestyle business

Screw The Commute Podcast Apphttps://screwthecommute.com/app/

College Ripoff Quizhttps://imtcva.org/quiz

Know a young person for our Youth Episode Series? Send an email to Tom! – orders@antion.com

Have a Roku box? Find Tom's Public Speaking Channel there!https://channelstore.roku.com/details/267358/the-public-speaking-channel

How To Automate Your Businesshttps://screwthecommute.com/automatefree/

Internet Marketing Retreat and Joint Venture Programhttps://greatinternetmarketingtraining.com/

Build For Tomorrowhttps://pessimists.co/

Build For Tomorrow podcasthttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/build-for-tomorrow-formerly-pessimists-archive/id1104682320

Mr. Nice Guy bookhttps://www.amazon.com/dp/B079DVZTQS/

Internet Marketing Training Centerhttps://imtcva.org/

Related Episodes

Jeff Herring – https://screwthecommute.com/407/

More Entrepreneurial Resources for Home Based Business, Lifestyle Business, Passive Income, Professional Speaking and Online Business

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The WordPress Ecourse. Learn how to Make World Class Websites for $20 or less. https://screwthecommute.com/wordpressecourse/

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entrepreneurship distance learning school, home based business, lifestyle business

entrepreneurship distance learning school, home based business, lifestyle business

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Episode 408 – Jason Feifer
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody it's Tom here with Episode four hundred and eight of Screw the commute podcast. I'm here with Jason Feifer. He is the editor of Entrepreneur magazine. Could we have a better guest for this show? Screw the commute. Right. We all are entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs. And boy, this guy is surrounded by him editing that magazine. He's got a lot of other cool things where I'll tell you how he sucked me in really big in my research for this episode. So we'll get to that in a moment. Hope you didn’t miss episode 407. That was Jeff Herring. And Jeff has been on several times. He's like the king of content creation. And he's got some brand new stuff to tell you about simplifying funnels and in chunking content and things like that. So you don't want to miss that episode 407. Anytime you want to find one of the episodes, go to screwthecommute.com slash and then the episode number 407. Now, how would you like to hear your own voice here on screw the Commute? Well, if the show's helped you out at all in your business or given your ideas to help you start a business, we want to hear about it. Visit screwthecommute.com. Look for a little blue sidebar that says send voicemail mail, click on it, talking to your phone or computer and tell me how the shows helped you. And don't forget to put your website on there so you can get a big shout out in your own voice on a future episode of Screw the Commute.

[00:01:49] Remember, we want you to pick up a copy of our automation book you will thank me for I'm telling you, this is how I handled up to one hundred and fifty thousand subscribers and 40000 customers without pulling my hair out. So pick up a copy of that. It's screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're over there, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app and you can take us with you on the road. All right. I want you to check out my school. You know, this pandemic has turned the world on its head, but it hasn't turned my world on its head and my students world because we can sell at home. I've been selling on the commercial Internet since it started around 1994, been teaching it since nineteen. Oh, jeez, 97 or so. And I formalized the training in about what was about 13 years ago where I, I got a state license where nobody on earth has gone through the scrutiny to teach this like I have background checks, criminal checks, the whole bit. So it's the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia. IMTCVA.org. We'll have it in the show notes for you. It's certified to operate by the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia to go to this school.

[00:03:18] If you're if you speak English and you can hear my voice, you can attend. And it's hard core skills that every business on Earth needs. You'll learn about email marketing, chat boards, text marketing blogs, product production, digital stuff, all the things you need to know and that small businesses need social media, all these things. We have students making money, you know, a few months into the school, long before they even graduate. We don't like the four year schools that, you know, just teach you how to protest and then you're competing for jobs at Starbucks. So check it out. And a little bit later, I'll tell you how you can get a scholarship. Now, I'm going to tell you now, because I don't want to interrupt anything at all from our super guest, Jason. So if you're in my mentor program, greatInternetmarketingtraining.com, which is the longest running, most successful, most unique ever in the field of Internet marketing, I've been running it over twenty to twenty three years and seventeen hundred plus students. That's still going strong, but it has unique features like coming in to the immersion weekend for the great Internet Marketing Retreat Center. You get time in our TV studio. We shoot videos for you and edit them. You get a scholarship to my school that I just told you about. So I don't want to hit that too hard right now because I'm really excited to get to the get to Jason.

[00:04:46] So let's bring on the main event. I'll tell you what, Jason Feifer is here with us in a let me tell you first why I don't like him. The guy is such a great storyteller, he sucked me into watching or listening to a 42 minute podcast on elevator history. All right, so so this guy is amazing. He sucked me in. I couldn't couldn't stop listening to it, but he is the editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine. Perfect place for this since I've never had a job. So I love that magazine for many, many years. And he's the host of the podcast billed for Tomorrow, which I think was the podcast he sucked me in on, which is about the things from history that shaped us and how we can shape the future. Jason, are you ready to screw the commute?

[00:05:38] I sure am. When am I not? No, I don't know. I don't know about your personal life. But, hey, thanks for coming on the show, man. We really appreciate it.

[00:05:48] This is the people on this show just want to get out of the darn job or they want to improve their business. And I thought, who better than the guy that surrounded with entrepreneurs forever to bring on the show?

[00:06:02] I love it. I'm here for it. And I am so glad that I sucked you into 42 minutes. Oh, man. That I was I was thinking, man, I don't have time for this, but I wonder what's next.

[00:06:14] That's that's that's the greatest compliment.

[00:06:17] Tell her I love it. Well, then I got that. I got 50 minutes on four kiss.

[00:06:20] Oh my goodness. Don't tell me that I'll be sucked in again. So so I've been I researched you a little bit.

[00:06:27] And it's kind of interesting because most of the people that we have on are, quote, entrepreneurs, they have their own business and so forth. But I looked at your history and it's like you've worked for many magazines and currently entrepreneurs. So do you really consider yourself an entrepreneur or a reporter of all about entrepreneurs?

[00:06:50] So if you had asked me that five years ago, I would have said a reporter. But then a couple different things happen. No. One, I spent a lot of time with entrepreneurs and I came to appreciate that the word entrepreneur, whatever it used to mean, because it used to mean all sorts of different things. Today, it is a culture. It is a mindset. It is an identity. And I define the word entrepreneur as someone who makes things happen for themselves. That doesn't mean that you have to do that by spending all of your time, every single day running your own business. You could be a side hustler. You could be an entrepreneur. There are a lot of different ways to be an entrepreneur. And for me personally, I do have a history.

[00:07:35] My mike my career has been in media. I've been working for national magazines for a very long time.

[00:07:41] But I do a lot of other stuff on the side. I mean, I have a production company of my own called Hey Feifer Productions, which is what produces that podcast that you listen to, which is a monetizable product.

[00:07:51] And it was highly produced.

[00:07:53] I bet that it was highly produced that had voiceover thank people, you know, actors, voice actors in it, that had a lot of research into that darn thing.

[00:08:05] Hun's tons, and there's a lot of stuff on the back end that, you know, that I do for that show, and then I have a whole bunch of other things that fall into, hey, favor production speaking, you know, a book deal, a number of other things. And so I would say that I right now am a model for probably some of your listeners who are working at a regular day job and are trying to figure out how to build something of their own. And you can do both at the same time.

[00:08:32] You can be working your day job and you can be building these other things that maybe aren't drawing enough stability and income for you to work full time at it. But you are exploring your building, you're creating opportunities and you're laying the foundation of something that you'll be able to find.

[00:08:48] What I teach around here is I want to eventually make it too expensive for you to go to work anymore, you know, because this stuff is is making money.

[00:08:59] But you're you're a pretty daring guy, I got to tell you, because I understand you wrote a novel with your wife and most people have World War Three on picking where to eat this evening.

[00:09:14] How did you do such a thing?

[00:09:18] Yeah, I did. So first of all, funny thing to talk about on a show called Screw the Commute, because the original name is so that that book was called Mr. Nice Guy, but the original title of that book that I for years, this is what we were calling it was called Screw the Critics.

[00:09:35] And the reason for that is because it was a book about it. So it's a romantic comedy. It has absolutely nothing to do with entrepreneurship. It was it's about two people who each week sleep together and then critically review each other's performance in the magazine.

[00:09:50] And it was an idea that I had the readers of the magazine know that there that this critique is about the husband or wife of the other.

[00:10:01] It's a yeah. So it's well, it's a recurring column and it is the woman is the longtime sex columnist for the magazine, and the guy is anonymous for most of the book until I mean, the reader of the book knows who he is. But but the people, you know, inside the world of the book do not. And there's good reason for that.

[00:10:19] And then it gets better if she is portraying herself as a slut, that's like sleeping with somebody different every week or they know it.

[00:10:25] Well, no, she's you know, she's portraying herself in a kind of Carrie Bradshaw Sex in the City way where she's you know, she's out there experimenting with her own sex life so that you, the reader, can understand what it's like to be a single person in the city.

[00:10:39] Well, it's the same guy everywhere. Interesting. But well, in this case, I mean, it wasn't for a long time. She was doing this for while. And and then and then she meets this guy at a bar. I mean, you know, now if you want to know the whole thing, she meets this guy at a bar and then and then she skewers him in the magazine. And then he reads the magazine because he works at the magazine. They just didn't realize that he was a he's a low level fact checker who just got a job there. And so he he writes a reply anonymously and and they run it. And so now there is a kind of battle of these two people who had this one night stand and then insulted each other in the magazine. And and so, of course, there's a lot of interest in this. Readers want more. And so the editor of the magazine sets a thing up where these two people will each week look together and then critically review each other in this magazine.

[00:11:27] And but, you know, for for for quite a while, the young fact checker manages to evade detection of who he really is. And then, of course, it comes out at some point.

[00:11:37] So this was an idea that I had in my 20s and I had no idea how to write it because I do a lot of kinds of writing, magazine writing, script writing.

[00:11:48] I've even done some television development, but I read fiction.

[00:11:51] Novel writing is just not it was not something I was good at. And then I married, as it would happen, a novelist and she knows how to write.

[00:12:00] Well, that was the I mean, I never heard anybody wants to be a big time author, married one to get there.

[00:12:06] That's I'll tell you, it's the greatest hack.

[00:12:10] You know how to write a novel and marry one who does. And so we decided after after her second or third novel was published, she was trying to figure out what to do. And I said, why don't you write this idea that I've always had that, you know, we both think is funny, but I'm never going to do it like I've tried. I failed. It's not going to happen. And she said, well, well, let's just do it together. And so we did. We spent it. We really it took about three years to do. And I will tell you, because you said, as many people have, that doing something like this sounds like I mean, Pictionary people get divorced over Pictionary.

[00:12:47] So here's the answer. I mean, this is this is what worked for us.

[00:12:51] And I think that this is important for really any partnership of any kind, distinct roles and responsibilities. We had to understand what each of us was bringing and then what we were functionally the CEO of. What parts of this process where we each the CEO of and then we are going to defer to the CEO depending on what the circumstances. And that was really helpful. So she you know, she's a stronger she is she is a much stronger writer in certain ways than I am.

[00:13:18] And I can do things better than she can in other ways. And so we divided the labor up and we tried to make as many decisions jointly as possible.

[00:13:26] But then when it came down to disagreements, we deferred to each other based on whose territory the disagreement took place in.

[00:13:33] There's so many big things right in here that you're talking about. First of all, you know, I've written twenty books, but I wouldn't go near a novel because of same thing. Character development and plot is a mind that I do not have much salt mines, all how to stuff. So that's that's one thing amazing that you guys got through that. But the second thing is, is we're talking about a family business here. And even though you wrote out the roles in a lot of family businesses, they might have roles, but they can't enforce them. And that's why they they go under. They don't want to hurt, you know, cause, you know, mess in the family and then your entrepreneurial, all the entrepreneurs you're surrounded with, how to how to family businesses. Fair.

[00:14:18] Well, I think you make a really good point here, which is that you either.

[00:14:23] You either create a structure that works and then you learn to stick with it or it's all going to fall apart, and and I've seen it play out both ways. You know, the real key, I think, is understanding who has what role, respecting that, staying with it. And then also, I think just as importantly, is is is also respecting and understanding everybody's relationship to each other, how that relationship may change depending on the setting. Right. The relationship at home is different from the relationship at work.

[00:14:54] You have to treat it like that and having a constant.

[00:15:00] Understanding of the journey that you're on, that you can't go to war over little things because there's so much at stake, and that's true regardless of whether or not you're working with somebody who you have some other kind of personal relationship with, be it be it a, you know, a sibling or a parent or spouse or a friend. But if you if you can keep in mind what the long game is here, which is to. Build something great, but also make sure that the relationship takes priority as well. Then I think that you are really setting yourself up for success.

[00:15:38] Yeah. And you know, and I've experienced this in multiple ways.

[00:15:41] I'm just saying I think it's really hard. You did you did a big thing here, much bigger than people would realize.

[00:15:49] Yeah, I think that's true, you know, it's funny, it doesn't feel that it was a big thing.

[00:15:56] And I think part of that was because we and this is, I think, another key to getting into business with anybody who you have. Well, getting into business with anybody, certainly anybody who have pre-existing relationship with is we went into it understanding how each other works and what each other's strengths and weaknesses are and where we could push each other and what was going to be most important. And if you don't understand how somebody else's somebody else works, if you don't understand how compatible you are with them, I think you need to figure that out to the best of your ability before you make some kind of commitment.

[00:16:35] Three years. Did you have any big fights over this?

[00:16:38] Yeah, no big fights, no one of us, we disagree, the lady that been married a long time, she said, I ask her, you know, what's the key to it? She said, you got to learn how to fight. So that you don't cross that line, you know, to really do damage.

[00:16:54] And so I said, that's interesting. You know, I think that's good advice if you happen to be a fighter. Well, Mr. Nice Guy is.

[00:17:04] Yeah, well, I mean, it's you know, I mean, it's funny. People always think that the name is it's like I mean, not it definitely it's something else. But it was a reference to what happens to the book. But but I am I am not a fighter.

[00:17:17] I am a resolver. And I my my brain happens to work in that. Any time there is any kind of challenge, whether it is a conflict with somebody or it is just trying to figure out why something isn't working or how my my brain goes down to the fundamentals, I think, OK, let's get down to the ground level of this and try to build it back up. Why is this happening? Why is this hard to understand?

[00:17:46] What are the needs here, what's important and what's not important? And the more that I can understand that, the better I can figure out how to go forward. And my wife is the same. She is a really good communicator. Really, really good. I mean, when when I was this was this was a big contrast between my previous, you know, my serious relationship. And then when I met what do I do when my wife is that in my series, previous previous serious relationship, we had a hard time communicating, in part because when something was was wrong, it wasn't talked about. It festered. And and then also we felt like we were on different pages. So even when we started to talk about it, we were kind of like missing each other. Whereas, Jenn, anytime something wrong, anytime something is wrong, she tells me not in a confrontational way, in a way in which, like, there is something wrong. Let us observe this and talk about it right now.

[00:18:41] Not like the comedians portray that. Where is there something wrong? No.

[00:18:46] Yeah, terrible. That's death. That's death. Right. Like, you can't you don't have to be confrontational in talking about if something's wrong, you just lay it out. It's a problem to be solved. And neither of us are fighters. We don't have like fights. We sure we disagree, but we don't like fight. And and it to me, there's a big distinction, right. Like to me, fighting is like being angry, saying things that are driven by emotion and that we don't do that we debate. We disagree, but we keep it down on a fundamental like let's keep in mind what the long term goal here.

[00:19:24] Jason, you missed your calling. You two should be marriage counselors.

[00:19:31] I don't want to I don't want to deal with anyone else's problem. I don't want anybody else.

[00:19:35] Well, I haven't figured out I have it figured out how you made this work because you do not believe in the three most dangerous world words.

[00:19:45] This is impossible. That's just about that that that's your hey, that's.

[00:19:50] That was a really that was like expert level transmission where you where you took something from my work and you applied it to this. I get around a little bit, put it that way. It was great. Well done.

[00:20:01] It's everyone should take notes on that. This is impossible. That came from a column that I wrote quite a while ago. And the argument that I made was that those are the three most dangerous words in entrepreneurship or really in life because they are so completely self-fulfilling. The second that you decide that something is impossible is the second that you decide to stop trying to figure out how to get it to work. And then, of course, it is impossible because at that point you've you've given up. But so often what I am seeing from the entrepreneurs who I meet with is that. The successful ones, they they come from this.

[00:20:39] Well, Bethenny Frankel, skinny girl, Real Housewives of New York, she she likes to say, because I just talked to her, she likes to say I come from a place of. Yes. Which is like what can what can we do? Caracara Golden from Hit Water uses that phrase all the time as well. What can we do? She she tells the story over and over again of all the times which she was trying to build this beverage brand, which is of course a very difficult category to grow it.

[00:21:04] And people kept saying, well, we can't do this, we can't do that, this isn't going to work. And she said, OK, what can we do? Right. If we can't do that, what can we do? How can we move forward? And that is how you start to turn something that is difficult but not impossible into something that is actually achievable. But if you say if you think if you act, if you believe that something is impossible, then you have you have guaranteed that it will not.

[00:21:30] Yeah. And and you have naysayers around you, too. And I teach this all the time that when somebody tells you you can't do something that doesn't mean anything to you, it means that they can't do it. This has nothing to do with you at all. And so, yeah, my my dad I grew up my dad came from Syria on a cattle boat in the early 1990s. They're actually doing a documentary about about me and my dad called The American Entrepreneur, by the way. And and he was. Do you remember Johnny Cash? Sure. OK, well, he wrote a song called A Boy named Sue because he was he is an old drunk cowboy. Thought he wouldn't be there to raise his kids. So he named them Sue, so he'd have to scrap and crawl. So my dad was 50 when he had me and he figured he wouldn't be around to raise me so he would have pillows. And just when I was crawling as a baby and put my toys on the other side of them to teach me how to overcome obstacles. And to this day, you know, if you tell me I can't do something, you better get out of the way as I blow by you doing it. And I won't cheat anybody or step on anybody to do it. But there's it's always somebody else can't do it. It's not you.

[00:22:45] You can do whatever you want to, but and you can also suck somebody in for forty two minutes to listen about freaking elevator and tell us about that podcast, because when I was listening to it I think, OK, he's going to interview a guy. I'll listen for a couple of minutes and then I'll get the idea and then have forty two minutes later. Looking at him I was like Oh man what's going to happen next.

[00:23:07] So yeah, it's not that. Oh it's not at all.

[00:23:11] I mean I've been around a long time and I never heard anybody sucked me in that deep with the story that you did. Good.

[00:23:19] Well that's great. I really appreciate that. Yeah. You know, I mean, I really firmly believe and there are many, many ways to do this, everyone can do it differently.

[00:23:28] But for me, especially because I come from media and storytelling is my skill set that I had. This is where I have to really apply this thing that I'm about to say. I really believe for anything that if you expect or want people to spend the most valuable resource that they have on you, which is their time, it's not their money, it's their time that you have to invest infinitely more time in the thing that you are creating that you want them to spend time on. And so when I listen to podcast and it sounds dashed off and, you know, there's no production and nobody's done any research, I get angry. And because you are asking me to spend something, spend my time on something that you didn't spend your time on. So to me, when I set out to make a podcast, I thought, what can I create that literally nobody has heard before? What can I do? That's just going to be completely unique, because to me, if I'm not creating something that's completely unique, that why am I doing it? What's the point? There's so many other people who are already doing a million different versions of other things. Why would I just join them and do another version of it?

[00:24:42] Let me I don't know.

[00:24:43] Let me ask you if this if I have this correct, it appears to me and just listen to one episode that you mixed your storytelling talent with history and then tied the history to the present and the future is that affair?

[00:24:58] That's exactly right.

[00:24:59] The show is about the things that shape us from the past. And then we take those lessons to try to understand how we can shape the future. The episode that you listen to about the elevator has all sorts of lessons in it, about how culture adapts to new technology and how we can wrap our heads around things that are new around us. That may seem scary and frankly impossible, but that in fact have so much benefit if we're able to understand the opportunity differently. The history of the elevator is actually a fact.

[00:25:34] Is totally complex. I'm saying it's going to be here for 42 minutes, but, you know, I'm always looking at so I had an entertainment company, so I'm always looking at the comic side of things that I'm thinking about, the Texas congressman that was debating in Congress whether you should take your hat off for a woman in the U.S. or not.

[00:25:53] The that was. But here's what I'm thinking.

[00:25:56] I'm thinking, you know what their approval rating then for that is probably higher than the Congress is now, the stuff they talk about.

[00:26:06] Yeah, well, I mean, look, I'll tell you. So the show for listeners is not every episode is not about the elevator. Right. But what I do is I dig into a lot of different innovations and and questions like why do people hate being told what to do at home?

[00:26:20] Oh, come on, Jason, stretch yourself. Make a whole series on.

[00:26:23] Oh, just the other. But but I'll tell you, because we're talking about the elevator, I'll tell you one of my absolute favorite facts about the elevator, which I think is actually quite relevant to entrepreneurs, and that is this. So as you'll remember from the from the episode, when automatic elevators were introduced like the 40s and 50s, this was a radical new thing because prior to that, there was always a elevator operator. And we today might think of an elevator operator as just the person who sits there and presses the button. But, you know, the history of the elevator operators, that is, that originally the elevator operator was literally the person who moved the elevator. They would pull a rope or they would turn a crank and they move this thing up and down. And then eventually just it evolved to the point where they were just pushing a button. And so eventually the manufacturers said, well, why don't I just get rid of this person? Buildings don't want this person. They have to pay for this person.

[00:27:12] Also, having an elevator operator is extremely annoying and inefficient because there used to be the elevator operator doesn't work 24 hours a day, which means that you might miss the last elevator in the way that you missed the last train today. So people wanted to get rid of these elevator operators.

[00:27:27] But but when they did, people the average consumer was totally freaked out, like very uncomfortable walking into the elevator, fearing that the elevator could think on its own. And what was it going to do is very unusual.

[00:27:41] And, you know, to be fair, the unions jumped in to just like to jump in.

[00:27:46] Absolutely. They sure did, because they started scaring people and saying, look, an elevator without an elevator operator is a dangerous thing. It murder rates go up in areas where there are no elevator. Right. They were really trying to scare people.

[00:28:00] And and and you can understand the fear here because there is no other. Experience that we have in which we walk into a closed space with no human operating it and no way to look outside of it, no windows, and then it moves. We don't have that. It's not the car. It's not the airplane. There's no other experience. It's not the subway nor the experience like that. So people were freaked out. Anyway, the whole point of this is what was the thing that ultimately shifted the tide? And a big part of it, getting people to be comfortable with a operator. This elevator with an automatic elevator was adding a soothing female voice that said, going up, going down floor one floor to and this bridged the gap. And this is the reason why I think this is an important story for entrepreneurs. This bridge, what I like to call or rather this this created what I like to call a bridge of familiarity, where the inventors of this thing, the innovators, the disruptors, they thought that by itself this new invention was going to be so compelling to people that they would change their behavior. But that's not what happened. Instead, what happened is that people were freaked out by it. And what you have to do is you have to identify what is the thing that people need, what is the familiar element of the old thing that they need to bring along to embrace this new thing, a bridge of familiarity. Any time that you offer something disruptive, people will not immediately understand it the way that you do new ideas can be scary to people. And so you need to prove to them not just that this is valuable, but that it's also kind of a new version of an old thing. It's a better way of doing something that they're already comfortable with. As I started the history of innovations, I see over and over again that this is the key to getting people to embrace new things. Is it showing them that the new thing isn't brand new? It's actually a new version of an old thing.

[00:30:04] Yeah. And I heard you say on an airplane that you looked out the window and you figured, I'm risking my life and this thing that I know nothing about. You know why? Well, I was a commercial charter pilot for a while, a freelance pilot. And so I'll screw you over and let you go look at the Bernoulli principle and let you research that for another forty two minutes to make up your mind.

[00:30:27] Ok, got it. Yeah.

[00:30:29] That's, that's, that's what kept you up in the air was the Bernoulli principle. Thanks Bernie. Yeah. So so how do they find this podcast so they can get sucked in deeper than ever before.

[00:30:44] Well I would say anywhere that you're listening to this podcast right now, you can find mine to just search for. Billed for tomorrow.

[00:30:50] Billed for now. It used to be called something else, right?

[00:30:53] It's right. It used to be called Pessimist's Archive. And that that was it, because it was originally affiliated with a popular Twitter feed that was called Pessimist's Archive. But eventually I realized and this is you know, this is an important lesson for anybody. And eventually I realized it was a real barrier to entry.

[00:31:11] The name turned people off. It's not a pessimistic show. It was an archive of pessimist's. That was the original idea. It also limited the kinds of stories that I could tell. And it just generally. People just started telling me, you know, I would love to listen to your podcast, but I'm not a pessimist and I would be like, listen to the show, you will discover that it's not about pessimism.

[00:31:29] But, you know, any time you have someone, you have one second, you have one second to make somebody, to convince somebody to pay attention. And this was not doing it. I also learned that because we did an audience deep dive, and I will tell you, the power of getting to know your customers in an intimate way is unparalleled. And as I started to learn from my from my customer, who actually hired a consultancy who helped me do this, they discovered that I thought of this originally years ago as a history show. That's not how people experienced it. They experienced it as a show that helped them feel more resilient about the future. They were learning about how change happens. They were discovering that new things are scary and to help them feel better about today's new things.

[00:32:13] Well, that's how you taught me. That's how you tied it to the the the driverless cars.

[00:32:19] That's right, but once but that was not an insight that I originally had, I thought I was making a quirky history show and because I was talking to my audience and I was seeing not just why do you like this show, but why do you include this show in your life? What does this show do for you? Asking really important questions like that, you start to discover the way in which people are consuming whatever you're creating in a way that you might not even be aware of. And once I realized that, I started leaning heavily into it. And the more that I was starting to make those connections and make things relevant to people today, the more they loved the show. It was a really great insight. And I can't stress enough to people who are listening to this show right now. If you are creating anything, if you have any kind of audience, any kind of customer base, even the smallest of customer bases, get to know them, ask them what they like, ask them what they don't like. And the more that you understand them, the more you will realize how and why you can be more relevant to them. It was a game changer.

[00:33:14] And you say one second for them to make a decision to listen or not. Right. Well, I mean I mean, it's science, but. Well, I saw a study out of Canada that people make a decision of staying at your Web site. I can't. It's been a few years since I saw this study. I can't remember the name of it. But they make a decision if they're staying at your website. And one twentieth of a second. Yeah, that's right. And it's just not a read. It's what they feel. But just by looking at it.

[00:33:43] That's right.

[00:33:44] You know, there's also a lot of data showing that if your website doesn't load and I think, oh, yeah, it's got a load on everybody so out. So people that are sitting in traffic recognize the name of this podcast. It's like a millisecond screw the commute. It's this car. So, man, thanks so much for coming on. I appreciate it so much. Been very inspiring in the I'm going to be quite a bit time wasting for me now. Having to listen to all your freaking Artec built for tomorrow's. I really appreciate it. And folks, we really are hitting the big time now. Editor of Entrepreneur magazine coming from Maxim. There's a there's a switch right there.

[00:34:27] Yeah. Thanks much.

[00:34:28] I jumped around. I mean, look, you know, the journey is never straightforward, so I zigzagged my way through this career.

[00:34:34] And the novel is Mr. Nice Guy.

[00:34:37] The novel is Mr. Nice. Mr. Nice Guy expected no lessons in entrepreneurship from you're looking for a fun beach read.

[00:34:43] It's there. All right, man, thanks so much for coming on. And we will catch everybody on the next episode. See you later.

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