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00:00:01
Mitch Joel: The Entrepreneur’s Mindset and the Danger of Stasis
20 Plays29 days ago
In this episode of The Unfolding Thought Podcast, Eric Pratum speaks with Mitch Joel — entrepreneur, author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and host of the podcasts Thinking with Mitch Joel and Groove: The No Treble Podcast. Mitch shares his perspective on entrepreneurship, creativity, and why “success is the anomaly.”
They explore how Thinkers One is democratizing access to thought leadership, why change—not stasis—is the natural state of business and culture, and how our relationship with technology and media shapes what it means to be “social.” Mitch also reflects on his decades-long journey across marketing, music, and digital innovation — and how curiosity, humility, and a willingness to “show your work” are essential to staying relevant in a world that never stops shifting.
Topics Explored:
- The myth of the “entrepreneurial mindset” and why success can’t be replicated
- Why Thinkers One exists and how it redefines access to expert thinking
- Escaping stasis: how to stay curious and open to change
- The balance between longform depth and shortform accessibility
- The philosophy behind Thinking with Mitch Joel and the art of asking better questions
- What creativity and bass playing have in common
- How to rethink “social” in an age of constant screens
Links:
- Mitch Joel’s website: https://www.mitchjoel.com
- Thinking with Mitch Joel podcast: https://thinkersone.com/blogs/six-pixels-of-separation-podcast
- Groove: The No Treble Podcast: https://www.notreble.com/podcast/
- Thinkers One: https://thinkersone.com
- Mitch’s Six Pixels of Separation: https://amzn.to/4qDUJyx
- Mitch’s Ctrl Alt Delete: https://amzn.to/436zVWC
- Susan Orlean on writing: https://www.susanorlean.com
- Empathy and fiction study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3559433/
- Patrick Tanguay: https://pkty.ca
- Tom Webster’s The Audience Listening: https://amzn.to/4qvmJ7w
- Colman Swisher’s appearance on From There to Here: https://boldrfutures.com/from-there-to-here-podcast-featuring-colman-swisher/
- Jess Villegas’ The Leader’s Commute: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-leaders-commute-podcast/id1712720351
For more episodes: https://unfoldingthought.com
Questions or guest ideas: eric@inboundandagile.com
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Transcript
00:00:03
Speaker
Mitch, thank you for joining me. Where does today's recording find you? Eric, always good to see you, and I'm happily at home in beautiful Montreal. I have been following your content for a long time. I mentioned right before we started recording that you and I met briefly. Of course, you've met a lot of people in your career.
00:00:24
Speaker
So nonetheless, you know, we connected quite a long time ago. Plus, we've also run in sort of some similar circles. So I've followed...
00:00:35
Speaker
one of your podcasts for a long time, another one off and on, plus your writing books and so on. So I appreciate you joining me. And for people who are, let's say, unfamiliar with you, if someone asks you what you do or tell me about your background or whatever, what do you sell them?
00:00:54
Speaker
Yeah, it's long sorted and weird as what I always tell them. And it's great to always reconnect. And we also spend a lot of time commenting and going back and forth on each other's content. So it's it's just great to to have this conversation.
00:01:08
Speaker
Normally, I tell people that I'm an entrepreneur if I'm being very to the point of it. If I get into it, I would talk about things like I work primarily at the intersection of technology and innovation and marketing and culture.
00:01:23
Speaker
you know Right now, having sold the digital marketing agency that I built with my three other partners well over 10 years ago, left a lot a lot less than that. But you know right now, I'm really focused on three to four things at any given time. One would be my start sort of startup venture called Thinkers One.
00:01:42
Speaker
Second would be speaking. I do a lot of keynote speeches all over the world for B2B and B2C organizations, associations, companies, big meetings, things like that.
00:01:54
Speaker
I create a lot of content. Like you said, I have a weekly podcast. It was called Six Pixels of Separation. It's now called Thinking with Mitch Joel. That's been going for over a thousand episodes every week, 52 weeks a year. No best ofs, no repeats, no seasons.
00:02:09
Speaker
I have a second podcast called Groove, the No Trouble Podcast, where I interview bass players. It's a monthly show at notrouble.com, which is not my site. I just host the podcast there. I do some investing and advising, and that's really the crux of my day. i'm very fortunate and I feel very privileged that I get to set my own calendar and have four very diverse and fun different ways to do some mental gymnastics, I guess.
00:02:35
Speaker
As you've gone through your career, has your day often been split amongst multiple projects or ventures as it is now? Yeah, i think when you're an entrepreneur, it's kind of always chef, bottle washer, maitre d'. I think it's always that that. When you're in an agency world, you're not only helping to run the agency corporately, you're in the client work, you're pitching clients, you're meeting new people, you're trying to build the business through doing association work. i was creating content. I was writing books back then. So it's kind of all i ever knew, which isn't fully true.
00:03:12
Speaker
I quasi started off as an entrepreneur, independent freelancer, worked in organizations a good chunk of my early part of my life. But you know my late 20s is when I really decided it's time to just go at it. And part of it was definitely philosophical in the sense of, one, I wanted to have some type of control over my calendar and my energy.
00:03:32
Speaker
And I think that there was a direct correlation between that and what I call the allowance mindset. I got really tired of doing some good tasks for somebody else and asking them every other week to please pay me for my tasks.
00:03:45
Speaker
I recognized that if I really want to be in control of my outcomes, be they financial, be they professional development, personal development whatever that might be, have to be in control of that. and You have to make decisions. It wasn't a question of less risk or or more risk. It was just more that I felt like you for me to really do what I think I want to do, I have to have more quote unquote control, even though it's not true.
00:04:07
Speaker
and over my day-to-day and what I want to accomplish. You've worked with a lot of people, both as, you know, not just both, but as clients, you have had employees, you've talked, you've spoken to tons of people.
00:04:23
Speaker
Having that kind of drive, I guess, to have a little bit of control is one thing that I hear, but also some autonomy or some flexibility and a number of other things.
00:04:34
Speaker
Do you generally see, if you were talking to a young person, let's say, would you just as your standard recommend that people go out and do their own things, that they freelance, that they start their own business or whatever? now Or do you feel like a bit of that has to do with your makeup? And so then it depends on the makeup of that person as well.
00:04:56
Speaker
Everybody has different needs and different wants. And so when people talk about success or they talk about money or they talk about where they are in their career, My summit of my Everest is not the summit of your Everest.
00:05:12
Speaker
And I do not think imposing certain aspects of what I think work for me will work for anybody else. I've really come to the point where even case studies give me a bit of a rash.
00:05:26
Speaker
And this idea that if you do what they did, that will work I'm starting to believe as I get older that success is the anomaly. And while we celebrate it en masse, it's actually more the anomaly and those who look at business, right? We have, what is it, a 95 plus percent failure rate of people who start a business.
00:05:47
Speaker
Now, you would make an argument here, which would to be very, very fair to say, well, we live in a Shopify world. So in theory, the cost expense to build a business is so much lower, the bar is so much lower, so much easier to do it.
00:05:59
Speaker
You would think that you would have a higher level of success and then based off of that, a lower level of failure. But we haven't really seen that. And I don't think it's related to any of those. I think it's related to that personal DNA. Yeah.
00:06:11
Speaker
And some people really thrive on riding that wave of sheer terror. Other people like being a part of the wake and like being in the wave of following and helping someone else build while they do it.
00:06:25
Speaker
Others want a different type of lifestyle and and life. And i look, I think we're seeing a lot of that come out. here are what five or six years after the pandemic and still we're talking about returning to office and whether or not we should go to the office or shouldn't and how we work and the type of work we do and what you realize in this is it's almost like the pharmaceutical business where all we're talking about is how do we get that perfect pill for eric and that pill would be completely different for mitch based of our dna our needs and all that and we're trying to personalize that with our work and so you see
00:06:56
Speaker
how different everyone is in terms of their values, in terms of what they want out of life, in terms of how they value the the work that they do, their skill. So I don't look at it and think, woe is you if you're not in the entrepreneurial mindset. It takes all kinds. and to me, that's what makes, that is to me the true sign of diversity in the economy.
00:07:16
Speaker
I realize I'm actually jumping a bit ahead with how I thought I was going to work through some things. It's conversation. Let's do it. i think what I understand of what you're doing with thinkers one. And i suspect where you're going with the change in your podcast is probably quite sympathetic to my interests and what I hope that I do over time with this podcast.
00:07:46
Speaker
And so that said, You know, what are you trying to accomplish? What are you trying to do with Thinker Swan? I'll ask that first and then get into what I think I hear you saying in that statement about entrepreneurialism and mindset so on.
00:08:02
Speaker
We called them thinkers because I didn't know what else to call them. Thought leaders felt weird. Speakers, podcasters, newsletter creators, intellectuals. All of these words just felt a little weird. And so we honed in on the idea of thinker. Essentially what these people are are experts.
00:08:19
Speaker
They are people who command stages, command newsletters and inboxes and businesses, academics, journalism, other areas. They're typically people who have had some level of success to the point where it makes them somewhat inaccessible to many audiences because of the fees they command for consulting, for speaking, whatever else it might be.
00:08:41
Speaker
and I found myself during the pandemic, for sure, having this interesting conversation because suddenly the stages were gone, the physical meetings were gone, and everybody went digital. And I felt that i had a lot of my peers who were buying ring lights and webcams and thinking they had reinvented the wheel.
00:08:57
Speaker
In a world where I had been a part of digital communications at that point for close to two decades and using tools like this to communicate and connect and build and have used tools like this in particular, even in our offices at the digital marketing agency where we would have it set up that everybody had at the time. It was Skype, but webcams, we had camera setups so you could see other offices and people walking by and working. was a very...
00:09:18
Speaker
integrated business from having also FTEs to freelancers, to part-times, to other agency partners and clients and that that type of vibe. And so it was interesting to me to see how the world was changing to be more welcoming to these types of ways in which we can connect and learn and grow together as one.
00:09:39
Speaker
Two is i was just getting requests because the moment of, hey, can you pop on our Zoom for 20 minutes to talk to our team? Or would you mind recording a quick, you know, 15, 20 minute video talking through some of the things you're working on or thinking about marketing or culture, technology, whatever it might be?
00:09:54
Speaker
Now, the truth is from my perspective, as someone who sells that content, primarily a keynotes for me, is it's the same amount of work on the business side as the 20 minutes. I have to meet with you, hear what your needs are, what your audience wants.
00:10:09
Speaker
I then have to create a contract for you. Usually I create the contract and they tell me it has to go through procurement. I have to fill out all this procurement work. And then I have to wait 36, 30 if I'm lucky, 60, 90, 120 days to payments. have to chase them.
00:10:23
Speaker
it's the same amount of of ah personal work as it is for me being the keynote speaker, thought leader, whatever. On the other side... It's problematic because you're just trying to get a 20-minute video and you're going through your whole corporate thing. And the idea was, could we Shopify? Could we e-commerce this so that the customer coming in, the business that wants to have that thought leadership, can simply fill out a form, slap it on their credit card, and either have a video delivered to them within five business days or go live by giving you know they thought leader a bunch of dates and they choose one.
00:10:52
Speaker
And off you go. So this way... One is it makes it much more accessible for businesses to grab experts who will in the the moment deliver content they probably haven't even really delivered, like their latest thinking. It's the stuff they're really on right now in the moment. So that's interesting.
00:11:09
Speaker
And secondarily, it makes it easier for the thought leader who doesn't necessarily want to block days, block times for their main stuff to be able to add in this type of work where they can make themselves more accessible.
00:11:21
Speaker
Because keynotes are one thing and consulting is one thing, but there's businesses all over our all over the world and associations and nonprofits and startups that would love to have these types of thought leaders just to pick their brains for a little bit or to get a little spark of energy for their meeting, their sales kickoff, whatever it might be.
00:11:39
Speaker
And that was the catalyst is how do we democratize this content for more and more audiences that could benefit the thought leader and actually benefit the organizations as well.
00:11:50
Speaker
And so that's what that's the space we're playing in right now. And it it could change. right It's it's ah an always evolving entrepreneur. I had a couple of thought leaders that were thinking about coming on the platform and they were pretty tough on me. Is this going to work? And how are you so sure?
00:12:03
Speaker
Am I not? don't know. I'm an entrepreneur. That's what we do. We take risks. They're kind of shocked by my answer, but I'm like, that's what it is. Like, i don't I'm not sure this is going to work. you know I don't think we, ah entrepreneurs do many things that they're sure is going to work. They hope, but I don't know.
00:12:17
Speaker
You know, when i saw the new name for your podcast, I wanted to ask you about what you were thinking, the focus of the podcast, and also tie into Thinkers 1. But also really liked what, to me, the name Thinking suggested, because i in particular, am interested in mental models.
00:12:44
Speaker
And how is it that you know, Mitch, when you and I are talking, I'll be so confident of the way that I see things or the next question that I want to ask or whatever else.
00:12:56
Speaker
And as soon as we hang up from this recording, I'll think, didn't even realize I should have asked this other question or i didn't, you know, I just, I see things from a different perspective and I may be wrong about your podcast, but but it suggested to me that there would be an exploration of what I think I've seen in a lot of what you've produced over the years, which is, seems like very often in Control-Alt-Delete or in Six Pixels of Separation, I'm speaking of your books specifically, keynotes that I've seen from you.
00:13:37
Speaker
It seems like you're very often exploring what is in kind of a proximal zone of development, if I can use a somewhat technical term here for and some people might not know that, but you know, the next thing, what's just right outside of our reach and how might we think about that thing?
00:13:55
Speaker
And there might be different use cases for your clients of thinkers one, but am I correct in thinking that at least some of your involvement in Thinker's One is motivated by that kind of thinking? Like, how do we understand the things that are just outside of our reach?
00:14:17
Speaker
I see it a bit differently, Eric. What I'm always confronted with is an idea. Somebody wrote a book, somebody wrote an article, there's a shift in the landscape of business.
00:14:31
Speaker
And we pile on all of us, pile on, you have perspectives and thoughts. And it's this, it's that look at return to office, look at post-pandemic, look at like the economy, look at tariffs. And what I often have to pause myself on is this idea that I often find i I do this and I see it for sure in the, in the output of others that they're operating in stasis.
00:14:54
Speaker
as if this stuff will change, but how we are today, that's not going to change. We're going to stay the same. It's going to stay the same. AI is not, generative AI, just is it doesn't really create jokes. It's bad it do you know bad at creating content. you know it's It's just predictive. It's just, you know,
00:15:09
Speaker
That's stasis. If it never changes, maybe that's It's a great example of exactly what I'm saying, actually. Because you can still say that and believe it and keep ah believing that. But if you're actually paying attention to it and speaking to those people who are developing it, working with it, you're working with it yourself, what you realize is that stasis is very dangerous.
00:15:32
Speaker
So I can have my own perception of what crypto means or what Bitcoin means. As you explore it and as a market develops or doesn't develop, I don't know why my mindset would stay in stasis.
00:15:45
Speaker
So I had somebody on who was talking about the space economy. And even those two words together, something that but gives me a bit of a brain zap. What does that mean? Space economy, you SpaceX and there's NASA. I'm like, what are we talking about here?
00:15:58
Speaker
And when you read the book and have a conversation with this definite expert and somebody who teaches this at highest levels of Ivy League schools, you start realizing that not only did I not understand it, but I'm so unsure in the conversation that they're providing answers that I think as they're saying it, they're rethinking their own stance.
00:16:19
Speaker
I love that. I love the idea of somebody who spent a lot of time on a topic. Showing their work. I love the fact that I have, know, I always say that I don't know if i'm smart, but I just know enough to be a little bit dangerous.
00:16:36
Speaker
mean, I've had a lot of clients over the years, a lot of different industries. I've worked in a lot of different industries. I'm curious. I'm constantly reading and exploring everything from economics to philosophy to business to life to personal development, like on and on and on.
00:16:49
Speaker
that I'm not trying to be provocative. I'm not trying to prove them wrong. I'm trying to have them show the work. And in showing their work, I'm trying to keep myself out of that stasis mentality that I'm And what I find myself doing more often than not, which I've been capitalizing on recently, is I'll record the show, and usually it could be months in advance from when I'm publishing it because i keep a backlog so I'm not having stress in my life.
00:17:13
Speaker
And then when I edit it, which is usually a day or two before I publish it, It's like I have so much distance from it that I'm now actually really consuming the content and taking notes and thinking about it. that Now what I do is I output this in a LinkedIn post or I post it on thinking with Mitch Joel as an article or an essay.
00:17:33
Speaker
And it's usually like one or two things that happen in the conversation that's this really deep emotional thing that I'm grappling with. And it's weird because as I'm writing and thinking about it, I'm realizing that it's been sitting in my brain since I had that conversation a month or two earlier.
00:17:50
Speaker
So it's really interesting to just spend time with ideas, to take notes about ideas, to reflect on your own confirmation bias in those ideas, to try to output that as a form of content.
00:18:05
Speaker
Susan Orleans, great creative nonfiction writer. think she said something like researching is learning. Writing is teaching something like that. I always love that as you know, you're kind of researching and thinking about topics and speaking to people. And when you're writing it, it's almost like you're teaching it to yourself and to an audience.
00:18:25
Speaker
And I think about that as like, wow, like what a time to be alive. Like, just think about that for a second. I went, you know, post-secondary, did one semester at college level in philosophy. And I could not get through these books. And I love philosophy.
00:18:37
Speaker
And then you fast forward to like a couple of years ago, maybe not even. And Alex O'Connor has a podcast with Rory Sutherland. It's an excellent watch. And they're just talking. And I don't think they knew that they were recording or whatever, but off the cuff about how it's really true how these types of conversations that you and I are having is actual philosophy.
00:18:55
Speaker
And this is what it is. It's like, I have a thought. You come back. You ask a question. I think about it. I come back with like, that is what it is. And when they took that and transcribed it into a physical book, what the way language was, it's yeah know for me, at least it's, it's unconsumable. it's just not something I can do, but I can have these talks with someone like you, or I can watch these talks.
00:19:15
Speaker
And whether I agree or disagree is somewhat secondary to just being enamored with the concept that we can. Just look at what's going on here. We are in different countries. And we are having this conversation live and in real time.
00:19:29
Speaker
And if anything i say or you say triggers something in each of us, value. If it triggers something in someone who's listening or watching, value. We could never have done this 15 years ago, 20 years ago.
00:19:42
Speaker
And so I don't take it for granted. And I see it as this really fun way to explore ideas. And at the same time, to be honest, like both check myself and stay out of the category of where I find myself often at this advanced age, the olds.
00:19:59
Speaker
I don't want to be the old's. Oh, it's it'll never work. ohs It's such an easy default that I try. It's not easy. I try not to get there. I 100% agree with you on so much of this. and all'll so so I got coffee with a The client, I think three days ago now at this point, and he used to run a music studio, had a lot of experience.
00:20:28
Speaker
I think he got his degree in music theory and composition or something like that. And he had heard that I play guitar. sent me an email, said, Hey, you want to talk music? I said, if you're willing to talk with someone who's terrible at a lot of instruments, then sure.
00:20:44
Speaker
Remind me to come back to that on the bass player thing. Yeah. I'm really curious about that, actually. So we were talking. We had a really great conversation. It was very obvious to me that in many ways within the very broad space of music, he knows so much more than I do.
00:21:05
Speaker
And as I've told my children before, and I tell plenty of other people, it does not bother me that I am bad at piano or guitar or whatever it is.
00:21:17
Speaker
I is personally fulfilling to be able to sit down with my son who has a very difficult time reading music. He can read tab, guitar tab, and he's actually quite talented for where he's at.
00:21:32
Speaker
it's yeah I find it very fulfilling to sit down with him and give him a piano book and say, you know, can you and I start picking out the melody line? in this piano piece.
00:21:45
Speaker
And the other day we were playing some Christmas music. I think it was. So I was saying, hey, we're going to visitors over the holidays. Don't you think it'd be really, it would feel good to you if you could do this? And There are other people who are so much more talented than me and this client. He's so much, he just knows so much more about recording and everything.
00:22:04
Speaker
And he asked, do you have any recordings? So I have some recordings from almost 20 years ago and I sent them to him and I said, of course, there is a lot that I would do differently now, but hey, it was fun at the time and I'm still proud of it.
00:22:19
Speaker
And his response as somebody who has been over the sort of Dunning-Kruger hump You know, he, he recognizes that he has the same thing in his life and he can appreciate something from my past for what it was.
00:22:35
Speaker
And not that something, you know, I don't know about you, Mitch, but I suspect you would go back to old blog posts. old podcasts, books, and say, well, if I had it to do today, I would do it differently.
00:22:47
Speaker
But hopefully you don't carry with you some sort of shame that it doesn't live up to today's standards in, guess, in a long meandering way here.
00:22:58
Speaker
That probably brings me back to Something that makes you an entrepreneur and something that is more difficult for others is you're constantly trying things.
00:23:10
Speaker
And even the things that succeeded in the past, maybe don't always, ah they're not, you would do them differently today, I suppose. I don't know. who is my My first, the note that I took down is i wouldn't do it differently. You know, one is it's on display.
00:23:28
Speaker
You can go and read the books right now, 10 plus years old, and there's a lot of wrong in them. You could look at the blogs and go back and feel however you want. In the moment, it captured where I was in the moment.
00:23:42
Speaker
This is the beauty of these channels and what we have that I don't think people spend a second thinking about. Because it's so native and organic and there all the time that we don't think about it.
00:23:53
Speaker
I think about it a lot. Someone once, so I get the question several times of, are you going to write a third book? Now, right now the answer is no, and I'm not even really thinking about that at all. But my reflection and and reflex to that is also, I'm giving you stuff every day in one way, shape, or form.
00:24:12
Speaker
I'm creating a podcast every week. I'm writing stuff that's being published four or five times sometimes every week, whether it's an article, an essay, some commentary, on the radio once a week. like and you know You're getting it like in live in real time, not like from a year and a half ago when I thought of it and had to publish it in that format.
00:24:31
Speaker
And so the reason I say I wouldn't do it differently, because I think there's something about legacy. I think there's something about a body of work that's almost more interesting than being right all the time. I mean, if I, you know, i don't um I won't get into the politics of life, but if you want to see why we're so divided,
00:24:49
Speaker
A lot of the reasoning of why we're so divided is because how we are now, it's tough to think of how we were and want to somehow fix or change or or correct versus saying, let's stop.
00:25:05
Speaker
How do we move forward versus trying to go back and fix and fix and fix? And the line that I say to a lot of my friends who are quite political or in a lot of pain, which I understand is, I always start off with, tell me where your timeline starts.
00:25:19
Speaker
Where does your timeline start? Does it start at the beginning of humanity and and the earth? And when we were little frogs becoming human, like, does it start when your family emigrated or immigrated somewhere? Does it start when a war started? Does it start when ah an election cycle happened?
00:25:36
Speaker
And you could tell a lot from that moment. It's like, we won't talk about the before stuff, but we'll start there. That's interesting. And so i I think about that a lot more, which is I'd rather have it all hanging out there and be a lot of wrong and even be wrong now. and Stuff I write even now that will be criticized, obviously on social media is where we criticize everything.
00:26:00
Speaker
And I'm okay with that. In fact, a lot of times, and I've made this argument for a long time, people say, you know, you got to like add in the comments and keep active in the comments. I was never good at that. And what a couple of reasons. One is as a journalist,
00:26:14
Speaker
When I publish something, i feel like that's the thought. I don't really have much more to add. If I did, it would have been in the post or the show. Two, If I like it or comment on it, I feel like there's a status play happening versus an acknowledgement happening, which is a weird thing that we've developed in society. And I don't like that feeling of, you know, if I liked it, it means I approve or I'm just happy you're here. Now, for some people, that is important. So I will give them that for sure.
00:26:42
Speaker
i also don't necessarily want to get into the comments in terms of the back and forth, because if Eric's opinion is fundamentally different than mine, good share it like this is the place share it but i don't need to get into it with you i already kind of did my thing up there you know the thing that got you to comment now i recognize that this is somewhat anachromatic how a lot of people think and they they want to get in and have this type of conversation i think that that's great and that's what i like to do on my podcast which is not necessarily what i want to do on articles and things like that and so
00:27:15
Speaker
The world shifts, the world turns, and we have different ways of approaching it and looking at these different types of commentary. And I think that's what makes it dynamic. The fact that we can actually track how my thinking has changed, where my confirmation bias was, what unhooked me from that confirmation bias.
00:27:34
Speaker
At the end of my podcast, I ask every guest the same question. Tell me the one thing that made you think differently. And the idea behind it wasn't just a play on thinkers one, it kind of was. But the real idea behind it was, I think too many people are so locked into their ideology that when they're exposed to another ideology, they go into stasis or they push against it.
00:27:56
Speaker
I'm trying to demonstrate with that question that very smart people who are experts at what they do could have been influenced by a song they heard or a comment a kid made at school, and that made them change their actual perspective.
00:28:08
Speaker
And that's a perspective that, by the way, you might even agree with now. And that's where I think we will have better breakthroughs and think much more differently about all that content out there. normal. We're going to change. Our opinions are going change. I was definitely Pollyannic about digital.
00:28:24
Speaker
Fundamentally right, situationally wrong. Also at the time, there wasn't really much video. There wasn't much Twitter, or twitter which was now X. like So the landscape changes and we adapt to it. And I think there's something really kind of inspiring and beautiful about letting that legacy just fly by. So would I do it differently today?
00:28:42
Speaker
I would. Would I go back and change it? Don't think so. I think you and I are in total alignment because i you know, I am just a naturally curious person. And yet, like some people, I'm often quite confident in the way that I see things. But, you know, anybody who listens to this frequently enough, hi mom, by the way.
00:29:06
Speaker
they probably get tired of me saying this, but I read ton of books. In an average year, I'll read about 150 books. And, you know, there's some research, I forget what it is, but People who read a lot of fiction on average are more empathetic than people who do not.
00:29:30
Speaker
And I forget if this has been proven or if it's just a theory, but as I recall it, the theory is that you get so much more practice hearing the inner thoughts of another, even though they're fake.
00:29:46
Speaker
And i don't read hardly any fiction, except in my children. But still, i think because I spend so much time with ideas and I take notes and, you know, you and I are talking, I'm taking notes.
00:30:04
Speaker
I, I'm, you posted actually recently on LinkedIn something about walking more in the morning. and think it was. yeah And how do you keep track of something someone said in a podcast or whatever else is? How do you keep track of those ideas, those notes, whatever?
00:30:22
Speaker
And my method is I was just running the other morning. Somebody said something in the audio book that I was listening to. And I said, Hey Siri, send me an email. And she said, what do you want in the email?
00:30:34
Speaker
And it was the quote from the book. And then that was just enough for me to be able to pick up from there. But I go back to those notes later on and I start to piece together.
00:30:46
Speaker
Well, you know, why was this interesting again? And how how does that relate to something else? And Mitch, I'm sure you're well aware of the whole idea of shower thoughts and that meme, but I have tons of those.
00:31:02
Speaker
But the thing is that it also doesn't embarrass me when I say something, and it may be a strongly held belief or idea at the time,
00:31:15
Speaker
And it turns out that I'm wrong or I change my mind six months later. It doesn't embarrass me that I was quote unquote wrong or that I changed. What I'm most interested in is am I moving towards some sense of, I guess, truth?
00:31:29
Speaker
perhaps? Yeah, it's it's it's interesting. I'm i'm thinking about um just like how much video podcasts have changed. And I'm being exposed to people I'd never heard of, and I'm watching them talk, and my visceral reaction is these are some smart people. Where do they come from? And you dig in and you rabbit hole a little bit. Some you do, some you don't.
00:31:54
Speaker
And I'd often share some thinking from some of these individuals and then watch the blowback come to me in comments of that person is this, they're that, they've been disproven, they're snake they're frauds. And frauds there and It's interesting. Like you start thinking, well, hold on a second.
00:32:13
Speaker
Can they be all that, but still have said something really interesting that inspired me? But that doesn't make it good what they're doing. It doesn't mean that, you know, it's like this weird protectionism we have over everyone's intellectual thing, right?
00:32:27
Speaker
And I'm often maybe more of a free thinker in that sense where I'm okay with thinking somebody said something really smart and then finding out, you not that they did something illegal or anything like that, but they might you know not be who they represent themselves to doesn't mean that they're not, they don't speak. And by the way, like what happens when we're scammed? We're typically scammed by someone who is very good at convincing us to do something that doesn't even make sense. So,
00:32:54
Speaker
it's This is like the interesting intellectual conversations I have with myself about how we think about thinking, which is a topic I'm always certainly very interested and The reading thing, just looping back a little bit is I was, yeah, I was just a nonfiction person all the time. In fact, I was such a purist that listening to audio books wouldn't count as reading books. like if I was keeping a list, I would just be like, I have an audio book list and I have a, an actual physical reading list.
00:33:23
Speaker
It doesn't matter. It's irrelevant, all of that. But I started getting into fiction and And I can't remember who it was, but someone made a similar comment as you did, which is it's the only art form where you can really read and think about what someone is thinking internally.
00:33:44
Speaker
And I paused, it really gave me pause, right? Because like a song is, it's an alliteration of what you're thinking. It's kind of mysterious. We're not really sure. Is it about a girl or a boy? they break up or did they fall in love?
00:33:56
Speaker
Or maybe it's not even a person. It could be inanimate object of the person, like like all these things. Art, you look at and you interpret what you're feeling is dance, all these art forms. But wow, to actually read what someone is thinking is so intimate and it's so powerful.
00:34:12
Speaker
And that's when I started really uncovering this idea that the best way to learn how to think is actually fiction. And that's a really tough place to hit when you're past 50. I have to tell you, someone who's reading the amount of books I was reading. And then my only other thought on that was, I don't know how to circle the square, but I might be interested in writing a book that felt more like that, a business book.
00:34:37
Speaker
That, wow, don't we, you know isn't it interesting that, you know obviously history is written by the winner, right? We see a lot of that. And I think nonfiction books are written by the winner. and So it's it's always, ah you know, the the joke used to be, what's what's more true, an authorized biography or an unauthorized biography?
00:34:57
Speaker
And when you think about you go, well, obviously an authorized biography is more real. Well, that person might be embellishing a lot and not giving you the whole perspective. And this is the the deeper stuff that it's that's tough to get into and tough to think about.
00:35:12
Speaker
There's so many things to think about here. I suppose I'll go with one thing that when I turn, when I don't know what to do and I turn to ah higher power, you know, that when I turn to, i don't mean it in the religious sense, when I turn to parent or a boss or whatever it is, a lot of times,
00:35:39
Speaker
in the short term, I want the same thing that they probably want in, in the short term, which is just tell me the answer. Just tell me how to do the thing. Right. And we all know in the long run, you have to let people figure things out for themselves.
00:35:56
Speaker
you know, I quote Blaise Pascal all the time. It said something along the lines of man will always be more convinced by the thoughts that have come into his own mind than by those which have come into the minds of others, something like that.
00:36:11
Speaker
And, know, so we know that in whether, you know, the quotes, it's just like, do you learn more by trying it out or by having somebody tell you what to do? and i think that we're so challenged when we are a parent or when we are a manager or we're the quote-unquote expert to just say, this is the way the world works.
00:36:41
Speaker
And actually, perhaps to go back to something you said before, maybe I can take a snapshot. Not that you said this, but in terms of things being in stasis, maybe I can take a snapshot and say, this is the way that things are today.
00:36:56
Speaker
So Mitch, you asked me how to handle the situation. I told you, do it like this. But if I cannot help you become the kind of person, and even I as a coach or an advisor cannot myself become the kind of person that realizes that you need to learn to deal with change, then i suspect you are always going to be coming to me for that right answer.
00:37:25
Speaker
And I'm curious with thinkers one, with thinking with your philosophy, and
00:37:32
Speaker
generally, aside from the projects,
00:37:36
Speaker
this This is something that you're trying to show people the value of, right? Is play with an idea and be okay with change and have some humility.
00:37:49
Speaker
There's a little bit of that. There's a lot more of this idea of when do we change and how do we think about change and how do we introduce change and how do we get everybody aligned on change or thinking?
00:38:04
Speaker
And what I mean by that is, you know just quoted Blaise Pascal, one line. And if I said, keep going, what did they say before that? And what did they say after that? what what how did how did Where is that sentence?
00:38:18
Speaker
Can you do the full paragraph for me if I asked you for that, Eric? Like quote it to me? Not even close. So we take all these courses. We spend hours and hours with people. We have lived experiences that are, for some people, very, very fortunate.
00:38:31
Speaker
And all we remember is three words somebody said to us. So what is that? So is that value per dollar? Right. I mean, it's like the Rory Sutherland joke of, you know, I get paid by the hours as ah as an advertising person.
00:38:45
Speaker
Then they run that campaign for six years and generate $30 billion dollars and we got paid by the hour for it. So it's like the value versus time argument. I'm making the argument that if you are thinking about moving a group or team in a direction, it's probably going to be a handful of words that are going to shift them or spark them or ignite them or get them excited or get them to understand it, even if they don't like it.
00:39:16
Speaker
We've learned that we can do that in a TED Talk. We've learned by our own admission and how we see things that it can happen in one sentence. I will constantly talk about my grade 10 or 11 art teacher, Alana Kuska, who one day walked over to me and, listen to me, in my school, art was ah the BOGO stuff. You took art to, like, not have what was going on in school.
00:39:41
Speaker
And she looked at whatever I was messing around with. I don't remember. And she said to me, you know, you're very creative. Have you ever considered pursuing ah job in creativity? And I looked at her like she was an alien in my world. It was doctors, lawyers, engineers, captains of industry, business, ah you all that stuff.
00:40:05
Speaker
And You know, when I reflect on how that line sent me spiraling, not in the moment, years later, upon real reflection, I didn't even know that was possible.
00:40:18
Speaker
I met up with her many years ago. I've still connected with her. And I told her and, you know, tears in her eyes, tears in my eyes. But do you think she, that was a toss away line. She didn't, know, she probably did only 50 other things that day.
00:40:29
Speaker
So what lands with us? And I think that that is at at the core, a very powerful part of thinkers want. And while it's the core of it, I think it's one of the greatest challenges because people's initial instinct is, i don't know, can my team learn anything really in 15 minutes?
00:40:47
Speaker
As if they can only learn something in 30, right? right Or an hour or a six hour course, whatever it might be. So You know, there's there's something in there, I think, that where we diminish time against value.
00:40:59
Speaker
And I've always been someone to push excessively hard against that. Similarly, i tend to write a bit long, whether it's my posts on LinkedIn or my articles.
00:41:10
Speaker
And I think part of that is attached to exactly what you were saying earlier, Eric, about reading books and why you do it. Like if we push down that road, There's something in you, I think, and maybe i'm just playing armchair psychologist, you can tell me if I'm wrong, where you're recognizing that the more time you spend on a topic with someone who's thought deeply about it, the better off you will be in the end.
00:41:30
Speaker
So even it's not a topic related to what you like, thoughll there'll be something you'll youll ah accumulate out of that. And I think that that's true. So in my writing, I tend to not just give you the, hey, what did you check this out? What did you think of that? Can you believe that? Or wow here's five reasons why this is that. It's like a summary thing.
00:41:47
Speaker
Versus if you spend a bit of time with me in a world where that's all you're getting everywhere else. Maybe you'll be better for it at the end of it. And when I'm writing it, I can tell you that my heart is there. My heart is saying, is this about you or is this about them?
00:42:03
Speaker
And I would say that 100% of the time when I'm usually publishing it, it's about them. And if it's not, I'm very overt that this is about me or me saying what's happening here so you understand where it's going next.
00:42:14
Speaker
I think there's a lot of connective tissue between that and what's happening at Thinkers Want. Like this idea that you could book you know myself or Dory Clark or Michael Bungay-Stanier to do a session, and they can keep adding different topics. So it's not really just 15 minutes. If that was good, you can do another topic that they have, and they can keep adding topics. And more importantly, you could then call them in and do like a live AMA with them.
00:42:36
Speaker
And that's a different experience. That... This isn't cameo where it's like, happy birthday, Eric, and then you'll I'll do Merry Christmas, and by Thanksgiving, you're you're good. You don't need the same person saying it.
00:42:48
Speaker
This is really experts who I hope are really giving you this stuff as it's happening. And that fast feedback loop is also really powerful in this world. Tell me what you think about this.
00:42:59
Speaker
We spend more time, we, as as ah as a people, you know, society, whatever whatever large group we want to pick, we spend more time watching videos about cooking or people cooking than we spend cooking.
00:43:15
Speaker
And we spend more time in let me characterize this appropriately, we spend more time cooking pretending to be social? Gosh, that's not even the right way to put it. But, you know, we spend more time in social media than we spend being social.
00:43:34
Speaker
You've heard critiques of this nature before. And one, I suppose, what do you think about that? And two, ah more of a statement, I suppose.
00:43:44
Speaker
I feel like what some of what you're talking about is It's suggestive of if you have a piece, you're thinking in an article, you're thinking in a 15 minute segment that,
00:44:02
Speaker
Maybe somebody doesn't need the hour. you know Maybe they don't need the entire book to just... What they might get more benefit out of is read the 15-minute article and then spend the hour actually doing something with the information because you're going to learn a heck of a lot more than if you spend an hour watching a keynote.
00:44:26
Speaker
I literally just posted about this idea because it came through... Loud and clear in my thinking on my 1,000th episode where the guest was Patrick Tongue, who has an excellent newsletter about the futures called Centiers.
00:44:40
Speaker
And my my my awakening and the conversation with him was, oh, right, like, I don't read anything. Reading is one third or one quarter of what I do.
00:44:55
Speaker
I read or watch a video. I take notes, as I'm doing here. i spend time synthesizing and thinking about what that means. And then I output it in some way. It's a slide.
00:45:08
Speaker
It's this conversation. It's my own podcast. It's a radio segment. It's a blog post. It's a link. I don't know. It's one of those things. That my actual time spent with with content is very different just in that way of thinking about it.
00:45:26
Speaker
But that's one angle because there is also just like an entertainment angle that i'm I'm being dismissive of. But I can just as easily sit on a plane and just rock through my FYP page on TikTok and be very happy that the time of which I sat my butt in the seat to wheels up, I'm by like that because I was lost in the rabbit hole. I'm really good with that. Like, I'm not going to deny that.
00:45:47
Speaker
So that's one aspect of it. it's It's like understanding what is this consumption for, like being, a it's almost like intentional eating, right? Or or like intermittent fasting, which I'm trying to do now. This idea of, yeah, I don't find it that hard, but but wow, it's a psychological hurdle to not have breakfast.
00:46:05
Speaker
It's like a weird thing, like you're removing this thing. um And so that's like one exploration of what you were saying. The second part about, are we social?
00:46:17
Speaker
think the better question is what is social? So if, if social is, i had a weird interview just the other day for my bass podcast where I interviewed Gary, Gary beers, who is the bass player for in excess very famous eighties and nineties band, tremendous success.
00:46:34
Speaker
And we were talking about what was a culmination moment of the band, which was Live Baby Live at Wembley Stadium. Sold out one band. And if you watch it, which you can, you just hop onto YouTube and see it. It's incredible to see a band that has, I wouldn't say they're forgotten at all, but, you know, we don't talk about them the way we used to.
00:46:53
Speaker
But the tremendous cultural impact they have, people singing every word and going crazy and the whole floor of a stadium. And there's no phones. there's no phones. There's no wristbands with lights.
00:47:07
Speaker
There's a band on stage using so some technology too, by the way. But everybody is there. Live in that moment. And I'm watching it on YouTube.
00:47:20
Speaker
It's like a lot going on in my brain. And I'm thinking about how there's no phones there. And then you go, well, it see that. And that's the old. Well, so it was so much better. We were all there and in the moment. And then I take one of my kids the other night to go see the Deftones.
00:47:35
Speaker
And all you see are phones and recording, or recording themselves, or recording the band. And is that unsocial? It's a different culture. It's a different intent.
00:47:46
Speaker
It's a different push. I think we have been too cheap to say things like, oh, kids today aren't living in the moment. They're producing, directing, and broadcasting to create an impression of themselves, to pursue likes, which is not good for their mental health.
00:48:04
Speaker
And it makes them constantly feel on and like they're recorded. And I think that all of that is true. And it's also true that this is the new way they are social and that they build community and that they build relationships and that they engage with culture.
00:48:19
Speaker
I can go either way on that. yeah we can We can split that 50-50. I'd be fine with it. But to say it's one or the other is unfair. yeah The other one I hear a lot of is it's these screens.
00:48:32
Speaker
They're always on their screens. And I would say it's weird to see us being so addicted to these square or you know rectangular lighted technologies that are connected. It's weird.
00:48:45
Speaker
It is is very weird. But if I don't read physical books and all I do is read books on my Kindle or use reader to read articles and all I'm reading is quality and having this access and be able to highlight it and share it. And my and i again, even like push this further with generative AI and we're seeing with AI.
00:49:05
Speaker
My argument to most of the people I know is I have never felt smarter and more smarter. more vibrant in how I'm thinking because of what these rectangular squares of light have brought me.
00:49:19
Speaker
I'm not addicted to video games. I'm not addicted to likes or streaks or comments. We as a society have to reconcile our relationship with technology. There's no doubt about that.
00:49:33
Speaker
There's no doubt about it that there are certain parts of our society that require protection from what this is. We're seeing a lot of that roll out in high schools, banning devices and social media and on and on and on.
00:49:44
Speaker
All of this is fair game. But it really makes me reflect on are we social versus what is social? And those are really difficult things to say.
00:49:56
Speaker
Are we social? You can look at, you know, these classic pictures of people on a train where all they're doing is everyone's staring into their newspaper. You know, this idea that, well, before phones, everybody was just having a swingers party on the subway on the way to work, right? Everyone was just talking, hooking up and catching us.
00:50:14
Speaker
Not reality. We've lost a lot. We've gained a lot. We've connected six pixels of separation versus six degrees of separation. It hasn't all been good. There's a lot of bad.
00:50:27
Speaker
And there's still a lot of good. There are a lot of threads that I want to pull on. I'm going to though pull on one that you, sorry, I'm going to follow a path that you opened up with the Deftones.
00:50:40
Speaker
ah So, well, one, I have not seen them in a long time. Chino's back is the good news. He's back. He's looking great. He's looking healthy and he's considering where he's at similar age to me. He's looks awesome and young on stage.
00:50:54
Speaker
They stick out in my mind as one of two bands that were both the loudest in terms of painful loud. And also i forgot hearing protection at the concert. going And I think the other one, not sure if I am remembering this clearly, was it might've been the Pixies.
00:51:17
Speaker
oh okay but i'm not sure it was whoever there was somebody who was playing with rem i remember when they were on tour once so and this person's voice was just so incredibly loud and i think they had mixed it bad mix i i hesitate to say improperly but there were some painful frequencies in there but anyway deftones so I was really glad that you referenced your bass podcast because i listened to that periodically because I, I, I just find the conversations really interesting despite the fact that I'm not quote unquote bass player. Like, you know, I can fiddle around
00:52:00
Speaker
and I saw the name of the podcast a while back and I thought, wait a minute, I thought it was called No Treble, but then Groove Podcast was on things.
00:52:11
Speaker
And then you mentioned the name of the podcast. So we talked about music a little bit earlier. i suppose, you know, where does...
00:52:23
Speaker
that podcast fit into how you think about your work? or do you think about it as being separate from your work?
00:52:34
Speaker
And suppose, what does it do for you? Or what why does it exist? Yeah, it's a long, crazy converse. I've had this insane life where my first job in the late 80s was interviewing Tommy Lee from Motley Crue, right before Dr. Feelgood came out. And I was a big fan of hard rock and heavy metal.
00:52:52
Speaker
And I had this opportunity and it wound up being for a very large, ah fat like, like teen, young adult magazine, full color, glossy English and French. I live in Canada, bilingual country.
00:53:04
Speaker
And I somehow got into this group and was able to write for them. And I was very young. I was 17-ish. And suddenly it's like, i I think the publisher thought it was kind of cute that there was a teenager actually writing for a teen magazine. I loved all kinds of music, but I was big on the hard rock stuff. And so I went from that to actually publishing some music magazines and helping someone else launch their own music magazine. At the same time, really loving the internet seeing all those things early 90s. And as that came to fruition, so I was involved in all of that.
00:53:32
Speaker
And I kept continuing on as a freelance writer, working in particular for the Alternative Weekly here in Montreal, which had a very large readership, and at the same time contributing for a magazine out of New York that was essentially the Billboard magazine, the industry magazine of the I'll call it rock, hard rock, punk world through a bunch of management and big companies.
00:53:54
Speaker
So in those early nineties had some of the first interviews with a lot of the bands that emerged in the nineties from your Pearl Jams and Soundgarden's and Nirvana's to your Deftones and Korns and, and on and on and on.
00:54:05
Speaker
And that gave me a lot of access that are those articles in particular, because it was very early. They're trying to prime them for when albums came out. So I did that and and I kept on kind of keeping my toe in the music business for a while until I didn't.
00:54:20
Speaker
And i even had a record label for a little bit before I started the digital agency in the early 2000s with my business partners. And I always just thought that's something back in the music business. I didn't want to become that old person who could just call and get tickets or meet a band that i liked. I kind of always just liked that.
00:54:37
Speaker
You fast forward many years. and Now it's been like 11 years since I've been doing the podcast. But I was really having, I wouldn't call it an existential crisis. I was just thinking like, what could I do now that I'm out on the road speaking and doing all this stuff to just do something more creative? Because the agency I had sold and was kind of moving away from it at one point.
00:54:54
Speaker
And I was talking to Seth Godin, believe it or not. And we were talking about stuff. And I was on this weird kick of, I know what I'll do. I fly into these cities. I'm sitting mostly in hotels until I get on stage for an hour or 45 minutes.
00:55:06
Speaker
I'll find out who the most amazing bass player is in the city and just buy a private lesson with them. I don't want to travel with my bass, so maybe they'll have an extra one. I'll figure something out like that. And I was talking probably very naively to Seth about this. And he kept mentioning Corey and no treble. And I didn't know what he was talking It was like weird. was like we were both talking over each other in a weird way. And at one point i was like, wait, but what are you talking about? what's He goes, no treble. It's like the biggest site for bass players.
00:55:32
Speaker
I'm like, I've heard of it. like I've seen it. Yeah. He goes, Corey, Corey Brown, who he had done Squidoo with. created notrouble.com and i was like oh like make an introduction maybe you can help me find these lessons or whatever and in talking to cory he was like i like your podcast the time six pixels separation he's like why don't we do something similar with bass players and it really clicked with me i thought that's really interesting because i love all these players i think they're so interesting and you really don't hear their stories and when you do hear their stories it's typically about like the year or
00:56:04
Speaker
The bass that they play, the technique they use, how they play, why they set up the way they do. It's a lot of weird stuff. And I thought, wouldn't it be fun to really take the idea of six pixels of like, how do we explore these creative areas and how someone's really thinking and do with bass players who typically don't tell the story?
00:56:26
Speaker
And that was the idea. And we started off, like I said, 11 years ago, very graciously with Robert Trujillo from Metallica, who I had known in my previous life because he had been in Suicidal Tendencies and played bass with Ozzy.
00:56:36
Speaker
At the time, he was fronting ah the money for a Jaco Pastore's documentary. And so everything came together at the right time. And so now it's been 10 years of this monthly show where I've been doing it. and And I'm so happy to hear you say that, because I keep saying to people, you don't have to like bass to listen to the show. The show is actually just incredible stories that you have never heard about music, about art, about creativity, that to me, some of those episodes are more impactful for my business development than the stuff I'm doing with Thinking with Mitch Jewell.
00:57:10
Speaker
I'll tell you a quick story to sort of illustrate this. Do you know who Graham Mabee is? That name sounds familiar. Right. But it's not like an immediate like, oh. Yeah. Graham Mabee has been playing bass with Joe Jackson since high school.
00:57:27
Speaker
So Joe Jackson comes to town and I think, I want to go to the show. Like, that would be fun. So who's the bass player? Graham. Okay, look let's go and have a conversation with Graham. Well, turns out Graham has been with Joe Jackson from day one to the point where in the early 70s, when they were walking down the streets in London, Joe Jackson had famously signed this deal with A&M Records.
00:57:45
Speaker
And they're walking after they signed the deal. And Joe Jackson turns to Graham maybe and says, just so you know, every song we write now is going to be driven by your bass lines. And now if you think about all of his hits, is she really going out with him stepping out, on and on and on, it's all driven by these baselines that Graham Mabee played, that he came up with.
00:58:08
Speaker
And very few people spend an hour talking to him about those stories. And then you interview bass players where they've just been on like 5,000 albums. And they've been in the studio and on the road and playing with them there.
00:58:18
Speaker
And the stories you get are just astounding because, again, if you think about a bass player, they're standing usually next to the drummer. They're definitely not the guitarist. They're definitely not the lead singer, unless you're Geddy Lee from Rush or some of the other greats who play bass and sing in front of the band.
00:58:34
Speaker
And wow, their perch very unique and different. And the stories they tell are fantastical. And so for me, selfishly, it was a way to keep a pinky toe in the music business so that I can go to concerts, have some street cred with my kids, still feel like I'm young and and valid and able to do stuff, while at the same time recognizing that my taste has really changed a lot. I love jazz. I love classical. I love modern.
00:58:59
Speaker
I love pop. I love rock. I love i love it all. And what a hoot to spend yeah hours with people from all different genres as well. as It's such a, where does it fit? I think if you want to make the connective tissue, you can candidly. It's just the hobby. It's the thing that I do that just keeps me young and fun and interested.
00:59:21
Speaker
I was kind of hoping that you would say that about where it fits in because... i have no monetization plans for it, Eric, if that's what you're asking me. Well, you know, as you were talking, one thing you reminded me of is, let's see, I think you know or know of Tom Webster.
00:59:42
Speaker
And he wrote a book called The Audience is Listening. And I think it's in that book that he says something like, the least interesting pitch for a podcast is two guys you've never heard of having a conversation.
00:59:59
Speaker
and I agree with that in most sort of like, what can we learn circumstances? Because i think that's generally true.
01:00:12
Speaker
Except that one, it's it's too easy to to interpret that cynically, which is, I do not believe that that's what he was communicating. I think he was his book is about how do you build an audience. How do you make a podcast that is worth people listening to?
01:00:31
Speaker
And he makes a very valid point, but if you only take it cynically, like, oh yeah, this is a podcast, two people I've never heard of, that must be like every other podcast. I think you miss the opportunity to hear really great conversation, to hear a really great interviewer or a spectacular story.
01:00:54
Speaker
you know, I'll throw one out just as an example. There's this gentleman that I know who recently founded a consultancy. His name is Coleman Swisher. He went on this fairly small podcast called From There to Here. It's run by a friend, Jason Shupp.
01:01:09
Speaker
I have interviewed Coleman on my podcast. I have yet to publish his episode, but I listened to that episode, which at this point came out just a day or two ago. And I thought, wow, not only is this guy who I already knew fascinating, but also these are two people that no one, quote unquote, you know, air quotes here has ever heard of.
01:01:36
Speaker
And it was a spectacular way to spend an hour. His story was fascinating. They had a really great conversation. And I think with your podcast, even though, you know, again, like, like you said, like I said, I'm not a bassist.
01:01:53
Speaker
And like a lot podcast listeners, I'm in and out that Maybe because of you, maybe because of the people that you choose, how you set it up, something.
01:02:05
Speaker
There are plenty of episodes where the thing that keeps me coming back for the next one is the fact that you opened up a world, a story, a history, just a line of thinking that If I had thought I'm not a bassist, I never would have been exposed to that.
01:02:26
Speaker
And I really value that. I'm going to put an and, not an instead of or a counter to what you're saying. So I think, obviously, ah I believe everything you're saying is to be true. Here's, I don't play bass.
01:02:39
Speaker
I used to play bass and I played a post-secondary music school and I left it and decided wanted to be more on the business side than the music playing side. And how I describe it to people, including my guests who are very accomplished in a whole bunch of different ways, they say to me often, you know, are you bassist? I go, I'm not a bassist.
01:02:59
Speaker
I can play the bass, but I'm not a bassist. Similarly, what I would say to that story, I love Tom Webster. We're very connected. We text often mostly just music-related stuff. I've known him 20-plus years, if if not longer.
01:03:13
Speaker
I'd make the argument that you really got lucky on that show. And I think the intention of that thought is just because you heard somebody have a great conversation doesn't mean...
01:03:30
Speaker
You're great at having a conversation. That's being recorded. It's very similar to what i said about bass players, meaning anybody can go up on stage and give a keynote speech.
01:03:41
Speaker
Anybody can. That's 100%. And by the way, you can train to get better at it. But it is rarefied air when someone can command the stage. And I'll spin this into something that I've been thinking a lot about. For many years, i would get off stage and somebody would come up to me and say something like, that was really great. I should i should go give keynote speeches.
01:04:04
Speaker
And my reaction at the time was, would you say that to a brain surgeon? Hey, I just saw what you did in there. Like, I should go do brain surgery. Would you say that? What? As I got older, and this was only more of a recent revelation for me, and it speaks, I think, to my character, my personality deficits, whatever it might be.
01:04:22
Speaker
My thinking now is when someone says that to me, my reaction, my honest reaction is, I must be really good at what I do to make it look that easy. Recording and thinking and having a great recorded conversation is such a unique and different art form that it's done well by many people. There's no doubt. and There are many great people who can do this.
01:04:45
Speaker
But it's not easy and it's not intuitive and just hitting record and trying to make it happen and swinging it and trying. So I actually don't necessarily even prescribe to this idea. Like, I think it's true that you can hear a lot of two people trying to have a conversation and it is nothing.
01:05:00
Speaker
And part of it is because the people creating it believe that that it's all in what happens, what's coming out of our mouths, but it's not. Like right now, what people don't see with Eric is the fact that we had three or four emails back and forth that he prepared and spent hours thinking about questions, how it's going to flow.
01:05:18
Speaker
He's good on his feet improv because I'm not giving him the answers back he was expected and he's moving out of that. He's also producing this show that's being recorded. He's thinking about how does he look? He's thinking about how do I look?
01:05:30
Speaker
To be able to do that and maintain a conversation, just having the conversation part is hard enough. So I do believe that we are in a world where because anybody can do things, they make the assumption that they are doing things.
01:05:42
Speaker
And there's a big difference between I can do something and I am doing And the difference is in the am, there are people on the other side who feel very connected to it and don't see anything else but something.
01:05:55
Speaker
the merits and value of the conversation. So I think you got really lucky on that show, especially if the two of them had never done it before. Because I can tell you the first rounds I've had of doing this sucked and I wouldn't have continued following with me.
01:06:08
Speaker
And there are times where I still do it now. And i my reaction after i after I finished recording is I didn't think they were that good. They weren't that compelling. They didn't tell the stories. They were holding back. They were trying to push it in a different way. They weren't going along.
01:06:20
Speaker
Sometimes that's on me. Sometimes that's on them, but it's not a good show. So there's a lot of nuance in that thought. I agree with you. I was just on a podcast the other day with my friend, Jess Villegas, who he publishes the Leaders Commute. I told him when I get wrapped up in my head, I'm so excited to talk to you. and there's all these things that I want to say, or there's all, there are all these things that I want to know that I will realize later on.
01:06:48
Speaker
I blew my chance. i had this amazing person who agreed to talk to me and i You know, there could be a number of things that we could judge, but I'm going to put it this way. I didn't get out of my own way and ask the right question or allow the person to open up and be a guest and be a thinker or a feature, something of that nature.
01:07:14
Speaker
And to come back to a bit of what we were saying earlier, I think that, well, gosh, I really hope that I don't blow my opportunity with whoever I'm interviewing, right? Like, hopefully they don't think less of me. But at the same time, I got to move forward.
01:07:30
Speaker
Yeah, self-esteem is a funny thing. Yeah, I mean, I hear you. I... I got over that really quickly, meaning I find that I'll prep for the conversation. I spend probably too much time doing that.
01:07:43
Speaker
And I don't beat myself up over we didn't do this, we didn't do that. I just look at it and think, did we have a level of familiarity that exposed that? Some new thinking.
01:07:55
Speaker
And my benchmark for it is usually when we stop recording and the person will say things. Say things like, i didn't I don't know what happened there. You didn't ask me anything about it.
01:08:06
Speaker
And we have this conversation where my my win, my win at the end of the show is if I become... I don't want to say friends with the guest, but better acquaintances.
01:08:17
Speaker
That we can text each other, we can hang out, that we can ask each other questions, we can send each other memes and jokes. That, to me, is a successful show because i made a connection, and I think that that connection will be felt by the audience.
01:08:28
Speaker
But I got out of my way really early. I mean, look, I was in the music business where for every, mill you know, the the running line was Metallica sold out on the Black album. I mean, I lived through this with the band and through their albums.
01:08:42
Speaker
And, you know, the band would jokingly respond back that we did. We sell out every single night anywhere that has electricity in the world. And again, you can feel that way, but ultimately they brought in millions more of people who love them and care about them and went with them on journeys that were very, very different and divisive, even along their success and their road.
01:09:04
Speaker
And we can have arguments back and forth about the merits of that. It's all fine. But at the end of the day, I think that that's what you're looking for is a world where you were pure in the sense of what you know is the direction of it and and the overall outcome. We we can't control it. How many times have you thought about something, written it out, edited it, posted it, digital tumbleweeds, virtual crickets, and then you off the cuff, shoot something out and it gets 80,000 times, right? it's That's what it is. It's the nature of the world.
01:09:33
Speaker
The market is brutal. Right. I just think that if you're going to start creating and doing things, understand that it may not be your thing, actually. Like, just because short videos is the way, short vertical videos is the way, I know, like, I don't think I'm that great on video.
01:09:49
Speaker
So I have to focus on where I think my energy should be best placed. And I'm okay with that. Sadly, I have agreed with you on everything you have said, Mitch. Forgive me for that.
01:10:00
Speaker
i want to continue asking you about a thousand things, but I would be a poor host if I did. So hopefully we leave any listener that has stuck with us wanting more.
01:10:12
Speaker
And if not, you know, they have well over a thousand episodes on your two podcasts, plus all the appearances that you've done. So going to bring it close to a close and we'll see how quickly we do that.
01:10:26
Speaker
You have a lot of things going on. Is there one, two, three places you would send people? And you have anything you would want to leave people with, whether it's words of wisdom or other things to think about, things to check out?
01:10:42
Speaker
I mean, finding me is easy. Thinkers1.com is the platform. Thinking with MitchJoel.com, MitchJoel.com, Google MitchJoel, you'll find me. I always laugh when people say, like, there's so much more we could cover. I'm like, I think both of us put out a lot of coverage out there. so there's a lot of ways you can engage with either of our content for sure.
01:11:02
Speaker
I'm thinking about so many different things. Primarily, I've been spending the most time really trying to think about where I'm captured.
01:11:14
Speaker
And what I mean by captured is in the idea of ideologies, politically, emotionally, being a citizen of a different country, trying to see that are my ideals...
01:11:27
Speaker
How do they stand up? How do they stand up? Where where do they where are they from? What would happen if I changed them? what So i'm I'm really spending more energy than is probably emotionally healthy just trying to think about values and what they mean and where I sit with them. And and if it's uncomfortable, why?
01:11:53
Speaker
It's made me, you know, maybe not as effective as I'd like to be, but it's definitely giving me new perspectives that have been quite freeing. You know, in moments where I think all of us are dealing with existential crises and multiple ones and and global poly crisis, it really has given me a lot of really interesting food for thought.
01:12:14
Speaker
What does home mean? Why does home mean what it means? What would it mean if I wanted to move? What does it look like if I thought about people who think very differently of of how I'm represented?
01:12:30
Speaker
Why am i perceived that way? All of these things are very interesting spaces that I probably spend too much time thinking about lately. I'm going to ask you one more question, and it can be brief. If somebody, if you were to recommend that people do this similar activity, is there and is there a ah system?
01:12:52
Speaker
Is there a question they can ask themselves to facilitate that process? Why do believe this? Why do I agree with that?
01:13:05
Speaker
Why do I disagree with this? What if I was someone who fundamentally didn't believe what I believe? Why would I think like that?
01:13:17
Speaker
What kind of person would that make me? How do I sit with that? And while you're doing that, don't make any rash decisions. because they're not going to be good.
01:13:28
Speaker
It's kind of like, you know, don't make a decision if you're having a panic attack. It's very similar. Wait till it goes away. You've had some clarity. The clouds are clear. Then start, you know, then start maybe talking about decisions. That would be my advice on that.
01:13:41
Speaker
I love it. It's great advice. Well, Mitch, I'll say it again. I appreciate you agreeing to speak with me. And I thank you for dedicating so much time to this. So thank you for being here.
01:13:52
Speaker
That was fun. Great, great reconnecting with you, Eric. Thank you. You as well. Thank you.