 Hello, good evening, good afternoon, good morning, wherever you are joining us from. My name is Abhijit Baduri and I'm the author of the book Career 3.0 and a lot of people collect stories. I collect stories about careers because if you ask people, how did you land up being where you are, you inevitably hear their entire life story. And today we have Mr. Jeff Parrot with us. Hey Jeff, welcome, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for joining me. And you talked about one of your passions being shadow careers. What is that about? It's based on shadow work. So full disclosure, my wife is a clinical psychologist. So there's an interesting juxtaposition where, you know, we chat a lot about things and sometimes, you know, you pull from things, but there's a term in psychology called shadow work. There was a author kind of had this contemplation about shadow careers, meaning that we seek out the careers that might not exactly be for us, might be the safe choices, right? Might be a metaphor for what we actually want. So many people, right, exist in something that's not completely divergent from what they actually want to be doing. But this, this idea of a shadow career is that it's something that isn't white where you want to be. And it's a metaphor for, can figure out what that metaphor is, then you figure out where you actually would want to be. And I think so many of us have had different paths in which we have gone from one thing to another. There are obvious inflection points. I can point to a few in my career, but I think it's really interesting to think about the decisions we make, whether we fear failure, whether we fear the unknown. What I've encountered the most is the difference between the 5% of people who succeed massively versus the other 95% are the people who have a little more confidence, have a little bit more certainty in what they actually want to be doing. Or in my case, just dumb luck. Oh, you're just being extremely modest. But I'm just really curious that in your own case, this whole concept of a shadow career play out or, you know, just tell me more about that. No, that was felt, right? I think the first thing I wanted to do was I wanted to have a contemplation am I in one right now? And we can get into that in a second. But the quick answer is no, I'm actually right where I should be. But what I think I recognized early on is I went to school for advertising. I have an accolade, the business in Cyrus, and I was the number one addict executive at one point. But it was not for me. I'm a creative person, but I am a person who wants to give and build relationships and not exist in a vacuum. And also I'm a giant extrovert. And what I very much realized quickly in the pivot I made is that I moved from advertising to PR and I moved into a field that aligned with who I am, how I interact in the world, how I want to interact with people. And it made me interesting in the field because I wasn't classically trained in PR, so I didn't come in with the same preconceived notions or the understanding that you should do it this way. Or this is the way it's done. And so I looked at it through a lens of what is wholly inefficient about this? How can it align with myself and how I want to interact with people and how could I make things better? When you think about this whole inefficiency that you are talking about, you know, I'm also intrigued by the fact that you decided to, from one particular ecosystem, which was the advertising ecosystem, and then it's like a little shift, it's an adjacency, and you kind of really have to shift some of your skills. How did you think or discover that you would be more successful in PR, which you obviously are hugely successful? And where do you see the difference? Where do you see the similarities playing out between advertising PR and the choices you made? Yeah, that's such a blurred line, right? I think if you ask some people who are not that, you know, proficient or don't play around in this space that much, they might say they're one in the same. I think the interesting cross-section that you'll ask people on is social media. Does that exist in an advertising space? Does that exist in a PR space? Where does it exist? PR, comps. This is in, I want to get back to your original question, but now we're in a subset of a question that I really am passionate about. I think 90% of influencer-based work or work with social media is done mostly programmatically, meaning that we're constantly doing it ad hoc, we're doing it as an ad spend, we're being targeted, and by the way, digital and targeting, the idea that you can, you can market to someone and know that I do scroll Zillow at 1145, and though I'm very happy with our house or that I am on this site at this time, the ability to target and all of these things are wonderful, right? I do not downplay that idea at all, but my assertion with social is that the energy and time spent and the opportunity cost lost when you do a quick ad spend with social and then you disengage with people and then you have to re-engage them. And then you do this again and you do this again and it becomes transactional versus if you can build a network of tens or hundreds of people who are consistently tied to the brand, there's an exponential build of brand equity that happens. And also you are well positioned if in the odd chance there is a crisis or if there's a good thing that needs to be touted or anything, you are better equipped and you're better suited to mobilize if you would have a constantly engaged group. Therefore, social should exist in comms more so than it should exist as a programmatic ad spend. I'm not saying it shouldn't have its place, but it's mostly to me, social as relationships, PR as relationships. Therefore, that's my biased answer. No, it just makes complete sense. As I was saying that one of the skills that we talk about in this particular book is how do you sort of leverage being in one ecosystem and you step out of that ecosystem and build your relationships over that. The difference between being part of an ecosystem versus networking is networking is fairly transactional. You are networking with someone because you have to gain or give something. But when it is really about building an entire ecosystem, that's what you talked about, that there are a whole lot of relationships that you play with and that is the exciting thing that you have that I think makes it possible for everyone to leverage the kind of skills that they have and make the most of it. I want to take you back to the beginning of your career. Did you, at any point of time when you were growing up, really have a clear view of what PR is and is this something you discovered? You stumbled along the way because you find both kinds of examples. Which one is yours? That was 25. Up until I was 25, I did not have a contemplation at all about wanting to be in PR. I also want to make sure I didn't completely skip past your last question because we talked about influencers, but you were talking about the shift from marketing to PR. These two things kind of merge into this question because for me, it was a recognition of... I kind of knew what it was. I knew it existed, but I didn't really play around with it. I think I had this fascination as a child about wanting to create Super Bowl commercials and then realized the world moved away from that and into very targeted, analytical, David-driven advertising that is really awesome and really interesting and really talented but doesn't suit my skill set. What I realized pretty quickly with the PR side of things and why I made that shift is that I had some leverage. I had done a few things that had gained some traction in experiential advertising. And when you're doing experiential advertising or you're doing stunts, you do have to have PR to kind of drive organic traffic to those. So really, I was kind of already dabbling in part of that, which allowed me to shift to that. That was probably the key part for me. I know that you almost had your own reality show when you were about 25 on stage. What is that true? Yeah, so I joke on my own podcast that when I'm interviewing influencers that I'm a retired YouTuber and I retired very early and went mostly behind the scenes. I've never been able to fully shake the idea that I have some kind of social influence. Like I have a decent following and I've won a short award, been nominated for a webby. I have done content creator adjacent things. And I think it's served me in PR because it's allowed me to one, understand who I'm working with better to have the leverage to be able to provide value and create opportunities for the people I'm working with and three, be able to have a very loud speaker whenever I need to get things out. With a couple partners, we had some early YouTube success around the same time as Dude Perfect. I do not regret any of my life choice, honestly, because I don't think I would have wanted to be near 40 and trying to shoot a football into a basketball hoop. I recognize talent. I think all of that is very interesting. But yes, we had some meetings early on because we had had some YouTube success and we walked into the network. We were very close. It was an interesting concept too. I won't get into too many details because it's most of the people but essentially it was going to cities almost like extreme home makeover for cities. And we'll get to this later because I wound up actually doing this on my own, not as a TV show. But I did like the idea of immersing yourself in a community and seeing what you could do with it. It was a really good lesson in humility and not knowing what you don't know and understanding that it was gonna take a lot more than just a little early success to really build something strong and rooted and incredible. And I think it was probably the function point in which I really realized I wanted to take all the pieces I had built but I wanted to apply them more behind the scenes with brands and entities rather than be the person who was always out to their front and center. When you think about career success, how would you define it? And if somebody says, I want to pursue a career in PR, what would you say is the benchmark of success? Then you can now turn back and say, I'm a successful person. I know you are a Fortune 500 PR expert. Is that how you would define it or is there something else that you would use as a parameter? What would that be? Well, that was my best way to put it in four words, I would say. The nature of the job is to be able to clearly and easily define things. That's one of them. The other big thing is being able to have the right relationships. What I think is inherently incorrect about the industry is that we spend, I use the collective we here because it does not include me or what my practice does. But the collective we tends to write a elaborate wonderful press release, spend time crafting this beautiful message, hoping, trusting, even praying that this will work. And at the end part of it, at the end part of that funnel is a journalist, producer, editor, TV host who has to make the decision based on is this the right kind of news? Does this work for me? Or quite frankly and honestly, do I want to do this out of the kindness of my heart because your pitch was so amazing? To me, that is very flawed and inefficient and will probably lead to a 10% success rate, if not worse because I want to answer what I think success means in this industry. But what I think PR misses tends to be, and this is where I've been able to shine as a person, not a giant entity that works directly with my clients is that you pay for relationships in PR. That's the whole point. You pay for the idea and the trust that you can get something from point A to point B. What happens is if you get with a big enough agency, you tend to wind up with someone junior who's cold calling. And I think one of the things I very much realized is I'm a little bit of a person who needs control, but I think more so I need certainty. And so I wanted to make sure that if I came to someone and said, yes, we can do this, I wasn't saying maybe, I was saying we absolutely can because I didn't want to sit up at night going, do I have the journal? Do I have fast company? Do I have CNBC? Are they gonna get this? Because that idea sounds incredibly stressful to me. I do not want to play in the space where so many play. Burnout is incredible in this job. And if you get back to the idea of what is success, success is finding a place in this industry where you have some kind of certainty, where you have the right kind of relationships you've built so that you can almost trust that you can deliver a certain level result. Maybe not the exact result every time, but a certain level result. That to me is success, but really honestly, success is just not burning out in the first five years in PR. Oh, that's so powerful. A lot of times burnout is a byproduct of your skills, skills and relationships. It's a combination of that. If you are low on either one of them, burnout is a byproduct of that. When people say, I'm burning out, it's a question to think about is, do you have the skills? With the kind of proficiency. So, you know, which is why in my book, I talk about the importance of monetization, not necessarily because money is a measure of success, but money is a measure of how good you are at doing what you claim to do. That's one. And the second is how you build your work through relationships, not as an individual provider of that skill. You know, I think these are the two very, very important pieces. And I've often sort of hypothesized that the creative economy actually leverages both these skill and end relationships in a way that traditional business doesn't. When you have looked at the opportunities, how do you decide whether this is a client you want to work with or you don't want to work with and who has shaped your thinking around that when you look at your, you know, the years of experience that you've had? What I think is fascinating, and I think this happens to a lot of us, is that we go in thinking one thing and we wind up executing another. And it doesn't, with hindsight, it looks very obvious, but I'll tell the story in reverse and you'll figure it out very quickly. When I was getting started in PR, and again, I'm 25 years old, I talked to a few people at Edelman and Porter in Boston. A lot of these agencies, to get a gauge of should I be there? Should I do this on my own? What should I be doing? And the basic thing I understood was if I can grab 1.5 clients, I should be on my own. And 1.5 clients across the entire globe is a pretty relaxing thought. 1.5 clients in my own local market at the time, which was Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is a city of 250,000. No, that would have been slightly more stressful, but when you open it up to the entire globe, you go, great. Second thing I looked at, well, all right, I do not want to offer everything because that's exactly what everybody else is offering. So I only want to offer one thing because I knew I was 25 years old going into a room saying, I can do this. And if I went and said, I offer all nine services that the other places offer, one, not true, two, not gonna be able to execute on scale, three, not gonna be able to compete with bigger places. So I wanted to try and find what was the wholesale inefficiency that I could just pinpoint and knock out. But the biggest mistake I made was thinking that I would be most palatable to small businesses looking to level up to mid-size or bigger, meaning that I could go to a small business and say, I can execute the same stuff that a larger place will execute and I can do it with efficiency. That wasn't untrue, I could do that. When I failed to realize small businesses do like this idea and do work with me, the vast majority wound up being the largest businesses in the world because they liked the idea of having certainty. They liked the ability to execute something that they didn't have to pay a retainer for. It was based on performance, which is kind of unheard of in this industry. And it was an offshoot. It was more so not all the general things we're doing here, but it started out as, Jeff, we're in a bind. This isn't pitchable in quotes, right? This isn't something we can pitch. This isn't something that people will pick up. Can you work with it? And of course I could. I knew I could. So I had the comfort of knowing I could say, yes, I can do it. Here's the timeline. Don't pay me until I'm done. I have massive confidence in myself. Which again, when you're starting out allows you to get the business because if you come in and say, there's no risk, people will be more interested, right? So at least I had that. But I did make the mistake of thinking that this was only going to be for small business. And this was for large business that really wanted to control the message and needed to get things out that they couldn't get out. And their expectations are larger. Their expectations at larger 4 to 500 companies or any company over a billion or worth. Especially if you have investors, your expectations are higher to make sure that you meet a quota of media attention and make sure that your release is being covered. Being able to fill that gap was incredibly helpful. So I hear two things from what you described your journey as a solo product. You were this young kid wanting to create your own work and your own company. And you decided that the way to take out stress on that is to say, I just need one and a half clients. And then you expanded the market by saying, it's not just the city where I am in, with the entire world. In this entire world, you cannot find one and a half clients. That was one element of it. The other element it was the differentiating factor that worked in your favor was that the larger companies wanted certainty that if you are saying this, that you are going to do this, this is certainly going to be done. Which to me is the second big factor of success. How do you ensure that you are delivering what you're committing to? So you build trust in that whole process. The other third element that I wanted to deep dive on this was walk me a little more about the way you thought about going from being employed in a place versus being on your own, when you didn't really have a huge track record behind you. You built on this over the years. Yes, of course. Now today you don't need to introduce yourself and say, I do this kind of work. Everyone knows you. But when you started, how did you go about having that confidence that I will be able to do this? And was it just bravado? Was it just believe in yourself? Was it, I think that's where some of us or most of us get stuck because we almost want to know that we can do something at a near 100% level before we're comfortable to execute on it. So I graduated college with a 3.98. I thought, ooh, all right, this will be easy. I've followed the path, I've achieved everything. Kids, I'm gonna look directly at the camera. I'm going to look at you and this is a video podcast. I'm gonna tell you that your GPA is not important unless you want to go to grad school. I did not go to grad school. Therefore, the 3.98 doesn't mean no good. Now, I did learn a lot of things. I'm sure through Osmosis, I picked up on a lot of things going to school that were helpful. But the idea of staying up late on a Friday night to try to achieve that number was probably one of the most inefficient exercises in my life. So when I went on my own in an industry in which the good news is that, yes, you can get PRSA certified, but you don't need to. This isn't a business where you have to have certification. This is a business where you have to have certainty. And so if you can make relationships, so one of the first things I realized is I had a few relationships from being covered on the news myself as an influencer. I had a few relationships that I knew I could create because I had a decent enough following, I think somewhere in the 50 to 100,000 follower range at that time, which was good enough to seem viable. But the third piece I've stacked on top of that is I made sure I started ready for the Washington Times Mashable and then ink. And doing all these writing gigs, even though they weren't paid or slightly paid, was an exercise in making sure that I could create value and I could create conversation because I didn't want to reach out to someone and build a relationship by not offering something. I didn't want to say, I'm young and I don't know what I'm doing. Would you like to have a conversation? I wanted to say, I would like to learn more about you. And I would like to do that in a public forum. Therefore it is helpful to you. That has always been a networking tool I've used. I have a podcast now. This is again, you know, to get very meta and get behind the scenes. Obviously with that podcast, I want to make sure I highlight really interesting topics. I don't want to just stick to advertising and marketing and PR and influencers and the things that, you know, both myself and the Shorty Awards are known for. I want to expand that. You make sure that it's sticking to the core but you obviously expand the conversation. We weren't afraid to go into very hard topics. But what I was really interested in is I was interested in meeting new people. And I think the through line to this entire conversation of why I felt comfortable is I felt comfortable in my process of how I was able to listen first, ask questions, build relationships and build relationships without the intention of immediate gratification. Because I did not need the people I was meeting to help me at that exact moment. But I knew probably six months, 12 months, 18 months, three years down the road. Everything helps. And so I've always been constantly like a doomsday prepper who has a bunker. I am constantly collecting and maintaining and building relationships for, you know, the inevitable time when, oh, I need that. Or I need to call upon the idea that I could connect this person to this person, which that might be beneficial. And again, understanding that building relationships is never a one to one exact trade. It's just putting good things out into the world, hoping they come back and hoping that you can kind of connect the dots. And one of the biggest things I realized of why I felt comfortable in this job too is that with a lot of ADHD and a decently idetic memory, I knew that I could kind of have all those pieces circulating in my head and call upon them at any time. And that that was going to be essentially my advantage. And so that made me feel comfortable. But I love getting that question because I don't get that question very often because I'm lying to you if I didn't say I was horrified. The other big thing is runway. I lived at my friend Adam's house and stayed in his nursery for the first four years of my career because I wanted to make sure that I built up enough to make sure that I didn't have to take a client I didn't want to take or that I felt comfortable where I was, that I built up enough savings to feel like if I lost a client, I wasn't stressed about it. All of those things made me feel comfortable. So what I heard you say is starting with what you just mentioned that it's important to have financial stability because it allows you to pick and choose clients because if you decide not to work with a client you need to also have to say that despite this I can still pay the bills. So that's a great sort of pointer that I took away from this. The other piece that I saw that as a similarity between your working hard to get to that 3.98. One A minus to the computer class at Baker College and I'm still mad about to this day. You know this whole business of working hard. I want to link it to what you just said that you work hard anyway. So you're working hard and you're saving it up and you're building your relationships and you're working hard. And it is this cycle that actually prepares you for the launch of something much bigger when you hit the big stage and you start winning your awards. Which was the first award that you won? There was multiple in the beginning. I believe the PR news where Ernie's best use of video social media was a long time ago that is an award that does not exist. The first very large award. Before I even went on my own. We're looking for United Way. We won Innovation Michigan. We won that over Ford and a lot of other places. So again, we were doing great work in digital but the biggest one for me was shorty award for best business blocker. That was a huge catalyst because it was an interesting award for me because as a PR person, I was almost being acknowledged for the other side of the industry because I was also writing to build relationships. And so I was being honored for the opposite side. And I think that obviously created some lovers that created some opportunities. That got me into speaking. That got me into working more on the influencer side. It opened up a lot of doors. It's why interestingly and in a fun way eight years later I am now hosting a podcast with them. I'm on the board of, I judge the shorty award. So I've always stayed involved because I've been very thankful for getting an honor when I'm 30 years old that's probably the biggest one I'm going to get. Why be nominated and a lot of the, there's been other things that have come but that was the thing that kind of solidified and allowed me to walk into any room with a lot more credibility. And it opened up a lot more doors. The other thing I just wanted to answer when you were kind of categorizing, what I said is when I talked about runway I think the other big point to that is obviously that comes from position of privilege because I had college scholarships and I didn't come out with debt. You come out with college debt, you have to make different decisions. You know, so I'm very much acknowledging some scholarships that allow me to take that risk but the runway not only does it allow you to fail, learn, keep yourself afloat because most businesses fail in the first 18 months. It more importantly allows you to not be desperate when you're pitching. And if there isn't a desperation when you're pitching a relationship or you're pitching a business or you're pitching a client. If you can walk into that with the comfort of knowing if I don't get it, that's not a big deal. That will allow you to succeed because if you have the pressure of if I don't get this I don't know how I'm going to pay the bills. You're going to act more erratic. You're going to take things that probably don't fit and you might devalue yourself and charge 50%, 25% of what you're actually worth. And it's so much harder to climb up than it is to price down after you've established the market. How do you decide what your skill is worth? What is the method of doing that? Is it your guesswork? Do you benchmark yourself against others? You kind of say that, well, I think I'm like this person therefore this person charges X, I should charge X. How does it work for you? Well, I think you have to look at how the industry normally does things but I'm a big fan of shamelessly stealing ideas from other industries, other countries, other places that have worked. If you go to Chicago or New York and then you go to your local market you probably see an idea that worked there as a restaurant that is now in your local market and it seems fresh and new but there's nothing wrong with that idea. What I looked at with PR is a lot of PR is functioning much like a law firm. It's billable hours. So you're saying, hey, we're going to work on your account, we're going to pay 50K a month and we're going to make sure that we've worked X amount of hours. And so then your time has to be spent proving that you've done those things if you can get paid for your output rather than your time. And so I looked at how valuable was my service to the entities I was working and they were already used to paying an advertising agency for outcomes. Maybe not a PR agency, but an advertising agency that were used to paying them for outcomes. And so I very much said, here is the a la carte menu. I kept it simple like you would at an in and out where you didn't have many decisions you had to make. It was, you know, three or four things just like any smart food retail person would tell you. And I said, these are things that I will do. This is the price. You will be very happy with this output if I execute at this level. And obviously everybody would be and I priced it according to I didn't have overhead and I priced it according to what would make sense in the market for somebody who was known but not a large entity. So I bring down a little bit my ego and saying, I understand that I'm not a top 10 PR firm in the world but I know I can execute at that level. So what if I do this at this number? And that was the idea. Basically applying an advertising model to PR when it came to pricing. It was interesting. You were talking about working harder. And I was a lesson I learned very young, right? That just because you work harder or you bury yourself in your work does not mean that the end result is going to be any better. Nor are you going to be any better. What I realized is I needed balance. I live in a city of 40,000 on a river with a bike pass in the backyard constantly looking at water, feeling peaceful, working from home and I travel when I need to. But I have all of these things that allow me to have balance and allow me to be able to connect dots and process things and spend time on what I think is important. And that working smarter, not working harder, not waking up at 4 a.m. and getting four hours of sleep and trying to burn yourself out. We've hung out. You've seen me at the end of 25 day trips from six different cities. I'm in a much more relaxed place now because there was a point in my career where you need to be out. You need to be present. You need to make sure everybody knows you but once you get to a point then you need to start to assess is there a diminishing level of return on that once you're known and can you do everything free of that? Can you do everything from anywhere? And if you can, then be more efficient. And so yes, understanding early life lessons that working harder doesn't simply make things better but working smarter and working more efficiently and giving yourself some time to do what you're best at and process things. I think was vital. How do you become better at your craft? I mean, what's your process of improving yourself? A healthy paranoia that you're never worthy and that the industry will pass you by. I read an hour to start most days but it's not, you know, conventional reading, right? Like sometimes I read books but most of the time I am reading articles. I'm trying to, I think the interesting thing about PR is that you never get to specialize in one topic. I'm never gonna go on stage and be able to give you an hour keynote on AI but I know enough to give you a good 20. I know interesting things about IoT because of the clients I've worked with whether it's FinTech or IoT or scientific research or, you know, things in the medical field, things in SAS, working on analytics projects with Adobe where I actually got to work on statistical models. There's interesting things that you can learn and pick up on. And so if you have this broad depth of knowledge combine that with a broad depth of contacts then you can figure out how to be even more beneficial to your network. But if you wanna get into kind of the more specific part of what I do in PR, it's making sure I stay up on publications. It's making sure that I don't stay beholden to one source or one place or one thing. These things ebb and flow, right? When elite daily in HuffPo are popular, one day they're not. Mashable was a big thing. It is not as big of a thing now. I do not want to say bad things about most publications but those are known facts at this point, right? Our tastes change, where companies want to have their messaging placed changes. So I need to stay ahead of that. I need to be thinking much like a futurist would be thinking two steps ahead to know not only what exists right now that I can be executing on but what are my clients gonna ask me for 18 months from now? How do I think the industry is gonna change really good case in point when we have changes or fracturing in social media? How does that change things? If one platform goes away, right? Do we eliminate the idea of the public square? Does discourse become different? Do we have to put disclaimers on content? All of these things I am thinking about I've always been happily surprised and I've had to pivot multiple times and adjust and balance things out but I tend to know if I'm thinking ahead on where things are going that I'll be able to be ready for what's coming next. A good example, my sales is going to be driven solely through AI. Been building it, I've been working on it but I'm going to be very, very, very upfront about it. So when you get an email or a call from my AI it will tell you it is my AI. It will answer questions for you it will take you through the process but it will tell you I'm not here to replace a job. This would have been me anyway but I'm here to make things more efficient so you can have a conversation with me so that I can work with you on a one-on-one level. So if we can personalize things and talk about it in that way then we can have an interesting use of AI. Is that going to be a huge part of my business? No, but I think you dabble in all kinds of things to see if they fit, if they work, if they're interesting to people but yes, I'm always constantly tinkering and testing. It keeps me young, thankfully. I need to know what a Twitch streamer is doing and why they got a contract larger than LeBron James so that allows me to stay current on things. I argue that that's why I play way too much PlayStation because I work in the video game industry too so that allows me to make a justification for why I'm simultaneously riding an exercise bike listening to a podcast and playing a video game. I mentioned I have ADHD. I think you've turned that to your advantage if I can say that. It's absolutely amazing. And neither Jeff nor you and I have spoken about a bunch of different things on various occasions. I'm always constantly impressed with how much you know about so many different things and I'm totally in awe of that. And so I'm fascinated by your process of reading, learning, building that skill and refining it and sort of doing that. And that's very helpful for me to have this conversation with you and to really learn about that. When you think about habits that you have to give up and what do you need to start building in order to stay relevant. You've talked about a bunch of different things. Just now, for example, you said that you need to know what is going to be relevant and what is not. So it's almost like an S curve that some things are going up the S curve because they are gaining momentum. Some things are already at the peak. Some things were at the peak at one point of time and then no longer at the peak. So the ability to actually build your skills almost like the way a VC does. The venture capitalists will invest in 20 different projects knowing that 19 of them will fail but one of them will hit the jackpot. So I think is that a good description of how you view your skill, the review thing about things? Yeah, and I mean, obviously 10 years ago I'm building a lot more on Twitter because that was the most relevant place for both PR people and journalists. I was very, I was mindful that Instagram, now TikTok or other platforms are more beneficial. Not unaware of that. But I was, for my industry, Twitter for a long time was super valuable. It is not as valuable. Now, I'm not going to leave unless there's different factors that change and I'll stay monitoring them. Dabble and Threads with Threads is not a viable business model. That's just to do it and have fun. But my amount of posting on X is significantly less. I'm still using it as a news source. I'm still doing a lot to kind of engage. But I've pivoted more of my attention and time to the podcast and LinkedIn and doing other things. You figure out where your best sources are to create value and build relationships and leverage those. So yes, I'm constantly thinking about that and I'm also trying to not be nostalgic about something that might've been fun at one point or I think was valuable at one point. I think the time that I retire is the time when I'm resistant to change. If I become resistant to change and I am not willing to pivot or go where my clients need to go or where I think the general public wants them to go, then I'm not doing my job. And so that when we specialize in our careers, right? Like if we're working in tech or we're working in science, we're working in data or we're doing something that's very focused that will adapt, it will change. But my industry and what I'm doing specifically in PR changes so much month to month about what you can do and what's relevant that I have to be as open to information and open to new sources and open to all things that that keeps me fresh. Part of it is that is me, it's not incongruent from who I am but also it is part of me recognizing that's what I need to be to be in this industry spending a lot of time perusing the wheel of outrage on X. I realized wasn't going to be my best use of time so I changed course. What is a data point or what is a indication that a particular platform is past its prime and it's going to sort of go into decline? What are some of the indications of doing that? This is the easiest question you've given me. The answer is simple, when your clients stop asking for it. If your clients stop asking for it or they stop using it in their metrics or they stop prioritizing it, then it is no longer a place you should pay too much attention. Once in a while, things can go dormant and they can come back. But most of the time once they go dormant we have already taken our gold frisk brains in nine seconds moved on to something else. When something like that happens and how do you change your content to a strategy around that? Because there are times when you can change your content the way you write on X now is different from the way that you would write on LinkedIn and the way you do stuff on LinkedIn is different from the way you do it on Instagram. How do you decide what works? Is that a tip that you have because you write so extensively for different magazines? So I'm very impressed by the fact that you can flex your muscles to suit the publication, to suit the platform, to suit the kind of content and how do you build that skill? I would love to learn that. This is one of the things I've realized about content creators that they've traversed all the way from MySpace to Snapchat to Instagram to TikTok and have it missed a beat. There are so many people if you start to look back at it and this is the benefit of working with the shorty wars and us working with a lot of different influencers is just chronicling like the journey of so many influencers and content creators who over the course of 15 years have been able to it does not matter the platform they'll find a way a content creator knows what to do. I don't know if I'm that well versed in that. I think I'm much more suited to the written word. I'm very aware of how to gain the algorithm on TikTok and I could clearly do that with clients and we can clearly figure out ways. And I love the idea that it used to be that you kind of had to curate a feed and you had to make sure that everything there kind of made sense and TikTok is just like, I don't know, try seven things, see what works. As we move into more algorithmic social media content there's less of a pronounced value on having to make sure that everything in the feed works. It's more so just take 50 swings and see what you can do with it. So there's some freedom in that. But me myself, I view this as if I've conquered one thing. So when I wrote for Ink and Entrepreneur and I traveled to 60 plus cities and I wrote about all these startup ecosystems why I achieved that? So there wasn't a lot more I could do in that vein. And so then I could start being just quote unquote an expert about content and storytelling. When I looked at that I was pretty impressed with a lot of other people who have pretty good thoughts too. And so as I was contemplating what I wanted to do this year I had a few conversations at the beginning of the year about was I going to have a consistent column was I going to do more speaking? And I settled on the shorty words podcast because I wanted to work with a big entity that understood the kind of people that I want to talk about that thankfully and wonderfully gave me a lot of freedom to have these conversations at a platform to have them. But more importantly I wanted to stop being the person that was telling people what you should do or how you should look at this. And I wanted to learn more. I felt like I was deficient in learning different perspectives. I think I was sitting in my own and kind of well traveled, well-conferenced if that's a word echo chamber of being constantly bombarded with the words like synergy and digital transformation. And I really wanted to understand, learn from and leverage different perspectives. And so the objective with this podcast and it's being achieved is highlight amazing people and also learn from their lived experience. Your podcast, it's no fluke. It's something that I would absolutely recommend to everyone because this is something that I find that the value lies in the absolutely amazing kinds of guests. And not all of them are necessarily people I heard about which is fascinating. There are of course some people who are really super well-known but there are also people who are less well-known. But when you think about the way that they have lived their life it was just incredible amount of insight. So I really found your podcast very, very useful. You've done a bunch of these. What's your tip for somebody like me who's doing the podcast? I don't want to give you tips. Is the actual answer? Let me unpack that for a second because I did think about that and we've had conversations behind the scenes. Okay, I will give you advice because it's solicited and not unsolicited, right? But my feeling is that you really won't find your voice until you're about 10 or 12 into these. So don't be rigid about how you're exactly going to do it. There are some things that I did at the beginning that have stayed through throughout the entire time. With a slight tweak kind of shamelessly took the idea of even though Malcolm Gladwell's revisionist history is a very well-produced, well-researched podcast and mine is an interview-based podcast. I did want to have that 30 or 45 seconds of kind of intentionally telling the story at the beginning and the end. So that you could really understand why you need to listen to this person and then what I thought were the main takeaways at the end. So that part of the structure made the same. But I think my biggest advice on podcasts is that I don't go in with an outline. Part of that is laziness, let's be honest. And then I'm busy. I do not want to be rigid in how I'm going to ask questions. And by the way, this has felt very relaxed because you aren't doing that. We are just having a natural conversation. Because if I go in with an outline, then I'm limiting what I can ask. And so really, I go in with an opening question. And from there, it is essentially 60 minutes of improv. It's 60 minutes of listening and being in tune with the idea of the person, who they are. Obviously I am a PR person, so I'm going to know the beats they want to hit, the things they might want to plug, the things that might be important to them. But when I hear something really interesting, I don't want to be so rigid that I can't spend 12 minutes just fully diving into that. So I have the things I need to make sure that I talk about. And then the rest is open to whatever energy and whatever wonderful things that person is bringing to me that day. And I remember when we were recording the scene podcast, I had an excerpt pop up and say, it's time to do something. And I left it in completely. And I said, oh my God, I hope, you know, Jeff, you're going to edit that out. And I didn't, Jeff's answer was no, I'm not going to edit that out. And by which time, you know, it was already on the air that I said, oh my God, I have to live with this for the rest of my life. But it personalizes, the thing to me, right, is that it personalizes you, right? That's a funny unplanned moment that you handled well in the moment. And so, yes, I've edited things here and there, if needed. Being able to be vulnerable, being able to be approachable is a very important thing. I mean, that's really the exercise of a podcast. It's a spending an hour or however long it may be, getting a deeper insight behind the mind of someone whose lived experience might be completely different than yours. I'm going to guess that the vast majority of people listening to this episode probably don't do what I do or haven't contemplated what I do. Maybe they have and that's great too. But I learned so much from listening to podcasts about deep hack and robotics and psychology and a lot of things that aren't directly applicable to my daily life, but I love to be immersed in that conversation. I also about seven or eight years ago switched from listening to music to listening to podcasts at the gym. And I found that I can do so much more when I'm listening to a podcast because I can just get lost in that, that headspace or that idea or that story or that conversation. Then if I'm just listening to very loud, very accelerated punk rock. And I think podcast is one of the most personalized versions of building an engagement with each individual listener. And thank you very, very much. And it's the arm. Thank you so much for your time. And I so appreciate you're doing this. And of course, we have your Twitter handle out there. If people wanted to get in touch with you, what else could I tell them that I could say that, yes, this is your podcast. Well, yeah, there you are. That's your podcast. And what else can I tell them that Twitter? Yes, thank you for plugging the podcast. Thank you for plugging Twitter. Bear at pr.com. If you want to know more about the work itself, you can find me on LinkedIn. It's bear it all just like the Twitter account. So there's a lot of different ways you can find me. I'm Google-able. So don't think it's too hard, but I always at the end of something like this, it's less about, hey, find out my things. And more so, if you find me, ask me a question, because I'm happy to provide advice, mostly when it's solicited and kind of give back. I'm at an interesting point in my career. I am so thankful and lucky that a lot of big people, and I will not drop names, have been willing to give me a lot of advice in my career at points where I don't think I was even deserving of that. But something about me allowed them to feel comfortable to give me advice, to help me navigate things, to open a door, to give connections. So that's a big part of what I want to be doing in the back half of my career is the same thing. I want to be able to answer a question, connect a dot, be able to be there for people. Again, it's part of what I do, but it's also, I think it's important. It's important, probably karmically and probably just in general as a person and a human on this earth to want to be able to make sure that people learn from my mistakes and my successes and whatever I can do to be helpful. Thank you very much for being here and being in touch. Thank you so much, okay, bye bye. Pleasure's in all mine, thank you. Well, you've heard what it takes to be a PR expert who's counted among the best in the world. And you've heard about that fascinating career journey full of twists and turns because really remember, no resume can ever capture what your career experience is. And I look forward to seeing you once again on this show about career 3.0. If you have a question, do write to me.