 Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming by. Really honored to be here. Johnny, I'm excited because we feel like there's a lot going on in the digital marketing space. There's a lot going on in the political space. And the overlap, I think a lot of our listeners are going to be surprised to see how it plays into personal relationships and how important relationship building is in each of those endeavors. So the first thing is we're seeing more and more outsiders in politics. Candidates who before you never would have imagined would one, run and two, win. And one of the things that really stands out is their ability to grab the voters' attention and start building that relationship with them, start building that trust. And I'd love to hear from your perspective what you advise candidates on to build that relationship, start building the trust with potential voters. So I think it's very clear. If your audience doesn't already know it, if you guys talk about it enough, but we are probably in the most disruptive moment in human history. People don't know. I mean, Peter Diamandis is a friend of mine, has this great PowerPoint slide he puts together. And in the slide, he shows the city street in New York in 1900 and it's all horse and carriage. And then in 1913, same city street, it's all car, right? We are in that moment right now. And so when people talk about whether it's social relationships, business relationships, or even politics, everything's being disrupted. And we saw that with the presidential race in 16. We saw that with this congressional race in New York with Cortez winning, who's a socialist, right? And that's what we're talking about. I actually tweeted to her a few months ago after she won because I read her story. I didn't read her politics. I'm not here to talk about that. I read her story and her story was amazing. She literally went through like four pairs of sneakers. She knocked on every single door in the district and she got to know on a personal level the voters. And if there's anything we're going to take away today, it is that this is the outlier strategy that nobody's talking about anymore, right? Because it's hard work. People can't see me. I'm holding my phone in front of my face. That's what everybody does. So if you can figure out a way to do it the opposite and I'll walk into all those strategies and how it looks, but that is the key to everything this day, whether it's successful relationships or it's being successful in marketing or being successful in business. And it's hard work. And Cortez, this candidate out of New York, she got that. Listen, I always say this. Like, in California right now, you've got a governor's race. You've got a U.S. Senate race right now. And if you're a down ballot candidate, let's say you're running for the state Senate and you want to break through, how do you break through the millions of dollars of ads that are being run right now? It's easy. I'll tell this to every down ballot candidate I've ever worked with. I know how to get you elected. It's not hard. You need to walk every single voter and knock on every door of every voter in your district four times. You need to call them. You need to write them handwritten notes. You need to get to know them, build a personal relationship. And then you use your marketing as a reinforcement of what you've converted. It's convert first, brand second, which a lot of marketers just don't get in this day and age. So that's what she did. And that's what these non-politicians are getting, to communicate in different ways that people aren't going. It's crazy. Listen. God, it's so crazy. This outlier strategy right now is building a personal relationship. That's insane to me. Right. We're talking about handwritten letters. Snail mail. And I'll give you a great example of that. So there's a clothing designer out of New York named Billy Reed. And my wife loves his clothes. And so for Christmas, I got her a big gift certificate, you know, because I'm not buying her clothes. And she orders, you know, like $1,000 worth of clothes, and they ship them to her. And in the box of the clothes that they ship, they have a handwritten note in there that says, we are so grateful for your business. Anything you could, if anything doesn't work, send it back to us. Anything you need. Here's our number. Call us. She went, I'm a customer for life now because they care about me. And then, I mean, and I'm like, yeah. I mean, we inherently get this in politics because the politician has to connect with the voter. And I always say this to any candidate or politician that we worked with. I love you. I'm sure you're great, you know. But I really care about what the voter thinks. Right. And in marketing on business, I care about what the customer thinks or the client thinks. First, that's my number one concern. And then I want to try to find alignment, whether it's with the candidate or the business and that voter or that customer. Now, obviously we know that name recognition and money play a big role in politics. But if you are that upstart and you don't have either of those advantages, what do you really have to work with? And how are you getting voters attention, appreciation, and ultimately their acceptance to actually vote for you? Yeah. I think this is what makes political marketers different than corporate marketers because I think a lot of corporate marketers come out to business and they're like, all right, we got to have a Facebook strategy. What's our SEO? And let's throw money at it and they don't understand the customer first. Like, what did they care about before you go spend all this money? And politics, it's the same way. A candidate starts at zero. It's like the ultimate startup company, right? It starts at zero. It's got to raise money throughout the campaign. By the way, that campaign where we've got to raise millions of dollars typically lasts like nine to 15 months. That's it. And like, so if you really think it's totally fucking insane, it's nine months where you raise, raise, raise, raise, raise, spend, spend, spend, spend. And then you have to finish at zero or you're negligent to your client. But in the first part of a political campaign, we don't spend any money, right? We go out and talk to voters. We test things like if we're, you know, we need to start. We're running social media campaigns. Maybe we have a small budget. But we use that small, very, very microscopic budget to test certain concepts, to test out what they care about, to test what the voters are thinking. Listen, I've never gone to a politician and said, you need to believe, you need to believe what the voter thinks. But a politician and I, you know, you can take a very, an issue that they believe and they want to talk about. It's really important to them, but the voter doesn't give a shit. And so I tell the politician, don't, don't talk about that. Or it's very divisive issue. Don't, don't do that. Find where you have alignment, two or three issues where you have alignment and then go to town on those issues. And that's what I tell the same thing with a, with a business. When we market for businesses, you just can't believe how many times businesses will talk about stuff that no one gives a damn about. Right. And our people that are out socially, they'll talk about themselves the whole time or they'll talk about things that people don't give a shit about that they're talking, you know, to the other person to. And so that's the point is, how do you find alignment? And then how do you drive your strategy to ultimately convert that person? And it feels like in politics, obviously, you have this deadline that's looming, right? The day of the vote, which is in business. A lot of times you don't have those deadlines. Maybe it's a product launching or maybe it's a new brand. But for the most part, from a marketing standpoint, we're just trying to get more eyeballs on a rolling basis, try to get more people through our funnels. Do you notice a difference in the way that politicians utilize that deadline more effectively than businesses? Yeah, we cut the bureaucracy out and we have the ultimate deadline, right, Election Day, and that creates speed. And so when I go work with businesses, they literally like slow, they tell me to slow down and I'm like, what do you mean slow down? Like, this is your business. And we use language like we need to go win. And these businesses are like, well, hold on, we need the brand management and the brand structure. I don't give a shit about that stuff. What I care about is like, let's go win. What is your outcome? What are you trying to achieve? And we understand that in working in politics, because we have this deadline. You know, if we do not like, here's the thing in my business and I would say I call it the three R's and I think it applies to everything in life. Right. It's reputational. It's relational and it's referral. And in the business of political marketing, don't don't take the politics out of it. The business of political marketing. That's the only way I get business, right? I've never run an ad in my life and gotten a client ever. I run it because my reputation is we win. And if we don't win political races, I'm out of business because everybody knows whether I win or lose my all of my competitors know what political campaigns we're working on. And they'll cut my throat if we lose. They'll savage me and pitches in the future because they'll say that guy lost. Right. And everybody loses, but you've got to win more than you lose. And then, you know, your relationships, the relationships you build with other people. And then obviously those two things help with referrals. And so if you're if you run a business, but if you could, if you think about this, if your entire company was based on referrals or optimizing current clients to build your business out, how differently would you look at your company or your business? And so we have to do that in politics. I typically don't make a lot of money on the political campaign I'm working on. It's only after we've had success and we've won for that politician. Do we get paid, whether that's in bonuses, whether that's in, you know, we submit for bigger like awards or creative awards for ads or anything like that. And it's all because we have to put the client first. And once they win, we reap the rewards after that. And that's just the way it should be. And so when I wrote the book, it was kind of like I didn't see that in the marketing place. All these marketers make money before businesses make money. And I just said, well, we don't do that in politics because we're relational, reputational and referral. And so I just sort of decided to like re-engineer that and lay it all out. And so how how business owners could win. And I think for us here, we've been preaching this for 12 years now with the technology advancements, the disruption that we talked about. Our lives are changing. Careers are not the same anymore. You're going to be asked to learn new skills, try new things, challenge yourself. So those three hours are valuable personally. We're talking about building a personal brand on reputation, making sure that you deliver and also, by the way, hey, most jobs are found through your network. So if you're not making relationships, you're not going to get those referrals that actually lead to that next gig. If your company implodes, your startup doesn't go anywhere. So on a personal level, obviously, you're the master of branding. What do you see most of us are doing wrong in our online branding in the way that we approach this Christ? How long do we have? Not enough time, right? The one thing I say I met with a business owner this morning. It's a client and he's like, yeah, I have an SEO guy and I have a Facebook guy. And I'm like, but what's the strategy? And he's like, oh, I didn't think about that. And so what people aren't getting is, again, let me make the parallel with politics. The first thing I do in a political campaign is I say, we got to understand the voter, right? And so we run out and we do research on all the voters in the district or the state or wherever, right? And we find out what are the high issue, high point issues? Where is their congruency with the candidate? We find out everything we need to know about them. That's the whole key to what we're doing. Ninety nine percent of the business owners outside of the Fortune 500, but even like 75 percent of the Fortune 500 don't even do this. They don't start with the research. And so you've got to go out and run and figure out everything you need to know about your clients or your customers. I could figure that out first. What do they care about? How do they see your business? What do they? I'll give you a great example. We have a client that we're working with and they I'm not going to say what industry does, but they have thousands of customers. And they've been running ads for years and they've stalled in their business. They had a real high growth. Also, they stalled for like four years and they were like they came to us and I can't figure this out. And I said, well, what are you what are you doing your marketing? Well, we're offering discounts for everything, right? And, you know, it used to work. It's not working anymore. It kind of goes back to the way the world's changing. And so I said, well, let's go in and figure this thing out. So we ran this whole data audience in site report. It's huge, like a hundred page report. And we found out that the customer cared about quality. They've been running a marketing effort, spending literally 80 grand a month on discounts. That's not what the customer wants. That doesn't mean you can't offer discounts, but you have to offer. They want to they get quality. So we went in there. You know, it doesn't cost the business anything. We went in there, changed all their scripts, changed their uniforms. We changed everything. Everything's about quality. Now, do we also also offer like referral discounts and things like that? Of course you do. Right. But that's just a tactic. The strategy is quality. And then how do you intercede that into everything you're doing? And that's what you've got to do. And so I think businesses miss the point of understanding their customers first. I would be out of business and politics if I said, you go talk about anything you want. Now, there is one politician that's done that successfully, but 99 percent of them have not. Right. And we're also talking about someone who's built such name recognition that could do that, right, that he could cut through that noise. But most of us are not there, whether it's personally, politically or even in a business, we're competing for everyone's attention. That's right. And to use your analogy earlier, you look at that same street corner in New York and now we're bombarded with ads and billboards and flashing lights and oh, we also have this mobile ad machine in our phones that's constantly fighting for our attention. So in all of this noise, how do we stand out as someone that people should pay attention to? Well, again, I go back to this and I'll just just go over your current thing. First of all, it's one of the the lies in the book. You see I think a lot of business owners see these bills like where we are right now. The billboards all over the place right off Sunset Boulevard. Right. And so they see this and they go, oh, I need to brand my business before I convert the customer. And that works for big companies. I don't have a problem with that, but 99 percent of small businesses and I'd say 100 million or less, you know, they have to convert first and brand second in politics. So listen, I think it's infinitely harder to convert someone to vote for an unknown or unsavory candidate than it is to get someone to buy tube of toothpaste, right? So I have to go do everything I can to have the candidate build personal relationships and convert a voter. And once we know that voter is converted, then we reinforce with branding. We reinforce with the digital marketing. We reinforce with whatever traditional marketing we need to do. But it all goes back to the fact that you have to build a personal relationship. If the customer sees you as a commodity, you will be out of business with that customer soon enough. So in great example, Tony Shay Zappos, he built a billion dollar company that sold to Amazon on one premise, build personal relationships with the customers. They're calls, you know about their call centers. Their call center has a 9 percent turnover rate. The average turnover rate for a call center in this country is 150 percent. They they don't use anybody overseas. They don't automate. They don't put rules like you need to be off in two minutes or they don't prioritize who calls because they're a big customer. Everybody is equal in their eyes. And their their their operators have one mission, build a relationship. Yeah, that's it. It doesn't matter. It starts with valuing their attention in the first place. Right. And a lot of business owners, a lot of people don't do that. We talk about this a lot on the show, active listening. Business owners aren't doing it. Politicians have their message that they want to get across. They're not listening as well as they could be. And then you see these upstarts come in who just focus solely on listening and they disrupt the whole thing. That's right. Oh, I could I can tell you that I honestly get upset of having to think about calling any of these companies about a product that I have or any issues I'm having, because I know that I'm going to be putting the phone on speaker. It's going to sit there. And then there's the the the you know, here's all your options and everything's automated. It's like, can I just get a human being? That's I would love to talk to one person really quickly because I have one small question and I've always noticed that every time that I need to call anybody for anything, the question is not going to be answered in the options. Right. I need I need a person. Yeah. It's your point with all these billboards and ads. We're we're paying for people's attention. We're not valuing it when we actually get it. Yeah, I'll give you can I give you two examples? So two airline examples. Am I not supposed to do that? No, we know the examples. No, you don't. Oh, so yesterday I flew American Airlines and they canceled my flight because there weren't enough people on it. So I ended up being delayed by five hours. When I was trying to reboot my flight, I called the number. My, you know, gold, American Airlines gold number. And they said, you know, we'll call you back within 45 minutes to an hour and a half. Now, my flight had been canceled. I never even knew that they did that. Oh, yeah. Now they have an option that you can press a button and then they'll call you back. But my flight is canceled. I haven't worked. I mean, I mean, my god, I'm coming to you guys like I don't put me on. Tell me you'll call me back in 45 minutes to an hour. Have me someone go, this is awful. We're so sorry. I know it's not not your fault operator. Right. Well, let's fix this. Like that's what I want. Right. They're not listening. The other one is Southwest Airlines, which I love Southwest. But you know that there was a person on their plane a few months ago who got almost sucked out of the plane. Yes. Yes. And she passed away. It was traumatizing to see the headline. How do you get sucked out of an airplane? So the next day, the CEO of Southwest goes on Twitter and does like a live update. Did you see this? No, I did not see the update. So he goes and I'm thinking I said, good for him. That was quick. That's a good response. People are concerned about their safety. I was literally flying Southwest the next day. So I was like, Jesus Christ, what's going to happen? So I'm like, good, that's assuring me, right? And he's on a social platform that people consume news. I'm like, great, that was really smart. And then he gets up and literally he's standing like at a podium and he's got a piece of paper. And he goes, today I want to mourn. And he's reading it. Someone died. Honestly, a customer died. And I, this is, I write about this. Why don't people just be humans? Right. Go, you know what? One person dying is too many on my flight. I will do whatever it takes to make sure there is no plane that is unsafe and would ever do this again. Understand this. I will fight until the bitter end to say, to do anything I can for our customers. Boy, if he had said that, that's a- Yeah, no paper necessary. You don't need to legally- Why don't you say that? Because he's like, lawyers are telling me I can't say this and I can't say that. Bullshit. Be human being. And that's what we lack. It's the personal connection. Everybody's on their phone. Everybody's on their tablet. Everybody, Zucks said, you know, we're gonna bring everybody together on Facebook. And that's really not what happened. No. And so you can use that platform as a positive, but it has to be authentic relationships. It has to be presence. People have to feel empathy and vulnerability from you as a business owner or a partner or, you know, whatever it is. Yeah, we're talking about building trust. Totally. And the other thing that people don't understand is, you know, I'm not trying to build trust to be friends with you for five minutes. I'm not trying to build trust with you to get the one purchase. I'm not trying to build trust to get the one vote. I wanna build a lifelong trust that leads to deeper relationships, deep friendship, multiple purchases as a customer, right? Just like your wife getting that handwritten note. Well, that's a customer for life who's going to buy a lot of stuff over the course of her lifetime from that brand. But if we're just getting yelled at and then the second something goes wrong, I gotta wait talking to a robot and then I get corporate speak. I'm completely turned off. I feel disconnected from the brand. That's right. So now we're forced into the airlines, but somebody's gonna disrupt this at some point. Well, it's amazing to me that no one thought that maybe we should not have him go if he's gonna be reading it, but set a representative or somebody who's good. It's speaking, because that's gonna be bad. But they've all been botching it. United, American Southwest, they're interchangeable. It's not like there wasn't a surprise for you to do. ESPN, as a year ago, the Charlottesville race wars happened. And someone passed away. And ESPN, a couple weeks later, do y'all remember this story? ESPN had a college football game in Charlottesville, like a couple weeks after this. So this was a year ago, so it was like a couple weeks later. And one of the announcers was a guy named Robert Lee that was gonna call the game for the University of Virginia's football game. Not the Confederate general Robert Lee, an Asian guy named Robert Lee. They pulled him from the broadcast because they said they didn't want to offend anybody. Now, I don't care if you lean left or right or whatever, everybody, there was outrage on both sides. It's even more offensive. How stupid. And then they sat on their hands for like three days. And then the president of ESPN comes out and says, we're sorry that this even made news anyway. And I'm like, you're the one who made it news. Are you crazy? Like, you're the one who caused this. If he would have come out and said, I'm an idiot. Actually, I made a boneheaded decision. I make boneheaded decisions sometimes. This is one of those. I way over thought this. I really apologize. Let's get back to sports. Everybody would have been like, we're good. They've been like, all right, they would have moved on. But we live in this society where people are so afraid to be authentic. They're so afraid of their shadow. Everybody, every business owner I run into is like, did you see what Roseanne said? I'm like, you're not Roseanne. Be normal. Talk authentically. This is what resonates with customers. And it's the same way with politicians. It happens every time. The reason politicians are so successful is because they meet this voter and they give their full presence to that person. And they have high status, right? And then give that presence. And that voter is like, I'm all in on this person. He cares about me. Oh, wait, hold on. I don't agree with him on anything. That's fine. That's like, you know, if we look at some of these presidential campaigns, that's why those presidential campaigns work. It's the, you know, who do you want to have a beer with? People want to have a beer with Obama. Yeah, they did not want to have a beer with McCain. Like, I get that. I understand that. So what can we do to pump up our likeability if we are John McCain or John Kerry or some of these bumps on a log who maybe don't have the personality? Oh, man. First of all, again, you're asking from a very presidential perspective and let's just say we're going to have a lot of people running in the future. Yeah. And I think the window is open for people that don't come from the system. And that door has been ripped open but someone that's probably more careful or has a little bit more deft can have an opportunity because they're looked at authentically. I think if you come up and you run for mayor and then state house and then Congress and then governor and then you decide you want to run for president, those people are going to have a harder time unless they redefine themselves and stick out by not always following what their party says they have to do. Right. By actually having a backbone and being a human instead. Or saying, this may be somewhat unpopular. I'm going to say it anyway. People respect that, right? When it comes to self-expression, right, then people are able to be attracted to that person. There's something to hold on to. There's something there. With everyone just playing it safe to not offend anyone, we're turning ourselves into cardboard cutouts. Right. It's difficult to have a beer or to feel any movement of an attachment to anyone. So I have a question for y'all. Yeah. So y'all deal with people that want to be coaches, but they have generic crap. Do those guys ever succeed? I mean, from our perspective, the first step of saying I want to be a coach is already saying that you're not ready for that responsibility. So we get those messages of, like, I don't actually need your training. I'm just ready to start teaching your training. And it's going about it the wrong way. We became a coach because people said, wow, the conversations you're having on this podcast are so interesting. I want you to work with me personally. It doesn't happen the other way. If you go in with the goal of being a coach, it's a heck of a lot more difficult than presenting yourself as the expert and then people seek you out for that coaching. And you can see the same thing in politics where people try to check the boxes, but there's really no substance there. So let's take into that a little bit more from an online perspective because obviously imagery is important in a campaign situation where you maybe only have a couple touch points with the candidate unless they've actually knocked on your door. So what are you doing digitally to increase that candidate's likability and are there any emotions that you're really looking to evoke in the potential voters? So we try to create the creative, right? The creative aspect of our ads or what we're trying to do in a way that resonates. That can be done in a positive way. It can be done in a very negative way. The positive way, there's one of our clients is the Lieutenant Governor of Florida, he's Carlos Lopez Quintero. And you can't go build a relationship with 7.9 million voters in Florida and that's what you need to win in the state of Florida. So you try to build that authentic relationship by your creative, like that's what you have to do. If you're a big business, you can't talk to every customer you have to figure out is your creative supplementing that authenticity. And so we did this video with him on, he loves donuts. So he always eats donuts, every time he's on the road, he's eating donuts. So it was national donut days. It's not like this is gonna sound maybe politically incorrect, but like Veterans Day, every politician will put out a generic bland statement, honoring the troops that have passed away and that's great, but that doesn't do anything. It's inauthentic in a way. It's like, you're just checking a box, right? Like you just said, right? And so we were like, how do we take one of these days that people celebrate stupid stuff and then make it authentic? So we did national donut day and we did this video what he talks about. He's one, the most he ever ate was like seven donuts at one time and then he stops. He says, hold on, is my wife gonna see this? And then we got his wife in like a couple of days later and we said, did you know that Carlos on camera? And he said, you know that Carlos ate seven donuts at once in one day and you could just see this huge eye roll on camera. Now I'm married and my wife rolls her eyes at me almost on a daily basis, right? So every woman could relate to that. You know, we did like a donut emoji around his head. I mean, we're just making it fun and authentic and all that stuff. And that thing went crazy. We had so many articles written about that video. Like it went viral because it wasn't we honor the troops on Veterans Day because of all the work. And all that's true, but it doesn't do anything. It doesn't move the needle. It's checking a box. Stop checking boxes. That's what we always say. Even hearing that story put a smile on my face. Oh, this guy's a regular. So let me go to the second one. Negative. Right. All right. So in politics, you've all seen the negative ads, right? A few. Yes. Do you like them? It's so funny you say that. You know, my gut says no, but they also tend to be the ones that I pay more attention to. Sure. But do you like them? Well, no. I don't think anyone likes them. And why do we use? Why do we do it? Well, fear works. Yeah, it works. Right. Totally agree. So, you know, in politics, we will literally take a club and hit somebody over the head with it. I'm not talking about that in the business world, in the personal world, or whatever. But if you can draw a comparison from it, especially if you're an underdog in the marketplace as a business, you can have explosive results through your creative, as you're asking. So I'll give you a couple of examples. And by the way, none of it's offensive. It's offensive. It's offensive. It's offensive. It's offensive. None of it offends anybody. But you are literally taking out your opponent, your competition, whatever. And when we've worked with businesses that have done this, and I'll give you a couple of examples, it's been amazing. So the Apple versus PC ads. Right. Remember those from ten years ago? Yeah. Yes. Nerdy PC guy, cool hip, young Mac guy. The greatest negative advertising campaign ever run was by Steve Jobs, who did something like, he did 360 of these ads. He only ran like 68. Right. It was a strategy. It wasn't a tactic. And, you know, on every ad, the PC guy tripped over himself. His glasses were all square and big and everything. He dug his own grave. Right. And everybody, you're smiling, AJ. This is what I'm talking about. It was hilarious. This is going on in the 80s. It was the Pepsi, it was the Pepsi taste test, Pepsi challenge versus Coke. Right now it's going on with McDonald's and Wendy's. Wendy's is punching up. Wendy's Twitter account went from 750,000 like two years ago to like over three million or two and a half million now. Because they are constantly ripping McDonald's in a funny way. Right. McDonald's put out a tweet recently that put insert copy here. Right. Like their stupid marketer forgot to like, whoops. Yeah. And Wendy's responded, hey McDonald's, your tweets are broken like your ice cream machine. Like you're laughing. Like no one's offended by that. But it makes your brain go to the negative on McDonald's and it makes you think, wow Wendy's is really fun. I like that. Right. T-Mobile, John Leger is doing this with Verizon and AT&T right now. He's crushing them every chance. He gets some customer service on, you know, they got, like AT&T came out with some update the other day and he's like, this is hilarious. Like do you know how backwards you are? You're bragging about updates that we've had for like two years now. Like he's doing this everywhere on them. And it's brilliant. And what happens is in politics, this particular, if I have a candidate, we run a negative ad, you have about an eight to, let me check that back. You have about a five to 14 day window before you get punched in the face. Right. Your competition, they know it's coming because that's all we do. Yeah. So they've either got something holstered that they know it's coming and they can respond immediately or they get called off guard and then they quickly act and they put something up to respond to it. In the business world, it's six to 12 months before a typical business realizes what's going on and they take an action on it. And usually because they don't understand how sort of the comparison advertising world works, they fuck it up. Right. So like Coke in the 80s created new Coke and it almost bankrupted. It almost. It was a huge mistake. That was because Pepsi ran the Pepsi challenge. Right? Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs, I can't think of a say, but Steve Jobs ran the negative ads and Bill Gates came out with some strategy two years ago and tried to defend themselves in an ad. It looked awful. It looked pathetic. Right. And so my thing is, and by the way, Apple had moved on. The combination of the Mac versus PC and the iPhone all came out at the same time and it gave them the most explosive growth to become the biggest company in the world and they also still dominate that one market, which is the younger market, and it all started with those ads. So we have some listener questions here. Let's dig into the first one going back to this idea of how we struggle to communicate over technology. And we feel that certainly here on the show that technology is a tool that we're still mastering, right? As humans, we've only been holding these digital phones for decades now, not centuries. So we're still trying to catch up. We got a question here. We're expected to do so much of our communication via technology these days. I wondered if you guys had any advice on rapport in these situations? How to keep digital communication meaningful? What are your thoughts on building rapport over digital communication? Make it about the other person. Stop making things about yourself. Like for me, building rapport is tell me about, if I'm catching up with a friend on Facebook Messenger or whatever, how's your family? What's going on? And I genuinely care about that. There was a point in my life where I didn't feel anything. I had no vulnerability. I had no empathy. I was a mess. And I married a good woman who kind of kicked me in the ass. And I did a lot of work on myself. And I realized that when I started caring more about others first rather than myself, same thing that I preach, whether it's the politician or the business owner, when I cared about the customers or when I cared about how great my product or service is, then those people had ultimately more success. And when I took a step back and said, I want to give more of myself to help other people or to care about other people or to understand their perspective, where they come from, whether it be on social media, whether it be through text or whether it be over coffee or dinner or whatever, I'm infinitely more happy and I have a lot more substance in my life. That mean right? Don't you feel that way? Absolutely. And I feel like the question number one, we've been huge proponents of fostering rapport in person. Absolutely. That is where we start because there's so much nuance to your nonverbal communication and being fully present to allow that rapport to actually build. That's why he's here in this room right now. Right. We want to do all these interviews live if possible because of that very thing. Hey, I flew from Florida. You did. But it was important. That's your mission. Yeah. I appreciate that. I can't do this visually. If we did a video conference, we'd build even less rapport. If we were strictly doing audio, it'd be even tougher for us to say, oh, I'm really connected to Phil and vice versa. But when you share a room with someone and you show them that you are completely present, right? We're not on our phones. We're not looking out the window. All that stuff is happening digitally. So I think a lot of times we try to fit rapport into this digital box when maybe we should just take a step back and go, you know what digital is good for? The planning, the coordination. Okay, meet me here. We'll grab coffee here. Oh, when's your flight land? Great. And then save the rapport building when you're actually in person and you can be fully present. You know who gets this really wrong? Half the people that try to connect with me on LinkedIn. Oh, yeah. It's only half for you. The worst. I think it's 99% of the people on LinkedIn. They literally take rapport and they throw it up. Like they just go, this is me. Yeah, I don't even know you. Right. Why are you messaging me? No, no, they want. They want to give me $10,000. Perfect. Right. I'll take it. So follow-up question. How do you not get overwhelmed when everyone is trying to contact you and you're trying to maintain five conversations at once? How to deal with people who like to message you constantly? So he's kind of tripping over himself with technology here. I find in general that being sincere and honest of like, honestly, Facebook Messenger, not the best way to communicate with me. If this is important, we need to elevate this to my cell phone. We got to elevate this to let's meet at lunch. In these situations where you're getting overwhelmed by everyone trying to contact you, it's compartmentalizing them a little bit and saying, okay, you know, I need to move this relationship forward. So let's move to being in a room together. Let's move to a phone call and then allowing it to put some of these people on the back burner. I feel like everyone has this need to like, I have to maintain every single connection lead that's coming across my inbox. We don't have that kind of time. It's respect for the other people and yourself. Right. You know, what I tell the guys, we have a lot of clients that we worked with for, we've been doing this for close to 12 years now. See, I'm constantly getting hit about questions or whatnot. And I tell all the guys, even after for these 12 years, it's, you know, if you have a question, you need me up for anything, hit me up. I have time for everybody. It's just, I have to make time to find when that time is. So I will make the room. I will look for time to be able to speak, but I try not to handle everyone digitally or just off kill, just to make sure that it's meaningful and powerful and engaging. Yeah, Johnny, I'm the same way. Like I have to carve it out in my schedule. I think that that's probably the answer for me. Well, other than the fact that I'm completely ADD, so I can handle probably handle 30 things juggling at once. But if I can create a schedule that says, I'll address certain contacts here and just put a box in it and then carve out time to respond and then prioritize the top ones that I need to get to. But I mean, I get that. I have clients that will call me at all, I had a client calling me at 5 a.m. this morning. That is going to be answered at a time where I can get that person my presence and I can be helpful to them, right? Well, if I send out a message to somebody and somebody just wrote me back saying, yeah, shoot, like, well, can we get on the phone? Can we meet? I'm reaching out to you because I want you to be impactful and engaging because if I'm reaching out, that means I'm in trouble. That means I need help. I need a question answered. I'm going to put yourself in a vulnerable situation to get a flip in. Yeah, go ahead and shoot. Well, also, think about it. We're so primed to say yes to everything. We end up letting everyone down and that burns our reputation, as you said. So I would much rather say, no, I can't do this right now. No, I don't have the time for this right now and be open up front because that actually saves my reputation. But if you say, yes, totally, let's do it. Let's jam out three months later. It doesn't happen. Then people don't trust your word anymore. Oh, AJ said he was going to do that, but he didn't follow through. So a lot of times when you're feeling overwhelmed, it's because you're not doing a good job of setting up a boundary of like, I don't have time for this. It's not helping me reach the goals that I've aligned for myself. And I know it's uncomfortable to say no to people, but it's actually very liberating because you just don't have enough time for everyone's wants, needs, desires. We had a question here around vulnerability. I may ask, sometimes after making myself vulnerable, I leave the conversation feeling let down. Reflecting on these conversations, I can usually trace back that feeling to a couple of emotional bids I made that the other person either didn't respond to or responded negatively to. If that person's a friend, do I just keep making myself vulnerable in the hope of better responses in the future, or do I consign them to the acquaintance ring? What are your thoughts here, Johnny? Well, it's something we've mentioned earlier. I think we're all learning how to deal with all this technology. And we were just talking the other day about the turning away from emotional bids and how destructive that could be to the other person because they're putting themselves in that vulnerable situation. But I said it then and I'll say it again. We have to take that in consideration that everyone's attention is being taken away and being forced in certain directions and they're going to miss some of those cues. And if you're somebody who's just learning to make those cues or make those emotional bids, don't get so offended if you're not getting that in return. And think about this, right? Most of us have never even heard of this term, emotional bid. It's just learned about this term recently and he's trying to put himself out there more. And I get it, it's difficult when you're being vulnerable, you're laying yourself out there and you're not getting a positive response. I like to take a step back and go, have I been responding to the other person's emotional bids? So instead of starting from a place of why aren't they responding to my emotional bids, I turn it around to myself and say, can I do a better job of responding to this person's vulnerability? These opportunities that they're presenting to me. And when you put the focus outward on how can I respond to more emotional bids instead of inward, which is what am I doing wrong? Why does this person not like me? You're in a much better place personally, emotionally, and ultimately you're going to reach the connection faster. So I have a deep understanding of this. So again, I talked about this a little while ago, but if I'm to break down, I'm not using this as any excuse, but if I'm to look and study at my background, I probably didn't, I was probably neglected on some parts of love in my life growing up. And what that has led over a long period of time is neediness. And you have to distinguish whether your emotional bid is clear and concise and is genuine or you being needy, because people turn away from the neediness as much as it sucks. And I know that if your spouse turns away from enough emotional bids, at least a divorce, but she turns away from a lot of my emotional bids. And I study in this concept, I said, why is that? Oh, she turns away from the needy emotional bids. She embraces the genuine and authentic emotional bids. That's something I have to work on personally. So it's not just, you know, am I listening, am I, is that person? But I think you have to figure out, are you being needy or are you being authentic? And once again, I mean, a lot of people will ask, well, then what is the tell-tale sign of a needy emotional bid? I think it's always going to be, what is the intent of it? Were you just looking for attention? Or were you actually looking to engage with that person? Yeah. And with this, I like to cut people some slack. And I feel like it's too early to write someone off if they didn't respond to your emotional bid or they responded negatively. I look at the totality of a few interactions before I start saying, okay, I'm going to put this person in the acquaintance box or I'm going to put this person in the friend box. Because we are all in different places at any given time. And there have been conversations where my friends have been trying to be vulnerable and I'm thinking about this impending deadline that I have with the company or I got to get this video shot. I'm not always present. So giving benefit of the doubt to the people that you are engaging with, even if you're putting yourself out there and being vulnerable and you're not seeing the reciprocity yet, is a much better place than being a cynic who just writes everyone off. And that's what we want to stay away from. Now, here's another follow-up on vulnerability. We've got a question on Instagram. Do you need to build some type of prior relation in order to open up to someone? And I think this is a misconception with vulnerability because when people hear vulnerability they think like, oh my God, I have to go into my closet of secrets and I have to talk about being abused at three years old or I have to talk about my alcoholic mom. That's not what we're talking about when we're meeting someone for the first time. So there is a grade to the levels of rapport that we're talking about here. There's light, medium, and heavy rapport. And sometimes when we think about vulnerability we race to the heavy rapport. We're talking about all of the baggage and all of the stuff that are secrets and that's not really the vulnerability that we're talking about here. We're talking about the realism, right, of calling things like you see them, being a little more honest about your opinions instead of the double-speak, the corporate-speak and holding yourself back. Johnny, you're smiling here on the levels of rapport. Well, it's, you know, I tend to be at least bits in my life kind of an extreme person when it comes so if you tell me you have to go left or it's going to go way left, you have to go right it's going to be way right. If you're listening to this music it's going to be way over here. And so I used to get caught up in this all the time. And just like you said when hearing the idea of being vulnerable it's like, well I need to really just open up myself and throw it all there and hope it goes well. No, no, no, because as you said with light, medium, and heavy disclosure there's amounts of risk that will allow you to build up to being extremely vulnerable but also I could share a story about being at lunch shaking my chocolate milk in that moment realizing that I'd already opened it earlier. Now this is a story that happened in fourth grade but the emotional bids are there of surprise, humiliation, embarrassment. We've all experienced them so we can all connect to those but yet I'm not really putting out anything that can be I could be manipulated or used against me. Yeah, isn't it really vulnerability just comes down to presence? Yeah. I mean it doesn't mean like you know you like announce all your failings. Right. It's just being present. And a little more honest. I think if you're willing to listen to other people and just feel that presence of listening to them that's vulnerability man. Yeah, when everyone else is in their head and you're present and giving that person an opportunity to be vulnerable with you too. Sometimes, and I feel like this is where we're getting to if we open the floodgates of vulnerability the other person hearing that is like I'm not ready for this. I don't want to get vulnerable with you it actually works against you. So understanding that vulnerability Johnny's example is something in his distant past no one's going to hold his milkshake against him. It's something that happened in the fourth grade. There are simple things in your life right now that are little mistakes, little foibles that you know frustrated you and just being honest about that frustration is actually that light disclosure that we're talking about. Well, when you're spending so much time on social media checking everything and triple checking that you don't post anything that's going to get backlash that creeps into your normal working life of just being around other people where checking yourself you don't want to say something and everyone's just seeing everyone is just sort of shutting themselves off and then of course we have these issues. Well, I mean in this PC world where everyone is on edge about being called out of what they're going to say a lot of times the most bodacious, braggadocious fiercest, I'm just going to be real to the extreme stands out. So we kind of see these two dichotomies. I put one foot out there and I get completely demolished or I just have to go to the extreme and just be a complete bragger and bully and that's how I stand out. And by the way you impressed 10% of the people and you can make a good living or you can have a lot of 10% of friends but yeah, I mean for me I just may here I am a digital marketer and I just pretty much made the decision a few months ago like I'm minimizing my presence because if I'm on it all day long I'm not giving my full presence to my five-year-old girl. I'm not giving my full presence to my wife and those are the people that I'm trying to obviously have the strongest relationships in my life and so this summer my wife and my little girl and I went to Europe for three weeks. We didn't post a picture because we didn't want people my wife's like I don't want everybody whether it's judging or whatever but there's this whole world of people who are just like what is this? What is that? All that stuff. Now I'm still going to post. I have to like this is what I do but I have to minimize it because I need to be emotionally there for other people and that saps so much of my energy. Well it's funny I think we're seeing some older people who are getting used to posting certain things. They're doing it more than the younger people, right? Well I was having a hard time I'm just getting comfortable with Instagram but then you look at the younger kids who their whole lives are lived online and for I think people see that that's terrifying and then the younger generation going on how do you feel so weird about it? It's what I grew up with. It's very bizarre. Now when it comes to vulnerability in politics it does feel like candidates tend to be more buttoned up and air on the side of caution with vulnerability. Did you have any guidelines when you worked on campaigns about hey this is too much vulnerability you might want to dial this back? Never. No. Because the way that we came up through politics was the way the generation before them came up, right? They're the ones that we modeled and learned from and that was the people that grew up in the 50s and 60s and 70s, right? And as I got into politics in the late 90s that's who taught us and we were like you never give any vulnerability. Now we're starting to see those successful ones do say and do talk and are vulnerable in certain aspects you can't do too much of it because you're right you have a high status person too much vulnerability and they lose their status, right? So you have to be cognizant of that but I'll give you a good example of where this works. There's a U.S. Senator from South Dakota I lived in South Dakota for a year and worked for this guy John Thune. John Thune was a congressman he's been a U.S. Senator he's in leadership in the United States Senate right now and if he goes home everybody calls him John and that's what he wants. You don't call him, there's no title you must call me the Senator. But that's how the other 99 do. Yeah, of course. He does, everybody calls him John and if people come up to him and say hey Senator at home he's like just call me John. Like to me that's a vulnerability it's like you don't have to do that I'm a normal person I have kids of a family and he's like the one guy in politics I've ever worked for that literally is the same person he was when the time I met him which was 16 years ago so that's impressive. Yeah, but I mean that to me is vulnerability right that's why I kind of like him he keeps that humbleness about him and I think that that's what we encourage some of these politicians to do is to show that humbleness and through that you get vulnerability. And people actually resonate with that right the buttoned up candidate, the candidate who doesn't make any mistakes, who always has the sound bite, who sticks to the script everyone is leery of them and it's getting worse for that candidate because people read it from a mile away it's kind of like the ESPN thing we talked about earlier no one's dumb like no one everybody sees that so don't speak to me like an idiot all the gobbledygook of these like very generic statements that companies put out now right like I use this in the book like if you're a company and you get a bad Yelp review pick up the phone and respond and say can I call you and talk to you like don't just put out recently someone gave us a generic we have tried really sincerely hard to run this business no one's paying attention to that and everybody sees this gobbledygook so stop that, stop it that's what I say stop the gobbledygook it just pisses me off this vulnerability and neediness is coming up a couple times here in a question Shane asks, lots of times an uncalibrated biff for vulnerability can come across as needy or approval seeking for some people even use as a mean of gaining control of the conversation what's a good way to frame the vulnerability without seeming needy or approval seeking and what is a good way to spot the needy behaviors in others so that we can just screen them out so let's unpack this the first layer that he's talking about is obviously no one wants to come across as needy or approval seeking we've talked about that right that is a complete turn off but it comes down to intent as Johnny was saying here if your intention is to win their attention, their approval and their acceptance in the words celebrating in the expression of the vulnerability then yes, you're doing just that you're needy and approval seeking but if you're being vulnerable to just share who you are regardless of the consequence regardless of the gaming out and strategizing right we're getting so internal in meta it's just this is how I'm feeling this is what happened, this is the truth this is what everyone saw with their own eyes whether it's corporate speak or whether it's a personal mistake that's the ownership that we're talking about in vulnerability now the over sharing for me is a turn off when it's every single time I talk to that person right again if someone's vulnerable once or twice or they share something I'm like okay well he wanted to get that point across but every single time you interact with them and Johnny's laughing because he knows these victims it's in their social media posts it's in their conversation it's just dripping with this victim mentality of course you're losing the plot you're losing people's interest aren't we a society of victims now it feels like it it feels like everyone has banded together as their own subgroup of victims and it's hard to get out of that mindset if you can't do it noodling around on social media a solidarity to the victimization it's like when you come out and say I'm a victim of this and then five other people say I too then you feel like you've tapped into this community and what the actual has allowed us is to find more of those like-minded victims which are needles and haystacks normally right in LA it advance you forward it keeps you back and that victimhood it doesn't allow you to actually change anything you've ceded all control of the problem and the issue to the universe well yeah because the result would either have to be oh I need to go to the gym today or I could talk to this guy he feels like crap too right so and it's much easier to talk to this guy than it is to go to the gym when we talk about screening people out I like to think about at the end of the interaction at the end of multitudes of interactions how did that person make me feel did that person make me feel like I should be charging them for my time because they just want to sit on the couch and complain and they just need my emotional support every time I talk to them I feel like there's genuine engagement with me and my problems and their support going both ways yeah I'll give a good example so I take a lot of action and if I'm confused or I need help so one of the people that I mentored and I've leached out to is Tucker Max and Tucker's become a friend of mine but you know Tucker will tell you the truth no matter how hard it hurts but when I'm stuck I call him and he just lays it out and then I get to work and I think he is cool with our friendship because I take action I don't mire in it but it's not easy I have to be able to take his raw truth which goes very very strong at me sometimes but let's be honest very few people are willing to give you that so it's important that you actually make space for that in your life and have those people who can share on that level alright well thank you so much for joining us Phillip we had great conversation here about the book check it out fire them now the 7 lies digital marketers sell to business owners, politicians and not only that we learned a lot about your personal life thank you for opening up and sharing some of that vulnerability with our listeners and if any business owner is just totally like wiped out doesn't understand what's going on we created through the book free digital media audit that can go and fill out for 3 minutes they can go fill out all their digital footprint and my team will literally assess everything they do, put together a report and do a free consultation call to kind of get them moving forward and we've typically seen businesses go improve their ROI about 50% just in the 2 or 3 things they can do to improve and where would I find that? philipstutz.com backslash thank you so much