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John Shegerian: Welcome to another edition of the impact podcast. I am John Shegerian. I am so honored and thrilled to have my good friend. Bob Johnson with us today. Bob is the CEO of the International Secure Information Governance and Management Association. Welcome to impact podcast, Bob.

Bob Johnson: Thank you, John. It is great to be here. You know Bob before we get into your history in the information management sector, can you share a little bit of your biography and journey leading up to the founding of NAID and the information business that you are in?

Bob: Well, sure, John. It is like public ghost stories. It is kind of happened by accident or serendipity. My family had been in the recycling business as far back as I can remember and it is a complicated story of how they ended up there and it was for the manufacture of products but leaving that aside for the moment. In high school, I used to work there. So, I worked there and I was exposed to the recycling world there but it was never going to be my career. Along the way, believe it or not, I took a job as a security guard on a break from the University, on that as a security guard working at this, I would not mention the name of the factory. It was a high-security factory my job on a third shift was reading paper. I am a 19-year-old kid and I realized at the time that they were doing it very inefficiently. Of course, we know we are now going back 40 years, right? So that is how old I am. The paper was the media and that is what stuff was recorded on, now, it is electronic and we will talk about that.

John: Right.

Bob: I saw right away how inefficient it was to do with the way they were doing it and I went back to my uncle who was still with the recycling company and said I would like to start a division of the company that is high security and he let me run with it in 1980. I never went back to university and I ran with it for 14 years. In about in those 14 years, we were over five states and it was the most profitable thing we were doing. That is how I got into it. Now, when I was doing and kind of lead to where nade came from. NAID was this trade Association that led to the formation of about i-SIGMA. Where that came from was while those 14 years, while I was grinding out this business and talking to people about information security, when information security really was not what it is today. I mean that we are again talking about the 1980s and early 90s and I got a lot of odd looks from people when I would talk about the need to protect this discarded information. Through those years I wished we had a trade Association that would: 1. Help educate customers that this was an issue they needed to pay attention to. 2. Help customers differentiate between what I was doing and what I consider the course the unscrupulous vendors that were out there that were saying things to the client but were not really walking the walk. That is where the association came in. Back in 1994, I and a handful of other guys in the business got together and formed NAID which was the National Association for Information Destruction. Itself grew to be two thousand member locations around the world all of which were companies that had the same goal as I did. Now, of course at that time and you have seen this, in your career. In that time, Information security went from being this kind of curiosity in the 80s to being like, the thing that all businesses need to and have to be careful with and take care of. That is kind of the whole arc of the story and how I ended up doing what I do now, here what 35 years later.

John: That is wonderful. I did not know that part of your background. I did not know you had run recycling. No wonder we get along so well. You already have done what I have tried to do right now that makes so much sense now. It makes even more sense than ever before. So can you go over a little bit about why need AAA certification has become the Platinum standard in the United States around the world and how and why it became so important to all the customers out there and potential customers when looking at a brand and how they handle the first what was paper destruction information on paper? Can you explain a little bit about that?

Bob: Sure. Well, maybe just the touch on that transition from the paper-based to the
electronic base first,…

John: Sure.

Bob: … because that is significant. All of those same issues and you know these. This is for your audience, you know this very well. Those same issues that we confronted in the world of paper media destruction. This course is this paper that contains very confidential and private information. Those same things with educating customers and getting customers able to differentiate between the reputable operator and the disreputable operator and the operator that was going to put them at risk that was really important. Well, that matched up perfectly with electronics. I mean at the end of the day we are talking about media that has confidential information, and you guys on the electronic side of it had the very same issues that we had on the paper side of it. Now, of course, as everything becomes electronic, it is even more so. That transition, well, it might seem a little awkward between some paper to electronics was very natural. We are really just focusing on the media and the disposal. So in that vein of giving customers a little bit more to go on, we did start now 20-plus years ago a certification program where vendors our members could go through this process to show customers they were doing the right thing in, they were for real and the customer could take reassurance in the fact they were dealing with a reputable service provider. We took a serious look at it. We develop these standards and we have a network of 20 Auditors around the world that look at that. But back then John, it was there was a still went a lot of regulation around it that was not a lot of laws and penalties that went with it. Within its infancy and what at the time we started it, it gave operators a way of differentiating themselves from their competition and it gave the customer a comfortable feeling they were dealing with a reputable vendor. So that was kind of in the beginning and that Arc has changed too because of what happened. Again, I keep saying this but as you well know what happened was the regulations did come along and first, you have the state regulations and you had HIPAA and then GLBA and in fact, they just kept building and I said all along it is kind of like a conveyor belt of these laws. However, one of the interesting things about it is in every one of these regulations.

I mean from the beginning of them as they have escalated over time is baked in that the customer in the regulation that is called the data controller, but it is really for you and me. It is the customer. They are required by law to make sure their service provider is doing certain things within their organization has certain policies or procedures. The reality is, however, customers usually do not know they have that requirement, and even if they knew they had the requirement to do the due diligence. They would not know what due diligence to do. So this role that of made certification has transitioned from being, where it gives the customer maybe a little bit of comfort. Now, it actually fulfills their due diligence because we do know what to look at. We are looking at all of it and we change it right along with the regulations. So when the California consumer Privacy Act comes along and introduces regulations that give the data subject, the right to know more details about the vendor, we have to modify certification because our commitment to the customer is that we are looking at everything they are supposed to be looking at. So they know if you are NAID certified. You guys are the poster child for NAID certification. You have every one of our certifications across all of your operations. When you look at a vendor like that, you know that they are doing everything they need to do under the law so that the customers compliant with their due diligence requirements.

John: So basically mean information security business, it is the Good Housekeeping seal of approval?

Bob: Yeah now see leave it to you to put it in such a succinct way after I give that long explanation. But you know what? I have always admired about your organization, John is that you guys, you saw early on that the only route to sustainability was dealing with the data security problem of it. That is why you guys were so quick to embrace it. Anyway, I am not here to yank your chain or anything, but I really do that. That is very insightful.

John: But I am going to give a personal story. A friend of ours co-friend of ours matched us up and said you guys have to meet, I forgot how many years ago now could have been six maybe seven. We had a lovely lunch in New Orleans.

Bob: [inaudible] remember.

John: I came away from that lunch. I know he told you that we were going to go all-in with you or what you were doing in your certifications. But I told my partner Kevin the same thing and he saw me after lunch that how was it, I said, Bob is amazing. He is so visionary and to all these issues. The sooner we get involved the better we will be as a company. Literally, it is been one of the biggest hour wise we have ever had getting involved with NAID which is now called i-SIGMA. For our listeners out there to find all of the important work that you are doing, it is important that they go to www.isigmaonline.org, i-s-i-g-m-a online. org to find your great organization and to get involved and to get certified. I just want to say, yes we went along with it, but you were the one who laid out the vision as to why it was critical to do so. Literally, one of the best decisions we ever made at this company and why one of the reasons we are one of the leading brands now in the United States in the world. Thanks to you. So that is a true story and I just needed to get that out because I want my listeners to hear that you are not only a creator and a maker but you are a visionary and that is rare. That is rare.

Bob: Well, thank you for your kind words and I appreciate it.

John: Yeah, but as I was sharing with you off here before we started this podcast. I was even in, you have been visionary many times when I have been in the room with you. One of them was when you invited me to your conference in Europe, which I believe is in Luxembourg, and it was a whole GDPR conference. GDPR, I thought I was literally a martian. I did not understand what was going on. In that room, what I came away with this, you said not only is GDPR is going to impact those who work in the EU but soon thereafter. If not immediately, thereafter of May of 2018, GDPR was going to come to America. Boy, I talk about prescient and again, right, you have been so right because not only is GDPR come to America, but there are numerous forms back to your conveyor belt metaphor. Numerous forms of national legislation in for approval in the United States right now have gotten put off because of all the other crises we are going through. But as you said, the California Privacy Act and now states are creating their own versions of privacy backslash, security backslash Destruction Data handling laws themselves, their version of GDPR and twenty-two states have their own form of legislation in, for Verde past it. When you listen to people like you, eventually in the next couple of years, every state will have its own version of this as well. The news is only tightening comparatively speaking on privacy and data protection. So getting involved with your organization and becoming a not only a member but also participating in getting certified is probably more critical than any time in its history. Is that how you see it as well?

Bob: Oh very much so. I mean, I am not going to comment on whether I am a visionary or not. I think that it is so on that part of it. I am not going to necessarily agree but with everything else that you said I will. I think where I get that credit comes from the fact that with the certification program, the Challenge is making sure that we are looking at all the things on regulations tell us we should be looking at. Right? The regulations change we have to change and look at it. That is where I spend a lot of my time is and of course, you spend thirty, forty years doing that. You get used to it. I mean I can see in the GDPR with the general European data protection regulation, I can see that it goes all the way back to its origins in 1995 with the first European data protection directive. I see the Arc of all of these things, but I want to touch on something that you mentioned because the GDPR actually has two interesting things so that the general data protection regulation that is now the law has been in effect in Europe for two years. As you mentioned, you know, we saw it was going to have this Global thing, but it was really for two. One way I predicted, one way I underestimated. So the way I predicted was and this is kind of interesting to on how all the regulations have changed because within the GDPR we could spend, two hours talking about what was new to it? Because they learn all these lessons from the US and around the world. We could spend a lot of time on that but, one of the interesting thing was it was borderless. It applied to the citizens of Europe not to what was going on within the borders of the European Union or within any specific country. If that person came to California and did business with any business in California, that law in California at least hypothetically was bound by the GDPR to do. Well, and of course if you are Hilton or if you are United Airlines, you have got to do that. You got to handle these European citizen’s information this way and what do they do? Well, they are not going to handle their information differently from US citizens. The U.S. Citizen’s information got had to be treated in the same way because big corporations going to have one standard for how they have got to do it and it rises to the highest level. In that regard being borderless, it naturally took it outside of the bounds of Europe and applied everywhere.

Well, so when California models the California consumer privacy act after the GDPR and which it really did it was borderless also. Now if you are in Georgia and you have somebody from California in Georgia, they have to comply with the California consumer protection act. You got both things. You got this span of borderless regulations that apply to everything and you have these corporations that now no longer are looking at what is the regulation in my state but there looking at is what is the toughest regulation in the world? I better meet that standard because that is the common denominator from now on. If New Zealand passes a regulation that is stronger than the GDPR the pretty much globally. They are going to say, all right. Well, we have got a rise to this standard and of course, that is the same standard we put on our certification programs. We have to accommodate that new highest denominator if you will. It is really been interesting how this has all changed from just in the last 10 years to be like one world that is hyper-focused on data security notwithstanding of course, as you say the pandemic we are going through. We all know we are going to come out of this. John, I do not know if you have seen this and I know you watch regulations, maybe not as close as I have. Everything went quiet, for the last two or three months. Now, we are starting to see more laws about facial recognition. More laws about data security. It is coming back like it never left and when we get clear of all of that what we are going through right now. As we all know, we will, whether it is for three months or six months. It is going to be back in spades and probably, with as much momentum as it ever had.

John: For our listeners who just joined us, we have got Bob Johnson, he is a CEO of i- SIGMA and also the co-founder and CEO of NAID National Association of Information Destruction. To find Bob and his great organization you can go to www.isigmaonline.org. I also want to mention, your great book. I have given out about 40 copies over the last years. It is called information disposition a practical guide to the secure and compliant disposal of records, media, and IT assets. It literally becomes the Bible of our industry. I highly recommend all our listeners buying it and reading it or at least using it as a resource tool. You can buy it on Amazon and it can come right to your house or your business. I highly recommend it. Bob, I want to ask you since I have met you and this whole issue of cybersecurity has become part of our lexicon, has become part of our regular vernacular. It concurrent with the rise of a borderless world. Like you said when it comes to information destruction, talk a little bit about your thoughts as I have heard you use these words before on what it means taking information disposal from the basement to the boardroom.

Bob: You have got a great question. It is nice to know you have been listening, John because that started, and for anyone who just joined us might know my history does go back so long. Some listeners may not remember the kind of gnashing that came with the Enron Anderson Scandal of the early 2000s. I remember it was January of 2001 and when it all broke before I should not say that it might be in 2002. When N1 Anderson broke the regulatory outcome of that, it was Sarbanes-Oxley. Sarbanes-Oxley was interesting because it was the first time the board of directors the top CEOs of the C Suite of a corporation was linked to the record-keeping of the organization. We saw right then that corporations were now keying in on how do we as an organization manage the information we have because Sarbanes-Oxley makes us personally liable for our business records keeping, records management practices, the Integrity of the accounting and all of those things are tied in. Now, if you remember John, I think you are probably old enough to remember that, but at the same time, part of that scandal was Arthur Andersen, may they rest in peace because they met their demise, they were accused and found to be insulted and Ron, I am sure, to be improperly destroying information to circumvent investigations, right? Here you have got an example of information destruction being used for the wrong purpose. They were getting in a lot of trouble. At the same time, we saw the board this board start paying attention to what was going on in corporations in their corporation. How are we handling information since now we are personally liable? They saw their corporate brethren getting in trouble for improper information disposal. Inside Council around the world went out to all their board and say, “The only way we have to destroy the stuff. We Can not destroy information legally, were bound to destroy the stuff. We have to destroy it in a uniform way. We have to document it, we have to do what we are going to do.” Suddenly information destruction was in the boardroom. Now, that was just the beginning because what then happened this, as you and I have spoken on the call here, these regulations started to come and play. It is a funny thing when you hire a company, a third party, to manage data that you are responsible for protecting. You as the organization hiring that company are still liable for the protection of that data. Now, unfortunately, maybe boards were slow to learn this but their liability does not go away when they hire this third party company. The only thing that mitigates that liability is if they are putting the due diligence into the selection of that third party vendor. Of course, the worst thing they can do is say that they were not paying, that they farmed it out to the lowest bidder or something like that because they need to be, they were liable for the actions of those third parties they were hiring. As they realize this, of course now, it is even higher up there, then, of course, adding maybe just the third leg of the stool. When it hits the headlines that there has been a cyberattack or someone has hacked into our computers and they have gotten all this personal information, the stock price drops by thirty or forty percent and there is no better way to get the board’s attention too, then the stock price goes down thirty or forty percent. All of those three things kind of happen over about a fifteen-year period and suddenly, information disposition is in the boardroom and I would add rightly so. If it is not in the boardroom, then that board needs to start thinking about it and at least be aware because ultimately they are liable for the protection of that information even when they are discarding it.

John: That is so important. The fiduciary responsibility they information destruction runs right up to the boardroom now and even, as you and I have seen, third-party vendors that are brought in to consult to large corporations who then have a big information breach. I have seen the splashback on even those very, very large, and iconic brands get sued as well. The liability goes far and wide now with regards to information destruction.

Bob: John, you probably know enough to ask this question of the clients you and your company calls on but the question that needs to be asked is to anybody making those decisions is: What is the value of your brand? I think we all know in our business if we could talk to the CEO. They would really get it why it is so important, the
services that our members offer, and why the decision of who is going to do that is so important. I mean it literally is the value of the brand that comes toward you.

John: That is really important. What is the value of your brand? Because to have a data breach and to have a reputational diminishment have litigation costs and maybe even operational disruption can literally be the difference between being in business and going out of business. All three of those things.

Bob: John, think about this one too, when your firm retires its electronic assets, I am not going to put you on the spot, I know that many of those corporations do not know where all those ITS sets are or they maybe do not know the exact vendors that they are using and how those vendors are processing it. Every laptop, every phone, everything that leads that organization, that pass through that organization, that could have collected, is a time but there is no statute of limitations on that. If they do not know where a laptop is and that laptop could have personal information on it and it comes up on CNN or sold on eBay or whatever it might be. There is no statute of limitations on the damage that can do. Those are all-time bombs out there floating around the community that could come back and like to meditate time. They need to take the it. That is why I say I think if we were talking to the CEO or even the vice president of risk management for our organization and you explain that these are all time bombs that are floating around the community, then you have no idea what is happening to in the world are going to them, they would take it much more seriously.

John: Agreed, agreed. Bob, I know you have a webinar series coming up. The world, because of COVID, has gone a little bit frozen when it comes to in-person events, and your in-person events and conferences have been so worthwhile to attend. They have the leaders of all sectors and it is just a great networking tool besides a great tool to learn. But I know you have pivoted this year and created this wonderful webinar series. Can you share with our listeners more about your webinar series and how people can get involved and participate?

Bob: Well, they really are aimed at our members. One of the things we recognize when we had to cancel our conference, and of course, our conference has always been to help our members. Really, if I had to say one reason it is to help our members, better educate their clients on the things that you and I have been talking about so their clients are making good decisions. We had to pivot from that to more of, well, how do we help our members navigate what they are going through now and navigate it in a way that not only addresses their challenges in this environment but their customer’s challenges in this environment? Knowing you and knowing your company as I do, we have not even talked about it but the challenges that come from remote working for corporations are pretty dramatic, right? We consider ourselves and our members to be information protection professionals. I know you embrace that. You are the epitome of it. In that regard, we have a responsibility to be reaching out to our customers and our clients that we are already working for, telling them that we can help you with these work challenges you have. A lot of what we are doing is in that regard. The interim full and complete information on how to register for our webinars online because we are a nonprofit organization and we pretty much do this because we believe in it. The webinar series is free. We are just offering out there because we are in this all together, it is to same as if we all say and we are just trying to get it out there. If anyone goes to the website that you mentioned, which is isigmaonline.com, they can find more information and they can register and we are happy to have you.

John: It is dot-org, right? I just want to say [crosstalk], dot org, right?

Bob: Yeah, thank you, dot org.

John: I just want to make sure.

Bob: Good call.

John: We are starting to get to the other side God willing Bob of this COVID tragic crisis. Tell our listeners, share with our listeners, please, your vision, and I know you always have a great one, on the future of NAID and i-Sigma, and what are some of the major initiatives you have both for the rest of this year and in the years to come?

Bob: Well, I mentioned this idea that we need to be responsive to what will be a growing trend in the remote work and how our members can help their customers deal with those issues that come from that. But of course, I think that while the trend for remote working has been accelerated, I still think we will largely be returning to our offices even if the trend has proceeded. That will kind of be back to normal. A couple of things we are doing on the certification side, I mentioned already that the role of NAID certification has now evolved to be that thing, which for the customer, demonstrates that the vendor is doing the right things under the regulations, something the customer is supposed to be doing. Well, by rights the customers should be able to have an evidence of that due diligence in a file that they are keeping on their vendor. Starting in, I think, probably October of this year, we will be launching the which is it is the service provider compliance report. For any company that is NAID-certified, a client of that company can go online, sign up and reserve an initial and automatic annual report demonstrating the compliant, what that company has met as far as its compliance. It goes in the file and it is the hard copy, they can get an electronic version of it as well. But it is their evidence of due diligence that was provided, that was performed on that service provider because that is their cover. I talked about some of the changes in GDPR. One of the most interesting changes in GDPR that is new, it is now in this whole new generation of regulations for seeing. It is now required in the law that you would be able to demonstrate your compliance. Now, that might seem counterintuitive people, or to people or whatever. But the law says, “If we come just to evaluate your compliance and you cannot demonstrate your compliance to us, you are not compliant.”

That is a pretty radical concept when you throw it into a regulation. Now, there is this burden on you as the data controller, our customers, right? That they have got to be able to demonstrate they are being compliant. It is not just enough to be compliant. You have to be able to demonstrate. That is where this report comes in and that is why we are doing it and go back to what I said about we try to change our program to be responsive. Similarly, though in a kind of a different vein, we are taking our certification into areas like… You and I, I think have talked about this in the past, automobiles are collecting a ton of information about us now. You suddenly have and by the way, these car dealers do not even know it yet, a car dealer that trades in a three-year-old car for another car is now a data controller under the regulations because they have taken in a big computer that has got a lot of personal information about the last guy that drove the car. They are now a data controller under the California consumer privacy act, under the GDPR, under any number of laws that will be coming down the pike on this. You have got a whole generation, a whole new category of data services that need to be done, and data protection. Of course, there are that you have the same issues in the cloud with information uploaded and I do not even know that we figure out a way to address data protection and data disposal in the GDPR in California because of the Privacy Act and the proposed in Jersey Law and all these laws, there is the right to be forgotten. As a data subject, you can demand that anything about you be eliminated. Well, if you are storing that person’s personal information in the cloud, when you erase, when you go to get rid of that information, the information does not necessarily go away. You have simply disconnected yourself from it. I am probably getting a little bit too in the weeds. I do not want to lose your audience on this but there is a whole bevy of kind of insinuations that come from how does this law interface with the fact that so much information is being uploaded to the cloud now and we do not really have direct control of that information. Yet the data subject, the individual has the right to say that it would be completely erased under the regulation.

John: Needless to say, given everything you just said, getting involved with your great organization i-Sigma is more important than ever just to navigate all the subtleties and all the layers of regulation that exist now that never even was existing when I first met you down in New Orleans and we were so compelled to get involved based on your vision with GDPR National Legislation coming to America, the existing legislation that was already there historically HIPAA Saw Box, Gramm Leach, and everything else and now all the states as you well-laid-out starting with California and three other states have already passed it. Other states are already in line to come after that. It is more critical than ever to get involved. I mean, roll up your sleeves and get really involved, get certified to the i-Sigma certifications because we need you, Bob. We need your great organization to help us navigate these very difficult complicated new waters that we are all floating on and if we mess up, the consequences to ourselves as companies and our clients could be disastrous. Could be disastrous. Then you have job security like nothing else. I know how well you keep yourself physically fit so I know that for the next forty or fifty years, you have plenty to do here to keep us all on the right side of these very, very complicated nuances and laws. Thank gosh, I know how healthy you are because there is so much to do. So much to do. I really want to share it with our listeners again. Bob’s great book, Information Disposition: A Practical Guide To The Secure and Compliant Disposal of Records, Media, and ITS, it is on Amazon. I recommend not only getting it as a resource for yourself but also sharing it with leaderships of your company and with some of your key clients, they will be very grateful for that. For our listeners out there also, to find Bob and i-Sigma, please go to www.isimaonline.org. He is Bob Johnson. He is a good friend. He is literally the godfather of the information security industry. Bob, you are making an important impact on the world and making the world a better and safer place. I am very grateful for you coming on the Impact podcast today.

Bob: Well, thank you for having me John, it was an honor.

John Shegerian: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast! I am John Shegerian. I am so honored to have with us today my good friend Jon Carson. Welcome to Impact, Jon!

Jon Carson: Thank you for having me on, John. I am really glad to be here.

John: Hey, listen, we go back a long time and we are not even getting into that part today, but I would love for you to share a little bit before we get talking about your great company Trajectory Energy. I would love you to share a little bit about your biography, your history, your journey coming out of college, what you studied in college, and what led up to the founding of Trajectory Energy.

Jon: Awesome. Absolutely. I grew up on a dairy farm in Western Wisconsin that is still in my family. I was actually the first person in my family to go to college. I went to the University of Wisconsin Platteville. It was about two hours away from me to study Civil and Environmental Engineering. I think I selected that major because I thought they were going to teach me how to save the Amazon River or something like that, but I am mostly actually learned about pouring asphalt, building wastewater treatment plants. I actually ended up when I graduated, I ended up being one of the few people from my school to get into politics. I shifted over at the time to work on a political campaign which was back in the mid-90’s the economy was doing great. A lot of my classmates were getting nice starting bonuses working for engineering firms in Chicago, but I went off to work on a US Senate race back in 1998.

John: I got it and then, how did that go and where did it go from there?

Jon: Yes, that started about 15 years of working on campaigns where I would work on a political campaign, maybe in New Jersey, South Carolina, Iowa, Wisconsin. After every campaign, I would convince myself that it was going to be the time I would finally find a job in the renewable energy world. I tried a couple of times but politics is a little bit like they say “the mafia” is I guess once you are in, you are in for good. So I would find myself in the next campaign. I did [inaudible] out two years to join the Peace Corps worked in Honduras from 2004 to 2006 and ended up on the Obama campaign in 2008, which I thought was maybe going to last six months. We ended up winning that one as it turned out which was an honor of a lifetime to be a part of that campaign and then to get to work for President Obama in the White House in his Environmental Office. And then in his Office of Public Engagement. Finally, I did make it out to the renewable energy side in 2014 when I went to work for what was then called SolarCity. It was just a fascinating two years finally back in the private sector working on solar renewable energy. I was there through when it was acquired by Tesla before I finally took the leap and started my own company Trajectory Energy.

John: So let us talk about lessons learned you have now. You had a lot of years working on campaigns. You got to work for a great president and you helped get him elected president. I knew you are humble about all that and all that experience. But share with our listeners, Jon, some of the great lessons learned from running and being involved with campaigns and then being in the political world after the campaign because as you know campaigning is different than governing. What were some of those lessons learned that you were then able to take and to help lead to your journey in entrepreneurship?

Jon: Absolutely. I think one of the benefits of working on a campaign when you are younger is it is a very intense experience to go to and you learn a lot about management and building a team really early on. You can be 23 years old and be an organizer one year and the next thing you know, you are a regional organizer with a team of six people that you are supervising. If you worked on the 2008 campaign as a field organizer, you probably had a couple of hundred volunteers that you were managing. So I learned so much early on about building a team and empowering a team. That is just an old adage about hiring really good people. Give them the tools they need to succeed. Set the North Star goal for everyone and then get out of the way and let them do their job.

Jon: I think a lesson I then also took from campaigns is just really instilling a culture. You can try to be a micromanager. You can try to and it just does not work, right? You are only able to micromanage so much but when you really said a culture and a value system of not just hard work, but incredibly smart work and empowering people. That is the number one way to be effective, I think. The interesting thing I have learned about how campaigns different from governing or how campaigns different from the business world when you are in it– What is that saying about what is the one thing fish do not know anything about is water because they are just surrounded by it. So they do not think about how it is different.

John: Right.

Jon: On a campaign, everything is governed by a deadline. Election day is actually enshrined in the constitution. So there is just this constant pressure and a timeline and a clock that you are working against that everyone takes for granted. So, you never have to have a meeting about the urgency of getting ready for election day. It is coming. When I made the transition over to the government, I think one thing that I had to learn and especially in business is if you do not focus on a timeline and if you do not create the urgency, you wake up six months have gone by and you have not gotten that initiative done in government. You have not got that program up and running. In business, you wake up six months later, you have not hit that goal if you do not just constantly create the urgency to get these things done. Those are some of the lessons. Just another one I would say I have learned from politics early on is to be nice to all the interns because you never know which one is going to own a company 20 years later that you are trying to do a deal with.

John: Great lesson. Great lesson.

[crosstalking]

Jon: What former volunteer becomes the US congressperson 20 years later.

John: That is a great lesson. For those of you who just joined us, I have got my very good friend on with us today on the Impact Podcast. His name is Jon Carson. He is the managing partner of Trajectory Energy Partners. You can look up Jon’s great company at www.trajectoryenergy.com. I am on your website now, Jon. I love your website. It so represents all the things that you love to talk about and the journey that you have shared with me personally on building this great company. Let us go back then to your transition from the Obama campaign, some of those lessons you learned, and then what exactly were you doing then? You have got involved with SolarCity. What was your main mission there? What did they bring you on to do exactly there? Did you already start to see your political skills transfer over into the business world?

Jon: I loved my time at SolarCity, John. I was there for two years and I had two very distinct different roles for and I ended up not really using, I used the lessons from politics but not maybe the ones I thought that I would. When I went to SolarCity, my title was Senior Director of Solar Ambassadors, which basically meant I worked with the sales team to teach them how to get more referrals. In the solar world, you spend a lot of time and money just acquiring customers, and digital ads for customers can be very expensive and time-consuming. The cheapest way to get a new customer is to have a happy existing customer refer someone to you. So that was what I was brought into SolarCity to do, to work with at that point five thousand person sales staff, to teach them organizing and teaching them approaches to engage people to drive referrals.

Jon: I think at the beginning, the reason I was brought in and sort of what was in my head at the time was to bring someone like Obama organizing magic and sort of razzmatazz. What I [inaudible] learning was that the number one thing I could do with salespeople was to teach them to be organized instead of a fancy new program or a fancy new website. Just teaching them to block off two hours a week and call all your old customers and ask them if they have new referrals and how to just be organized which is absolutely a skill you bring from politics that ended up being the top advice I could give.

Jon: Then one year into my time at SolarCity, I have got a call from our CEO who said, “Hey Jon, you know politics, right? Do you think you could go fix what is going on in Nevada?” And that led to me switching over to the government relations side of the team and just being part of a crazy and fascinating many months-long fight around the policy fight that was going on in Nevada at the time to get rid of Net Metering, a policy that allows residential customers to put solar on their own roof. I spent about 40 nights in various Las Vegas hotels as I was out there. At the end of the day, it was probably a year later, but the legislature in Nevada did reverse that bad policy and bring solar back to Nevada.

John: So in essence, you got that accomplished. That was mission accomplished. The initiative was overturned and the bad legislation was pushed away. So, you got a really make a great impact before Tesla took over SolarCity. So your days there were well spent.

Jon: And I met such great people and learned so much, both from my time in the Obama world and then at SolarCity. It was such a fascinating network of people and those alumni are now everywhere. I run into them in all sorts of interesting places.

John: Well, one of the alumni happens to be my son and he gets to be one of the few alumni that is a dual alumnus. And he, thanks to you, got a chance to work out of the New York office on the Obama campaign, in the second campaign. And he just said when you used to host a conference or a conference call, it was magical. So he remembers his days and your leading calls and leading events in the Obama era. But he also then unbeknownst to him took a job as a salesperson at SolarCity when you were in your position there and also happened to be on calls and in rooms. Sometimes, when you were leading the charge and said, “Wow, that Jon, he just is magical.” He used to talk about you and almost a Tony Robbins ask-type way which is so funny because I know you so differently in terms of your mild-mannered temperament and way of being. But it is almost like Clark Kent in Superman the way my son, Tyler, speaks about you. So, he got a dual opportunity to work for you and just said both experiences were amazing.

John: So I am sure there are hundreds or thousands of young people across this country who you have impacted in your leadership at the Obama during your Obama years and your SolarCity years that are going to continue to go out. You have set the seeds by influencing them positively and there they are going to go out and be the change-makers and the impact makers in the years to come. So, I could speak personally from the Shegerian family experience, but I am sure there are other parents like me out there that I have had similar experiences with you, Jon. So I just wanted to share that as I thought back before we did this interview today that you have had a big impact on our family itself. So I wanted to say thank you for that.

Jon: Well, I was very lucky to have Tyler on my team both those times, John. I am a big believer in doing everything you can to pay it forward. I was the recipient of so much great mentorship, advice, support at so many stages in my career. The first people who got me involved in politics, people who made the connection for me to be able to make the jump over to SolarCity. As you know well, John, when I was thinking about starting my own company, you were one of the very first people I reached out to advise and would not have been able to do it without you. So, I am always trying to find opportunities to pay for those things. You cannot really ever pay them back that you can absolutely pay them forward.

John: Well, that is so nice of you. I do not think that is really true in terms of my involvement. But I do want to say for truth and advertising, I am an investor in Trajectory Energy. So I always like to say that in any show that I have, in the entrepreneur that I am financially involved with and I was an original investor. I have nothing to do with the success of the company. That is all Jon Carson and the great people he has surrounded himself and the team he has built around himself. For our listeners out there if you want to get involved with Trajectory or want to learn more about all the great work Jon’s doing, please go to www.trajectoryenergy.com.

John: Jon, talk a little bit about then, your evolution from working in the energy field at SolarCity and post-Tesla BYOP to then starting to decide how to build Trajectory, why Trajectory, why the space that you chose. Alternative energy is a big field. Talk a little bit about what niche you chose, why, and how that was applicable to your experiences prior to in politics and other [inaudible].

Jon: First and foremost, I just always and fascinated by clean energy. I always wanted to be a part of it for so many years. There was always that next campaign to hop into but I have always been passionate about it. I think in my head, I was a solar developer for the last 20 years just happened to be working on campaigns for most of it. My time at SolarCity really just taught me so much about business in many ways. The first thing is a little bit like learning a second language. They are just concepts and ideas and ways of looking at the world that you need to learn about. I could not have started my own company without that time at SolarCity first. But what I was so passionate about was not just clean energy writ large, but I really wanted to do something here in the Midwest. So, it is taking off in many parts of the country. It is really taking off everywhere now. But I really wanted to help make this transition possible here in Illinois. The other thing I knew is that I love being at the front end of things. Being an early part of that Obama campaign and being part of putting together the new approach that we took, being there in the early days of the first Obama administration. So we decided that Trajectory, we were going to be on the front end of this. We are early, early-stage developers. We are the first people to identify a good location for solar, the ones to reach out to those landowners, build a relationship there and do all the early work that is involved in building out these solar projects.

John: How has it been going? Talk a little bit about what you expected going into the whole process and what you did not expect that actually occurred and some lessons you have learned in the last years running Trajectory and then where are you going?

Jon: It has been such a fantastic three years. I would say I have learned so much. I was probably wrong on the details but right on the big picture. The core fundamental thesis we had was that we could be good at developing projects because of our understanding of people, of communities, of community engagements, and that quality would matter. Those were our two founding pieces and they have really proven out to be right. We have had thirty-one zoning hearings in the last two years. We won every single one. Now, have I learned a million things about how zoning works in the United States, here in Illinois? Absolutely. I am not sure I knew exactly what a special use permit or a variance was when I started Trajectory, but my core fundamental thesis that we could be good at this and there was the right way to do it has absolutely proven out to be true. I mean, it is just so much fun for me to get to work on clean energy but at the same time do this work in rural America. It is a part of the country I care so much about, I grew up in, and I feel like I understand. After three hard years of work, we will see our first projects get built here in Illinois. That will be a really proud moment when those first electrons are flown onto a grid because we walked out onto a parcel of land and said there should be solar built here and made it happen.

John: When is ETA of the first one’s going live?

Jon: It should be this fall. Our project in Rockford should be the first one across the finish line. That project is a project that helps out low-income communities. It is based in Rockford, Illinois built on a brownfield site of an old gravel mining operation and later municipal dump. That project should be completed. So far, it looks like construction projects are continuing. It is an exempted activity with the COVID situation here in Illinois. I guess if I am thinking a little further back, we do already have one project that was built last year when we started Trajectory. Even though we were a brand new company, we decided to do a little pro bono work. We helped a small non-profit boarding school in Jackson, Mississippi that works with low-income African-American students. We had pro bono and developed a hundred-kilowatt system for them. We actually won a Department of Energy grant for that project and that project I built last year. It has reduced the school’s utility bills by thirty percent so far.

John: That was awesome. So that was already a win that did not show up as a win really on the P and L statement, but it was a win for Trajectory and your leadership and your team, nonetheless.

Jon: Exactly. Then we learn so much from going to that process. That was something I would recommend to others. You may not feel like you have the balance sheet for a pro bono project like that early on, but for us, it ended up being a really great learning experience.

John: Jon, talking about learning experiences, you growing up in Wisconsin on a dairy farm. That has served you well and has continued to serve you well as you go out and meet with farmers and that whole community in rural America pitching your solar opportunity. Is that a correct statement because whenever I call you, whenever we had catch up discussions, sometimes deeper, sometimes just on the fly, so many times on the road in just a rural part of America. Many times I have not even heard of that area and your meeting or just have come with from a meeting with a farmer.

Jon: It is so interesting. First of all, if we are going to switch to renewable energy in America, we need to put solar everywhere. We need to put it on every roof that we can, every school that we can but that is going to be a tiny percentage of getting there. We need big projects. We need medium-sized projects and that land is just not going to be found in urban America. It is not going to be found in suburban America. If we are going to tackle the climate crisis, if we are going to switch to renewable energy, it will be rural America that gets us there. That is true everywhere and it is certainly true here in the Midwest and an Illinois and it is so interesting. There is a certain pride about that that I find in rural America. The landowners I work with may not think about climate changes as much as others do but they have enormous pride in the idea of American energy, in the idea of energy independence driven through nobles in their community, in their county. But farmers, landowners, and rural America, they want to know that they are dealing with is someone that they trust. Of all the different backgrounds that I have had, my work at SolarCity, at Tesla, in government, the fact that I bailed [inaudible] when I was a teenager, the fact that I can talk to them about what kind of dairy cows my grandpa had is probably the number one thing that helps me build relationships with these landowners.

John: Well, it is trust. They feel like you speak their language and you are one of them.

Jon: Absolutely, and I have really developed some great friendships with some of these landowners across the states.

John: You know Jon, I typically do not want the impact. It is all about the great entrepreneurs and I do not like to talk politics a lot on it, but given that we are in an election year. I would love you to share with our listeners a few of your thoughts. It is not about who is going to win or who is going to lose. That is not really the whole essence here. But when it comes to renewable energy, how much is politically driven now and what would it do to your business? If there was, if there was a change in the administration given that there are a new generation and a new push with regards to both climate change vis-à-vis Greta Thunberg and both from top and bottom from Jane Fonda to Greta Thunberg. There are new excitement and a new push that I had never felt before since Inconvenient Truth came out. So, once you have that working in your favor too if there is. If there happens to be in November a change in administration and parties, how does that affect a renewable energy company like yours now or does it not affect it at all? What are your thoughts on that?

Jon: It will be positive. There will be benefits but it probably affects us less than almost any other issue just because of the enormous groundswell towards renewables. The enormous momentum that is being created from so many different sectors. First of all, I would say renewables are not really bipartisan. They are almost nonpartisan. I have never lost a deal. I have never lost a zoning hearing because someone thought this was some liberal plot. They do not care about climate change. They absolutely see the economic benefits. This administration that is currently in is doing everything they can that top up the coal industry and it is not working at all. Coal plants are closing faster than ever. With a new administration, help with some incentives. With a new administration may be slow down natural gas a little bit. Absolutely. But it with renewables, it is just a matter of how fast not if and a big bit of the credit for that really has to be given to corporate America. Corporate America has stepped up and said renewables matter and not just Facebook and Google doing it for their data centers. Today, it was not [inaudible] company but a different company announced today. The biggest solar project that has ever been planned to be dealt in Illinois at a 200-megawatt project in Coles County, Illinois in the off-taker is Cargill. Cargill, agriculture company profits to buy renewable energy. So this train has left the station a long time ago. I will be thrilled if we have a new administration and it will help but not like other issues like immigration for instance, where everything comes down to federal policy.

John: I got it. I got it. Jon, before we sign off today, there is a lot of young people out there especially during this tragic period in our history were all dealing with the self, staying at home, a process that we are living with, a lot of loneliness, a lot of self-reflection on careers and career choices and paths and what they are doing with their lives. A lot of young people come to me and always say, “Hey, listen, I listen to your show. I want to be the next blank, I want to be…” I am sure the same will go for you. What advice do you have for our listeners out there that might want to change career paths and not make widgets anymore or not sell stocks and bonds anymore? That might want to just make an impact and make the world a better place in terms of changing careers and really being a more impactful entrepreneur than just financial capitalist-driven entrepreneurs.

Jon: Well John, I think there are two different pieces of advice. The first is one that I have often heard my old boss Barack Obama talked about and he used to say, “Focus on what you want to accomplish not who you want to be.” Now that is easy for him to say, right? He got to be President of the United States but his point was he saw so many people who have impacts, maybe from not being the person at the podium, maybe you care deeply about an issue and there is an opportunity not to be the CEO or entrepreneur yourself but to join a team. Focus on what you want to be a part of and what you want to accomplish, not what the titles going to be.

Jon: My second piece of advice is years from now, you are going to have much more regret over the what-if than the failures so take the chance. Go for it. You will regret so much if you never took that chance than when you tried and worked your butt off and did not work. I worked in politics. I spent two years trying to get Al Gore elected president that did not work out. But I do not sit up at night worried about that you worry about the things you could have done that you did not do.

John: Interesting. That is so interesting. Jon, you are just doing so much wonderful work at the Trajectory and I just want to thank you as your friend, a long time friend. It is just a great the impact that you are making on this planet and thanks to you for spending time with me today. You are always welcome back on the show just to talk about anything political or non-political business and updates with Trajectory and other great projects you are working on. I just love to have you back as you continue to grow your great brand. For our listeners out there, again, to connect with Jon or his great company, you could go to www.trajectoryenergy.com. T-R-A-J-E-C-T-O-R-Y energy.com. Jon Carson, you are making an impact. You are making the world a better place. I am honored to be your friend and thank you for being on the Impact Podcast today.

Jon: Thank you for all you do John.

John Shegerian: Welcome to another edition of The Impact podcast. I am so honored to have with us today. Dr. Mathew Knowles. His mission in life is to motivate and educate and he is a best-selling author, professor, lecturer, public speaker, entrepreneur, music executive, artist manager, and founder of Music World Entertainment. Welcome to The Impact podcast, Dr. Mathew Knowles.

Dr. Mathew Knowles: Hey, John, thank you. I have to teach others how to give that introduction as quickly as precise as you did John. I love that. That was great.

John: Well, listen, it is a lot to cover and you have done so much and I first want to ask you about your journey. You grew up in Alabama. Can you share with our listeners, growing up, how that was, and how you evolve professionally once you got through college?

Mathew: Good question, John. I grew up in Gaston, Alabama, which is in the northern part, of 1952. So imagine George Wallace is our governor, Bull Connor is the commissioner and in Birmingham, Al Lingo is over the state troopers and we are in the heart of racism and desegregation is beginning to start. My mother went to high school with Coretta King in a little small town and when she moved to Gaston, she has that spirit of integration and desegregation. So as a result, John, I never went to a black school. Now imagine that and elementary school is 1958 and I am at a white elementary school then I am at a white junior high school with a thousand kids in the six blacks. Then I am at Gaston High and then I am at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where I play basketball. And then I finally transferred my junior college to a black university at Fisk University in Nashville. I have been beaten, I have been spit on, I have been hit by electric products, all the things we are talking about today is just sort of cyclical on what I grew up seeing colored water fountain, colored bathroom. Many people do not know the drive-thru restaurant, McDonald’s drive-thru concept was really brought from segregation whereas black, we have to drive our car around to the back of a restaurant, get out the car, they had a window, ring the bell, they will come, take out order, get in the car, when they are finished with their white customers, they will give us our food. That is how to drive-thru concept came off.

John: Never heard that before. Never read that, heard that in my entire life before. That is amazing. That is shocking. It is shocking and but, I mean, I am glad you said it because it is not something that is discussed in the media. It is not just a…

Mathew: Well, that is why I was so excited about having this conversation with you because I think folks need to understand and people need to know when we look at from a racial perspective, I am encouraged, John. I am in courage today becomes a young people and I tell you, our young people, they are a different breed than you and I am a little older than you, but you know my nephew and my grandson, late grew up best friends white and you know dated and so it is a different type of young person that is not afraid of social courage. It is stepping out. And so I see this nation-changing and it is really encouraging to me.

John: You were ahead of it though for many reasons that we are going to discuss but one of the things is your best-selling author and you have written many books we are going to talk about a bunch of them, but I would like to start with the book that you wrote called Racism: From the Eyes of a Child, which is more than timely right now obviously way in front of this issue. Can you share a little bit about why you wrote that book in particular and what it means to you right now?

Mathew: Well, I just really briefly tell you how the book starts, the introduction. It was night and in the summers, my mother and my brother would go to my grandparents and my mother and my grandmother were like oil and water, were oil and vinegar. They never got along. This night, they got into argument. My mother took me and my brother, we got on the dirt road to the main highway in Marion, Alabama and started walking to the nearest relative. Well in a distance, we saw these lights and as a kid, I am excited and then we begin hearing horns, and then they got closer, the horns got louder, the lights got brighter, then my mother just stopped and said, “Hey, we have to get in the bushes. We have to get in the bushes right now.” Well, I am only five or six years old. So I do not really understand what is happening. We get in but I understand fear. We get on the buses and then the lights get really bright, horns really loud. My mother gets on top of me and starts praying and I started crying she likes, “You got to be quiet. You got to be quiet.” She said to my brother Jesse, “Jesse, there was a barbed-wire fence and there were cattle on the other side.” She said, “anything happened Jesse, you take your little brother, you all get under this barbed-wire fence and you all just run as fast as you can.” And then finally the cars passed and we get out. And here I am, I do not understand what just happened and we were walking down the highway and I am picking up these confederate flags, that my mother spanks in my hand. And that is why I got the whole Racism: From the Eyes of a Child because that was my first experience.

John: Got it. Wow, what an experience. You just said the story like it happened yesterday. I feel like we are back there together and I am watching it all go down and that is you know, 60 somewhat years ago. And so that is how much that story impacted your life and seared that into your soul.

Mathew: It is crazy. I am having right now like chills just thinking about it again. I talk about it and Racism: From the Eyes of a Child, I talked about the ten years, John, that I went to therapy about racial trauma. 10 years.

John: At what point in your life did you do that? That is an interesting point. When did you do, as an adult did you realize you need that or did you start getting that even earlier?

Mathew: No, it was in my adult life and it was a period of my life that was becoming unravel and I just did not understand why it was becoming unravel and I had talked to a therapist years ago. Then I went and I remember what she said to me. She says, “You know, because of your childhood and because you were very compulsive, you know, it is the blessing and curse. You are the top sales rep, you top it all that you do but then you hit this little bottom.” And I had tremendous success where I was going, I had sold my company, I was running a huge music label and it was a lot of trial mode, there was a lot of stress and every time I would encounter some type of racial conflict because as black men, that is a daily moment occurrence almost. I subconsciously went back into these feelings that I had, a childhood that I would do destructive things. And that is when I found it and it costs me my marriage, my first marriage, it cost me a relationship with my daughter. So, fortunately, it is totally mended now. And my former wife always says, my former wife and my best friend Tina because she is a good friend of mine but trauma is real. We hear about women that wait 30 years and then they talk. I can relate to that. I can absolutely relate to that.

John: And I am sure now that we are having this conversation and they are not always easy conversations. Just listening to you, my heart’s breaking, and I am taking on a whole new level of empathy for things I never even thought about, I never even thought of racial trauma and a PTSD that stays with people after they have come through horrific experiences. I never, as you said, it is always been related to trauma with women or with war. I never heard about it, from a racial perspective, but this is the first time I am even hearing of it and understanding it and it makes total sense. It makes total sense. Wow.

Mathew: Well, it is a lot, there is a thing called a lot of size rage. I am sure you have never heard that term before. In therapy, we have to work through that. That is when you date someone just because of the color of their skin because of the race. You hear people say, “I only date this person.” “I only date black men.” “I only date white women.” Well, they do not look at them as people and that was something I had to work with. It was my eroticized great rage towards white women. So this whole thing of trauma is real. I could talk about it John because, when I am a public speaker like this, I always say at the beginning in my vulnerability lies my safety. You and I were talking about this before. We came on-air, people know when you are not out there. You know, they know when you are not out there. And I have a whole pathetic, pathetic self.

John: Yeah. No. Just what you are sharing is really really enlightening and you just shared that experience that you had with your mom which was the beginning, serves as the beginning of your book Racism: From the Eyes of a Child. When you were growing up though, you had to have grabbed onto some heroes or role models to just get you through what you were living through. Who were some of your heroes, role models that you aspire to get you through your childhood?

Mathew: Yeah. Good question. My parents first. My mom was very strong and I talked about her in my book. She was a very strong black woman. I will share one story with you, a white young insurance man. They would do the weekly premiums down in the South and licensed he went. So this new insurance, white insurance man came and he knocked on the door and we were on the porch and he was like, “Is Helen here? Is Helen Knowles here?” And my mother came to the door and she says, “Young man, you have two choices. You can either get back in your car and leave or you can get back in your car and get out and then knock on this door and say, is Mrs. Helen knows here.”

John: Good for her. Good for her.

Mathew: That was my mom. She will call you out, she did not care.

John: And she was authentic and she was square. And she did not mince words, which I love, right?

Mathew: Not at all.

John: Wow.

Mathew: But my mom and dad, and I will tell you why. My dad made $30 a week driving a totals truck and an educated man that went to the third grade. He convinced the owners to let him keep that truck all the time and he would go and tear down all houses and sell all the metals and coppers. It was pretty common in a softback there that if your car stops you just left it in the front yard or somewhere and he will buy these cars and he will sell every part. My mom was a collared maid. She made three dollars a day. $15 a week. She would convince the white woman she worked for to ask her to ask all of her friends, any type of hand-me-down clothes, anything. She wanted them. So my mom made quotes on the weekends with two of her girlfriends. My dad was tearing out old houses, and all the scraps of the cars and that are when they made a significant entrepreneurial income. So I was taught, my grandfather was on both sides were entrepreneurs. I came from an entrepreneurial spirit and background and so my parents will be first and foremost. Then I was a minister in my life. That was my godfather and my parents had lived with him because it was common and I saw, you first got married, black couples would stay in someone’s home and rent that room. And so he always encouraged me. He always would talk to me about education and perception. He would tell me, I would say, “Reverend Walker why do you put on a suit to go to the grocery store?” And he says “Matthew it is about perception. When I walk out of this house, people have an opinion of me and I have an opinion of you. And so I am a minister of a permanent church, I have to look that role and I have to conduct myself in that role all the time.” And I remember those life lessons and then last would be in Corporate America. Although you ask my childhood, I have to say I have one real mentor that is Xerox. I was fortunate to do 20 years of Corporate America, Xerox, Phillips medical system, and Johnson & Johnson, but I moved quickly. This is my first really major job out of college and I moved to Houston. I moved quickly through the corporation to the medical division and when I was selling copiers, I would go early like 6:30 or 7 o’clock to work and I will see the New York Post, and I would grab it and read it. Actually it was the Wall Street Journal, I am sorry. That was actually, I read the business section. And then finally the branch manager was like looking around a cubbyhole like, “Who has my Wall Street.” and I was like, “Oh I am sorry. I have it” He is like, “Come into my office, Knowles.” I am thinking, “Oh shoot. Maybe I am going to get fire.” You know.

John: That is right. That does not sound like a good call of action, come into my office.

Mathew: Yeah, so I sit there and he says, “Knowles why did you get my Wall Street?” I said, “Well sir, you know, I covered downtown a lot of petroleum companies that I just want to understand, you know, the business side of the oil industry and understanding the business decisions or new companies.” He says, “I love that. I love that.” He says, “You know, what? What is your goal?” I said, “Well my goal is to be the number one sales rep in the world like Xerox, big Cadillac.” He was like, “Yeah.” He says, “I will tell you what, I want you to go to some meetings with me.” So I talked about this in another one of my books The DNA of Achievers and I go to this meeting and here is this older white men and I am like, “Why the hell am I here?” They like, “Knowles get us some coffee, you know” Then finally they would ask me a question and I answer they liked it. Well, I say it was only the president of Pennzoil, Exxon, Shell, and he gave me the opportunity to understand at a forty thousand feet level how business is done which is a lot different looking at the macro perspective of doing business. And now a lot of my success is owed to Xerox Corporation.

John: That is awesome. So when did you decide to leave a big, comfortable, iconic, worldwide iconic brand like Xerox and then put your foot into the world that you learned growing up from mom and dad, the world of entrepreneurs?

Mathew: Well, you know, but if you ask me great questions John I tell you. Actually, in the 80s, my former wife and I have started a hair salon and…

John: Where do you living then? Where was this?

Mathew: Houston…

John: Okay, got it.

Mathew: …Houston, Texas where I am right now speaking to you. You can see after six years of staying at home, and I said, “What is your passion?” and she said, “I love hair and beauty and I said, “I tell you what, you go school, cosmetology school and they will start a hair salon.” And we did and I share. The first million dollars we made was in 1986 with this hair salon. We grew it from 0 to 35 people. And so I had already experienced entrepreneur while in Corporate America…

John: In success, that is a lot of money back in those days. Let us be frank here.

Mathew: Yeah, and you know I have to say I was fortunate at the medical division of Xerox. Three years out of eight to be the number one sales rep worldwide selling Xeroradiography for breast cancer detection. Then I went to Phillips and one of the first blacks, not the first black to sell MRI and CT scanners in America, and then ended my career at Johnson & Johnson as a Neurosurgical specialist. Most people do not know that is my background, Diagnostic Imaging…

John: I have no idea. No idea.

Mathew: And I love that…

John: Three great brands though. Three great iconic brands that you work for. Three amazing brands.

Mathew: Yeah. How about that man. And Phillips taught me that whole multi-national. They were based in Eindhoven and New Amsterdam and so I got to see the world and how business was done in the world which really played an important factor with me. But you know Johnson & Johnson, I went from selling a 5 million dollar piece of equipment to 5 thousand dollar bunch of instruments and I was just used to that I would not use to getting up early in the morning. I went used to having a pager on the weekend and I get a dual procedure and it is Neural Surging pages me at the hospital and asked me to come to his office after the procedure. I thought maybe the patient had died because we had a protocol for that and so I am scared as hell. I get to his office and he said, “I like you, Mr. Knowles, but unfortunately, I can not use your product anymore.” He says, “The hospital has told me if I do not reduce my costs per procedure at all operating room, I will not be able to practice here.” He says, “This new thing called managed care.” After that meeting, I called my former wife and said, “I can not do this anymore. I can not sell price. I am just not used to the selling price and do not want to do that. I sell quality.” And so I had to start doing this soul-searching that I tell everybody because I believe when you live your passion, you never work a day in your life because passion is that thing that excites you, motivates you, and dreams about it, and you can not wait. You smile like I am right now because I am passionate about what I do. And I just went past it about that anymore. So I said, “What do you love? What are you passionate about now at this point in your life?” And at the same time, Beyonce’s girl group lost on Star Search which for those of you listening do not know that is kind of like American Idol today. So after they lost, I went up to Ed McMahon. I said, “Mr. McMahon, you know these kids are boohoo. I am a dad. I am not involved with this. I just came down to help them with.” He says, “Well, I tell you what, but some reason I can not explain to you out of everybody that loses, a lot of them go on to be successful.” He started naming Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, Boys to Men, Usher. I mean names we know they all lost in Star Search…

John: Right. I did not realize that either. Wow.

Mathew: He says, “What they did, Mr. Knowles, is they went back and they made changes. They refocused and rededicated.” And I never forgot that got into my head, well, when I was a kid, my dad, in Sundays, they had vinyl and he would dance with my mom in the living room, which was off-limits and my job was a have a Nickel Dime quarter to put on top of the needle for the vinyl if it is scratched because my dad was a really good dancer and really likes to get out of rhythm. That is when I start coming up with a playlist. I did not know what the hell I was doing but playlist and I could look at my dad’s mood and I would pick out the right records and I was studying the records. So I love music and I took piano lessons when I grew up. I hated my mother for making me take piano lessons. I love her. I love her now.

John: Right. Back then not so much.

Mathew: No, it was cool, man to be taking piano lessons. So you know, I love music. And I said, “Wait. I love music. I love the business part of it. I love the [inaudible] back to college and I went to every seminar I could go to and then finally I transition to being a girl’s manager.

John: No kidding. So you had it already in your background and DNA the love for music, but then you got to apply it because you also have the understanding of entrepreneurship, you also were ready to move on from big corporate structures and do more entrepreneurial work beyond the hair salon and this was the next step, the next logical step. Wow.

Mathew: And thankfully from Corporate America a lot I learned some key valuable points like the importance of branding, the importance of strategic partnerships, understanding the difference between growth and scaly. You know, I learned a whole lot from Corporate America that helped me to…

John: So, that is really interesting because here, you are so massively successful. But so many young people out there who listen to the show and way beyond the show think that going to school and getting a JD or an MBA and that is it. They are done. But what you are really saying is you have an MBA besides your college education. You have a Ph.D., but you are even saying life is constantly a learning journey and what you learned in your 20 years in the high-level corporate world was part of your finishing school. It was part of your education that obviously continues today, but help make you become what you became.

Mathew: Absolutely John and by the way in August, I am taking a leadership course. I got accepted at Harvard. So for me, it does not stop and I am teaching you to know, this is my 12 years of a college professor. So I am teaching as well at HBCU Prairie View University, but I want to continue to grow and I want to understand leadership and I can become a better and more effective leader.

John: Wow. We are going to get back to that. I want to talk about leadership in a little bit, but let us go into– So now Destiny’s Child you wrote a book on that and you are going to be bringing that story to Broadway. Share the story and that the book is called Destiny’s Child: The Untold Story. And for those who just joined us, honored to have, beyond honored to have today with us, Dr. Mathew Knowles. And to find Dr. Knowles, you could go to WWW dot Mathew and it is one T. M-A-T-H-E-W Knowles. K-N-O-W-L-E-S dot com. He has five books. He is writing his sixth which he is going to tell us about a little while. All can be found on Amazon and other great places including his own website. Dr. Knowles, tell us a little about now, the book that you have out right now Destiny’s Child: The Untold Story. Share some great stories from that book that you like our listeners here and talk a little bit about maybe next year tease us a little bit on what you want to do on Broadway.

Mathew: Yeah. Well, you know, this Destiny’s Child. It was a constant evolution. Beyonce was 19 years old when she came with these two managers, came to the hair salon, and said, “Hey, we are going to start a young version of En Vogue and back those times it was all these Jackson 5, Bobby Brown and his group, and it is just always kids crisscrossing all of these kids. So kids are what we had. Did you know that was a cool thing in the music industry? Believe it or not, not today. But so, Tina said, “Oh cool. [inaudible]” So it started out as girl’s time and that evolve to getting a deal with Babyface [inaudible] and reach partner Darryl Simmons, and they went to Atlanta and they became the dolls and they then got dropped by Elektra Records and came back. And for those of you who do not understand, got dropped. That means you got fire. So…

John: Everyone understands that.

Mathew: And then they came back, the name is changed again. Something impressive but the ladies kept working. I had to make changes. I have a partner at the time who eventually died of Lupus and did not get to see this after. We talked about that as well. But that was a lot of failures that these girls had and I talked about failure and mistakes are an opportunity to grow and not a reason to quit and every time they grew from them and we all grow when we make mistakes and failures. They did not give up. They just got better and better and better. And it was a good thing, actually, that they did make it as a kid because they would have always been you know trademark branded as that little kid groups. So it was actually a good thing but there were a lot of ups and downs and changes and challenges that we talked about before success and even when they got success there was another membership change. And even the member that came into, the new member had to be a change. So with every evolution of change and growth.

John: Is part of the success the ability to stay flexible and open to change and growth then?

Mathew: That is exactly what it is. That is being able to modify and adapt. Those were the two words that I have been using consistently due to a Coronavirus is the opportunity to modify and adapt our behavior. And that is what success is. You do not learn or I do not learn from my successes. I learned when I messed up. When I make a mistake when I fell at something. I then re-evaluate. I get information and knowledge because a lot of failures is done because we do not have the knowledge. That is why some forms of education are so important for us to have the knowledge that is needed.

John: You know, Dr. Knowles, you are in that rare air and I was sharing this with you before we started taping today, but you are in that rare air of super parent and in this goes for you and your ex-wife as well both super parents and but you are also a massively successful entrepreneur. How were you able to blend? Because everyone who hears this show who is a parent or soon to be a parent and even a grandparent now. Everyone wants to be a great parent. We want to be known as great parents to our children, especially in our children’s eyes, but even to the general of our social circles. Most people take a lot of pride in being a great parent, but you have reached that rare air of super-parent of these tons of people whether it is the Manning brothers and Archie Manning, whether it is Earl Woods or the Williams sister’s great dad and mom. I mean you are in that rare air, but how did you manage both being their business manager and being in business with your children, but also trying to be a great parent with your wife to your children as well. How difficult do the lines blur and how difficult does that make it when the lines blur for you to like you said, to come out on the other side and for them to come out on the other side and everyone be intact?

Mathew: Yeah. Well, you were reading a word out of my mind. I was thinking boy, that is difficult.

John: But you did it. So I want to here your– How do you make it through? You are here today and you are as clear as a bell and you have got some great words of wisdom. I want to hear because there is a lot of parents out there including me that want to know, how to do this? How can we be the best that we can be as a parent?

Mathew: I will tell you. You know it starts first with, I think to understand what your child’s passion is. And I think of a mistake and I do often as a college professor. A lot of students are in college because they were forced to be there by their parents and they really have other things that they are passionate about but their parents could not understand it. I can only tell you that when someone is forced to do something in life, it will fail most of the time. So we wanted to see our kids both Solange and Beyonce. We surrounded them with dance and theater and music and all types of activities to see at a young age, what were they are drawing to and it was music. And then when we saw that most teachers do not support the Arts, especially in elementary and middle school. If I am fortunate but it is a fact I say things John that sometimes makes people uncomfortable and I love that. I want people to feel uncomfortable, but that is a fact and so especially in our kids. So we then got, we saw the girls love music and dance. We got a dance court, put them in a dance troupe. Got vocal lessons and we are kind of let them explore and discover on their own. And I always say to parents how do you know if this kid is passionate about something? So let us take a young boy that wants to be a professional baseball player. He is taking softball. If you have to tell that kid to go to practice, it is a hobby. The moment you have to tell them to go to practice, it is a hobby. I have never had to tell Beyonce and Solange to go to practice when they were kids. Matter of fact they bored the hell out of me. Bored me like, “Daddy. You do not practice us to park…” That is a true indication. They are passionate about it. And it is okay to have a hobby. Hobbies are cool. There is nothing wrong with that and they will finally find their passion, but we did not force it upon them. So I think it starts there but to your point being a manager, professionally and a dad, I had a corporate experience that helped me to know how understanding, I had a fiduciary duty to not just Beyonce this was two other young ladies. So I could look out, actually, I talked about a lot of times work and Beyonce’s did not work in her favor at all because I was harder on her. But that made her better because I never wanted to show favor to them that I was putting more favoritism as their manager. But you know the thing it became a challenge is hard to separate. Work from and family and I have to tell you that it is very difficult. And when you were at a level we were at Destiny’s Child and with Beyonce, we are talking number one female group of the history of music, number one female artist today. At that level of a different kind of conversation, it becomes very difficult.

John: When did you learn that you have the gift to be a writer because you are prolific? I mean you have five books out you are working on your sixth. I want you to share what that sixth book is. But when did you even know you had that gift and that you wanted to not only share it in your public speaking abilities, which are unformidable obviously to say the least but when did you know you could also take the storytelling and put paper to pen and make that a reality as well.

Mathew: Well, I miss being in a business of music and to be fortunate to write songs. I was fortunate to co-write the number one song about Destiny’s Child Survivor…

John: I did not know that it was you. Wow.

Mathew: I co-wrote that and so at best in the industry and seeing a creative process, I have always been creative in business. My approach has always been creative. But I tell you, John, I am always that guy that strategically planning. This is what is part of the plan. Is to, okay life after the music industry, what would that look like? And for me? What was my passion? I love educating and motivating people. And so that was part of it. And part of that was I understood as to be an impactful public speaker, that you need to have books.

John: Yeah. That is true. What is the next book you are working on? I know you are writing another one. What is the new one that you are working on?

Mathew: I am actually doing a revision that I am really really loving on my first book The DNA of Achievers, which was the number one bestseller at Amazon just going through the 10 traits of highly successful people because when you find someone successful, you will see they all have these common traits of passion first and foremost and then what coexists with passion you can not have one without the other is work ethics. So that is why you see these successful people work so hard and people were like, “I work so hard.” No, they are having so much fun working so hard.

John: Right, right. I got you. You know, Warren Buffett. I was in the audience in his annual shareholder meetings a few years back with my wife and he said that he looks for three qualities for people to run his portfolio companies. Three qualities. He said intelligence and energy but he says the last one is character. And he goes if you are missing the character, the first two will kill you, the first two will just kill you.

Mathew: Amen. Amen.

John: It is always fascinating to listen to great leaders, motivators, educators like you, Warren Buffett, to listen to what you have found in all the folks that you have met to be the common themes of success of great leaders. Like you said DNA issues because those are just great points. So you are rewriting that and that is going to be coming out sometime this year or is that coming out next year?

Mathew: That is coming out this year. It would probably be the fourth quarter of this year, but absolutely coming week. I should get my final draft here any day. Actually today I am supposed to get it. But you know I was able to update it. It was really a defining moment when I look back on that book and found that I had four people because I have found a style that I have in writing. I like to interview other people in my books and get their perspective on what I am talking about. And so I had The DNA of Achievers, have 10 chapters. and I linked the chapters, but I had three people per chapter. And four of those people are dead. And I had to talk to two or three of them in a long time and we were looking through the BIOS, updating the BIOS. That is when I found a really good friend of mine, Joe Campanella who was the chairman and president of L’Oreal. We did so many commercials and deals with L’Oreal over my professional and with Jo, Jo died in April of a Coronavirus at 73.

John: Oh my gosh, that is too young in this world. That is way too young. You know we are going to talk about health then. You bring up health. We are told we are still having this conversation in this COVID-19 tragic period that everyone in the world is affected by this. No one who goes gone untouched from this in one way or another and you are not only, what I love about you, is not only your authenticity and your willingness to speak out and speak up on so many important topics, but I think there is no greater topic than health and you and I are old enough to have lived through Betty Ford making it socializing and democratizing the discussion around breast cancer and Bob Dole and other great leaders, I believe it was Bob Dole, Colin Powell, and some other great leaders did the same with prostate cancer. You recently have become a survivor of breast cancer and I would love you to share your story how you detected it, the action you took, and how you successfully got to the other side because this is not a topic that is talked about a lot yet, but hopefully you breaking it can lead to a bigger and better conversation. So more men can say safely navigate this disease as well.

Mathew: Yeah. Well, thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about this because I love talking about it. As I was talking about my corporate career, remember that eight years I was in a medical division of Xerox selling Xeroradiography in the 80s, which is the leading modality for breast cancer. So let us start there. And then I went on to MRI, which now has become a top modality in breast cancer detection as well, breast MRI. So I had some knowledge of breast cancer. I had knowledge. I had information being the number one rep, I only sold the radiologist. So I had to technically, I needed to know my facts. So one day I had a little white t-shirt and I took on the shirt at night and noticed a red dot. Literally, we had a sheet of paper and you had red pen and a dot…

John: Red little dot, that is it?

Mathew: …I did not think anything about it. The second day, I saw it and I was like, well my wife Gina, my first wife is Tina. My second wife is Gina, go figure. But you know what I mean? So I say, “Gina bought me some weird shirt [inaudible].” And so on the third day, I see it on the same spot and I said, “Hey you know, I keep seeing this red dot. Is that go along with the t-shirt?” She says, “Wait a minute, I just cleaned the sheets and I saw three red dots on the sheets.” And I said what I knew even back in the 80s when I was selling Xeroradiography about men in breast cancer. Very rare, but men do have breast cancer. Matter of fact in America, we have some 3,000 plus men that die every year. I do not call it, John, breast cancer. I am branding a new term, Male Chest Cancer.

John: That is actually great. That actually really makes more sense frankly.

Mathew: Because if we are going to let them feel comfortable, I sure did not feel comfortable opening a door that said woman’s breast center. I did not feel comfortable opening that door and I know no other man feels comfortable. And also I have respect for women. As I got to walk around with our shirts off and yeah, we look at that part of our body differently. So I just think there is a difference in how we view and say that but the point is that I had a sense that this is what it might be and I went to my doctor. I have a great team I position in Internal Medicine guy that has been with me for years now. He suggested a surgeon who specializes in and this area saw him got a mammogram got a boxy and has surgery within an eight-day period and was fortunate.

John: So speed matters. Dr. Knowles, speed matters when it comes to these things, huh?

Mathew: They are since urgency, definitely matters when it comes to health. You do not want to find any different stages of this. So I was Stage 1A and I am very grateful and very blessed that I saw those signs and I knew immediately to go to my doctor and to immediately go to a surgeon and get a biopsy person and have surgery but I found something that I did not know, John. I never had heard about BRCA to genetics. Know anything about that? BRCA to genetics?

John: I thought it is the gene that could be passed down by a family member and give you a predisposition for that type of cancer for especially in the chest area.

Mathew: Well, you are halfway accurate. We all human beings have BRCA Genes. They are supposed to…

John: I just thought it was just a woman. Frankly. I never heard it applied to men. So now I want to hear about…

Mathew: Every human being and you know, there are some theories that think that a third of the world population has mutated BRCA Genes. So these days are supposed to fight off disease, manages, mutated and you are right in that is family who hereditary DNA type of thing. And so what does that mean if my pocket too, is mutated? This is very important because I will share why it means that as a man what a block you to mutation. I have a higher risk of 40 to 50 percent greater risk for male chest cancer, prostate cancer, melanoma, and pancreatic cancer. 40 to 50 percent greater chance. As a woman, it means the same type of percentage greater chance, does not mean you are going to have it just means you have a greater chance and because you know you have a greater chance that you got to go and get these exams on a routine basis. That is the message I want to give. But for women, it is breast cancer and ovarian cancer. And so I have not had mutated. I had to call my kids my nieces and everyone and let them know go get a sample test and…

John: At the doctor’s office?

Mathew: No, no, they will mail, there are these companies like the company I used is called [inaudible] they will mail it to you, you do a saliva sample and it will give you all like cancer and cardiovascular screening to let you know if you have a higher risk. I mean, if I do not know that I would have had that like most insurance are 200 bucks. Well, do you think I want to know if I have a higher risk? Because if I know I have a higher risk, then if I am a woman, I am gonna get my mammogram. I am gonna make sure I get my routine mammogram. I am not missing a day. For me every six months, I get an MRI on my prostate. I am getting an MRI. There is a special MRI procedure for the prostate. I get one for my pancreas I go. Get all of my molds checked for my dermatologist and I do a blood test.

John: So I want to clearly have your advice out there for our listeners. Everyone who is an adult should be getting this BRCA test you are saying now…

Mathew: Absolutely.

John: Wow, and it is as easy as a saliva test that can come in the mail?

Mathew: Come in the mail, you mail it back.

John: This is great. I never knew that was even part of the protocol that I should be doing as a male or I thought it just was relegated to a woman who potentially had the predisposition for breast cancer. I just thought they were the ones who were supposed to be getting the BRCA test. Never knew that even guys were even in that category. Unbelievable.

Mathew: Well, it is a business reason why because after going to the Supreme Court, the company that had a patent on all of this testing, there were almost 12 years that they were in court. And finally like maybe eight or seven years ago, they had to give up the passing. So it is always a business decision. Right?

John: Wow. And now you are on the other side of this thing and you are doing very well? No, no evidence? Everything is gone? And you are clean and healthy now?

Mathew: Well, I always say, I am clean and healthy today, but I will certainly, August, the top of August, I would have the routine tests that I just said. I will do a mammogram. I will do it to the prostate. I will go back and get my moles. I had two moles that were biopsy last time. They were fine. I will go through it. The inconvenience is that it will cost me every six months four hours of time out of my life.

John: For your peace of mind and your productive and great health for the years to come?

Mathew: For the years to come four hours out of my life and it is something…

John: As far as I am concerned, that is a heck of an investment.

Mathew: That is the way I look at it, man. Really, like if we are on business, the return on that investment is your life.

John: Is your life. Wow. That is great advice. Never knew it. I am going to give you taking that test myself now and I never even heard of that. Never knew was even in the realm of possibilities for guys but like you said medicine is a business and business decisions are made that affect all of us unless we get knowledge and take action. Sometimes we are on the wrong side of that if we do not understand what is really at going on out there.

Mathew: Yeah. but that is what your show is all about is to give…

John: Yep.

Mathew: I mean I research you. Trust me, I mean, I am a research guy. I know you, man. You are a good man. You had some really amazing people that you are sharing knowledge with people. And knowledge is power. It is power if you are knowledgable.

John: You talk a little bit about planning and uses that word or a couple of minutes ago. I want to go back to that. How far out in advance you have been planning and I am going to tell you my favorite planning story. When this whole Coronavirus thing hit, everyone, you know, this was all new to all of us, Dr. Knowles and we were all forced to retreat and go into our homes and other structures and try to survive or make it through and get to the other side where we are starting. It just seems like now we are starting to come back to some sort of new normal and by luck, about a year ago I had seen a documentary on Nelson Mandela. In the documentary, the interviewer asked Nelson Mandela, “How did you make it through your years in jail? How did you survive?” And I loved his answer. His answer is stuck with me since and I sort of, it is really was burning in my head throughout this COVID period. His answer was, “I did not survive. I was planning for when I got out. I was planning for when I got to…” So you did not know one and I was having a fun laugh with you before we started taping that I need three or four lifetimes to catch up to what you have already accomplished and you are still going so I am in a race now that I know I have never going to achieve but you know how was part of the art of your success, planning? And are you still constantly laying it out laying out months and years ahead for yourself to continue to achieve and leave as you have already done so well before?

Mathew: Yeah, the answer is yes, yes, yes, I have this saying, a pretty well-known saying, that failure to plan is planning to fail.

John: I love that saying.

Mathew: And you know, I plan and strategic, and I always use a strategic plan because, to me, a plan without a strategy, there is a difference. A strategy is when you utilize others to help you fulfill your goal. And so I believe in short-term planning and long-term planning. For example, I know my wife and I short term, we know we are moving from Houston to another city next year. So a year ago, we got an apartment in that city so that we can begin to start the strategic planning of buying a house in January or February when this is hopefully all behind us. So I am already planning, my ex was planning after the music industry now I meant to film in TV, selling, I actually put my record label for sale last week that is what is part of this strategic plan. Continual education is to increase my public speaking, to increase my teaching like I do not just luck. But luck is cool. But we have to be prepared when that happens, but I like having a plan of action on how I am going to get to some– I would not get on an airplane and the pilot says he has nowhere, no idea where we are going.

John: Good point that is great…

Mathew: Think about that.

John: Yeah, I mean that is actually a brilliant point. He has a plan and he has it all mapped out, where he is going and how he is getting there.

Mathew: Right and a lot of people that is their life. They are just flying, they have no idea and they run out of gas and fuel and you know, then they crash.

John: I mean besides everything you just mentioned that you are doing and finishing up your sixth book which is a rewrite of DNA of Achievers. As a revision of that, you have also said you enrolled at Harvard now. I mean, how long does that course and tell what are you hoping to get out of that? It is a leadership course and you just want to continue to polish and hone your leadership skills, I take it?

Mathew: Yeah, that is what it is. It is ethical leadership, it is part of their professional development, and you know as a professional I just want to continue to grow and leadership at this time of my age and the chapter of my life, leadership is what I am about. And I just want to hone and my skills in leadership. And being a better effective leader.

John: So let us talk about leadership then. So I know you and I both enjoyed the Michael Jordan biography, a 10-part biography that we just played on, I believe HBO or ESPN or one of those great channels, and we were chatting a little bit about this before we came on the air and the end of the eighth episode was the only time that Michael Jordan got emotional during all of his interviews that he did. He ended that eighth episode and this was his quote, “Winning has a price, and leadership has a price.” Dr. Knowles, what does that mean to you? Because he got emotional as for actually a break because winning and his strategy in his methodologies he said we are in for everybody but for those who went with it and got to the other side, there is a lot of rings and a lot of good living that came to post those Championship seasons. For all those young people that got affected and benefit from that. What does “Winning has a price and leadership has a price” to you because you are a winner and you are clearly a leader whether or not you go to Harvard. You have proven to win and lead over and over again. What does that mean with regard to your life and your journey?

Mathew: Yeah. That was a great question, John? What do I start? So you know leadership is first and foremost means that you have people that follow. People that are part of the team, people that look to you for direction. That is leadership and it requires that leader to have clear directions. We talked about that and strategy and those things but more than that, it requires empathy. It requires helping others and yourself to understand the difference between accountability and responsibility because a lot of people do not know the difference of accountability– And my company I am ultimately accountable for whatever happens, but it could be somebody in my organization that does something that makes no sense that cost the company money that they are responsible for but I am ultimately accountable. So it is about making sure everyone understands that. It is about having clear communication skills that everyone is clear on. But that empathy part becomes a very important thing. Winning, I played on the championship and maybe that plays a role in me. I was on a championship Junior and Senior year high school team. Three years of college on a championship team. So I know what is required to be a winner and a champion and what team means the most incredible thing. I think that is why Michael got emotional because to be a winner sometimes, it is the same as being a visionary. It is a lonely road being a visionary. Very lonely road.

John: I am so glad that you said that word lonely. I took that from that series when they showed him on the road in those hotels when he said he was ready. He was ready to be done with it all. The loneliness is deafening at some point, is not it for all great leaders, winners, and even entrepreneurs or athletes? It is deafening loneliness at some points.

Mathew: Yeah, he could not go out to the hotel I mean, I just know, I have seen it. I am watching one of my kids get to that point in her career where it is just you want to go back to normalcy. And so…

John: Did you feel that? During your journey as well?

Mathew: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I was relieved when me and my oldest daughter Beyonce decided that we were going to park and I was going to become back a dad and not her manager and I enjoyed the laughter and conversation and I enjoy her asking me business questions and trusting me, but I am not dad now with her. I am not a manager and it is a beautiful thing. And I missed that part of our lives just like being a winner, you sometimes have to so tough love as well as we saw Michael show, tough love. But what I love is he was the example. I think a true leader is an example. I am not going to ever ask you to do something, John that either I have not done or I would not do I am never going to ask anybody on my team to do that. And so…

John: Is that the mark of a great leader? Is that a theme of all great leaders? Because you really can not be authentic if you are going to ask others to do what you are not willing to do. Is not that correct?

Mathew: That is absolutely correct. And integrity is paramount in leadership. It was a while in my life, John. We’ve talked about the vulnerability, that was a part of my life that I thought John that, “Man I could live this professional life and I got all of that together. I can do that in my sleep.” But in my personal life, I did not have the same level of integrity. And I had to find a hard way that those things have to run parallel in your life. Personal and professional integrity. I see true leaders have that integrity. They are truthful, John. They do not lie. They are truthful regardless of what and how the end results are.

John: Consequences do not matter as much as the truth.

Mathew: Exactly.

John: I love it.

Mathew: And when you are telling the truth, John, it is so easy because you can just talk. I do not have to worry, like, “Oh, man. I did not say this in the last interview, you know I am going to leave this part out. I am not going to talk about that.” But we had a conversation.

John: I love it. But obviously you are a winner and you are a leader and hearing your thoughts on those on that quote means a lot to me and it means a lot to our listeners. I am going to leave you with one more and I want to hear I want to go back to the issue of what we started the show with, your great book, Racism: From the Eyes of a Child, and for our listeners out there, this has been just one of the best interviews I have ever had. It was to me before we even started the interview, I told Dr. Knowles that I have done over a thousand of these and I was looking forward to this one, maybe more than any other and I will tell you what, this one leaves a mark like none other have left. For those listeners out there that want to find Dr. Knowles please go to WWW dot Mathew with one T. M-A-T-H-E-W Knowles. K-N-O-W-L-E-S dot com. mathewknowles.com. He is got five books out. He is writing a sixth. You can book him also to speak but I want to go back to Racism: From the Eyes of a Child and what we are going through right now. This was not planned, you and I had planned this podcast way before any of the events that have occurred. But I take that as an opportunity and a blessing because to have such an articulate, great speaker with all the experiences that you have had just having a chance to speak with you and having our listeners get an opportunity to listen to your important thoughts. So as I shared with you earlier before we tape the show, when you walk into our offices when I was a little boy growing up in the 60s. My mom used to buy me some books and my four heroes where RFK, JFK, MLK, and Muhammed Ali. All four of them are stuck with me for numerous reasons, but MLK’s words are over our front door when you walk into our offices and it is in also in the sitting area so people can take it in when they wait to have a meeting here and it is, “Everyone can be great because everyone can serve.” Given the times that we are living here in the United States and around the world frankly, but you and I live in the United States and we both grew up here. What does that mean to you? How can our listeners who are confused, who are sad, who are heartbroken from what they have been observing both and social media traditional media and just in their lives? How can they be better servants to help be part of the solution to make this country a better country and to make this world a better place?

Mathew: Well, John, what a great closing question. Again, I started, you and I talking about this topic of racism and I said that I am encouraged. I am encouraged because finally, we have to get to a point where it is comfortable to say, “Hey, John, you are a white guy man.” We are different. There are some cultural differences. Let us talk about it. Tell me, this is what I observed, “Oh, you are a black guy.” Just the Grammy’s just yesterday finally had a policy that they were no longer have an award that said urban. Because urban really has always meant black. So first of all, we have to get to a part that we can begin to have these types of conversations. That we can talk about our differences and how we view, how as a black man do things and as the white man, how do you view things? And when you see these marches to see the number of white people that are saying enough is enough. That is the encouragement that I am seeing. You know Mark Cuban who I just really am a fan of. He said the other day, “The reality is to be brutally honest when people talk about the white privilege we get defensive. We have this mechanism that I call manufactured factored equivalency.” We have to talk about white privilege and how black people view that. How when police stopped us versus how they stopped me, John. How they stopped you are going to be totally different. I have got alike at 68 years old, I have got to change my whole demeanor, my whole energy, I got to make all of these changes for safety because I can not get enough at 68 years old who had a bad day, who wants to go back to the bar and brag about, “Oh, guess what I did to Beyonce’s Dad.” So those are the things I have only you know, after Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery we can go on and on and on…

John: We go on and on, it is crazy.

Mathew: Come on, guys. When are we going to stop saying, “I do not think racism exists and I think that is where we are in America.” I think we are finally to a point that most people, because they are always some differences, that most people and most good white people are saying this is enough. And by the way, my son’s best friend is black, but he has dinner hangs out and spends the night and no, enough is enough. But there are pictures we got to do. We have structural racism, John in America based on poverty, the brutality rate. Look, we talked about the health system and poor black people. It is not happenstance that blacks lead and mortality rate and cancer and cardiovascular disease…

John: Diabetes.

Mathew: …diabetes but now is that we do not understand why Coronavirus, we would lead in that also? And by the way white America, let us be honest. At the very beginning of black America, a lot of my friends, we thought the Coronavirus was just white people because no blacks in the early beginning and people were saying oh. And now let us just be honest. A lot of white people say this is a black bar. That is why probably they do not wear a mask because they– but you carry it and then you kill us. It is called a [inaudible] medic. You get on the elevator with no mask on and you kill us.

John: Right. 40% of the cases are coming from asymptomatic people. That is what Dr. David Agus said the other day.

Mathew: Yeah.

John: Yeah, you are right. This is crazy.

Mathew: So the structural racism about housing. Part of this whole Coronavirus is housing. Education that we talked about, that locked up. And the whole criminal justice system from what these men and women wear, to how they behave has to change. And it has to be…

John: Do we have it in us to make that change? Do we have it in us as a country to make this change?

Mathew: Yes, we do.

John: Good.

Mathew: I see it every day that people are having a social courage to stand up, speak out. People are risking their lives, you know.

John: And their careers.

Mathew: And tell me about my daughter with her career at the Super Bowl. Why people do not even know what happened to Beyonce at the Super Bowl? When she did the Black Panther and a black power sign and said black lives matter. She still has pain and hurt from that. A lot of people do not even know about the Miami Police Union head who sent out a memo to every Police Union in America to boycott Beyonce’s World Tour and not to work to give her safety. Most people do not even know about that. But Google it those of you who are listening.

John: I believe. If you said it that is the way it is. I mean you would know. I mean that is horrific. It makes no sense.

Mathew: So it is about having these types of uncomfortable discussions. If they are not uncomfortable. There will be no change. So it is uncomfortable. I like to come back and we just have a whole discussion on Race.

John: Let us do this.

Mathew: Really.

John: You have been more than generous. You have been more than generous. This is the longest I have run on a show probably in the last four years, but that is because you have so much to say and share, and you really truly are a motivator and an educator. You know, I was with my son last night and I said, “I have Dr. Knowles coming on.” So I said, and he is 28, “You just graduated law school.” and I said, “What should I do? He said, “Dad, just get out of the way. Let him do his thing.” And I am glad I listened to him and I am honored to say that you were more than generous with your time and your authenticity, and your truths and you have a deal there, my friend that I would love to have you on and I am going to read through your book and full. I did not have a chance to read the whole book on racism, because I got all your books. I bought them all off actually off of Amazon and they are all on my desk, but I am going to read it through and I would love to have you back on Dr. Knowles just a show on this issue and maybe if you would like we could even bring on a few other people.

Mathew: Yeah, I would like that. I would love that…

John: I would like you to curate it. You to curate the show. How was that?…

Mathew: Let me tell you something. We connected the moment we got on the phone. I think it is important for listeners to understand. We were able to just have a conversation. Two men just having a conversation and you took the time, you took the step forward to get to know me somewhat. We just talked and that is, that you from the very beginning because I always say I have a three-second rule. In three seconds you can scam someone up. In three seconds. And you came with love and brotherhood and energy that I love so I enjoyed this, my brother.

John: The feeling is mutual. And like I said, I really would love you too and when it is convenient, I would like you to curate the show because this issue is not going to get solved overnight. And the more conversations we have on them, the better role going to be. And more conversations with really important people like you who are truly leaders and educators that is a unique melding of talents that are, there is a void in, you know everywhere. There is a void in leadership. I really feel that in America right now, in government and in so many other areas. So to have you back on and you curate the show just not you and me. You are going to tell me who we are going to invite.

Mathew: Well, thank you.

John: I am going to read your book and for our listeners out there, it is important that we do a little commercial here because this is very important, this is my gratitude to you. Please lookup, Dr. Mathew Knowles, you could buy his books on his website. You could book him to speak and obviously after 90 minutes today, you could tell he is got a lot to share. Please go to www.mathewknowles.com with one T. M-A-T-H-E-W K-N-O-W-L-E-S dot com. You could also buy his books as I did originally on Amazon. They are all over Amazon and other great places. You could buy fine books. He is got five books out. His sixth book is coming out. Dr. Mathew Knowles, I am beyond honored to have spent 90 minutes with you today. I am beyond grateful. Hopefully, I can reciprocate one day and I would love to have you on again and I would really love us to keep our word to each other and we do another show just on this important topic and you create that whole show, you will be the curator of it.

Mathew: Well, thank you so much, John. I just want to read something in ending, “Collective Hearts, when put to positive action, can start the wheels of change.” And I am proud to say that that was in Beyonce’s speech to all of the graduates last weekend. “Collective Hearts, when put to positive action, can start the Wheels of Change.”

John: I love that. That was in her 2020 online graduation speech, right?

Mathew: Yes, she wrote that, yes.

John: That is beautiful and obviously that comes from two great parents and leadership in your family and from a brave and great and ultra-successful young woman that she is and I just want to thank you for making the impact that you have made on me, on our listeners and in this in this country. We need to hear more of your voice and if it is up to me we are going to. So thank you again, Dr. Knowles. This has been a true honor today.

Mathew: Thank you, John. Have a great day.

John Shegerian: Welcome again to the Impact podcast. I am JohnShegerianand I am so honored and excited to have my good friend Tony Schifano on with us again. He came on green his good years ago and he has done so much since we have last spoken with him. Welcome to the Impact podcast, Tony.

Tony Schifano: John, such a pleasure to be with you again. My old friend, it has been how long since that?

John: Oh my gosh, six or seven, maybe eight years. It feels like a blink of an eye, but for guys like you and me life moves so fast now and it just feels like it was a moment ago. So it is just wonderful to hear your voice and you have been doing so many fascinating things that our listeners need to hear about. But before we go into everything you are working on right now and the period of the world history that we are living through together with all our listeners, I want you to share a little bit about what has happened at Antos Environmental since we have last spoken and the evolution of of your company.

Tony: Oh, that is a nice question. Thanks. Well, since we last spoke, of course, we have just continued to grow exponentially and much of my work has been in health care for all of the thirty years. A good decade ago, we started looking at how we can affect and change the way or other organizations operate such as universities and corporations. So westarted taking our expertise in that direction and it happened quite accidentally, John, because we often service some very big health systems like the University of Miami Medical Center, but they are attached to two huge campuses of the University of Miami. So after a while the schools were just asking us, “Hey, could you come help us?” And you know, I am very passionate about my work, so it was an easy “yes”for us. And when you have been experience doing hospitals and healthcare organizations, as long as I have and they are very complex as you know, and very scientific and challenging in terms of how many waste dreams actually exist in healthcare organization moving to a non healthcare organization and forgive me. I mean, no ill-will with this statement, but it is much easier for us. I mean, there is no medical waste. There is no pathological waste to speak of coming out of the University. So we started making a move in that direction and it was so lively and vibrant for us dealing with university students and staff who really just want to do the right thing and helping them and guiding them just opened up the doors for us. And now of course we are partnered with an organization called E&I Education and Industry, a wonderful organization that has a few thousand universities connected to them and they introduced us like, you know that format of a GPO kind of thing. But a little different, they really develop relationships and they have gotten us in front of many many universities. So that happened and we got very very busy.

Tony: Then at one point, some of these larger organizations stepped in and really wanted to acquire us and I was not certain whether I wanted to do that. I have been working with organizations likeAramark, Sodexo, Crothal and the like for many many many years and I have some great friends in all of those organizations, and some of them sort of stepped up and started to show an interest because none of them actually do what I do and when we partnered we had so much value to their proposition. So the long and the short of it is I ended up selling my company and I thought I was very happy.You know, you work hard and I have got to be in my 60s and thought, well, this might be a good time. Well, the long story short is that I did not know what to do with myself. The people who were running my company with all due respect know how to run my company. Certainly, they did not have the passion I have around our work because it is not their work. Their work is something else and they wanted to sort of add my stuff Scotch tape it to their stuff. SoI was watching a little decline and I was not as busy as I wanted to be and I am not the kind of guy who embraces the word retire. So I bought my company back. I know that sounds a little wild but it did not feel well to me. We bought it back. They were happy. I was buying it back because they were sort of confused on how to operate it anyway. And John, I have been the happiest guy ever since and I have to have a purpose and this is what I do. I have been busier ever since and I have got my boys involved in the business, which is a real pleasure for me. And we have been now sort of focusing on the things we love to do and and it is great because we save people tons of money and we make money. You know, I always tell people– I sleep at night because I really live my life honestly and ethically.I have a great moral compass around this work and I get checks in the mail. We do this work and then we get paid. It is like a miracle so it feels good. I feel really blessed, John. That is kind of short stories.

John: Tony, you love what you do. So that is why your joy is always so easy to to see and hear when I speak with you every time, whether it is on the phone or on the show.I always sense how happy you are doing what you are doing and that is why you are also great at what you do.

John: For our listeners out there that want to find Tony’s great company Antos Environmental or want to use their services, you could go to www.antosinc.com. Tony, you and I were chatting last week in catching up just as two friends do and we both were sharing the timesthat we live in in our experiences that were both going through, both our families, friends and our businesses, and I would love you to share some of your thoughts and comments around this covid tragedy that the world is facing right now, how it relates to medical waste generation and just some your general thoughts around where we are going with this and how we can better handle this crisis from a medical wasteperspective and from a healthcare perspective as well.

Tony: Another great question and thank you for that opportunity because it really starts back more than thirty years ago from me, John, to answer that question because you know, I started my career– Well, I started my career scraping gum off the stairwell at Columbia Presbyterian [crosstalk], like most of us, right? But at some point, school and a lot of hard work, I found myself in hospital management and in the late 1970s, we experienced something like this and it was called the AIDS epidemic. Everything that makes my company what it is today came out of that experience. You know, like you because I know you and I sense things about you and our friendship, we look at what reveals itself in life, and if you have youreyes open then you miss things and I always have my eyes open. Back in the late 1970s, I watched this AIDS epidemic create a hysteria and a level of paranoia that I never experienced in my life. And my hospital at the time was Booth Memorial Medical Center in Queens. It is now– I do not know what it is now. I think it was New York Hospital Queens. It might have even transition to something else.

Tony: Anyway, I am standing in this five hundred bed hospital andwe were generating about ten red bags a day back then, John. It was called infectious waste. When you saw a red bag, you got really nervous. You know what I mean? It was a lot of integrity in that bag. And in seventy-two hours, there was a red bag everywhere under secretaries desk, in the bathroom. It was the most unbelievable reaction that I had ever seen because universal precautions came out then, which was highly misinterpreted and basically they said,”Anything, everything is infectious, unless you prove it otherwise,” which means what everything, blow your nose in a tissue, went to red bag. Then that time what happened to me because I was a young man hungry for money. I quit my job and I got a truck and we created this third licensed medical waste hauler in the United States and we were picking up “medical waste” and laughing all the way to the bank because these red bags had flowers, pizza boxes, soda cans and everything. The whole hospital is red bagged. I do not want to tell you how much money we made in the first nine months. But we were laughing all the way to the bank. I am embarrassed to tell you. That did not work for me in a very short period of time. I sold a company within two years. That company became Browning-Ferris Waste and then Browning-Ferris, of course so-

John: BFI.

Tony: BFI and they sold this TerraCycle, which TerraCycle originally formed. They estimate of become, you know, a CEO or COO or something, but I did not want to do that because I knew that picking up waste material carried an agenda that I did not want. Okay. So let us fast forward the tape to now to this covid-19. And of course, I have thirty years of experience, you know stars and all these things that have come. What immediately happens and I mean no disrespect to any of my friends in the disposal business, but there becomes a dialogue out of that industry that is predatory based in my opinion and I am speaking like a capitalist but there is a lack of consciousness, I think, because they create that nonsense paranoia and of course, our behaviors shift and volumes increase and their revenue increases. We are seeing that now throughout many healthcare organizations around the United States, around the world. Actually, we saw it in China and will get the China in a conversation I am sure, but I have been trying to deal with that volume and the technological void in China so that it can handle the volume properly. But everything about managing emotions and then waste, it comes from emotion. It is a behavioral thing and we have to manage our behavior and hospitals because waste is garbage and garbage is a brilliant word and garbage translates to let us not pay so much attention to this kind of psychologically. It is sort of drifts away from priorities and before you know it, a hospital that was paying a hundred thousand dollars a year is now paying a half a million dollars a year because their behavior change, the paranoia drove these nonsensical changes in operations, and we are seeing it again and it is a little upsetting to me and I have a lot of work ahead of me with clients. There was a time when we were working with Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and when we arrived, there cause for medical waste were six hundred thousand dollars a year, John. When we left it was eighty, six hundred to eighty.

John: Wow.

Tony: What it is supposed to be. I mean, we measure medical waste volume based on adjusted patient day activity. It is a very scientific and behavioral process. And this covid thing is just going to blow this right out of the water again, because people are red bagging, PPEs and all kinds of crazy stuff that they really do not.

John: So you are saying some of the bad actors will get involved and take advantage of this crisisand tragedy until folks like you step in and bring some rationality to it.

Tony: Well, there is a whole lot of money to be made in crisis and tragedies [inaudible]. I mean even as we see the stock market tanked, there are people thinking about how much money can be made moving into that environment and it is the same thing here. I appreciate that. Do not get me wrong. This is America and we are allowed to do that. But I think and what I am hopeful for is somewhere inEarth 2.0. What comes out of this is more of a moral and ethical sort of compass for all of us where it is more of like, do unto others not before they do unto you because that was what we have seen since 1929 to 2020. Everybody is in this do unto others before they get it themselves. But now we need to be out reaching that hand of helpfulness and generosity and this is the time to give without expecting anything in return. Believe me, John. I am a businessman. So do not think I am naive or do not think that I am about to start working for free, but I want the people that are in related industries to understand the whole picture and you know, hospitals right now are in a crisis. They are spending money they do not have. This is all over. They are going to have to recover businesses not going to be as usual. It is going to be quite different. I am not sure what it is, but I hope it is kinder and gentler.

John: Again, for our listeners who want to talk to Tony and his team about some of the services they could get from him at Antos Environmental, you could go to www.antosinc.com. So many of your amazing clients are on your website NYU Langone, Mount Sinai and some of the greatest brands in healthcare in the world you service. I thinkfor a lot of our listeners out there that are need for these kind of services or want to get an assessment to make sure that they are paying rational pricing during this type of crisis, I think it would serve them well to be in touch with you and of course I have nothing to do with Antos Inc. except just to bring them to someone who is really the godfather of this industry in so many ways and also a great person.

John: Tony, one of the things I want to talk about are some of your unique partnerships and leadership positions, you have taken not only in the United States but around the world with regards to healthcare and education. And first I want to hit upon this unique partnership and story that you have created in Puerto Rico. Can you share with our listeners what you are doing there, how you got involved and how that evolved over the last five years or so?

Tony: Absolutely. It is been a real delight for me personally and amazing experience for my company. I go back again about seven or eight years. The first time I visited actually going to Puerto Rico is in 1967 as a very young man, and it was just an enchanting place for me to be and I have some friends who live up here in the Berkshires and they went to school in Puerto Rico as children in the 50s and they always talk to me about helping Puerto Rico and I was always interested.

Tony: Well, one of the people they went to school with, absolutely wonderful man who I just lost. I miss him terribly. His name is Dr. John [inaudible] He is an epidemiologist and he was the Secretary of Health of Puerto Rico for two terms under both political leaderships. John went to a place called The Robinson School. A friend of mine went there with John and his children, and this gal said to me, “Hey, won’t you fly down there and meet John? He is great guy.” Well, I did and meeting John was like meeting a brother from another mother kind of like you, John. You just kind of connect. It is a soulful connection.

John: Instinct chemistry.

Tony: Well, that is just the chemical thing and it was wonderful and John did not know me or anything I did. You know, over the years while we have had so much success in medical waste management, reduction and efficiencies, we embraced all waste streams now, so solid waste, pathological, confidential and all kinds of things around sustainability, which is the key word here. We talked about John and I. He said, “I guess you want to get a hospital client.” And I said, “Well, I would love that.” But he took me to the biggest hospital, there was on the island, and we were contracted under three months and we reduce their costs and volumes by sixty-five percent and it became a minor miracle, but some of their regulations and laws were outdated. So we connected with the Environmental Quality Boards down there, and the DEC of Puerto Rico is actually connected to the DEC of New York and I had wrote regulations for the DEC in New York many years ago. To make a long story short, we updated all the regulations which led me to relate to many of the politicians. I got to meet the governor at the time, et cetera. And long story short, John, when you live on an island, any Island, but in this case Puerto Rico, there are many many challenges, you know the idea of throwing something away. About 20 years ago, I coined the phrase, there is no place called the way.

John: That is right.

Tony: It really stuck that phrase but on an island, there is no place called the way, right? I mean it just going to go away and you got to think differently when you are on an island andthere are some areas of the island where you are at a stoplight and you watch somebody through a coffee cup out a window, just breaks my heart. So I started to contemplate the idea of a cultural transformation and you can imagine that is a pretty heady thought, but it leads me to some very big personal growth when I think about that because how the hell am I going to do this? But the fact is, I have got to create a cultural transformation because they are generating the island, eleven thousand tons of solid waste material a day.Their landfill space is filling rapidly. They have a number of landfill space that are not approved by the EPA and some of the private spaces, it is just a matter of time before they are full. So what happens once these things are full in their shut, they end up dumping waste in the mountains. And by the way, they are dumping waste on the side of 95 on the east coast of Florida today because there is no landfill and they can not get the State of Florida to change their behavior. This is really a human tragedybecause if we just changed the way we are, our being, it is not about doing anything different, about being something different. If we can just stop landfilling waste, then we could solve so many problems.

Tony: Well in this case, Puerto Rico’s got eleven thousand ton of problem. Forty percent of it is food and all of it can be compost and turned into a soil amendment. That soil amendment would happily go to all the young farmers in Puerto Rico,which now are starting a whole new industry. So we are trying to create that shift and that movement pull forty percent of the food out. And then recycle at least fifty or sixty percent by creating a circular economy, turning plastic, metal and things into road surfaces and end up with maybe two or three thousand tons a day, which we can ultimately make go away with some zero-waste initiatives. But the real key of course is to educating the young, so we have infused ourselves into the school systems down there, particularly the Robinson School and many others where we are teaching the young people and helping them learn about composting and recycling and why buy a plastic water bottle when you can bring a water bottle from home and reuse it. This is the simplest thing in the world, John, but how many millions of people around the world just do not do that. We have acres and acres of plastic floating in the oceans and this has to stop.

Tony: My work in Puerto Rico is been very satisfying for me because we are moving in that direction. There is a real awareness happening. And this takes time, John. Going to take generations, you know. Hopefully my sons will continue this long after I am gone, but it is a very satisfying experience for us. We have been contacted now by other Central American countries like Panama, et cetera. We are studying what they are doing in the Philippines. Right now, believe it or not, because the covid and everybody is at home. Nobody is on the road. There is a perfect opportunity to resurface the road. So the Philippines making their plastic and their glass and they are creating this unique road surface and they are redoing all of their roads during this time. And you know, we have to start thinking that way, John.

Tony: So Puerto Rico to me now– I have some friends. I just lived there for the past year. I have my daughter at the Robinson School actually and learning a Spanish. She is a fabulous twelve-year-old and we just had a real experience living there. We moved back since because of the virus and we are going to stay here now for a while. When this virus is over, I am probably going to be quite busy and then of course I have this China thing going on and that is going to keep me busy too.

John: We are going to get to that in a second. Before we get to that, I just want to note a word from our sponsors. One of our sponsors here at the Impact podcast is Companies for Zero Waste. Companies for Zero Waste, theirgoal is to educate policymakers, corporations and investors to accelerate the movement towards eliminating waste and optimizing resources. To learn more about Companies for Zero Waste where Tony is going to be speaking at one of their next conference a date soon to be announced, you can find them at companiesforzerowaste.com, companiesforzerowaste.com.

John: Tony, let us go from a small island like Puerto Rico that you have begun the transformation culturally from an education standpoint from a motivation standpoint and from a policy standpoint now to one of the biggest countries in the world, China. You are now getting involved in a very very meaningful way with all of China and I would love you to explain to our listeners this very groundbreaking and important partnership that you are involved with now and going to be one of the leaders on for the years to come in China in the healthcare sector.

Tony: Yeah, that is a great challenge for us and I am really looking forward to it. I have been there already pre-virus crisis. I will pause for a second though, John, on that Companies for Zero Waste because those-

John: Sure.

Tony: They are just great. They are new relatively speaking, but they are very passionate. I communicate with Scott very regularly. I will be speaking at his conference. I think it is rescheduled now to September.They have two hundred plus companies. Everyone is trying to commit to zero waste which is a very very difficult undertaking, and make sure we circle back to that zero waste thing because I want to talk about that, but we will talk about China. So China is massive, right? thirty-one hospitals, twenty-two universities and education organization. It is a massive massive market. It will outshine us, and we are big, either they do now or they will shortly.

Tony: So I was there in 2005. I was invited by the Environmental Protection Bureau of Shanghai to help them with their medical waste technology future. So I flew over in 2005 and I was there for considerable amount of time and I got to assess the operationsof hospitals as it relates to this waste stream and I got to look at some of the technologies that were being used far and wide. To be quite frank, it was actually frightening what they were doing. The people that were handling this waste, there was so much risk and so much exposure and so much aerosolization and pollution. That was back in 2005. Of course since then they have evolved in leaps and bounds. I started talking about waste reductioninitiatives to China back then.

Tony: John, waste reduction are not two words that easily flow and did not flow at all. Ten or fifteen years ago, you start talking about waste reduction. People look at you like you are out of your mind, because we are throwaway society. We throw everything away. I mean our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, I mean in a very natural way, they reused everything. They washed everything. They were used it whether it was diapers. No matter what, right? But as we got more modern and our technology, plastics and everything became disposable. Even in the hospital, right? They would clean and sterilize a syringe and use it over and over again. Today we just throw them away. So the throwaway sort of thing in China– Well, that is really scary, John. I mean I have seen some landfills. Fresh kills landfill is the largest man-made object in the history of our civilization. It is the biggest and has ever made. You know in China, sized landfills of that capacity, they are everywhere and they are running out of space too and their population is huge.

Tony: So very recently I was contacted by a wonderful guy named Michael Edwards, Dr. Michael Edwards who owns a organization called USAT, United States Authentic Trading, and they have been trying to improve public health in China with Western technology is here from everywhere. Not only phenomenal companies, but Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, Purdue, University of California and the list goes on and on and on and on and they bring fascinating things to China and through USAT– You know, USAT is created this channel by which the introduction of these services and products move very rapidly and you get introduced to all of the right people that could make your product or service is very successful in China. So like virtual education, there is a virtual goggle that allows nursing students to actually study nursing without having to go to a building right there. They work on cadavers through this virtual glasses. It is phenomenal stuff.

John: Come on. Wow.

Tony: Long story short, these guys reach out to me because this group of people, Cleveland male all these people, they start doing some homework because the Chinese government has contacted them over the last couple of years. They want a sustainability direction and assistance and they really do not know what to do and they need it. And so this group of people did their diligence and they came up with me and contacted me. We had some initial dialogue and I happily invited myself to participate in this because this is a real challenge for me; Thirty-one thousand hospitals, right? twenty-two thousand is massive and I have to be thinking– again, here are some more personal growth, right? I am a great public speaker. I did speak all over the world. And but now I have to educate hundreds of millions of people and I have to try to figure this out with the Chinese government.

Tony: So we flew over. We had some fantastic meetings with guys who run the largest pharmaceutical companies and you know, who knows the president and the president now wants clean air, blue skies and healthy children. John, no matter what you think about China. I believe this guy actually wants that. I mean whether they are going to compete with us and-

John: I agree with you. Why would not he? I mean, he is a human being. Who does not want their children to have clean air, clean water in a better world? Then we found it.

Tony: Exactly. Right. Well, but that has not really been China’s MO over [crosstalk] right?

John: Right.

Tony: They would rather pollute and win. Now they want to win but they kind of want to do this the right way, which is– now, you are talking my language. Because you could be Jiffy Lube, you could be Price Chopper or you could be Sears Roebuck. I do not care. I do not care what you do. I care about who you are, right? So there is a conscious capitalism that has to be embraced. I do not care if you are the U.S., Puerto Rico, Panama or China. You could be this great country and you could care about your pollution levels, your people, your waste volumes and your water. I mean, all of these things are incredibly powerful and important.

Tony: So we went over. John, the vibe and the chemistry is like I am talking to you now. Robert Yao who runs Una Health over there. He is just a bright man. And they know that I have been doing this for thirty years. So there has not a lot of figuring me out. They already know what I am doing. They already know that I could help them. So what happened is we created this great partnership. I am now the director of Green Hospital education initiatives in China. We will be directing and working hand in hand with the government in helping healthcare operate in a new way and care about their pollution, more about their effect of their communities, et cetera. Now, along comes covid virus. Literally. I mean I come back. I am home. We are starting to build this relationship. They want to approve grants. We are looking at education video. We are looking– and then bang, this thing happens. It shuts China down, shuts me down, conversations, anything but the bigger picture now we have to focus on this immediate crisis. And of course, you know, China starts generating medical waste ten times what it was before and they just do not have the kinds of technologies.

Tony: I have relationships with fabulous people all over the world. And you know, one of them is a good pal who owns a company called Eco-DAS. Eco-DAS is a technology that actually manages, minimizes and destroy medical waste in seventy countries. They just do a great job. We introduced to China to Eco-DAS. We are trying to help them now with this great volume. They literally have, John, a mobile incinerator that rides around in the rural area and burns all this waste.

John: Oh my gosh.

Tony: Well, I am glad you said that because you can remember back in the 70s when it was black smoke and every major city of the U.S. from pathological incinerators burning God knows what in these hospitals and the dioxins and the levels of cancer were just astounding. That is why we do not do that anymore. And now this truck is running around China, burn all this stuff and it just really frightens me. So we are in the middle of doing our best to sort of upgrade, develop, and plan for the future and then hopefully get back to where we, Antos can get over there without team. They want us to set up an office in Shanghai. We are going to do a JV with them on a number of sort of side levels of business and start working on driving sustainability in healthcare. The way I worked on here in the states, I want to sort of mimic and copy over in China. So if I am in the middle of Philadelphia, for example, and I am working at Thomas Jefferson and was once Hardeman. You know, I have got five, six, seven big big clients in Philadelphia. The next thing I am going to do is move right into the university settings as many as I can. And the next thing I am going to do is move right into the K through 12. So we are layering this transformation, this cultural transformation because that is what most important. The best thing we can do in China is to educate the children. The best thing that we can do in Puerto Rico is to educate the children. The best thing we can do in the United States or anywhere in the world is to educate the children. So that now I have a full circle, right? I am at the hospital which is the largest employer of the area. I am at the university which has all these mature minded young people and then we are getting down to that grandma’s school mind where we can create a new way of being these kids can grow and they can become the leaders of our next generation where taking care of our natural resources is weaved into the fabric of their character unlike us. People’s characters can change if you offer someone enough money. Well, those kids– it will not change because it will be who they are and that is the future. So that is China’s future and that is our future and I think that is the world’s future. Right now as I am getting older the importance and focus of that education for the young becomes paramount.

Tony: But getting back to that volume issue, we are going to see it here in the states temporarily, I think. I think we have gone through a cycle of ups and downs even in the momentum of sustainability. I am sure you sense this, John. For a period of years, everybody is all hyped up about the sustainability, “Let us save the planet.” And then all of a sudden it wanes. I do not know why. It just goes away. And then it drops off and everybody is interested in money or everybody is interested in growth, and then it comes back. I mean, I am doing this in thirty years year. So this has happened to me five or six times. But this last time pre virus, I sense a momentum I really sensed before. I was in communication with huge organizations, you know, Kaiser. There is a stronger belief system that is coming from the people and it is not coming from the nurse, the doctor and/or the mechanic. It is coming from the people, schools and universities and they understand that now. There is enough data out there. I mean, this is science.

John: It is real.

Tony: I mean, you have the landfill space. Why are we using so many plastic? Single-use plastic is insane. Now, I do not want Coca-Cola or Pepsi to hate me if they are listening to this because I understand. I am about to work with a great company called Compass out of the Carolina at University of Pittsburgh and we have to look down the road. I mean maybe we are going to be selling Coca-Cola and Pepsi or whatever in single-use plastic right now because that is what we got. But we are going to look at five years from now to that plan. Maybe we can create a new dispenser. Maybe we can create– something has to change and if we are all focused on it and that momentum does not go away then we can change the world. It is very very important that we do.

John: You andI both have children that are young. Julian is my son’s age. My daughter’s a couple years older than them, those kids. And then your younger children are all like Greta Thunberg. They are all literally passionate about this. This was not part of your or my upbringing. We grew up in the public school systems in the New York metropolitan area. It was not part of the U.S. culture and like you said, now you are involved– No pun intended, you are involved with the whole ecosystem in Puerto Rico, U.S. and China. You are down in the education levels with great schoolers. You are on the medical level working with people in the field and you are also working with policymakers on all these levels and that is what is going to move the needle. America had already moved on from the industrial revolution. You have caught China. Unfortunately, China did not have the luxury of going through the industrial revolution when we did. They were going through their industrial technological and sustainability revolution all together and your shepherding them from the industrial and technological revolution, which we went through in sort of a sequential form here in America. You are now helping, shepherd them in Puerto Rico into the sustainability revolution, which we sort of have a jump on here in America, but we are still far behind from South Korea, Japan, Europe, which are like, you said, smaller countries less land could not act as responsibly as larger land masses have acted for all these generations. So now, you are in that unique position of ecosystem, education field, policy making and touching all of those. You really get to push the movement forward much faster than many others who just work in silos.

Tony: Thank you. And that is true. It is not without very deep challenge and frustration and you know, obviously under [crosstalk] about what I do, I love it, right? But some of the things that I come up against and I am grateful that I do not have a truck anymore. I have not had one for thirty years, right? So my agenda is very pure but I am very aware and I have a lot of empathy about the changing sort of industries. The garbage man, he just can not be a garbage man anymore. You know, I meet a guy in Puerto Rico, John, who is doing a hundred million dollars a year. Very nice business; hundred million dollars a year. And this guy does not want to change his company. He does not want to evolve. He likes picking up garbage and he likes making a hundred million dollars a year. I am trying to convince him that that is not going to work anymore. You know, it is been great for you. You have had a great run. Now, you could still make a hundred million dollars a year, but now you have to compost food waste, you have to create some circular economy around your recyclables. There is so many innovative, creative and exciting things that you can do with your resources and potentially make more than a hundred million dollars a year. But what we have are some– you know, they are set in their ways. They are very familiar. They have gotten very used to this revenue and I speak the same way about major companies here in the United States, John, that are just kind of stuck. You know, the garbage guy that comes and says, “We are going to help you recycle and we are going to help you minimize waste.” Well, that is like the mice garden the cheese. It just does not work. So they have to evolve and I do not mean that in a disrespectful way. It has to happen. And that is where I am betting on that college kid and that young sixth grader and twenty-five years from now, we are not going to have garbage men because there is no such thing as garbage.

Tony: Let me do this with you, John, because it is really fun. I do this all the time with lots of people particularly during a speaking engagement. So you are sitting in your office, you have a garbage can, everybody says, “Yes.” And then I asked this very trick question, “Okay, tell me what is garbage” and everybody gets really quiet and I let everybody off the hook, and I am going to let you off the hook because this is a trick question and there are two answers to this question and both answers are absolutely true. The first answer is everything is garbage because that is a garbage can and everything you put in it is going to go to the dumpster and going to go to the landfill and it is garbage, unless a rather sophisticated back in company that is going to segregate on the back end with magnets and blowers and pick out all the resource and sell it somewhere around the world. That is a smart guy. But in your office, it is garbage. The second answer which is absolutely true, is nothing. What is garbage? Paper? No. Plastic? No. Glass? No. What? Half a tuna fish sandwich? No. I can compost that. What? What is garbage? Now, I am a realist, so I know that there are things that are garbage. If you like to eat Frito-Lay chips or something, you know, you got that stupid little bag that you both downstairs at the bodega or a dollar fifty and they would like thirty-two chips and you ate them all. Now you got this stupid little bag and that bag has to be garbage. So if there is no garbage can in your office, what do you do with those few items that need to be put into a trash can? Well, in my clients and in my environments, there is a landfill bucket near the restroom because everybody has got to go to the restroom, but on a floor where there were six hundred garbage cans, now there is one. Got it?

John: Got it.

Tony: And that is how we move towards zero waste. Now, the real problem is that stupid little bag and that single use plastic bottle and all those stupid little things that we buy. Like you know, your Arizona or your Snapple or your favorite iced tea, I mean, why do you buy it? You buy it because you want the liquid but when the liquid is gone, what do you do? You throw the glass bottle in a public garbage can. You walk away. The bottle will take a hundred years to decompose. You will be dead. You know, we need a therapist here. This is serious. You can not do that. So people have to become accustomed to taking a water bottle with them, fill a water bottle with iced tea for later, buy a big stupid bag of chips and fill a little bag that you can reuse, take your lunch with– Like it is just changing behavior and minimizing your impact on the planet.

Tony: John, when you and I were born, there were two billion people on the planet. Now there are– how many? How many are there going to be in another twenty? This is hard and we have to make some radical changes in our behavior. But I think the momentum is there and I am so grateful for today because the more I get to talk about it, the more I can help implement change.

John: Let us end this episode by talking about what are you going to be doing at Companies for Zero Waste next conference in Newark, New Jersey on September 29th and 30th, where you are going to be one of the keynote speakers. Can you share a little bit with our audience? Give them a little taste of what you are going to be talking about.

Tony: Of course. Well, more of what you heard today. You know, this is one of those occasions where I feel honored because I am actually preaching to the choir, right? I tend to like more when I am sitting in front of a thousand people who are not devotees or are working for some massive organization like Microsoft and I am trying to change the entire country. This particular instance I am going to be sitting in front of industry leaders who really want to do this. So it is not just going to be about medical waste, my discussion. It is going to be about this cultural transformation that is absolutely necessary. And listen, if Subaru can make a damn car in Indianapolis in 2001, they decided they were going to be a zero waste company in 2004, they did not landfill a coffee cup. Nothing. As a matter of fact, last year, John, they took their final item, which was the coffee pod out of those machines. You know what I am talking about?

John: Right.

Tony: Now, they make picnic benches out of the pods. This is Subaru. This is an automobile manufacturing company. They make damn cars and they landfill nothing. Now, if they can do that, I would guess eighty-five percent of the industry in the United States can do that. We just have to create the desire. Now, my desire– and I will be sharing this with Scott and his group in September, is when you do not throw something away, you save money. I mean, this is how I have made money, John, my whole life, right? I mean, if I save a hospital a hundred bucks, I get a portion of the hundred bucks and they do not have to pay me anything unless I deliver the savings. So if you are feeling up a compactor five times a week and when I get done with my magic, it is twice a month. You just cut your costs besides your volume dramatically. When Thomas Jefferson’s medical waste cost goes from six hundred thousand a year to eighty. I mean, listen, if you are not inspired to save the planet, you got to be inspired to save money. We need to talk about this now to companies and policymakers who are stuck and you know, they have been business as usual, Waste Management Inc., TerraCycle, on and on and on, Republic and Allied and you know, we know what their business is. They have got to step up. They have got to evolve. They have got to join in on this. Of course, they are not sitting in the audience in September. I believe they should be. They need to surround themselves with people who want to change their behavior. Now, is it going to impact their revenue? Absolutely. TerraCycle has been trying to wipe me off the planet for twenty years. My buddy Charlie Eludo, we grew up on Long Island together. He was the president of TerraCycle for three years and he was fighting himself whether to buy me or build me. He did not know what to do with me, but there were years when I cost them seventy million dollars because we reduce the volume. That is the magic of personal power and I am going to be discussing this in great detail with those wonderful guys- [crosstalk]

John: Wonderful.

Tony: –to throw a waste and they will probably be two hundred companies. They are trying to be zero waste. Let us talk about zero waste just for a minute, John, because two very easy words to say, you know, very easy, but this is a very huge undertaking. It is massive and it is not going to happen in like– you do not use duct tape and magic wands here. This is bigger than losing weight or stopping smoking. This is massive, right? And we do not do that very well. We do not need good with [crosstalk] way. We do not do those things very well.

Tony: So zero waste is an undertaking and an evolution in my mind and it easily is a five-year game. You are maybe not going to get there even then because it has so much to do with the purchasing aspect, the utilization asking those big questions, do I need this? You know, we go to a supermarket, John, and we have been for most of our lives and you go to the produce section and there is a big wheel of plastic bags and you pull plastic bag out and you put your broccoli in. Now that seems really normal, but it is not normal because we do not need the plastic bag. There are companies now that make net breathable bags of all different sizes. My wife and I have them and we do not take a plastic bag. We have not taken plastic bag in years because we go to the supermarket carrying these net bags for all of the produce and eliminate the use of plastic. That simple shift has to be done in every which way from Sunday in either personal homes or schools or hospitals or businesses and that is how you slowly get to zero waste. The most satisfying thing of the zero waste initiative is the process and I joke and say, well, it is wonderful to fail and I do not mean failure in a negative way. But you know, when you start reducing your overall waste volume by eighty percent or ninety percent,I know you want a hundred percent but wow! We just cut this back down to eighty-five percent and it is massive and that is what we need. So I am an advocate. We have done it tons of times. We are helping organizations as we speak today. Well, not exactly today unless we could do it on Zoom. How about Zoom these days, John? What a company?

John: Right, right.

Tony: I am looking forward to September. I support the Companies for Zero Waste in what they are doing and I am going to have a great time when I am presenting.

John: For any of our listeners out there that want to buy tickets to come see Tony speak and the other great speakers that Companies for Zero Waste in Newark, New Jersey on September 29th and 30th, you could go to www.companiesforzerowaste.com. To reach Tony the CEO of Antos Environmental, you could go to www.antosinc.com. Tony, you are making a huge impact in our world and making the world a better place. I thank you for your time today. I thank you for what you are doing for all of us on our behalf and on the environments behalf. And again, thank you for being my friend and a guest today.

Tony: Pleasure, John. I look forward to speaking with you again soon.

John Shegerian: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com.

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Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I am John Shegerian. I am so honored to have today, Joel Peterson, with us. Welcome to Impact, Joel Peterson.

Joel Peterson: Really nice to be with you, John.

John: You know, Joel, you are literally one of the legends in the business community, in the world, and I’m going to take the show to go into all the things you’ve done and accomplished. But I’m just going to give a little bit of a highlight here to our listeners, to kick off the show. You have been the chairman of JetBlue for somewhere around the last 12 years and this is your second-to-last day. So I am going to ask you about JetBlue because I’m a huge fan of the great brand that you helped build there. You are also a storied and very very awarded Stanford business professor. You’re also the founder of the P Firm Peterson Partners and also one of the seed investors and early investors in some great brands that so many of us love and adore such as Bonobos and Asurion. So, welcome to Impact and I’m just so honored that you’re here today with us, Joel. Can you just share a little bit about your journey in life and in the business world?

Joel: So, yeah, I started out in Iowa. I was born in Iowa. My father was a graduate student and we then moved to Michigan where he went on the faculty at Michigan State University and I started my first business when I was 11 years old. And it was basically selling vegetables in the neighborhood. I hired my younger brother to carry them around and deliver them in his red Radio Flyer wagon, and I paid him a nickel for the whole summer. So I had an entrepreneurial instinct early on and then I worked as a busboy, a dishwasher, a biochem lab assistant, a French teacher, a sugar beet thinner. I did all kinds of things. Ultimately, I ended up at Harvard Business School where I learned not as much as I did delivering vegetables around the neighborhood. Probably a little more sophisticated, but I think I learned really the essence of delighting customers from those early days doing all those, kind of, very manual jobs.

John: And when you got out of Harvard, what did you do after Harvard?

Joel: So I was hired by a fellow by the name of Trammell Crow who’s a legend in the real estate business and he sent me to the French Riviera and–

John: Woah.

Joel: Yeah. It was a tough assignment, but I never really made it there. I made it to Lyon, which is a great city and then in Paris where I developed office buildings and warehouses for a couple of years, came back to the United States, was appointed treasurer of a company without any cash and then became the Chief Financial Officer of a company in duress, where I ended up working out debt. And then for about 10 years, I served as the Chief Financial Officer of this really the largest private real estate development company in the world. And, ultimately, I became the managing partner. After that, I formed my own private equity and investment firm. We actually do real estate investing, venture investing, and private equity investing and I started teaching on the faculty at Stanford. I was asked to teach just for a year to fill in for a fellow and I’ve been there for 28 years. Since then, I’ve joined lots of boards, invested in hundreds of companies, developed hundreds of more real estate projects, and just tried to stay busy. I was kind of the original guy in the gig economy.

John: Oh my gosh, no kidding, my god. And that’s why I’m so honored to have you here today, too, because I know how busy you are in all the brands that you’re involved with. But today I’m so excited because I’m a serial entrepreneur and we’re living through very different times right now. You and I are taping this show as we said, your second to last day as the executive– as the chairman of JetBlue, which I want to get into in a little bit but you’ve also written this wonderful book and I’ve read part of this book and I want to ask you questions about it’s called, Entrepreneurial Leadership: The Art of Launching New Ventures, Inspiring Others and Running Stuff. You know, as a country that is known for innovation, for the innovation nation and actually it’s very arguable that Silicon Valley is the heart of that innovation and you’ve been a teacher there now, 28 years, a professor there. Tell me why was it important for you to write this book and then we’re going to get into some of the key themes of this book but why did you want to write it now? What was on your mind?

Joel: What was on my mind was the 4,000 MBA students that I’ve taught over the last 28 years and realizing that many of them go out into the market and they struggle. We’ve taught them all the things they need to know but they’ve never really had to face high winds, face cold nights, face cash shortages, faced all the things that that you do. So I actually use the analogy of a trek, of actually a hike that my wife took in the mountains and she got lost and ended up having to spend the night on the mountain. Even though she knew to take a down jacket, to hike with somebody else, to have a compass, to have a cell phone charged but, you know, in the heat of the moment or in the cold of the moment, she didn’t have any of those things. And so I thought, “You know, so many of our young entrepreneurs get out there and they don’t really have all the skills or the checklist,” so I thought, “I’m going to put them all together. I’m going to try to boil it down to four simple things that you must do and then give a set of checklists that people can follow so when they are faced with adversity or driving change or needing to negotiate deals or communicate in bad times or whatever, they kind of have a checklist, a series of mindsets they can use.” And I just thought that would be a helpful guide to young entrepreneurs and we need entrepreneurs, we need entrepreneurial leaders.

John: I love it. And just for our listeners out there, the book is out. You could get it at great bookstores around you. I know this is a time where bookstores are not really open yet. So, online, of course, you could get it at barnesandnoble.com. And, of course, the huge giant amazon.com. It’s a great read and towards the end of the show, we’re going to be giving away a few copies signed by Joel himself. So, listen in and we’ll talk about that later in the show. You say these four pillars that you talk about in the book – hallmarks of an entrepreneurial leader. Can you walk us through what you believe are the hallmarks of an entrepreneurial leader, Joel?

Joel: So I’ll just quickly give you the four and I described them as piers. If you’ve been in the construction business, you know, the piers are the things that contractors drill all the way to bedrock – the foundation sits on piers. So these are the things that you really need to get established. And the first one is trust. Great businesses are built on trust. That’s trust with their customers, they have loyal customers but it starts with the entrepreneur or the leader being trustworthy. That means he or she delivers on promises and then it devolves into creating high trust cultures; high trust organizations where all of the team relies on each other. The second thing that these great enterprises do is they have a common mission and they are clear about it. They can describe their mission, they own their mission, they have helped develop their mission and they are clear about it. They know what they’re about and this gives meaning to the organization. People work for meaning and you don’t need to worry about motivating people who are working for something that means a lot to them. So, having trust, developing a mission, then what you got to do is you’ve got to have a great team and that means sourcing great people, interviewing them, doing due diligence on them, onboarding them, coaching them along the way, promoting or demoting them, and ultimately, it means you have to learn how to, unfortunately, fire people who don’t fit. Because, if you really think about it, your job is to put the best possible team on the field at all times. So, once you’ve got a high trust culture, a clear mission and you’ve got a great team on the field, what you have to do then is execute and what I determined was that there really are ten things that every entrepreneur runs into. You know, they are going to have to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty. They’re going to have to make sales, without sales there’s no business. You got to have revenue, they got to have to negotiate, they are going to have to raise capital, they got to communicate in bad and good times, they have to run great meetings, they have to work with the board. They have to overcome adversity, survive growth, and then really drive permanent change which is the essence of being an entrepreneurial leader. So really there are checklists there and the way I tried to describe that is that using the analogy of a pilot. You know if you have a pilot that’s flown a plane for 25 years, you may not need the checklist, but he always goes through it. There’s not a single pilot ever that wouldn’t sit down with the checklist and go through it. So this is really to, sort of, give the entrepreneurial leader a way to add up. To really consider what they’re going through and saying, “Have I thought about this. What’s my mindset about change? How do I make these decisions? How do I raise capital?”

John: When you’re investing as an angel investor and also sitting on boards that you do, is this a checklist that you promote to the teams that you touch as an investor and then also as a board member, is this something that you constantly– is this a drumbeat that’s been a constant throughout your life?

Joel: No, I’ve actually developed and I’ve developed largely by making mistakes, you know, I don’t know that anybody’s ever really studied all these things and wired them all together. This is just my observation over 50 years and seeing a lot of things work and seeing things not work and it’s a little bit like seeing a movie a bunch of times. Once you’ve seen it a bunch of times, you know the plotline, you know where the hero runs into trouble and so I actually have a bit of pattern recognition now on these things. So that’s one of the reasons I thought, “You know, I had to write this down. This might help somebody else get off the mountain when they’re astray.”

John: Hey, for our listeners who have just tuned in, we’re so honored to have with us today, Joel Peterson. He just wrote a book called, Entrepreneurial Leadership: The Art of Launching New Ventures, Inspiring Others, and Running Stuff. No greater time than right now during this tragic pandemic to learn about entrepreneurial leadership if you’re sitting at home and you have time on your hands during this pause in society, read this book. We all can learn to become better leaders.

Joel, you are still, today the chairman of JetBlue. Talk a little bit about the last 12 years there and some of the highs and lows that you’ve had there and as you say goodbye now to that position there, how does it feel?

Joel: Bittersweet, in a word. So, I joined JetBlue before we had any planes. So I’ve been there right from the very beginning. I was actually brought on board to develop T5, Terminal 5, out of JFK because I’d come, as I mentioned from a real estate background, and nobody else on the board had ever built a building. This is a fairly complex project and they wanted somebody at board level who could kind of oversee it and work with folks. So we grew, like all airlines do, with debt and it’s about 2007 or 8, we had a big mountain of debt. We were probably 80% leveraged and we were losing, I think, that year we lost maybe eighty-five million dollars, something like that. So we actually made a change in CEO, David Neeleman was our founder, he’d been there for about 10 years.

John: Right.

Joel: Fantastic guy. A brilliant entrepreneur. A wonderful human being. But we just decided as a board that it was time for new leadership, 10 years is a long time particularly as a CEO. So I stepped in at that time as chairman. Actually, David became chairman for a year and then I stepped in as chairman and we started working on reducing our debt load, building our income statement, and we really ended up going into this pandemic with the second strongest balance sheet in the airline industry. So we did a lot of surgery on things and the thing that I’m proudest of though is that we build a phenomenal culture and you know if you’re in a commodity business, typically the only way you win in a commodity business is on price and we decided we wanted to offer the customer something better. David’s initial comment was he wanted to bring humanity back to air travel. So we initiated with seatback TVs, more space, free snacks, and nice people, you know, people who really like their customers. So I think we’ve developed, kind of, a JetBlue experience that is differentiated.

John: You definitely did, Joel. I mean, I grew up in Queens. So, even though I live on the West Coast, I go back and forth a lot. I have an office in New York, and I’ve been a huge fan since day one of your airline. So you did build one of the greatest and nicest airlines with some of the greatest people on them and also some of the best equipment that having a television on board sure makes the time go by a lot faster than without a television.

Joel: Yeah. Well, do you remember when Maria – not Navratilova – Sharapova.

John: Yeah, of course.

Joel: It turned out her mother had been on that flight out to the West Coast and got to see her daughter win that and Maria was being interviewed and she gave us free advertising by saying, “You know, my mom got to watch me on JetBlue.” So–

John: That’s awesome. That is just awesome. Well, you built a great airline. And it is bittersweet, I’m sure, after 12 years. But you have so much going on, there are so many things still for you to accomplish including this great book you’ve just written. So in the book, you talk about trust and you talk about assessing your core values. Can you share a little bit about what you mean by that in terms of leadership and trust in assessing your own core values first?

Joel: Yeah. I think, really, we each have a brand, you know, if you were to ask the twenty people who know you best–

John: Yeah.

Joel: The likelihood is they would come up with some of the same words to describe you. That is your brand. That’s what Tom Peters calls Me Inc. and that’s your promise to people who meet you, to the marketplace, to customers. So you have a brand and I think every company has a brand, some are a little bit frazzled, they’re frayed, they’re unclear, they are amorphous. But if you really think about it and you become predictable, if you’re predictable other people can make decisions for you. If you’re not – if you’re mercurial, if nobody can really put their finger on your brand, nobody dares make any decisions because you might countermand them. So I think one of the main things is to really become predictable as a leader so that people can then step in and make the calls and the more that you can empower your team – that’s what Stan McChrystal talks about, driving the decision as far into the field as you can until it hurts.

John: That’s interesting. That is very interesting. You talk about the brand though. And you talk about having a consistent brand but there’s something in the book that was really interesting to me that I want you to discuss more and enlighten us on. You talk about rewriting your operating system and the mantra that you had that was repeated. Can you share a little bit about – it’s not about me, and what that means to you and how that’s important as a leader?

Joel: Well, that was intended to be idiosyncratic to me. It may be helpful to other people but really when I looked at sort of how I behaved and what was getting in the way of me being really affected, I really realized when I was really honest, you know, in the dark, thinking about it, that I was egocentric and I was thinking about how everything affected me and I really realized that I couldn’t be as effective as a leader unless I made it not about me. And, you know, you’ve been around people who are quiet, just waiting for you to finish saying something so they can jump in with their own point of view. That’s a little bit how I was I think and so I decided, “I’m going to make it so that I’m a great listener. I can capture and it’s not about me. It’s about the mission.” And so I became other-centered. I actually became really a fiduciary for other people trying to sort out what’s in their best interest. What’s in the best interest of the enterprise? It is not about me and it changed the way I work. So that was one of the things that I needed to address because of that characteristic that I had grown up with. I was the oldest of five children. I was much older than my next sibling, I had always gotten great grades. My parents had praised me and so I just grew up thinking I was, you know, the center of the universe and that’s not a good way to lead. So that was the mantra that I repeated. It took me several years and a number of instances of doing that to unwind that and replace it.

John: That’s a classy way of really saying that as leaders, people really have to learn to get over themselves.

Joel: Exactly.

John: You know, my wife and I have had the honor and luck to have attended one of Warren Buffett’s annual events in Omaha, Nebraska, and our favorite part of the event when he was talking about leaders – this was about seven years ago, and he said when he’s trying to pick a leader of one of his portfolio brands, he has three things he thinks about constantly when he’s interacting with the person that he’s focused on to potentially be his choice. He says they need to have energy, they need to have brains, and they need to have character. And he said if they don’t have the third thing, the first two will kill you. And that stuck with us in terms of our hiring practices and our leadership of our little brand. For you, one of the words in terms of great leadership that you focus on in your new book, Entrepreneurial Leadership is integrity. Can you share a little bit about what you mean by integrity and how is that applied for entrepreneurial leaders across the planet?

Joel: I think the most powerful way to think about it is thinking about whether or not you have what I call a say-do gap. Is there a gap between what you say and what you do? Because any distance between those actually creates a leak, creates mistrust. People say, “Well, he says this but he does this.” There’s a cynicism that comes with that. So reducing that say-do gap is really powerful. I think another thing is not having one set of standards in your private life and another in your public or professional life. People are smart. They realized that if you don’t have integrity in your private life, they can’t really trust you in your public life because, at some point, something’s going to come along that will tempt you to do something else. So it’s, kind of, a structural integrity. The way engineers talk about structural integrity that really holds it all together. So, to me, that’s the notion of integrity.

John: Oh, that’s wonderful. And for our listeners who have just joined, we’ve got Joel Peterson. He’s a storied business leader. He’s written a new book called, Entrepreneurial Leadership. Of course, it’s available now on amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and bookstores near you when all the bookstore is open up across this great planet. He also is the founder of Peterson Partners. If you want to find Joel there, it’s www.petersonpartners.com. It’s an amazing website. I love the landing page – capital for changemakers. It’s a wonderful line. I love that.

Joel, you know, you just talked about personal brand and personal life and how people are smart and they’ll smell you out if you’re living one way but promoting other ideas at your company and they know that at some point that will collide. In your book, though, you talk about establishing a personal brand but protecting your personal life, can you parse out that subtlety for our listeners?

Joel: Yeah. I think your personal life is a place that you can be safe, you know, that you can go to and I think having those strong relationships there is one of the things that gives you the thick skin you’re going to need as a leader. The ability to make decisions that may not be popular at the moment. The way to get things done with a safe place in your life to go back to and so I found early on in my career, I got a call from Trammell Crow who is a guy with the name on the door. And he said, “Could you come in?” It was a Sunday afternoon and I had reserved Sundays for my wife and kids and I think I only had one at the time and he was taken aback. I could tell he didn’t really like that very much, but it’s amazing. He respected it and I ended up being the managing partner of the whole firm, so it didn’t really get in my way. I decided that you know, this was a place that I was going to reserve and preserve, it made me nervous for a little while, but it actually turned out to be a good thing.

John: Psychologists of modern time who have now risen to the top in terms of business pop psychology and stuff of that nature, would say that you were early trendsetter in setting boundaries.

Joel: Well, I think one of the most important things you do in life is set boundaries, and those really help you establish your priorities in life. Without them, you drift and people get off course and they try things that won’t make them happy in the end. They may make them happy momentarily. So people tend, you know, to follow pleasure and short term happiness unless they have a notion of what is joy? What is peace in life? And so, to me, it’s always best to solve for joy and peace and let pleasure and happiness, you know, sit on the sideline a little bit.

John: I like it. You know, at the top of the show, you mentioned that you’ve had, what? Four thousand students over 28 years at Stanford?

Joel: Yeah.

John: You know, as students, we have a favorite teacher. We have a favorite, somewhere. How about as of professor, do you have one or two students that stood out that you want to talk about today in terms of who they were and what they became after they went through or why they were one of your favorites during the process of you teaching them?

Joel: Well, the dilemma I’ve got in answering that question is there are so many, you know, it’s like if you ask me about my favorite child, I have seven children and I love them all.

John: I gave you Sophie’s choice. It’s really not fair. But talk about a couple of just– I regress, I take it back. I’m not going to say favorite but talk about a couple of standouts that you could share with our listeners of experiences. A wonderful experience that you had with some of your great students.

Joel: Well, you know, so I just started out my first year. I was on the Advisory Board of the Business School and they lost the guy who is teaching the Real Estate Finance Course. So, they asked me if I would step in and I thought, “Well, this will be a piece of cake,” and then I soon found myself in a room full of people who are all brighter than I and expected a lot of me. And so I worked like a dog but I didn’t give very many high grades. I was very stingy because I expected professional work from all these brilliant young people and I only gave, I think, two or three H’s and one of them went to a guy by the name of Jim Ellis and I ended up backing him in the founding of Asurion, as a favor. I mean, I thought this was, sort of, a tax on being a teacher there and I backed him and it turns out to have been, I don’t know, maybe a thousand times return on value.

John: I guess, it wasn’t a bad tax you pay. I guess that was a tax with a return.

Joel: Yeah.

John: I’ve never heard of that but I’m going to take it as you say it. So, I love it. That’s awesome. So he was one of your first students.

Joel: He’s in my very first class. A number of years later, I had a guy that asked me to do an independent project with him and he was going to import South African Biltong which is beef jerky. And I had just bought a salty snack food company that had been brutal, Frito Lay had decided we didn’t deserve to live and so we didn’t live. Put us into bankruptcy. So I pulled him aside after class. I said, “Look, I’m going to give you a top grade on your project. You did a great job at it, but please do not do this business.” So he disappeared. I never saw his second year. He walked into my office and said, “I want to sell pants over the internet.” And I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is worse than Biltong,” and so I said, “Why don’t you practice your pitch on me,” and forty minutes later, he had me convinced that he was another David Neeleman. He was going to upset a category and really do something great. So I became his first investor in what became Bonobos, which is a favorite brand for many many men.

John: It’s a great brand. Wow. So, that’s how Bonobos was born. Wow. Wow. That’s two great stories out of the 4,000. I’m sure you could write a book just on those stories of your students and ideas that they had and ideas that you backed and that probably another book coming in. For our listeners who have joined, we’ve got Joel Peterson today. He’s written a book recently called, Entrepreneurial Leadership. I think we all can stand to hone our entrepreneurial skills, especially on the issue of leadership as we make it through these historically unnavigated times that we live in now. You know, this is still, I don’t know, maybe the top of the third inning of this COVID crisis, what do you see that’s going on, Joel, you know, you’re a leader with a massive biography and also history of seeing the ups and downs in the business world and in society, where are we going post-coronavirus times in America and around the world? What are some of the thoughts of hope that you could share with our listeners today?

Joel: So, you know, I actually think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he gave his first inaugural address on the East Portico of the Capitol Building in March of 1933, we were in the throes of depression and that’s where he uttered that famous line, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” And, you know, he was really right about that. And I think we’re overly afraid of this. I’m not diminishing and I am certainly not criticizing the decisions that were made.

John: Right.

Joel: So I think everybody did the very best they could I think we’re learning more and more about this virus. And we’re learning more and more who it attacks and there are better and better ways coming out of how to protect ourselves and how to protect that most vulnerable class. So, all of that said, I think job one for any business leader is survival. You know when you’re under attack when there’s a crisis, whatever, you have to think about survival and the way I think about that in the business sense is when you’re out of cash, you’re out of business. And so you have to extend the runway and that means deferring capital expenditures and cutting down on operating expenses, borrowing capital, being very frugal and thoughtful. And then I think you have to really reconsider your brand. You have to reimagine what it is that you’re doing. You’re going to emerge with a brand. You’ll have a covenant with your customers, suppliers, investors, employees and you really want to think that through. For example, at JetBlue, our brand our first value is safety. And so do we want to emerge with that brand value and the answer is absolutely, yes. It’s now just extended to a new category that includes health which means wearing masks, it means probably not for a while at least, selling middle seats. It means taking temperatures. It means sanitizing planes. It means cutting down on our routes. It means a bunch of different things, but we’re still the safest form of travel on the planet and we’re the most environmentally friendly. The air on an airplane is the cleanest air on the planet with the filtering system. So, that’s a brand attribute that we want to maintain – we’ve got to really think about that. Then I think you have to really do things that radiate the mindsets of leaders in these times and I think that means number one, you confront reality, but you remain optimistic. And then I think your action-oriented. You can’t dawdle, you can’t dither, you can’t delay decisions. You have to take action and making those timely decisions means you’ll make some mistakes. And so my rule is always: no recriminations. Everybody’s doing what we can, we’re belayed on a cliff. We’re holding the ropes for each other. So, you don’t get to criticize. You get to a place where, you know, we can decide people may want to step off but while we’re on the cliff, we don’t do that and then I think you have to communicate. You really have to be lavishing your communications.

John: That’s great. I mean, those are some– well, first of all, that’s a hopeful message. And those are some great tips for our leaders out there, entrepreneurial leaders to help their brand get to the other side and that’s what it’s all about right now, getting to the other side, for all of us. For all of us. You know, a mission. There’s no great company ever that hasn’t had a mission. Can you talk a little bit about how you view mission – creating a mission, and the importance of that, and how you laid that out in your book, Entrepreneurial Leadership?

Joel: So I really distinguish between a mission and a mission statement. Mission statements are often delivered from the corner office and they belong to Senior Management. Missions are owned by everybody. This is really what gives us meaning. And so I like people to craft, to wordsmith the mission. And again, it’s what are our values? What are our priorities? What do we all believe in? If you get people to own the mission, there’s no issue ever of motivating them. They are motivated by the mission. It’s what gives them meaning and they stay longer, you get better people, they stay longer having clarity. So, whenever I’m starting a business or working with a business, I regard what we’re doing as picking a peak. There’s a whole mountain range in front of us of possible peaks, but it’s getting everybody to say, “This is the peak we’re going to climb and we’re going to climb it together and it’s going to require all of our skills and we’re going to all agree on it.” So everybody has a line of sight from their job to the peak. And, boy, once that’s clear, you really don’t worry about motivation, but it’s so vital. And by the way, it’s so hard, you know to get the mission just right is really hard work.

John: Yeah, and with that, you know, one of my favorite words of just the last couple of years and I never used it historically, but I’ve been using it more and more and you mention it in your book and you talk about it is building alignment. Is that part of the mission, building that alignment among your colleagues and to get to that peak?

Joel: Yeah. In fact, I talked about MAD goals: memorable, aligned, and doable. And if your goals are memorable, they have some emotional content and meaning to them. They’re aligned, they’re aligned with your values, they’re aligned with the strategy you’re going to get them done and the tactics and the things you measure, you get what you measure in business. So if you get alignment between values, objectives, strategy, tactics, and measurements or controls, you’re going to find that things almost run themselves. So, to me, alignment is a really really powerful notion and that also is hard, you have to keep reviewing it and making sure you don’t have a compensation system that pays people to do one thing while you’re jawboning them to do something else.

John: You know, Joel, one of the themes just from having this lovely conversation with you today that I’m taking away is that if there’s no such thing as, okay, being a great leader and saying, “I’m done.” It’s an evolution that there’s always work involved in terms of honing it, polishing it, working it, and assessing it all the time. Is that sort of the way you approach this, that the evolution is always ongoing and vigilance and the energy behind that is always a necessity?

Joel: Yeah, for two reasons. One is we’re imperfect beings and so we’re always knocking off the rough edges and learning things. If we’re humble, we’re always going to be learning new things and so that refines you. And the second thing is we live in a dynamic world, the world is changing and so you got to be willing to adjust which requires a level of humility. Humility is hard and you got to be committed to it.

John: Yeah. You know, one thing I love to leave our listeners with today is lessons learned. Now, besides having the proactive lessons that you’ve learned, can you share with our listeners some of the– let’s just call them, common mistakes that leaders make that you’ve laid out in the book and how could an aspiring leader or someone who, today,is listening to this show who is a leader of an entrepreneurial venture avoid making and how to do that? Lessons learned by you.

Joel: Yeah. So I made virtually all the mistakes you can make and I’ve tried not to make them more than once but I’ve even done some of them more than once. I would say that early on, out of business school, I wanted to get the right answer and that meant I always needed more information, and that always meant I needed more time until I realized that delaying was a decision. That the world changed and I had, in fact, made a decision. So that’s one of them. Another one that I’ve made over and over is I’ve waited too long to let somebody go. It’s really interesting, most of the time when you realize somebody’s not a good fit, and it may not be their fault at all, things don’t get better. And I believe in coaching, I believe in redemption, I believe in working with people, but I do believe that I’ve tended to wait too long. And so that’s been one that I’ve learned the hard way.

John: And that’s a common mistake, though, among entrepreneurs because you choose someone, you sort of fall in love with them, and you want them to do what they said they’re going to do and then when they don’t, it’s hard to separate your own ego and your own decision-making with the understanding you made a bad choice and you got to say goodbye, right?

Joel: Yeah. And what helped me a lot with that is realizing that I have a whole team that’s relying on me. And I’ve got to score a touchdown and if that wide receiver keeps dropping the ball, I need to put a different wide receiver in for the benefit of the rest of the team. And so once you realize that it’s a team sport and you owe it to everybody, then you can get over that natural hesitancy.

John: You talked about motivating employee performance but when you fire, you fire with empathy.

Joel: Absolutely.

John: Why is that?

Joel: Well, to me, I have a whole bunch of self-talk that I use and one of the things I tell myself is, “This is my mistake too. I joint ventured this outcome.” And it may be that I selected a person who couldn’t grow into the role, it may be that I didn’t give him good coaching or direction, whatever. But it’s not all their fault and I really want the best for them. It’s not the best for them to stay someplace where they’re underperforming. I want to help them get to a better place. So I try to have that kind of self-talk to help people elegantly and gracefully move into a different place. And in many cases, it’s worked out that they’re grateful. I’ve actually been fired and it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

John: Did they fire you with empathy or was it not a great experience at the time?

Joel: Well, you tell me, they fired me and sued me in county state and federal court.

John: It wasn’t with empathy then. Let’s just say that. Let’s just say that. Hey, you know what? For our listeners out there, we’ve got Joel Peterson today. He’s not only the chairman of JetBlue but he’s a storied and awarded, many awarded Stanford Business Professor, 28 years there. But he also is the founder of the P Firm, Peterson Partners. You could find them at petersonpartners.com and I love on the landing site. Like I said later and I have the website open in front of me, capital for changemaker. So if you think you’re a changemaker, that’s where you’ve got to go. But, you know, before we wind up today, I want to talk about the final ten chapters of the book where you talk about what you’ve seen in your experience, common execution challenges that entrepreneurial leaders have faced and some strategies that you have laid out. And since we’re going through very tough times and many companies, great companies, that should survive, are going to be facing some headwinds because of this pretty much unprecedented crisis that we are all up against, there’s going to be somewhat of a feeling of some of them are going to need workouts, some of them are going to need a turnaround, some of them just going to need extra TLC. Can you share what you’ve put in the book in terms of your smart steps, your six smart steps for managing a turnaround?

Joel: So, managing a turnaround is really just doing great management under adverse conditions. There’s nothing unique about this. This is exactly what you should be doing to be running a great enterprise.

John: That’s great advice. I want to hear it, so, give us your six. Give us your best six.

Joel: Okay. Well, I think the first one is the one that I mentioned which is, you know, confronting reality. You know, what is the market telling you? And then making sure that you’re doing that. So, to me, again, it’s a team sport and it’s particularly a team sport when you are belayed on a cliff and you really try to work your way through it. So, I think, bringing people into the tent and really leveling with them and making sure that they know exactly where things are, and this may be another point that I make but I’ll make it right now and that is setting with them, specific goals so there’s clarity. I believe in winning while you’re losing. It may mean that you lost a certain amount last month and we’re going to lose less this month than last month. Well, it’s hard to say losing is winning. But if it’s less than before you’ve actually chopped up a win.

John: You’re right. You’re right.

Joel: Yeah. Measuring those wins along the way is really an important thing.

John: And celebrating them as well. Do you celebrate those wins as you go?

Joel: Absolutely. The team has to feel great about itself, great about making progress. See the end. I mentioned getting to the– you know when you’re climbing the cliff, you know, we want to get to this meadow, though it may be an interim step, we’re going to celebrate when we get there and if people want off, at that point in time, they can leave. But not while we’re belayed.

John: The third one reminds me of my personal trainer. It says, “Focus on your core,” you know, that sounds like something our trainers would say, “Hey, you got to get your core stronger.” Explain what you mean by core?

Joel: Well, most businesses in good times, start developing a bunch of things that aren’t core to the business. That’s what I call hobbies. They have a lot of hobbies that they developed and a lot of the times they don’t sunset those hobbies. So you have committees that are set up and they start to have a life of their own and you find out that you have a lot of things that aren’t essential to your business. So, to me, figuring out, “What are we providing our customers? What’s the thing without which we would not survive?” And then make sure that you deliver that in a perfect way.

John: The fourth one you had here in the book that I have open right here in front of me is set metrics.

Joel: Yeah, you get what you measure in life and in business, it really helps you decide what your priorities are, but I like to even have physical charts, you know, visual aids where people can see, “Here is where we are last month. Here’s where we are this month.” And I found that it’s actually helpful in many cases to do ratios. So you can measure two things at once, sales and employee that shows our sales and it shows how efficient each employee was. And you see that going up and you say, “We are becoming more efficient. Our sales are going up and our employees are becoming more efficient.”

John: The fifth one you have here, which I love because you throw in, in your great book, Entrepreneurial Leadership, you throw in an airline analogy – extend the runway. Extend the runway.

Joel: So that’s where I kind of started with this idea of cash, you know, that’s what I mean by extending the runway. There are a lot of ways to do that – you can delay payments, you can get more loans, you can cut back on things, you can get back to just the core. But again, this idea is you don’t know how much time it’s going to take in the turnaround. So you really want to make sure you’ve got plenty of runways to get there. Because, again, survival in a turnaround is what it’s all about.

John: And the last one of the six is – take action now. Talk about that. And then I want to ask you a couple of questions about action. Go ahead.

Joel: Yeah, so that’s the idea of not dithering. In turnarounds, you really find that time is of the essence, you know, people who take too long and assume things are going to get better often run into big problems. Whereas, if you take action, in some cases, I think we’re in the emergency room, you know, emergency room doctors don’t make sure that everything is perfect and clean and exactly how it needs to be, they take care of people who are under duress. And so I think you’re in the emergency room, take action, you know, save the patient.

John: But Joel, I mean, it’s great advice, but you know, this is from someone with a massive book of experience like yours. There are some leaders out there, that when you have seen them face adversity or even while they’re leading but facing tough decisions even leading during good times, that they freeze out of fear. Is being frozen as a leader, one of the great potential fatal mistakes?

Joel: Yeah, that’s the problem of dithering – not making timely decisions. And that’s one of the places a board can really be helpful because boards typically have people who’ve seen the movie several times and they can be really quite helpful coaches.

John: Talk a little bit about a board, you know, in modern times, what do you believe entrepreneurs should be looking for when he or she is putting together a good and resilient and helpful board of directors? Do you have a favorite one or two or three tips on entrepreneurs building the right board to help them get from point A to point Z?

Joel: Yeah. To me, the most important thing a board does is serve as a team. You know, they are one of the teams, a management group has. And so, I think, the idea that the board is there to lord over and control or whatever– yes, they represent shareholders, but they’re there to provide wisdom and judgment, to do it gracefully, to evaluate things, and to remove obstacles. And a great board can actually accelerate a company rather significantly; a bad board has political infighting and can actually damage, they can push a management team too hard, too fast, too far and could actually damage a company. So, to me, getting the right people and one of the things that I would say there, John, is I think hiring for particular expertise while there’s a role for that, it’s not nearly as important as hiring graceful, wise, thoughtful, experienced human beings who know how to get along with others. I mean, it’s really vital.

John: So, really, choosing your board which is your choosing upwards as opposed to when you’re an entrepreneur leader choosing colleagues and other people that are going to hopefully help you get to your goals. But choosing a board is really a tremendous necessity but not one that many new entrepreneurs who find themselves in a leadership position are used to, so who did they lean on for advice while they’re trying to put together this very important group of people? I mean, that sounds like almost a conundrum that you’ve dealt with a lot because you’re taking these– the four thousand young people you’ve mentored and taught for the last 28 years and some of them like Jim Ellis and other great folks have gone on to create businesses, without having ever done this before, how do they know how to put together a board?

Joel: Well, in a lot of cases, I think what they do is whoever their investors are, become their board, initially. And so I think what I tell entrepreneurs to do is interview those investors as much as they’re interviewing you. A lot of times people think they’re pitching so they can get money and I always say, “Money has faces. And it’s not Jefferson and Franklin and Lincoln.” And so really think about who those people are, you are hiring them as much as they’re backing you, so make sure that you do that carefully. Then have off-ramps have a way that you can adjust your board over time. You don’t want to get those initial investors locked in. In many cases, the initial investors are looking for a return on capital. They’re not necessarily looking to build a great enduring company. So they’re looking for ROI, they have limited partners that they’re serving, they have fund lives, et cetera. And so that’s not the best overall board. I would also, lastly, say find a mensch, find somebody who’s really wise and experienced that the others will look to as a lead director. That lead director can shape things in ways that you can’t, so you want to have an ally who’s really a mensch and that people won’t question. They may not always agree, but they will go along with that person so I would say that’s an important role too.

John: Great advice. And for our listeners out there, you know, Entrepreneurial Leadership, Joel’s book is literally one of the best books I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. It’s so helpful. There is so much for us to learn from his great career, both as a professor but also as a business leader at JetBlue and the other companies he’s been involved with. For our lucky five listeners, I would say write to me at the Impact Podcast and tell me what you’ve learned from today’s interview. Give me the best thing that you’ve learned out of today’s interview and the five best will get a signed copy of Entrepreneurial Leadership from Joel Peterson. He’s signed a bunch of copies for us and we have some to give away today. You could find the book, of course, on amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and great bookstores around you, and hopefully soon after this episode airs, those book stores will be open and selling books again for all of us to enjoy like this book. You know, Joel, before we say goodbye, we were talking off the air before we started the show and there’s a lot of things we were just touching on and one of the things I brought up to you is Michael Jordan. The basketball player’s recent biography that’s been taped and shown on HBO that since we’re all been in lockdown and there are no sports on television, it seems like America and the world has been enjoying and he had a very interesting line. He actually got emotional when he said it in the eighth episode. He said, “Winning has a price, and leadership has a price.” And since this show today and your book is on leadership and more important, entrepreneurial leadership and I think more important because America is known as the Innovation Nation, we’re known as the great entrepreneurs of the world, so this book has so much meaning and especially during these challenging times, but he was very emotional talking about that. How do you apply those words that one of the greatest athletes of our generation said, “Winning has a price and leadership has a price.” How do you relate that to the business world and the price that great business leaders sometimes have to pay that others aren’t willing to pay? Can you throw some wisdom against the sports analogy that I just used?

Joel: Yeah. So, I think, leadership is a lonely place. Leaders that are carrying these burdens around feel rather lonely and they feel like they have to grow fairly thick-skinned but I have found that people in business also want to be respected members of a winning team doing something meaningful. And if you can hit on all three of those notes: showing them respect, figuring out how to get to the summit. and making that summit really meaningful, you really have a team. Michael Jordan didn’t win those championships by himself. He had Scottie Pippen and Steve Kerr and they were there supporting him and carrying him at points in time. So being the leader requires what he says, but it also requires a great team and it’s much better if they feel like they’re doing something that’s really meaningful that’s theirs, that belongs to them. And I think it’s the key to a winning team.

John: You know, this book, the reason why I invited you on the show, Joel, is because I learned a lot from reading your book and I’m 57 years old and it made an impact on my life. It’s going to make an impact on how I lead my company and I really really can’t impress upon our listeners whether you’re just a new entrepreneur or you’re an oldie like me who’s been doing it his whole life. There’s so much still to learn from someone with your wisdom, with your experience, and with your clarity. You’re so clear in this book and it’s not a long book and it’s really easy to read. For our listeners out there, I really highly suggest you pick up a copy of Entrepreneurial Leadership. You know, Joel, you’ve been so generous with your time today. You’ve been so generous to come on our show, especially since you’re in the second to last day of your tenure of Chairman of JetBlue. It’s been an honor to have you today. I thank you for the impact you’ve made on our business community over the last 28 years, training 4,000 students, and also on our business community. Thank you for building the great brands you build and thank you for being with us here today and the impact you’ve made on this whole world and making it a better place.

Joel: Well, thank you so much for having me on, John. It’s been a pleasure to talk with you.

John Shegerian: Welcome to another edition of the Impact podcast. I am so honored and excited today to have my good friend on Ron Gonen.

Ron Gonen: Hey, John glad to be here.

John: Ron before we even get talking about your fascinating journey in background. I just want for our listeners if this is your first exposure to Ron Gonen, Ron was kind enough to come on the Green is Good podcast in 2007 as my first guest and he was then the co-founder and the CEO of Recycle Bank and he went on to do many other great things. He is right now the CEO of Closed Loop Partners, which is a huge investment firm in the sustainability circular economy space. Ron share with our listeners a little bit of your journey of how you got involved with co-founding Recycle Bank. And then where that journey has led you all the way up to Closed Loop Partners?

Ron: Sure. John, I did not realize that I was your first guest of your podcast back in 2007. So you learn something new every day be funny to actually go back and listen to that podcast and hear the things that I said and maybe forecasted but that is a great thing to hear today that was the case that in terms of my journey, I have been interested in the intersection between sustainable business practices and maximizing returns actually since high school. I was very fortunate to get a job in high school working for a family kind of doing odds-and-ends, mowing the lawn, taking care of their kids, fixing stuff around the house, and the dad, Palma was one of the first green architects in America, and this was in the early 90s and so very early on I became very passionate about this space and then in my mid to late 20s when I was starting business school a friend of mine from high school approached me with a concept around, “Would it be possible to reward people for recycling?” And I thought it was a great idea and thought with my background in business, my background in software that I could build the technology, developed software, developed the business model that became Recycle Bank and a company that Patrick and I founded and grew.

John: From Recycle Bank as that became a huge success and got lots of coverage and touched so many cities across the United States and got people thinking more sustainably-minded and Closed Loop-minded, closed circular economy minded. Where did you evolve then in terms of your career? I know you started teaching at Columbia, your Alma mater and then you also took a huge position in New York City. Share with our listeners a little bit about that part of the journey.

Ron: Sure. I have had an interesting vantage point to see the growth of sustainability in the U.S. because when I was in high school and started talking about sustainability, my friends’ parents always seem to have this kind of response where they would say, “Well, you seem like such a bright kid, eventually you will let that kind of stuff go and get a real job.” And then when I got to business school in 2002 at Columbia, and I told people that are going to use my MBA to do something in the sustainability space. People sort of looked awry at me kind of curious as to why I would spend so much money to go to Columbia business school only to pursue a career without make no money. And so that was the perspective of the first part of the journey, but then kind of fast forward and I end up having a fair amount of success with my first company, Recycle Bank and Columbia ends up asking me to come back and launch a course on Social Entrepreneurship and teach the class. And then I get asked by Mayor Bloomberg to come in and be a Sanitation commissioner in his administration and help rebuild the largest sanitation department in the world. And then from that I ended up developing the concept for Closed Loop Partners, which is now an investment firm that I run, that is a decent size. So that is a little bit about the trajectory and having different perspectives on it.

John: Talk about though, has teaching though giving you a whole different perspective and then similarly instead of being an entrepreneur. Now you were teaching and then you were sitting on the municipal side, which is the other side of the coin of who you were negotiating with all those years of recycling. They talk a little bit about what you took away from both your teaching experience and how you have applied that at Closed Loop. Same goes for your government experience at the City of New York and how you have also used that in your applications.

Ron: Sure. Well, both were instrumental in a lot of the success I have had and I would encourage anybody that ever has a chance to teach, to go and try it but it is a challenging occupation. I have tremendous respect for teachers, and so make sure it is something that you are really passionate about and want to do but if it is something that you want to do, even if it is not for a career, it is just something that you want to try, I highly recommend it. And the same as for an experienced government and public service, it is very challenging. But if you have a passion for it, I definitely recommend trying it and some of the lessons that I learned in teaching were how to effectively communicate and make sure that you are connecting with your audience. Because I think a lot of the times if someone is asked to do public speaking, it is a one-off event, it is maybe ten minutes, twenty minutes, a half an hour and that is it. And people are going to clap for you no matter how well your talk went and then everybody goes. When you are in a position where you are teaching especially in a graduate school, you are dealing with people who are professionals, who have paid a lot of money for you to impart some skill set to them. And you are up there in front of them sometimes for an hour and a half, sometimes three hours at a time, and they are going to be back next week. And you really need to develop and elaborate a number of skills in order to I think do that really, really well.

John: Right.

Ron: And it is something that I worked really, really hard at and I ended up being able to use a lot of the communication and connection skills that I developed as a teacher in my business career. So that is from the teaching standpoint, from the government standpoint–

John: Yes.

Ron: Again, a lot of great lessons, the one I really single out is building consensus.

John: Mm-hmm.

Ron: When you are in government a lot of your success is about how you build consensus and figuring out how to effectively do that in my position in government. I think also with a great skill to learn when I went back into the private sector.

John: So interesting and what year did you join at the Bloomberg Administration? What year did you exit that Administration?

Ron: I joined in 2012 and left office when he got out of office. I was there for about the last three years of the administration.

John: So if I am not mistaken, but please correct me. When you were there under your tenure, it was launched the Composting-Recycling Program, the Closed Recycling Program and also the electronic waste recycling program. So it was very busy and productive three years that you were engaged and led how a huge leadership role in the Bloomberg Administration and into that credit goes to you and obviously to the great mayor and that is a lot of production in three short years in government. Is not that like a tight window in terms of under government perspective? Is not that very, very tight window to get all three of those launched and planned and launched?

Ron: It is but I had the advantage of working for, I think once in a generation type mayor and a staff that he had put together that was phenomenal.

John: Right.

Ron: And extremely supportive of what I was trying to do.

John: Got it.

Ron: So it is not something that I think, the accomplishments that we had in such a short period of time. The government is not something that you would ordinarily–

John: Right.

Ron: Replicate because there need to be a number of pieces in place for that to happen. Starting with the mayor we had and the staff that he put together that I was able to leverage and utilize. And in doing so, we were able to accomplish a lot in a small amount of time.

John: That is great. And for our listeners who just joined us, we have got Ron Gonen in today. He is a good friend of mine, almost 15 years of friend. He is the CEO of Closed Loop Partners and to learn more about Ron and his great work at Closed Loop Partners, you could go to www.closedlooppartners.com, Ron talk about what year did you start Closed Loop Partners?

Ron: 2014.

John: 2014 and I remember visiting you in what was a very humble beginnings in your office when you first started. But I love that to me, I am such a junkie for the entrepreneurial spirit of America you so embody that spirit. So just coming to visit you in your office and the quarters were so tight, but that also makes it a lot more exciting. I mean, frankly speaking, it was just great to come up and see you in that new role of, as you started that, and talk about the evolution, talk about the last six years. I mean, you have grown massively. I have been up to your recent offices, your new offices, they are gorgeous and they are functional and they are just fabulous. And talk a little bit about the evolution though, in terms of people that you have brought on board with you and some of your amazing and wonderful portfolio companies that you have invested in. And why you chose those sectors and the entrepreneurs behind those great companies?

Ron: Sure from an evolution standpoint, one of the things that I count as some of the younger people in our firm on or when younger professionals ask me for advice is, I think the greatest way to measure your ability as a manager is if you can get people to join you. And one of the things that I feel very appreciative of is over my career. I have been able to build a network of really phenomenal people that join me when I asked them to join me in my next initiative. And so once I launch Close Loop Partners, I slowly started going to all of the different people in my network that I thought would be great parts of the firm and talk to them about what I was trying to accomplish and they join me along with also selecting some new people that I met along the way that I also wanted to bring on board. And the original vision of the firm was to become an investment firm that could invest anywhere along the growth trajectory of a solution. I did not want to be just one asset class that a venture fund that investments are going to come here and peak fund investments are going to comment. I wanted to be able to look at all the bottlenecks, identify solutions, and apply the appropriate form of capital. And so that is what we eventually evolved into and today we have about fifty portfolio companies that everything from companies we have invested a couple hundred thousand dollars into the companies that we have acquired for tens of millions of dollars.

John: Wow talk a little bit about some of them to give our listeners just a snapshot view of some of your great companies and why you chose those sectors.

Ron: Sure. So one of them is the company John, do you know well, AMP Robotics?

John: Yes.

Ron: And this goes to the network that we have been able to build a few years ago of CEO of one of the top recycling companies in the country. Older gentleman called school, calls me up and says, “I just saw the most revolutionary technology that I have seen in forty years in the industry.” But I do not know what to do with it, I do not know how to help the entrepreneur but I am talented. This is something that you got to see and you guys are the ones to help this entrepreneur. And so, I flew out to Denver to meet Matanya Horowitz the CEO of AMP Robotics. And what I saw was the first robotics and artificial intelligence system for the recycling industry that could hyper sort, identify contamination, identify the quality of the bales. And it was early, it was just a prototype but it was revolutionary and he was obviously somebody who had the intellect and the drive to build it into a company. And so we became the seed investor in AMP Robotics which is now the leading Robotics and artificial intelligence company in the recycling industry.

John: Wow.

Ron: Another company that catalytic that we were seed investor and it is a company called Home Biogas to the company based in Israel which has developed first household size anaerobic digester. So anaerobic digesters convert food waste into clean renewable energy, they are generally municipal sized facilities, so like coughing anywhere from twenty-five million to a hundred fifty million. Home Biogas has developed a way to miniaturize the technology where any home can put a digester in their backyard. Put all their food waste into it, convert it to gas that goes into their stove or their hot water system. So another example of a catalytic company that we backed and the third I would say is other side of just large companies. We also acquired Balcones Resources, which is the largest privately-held recycling company in Texas. They service the Austin and Dallas Market.

John: So you are into so many different segments of the circular economy, your fund I see you first of all, as one of the top tier leaders in the circular economy and sustainability movement for years to come Ron, you are very young. Obviously still, you have a young family, you are a young guy and where is this going? We are now taping this broadcast and it is airing and in a post-Covid time period when we are getting thankfully, hopefully on the other side of this pandemic tragedy that has hit everybody in the world. Where are the circular economy and the sustainability revolution going and how does your great fund continue to play, not only a relevant role but also role of innovation and funding pioneers?

Ron: I think one thing that we have been discussing for years that has now become apparent during this Covid crisis is that supply chains in the way things are manufactured.

John: Yes.

Ron: Are highly inefficient, lack transparency, and have huge amounts of risk intertwined in the way they are currently structured. And I think the circular economy is primarily focused on eliminating that waste, making systems more transparent, and reducing that risk. And so I think coming out of this Covid crisis, you can see a much greater focus on transparency, efficiency, local manufacturing, I will give you one example of where it is, we are–

John: Sure.

Ron: It really is a shocking awareness of the need for a circular economy. Traditionally, the way hospitals operated when it came to protective equipment is you would buy protective equipment, you would use once, you would throw it away, then you would buy some more. And the companies that make the protective equipment made a lot of money, the companies that hauled it off to landfill after is used one time made a lot of money. And then there is a crisis, where there is way more demand on a daily basis than there is possibly a supply. Even if the hospitals had unlimited amount of cash, they still could not buy enough protective equipment. And someone came along and said, “Wait a second, could not we just sanitized this protective equipment and just continually reuse it?” There by not having to worry about any supply issues, trying to find the money to buy them, so we have them as all these patients are coming in or worried about seeing them to landfill. And people look around and said, “Yes, like why are not we just sanitizing this protective equipment?” And I think you are going to see more and more examples of that of people looking around and saying, “This is completely wasteful and inefficient, why have we been operating under this the structure?”

John: That is so interesting. So everything you feel that they will be normally, when they call a post Covid time for all of us, this new normal. You feel that supply chains now will come under more scrutiny and they will be more innovation and potentially upheaval and recreation in the supply chain now than ever before.

Ron: Absolutely. I will say that we need to be mindful that there are some entrenched interests that will not want to see that happen. So I also do not want to create the perception that because it is obvious that this is the most–

John: Right.

Ron: Economical and sustainable way for us to all live as a society that everyone is going to be on board and it is not going to be that easy. Well, it should be that easy, it is not going to be–

John: Right.

Ron: Because there is definitely some entrenched interests that absolutely do not want to see that transition happen.

John: But speaking, putting back on your serial entrepreneur hat, which really you get to be just now you get to be the kingmaker now, but still you get to keep your serial entrepreneurship DNA fed that hunger still fed. You have been living comfortably and I say comfortably I mean as an entrepreneur, probably not financially, we are not talking about now. We are talking about just someone who can work within that space of pushing against legacy paradigms and pushing ahead for the greater good. You have been doing that since Recycle Bank day, so there is nothing new to pushing against legacy paradigms that we are not going to see now in a post Covid Society, true?

Ron: Absolutely. I mean, I am super excited for the world to come. I think that this has been a tragic but important wake-up call for all of us around how we are living.

John: Ron one of the fascinating parts of what you do now is you get to see, you have visibility not only the United States but as you pointed out one of your portfolio companies is from Israel. I know you have shown me other companies from different parts of the world, that you get visibility to some of the best and brightest concepts, innovations, and people that approach you for funding or partnerships, collaborations. Talk a little bit about your personal algorithm when you are sizing up opportunities that you are constantly being approached with at Closed Loop Partners. Is it about the business concept? Is it about the concept or businesses potential market size? Or is it more about the entrepreneur? What turns you on as an investor, as someone who is now sizing up these opportunities on a regular basis?

Ron: It is all of that combined in one and if any one piece is missing, it is hard for me to proceed because building a business is, John, it is the hardest thing to do in business. And a good idea is not sufficient, it takes a good idea, it takes an extraordinary entrepreneur, it takes timing, it takes a number of things. Like who would not want to take their idea and launch of the company and make a nice living, everybody would like to do that.

John: Right.

Ron: If it would be easy, everybody would be doing it, the challenge is the hardest thing to do in business. And so it is actually for me to move forward with an investment, all of that needs to be true. So that is why we make so few investments, it is hard to find scenarios where all that strength and we have looked at in our Venture fund. We have broken probably two thousand businesses and have made eighteen investments.

John: Wow. In terms of appetite to continue, to grow your great fund and your important fund which I just think what you are doing is just so important and so great together. What is the appetite from your financial investors, the huge corporations that just love what you are doing and have back you? Can you share some of the great names that have historically back to you and talk a little bit about the future in a post Covid world, do they see it the way you do, the way I do in terms of the Paradigm getting re-figured for the better? How is that looking too, in terms of your ongoing and future investor pipeline?

Ron: Mm-hmm. So one of the things that makes us unique is we manage money for the world’s largest retailers of consumer goods companies in terms of how they invest in the circular economy. So we have Walmart, Amazon, Starbucks its retailers. We have–

John: Wow.

John: Five largest beverage companies including Coke and Pepsi. We have consumer goods companies like P&G and Unilever. So good news is they are investing in the space. They are very aware of it. They are very focused on being part of that tradition. At the same time their executives also deal with the reality of quarterly reports. And so whenever talking about large corporate, there is and I think ever as simple as saying this is the straight line that they are pursuing. It is oftentimes more nuanced than that, but as a group, they all recognize that this transition is happening and then if done right it is a huge opportunity for them.

John: Right, right, right, right. And do you feel that once we get beyond this tragedy and this period in history that potentially, that investment flow. I mean you already have some of the greatest and most iconic brands in the world, but there is always more.

Ron: Mm-hmm.

John: Do you feel that that will accelerate, that further accelerate because many of them will also see that opportunity that we both see as well?

Ron: I hope so.

John: Yes. For our listeners out there Ron that want to make an impact. I mean you are like I said, you are the reason that I rename the show because you get to seed and work with and collaborate and nurture right now only fifty portfolio brands probably when I have you back on the show, and two years from now, a year from now, will be a hundred portfolio brands you get to make impacts that are just worldwide and so important. And for our listeners out there, Matanya Horowitz was introduced to me by Ron, I do not know maybe five years ago or so and we were one of the first adopters of AMP Robotics in our facilities. Ron knows and when Ron send somebody over it is just typically an incredible experience and AMP has been just really crucial in the evolution of our company and our business. You are making an impact every day, not only on just what you do, and how you live and how you carry yourself but the company you now have created with Closed Loop and all the portfolio companies, impact companies that you are investing in and collaborating with. For the young people out there that want to create the next AMP Robotics or the next startup that is going to make an impact, make a difference; make the world a better place. How do they go about approaching you or other funds like yours with the best shot of getting funded? What are you looking for in a pure start-up, Ron?

Ron: I am looking for that startup to identify the pain point that they are solving and when I say the pain point, there is a difference between a vitamin and an aspirin. A vitamin is something that somebody usually takes because they feel like it will make them feel better.

John: Right.

Ron: And sometimes it is true like they actually need that vitamin or make them feel better. Sometimes it is something that they just believe that it will make them feel better. Aspirin is something that you take because you got a toothache and you need that aspirin now or you struggle to function or to compete.

John: Right.

Ron: And that is what we are looking for and so as an entrepreneur I would really focus on what is the pain that my idea is sobbing for somebody and why would they treat it as an aspirin and not a vitamin, meaning they pay immediately forth.

John: So let us reverse the question. You are a young 24 Ron Gonen and money is not the issue. You have plenty of backers and you are trying to say solve one of the biggest pain points in the world right now. What would be that pain point that you see as one of the greatest opportunities that exist today, coming from your young eyes and that a company that you would start knowing that the backing is there for you?

Ron: It is a great question. I would focus on how to help communities become more independent. How can they grow their own food, produce their own energy, manage their own sanitation, all of those local distributed technology, whether they be solar or wind or modular recycling systems, vertical farming. How can we, as a local community becomes resilient and self-sufficient that thing is not smiles that can help at that level I got to find a lot of interest.

John: That is awesome. Ron we are at the end here any final thoughts before we say goodbye for this episode and of course, I will always have your back on to talk about more of your great companies that you are involved with and investing in and just then some more wisdom because you see more and know more about the circular economy and sustainability than any one person I really know any final thoughts before we say goodbye for today?

Ron: No, I am glad to hear you are doing well during this time. I am glad to see the podcast is still continuing on.

John: Well, but you were my first guest and we are going to keep having you back on a couple of points here for any of our listeners who want to find Ron and learn more about his great work at Closed Loop Partners, please go to www.closedlooppartners.com. Ron as I said, you were my first guest, you are the reason why I change the name from Green is Good, which things have gone much wider now in terms of making impact. And you make an impact more than almost anyone human being that I know. I am very grateful for our friendship and thank you for spending your precious time today on the Impact podcast. Continue to do your great work and continue to make the world a better place.

Ron: Thank you, John.

John Shegerian: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian and I’m so honored and excited to have my friend on today. He is Scott Augenbaum. Welcome to the Impact Podcast, Scott.

Scott Augenbaum: John, it’s great to be here. It’s great to reconnect with an old friend from New York City.

John: New York. We got Brooklyn and Queens in the house today.

Scott: Yes, a little rivalry going on over there but now, I’m a Nashville guy, Tennessee guy and you’re a–

John: California boy.

Scott: –California guy.

John: I’m a California boy but you know, for our listeners out there, this is your first exposure to Scott. Scott is very humble but a unique human being. He is an ex-FBI agent and not only an agent but a special agent in the Cyber Division of the FBI. He is really one of the formal cybersecurity experts in the world and he has written a book called The Secret to Cybersecurity. Today, Scott is going to be sharing a little bit of what he does on a regular basis, on a day-to-day basis, but also talking a little bit about his book and how people can engage with Scott to either safeguard themselves or safeguard the organization they work with. Scott, we’re so honored to have you on today because the impact you’re making in a world that consistently becomes more unsafe and I don’t know, some of your colleagues from the FBI recently came out with an article that was well published that said during this coronavirus tragedy, cybercrimes are up four times from the previous period. That is a scary statistic but why your work, your knowledge, and your expertise are more needed than ever before. Thank you for being here today. Go ahead, Scott, talk a little bit about what you do. You’re an expert and I want you to talk.

Scott: It is so good to be here today, John. You know when I hear what I do, I just kind of smile a bit. If you would have called me 32 years ago, that I’d be retired from the FBI, a cybersecurity expert, I would have said no way. I mean, raised in New York by a single parent, didn’t do very well in community college but my mom was so happy I graduated. She found a simple servant’s job with me with the FBI at 1988 as a file clerk for the FBI making $5.50 an hour. Do you know what she said to me? She said, “Look, Scott”, she goes, “This is great”, she goes, “You’re going to get healthcare for life and you’re going to have a pension”, and I said, “Mom, I’m going to get a cool-looking jacket and stuff.” I become an agent in ’94 and if you’d ask me to describe the role of an FBI agent in 1994, I would say it was so simple and easy. Bad people did bad things to good people in my area of responsibility. From that time, I got transferred up from New York City to Syracuse and I worked with state and local cops and we put bad guys in jail who would do bad things. What a fun and exciting job for a 27-year-old kid from Brooklyn, New York. I got a badge, a bulletproof vest, a car with lights and sirens, and I get to play with my friends. I got into cybercrime because I was the first guy in the office to have a home computer and the only reason I got a home computer is because of Windows ’95. Do you remember how difficult it was, John, before Windows ’95? Do you remember the days of DOS?

John: Yes.

Scott: And was it easy to use DOS?

John: No.

Scott: Maybe for you with NYU–

John: Not for me, don’t worry.

Scott: –but not for me.

John: Not from a kid from Queens. No, it wasn’t.

Scott: Yes and so I became the cyber guy and it wasn’t a fun and sexy job to have because as they were arresting bank robbers and fugitives, I was chasing high school kids, college kids, and kids by the name of Mafia Boy who is hacking into the Pentagon and just all the stuff. When I got promoted to Washington DC in 2003 in the Cyber Division of the FBI because the FBI developed a Cyber Division to deal with this emerging threat, a lot of my friends made fun of me and they said, “You were committing career suicide because in the next three years, the FBI is gonna arrest all the teenage hackers and the cybercrime problems are going to go away”. John, let me ask you how do you think that’s working out for any of us today?

John: Let me just say whoever made that prediction, they were slightly off. They were a little bit more than slightly off.

Scott: Yes, I’m not going to mention him by name but he knows his name. I’m going to tell him to listen to this definitely. I got to Nashville in 2007 and one of the things that I did was I started making contact with all the big companies in town:, the Vanderbilt, the Nissan, the tractor supply. We’re the Silicon Valley of healthcare. I’m responsible for FedEx and international paper doting the relationship and the liaison to share information and we built this bridge with the private sector to be able to collaborate because the private sector is on the tip of the sphere. By the time we got involved, it’s too late and it brings back to what you said earlier. The FBI, we just reported that because of the COVID-19, cybercriming complaints have been up 400% but what baffles my mind about that, John, is in 2015, there was a report from cybercrime magazine that the cybercrime problem was a three trillion-dollar problem and by 2021, it was going up to a six trillion-dollar problem. That was before COVID-19 and every day, we hear about it in the news. We read about it. Identity theft. 57 million Americans rant somewhere every single day. Companies’ crown jewels are being held hostage. We’re looking at the business scene now compromised which is social engineering at its finest. A 30 billion dollar fraud that it’s all least so much and here’s the unfair part about it, for most people, they hear that, they get scared, and they get upset because it seems that no matter what we do, the problem keeps getting worse. I’m sure you’re seeing that every day with your clients and your partners.

John: Right. Hundred percent.

Scott: At that point in time, we have that going on. The cybercrime problem is going on but here’s something else, we keep spending more money on keeping ourselves safe and the problem keeps getting worse. So, let me ask you. What does that mean when we spend money to prevent bad things from happening but bad things keep happening? What does that mean to you?

John: They’re going to keep happening and that they’re winning. That there’s a pot of gold. I saw a number, you correct me if I’m wrong, that this year alone, six trillion dollars is going to be done by the bad guys, by the threat actors, and if that’s the case, Scott, isn’t that really turning on its head that really, crime does pay? Crime does pay.

Scott: Well, it’s sad but when we get back to my other point, you’re so right. The thing that frustrates me is we’re spending money to be safe and crime pays. That is something that anyone can empathize with.

John: Hundred percent.

Scott: In my opinion, it means we’re not doing it right.

John: Oh, no. That’s why I was so excited to have you on today because having an expert, a special agent who has done this as a career and is really one of the premier experts right now in the world on this is so important because our listeners, there’s a void out there, they don’t understand how to access the right solutions, how to protect themselves, their families or their organizations and/or the organizations they work within. That’s why having you here today is so important and also, getting this book that I’m holding in my hand and I’ve read already, into the hands of our readers. The Secret to Cybersecurity: A Simple Plan to Protect Your Family and Business from Cybercrime is by Scott and to learn more about Scott, you could go to his website or his LinkedIn but how his website looks is www.scott, then there’s an e there, and then his last name, Augenbaum, a-u-g-e-n-b-a-u-m.com. scotteaugenbaum.com. So, talk a little bit about the over a thousand victimizations that you’ve dealt with over the years and what are some of the common threads of these victimizations, of these crimes, that you could share with our listeners in terms of looking for common themes to try to prevent themselves from getting caught up in?

Scott: Okay, here’s the bottom line: in my career and after I retired about two and a half years ago, I had the opportunity to interact with close to a thousand victims and most of them were in person. I mean, when people were victimized, I would go out and I would talk to them. It kind of broke my heart because they all had commonalities. It was almost like groundhogs day. It was almost the same day, day in, and day out. Here’s what the four commonalities that I call The Four Truths to Cybersecurity. The first truth is none of my victims ever expected to be a victim. They all went like this, “I don’t have anything that anybody wants. Why would anybody target me?”, and I would hear this from small businesses, nonprofit organizations, religious organizations, and in Nashville, very much healthcare centric. Five hundred healthcare companies. So, I would sit down with an organization and I would say, “Are you worried about this problem?”, and they’d go, “No”, and I’d go, “Why not?”, “Because we’re a small company”, and I would say, “Well, define small for me”, and they would say, “Well, we only have 10,000 records”, and I’m like, “Woah, don’t you need to keep those safe?” I had an organization tell me that they weren’t concerned because they only were a half a billion-dollar company. Now, compared to a ten billion-dollar company, a half a billion-dollar company is a small company and then they said, “Look, we’re not a publicly-traded company. We don’t have anything to worry about”. So then, I would go talk to publicly-traded companies and I would talk to these companies that were traded on the Nasdaq and they would say to me, “Why are you here? We’re not on the New York stock exchange. Why would anyone want to target us?”. I’d be like, “Okay”, and then I would go talk to companies that were on the New York stock exchange and the best response I ever received was one company said, “We’re a 5.8 billion dollar company and the bad guys are only targeting organizations that have ten billion dollars and above”, and you know, John, us New York guys, we have a very, very difficult time of filtering things but it took every ounce of energy that I had to say to them, “Where are you getting your information from? People magazine? The bad guys do not care who you are. They want access to your stuff and every organization has different stuff. I mean, even think about it, within your organization, you have marketing. What happens if the bad guys take over your marketing platform and send messages out?” That’s what happened with the NFL Twitter hacks. I’ve seen bad guys get into payroll accounts and they would compromise these payroll accounts, put in the username, put in the bank account routing information of these mule accounts and then on a Monday, when everyone is supposed to get paid, all the paid checks get diverted to another account. I would see HR platforms and companies don’t know what they need to protect. So, when I’m going out and doing proactive talks, I’d get out to companies all the time and part of what I do now is trying to change their behavior and change their culture. I believe if you can teach them how to be safe at home, then they’re going to bring that to work and that’s kind of why I wrote the book because if you go like this, “Hey, we’re going to bring in retired FBI agent, Scott Augenbaum, to talk about cybercrime because it’s part of HIPAA compliance, the PCI compliance, the stocks compliance”, nobody cares. However, if you bring me in to talk about how to stay safe at home and not be one of the 50 million identity theft victims, and I’m telling these stories, then people can take that and bring it to the home. So, I want you to think about this, John, in your organization. You don’t even have to answer me. Think about what you have which is your crown jewels. Forget about money. It could be your intellectual property, it could be your brand, your reputation, it could be your HR records, it could be your banking and finance, it could be your sales force–

John: Or clients’ data.

Scott: Yes, your clients’ data. All that stuff and your e-mail too because if the bad guys compromise your e-mail, they’re going to send an e-mail out from you to one of your clients. They’re going to read all your e-mails and they’re going to direct this individual to send money. So, think about whatever is the worst thing in the world that the bad guys have stolen. You don’t have to tell me. Now, I want you to think about this and now, I’m going to tell you the second truth to cybersecurity. When the bad guys steal your stuff and you contact law enforcement, we’ll not get it back for you. Hate to say it. When stuff is gone, it’s gone and I brought this up one day at a conference and this is when I was with the FBI and there was a Senior Executive there and he said to me, he goes, “Did you just tell the American public that we, the FBI, don’t get their stuff back?”, and I kind of have that Brooklyn Tourettes for sarcasm, I just can’t help myself and I said to him, “What, do you think these people are that dumb?”, and he looked at me with that really harsh look and I started to smile and I said, “Office Personal Management, 21.5 million records stolen by the Chinese government. We have Blue Cross, Blue Shield– which is Anthem– also 80 million records. Home Depot, Target, JP Morgan, Sony, Equifax, Marriott, the list goes on and on. Let me ask you. Is there any chance in the world that law enforcement can get those records back?”

John: Doesn’t sound like it.

Scott: No, you can’t, and even if you get it back and the business e-mail compromised which I’ve touched 150 million dollars worth of losses. When the bad guys get into your e-mail account and direct you to send money out, it’s impossible to get back. In my career, I like to joke if there is a hall of fame for FBI agents, I want to go to the hall of fame for getting money back because I stopped five wired transfers from going overseas and no, not because I was an expert, because I was lucky and it was the right place at the right time. I want to go to the hall of fame but if I was a baseball team, do you know what my record would be?

John: What’s that?

Scott: Five wins, 17,000 losses, and I’m a Hall of Famer.

John: Those are stark statistics but it’s the truth and that’s what this show is about–bringing the truth to our listeners so they can learn something about some topic that most people really don’t understand, most people are scared of.

Scott: Knowing this is so important.

John: Right. It’s so important and if cybercrime is going up as you said during COVID-19 or other times of great distraction, what happens next? Getting your voice out there and for our listeners out there that are interested in Scott’s great book, the name of it is The Secret to Cybersecurity: A Simple Plan to Protect Your Family and Business from Cybercrime. I’ve read it and I work in this field. If you’re a CEO or CTO or an IT Director or Board Member, not only should you get a copy of this book but you should contact Scott, have him come in, do a seminar, do one of his things whatever his things are. I don’t work for Scott but I’m just telling you because I know how much of a void there is in corporate America or other organizations, governmental America, to these issues about software and hardware and how risky things are right now. Scott is an expert and he is out there for you. You could go to his website www.scotteaugenbaum.com to learn more about Scott, how to book him, how to buy his book, also on Amazon.com and other great places you could buy books. Scott, talk a little bit about number three. When stuff is gone, it’s gone, that’s number two, Number three. Tell all our listeners what your number three truth is.

Scott: We’re both from New York so if you take something from us, you should be punished, right? Those are New York rules.

John: Those are New York rules.

Scott: That’s what we grew up with. Yes, but here is the third truth. The chances of putting the bad guys in jail are even harder than getting your money back. Why is that? Crime used to be a local problem. No longer are cybercriminals– They’re all located outside of the US. They are located over in China. They are located over in West Africa. They are located over in Iran and when I’m doing these live seminars, I usually will have 500 people in front of me and I go, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to tell you something today that I couldn’t confirm with you when I’m with the FBI but I want everyone to sit down and understand”, and I said, “I’m going to confirm for you today that the Russians have been hacking us”, and usually, I get these sarcastic looks and I’m going to explain why I have the badge that I can say that because in 2008, I was going around telling the financial services sector that Russian organized crime was the number one threat to the financial services sector in 2008. How many years ago was that?

John: Twelve.

Scott: Twelve. So, do you think I have the right to go out and be sarcastic about this? Things have not changed at all. Let’s think about this. What have we talked about so far? We talked about the bad guys steal your stuff, you’re not getting it back, the law enforcement is not putting the bad guys in jail and that paints a really really upsetting picture for a lot of people. People get angry and I’ve had people call me out when I say these and they look at me and they go, “What the heck have you done for a living if you, the FBI, can’t get our stuff back and we can’t put people in jail?”, and then I just look at them and I go, “So, you’re angry and I’m depressed”, and that just usually gets them angrier which is part of the act and I go, “You want to know what I’m depressed about?”, and this is one thing and this is the last truth to cybersecurity. This is what’s worth listening to. Ninety percent of what I dealt with in my career could have been prevented by understanding the motivation of the threat actors, having an awareness campaign, and locking down everything with all your remote access with two-factor authentication. If my victims– and there were thousands of them– would have done that, if I could have had a time machine and went back in time and told them what I know now, I’m hoping I could have prevented a lot of more victimizations. That is why I wrote the book to lay out the simple steps because what we’re talking about now isn’t complicated. I focused on six or seven really key elements of what people need to do before you send money and that’s the most important thing out here because when a big enterprise suffers a breach, it’s going to be okay for the company. Maybe bad things will happen, but it broke my heart time and time again when I’d have to deal with a small business that lost their entire payroll account, or a senior citizen who lost their life savings, or a nonprofit organization that clicked on one link in an email and everything that they worked for was destroyed. It was never the right moment for me to put my arm around the victim and say, “Well if you just would have done this, it wouldn’t have happened.” That’s why today, I live my life is kind of almost a passion project where I share what I’ve learned. I share my experiences with large organizations and they usually come to me and they go, “Well, we got this great firewall. We got this endpoint solution”, and I’m like, “Hey, listen. You’re doing these seven things”, I go, “I didn’t invent any of this.” You know, when you say expert, I wasn’t an expert. I was a good listener. I listened to what the victims told me, I correlated it, and I put it together in a very, very simple plan and that’s why it’s called The Secret to Cybersecurity because when you read it, there is no secret. It’s doing the hygiene. It’s knowing that email is the number one attack vector. It’s making sure we think before we click, making sure we think before we act, it’s making sure we have strong robust passwords, we’re not using the same password for mission-critical platforms. We take a deep dive in identifying what are the crown jewels within the organization and then we show you how you secure it. The best part about it is when I do these talks, I go to individuals. I go, “How much money you have to go out and spend to keep your shop safe?”, and the answer really isn’t a lot. So my goal is to teach organizations how not to be the next victim without them really spending money. By showing them and reinforcing what the fundamentals are. Am I saying we don’t spend money? Of course not but I don’t care what you spend your money on. If you don’t do what I tell you to do for free, you’re going to be a victim.

John: Right, so really, what you do, how you spend your professional life now is preventing organizations from becoming the next cybercrime victim. That’s really your main mission and motivation now when you go and do your live seminars at organizations all across the United States.

Scott: Yes, and some of the best things that I get right now is when somebody hits me up on LinkedIn and they’ve heard me speak and they went like this, “I heard you speak and I did what you said. Wow, I’m going to be so much safer.” They didn’t even have to buy my book and it just makes me feel so good.

John: That’s awesome. You know, Scott, when we look at what goes on in the media now, I saw yesterday Easyjet just had a huge breach and I thought 9 million or so of their customers’ information was exposed. We have, of course, lived through many other big brands over the years getting breached– Aquafax, Home Depot– and these are huge organizations where normally are the clients then, their constituents, and other stakeholders put at risk when there’s a breach but leadership of these organizations lose their jobs. This is really your prevention methodology and teaching in your live seminars. You’re there not only to protect all the stakeholders. The stakeholders include upper management who if they don’t take the actions that you’re sharing with them and lead them to, could actually lose their jobs and we’ve seen it time and time again.

Scott: Even worse about that, when it comes to small businesses and non-profit organizations, besides losing their jobs we’re talking about companies closing. We’re talking about people losing their livelihoods, especially in this time of COVID-19.

John: That’s a great point.

Scott: That’s really the point is, on my side, it’s the prevention side. I kind of had the opportunity to go out and work for companies and now, I just find it so much more fulfilling to do what I love to do which is sharing my experiences. I feel very blessed that I have a great pension and even during this time of COVID-19, I’ve reinvented myself. I’ve been doing some webinars and stuff which I find very, very difficult because I like to bounce around the room and do a hundreds, a thousand steps while I’m doing the talk and it’s just trying to figure that out. But here’s the bottom line, even though this COVID-19 is going on to cybercriminals are still looking at ways to exploit us. So I want everyone here to realize right now that if you get an email and it looks like it’s coming from the IRS and it’s saying, “Hey, there’s been a problem with your economic stimulus check, please click here.” Stop, become a human firewall. What are some other ways? What if you immediately get an email that appears to be coming from the director of HR and it says that, “Hey, we want to announce there’s a town hall meeting. There’s gonna be a series of layoffs.”, and this is what happens when companies aren’t securing their emails with two-factor authentication. The bad guys are getting in.

We have to teach people that email is the number one attack vector and the bad guys are sending this email just trying to get us to click on links. Especially in social media, people are posting articles and that is all getting you to click on stuff.

John: Besides the trend of this massive tragedy that we’re all going through COVID-19, we are gonna get to the other side of it. There’s going to be a new normal. But the danger continues to grow. But let’s talk about another trend out there that has come to America since May of 2018. In May of 2018, Scott, GDPR regulations were passed in the EU and they have greatly affected what’s happening in America because the US Government, of course, the federal government, like everything else we do here in America, we look at the EU or other parts of the world. Let’s say we’re in America, we could do something bigger and better. There’s seven or eight forms of national GDPR legislation that were put in for approval. They haven’t passed yet but once we get through COVID-19, one of them will pass and become the law of the land on a national basis. What we’ve also seen happen with the privacy rules and GDPR’s effect on the United States, is states now, are passing their own version of privacy regulations and GDPR. You have 22 states that have put in some form of legislation that will get passed as predicted by the end of this year. All 50 states will pass something by the end of 2021 and already 4 states including New York and California have already passed their own version. So the laws of privacy and data protection are tightening now more than ever both on the localized basis, federal basis, and an international basis. The rules around privacy are tightening. Now, if I was a macroeconomic whiz kid, I would say this trend has to be pushing people into your arms at a higher velocity more than ever because, as the news tightens, that means organizations are going to be held liable now for their constituents and stakeholders’ privacy and data more than ever. How has that affected what you do because you are still the expert that you are and there’s still a huge void of information on how these organizations are supposed to protect their constituents data and privacy?

Scott: That is an incredible challenge of organizations. There’s massive things about privacy and I sit down with C-suites all the time. It just goes back to that exercise. What do we need to protect and where is it? All of a sudden when I discovered that the head of marketing has a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that contains all the customers’ names, dates of birth, and addresses to send a personalized birthday card, you know what that is? It’s PII and it’s sitting out here in probably her personal Gmail account. Companies just don’t know how to process that information and one of the trends that I see right now, which is a very unfortunate trend is companies are spending a lot of money on reactive services. I have a lot of friends. I have friends who work for Kroll, they’re the gold standard of intrusion response and they are so busy during this time. That it’s not even funny and the phone’s ringing off the hook because the majority of their issues are account compromise. Which means the bad guys are able to get in and they steal username and password of the CEO. They log in remotely to the CEO’s email account and now, what is your email hooked up to today that it wasn’t hooked up to years ago which hooked up to your one drive. Now, what do you think a law firm keeps in their one drive? Legal records. Another, what do you think a healthcare company keeps? Their healthcare records. They’re telling me– and a lot of other people are– that 85% of the intrusion response work is being caused by an account compromise which to me could easily be prevented. We’re not talking and we didn’t even need to have this discussion. The other 10% is really complicated. Keeping your network secure and having firewalls and knowing what’s on your network and end point solutions is so important. However, an account compromise which makes up a majority of today’s data breaches can easily be prevented and that’s leaving these organizations wide open to class action lawsuits, GDPR fines. I mean, let’s just think about what happened to Marriott? How are the company’s going to deal with that? It’s kind of the challenges because here’s what I see. From your listener’s point of view, there’s a fog. Where do I start? Because if you have a thousand different companies and they’re all telling you buy this, do this, get a pen test, get a risk assessment, buy an important solution, buy a firewall, get block chain, get artificial intelligence. People don’t know where to start and I’m telling them if 90% of what I dealt with in my career could have been prevented by learning what I teach in my book, go get a copy of the book and start there. Don’t go over there and try to over complicate this because it’s the high geniuses. What did they tell us about COVID 19? What’s the most effective way to get with this? Wash your hands.

John: Wash your hands.

Scott: Wash your hands.

John: Cover your mouth when you cough. Real hygiene 101.

Scott: Then after you wash your hands you know what to do?

John: What’s that?

Scott: You bring your bottle of hand sanitizer and you leave it in the car, okay? Then when you’re done, you do it until your hands turn raw. It’s the same thing. That’s why people aren’t talking about what I’m doing because if you are an organization and I know you deal with consulting company, what’s the goal of a consulting company? To get you on the hook which I’m not throwing stones at the consultants, well yes, I guess I kind of am. You know, they are coming in and they are moving in. I’m just saying, “Look.” One individual asked me, he said, “Are you a consultant?” I go, “No, I’m a speaker trainer.” He goes, “What’s the difference?”, and I kind of laughed and I said, “I guess I’m more expensive than a consultant.” However, I’m not gonna spend more than 6 hours with you. Eight hours of just a happy [inaudible] dinner and I go, “We’re gonna do a series of talks and we are gonna talk to your CEO and provide that high-level briefing to the CEO and the C-suite.”, because information security does not start with the technology department. It’s starts with the business owners because they hold the data. If you can teach them how to be safe at home, they’re going to be safe at work. You do an all employees conference and then I sit down with organizations, I scratch test their intrusion response plans which they spend tons of money on, and I go, “When do you call the FBI or the secret service?”, and then before they give me an answer I cut them off, I go like this “Hi. I’m with the FBI. Here’s your data. Let’s start the exercise.” Then they go, “What do you mean?” I go, “In most standard breaches, it’s us, law enforcement who tells you that you have a problem. How do you handle that?”, and then, I tell them that this is the closer for me as I say this sarcastically. I said, “Then I give you the best to all in the world.” They go, “What’s that?” I go, “I leave and I never call you again.” Honestly, I’m not here to make friends with these companies. I’ve sat with CEOs and I’ve told them that they were out of their mind if they didn’t want to do what I told them to do. They were so taken back, and they’re like “Well, no one’s ever said that to me before.”, and I said, “No one’s told you the truth.” If you don’t want to do what I tell you to do, I will give you the name of my best friend who works intrusion response, Matt Don. Call him 24 hours a day, seven days a week, bother him at home but mention my name and he’ll take 10% off your five, six, or seven figure engagement which you will pay when you have a problem. Then, he’ll kick me back 25%. Then I go, “I’m former FBI, I can’t take say kick back.” In the information security world we call it referral fee and then I go, “Or you can do what I told you to do for free which is just do this.”

John: Many times you’re saving these guys’ jobs, these people’s jobs, the CEOs that you’re consulting. For our listeners who just joined us, we’re so lucky to have today Scott Augenbaum. He’s a cyber security expert, ex special agent with the FBI, he’s written a book The Secret Of Cybersecurity: A Simple Plan to Protect Your Family and Business from Cybercrime. You can buy this on Amazon. It will be the highest [inaudible] you’ve ever gone. If you’re a CFO, a CTO, a CEO, an IT Director, or board member of an organization that you’re trying to protect, that your fiduciary for. Scott, you can also find him on his website www.scotte– is his middle initial–scotteaugenbaum– a-u-g-e-n-b-a-u-m.com. Scott, I know you have some great stories that we could talk for hours but I do want you to share before we say good bye. There’s an importance in companies buying software tools to protect their organizations and there’s tons of great companies out there like Palantir, Cyberark, Fireeye, and the list goes long. All these great unicorns and I’m not here to promote or knock any of them. I’m sure they all have a place out there. But, one of the dirty little secrets, as you were referring to earlier about an end points is the hardware. The hardware that contains data. That if misappropriated or handled the wrong way when they come to the end of life or given access to the wrong people in an organization could spell disaster. I know you have a great story about hardware. Can you share that with our listeners? I want you to share that story with our listeners today.

Scott: Oh, sure. I mean, here’s one of the things that we don’t think about. What do we do with our stuff? Give it away. Now, companies give it away. Now, I remember getting a lead that came in because there was a computer that was found in the Middle East in the hands of a– let’s just say he was a guy who wasn’t a good guy in the Middle East about a decade ago and he was using this laptop and the Department of Defense analyzed the laptop and they saw that it belong to a guy who lived in my area. I got a lead– but from the Department of Defense sent the lead to the FBI, “Hey, go out and track this down.”, because how the heck does this guy who lives here– How does his laptop get in the hands of a bad guy who’s doing bad things.

John: Right.

Scott: We ended up tracking it down and we found out that this guy work for a pretty large organization and we knew the chief information security officer whose job is nothing more to protect the network. His job isn’t disposal of hardware. So what did the organization do? They donated their old laptops to this company that kind of said, ‘Hey, don’t worry. We’ll make sure everything is wiped clean and everything like that.” What ended up happening is they donated it to some company, that company took it and obviously, that information– we don’t know how because they didn’t keep records. That was the crazy thing. They were like, “Hey we donated it to 15 or 20 different organizations and they ended up doing it to somebody else.”, and then those things were obviously purchased, taken overseas, and they got in the hands of a bad guy. Now, let’s think about this. You know, at the end of the day for whoever is the legal council at this company– and this is what I wanna tell as your guide to our listeners out here. Think about if this is your organization, what is it going to do to your brand if one of the computers that you gave away– and I’m not saying don’t give computers away and do good things– but that computer gets traced back because there was data on that computer and there was corporate information. We’re not even talking about that. We’re talking about the fact that the bad guy was using the computer but there was still corporate data on it that led us to track down to the user and there were fax, figures, spreadsheets, and everything like that that were buried deeper on the computer that the bomb thrower had, or I should say bomb maker.

John: Right. You and I know this is happening both on a federal level with government assets from the DOD and other parts of government. This is happening on a corporate and also on other organizations, municipality, and non-profit level. Now that the people have to take care of so foreign– as you said phishing attacks, spear phishing attacks with emails and all the other kind of stuff and other types of preventative software. But their end points, their hardware also has to be destroyed the right way in order to continue to protect that organization. Your book is full of facts, full of information. Again, for our listeners out there, he’s Scott Augenbaum. You can find him on LinkedIn and you can also find him on his website www.scotteaugenbaum.com with an “e” as his middle initial. The name of his book is The Secret To Cybersecurity: A Simple Plan to Protect Your Family and Business to Cybercrime. If I were you, if I was a CFO, CTO, CEO, or board member, I’d hire Scott bring, bring him in, read his book. He’ll prevent your organization from becoming the next cybercrime victim. Scott, you’re making a huge impact in making the world a better place. I’m so grateful for what you do and for your time today. Thank you for joining us on the Impact Podcast.

Scott: John, thank you so much. I have a couple of books here that were sent to me. For the first five people who listened today, go connect with me on LinkedIn and ask me one good question. As you can tell, I’m very shy and I don’t like to talk so we can continue this conversation. Hit me up on LinkedIn and I will gladly send you– first five people– send you a copy of my book. John, it was such a pleasure to talk to you and I hope to get out to California really soon and see you in person and we can–

John: Yes, here or Nashville, which is another great city and I love Nashville so I’ll be there have a great excuse to visit you in Nashville or I will host you here in Fresno, California with all the hospitality on the planet.

Scott: Oh. Excellent. Well, thank you so much and to everyone be safe during this crazy time.

John Shegerian: Welcome to another edition of The Impact podcast. I’m John Shegerian. I’m so honored to have with me today, my good friends Paul Midzak and Robert Tokarchyk. Did I get that right, Robert?

Robert Tokarchyk: Tokarchyk. Yes, it’s close.

John: Tokarchyk. Oh my gosh. Anyway, these two entrepreneurs are the co-founders of the Global Itad Institute and Summit. You can find them at www.itadsummit.com. Robert and Paul, when you started this together we became friends, but I want you to share your journeys leading up to this. What were you guys doing before you came up with this great idea? I want you to share a little bit about how you came together for your visionary idea of putting on this summit.

Robert: Yes. I got it. John, Robert here. Yes, so I’ve been involved in the software side of the business, from the recycling and the ITADsize we provide, inventory management systems to a lot of people on the ITAD space, electronics recycling space, IT reseller world. We cover a large gamut and one side of my company. That being said, we have a lot of clients around the country, the world. We’ve been providing consultative services out to various companies. We were out in, Minnesota.

Robert: I believe it was like 2018 with one of my clients then, they were very interested in setting up kind of an event, a party on one of their yachts, which their family business has a yachting company and they asked us, “Hey, can you guys put on an event, help us out with getting people out to the event?” I was like, “Yes, we could definitely get people out to the event. I’m very well-connected in the industry.” It came down to, I talked over Paul and I’m like why just throw a quick party on a boat when we could actually bring kind of the whole community together and see what we could do from an event’s standpoint. We attend a lot of events out there and I find one of the hardest things to do at these events is really to meet people and have an effective time for your employees. You spend a lot of money and you want to make sure you’re able to kind of have that great return on investment so that’s kind of how it started. The guys we were talking to, they kind of thought we were a little crazy having a conference event. We had 45 days of put this event on. We did a lot of marketing in 45 days and in about 40 to 45 days we’re able to get 220 people up from the industry. It turns out to be a really successful event.

John: When was your first event? Please share with our listeners when was the vision and your dear hatched. When did the first event happen, because I was there? It was amazing and huge. I got to speak there.

Paul Midzak: Hold on, John. You actually weren’t at the first event, you were at our second event. By the way, this isPaul Midzak. I’ve worked with Rob starting this and you were at our second event in Miami. The first event was in the summer of 18.

John: That one, okay.

Paul: By the way, a quick background on myself, I’m not really from this industry. Rob and I go way back and friends. I’m a lawyer. I’ve got a law firm. I have also a public advocacy shop down in Washington, DC. Rob called me and said, “Hey, let’s try and organize something for this ITAD industry.” I said, “What the heck is that? Who the hell is ITAD?” We researched it. We really kind of dug down into the guts of what people are doing in the ITAD space.

John: Okay.

Paul: We ran this first event out in Lake Minnetonka, basically September. This is a great time to be out in Lake Minnetonka, in Minnesota, outside of Minneapolis.

John: Right.

Paul: We expected nothing. We thought maybe a couple of companieswill come out. This is a big broker center in the United States, in the ITAD space. We had such energy and great people coming out. IBM showed up, Blanco, a lot of the bigger, usual suspects now, they showed up. They said to us, “Can you guys do this again?” And we said, “Hey, why not?” Round two John, you were our keynote speaker at our, let’s call it our first real event. That was in Miami, at the Eden Roc Hotel.

John: Right.

Paul: That’s when we really started realizing this industry is very interesting. There’s a lot of future here. There’s a lot happening with data privacy, the environment, and the supply chains. That’s really when we kind of tightened up and said, hey, we really offer something valuable to our attendees for people to learn about what’s new, what’s innovative, where is this all going, and that’s what we’re doing. We did that in Arizona. We’re going to do that in[inaudible] in California and we’re looking at international offers in Europe. We just had a little off the topic, off the line at where we’re at with Corona. Hopefully, when people are listening to this, this is all be ancienthistory.

John: Right.

Paul: We know we’re cautious about that but we’re going to continue working on making this a great program for everybody when it comes out.

John: That is wonderful. Talking a little bit about that first event that I got to go doing was your keynote, I knew you were onto something there because the energy in the room and the number of people there were just fabulous. How many people showed up for that? What was your second event, but the first event that I attended in Miami?

Robert: The event in Miami we had around 605 people come out to the event.

John: Wow.

Robert: Yes, we started with a marketing program for three months in advance. It was extremely successful. We ran it, I would say six months after the Minnesota event. So far we’ve been running the events every six months but probably we’ll move to a once-a-year format. It’s getting big enough. We want to make sure the program doesn’t grow stale and people are able to meet a network of new people so that’s kind of where we’re at with that.

John: I want to say, then I showed up to speak again. How many months later was your Arizona event, your Scottsdale event?

Robert: It was again about six months after the Miami event.

John: We went from just a regular NFL game in Miami to all of a sudden I felt like we were at the Super Bowl at Scottsdale. I mean you guys just were off the chain there. Well, I mean what happened? Was it in Miami that you guys had your aha moment, that you realized you’re onto something big, or was it literally standing in the middle of how big the event was in Scottsdale that you realized, “Wow, this is beyond whatever we dream.” How many people showed up in Scottsdale, and how big was that event?

Robert: Scottsdale we’re right around seven hundred and thirty people so we definitely had a significant bump. We knew we were onto something in Miami. I mean the buzz in the room speaking to a lot of the attendees, the exhibitors, and almost everybody has said unbelievable things about the event. They loved it.

Paul: By the way John, I don’t know if you remember this, but I do because I remember. Maybe two weeks before we really hosted the Miami event and if you saw this thing on

Netflix, The Fire Festival movie.

John: Yes, I did see that.

Paul: This kid runs an event that’s a complete farce. We were scared because we thought, “Oh man, this is gonna be tough.” We’ve got so many people. We got to make sure everything is managed. I don’t know if you remember this, but we actually had to delay your keynote and you were so gracious with us so we really appreciate that. We had to delay because the line getting into the venue was out the door. It had snaked all the way outside the lobby. We had eight people working there, working their asses off to get them through. We literally had to push it back a little. I would say around that time we had an aha moment like you said and we said, “First of all, we need a bigger venue.” Rob did a fabulous job securing that in Arizona. That’s why it really started to feel like okay, this is starting to gel, and then people have the expectation. They have an expectation that they’re going to be doing great business, which is really the feedback we’re getting. It’s so fantastic to get an email or phone call and somebody says, “You know what I closed like seven deals out of that conference.”

Robert: We even had people that were at the conference and they’re like, “Rob guess what, I just closed the deal while I’m working on the floor here.” It’s unbelievable so it’s a tremendous opportunity.

John: Well, we’re going to go into that in a second. I just want to say my team who was down in your Scottsdale event who had a booth there made over a hundred new contacts from their time at that booth those days down there. They felt it was the most valuable conference they had been to in years. Obviously, they’re coming back with me to your other conferences this year and beyond because they felt like they got more done and kind of compact amount of time than they ever did at other conferences or just working the phones and emails themselves. I could say from a first-person perspective and as an entrepreneur to an entrepreneur, huge success from our perspective, huge ROI from our perspective. I can’t recommend your conferences more. Let’s talk a bit little about the benefits. Talk a little bit about first, what is ITAD really mean? We have a lot of listeners who don’t even know what the acronym stands for or what kind of people you’re attracting. Talk a little bit about who you’re trying to get to come to your conference. Why they should come and then what are some of the benefits of being an attendee at your conference?

Paul: Sure. Well, ITAD is IT Asset Disposition and you guys are very familiar with this but for anybody who’s not familiar with that is the industry of electronic recycling has evolved over maybe the last 40 or 50 years, where the true value in these assets was in the raw materials like copper and gold and silver or whatever and extracting that, grinding that again. There’s still plenty ofmarket for that in the recycling space but now you’re looking at how many devices, IT devices that we all have. I was thinking about this the other day. I’ve got three iPads. I got two computers. We have all these data-bearing devices that we use for our work and at some point, they have an end of use for a user. If it’s the first user then it’s got to go into us. There’s still value in the asset so it goes into the secondary market. When you think of larger organizations that are buying, mobile devices for all of their employees and then they upgrade everybody. Well, those first-generation phones or laptops or servers, they still have a useful life for somebody, maybe somebody in Latin America or somebody in Africa, who knows. That life cycle continues in the disposition world. What we want to do is we want to bring together all of the folks in this supply chain. Anybody who’s dealing with the disposition, they’re taking it out as a service or they’re wiping data off of devices. Anybody who’s in that space. We’re bringing them together with this unified vision of, well, if you’re in ITAD, this is what this is where you’re going to meet people who are doing similar things, or they can help you in your supply to provide that service to companies. Rob, you’re from this space so maybe you can add to that.

Robert: Yes, so I mean with the whole ITAD space, you’re providing reverse logistics services for your large businesses. You’re pulling out assets with all the uptick and data privacy laws. You need to provide compliant reporting. You need to use proper data sanitization software where you’re wiping the hard drives. You’re providing a paper trail back to the company. You’re providing the services for the ITAD space, obviously evolved out of the electronics recycling space just from the standpoint. You’re providing a lot more services. You’re charging for your data erasure services. You’re charging for specific auditing of equipment and providing that compliance reporting back to the client. You’re providing proper electronics recycling services. Now, it’s all embodied by your R2 Certifications, your e-Stewards that are chaperoning the industry. It’s kind of ensuring that things are handled properly because before, there were really not a lot of certifications out there monitoring what’s going on with the industry. You were able to basically take equipment in, maybe erase the software, maybe not, re-sell it on E-bay. It caused a lot of problems with data privacy leaks and things like that. The IT Asset Disposition industry is obviously a very big need for the world.

John: I got it. Who is the kind of groups that should be coming to your great summit? For our listeners out there, we’ve got the co-founders Rob and Paul from the Global ITAD Institute, which you can find them at www.itadsummit.com. I’ve attended the last two ITAD summits, their amazing events. Our company is going to be attending the next summit too and I’ll be there as well. We’re electronic recyclers and we’re also a data management and data destruction company, talk a little bit about who else do you suggest should be coming to your great events.

Robert: So, right now kind of the profile of the event, the attendee profile, we have about 50% ITAD providers there. You’re going to have 10% in the corporate sector. People that are looking for new down streams from an ITAD standpoint. It’s a great place for ITAD to meet corporations looking to potentially set up a contract. We have a ton of IT resellers and brokers, so maybe about 30 to 35 percent would be about your like IT resources, your brokers. The reason why a lot of ITAD guys like coming to this event is you’re going to meet the top IT resellers, the top IT brokers in the world. You have your guys coming from anywhere in the U.S.A., anywhere from Europe. These are guys that are buying computers, paying top prices for your wholesale computer deals, and things like that. You’re able to do a lot of face-to-face with your vendors or suppliers. It’s a tremendous networking opportunity. We have this one-to-one meeting so typically if you attend the event, you’re going to set up about 20 to 25 meetings that day. You’re really able to see who’s coming to the event before you arrive. You could target exactly who you want to meet and it’s just a tremendous opportunity.

Paul: By the way, that’s another little bit of our secret sauce, John. It was another aha moment for us, too. We really kicked off this one-to-one technology. There’s a lot of meetings that do this now too, but we really focus on trying to make sure that this works. For example in Miami, I don’t know if you remember this, but you’re walking through the exhibit hall and this place was just buzzing with life and meetings because people were setting up thousands of meetings. I mean, we had 600 some people there, but there were thousands of meetings. When we kind of looked at the analytics on the backside and we said, “Oh my God, look at the interaction that’s happening here.”

Robert: Yeah, I could give you some of the metrics there. In Minnesota, we probably had about 800 meetings set up. We really didn’t have enough time to throw the event in 45 days, but in Miami with the 600 people that attended, we had over 2,700 meetings in Miami. We packed the people in this room and the room, honestly, was too small. It felt like you were inside of a stadium. Then in Scottsdale we had about the 720 to 730 range of attendees. We had over 5,000 meetings set up for that event so it’s a growing evolving thing.

John: Right. How about Fortune 500 companies and other organizations like that? Should they be coming to your conference?

Robert: Yes, I mean, we’ve had guys like Intel come out to the event, people that are handling the reverse logistics side for the companies. We had a bunch of people out of the mobile industry, RingCentral, people like that. I think it’s a good opportunity for them. They would you know if they’re dealing with a certain ITAD provider at the event. They are able to have direct face time with most likely people they’re dealing with in the ITAD space. It gives them the opportunity tomeet new providers that are kind of on the up-and-up in the industry so it gives just it’s pretty good I think for that sector.

John: There are some new trends that are happening both in electronic recycling and also the ITAD world. This whole GDPR coming to America and the issue of data destruction and data management. Can you talk a little bit about, Rob or Paul, the trend of
privacy rights rising, and the need for appropriate and responsible hardware data destruction? How that impact your conference and creates even more of a need to come to your conference to listen and learn about unique subject matters and growing trends?

Paul: Sure. GDPR was actually the second topic that we presented, we had a lawyer out of Minneapolis, in the Minnesota event that we had. GDP from the get-go, the data destruction, the data privacy, also the CCPA, this California Privacy Act, which is it looks like States. We’ve got 50 different states in the United States and fifty different privacy laws. I’ve been saying this since day one again because I have an office in Washington DC. Data privacy is one of the major issues in the next — It’s the future. I mean forget the next decade, it’s going to be about what data is on these devices that we use. Frankly, there are trade secrets, there’s personal information that you just don’t want to be shared and it’s a liability issue more so than losing a device. You lose your phone, your iPhone or your computer, you can get a new one. You’re worried about losing what’s on that phone.

John: Right.

Paul: If you’re a company and you have employees who frankly have trade secrets or there are designs on all of these devices, if you haven’t done your due diligence and wiped and you’vebeen in compliance with these regulations that are in place, you’re in for it. That’s big and it’s a growing, growing issue. Every other week we hear about some kind of abreach. Also on the backside, something’s been stolen, something is misappropriated. It’s floating around on the dark web that shouldn’t happen. You’re always going to hear about an issue of this sort at our conference because it’s a pillar of ITAD. Data privacy and data wiping is the pillar of ITAD.

John: So it’s going to be covered at your conferences this year, your two conferences and then beyond.

Paul: Absolutely.

John: Let’s talk a little bit about this year. When will your next conference be and where will it be so our listeners can know how to start getting ready to attend and sign up for your great conference coming up?

Robert: The current event is scheduled at Huntington Beach, California at the Hyatt Regency.

John: Okay.

Robert: It’s scheduled from May 27th to May 28th. Actually, I screwed that up. I was like, which holiday we’re in for?

John: What’s right before May 27th, the holiday?

Robert: It’s a holiday but it’s —

John: Memorial Day?

Robert: Memorial.

John: Don’t worry about it. Sometimes it’s not the most memorable.

Paul: You know, we don’t celebrate holidays, John. We just work all the time.

John: You’re just workers. Don’t worry about it. I got it.

Robert: I was a restart. Okay, so the event is going to be held at Huntington Beach California at the Hyatt Regency. The dates are May 27th, May 28th. It’s right after Memorial Day. I lost my train of thought here. What else are we discussing with this question?

John: We’re discussing where the event is, what the dates are, and how people can sign up for it.

Robert: I got it. I just direct them to the website, I guess.

John: Yeah.

Robert: All right, let me restart.

John: No worries. That’s the beauty of editing these things.

Paul: Take three.

John: Don’t worry about it.This is no big deal.

Robert: Okay. So the event is going to be held in Huntington Beach, California. The dates are May 27th, May 28 right after Memorial Day. If you’re interested in buying tickets, you can purchase tickets at www.itadsummit.com. Ticketsare available right now. We’re at a pre-advanced ticket special. The price right now is $550 a ticket, so if interested visit the website and purchase them.

John: Perfect. Guys, how do listeners connect with both of you if they have specific questions or concerns or want to discuss your conference with you before they sign up. How can our listeners best connect with you guys?

Robert: The best way to connect with me, Robert, you can email me at [email protected]. If you’re interested in calling us, can you give you a phone number here for a second? I restarted that.

John: Okay, no worries. Take two.

Robert: Paul, what do you want to say for your email?

Paul: We have a catch-all email on the website, events at ITAD Summit. You can reach us directly there. We get it. We have a chat feature on the website as well. If anybody has specific questions, we’ve got one of our guys handles this and it’s very helpful because there’s always kind of questions about the specifics of how this all runs. The other thing we want we want people to consider is like you said earlier John, Fortune 500s, or any other new company in this ITADspace, we’re always interested in hearing from potential speakers as well. If there is somebody who’s interested in and has a great idea, last time we had some new stuff about blockchain and robotics and artificial intelligence. If there’s someone out there who’s doing something innovative and they want to maybe give us a little bit of a sneak peek or give us their perspective, we want to hear from them, too. There’s contact info. The best point of contact is on the website. We read these emails. We get them, we process them, so reach us there.

John: Before we have to say goodbye here, shameless plugs, anything you guys want to plug including your conference or future events. This is your time and then we’re going to sign off here.

Paul: Well, definitely first of all we appreciate that you’re taking the time to speak with us, John. We appreciate that. You’ve been with us since the beginning. This is great for us to see how this grows and the industry is growing. We will shamelessly promote all of our speakers including you John. We’re going to shamelessly promote all the attendees who come out because at the end of the day you go to an event, you meet great people and you say, “I want to do business with that person or this person.” We create that environment for people to add that to their agenda, to their annual agenda. This is our shameless plug of getting on the website, get registered. It’s going to be an incredibly productive week. I don’t make any guarantees like this, but I think with a lot of confidence you’re going to do great business if you come on out. You’re going to learn some wonderful things about the industry.

John: Well, for sure we’ve done great business at your conferences and again for people who want to find Rob or Paul, please go to www.itadsummit.com. Both of you guys are the reason I have this show you’re making a great impact on this world. You’re making a great impact on our industry. Thank you both for being my guest today on The Impact podcast. Thank you again.

Paul: Thanks, John.

Robert: Thanks, John.

John Shegerian: Welcome to the Impact Podcast. This is the first episode ever of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian and today, I’m so honored to have on our podcast on the inaugural Impact Podcast my good friend and business partner, Mr. Jake Olson. Welcome to Impact, Jake.

Jake Olson: Thank you. You didn’t tell me I was going to be the first.

John: You know, Jake, there’s a lot of things I can say but all I’m going to say is you know what, you always remember the first.

Jake: Yes, you do. Well, let’s make this a memorable podcast.

John: That’s why. You’re it, man. It will be. Just having you on and thank you for taking the time today to join in. Before we get going here, Jake, I just want you to share a little bit about your background andhistory. For people who haven’t heard about you before, tell a little bit about who you are and where you’ve been.

Jake: Yes. Well, I was born and raised in Southern California where I still am today. I’m currently 20 [inaudible] old. I graduated from USC, that’s Southern California for those listening across the country. I played football at USC, but what makes that I guess a little more special and cool than the average football player at USC is that I’m completely blind. I was a long snapper on the team for four years, which was just incredible experience. Kind of coming up to that, I guess point in my life, I had battled cancer for the first 12 years of my life and after 12 years of battling that cancer, the cancer rendered me blind. It took both my eyes. At 12 years old, had a real crossroads of where I wanted to take my life and continue to push forward. That included to continue to play the sports that I loved. Eventually throughout high school, was playing golf and football, earned my way in the USC, and then was offered a walk-on at USC. Of course, took that opportunity and just made the most of it. As a result, I’ve had incredible experiences in my life, been able to meet incredible people like you, John, and then just leverage those relationships into what I’m doing today–an entrepreneur and a motivational speaker and everything else I’m doing.

John: You know, Jake, I want to go back to something you mentioned because it’s sort of sometimes gets glossed over with your incredible story. For those who haven’t seen you, I’m going to be on the Impact Podcast on the website. I’m going to have a link to the ESPN video that they did the profile on you, which I just love every time it comes on ESPN E60. I just watch it over and over again almost like it’s the first time. As you said in your
earlier remarks, you beat cancer and you fought cancer. A lot of people beat cancer once or twice and it’s an incredible story, incredible journey. How many times in the first 12 years of your life did you have to fight back and be cancer down?

Jake: It was a nasty cycle. I guess at the end of it all, the last time it came back was the eighth time that I would have come back. At that time where we just had to kind of come to the conclusion that one, this thing did not seem like it was going to be going anywhere anytime soon and two, because it did come back eight times, we had fought it with everything that existed. I maxed out on radiation, I maxed out on chemotherapy and as a result, we couldn’t use those treatments anymore. Everything was was utilized.John: First 12 years, that’s a lot to fight cancer eight times. That’s a lot.

Jake: It was. It was difficult just because if you think about it, you’re celebrating the fact that the cancer goes away and then six months or a year later, you’re back in that same mindset you were two years ago when you found that the cancer came back. Eventually kind of gets into this thing that toys with your mind, your hope, and your spirit because you just never know. Is it gonna be the last time? Okay, like, should we be celebrating right now? I don’t know.

John: Right, right, right. You know, Jake, every time I’m with you. I learn something new about you and I enjoy just being with you because you’re one of those special people that have whatever one wants, that X Factor but very few really, really have. If you could share a little bit with our audience, what is your core mission or guiding light and what drives you to be the best everyday? I love you to just share. What makes you tick?

Jake: Well, I think what makes me tick is and I don’t know if it’s in my DNA or not, but I’ve always been a very stubborn individual. I’ve always been someone who when is confronted with a challenge, almost has this desire to fix the problem. I’m one of those people that if I’m writing an essay and it’s 1 am, 2 am, I’ve been working on for four hours. Even if I try to go to bed, it’s going to be on my mind. I just want to finish through it. I just want to just absolutely finish it. That’s just I guess where my core is in trying to accomplish goals. I’m very much into helping others and impacting other people’s lives. When you combine those two things together, plus obviously the circumstances my life has been put through of me just continuing to overcome adversity, impactingpeople’s lives, sharing my story and then making sure that when the obstacles do come that I’m putting my head down and embracing them. I really do think there’s no greater feeling than when you do accomplish your goal, when you do go through that journey and look back on all the steps you’ve had made, all the different times you had to overcome what you were going through. I think the journey and obviously the accomplishment itself, make any adversity worth going through and overcoming.

John: You know, you speak about impact. I have seen you speak publicly numerous times and every time I’m very moved. What are some of the comments that people share with you after they’ve either seen your story on television or seen you in person speak? What are some of the impact that you make on other people’s lives when you’re sharing and what resonates with people after they’ve heard your story, Jake?

Jake: It’s incredible. It’s something that really inspires me. To be honest, just being able to impact people’s lives in the way that my story has been able to and that I’ve been able to. I think it’s something that is like when someone that you know has gone through struggles themselves and if it’s someone going through cancer, if it’s someone who’s lost a kid or a parent, if it’s someone who was born in a terrible family, bounced around foster homes, the ones that really get me are the service men and women that have lost legs and limbs. They come and say, “You know, Jake, you’re doing this. We see you out here living a normal life and inspires me to do the same.” In those times, it really humbles me just because at the same time, I realized blindness is tough and what I’ve done is incredible, but for someone who’s literally given up their their livelihood and their body parts to keep me safe every day, I mean that’s at another level. To be able to inspire those people, it really does kind of put a light on what I’m doing and just makes me want to continue to do it and do it even at a greater level.

John: You know, Jake, everyone has a secret super power. What’s yours and how did you figure out what your secret superpower really was? Because I’ve seen you do things besides the very obvious USC long snapping that everyone in America has seen. What’s your inside superpower that you’re able to turn on? I was sharing this with a friend last night who knows you too, Dan Angelo. Your memory, your recall, your intelligence is just so next level, Jake, and I know you know, I’m one of the co-CEOs of your fan club, but I mean, what’s your secret superpower from in your own words and how did you discover it?

Jake: Well, John, a lot of people have called me Daredevil, or at least compared me to him, so there’s there’s definitely that. I don’t know if it’s because of my excellent hearing or my other blind senses or whatever you want to call them, spider senses, I got blind senses. There’s been a lot. One of my super powers is being able to look at situations and I know it’s kind of weird because I don’t have physical sight, but just the ability to look at a situation, circumstance or opportunity from a lot of different angles, from a third party, try to remove emotion from it and just really see it how it is. I think that’s definitely one of my superpowers. I think humor is one of my superpowers. I think I’m a somewhat of a funny guy or at least I like to bring a light to a situation, but my real answer to you I think is resilience and that’s just my ability to continue to balance off different aversions that come my way, put my head down and push through like one of those guys that I think if you drop off in the middle of the wilderness or middle of the ocean, I’m not giving up until I literally can’t move anymore. I know there’s a lot of people out there who have that mindset, who have taken that task on of just fighting, fighting, and fighting even when the odds are stacked against you. Even when there’s nothing left in the tank, you’re still fighting, finding more, you’re still fighting and I think that’s something that I pride myself. I think that is something that gives me dignity. I think that it’s something that you really have to create that mindset and live in that mindset because you never know when those situations are going to come. You never know when life’s gonna hit you hard. It’s about preparing that, not choosing it just in the moment, but preparing your whole life for that. It’s gotten me to where I am today and it’s going to get me to where I’m going, so I think resilience is the answer I’m going to give you.

John: I love it and you know, you’re always in great shape whenever I see you both mentally, physically, and always upbeat. What would you say is your greatest time or health act? Because you’re always absorbing tons of information. You don’t have all your senses like everybody else does to do so, so what’s a timer health act you could share with our audience that gives you more time and makes you more efficient to be the best Jake Olson that you can be on a daily basis?

Jake: Yes, I think from a health standpoint, there’s two things I think that really helped me just be able to grind throughout the rest of the day, throughout the rest of the week and that is working out. I love lifting. I love setting that time aside every day or at least three, four, five times a week to just go in there and kind of almost have a different universe. You’re not concerned about things on the outside. You’re just there to get yourself better and take out emotions on weights or whatever the individual wants to do. The other thing I’d say is hanging out with friends and meaningful relationships. Just making sure you spend the time that you need with quality friends and family and for me it’s hanging out or whatever you do. If it’s watching a baseball game, if it’s going out to dinner, the activity doesn’t have to be anything special and it doesn’t have to be the same every week. Just making sure you’re sharing your feelings with those people, that you’re soaking in what they have to say, helping them with their problems and just building that relationship with people that are there for you and are definitely in your corner of the ring and are going to be there for the rest of your life.

John: Jake, you know, everybody gets to inspiration from different places. Do you ever listen to podcasts, TED talks or do you listen to television or the radio? Where do you get your best information or is it just books? Because I find you’re always up. You’re so unique in that you’re always up to speed on what’s going on in the real world. You and I are always having fascinating discussions. You also have tremendous knowledge about things that I wouldn’t expect you to be able to totally riff about such as when we had dinner the other night, you know more about the Bible than most priests I know. You’re so fascinating and have such a world of knowledge. Where are you finding the inspiration in terms of your knowledge? How are you feeding your mind and your soul? Where are you gathering that information from typically?

Jake: Well, I guess I can be kind of real funny with this and say I definitely read the Bible a ton, so I have a vast knowledge of that. Yes, and obviously it provides a lot of wisdom for my life and guidance. On the flip side Twitter.

John: That’s okay. That’s fine.

Jake: I watch TV. Just reading different news articles and the thing I think that’s important that I think a lot of people have lost too is if it’s on Twitter, if it’s on my news app on the phone or whatever, I make sure to follow CNN, Fox, Wall Street Journal, and all these different publications. I’ll read every article just because it’s something different. Again I kind of mentioned this in the previous answer but all these people have different ways of viewing the same situation. There’s a lens of bias in all of them. You can you can create your own but I think where people are getting tripped up is when you choose a look at this this one situation through one lens and then you get trapped in all the opinions in that lens and it’s like, “Okay. Well, wait a second. There’s actually like four other people that have different views on it?” and some you can just check off. Hey that’s a ridiculous thing, but it’s still important to know that theories out there because someone else might have changed up a little bit and have used that to formulate their own opinion. There’s just so many things out there that I think are importantto look at every situation, look at every circumstance from different lenses. I think when you say like, “Oh, I know so much about things.” It’s like, well, I probably don’t know too much about a lot of things but the things I do know, I kind of try to surround it and figure out what everyone thinks about it from every side.

John: Yes, you do and I’ll tell you what, Jake, it’s just inspirational to be around you because of your knowledge base and how you process different information is just fascinating. Hey, before we get going here and do some plugs for some of the brands that you’re involved with and you’re speaking engagements as well, I want you to just share your best advice for our audience and listeners if they want to make a change in their life or do something that makes an impact like you’re doing. I want to share also a little bit about your vision of the future. How can our listeners make a change and make the world a better place as well?

Jake: Yes. I think the thing I would say is you really have to change the way you look at yourself in the sense that you got to be the first person to believe in yourself and the first person that believes that you can go out there and accomplish what you want to accomplish. Once you really believe in yourself and I mean really, really believe in yourself, then you can start putting things in motion. The first thing is obviously you surround yourself as a support system then that believes in you, believes you can do it and gives you opportunities to prove yourself. Beyond that is just continuing to then deal with the adversity that’s going to come when trying to prove yourself and and reach your goals. Diversity will come, but again, that’s why authentic belief in yourself is going to be so necessary in those moments of doubt and adversity that do come. Throughout it all just making sure you’re following your passion. I think a lot of people in this world do a lot of things that they’re not passionate about and as a result, they don’t feel fulfilled at the end of the day. They look back 10 years and they’re like, “What have I accomplished?” and they feel empty. So I think really pursuing your passion is something that’s very important and just realizing that what you love to do is what you want to do in life. Never forget that. I think one of the most special things you can have in life is when you make that you’re living and I think that’s the most successful people in this world as well.

John: Jake, before we ask you how people can best connect with you, shameless plugs. I know you’re involved with a lot of brands. I know you’re doing a lot of things and this is your opportunity to share with our listeners all the great places and things that you’re doing so they could listen to you, hear you more, see you more online offline. Give us some shameless plugs on brands that you’re involved with.

Jake: Absolutely. First brand, my company, John, is letsengage.com. Engage is the company’s name, but as where you can find me, you go to my social media handles to JakeOlson61 both on Twitter and Instagram and you can see them in my link there. It’s a cool hub where you can kind of find out what I’m doing, but also you can book me for anything you want to including a couple fun experiences like playing golf with me. If you have never played golf with the blind guy, it’s a quite an experience. I’m not going to promise that I’ll let you win, but you pay me enough money maybe I will. Just kidding.

I mean, it’s definitely something I’m doing. Definitely follow me on social because I’m up to a lot of cool projects including maybe another book coming out here soon and a lot of other cool things that hopefully can inspire you to live your best life.

John: Jake, that’s amazing. I mean, you’re such a humble person when you say that people can book an event with you on Let’s Engage and again, for people who missed it the first time it’s www.letsengage.com. Jake Olson is the president and co-founder and you could book him there. I know that one of your friends / acquaintances and someone you played golf with before is Tiger Woods, that just goes to show how everyone loves being around you, how everyone’s inspired by you both large personalities, superstars and just the regular man or woman on the street. You do love speaking and you do a lot of speaking eventsso people can book you on Let’s Engage to do more speaking around the country.

Jake: Absolutely.

John: Jake, any last words before we sign off here?

Jake: No, it’s been a pleasure to be the first. I hope that based on this interview people come back for more because I know, John, you, like me are very well connected and have a lot to share for people to live successful lives.

John: Well, for all our listeners out there, this has been the first edition and podcast ofImpact. We’ve been honored to have both my friend and business partner, Jake Olson on. Jake, you are living proof that we can all make an impact. Thank you very much.

John Shegerian: Welcome to the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian the host and this is the second episode of Impact and I’m so honored to have with us today, Daniel Hennes. He’s the CEO of Engage. It’s really called www.LetsEngage.com but Daniels not only a good friend of mine, but he’s also abusiness partner. I’m going to leave it at that because this is all about Daniel. Daniel, welcome to Impact.

Daniel Hennes: Thanks, John. Great to be here excited to get into it.

John: Hey, Daniel before we get into your business ventures and other things. For someone who hasn’t known you or heard about you before, can you share a little bit about yourself and who you are and your journey leading up to your becoming the CEO of let’s engage?

Daniel: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, yes. I’m a recent USC graduate. I graduated class of 2019, living in the real world now and my sort of journey leading up to Engage, I’d always wanted to work in sports, work in sports business. I remember when I was a third-grader, my dad asked, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” and like any third grader who likes sports, I was like, “Oh, I want to be a professional baseball player.” He goes I’ve seen you play baseball you definitely that’s not a valid career path. You’re just not going to be very nice blond Jewish parent like not going to be aprofessional baseball player. So, he said, “Start thinking about other ways you can get involved. There’s plenty of ways whether it’s being engineer[?], being an executive. You should start thinking about other ways you can get involved with sports.” So, that’s start off from a very young age, I started to become fascinated by the business aspect who the power agents were, who the right Executives were. I’d always develop the sort of interest in the sports business. When I was a freshman at USC, my random freshman year roommate was I think a previous guest on the show Jake Coulson who’s completely blind and played long snapper for the football team. So, that was my random freshman year roommate and just a unique opportunity. He’s such a humble kid. I remember the first time he practiced I told Jake I said, “Jake, this is going to be a huge story that blind person is practicing for a team that he grew up a fan of and is gonna be a first blind player in college football. This is going to be a huge story. Let me be your PR person is a joke.” Jake’s sort of thought nothing of it he goes, “No one’s going to care but fine. If I do a lot of interviews, you can be my PR person.” Well, sure enough, he gets in to practice and it’s a massive story. He calls me after class one day goes, “Daniel, put on a suit, come down to Heritage Hall where the athletic office is. I actually have a bunch of interviews lined up. You can come if you want.” So I grabbed a suit, I run down there and then Jake is a joke, introduce me to the USC people as his personal PR person and then all of the USC people said, “Great,” and started forwarding me all of his requests and all of his media appearances, and I was just sort of thrown into the fire by default. January of our freshman year, I took over as his manager and started handling all of his speaking engagement. After he snapped and played in his first game that sort of what led to this idea of Engage as we just got flooded with speaking requests and appearances and Jake are saying, “Okay. There’s got to be a better way to find him, to do all this, to do this process. I shouldn’t be faxing people contracts in 2019.” So we started looking for a platform to do the whole process online just for ourselves to make our lives easier and then when we couldn’t find,when we called a bunch of athletes and agents we knew and they all said the same thing. They said, “The process is so inefficient,” and because of that were only able to focus on one percent of our clients and there’s this real need for a digital platform that just democratizes the process of digitizes the process and that’s what led to its founding Engage.

John: Okay, hold on before let’s step back. First of all, you’re growing up. You’re told that you’re not going to be the next Barry Bonds or Tom Seaver, whoever you want to A-Rod or whatever. You then fall in love with sports as a whole.

Daniel: Yes.

John: When you were growing up, who did you want to be? I mean, was it just based on the movie Jerry Maguire or was it some other sports agent that you would read about? In your readings or in television, who was your model sports agent?

Daniel: That’s an awesome question. Back then, it was definitely Scott Boras. He runs [inaudible] down Newport Beach, over powerful baseball agent who always did things definitely, first guy to embrace statistics. First guy to think about injury prevention. He just took a holistic view and cared and the whole thing is genuine relationships. He seemed like the type of guy and I’ve gotten to know him a little bit and he is the type of guy who cares deeply in genuinely about all of his clients.

John: Got it. Now you’re with Jake, it’s freshman year. As fate would have it Jake Coulson, the special Jake Coulson who is also a friend of mine as well and business partner of mine, heis your roommate in college, did you even ever imagine the first month that you were together? First two months that he would become your first client?

Daniel: Yeah. No. When I found out Jake was my random freshman roommate. I didn’t think he was a real person. I mean, we get like before we move in, we got bios on all of our roommates. We get bios in all of our roommates and I had never heard Jake story. So I’m reading Jake’s bio and it goes, “Hi guys. I’m Jake. I play on the football team,” and I’m thinking that’sawesome, I get to live with a football player.

John: Right.

Daniel: I’m also blind and I have a guide dog Quebec[?] and I’m like, “Oh, this guy can’t be real.” This kid is hilarious. He understands how awkward this thing is. This id so funny. He’s going to be a great funny kid. I don’t think anything of it a week before we move in, one of my other roommates text me, “Hey, we’re getting a TV. Do you think it’s appropriate to have Jake pay for a portion and I go, “Of course, why not? He’ll use a TV,” and my roommate responds, “Because he’s blind,” and I go, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait that’s real? What — in theroom?” So that, of course, I started reading Jake story. I remember when — I never spend any time around a blind person before so I was super nervous like how can I say, “Did you see that? Did you watch this?” I was nervous about everything. I think pretty quickly, we became good friends. From there I never expected to become his manager, but as we became good friends first, I think it was a natural evolution given both of our interests.

John: I mean, you never expected your first year freshman year at USC to be rooming up with seeing idol, either.

Daniel: Right. Right. Right. Exactly. That is not in the stands for the oven[?] guide to college. No, I did not expect that.

John: Got it. Got it. Oh boy. Okay. So now let’s fast forward, you and Jake are roommates. Things are going well. Talk a little bit about, pre-engaged when you were thinking about this business and thinking about the industry being broken in the voids in the industry. What’s your coremission, Daniel? Like yourself, what drives you every day to do what you do? Is it go back to your childhood and sort of a chip on your shoulder that you were told that you’re never going to be the next A-Rod or is it more just someone who wanted to be a successful entrepreneur or business person? What’s your deal?

Daniel: That’s an awesome question. I think what drove me is really being around Jake. I saw the power of his story. I mean, we have people who reach out to Jake years later letting him know, “Hey, your speech really changed how I thought about X, Y & Z. I saw that he was doing something that legitimately mattered and legitimately was making an impact and sort of my motivation for really founding Engage was we talked to a ton of talent and their agents and it sounded like because of the current system, there was a ton of talent that wanted to be making an impact, thatcould be making impact, that had great just amazing stories. But, no platform and no market place for them to get books to share it. My theory was there were a lot — there’s obviously, there’s only one of Jake but there are a lot of incredible inspiring people. On the flip side, there are a lot of people who want to hear from them. I mean being around with Jake everyday has made me a more positive resilient person. So I think there’s a lot of people who wanted to hear from those people. So what really motivated me in starting Engage was democratizing the access on both sides.

John: Right. Right, Right, that’s great. Talk a little bit about impact, this is the Impact podcast andhow do you feel that your company Engage impacts the planet, the community, the industry at large and makes a positive impact?

Daniel: Mm-hmm. No, I think one of the unique things about Engage is that’s literally our goal is to help provide. I mean our mottos “Find book experience” because we want people to have those experiences that changed their lives. So, I would tell you by opening up a marketplace for more people with incrediblestories, cancer survivors, Elite athletes, successful business people, we’re making an impact by helping match those people. The people who need to hear their stories. The people who can learn and their lives will be better from having heard them speak or from having played golf with them. So we’re making an impact there and I think kind of what’s unique about Engage is we’re making an impact just in how we run the business. I mean, Jake is our president and he’s very, very involved in the day-to-day operations and strategy. So, it just goes to show that you shouldn’t let blindness or you should let disability stop you from being able to run a business. It shows that there aren’t — I don’t know John, I can’t think of any notable entrepreneurs with disabilities. We want Jake to be the first to really pave a path for people, that shows no matter what’s going on in your life, you can still easily succeed in business.

John: Right. I love that. I really do love that and I really agree with you on that, Daniel. Daniel everybody has superpowers. Some understand it and leverage them. Some really don’t and some don’t take advantage of their secret superpower. If you were to say that you have a secret superpower. What would that be? How do you discover and how do you leverage it on a consistent basis to be the best Daniel Hannes that you can be and to inspire people around you on a regular basis?

Daniel: That’s awesome. I think my jokes superpower is I think I’m really, really good at carrying groceries. I can carry aninsane amount of groceries. People have observed, I could get like seven or eight bags in one hand easily. [laughs] because it’s always send my mom to the grocery store and I never go with her. So the deal was I had to carry them into the house.

John: You were in charge of that.

Daniel: I was charge of it.Yes, but on a more serious note, I think my superpower has been that I’m always able even if I meet someone once, I can remember talking them who they are and what they do. I can be genuinely interested in what they are and I think in what they were doing and I think having the ability to genuinely be interested in people is a really really powerful thing. Since I’m interested in so many things, I always remembering what people do, who they are, what drives them and I think by being able to have that memory and stored and when you talk to people and it’s clear that you remember your conversations and you know who they are. I think that goes a lot way a long, long way in building relationships. If there’s one thing I’ve learned I think the key to business is finding the right strategic partners and building those meaningful relationships. That happens by understandingwho people are, by genuinely caring and by just remembering when people give you advice. When people tell you things and that’s I think would be my super powers. I have a pretty good ability to remember who does what.

John: Time is everything now because that’s all we all have. How do you make — what’s your greatest time hack so you can make yourself smarter, stronger make your brand better. How do you get through every day with the least amount of friction and the most amount of productivity?

Daniel: Yeah. The first thing is living in Los Angeles. I avoid rush hour traffic at all costs. Generally what that means my day looks like I’ll get up probably about 7:30 or respond everything on the east coast. Then I’ll shower, get cleaned up, do my work but then I want head to the office until 10:00 because that way instead of spending an hour in the car, I’m spending 20 minutes in the car. I’m only losing a little bit of productivity and on the flip side, I’ll either wait late at night to wait out the traffic or I’ll leave at 3:30. Get back to my home and do the rest of my work from there. Today’s day and age, it’s really easy to do things electronically and virtually via email and cell phone. So, it’s important to be in the office and show a presence, but if you’re spending, I know people who spend three hours a day in traffic that’s three lost hours. That’s three hours are not working, not exercising not spending time with her family. So I think people lose so much time and traffic. I don’t do that and the second thing is and this is a little more unique to me I think is, I’m a big fan of working out and exercising as the last thing I do every day. A lot of people say that it energizes them too much. For me, I love working out from 10:00 PM to 11:00 PM, because it allows me to end my day on a high note and I find that I sleep better when I’m physically tired and relaxed. So, I think that’s been a huge, I don’t lose it — when I wake up literally the first thing I do is check email and get to work. So, for me because I’m well-rested and I’m physically tired. I’m physically tired, I’m able to sleep well and that allows me to just be supercharged for my day.

John: That’s really great. Sometimes you read and help literature that exercising at night is way to energize yourself and it keeps people up. I’m like you, I get exercise in the morning as well, but if I exercise at night, I sleep my deepest sleep and that’s fascinating. That’s a really fascinating health act because it flies in the face of what you read typically, but I find it to be exactly the same benefit that you do. I really highly recommend it as well to our listeners out there, just to try it as a deep sleep practice. So, that’s a good one. There’s a lot of people out there Daniel that will listen to this, go online, look at LetsEngage.com and read a little bit about you online and say, “I want to be Daniel. I want to be doing what he’s doing.” So there’s a lot of people out there that want to switch position and get out of working for someone else or change life path. What are some pieces of good advice that you could share with our listeners, who want to change their journey and potentially take on a new journey whatever that is were like you and frankly speaking, our good friend Jake Coulson can make an impact and make the world a better place? Share some of your thoughts because I know that soon, if not already you’re going to be getting emails or text messages from your classmates at USC who go, “Dude, I’m really not digging my first job,”–

Daniel: It’s happening —

[crosstalk]

John: Right. How can I join what you’re doing or how can I find something like what you found or created really more specifically and take my own journey into my own hands?

Daniel: Yes, that’s awesome. I think the first thing that anybody has to understand is if they want to start that journey, they better not start it alone. They need to understand that if you’re going to start to create an impact, I knew nothing about business when I first started, but I did know that if I was lucky enough to find the right people and the right partners, that would exponentially speed up my learning curve like you need to be, if you want to start something on your own you need to be willing to take honest feedback. You need to surround yourself with people who will give you that honest feedback and push you and you also need to be willing to work at all hours of the day. A lot of people what they love about what I do is to go, “Oh man, you have so much flexibility. You get to go to the Super Bowl. You get to go NBA All-Star weekend.” Yes, that’s true. I mean, I will also gladly get up and do three hours of work on a Saturday. Sometimes that means I’m working until 8:00 PM or 9:00 PM. The upside of a 9 to 5 job is it’s from 9 to 5. The downside is so many other things. The upside of being an entrepreneur is Teddy Roosevelt has a quote “the greatest opportunity life can provide is the opportunity to work hard at work worth doing” because of Engage I have that opportunity. So I’m so thankful for that every day. And for me like since I’m given that opportunity, the flip side is I better work my ass off to earn what I’ve been given and because of that like my friends always joke, even Jake jokes, like I am always on my phone, always on email. I sleep with my phone by my bed. I can’t tell you how many times. I’ll get up at midnight or 1:00 AM. Write down an idea or a strategy thing. Its surrounding yourself with like-minded people who have that drive and also have that desire.That’s what keeps you going. There will be days where I’m exhausted, but our CEO was so energized and he’s doing a hundred different things and that gets me energized again to keep going and keep pushing through. So you need to — nobody gets there alone, find the right people and be willing to work at all hours.

John: That’s great advice. That’s really great advice. Work all hours.

Daniel: I think you’re an example of that. You’re literally being perfect example of that.

John: Hey, thank you. When you told your mom and dad that you were going to start a business and not take a job out of SC. Well, what were their thoughts on all that?

Daniel: You know what? I’m so thankful that the parents, I do. My dad, in particular, his whole thing was what he’s always instilled in me is he will support whatever I do. Literally whatever I do as long as it is thought out and I have considered all of the options. So my dad like blind support go for it.My mom obviously, she’s incredibly supportive. She just had a few more questions, but my parents whole thing was you know what this is the time in your life to —

John: That’s awesome.

Daniel: — maximize your upside. You have no risk, you have no downside. So I was very lucky. I mean my grandfather was very entrepreneurial and was very successful. I was very lucky to have parents who really just trusted me. They know I’m a hard worker. They know I wasn’t just trying to cost off of some investor money. They know that this is the opportunity in my life to set myself up to be happy inmy work for forever. That’s something that’s so few people have and I think it’s something that my parents have always said they want nothing more than for us to be happy as kids and they saw that this was something that gave me that opportunity. They have been nothing but supportive whether it’s — I mean I had to tell them they couldn’t invest but literally they’ve done, they want to do everything they can to help me and I’m very thankful for that. I’m also very proud that one of the promises I made myself was that if I was going to do this on my own, I wasn’t going to let them continue to support me. I was going to pay my own bills. So since they knew that like I was serious enough and I’m off the Hennes family, [inaudible] I’m supporting myself. I think that also went a long way and showing them that I was really really serious about this.

John: For our listeners that don’t know, how old are you?

Daniel: I’m 23. I look like I’m 40 because I’ve lost a lot of hair but —

John: Twenty three, that’s impressive. What everything you’ve accomplished. Talk a little bit before we got to go here, talk a little bit about Engage. How many people you signed up and have on it. What’s your goal for the rest of this year? What’s your goal for the future for Engage?

Daniel: Yes. I think we started this pasture super small. We grew from nothing to over 300 talent in our first year. Now, we’ve already added 50 or 60. We have another about 30, literally 30 in the pipeline. So, the goal this year is to get to a thousand talent in a really diverse range. We’ve added some of these last couple weeks from Top-tier business speakers. We added one of the top speaking doctors in the country as well as continuing to add big-name athletes. We have Steve Young coming on board the platform here in the next week. We have some real big-name guys coming and so my goal is to really grow the talent. We have a lot of strategy laid out for PR to consistently get us big publicity in PR head. So people hear about and understand the impact Jake is making in the broader mission and then the goal for the future is to build a marketplace where every consumer knows that if they want to book talent and they want a seamless easy way to do it that Engage is the platform to do it. In order for us to get there, the first thing we have to have is the talent. So right now, I’m laser-focused on Partnerships that help us grow the talent and then we’re continuing to build the consumer base with the end goal of building this massive market place that just completely changes the way that people get booked and then we sell that company and then I would want to spend the rest of my life investing. There’s so many great people who helped me, who took a shot on Engage. I’m talking to one of them right now. Who took a shot on Engage when itjust an idea. I want to be that person for the Next Generation. So the goal is to sell it and then all make an impact by continuing to invest and fun people who need someone to take a shot at them at the very beginning. It’s super easy to raise money when you’ve got a profitable business and you have a lot of talent. It’s really hard to find people who say, you know, what I just believe in the passion and the energy and I’m going to support that. That’s the person, that’s the type of investor I want to be.

John: For our listeners out there, how do they connect with you, Daniel?

Daniel: I’m notoriously off of social media. I don’t have Twitter orInstagram, but you can find me on LinkedIn Daniel Hennes is my name. I’m super accessible via email Daniel LetsEngage.com and then I also encourage you to follow our company Engage, our Twitter is @let_engage and our Instagram is @lets_ engage. I really encourage you to connect with me through seeing the work I’m doing because I think that’s the best way.

John: Hey, if I’m a speaker or a public speaker whether I’m a business person or an athlete or Entertainer, how do I sign up forto get on your great platform once engage.com.

Daniel: So couple ways, one you can always email me directly if you’d prefer to have a phone call first, but you can also just go to our website click go to LetsEngage.com, click register as talent. From there, you’ll be asked to fill out some questions and some information and then our team reviews your profile, approves it, finishes it out and sort of hops on a couple calls with you to really brainstorm how you want to be marketed, what you like doing. So the first step is to either email me or go to our website and register as talent.

John: Daniel, any final thoughts for our listeners before we say goodbye?

Daniel: I would just say, continue to listen to this wonderful podcast.

John: Oh, you’re too nice. Daniel Hennes, he’s my friend. He’s my business partner. He’s the CEO and co-founder of LetsEngage.com. Daniel Hennes, you’re living proof that we can all make a great impact in this world. Thank you so much.