John Cousins: How to Use AI and Automation to Your Benefit

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome back to Unscripted Small Business where we connect with business owners, founders and creators from across the United States to explore the challenges, success and insight that define the world of small business. I'm excited for you to hear from today's guest, John Cousins. With an electronics degree from MIT and an MBA from the prestigious Wharton School, John has forged an impressive career both inside and outside the corporate world. He has served as CEO of an innovative cancer diagnostics company and CFO for several public companies. In addition to his corporate success, John is the author of best selling books like Patent it Yourself. And he has built an online platform called MBA ASAP that provides accessible business education to people worldwide. In today's conversation, we'll dive into his insights on navigating the rapidly changing business landscape and the lessons he has learned in entrepreneurship, finance and innovation. From embracing AI to the importance of pivoting, we'll cover it all. John, welcome to the show. We're so happy to have you. [00:01:17] Speaker B: Abby, a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much. [00:01:20] Speaker A: So I am super excited to talk about your business and all of the things within the financial sphere. But before we dive into all of that, just give us a little bit of background on how you kind of got into business and entrepreneurship and academia work. [00:01:36] Speaker B: Oh, okay. Well, it all started back when I was a small boy and I started collecting stamps. The. But you know, really where. Well, it's entrepreneurship for me basically was a. A tale of feeling too claustrophobic and too boxed in working for companies. And so then I really wanted to be my own boss. Little did I know, you know, that I sometimes I wouldn't like the boss myself. But yeah, I, I started out, you know, after high school, went to college, started out as a mechanical engineering major, then became a, an English literature major. I decided that mechanical engineering a little too dry and then I ended up, I really wanted to be involved in, in rock and roll pop music field. So I ended up luckily getting a job with this synthesizer company. It was up in Boston where I went to college and graduate. Went up through that over about six months. You know, didn't go back to school to college in the fall and became their top final test engineer for their synthesizers. These things were back in the day, I mean nowadays it's all done on the computer. But back then, you know, old records, you know, from the 70s and 80s were made with these instruments that were basically electronic oscillators and filters and a keyboard. And I would make all these cool swoopy sounds that you hear on record and so from there, I got involved in. I also started studying electronics after that. And then I started working. That was my entree into rock and roll recording studios. And I worked in a bunch of famous recording studios with a bunch of things actual. And from there I went to work for an equipment manufacturer, Ampex, and they made the professional equipment recording audio and video. They basically invented magnetic tape and audio recording and then used magnetic tape to do a video recording. And that was like a breakthrough, you know, for the television networks and all from Ampex. They were an early Silicon Valley company out of Redwood City, California. I worked in New York and did all the, you know, the work for the recording studios and things there and then for the networks. And the networks were notorious for poaching Ampex engineers. Ampex would train them up. They know all the equipment. The networks bought all the equipment. So they needed people that could fix them and maintain them and design, you know, systems with that equipment. So I got hired by ABC Television. And back then there were three networks. That was it. You know, you'd watch those three networks, and it was sort of an oligopoly type of environment. Now we have all kinds. Even like this is a, you know, a broadcast mechanism where you can distribute it on the. Record it easily on computers, distribute it on. On the Internet. And all of those gatekeepers and, you know, rate limiters and limitations are gone now, which is really fantastic. But back then, you know, it's just the three networks. And I worked there for about a decade, you know, putting on. I was a audio video systems engineer designing and building facilities for the network. There are about 40 of us that built everything for the network and did all the big broadcasting. It was Monday Night Football and, you know, and then World Series, all those Olympics and political conventions, space shuttle launches, all that kind of stuff. And it was really lovely, you know, really fun work. But I was on the road maybe six to eight months a year. And after a while, you know, after a decade that got. Grew kind of old, and I wanted to, you know, I started to think about creating a family. I was getting near 30, and so I couldn't be on the road that much at all. And plus, I looked around at the guys I was working with. I was young for doing that. I was like, in my 20s, you know, late 20s by that time. And. And all the guys that I was working with were in their mid-40s and 50s and. And, you know, they're on the road all the time, living out of a suitcase. And I just looked around and they were all had pathologies, you know, they were all divorced, you know, alcoholic, functioning alcoholic, drinking way too much. And then. And gamblers, you know, because you gamble on all the, you know, the. The events you'd have. And I looked around and I said, that's not the life for me. I don't want to, you know, end up like this in 20 years. And. And I mean, I was in sort of golden handcuffs to a degree, too. I was making a lot of money, traveling the world. Every place I went was a huge celebration because it would be some sort of big event happening in that town, and it was super fun. But I decided to leave at bail and go back to B school, you know, go. Go to business school and. And learn about business. And one of the reasons, too, I always had wanted to do that, but it was like, you know, if I don't do it now, you know, I'm not going to do it. Even when I went, I was 32, and that was old. You know, a lot of my. The college was graduate school. It's a master's degree. But they were all, you know, 22, 24. I was like the old guy, you know, it was funny. And, you know, so I decided to. To do that and had a young family and left work and so wasn't working. So no salary, you know, big, big tuition. I went to Wharton, which is University of Pennsylvania, Ivy League school, and, you know, one of the best MBA programs in the. In the world. Very expensive and. And then had living expenses for a family for two years. So all that kind of. I ended up digging myself a hole of about $400,000, you know, and. And afterwards I started wondering, is that the smartest thing I could do? I mean, I really wanted to break through my career, you know, and like, I had reached the sort of the pinnacle of what I could do in the technical field. And everybody was, like I said, was 20 years older than me, maybe 10 years older. They weren't going anywhere for a while, so there wasn't a lot of opportunities to go up. So I had to figure out a new way to kind of go up the career ladder. So I was thinking, too. And so I did that. And then while I was doing that, I really started to think more and more about entrepreneurship. Do I really want to go back and have some company I could do well, but they're telling me what to do. They own me, you know, they own me. They tell me, you know, next week you're going to be in Hong Kong. Next week you're going to be In Paris next week. You're going to go here? Yeah. And, and, and I really didn't. I wanted to be more self directed in my life and take more control of my life. So I thought I want to be my own boss. I want to be an entrepreneur. And even when I, you know, as a technical guy, what I was doing at ABC was pushing the state of the art. You know, my, my clients were news and sports and all the production people they wanted. Maybe we can do a new thing for a graphic scene or maybe we could do better slow motion. Maybe we could get better close up cameras or maybe a little camera we could put on a bobsled or all these kind of things, microphones where we could hear what's going on from the sidelines out into the football field. All these kind of interesting things. And then I would talk to, we would design them in house or I would talk to equipment manufacturers and we would develop something and they would end up selling, you know, thousands of these things and making a whole bunch of money. And I thought, you know, I could do that. You know, I could have the idea. I'd like to try to build some widgets myself and then figure out how to sell them and all that. So for those reasons I really wanted to be an entrepreneur. And so we had just thought about going, obviously we were going to go back to New York. We sublet our place in New York and we were living in Philly for a couple years and but then decided let's, we've been vacationing in the Southwest, let's try living out there. So came out to the, to the great Southwest, to New Mexico and it was like Goldilocks. I mean, living as a Manhattanite. I don't know if you ever saw that New Yorker cover where it's like, here's Manhattan, here's the Hudson river, there's New Jersey, there's California, there's China. You know, it's like knowing nothing about the rest of the country certainly. And so I knew kind of a lot about, but not that much about the Southwest and just loved the weather and all the, the, the culture and history, you know, the, the ancient Indian ruins and just incredible stuff. And it just seemed like another world and so moved out here. And it was literally like a Goldilocks kind of thing. It was like, well, you know, Phoenix and Tucson are too hot in the summer and Denver gets snowy in the winter and Sedona and Santa Fe are, are too small. And so Albuquerque seems about right size. And so landed in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And, and, and. But then it was like Podunkville, you know, in the middle of nowhere. And, and now I live a little bit outside of Santa Fe, but out in the, you know, in the, in the high desert area. Yeah. So, you know, initially it was like a backwater because it was 1990, right. So before the Internet, and no one saw the Internet coming. You know, it's amazing. You look back at, like, these future shock and megatrends and these future, you know, these futurist prediction guys of that time, and they were basically extrapolating off of what was happening at the time. And no one really saw that the Internet was going to revolutionize and change everything and give us these connectivities that, you know, we didn't have before. And so once that happened, it made living out here just so much better because I could connect with the rest of the world and, and, and live in what I consider a really lovely place. So did that, and then I started to create companies because that's what I want to do. I want to be my own boss, you know, so I've created about, oh, a dozen or more companies. Some of them have been abject failures, and some of the two of them I took public, and then I was a public company, CFO and CEO for 15 years. So those were good exit exits, you know, liquidity events where suddenly, you know, you could sell your stock and, and recoup some of the money that you had, the value, unlock the value had created. So that, that worked good. And, but along the, along the way, you know, I realized, you know, being your own boss isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's really difficult, you know, and challenging and not, you know, being your own boss. Okay, but. But I started to chafe at, you know, at first I chafed at having bosses, right. I didn't want to be told what to do. I wanted to follow my own directions and, and then, you know, make things work or not. But it would be based on my efforts, right? So. But then I started to chafe at having partners, you know, and partners just became a real headache. You know, I'd have a bunch of people and they're. They would butt heads. I had one company, it was a brilliant company, but I had a operations guy, genius, you know, in information. He came out of the. The military and was a, you know, a information guy and one of the top guys, you know, and then. And I had this brilliant marketing guy. This guy's very conservative. This guy's very liberal. They did not get along at all. And from a marketing, you know, from a standpoint of running a company, here's the marketing guy, and he's really brilliant, doing market research and saying, this is what the market wants, right? And this guy saying, this is the stuff that I can create. And they didn't really match up, you know, so I was trying to keep that personality thing together long enough to make a big payday. And. And it just didn't work out. Finally, the. They had an argument. The marketing guy said, life's too short. He quit. Yeah. Went back to other stuff he's doing, and we just didn't get there. So I started to think, you know, having partners and I had other partner situations where it was a problem too. And I realized that with partners, I. Whatever part. First of all, when you're building a company, it's always evolving. And as it evolves, different skill sets are. Need to take care of tasks sometimes. So sometimes if you have a partner, one guy's really, you know, one person's really having to tear it up because the demands at the time are in their wheelhouse. And then this person isn't maybe working as hard or they're working on other stuff, but. But then this person thinks, that's not fair. I'm working all the time and you're not doing anything. You know, it's really. You gotta wait till the next step. Then this person's skill set ascends, and then this person's more, you know, in the background. And if you're not used to those dynamics, everybody wants equity and fairness the entire time, and it just doesn't work out that way. So trying to manage personalities, you know, and you get strong personalities that have, you know, strong opinions, and it's very difficult to manage them, to try to keep them, you know, all focused, you know, on the same kind of goal. And so I, I decided I don't want partners anymore. And then I, I got really tired of investors. You know, I was like, oh, raising money is a great thing, right? You pitch them and you. And you raise $5 million. And then you go to work and, you know, you got this money, you got this Runway, you going to deliver all these different milestones and deliverables. And, you know, the, the revenue projections are going to go like this, and suddenly you start running into some problems because it never goes the way that you think it's going to go. You know, who von. Von Molke, the. The famous Prussian general said, you know, no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. It's True. With any kind of business plan, you know, once you take it out into the real world, you know, your ideas about what is going to be the thing that everybody's going to want is different than actually what customers want. And it has to be this iterative process of evolving, you know, customer discovery and customer validation and making a minimal viable product and getting that product market fit and all that kind of good stuff. So you have to be flexible in that way. But investors don't care about that. You know, immediately you've hired yourself a boss, you know, and they're going to be like, what did you do this week? What do you. Why are you, you know, taking a vacation? Why are you bleeding money for me? Because that's what I, you know, put my money in for you to do. So I got really, you know, kind of tired of that. Wanted to control all the equity and not have other people telling me what direction to go in and stuff like that. So investors became an issue for me. And employees. Employees are. It's like babysitting, right? Everybody's whining about this or that or they have this problem why they can't come to work or do that, you know, and it's like you're, you know, you know, like a bartender or something. You have to listen to everybody's, you know, gripes and stuff. Now I'm being. I'm being kind of facetious and over the top, but, you know, I want to. I want to sort of paint the picture of, you know, when you have employees, oh, my gosh, you have, you know, they all have their own agendas and interests that you have to sort of try to make them overcome and see the vision of what you want to do. You know, that's part of leadership, right? Communicating a great vision that everybody's going to get behind. So I got tired of employees. Plus, employees are the biggest component, you know, expense in any company. You look at any company's income statement, and between 60 to 70% of the expenses are HR, human resources. Now, the beautiful thing is, while I was evolving my ideas about this and making companies and coming to these kind of conclusions, technology was chugging along, right? And making it so that now it can be just me and the robots, you know, every. I can automate everything. I can hire expertise as I need, you know, in. In. In consulting services, like on upwork or, you know, fiverr or whatever. You know, I have consulting contracts with people and just assemble the mosaic of talent I need at the time for the particular skill sets or whatever. I am in my development of my companies and then you know, after that, you know, can reduce those contracts and then put in new people. When you have employees, you have to pay them the entire time. And so you have this big dragon to feed. You know, you have 20 employees, my gosh, you know, and think about that. And everybody is getting, you know, and everything else. Everybody's getting 10 grand, you know, a month and that's 200 grand a year a month just in, in salaries, you know. And then you start worrying at night like, you know, how am I, am I going to meet payroll next week? When you, you know, sometimes with a, with a startup, you know, you get to the point where you've run out of some money and you're waiting for the next funding to come in and you know, your pre revenue or just less revenue than your burn rate and things, you know, it's incredibly anxious generating for, for the, for the founder. And so I got tired of, of all those different parts of it and just wanted to be a. And now that's sort of a phrase as a solopreneur where you, where you work for your, you know, solo. You can, you hold all the equity so you have all the control and you, all the value you create accrues to you the, the solopreneur. And then use automation leverage computers and the Internet to do all kinds of things. I mean you can make you know, on the sales side, you know, just Facebook ads or Instagram ads, create a funnel, you know, give them a lead magnet so you get their email and then have you know, an automated email system that gives them a bunch of different posts and hopefully convince them to go to your landing page and, and look at what you're selling and, and click the button and, and make that conversion right you know, into, into a sale and, and then the money comes through Stripe or PayPal or something goes right in your bank account. Everything's automated and then you deliver. I all I do is digital first type of services. You know, books, ebooks, you know, video courses, you know, PDFs, all that kind of stuff is how I deliver my material. So everything is just a digital download. So there's no cost of goods sold once it's made. You know, I can make one copy or a million copies and it's just a know a digital download. So have no money invested in inventory or working capital and it, so it makes for a very clean business model. And so that's, that's sort of my, my arc from engineer to entrepreneur and now investor. I Invest in a bunch of companies. One, because I, I know how to read, you know, financial statements and see where they're at and, and also because I've been there before, I can see maybe what seems promising to me. And from a technical side, I can analyze the technology that they're doing. So I like tech companies and I invest both as an angel investor in private companies and then mostly in the public markets. I founded what they call quantitative hedge fund, which is using computers and statistics and a lot of big math to look at historical, you know, stock market data and try to parse out predictive, you know, trends and, and things and then, and make bets, investments based on that. And so I really like to, to do that, to invest, you know, put my money to work, you know, actually on the other side of things where people are, are working for, you know, for me and, and help them, to guide them with the, with what I've, I've learned along the way. [00:21:15] Speaker A: I love this, John. You've shared so much wisdom just within your background. My goodness, I have so many questions that are kind of formulating just from the things that you've already shared. Um, you, you've had such a long list of life experience in your career, which is absolutely incredible. One of the main things that I want to touch on going back to the, the AI, because we are in this era right now with AI and a lot of our workflow is becoming automated. Do you feel like this is something that people should be afraid of moving forward? How can we utilize AI but not necessarily make it so that AI is taking all of the jobs away? [00:21:56] Speaker B: Oh, that's Abby. That's a great question. Yeah. To me, artificial intelligence and the tools, ChatGPT and, and tons of tools that are out there now are just that they're power tools, high power tools. But I like to use them as tools and use them as co creators. It's interesting. Deep Blue was IBM's computer program for chess back in the 1990s. And in the middle of the 1990s they made Deep Blue powerful enough that it beat Garry Kasparov, who was the grandmaster of chess at that time. And that was a big shock moment, like, wow, a computer can beat the greatest chess champion. And then Caspar of those, a brilliant guy. And instead of saying, oh well my career's over and now computers are going to be better than me and all, he started to work with computers. And it turns out that now the best chess player is not a human and it's not a computer, but it's the pairing of the two, it's. And they call that a centaur. They call that a centaur, like the half human, half horse kind of thing. And that pairing is more powerful than any, any human or computer by itself. And it's because we have separate skill. You know, we have great skills and the computer has great skills too. And artificial intelligence. And so if we use it in the right way, it's an incredible, incredibly powerful set of tools to amplify what we, what we can do. And so we can think about, you know, I want to do this or that, and you can, you know, use something, either make an outline or organize or give you a business plan or, you know, all kind or some great marketing tags, all kinds of great ways that you can use artificial intelligence. Now, that being said, there's been a bunch of, you know, worry about, you know, artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence, AGI and asi, and how quickly is that going to happen, you know, is when, when artificial general intelligence is when a, you know, artificial intelligence system will be as good as any human across a whole bunch of tasks instead of specifically, you know, what you prompt it. And artificial superintelligence is when the artificial intelligence is smarter than any human ever, you know, and we're getting to that point, you know, and it's, we're getting to that point a lot faster than we actually thought. Two weeks ago we had a, what we had a Sputnik moment just last week with this new Chinese AI called Deep Seek. I don't know if you heard about that, but Deep Seek is a tool, artificial intelligence, chatbot like Chat GPT, that was developed in China and it just came out like two weeks ago. Not even two in a week, 10 days ago. And everybody is freaking out in Silicon Valley because they, they, you know, we've been having this arms race where we're taking all of these big graphic processors, GPUs from Nvidia and using those, stacking them in these giant server farms. And the more of those we put together, the better the, the inferences of the, of the artificial intelligence model. And so it's been this arms race. Who can buy the most of those and who can put them together in the best configuration and then train on. They basically, they're worried that we're going to run out of data soon because it's consumed all the data on the Internet to train the artificial intelligence agents. And so once the, the data, the data runs out for training, then they can't, that's going to be a Rate limiter, you can't go any fast. So they're talking about now where they got to start making synthetic data, making data that looks like real data that can train the AIs more. So this Chinese one, deep seq, they thought China was way behind, not way behind, but like a year behind the silicon valve OpenAI and Anthropic and these other companies. And so all of a sudden exploded with this, you know, with this model that is running as good as the top ones as everywhere else, but it was trained and is housed on computers that are much less expensive, like an order of magnitude less expensive and trained on a smaller amount of data. And because the US essentially has barred China from Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation from exporting the highest grade chips to China, the Chinese had to figure out how to do this with chips that are less performative, you know, and so there, it's blowing everybody's mind. They're doing it for less money. And it's as powerful as anything that is made in the US or in Europe. And so it's a really worried moment for everybody. It's like, oh my gosh, they're going to, if they're, if they come that fast, maybe they'll get ahead of us and if they can do it cheaper. Our business models are blown and all that kind of stuff. And they're calling it a Sputnik moment. Sputnik was the Russian satellite in 1959 that went up and orbited the Earth, right? And suddenly we freaked out in the United States that the Russians were more advanced than we were and it was for national defense and all these kind of issues. We were completely, you know, freaked out. And so what we did, we doubled down on an accelerated program and did the Apollo space missions and by the end of that decade in 1969, put Some people on the moon, you know. And so we were able to race ahead in a space race. And now we have this AI race going on. And so because of that, you know, anything that's on a comp, on a computer is following what's called Moore's Law. And Moore's Law. Gordon Moore was from founded intel, and he came up back in 1965 with this idea that every 18 months, basically, computer chips are getting twice as good and half as expensive and that they call it Moore's Law now. Gordon Moore's Law, because for, for the last, since 1965, what is that for 40, 50 years, 60 years, that has proven to be the case. And so we have these doubling of computer power every, you know, 18 months and halving the expense of it. And so we've been on this, and that's an exponential growth curve. And we're used to thinking linearly, like progress goes like this. And when something goes like that, you know, we're not used to that. And that's what we're on with AI. And so that this big chatgpt like two years ago was a huge thing. Oh my gosh, this thing can, you know, really, you could prompt it. It'll actually give you great answers. And now with this deep seek tool, we're realizing we're on an accelerated curve that's going to get away from us pretty quickly. And so now people are re evaluating when they said, well, we might have the singularity when we would meld with computers. That's a bit. They were saying that was in 2040. Now they're starting to revise their things and say we're going to have, you know, artificial superintelligence by 2027. That's just a couple years away. [00:29:20] Speaker A: That's only two years away. [00:29:22] Speaker B: The world is going to change rapidly and we are not ready for it. And so those are the kind of things that people are worried about. Like, what does that mean? You know, what does that mean for us as humans? And are we going to have to bow down to our artificial intelligence overlords or are we going to be able to live in harmony with them? Or are bad actors going to harness this stuff in some way to take over the world? And, you know, know, so there's a lot of concern out there about what's going to happen and, and what it means for humanity and, and it could mean a utopia or it could mean a dystopia, you know, and so in fact, the guy that 10 years ago, I can't think of his name now, but he wrote the book that made everybody scared about what was going to happen on this and all the. [00:30:12] Speaker A: Oh, George Orwell. [00:30:14] Speaker B: No, not George Orwell. It was about 10 years ago. He's an AI professor, I think, at Oxford. Maybe. I'll think of his name. Yeah, George Orwell wrote 1984 and all those books. And that was back in like the 1930s and professing all these ways that things could go awry for humanity with totalitarianism and dystopian ideas. But this guy wrote a book about. It was called Superintelligence. That's the name of the book. And he wrote, you know, all the things that could happen wrong. And for the last 10 years everybody's been pointing to that as like, you see, you know, these are the things that could happen. Well, just this year he wrote a book and it's called like Utopia or something like that. And it's all about all the good things that could happen. I mean, we can eliminate all diseases, we can eliminate, you know, work, we can eliminate all kinds of things that could allow us to just really be the best things that we all could want to be and not have to worry about all the survival issues that we have to worry about now. And so it could be a wonderful world. And so that's what I'm hoping for, is that type of world. I'm a techno optimist. I really believe that things are going to work out well. But it's going to be exciting to see and it's going to probably be. It may not be that fast, it may be, you know, another 10 years or five years or whatever, but, but these things are advancing incredibly rapidly and, and I think it does us all, you know, well to, to keep up with these things and use these tools and feel comfortable with them. Because it could be very quickly that the people that don't will be marginalized. You know, they'll, the other people that do will be having this incredible leverage and be able to outwork and outthink and outperform people that don't have real facility with artificial intelligence tools. [00:32:15] Speaker A: Yeah, I think something that I just would encourage business owners to keep in mind and just people in general as we're transitioning into this generation where AI is becoming so prevalent and technology is advancing so quickly, is that we don't take away the humanism aspect. And I think that's what makes us different from the technology is that we have emotions. And so I think a lot of service based businesses and businesses that kind of factor into just humanism are going to still remain important. And so if we can utilize AI to help us, you know, with workflow, automation and things like that, but understand that AI has its place, I think that that's where businesses can, can utilize it in a way that they will continue to thrive. [00:33:04] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely, Abby, I couldn't agree with you more. You know, there's, there's really two things I, I think that, that businesses do. Either either they solve some pain, that we have some sort of friction in our life that then, you know, a business will eliminate, you know, or they bring us some sort of delight, you know, it's some sort of joy. And in both those ways, I think that, you know, AI can Can, can help us, you know, whether it's with new forms of entertainment that are just, you know, or, or music that's created by, that's just that we love, that's just like my gosh, you know, no human could even have conceived of that so cool of a tune or whatever, you know, or, or lyrics or, or, or, or solving things like, you know, getting rid of, of diseases that, you know, that, that plague us, you know, and, and, and creating new compounds and new medicines and stuff. And suddenly, you know, we don't have to worry about the kind of things that we have to worry about now. And, and I think even with businesses, if you know so many people, it's great to be an entrepreneur because then you can actually follow your own, you know, your own, you know, you own drummer or whatever. But so many people have to work in jobs that are really mundane, you know, and if there's ways that automation could get rid of those jobs and the money that's created by the value of the, you know, of our automations could be then distributed to everybody so everybody could have a, a baseline income and life and not have to worry about how am I going to pay the rent next month, you know, and I have to be a greeter at Walmart, you know, to do, or I have to flip burgers at McDonald's to do that and I really don't like it or I have to work in a coal mine or something like that. If we could eliminate some of those dangerous or banal jobs and let people do what, what they really want to do. I always wanted to be a ballet dancer. I always wanted to learn how to play the piano or I always wanted to. And then unleash their, their, you know, latent, their hidden sort of productivity through their, what they're really interested in. I think then many more of us could contribute to the world in a more meaningful way. And you never know what that might bring, you know, like some sort of way out of left field. Some person just comes up with something that is just wonderful and so that, and they can't do that now because they're too exhausted after working, you know, 60 hours, two jobs, you know, as a, as a house cleaner or something. But they have these brilliant skills that, that they could bring to force up to the fore. So I'd love to see those kind of things happen in the world based on our ability to use automation and robots and, and AI. And that's another thing that's coming along is, is robots, you know, like robots that look like, people, you know, are. Maybe in the next couple of years, you know, Tesla has one beta, and a lot of other companies have these incredible robots. And Japan has been very big on trying to get robots to assist because they have a large bulge of aging population. They don't have enough people to help those older folks, and so they're really driving. If they can get robots that then can help people as they get more limited in their physical abilities, things like that would be wonderful. Or even as companions. There's a lot of loneliness in the world. And if we could have, you know, artificial companions, even just on the. It's something to talk to, you know, like even a therapist or something that could sort of interact with people and help them to feel less alone and help them solve their problems. And at scale, you know, it could be done at scale. [00:36:57] Speaker A: Do you think you'll have a robot one day? [00:37:00] Speaker B: I want to have a robot. Yeah, maybe. You know, I think it would be incredible. It seems like what I've been hearing is, you know, and their cost is, you know, less than a car even now, like, you know, 18,000 or $10,000. And you get a robot that could, you know, go out and shovel the snow or sweep the sidewalk or cook dinner, whatever. You know, all kinds of fun stuff. It could be kind of neat, but. I don't know. What about you? What do you think? [00:37:28] Speaker A: Time? Money? I would love to have a robot that will do my laundry, my dishes for me, mop my floors so then I can come home and just work on the things that, like you mentioned, bring me joy. And I think that, you know, if more, like you said, if more people were focused on things that bring them joy, where would the world be? [00:37:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I, I agree. And, and, and so, and what would that mean for the. All the content that we could, you know, enjoy and things. And then I think a lot of people, too, that wouldn't be discontented and then angry and then commit crimes or whatever like that, they'd be too busy having fun, you know, doing the stuff that they want to do. And now we even have the kind of. Have those robots, the, like those little roombas, you know, that go around and clean your floor and stuff like that. I have one, but it keeps getting caught in the rug or the, you know, electrical wires are there, you know, so they're not there yet, but. But, yeah, exactly. Those kind of things. Some, you know, that we do. I mean, in a way, we already have lots of robots like that. You know, think about one of the biggest inventions, Time Saving inventions of. Of, you know, ever was the washing machine, before the washing machine, it was really time consuming to wash your clothes. It would take all day and, you know, take them down to the river and then dry and all this stuff. And you talk about time consuming, you know, and so that, you know, we can think about those as basically robots. You toss your thing, you know, your laundry in with a little detergent. The water comes on, pop it in the dryer, boom, your clothes are done. It still takes time, but not nowhere near as much as if you had to do it by hand. You know, same thing with like a refrigerator, you know, having food that. That doesn't spoil and it will stay a long time. You know, the only way. [00:39:10] Speaker A: Dishwashers. [00:39:11] Speaker B: Dishwashers are wonderful, right? Exactly. You just pop it in there, it wash all the dishes, they're clean. Still have to unload it and load it. And, you know, that's. A robot would be great for that kind of stuff. But, you know, I went to thinking about this. I went to Thomas Jefferson's house, like two years ago, Monticello, and it's this beautiful home. You know, Thomas Jefferson wrote it, writer of the Declaration of Independence, you know, brilliant founder of this country. And, you know, and he had. He made this incredible house on top of this hill right in Virginia. And it's beautiful. But as I was there, you know, it was. They didn't have refrigerators. They didn't have to lug the water up because they didn't have a. Well, we have, you know, you turn on the faucet, water comes out. Now all these kind of things that back then, and unfortunately, you know, it took a whole bunch of slaves to be able for him to live at this level that I was walking around thinking, wow, now we have refrigerators, we have dishwashers, washing machines. So we've automated ourselves out of the. Of the need to have slaves. In a way. That's another thing that would be great about having. Having robots, right? It'll be like, oh, my gosh, we don't have to oppress anyone because we can just have machines do the oppressive stuff. And we can. We like to have the benefits of that. But there's, you know, it's sort of. There's moral and ethical problems with that. And then to have robots do that would be a wonderful thing too, because then the more menial jobs that we have now, you know, that. That are they called wage slaves. You know, you do this because you have to make the money to pay the rent and get the food and all that. And so you do this job that's, you know, less than optimal for what you'd love to be doing, you know, you aspire to, but you do it because you have these demands, expenses to live. If those things could be eliminated by having robots, you know, like, we could have street cleaners and all kinds of stuff that would take care of, or, you know, working in. Go back to coal mines, you know, that's. That's tough work and very dangerous, and the mine could collapse or you get the cold dust and you get black lung after 20 years or, you know, all that kind of stuff. If we could have robots doing that, you know, it would. People would. Would worry about, well, that's my. That's my career. What am I going to do if I don't have that? Or if we have autonomous, you know, trucks, you know, autonomous vehicles that drive themselves, you know, and know the roads and all. Well, right now, I think truck drivers are the. Are the biggest employment. You know, in the United States, there's more truck drivers than anything else. What would all those people do? That. That's what they rely on to. For their. For their money. You know, they have to figure out something else. So they'd have to be creative about, I want to do this or that or the other thing. But, you know, that. That's a tough job, too. Think about when I drive on the highway, even for an hour, it's like, this is kind of stressful. You know, I have to sit here and really pay attention, but I'm not moving. So all that stress is just building up in my body, you know, and I. I think these guys in the big rigs that go by, it's like, you know, that guy's been driving for 10 hours and, you know, five days a week or seven days a week, you know, and it's just all that stress of trying to be alert, but, you know, and then every once in a while you have to make a crazy turn or something because somebody cuts in front of you and then you're angry and all that, you know, you know, bad hormones get built up, you know, all those anger hormones. So getting rid of those jobs would probably be a benefit for people, but I think a lot of people might even go kicking and screaming because that's what they know. That's their sort of safety, safety space. And, and. And so I think what we have to. One of the plans we have to make is as we transition into these things that are probably inevitable, that we have to have a safety net. So that the people that are displaced don't just get kicked out to the side and have nothing, but they have. They get money and stuff. I think that was one of the bad, not for. For sightful things that happened with like, Uber and Lyft. You know, like Uber came along, great matching engine, you know, that could ride on top of a, you know, smartphone, and somebody has, you know, capacity in their car and somebody needs a ride. Oh, put them together, Airbnb, all those kind of things, but especially those car companies. Because when Uber and Lyft came along, suddenly the taxi companies were disrupted. And these poor taxi guys had spent, you know, $200,000 to buy a taxi medallion to be authorized to drive their taxi, say, in Manhattan. Suddenly their taxi medallion went for 200 grand to worth like 50 grand. And these guys saved up forever, and that was their whole livelihood. And, and we had no. It was a cold, cold world. We had no plan in place to say, don't worry about it, you're going to be taken care of. Because all this money that this other entity is making now, part of that's going to go to. To as a safety net for the people that get displaced out of, you know, what they call creative destruction. You know, in, in economics, Schumpeter's term for, you know, that's what innovation does is, you know, it takes something and makes it different. Like, you know, Kodak used to have the, the market for film and cameras and all that. Well, all of a sudden our smartphones come along, right. And what happens, the camera and the film get, you know, evaporated actually into our phones, and that whole market goes away. Rochester, New York used to employ over 200,000 people at the Kodak plant. All of a sudden that went away. That town collapsed, and there was nothing in place to say, wait a minute, we have to have, you know, the people that are going to be displaced and disrupted out. You know, it's great to have these innovations, and as customers, they're fantastic. For us, you know, there's nothing better than taking a picture and immediately popping it up on social media. And you don't have to make one copy of it and take it and get the film developed and all that kind of stuff, and it's free. You can take millions of pictures. But what about the people that were relying on how the world, the business model in the world before that innovation came along and disrupted them all out of a livelihood? [00:45:09] Speaker A: Yeah, this is kind of reminding me of one specific word that I've heard so much in entrepreneurship and it's the word pivot. What would you say? You know, like, let's say you were one of those people and you were displaced from Kodak, for example. What types of things could people be looking for to make good pivots? Are there anything within the business structure that you would kind of start looking at? [00:45:37] Speaker B: That's a great question. I. I would say that, you know, nowadays, you know, in entrepreneurship, yeah, it's persevere or pivot. You know, as you're doing your thing, either you persevere and say, yep, we hit this obstacle, but we're going to keep going until we get through that obstacle, and on the other side of that, we're going to be a success, or this obstacle is real, and we have to pivot around it somehow change our business model, change what our product or service is to more match with what people want. And that persevere pivot is such a. An intuitive, you know, kind of idea because there's lots of, you know, success stories of people that persevered and just kept banging their head against the wall until that wall came down. And then they, you know, on the other side of it, they were, you know, heroically successful. And other people that, like, kept doing that. And didn't you understand that this was not going to, you know, move and you ran out of money and it. And the thing went away. Blockbuster. Yeah, exactly. Videotapes and stuff, suddenly they were out of it. So how do you pivot? And like, Netflix is a great example of they pivoted. You know, they. They went to. To Blockbuster and tried to sell them their business about. We'll have. We're mailing people the DVDs, which, my gosh, now and then they realized that the Internet was getting bandwidth enough to. To stream and pivoted into streaming. Oh, my gosh, what a. What a wonderful pivot. Yeah. So I think that as a safety net, you know, one thing is to augment our. Our revenue, our income. I think everybody should have a couple of side hustles, a couple of side businesses that they're working on, you know, figuring out how to create marketing funnels, create an email list, make a website, sell something that's based on an idea that they have or a love they have. You know, if they. If you like embroidery or something, you know, have a little. Make, you know, little samplers and make the videos of them and put them up on YouTube and start to have a following for whatever it is you like, fishing, you know, all that kind of stuff. And so that you have a Some sort of a plan B that's already kind of being nurtured in place. It might not be there all the way, but that plan B can be something that you, the lifeboat that you hop into. If your main source of money, you know, the company you're working for, suddenly like says, you know, what, we're going out of business, or, you know, because this new technology came and leapfrogged over us like, just like that deep sea thing came and sort of is, you know, disrupted OpenAI and chat, GPT and all these others. So we have to be ready for that. In this day and age, everything is changing so fast. It's difficult to predict what are the careers of the future and what are the careers that are going to be around for a long time. It used to be you could just go to high school, you know, and then after high school, you know, you get your lunch pail and you march off to the factory. And there was this sort of paternalistic idea about companies that the company, you'd work for them and the company would take care of you. And then after 30 years or whatever, 40 years, you retire and you get a pension from that company and all that kind of stuff. That doesn't happen that much anymore. It's like, you know, things happen so fast that I think on average now the person has, in their arc of their lifetime, nine careers, you know, because we're always trying to, we always have to change. And so learning and continuous learning is so important, but not just learning, but unlearning and relearning. Because a lot of things that we learned 10, 15 years on don't service anymore because the world has changed and we have to unlearn those habits and that kind of knowledge and relearn something new. So those are skill sets, I think, for pivoting, getting really good at learning how to learn, you know, really understanding how can. What's the, what's the best way that I learn? You know, because people, we all have different ways of learning, right? Do I get things better visually or do I get it, you know, like through YouTube videos or by reading it or by doing, you know, is it. Am I more of a doer than an actual, you know, sit down and read something or learn it that way I have to do it, and that's how I learned and finding out those things so that we know ourselves better, so that when the time comes when we have to quickly scramble and learn something new, we have the, the habits and the, and the, and the skill sets to, to be Able to do that. And that consists from continuous, you know, continuous learning, whatever it is, being curious about things and then just sort of following our, our curiosity and, and building that habit and building that muscle, building that learning muscle, you know, because it's like doing reps. You know, if you, if you read every day for a half hour, you just. Whatever kind of things you love. After a while, you know, oh, I know how to speed read through this and highlight the important parts, make it into an outline. Now I know, you know, I've got this. Starting to learn how to use, you know, things like ChatGPT and other AI tools. They're incredible tutors. You can say, you know, write me up a, a quick, you know, outline on. I want to learn about astronomy. I want to learn about, you know, the constellations in the northern hemisphere. You know, how can I learn that? What's the most important ones? It would tell you and anything you wanted to know, you know, you could start and take that outline then and go and name, you know, 10 the best YouTube videos on how to fix a carburetor for, you know, a 1957 Chevy or something. And then you know what to do. You go off and you learn that whatever it is, you can learn it quickly if you have those type of creative approaches to where you're going to get some direction, you know, because that's, you can flounder around a lot too, because there's so much information. It's hard to know where to start and what, how to build on what's foundational and what to put on top of that, you know, and all that. So I think that's, that's the best way for people to be ready to pivot. [00:51:32] Speaker A: I love that. And on the topic of learning, I want to talk about something that you've created where you are giving people just these, these chunks of information about financial literacy through MBA asap. Tell us more about that. [00:51:49] Speaker B: Oh, thanks, Abby. That's my, yeah, my, my, my business now, this is what I do is I, you know, I, I was an entrepreneur. I've been an entrepreneur. And this is an entrepreneurial project, MBA asap. And as I was, you know, running the companies that I took public, my sister was teaching finance at a university in the night. She was a, I had a corporate job at night, night school. She was teaching MBA students finance. I thought that's so cool. So I started looking around and got, got some appointments teaching in universities. And as I was doing that, I realized that, you know, the textbooks are like this thick, you know, and 800 pages on finance, 800 pages on accounting, 800 pages on marketing. And a lot of those books are kind of, Even if they're 5 or 10 years old, they're outdated, you know, and, and I started looking at it and say, you know, I'm running companies and I don't use that much. You know, there's like, maybe I can boil that down to 30 pages of. Here's the fundamentals of what you really need to know on a day to day basis that you're really going to use in finance and strategy, in marketing and negotiations, you know, all these different management, all these different subjects, operations. Instead of like reading all this information. And the students I had, they were just, they couldn't see the forest through the trees, you know, they had been drinking through a fire hose of all this information that they didn't know what was fundamentally important and what was maybe intellectually interesting but not something you're going to use every day, you know, in your, in your career. And so that's how I started to approach my teaching like that. And, and I could just see the light bulbs go off in my students. You know, like I've taken four accounting courses and I never understood what a balance sheet really was. In, in 15 minutes you've explained it, you know, and, and so I was like, I'm kind of onto something. So I started doing more of that. And the, my classrooms are kind of like my laboratory, you know, I'd like see what made the light bulbs go off and the students like have those aha moments, you know, that were really, that's to me, that's like angels pay, you know, that's where you, you know, it's like I've actually made an impact. And then I see where people just glazed over and you know, like looking at their watch and like, when's this clash going to be over? I knew, oh, okay, well, I'm not presenting that in a compelling enough manner to get their attention. And so I'd have to change either that, you know, that stuff had to go out or change it to present that information in a way, if I thought it was really important for them to learn, you know, make it so that it was something that they really wanted to learn. And so little by little I started to create these little, you know, a lot of slide decks, right? You know, PowerPoint presentations. And from there I make those into books, little books. And then I started publishing those books on Amazon. And then I, and then I would record my lectures on just on my phone. Right. A little tripod and go up to the whiteboard and do my lecture. And then started uploading those. There's some sites like Udemy and Skillshare and others that teachable, where you can upload your videos and books and slide decks and make courses. And so I started making courses that way, and those courses started to get popular. And now I have students all over the world. In 165 countries. I have students right now. And that's. There's only like 200 countries. And I didn't even realize there was 165 countries, but all over the place. And it's so satisfying to me to interact with all these people, you know, that are aspirational. You know, they want to add business skills to their skill stack, whatever they're doing. You know, some fundamental business skills are really, really help them, you know, to be a better baker or a better car mechanic or dance studio owner, whatever. You know, you have to talk to your accountant. You have to figure out how much money's coming in, how much your expenses are, how do you get new customers, you know, marketing, you know, how do you create awareness campaigns for your business? All those kind of things are important. And so I. What I try to do is bring like that Ivy League, you know, their top and business education boiled down and distilled to its fundamentals and essence, and deliver it relatively inexpensively, you know, across the Internet. And one thing that's great, too, pedagogically, you know, just from a teaching standpoint of videos or reading, but videos especially, I think, is that, you know, when you're in a class with someone and. And you sort of. And I do this all the time, you know, you sort of daydream for five minutes, and then you come back, it's like, oh, I forget what they're talking about. And you've missed some kind of critical point. You can't tell the teacher, you know, with 200 students in the collaborator. Could you go back and repeat what you just said? For the last 10 minutes, I was looking out the window, thinking about the weekend. You know, you can't do that. But with a video, you can. You can just say, oh, I drifted off for a minute. Because people say key words, something that triggers something in our mind, and then we're thinking of a memory and it takes us off. So it happens, you know, whether we want to be focused and disciplined or not. And so to be able to just like, rewind it and say, what are you talking about? You know, because things are so cumulative, you Know if you miss one point, then the other points are built on that, you're kind of lost. So videos are a really good tool and especially if you have a little bit of trouble, like one concept is just what I can't. You can rewind it and play it five times until you really understand what that concept is before you move on. And so I, I found that teaching that way actually has a lot of benefits over live teaching. And also I can reach people, like I said, all over the world. As long as you have an Internet connection and a phone or a computer or whatever, you can watch the lessons and, and it's not going to cost you $400,000 like it ends up costing me. You know, you can get it for a couple hundred bucks and, and, and, and learn these things. And what I like about the ASAP part is, you know, you can start to apply this stuff immediately. That's what I want. You know, people can watch a 10 minute video and then they got this stuff and they can apply it. But around the world, you know, mba, asap, it's all in English. And English is the second language of people all over the world now. But a lot of people don't know those kind of little colloquial acronym acronyms like asap. So, you know, they don't. I have to always tell me it's as soon as possible, you know, is what it stands for. You know, it's for, for getting this stuff as soon as possible really, so you can start using it right away in your life. And because at the end of the day in a cap in capitalist societies, right, part of our life is like an enterprise, you know, we get our money through our salary or for whatever, whatever revenue streams we have. We have our expenses, we have to pay the rent, the food, all that kind of stuff. And at the end of the, you know, end of time, end of the month or whatever, we hopefully have some leftover and that's the, the net income, the profit, you know, the, the, the bottom line. And so thinking about our, you know, our lives is kind of like a business, business skills, just some business skills are good for everybody, you know, so especially so you know, how to manage credit cards and how to manage a loan and how to think about buying a house or a car, you know, or all those kind of things. You know, they all have a finance and, and business aspect to them. It's good to be, you know, a little bit aware of that so that you, you're not prey for predatory lenders and predatory salespeople and everything else. [00:59:23] Speaker A: Yeah. So I, I love this. So this is, you know, accessible to anybody. So anybody wanting to download these courses can, can do. So if they have a laptop or phone. What about people who don't have business background or maybe they weren't good at math, you know, in school? Do these courses are approachable for them as well? [00:59:47] Speaker B: Absolutely, Abby. And that's one of the key things that I try to do too, is they, you don't need specialized education and skill sets or, you know, that's one of the things that people say I'm not smart enough to understand all this fancy, you know, stuff, but we all are. And I break it down into ways that, you know, if you can add and subtract a little bit and, you know, that's all you really need to know is everything is based on those small concepts. And I build it up from, from just, you know, the basic kind of thing so no one gets. Feels left behind. And I think that's a big problem with a lot of business education and business in general is that there's kind of a buzzwordy, kind of clicky mentality about it. So that people feel like, oh, they must know something really, you know, that must be something fancy or what they talk about net present value or they talk about, you know, this or that. And, and it's really not. It's just that there's these buzzwords that I think people use to try to intimidate others out of. Of participating because they want to keep it all to themselves, you know. [01:00:53] Speaker A: Sure, sure. Awesome. So where can we find the courses? [01:00:58] Speaker B: Great. Yeah, the, the best place is on my website. Mba-asap.com that's the best place to get a hold of me. And there's a way, there's a free ebook that you can get and, and then that gets you on my email list too. And then you can just email to me and I respond to all the emails of anybody that asks me questions. I love to talk with everybody, so. And then my courses are on there and everything else, so that that's the best sort of entree place. [01:01:26] Speaker A: Amazing. Well, I am so excited to, to go onto your website and start downloading some of these courses because like you, like you mentioned, I think that these are skills that everybody can benefit from, you know, even if it just budgeting your own credit cards and finances. So that's wonderful. And I know you've also written several books as well. Can we find those books on your website or Amazon? [01:01:49] Speaker B: Yes. Thanks, Abby. Yeah, they're they're on Amazon and if you just John Cousins and, and MBA asap, and the books pop up. I've actually just published my 63rd book, and so I got a whole bunch of them on there. And they're in everything from corporate finance and bookkeeping and management leadership, angel investing, and just, just all kinds of. The last two I wrote was one was on mental models. And so the mental models that we construct for rapid ways of thinking and decision making and what they are and the biases that they have in them that could, you know, lead us to make less than good decisions and how to watch out for those and things. And then a book on focus, just on how do you maintain focus and which is a. I was, I wrote, you know, there was a whole book's worth of ideas on that I had. And, you know, it's interesting, like, you know, Steve Jobs said that, you know, focus isn't about, you know, thinking about one thing. It's about saying no to a hundred other good ideas. So you can stay on one. Because there's, that's, that's always been my problem, you know, is I, there's. Because I'm, you know, we're curious people. The next bright, shiny object, we start chasing that and we don't really stay on target. And so, or, you know, somebody calls up and say, hey, you know, there's a great party tonight, or something like that. And then from, you know, fear of missing out, we go do that instead of saying, no, I got to, you know, I have some tasks that I have to take care of. And so it's really about learning how to say no and saying no politely so that we don't get involved in too many things that aren't, you know, related to the real one. One or two or three things that we want to do. That's what, that's what Warren Buffett said, too. If you have more than three priorities, you don't have any priorities. So you really have to boil things down. And that, that's where it takes discipline. And it's painful to say no to some other things that look like they might be fascinating and interesting. I mean, we just put them on the back burner until we finish this one project. But, you know, so those are my last two books. And I, I found that, you know, those are good fundamental skill sets for us to think about, you know. [01:04:01] Speaker A: Well, absolutely. Especially, you know, talking to a group of entrepreneurs. Because to be an entrepreneur, you have to be creative. And I find that with creatives, there's so Many different things that we want to do, we want to achieve in our lives. And so it's hard to kind of find that focus of. Well, what do I start with first? Do you have any advice? And I'm sure you talk about this in your book, but what would be like that first step towards making a decision on what to start with? [01:04:27] Speaker B: Well, that's a great, a great question, Abby. And I would say that, you know, whatever feels the most priority that you have. And I was just reading a quote by Martin Luther King that said, you know, you don't have to see the whole staircase, you just have to take that next step, you know, and so sometimes you don't have to have everything planned out, but if you know the next thing that you can do that's going to move you forward in whatever you want to do, just take that next one and then the next thing will reveal itself. And then the next thing will reveal itself and you can move away, you know, sort of move forward in that way. I think that's probably the best, the best way is to just to have a bias towards action, you know, you know, don't. We shouldn't, you know, feed, you know, feed our worries with thought, we should starve them with actions, you know, just do stuff, you know, and, and do lots of stuff, whatever it is, instead of waiting to make it the perfect decision. Try something and then be ready for the feedback, you know, if it did that work or not, and have an idea about what is going to look like success of this thing that I do, whatever action it is and then iterate, you know, so it's like you do something, the world responds in some way. Either it's positive and then you double down on that or it's negative to some degree and then you pivot or you refine your thing a little bit and try it again until you get the thing that works. Instead of like ready, aim, fire, it's more like ready, fire, aim, you know, kind of do the action and then you refine the aim, you know, after you get the feedback from what you did. And nowadays we can do that kind of stuff so easily with even our social media accounts or if we have a little email list or whatever it is or a website and we can just put up something and see if people respond to it positively or indifferently or negatively, you know, and then act accordingly. Course correct according to that. If it's positive, double down on that. If it's negative, change it. And if it's indifferent, which is a lot of times what happens first, you know, nobody likes it. Now he's like, wait a minute. You know, I think this is a good idea. I must, I have to figure out a different messaging or something to make it more compelling or I have to refine the, the product or service so that people like it. It's amazing. So many times I've thought of something and it's like, oh, people are going to love this. And then they end up liking one little aspect of it that I really didn't think was that important. And then. So, okay, but that's what you have to develop. Like with corporate finance, my. When I started my courses and things, I always thought that, that people would be much more interested in the, you know, sexier subjects of business like marketing and, you know, all these different design and messaging or strategy where you're thinking about the big picture and all that. And I thought finance, you know, I put out my stuff because I know a lot about it, but I thought, nobody's going to really like that because it's dry and boring and, you know, it's not that interesting. It turned out to be my most popular thing. And it's so strange. So it's hard to second guess what people are going to like. And you have to be ready to revise, like you say, pivot to meet your customers where they're at because they're the final arbiters. It's not what we think is the greatest idea. It's what we present to people and then they think is good and then we give them more of that, I think. [01:07:56] Speaker A: Do you have any advice for people on how to overcome fears? It kind of sounds like you're, you're fearless. You've written over 60 books, you've made these courses, you've changed your career trajectory several times. What kind of gives you that edge over fear? [01:08:13] Speaker B: Well, and that's a great question too, Abby, because I have fears. Oh, my gosh. You know, but, you know, they say that courage is not. Not being fearless, but acting in the face of fear. You know, even though you have fears, you still act. And I think that's part of it. It's just not. Not worrying about if you're fear. I mean, basically the fear is the fear of failure, right? That some somehow people are not going to like what we, what we do or they're going to laugh at us or, you know, they're going to think, oh, boy, you know, we, you know, you spent all this time and you didn't do anything. But really, if you think, if you Change, reframe, failure as experiments. Right? It's all experiments and it's not a failure. And if you do it with a sincere, you know, intention to help people or to convey, you know, communicate something that you think is worthwhile. Worthwhile, then it's. There's nothing I don't think to be afraid of. And if people don't like it, you know, that's fine. You can always revise what you, what you have, like I said, and keep moving forward. And you're going to find some people that are going to like it, you know. You know, the way you don't run after butterflies and chase them. What you do is you create a garden and then the butterflies come. You know, it's. You're not going to find the people you were looking for. You're going to find the people that were looking for you. And that's how it works. You know, if you put yourself out there in some way, say on a website or an email list or a substack or, you know, some, some Instagram, you know, or, or TikTok videos or YouTube videos, you're gonna, you're gonna have your audience in mind of who you think you're gonna reach. And that may be surprisingly different than the people that actually respond. And that's how you find that. You find the people that were looking for you. And that's a wonderful feeling. And I think that once you have that feeling a couple times, then you overcome that fear of it because you know that, you know, you don't have to have faith anymore because you have experience, you know, it's worked for you. And so I think that is a way to overcome any kind of fear of starting or fear of failure and just go for it, you know, and do it in little small steps. You know, you don't have to do anything grandiose. You know, you just take your phone and, you know, think about one thought that you had and then post it on YouTube and see what happens. [01:10:45] Speaker A: I love that. It's the abundance mindset of what you said. Knowing that there's always going to be people, the right people are going to find you. You don't have to go out there looking for them. [01:10:57] Speaker B: Yeah, it's that long tail marketing that we can do now where, you know, you don't have to worry about how many people in your neighborhood are going to really appreciate that maybe the little niche thing that you're presenting or interested in. But if there's some people here and there's some people there and some people Here and some people there all over the world, because we can reach them through the Internet now that adds up to a big audience, you know, and it's, it's geographically dispersed, but it's enough people to, to really help us to make a living. And that Kevin Kelly essay that he did back at the beginning of the Internet, you know, kind of thing, 1,000 true fans. If you have 1,000 true fans, you know, true people around the world that really dig what you're doing. And if they pay you $100 a year, you know, that's $100,000 that you can make a living with. Just a thousand, a thousand people that are interested and not at a level that's going to break their bank, you know, they can, they can contribute. And that's why we have things like Patreon and Substacks and all these things now where, where people can vote with a little bit of money. And when it's aggregated up with enough people, you make a good living. And, you know, and that, that can be really marvelous to, to find out, you know, that, that when you're touching with other people that find what you're doing interesting. Another thing that I wanted to say, I just forgot about before, but that, that pulls that forward and gets overcomes the fear, I think, is that all of these type of tools now are kind of gamified. There's a gamification aspect to it that I found. Like, if I sell, you know, I go on, I look every day and how many books do I sell, you know, and how many pages I get paid on, you know, Kindle Direct Publishing through Amazon. If, if you belong to Prime, I think it is, you get Kindle Unlimited, where you can read the Kindle books for free. And then Kindle Amazon has a pool of money. And depending on how many page reads you get, you get a prorated slice of that big pool of money each month. And so every day, you know, I look and say, oh, oh, wow, 400 pages. Read, oh, a thousand pages today. And to me, that's even more fun. It's like a little dopamine rush. Just like, you know, when you're scrolling or get an email or a text message and it's, you know, you get that excited dopamine rush. And that's what they say is the addiction. There's a dopamine rush aspect to it. It's like I found that I'm more impacted by instead of someone if they buy my book. I love that, but I don't really know if they Read it. But I can see on the other side on that Kindle Unlimited part, that if 900 pages are read today of my books, and it tells me what books I know that people actually read those pages. And that makes me feel really good. You know, that makes me feel so that makes me want to do more of it. It's like, oh, you like this? Well, I'm going to, I'll write some more of that, you know, and the same thing with my courses. I look and see, you know, how many, how many people signed up today and how many I can actually see on some of the sites, like on Udemy. And I have about 20 courses on there. That's a nice platform for me. It says how many people watched what video, how long they watched it. Just like with YouTube, you know, did they watch the whole thing through or they watch just the first two seconds. And, you know, and so I really like to look at that. When people are actually consuming my content, you know, most of it and all that, I get a little, you know, excitement rush. And so that is like a pull, you know, because we always think about entrepreneurship is like this. We're pushing and, you know, we're really struggling. But there's that also that pull. When people are liking your stuff, then you want to do more of that, and you just can't help it because you like the feeling of that. They like it. And so I think that kind of overcomes fear because it's just too much fun. It's all like play to me. I mean, it says, you know, that's a novel Robin Kant said was right that, you know, the best thing is what looks like work to others but feels like play to you. That's the thing to do. And that's what this feels like to me. It just feels like there's a playful element to it. It's just fun, you know, it's just fun. And I don't get a lot. I'm surprised and maybe I shouldn't say this, but I don't get a lot of trolling or, you know, people, you know, leaving nasty comments in my, you know, in my social media posts or anything like that. So, you know, I, I, I think I found kind of a dialed it in. There's a word, anodyne, where you make things that are not susceptible to, to big reactions from people, you know, and so trying, trying to, you know, just, just to, to make things that people like and not be controversial in some way, you know, so that you get a lot of negative, you know, comments or energy attracted towards you. And so that I, I think if I had a lot more of that, I would probably be more fearful because it'd be like, oh, you know, I don't want to say something that everybody's going to say, you idiot. So, you know, that that's. I've been blessed in that way, I think. And so that that makes me less, Less fearful to, to put myself out there. Because it is, you know, when you put something out there, you feel vulnerable. That's your idea. That's your baby, you know, that's your, that's your thing. And so you're attached to that. You don't want people to criticize it. You know, that's hurtful. And so, you know, I understand. You know, I totally understand. It's. It's a scary thing to, to hit that, you know, send button or that, you know, post publish button or whatever like that, because then, then you're, you know, you're out there in the world and can be. It can be scary. [01:16:31] Speaker A: I think what you said, you know, that was such a beautiful thing that you said about how we're just collecting data. You know, everything's just collecting data and we can, we can make changes to it. So when we go into our work with that mindset, there's no room for fear anymore because now we can just continue to make edits until it's what it needs to be. [01:16:52] Speaker B: Absolutely. Yeah. It's. You think of it, everything is a little experiment and you have your hypotheses that, you know, somebody's gonna. This will be interesting. And then, and then, right, and we refine things. We course correct. We pivot, you know, and. And we refine and we iterate, you know, until. Right. It's like polishing, like putting stones in a rock tumbler. And they, they iterate around until they're polished up and they look like beautiful little gems, you know, and that's what we're, you know, that I. What I do a lot is not wait till everything's perfect because perfection is the enemy of good enough. Right? You have to let something that's out there, and then you can always refine it. Even with my books, what, what has been really great is that on Kindle, you know, on Kindle Direct Publishing, publishing through Amazon, you put up your file, you know, and it could be as simple as a Word document, you know, and you upload that and it makes the book. I use fancy tools now, but I can, I can revise any manuscript at any time. So if suddenly I Realize that, you know, there's a typo on page 144. I can just fix that, upload it, and then within, you know, a few hours, the new render scripts up there, if I think of a chapter that I want to add between this and that chapter, I just put that in, upload it, and then so I don't have to worry about it being perfect before, you know, putting, Presenting it to the world, because you can always just keep polishing it. And I think that's really the important thing is there's no good writing. It's, there's only good rewriting. And it's rewriting and rewriting, you know, until it actually. And that's the same with everything. There's no good. Reid Hoffman, the guy who made LinkedIn, he said, you know, if you've, if, if, if you're not embarrassed by your product launch, you've waited too long to launch. You know, you have to, you have to be ready to just, like, it's good enough. Let's put it out there and we'll see. Let's get some reactions, and then we'll quickly iterate on it to fix what's wrong and make it, make it better. And that's better than, oh, it's 98% done. But I really think there's a couple of things. And you wait for three years and then, you know, you lost the momentum and someone else has done your. What you're. We're going to do. [01:19:06] Speaker A: You know, I feel very called out right now, John. This is like you're speaking right to my own, my own fear right now. So this is super helpful wisdom coming from you. I love this. [01:19:19] Speaker B: Oh, thanks. [01:19:20] Speaker A: I feel like I could just, I feel like I could keep this conversation going forever. You just have so much wisdom to share. And I'm so excited to see just like what listeners take away from this conversation. Cause I know you've hit on so many amazing things. As we wrap up our time, there's a question that I like to ask every single guest that comes on my show, and it's kind of like a Mad Libs fill in the blank question. So the question is, you have to blank to blank well. [01:19:51] Speaker B: And tying back to what we just talked about, you have to fail to succeed. That failure is an integral part of success. That we don't just succeed. You know, it's those failures that actually teach us. Those are the lessons that we're learning, the experiments that we're running and the lessons we're learning that ultimately lead to success. And it's like, you know, Thomas Edison said, I didn't. I didn't fail. I just learned 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb. You know, it took him 10,000 times before he found out how to do it. And he just kept on going and kept on going, and each one was an experiment. Then he knew that wasn't going to work, and that wasn't going to work. And little by little, it's almost like, I would say, almost like sculpture, right? You get a piece of granite, and it's just this granite, but, you know, there's a beautiful, you know, figure in there, and you chip away little by little, you know, and you're chipping away, chipping away until that magnificent sculpture reveals itself. And. And how exciting that we have the opportunity to polish our work in that way and make it manifest in the world. You know, it's incredible. So I think we really have to take that idea of embracing failure. There's all those quotes like, you know, fail, fast, fail forward. You know, keep keep moving on these things. [01:21:08] Speaker A: I love that. John, thank you so, so much for being here today and for sharing everything that you have shared. It's been such a great time. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for tuning in today. John's story is a powerful reminder of the importance of adaptability, continuous learning, and embracing innovation. If you enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review. Your feedback helps us bring you even more amazing, amazing guests and stories. And if you're looking to dive deeper into the world of small business, be sure to check out our previous episodes for more tips and inspiration. As John said, you have to fail to succeed. We'll catch you next time.