Well, hello there. This is Jennifer and. Hello, Chad.
Hello.
Welcome to the premise.
It's good to be back.
It is good to be back. And, Yeah, we're ready to rock and roll. We've got mister John M M. Jennings on the line with us. Hey, John.
Yo.
How you doing?
I'm, Rocking.
You're rocking it. You're ready to rock it.
Rocking and rolling in. Rocking and rolling in the loo, which is what we, those of us in St. Louis sometimes call it.
I like that. In the loo. It's also what we call the bathroom, so that could be weird.
But, yeah, there's some confusion sometimes. You know, we used to spend a.
Time in the loo, John.
Yeah, I'm going to. I'm going to the loo. Yeah, exactly. That does happen. But, you know, it's. It's all in good fun.
Well, let's tell people a little bit about you. So, John M M. Jennings is president and chief strategist of St. Louis Trust and family office, a $15 billion wealth management firm. What?
With a b?
With a b, 15 billion. I said that correctly? You heard me right. He's an author and speaker. He's a leading voice in the space of wealth management, as you would imagine, and leadership. His book, the Uncertainty Solution, is an engaging dive into investing philosophy, best practices, as well as an authoritative and accessible guide for anyone who feels inundated with financial news and data. It's a must have addition to anyone's reading list, says Charles R. Schwab.
Wait, like the Chuck?
Yeah, the real the Chuck? Yeah, Chuck Schwab. Right, right.
John, it's the real Chuck Schwab. That's a pretty good Charles. founder of the Charles Schwab Corporation. Never heard of it.
When you landed that endorsement, that must have made you kind of happy.
Yeah, like, it was. It was incredible. And I was like, this is like the best endorsement. And I'd asked, like, some Nobel Prize winning economists. To endorse my book, and they actually responded no. So I was glad to get the,
That's actually nice of them. Right?
Yeah, it was great. I was, like, so thrilled to get, you know, emails back from Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler. Daniel Kahneman, who died, you know, a few weeks ago, unfortunately. But, then when I got Chuck Schwab and I told my wife, and she's like, that is so much better than Nobel Prize. The average person, they know who these people are, and they don't want to read a book that's been endorsed by an economist, but
something endorsed by Chuck Schwab. I mean, come on, this book's gonna fly off the ship.
You're gonna sell so many copies. I know we're gonna get to that. So there's more, folks. There's more. Jennings is also the author of the highly acclaimed ifod blog. That's interesting. Fact of the day, for those of you who don't know yet. He's an adjunct professor at Washington University's Olin business School and he writes a wealth management column for
Forbes. He has finance and law degrees from the University of Missouri there in the loo, and a professional certificate in decision making and behavioral finance from Harvard. Now, on a more personal note, and this is according to John, he is of median height, a big fan of coffee, a lover of indie music, he's a vegan and a ravenous St. Louis blues fan, as you would
imagine. You can connect with John and read his interesting fact of the day blog, which I highly recommend at johnmjennings m.com dot. So John, again, a very, very warm welcome to the premise.
Thank you. I'm excited to be on the premise.
I'm excited to have you. We've kind of been talking about doing this for a while.
longtime listener, first ah, time caller.
Nice. I like that. I like that. And I gotta say, dear listener, full disclosure, I had the pleasure of working with John during the lead up to the publication of his book. we worked on his brand and his website. So John's not only an author, he's also a client. And today we're not just going to talk about his book again, the Uncertainty Solution, which is, by the way, it's a great book. I absolutely loved it. Who knew I would love reading a finance book.
Who knew?
But I did. It's a fun book and we're going to talk a little bit about it.
And to be fair, you felt obligated to read it. Like you're, this is going to be a chore. I have to read it.
Totally.
It's a client. M maybe you even reconsidered, take me to taking me on as a client once you found out the topic. But there you go, you dove in.
Anyway and I put it off a little bit and you were like, jennifer, you have to read my book, dammit.
You had to help me.
And I did, and I flew through it. It was such a well written, fun, entertaining book. And I learned so much that I was like, wait a minute. Okay, it's not just a finance book. And I needed to read it, to understand that, because that was part of your brand. Really?
Yeah, it totally is. And it's got to be broader than just me telling you that my mom liked it.
Well, Charles, Chuck Schwab liked it.
So my mom and Chuck Schwab and.
Jennifer Thompson, very important reader here.
Yeah. Yeah.
So today we're gonna, you know, we're gonna get to the story behind the storyteller, as we do on the premise, but an even deeper way. We're not just gonna talk about John's book. We're gonna talk about his publishing journey, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Bom, bom, bom.
I'm ready.
Okay, so here we go, John. I was sitting in a parking lot a few weeks back, listening to the BBC on my local NPR station, when the announcer says something along the lines of, the biggest lottery winner. I think it was, out of Portland. I think it was 1.326 billion in the Powerball jackpot. And I was just getting ready to get on my car, and I was like, oh, wow, that's interesting. Right? So I paused. My engine's running. And then he says, you know, most people
think that when you win that much money, it's going to ruin your life. And I thought to myself, yeah, yeah, I've heard that before. And he goes, and here to tell us if this is true is the author of the uncertainty solution, john m M. Jennings. And I'm so proud. That was a pretty cool moment.
and you texted me, and, you didn't know it was live, and I didn't have my phone silenced. So if you listen to the recording, you can hear the ding of your text to me, like, oh, my God, you're on the BBC or NPR or whatever you said. Actually, you. Isn't that great?
Oh, I have to go back and listen to that. I'm on. I'm on the BBC.
What have we learned? Silence your phones, people. Yeah, silence your phone. Well, you know, I didn't have silence because they actually called me on my phone, right. So I was like, oh, and they're gonna go. They were like, oh, we're gonna call you between this time and this time. You know, it's like this 30 minutes window.
I can't believe you only got one text, though. I can't believe everyone wasn't like, oh, my God. So the BBC doesn't have as many listeners as I think I. Yeah, yeah.
I got a few.
Okay. So. But my mom listened, and Chuck Schwab. Wait, is he alive?
Yeah, he's still alive. He's still chairman of the firm.
I'm terrible. I didn't know that. I, want you to answer the question. Does it ruin your life to win that much money?
it could, but usually it doesn't. Yeah, that's like the short answer. So. So the story behind that is that they actually, found a Forbes article I wrote on that topic. And it's because, two years ago, I got this, text and then this call from somebody that I didn't remember his name, quite frankly. It was kind of embarrassing now. And then I realized that, oh, I went to college with him. He was a fraternity brother. And, I'm m trained as a lawyer. He was a year behind me in law school. And he
said, I have this emergency and his name's John. Also, I have this emergency. Please give me a call. And it's on a Sunday at noon or whatever. So I call him back and he said, you know, my wife's aunt just won Powerball. Just found out and she is completely freaking out. And they called me because I'm a lawyer. He goes, but, like, I'm a litigator. I don't know what to do. And, you know, I read your blog and I, you know, I read your Forbes articles from LinkedIn, and so I thought I'd give you a
call. And so my initial reaction was, you know, we really need to help this person because winning this much money is going to ruin her life.
You thought that?
Yeah. And our firm, you know, you mentioned we have, you know, we oversee $15 billion for our clients, but most of our clients have a hundred million plus. So it's like all our client families have. It's like they've all won after tax and payout. Like, you know, Powerball or mega, mega millions. So, you know, this, this client is. The math is kind of interesting. sorry I just said that sentence, by the way, but this is really interesting. You know, she won, I think it was like $96
million. And, you know, she took the, the lump sum payout instead of the annuity payout. And we ran the numbers on that and you know why that makes sense? And in the last 15 years, every single Powerball and Mega millions winner has taken the lump sum path. So you can either take. You could take $96 million paid out over 29 years, or you can take a discounted amount based on current interest rates in a formula. So we did that because it made economic sense. But that's $47 million.
Wow.
And then when you take the taxes off of it. She ended up with about $29 million.
So it was originally 96 million.
96 million, yeah. So the hundred or, the $1.3 billion, you know, amount ended up being, you know, you know, something like 500 million or whatever it was. So it was 4 million after tax, even like 300 and something million. So, yeah, when you hear the headline number, it's a lot bigger than most people actually get because of taxes. But anyway, I researched, no, is this going to ruinous her life? And there's studies out there on this, and there's reasons why it's kind of widely, thought that
winning a lot of money ruins your life. But it turns out there's studies on it and usually it doesn't. And it sort of makes sense because if you go from having very little money to a lot of money, it opens up all sorts of things. Like you can do activities that, are more fun, you have less money, stressed, you can do things for other people, you can take better trips, better vacations.
There are some downsides to it, but in general, the studies have shown that, people that win, lottery are happier a year and two, and even some cases ten years, later. But these studies weren't on people that won $1.3 billion. They were more on single digit millions on average. it could be different if you go from not having very much money at all to having hundreds of millions. It's like being an, an
immigrant into a different culture. You go from being like a normal, totally right american to now I am a very wealthy american. So it does change things. There could be an inverted you where it's better to have more money, but at some point you can have too much money. Maybe winning $1.3 billion is too much money.
You once said something to me, a couple years ago that stuck with me and basically was like, imagine what you would do if you won the lottery, a large amount of money, and if you wouldn't change most of how you live. Right then you are wealthy.
Absolutely.
Like, wealth is very subjective.
It totally is. And yeah, so think about like if your income doubled tomorrow, if your, your amount of assets doubled, not even winning the lottery, and if mainly what you would do is just save more. You know, I like to, yeah, take better vacations. You know, you change a little bit, but if in general your life stays the same, you're like what I like to call in the
gravy and you're wealthy. And, you know, I know people that have a lot of money that I don't consider wealthy because they're still wanting for more, they're still striving. And I know people have pretty modest net worths. Like, I have a friend that in his late thirties, retired. And it's not because he had a ton of money, it's because he's really frugal, right? And he loves being frugal. And if all of a sudden, you know, his modest wealth doubled, he'd be like,
nothing changes. Whereas, you know, I know people that have tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that wish they had more because they would do different things. You know, maybe instead of, you know, chartering a private jet, they would own a private jet, you know, and, you know, they'd buy a yacht, they would buy their third house or, you know. So it's, fascinating. And in fact, my next book is about wealth and happiness. So part of my looking
at this lottery, win or it's a happiness. It tells us a lot about what money does to us in terms of happiness. And having more money is slightly positively correlated with happiness and life satisfaction. So, you know, as you gain more money, it does slightly, on average, make people happier and more satisfied with their lives.
But there's.
Isn't there a point where it kind of inverts, though? Yeah. So what's fascinating is there's not really studies on the super wealthy when it comes to this. There's only two that I've found, and one is by, is actually from 1985. And what it did is it surveyed, there's this list called the Forbes 400 of, the richest Americans. And now to be on the Forbes 400, it starts at like, your number 400, at like $2
billion or something. But back in 1983, when they surveyed these people, it was like 125 million to be on the Forbes 400. So this, this researcher, Ed, Diener, who's also known as Doctor happy, he's, he's passed, but he was at University of Illinois. He sent out a survey to all 400 members of the Forbes 400, in 1983, and something like 85 of them responded and actually answered his survey. And so then he took, these, he surveyed people in the same zip code, just as random
controls. And he found that the people that were in the Forbes 400 were a bit happier on average, and had a bit more life satisfaction than the controls. But there was overlap. There was some percentage of these. You can now think of them as billionaires. Back then, it was 100 millionaires mainly. There was some percentage that were less happy. But in general, they were a bit
happier, but it wasn't like night and day. And then there's another study, more recent from Harvard from, I think it was 2018, 2019, that surveyed a bunch of multimillionaires. So there were people that had single digit millions, but most had over $10 million. And they found that as you had more and more money, that the happiness and life satisfaction again increased and continued to increase slightly. But importantly, there's a difference between if you made the money yourself
or if you were a beneficiary of the money. Even a spouse has less life satisfaction. So if you inherited the money or if it was your spouse that made it, you have less life satisfaction around the money than if you made it yourself. And if you think about it, that makes a lot of sense, right?
Yeah, it really does.
You know, if you probably built a business or had an incredibly successful career that you've built, you know, all this money, you can imagine how that add to your life satisfaction and compared, to, just inheriting it and then working with the clients that I work with. Yeah, there definitely comes a point, and a lot of our clients have reached this, where the money ends up being somewhat of a burden.
Right.
But it's also great.
So it's, they just need to hire someone like you so that they don't have to deal with that.
I buy powerball tickets or mega millions tickets on occasion, and it's really just to take stock of my life. But I've kind of reached the point where, like, I don't want to win.
M I really do want to win now. Hey, wait a minute. Let's go back to that. You said you buy powerball tickets to take stock of your life. What did you mean by that?
In fact, I did a blog post on ifod on this years ago. so I asked myself, like, what would I do differently in my life if I had that much money? And I think a lot of the things that people would do, they could do anyway. So if I were like, well, I would quit my job, and I wouldn't, but I think I wouldn't, but if I would quit my job, well, then maybe you should find a new career.
Exactly.
It was like, you know, I live in Missouri. If I was like, oh, I would move to San Diego, because I hear that's a great place. Well, I could move to San Diego anyway, right? or, you know, I would start a charitable organization or do more charitably. Well, maybe I should do more charitably anyway. So I think a lot of the things you could do anyway, and then also think about, like, the issues that you have in your life that wouldn't be changed by
the money. So, you know, there's the University of Michigan surveys, people on all sorts of things in this particular survey, and one of the questions they ask, and the last data I saw was from about five years ago, but they ask what one thing would make the biggest difference to make you happier in your life. And 72% of the respondents, their number one thing was more money. Right. And I, you know, I wonder about that. I mean, definitely for a certain slice, like, if you're, you know,
working two jobs, you're hand to mouth and you have a lot of money stress. Yeah, no doubt. Like, I'm sure having more money would help, but if you're, you know, you're doing okay, you're, like, you put it, Jennifer. You're taking vacations and, you know, kind of getting through life. You know, I really questioned that if having a lot more money would make that big of a difference.
it's not about having more money. It's how you would live if you had more money.
Yeah. How would you live if you had more money? And. And, you know, there's ways you can use money to enhance your sense of happiness, and there's ways that you can use money that's more, you know, destructive. And, you know, I think that using money to enhance happiness, you know, the things that you do is if you buy experiences rather than things, is a huge one. And, you
know, using money to deepen relationships. So, like, I have all sorts of clients that take their extended family or friends on all these fabulous trips, you know, that's great, great. Some money, if you use money to buy time, you know, so if you're like, oh, I hate doing yard work, hire someone to do your. Your yard work or your housework or, you know, go to dinner with your spouse or, you know, whatever you don't like to do.
Right. Yeah, I like this. It's. It's almost like a self help book, you know?
Yeah. Yeah.
How to live a better life by analyzing what you're doing and how you can do differently. Do it differently, rather.
Yeah. So this is all the topic of my next book, which I'm, you know, at that point, Jennifer and Jadwick. I'm just in Struggleville, so it's great.
It's fun.
It's part of the process.
Well, let's talk about your current book, the uncertainty solution. Yeah. Just so our listeners know it's not really a book about how to invest, although there is some of that. It's more of a book about how you can't really know what's going to happen. I mean, as the title infers, uncertainty and the solution. It's about knowing what you can control and how to manage uncertain situations. Maybe it's about expectations. and letting go of anxiety, I think, goes a lot
into that. Like, stop trying to predict what you cannot predict. but what can we know?
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, the premise of the book, is really we as humans, we don't like most uncertainty. And the way we react to it, especially in the investment realm, is largely counterproductive. And the best thing to do is to accept uncertainty, sit in our discomfort of uncertainty. But really what you can do is you can create mental models. So this was championed by Charlie Munger, who died in the fall at nearly age 100, the business
partner of the famed Warren Buffet. But he really championed this concept of mental models, where you create models in your head of how the world really works, and then you fall back on these mental models to help you make better decisions, especially when faced with uncertainty. So that's what the book really gets into, is these different mental models that all apply to investments, and most of them apply to just life in general.
Really what I wanted to do is spread wisdom that I've learned over the years as I became a student of how to better handle uncertainty. There's just a lot of uncertainty and we feel better in the investment realm or, when we hear a confident expert predict what they think is going to happen in the stock market or the economy or geopolitically or whatever, and they just really don't know. They just don't. I go in depth in my book about they just don't know. But they're
going to predict anyway. And we feel better because it gives us a sense of certainty if we believe this expert. But it's better just to say, hey, an expert's not going to be able to predict what's going to happen around the bend. I mean, who predict what happened in Israel with Hamas, or the Ukraine war, or a lot of things that have happened in the
stock market. I mean, yesterday Gamestop, rose by 78% because some person tweeted an image, and it was the guy that started the Gamestop, you know, the 2000% rise back in 2021. So a bunch of people were like, oh, let's jump onto GameStop. Like, how do you predict that?
Right?
Everybody part of the Reddit forums, I guess, right? Yeah, totally. It's a Reddit forum, sort of thing. And, you know, back in, the fall of 2022, Bloomberg surveyed economists, and there was the economists they surveyed put a hundred percent likelihood of a recession in 2023, and it didn't happen, you know, and on and on and on and on.
So the part of the premise of the book is, you know, how to, how to be a better investor or just make better decisions in your life, by not chasing false certainty and falling back on what you can, you know, actually truly know you're going to.
Make yourself crazy if you're chasing them. Right?
Yeah, yeah.
Speaking of chasing things like trends.
Like trends, you know? Yeah, yeah.
Like chapter seven in your book, the trend is not your friend. Tell us more. John M. Jennings.
Yeah, yeah. So, really this chapter is in response to clients coming to us and saying either a, why didn't you see this trend that we could have made a lot of money in? Or b, we think we see a trend and we want to pour a bunch of money in it. And so really it's not predicting what trends are going to be big, but how to think about
trends. And a key aspect of, the difficulty of spotting important trends is that there's, you know, we as humans, don't grasp exponential growth and important trends that have exponential advancement. So, I mean, you can look at what's going on with electric vehicles. I mean, the sales of electric vehicles in the US growing exponentially. I mean, they made up an incredibly tiny percent ten years ago. And, in 2023, EV's and plug
in hybrids made up just under 10% of sales. Again, it's still minority, but it goes from ten years ago, them being novelties, to these days, probably everybody listening to this episode knows somebody that has an EV, or they drive one themselves. So this is expanding rapidly. And we have a client that we started working with like seven or eight years ago. And their family owns
an energy company. Basically they own a bunch of gas stations and distribution of like, commercial, oils, but also gasoline. Right. And I remember saying to them seven or eight years ago, you know, what are you going to do about electric cars? And they said, oh, that's so far off. that's something for our grandchildren to worry about.
Wow.
And so then I talked to them about the nature of exponential growth, that, ah, yes, it's not moving the needle much yet, but it's growing exponentially. And so you may be thinking, well, there's all these problems with Ev's you know, there's range anxiety and there's not a great charging network out there. And like, if you live in an apartment or condo or a place that doesn't have a
garage, you know, you probably don't have a charger. So, yeah, there's a lot of impediments, so maybe it doesn't continue to exponentially grow. But also I get into the chapter about how a lot of these other technologies had a lot of impediments as well, and they continue to grow. So a lot of things on understanding and appreciating trends. again, not telling you what trends to invest in, but really how to think about investing in trends. and AI is another
huge one that's going crazy. So a lot of when I wrote the book, it was before, you know, it was published after, but it was, written before chat, GPT was launched to the public. but the same thing is there's, all these mental models in the chapter about how to think about things like the rise of AI.
I Loved reading, like, looking at trends and looking at how, like, you know, bell graphs and, statistics. I read about statistics, and let me just tell you, listener, I'm a writer. I was told there'd be no math, but I really enjoyed actually reading about the statistics because in a way, you know, when I was done reading the book, I had this sense of hope. I was like, okay, you
know what I mean? And I think the biggest takeaway and something I was a little maybe proud of myself about is, the best investor is one who acts like they're dead.
Yeah.
don't touch it. Just leave it alone. And Chad and I are good at that. We just. We. Yeah, you know what little we invest, we leave it alone. And if the stock market's crashing, we don't care because we're not going to touch it. It doesn't matter. One of the takeaways I got from you is like, stop worrying about it.
Yeah. I mean, I kind of worry about it.
No, you do.
Yeah, it's hard not to worry about it, but, yeah, people are better off. They don't.
I don't, I don't really worry about it. I'm like, yeah, what's the matter right now? It's gonna come.
Well, I'll tell you. So, so this coming August, I will have been married 30 years to my trophy wife.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
And she is absolutely lovely. We've met. Your trophy wife. I'm glad to say we have.
Yeah, I like her quite a bit.
I like her quite a bit.
Yeah, I do. I still like her. We still got it going on, but, So we, So, she changed her name. Her last. Her main name was Simmons, and she changed it to Jennings, like, on her driver's license and even her passport and, you know, things like that. But she has never changed it with the Social Security administration. It has literally been on her to do list for going on 30 years.
I was gonna say 30 years. Yeah.
Yeah. Ah, 30 years. And, I don't know, like, 15 or 20 years ago, like, she had this, you know, Ira account with the Charles Schwab corporation. Thank you, Chuck. And, they locked the account because the, Because her Social Security number and the name on the account did not match. I mean, it kind of makes sense. It's like, okay, is there some sort of, you know, terrorist funding going on with the Tammy Jennings, you know,
Ira? And again, it's. It's not, you know, it's not a huge account, but, yeah, it's, you know, saved over the years, and so, like, we couldn't tinker with it. So I was like, tammy, like, you gotta go get this changed. And she still hasn't, by the way. So we can unlock this account. We can see it, but we can't do anything. So it's like this time capsule from, you know, 1518 years ago, how we invested.
And it's in, like, you know, four funds, like, three index funds and one active manager, and I've not been able to tinker with it, and it's done. Awesome.
I knew you were gonna say that.
It's done so good. It has done so good. And fidelity did this study of a ten year study of all their accounts, and, you know, who were the best investors? And it was of dead people, unlocked accounts. So there's your dead person.
There it is.
Yeah, maybe. It's embarrassing. And again, I brought up to Tammy recently, like, are you going to get that change? Because we have to file our tax returns under her maiden name. And if we get a refund, it's like, how do we deposit it, right? Not her name. Yeah. So we have those sort of issues. So it's, fortunately, we almost never get a refund. So there you go.
I'm really glad to know that your life isn't, like, totally, like, locked down and everything. The rest of us who aren't doing it perfect. Hey, it's all good. Even John.
Oh, you know, it's like I'm a duck I look calm on the surface, but there's a lot going on underneath.
Right.
There's a lot of, There's a lot of scrambling underneath.
So, I have a question for you. What can toilet paper teach us about investing?
Oh, my gosh. So you remember back in the pandemic when people were hoarding toilet paper?
Yeah.
So it was. It was kind of crazy. So, Like, who knows why it started? Like, why did the first person.
Yeah, who was it?
Who was that person who said, I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go buy, like, four shopping carts of toilet paper?
Patient zero. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. There was.
And it was.
It was probably in, like, des moines or something, and then it, you know, spread.
I think it was patient.
Yeah, that's probably where. A lot of preppers up there.
Yeah, there's a lot of preppers up there. I know.
Yeah. But they produce some great people in northern Idaho, though, right?
That is true. You know, it's funny, I have to pause for just a minute. I'm dear listener. I grew up partly in northern Idaho and eastern Washington, and, a friend of mine was telling me he was going on a date with. With a gal from Idaho. And I said, oh, ask her where she's from. And I said, oh, never mind. She's from Boise. People from northern Idaho never leave. And he looked at me. He's like, what? I'm like, no, it's totally true.
And I said, later, where's she from? He's like, boise? I'm like, of course. Yeah, of course. So, okay, we don't know how it started, but, yeah, people were, and I.
Have to admit, so, you know, it spread. And on a system wide level, it was completely bonkers. But an individual level, it was completely rational. So, you know, if you started, you know, you put on your mask and you made your way to, you know, target or Walmart or Walgreens or CFS, whatever, and they didn't have toilet paper, right. And you're trying to order on Amazon or whatever, and it's
like, oh, you know, we'll get it to you in six weeks. So, you know, basically what happened is, as people bought toilet paper, it created a shortage. And I'll tell you, I thought, you know, I was immune to, you know, more than I am to irrational behavior. But, like, six weeks into the pandemic, I go to Walgreens and, you know, we have plenty of toilet paper. Tammy Jennings is just amazing at, you know, having us stocked in, like, everything, you know, like, we have
plenty of paper. Towels, plenty of toilet paper. Great. I go into Walgreens, and there's one package of toilet paper on the shelf, and I bought it. I tell the clerk at checkout, I'm like, you know, like the clerk, she's behind, like, glass, and she's wearing, like, three masks. I'm wearing a mask, you know, you remember this time? And I'm, I say to her, I say, I'm so sorry. I'm buying this toilet paper. It's your last,
your last package. I actually have plenty at home. I know I'm being part of the problem and not part of the solution, but on an individual level, I think it's rational. And she just, like, looked at me like, you know, get your, you know, potential Covid breath away. And then I bought it. But this is how the stock market and the economy and a lot of things in life worked, because you have intelligent actors, people or firms, everybody's watching everybody else, and we do things based on their
actions. It's like we just mentioned with GameStop. I mean, the reason why people pushed up GameStop by GameStop stock yesterday by nearly 80% is they said, oh, well, this guy just tweeted, which means other people are going to want to buy it. So I'm going to get in and buy it, and I'm just going to assume I'm going to sell out in time, right? So that's how the stock market works, is we're all looking, and the economy, we're all looking at
everybody else, look at everybody else. And then the way we act actually changes the real world and creates feedback loops. And this is why it's so hard to predict the economy and the stock market is because there's all these moving parts and people change and they learn. And there used to be this strategy, back in the sixties or seventies, I don't remember the exact time period, called the
dogs of the Dow. So you take the Dow Jones industrial average, which is 37% stocks, when they quote the Dow, if you invested in the five, or maybe it was ten worst performing stocks of the Dow. So the dogs of the Dow, then you would outperform the other stocks over time. People would do the strategy, and it was like, oh, my gosh, this is great. It's working. But then what happened is enough. People started doing it, and then it just blew up and it didn't work
anymore. this is the history of investing. People in the two thousands poured into hedge funds because they did so well during the.com crash, and they did well in the nineties and the hedge fund industry went from having a few hundred billion in assets to three or 4 trillion. And then once everybody poured money in, it changed. There weren't enough investments that were great that the hedge funds could buy, but they still took the money
because they wanted to make the fees. And then hedge fund returns were horrible. And know we're, bad and we just see this over and over and over, that how we act in the world actually changes the world we live in. Right.
Yeah.
So. And then it destroys the ability to predict what's going to happen.
It's like any good algorithm. If you figure it out, it's going to change.
Yeah, absolutely.
In a nutshell. Right?
It is. Right, right. If everybody knew the exact Google algorithm.
Yeah.
Then everybody would do it and it lose its relevance. They have to play the shell game of changing around stuff. Right.
Which is why they'll never share the algorithms with it.
Yeah.
so here's, a statement. You once said, wisdom is taking the data, information and knowledge and shaping behavior. And that's really kind of what you're talking about here, right?
Yeah, yeah. So you think about it. Data is just like raw, facts and figures and not very helpful. And information, you take it and you arrange it in a way that makes sense. So, like, data would be, for instance, in terms of the economy, it would be something like housing starts. So you just get all this raw data. Here's the housing starts all over the US. And information, you would arrange it. So maybe you arrange it by zip code or single family versus
multifamily home. You might do it by the price of the house, less than 100 grand, less than 250, less than a million, 2 million, whatever. And that would start telling you something about what's going on in the economy. More than just having the raw data. The knowledge is taking that information,
pairing it with other information to say. You might be able to say something like, okay, here's ish where we think we are in the economic cycle, based on housing starts and unemployment claims and inflation and interest rates and GDP, all these other things, it looks like we're solidly in our recovery. Right? So that's, that's knowledge. And that's where a lot of things stop. And that what wisdom is, is then knowing what to do with
it. And you know that, you've heard wisdom, especially in the investment realm, if it's simple, but it's not necessarily easy. Right? So wisdom would be knowing, even though we're getting, you know, maybe the economy is really heating up. Wisdom is knowing, but I'm not going to be able to tell when it's going to turn right. Someone to be patient or its wisdom is things like what Warren Buffett said about investing, that to be successful, you should be fearful when others are greedy and
greedy when others are fearful. So that's incredibly simple, but, that is, like, the hardest thing to do in investing. But if you just did that, you'd be incredibly successful as an investor. Right. But that's so hard. So when everybody else is going crazy and making all these returns or, their business is booming, it's hard then to say, I'm going to be the fearful one. And it's even harder when I. And everything is falling apart to say, now I'm going to be
greedy. But that's what Warren Buffett has always done, and that is. That is true wisdom. And it's, again, it's simple, but not easy.
Well, I think this is a good point for us to turn our conversation, away from investing, although it's fascinating and ish. Ish? Yeah. Sometimes I'm like, wait, what? My head is sort of spinning. but the takeaway is good. let's talk about your publishing journey. I want to ask you a bunch of questions. I want to know what worked, what didn't work, what you would do differently, what advice you have for authors, what you learned, expectations. where do you want to start?
I want to start with my therapist.
Okay, let's do it.
Doctor brog. I worked with my therapist for well over a year to get where I could write this book, because we all have our own brand. So, really, a brand is what somebody says about you when you're not around. I mean, there's other definitions, but that's kind of my favorite one. I felt like I built this brand, right? So I, you know, I've networked, I give speeches. I teach at a, you know, prestigious university. I write a blog. I write for
Forbes. So I'd done all these things where I felt like I've created this brand, and the brand was the, you know, I'm relatively intelligent, sort of funny, sort of curious, whatever. But, you know, I felt like it was this positive brand, and I'm 54 years old. I was kind of, you know, call it 50 when I was really talking to Doctor Brogg about this, maybe 49. But I feel like I've spent my whole career creating this brain. I was like, what if I write this book and it's not good and it
detracts from everything? That I've done, you know, I just had this fear and I don't, you know, at least then I didn't identify myself as a writer, even though I'd done a decent amount of writing and, you know, just wasn't really part of my identity. And basically, Doctor Brog, I'll give you like a year's worth and, you know, thousands of
dollars of therapy. He basically was like, stop being such a wimp. You know, like, if your brand is being this person that's kind of out there and you want to have, you know, the, you know, certain things known about you, there's no better way to do that than then do a book. And you just have to have confidence that. That you can do this and especially if you have the right partners and, like, you and Chad are part of that ecosystem of partners. So. Thank you. but it. It was then sitting down
to write. And then, then I was on this, webinar. I was like this, on this panel, like in the middle of COVID It was like, you know, spring of like probably like may or some end of 2020. And this person like pinged me on LinkedIn afterwards and she's like, I really enjoyed your comments on that panel. It seems to me like you have a book in you. And I was like, well, I do. I've been talking to my therapist for a year about a book. So she's a book coach and an
editor. So, you know, I hired her and we kind of went into this process of, you know, outlining and diagramming the book. And then she was my first editor, so I. She kept me on track mostly. And I'd give her chapters and she'd edit it. And really she was an a plus, book coach and an ok editor. So then I hired a second editor because I'd give her like a 6000 word chapter and it'd come back at like 5800 words
and I'd be like, I'm not that good of a writer. So I had this other guy that, mostly retired and then I'd give him the 5800 words and he'd come back at like 4200 words. And I'm like, now we're talking. So it's all about cutting. He's like, oh, you know, he'd tell me all the time, john, you got to kill your darlings, you know, and you got to streamline it down and think about what the reader needs to hear, not what you want to say. And, you know,
that was really hard. But I decided. I decided to use a hybrid publisher and not go traditional route. because the main purpose of the book is for our firm to use it in gaining new clients and we work mainly in kind of the 50 million and up family range. So we wanted to use it as a way for me to get speaking engagements, which has gone incredibly well. We have probably given away like 2500 of them. I just gave a speech this morning, to a group on
the book and have a prospect out of that. So it's been really good for that. We've had some inbound prospects, so that was the main purpose of the book. And so we decided to do hybrid, because I, we, the company, we completely own the rights to the book and we can do whatever we want to it with it. We buy it for, I think they cost us like $4 apiece and we can give them out. I can use whatever I want from the book and publish in Forbes, I can use it in my blog, I can
use whatever. So that's what we decided to do. I thought the publisher was really good. The book looks great, it's really high quality. It looks as good as anything that comes out of the, the big five traditional publishers. but it definitely was expensive. And I'm very fortunate that my company paid for it because again, it's mainly been a great thing for my company's brand and my brand, and I'm kind of one of the main faces of the company. So it's been
a phenomenal journey. I've been on I don't know, 30 plus podcasts. I've been on all these radio interviews, the BBC, the BBC, some really big podcasts. hm. So all that has been fantastic. I've spoken, you know, even overseas on the book in front of, you know, all the right crowds and audiences and it's,
it's, it's really gone well. in terms of the main goals for the book, you know, in terms of actual sales though, it's on one hand done great, on the other hand, I'm incredibly disappointed both at the same time.
Yeah. So why is that?
I, well, it has, you know, and it's one year mark. I don't know, it's a few weeks past the one year mark. It was published April or excuse me, May 2 of 2023. And so we're now in kind of mid May. So, you know, about two weeks ago is its one year anniversary. As of its one year anniversary, if you take print, audio and ebook together, it sold about
3400 copies. So on one hand, that is terrific because if you look at all the stats of books and a lot of the stats that came out of the Simon, Schuster and, Penguin Random House antitrust trial, which has just been a treasure trove of stats about the publishing industry, that's really good. That's better than 90% of the books out there. So on one hand, that's really good. On the other hand, it's disappointing because, we spent a lot of time, money and effort on promoting the
book. I wrote a blog post on this a few weeks ago. Actually, on the anniversary when it came out, I was on a podcast this summer. My podcast had 90,000 downloads. That was another that had 30 or 40,000 downloads. I had someone a few weeks ago that sent out, basically to his 50,000 subscribers on his newsletter, all about my book and a
recommendation to buy it. I have somebody that was a book influencer that both tweeted out and instagrammed out to his over 500,000 people a glowing recommendation of my book. And so you're thinking about like, okay, we're getting hundreds of thousands of people that have seen or heard about a book and it's sold 3400 copies. so that is disappointing. But the good news is that the purpose of the book was never sales. And it's kind of like going back to the question of, you
know, wealthy. You know, if you doubled your income or your assets would much change. You know, if my book, instead of selling 3400 copies, if it had sold 34,000 copies, copies, I don't think it makes a bit of difference in terms of what the book is for or quite frankly, how I feel about it. because I do think it's a really good book. I'm proud of it and it's enhanced my brand and my firm's brand and people that have read it. I've gotten almost
100% overwhelming feedback. I mean, I've gotten the one or two one star reviews, which I love on Amazon, but I'll get, you know, I'll get people that I don't even know that email me and just like, oh my gosh, this book is amazing. It's like, you know, cross between Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis and I bought copies for all my kids. And, you know, I've had some people that I really respect that have, you know, read my book and then, have emailed me or even called me or have met in person and
they've just said, you know, your book is fantastic. And has changed how I look at the world. So what I had to train myself is it's so easy to look at your book sales and let that define what success is because it's so easy to measure that. Right. My publisher every week updates on Thursday afternoons what all the stats are. And really from the get go, I don't look at those. I kind of had an ish what my book had sold, the first time I really looked at it in depth, was really on its one
year anniversary. Because kind of like not looking at your stock portfolio because it leads to bad behavior. I really said to myself, I want to focus on what matters and book sales are so easy to measure, I think I'll fall into that. And I did know enough, I know that it wasn't like, the print run on my book was 5000 copies and there hasn't been a second edition yet or second
printing yet. So I knew it wasn't to that point. But I think it'd be really easy just to focus on sales as success or failure when it's done all these other things for me and been this overwhelmingly positive, positive experience. But yeah, the sales are disappointing to me.
Sure. Yeah. that makes a lot of sense and it's hard for us not to judge the success by book sales. But then also 3.5 million books were published last year. And 1% of books, one to 3% of books, maybe one to 5% of books, they make all the money. So even the big five traditional publishers don't expect all books to sell. And you know, they. 3500 is pretty high for a lot of those books.
and I think, and basically hybrid, which is a form of self publishing as well because I found from the publicity, firm that I use, they were like, you know, this is going to make it more challenging getting some of the media and some of the reviews and some of the things that will maybe move the needle some, because you didn't run the gauntlet of getting an agent and doing the book proposal and getting a publisher to plunk down their cold, hard cash in terms of advance.
So I didn't do any of that. So, it is harder, at least according to them, and I think it's true, to maybe gain some of the sales success with a self published or hybrid published book as opposed to a traditional publisher.
Yeah. So there is some stigma around this idea that your book wasn't vetted by the traditional publishing industry, but it is changing. It's absolutely changing.
Well, I was at this conference recently. I was on this panel with, these two other authors, and they were both traditionally published, one by a university press. He was a professor, and the other by, you know, Wiley, which is, you know, a well known, like, business book publisher. And the, the professor was, was, you know, very gracious about the fact that I used a hybrid publisher. The Wiley guy, like kind of threw me some shade.
Wow.
Like, oh, you know, you're self published or you know, whatever. I was like, oh, yeah, whatever. So anyway, my book, fucker. Anyway, well, this is going to sound really, really petty of me, so I ended up buying a copy of his book. I haven't read it yet. It's kind of like on, something that's financier, economicy. So we'll see if I read it. but when I bought Amazon, I noticed it was published like three years ago and he has twelve reviews.
Oh, wow. That's really, that's actually kind of shocking. Yeah.
so you know that, you know, there's not, you know, I'm sure there's different algorithms out there, but like, with twelve reviews, he probably hasn't sold that many books.
He's not selling. Yeah, absolutely. Well, that is a huge tell, actually. And it, I will also say it is harder for self published and a lot of hybrid published books to get reviews because Amazon will accept them. In fact, we had a client who got so many reviews that Amazon actually shut it down and was not allowing more reviews because they said, well, there's too many, so we don't believe they're real.
However, if a Wiley book or a Simon and Schuster book is released, it's going to get thousands of reviews and Amazon's not shutting that down. So the playing field is still not exactly fair.
Yeah, well, and I think for my first book, doing the hybrid publisher was great, especially, again, I have to just reiterate, my company paid for it.
Well, I was, you went with, and I'm just, is it okay if I say who your publishers? So Greenleaf Publishing does a great job. I mean, their packaging is wonderful, you know, and Chattanooga package books. So we can really appreciate good design. They win a lot of contests. they do a great job, but they are really expensive, so you were really expensive.
And I'll tell you, I think for my next book, I'm probably going to go the traditional route. And one of the main reasons is I have this sense of guilt about my company paying for my first book because it was such a passion project for me. And again, it's been great for our. It's been great for our company. It's, like, been worth, every dollar that we've spent on it. And my business partners,
they all agree. But I kind of feel for this next book, I want to not have my company, even though wealth and happiness and whatever it's arguably would help with our company as well. I just really feel like it's so personal to me to be writing these books and that I feel really guilty that I had the company, do this.
You know what my sister says about guilt? She says guilt is the playground bully for adults.
That's great.
well, no, I see your point, though. I see your point. But, I think you should try and seek out an agent, and I think you have built a brand, and that's part of it. Building the brand, building the platform, getting the visibility, getting on the BBC.
Getting on the BBC.
And then you go seek out an agent, and now you proven yourself, right. I loved your book. I really, really did. And so when I look at it, you know, I feel a little heartbroken about it myself. And we work together on your brand, getting, And you. You got some great press. You really did. I feel like wonderkind is. Wonderkin was your publisher or publicist. I hope it's okay that I am. Of course they did. They do such a good job.
They did an amazing job.
And, you know, so what. How do we parse this? Like, why didn't we sell more books? Why didn't you sell more books? And there's just. There's really actually no way of knowing. There's been situations where an author has come out with a book. I have an example. An author wrote a book about, Oh, my gosh. Sarah Palin didn't m do great. You know, it sold maybe a thousand copies. And then, of course, what happened? she became the VP, and then the publisher. Nominee,
nominee, maybe nominee. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm moving too fast in my head. And you know what happened? The book went crazy. Like, you never know what's gonna happen in the media that's going to affect or in politics or, you know, anything that's going to affect your book sales. And publishers know this. well, I have a friend that.
Wrote this amazing book called the Watermen, and it's about kind of the. There was this guy named Charles Daniels that was America's first swimming champion. He helped invent what's known as freestyle style, the crawl. And at one point, he owned every swimming world record in every distance. Amazing. So, like, he competed in the 1904 Olympics, so that far back, which, by the way, was in St. Louis, but,
In the loo.
Exactly. So. But it's like, it's kind of like reading boys in the boat or, you know, one of these, you know, sort of not quite unbroken, but it's like one of these really just amazing, amazing stories. Like, the book is so good, I devoured it's, you know, like 350 pages, and I devoured it in a day. Like, it's so. It's so good. And I don't know exactly what it sold, but, you know, it's not, you know, I thought this thing was gonna be a
bestseller everywhere. And, you know, I think, you know, I'm pretty sure you see, a, division of Penguin, random, random house, like Riverside books or something.
Okay.
So, Yeah, so, no, it's an amazing book.
And I.
And, you know, I don't know what his advance was, but I've heard from friends that it was, you know, really, really solid advance. So, And I don't know exactly what it's sold, but I would be surprised if it's probably sold over 10,000 copies. But I don't really know. But it's called the waterman. It's so good. And I'm just stunned that it's not like, just everywhere, because it's so good. Well, he had written a prior book, I don't know, like 15 or 20 years ago or something.
That's a work of fiction that's about, It was centered around in Door County, Wisconsin, kind of a resort area. About this shop that catered to, like, you know, irish, sold like, irish stuff or whatever it's called, all things irish. And I read it and I thought it was fine. But, like, waterman is like, amazing, right? But all things irish. I think, like, he told me what he sold, so I'm not going to share it, but it told. It sold a shit ton.
A lot of books.
A lot of books. And it was because somebody, I forget who it was, but somebody, some big irish figure, died. Like, right around the time that the book was published, there was this kind of,
People are looking for it.
People were looking for it. Kind of like what you mentioned with the Sarah Palin book, and it sold a ton. And again, it's a good book. I don't mean to, like, cast aspersions on that first book because it was good, but, like, his second book is amazing and has sold nowhere near that thus far.
Right? Well, something I was gonna say too. the number one thing that sells your first book is your third book.
Yeah.
And that's proven over and over and over again. And there's a reason for that, because you're building your brand, you're developing a relationship with your readers, and you're getting better at promoting yourself. Right.
Yeah.
Building that visibility and connecting the dots of your success and all of that. so while 3500 books may not be an exciting thing right now, I do believe your second book will do better and then your third book, which we don't know what it is yet, but that could be the breakthrough. So for me, it's like, follow your heart and publish the book that you need to write. And it's a long tail journey, folks.
It's looking down the road and not, you know, the first 90 days of the first year of a book's release. And you never know. And this is true of music, too. Look at Kate Bush.
Yeah. Took her, what, 30 years to get a number one hit.
Yeah, exactly. Because her song was featured on stranger things.
Is that what it was?
Yeah. yeah, we just never know. But.
So I'm a big fan of Steven Pressfield, who, of course, wrote the war of art, which is amazing. And, you know, he really came into prominence, ah, with the legend of Bagger Vance, which, of course, was made into a mediocre movie, but great book, and I'm a big, big fan of his. And, you know, he worked for decades as a writer and wrote all these books that weren't published until
he really had his big break. I think he was probably in his fifties when the legend of Bagger Vance was published and became this big hit. And he's written all these other great books kind of about how to write. So, like, he has this great book, called no one wants to read your show shit. And, like, for anybody as a writer out there that's listening, go, go read that book. I mean, read the war of art and then read. No one wants to read your shit. It's just fantastic. But we have the war of art.
That'S on our bookshelf somewhere around. Yeah, Chad bought it for me. Yeah.
Oh, it's so. It's so good. It's a great book. But, like, just his insight on, you know, all his struggles, as a writer and, you know, just kind of the torture and exhilaration of it is just, I, found an incredibly inspiring. And again, it took him decades, and I'm sure after the legend of Bagger Vance, people went and read his other works.
Nice. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's awesome. Yeah. I'd like to tell our listeners that John has a great reading list. I'm so envious of you that you make the time to do this, because I always think I will. But you list all of the books you read, and you don't necessarily review them, but you. You give a little bit of a review. Yeah. Yeah. And then you can go back and remember all the books you've read, and people can see your reading list, and it's fantastic. Both fiction,
non fiction. and that can be [email protected]. before we go, I want to ask you to talk a little bit about the I fod. And actually, I'm going to talk about it before you do. So again, interesting fact of the day. And while it's not daily, it is, in fact, interesting. Here's some topics that you've written.
Was that it used to be daily, and that was. That was some more work with my therapist to make it not daily.
You're like, okay, this isn't tenable anymore. So, the surprising reading habits of adults. resilience. Rule number two. Why less is more when making life changes. These are topics how a fictitious town became real and then disappeared again. I have to say, I love that one. Beefcakes. versus dad bods. Decoding female attraction to male masculine masculinity and the cruel curve of forgetting. We rapidly lose most memories, but we can fight it. So, I mean,
your topics run the gamut. Where do you get these topics from? Tell us about them.
Well, if you viewed the world as. I need to produce a blog post. One or two. It's like one or two times a week now, on something that's interesting. If you viewed the world that way, then you'd start seeing these things pop up everywhere. And so I read a lot of fiction and nonfiction and then just kinda kind of stay up on the world. And then I email to myself ideas or articles. And then
I have this queue of. I don't know how long it is now. It's probably 1500 topics because I started writing this on Groundhog's day 2017. So it's been over seven years. but so I have this huge queue, and what I will do is I'll just kind of scroll through it. I'm usually writing on more recent things, but I'll tell you, like, for instance, one of the things in my queue from a few years ago was about y two k. And it's you know, I have a good story.
I have a good story.
It was this huge deal, and then, like, then, like, the millennium turned, and then, like, nothing happened. So was it overblown?
Yeah.
Or did we just actually prepare? And there's, there's a lot of learning there besides just y two k, because it's like, this, this thought. And, my blog post, I'm gonna write on why I've written it, but I haven't published it yet. It's gonna be tomorrow. But, like, I start talking about the movie Kingsmanda, the M
Secret Service, starring Colin Firth. And so, basically, it's about the secret organization of spies, and they basically, thwart terrorist attacks and rogue governments and crazy billionaires played by Samuel L. Jackson and Colin Firth. his main character's name is Harry Hart. He has in his office all these front pages of, the sun newspaper over in the UK of, just normal, unremarkable headlines. And the aspiring agent asked him, he was like, what are all these headlines? These
are boring. He's like, these are the headlines the day after I stepped in and stopped a huge disaster.
Oh, so,
They're a reminder. They're a reminder of what I accomplished, because there was no big headline that day about what happened the prior day. And that's kind of like, so it's kind of like y two k. And you can apply this to all sorts of areas for life. Like, y two k ended up not being a big deal because people stepped in and did something. I mean, worldwide, somewhere between 300 and $500 billion was spent mostly by private companies to fix the y two k problem before
it happened. And then afterwards, people were like, well, that was just media overhype. It was ridiculous. And there was all these people lambasting it. But that's what happens a lot with preparation. And I, have this coworker that calls it something similar. The paradox of the clean house. Like, you know, people will notice if your house is dirty, but often don't notice that there isn't a mess.
Right, right.
Yeah. This applies to all sorts of areas of life, of, not noticing bad things that were prevented. I mean, think about all the wars or potential nuclear attacks or terrorist attacks that were prevented that none of us know about, of course.
Well, I mean, it's like going on a road trip, right? You remember the ones where the car breaks down when things go wrong. You're more likely when it's right.
It's all, it's all right. You know, the fact that, you know, dad got the oil changed and whatever. But anyway, I'm writing about y two k because I watched for, mother's day, we watched a bunch of old home videos that we had digitized a few months ago. And, one of them, my oldest child, was born in 1999. And on one of her videos of when she was an infant, the date displays very old camcorder. But it said January 2, 2000. I was like, look, kidde, we survived y two k. And my kids were like, who are
now 25 and 22. They were like, dad, what are you talking about? What is y two k? Oh, my gosh. So that's why I'm writing on y two k, because I knew that I had saved this from a few years ago. So it's just stuff like that. I just view the world as, what can I write about?
Well, and it's always something that most people are going to have, will have thought about this. At one point I'm like, oh, that's interesting. But who goes out and actually researches it and then write about it? Well, I'll tell you who, John.
Yeah. And so what's, what's been fascinating about the blog is like the growth of my subscribers kind of grew pretty well. Like, I started with like 100% subscribers, I think about 3000 now. But I would have thought with, with all the promotion I did to this book and all these speeches and everything, that my, my subscriber base would continue to grow. And it's like basically where it was a year ago. So I'm like, well, why, why have this topped off? But, you know, it's a flat.
Line thing though, right? You get new ones and old ones.
Yeah. So my new ones and my old ones are my birthday. Deaths of subscribers is, kind of, in a stasis, but it's pretty fascinating. I get somewhere between 15 and 30,000 page views a month. And the vast majority of the page views are now of old blog posts. So if somebody researches, it's mostly from Google, but somebody researches, why do competitors often put their stores next week each other?
Like, you know, I get 30, 40, 50, 60 clicks on that a day because, you know, that's a very specific question that I actually have the.
Answer to now, the BBC, when you were on talking about the lottery, was that a result of them finding you? how did that.
Yeah, but that was, that was one of my Forbes articles. Yeah. Okay, so Forbes has a huge reach and so, like, I'll publish a Forbes article and, you know, maybe get 400 page views, but others of mine have gotten 70, 80, 90,000 page views. And it's just because Forbes is such a talk about SEO. It's just this traffic website that has a huge amount of
credibility with Google, 100%. yeah, so that traffic's well, but it's been fascinating to see, both with my iFOd blog and the Forbes articles, things that I think are really interesting that just don't end up getting clicks and other things that I just think, you know, are sort of stupid that I write, you know, like my most clicked on blog post is what can 16 year olds legally do? And it's when my company turns 16, you know,
years old six years ago. And, and I get all these 16 year olds, I guess, turning 16, wanting to know what they can do legally, that is. And my comments are just full of just these angsty 16 year olds, you know, asking, asking questions like, you know, am I old enough that I can, you know, they don't put it this way, legally emancipate from my asshole parents.
You know, oh my.
And they're like, they're asking this and I reply and I'm just like, you know, I don't think so.
And you reply to all of them. I think that's great, that's great.
Yeah, I love the 16 year olds, but, yeah, like, what a dumb blog post. And it has, I don't know, like Hun, probably like 200,000 page views or something. It's like ridiculous.
You never know, you never know what's gonna hit. And that's the thing, you gotta pay attention because if you're paying attention to the engagement, then you can and more accurately create content that people are interested in, right?
Well, yes, but I kind of try not to pay too much attention to the engagement.
Yeah, you just do what you want.
Like, I have enough traffic that I get contacted literally every day now by somebody that wants to pay me for them to do, a paid post or for me to backlink to the, you know, link to their product or their website or whatever, or even people reaching out offering that I'll get all this money if I advertise, maybe I will. I mean, but I don't want to do any of that. Yeah, so like this blog has never been about ever making money off of it and so it actually really doesn't matter how many clicks I
get. But it is kind of weird because like, but with your and Chad's help, you know, more than your help. I mean, my, my blog website is now a lot about me and my book and again, 3400 copies. I mean, over the past year I've probably had, I don't know, like 200,000 page views and still 3400 copies, so.
Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Crazy. Crazy.
Well, we are coming to the end of our time with you, John. Is there, any advice you'd like to give people? Whether it's about publishing, how to spend money, how to be happy, how to be wealthy, how to invest. What do you got for us?
Yeah, I'd say with respect to books and publishing, as you're writing the book, and especially as you're publishing the book, write down what your measures of success are. And hopefully they're other than just sales. Sales are nice and it's great if you make money off of your book. If that's the number one, so be it. But write down what all your measures of success are and some of them are going be more
intangible and harder to quantify. And if the sales aren't going well, which for the vast majority of books, they don't, be able to have these other sources of success that you can focus on other than just how many books you sold.
Absolutely. Well. And, you know, for a lot of people, especially non fiction, your book is your glorified business card. It's an authority builder. So you're speaking and, you know, you're making money in other ways. but it's your authority builder. So that's very, very good advice. Thank you. John. We really appreciate you joining us today.
Thanks for having me on. It's been a great discussion. I could talk to you guys, as I have before, all day.
Absolutely. And we love it. And we'll have to have you come back after your next book comes out, which I hope is getting close. Is it getting close?
No, no, no. So I have written the introduction, which I know to do last, so it was kind of a throwaway. And it's horrible. It's horrendous. And I basically have all the concepts I have the book outlined, but my problem is I can't really move forward on it yet because I don't have the concept and the theme and the audience pared down enough. It's still all too broad and I'm still in the version of. I
know. I've done so much research, I have so many examples, I have so much to say which will just produce this horrible word vomit that will just. If anybody read it, it would just completely waste their time. so I'm still in that. I'm still in that phase and I'm tortured on a daily basis by not being able to succinctly express what the hell this book's about.
So either you need to go back to your therapist or your book coach.
But one of them, you know, I'm going back to my book coach. She's on vacation in Europe for another two weeks, but we're starting up here in a few weeks.
Nice. Nice.
And doctor Brog's been helpful, too. He's great.
Well, thank you, doctor Brog. So, John, thank you so much again. We really appreciate it. you can learn more about John at johnmgennings m.com. and do yourself a favor. I mean, really buy his book, the Uncertainty Solution, and subscribe to the I five. It's a great blog. It's again at johnmjennings m.com. and do John a favor and post a review once you've read the book, even part of the book, wherever you get books. And remember, if you do win the lottery, John Jennings is your man.
Oh, totally.
He's got you. This has been another episode of the premise. You can visit us [email protected] and subscribe and rate or review the premise wherever you get your podcasts. Those reviews really help us get the word out and increase our subscriber base, and we really appreciate it. You can also follow me, your host, here, on the premise on Instagram enifergrace, or follow me on Facebook at jenniferthompsonconsulting. Until next week, thanks for listening. Goodbye.
Goodbye. Bye. M.