Jeniffer: Well, hello there. This is Jennifer and. Hello, Chad.

John: Hello.

Jeniffer: Welcome to the premise.

John: It's good to be back.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: Yo.

Jeniffer: How you doing?

John: I'm, Rocking.

Jeniffer: You're rocking it. You're ready to rock it.

John: Rocking and rolling in. Rocking and

rolling in the loo, which is what we, those of us in St. Louis

sometimes call it.

Jeniffer: I like that. In the loo. It's also what we call the

bathroom, so that could be weird.

John: But, yeah, there's some confusion

sometimes. You know, we used to spend a.

Jeniffer: Time in the loo, John.

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.

Jeniffer: 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?

John: With a b?

Jeniffer: 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.

John: Wait, like the Chuck?

Jeniffer: Yeah, the real the Chuck? Yeah, Chuck Schwab.

Right, right.

John: John, it's the real Chuck Schwab. That's

a pretty good Charles. founder of the Charles

Schwab Corporation. Never heard of it.

Jeniffer: When you landed that endorsement, that must have made you kind of

happy.

John: 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.

John: To endorse my book, and they actually responded no. So I was glad to get

the,

Jeniffer: That's actually nice of them. Right?

John: 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.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: Thank you. I'm excited to be on the premise.

Jeniffer: I'm excited to have you. We've kind of been talking about doing this for a

while.

John: longtime listener, first ah, time

caller.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: Who knew?

Jeniffer: But I did. It's a fun book and we're going to talk a little bit about it.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: Totally.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: Anyway and I put it off a little bit and you were like, jennifer, you have to

read my book, dammit.

John: You had to help me.

Jeniffer: 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?

John: Yeah, it totally is. And it's got to be broader than just me

telling you that my mom liked it.

Jeniffer: Well, Charles, Chuck Schwab liked it.

John: So my mom and Chuck Schwab

and.

Jeniffer: Jennifer Thompson, very

important reader here.

John: Yeah. Yeah.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: I'm ready.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: 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?

Jeniffer: Oh, I have to go back and listen to that. I'm on. I'm on the BBC.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: I got a few.

Jeniffer: Okay. So. But my mom

listened, and Chuck Schwab. Wait, is he

alive?

John: Yeah, he's still alive. He's still chairman of the firm.

Jeniffer: 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?

John: 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.

Jeniffer: You thought that?

John: 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.

Jeniffer: Wow.

John: And then when you take the taxes off of it. She ended up

with about $29 million.

Jeniffer: So it was originally 96 million.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: Absolutely.

Jeniffer: Like, wealth is very subjective.

John: 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.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: But there's.

John: 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?

Jeniffer: Yeah, it really does.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: Right.

John: But it's also great.

Jeniffer: So it's, they just need to hire someone like you so that

they don't have to deal with that.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: 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?

John: 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.

Jeniffer: Exactly.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: it's not about having more money. It's how you would live if you

had more money.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: Right. Yeah, I like this. It's. It's almost like a self

help book, you know?

John: Yeah. Yeah.

Jeniffer: How to live a better life by analyzing what you're doing and how

you can do differently. Do it differently, rather.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: It's fun.

John: It's part of the process.

Jeniffer: 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?

John: 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.

John: 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?

Jeniffer: Right?

John: 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.

Jeniffer: Make yourself crazy if you're chasing them. Right?

John: Yeah, yeah.

Jeniffer: Speaking of chasing things like trends.

John: Like trends, you know? Yeah, yeah.

Jeniffer: Like chapter seven in your book, the trend is not your friend.

Tell us more. John M. Jennings.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: Wow.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: Yeah.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: Yeah. I mean, I kind of worry about it.

Jeniffer: No, you do.

John: Yeah, it's hard not to worry about it, but, yeah, people are better off.

They don't.

Jeniffer: I don't, I don't really worry about it. I'm like, yeah, what's the

matter right now? It's gonna come.

John: Well, I'll tell you.

So, so this coming August, I will have been

married 30 years to my trophy wife.

Jeniffer: Congratulations.

John: Thank you.

Jeniffer: And she is absolutely lovely.

We've met. Your trophy wife. I'm glad to say we have.

John: Yeah, I like her quite a bit.

Jeniffer: I like her quite a bit.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: I was gonna say 30 years. Yeah.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: I knew you were gonna say that.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: There it is.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: 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.

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.

Jeniffer: Right.

John: There's a lot of, There's a lot of scrambling underneath.

Jeniffer: So, I have a question for you.

What can toilet paper teach us about investing?

John: Oh, my gosh. So you remember

back in the pandemic when people were hoarding toilet paper?

Jeniffer: Yeah.

John: So it was. It was kind of crazy. So, Like, who

knows why it started? Like, why did the first

person.

Jeniffer: Yeah, who was it?

John: Who was that person who said, I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go buy, like, four

shopping carts of toilet paper?

Jeniffer: Patient zero. Yeah.

John: Yeah, exactly. There was.

Jeniffer: And it was.

John: It was probably in, like, des moines or something, and then it, you know,

spread.

Jeniffer: I think it was patient.

John: Yeah, that's probably where. A lot of preppers up there.

Jeniffer: Yeah, there's a lot of preppers up there. I know.

John: Yeah. But they produce some great people in northern Idaho, though,

right?

Jeniffer: 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.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: Yeah.

John: So. And then it destroys the

ability to predict what's going to happen.

Jeniffer: It's like any good algorithm. If you figure it out, it's going to

change.

John: Yeah, absolutely.

Jeniffer: In a nutshell. Right?

John: It is. Right, right.

If everybody knew the exact Google algorithm.

Jeniffer: Yeah.

John: Then everybody would do it and it lose its relevance.

They have to play the shell game of changing around stuff. Right.

Jeniffer: Which is why they'll never share the algorithms with it.

John: Yeah.

Jeniffer: 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?

John: 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.

Jeniffer: 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?

John: I want to start with my therapist.

Jeniffer: Okay, let's do it.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: Yeah. So why is that?

John: 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.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: Wow.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: Oh, wow. That's really, that's actually kind of

shocking. Yeah.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: You know what my sister says about guilt? She says

guilt is the playground bully for

adults.

John: That's great.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: Getting on the BBC.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: They did an amazing job.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: 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.

John: Amazing. So, like, he competed in the 1904 Olympics, so that

far back, which, by the way, was in St. Louis, but,

Jeniffer: In the loo.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: Okay.

John: So, Yeah, so, no, it's an amazing book.

Jeniffer: And I.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: A lot of books.

John: 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,

Jeniffer: People are looking for it.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: Right? Well, something I was gonna say too.

the number one thing that sells your first book is your third book.

John: Yeah.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: Yeah.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: Yeah. Took her, what, 30 years to get a number one hit.

Jeniffer: Yeah, exactly. Because her song was featured on

stranger things.

John: Is that what it was?

Jeniffer: Yeah. yeah, we just never know. But.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: That'S on our bookshelf somewhere around. Yeah, Chad bought it for me.

Yeah.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: 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

found@johnmjennings.com.

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.

John: Was that it used to be daily, and that was. That was some more work

with my therapist to make it not daily.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: I have a good story.

John: It was this huge deal, and then, like,

then, like, the millennium turned, and then, like, nothing happened. So was it

overblown?

Jeniffer: Yeah.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: Oh, so,

John: 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.

Jeniffer: Right, right.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: 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?

Jeniffer: 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.

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.

Jeniffer: Line thing though, right? You get new ones and old ones.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: Answer to now, the BBC, when you

were on talking about the lottery, was that a result

of them finding you? how did that.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: You know, oh my.

John: And they're like, they're asking this and I reply and I'm just like,

you know, I don't think so.

Jeniffer: And you reply to all of them. I think that's great, that's great.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: 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?

John: Well, yes, but I kind

of try not to pay too much attention to the engagement.

Jeniffer: Yeah, you just do what you want.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: Yeah. Right. Yeah.

John: Crazy. Crazy.

Jeniffer: 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?

John: 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.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: Thanks for having me on. It's been a great discussion. I could talk to you guys, as I

have before, all day.

Jeniffer: 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?

John: 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.

Jeniffer: So either you need to go back to your therapist or your book coach.

John: 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.

Jeniffer: Nice. Nice.

John: And doctor Brog's been helpful, too. He's great.

Jeniffer: 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.

John: Oh, totally.

Jeniffer: He's got you. This has been another

episode of the premise. You can visit us

online@thepremisepod.com

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.

John: Goodbye. Bye.

M.