How to be doing MOR right now with Mark Smith and Bunny Young

So, Mark, one of the things that I thought from our previous discussions, which normally are around Chewy's and I'm waiting for them to get back to Chewy's, was, what are you doing right now? And what are some of the cool things that we can be doing from a personal development, Professional development.

So personally, you know, I do what I always do, Bonnie. I read for an hour a day. I've done that for personal 57 years now. I plan on doing it until I wake up dead. And if I can, I'll do it after that. That's kind of what I personally, professionally, it's just, you know, so we're in this Covid mess, right? And we can either go, woe is me, we're in this Covid mess, or we can just say screw it and work through it to the other side. That's kind of a message to my team every day is, look, we're here. We can't not be here. Be really cool if we could flip a switch. That's not possible. We're here. We're getting through it. It's a positive message. Let's focus on what we can control and not worry about what we can't. And we're going to get through this, and we are. The stores are doing well. It's just, I think it's a matter mindset right now. I think is critically important because if you let yourself get run over by this bus, you will be.

Yeah, absolutely. With the mindset. So you've got some interesting pieces of art behind you. Can you tell me, what is the Mark Smith inspiration for how you decorate your office? Because I know you've got that big ass wooden desk that I always love.

That's New York City, my favorite place on the planet. I can't get nothing. This is anywhere you want it to be, in an open road. Maybe it's in Utah, maybe it's in Wyoming. Maybe it's Virginia, post Holocaust, I don't know. Whitewater trips down the galley tofino, British Columbia. Padi go kart racing. The inlet at Canna Beach, Oregon, that's San Francisco. Over here you've got Haystack Rock out in Cannon Beach, Oregon. Again, a favorite place. That's about 11,000 people on the side of Mount Rainier. Jimi Hendrix, a model that I think we can all live by. And the boys.

Yes, I love the boys. Are the boys there? You wouldn't forgive me if I didn't show you this here. Can you see him? Can you see your boy?

Yeah, mine are doing the same thing.

So I had to, like, readjust where I sat in the house because he was not able to be seen in the camera. And people really. I'd hop on a zoom call and they'd be like, hey, where's Guinness? And I'm like, okay, fine, I'll sit in a place where Guinness can be seen behind me. So what I've learned is that people just want to see Guinness.

There's that.

So the thing that strikes me is like, you could not get to different place, like more different places between Times Square and this abandoned road behind you. Like.

Maybe, I don't know, you know, Times Square four times a year, four days, three nights. The one hotel in Brooklyn's right on the waterfront. It's everything all the time. Versus that is just someplace I go when about every two years, I take two weeks and just disappear. And I disappear to places like that.

Have you still been doing your schedule of disappearing during this time? I know you told me there's disappearance.

You know, that's basically a little petri dish of stuff. So while I'm not really worried about Corona, neither am I going to take a stupid risk. And that's. I also think it's important right now, especially doing what we do front facing retail in an essential business. I think it's important that I'm out there. I say hi to folks every day. I walk the stores every day. I'm literally in every store every day, seven days a week. Just the message and be the face of this and get out there and go, and, you know, later this year, sometime next year, I'll disappear again. Always.

That's one thing I love, is that you always take care of you. But if I'm. I'm going to say that you take care of your team first. So that's one of the things that I have noticed, especially during COVID is you're taking care of your team.

Well, think about it, Bonnie. There's so much noise out there, right? There's so many opinions parading as facts. They're not facts. This is political. This is partisan. This is some education base. But we're in a world where we don't know what we don't know, as a lot of people are. My people are nervous. They probably still are. They're a lot less nervous today than they were eight weeks ago. We're kind of past. The sky is falling fades. But I still think it's important to let them know, look, you know, check out everything that's going on around us. We've got cars, we've got action. We're seeing people. We're gonna get through this. And it may not register with you, but you gotta spend a few simple idea that there's a boatload of people that have it a hell of a lot worse than we do. You know, there was a nurse in here yesterday from mtv. We had a good chat. You just got off of five days of 16 hours a day. Five straight days. 16 hours. You could tell by her body language she was poached. And I just said, take one of my cars, go home, go to bed, and we'll worry about all this other nonsense. We'll go to your car key when we're done. There's a lot of people out there working their asses off on the front line, first responders. There's a lot of people lost jobs, you know, and we're not in a bad spot. And we just need to make sure we remind ourselves that over and over and over.

Is that what you say when you wake up in the morning? Like, is that what gets you out of bed and gives you the juice to go talk to your team seven days a week?

You know, you know this about.

I don't know if I want to ask you what the first thing that comes I don't know, Mark. If I want to ask you what the first thing that goes through your mind in the morning is.

We'Ll keep this relatively busy. So, you know, I'm a morning guy. I get up at 4:30, I'm out of the door by 5:30 late. My most productive hours are between then and probably two. If you ask me anything I really need to think about after three or four o'. Clock. You're way, way past diminishing returns.

So.

I don't generally have a hard time getting myself up. I kind of take that approach. Anyway, we've got choices to make and I'm just not a big fan of E.

All right, so when. Well, I don't know if I want to. I want to go back to Chewy's. Are you going back to Chewy's anytime soon?

Yeah, I'll go as soon as they're open.

You're going to bring it in.

Patty and I went out. Huh? Repeat that? Patty and I went out.

No, I said. I said, when are we going? And you said when they're open.

Yeah, I think they're open. I don't know. But I know you've got some other issues you got to worry about, so it's a hell of a lot easier for me to go than it is you. But no, I would go in a heartbeat. Yeah, I wouldn't hesitate.

What else should I ask you?

Bonnie? You're one of the few people in my world where there's nothing off limits. So let me turn that around and say what else would you like to ask? Be really careful.

I'll ask you what you want to ask me. I mean, it's a discussion. What do you want to ask me?

What?

It wasn't an interview. It's a discussion.

What's.

What?

Okay, you caught me off guard here. You know, what are you hearing? What are you hearing out about? What do you think of all this mess? You know, we're here, we're going to get through it. We're going to work through. I shared more good deeds with you. I think that's our most forward facing idea yet to say, let's just go out and do something good. Small hope exists in small gestures. Let's go out and really make ourselves the manifestation of that. And it's not a bad habit to have 365 days a year.

No, no. So you share that with me. And on one hand, Mark, so I struggle because on one hand I think it's an amazing campaign. On the other hand, the fact that we have to make this a thing as a human frustrates me, you know, that doing good deeds is something that is not in human nature. You know, I spend a whole lot of time with horses. And so, you know, I equated the toilet paper emergency to the fact that horses would never overeat a pasture, you know, for the sake of it. Like, it's just not good for the herd. And so I think as humans in the past couple months, I've seen a lot of demonstration of not doing what's best for humanity, but what's doing what's best for you. And so I'm inspired by the June more good deeds. I plan on participating with it. And you know, and then there's a part of me that says, you know, Monday's Memorial Day. I wish that every day we could be thankful and recognize the sacrifices that are made. So those are my thoughts on that. And you asked me, what am I hearing? I'm hearing that our hospitals never went over 30% usage of their ventilators and their available Covid beds. And so, you know, that makes me feel like we are good, you know, and like somebody like me that like you said or you didn't say, but I'll say I'm immunocompromised. Because of my heart condition, that there's resources out there that I can go out into the community and I can re. Engage in the community. So. And I believe that basically in order to stay sane instead of being preached to you, we need to do what we're doing exactly right now and just have discussions about how we're feeling in the present moment and our thoughts and what we can do to make today a little bit better. And if you add up all the today's, I don't know what you get in your math equation, but I get a pretty damn good life.

So a lot of possible tangents there. There's a large segment of the population that's controlled by bsos. A bright shiny object.

Okay, because I was starting with BS in a whole different fashion.

Mark, no bright shiny object. And Covid right now. And please understand I'm not making light of this disease has killed a lot of people. This virus killed a lot of people and it's probably not done. So I get it. And we take all the precautions here we can take. We've got Mass one, but you know, you've got, on one hand you've got a very small population of medical professionals talking about COVID and viral issues and what that means you've got a whole bunch of knuckleheads imposing their belief system or their opinion on us as a fact. And it's not, you know, you've heard 30% of the beds are, you know, aren't occupied. We. Patty had a conversation with a nurse here in Short Pump yesterday who said we are 100% full. And the girl looked exhausted, physically exhausted. The fact is somewhere between here and there is a middle and I'm not smart enough to know where that is. You know, that's a fairly low bar. Using me as your inlet engagement, there's a thing you gotta think about. We hear so much noise coming at us. It's kind of like when there's a flood or there's a tsunami or there's whatever and then poof, Obama and Bush show up on TV and say, oh my God, look at this flooded area. Please send your money there. And I'm not making light of that, but that's why the world gave us NGOs. That's why we've got non government organizations. The hundred dollars you send them, that leaves Richmond. One will be inefficiently allocated in all likelihood. And two won't be applied to Richmond. My thought process is let's focus local, let's keep it local, let's Be local. There are 53,000 kids in Central Virginia that may not eat today. I have a big issue with that, and I want those kids fed. We need blood in our blood banks right now. I have a big issue with that. So we can just engage people. I would push back on your comment a little bit once people understand. I mean, yes, we launched more good deeds formally yesterday. The feedback has been stunning. I had nine, 11 conversations about it yesterday, nine of whom I had with people who reached out to me I've never met. We've got four media interviews set up. I think once you let people know what's going on and you challenge them, because I think there's so much noise in our world right now, people get overwhelmed, and I don't think they're. They're not willing to do good. I think they just have so much on their plate that, you know, at the end of the day, they just want to go home, crack a bottle of wine, and go, wow, I made it through another day, which I'll probably do tonight anyway. But it's just a matter of mindset. It's a matter of showing people the power of the possible. It's a matter of multiplying 6 by 18. You know, the 6 inches between your ears by the 18 inches from your head to your heart can create a pretty incredible map of possible. If you're willing to pursue it, Scott, you gotta opt in. Nobody's gonna opt in for you.

I appreciate that. You make it really easy to do the right thing. So when I know I'm gonna take it back to my horse training. But when you're training a horse, you try to make the right thing easy to do and the wrong thing hard to do. And I think what more is, is it's an outline of, you know, here's an easy way to do the right thing. And for somebody who wakes up in the morning in the midst of this and of all that noise that you're talking about, it's not always easy to figure out what the right thing is to do. And so I hope more people get involved in the More program. I know that was redundant. I should have said that in better English. I hope all of the people get involved in the More program. And we'll put that link below this discussion, you know, and that's. It's just from my tiny box out in the middle of the country of, you know, Virginia, and you're in the midst of it every single day. You know, you're. You're 10ft away from the front Door to Broad street, and I'm 70 miles away from you. So it's what makes the world go round. And I've leaned on you. I've text you, I've emailed you, I've called you just to know that you're okay and to tell you how I was feeling. And for you to ask me if I was okay and what I needed. And that's what has kept me sane, is that you've been telling your team, we were here before. We're here right now. The cars are still coming in. We're going to be here after. And so having. In the midst of the panic, having a relationship, a friendship, and surrounding myself with people that can support me and that can allow me to support them, which you make really difficult, sir. Is that cat, though. That cat.

Gotta figure out that cat out in Williamsburg. You gotta take pointers from him.

What happened to the cat in Williamsburg?

I was petting that cat. I think the quote was, that cat knows you better than any of us do. Or maybe she does, I don't know. But she had the right mojo.

The last thing that I'm gonna leave this with is that I remember you picked up a poll and you said, look, this is the amount of pain you're gonna go through. And you can take it this way, and you can take it this way, or you can take it this way. It's up to you, but this is the amount of pain. So we're going to leave it with the cat wisdom and with Mark Smith's description of pain.

Yeah, I've got some calls to make to my equine friends to ask them why they cause a toilet paper shortage. So I need to get down to that.

All right, so we're going to put the link to the More campaign down there with your mug, and I might actually swap your mug for Dudley's mug in on the the webpage because people want to click on cute puppy pictures. So we have three cgos right now, Dudley.

Well, you got one, I've got two. So. Yeah, no, Doug passed. Doug passed in December.

Yeah.

14 years ago.

Dude. Well, I appreciate your time. I keep getting these notices that my Internet connection is unstable, which I got to tell you, I don't understand how we have Internet on the International Space Station, but we can't get Internet out in the country. So that's the next thing that we've got to solve. But I appreciate you. Nothing's above your pay grade. Nothing's above your pay grade. That's a mindset.

I have a very simple guy who changes oil for a living. So, you know, it's not like I need a PhD to do what I do.

Well, I love you for it and a lot of other things. And I appreciate you always making time for me this morning and beyond. And I will see you soon. I know that. So, any last words of wisdom before I shut off the recording and then say goodbye or say see you later? Not goodbye. See you later.

We're going to get through this. Focus forward. We're going to get through this. One foot in front of the other. This is a new reality. It's everybody's reality. So you can either whine about it or you can do something about it. I'll leave a wand of the floats.

Mark Smith, ladies and gentlemen.