Finally Friday with John & Melissa

down, or what do I need to do?

They counted down already to me. For me.

Hey, we're all here and we're live.

Nice.

So that whole thing about bringing you in at one at a time didn't work whatsoever. So that's a good indication about how this afternoon's going. Hey everybody, welcome to Finally Friday, uh, with John. Everybody, and, um, I'm missing my wife at the moment. She's in Dallas and I'm in the woods, 900 acres, uh, up in South Carolina, about to go on a bear hunt. And, um, and then I'm just finishing off a novel. So I've come away a little bit and it's going to be great. And so she's home painting away and I've got some great people on here. And, uh, I've been— I did a bunch of podcasts in the last 12 months and Melissa and I had the privilege of sitting with Jet and it's one of the best podcasts I've done. He pretends it's about business, which is total BS because it's about people. And Chris McDonald, 10 years ago, wrote a book that I inflicted on my wife, and it is about these gnarly old Greek guys running up and down hills, which his book totally threw to the wind everything you could imagine about the excuses about why you're fat and lazy and you're not moving and you're not exercising. And so I encourage you not to buy his book. And don't read it, and don't be challenged, because there's no way you can read a Chris McDonald book without being challenged. So I'm going to throw to you first, Jet. Why don't you introduce yourself, mate? Tell us about who you are, what you do. Then we'll go to you, Chris, and then we'll just have a chat for the next however long until we're bored with each other.

Yeah, thank you so much, guys, for having me. Yeah, so my name is Jet Panawong. I am a business advisor, worked in businesses by, I guess, trade for over the last 10 years and ended up creating a podcast to try to help small businesses. But I think for me, and, you know, we're probably going to dig into this for our creativity side, I think I needed something that was a little more emotionally connected to a lot of what I do, because I think With businesses, it's emotional, it's mental, it's tiring, it's a lot of work. And I think when we get into that type of world, we're trying to figure out if what we started makes any sense, right? We do this, and I wanted to give a space where people can hear other stories. And that's what happened. I created this podcast, and it's kind of taken off in its own world and become almost a full-time job for me. So it's been a fun journey.

That's great. Where can folks find you? We like to do that at the front so people can go follow you.

Yeah, the easiest place, I think, if you go to— the podcast is called The Personal Side of Business. If you go to personalsideofbusiness.com, it holds everything. It's got the YouTube links of the guests, you can do research. It's got the audio versions in there, you can click on it and listen to it. It's a lot easier to navigate from there. But personalsideofbusiness.com.

Great. Oh no. So John will be right back with us, obviously. So

Chris, sorry about that.

Gosh,

sorry about that.

No, I love it.

And my satellite might drop. Uh, I got nothing, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I loved— I love the fading voice, John, as you kind of went off frame. Yeah.

Hey, hey, listen, mate, we're a professional outfit. We're a professional outfit here at Finally Friday,

right?

Has, has any Australian ever ruined the mood of anything? I feel like anytime there's a social situation, just introduce an Australian and automatically— an Australian or Brazilian— automatically it's fun.

Yeah, yeah, it's true. That is, that is a rule of thumb I've lived by, uh, when you, you can insert those two cultures into a bad situation and we will clear everything up.

Yeah,

yeah, they'll ruin your reputation. They'll ruin your reputation. They'll ruin your likelihood of having a prosperous future because you've now got a, like, a legal record, like a— but, um, but they're a reasonable amount of fun.

Have you ever seen that video of the Australian guy who was arrested in a Chinese restaurant on mistaken identity? And as he's being dragged out, he's giving this soliloquy to the police. You interrupted me in the middle of a succulent meal! And he just goes on. But he's an Australian guy being taken into custody, and he takes it as an opportunity for performative art, and it's fantastic. But I thought that, to me, is the Australian national animal. Yes. A guy that even as he's going to jail Is going to go out on a high note and entertain the world.

Yeah, yeah, it has a little less shame in Australia going to jail.

Right, right, right. I mean, it's what, it's what the, it's what the country is, right?

Yeah, a bunch of bloody convicts. Yeah.

Hey, John, from the get-go, I'm going to correct you on pronunciation. I know you're thinking golden arches McDonald's. It's actually McDougall.

Sorry, it's Scottish. My bad, my bad.

That's all right. Yeah, Chris McDougall. And, um, one thing I like to discuss with you, Jed, is I personally have almost dwindled away from social media, uh, as a business person because as a writer over the past, uh, I don't know, 20 years, I've watched the escalation in talent of social media posting versus the amount of time it takes. John, you'll understand this too, the amount of time it takes to actually dedicate to what you're trying to write. And I felt like I can do one or the other. I can either get as good as these 15-year-olds with their phones who are turning out like Spielberg-quality videos, or I can actually finish the 2 years I've dedicated to this book. And so I've opted for the book. So, uh, yeah, anyways, my name is Chris McDougall. I'm a writer by profession. I started as a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press years ago and then gravitated into magazines and into books. And I've kind of stumbled upon, um, a niche or a genre of my own, which is sort of like narrative nonfiction adventure-y slash self-help, which I think is what really caught my attention about John's review of Natural Born Heroes because You got exactly what I was aiming for, John, exactly what I was hoping to accomplish with this book, which is,

well,

I want it to be fun, I want to be invigorating, but also at the same time I want to, you know, I want the wheels to turn a little bit and challenge some preconceived ideas.

That's great.

You, you made, you made a very interesting point, Chris, about the pressure that writers have and creative people have between having to do their self- promotion. And as a writer, when you get an agent, which I'm blessed to have got, and they make such a big difference in social media. And we are— and people are scared of AI. We use AI as a force multiplier to do the things we don't want to do. And one of the things we don't want to do is our social media. Media publication. Got it. We've developed a way to have our tools do a whole range of that stuff, um, so it actually frees to do things. The, the other thing we do is we do things like Finally Friday. There's no editing in it whatsoever, and we do that very deliberately because of the AI stuff, because of the performance stuff. And I, I think what we're finding is that resonates more with people. And resonates with, with what people see, what people understand. And I think there's this incredible need for authenticity.

It's also

both

about the ways that John can get me to show up. If he, if he keeps it relaxed, he knows that I will come and participate.

Yeah, so you're gonna get a fun hang and Melissa will show up.

Exactly. And, um, So if my feed gets a little choppy, just let me know, babe, and I'll pop off. Um, so, and that's what I love about Jet was his authenticity. And what I really found interesting, book this, is the way you were able to connect with people in a real authentic way. And I think that's a similarity I see between both of you guys. Authenticity seems to be important.

I was thinking about this because I was giving a talk to some elementary school kids recently. And as I was talking to them, I said, basically, I'm here in this profession because I was so terrible in your seats. I was constantly chucked out in the hall as a kid. I would walk into the classroom in 4th grade and the teacher would take a look at me and she'd go, no, just go. She kicked me out. She could see in my eyes like, all right, this guy's already amped up. He's going to start some shit. Out the door. And back then you could actually leave the school and I could— I would leave the school. I'd go to the drugstore where they had the whole rack of comic books and I would just read comic books. And I found that I could get myself absorbed in something if I was reading it myself. Like, that was like my form of like Ritalin. My like self-medicated ADHD was to either read a comic book or I'd sneak books into class in my book bag and hold in my lap and just kind of read to myself. So she's doing boring math, I'm reading, uh, The Once and Future King in my lap. And the thing about it was the only kind of books that would get my attention were the ones where I felt like the author had done a great job of making me feel like I was sitting across the room from the coolest uncle in the family who's like, let me tell you about that time I met the stewardess on the plane and she brought me back to her apartment. You know, and I'm a 7-year-old, like, really? If you get that kind of a tone of voice, like, I'm telling you something I probably shouldn't be telling you. And yeah, that's been like on my reading list my entire life ever since. Like, the books I like to read, like Frederick Forsyth, Elmore Leonard. Have you ever read like The Day of the Jackal? It's like, you know, guys, yeah, I shouldn't be telling you this between you and I, but some guy tried to kill the president of France. Here's the story. And so that's, that's what I've tried to do in all my books. I want to make it a book that I would like to read if I were that kid in class bored off my ass about social studies.

Yeah, and you know, to your point, John, that you made, that actually just literally said this yesterday, that, um, you know, someone asked me where do I think the, the, the, the future of, um, what we're supposed to be doing as creators online, it's gonna go. And I think it's gonna— the authenticity of what we're doing has to grow even more. Because I think in the next 2 to 3 years, we're probably gonna get a lot of people between AI that's gonna make stuff that we're not sure what's real, what's not. And then with people, accounts that are gonna do more scripted, fake, set up situations to try to pull from that whatever growth that everyone else is doing. The authenticity of people just having real conversations is gonna be more needed in the next couple of years than it has been before. And I think we're probably going to get to a space where stuff like this, where it's just like, oh, this is a live. This is— there's no scripts. I mean, I guess you could script this, but for the most part, people are going to want to do something like this just to be able to have real conversations. And people just want to hear people talk to each other. You know, that's the thing. And, you know, with— if we're at a point now with AI, what we're dealing with now, I can't imagine in 2 to 3 years what we're going to do. We're not going to know. Like, I bet you we're gonna have people— I'm gonna get interviewed by someone, it's not gonna even be a person.

I know.

It's just gonna be an avatar. Like, I can't tell if this is a real person or not. But, and then, you know, Chris, to your point, I think that that is something that I think for a lot of us, a generation growing up, I was into that too. That was such a cool thing where we like, I don't want to read about these stories that were just like it felt like it could just be a movie. I wanted to get into those stories where like, this could never be a movie. You know, it was just too— it was too— it was too conversational. It was too, too side piece, you know? So I appreciate that.

I think it is— it all comes back to connection. I know, Jet, a lot of your podcast is all about you making connections with real human beings. And for John and I, 2026, we said this is going to be the year of intentional connection for us. And so I think, I think you're right. The way Chris connects with people with this book and you connect with people with your podcast, um, I think it is— that's what's going to get, um, you know, the hooks into people who are, um, really just weary of AI and, uh, stuff they don't know if it's real or not.

Because you can only do that— you can only watch those videos where people are dancing For so much, right? I feel like that happens for about 3 years and you're just like, okay, I need to upgrade my intelligence into something that connects me as an adult. And that's why all those people start to— I mean, there's this great algorithm that has happened on my social media feeds that it's adults listening to songs from the '80s and '90s and reinterpreting as different songs. We're like, oh, they were talking about relationships. I thought we were talking about going to the mall, right? It— I think this is what is going to happen with all of us over time, is those 20 and 30-something-year-olds that were just like, ah, I'm just watching some guy do some pranks or do whatever, you know, I, I love it too. And then you're just like, okay, now I need to listen to the doctor online that's telling me why my knees hurt every time I get up in the morning, right? This is real things that are attached to what I do. So I think it will— We're going to see this wave of change over the next couple years when all this stuff starts to hit us and go, okay, let's reset and go into something that's really going to connect to us as people.

Yeah, that's very good. That's

very, very good. I would like to throw a huge segue out here and say that Chris is working on a book about body surfing if we want to talk about waves. Tell us about your book. And how did you get started doing that, Chris?

Well, it's funny because I was just thinking to myself, I'm in a way— in a way, I'm in kind of a privileged position because I don't really need to know what's going to happen. Like, I don't have to anticipate it because my job is to just figure it out in the moment, like describe as it goes. I was talking to a friend yesterday. I just heard about a really vibrant body surfing community in El Salvador. And I'm like, oh, I gotta check that out. And I was talking to my friend and he's like, well, you know, El Salvador, that's a seriously right-wing, autocratic, domineering culture. Like, I understand, but I'm not there to applaud the government. I'm there to observe and watch. And whatever's happening is the story. And I don't need to script it. I just got to go and show up. And that's been, to me, a really cool thing And I don't know when the carpet's gonna get yanked out from under my feet because, you know, the technology may just end up sweeping me by and making me defunct before I know it. I, I won't see it coming, but, you know, so be it. I was actually on a, a training run recently with a little group of Navy SEALs. And afterwards, we're having lunch back at my place, and they're talking about ChatGPT and how often they use it for interoffice communications in the military. And because The military is so hierarchical, and your vocabulary and phrasing has to be very exact if you're addressing a superior or an officer of equal rank or, or inferior, that you have to phrase your emails just right. And so they use ChatGPT to draft their emails just so that you don't piss off a lieutenant or you don't come across as condescending to somebody else. And I never use any kind of AI at all. So they're telling me this. And I'm nodding along like, yeah, but you know, AI could never really replace what I do. Like, really? And they go, uh, let's, let's give us a prompt. Like, okay, let's say a novel about, I don't know, a dragon and some villagers and, uh, and, and, and, um, uh, was it dragon? Uh, I forgot what the third thing was. A dragon, villagers, and I don't remember. But anyway, I gave them these prompts and they popped it in, and within a nanosecond They started to read me this short story. I'm like, goddamn, that's good. Like, go, go on, give me more. This, um, bot had just created a perfectly scripted short story that had all the elements of success. So I realized, okay, it's happening outside of my control, and I'm just gonna keep doing what I'm doing as long as I can keep doing it. Which brings us to your question, Melissa, which was body surfing. So You know, um, I'd worked overseas as a war correspondent and then a foreign correspondent in Africa and Europe for a bunch of years. And when I came out of that experience, I needed a, a real overall reset. I needed to get out of those environments which were based upon cruelty and suffering and just get myself back. Reassemble the pieces. And what I started to do was to go running. It was a great way to just empty the brain. And I knew I would go out the door with my head like a beehive, and I knew that within 20 minutes, almost to the minute, those bees would just kind of waft off. Like, there's something about those first 20 minutes of exercise because you're, you're trying to breathe, you know, you're trying to get your body to move. Yeah. You're, you're You're focused on all these, you know, like, damn, my shoulder hurts, I'm out of wind, where am I going to go, am I lost? Your autonomous functions take over, you know, because you're trying to steer this, this physical machine.

John and I call that moving meditation.

Exactly. And, you know, you may resist it for the first 19 minutes because your brain is still on what you left back in the office, but once you— as soon as you start to run out of oxygen, That's the one thing which resets everything. Once you can't breathe, you know, all of a sudden that's the only thing you can think about. And so I'll go on these runs.

That's great.

But then what would happen is I'd get injured, you know. I'd be doing these runs and I get injured and like, you know, my heel, my foot hurts, my Achilles hurt. I'll go see doctors. I'm like, dude, you're, you're 2 meters tall, you know, you're, you're the size of a refrigerator, you shouldn't be running. And that's what actually led me to my first book, Born to Run, because I'm like, well, hang on, How come some people can run 200 miles, they never get hurt, and then the rest of us are hurt all the time? So I researched this book about this tribe in Mexico, the Tarahumara, who run fantastically long distances. And then over time, that became Born to Run, led to Natural Born Heroes about World War II resistance fighters, led to Running with Sherman about animal-human partnerships, and now it leads to body surfing. You know, when I— when my wife is from Hawaii, When we came here, I was watching the kind of superhuman gymnastics that men and women of all ages are doing in the water. And I thought, man, you know, that is the one place right now where you can't bring your screens, you can't bring your earbuds. You got to be—

Exactly.

And if you're messing around in the water and you make a mistake, you're dead. You're dead fast. If you think you're out there floating around on a wave and all of a sudden the tide changes, You're out to sea before you know it. It's an environment that is trying to kill you all the time, and that's what really got my attention.

Chris, that sounds fantastic and terrifying all at the same time.

All at once.

It's been that way. So there's a place here in Hawaii called Point Panic, and it is like perfectly named. It's this big beautiful wave but breaks right toward a stone jetty. So when you're on the wave, as you're riding it, you're heading straight at the rocks. So if you do things right, you'll swerve by the rocks and pop out into a channel. If you don't, you will smash into these rocks like my friend Hot Sauce did. Derek went face into the rocks, busted open his, his nose, his cheekbones, and his head. And there's something about that though, because, you know, you refine your craft, you'll have a great experience. You lose focus and you are being wheeled to the hospital.

I, I love, I love

I love the fact that he's called Hot Sauce.

Yeah, and I love how Chris is like, you know what, I had problems with my ankles and my knees, but now my face is what we're willing to give up. Like, this is where we're willing to trade off all the joints with my face.

Yeah, I had trouble with my ankles and my knees, so I quit running.

That's

great.

Yeah, there, there's been an escalation which may not be wise. You know what's cool about it? And this is another segue. Um, once you get into this world, any— I learned a long time ago that there really is no such thing as a boring person. There's just, just the wrong question. Like, everybody's got something.

Yeah.

And if you just figure out what's the question which unlocks whatever weird freaking story they've got inside them, then you're off to the races. Yeah. And there's always the thing, you know. Um, And with body surfing, there's this whole group of people that make these things called handplanes. And, uh, I just heard about this guy who's based in Japan from Southern California, and he makes these handplanes. But my friend, uh, Zach Payne, who's a great body surfer, came across him recently. And if you listen to this guy, Ben Wei— W-E-I is his last name— Ben Wei. And if you hear him talk about the construction of this thing Which is only like 9 inches long, but he describes it like he's building the space shuttle. Every, every contour, every curve, every bit of the handle, it's so amazing. And listen to him talk, I thought, okay, this is, this is it. I can spend years learning about this kind of a simple little device.

So that's— that brings me to a question about creativity, because like that guy and his hand plane, it's like Bro, like, okay, 15 minutes, I'll give you that. But like, dude, after that, like, how much can we talk about? But the passion that drives people— like, I listen to Jet and his podcast, it's like, this is— you're phenomenal, Jet. But man, I think I'd get

bored,

you know?

Let me throw something to Jet and see if he agrees. So I asked that exact question to this guy Ben Wade who makes the