Thought Leadership, from In Person to Virtual and Back | Nick Morgan & Joseph Michelli | 429

Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on our LinkedIn Live, which is an extension of the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. So I want to introduce two folks that happen to be doctors, but we're not a medical show today. Let me start with Joseph Micheli. If you don't know his work, you should. He is an in-person and virtual speaker on leadership, employee engagement, customer experience, customer loyalty, and consumer advocacy. He's a New York Times bestseller many, many times over. Some of his books are The Airbnb Way, Driven to Delight, The Starbucks Way, The Zappos Experience. I just was asking and he would not tell me what his next book is, so I will have to wait and just buy it when it comes out like I always do. But his books are amazing. And then my second guest is Dr. Nick Morgan from up in Boston. So he is also an author. He's one of America's top communication theorists and coaches. He has coached many, many folks on the Fortune 500, folks giving testimonial at Congress, as well as the Today Show and many other places. And he's very, very well known in the speaker community. Everybody always says if you need, you know, a speaker needs help, you got to call the doctor, and that is Nick. Anyway, Thank you both for coming on board today.

Pleasure.

I just wish I'd hired Nick before I did the show today. That's all I can say.

Well, there's always after.

Yeah, he's going to do a postmortem on my performance.

I got notes. I got notes.

He's got autopsies. He's the Quincy M.D. of the speaker world, right? So, so let's start with you, Joseph. Your sort of business model was fairly predictable pre-COVID. Write a book every couple of years, you know, embed yourself in a company, write a book based on that experience, you know, put in the hard work, put in the effort, and then you were out there very, very often speaking, not just about the latest book, but about your general experiences. And what's the same and what's different?

Well, so I was on that path, right? When COVID hit, I was going to do a book about Godiva Chocolate. It was going to be their— that was in the 94th year of their existence. It was going to come out in their 95th year. Everything closed down. Their high street locations were closing down as they were going head-to-head against Starbucks, and I couldn't get to the plant. So as a consultant in the space, clients of mine that were having all kinds of challenges trying to lead, and so I just started asking them, how are you surviving this thing? How are you delivering great experiences to your people and your customers? And 140 interviews later, we had a book. So rather than Instead of pursuing my typical formula, I pivoted my formula to leverage the insights of my leader community to be able to get them to speak to a book called Stronger Through Adversity, which McGraw-Hill published. And, you know, it's wonderful for me because it has the CEOs of Verizon and Target and all these great brands who engaged in the conversation. And then, they became promoters of the book, right? So, that was a different formula for me. I never really had that happen.

And that book, not only did you pivot the theme of the book, but that book came out lightning fast with respect to typical publishing cycles.

Amen. I mean, first we wrote it fast, right? So we were doing interviews and writing the book and then moving interviews around. It was just, it was definitely crazy. And then the publishers agreed to get it out in 2020. So we did that book throughout early part of 2020. Publishing cycle was reduced down from, say, a 6-month publishing cycle to about, I think, 3 months or 2 months. It was amazing. And it came out, was very well received and very— yeah, now people are a little tired of talking about COVID but at the time, people were still trying to figure out how to manage it, right?

I think it'll, it'll be one of those books that people look back on in 5 years as sort of a period piece. What was the pulse of the, of, of the leadership of the universe at a moment in time?

Right.

So I hope so. Yeah. Nick, what's new and what's the same in your world? What are you— because you're at sort of the centerpiece of it all.

Yeah. From the speaking world, as it did at 9/11 and as it did in 2008, 2009, shut down. And I, like a lot of others, had 6 months bookings. That just vanished. I'll never forget, I was sitting in Calgary Airport getting ready to take a flight home after seeing a client, and, and I was getting these texts and email messages saying cancel, cancel, cancel. What's going on? I'd heard of COVID at that point, this was February, but it didn't seem like it's gonna be that big a deal. We were still thinking a couple of weeks it'll be done, right? Well, sure, as we all know, it didn't quite work out that way, but, uh, the business had picked itself up and went virtual, but the virtual has been a sort of a pale imitation of the real life in-person one. There are fewer of them. Many, many conferences just postponed.

Yep.

And it still hasn't come back yet. It's an industry that depends on the courage of attendees. The attendees have to feel safe en masse, and of course then there have to be there has to be money in the budget to, to pay for the travel and that kind of thing. So there are a number of things that are going to have to get rolling again. And it's a big flywheel business. It's going to take a while to get that flywheel going again, but it will come back.

And so when you say it will come back, I want to stay there for a moment because, you know, everybody's got an opinion. But it's interesting to me in that the longer we've been without events, a couple of things have changed. Longer we've been without anything, we get acclimated to remote work and all these things that were foreign to us, remote learning, etc., etc. And now it's like, yeah, remote work, it's just work that's just not done at the same proximity, right? So, you know, events, and you put it nicely, Nick, in terms of, you know, the faith or whatever that attendees have. I don't know that when that switch goes back on, if it's so binary, because I think one of the things that we've learned is if the average mid-level executive at a Fortune 1000 was going to a dozen events a year, We've learned that this is a great format to exchange information, to present, to give out ideas. It's kind of lousy for connection and community. So there'll probably be a spike in, oh my God, I want to get out of the house. It'll be spring break, whatever. But I think the economics, it's going to be harder to make the business case, I think, internally at organizations of, hey boss, I want to go to 13 events this year. I don't know what you're saying.

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think it's hard to predict at this point. Anybody who says they know exactly what's going to happen is— a whole lot smarter than I am or a whole lot more willing to BS you. I would say it's clear we're gonna have some sort of dual market and maybe the top-end conferences and the top-end get-togethers will stay and some of the sort of more routine ones, let's put it that way, will shake out and become virtual. I choose to see it as an opportunity. I was talking about this with a with a buddy just the other day, and he was remembering fondly having once jumped on an airplane and taken a 30-hour plane trip, round-trip plane ride to do a 1-hour meeting. And we were saying, yeah, those days are gone. And then as we thought about it, we thought, well, on the other hand, if you did that, that would send an incredible message of, boy, this is really important to me to do this thing. And so now we have these two tiers. We have routine meetings that let's just do them by Zoom. And then we have these, the face-to-face opportunity, which suddenly becomes a bigger deal. So I see it as an expanding pie in the long run, but in the short run, it sure doesn't feel that way to speakers and meeting planners and speakers.

And another sort of upside or differentiation, I wanted to get your take on this, Joseph, is that, well, now if we're putting on an event, the default is hybrid at a minimum, if not remote. It will never be all in person. Now that we've learned the hybrid piece, why not do that? And that allows organizations to increase reach, right? Because now we can say, let's invite everyone in Europe, let's invite, you know, everyone all over the place. Doesn't have to be our top 300 or whatever to get the message. How are you seeing, Joseph, sort of speakers' reaction? Because it's almost saying, hey, give us a lot more of your stuff for the same money, or more people get to hear the message?

What—

how are you? I just—

I guess I'm in a different reality. I mean, I didn't speak much, uh, during 2020 and 2021. Those were all virtuals, right? I mean, that was definitely the world I lived in, but it's not been that way for me since. I mean, in mid-2021, I did 5 days straight with 500 people in an audience for an organization. Last week, I was in Dallas and did 1,200 dentists, and I'll be in Orlando this weekend and 2 weeks from that I'm in Nashville and I'm just not feeling it. I mean, I do believe that there is a decrease in the market for this and I think there's value in having all of our meetings that we can on virtual, but I see organizations, A, maybe just having pent-up demand to your point, Peter.

Yeah.

So there's that, there's that possibility. But I also think people are starting to say, we're gonna figure out how to cope with this. We're traveling for all kinds of other reasons. Reasonably vaccinated across the country. There's a sense that we're not as likely to die from COVID as we were at one point in history. And so to me, I'm just, I'm not that. I like having the option to say to an organization, look, I, you know, your budget isn't what it needs to be for you to hire me to do a keynote, but I can give you a virtual and I can show you that it has impact and positive stuff. So I'm opening up some markets where I get to stay at home, that I probably would not have priced into in the old days. And I still get a sufficient amount of other events that makes it worthwhile to get on a plane.

So I like how you've sort of done a two-tier piece because what was interesting is, you know, as a keynoter, as a speaker, everyone used to talk about their rate. Oh, that's great. You know, I get, you know, whatever, $15,000, $20,000, $25,000, $50,000 for a gig and it's 45 minutes. Except when you live in Seattle and the event's in Orlando and it's actually 3 days of your life, but you're only getting paid for that 45 minutes. So I do love this tiered approach. Hey, if you want me in person, that's great. I prefer that. I love it. There's nothing that replaces that connection in the room. But that's going to cost this. If you'd like me remotely, with a couple disclaimers, it's not an even exchange, but it's pretty damn good. And by the way, it might be a fraction of the price. So it actually opens a different market for you without cannibalizing the other side of the house. So I kind of like that as an approach. And we are seeing that. I think In the beginning, in early, first, second quarter of 2020, nobody knew what to do. It was like, uh-oh, you know, a lot of speaker friends had literally a million dollars worth of business vaporized in hours. And now you had $30,000 speakers doing things for $2,000. I think the dust is starting to settle in terms of where that goes, because it was a little bit frantic. I want to go to you for a moment, Nick. You know, a lot of your work is on the speech writing, the coaching, sort of the delivery, the physical, whatever. And I saw some interesting happening where someone that has mastered their craft, the keynote, has a sense of the state, you know, everything is there. They get the music when they come in, the vibe that they're creating when they walk in, how to anchor themselves, the physicality. And all that went out the window because none of those— well, I shouldn't say that— most of those things aren't valid when we're all living in a box that's 3 inches square. So what kind of work have you done to help people to sort of master this modality is for them?

Well, as it happened, I got interested in the topic about 6 years ago, 6 or 7 years ago, because I was starting to get the question as I went around the world speaking about body language and storytelling and those kind of things. I'd finish my speech and the first question, somebody would shoot their hand up right away and be ready for this and say, well, Nick, this stuff about body language is really interesting. Thanks for that. But I have a team that's based in India and California and France. I never see them. So how does this body language communication stuff work over the virtual thing? So before the pandemic, people were asking that question. And my first reaction was, well, duh, it doesn't. And I thought, I'm supposed to be an expert in communications. That's not a good enough response. So I started doing—

So duh is not one of the typical answers? Is it good?

It's not a good one, no. It's not my best shot.

Note to self. All right, good.

Yeah, note to self. Although, huh, it made a little fun little factoid. Huh is the only universally understood word, let's say, or sound in any language so far.

Huh.

Yeah. So that one will get you.

Let them cue, Jason.

Any language. Yeah, good job. Yeah. So anyway, I did the research and I wrote a book that came out in 2018 called Can You Hear Me? And nobody wanted to buy it because nobody was using video communications much, right? The numbers may surprise you. 5% Fortune 1000 companies were using video conferencing on a regular basis.

Because it was awful. It was painful and it was awful.

Why do it when you can be in person? And so that all suddenly switched in 2020. And the one bit of good news for me was the book started selling and people started asking the questions. About it. Uh, but what I found in my research was that it's impoverished. Not, not a huge surprise to those of us who have been doing it for the last 2 years. It's impoverished in a number of ways. And so the, the question became, how do you fill that up, and how do you make that more satisfying? And the book is full of lots of tips and ways to do that. But on the whole, you know, my best advice was, if you can start a relationship in person, do it. If you can If you're going to renew a relationship over time in person, do it because every virtual relationship gets clogged up and gradually degrades over time because of the little misunderstandings that happen in two dimensions and on the phone and that kind of thing. And so it's just, it's not the perfect medium, but it's good enough. And that's the point. And that's what Joseph is saying. It's good enough for some some things, and that's what you're arguing. So we have this another string to our bow now. That's a good thing.

Yeah, I think that's— and I think there's also been, how would I put it, you know, that there's this equalization maybe of introvert to extrovert, right? So there's people that master the room, the people that have maybe a big physical presence or present a big physical presence, and they do that. And then, you know, I have a lot of speaker clients, shockingly, that are amazingly introverted. You know, put them up in front of a stage of 500 people, no problem. Tell them we're going to the cocktail party with the client the night before, not happening. You know, break out in hives, whatever. And I think there's a little bit of— maybe it's because we're all working from home, a little bit more comfort there, where folks that might have been quieter have come into their own on this format. I don't know if any of you have experienced that as well, Joseph.

Well, I think it pulls for more transparency. I mean, you know, I've worked with a lot of CEOs who were, you know, they were communicating from the boardroom most of their life with that gravitas of all of the, you know, the ivory and walnut, uh, and now they're communicating from their bedroom, right? So suddenly there's this, this transparency and vulnerability that happens, and we're all on equal footing other than whatever our titles say. We're all looking at pretty much the same in this format. So, uh, I, I do think it has created a different I think he froze up for a second there.

Well, he's keeping us in suspense.

It's created a different—

We were lost. Well, you and I— Both of you and I just demonstrated the challenges of this technology. Peter, you disappeared.

I disappeared.

Nick Winick was again the communication expert. He stayed on when we were completely incommunicado.

Me and Verizon were just like this.

It's all about the dough. I think it's the power of the dough.

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So, you know, at some level, we all need to— we're all in the business of providing value to our clients. That's what we do. That's what we get paid for. We each have very, very different domain expertise and experiences and potentially different clients. And I think a lot of this has forced all of us to re-examine the how, because there was the how we didn't really think, oh, well, if you're a consultant, you jump on a plane, you work with your client. If you're a speaker coach, obviously you're going to do that in person because that's a physical component. If you're a keynoter, obviously that's what you're going to do. And I think it's been really interesting. I've been calling it sort of the COVID Renaissance. Where everybody's had to recreate and rethink and the world's given us permission to experiment and not every experiment works, but how are you guys sort of processing that?

You know, I found one thing actually works better on Zoom or video conferencing of choice. And that was, so when I start to work with a client on the content of a speech, it used to be pre-pandemic, we'd get together for a day.

Sure.

And, and then we try to jam it all in in that day. And then of course we'd work on the idea afterwards and over a period of weeks, pass drafts back and forth until we got to the place we loved. But what we found on Zoom, doing the same thing on Zoom was we weren't going to go a whole day. Nobody wants to do it 8 hours on Zoom. That would be awful. But what we did instead was we do an hour and a half, something like that, and then come back the next day and do another hour and a half. And what we found was sleeping on it, having that extra time actually led to better ideas and richer thoughts and interesting tangents. And the client would come up with a story that he or she hadn't thought of before. And so that result actually was a plus and gives us now a new option, a new way to work.

You know, it's so funny that you say that because we've, you know, our initial work with clients is typically there's a bunch of pre-work, but a big piece of it is spending a day together. And obviously, when you're traveling, you want to get the most, theoretically, the most into that day. You're not going to spend 4 days and do a quarter day times 4, right? That's not the way we were working. But, we do have split up the way we do and we found there's a lot of power in that pause, right? And saying, "You know what? 3 hours on Zoom is about max to do what used to be a day in whiteboarding." You're not dealing with the carb load after lunch or whatever, where everybody, you sleepy, I'm sleepy, caffeine, whatever. And I think to your point, Nick, that sleeping on it, you know, and it might take a little bit longer to get an engagement done, but I think the outcomes are a little better. Joseph, you were going to say something.

On my, on the consulting side, my day started today with a client from South Africa. I would not have consulted with a client in South Africa in the past because my model was so narrowed, right? Time zone was an issue, and I, the way I thought about how I consulted would have meant I had to go to South Africa. I, you know, I've been to South Africa. I love going to South Africa, but not unless the client's really well prepared for some pretty extensive stuff. And then I still worry that we're not going to get deep enough into it. And I just didn't believe that we could create value as much as we do now through this medium. So it's forced us to rethink our workflows probably in a lot of different ways and who and how we can have impact.

Yeah, I think it's a self-limiting belief to some degree, right? Because I think most of us, whether by design or not, are sort of following the sun, right? So my early calls tend to start in Europe and then, you know, blah, blah, blah. Whereas before, you know, if you're traveling all the time, it's just not possible financially, physically, you know, exhausting and all that. Nick, you had something?

Yeah, I mean, I think the opportunity on Zoom too, or on video conferencing— I'm using Zoom as a verb like everybody else, but I don't mean to imply a brand endorsement— is if you're going to make it work on video conferencing, you've got to go fast, deep. You've got to make a strong connection right out of the gate. And I think that's actually changed or improved in some ways the way consultants like me work, because when you're in person, it's natural enough to start with sort of chitchat, get-to-know-you stuff. And you can easily blow 45 minutes over coffee and just talking about the weather and in Boston, our magnificent sports teams. But what's—

that will take—

you made a Yankee fan joke.

That'll take at least 2 or 3 minutes, I would imagine.

I just thought I'd throw that in there to get your goat. But yeah, but what's actually happening there is not the chitchat. What's happening is The two bodies, the two people, or the several people involved are sending out nonverbal signals to each other. Do I trust this person? Can I work with this person? They're starting to build a bond. And so the chitchat is the least important part of that. Now, the question is, what do you replace that with when you get on Zoom? And the answer is you've got to do that work verbally. You've got to go deep with questions and honesty and transparency. And I think that's turned out to be a good thing. I think for me, speaking for myself, I'm learning new ways to work that get to the point faster and go deeper than I would have had to in person.

Well, I think there's a level of, not gravitas in a non-fun way, but depth, you know? So a lot of keynoting, not all, but elements of many keynotes, and to some extent all of some keynotes, were more on the entertainment side. Oh, tell me your war stories, or what was it like when you were in the Olympics, or hahaha, here comes the joke, and you know, all that sort of stuff. There's really no patience for that or need for that sort of the entertainment exclusivity side of that. Like, we can all watch Netflix, we can all— we're all streaming stuff all the time. So it doesn't mean I don't want you to be fun or engaging or whatever, but get to it. Like, I want to— I want to— if I'm going to invest an hour with you, what am I going to take away? What am I going to learn? What am I going to understand from this? Versus, oh, you know, just saw whatever, an Olympic skier, I'll never ski that fast. Like, it's a great no disrespect to them, that entertainment side of the house, I think there's less of a demand for that.

I think that's brilliant. I hate to give you that, Peter, but it really is because—

We can end now. Thank you.

Thank you, everyone. You know, if you think about it, we're all kind of like doing movies, little, you know, internet movies right now. And so if I watch you on a live stream or if I watch you on a video that you prepared, or I watch a video of your speech, it's all the same really in some way. We're watching a screen. And the beauty of a live event, right, is you're in the presence of these people and you can say, hey, I was with them and look at my selfie with them. I mean, taking a screenshot of the three of us together is not quite the same as us getting that money shot at an event, right? And so I think it causes this to turn out to be a little bit detached, like you're watching something outside of your body. And I think that that's not what you want in an event. So figuring out how do you pull them in, how do you kind of make some kind of real human connection, it's hard. It is really hard. And that's why I'm not giving up hope on the need for humanity to have live events and that there's going to be a return of it mitigated by all the concerns we have for an endemic virus.

So Nick, to your point where you got to sort of get to it quicker, I can tell you, and I'm sure you've got hundreds of stories of speakers spending months working on that opening, that first 90 seconds of a hook for this, the story, though, you know, and the music and what's the image on the PowerPoint and blah, yeah, whatever. It's not so much a hook, but how do you get me to lean in and sort of go, oh, this is going to be a good hour? This, like, what are you seeing, Nick, from a, maybe from a from a speech writing standpoint or delivery? How do you hook me early?

Well, of course, the power of storytelling is never going to go away, and storytelling works in two dimensions as well as three. I think, though, that really the best way to bring in a virtual audience is to engage them, is to get them doing something. And I think speakers are missing a trick if they don't have some form of interaction. There are all kinds of ways that that can get complicated and ways it can be done well and badly and that sort of thing. But what I found and what I've seen my clients do when they get some genuine interaction going, then that pulls people in and holds them there. Whereas if you're just preaching at them, then you're just another URL. You're competing with YouTube, you know, and I can click right over to the— or internet shopping. I can click over to Amazon.

Did you have an example or two? Because it's so easy in the ballroom thing to say, hey, go to your neighbor and ask them this, or, you know, break out in a little, you know, why don't you discuss how you would answer this question? How have you seen that effectively in the Zoom as a verb world?

Well, I use an example that I've used, which is in talking about virtual communications. I'll say to people, how many of you have sent the email good job, nice job, or great job? And everybody sent that email. So I always get 100% response. So that's nice to get us, get some clicking or they find the poll button or whatever they need to do. So they're engaged. And then I say, would it interest you to know that 60% of the time that email in or text in the virtual world is taken as sarcastic? Right now, when I said that, I used to use that example 2018, 2019, talking about my book in person and I get an audible gasp. Now, speaking selfishly as the speaker, I really miss that audible gasp. That was a lot of fun. That was a good moment for me. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, appreciate it. But what I get instead is an engagement from people because they really want to understand that. It doesn't make sense. Like, how could anybody misunderstand that simple two-word email, nice job? How could you possibly read that as anything but nice job? And then, so then I'll get the response and the question and the commentary, and then I'll say, well, roll your eyes and say it, nice job. That changes it instantly. And they start to get it. And then they realize, start to realize the power of nonverbal communication and the danger of communication that doesn't have that envelope of human intent, the wrapping of human intent around it. So if I just send you words, you don't know what to make of it.

Right. But if I were to say to you, nice job, whether it's on the phone or over Zoom, you would know clearly if I was being sarcastic or authentic.

Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, I mean, there's some ways— we can get in the details if you want to— but there's some ways in which even on Zoom or even on video conferencing, the signals are muted. They're not quite as clear. When you take a three-dimensional face and turn it into two dimensions, then I don't see quite as much of the facial expression as I do in person. That's one thing. Another thing is your voice is narrowed down the frequency response of your voice, so I'm not getting as many of those warm overtones and undertones. And on and on we could talk about the technical details.

I'd love to geek out on that stuff, but yeah, I think there were so many lessons in that Nick setup though. I mean, first he's asking people, how many of you, right? So it's an invite into the— and then he did the next cool iteration of it, right? So he goes from how many of you to you might be interested in knowing. And it's just an invitation to peek into and it piques the interest of it. Given that this is a reality for you, you might be interested. And there's a pause to that which says, yeah, I am. Okay, now let's go forward and let me pull the switch on you which causes you to go the ah, right? Like, oh my gosh, I didn't mean that to have that impact. I do very similar. Things we talk about is, are you stronger through this adversity? And on a scale of 0 to 10, just put in the comments a number that tell me where you're at. And I'm kind of just scrolling the content there, and so I'm seeing a lot of 7s, I'm seeing a lot of 8s. You know, there are a couple of people who are in the 2s right now. You know, you know, for some of you, it must have felt like you're just holding on to get through the round, and others of you actually believe you're going to come through this stronger.

And now I'm speaking to both parts of the—

like, I'm getting a little bit of a sense of where the audience is, and I'm speaking to different parts of the audience and trying to say, I see you, I see you too.

Also getting a sense, Joseph, of, well, I did this 3 times last week and the averages are in the 8s. This group's in the 4s. Wow, they're feeling it more. And you might not say that out loud.

Yeah, and it may, it may, you know, it may soften my approach if I think they're really in the dumps, right? But I think the point is it's not going in and saying, hey, let me tell you how you could be stronger through adversity.

I'm the man, right?

It's that sense of I am curious, I'm interested. So if I want you to be interested in me, I don't need to be interesting, I need to be interested in you.

Yeah, I love it.

I think that's absolutely right. It's the idea that people want to be seen, they want to be heard, and we've all been isolated to a greater or lesser extent during the during the pandemic. And so that need to be seen as a human being has only grown. And so I love Joseph's way of interacting and asking people how they are so you can get a sense of the audience.

That's very cool. So as we start to wrap here, because we're running out of time, I'd love to get some thoughts from each of you on what you're excited about, you know, for the rest of this year. What's most exciting to you and most people?

I already spoke with you, Peter. The year is done, man.

I have nothing left to look forward to. It's terrible. Go ahead, Nick.

I'm sure you have an exciting life ahead.

Well, it's like you, it's mostly done, but as of today, but yeah, I just launched a networking hub for speakers and we're starting very small and try to grow it very organically. But for me, that was a way of replacing some of the camaraderie and fun I had on the road. I was on the road essentially half the time pre-pandemic, and so I realized that speakers both have a lot of questions right now about what the future is going to look like, and then they just have a need to interact with each other. We always say that the speaker is the most— the loneliest extrovert on the planet because you give the speech. By the end of the day, then you're in your hotel room, and unless you've planned things out really, really well, you know, you're sitting there with a bottle of wine and the greasy pizza watching a movie you probably didn't really care that much about. So that's the speaker's life. It's alternately wildly extroverted and then introverted, and we have to deal with that cycle. So networking amongst speakers can really help with that. So I'm excited about doing that. And I'm starting on a new book.

Of course. When's that coming up?

Oh, 2023, maybe 2024. A lot of research to do.

So I've thought of an answer now, Peter. I bounced as much as I could before, but so I am really starting to think about productizing now. I mean, because my model has always been very labor-intensive for me. Either I'm keynoting, I'm consulting, or I'm writing a book. Those are the things I got. The book is at least a multiplier of my hours. Writing weekly blogs, so that's another intensive process. So I'm really starting to figure out how do I take all this stuff I've created over my career and start compartmentalizing it into products that I can try to figure out a market to sell to online. And I'm excited about just making that transition.

Cool. Well, we should definitely talk because that's how I spend most of the hours of most of my days helping people think that through from a strategic perspective.

I would like you just to do it for for me if you wouldn't mind, personally. I don't really—

A lot easier that way.

Exactly. Well, anyway, this has been fantastic. And, you know, Nick, I'm just reflecting on what you said, and many nights of greasy pizza and a bottle of Cabernet don't sound like the worst option out there.

Well, they sound better now, you know, given—

Yeah, exactly. Well, I appreciate you both for coming on. I've been a fan of both of yours for a long, long time and read all your work and really enjoyed it. And I'm looking So glad you got new stuff coming out, as always. So, uh, thank you, thank you for sharing with us today. Appreciate it.

Well, the fandom is reciprocal, so thank you for all you do for us, Peter.

Yeah, thanks, Peter.

It's great to chat with you and great to connect. And good to meet you, Joseph, and good to meet you.

Yeah, and then you can give me the download about how badly I did after the thing. Let's just do that offline though, okay?

Yeah, we won't share that with the others.

Thanks.

To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter@thoughtleadershipleverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.