How Green Communicators Work - Shel Horowitz

Speaking with TJ Walker, dissecting the communication skills and practices of world class leaders. We live in a world where big oil companies, big banks, major pharmaceutical companies are always going to have great marketing experts at their disposal. And hey, I work for some of those industries too. But our guest today is often working on the other side. He is working to advance the message of planet Earth. Our guest is Shel Horowitz. He is the author of Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. I've known him for a decade and a half. He's always off promoting something that seems to be great for the planet, great for the community, great for people who aren't a part of the top 1%. Shel, it's a pleasure to have you with us.

Always good to be with you, T.J. i still remember touring your studio in New York many, many years ago. I do want to point out, though, that it's not necessarily a question of opposite sides, that business and the environment can actually line up on the same side and find ways that are really good for both. That's the core of a lot of the speaking and writing I've been doing the last few years.

Absolutely. And in Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, you talk specifically about how there can be partnerships between companies and individuals, nonprofits, people who care about the environment. How does that work exactly?

Well, there are so many different models for this. Some people are probably familiar with Tom's Shoes. You buy a pair, they give a pair to somebody. There are, of course, a lot of companies that give their employees flex time to go out and do some community project. But really, I think when the wheels of society start to change in a much bigger way will be when more businesses realize that they can create profitable products and services that actually address human needs and the environment and strengthen all of the things that we really want, the world that we really want to live in. Just as an example, there are a number of companies out there selling solar powered LED lamps and they're selling them to places where they used to use kerosene. Now you say, so what's the big deal? Well, here's the big deal. Number one, a solar powered LED lamp doesn't cause fires. Kerosene lamps burn and maim and kill many, many people every year in horrible fires. Number two, you eliminate the toxic fumes of the kerosene. Number three, once the lamp is paid for, and typically these are sold on time payment. So the household is paying a dollar or two a month toward the purchase of the lamp. But then after, let's say, 10 months it's done. So there's considerably more disposable income. If you are in a place like Rwanda and you only make $25 a month and you've been paying $2 a month for kerosene and you can stop. And fourth, the quality of the light is much better. So much better that the parents perhaps can come in after a day working in the fields and start some sort of cottage industry and the kids can see to do better on their homework and get better grades in school and maybe eventually get good government jobs or good jobs in the corporate sector. So this 10 or $20 lantern becomes a ladder out of poverty while helping the environment, while making a profit. I think that's the perfect storm of the kind of thing that people should be aspiring to.

And here I was guilty of creating the same false dichotomy in my intro to you. It's not are you for corporations or against them or for using energy or against it?

Well, you notice I called you on that pretty quickly and I'm glad you did in a non threatening way. And a lot of it is about getting people to listen to each other and getting people to see the real message and getting people to understand that even if we come at things from different ways, we all ultimately want pretty much the same things for ourselves and our families and our planet.

Well, I do have to take issue there. I think you and I, without boring people with our own personal preferences in politics, you and I are probably fairly ideologically aligned. But there's. There certainly are Americans who believe that the end of the world is this generation and they might as well use up the planet because they're going to be in heaven in 20 or 25 years. But let's not get into a big theological debate there.

I'm not going to go into arguments with ridiculous.

I want to know specifically what other tips are in the book to help the average consumer who is, shall we say, a little more mainstream ideologically. Everybody gets to vote for president once every four years, but you get to vote with your pocketbook every single day when you go to the grocery store. Kmart, Walmart, Amazon. How do you try to change behavior, make the world better with your own pocketbook on a daily basis?

Well, you do. You look at the choices you make. And this book is not really aimed so much at the consumer market, more at businesses. But there are things in the book and on the website going beyond sustainability.com and the other website, Transformpreneur, that speak directly to the consumer side. You can think, for example, Many years ago, I read a very, very disturbing article about how most chocolate in the world is farmed through child slave labor. And I decided right then and there that from then on I was only when I buy chocolate, it's going to be fair trade and usually organic too, because I want to protect my own health as well as the health of the people growing it and collecting it. So that was one shift that I made in my own life. And at that time, this is going back, I don't know, 15, 16. It was pretty hard to find decent fair trade chocolate. Now it's easy. And the reason it's easy is because there has been so much consumer pressure. Groups like Green America have even gotten companies like Hershey's and Mars to agree to change the way they're producing chocolate. It's a slow thing and Hershey's has a ways to go, certainly, but they have made a commitment to get out of the slave chocolate world. And that's great. You see Starbucks slowly increasing its percentage of fair trade coffee. My friend Dean Sikon, who owns Dean's Beans coffee, which has been organic and fair trade from the very first bean they roasted in 1993, is always on their case saying, you guys can do more, you guys can do more. And he's wearing both his hat as a coffee industry expert and his hat as a consumer. It's interesting because people have the idea, oh, you can't fight city hall. Oh, there's nothing we can do. Well, ordinary people are always what changes the world. I can name you a number of famous examples of people who were ordinary people before they were famous. I mean, what is more ordinary than an electrician working in a shipyard in gdask, Poland? An electrician working in a shipyard started the Solidarity movement, kicked the Russians out of Poland, and eventually became president. Lek Walesa.

Michelle Horowitz, I think we can agree you're no ordinary person or ordinary marketer. You're doing it extremely well. The name of the book is is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. The author, Shaj Horowitz. The book is available at Amazon.com for more information, go to goingbeyondsustainability.com and that address will be put in the show notes as well. Again, three ws.goingbeyondsustainability.com Once you're on that.

Website, if you do going beyondsustainability.com freebies, you'll get all sorts of gifts from me, including a sampler from the book and some other cool stuff. I actually thought I had the page up here.

Great. And we're out of time. Thanks, Shel. Okay, stop. Cut. Let's analyze what just happened. That was more or less sort of a typical interview in many respects. Under eight minutes. That's all you would typically get. Certainly even less than that on a normal TV show, radio show. Sort of an ill informed host who didn't read your book. I have read other books of yours, but I also wanted to give you a chance to see how you hit your message points with an ill informed host. Because let's face it, as guests, quite often we don't get to pick the expertise of our host. And in a moment I'm going to ask you to tell us what was your strategy for this interview? How did you pick your message points? But first I just have to compliment you, sort of let people know behind the scenes. One of the reasons Kjell Horowitz is quoted in the New York Times and every other publication, and why he's on TV and why he's been on thousands of talk radio shows is he has an initial instinct of yes. He doesn't call every producer and say, well, show me your ratings and prove to me you have 10 billion viewers or listeners. I have interviewed Shell in the past, sometimes with frankly ill thought out Internet TV ventures where the audience was seven people. And Shell's attitude is always the same. He treats every interview with the same respect, as if it were the Today show. His initial reaction is to say yes, to show up and do it with a smile. And I think that's a tip far too few people actually follow. But Kjell, on to you. Tell us your agenda for an interview like this. And out of all the things you could have said, what were your message points?

Well, thank you first of all for the compliment. And it is true that I will give the same good attention to somebody. If they can get me to agree to do the interview and they've got 12 people in the room, then I'll speak to those 12 people. But my biggest message point is the idea that business can be a tool to be leveraged for global social change. That business can actually address hunger, poverty, war, catastrophic climate change in ways that are good for the planet and good for the business. And the second major point that I always try to get in is the idea that ordinary people can make a difference, that we don't have to be beaten down just because we are not in a position of power. I got Lek Walesa in and then you pulled the plug on me just before I was going to talk about a Certain seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, named Rosa Parks. And I can give you a long list of ordinary people that went on to organize or be the front face of movements.

All great examples that resonate because too often people do feel powerless. Oh, I'm just little me sitting in my suburban home watching tv. What can I do?

And even, I mean, I'm one guy working out of a farmhouse. I actually started a movement, a successful movement that saved our local mountain. And it was the biggest thing that I had to overcome was not anybody thinking that the development project was a good idea. It was this idea that there was nothing we can do. Once we overcame that, we won amazingly quickly.

And walk us through that. You live in beautiful rural part of Massachusetts in a restored farmhouse. There's a mountain nearby. Give us the history there.

Yeah, I live in Hadley, Massachusetts. The Skinner State park, which contains Mount Holyoke Mountain, as opposed to Mount Holyoke. The college is literally outside my window. I'm looking at it right now. One mile north of that, in the Mount Holyoke range, a developer got a buy sell agreement to take on 100 acres or so and to build 40 McMansions. And the article in the paper was on page one. And it was not actually reading about the project that got me riled up. It was when I got to the part where various environmental active activists who should know better, including the guy who was the point person at the time for the state's land purchase and preservation program, all said, terrible. There's nothing we can do. And that's when I got angry enough to say, what do you mean, there's nothing we can do? It was the red flag in front of the bowl. So within two weeks, we had the first meeting of Save the Mountain in my dining room. It was very crowded. We had people sitting on the wood stove, which was a warm November. So fortunately, the wood stove wasn't on. We had people sitting in the bay window. We actually. We had, at that time, two tables in our kitchen and dining room. We stacked them to make more room. So we had 70 people jammed into this space. And the interesting thing was I thought all along that we would be enough of an annoyance to the developer that he would go away. But it would probably take about five years. Well, TJ it took 13 months flat, a year and a month.

That's quick work. What was the single thing that generated the most media attention and therefore the most pressure on the developer to scare him away?

Well, the media attention was a constant drip. I got a lot of attention when I organized the first meeting, I was in all the local papers. I was, I think, on two or three of the local radio stations. I don't remember if I did any TV in conjunction with launching that first meeting or not, but I remember that I had a very good sound bite about how the developer, who I named by name, has grossly underestimated the love that people in Hampshire county have for this mountain. And all the media ran with that sound bite. And it turned out, as I knew it would, to be true. And this was the iconic. Every image you see of our area, it has this mountain and the one across the river with the river flowing through them. That's kind of what every nonprofit uses around here. That's got a visual logo, that's geographically based. It's the theme. People see that they're driving through the city of Holyoke, and then they see the mountain and they say, ah, I'm home. I can put New York City behind me. I'm almost there. And I know you live in New York, but people like to decompress when they go to New York and they see that mountain, and that's when they start decompressing. So to mess with that, it was some pretty powerful mojo that we had on our side because people really wanted to preserve that mountain. And the obstacle was convincing them that they could. So we went through. We had, over the 13 months, we had more than 70 media hits in print, a few dozen on radio and a couple on tv. And we even got the attention of the Boston Globe. They did a story on us. And then we named the developer our honorary fundraising chair. When the local paper did an in depth interview with him, and he said outrageously obnoxious things, and $1,000 in small checks flowed into our bank account in the next seven days.

Things started acting quickly. I'm sorry, Things started moving quickly.

Yeah. And really, I found out fairly late in the game. The project was announced in November, and we won December a year later, and by March. I didn't know it, but the mechanisms for our winning our victory were already beginning to churn. And that we had attracted through the media. We had attracted the attention of a local philanthropist who was trying to figure out how best to buy the land for the state. And basically from March through November through December, the following December was all about how to make that work from a practical and legal point of view. But really, we had won through the media in March. And it wasn't just the media, but we also used public pressure. We were out there tabling. We showed up in Numbers. I live in a town of 5,000 people. Anytime there was a hearing about anything related to this mountain project, we were able to get 400 people in the room. That's like 9% of the town.

That's a huge percentage. Yeah. You're listening to Speaking with TJ Walker. Our special guest is Shel Horowitz. He's the author of Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, available at Amazon. And by the way, if you have to fight the development in your own community, or secure development rights for that matter, you're going to have to speak to the media at absolutely no charge to you. If you click on the link below in the show notes mediatrainingworldwide.com I will send you a free media training course, an online media training course to help you figure out how to speak more effectively to the news media to advocate for your cause. Shel, you've. You and I are about the same age, just a few years difference. You've been in the whole media communication business since before Snapchat, before Twitter, before Facebook, before the Internet, and even before computers. I won't say before the phone. We're not that old.

No, we're not that old. But I did publish my first articles at age 15 in an alternative newspaper through my high school. And I wrote my first press release as I think I was a freshman in college. So I have been doing this a long time. I know how to write a press release on a manual typewriter. I'm rather grateful not to have to do that anymore, but I have done it many times.

What skills do you have that have really served you? I mean, there's some skills you have to learn new. Like even right now, I'm having to learn how to edit audio, something I've never really learned how to do. That's what I was doing before starting this interview with you. We all have to learn new things, but there's certain skills, traits, tactics you've used for the last 40 years. Can you share one or two that you think most people either just don't get or don't follow?

I think clear language is so important whether you're writing or speaking. I think the ability to distill a concept down to its essence, keeping it simple enough for an eighth grader, while acknowledging that there are shades of gray, there are complexities, and there are technical aspects that you don't necessarily have to go into, but that people can drill down with you if they need more information. I think that's really cool. Crucial. I think being able to understand the difference between phrasing things as what I call the wee wee wee all the way home press release, which is like, oh, I'm so great. My company did this and my company what does it mean to the reader? What does it mean to the viewer? What problem does it solve? What pain does it make go away? What goal does it help achieve? Frame all your talking points in terms of the results that they can bring as opposed to the accomplishment of you got this award or whatever it is.

And well stated. And for the record, we've been speaking for almost 20 minutes. I haven't heard a single buzzword from you, a single piece of jargon, nothing. I had to sort of stop and explain and define for the audience the way I do with some guests. No acronyms that were insiderish that I had to explain. So you're definitely walking the talk, there's no doubt about it.

And I do this for a living, by the way. I'm very, very happy to speak to people about your own marketing, particularly those of you who are in the social change and green space. And in fact, on that page I mentioned earlier, going beyond sustainability.com freebies, there are two assessments you can take about how ready you are to develop products and services in the green and social change arenas. And those are free. And if you complete them, then you actually get 15 minutes on the phone with me to discuss discuss them.

And if you're interested in taking him up on that, you should check out his website going beyond sustainability.com and again, we'll link to that in the show notes as well. How have your communication tactics changed over the last 40 years? So, for example, I should have reached out to you because I knew you would be a great guest. And I've only in the last week started doing interviews on my program. Before that it was a question and answer format, but you saw a blurb that I put on some website and actively reached out to me. And what impresses me about you is I find an awful lot of people in the marketing PR business, after they reach about 29, they don't really want to reach out and pitch anymore. They sort of want to sit back and talk strategy, but they don't actually want to be out constantly looking for new opportunities, new venues, pitching, because anytime you pitch, you face rejection. Number one, how do you sustain that energy? And number two, what other tactics are you doing now that you didn't do 40 years ago or even five years ago?

Well, we've had this little thing come up that has totally upended PR called the Internet. I found your blurb on a site called radioguestlist.com, which I troll regularly and I get a few interviews a year from it. I also the first thing I do after it comes out, three times a day, if I'm anywhere near my computer or sometimes I'll even at least look on my phone. I typically won't answer from my phone because it's just difficult. But I will note okay, there's a HARO query I have to respond to. Help a reporter. Is this thing also known as Haro Help Reporter Out. It's a service that gives you typically three times a weekday, somewhere between 30 and 60 leads from journalists specifically looking for story sources. Now let me tell you, it is a whole lot easier to go to somebody who's pitching their show or their media outlet saying, I need story sources to talk about X on radio, guest list or help a reporter than it is to go and cold pitch. So I'm actually a very lazy PR person. These are great tools for me because they make my life easier. I am able to avoid the people who are not interested and go straight to the people who are actively looking for guests or interview sources. So, and of course I knew you. I saw your name come up like, oh, okay, TJ wants guests. I've been interviewed by you before. We've met in person, we've chatted on the phone about things that have nothing to do with pr. Consider you a friend. So that was an easy one. I had about 98% certainty that you would say yes, but that and you were correct, did not stop me from giving you a pitch that was directly related to what you were looking for.

And really smart because no matter how good a friendship you have with someone, if they have a particular show on a particular topic, they can't very well bend the rules just out of friendship.

We were looking for communication styles tips and I phrased my query like, here's how I communicate about these issues. And it's a little bit. It was certainly based on the standard respond to reporter template, but it was modified because that piece is specific to.

You, not just relying on, hey, remember me? I'm your buddy. Very smart indeed. I have to ask you a time management question question regarding the help out or help a reporter out the other list, because I know, I don't know if it was five years ago, 10 years ago, I would use the ProfNet service and help out a reporter to respond to queries about reporters doing stories on communications, public relations, media issues. And I did get some interviews, but I just found it so wildly time consuming. It just didn't seem like I was spending an hour a day and getting an interview every two weeks. It just didn't seem worth it. How do you manage the constant flow? And how do you figure out the cost benefit analysis?

Okay, that's a multipart question, so I'll take it a little piece at a time. First of all, it does take some time. It takes me probably 15 minutes to scan through the three feeds a day from HARO and the one from Radio guest list. Then if I respond to something, I do have templates that I use that speed it along that have, for example, my latest book title and the people who've endorsed it and my website, all that sort of stuff. My media link for people who need to see my sample questions or my photo or whatever. So sometimes I can answer a query very quickly, but I always personalize it to specifically what they're looking for. If it's a reporter I have a relationship with from past stories, I will bring that up. I'll say, oh, we haven't talked in a while. I hope you're having a great summer. So just so they remember that I've been a good source for them before. And I will say that in the old days when there was only profnet and not helper reporter and there were 30,000 people looking at the feed instead of 200,000 or 500,000 or however many they've got now, it was easier. I was getting a much higher hit rate. In a typical HARO feed, I will respond somewhere between 0 and 4. And if there's a lot of stuff in a feed that I'm going to respond to or could respond to, I will prioritize. I'll say, okay, well, Forbes and the New York Times, they're looking for story sources. I'll do them and I'll let Moe's Springtime Journal in Peoria. I'll wait for next time to hit them. But if Moe's Springtime Journal in Peoria is the only thing that I'm going to respond to on a day, I'll spend the 10 minutes and I'll get a query out. Because I know that things will live beyond Peoria, that almost everything is archived on the web these days. And when people do a search for me and they see that I've got hundreds of thousands of hits on Google, they notice that. And when they see that I've been quoted in places like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and almost all of this is through services like Haro or I used to use Profnet before I used Haro.

Well, now you just mentioned that people could search you and find hundreds of thousands of hits. I got to call you out on something positive for you. But something bizarrely negative happened to me just today. In the information you sent me, your pitch to me you say, author 10 books, guest on over 300 radio shows and podcasts. Well, that's under stating it. I bet you've been on 3,000 shares.

I've probably been on close to a thousand.

But you didn't lie, you didn't oversell, you undersold, which I think is a good thing. Believe it or not, I received a pitch today from someone wanting to be on this show. It was the publicist for the head of an ad agency who claimed that this person had a podcast with 100 million subscribers. I thought, oh, that's interesting. It's nice to meet this person I've never heard of who's much more popular than Oprah. 100 million subscribers. I thought, that's, that's fascinating because I've, I've been around for a few months and I only have about 25 reviews on my podcast. I bet this person's gonna have 10 million. So I went to and looked at their podcast. Guess how many reviews?

Two.

Zero. And I said, but I could see that the person was doing this show in audio and video. And I said, okay, well, maybe they spend all their time promoting the show in the video format. Let me check out their YouTube channel. And sure enough, they had really, really slick, good looking videos on YouTube. But then I looked at the count. Two views, seven views, eight views. So they, they only had, you know, a dozen views on average per each video. Less than 100,000 views total. Less than a thousand subscribers. And then I went to their Twitter. I thought, well, maybe they're just, maybe they're counting it because somehow everyone's picking up snippets on Twitter. And sure enough, this person did have about 12,000 Twitter followers. But then I looked. This is a telltale sign. I'm sure you do this too. Like every time the person posted something, was the person getting 500, 800, 1,000 retweets. The average retweet was zero. So that just led me to believe that this person is full of hype and has an audience of nothing.

You could do a really interesting guerrilla show if you don't mind making an enemy of this person, have them on and basically expose them and say, where are you getting this Claim from.

I actually did write back the public and said I wasn't rude. I said, I'm a little confused. You mentioned you have 100 million subscribers to your show, and I'm not seeing any indication of this. She's like, oh, I'm sorry. I meant to say 100,000, but still, it just doesn't add up.

I am a big believer in honesty, and now we live in the age where you can check anything as easily as you did. But even before that, I wrote my first book on business ethics as a success tool that was published in 2003. So that was 13 years ago. And even then, I was saying it is the smart thing and the good for business thing to run your business ethically because you will build a loyal audience as opposed to making enemies. And these days, it is just so, so easy to check.

By the way, I apologize for interrupting, but a quick media training tip for everyone. I just made a standard blunder. I turned off my phone before we started the interview, but then we had a slight technical problem. We had to restart. I had to turn on to respond to your response on Skype, and I forgot to turn my phone off. So my mistake. If you're hearing that ringing sound, that's what it was. I could try to sweep it under the rug and edit it out, but I just wanted to use it as a learning moment. Excuse the rudeness on my part, but I hope we can learn from it.

I just turned my cell volume to zero. I can't, unfortunately, do that with my landline. If it goes off, we're going to hear it.

Okay, that's fine, but I interrupted you. Please continue.

Okay. Yeah. So I was talking about business and I apologize.

I've lost your volume somewhere. Something has gone down.

Let's see.

Are you any further away from your microphone?

I just leaned in a little closer. Is this better?

Okay. Yes, that's great. Thanks.

Okay, so we were talking about business ethics as a success strategy and about how easy it is to check to verify these claims. And for every Donald Trump who seems to be made out of Teflon and just randomly retracts or doesn't retract or contradicts or whatever, most of us have to deal with the real world rules where if you get caught in a lie, there are consequences.

Now you brought up the name. I wasn't going to go there, but I have to tell you, I've been thinking for the last 20 minutes. Hmm. I wonder what Shell thinks of the Donald Trump campaign. But I apolog. Let me Frame it a little tighter because everybody has opinions on politics. What I'm most interested in is the standard mantra of media trainers, PR experts, marketers across the political spectrum has always been do not lie, do not lie to the media. If you do, they will destroy you. Your career will be ruined. It's never worth it. You'll be punished. And yet Donald Trump certainly in the primary process was rewarded by every lie and it never, ever seemed to hurt it. Now when we're recording this, it's August of the election year, we don't really know what's going to happen. But certainly you could say in the first year of his campaign, telling lies demonstrably did not hurt his campaign. What's going on there?

Well, a lot of people think Trump is very stupid. And I disagree. I think Trump is a master communicator. I think he has probably studied neuro linguistic programming. I think he has probably studied the propaganda machines of people like Hitler and Stalin. And in fact, I have seen some parallels to things that I forget if it was Goering or Goebbels wrote and things that Trump has said. There are repetitions in the message there that make me think it is not a coincidence. I think he knows exactly what he's doing and he has figured out how to go so far below the norm in terms of ethics in media that people don't know how to put up their defenses. And he is also a master communicator who stands for everything that I am revolted by. So I will tell you that I am personally doing what I can to make sure that he is defeated soundly in November. I'm not in love with Hillary Clinton as a candidate or as a communicator. But I think we don't have an alternative. We really cannot have a man that power mad, that thin skinned.

In a minute. I do want to ask who you really loved as a communications role model growing up, whether it was a 60s civil rights leader, politicians in the 70s. But I just want to isolate this one aspect of telling lies. We still live in a situation where that, where let's say the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie's political career was basically destroyed over the lie of the whole bridge gate situation. Whereas Donald Trump is able to tell lies a thousand times bigger hourly and it seemingly has no impact. So what I have said for years on this issue before this political campaign was, is as a personal moral issue, an ethical issue. I don't advocate that people lie, but I can't in good conscience tell you as a basic business Strategy. It's bad to lie because Donald Trump, and I've used him as an example for a decade. Donald Trump is an example of someone who has routinely lied and received nothing but presence from the media. I mean, he was known to be a liar 15 years ago when NBC gave him a primetime show. Yeah.

And he is known also to be a cheater. He is known to stiff small businesses by taking out the bankruptcy option if he feels like he owes them more than he should pay them.

So why has it worked with the media? I mean, you and I think are in agreement on Trump as a leader, the leadership qualities. But why has it worked for him when we have been told and you and I have told people, never lie to the media.

I think there are people who are really gifted communicators who make their own rules. And it's not just a left right thing. Steve Jobs was considered by anybody who ever worked for him to be a really difficult boss, a very difficult person. But he was charismatic. He was really good at conveying a message. He had the higher concept. He could boil it down to, it's not a better Walkman. It's a thousand songs you can fit in your pocket, or it's a computer for the rest of us that don't speak geek ease. He was really, really good at that big vision. But he needed other people, people with some management skills to actually get it done because nobody was willing to go out on a limb and get the limb sawed off by him. You see, John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, did some things that pretty much would have torn any other CEO to shreds, and somehow none of it stuck. And I happen to think that Whole Foods has done amazing things for changing the face of the food that we eat in this country. But some of the things that he.

Has done, and he stepped into controversy, essentially being against Obamacare. Does my memory serve correct?

He did, but that's not what I'm about talking, talking about. I'm actually talking about what I consider to be extremely unethical behavior where he was sock puppeting on Twitter anonymously, a company that he was in the process of buying so as presumably to drive down the valuation so he could get it cheaper. To me, that is just as bad as Trump cheating small businesses by declaring bankruptcy instead of paying his bills.

Let's talk about other political leaders because we, I think all our listeners and you and I have very strong opinions on Trump. And we'll be dissecting him and this campaign for years to come, regardless of what Happens. Let's take a step back in time. Tell me about really the first political leader or social justice leader you saw in person give a speech and on TV that you liked not just their message, but how they communicated.

Well, he was not the first, but one of the more memorable was hearing Dave Dellinger, who was one of the Chicago Eight defendants. I saw him give a speech in 1975 that was very, very powerful. And I don't really remember much of the message he said at that time. I have since read a number of his books and can kind of guess. But it was all about the deep philosophy of nonviolence. And it was all about the power of nonviolence to really change the world. I actually went up to him after that speech. It was like 100 people in a rally near the White House. And it was not the big Washington rally, kind of Washington rally. And we became friends and we communicated for a number of years. We wrote long letters back and forth. I did read his books. So he was somebody who was a major influence on me and on this idea that ordinary people can really make a difference. He had been a World War II resister. And then people came along like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who. I never heard Jerry Rubin speak in person, but I did actually hear Abbie Hoffman perform at a nightclub, if you can believe it.

I heard him. He came to my college campus when I was a freshman in 1981. And I saw him. Well, for our younger audience members, these were radicals from the 60s and 70s who went underground and were activists in anti war movements and other left wing causes.

Yeah. And of course I never saw him in person, but Martin Luther King. I actually at one point did an analysis of the I have a Dream speech as a marketing message. Because these people are all brilliant marketers with very different styles. And this is an important piece of why they got currency while other people like a Philip Randolph really didn't. Saying basically the same thing, but saying it in a much less charismatic way. So it was in the 60s that Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the massage or the medium is the message, depending on how you think he was pronouncing or spelling. But it's partly true. So those of us that want to get play in the media and want to get. Now we have our own media. Want to get anybody to listen and watch our own media. Because now everybody's a media company, right? We need.

They better be, or they're going to.

Be out there in these more universalistic tones. And this is, I think, Where Trump's strength is, he is very, very good at framing a message that slices through the elements of society that think they've been betrayed by the current system and gives them something to hang onto and say, you see, there's other people, even successful people, who feel this way. That's really where he has built his audience. And it was true. I heard him speak. He keynoted the 2004 PR Society of America conference.

Dyer was there.

Yeah, I led a workshop there. And I was. At that time, I took a lot of notes, and I was going to do an article about why I thought he was disgusting. And then I decided he is not worth my energy. And I never wrote the article, and now I'm kind of sorry. But I really didn't want to give him the psychic space in my head for the two hours it would take me to write that article.

You're right. He does some things well. I would also argue he's horrible in other respects. I mean, he yelled his entire convention speech, which brings. It makes it a certain type of flat and monotone. I'm interested in your opinion. Who is the best speaker in the world today? Number one, whose ideals you like and respect. And best speaker in terms of not just their message, but how they present. And number two, who do you think is just the best speaker overall, even if you don't like their politics? Because I'm guessing you perhaps like Bernie Sanders as a politician. But I think, if we're being honest, he's not a good speaker.

He's not a great speaker. George McGovern was a terrible speaker. I heard him live in 1972. He was awful. He was. I just couldn't believe. It was, like, worse than somebody reading.

A PowerPoint and lost in a massive landslide.

Yeah. And I think those two are not unrelated. If you go back to Kennedy, Nixon. The reason that Kennedy probably won is that Kennedy was better on TV than Nixon. And that was the first election where TV was really a factor. And I was in diapers at this time, so I wasn't really paying attention. But I have studied this, and I would have to say that one of my favorite current communicators in the political arena is Michelle Obama. I think she is oratorically brilliant. She has more charisma in her delivery than her husband does. And she has. She's always bringing in her personal history to it, making it something real and touchable, and I think she's great with that. I think if she were the one running for president, I think we would have a very different feel to the election right now.

Certainly her convention speech in 2016 was off the charts fantastic.

But she's done many great speeches before that one.

And I like her personally. I don't know her personally, but I mean, as a public figure, I like her. I'm certainly fairly in tune with the politics of the Obama administration. Not that this show is about politics, but I'm hard pressed to really name another speech of hers that I can truly remember, the messages that stood out. Although again, I gave her extremely high marks in this past convention speech. But in fairness, it's pretty easy to be very popular as a first lady because you get the star status of being the most famous woman in the world and yet you typically are not blamed for the administration's faults.

That didn't stop them from dumping on Hillary. But when she was first laid, no.

But even important point for history every year, I think, except for one. When Hillary Clinton was first lady, she was the most admired woman in America according to. Was it Redbook or the woman's magazine that does that? She was the most respected admired woman in America the whole time she was in the White House.

Well, if you go on greenandprofitable.com and click on my blog and then search my blog for Michelle Obama, you will see references to, I think at least two other speeches that she made a couple of years ago that I blogged about at the time that I thought were pretty terrific.

She definitely was great. I would contend that one of the reasons she's great is because she has absolutely no interest in ever running for office. The whole right wing, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, Rush Limbaugh, Axis doesn't spend any time or much time trying to drive up her negatives. It is easier to be seen as a great communicator in that environment as far as someone in the arena, someone who's really actively out there trying to create change. And it doesn't have to be a US Politician. We have an audience worldwide. Is there someone else out there you see is really doing a great job? Okay.

I just went to see Malala yousafzai in Providence, Rhode island last month. She is 19. She was shot by the Taliban at age 11 when she was already an activist for a few years. She won the Nobel Peace Prize. I think she was 15. And she is an advocate for girls education. And she has literally put her life in danger for this cause, as has her father. And I just actually we took a driving trip in July and we listened, among other books, to her memoir, I Am Malala and this girl was out there in the trenches very early in a culture where women were not respected, not supposed to be public, certainly not supposed to be educated, and where men with guns were running around enforcing them. And she's a very heartfelt speaker. She's not, you can tell she has not been trained by media coaches. She has been certainly trained to get comfortable with a microphone and facing a crowd. But her message points are so obviously and honestly her own. It's very refreshing.

And just as you corrected me earlier, I will take one issue with that. A good media coach, I believe is going to make a speaker come off as though they haven't been coached. Their real authenticity will come through. I mean, she's not my client. I have trained people before their Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speeches, but she's not my client. But I know what you mean, how much of it, and this is in no way a knock on her. I have tremendous respect for her. But at some level, if you're this young woman, if your Mother Teresa, at some point, your personal biography is so impressive, you get massive attention, praise and acceptance before you even opened your mouth at a forum. And so I'm wondering who else do you know where they actually have demonstrable skill as a speaker on the things that you think just make good public speaking, Whether it is you could say Fidel Castro in the 50s and 60s was a very powerful speaker. Is there anyone else that you think.

What'S that people would put up with those three hour speeches from him?

Well, they didn't have much choice, but he certainly was considered charismatic and powerful and engaging and interesting.

Let me think. It's interesting because a lot of the people who really shape history are not known as great public speakers. I'm a great fan of Gandhi, but from what I've heard, he was not a particularly good public speaker. And I've heard that President Lincoln, even though his speeches are very famous, I've heard that he had kind of a surprisingly high voice for such a tall man and really command a presence in the way that you would expect him to.

Well, that's something I've done a lot of study on just recently. And it's interesting how technology changes our perceptions of things. You're absolutely right. Abe Lincoln, who was our tallest president, depending on your historical source, 6 foot 4, 6 foot 5, he did have a thin, high pitched voice. But here's how it worked as an advantage. When he was giving a speech at Lincoln Douglas debates, for example, there might be a crowd of 5 to 10,000 with no microphone or speakers. So the fact that he had a high voice, high pitched, it was apparently irritating at first, but his voice carried in a way that made it easy for people to hear it, so actually worked in his favor. You're listening to Speaking with TJ Walker. Our special guest is Shel Horowitz. He's the author of Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the world, available at Amazon.com you can also get more information@goingbeyondsustainability.com Shell. You've been at this for decades. You continue to grow. You continue to be in. In media that didn't exist five years previous. But how do you try to continue to get better? Is it watching TED Talks? Is it spending time with nieces and nephews who are telling you about Snapchat? How do you continue to grow and get better as a communicator? And where do you still feel like you need to improve?

Well, the biggest thing I would say to you is, yes, all of the above. I do listen to TED Talks. I find some of them very, very inspiring. And I'm always looking at them both from the point of view of the content as well as the delivery, as I'm sure you do. And some of them are delivered better than others. I was actually a TED talker for a TEDx around here, and I was asked to curate some TED Talks from the archives that we should show that would reinforce my message. One of the ones I chose was a speech by Amory Lovins, who is absolutely brilliant. But when I dissected his talk from a professional technical communicator level, I would only give it about a 70, 75% content. I would give him a 98. And I see, I watch a lot ofstuff on greenbiz.com and I'm always thinking, can't you guys do any better on the communications side of this? You've got great facts, great stories. Why do you have to make everything like a 1950s classroom lecture? And the person who runs that website is a friend. I've actually interviewed him and he gave me a nice endorsement for my book. But I do think that being able to capture and hold an audience is an ever deeper challenge in a world where the sound bites get shorter and shorter and shorter. When you and I were kids, a commercial was 60 seconds. Now that's a whole commercial break with four commercials.

Yeah. But I do want to take issue that famously. In 1988, Michael Dukakis complained about the average length of the sound bite. At that point, it was less than 10 seconds. I forgot if it was 8.9 seconds or 9.8 seconds. Today we live in a world where a politician can usually get 20 minutes on Sean Hannity. If you wanted to be in a forum like that, they can do an hour on podcast, on cable TV shows. In a sense, isn't it easier than ever to communicate a lot of content if you can actually cultivate an audience of people who care about your stuff?

If you find the audience who's willing to drill down, absolutely. But you just like, a good website is designed so the people who just want to scan the highlights because and scan the highlights and the people who want to go deeper can go not just one but six or seven levels deeper. That's how we as communicators have to perceive our role. There are going to be times when we're talking to an audience of generalists and they just want the broad brush overview. And then let's say there's 5,000 people listening and 10 of them decide they want to know more and you have more content available for those. But the other 4990 are just going to go about their day and you'll be sorry. Some small snippet of their consciousness that maybe two years later, oh yeah, I heard something about that on the radio once. So we have to find our core audience and develop them. And for me, that has been a challenge. I have been in social media since 1995. I've been blogging since 2004. I've been doing my email newsletter since, good God, 1997. And I do find that it's a very slow build to get the size of the audience that I'd really like to have. I don't have it yet.

Are you seeing any change in attitude among those on the progressive side, the left? Because historically it just seemed. Because I've worked in some of those circles myself, it seems as though many in the activist side of progressive green left politics were almost contemptuous of good communication. It was seen almost as a badge of honor to be a bad communicator. Noam Chomsky may have some good ideas, but if you're not sort of a college kid at an upscale university, he doesn't have a lot of appeal.

No, he doesn't. But this is not a factor of the times we live in. There are always going to be the stiff academic types and then there are the popularizers. Would we have so much interest in astronomy without, number one, the space program, but number two, Carl Sagan and Carl Sagan's late ex wife, Lynne Margulis, you can hear her talk about bacteria in a way that just. You do not multitask. When you're listening to her talk about bacteria, you are sitting there with your eyes wide open and you are riveted because she is making it absolutely fascinating. That sounds like a pretty dull subject to most people. I once had the challenge of writing. I forget if it was a press release or a book cover to make Chartered Accounting, which is the British equivalent of cpa, interesting. And the publisher I was working with came back and said, I never dreamed that somebody could actually make my book sound interesting.

You've written more than 10 books. You're a prolific author. You've done hardback, paperback, PDF book. I have to assume traditional publishers, self publishing. Where do you see the future of publishing? Because at the moment it seems to be going, and I'm not anti publishing, but it certainly seems to be going down a rabbit hole of it's all about how many followers you can get in some other medium and then you can sell that book to people who already love you. But the idea of just writing a great book and having it take off doesn't seem to be really working anymore, does it?

Well, I want to give a shout out to J.K. rowling because I think she single handedly created a generation of readers among my children's generation. So it still can be done. You know.

I mean, Harry Potter came out at this point. Is it 15 years ago?

More than that? I think around 20 years ago, I think. But that's a whole generation that grew up with that. And my kids are now 28 and 23 and all of their contemporaries grew up with that. And before that, if you recall, TJ A lot of people on the Internet and elsewhere were bemoaning the death of readers. And yet at the Same time, in 1990, there were about 40,000 separate titles published in the United States. The last time I checked, which was somewhere around 2008, 2009, it was 3 million.

Well, no, I'm not suggesting that reading is going down or book publishing is going down. What I'm suggesting is that if you go to a bookstore and you look at the New York Times best seller list, you have a very difficult time, especially on the nonfiction list, finding anybody on the list who doesn't also have a primetime TV show and the book is ghostwritten. I mean, Bill O'Reilly has half a dozen books on the bookseller list at any given time. And it's because is he really the best writer in the world? I think it has more to do with the fact that he is the number one rated cable TV show.

It's all about, for the big publishers especially, it's all about your platform right now. And I, with my 9,000 followers on Twitter and my 5,000 followers on other social media and 5,000 subscribers to my own newsletter, I'm not considered to have a big platform these days. And that is a shift 15, 20 years ago that would have been huge and people would have been flocking to me to say, yeah, let me do your next book. It's much harder now. There is if you think about the TV world. When I was a child, I grew up in New York City. And in New York City there were, I believe, seven VHF television stations. And that was more than anybody else had. Like Los Angeles, I think, had about three, Chicago about the same. And now you have tens of millions of television channels competing with you. You have so many more books coming out, so many more publications, Internet and physical. It's much, much harder to grab your share of attention. But if you niche down far enough, you can get the attention of the 10 or 100 or 10,000 people who are going to really care.

So, Shel, let's do some grabbing right now of the audience members now who like what they hear about you and want more. How do you want them to get into your world? Do you want them to follow you on Twitter? First, go to your website newsletter. This is your chance. Pitch away. And unlike, you're not going to be Donald Trump selling us steaks and water and vodka that are out of business. So feel free to pitch away.

Okay, well, the first thing I would do is go to goingbeyondsustainability.com freebies, do the assessments, download the sampler from the book, then go ahead and buy the book. If you buy it from me, you can get it autographed. If you buy it from Amazon, that's okay, too. If you buy it from your local independent bookstore, your local economy will thank you. You can also sign up on that page for my newsletter. And that comes with nine different bonuses, by the way, some very cool things. Five ways Business can Create a Better World, for example, seven tips to gain Marketing Traction as a Green Gorilla. You can also on that page, you can actually see the video of my TEDX talk Impossible as a Dinner, where I talk about how ordinary people can change the world and how business can be a lever for ending hunger, poverty, war and catastrophic climate change. So all that is on that page, along with a few other things. There is also for those who are consumers and not in business. The very bottom thing in the freebies section is a resource page and a timeline for citizen and consumer activists. So check all of that out. My Twitter is my name S likesam H e l H o R o W I T as in Tom, Z as in zebra Shel Horowitz with one L and I'm very happy to hear from people. My email address is s h e l@greenandprofitable.com and my phone number 8am to 10pm Eastern time in the US is 413-586-2388. And I know I went through that very quickly and I know you put it on the Show Links page, but I'm going to do it again a little more slowly. So email S h e l@greenandprofitable.com phone 413-586-2388 and Twitter my name Shel Horowitz.

Now I gotta stop you right there. And this is a learning moment. Audience pay attention. He didn't ask permission, he didn't ask. He didn't act like he was embarrassed. He gave his website not once, twice, but he did it in exactly the same way I do it. You give it once, then without pausing, but changing the speed, you do it again slowly. And it's harder to be edited out, it's harder to be interrupted and it doesn't seem rude. So very well done, Shel Horowitz. You are a master communicator. Thank you for being our guest today on Speaking with TJ Walker. Thanks for listening to Speaking with TJ Walker, where the communication skills and practices of world class leaders are dissected.