Episode 273 – Joey Coleman

Richard Matthews: So welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews, today I have the very special pleasure of having one of you know my personal mentors on Joey Coleman and I say mentor just because anyone who I read their books a lot I always consider them a mentor.

My first one was Robert Kiyosaki. But joey, are you here on the line?

Joey Coleman: I am and I am super excited to be here, Richard. Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. So glad to have you here. So what I always do before we get too into like your bio and what you’re here for is where are you calling in from right now?

Joey Coleman: Today, you are finding me rarely, although enjoyably at my home, just outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota in the United States. I spend a lot of time on the road, but today I am at home. So in the home studio.

Richard Matthews: So, for those of us who watch this show regularly, they know we travel. So we’re always in different places and we are currently in the path of Milton’s hurricane.

Joey Coleman: Oh my goodness.

Richard Matthews: We’re in a nice spot with nice high ground and wind walls all around and lots of people are evacuating to where we are located, but we’re still in the path of the hurricane.

So that is what it is in Florida. We’re getting this interview in right under the line [00:01:00] before we probably will lose power and electricity tomorrow night.

Joey Coleman: I look forward to having this be a positive aspect of the week.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely.

Joey Coleman: As opposed to the pending storm and craziness that I imagine will be associated with that.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. So let me do just a brief introduction for our audience who may not know who you are. So Joey Coleman is an author and speaker. He helps companies keep their customers and employees award winning speaker. He shares his first hundred days methodology for improving customer employee retention with organizations around the world, like Whirlpool, Volkswagen, Australia and Zappos.

His two books have received critical acclaim. Both were instant Wall Street Journal bestsellers. Never lose a customer again, shows how to turn any sale into a life. His newest book,Never Lose an Employee Again, details a framework companies around the world can use to reduce turnover and increase employee engagement.

And so I was introduced to you because of the first book, Never Lose a Customer Again. And because it was so good, and we’re still working through that onboarding process for our first 100 days we actually have your next book on our company book list for next month to start going through that and start working through the ideas in [00:02:00] there.

So to start the conversation off, I want to talk about what you’re known for, right? This question sets up who you are now, what’s your business like? Who do you serve? What do you do for them?

Joey Coleman: Yeah, I would say I am known for being a speaker that teaches companies how to keep their customers and keep their employees. It’s what I’ve been doing for over a decade now. Love the opportunity to travel all over the world giving speeches and love being in a position where I can help companies focus on the thing that matters most in every business.

The people you serve and the people that you have together that are serving them. So it’s really fun for me to be able to take different aspects of my career in my past and combine them into an experience that hopefully leaves my audiences loving it and wanting more and wanting to dive deeper into these important topics.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. And if you’re listening, you ever, I would check Joey’s speaking schedule and see if he’s ever going to be close to you. Cause he is absolutely worth going to see on stage and seeing his stage president, the information that he teaches. It’s a worthwhile experience. But what I want to get into is you mentioned like your two books.

[00:03:00] One’s never lose a customer again. And the other one is never lose an employee again. And that’s one of the things that I love that sort of dichotomy of ideas, because and it’s something I talk about in my business regularly is we’re always in the people business and you have the people you serve and you have the people that help you serve them.

And so for me the never lose a customer again, I want to talk about two things. So never lose a customer again. Why is a customer that you don’t have to go out and get new, more valuable than. Then I, then customers, you have to constantly go and fight that churn.

And then on the employee side, the same sort of question, why is it more valuable to keep talent and to have talent that’s wants to stay with you and is bought into your vision.

That is to constantly have to go out and get new employees to come in and do your stuff. And so it’s same question in two different categories, but what are your thoughts there and why those two areas of the business?

Joey Coleman: Yeah, absolutely. Let’s look at the facts first and then we can look at the feelings second.

Okay, so let’s look first at the facts and we’ll break this into the facts as it relates to the customers and the facts as it [00:04:00] relates to the employees.

On the customer side, if you keep your customers, you will make more money. You will get more referrals. You will have a more sustainable business.

How do we know that to be true? The research shows that if just 5% and this is research out of Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School and Bain and Company, the folks who came up with net promoter score that many business owners are familiar with.

If you get 5% of the customers who are going to leave. to stay just 5%. It increases your profits, not your revenues, your profits 25 to 100% so this is real money.

So lots of people when they first hear of me are exposed to my work, they’re like, Oh, Joey’s just the touchy feely lovey dovey, treat the customers nice. It’s so good to lead with your heart. And that’s true. And it impacts your bottom line.

Richard Matthews: We call that eight HNB, by the way, hip national bank, the money that goes into your pocket at the end of the day.

Joey Coleman: Exactly. And on top of that, we know that when we are [00:05:00] selling to existing customers, it is easier than selling to cold customers. In fact, the research shows that if you are pitching a new product, a new service to a cold market, the average across all industries globally, is that you will have somewhere between a 5 to 10% close rate.

That’s just, if you look at all products, all services, brand new cold traffic, 5 to 10% close rate. If you are selling a product to a service to someone who has already purchased a products or service from you, that likelihood of closing increases to 60 to 75%.

Again, depending on the industry and what you’re talking about. So it’s more profitable and it’s easier to sell. So those are the facts.

Let’s look at the facts on the employee side. The reality is on the employee side, the cost of replacing an employee, if an employee quits and you want to get a new member to join your team and to take that role on average, it is going to cost you somewhere between 100 and 300% of [00:06:00] that position’s annual salary, wow to fill that role.

Okay, so it’s Whoa, these are hard dollars. These are factual numbers.

Now let’s look at the feeling. So we know there’s money involved, but what about the feelings when you’re already doing business with someone? It’s easier to continue doing business with them. You already know their likes, their dislikes, their quirks, their quibbles, what everything they’re doing.

So it is so much easier for us not to mention when our Customers are happier. It’s easier to come to work, so it makes it better for our employees. When our employees love coming to work, we have happier customers. So when we think about the feelings, customer experience and employee experience are two sides of the same coin.

As you improve one, it necessarily improves the other. As one struggle, it necessarily pulls the other one down with it. So while these are two separate areas of focus that we might want to focus on for either factual reasons or feeling reasons. The reality is [00:07:00] when we focus on these, it makes our business better.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. So I want to get into something super nerdy here for people who like the facts and numbers. So if you’re really into, we’re in the stage where we’re trying to scale and we’re trying to scale pretty aggressively right now.

We’re trying to go from 40 shows to 200 shows in our, with our podcasting agency over the next year or so, which, necessitates scale and a lot of operational things to work right and teams to work right.

And a lot of other things to like, to operate appropriately. One of the numbers that I learned is really important for businesses that have to scale is something they call a CAC to LTGP ratio, which is the cost of customer acquisition to compared to your lifetime gross profits.

And so what I’m hearing you say is that focusing on these two things helps you reduce the cost of customer acquisition and increase lifetime gross profit. What I’ve learned is that if you hit a 3.1 or higher on that ratio, you have an almost infinitely scalable business. And businesses will, they’ll fund you, they’ll have, VCs interested in you.

There’s a lot of things that go into that, but that [00:08:00] ratio, if you’re under that 3.1, which is that cost of customer acquisition versus lifetime gross profit, they won’t touch you. But if you’re over it, you become very exciting as a business to work with and it’s scalable.

Joey Coleman: Absolutely, here’s the interesting thing. And for those of you that are like, wait a minute, I was told there would be no math. I’m with you, right? I’m like, Oh, hang on a second. We’re doing a lot of math here, but let’s look at what actually happens.

The first companies. The first organizations that really started to pay attention to churn and losing customers were the venture capitalists.

They were the first ones that started to place huge dollars and multiples when they were buying companies behind those that had a low churn rate. They were keeping the customers longer.

It is also the case that the research shows that the lifetime value of a customer is determined most by what happens in the first 100 days of the relationship.

So that lifetime value, that lifetime gross profits, all of that [00:09:00] ties to what was their experience getting up to speed, getting on board it. The same holds true over on the employee side.

So I totally agree with you. We take the dollars, the cost of acquisition and the lifetime gross value gross profits.

And what we find in between is how are we getting people up to speed? After they’ve been acquired, how quickly are we moving them to those LTV lifetime value type conversations?

Richard Matthews: And I gotta say, it’s not easy either.

Joey Coleman: No easy at all.

Richard Matthews: We’ve been working on this this onboarding stuff for going on a year and we’re still like, man, this is like trying to get it to the point where every experience that they have from the moment they give you their credit card through the end of that first hundred days is like, wow, I’m really excited to be a part of working with these guys. Not easy.

There’s lots of things that have to be in place and work well. And things that, and every time you get a little thing figured out, you got another thing that’s Oh, that’s not the way that as good as it could be.

Joey Coleman: Exactly. And I will say one of the joys and curses of the world that I work in is that it’s never done, right? There isn’t a finish line. So if I can offer a [00:10:00] suggestion slash encouragement to everybody who’s considering this type of philosophy or this type of approach to really paying attention to your customer employee experience.

Give yourself the grace, give yourself the permission to understand that you’re not racing towards a finish line.

Your goal is slow, steady progress. Your goal is the experience of working here better than it was a week ago? Is the experience of being a customer here better than it was last month?

Give yourself the permission to build over time because what we find is that growth and that linear acceleration combined with exponential advancement creates an experience where it is better each additional day. And that means more dollars, more profits, more opportunities, more possibilities.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. And I know I get myself in the trap of perfectionism in that. A lot of people struggle with that and it’s this idea that Oh, I’m struggling or striving for this idea of perfection and realizing that we just need to make this thing better and ship it.

Instead of trying to make [00:11:00] everything perfect and then shipping it, because that’s never going to happen.

Joey Coleman: And it’s also the case that as much as we believe we know what the customer base wants, we don’t know until we start giving it to them.

I’ll give you a little example from my own personal life. I had a scenario where I used to think that customers, my audiences wanted more information.

So I would try to talk faster. I would try to fit more in. I would try to, they would say, Hey, we have an hour long slot for you to do a keynote, and I’d be like, let’s do a day long workshop instead.

And what I realized is that people aren’t looking for more. Especially in 2024. They’re looking for applicable. They’re looking for curated. They’re looking for, can we tweak this? Can I apply it? Can it impact my life?

It’s exciting. It’s a different angle on Richard. I like it. There you go.

Richard Matthews: Okay, so tech issues notwithstanding, my next question for you on that is I want to dive into how you got into this world in the first place. Your origin story, right?

We talk on this show all the time about were [00:12:00] you bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to get into, customer what was it called?

Lifetime customer value and this kind of stuff. Or did you start in a job and eventually become a speaker and entrepreneur? How did you get into this world?

Joey Coleman: Oh, the origin story, I promise you, Richard, is incredibly eclectic and varied, much like my career. What I’ll do is I’ll give you the super fast overview, and you tell me which pieces of that origin story you might want to pull on.

Grew up in the Midwest, family of seven kids, went to college at the University of Notre Dame, where I studied government and international relations.

Went straight from college to law school, where I focused on litigation and international law and national security law. Following law school, I had the opportunity to work for the United States Secret Service, for the White House Office of Counsel to the President, and for the Central Intelligence Agency.

I then did two years Business consulting for a year, working as basically for a for profit think tank. I then was a criminal defense lawyer for five years. I then taught at the postgraduate level, think nighttime NBA school program.

I then ran a [00:13:00] division of a promotional products company. I then started an ad agency, which I ran for 15 years. Then I became a full time speaker and consultant on customer experience and employee experience.

So those are all the career markers. What’s interesting is when people hear that, they’re like, okay, first of all, Joey can’t keep a job. Second of all, these things feel so different and so desparate. And how could one person be in this many different types of industries or roles?

And the thing that I found the thread radioactive spider, a reference intended that connected all of these pieces together was that the way you succeeded in any of these roles was by having a keen understanding of the human condition.

Why do people do the things they do? And what can we do to convince, persuade, encourage them to do the things that we’d like them to do?

So when I was working in sales, how can I help people buy more widgets? When I was a criminal defense lawyer, how can I convince a jury not to find my guy guilty? When I was a teacher, how can I convince my students to do their homework? [00:14:00] As a speaker, how can I convince my audience to actually take what they’ve learned in my presentation and put it into a fact.

Richard Matthews: Do something with it.

Joey Coleman: All of these roles, while seemingly and genuinely in completely different worlds and different industries, had the same underlying operative process?

Richard Matthews: So two things, one, I don’t understand how you could have done anything like that many things, because you look like you’re 35.

Joey Coleman: You are so kind. I’m in my early 50s, Richard, so I so appreciate you saying that I look like I’m 35. What a compliment. Ladies and gentlemen, this is why I’m thrilled to be on The Hero Show where the real hero is Richard. might need his eyesight improved, but we so appreciate the compliment nonetheless.

Richard Matthews: It’s just, that was my first thought. I was like, wow, he’s done a lot for how young he looks. And you handled the stress or something. You got good genes. It’s working out well for you.

But the second thing is the thread that you pulled through there is actually one of the things that I fell in love with when I was actually really young.

And it was as a result of Robert Kiyosaki’s work. If you’ve read any of his stuff.

Joey Coleman: Very much. Oh, absolutely.

Richard Matthews: And it wasn’t something that he talked [00:15:00] about a lot explicitly, but it was something that I picked up in his readings because I’m a super nerd about storytelling is that persuasive Education or persuasive storytelling is one of the world’s like greatest superpowers and you can apply it to like anything.

And I was really fascinated by this idea. And so this is called the hero show, right? So my, my hero name is called the alchemist. And my catchphrase is modern day marketing is like alchemy of old.

If you learn to master it, you can learn to turn your words into gold. And that persuasive idea that if I put my words together and I string them together in the right way, I can get someone else to literally change their future. Good, bad, indifferent, it’s a neutral tool, right? Good

Joey Coleman: We get to choose how we use our superpowers, right? Do we use for good or do we use them for ill? But I think you are spot on. If we look at the concept of story and storytelling, this is one of the oldest human traditions, people [00:16:00] gathering around the campfire or the cave fire as it was in the beginning.

Telling stories is something that has been going on for millennia. The advent of books, the advent of the internet. So many of these tools that we use were propelled into existence as vessels for transmitting stories, right?

There was no other reason other than we want to make sure that more of the stories we tell are able to spread and to get to other parts of the world.

So yeah, I’m a big student of it as well.

Richard Matthews: So, I’m not sure how religious you are, but one of the things that I’ve been it’s a concept I’ve been playing around with and I’m still working on trying to figure out how to speak about it. So I’m going to test it out on you and see what your thoughts are, but this idea that the story of creation in Genesis is that God spoke everything into existence.

He used his words and he spoke everything, the whole universe into existence, except humans. He didn’t speak us into existence. He formed us out of the dirt and then he breathed life into us.

He breathed that spark of divinity into us. [00:17:00] And I have a theory. And my theory is that spark of divinity that he gave us was our ability to tell stories the actual thing that is that spark of divinity is our ability to tell stories.

Cause it’s what leads to all of our progress. That’s what allows us to take chaos and make order. It’s what allows us to progress through our whole history.

And so this idea that storytelling is not just a thing that humans do. It might be the thing that makes us human, right? The thing that makes us that the spark of divine is our ability to tell stories and to create with our words. And so that’s, I know it’s a high level philosophy for a podcast.

Joey Coleman: No, it’s fascinating. First of all, I’m very intrigued by your thesis. And I can see as a student of history and religions around the world, I can see where that ties through a number of religions, not just the Christian religion but a number of religions of this idea of telling stories and getting the word out.

I’m also intrigued by some research that I saw recently with artificial intelligence, and what they have done is they have taken whale songs, so, the sounds that whales [00:18:00] make, and they have dumped them into these giant large AI modelers. And not only have they been able to produce songs back that they are now starting to communicate with the whales, not just by playing recordings that they’ve made from other whales, but by actually generating initial original sounds and putting it forward.

But the article that I was reading and again, I haven’t dove entirely into this research for anybody out there who’s more familiar than this.

Please forgive me for any ignorance I’m about to express here. But my understanding of it was the researchers are predicting that within the decade cross species communication across all animal life species on the planet will be attainable.

Now what I find fascinating about that, Richard, is if what makes us human is our ability to tell stories, is that true or is it what we believe because we can’t decipher the stories that the [00:19:00] animals are telling? Now

Richard Matthews: Fascinating question.

Joey Coleman: I find myself wondering is if the animals are telling stories and we’re telling stories and suddenly we’re able to understand each other’s stories, what happens then?

Because we know that animals understand language. Anyone who has ever had a pet understands that over time you can call your pet by its name and it will come.

Your pet can do things that make you think. They have to be able to understand what I’m saying right now. They’re responding as if they understand.

So we know that language transcends species. And we know that language transcends within humanity, and we know that stories transcend within humanity. What’s it going to be like if stories transcend species?

Richard Matthews: That’s a fascinating question. And so I’m going to pull an alternate thing. So first off on the pet thing, if you haven’t done this and you have pets I would absolutely look at the, what do they call them? There’s these little buttons that you can get for pets.

Joey Coleman: Yes! Where the pet. And you see the videos of the dogs [00:20:00] basically hitting the things and talking back to the humans they live with. Unbelievable.

Richard Matthews: Like, it’s unbelievably cool. But here’s another thought.

We have, because of AI, really, we’re creating babblefish in real time. And, that’s a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reference for everyone who’s not up on all their nihilistic comedy books.

But the AI is basically rebuilding the Tower of Babel, right? And so in the, again, back in the Genesis story, all the people communicated with the same language and they started to build this Tower of Babel and God said to them basically Hey, nothing’s impossible to them because they communicate together.

And then, the story goes that the Tower of Babel was destroyed. And what he did is what God did as a result was to split their language. That everyone spoke different languages. And so that’s one of our origin stories as a human species is, and that in a lot of religions, the Christian one is the most famous at least here in the U.S and so that story of the language being split, we’re at the first time in history where we’re starting to see that change.

That it is almost like within a decade, [00:21:00] it won’t matter what language your language of origin is. It won’t matter. And we’re already seeing that because of things like the internet and Tik and whatnot, that I think. Most famous culturally recently was Matt Walsh’s documentary where he did what is a woman?

And he went over and talked to some tribes in Africa. One of the things that stuck out to me, regardless of what the political discourse around that movie was that he was talking to tribesmen in Africa who have very little interaction with the outside world and they all spoke English, the elders in the tribe did, right?

They spoke English and could communicate with them because they all watch YouTube and everything. And if you talk to,

Joey Coleman: absolutely

Richard Matthews: Yeah, if you’ve done international travel over the past 20 years, you go back 20 years ago, you travel internationally, you got to learn to speak the language, travel internationally today, you don’t really need to, because we’ve created a world where the lingua franca, English is so pervasive and and it’s still not quite there yet.

Like with the AI tools and the translate tools and everything, like it’s going to get to the point where you can just speak whatever language you need to. And the other person will be able to hear you and understand you.

Joey Coleman: Well, it’s so funny.

Richard Matthews: It [00:22:00] changes the world.

Joey Coleman: Absolutely. And it’s so funny. You mentioned lingua franca. What’s interesting is that the French used to be the language of this diplomacy, right? And then English became it. I would posit that the global language now is not English. It’s actually American.

Richard Matthews: That’s a good way put it. Yeah.

Joey Coleman: And the distinction of that is that it is not the traditional English that came up Middle English. It is the slang. It is the cultural references. It is the pervasive pumping of the American culture and the American worldview and the American literature and movies and music globally that is changing things.

To your point, 20, 30 years ago, you went to a foreign country or country outside the United States.

You might see a McDonald’s. And that was a might. Now you’re going to see a McDonald’s, a Papa John’s, a Pizza Hut, a Taco Bell, a Taco John’s. You’re going to see all of these brands that have been exported globally. I just went back and reread a book that I read when it came [00:23:00] out in 1992. And I reread it.

And it is so on point to this conversation we’re having. The book is called Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. It is a science fiction book.

But an underlying piece of the entire book is the Babel story. And language. And it dives deep. Neil Stevenson, an amazing writer and researcher. It dives deep into some of the parallels across different religions around this concept of telling stories, communicating verbally, how we do that?

But we also know as humans that communication transcends the verbal. So how is it that music can elicit emotions whether you understand the native language of the composer or not? How is it that art can elicit feelings regardless of where the piece was painted in the world, you can look at it and still feel moved?

So I think there are elements of our humanity that we think we [00:24:00] understand, but at

Richard Matthews: And we don’t

Joey Coleman: Like we are a snowflake on top of the iceberg. We’re not even the tip of the iceberg, we are the snowflake on top of the iceberg.

Richard Matthews: I have a whole podcast I want to start about this topic called undeniably good that I’ll get into at some point, but this idea that and it goes right back to that initial part of the thesis, what makes us human is our ability to tell stories and I think we don’t know what storytelling means yet.

And so this is where you get into it. It’s because language is language and storytelling, if you’re doing it in code,

I’ve been writing code all day for some of our customer experience things we’re working on and math science. The stuff that you see with art and music, my son, for instance, is he is madly in love with a which if you haven’t checked this out yet.

There’s a musical being created socially right now on TikTok called epic, the musical, and it’s a retelling of the odysseus story. And it’s fricking phenomenal, but it’s one of the first times I’ve ever seen someone using social media to create.

And so we’ve got a composer who is leveraging social media to find artists [00:25:00] and leveraging social media to see how the songs are performing and to he’s got millions of people now who are invested in the creation of this Broadway musical.

And it’s going to be studied for years, but anyways, it’s got my son into this musical storytelling stuff and he’s starting to listen to the music and come to me every day and be like, I found this new motif and you see how this motif comes here, and here.

And he uses it in the musical in these ways. And he’s seeing how the music is communicating. And it’s one of the most fascinating things watching this social media phenomenon happen around this musical is seeing children as young as my son, who’s 13, 14 years old, as he’s been going through this experience, learn how music communicates.

And I don’t know, there’s something really fascinating and powerful about storytelling. And I think to bring this all back to where we started this discussion, that common thread of persuasive teaching and storytelling comes right back into if you’re running a business, the stories you tell your customers and the stories you tell your employees are what make your business profitable and functional and valuable in the world.

Joey Coleman: 100%. And I would add to that, Richard, the stories you tell yourself [00:26:00] as the business owner or the founder, right? And it’s almost like it’s a triangle. The stories we tell ourselves, the story stories we tell our team, the stories we tell the marketplace, whether those are our prospects or our customers.

How those stories interact and feed off each other and build on each other. And is it a sequel or is it a completely different book? Are we staying in genre? Are we going to a different genre? Is this part of a 20 book series or is it one epic musical, whatever it may be, we’re able to be the composers and the architects and the authors of our own stories.

And that is a uniquely wonderful gift that every person on the planet has. Not every person on the planet chooses to exercise it. Not every person on the planet is in a position where they feel able to exercise it. But it is fascinating to me to see that is a gift that all humans have.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. I tell my son and my, I’ve got three daughters too. I tell them all the time that, but my son’s the oldest ones. He’s the one who’s like actually like writing and communicating and [00:27:00] doing things. Now my other ones are all still like in young grade school that communication and storytelling in particular is the most learnable superpower you can on the planet like you.

It is the one thing that all humans have the cap capacity for. And it’s the one thing that if you learn it and you put the time and the effort and the reps in. It has just the greatest leverage effect on your output in the world.

Joey Coleman: The dividends are lifelong, professionally and personally stop and think about the communications that we have with our loved ones. You mentioned your children, right? What are we trying to teach them? How are we trying to interact? What are we trying to learn from them?

Our significant others, our spouses, our friends, our family, as the ripples extend the stories, we tell the conversations we have, the interactions, verbal and nonverbal that contribute to our environment, or at least our picture of our worldview are limitless. Just how much are we having fun and leaning into these?

Richard Matthews: So we’ve gotten real deep in this conversation real [00:28:00] fast, which I don’t have a problem with, but I do want to ask you, and since we’re on the topic of superpowers, right?

Every iconic hero has a superpower, right? Whether that’s a fancy flying suit made by their genius intellect, or the ability to hold on thunder from the sky.

In the real world, heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is like a skill that you were born with, or a skill that you developed over the course of your life, right?

Like storytelling or communication. And With all of your vast experience and all these different worlds that you’ve been in, what do you think that common thread, your superpower is that you were either born with, you’ve developed over the course of your career?

Joey Coleman: I would say that one of my favorite superpowers, if I can call it a superpower, but one of my favorite tools or techniques that I get to bring to bear in a variety of different situations is pattern recognition.

And I have been very fortunate and very blessed to have had a variety of different experiences on all seven continents, with people from all walks of life and all ages and all perspectives that has allowed [00:29:00] me to have a sample set or a library of experiences that I have been able to connect dots to.

And it’s something that I lean into in the work that I do professionally with my clients. People ask me all the time, Joey, what type of audiences do you speak to?

What industries do you specialize in? And my answer is usually the ones that have humans. It’s literally that, whether I’m speaking to, financial advisors or actuaries or speaking to, lawyers or litigators or pawn shop owners, or, whoever it may be in the audience, my goal always is to try to find the patterns.

And my favorite compliment that I get when I walk off stage is when people say, Oh, how long have you been an accountant or how long have you been in boat sales or how long have you been a real estate injury? And I’ve not done any of these things. And they’re like, that’s impossible. How do you know so much about our world?

And [00:30:00] it’s because I try to study humans,

Richard Matthews: and

Joey Coleman: I try to learn humans as much as I can. And once you start to see some of the patterns in the building blocks that cut across genres that cut across generations that cut across demographics, you start to realize that there are actually more patterns in the system than not.

And once you can see those patterns and move with those patterns, life gets really interesting.

Richard Matthews: So I’m going to go deep again on you because

like handle it. So one of the

Joey Coleman: I’ll do my best. I don’t know. So some of the people listening are like, Joey’s trying to rush to keep up with Richard. Let’s see if I can keep running.

Richard Matthews: The thing that I love about the whole pattern recognition is this idea that like the human aspect of what we’re doing is the thing that goes through everything.

And I mentioned before we run a podcast company. And so podcasting is a storytelling medium, right? Storytelling at scale is our goal.

And one of the things that I’ve noticed recently and it’s just something, one of the patterns I’ve been noticing is that People who are really good at [00:31:00] driving a conversation, right? This kind of conversation, the kind of conversation that’s interesting, that’s fun, that people want to sit around the campfire and listen to if they’re good at it.

They immediately rise to the national stage in some way, either they’re authors, they get on the, the political things, they have YouTube channels, people who are good at this thing, which is, having good conversation or being able to structure a good conversation to have a good conversation.

They immediately move up. And so you don’t see a lot of smaller businesses, smaller local things that have the kind of attention that a lot of the national level stuff does.

And one of the things that I’ve been working on recently is training an AI bot how to think through a persuasive conversation, how to be a good conversation host.

And I’ve spent way more time than I would like to admit training and I bought how to do this, but I just finally got it to the point where I was like, I started taking very minimal inputs around a topic that you might want to talk about from, for clients and all their different businesses and the different categories that they’re in and take a couple of different prompts about what’s their business about?

What’s their [00:32:00] thing? And, to back this up, there’s 100,000 words and characters of like training data that we’ve put on it. But it takes a couple of prompts on the front end, take any topic, any business and click a couple of buttons and have a conversation outline that is redonkulous, if I could use a made up word, right?

It’s just incredible. And the thing that makes, that connects us together is this idea that there’s a lot of patterns. Right?

A persuasive conversation in accounting or in the CIA or about storytelling or about, insert whatever topic you want to talk about here. It’s all the same. Like the same markers are there.

And one of the really neat things about like the technology that we’re accessing now is that we can democratize that pattern recognition and distribute at mass to people and be like, listen, here’s how you do it.

And just, I don’t know. There’s some stuff coming down the road. I don’t think the world is ready for where we’re going, because I think it’s going to be massively positive. But

Joey Coleman: I think like most things in life, it is going to be either massively positive or massively negative depending on your [00:33:00] perspective and your experience of it.

And I agree with you. I think what is fascinating to me about the time of history we’re living in is, it is my belief that the news is wrong. And what I mean by that is the news is wrong because this is the greatest time in the history of humanity to be alive.

Now if you flip on the news, regardless of what channel you go to, this isn’t a political commentary. Regardless of what channel you go to, a lot of the discussion is, woe is me, it’s a terrible time to be, things are so much harder, they’re so much worse.

And let me be abundantly clear, I recognize that there’s a lot of struggle in the world. There’s a lot of pain in the world. There’s a lot of heartache in the world. We are not living in a utopian society. I’m not claiming that we are, but the majority of people on the planet aren’t going to run for their lives today.

Some are, and I feel with great empathy for those folks, and I aspire to live on a planet where that decreases. But the fact of the matter is, your likelihood of needing to run for your life today is [00:34:00] less than it was 500 years ago.

Richard Matthews: Oh yeah.

Joey Coleman: So it’s better and you have more access. You talk about babble. Stop and think about what the librarian at the Library of Alexandria would have given to have what we all have in our phones, which is access to every Book on every topic that has ever been written in the history of the world.

That’s unbelievable. Now, availing ourselves of that information and not being overwhelmed by that information is certainly part of the conversation, right?

But the fact that you can take a phone or a computer and pretty much find the answer or a lot of good ideas towards the answer to everything in a matter of seconds is phenomenal.

But the challenge we have is throughout human history. If we look at evolutionary growth, the species has evolved in a linear fashion. [00:35:00] We are now living in an exponential era, right?

So a potential, I’m not sure if it’s the case because I don’t want to limit human potential, but it is potentially going to be a challenge that a linear species is being asked to live in an exponential era.

And our brains is the wet work, the actual organic substance of our body able to handle this shift. I would posit that it is, but it’s going to require effort.

Richard Matthews: So here’s my question for you. Do you have any teenagers in your life that you interact with regularly right now?

Joey Coleman: I do. Yes.

Richard Matthews: So I mentioned that cause I have a 13 year old. I also have a five year old. They have a tremendous access to the world because we travel full time and we homeschool. And as soon as AI became available, like I bought my son.

Full professional versions of every tool on the market. And I was like, learn to play with these cause you have to. And it’s not just we do that with a lot of things, but it’s, what’s fascinating to me. And it’s not just my kids. It’s a lot of kids that we know in the homeschool world.

[00:36:00] And a lot of these things, the things that they accomplish at the age that they’re at. blows me away. And it’s because they have access to technology and information that we only dreamed of when we were their age. And they have access to education and storytelling at levels that they just are. That’s insane.

Like my daughter, my oldest daughter is 10. She’s interested in art. She’s enrolled in creature art teacher. Creature art teacher is an art school from Aaron Blaze. Aaron Blaze is the animator behind Lion King, Aladdin, Brother Bear, right? And is learning from one of the most decorated animators on the planet for less than $200 a year, right?

It’s insane. So you like take that and you put it in every single category of everything they’re interacting with. My son, we mentioned that Broadway musical. It’s incredible, right? It’s stuff that is, Lin Manuel Miranda style composition is being taught to my son who is 13, 14 year old in ways that he’s really interested in engaging with.

And as a result, right at 14 [00:37:00] years old. He’s written two novels. He’s learning to animate. His novels and storytelling. He’s writing music, he’s learning piano, he spins fire. He’s one of the best fire spinners in the world in his age group. It’s nuts, right?

The kind of things that they do. And so to bring this right back into that conversation of can we as humans, can the wet work handle what’s happening?

And so I have this idea that human capability is a box with inside of a box, right? We have the box we’re in is human capability and the box that it’s inside of its human potential.

And so we can’t see human potential. We can only see human capability, but single time in every category that we’ve ever tested it, when we push on human capability, we find that we don’t actually know what the limit it is.

Joey Coleman: 100%. This is the infamous case of Roger Bannister and the four minute mile, right? When they said no human will ever be able to run fast a mile faster than four minutes and then Bannister does it And then what happens in the next year a dozen other people do it now most top high schoolers can run it in under four minutes, right?

And so it’s just it’s fascinating. I was reading [00:38:00] a story. I know we’ve had a lovely conversation geeking out in the worlds of art and science and music for any of the listeners or followers that might have other categories of interest. Let me share something that I learned recently about a young man named Ryan Williams.

Ryan Williams is 17 years old. He has become since the beginning of the year, one of the top receivers for the University of Alabama football team.

Okay, if you watch football and you have watched ESPN or SportsCenter or any of the highlight reels, I can guarantee you have seen catches that Ryan Williams has made and plays that he has made this year.

We’re halfway through the season, and this kid is just everywhere. And he’s a freshman. What’s fascinating is the first time I was watching him with a group of other people, I said, This kid, plays like it’s a video game and somebody said to me, that’s what they’re saying is why he’s so good is that he grew [00:39:00] up playing video games.

So his world is not limited by what he saw watching other players who have played football do in the past. His world is opened up because whatever he can do on the controller, he then starts training himself physically to do the move and it unlocks to your point goes from capability to potential.

And he starts to realize what this is. And I thought, Oh, that’s really interesting. And then I saw a story that some NFL players had been using virtual reality to run game scenarios and get more reps than their body could physically handle.

Their brain could get the reps because they could see the patterns, even though their body was in recovery and Oh, I can’t do this anymore.

Richard Matthews: And if you can get your brain to visualize it, oh man.

Joey Coleman: Exactly. And so now it’s wait a second. Have we grossly underestimated [00:40:00] human capability by just on what we’ve seen? Stop and look at the fact that the first time from the first moment that a human took flight, The Wright brothers until the time that a human was standing on the moon

Richard Matthews: it’s 60 years.

Joey Coleman: 60 years. Like it was like 66 60 less than 70, hundred. We’ve done enough math less than 70 years less one person’s lifetime from we are off terra firma, we are flying to we are standing on the moon looking back at the earth.

If that is not evidence of the fact that there is more to the potential than we’ve already tapped, I don’t know what more proof you need.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. It goes right back into that idea of the storytelling is a spark of divinity. And this idea that there is a potential that I’m not willing to say is a 100% [00:41:00] true yet, but there’s a good potential that human beings are limitless.

We can’t prove that one way or another because every time we’ve tested it, we found out that, we don’t actually know our limits. And you, if you’ve ever read a Bitcoin standard, he goes through the history of money, which is really fascinating.

And he talks about in there that every single resource we’ve ever pointed more human attention at becomes more abundant. We’ve never found a resource ever in our entire history that if we put more human attention at it, it doesn’t become more abundant and there’s no exceptions, like there’s literally none to everything.

There’s a whole bunch of resources went on in that. It’s super fascinating. You realize that maybe this idea that humans are valuable and the individual is valuable. And the more that we have, the better it is, the better we get at storytelling, the more limitless we become. And it’s a really fascinating view of humanity.

And when it comes down to looking at the way our kids interact with technology, like the kid who’s playing the football or my son who spins fire, like fricking badass, right? He’s one of the best fire spinners in the world. He’s 14. It’s crazy. But this idea, they look at the world differently than we do. Because they grow up with different limits.

Different limits.

Joey Coleman: Yes. And, are we paying [00:42:00] attention to them growing up with negative limits? So as much as I love the optimistic nature of our conversation, I do think as in most sides of life, there’s the light side and the shadow side, right?

The shadow side is if you believe you can’t achieve it, if you believe that you’re boxed out from it, if you believe that it’s not possible, or if somebody is wielding that story power for ill.

And is taking things and reconstructing them to make it a version that is in alignment with their worldview, but not in alignment with, oh, I don’t know, facts or humanity or history or any number of patterns that we might want to look at and recognize.

It’s not the end all be all negative destructive scenario, but it’s it just shows that as we go through these developments, I think we have to go through them with eyes wide open, both directions, not open, not only open to the possibilities, but open to the downfalls as well.[00:43:00]

Richard Matthews: Absolutely. It looks like my face froze. Can you still hear me?

Joey Coleman: Yeah, I can hear you, but you did freeze.

Richard Matthews: I don’t know why the video froze.

Joey Coleman: I don’t know either. Do you want to stop again and and then restart just in case that seemed to fix it last time.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, there we go. Yeah. And so just to continue that thought, the other part of it that I think is really fascinating with particularly with the way technology is going is, it comes right back into that storytelling thing where we are figuring out how to mass leverage individual one on one storytelling.

And so the most powerful form of communication is two people sitting across from each other with, a cup of coffee and, exchanging ideas, right?

That kind of thing. That’s the most persuasive setting that you can be in to help change someone’s life and social media was a we were able to democratize the one to many communication.

And I believe things like augmented reality and artificial intelligence are going to shift that where we have the same sort of mass connection of one to many that you have with social media, where you can have the same scale, but one to one.

Where Joey [00:44:00] Coleman, if you take everything you’ve ever thought and everything you’ve ever said and everything you’ve ever done and train an AI bot who knows you and can speak like you and understands you and communicates like you and thinks the way that you do, and can put you in an augmented reality with another person that you can one to one at scale, tell your story interactively with the other person.

I think we are not just we’re only a few iterations away from that. Cause all the technology for that to exist exists today. It just hasn’t been put together in that way yet.

Joey Coleman: Yeah, I don’t disagree. It is the ancient Chinese proverb of may you live in interesting times is certainly coming true right now. It is a fascinating time to be alive.

Richard Matthews: So, we’ve gone quite a bit into this podcast and I only got through about half of my questions that I normally go through. So my audience is going to be like, you only got to two major questions, but I’m going to skip a few here. And I want to ask you one more question here that is about your guiding principles, right?

One of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code, right? For instance, Batman never kills his enemies. He only ever brings them some Arkham [00:45:00] asylum. So as we, wrap this interview and get near the end of our time together, what are the top principles that you live by to run your life?

Joey Coleman: Oh, this is a really interesting question. They’re evolving, the principles that I led my life by maybe a decade ago are not necessarily the same ones that I live my life by today.

Not because those principles, I found a fatal flaw in those principles, but because those principles served me to get me to where I was, but where I want to go next, I think I need some different principles.

So some of the principles or phrases that I’m locking into right now and really trying to lean into. One of them is, get curious before you get critical.

So anytime I start to feel in myself, this bubbling up from inside of, that’s a stupid way to do that. Or, Oh, I can’t believe they believe that. Or, Oh, why would they want to do that?

Instead saying, pause, I’m not rejecting the critical, but before we go there, we have to get curious first. We have to say why did [00:46:00] they think that? Why did they do that? Why did they say that? What else could be at play here?

So really leaning into the being curious before critical, which also then spins up to a larger umbrella of wherever possible lead with empathy. Wherever possible, try to say, what else could be going on here? What is going on with this person’s perspective, their story, their worldview that I don’t understand? And let me seek first to understand that before I understand what they’re saying.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, So like an extension of the same idea, this curiosity.

Joey Coleman: Exactly.

Richard Matthews: What that brings to mind for me is one of we, as I mentioned, we run a podcast company. I have a series called the 10 commandments of podcast and the 10th commandment of podcasting is thou shalt learn to give good interview.

And the rule for how to give a good interview is two things, be ignorant and curious, right? And so if you approach the conversation with ignorance, and what I mean by ignorance is not that you are dumb or uninformed. It’s that [00:47:00] you don’t know their perspective. You don’t know who they are. You haven’t been in their shoes yet.

And so if you approach the conversation from that ignorance of, I don’t know who you are, I don’t know how you’re going to approach this conversation. I don’t know your stories and all the things that led to the perspectives that you have, and then pair that with the curiosity of, I would love to know who you are and I would love to know those stories and I’d love to know what it’s like to walk in your shoes, that you can always give a good interview.

Joey Coleman: Richard, I love that. And it’s funny if I may pull on a thread of what you’ve said there about, walking in their shoes. I think many of us are familiar with that phrase of, walk a mile in their shoes.

I think what is really fascinating is the huge percentage of humans that think just even seeing what their shoes are is enough to understand their shoes.

It’s I see you have red shoes on, that means this, or I see you have blue shoes on, that means this. Instead of saying, let me first try your shoes on and now let me walk a mile in your shoes. And then share my perspective and then ask my [00:48:00] questions, right?

I think in an increasingly digital, fast paced on demand era that we all live in are we are being called to pump the brakes.

We’re being called to slow down. We’re being called to say, wait a second. How can I make less snap judgments and more extended understandings?

How can I try to better see where they’re coming from, why they’re coming from this place and what they’re actually saying, instead of shorthanding into they must seen this about this, which means this, which means they’re not my friend, or which means I disagree with them or whatever it may be.

And I think that’s the opportunity that all of us have to lean into that being curious before we’re critical.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. It’s such a powerful way to look at the world and to build community, this idea that, if you step into politics, we have these two like juxtaposed ideas that one is the individual is the most important to the exclusion of the [00:49:00] community and the other one is the community is so important to the exclusion of the individual and the reality is that like somewhere in the middle, like you don’t, humans don’t live without their communities and communities don’t exist without the individuals that make them up.

They are the yin yang. And so we have to learn how to fall in love with the people that are around us. And that’s only going to happen when you actually take the time to understand their perspectives and how they got there.

And there is a good possibility that the other person is a 100% wrong about something. And that their perspective is flawed and endangering them or endangering the people around them. And they need to have it fixed, but you can’t help them if you don’t understand them.

Joey Coleman: Absolutely. And I can guarantee Richard that there are things that I’m a 100% wrong about.

Richard Matthews: Oh yeah, me too.

Joey Coleman: I don’t know what they are, but I know they’re there. Somebody said to me recently, because I studied government and worked in the government and grew up, in a family of politicians and that I’ve had a lot of direct exposure to the, especially to the office of the United States president that most people have not had in their [00:50:00] lives.

And I consider myself very fortunate to have had that exposure. And somebody asked me recently, they’re like, how can you vote for a president who you don’t believe everything they believe?

And I said in the same way that I can breathe, because I don’t believe everything that I believe. And they were like, what? I was like, I’m not 100% sure that I believe everything that I claim to believe.

But what are we going to do? We can’t just sit back and say then no one gets to be in charge. We can’t just say then let’s go anarchy. Let’s choose chaos. Let’s choose disorder and discommunity.

No, we need to, in my estimation, be always working to take a step forward, be always working to say, How can we make this place better than it was?

Richard Matthews: It could be better.

Joey Coleman: And pardon me?

Richard Matthews: It could be better.

Joey Coleman: It could be better. It could always be better. And that doesn’t mean we don’t celebrate where we are. I think part of the challenge of the movement of let’s do it better is we’re never happy with what we’ve done. [00:51:00]

We’re never thankful for what we’ve been able to accomplish. We never celebrate our achievements because they’re always less than what they could have been. Of course, it could always be better. It could always be more enhanced. The customer experience could always be better. The employee experience could always be better.

But are we doing our best and are we making efforts to continue to do even better than that in the future? If the answer to both of those statements are yes, I think he can sleep peacefully at night. That doing a good job.

Richard Matthews: I call that contented ambition. And there’s an American flag sitting on the wall behind me. It’s actually there. That’s my backdrop as an American flag. And I get a lot of comments on that. Mostly positive, like 99% positive when people come on the podcast and it comes from that exact idea that you were talking about that we have. And so this is a pervasive idea.

I’m just going to use the United States as an example for this pervasive idea. The United States is one of the greatest horses for good that humanity has ever seen. Have we gotten everything right? No,

Joey Coleman: Not even close.

Richard Matthews: Not even close.

Joey Coleman: Not even [00:52:00] close. But have we gotten a lot of things right? Absolutely. And you can believe both of those things without being anti American.

Richard Matthews: Yes, absolutely. And that’s one of the ideas is the constitution is a really powerful document that allowed for the ending of slavery, it allowed for the equal rights for women, it allowed for the protections of privacy, right? It allowed for those things to happen. They didn’t happen at the time.

And so you have this thing that is undeniably good and yet can still be better. And that is one of the things that I think, you talk about in your books is that you can build a customer experience that is undeniably good and still make it better. And that’s really what we’re striving for every day is how can we look at and appreciate the things we have today that are undeniably good and then look towards how do we make these better.

And that’s probably why I have such an optimistic outlook on life is because that’s,

Joey Coleman: I agree with you. And, equally optimistic, but maybe equally realistic. America on the global scale is a teenager. We’ve been around for, 250 [00:53:00] years ish, right?

Richard Matthews: Our voice is changing. Our balls just dropped.

Joey Coleman: Yeah, it’s I did like it. Like we’re just figuring it out. And here’s what I know. You asked me about. Do I know any teenagers?

Richard Matthews: All of America.

Joey Coleman: Here’s something that I know about teenagers. Okay. Teenagers believe they have it all figured out. And guess what? As a teenager, I believed I have it all figured out. And it’s somebody who’s in his early fifties. The biggest statement that I can make is there’s actually nothing I have all figured out.

There are a couple of things that I feel like I’m starting to understand a little bit. That’s where I am five decades in. So here’s the thing. Do I love this country? Absolutely. Am I proud to be an American? Absolutely.

And we could probably learn from looking to some of these other countries and civilizations in the world who have been around for millennia not centuries and say what might they know that we don’t [00:54:00] know, what might we be able to learn from them?

Instead of constantly believing. I’ve got it all figured out Just do it my way and you’ll be fine. There’s unbelievable ingenuity. There’s unbelievable creativity. There’s unbelievable innovation that has been born in this crucible of the United States of America that has not existed in other places throughout history, right?

It’s very special and it’s very unique. What I get excited about is us trying to navigate our teenage years

Richard Matthews: Yeah. That’s a

Joey Coleman: With the grace and the patience that we wish the teenagers in our lives would navigate their teenage years.

Richard Matthews: It’s a really fascinating perspective because there’s so much history to humanity that like, there’s some things we know, like we, we know we, or we should know, but we’re trying to F with at the moment. Like that, we ended [00:55:00] up with this family structure, mom, dad, kids, like for thousands of years, pervasive across all societies.

And we’re trying to fiddle with it at the moment and try to see if maybe it works other ways. We’re like, maybe there’s some things that we’ve gotten right for a good long time and maybe we shouldn’t mess with those things.

Joey Coleman: And the reasons we created that structure in the beginning don’t apply now. Part of the reasons why that structure existed is because if you weren’t in a family unit, in a larger family of several siblings and parents, in a larger community of, everybody working together to till the fields, you would die.

Richard Matthews: Yeah,

Joey Coleman: Now, an individual person can move to anywhere in the world. And live. Now, what kind of life will they live? Will it be as a fulfilled of his life? They would live.

Richard Matthews: The questions we’re currently trying to answer. Yeah.

Joey Coleman: Yeah, and we can answer those questions. But the fact of the matter is a [00:56:00] thousand years ago, you couldn’t move to the other side of the planet and live as even a fraction as easily as you could today.

You or I could move to any country in the world next week and find a place to stay, find some food to eat, even if we knew no one there, be able to survive.

Richard Matthews: What’s crazy about that. It’s not just you and me either. Like I could send my teenage son.

Joey Coleman: Oh yeah,

Richard Matthews: If he’s got a pocket full of cash and his cell phone, like he could go anywhere in the world and be just fine. At 14 years which is

Joey Coleman: Absolutely nuts and is beautiful and is amazing and we should recognize that is different than at any other time in human history. So to me, again, this is not me saying that any of the models or the modalities of the past are fundamentally broken.

But what it is saying is, as we reinvent and move out of the box of capability into the box of possibility, is there an opportunity to question [00:57:00] everything?

Some people don’t like to question everything. And that’s okay. And I understand the uncertainty that brings. And I understand the chaos that brings internally when you have a worldview and suddenly you’re being asked to question your own worldview.

If my worldview isn’t true anymore, where do I fit in this new world? I understand the angst and the fear and the pain and the sorrow that comes from that. But I also understand the possibility.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, and that’s why that right there nails on the head, why there’s so much of this turmoil that you see in people’s heads and all over social media right now is that we’ve reached that point where we’re no longer linear, we’ll exponential, or, it’s always been exponential, but a hockey stick curve is what it is, right?

It’s this way for a long time until it’s this way. And so we’ve always been on an exponential curve. We’re just on the corner right now. And so everyone is what is the world going to look like in five years and nobody knows.

And so we have to question everything and we have to pick what are we taking with us and what’s not coming. Because some of it is important and some of it we’ve put thousands of years into figuring out what makes [00:58:00] the most sense for us.

But we have to figure that out and nobody knows the answers to that. So it’s really interesting to have those conversations.

Joey Coleman: I totally agree. And yet, but what I do know has stood the test of time and served humanity incredibly well is the desire to continuously be curious.

If we look throughout human history, when we got set in our ways it has to be this. We can only trade with people that live within walking distance.

We can’t trade with anyone

Richard Matthews: Not on cinnamon.

Joey Coleman: We can only read one book. We can only, mine one material. We can only grow one crop. Any of these kind of unilaterally focused, belief systems have not served the species well over time.

It’s only when we say what’s cross pollination look like? What does travel look like? What does exposure to different environments and different circumstances and different people and different stories look like?

That is [00:59:00] where all of the movement up the hockey stick has come

Richard Matthews: Yeah. Curiosity. Storytelling. There’s some things that are never going away.

Joey Coleman: Exactly.

Richard Matthews: I do want to wrap up before we keep people here all day, cause I would absolutely keep people here all day to continue talking and having this conversation.

But I do want to wrap our interview, but I do finish every interview with something I call a hero’s challenge and hero’s challenge is really simple.

And it’s just this, do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they? First names are fine. And why do you think they should come share their story with us here on the hero show?

Joey Coleman: I have been blessed, Richard, to have an unbelievable network of people with amazing stories and at the risk of copping out of giving you a specific answer I might offer this observation that might be even more useful to your listeners than a recommendation of somebody to be a future guest on the show.

I have had the unbelievable privilege and opportunity to visit 58 countries. On all seven continents. I have met people, [01:00:00] seconds after they were born. Have been with people minutes before they died. And what I know to be true is that every human on the planet has a remarkable story. If we’re willing to give them the space to tell it.

If we are willing to be a curious interviewer, if we are willing to ask questions that lead to stories instead of answers, if we are willing to lean in when the other person is talking and really try to become part of the narrative in the story they’re telling instead of just planning what we’re going to say in response to what they’re saying, I have yet to find a human that I didn’t want to hear their story.

Richard Matthews: I can’t tell you how much I love that. And I just finished this off with one example of that came up recently.

So my, my son went to a summer camp this year and I went and it was one of those, it wasn’t technically a camp because the parents had to be there. [01:01:00] I know there’s some legal structure around whether or not the parents are there, whether or not it gets to be designated a camp.

Regardless, I was there because We needed to be there. I wasn’t going to be a chaperone or anything, but they had it, during the group things or whatever, they had the classes that they would teach and whatnot, one of the classes on a communication, they were talking about active listening. And a gentleman got up to speak, who was running this thing.

He’s an octogenarian, unfortunately he passed away earlier this summer. So it was his last summer camp, but he got up and he was talking about what he viewed as active listening. And the view of active listening that he was teaching all the children was this idea that you sit down and then you just listen to the other person and you don’t interact at all.

And I like slowly raised my hand and I was like, I feel like this is a terrible lesson to teach all the children. And I was like, I run, I happen to run a podcast company and interview people professionally. Can I offer some suggestions on what active listening actually is?

And active listening, the key word is active. That you are a part of the conversation that you’re becoming a part of the other person’s story by listening to what [01:02:00] they have to say, and then finding the stories that you have and exchanging stories together and becoming a part of the other person’s narrative.

So active listening is this idea that you can actually really get to know someone by pulling their story out of them and then sharing your story with them in return. That there is a connection that you build when you do that. That’s what active listening really is. And I just, that was my sort

Joey Coleman: of example.

Yeah, I love it. I absolutely love it. And, oh, that we would all get better in every conversation we’re in at being more of an active listener that I think that’s a net positive for humanity.

Richard Matthews: Absolutely. So in comic books, Joey, there’s always the crowd who, cheer for the acts of heroism and clap for their work. So as we close, what I want to do is I want to find out where can people find you if they want your help in the future, where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak, and ask for your help to either, never lose a customer again, or never lose an employee again.

Where can people find you, Joey?

Joey Coleman: Yeah, I saw a police. He appreciate that. Richard. The best place to find me is on my website. [01:03:00] JoeyColeman.com. That’s J O E Y like a baby kangaroo or a five year old. Coleman C O L E M A N like the camping equipment, but no relation. Joey Coleman dot com. com. My books are called Never Lose a Customer Again and Never Lose an Employee Again.

They are available wherever you like to get your books in whatever format you like to consume them. There’s a hardcover version, there’s an ebook, there’s an audiobook, which I actually narrate.

So if you’ve enjoyed the sound of my voice, I will read the books to you. But those are the best places to find me.

And I’ll just close by saying not only have I greatly enjoyed our wide ranging and provocative and fun and philosophical and tactical conversation, but I just wish everybody listening the very best as you go out and think consciously about the stories that you want to tell to your customers, to your employees, and maybe most importantly to yourself.

Richard Matthews: I was just pulling this up because this is, copy of his audio book. This is one I’ve listened to probably six times and your voice is wonderful. It’s especially if you’re on a plane and don’t have anything else to do. It’s a good one to, a good one to listen [01:04:00] to.

Joey Coleman: I appreciate that.

Richard Matthews: So the audible versions are both very good on both those books.

So definitely take the chance to check out Joey Coleman’s work. And like I said, I don’t know if you have a public speaking schedule at all, but if you get a chance to see Joey speak, that’s also a treat. And hear his ideas on how to make the first hundred days a super impactful part of your business.

It’s worth every moment of your time to do that. So Joey, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your stories with us today.

Do you have any final words of wisdom or hit the stop record button?

Joey Coleman: No, I so appreciate it, Richard. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Thanks to everybody for investing your time to listen to our stories and listen to our conversation.

And respectfully to all of you, go tell your stories. The world needs to hear your stories. If you are listening to our stories, I can promise you the world needs to listen to your stories as well.

So go out there and share them. I’m excited to hear them.

Richard Matthews: Okay. Here’s my shameless plug for the day. If you’re a business owner and need help with that’s what we do.

I’ll be sharing your stories. Thank you, Joey.