--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. This is a tremendous episode. I'm just going to leave it right there with you. We have Scott Monty on the show. Among other things, Scott is a speaker, he's an executive coach, he was the first executive at the Ford Motor Company to head up digital communications and social media. He has a dynamic background, he's former pre-med, and he's got an MBA and all kinds of accolades and experiences and expertise. But he's a tremendously deep thinker, and his newsletter, *Timeless and Timely*, is one of the best in the business. It is absolutely a must-read for anyone who's interested in communications, marketing, sales, leadership. He pulls from a range of sources and his own experience to deliver value every single week. It comes directly into my main mailbox on my Gmail and I read it as soon as I see it every week.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I actually had a whole episode, a whole strategy, or whatever you want to say, research that I had done for my interview with Scott. And then his newsletter that came out this week just grabbed hold of me and I had to talk about that. And that's how good his newsletters are. And that's really the core of what we talk about: this deep conflict between eternal and ethereal content and the decisions that businesses need to make around where they spend their time and energy.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This is an episode you do not want to miss. You're going to want to listen to it again and you're going to want to share it with all your friends. Please do that. Also, if you're not subscribed, please subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you listen on iTunes, leave a rating and review of the show. That helps more amazing people like you find the Ryan Hanley show. Thank you for your time. I love you for listening. Let's get to Scott.
--:-- [Transition to interview]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I appreciate you coming on the show, man.
--:-- Scott Monty: It's my pleasure. I'm honored to be asked.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I don't know that we've ever actually met before. Actually, I know that we have not met before, but we've both been in Speak and Spill for a while. I've followed your career from afar. I'm a subscriber to your newsletter, which is actually a lot of what you've written in there was the impetus for me reaching out.
--:-- Scott Monty: Oh, okay, great.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I want to kind of talk through that. It's working.
--:-- Scott Monty: Yeah, no, it definitely is, man. It's really good stuff.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I just have a lot of questions. Just to give you background on the show, it's very conversational. Tangents are a hundred percent allowed and encouraged, so go wherever you want to go. I know the great showrunner Jay Acunzo would admonish me for my podcasting style, but I have some things that I want to hit. Where I'd rather go is where you're the most interested. I'm going to listen to what you say and try to guide us there. Anything you want to talk about that you think is relevant is fine. The audience is primarily business professionals, people interested in peak performance, sales, and marketing. I'd say those are the primary veins. I interview just about anybody who I find interesting, so you can talk about whatever you want.
--:-- Scott Monty: Okay, fair enough. Cool.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So if that's all good, I'll do a little intro before this. We'll just rock and roll.
--:-- Scott Monty: Okay, sounds good.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So let's dive right into the newsletter. That is where I have really become a fan of yours. It's been coming bi-weekly or weekly emails. I don't know how often they come. But when they come in, I read them. It's called *Timeless and Timely*. For anyone listening at home, just go to scottmonty.com. You'll find the way to sign up, or you can come check out the show notes for the episode. I'll have links there too, but it's probably easier if you just go to Scott's website directly.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I started subscribing. I don't know why or how, but obviously I've known of you for a while and your work. I've seen you in our Speak and Spill Facebook group where a lot of speakers share stuff. I love the way that you attack the newsletter from both a tactical standpoint and the content that you actually put in. So my very first question for you, and this is probably hyper tactical, is why lead with a newsletter? It seems like you push your stuff out into a newsletter and then you take it from the newsletter and you put it on your website. What is it about the email format that you find to be a very positive and productive way of connecting with your audience?
--:-- Scott Monty: It is. Well, first of all, thank you, Ryan, for subscribing, for your interest in what I do, as niche or different as it is. I don't know if it's niche, but it's certainly different. Let me take you on a journey through the time I've been publishing online and how I've thought through this.
--:-- Scott Monty: I've had my own website for, geez, probably going on 15 years or so now. I started blogging maybe in the mid-2000s. I had done personal blogging for a while, but blogging for business probably began around 2005 for me. I initially started out down the road of social media and created a name for myself there on the site and interacting with other people on their blogs back before we had things like Twitter and Facebook.
--:-- Scott Monty: To me, email or RSS at the time had been a key to getting people's attention, arriving in their inboxes or arriving in their feed reader as a way of regularly sharing content. As I said, back then, the community that we built was all based on reading each other's blogs or newsletters. And my, how cyclical the world is. We've been bombarded with so many different social feeds and platforms and the algorithms have taken over. As Mark Schaefer has called it for years, we've suffered from content shock. There's just too much stuff out there.
--:-- Scott Monty: To me, focusing on an email newsletter, focusing on a list, focusing on that community that exists in inboxes, it's a much more intimate relationship and allows the writer to go much deeper than they could on the superficiality of social sites. You can create longer posts on Facebook, notes and whatnot. You can create threads on Twitter. But to me, they're ephemeral. The stuff that I'm writing through my newsletter and again on my blog is meant to be something that is more eternal, more timeless, as the title infers.
--:-- Scott Monty: For a while, the newsletter had actually turned into a weekly, almost link dump. It was initially called *This Week in Digital*, then I changed it to *The Full Monty*, and it just became overwhelming. There were scores and scores of links that I would share in eight different categories every week, and it felt like I was trying to become all things to all people. As you know, when you try to become all things to all people, you become nothing to no one.
--:-- Scott Monty: So I stepped back and I said, "What am I doing this for? What are the things that matter to me?" As I've moved further away from the specialization of social and digital, I moved more into the realms of leadership. These are the lessons I've learned after having been in social and digital for a while, after having operated at a strategic level, at an executive level at a Fortune 10 company. There are bigger issues that we need to address.
--:-- Scott Monty: Through my newsletter, *Timeless and Timely*, I'm taking these things that are still vexing us today, but that we can find usable and really time-tested advice from history, from literature, from philosophy that assures us that we're on the right path. That humans are still dealing with the same kinds of things. Even though the technologies are new, the issues that undergird them are the same that we've always had to deal with. Therefore, email makes perfect sense in that regard.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There's a lot in there that I want to unpack, not to use a classic podcast cliché. But the first one I want to get is actually the last one you mentioned, and that's philosophy. One of the things that has been interesting as an observation to me just in the last few years, and it probably has a lot to do with Ryan Holiday, though he certainly isn't the first one, is the mainstreaming of ancient philosophy. Not just Stoicism, which is his bread and butter, but a lot of people now dissect and write about existentialism and transcendentalism. John Jantsch just wrote a book on that and everything in between.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I've started talking about that as well and really digging in. I just read *Meditations* and I started reading one of Seneca's works. I have another book coming that I want to read, diving into a lot of that kind of stuff. What I find most interesting, and this is particularly about *Meditations*, is that here is a guy in Marcus Aurelius who was at the pinnacle of the world. He is the emperor of the Roman Empire at, maybe they're in the fading days of the empire, but still, this is the organization, the society of the world. He's sitting at the very top of it. And he's writing in a journal examining the same personality imperfections and how to handle them and how to navigate days that you and I are thinking about 2,000 years later.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: How do you be a good leader? How do you communicate well in situations where people are being aggressive with you? How do you not allow your own failings or the lustfulness of life to take over versus what's important? It's crazy to me that these ideas transcend that because we think of ourselves as modern, considering higher level ideas, but really, it's all the same stuff. How do you take that in and apply it to your own day? Because I see you write about it quite a bit. You have a lot of references to ancient philosophy in your work.
--:-- Scott Monty: Part of it comes from my own education. Contrary to anyone's expectations, when I went to school at Boston University and pursued a pre-med path, you didn't have to major in science to be pre-med. So I chose to major in classics, classical civilization. I had taken Latin in high school, and I always had some kind of enjoyment for the ancients. But it wasn't until my sophomore year when I consciously decided to remove myself from the science track. Most pre-med concentrators were biology or chemistry majors. I figured, if I'm going into medicine, I'm going to be scienced out for the rest of my life. Why don't I use the resources that Boston University's College of Arts and Sciences offers? Why not open myself up to the humanities?
--:-- Scott Monty: So I took a course in Greek civilization. As soon as I did that and was just opened up to this world of history and drama and philosophy and architecture and all the other things we studied by some amazing professors who were themselves great storytellers, I realized that I could take that basis of critical thinking, of essay writing, and I could apply that to anything I did in my studies.
--:-- Scott Monty: Long story short, I ended up going to the first year of medical school, added an MBA with healthcare as a concentration, healthcare administration, worked in the managed healthcare field, and then consulted in the biotech and medical device area for a while before moving over to high tech and social media. What I've found over the course of my career is that I go back to that education, to the basics of that education, more now than I did while I was undergoing the education.
--:-- Scott Monty: I have a whole wall of books here of history and philosophy and literature. I'm a biography junkie. I do enjoy a lot of Stoic philosophy as well. I'm just overjoyed to see that making a comeback. I've realized that it's all been done before. As a matter of fact, there's a quote in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories where Sherlock Holmes says, "There's nothing new under the sun. It's all been done before and will be done again." If you just understand that about human nature, about who we are as a species, then you can predict for any kind of leadership situation, any kind of new technology or platform that's coming along. The formula is there.
--:-- Scott Monty: Not enough people study history or take the time to look back at what we've done. They're always looking forward. Particularly for this digital generation who are mostly digital natives, they haven't made the same mistakes that those of us who are digital immigrants have over the course of the last 20 years. We found out the hard way about the things not to do, the things to avoid, the things that work. Some of them are coming to the table just five years in as if they're Prometheus, that they've discovered fire. The news is, it's been around a lot longer than you think.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Do you think your education helps you be able to carve out what has the potential to be eternal from what is ethereal? Because I couldn't agree with that concept more. It's something that I have shifted. I recently deleted Instagram from my phone a couple of weeks ago. I've really tried to focus on delivering value in places that I believe have more of an eternal nature and less ethereal. I'm interested in what parts of your background you believe allow you to start to carve through that and how other people can look at their own work and find the things that have a more lasting nature.
--:-- Scott Monty: That's a tough question, Ryan. To me, it's partly a sixth sense, if you will. I don't know if I'm eligible to say that or not. Perhaps it's part of the futurist in me, which is interesting that a classics major would talk about being a futurist. It's almost a smell test.
--:-- Scott Monty: When Silicon Valley, and it was pretty much led by Silicon Valley in the last three years or so, was saying that autonomous vehicles are going to be here within the next three to five years, and talking about it in a very mainstream way, I knew that wasn't going to be the case. I look at the data points from a bunch of different perspectives, from working in the automotive industry, from dialoguing with people here in the Midwest, and people who are not in the city centers all around the country. Being exposed to a lot of different viewpoints helps inform that.
--:-- Scott Monty: I knew that we probably won't see a mainstreaming of autonomous vehicles, driverless cars, the fantasy where people are sitting in the back seat and their cars chauffeur them from place to place. We probably won't see that for decades. Because the reality is we're going to see a mixed medium of driving. There are going to be drivers on the road behind the wheel. There are going to be people with semi-autonomous vehicles, or already are. There's going to be people in fully autonomous vehicles. But it's going to differ based on geography, based on ethnography, based on age, and a whole bunch of other things.
--:-- Scott Monty: In understanding all of those data points and understanding it in just a moment, I can sniff out BS and call it out and discern what's going to actually take root and what isn't in the immediate future versus the long-term future.
--:-- Scott Monty: It's funny. When I first graduated from business school, which was basically following on my undergraduate education, I really had no significant work experience other than having been a writer for the National Healthcare Reform Project under the Veterans Affairs Department. I wanted a job as a strategist. You don't really go directly into strategy fresh out of business school unless you've got some significant work experience. Why? Because strategy is the amalgamation. It's the consummation of having studied finance and accounting and operations and organizational behavior and all of the elements that make up business. When you see how they work together, then and only then can you become a decent strategist. For me, it's about putting all these things together and understanding them in context and then being able to make a semi-valid prediction or a reasonable recommendation to clients.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I do a newsletter as well, except it's video. Instead of writing everything, I love to write, but I just felt like I could potentially deliver more context through video. I basically package up a video like a newsletter and just deliver it via video. In the last one, it was talking about preparing for the end of social media. Not that it was going to happen anytime soon, but that the idea of social media as a tool for organic growth engine for your business was coming to an end.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I look in your writing, a lot of your viewpoints. Not that I'm operating under the assumption that you share that viewpoint, but you have been, I don't want to say harsh, but critical, particularly of Facebook. I don't disagree with what you're saying. I'm just incredibly interested by it. It's a viewpoint that I don't see a lot of people who have a marketing background taking. I see a lot of politically oriented talking head figures taking shots at some of these, but it feels very surfacy. The way in which you dive into some of your analysis of the platforms, particularly Facebook and the things that Zuckerberg is doing, is incredibly interesting to me.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I would love if you could just break down, and particularly I'm thinking about this is one of your more recent ones. It may even have been your most recent one. It actually is: *The Leadership's Guide to Handling Deception*, where you dive into some of Sacha Baron Cohen's talking points, which I watched that speech. It's really interesting. Using some of your comments around Facebook as a framework or context, where do you see these things going? Why do we need to be careful of what companies like Facebook are doing for our discourse?
--:-- Scott Monty: I think it's an important observation, Ryan. Before I get too far into this, how wonderful is it that you do a video newsletter? I think that's fantastic. As much as you've cut yourself off from Instagram, and I think there are a lot of good reasons to do that, doubling down on video, just like doubling down on email, I think it's the same kind of thing. It allows you to build a relationship with people. Humans are a visual species. We communicated with images before we communicated with language. Back to the cave paintings that were found from tens of thousands of years ago that were evidence of how humans communicated with each other. It is still universal, the way we can look at someone and discern things. I completely agree with that direction.
--:-- Scott Monty: Specifically with Facebook and the issues I have there, my issues are not political. I don't care what side of the political spectrum you fall on, whether you're conservative, liberal, moderate, etc. My problem is with ethics, integrity, and hypocrisy. What I've seen from Facebook again and again, and it really relates to the title of this week's newsletter, is about deception. How they've deceived users, how they've gotten into this business.
--:-- Scott Monty: The very first issue or notion that we had of Mark Zuckerberg and his intentions comes from IMs that were exchanged from his dorm room in Harvard. I believe it's from a transcript of a deposition or some kind of investigation where we actually have the documentation of he and somebody in Harvard IMing each other. The guy says, "Well, how is it that you were able to put this thing together, this thing that would later become Facebook?" And he said, "I don't know, people just gave me their info. They trust me. Dumb [expletive]."
--:-- Scott Monty: Right there, from its very inception, Facebook was predicated on duping people, on getting them to submit personal information with some false premise of trust. That's exactly what has driven Facebook these last 15 years and still drives them. They don't care what you think, as long as they're getting their advertising money, as long as they're expanding. Now between WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, they reach one third of the world's population. They're taking things fairly cavalierly.
--:-- Scott Monty: On the one hand, they're saying, "We know what's best for us." But on the other hand, "We're too big to manage all of this stuff." That's an argument that eats itself. If you are so big that you can't self-regulate, then why should we allow you to be so big? And why does free speech need to happen on such a large platform?
--:-- Scott Monty: I think Sacha Baron Cohen put it so succinctly when he tore apart the argument that Facebook was making regarding freedom of speech and political advertising. People can pay to lie or tell falsehoods. Facebook is saying that's fine with us. We're okay with that. Cohen said, "Freedom of speech is not the same thing as freedom of reach." You can lie all you want, but don't expect to pay for it and to allow publishers to publish that lie thanks to your payment. That's the fundamental difference here.
--:-- Scott Monty: People will cry censorship all day long. No one's being censored. These people can still say whatever they want. But when it comes to weaponizing that, monetizing it, and scaling it so that more people see it and it becomes a form of propaganda, and as Baron Cohen said, "Democracy, which depends on shared truths, and when that's in retreat, and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march." This is the crux of the matter we're dealing with right now. When you reach a third of the world's population, you have a moral and ethical responsibility to ensure that harm is not being done. Or said another way, that more good than harm is being done.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's so interesting to me. I have so many thoughts. As a marketer and as a former executive myself, to reach certain customer bases, you use these tools. You actually mentioned it further down in your article where you're talking about how at the brand level, it's going to be difficult to convince brands to move away. Advertising or messaging done well on these platforms, hopefully well and right, can help a business reach customers and grow and deliver the right product at the right time to the right person. I think there's at least an argument to be made for that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: On the other hand, as a human, I struggle with Facebook so much because I've watched them change the rules so many times. Just take out the depth of this particular issue, which I do want to come back to. At a surface level, the number of times they have changed the rules or changed the game. I get that it's a free platform and what do you expect for free. I can understand that argument to a certain extent. But the number of times that they said, "Here's how we want you to use the platform," and then they change the rules, and then you use the platform that new way, and they change the rules again. To think that even if it's not nefarious, that you could trust a platform that consistently changes the rules, I just find that very difficult to deal with. That in of itself makes me skeptical.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I watched the same testimony of Zuckerberg. Though I feel like our political leaders often make a fool of themselves when they're doing those things, his statements have to be taken at face value and it's so disheartening to hear some of the things he said. But the counter argument to that, and this is the fine line that I'm super interested in your perspective on, is who determines what's a lie? That's what I always come back to. I don't mean that to be political. If you believe one thing and I believe something else, which one of us is telling the truth and which one is lying? That's the part that really scares me.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I don't mean to be on a soapbox here. I'm supposed to be interviewing you. I just find this topic to be so... I didn't even plan on talking to you about this and then I read this. I was like, "This is what we have to talk about." I watched Sacha Baron Cohen's thing. I would say 80% of it, I was pounding the table saying, "Amen, bro. Very good stuff." And he's also hilarious. But there was this part of it that I can't help. Maybe it's my recovering libertarian side or whatever that says, "What you're saying is your truth, not the truth. What if your truth isn't my truth?" I don't mean that politically, just in general. I'm not taking a stance. I'm saying, when the issue with these platforms for me in general is that someone is getting to determine the truth. Any individual human is always going to end up being biased one way or the other. Even if it's not political, maybe they just don't play as many Bills highlights as they do New York Giants highlights. I'm a Buffalo Bills fan. Something silly like that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The idea that as we go towards the truth, this statement of "democracy is based on shared truths, not shared lies," is always who gets to determine which things are truths and which things are lies. Should we even be concerned about that?
--:-- Scott Monty: What you've touched on here is one of the great philosophical debates of all time: how we determine what is true and what is not. It's almost the George Costanza school of philosophy. George Costanza, that wonderful character from *Seinfeld*, once famously said, "Jerry, remember, it's not a lie if you believe it." There actually is a philosophical debate about that very topic. I forget exactly who the philosopher was off the top of my head. Most recently it's Jordan Peterson, but it goes further back into the realms of philosophy. I just read something about this the other day that made that spring up, and I can't remember who it was. It's something that humans have been debating for a long time. It's not going to change anytime soon.
--:-- Scott Monty: There will always be certain empirical things that are backed by data that we can all agree on. Well, that we *should* be able to agree on. I think things have gotten more contentious. The situation that we're in right now, particularly politically, we've seen so many things questioned. This is part of the strategy behind this. If you question enough things that are actually true, you begin to make doubters out of people who don't think for themselves. They then begin to seriously doubt things that are always empirically true.
--:-- Scott Monty: Look at the Flat Earth Society. How is it possible in almost 2020 that a Flat Earth Society with tens of thousands of members actually exists when empirically it can be proven that the earth is round in many different ways? These people fervently believe it. Why? Because they take it as a belief. They don't take it as accepted fact.
--:-- Scott Monty: Bring this back to the likes of Facebook and their decision about punting on political advertising. Their attitude is, "Well, who are we to say what's true or what's not?" Exactly, which is why you shouldn't be in the business of political advertising at all. You shouldn't be picking and choosing which things are true and aren't. Just get out of the political advertising business, period. For political campaigns. If you extract yourself out of all political issues advertising, then suddenly you're in the realm of, I don't know, pro-choice versus abortion, anti-vaxxers versus vaccinations, which is another thing that's on the realm of Flat Earth Society. There's a whole host of issues that are out there that we can debate on and that certainly people can still weaponize. But at least if you take the political campaigns out of the advertising business on Facebook, that'll be one section removed from continuing to spew some of these outright lies.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I philosophically agree with that point. And then I see someone like Andrew Yang, who if it wasn't for Facebook, we wouldn't even know that he existed. Because Facebook and Twitter... I shouldn't say this is fact, it is my perception in my professional opinion. I'm not even really a Yang supporter. I just—
--:-- Scott Monty: What are the Yang Gang?
--:-- Scott Monty: You know, I really like the Yang Gang. They seem like they're pretty fun. And I am not anti-Yang in any way. I just don't know that I'm sold on UBI yet, but he seems like a problem solver. I don't want to get political. I just find him very interesting. He seems like a very interesting candidate to me. And out of all of them, if I had to see someone go up against Trump in a debate, I feel like he's one of the few who could take some of the punishment that would come. I don't know. But again, I'm not for or against Trump in any way. I just don't mean it politically, but I find it interesting.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Right. I want it to be good debate, not just yelling at each other. What I see is the story in mainstream media feels very scripted. Someone like Andrew Yang wouldn't have a shot if he didn't have a chance to reach an audience on these platforms. He's developed a very large following. Because I don't believe political polling from mainstream sources, I actually think he's a scarier candidate to some of the front runners than they give on. That is entirely because of his ability to reach people on the platforms. So if I'm thinking about it, my gut tells me to axe political advertising from all social media. It's too divisive. It's too easy to rig and game and be deceptive. You can take a singular fact—if we're both looking at the number three, you can make that number three look good for you, and I can make that number three look good for me. No one knows what that number three stands for because it's meaningless to begin with. But how do you coordinate that with someone who is not a mainstream favorite, who still has a voice and wants to be part of a campaign? Is there a way, or is that the kind of collateral damage of a decision like this?
--:-- Scott Monty: Well, I think you've hit on a great point or counterpoint to eliminating political advertising on social media. It gives the incumbent the advantage. And certainly that's not what we want in America. I think we always want a fair fight. We always want people with good ideas to be able to come to the table, regardless of how minor they are as players. This has always been the American dream. Anyone can grow up to be president. And certainly they have.
--:-- You know, to me, I think back to the 2008 election. That was the year that Obama won. This guy who was not really known outside of very few circles, a junior senator, managed to have this amazing victory. A lot of it, at least publicly, the success was contributed by social media. That was the popular opinion. When I was at Ford, we brought in the consulting team that was behind the digital campaign for Obama. We wanted to learn from them. If we were to use a campaign style communication for a big corporation, what would it look like? What are the best practices? And lo and behold, they told us that their secret was email. So here we come right back to email where we started.
--:-- They said all they needed from people was a first name, a zip code, and an email address. That's not too much data to give up, is it? From there, they were able to build a relationship with people. They were able to get people to opt in more and more to share more information as they moved ahead. They could see the type of content that worked with them. They had amazing tools to arrange content, work with colors, do lots of testing on subject lines. To the point where it was a finely oiled machine. They said all they needed to do in every single email was to present three things: here's what you missed, here's what's coming next, and here's how you can get involved. That's a formula and a technology that anyone can use, regardless of their size. Whether you're a small business owner, a local politician, or somebody just starting out coming out of college who wants to make a name for yourself. It's a simple formula on a universal technology that works wonders if you do it well.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. You remember his website? It was just a landing page.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It was just a single—any hack who can go to Squarespace or download a standard theme from WordPress could have that website. It was a simple call to action with a picture and an embedded form. That was the whole deal. Yeah, that's absolutely it. Take social media out of the entire equation, and the basics are still there.
--:-- You know, it's funny to me. I feel like I am much more in the eternal camp. If there's a spectrum, and one side is you create something you can only do once a year but it lasts for all of history, and the other side is you can create a million things in a day but every single one is gone by the end of the day, I would skew towards that eternal side. Using your terminology, the more ethereal end of the spectrum. We have someone like Gary Vaynerchuk. You said the other day in one of your newsletters that he is often misunderstood or misquoted. I agree with that sentiment. I think his message is often misconstrued, taken from a very shallow vantage point, which misses a lot of the depth of what he's trying to teach people.
--:-- But it feels to me like you really have two options today. In the middle is where you get lost in the shuffle and you're just noise. It is either doing something like what you're doing with Timeless and Timely. It's solid. It's lasting. It makes you think. I took one newsletter that you sent out yesterday, and we've had an entire conversation around it because of the depth of the topic. And then the other side is you go—Gary obviously has a 30-person team to help him, but there are versions of this that even an individual can do where the depth of the content is spread out over a thousand touches. Do you think it's fair to say that you really have to choose one way or the other and swing far? To be in that middle where you're creating a couple pieces of social media and then occasionally do something long—it's really difficult to be in that middle section and be successful with your message, regardless if you're promoting a business, a brand, a political campaign, whatever.
--:-- Scott Monty: Yeah, I think if you do anything in half measures, you're going to get half results or less. Look, I've taken a very deliberate step in the direction I have. There are not a lot of people out there that are clamoring for deep thinking and timeless messages. I see all sorts of social media gurus out there who are getting business hand over fist because they're selling get rich quick schemes. They're telling people to focus on a Snapchat story or your TikTok strategy, on and on and on. I'm tired of chasing the latest trend. I'm tired of seeing executives with shiny object syndrome. Particularly at a time when CMO tenure is as low as it's ever been, some 18 months or so. As a CMO, you need to sit down with your CEO and have a frank conversation about strategy and about the long-term approach. Chasing numbers and trying to meet monthly or quarterly quotas and trying to simply satisfy Wall Street is an impossible game. You're going to lose if not sooner, then later.
--:-- Creating a long-term strategy, building relationships with the constituents that matter—whether it's customers, certainly employees, suppliers, shareholders as well. This is part of the whole Business Roundtable statement of purpose of a corporation that came out a few months ago. It's part of the Davos 2020 statement that was just put out. Businesses need to exist for more than just their shareholders. You need to put a stake in the ground and say, either I'm going to do this short-term chase because that's simply the dance my CEO is requiring me to do, or I'm going to have a frank conversation about what our business means, what values we have, what our mission is, what we're trying to accomplish, and determine the best way forward to do that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Ron Tite's new book, Think, Do, Say—or, Think, Do, Say, Do, Say. Oh, Jesus. I'm going to butcher it. I apologize, Ron. Purpose before product, right? He pounds that over and over and over again. I had him on the show a few weeks ago, and we just pounded that topic because I could not agree with you more. I couldn't agree with him more. This is the driving factor.
--:-- I know you don't know a tremendous amount about my history, but most of my tenure has been inside the insurance industry, in particular independent insurance agents. Not the guy at State Farm or the big brands, but smaller, relatively smaller carriers and smaller agencies. This idea of hammering home purpose—before we think about product, before we think about our investors or our shareholders—the value they derive is meaningless if we haven't backed all the way up. But we've gotten into this space of people chasing tactics and selling courses. One thing is that's a real shitty life. If your life is the next TikTok ebook because Gary V just put out a video about it, that's a shitty life. I don't want that life.
--:-- But I do believe I'm going to disagree with you on one point. You started your last answer with "there's not many people clamoring for deep thinking." I could not disagree with you more on that topic. I think people are dying for deep thinking. They don't know where to go with it, and they don't yet know who to trust. If Joe Rogan—and I follow the IDW, whatever it's technically called—I like the way they attack things, even though I don't agree with them all the time. This long form diving into really complex topics and having respectful but productive disagreements on things—I feel this is the discourse that people are dying for. The pendulum just hasn't swung back far enough yet. There are only so many people like you doing a newsletter like this. I would love to think that my 18 to 30 minute video newsletter could someday be part of that conversation. This type of deeper, richer, more dynamic conversations, or beginnings of conversations, are what people are dying for. They just don't know where to go to get them yet because there aren't enough of you out there creating them. Hopefully, conversations like this point more people towards resources like yours.
--:-- Scott Monty: You know what, Ryan, I would agree with that assessment. I think there is a need for this out there. I'm working on a book right now, and it's going to be largely informed by the newsletters and blog posts that I've done, but I'm still trying to put some shape around it. It's going to be something deeper. It's going to be around virtuous leadership and what that means. But the thing that I haven't seen come to fruition yet is people hiring for this kind of thing. People bringing in executive coaches, advisors like me to help them think through these things. They haven't gotten to the point where it's a business requirement yet. I'm sure there are CEOs out there—this is a particularly C-level discussion—who are beginning to think that way, but I just haven't seen it spring out yet as far as people who want advice, who want help to work through some of these thorny issues within their organizations.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I agree with that point. I completely agree with that. Speaking specifically to the insurance industry, because that's where I've done the executive coaching that I've done, it's there. But it's the conversation you have over a glass of scotch at the bar, not when you're sitting in the conference room working the whiteboard, talking through ideas, listening to gameplay. When you're doing the work, you get what you would expect from a 2019 leader—all the cliches. Then you go have the glass of scotch afterwards and decompress. Now all of a sudden you start to dive into these things. You're like, "Why didn't you say that when we were sitting in the room?" That's where we need to go.
--:-- This is why my perspective is that the pendulum hasn't swung back enough yet where people are comfortable having these conversations in the open. When I can have someone like you on and have a conversation like this that includes a little bit of vulnerability and some insightful connections into deeper topics, I think it's important. What I hope is it shows people that these types of conversations are okay. You're not showing weakness by hiring Scott Monty to come into your office and work you through how to be the best version of your position. That's not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of strength. I think that's where we need to get.
--:-- Scott Monty: Well, Ryan, I think that's so well put. It underscores some of the thinking and the references I've made recently. It's not just because it's trendy because of the movie—it's something I've thought of for a while. If you go through my archives, my website, et cetera, you'll see it's there throughout. What I've come to appreciate again as an adult, just like I've come to appreciate my classics education, is the wisdom of Fred Rogers more and more. His simple truths, his willingness to slow down, to slow the cadence down, to listen to people, particularly to children, and to encourage them to simply express what's on their minds and to say it's okay with who they are. If we can take that same kind of philosophy and apply it to business, we'll achieve the outcomes that you were just talking about—making it okay to have these thoughts, to express these kinds of things, and to begin to push that pendulum forward together.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Scott, I think that is a wonderful place to end our conversation. I want to thank you so much for your time, and I want to thank you for the work you do on your newsletter and just in general. You are very giving with your insight and your experience. The fact that a lot of the content that you give away is completely free for people just to subscribe to your newsletter is a gift. If you could just let people know the place you would like them to go to connect with you, that would be tremendous.
--:-- Scott Monty: Absolutely. Well, thank you for that. The easiest way to find me and my content is at scottmonty.com. I put out one newsletter a week. I used to try and overachieve and do lots of stuff. I've cut it back. However, I do have a bonus subscription for people that support me on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/scottmonty. There you can get an additional post per week. If you like the insights you're getting every Wednesday, every Friday I send a bonus one just for my Patreon supporters. So scottmonty.com will get you to all of those places.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Thank you so much, Scott. It's been a pleasure.
--:-- Scott Monty: Thank you, Ryan.
--:-- Announcer: Close twice as many deals by this time next week. Sound impossible? It's not. With the One Call Close System, you'll stop chasing leads and start closing deals in one call. This is the exact method we use to close 1,200 clients in under three years during the pandemic. No fluff, no endless follow-ups, just results fast. Based in behavioral psychology and battle tested, the One Call Close System eliminates excuses and gets the prospect saying yes more than you ever thought possible. If you're ready to stop losing opportunities and start winning, visit MasterTheClose.com. That's MasterTheClose.com. Do it today.
