The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Mari Anne Snow CEO, Founder of Sophaya & The Remote Nation Institute

Episode Date: August 17, 2022

Mari Anne Snow CEO, Founder of Sophaya & The Remote Nation Institute Sophaya.com Remotenationworks.org

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss you wanted the best you got the best the greatest kiss band in the world does anybody has anyone ever figured out in all 13 years we turned this month that i stole that from kiss kiss alive one that's that's their opening when they do that so i and i'm of the vintage chris where ah i would actually get that

we have a fan of kiss two fans actually and so we stole that we thought it was a great pitch but if you haven't figured out where that is from shame on you go go listen to kiss live one two three anyway guys i'm'm Chris Voss. If you've never met me before, the host of the show, at least that's what the title says they sell. They prop me up every day and we put up a podcast. You may have heard of it. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you guys being here.

We have an amazing guest on the show, Mary Ann Snow. She does a lot of things. She's a multi-hat wearer, if you would, a multi-serial entrepreneur, if you would. So we're talking to her about her things that she does and how she accomplishes them. In the meantime, always go to give us a five-star rating on iTunes. Refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Put your arm around them and say, have you joined the family that loves you but doesn't judge you? The Chris Foss Show.

Also see our big LinkedIn group and our LinkedIn newsletter and all this stuff and all the crazy places we are on the web. We have today Mary Ann Snow. She is Sophia's founder and CEO. She's a recognized remote work expert with over 18 years experience helping organizations use remote work and distributed team strategies for cost effective business growth and competitive market advantage. Her and her team focuses on the human side of remote work throughout the pandemic, which is probably really good for remote work for business consulting. Her and her team apply their expertise to help companies rethink their business models, stay connected with their people and assess their strategic risk. Her goal expertise to help companies rethink their business models, stay connected with their people, and assess their strategic risk. Her goal is to help her clients build greater business

resilience, learn new skills, and leading dispersed teams and productivity plan for the workplace of the future. I'm just adding to your bio as I go. Welcome to the show, Mary. How are you? I'm great, Chris. Thank you very much. And yes, the pandemic was quite an experience for a lot of people, wasn't it? What? Did something go on the last two years? I'd say that you want to talk about a proof of concept that we could do way more than we think, thank God, with technology these days. And think about all the people in the world who kept the world running,

even though we were doing it from our closets, from our kitchen tables, and God only knows whatever else is sitting behind our virtual backdrops. I'm looking to go ultra remote. I want an ultra remote situation where I can be as far away from my boss as I possibly can, not have to do any work, and still receive checks. Do you have a program for that? Anyway. So give us your dot coms. We're going to be talking about a couple of different projects that you're working on.

Give us your dot coms so people can look them up on the interwebs, please. So our website is our business-to-business B2B consulting company. It's S-O-P-H-A-Y-A.com. And then we've got the Remote Nation Institute where we're standardizing work practices for folks who have to manage these types of organizations. And that is remotenationworks.org. Come and find us if you're leading remote teams, if you want to work distributed teams, and if you want to know how to manage Chris Voss when he's off gallivanting, come and talk to me. I'll help you with that. Don't talk to her, please. Please let me gallivant away. So let's talk about the first company first, Sophia. Tell us about what you offer clients, how you work with them.

I'm sure our LinkedIn crowd was going to love this data. So it's no surprise to anybody that, you know,, who claim that they want everybody back into an office. The plain fact is with globalization and companies that are distributed, they sit in more than one place, the likelihood that you're going to be sitting in the exact same geographic location as your boss was already starting to shift before 2020. And then in 2020, it really took a turn. It became front and center. So we work with organizations that have been trying for years, really struggling for years, thinking about how do you take a global team or a national team or even a regional team that's

sitting in different locations? How do you keep them engaged? How do you actually keep them in the know? How do you build trust, but also hold them accountable? And how do you shift the way that you're thinking about how you're going to get the best value out of that team? Yeah. And so you come up with, it sounds like you were in the business for a long time before COVID. And so you guys already have system downing. COVID probably, like you said, proof of concept. Yeah, it was interesting because I've been working in distributed teams and remote teams since the 1990s. And actually, I was running national teams of folks and you want to get a big kick out of things. When I first started, the only technology that was available

was VHS tapes. And so if we wanted to get a message out to a national group of folks on the team, I would have to go into a video studio, get videotaped. It would go on a VHS tape. We would then make copies, which I would put in envelopes with labels and take to something called the post office. I've heard of that. I've heard of that. Yeah. And, you know, so I was working in international finance and with international financial service teams. And we, the only video channel at that point was Skype.

And there was this little product that was just starting to come on the market that I started working with called SharePoint. Microsoft's big Kahuna, you know, collaborative team program that they're pushing a lot right now. And I was actually working with the, with the Redmond team because I was a beta tester very early on and was already convinced that it was a really great platform to use. Yeah. And so on your company's webpage, you guys offer what you call the SOFIA method, four-step process. Talk to us about that and how you help companies,

you know, implement and do so. Yeah. So I ironically in 2020 and 21 wrote the book, literally wrote the book. It's coming out on September 13th called Remote Work Handbook. And the four-step process really boils down to, first of all, do you have a strategy that integrates and implements remote work very deliberately and consciously into your business objectives so that you can get your leadership on board and get them, you know, informed. And the second piece is we help you to assess your operations to really kind of think about how do you start integrating some of the best practices into every level of your organization. The third piece is your talent management cycle.

Once you have it built into operations and you're bringing people in, what does that look like? What does an interview look like when you never meet that person in person? What does that integration process? How do you get them connected to know, how do you get them connected to your culture? So we help companies really kind of think about that piece. And then we help them by teaching them the business skills, both at the leadership level and the employee level so that, so that people know how to do it and do it effectively.

That's awesome. I mean, you know, it's a good drop-in plan where people can learn everything how to get from A to Z. I know you have some different partners that you use on your website too for helping design remote work and it's good to have different kits, I guess. Yeah. And it's, you know, we work with all sorts of really kind of, you know, because people always say to me, you know, not everybody can do remote work. And I kind of chuckle because, you know, even if you own a retail store that has a brick and mortar presence and you sell things over the counter, if you talk to vendors online, if you have, you know, connections with people that you are doing via phone or, you know, you do emails with people or you send them letters, whatever it is, you are actually engaging in some form of remote work. So even very traditional companies are really kind of thinking about things differently. And quite frankly, technology is disrupting a lot of things. During the pandemic, we're now

working with healthcare systems that are thinking about different ways like telemedicine to connect with their patients. We're thinking about different ways that retail companies that have receptionists, different types of organizations like banks. We worked with a hearing aid company that had hearing clinics. We worked with a very large scale automobile company. It's an international company. Everybody knows it begins with a T. And quite frankly, they're thinking about the way people buy cars now in comparison to how they used to. So we were helping them to bring their dealers in so that their dealers could start to really reimagine how they're going to interact with their customers in the future. So we're talking small scale, big scale, manufacturing, energy segments, financial services, name a business. And it's quite possible that we've had a conversation with them. So what's the future of remote work? Do you

see, I know people, some companies have been trying to claw back workers in the office and they've met some significant resistance. People are very spoiled by this program and I think they feel that maybe their life quality, the quality of life is better. I mean, I've seen a lot of people talk about how, you know, I'm not stuck in traffic four hours a day. My life quality is better. And sometimes they're switching to other employers for remote work. What's the future of things seeing? Are we going to refill all these empty leasing buildings I see everywhere around me? Well, the reality is that every employee survey, every labor market survey that has been done by all the big consulting companies indicate that flexible work is going to be a differentiator and something that puts you in the preferred employer category in the future. Wow. here is, Chris, I want you to think back on the last two and a half years, right? So we told people

who had never worked from home that we were going to send them home. We told them they were going to have to do it whether they liked it or not. Even when school was out, they had to homeschool kids, daycare was gone, going to the grocery store was hard. Everybody's fighting for internet bandwidth. And we made it work for two and a half years. And now that things are opening up again, what managers are telling people is you have to come back to the office because I don't trust you. So you saved our bacon during COVID and the last two and a half years. But if you don't come back to the office because I don't trust you. And guess what?

A lot of people are not loving that too much. You know, feeling disrespected, basically saying I saved your bacon. And now you are telling me I have to get in a car. I have to drive to work for two hours when the gas prices are astronomical. Yeah, that's true. And now I have daycare back. My kids are going back to school and you're going to make me come back into an office for what? The fear is that, you know, the really crazy part, the really crazy part is very often when people are getting back into the office,

they're not going into conference rooms to meet. They'll actually meet from their laptop and do virtual meetings inside the office, mind you. That is crazy. I haven't heard that. So basically, instead of, you know, walking over to Bob's booth, you're just like, I'm just going to call Bob on my laptop because I've been doing that for the last two years. There's no reason to walk five feet to his booth because, you know, I'm used to this, right? Yeah. And quite frankly, we were going in that direction anyway because everybody was already feeling from you know 2008 2009 with the

financial crisis you and i both know that teams got leaner and people were doing more with less and then we had the great resignation we had covet we had great resignation and you know yeah people are not willing to put up with what they put up with before. Plus, no one wants to go to Bob's booth. He smells bad and he always has fish for lunch in the microwave. That's right. Chris, you named something really great. It's like, don't over-romanticize the office. Do you think it was that great before? It wasn't. It's the same as people

working from home people are just on youtube between tuesday and friday or only fans you know doing whatever you know like monday was the day they were working i'm gonna push back on that because this is the people the people who were working in your office are working out of your office. The people who weren't working in your office are not working outside of your office. So there were always slackers. Yeah. Slackers existed in the office. All right.

So I'll give you their working Monday to Tuesday and the rest of the time they were on YouTube. I don't know. I'm just, that's a joke. I, you know, this is what we do on the show. We bring levity or is levity? I don't know. Comedy. We try and read comedy. We call it comedy, but it isn't funny. Anyway. So have we, have we plumbed enough about Sophia? Should we move to the next company or the more we we left off i think you know the remote nation institute was born in 2020 because we were getting inundated with calls from folks who were really completely absolutely fluxed because they had no idea it's like what do i do I do? How do I do this? And, you know, so they were trying to really kind of think about how they were going to do it. And how they were going to get it done. And they struggled. And so Remote Nation Institute was conceived in pretty much overnight. And in that timeframe, what we did was we started. I think we lost your audio, Mary. We'll be back with Mary here in a second.

We're enjoying the remote networking issues that people have to remote networking. There we go. Let's see if we have her back now. Hey, I've got you. I've got you on audio. Mary? Hi, can you hear me? I can hear you.

I can hear you. For whatever reason, my cam has decided to call it a day. Well, the podcast is all audio. We can just finish off doing the audio. That sounds great. There you go. So you were starting to tell us about Remote Nation Institute. The Remote Nation Institute got started because in early 2020, we were getting inundated with calls from folks who were struggling, right? It just hit everybody really hard. And we had expertise

that was really important to share. So we stood up the Remote Nation Institute in about two weeks and throughout 2020 into 2021, we did pro bono webinars and consulting with every company that came to us that had questions because we knew that the world was really, really struggling. And we felt an obligation to make sure that if we had concrete practical tips that we could give people, that we would do that and help wherever we could. So that's really good. And so you've got courses on the site and stuff? We've got courses. We have self-paced courses, e-learning courses. We do a professional certificate program that we've made available to people so that they can learn a standardized set of business skill practices specifically

related. We do executive coaching. We do planning with our clients. But the other thing that we do is we do lots and lots of webinars and conversations like this, Chris, where we get out in front of folks and let folks know that this is not only a viable alternative, but quite frankly, is something that is a big business differentiator and a competitive advantage for folks who are deliberate, very deliberate in how they are applying it. Awesome, Sus. What's some of the courses that you cover there that are on there if you want to just give us a sampling? Sure. First of all, let's get practical, right?

Running a meeting and running a meeting in lots of different forms these days because not everybody's in the room. So you might be doing an in-person meeting, but you might be doing a hybrid meeting with some people in the room, some people out of the room, or you might be doing an in-person meeting, but you might be doing a hybrid meeting with some people in the room, some people out of the room, or you might be doing an all virtual meeting. And how do you keep people engaged? To your point, how do you use humor effectively? How do you get people to participate? How do you take care of things? Managing interpersonal communications, multi-channel interpersonal communications. And how do you build trust and how do you overcome misunderstandings with your remote

teams? How do you engage people? There's lots and lots, endless topics. You know, people are messy and anytime that you have to interact with people, we can help you think about how to do that in this construct. Yeah, I think a rule that we should probably make, I've had this theory going on my head, is that when we do Zoom calls, everyone should be naked. Now, there shouldn't be anything showing, but everyone should just be naked. Does that sound like a good idea or a bad idea? Well, I had a breastfeeding mom coming into my calls.

And, you know, we can only see her from the neck down. So there you go. There you go. I mean, it's all about what you see. I mean, what about Jeffrey Toobin? I've seen it. No, I'm just kidding. We don't want to get into that subject.

But no, it's good that there's... Remember when you're... Remember when you're... Here, let me write this down. Note to self, don't be Jeffrey Toobin on a Zoom call. That joke will not be handled. I'll be writing that joke horse and call back until I die. And he got his job back too.

So, I mean, maybe if you want a promotion, that's the thing to do. I don't know. Don't do that, folks. Don't do that. These are jokes. We do jokes. So, Mary, you've got a lot of great data and information on there. And so companies can use this and then they can hire you and basically say, hey, to their folks, go through these videos, go through these trainings,

and whatever you're struggling with or whatever you need to do, you can find this as a resource. Is that correct? Absolutely. Absolutely. We're here to help, and we're here to give people an advantage because, you know, quite frankly, you know, the world changes all the time. And when the world changes, there's opportunities lost, but there's opportunities gained. So it's the folks who are the early adopters that are going to get that first mover advantage. So we're helping them do that.

It's really interesting to me that the people who have embraced remote work and mastered it or you know they're trying to master i don't know if anybody's the greatest at it maybe somebody is you probably have a good idea if anybody's really got it down well but i think it's still a moving target but you know it's interesting to me how there were people that you know they jump ship they'd be like oh you want to claw back bring us to the office yeah we're we're going to go with another employer. You know, I saw some high-level people leave at Apple and change their clawback policy because they're like, oh, crap, we're going to lose good people if we did this clawback. It's really interesting, the balance. What do you think about the hybrid sort of thing where, I don't know, people come in the office every other day or something or half the week and the other half they don't.

Is that going to be a successful thing in the future? I mean, maybe you got to at least, you got to show up once a week and, you know, have a meeting and just let us know that you're wearing clothes or something. Well, for one day out of the week, you're not running around in your pajamas. Well, if I'm effective and I'm making money for you, why do you care? You know, why is that a problem? You know, so I think it's important that we're really kind of saying to ourselves, what do we care about when we're thinking about, you know, what we're paying for with our these days. And I think it's important that most people know that Apple's not the only one who clawed back.

Elon Musk, who is, you know, Mr. Get eyeballs on social media, made a big exclamation and a big proclamation that had to be clawed back as well. He's already clawed back on it. And, you know, he's not the only one. And the reason why is because, you know, in the end, if you are dependent on your team and your team tells you that they can't work in the work environment that you're setting up for them, then why is it so important that people be physically present

if they have the setup to be able to very productively get their work done? And I think that that's a big question that I say to people a lot. Why is it important? Why, you know, really kind of think about what it is that you're objecting to. And if it comes down to you want to see people because you want to see people, then whose problem is it? Isn't it an employee's problem or is it your problem? You know, it's kind of that old world. Is it old world thinking?

Has it become old world thinking now to we need to see people working or else? Well, I went to my first in-person networking event, and I was pretty amused by the fact that there were a lot of individuals in that room sporting their high-powered suits and doing a lot of fist pumping and chest bumping just to make sure that everybody understood that they were there and they were in the room and they were doing their thing. And so I'm like, how do you know that you're the big cheese if nobody actually can see you, right? And so I think we have to really kind of think about why we want folks in that space. Now, I will also tell you that, you know, there will always be value to in-person stuff within a context, right? And it's just like, if you're going to bring people together, then do you want to maintain an office and pay that rent when people only want to come together once a month? once or twice in a week and you still have the same overhead so why is that a good business proposition for you and how is that going to impact your bottom line yeah yeah i had heard i don't know if this is true i think it was a survey or something i saw on linkedin that they found that most people that were coming back to the office, they were just spending all their time socializing around the water cooler.

Like, it was like, you know, they were just catching, hey, what did you do this week? Ah, we took the kids for a barbecue and blah, blah, blah. You know, it's like they weren't doing anything. They were actually using it as like, it became like a social event. Like when you go to the bar or the club after work and socialize, it almost became like that instead of people going and going, we should get to work now at our desk for a change. You know, it's interesting. I'm going to go back to what I said before. There were always people who were using work as more of a social event. And there were people who were actually getting the work done.

And here's the interesting piece. I will tell you that if you looked at that survey, it said, yes, they were glad to go back to the office and see their buddies. But then they said, can I go back home tomorrow to work to get my work done? So and appreciate that even really diligent employees coming back into the office, if they're getting pulled into meeting after meeting or if they are getting disrupted because they haven't seen someone for a while, then it's harder to get your task list taken care of. And so, you know, you have to balance those things. You definitely do. What do you think about, you know, you've had a lot of people on the show for remote work and book authors.

What do you think about like the software? I feel like there's some sort of software that will track whether you've been working or not. I think it's, this goes back to, do you trust people or don't trust people? And, you know, ultimately, you know, ultimately, you know, if you set up a culture where you're going to track people electronically and you're going to put them in a police state, and I don't care. I mean, people do this in an office. People do this with call office. People do this with

call security. They do it with all sorts of different stuff. And, you know, appreciate that you get a certain level of compliance, but you'll also get smart people who are going to figure out how to game the system. So you're not necessarily going to get better productivity. You're just going to get people who are going to get a little more savvy about, you know, if they're going to get better productivity. You're just going to get people who are going to get a little more savvy about, you know, if they're going to figure out a way around it, they were going to figure out a way around it no matter what. And, you know, I used to, many years ago, had a locksmith who once said something really profound to me.

And he said, he said, said you know locks keep honest people honest you know years ago i read it was used to be over there tom peter's book thriving on chaos and one i believe was one of the chapters he talks about trusting people he's like the more trust people have the more honest they'll be or the more they're entrusted with the more else they would be and he wrote he wrote in his book about how nuclear people work at nuclear plants you know they're trusted with something very powerful right they're usually very responsible and i took that and ran with that and then i almost bankrupted me and my companies and what i realized is he'd missed

a key note. The reason those people are responsible is yes, they know they can kill millions of people if they screw up, but they can also kill themselves. So it's kind of a personal interest of dying in pain. If you steal staplers from my storage room, no one's going to die. So I learned the hard way about that. How do you feel about that? I mean, we can trust people, but isn't there a certain point, like you say, with the analogy of the lock, where certain locks keep people... I mean, how do we measure or...

I don't want to ask for the secret sauce. Do you think... What's good ways to measure whether people are being productive or not? Do we need do you do reporting on them? Do you, you know, somehow, you know, measure the metrics of their work? So you just, you know, encapsulated in very short order some of the primary concerns that multiple people have when they think about remote distributed teams. The assumption is, is if people are out of the office, that there is a higher likelihood that they're messing around and, and screwing off. And,

you know, ironically, people can mess around and screw off in an office just like they can steal if they're in an office, just like they can be dishonest and have a lack of integrity in an office. So let's parse it out. What it basically means, and it's not a secret sauce, it really kind of comes down to trust but verify. Do you have some sort of an accountability structure where you've actually set up expectations, where you have conveyed those expectations, and then you have a skilled group of managers or leaders or supervisors who are then capable of holding people accountable by observing their performance against performance metrics. So, you know, part of this is,

what are you asking of people? Do they have job descriptions? Do they have performance requirements? Do they have functional responsibilities? And do they have published deliverables? So when you're sitting there saying, how do you know someone's working? Well, if they are meeting the requirements of the job, if they are producing the functional tasks appropriately, if they're delivering on whatever you have set out for them for tasks in a manner that you've laid out, and you're observing this, and you're providing feedback for folks, and if they're off target, you're going to call them on it. You're going to go to them and say, hey, you missed a deadline. Tell me, tell me why. And, you know, at first, give people the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they missed a deadline because there wasn't clarity or because you gave them a piece of crappy technology that wasn't up to the task.

And then you set up a security system that was so tough that they couldn't actually execute in the timeframe because you don't have the infrastructure for them to do so. Or maybe they just needed to get a refresher on the tool you're asking them to use. So maybe it's a training problem. You know, so identify what the issue is that's preventing them. And if they're just slacking, then, you know, make sure that they understand the consequences of continued inappropriate behavior. And if they, you know, can't make the grade, cut them loose. Cut them loose.

That's my favorite part of the whole thing. You know, but cut them loose when you know you've given them the best chance to be successful. Wait, you have to give them a chance to? Up for success. Oh, but setting them up for failure is much more funner. And the drama stuff is... Note to self, stop sabotaging employees and set them up for success. Evidently, it's better, but less fun.

All right, there we go. I just got... I'll make some changes tomorrow, maybe. I don't know. I might not. It's... I don't know. I like the entertainment value of it.

Anyway, I'm sadistic. Clearly, we know that. Or masochist, one of the two. So what have we touched on about your business, what you do and how you do it? And what do we need to make sure we get in the can here? I think probably the biggest thing is, like it or not, the pandemic has really changed a lot of consumers' behavior and has introduced unbelievable amounts of cost-effective technology to the market that is going to have lots you think about a whole different set of societal rules in terms of how people are talking to each other and coming together and what they're willing to tolerate and not tolerate, then I think you got to make sure you rethink your business model because we're not going back. The good old days are the

good old days. And it's going to be the people who think about the opportunities in the moment, like Chris Voss, who's capitalizing in the podcast world right at this point in time. Right? Because we get our information differently. We connect with people differently. And, you know, think about that for the future. Yeah. I'm pretty sure people never listen to podcasts while they're on work hours. But, you know, the great thing about the podcast, the Chris Marshall podcast, you never have to feel guilty. You can tell your boss that you were listening so you can learn all the important data Mary is sharing with us because you want to be the best remote worker you can. So there you go. Or if you're a leader who's trying to do remote work and stuff, it's, it's an interesting field that we're in and in kind of uncharted territory, if you will. And yeah, I'm just, the one thing I'm mostly glad about is I'm not invested in commercial real estate. Everywhere I go, I see these buildings going up and I'm just like, yeah, who's going to use that? I'm just surrounded by empty office buildings that, I don't know.

You know, I just participated in an international conference talking about the future of work and how the current trends are going to impact. And it's changing the way houses are designed in Australia. People in Europe are rethinking the use of public spaces because with more people working at home, you know, how do they come together? What does a city center look like when you don't go to an office every day? That's true. There's no downtown sort of, you know, it really affects downtown. Here in Utah, decades ago, that's how old I am, at least a decade or two or three or four or five.

But here in Utah, we had, you know, a thriving downtown, you know, and we were going to have the Olympics come to the state. This is that people are like, holy crap, he is old. And you're right. And so they literally shut down the downtown. They, they, they're rebuilding the whole freeway that would be the heart center going, it's a bloodline or whatever, going down to the heart of the city. And so people had to learn to use back roads and side roads for like, I think two years this went on and it literally killed the downtown. It killed the bars, the clubs, you know, offices had to, you know, it was, it was a nightmare, but by, by killing, by teaching a new pattern to people. And it's interesting how people adopt with their patterns. If you teach

them a new pattern, it's really hard to get to go back to the old one. And so more people went to clubs or bars that were in the suburbs. And, you know, it basically everything that used to be, you know, the whole, the whole city used to revolve around downtown. And so all of a sudden it became, okay, well, no, and we need offices out in the suburbs and, you know, it became more spread out. And it was really interesting to see the dynamic because when the downtown came back, it still was bankrupt and dead because people were just like, yeah, we learned a new place to go, so we're not going there anymore. It was really interesting how that worked and, you know,

and like how the downtown is affected because if people aren't showing up to work, it affects the restaurants there, the bars, the clubs. It affects everything in downtown. And then there were a lot of people who lived in downtown. So, you know, condominiums and stuff like that, et cetera, et cetera. So there you go. It's really interesting. It's been an interesting conversation to have about this. Anything more we want to touch on before you go out? No, I think that, I think your example is really kind of reflective of what's happened in COVID. You know, we've had two and a half years, Chris, two and a half years of disruption, two and a half years of travel was, entertainment was disrupted, luxury stuff was disrupted, work was disrupted, and now people made different habits. Yeah, yeah. And it's going to be hard to get them to go back. I think the sooner companies

realize that, the better. I mean, even like hybrid and stuff. But I think inflation, gas I know is coming down. I heard the consumer prices for goods or consumer wholesale prices for goods is coming down. The supply chain is caught up. You know, things hopefully will be coming a little bit normalized. We still have a war in Europe, but we wish that thing would get rounded up. Yes. Ukrainian friends, I'd say. Yeah.

I heartily agree with you. It's just, it's so sad to watch people who, you can see them going through every one of those lives, which were normal like ours, and they're not offended, and they're in a war zone. And so hopefully, you know, somebody takes care of the Putin problem. But, you know, it's interesting the world we live in. And, yeah, it was kind of funny how everyone was starting to go back to the office. They were forcing people back to the office, and the gas prices went crazy. And, you know, companies had to go, well, crap, you know.

They're spending half their day of what they would make per hour paying for gas in their car, you know. It's really just been a bad two years. I don't have to tell anybody. But it's great that there's resources like yours where people can utilize them to make do with the state that we're in. And it's not just make do, my dear. It is, you know, it's like, you know, how do you, how do you capitalize on it?

Because there are people right now who are moving and shaking in ways that are going to have very, very specific, positive impacts on their business models. Most definitely. Most definitely. Well, give us your dot coms again so people can look them up on the interwebs, please. So we've got Sophia at S-O-P-H-A-Y-A dot com. And we have RemoteNationworks.org. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm all over LinkedIn as well. And we love having

conversations about remote work. And we have my book coming out September 13th, the Remote Work Handbook. There you go. There you go. Is it going to be on Amazon

and stuff? It's already up there for pre-sale. All right, cool It's already up there for pre-sale. All right, cool. Order that book up for pre-sale, folks. You can get it wherever fine books are sold. Thanks for coming on the show with us, Mary. We really appreciate it.

My pleasure, Chris. So nice to meet you and so nice to meet your audience. Pleasure. And they've learned so much, so it'll be good. It'll be, you know, this is, it's really an interesting future that we have going on. And, you know, I'm sure that we're all going to have it. We barely got started. Barely got started.

So enjoy the ride. Thanks for tuning in, my audience. Be sure to go to youtube.com for us. That's Chris Voss here, our big LinkedIn group and our LinkedIn newsletter. All the stuff we do on The Chris Voss Show. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe.

And we'll see you guys next time.