The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Ted Rubin – Speaker / Author / Provocateur Interview

Episode Date: February 18, 2020

Ted Rubin - Speaker/Author/Provocateur Interview

Hi folks, Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, welcome to the podcast, guys. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to go to our channel at youtube.com, 4x4chrisvoss, hit that bell notification and like button so you can get all the wonderful things that are going on there. Go to thecvpn.com or you can also go to Chris Voss Podcast Network. That's what cvpn.com stands for, Chris. Yeah, it's like two different websites that go to the same place.

Who knew? It's technology and digital, whatever. So you can go there. You can subscribe to all the different podcasts we do and see all the different wonderful things. As always, we have the best guests on The Chris Voss Show, only the best guests. And today we have the most

extraordinary guest. You've probably heard of him. He's been all over the world. He's been an incredible speaker, author, and everything else for a long time. I've known him for a long time. And his name is Ted Rubin. Ted is a leading social marketing strategist. He's the Photify CMO. He's an author, speaker, provocateur. Ted was the chief social marketing officer of Collective Bias and early entrant to the content and influencer marketing space and a principal shareholder until November 2016 when he sold out with a seven-figure acquisition. He has the book Return on Relationship, a multitude of books actually. Another one, How to Look People in the Eye Digitally, and The Age of Influence, Selling to the Digitally Connected Customer. And he's working on his latest book with his business partner and retail thought leader, John Andrews, titled Retail Revelancy. He talks a lot about return on relationship. Welcome to the show, Ted. How are you doing, buddy? I'm doing great, Chris. That was a mouthful. I actually didn't

expect you to get through all of it so efficiently. Dude, I've been researching to have you on the show and it's like I could spend days just trying to, all the stuff you've done and like books and different things you've been involved in. I watched a lot of your speaking videos and you've got some amazing stuff where can people find you on the interwebs so people can check you out as we're going through this well it's easy just just just google ted rubin t-e-d-r-u-b-i-n about the first 14 pages is all my stuff on ted rubin on every social network uh youtube is the only different one ted rubin usa and uh easy enough to find. But I got to tell you, you know, you said about all those things I've done, recognize the

fact that I'm 62 years old. So it's really more about age than it is about accomplishment. So is, so what, how does that work with the age? Is, is, did you, did you, like, how does that work with the age? Like, so is the age the key or is the accomplishment the key? Well, you know, I think with age comes accomplishment, hopefully, or at least a multitude of different efforts. So whichever way you want to look at it, some people look at it as an accomplishment, some people look at it as experience. I certainly have a boatload of experience, good and bad. And I love your energy, Ted. You have so much energy.

You just have this abounding energy. I think I'm basically 10 years younger than you. And hanging out with you is really motivating me right now. And watching your videos, you really have a lot of energy. You motivate people. But the rest of the time, I'm just pretty much asleep when I'm not hanging out with you. Fun fact for our listeners, he and I were both on the Forbes top 50 list. You were number 13 one year and I was 23. I was right below Chris Brogan. And our friend, was it Shaden Haunessy?

Hayden Shaughnessy? I'm dyslexic in my brain, I guess, when I speak. So we shared the same Forbes list at one time. We did. I mean, that might even be part of how we got to know each other. I think we connected back in 2013. What I really can't believe is that 2013 was seven freaking years ago. Dude, it went fast, man.

It went fast crazy. So you're working on some new books. I saw that you're speaking on Return on Relationship. For someone who's never heard of you, and it's hard to imagine that no one would have, but there's always the newer, younger audience. Tell us some more about you. Who is Ted Rubin?

What is the hip-hop about you, man? Oh, the hip-hop about me. oh the hip-hop about me well i was trying to be i was trying to be i pride myself on telling it like it is a lot of people don't realize because my blog is tedrubin.com it has a name it's called straight talk so i've got kind of a reputation for speaking my mind uh i try to do it professionally as much as i can um i'm also about being good to people, which is something that I, I mean, I've always tried to be good to people, but kind of the whole concept and the hats and the gear that I wear, which remind me and others around me have been a part of what I've been doing probably since about 2009, 2010. Just to give you a little

of the most recent, like digital kind of time, because again, I'm 62. And you don't want to go back into my whole career. But in 1997, I discovered the internet. And I was fortunate while doing that deciding that I wanted to get into that space, move back to New York from Florida, where I had moved after a career in finance for a while. I read a interview of Seth Godin. And it was before everyone knew who Seth Godin was. It's when he had just founded Yo-Yo Dine or shortly thereafter. His claim to fame before that was mostly just in the marketing community. He was a wunderkind at Atari as a brand manager. And the only books he had written were self-help books with Jay

Levinson. It was before his first bestseller in the marketing space, Permission Marketing. And everything he was talking about intrigued me, about how to deal with the customer, how ideas move around, the idea of permission marketing before he started calling it permission marketing. But what really got my attention was at the end of the article, the interviewer said, wow, this sounds like a really cool company.

He called it the first online direct marketing company. Do you have any job openings? And his answer was, I don't have any specific openings, but the way I build my company is I'll always hire smart people. And I need to find people that can sell anything because we're selling something that no one's ever sold before. And I raised my hand. I actually typed out on a typewriter my cover letter, stuck it into an envelope. Most of your audience might not know what a stamp is.

It's this thing from the U.S. government that you attach to an envelope, and you can actually put it in this box, and these guys kind of drive it or fly it all over the country, and then actually get out of their cars and walk it. Did you lick the envelope, the back of the envelope, to seal it? You get that nice minty. I actually not only licked the country, and then actually get out of the cars and walk it. Did you lick the envelope, the back of the envelope, to seal it? You get that nice minty. I actually not only licked the envelope, but back then I think I licked the stamp. Oh, that's right.

You had to lick the stamp back then. Shit, wow, I'm losing. I'm forgetting a lot of stuff here. My cover letter basically said, I'm smart, and I can sell anything. You need to hire me. There you go. My wife at the time, who my my ex-wife um now and for many years um looked at me like i was nuts and actually got angry at me why are you

wasting your time and a stamp a stamp a stamp a whole stamp someone that doesn't have a job opening i think it was like 23 cents back then something like that there's a lot of money to us you know maybe maybe that could be like a new book for you. The success is just licking the stamp. No, success is just a lick away. Actually, that's my profile motto on Pornhub. I don't know what that is. I mean, the truth is he called.

I ended up moving back to New York, going to work for Seth. And when I first got there, my family was still in Florida. I made the critical mistake. I ended up moving back to New York, going to work for Seth. And when I first got there, my family was still in Florida. I made the critical mistake. Don't anybody ever do this. If you've done it before, you'll know what I'm talking about. My family was still in Florida.

So when I went back to New York, I moved in with my in-laws for a few months. I mean, especially if your in-laws are like the Costanzas. Just do not do it. But, you know, everything happens for a reason. So it got me out of the house. I'm not an early ris a reason so it got me out i'm not an early riser but it got me out of the house every morning at 5 30 a.m before anybody woke up and it turns out who else is an early riser and gets to the office before anybody else seth i spent a few months every morning with one-on-one time with seth i was sitting there when he when

he wrote the article permission marketing for fast, that ended up becoming his best-selling book. So it just gave me some insight into a new world that was evolving that he was kind of at the forefront of. And I've always been a relationship guy and a networking guy, but it's where really the concept of return on relationship kind of really first took hold because he didn't call it that. But Seth was the guy that would send us out on meetings and not want us to come back with an order after the first meeting because he felt like if we did that, we didn't properly explain what we were doing and we didn't learn enough from the customer. So it was a great way to break into the digital world. That's a great way to approach that. I really like that. I used to teach my salespeople the most important question I wanted them to ask was, what are you trying to accomplish?

And to shut up and listen. And nine times out of ten, I mean, anytime they didn't ask that question, we'd have a customer that when they got to closing, they'd be pissed off. And they're like, this is what I told the loan officer. And the loan officer just kind of rammed down what I wanted. And I think I talked about the other day, it's real important for, to qualify your customer, to listen to your customer, find out what they really are trying to achieve. And if you can help them do that,

that makes all the difference in the world. I like that approach where they didn't want you to write an order too quickly because some, I've had clients that have written orders too quickly with me and later they're like, well, this isn't what I want. And I'm like, well, you ran around it through. Obviously I didn't collect enough data from you. So that makes complete sense to me as a salesman. Especially in a market where we were selling something that people hadn't bought before. I mean, when a few months after joining Yoyo9, I built a whole separate sales team to sell a product that no one else had sold before. We were selling click-throughs back in 2000, I'm sorry, back in 1997, when no one knew what a click-through was.

What's the internet? We would do a presentation to an agency. I mean, even a digital agency. Back then, I don't know if you remember Moda Media, but it was one of the first digital agencies. And after explaining that someone clicks and you pay for that and they land wherever you send them, they'd ask, what's the CPM? And I'd say, dude, you can reverse engineer back into the CPM. It's just math. That's not what it's about. You will only pay for a visitor. It was,

it was totally new thinking. So it was, it was a great place to be at that time. It was, I was, I had a lot of sales training, but it taught me about – I was always selling things that basically people knew what I was selling them. Whether or not they liked it or not might have been a different question. And by the way, as we all know since then, so many things have evolved. I mean, Collective Bias was a new product that no one knew what the hell it was until we spent the time and the patience and the listening to be able to explain it to them in a way they would understand. And now I'm back doing the same thing with Photify. So I have to say it was a very important critical moment in my

career. So now you're the CMO for Photify. And I think I'm seeing those posts on your Facebook channel, right? Well, what you've seen is photify is is a photo and video app that allows overlays of brands and and uh a branded content of of taglines of all different types of things in your photos and what i do mostly when i'm promoting something is instead of talking about it and writing oh use photify i use it myself yeah and i i like to say you know my dad i grew up with a dad who always said, you probably heard this expression coming from the same generation. Do like I say, not like I do. And I've always said to my daughters, you know, do like I do. Like I've become in the way

I lead in the way I market is I do things and people notice them and say, what's that? And what are you doing? Or people say, how do I best communicate with people on a certain platform? I'll go, well, like, I don't know if I have the best way, but I certainly have a way that's working for me. Why don't you watch what I do and see if you can do it. And I have a, a, a guy who I call my, my little brother, he grew up next door to me. Um, he, he became, he's now like my younger brother and, and, uh, he was not having a lot of success with social. And then a couple of years ago, he's now like my younger brother and, and he was not having a lot of success with social. And then a couple of years ago he started like just watching what I'm doing and it's, it's worked for him.

So what I do with photify is I use the tool. I overlay a lot of videos with it. I put it on my photos. I share it using other companies, brands. I'm remax is a big customer of ours. So I'll publish some content using their imagery because I just want to demonstrate how easy it is to use. And just real basic, and we can move on to something else. What's beautiful about Photovise, it helps companies scale content creation,

which they all have a challenge with, by empowering their employees to create content. And just like at Collective Bias, where we were trying to break through brands being afraid to let anybody but their agency create content and a collective bias, we used a community of bloggers. Now we're empowering companies to get their frontline employees who probably know their customers best to be able to share content and for them to have, not the word control is a bad word, but to have a little more influence over it to make sure they use the right colors the right imagery the right the right fonts the right tag

lines that they're spelling things right and giving the ability to track it to a certain degree and where can people find photify is it a photify.com you can go to photify.com if you want to just see some of the stuff about the company in general, or you can just go to the, or you can go to the app store and look at fortify app, P H O T O F Y. APP. Awesome sauce. So be good to yourself. I've seen that or not.

Be good to yourself. Be good to others. That's my, that's my thing. But I am a people. And I always tell people that part of, you know, no,

let part of no let up and be good to people is being good to yourself. Because if you're not good to yourself, it's going to be hard to be good to others. That's true. So I've seen the hashtag. And so what does that mean? What does that really mean to you? And what should people gather from that? Well, what it means to me is that it's just not that hard to be good to people.

And what I'm trying to convey is not just that it's nice to be good to people, but that it will make your life better. The way people react to you. So just quick story. I went through a really bad fight to keep my daughters in my life. I was, I was really angry when it ended. I had spent seven figures. I was 300 grand in debt back in 2010. And I, for another podcast, I'll tell you the story of the business I almost started, but good friends allowed me to do it for therapy to do the beginnings of it, but were there to stop me when it might've gone too far. But what happened was I woke up one morning when this whole thing was going on and I said, I don't want to be angry

anymore. And I started a Twitter handle, just be nice. And you know, just be nice was taken. So it's just underscore the letter B underscore nice. And I started using it as a part of my brand. And I started using the hashtag just be nice. And I started tweeting from it and talking about it. And like what happens with me a lot, as you know, you might remember, I wear funky socks and I post them and I have a headstock. Everybody wanted me to make a sock brand and then everyone wanted me to sell just be nice t-shirts. And my personal thing, and I'm not putting this on other people, is that I feel if I'm selling something, it takes away from the authenticity. So if I'm wearing be good to people, just be nice t-shirts, or I'm wearing socks and saying,

hey, look at my funky socks and oh, go to tedsock.com and buy them. Then it's more of a promotional marketing rather than something that's really part of who I am. Now, the socks is really part of who I am. The hashtag came because people started taking pictures of them. And it just kind of evolved into something which we could talk about, about letting things happen around you and then embracing them instead of maybe a brainstorming session where you try to come up with something that's your brand, which might not really be you. And the same thing

happened with Just Be Nice. Everyone kept saying, you should make t-shirts. I'm like, yeah, but then when I'm on stage talking about it, everyone's going to think about that. So I was on stage at a woman's event and this topic came up. And the when the show when the when the presentation ended this woman walked up to me and says said we've got to meet you're going to love what i'm doing because i said i'd rather support other people's things and embrace them than it to be mine that i'm selling and she brings me over this table and she has all these be good to people stickers and and booklets and you know a whole bunch of different premium type of goods and she goes my husband and i started this we were in the premium business. I decided that people just

aren't treating each other well. And now we've rolled it out into a whole separate business. And at the time it was just stickers and pencils and some cups. And she said, I would be honored if you would take a bunch of these stickers and, you know, maybe if you don't want to do your thing and I just kind of, I still have the Twitter handle but i i just adopted be good to people and i have the sticker on my i mean it's on my uh i have it on my phone i have it on my laptop every time i'm on my laptop and what i started finding is that people would walk behind my laptop and stop and say i love your sticker or wow that's great yeah oh my god that makes me feel good. And then she made T-shirts. I had them on the plane, and a flight attendant every once in a while

would walk by, and people would walk by me, and they'd say something. I started wearing the T-shirts, and I have to tell you, from my heart and my experience, this has changed my travel life. I get treated exponentially better. So maybe I can get in first class and upgrade. I don't know if it goes that far, but I will tell you that the TSA guys say hello to me. Oh, do they?

They know me in Fort Lauderdale. Oh, the Be Good to People guy. I walk into the Delta lounges. They call me the Be Good to People guy. That's awesome. I carry stickers with me. I have these T-shirts and I have the hats and I pullovers. But at one time she didn't have the hatch yet and you didn't have the pullover.

She just had the shirts. And I said, I wrote to her and said, listen, you know, sometimes when I fly, I'm coming from an event, I'm wearing a suit or I'm wearing a jacket and a shirt.

I don't know. It might be good to people. Can you make me some buttons? So she made buttons, which she sells now. And so I don't travel without a piece of paraphernalia and flight attendants. Like, look at me now once, do I walk on a plane with them saying, I really liked that. They come over to me two seconds later, anything I can do for

you? Can I help you with anything? I tend to sit up front. So a lot of people pass me and I mean, ask John Andrews about this. Cause it always amazed him at least five to ten people stopped me on their way passing by going I really like that wow I love your hat your shirt and I get and I carry stickers with me now and buttons and I give them out it's a great way to pay it forward and remind people that we're all human beings we all should be good to each other I mean I always tell people we're on this uh we're on this little ship going through space, and it's an island unto itself, really. And we all need to be nicer to each other. Me, on the other hand.

One other thing is that I say to people, it's just not that hard. Yeah. And it really makes you nicer. Because, look, I'm a New Yorker. I can have an experience guy starts clipping his toenails on the plane i'm ready to tell him you know like dude but what i do now is i know i'm wearing this thing and he's like being nasty i'll go hey how are you like your truth you know like the person that opens up their laptop and starts watching a movie

without headphones you know and everybody's freaking out i just take an extra pair of headphones i always carry those free ones in my bag and they go oh you must have forgotten your headphones here and everybody's going oh my god thank you you know but the guy can't really get mad at you because you didn't say dick turn off goddamn volume and i think i've had plenty of times in my life you may have seen some of my posts where i ranted um and where i've where i've where i've approached things wrong and i probably should have you know took the nicer trend and not stirred it up but uh you know one of my problems i go through when i go through tsa i wear a shirt that says i like being touched by strangers have at it. When I travel internationally, I wear a t-shirt that says in 10 different languages, I'm sorry for our president.

Oh, do you really? And that gets kudos in every country around the world. That's probably a good way to survive as an American. I think one of my friends shortly after our president, well, that's pushing it. American East Asian in the world. I think one of my friends, one of my friends shortly after our president, well, that's pushing it. Quote, our president.

I think one of my friends was in London. It was shortly after he'd been there and caused a stir and some hooligans came up and asked if they're American and then poured beer on his wife's head. You're talking about Brian Kramer. Yeah, I'm talking about Brian Kramer,

and they beat him quite badly, actually. And some of my British friends said, those are just the hooligans the way they are. But I'm like, it seems too weird. They asked if he was American, and then Trump had just been there. So there's that. I guess now that we brought up politics,

we might as well go into something that I think is funny and interesting. On Facebook, your name is Ted Libtard Rubin. Ted Libtard Rubin. And so I think it's really brave of you and speaking your truth and being honest and, of course course championing decency and stuff, which is what your hat's about and your, your slogan. It's interesting to me because a lot of my speaker friends,

a lot of my author friends have, have just run away from doing anything in politics because they worry it'll do it. In fact, a lot, you know, just, I think we talked about before the show,

a lot of them, you know, approached me in 2015 and said, you know, you're going to fact a lot you know just i think we talked about before the show a lot of them you know approached me in 2015 and said you know you're gonna lose money you know banging the table over donald trump and i was like i don't care i'm sending up the warning flares i'm i'm screaming what's funny is a lot of a lot of my friends who who approached me in 2015 and said said you know you're you're screaming way too much about trump and you're you're yelling too much about you know the sky is falling all the shit and now some of those people are some of the uh village criers like me and you that are on you know uh that are

sounding the battle cry and trying to warn people that it can get worse right Right. And it seems to me, but you know, so first of all, I've always been about speaking my mind. Yeah. You know, I, I, I've fortunately been mentored well and taught well and have enough of my own

attitude that I try to keep it as professional as possible. Some people might beg to differ about some of the things they say, but if you notice the engagement on my site, as long as someone doesn't get incredibly rude, which if they do, I just delete their comments. I don't fight back with them. And I want to hear other people's opinions. So I'm okay with that as long as it doesn't get out of hand. And I get very active in providing guardrails.

But my blog, although it's tedrubin.com, is called Straight Talk. So it's always been part of my brand. Every company I've ever worked for, they know right up front, don't hire me if you're not going to want to hear what I have to say. You know, about your product, about your business. I mean, granted, they might say, and if they say to me, like I don't bring politics into the boardroom or into their meetings. But if they come to me and say, hey, look what you're posting, we're not happy about that. I'm like, well, that's who you hired. Now, let's understand something. I'm also at a point in my life

where I can afford to do that. Now, I've always done it to a certain degree, but there were times in my life where I couldn't afford to lose a job or I couldn't afford to do something. When someone says to me, listen, my company really frowns upon that, I would never pressure them to do anything different. I understand that. What bothers me is the people that can certainly afford it, that have a strong enough brand to overcome it. It hasn't affected my business whatsoever as a matter of fact. And that might be because it's on brand. Because if I don't speak my mind about that, how can I be expected to speak my mind about anything else? But the story behind my name. So first of all, my Facebook, if you look it up, is facebook.com slash Ted Rubin.

But you can change your name around. By the way, I think you can only do it every 60 days. But what happened was a few years ago, there was a glitch in Android devices. And when you posted, when you tag somebody, it would double your last name. A woman by the name of Vicki Fitch was commenting and engaging with me. And every time she did it, it came up as Ted Rubin Rubin. And I started laughing. And I just responded. And then I started responding, signed Ted Rubin Rubin.

And she's like, she thought I was making fun of her. And she's like, I'm so sorry. I keep trying to fix it. It won't happen. I'm like, no, I love it. She goes, no, you don't. I said, no, I am going to change my name to Ted Rubin Rubin. So now my business partner and I, John Andrews, love to do certain things to see how people react to it. What do they do?

So I go on Facebook, I change my name to Ted Rubin Rubin, and I must have gotten a few thousand messages. What's going on? Is there something new? Is there something I should know about? Should I change my name? And it created such an uproar that John went and changed his name to John Andrews Andrews. And then about, I don't know, three or four months later, we wanted to have a little more fun. So I changed it to Ted Rubin, Rubin, Rubin, because people would keep commenting like, what's the deal? When are you going to change your name again? And John changed his his name and then what happened was somebody reported john to facebook oh that he was that he was going under a false name john andrews andrews and they shut his page down oh and you know when he got back up we wrote this whole thing about it because it you know it was a joke so he goes you know when i was a kid everyone called me john john let's change my

name because i can say i can show Facebook documentation that my name was John John. So we change his name to John John Andrews. I changed my name to Ted Ted Rubin. And, you know, and again, everybody jumps in what's going on. And as a lesson to people in your audience, if you're trying to get people, there are things you can do that are kind of fun, and you can afford to get people engaging with you. I'm hearing from people that I didn't hear from in a long time. And then this whole thing started with the election and Trump. And I was, you know, I'm a liberal and I really wanted Hillary Clinton to win.

And I was very anti-Trump, which became worse and worse as he started doing a lot of the things he's done. And all of a sudden there were people in my community that started insulting me by calling me a libtard. Like it started appearing in my feed. You're a goddamn libtard, you're this, you're a libtard. Like it started appearing in my feed. You're a goddamn libtard. You're this.

You're a libtard. And I, you know, I always tell people to embrace like what people do. And I've done it in other areas when people said that, I don't know, at one point someone started calling me Mr. R&R. So I started signing things, Ted, Mr. R&R Rubin, because it was an insult. So I said, you know, I'm going to change my name to libtard. And I changed my name to Ted Libtard Rubin. And first of all, the insults completely stopped because I took ownership.

You owned it. Yeah. That's brilliant, actually. Right away. I am a Libtard. There goes your insult. And then people loved it so much. You know, a lot of my followers, like, I love the way,

kind of towards what you're talking about. I love the way you take ownership and that you're upfront about who you are and what you're about. And did I change my name like that on LinkedIn? Of course not, because that's just but you know, my, my, everybody knows my Facebook page and it's open to everybody. So it's not hidden from, you know, whether you follow me or not, it's open to the world. And to me, it's just taking ownership of what I do. Now, I've had a few people who think that I'm making fun of the word, but it's been so limited.

And once I explain to them the reason I did it, they go, oh, wow, that's really cool. I think it's awesome. It totally infuses you. I almost changed it to Ted Universal Healthcare Rubin, but I decided it just didn't have the same ring to it. If I think coming up on the election year, you might have to change it to Ted socialist because we're all going to be called socialist here.

Oh, you know, I'm not a socialist. And as much as everybody thinks that the left wing of the democratic party is socialist, what they don't understand is that we have socialist part of our government. I mean, you want roads. Do you want police force force do you want like oh my god so let's not

even get into that yeah i i am i am not what what what qualifies in the definition of a socialist but i do believe in helping people and that oh yeah or should help the people with less i don't know when we became a country yeah what i didn't know when i don't know when we became a country yeah what i didn't know when i don't know when we became a country that uh we used to think we were rich and we could take care of the poor you know uh johnson president johnson uh enacted a lot of poor um assistance programs and uh you know what's crazy now is just all the all the different uh benefits we give the big corporations and stuff i mean i i was reading, and I haven't been able to validate this, but there's a meme going around saying that $4,000 of your taxes every year

are going to help socialize welfare for big corporations and rich guys. There's like nine guys on the planet who own more wealth than I think like half the planet or some shit like that. Something like that. So, you know, and I think you've seen the same graphs and data we have that there's been this slow reduction of taxes being paid by ultra rich people. And it's just crazy to me some of the stuff I've seen, you know, the big corporations like Apple that park their, you know, park their corporations in Ireland for tax haven purposes and don't pay any, you know the big corporations like apple that park their you know park their corporations in ireland for tax haven purposes and don't pay any you know um you know i'm i'm not a bernie supporter by any means although if he gets the nomination of course i'll support him wholeheartedly

um but like i said i just don't understand people that don't want to help people without and you know someone recently that i know posted something, I don't remember the exact words. It's, it's, I posted on my Facebook page, but it was just so beyond the imagination that someone could think that everybody has the same opportunities. And it was basically saying that if you say that you don't have any opportunities in America today, then you're just not trying. I mean, go into these communities, go into the, go into the middle America, go into Appalachia, go into the black community in certain areas. And I can't tell you I'm an expert, but I'm certainly smart enough to have enough open eyes to see that it is not the same opportunity.

And yes, there is that guy that can raise himself out of it. There is that opportunity here, no doubt. But we need to make it available to's always, there is that opportunity here, no doubt, but we need to make it available to more people. The fact that everybody doesn't have high-speed Wi-Fi in this country with the kind of dollars being made by these major companies and the richest people is just, to me, just unacceptable. Yeah. And we claim to be the greatest richest country in the world and yet we can't, you know, we can't fix this. Or that everybody look i don't believe in medicare for all i believe in medicare for all for those who can't afford another plan like i want to be able to keep my plan or a lot of people do but why doesn't

everybody in this country have some kind of coverage yeah in this country it's just and the people that say no they have to work harder or they're bums or they're lazy. You know, we are not a welfare society by any means. Yeah, I mean, it's, and there are people that have tragedies happen that are crazy and then our insurance is so fucked up. I mean, I had a friend who, she lives in Australia, so she doesn't have quite the same problems we do. But, you know, she's traveled the world healthy wonderful person she went to uh for a company to uh i think it was jamaica or someplace and she got bit by a fly that had the malaria virus and it was the kind that puts you in a coma and kills you right oh

i saw that on your page i saw your she's been a good friend of mine for 10 or 15 years and you know just in overnight her whole world just turned upside down her finances are turned upside down uh i don't know what the australian medical insurance thing is and i'm sure she had a great policy but what she's going through is extraordinary and you know you just can't you just can't foresee something like that and you know we we used to be this country that when people fell down, we, we picked them up and, and we helped them, you know, I grew up in a poor family. We had to go get the government cheese and, uh, I had to get a Pell Grant to possibly go to college. Um, you know, and I, my family was so poor. We lived on, uh, it wasn't the welfare stuff, but it was, I was in the, my family's in the Mormon cult.

And so they had the Mormons have their own Deseret line of welfare. And so, you know, we'd have to get the cans and everything. And I couldn't have friends over to my house because if they saw it in the fridge or on the counter, they'd be like, oh, your parents are on welfare. And so I know what that's like and it's it's hard to get out of and it's also the the people that don't get this don't do the math and they're not it's not explained to them because if people don't have health insurance it ends up becoming a part of something that we carry regardless because you can't not treat someone if they show up in a hospital i mean to me it needs to be. I've got a friend who thinks he's beating the system

because he doesn't have health insurance. And he talks about, like, look at all the money I've saved. I'm like, dude, one freaking rear end. One trip and fall. And you're going to, I said, and I always look at him and say, I just want to make something perfectly clear. I love you, buddy, but I'm not paying that hospital bill. Like, I've helped you out with other things,

but if you end up in the hospital and have a $200,000 or 50,000 or whatever crazy number it is, because you were stupid enough not to have health insurance. He goes, well, I've got a friend who's a doctor. He gives me an annual physical. Medical insurance is not for your physical catastrophic things that happened to you. And by the way, this guy's, this guy had a heart attack in his thirties. He had a series of stroke in his 40s. He's had a neck operation and he's going to, he's a,

and he can't, I'm still living on the edge budget. He's got the money. He just thinks he's, you know, well now I've got a bank account. I'm like, dude,

my account is going to cover one minute in the hospital. Yeah. I mean, I, there's a story I read recently about some gal went in for some sort of mouth swab, you know, the mouth swab where they check to see maybe what virus you had. And she got a bill for 25 fucking grand. And, I mean, there's just a lot of shit wrong with the system.

I am a vegan. I work out every day. I'm in great shape but i had two hernia operations i mean because i mean it was something that was unavoidable that had nothing to do with activities it just happened and each of those cost 50 000 plus if i didn't damn that's no fun so uh so we know a lot about you now in fact i just found out you're a vegan that's very cool i did i became a vegan for about, I think, six or eight months, and I was losing three to four pounds a day.

And I went from 370-ish, 350-ish, down to 280. I thought you were going to say six to eight hours. Six to eight hours. I was a vegan for six to eight hours. It was awesome. It was a pretty crazy time. And, yeah, I was doing veganism and and uh yeah you can lose a lot of weight you don't you don't realize all the crap you eat

of course i cut sugar and pop and all the other junk out of my system that i was doing and and uh and and got some good stuff so well you know everyone's got a chance to get to know ted better if you haven't and uh he's just a wonderful, accomplished author. I watched a bunch of your speaking videos. Those are amazing. Your energy is just so huge during them and so motivational. And, yeah, I mean, everyone should go check you out. Buy the books.

You can go to Amazon.com. How many books do you have total again? Well, I've written three books. A gentleman by the name of Mitch Levy has this company that's pretty cool where he turns your books into 140 tweets. So it looks like I have five because Return of Relationship and How to Know People in the Eye Digitally were made into these Twitter books. And then I'm working on my fourth real book with John Andrews where he's going to be the lead author called Retail Relevancy. And if we ever get it completed,

you might get to read it. Awesome sauce, man. Awesome sauce. I know how hard it is to write books. I'm trying to write one right now. And right now it's pretty much, it's either a Playboy centerfold or it's a pop-up book. I'm not really sure, but.

Well, you know, you could make it a coffee table book about coffee tables. That's probably true. And there's nothing in it. It opens up into a coffee table. There you go. That's a brilliant idea. Don't you remember that from Seinfeld?

You have a coffee table book. And if you folded it together, it's an end table as well. Anything more we should know about you, you ted before we wrap up our show it's been wonderful to have you we gotta have you on more often man you're you know this was fun i'm happy to get on with you and chat about a topic anytime so just reach out this is real easy um talking to you is fun we'd love to get involved with your audience a little bit more. So like anytime you want to, like if you're just bored in the morning, just, you know,

give me a shout. I've got a, I've got a, an Amazon, you know, the, the video echo next to my bed. We can just,

we can, it can be, no, that sounds weird. Bedtime conversations with the waking up with Chris and Ted. And you'll have all this energy. You'll be like, hey, Chris, it's really wonderful. And I'll be like, oh, my God, I just woke up.

Not when I wake up. Don't worry about it. All right. Have you ever seen, it's Adams. Who's the guy on Periscope? He used to do, I think, the Farside or something like that. And he does like a coffee with him. Does Periscope exist's the uh he used to do i think the far side or something like that and he does like a coffee with with him exist anymore it does really fucking crazy dude like i gave up on it

twice and i came back and i went you're still here holy shit and it's uh it's i believe it's the guy who did the far side comics scott no it's scott adams or he did the hitchhiker i think stuff uh i have to look it up but he does a thing where every morning on periscope he does a coffee with with uh i think it's scott adams he has a coffee dedication that's pretty cool yeah and so and he literally has a cup and he goes let's all drink from the cup it's kind of a weird sort of kool-aid thing and uh yeah you never know you need a podcast too do you have a podcast you know people have been saying that to me for years and it's just another thing to do so i just want to be on other people's podcasts there you go my business partner john andrews desperately wants to start one so we started making

some videos that we just post online or we put up on YouTube. So at some point, John and I, here's my bet. We're going to sell Photify, and then we're going to do Ted and John from Costa Rica. You could do Ted and John's excellent podcast. Yeah, we could do that. Most excellent podcast. Yeah, it is Scott Adams. I think Scott Adams wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,

or he did the Farsight Comics. It's one of those two, so someone in the audience can correct me. So, hey, guys, we appreciate you guys tuning in, and thanks to Ted for a wonderful take his time off on his vacation day for President's Day. We don't really have a president, so I guess it's not really a holiday. Not really. Oh, no, no, because President's Day is really about past presidents. That's true.

You know, one of my favorite things to do is on Instagram, the photographer, the official photographer for Obama, he posts the photos from that presidency for that day, that he took that day. And he's like, this is what Obama was doing today. And it's a, it's wonderfully cathartic. You know,

I got to tell you, so just real quick before you go, as long as we're ending on that topic, uh, there's a book I'm reading and what I'm getting ready to read. I've tried to dedicate myself to reading books again, but you know, if you come from our side of the fence

or even any side of the fence, this is a fabulous book. Samantha Power was the ambassador to the UN and the Obama administration. One of them. She also worked at his administration. She's brilliant. It's a great book about,

it says the education of idealist. I like to think of it also as the education of someone with humanity. Great. And it's pushed me to read a book I never wrote because I think we're desperately in need of hope right now. And I keep telling people, a lot of people think there's no hope. And so I

quickly ran out and bought a book because I just thought it was very relevant to our time. So just a little suggestion for people in your audience if they want some. Most definitely. It's interesting to see the correlations. Like I saw somebody on Twitter, they posted a thing.

They go, if you want to show your kids the difference between presidents, they, you know, they had like a 30 second blurb or a minute speech by Obama and they had like a Trump speech. And wow, it's great. What's great about Samantha Power's book is, you know, she is a big advocate for, for horrible things going on around in the world, for stopping mass executions and all the different things that have happened. But what's really interesting in the book is it just talks about all the

different groups and, and, and, and organizations within the Obama administration that were geared to things that none of us are even aware of. And a lot of these things have ceased to exist in the current administration. They think it's irrelevant or unnecessary. And it's just, it's worth the read. It's a great book. She's a remarkable woman.

So that's all. We come from the same sort of past, Ted. Like my, I think I can say, I don't know what you call it, the motto I try and live by in my life, and I'm not always good at it, is the song Imagine by John Lennon. Right. Caring about other people, being a good human being to other people, be good to others.

You know, it's such a world that, and I think a lot of it gets lost with digital too. good human being to other people, be good to others. It's such a world that – and I think a lot of it gets lost with digital too. I think I – I don't know who I was – oh, I was listening to your speech, I think. I think – and we were talking about the loss of the interpersonal relationship where people are really into their phones. That or maybe it was Bill Maher. It might have been the Bill maher show i didn't yeah but they were talking about how how with these mobile phones there's a real loss of the

human touch the human experience the human love and it's it's really easy for us to get nasty with each other and uh post i wrote that i think it's easier to default to default to angry than to happy. Yeah. As you, as you get older and you have to work really hard. You have to work hard at being good. I do. And you've got to think twice. You've got to, like I talk about, you know, Gary Vaynerchuk talks about self-awareness only do what you're good at. Um, which I don't necessarily agree with clearly clearly. It's in his book. It was a question that I brought up to him.

But what I talk about is self-awareness about how what you do affects others, as simply as walking through an airport and stopping short when there's 20 people behind you. Or how about the people that stop at the bottom of the escalator? Like, dude, this sidewalk's moving. Like, can you just move over? Or walk five abreast on their way to the gate because their flight's not leaving for three hours but you're in an airport and or shoving and i look i'm not one of the advocates of don't put your seat back but don't shove it back into

someone's face don't slam things that wake people up it's just a matter of thinking a little bit more and by the way i have to make myself do it every day because i'll be walking and i'll think oh i wonder if i'm blocking someone behind me or if I walk on the beach and I know I'm going to play my music and the whole beach is open. Don't sit down right next to other people. Go by yourself. Just a little bit of thought into and be a little more self-aware about how your actions affect others.

Yeah. I think I got that one time at the beach where I just decided that I was going to make it a nudist beach and it wasn't. I'm kind of glad I wasn't there that day. Hey, that's not nice, Ted. All right. Well, Ted, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. Well, definitely. You're always welcome back, Ted. I love you. And what's been nice is I've been really getting to know you

the past couple of years, followed you on Facebook. I guess I wasn't connected to you on Facebook. I was probably following you on Twitter. I was surprised about that. I don't know why. There's just so many people. But the beauty of it is I get to – people develop around me like Polaroids and I get to know them better.

And I'm like, Oh, there's that person. And who are they? And, and, uh, it's been wonderful to get to know you.

And so I, I value as a friend and, and, uh, it's been wonderful to talk to you today. So I hope my audience goes to tedrubin.com, checks him out, checks out all his books,

order them on Amazon, plug him, plug him to do a podcast. Cause I'd love to hear it. Cause you're so motivational. You've got so much energy. Um, I need to hear it because you're so motivational you've got so much energy I need to figure out whatever you're having in the morning

whatever coffee in the morning no coffee? I said a lot of coffee a lot of coffee alright well there you go alright well thanks for tuning in we certainly appreciate you guys refer people to the show if you would

they can go to thecvpn.com or chrisvosspodcastnetwork.com guys refer people to show. If you would, they can go to the CBPN.com or Chris Voss podcast network.com. You can go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. And you can find me anywhere on the web, pretty much under Chris Voss, Chris Voss.net. There you go. And, uh,

thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.