Why You Need A Reboot, with Mitch Joel

Welcome to Brainfluence Podcast with Roger Dooley. Author, speaker, and educator on neural marketing and the psychology of persuasion. Every week we talk with thought leaders that will help you improve your influence with factual evidence and concrete research. Introducing your host, Roger Dooley.

Roger Dooley:     Welcome to the Brainfluence podcast. I’m Roger Dooley. I’m not going to introduce today’s guest. Instead, I’m going to rip a page from his playbook and ask who are you and what do you do?

Mitch Joel:          Sure. Thanks, Roger. My name is Mitch Joel, and currently, I’m the founder/co-founder of a company called the Six Pixels Group. Prior to that, I was the co-founder and president of a digital marketing agency called Twist Image that I sold to WPP along with my business partners, and that agency became Mirum, which is a global digital marketing agency that still operates today. And in the process of all that, I started a blog and a podcast in pretty early days of digital connectivity called Six Pixels of Separation. I wrote a book by that title, a second book called Ctrl Alt Delete, and I do a lot of speaking and presentation on just decoding the future.

Roger Dooley:     Great. Well, I have to let our listeners know that if they’ve enjoyed some of my episodes here, that they can blame you, Mitch, for that because you were my introduction to podcasting. When my book Brainfluence was coming out about eight years ago now, the first contact I got was from somebody named Mitch who wanted me to be on a podcast. And at that point, I had an idea what a podcast was. I wasn’t quite sure why somebody would want to talk to me, but in any case, we did it, and it was a little bit awkward, I think. At least, it sounded awkward when I listened to it when it aired, but I think that I was in good hands because you are a really skilled interviewer, Mitch.

Mitch Joel:          Well, it’s out there somewhere if someone wants to hear it. Everything I’ve published is still there, so go and make fun of Roger if you think he sounds bad.

Roger Dooley:     Gee, thanks.

Mitch Joel:          It’s great. Yeah.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah, well, I think I’m gonna exercise my right to be forgotten, except now I guess that would only work in the EU.

Mitch Joel:          Yeah. I’m not going to kowtow to that request.

Roger Dooley:     So Mitch, you’ve been doing podcasts for longer than most people have. How many years, how many episodes of Six Pixels have there been?

Mitch Joel:          Over 650, and I do it every single week. It publishes on Sunday, and I’ve never missed a weekend, so you can, I guess, reverse engineer that by dividing that by, what, 52?

Roger Dooley:     Yes. That would be well over 10 years. That’s really amazing. I guess the technology itself has changed quite a bit since then because originally, podcasts were kind of awkward to listen to. I remember having to go through all sorts of convolutions to just download a podcast episode.

Mitch Joel:          I think it’s definitely changed. I mean, if you just think about the sort of studio quality that we use to record it, it’s changed a lot. I don’t know if my system and rig has changed that much. I’m pretty ghetto and indie when I record. So it’s true on the recording side, it’s true for sure on the distribution side. Right before it was really just through Apple, and now there’s many players in the space, including Spotify very recently, which is very exciting. And then it’s just true also on purely, sort of, the quality and how to get them and how to download them in terms of apps and stuff like that, for sure. It used to be much more convoluted, but I mean, all technology is like that. I don’t sort of look at that and go, wow. I mean, every single piece of technology is like that including the newer technologies of today, like you know, smart audio and stuff like that. It’s very convoluted to get your Alexa or your Google Home to do stuff. But that’ll change, and it’s just typical with this sort of adoption of technology.

Roger Dooley:     Right. And those technologies themselves are a huge improvement. To date myself, Mitch, I was involved in the very early days of, I guess, maybe the first home automation push, which was back in the late ’80s and early ’90s. There was actually a huge technology effort then to create smart homes. There were efforts by the National Home Builders Association, which is a huge entity. All the major manufacturers from GE and the cable manufacturers were all creating products to make your home smarter. And those efforts pretty much fizzled out, and the reason was because it was so hard for normal people to do stuff. I mean, it was sort of a techie’s dream, that, you know, they could cobble together something, they could turn their lights on and off, respond to voice commands. But unless you were that techie, it wasn’t a very friendly technology. So now already a lot of those things have become much, much easier because of Google Assistant and Alexa.

Mitch Joel:          Yeah. I think that the automation at the home got facilitated as just technology and hardware in general got cheaper. I think that smart phones and applications really pushed it further. And I absolutely agree that, you know, voice is going to take it to a whole other level. If you look at things like even AmazonBasics having a $50 Alexa-enabled microwave, or a $19 Echo for the car, or what we’re seeing now with the screens, the sort of multi-module platforms for both Google and Amazon, I believe it’s the Show. Yeah, I mean, it’s amazing to see it and how intuitive and easy it is compared to what it was. But again, you sort of look at it and think about what we spent on the early first home computers versus what you can get for a laptop today. Or why even bother with a laptop when you can have a tablet or a smart phone.

I think the price right now on these voice devices are there for a reason. They want to make them pervasive in the home. They’re very much lacking in terms of content, so you’re right, in terms of functionality. And even that, I’ve had those devices from basically day one. And it’s an industry I am very closely in touch with in my new company, Six Pixels Group. We see the leaps and bounds happening there literally daily. It is, it’s amazing to see, and the push is there because look, everyone’s got WiFi in their house, everyone has access to a smartphone or a cheap computer, you can get these sort of smart plugs for $20 a pop now, and they have all the major companies listening to you.

Roger Dooley:     I think pervasive WiFi has been a big factor too, because in the early days, a lot of stuff had to be hard-wired. And of course, hard-wiring is incredibly more expensive than connecting wirelessly. But the combination is really great. Now you get a smart plug for a few bucks and you can just yell at Alexa and she’ll turn stuff on and off for you.

I know that at least some of our listeners are interested in podcasting, and it’s pretty rare to get somebody on the show of your experience, so I’m curious, after all the years you’ve been doing it, has your approach changed to the way you record podcasts, or any aspect of it? I mean, the technology has changed a little bit, as we discussed, but what about sort of a software approach, has that changed at all?

Mitch Joel:          Yeah, it probably should, but it hasn’t. I guess I’m getting old and getting more set in my ways and I think if I were re-doing or re-booting the show today, I might think about it differently. My perspective on it has always been that I’m just trying to do something that you couldn’t necessarily do in the other format, which primarily was radio. You know, talk radio was typically running on the AM station. That doesn’t sound great, there’s a lot of interruptions and commercials, and as there was pressure on the radio stations, it’s more and more commercials and more repetitive, and the sort of “and we’re back from the break” and let’s repeat what we just said, and the segments were really short because they wanted to keep things moving along. When I started I just looked at it and thought, I’m reading all these great books and I’m engaged with all of these really interesting thinkers online, and I want to have more depth in the conversation. And before this individual became a complete creep, it really was sort of like, what would Charlie Rose do with these types of people and content?

And so the idea for me was really long-form audio content that didn’t have to be interrupted by a commercial break or have any of the sort of callbacks and things like that. I wanted it to be driven episode by episode, I wanted it to be very episodic, meaning from one week to the next there is no continuity other than the host and a somewhat framework around the type of content that I’m going to be discussing. And it is primarily nonfiction or business book authors, it would be more of where it evolved to eventually over time. And then the other component was just my own curiosity. Like what’s itching, what’s bothering me? What’s in the zeitgeist that I’m not confident in, not sure about, have questions about? The joke that I would tell people is, well, this way I get to grab someone who’s basically an expert in this space and ask them everything I want to ask them, and then the joke’s on them because then I’d just publish it to the world. But the real act of it was quite selfish for my own knowledge-gathering and information and research, and that stuff turns into blog posts, book ideas, other potential guests, other articles that I might be writing, ideas for clients, ideas for speeches and presentations. So it’s almost like I’m more of an info-vore, I’m just out there gathering information very aggressively, and a lot of it.

Technically, I’d love to say things have changed for me; they really haven’t. I mean, I record in a very primal way. My rig is the rig I’m currently using now, which is a computer plugged into a headset with a mic on it. It’s not even studio quality, there’s no mixer. I don’t have any effects on my voice. A lot of people do that, they sound amazing, they sound real broadcast quality. Perhaps one day I’ll get there, I’m not that type of audio nerd. My feeling is very sort of indie garage band. I want to have a conversation and get it out to the world. I’m not so worried about the stutters and the ums and the ahs and cutting out the stuff. It’s very raw. And that’s what I like about it. I liked that it was counter-culture, pirate radio type of stuff. And I’ve kept it that way. But that’s not the way that shows are made these days, and if you watch Joe Rogan, for example, he’s got a full studio setup and cameras and producer, and it’s an amazing thing to see it. Mine is me, and that’s it.

Roger Dooley:     Right, right. And I guess that my style is obviously a lot more like yours too, in that basically it is a conversation that runs with minimal editing, and no real production in terms of cuts and musical intros and jumping between different sources. I enjoy podcasts, and one that I like is Freakonomics. They cover a lot of topics that I think probably many of my listeners are familiar with. And they will do a themed episode where they have multiple guests and cut back and forth between them and create sort of a well-produced show, much like a TV show covering that topic, albeit audio only. It’s just a different style, but those are the ones that seem to be getting a lot of the attention these days, perhaps because of the way they’re produced and their professionalism. You mentioned Spotify at the intro. Our listeners will be hearing this a little bit later than now, but it was just a couple days ago that they purchased a couple of podcast groups for hundred of millions of dollars. What do you make of that, Mitch? Why is that, and how’s it gonna change podcasting? Or will it?

Mitch Joel:          Yeah, so Spotify purchased Gimlet, which is a producer of shows and they’ve been very successful in producing some really interesting podcasting and digital audio contact. And Anchor, which is a tool that allows people to quickly record and build and produce their own shows. You know, a very interesting move.

I have my own perspective, and then my friend Tom Webster over at Edison Research who’s really smart in this space wrote a fascinating post on Medium about it, and he says it so much better than I can, which is if you’re Spotify and you’re thinking about the grander context of audio, voice plays a big part in that. I mean, it really does. If you think about having talent, if you think about what’s happened on satellite radio. The other thing is every time that Spotify plays something, there’s a fee that they have to send back to the artist, and music is short bursts, 2-, 3-, 4-minute songs. If you have a podcast on and someone’s on Spotify for an hour listening to you, Roger, for example, they don’t really pay you anything. You might be ad-supported or another way. That hour is a lot of tunes that suddenly Spotify doesn’t have to necessarily pay out to artists in royalties. And just from a mathematic standpoint, if that’s 10 or 20 percent, just imagine what that does to their business model. It’s unbelievable. And there’s a thirst for voice, there’s a thirst for audio content. We see this in platforms like Audible and beyond.

I think it’s a very good thing for podcasting. I think it’s good that we make this content more mainstream. I think it’s good that people like Joe Rogan or Marc Maron can come out and have a very successful show with numbers that are comparable to, you know, strong network television viewership, and it’s an amazing time.

So it’s exciting, it’s exciting and it means that things are gonna change a little bit more. It makes me nervous because I think it ups the game and quality, which is good. I say nervous in a good way. But also because it means more competition, and there’s only so many hours in a day that people can listen to this stuff. I’m the first to raise my hand and admit guilt in that my shows are pretty long, and it takes effort if you wanna follow every one, which again, isn’t the theory or strategy of my show.

Overall, this is a good thing. It’s a good thing because you want validation and there are primarily two models here. One is ad-supported and one is pay-to-play, and you can watch the diversity of that in let’s say someone like a Joe Rogan, who’s very ad-supported, or let’s say a Sam Harris who has no ads but it’s almost like a PBS-type of model, and those products and things like that. Both work, both are phenomenal, and I think it depends on the type of audience you’re building and the type of engagement you’re having. But it can only be good when the people who are really in command of quote unquote “the airwaves,” are starting to recognize and acknowledge that this type of content is in demand, that people want it.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah, so basically, one big argument is that you and I provide cheap or free content to them, but you know, I wonder if there’s a parallel to the book publishing industry here, where you’ve got the small number of authors that sell millions of copies, and then the sort of vast other group of authors that sell in the low thousands or maybe low tens of thousands of copies, if they’re lucky, and then a lot that don’t sell even that many copies and just sort of disappear. As you say, there’s only so much listening time and I enjoy listening to Tim Ferriss from time to time, he’s an Austenite now, and he has some really interesting guests but wow, some of his episodes run two hours. When I think about that, and he gets many, many downloads, how much time is that squeezing out for everybody else, for anybody who listens to one of his full episodes, you know, there’s probably four other podcasts they could listen to. So I don’t know, it’s a battle.

Mitch Joel:          Yeah, and download isn’t listen, so people sort of have it on auto and it just grabs it and they use those numbers. Tim obviously has a massive following for an obvious reason, he’s very good and smart at what he does and he’s very calculated, and creating content that’s compelling, and has has amazing guests.

People make time for the content they want. The beautiful thing about audio is you can do it while you’re working, you can listen to it while you’re walking to work, you can do it on your commute, you can do it while you’re cleaning the house. It’s pretty easy in this day and age, especially in the world of AirPods and Bluetooth headsets, and just Bluetooth speakers and all these devices from, you know, your Alexas to your Bose to your whatever, to have this stuff playing all the time. So I think that you’re right, there is a media consumption issue, which I agree to, there’s no doubt, but audio can keep going. There’s a lot of room for it to be. You don’t have to be fixed in front of a screen to get the benefits of it. So I think it has its own place and its own power there.

I also think that people sort of have an interesting palette of voices they can hear from. Not much diversity. I mean, if you think about what we’re talking about, we’ve mentioned a lot of pale, male, and stale individuals, right? Just basically white men. And I’m not saying that there aren’t voices of diversity or females in this. Just, it’s interesting to me that in all the conversations, it’s very rare that we talk about who are the leading female podcasters, you know? Who are the people of diversity? And they are there, they exist, it’s just that the numbers we’re talking about, we sway around these sort of big, big numbers, tend to be white males right now, which is strange and bizarre in the world that we live in.

But that’s just the nature of this beast as it grows, and as it gets bigger it’s gonna change, it’s gonna diversify, it’s gonna lose its homogeny, it’s gonna get out of this sort of geek sector and we’re gonna see some more interesting voices. And again, when you look to it, I think that NPR has done a great job of that. Another platform is Gimlet, too has had some amazing voices and a lot of diversity there too.

Roger Dooley:     Yep. Since the barriers to starting a podcast are so low now, I’m sure at least a few of the folks listening harbor an idea that they might wanna do that, despite the competition. And I know that about two nights ago, here in Austin, there was a podcast meet-up, and it was one of the first meet-ups of a local group of podcasters. And there were a few very experienced podcasters with hundreds of episodes out there, but probably 2/3 or 3/4 of the group was much newer than that, ranging from maybe a few months of podcasting experience to really just sort of being in the about-to-launch phase. So there’s still a lot of interest in the medium. What advice would you offer someone who says, “Yeah, okay, I’ve got a niche I know something about this particular topic and it interests me and I think that I can either tell people about it or I can connect with other people and talk to them about it.” What would your advice be, Mitch?

Mitch Joel:          Well on a macro level my advice doesn’t count, cause the market speaks. I mean, that’s the beautiful thing about this type of content. You put it out into the world, you share it, and the audience can find you if you do a good job of it. So try, I mean, try and see.

But taking a step back, I do believe in planning and thinking about this. So I tend to look at things from a, is this the type of content I’m comfortable with, what type of content am I going to create? Is it going to be this rambly, long-form conversation? Is it gonna be more like that Freakonomics where I’m gonna cut it up and edit it and do heavy editing on it? What’s the frequency? How much time and money and energy am I committing to this? It’s not just a conversation that you and I are having, it’s the preparation, it’s the technology behind it, it’s making sure it’s distributed, it’s the blog post writing, it’s the hosting, it’s blah blah blah blah blah. And I really do believe in the sort of editorial calendar. What does a year look like if you’re gonna commit to this? How many episodes is that? Is it weekly, is it monthly, is it when you feel like it? How are you gonna get the word out? This sort of planning and thinking of it as an idea seems like a good idea at the time, but when it comes down to the sort of mechanics of it and doing it, I think it’s more complex.

The other thing is, you know,  I get a lot of people saying, “Well, you know, Mitch just has these conversations, and anybody can do that.” You know, my answer back to that is I don’t think that that’s true. What people may or may not know about me is I spent a lot of time in the later ’80s, and for over a decade, interviewing musicians and other entertainers. And that gave me a certain understanding of what it takes to create a conversation, and be compelling in a conversation, or what it takes to get information out of people that you’re having conversations with. And it wasn’t an easy job, it was actually a very hard job back then because there wasn’t really an internet, so you’re dealing with editors and gate-keepers and that sort of stuff. That takes a long time to get good at, and to think you’re gonna sort of just, you know turn the microphone on and it’s gonna get hot and you’re gonna be awesome, I think there’s a challenge there that I have, which is it takes a long time to make it seem like it’s very natural and intuitive. It doesn’t just happen.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah, I can definitely agree with that, Mitch. And you prepare, too, don’t you? I mean, you actually get the books and read them, at least to some degree, and that way you can have an informed conversation. I know I’ve heard a few podcasts, that’ll say “Well I never read the book, I want to communicate with the author just like my listeners would, as somebody who really doesn’t know what the topic is about and wants to learn about it.” But to me it’s harder to have a good conversation that way, if you’re really approaching it without  some degree of preparation.

Mitch Joel:          My reaction when you said that was like, ugh, like I would never want to listen to that content at all. It has no, you know, “What’s your book about?” All that stuff to me is such a waste of time and energy.

I do things a bit differently. So the sort of analogy I tell people is there’s a lot of people have a notebook full of ideas they wanna talk about. My notebook is actually empty, and by the time I finish the conversation, the notebook is full. And the way that I prep is a bit different. Again, this goes back to my sort of work being a music writer, which is, the journalists I’ve watched, this parade of journalists go in before and after me, and they’d all have their little reporter’s notebooks with all of their questions, and I just realized that that was too much homogeny here. That the artists, by the time I get there, are bored. They’ve done it, you know, 40 times already, in 15 minute blocks. And I had to do something different.

And so my strategy was to really read and research and learn about them, and to really take it in and know them and know their content so that when we sat down, I never had notes with me, and it was a conversation. I wouldn’t ask them about anything really related to the stuff that I’d read 50 million times in a million other places. I would ask them about hobbies and stuff that I’d picked up on in other conversations that they had already had that would sort of lubricate the conversation and loosen it up, and then get us to a place where, organically you’re getting something different out of them versus the standard answer.

Every author gets on the show and knows why they wrote the book or what the title is or why they published with whomever, and they’re pretty certain you’re gonna ask them about it. But if you don’t, because you know the information, you have more questions or more probing questions about even why they are interested in that topic, it does, it’s a form of lubrication and it makes the conversation flow better. So I tend to take notes as I have a conversation, versus have notes that I wanna ask questions.

The other thing I realize is that, questions tend to break, like interviews tend to break conversation flow. It’s like, we’ll talk about something, and then you’ll ask me about something else. There’s no real flow with that. And the way in which the person sort of researched it and wrote the questions out isn’t an organic flow in the way we have a conversation. And so the output that I want when I do audio is, I don’t want anybody who’s listening to this to feel that it wasn’t just like two people sitting down and really having a general conversation. Not being led, not being forced into areas with questions.

There definitely have been times in the thousands of conversations that I’ve had where I’ve had to pull more stuff out of the person, and I don’t necessarily love those conversations. In fact, that’s one of the main reasons I don’t interview two people at the same time, even if they’re co-authors. I find it’s very hard to, you’re sort of throwing the ball to one person, they’re throwing it back, then you’re throwing it to the other. So all of that stuff, including the fact that even a notebook is a physical thing between you and the person you’re talking to. I just want to be prepared, like I’d never go for coffee with someone without Googling them and reading a bit about them, and seeing at least even their LinkedIn profile, like what they’re about. And I don’t know why you would ever sort of come at it with the approach of, well, my audience doesn’t know who they are so …

Roger Dooley:     Well it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me either, Mitch. But I’ve heard that expressed and it may just be a way of justifying laziness too.

Mitch Joel:          Well that’s the thing. I mean, and I get this from podcasters too, where they’re like, “Okay, you’re gonna be on the show, here’s the list of questions I’m gonna ask you.” Sometimes I’ll actually not go on the show, or I’ll just respond back that I’m not gonna be looking at this, I’m not really interested in that. If someone stopped me on the street and asked me a question about podcasting, I wouldn’t be like, “Hold on, let me go and prepare.” I mean, you either know your content or you don’t. You can either defend your work or you can’t. You can either show your work or you can’t.

Roger Dooley:     I’m sure you’ve also had the experience, Mitch, that a potential guest wants a list of the questions that’ll be asked before they agree to come on. And I’m sure, like I do, you say “Gee, sorry, don’t work from a script like that, there’ll be a conversation.”

Mitch Joel:          Yeah, I mean, I’ve been very lucky. I use a little piece of technology called TextExpander, that I love, which allows you to write something once and then just use a specific keyword to respond back. So I literally have one in that, which is not that long, that basically says that, which is, you know, it’s a conversation, I don’t really know where it’s gonna go. It’s not 60 Minutes, I’m not trying to catch you or get you in a gotcha situation. If you’re uncomfortable with that I totally get it and you don’t have to be on the show. It’s completely free will. And I don’t actually want you on the show if you wanna have all this stuff in advance. So I’m very thankful that, again, over the years and the multiple shows I’ve done and the different genres I’ve done, I don’t think anybody has said, “It’s not for me, I don’t wanna do it.”

Roger Dooley:     Now I’m gonna do what you just advised me not to do, and that’s to sort of interrupt with a segue. I’m just-

Mitch Joel:          Well, segues are fine.

Roger Dooley:     Your book, Ctrl Alt Delete, came out about five years ago now, I guess. Now every PC owner knows what control alt delete means, having pressed it a million times. First I’m curious, did your publishers find that a little bit risky, saying, “Well gee, what about Mac people and such?” Or is that so much a part of popular culture that it wasn’t an issue?

Mitch Joel:          Yeah, I mean, command control escape isn’t vernacular, it’s not something that we use. I think it was a title that was part of popular culture, as a sort of play off of the word ‘reboot.’ That’s really all it was, and if anything, no, I mean,  I think the reaction to both titles from both my literary agent and my publishers were both like, “Perfect, let’s go.”

Most people struggle to find the title. I’m a bit of a different writer. I need the title first before I can start doing the book. So for me it was very natural. I also work really hard on subtitles, so for Ctrl Alt Delete it was Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It. So I felt that the sort of working of it together worked well, and I like those play on words. Six Pixels of Separation, Ctrl Alt Delete, I like it when there’s sort of this play between a saying we know, a philosophy we understand, a bit of a techie thing. I love those types of titles.

Roger Dooley:     Here’s a true story, Mitch. My book that may or may not be out by the time folks hear this, is about friction. And I was thinking about pushing the WD-40 metaphor, maybe even asking for permission to use it in cover art or something like that. But my first question was, “Well gee, do people really know what WD-40 is?”

Mitch Joel:          The bigger question there, Roger, is do you want somebody buying the book who doesn’t know what WD-40 is?

Roger Dooley:     Well there’s a good point. Well here’s the funny story, though. Garry Ridge, by the way, who’s CEO of WD-40, did a blurb for me. But I asked some of my friends in Europe and Asia, “Do you guys know what WD-40 is over there?” And to a person, they all said, oh yeah, everybody knows WD-40. But then my editor, who is in New York City, asked around the office and half the people have no clue, which either represented a gender gap in WD-40 being mainly, like duct tape, a guy thing, or the fact that in New York City, nobody actually fixes things themselves. Anything goes wrong, you call the super and they take care of it for you. But that was a real eye-opener because that was the last place that I thought there would be unfamiliarity with the term.

Mitch Joel:          Yeah, it’s sort of sad to hear. I think of WD-40 like Windex, or any other sort of brand that’s just been a staple for so many years that it’d be surprising to me that people … it’s somewhat shocking to me. Maybe you should call it Astroglide.

Roger Dooley:     Well that might be in a different niche audience.

Mitch Joel:          Exactly.

Roger Dooley:     But you mentioned the word purgatory a lot in the book, and purgatory, being at least for Christians, a kind of waiting room between heaven and hell. In the ensuing years, have we moved in one direction or the other do you think, Mitch? Or are we still firmly in purgatory?

Mitch Joel:          Well, the idea of purgatory at the time was the analogy that everybody knows they need all this stuff, everybody knows the consumers are doing it. But when you actually sort of self-evaluate the level of which you’re committing and dedicating your resources to that, you’re not. So it’s one of those things where you’re not in heaven where everything’s working, everything’s great, and you’re not in hell where you have no clue. You actually have a clear understanding of, this is where it’s going, but you’re not doing it. And that was a sort of sense of purgatory. And I think the idea is still true, but it shifts.

You know, back then it was about embracing things like social channels or digital. I think still to this day, you think about digital transformation and innovation, it’s still really true. I mean, there is no doubt that most people’s engagement with a brand right now happens on their smartphone. You just look at the data where I think some new research came out that suggested that the smartphone is used more in terms of hours and time in the home than even TV. Which is a very transformative way to think, because we always think of it as this sort of device on the go, but it’s actually now the device that you use when you’re fixed and in an area too. And if you take and analyze everything from a company’s website to how they connect, what they’re doing is what we would call mobile first. And the answer is probably not. There’s very few businesses and brands that do that. So I think that that’s another sign of purgatory. I think if you’re a brand and you’re not thinking of this world of smart audio and what’s going to happen when in the next couple of years you’re going to have 30 to 40 percent of all searches being done by voice without a screen, and you have no idea what you’re doing or what your plan is or not even attempting to do that, to me that’s a sign of purgatory.

There’s no doubt we’re going that direction, right? Two hundred and fifty million of these smart speakers will be in market by the end of the year. You’ve got Google Assistant on a billion devices currently. You’ve got Amazon making the announcement that they have 10,000 people employed by Alexa. It’s not potential, “maybe it’s coming, we’re not sure.” It’s an “it’s here and it’s growing.” And those to me are sort of moments of purgatory still, and I think that that’s still a true sentiment.

So the pride in my work comes from the fact that I think both books, Six Pixels of Separation and Ctrl Alt Delete, which are both old books, I’m self-admitting that. I think while the examples or the books might’ve been books of the times, they weren’t sort of perennial types of pieces of content, philosophically the ideas and how to embrace them, how to use them and how to find them are still as relevant today as they were when I first published them.

I also think that the way that all clicks together is followed by the digital trail. Like my digital trail of writing and publishing basically everyday, having the podcast every week, you can’t not look at the gap before Six Pixels the book, in between Six Pixels and Ctrl Alt Delete, and then post-Ctrl Alt Delete and be like, well it’s so old. I mean, it’s old if you look at them at fixed moments in time, but they’re completely evolving if you just look at like, what does Mitch Joel create and put out into the world as content. And that’s ever-changing and constantly there and present.

So I think we have to look at pieces of content and this idea of purgatory as more evolutionary. What has happened? What has taken place? Are these ideas still true? When I wrote the book I don’t think even Twitter was really happening all that much, and I think about what those 140 and then 280 characters have done to change, I mean, everything. You have literally leaders of countries threatening other countries in 140 or 280 characters.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah, the world has really changed in kind of a weird way, but totally true. Again, one last question for you. As a podcast host, I know that you read a lot of books. In Ctrl Alt Delete you mentioned that you shifted at least some of your reading to Kindle, but I’m guessing that you still get a rather massive in-flow of books. Have they completely taken over your living space, or have you found a way of dealing with that? I mean, I just find that they’re multiplying like rabbits. And they’re great and I value them, I don’t wanna give them all away or throw them out or do anything like that, but wow. They’re taking over.

Mitch Joel:          I am self-admitted to having a very extensive physical book library that I love. My strategy now is, it’s true, I get a lot of books that people send me, and I keep them, and I have them either in my home study or here in my physical office. I maintain two spaces. My personal reading choice and strategy is I read on a Kindle, and if I’ve really enjoyed the book I buy a physical copy so that I can have it either in my home study or at the office. That’s just because I like the artifact, the souvenir of it. It’s not because I’m going back and writing in it. It’s very rare that I go back and look at something and take up the physical book, is very rare these days for me, for sure. But it is the only sort of physical media that I’m still actually interested in.

I was just lamenting the other day to a friend how I used to love physical magazines, and I still love reading magazines and articles, but just not physical. In fact, I really stopped going to the store and buying physical copies, and with books I still have that desire to. With magazines I really don’t. I don’t know why that shift happened, but it did. But I’m still a fan of physical books for sure, I just don’t really read with them, it’s more of a collector souvenir thing for me.

Roger Dooley:     Actually I kind of move in the opposite direction, Mitch. I like to read a book for the first time in physical form, if logistics allow, if I’m not going on a plane trip to Asia or something. But then, sometimes I’ll buy the Kindle version simply because it’s searchable, and particularly if I find the book so interesting that I’m likely to use it for future research, the Kindle version makes it so much easier to find stuff than even the best index in a physical book.

Mitch Joel:          Yeah, I mean, again, I highlight things for sure. I mean, usually if it’s really, really something, I tend to write it in a physical notebook or transfer it over to Evernote, and again I sort of manage both digital and physical. But it’s very rare that I go backwards. I’m always sort of capturing. It sort of comes from my music industry days where there are some musicians who, like, want every single beat or rhythm or lyric, they want to capture. And then the other musicians, the more sort of prolific ones, it seems to me have this common ideology that if something is really good, it tends to stick with you and it comes back and it keeps haunting you and coming back. And I tend to curate ideas that way, where if it’s really something important, I’ll wind up seeing it somewhere. I’ll share it, I’ll see it somewhere there, I’ll see an article about it, and then that’s when I’m like, there’s an urge here to do something with it.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah, I tend to use little sticky tabs for marking up my books, and I can tell when I’ve really gotten a lot out of a book because it’s festooned with these little tabs sticking out of it.

Anyway, let me remind folks that are listening that our guest today is Mitch Joel, multi-talented podcast host, entrepreneur, and author of Ctrl Alt Delete. Mitch, where can people find you?

Mitch Joel:          Well if you want to learn more about me personally, mitchjoel.com is great. And if you wanna follow the intensely vast amounts of content that I publish, and I apologize for that in advance, you can just go to sixpixels.com.

Roger Dooley:     Awesome. We will link to those places and to any other resources we spoke about on the show notes page at rogerdooley.com/podcast. And we’ll have a text version of our conversation there too.

Mitch, it’s been really great to have you on the show, I’m honored to have the guy who started me off in this world as a guest. Thanks a lot.

Mitch Joel:          Well that’s very flattering, Roger. Thank you for your time.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of The Brainfluence Podcast. To continue the discussion and to find your own path to brainy success, please visit us at RogerDooley.com.