How Valuable is Trust?
John Marshall joins Matt to follow up on his previous appearance on Endless Coffee Cup, where he talked about his new book, Free is Bad. They talk about the reception of the book and the prevailing opinions about online privacy.
John shares about his upcoming series of videos, “Can I Trust It?” which brings up another line of discussion about the value of trust in the Digital Economy. With social media suffering failures, hacks, scrapes, and investigations weekly, how do you know who or what to trust?
Transcript
[00:00:00] John Marshall: I think companies, businesses, especially bigger businesses, uh, in this transformational moment with on multiple fronts and consumers are trying to understand what these companies have, the position of companies on certain social issues and that kind of thing. But ultimately you can take all of that stuff and you can boil it down to the simple word “Trust.”
[00:00:38] Bumper Intro-Outro: Welcome to Endless Coffee Cup, a regular discussion of marketing news, culture, and media for our complex digital lifestyle. Join Matt Bailey as he engages in conversation to find insights beyond the latest headlines and deeper understanding for those involved in marketing. Grab a cup of coffee, have a seat, and thanks for joining.
[00:01:05] Matt Bailey: Well, hello, listener and welcome to another edition of the Endless Coffee Cup, and I’m excited because today we have a returning guest, one that many of you were really happy when I had him on the first time. John Marshall, uh, John, how are you doing today?
[00:01:20] John Marshall: Great, Matt. Thank you. Yup. Yup. It’s a good day here in Santa Cruz, California.
[00:01:26] Matt Bailey: Well, I think it’s always a good day down there in Santa Cruz.
[00:01:29] John Marshall: It could be, it could be worse.
[00:01:30] Matt Bailey: I, well, it could be on fire, I guess. There’s, there’s been that happening, uh, so. But fortunately, you’re safe and, and nothing I think has touched you too closely, has it?
[00:01:42] John Marshall: We were evacuated actually, in the, in those fires.
[00:01:45] Matt Bailey: Oh, wow.
[00:01:45] John Marshall: We had to leave this, we had to leave this house. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It got within about five miles of us.
[00:01:51] Matt Bailey: Oh, wow. Wow.
[00:01:52] John Marshall: Yeah.
[00:01:52] Matt Bailey: Yeah, earlier John showed me what’s behind his curtains there. It’s the, uh, some of the redwoods in the background there, and we, we debated a bit on whether to show those or how that would work on the background. But yeah, beautiful, beautiful place there, John.
[00:02:07] John Marshall: Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It could be worse.
[00:02:11] Matt Bailey: So, this, uh, is a follow-up because earlier, John, when I had you on, we talked about your book “Free is Bad.” And since then, you and I have talked a little bit about the reception and how people react to that message. And, you know, if you could share with me just a little bit about some of maybe the encounters you’ve had, uh, or the response of “Free is Bad.”
[00:02:39] John Marshall: I chose the title of the book because I thought it was easiest to sort of just state the end point of the, what the book has to say. Just start out with the conclusion and then fill in the evidence of that. I did get some people that you, you know who said to me, you know, some people loved the title and some people said, “No, you’re going to have a hard time with that one.”
So, I was kind of prepared for, um, really, actually anything. To put it politely, I think I might be ahead of the curve. I think I might be ahead of the curve. I think that we are so inured, so just trained to believe that free is good, that if somebody like me comes along in this slightly arrogant way and says, “Nah, nah,” like “You’ve got it all wrong. Free is bad,” it, it’s too much of a shift. And I think that is definitely true with older people.
And then maybe the reason for that, and I kind of touched on this in the book, but I think it’s more true than I realized is, um, if you grew up in the era of sort of the golden age of TV, um, you grew up in a world in which free was good.
[00:03:53] Matt Bailey: Right.
[00:03:54] John Marshall: And it’s hard to shake that. It’s hard to think that maybe the free stuff isn’t working out so well for us now. So, um, I’m glad I wrote the book. I had a lot of fun. I learned a lot. I still want to help people make good choices and, and navigate their way through their online life more effectively. That’s my goal.
So, I decided to take some of the concepts from the book and package them up into more digestible chunks. And I’ve got a, um, series of videos that I’m working on. They’re not out yet, they’ll be out soon, but the, the title for that is “Can I Trust It?” And it’s a, I don’t want to say it’s a simplified version of, of the book.
It’s more like it’s, it’s, there’s smaller chunks from the book. They’re five-minute videos. We take a different topic, and the one I’ve started out with which I’ve, I, I finished the recording of this is “Can I Trust Gmail?” Gmail is pretty ubiquitous, and people are getting a bit weirded out by Gmail.
[00:04:51] Matt Bailey: Right.
[00:04:51] John Marshall: So, I answered the question, “Can you trust it?”
[00:04:53] Matt Bailey: Great. Well, that is an amazing topic to handle because that’s what the book handled, but now you’re putting it into a very, I think, applicable question and providing a very, like you said, a five-minute answer. I think that number one, I think you’re repackaging it for the attention span of the average consumer. That’s, um, because, because one thing I loved about the book is you went into the, the historical aspect of how all this happened.
Uh, but I think this is so practical because in my research, when I was working on my master’s degree, I took on the attitude people have about privacy and how people say they’re concerned about it. But yet there is this resignation by us that, “These companies are too big, I’m using it anyway, what’s it going to hurt? I’m, I don’t have anything to hide.” And, and there was this continued rationalization that people made that, “It’s completely out of my hands. There’s nothing I could do, even if I wanted to.”
And that seems to be the prevailing attitude of when people are faced with some of these things that, “Yeah. I’m not surprised, but what can you do?” That just seems to be a, a big attitude. Is that what you encountered as well?
[00:06:16] John Marshall: Yeah, for sure. For sure. And in some ways, my frustration with that attitude is what prompted me to want to write the book. I think that the resignation that people have, it, it shouldn’t exist because you actually can take action with these things in a, in a, in a relatively straightforward way. It requires maybe a little bit of thinking, a little bit of effort, and in most cases, it requires that you, you got to pay a little bit of money. And that, you know, that’s, hence the title of the book, right? “Free is Bad.”
I mean, I’m just, I’m just, there’s just no way around it. There is just no way around it. With a few limited exceptions in life, free is bad, but the inertia that people have, I knew about it before I wrote the book and I, I knew that it would be a problem. I guess I’m surprised at the conversations I’ve had with people. This has happened more than once, where they say to me, “Your book was great. I learned so much, I see the way the world is, I, I, I, I really enjoyed it. It was great.” And if I say, “What are you doing different now?” Oh, by a look.
[00:07:30] Matt Bailey: Wow.
[00:07:30] John Marshall: “Really?” Oh, that, you could tell that, you know, all like, “Really? I, I was, I was supposed to be doing something different? You surprised me.”
[00:07:39] Matt Bailey: Wow. Wow, yeah. You’ve got to change something. I mean, that was the call to action of the book is, “Here’s your options. Here’s what’s available to you.” Um, maybe you didn’t come right out and say it, as, as far as…
[00:07:53] John Marshall: I don’t know. I, I don’t know. I think, um, you, you, Matt, you used such a good word when you said resignation that people have, resignation bias. It’s a very thought-provoking statement and, uh, yeah, I think, I think that’s exactly what’s going on.
We need to be a little bit careful here and I, and I need to be careful to not sound, you know, completely arrogant about it because it is, after all, easier for me to make changes in my life with this kind of stuff, because I understand so much about it. None of it’s that difficult. And for other people, it’s a big deal to change the email provider or whatever. It’s a big deal.
So, I have to be respectful of that. I have to be respectful, but I, I am hoping that I bring about more change. Um, but we’ll see, right? The “Can I Trust It?” series, maybe that does make things more digestible, and it makes it seem more attainable for people. We’ll see.
[00:08:48] Matt Bailey: Well, and you bring up a great point that the place you’re at and the place where, you know, maybe some of us are at is we have that ability, uh, we have the financial means. I, I will say, you, you know, even prior to reading your book, I, I don’t use Chrome. I don’t use free email services. I don’t do that. I have made an emphasis to switch everything over to Firefox. Uh, I’ve worked with Brave just to see how well it works and, but I think this gets to something that you and I had talked about is that I have one computer where I do my podcasting, and that has Chrome because the podcasting software needs Chrome.
It’s the only computer that has Chrome. And so, but I have another computer where I do research, where I want to see the ads that show up. I want to see what happens when I go to this site, how long it takes to load and that’s what happens. But then on my daily driver, so to speak, that’s where I’ve got the ad block. That’s where I’m using Firefox. That’s where I, I want speed and efficiency. But, you know, the more I thought about it and from our conversation, I’ve got the money to do that. That’s my business.
[00:09:59] John Marshall: Yep.
[00:10:00] Matt Bailey: And the more I think about it, I’m like, this is not equitable. This is not a solution for everybody. And so, there is a level at which, boy, there’s an entry to it. There, there is a, I’m trying to think of the word it’s, it’s not, you know, I would say easily accessible for everybody to do things like that, and, and there’s an economic obstacle to employing some of these things.
[00:10:24] John Marshall: Yeah. The, the, um, the economic problem and the, um, the accessibility problem is really acute in smartphones. I think actually smartphones is maybe the best example of sort of the divide that exists because you, you’ve only got two choices there, besides some of these obscure open-source things that we’re not going to spend time talking about, right? But you’ve got your Apple devices and you’ve got your Android devices.
And there are people that I know that would never use an Apple device under no circumstances because of the elitism of the brand and, you know, the idea that the consumers of Apple products are sort of irrationally attached to the brand, and I mean, it is, it’s, it’s kind of this cult-like thing and I kind of don’t get it, but, you, you know, if you refuse to buy an Apple product, which I know people, then you gotta get an Android product and there’s a whole load of privacy and compromises and so on over there that, that, that should make people uncomfortable.
And then you’ve got these very inexpensive phones that, to get to the, the equitable part of the conversation, but in the very inexpensive phones, ah, Android’s the only way to go. Right? And so, you, you give up a ton in return for that cheap phone. You give up all kinds of problems of, you know, data collect, I mean, I, I, we don’t need to go into it, right?
[00:11:49] Matt Bailey: Yeah.
[00:11:49] John Marshall: We, we know what’s going on there. And I think that’s a really good example of that, that divide that I wish didn’t exist. I wish in my heart of hearts, I wish Microsoft could come up with an operating system for smart phones.
[00:12:07] Matt Bailey: Well, not just Microsoft. This has got to be an area where there’s something, but I think, you, you know, to get into a deeper subject, we also then would have to talk about carriers and how well they would adopt that, and we’ve got these relationships. And you went into this in the book, the relationships between the, the phone manufacturers, the operating systems, and the carriers.
And without that, you can’t sell a phone that costs $1,000 to create for $300. And so, you know, there, there’s a whole network, but yeah, absolutely. I would love to see somebody else bring something up. But to your point, another example of this is these gigantic 80-inch smart TVs. Just 10 years ago, a TV of any size was $1,000 or more.
[00:12:57] John Marshall: Right.
[00:12:58] Matt Bailey: Now you can pick up this 80-inch smart TV flat screen for $400 or less, but it’s because they are collecting your data. In setting up the smart TV, you have to accept that they are collecting your data and selling it for advertising purposes. And so, you are funding, you’re paying for it either way. You’re paying for the TV itself, and then you’re paying to subsidize the actual value of that TV through your data being used for advertisers. It’s making it accessible, but there’s that trade.
[00:13:36] John Marshall: I really dislike these hidden economics, you know, I’m a, I’m a huge fan of economics and the study of economics and just trying, you, just using quantitative information to try and make sense of the world, which ultimately is what economics is all about. And these hidden incentives just drive me bonkers. I mean, I’m just allergic to this kind of stuff. But the world has become more and more full of these hidden incentives because it’s just so easy with, with, with the software-based technology. It’s so easy to hide the incentives.
[00:14:11] Matt Bailey: Oh…
[00:14:11] John Marshall: You know, when you’re selling physical products, it’s, it’s, it’s much harder to hide the incentives.
[00:14:17] Matt Bailey: Right.
[00:14:17] John Marshall: But in software, that’s all pretty straightforward.
[00:14:21] Matt Bailey: Well, and one area where I see this, and, and probably it’s the most concerning for me is public schools. And not just public schools, it’s any schools. They’re signing on to Google Classroom, all the students then have to use Chrome in order to use all of the Google Suite. Uh, you know, I just, I look at what my kids are doing in their school, and they use Google Docs, they use Google Chrome, they have to turn in assignments. They have to, they’ve got Google Classroom set up and yes, they give them these PCs, these Chromebooks, uh, it’s all free.
And, but by being free, boy, they’re hooking in, they’re getting data, you, you know, they’re getting email addresses on minors that sometimes will be with them for years. And they’re able to see this. It’s very interesting how they have gotten around this, but again, it goes to your point of free, that they’ve offered this for free to schools, but there’s a big drop off here, and, and there’s a payment happening, but it’s the students that are making that payment.
[00:15:27] John Marshall: Yeah, yeah. That topic is, uh, is huge and, uh, there’s a, there’s a whole bunch of stuff there that bothers me actually with quality of education and a whole bunch of other stuff in, in that world. For the record, I do want to make clear that I personally believe Google is one of the less evil companies in the world of online advertising. Okay? I mean, I bash Google a fair amount in my book, but that’s not because they are just relentlessly evil. It’s because, you know, they do so many things, it’s just kind of inevitable. But there are plenty of other ad tech companies that are way, way worse…
[00:16:09] Matt Bailey: Yes.
[00:16:09] John Marshall: …and would really make the hair stand up on the back of your neck if you knew what they were up to. And Google does have ethics and they don’t quite deserve all of the flack they get. I know it sounds weird. You know, I wrote this, the, the book where I, I’m, I, you know, everything is about complaining about Google, but they’re not as bad as they could be. Praise indeed, huh? Praise indeed.
[00:16:33] Matt Bailey: I mean, it’s starting from a very low bar to say it’s not as bad as it could be. Oh no. Oh, I, I, okay John. I gotta set aside because I heard this recently and someone was saying that the phrase, “Not as bad as it could be,” is a very British phrase.
[00:16:58] John Marshall: Totally.
[00:16:59] Matt Bailey: That compared to Americans, that if you ask an American how they’re doing, “Great. Fantastic. Couldn’t be better.” But you ask a Brit, “Could be worse,” that, that the, the different views of the day of how it’s going, it is there, very much a cultural issue.
[00:17:16] John Marshall: It’s the weather. It is. I am not kidding. I am not kidding. It’s, it’s the weather. It, it makes us that way. It’s the weather.
[00:17:25] Matt Bailey: But at the same time, I think this was um, I have no problem going off topic here, John. I think this was Bill Bailey in, in one of his observations that yet Britain has one of the highest concentrations of cars with, uh, sunroofs and…
[00:17:43] John Marshall: Oh, convertibles.
[00:17:44] Matt Bailey: …convertibles.
[00:17:45] John Marshall: That’s right.
[00:17:46] Matt Bailey: That you have this endless optimism of having a convertible…
[00:17:49] John Marshall: That’s right.
[00:17:49] Matt Bailey: …that can be used three weeks out of the year.
[00:17:51] John Marshall: That’s right.
[00:17:51] Matt Bailey: Um, but yet, the weather.
[00:17:54] John Marshall: That’s right, and, and, and of course those convertibles are notorious for leaking in the rain. I mean, because if, if they don’t leak in the rain, well then they’re not genuine, right? They’re a fake of some sort, they’re some, you know, modern contrivance.
[00:18:11] Matt Bailey: So, there is optimism. Uh, we’re not going to admit it, so. I, sorry, just had to make that aside. I had just recently heard that and, and you’re using that phrase and I love how you’re applying it to digital though, and, and ethics, so.
[00:18:28] John Marshall: Well, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve lived here, somebody asked me the question the other day, um, how long have I lived here now? If 20, it was more than, it’s more than half my life. I think I’ve lived here for 29 years.
[00:18:39] Matt Bailey: Wow.
[00:18:39] John Marshall: Yeah. May, May of ’92. I moved to California in May of ’92, so it was 29 years.
[00:18:45] Matt Bailey: Wow. So, more than half your life now is in the U.S. That’s…
[00:18:50] John Marshall: Yeah, yeah. That’s right.
[00:18:51] Matt Bailey: Wow.
[00:18:51] John Marshall: I have.
[00:18:52] Matt Bailey: And you’re still, “Things could be worse.” So…
[00:18:56] John Marshall: You can’t, you can’t, you can’t get it out. I mean, it’s just the way you, it’s just the way you think about things. Actually, that’s not true. That, that’s not true. I mean, I’m, in fact, uh, it’s, it’s an expression, but no, I’m an innately optimistic person. Uh, I’m moving away from California. I mean, you know, that’s one of the reasons why these videos are taking me a long time. I’m in the middle of packing up my house. I’m leaving California, just because I want an adventure and I want some, you know, to live somewhere different. We’re moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico…
[00:19:25] Matt Bailey: Oh.
[00:19:25] John Marshall: …which is just, you know, really, really different.
[00:19:28] Matt Bailey: Oh yeah.
[00:19:28] John Marshall: Um, but what, when I first came to California, the, I found my people. I absolutely found my people because the people that I met were primarily interested in inventing the future. And there was this forward-thinking, you know, “We are the, the future is possible, we can make the future what we want it to be. We can make the future,” and I, wow. I could not get enough. I was just totally in love. And it is a love affair that has persisted. I haven’t fallen out of love with California. I just think I could learn something new if I live somewhere else. So, hence the move.
[00:20:00] Matt Bailey: Yeah. Oh, it’s always good to get a, a change of perspective and a, a different view, but very interesting that you, you talked about, you found your people, the, the optimism, the, the technology, you shared that with us, that, you know, you’re, you’re around people who speak the same language of technology and data.
And I find it interesting that the most outspoken proponents of data collection, of, and, and, and I would say going extraordinarily great lengths of data collection, of unethical, uh, ad companies, they’re analysts. They’re I, I’m, you know, Stéphane Hamel, Brian Clifton, Dr. Augustine Fou, I’ve had him on the show, you, people that have their background in analytics seem to be the most aware and outspoken of these data collection practices.
[00:21:09] John Marshall: I think it’s because we’ve seen the data and we’ve seen the stuff flying around, you know, uh, we’ve seen, you know, people just casually throwing around, you know, a CSV file with goodness knows what of all kinds of information. And, you know, as an analyst, you’re sort of expected to, to, to draw conclusions from this and when you, when you see inside the sausage factory, it makes you really concerned that people are eating these sausages, you know.
[00:21:39] Matt Bailey: I have to ask, so when you developed Clicktracks, which was, you know, initially log file analysis for analytics to see what was going on on a website, were you ever surprised at how much data or the depth of data that you, you were able to see?
[00:21:55] John Marshall: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had a, a, a bug in the software and a customer, the, the software was not working correctly on their website, okay? So, it was necessary for them to send to us the log file so that we could do some diagnostics and we could understand why the thing was breaking, right? So, they send us the log file, and unusually they had the log file configured to, um, contain the cookies.
[00:22:19] Matt Bailey: Oh.
[00:22:19] John Marshall: Okay? Which is an option, right? It’s, if I’m, suddenly, this is all coming back to me. It’s like, you know, it’s like a numb flashback. I’m sort of remembering, I remember what was going, but I remember this. And so, they had it configured to have, like, show the cookies and everything about the individuals visiting the website, it was a tax prep website.
[00:22:39] Matt Bailey: Oh wow.
[00:22:39] John Marshall: I should’ve said that. It was a website for tax prep. Okay? It, right. And so much information about what the customer was doing was expressed in cookies. And it’s really a bad idea, um, they should have coded this some other way, but they didn’t. So, the, the information, you know, financial information, the social security number, just a whole load of stuff, was in these cookies. And for listeners that, are, are blissfully unaware of this…
[00:23:13] Matt Bailey: Knowing, though, why you said it was a flashback…
[00:23:15] John Marshall: …the thing about cookies is that…
[00:23:17] Matt Bailey: …this is…
[00:23:17] John Marshall: Yeah, is that the cookies go back and forth on every transaction, okay? So, cookies are kind of, they’re not as bad as some people say, but they are kind of this special thing because they go back and forth on every transaction. So, you just need to be looking in the exchange at any time, any time, and you see the full stream of cookies, it’s not this sort of one-time thing, you need to be in the right place at the right time. No. Constantly these cookies are going back and forth.
And I remember seeing that thinking, “Holy cow, these guys, these guys kind of don’t know what they’re doing.” By the way, it, it, it wasn’t Intuit. I will also say that. It’s important that I say that because, um, it, it, it was a, it was a much more obscure company. Intuit was too, they wouldn’t have done this. Anyway, yeah. Yeah. Don’t see inside the sausage factory, ’cause you’ll never eat sausages again.
[00:24:06] Matt Bailey: No, I mean, that’s fascinating. And I, I think that has a lot to do with it, that, that there comes those times where you’re fascinated by, look at how much data is collected just in, in website analytics. And, you know there’s more happening with cookie data, and, and to me, it was just a fascinating observation of how many analysts, you, you know, are sounding the alarm and, and saying these warnings about data collection and, and how it’s going off the charts and off the rails and, and people aren’t, they aren’t either paying attention or they’ve got that resignation.
[00:24:45] John Marshall: Yeah. You, you, you used that word again, the resignation, and I think it’s just such a good word. I had this, uh, I had this interesting experience when I was talking to somebody about trust, and somebody said, uh, “You know, you can’t trust anything online.” Right? These are, these were…
[00:25:01] Matt Bailey: That was me.
[00:25:02] John Marshall: I was trying…
[00:25:04] Matt Bailey: You can do, you can do this. You can say it. No, I, I think I was at a pretty low point that day.
[00:25:10] John Marshall: No, I, I think that would be allowed to say, but yeah, yeah, yeah. Mate, were you in London? Were, were you in London when you said that? I mean, that would be consistent with the weather.
[00:25:21] Matt Bailey: No, uh, well, let me frame why I said that, is because I, I had watched a video, and it was a debunking video. And it was about these like five-minute food hacks or something, and in the debunking, not only were they saying, “This won’t work,” they were coming out saying, “This is dangerous. This is a health risk. This shouldn’t be published.”
But the company that published it said, “Oh, it’s entertainment.” And that’s what they hid behind. And just seeing how debunking is an industry right now. And I, I started listing everything that was fake. You know, you got fake followers, you have filters on to, you know, on Instagram to create a fake body, a fake face, a fake, we have deep fakes. We, you know, I’m just going down and listing, and then I talked to you, uh, on the phone shortly after. So, yes.
[00:26:20] John Marshall: Right. Right.
[00:26:21] Matt Bailey: That’s why I said, “You can’t trust anything.”
[00:26:24] John Marshall: It resonated with me, okay? You, you said that, and I had this sort of visceral reaction to it. And I thought about it so much afterwards because I experience stuff online that, you know, just, just like everybody else. I live my life online, I derive, everything’s online, and I absolutely trust most of what I experience online.
Okay. So, I thought about, I thought about that. I, what, what’s different here? What’s different? And I want to explore this, and I want to use a little example. I want to use a little example. Let’s say that you want to buy a new blender. Where would you turn? What would you do? You want to buy a new blender, you don’t know anything about blenders, what’s the first thing that you’re going to do?
[00:27:11] Matt Bailey: I’m going to give the prevailing man on the street response.
[00:27:16] John Marshall: Yeah.
[00:27:17] Matt Bailey: I would go online, I would look at reviews, I would find some ratings. Now, and I will say, knowing now, from my perspective, knowing that reviews are for sale, there are fake reviews and it’s a fake review industry, that you can’t even trust the Amazon reviews…
[00:27:37] John Marshall: Right.
[00:27:37] Matt Bailey: …because they’re, they’re beefed up.
[00:27:39] John Marshall: Right.
[00:27:39] Matt Bailey: Uh, but I think the man on the street is, or the person on the street will, will say, “I’m going to go do my research, look at this.” Now, what I would do is I would find something like a Consumer Reports. It’s a non-ad supported organization, it’s a membership organization, uh, and they do tests of equipment, of products, and they show under these conditions, this is how it performed. And they give the recommendation. That, that’s, and, and that goes back decades. I, I’ve been a fan of Consumer Reports for years because of that factor.
[00:28:17] John Marshall: Right. And, and articles, that’s why they pay you the big bucks, right? As an analyst, because, and as, and as an educator, because you know that, so I, I think you are 100% correct on both fronts. I think that your average person on the street would look at reviews and look at other stuff, and you or I would go to Consumer Reports. I would do that.
And, and I actually, I actually checked, does, does Consumer Reports have review of blenders? And yes, they do. Yes. They have done, as you would expect, an extensive analysis of blenders on Consumer Reports. So, why do we trust Consumer Reports and why do we not trust reviews?
[00:28:55] Matt Bailey: That’s a good question. I, I think it was, uh, and I will, I will quote, uh, so Dr. Augustine Fou published the other day that Facebook removed I think 40 review sharing groups. And that’s where you could join the group on Facebook, and basically, I’ll review you if you review me. There was these exchanges that were going on on Facebook and what it produced was fake reviews. Uh, and Facebook removed dozens of these groups.
[00:30:00] And, and, and after reading that, I, I think that was one of those things that I was, “Ugh,” you know, you know, now, that’s because I live in this industry. I, I live in this digital marketing hurricane of articles and facts and observations. I am steeped in it, and that’s how I know it, but, you know, I, I, and this is where I, like, I use my kids for information. They’re my people on the street, you know, or, or I talk to friends and I ask them, average person probably has no idea how many of Amazon’s reviews are considered to be fake, fraudulent, or whatever, um, or, or even that that’s an industry.
[00:30:12] John Marshall: You and I trust Consumer Reports, and you and I do not trust reviews, at least not, not for anything that matters.
[00:30:20] Matt Bailey: Yes.
[00:30:20] John Marshall: I might trust online reviews for, you know, the new Taylor Swift album or like whatever, but for stuff, for entertainment.
[00:30:27] Matt Bailey: Yeah.
[00:30:27] John Marshall: But for stuff that matters, blenders or cars or whatever. So, we, what is different about Consumer Reports that makes us, in our minds we’re correct, and I think actually objectively, we are correct that Consumer Reports is trustworthy. What’s the difference?
[00:30:45] Matt Bailey: They’re not ad supported.
[00:30:46] John Marshall: That’s right. You have to pay, you have to buy a subscription to Consumer Reports. So, when you, when you said the words, “I don’t trust anything online.” Okay, it’s an exaggeration. It’s hyperbolic. It’s fine. Um, and I thought, “Now, wait a minute. I trust plenty of stuff online.” The reason is I’m paying for it. I have a subscription to Consumer Reports. I love it. I love consuming it online. I love the facts, online Consumer Reports has changed the way that I buy things, because I can, it, it, it used to be that you had to have a subscription to Consumer Reports, you know, for at least 20 years for them to cover, you know, the product that you wanted to buy.
[00:31:31] Matt Bailey: At that point, yes.
[00:31:31] John Marshall: You needed to shelve all of them.
[00:31:33] Matt Bailey: Yes. At that time, “I need to go,” yeah.
[00:31:35] John Marshall: Yeah.
[00:31:36] Matt Bailey: The, the back catalog was the most valuable thing there was.
[00:31:38] John Marshall: No, that’s right. There’s not like that now.
[00:31:40] Matt Bailey: No.
[00:31:40] John Marshall: Now you can go and subscribe for six bucks. It costs six bucks a month. You can go and subscribe for six bucks, get the piece of information that you want, cancel the subscription when you’re done. Uh, and I’m, I’m, I happen to be shopping for a car at the moment. So, you, you know, it’s, it’s kind of a big deal for me. News, right? I consume pretty much no free news. Right? Pretty much. Now, I’m not going to say it’s completely zero. I consume a very small amount of free news.
I pay for all the news that I get. So, people are whining about, you know, poor quality news, or even, you know, they use this phrase, “Fake news,” or all this kind of stuff, and it, it, of course, I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. It absolutely exists and it’s a cancer on society and all the rest of it. But I don’t experience it.
[00:32:28] Matt Bailey: Right.
[00:32:29] John Marshall: My life online, I’m pretty happy with it.
[00:32:31] Matt Bailey: Yeah.
[00:32:31] John Marshall: You’re going to have a hard time convincing me that my life online is low quality.
[00:32:37] Matt Bailey: Oh, yeah. Not, not by any means, but I, I will say even if I pay for YouTube Premium, I can’t trust anything I see on there.
[00:32:46] John Marshall: No. Indeed. Indeed.
[00:32:47] Matt Bailey: So, yeah, the, the simple act of payment, and that’s where I think a lot of these places, they’re, they, it’s a payment to remove the ads. It’s not the same as…
[00:32:59] John Marshall: No.
[00:33:00] Matt Bailey: …a business model that relies on quality, on, that relies on memberships in order to survive. And, and I think that’s, that’s to your point that, that news that can’t survive without people finding it valuable enough to pay means it’s not good news. Um, I, I generalized your statement there, but, uh…
[00:33:24] John Marshall: No, I think, I think that’s true. Yeah. Yeah. The, the example of Consumer Reports I think is so powerful because the argument that information wants to be free, and yet, can you imagine what Consumer Reports would be like if it were ad funded. I mean, just…
[00:33:42] Matt Bailey: Absolutely.
[00:33:43] John Marshall: It, it, it just doesn’t bear thinking about. It just doesn’t bear thinking about, alright? And, and, and yet with news, we kind of say, “Well, it’s gotta be free. It’s gotta be ad funded, right? ‘Cause, uh, I’m letting, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever.” The, the world of online has made the world a better place. I’m going to make that statement. The existence of all of this stuff online has made the world a better place.
It’s not without its problems. And for me, the fastest way to avoid the problems is to avoid free stuff. That’s like, there’s a, that is a pretty much universal rule that I apply. The only exception to that is Facebook. I use Facebook, and I actually, I like Facebook. I think it’s hilarious. Some of the stuff that gets shown, you know, some of the stuff that goes around is great, but it’s just entertainment.
So, is there anything else that I get that’s free? YouTube. I don’t use YouTube a whole lot because I’m going to be putting my, “Can I Trust It?” videos on YouTube and they’re going to be free, but that’s really because there’s no alternative, I mean, you know, I’ve got to do, I have to do that.
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[00:36:23] Matt Bailey: Well, and, and that’s a great point. The whole trust factor, uh, because this is something I talk with companies when we’re developing training programs and the value of training and, and invariably, one of the objections comes up that, “We could just use YouTube. It’s free, and there’s training available all over YouTube.” And I have to bring up the point of, “But who’s going to curate it and, and decide on these 50 videos we will say are approved for our company, and to get to 50, how many are you going to watch in order to approve and get to that final number?”
And, and I guess people don’t equate that, that they know the information is there. It’s free. The information wants to be free, but now there’s a cost to curate and to develop a level of assessment that this is trustworthy, it contains the information that’s important, and we will recommend it to, and, and that’s, those levels of evaluation are just not in people’s minds.
It’s just the fact that it’s there, they find it to be valuable, but not the level of who’s going to curate it? Who’s going to do that? And again, that level of trust, in order to create a playlist that you trust of information, that takes a lot of work.
[00:37:47] John Marshall: Yeah. What about some of the other online learning platforms? You know, there, there, there’s, there’s been so many of those, um, is there, there’s almost too many of them, actually.
[00:37:57] Matt Bailey: Yes.
[00:37:58] John Marshall: Are we going to get some success with some of those online learning platforms? I don’t feel like we’ve got there yet. So, are we going to get there?
[00:38:03] Matt Bailey: Well, and I’m adding to it. So, I’m adding to it with my training platform, but I’ve got a couple of issues with that because yes, I could pay, I can get curated content, I can, hopefully I have to trust that the content’s being updated, that it’s relevant and, and, and updated according to, uh, any updates that, you know, for example, Google Analytics, are they universal examples or are they GA4 examples or do I need both?
So, you have to update with the, the software, whatever, but what I find some of the problem, and, and I see this, of some of the online learning platforms, what makes them unique or what is a selling point is how many hundreds of hours of videos are available. Now, I don’t know about you, but after this whole COVID thing, the number of hours spent in front of my computer watching anything is not a selling point.
[00:39:03] John Marshall: Well said.
[00:39:04] Matt Bailey: And so, for online learning, simply having a catalog of videos is a very poor selling point. And, and yeah, I can watch a video, but who’s going to tell me that when I actually try and do it, who’s going to tell me that I did it right? And so, that’s where I think the difference is going to be on online learning is, it’s going to have to adapt. And, and the problem is you can’t scale.
[00:39:30] John Marshall: Yeah.
[00:39:30] Matt Bailey: It’s very, very difficult to scale when you give feedback. But that’s what makes online learning effective.
[00:39:38] John Marshall: I’m, I’m a little bit surprised that online learning platforms haven’t attained their moment in this world of COVID. I expected that, you know, the Wall Street Journal and your sort of mainstream investment publications would be talking about online learning platforms because suddenly they’re the most important thing in the world of COVID, but there’s just been a complete silence, uh, on that. We, we’ve sort of been depending on public school teachers somehow winging it on Zoom, which, which no implied criticism. I mean, you know, they’re doing the best they can and it’s not easy.
[00:40:00] Matt Bailey: Right.
[00:40:14] John Marshall: And, you know, we all, we all got to respect that. Um, but I was really surprised. Why is there not sort of a couple of online learning platforms that have surged to the front of the pack and, you know, uh, that are going public on the back of this, and it’s just ’cause, like, didn’t you expect that to happen? I sure as hell did.
[00:40:34] Matt Bailey: No, I didn’t.
[00:40:35] John Marshall: Huh.
[00:40:36] Matt Bailey: Because, and, and it comes back to Marshall McLuhan. Uh, the medium is the message. As long as people treated online learning as lectures, as, “All I have to do is speak in my camera,” uh, and that’s online learning, as long as people came at it with that attitude that it’s just like TV or it’s just like YouTube, it was always going to be wrong.
And this is why I, I value going back and I, I got my master’s degree in, in instructional design. And what was so valuable about that is that it treated online as a completely different experience than the classroom and a completely different experience than simply putting videos online.
It’s now that you are going to teach this through online, what are specific modalities that you can use to engage people at a different level, rather than just a video lecture? What are integrated things that you could use? Uh, how can you create a scenario that instructs as well as tests people’s knowledge? How do you give them the ability to demonstrate that they’ve learned it?
And so, starting with the goal in mind that, John, I want you to know how to set up this by the end of the instruction. That’s my end goal. Now, how do I go about doing that in a creative way and not just rely on a video lecture? And so, as long as they approached it with, “We just put videos up and that’ll show people how to do it and then they take a quiz at the end.” If that’s how you approached it, you’re wrong, and you are always going to be wrong.
Uh, so, and that’s where I’ve become completely an anti-scale, anti-scale enterprise, that at scale, you lose that personalization. You lose that coaching. You lose that, what makes teachers so valuable.
[00:42:40] John Marshall: Yeah.
[00:42:40] Matt Bailey: You know, anyone, they’ll always have that one teacher, because that teacher spent time with them and instilled this, this passion, this, this, this appreciation. When you rely on online, you take, you take away that one huge factor, and that is the ability of a teacher to inspire. And if you go about with that attitude, that changes how you create the online learning experience. That’s my soap box, there. You, you got me on it.
[00:43:13] John Marshall: I’m with you, I’m with you a hundred percent. Yeah. Are you, yeah, you’ve, you’ve had a couple of in-person events, uh, recently, haven’t you?
[00:43:19] Matt Bailey: Yeah, yeah. They’re starting up again. I’m so excited.
[00:43:22] John Marshall: Good. Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s really good. Yeah. Yeah. I can’t wait for that. I can’t wait for the world to start returning to normal here.
[00:43:31] Matt Bailey: Right. And, and it makes such a difference. I had to do a, an online Zoom presentation for three hours, teaching analytics, John. No one turned on their camera.
[00:43:41] John Marshall: Oh.
[00:43:42] Matt Bailey: As much as I repeated, “Please turn on your camera, please. If you,” and, and what I, I instill at the very beginning, ‘If you want the most out of this instructional time, please turn on your camera. Because if I can’t see you, I can’t respond to you. If I can’t see you, I don’t know if you are interested or not.” You know, not turning on your camera is basically the equivalent to me as a speaker or trainer of you sitting in the classroom with your phone in front of your face. That’s what it’s like.
And I had a few people turn it on and, and, and it lasted for a while, but honestly, a three hour Zoom call for analytics, John, I can’t even sit on my couch and watch a movie for three hours. And that’s entertaining. Um, but in a room, when you’re face-to-face, especially with an in-depth topic like analytics, I can see the moment where someone just isn’t sure. And I can stop and address.
At, at the beginning of the pandemic, if people were like, I, I remember, I, I even copied some of these headlines where like, “This is the new way. It’s effective. It’s exciting. We can replace education with all,” and I’m sitting there going, “No, you can’t. No, you can’t.” Because I think as soon as all this is over, everyone’s going to rush to do in-person again, because it’s effective, it’s refreshing, and it’s human contact. I do not see video conferencing, video, replacing actual human interaction. I, I think we will see a step-up, but I don’t see it being a major step-up in changing how anyone does anything.
[00:45:19] John Marshall: Yeah. I think I, I, now that we’ve got to the stage that we, we have got to, I agree with you 100% and I, um, I might have been one of those optimists a year ago saying, “This, you know, this is just going to change,” right? But, um…
[00:45:34] Matt Bailey: No, not when you’re on the camera side of things.
[00:45:36] John Marshall: No. That’s right.
[00:45:37] Matt Bailey: Not when you’re on the camera’s side. I, I was more exhausted after a three hour Zoom training than if I had done a full day workshop on site with a client. Those at the end of that, I’m energized. I’m excited. I’m coming away with ideas based on the feedback. But a three hour Zoom instruction? I’m exhausted. I want to go lay down afterwards because my brain is shot, uh, from trying to continually engage and you get less questions. You get less interaction. You get, and so your brain is, is, is like working overtime, trying to ensure that, you know, are we getting this across? Is this effective? So, it does a lot to an instructor.
[00:46:26] John Marshall: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve certainly, I’ve certainly done enough teaching to picture that clearly and, and understand it 100%.
[00:46:33] Matt Bailey: Well, and on the subject of trust, I, I just kind of put this together. There was a book I had read, it was, uh, Reclaiming Conversations, trying to think who it was that wrote that, but she is a professor at MIT, Sherry Turkle, and she was all in on digital, all in on everything online. And she had a moment where now she writes this book called Reclaiming Conversations, where she analyzes these large online learning systems of teaching online. And she did a lot of assessments and studies, what it came down to, and, and it comes back to the word trust that you brought up earlier.
When students were asked, “What makes the difference in a classroom? What makes you trust an instructor?” The overwhelming response was, “When I can see how the instructor handles questions,” that was a key factor because they could see how they would think, formulate, respond, ask another question, draw it out. And they said that is what motivated students to feel like, “I can do this. I can do that.” By seeing how their instructor took questions, responded to questions, and, and developed a response, that it was that part of the educational process that meant the most, and, uh, instilled the most motivation into a student.
[00:48:14] John Marshall: I’ve chosen the word, you know, for this new video series that I’m doing, um, not necessarily thinking about it a whole lot. I mean, I, I honestly, I needed a name and I kind of came up with that and it sounded like, it seemed good enough to me, but the word trust actually is quite useful. And it is under-served at the moment.
And I think companies, businesses, especially bigger businesses, uh, in this transformational moment, um, with, on multiple fronts, and consumers are, are, are trying to understand what these companies are, the position of companies on certain social issues and that kind of thing. But ultimately, you can take all of that stuff and you can boil it down to the simple word trust, and, and, and people are trying to figure out, “Can I trust it?” I’m sorry, that makes it sound like I’m, I’m shilling…
[00:49:07] Matt Bailey: No.
[00:49:07] John Marshall: Seriously, and I’m not.
[00:49:08] Matt Bailey: Yeah.
[00:49:08] John Marshall: I’m not because they’re, they’re trying to figure out, you know, “Can I trust this company? Do, do, you know, the sneakers they make, can I trust that they’re not made by, you know, nine-year-old kids in a terrible factory? Can I trust that these guys are not pouring mercury into the rivers? Can I trust these guys when they say this?”
You know, business and establishing trust, and I, I don’t hear us saying that word a whole lot right now. We’re using a whole lot of other words that ultimately might mean that, but I, maybe we’re at the beginning of a little, maybe a big trend here, and trust is going to become a currency that, I don’t know, maybe it can even be quantified. There’s, there’s the nerd in me…
[00:49:51] Matt Bailey: Wow.
[00:49:52] John Marshall: …that wants to quantify everything.
[00:49:54] Matt Bailey: Well, and, and I completely agree. Trust is going to become, I think, a, a central part of the, the marketing message of companies. Now, what I think will be able to be quantifiable is what are you doing that doesn’t evoke trust? You know, I, I was just thinking the past two days, I think yesterday, uh, there is another Facebook, uh, data scrape. Uh, there’s a data scrape on Clubhouse, Tik Tok’s being sued for collecting data on minors.
[00:50:00] You can quantify those. You can quantify the amount of records and data, and does that then have a quantifiable impact on the brand or the perception? Um, you know, definitely things people or companies say and what happens that, uh, I think you could come up with an index. I think I’d be really interested to see that.
[00:50:48] John Marshall: That’s an, it’s actually sort of a, it’s sort of an extension of PageRank.
[00:50:52] Matt Bailey: Oh.
[00:50:52] John Marshall: Right? Page, PageRank is actually, I, you know, really, it’s a measure of trust, ultimately. So, it is being quantified, you know, at least on webpages and since, since the only stuff that’s important these days is webpages, nothing else matters. Maybe that’s all we need.
[00:51:11] Matt Bailey: Yeah, I, I, I, yeah, and it has to do sentiment as well, uh, in order to be accurate because, uh, I think people figured that out as well, that even getting bad links, uh, who worked well.
[00:51:24] John Marshall: For a while. Yeah, yeah.
[00:51:25] Matt Bailey: Yeah, yeah.
[00:51:26] John Marshall: Yeah. Life was so simple then. Good grief.
[00:51:30] Matt Bailey: Well, and, and, and so, yeah, I’ll, I’ll rant a little bit, ’cause I think my, my response in our original conversation, it’s the combination of social media and the smartphone. In the previous podcast I think I alluded to this, that the internet was so much fun 10 years ago. It was, it was almost like, you, you know, so full of hope, so full of promise. But I think that this, this personalization, I, I want to call it the, maybe now it’s the 15 seconds of fame that was social media with my phone and social media on the phone. It, it’s, it’s, everyone’s clamoring for this 15 seconds of fame. And that has created an attitude. It’s created a, I, I, I think this response that has changed how people view these technologies.
[00:52:20] John Marshall: Well, I am once again going to apply my, my division here, right? My reasoning, my division. It is not the technology. You’re going to have a really, a hard time moving me off this point of view. It is not. It is our insistence that it be free. If we continue to insist that it be free, then things are not going to work out too well for us, right? My smartphone has all kinds of useful stuff on it. And I do not regret having that phone and I do not regret having that useful stuff, and my life is pretty good.
It’s just that the free stuff I’m very still, like, I don’t go that, but I’m very careful with how much exposure I give myself to free stuff. It’s a great analogy, I’m going to try this out on you. You’re the first person that I’m going to, I’m, I’m trying this, I’ll try this out, alright? I’m very careful about what I put in my body. I am. I eat carefully. I eat deliberately, you know, I watch my diet, a bunch of, I, I could go on about that, but just suffice it to say that I’m very careful about what I put in my body. And I’m very careful about what I put in my head. And for me, the free stuff online is junk food.
[00:53:50] Matt Bailey: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:53:50] John Marshall: And I, it is not true to say that I don’t eat junk food. Occasionally I’m in a hurry, I’m driving, I’m on a road trip or whatever, and I just need to, I got to eat something and I, I, and I, it’s fine, right? I’m, I’m not, I’m not that strict about it, but kale on brown rice and, yeah, what’s that? Yes, I’m careful about what I put in my body. And, um, and I’m careful about what I put in my head, and I don’t put free stuff in my head, and I don’t put free food in my mouth. How did that work? Does it, does it, does that?
[00:54:27] Matt Bailey: Well, absolutely. No, that works. I mean, to extend this a little further, when I do eat junk food, I feel terrible afterwards. And yeah, when I expose my brain to free things, I feel terrible afterwards. And that’s when I talked to you on the phone and be like, “I can’t trust anything,” ’cause I’m eating the junk food. That’s…
[00:54:50] John Marshall: That’s right.
[00:54:50] Matt Bailey: That’s exactly it.
[00:54:52] John Marshall: Yeah.
[00:54:52] Matt Bailey: No, you’re dead on. You’re, you’re dead on. And, uh, it, it, it comes down to, yeah, it’s human nature. It’s what we, what we want and what we fill our heads with that determines a lot of that and, and what we want, so. And like you said, it’s a tough sell. Eating healthy is a tough sell. Uh, kale, John, is a tough sell. It’s, uh, I, I wanted to say that.
[00:55:20] John Marshall: You just ruined my day. You ruined my day.
[00:55:22] Matt Bailey: How did I ruin your day? I, I, I’m, I’ll tell, I didn’t say it’s bad. I didn’t say it’s, you know, it’s not something, but…
[00:55:30] John Marshall: You, you, you were very judicious. Yeah. You said, “It’s a, it’s a tough sell.”
[00:55:33] Matt Bailey: It is.
[00:55:34] John Marshall: Alright, so, so I, I, I shouldn’t be buying those kale futures then, right? Because we’re not going to be selling a whole lot of kale all of a sudden. I should stick with the pork belly, so.
[00:55:45] Matt Bailey: Hey, you know what? You want to make people happy at a party, that’s one way to do it. So…
[00:55:50] John Marshall: Yeah. I, I, I, I get it. I do. I do, I get it.
[00:55:54] Matt Bailey: Yeah. But I, I love, John, I think that is a fantastic way of summarizing it, that, you know, you eat healthy, you also read healthy and there’s a lot of junk food available and a lot of junk food out there, and the junk food’s cheap. Um…
[00:56:09] John Marshall: That’s right.
[00:56:09] Matt Bailey: And, and I think that is an excellent, excellent visual way of thinking about the content we consume. The same way we think about the food we consume and what, the effect is, has on our bodies, uh…
[00:56:22] John Marshall: Yeah.
[00:56:22] Matt Bailey: …I think is just an excellent, excellent way of looking at it.
[00:56:24] John Marshall: Yeah. So, so the, the, the, you know, my smart phone, I got all kinds of stuff that shows up on my smartphone, right? All, all kinds, there’s all kinds of stuff. And, and, but, but almost none of it is free. Almost none of it is free. And I, I am gonna stick with that rule of life. I am going to stick with that.
[00:56:45] Matt Bailey: Fantastic. John, hey, it, it has been a, a great discussion and, and yes, you have inspired me to make changes, and I, I, in the show notes, I’m, I’m going to list, uh, a number of the resources that you listed, uh, for people to investigate, look at these things, uh, because I can tell you, yeah, when you, when you move towards a more, more payment based tools, payment based, you know, email, things like that, uh, it, it’s like changing your diet, and, uh, the, the results are, are evident, uh, when that happens.
[00:57:20] John Marshall: Hey, um, I, ’cause I, I, not to, not to promote this stuff here, but…
[00:57:23] Matt Bailey: No, promote away.
[00:57:24] John Marshall: …I did do, I did do, I, I did some analysis on this, right?
[00:57:26] Matt Bailey: Yes.
[00:57:27] John Marshall: I mean, you know, in the, in the original book “Free is Bad,” I did the analysis on this. You can go to freeisbad.com/charts. If you were to provide a link to that. And, and if, I’m sure your audience is, is, is pretty, um, analytically minded, I mean, you, you, know, being who you are. So, I think that people would find that interesting, the, the correlation that I draw between the free news and sort of problematic news.
[00:57:51] Matt Bailey: Yes.
[00:57:51] John Marshall: There’s a strong correlation there.
[00:57:53] Matt Bailey: Yes.
[00:57:53] John Marshall: There’s a strong correlation between problematic news and the fact that it’s free. And the opposite is true. There’s a strong correlation between quality news and the fact that it’s expensive, just like food, just like kale. What do you know?
[00:58:13] Matt Bailey: Well, and that’s a discussion for a whole ‘nother time is government subsidies of junk food and, and why junk food is cheaper than vegetables. Uh, that’s, I think that’s a whole ‘nother discussion there, but…
[00:58:29] John Marshall: Right.
[00:58:29] Matt Bailey: Oh, John, hey, thank you so much for, uh, spending this afternoon with me. I really appreciate it, and I’m sure the listeners appreciate it, as well.
[00:58:37] John Marshall: Thank you, Matt. Always a pleasure to see you.
[00:58:39] Matt Bailey: And of course, I’m going to put, uh, you, you know, you pitched the “Free is Bad” charts. Anything else, John? Uh, I mean, there’s always…
[00:58:46] John Marshall: Kale!
[00:58:46] Matt Bailey: Kale, alright.
[00:58:47] John Marshall: Did, did I, did I tell people to eat more kale?
[00:58:49] Matt Bailey: I can’t link to kale, but, uh, I, I will, I will link to a kale recipe that I saw online that if you cook kale with coconut oil, it slides off the pan and into the trash much easier. So, there’s a recipe for that. Um, oh, John, I miss talking to you. I, I, it’s, I, I think we need to, we need to do this more often.
[00:59:15] John Marshall: We’ll do that.
[00:59:16] Matt Bailey: Alright. John, thanks again. I really appreciate it, and, uh, boy, thanks again, and, uh, I’ll point people to the book and also some of the resources that you have pointing there as well.
[00:59:26] John Marshall: Appreciate it, Matt. Alright. Talk soon.
[00:59:28] Matt Bailey: Alright. Thank you again, listener for tuning in to another episode of the Endless Coffee Cup. Besides being a free podcast, I hope this has been educational and a great experience just, uh, listening in on, uh, what you can do to improve, I would say, your quality of life, your quality of mind by paying for some of those resources and news that you can get on a daily basis.
[01:00:00] Thanks again for joining us. Be sure to like us, leave a review, and I’ll see you again on the next episode of the Endless Coffee Cup.
Featured Guest:
John Marshall
Entrepreneur, Author
LinkedIn: John Marshall | LinkedIn
Book: Free is Bad
Listen to John Marshall in another episode:
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