Powder Keg of Unpopular

When I saw Jerry uncork a bottle of wine at 11am in the morning, I knew it was going to be a good pod cast recording. Jackie Dotson and Jerry Kennedy had invited me as a guest on their pod cast Powder Keg of Awesome. True to their roots and values, this program is an unscripted hour-long free speech and association, loosely guided by a nominal topic and the uncertainties of good conversation.

Kindred spirits

Since I am a bohemian at heart in a Brooks Brother tie, I can ad-lib and speak extemporaneously with the best of them. While I have known Jackie and Jerry casually for a year or so, I didn’t really pop up on their radar screen until some my blog posts (My days as a salesman are over and How the Republican Party lost this old white guy’s vote) caught their attention.

He tweeted what?!

Ostensibly, we had gathered for a one hour conversation about social media, marketing, insurance

(I guess) and what it means to be honest in marketing your products and yourself. I suggested the title of the podcast be, “How to destroy your marketing efforts through social media”, which I seem to be particularly good at these days.

Smiling on the outside

I have always gotten the sense that both Jackie and Jerry reluctantly participated in the network marketing game for their services. Until some of my self-revelatory blog posts “outed” me as someone that had more than a little disdain for the status quo of business, I assume most folks figured that I was just another eager participant in the contrived marketing environment of networking events as well. It is not that we don’t like networking, talking, drinking and having fun, there is just a certain level of pretension that must be maintained in order to participate.

This explains everything*

After our 1 hour pod cast recording, which no doubt captured near God-like utterances of wisdom,

Jackie handed me a book called The Power of Unpopular. Oh God, I thought to myself, not another self-published, self-help book by a self-taught expert. I was wrong.  Intrigued by the title, I read the book and everything about Jackie and Jerry fell into place, more or less. (You can read my book review of The Power of Unpopular here)

Ahhhh

In a nutshell, Unpopular is about being drawn to people, products, and services because of their honesty and what they represent. An analogy might be: stop posting cute motivational kitten pictures in your Facebook status and tell me why you cried at work. As a business, just be upfront an honest with me so I know who I am dealing with.

Watching the Detectives

It was fun recording the pod cast with Jackie and Jerry. I am not sure if most people in Sacramento

get them or not. My gut instinct about them was right. They are cool people that are really trying to do the right thing in business. I am so pumped that I think I will make cute puppy poster to tell them how much they mean to me and post it to Facebook, #smirk.

*As exclaimed by Bart Simpson in the episode A Fish Called Selma, after he watches a musical based on the Planet of the Apes movie.