#74 - Why I'm Choosing to Not Analyze Donald Trump

Welcome to the Talk To People Podcast.

This is your host, Chris Miller.

If you've never been here before, it is great to have you.

And also, the purpose of this podcast is for us to grow in a lot of the different things, but most importantly, our ability to talk to those around us because life is better when you talk to people.

We believe one of the best things to invest our time, energy, talent, treasure is our ability to build relationships.

Earlier on, let's see here, how many episodes ago we had how to avoid awkward silence in conversation, which was April 15th, 2024, episode number 63, where I talked about the Ford method.

The Ford method is a common tool that people use to help them navigate conversation whenever they don't know what to say or they don't know how to push the ball forward.

This is often actually used in sales training.

Ford stands for Family, Occupation, Recreation, and Dreams.

And the premise is that throughout the whole entire conversation, you could essentially ping pong back and forth through all of these and come up with a question.

Well, I found a new one, and I would have to omit a better one.

I didn't make it up.

I didn't coin it myself, but I did find it on Reddit by this person, username oddfix, subreddit called social skills.

And it's titled, Why Ford is BS and Why Jefe is Better.

So when you think of Jefe, Jefe, you think of, or I think of like boss in Spanish, but this is H-E-F-E.

And what it stands for is Hobbies, Entertainment, Food, and Environment.

And the critique about the Ford tool was that it was a bit too formal.

It was a bit too corporate.

Whenever you think about, tell me about your biggest dreams, right?

What are the odds you're going to stumble upon that in a conversation where you're just sitting down?

Rather, H-E-F-E, Jefe, Hobbies, Entertainment, Food, and Environment is a lot more accessible.

As the Reddit user oddfix writes, Everyone has hobbies.

Everyone likes music.

Everyone watches movies and TV shows, and everyone eats food.

You can quite literally make friends just sharing stuff you like, and it may be finding common ground.

Want to show them your artistic side?

Guess all that crippling depression and introverted house sitting finally paid off.

And hey, if there's a movie showing or a concert happening, guess what?

Now you have a hobby buddy so you can watch Spider-Man turn into dusk for the second time and cry for the second time.

All of these four are very vague and can be applied to lots of things.

In the Ford Method, family only applies to one thing.

You only have one family, occupation applies to one thing.

But the Ford Method, rather, your hobby, the Hefe Method, your hobby could be drawing, singing, exercising, dancing, whatever.

It could be video games, music, movies.

Food is another thing.

Ask them about any food they like.

So this is much more accessible and hobbies, entertainment, food, and environment.

I really do like the environment one because he had mentioned in this post, if you don't know what to say at all, talk about your immediate environment.

I keep saying he had mentioned, it may have been a woman she had mentioned.

Whoever this user is, talk about your immediate environment.

If you're sitting there, you don't know what to say.

Look over and be like, hey, that's a really interesting thing, or wow, I've never seen something like that, or tell me where you got your shoes.

Immediate environment.

You don't even need to leave the room to come up with a new line.

So the HEFE method, the H-E-F-E, hobbies, entertainment, food, and environment, I'm imparting that to you.

And now you can carry it on to all of your conversations you're going to be having this week or this week.

Whenever you're listening to this podcast, I was looking at the analytics earlier today, and what I've noticed is that there has yet to be a day in the past, I can't confirm, but I would say in the past, I mean, I can definitely confirm the past month, there's yet to be a day where nobody's listening to the Talk to People podcast, which is really cool.

Today we had people who were listening to episode 73, 72, 71, 70, 69, 68, 67.

Yesterday we had people listening to 73, 67, 65, 63, 61.

Some people are asking, and I'll go ahead and give you the scoop here, what is the most listened to episode on this podcast?

The most listened to is the trailer.

What's this podcast about?

I need to update that trailer.

It's not as recent or relevant.

And then the first most, the most listened to out of anybody who's ever been on this podcast is episode number one, Annie Miller, Life, Laughter and Love.

It's funny because the title is Life, Laughter, Love.

It's what she would have on a billboard if millions of people were to see a billboard and she got to put whatever phrase she wanted on there.

That's what she picked.

I think it's quite common to have the first episode be the most popular for podcasts, but number one, two, and three are all my most popular, going one, two, and three.

And one of the big reasons is that whenever the podcast first launched, it was featured on Apple Podcasts homepage and it got a lot of traction from everybody that was beyond my social circle.

So initially, typically when you launch a podcast, it's your friends and your family, like 100, 150 downloads per episode.

But this wasn't the case, and it really blew up.

After that, we have Jeremy Pearson.

He's number six.

Let's see here, most popular.

Yeah, he's number six, then number four, then we jumped to Paul Harworth, number 15.

Super cool to be able to see all the different conversations happening.

But one thing that really came through the cracks, it stands out upon all the episodes for amount of time being published versus all the other ones.

Like the most popular one was also the longest standing one.

But episode number 44, if you've never listened to episode number 44, this is a good chance for you to maybe put it in your queue.

It's called Small Talk Secrets Transform Boring Chats Into Memorable Moments.

This episode is seven months old, but it has more downloads than episodes that are more than a year old.

It has more downloads than episodes that were in the first 10 episodes of this podcast, which goes to show how long they've been around.

And I'm going to check real quick to see another statistic that may be interesting to you all.

Maybe you're like, none of this stuff is interesting to me.

And if that's the case, then stick around for a second, because it's interesting to me.

Okay, so that episode number 44, small talk secrets transform boring chats into memorable moments.

Whenever I see that, I'm like, hmm, should I be titling my podcasts with a hyphen in there like that?

Should I do more secrets?

Or should I, I'm always wondering, how could I have improved my other episodes by using what's working for this episode?

All right, and I look at all episodes.

Listeners.

The stats aren't showing up for me.

Okay, guys, episode 44.

Okay, and it has really high consumption rate.

So people are listening all the way to the end.

On Apple podcasts alone, we have like 60 people who've listened to at least 10 minutes of the episode, and the whole episode is 27 minutes.

So 60 people listening to 10 minutes, that's 600 minutes, that's 10 hours worth of people listening to us talk about how to make small talk turn into memorable moments.

So this morning, I launched this.

I shipped, I published a YouTube video called How to Keep Conversations from Going Nowhere, and the thumbnail is me making a face, and I made the whole thumbnail.

There's a dead-end sign, and there's people walking down a path in the background.

But it's performing pretty poorly.

And something I've realized with the YouTube channel is that I'm going to have to rework the YouTube channel.

It kind of came to fame with the communication moments, Communication Expert reacts.

But what I also realized was that's not sustainable.

It's not practical for me to be sitting down and looking at the news every day like, okay, what's going to pop up next?

Like Trump just got the big court case that happened, and he gave a big speech.

Let me see if I can find it real quick.

34 for 45, Trump conviction, Trump guilty on 34 accounts.

Trump campaign says that it raised 52.8 million after the guilty verdict.

That's something.

Okay, and then Trump speech.

So the man has already given several speeches.

Trump delivers speech after guilty verdict.

These are, in many cases, I believe, sick people.

When you look at our country, what's happening, where millions and millions of people are flowing in from all parts of the world, not just South America, from Africa, from Asia, from the Middle East, and they're coming in from jails and prisons, and they're coming in from mental institutions and insane asylums, and they're coming in from all over the world into our country.

And we have a president and a group of fascists that don't want to do anything about it, because they could right now, today, he could stop it.

Okay, that was 40 seconds of it, I could theoretically put up a video, Communication Expert reacts to shocking Trump verdict speech, or Trump's shocking verdict speech, something like that, and get 10,000 views.

I'm pretty confident about that.

And I keep 10,000 views in mind, because my current video has 14 views.

So that's how big of a difference is there.

But something I'm learning is that it's not the community that I want.

Just because the YouTube channel now is partnered with YouTube, they're paying money for views now, like, I theoretically could pursue that.

But not only is it not a good community that I want to create, it's also very unsustainable.

You can't, I can't just be sitting there waiting for the next breaking thing to happen.

And I also don't like appealing to authority, like communication expert reacts.

I'm fine talking to someone and sharing with them why I believe I could identify myself as a communication expert and why I did that on YouTube.

But I don't want to keep having that conversation over and over and over again.

And I'd rather not have these videos that are subject to timeframes, because Trump's going to give another speech after that speech he just gave.

A lot of people are going to watch the video, if I were to publish it.

Watch that video now, because it's hot.

But then a week from now, a lot less people are going to watch it.

And if you want to win on YouTube, if you want to win with content, you have to have evergreen content.

You have to have content that people will watch today, tomorrow, next week, next year.

Because the way you win is this metric views per hour.

And on average, you will get...

There's the CPM and the RPM, there's cost per mil, and there's revenue per mil.

So every thousand views you get on YouTube, YouTube gets a certain amount of money from our advertisers, and they give you a share of that as your ad revenue payment.

And the best way to become full time on YouTube is to build a body of work that generates views over hour.

So if we were to go look at my YouTube channel right now, I've gotten in the past 48 hours, I have gotten 47 views.

So about one view per hour.

But in the past 48 hours, nine people have watched my video about Cat Williams.

Five people watched how I became confident with my speaking.

Three people watched Tucker Carlson.

So that's how you really get big on YouTube is you just build a library, and over time people begin watching it and keep watching it.

But that's never going to work if my content isn't ever green.

It's never going to work if my content is just about, ooh, this event happened.

It also is not going to get the right community and it's not sustainable.

So there's a lot of different reasons why I'm changing my content on YouTube.

And the, I'm finally getting out there and putting stuff up.

I did it today, how to keep conversations from going nowhere.

And it's really not performing that well.

And I just have to be okay with that.

Like I am not creating for the views.

I am simply creating to be able to help people.

And regardless of how many views anything gets, it's not going to matter.

And of course, it matters to some extent, but that's not my pursuit.

And big shout out to everybody who listens to this podcast, because I'll have people reach out to me.

I'll have people message me, talk to me about the value add.

It's added to them.

And for that, I'm incredibly grateful.

I think the way I want to be remembered is by helping people become more inquisitive and curious and more likely to interact with those around them.

It's okay if you don't exactly know how to do that, or if you don't feel like you're the most popular, the most funny, the most attractive, the most charismatic.

All of that's okay, but what isn't okay is if you live your life not feeling some type of calling or pool to learn about the people around you.

And I can get way better at this, and I hope to get way better at it.

I hope to become a much better conversationalist.

I hope to become much better with people, my friends, my family, my acquaintances, my colleagues, my clients, everybody.

But that's why I'm creating on YouTube.

So I'm looking at analytics now.

The click through rate is 2%, which is not good at all.

So that's a bummer because I'll probably have to figure out different packaging for my next video, but I'm not going to overthink it, and I am just going to let it ride.

I think it's a fun video, and we're going to sit with that.

So this episode, I gave you the Hefe method at the beginning, but really, I guess it's a inside look at the creator mentality, like what goes on in my brain and how I try and navigate some of this.

I think it's really important for people to create.

If you ever want to create something on YouTube or a podcast, contact me, let me know.

Tell me that you listen to this episode, because I will help you.

I will give you resources.

I'll give you some of my time.

We will come together and you will create something.

It's no longer going to be one day I want to do this.

It's going to be, I just did it.

I'm there for you.

All right, folks, I missed this Thursday because I felt like I had a concussion because I hit the soccer ball way too hard and had headache for a couple of days.

Not a good thing.

I'm going to lay off the heading, but I will be here this Thursday.

So without further ado, I'll see you on Thursday.

And remember, life is better when you talk to people.

Thank you.