Why Small Acts Of Kindness Still Matter

A car overheats on a scorching Sunday in 1969. No phones, no call boxes, no easy way out. What happens next is the kind of true story that quietly rewires your brain: a young cowboy pulls over, tows a stranded father and son into town, recruits a mechanic after church, and turns a miserable breakdown into one of the best days of their lives. That’s the heart of my conversation with Neal Foard, one of the most trusted modern voices in heartfelt storytelling.

We get into why this message hits so hard right now, when social media and the news can make it feel like everyone is angry and nothing is safe. Neil shares practical ways to curate your algorithm, avoid rage bait, and treat your information diet like your food diet. We also talk about the strange backlash hopeful stories can trigger and why some people use them to argue for nostalgia instead of empathy.

Then we zoom out into the craft and power of storytelling itself: how stories teach us what a good life looks like, how tiny gestures like a simple compliment can have an outsized impact, and why sincerity cuts through the noise. Neal also explains Story Fire, his approach to using storytelling and clear communication as a real career skill, from running tighter meetings to earning trust in high-stakes rooms. 

Make sure to follow Neal on his social media platforms Instagram, Tik Tok, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

If you finish this conversation feeling more hopeful, help us spread that ripple: subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a quick review or comment so more people can find Kindness Matters.

You can support the show in a few different ways—by grabbing something from our merch store, picking up a copy of my book, or joining us on Buy Me a Coffee. Every bit of support helps keep the podcast going and also helps us give back to nonprofits doing good in the world.

“Intro music: ‘Human First’ by Mike Baker – YouTube Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRXqkYVarGA  | Podcast: Still Here, Still Trying | Website: www.mikebakerhq.com”

Transcript

Welcome And The Kindness Mission

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Welcome to the Kindness Matters podcast. Show that celebrate the powerful truth. That kindness can change the world. Every week I aim to chinalize up people and organizations making a positive difference to their communities. Proving that compassion, empathy, and connection to five minutes out of three times. This podcast is about 400 stories. It's about 300. Through hotel conversations, inspiring acts. If the message of this show resonates with you, please share it with your friends and family. FaithChare helps spread the light a little further. Because when it comes to kindness, the ripple effect is limitless. Hey, hello, and welcome everybody to the kindness matters podcast. Um, I'm your host, Mike Rathman, as always, and as always, I just want to take a second and and thank you all for joining. Um I say this every time, but in case there's somebody new here, we all have so only so many hours every day, and the fact that you chose to take uh a portion of one of those hours to listen to this podcast means the world to me, and and I'm I'm so incredibly grateful. I'll tell you what, there's something else I'm incredibly grateful for, and that is my guest today. My guest is Neil Ford, and he has become one of the most recognizable and trusted voices. Dang you, Neil Ford, one of the most recognizable and trusted voices in modern storm storytelling, not because he chases attention, but because he chases truth, humanity, and the small moments that remind us who we can be. After decades leading creative teams for some of the world's biggest brands, Neil shifted his focus to something far more personal. Telling stories that cut through the noise and reconnect us to empathy, decency, and each other. Uh, his videos have reached millions across social platforms, not through shock or spectacle, but through sincerity. Neil has a rare ability to take an ordinary moment, a conversation in a parking lot, a memory from childhood, a stranger's quiet kindness, and reveal the profound lesson inside it. I am so excited. I have been following you forever. Welcome to the show, Neil Ford.

SPEAKER_02 3:23

Thank you, Mike. I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

That's a very sweet introduction. Yeah, you know, it was thank you. Thank you for that. Um and I I've been following you probably for a couple of years now. I think I stumbled across you on TikTok, most likely,

Curating Social Media Without Rage

SPEAKER_01 3:41

which seems out of character for somebody my age to be on TikTok, right? Well, you're on it. I I know now. My wife and I, I don't know if you know this. My wife and I have a uh home cleaning business, and we were during the pandemic, we were cleaning for a client, and we were both kind of reminiscing about how ugly the world was right then, and she goes, Have you seen TikTok? I'm like, that seems a little young for me. And she said, I just go on it to watch the funny cat videos and dog videos and this and that and the other thing. And she goes, and it makes me laugh and it brings me joy. And and so I started, I got a TikTok account, and then at some point I think I said, I could use this to promote my podcast, maybe kind of sort of. And here we are. There you go.

SPEAKER_03 4:33

And that's how I found you.

SPEAKER_02 4:34

People that use TikTok are are not quite hip to how personalized it can be. They don't they don't quite make the effort to say, well, what am I interested in? In my case, I live in Southern California. So specifically in a little section they call the South Bay. And all I have to do is type in South Bay, Los Angeles, and all of a sudden I get all kinds of great restaurant reviews, and I'm I'm seeing young people talking about what what life is like, you know, in the music scene there and so on. And so I think if people just made a little bit of effort to curate their social media and and communicate to the algorithm what it is they want to see, the the algorithm for all of its bad points is also responsive to what you engage with. So this is why this is one of the nice things for my sake, which is if you're sending messages of positivity and and how not everybody is your enemy and you're not surrounded by threats, that people that have a kind of positive outlook, they'll find you and they'll be they'll be glad you exist. And so I try to do much the same when I'm on social media. If I see something that I can tell is just trying to rage bait me or is is a you know clickbait, I will downvote it and move on. And uh I'll often block people that are doing that kind of thing as a signal to the algorithm. It's like, I don't want to see these people anymore. Yeah. And and it creates, as you know, I mean, um, what you take in as information and entertainment is very similar in nature to food. If you if you consume garbage, you're going to become garbage. Garbage in, garbage out. Yeah, so it's it I take pains to curate my social media now in a way that I wouldn't have. I can't honestly say I would even be on social media were it not for the fact that I post videos on it and then I want to engage with it.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

Yeah, for sure. And and it's it's gotten a lot of eyes on what you do, though. I mean, for yeah, you can say what you will about social media and and for sure the segment of it is total garbage. But and yet there's and yet I found you and um and here we are.

The Postcard From 1969 Story

SPEAKER_01 6:54

Yeah. I I saw a couple of your videos first, but the first one that really stuck with me was um your postcard from 1969. Because I thought that's what I want to tell. That's the story that I want to tell. And I should you should go ahead and just tell us briefly what it's about.

SPEAKER_02 7:18

Yeah, so if you go back to um if you look at where we are right now, things seem like they're sort of unprecedentedly unprecedentedly bad. Like uh, everybody hates everybody, the country seems to be on the brink of a civil war, and so on. And they don't have any context because they haven't lived long enough to remember in 1969, the country was tearing itself apart. In Vietnam, people were getting drafted to go to a war they didn't believe in, and there were horrible things being committed by our own soldiers and to our own soldiers, and there were the FBI was actively engaged in spying on its own citizens and so on and so on. And it it was a it was the Manson family and the zodiac killer in the Bay Area, and it really felt like the country was tearing itself apart, and people don't recognize that. And in that, in that age, my father and I were driving from Los Angeles to Oakland on the five. The five goes right through California's Central Valley, which is hot as the hinges of hell in summer.

SPEAKER_03 8:29

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 8:30

And on a Sunday, we were making this trip. Now, my father, who had grown up in the depression, he was convinced that even in the depression, it wasn't this bad in terms of the way that the country felt about itself. And so he was deeply suspicious and he was really disappointed in the human race. He'd lost all faith in his fellow man. So we're making this drive. We get to the bottom of the grapevine, just south of Bakersfield, uh, on a Sunday, just about 11:55. So it's going to turn really hot. And the car loses its coolant. We blew a gasket. Now the car can't move. This is back before cell phones, back before call boxes. We're on the side of the road on a Sunday, and my father's, he was re he was angry enough to spit rivets. And he doesn't quite know what we're going to do. It looks like we're going to have to hoof it about nine miles into Bakersfield in the middle of that California heat. And so, hood up on the car, along comes this young cowboy in a flatbed, and he says, Hey, fellas, uh, looks like you got yourself in some trouble here. And my dad's like really skeptical about like why this guy stopped. He says, I can tow you into town if that'll help you out. And so he goes, uh, okay. Now, my dad's first thing, the comment to this kid is, I can't pay you because all we have is a chevron gas cart. So this guy says, Yeah, I wasn't gonna charge you. So he hooks us up with electrical conduit to his pickup, and we all ride in together in Bakersfield. Now, here's the thing it's Sunday and nothing's open. So, in order to get this mechanic that would work in his car, this cowboy plants himself outside of this church and waits for the service to exit. And then out comes the mechanic who's got one of those bolo ties. And uh, and he and his wife, you know, come out looking in their Sunday best and he says, Yeah, you know, I can get you hooked up. So they tow us over to the guy's garage and he puts us up on the jack, only to realize he doesn't have a part for this fix. So my father, who's like, hey, you know, I can't pay you for this work, and they go, Well, we'll work something out. Then they realize they got to go down to the local Napa parts store, which again is not open on Sunday. They got to get that make that guy to open the store for us to get the part. And my father has finally reached the point where he's like, Listen, I cannot pay you. I only have this chevron card. So we got to figure out how I'm gonna settle this all up because I'm not selling you the boy, if that's what this is about. And so they're all looking at my dad like, what the hell, bro? Uh they're they're flummoxed that somebody is this distrustful. So the cowboy who started the whole thing, he says, Listen, if it'll make you feel better, I've got a load of watermelons. I got to get off a rail spur. Um, and so if I'll pay for the part at least, if you'll help me get these watermelons unloaded. And so the mechanic says, Yeah, we can figure out some kind of trade or something. So happily, whistling, we're inside a rail car. It's got to be 130, 140 degrees in there. And we're unloading watermelons, but my father is happy as a clam because we're earning our keep.

unknown 11:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:46

But we get to the end of this, we've finally unloaded like about six loads of these watermelons back and forth with this flatbed. And uh the cark pulls up just running like a top. They filled it with coolant and it's all fixed. And we're working out where we're going to send the money. And my father says, I don't quite know how to thank you, fellas, for such a good turn. And we're just about to go, just pitted out in our shirts, just sweat covered. And the mechanic says, Hey, hey, hey, where do you think you're going? And it's this point when my father stiffens like a leopard, and he goes, I knew it. I knew it. And at this point, the mechanic goes, No, no, no, no. We're just one, we're gonna get my wife's gonna make a Sunday dinner, and we thought you and the boy want to get a shower, maybe get some clean shirts before you drive up to Oakland. Oh, okay. So we all have Sunday fried chicken on this picnic table in his backyard, and it's it's the greatest meal I've ever had. It was with the corn on the cob from the corn right over there, and the chicken that we're having is from the chickens right over there. And that was my first beer at nine years old. Um, they had one of those, they had one of those Budweisers you had to tap with a church key. You know, you remember that? Didn't even have a pop top. Right. And so I thought beer was disgusting, but nevertheless. So my father, all during that meal, he's he's not saying much at all. He just keeps shaking his head like this. And if you knew my old man, you knew what he was thinking, which is I am so ashamed of myself for having thought the worst of these people. And we get in the car on the way home. I'm I'm wearing a cowboy shirt with that had those fake pearl buttons. You know, the old timey cowboy shirts that they used to have? Yeah. Button things. Yeah, that's the one. So we go home, and my dad doesn't say maybe nine words on the whole drive back, and you know, we fill up a couple times using the chevron card. And then we finally get to Oakland, we I'm climbing into bed, and he appears in the doorway. I can't see him much because he's just silhouetted against the light in the hallway. And he goes, Listen, uh, no matter what you see in the movies, or you read in the papers, or you hear on the radio, or you read in books, let me tell you something. Don't listen to them. That's how people really are. And in that day, if you had told my father at the beginning of the day, so here's what's gonna happen, Bill. You're gonna be broken down on the side of the road in the deep summer of um of the Central Valley in the high heat. And when you reach the end of this day, it's going to be one of the best days of your life. He would not have believed you. And about a month later, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and he saw it with different eyes than he would have seen it at the beginning. And it struck me that that story, which I I would tell um frequently at like Thanksgiving, that that story deserved to be heard by other people. My daughter was the one who suggested I put it on TikTok. Oh, really? Because she thought it was the sort of message that uh you know would reach other people's hearts because they'll recognize their old man and what my father was like.

SPEAKER_01 15:13

Yeah. But I I I think I mean it was true in 1969, it's true today, right?

SPEAKER_02 15:20

Most most people are like that. But the one but the ones we see um being their worst selves, the reason they're being that way is because they've been given license to by other douchebags who make a career out of dividing us and telling us it's okay to be your to serve the worst angels of your nature. And because most people when given an uplifting message will behave as though that's you know, that they don't have to work they don't have to react to the world out of fear. Right.

SPEAKER_01 15:56

Right. And and I was really surprised when we were speaking uh before the show you had said that you had heard and because I think most people would hear that story and feel uplifted or inspired to be better or or hopeful.

When People Misread A Kind Message

SPEAKER_01 16:15

But you said you you've heard of some people who may have interpreted differently.

SPEAKER_02 16:20

Well, I've gotten all kinds of peculiar reactions. The the vast, vast bulk of people um share that message with with happiness to spread that the word that, you know, maybe people aren't so bad. And maybe maybe what maybe our our self-image is based on people rage baiting us and trying to divide us. And the you know, that got something on the order of six million views or seven million views. And but nevertheless, you'll often hear, or not often, you will sometimes hear reactions like that wouldn't happen today or that only happened because you were white. Or or um although I've had personal experiences that that aren't that don't agree with that. I've had you know, I'm not gonna believe the news accounts when my own personal experience I'm gonna believe my own eyes and ears, where I've I've run across unbelievable generosity. And even in cases I used to work at a lumber yard in South Central LA, I think I was one of two white guys at this lumber yard. And uh the the bulk of it was African American and then the rest of us Mexican. And after a time, uh I was shown incredible hospitality. I mean, I got called hoggy about nine times a day, but it it washes off to you off you after a while because you're like, I know why they're reacting that way. They don't know me. The people that know me down here feel good about me, and um you learn a lot from it's it's not I I get that comment, I get it, but at the same time, you don't know that's how it would have gone down. That cowboy, I'm pretty sure he would have stopped for just about anybody. I'm pretty sure. And and I'm also pretty sure that you know, uh, under the right circumstances, uh it would happen to anyone. But here's my I think the reason you are commenting that not everybody had that reaction is that some people actually use that video to tell a different story from the one I'm telling. They're not reacting to it as though people are the same wherever you go, or that most people are pretty cool, or that most people can be trusted. What they do is they use it to refer to a nostalgia of a country that's no longer there. And they bitch and moan about how America used to be. And they've it has completely gotten lost on them that what I'm telling you is 1969, it was a if you'd lived then, if you'd experienced the trauma of what Vietnam was doing to people, and how people would literally say, I'm gonna go out and shoot some hippies, you would not feel like that the country's going to hell in a handbasket. The country has always strained and struggled with its identity around goodness and kindness and I you know and the other people in your life, and feeling threatened at every corner because somebody doesn't necessarily believe the same things you believe.

SPEAKER_01 19:33

Yeah. Yeah. And and so this is such a fantastically structured story, and and I think again, most people took it in the most, most, like statistically. Right, right. Right.

Why Storytelling Shapes Human Behavior

SPEAKER_01 19:54

So what is it about storytelling? Why does it matter? And how I mean yeah, why does it matter? Because here we are, I mean, a story like that can travel around the world and and 90% of the people who watch it will feel good about it, some won't. That's on them. Um but why why storytelling? Uh we I mean, a as a society, as as human beings. I mean, we started off storytelling, right? Did we lose that? Did we lose that ability?

SPEAKER_02 20:35

No, no, not at all. Stories stories are the default operating system for human beings. I'm looking behind over your shoulder. You've got a book. It's filled with stories, no doubt. And it is the default operating system for human beings, it has been since the beginning. Since the time we were hunting woolly mammoths with sharp sticks, we have been sitting around the campfire telling each other stories in order to make sense of what it's like to have this experience. So, I mean, so we're saying, why is why are is there a volcano? Why do the locusts show up every, you know, circuit of years? What are the seasons about? Why do people die? You know, you didn't come out of the womb and somebody hand you an owner's manual that explained everything. I've everybody's got a holy book and they all say, well, this has all the answers. Well, I'm not so sure you're right about that, because if your if your holy book was so complete and it answered all questions, then why are people still angry with each other? And you know, why are some of the most awful people I've ever met deeply pious, or at least pretend to be? And the together we're going through an experience and we're trying to explain it, we're trying to make sense of it. In the end, we're hoping that it all adds up to mean something. So storytelling was ways we used to explain our environment to each other. And there's sometimes a really important element of storytelling. Telling, which is what is I'm to quote Yuvel Harari, the guy that wrote Sapiens. He says, The most important stories we tell are the ones we tell ourselves about ourselves. Who are we? What is a good life? Who is a good man or a good woman? What do you have to do to be a good person? It's really important that stories are how we decide what being a good person is. And when you when I I tell a story like that postcard from 1969, what I'm trying to say is we haven't changed as a species between then and now. We still fight these battles. We're still angry about the same things. We still disagree about the same things. But you know what I found? You know what my personal experience was? That when we were in trouble and had nowhere to turn, somebody came along and helped us for nothing. They bent their day and half and went out of their way to help us. They fed us, they fixed our car with no, they never intended really at the beginning to ever hand us a bill. It's only because my father insisted that we, you know, and and he did pay them eventually by mail with a beautiful note and so on. But and you, if you think about it, all that cowboy really was doing was he was just trying to be a good person. He was just living up to his own expectations. He had told himself a story that this is how I am as a person and this is how I'm going to live. And along comes somebody that lets me prove it. In a way, the big winner was the cowboy. Because he'd lived up to his own expectations of what kind of man he was.

SPEAKER_03 23:46

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 23:47

And he'd set an example for me, a nine-year-old boy, to go, I'm gonna be like that. And and so uh, what is the purpose of stories? It's to it's to teach us how to behave. And to teach us that you know who we other people are and and that they're all having an experience.

SPEAKER_01 24:09

You have this incredible knack, um and and that's probably why I mean you're you're a very successful storyteller, and and you have this incredible knack of taking a memory or a moment and and something that somebody else who maybe had the same experience wouldn't think twice about. Just small moments and creating I I don't want to say a parable, uh creating this moment of magic out of it. Um and and I I I have this story.

Small Compliments With Massive Impact

SPEAKER_01 24:58

I have a story. I'd heard it, it's not mine. I had I had asked a question on Reddit in the kindness community, and I'd said, um, what's one small thing that happened to you that had act of kindness that had an outsized effect? And this one guy said uh it was after the pandemic, he was walking back to his truck, he'd been really down for like two, three, four months, just you know, feeling like crap about himself, about his situation. And he was getting to his truck after work, and all of a sudden he heard somebody say, Hey man, nice beard. And he looked around and he saw a guy across the street and he was hollering at him, right? And he said, I had not been taking care of myself. I had not been grooming, I had not been, you know, it wasn't like I was out there making an effort every day to take care of myself and look my best. But somebody took two seconds out of their day to point to me and say, nice beard. And he said, I got in my truck and I cried because somebody had taken, made an effort to try and make my day a little better. And I just that story stuck with me a bit because it shows minimal effort on somebody's part had a huge impact on somebody else. Right.

SPEAKER_02 26:36

There's a dark version of that story that is told by uh a psychiatrist in San Francisco. This would have been right around 1968-69. And so it's concurrent with my um with my other story. What happened was that the the Golden Gate Bridge is a place where people a lot of suicides jump off the Golden Gate. And nobody ever jumps off looking at the oceanside. They all jump this off the side that faces San Francisco. And um, you know, as a kind of middle finger as they descend. And one day they uh there was a person who had committed suicide on the bridge. They went and they, through their the identification that was still on him, they went and they found his apartment. And he had left a suicide note, and in the note it says, If if on my way to the bridge even one person smiles at me or says hello, I won't do it. Which means that nobody did. So in the very same spirit of the guy shouting out to him, nice beard, for all we know, that small gesture might have made the difference. And so when you and I go into the world, you and I are both making an effort to find an opportunity to try to improve somebody's day. I even, you know, uh, as you may know from my stories, I always keep a pocket full of these ridiculous guys. And the reason the other name? The Bjarke, Bjarke the revenge troll. And the purpose of it is to just inch towards trying to say, um, I went a little bit out of the way to make you smile because uh we're both human beings and I recognize that you've got a tough job. And the the gesture, the extra little gesture, it has a disproportionate impact on people.

Generosity In Business And Online Noise

SPEAKER_02 28:34

And I learned this from being in advertising, which is if you're not making an extra effort to make people smile or touch them emotionally in your commercials, you're not even trying. Instead of being the signal amongst the signal and noise, you are contributing to the noise. When you are entirely self-interested, um, people not only are not interested in listening to you, but you've actually degraded their life experience today, because you have created a suspicion that everybody is in it for themselves, instead of somebody saying, We're all on this journey together, and I have something that might be of interest to you. But you know what? As long as I've got your attention, let me make you laugh in the course of this. That a generosity of spirit in business, it it refills the tank on people to feel like all hope is not lost. But uh, I don't know if you've had this experience, Mike, where you get a message on LinkedIn and it's somebody who at first expresses some kind of feeling like, hey, uh, I'm really, I thought I saw your profile and I saw this, and I thought, you know, we should connect. We have a lot in common. And then you know it's gonna be because of experience, you know that three messages later they're gonna hit you with their sales thing. So it that kind of thing is a pollutant to the commons. That sort of, I come on like a friend only to try and fleece you like a sheep. Um AI does this. AI has figured out how to do a cadence of messages that will produce a response of signing up for your course. Whenever I get a message like that now, where um they say, I'm very interested in what you're doing, I say, fantastic. Then you'll want this 30% discount code on my course. So here you go. And immediately they end contact. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 30:38

Because so it's like hanging up on the on the telemarketer, right?

SPEAKER_02 30:44

Well, or the whistle in the phone or something. No, no, I don't, I don't telemarketers have a really hard job. So, what I'll usually say to a telemarketer is I go, Can I just stop you for a second? Listen, I'm not gonna buy your service, but I know how hard it is what you do. I I respect the fact that you take your lumps. So listen, I'm just wishing you good luck today. And not for me, but god go with God. Okay. And that to me, um, in a kind of perverse way, it's like they may run across somebody who needs what they have. So let me keep you going, bro. You know, it's the ones, it's the ones that come on like a friend and then backstab you with this kind of thing. Um sometimes I don't react out of courtesy, by the way. I react out of cynicism. Have you ever done this, Mike? Where they start taking you down that path where they're saying that. And so what I will do is I will send them a screed that's like two paragraphs long of just buzzword-filled nonsense where I you can't really tell what I'm saying. It's like, I'm so glad, so glad you left you right reached out, because I'm engaged in trying to upscale a blah, blah, blah that brings a divergent, you know, it's just buzzwords and it's two paragraphs. And then they'll say, So um uh how do you uh how do you find that this you know works? And I'll send them another two paragraphs, and I and I get AI to gin up this stuff for me. So, and then eventually, you know, I'm just waiting for them to hit me with the sales thing. And I have been talking to some guy, I think we must have exchanged 16 messages. He never tells me what he does. He's only interested in learning more about what I do. So I just keep saying, I eventually, um at some point or another, I'm gonna stop. But but I'm kind of perversely interested in how long his algorithm is gonna keep trying to get me.

SPEAKER_01 32:47

Yeah. I have been out of the corporate world for so long, and I'll go through, I'll scroll through LinkedIn, and I'm seeing all these buzzwords, and you know, yeah, I I can't even say it. But it's just like I would be so lost if I had to get a corporate job right now. God forbid.

SPEAKER_02 33:07

Well but Yeah, I mean, the the the environment has been automated and algorithmized and uh and weaponized in such a way that the incentives are misaligned with the human experience.

SPEAKER_03 33:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:23

Um You know, it used to be when when you and I were running in our heyday, um, there really was such a thing as a kind of company loyalty, which was there was a contract, a social contract. Um your boss understood that if they if they have you working two weekends in a row and you know you've worked a good solid 14 days without a break, you are owed something in return. And most, most human beings would react out of generosity and kindness and gratitude for the extra effort you'd shown. Uh they would, this was when you found mentors. Like a mentor would say, I am I'm very grateful that you did that. You remind me of me. Therefore, can I give you a tip on this and that and the other thing? And that it's really, we have been propagandized to not react that way anymore. That they're uh, you know, regular layoffs are whether the company's doing great or not, they just they do the Jack Welch thing and they just go through there and rank and yank. And at that point you go, you know what? If that's how you're gonna behave, there's a million ways I can paper cut this place into oblivion. Yeah. Uh so don't, you know, I'm it sounds like what I'm saying is cynical. What I'm actually saying is most people are disinclined to do that, and yet there are forces at work that are misaligning the incentives of how people behave as managers. And it is it is anti-productive. They're they're actually having a consequence that's deincentivizing their workforce to contribute, and it's bad for business to behave like a dirtbag.

SPEAKER_01 35:04

Right. But to right, yeah. I mean, even the last corporate job I had, I we the company had screwed up somebody's order horribly, and I apologized, and I got written up because my manager said you should never apologize. Like, we screwed up. That requires anything.

SPEAKER_02 35:29

Was he worried about like legal indemnification or something? Because if you admit a mistake, you're on the hook for never apologize to a client.

SPEAKER_01 35:38

Okay. Anyhow. No, we're sort of we're going off-road now because we're we are our souls. Talk to me about Story Fire and what prompted that.

Story Fire And Career-Advancing Communication

SPEAKER_02 35:52

Because it sounds like it's a sort of fluffy thing to teach people how to tell stories. But in fact, it is a it's a career-enhancing tool. It will fast track you for advancement. Um, I tell every audience, I guarantee you, that I can affect the trajectory of your career, and even if you're skeptical, I'll prove it to you. And the there is abundant evidence, and I've seen it uh over and over again, that when people can captivate a room, when they can hold the attention of a 300-person gathering, that when they can stand up in front of a board of directors and seize and hold their attention and then lead them to a logical moral, here are the action items, this is what I need you to prove. When you can do that skillfully, you advance quickly. Because a board of when a board of directors looks at you at say 27 and they go, that son of a bitch was not intimidated at all. Like they walked in here and knew under exactly. I'll give you an example, a small example, but storytelling is not always what people think it is. Storytelling is how you behave in such a way that it communicates who you are. And just as important, it communicates your attitude towards the person you're talking to. So it goes like this. I used to have a guy, we used to report to the CFO for a very peculiar reason. My creative team used to report to the chief financial officer of Saatchi and Satchi Big Advertising Agency. Now, I happened to notice, and my number two, Tim, happened to notice, that the CFO's calendar, you know, his executive assistant's calendar for his time was in 10-minute blocks because he was so busy. He was the global CEFO for this giant company. So you got to get to the point with this guy really quickly. Now, other people hadn't noticed that, that his time is blocked out in 10-minute increments. So they would think they were going to roll in there and get a 30-minute meeting or something like that. Now, now, what Tim figured out, and Tim was a brilliant storyteller, is he goes, Oh, the executive assistant must be furious when people go over their allotted time. They're spoiling her afternoon. They're really wrecking it for her because now she has to juggle everybody. Hey, now you she got to make calls and say you can't come up for another 10 minutes, or you get the idea. She doesn't want him stacked up outside of his office. Right. And she can't very well march in there and tell this person to shut up. And Bill wants to be courteous, so he doesn't want to shut anybody else up either.

SPEAKER_03 38:36

Right.

SPEAKER_02 38:37

But what Tim did, such a shrewd move. Next time we walked in, he says, so that the EA can hear it, Bill, this is gonna take three minutes and 28 seconds. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna ask for you to approve this software purchase. Here's the background. It's gonna, this is what we're operating off, this is how we're doing it now. We're suffering from this issue. This software, I believe, will solve this problem. It costs this amount of money. It will take this amount of time to integrate. If I can get your approval on this budget exposure, you know, this expenditure right now, we'll have the system integrated up and running and be and not have that problem in two weeks. And then he looks at his watch and he goes, Well, I was wrong. Two minutes and 38 seconds. Now, why would he do that? What's the point? The point is so that the EA hears when Tim comes into the room, he's going to be conscious of your time. He has rehearsed this, the the 28 seconds. Why would he say that? So that he has proven I've rehearsed this enough times to know exactly how long it takes, which means I've come into the room prepared, which means I've given the executive assistant, I've given her time back. He's got a buffer, he's got a cushion. He can go to the bathroom and not worry about that. Now, what happened from that point on was he would always do that. He would walk in and he would announce this is how long this is going to take. This is the decision I need your approval on. Bill would sometimes say no. He would go, I'm not going to approve that. I need to talk to you about something else because there are reasons I can't spend money on that. Uh, make an appointment with Marianne and she'll get you back on the thing. Do you think Marianne? Marianne overheard the whole thing. So she's already getting you another appointment when he's back from his trip. What Tim understood is that the story Tim was telling was we are efficient people who prepare before we arrive. Despite the fact that we are creative people by profession, we are extremely orderly, respectful, and we understand the pressures you're under. So how you do anything is how you do everything, is the way that we sort of operate. And what he was saying to Marianne, the assistant, was we do everything like this. Therefore, if you have a five-minute window or a 10-minute window and suddenly somebody bailed out of their appointment, call us and we will arrive and fill that gap.

SPEAKER_03 41:07

Nice.

SPEAKER_02 41:08

And so you see what I mean by storytelling. Well, the story fire course is to create an entire persona, an entire career-enhancing approach to how you communicate in business so that you are perceived the way you want to be perceived. You are perceived as someone who is promotable. You are perceived as someone who you do not want to fire them during the layoffs. This one you want to keep. That's what I'm in the business of is saying I can help you be more persuasive. I can help you tell stories that seize the emotions so that people have already decided they want to approve it, even if they don't necessarily have the money. You know, you so that you will cultivate a when this guy shows up or when this woman comes into the room, that's going to be the best meeting of your day. You will enjoy this. And you see that that's the story fire promise, is that it's not that I'm teaching you to tell stories, it's that I'm helping you use this tool to enhance your prospects for a more productive career.

SPEAKER_01 42:14

And that's that's the best I've ever told that. Yeah. And Tim was the one that came up Birky, wasn't he?

SPEAKER_02 42:26

No, that was Marcus, my friend Marcus, who was a former, he was a former improv actor. And that's just the way that he operates in the world. Is like he he cannot wait for a chance to use an A an accent or you know, to play some stupid role.

SPEAKER_01 42:40

Wait, you got the dinosaur.

SPEAKER_02 42:46

Um, I got the dinosaur from my friend, uh, from my friend Doug. Or no, I got it originally from Photo Jojo. They had packed it in the package.

Symbols, Belonging, And The Ripple Effect

SPEAKER_02 42:54

But my friend Doug, when I'd sent him an army man, he sent me back a rock that he painted a face on and it said, you rock. And and then um one of the gals from my office, she was a copywriter, she was the one who came up with the idea of happy rocks, which was the little seed balls that you would take a creature and put seeds in, and then you would throw it into an empty lot in Manhattan so that after a rain it would sprout wildflowers. And all of these were a chain reaction off of that photo JoJo thing, which is, you know, I take a big lesson from that, which is that when you do nice things for people or you disrupt their day with something fun, they tend to vibe on that. They the vibration lingers and echoes, and then they can go into the world and spread concentric circles of goodness and happiness and positivity.

SPEAKER_01 43:42

And that's what happens every time I watch one of your videos, and then I share it. Thank you. And then somebody else sees it and they share it. And that's what this is all about.

SPEAKER_02 43:52

Um, you know, there's a there's a phenomenon in New York City of not everyone in New York is a Yankees fan. But but everybody wears those Yankee hats. And the reason is it has become synonymous with New York City. And so what they're really doing is they're not saying I'm a Yankees fan, they're not saying I support the Yankees. What they're saying is I'm a proud New Yorker. Now New York pride is very real. And the people have they had and still to some extent have a reputation of being sort of short-tempered and angry and nasty to people. And that was not my experience. My experience with New Yorkers was that their New York pride would not allow them to be bad to tourists or or nasty to waiters and waitresses. That they they were often abrupt and they were plain spoken. And they would go, let's go, just get just bottom line me. What are you trying to tell me? What do you need? And they were impatient because New York was a pacey town, but they were never mean. And I believe that that the New York Yankee hats have something to do with that. It reminds everybody that they're part of a tribe. You know, that we all belong to each other. Black guy wearing a Yankees hat, white guy wearing a Yankees hat, Chinese guy wearing a Yankees hat, you know, Puerto Rican wearing a Yankees hat. We're all New Yorkers, man. Relax. Forget about it. Yeah, forget about it. And that had such an appeal to me as and I was a Californian, I was very proud of being from California. Still am. But when I saw that, I thought, hmm, we need to as Angelinos, we need to decide who we are. We need to decide what this town is about. And I don't think there's enough Los Angeles is so big it divides into neighborhoods. But I do think that it's possible for Angelinos to say, here are our values and um this is what we stand for, this is what we won't tolerate. So just a thought. Well, uh there is something to be said for a a city flag that you can identify. So for example, the Chicago city flag you can reproduce very easily. It's the two two sky blue bands and then the four red stars in the center. And it's on all the cop jackets and uniforms. And what makes it what it is is that it's simple to reproduce, so it's instantly recognizable, as opposed to you'll see these things and it'll have like a crest or a shield, and then there'll be like a um an engraving in the center. You go, I can't draw that. Right. You know, even the California flag could be simplified to be nothing more than the bear and the star, and you'd be home free and it would be glorious, and everybody would put it on everything.

SPEAKER_03 46:59

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 46:59

You know, instead it says California Republic and it's and and it's all you know, multicolors. No. But having a symbol, a very easily reproduced symbol, every school child in New York, every school child in New York can draw you to the NY.

SPEAKER_01 47:16

The NY, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 47:18

And we need something like that. That's so simple. Like LA um needs a it needs to decide what it is.

SPEAKER_01 47:29

Well, you work on that, and I will I'll let you go to work on that. I so appreciate your time today, Neil. Um what you world is amazing and needed. Thank you. And I I really appreciate you.

SPEAKER_02 47:48

Back at you, Mike.

SPEAKER_01 47:50

All right. You take care, and we will talk soon.

SPEAKER_02 47:54

All right. Cheers.

Final Thanks And Ways To Support

SPEAKER_01 48:05

Thanks so much for hanging out with us for today's episode of the Kindness Matters Podcast with my very special guest, my hero, my mentor, um, Neil Ford. Uh, it's so awesome to talk to him. I've been watching this stuff forever, and uh I I hope that you were able to to take something from this uh that's been um a great story, certainly that should be appreciated. Um but I really appreciate that you you tuned in and that you are a part of this kind of community. If you liked what you heard, leaving a quick review or comment really helps others find the show, and it means a lot to me personally. And hey, if you can't support us financially, that's totally okay. The best way you can support the show is to go out and do one random act of kindness for a stranger today. But if you are in a position to help us grow, you can make a one-time gift or join one of our monthly supporter tiers over on Buy Me a Coffee. The link is in the show notes. We will be back again next week with another episode, but until then, remember kindness matters, and so do you.

SPEAKER_00 49:35

Together strong with human foods.