What if the most important marketing metric isn't clicks, conversions, or impressions—but the ability to keep people interested?
In this episode of The Personal Side of Business, Jet sits down with marketing strategist, fractional CMO, and author Jonathan Lo to explore how empathy, human connection, and genuine value creation are becoming the biggest differentiators in today's AI-driven world. Jonathan shares his unique journey from electrical engineering and humanitarian work to leading marketing initiatives for multi-billion-dollar organizations.
They discuss why businesses often focus too heavily on the 3% of customers ready to buy today while ignoring the other 97%, how AI is changing the future of marketing and e-commerce, and why authentic human connection may become even more valuable as technology advances.
Jonathan also dives into the core ideas from his new book, Keeping People Interested, offering practical insights for founders, entrepreneurs, marketers, and growing businesses looking to build stronger customer relationships and sustainable growth.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- Why empathy is a competitive advantage in marketing
- The "97% Rule" and how it impacts business growth
- How AI will reshape marketing and consumer behavior
- Why branding and human connection matter more than ever
- Common marketing mistakes growing companies make
- How founders can create long-term customer loyalty
- The balance between data, psychology, and creativity in business
Whether you're a startup founder, business owner, marketer, or simply interested in the future of business, this conversation offers valuable insights into keeping customers engaged in an increasingly automated world.
Check out more about Jonathan and his book and company...
Check out my website and more episodes and info at personalsideofbusiness.com
#ThePersonalSideOfBusiness #JonathanLo #MarketingStrategy #CustomerExperience #BusinessGrowth #Entrepreneurship #Branding #AI #Marketing #Leadership #SmallBusiness #Podcast
00:00:00
Welcome to The Personal Side of Business, where you hear real stories from real entrepreneurs.
00:00:16
Hi, and welcome to The Personal Side of Business, where every business has a story.
00:00:20
I'm your host, Jeff Bundy Wong. Today, my guest is going to talk about how empathy
00:00:24
can play a key role in marketing and business growth. Welcome to the podcast, Jonathan Lowe.
00:00:29
Thank you. It's great to be here, Jeff.
00:00:31
Yeah, thanks for coming on. So let's start with your story. How did we get here? Because you have
00:00:36
a pretty unique story of starting out in a place where it had nothing to do with marketing,
00:00:42
and now you're here.
00:00:43
Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and I always loved technology as a kid.
00:00:50
You know, I remember spilling orange juice on my keyboard once and taking it all apart,
00:00:55
cleaning it up, and, you know, love seeing the circuit boards and everything, and
00:00:59
really resonated with science and math growing up. And so I studied electrical engineering
00:01:05
in my undergrad. Interestingly, though, I discovered a little bit through the process
00:01:10
of engineering that I love solving problems and the application of technology more than
00:01:16
I loved doing the engineering itself. But in any case, I continued on my journey through college,
00:01:22
and near the end of my time there, I learned about global poverty issues and, you know,
00:01:30
just how 2 billion people in the world live down less than $2 a day. You know, 20-some million
00:01:36
people were modern-day slaves. Like, so many of these statistics just really wrecked me,
00:01:41
and I felt very compelled to do something about it. So I ended up, after graduating,
00:01:46
taking a one-year fellowship program with a global nonprofit based out of Seattle.
00:01:51
And the intent there was to really help raise awareness on college campuses, something I was
00:01:56
working on in my senior year, awareness and funds, and just helping wake up the first world
00:02:02
into really what's going on more broadly. And so I ended up taking a fellowship program with
00:02:08
this nonprofit, loved it, felt so compelled to stay that after my year with them, I asked,
00:02:14
you know, how else can I help? And so we found me a role in data analytics because I could deal
00:02:19
with numbers. And eventually I ended up giving, taking on a role that I said back in the day,
00:02:26
you know, the job that you gave a millennial who had no discernible skills was what? Organic social
00:02:31
media marketing. So I took over their Facebook page and Twitter and all of that and helped grow
00:02:37
the page to over a million fans, which to this day is a lot, but back then was very significant.
00:02:42
And I learned marketing so quick when every single post out there, right, if you don't
00:02:47
get 300 to a thousand engagements within minutes, you know, something's wrong. So that was the
00:02:52
beginning of my journey into marketing. And I'm happy to share much more about my path
00:02:57
as I dove deeper into that. Yeah, that's, that's interesting. And question for you,
00:03:02
did you get interested in the marketing side? Was it, I mean, outside of your goal to really help
00:03:09
people, but I felt like you're that engineering brain was really what drove you, right? Learning
00:03:15
those numbers and making it come to use for something else. Was that a driving force in it?
00:03:21
Yeah. So, you know, what's funny is, and thank you for asking. It took me probably over a decade to
00:03:27
decide I actually liked marketing, but it served me really well. And I realized why I kept sticking
00:03:33
with it, right. Because out of the organic social media piece, I ended up working in product
00:03:38
management, helped launch their first mobile optimized website, which is increased mobile
00:03:42
acquisitions by over 50%. I ended up managing a multimillion dollar digital advertising budget.
00:03:48
I realized that I love the balance of the art and the science of marketing, right? There's,
00:03:56
there's numbers, there's technology, there's all these pieces, automations. And at the same time,
00:04:02
there's this creative element of copywriting and imagery and design. And so it turns out I,
00:04:08
even in engineering, that was the part I liked. It's this interesting marriage of being creative
00:04:12
for the sake of solving broader problems. And it turns out that's exactly what marketing is.
00:04:17
Do you think coming from, you know, we're going to get into it more of that human aspect and
00:04:23
empathetic side of marketing that you are building your business upon? Do you think coming from that
00:04:29
side really can never get taken out of the true marketing sense? Like if you, if you were,
00:04:37
all this AI automation that we have, all this computerized digital stuff that we carry over
00:04:43
into now almost everything we do, do you think the human side will always need to be there in
00:04:48
order for marketing to exist and grow the way you're looking at it now? Yeah. You know, what's
00:04:53
fascinating is I actually think that in the age of AI, marketing is going to be even more necessary
00:05:00
marketing from humans. And the reason I say that is because technology continues to democratize
00:05:06
things such as product development. You know, the ability to vibe code a functional application,
00:05:12
whether or not you're building pieces on cloud or lovable these days, whatever it looks like,
00:05:17
something you can actually go to market with and provide value and start solving problems,
00:05:22
that barrier is reducing over and over again. So how do you differentiate really is actually going
00:05:29
to be in your marketing and branding. And in fact, related to even my, something I was very
00:05:37
excited for this week was the launch of my debut book, which is called Keeping People Interested.
00:05:41
Your ability to keep people interested is always going to need a human element and a human
00:05:47
creativity, that person to tie it all together, accelerated by AI, yes, but not replaced by it.
00:05:55
Yeah, that's interesting. It's a great segue that I was wanting to get to your book. When
00:05:59
you're sharing this information, what do you think is the key element in making us different
00:06:07
or making a company different when they're marketing and using that human element? What
00:06:12
do you think is that key element that either companies are missing out on or they need to
00:06:17
improve on in order to bring that to light even more? Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for asking.
00:06:22
And I'll even just kind of show your folks here. This book is called Keeping People Interested,
00:06:27
and the promise is that it's the only KPI that really matters, right? And so as an engineer,
00:06:34
obviously numbers are incredibly important, but the ability to keep someone interested
00:06:39
is the crux of what will help companies be successful or not. And so you naturally should
00:06:44
be asking me, well, how do you keep people interested? The promise of the book and my
00:06:48
philosophy is that to keep people interested, you need to be interested in them. And what that
00:06:53
means is having empathy for them along every stage of the shopping journey that they're in
00:06:58
and constantly providing value, not simply asking over and over again for the sale.
00:07:03
You know, I talk about what I call the 97% rule in my book, where so many companies,
00:07:09
especially e-commerce companies, are obsessed with their conversion rate. The two to three or
00:07:15
4% will go with 3% of people who come to the website and buy today. And when you're at a large
00:07:22
scale, I ended up working for a $2 billion e-commerce company. Like every BIP, basis point,
00:07:28
hundredth of a percent difference in conversion rate, really did net out to hundreds of thousand
00:07:34
dollars in revenue for the year. It makes sense why they were focused there. But the promise
00:07:40
that of the book and what I've really come to learn and believe through my year's experience
00:07:45
with multi-billion dollar organizations, with startups, with grad school, is that you've got
00:07:50
to care about the other 97%. That's why it's called the 97% rule. Help people by providing value if
00:07:57
they need education or inspiration or a sense of belonging with your brand. I go into all these
00:08:04
different strategies and tactics because that's really how companies will end up achieving long
00:08:10
term, sustainable, profitable growth. It's companies that add value that grow in the long run,
00:08:15
companies that chase profitability today and obsess over market share, that don't think
00:08:21
about the human that's actually purchasing your service or product. Those are the folks that
00:08:27
will end up not succeeding. Yeah, that's a great point. Do you think that there are enough of these
00:08:33
large corporations, especially the ones that are based in the e-commerce space, that are putting
00:08:39
weight into this human side of marketing to go really connect with those people? Or do you think
00:08:47
they're such a huge machine that they're just looking at numbers and they've gotten
00:08:51
away from that? You know, it's really tricky. The trend that I've seen is with more established,
00:08:56
publicly traded companies, they have shareholders and they have quarterly targets to hit. And it is
00:09:02
very difficult to truly be customer-centric in the long run when you have all these pressures
00:09:08
of investors or folks who demand profitability and dividends and growth. Now, the trend that I've
00:09:14
seen on the flip side is that companies, large ones who are still founder-led, are able to take
00:09:21
this longer-term view because investors have bought into the vision of what they're trying to
00:09:25
accomplish in the long run. And those are the companies that are able to say, I don't even care
00:09:29
about making money today. I care about adding value and I know I'll make money in the future.
00:09:34
Now, there's a tension, of course, because what essentially I was speaking toward,
00:09:39
well, they actually go down toward that venture capital, seeking the unicorn path,
00:09:44
and that's not for everyone. But there are many companies that are just saying, you know,
00:09:50
we'll figure out the money thing. We just got to add value. And those are the companies that
00:09:54
on the average will be successful. And I'm assuming the companies that you've worked with,
00:09:59
if you go in there and you start to feel and get a sense that they're open-minded to what you're
00:10:05
trying to strategize with them, I'm sure that's just like, oh, that's a sigh of relief, right?
00:10:09
But then you go into a company that's like, no, no, no, this doesn't really work for us. We're
00:10:14
just looking at numbers. That's got to be a higher hurdle for you to get over, right? And I'm sure
00:10:22
it really takes the heads of those companies to really work with you and to change the shape of
00:10:27
the way a company is going to start to go after their clients or their customers, and then also
00:10:32
see a different vision. How is that conversation for you with them? Can you, you think in your
00:10:37
experience you can get that over a course of like a few months or sometimes it takes years to change
00:10:42
a culture of a corporation? Yeah, so I'll share a couple perspectives. To no surprise, the larger
00:10:49
an organization is, the more inertia it has and the more time it takes to change direction. Now,
00:10:55
I am a fractional chief marketing officer and I've got a crew of fractional CMOs in our
00:11:01
collective called Salt Foundry. And so what I do is I embed myself within teams as their CMO, but
00:11:09
the benefit to them is they get my time, a portion of it, because they don't need me for 40 to 80
00:11:14
hours a week and can pay just a portion of what a full-time CMO would cost. For sure, what I've
00:11:21
seen is that generally, fractional CMOs are hired to solve a problem and that problem is either
00:11:26
sales or leads, which turn into sales. In my book, I do walk through kind of the five transitions,
00:11:33
right, of how to help people move through the different shopping stages, but also there's a
00:11:38
chapter seven where I outline the practical framework that I use with clients that I've
00:11:44
called the SALT framework. SALT being an acronym for Strategy, Alignment, Leverage and Traction.
00:11:50
And there's a lot of quick, low-hanging fruit ways. And so very practically, when I enter in
00:11:55
an organization, there is undoubtedly some low-hanging fruit. And whether it is around
00:12:00
your brand and messaging, because your website copy was all about you, how long you've been around,
00:12:06
how big you are, how big your team is, all about your product features and not actually about the
00:12:11
problems that your customer needs solved, well, we can make a quick change and usually see a pretty
00:12:16
immediate impact on the conversion rate. So there's always a balance of, as a responsible
00:12:21
business, you do need growth, you do need profitability, but let's make sure that
00:12:26
always in the background, we are working toward providing more and more value as we leverage the
00:12:31
tactics for the near-term wins as well. Yeah, that's great. And there have been,
00:12:37
and even guests that have come on my show that I've spoken to that are base in the sales, retail,
00:12:43
e-commerce world, not only does it seem to allow the company to connect with the customer base,
00:12:52
I think in a way that you're talking about where they want to support the business because there's
00:12:57
all this emotional connection with it, but I also get the sense that the people that are
00:13:04
working there also, there's this culture, this really good, like, you know, you get to, I've
00:13:10
run into some of those people that work in those corporations and they're just excited there, they
00:13:14
have a purpose, they go to work, they enjoy their work, even though it could be just like admin work,
00:13:20
they're just like, I'm working for a company that's trying to do something, make a change in the
00:13:25
world. So I love this with the marketing you're going after. Are there really like different
00:13:32
levels of fits for the marketing that you're strategizing with them or is it for any type of
00:13:38
business this can be applied to? Yeah, one thing I share as well is obviously marketing and some of
00:13:43
the tactics will change over time, but the premise of marketing and the philosophy and what has worked
00:13:49
over and over again, that foundation stays the same. It is, who are you trying to target and
00:13:55
what is their need and how can you meet that need and make them be aware that you can meet that need
00:14:00
for them, right? And so this book really can be applied to, this would be great for marketing
00:14:05
directors and multi-billion dollar organizations and also great for startups who are trying to get
00:14:11
their head around, hey, where do I even focus first? What even is marketing? How do I get this message
00:14:16
in front of somebody? And obviously nothing is all things to all people. The book really is
00:14:22
written and targeted toward founders and early stage companies who are in their growth phase,
00:14:27
so not super early, but probably in the one to five scaling to $50 million revenue phase.
00:14:33
This will add so much clarity for them. But again, if you're just getting started, you can
00:14:38
get a sense of how to do that. If you already are at a very robust, you know, 100 person marketing
00:14:44
team, there are plenty of stories and inspiration and tactics that will spark great conversations in
00:14:50
your team. Great. Yeah, I think even if small businesses that are not quite up to where they
00:14:55
need to be yet in terms of that, I feel like this is starting to sound like more of a certain high
00:15:01
level marketing that it's scaling, right? If I'm correct in that, it sounds like there's this
00:15:06
moment where, okay, we need to take this to another level and we're missing out on a couple
00:15:12
key elements here in our marketing. This is where we need to go. But I think for those small
00:15:16
businesses that might not be there yet, I would feel like this is a great book for them to read
00:15:21
just so they can have a path and vision as to where they're going to go once they get there
00:15:26
and then be able to, one, maybe contact you, be able to talk to you about it. And two,
00:15:30
be really to feel like there is this next level. Because I think a lot of small businesses that
00:15:37
I've talked to, they see marketing as what you brought before earlier, that it's just these
00:15:43
social media, get things out there, Google ads and whatnot, and that's it. And I think
00:15:48
we're talking about this, let's really dive deep into our clientele and start to figure out what
00:15:56
they really need and what they want from us, as opposed to just say, we have a product and we're
00:16:00
just trying to get the product out there, right? Am I correct in thinking that way?
00:16:03
Yeah. And what you said really speaks to the motivation of why I put this book together in
00:16:07
the first place is you ask any founder, CEO, or even marketing leader, hey, what books on marketing
00:16:13
have you read? I mean, there are so few dedicated marketing books. And there are some books that
00:16:20
kind of relate to sales or thinking about that territory. And Seth Godin has some great works
00:16:25
that I've read and even referenced in the book. Malcolm Gladwell speaks toward this kind of topic.
00:16:30
But there isn't just this one holistic way to help think through an entire marketing strategy
00:16:35
and all the different pieces that fit into it. I create this framework where I talk about
00:16:40
transitions between stages of the shopping journey as an excuse to cover every topic
00:16:45
holistically, brand strategy, customer research, retargeting, loyalty and advocacy programs.
00:16:52
All of that is packed in here in a very logical manner. So you can get your head around the
00:16:57
entirety of marketing. A lot of the folks I meet are solopreneurs or smaller business owners who
00:17:04
truthfully cannot even afford a fractional CMO or for whom that is not the right fit.
00:17:09
They don't need five to 10 hours of strategy every week. Right. And so this is a way to
00:17:14
democratize that information for folks. Yeah. And I think over time as e-commerce starts to
00:17:22
become a part of so many different types of businesses, regardless if they, I always think
00:17:26
like if they want to or not, people are having to figure out how to sell online to get their
00:17:31
products out there, whether it be food and beverage, you know, retail or people who just
00:17:36
now selling services, you know, they're like, I'm going to start to figure out a way how to make
00:17:41
money online while I'm sleeping. Do you think e-commerce in the next five to 10 years is going
00:17:49
to look a lot different than it does now from your experience? Yeah. Let me see if I can pull up a
00:17:56
chart real quick from my book. Oh, do you already have this?
00:18:02
No, there's just something relevant. I want to speak to call it the value price cost model,
00:18:09
the VPC model, and I will just speak to it. So there's something called the VPC model. I just
00:18:18
found it. That is not something I came up with, but I put in the book and elaborate on as well.
00:18:23
So essentially at the bottom is your cost, you know, the cost to produce an item or your margin
00:18:29
or, you know, cause if you're selling an item and then price in the middle, right? The price
00:18:34
of the consumer and in between is your profit margin. Now the value at the top is the customer's
00:18:40
perceived value. And that is a summation of the utility, but also the brand and marketing that
00:18:47
you can attach to a product. And so somebody might get $60 worth of utility out of a product
00:18:56
that you sell for $50 that you made for $40, right? So you can sell it at $60, right? Because
00:19:01
that's theoretically what they'd be willing to pay for the utility of that product. Say,
00:19:06
it's a kitchen knife or shoes to run a marathon. But what the true differentiator of how you can
00:19:12
increase perceived value is your brand, how somebody thinks and identify with the products
00:19:17
that you're selling and the marketing around, well, what is this design as a shoe for marathoners
00:19:23
on purpose? Because it, you know, is for long distance as opposed to sprinting. That's where
00:19:27
you can actually truly increase the perceived value. So again, marketing, whether it's online
00:19:33
or wherever it is, there's all these principles and yeah, absolutely. The mechanisms by which
00:19:38
we will engage in shop are going to shift, right? So for example, today in 2020, a lot more people
00:19:44
are leveraging chat tools, whether chat GPT, cloud, for publicity, for shopping. And so you,
00:19:51
how do you optimize for those tools to recommend your product? Well, two answers, right? There are
00:19:58
certainly different tactics. Yeah. Have FAQs, right? Like people are learning, you know, make
00:20:03
sure you're on multiple different channels. Video is important. Reddit is helpful. FAQs, yes. But
00:20:07
also why is that helpful? Because the point is that the content is useful to people. So if you
00:20:13
are adding value at whatever channel it is, people are going to value that and the algorithms will
00:20:19
reward you for it. Yeah. And okay. So you bring up a good point and I don't know, this is a little
00:20:24
bit off topic, but I feel like you're an expert on it. So I would like to, I've been thinking about
00:20:30
this for a few months now. As we are using AI for tools for now getting suggestions for this stuff
00:20:39
that we buy and the services and the places we want to go eat to, as this is happening over the
00:20:45
next, let's say two to three years, do you feel like we are going to be shopping more with the AI
00:20:53
first and then it's sort of like how like AI is pushing us in a certain way or do you think the
00:21:01
human element of it is going to hold enough value that we're always going to be in control? Do you
00:21:06
see what I'm getting at? I always wonder if over time we've get so comfortable and the AI starts
00:21:13
to be like, Hmm, I've got this person, Jack GVT has been, you know, getting a feel for who you are as a
00:21:20
person and what you like to do. So we're going to start to throw things out there. And then it starts
00:21:25
to guide you to shop a certain way where as up until maybe, you know, beginning of 2025, we were
00:21:33
really, I felt like in control. If we wanted to look for a red shirt, we went and found a red
00:21:38
shirt. But now it could be, I'm guessing maybe in a year, you know, AI is going to be like, You know
00:21:44
what? It looks like we might need to update your wardrobe. And you're like, You're right. I'm going
00:21:48
to start to shop this certain way. Do you think there is this persuasive move that AI is going to
00:21:56
make us go in a certain way without us really realizing it? Yeah, I mean, two answers come to
00:22:00
mind. First is that it's already happening, or it's happened for the last 10 years. With the
00:22:06
internet, with algorithms, with the way search, you know, there is this convergence, this information
00:22:12
bubble of the things you start engaging with, you will just see more of, you know, whether that is
00:22:17
in shopping or even politics, right? We end up hearing things that are already like us. And it
00:22:23
does move to, hey, a few people are interested in this, and the technology pushes and snowballs
00:22:28
something, right? So that's already happening, whether or not the chat, like format of tools
00:22:33
take over or not. My other answer, though, is, as I mentioned earlier, this is where marketing and
00:22:39
humans will be necessary to differentiate. I do think there will be a split. I think many of us
00:22:46
for less important decisions in our lives will be aided by something like AI to just take the
00:22:51
burden of decision making away. I don't know about you, but I feel decision fatigue all the time.
00:22:57
I think on the flip side, how a brand differentiates is by putting real humans that are
00:23:02
authentic, vulnerable, real in front of the brand. That is actually what's going to resonate with the
00:23:08
ultimately the human who is making the decision. And so a lot of how you're going to keep people
00:23:14
interested is by having real humans show up and doing things that the algorithm would never push
00:23:22
to begin with. Yeah. Do you think that we're going to go
00:23:28
so far in the AI advertising? And speaking even broader to these videos, it's tricky now to tell
00:23:39
the difference of what's real, what's not. You almost need a second just to look at something
00:23:44
and then make a decision. But we're going to get thrown all of that stuff in our face
00:23:50
for a period of time. And then is it this moment that you're thinking that we just we're like,
00:23:56
OK, we need to come back to real humans because we've we've had enough of this weird world of
00:24:02
non-humans and robots and AI coming at us. And we want to connect to people again. Is that that
00:24:08
moment you're thinking it's or is it already happening? You think right now in 2026?
00:24:14
I think there's elements already happening for sure. And there's a difference between
00:24:18
AI entertainment and the real problems it's solving for people. Right. I have dashboards of
00:24:24
data or like raw data you can integrate through APIs and then have AI write reports. And so
00:24:31
you're saving hours of being able to ask the right questions and understand it and leverage it in a
00:24:37
way that's very useful. And I do think, you know, every next generation is going to keep up with
00:24:45
their BS meter. Back in the day, our parents generation, you know, thought when Photoshop came
00:24:51
up around that, oh, my gosh, how can you even tell what's real or not? I can guarantee every millennial
00:24:57
can tell you if something's photoshopped or not. Now, our millennials are freaking out about, oh,
00:25:02
my gosh, with AI, how can you tell what's real or not? I can guarantee you Gen Z can tell.
00:25:06
We're going to figure it out. We can tell what's authentic.
00:25:09
Yeah. You know, when I was looking at everything in your bio and learning about you,
00:25:19
I had this question, and I don't know if you've even thought of this, but do you think you would
00:25:24
have been looking at marketing in this frame glasses if you didn't go out and try to help
00:25:32
the world when you were younger? That was a great question. You know,
00:25:35
what's interesting is I felt that with each next phase of life, I have had to learn to be more
00:25:42
empathetic, not only because it's good for others, but because it's good for me. And I don't know if
00:25:46
I didn't do the humanitarian thing at first, you know, or not how that would have caught up. But
00:25:52
I think folks who, and especially you talk to anyone older, I mean, priorities shift as you
00:25:57
get older and turns out they're usually right. Relationships are more important than achievement.
00:26:02
You know, caring about people and how they feel about you versus like what they think about you
00:26:07
might be more important. I see that trend in my life as well. Now it's interesting because I did
00:26:12
grow up so technology driven, very binary, literally ones and zeros in engineering, you know,
00:26:19
for whatever reason that ended up being less and less compelling with me over time, as opposed to
00:26:23
solving real human issues and really paying attention to the person in front of me. And so
00:26:30
for sure, I can look at the hypotheticals. I don't know, but for sure, the stories that I learned
00:26:38
and wrestled with for years at that nonprofit, hearing about human adversity and overcoming it
00:26:44
in achievement and perseverance, and also how people can help and support each other,
00:26:49
how, you know, our efforts here may be the answer to somebody else's prayers.
00:26:54
That absolutely had a huge impact on my life and really continued to frame my understanding of
00:27:01
how empathy can be and should be applied to all areas of life, including marketing and business.
00:27:06
I love that. I love that answer. I feel like you can get a sense that it was always in you,
00:27:13
right? It was just going to come out in a different way, one or another. These were just
00:27:18
what happened in life. Just to wrap up, Jonathan, it was great learning about this,
00:27:23
and I hope the businesses can really connect with you to see how this is actually going to connect
00:27:30
their business with their clientele. If you could go back and give yourself some advice
00:27:38
when you were younger in your engineer brain to where you are now, what do you think you would
00:27:45
have told yourself back then to maybe one piece of advice that would have changed your life for
00:27:51
the better? You know, it's funny. I just had this conversation with someone in the car about three
00:27:57
months ago after some alumni event, and I told that person, I wish I cared about psychology
00:28:04
more earlier. Well, so it's interesting because I feel like you're slowly, and maybe five years
00:28:12
from now, we're going to have another answer that you're going to have, but I feel like you
00:28:16
went from the brain to the heart, and now you're coming back to the brain. There's these pieces of
00:28:22
you that are trying to learn more about the body from, I want to say from a sort of scientific
00:28:30
way, right? You picked the part of the brain for engineering. Now you're trying to get to people
00:28:33
through the heart, and now you're doing working marketing, and now you're like, I want to
00:28:37
understand people more. You know, it's funny. Again, that piece of connecting science and art,
00:28:46
I really love frameworks. I have a whole email newsletter on strategic frameworks
00:28:51
called The Strategic Frame. I nerd out over it, but really, I nerd out over it with the final
00:28:57
application of how it affects real people, right? And that is the thing I would impart on my younger
00:29:02
self is care about people, the psychology, both the science and heart elements of it sooner.
00:29:09
Understand trends and recognize that one thing is not better or worse. It just is, right? And then
00:29:14
serve people. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, great. Thank you, Jonathan. And let's tell
00:29:21
everyone where they can find you and also where they can get your book. Yeah, absolutely. So the
00:29:26
book is available on Amazon, on paperback and Kindle. So just search Keeping People Interested,
00:29:32
and it will come up. You can find me at my author site on JonathanCalo.com, and also I'm very active
00:29:39
on LinkedIn as well. All right. Well, thank you so much, Jonathan. It was a pleasure. Everyone,
00:29:43
please check out his book. Also, try to find and get in touch with Jonathan. I think you're
00:29:47
going to have a wealth of knowledge that he can share with you. Thank you, Jonathan, for being
00:29:50
on the podcast. Thank you, Jeff. Really appreciate it. You know, this personal side of business.