Joe Templin Everyday Excellence

Joe Templin

[00:00:00] Ed Watters: I, I always like to say, if you see somebody really desperate in need, stop and say hi at least.

[00:00:09] Joe Templin: Yeah.

[00:00:09] Ed Watters: If you can,

[00:00:10] Joe Templin: as my mom taught

[00:00:10] Ed Watters: buy them a hamburger.

[00:00:12] Joe Templin: me, my mom taught me years ago, when you're having a bad day, go help somebody else.

[00:00:17] Ed Watters: Yes.

[00:00:18] Joe Templin: Okay. You may not feel better but by helping somebody else, you're doing good. You're creating a positive impact on the world and you don't know how that's gonna ripple. It could be, you know, the butterfly effect in a positive manner. But by changing your focus to gratitude or service to others, you're going to be better off. As Muhammad Ali said, Service to others is the rent that we pay for our room here on Earth. So if you can turn around and help somebody else out in some capacity, like we used to tell the Cub Scouts, do a good turn daily. If you go and do that, it's going to have impact that you'll never know about. Cause this person can help that person who does something here that, you know, then turns around and saves this kid's life and he grows up to cure cancer. Who knows? But you do it not because you can see the chain, but because you have faith in humanity.

[00:01:15] Ed Watters: To overcome, you must educate. Educate not only yourself, but educate anyone seeking to learn. We are all Dead America, we can all learn something. To learn, we must challenge what we already understand. The way we do that is through conversation. Sometimes we have conversations with others, however, some of the best conversations happen with ourself. Reach out and challenge yourself; let's dive in and learn something right now.

[00:02:06] Today we're speaking with Joe Templin, Joe Templin is a human kaizen expert, an author, a polymath, and an autodidact, he is the author of Every Day Excellence. Joe, could you please introduce yourself? Let people know just a little bit about you, please?

[00:02:26] Joe Templin: Ed, I think you did a great job introducing me. I mean, uh, I, another way to introduce me would be, that, to say I'm a human Swiss army knife because I've got, as you talked about, rather eclectic background. Uh, I started college when I was 13 because my parents said 12 was too young. Uh, I was an applied physicist, I built, uh, stuff for the government. Uh, I, uh, started Taekwondo, uh, like 12 years old. This is after I was dead from my asthma, by the way. I, I, I got better obviously, um, ended up winning a couple of world championships and all that.

[00:03:02] Uh, I built a career doing financial planning cause of the Taekwondo and the other kind of things that I was doing. I started studying psychology, performance psychology, behavioral economics, eventually built my own consulting firm and that led me into the writing of the book, Every Day Excellence. Which is really an attempt to help others along in their journey in the ways that I've been helped by multiple others, whether it's books, podcasts, various teachers, instructors, people who've come across my life study. So it's an attempt to give people a tool to help them be better on a regular basis. I call them a multivitamin for life.

[00:03:52] Ed Watters: Awesome. You know, Joe, you're a cornucopia of knowledge that, it's amazing when you start digging into what you've done.

[00:04:01] Joe Templin: Would you say, I

[00:04:02] Ed Watters: You don't look old enough, you, you, you do. You don't even look old enough for all this, Joe. Come on, come on, are you just jiving me.

[00:04:13] Joe Templin: That's funny.

[00:04:15] Ed Watters: Wow, I, I love it. Yeah. And, and kicking at 18 again, huh? You know, we're always a child at heart, if we remember that. And the world, it puts on so much burden to us. We panic sometimes and we forget how to be social, accepting of others, you know? How do we handle all this, Joe? What? What's our purpose in life?

[00:04:42] Joe Templin: Well, we wanna be childlike as opposed to childish. And as Einstein said, The essence of genius is to maintain the mindset of a child, uh, always. And if we continue to believe that we're young and act like we're young, maintain that growth mentality that Dr. Dweck talks about in a lot of her research, we can continue to grow. And, you know, 50 is like 30 in a lot of ways, especially with a lot of the innovations in medical science, nutrition that we're seeing. I mean, we're, one out, out of three babies born this year is probably gonna see a hundred. We could probably push that even higher and not just live for a long time, but actually live and have quality of lifestyle based on our individual choices.

[00:05:33] And it comes down to that in a lot of ways. We were talking about this earlier, but we have become a society of convenience and convenience kills. It slowly can kill your soul because it's so easy. There's 5,000 channels on TV, you can get any food that you want essentially, instantly. So calories are no longer as valuable. Um, you know, the cost of light has gone from being several hours of your day, sacrifice work in the fields to get an hour of light at night. So literally you can have years worth of light for an hour worth of work. So we no longer appreciate these things, stuff is no longer hard. And if things are too easy, they're not appreciated.

[00:06:23] Ed Watters: That is so true. And I, I look at the world today and I see that everywhere. And you, you mentioned we, we have a narcissistic outlook, we portray narcissism, uh, at our very core anymore. Uh, we have to have that thumbs up, the like. Uh, we care about what other people think of us instead of what we think of ourselves, which is more important.

[00:06:55] Joe Templin: And that's a very, a very old school stoic ideal, is that we look externally when we should be focused internally.

[00:07:06] Ed Watters: Yeah. Yeah. So how do we turn the tide with so much of this around us? And we, we fall into this hopelessness per se when we say, why should I even try if nobody else around me is trying?

[00:07:24] Joe Templin: Well, it comes down to that, you know, why should I try? Because that's what human beings do, we are meant to strive and grow. Look at a, a little kid, okay? No little kid, no baby can walk, they see big people do. So what do they do? They try and they fall, and they try and they fall, and they try and they fall, repeat, repeat, repeat.

[00:07:46] Eventually they pull themselves up and they're pulling themselves along the couch and then you're laying across the floor and they've fallen a 100, a 1000, 10,000 times, but they don't give up. Henry Ford, I mean, not Henry Ford, uh, Edison failed 10,000 times to make the light bulb, but everybody's like, whoa, you know, he finally did it and he was, had such stick to itness. Babies, every kid does that but as we become big people, we forget about this capability of failure as feedback and a way to learn and improve. And so there's an old saying that the master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried. And so we need to go back to embracing failure with a purpose of trying to achieve something.

[00:08:35] For example, anybody who's played an instrument, you know, when you start playing violin at seven years old, you sound like you're strangling a cat. By the time you're 11, you can do your scales and you can play fairly decently. By the time you're 14, 15, it actually sounds reasonable and if you keep at it and you invest the time, you sacrifice the time essentially, because you could be sitting there playing video games like everybody else. But if you sacrifice the time to achieve greatness,

[00:09:03] by the time you're 18, 19, 20 years old, you sound really darn good. And even if you don't continue to play at that level and continue to practice or to make it like your profession long range, you can still be a really good amateur. You can entertain yourself, you can entertain others because you did that. Same thing with martial arts,

[00:09:23] same thing with picking up a language, all these other things. So people have it so easy, everybody wants to Google translate or, you know, they're just gonna, you know, type it in and get the response instead of actually learning how to do something and invest the time so that it pays dividends in certain ways.

[00:09:42] Ed Watters: Yeah. And that's so important, that time value put in. You know, Edison is the best example I can think of with the light bulb. Uh, I love that analogy and it, it develops us, you know, baby steps us [00:10:00] into something. And when we start something new and we think we like it, we don't really know that we like it because there's always work involved in anything we do. And when we hit that rock wall of work, that's when people say, oh, well I don't like this anymore. You've gotta push through that.

[00:10:23] Joe Templin: Right, because beyond that rock wall of liking something is where you love it.

[00:10:30] Ed Watters: That's right.

[00:10:31] Joe Templin: Arnold Schwarzenegger, yeah, Arnold Schwarzenegger was asked about his discipline. He's like, I have no discipline. I loved what I was doing, every rep made me better, brought me closer to my goal. So I would, you know, lift until I passed out. Wake up and keep going because it was what I needed to do, it was so important to me. And, uh, we see this in the academic world in a lot of ways, where people are like working on their PhD dissertation and they're just so psyched about the research that they forget to eat for a couple of days.

[00:11:05] Or, you know, when like, uh, I've got teenage boys, they get there and they're playing video games and like five hours later, the time is fast. If you can find that level of engagement for other things, something that actually contributes to the world, then that's how you can truly achieve excellence and find something that motivates you. And having something that you care about that much, that eliminates the deadness inside. You know, Mark Manson, the author of the Subtle Art Of Not Giving an, A F, I swear, by the way, is that okay?

[00:11:40] Ed Watters: Sure.

[00:11:41] Joe Templin: Right. Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck. You know, Pete, you, all these Karens who are complaining about stuff, it's because they've got nothing to really care about until they've got these first world problems and they're being old bitties and getting involved with stuff. You know, I don't care about that because I'm busy with my mission of trying to reach a hundred million people and help them be better. That drives me, that gets me up at 4:15 in the morning, you know, and I'm still working at 10 o'clock at night and it doesn't matter how tired I am.

[00:12:08] That is so important, the mission is what drives you. As Nietzsche said, If a man has a strong enough why, you know, he can overcome any how. If you care that much, that it's that critical to you to do this, if it's like as important as breathing, guess what? You're gonna find a way or make a way as Hannibal says, so you're just going to keep going. And if that is out, we'll, eliminate the emptiness inside is by filling it with something worthwhile.

[00:12:36] Ed Watters: Yeah, that's right. You know, my guest yesterday that I was interviewing, we were speaking about being in that zone when, when we're doing something, it's always art. And you just explained it, when, when you're doing something and you are finding pleasure in that zone, you are lost into it until your system tells you you're done. And, and, and that is how America was built.

[00:13:09] Joe Templin: And it's not necessarily easy. I mean, as a martial artist, there are times when it sucks with my training, where if I'm like , um, doing training for an ultra marathon and then running in the rain or whatever, it's horrible. But it's the sort of thing where you're like, I will do this because of what's on the other side.

[00:13:25] It is, you know, um, running in the rain is the best example of the squishy feet, which I hate and all that. And I do it because even though I hate it, I know it's gonna help me in other capacities. And being willing to go and do that thing that you really dislike, knowing that it's critical for the success.

[00:13:45] So for example, um, let's say that you're a young business person and you hate doing the marketing. But you know if you don't do the marketing component where it's picking up the phone in the old school way, or putting together stuff on the computer and doing digital marketing. If you don't do that, you have no customers, you can't serve other people. Well, you're gonna do that thing that you hate because you get to do the stuff that you love.

[00:14:06] It's like eating the liver so you can have the dessert. I hate liver, my brother loves liver, my mom loved it, you know, very stuff. But you know what? I eat the liver so I could have the stuff that was on the other side. I, you know, do the yard work for five hours and that beer that I get afterwards that I earned is the best beer in the world.

[00:14:24] So all too often people are like just getting their reward without having to do the work. They're not going through the pain, the suffering. As I said, it's too convenient, it's too easy. They can just Google something, you know, they can just throw something in the microwave instead of having to do it by hand and cook it longer. You know,

[00:14:40] I guarantee you that most people, if they could essentially microwave the baby and have in two months instead of nine, they would do that. But anything great, anything worthwhile takes a while and we don't have the patience.

[00:14:57] Ed Watters: Uh, Joe, I wanna talk a little bit about influence and, you know, influence comes from every place. Television is the old boob tube, everybody, you know, sit down there, that's babysitter for a while and that's absentness of parents. And there's a lot of this going on now with our cell phones and things like that. So the babysitter is shifted, but yet it's still the same thing that we've been dealing with for years and years. There's a disconnect there between what should be connected.

[00:15:44] Joe Templin: Well,

[00:15:45] Ed Watters: Can we talk about that?

[00:15:45] Joe Templin: It's a very passive way of doing things. So I don't care if it's a kid playing on the iPad, or watching people play video games on YouTube, or the boob tube in, from, you know, the 1970s and 80's. You know, there's not an interaction, they're not changing their environment. When I was a kid, during the summers my mom would kick me outside and say, um, you know, there's a, the garden hose, you know where the bathroom is, I don't wanna see you till lunchtime. Have fun, don't die and that's what we did. So we were out running through the field and, you know, doing stuff and this is a very seventies way to growing up.

[00:16:24] And so we were responsible for ourselves. And so, you know, yeah, we have some scars from it, but we also learned responsibility. We've learned the connection between your actions and result. There was consequences for our actions, our decisions, and we also learned personal responsibility around it. And that's something that's not being allowed very much any more and I think part of it is because we've got more and more people, so the bell curve is getting bigger. And when you have more of a population, 350 million versus a 100 million, you know, you're gonna have more people on the extremes, we have more people on the extremes. That means they have more people doing stupid stuff and those people doing stupid things, what they're trying to do is, that they are putting in protections to take care of that bottom 0.1%. And what's done is it's now made it so everybody else can't do the things that they did because of that. For example, when was the last time you saw a merry go round at a playground?

[00:17:32] Ed Watters: Yeah. You, you don't see them.

[00:17:35] Joe Templin: Okay. Because we know one or two kids across the entire country, you know, got super hurt when the rest of us just got mildly hurt and learned, Hey, that's what your

[00:17:46] Ed Watters: Yeah.

[00:17:46] Joe Templin: G-force is. And hey, I shouldn't do that to hurt me, and things like that. And so they have put these bubble wrappings and these walls up and it's like when they put a, uh, railing at the edge of the cliff, everybody gets the false sense of oh, it's now safe. And so everybody goes to the edge of the cliff and eventually they all fall off because of the illusion of safety and the disconnect.

[00:18:12] Because it used to be you did something stupid, you got hurt right away and you realize don't do it again. And that would happen with little things and so you learn to interpolate from there to bigger and bigger things. And that's why common sense was fairly common, you know, now they don't do that. It's all protected, it's all isolated,

[00:18:30] it's all TV where it's passive as opposed to playing with stuff like, ow, that's hot, or that's cold or, so you're not getting that. And it was that sort of interaction that allowed people to have a more intuitive understanding, but also to be, have interpretative powers and say, Ooh, yeah, that's, I'm not gonna go there.

[00:18:49] I mean, I remember when I was in my fraternity, this is going back 30 years ago, we had a really bad idea and so what did we do? We took out a napkin and we started doing some calculations on the back of it to see if something would kill someone. And we're like, oh, this won't kill my bike. And it's not even close in terms of the calculation, so let's just go ahead.

[00:19:09] We ended up building a 55 foot funnel and crazy stuff like that. But, you know, now they would just do something without checking it because we did a couple of other things that we did some calculations on. We're like, yeah, that's not a good idea, we're gonna die. You know, because we had made little mistakes along the way,

[00:19:31] we were able to do things like this and figure it out and start developing some sense of the return on it in terms of, uh, what was done. So I don't know how many people here in the Northeast, there are pipes freezing in the winter cause they don't realize, Hmm, you know what? We need to, when it gets cold, things expand and things freeze.

[00:19:53] That's like, why don't you know this basic premise that most kids find out when [00:20:00] they're like six years old from leaving a bottle of water outside or something. You know, it's that disconnect. It's because it's become uncommon because of this disconnect, because of this passive learning environment or passive babysitting environment that we were talking about as opposed to playing in the dirt and, you know, getting some, you know, bug bites and scars. But minor things as opposed to major damage later on. Because,

[00:20:26] Ed Watters: Yeah.

[00:20:26] Joe Templin: you know, going back to my book, you know, that cool non-linear growth curve, this happens both for good and corrupt.

[00:20:31] Ed Watters: That's right.

[00:20:32] Joe Templin: If you don't address the problem, it becomes horrible over time. Whether it's, uh, compound interest on credit cards, or it's not having the discussion with your significant other and things get worse and worse and eventually somebody's having an affair, or, you know, uh, other problems like this. But it can also happen on the good side where you're investing things properly. Like you set aside money on a regular basis, you have money for a kid's education and retirement. You set aside time on a regular basis, whether it's for your physical health or for learning, and eventually you get advanced degrees or you're in good physical shape. This sort of compounding, this non-linear growth curve is both a positive and negative. And we've seen a lot of the negative effects because of people avoiding and pushing off, kicking the can essentially of the responsibility. It's coming back and, you know, as Jordan Peterson says, the dragon is now huge.

[00:21:27] Ed Watters: Yeah, that's right. And, and dragons can burn, that's for sure. So, you know, there's, there's this bad environment in the world today, and eventually it's going to get better. I, I, it's always that way, there's a rollercoaster.

[00:21:48] Joe Templin: Yes. The pendulum swings back and forth.

[00:21:50] Ed Watters: Exactly, it's the pendulum effect. We, we are on, I hope, one of the far reaches of this pen, pendulum now because, uh, we really need to start addressing the change that needs to occur in our world.

[00:22:08] Joe Templin: It's gonna get a little bit worse for a little while because people don't have enough suck it up in them.

[00:22:17] Ed Watters: Yeah, yeah.

[00:22:18] Joe Templin: And so, you know, there's still some excess in the system in a lot of ways that needs to be pushed on through and people need to take a little more personal responsibility, roll up their sleeves a little bit more, you know, skip a few meals, have some sleepless nights, you know, have to actually have real problems and figure out

[00:22:37] Ed Watters: That's right.

[00:22:37] Joe Templin: how to solve them. And, you know, another 6 months to 18 months of that, you're gonna see a big change in people. And, you know, you're gonna see, I think actually the younger generation, so the younger Gen Z people from like 16 down to, um, maybe six or so, they are going to be much more like the people who grew up during World War II. So, uh, the greatest generation, the silent generation after them, which is what my dad's generation was. These are people who saw this actualized, felt the tough times, you know, maybe lived through the, or lived the depression a little bit. And so, not necessarily became frugal, but understood the value. Not everything's cheap and disposable and throw it away and we just replace it. Not, you know, we just throw away people

[00:23:33] the same way that you do, uh, you know, a single serving app now, which is basically what Tinder and all these other things really are. So that there's more value, that there's more time that they understand, you know what? Things are gonna take a while and if need be, I can make sacrifices to get what I need down the road.

[00:23:56] So I think that we're gonna see probably my, my kids, my youngest one's 11 and a half, so his peers, 10, 15 years without, we're gonna, if we survive that long, have a really good probably 15, 20 years from that, that point when they're really starting to get going in the marketplace. Because there will be a seismic shift because of that attitude returning to the more fundamental patient manner that we've seen previous.

[00:24:32] Ed Watters: Yeah, the world's changed and that's for sure. And, and I'm, I'm really excited and I'm pretty optimistic about it because I believe that that hardship that you talked about, it's gonna kick us into gear. And, uh, that's, that's really what I'm anticipating, I hope it doesn't take 30 years, 50 years. But, you know, change comes slowly.

[00:25:00] Joe Templin: Well, one point remember, is that some of the great, biggest corporations and greatest fortunes are always made during choppy times. I mean, in the 1970s, that's when we saw Microsoft and Apple founded, okay.

[00:25:18] Ed Watters: Yeah.

[00:25:18] Joe Templin: If you go back into, you know, the depressions or the recessions of the 1950s, that's when the UN Pact was made. So there is always going to be opportunity for those who are willing to work hard, have vision, approach things differently, or willing to sacrifice and play the long game. There will always be opportunities, I don't care how big the market is or how bad the market is, the, that potential will always be there for some people.

[00:25:45] Ed Watters: Yeah.

[00:25:46] Joe Templin: The question is, is the majority of society of the right mindset to make that opportunity extend to a ton of people, or is there only going to be, limited to the people with the greatest amount of discipline and desire?

[00:26:08] Ed Watters: Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. You know that, that want to do something for yourself and not have somebody do it for you, that's unique in the world anymore. My, my father, he's a World War II vet, well was, he's passed now. But, you know, his mindset was totally different from adults today. And I, my father would actually slap people, to be frank about it, in today's world. And I, I kind of look back and see how, uh, goofy the world had become because of all of that prosperity that flooded us after the World War II.

[00:27:02] Joe Templin: Right.

[00:27:02] Ed Watters: And, you know, when, when I got married in the eighties, I really, I really stopped and thought, Is this a good move to be married? Is, is my future really going to be worth anything because of all of the ups and downs during the latter part of the seventies, early part of the eighties. And then, uh, Reagan and Gorbachev, it really changed everything when that Berlin Wall fell. It, it changed the world, just the attitude shift. And I, I really thought we would go in a different direction at that point in time. But I think we just drug the world down with us into this cesspool of, uh, easy, disposable living like you were talking about earlier.

[00:28:02] Joe Templin: So, Bjork talks about desired difficulties. And so this is something that is tough really when you're successful to try and make things difficult for your kids. I had this conversation with one of my close friends, she's a senior vice president for a tech company, you know, makes a lot, lot of money. And, you know, the, the response from her, and she grew up with nothing, dirt poor. It, it, because she's so successful, she used to throw money at me.

[00:28:37] And, um, it is one of those things where it's like, no, I'm gonna roll up my sleeves and try and fix these things and show the boys this is the way that it is. So my kids know that my first response is always gonna be no, always. Because it's always if you say yes, then saying no is a sacrifice. But if you say no, then, you know, you can loosen it up over time.

[00:29:02] And so there was a, a thing a few years ago where I had clogged drains and everything. And so I tried snaking it and everything and the boys saw me attempting these things, still didn't work really well, you know, went down and, uh, the pipes were completely clogged. 130 year old home, so happens over time.

[00:29:22] And I was going to cut the pipes and drain them and do everything on my own. And after an hour and a half, both of them seeing now it's struggling, I was doing this and everything. I'm like, All right, now's the time to actually call somebody. It was like $250 and they were in and out in day, in a half day. They had the right

[00:29:42] tools versus me sacrificing an entire day. But the boys saw that I worked at it, tried it, and made the decision to then call somebody else. But like we had a, have a garden, okay, they see me till the garden, we plant the garden together, we weed it, we do [00:30:00] all the things even though it's not a big thing and it doesn't grow a ton of food.

[00:30:05] They have more of an appreciation because of doing this. I grew up on the farm where if you didn't work, you didn't eat. So I value where food comes from because we had to work for it, we had to go and feed the animals in the morning and all that. My kids aren't very good at that full experience, but they've gotten enough to have a better appreciation of it than people who just go in, swipe mom or dad's credit card, and food instantly appears.

[00:30:34] Ed Watters: That's right. Yeah. You know, I was out planting peas this morning in my garden for our fall harvest and that, that work ethic, to get it done, you've got to put it in yourself because nobody's going to do it for you.

[00:30:51] Joe Templin: So you need to be exposed to it, we need to expose our kids to it. And so I think like, and kids to work on a farm

[00:30:57] Ed Watters: Yes.

[00:30:57] Joe Templin: a couple of times throughout their life because they learn to understand.

[00:31:00] Ed Watters: FFA, I, I love FFA. I was part of it, you know, and just what you learn, that your food does not just show up on the supermarket shelf. It's, it's a, it's a vital lesson. And, uh, we, we all pack ourselves into cities and that's not really healthy in my mindset, but,

[00:31:28] Joe Templin: Well, if you look at it, the United States was founded, something like 99% of our population was agrarian. And if you look today,

[00:31:38] Ed Watters: That's right.

[00:31:39] Joe Templin: about 1%'s agrarian. And so we've had this massive shift and every single decade is moved more and more away from being landed, of people working and directly creating what they eat, what they use, you know?

[00:31:59] Ed Watters: That's right.

[00:31:59] Joe Templin: Having this connection to their effort and what they get to enjoy from it. And so, having more of that, an appreciation of that, even if it's, you know, a kid just goes and works on a farm for a week or, you know, goes and actually works in a, uh, a shop for a while. So that there is more of a connection as opposed to everything being on a computer screen and, you know, up here and looking at things.

[00:32:26] It's going to create more value and appreciation. Also, um, you know, when people were pushing everybody, oh, you got to go to college, you got to go to college, and so we have, you know, probably 30, 40 million people with useless college degrees out there. And they look down their noses at people who are in the trades. I've got a good friend who dropped out of college where he was studying engineering, uh, his parents,

[00:32:54] his dad was an engineer, his twin brother's an engineer actually, to go, uh, learn how to weld. He joined a company, he's a welder and he's a senior welder, and he makes six figures a year now, but he'll always have a demand for what he does. He enjoys it, there's a connection. And he's still utilizing his mind in a lot of ways because he is doing all these calculations, and understanding, and everything.

[00:33:18] But having skilled tradesmen is critical. And so I think that everybody should find something that they do with their hands to help offset the work of mind and vice versa. So my friends who are, work, like, on a farm, or run a machine shop, or work in a machine shop, or mechanics, or things like that, they actually have intellectual pursuits for their rest and leisure.

[00:33:48] Those of us who utilize our mind, which is way too many people, or should be using their mind, you know, not being, actually think, should be finding something physically intensive to offset that and to appreciate it. And having people have both of these is actually going to reduce a lot of the, uh, politicization that we're seeing and the polarization because

[00:34:14] Ed Watters: Yeah.

[00:34:14] Joe Templin: people who have never had to dig ditches don't understand it. And people who have never worn a tie don't appreciate that part either. And so we need to have a coming together and understanding of what others do more, which will create more empathy and resolve a lot of our political issues.

[00:34:33] Ed Watters: Yeah, I, I agree a hundred percent. You know, when Herbert Hoover was kind of kicked out of office and we went the New deal direction, I, I really wonder about that. What, what the world would actually be today if we would've sided with Hoover and rolled up our sleeves and got to work and not worried about the government supplying everything you needed, you know? Yes, there are loss of life, and there's hurt, and there's all of this misery, but out of that comes greatness.

[00:35:20] Joe Templin: Yeah, Ed, here's the thing, we can't control the weather, we can't control, you know, many things and people thinking that the government's going to come on in and take care of them and save them, has never, you know, really understood how the economy works. And most people in the government actually don't really understand it either. And there is an old, uh, saying of my friends in the military and in the intelligence community that, nobody who has actually worked for the government trusts the government to take care of them.

[00:35:57] Ed Watters: Yeah. Well, that's wise. You know, my, my cousin taught me the seven P's, I, I guess it was 35 years ago, and it's Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. That planning phase, anything we do, if you don't have a plan and a redundancy plan, you know, a backup,

[00:36:21] Joe Templin: You need to have resiliency because as Mike Tyson said, Everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face.

[00:36:27] Ed Watters: That's right.

[00:36:27] Joe Templin: But just in the first thinking it, about it and looking at some contingencies. So that is,

[00:36:33] Ed Watters: Yeah.

[00:36:33] Joe Templin: I don't care if you're in business, I don't care if you're a parent, this is actually something I've learned as a special needs parent is, having plans by having the backup plans because

[00:36:42] Ed Watters: Yeah.

[00:36:42] Joe Templin: nothing's gonna go the way that you think. So as Star- Lord says, uh, in the Marvel comics world, You've only got 12% of a plan, that's actually better than the vast majority.

[00:36:54] Ed Watters: That's true. You know,

[00:36:55] Joe Templin: In my fraternity there was always a saying, Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine. And unfortunately, we have seen that where people completely failed to plan in any way, shape, or form. And failed to sacrifice, failed to set aside in times of good for times of bad and expect other people to take care of them when stuff happens.

[00:37:19] Ed Watters: That's right. You know, it, it's your responsibility because it's your life. Uh, I, I was talking about the Stanley Milgram experiment, uh, done in the sixties, early seventies, somewhere around there. But what people will do if an authoritative figure in a white coat tells you, You must do this, the experiment depends on you doing this. Who's gonna take responsibility? And as soon as the white coat says, I'll take responsibility, you do it. All, all bets are off.

[00:38:02] Joe Templin: Same thing that happened in Nazi Germany is, somebody's who's trying to step forward and assume responsibility, could then turn around and command the other 85% of the people and they would fall in line. And so

[00:38:17] Ed Watters: That's right.

[00:38:17] Joe Templin: You know, Americans who say, oh, well, you know, in Nazi Germany, I would've resisted. Well, you know what? Today's your time to resist, do the right thing, because

[00:38:26] Ed Watters: That's right.

[00:38:27] Joe Templin: you know what's the right thing overall.

[00:38:30] Ed Watters: That's right. You know, and, and I, I really encourage people to put your pettiness aside and just calm your mind and think about what is actually happening around you and make a plan for it, uh, it's so important. Joe,

[00:38:52] Joe Templin: One more thing people should be doing also is, you know, they hear this or they see that, or, you know, just ask yourself who benefits from it?

[00:39:01] Ed Watters: Yeah, that's a good question, that, that's an important question, you know.

[00:39:07] Joe Templin: So you know, there's, you know, this executive order, who benefits from it? And Jeff Gill follow the dollars, follow the power cause, you know, control is as important as money. You know, just think it through three or four steps.

[00:39:22] Ed Watters: Yeah.

[00:39:23] Joe Templin: I don't care if it's the local school board, or the police department, or even at the state level or the federal level, just ask yourself, Okay, who benefits from that? And think about it for a couple of minutes.

[00:39:35] Ed Watters: Especially in today's world. Yeah. You know, and, and another thing to add to that is not only the benefit of it, but who's going to control it? You know,

[00:39:51] Joe Templin: Typically that's who's benefiting or somebody closely aligned to it.

[00:39:56] Ed Watters: That's right. So how [00:40:00] do we, uh, get through it without a civil war at this point, Joe? Because a lot of people are talking about civil war, and violence, and you know, I wanna put my head in the sand because of the two sides.

[00:40:18] Joe Templin: That's part of the problem is putting the head in the sand, becoming an ostrich and

[00:40:22] Ed Watters: That's right.

[00:40:22] Joe Templin: letting the extremes on either side of the aisle, you know, politicize, and dictate, and polarize. And what needs to be done is that we need to remember that more brings us together than pulls us apart. That you should spend time talking with somebody you disagree with and both of you should have an open mind so you can understand why they're disgruntled at that

[00:40:46] and come to some sort of, hopefully, middle ground. Cause as Sir St. Francis of Assisi said, The unexamined Life's not worth lemonade. We should also examine our beliefs and beliefs of others, and

[00:40:59] Ed Watters: That's right.

[00:41:00] Joe Templin: we need to focus on having our personal responsibility. What can I do to make sure myself and my family are taken care of? What can I do to make better decisions to take care of me so that I have better outcomes down the road. For example, all these people who are like, healthcare is, you know, a right and we need to pay for it all. It's like, okay, with every right, there's an equal and counterbalancing responsibility. If you want me to pay for your healthcare, you need to be willing to take care of yourself.

[00:41:36] You need to not eat five cheeseburgers and two donuts at one time. You need to be willing to invest 30 to 45 minutes of physical activity every single day. If you're willing to make that trade off, I'm willing to pay taxes to cover that stuff. But if you're not, don't think that you can have all of the fun with none of the costs.

[00:42:00] Don't think that your actions are completely, um, disconnected from their consequences. We need to remember that and take responsibility for our own actions and consequences. So if we had more people doing it and had a little bit more of a suck it up mentality, we could have some, uh, better outcomes. And because of what's going on economically now in the, uh, essentially pushback from what's been occurring with the extremism on all the sides, and now we've got inflation, or these other things, we're gonna see more people saying, What can I do to make things better for me and my family? I think that's gonna be one of the early stages of us turning everything.

[00:42:46] Ed Watters: Yeah. Uh, I wanna address one more issue with you that we're really facing and it's really bad in our world today, Joe. And I, I found myself guilty of it yesterday and I was put in check. Thank the person for putting me in check because I like to be checked. News sources, uh, I didn't check a news source and I shared it out. I, I got lazy for that one time, that one time bit me in the rear, it was a false story. Now, I, I know time gets really sensitive and I go through things and sometimes not very often because of who is sharing it. I'll just share the story out because I think

[00:43:40] Joe Templin: Trust lept in and, but you are doing the right thing, you verify your stuff vast majority of the time and you trust the source that in the past has been trustworthy. So part of the problem is that there are not nearly as many trustworthy resources. I saw a statistic the other day that, um, trust in the media is down to like 10%, which is

[00:44:00] Ed Watters: Yeah.

[00:44:02] Joe Templin: lower than it is for, uh, used car sales at this point. Think about that.

[00:44:06] Ed Watters: Wow.

[00:44:08] Joe Templin: Okay. Because before it's, the state is no longer completely separate from government in any of the, uh, developed world. They've been in bed for too long as opposed to being, you know, counterbalances and so, um, that is a major concern. And one of the things that would help out is going on a news diet in a lot of ways. You know, look, it doesn't matter, almost none of it matters. It is all designed to get eyeballs, get attention, create fear, which then allows for further control and division and ultimately to generate economic return for individuals. Why do you

[00:44:55] Ed Watters: So no news is better news.

[00:44:57] Joe Templin: Yeah. So the only thing that I care about on the news is the Major League Baseball Training deadline is coming up. I care about that because I care about the New York Yankees. But

[00:45:10] Ed Watters: Yeah.

[00:45:10] Joe Templin: I don't watch very much TV. I mean, I can't tell you the last TV program that I watched, you know, I just quick glance over the headlines if there's actually anything going on in terms of econo, real economic stuff, not talk, but actual economic policy. I will double check it and research on it. But, you know, only having an information diet for the most part, makes sense. I can't tell you what the current cool TV show is or, and that sort of stuff now, because it doesn't matter.

[00:45:42] Ed Watters: Yeah.

[00:45:43] Joe Templin: It's,

[00:45:43] Ed Watters: Yeah.

[00:45:44] Joe Templin: And it's meant to distract us.

[00:45:47] Ed Watters: I've actually put myself on a Facebook diet where I, I just go on for the basic necessities. I share the show information and I try to catch up on a few basic friends that I know connect with me. And other than that, I try to stay off and stay busy doing other things because I find

[00:46:09] Joe Templin: Well, social media was designed to play to our addictive personalities, if you look it is designed to be addictive. It hits

[00:46:18] Ed Watters: Yes.

[00:46:18] Joe Templin: the same parts of the brain that cocaine,

[00:46:20] Ed Watters: Dopamine.

[00:46:21] Joe Templin: processed sugar does, and it is meant to be that way. So you spend more time there, more eyeballs, more power, more money. So breaking that and minimizing it, is critical. But people don't want to because it allows them to not have to think. It fills that void that they have inside to go look at cute cat memes or talk about, you know, so-and-so on TV. You don't even know Kardashians or whatever the hell, you know, and now allows them to not have to do the deep work on themselves.

[00:46:56] Ed Watters: Yeah, that's right.

[00:46:57] Joe Templin: That's the, the hard right path of self-improvement and that internal mastery as opposed to external gratification we were talking about at beginning.

[00:47:08] Ed Watters: So tell us about your book, Joe. Why, why did you write it and what was the process of writing that book?

[00:47:16] Joe Templin: So, the book as I said is meant to be a multivitamin for life because we all have these different components of our life. Our personal health, our, uh, physical health, mental health, spiritual health, occupation, communication, our relationships, all this. And because life is complex and stuff's going on constantly, we don't invest the time that we should. We lose track, uh, we're missing different components of it. So the book being a multivitamin for life, it should be taken every single day. Um, I recommend people read it in the morning, take two to three minutes every day.

[00:47:53] There's a quote by somebody, whether it's William Shatner or whether it's Muhammad Ali, Oprah Winfrey, Mahatma Gandhi, uh, Dr. Seuss, William Shakespeare. So there's a quote, there's discussion around it, which hits a lot of these different areas. And then there's an action item because a lot of the other daily readers, they'll talk about something, they'll give you your daily devotional, but they don't then give you

[00:48:19] a mechanism to reinforce the lesson to make change in yourself and thus the world around you. So for example, one of my favorite, uh, action items that I wrote is to smile at five people. Now this sounds like a very easy thing and is because as James Clear talks about in Atomic Habits, having tiny changes produces major results long range.

[00:48:46] Whereas, Zeno of Citium under Stoicism said, Wellbeing is no small thing, but it's made up of small steps. If you smile, you decrease the cortisol in your system so you slow down the aging process. Also helps, uh, uh, produ, stop producing belly fat so there's a physical attractiveness reason behind it. Well, it's a little thing like that, but you also become more creative, more intelligent for 10, 15 minutes, you become more charismatic.

[00:49:16] So because we are social creatures, if I smile at you, Ed, a real smile like that, from our laughter and all that you're gonna laugh, you're gonna smile. And so I have now given you the gift of health for a couple of minutes. You are better off for the next 15, 20 minutes because of what I just did. And maybe you go and you now smile at somebody else, or you've got a slightly better mood and so you're more productive, or you don't kick the cat, or you help a little old lady across the street, or what have you.

[00:49:46] So by something as little as smiling a few more times throughout the day and smiling at others, produces these much bigger, these disproportionate positive effects [00:50:00] out there. And if we can do things like that on a regular basis, in other words, do a good deed for somebody. Whether it's forgiving somebody who's wronged you, whether it's sitting there and assessing your situation as to how to be a better parent or a better mentor at work, or what have you.

[00:50:17] Doing these little things on a regular basis over weeks and months produces monstrous changes in ourselves, in those around us. And as I said, my goal is to reach out and impact a hundred million people this year, even at a tiny capacity like this. But when you come down there and see how those interact with each other, the effect could be absolutely positively monstrous. So it's things like that, that were the driver behind the book.

[00:50:46] Ed Watters: That's right. So, so, you know, very important, you change one person's life, you never know who that person might be and who that person might impact or the amount of people they might impact. I always like to say, If you see somebody really desperate in need, stop and say hi at least.

[00:51:12] Joe Templin: Yeah.

[00:51:13] Ed Watters: If you can,

[00:51:13] Joe Templin: As my mom taught,

[00:51:14] Ed Watters: buy them a hamburger.

[00:51:16] Joe Templin: My mom taught me years ago, when you're having a bad day, go help somebody else.

[00:51:20] Ed Watters: Yes.

[00:51:21] Joe Templin: Okay. You may not feel better but by helping somebody else, you're doing good. You're creating a positive impact on the world and you don't know how that's gonna ripple. It could be, you know, the butterfly effect in a positive matter. But by changing your focus to gratitude or service to others, you're going to be better off. As Muhammad Ali said, Service to others is the rent that we pay for our room here on Earth.

[00:51:48] So if you can turn around and help somebody else out in some capacity, like we used to tell the Cub Scouts, Do a good turn daily. If you go and do that, it's going to have impact that you'll never know about. Cause this person can help that person who does something here that, you know, then turns around and saves this kid's life, he grows up to cure cancer, who knows? But you do it not because you see the chain, but because you have faith in humanity.

[00:52:13] Ed Watters: That's right. And you know, I, I often tell the podcasters that I help out and work with, Don't focus on the numbers, the listeners, focus on the quality of your message and that will help you change the world. You know, you, you just never know who you're going to impact. I love it. So, Joe, our time is running out and I have so much more I could talk to you about. Do you have a call to action for our listeners today?

[00:52:48] Joe Templin: Yes. So my call to action is, I want them to go to the website everyday- excellence.com. That's everyday- excellence.com. Every single day I put up a new micro blog, a quick hit I, I call them Espresso of Excellence from Joe.

[00:53:05] where in one to two minutes, even without buying the book or anything else, they can make themselves better. They get a little insight, they improve their mood. Something like this to turn around and help them. And they can do it on a daily basis, cost them nothing. Yeah, they can buy the book there if they want, all that.

[00:53:23] They can listen to this podcast and all the other ones, there's all sorts of other things there. But just making that commitment to take a couple of seconds every morning or throughout the day whenever they want to improve themselves, cost them nothing but could mean absolutely everything. So everyday- excellence.com.

[00:53:46] Ed Watters: Awesome. Where can people locate you and find your books?

[00:53:51] Joe Templin: So hopefully they can find me at a pub but probably not. But they can buy the books wherever books are sold. Amazon, uh, barnesandnoble.com, at their local bookstore, they might have to request it, but it's in their system so it can be ordered. They can get it from my website too.

[00:54:08] Uh, so there's lots of different places that they can find it. Um, they can interact with me On Twitter or Facebook, it, that's @edewithjoe, ede for Every day Excellence with Joe, that's me. Or as I said, just go to the website and from there they can find all the various resources to help them have a slightly better decision making process and better outcomes.

[00:54:35] Ed Watters: Joe, you're a fascinating man with some fascinating answers. I thank you for sharing your story and your time here on the Dead America Podcast with us.

[00:54:45] Joe Templin: Ed, thank you. Be excellent and grow today.

[00:54:54] Ed Watters: Thank you for joining us today. If you found this podcast enlightening, entertaining, educational in any way, please share, like, subscribe, and join us right back here next week for another great episode of Dead America Podcast. I'm Ed Watters your host, enjoy your afternoon. Wherever you may be.

joe@everyday-excellence.com

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