work. We work. Hey, good afternoon everybody. Tom Street here. I am with Matt Ricketts. We've got a special guest today, Cory Box with Drive Social Media. He's going to have some awesome useful information for us in terms of how to make money for your business and social media. And we've got a whole room full of people. Liz Trotter in Las Vegas. So for the meet and work we're going to be talking about today, we're going to be talking with Cory, but we wanted to jump in just for a minute and let Liz give you an update for at least the part that she can share anyway. What you guys, what you guys been doing in Las Vegas. All right. And we are doing our end of year plan. So what we can do is we move on on day two and six this next on day three. And so we have been taking our local week for the next report. Liz, you might want to get a little bit closer to the computer. We're having a hard time hearing you. This may not work. That's a little better. Yeah. Even still, it's still tough. Maybe it's still lag. Why don't we roll time and we'll just talk about what you're doing. Yeah. We'll kind of give everybody an update. Say, say hi. Maybe next week we can get an update from not in Vegas. We hear you loud and clear right in the center there because that's where the mic is kind of going. So whoever needs to talk needs to be in the center. Yeah. If we were to do anything, we can hear you loud and clear. So you're on the spot, Katie. Okay. Well, I can, if you guys can hear me, we've been here for the past few days in Vegas. We're focusing on our wildly important goals that we got from 40X for disloons of execution. And we're all just kind of wrapping up. This is our last couple of hours. I had a great past few days just getting to know everybody and working on my goals. I have a clear plan what I'm going to do to get back to my office and input. So I'm really excited. And about this accountability course real quick, I've been in it for the past year and doubled our business. It's really helped me just stay on track. Stay accountable. I've learned so much. So I'm really grateful for this trip. I just want to say quick, for anybody that thinks that I must have paid Katie to say that, she's Katie. If anybody needs a good testimonial, she should go. I'll tell you, she always will tell you how she's feeling about everything. And she'll get too straight. So anything else that you guys want to share about what you've done, what you've gotten out of the event? They're all quiet now. I am not going to get these. I'm so forced. Riz, why don't you like Katie sit back down and tell us about Made Central? We already recorded a big testimonial. But it's been a life changer, I would just say. She didn't record a video. Well, we recorded a video for you at testimonial, the people that are using it. Yeah, but Made Central has also been a complete game changer.  So yeah, it's my fault. It's just to know where things are going in the company. Oh, Travis is coming to us.  And I really appreciate everybody here and everybody's contributed. And right back to where you are, Travis. I'm Travis with Moran's Bait Service out of Houston. Awesome. We love Travis, but he doesn't stop us. Nice to meet you. Thank you. I just did. I got a fight to catch. Hi, Travis. Hi, Travis. I didn't want this to be a testimonial. That's kind of what it's turning into. I didn't want that. What I was hoping is that you guys could share what you've gotten out of this and what other people should be doing going into this last half of the year. Okay, so I, we work on our wildly important goals. I actually, so I've never had goals broken down so granular to where, you know, we're going to involve our whole team. So we're going to go home. We're going to involve our whole team and get buy-in from our whole teams to help us complete these goals. And that's really what I learned from this event is that you need buy-in from your whole team. And for Distance of Execution is, is the book you'll need to read to learn about that. But that's what I got out of this. And I think that everybody should be working on their goals for the last half of the year. We're already in June. At the end of this month, we have the last half of the year. So start working on your goals. Plan where you want to be, where you are now, where you want to go to, by what date, and share that with your team. Ask them how we're going to get there and you're going to get the buy-in from your team. So that's what I learned. Technically, the 27th week of the year is tomorrow. So next week marks the, this, the, the end of this week marks the midpoint of the year, basically, not even the quarter, but the midpoint actually is Sunday, basically. So you guys are on the right track. I love the wildly important goal idea of focusing on key things and just driving on those ideas. So like, like for me, I look at some key numbers in my business, like payroll to revenue. I look at things like, like, you know, sales, sales numbers, when I'm looking at like, you know, quotes, how many, how many quotes we got, how many of those we turned into opportunities, and how many we turned into sales. And so I love it. You guys just drive those numbers the rest of year. I think you guys are going to kill it. That's, that's the most important thing. Thank you, Matt. Thank you guys. Bye. Thank you, guys. Bye all. Cool. So I want to just give a special shout out to Corey. So we were talking behind the scenes when we got started. Corey and I met, it sounds like it was like one of his first weeks at Drive Social Media. So Drive Social Media is the agency that puts out all those wonderful Facebook ads that if you've ever visited my website, you have seen because I purposely allow them to be seen all over the country because I want other made services to see what we're doing. And it costs me pennies to do that. So I could narrow it down to St. Louis and people have been like, oh, your targeting is bad. No, that's intentional because I've always had, you know, the goal of sharing my, you know, my strategies and visions with other companies. And it costs me very little to do that. So if you've ever been to our website, seen our cool videos or cool ads, they've been behind that. So we've been working together for seven years. And in that time, Corey shared with me that they were at $700,000 or $800,000 a year at the time that he walked to my door. Where are you guys at now, Corey? This year, we will probably finish someone around $40 million in revenue. Wow. Yeah, we're all jaw, you know, jaw dropping to think about that. And so those folks just came out from a meeting where they were focusing on kind of a key metric of business to kind of focus on. What does drive focus on what's like your kind of like, you know, North Star principle or wildly important goal? I mean, is it just growth? Is it like, what are you guys looking for? It, we're definitely folks. So I'm growing inside of that, though. I think our driving principle and you'll see us all over our office. I know you've visited enough times. We go by a pretty catchy tagline, which is ROI or die. We look at it as if our clients aren't making money, they definitely won't be able to pay for us. So we need to first and foremost serve them. And as we continue kind of beating that drum, you got to one hand watch in the other scenario. And we have been able to continue to scale that across the country. And we're big on the servicing side too. So, you know, I think that helps like where we go build in people's backyards like Nashville and Miami. And we work directly with the business owners on helping them grow their revenue and overall use effective marketing. Yeah, that's, you know, that's, that's an amazing growth story. I mean, that's seven years. Basically, you're doubling every year and a half is what you're is what you would have to do to make that happen. So that's about what is that like 80% growth per year, like that's incredible. Yeah, we've made the the Inc. 5000 list if you're familiar with it. And obviously, I think there's a journal here multiple times due to our rate of growth. And yeah, there was there's probably, I guess it was five years straight, we doubled revenue every single year. And so that's where now obviously we're getting to bigger, you know, land grabs and revenue and we have more teams, we're growing, but it's not by percentage wise as as insane as it once was. So one thing that everyone always tells me that like drives me crazy because I'm like, well, Facebook marketing doesn't work for me. And I like I smile and I say, it's my number one source of revenue generation. And if somebody comes to my website, it's my number one source to continue to market to them, even beyond following up with them with phone calls and emails and everything else that we already do. But we can catch them on a platform that they're using in really random ways 24 hours a day on their on the seat on the toilet, right? Like like, oh yeah, phones don't leave people's hands. People are taking showers with their phones now. It is not uncommon for the phone to go in the shower. And I've read more and more studies that are saying that like like some weird percentage of adults shower with their phone now, like, and they're reading the news in the shower, it's it's an absurd number, like it's not leaving their hands. So when people tell me it doesn't work, I have to say it's getting harder because because, you know, Apple made a little harder with the phone algorithms and things like that. But it's where people are at, right? It's where it's where they're at. And that's always been the crux of all marketing, right? Like, finding out where your exact customer is spending their time and attention, whether it be the Super Bowl or the billboard that's in the neighborhood that you service, and then putting a value in front of them that makes them, you know, stop and pay attention to you. And so yeah, social media and smartphones. All you got to do is look at, you know, any any happening restaurant on a Friday night in America and you can see people just as many people in conversation or as many people buried stuck at looking at their phone or if you go to the gym and you know any that person sitting on your piece of equipment. It's the worst. And it's like, actually, I'm really bad about it in one way because I swim a lot and I'll bring my phone to the edge of the pool. And I'll be checking my messages in between like we use walkie talkie with Tom. So sometimes Tom when you're walking talking to me, I'm swimming laps and I'm getting back between sets. And so I'm kind of bad about that too. My phone comes with me to the pool. So you know, it's right on the edge of the pool, right next to me while I'm getting my swim set in. So yeah, man, like the phone is where you need to reach people. So there's other ways where they're at. But I mean, I don't know the number.  Is there like a quantifier? Yeah, something actually I was going to hit on today. It's over 90 plus minutes on social media alone, but three to five hours a day just looking at their smartphones. And then what's even crazier is the amount of phones in the world. There's more phones than people in terms of smartphones and free times like up to like 13 hours a day now. So North America globally. So the phone, the phone count, there's 8.4 billion global mobile connections. And then that three to five hours a day takes in new account the entire world. In North America is the heaviest concentration of Facebook and Instagram users. And they're the ones that are 90 minutes plus a day checking that platform or varieties of it. Yeah. So you got you got me thinking now am I one of them? I might be, you know, you don't, you know, even where you're doing it. Everyone's use cases different. That's that's a great point. Some people are on marketplace or messenger, like Matt said. Some people use Instagram or Facebook. But in some way or another, they're touching that platform. And those kind of micro moments to get throughout the day to kill the boredom. Yeah. Yeah, I would say I would say if you were to put like a tracker on it and actually quantify it, you would actually not like the number. It would probably be it would probably be something you don't want to know necessarily. Like it's it's I'm I have done things where I've taken Facebook off my phone and, you know, just try to use it when I'm on desktop and things like that. And then I just find that I'm going back to my computer more.  Sorry for the expert. We'll have to beep that one out later. But it's going to be it's going to be one of those things that, you know, if I had to quantify it on myself personally, I don't think I'd want to know the number. I mean, it's not good. Yeah, it's Apple gives you that update. And I just tend to ignore it every time I get it weekly. Yeah, I have that turned off. You can actually turn that on in iOS.  So most of us would be in the SMB range of like small to medium sized businesses. What can someone do to kind of get started and leverage this, you know, this media? Yeah. So I do have a kind of like some visuals. I can walk you guys through that. Let's try this. Let me go ahead. I'll share my screen here to kind of give an idea. We see it. Yeah, we're good. It's loading on my end. One second. So I kind of hit on the of advertising and how it's always kind of existed.  So people buy what is being sold. The reason why they're not choosing your business is simply because either a they don't know you exist or they're not thinking about you when it comes time for them to buy. Right. So so what we have to do is solve that kind of attention that awareness with your consumers and marketing and advertising has always existed this way where, you know, the place where people spend the most time and tension has always been the most expensive. Well, since, you know, the smartphone really only came out like 2008, one of the advantages you have right now, if you're a small business owner, is it still hasn't reached apex like a billboard or like TV or like radio that are much more established advertising medium. And so the competition isn't so high. So you can really get a good cost-effective way of getting in front of your consumers and overall even generating leads out of this, generating business out of it. The product kind of touch on is the 8.4 billion global mobile connections. There's no greater medium in the world that goes with you absolutely everywhere like the smartphone. And then with three to five hours a day on their phone, you know that they're spending the time and attention here. It's not just like it's the part that goes with us. A lot, a lot of focus is being spent on this. So that's the medium. But in terms of channel, right now you're like, all right, where do I spend my time, right? Where's my most most cost-effective time spent and and Facebook and Instagram are far and away the biggest drivers for that time and attention when it comes to social media. There's 2.8 billion global active users on this platform on a monthly basis. So if you were to boil us down just looking at North America, 84% of people over the age of 18 checked this platform daily from a mobile device. So that means 8.4 out of 10 of the people you want to talk to are going to give this time and attention. So that's a huge piece of solving where do I even spend my dollars? If I think about where else can you reach 8.4 out of 10 of your customers because not everybody's going to watch the same TV shows or read the same news outlet or get the same direct mail piece or even drive by the same billboard. But 8.4 out of 10 of your customers can see this. So we talked about it going everywhere with us. It really is true. It goes from date night. It's in the bedroom. Oddly enough, it's in the bathroom. It's in the gym with us. It follows you everywhere. You know, you think about it. It's like I can't leave home without my A coupon or B smartphone and it's overwhelmingly B. So if I'm looking to solve my overall advertising problem or my customer generation problem or my customer loyalty problem, the number one way I can continue to give my value to people and find people that are likely to buy my services is using this platform. Now, we talked about time spent. It only continues to grow.  You can be spending time on social media is really when people bought their smartphones where they're looking. I would recommend though, this is where you talk about people saying Facebook doesn't work for my business. I think there's something to clear the highlight and state here is I would recommend a page strategy for any business. Yeah. When Facebook was in its beginning stages, you could create organic cons, which basically means if you make a post from your page right now, right in 2011, that post would reach 100% of your users and followers, your fans, basically, I'm starting followers. As of 2016, that number for organic distribution has shrunk around 0 to 1%. And the biggest reason is the competition for news feed. So when you open up your phone or you open up your desktop and where you're actually getting information from is just grown because the amount of advertisers going there, but also with the amount of users that are using the platform. So you want to focus on using paid content for each of the consumers. And it can create like when it comes to a Facebook ad or Instagram ad, right owned by the same company, these are all the different places you can see an ad, right? So everything from like where you originally were seeing it on desktop, which are like your right column ads or your news feed ads, or now you have things like in-stream video, instant articles, messenger stories, right? And then when they acquired Instagram, you get everything in their platform too. So you have all of these places, you can get served content to your exact consumer, to the people that you want to reach that can afford what you sell that are in your buying radius and that are either currently prospecting businesses like yours, or they match criteria that make them an ideal consumer for you. And what's cool is that as you're using the ads builder and there's actually even some mock-up tools, there's a mock-up tool within the ads builder where you can actually see what it'll look like on all the different platforms. It adjusts the look and feel so that it looks native on each platform. And it'll even now, it'll even give you some suggestions on to what you can do to make your image pop a little more.  So that mock-up tool, like what you just displayed, will actually help you maximize how it'll look on all these different platforms. So I love the look of that slide. And I'm going to touch on that a little bit more too because I know one of the things that's made your business so successful now is you've always been, since we've known each other, we're saying like seven years, you're very focused on the data.   All of those things allow you to really refine your message. If you're of a small budget or you're saying, hey, I want to run a really low cost of acquisition marketing approach, this is one of the first ways I would start doing it. And once you validate, you get proof of concept, this works and works with your audience. Now maybe it depends if you want to go from that $500,000 to $5 million. Now maybe you start folding a little bit more in your advertising budget and you know and definitively what should be in your TV commercial or what should be on your billboards because you had it validated on a smaller, more cost-effective scale with using social and digital. And not just customers, you guys have helped me with Spanish language marketing to, you know, certain targets to when we were really big on going after, you know, employees through Facebook. And now that we're actually, so my next sprint is in a week and guess what I'm going to be talking about is we need to refocus on that Spanish language market. And where else can I target it? Not, there's no place as cheap that I can get a hold of those groups, those individuals. There's Facebook groups that we post in and things like that as well locally, but I want to continue to engage them. And then when they see us posting in those Facebook groups, they'll be like, oh, I've seen their ads before. That company's big. That's where I want to go work. And that's hitting on a better, you know, increasing familiarity with your end consumer is going to make it more likely when even they're prospecting what made company they're going to choose, you know, continue to remarketize people and influence these people on their buying journey, right? Their confidence is going to mean so much higher. I always tell people, if you have a runny nose, rarely do people say hand me a tissue, you know, commonly people say hand me a Kleenex. Same thing, you can tell people to Google it, right? You might use Yahoo and Bing, your small part of the market, but you would tell people to Google it. And same thing when you look at made cleaning companies, you know, a lot of times when consumers are first getting into the market, they don't know who to choose. This is a great way for you to put yourself ahead of your competition and make sure you're continuing the conversation with them to make it easier for you to convert them to client. So this is kind of the ways I look at, you know, putting your people in buckets, right? And creating a funnel out of your approach to your Facebook. And you probably have, if you're an established business, more of this material, but I'll talk about how you can start if you don't have any of it. So when I say more of this material, what I mean is people that are going to help influence or are currently prospecting you would think warm leads and they're coming from a variety of places, right? These are people who are currently engaging with either your ads that you've been trying in the past, right? Or they've been visiting your timeline because potentially one of their friends told them about how great of experience they had with you. These are people visiting your website, right? They're sitting in possibly submitting a quote or looking at what people are saying about you, looking at the service you provide. These might be in email addresses or phone numbers or maybe it's community activation. Maybe you're out in the community at a 5k or you're you're door knocking on businesses and you're collecting this data from these people, right? We can use this in really powerful ways and then we'll use that to even create kind of like a scenario. How do I think people 99% like the folks that are choosing from me already? So when you look at Facebook fan targeting, it's one of things Facebook has taken away. And I think it's important to understand if you're starting out and you're starting to build your page, fans are actually one of the elements that have very little to do with purchasing from you. The people knew the fact, why would say that is, you know, if you're like me, right? I have friends and family from all over the country. If I was to recommend they like Better Life Maids page, right? Like Matt's page. There's no correlation between them liking his page and then buying from Matt. They just simply took my advice and or took, you know, did something in the favor of me to like his page. Harvard did a big study on this and show there's no correlation between simply liking a Facebook page or liking content and actually buying. It can be an indication of what resonates with your audience, but it doesn't lead to sales. The more warm leads you're going to look at are the people that are actually watching your videos.  Where I see him talking about Better Life Maids. I see his maid, you know, commercial that is super entertaining. And if I'm watching them, right, and I'm his core audience, I'm starting to get entertained. You know, good commercials looking further than like insurance industry. The insurance industry is super good about entertaining their end consumer. It's an actuarial business, right? Very, very much ones and zeros being counting kind of boring in general. But all their commercials are really notable. Everybody knows, you know, flow from progressive, right? And main hand from all states, you know, Geico and the Gecko. So if you can stop and pay attention to, you're giving them a value by entertaining them. In addition, once they start looking at filling out lead forms or visiting your timelines or even flipping through your carousel ads, you know, there are multiple images of what you're offering, right? They visit your Instagram profile. If they like your page, you can interact and engage and retarget these people up to 365 days. So these people have just crossed a big threshold. They went from not knowing about your business at all to now being aware of you. And that's where they're moving down the funnel to starting getting closer to researching and considering buying from you. So these are people you want to continue nurturing and staying in front of. Now, after you get past that point, right, once you engage with me on Facebook, I don't care if it's because of your word of mouth marketing, it's your direct mailers, it's your drive by traffic, all road lead to run. If people are considering buying from you in order to get your phone number, in order to look at your services, in order to fill out your lead form, they have to go through your website. And so you can actually remark it to people that are hitting your website, whether they convert as a lead, they pick up the phone and call you, but any one of those people who might not possibly have converted or people who just visit your website and understand even on a high performance website designed to convert a lot of traffic, over 90 plus percent of that traffic is going to simply bounce from the website when it lands there. So these are people who are already considering you, but for some reason or another, maybe your website is not mobile friendly, maybe it doesn't have all the information about what you provide, you can continue having the conversation. So this is even further down the funnel. They're really starting getting closer to asking buying questions, how much does this cost, what can you do for me?  And especially when you understand 57% of consumers visit five plus different brand sites people are purchasing. So almost half the amount of people that are looking at five of your competitors before they even buy from you. So this is super important to factor in. It's one of the reasons why Matt says his audience is so broad, he continues these conversations across the country. And he wants people to see, if you've ever visited his site or engaged with his content, that's how this works. That's why you continue to see it. And you're very familiar with him, become the trusted figure. The other thing is all the people phone numbers that you might have collected, whether you're door knocking, you're going business to business, right? Even if you do a manual scrape, where you go and identify all the business in your area that you'd like to be in communications with, right? You take those phone numbers. You could upload those into Facebook and you would actually identify those people on the platform. You could start marketing to them. That's interesting. So for a B2B business, you could actually identify those business, would that work for a business phone number or that you need a personal one? Think the way you do guerrilla marketing, right?  Odds are they're going to give you a name and number, maybe a business card. That's where you would be able to get in touch with that business, right? At the end of the day, if business is an inanimate object, you wouldn't want to reach the business anyways. You want to reach the influencer or the decision maker in that business with your ads. So not a lot of us are B2B, but there are a lot of us that go to commercial. So think about that guys. You could actually use your LinkedIn network, your other networks, and then take that to the place that they actually spend most of their time. While I am on LinkedIn for a moment a day, maybe to check messages that some other marketers sent me to try and engage in, I'll read their message. Actually, somebody sent me one that was really good the other day that I actually plan to respond to. I'm actually going to copy that format because it was actually really good. And so I at least owe them, hey, your email format was very engaging, your inbox was engaging. But you can actually, once you've made a connection on LinkedIn, you can actually take that data and actually create a list of businesses you want to target, like the top facilities you want to do, especially like someone like Tom, he does a lot of what we call res-immersal. He could look at all the mid-rises, the mid-rise apartments. He could look at all the retirement facilities in Charleston and get the decision makers and upload them into Facebook and then be like, hey, next time you're looking for a bid, let me take you out for lunch and we'll talk about it. It could be just like almost like super targeted like that. That could be really effective. So the number you're looking for is like their mobile number, right? Yes. The other part of this is, so there's probably a place that's even easier to glean these from, right? What about all the people that call in to get quotes over the phone that you don't hear back from? If you have a good voiceover IP phone system set up, there's inexpensive ones like Vonage and Ring Central, where you can actually retarget the phone calls that are coming in. You actually do that at Drive. I don't have that service because I use a company called Four Voice, but Tom uses Ring Central and like you guys integrate directly with like lots of these companies like Vonage, Ring Central, and you guys pull the data in. Now I give you my logins and you guys run reports and do it for me, but yeah, we're doing that and I find that to be incredibly effective. When I look at the reporting and I say, wow, this audience does really well that's previously called us, but didn't buy, that is an audience we want to be marketing to. So that's something to think about. Oh, you got to think. I'm 34 years old, so I'm not a spring chicken by any means, but even my generation hates jumping on a phone call. It's text and email is a very preferable way to communicate, right? So somebody's so hot and bothered that they can't find the information on the website, right?  That's a hot lead. That's somebody you definitely want to say in front of. So you can use that technology for remarketing people or run that report at the end of the month, take those phone numbers and upload them as at least something to cover that base there, right? If you think about it this way and just kind of looking at the next part of this, email address so you can do the same thing with. If you think about it, data is trading higher than oil, like the trillion dollar publicly valued companies, right? Or data companies, right? Looking at Alphabet, right? Looking at Amazon, I look at Apple, right? Data companies, right? Data is trading higher than oil. So like this data, if you have this information, this is how you monetize it. You know, if you have email addresses you're collecting or people are submitting leads, right? Taking that information and building audiences out is a great way to stay in front because even a high performing email campaign, right? And you could write the best emails in the world but like you're looking at a 25% open rate, right? You're getting 37 emails a day, right? 25%, one in four of your actual prospective buyers or clients right now are likely to even open that and that's if you're the best in the email game, right? The one Matt has just described, the guy who's got a great email template. So most businesses are closer like 10 to 15%. If you put this information into the platform, you can prepare customer profiles, you can serve them ads in their newsfeed two to four times a day if you want to or if need be, right? If you're running a big promotion or something. So really gets powerful and beyond that, and this is actually talking about what Matt said, I won't hit on this too much, it's kind of exclusive to drive, but you can, there's software that'll clean that data, run it into Facebook and allow you to reach AI audiences. And AI is one of the most impressive things about what Facebook and platforms like Google are providing right now. So if you take all of your customer data and you're looking beyond, you're looking at people who buy from you, you're looking at people who are prospecting you, looking at people who are visiting your website, right? People whose information you've gathered, you can actually use that information to identify people that are 99% like them in behavior and profile and interests. So you can take your best customers, build a list and find people that share 99% and similarities to that. And this works guys. So there are, this is, this is crazy, but like, there are whole businesses built around this outside of Facebook and like the political like, and so, so like political operatives, like for years have been basically creating lookalike audiences based on people's, you know, buying habits, magazine habits, things like that. But the amount of data that Facebook has on you, and then you can create audiences that are even more targeted than those and think about all the money that goes into politics, the billions of dollars that happens every year and they're not even getting as detailed and granular as Facebook is. All you really need to do is figure out like what the demographics of what your customers look like and find more of them and Facebook will help you with that and create lookalike audiences that are incredibly effective. I use it in some marketing review for Made Central and it's, it drives a lot of traffic to our website and very inexpensively generating demos for the software for people that I've never, I've never met before, you know, they've, we've never had any relationship up till now. So, you know, and again, of course in my business for Better Life Mades, yeah, absolutely, I would say this is probably one of our best performing audiences. If I were to break out my metrics, I'm like, I'm always surprised at how well Facebook does at matching audiences. And I think the large part of that is because, you know, if A, a lot of us aren't super data minded, right? So if you're not good about visualizing data and building regression models, which I can raise my hand and say I'm not good at building regression models, Facebook takes that heavy lifting off of the plate for you and it uses hundreds of thousands of data points analyzed in real time and it also has this neural network, right? If you ever want to use their technology and register your page on Facebook with them, right? You're, you're helping them understand who is prospecting you and you can't go directly after your competitor's business, but they can't identify people that are in market and near market for your solution based on other sites they're visiting. And so the interesting thing about it, like kind of Matt said, is like there's tons of political operatives that have been trying to do this for years, really can be made about governments doing this. The difference is we give Facebook our consent to do it when we use the platform. And, and you can also, when you upload that information, when you upload, I think this might be Matt's favorite part these days, is if you, and he keeps talking about the success of getting out of campaigns and the leads, you can actually upload your data from your CRM and see how many people were driven in by your ads. And that gets really powerful because now you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing and you have a better idea of where your dollars are better spent and you can start really narrowing down if you're on a small budget, right? Or if you have a big budget, you know, I, the number one thing to look at is scaling it out. So you can grow with it. I'll share like, you know, so in general, this, this may not sound like a crazy number, but we're spending, you know, roughly between our, between our retainer with Drive and our ad spend about $4,500 to $5,000 a month on, on our social, social media ad spend with, with you guys. And so with that, you know, we're getting almost a 10x return at minimum and oftentimes, oftentimes closer to like more like 18x return, we're averaging 15 though. So for every dollar that I, that I put into Facebook marketing, I'm seeing a 15x annual return back now. When you think about the lifetime value of a customer in the maid service, multiply that number by 2.8 to 3.5 depending on how long you keep your customers. Then, then I'm really getting almost like a 50x return on every dollar that I put into, to put into Facebook. So, roughly, if I just get 13 or 14 recurring customers a month, that doesn't sound like a crazy number. But if I think that the average customer is going to spend $4,000 a year, right? So if I spend $5,000 to hit $60,000 in annual sales, would you do that every month, month after month? That's my, that's my logic behind doing it. I think you're talking about recurring customers. So, you know, even at a 5%, you know, turn rate, you're going to have them for 20 months, right? Yeah. Even if your turn rate is terrible, and my turn rate is closer to 2.8 to 3%. So I'm keeping them 33 months on the low side for my average customer.  Is there like, so you're, you're, you're spending $5,000 a month and you're getting a heck of a return off of it, which kind of begs the question of what would happen if you, you, you spent more. I mean, is there a point of diminishing return where the, the point is right now is I don't like up till this week, I didn't have enough staff. It was, I've been, I've been staying the course, even though I haven't had the staff to even like deal with all the leads that are coming in because I don't want to give up market share. And I'm such a believer in, I want my, I don't want people to forget about me. And guess what's happened in the last week? Well, in the last, in the last two weeks, we've hired 11 people. I've got seven of them on property already. And one didn't show up today, but I've got three more left to next week and won the following week all in pipeline. And it's only growing. So we've all been waiting for this damn to break on the employee side.  And, and now we're, we're raising our revenue targets by $1,500 a day all of a sudden, like we're, we're getting back to, you know, 90% of COVID levels. And then my goal is by August to be at pre COVID levels, 2019 sales levels by August. And the damn has been the, or the, the whole up until now has been labor. But I, I'm sort of a believer of just not turning your marketing off and just keep making that investment. I just believed that the labor situation would turn around. And I didn't want to get behind that curve when it did. And it just happened so quick. Like, I don't know, you know, Missouri was one of the first states to do away with the unemployment extra. And I don't want to get into politics whether I'm not sure if that's 100% of what's going on here. But that seems to be a big driver that ended a week ago. And all of a sudden I have 11 new employees on property and they're great employees. Some of them may have been on the sidelines. Or now the, the job market has all of a sudden gotten more competitive. And so, you know, people, you know, that waited are going to have to pick what's left because all the other jobs have been taken. You know, there's, you know, a lot of jobs have been taken. I don't know. I don't know all the reasons behind it, but it's, it broke. And now we're going to explode in growth and we're prepared.  And so let me get this right. Is there like third party software in here or will Facebook actually look at your leads and then recommend other leads that are similar that might even part of yours because they, they share the AI says that, you know, I've got more people just like the people that you have. Is that within Facebook or software? Yeah. So the way that ultimately like what you see right here is the manual labor part, easy way to think about it. This is something that we do in decided drive, but what you would do is you would just say you would want to run a report of all new customers or customers that ran for the month of June, all payments ran, right? You run a report of those customers. Specifically, you want to look at the very unique personal identifiable data like phone numbers and emails. You'd run that out of your, you know, made central, right? Run that out of made central. You actually can then, if you organize and clean and probably exported via Excel, right? Organize and clean that data, you can upload it directly into Facebook. And from there, they're going to say there's 180,000 people within a 20 mile radius of your location or your service area that match the criteria that are similar to these people. And so you could then run out to those people and build an audience off of them. Okay. Yeah. And that's really as simple as that if you were wanting to do it yourself. And so we have it automated with Drive where they're doing this for us and making sure that that's happening. But it's something I still do for, I personally do that stuff for Made Central. So Tom, we're doing that now. We're doing some of that, that kind of hardening now to kind of find users for the software that, that don't already know us. And then we're introducing them to our, to our ideas and to our thought process. It's interesting, Corey, because, you know, we have SEL professionals on smart business moves. We have people on smart business moves that do like Google, you know, AdWords, retargeting, things like that. And pretty much the person is like, Hey, do you guys do anything with like social media Facebook? And they're like, Oh, we don't do that. So share with us a little bit. What is it about Facebook, Instagram, the other social media platforms that's different than what your traditional AdWords person or SEO person would be doing? Yeah, the easiest thing about it, those platforms have been around just a little bit longer in terms of their ad platform site. So they have like a decade head start. So that it's easier to have people who've kind of learned that technology by exposure. The other, the other aspect is the barrier to entry for Facebook is, is it does take some know how it can definitely be a black hole of spend if you don't want what you're doing. And the easy thing to point to is like boosting Facebook posts, right? A lot of people, it's a self service tool Facebook creates. And it's not designed to get them sale, but they could spend, you know, like in that scenario, they spend 5000 a month, it can increase awareness, which in fact can get you sales, get you leads, but it's not really designed that way. So you, so there's, there's some technical know how there's a reason why it's, it's a little bit less touched by people. Or people maybe use it in the past, but I've had struggle with it being effective for them. That's, that's the number one barrier I would say. I think the other thing that maybe we need to address is the creative.  How long do you think it goes takes to go stale for an ad on Facebook? What do you think a quarter, maybe three months? You get how fast does this guy go change from the caveman to the gecko? You know, it's like that, that kind of gives you an idea. If they're doing on a TV level, imagine what it's like on Facebook.  We rotate it though. We turn it off for a month or two, and then we reintroduce it. Like we have videos that have been playing for four or five years. We nailed it. And then what we'll do is we'll be like, all right, let's turn that off for a quarter and let it get kind of recycled. I think the number one problem that people faces is creating content that is engaging. And there's templates that work, but then those templates get played out because everybody's doing that same thing. Like emojis are the thing of the moment. Putting emojis really colorful and bright and catching people's eyes. But that'll get played out. And everyone will catch on that that's being used to grab their attention. And they'll be like, you don't have to be another thing. Video for a moment there was just incredibly engaging on Facebook. And they had the autoplay as you scrolled. And it would catch your eye. And for a while they had it so the sound autoplayed as you scrolled through. And so as you scrolled through your newsfeed, somebody would be blasting. Now they have that dint. And you have to, some things still autoplay, but very few, so it changes so much. That's the biggest thing. Yeah, that's another good point. It's just rapidly changing. And I think it's hard for people to keep up with. Our strategy has changed two times in the last two years. Pretty much you can count on it. And sometimes there's years where it changed twice in the year. The AI built audiences, that's something of the last three years has been available. Conversion tracking, Matt, I don't know if you remember that came out, I'd say like four or five years ago and you can start tracking your conversions. I'll find out a purchase and stuff like that. So it's just rapidly changing. And it makes it very hard for, it's hard to be the ad guys, setting ads, kind of like the AdWords guys are. And then learning at the same time about what's changing, what technology is coming down the pipe that is worth testing. That's the thing, man. As a business owner, can you afford to keep up with this amount of knowledge and change that's constantly happening? Yeah, if your ad budget is $1,000 a month, you probably can. You start scaling up to $5,000 a month, you can start burning a hole in your pocket and you might have been better to have reinvested a little bit in some professional help. But the platform is designed to be self-serve, but you almost have to be taking a course like on Udemy or like Linda or one of these learning platforms and just keep taking new courses because it is ever-evolving, ever-changing. And that's the challenge that I see most is that what worked yesterday is not going to work tomorrow. Or it could be a totally new strategy in a week. It's evolving very fast. And I'll kind of, I can wrap some of this stuff for you guys because that's the other part that I think Matt hits on is like, there's so many different ways you can put people in buckets. Like I think a lot of times folks forget about their current customers or current clients. And don't forget when someone hits them with a big value for some reason for them change. So if you can continue to stay in front of these people too, what you really end up creating is a funnel scenario because the other one is there's still people you want to influence in your market. And this is where the secondary targeting comes in. This is no different than picking from traditional marketing where you're going to pick people based on interest, location, life events, age, gender. And so you can use all this. And when you do it correctly, you're building a funnel. And so this is where you're really adding multiple ponies in the race. And knowing how to set these up correctly and measure where your leads are coming from most effectively and where to spend money is probably the tricky part too. Because this takes, again, lots and lots of time. And I think you hit on a good point, man. It's like, I personally don't do my own taxes. I don't cut my own grass. There are things I find that I'm better off outsourcing. If I do that, there's probably an opportunity cost to my time. I didn't always, you know, I wasn't always in that boat, but that's where I am now. And so if you're finding you're saying this is really eye crossing to me, I already have enough problems managing, you know, humans right now or, you know, I'm really the person that's really good at the sales side of this. This might be something worth outsourcing because like, if you're not setting it up like this or things I went over didn't kind of flow in your head to be like this, this is where you can really run into challenges. That's kind of how the people you talked about before with SEO and kind of the AdWords stuff can be a lot of like repeat, set it and forget it. And so it just would be the opposite of that in this scenario. But to kind of help you guys picture this and why we use this funnel idea is like, your human based audiences are going to be your most flawed because you are inherently flawed. They're going to be based off of what you feel. And they also don't know about you either. So the next best audience are people who don't know about you, but they match all of your current customers profiles or your prospective customer profiles. So the people considering doing business with you from their engage users, right? They get it with an ad in their feed and now they're aware of you, but they still haven't started researching you, which is where it starts becoming part of the closing process. And so once they start researching you with true buying intent, right, they're looking for your phone number, they're submitting his leads, they're looking at your services, these people are asking buying questions quietly. So we really want to make sure we're focusing budget on these people because they're the warmest of converting. And then same thing with phone calls. Now once they convert, it depends on how you approach business, if you're always in search of new business, right, you're not like Matt, where you understand the value kind of keeping everyone in market with you, then you would eliminate the current customers from your marketing, right? And you would refeed that though to back in to feed your AI built audiences and just continue to rinse and repeat and refine your cost of acquisition to scale out your ROI and continue filling your funnel. It's not a bad idea. It's not even a bad idea to even still hit your current audience with certain like specific messages in our industry like, hey, Merry Christmas, thank you for being a great customer. And like, you know, maybe that could be a little creepy or whatever, but you can make it not. You can target them in a way that's like, we're so grateful to have such wonderful customers.  There's ways you can target them, your current customers to engage them that make them think about you in a way that they might otherwise not. So you want to say that as well. You do seasonal pushes too, don't you? Like with people that might have been like win backs or people maybe did a single cleaning. I don't know if that's okay. Yeah. And we do gift cards. We do gift cards to our current audience over Christmas. So our current customers, we push really hard, you know, for seasonal sales over the holidays too. So yeah. Yeah. And this kind of brings me right into like messaging, right? So like the best part is you can kind of AB split test your values, right? And even your audience is in here too. It's kind of easy way to visualize it. Whatever your value is to your audience in your area, you know, first, first cleaning free, went up to a free year of cleaning, right? Whatever it is that you want to talk to your community about what you can do that's nice, as opposed to running an ad in the newspaper or, you know, going with TV or billboard, where you can only really say one thing. You can pause campaigns that are costing you more to generate leads. And you can reallocate that budget to the ones that are getting you the lowest cost per lead. This also works really well when you're looking at, I want to say multiple things. Matt, Matt's not only looking to bring in clients, but he's also looking to bring in staff. So you can, you can, you can from your brand talk to people very differently based on what you want to, you know, ultimately trying to engage them in. And so, you know, I don't think many people would want to take out a billboard, you know, even at $5 million, right? Say, you know, looking for, for staff. It's quite the investment to make, you know, and create the same funnel. So, a great way to get this from a creative side. I think, you know, kind of giving you an idea, the other part is, if you were to hit them with a really good piece of creative, right? You know, whether it's direct mail, it's a, it's a magazine, it's TV, it's billboard. Like, if they like it anyways, it's going to drive them online, right? They're going to start researching you anyways. This is such an easy way to make it for people to convert. Facebook's made it so easy to convert. Or if you see an ad and you decide you want to do business with that company, you'll get what is called a lead form, right? These lead forms auto-populate a lot of times the information. It's one of the reasons why I continue to buy more from Amazon than I do from other, other businesses online is they save my information. So I don't have to worry about putting that back in and it makes it very easy to convert and it's called low friction for your consumers. And so this could be for acquiring data, which is, it's, it's super valuable. If you're just looking at people who are visiting your website but have never reached out to you. I mean, how valuable is that email address to be able to add them in your email campaigns, right? How valuable is it for them to reach out and say, hey, you know, we're offering for you your cleaning, but in order to be entered into it, right? What we ask is, you have your first cleaning with us, right? When would we be able to, or even our first free cleaning, right? We'd like to schedule a free cleaning with you. Obviously, I'm not in the industry, so I'm paraphrasing here, forgive me if I'm, if I'm, but just kind of giving you guys an idea of how that all works. And so that kind of brings me up to the end here. So Corey, this is, this is headspending. This is awesome stuff. Certainly can see how this would be useful to house cleaning businesses. Tell us a little bit about your service. I mean, obviously, you've got a number of large clients. I mean, obviously, Matt's a client as well, has been for seven years. Yeah. Do you work with small businesses as well? What would the profile be for anybody out in our audience that would be thinking about, well, gee, I wonder if they would even take me as a client. We absolutely would. So our whole business model is around the Fortune 5 million, right? All the businesses that are small businesses in America, anywhere from half a million to 25 million really is our sweet spot, right? We work with brands as big as, you know, we do projects with the St. Louis Blues and the National Predators and even, you know, we did the NHL All-Star game. We do projects as big as that, but really we're, like these, the people that are in attendance today are our core demographic. They're the businesses we work best with. We grow with them. We help them look at their marketing differently. That way, they don't have to have an entire internal marketing team to do that. So that's, yeah, I'd say anybody, anybody probably in attendance today will probably be a good person worth reaching out to us and whether we can improve on it or just give you information like we kind of just did today. So you're located in St. Louis. I was looking at your website. You've got an office in Miami in Nashville, but do you have to be in one of those cities in order to be a client? We, you don't at all. So we actually, we, you know, one of our big partners is a more serious fitness. They have about a thousand domestic franchisees here. We work with about 700 of them and they're all remote. Very few are, well, we do have the ones in our backyard right in those markets, but in general, they're all serviced remotely. And in addition, we were clients in New Zealand and Singapore and Spain and Canada. So we are well equipped to work with anybody that is not in our backyard. I'm going to drop the link to your website in chat. So it'll be out there in several Facebook pages and a couple of YouTube channels. Is there anything more that our audience would need to know if they wanted to reach out and learn more about your service? No, our website makes it really easy to contact us. If you do that, we're big on nurturing our leads on our end too. So you can guarantee we'll follow up with you and set a time that works around your calendar to kind of walk through what it is that we do and how we'd help you. We're, we're big on expectations setting on the front end. I'm sure Matt can tell you. We, we, we're not, it's, it's marketing, not magic. So we want to make sure you understand what it is that we're doing and how we help you and set those expectations. And so it's a lot of hand holding on the front end. So just, you know, I would tell people, if you, if you call me, I probably am not the person to do that, but I can build you a skill or repeatable ROI generating model. Okay. So I'm on your website now. Does that mean you're going to be showing up in my Facebook feed tomorrow? You know, we use our own strategy.   It's, uh, yeah. It's honestly everyone that's on the show today, if you have another brand that you want to learn about and see how they're advertising, you should go to your competitors websites and see if they're, see if they're retargeting you, you should go to other brands that are even outside of our vertical and then see how their ads show up and get some ideas. If so, if you're not going to do this on your own, you should do your research and see what kind of ads that you're getting and what's effective and what catches your interest. And they're very good at, at this. So they're going to, you're going to see some ads for you. So I suggest you go to their website and get an idea of how, how they're going to reach you. Cause it's like you said, they're, they're eating their own, they're eating their own cooking, right? They're, they're, you know, they're, they're delivering on that same kind of promise of reaching you via the social channels that, that you're living on basically and taking you to the shower. So we, we are at the top of the hour. Is there anything else we, we have here to wrap up? No, thank you guys for having me. This was fun. Corey, man, you guys are awesome. This was good stuff. Thank you, man. Of course. Okay. Well, thanks a bunch. We're done for today. You know, we're done for the week. We'll be back Monday, five o'clock Eastern, smart business moves. You guys have an awesome rest of the week and we'll see you Monday. Bye guys. Bye. Thanks.


For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch in Globetrotter. Today, on the 14th of May, Israel continues to bomb the Palestinian people. We're going to talk to Roger Waters. Roger, welcome to People's Dispatch in Globetrotter. B.J. Thank you. I'm so happy to be talking to you again. Roger, you have been involved in trying to lift the voices of Palestinians to try to raise awareness about the atrocity that Israel commits on a regular basis, on an everyday basis. And then again, we're in the middle of something hideous. What's your immediate reaction to what's happening? Well, obviously, deep concern for the people who are there being killed again, you know, particularly after 2008, 2009, 2012, summer of 2014 and now. But beyond that, I've actually been moving around this little bit of the United States a fair bit. I've been having to go to court in support of a friend of mine who's in court at the moment and blah blah blah blah. So I've been, it's a bit, I've been a bit peripatetic. Something that excites me is that I feel my team fighting back.  They're saying, let's lurch further to the right.  And I think they're making a fundamental strategic and tactical error. I really do. It remains to be seen whether I'm right about this or not. But in the wake of the HRW declaration that Israel is now in apartheid state and blah blah blah blah blah blah, I have noticed that, well, two days ago, I had RT Moscow call me up and say, will you be on the news, please? And I went, yeah, and I called them out. I had 17 minutes of nonstop me talking about Gaza and about, you know, the West Bank and about potentials for what might happen in the future on what is the only alternative to mainstream media that you can find on the television in the United States of America. And in consequence, it's the only thing that you can watch if you want to find anything. RT is the most balanced look at international politics that I can find, anyway, which is interesting. But why are they speaking to me for 17, 10 years ago, they didn't even know who I was unless they looked up Pink Floyd. But now they know that I'm one of the talking heads that you can go to if you want to talk to somebody who is passionately pro-human rights, which is all this is about. It's a small platform, I've said it before, and I'll say it again, it's my platform, it's lots of other people's platform as well. But as far as it pertains to the Israel Palestine question, it's the platform. All our brothers and sisters all over the world, irrespective of their race, color, creed, this religion, blah, blah, blah, but nationality deserve and should have under international law equal human rights. That's the end of the story.  And if you won't come around to subscribing to that basic fundamental idea, Israel will be history. This is a very important thing you're saying because you mentioned the Human Rights Watch report, which after so many years finally has said that Israel is an apartheid state in 2014, 2017, the UN Economic and Social Commission on West Asia already said that, but well, it's never too late, right? Ten years ago, Roger, you recorded a version of We Shall Overcome as part of your stand against the medieval siege placed around Gaza. Last year at Nakba Day, you did another version of We Shall Overcome. It's a powerful version in it. You're saying we choose human rights instead. Though we choose human rights instead. We choose human rights instead. Reflect a little bit on why you chose We Shall Overcome to record then and again, and I suppose again, in the service of the Palestinian cause. Well, because it's a recognizable anthem, all right? The music is gospel. Where are the words gospel? I do not know. Maybe there is some attachment with one or other forms of Christianity. I've no idea. That doesn't form part of my attachment to it. I'm attached to the idea that right and wrong, good and evil are identifiable. And that those of us who choose to subscribe to the notion that we should support good and oppose evil. And in consequence of that, we believe that there is a fight that's been going on certainly in the Western world for the last 500 years, mainly the fight against slavery. But when we look at it from our perspective now, it actually spreads all around the world. It's actually the fight against imperialism. The idea that one person, the emperor, can sit on his throne and say, go and plunder those countries over there.  Or that would, of course, be a Spanish emperor or a Portuguese emperor. But there were European emperors who said, just go and steal everything, everything.  I live in the United States of America, which is the great imperial plunderer of everything. And the Acolytes are still the Europeans. They follow the American lead, which is, let's continue this tradition of plundering the third world and plundering Asia and plundering the southern hemisphere. Well, it's wrong. In the days to cut them a little bit of slack, the emperors back in the 16th century or whenever it was had no idea that the divine right of kings was a load of bollocks. Now we know a lot more about everything. So we know about the genomes.  There weren't many of us, but we were all in North Africa 200,000 years ago, and we spread out. And so we look a bit different and we intermarried. But we're all from the same stock. We know it. All you have to do is give a drop of blood and they can tell you where you're from, what your lineage is. We're all African. So it's taking us a while to get used to that. I live in America. There's a phrase that I like to use now. I learned, I saw it somewhere, primal disdain.  You can shake them until their teeth fall out, but it's ingrained and it's deeply ingrained in them. So the process of explaining to them or encouraging them in the belief that they're not special, even though one I told them they were as a way of keeping them subservient, i.e. keeping poor white people enslaved as well as the slaves, you know, and all the brown people in all the colonies all over the world, all working themselves to an early grave, you know, in the service of their white masters. It's hard to explain to people that that is the reality of their life.  It's a powerful concept. You know, I wanted to also come a little bit to resistance because, look, the families in Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem just don't want to be evicted. The people of the West Bank just don't want to be humiliated. And the people of Gaza are just resisting. They are not interested in surrendering to, you know, whatever Israel said, the primal disdain from Israel toward the Palestinians. If we can use that concept, the resistance is quite powerful. How have you been impacted by this resistance? Well, they have an absolute moral obligation and also political and legal obligation to resist the occupier. In this case, the imperial settler colonist, I don't know actually where the that where does the head of the Israeli Empire start somewhere in Eastern Europe? I think somewhere in the what they would claim was the diaspora of of adherence to the Jewish religion, who maybe had some vague collection a thousand years before with somebody who might once have lived in the Middle East, somewhere near what was called the Holy Land. I've no idea. But certainly the ones who started, Bengorian, you know, and the rest of them, they were all Northeastern Europeans and they and they they picked up on the whole idea of Zionism, which was we're going to go and carve out a land for ourselves. And we're going to do it in a warlike way. We are followers of the Old Testament. The Old Testament is full of mass murder.  And God loved it. Apparently, Wahey or whatever they called God in those days, went, Yeah, go for it, my son, murder is really good. You know, this is a rough and tumble world. You have to assert yourself by force and force of arms and if necessary, by extra judicial executions or whatever it take. A lot of this seems to have run. I'm not criticizing the Jewish religion. Please don't get me wrong. And I believe it when my Jewish friends tell me that the Talmud is actually, you know, prescribes the notion of sharing and forgiveness and brotherhood and all of the things that I said as a radical atheist subscribe to. It's no different. And I know why they do. I know why they do because if you subscribe to that ethos, which none of the Israeli government do, if you do, if you're a Jewish person like me, you do so maybe for the selfish reason that it brings joy to your life. It brings you joy. I saw on something I lucked into on the internet the other day. It was actually from a, it's called the Bridgehampton Child Care Day Center or something. And it's a sort of day school and whatever. And it was set up, I think, originally for the children of sort of itinerant, but then domestic or whatever workers, but Brown mainly, let me say. And it's a wonderful thing. I try and support it a bit myself. But I saw a thing about every Thursday, ladies appear there and they, they've set up a whole organization and they collect food and particularly through COVID, they collected food and then they deliver food to people who are either disabled or very old or this and that. And they deliver food to, I feel quite emotionally, interesting this. There were three old black ladies all between the ages of 80 and 100 and one old white lady. So she was outnumbered. But they were all the same woman, obviously clearly. And they all made basically the same speech. And the speech was, I really look forward to Thursday because on Thursdays, I go and do this work with these other lovely old ladies and whatever. And we get this stuff. And then we get to go and say here to somebody and we give somebody something and they take it. And the joy that we derive from being in that relationship, let's look after one another is beyond all description. And they're right. So that's how my Jewish friends who believe in the bit of the Talmud that says, you should cross over to the other side of the street. We all need to be the good Samaritan why? Because it gives us joy. And the joy comes from the fact that the person we cross the street for to help needs help. So it brings joy to them as well.  I'm killing a family of eight with one bomb bring you joy. I suggest no. No, it doesn't. It brings you a lifetime of mental ruin. I assume. I mean, I've never done it, but I can only assume that if you're an Israeli pilot doing that today, today you're doing it, you did it yesterday and the day before that until there's a ceasefire, you will go on doing it. Does that bring you anything in your life? Anything at all of any value to you or your family or any? No, it doesn't.  And that's the end of it. Faster. You become that part of history. All right. So do you want to be this part? Do you want to be the old black lady and all white lady in bridge hampton giving food? Or do you want to be the arsehole in the F 16?     Disgusting.  And I'm sorry for you. I really am. I'm not being nasty about it.    What a pulling waste of the flitter. We get a heartbeat to live in all of us. Human lives are very short. If you get to live to be 60 or 70 or something, you know, or 80, it's a long time. Well, it's think of it as that's all you get.  How would I feel? I said this to Joe Biden the other day. How would you feel Joe Biden?  He's just somebody who comes in and goes, Oi! Out! I beg your pardon. Out! I'm taking your house. Well, hold on a minute. I live here with my wife and my father lived here before me and this is where we live. This is our neighborhood. This is what are you talking about? No, we have the power here. The Israeli Supreme Court has told us so.  I mean, Joe, hey Joe, how do you like them apples? Oh, you don't like it? Well, why don't you stand up for the victims of it then? You old person. So Roger, what you've said to our viewers, they have a choice. They can either be one of the four women who go on Thursday and deliver food to other people and it touches a part of our hearts, yours, mine and theirs. Or you can be a pilot in an Israeli jet, killing a family of eight people. That's quite a choice and I hope people will listen and consider how we should live in the world. We will overcome. Thanks a lot for joining us on People's Dispatch and Globe Trotter.


Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news roundup. Today is September 10th, 2021. You're with Give the People What They Want, your favorite weekly world news story show. Story show because we bring you stories that nobody shows you. We're serious about that. We're happy to have you with us. Today we don't have the benefit of Prashant. You're just getting, merely getting Zoe from People's Dispatch. People's Dispatch.org and I am Vijay from Globetrotter. Coming to you the day before, what is known as 9-Eleven. What is called 9-Eleven in the United States. 20 years ago, on the morning of September the 11th, 2001, four aircraft commercial airliners were hijacked by various 19 terrorists. Two of the aircraft crashed into buildings in New York City, buildings that comprise the World Trade Center, which people should know as a complex of buildings. Two flights went into the World Trade Center. Eventually the World Trade Center collapsed. Lots of people died. A third plane flew into the Pentagon, crashing into the heart of the US Defense Department. The fourth plane, because of the bravery of some of the passengers and in particular the air staff, the air stewards and others, they were able to crash the plane in Pennsylvania. It has later been reported and said by people involved in the plot that they hope to crash that plane at other important sites in Washington DC, perhaps the White House. Those events took place in the morning of September the 11th, 2001. They provoked a sense of sadness in different parts of the world and some, of course, celebration. People who felt that this was legitimate, but most people in the world do not feel things like this are legitimate. After all, in those buildings early in the morning in New York City, it wasn't the bankers who were brought down and killed. It was the cleaning staff. It was restaurant workers. It was immigrants from almost every country that sends migrants into the United States, people from the Caribbean, from Bangladesh, from West Africa and so on. They were the ones with their brooms and vacuum cleaners, busy keeping the office clean so that then the bankers and others could come in to work later in the day. They were the ones who felt that morning. United States government of George W. Bush saw this as indeed it was as a major attack on the United States. Again, this is an attack on a country 3,000 plus people killed. Very hastily, the United States decided to go after the government in Afghanistan and attack the Al-Qaeda bases again in Afghanistan. This was 20 years ago. Just a few weeks ago, the United States ended its overt military campaign in Afghanistan, which it began in October of 2001, just a month after 9-11. This is all important to say and we're going to come back at the end of our program today to talk about Afghanistan. It's all important to say that when a country is attacked in this form, it in a sense asks the population to go back and understand why such a thing happened. Right after 9-11, Time magazine and others carried stories with the headline and the headline read, Why Do They Hate Us? It's a fair question for a country, a civilization to ask. I'm sitting right now in Austin, which is a city in Belgium. I've just come back into my room walking the promenade built by King Leopold II. He built that promenade with blood and sweat, but more blood of the people of the Congo. In fact, there's a statue at the head of the promenade of Leopold being thanked by the people of the Congo for destroying their world in the Congo. The question might be asked, why do they hate us? It's a legitimate question. Nothing justifies an act of terrorism of that kind, but one has to understand it in that longer context. It's not enough to say we have to go after Al Qaeda. It asks people in a country, in a civilization to look in the mirror. It's also important to point out friends that tomorrow is the 11th of September. It's not just 9-11. It also marks the anniversary in 1973 of a military coup authorized by the United States government. The government of Richard Milhouse Nixon, president, and Henry Kissinger, national security advisor, they authorized green-lighted a coup conducted by General Augusto Pinochet against the legitimate popular unity government of Salvador Allende. That's another anniversary. On the 11th of September, 1973, we can go back, friends, 70 years back to South Africa on the 11th of September, where Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi launches his first passive resistance movement, nonviolent action against the offensive state in South Africa. There's a lot that happens on 9-11, but we now remember it around the world is 9-11, the day the United States was attacked and then the outcome. In Chile, there will be a commemoration of the coup data. I hope we will remember how US power not only was struck in 2001, but how it struck the people of Chile in no less a terrorist attack than authorizing a military coup in 1973. When the question is asked, why do they hate us? Chile should be part of the conversation. And let me just say very quickly, we should also remember the start of Gandhi's movement in South Africa because that movement teaches us a lot about the capacity of ordinary people to change the world. I know this is a long beginning for a weekly news roundup story, but there will be a lot of conversation about 9-11, September 11, 1973, September 11, early 1900s. There will be a lot of conversation about 9-11 by itself. I think it's important for us as journalists, as people interested in the news, to take a deep breath and think of the broader context of this 9-11. We're going to switch gears now, Zoe. Lots of activity in Brazil. Brazil also, in a sense, the people terrorized by what they call a day that lasted 21 years, the military coup in Brazil of 1964. Brazil not unaware of the exploitation of US power. What has been happening in Brazil that has people so astounded? Yes, well, that's exactly right, Vijay. On September 7th, which is Brazilian Independence Day or Brazilian Republic Day, which is the day that they finally, after a long struggle with many lives lost, with many people who gave up their lives for the struggle, the Brazilian people were able to end the military dictatorship and establish the republic, establish democracy. For decades, movements, community organizations, marginalized sectors in Brazil have been mobilizing on this day, September 7th, in a mobilization called the Cry of the Excluded, to draw attention to the fact that even though they won democracy, there's so much more to do. There's so many people that are still left out of this system. There's so many rights that are yet to conquer. And so this year, you know, people also organize these protests, but it was a little different this year. And that's because, you know, which we have covered a lot on this show, the actions of the government of Jair Bolsonaro have been threatening this young democracy. This young democracy with many faults, with many shortcomings, but he has been attacking the very foundation of what is a democratic system.  But he has also been launching, you know, pointed attacks on the different branches of government, which have been trying to hold him accountable for his actions. And so on September 7th, amid this political institutional tension and crisis in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro calls on his supporters to also participate in what he says are going to be massive historic protests. And you know, with really the goal, stated goal from Jair Bolsonaro himself to put pressure on Congress, which has been, you know, there have been over 100 impeachment motions filed in Congress. He thankfully has a very, very strong ally who is the head of the Congress who has blocked every single impeachment motion from, you know, actually going forward and also the Supreme Court. So he actually said his mobilization is to show the Supreme Court and the Congress that we are strong and that we have the power and to show at least one or two, this is a direct quote, at least one or two justices of the Supreme Court that they can't overstep. And so, you know, this was considered by many an attack on democracy. Many said this was even had, you know, characteristics of supporting a coup against these branches of power. So on one hand, on September 7th, we had these far-right, anti-democratic, lightly, vaguely coup-supporting protests by Bolsonaro supporters, which, you know, to be honest, they had tens of thousands of people in the streets in several cities in Brasilia, in Sao Paulo, in Rio de Janeiro. But on the other hand, in over 200 municipalities, there were masses of people on the streets as part of these cry of the excluded protests to not only raise this historic banner of demanding more inclusion in the Brazilian democracy, but also to defend democracy from these attacks from Bolsonaro and to demand that he be removed from office and that, you know, the people are able to live with dignity and not die from COVID, have access to vaccines, you know, not have their labor rights threatened, which have been under attack every single day in this Bolsonaro government. And so it was a really impressive day of protest. They continue to fight against Bolsonaro. They continue to, you know, defend their democracy, what remains of it. And so it's a really, really important moment in Brazil that we need to keep covering. And you will be covering it because, I mean, at people's dispatch, people can find at peoplesdispatch.org. This is exactly the kind of story we like to cover. We like to pursue stories over a long period of time. I've been pursuing a story for now over five years. And this is thanks to my work at Globetrotter. This is a story about Mozambique. And I know I've talked on our show about Mozambique before, but this week at People's Dispatch, you published my third report on Mozambique, which is about France, Rwanda, and the crisis in Mozambique. You know, it's an interesting story because to put the whole story in context, in 2010, the government of Mozambique was informed by a private oil company that off the coast of Cabo Delgado in the northern provinces of Mozambique, they just discovered a massive natural gas reserve, perhaps the largest natural gas reserve off the coast of Africa. Some people say the second largest, but we don't know the extent yet. I think it's going to be enormous. The energy companies know it's going to be enormous. Quickly, total energies from France and ExxonMobil came in. They bought out other people's concessions because they understand this is a cash cow. There's a lot of money under the water off the coast. In 2010, they entered, they slowly started to put money in, invest, build up their infrastructure and so on. In an area that has been totally neglected by the government of Mozambique over the course of the last 30, 40 years, totally neglected area. It's racially poor in many respects. In the year 2017, some so-called militants crossed the border from Tanzania. Some of them were homegrown in northern Mozambique, calling themselves al-Shabaab. The youth arrived on the scene. They were armed, various kinds of armed, very eclectic. They basically started taking over small villages and towns, rousing people up against the government of Mozambique. They developed a kind of Islamic platform, but this was not originally an Islamic kind of organization. Only recently, the US government has called them ISIS Mozambique or IS Mozambique. It's very unlikely that there's any formal connection to the movement in Syria and the Levant. Very unlikely, the leader of this group in Mozambique essentially is born and brought up. He was in the Mozambican military. For years, the government of Mozambique was unable to tackle this problem and let Total, this French company, and to let ExxonMobil go on with the exploration. That was the key problem, by the way, all along. I was very interested in this third story, in what happened between France, Rwanda and Mozambique. Because over the course of this year, this calendar, this 12-month period from August 2020 to August 2021, the group al-Shabaab became more aggressive and in 2021, August, they took the main port city in Kabul, Delgado. They actually captured it and chased the Mozambican military out. Well, from this period, the French government have been in talks with the Mozambique government about what to do about this. Mozambique brought in private contractors, including the Wagner group and others, but they couldn't do anything. Then the Mozambican government asked the French to intervene. Very interesting that they asked the French. French were not keen. So the French worked out a deal with the government of Rwanda, which has intervened now in the Central African Republic and in South Sudan and has developed remarkably, despite the atrocities in Eastern Congo, they've developed a reputation of being good at fighting these kind of conflicts. And the French, in order to get the Rwandans to enter this, made some private deals, but also the French had to release a report that essentially admitted to French complicity in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. France will refuse to apologize for its behavior in Algeria, but was okay to do this for Rwanda in order for Rwandan troops then to get permission, a thousand of them enter Mozambique and push the rebels out into the countryside, which is what's happened.  They've just disappeared. And now total energies is back on the scene and they're going to basically be out there, looking for the natural gas to be pumped out and billions of dollars will be made. It's a very interesting story. And I very much hope people will go and read the series because at least in the English language, Lusophone Africa is not covered at all, Angola, Mozambique and so on. And it's a lost story. But I hope you will go and see it because there's something really fascinating about governments, private companies and militaries and the way Al Qaeda or in this case, ISIS is used. I'm going to start a new series on ISIS Congo, so-called ISIS Congo. What is this? Who are these people? It's a very distressing fact that governments put their militaries so blatantly at the service of their companies or in this case, contract of foreign governments, military France contracting essentially, Rwanda's military to do the work for a French multinational company. Keep an eye on this friends. There's much more to write about this story and I'm going to be looking at it. Slightly more interesting news now perhaps Zoe, we're going to go, is it to Mexico where the Venezuelan government and the opposition sat down and had a meeting. What's been happening? Well, are you going to talk about Juan Guaidó? Yes, of course. I think this is really interesting and positive news. I don't know if people have been following it much. We've covered it at People's Dispatch, but for the past six, seven years, there's been undeniably a political and institutional crisis in Venezuela. The far right after the death of People Chávez really tried to capture the moment of loss and upheaval to come in with their agenda and just divide the country, try to take power. They were, of course, unable to. They staged a series of protests in 2014, 2017. These are also referred to as the guarimbas, violent, extremely violent protests which involved horrific acts of violence against people identified or seeming to be identified with the Chavista movement supporting the government of Nicolás Maduro. Along with this attack on the government from the far right opposition, it was accompanied by the application, the imposition of unilateral coercive measures from the US government which has sent the Venezuelan economy and society into a tailspin. Of course, there was once very robust economy which was able to support the people. Having very strong social programs was, of course, shrunk and strangled with sanctions. We've done numerous reports on the effect of these sanctions. There's a very strong report by CEPR about the impact of these sanctions. Over 40,000 people died in just a period of 2017, 2018 because of no access to medicine, because of these sanctions, less access to food. I mean, I'm not going to get into those numbers. However, and then we saw this pickup in 2019. Juan Guaido declared himself interim president of Venezuela in all of the US and its allies rallied behind them immediately and said, okay, this is the president of Venezuela. And again, proceeds to apply very, very strict sanctions which have further tightened the Venezuelan economy. But the Venezuelan people have remained strong and they've said, this is not our government and we will continue to defend the constitutional government of Nicolás Maduro, the democratically elected government. And this has continued. And so for a while, there was a parallel national assembly that was run by Juan Guaido and his close opposition friends. Vijay, when we were in Venezuela last year, you actually spoke to sectors of the opposition that had grown tired of Guaido and said, we are no longer going to boycott this democratic process. We're actually invested in creating a better Venezuela, strengthening the institutions and engaging in dialogue with the government because the path of strangling the entire population and trying to undermine the political institutions is not the way to save the country. And so in that sense, in the past couple of months, there have been really positive moves towards new dialogues with the opposition. And there have been two prior dialogue processes between the government and opposition forces. None of the processes were able to reach an agreement, make any meaningful changes, but this process in Mexico has been embraced by both this more moderate opposition that you spoke to last year, Vijay, who have been engaging in the electoral process, who have been participating, who have not been boycotting and not calling for sanctions against the government, but also this Juan Guaido section. And so they had a first round of meetings in August. They just finished, I think, four days of talks from September 3rd to September 6th. They had really important agreements, one recognizing the territorial sovereignty of Guyana Esquiva, which we spoke about on this program a couple of months back, and also trying to establish mechanisms to be able to recover money to support Venezuela's COVID efforts. So as we know, because of the sanctions, Venezuela has been cut off from its funds, billions of dollars that it does not have access to, not even to buy food, not even to buy medicine. There have been a bunch of international litigations, most notably with the Bank of England, to try to recover some of these assets to buy food and medicine, which they have not been successful in doing. And so this dialogue process, this agreement is such a huge step because the Venezuelan people need this money, they need access to food, they need access to international markets to be able to survive. And also very important to note is that this far right section of opposition, led by Juan Guaidó, who's up until recently been claiming, still claiming himself as the interim president, has also agreed to participate in the kind of sub-national elections on November 21st. And what Juan Guaidó himself, if I'm not mistaken, is a candidate. And so this whole fallacy that he was the interim president has completely fallen on its side because, of course, how is he president if he's also running for local office? So this is, you know, the Venezuelan people have persisted. They've, you know, combated these attacks from the U.S. Empire. They've continued to resist despite these horrific sanctions. And it seems like finally the opposition and the government are going to be able to make serious strides in support of the people and to alleviate some of the suffering that has been caused. You know, in November, during that election, you and I should go and interview Juan Guaidó. That would be fascinating. There's so much to ask, you know, Mr. Guaidó about the last few years and how he now feels about them. You see, the issue that you brought up is very important, which is the integrity of a country's political process, bringing people back at the table, acknowledging that the Constitution must be respected, that, you know, things like external force to remove a government is outside the bounds of the UN Charter and so on. In Afghanistan, which will be our last story today, this has been an issue on the table. There was some hope after the Taliban entered Kabul on the 14th and 15th of August of this year, 2021. There was some hope for two weeks, in fact, that the people of the Taliban leadership, having lived abroad, some of them, like Mullah Baradar, being in Doha, Qatar, travelled in other capitals around the world, they would have decided to bring in other members of the right who were not part of the Taliban. For instance, right after the Taliban entered Kabul, they sent an emissary, Anas Hakani, to go and speak to Hamid Karzai, to speak to Abdullah, the members of the so-called Northern Alliance. Mr. Karzai, of course, was the president of Afghanistan after the United States throughout the Taliban. There was a lot of speculation that this is indicating that the Taliban might bring them onto the cabinet. There was also some hope, I don't know where this came from, that the Taliban would have women in the cabinet. That struck me as really very insincere hope because it goes against the Taliban's very outlook on the world. But there was this sense that the government would be, let's say, somewhat of a national government and not a Taliban government. Well, as you know, by now the government is entirely a government of the Taliban. There are, of course, no women and there is no sign of anybody from the Northern Alliance. But also, I think, strikingly, there are no minorities, no Hazaras, for instance, who are from the western part of Afghanistan, primarily, mostly Shia population. There is no Hazara minister, a departure now from the Northern Alliance and then the Ashraf Ghani governments where there were people from minority groups, there were women and so on. The minister of education made a comment which I think is easy to have as a headline. He said that nobody here has a PhD, we think PhDs are no good because look at the government, nobody has a PhD. Well, it's easy to make fun of that, to mock that, but don't forget that these are smart people, they're also playing to a certain audience. And at the same time as he's saying that, one of the Haqqanis, who is the head of refugees, is having to deal with the fact, Khalilul Haqqani, I think is the minister of refugees, Khalilul Haqqani is trying to deal with the fact that people with skills are trying to leave the country. So, headline that merely says, oh, we don't think PhD, that's not actually true because Khalilul Haqqani is trying, they did allow one flight to leave Kabul airport, 100 people on board for Doha, Khalilul Haqqani is a smart guy, but now remember his relative Sirajuddin Haqqani is the minister of interior. They have another Haqqani relative in the government, three Haqqanis in the cabinet. Why does this name bear repeating so many times? Well, not only are they part of the Taliban as such, but they are also a great inspiration to a terrorist organization in Pakistan. The Tariqi Taliban Pakistan, the TTP, is in fact, you know, very much a danger threat to the government of Inman Khan and the Pakistani state. So, you know, we have an interesting scenario, Zoe, where the entire cabinet is filled with people of moderate, you know, various degrees of canny and intelligence, but they are certainly not sending a signal out of the country that they want to create a coherent political space in Afghanistan. You see, if they had brought even a few members of the right, Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah, who are not part of the Taliban, that would have suggested some openness to create a political table, but they've pulled the table out of the room and they said, we are all sitting on the floor and we are all ruling. You guys are out of the next room or somewhere else. It's hard to say what's going to happen here. United Nations has said, I think quite correctly that, look, you need to engage the Taliban because aid money must return. Half the population is in hunger, in poverty. Aid money has to return. 40% of Afghanistan's budget was reliant on aid flows. Afghanistan has to be allowed to access its own money. Even the Taliban government should be allowed to access its own money. That's a principal issue. If they are the government, then they should access the money. It's their money, 9.6 billion in the central bank of Afghanistan, now captured by the New York Federal Reserve, which is where the money had been housed. So the Taliban government, a hard government of the very much right, without any access to funds and so on, it's the population that will suffer. This is again collective punishment of the Afghan people, the very last thing they need. Looks like most of the armed resistance inside the country has now been forstalled. Whatever uprising Mr. Saleh and Ahmad Masood tried to develop inside the Panchir Valley looks to be largely now silent. Some of it is taking place, but it's largely silent. Tough days ahead for Afghanistan. Priority must be to prevent mass starvation. Priority must be to take care of the people, the Afghan people, who have been through a lot for decades and decades and decades. Will the world have the patience to see this through? We don't need to have, I suppose, another war to get rid of the Taliban. We need to inject hope in Afghanistan. People need to create their own government. I think that's the real point. This is government by the gun, by the way. It's not that kind of legitimate government. It's a government by the gun. You've been listening to give the people what they want, brought to you from people's dispatch. We have Zoe from People's Dispatch that's peoplesdispatch.org and I'm Vijay from Globetrotter, a range of stories. We miss Prashant today. He'll be back next week. He'll be back next week where we hope to hear something of what's been going on in Swaziland. People's dispatch has been covering that a lot and we'll certainly talk about what's happening in India. There's a lot to say on what's happening in India and we better say it now before it's too late. Thank you very much.