Hi there. Good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are. Thank you very much for joining us. And welcome to season two of Remus and Bureaucons, which as you know is a conversation between some of the most fascinated people that I know of. And today we have one such person and that person is Greg Satell. Many of you may be familiar with his work if you've been reading his post on innovation. After all, he's one of the top writers on innovation and Greg is the one to have the show. And of course I must say that I've always enjoyed what you write and so many other places on innovation. So what is this obsession that you have about innovation for you? What brought you into this space? Necessity. I spent most of my adult life running media companies in Eastern Europe. And I was always, I always felt this urgent need to innovate. But I wasn't quite sure how to go about it. So I started looking for how do successful innovators innovate. And what I found was that everybody seemed to do it a different way. You'd find someone who was super successful like you'd go and you'd look at Steve Jobs and you'd see, oh, he really, you know, he really loves this idea of design thinking, you know, and then you see that ideal had built this amazing design practice on design thinking and Stanford had built a school around this idea. And you say, wow, that's really interesting. And you look at it and says, well, well, you should focus on the end user. And that's, and then you get to understand their needs and then you rapidly prototype and iterate towards a radically better solution is that sounds great. That must be what you do. And then you go and you read Clayton Christensen and the innovators dilemma and disruptive innovation. And he says that that's how you go out of business, because you pay too much attention to your customers when the basis of competition changes. So he says, Oh, well, that doesn't sound good. I mean, how can both those things be right. And, and then you have open innovation and lean startup and, and it's, you know, and it's just all very confusing. So I kind of set out to, to figure that out and to straighten things out. And that's, that's what led to my first book mapping innovation. And, and, you know, I have seen that a lot of times when people have a bright idea, the problem is not with the bright idea, the problem is that, you know, you inevitably encounter a lot of resistance, because, you know, there is a certain way of by definition, innovation means that there is a status quo, you disrupt the status quo, change it in some way. And that's inconvenient to all the incumbents in my book, I talk about the fact that incumbents are the first ones who kind of resist change. What does one do about this? It's funny. There's a famous book by Thomas Coon, where he coined the term paradigm shift called the, the structure scientific revolutions. And he quoted, I think it was Max Planck saying that a new idea doesn't take hold because anybody's convinced of it. But basically the old guard dies out and the new generation comes up and, and don't need to be convinced. You know, I think that that the, I think you put your finger on a really, really profound problem and something that we work actively with organizations on, because the traditional approach to change management is this sort of, you know, it's almost, it works off this assumption that when people understand change, they'll embrace it. So, so what you really need to do is communicate it more effectively and then everybody will embrace it and you'll all hold hands and sing together and be happy. When actually that almost never happens if if an idea is important, and it has potential to impact people, there's going to be some people who are going to hate it, and they're going to work to undermine it in ways that are dishonest and underhanded and deceptive. So I think the first step is to treat that as a primary design constraint, knowing, you know, knowing that that that there are going to be people who are going to work to undermine it. You know, you need to anticipate that so so that's the first thing is accept that as a reality. You can't say it's, you know, well it's really unfair or, well maybe if we explained it to them in a different way or maybe we if we talk to them. And it doesn't work if somebody really hates an idea they hate an idea there and the chances of them going along with it or you know adopting it or is is so low and you're going to waste so much energy trying to convince them of something they don't want to be convinced of that you're just going to get bogged down and spin your wheels and you're much better off identifying people who are already enthusiastic about the change and empowering them to be successful so that they can bring in others who bring in others still that's how you gain momentum, not by trying to convince people, but by empowering people to succeed with that idea. And if you can't do that then maybe you need to rethink whether it's a good idea in the first place. So, you know, Greg, we've got a couple of people who joined us and you know, thank you very much for joining. We've got actually a question from a partner who's sort of really saying that why is it that, you know, the VCs and everybody else are tech obsessed? Is everything supposed to be only from tech? You know, that's the question that she's asked. So, there's a question from Aparna. So thanks Aparna. I'm going to let Greg respond to that and I'll of course I have a point of view and my answer is that I think all industries today are tech industries one way or the other and you know, so that's one of the reasons why when people are saying this morning I was talking to somebody from Israel and the tech, you know, who was part of the tech startup scene and they were saying that there is, I've heard of fidd tech, educational tech, health tech, everything. By the first time today I heard of diamond tech, you know, that is sort of investing in that which I found really fascinating. So what's your view, Greg? Yeah, first of all, I think that you need to define tech. I think all too often when we say technology these days we mean digital technology, which is a fairly mature technology. And increasingly when we talk about tech technology, we're talking about biotech, you're talking about space tech, you're talking about material science, advanced manufacturing technologies. So I think in that way, the portfolio has sort of increased and spread out clean tech is another hot area. But when you say VC, you're talking about high risk money, you're talking about high risk investors. So they're really looking to make maybe one investment in 10 to be super, super successful because they expect most of their investments to fail. And that's why the ones that succeed really need to be home runs. And it's really hard to hit those types of home runs with more conventional technology. With software and consumer gadgets in particular, there can exist something called increasing returns to capital, which is almost like economic like perpetual motion machine. There was a back in the 90s, they started noticing that that some of these internet companies could sort of defy gravity in in that they just seem to be able to make so much money so quickly, and investors were throwing money at them so fast that they had to come up with a new economic theory. And basically they came up with this idea of increasing returns where if you have a combination of high upfront costs, very, very low or negligible marginal costs, and the potential for network effects and basically winner takes all markets, you can have this situation of increasing returns. And that's what sort of drove Silicon Valley valuations for a long time. Unfortunately, more recently, some investors have been applying those where they don't belong, which is why we get things like we work and. But there is, I will say that that we that we Silicon Valley does seem to be in a very, very difficult period. You know, it seems like the, we have an excess of capital globally, and it seems to have found a home in in Silicon Valley and I'm not sure that that's helpful. Sometimes Silicon Valley, and increasingly there's data suggesting that Silicon Valley is becoming some sort of doomsday machine. When you when you look at something like we work, which didn't have any special business model but because they were able to get so much money. They were basically able to undercut the entire market and drove lots of people with with reasonable business models out of business. And then of course they collapsed and the whole thing caused a lot of economic damage so you have to be careful about that. So Greg, I'm going to, you know, take your this statement and sort of take the previous statement and merge it together and sort of I have a question then.  Have they fundamentally when people talk about product market fit, are they also saying this is the path of police resistance which is that, you know, there is going to be no one who will oppose that idea. You know, you've written a lot about how organizations deal with, you know, resistance to change. So which means I have a brilliant product, but the only way it will succeed is if I can find a product where there will be no resistance to adoption. Is that what it is? I think it's more about, so there's a story about this that I like quite a bit. We have a, we have a program of commercialization grants in America that has not been very successful. So, so every, every, and I forget the name of this, these, these grants, it'll come to me in a second, but every government department that that give scientific grants, so like the NSF, the National Science Foundation, the NIH, DARPA, the agricultural department, these all give grants to scientists, and this was a system we developed in World War Two and then, and then was sort of laid out for the private sector in a wonderful document called Science, the emerging, emerging from frontier. And we, so we've, in addition to these scientific grants, they, they're paired with commercialization grants where these scientists can get small grants to take their discoveries and make businesses out of them. And, and they weren't particularly successful for a long, long time, until a guy named Steve Blank came along with this program called iCOR, where he basically offered to these, along with the National Science Foundation, his entrepreneurial course that he, he, at the time he was giving it Cal Berkeley and Stanford to these scientists, and he would ask them. And at the beginning, he would ask them all the same thing, which was how many customers have you talked to, and all of them who, who, who worked on their presentations for weeks. They all told him, oh, I haven't talked to customers, I've been developing this science.  Get out of the building and start talking to customers.  They all had made some breakthrough, but had the wrong application for a million reasons that they would have never known that. But once they talked to customers, and these were like 15 minute interviews, they found very quickly that they had the wrong application, which sort of sent them sprinting to go find the right application. So I don't think it's path of resistance. I think it's just understanding that you have to build, to build for the world, you have to understand it. There's a very famous essay by Martin Heidegger called Building Dwelling Thinking that speaks to this. But I think we get so focused on what we're doing, we don't understand enough about who we're doing it for. And I think that's sort of the key to product market fit. So then my question would be that when people have a product or an idea for a product, they kind of roughly know what they made a prototype. What is the question they should be asking the potential user to establish product market fit? How do you do that? What would you think of asking? They're on fire use case. What is that? I think if you go back to the Kotler marketing books, they'll tell you that you should always look for the largest addressable market. And that's typically how people do business plans for new products. They say, okay, well, the market is a billion dollars. If we can get 10% of that, we have a hundred million dollar business. And we think our margins can be 40%. So you should pay us, you should give us a valuation of $400 million. That's what we're talking about. But in actuality, if you really have something new and different, a large addressable market is pretty much the worst thing. Last thing you should be looking for, right? Because a large addressable market tends almost by definition is one that's well served, right? I mean, that's why it's a large addressable market. What you really need is to find a hair on fire use case. Somebody who has a problem that they need solved so badly, they almost literally have their hair on fire. So either that they've already have budget to solve this problem, but can't find a place to sell it to spend that budget. Or they've kind of scotch taped together some solution that doesn't really work. My favorite sort of comparison is to look at electric cars. There was a guy named Shai Agassi in Israel who created this company called Better World. And he was going to build an electric car for the masses. And he got a lot of people really, really interested in it. He raised over a billion dollars and he flopped, right? So many things had to go right to make a car for the masses. And once he fell behind and anybody who's ever run a business knows, once you get behind your business plan, you're in big trouble. And then you look at what Elon Musk did. He built a very, very expensive car for Silicon Valley, rich people in Silicon Valley. They weren't depending on these to drive their kids to soccer practice or to make it to work. These were cars that they got to speed around in on the weekends. One of the advantages of an electric car is that it accelerates much faster and it's sort of eco-cool. So it wasn't a very practical car, but he was able to sell it and he was able to get customers. And those customers were enthusiastic enough that they helped him sort of iron out the kinks. So those are the customers you're looking for. To get a business, you first need to get a customer and find somebody who actually has this problem that you can solve. And if you have a very new, very different solution, you need to find somebody who needs this problem solved really, really badly. Because if they have a huge desire to solve that problem, they're going to overlook the inevitable glitches that come up. And they're going to work with you to help improve it because that's what they need. And then you can build the business from there. And that's what I always look for is, and I've looked at this and studied this for many, many years. And it's a consistent pattern. When you have something new and different, don't go to compete in a large addressable market. Find that smaller market that really needs it so, so badly or wants it so, so badly that they're going to be willing to overlook that. You're a small company and there's glitches in your product and it doesn't work as well as you'd want it to. And then you can move up from there. So, you know, last week I was talking to Saul Kaplan and he said something similar you kind of built. Yeah, I know I just thought that because my question to him was, you call your company business innovation factory and yet you say that, you know, the moment you scale up something innovation stops. And then these are of course had a similar thing that you first, you know, don't worry about how many billions of people are going to use it. Can you make a small market, get to use it? And so, you know, if you have that, then you build from there.  Yeah, I don't always agree with Saul on that kind of stuff. I mean, we tend to romanticize startups, but most of them fail.  I mean, when's the last startup that has really done something super interesting in digital technology? But if you look at what's going on with, you know, who's done all the big innovations over the last 10 years in digital technology? Who's been driving artificial intelligence, quantum and then the post digital technologies like quantum and Noramorfic and I mean, big companies can afford to innovate slow. And they can, you know, if you look at IBM, for instance, which isn't the best run company, but they're still in business after over 100 years. Because every time their business collapses, which seems to be once every 20 years or so, they pull something out of their research division. Well, we've been working on this for 25 years. And something like quantum computing, they've been working on it for since at least 1993. So that's almost 30 years.  So is that what you and is that what you call slow innovation that it's brewing over a span of time and then you bring it out to the market when there's a market ready for it? Is that slow innovation? What is your definition? I think it's about because Google does something similar. I think you need to have a portfolio, right? And one of the things I noticed about companies that can innovate consistently over time is that they're always looking for new problems to solve. They have different ways of solving problems. And, you know, if you look at, let's say Apple, Amazon, IBM, Google, they all work in completely different ways. They all innovate in completely different ways.   Well, Google does exactly that, right? And actually, Amazon does too. They have an innovation unit. So, you know, what works for Apple, you know, might not work for for Amazon or Google. So I think you need to be very careful about that about saying this is the one way, you know, this is the one true path to innovation. Where what's really important is, are you constantly looking for new problems to solve? And that's quite difficult to do over time, you know, over decades. But if you look at Steve Jobs, his real talent, like he quite famously, he never invested in market research. But he always was looking for products that sucked. You know, he why did he why did he make the iPod? Well, because he thought music players sucked. That was the problem. And he wanted a thousand songs in his pocket. So that was, you know, that was a technical specification.  So which is why he built the iPhone. So if you can go and find a real problem or to use Steve Jobs term, if you can find something that sucks, well, then that's an area right for innovation. So every pain point is, you know, an opportunity for innovation in some sense, which is why they say it. And that's one of the things we find in our transformation work. And I'd be interested to hear your experiences as a chief learning officer at that we pro for so many years. One of the things we often find with when people come to us with a transformation initiative. It's funny because we see this. We see this this pattern continuously that somebody in the C sweep comes up with a an idea for a change initiative. And then they they find some high potential employee like a bright eyed boy or girl to to run this transformation initiative. And they're really enthusiastic and they're told they have the full backing of this board. They have a budget and they're supposed to charge boldly forward because we really need this to happen. And then after about six months, they start figuring out that they've been quietly undermined. The whole initiative has gone nowhere. And the the the executive sponsorship starts to dissipate.  Now it looks like it's going to send it off the rails. And that's usually when they come to us, which we wish they had come would come earlier when they're not in such trouble, but we are. It is quite rewarding we're able to help them but but very, very often part of the problem is they've defined the solution but they haven't defined the problem. So they haven't defined the pain point. So if it's a digital, if it's a digital transformation, for instance, or an agile transformation or whatever it is. Or if it's a diversity initiative that they've defined the solution they've mandated the solution, but they haven't really identified what the problem is, and they haven't really identified who really needs that problem solved. So they're trying to wheel it out to the entire enterprise, where what they really need to do is make that problem make that solution work in one place, one place first, you know, make it. So you need to find somebody who really wants to solve this problem. And then you can empower them we, we, we, we have a concept we call co-optability, where instead of mandating that people change. Giving them resources that they can take ownership of to do things that they want to do. So find somebody who's excited about this technology, find somebody who believes that diversity and inclusion leads to better performance and better innovation. And empower them to succeed. And then build up from there. And then later on, you can start mandating. Once you've proven that this works and has some success. But don't go trying to sell an, you know, an unsuccessful and an idea that doesn't have a track record to people who are skeptical of it. Because you're just asking too much. Go with an idea to people who are excited about it, who want to make it work and show that you can make it work with them first, before you start pushing people into it. So Greg, you know, that's really fantastic, because what I want to do is, you know, respond to some of the questions that have come up here. And, you know, just for the purpose of resetting the room, you know, I'm talking to Greg Satel, who's a very, very favorite columnist and author of mine. And I love all the stuff that he's done.  And why is there so much of resistance to change, even though we know that it's a good idea and it should probably be done.  And if you read, you know, which, which brings me to this whole question, I've read a lot of your stuff on your website, which is called Digital Tonto, T-O-N-T-O. I'm going to put that for people to sort of look at. What is the meaning of Digital Tonto? What is that? So that's an old story. There's an old joke about, I spent most of my career, I spent roughly half my adult life in the, in post-communist markets in Eastern Europe. And he was always an outsider and always a foreigner. And there's this famous joke about the Lone Ranger in Tonto, which are two characters in sort of American mythology. And Lone Ranger was a cowboy and Tonto was an Indian, obviously not an Indian Indian, but a Native American. And Lone Ranger says, Tonto, Tonto, we're surrounded by Indians. What do we do? And Tonto says, what mean we white men? Whenever, whenever, and that's what it was like living in Eastern Europe all those years, whenever trouble came, whenever things were good, everybody'd say, oh, Greg, you're, you know, you're, you're, you're Polish or you're, you're Ukrainian now, you're like a Native. Until the, you know, until we had one of the inevitable crises that, that, that seemed to pop up in Eastern Europe. And then it was all what mean we white men. You, you are different. You're not. Then all of a sudden I wasn't, I wasn't, I wasn't one of them anymore. When trouble came, I was on my own. So does it mean that, you know, today, if you look at a lot of the business leaders, many of them are schooled in technology, should they have been schooled in psychology or social sciences instead? Yeah, I, you know, I'm biased because my degrees in, in philosophy, and I think it's, it's the most practical thing I could have studied. The reason, that's not the reason I studied it. I was actually a biology econ double major, but in college I was, I was really majoring in intercollegiate wrestling. And I was, had to train all the time. And I found that it was much easier just to write a paper than it was harder to fail. You hardly ever failed writing a paper, but you could easily fail taking a test. So that's why I switched to philosophy. But I found that, that the, the most important thing today is, is to, I think the most important skill is to think critically and, and, and to be able to communicate ideas. One of the interesting things about Amazon is they really invest a lot in writing as a skill. You cannot make a career at Amazon unless you learn how to write and communicate clearly and effectively. You can be the best engineer in the world. You're not going to, you're not going to make it an Amazon, you know, you could be the best marketer in the world, you're not going to make it an Amazon, unless you can communicate clearly, unless you can write good memos, you're just not going to make it. And I think there's a lot to that. I mean, they've been pretty successful. I mean, people make a lot about, oh, they've banned PowerPoint, they've, you know, they have these six page memos, and people try and copy them, but you can have all the six page memo and they have a reading period during their meetings and, I mean, you can copy all of that. But unless you have the writing culture and the communication culture that all that's meant to service, you're not going to be effective. So I think you make a very interesting point. I think I, I think undergrad, you should, you can always study, study what you want, right.  Nobody needs to know how to code. If, if it's something you like, and something you're passionate about, you can definitely have a good career writing code or sitting in a biology lab or fixing cars and people make great money fixing cars and designing cars. I think in that case, you were, you really need to follow your passion in terms of what you want to study. But in, in terms of the skills that everybody needs to have, you need to be able to think critically and you need to be able to communicate ideas. And, and which is why you think that being just articulate that, you know, being very fluent in the language and, you know, because that was when I was growing up. So that was really one of the things that became important that, you know, you had to be able to communicate in a certain way, you know, your presentation slides must look a certain way and all of that. Now I think, and, and I, you know, to build on what you just talked about the Amazon culture that I would say I quite value that, that being able to put down things in writing in that six page document actually tells you that you're committing to what you have said, because you could have made a straight comment during the presentation, nobody's recording it. And so you can always say, but I said that, you know, it's not going to work, you know, and I remember saying that and most people would have forgotten. But when you put things down in writing, you're really committed to it. So I think that there is a value to that. But then when you say that, you know, this is the culture that you should have in order to build for, and they've been very comfortable adapting themselves. So when you put down things in writing, it's in some sense, you're getting rooted in an idea. At the same time, the company has been very fluid and adaptable. How do you reconcile these two polarities? I think everybody. Luke Gersener had this great comment where culture is what you reward and what you punish. And so I think it relates to values that Amazon values the customer and values collaboration. So part of a big, a big part of that, you know, if you look at the structure of those memos, there is a press release that you need to write. And then there's a series of FAQs. So you need to anticipate questions, anticipate problems people might have, and answer those questions. So it's very outwardly focused and the writing needs to be clear. People need to be able to understand this, what you're saying. It's one thing, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, he had this very influential essay about private language. And he said a private language doesn't exist. If you can't express something, you don't really know it. If you call something a beetle, and he used the analogy of the beetle in the box. If you say you have a beetle in the box, but nobody can see the beetle, they can't hear the beetle, they can't experience the beetle in any way. Right. And you don't know whether that beetle is an insect, or a German car, or a rock band, the beetle just becomes the name for the thing in the box, right. So, so, and I think we, especially, and when we discussed this before, in some professional situations, people get obsessed with jargon, and they're not able to express themselves without using jargon. And I really question whether even they really understand what they're talking about. If you really understand what you're talking about, you should be able to use it, you should be able to express it in a common language. And if you can't, you need to go back and question how well you know it. So I think that rather than the memo or the PowerPoint slides or however you want to do it, I found it a very useful exercise to always think about how I would express this to somebody else. And in that case, writing a blog I think is very therapeutic almost, because it forces you to be clear. And if you can't be clear, if you can't communicate clearly, you're probably not thinking clearly. So talk to me about your process of writing. I mean, how do you, you write a lot and, you know, you write for some of the top post magazines and journals and all of that. So clearly you're very good at it. And I want to learn from you about how do you go about, you know, you have an idea. And let's say your central thesis is that we aren't innovating anymore, or maybe we are continuing to innovate, whichever way you sort of have an idea. Talk to me about what happens once you have a broad idea. It's a fuzzy idea. You kind of think that, yeah, I want to write something about resistance to change. Maybe that's what you're going to write about. How do you then whittle it down to the final 500 words or whatever number that you are thinking of? What is that process? So I wouldn't call it having an idea. Usually I make a connection, like I'll be reading something or I'll be talking to someone like you and I'll make a connection between two things that weren't obvious to me before. And so the first step is I try and write an outline of three or four or five points and see if I can make something out of it. And if I can support it with three or four or five points, then I have something to work with. That's really the hardest part is getting the outlines. And then with the outlines, it goes pretty smoothly. Sometimes it goes faster, sometimes it goes slower, sometimes I have to go back and I realize that the way I was working on didn't quite make much sense. But I think it's just writing is rewriting and you're constantly trying to figure out how you can make it more clear. How can I make this more clear? Always clarity over creativity and then when in doubt, leave it out. I have all these little rules.  And my favorite rule is dare to be crap, meaning I get down to write every day and sometimes it goes better, sometimes it goes worse. But you can always fix bad writing. What you can't fix is an empty page.  Dare to be crap, that's my mantra for almost everything. So you first write it down and then you continuously refine it. I've got a few friends who compose music and it's similar to what you just said. So they all say that thinking of a tune is very easy. I mean, I can get a tune out in maybe 10 minutes. But to polish it and make it something into a best-selling tune or whatever, that sometimes could be that you're chiseling away. You're saying, okay, is that not really necessary? I would remove that. Then I say, oh, it's empty. Then I add it back. Then I say, no, maybe I change something else. So the term that one of the famous poets in India, Gulzar Sahib, he says that it's about nurturing the idea, nourishing the idea. He actually uses the term nourishing the idea and sort of till it begins to blossom and have an identity of itself. Yeah, and sometimes you have to put an idea down on paper to figure out that it doesn't make any sense. That's the easiest way. You get an idea and you think, and then you try and explain it to somebody else and it's much better to write it down. And then you can see whether it makes sense. And then sometimes you realize that I haven't quite thought this through. And sometimes I erase it and sometimes I leave it there and then see maybe if I can make one more connection. But you're always just kind of mucking about, I guess, and trying to see. One of my favorite sayings is all who wander aren't lost. Sometimes we're just wandering. And I think you need to wander a little bit to kind of find the path that you want to go on. And when you write a book, is that substantially a different process? Or it's similar that you have an idea that you kind of build on and you think of, how do you write?  Or do you have the central idea? It's like a spine and then you build on it. Do you do the chapters first?  I've seen all kinds of models that writers. I'm very curious. I always ask that. I mean, for me, a book is a much bigger thing. So it requires a very, very different process. Let's do it over, you know, I can sit down and write a blog post or I've written HBR articles in the morning. Wow. You know, sometimes it can go quite quickly. And somebody told me once you have to let the muse know you're serious.  And some days it's quite difficult and you don't get much done. And then sometimes it goes extraordinarily well, but you got to be there every day for that to happen. So my last book, let's start with my last book, which is the one I really always wanted to write Cascades. I spent 15 years on that book. Wow. Both books started with a problem I really wanted to solve. And, you know, to spend 15 years on a problem is, it's got to be a pretty interesting problem, right? But I was in the, I was running a major news organization in Kiev during the Orange Revolution. And I thought I thought it was just amazing how, well, first of all, there was this incredible feeling of confusion and nobody seemed to know what was going on or what would happen next. Not the, you know, not the journalists I'd see in the newsroom every day, not the other business leaders, not the political leaders. Nobody with any conventional form of power seemed to have any ability at all to shape events. So, and one thing I noticed was there was this incredible way in which people, thousands upon thousands of people who would ordinarily be doing very different things would stop what they were doing and then start doing the same thing all at once in nearly perfect unison. And I thought to myself, even then, well, I'd like to be able to do that, you know, I'd like to be able to bottle that force and put it to good use.  I wanted them to all unify on the one thing I was trying to sell them. And I, you know, and I have, and I'm sure you had the same experience as, you know, and as an HR executive and then as a chief learning officer where you have hundreds or in case of we pro hundreds of thousands of employees, bright ambitious people, all with their own ideas. But I wanted them to embrace the one I wanted to initiatives that I thought needed to be priorities. But I had no idea how to do that. But I was interested. I was how does that happen, right? How does this, how does all of a sudden, you know, Ukraine, which was a politically docile place. How did all of a sudden are 100,000, you know, hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, demanding a different society. How does it happen in very quick, you know, in a few months, like somebody flipped a switch somewhere, and the whole country seemed to have changed overnight. And then a couple of years later, I was in Silicon Valley and people were talking about social media was that was 2006. So it was all new that and we had a very big digital business. And so I said, I should really know about that. I should learn about it. So I started researching network theory and I found like an almost perfect mathematical explanation for almost everything that happened during the Orange Revolution. And I found that scientists had known for centuries about this mysterious force that I encountered on the streets of Kiev, and it was called a network cascade. And then because of some breakthroughs in network science in the late 90s, they found out exactly how these network test gates work. So that's what got me hooked. And then I started right researching and writing about movements. And I found out about one of these movements in Serbia, which there are these amazing group of kids and this one guy who was a key leader, then went on to train all these other movements, whether it was in Georgian Republic or Ukraine or Egypt or, and this guy named Sir Joppovovic, and now, and he became sort of this professional revolution. Well, I published something in Harvard Business Review, some years ago, and who tweets it but this guy Sir Joppopovic. So I, I reach out to him, I say, Hey, could I interviews. So he said, Yeah, sure. So we get on zoom. And I said, I got to tell you, I'm such a huge fan of yours. You know, it's like an honor to speak to you so we really because we've been reading your stuff for years. And so we hit it off, we became friends and I found out that Sir Jop had developed this repeatable model for overthrowing countries, or for running a social movement or whatever it is. And then I had this idea of what if you could adapt this framework for overthrowing countries and apply it to transforming organizations. And that's basically what the Cascades research was was trying looking to validate this idea that you could transform a organization, you could use these these sort of principles of social and political revolutions and apply it to an organization. And I found out that not only does it work.  And the ones that succeed. And what I found was, and the same thing with social and political revolutions, they all started off from very different places. You know, if you look at, let's say Gandhi, and Mandela and Martin Luther King, and Lech Wałęsa in Poland, these people had nothing to do with each other. I mean, very different personalities, very different philosophies, but they all ended up with the same principles that allowed them to succeed. And I found the same thing with organizational transformations. And I realized something else as well. When we look at organizational transformations, very often, almost always what we know about them happens when a business school professor or consultant. First of all, we only, we, we very rarely hear about failures, we, we, we generally hear only about successes. And then through these case studies where they go and they interview half a dozen people and then they try and tell people, you know, communicate what happened. But with social and political revolutions, you have, you have such amazing documentation.  And what we found is, when, when I went to, to go and, and interview people who were involved with major organizational transformations at places like IDM during the 90s, or more recently at Experian other, other places as well. When we asked them, did this happen? Did that happen? And they'd say, you know what it did. But we just thought that was something strange that only happened to us. So we found that the pattern, some of these patterns were so universal that even, even they didn't realize that it was part of the transformation. But it, it, it applied to them as well. So that was, that was really interesting. So that's, that's the subject of your book, Cascades, which I absolutely recommend. Guys, you must read it's a lovely book where he talks about, you know, what is a keystone change, et cetera, all of that. And very, very powerful writing, of course, like a lot of everything else that Greg writes, I'm a big fan of his writing. So, so you know, it's one of those things that I have no hesitation recommending. Okay, we are down to the last seven minutes of our conversation. And I'm going to switch gears and sort of move on to a couple of different things. And then towards the end, you can ask me two questions. I'm going to ask you a couple more. So do you want to start with your questions? Do you want me to start with my rapid fire questions? Which one would you rather? Yeah, I would, I've been wanting to ask you something for quite a long time. So when you're prioritizing learning for an organization, I mean, every organization needs to learn so much. How do you, on what basis do you make those decisions? I think, you know, you kind of look at three questions, which I think every chief learning officer would sort of need to address. One is to really understand which way the business is going to move in the next 12 to 18 months, because in technology, more than that is hard to predict. So you kind of have a view of that. But then you translate it into skills, which is where I think a number of people mess up, because, you know, if you, for example, you say your growth is going to come from mergers and acquisitions, they kind of translate and say, okay, the people who are doing it, what skills do they need? You know, what would finance need to do? What would HR need to do? So you kind of have a portfolio of that shift. Then you map it against what you already have, that you realize that you don't have anyone who's handled mergers and acquisitions, for example, then you have a gap to be met. Now, that's a build versus buy decision. When you go through that, then I think comes the real tough portion, which is to really understand what is the fastest way to get people to learn that. I mean, so, you know, you have a combination of educational experience and exposure. So education is what you can read up exposure is looking at alternative ways to do this and very often choosing what works best. And experiences when people try it out and say, okay, you know, I learned faster when I do this. That's really the way that in a nutshell, that's really what you what you are doing. So that's the thing. Yeah, so did that answer your question? Yeah, no, it's it's it's it's quite a good answer. And then how do you validate whether that learning has been effective? And, and could you tell me a actually quite like being able to ask the questions. It's easier than giving the answers. This is your last chance. Okay, so have you ever had a situation where you put together a learning program, and you realize that it wasn't quite working and people weren't acquiring the skills. And then we're able to sort of turn that situation around. Yes, you know, more often than not, I found that when you do something which is canned, you know, so this is a program and then, you know, so you decide the program without really understanding any of those questions that I talked about. And very often when you look at that's why I'm very deeply skeptical of people when they are sort of, you know, going in for these camp programs. You know, the cookie cutter thing you do it, because learning is so individual driven, you know, so the way that you enjoy. It's like writing your writing style is very different from mine and the way that you write is different the way that you learn is different. So until and unless you are able to tap into that you're inevitably going to make errors. So I think that's really the piece that I think goes wrong. So I've always tried to sort of work with the people who are designed, you know, who are going to be part of it. And so when you design it with the people, you are more likely to get a larger portion of it right. And then of course, you know, learning is a fairly complex process. So one of the major challenges in an organizational context is that there is always this thing that you did it and so what's the measure, you know, what is the ROI. And very often that kind of a question actually is good for things which are hard skills, you know, do you know how to do quadratic equations? No. Now once you've gone through the program, you can do that. That's easy to do. Has your leadership skill improved? Much harder. And it's something that gets done and you will see the results over a span of time, after a fair bit of time. And usually that's the place where learning and training are not really differentiated in organizations. But I have a question for you. We all know that, you know, upskilling is very important for organizations. You've written about overcoming resistance to change. Why do training programs get knocked off as soon as there's a problem? It's really like saying that since the Titanic is sinking, we are going to stop investing in swimming lessons. So why does that happen? Yeah, I think it comes down to values. And we have, and it's not just, it's not just training programs, right? But I mean, the famous case is Circuit City, where they had invested training. And that's what made them successful, that you would go there and you would have very knowledgeable people. Home Depot is another one where they actually brought in X contractors. And then somebody comes in, you know, quite clever and says, you know, these numbers would work a lot better if we're not investing in this. And there's going to be no immediate impact on our revenues, but we can cut costs very nicely. And I think that's just what happens when you have people not understanding the business. There's a great case study in Spain with Mercadona, which is a retailer there. And when the financial crisis came, they didn't fire anybody. They said, we need to cut costs. I think it was by 25%. I mean, that sounds high. I forget what the percentage was, but it was significant. And they said to their employees, you guys need to help us figure out how to cut costs. So the employees were highly motivated to figure out, oh, well, if we change the packaging like this, if we did that, if we did that, and they came up with, they sort of crowdsourced the cost cutting. And they were able to not only cut costs, but they cut these costs permanently, right? They could have thinned out the people in the stores and they could have made it work. But instead, they kept all the people in the stores. They had those people figure out how to cut costs. And not only did they cut costs, but they increased revenues because all of their competitors had cut their employees.  So people who went in their stores, they were understaffed. They couldn't get any help. And at Mercadona, they had fully staffed stores where people could get help. And they ended up increasing their market share. Again, I don't remember the percentage, but by an impressive amount. So I think you really need to understand how the business runs. And I think all too often, I know as a CEO myself, and I didn't run anything company, we had like 800 people in our company, so nothing the size of organizations that you were involved with. Anything close. But even in a company with 800 people, it's hard to stay connected. You know, you have what Barack Obama would call the fierce urgency of now.  I had serious fires to put out every single day, and a lot of people I had to keep happy. And it was an effort to, I would make sure I was in every department every single day. And it was tough.  But to make that effort to stay connected to the business is very, very difficult. And I think that too many executives, they should teach that in business school, how easy it is to get detached. And how, and, you know, I will say this, and I think this is a great maybe thing to close on. I think when we're analyzing business, or any process, innovation or whatever, I think that it's so easy to imagine that people are stupid.   You're much more likely to get the real story. B, you're going to learn a lot more. And C, you learn probably the greatest truth in business, and that is that everybody gets disrupted. Everybody's square peg business eventually meets its round the whole world. And when that happens all too often, we make the mistake of getting better and better at a bunch of things people care less and less about. So once, and it comes back to the conversation about transformation.  That's when you can start to move forward and make things happen. Wow. I mean, terrific. Thank you, Greg. There was such a brilliant recap of everything that we talked about. I just want to, you know, say thank you to all the people who have joined us today. And, you know, it's great. Thanks a lot for being here. And, you know, Greg, what can I say? I just really so enjoyed the conversation. And I just, you know, wish you the very best. And me as well. This has been a lot of fun. So thank you so much for having the Abhijit. Thanks a lot. Stay connected and we'll see you guys soon. See you next week for yet another conversation with another fascinating guest. Thanks a lot. Goodbye.


From DailyDoseOfWeirdNews.com, I'm Darren Marlar and this is your Daily Dose of Weird News! This episode is brought to you by the audiobook Your Haunted Lives, True Tales of the Paranormal by G. Michael Vasey, a collection of creepy, often downright chilling true experiences of the strange and weird that'll keep you looking over your shoulder. Here are a free sample and support Marlar House by downloading the audiobook for yourself at DailyDoseOfWeirdNews.com. Johnny Depp, speaking on stage Thursday at Glastonbury Festival in Somerset, England, said this about President Trump. ***This is going to be in the press and it'll be horrible, but I like that you're all a part of it. When was the last time an actor assassinated a president? ***Of all the bandwagons you could have chosen to jump on, you chose the career-destroying Kathy Griffin one. President Trump admitted Thursday that he made no audio recordings of his meeting with James Comey, which would have been great news for Comey. President Trump was recorded on video recently driving his golf cart over a well-manicured green at his own New Jersey golf course. Driving onto greens is considered a serious faux pas among golfers, and then he started making bets with other golfers on the course and cranked up journeys any way you want it on the stereo installed in his golf bag. ***So what? So let's dance! ***The Pentagon has blown $28 million in taxpayer money over the past decade buying the wrong uniforms for the Afghan Army. The uniforms featured a woodland camouflage pattern, but the problem is forests cover only about 2% of the country. Hey, Ahmed, it looks like there's a forest coming right for us, and the trees are carrying rifles! Cher is blaming Nancy Pelosi for that loss in Georgia last week. She's had two failed marriages, a variety show, a daughter who's had a sex change operation, so yeah, obviously she's the right person to listen to when it comes to political analysis. Boeing is said to be working on jets that fly themselves. Of course, the first question by the folks at United Airlines, so who would drag the passengers off? A faculty advisor at Vista Marietta High School in Southern California has been fired after it came to light that the advisor had rigged the election for class president. Vladimir Putin has refused to return calls from reporters. North Korea says that President Trump is a psychopath who may launch a preemptive strike against them to distract from his problems at home. Hey pot, meet Kettle. A new study indicates olive oil can help you preserve memories. Now just remember that the next time I'm at the store. According to a new survey, the number one thing most Americans want to do on their vacations? Nothing. Hey, good news! I'm actually offering Marlar House Vacation packages starting at $1,000 per person, where you can stay in my basement for an entire week and do nothing! It's the perfect vacation! Don't talk to your travel agent, just email me directly. The latest report says that the modern KKK is beset with constant infighting. Well, if they got along with people, they wouldn't be a hate group now, would they? Well, it appears Mr. Kim Jong-un is just as insecure as the rest of us, and he is self-conscious about his body, specifically his ears. North Korea has strangely taken to photoshopping its leaders' ears, which a pair of non-proliferation experts picked up on. Dave Schmurler of the James Martin Center for Non-proliferation Studies and Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey say they've noticed several photos in which editing specifically targets Kim's ears. As Lewis puts it, he doesn't like his ears, or so it seems. The cosmetic alteration and others like it are likely designed to help Kim look a bit more handsome than he is in real life, Lewis says. His ears aren't Kim's greatest cause for distress, apparently. The chairman of South Korea's Parliamentary Intelligence Committee says Kim is limiting public appearances and travel over fears that there's a plot to cut his head off per the Korean Herald. Hey, you know what, you can do that with Photoshop, too. A Texas woman has had eight surgeries so far with her goal to look like Melania Trump.  The median age for Americans has risen to 38 years old. Hey, I'm above average! Burger King has started serving Lucky Charms milkshakes made with ice cream, syrup, marshmallows, and Lucky Charms cereal.  In Shelton, Connecticut, 33-year-old Lance Churchill would do well to choose his battles a bit more wisely. He's facing charges after police say he got into an altercation with a five-year-old. Yes, a five-year-old. This went down last Friday at the Apple Tree Daycare. Churchill was visiting for a Father's Day party where all of the children's fathers were invited. Police say a child playfully took the Father's Day card that Churchill received from his son and ran around the room with it. That's when Churchill, who is 6'4 and weighs 270 pounds, chased after the child, picked him up over his head and pinned him to the ground and screamed at him. Daycare staff took the child away from Churchill and called the police. When officers arrived, Churchill allegedly wanted the five-year-old arrested. Right instead, they arrested Mr. Churchill and charged him with risk of injury to a minor and disorderly conduct. Next time, pick on somebody your own size, Lance. Hey, good news, Oregon! Your fresh meat supply just became more plentiful, thanks to a new bill passed overwhelmingly by the legislature and signed by the governor, motorists who crash into animals can now harvest the meat to eat. Yep, it's now legal to eat roadkill in Oregon. That's right, Oregonians, you'll never again have to worry about running out of possum in your freezer. Amazon is launching its own fashion service, allowing people to try clothes for a week before buying. Which is great, because I could really use some new underwear. A Florida Lice Treatment Center says that selfies could be one of the major causes of lice with teens. I guess lice just like to photobomb people's pics. For decades, a 55-year-old woman in China has had an appetite for dirt. Her unusual habit began some 50 years ago when she got a taste while cleaning a family home.  President Trump now admits there are no tapes of James Comey. Meanwhile, Comey confessed that he never DVR'd the apprentice. A book of short stories titled 40 Minutes Late has been returned to a San Francisco library 100 years late. Webb Johnson returned the book Friday, and there was no fine. Johnson's great-grandmother had checked it out in 1917. She passed away a week before the due date. Johnson found the 1909 book in an old steamer trunk in 1996. So maybe it wasn't great grandma's fault, since she died before it was due, you found the book in 1996. You're just now returning it? 21 years after you found it? A couple from Ecuador claims that they have lived without eating food for nine years, saying they live on just air. Looking for a new dining experience in San Francisco, a place called The Dungeon has planned a two-day experimental rat café for those who feel their coffee or tea is better sipped while rats, supplied by the local rat rescue, scurry about the room. Pastries are included for the $49.99 price, but the rats will be removed before the food comes. Guests are promised at least 15 minutes of rat interaction, and the price includes admission to The Dungeon.  This all goes down July 1st and July 8th. Yum. There are rumors circulating around DC that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is about to retire. The rumors started when he began showing up each morning wearing a fishing hat. An associate professor of English at an Ontario University lent her copy of a textbook to one of her students five years ago, and never saw it again. That is, until she recently ordered a used replacement copy on Amazon, and her old copy arrived, complete with her name and the date written in her handwriting on the title page. Eugenia Zorowski said, I was stunned. She notes that it's particularly uncanny because the book is about shopping practices and how consumer markets encourage us to feel closely attached to the things we buy. Good thing she was an English teacher and not teaching ethics, seeing as her student just stole her book and sold it online. Japan is in constant conflict over whether to beef up their military. As of late, increasing concerns about North Korea are fueling the fire, even though the country's constitution requires a low-profile military, only for purposes of self-defense. However, when the country's defense minister recently suggested placing females into combat roles, the constitutional law professor strongly objected. It's not the obvious sexism that got people talking, though, rather it was his reasoning for not wanting women in combat. He actually said that Japan's enemies might have bombs capable of blowing women's uniforms off, thus exposing their bodies. Don't worry, the laughter and ridicule was swift. One critic wrote, I think I saw something like that in Dragon Ball Z. The toddler in Massachusetts survived a two-story fall from a building last Wednesday thanks to his stuffed animal. The two-year-old boy of Chelsea was jumping on his bed when a hop sent him out his home window. Luckily, the boy was holding a large stuffed cow during the fall. He landed on the toy, which provided a cushion between him and the concrete sidewalk. I had a cow save my life once, I was starving, but I found a McDonald's just in time to grab a cheeseburger. An Algerian man picked a truly horrible way to satisfy his craving for attention, and now will get plenty of attention in prison. You've probably seen the now-infamous photo posted by the unnamed man dangling a baby out of a 15th-story window of an apartment building in Algiers with the caption, 1,000 likes or I drop him. Well, social media users quickly denounced the photo and police charged the man with endangering the life of a child when they arrested him on Sunday. The man who is a cousin of the baby swears the whole thing was a misunderstanding. The boy's father also said he believed the man was just being playful and asked the court for mercy.  Maybe you remember the story of 34-year-old Kelly Mason of Leicester, England. She had grown weary of her neighbor's kid's soccer ball constantly landing in her garden, and when it happened again, punctured the ball before throwing it back. The mother of the children, Natalie Bolan and her father, William Jelly, responded by coming right over and beating Mrs. Mason to death. While the two murderers just found out their fate, they each got seven years in prison. Bolan's lawyer said things had been boiling for a long time, both women had filed complaints with police regarding the other, and his client simply snapped. He added the consequences were far beyond anything she could have imagined and is something she will be eternally ashamed of and will regret forever. However, the judge said neither Bolan nor Jelly showed any remorse for their actions. He said Bolan boasted about the assault to friends and seemed almost triumphant at Mason's death. And so you give them just seven years? Despite experiencing the hottest June temperatures and more than 40 years, the head teacher at ISCA Academy in Devon, England told boys shorts were not an acceptable part of the school uniform. However, she did not ban skirts. So, guess what happened next? Yep, dozens of boys at the secondary school turned up in skirts that they had borrowed from friends or siblings. One teen described the feeling as a nice breeze amid these sweltering temperatures.  The boys see the female teachers in sandals and nice, cool skirts and tops, while they are wearing long trousers and shoes and the older boys have to wear blazers. Boys who wore the school's regulation tartan skirts did not get into trouble, except for the one who wore his too short. Despite the protest now spreading to other schools with bans on shorts, Mitchell has said she is ready to consider the school's dress code. Congratulations boys, you stood up like real women and fought for equal rights for boys. Curl power! Ryan Seacrest is still trying to hammer out the final details for him hosting the next incarnation of American Idol. The current sticking point is that Ryan wants executive producer credit as part of his compensation. Lionel Ritchie won't supposedly sign on as a judge until Ryan is secured. Wait a minute, Lionel Ritchie, he's still alive? Kim Kardashian was the top bidder at an auction for a wristwatch once owned by Jackie Kennedy. All it took was $379,000. What do you need a watch for, Kimmy? Do you know what also tells time? That phone you keep taking selfies with. Oscar-winning filmmaker Ron Howard is stepping into a galaxy far, far away from the upcoming Star Wars Han Solo spin-off movie after the surprised departure of its directors. Who would have thought that back in 1977, when Star Wars was released in theaters, that the redhead kid on Happy Days, which was on television at that same time, would be directing a prequel to that movie 40 years later? In fact, who knew what a prequel even WAS back in 1977? Never miss a single episode of The Daily Dose of Weird News. Download the free Marlar House mobile app. In the app you can find links to my Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Watch other Marlar House YouTube videos. Sign up for the Marlar Sheet newsletter to automatically be registered for giveaways. Purchase Daily Dose of Weird News t-shirts or mugs. Download audiobooks I've narrated. See my latest blog posts and more. The Marlar House mobile app is free for iOS and Android users. Download it now by clicking the mobile app tab at DailyDoseOfWeirdNews.com or search for Marlar House in your phone app store. Study says there is a connection between drinking black coffee and sadistic psychopathic tendencies.  Los Angeles may soon dedicate a street called Obama Boulevard. Actually, it'll be a toll road that requires change. In Cedro Willy Washington, Leno Silva was driving down the road when he saw what he thought was a large tree root. Turns out it was a dead 16-foot-long python. Silva said it had apparently been run over by a car, so he and a buddy hauled the huge snake to a friend's house and did what probably most of us would have done. They skinned it, said they learned how by watching the Discovery Channel. Leno now plans to call a taxidermist so he can preserve the skin and use it to make a jacket or a vest. Down at the Lake County Jail in Florida, 32-year-old inmate Larry Stone made a phone call that would typically cost about $20. But it didn't go through. The charge was supposed to be refunded to his inmate account, but when Larry checked his balance, he discovered his account now had more money than before the call. So he thought he'd test his luck again and made another call and hung up. Once again, more money magically appeared. So he then repeated this little exercise 77 times, exploiting the glitch that was mistakenly depositing credits into inmate trust accounts for each incomplete phone call. After four hours of this, Larry had accumulated more than $1,250 – enough money to bond out of jail. So he paid his bond and walked out. But his newfound freedom didn't last long, news of the bug floated to other inmates who began to spend inordinate amounts of time on the phone. But soon the jail officers caught wind of what was going on and put a stop to it. Nevertheless, the glitch affected about 256 jail inmate accounts and lasted 24 hours. Now the software error has been fixed and accounts restored to their pre-glitch totals. And just a few hours after his release, Mr. Stone turned himself in to authorities, saying he knew they were looking for him. He now faces additional charges of scheming with intent to defraud and grand theft. More inmates will likely be charged as well. Fool me once, shame on you, but fool me 77 times. The latest numbers show that in America our pets are getting fatter. But interestingly, the pets are actually thinner in the states where the people are the fattest. Well, obviously that's because there are no leftovers in those states. A study says forgetting things is not only normal, it can make people smarter. That must be why I always forget I'm a genius. A city in Northern Taiwan is trying the mightest touch to persuade reluctant residents to clean up after their dogs by offering a chance to win gold bars to anyone handing in bags of doggy-do. Starting August 1, dog owners and other residents of New Taipei City can hand in dog poop to government cleaning teams in exchange for tickets to a drawing. First prize is three gold ingots worth about $2,100. I don't know, $2,100 or don't pick up poop. That's a tough call. A study says the average wedding guest last year spent $888 on each ceremony. They have no wonder fewer and fewer people believe in marriage nowadays. They can't afford to attend the ceremonies. Matthew Perry's LA home is up for sale. Yours for only $13.5 million. Yep, friends in high places. In Victorville, California, deputies and witnesses were left dumbfounded after a motorcyclist rear-ended a minivan and landed in the backseat unscathed. Meanwhile, the driver of the van continued making his turn and pulled into his own driveway nearby completely unaware that he had a new passenger. Police spokeswoman Karen Hunt said, we're calling this one a non-injury collision with a twist. It seems the driver of the minivan slowed down to make a left turn. The motorcyclist following behind him didn't stop in time and crashed into the rear of the van shattering the van's window. By then, the minivan driver had already committed to the turn and pulled onto his driveway less than a half a block away. As he turned around, the man discovered the shocked motorcyclist behind him, and while there was severe damage to the motorcycle and back of the minivan, amazingly neither of the men required any medical attention. Although you gotta wonder if maybe that van driver needs a check-up. If he didn't see, hear, or feel something crash through his back window. Engineers in Boise did an amazing thing. They transplanted a 10-story tall 100-year-old sequoia tree to its new location a couple of blocks away. Traffic in the area was murder. Not because of the slow-moving tractor trailer hauling the tree, but because of the long line of squirrels having to relocate by crossing the road. The California man has visited Disneyland 2,000 days in a row. So far, he's only been able to get on to five rides, the rest of the time was spent waiting in line. Facebook is in talks with Hollywood Studios about producing scripted TV quality shows with an aim of launching original programming by late summer. They plan on creating their own version of the TV show Friends, but none of the cast will actually know each other in real life. This episode is brought to you by the audiobook Your Haunted Lives, True Tales of the Paranormal by G. Michael Vasey, a collection of creepy, often downright chilling, true experiences of the strange and weird that'll keep you looking over your shoulder. Here are free sample and support Marlar House by downloading the audiobook for yourself at DailyDoseOfWeirdNews.com. Burger King and Popeyes have both promised to stop using chickens injected with antibiotics by the end of the year. Who knew sick chickens could taste so delicious? In Hudson Bend, Texas, a 30-year-old man made the huge mistake of falling asleep while nude on a boat dock under the blazing sun. He finally awoke to find second-degree burns on 40% of his body and had to be taken to the hospital by helicopter. Second-degree burns are described as open blisters. Two words, sunscreen. Another two words, wear clothes. Police in Cincinnati say Jamila Turnbow was attacked simply because of what she was wearing.  But she had the misfortune of walking by just as a police officer let one of the police dogs loose to answer the call of nature. The outfit Jamila was wearing had a strong resemblance to the bite suit used during canine training, so the dog reacted as he had been trained. An attack. Jamila got a 3-inch cut on her upper right arm from the attack, but police sergeant Daniel Hills stated in a memo to police higher-ups that her attire and the dog's response doesn't excuse what he describes as the canine officer's lack of attention and control of his canine partner. Hills is recommending a reprimand and has ordered that no police dogs be allowed off their leash in public. And that sound you hear, that's the dripping of saliva coming from the mouths of the personal injury attorneys who are just lining up at Jamila's front door right about now. A woman in China claims to be the oldest living person in the world and supposedly turns 131 this week. She's so old she could be Mel Brooks' mother, and he turned 91 this week. China's challenge to Samsung and Apple is becoming available in the U.S. The OnePlus 5 that comes with a starting price tag of $479 for a 64 GB model. Plus, being from China, you also get the added benefit of the phone including lead at no extra charge. In Essex, England, a 17-year-old high school senior girl was so upset about the prospect of receiving her first school detention, she had a heart attack. No kidding. Tabitha Magelliot was unaware she had a heart condition that could have killed her at any minute. Things got rough when she got caught sneaking out of school without permission. Tabitha said, When we got to the gates, I could hear my teacher calling my name and my heart started hammering. I felt my legs turning to jelly and then everything went black. I now know my heart was a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. Luckily, a paramedic got to West Cliff High School for girls within three minutes to restart the teenager's heart. She was hospitalized and experts later diagnosed a rare condition that causes the body to pump blood around the heart the wrong way. Just 10% of sufferers survived beyond their first birthday, but amazingly, Tabitha has now made a full recovery following surgery. Talk about having a twinkle in your eye. An optometrist at India's Shekhar Eye Research Center has developed diamond-incrusted gold-plated contact lenses. No kidding! It's fired by the jewels in his wife's teeth. The exotic eyewear will set you back $15,000 a pair. Plus, you get the added benefit of looking like you're possessed by the devil. That's always a good thing. In playstyle in New Hampshire, a thief who stole a woman's wallet in a supermarket showed up at her door a few days later to return her $90, a GPS and brought along an apology letter. The wallet was stolen from the 61-year-old woman's shopping cart, and while it was later found at a Massachusetts post office, the money was gone. Days later, when the victim answered a knock at her door, a man said he was sorry, returned her belongings, gave her the long letter and fled. Police say he probably found her address in the wallet. While our victim is happy to have her stuff back, she is a little nervous that the thief knows where she lives. And despite his remorseful act, if the police catch him, he still faces charges. So it's kind of hard to be good at robbery if you're going to let that nasty conscience of yours get the best of you. AAA says that 37.5 million Americans will hit the road this long holiday weekend. Which sounds like a great reason to stay home. Megan Kelly's Sunday night show took another dip in the ratings last weekend. It's been getting lower each week. This past Sunday, a rerun of America's funniest home videos had more viewers. So, MSNBC is now offering Tom Bergeron his own talk show. In Peterborough, Ontario, police arrested 41-year-old Lawrence Alfred Cameron while biking downtown with an axe in his hand, covered in his own blood. Police are still trying to sort out the chaos, but they have confirmed there was no victim involved in the incident. Cameron has been charged with publicly carrying dangerous weapons. This really wasn't such a shocker for local police as Mr. Cameron has an extensive criminal record and is well-known by officers and the local judicial system. He also has a history of drug addiction. Okay, so here's a little life tip for you. If you're going to go around riding your bike while carrying an axe and covered in your own blood, the police aren't going to want to talk to you. Glyphosate, the herbicide and the active ingredient in Monsanto Co.'s popular round-up weed killer, will be added to California's list of chemicals known to cause cancer, effective July 7. But then everything is deemed cancer-causing in California. You've got to cross state lines just to get a decent meal. You know those get-out-of-jail-free cards in the Monopoly board game? They don't work in real life. The Minnesota deputy arrested a man on a felony warrant over the weekend and the suspect pulled out his Monopoly card. He went to jail, directly to jail. He did not pass go and he did not collect $200. Oh yeah, and that Monopoly money? That's not going to help you with bail, either, Uncle Pennybags. Never miss a single episode of The Daily Dose of Weird News. Download the free Marlar House mobile app. In the app you can find links to my Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Watch other Marlar House YouTube videos. Sign up for the Marlar Sheet newsletter to automatically be registered for giveaways. Purchase Daily Dose of Weird News t-shirts or mugs. Download audiobooks if narrated. See my latest blog posts and more. The Marlar House mobile app is free for iOS and Android users. Download it now by clicking the mobile app tab at DailyDoseOfWeirdNews.com or search for Marlar House in your phone app store. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up and be sure to subscribe if you want to see more. And click that little bell icon next to the subscribe button to be notified when I post new videos. And if you're already an official weirdo, please share this video on your own social media. You can find even more weird news that I didn't have time for on the Facebook page at DailyDoseOfWeirdNews.com. I'm Darren Marlar and now as a public service to the entire Internet community, I will end the show. I'll see you next time, Weirdos. I pledge allegiance to Mr. Gorbachev, the flag of the United States of America, teared down this wall and to the republic for which it stands. I have a dream, one nation, free at last, and of God, free at last, indivisible, free at last, and justice for all.