Speaker 1: Ero dot net. It's a network of podcasts, twenty different
podcasts to listen to a r r oe dot net.
One of those podcasts is CTCs, a very popular show
about a group of people who happen to work at
a grocery store. This is how it really goes down
ct CS. The customer is never right. Ero dot net
a r r oe dot net. Enjoy your exploration.
Speaker 2: Hey air, it's Matt Ross.
Speaker 1: Matt Ross. Listen to that voice. Man, Holy crap, did
you do radio one time?
Speaker 2: No? But I managed broadcasters. Oh what? Oh?
Speaker 1: So you understand pitch, volume and tone quite well?
Speaker 2: Do I tried to to.
Speaker 3: I have to suspend my typical Queens New York accent
when I'm trying to speak like a normal human.
Speaker 1: That's the way I was when I came down from Montana.
There are certain things that we say out there in
those prairie lands of Montana they don't say in the South.
And they would sit down with me and say, you
got to change your way, dude, and you got to
start sounding a little bit more southern. They're not going
to buy into you at all.
Speaker 2: So funny.
Speaker 3: So I lived in Charlotte, North Carolina. I see a
seven O four areco.
Speaker 2: Where are you?
Speaker 1: I'm in South Charlotte and Valentine. Where you Where? Where
are you at?
Speaker 2: What do you know?
Speaker 3: So I was running radio stations back in the day.
I'm an old guy and I lived in South Park.
Oh yeah, and then I lived in the Piper Glen area.
Speaker 1: Well, Piper Glen is exactly where I am. That's exactly
where I am. Oh my god. So you're familiar with
this forest here that stretches between our neighborhoods. And I
mean there's so much positive and spiritual energy within these trees.
Speaker 2: Without a doubt.
Speaker 3: And I was there before that, we'll call it the
Outer Belt was old. I mean literally my home backed
up to some woods that was being got backed up
to the actually a highway that they were building.
Speaker 1: Yep, yep, Oh it's there. It's there. Now it's turned
the city and do something that I don't know. Man,
it's just a huge, huge, big at Atlanta is what
it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is definitely and Atlanta in development.
Speaker 1: One of the things that you've done, Matt here is
that you've tapped into where people are in the way
of thinking about, you know, making that transformation at the
midlife level, because I you know, I'm out there on
the streets with the everyday person, because that's who I
am as a broadcaster. I got to be with the people.
And I'm seeing this, And until I got your book,
I didn't know how to deal with it. And and
so if I don't know how to do it, neither
do they. And then here come, here comes Matt. Matt's
got an idea.
Speaker 3: Well, it's funny, and I can't really say that I
knew how to deal with it early on.
Speaker 2: So so let's break it down.
Speaker 3: Okay, if you're younger than thirty five, you're just trying
to figure out who you are.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're just getting in the game.
Speaker 3: You get on the playing field, you're trying to build
some competency and some skills. Then you get into this page,
this space where you're thirty five is we'll call it
three middle age lift to get a little serious. And
then you've made some best generally, you know, maybe you've
gotten married, or you've got a career track and you've
got kids or something, and now you sort of sort
of lived in your life in your forties. And in
my case, I woke up at fifty and I had
just been in constant motion. I'm a pretty smart guy,
but I didn't always do everything right. And then literally
at fifty, I had to sort of really step back
and think about how I was going to behave Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, see.
Speaker 1: I think that's one of the reasons why I started
daily writing in July of nineteen ninety four. I have
my thirties, my forties, fifties, and sixties in a daily journal,
and I can go to it and so and I,
but I don't go back to read it because I
feel like it's not for me. What about you in
observing your life?
Speaker 2: So that's a really interesting point.
Speaker 3: I would sort of challenge that, and and let me
tell you why in going back and trying and telling
my story. So I went back and reflected on my journey,
and you know what it did for me. It really
created this sense of appreciation for a how hard things
are and how hard it is to get to a
place where you really feel at ease and at peace.
And it's it's just the human brain is just complicated,
and the world is complicated, and so you know, when
you're in it, sometimes it feels like you're in battle.
Speaker 2: And I was.
Speaker 3: I was in battle from the time I was a child,
having grown up in some really adverse situations and fought
through them and always kept fighting. And I thought that
was normal, but it kind of in some ways wasn't.
Speaker 1: How important is it to surround yourself with the right
people when you're trying to grow forward, because you know,
you never want to be that person to point out
and say, oh, he's stuck in his way. You don't
want to hang out with him, he's he's really into
his own thinking process.
Speaker 2: Two things popped into my mind.
Speaker 3: Number One, I wrote in the book that's surrounding yourself
with the right people maybe be the key difference in
success or not, or getting to a better place or not.
You know, those influences around you are everything, and you know,
we all sort of tend to gravitate to people who
are just like us, but that's not kind of what
I mean. I mean people with great values, who care,
who do challenge you at times, who do have different
opinions at times, and yet you could all come together
and still have share this sort of love for similar things.
So so you know, to me, that's an important piece.
And again I didn't realize that until I got a
little bit older, I was very good at building teams at.
Speaker 2: Work to compliment me.
Speaker 3: But you know, I was just moving so fast and
that I didn't always hang around the people that I
thought lifted me up. Another part of that in the
book that I write about, you have to hear this
saying where people say my thing is, oh.
Speaker 2: All right, so you know what my thing is.
Speaker 3: My thing could often be a blocking mechanism to hear
what your thing is. What I really believe is we
have one of the keys to building yourself, better relationships,
better solutions is asking great questions. So one of my
mentors said to me when I was a young guy
in advertising sales, when somebody starts talking a customer and
they're sharing stuff.
Speaker 2: Don't come with all the answers, say tell me more.
Oh yeah, tell me more.
Speaker 3: Those three words have been so important to me because
what it is it does two things.
Speaker 2: AI learn more about how you think.
Speaker 3: Maybe there's things in there that I was ready to judge,
and now I'm hearing another perspective.
Speaker 4: But you know what also happens. We build trust. We
build trust because you feel and hopefully it's real that
I care about you, what you think and your opinion
as opposed to.
Speaker 3: Me stepping on you going with well my thing is,
and all of a sudden you're stuck in your thing
and you've lost to it. Night.
Speaker 2: What I was trying to say.
Speaker 1: Boy, you are so right about that, because I've got
a crutch right now where I'll go. You know, when
I was at this place and it's like, shut up,
they don't care that you were there. You are here.
And so therefore what I try to rely on is
something that you talk about in the book, and that
is I need to learn how to clarify the path.
Make it simple. Well, we learned that in radio, dude,
and I'm sure you probably preached it, you know, make
it simple. Stupid because that listener that they're listening, it's
not that they're stupid, it's just they're halfway listening to
you right now. Make it simple.
Speaker 3: Well, it's funny you say that. Sometimes I tend to
go a bit on a tangent. Dah, I'm not sure
I would be as good as at what you do.
I can make some great points, but my storytelling goes
from art point A to B two C. And sometimes
I see people losing, so I have to come back
to the sweet spot. And I see it in the
body language. I see it in their face, and then
I go, I'm losing them. I better get to the
crescendo really quickly because they're out, They're completely stopped listening.
Speaker 1: My god, you just hit something on the head there
that that I think that a lot of people in
broadcasting and the everyday business world don't understand. And that
is body language. And and one of the things that
you cover inside your book are taking the skills that
you've got from other positions in your life and using them.
For instance, like the I work at a grocery store
out of choice. I just want to be with people.
I use every skill that I got in radio at
that register because I've got a live audience, dude, and
they're right there in front of me, and I get
to see their body language. I get to hear their
vocal tones. Whereas in radio, you assumed that. And I
think that that's where a lot of us are lost
in real life is we assume we know what they're thinking.
Speaker 3: You know what George Carlin said, his famous statement, the
Great George Carlin said, do you make an asset.
Speaker 2: Of you and makeing it's true? And you've heard that
when you assume.
Speaker 3: But you know, one of my earliest jobs, in fact,
my first job was working in.
Speaker 2: The produce department of the supermarket. Oh yeah, and back
in the day, people would come up and they would hand.
Speaker 3: You a bag with the apples and you'd have to
weigh them and then take a marker and put two
dollars twenty two cents on it.
Speaker 2: I know, I'm dating myself, right. You'd hand it back
to the customer.
Speaker 3: But you know what I would do. I would look
at them right away and I go, are they in
a rush or are they sort of here? Because they
like to putter slowly around the supermarket, And if they
were the putter, I'd kind of ask them some questions
and I start to chat them.
Speaker 2: Up a little bit.
Speaker 3: And I do like people, which is a which in
my sense is a strength because I again I try
to build rapport and connect. But you know, if you're
in business also like that's also the pathway to achieving
your goals. What do you what did those people want
for me? I know what I want, but if I
could also make this win win, like I get what
I want, but also solving their challenges in business or
in life, that's the win win. When I was coaching
and developing talent for years leading teams, that was the
that was the be.
Speaker 2: All end off of me.
Speaker 1: Well, you use a power word in my heart, and
it's a word grow. I never say let's go forward,
let's sy I always use that word grow. Where did
you meet up with that and decide to dance with it?
Because that word grow is a very powerful statement.
Speaker 3: So my new book that came out a couple of
weeks ago is called grow or Fold, and the there
was an organic flavor to that as a title for
the book. At fifty years old, my life was in
free fall and I was literally sitting in my basement
on one of the worst nights of my life, staring
in the dark, and the thought popped into my head
that said, are you going to fold? Which was a
strange thought. Here I was at one of my worst
moments and now I'm beating myself up. And I sat
there and I paused, and then all of a sudden,
something popped in my head said or are you going
to grow? And the grow or full became a mantra
for me. I've always been super growth oriented. I've always
been a learner I probably set the world record for
most self help books read, which is kind of a
strange thing to tell people because it means like you've
always been sort of confused and searching, and but I
view that.
Speaker 2: As a positive. Yep, if you have a growth mantra.
Speaker 3: It says that you know where you are, maybe even
pretty good, but maybe there's even a better place to
get to if you get the right fuel. Intellectual, emotional, functional,
and that piece growth is about functional, emotional, and creative growth.
Those are the three components to me of having a
growth plan.
Speaker 1: Please do not move. There's more with Matt Ross coming
up next, the name of his book grow or Fold.
We are back with Matt Ross. So then, how do
you talk to that inner child that's still probably a
pre teenager or an early teenager in the way of going.
They knew what you were going to be when you
were gonna get older. You either listened to them and
then did it when you were fifty, or you tried
to guide them along the way. How do you talk
to that person saying that, look, here we are now.
I like your plans still at the age you are,
but we're going to have to change.
Speaker 3: So I would tell them that they're working progress, oh good,
And no matter what they think, there's no way they
could have a definitive, clear guidance where are they're going to.
Speaker 2: Get to and what the future is going to look like.
Speaker 3: So my only recommendation to them three work your teloff,
invest in your development, own personal growth and development intellectually, spiritually, functionally, physically, mentally,
all of that, and find some good mentors and guides.
Because if you find people who take an interest in
you and have already been a few steps further.
Speaker 2: Down the road, then that's it.
Speaker 3: Man. You've got somebody, somebody who's emotionally invested in your growth,
and somebody who can go to you and they will
call you out and check you when they think you're
off plan for the right reasons, not to just one
up you, but to give you that point of view.
And I think mentorship is the key thing. And trying
to find someone early in your life that well and
not just your parents, not just your friends. We'll call
this a third party, objective person who cares about you
and believes in you.
Speaker 1: Well. Your book is a book of activation. For a
good example would be when you talk about wisdom, you
say that it's something that you earn. And we live
in this age of chat GPT and I don't know
how many times I tell people that's not about wisdom.
If you don't go out there and experience something, you're
not gonna get wisdom. All you've got is context. You've
got you've got content. Go start a podcast, go do
something with that information. But if all you're going to
do is about things for me from chat GPT, we're
not winning here.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think there's something also about how the brain works.
Speaker 3: Right, So problem solving, when you get into trying to
solve a problem and you're doing the research, and you're investigating,
and you're trialing things and you're measuring. This is what
we do in business, but we should also do it
in life. And I talk about treating yourself like your business. Yes,
so you learn by doing, you learn by making these mistakes,
And there's something that happens, probably at the celluarial level
in the brain that you make these sort of important
check marks. I tried that. I went down that path.
I had an intellectual investment in it, and it was
right or wrong, and I acknowledged it, and I moved
to the next one. When you're just doing a query online.
You don't have the intellectual rigor invested in it. So
then what happens is just sort of absorbing data and
reading it. But I don't think it actually enhances your functionality.
Speaker 2: If that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Oh, it does make sense, because I'll tell you what.
Just to kind of piss off the world, what I
did as a broadcaster is that you know, everybody is
so ai AI. So I decided to do a show
with Alexa and so and so so I'm and what
it is is that I take the stuff that I've
got in my my forty some odd years of daily writing,
and then I challenge her and she cannot put the
emotion in it that I do. And what so the
invisible word to those who may pick up on it,
they might, And the thing is is that they may
pick up on the idea the human versus the computer.
The human is winning because he's bringing emotion.
Speaker 3: Yes, I mean, and I think the emotion pieces is
a critical thing because it can't measure my passion, right,
it can't measure everything, every feeling, every experience that I've had.
It's measuring in linear fashion the question that I've asked,
So I recently asked it to build a trip by
itinerary for a trip that I want to go on.
That's a beautiful way to use it to compress the
amount of time it would take me to do that
research right, and then I could ask some more questions.
Speaker 5: But you know what, whether I stay at this hotel
or that hotel is now that I call a mission
critical decision that I need to be emotionally engaged in
and invested in building intellectual resources around.
Speaker 1: One thing that I'm seeing And I got to find
it in your book grow or Fold, and that is
is that how people at around fifty years old, they
start going into what I call grumpy person syndrome. And
oh my god. And I love taking someone that has it.
I like just talking to them. I because I think
they're screaming to be heard.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think there's a few reasons. Because I did a
talk recently. I was going to do a TED talk
called your midlife Moment. And what we often don't know
is the layers of complexity that people are dealing with
in their life that they have not solved for. And
in some ways they have this fear and anxiety and stress,
and they know that they feel vulnerable at fifty, for
the first time I felt vulnerable physically mentally. I had
always just stayed in motion. I had great stabb and
I always felt young. All of a sudden, now I'm like, God,
what got me here is won't get me there? And
I'd better start really trying to think more deeply of
being more honest about what I need to solve. And
so I think in some respects the complexity of midlife
is what they're dealing with. But no one knows, Like
no one knew how complex my life was. I got
a happy face most of the time. I'm a positive guy.
I wasn't sharing the sleepless nights every night and drinking
too much alcohol and trying to really sort of suppress
all of the dark thoughts that I was having.
Speaker 1: So then what do you do in situations where as
you grow older you begin to understand Yoda better? Do
you understand what I mean by that? So you do,
don't you?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: My god?
Speaker 2: I do you know? You know? When you do?
Speaker 3: When you start to make progress and you start to reflect,
I think you start to reinforce the positive emotions that
you need to take with you going forward. There's a
book called The Body Keeps the Score. I'm not sure
if you've ever heard of it.
Speaker 2: Wow, it's one of the.
Speaker 3: Great books of all time that actually deals with overcoming
post traumatic stress and what it says in essence, those
people who've overcome the most challenging PTSD, here's what they
did when they made some changes that got to to
a better place.
Speaker 2: They made sure they documented what it.
Speaker 3: Was, where they were, what they learned, and continue to
think and think about that regularly because you're reinforcing the
positive steps you've made as you move going forward. So
when you've become a little more Yoda centric, it comes
with this fact that you've now got some wisdom because
you've fought the fight. You've been through the battles, and
you know, I think at sixty five, when you leave
middle age and you leave in that club, you know
a lot of people maybe are going on to their
older adult years thinking like it's all downhill, and it's
not because maybe you haven't gotten to crystallize it prior to.
But you can still make change happen, and you can
still refine how you're thinking. And the journey of life
is really about that. It's on you to create context
for where you are and where you want to get
to and what's the work you have to do to
get there.
Speaker 1: You need your own podcast, you really do. Would I
would sit there and tune into you as I'm driving
in the car, just to hear your inside scoop and
to bring your journey forward.
Speaker 2: That's nice of you.
Speaker 1: Wow. Where can people go to find out more about you?
Because they until they put their hands on these pages
and they need the physical book. I realized the ebook
is cool, but there's just something about this physical book
that you can touch it and you can put a
highlighter on it, and that's what I love about it.
Speaker 3: Thank you a few different ways, of course, anywhere online
grower fold.
Speaker 2: Matt Ross is my name. That's the book.
Speaker 3: I'm doing a talk actually this Sunday at this legendary
place in New York and people could stream it three
pm on Sunday at the ninety second Street y in
New York with a legendary New York radio broadcaster named Kendesho.
Also my website Matt Ross dot com. I'm just getting started,
you know, I still run a business. Just I'm not
sure your audience knows this. I was in radio for
twenty years I pickame the CEO of the School of
Rock and built that brand, and now I run a
business that teaches are in digital media and design, just
like the School of Rock to kids and adults. So
I'm I'm that guy who's trying to also celebrate the
importance of creative growth as we age. And I'm not
sure I'm to have a podcast because I also having
run radio stations, I know the.
Speaker 2: Work that goes into I have respect.
Speaker 3: I have respect, But now that I'm sixty four going
on sixty five, I have to lead in on what
I'm really great at and really love to do. And
I love teaching people to grow and help them. And
I've got this business that we're trying to germinate and
continue to grow, and I want to have some downtime
to write more books.
Speaker 1: Oh God, I love where your heart is. You got
to come back to this show anytime in the future, Matt.
The door is always going to be open.
Speaker 2: Your friend, appreciate you.
Speaker 1: Will you be brilliant today? Okay, thanks