All Things Manifesto with Sam Goodman

Today on The Jay Allen Show, Jay speaks with the one and only Sam Goodman from The Hop Nerd fame! During their conversation, Sam talks about his new book “Safety Sucks — The Manifesto”. How he has been staying busy during the pandemic and what is next on his journey.

Enjoy this conversation with Sam Goodman on this episode of The Jay Allen Show on Safety FM.

[00:00:03] spk_0: this show is brought to you by safety FM. Well hello and welcome to another episode of the J ALLen show. Hopefully everything is good and grand inside of your neck of the woods. So I have to tell you it has not been super long, but I was finally able to sit down and do a proper interview and that kind of a quickie. What Sam Goodman. So Sam and I sit around and talk about what's going on with him. His new book, Safety sucks the manifesto. And we talk about all things hot nerd on this episode of the J ALLen show. So stick around and take a listen to this conversation with Samuel Goodman and yours truly right now of the J Allen joe streaming now on safety FM dot life where it should go. So I'm here at your mercy. I don't know what we're doing. So it sounds like a plan. We can do one here and there. Yeah. So how have you been? It's been a it's been a hot minute. What? It's been like a couple of months now since I've seen something like that? It is but it's it's been I mean it's been a while, I mean, I don't know, it's like I still remember that you were just here, but then it's like, it seems like it's longer than what it has been, if that makes sense. It's uh especially in the past few weeks, man, I don't know what's going on. Time just seems to be moving fast. Things kind of went really uh busy but slow kind of when we hit all that quarantine stuff, you know? And then as the world kind of came back to kind of its normal state of being, or somewhat normal state of being and it seems like time just did double time to catch up with maybe some of what we missed. I don't I don't know what happened. Well, I mean, but you've been extremely busy. Let's let's not play because you were here in Orlando then you were doing virtual events. You were doing virtual events for a global scale. Um, so I saw, so I saw some a couple of those. So you are staying busy? Yeah, the virtual stuff man, the virtual stuff is cool. I've got to say though, hands down, not to call anybody out, but coming and hanging out with you guys at safety Day has been the highlight of my year so far. Just, you need to do that in person, getting to come to the great state of florida. It's always kind of fun. Um, and yeah, it was, it was a blast in the virtual stuff. Cool. It's great to get to connect with people around the world, but it's so fun just to get to have those little one off one off face to face conversations with folks, you know, put a face to a name in person. Just kind of get to, you know, me, I like to go down this rabbit holes man. So when people start having conversations it's, it's cool. Well, I mean I have to tell you it's been kind of interesting because hanging out on the virtual side, it's, it's good. I mean you get to meet a ton of people that you probably won't end up meeting. Um it's just a very short period of time, but it's not the same thing as being in person. I mean it's just, I like the world that we're starting to evolve into the middle way, Right? You can see that there's value in both. That that's a great way to get folks together folks that you would normally not good to see with any frequency at least. Right. I mean kind of more national, more global events in particular. You know, you might get to connect with people once or twice in your entire career, you know, through through a setting like that virtual makes that makes that little much smaller. Um, but then just the quality for me, I'm a people person. All right. So when you go, yeah, when, you know, kind of more vulnerable here, when when we went into the first little bit of quarantine man, it's depressing, right? When you're, when you're a people person like man, I just like I will silently stand next to someone just to be able to get some energy of being next to something. Like I don't even talk from having the ability now to do some do some fun kind of important stuff has been, has been called a lot of virtual stuff coming up. They're still in the future because as we know, a good portion of the world is still locked down right? Or in some form of pause or whatever we're calling it nowadays. But we a lot a lot of our role is still continuing on in the virtual realm alone. So oh, so that that at least you know, we continue with some of those connections, we can continue to have some of those conversations and make some new friends and hopefully we'll get to see face to face one of these things, Hopefully sooner rather than later. So with that going on then there's also been some other changes your surroundings have changed. I moved right? I moved. So that was, that was so I've got to say that was my my one bummed out moment come to florida and I didn't get to come hang out at the safety fl studio. I didn't get to come around on the radar safety show. Right? You can I'll let you do like exploration and player out, you know, it's funny, But but yeah, so kind of time that back to back to this studio. So we moved here a little bit of temporary space right now. So kind of going through quarantine. We've spent the past four or five years in downtown phoenix and that's fun and all, until you realize what you're locked there. It's kind of not great. Kind of went to the space of the headspace of saying, well, we just club desert further. Let's let's get some some room a little bit around us, you know, because the same thing, right? You go outdoors, Downtown phoenix is amazing. I still love it. I'm down there all the time. but you go out and you wander around and it's just, it is kind of concrete jungle, right? It's, it's just pavement and bus stops and traffic lights. So when there's nothing else to do and all the fun stuff that the owners closed, you start to really understand that having the ability to walk outside and maybe steal grass or touch a tree is something that that might be, might be important to it. And so we moved, we moved, we moved about Probably 45 minutes out of downtown phoenix. And uh, you know, we, we found a spot um, to rent until we end up purchasing the house out here. And so we've set up in a, in a nice little temporary studio here, which is, well, I mean you're making the same, right? You're making the best of it because I mean, if you were if he would have told me, I did a different camera angle and I'm still in the same spot, I would believe it because that's because that's how you make it look. So it's my it's my that's my junk collection. It's not it's my, it's my weird, wacky collection of books and buddha's and coins and Geiger counters and the bucket. I think it's neat and I want to just kind of chuck on the shelf, but I'm not allowed to put anywhere else. Well, this is your designated area only. So besides that, you, so you moved, you have some other things going on. I'll use this wording. If it's poor wording, somebody else can edited it out. But you've also got the golden handcuffs during that same time. So how are you liking that? Yeah, it's good, man. I mean, it's good, it's good. Uh if they're listening, it's great. So my employer that I've never met a woman, like for for obvious reasons, I don't think anyone out there that does podcasts and stay job doesn't think we do. They understand the value and obviously not not throwing that out there, it's easy enough what that is. Um but you know, through the, through the course of that, you know, I've never really run into any conflict at least, you know, as of yet, and I attribute some of that kind of managing that on my end. You know, obviously there's there's a there's a responsibility there to do so, um so managing those things with that responsibility in mind, But I'm a busy person. I like busy man. I mean my days are I cram them full, you know, crammed full of stuff just to give you an example of today. You know, I was about 4:30 this morning and had to get up at 4:30 because I had a virtual event at That's officially kicked off later. But the pre stuff started around 5:30 and then moving into the, into the daytime stuff, you know, and doing kind of all the normal day to day stuff of my, my real life job. Well, I mean, and I have to tell you, I'm always amazed on when we get together at least virtually on how it works. It, you pretty much do it whenever you, whenever you can and like right now it's, I would imagine what one about noontime, right noontime where you're, so it's noon time. So I don't know if you're doing this during your lunch hour or if you're just saying, hey, I'm doing this now and then I get back to my real life, but you're constantly doing stuff and let's not forget about the book writing the other things that you assist other people with, you still, you still have of university and all these other things that you're going on. I'm still trying to figure out the magic because there has to be something that you're doing that I just don't comprehend. It's funny because I get this question a lot, just just, you know, in this kind of setting from friends that I'm around kind of daily, even even kinda in more of the day job realm, right? And my, my kind of tongue in cheek answer is stupid, stupidity and persistence, right that I think I think too stupid to know when to quit, I can't leave things unfinished. So it's one of those things where you couple that stupidity with persistence and something happens right? It makes stuff will surprise you with what you're able to do, right? I think the what I've realized is, and I've come to a point with certain things, just just personally that you know, it's a question that not to kind of like shamelessly plug the book or find anything else. It's a lot of some of the rabbit hole that I've been diving down and Ian and I dove down in kind of the more recent book and some other stuff that I've really been exploring with writing is this idea of what's meaningful and meaningless. And I've really been kind of sorting through even just on a life perspective throughout my day, what's what's actually meaningful, what do I actually need to focus on? So you'll notice that I'm typically painfully absent from social media a lot these days. I mean I'll post stuff here and there, but I'm not like living on social media interacting because I'm just that's okay. Just I need to invest time other places in for sanity, say. So some of that is just freeing up from those areas to be able to accomplish those things to be able to sit down and say, you know, yeah, when I wake up in the morning, is it better for me to get my cup of coffee or three or four and then sit down on the computer and play on linkedin? Or is it more important for me to sit down and maybe write 1000 words, You know, So that's kind of how I've been approaching. So at least over the past few months as I've been trying to find, I've accepted that that balance isn't really much of a thing in my life because I'm trying to find what that same middle ground and it looks like. Well, I mean, I think there's a season for everything because I think that it's, to some extent what you did at the very beginning where you were actually on social media all the time. And I mean that in a good way, um, posting stuff and then kind of talking about the things that you were doing, it was needed to get attention to what you were doing, and then you get to the point where you start getting busy, what you can't do so much social media that you don't want to do it, but you have to start doing the time management aspect of it. But I mean, and let's not even talk about the most important job that you have, which is being a dad, and we didn't even talk about that portion or your relationship at the time that you have the development of those things. I'm just have, like, a right, I think, I think that's that's that's obvious if you're going to go down the insane, kind of wacky road that most of us doing this kind of space, you know, especially trying to juggle the things that we do. Um So, having that support and then as far as being a dad, I mean, you know, the thing that I found and we've done this since the beginning, I say we because it is kind of a group family effort, I wouldn't be able to do the things that I do without the support there, you know, um there's a lot that goes in like behind the scenes of just general support for me to get to sit here and have fun talking to jay, right, kind of free up the space to be able to do this. Um but with being being a dad or it's just, I've always included her, you know, she's always just been a part of it. So it's not like, it's something where it's like, and don't get me wrong, there's times like this I'm gonna go like, shut the door and lock it and she's on summer vacation, so I'm like, go hide in your room and be quiet. But there's, there's those things where, you know, it's not me squirreling myself away and leave me alone. I need time to just do this and avoid you, right? It's just, it's always been included. That's why, you know, you go back through the podcast and you listen, I mean, you'll hear every kind of wonder and you'll see in the background of the videos, you'll see her, you know, you'll you'll hear her chat, you know, a little bit. And he kind of, she was even doing commercials at one point. I mean, she was, yeah, that's her favorite thing is to get on the microphone as soon as I move stuff, I have things kind of connected yet, you know, uh I'm still back to life stuff. I'm still in the process of moving because we still have the studio downtown. Um but also you still have it downtown then as well to, yeah, I can still, you know, I'm still down there here and there. It's just, I'm going to let loose of it. You start outsourcing it. Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna let go of it. But it's one of those things where it's like, you know, it's an hour away, right? It's an hour drive with early morning or evening phoenix traffic and it just makes it too hard back to finding insanity and that it just makes it too hard to sit down and do stuff like this without making it a whole half a day event. No, I have to tell you when you go from doing the normal studio to the home studio, there's such a change inside of that because let's just use the hypothetical scenario, if you would have started off with that studio that you're currently, and and then did the downtown studio, you'd be like, well the commute of eight seconds compared to the hour commute makes it slightly different. And I, and I know it's kind of uh it's kind of one of those uh, first world problems, but because we found ourself, you know, in the studio needed the space. Sorry, dogs. No, you're good. Now, we all know that it's real life and you're really at home, it's real life stuff. I'm not on some getting away highly advanced set somewhere. Yeah, but it's uh, yeah, so once, once we moved down there, it actually ended up being a really, really cool opportunity a blessing really. Um, because we got moved in and started to get set up right when things started to lock down, right, when people were starting to go work from home. So for me to have a space to not be at home was kind of the whole point right at that moment. Um, and then now after kind of functioning at home and then having the space to do stuff at home, it's like, well, I don't want to go back to the studio. I want to stay at home now that I have like the space and I can create something back to downtown problems. You don't give much space when you, when you're living right in the middle of it. Well, with, with everything that's happened during the lockdown and the changes that have come into your life, you've done some, some important things. So let's talk about the safety sucks manifesto. You decide to release that. It was about a couple of months ago at this particular point. What, what are you seeing? What are, what are people coming back to you with? What are they, what are they, what are they telling you? What do they like what they dislike? Because you're honest enough to tell people what people don't like because I have interviewed people were like, you know, everybody loves it. No, they don't. You know, it's, it's, um, as, as far as what they like and I think it's a mixture. Some folks, when you see these things that certain people like, other people dislike it for the same reasons, right? It's, we're unapologetic about being honest and just trying to lay things out on the table and for some folks that's a little too, um, I'll use this word tongue and you can look to triggering for certain safety professionals, leaders, right? That we're willing to challenge some of the things that are viewed as most sacred. And we're not really seeing a ton of stuff that's completely brand new, right? We really take things and kind of view it through the lens of the safety practitioner. Right? And so safety sucks. The original book was obviously us trying to, or me keep saying us now that I'm hanging out with this book was really just talking solely about the profession, right? Uh, and then as we kind of started writing the manifesto, it started in and kind of that head space and then that evolved. It's no, this, let's just take an overall kind of approach. Let's, let's put a lens here, let's let's create a lens and you know, um, a lot of the kind of general comments that come back, people just kind of reaching out, you know, to try to think of things very specific. You know, folks just really like that kind of rip off the Band Aid approach to things. And if things suck, we should talk about the fact that they suck, right? If we're creating suffering in our work world, we should put our finger on that suffering and explore that and hold it and figure out where that's coming from and why, how that's being created in our organizations and how it's causing harm and dig deeper into that to be able to kind of pull it out of our organizations, um, from the, from the not so great side of things. It's a lot of the same reason though, right? It's because that it's, it's we almost, I don't get many of those, but the ones that do, it's kind of like how dare you, right? It's kinda, it's kinda this how dare you respond. Um you know, I get accused of being a little too little too brutal, you know, sometimes I get accused of being a little too, you know, I get, I get the random kind of people trying to make you feel bad for being provocative. I feel that I look at it this way, if you're willing to take the time to actually send me an email, don't send me like a post or something along those, like, like you're gonna send me an email or write me a letter snail mail style and you're going to go into detail of what you didn't like about something that I did, Hey, I'll respond to you just cause you took the time commitment. So it meant something to you. But if you give it, if you give it to me on a post or on a review, okay, tough. But if you want to spend enough time, okay, I'm willing to listen. So that, that's one thing that's kind of touched on social media, not to get away from cover name, a lot of conversation there, but to kind of go back a little bit, you know, as much as I try to avoid kind of hosting and just kind of interacting, um, it kind of opened social media messages, Diem's emails at this point in my life and I kind of share that on the podcast with some regularity, just let folks know. Um, I still pride myself on returning practically everything that people reach out to me about right, whether it's for advice, whether it's for input, whether it's just to say, hey, you know, uh I don't leave much stuff unanswered unless it's an email for me. If I send you an email, it was on my list this week, it was on my list this week to respond to it, I get it, I get it. But yeah, I always appreciate that stuff, you know, I always appreciate that, appreciate the, because to me, it honestly, I'm not saying that that it steers, but it informs my next moves as far as kind of what I'm currently exploring what I'm currently writing, you know, the stuff and the radicals I'm currently going down, you know, that gives me kind of that real time feedback. Um, one of the biggest thieves that I, that I get from, from really anything that I've written this book in particular is that we leave, what part of kind of my thought process to leave you with more questions than answers? A lot of times. Right? And and that drives some folks just up the wall, Right? Because they want to give me the abc checklist on how I can fix safe in the No. Yeah. If I kinda not not to dive too deep on this stuff, I'm kind of working on the side. But as I'm kind of writing some stuff the other day, I was kind of doing kind of exploring a little bit of that thought, you know, and, you know, I'm very unapologetic about that. Is that, you know, if if I come to you and tell you that I've got the A B C 123 solution for your safety program, I'm lying, I'm not going to do that. And any book that you pick up that says, here's abc how to safety Greatness. They're lying. All right. Because there's no one size fits all process for anything. And I'm not talking basic principles or waste a few things or thought processes. If you you've seen some of these where you open it up like you do this and you do that and you do this and you do that exactly like this and everything will be perfect, right? And that's just never going to work well for anybody. Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't know. There's so many different things that you can take a look at when, when you hear stuff like that because I look at it. A lot of what people do on social media is they're not false advertising. It's puffery. It's over exaggerating what we've already what we have. I claim that it doesn't, there's never a failure. It always works. But this is what you have to do. And it's also part of the industry capture. And we can start talking about industry capture and we start talking about large organizations that like to give out lettering. But that kind of get some people upset. But that's what it is. I've captured the industry. I said, hey, this is what you need to do. And as long as you're listening to what I'm saying, this is the way that everything rolls out. Some people will agree with that if they've actually been vetted to believe that. But then on the other side of the equation, you start talking about industry capture all of a sudden has a derogatory comment or conversation associated to it because all of a sudden from who it's coming from. Because when I say that, well, yeah, all of a sudden I see a value in this designation that I get from an organization, but only from the standpoint because that's how I've been trained to believe that it's great, right? And you know, so much of the way that that again, we we kind of approach things with the manifesto was down this idea of, you know, how do you view things a little differently? You know, again, better lens, right. I'm not gonna tell you how to think, right? I'm not going to tell you exactly what to do. But here's some thoughts. Here's here's some questions, right? We were talking a little bit about even relating that to personal life around what's meaningful, what's meaningless. That's that's so much of the question that we kind of thread through that book as you should be in this constant state of not me telling you what's important, but for you going out and figuring out what's important to you in your particular work world, right? What's important to your operations? What's important to your folks? Because it's never gonna be exactly the same. We're going to have some overlap, right? And we're probably gonna have some common ground where we can learn from each other. We can exchange some protests and, you know, we can we can exchange some ideas. But I think the power isn't as much of the answer, right? I mean, we we hear that from from one of our one of our near and dear the goat, right? All the time, right? That's such a powerful way to approach things. The question is more important, right? The question is way more interesting, if not for anything else. Right? So, so much of what we continue to ask throughout throughout the manifesto, is that what's what's what's golden, what's fools go what's trash and what's treasure? What's trash that you painted gold? And you're pretending this treasure within your organization? What's gold that you're pretending this trash? Because you don't want to look at it right in asking those questions kind of on a regular basis and then going deeper, right? So when we're putting our hands on those things, when we, when we're touching those pain points or the progress, what are the unintended consequences that will come from those right and intended versus unintended? Are we creating more harm than good or more good than harm? Right? To kind of reduce it down to something? Um, and so back to the beef. Some folks don't want to get that meta, I guess some of the thoughts around safety, we want something that's linear because again, I grew up in more of the traditional school of thought of safety before departing from it. Um, and it was always this kind of idea that it's it's abc you do A B and C, and you get you get the right, that's where you end up at. This is not always the case. All right. It's just not always the case. So, um, while some of those kind of more prescriptive approaches can maybe be helpful to certain organizations, there still has to be significant adaptation that takes place and significant learning and growth. You might start with the check sheet and then evolve past, right? You might start with with following step one, step two and step three is kind of crap. We're not doing step three, we're gonna do something, do something, right? Well, I mean, because of you and Ian were able to take this dive into this when you start looking back at what you guys put down and watch trash what's gold and and so on. When somebody is going to come and approach this book, do you think someone new into the industry should, this should be the first book that they look at? Or do you think they should go with safety sucks first? No. You know, actually uh somebody that's new into this industry, um I wouldn't even give them one of mine, I would give them talk to be honest with you. I mean completely level with you for sure. There's there's there's a there's a few other books, you know, as far as just general approach that um you know, again, you know, we and we mentioned that frequently, you know that the stuff that we're doing is building up on years and years and years and years and years and years of work with any kind of more new if you safety and traditional safety. Alright, so again, there's as far as someone that's new to maybe hop for safety differently as a thing, I would not start with the manifesto, I mean for sure, but I'm not saying that it's, it's infinitely deep and complex. You definitely can sit down and if anyone is going to have my writing style, I try to keep things pretty conversation, pretty pretty, pretty, pretty easy to read. You know, other than other than uh, you know, maybe putting in like block large block text. You know, we make it easy. So this is the adult adult version. So it's, you know, you know, I think it's one of those things, it's according to where you're starting at, you know, as far as the original safety side for someone that's brand new to the profession, I think it is a valuable read to kind of understand, um, to understand maybe some of the challenges that you'll face not to scare people off again back to some of the intent of that book originally was to, was to me kind of saying that this is kind of what I wish I would have known before I came into safety, not so I could stay away from it, but so I could be more prepared to not have like amid a few years in kind of crisis, if I did say I want to, I'm gonna go to sweep floors before safety guy anymore, like this is horrible, you know, this is this is horrible. I was ready to give it all up just around. Well, glad that she didn't do that after during the lockdown, then it would just be straight over eats that's for sure. So as you and Ian have been doing this and kind of going through it, I know that Ian was kind of getting into a new world when it came to this, especially from the the author point of view, Have you guys thought of giving any thought of now that things are starting to open back up of potential potential uh many roadshows where come meet the authors and all that kind of fun stuff. We're hoping so, and for sure at some point we we've had some you're not going to Austin, are you? I am not presenting. Okay. I, you know, I think um for sure that's something that we've been kind of looking at, you know, we, it is the kind of person that's just as busy as I am, which is is insane to try to think about coordinated or to people like that coordinate on a project. So, fortunately, you know, through the power of dropbox in zoom and then a lot of kind of late nights on top of that kind of after hours just meeting up to just sit and talk, you know, talk through ideas. Um then, you know, things came to be um I say that to say this size that were, you know, as we start scheduling, I don't know what when or what that looks like, but that would be a goal for us for sure. I mean, because I think that you have the opportunity of doing a couple of interesting things together because you can do meet the author of course, you can do the book signing as always. But then you could also do your podcast, which I think that would be kind of be a very cool thing. Now I'm gonna I'm gonna put you kind of in a bad spot here at the moment because about two months ago we had a conversation about your potential audiobook, you know, you're gonna make time you actually, you know, but but here's the thing, I'm going to kind of put you on the hook, but also get you off the hook at the same time, because you said you wanted to do something different. And that was that was deep into the conversation, and that was something that came up right away. You weren't using it, an excuse, you said that you want to do something different because it was two authors, which I understood. So, have you come up with what that might be the difference yet, or what have you been thinking? We've you know, we're tossing around some ideas. I don't I don't want to say too much about what we're going to toss around. It wouldn't be anything extreme, all right. But we're talking about some ideas about just structure and how that plays out in an audio book format and maybe adding in some something some bonus something, you know, and figuring out just to bring something cool, right? You know, because for me personally, I'm one of those wacky people that when I sit down and read, like I do both, right, I usually do an audio book and I'll get a hard copy. And so the ability to maybe have some bonus content that goes maybe a little bit farther into particular ideas to branch out of that is something that we kind of tossed around just and I'm just addressing that from my own personal style, right? Of how I kind of absorb material and the person is like listening and reading, you know, just listening and then just reading and then listening, reading and highlighting the scribbling, right? So to have something that might bring just a little bit more kind of content and explanation to certain pieces of that I think would be something needs to do but we haven't landed on anything solid as of yet because then once we do it probably is some of our own kind of procrastination because once we find do, then that means we have to commit to actually producing it alright producing this almost without you saying it, that there might be some sort of level of a workbook may be associated to it or you don't want to go that deep into it which I don't blame you with all the organizations and leagues that imitate everybody else. That's the route. You know how much I don't know. Uh huh. A pause for a second workbook is just one of those words as much as I said everybody that we could do some cool stuff that the word, the word itself and whether this has been used with other with other things makes me kind of throw up in my mouth a little bit and I'm like I don't know if we want to do something but something like that might be interesting, you know I mean to take tha