6 - Unlock Success: Tim Ash Reveals the Biggest Blunders in Digital Strategy

Jim Banks [00:00:00]:
My guest today on Bad Decisions with Jim Banks is Tim Ash. Tim has been a friend of mine for a huge number of years, wrote a recent book, and I'm just flicking through it. I see. I even got mentioned in the acknowledgements. That's how important I am to him, how important he is to me, for me to bring him, to have him as a guest on the podcast today. Tim, welcome to the show.

Tim Ash [00:00:21]:
Thanks, Jim. Great to be back with you.

Jim Banks [00:00:23]:
Jim and I, we had dinner in San Diego a couple of weeks ago, and it was amazing to see Tim. I've left the dreary shores of the UK to go and spend time in beautiful San Diego. Every time Tim posts something on Facebook, I'm like, wow, I'm really jealous of how great the weather always looks. It's always sunny. Recently, California has been battered by storms, but San Diego seems to be immune from that. We had dinner with a good friend of ours, Dave Roth. The conversation was incredibly deep, even though that wasn't the reason that I wanted to have you on the show, I thought to myself, wow, Tim would be a great guest to have on the podcast. So tell me, Tim, about what you're up to these days.

Tim Ash [00:00:59]:
Oh, these days, my focus is on public speaking and advising senior executives at companies. So public speaking speaks for itself. I keynote all over the world at this point. About 20 countries, four continents, huge stages, 10,000 plus to intimate CEO events, full range. And then on the advisory, I figured out that my life experience is really valuable to senior executives. And so I've set it up as an unlimited on call access to me. Put a meeting on the calendar. If it's important enough for you to be there, I'm there.

Tim Ash [00:01:33]:
And that way I'm of service and can give as much of myself as I can on every call. I really like that format.

Jim Banks [00:01:41]:
So no limit, like a Ray Donovan, but without the baseball, you know, if.

Tim Ash [00:01:47]:
You want me to bring one, I will. There's no extra charge for that.

Jim Banks [00:01:51]:
So, obviously to me and a lot of the people that may be listening to this particular podcast, because primarily the topic is around bad decisions that people have made in both a personal and professional life. And a lot of the people that will be listening will probably be involved in some way or another in the digital marketing ecosystem. And obviously for me, your introduction to me, you were like one of the demigods of landing page optimization. You were the CEO of Site Tuners, and then you basically turned your back on it. So what happened there? Why did you pivot from doing what you were doing there to what you're doing now?

Tim Ash [00:02:25]:
That's a great question. I think that one of the bad decisions I made is early on, I didn't really focus on what suited my character and my basic nature. And so I just go, I'm smart enough to break off on my own and start a conversion rate optimization focused agency. And of course, lots of changes over the years. Ran the conversion conference, which was the first industry conference still going on in the UK, Germany and the US every year about conversion rate optimization. But what I didn't realize is just the business model that running a professional services firm or running a live events business, those weren't my highest and best use on the planet. So if I tuned in a little more into what really fueled my fire, it would be evangelism, it'd be writing books, it'd be public speaking, it'd be being of service and advising senior executives. And so I did a very conscious pivot about five years ago to that.

Tim Ash [00:03:25]:
I said, I just have a limited amount of time on the planet. You and I are roughly comparable in age, although you have more hair than I do. But I decided that I'm going to spend it doing what really floats my boat. And so it was a very conscious decision to walk away from that. Now, I handed off the agency and the conference series to my dear friend and partner, Marty Greif, and he's since then tripled the size of the agency. Which just goes to show you that the right person for the right role is super important. And it wasn't the right role for me.

Jim Banks [00:03:57]:
Yeah, it's funny, I think so many people in the agency ecosystem, like I always say to people, I run a boutique agency. It's very small. I'm very happy it's small. I've got a small book of clients that don't give me hassle, pay me on time, all the kind of things that you would want to have as an agency owner. And I don't have all the stress that comes with running big agencies, big teams and all that sort of stuff. And for me, people always go, why don't you want to do it? I made the conscious decision of actually saying, you know what? I'm not going to get involved in this kind of chasing after trying to grow a 50 person agency to flip it and everything else. Because what really struck me, I think he was 56 when he died, but Steve Jobs had all the money in the world, but he couldn't buy his health and he couldn't buy his happiness. He died an unhealthy and miserable person, even though he had absolutely crap tons of money.

Jim Banks [00:04:43]:
And I just thought, I don't want to be.

Tim Ash [00:04:45]:
By the way, I know we're all bought into this. I'm going to be the next unicorn and pivot my way to public offering, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there is some science around the happiness of being independently wealthy, and there is a statistically significant effect. You are happier if you're independently wealthy. That's true. You know, the size of that effect, it's 3%.

Jim Banks [00:05:06]:
Wow.

Tim Ash [00:05:07]:
You are 3% happier being independently wealthy. The place that if you're going to put all your eggs in one basket, it'd be the strength of your social connections. There's a bunch of longitudinal studies that basically say weak social connections are medically the equivalent of being half a pack a day smoker or being obese. It's really bad news. So keeping up your social connections, that's what really makes us happy, because we're very tribal and social animals. The most social on the planet.

Jim Banks [00:05:33]:
In fact, you and I, we met in Australia, we both spoke on stage down there in the Gold coast, and obviously, we've met in the States, and.

Tim Ash [00:05:41]:
We've met Las Vegas many times. I believe you're the mayor of the Chandelier Bar in Las Vegas on social media.

Jim Banks [00:05:47]:
Yeah. And again, I think a lot of people, funny enough, somebody posted on Facebook and said, I'm looking for the mayor of the Chandelier Bar, and mentioned me by name. So for me, I think sometimes, yes, it costs money. Yes, it costs time. It's time away from your family. But I think sometimes you need to make those sort of commitments to keep those social interactions alive. I talked about it before where we've had a number of people in the search industry who've ended up, like, killing themselves because they couldn't cope with life because they were working at home in isolation, didn't have that social interaction with other people. The events stopped.

Jim Banks [00:06:20]:
They were not going to events. They were just lost in their own inward looking self and just couldn't go home.

Tim Ash [00:06:26]:
The kids got hit really hard. My daughter is a teenager, and they're having the worst end of it. When I re enrolled her back to in person school, I was talking to the guidance counselor, and she said that the incidence of major depression diagnosis among high school kids at the school she was going had gone up 600% as a result of the pandemic and the isolation. So this is no joke. Social isolation is the silent killer.

Jim Banks [00:06:51]:
Yeah. I went to watch my five year old grandson play mini rugby at the weekend. And you watch this kind of group of kids, and a lot of them are Covid babies. They formed their two to four year old, should have had their best interaction with kids of a similar age, and they didn't have that. All they had was the interaction with their parents and if they were lucky, their grandparents. And it's really interesting to see how kids that you would normally see at five and six years old running around and everything else, it just doesn't look the same as it did. Maybe same sort of cohort from, say.

Tim Ash [00:07:22]:
Three or four years prior to hesitation. There are hot house flowers that were raised during a crisis. You can tell.

Jim Banks [00:07:29]:
Yeah. So obviously you pivoted from being like the demigod of landing page optimization. CRO.

Tim Ash [00:07:36]:
Yeah. Wrote a couple of books on it. This is that you did.

Jim Banks [00:07:39]:
And like I said, I got this book here. Tim was very kind to. He wrote. So again, for people listening on audio, I'm holding up the book to show people, like the personalized inscription on the front from Tim. Thank you so much for that. For those of you, it says, dear Jim, thank you for your friendship and support over the years. May this book give you insights into yourself and all of your fellow humans. Much love Tim.

Jim Banks [00:08:04]:
And like I said, I was honored to, obviously receive the book more honored to be able to sit down and have dinner with you in San Diego, like I said, with Dave. So do you want to talk about that evening? Because again, I thought, for me, the conversation was really profound. It went incredibly deep, and I think a lot of it was based upon the kind of content of the book itself, like this kind of primal brain that we all have.

Tim Ash [00:08:26]:
Yeah. As you said, the conversation was amazing. And what it is, I definitely feel it's not like death is stalking me, but I don't have time to fuck around, and I have to be closer to my personal purpose while whatever time I have left on this planet. And I just like to cut through all the surface level stuff these days. And I know you and Dave are definitely capable of going deep, so I just like to connect at that really deep, universal level. And I have no patience for small talk anymore or surface level stuff. I think we're talking a lot about purpose, about human nature, about what to do with our time on the planet. And that's the juicy stuff for me.

Jim Banks [00:09:10]:
And one of the things that didn't keep me up, but it certainly made me stop and think, was you were talking about China and what's going on in China and how basically China in the not too distant future are going to be completely.

Tim Ash [00:09:23]:
Yes.

Jim Banks [00:09:23]:
Yeah.

Tim Ash [00:09:24]:
Implode, I believe, was the.

Jim Banks [00:09:29]:
Talk to us a little bit more about that.

Tim Ash [00:09:31]:
Sure. I've been following this geopolitical analyst, Peter Zan, and he wrote a book called the End of the World is just the beginning, about the unrolling of globalization and the reversal of it. And he looks at things a lot from geography, access to resources and demographic perspective. And no matter what else is going on in China, they are the fastest aging society in the history of the world. And when you do the math on it, it's not going to be some engine of growth. They're not going to overtake the United States. They'll be really lucky to not go into massive famine and have a completely deglobalize and try to go back to subsistence farming. That's what's on tap in the next 10-20 years for China.

Tim Ash [00:10:12]:
Hopefully they'll do that without setting off some nukes in the process. But that's the best case scenario, unfortunately.

Jim Banks [00:10:18]:
And obviously, I think one of the things you talked about was the bad decision that was made some years ago to basically restrict the ability to be able to have as many children as you wanted, right?

Tim Ash [00:10:28]:
Yeah, the word child policy. Absolutely. So that stuff was bad in the. Because they're very, you say, chauvinistic society, that boys are preferred to girls. There's a lot of killing off or aborting of girls. So there's a huge imbalance, too. So you have all these really frustrated grown men now they can't find wives, and that's putting all kinds of other social tensions on them as well.

Jim Banks [00:10:53]:
Yeah. Like at the beginning of the podcast, I talked the kind of the forerunner to the actual episode itself. I talked a little bit about the fact that when I set up the podcast, I wanted to help educate the next generation of people in digital marketing, and I really wanted to focus on female digital marketers, because again, I think a lot of people, when they first got into the industry, it was like incredibly lopsided, like men to women. And I think it still is, to a point. Right. But I didn't know what your thoughts were around. What do we need to do as two old white men? What do we need to do to try and encourage and get more women with great stories on this podcast, as guests, on stages, as keynotes, those types of things? Because again, I think for me, it's a travesty that there aren't more of them. Certainly in the digital marketing space, not so much like elsewhere, but certainly in digital marketing, there's a lot fewer than they should be.

Tim Ash [00:11:46]:
Yeah. First of all, I take issue with this old white men characterization. No, I'm just kidding. I resemble that reward. No, but you almost said it in an apologetic way. Absolutely. There are imbalances in different professions, and that's based on the psychology of men and women being radically different, because we're really designed for different roles at the species level, there's nothing inherently things that women can't do. There are women that have gone through elite commando training, that fly fighter jets.

Tim Ash [00:12:15]:
I know some of them. So it's not like, even in the traditional warrior sphere, that women can't compete. They certainly can. I think in online marketing, that's actually one of the best professions for women because it involves psychology and persuasion. At the root of all marketing is that, and I think women are way better at that than men. They've been shown that women are more collaborative, better leaders. They have boards that have women on them do, on average, outperform the market by 10% in publicly traded companies. So all the signals from women's graduation rates, from college and women are actually on a huge upswing right now, which is wonderful.

Tim Ash [00:12:54]:
I'm super happy for my daughter and all my female friends, but specifically in the industry, I think you do need a kind of a critical mass of women helping each other. There's the LinkUnite initiative that Amanda Faris and Sara Malo started. Yeah. And so they're holding meetings at most conferences of link unite members and guests and mentoring women. I think once you see a role model ahead of you, that's critical, and you can see, I could be like them, and I have something to aim for. And so I think that the most important thing, probably single most important thing, is mentoring. So I think that comes with age as well. When you get into your beyond that, you want to give back.

Tim Ash [00:13:34]:
You want to leave some kind of legacy and pass on the culture, if you will. And so I think that as women age into that cohort that have been in the field, the most impactful thing would be them mentoring younger women. It's not anything you or I could be doing, necessarily.

Jim Banks [00:13:51]:
No. But at the same time, I think for us to be able to help raise awareness of the existence of things like LinkUnite again, there's probably a lot of women in digital marketing.

Tim Ash [00:14:03]:
Yeah, I remember there's an initiative a few years ago, janes of digital. I don't think it's around anymore, but it was another attempt to just get women in the industry to be more visible and aware of each other. Yeah, absolutely. And when I ran the conversion conference the last three years, I believe that I programmed it. We had a 50 50 male female speaker ratio. And that was very intentional on my part. And it was a little harder to find the people, but not that they weren't qualified. It was just a little harder to find them.

Tim Ash [00:14:31]:
So my go to was like, to ask my other women's speakers, it's like, hey, who else could you recommend? And then it got a lot easier all of a sudden because they're like, here's a list of 400 people.

Jim Banks [00:14:40]:
Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I know that there's a lot of high powered executive women that I've spoken to who basically say they will not speak at a conference unless it's got 50 50 men to women. Right. And then obviously there's the whole diversity, equality, inclusion. There's a whole bunch of other kind of things that kind of can cause some issues around that. And again, people say to me now, so I used to do a lot of speaking, loved it. It was great. Used to get lots of clients from it.

Jim Banks [00:15:06]:
Used to give away lots of information people. For me, it was a good exchange. I gave away some good stuff. I got good stuff in return. We all left there happier as a result of going. And interestingly, I think the last sort of few years, certainly since kind of came out of the pandemic, I've been a little bit more selective about where I'd speak and so on. And people say to me, do you not speak anymore? And I'm like, I do speak. And I said, but I'm a little bit more selective.

Jim Banks [00:15:31]:
They go, what do you mean by that? And quite often when I look at an event, I'm too old, I'm too white, and I'm too male. And I think in some respects, I'd much rather put forward somebody who's younger, somebody who's a person of color, somebody who is female to, if you like, take the space that maybe I was going to take on the stage because I know that they're more than capable of delivering that. And again, I'm quite happy to help them with their presentation and whatever else.

Tim Ash [00:15:55]:
I'll give you a little counter perspective on that. Again, as somebody who ran a conference and programmed it for ten years and obviously continuing to speak all over the world, I've seen this from both sides, and I think that there are also practical limits to that. And I don't mean that we shouldn't try, but I think it's pushed to an illogical extreme sometimes. I was talking to one conference organizer. I was coming back from a conference on the plane with him, and they said, hey, I haven't spoken to your conference in three years, because I'm basically like a white guy. And he's basically, yeah, that's why. So that's a reverse discrimination that I'm not a huge fan of. And I also think that balancing things exactly isn't the point.

Tim Ash [00:16:33]:
It's like if you get to the intersectionality kind of arguments, oh, you're not a soviet jewish bisexual nun, and we need those on the agenda. You know what I mean? It's like, how many ways can you slice and dice this thing to make the perfect world? And again, even just at the profession level, I can tell you there's going to be a lot more women nurses than women construction workers. And that's because they're smart and they don't want to be climbing around with a hammer in the rain, putting on siding on someone's house. So you shouldn't try to go for equality of outcomes. You should go for equality of opportunities. That's my basic perspective on it. As a first generation immigrant to the.

Jim Banks [00:17:13]:
US, to go and attend an event. And they've got maybe another couple of travel and incidentals per dms two or three days out of the office. The last thing I would want to do is to go into an auditorium. Let's say it's a panel and there's four people on there, and there are two men, two women, one black, one white, one chinese. It doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter the combination, but they're there to make up a quota rather than they're the four best people that you can put on stage. Who are the smartest subject matter experts on that particular topic. I will always take the subject matter experts and argue the point afterwards about whether this is the right mix of genders and ages and everything else.

Tim Ash [00:18:01]:
So I'll tell you a conversation I had with Jim Sterne, who ran web analytics conferences, and he was saying in terms of how selecting speakers, he would look for good speakers that knew what they were talking about and were with major brands, he would take any two of those three. And for me, being a shit speaker is not optional. You have to have that part. Okay? So, for example, I've been speaking for almost 20 years. I've invested a lot of money in this really high end keynote speaking program called heroic. And usually when I develop a new speech, I'm spending two years working on it and test driving it, refining it, rehearsing it. So there's speakers and then there's speakers, and maybe you can be a big fish in a small pond that speak at online marketing conferences because you're an agency head and you have a big mouth. That's how I started out.

Tim Ash [00:18:48]:
But if you really want to talk about impactful speeches, certainly at the keynote level. Yeah, I wouldn't sacrifice the quality.

Jim Banks [00:18:55]:
Good. Yeah. And I always thought you were a fantastic speaker before. I would love to see where you are now. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about this new sort of presentation that you've got for executives. Tell me a little bit more about that.

Tim Ash [00:19:09]:
I'd like to go back to my college days and just tell you the larger arc of it. So when I was an undergraduate, I spoke about, sorry. I majored in computer engineering and cognitive science at University of California, San Diego, and then I stayed there for graduate school in AI, neural networks, machine learning, whatever they want to call it these days. And then I went mostly in the marketing path and was in digital marketing for about 25 years. Digital marketing was a perfect combination of measurable stuff and the psychology, so the art and the science of it both. But what I've done now is I've come full circle. And as you mentioned, my latest book, unleash your primal brain, demystifying how we think and why we act. It's available in audiobook everywhere else as well.

Jim Banks [00:19:54]:
And it's fantastic, by the way.

Tim Ash [00:19:56]:
Thank you. No, seriously, it's much better than my landing page optimization books. And those got sold a lot and were translated. But the point is, I came back to my first love, which is understanding human behavior. And broadly speaking, that's what I do. And then I realized, since I decoupled it from online marketing, this book is basically like a really readable operating system for all human beings. What could I apply it to? And so I was looking for the biggest challenges that people in the business have. And demographically, with baby boomers like you retiring and Gen Z's being a small cohort stepping in to take their place, there's this massive war for talent right now, and we're all just commodities.

Tim Ash [00:20:39]:
How much can you pay me? Everybody who's hiring is a commodity, or I'm just looking to squeeze money out of you, but that's really not that satisfying. So this speech is about how to create a tribal culture, tribal in the traditional sense of the word, of how we evolved in a single tribe, and how to initiate people very consciously into a positive cultural package. That way your company attracts people. That way your company has a clear purpose. That way people are passionate and want to be there instead of just quiet, quitting for a dollar more and finding a better job tomorrow. So this topic, the title is the initiated tribe. How evolved leaders are winning the war for talent is very near and dear to my heart, because again, it ties into that sense of purpose and that leaders need to have a really clear vision beyond the tactics, beyond the strategy, beyond even the vision to create the culture. You need another layer, and below that is your personal purpose as a leader.

Tim Ash [00:21:41]:
You have to say, this is why I'm flying this flag. This is why we're going on this mission, and I want you to join me. And people that don't want to be here certainly shouldn't be, just to collect the paycheck.

Jim Banks [00:21:54]:
Yeah, that was always one of the great stories that I used to love of the leader in battle. As they're going over the walls to attack the opposition, they don't want to turn around and see who's actually going with them. They want to just know that when they make the decision to go, they go. And they know that every single person that is following them will go with them because they believe in them as a leader.

Tim Ash [00:22:15]:
Exactly. And so the leaders have an outsized role in this. And I'm not talking about what should be in your cultural package, the conscious initiation stuff. I'm talking about the mechanics of it could be used to start a new book club or a religious cult or a healthy company culture. It universally works, the principles I'm talking about. So you have to decide what to apply it to. And I actually have the participants in my speeches swear to not use it for evil because you can use the same techniques to rally people around really.

Jim Banks [00:22:46]:
Negative causes, of course. Yeah, that's probably where a lot of the kind of cults and religious kind of cults have come from.

Tim Ash [00:22:54]:
And nationalism and a lot of wars start that way. Basically, you whip up the other into being something subhuman and you're better than them. So that's the danger.

Jim Banks [00:23:04]:
Okay, so obviously, technically, you're out of the sort of digital marketing industry now, but as somebody who used to be so heavily involved in it, what state do you think the digital marketing industry is in at the moment?

Tim Ash [00:23:17]:
Well, to partially correct that, as I mentioned that my main, besides public speaking, my main work these days is executive advisory. So I am advising senior executives. Quite a few of those are actually people running agencies because obviously I have directly applicable experience to that. And so I'm there to keep them from stepping in the dew or save them a lot of time and pain just by telling them stuff that their employees aren't going to. But I do keep eyes on the industry, but it is easier to step back from it and to say, hey, what was that experience? Like you mentioned big agencies earlier, there's the WPPs of the world and the McCann Ericksons. They're juggernauts. They're giant machines. But really, there's no middle size agencies.

Tim Ash [00:23:59]:
Very few. Like you're on one side of that or the other. Most of the people that I've run into are parts of small agencies. And if that's the case, what I found for at least from the leaders of small agencies, there's a lot of posturing, there's a lot of I'm smarter, and here, download my swipe file, and here's guaranteed ways to do XYZ. All of this social media barfing and trying to puff yourself up. You mentioned some people actually haven't committed suicide. I think the reality is very different. The entrepreneurial path is very unstable.

Tim Ash [00:24:33]:
If you're a small business owner, there's massive ups and downs. You get buffeted around by historical and cultural and economic waves, and then a bunch of luck in there as well. So anybody that's quote unquote successful, at least financially, I'm sure that there was a bunch of lucky breaks in there. I guarantee it. If anything, this gets back to my theme of getting real. I wish there was an organization for people in the industry where they could just be more honest with each other. And I'm so glad your podcast is called bad Decisions with Jim Banks because I think puncturing the bubble of self importance and all those instagrammable moments is the first order of business. This industry is just a little too full of itself.

Jim Banks [00:25:17]:
Yeah. And the thing is, you highlighted about it being bad decisions. For me, it's not about, let's just talk about all the bad things that have happened and bad things that we've done. It's about trying to help educate people not to make the same mistakes that we've all made in the past. Right.

Tim Ash [00:25:31]:
Actually, what have you learned from it? I had a friend who once told me, you get what you want or you get the lesson.

Jim Banks [00:25:38]:
Yeah.

Tim Ash [00:25:38]:
The question is whether you learned a lesson or you need to learn it in a more extreme form because you chose to ignore it.

Jim Banks [00:25:46]:
Again. Usually people get presented with two paths to go down. There's path a and there's path b. Right. And you have to try and assimilate, which is going to be the right path to go down. And again, I think sometimes if you can look at inwardly at what your belief system is, that will steer you towards one path versus another. When I sold my original agency back in 2006, I had the option of merging with other companies to try and make my agency bigger. Right? So to your point about, there's a lot of small agencies, we were too small to get on the radar of your wpps, but I figured if we put two agencies or three agencies together, we could make a bigger kind of splash in the pond.

Jim Banks [00:26:23]:
So that was one option. One of the other options was to float the company. And when I spoke to the people who were prepared to financially underwrite, I said, what would my job be? And they said, probably 50, 60% of your job will be going out for lunches and dinners with investors and potential investors, right. And for a lot of people, that'd be like, fantastic, bring it on. But for me, at that particular point in time, 2006 is quite a while back. I just wanted to do search, right? I wanted to run PPC campaigns, right? I didn't want to do all that sort of crap, which is why I ultimately ended up selling the business to a publicly traded company in America that had a CEO, and he was the guy that can go and do the fat cat lunches and dinners and everything else, right? Turns out he was embezzling money. That's by the buy, right? But maybe that's a story for another episode of the podcast. But I think at the time, I made the decision based on the data that I had available to me.

Jim Banks [00:27:15]:
With hindsight, it was probably the wrong decision. But again, you've just got to go with making a decision. Sometimes making no decision is the worst decision you could make.

Tim Ash [00:27:23]:
Well, I don't know that. Also, this notion of agency, let me.

Jim Banks [00:27:26]:
Come back to that.

Tim Ash [00:27:26]:
I don't mean like a digital agency. I mean that you have action in your life and you control your destiny. I don't know how operative that is. The longer I live, the more I realize that there's just these giant forces around us. And unless you learn to surf energy waves of other people, trends, other stuff, there's a huge limitation on what you can do with personal power. So the notion that we choose, and we're the choosers of our destiny, and there's a clear path or decisions and forks in the road that we need to be clear about, I think that a lot of it for me now is just a lot of times the right answer is to do nothing. To be more in listening mode, to be more attuned to energies, and to let things ripen. Eleven, to mix two metaphors.

Tim Ash [00:28:09]:
So when the things are right, then the action flows naturally. So I guess I'm becoming a bit of a Taoist in my old age.

Jim Banks [00:28:17]:
Good for you. So what's the future for Tim Ash look like? What does that look like in the next, say, five to ten years?

Tim Ash [00:28:23]:
Well, I think I have definitely one more professional chapter left in me, and I'm now focused on doing things that are closer to my purpose. And I think, again, this ties back into everything I've been talking about, which is the most powerful thing you can do is get self knowledge. The earlier in your career you do that, the better off you're going to be in alignment with who you are and how to express yourself in the world. I guess you'd call it purpose. And I have an explicit purpose, and it's compact. I can put in a sentence and I use it as a guide to decision making and what I invest my energy into. I'll be glad to share it with you if you like.

Jim Banks [00:29:00]:
I'd love to hear it.

Tim Ash [00:29:01]:
So what I do is I co create a world of peace, safety and love through joyous expression and service.

Jim Banks [00:29:11]:
That sounds good.

Tim Ash [00:29:13]:
And it's not obviously anything that you could ever reach, right? There's never going to be a perfect world of peace, safety and love, but that's the direction I work in. So it's very easy for me to say, hey, when I'm confronted with this situation, do I put energy into it? If it's close to this purpose, I say, hell yes. And everything else is a no. So it's really a simple decision making guide. So if you say, Tim, be on my podcast, does this involve co creating together something, a world of peace, safety and love through joyous expression and service? Fuck yeah, I'm there, so it makes it easier. So I don't know what I'll be doing with my life. I love serving senior executives, I love speaking in front of audiences and passionately describing what I consider to be important things in the world. And so both sides of what I've created as a career consciously at this stage, involved my purpose.

Tim Ash [00:30:06]:
And so all I can tell you is I'm going to stay on that purpose of joyous expression and service.

Jim Banks [00:30:12]:
And clearly, Tim, you are incredibly good at what you do. And I'm not just saying that, I know it to be true. Right. I said I talk a little bit about we talked about our dinner in San Diego when I was there just a few weeks ago when we went out for dinner with. So we had this amazing conversation. Tim was very generous with, obviously, sharing his books with us, but also sharing his thoughts on lots of really deep things that had nothing to do with digital marketing, which, again, for me, sometimes it's good to get out of your own comfort zone and kind of talk at a much more kind of ethereal level about something completely unrelated to.

Tim Ash [00:30:51]:
I like to think of it at a human level.

Jim Banks [00:30:54]:
So for me, as we were leaving the restaurant, we were walking towards the exit, and this guy looked up and spotted Tim. Right? And he goes, Tim. And he was with his wife and his young son, who's probably like maybe eight or nine, something like that. I don't know. Would you say? And basically, this guy had seen Tim present as part of his MBA course in Brazil. Is that right?

Tim Ash [00:31:22]:
Yeah, in translation. I spoke at the phuket, which is a university with their campus in Puerto Legra in the south of Brazil.

Jim Banks [00:31:30]:
So obviously, as Tim said, the guy was speaking through his wife. She was translating. So we were getting a lot of this kind of stuff secondhand from her. But what was really amazing for Dave and I to stand there and watch was basically Tim's work. The kind of being there and teaching people had such an amazing impact on somebody that none of us knew. None of us knew who this guy was. I think Tim had obviously spoken to him briefly at the event, but it was amazing that this guy said that his content had changed. His.

Tim Ash [00:32:04]:
He. I don't think he actually met me. So I do it in front of a small live class, and then all the online MBA students are the ones that were studying it. So I did a series of guest lectures that he heard, and I guess he claimed that was the reason he decided to go into digital marketing as a career. And, yeah, you don't get that kind of feedback when you're putting out speeches or content sometimes, but I think of it as little ripples of goodness that hopefully continue to radiate into the world.

Jim Banks [00:32:32]:
So, of course, me being the cynic that I am, as we were leaving, I said to Dave, how much do you think Tim paid those actors for?

Tim Ash [00:32:39]:
You actually said that? You're like, yeah, those are paid actors. There's no way somebody from halfway around the world visiting San Diego would actually come up and say that to me.

Jim Banks [00:32:49]:
Because honestly, Tim, I can't tell you. It was so beautiful to see. And like I said, for me, it was just so relevant and worthy of the effort that you put in. Again, I know how hard it is to travel. Traveling to Brazil is not the easiest sort of flight in the world. Probably easier for you, but it's still a long way to go. It's time away from family and disruption. So to get that sort.

Jim Banks [00:33:10]:
Yeah. People say, oh, yeah, it was great, fantastic. But to actually physically see it in reality was just, yeah, yeah, thank you.

Tim Ash [00:33:18]:
And that's the way I'd say is I'm not a particularly religious person, but this phrase was attributed to Einstein. He said, coincidence is God's way of staying anonymous. And whatever you believe, I like the sentiment behind that. I think this is what people call flow state or something like that. So I get these little hints more and more in my life that, yeah, you're on the right track, you're doing the right things. Keep going in this direction.

Jim Banks [00:33:42]:
I had. It happened to me once at Brighton SEO. I was at one of the after parties and I was standing at the bar waiting to get a drink, and this guy came up and he said, jim, let me buy you that drink. You changed my life. I was having some real problems. You helped you talk to me, you said, you gave me some career advice and it's been like, fantastic. And I'm like, thank you. I'll have whatever I was drinking.

Jim Banks [00:34:05]:
I can't remember what I was drinking at the time, but again, for me, it's just nice to get that recognition again. For me, it was like, I like to help people. I always like to help people. My wife says I help people too much. You can't help it if it's in your dna. You can't change your dna, right? You are who you are. So for me, like I said, I just love helping people, and nobody's beneath me in any way at all. It's just I'm prepared to help whoever I can.

Tim Ash [00:34:31]:
Yeah, maybe you've been doing it your whole life, but to me it's partly a life stage thing. And again, something I talk about in the book, one of the things I talk about is one of the unique human abilities is transmitting culture. That's our superpower. We didn't adapt physically to different environments, and yet we've taken over the whole planet. And that's because we can learn from the tribe around us the survival mechanisms to be in a certain environment. But to do that, that means we have to be geared towards transmitting culture. So in addition to dominance and power and stuff like that, we actually get a payoff of prestige for teaching and helping others. And I think this kicks in and definitely the second half of life where you're a link in that cultural chain.

Tim Ash [00:35:12]:
Whatever good stuff you've distilled in your life, you want to pass it on. And so I think this is just a natural thing and it's a beautiful part of being human.

Jim Banks [00:35:21]:
And it's funny, I always remember talking to a friend of mine and his wife had gone into teaching, and she'd gone through teacher college and got qualifications, got a job teaching school kids. And I saw her about, I don't know, two or three months after she started. And I'm like, how's the job going? She says, the kids are horrible and the money's crap, right?

Tim Ash [00:35:41]:
And I love it.

Jim Banks [00:35:42]:
I could have told you that, right? But she did. She said, but absolutely love it. And again, people don't go into those types of roles for the money or for the kind of the good vibe that they'll get from the kids. They go in there because they have the opportunity to formulate what those people become later on in life.

Tim Ash [00:36:01]:
I was lucky enough to give a copy of this book to my honors english teacher from high school. Later became the principal of my high school and so on, but must be in his late eighty s now. And I saw him recently back east. And so I go, you get a book back from a published author. And a lot of that was the example and the passion I got for writing and communication in your class in high school so many decades ago. So, yeah, those things are very real and they're very gratifying with Jason Barnard.

Jim Banks [00:36:34]:
And I was talking about going to a school reunion and how important for me keeping touch with the past was I got the opportunity to see all the teachers that taught me when I was at senior. Right. And the first thing I always do whenever I see them is apologize for being such a dick because I was a dick at school. Right.

Tim Ash [00:36:51]:
He is charged that as well.

Jim Banks [00:36:52]:
Yeah, but at the same time, it's fine. It's no problem. We knew you would be fine. You were never going to have any issues. You had a great personality, and that's been fine. But at the same time, like I said, I still felt I was interrupting them from doing what they were passionate about just because I didn't want to learn. Everyone else that was there did. I shouldn't have been the one trying to disrupt it, to bring it to the way I wanted things done rather than the way they wanted it done.

Jim Banks [00:37:18]:
The curriculum, if you like, again, you.

Tim Ash [00:37:21]:
Get what you want or you get the lesson. So looking back. We're very hopefully different people than we were decades ago. Years ago, maybe even yesterday. I think that's really where Ian having a fixed notion of who you are, or specific measurable goals, I think is, in a way, counterproductive. At least that's how I feel now that I'm much more happy to just see who I'm becoming and become unmoored, not try to cling to the past or my image of who I was or what props up my ego structure, but just go, hey, where's this river going? I'm along for the ride.

Jim Banks [00:37:56]:
Yeah, it's funny, I posted on threads the other day a video of the very first video ever posted on YouTube. And I keep thinking, like, when you look at it, you go, how on earth did that one video turn into this colossus of a kind of business that Google has now? But at the same time, it's like people had belief in what it was rather than what it was doing on that particular day, right?

Tim Ash [00:38:19]:
It's a seed, and the seed has to be given the time and room and conditions to grow, but you don't know what it'll turn into.

Jim Banks [00:38:26]:
And that's the way that this podcast was just an idea that festered. It's been festering for ten years. I had Alita Harvey Rodriguez on, and we were talking about wonderful lady Jim Banks ages ago, probably ten years ago. We were talking about bad decision with Jim Banks. And for me, it's taken this long for it to manifest itself into the podcast that it is now.

Tim Ash [00:38:45]:
It has to be ripened. You're now bringing your full self to it, who's now ten years older and ten years wiser, and ten years clearer and on your own mission and closer to your own purpose. So it's going to be much more powerful now. That's my judgment.

Jim Banks [00:38:58]:
I hope so, Tim. Like I said, for me, I'm doing this. It's cathartic for me, hopefully it's cathartic for my guests, cathartic for the listeners that are listening in. So let's wrap things up. Tim, is there anything that you would like to say to my audience in terms of an offer or something that you feel would be of value to them?

Tim Ash [00:39:15]:
I really do feel like the book, again, it's not about marketing. This, whether you're looking for business impact and your relationships or personal development, this book unleash your primal brain. Demystifying how we think and why we act is a very readable or listenable, if you get the audio version, overview of evolutionary psychology. So this will help you immeasurably, no matter what kind of use you put it to. And again, you've read it. I've made it digestible and hopefully fun and dynamic. I'd recommend people pick up the book. More info would be@primalbrain.com there we go.

Jim Banks [00:39:51]:
Primalbrain.com. And obviously, all of that information and Tim's contact details will be available in the show notes when the show is published. So, Tim, thank you so much for being guests on today's show. I really appreciate your time and hope that you have a great rest of your week.

Tim Ash [00:40:09]:
It's been an absolute pleasure, my friend. Thank you for the opportunity.