MKJ 
All right, welcome back to the conversation with an amazing person, Brian Wallace. Welcome back to the conversation, sir. How are you?

Brian Wallace 
You gotcha, still doing great. Let’s do it, round two.

MKJ
So if you have not listened to our conversation about mindset, you need to go listen to that because we are now going to build on some of the very specific things that Brian shared. We talked about talent. We talked about hard work. We talked about certain mindset issues and consistency and those kinds of things. But I think most importantly for this segment, we talked about how you look at relationships and some of the things that Brian brought up.

We’re talking about kindness. We’re talking about how people treat each other. When you have a conversation, are they just staying surface level about sports and weather, or are they actually getting into the depths of actual human relationships? So let’s take that a little bit further. I know…

I know based on this, this is just our second conversation. I know that relationships are very important to you and they are what drive you personally, I believe, and professionally. So how, first before I ask you this question, I want to reiterate for the audience, the way I define the word innovation is not the Steve Jobs and the Elon Musk’s of the world coming up with new ideas and products and all that. I think of innovation. We innovate every day.

of the previous experience we have gathered, the tools that we’ve learned, the way we look at the world, that changes the way we look to our future and the things we do. So your pre and it actually has a title it’s called tacit knowledge. And so that tacit knowledge, which is inherent and instinctual after a while, we guide our lives by it.

So in that sense, I talked about relationships, we talked about mindset and how you look at the way you do business and the things you do, and especially now you’re looking at conferences. How are you taking that previous knowledge, that intuition, and now innovating the space of marketing and what you do?

Brian Wallace 
Sure. So innovation is really just applied wisdom over time. So when you have a lot of vet bats and the better you got, the better you really got instead of just this aspirational sort of fake it till you make it paradigm. That isn’t always such a wonderful thing. And I don’t know, you can’t believe all the little popcorn nuggets on the internet. Sometimes you see like, don’t believe everything you read on the internet, Abraham Lincoln. So, you know, there’s a lot of stuff that you should take with a grain of salt and kind of throw that out and adopt some new mindsets.

MKJ 
Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Wallace 
Hmm. So innovation is a very interesting thing. I really liked what you said because a lot of people mistake when I talk about innovation, when I talk about innovation as a function of the events that we just started, I tell people innovation is not technology. Technology can be used to solve innovative problems, but you can…

like peel a banana backwards and that’s innovation. Like literally the guy that started Ted, you know, like Ted talks before he sold it to the other guy, that’s his Ted talk is that you’re all eating bananas wrong. Is that tech? Did we need to build AI machine language, buzzwords, SaaS cloud computing, blah, blah, blah, tech babble. We did not. It’s a banana. Okay.

MKJ
Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, right now, that’s all right. Totally. I get it. Because it’s the easier way. So just try it. If you haven’t done it, try and open a banana or peel a banana from the opposite end of the place you typically would. And you’re going to be very pleasantly surprised that something… It really is. It really is. And that little black…

Brian Wallace
I wasn’t expecting to talk about bananas this much, but here we go.

Brian Wallace 
Right. Yeah. It’s cleaner. It’s weird, right? Like, it seems unnatural, but it is natural.

MKJ
thing at the end of the banana disappears. It’s amazing. Anyway, so yes, and this basically fits directly with what you talked about in our first conversation when you left the tech world. You were tech heavy and in that whole world and you started transitioning into 18 years ago, you said, marketing and what you’re doing now. And now that, so take me from when you first started your marketing firm to now.

Brian Wallace 
Yeah.

Brian Wallace
Yep.

MKJ 
and really specific, you got specific on infographics and telling stories with visual stories. How did that, how did you innovate that?

Brian Wallace
Sure, I would say that we’re in about three and a half evolutions so far, or revolutions, if you will. So version one of now sourcing was sort of a remnant from what I was doing in tech, where it was sort of a play on words of outsourcing in a period of now where I thought I was going to be a portable CIO, CTO, help you figure out vendors, blah, blah. And I’m like, wait, I don’t really want to just do technology. What am I doing?

MKJ 
I like evolutions, yeah.

Brian Wallace
So now we’re talking 2006 housing market crisis where Brian and the fam are leaving New York and weathering out the global economy crash in Kentucky, where we barely know anybody at all.

building this crazy company, but it was also the dawn of social media. So now we’re at revision two. So revision two is we’re at the awakening of a very interesting moment in time where there is a leveling of the playing field where instead of gigantic TV networks, movies, talking heads, newspapers, and whatever, all of a sudden a human being

can open a Twitter account, Facebook, MySpace, but I don’t know. That wasn’t really the moment where it kind of changed. But more like Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn a little bit later, stuff like that, and a few other social networks that went away that we’re not going to talk about right now changed the way people got information, changed the way people communicated. And it was very different from the first internet age. So I said, wow.

I still have all this tech floating around in my head and we have a small team, but I really like the human behavior side of stuff. And I took some neuroscience and stuff in undergrad and did a bunch of interesting stuff.

I said, wow, this is really interesting. So early on, we were a very early social media company. And back in the day, we did stuff for places like John Deere. And we worked with Jay -Z when the Blueprint 2 album was coming out. It was like the Wild West. And everything was amazing. And I wrote for Mashable for a while. And that was cool back then. But I don’t know if that still hits the same whatever. But here’s the thing. And now we’re approaching how version 2 becomes version 3.

Brian Wallace
I thought that everybody wanted to be a social media expert because they were just retweeting some blog post or something. So there’s like absolutely no barrier of entry at all. And that scared me a little. And then Twitter would change its background sizing for a graphic and you’d have like hundred people saying, no, what’s going to happen? It’s like, calm down. Like everything’s going to be all right. Like, okay, chill. So I didn’t want to be like everything to everyone. And I wasn’t really satisfied with.

iteration two of now sourcing. And then now we’re talking 2010. No, that’s not true. No, no, like just a couple of years after existence. Never mind that. So like 2007, 2008.

there was a website called dig .com with two Gs. And dig .com had a very interesting principle to it that we may never see in the world again. So I did say the redistribution of power, where you had major networks down to the hands of individuals, but just because you had a random Twitter account or Facebook account didn’t mean anybody was really listening to you. You could just have an account, right? Before they got kind of creepy and politicized and having everybody argue with each other and algorithms and selling data and social experiment,

crap. Don’t even get me started. We’ll save that for like show number four therapy session. Anyway, so there was this there was this site called dig .com that you would take a story, you would curate it, and if enough people voted on it, it would be on the front page of their site, which might as well have been the front page of the internet. Because if a site was that popular,

MKJ
I know. Yeah, I think we do. We’ll go there, believe me.

Brian Wallace 
it would have so much simultaneous traffic that the site, with few exceptions, would literally crash with simultaneous traffic. And there were 100 people, not giant corporations, but individual humans like you and me, that were responsible for 50 % of what would actually hit the front page. And I was one of those people. Or 1 ,000, whatever. Like a few hundred people maybe were consistently hitting it. So.

something interesting was happening in the evolution of who I am, what our company was doing, and the weight of the world, and how it was shuffling its levels and variations and abilities to influence others. So I said, huh, this is really interesting, and it seems like it’s a different model and a paradigm than what we doing already.

Tech by itself, no thanks, we’re good, everybody does that. Social by itself, no thanks, whatever. I don’t want to just do social media, whatever. So I said, all right, what are we all good at? We’re good at storytelling, we’re good at visuals and art and stuff, and we’re good at this weird, uncanny…

I hate the word virality because virality is just an amplification of good or bad. I don’t know that everything, don’t want everything. Like we don’t want Ebola, right? Like not everything like should go viral, not, and it shouldn’t be the goal in your life. In the world where everybody thinks they need to make some noise, you actually should make some signal and have people pay attention to things that matter instead of glittery glam nonsense.

But I digress. So we were good at these three things, storytelling the visuals and making things popular, viral, whatever you want to call it, influential. And at the time, there were maybe like two places in the entire world that were doing these weird things called infographics. And I looked at these things and I said, wow.

Brian Wallace 
This is something that bypasses the pseudo sophistication of the human mind that we’re covering for the subconscious of the actual human mind and all of the core emotions and all the storytelling and stuff. And I said, wow, this is really a thing. There’s even a guy, Jacob Nielsen, I think like 30 years ago said, people don’t actually read on the web. There’s actually a different thing that happens in your brain that lights up differently called chunking. So you’re actually looking for different visual patterns and structure and stuff like that.

So I said, hey, let’s go do this and stop doing everything else. And everybody’s like, what’s an infographic? Why would you do that? I’m like, I don’t know. I think this is a good idea. And the rest is history. And we’ve done this thousands and thousands of times. We’ve done stuff for every imaginable vertical. I don’t want to get into all the solutioning and all that. We’ll probably save that for the next episode. So I won’t give away all the.

the goodies of that and encourage everybody to listen to the next episode. We’ll leave it at that. And I guess I could say version 3 .5 into 4 is now, hey, let’s do these conferences. OK, full stop.

MKJ
So wow. Okay. So, everybody listening, I’m going to have to go back and I know there’s a part of the first episode where he talked about mind that I’m going to have to go back and listen to. There’s a one, you want to talk about chunk. There’s one piece of information where you used mind that it just basically went right over mine. And you did it again with the, when you were talking about the, the infographics and the stories and, and I love the chunking cause I’ve heard that before and it’s absolutely true. And I think it’s because of the overwhelm.

that we have with so much information we have to find a way to filter and so we chunk we scan we scan.

Brian Wallace 
Yeah, we have to, because the presentation of information is so different. You are incredibly overstimulated. Whether there’s an ad or not, and these infinite doom scroll things are destroying our brain, memory, ability to think, reason, act, react. Imagine a book. Remember when we would go to a library and use the card catalog and look at a book, and our brain was less crowded with insanity.

MKJ 
Yes. Yes. Yes, absolutely. And I think about my kids that way as well to help them. Luckily, you know, yeah. my goodness. Yes.

Brian Wallace
yeah, please read a book. Yes. I’m so glad there’s so many books behind you. So thank you for your service.

MKJ 
You are very welcome. Very much. That’s one of the topics with myself and both of my sons is what book are you reading? Wow. How do you like it? What do you think about it? It’s vital to our society, I think, to continue the human race. But I digress. But the innovation you talked about, thank you for taking us through version one, two, three, and now 3 .5, because we’ll talk about that in a second too. Because I still think everything that you’ve

Brian Wallace 
Yeah, I would agree.

MKJ 
you’ve talked about it, and it’s now becoming even more clear because your brain science, right, the neuro linguistics, whatever you studied before in undergrad that specifically sparked that, you’ve continued in that research. You’ve continued making that a very important piece in your progression, in the way you look at the world. And because of that,

I think it’s allowed you to be more, quote, futurist. I know that’s a buzzword, but it is. It has allowed you to go and analyze the situations that we are in, the social media. I call the people who follow the social media algorithms, I call them algorithm zombies.

because that’s what they are. They’re zombies to the algorithm. So any algorithm that changes, my gosh, we’re doing carousels in LinkedIn. nope, we’re not doing carousels anymore. We’re doing, you know, whatever. It’s a zombie -like attitude. And when you create a business, when you actually strategically set your business to follow the algorithms, you are a zombie and you will, your brain will die. I’m sorry, it’s just the way it is.

Brian Wallace 
I kid you not, I literally think that some of these people must think that there’s like some dude sitting in a cubicle named algorithm and how do we make this person happy? And it’s like, what’s wrong with you? Do you know that there’s like humans that look at content? Why is this the only way you understand the world?

MKJ 
Yeah, so we know that that’s not where we are, but because of that, because of that neuroscience, because of that ability to see things that way, you are able to know human to human is what we’re talking about. And so if we need, if we are, have humans on the other end of all of our marketing, then we have to allow them to absorb what we want to tell them in a way that meets them.

not tries to make them change and have the dopamine hit of the internet, of social media and Facebook especially, and all these things. So with that, what is it?

Brian Wallace 
Yes.

MKJ 
So how did you, how are you now going into the next phase? Because I love the fact that we’re talking about innovation and you have a conference called innovate. So tell me a little bit more about why you did that and how that worked. And I know I’ve heard this story, but I want my, my listeners to hear it because it’s fascinating. Yeah.

Brian Wallace 
Yep.

Brian Wallace
It’s a wild story. Yeah, it’s a wild story. If you ask me, am I going to put on a conference to really like go at the conference industry?

in 2024, I’d be like, I mean, I do a lot of content marketing. I’ve put together small events. I’ve done a lot of LinkedIn events all over the planet and spoken at all sorts of stuff. And I’ve been behind the scenes at a major world conference on their advisory board. So it’s not my first day when it’s triangulating all of this stuff. But if you said, hey, are you going to run like a conference proper and be the have this be part of the evolution of the next phase, in addition to all this stuff you do, I’d be

No way. That doesn’t make any sense. So it wasn’t like a comedy of errors, but it was like one of the most unlikely of places. Like if we’re watching Lord of the Rings and it’s like, oh, and suddenly this ring came to the Hobbit. And so I guess I’m the Hobbit in this story. I don’t eat like 11 Z’s and all that. Like I eat regular meals, but I digress. So because like we said earlier, I’ve been in the bluegrass part of the nation for a while, better part of last 17 years.

MKJ 
Aw darn.

Brian Wallace 
We tend to work with a lot of the industries that are over here because of proximity. So the part of the world has a lot of the world’s bourbon and alcohol and stuff like that. So a lot of the big brands are based over there and sometimes they hire us for marketing stuff. So one of my buddies that became the head of marketing for the sixth, the oldest bourbon brand called Green River Bourbon, and even has a horseshoe made out of glass in the bottom of the bottle. That’s really

Talk about innovation, right? You could have a glass bottle with innovation, not just tech. So pretty sure it’s an old industry. In any case, glass bottles aside, we were about to do work for this particular brand and they got acquired by a hedge fund and my buddy lost his job because shuffling brands. And the story doesn’t stop there. And it could have been one of the best deals we didn’t get.

because then he starts talking to the who’s who of this town, a small town. I believe they say it’s the fourth largest town in Kentucky. Kentucky doesn’t have very large cities, so that doesn’t mean it’s big. Its metro is probably 80 ,000 people, which could be a couple of blocks in California or New York, right? So who are we kidding?

MKJ 
Yeah, yeah, yeah. yeah, yeah.

Brian Wallace
But here’s the thing, this little MSA of maybe 80 ,000 people is the county seat and is the big brother of like a 10 to 12 county radius, so just endless land and ag in every possible direction, which means that they benefit from being a little bit bigger, ages and stages punching above their weight class in terms of political and grants and public, private.

MKJ 
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Brian Wallace
partnerships and all sorts of stuff. So somehow after all was said and done and the dust settled these guys over the last…

10 years, whatever, I forget the exact dates that they started and stopped, but they built a $200 million waterfront for 80 ,000 people. How much waterfront is that per person? It’s a lot of money. Like that should be for a city of millions. And it looks like it. Like we talked about bluegrass a couple of times. So imagine this in a contiguous mile, mile and a half.

MKJ 
Yeah.

Brian Wallace 
You have waterworks that they probably were looking at the Bellagio or something. The International Bluegrass Hall of Fame. A bunch of hotels right on the river. A beautiful river walk.

one of the largest children’s parks in the world, and this gigantic oversized convention center. So unlike a bunch of events, place matters. You can go to cool places. Like, where does everybody go for events? Go to New York at the Java Center. You go to LA. Endless events at Vegas. Sometimes you go to Miami. Austin’s popular nowadays. But a lot of things look like the same thing with the same Tom and Jerry background on repeat in the background. And sometimes you don’t

the four walls. So here, we intentionally went to something that’s a little bit out of the way. And everybody loved it because everything doesn’t look like that. Things aren’t always so clean and safe and affordable and intentional. And there you go.

MKJ 
And that again, because of your previous experience, you spoke, you talked to people, you felt comfortable with the people you were speaking with, you felt like they were good people, they had a heart, a purpose to this rather than just making money or whatever and increasing their influence or whatever that is. And you gathered together a conference full of people and you said, you just picked up the phone and called people that you knew from the other conferences that you

had attended or were speakers and these people and just said.

Brian Wallace 
I actually did more than that. I did more than that. Do we want to get into something that I did? You sure? OK, you ready? So I think a lot of people think that a way to get people to come to an event is you do a bunch of social media posts. Then, of course, everybody’s going to magically see that one post that you’re doing for five seconds. Even if they see it, they might like it. They might comment. But are they really going to stop what they’re going to do and go to a city that

MKJ 
Go. Yep.

Brian Wallace 
The two major airports that are near it are still a two hour drive? Probably not. So how do you get people to come? By inviting people. Inviting people that know you, that like you, that trust you, that have worked with you, that have heard you by reputation. So I literally did a ground game for months where I went to numerous cities and I explained my vision person to person. Sometimes some small groups, sometimes some events, sometimes some breakfasts and lunches and drinks and whatever.

And guess what? I don’t think there was a single city that I went to that at least somebody didn’t come. And I’m not just talking about like an hour away. I’m talking about people came from both coasts. People came from different countries. It wasn’t a giant amount of people, but the people that came all fit that whole column of stuff that I said through the gauntlet. They were all wonderful people that were generous and not scarce with their connections and talent and power. And they were all at the top of their game of stuff. And when you bring that

of that many people together, even if it’s 10, even if it’s 20, even if it’s 50, 100, 200, 1 ,000, whatever, the numbers don’t matter because what you’re doing is special.

MKJ 
That’s innovation, my friends, that is innovation. So you are continuing to do these conferences. Is that the next evolution of your business and your goals? That’s…

Brian Wallace
Yeah, sure. So we’re going to keep on doing what we’re doing. I have a book in my mind that for all sorts of reasons just has been delayed for a while. But I want to teach people the proper ability to attain and utilize influence. The word influence has been ruined over time by influencers that often take your money and go to jail and make conferences in the Bahamas that don’t happen. But we’re not throwing shade at anybody in particular. So.

I like the word renown, which makes me sound like a Renaissance painter, but just, you know, I’m not that old timey. I’m from today. I’m not from the past, but I think that a renowned person is respected that doesn’t treat you like that. So I want to teach and educate people that way by eventually finishing this book and writing it and having that part in parcel with the whole conference. And I want to do it again. We already announced a date,

same time, same place next year. There’s another major city in America and I also want to bring it abroad.