Intro/Outro (00:04): It takes a bit of a blend of art and science to get baking just right and having extra eyes, ears, and hands can make a big difference along the way. That's where Ab Maori, north America comes into play. We are the team behind industrial and artisan bakers that help optimize success. We'll discuss more on this episode of the Oven light, so let's get going. Flip the switch.

Rick (00:31): Alright everybody, welcome back to the oven light. The switch is on and here we go. I'm your host Rick Sach from AB Maori North America. Okay, so today we've got a very captivating guest and I met this gentleman a few years ago and we'll talk about that, but if you're ready for some action, you're ready for some energy. This guy brings it. So our guest, he's a keynote speaker and a host. He's an award-winning business and customer focused expert.

Rick (00:56): An area that I really want to talk a little bit about too. He's so avowed. Number two, tequila influencer in the world, in the non-celebrity category. He can explain a little bit more about that. Works with a number, dozens of Fortune 500 brands. He's a social media gurus, got hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and TikTok. He's an Arizona grad and a guy who has an unbelievable wardrobe of plaid suits and sport coats and even hats. He's wearing a cool lid today. Kind of the cabby style. So hey, we're with Indiana Zone. Jay Bear, welcome to the Oven Light.

Jay (01:33): Thanks so much for having me, Rick. Great to be here on the oven light. It's going to be awesome.

Rick (01:37): Sounds like you've been traveling all over the place.

Jay (01:40): Always.

Rick (01:40): We're going to lighten the mood real quick. All right, we have a thing on the show called a hot pan. Sometimes it's a quick take, but essentially they're just kind of fast little questions. So we're going to start easy, kind, warm up to the program. Favorite breakfast style baked good and why? Or does it switch on the situation?

Jay (01:59): It switches based on availability because I travel so much, you sort of catches catch can, but I got to tell you, I am a fan of a really good lemon poppy seed bread kind of thing when that's done well, big fan.

Rick (02:12): Okay, I like that. Nobody's said that in three or four years of this, nobody has ever

Jay (02:17): Said we're already on the right track.

Rick (02:18): I know, I dig it already. Okay, alright, let's talk to Kela. How do you like it? Is there a certain brand or maybe you don't want to get on that path or is there a situation, maybe a time of day?

Jay (02:28): The situation is typically when I'm conscious is that's the prerequisite, amen to that. But now that I have a whole tequila business, I have 17 tequila brand clients, I can't pick a favorite, but I will say that I mostly drink Blanco tequilas and that is common. I actually have a brand new national comprehensive research study I just put out called the Tequila Seekers, which is all about tequila fans and what motivates them and drives them. Tequila seekers.com if you're interested. And what we find in that research is as you go down the rabbit hole of the tequila hobby if you will, you tend to end up at Blanco, which is the unadulterated unaged version of tequila. The clear one, because it's the true expression of the plant and the craftsmanship, they don't have the wood and the barrel and the vanilla character. So most people who are sort of tequila nerds end up at Blanco and I'm certainly part of that

Rick (03:21): Crowd. Tequila seekers.com. I made a note of that, so you should too if you're listening in. So, alright, so we're talking to Jay Bear here, and one final last quick shot kind of question. Why the interest in hip and kind of plaid styles? Because I mean it's part of your identity and certainly you play into that. So how did this even start

Jay (03:43): Purely practical as a keynote speaker, as you mentioned, I am in stages all over the world pretty much once or twice a week, and I don't take questions in my program very often. I don't do q and a because you can't control the emotional resonance of that. The problem with q and a is the Qs, not the A's. Right? People don't ask very good questions in many cases or they're super specific and so then the whole audience just sort of tunes out. So I just don't like to do it, but then people have questions and I'm happy to answer questions, I just don't want to answer them publicly. So my observation was, okay, I'm in a ballroom and there's a thousand people here and the lights are fairly low and realistically dudes have a very narrow dress code in business events. True. It's gray suit, blue suit, gray suit, blue suit, and I'm like, all right, I need to find a way that people can find me after to either ask me a question or give me their card and say, Hey, can you come give a presentation to my company, et cetera.

Jay (04:36): I need to have some sort of device that makes me easier to find in the hallway. And I said, okay, let's do something that's brighter, louder, bolder. And so I went to my suit guy because I'm kind of a Frankenstein shape, so off the rack doesn't really work for me. And I said, make me a suit that's flat. And he's like, are you sure? It feels like it's a little loud. I'm like, let's just try it. He gave me one and people loved it and it worked where people could spot me right away in the hallway and then I went back and said, make me one that's crazier and then make me one that's crazier. Then over the last 15 years, every time they get in a pattern book, they call me like, this is one that nobody would even make a tablecloth out of, but Jay will make a suit out of it. So now they see me coming and now it's become a calling card for sure.

Rick (05:17): That's fantastic. And I'm thinking about this as you're talking about Plaid and I just popped in my head, recall a movie back in the set, the eighties, I believe Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. Was it Steve Martin maybe? Yes. Is that right,

Jay (05:30): Steve Martin, I think that's right.

Rick (05:31): Did you ever see it or are you a follower?

Jay (05:33): Of course. Yeah, absolutely. A huge Steve Martin fan in comedy in general, I watch a lot of comedy online. I listen to a lot of comedy. We have an amazing comedy club here in Bloomington, Indiana that I go to a lot, including again tomorrow. As a performer myself, I learn so much from standup that I actually spend a lot of time studying it.

Rick (05:52): Okay, that's cool. Maybe we'll give you a couple minutes here at the end if you've got some new material you want to work on

Jay (05:58): That? No, no, no, I don't do it. No, that's it. I don't do any material. I do speeches, not standup, but I do have that style right. I use a handheld microphone and I have a looser style on stage, which is definitely derived from standups for sure.

Rick (06:10): The material will just stay with the plaid material. How about that? Alright, so let's get into the nuts and bolts a little bit. I was kind of doing a little background. You're seventh generation entrepreneur and I read something or I saw a video about a license plate that goes back maybe to your grandfather and it says it's oak. So what's the scoop on that?

Jay (06:33): My been self-employed in some form or fashion since 1842, came to the US from Switzerland and opened a casket making company, which then parlayed into a furniture business and a regional furniture company, et cetera. That's the culture that I grew up in. My dad did not want to be in the furniture business because he was profoundly colorblind, which is not the quality you want in your furniture consultant. No. It's like, this is going to look great in your house,

Jay (06:59): Jim, that's brown. He got into finance and then restaurants and a bunch. He's quite an entrepreneur, started a lot of companies, and so that's the culture that I grew up in. It was never really a question of whether you were going to do your own thing, it was just what you were going to do. I actually started late. I didn't start my own company until I was 30, which is a whole other story, but my grandfather's license plate always read its oak because in the furniture business, especially in the Midwest where we're from originally, farmers will buy furniture and keep it forever. It's like it's generational furniture. And so they want something that's really sturdy, really well made. They're not looking for a deal necessarily, they're looking for lifestyle lifespan I should say. But what would happen in those early days, turn the century kind of stuff, is unscrupulous furniture dealers would make cheaper furniture, paint it to look like oak, and then they'd fill it with buckshot, so they'd hollow out the legs on the top and they put metal in there so it felt heavy. Right.

Rick (07:55): Dirty, poor man. That is dirty fool.

Jay (07:57): If you try to pick it up, if you pick it up and it's heavy, it must be real. So the slogan of the store was always, if Bear says it's oak, it's oak.

Rick (08:07): Nothing wrong with that. Right.

Jay (08:09): No, it's good. And they still use it today.

Rick (08:11): Okay. All right. Well, let's continue down this path. So you talked at the age of 30, you started your first business, and I've read where you have five multimillion dollar companies that you've started, you've written seven books. I mean, do you sleep Jay? Seriously, brother?

Jay (08:28): I am really good at only two things, recognizing patterns and hiring great people. I've been so fortunate. Not only have I had a lot of, before I started my own company, I had a lot of great managers, which taught me a lot. Sometimes people become good coaches because they had good coaches, and I'm certainly in that category, but I have been blessed beyond measure with the people that I've been able to work with, including my current business partner, Maddie Jaeger, who's amazing and does everything in our business. There's no way I could have had the throughput that I have had in my career without all the great people that I've been surrounded by.

Rick (09:08): Well, speaking of that, so we recently had Seth Godin on the program, and you're probably familiar with his work of course, and how publicly available he is. He's great. We've had musicians, a friend of mine who's a keyboard player for the band Foreigner on, we've had some sports celebrities on as well. Jim Morris, who's the inspiration for the Disney movie, the Rookie, and they all speak in different kind of places, but why did speaking come naturally to you? Or was it hard to pick it up? Or where was that instance when you're like, wow, I've found my calling?

Jay (09:42): Yeah, it's really interesting. They say, I've read this research that public speaking is the second greatest fear that people have.

Rick (09:52): I thought it was number one beyond

Jay (09:54): Snakes. Snakes is number one.

Rick (09:55): Oh, I didn't know that. Okay.

Jay (09:57): Snakes is first, public speaking second, which bad news if you're a snake.

Jay (10:03): I've never been nervous about it and I don't know why. My dad and my mom are both very loquacious. My mom was a very well-regarded high school teacher for many years, and I just had both of them had that sort of gift of veracity. So I was never nervous. Even when I was in high school, and I wasn't even an upperclassman, I was like a sophomore and people would be like, we need somebody to mc the talent show that Jay kid will do it. He's not scared. And so I'm scared of a lot of other things, but microphone's not one of them. And so the mechanics of it never gave me pause, but I never thought I could do it as a job until quite late in my career. Actually, this might surprise you, but I didn't give a paid speech until I was 40 years old. Wait, what? I did not give a paid speech

Rick (10:51): When I was 40 and you're 37. How does that work? I don't understand the math.

Jay (10:53): Yeah, exactly. I'm aging backwards. So I started at 40 and they inducted me into the professional speaking hall of fame at 47.

Rick (11:01): Wow.

Jay (11:01): So it was a

Rick (11:02): Congratulations on that.

Jay (11:04): Thanks. It was a quick runup for sure. And I just had always communicated in other forms and fashion, I was a columnist, I was a writer, did radio shows, did some television, et cetera. But this whole idea of give presentations for money was never really a thing until I wrote my first book, the Now Revolution, with my co-author Amber Nalin, and we did a book tour and went to 20 different cities and said, if you buy a bunch of books, we'll give a presentation about the book. And so we did that and people are like, oh, that was really great. You should do more of that. I'm like, should I? Should I then? Yeah, we'll even have you come do that to our company and we'll give you a few dollars. I'm like, really? And then all of a sudden, that's all I needed to hear. And we find ourselves where we are now, and here we are, 1200 speeches later. 1200 speeches later. Yeah.

Rick (11:49): Is that what the number is? Do you have a tally at home that's like

Jay (11:53): Not

Rick (11:53): A bell? No.

Jay (11:54): Yeah, I added up once a year. Yeah. And it's, I dunno, 1200 or

Rick (11:57): Something like that. That's an impressive number. Some people, they would be fearful of just having one. So well done. Alright, so continuing down this storytelling and presentation kind of world. I heard you did a little radio work at the University of Arizona. There's a wildcat, huh?

Jay (12:13): Yeah, I didn't do a lot of on air.

Rick (12:15): Okay.

Jay (12:16): I founded the station.

Rick (12:17): Oh, did you?

Jay (12:18): The radio station I did at University of Arizona, bear Down still. Oh yeah. Okay. So two friends of mine and bear

Rick (12:24): Down, by the way,

Jay (12:25): Founded the station.

Rick (12:26): Don't let that one get away. Really? Bear down.

Jay (12:28): Bear down. That's awesome. No, that's the slogan. Bear down spelled the right way. Not my way,

Rick (12:32): Unfortunately. Oh, gotcha.

Jay (12:33): But yeah, we started the station. There was no radio station on campus and I was into sort of indie rock and that scene even in high school, which just started a station and we did, and it was a ton of work, really gratifying. As I mentioned, it's still on air today, so it was a great time. Learned a lot, but I didn't do too many shifts. I did a show maybe twice a month. I was much more on the business and marketing side.

Rick (12:58): Got it. Got it. I went to the University of Florida and did broadcast journalism. Love it. And so I worked in the AM station for radio and did TV and did some sports highlights and stuff like that. But I'm going to give a shameless plug just for AB Maori, it was just announced yesterday. So we're getting ready for our big IBIE. It's the International Baking Industry Exposition. It's the big trade show for the commercial and Artisan Bakers in the US and it happens every three years, so it's kind of a big buildup. Wow. Only every

Jay (13:27): Three years. That is

Rick (13:27): Big. Yeah. Yeah. So Vegas, we're talking 22,000 people, so excited about September, mid-September coming up, but we just announced yesterday. You said indie rock, but I'll go, I'll take some liberties. Eighties band Wang Chung is going to lead off a concert that we're doing amazing with Duff Goldman from Food Network and his Band Rock. So that's going to be opening night September 14th. That's incredible. All tunes. Yeah, it's going to be good. I

Jay (13:50): Love it. I thought you enjoy that. Do you need a keynote speaker? I will work for Lemon Poppy Seed Bread.

Rick (13:56): We may be able to work that out. Okay,

Jay (13:58): Fantastic.

Rick (14:00): So hey, we met at the Killer Content Awards and this is the Finney's, and I kind of had that on our schedule for AB Maori. We tend to do things a little bit different. We want to stand out, we want to lead, and in a way it's kind of plaid, if you will, kind of our mentality. And that's where we first met. But have you been doing that one a while? Have you been doing that show or you like the annual guy or

Jay (14:20): Was that just I was for a while. Yeah, I think I wore up my welcome. That happens a lot. I'll do sort of an mc host role, usually three years in a row for a company, and then they're like, okay, we've seen this guy's ax. So I did all of IBM for three years, did all of Oracle Coal for three years, and you just rotate. That's fantastic. And then it's DNH distributing and a few others where I've come back year after year and then at some point, obviously we want a different voice and a different vibe up there, so it's totally fine.

Rick (14:51): So in the Indiana market, and I'm just getting back from the Craft Brewers Conference, right? Yes. With the Brewers Association in Indianapolis, and we've got two different yeast brands. We've got the Omega yeast brand, it's a liquid yeast provider. We also have Pinnacle, which is a dry yeast, and we've been talking a lot about beer, but let's talk about tequila, right? That's another hotspot. We have yeast that goes into that.

Jay (15:12): Yeast is the most important thing. I mean, yeast is, so look, there's a lot of things that can make a tequila taste one way or the other. Just fun fact, there's more than 2000 tequila brands, so it's much more competitive than people might expect. There's only three ingredients in tequila, unadulterated tequila, it's water, agave, and yeast and all of them have a role to play and obviously production method and equipment, et cetera, just like baking. But yeast is the unsung hero in the tequila of the business. It is the thing that people don't talk about enough that has a huge impact on flavor profile. The entire art of fermentation is a major, major part of why one tequila tastes one way and another tequila tastes another way. And there's a lot of yeast experimentation happening right now in the industry. As brands attempt to innovate and differentiate, you're starting to see a lot more use of champagne yeast, proprietary yeast.

Jay (16:00): And one of the other trends in the tequila industry right now, which is relatively new, is people using natural fermentation. So not pitching yeast at all into a fermentation vessel, but actually just relying on whatever's happening atmospherically naturally at the time. So obviously that requires open tank fermentation, and it's fascinating because if you do it that way, ipso facto, every batch of tequila is going to taste different because if you make a batch of tequila in February, what's in the air in February is different than what's in the air in June. And so some brands are leaning into those differences and using it as a calling card and saying, okay, well the February batch is different than the June batch, and this is a relatively new development in the industry. I think it's a cool way to differentiate. We'll see how it goes.

Rick (16:41): I didn't expect us to go down the path of the east, but I love that a lot.

Jay (16:45): I can riff on youth for a while. No problem.

Rick (16:47): Alright, so a conversation I had with some brewers the other day, we know in the wine industry they're like, well, vintage 2022 was a little bit different than vintage 23, but nobody really talks about that in the beer industry. And I would say the same would be in distilling as well, because the inputs are all different based on climate or the type of rainfall you had or just something shifting in the inputs, right? Can you talk about that a little bit?

Jay (17:12): Yeah. Largely I think in the beer business and overwhelmingly so, especially historically in the tequila business, the desire was for consistency. So if you get a bottle of X now it tastes this way, and if you get a bottle of X three years from now, it tastes exactly the same. It looks the same, tastes the same. You're trying to achieve a consistent flavor profile across the board every time, even though the inputs may differ. That's one of the arts of distilling and also blending, if you put it in barrels, is how do you make it taste the same every time? But now we are seeing some brands that are like, okay, well what if we didn't do it that way? What if every time you bought it it was different? And that's not only, okay, that's on purpose. There are three tequila brands now, again, three out of 2000, but three that are actually doing sort of a terroir and time-based releases. So it's the 2022 tequila, it's the 2023 tequila, more of a wine style, which from a marketing standpoint I think is really interesting.

Rick (18:06): Yeah, I think there is kind of an interesting market there for that. I did work for Anheuser-Busch for 13 years and they took, I mean they were really, really good at being consistent, taking a Budweiser in London, one in Shanghai, and one in the us, and it tasted the same. And water changes, water variances

Jay (18:23): From, it's a magic trick.

Rick (18:24): Yeah, it really is. Okay,

Jay (18:26): I have a story for you that you might not know.

Rick (18:28): Okay.

Jay (18:28): And my partners, my very first internet company were the original owners of the budweiser.com domain name. Oh

Rick (18:36): My goodness.

Jay (18:37): Back when domain names were still free.

Rick (18:39): That's

Jay (18:39): How long ago it was. And we sold the domain name budweiser.com to Anheuser-Busch before they were part of InBev, et cetera. In 1993, we sold the domain name. They were building the first website ever

Rick (18:51): For

Jay (18:51): Budweiser. We sold it for 50

Rick (18:57): 50

Jay (18:57): Cases of beer. What?

Rick (19:00): Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.

Jay (19:04): In the actual legal document drawn up by our attorney and the general counsel for Anheuser-Busch, it said, and I quote, bottles not cans. What? Keep it classy.

Rick (19:15): That is good

Jay (19:16): Stuff. That is a true story,

Rick (19:16): Jay, I didn't know that. And I was there 2000 to the end of 2013, but

Jay (19:21): Wow,

Rick (19:22): I learned something really incredible today.

Jay (19:25): That's how long I've been doing internet marketing. Right? That's pretty cool since it was invented literally.

Rick (19:31): So let's stay on the internet in a way, but let's talk about hosting your own program as well. You have the Spirit guides. So tell me about that one. How long has that been going and what are you diving into?

Jay (19:43): I started it last year. I've been doing podcasting for 12 years. So my previous show, social Pros was named Best Marketing podcast in the world multiple times. I did 500 plus episodes of that show all about enterprise social media strategy. When I sold my consulting firm, I stayed on the microphone for a year or so, and then we handed it off to new hosts. And when that show sunsetted, I'm like, I have some time in my schedule now. And that's actually when I started making tequila videos because I took the time I used to spend on the podcast and started making tequila videos, and then that blew up and now that became a whole thing. And the Spirit Guides is sort of a hybrid where it's a show where I interview other people who are content creators in the world of spirits. So gin experts and rum guys and other tequila influencers, et cetera. And it's about kind of their hero's journey. Nobody went to school to be a tequila influencer and nobody went to school to be a whiskey content creator. So it's like, how did this happen? Why did it happen? What has it meant to your life for this to be part of your life now? So it's a fun show and you get a lot of cool stories about, well, I was running a coffee shop and turned down I liked whiskey and I made one video and now, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a fun show.

Rick (20:56): So how do you handle it if you're in the non-celebrity category as influencers are, and then you've got guys like George Clooney, you've got a lot of celebrities out there doing

Jay (21:05): It. Yeah.

Rick (21:06): Have you run across some of these guys too in your past?

Jay (21:08): Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Especially in tequila, right? Because being one of the more prominent voices in the industry, all of those celebrity tequila owners certainly know the work that I do, and I've interacted with some of them, the Rock and George Clooney and Kendall Jenner guy, and some of those folks I've interviewed. Sometimes we've just exchanged direct messages behind the scenes on Instagram. But yeah, I mean the tequila business in the US is a 9 billion industry. It's a significant market, but there's not that many people working in it right in that way. So yeah, people run across one another from time to time, and some folks are anti celebrity tequila, and I am anti celebrity tequila if the celebrities are just slapping their name on it. There are many stories where celebrities have never even been to Mexico, but now they have a,

Rick (21:56): You want to be invested.

Jay (21:57): That's distasteful to me. But there are a number of celebrities out there who really care and know their stuff and spend time down there and have given back a lot to the communities that serve the tequila industry. So I'm not reflexively anti celebrity tequila, I'm just anti celebrities that don't care.

Rick (22:14): You are a guy that does not phone it in. I would say that for sure.

Jay (22:18): True,

Rick (22:19): True story. Yeah. For 50 cases of beer, by the way, in bottles. Alright, so hey, if you're tuning into the oven light, we've got Jay bearer here and credible character. If you do have questions after the fact, you can always email us. It's the oven light@abmaori.com. We might even send you some swag if you've got an interesting question, we'll make sure to pass it on to Jay. So hey, is there something about tequila that most people don't know? I know you kind of ran through the ingredients and pretty simple legend, just like baking bread, right? It's water and yeast and a little flour and maybe some salt and you want a little sugar if you're kings of wine maybe. But is there something cool about tequila that maybe most people listening wouldn't know?

Jay (22:59): Oh, how much time do we have? I know the

Rick (23:02): Roots, the heritage, all that kind of

Jay (23:03): Stuff. I'll give you two.

Rick (23:04): Okay.

Jay (23:04): Tequila is a protected domination of origin product internationally, the same way that champagne is, right? You can make sparkling wine anywhere, but champagne can only be made in the champagne region in France, tequila can only be made in a specific area of Mexico. In total, every drop of tequila in the world is made in a region the size of Tennessee. So it's not a huge space. Right. Second thing I will tell you is unlike almost every other beverage, alcohol, the timeline to make tequila is absurd. So you plant an agave, you wait seven years,

Jay (23:44): You harvest it, you take it to the distillery, you cook it, you squeeze the juices out, you ferment it. Then if it's an extra eho, you put it in wood for three years and then you bottle it. So if you get an extra eho tequila, which is the oldest darkest ones, that plant was put in the ground at least 11 years ago. So tequila is getting more expensive, obviously having a moment. But once you visit tequila distilleries, and I've had the pleasure of being at I think 26 different distilleries now, and you see how hard it is to make a bottle of tequila, you'll never complain about the price again.

Rick (24:21): Yeah, I was going to say, and my favorite artist all time is Tom Petty, right? Growing up in central Florida from Gainesville, Florida, he said it best. The waiting is the hardest part. Right?

Jay (24:32): It's so true.

Rick (24:33): So hey, let's talk music. Just kind of off the cuff, what do you listen to? What do you jam to? Are there certain bands? I mentioned Wang Chung, I don't know if you're the eighties follower or maybe the nineties is your jive.

Jay (24:42): I am, of course, because that was my genre coming up. Of course, my wife though is a huge eighties devotee. She still plays in that sandbox pretty exclusively. I am still an indie fan, so whether it's eighties or modern. So I listen to a lot of Radiohead or TV on the radio or bands of that ilk. And then modern indie rock as well. Although my second favorite genre is probably alt country, so I get into that world a little bit as well. Not modern kind of shiny country, but a little bit more singers, songwriter kind of stuff.

Rick (25:16): Yeah, there's a lot of kind of a return to folk music, a little bit.

Jay (25:20): Kind

Rick (25:20): Of a hint from

Jay (25:20): Americana style.

Rick (25:22): Yeah, for sure. Man, that's outstanding. Hey, so if listeners want to stay in touch with you, how do they get in the world of J Bear? How do they follow you? Are there certain things that you recommend so they can stay in touch on? Hey, where's Jay now?

Jay (25:35): Yeah, I pretty easy to find, I think the best thing to do, two options, one for all the business stuff. So I have a very popular email newsletter, comes out twice a month, which has, each episode has a story, a business story usually drawn from my own life, customer experience lessons, there's book reviews, et cetera. If you go to the bare facts.com, the bare BAER, the bare fax.com, that signs you up for that email. And then from there you can get to the website or speeches or whatever. And then on the tequila side, you can obviously find me on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, but I have a list of the 83 tequila brands that I recommend.

Rick (26:11): 83 that out of 2000, right?

Jay (26:13): Yes. Okay. So pretty tightly curated and people get that list and they keep it on their phone so that they can have it with them when they go to the store or the bar, the restaurant, et cetera. If you go to J Tequila, JAYJ tequila.com, that will put you on that list, it'll spit it back to you, and then we'll send you a tequila related email. Usually once a month.

Rick (26:33): I do get your newsletter and it's great content and love that and appreciate you sharing that with everybody. Alright, so before we kind of finish it up here, we mentioned Seth Godin earlier. Are there people that you follow or are there books or any kind of, is there a quote or a mantra that you live by that you're like, boy, I got to make sure if anything, somebody hears this today? It was impactful for me.

Jay (26:56): Yeah, I'm really fortunate in that being in the sort of content creation business for so long, both on page and on stage, I've had the chance to interact with a lot of people like Seth, who I really look up to and a lot of just absolutely brilliant business leaders. But I'll give you the quote because I can see it right off camera here. My mom gave me this sign when I started my first company and it says, remember some days you're the pigeon and some days you are the statue. And I love that quote, and that's why it's right in front of me at all times because it really does help keep an even keel. I think one of the things that hurts business people is getting too excited about your successes and too despondent about your failures. And so that quote, being on the present kind of helps me keep everything in perspective.

Rick (27:49): Yeah, that's pretty good kind of balancing, so you're not at either extreme, right?

Jay (27:53): Yeah, exactly.

Rick (27:54): Yeah, that's powerful. I appreciate you sharing that. Of course. Who's that attributed to? Because I've heard some variation of that over time, but

Jay (28:00): It's not on the sign that I have, so I should ask a GPT about that. Where did that come from?

Rick (28:06): I'll work on that. We can check into that, but hey, I tell you what, it's been a great program. Jay, thanks for joining the oven Light pleasure. And for now, hey, this switches off and we'll see you next time.

Intro/Outro (28:17): We hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Oven Light. Until next time, when we discuss more about the wonderful world of baking technology trends and more, the switch is officially off. Goodbye for now. See you next time.