Phronesis: Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott J. Allen

Neal Foard - Shining a Light

• Scott J. Allen • Season 1 • Episode 261

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Neal Foard has spent 30 years in advertising and marketing, creating award-winning campaigns for global power brands like Budweiser, Sony and Lexus. For his work on Toyota, Neal ranked among the top ten most awarded creative directors in the world in 2002. As the author of an innovative talent development series, Neal was named Worldwide Director of Creative Learning for global ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi.

He has consulted on creative messaging for Fortune 500 companies, governments and universities and been a featured speaker at TEDx conferences. Most recently, Neal has gained a following on social media for his inspirational videos about the kindnesses of everyday people.

A Quote From This Episode

  • "Curiosity and humility. Boy, those are going to go a long way as a leader."


Resources Mentioned in This Episode

 

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

  • The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Plan for Prague - October 15-18, 2025!


About  Scott J. Allen


My Approach to Hosting

  • The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.

Scott Allen  0:00 

Okay, everybody, welcome to Practical Wisdom for Leaders. Thank you so much for checking in wherever you are in the world today. I have someone I very, very much admire. I've admired him from afar, and now it's an honor to have him on the podcast. Reached out a few months back, said, “Hey, would you be interested in doing this?” And he wrote back right away and said, “Yes.” And so, I'm excited for all of you to learn about the work of Neal Foard. He has spent 30 years in advertising and marketing, creating award-winning campaigns for global power brands like Budweiser, Sony, and Lexus. For his work on Toyota, Neal ranked among the top 10 most awarded creative directors in the world in 2002. As the author of an innovative talent development series, Neal was named Worldwide Director of Creative Learning for global ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi. He has consulted on creative messaging for Fortune 500 companies, governments, and universities, and been a featured speaker at TEDx conferences. Most recently, Neal has gained a following on social media for his inspirational videos about the kindness of everyday people. I will have a bunch of links in the show notes for listeners to access those. Sir, what's not in your bio that maybe listeners should know about you? What do you think? 

 

Neal Foard  1:14  

I can't think of anything relevant to say in response to that question, except that I am a northern Californian who has relocated to Southern Cal, and that, I think, is the equivalent of any kind of traitor to the cause. I grew up in Oakland, California. And as a proud northern Californian, you develop a sort of chip on your shoulder about Southern Cal, and you secretly hate them, or openly in some cases. And when I moved to Los Angeles, I discovered, “Oh my god, I love it down here. This is fantastic.” And then, to add to that, when you grow up in the Bay Area, you think of San Francisco as a global city that is nonpareil. Nothing compares. And then I lived in Jersey and worked in New York City, and thought, “Oh, my God, I love this place. I never want to leave.” So, I think what this teaches me is that, you know what? You can get by anywhere if you have the right attitude.

 

Scott Allen  2:16 

(Laughs) Oh, that's awesome. I was telling you before we started recording that I had done an event this summer with Lexus, and some of your videos were featured. I had not heard of your work, and then, of course, did hear of your work and fell in love with the videos that you've been putting up on YouTube, and just actively share them, and want others to know about that. So, what I would love to know is just what is the impetus for those very quick, they're often two and a half minutes, max, three, probably, but just a really, really nice shot in the arm? Such a beautiful way of getting a… So, I'll use them in some of my learning, the workshops that I do. It's a nice quick, it's not like I have to show a 15-minute TED Talk, which is sad now that 15 minutes is too long.

 

Neal Foard  3:04

I know. 

 

Scott Allen  3:05

So, what's the impetus for these videos? I just love it. 

 

Neal Foard  3:07  

I had a very small company with some partners, and we didn't have any money to market our organization. So, literally, you can see behind me this black background, it's just black chalkboard paint on the wall. I started shooting these videos in order to market our company. And, over the course of doing three or four or five of these videos, I thought, “Well, as long as I've got the camera running, I'm going to do some stories that describe my relationship with my father.” This was for the benefit of my children who never met him. It was quite sad to me that my dad never met my children, especially because, you know how the family tree is, you'll see characteristics in your son or your daughter that remind you of your old man, and it really breaks your heart that they never got a chance to see that. So, I started doing these stories about my old man, and one of them, in particular, my daughter said to me, she goes, “You know, you really need to post that on TikTok because it's such a sweet story.” So, we were having breakfast, the two of us, and we posted it from this diner. And, after about 20 minutes, she goes, “Hey, pop, I think you just went viral,” because it had 200,000 views in 20 minutes. And then we sat there, the two of us, for the rest of the day, just watching the count go up and responding to all the comments. In that single day, I think it crested a million. And then, over the course of the week, it had gone to 3 million. And then, somebody picked it up on Facebook, literally, like over the next day, and I get this call from my sister, Trish, who says, “You know what I've had to deal with all day? People sending me your stupid video and going, ‘You really should see, this guy's wonderful.’” She's going, “Yeah, he's not that wonderful. Relax.” 

 

Scott Allen  4:55

“I know all the stories.”

 

Neal Foard  4:57

Exactly. So, what happened was, from this encouragement and from that sort of feedback, I started saying, “Well, let me tell you some of the other stories from my personal experience in my family life.” And what I discovered, again and again, was when you genuinely go into the world with what inspires you and your human experience, it resonates with people because they feel similarly. Like I would tell a story about me forbidding my father from ever coming to any of my little league games because I was so terrified I would blow it. He was a great athlete, and I was not, and I was spooked that he would see me doing something stupid. And then, on the one day when I finally did something right, I thought, “Oh, I wish the old man had seen that.” And then, I discovered he'd been watching all the games from this hillside in his car with binoculars. That sort of thing people immediately respond with, “Oh, yeah, my old man, this, that…” And so, they feel a kindred spirit. And, from this, I'm starting to… I know this is a cliche, but the energy that you send out into the world gets reflected back at you. And what has happened is that, as I've told these stories about my family, my upbringing, the things that I find inspiring, or the things that drive me crazy, what has happened is that the universe feeds me back a similar energy, and it's incredibly reassuring. So, one day I was losing my temper over some… I don't know what it was, some kind of online thing, and my daughter says to me, “Dad, you got to remember that's off-brand for you. You can't behave like this. People are going to be very upset if they see you being like this.” So it has had the effect. My posts on social media has had the effect of making me literally a better person because I have to live up to this.

 

Scott Allen  6:53 

(Laughs) You don't want to be followed by… Who are the people in LA that are going to follow you, the paparazzi, and they're going to catch you off-brand. 

Neal Foard  7:01  

Fortunately for me, whatever dreams I have of being really big on social media, actually, I'm never going to be that big. I think I've topped out at under a half mil. But it's a tribe. It's a tribe of people who feel similarly, and they like being reassured that we're not all bad. Our news media, now powered by algorithms, knows that outrage sells. That rage baiting and portrayals… A really good example is “reality” TV. I say reality in quotes. “Reality” TV where they literally will sleep deprive the people on the shows and liquor them up, deliberately trying to provoke their worst angels because when people are nice to each other it's boring. The problem is that when you do this drum beat, this incessant portrayal of human beings as monsters, it's depressing, and it gives people the wrong impression of one another. So, I'm doing my very, very small part of being an antidote to that, and saying people aren't as bad as you think they are, or they're not as bad as you're being told. The evidence is abundant. Let's look at right now like Hurricane Helene and the current circumstances, you can see examples over and over of people being incredibly generous with one another and taking care of one another. And I'm going to visit a business in Gadsden, Alabama, they make brush monster equipment. They make equipment for clearing land and cutting down trees that need to go under buildings and so on. And they're completely stopping what they're doing and shifting to helping people in North Carolina that suffered from the hurricane. That kind of thing. When disaster strikes, people are at their best. And so, it's not going to be a hellscape of roving bands of armed cannibals when problems happen, it's the exact opposite. But we get fed this media portrayal again and again, and it starts to make people think that they need to arm themselves and bunker up and stockpile toilet paper. Relax, bro.

 

Scott Allen  9:14 

It reminds me, I don't know if you recall early in the pandemic, John Krasinski had that show, some good…

 

Neal Foard  9:20  

Yeah. It was really good. 

 

Scott Allen  9:24 

It was. It was so good. And, to your point, listeners of the podcast, they've heard me lament a time or two. Yes, it's fascinating to me that we have this device, or these devices, that will feed us the six things that went wrong in the country today in our community…

 

Neal Foard  9:40

Six, lucky to get [Inaudible 9:41]

 

Scott Allen  9:41

But there's literally, to your point, what do we have that can offset that? There's millions of acts of goodness. Hundreds of millions of people went to work today. They were good people, they actually helped someone else in the process. Yet, we don't have a filter to give that its due. And, in a way, I think your videos, they do that in a really nice, bite-sized way. It's a power pellet. It's almost like they arm you with, “Okay, yeah.” And they reorient -- maybe that's the word I'm looking for -- reorient people to some common human elements that are that positive side of the world. And I love your ‘you get back what you put out.’ There's a, “Life is like an echo, what you put out comes back.” There's that quote, I forget…

 

Neal Foard  10:33  

I'm learning it more now. I really wish I'd known, or I wish I'd had the sensation of feeling what I've felt in the last two years. I wish I'd had that in my 20s, I wouldn't have walked around with such vibrating anger that everybody was out to get me. I had a very bad temper in my 20s. As you get older, it tends to wear down a little bit unless it gets provoked by constant rage-baiting. But let's think of it in a leadership context because I think that it is the role of a leader in a workplace to reassure people that in order to achieve a high degree of teamplay, of interdependence, and reliance, and trustworthiness among people, you need to feed them a self image that's positive. The Pygmalion effect, the idea that people will live up to the expectations you have for them. And if you are this type of person who vibrates all the time with, “Nobody wants to work anymore,” you're going to get that in response, as opposed to… Let me give you an example that I just heard, it was the most beautiful turn of phrase. I happen to really like Gen Z, the reason I like Gen Z so much is they're so media savvy. So, it's no accident that they take advantage of social media, they use their phones as little miniature movie studios. And again, I'll see examples of people who just have a real knack. They're native to the space, so they do a really tremendous job of doing these little short videos. A friend at a very fancy restaurant… I was at a table with four executives and two were startup executives, and one was singing that same old song about how nobody wants to work anymore. By the way, they've been singing that song since the 12th century BC.

 

Scott Allen  12:24 

Yeah. Roman emperors. Like, “Hey, kids just don't want to go fight anymore.”

 

Neal Foard  12:27  

Exactly. So, I got a feeling that's not new, bro, but one of the other guys at the table, he goes, “I'll hear that now and again., but, I got to tell you, I overheard one of my managers say when somebody else complained that he couldn't get this kid to work, is he said, ‘I know that kid,’ and he said, ‘He is holding in his hand a Stradivarius and he's angry that it doesn't sound like a piano.’” And that, to me, was like, “Yes, exactly.” You've got to appreciate the strengths that certain groups of people bring to the party. Don't expect them to act and sound like you, instead, think like a college football coach. College football coach has got a roster of young people. Now, do you want to win? Absolutely, I want to win. Then your job is to do the old Vince Lombardi trick, which is do what you can with what you have where you are. Don't expect Michael Urban to walk in here, you're not going to get Megatron. You gotta do what you can with what you've got, which means you have to exploit what they're good at and bring it out of them. Which means you’ve got to be a good listener, you've got to be a good observer. And you say, 
“You know what? I don't think they should be a fullback, I think they should be a tight end.” Or the number of times this quarterback down there at Vanderbilt just smoked Alabama.

 

Scott Allen  13:58 

Be careful, you're on your way to Alabama. (Laughs)

 

Neal Foard  14:01  

That's true. Still, you’ve got to admire Vandy [Inaudible 14:05] But I gather that he used to play safety in junior college or something, and then they turned him into a quarterback. He's one of these people gifted by that extraordinary confidence, that degree of self-belief that is infectious. Like a Tim Tebow, he just had such belief that you couldn't help but feed off of it. Anyway, this is all just my way of saying that, in what I do, these little messages of hope and encouragement and inspiration, I'm trying to be the antidote to the negativity so that what can happen is people can feed off of, “You know what? Maybe it isn't so bad. Maybe there's a path for us all to get together.” The greatest strength of human beings is cooperation. It's what makes us dangerous. And I say that dangerous as in, look, if you're on the…

 

Scott Allen  15:00

Really innovating. 

 

Neal Foard  15:03

Imagine us, Scott, okay, we're a couple of ignorant, flea-bitten… All we have as a tool is a sharp stick, and you're thinking, “How are they going to survive against lions and tigers and bears?” I'll tell you how we did it: Numbers. We said there is nothing more… Imagine you are a lion, you're a king of beasts and you're on the African plane, and then you see 30 human beings coming towards you with sharp sticks, and they're all yammering. That is, “I want nothing to do with this.” The great strength of human beings is cooperation, and the number one way to help encourage people to be cooperative with one another is by being a good teammate. And the way to be a good teammate is to be trustworthy and loyal and helpful and friendly and courteous. If you're a Boy Scout, you know where I'm headed. That's the Boy Scout law. A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. And I can think of no better… If I had a company, I wouldn't produce a document that says, “This is how you're supposed to behave,” I would just hand them the Boy Scout handbook and go, “Memorize this.”

 

Scott Allen  16:27 

(Laughs) I can totally appreciate what you said about Gen Z's and the Pygmalion effect, the opposite of what you alluded it as the Golem effect, where… I almost got beat up a few years back, Neal, in Louisville, Kentucky. I was in an organization, and I'd been with these younger members of the organization earlier in the day, and then I was with kind of the Silverbacks in the afternoon. And so, they were commiserating about these younger men that I'd been with, and, in this case, it was all men. And they were awesome, I had a great morning with them. It was a great conversation, it was a lot of fun. And so, I get into the afternoon, and it becomes this dialog, “They don't want to work, they don't know what work is.” This whole kind of. “All they want is a trophy. And they want rewards.” I looked at this one gentleman in particular, and I said, “So how old are you, sir?” And he said, “56.” And I said, “Well, how old are they over there?” And he said, “23.” And I said, “Who was handing out those trophies and those ribbons? It was you.” And he almost beat me up, he said, “I wasn’t handing…” But we also miss that. We miss what we've contributed to. And, to your point, I think, in the classroom, I learned so much from… Because before Gen Z's, it was millennials that we like to [Inaudible 17:47]about. And I was a Gen Xer, we were all lost in our… You could get the film on VHS, the movie was called ‘Slacker.’ We were Gen X…

 

Neal Foard  17:56

Yeah. Richard Linklater.

 

Scott Allen  18:00

Right. Kurt Cobain. But yeah, this notion. And I think it's so true in leadership as well, what you put out comes back. And even when you show kindness in certain instances, it's not going to come back, and…

 

Neal Foard  18:08  

Absolutely. You can't go in with the expectation that's what's going to happen. 

 

Scott Allen  18:13 

No, not always, for sure. But are you going to be better off and are you going to win more of the time? Yeah. Showing up with care and love and kindness and curiosity, versus judgment and blame and criticism. Yes.

 

Neal Foard  18:27  

There's a truism, the older I get the more I believe this is so, which is, if that 56-year-old or 53-year-old, or whatever he was, if he was born at the same time as the rest of that generation, he'd be doing exactly the same thing they're doing.

 

Scott Allen  18:40

100%

 

Neal Foard  18:42

What makes you think you're so special? And the generation that complained about you, if you had been born into their circumstances, likewise, you would behave as they behave. There's a failure of recognition that human beings haven't changed in 100,000 years. And that, in that time, they all complained about the next generation, they all moaned about the previous generation. It's very much like the phenomenon, I don't know if I can swear on your program, but…

 

Scott Allen  19:10

Go for it. 

 

Neal Foard  19:11

You're in traffic, the guy ahead of you is an idiot and the guy behind you is an asshole. That is the human condition. And the one solid truth about anybody that pilots a motor vehicle is everybody thinks they are a better-than-average driver. Okay. What we have to recognize as leaders in particular is, if you were in the same situation as that other person, you would likely respond exactly the same way. So, you've got to grant a certain amount of grace. And, as we were saying before, the great human superpower is cooperation. So, part of amplifying a cooperative spirit is to be a very good listener. And take advantage of what can somebody tell me about the circumstances they have confronted here, what their problems are? How can I take that information and combine it with what I know so that the two of us will both be smarter about this? This is just old-fashioned blocking and tackling, but it begins with the appreciation for the fact that, if I had lived through what they lived through, I would probably see the world the same way. Our political disagreements right now are not happening because we're all different kinds of people, they're happening because we're listening to different inputs. And it's really important that we grant some latitude and license for… That dude, he probably hasn't heard the same facts I've heard, and I have not heard the same facts he's heard, so therefore, let me not assume he or she is a bad person.

 

Scott Allen  20:48 

Entering from a place of curiosity and a little bit of humility is important.

 

Neal Foard  20:52  

Yeah. I love that. Curiosity and humility, boy, those are going to go a long way as a leader. There is a beauty to a workplace. A workplace can provide you with something family life can't, leisure time can't. In many cases, there have been days on the job when I was vastly happier than on vacation, and you've probably had the same experience. A workplace can be a magical environment of camaraderie and satisfaction. And even when you work very hard, if you win something or you achieve some metric, and it was a team activity, the sense of belonging is so profound. Drinks after work are just so deeply satisfying. I'll give you an example of how… I was hosting a client in the Bahamas. Oh God, it was so ritzy, it was that place called Atlantis. Super ritzy resort. Super Ritz. I was paying the bills because, on behalf of my employer, we were hosting this group of clients. And I had this guy out to breakfast, we both had something simple like bacon and eggs and juice and coffee. And this was years ago, and I think the bill was something like $170. So, I'm putting down the company credit card, but he can see the look on my face when I look at this check, and he laughs and he goes, “It's a lot, isn't it?” I go, “Yeah, it's a lot.” And he goes, “Tell the truth, you and I would be having more fun if we were eating pizza off the hood of my car right now.” And I go, “Oh, my God, Paul, that's exact… That is so correct.” All this luxury and all of the surroundings are meaningless compared to the significance of the company that you're in. This is something about the workplace where any leader, really, if they just lean into it a little bit, I think they can create an environment where they can give people things to win at. And there's nothing as wonderful as working together and winning at something.

 

Scott Allen  22:51 

So, a good friend of mine has a quote, “Leaders create the weather.” Beautiful. 

 

Neal Foard  22:57

Oh, that's interesting. 

 

Scott Allen  22:59

Isn't that a beautiful quote? 

 

Neal Foard  22:59

Yeah.

 

Scott Allen  23:00

Jonathan Reams is his name, and so he shared that with me on the podcast one day. Leaders create the weather. We can take that conversation a lot of different directions. You could say parents create the weather, coaches, teachers, etc., but just a really fun quote. And I think at times in organizational life, leaders can get so focused on the fires, on the puzzles, on the challenges, on this and that and the other because that becomes their day at times, they forget to create those weather patterns. Because there's a lot of good, just like what we were talking about with the media, there is so much good happening in front of their eyes. There just is. Of people doing their jobs, people going above and beyond, people who are really knocking it out of the park. And it's tragic when those individuals miss the opportunity to just a very quick, “That was awesome. I can always count on you. Thank you.”

 

Neal Foard  23:50  

There's another angle to that, which is really significant. When an employee knows that the boss cares about them, then the boss can criticize them and they'll take the criticism. They'll act on it. So, for example, I had a boss who I just revered. He was so good. And he would frequently critique me, and he would say, “I think you may have handled this better. I think if you had done this instead…” Or he'll say, “You have to be so careful, Neal, about saying stuff like that among those people. You don't realize it, but you were insulting them,” and so on and so on. And every time he had a criticism, it really stung because it was like my own father telling me I'd screwed up, but I completely and totally absorbed that criticism and changed. But if you don't like the person telling you, it goes in one ear and out the other. So, when you say they create the weather, that is such an apt metaphor for this reason. Imagine a weather of non-stop heat, nothing is ever going to grow. And what do you do? You leave the desert, you get out of the desert. And so, a great boss will be sunshine, but also rain, and fertile soil, and so on. I think the metaphor, I'm going to start using it. Because you can't be a hurricane, you've got to be… 

 

Scott Allen  25:17 

But you've worked for that person who they were a hurricane, or that person where it's always a little bit 50 and rainy. “How are you doing?” “Crappy.” Okay. Have a great day.” (Laughs)

 

Neal Foard  25:26  

I do think that there are qualities of every generation that are not necessarily admirable, so you are allowed to complain perhaps about this or that. But I want to pass on another one of my experiences. I was in the creative industry, so I was in advertising. And, in the creative industry, your stock and trade is ideas. Your organization has to generate ideas. And to have a few good ideas, you have to have a ton of terrible ideas, and therefore your organization is very much where you have to keep people enthused about generating new ideas. You can't let them get discouraged, and you can't have them resorting to the same old thinking. And what I discovered was there is a tremendous advantage in diversity of thought in that workplace. We would brainstorm, and you don't want the same ethnicity, the same age group, the same educational background. You need diversity of age, diversity of gender, diversity of political perspective, diversity of ethnicity. Every diversity you can achieve, you need them in the room because what will happen is there are two phenomenon. The first is, so if you have eight people, you're going to get interesting eight flavors of the same solution. There's another phenomenon, and that is when people are aware that they are not going to all have the same opinion, they become better listeners. They've proven this on juries, that juries are diverse. People become better listeners because they don't want to make a mistake. They don't want to be accused of just knee-jerking to your typical response. They want to be able to defend their position, so they take more notes and they become more attentive listeners. And I find that very interesting. In my particular case, we made an effort to make sure that there were enough women in the creative department, we saw immediate results. And the guys got better. With women in the group, the guys got better. This is all just my way of reinforcing that if you're holding a violin, don't play it like a piano, and have no expectation it's going to sound like a trumpet.

 

Scott Allen  27:39 

Well, it's so much fun. And I know that you have some adventures ahead of you, are you able or in a position to share a little sneak peek with listeners? Something to look out for.

 

Neal Foard  27:50  

I am just starting next week filming episodes of a show called Good Company. The basic remit of the show is to go out into the world and find small businesses who are succeeding and who are thriving. But in their thriving, they are also good for their communities, good for their employees, and good to their customers and suppliers. They are companies that are an example of what I believe to be true, which is when you are attempting to do good things, you will get reflected back to you the energy that you're putting out in the world. Not every company that behaves ethically and is good to its employees succeeds, but what I want to demonstrate is there are lots of examples of companies that can be ethical, and good to their suppliers, good to their customers, good to their employees, and do succeed. Let's use the show as a way of saying, “What do they have in common?” And my hope is that people will see the show. We're being inspired a little bit by Anthony Bourdain, a little bit by Charles Kuraltz ‘On the Road,’ and a little bit by the Twilight Zone. So what we're going to try and do is make sure that it feels contemporary and fresh and interesting, and any business leader would be able to look at it as more than just entertainment. They would look at it and say, “Oh, that's a very good example of something these people are doing well.” And happily, Scott, I find that just a quick simple outreach on my website produced immediate recommendations of very good companies that we're going to be doing episodes on. My website, by the way, is nealfoard.com. My name is spelled weird, N-E-AL F-O-A-R-D, nealfoard.com.

 

Scott Allen  29:47

And I'll put that in the show notes. 

 

Neal Foard  29:49

Yeah. Thank you. But that's what I'm doing. And I find that this mission has me energized in a way that previous missions didn't quite. That this is something I deeply believe in and I want to spread the evangel of good companies.

 

Scott Allen  30:05 

I love it. We need more of that out there, and we need more case studies. And they exist, they're out there. Of course, they are. People doing incredible work in our communities, trying to make a difference. I can think of several in mind that [Inaudible 30:20]

 

Neal Foard  30:21

Oh, good.

 

Scott Allen  30:22

Recommendations in Northeast Ohio, you let me know. 

 

Neal Foard  30:25

Oh, by all means.

 

Scott Allen  30:25

I'll take you to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when you get here and buy you lunch. (Laughs)

 

Neal Foard  30:29  

Right on. I could go for that. By the way…

 

Scott Allen  30:32 

[Inaudible 30:34] outfits were very tiny. Right next to Christina Aguilera, you can see they're very tiny little people.

 

Neal Foard  30:38  

When they were inducting Led Zeppelin into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and they had the band, Heart and Ann & Nancy Wilson on there, Oh, my God, Nancy Wilson can belt Zeppelin tunes. 

 

Scott Allen  30:50 

Their performance of ‘Stairway’ and ‘Battle of Evermore,’ oof.

 

Neal Foard  30:54  

That was, I thought, “Oh, this is almost… Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, I'm not sure I actually want to see this. This is embarrassingly good. 

 

Scott Allen  31:06 

It's so good. I wish you all the best in your endeavors. And again, I'm just so excited for listeners to jump into the show notes, click on a couple of those links, you're going to feel inspired. And then, share those with your communities, and add them into your workshops, add them into some of the things that you're doing because they're just wonderful little shots. They're little lightning bolts of energy and enthusiasm and positivity, and again, kindness of everyday people. Love it.

 

Neal Foard  31:36  

Thank you for that, Scott. I appreciate it. My daughter calls them pop songs. I write these little pop songs of positivity.

 

Scott Allen  31:46 

I love it. Okay. I always end the show by saying, “What's caught your attention recently?” It could be something you've been streaming, something you've been listening to, something you've been reading. It doesn't have to do with anything we've just discussed. It could just be that you've watched ‘The Old Man.’ That's what I've been watching recently. John Lithgow, Jeff Bridges, Hulu, so good. It could just be something you've been watching that's caught your attention. What do you think?

 

Neal Foard  32:11  

There is so much that's so good. For me, I just absolutely cannot wait for another season of Fargo, and I can't wait for the second season of Severance on Apple. But let me throw something out for your listeners that I think is valuable, and that is, some years ago I read ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ by Dostoevsky, which I think it was written in 1880 or 1870. Now here's why I recommend it because it is very entertaining, quite funny. I found myself laughing out loud in spots. Written by some Russian author in 1870 and I'm laughing out loud. But here's what was most important, I left the book and thought, “Nothing ever changes.” Human beings do the same stupid things we've been doing for millennia. So don't get on your high horse thinking you're any smarter than any previous generations, you're going to make the same dumb mistakes they made. Why? Because it's in our helix to do it. So, I think reading that book gave me a sense of humility about what it is to be a human being. Don't think that the next generation is going to be dumber than you, and the one behind you is dumber.

 

Scott Allen  33:24 

Sometimes my wife and I just look at each other and we say… It's a sides, “Okay, humans being.” (Laughs)

 

Neal Foard  33:33  

Yeah. That's great. That's a great phrase; humans being. Exactly. I haven't done a video on this yet, but if I could give a gift to your listeners it would be that the extent of grace you grant other people for their foibles will be good for your soul. That everybody's going through challenges. Everybody. Even ultra rich people have their problems. In fact, some of them have way more problems than the ordinary human and civilian. As I am getting older and I am getting better at this, not getting upset about people that cut me off in traffic, and understanding that when you open a door for somebody and they don't say thank you, don't get upset about it. You don't know what they're going through. And the more grace you grant other people with no expectation that you're going to get that returned, your life just gets better. Your day gets sunnier.

 

Scott Allen  34:26 

Back to that weather, your day gets sunnier. And, oof, yeah. I'll put this in the show notes and I'll email it to you, but there's a wonderful video that was created by the Cleveland Clinic that was really around this empathy. It shows these individuals moving through the hospital, and, above their head, it says, “Just diagnosed with cancer,” but no one would know. Visiting mom, and so you have all these people that… It's a beautiful video, I'm going to send it to you. It's very powerful, but it gives it to that spirit of, yes. And I think the hard part I struggle with is the ‘don't expect anything in return.’ Just put it out there and be nice, and then goes through the filter of ‘they must have something going on. I'm going to continue on and not let it impact me.’

 

Neal Foard  35:15  

Gee, I wish we had another half hour because we could talk about certain experiences that I've had. Some years ago when I had my 50th birthday, I did Ayahuasca. And the experience was one in which nothing much happened to me the whole time. And everybody else was tripping, and I'm not. And then, afterwards, people, sort of veterans who had done Ayahuasca many times before, they said, “Well, you have to realize this is a ‘unique to you experience.’ It's not going to give you what it gives everybody else because Ayahuasca is actually a medicine.” In the Peruvian Amazon, the people use it to get rid of parasites. It's serious medicine for the indigenous population in the Amazon. And, in your case, you don't know. For all you know, it was working on something really important that was going to cause you trouble, and you think nothing happened. Oh, brother, it was busy. So, I thought, “Oh, okay. Yeah, I could be…” This is the way that we all walk through life, is we don't have a full appreciation for how unique and yet how similar our experiences are. There's a great quote from St. Francis of Assisi, “A single sunbeam gets rid of many shadows.” Charles Bukowski would say, “There isn't much light against the darkness, but there's some.” The more you work on it, the more light there is. I have a hypothesis about Charles Bukowski. Do you ever read any of his stuff? 

 

Scott Allen  36:39

No. 

 

Neal Foard  36:40

Bukowski was a gifted poet. He was a hard-drinking, misogynistic, crotchety SOB, but my hypothesis is that when he would drink, two beers, maybe three beers in, he would get sentimental, and that's when he would write his poems of encouragement and humility and grace. And then, six beers in, he would start to get pissy. And then 10 beers in, it's, “All women are whores and all men are assholes.” Like that. So, I want to be in that two-beer Bukowski state of being sentimental about the human race. He has a poem called ‘The Laughing Heart,’ which is just beautiful. And then you can sense… It's funny how this single author runs a spectrum of emotions.

 

Scott Allen  37:30 

Well, yeah. Just even as you're explaining it, you just see this human existence, this spectrum of existence for all of us, in some way.

 

Neal Foard  37:38  

And he had a knack for expressing every dimension of that. And in expressing it, you're seeing another human being alive. And this is what you would have called authenticity. In his day, there wasn't anything quite like it. It was so raw and straightforward. And it's useful to read that kind of thing, even though you blanch at some of the opinions he has about women. But it's useful to hear somebody else's strain against struggles.

 

Scott Allen  38:12 

Yeah. You are an individual who's putting some sunbeams into the world. And, sir, for that, I say thank you. Thanks so much. Let's do it again, I'd love to.

 

Neal Foard  38:22  

Yeah. I would like to, and I'd like to take you up on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame offer. That'd be good.

 

Scott Allen  38:27 

I would love that.

 

Neal Foard  38:29

Good coffee.

 

Scott Allen   38:30

Okay, sir. Be well. Thank you so much for stopping by, I appreciate it.

 

Neal Foard  38:33

Cheers.

 

Neal Foard  38:32  

I hope that you will immediately go and click on some of the links in the show notes. It's just a lot of fun. Here's a gentleman who is choosing kindness, spreading some great stories into the world, some positivity, and, as I said, some rays of light. Neal, I hope the show is just a wonderful success. I hope your adventures are filled with love and curiosity. And when you are in Northeast Ohio, let me know. We have a date. Take care, everybody. Shine some light. Be well. Bye-bye.

 

 

[End Of Recording]