Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode, a couple of nukes. As always, I'm your host, Mr. Whiskey, and it has been a while since we've done a Civilians versus nukes on this show.
In fact, it's my series with the least episodes, so I'm happy to sit down with a civilian and just talk about life for a while. I had a fever last night and woke up with a sore throat, so the bane of existence for a podcaster. So I'm gonna let Mike Roth here, our guest, do most of the talking, but he's gonna go ahead and introduce himself to us now.
Mike, would you please tell us a little bit about yourself, man? Sure, thanks, Mr. Whiskey. My name is Mike Roth. I run podcast based here in the Villages Florida called Open Forum in the Villages, Florida. I also am a podcasting instructor at the, actually the only podcasting instructor at the Villages Enrichment Academy.
And I run a uh, three week course on podcasting a couple of times a year back the next time we started this tomorrow. And. The reason I started the course is a couple of my friends kept beating me up verbally. Mike, would you teach me how to do a podcast? I know you used to do one in Cincinnati. I lived in Cincinnati for 25 years before coming to the Villages, and as part of my sales training and leadership training business, I did a podcast to promote the business.
And we had about 90,000 listeners. I did about 350 episodes before I sold the business, and the fellow who bought the business from me recorded the grand total of one additional episode. I. And then he closed it down and I, when I came here, I thought I'd never have to do another podcast, but the guy just driving me crazy.
So I said, okay, I'll teach you. There's a course in the Richmond Academy. One of the two guys took the course twice and he was a audio engineer for National Public Radio, which surprised the heck outta me that he would even be bothering to take a horse in podcasting. Took it twice. The other guy. Never did.
And I also run two improvisational theater clubs here in the villages where we, on the basic training level, we give people the understanding of the routines, the ropes, the things that you have to do in improv to be successful. And the other group is a advanced course for people who are gay with being on stage.
And we do someplace between three and 10 improv shows a year. Some of them are small for groups of, uh, 30 people like we did. Show on Saturday for 130 people. We did a show on Sunday for almost 260 people. The show was very funny. I, I like to include some musical parodies and the audience had a good time, players had a good time, and it keeps you busy, keeps your mind active, bringing.
Outside training instructors to help our people become better improvs. And we've been doing the improv course for four years. The Podcast Open Forum in the Villages, Florida. You can listen to them directly on your computer browser or your phone at Open Forum in the villages florida.com. And there is a list of all of the shows if you wanna find out what's in the show.
Most of the shows have a, most of the newest shows have a. Transcript available where you can read approximately what the people said. I use a lot of. Creation of the shows. All of my announcers are ai, much easier. I save time background. When I was in the sales training business, I got in that business for 25 years after I took a course called the San La Sales Institute when I was in la.
I was in LA for 15 years and I was there when Reagan turned off the Star Wars program. And I was looking for a way to grow my business while in fact we were getting ready to commit an act of bankruptcy 'cause we were dying. And I took this course and in eight weeks the business doubled in size and I was growing rapidly.
While I was watching my competitors go outta business, I was scratching my head all the way to the bank. My wife was transferred to Cincinnati, BYZ couldn't sell my business. I went to the training instructor in LA and I said to him, how do I sell this business? And he says to me, find someone who doesn't need to buy it.
And, and then use the Sandler techniques on him. And the second person I talked to slapped the cash down on the table. He paid me more than I thought it was worth in cash, and then he paid me on payments an equal amount over the next nine years. Wow. It was very easy for me to buy into the Sandler system and the franchise.
And we were successful in Cincinnati. We came unhappy with franchises, but the business was successful and I made my clients successful and scope improved. It changed. We added sales, management, management, enterprise selling, and the customer service, and it was. A good thing we did in the beginning. It was training from the book that probably lasted for the first year, and that got boring.
And I adopted a, a system of entertainment where everything was broken up into increments of no more than 15 minutes. There were exercises, sometimes comedy, sometimes magic, to keep the players, the people in the glass entertained. Interested and engaged. That worked like a job. Another interesting thing that I discovered was that the salespeople in general were pretty psychologically screwed up.
They needed help and. Through the training, I could fix them in two or three years, but most people would drop out before that period of time. Or they people learn by long-term positive reinforcement training. And if they drop out in eight months, when they need three years worth of training, they're gonna say it didn't work.
And I didn't like that. So I stumbled into something called eye movement. Desensitization and reprocessing are for short, and it's a psychological technique, and in fact, when I heard about it, I said, gee, this is crazy. It's not never gonna work. So I was given a book on EMDR, and probably the first page in the book was a.
Prefix, which was an endorsement by the FB, and they said they used EMDR to cure the host trauma ions caused in the people who survived the Oklahoma City bombing. Interesting. When I read the book, I said to myself, gee whiz, trauma, Oklahoma City bombing was a big T trauma. People could remember it. People have traumas when they're children and they repress and distort.
The trauma was in their childhood, right? And it affects their everyday life. So we, I engaged an EMDR therapist to work with my salespeople who had a, an indicator in the conscious level of what their problem was. Now, now to test the EMDR process, even though it had the endorsement of the FBI, I said I am gonna be client number one for the EMDR and.
I said, I don't have any problems, but I'll go through it. And in my first EMDR session, I left crying, couldn't believe it. Wow. Because I relived a childhood trauma. That happened probably when I was nine years old, that I had completely repressed Wow. And misidentified in my. Just brain. So it, it worked for me and I discovered that there were outward signs that people had of trauma that, that were depressed.
I would ask questions like, did your, either one of your parents or anyone in your family die before you were 18? The death of a parent, major traumatic incident, agreed, uh, a major accident. A, an injury or a loss, and we had a probably about 85% success ratio with the MDR, with our salespeople. Most of them, they would buy into a an MDR set of sessions of six sessions, and less than half of them, less than half needed, all six by the time.
We got to the third session, about 50% of them were called themselves cured, and when they went on to be more successful in sales. I consider it a success. That's a little bit of the background of what I've done. The open forum in the Village podcast is designed, it was originally designed for villagers to be by villagers, and we're expanding the scope a little bit.
I've done over 110 episodes now. We have about 7,000 regular listeners, and as we do, as we view the statistics, it becomes clear. That a show that has the word cancer in the title is much more listened to than a show that's not in the medical area. And we have, uh, a number of shows on Alzheimer's. We've talked a little bit about diabetes, and we're gonna be talking more about that this year coming up.
We do one show a week, which is released every Friday morning at 9:00 AM Oh yeah. Yeah. Mike, what I'm trying to track here is you were a salesperson and then you sold the business, and then you ended up training salespeople. Correct.
Yes. Yeah. I started out, believe it or not, as a political aid to Mayor Lindsay in New York City. That lasted for probably 18 months before I discovered I disliked. I. Politicians. Yeah. Every time I, I saw them, Lindsay or any of us deputies, deputy mayors, everyone was wearing makeup five days a week as a kid, fresh outta college, that, that was driving me crazy and Right.
Uh, I wound up doing a radio show with Mayor Lindsay. It was like nine 9:00 PM on WNYC. And we would go, I had to go into Manhattan, up to the town studio, and we sat across the desk for Mailin and I talked to him every week. Okay. And what drove me crazy, it was one night. It was a nice night outside. I had a light coat on.
As we left the studio, Lindsay had a heavy trench coat on, and as soon as we stepped outside, he rolled up the collar okay and pulled his hat down and I said to him, why are you doing that? It's not that cold. He said to me, I don't want anyone to recognize me. Yeah. Yeah, I can imagine. Okay. Very good. I got to learn more about political game than I wanted to, and I had a chance to go into sales.
I didn't know if I'd like it. I took a telephone sales jobs with a company called Tenco and sold thin peeled polyurethane foam. I. About a year and discovered that I actually could sell, but other people were taking credit for the sales that I made. That sounds about right. Yeah. I said that that's enough for Tenco and I, uh, went over to the Burrows Corporation where they had me selling, adding machines and calculators and multiplying machines door to door.
In New York City, in the jewelry district and in fellow center, and it was great training. He got a lot a chance to do a lot of calls. I learned what worked. I learned what didn't work right. I was very successful. They promoted me into the computer group, into the accounting machine group, and then the computer.
Accounting computers. I was actually the first desktop computer. The boroughs L 2000 sold a heck of a lock. A lot of those thought pros to make any money, you didn't get paid your commission until the system was paid for. That meant it had to be programmed 'cause no one bought it with the Borough Standard programs.
So I discovered that I was a, a programmer and three of my buddies. We formed a company to. Hire people to write the programs better and faster than we could. We hire, we, we hired in that company, we found people to operate the borough's computers. Okay. And we found people to print the, the business forms.
Sometimes people wanted to lease the computers instead of buying 'em for cash. And we employed some leasing companies. I found myself making more money in this little. Three person company than I was as a salesman at boroughs. Wow. And I said, you really, really know how to sell and uh, I should go someplace that pays me more.
I don't have to be a juggler. Which is what I turned out to be there and found a job with a competitor of, uh, IBM Telex computer products. I went from working seven days a week to working five days a week. That's nice. With twice as much money. I said, gee, this is, I know how to sell. And uh, a couple of years later wound up working for a division of IB and I became the number one salesperson in that company.
And. When I made more money than the mission president, he comes down to LA and he says to me, Mike, we're gonna cut your commission plan by, uh, two thirds and we're gonna take away half your territory. Uh, of course. Yeah. I, and I was absolutely dumbfounded and I asked my boss in LA This can't be right. I must have heard it wrong.
Uh, and he said, no, that's right, Mike. They gave me a big commission check and I said to myself, I really know how to sell. I don't need their salary. I, I went out on my own and rated my own companies to sell phone systems and computer networks and even advertising on hold, and that's what got me started down the path and it's so interesting to me.
So you were selling like. Calculators, like just a regular old calculator originally? Yeah. It started out before that Burrows had mechanical adding machines where you put, put the three numbers in and then you pulled the crank. Oh, wow. They had an electric motor. All the machines seemed to have a backup crank just in case they lost electricity.
The lamoda died and then they, they started importing digital. Calculators with Nixy tubes, and they sold from between $1,100 to $202,000. The $2,000 machine had two memories and it could do square roots and. They were great machines. They couldn't get 'em off the boat fast enough in Japan and to really make a living that they had a French maid adding, subtracting and multiplying machine.
But if you asked the machine 1, 2, 3 times 4, 5, 6, it would never give you the right answer. 56 0 8 8 and I had a quarter. I was supposed to sell a couple of those. French machines every month, and I was scratching, man, how the heck do that? I'd rather sell the calculators with nixy tubes that were fancy. Two grand.
And as soon as you, you, you put some one of these on someone's desk, so you left it there for a few days, you came back, I said, you want, I'm gonna, do you want it? Write up an order or be I'll take it off your desk and get it out of the way. And most people said, I want it. How much is it? No one wanted this French adding machine.
So one day at the time I was in graduate school and I was. Taking statistics, and I learned that from a standard deviation, the random number is the seed. And I said to myself, that damn J hundred, it can never get the right answer. So I went over to a Rockefeller center with one of the machines under my arm.
They weighed a ton and they found an actuarial firm. I went to the head actuary and I said, Hey, you wouldn't want to have a random number generator that really generates a different number every time, as opposed to looking through the books of random numbers that you have. Oh, wow. And and he said to me.
There's no such thing. And I said, I got it right here. Let's try a couple. Okay. Wow. And you know, if 1, 2, 3 times 4, 5, 6 is 56, we did that problem probably 20 times. The machine never came up with 56 0 88 and never came up with the same number twice. And he said, leave it with me for a week. Let me try it and see what I think.
I said, okay. A week later I go back and he buys six of them. Wow. Okay. And I get back to the branch, turn the order in. Branch manager looks at me and says, Mike, you sold six of these things to an actuarial firm where they work with numbers. I said, yep. He said, Mike, they're gonna return 'em. We're gonna hold your commission back for 60 days.
I said, that's not fair. And he said, if the machines come back, then you won't have to get a charge back. I said, okay. She's making plenty of money. He goes on the other products, and within those six weeks I get a call from the guy. He says, Mike, I got a friend on the next block. He runs an actuarial firm.
He loved the idea of an automatic. Random number generator like I have. Why don't you go over and see him? So went over to see him. I sold 24 of the buggers. Wow. This is so crazy because you are a smart guy, Mike, to think, all right, we've got this product that doesn't work. What can I do with it? But the reason I wanted to go back it, it added and subtract beautifully.
But you hit that X key and I told the guy the X meant random number. Yeah. What's so crazy to me about all of this is what you did and the life you lived is obsolete, it's gone nowadays. I could pull up my phone, a calculator, a random number, generator, all of this. You live through a time where. Being a salesperson, it was the peak time to be a salesperson because nowadays there's very few salespeople because everyone has everything between Amazon and the internet.
But you gotta do this experience where you went and, and you sold machines that were slightly better than a, uh, an abacus where you used to move the beads, but that's so insane. Now you mentioned going to college. And then you were a salesperson. What was your degree in? Well, I spent two years in the electrical engineering school at the City College of New York.
And uh, after almost flunking out, I went to my, uh, instructor and said I got a change. I went the Bernard Baruch College of Business, which was part of City College for the last two years. Okay. Got a degree in management. And, uh, marketing. And then by that time when I graduated, I had the job with Mayor Lindsay.
So I worked nine to five for Lindsay, and then three nights a week I was working on my graduate degree at Baruch. And that's where I took the statistics course. And I hated the statistics course, but I, I learned the one thing about random numbers and you need a seed one, which allowed me to sell those. A darn J.
Eight hundreds. Right. That's so interesting. Now, fast forward, you take these business courses, you sell, you make a bunch of money, then you end up in charge of other people. Now, it seems, if I'm tracking, you are trying to help salespeople overcome their personal trauma and deal with their personal life so that they could focus on work better and be better salespeople.
Correct. When I got. Really two types of clients there. One, were were the individuals who, who voted themselves in with their own cash and said, Mike, I know I can be better in sales. I gotta be better. I want to join the, the samr. They called it a President's Club, which was a lifetime program of sales training.
They were a little bit easier to work with. And then I got the secondary type, which were. Companies that said, Mike, we've got a problem here. I want our team to grow. Here's our team of salespeople. And they were what? Say it involuntarily put into the sales training course when I got those teams, some were definitely untrainable and some were definitely trainable.
And when the Trainables or the UN Trainables indicated that they had one of the trauma problems in their past, I immediately thought, let's use the MDR therapy, which would prove the odds of turning them into a winning salesperson. Whether, and, and you, you were, look, when you said there aren't as many salespeople, I still think there are a lot of salespeople that just not selling consumer products.
Okay. They're selling industrial products, whether it's the guy that works for Motorola that's selling police and fire communication systems, or the guy at, uh, a company like Martin Marietta, materials that's selling asphalt and gravel to road building companies. There's always a need for salespeople, okay?
You just, you, you never think of a guy who sells rocks in tremendous quantities. I remember the first day after I got the contract with Martin Marietta that that was really classic because it was a one call close, very large company, and they said, what do you know about quarries and mining? I said, going up in New York City, you just didn't run into a lot of mining companies.
Yeah, of course, of course. So that first day I was dressed in jeans and we went out to a couple of quarries. So I learned how they operate. Where they got their material and then we could apply it to improve their sales team and they had some significant growth. It was funny 'cause at the other end of the scale.
I got hired by a division of IBM, even though they had their own training company inside of IBM because their people weren't growing and we, they had a very aggressive woman manager wanted her division be number one. And she said, Mike, we'll do whatever it takes. And I said, it's gonna be expensive, probably more than you, you wanna spend.
And she, she pounds on the table and says, how much? And I gave her my price. Nice. And she says, let's do it. Came on. There were a lot of companies, there's a lot of need recruiters, whether it's guy, a guy selling high end copier machines, printing systems, you just never know. I remember a, a deal that we did with a Readers Digest.
This is when I was with telex com products. We had an i IBM M compatible printer that printed someplace between 30 and 200% of the speed of the uh, I printer. Let's say it was dog, it had a meantime to failure of about 20 hours, which meant it would go outta service and that's not very good. I said I gave couple, couple, we, we loaned a couple of the machines to the region to digest to try 'em out, and like I told them.
They broke down every 20 hours. Wow. On the other hand, it had a, a variable print density control so that this is when they were printing the reader to digest sweepstakes. They could put the name of the consumer on the form in the same color, black, and same intensity that the pre-printed form was. So it looked like it came out of a printer that way.
They loved it and the IT manager says to me, when I show this to my marketing director, he said he loved it. It's much better than the IBM printers. In fact, he's been on my back for years about it and I said, let's pretend we could solve the problem for you of reliability. And you could get the, the marketing guy off your back.
Would we have a basis to do a deal? And he says, absolutely. And, and then I remember I spent the next three weeks living at the Reader's Digest. Wow. Hammering out a deal between my company and them. It was crazy. They gave us, uh, space inside of their facility for us to have the East Coast Printer Service Depot there.
And we had a service technician in the depot 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So that he could fix the, their machines as well as others, they had an external door so that they could move these printers in and out without going through the security at Reader's Digest. It was the craziest deal in the world.
In the end, I remember Mr. Simpson, the owner of the Reader's Digest, had to sign my check for $1.2 million. And, uh, wow. When I got the check in my hand, I called my boss in, in New York City and said, Frank, what do I do with the check? And he says to me, Mike, go out to JFK airport and buy it a seat on the plane.
The Tulsa, that's where the company were. And it was crazy. Again, it it, it was a structured deal where I told them upfront. Wasn't gonna work more than 20 hours before diet. And our technicians in their facility learned how to keep the machines running longer because they had so much time and experience with just that one model machine.
Right? So you, you, you have to think out of the box, I think in the box. It helped there a lot of food and water in there. Now, Mike, when I told Ms. Whitney, she's my co-host for the Davy Jones locker series on my show, I was like, Hey, I met this guy, Mike Roth. He runs this podcast about the villages in Florida, blah, blah, blah.
He performed open mic night with me and she just goes. We must be an older guy. 'cause the villages is a gated community for seniors. I said I I didn't know that. So Mike, how long have you been retired or semi-retired now? About seven years. It's not a gated community, it's a community that has gates. But if you put, push the button and say, I'm here to see Mike.
You, you're in. If you, if you push the red button, you don't even have to say anything. You come. But everyone in there is retired. Like it's all, is there an age requirement? I, I guess it's a Florida law. It might be a federal law to call yourself a retirement community. 80% of the new home buyers must be at least one of the two residents in the home.
Must be more than 55. So if you were 55 and you had a 44-year-old bride, you, you could buy in a new house. That's called a internal restriction. But if I was to sell my house to someone who was less than 55 and no one in their household was more than 55 a used house, the restriction would still apply to the deed, but in fact, are many homes that are owned by people who are less than 55.
There aren't supposed to be any children inside of the villages. And the, their solution around that was they created several communities inside the villages that they call family areas where the houses are built for families. Okay. The retirement areas, villages, uh, all the houses are one story in the family area.
Some of the houses, probably 25% are two story houses. So there, there is that. Accommodation for folks who work here in the villages inside the retirement area. There are a lot of people who work a part-time job. Back in my improv last night used to be a college president and it's a good improper, and he got called by one of his former.
Colleges to come back as a professor. Oh, wow. They wanted them on campus and he said, I don't wanna do that. And they said, we'll give you an apartment on campus and a car. And it's good money. It's good money too. Oh, very good money. I don't want to use the real number. Yeah, of course. But, but it was significantly into the two, into the six figures.
Of course for him to come back and he said, so he's gonna spend the summers summer of the spring and summer of the fall. About 24 weeks a year at that college in the north, and the rest of the time he's gonna be spending it here. Oh, that's the best plan. Yeah. Yeah. We have people in here, in the villages that work in all kinds of jobs, both remotely and local from home.
It's not unusual. One of my proverbs is a guy probably. 58 50 and Bob Evans restaurant. Hey, so Mike, I keep talking about the villages and you've got a whole podcast about it. In fact, what's so special about it? If I'm a senior, why should I retire there other than the nice warm weather year round? Of course.
Yeah, the weather is good. Okay. Some people say it gets too hot in the summer. I look at it this way. You're going to leave your air conditioned house in the summer to get into your air conditioned car, drive to an air conditioned recreation center, and then. Drive maybe to an air conditioned supermarket.
And yes, it will be a little bit uncomfortable when you walk out. Some people say the villages is a golfing community with a drinking problem. I can imagine that. Yeah. The I. The villages. We have golf cart paths every place. People who no longer have driver's licenses drive their golf carts. It's over 54 square miles now, so it's a really big place with over 150,000 people.
Wow. My story, I knew I wanted, wanted to get out of the north. It's too cold here. Snows all the time. It's cold in the north. Yes, in the winter. I lived in LA for 15 years and I hated earthquakes, but on the other side of the coin, I, I also hated winter. So my wife gets this transfer to Cincinnati. I. I said to her, we're gonna go there for two years.
If I don't like it, we're leaving. And uh, then the sales training business I put together there was very successful. So I, excuse me. So I stayed probably a couple of years longer than I should have. But we were looking around for the last five years, various places from North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida.
I remember seeing a very nice Dell Web community and beautiful houses, nice community. And I said to the salesman, does it ever snow here? And he looks at me, he says, Mike, I, I gotta be honest with you, it snows here, but it usually melts by the next day. And I said to myself, no, thank you very much. We went further south to Florida, looked at a couple of communities, and it came to this strange conclusion that although I had played golf at half played here, it's not a big part of my life.
And so I. Instead measured the number of clubs and activities each community had. Right. You know, the top of the world community at the time had 200 clubs and that looked nice. But then I looked at the villages and at that time, in 2017, they had 2200 clubs. And I said, okay, look at the number of recreation centers.
Top of the world had one or two, the villages had 30. And I said, oh. There's a big difference here. The villagers had live entertainment in three town squares. I said Anything like that in the other communities? No. And I said, let's give the villagers a try. And so we moved down to the villagers. Now there are probably 33 to 3,500 clubs and activities or a hundred swimming pools.
Like the, uh, about the last thing I want is to take on the maintenance of keeping the. Swimming pool. Yeah, of course. So you didn't like earthquakes, you didn't like snow. But Mike, you're fine with hurricanes. Yeah. We bought a house that's made outta cinder block. Okay, that's good. We looked at Florida that way too, and we said, look, you can live on either coast, but eventually you're gonna get with a hurricane.
Yeah. Here we, the area had been hit with only two hurricanes, a glancing blow knocking waters. They said that, or 70 miles. From either shore or Florida. Okay. We're about 80 feet above sea level, so the chance of a hurricane tidal wave reaching us is pretty much zero. Okay. But never zero. It's never zero, but pretty much zero.
Yeah. We're in central Florida where. Occasionally there are some sinkhole, but those were remediated pretty quickly. Yeah, and And I grew up, I grew up about an hour away from New York City, so I know since you were there too, that the northeast gets hits with hurricane quite a bit and a lot of people don't recognize that, but New Jersey, New York and Connecticut, we get just sucker punch with the hurricanes.
I go up the. East coast, they just go right up and then they just decide to land right in the middle of us. Yeah, I remember Hurricane Sandy, Irene, all of that. Yeah. I remember as a kid sitting in the house getting hit by a hurricane. Two hurricanes passed over since I've been here. There were tornadoes, uh, that happened in Florida, but in New York there were noster.
I remember trudging to school 10 blocks wearing galas and thinking, why am I here? Why am I doing this? And in, in a sales business? But you make appointments two weeks out or three weeks out, and then the day you're supposed to get up there, it's snowing like crazy. You find yourself driving in the snow.
It was unpleasant. It doesn't rain here in Florida. Sure, but it's not as bad. Weather is not. A real issue. It happens wherever you are. Yeah, I still remember in Cincinnati being surprised after a couple of years when I'm sitting at the kitchen table and the house shakes and I look up and the chandelier is swinging abo above my head.
I said, gee, we're not supposed to have earthquakes here, but they had earthquakes in the Midwest. So yeah, you play in the odds. Yeah, of course. Now, Mike, before we wrap things up here, the last segment I want to get into is improv. So like I said, I actually officially met you at the speed networking tables and then again at the open mic night.
And so I can vouch for you that you're, you're very funny, you're good at improv. And so what got you into that? 'cause you're still doing that nowadays. I know you and I spoke on the phone the other night. You had a sold out show and everything, and. You work with a team and are you going up on stage still or you're more behind the scenes kind of guy now?
No, I, I go up on stage. I consider myself one of the understudies for most of the skits, if not all. I won't do skit where I have to pick up a guitar and sing a song that's a beyond my skill level. But we have senior citizens here. I have people over 80 years of age in my group and. At any moment anyone can have a problem.
We had one lady who, uh, was in our scheduled to be in our show, and she falls down one day, okay? Right. Breaks an arm. Okay. She winds up with one of those, or her arm is out in 90 degrees to her body. Three days later, she gets out of her car to get her mail and she breaks her other arm. Oh no. I hate to hear it.
But we have other studies for that who we even had a few people die. It happens. I was in the sales training business, this guy Dave Sandler. He would say Sales is a Broadway play performed by a psychiatrist. And so interesting. He said to me, and everybody go out, take acting courses, take improv occasionally.
In what? In some of their training courses. They brought in actors or imp improvs. And frankly, I had some acting training when I was in high school. I. But when I was given a choice of either running the lights or being an onstage player, I said, I'll take the lights. So I took, when I got to the villages the first year I joined 20 clubs.
Seven of 'em had something to do with acting or improv. I. And I had guess a couple of imp acting parts on stage, and I didn't like memorizing the lines and in sales for all the, all those years I was improvising, but I didn't know I was improvising. Right. I know the general, what I should have been should be doing in saying, but I didn't have it written down in a script.
Uh, a couple of the companies gave us scripts that they wanted us to memorize, and for the purposes of passing their tests, yes, I would memorize the script, but then when I got out in the real world. I ad-libbed it. I didn't know that was improvising. Right. Anyway, so I take this improvising course. And leader of that course gave us just imp improvisational games.
And I was good at it, and I became his number two guy in the club. And probably after eight months he comes to me one day and says, Mike, I'm gonna be closing the improv club. So I go, what? You can't close. It's a great club. He says, I got a job in it for 200 grand a year in Boston. I'm moving back to Boston.
Yeah. Yeah. I imagine. What about the club? He said, Mike, you could take it over or be, it's closed. And I, I not, the last thing in the world I wanted to do was take over an improv club. So I called up one of my acting friends and I said, Hey Greg, you want help me out with the running this club? And he said, sure.
It sounds like a great idea. And we took it over. We built it. We built it. In a funny way, there were 140 people on the roster, most of whom never showed up most of the time, and you couldn't get any continuity. So we decided to charge $10 a year in dues, and all of a sudden the club went down from 140 people to 25, and we had 25 people who would come most of the time.
Wow. It made a difference that we could put shows on the, that I found myself learning improvisational techniques and reading improv books and watching whose line is it anyway on TV to learn what they're doing. And uh, they do something called short form improv. Yeah, read to five minute sketches. And that's primarily what we do now, last July.
I got an email somehow, I don't know how, from the improv festival, international Improv Festival in Sarasota, July. I looked at it and said, sounds interesting. Probably a fake, and I gave it to one of my people in the club, an ex lawyer, and I said to her, Margaret, check this out, see if it's worth us going, and she checks it out.
She calls me back a couple of days later and says, Mike, I'm going. I bought the tickets for three days. It's only $79. Okay. And I said, oh, and then I discovered the hotel was $260 an night. Yeah. But it was a great hotel. Unlike the hotel the best convention was in. Yeah, yeah. I know exactly what you're talking about.
We go down there and we, we discover that not only do they have improv shows for three nights in four theaters. Five shows a night that was all included in your ticket. During the daytime, they had improv classes or workshops that you could take. I took a workshop, but the first night at the show had a big problem.
I'm sitting there and my face hurt because 45 minutes, I was laughing like crazy and we watched. Two or three more shows. And they did something that we hadn't done before. We hadn't attempted. They incorporated music sing, oh, and a keyboard player, and me and my co-leader to come back from the improv festival.
And we said light bulb music, an improv is a good idea. And we scrounged around and we found a really great. Keyboard player named Wayne Richards, who was a composer who, and doesn't read music, but he plays everything by ear and we've incorporated him into our show. And the show he just did with us. It was fantastic because he played cover music in between scenes.
We played a game called Musical Chairs. Where he played the music and the loser of each round had to sing a song at random, that rain was playing on the keyboard. Wow, okay. It, it was fantastic and I'm hoping that we went. Last year to the improv festival in Sarasota with five people This year, I'm hoping it's gonna be closer to 20.
Um, wasn't cheap, probably. We spent more than grand. I became a better improv person myself, and it gave me a lot of material to teach our players. We had this. Dramatic change where we put music in made a big difference. Yeah, I feel you on that. I'm going to VO Atlanta pretty soon here, and it was one of America's largest conferences for all kinds of stuff, specifically voice acting, film industry, networking.
So obviously I'm going because I'm trying to get into that world and with $647 for a general emissions ticket. And in every single booth they have there that is considered an X session is an additional two $75. So I'm not taking a single X session 'cause I can't afford that. The hotels. Because it's so soon, and because it's such a big conference, they're charging double their regular rate.
So for three nights, it's costing me over $600 to stay at the La Quinta, which is normally $70 a night. But because of V Atlanta, it's 140 a night. I. And I was like, I'm about to just sleep in my car. I'm about to set up in the back of my car. I said, it's cost me almost more to stay at the hotel, just just to sleep there at night than it is to, to go to the event.
No, I lived in LA for 15 years and I had some friends who were in the movie industry and tv. My, my advice to anyone who wants to be in those businesses as a career. You have to go away. The fish show, you're gonna fish you. You gotta go to LA live in la, you gotta go to New York. Live in New York if you're thinking about Broadway and you gotta take the auditions and you gotta take the acting training to make it happen.
Very few people who live in Indianapolis ever wind up on the big screen. And there were a few exceptions, but people tend to like people that they know and trust. So if a beginner does a good audition. One of their friends does an audition. That's okay, eh, chances are they're gonna go with their friend.
It's very close knit industry that that's my advice for anyone who wants to get into acting or stage work professionally. Yeah, you gotta go with a fish yard if you want to be in the music business. You know? I think there's only one place to go. Nashville. I mean, if, if, if you can sing, it's where you gotta be, you know, go, go where the fish are.
Yeah. At this rate, I think I'm just gonna buy a mobile home or an RV with how much traveling I'm doing now to all these conferences and everything and just park it and, and stay there instead of paying all these hotels that aren't even good quality. And I know you mentioned the Winham Resort. I mean, we had, bridges were missing, coffee machines didn't work, poor wifi, there were maintenance.
They sent me to a different hotel 'cause they overbooked. So I, I had to walk 20 minutes. I spent over $200 in Uber rides after paying hundreds of dollars for a hotel to be at the conference. But they put you at, they put me down the street at the Ivanti International Resort and, and my base complaint, Mike was.
We're paying a hundred to $200 a night and there was no complimentary breakfast. Not even a muffin, not even a cereal that blows my mind. Could have stayed at a or a Hampton. The, I don't really wanna say anything about the hotels 'cause I can't say anything good. The hotel where the convention was, I did tell the leader or the convention that I'd rather pay more or even a lot more.
To have really good accommodations. You said it took you 20 minutes to walk to the conference. I was on the hotel grounds probably as far away from the conference center as you could get. And it would take me 12 to 15 minutes to make that walk. Yeah. 'cause the, they had all these like satellite. Hotel rooms, know these buildings that were far away from the conference hall.
And by the third day I said to myself, I ain't gonna walk this far. So I got in my car and at 7:00 AM right to the main conference center and parked my car outside all day. That's where I was. Yeah, yeah. I know. And the weird part too, was. The one lady I was talking to, Ms. Ann Loyn, I believe it was, she, they put her a, a single older woman by herself with her door going straight out into the gas station there.
There was a gas station like attached to the hotel, and so if you were in the one satellite building, you would just walk out into the gas station, which. At night in Orlando, gas stations can be dangerous places. Me and my buddy had an issue once that night where? Where we got robbed. Yeah. When I walked outta my place, I was looking at a gigantic parking lot and then in the distance International drive and the Long's Restaurant and was a nice walk, couple of nights meals at the restaurants, but.
Last morning I get out of the room and looking at long ones and who's sitting in the parking lot with the local sheriff. Yeah. Yeah. They literally had the cops stationed. I saw that too, Mike. I saw there was multiple times where they had police stationed there because. People had reported there was homeless people squatting in the bushes, outside the doors, uh, of pod festers.
They actually reported pizza. Yeah. I, someone had mentioned it to me like my one friend, I was walking her to her room every night to make sure she was safe and 'cause there was, there had been reports of people squatting outside her bushes. So it's wild. I, I hadn't heard that, didn't see it, but it was a great convention.
There was a lot of good, oh, I, I will admit, to suffer from information overload from that convention. Last year I went only for one day and the value of the ticket I had was DMA dramatically reduced because most of the sessions they had were closed sessions. Right? So this year bought the EIP set ticket and.
There were, I got very little for the VIP ticket. I got two lunches and I got access to a VIP. Yeah, no, I, I just stuck with the creator pass. I, I balanced it and I, I felt like the benefits offered weren't that good. The full body massage did sound nice, though. I am sad I missed out on that. That's one thing that would've been nice.
I, I didn't partake in that. I didn't have the time. I went from session to session and usually I. I discovered that there were three sessions on the agenda that I wanted to see. Same time, really thought about do I want to buy the videos or the cassettes, but however they're selling the media, and will I have the time in my schedule?
I. To spend another nine to 27 hours listening to it. And I said to myself, Nope. When I was in the sales training business, we had four conventions a year, all, and there were 20 hours of material to listen to, and probably most of it I never listened to. But there was that one session that I sat in. That I knew was good, that had journals of truth that I could make some money on or might would be good for my customers.
I would spend those extra 20 hours disassembling was in that audio or so like could internalize it and put it in my brain because it was invaluable and podcast. There was so much material. So much, so many things. If anyone's listening and thinking of doing a podcast, definitely go. Um oh, yeah. Yeah. I wish I had gone before I started my podcast.
I learned so much and I barely went to any of the sessions. I actually spent 95% of my time networking. I. Talking to other people 'cause I had a different mindset than you, Mike. My mindset is, Hey, I'll, I can always listen back to the videos at any time. But meeting these people, this is the once in a lifetime opportunity.
Some of them might not be back next year. I don't know if I'll see them again. I might not be able to make it, and I'm glad I've been booked on several podcasts. I've gotten new equipment, I've made good contacts. And, uh, I've had a great time and it was really nice since leaving, 'cause I only left the military recently, it was the first time I've really interacted with other people and the support for the military and veterans there was great.
And everyone there was so friendly and and welcoming and it was awesome to interact with everyone and try new things. It was my first time traveling alone. It was my first time doing open mic night. It was my first time really meeting that many people, so it, it was a great time. Yeah. Chris talks about it as a community of podcasters and I think he does a really good job of creating, there was a, a meetup of podcaster over 55 years of age, so I went to that and the person running it said, we're in the biggest minority group here at podcast Podcasters OPA 55.
There were only about 15 of us in that group. I don't know if that was totally true, but they were their podcasters of every age and every subject that you could dream of. Something I couldn't dream of. So I met a lot of people too. It was a good show. I was very surprised to see that they had an open mic night, a comedy night, and at first I didn't think I would bother to participate in it because standup comedy is best today when you write your own material and you don't use canned jokes, right.
Steal someone else's material. I didn't think about doing it. And then I, I spoke to one of the organizers and I said, Hey, if I sign up, can I do improv instead of standup? And he said, sure, as long as you only do it for three minutes, I'm pretty sure I can keep it three minutes. And, uh, we put together that little improv routine absolutely killed in a comedy sense.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. No, you had me laughing. I thought it was great. See, I didn't even know about it till last minute. And all the comedy I've ever done has been on my show, right? So behind the screens it's very different and so. That morning I was super nervous. I got in the shower. That's where I do all my thinking.
I'm like, all right, I gotta make a script up because I, obviously, I wanna make it up on stage, but I want to have some kind of idea where I'm going. And I, I had everything down. And then I get there and they're like, you only have three minutes. And I was like, oh, no. I plan for five to 10 minutes. Now I gotta compact it down.
And for me, I got some good feedback. I, I spoke too fast, my biggest error. And when I listened back to my recording, I was like, man. When people are laughing, I gotta stop talking. I gotta let them laugh. How'd you, how'd you get a recording of it? I, I actually, I gave my phone to the woman behind me and I asked her to record me.
But Mike, they are releasing a, an edited video version of it in a couple weeks here. I. From three different camera angles, so it'll be pretty awesome. And as soon as I get that, if you haven't gotten in it, I'll send it to you so you can, yeah, I'd love to see that. No, I'm gonna add it here. I'm gonna add it in the description for this episode so y'all can see Mike on stage.
And his performance was great. It had me dying, and if you like jokes about blonde, he's also pretty good at those. I was very apprehensive about that joke. Yeah. My wife is a blonde and she doesn't like it. When I do blonde jokes, my sister's fully blonde. Most people don't know it, and so we grew up making those jokes all the time because my sister is so blonde.
She would get into someone's car and they'd be like. You're not my mom. And she would get out, she, she could never remember what car we drove. And so at school she would just get in someone's car and be like, oh crap, you're not my mom. And get out and yeah. And, and, and she has walked into glass doors, so blondes and glass doors, my two glass once myself.
Yeah. It happens to the best of us, but it, it was great. That improv routine. I, I had three people working with me in it who never done improv, never worked with before. Yeah. And never worked with, barely knew their first names, but that was about it. 'cause the first name was on their badge and it was, it turned out to be a killer routine.
And that happens sometimes. Improv really works great. Sometimes it's a dud. Yeah. We did a show in front of a group that turned out to be people who were on average, much older people who weren't drinking, and it was a tough show. I'm telling you. It was a tough show. And we, I, we wrote the show for the Sunday night based on what happened on Saturday night.
And Saturday night was okay, but Sunday night was phenomenal. The rewrite really helped in comedy. I, we have an actual comedy club here at the, uh, villages, but we just changed leadership on it, and one of the recommendations for people who want to do standup is I. You record your material as you go, and then you listen to it back word for word and figure out what jokes worked, what didn't work, what do you ta take out?
What do you have to rework? Sometimes a standup routine, moving a word from the beginning of a sentence to the end of a sentence or vice versa, makes the difference between getting a really big laugh, getting a whole, yeah. Yeah, you never want that. So, Mike, bud, if I'm someone and I happen to be passing through Florida and I wanna see one of your shows or one of your groups perform, where, where do I go to buy the tickets for that?
The way to, to get on our email list, so you find out about the shows so you can buy tickets, is send me an email to Mike, MIKE at Roth, ROTH, voice, VOIC e.com. That's [email protected] and I'll put you on our Constant contact email list. We announced shows about eight weeks before the show. If you're trying to come to the show and you're not a village resident, you'll need to get a guest pass.
Guest paths are not hard to get. They're free. I. As long as you don't live in Sumter Lake or Marion counties, in which case they're almost impossible to get, then you have to say you are a relative. But if you say you're from Georgia and you want to come to the Villages for a couple of days, can you get a guest pass?
No problem. They love having people come in. We also do some shows at a comedy club called The Joke Joint in Summerfield. Okay. Okay, which is just North of the Villages is a small seat, small venue with about 80 seats. It's better in the sense that there's no language restrictions in inside of the villages.
In the recreation centers that we use for our meet our shows, we have a language restriction that we aren't allowed to use any obscene language at the joke joint. We could say whatever we want. I would say that the performances that we've done there are mildly R-rated as opposed to X-ray. Oh yeah. You never wanna insult anybody in the audience or single 'em out.
So we try to keep it clean and have a a lot of fun in the process, but the result is. You got a very funny show when, when people's faces hurt at the end of the show, then you know you've done a good job. Yeah. Yes, sir. Like I said, ladies and gentlemen, I highly encourage you to check that out and so Michael, have your website that you could check out the villages improv.com.
And that will take that on that site, we announce the shows and we give you a link to the ticketing. Yeah. And all that information will be in the description below for the podcast, ladies and gentlemen, so you can find those website links and emails. That way you can find out about the next improv show and hopefully you'll be able to go see it.
But Mike, I'd like to thank you for coming on the show. And before we close out here, do you have any closing remarks or anything you'd like to say? No. Live your life to the fullest. Enjoy yourself laughing. Tends to extend your life. So the long, the earlier in your life that you can learn to laugh, it's going to extend your life.
And I wholeheartedly agree with that. So Mike, once again, thank you for coming on man. I appreciate you. Hey, thank you Mr. Whiskey for having me on your show.
