Jaffe Juice

Welcome back to another tl;dr of "Joseph Jaffe is Not Famous", with your host, the not famous Joseph Jaffe! In the show, we talk to some pretty interesting and sometimes famous people about how they tackle their day-to-day, why they do what they do, and hopefully teach us a thing or two about leading life with a little more spring in our step. 

In this very special episode, I talked to Gilly the Sunshine Wizard aka Gilderoy Dauterive, our very own sunshine giver and part of my own daily video-watching routine. His Instagram and TikTok channels focus on different aspects of positivity, acceptance, and everyday magic that help you find a better perspective on your day-to-day lives. Throughout our discussion, we touched on what it’s like to be a creator focused on "non-conventional" content while also exploring how Gilly the Sunshine Wizard earned his robes.

Wisha Wisha! I love you!

Who is Gilly the Sunshine Wizard

Gilly the Sunshine Wizard, aka Gilderoy Dauterive, is a content creator focused on different short videos on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok that showcase the different kinds of magic we experience every day and how we can generate our own magic through the power of positivity, acceptance, and personal sunshine.

Apart from video creation, Gilly is also a published poet, writer, and beauty pageant winner. It's through these different experiences that Gilly is able to bring smiles around the world (covering 6/7 continents to date!).

Key Episode Topics

Trusting the Value of Everyday Magic

A lot of our experiences happen for us, not to us. Gilly themselves saw this happen in real-time when they were inspired by a sign they saw that said: "You Are Loved". Sometimes something as simple as a poster board can be incredibly moving in sharing a simple but profound idea about life. 

Gilly then realized that they can use social media as their very own "poster board." Each of their videos focuses on easy everyday steps delivered in a short format for a quick reminder of your daily routine. 

As Gilly mentions, "you can get a poster board, write 'You are Loved' and I guarantee you you will make at least one person smile." 

Embracing Your Own True Self

Very early on in Gilly's life, they knew that they could be a wizard. Growing up as a "fat kid", Gilly felt that there was a lack of representation in the media for people like them. "You get to either be the funny best friend or the cartoonishly gay villain", Gilly reflects, "or you can be the Wizard". It was this insight that allowed Gilly to begin their transformation into the Sunshine Wizard persona.

It's the acceptance of the non-conventional and stepping out of the identities being imposed on you that you can truly begin embracing your true self and finding that sunshine that drives you forward. 

Living The Story of Your Own Life

There are a lot of different philosophies today that dictate how you should think, act, and feel. But Gilly finds a different route espoused by Jean-Paul Sartre (expressed in Gilly’s trademark Wizard-y ways): "In this world nothing matters, you can do what you want, [so] if you have the opportunity to help people you should."

Instead of viewing this as a downer way of thinking, Gilly discussed the potential of such a perspective to "turn the mundane and the mediocre into something magical." A strong motivator for Gilly is their belief in the power of conversation and open positive dialogue. "Every life has a story," they continue, "and we can shape the world one conversation at a time." 

Being a Creator Today

Today's social media landscape is full of eye-catching content and other media that are meant to grab our attention. But Gilly's short videos focus not on clickbait news headlines but rather messages of joy and positivity that radiates with their many followers (over 100,000 now on Instagram alone). 

Their viral video (originally listed under "Mutton Choppa Poppa"), "You'll be the Sunshine", was actually inspired by a conversation they had with a close friend who was feeling down. It's these everyday interactions that make Gilly's content so relatable as it speaks towards simple yet powerful daily reminders about the sunshine sources in your life. 

This also goes to show that authenticity still plays a big role in creator content success. Much of Gilly's work is focused on their own personal anecdotes and perspectives, which resonate with like minded viewers looking for that type of content. Without a truly authentic brand image (that stands out the way Gilly's does), you’ll likely have difficulty finding that audience that's right for you. 

Much has been discussed beyond the key takeaways above, including ideas Gilly shared on accepting the different emotional states you might find yourself in (affectionately described as "mads, rads, and sads"), non-neurotypical thinking, and self-identity in today's world.

Catch the rest of the Gilly the Sunshine Wizard episode here and keep an eye out for other possibly famous people in the next edition of Joseph Jaffe is Not Famous!

You can subscribe here.

This soliloquy (transcribed from an off the cuff and conversational delivery) preceded my guest, Michael Brenner on Joseph Jaffe is not Famous on November 9th, 2022. You can watch it here. Please subscribe to the show here.

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I don't normally choose a soliloquy that is literally verbatim the show title or a book from my guest, but how could I not with this? After all, I wrote a book called built to suck.   

Why do mean people succeed or finish first? There are so many mean people. And first of all, meanness is a choice. So is being good. Everything is a choice.

In this world. You can choose to be kind, and you can choose to be cruel. You can choose to be generous, you can choose to have empathy for someone else, and you can choose to be selfish, egotistical and arrogant - it is a choice. It is an absolute choice.

Now, I will tell you, that when we see people acting in a "not nice way," it's typically because something is going on in their lives. I think we should always give people the benefit of the doubt, that is to recognize that when they're having a bad day, they might be a little impatient; a little mean; even a little cruel, but is that an excuse? Is that acceptable?

If meanness is a choice - and kindness is a choice - then even when we're having a bad day, we have the choice whether we want to rise above it or not.

Over the last two and a half years, we've seen people act in incredibly kind and empathetic ways. And we've seen people just batten down the hatches and retreat, and demonstrate that meanness.

But like I just said, it's a choice.

Make that choice when you come to a fork in the road. Take it.

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Excerpt from our interview: "The point of the great resignation was kind of like I've had enough; I don't need to put up with this BS anymore. And that's my advice to folks that work in mean situations. I tell a number of stories in the book (Mean People Suck) about folks that have achieved success, despite working for assholes in many instances, by gaining the support of the folks around them (and I think you've talked about this in your book, Built to Suck, as well.) I talked about the three C's: customers, colleagues and the company - I call it the bull's eye organization: a bull's eye organization is one where everyone is focused on meeting customer needs, and so the impact of a mean boss becomes significantly reduced when the focus is on driving customer experience."

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Michael Brenner is the former VP of Digital Marketing at SAP, he's been a CMO of multiple high-growth startups, is a top Content Marketing influencer, and now runs a fast-growing content marketing agency, Marketing Insider Group. He is also the author of The Content Formula, and Mean People Suck. When he's not running after his 4 kids, Michael enjoys sharing his experiences and client stories to inspire leaders like you to create growth and impact.

Todd Kaplan, PepsiCo's CMO, recently joined Joseph Jaffe on his business talk show, Joseph Jaffe is Not Famous, for an in-depth marketing conversation concerning community, brand building, and so much more!

This incredible interview highlights why we need to avoid cutting marketing budgets while focusing on optimism, courage, hope, positivity, and what Joseph calls "community capitalism."

Here are a few noteworthy takeaways and you'll be sure to want to watch the entire episode and while you're at it, subscribe to the show.

Top 10 Key Takeaways

1.    Marketing is Not About the CMO 

As Todd Kaplan states straight out of the gate, marketing is about community and brand vision. While the CMO provides thought leadership and helps drive the agenda, successful marketing comes down to teaching, passion, and pride within the industry, moving forward in a way that will resonate and live up to its potential.

2.    The Idea of Intrapreneurship

Many great ideas and ways to connect with consumers may be right in front of you..inside your own company. Joseph talks about how innovation powers marketing in culture-forward companies. They discuss how treating every advertising role as a startup can help find new ways to bring a product to life and spark creativity within branding.

3.    Embracing the Challenger Mindset

The challenger mindset encourages marketing and advertising agencies to look closely at who the competition is and what you're competing with, enabling brands to think about how consumers are spending their time. Becoming a lifestyle brand and engaging with modern consumers puts you in competition with almost anything that asks for their time. Todd offers some great marketing points, including a Metaverse take on marketing.

4.    The Future of Brands is Community

Recognizing where the future of marketing lies is essential, and understanding the community's role is just as crucial. In this segment, Joseph inquires Todd about whether community is the future of marketing or branding, and Todd responds by stating the future lies with community building. Community plays a considerable role in brand building and focusing on consumers' emotions.

5.    The Tattoo Test

In an intriguing take, Todd Kaplan brings up "The Tattoo Test," which can stand as a marketing test for consumer loyalty and the role a brand plays in their lives. Brands don't only serve as product and service providers but often play a more profound role in consumer lives. Todd names sports as an outstanding example of The Tattoo Test, stating that fans can celebrate or commiserate together, all in the name of a "team," which, at its core, is a brand.

6.    Brand Ownership

In this fascinating segment, Joseph asks Todd who owns the brand: the company, or the consumer? Todd states that the brand owns the ideas, the products, and creative executions. However, deepening the partnership with consumers is essential, and he uses Harley Davidson as an example to show how consumers can take ownership through brand engagement and support.

7.    Courage and Bravery in Marketing

Philosopher Tom Morris comes into the conversation to discuss courage in marketing, stating that "good marketers need confidence, great marketers need courage." What's the difference? Confidence is the expectation of good results, while courage is a commitment to what's needed rather than to what's safe. This entire segment offers invaluable marketing advice from a philosophical point of view, including the emotions marketing evokes in consumers.

8.    The Key to the Consumer

Is courage, or getting off the ride and building your own ride, the key to reaching the consumer in marketing? Sort of. Todd Kaplan broadens this idea by encouraging marketers to realize that they, and the innovation and creative thinking they employ, are the key to the consumer.

9.    "No" is a Request for More Information 

This statement is a beautiful takeaway from this conversation. It's challenging to get every marketing element right the first time. As marketers run into barriers, it's crucial to take the word "no" as a request for more information from a marketing perspective. A "no" from a corporate brand should inspire one to look at it from another perspective, and as Joseph states, "no" could mean "not yet" or "not now."

10. Learning by Doing

Joseph shared a quote: "The point of human evolution is adapting to circumstance. Not letting go of the old, but adapting it, is necessary." - Sonali Bendre

Todd expands on this, as being a marketer means learning by doing, moving through ideas and creative concepts with agility and flexibility. Risks are relative.

The Final Word

"What's wrong with marketing?" Joseph posits in his Seated Soliloquy.

 Spoiler alert: The answer is nothing. Nothing is wrong with marketing. There could be an issue with marketers or business in general, but marketing is as it has always been.

We've gone over the takeaways, but we've barely scratched the surface of what the entire interview has to offer. Watch it today, and subscribe for more life-coach-esque, daily talk show content.

Todd Kaplan is Pepsi's Chief Marketing Officer, overseeing marketing for the Pepsi brand in North America, where he is responsible for all creative communications, brand strategy, product innovation, and commercial execution across the entire Pepsi trademark. Since Fall 2018, Kaplan brings an unapologetic, culture-forward perspective that has been foundational to re-energizing the brand bringing it back into the cultural zeitgeist - from reinvigorating the Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show platform with historic performances from JLo & Shakira, Dr Dre, Snoop, Eminem, The Weeknd and many more, to developing disruptive new products like Nitro Pepsi, to putting out some of the boldest and most talked about brand creative the Pepsi brand has ever seen. Todd has established Pepsi as an industry leader of modern marketing, developing new content models - including multiple television shows, long form films -  trailblazed into Web 3 with one of the first brand NFT projects, and more. 

This soliloquy (transcribed from an off the cuff delivery and thus, informal and conversational) preceded my guest, Louis L. Reed on Joseph Jaffe is not Famous on October 31st, 2022. You can watch it here. Please subscribe to the show here.

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I can't imagine what it must be to have your freedom taken away from you. And thank goodness now for the first time that feels in forever, whether it's due to DNA research, but also to activism, and to brave courageous people that stand up for those that have had their rights, robbed or stripped or taken away from them, there is hope.

The ability to have a second chance - a second chance in life - a second chance to right the wrongs and correct mistakes…and who hasn't made a mistake?

We all make mistakes. We are all flawed. We are all imperfect. Sometimes we make mistakes based on youth, based on impetuosity, based on desperation, but it really kind of sucks when there are different standards - a different bar; a different ability to treat and address one person based on the color of their skin relative to someone else. Take the Jeffrey Dahmer Netflix docudrama and realizing what really was in play at the time, and how he might not have gotten away with what he got away with had his victims all been of a different color. Had there been just an element of and I'm just going to call it what it is. decency, and, justice.

And I have to say at the end of the day, if you believe in justice, and if you fight for justice, then truly, it should be justice for all. If justice is blind, maybe it's time that we open up our eyes, open up our ears, open up our hearts, open up our soul, and advocate not just on behalf of everyone, but specifically for the people that have been disadvantaged.

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Louis delivered an incredible insight into what it must be like growing up with essentially the odds stacked against you…destined to fail. A black and brown male who grows up with an incarcerated father is almost guaranteed to follow suit.

 "…there are people who actually made poor choices. I made a poor choice and I wasn't wrongly imprisoned. The fact of the matter is that I arguably deserve to have been in prison, especially the way that I impacted the lives of people through criminal enterprise. And So I think that how do we get to a place the larger question is, how do we get to a place where we are dispensing justice, inequity, but we're also focused on rehabilitation, we're also focused on fair chance, oftentimes, you hear the term second chance, a lot of people never even got a first chance. You think about me at the age of five years old? What chance did I get, you know, having, in effect been exposed to the school to prison pipeline? This is not an excuse. This is just an understanding. And so how do we give people who have been impacted who are incarcerated? How do we how do we how do we create opportunities for the children of those parents who are incarcerated? And so oftentimes, we focus on an individual who's who's physically incarcerated, but what about the child that's emotionally incarcerated? What about what about that? What about the parents who are supporting their loved one who's incarcerated, and so we have to look at this from a global perspective, and not necessarily just an individual perspective."

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Louis L. Reed is an acclaimed author, social and criminal justice activist, and the former senior director of membership and partnerships for Jay Z's reform Alliance. He served 14 years in federal prison and five years on supervision. Lewis is a licensed and board-certified addiction practitioner. His professional experience includes working as the Director of National organizing and partnerships for dream.org, formerly known as #cut50. There, he led an advocacy for the passage of the historic first step act through the empathy network where he grew the nation's largest bipartisan grassroots advocacy coalition of justice impacted people

You've heard the mantras. You've seen inspired moments from athletes, entrepreneurs, and stories of personal triumph.

This conversation between CEO, author, and coach Ray Higdon and host Joseph Jaffe hits on points that take you way beyond quick-fix motivation.

The must-see episode of the Joseph Jaffe Is Not Famous Show, challenges core beliefs that you didn't even know you have, and teaches you how to actually shift your view of the world.

These takeaways are life lessons that everyone should take to heart - or rather, mind.

1.   You're playing the victim, you just don't know it

It's easier to swallow the idea that you could if only *blank* were different. In fact, this familiar mindset tends to become the default over time - a crutch; an excuse.

"The only way [you] fail, is if we get out of our own way," Jaffe says. "That scarcity mindset, that victim mindset - we know that needs to be replaced with an abundance mindset."

2.   90% of our thoughts are the same as yesterday's

"You're in this rut of feeling and thinking the same thing everyday, but you're not aware of it," says Higdon.

The question, then, is how you get out of thinking the same thoughts everyday and cultivate an awareness around those thoughts.

"Allowing 100-percent reliance on your senses to define your reality is just not the smartest way," adds Higdon.

The key, he notes, is to take inventory of your life and see where you are in relation to your goals and expectations.

3.   See things the way you wish they were before they are

What does it mean to rely on your senses? It means building a strong mindset that's independent of your external environment.

One example Higdon looks to as inspiration is from the life of philosopher and author Victor Frankl. Frankl - who was a prisoner at a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust - has a famous quote of how he views his life experiences:

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

4.   Manifestation works, it just takes work

Manifestation is not the casual request for money and happiness that it's often portrayed as in pop culture. It's a mindset practice and tool that can be applied towards many areas of life.

Higdon has proven this in business time and time again, though he reinforced it in himself when taking ballroom dance classes with his wife - which he was terrible at.

"I started on a nightly basis just taking two minutes, a minute and just kind of seeing myself as a good dancer. What would that look like? How would I feel? What would people say to me?"

Six months later he and his wife won a ballroom dance competition. No added practice or coaching. Simply a shift in mindset.

Manifestation, in this way, is really cultivating the belief that you can be a certain person; that you can achieve a goal.

5.   Be defiant.

"We're focused on those one or two points of imperfections to get to that point of perfection...as opposed to being able to really push on our strengths," Jaffe points out.

Focusing on those imperfections instead of driving forward strengths often inhibits people to be "great."

Higdon puts forward the concept of being defiant as a tool - or rule - for people to follow as they go through life.

"What is something I don't want to do, but I know it would help grow me" That way of thinking has helped me grow in a lot of areas," says Higdon.

"The person afraid of falling off a mountain just won’t ever climb it."

6.   Money and happiness are two different equations

As the saying goes: "money doesn't buy happiness."

For Higdon, "it's not an either or scenario. They're just not equal."

"You can have a lot of money and be happy. You can not have a lot of money and be happy."

Of course, having money has its benefits. The key though, is not attaching self-fulfillment to making money. Higdon notes that when you do that, you put yourself into a cycle of basing your happiness on making more money or achieving the next goal.

"Why are we linking them?" asks Jaffe. "They're causality not correlation."

"Don't conflate or confuse the two. Focus on them and realize that one is not necessarily an influencer or a variable that affects the other."

Final Word

Of course, all of the above only comes to life from a person's willingness to act and be persistent. As Jaffe emphasized in his Seated Soliloquy: "The only way we fail is if we get in our own way."

Success comes down to the people, he says, and whether or not they can get out of their own way.

One way to do so is to keep learning and being inspired, so be sure to subscribe to Jaffe's channel to for more empowering, thought-provoking content.