June 10, 2026 – Steve Jobs in Exile Geoffrey Cain and The Back Nine P. Scott Bening

Intro 1 0:04
Broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration Award-winning School for Startups Radio, where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk, or passion. Jim Beach,

Jim Beach 0:26
just another amazing show. Welcome to School for Startups Radio. Thank you so much for being with us today. As I said, damn, just another amazing show. First up, we have Jeffrey Kane. He is going to talk about Steve Jobs in exile. He has written a new book about Steve Jobs during the 12 years in between his two Apple stints, and how they were, how that time was so critical to his long-term success of what happened during the second stay at Apple’s. A lot of people don’t know that he was actually fired by Apple, and then brought back, and we talk about John Sculley and all of the other players along the way. It’s a great conversation, really fun. Then, after that, we have Scott Benning. He is written a new book called The Back Nine Retirement, and I am 100% sure you have used one of his products. You know, the thing that the Tide Pod is wrapped in, and then you throw it in the washer, and then that thing dissolves, exposing the tide detergent. He invented that dissolving wrapper and sold it for trillions and trillions of dollars. That’s a lie, obviously. So, anyway, huge great show for you today. One of.. oh, we have two quick 10s, two people playing the quick 10, so we don’t get more exciting than that. Great show. Thanks for being with us. And we’ll get started in just a second.

The Real Environmentalists AD 1:50
Introducing the real environmentalists with a bold new book by Jim Beach. It’s not about activists, politicians, or professors. It’s about the entrepreneurs, real risk takers, building cleaner, smarter solutions, not for applause, but for profit. The entrepreneurs in the book aren’t giving speeches, they’re in labs, factories, and offices, cleaning the past and building clean products for the future. The real environmentalists is available now, because the people saving the planet aren’t the ones you think. Go to Amazon and search for real environmentalists. Thank you.

Jim Beach 2:22
We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us. You know, we are still all obsessed with Steve Jobs, and of course, have varied opinions about him, but I’m excited to welcome someone to the show who can help us learn a little bit more, especially the period of time that we don’t know about so much. Please welcome Jeffrey Kane to the show. He is author of a new book called Steve Jobs in Exile, just came out with by Penguin Random House. You don’t really get any more prestigious than that. Jeffrey has had a very interesting career. He has written two other books and has had time to have his own business as well. He’s the managing partner of Alembic Partners, where he helps founders, investors, and executives build authority and tell powerful stories through books and proper strategic positioning. Jeff, did I get the name of the business right? Alembic.

Geoffrey Cain 3:18
Yeah, you got it right. And it’s great to be here, Jim.

Jim Beach 3:20
Thank you so much for being here. Congratulations on the book, it looks fascinating. I have not seen anyone talk about this before. What are the exile years in Steve Jobs’ life? 40 years in the desert, I think. Right,

Geoffrey Cain 3:37
you could say it’s comparable to that. It’s the 40 years in the desert for Steve Jobs, except he spent 12 years in exile after being pushed out of Apple, and then in the end returning to Apple and saving it from bankruptcy. This is one of the major stories of one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time, and this is a story that I wanted to write about, because I was so deep into the lives and biographies of various businessmen, I knew that this gap existed. I knew as a journalist that there was an entire chapter in the life of Steve Jobs that just hadn’t been covered very well, and so I wanted to go in there and I wanted to excavate what really happened. And let me tell you, it was the project of a lifetime, because this is the other Steve Jobs that we never see, we always see the guy in the turtle deck holding up that black rectangle. He tells you it’s going to be the future. He’s charismatic, he’s great at theatrics, but this is Steve Jobs at rock bottom. This is the Steve who’s in failure mode, and who has to learn some pretty hard lessons very quickly if he’s going to get out of this

Jim Beach 4:40
all right. So describe why he got kicked out of Apple in the first place. Maybe a lot of people don’t know that, that he was kicked out of Apple for over a decade. Why

Geoffrey Cain 4:50
he was so impossible to manage. He was certainly brilliant and very creative. What

Jim Beach 4:56
do you mean, manage? He owned Apple

Geoffrey Cain 4:58
well. He was the co-founder. There, but he actually, yes, he, so he did own stock in Apple, but he was not the CEO of Apple. His title was actually the head of the Macintosh division, so he was charged with building his baby, which was the original Macintosh computer released in 1984 But no, it’s a complete myth that Steve Jobs actually ran Apple at that time. It was his CEO, John Sculley, who he personally brought in to bring some adult supervision, because you got to remember Apple, at the time in the 1980s was still a startup, it was still kind of scrappy, disorganized, and so they brought in the Pepsi CEO John Sculley to take charge and to build it into a more adult, mature company,

Jim Beach 5:39
and I remember hearing some rumors and stories about him at the end hiding underneath his desk.

Geoffrey Cain 5:48
Yes, there are lots of stories like this. And also, when John Sculley pushed him out, he went into Steve’s office later and found a broken frame, a photo of both of them together, and the frame had been broken, as if Steve hurled it across the room. This was really devastating, because you have to remember this was Steve Jobs’s life – Apple with his baby, he didn’t have real friends, he barely had a private social life. It was just a really hard time for him. And then suddenly he’s driven out of the company that he, that he co-founded in his garage, and the corporates come in and take it over, so Steve is bitter and angry and vindictive, and this is going to be the moment in his life that’s going to define what happens later.

Jim Beach 6:30
All right, there have been some good movies about this, or parts of movies that I’ve seen and read about. He begged Scully to join the company, and you know, really was an example of bringing an adult into the room, and the adult ended up losing, you know, absolutely fascinating, and ruined his career. Poor Scully.

Geoffrey Cain 6:57
Right, right. Well, John Sculley, you know, originally he came into Apple. He built it up into, into a real company, you know. This was when Apple hit the billion dollar mark, back in the 1980s So it was starting to join that Fortune 500 and becoming the Apple we know today. But what John Scully did, he had the opposite vision of Steve. Steve was all about the focus. He wanted the one computer that everybody buys, but John Sculley wanted a much broader product line. He wanted all kinds of other computers. He wanted a handheld device, and so he set Apple on a different course, and he set it on the course of being this big bureaucratic corporation that had a zillion offices that would, that had all kinds of far off futuristic ideas. And so, as a result, Apple just got unwieldy. It was doing too much. It lacked focus. It was costly. Inventories were piling up, and the Apple that John Scully took over in the end would almost not survive. It was getting very close to bankruptcy by the 1990s and that’s why they had to call back Steve Jobs.

Jim Beach 8:01
All right, talk to us about the desert years and the product that he built, and the idea that he was building it forward to be acquired by Apple, which is eventually what happened. Apple really needed him after those 12 years, didn’t they?

Geoffrey Cain 8:23
Oh, they absolutely needed him. Well, Apple was aimless. It was wandering. So, you know, today Apple is a really cool company. We all have our iPhones. We all like using Macintoshes. It’s a $4 trillion company now, but Apple then was completely dysfunctional. And when Steve and his colleagues went back in there, they were just like, “Oh my god, this place is a disaster zone. Steve Jobs, in these years, he wanted to, so at Next Computer, this was the second company that he founded, after Apple, and his goal was to up Apple. He was trying to get revenge on Apple for ousting him, and he wanted to build a much more advanced computer, so one of the most advanced computers that would be available at the time, in the late 1980s this would be sold to intelligence agencies, it would be sold to university science labs, and this was really going to be something that Steve wanted to change the world. Also, AI, Steve was trying to put advanced AI for the time on this thing 40 years ago, before Chat GPT existed, it just shows how far ahead of his time he was, but the problem here was that Steve wasn’t thinking about his market and his customer. He was building a computer that was a monument to his own genius. He wanted to show the world what he was made of, and he wanted to show that he was not irrelevant anymore, despite being pushed out of Apple, but the company Next Computer also almost failed in the end, because they just couldn’t sell enough computers, and so

Jim Beach 9:50
overpriced too, and overbuilt. It

Geoffrey CainSr. 9:53
was overbuilt, it was overpriced. The customers, which were university departments, told. Steve, you have to keep it under $3,000 keeping in mind this is the year 1988 that’s a lot of money back then. The end, the end price with all the add-ons, the add-ons were necessary in the end, and it went over $10,000 which was about a year’s tuition at a university in the 1980s So, I mean, it’s completely out of control. Steve overbuilt it. He wanted all the latest gadgets and gizmos on this thing, but it’s just not what the.. it’s not what the market wanted in the end,

Jim Beach 10:29
right? But they developed something that Apple itself needed, right? Wasn’t that software and operating system,

Geoffrey Cain 10:36
right? And this is what this is what shows how far ahead of his time, he was in the 1980s Steve was developing a new operating system using something called object-oriented programming, which was truly revolutionary for the time, because it allowed developers, regular developers, to build excellent software quite quickly. You got to keep in mind this was the 1980s it was really hard to program a computer, lots of code, lots of lines of code on that Unix, and it’s just not something that was enjoyable. But Steve took development and put it in the hands of regular people, and that’s where things started to turn around for him. It’s just that he was too late to see it. He didn’t realize just how powerful this software was

Jim Beach 11:23
all right. What is his personality doing at this time? Is he learning, getting any sense of accountability, or is he growing at all? And what would we say his emotional intelligence is zero kind your thoughts,

Geoffrey Cain 11:45
EQ, Steve Jobs was not known for emotional intelligence. His EQ was definitely under 100 and he was not easy to work with. So, he would go around next computer, he hired the best talent of the time, and he would give them orders that made no sense. He would say, we’re going to release the computer on this date. Well, if we release it on this date, we’re going to have trouble with the design and getting parts and components, and it’s just not going to work. His team was advising him the whole way through, and Steve kept ignoring them. This was the moment in his life when he had to learn of the importance of team building, teamwork, as opposed to everything being about Steve Jobs, and what Steve Jobs wanted. So, you can think about this as the time when he was being tamed, and he was going from being this artistic visionary at the original Apple to the business leader. Being a business leader is not the same as being an artistic visionary, and he had to learn that the hard way,

Jim Beach 12:44
right, and his personal life was also a train wreck around now, too, with his daughter that he wouldn’t claim, but he named a computer after her,

Geoffrey Cain12:56
right, the Lisa named after his daughter, Lisa, he refused to claim paternity. He refused to give much money at all to the mother. It was really a horrible situation. So, yes, Steve Jobs was not a good guy to work for, not a good guy in his personal life. And it was through meeting actually Lorraine Powell Jobs that some of that taming happened, getting married and having kids that the second time is what started to mature Steve Jobs,

Jim Beach 13:30
did it work? I mean, was he much better when he died?

Geoffrey Cain. 13:34
You know, so don’t get me wrong, Steve was always a tough guy, he was extremely hard to work for, but by the time he got to later life, he was able to direct that energy in better ways. So, everything he did later in life had purpose, it had conviction behind it, whereas in his earlier life, in his youth, he just wasn’t somebody who could make sound decisions, he would make really strange decisions that satisfied his narcissistic ego, but didn’t really advance the idea of building new technology. Always, it’s surprising to learn this about Steve Jobs, and this is something that I was even surprised about. You know, I would go through old emails and memos, I spent, you know, years and years going through this stuff, and I would see Steve Jobs just saying the most wacko stuff in there. He would, he would say, you know, we’re going to ship 25,000 computers next month, and meanwhile, you know, they’re only shipping 100 the previous month. So everybody around him is thinking, what the heck is Steve Jobs doing? He’s going to drive this company into the ground, he’s going to be almost written out of history. And at one point, Steve Jobs was almost personally out of money. He had about two to three years left of his own money. You got to remember these were not public companies. He was investing his own cash and trying to keep these struggling companies afloat, but it was through that rock bottom moment, you know, Steve Jobs at rock bottom. Everything around him is falling apart, almost out of money. That’s when the realizations start happening, and that’s when he backs off and learns that people can succeed without him being around constantly. He steps back, his team does their best work, and that’s ironically when the successes start for Steve,

Jim Beach 15:21
and he did have some really good helpers along at that point, some people in, you know, industrial design that are da Vincis of their time, right?

Geoffrey Cain 15:33
Yeah, and not just da Vincis, but also hardware engineers, software engineers. One of Steve’s greatest talents was his ability to attract other talents. He just had this eye, you know. People described him to me as a street hustler, that was his soul, and he could look at you and pierce right through you and figure out who you were and what you wanted in life, and he would bring you on and convince you that you were there to change the world with him. He really had that magnetism, but early on that magnetism was not a good force, because he would plow through people’s goodwill, he would, you know, hurt them, he would say nasty things, and his five co-founders at Next Computer ended up leaving, they just couldn’t take it anymore. So Steve was alone, I mean, Steve Jobs did not have a lot of fans, and even Fortune magazine, at one point asked whether he’s a snake oil salesman, the literal, literal quote. So Steve Jobs, you know, we think of him today as this great messiah of technology who brought us the iPhone and brought us Apple, but he was only able to get here by going through that tortuous path, by going through the hardship of the desert and learning what it was that people really want from him,

Jim Beach 16:45
that’s an interesting theme, right there. The theme of jazz music, do you have to have pain to succeed or to be interesting in life?

Geoffrey Cain 16:56
Yeah, well, I’m a jazz musician, and I’ve had my own hard times, but I wouldn’t attribute that to, you know, hardship, my own musical abilities that I’ve cultivated over many years. So, you know, I would maybe disagree with the premise of the question. I don’t think it’s necessary to go through hardship, but I think for certain people who start off believing that they truly are the greatest, that their ideas by nature are great, that wilderness is it’s a necessary taming force, and by the way, it’s not just Steve Jobs. A lot of great leaders have gone through this: Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln,

Jim Beach 17:30
Winston Churchill – just proves my thesis, Jeff, that if you’re to be super successful, interesting, you have to have a period of pain in your life. That should be your next book challenging that premise, because you inherently disagreed with it, but then you went off and started to prove

Geoffrey Cain 17:47
it. Well, I did name some great names, so not everybody has gone through it, you know. Not everybody has been through the hard times. Some people do succeed, people early in life. Me,

Jim Beach 17:56
a great person that hasn’t. Then we’ll have a conversation.

Geoffrey Cain 18:00
Okay. Okay. Well, we’ll have this, we’ll have this discussion sometime, a debate. But Steve had to go through it. I mean, Steve really did have to suffer, because without it, he would have become what his colleagues described as, you know, the sprung hair ideologue out there. He would have been somebody preaching to nothing. He would have had these brilliant ideas, but if you can’t use the brilliant ideas if you can’t execute them well, then none of that really matters in the end. And so Steve Jobs had to learn that lesson, that an idea is actually not the most important thing. And he even talked about this in interviews. He said the execution is the more important part. You can’t make electrons do certain things, you can’t make protons do certain things. A lot of what the wilderness is, is learning to work with the limitations of the world and finding your place within it.

Jim Beach 18:47
Very well said. Let’s switch gears. I want to talk about some of the other books for a second. In particular, The Perfect Police State, which was NPR’s Book of the Day, Overseas Press Club, and Cornelius Ryan Award winner. I didn’t list off all the awards you have won, but you’ve won an absolute ton of them. Congratulations. Stories that there are places in California that have Chinese police barracks.

Geoffrey Cain 19:20
Yes, so there are places in various parts of the country. There was a Chinese police station found in New York. The person running that has been charged with a crime. A mayor in California has been accused of working as an agent for the Chinese government and is now being charged with her own set of crimes, this is a real threat, and this is something that I, you know, separate from my work on Steve Jobs. I spent many years overseas as a foreign correspondent. This was back in China, so back when the surveillance state was just being erected. This was back when AI, facial recognition, voice recognition. Technologies were all new. The world had not really seen these things before, and I saw what they were doing, and it just truly terrified me. It was a 24/7 total surveillance dystopia being created, and I thought, I really hope that this does not become the new normal all over the world. I hope that we Americans can treasure our freedoms and keep our liberties. I really don’t want to see this. What’s happening in China go elsewhere?

Jim Beach 20:27
It is very scary. So, how many police does the Chinese government have in the United States? Is that an aberration? Or I sort of thought there were a whole network of them, and are they here to monitor the Chinese or the Americans,

Geoffrey Cain 20:45
so it’s so it’s hard to say the number. I mean, I’m not, I’m not really able to put a finger on an exact number, but I do think that the number is more significant than what we thought before. The Chinese government, which is run by, you know, the Chinese Communist Party, a one-party authoritarian state. They don’t have much regard for the borders of other nations, and they’re happy to send in spies and agents. Most, for the most part, the people they’re monitoring are dissidents from China. They’re monitoring, you know, people from China living in America, and they want to keep tabs on them and see what they’re up to, but the Chinese Communist Party has become a lot bolder and more aggressive with this over the last few years, and so we’re starting to see things like a mayor being accused of working with the Chinese government. I mean, it truly is astounding, and it makes me worried for the future of a lot of the world

Jim Beach 21:41
very much, so what services do you offer? What could you help us do? What’s the perfect client for you, Jeff? Who do you want to help

Geoffrey Cain 21:55
anybody who has made it in life but wants to get to that next step of becoming a thought leader, somebody who wants to get into the New York Times or wants to get on big podcasts. We help people package their voice, understand their strengths and weaknesses when they go out there in public. We train them, we coach them, and we help them write their books, their memoirs, their various leadership ideas. We put it out there, and we help turn them into somebody who can garner that kind of public respect.

Jim Beach 22:28
Excellent. I heard you were willing to play our little game, the quick 10.

Geoffrey Cain 22:33
Let’s give it a shot. Sounds like fun.

Jim Beach 22:34
Are you currently sober?

Geoffrey Cain 22:36
Yes.

Jim Beach 22:37
All right. State law requires Monday morning. Ask, yes. Do you want to accept the standard wager?

Geoffrey Cain 22:44
We could accept that. Okay, let’s try.

Jim Beach 22:46
Love the attitude. Number one, your favorite creativity hack walks. Just go on a walk. Number two, favorite bootstrapping trick:

Geoffrey Cain 22:57
trust your gut. If the information is incomplete, your gut will fill in for you.

Jim Beach 23:02
Number three, name your top passions:

Geoffrey Cain. 23:05
music, design, technology, entrepreneurship, and art.

Jim Beach 23:14
Number four, the first three steps in starting a business are

Geoffrey Cain 23:18
have a vision, build a team, execute the vision well.

Jim Beach 23:24
Number five, the best way to get your first real customer

Geoffrey Cain 23:28
is word of mouth. It’s through family and friends at the start.

Jim Beach 23:32
Number six, your dreamiest technology is

Geoffrey Cain 23:35
a cleaning robot that can do everything around the house.

Jim Beach 23:40
Number seven, your best entrepreneurial advice.

Geoffrey Cain 23:47
Think about who you’re selling to and what people want from you.

Jim Beach 23:51
Number eight, worst entrepreneurial mistake:

Geoffrey Cain 23:56
getting too ahead of the market, as Steve Jobs did.

Jim Beach 24:00
Number nine, your favorite entrepreneur, and

Geoffrey Cain 24:04
why Walt Disney, because he understood that success in culture translates into success in business.

Jim Beach 24:11
Number 10, your favorite superhero,

Geoffrey Cain 24:14
Spider-Man. With great power comes great responsibility, that’s what he said.

Jim Beach 24:17
Oh, I like that line. All right, Jeff, while we calculate the winner of the wager and your score, how do we find out more about you? Get in touch, get some books.

Geoffrey Cain 24:26
So, I’m on the web, I’m at my website, Jeffrey king.net You can buy books there on Amazon. I’m also on X, it’s at Jeffrey underscore Kane, and I’m on LinkedIn too. Just type my name in, and I do respond to messages, I read everything, and I try to get back to everything

Jim Beach 24:42
fantastic. Well, thank you so very much for being with.. oh, this is devastating. I just got your score. I was so sorry. You got a 94 a 94 You have to have a 95 to win, so I win. I’m really sorry, and we always play for a Tesla. So you owe us a Tesla. I’ll look forward to that.

Geoffrey Cain 25:02
Oh, all right. I’ll send it your way. Thanks for having me, Jim and Tesla. I’m gonna go check them out this afternoon.

Jim Beach 25:08
Yeah, they’re almost free now. You know, so many people are tired of them. Probably get one of those Tesla trucks for free. People can’t get them insured. Have you heard that?

Geoffrey Cain 25:19
Right? Nobody wants to ensure that, because people are throwing fire bombs at them. Now, is that the reason

Jim Beach 25:25
on his career? Jeffrey Kane. Thank you so very much for being with us. Fantastic information, and great, great story. Again, thank you so much for sharing it. The book again, Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of Next in the remaking of an American visionary. Jeff, we’d love to have you back. Thanks a lot.

Geoffrey Cain25:47
Thanks so much. Great to be here,

Jim Beach 25:49
and we will be right back. Bye. well,

Intro 2 26:05
that’s a, that’s a, that’s a wonderful question. Actually, oh my gosh, I love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim. Wow, that’s, that’s all, that’s a great one. You know, that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question, and, and I don’t have a great answer. That’s a great question. Oh, that is such a loaded question, and that’s actually a really good question. School

Intro 1 26:24
for Startups Radio.

Jim Beach 26:26
We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us. Very excited to introduce an amazing guest. Please welcome Scott Benning to the show. He is an incredible star in an industry that we probably all ignore. I guarantee that you have used one of his products while he was the president and CEO of a company called Mono Soul. They created the Tide Pod thing that we all use, and he made $17 trillion from it. So that’s probably a typo. Let’s not go. Don’t repeat that number. He is now the CEO of a company called MBS Two Advisors. They are a strategic marketing organization that helps entrepreneurs and executives and business leaders. He has been awarded a congressional award for his achievements and is a Chicago Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame member, just released a new book called The Back Nine: Inspiration and Insights on Retaining Relevance, Purpose, and Integrity in Retirement. Scott Benning, welcome to the show. How you doing?

P. Scott Bening Sr. 27:36
I’m doing great, thanks for having me today.

Jim Beach 27:38
It is our pleasure. Congratulations on the new book, a golf reference, and it’s got the 19th tee there at the sort of the bottom of the cover, where I guess the 19th tee is the bar, isn’t it? Isn’t that where you go after

P. Scott Bening Sr. 27:54
the, yeah,

P. Scott Bening Sr. 27:55
typically, and if you look at the cover really closely, there’s a chaise lounge in there that’s supposed to have been a little bit bigger with the martini on it, so it’s where you start to relax in the second half of your life.

Jim Beach 28:06
Okay, excellent. You’re not already there, are you? Are you claiming that you’re in the second half? Well, yeah, probably I

P. Scott Bening Sr. 28:15
hit the 67 mark in a couple weeks, and my dad’s at 94 and it’s still going strong, so I got some years left in me.

Jim Beach 28:23
All right, are you still playing the game, or are you just playing golf now? No, I’m playing,

P. Scott Bening Sr. 28:27
I’m playing all kinds of games. I’ll give you a typical day. For me, yesterday I got up and went to the racetrack and had a race in the afternoon, racing them to CS BMW race car in the GT Challenge series. I got out of the car after the race came home, took a shower, and went up to a local place outside, and sat in and played the drums for about 45 minutes, and then came home. So that was my day yesterday. I didn’t get the golf, but maybe that’s going to happen tomorrow. In between that, I’m doing all kinds of advisory work, obviously writing the books, or you know, two books over the last few years has taken some of my time up, but I’m still working with the parent company that I sold Monosol to back in 2012 and I’ve been on an advisory role with them with their board, and also helping them with some startups that they’ve, they’ve acquired.

Jim Beach 29:18
Go ahead, I’m sorry.

P. Scott Bening Sr. 29:19
No, I said so. I’m staying pretty busy.

Jim Beach 29:21
Yes, you are. Tell us about the monosole days. Was it a random discovery? Were you working for a better detergent?

P. Scott Bening Sr. 29:32
No. Actually, to be clear, we didn’t. We didn’t have anything to do with the actual detergent. We made the stop, the film that dissolved the case, the case, yeah, the casing, if you want to call it, and I joined the company in 1989 and they had been floundering and playing in this area for since 1955 I think, and it never really caught on, and I think what I was able to do was bring a level of kind. Maybe I could say chemistry and professionalism that they hadn’t had, and you know, we went from a couple million in sales doing odds and then things to, you know, well over the half a billion before I retired. So it was a long journey, took a lot of people, I brought in the right folks and the right technical folks, the right marketing people, and kind of led by example in a large way, especially in our early days, and I think that the only reason that the whole thing worked is because the relationships we built with our customers and working together.

Jim Beach 30:32
How many different brands use that kind of casing?

P. Scott Bening Sr. 30:36
Oh boy, at one time before I retired, I could probably tell you that Monosol supplied well over 90% of all all the materials that are in the marketplace. I don’t know what those numbers are today. There’s been some competitors that have come in and tried to chip away at their market share, but the big ones, Procter and Gamble, Unilever, Henkel, Breckit, Ben Keeser, all the big names, and Monosol was the supplier for those folks. So, there’s there’s there’s many over in China now that have put out some own brand things over in the Asia Pacific region, but we had a good stronghold, and we earned it because of the relationships and the technology we deliver to the large, large consumer good companies

Jim Beach 31:24
very interesting. You got your undergrad in chemistry, I find that absolutely fascinating. Do you recommend that entrepreneurs gain a real skill set like that, that

P. Scott Bening Sr. 31:37
you know,

Jim Beach 31:39
getting major? I can talk about marketing. Yeah, really talk about, you know, so many companies are going to want to hire a chemist because it’s a true skill set.

P. Scott Bening Sr. 31:49
Well, I always said that the, it’s a lot easier to take a scientist and turn them into a marketing person than taking a marketing person and turning them into a scientist. There’s just something about I was able to add on to the learnings that I had in the science arena, and if you have the right personality and the right acumen, you can go out and become a marketing person, or a salesperson, or a business person. You can learn those things. It’s pretty hard to go back and actually learn how organic chemistry works, or inorganic chemistry, unless you go back to school, that’s kind of my two cents. A lot of the things you do on the marketing side can be bootstrap, you know, school to hard docs, while you’re out there learning, which is probably the best way to learn. Actually,

Jim Beach 32:34
I would agree with that, you know. I consider myself a, you know, not a genius or anything, Scott, but I’m a fairly smart guy. I never understood chemistry. I just.. I guess I don’t know if I had bad teachers or, or what, but I just never could make heads or tails of chemistry. Hated that class.

P. Scott Bening Sr. 32:55
No, it’s kind of weird. I picked it up in high school, and I think some of it was some of the people that hung around with, which is, which is kind of the lesson in life, and in business, you hang around the right people, and you either get lucky or you learn, right? So the guys I hung around with, a few guys that were also chemistry majors, and one of them went on to become a surgeon, another one became a dentist, and you know, I just became a, actually, a technical sales guy, and you know, at the end of the day, after several years, I think we probably all ended up okay. But it was, it’s kind of like I hung around it. I had an uncle that was a had a chemistry degree, excuse me, that went on, and actually at one time was the president of Ashland Chemical, and I thought it was cool, because they owned Valvoline, and he was one whole year, I think. All he did was travel around with the Valvoline race team, and got to go to all the races, and all that. And he had nice cars, and he had a nice house, and I thought that’s a cool thing, that’s what I want to do. I want to be like that, and I think that’s had a lot of influence on my desire to pursue it, and it came naturally to me too. That’s another thing.

Jim Beach 34:04
Yes, I know one chemist of note, and his only, or his primary invention is something that, again, a product just like yours, that 99% of the world has consumed, Tony Aman, and he invented or formulated the first Diet Coke, and go to his house, had a wedding reception, or a wedding baby shower, or something like that, at his house. He would sit there at his bar and mix a Diet Coke from hand, and you know, would stir it with the, you know, like the old bar at the dime store. What about AI? Is AI a threat to chemistry, and

P. Scott Bening Sr. 34:51
to.. oh, no way. I think the complete opposite. And I, you know, I look at it this way. I think in the back then I write a lot of a lot about tech. Technology, and being a baby boomer, and all the things that we’ve had to go through in progression, and the latest, obviously, is AI, and the old adage is AI should, could be, and should be the best personal assistant you ever had, or researcher that you ever had, and you don’t have to remember their birthday, you know, it’s like it’s incredible what, how quickly things can get done, you know. When I was going to school, we didn’t even have computers. I hate to say it, but we didn’t. We just had to go to the library and look up IR charts, and it’s stuff that was all manual, that was, and it was static. It was not dynamic at all. And AI today, from a formulary perspective, so give you a tide pod story. During Covid, Procter and Gamble shut their labs all down because everybody was going home, can’t work in the lab. They’d made more progress using AI before everybody knew what AI was on experimentation than they did when, when the labs were open, they were able to run 10s and 10s of 1000s of simulations on experiment, experimental simulations, and get down to all right now. When we get back in the lab, we’re going to test these one, two, or three variants, and they were, they were spot on, and I had very many conversations at the time with the CTO at the time of PNG, and he was explaining that it was like a major breakthrough, and PNG, as being cutting edge, they were, they had the ability to tap into what’s become AI before Chat GBT ever existed, so I’m a big believer in it. It’s you have to be careful, very careful. I mean, you have to test everything. You know, everything you do with AI needs to be humanized at some point before it’s put into play. And I would, I would suggest, you know, that I think I heard some statistics. People my age are many of them afraid of it, and I think if you embrace it, and you see what the capabilities are, or the possibilities, you’re going to find out how it can make life easy and allow you to have more time to do other things, as opposed to replacing people. So, I’m a big proponent,

Jim Beach 37:18
all right, and instead of replacing people, do you think your friends are going to lose jobs?

P. Scott Bening Sr. 37:27
I don’t know that I am. I think there’s going to be lots of new, different jobs, and people will excel at the end of the day. The humans still need to be around, in my humble opinion. I can’t, you know, I’m not running the business anymore, and I don’t know how many people have been rationalized because of AI, but I look at the science industry, or I look at the our parent, the parent company Karari, has, you know, hundreds and hundreds of scientists in their research labs, and I’m not hearing a word about any of them being made redundant, I see what I’m finding is that the breakthroughs are coming back and coming through faster and faster and more abundance. So, yeah, I think some jobs could be rationalized, but then there’ll be new jobs that are going to be created just as well.

Jim Beach 38:14
How should a person go into retirement? What mindset do you need to have a successful retirement that you don’t kill your spouse because you’re spending more time or you become bored, have nothing to do but watch Wheel of Fortune. What’s the mindset for a successful retirement?

P. Scott Bening Sr. 38:32
Well, I go into it in a lot of depth in the back nine, I think blue is the first paragraph, and it’s about retirement and the fact that I hate that word, I hated the idea of ever being anyone thinking that I was quote retiring, excuse me, or being retired. It’s like you’re retiring a racehorse or put out to pasture. I think people have to go into it. I spent six months planning, which was nowhere near enough mentally the way mine came about, and I think figuring out what your relevance will be after you stop doing what you’ve been doing as a business leader, as a manager, as an owner, CEO, whatever it is, you got to figure out what your relevance it will be going forward, and also think about how much your mind has been stimulated while you were working day in and day out, from the moment you wake, or even before you really wake, through to, you know, going, going to sleep at night, and you have to do the same thing when you, when you retire, you’re going to be doing different things, and you have to find out what those are, smell in the roses, and talk about the book that I remember. The first time I went to the hardware store, I think I went to Lowe’s, and I used to run into grab things, and I’d be in and out there in two seconds, trying to find a parking space, because I had to run, run. I found myself walking around the hardware store and shopping and. Looking around, and I was laughing to myself. It’s like I’ve never done this before. Stress levels should drop dramatically. All of this is prefaced, of course, by health being one, and liquidity, and having enough money to retire. If you have those two things, then the rest of it’s all mindset in your, in your, in your, your brain, and how you’re going to approach and look every day. Look at your schedule. I’m just as busy as I was when I was working. I’m just doing different things, and there are times where I wish I could get – I need a vacation from retirement. Actually, I have a couple friends of mine that are also pretty busy in their quote retirement years, and they always joke about, hey, this retirement thing really sucks, I’m too busy, so, but that’s a good thing in my opinion. So, I think planning ahead is very important. Read my book, that would be another way, because I’ve had several people that have called me and texted me an email and said, this is perfect. I needed to have this. I needed somebody to steer me in the right direction and have you start to think about this in the right timeframe and the right frame of mind as well.

Jim Beach 41:14
In the book, you have a chapter entitled mr. Miyagi, our favorite karate kid hero, what is that guy’s name?

P. Scott Bening Sr. 41:27
Danny, Danny, whatever, I forgot his name. La Russa was the kid. Oh, yeah,

Jim Beach 41:34
yeah. What’s the realm? Yeah, mr. Miyagi, to your book,

P. Scott Bening Sr. 41:39
I. that whole chapter is about mentoring and being mentored and mentoring other people. I’ve, I had very strong mentors growing up through my life. Most of them were athletic coaches, some were professors or teachers. One that just popped into my head, you know, I would have got a chemistry degree while I was playing football in the NCAA, and those two things didn’t match. I was gone all the time. The head of the chemistry department loved football, believe it or not, and he gave me and one of my teammates the keys to the building, so we could do our labs on the weekends and nights. Well, because we were not there all the time, and we were able to graduate with our degrees while we played football, which is pretty cool. He was a mentor to me. He helped me get through organic chemistry. He helped me get through calculus to be able to achieve that goal of that degree. I had been mentored by co-owners and the guy that was the chairman of Chris Craft. He grabbed me by the ear and said, “Kid, I’m going to teach you how to run a business. You know, you might be a chemistry guy, but you know how to run a business. So, I’ve had that, the benefit of those types of relationships with mentors, and I think it’s important when you look at retirement and you look at this next chapter, you, if you sit back and think about all that you have accomplished and everything you know, I started doing that just before I retired, and in a spreadsheet form, and I ended up with 400 lines of text. I thought, wow, I know a lot of stuff now. How can I help other people? And mostly I’m helping a lot of younger folks that are either in business or even in college, wondering where they’re going to go, how they’re going to get there, and making us making oneself available for people to be the phone a friend person, I’ve really enjoyed that, and it’s becoming more and more common, where I sometimes have to drop what I’m doing, because I get an email or a text from people that want help, they want advice, and I first thing is I do applaud them, because I also know people that think they can do it all themselves, and I believe firmly in the fact that I would have never gotten where I am in life or business if I hadn’t had people mentoring me, and this chapter in the back nine talks a lot about how to do that, why to do it, and the responsibilities involved both being a mentor and mentee.

Jim Beach 44:04
Another chapter on fairness. My mother always said that she would make me one promise, and that promise was that life ain’t gonna be fair.

P. Scott Bening Sr. 44:13
That’s right, that’s right. So there’s a bunch of things that that inspired me to write that, and some of it was maybe a bit of anger, because I’ve mentioned racing cars before, and people don’t always follow the rules when they race, just like every sport. The technical specs on cars can be tweaked and done this and that, and we had a couple of situations where rules weren’t being followed, but also people weren’t out enforcing rules around the same time. I watched, having grown up in Buffalo, New York, but Buffalo Bills get frankly screwed two years in a row by really bad calls that kept them out of the Super Bowl, and that was all

Jim Beach 44:57
land that was part of the plan. No one wants to. Watch them in the Super Bowl.

P. Scott Bening Sr. 45:01
Yes, we only did it four times in a row, right? Yeah, so those things, there’s many other examples in there about fairness and what’s not fair, but the best part of that chapter is the reality that, yeah, I think I got screwed that I did not win the championship one year because of an illegal car, but I also had a chance to win one specific race, and I didn’t, and I didn’t win the championship, and just like Josh Allen says, we didn’t play like champions, and no matter who’s out there, you got to win. If you can’t figure out a way to win, then too bad, you know, become a champion, go look in the mirror. So I think that was that really how I round that chapter out, that said, yeah, we can whine and complain, and things are not fair in the world today, but there’s, you’ve got to work around that, because you know what’s going to happen, just like your mom said.

Jim Beach 45:51
And finally, a chapter on things ain’t what they used to be. Where are you going with that?

P. Scott Bening Sr. 45:56
You’re going to read everything from technology changing things a lot of its manners, and what we see out in the world today, and frankly, as a baby boomer at the age that I am, it’s like one of the things that triggered was going to a restaurant or going to a restaurant from a hotel walking in Chicago with two executives from Japan, and we walked by three groups of people in a three block area smoking pot out of a bong on the street in a very nice park near on Wacker Drive in Chicago, going from a beautiful hotel to a great restaurant, and they couldn’t believe it. And in the book, I kind of talked about, I don’t care whether people smoke pot or not. What I don’t like is the smell. I don’t like people going into restaurants with their baseball caps turned backwards, even though there’s a dress code. Everything seems so relaxed, you know. The chivalry is gone, you know. There’s a lot of that kind of, maybe it’s a whining, and I start out in the chapter, talk about the guy that maybe you know or remember, Andy Rooney, who was on 60 minutes, and I talked about, you know, what I, you know, what I hate, he used to do that at the end of every show, and I kind of start the chapter, and the feedback I’ve gotten from several folks, you know, in the maybe 50 to 70 year range, are like, yeah, you know, I totally get that. So that’s what that chapter, it’s kind of a fun chapter, little bit of unfiltered out of me, and you know, that’s that’s the part of this book too. The first, the first book, formulating solutions, went over great, and it was a lot of the lessons learned in business, growing monosol into what it was, and everything I’ve learned, but this I took the filter off on this book, and kind of just spoke from the heart. I

Jim Beach 47:49
saw that the formulating solutions book was translated into Japanese, and you just referred to your Japanese colleagues. You know what, there’s just no way to make Japanese language look pretty in terms of page design or graphic design or something like that. It’s just an ugly looking language. Chinese is too, I think. I actually have a master’s of Japanese and lived in Japan and worked for the government for a while and stuff. So I just think that Japanese.. I’m just comparing your two covers and the American, the English one just looks so good. In the Japanese one, just looks like scratch. I gotta

P. Scott Bening Sr. 48:27
tell you, I’ve sold more books in Japan. I sold over 1000 books in Japan in less than a year that I did in the US. It went over great in it, and I got invited and did a three city book tour.

Intro 2 48:40
Wow, last June,

P. Scott Bening Sr. 48:41
and that was, that was fun. It was cool, because having worked there, you know, that people are very shy, they don’t speak in public, they kind of, their hands don’t raise, but when you skip, when you, when you take the, the bottle cap off, it’s, you know, the, if you think using your Diet Coke thing, if you shake the bottle, the thing starts falling out, and I’ve had so many of those book tours where we had 15 minutes left, and I was there for 45 minutes because people wouldn’t stop talking, but it takes a while to get that bottle opened.

Jim Beach 49:12
Yes, great, great stories, Scott. And congratulations on an amazing career, and good luck with the book. How do we get a copy? Find out more about you, follow you online, all that stuff, please.

P. Scott Bening Sr. 49:25
www dot m bs two.org You can get books there, learn about the books, come connect with me through the website. Yeah, it’s www dot mbs two.org And I got a question for you. What about the quick 10 game?

Jim Beach 49:42
Let’s play. Are you currently sober? I’m required by state law to ask.

Geoffrey Cain 49:50
Yes.

Jim Beach 49:51
Do you want to change that? You can get on sober. We just need to know which

P. Scott Bening Sr. 49:55
it is. No, thank you. Not now. The

Jim Beach 49:58
standard wager, except. The standard wager.

P. Scott Bening Sr. 50:02
No,

Jim Beach 50:03
you have to.

P. Scott Bening Sr. 50:04
Okay, I do.

Jim Beach 50:05
All right, there you go. Number one, your favorite creativity hack.

P. Scott Bening Sr. 50:09
I think people solve people try to solve the first problem. I try to solve the real problem.

Jim Beach 50:15
Number two, bootstrapping trick. What’s your favorite bootstrapping trick?

P. Scott Bening Sr. 50:19
I don’t know if it’s a trick. It was a strategy to get the customers to fund our scaled expansion. Let them use their capital, so that you feed their business, and it was worked with the great large consumer good companies that needed us.

Jim Beach 50:32
Number three, name your top passions:

P. Scott Bening Sr. 50:35
wife and kids, GT racing, playing the drums, playing golf, and mentoring the next generation of leaders,

Jim Beach 50:42
number four, the first three steps in starting a business are

P. Scott Bening Sr. 50:47
identify a problem, pay the people for solutions and not ideas, and define what your business is, that’s first, validate everything before you invest, and make sure somebody actually wants what you’re offering, and that you can also deliver, and I guess third, I guess use your experience, what you already know, and have in your relationships, and use your credibility. It’s better than money sometimes to get you going.

Jim Beach 51:14
Number five, the best way to get your first real customer

P. Scott Bening Sr. 51:18
is have a great product, and know that you can deliver it and start a relationship to open the door.

Jim Beach 51:24
Number six, what’s your dreamiest technology?

P. Scott Bening Sr. 51:27
I want everybody to go back to gasoline engine cars.

Jim Beach 51:31
Number seven, what’s your best entrepreneurial advice?

P. Scott Bening Sr. 51:37
Um, I guess if you don’t fail, that means you haven’t tried, and if you fail, I always say figure out how you fail and get it right before anybody else realizes that you failed.

Jim Beach 51:49
Number eight, worst entrepreneurial mistake,

Geoffrey Cain 51:52
not asking for help and guidance from your elders or trusting other people.

Jim Beach 51:57
Number nine, favorite entrepreneur and why I

P. Scott Bening Sr. 52:02
I just, okay, this one’s pretty nude in my head. I just read something. Sarah Blakely, she started the Spanx thing, and I didn’t know how she did it. She just took pantyhose and cut the legs off and said, ‘Wow, this works. And then built a, you know, became a billionaire. Pretty awesome.

Jim Beach 52:19
Number 10, favorite superhero,

P. Scott Bening Sr. 52:22
um Well, superhero. Okay, Spider-Man. He wasn’t the richest or the strongest guy. He just had touch with lots of people in relationships, lot of self-doubt, but he found the right thing to do at the end of the day. Yeah.

Jim Beach 52:39
Fantastic, Scott. Why don’t we figure out your score and the winner of the wager. How do we find out more about you? Follow you online, get a copy of the book,

P. Scott Bening Sr. 52:49
www dot m b s two.org Everything’s on the website, it’ll pop right up. You can order books and also reach out and connect with me.

Jim Beach 53:00
All right, I’m just waiting until.. oh, I’ve just been giving your score. I’m so sorry, Scott. Got a 94 Excellent, excellent score. We have to have a 95 to win the wager. I don’t know what one of the judges was thinking, but that’s all. I’m just reporting what they said. So we win the wager. We always play for a Tesla, so I will look forward to that soon. Please.

P. Scott Bening Sr. 53:20
All right, I’ll get it on my list. I’ll get it on my new to-do list, but I’m pretty busy in retirement at all.

Jim Beach 53:25
Yeah, well, you said that already, but you know you’re still retired, so you should have time to do it in the next week or so. All

P. Scott Bening Sr. 53:31
right, I’ll give it my best.

Jim Beach 53:33
Scott Benning, thank you so much for being with us. The back nine, and we are out of time. We are back tomorrow, though. Be safe, take care, and go make a million dollars. Bye now,