Michael Hook — Entrepreneur, Platinum Tribe Creator, Author

Once more, it is what's involved and as always, we bring you fascinating guests, interesting guests. Today, I'm talking to a very interesting guest. He is an author and may we say at this stage, self-published author. He wrote a book called "2020, the year that killed retirement, aging, adapting, and reflecting on disruption and change." And who is it? It is Michael Hook. Hello, Michael, welcome to the show. - Good morning, David, and thank you. - Right, so Michael, before we get into the book and why you wrote it and what you think about in the book, tell me a little bit about Michael himself. You know, sort of where were you born? What was your upbringing like? And what led you to decide that, not only did you want to write a book, but you wanted to self-publish it as well? - Well, I'm a Joburg boy. It's strange, this circle of life, for one day you're young, then you kind of in the middle ages and you keep putting off any kind of sorts of retirement or the later days. And one day you wake up and you find, well, that's happened to you. You're in your sixties, time is passing by, and you start to not only examine your life, but really say, what am I going to do for the rest of my life?

So aging is nothing that I've planned. I don't think any of us plan to get old. Very few of us financially plan to get old and we'll get onto that later. But it's something that happens. And one day you wake up and you are what Chuk Conley would call a modern elder. So yeah, I'm a Johannesburg boy, local guy who earned my living is herbal and natural medicines, which I sell in the big retailers and online. In the last few years, I've been doing talks in corporates, trying to help people with personal transformation. In my case, quit smoking. I've got a quit smoking program, but that has really set the stage for me to be able to intervene with helping people set for retirement, set for retrenchment, set for early retirement, and really wondering what the heck they're going to do for the next 25 or 30 years. - Okay. And you know what? That is such a valid, valid, valid point that you make there because in the old days, you know, when I say in the olden times, I'm kind of right up there in my almost mid fifties at the moment, but you would work for 20, 30, 40 years, whatever the case may be, for a single company, and then you would retire and you would be able to live on your retirement and your retirement because, you know, we weren't expected to live that long.

These days, things have changed because now what you were told, I mean, I remember when I was 18, I took out a retirement policy and they told me that by the time I was 55 and I retired, I was going to have 1.5 million rand. And I thought, man, that is a lot of money. Well, let's just say that 1.5 million rand is not even a drop in the bucket at the moment. So Michael, you touched on what you do. So did you spend most of your sort of working life to date selling these herbal supplements and remedies? Tell me a little bit about that, 'cause that sounds fascinating. - Well, David, I think my skill and my curse is that I've got a very short attention span. So through my lifetime, I've done many things. Most of my life was spent in event management, organizing sports events and that kind of thing. But I married a lady who was involved in homeopathy. I got very interested in it. And so for the last, say, 15 or 20 years, I've had various natural and holistic medicines, which I've been concocted in and sold in. And that really led me to putting together a quit smoking program. I have a quit smoking program, which I sell internationally as well as here, which is a homeopathic or a herbal formula, but obviously all linking to an online course and to the motivations and all the things that make this program so special.

That really led me there to standing up in front of audiences of corporate, taking groups of people and trying to work this magic of personal transformation. - Okay, now how does that, which in and of itself is a calling, how does that then translate into writing a book? What on earth possessed you? - Well, I did write a book, which is actually more of a manual on quitting smoking, which I've got in the big retailers and I sell it online. I sell it on Amazon and that kind of thing. When lockdown came, my wife, who's a lot cleverer than me, said, "Look, how are we going to use this time?" So we made a couple of ground rules. The first one was we weren't going to slosh around in bed and still be in our pajamas by 10 in the morning. We were going to get up, we were going to plan the day, we were going to have family time. The second is we weren't going to open the bottle five in the afternoon, because after all, we weren't on holiday. It was really work as usual, but with a different twist. And the third was, how do we use this time, this very strange time to come out of COVID? And at that stage, no one knew if we were going to that, you know, it was obviously a lot more scary than it's kind of turned out to be.

How are we going to look back on this period and say, "Okay, I use that time profitably." So I decided to put down my thoughts. I decided to bear my heart about some of the philosophies I'm interested in, Eastern philosophies and that kind of thing, logotherapy, always been a big interest of mine. And this whole concept of what happens towards the end of our day. So I started documenting that. And then I thought, "Look, I'm not Frederick Forsyth. I do want to put out a book. I don't want it to be too long and lengthy." So I said, "Who are eight or 10 people that I admire? Don't necessarily know. A lot of them I've had contact with, but not necessarily been friends with." And I invited nine different people to each write a couple of pages on not only the experience of COVID and this weird lockdown period, but what they think it's going to mean to us as a planet, as people. The brief was bear your heart. Let's have something without any frills. Let's get down to the nitty gritty. We're all scared. We're all uncertain. And let's all hold hands and see this thing through together. And that is why the contributors came into the picture and have been a great enhancement to the book. I really think at the end of the day, we've got a product that it'll be of wide interest.

And a lot of that credit is due to the quality of the people that I've invited to be part of the project. I think that is fantastic. And, you know, there's a lot of, when you look at your contributors, you know, and you mentioned that some of them you didn't even know, you weren't like personal friends with them and the sort of value they gave to the book. I'm just amazed that you got the people that you did get and that they were so open. Let's go through a couple of them. There was the futurist, the logotherapist. I need to touch on that. The guardian angel, the veteran sports writer, the prisoner, the Buddhist monk, the scientist, the financial planner, and the untimely traveler. The book was put together in such a way that to read it, it was amazing. I'm a big fan of stories and storytelling. I believe that us as humans are designed to be storytellers and to be listeners to stories. So it's been absolutely fantastic. I want to dive a little deeper into this though, when we come back. My special guest is Michael Hook. He is the author of "2020, the year that killed retirement, aging, adapting, and reflecting on disruption and change." More with Michael when we come back. This is what's involved.

And we're back with my special guest, Michael Hook, author of "2020, the year that killed retirement." So Michael, in the book, you got it in a nutshell when you started off, is that it starts off, and I think I'm at that place right now where you're young and 10 foot tall and bulletproof and nothing can happen to you. So you don't have to worry too much about planning anything or thinking too much about anything. And then suddenly you get to this middle. And in my case, maybe the middle approaching the beginning of the end and you go, "Uh-oh, now what?" Because the title is so apt, "The year that killed retirement," because people left, right, and center have lost jobs. There's been massive disruption. The days of working for 30 or 40 years and enjoying 20 odd years of retirement are gone. So talk to me a little bit about that. What is your thoughts on that? - Well, David, first of all, you mentioned the middle, and the middle is a moving target. Even when I was in the early part of my working career, the end of the road was 55 or 60 or 62. All the stats I've seen is the insurance companies would tailor their packages around you retiring and then popping your clogs within seven years.

So things have changed. Today, a couple aged 65, there's a 50% chance of one of them reaching 94 and a 25% chance of one of them reaching 100. So this middle you talk about, and I'm glad it's a middle because I hate this concept of the end. The middle has been expanded. We can quite comfortably say at 60, we've got 25 or 30 very productive and useful years ahead of us. And the whole question is, what are we going to do with this extra time as Camilla Cavendish describes it? This great gift we've been given at this time on the planet, due to various forces, et cetera, like better nutrition, better medical type of care, cleaner, water, and sanitation, we suddenly find that we've got these longer lives. And the whole theory is, what do we do with these longer lives? - Okay, now, in terms of what do we do, where do we start figuring out what do we do? I mean, I've got a prime example. I've mentioned it on the show a couple of times. My mom is 78 now. And literally with all of their retirement planning, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. According to the insurance people in those days, she wasn't supposed to still be going strong and ran out of money. So what do you do there? Where do we start?

- Well, David, this whole concept is, where do we start is divided into two. One is the bucks, whether we like it or not, it costs money to stay alive. And we've got to, in some way, have money coming in. And stats tell us that only 6% of South Africans can really retire in comfort. So 6% sounds strange, but let's turn it around. It means 94%, nine and a half people out of 10, are not gonna have the money to retire and not be able to retire. So the bucks is part of it. The other part of it, which you've seen from the book, and where I put a lot of effort, is the meaning of this later part in life. How are we going to use this, not just to earn livings, but to come to terms with our lives, with what it's all been about, with have we been of use to the planet? How have our interactions with people and family be? Are there things we can do in this late period of life to either make amends or make things better for ourselves and others? So that's the two aspects. - Okay, now when you talk about that, I'm sitting here and I'm thinking, all right, so I'm kind of in a position where I'm not, obviously at the 70 year mark yet, I'm in the mid 50s mark, I'm starting to wrestle with these things as well.

And I'm wondering, can I leave a legacy? Is it possible because a lot of times, and I mentioned this as well on the show a little while ago, I was talking to my mom about technology and she said, I don't understand any of this technology nonsense, I'm too old, I don't care about it, and then proceeded to go and download a few Kindle books and chat to her friends via WhatsApp and on Facebook. So I said, well, you kind of do understand technology, but how important is technology to us now? - Well, it's very, very important because that's the way we communicate and that's the way we keep ourselves from being isolated. Look, we're not all gonna be technogenesis, but it's absolutely vital that we do have a rudimentary grasp of the tools available to us, like cell phones, like social media, WhatsApp, Facebook and that kind of stuff, Zoom, Skype, because really these things are really mainstream now. But just to jump back a little bit, what is your mark going to do? What are people of 60, 70, 80 going to do? And the whole thought here is we have knowledge, we have skills, and we have a choice to say, how do we make those things become income earning? So for example, I know a lady who makes shortbread and she's famous for it and she loves it and it's kind of a social thing for her.

She could probably turn that into a little incoming industry. She's a darn good cook, she could make shortbread, she could take a stroll on a market on Saturdays, you could put it online, which is really easy to do. So she could turn her hobby into an income producing

a way of keeping the backs rolling in. What I say to people in corporates, 'cause the idea is we take groups of people who've been slated for retirement for early retirement, and we say, all right, let's take stock of these skills sets. So if you're a lady, you've been a PA to one of the directors for the last 20 years. Well, you can become a virtual assistant very easily. You can have clients anywhere in the world. You do have to learn a little bit of technology, but it's not too difficult. So there is a growing career. That's a sector that really is growing quickly. If one was in a bank and you were in HR, well, you could start a small recruitment agency. If you were in the bond department of the bank and I keep saying banks, because it's really where most of my work has come. If you were in the dealing department, well, why not do a course, raise your skill bill, and become a trader, trade stocks and bonds, or become a financial advisor? It's very rare we look back and find that we don't have some kind of a skill that we could use and transform into some kind of a small business. - Wonderful stuff. And I like the way that you're talking about this. I like the way that we're thinking about this.

My special guest is Michael Hook. He is the author of 2020, the year that killed retirement. We'll be back with Michael in just a bit. This is what's involved. Great to have you along with us. And we're back with what's involved. My guest is Michael Hook, author of 2020, the year that killed retirement. So Michael, a mindset change is obviously something that is very, very important here, because I know, and if I think back, I mean, if I think of the elder people that I know, there's a wealth of knowledge in them. There's a wealth of experience. Their EQ is well-developed. And I don't know, in the old days, it strikes me in way, way back, times gone by, elders used to be revered. They used to be looked up to as sources of knowledge. In today's world, it doesn't seem to be like that. Did you find the same thing? - Yeah, absolutely. And you know, a lot of the reading I've done, and I brought it into the book, is around the work of a very interesting American guy called Chip Connolly. Chip, just in a nutshell, had a very successful boutique hotel business. He sold it at 55, and suddenly the phone stopped ringing, and he suffered from this malaise that we all do, and suddenly I'm not good enough anymore.

No one wants to talk to me. No one wants to consult me. And that leads to all kinds of emotional problems. Chip, then, was approached by some young guys who lived in San Francisco. They bought some lilas from Army Surface. They blew them up, and they were renting them out when the San Francisco Conference Center was in full swing and accommodation was rare. And they said to Chip, "Listen, Chip, "we've got this weird concept. "To pay the rent we've been sitting in these blowout beds, "people seem to be buying them. "So we've started a little site called Airbed and Breakfast, "and we don't know what to do with it. "We need the knowledge of someone who's been there." Chip joined them. Don't have to tell you how Airbnb has grown into one of the major, in fact, I think we can call it an app, one of the major apps on the planet right now. And Chip has now pioneered this thing about mixing the enthusiasm, the great technology ability,

and the resilience and the energy of these youngsters, albeit with their short attention spans, matched that to the knowledge and the stability and had the done-it-before view of people with a little bit of platinum or gray in their hair. And he believes that you have pure magic. And he reckons that's where the secret weapon of the future lies. - And that makes absolute sense when you think about it, is you've got that stability, you've got that experience, the revered elder, as I like to call them. And then you've got the youngsters that are 10 foot tall and bulletproof, and they go out and do this. So there would seem to be a bit of a balance in there. I think the most important thing though for anybody, maybe people, and I'm not, I can't even say maybe, because lots of people have lost their jobs during this period of COVID. Any ideas you may have had about anything has literally been turned upside down on its head. My sister worked for the same company for 21 years. That company in its entirety in Africa closed down. And that was it, thank you very much, goodbye, not their fault, but now we're sitting and she's going, but what do I do? How do I do anything? And mindset is so, so important.

Now, one of the chapters that caught my attention was the Logotherapist. Tell me a little bit about what is Logotherapy to start off with. - Right, Logotherapy is one of the schools of psychology, and it really was championed and thought up and put into action by a hugely interesting guy called Viktor Frankl. Viktor Frankl was in the intern camps in the Second World War. He looked at this whole thing of the suffering around him, the people around him, and he said to himself, what can I do to use this period to make it a little bit more meaningful and to transfer that to help the people around me? And he came up with a couple of tenets. The one being that if the why is there, the how follows. If we can find meaning, we can really translate it into something that would yield benefits. After the war, of course, he wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning. One can buy it anywhere. It's one of these books that you'll find in airports and exclusives, et cetera. And it's the most beautiful little book. It's clean, it's uncomplicated, and out of that stemmed this concept of Logotherapy. So in the book, we've got a guy called Classy Vessels, who is a Logotherapy master. And he writes about how we can use Viktor Frankl's teachings in this incredibly uncertain time.

Where everyone's adriftly scared, we're afraid, we've got no real, nothing to link us to because we've never been in this kind of position before. And he's saying, how do we find meaning in this year of COVID? - That fascinated me. The other thing that fascinated me, oh look, there was a great, all of these contributors have added great value to the book. But there was a couple that stood out for me. The one is the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown from a prisoner's perspective. And that was by inmate 11289224.

Talk to me about that. - What an interesting guy this is. It's a guy I've met over the last couple of years through my transformation talks. The most humble guy who really is also a Logotherapist for whatever reason he found himself incarcerated. And he found himself in Sun City out in the South of Johannesburg during lockdown. And it's the most fascinating story. He's a wonderful guy. He opted not to have his name mentioned, which we respect and honor. But gee, when one thinks of it, we sit in a morning that we can't go down to the restaurant or we can't get a takeout. And we look at the suffering that this guy went through in jail, it puts it all into perspective. - It certainly does. And it's one of those things that during this lockdown, which is understandable, we all worried about ourselves. And our immediate family, our friends and how rough it is, and people moaning they couldn't get cigarettes or alcohol, when you read the story of the prisoner, you suddenly realize how lots and lots and lots of things you have that you can be grateful for, things that we take for granted every single day. - Absolutely, and I do mention David in the book, how hardened I am at how people seem to have responded.

I don't know anyone who is not in some way or are they helping people less fortunate. Whether it's just handouts of food and clothes, whether it's joining organizations, voluntary organizations, whether it's trying to find employment for people. So, you know, it goes back to this premise that Victor Frankel also has, that humanity is basically good and kind and we are programmed to be great human beings. We just have to find the spark that allows us to turn those into tools. - You know, speaking about this, my radio show has been going for a couple of years now and I have seen a transformation in the kind of guests that I've been getting on the show, because in the beginning it was hard hitting, it was business, it was bottom line, it was this and that. Now the recurring theme seems to be embracing your humanity, becoming more human. There's a lot of writing about that. I interviewed a lady a little while ago who wrote a book on empathy and empathic leadership and I chatted to a guy by the name of Martin Brown a little while ago about the concept of servant leadership. Do you think there's this groundswell of awakening and COVID has certainly pushed us more in that direction? - Yeah, I certainly think the world is moving towards a better place.

It's quite strange, we seem to have a weird crop of leaders around the world that are kind of becoming barriers to that. But yeah, I think we're moving in the right direction and my greatest hope is that the gift of COVID, it's going to accelerate this trend towards our basic humanity and realizing that if I throw a stone, it's gonna bounce off the wall and hit me in the head because we are absolutely in joint. There's no me, there's no you, there's only an us. And if COVID has accelerated that, well, maybe we've paid a big price for an even greater gift. - I would tend to agree with you on that, Michael, because I've seen it and I've seen people that were, you know, before the COVID pandemic that were these incredible hard-nosed businessmen, that was all they cared about, that was all they focused on. And a lot of them have made big, big, big shifts in turnarounds in their lives. And it's almost as though we've suddenly become aware of what is really, really important. When we come back though, because as always we are running short on time, when we come back though, I'd like to chat to you a little bit more about what you're doing. We've mentioned the beyond nicotine quit smoking, but you've also founded something which I am fascinated by.

So we'll talk about that when we come back. This is what's involved. My special guest is Michael Hook, author of 2020, The Year That Killed Retirement. You need to get hold of this book, particularly if you're in sort of my age bracket. Even if you're younger, I would say get it. We'll be back with what's involved in just a bit. And we're back, my special guest is Michael Hook, 2020, the year that killed retirement, aging, adapting, and reflecting on disruption and change. So Michael, you mentioned your beyond nicotine quit smoking intervention, but you've just recently founded a platform. Talk to me about this because I think this is vitally important. - David, the platform really came from a need expressed by some of the learning and development people in the big corporates, which is people are now retiring or being pushed into retirement or we're still now retrenched and fired, et cetera. What is the obligation of a big company to these staff members? So I was so that most of the companies have a bit of a program, but if you really boil it down, all it is, is how they're going to make their payout last for the time ahead, which it's not going to do. We founded something called the Platinum Project, www.platinum-project.com.

And the Platinum Project is anyone who finds themselves in these later years, wanting to reinvent themselves, wanting some kind of a support base, wanting a platform to express their views, wanting to be able to share knowledge, gain knowledge. So at the moment, it's in the form of a website, as I say, Platinum Project. And as we go along, people are contributing modules. People are helping where they can in terms of we spoke about these various job options, all kinds of people able to train people in these specific disciplines. So we want a database of anyone over 55 years old with the right intentions, with the right kind of heart, and we hold hands as platinum tribe members and try and figure out a way to make these next 30 years really speak to us. - Which is fantastic because that is something, and I only became aware of it because of your book, that there are so, so many of these people out there, and they're floundering, and they don't have a voice. They don't have somebody to speak to. So this Platinum Project seems to me to be an absolute godsend. I mean, can anybody join? That is over the age of 55, or if I'm an entrepreneur, they did say I'm in my 30s or 40s, but I feel maybe I can add value or maybe I can go, listen, let me get some of these platinum people because platinum is worth its weight.

Let's get them and see if we can't fit them into our business as the guys with Airbnb did. - Yeah, absolutely. David, I'm not restricting it to anyone, however old or young. What I am restricting, I'm going to guard this out very jealously from the point of view. It's not going to be a forum for people to sell things to other people. In other words, you're not gonna be bombarded with insurances, cruise ads, retirement villages, and that kind of stuff. Will we be very specific about that? - I can't help laughing there because I can actually see how easily some people would jump on that bandwagon and in your golden years, have you thought about la, la, la, la, la? Take the last trip, so well done. Well done to you for not going that way. Michael, before we wrap up everything, your book is self-published and I deal quite a lot with publishers in this country. Why self-publish your book? - Well, first of all, when I decided to do it as a lockdown project, I wanted to have it out and printed by Spring, which was quite a tall order 'cause it was only in about April I decided to embark on the project. I did put out healers to the publishers. A lot of them came back and said, "Look, the title sounds good, the concept's great.

We have review committees, but with COVID it'll take a couple of months." And I didn't have a few months. The second thing is I wanted to be able to use the book as a calling card for HR people for learning and development people in the big corporates to be able to give it to them and give them an idea of what our training modules for their staff were going to be. And if I self-published and I printed it myself, it made the book a heck of a lot more economical to give out large amounts. And I've given out a couple of hundred to relevant people. So it became a no-brainer. I had to do it myself. I did then get a distributor who's put me into places like exclusives and bargain books. I had a publicist and how I got onto your show. So all these skills are there without having necessary to sell your soul to a publisher. - Which again, it just speaks to incredible foresight and bravery and the idea of wanting to give back. Michael, the book itself is available in, as we like to say, all good bookstores. Have you got an online version yet? - Yes and no, not an online version, but most of my sales have come off the online platform. So if one just enters 2020 in the year that killed retirement, you can click on that.

You get your book the next day. So I'm trying to make it very easy for people to grab hold of it. - All right, so 2020, that's the numerals 2020, the year that killed retirement.com. That is where the website is. That is where you'll be able to order it and get it delivered to you, which is quite amazing. You know, that's one of the things that South Africa was lagging far behind in terms of online purchases compared to the rest of the world. Over this COVID period, I think we've done a lot of catching up and it is. It's literally that easy. You know, you point, you click, you pay, you get it. It's that simple. Michael, with somebody like yourself though, there's two things I'd like to ask you before I let you go. What one piece of advice would you give somebody that might be listening either to the radio version of this or the podcast version, what advice would you give them if they're sitting now and they are one of those people that are without a job or that have been retrenched? - Well, I would go back to one of the tenants of logotherapy and saying, don't despair. Because from despair, you really limit your options. So whatever we do, please, let's not panic. We're all in this together.

It's not just me, it's not just you. It's almost everyone on this planet. Let's figure out a way forward from this really scary position. - Sound advice indeed. And then Michael, in conclusion, what is next for Michael Hook? What is your next? - Well, my next is really getting the corporates to use my services here to run my day long out of office encounters where we start this process of looking back on where we've come from, making sense of our lives, and then planning what we're going to do forward. And not just as we emphasized earlier, earning backs. How are we going to use this period forward to throw out the old baggage? So we've now the kids have left home. We've got this massive house. Do we need the house? Do we need the cars? I think as you showed us, we don't need these overseas trips. How are we going to simplify our lives and identify things that are valuable to us and useful to us? And it's quite a hard selling the corporates because they're used to facts and figures. And I'm saying, give me your people for a day and then also give me your people for three or four days when we're going to do a country retreat. And that country retreat is really important because you come to the retreat for four days.

You're wearing ordinary clothes. You've dropped your title. You're not David Watts, the financial director or the CEO. You don't have the big desk. You don't have the car. Like everyone else, you're getting up early. There's periods of yoga and meditation. You're going to help with the cooking. You're going to work in the garden. A lot of thinking time, a lot of exercises. And it allows us to finally come back into our bodies and really make the kind of correct decisions for the future. And it's quite a hard sell because no one's really done this before. You know, we've solved mindfulness and that kind of thing. But this whole holistic approach to the future is a little bit different. But hugely exciting. And the ones that we managed to do just before lockdown, we're incredibly valuable to the attendees. - Brilliant stuff. Well, Michael, all I can say is hats off to you. I think you've done an incredible job with the book. I think you're offering an incredible service. More people need to take you up on your offer. If somebody wants to get hold of you, is the best place through the Platinum Project? - Through the Platinum Project or just mhook@global.co.za. That's my private email, mhook@global.com.

And I'd love to hear from anyone and everyone. - There we go, mhook@global.co.za. That was my special guest, Michael Hook, author of 2020, The Year That Killed Retirement, Ageing, Adapting, and Reflecting on Disruption and Change. Well, what's involved? Coming your way.