Meet Michael Hingson, known as blind World Trade Center survivor, a #1 New York Times Best-Selling Author, Inspirational Speaker and the host of Unstoppable Mindset podcast. "Come to Podapalooza", That's the piece of advice he'd like to give to someone who's listening to this show, and haven't pulled the trigger on being a podcaster yet.

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Podapalooza! It sounds hard to spell, but it's easy to say and it's so much fun!!

Welcome to the official Podapalooza podcast. That's right. We're the official podcast for the hottest newest podcasting event out there. You can take a look at more information about Podapalooza at WWW.Podapalooza.com It sounds hard to spell, but it's easy to say and it's so much fun. Let me tell you about this podcast. So we are interviewing our particular is a featured podcasters That's right, I've heard of Lou's that are feature podcasters are gonna be interviewing VIPs all throughout the event. And each podcaster is going to be featured on this podcast. You can learn a little bit more about the show, what makes them tick why they started their show, and they're gonna give some great tips to how to be a great guest on their show. You too can be on their show when you go to Podapalooza.com Buy your VIP ticket. All right, let's do this.

Podapalooza family welcome back to Podapalooza podcast. It's the official podcast of Podapalooza. I am here today with a special guest Michael Hingson. Michael, how are you doing today?

I'm doing well. I'm you.

I am doing so well. And I'm really excited. You're here because one of my favorite podcasters ever and you have been with us from the beginning of Podapalooza. And coming back to join us again for another round of Podapalooza . Tell us a little bit about your the name of your show what it's all about.

Yeah, this is the third time for us. And there's only been three Podapalooza is coming this one. So that's kind of a missed one yet. No goes all the way back to December of last year how quickly time flies. So my podcast is called unstoppable mindset where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. And I especially love the unexpected part. But the idea behind it is to talk about challenges that people get in their lives, people who suddenly are confronted by something they didn't expect. Or maybe they just have an ongoing challenge, like they happen to be a person with a disability, or a number of the people we've interviewed of late have been people who work in the inclusion, inclusion area for colleges or whatever. And they run programs for persons with disabilities. And they have their own challenges. And so we get to talk to all these people, each for about an hour we have conversations, I asked them to send me questions that I want to get from them so that they tell me what they want to talk about. And then we go off in all sorts of different directions from that. But we have fun. And it's all about having fun. And making people understand that what we're trying to do is to inspire other people to be unstoppable as well.

I love it. And you have a literally unstoppable lead flow of people that are trying to get on your show right now. So you have no shortage of podcast guests right now. And I'm so grateful that you're still coming to find affiliates, as a speaker and a featured podcaster.

Well have a lot of fun doing it. The podcast started last September. We now have 36 shows up and number 37 will come out next week. And also, we we have a lot ready to go up over the next little while. But what's really fun is that I get to meet so many interesting people and get to learn from them. And as I tell people, if I'm not learning as much, at least as other people are learning, then I'm not doing my job very well. So I do like it to be fun. And I want to learn a lot too. So I get the chance to do that.

I love that. And I think that's a really inspiring, inspiring outlook. What is the impact that you want to make with your show?

I want people who listen to the show to understand that, while they may have things going on in their lives, and they say I can't deal with that, or I don't know how to do that, or that scares me. The reality is you can work through stuff. I've been blind my whole life. And I've been told I can't do things yet. For me personally, I've traveled all over the country and all over the world. prior to September 11 2001. I had a successful career in sales. And then on September 11, my job had me working as the Mid Atlantic region sales manager for a fortune 500 computer company and I had opened an office in the World Trade Center on the 78th floor of Tower One. Of course people even today say What were you doing in the World Trade Center while I worked there just like other people did. And it's all about recognizing that we can do a lot more than we think we can. And what we need to do is to recognize that and maybe figure out how we're going to do more than we think we can do. But we are as unstoppable as we want to make ourselves and so I get to help people be inspired by interviewing people who have gone through this whole unstoppable process, whether they thought about it or not. And in fact, they've been able to deal with the challenges that they face, as I did, and other people do. And so we get to talk with these folks. And hopefully they will, through these interviews inspire other people to think more highly of themselves in a positive way.

Absolutely. I remember one of the stories you're sharing with me about learning to ride a bike as a young boy and with the past amazing. And I think that for those who have not listened to your podcast, they definitely need to go and listen to the first few episodes of your show, where you share your story about growing up as a child and, and the childhood that your parents, you know, I think did such an amazing job of just treating you like any other kid and like, have that mindset and that growth not having that growth mindset. So you were willing to try and do everything. I was just amazing.

Well, I rode a bike, and rode it to school, rode around my neighborhood. My brother and I had a paper route, I was an amateur and am an amateur radio operator. In college, I got a master's degree in physics. I was program director at our campus radio station for a year and had a radio show for six years on Sunday nights.

We that explains so many things. Now, I didn't know that you did that. Now I know why you're so good at your podcasts, you've got such a good radio voice.

Well, my fun thing about the radio show is that it was on Sunday nights from six to nine. And I hadn't even heard of 60 minutes. And one day during the show, somebody was talking to me about 60 minutes and all that sort of stuff. And I realized that for six years in Orange County, we competed favorably with Mike Wallace on those clowns on 60 minutes, you know. And so I love to say that we beat out Wallace in Orange County, which which was true, actually. My favorite story is that we had a call one night from the Orange County Jail, one of the deputies there who said, you know, you've really created a challenge for us because people have discovered your show. And somewhere around half of the people in the jail, want to watch 60 minutes, and we have a place where they can go watch TV. But most of the people want to come and listen to your show. So we have to have another room for them to come and listen to your show. On Sunday night. We played old radio shows. And of course, sometimes we even heard Mike Wallace on one of the shows because he was an announcer in the early 40s for various radio shows.

That's so cool. I love that. Sorry. Very, very cool. So I would love to know a little bit about how podcasting may have changed your life a little bit in the last year or so

it is really kept me busy. We were honored in February that podcast magazine showed us shows chose us as Editor's Choice, which was kind of cool. But it's affected me in several ways. One, it's just been fun to be able to do it. And to interview people to be able to set up good audio production facilities to do it. It's a whole lot different than splicing tape back in the 70s. When I did a radio show now it's all audio editing, with software, which is so cool. But also I've gotten to learn a lot. I've gotten to meet people I never thought I would have met and I've got to hear stories that I never thought I would hear. For example, the show that went up on unstoppable mindset. Yesterday, was with a gentleman who worked in software and software development worked for a number of contractors and so on. And when he was 40. He, as he described it, asked his wife. So is there anything in this world that you really haven't done that you want to do, because we're thinking about retiring. And she said, I want to adopt a baby from China. He had no clue that this kind of thing was in her mind. She wanted to do it because she had read in her childhood, about a place in China, where people would take their babies that they didn't want, they would throw them off cliffs, and then the mothers would come and weep and so on and says I don't want that I want them to adopt these kids. And so when she told him that, they started on a journey they have now adopted well back 20 years, they adopted two girls, who are now I think 21 and 24 or so in the sciences to a significant degree ones and engineering and the other one is in biology if I know that's one of their their sisters. But he tells the story. And then the girls wanted to find out about their birth parents. And so that was another journey that they all went through. And they've discovered the birth parents of one of the daughters but they have yet to find the other one. And he talks all about the different things that they do to to work to try to find the birth parents, including using genetic work and genetic forensics and so on to actually go out and look at different lists of DNA samples and so on because they are in China as well. It's a fascinating story that he enjoys telling, he's written a book about it. Now, I never had any notion that I would meet someone like that. But I had the opportunity to do it. And I learned so much, it's as good as it gets.

Great, sorry. Wow. It's you never know the type of people you're gonna meet on a podcast, especially when especially in events like Podapalooza where someone just shows up in your, in your, in your room, and you got to get an interview, though. And I remember, one of the police says you had a few extra people that didn't have anywhere to be interviewed. So you're like, let's bring them all into a round table, amazing roundtable of people that were just totally random and not connected in any way. And you were able to make a great episode of that. And that takes some talent and skill.

It was fun to do that. What I like to do when I have guests come on, is I asked them to give me at least five questions in advance that they want me to cover. And it's not that we're going to limit our discussions to that. But these people know what they want to talk about. And I want them to think about what they want to talk about. So we get the questions. But on things like the round table, of course, we didn't have access to that because the Podapalooza is at the spur of the moment, almost. And you don't get a chance to get a lot of that information in advance. But there are ways to extract enough that you can make it fun. And I think everyone on that roundtable I know I did, everyone had a lot of fun. And it made a great episode. That's great. I love it. It's out there for people to listen to on unstoppable mindset. Wherever podcasts are presented,

I think you should like look into doing some voiceover work, you got a really great voice that would be fun. What would be a piece of advice you have for a guest who's maybe they bought a VIP ticket, they're gonna come and be interviewed upon a Podapalooza, what's a piece of advice or a podcast guest,

I think when they're giving a description of what, what they are and who they are, and all that it would be useful if they would include what they think they could talk about. But I also think it's important that they'd be willing to be open to letting the interviews go whatever way they go. And I think it's important, the most important thing is that people who pay the VIP price and want to be interviewed should come relaxed. Just be yourself. That's the most important thing that you can do on any podcast, I think is to just be yourself. And any good podcast interviewer will recognize that and help you through the whole process just through the questions they asked, which wishes the value of why I like the questions in advance when I can. But I've done this long enough that I think I can make people feel comfortable and make any interview worth doing. But when people want to be interviewed, just come and be yourself.

Yeah, good one, be yourself. It's just like it puts everyone at ease when you're by yourself, right? Currency is just so much easier to

do. And you don't have anything to be nervous about. If you want to be interviewed, you must have a reason for wanting to be interviewed, you'll get a chance to talk about that and tell it and you'll be able to hear your podcasts when it goes up. And it will also help you become even a better interviewee because the more you get to listen to yourself, the more you can see what works, what didn't work, or whatever. And hopefully you decide, oh, I guess I really did sound pretty good and want to do more of it. But if you just go into it relaxed, that's the best thing that you can do. We've we're not enemies, when we're interviewing on podcasts, we're not here to grill you or pick on anyone to

look bad or anything. No, we

want you to be successful. We want you to look great. And we'll, we'll help. And so if people just relax. It's great.

That's awesome. And so you've had a really successful first year of podcasting with us. And I appreciate you sharing some of those moments and those amazing successes you've had with being you know, showcased in podcast magazine and all that what would be a piece of advice you'd give someone who's maybe listening to this show, maybe they're sitting at home, they haven't quite pulled the trigger on being a podcaster yet. What would you say to them,

Come to Podapalooza? And if you're not ready to do it, right, the second, you will hear an amazing lineup of speakers. You'll get more information in one day than you're going to get anywhere else. And you're going to get it from the people who have the experience and who have the expertise and who are willing to share it and tell you what podcasting is all about. And they'll give you lots to think about. You can sign up to be a VIP and you may or may not do a lot of interviews, but you can always get the recordings and listen to it some more to but it's all about out, you got to take that first step and the first step is just come and listen and absorb be a sponge. And you'll find out that it's really rewarding to do and it's enjoyable to do. And probably you can do it a lot better than you thought you could.

And we have a heck of a lot of fun doing YouTube.

And we have a lot of fun doing.

So well. Thank you so much, Mike for being with us today. It's been awesome to have you on the potter Palooza podcast. We look forward to having you again a part of Palooza coming up in a few weeks here. Now before I let you go one last thing you share with everyone, again, your podcast name and where we can find all about your show. Okay.

So the podcast is called unstoppable mindset. You can find it anywhere you can find podcasts. So you can go to Apple iTunes, you can go to my website, my podcast page, which is www.Michaelhingson.com. That's michaelhingson.com/podcast. And you can get all the episodes there. And of course, if you listen to any of them, we hope that you'll give us a five star rating which you can easily do from that page. And you can also learn a lot more about me at Michael henson.com. And even learn about the book that we wrote called tender dog. The story of a blind man is guide dog and the triumph of trust and go by it because being a poor, starving author. I have a dog that says if you don't get more people buying the book, I'm not going to have Tibbles and you're going to be in trouble. But they can learn all about us and I hope that they will and I hope that they want to come on to unstoppable mindset, whether they do it at Podapalooza or later, there's contact information where they can reach out to me and we'd love to talk with them.

Absolutely. Michael has some awesome podcast guests, you so if you have a podcast and you're listening, you want to invite him to be on your show, please reach out to him as well, because his story is fascinating and incredible. And it's so so so inspiring. So definitely reach out to Michael and before we let you go I got one last piece of advice or words one last word for our audience before we let you go to

come to Podapaloozaand have fun. Everyone else is going to and you should too

awesome. And at the end of the day, you will be potty pooped as our point. But it's like well worth it. It's so fun. All right, Michael, thank you so much for being with us today. And all right, all you guys listening out there. If you haven't got your tickets yet, head on over to Podapalooza.com And we'll see you there.