Intro: 00:00

Welcome to the Heard and Empowered podcast, presented by National Industries for the Blind. We’re on a mission to empower people who are blind, low-vision, or visually impaired to build fulfilling careers, gain personal independence, and take the next step toward achieving their own American dream. Guests from all walks of life share their journeys and how they overcame challenges they faced along the way. Whatever your interests, experience, talents, or career goals, listen to discover important connections and unlock the resources and inspiration you need to chart a new path. Ready to be heard and empowered?

Marianne Haegeli: 00:36

Hello and welcome to a special episode of the Heard & Empowered podcast. I’m Marianne Haegeli, Director of Learning and Leadership at NSITE. Our parent company is the National Industries for the Blind. And here at NSITE, we focus on workforce development by providing career skills training and employment placement services for job seekers who are blind, low vision or visually impaired. Many of our graduates, business partners and staff members have been featured on the podcast, including me.

I made my first appearance about a year ago. Today, though, I’m stepping in to introduce you to Dean Thompson, the new host for Heard & Empowered. Dean and I have worked together for more than ten years, and I can’t wait for all of you to meet him. Well, Dean, it’s great to see you.

Dean Thompson: 01:21

Likewise. How are you doing, Marianne?

Marianne Haegeli: 01:23

I’m doing fine. You and I met more than ten years ago at the corporate headquarters of Booz Allen Hamilton in Northern Virginia.

Dean Thompson: 01:32

Out of high school at the time, as I recall. Yes.

Marianne Haegeli: 01:34

Yes. And what started as a business meeting turned quickly into not only a lasting friendship, but also into more than one opportunity to partner on business projects.

Dean Thompson: 01:47

That’s true. That’s true. You’re right.

Marianne Haegeli: 01:48

Yeah. So the most recent outcome of this fateful first meeting that we had is your new role as our podcast host. Heard and Empowered is the name of the podcast, and the National Industries for the Blind are putting this podcast together and often features NSITE. And I wanted to kind of talk to you about how all this came about. You have an amazing coming of age story, both in terms of, you know, we all have that how we went through college, the ambitions we had and how we ended up in the career fields that we end up in.

Yours has a couple of really interesting twists. Can you take us through that experience?

Dean Thompson: 02:31

Well, sure. It began my entire life, as I’m sure many people watching or listening to this podcast will say the same. Much of my life has been shaped by my partial sightedness, my blindness. I lost my sight for the most part when I was 14 or 15. I was on my way to becoming probably a third string tight end in Ohio State.

I was a fairly good football player in northern, in southern Ohio. And during the span of my sophomore year in playing football, my eyesight went from okay to terrible. The previous spring, I reported to my father, who was a and my father was a guidance counselor. I said, you know, I’m having trouble seeing the boards. He took me to the mall.

We all go to the mall for everything, especially back in the 60s. He took me to something called 950 optical. It was not an address. Okay. It was because the glasses cost $9.50.

An attractive, attractive sign for my father. So I got tested. Yes. You need glasses. Got me a pair of glasses.

So I go back to school for the last month or so. I can see the blackboard. That’s fine. Like any good red blooded American boy. I took the glasses off and not touch them until, like, August.

Because who wants to read or see a blackboard during the summer? So I did that. So I report them for football and of course a blackboard back then and probably still now it’s a white board is an important aspect of football camp. I began to draw plays up and I couldn’t see them. So I went back to my father and said I’m having trouble seeing the board.

So my dad took me back to 950 52 at the mall. And the little guy who was not a doctor, he was just an, I guess, an Oculus test. He goes, oh, I’m way off. I’m so sorry. So he grinds a new pair of glasses for free.

Again, very attractive to my father. So I got a pair of free glasses. So for about 3 or 4 weeks, I could see the board kind of, sort of. Okay. And then I think maybe the second or third game of my sophomore season, I got hit very hard.

And I think I must have had a concussion or minor concussion because I was out on my feet for quite a period of time. And when I, when I in fact, I left the game in the first quarter and when I, the next thing I remember is the third quarter. So I half the game. I even caught a pass, which is very cool. And I didn’t tell anybody this.

Why would I tell somebody I might have been hurt. I might lose my position on the starting offense. So I didn’t say anything. Eyes continue to get worse and worse and worse. By the end of my one year in playing varsity football, I began to listen for the football.

I couldn’t see it any longer. Did that make for a very good catching tight end? A lot of stuff bounced off me, to be truthful. After the season, I went to my dad one more time and I said, get up, get up. He went back to the back to the mall.

The guy says, oh no, this time it’s not my fault. Far worse. You got a problem. So never go to ophthalmologists. And a whole string of people wound up in the hospital that over Christmas that year for a bunch of tests.

They couldn’t find anything wrong. This is 1962. Remember ancient times by comparison. Here. Now.

Marianne Haegeli: 05:15

My birth year, by the way, you know. Your birth year was such a bad year for you.

Dean Thompson: 05:19

But rub that in, okay you youngster. Long story short, nobody could find was wrong. I had then I always had stargardt’s. Nobody knew that I did not hear the word stargardt’s till I was in my mid 20s. I moved to New York.

Oh, back then they said, well, you know, the problem is not us. The problem is you. Me, what am I, I just can’t. Well, the problem is you. It’s obviously psychosomatic.

You’re crazy. Thank you very much for that.

Marianne Haegeli: 05:40

Oh, wow.

Dean Thompson: 05:41

Tell a 15 year old he’s nuts, and I. My dad didn’t give up on them. My dad never accepted that, bless his heart. And I didn’t either, therefore. And dad continued to schlep me to every doctor he could think of.

We went to the Cleveland Clinic, upstate Ohio. We went to the went to the Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Somebody from the Mayo Clinic came through. We met with that guy. Everybody came through, looked at my eyes and goes, I don’t know what’s wrong.

Think of that. Within our lifetimes, something which is now diagnosed by any good eye doctor was something nobody knew what it was. So I come to New York and Victoria, my wonderful wife, finds a doctor in The New York Times. Oh, go to this guy.

I don’t want to go any more eye doctors. I don’t want to do that anymore. I’m just. I’m. I’m able to get by kind of sort of myself.

I don’t need this. In fact, we moved to New York because of my blindness. I couldn’t get a job in Ohio. Like so many people I’m talking to on the podcast, they, you know, rejection is a big part of their lives. I think I got 93 or 94 rejections for work in Ohio, and I was top of my class.

I was the number one wonderful, stellar student in radio and television. I stress the word television because I went to the University of Cincinnati, a fine basketball school, to.

Marianne Haegeli: 06:49

This is this is actually that was a key of your story that always resonated with me. You were in radio first.

Dean Thompson: 06:55

Well, I thought it was a good idea. You can’t see you’re funny and you’re glib. Radio. Yeah. The guidance counselor at my dinner table.

My dad said you should go to radio. So I went. And for the first two years, I studied radio, played around with the student radio station, and became the big muckety there. And then I think the summer of my before my junior year, they built a TV studio and I began to poke around there, and I found that radio with pictures was more fun. Great thing about learning any skill, I think, in a university setting is that it’s good and it’s bad. Nobody said, by the way, if you want to work in this business, you ought to think twice because it’s going to be difficult to find a job as a television producer if you’re legally blind. Nobody said to me, you just continue to take courses and excel and learn the craft. And all the way through a year of graduate school. And long story short, they were right.

I couldn’t get a job in Ohio to save my life because you start at the bottom in almost any business and in television especially. And you become a gopher. Go for this, go for that. Well, in Ohio, there’s no such thing as public transit to speak of. You have to have a car.

And of course, I couldn’t drive. Never have driven, so struck out a million times. At the end of my one year in graduate school, I was offered a job at a small agency in New York, and I jumped for it. First it was a it was a job offer. Oh boy, oh boy. And B, I’ve always been enamored of New York City. Always have been. So we did that. We decamped, came to New York, began to work at the agency, that lasted for 2 or 3 years. Then I got into film and do I dare mention John Lennon’s name?

I will. I worked for him for a while.

Dean Thompson: 08:22

Well, I you know, I was going to ask you about that. So it’s a and it’s been a series of like anybody in this business, it’s not been it’s been a career but not but not a long term anywhere. The longest I’ve worked for anybody was working for myself because I had a company for about 20 years, which is when you and I met. So that is the Reader’s Digest version from from.

Marianne Haegeli: 08:42

Wow.

Dean Thompson: 08:43

Guy to somebody who’s worked in TV, which I’ve always said, I’ve worked in TV my entire life, which proves it’s a team sport. So if I had 20-20 vision, I still would not handle the lighting. Get behind the camera. Tell people where to put th,e put the lights.

Where to put makeup on. No, I wouldn’t do that. I’m the idea guy, which is perfect. When you don’t see very well, you tell people. And it’s better because I’ve learned to rely upon the craftspeople in my industry.

I’ll tell the cameraman. Here’s the kind of shot I see. What do you think? Here’s how I see the lighting. What are you going to do?  What do you think? So what do you think? Is always a big part of it, which is important.

Dean Thompson: 9:13

Remember the day you called and told me you got the job with NSITE and NIB?

Marianne Haegeli: 9:17

Yes. And it is. Thanks in great part to you and my continuous contact with you professionally and personally, that that gave me the courage to accept that offer.

Dean Thompson: 9:28

I’m so glad you’re happy and successful. Because if it’s not, it’s my fault, basically.

Marianne Haegeli: 9:31

It is totally your fault. Yeah, I blame you entirely. But no, seriously, this is. You know, I literally thought I couldn’t even even apply for this job because I felt I didn’t have enough knowledge about the challenges of blind and low vision learners and that whole environment. And then I thought, no, wait, I actually do have a contact that I’ve been working with and and I know I’m going to try to learn more, but it’s blind colleagues like you and some of the colleagues and business partners I’m working with now who are so patient with my constant slip ups that that I feel like I have an opportunity to learn and get better every day.

So thank you.

Dean Thompson: 10:12

Everybody slips up and everybody reacts badly. Once when I was back at ABC for a while in the late 70s, I interviewed a very relatively famous singer, and we were talking about, I think at that point we may have been talking about Vietnam or something to do with something timely, which I said said, how do you see the war affecting? He said, hey man, I can’t see nothing. Oh yeah, of course, because he is stoned. I said, well, he says, so just don’t go there, okay?

That’s fine. Give, I give, I give fine. So rephrased it, asked the question, got the answer. We break down back then we’re shooting film. It’s much more difficult than shooting video.

And a guy named Eddie. I can’t think of Eddie’s last name was my cameraman then. And he starts breaking down and he looks at the guy and says, you know, by the way, Dean’s blind. And they say, what? Dean’s blind? What?

Oh, get that dude. I mean, what does that do? I’m sorry. So he screwed up like that, but, you know, how did he know? You know, etc. like that.

We all slip up. Go on. Please.

Marianne Haegeli: 11:05

No. So I’m grateful for the patience and the mentorship. Seriously. And now here we are. Right?

NSITE has this program, and we do a lot of career skills training. But one of the coolest programs we run is called Entrepreneurial Initiatives. And we have a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs amongst the blind and low vision community. And so it was a perfect opportunity for me to call you, Dean, and say, so, listen, would you be interested in supporting this crazy program because you are such an amazing entrepreneur who also happens to be blind?

Dean Thompson: 11:40

And tell them what you have to tell them if you name the program. Come on.

Marianne Haegeli: 11:45

Yeah. Well, so so we booked you for a monthly session we call True Confessions of a Blind Entrepreneur.

Dean Thompson: 11:54

What did I ask you? Who’s going to be the blind entrepreneur? Entrepreneur? Oh, that’s me. Oh, okay. That’s cool. Okay.

Marianne Haegeli: 12:01

Yes. And and we had this conversation up front where I said to him, look, when we do the kickoff for this program, the title of the kickoff meeting is So You Think You Want to Be An Entrepreneur?

Dean Thompson: 12:13

Yes.

Marianne Haegeli: 12:14

Because what everybody thinks is, I can’t get a job. Nobody will employ me. And you need to understand that if you work for yourself, you’ll hopefully be working for the toughest employer you’ll ever have. And if you’re not, you need to switch jobs, right?

Dean Thompson: 12:29

So go someplace else. Exactly.

Marianne Haegeli: 12:32

Yeah. So tell me about that experience, having those sessions with aspiring blind entrepreneurs.

Dean Thompson: 12:38

Well, I’ll go back a half step to again. I go back to denial and my own personal case I never spent much time in. If there’s such a thing called the Blind Community, where one of the folks we interviewed last week called it the Blind the Blind Club. For some reason, I never spent much time there, and not because I didn’t want to. I just never found a reason to be there.

And only in the last, say, 5 or 10 years have I become more involved with people who have lost their vision or most of their vision. I did a documentary for a very interesting man who helped found the Foundation Fighting Blindness ten, 12 years ago, got deeply involved in there. So when you wandered into NIB and NSITE, it was perfect. Okay, well, let’s you do that. You do you, you go girl.

Because that’s going to be a great place to work and you’ll find some interesting people. The point I’m going to make here and you ask your question again as I’ve forgotten where I’m going.

Marianne Haegeli: 13:26

Your experience kind of mentoring or running these sessions for aspiring blind entrepreneurs?

Dean Thompson: 13:31

It remains to be seen. So there’s some wonderful, with very small sessions, maybe 3 or 4 entrepreneurs. And we, I, we talk maybe once every 3 or 4 weeks and just watch these people. I will say the word kids because I’m really older than dirt. But these kids who could barely communicate via Zoom in the first 2 or 3 weeks become not glib, but very communicative and very forceful and very out front.

It was really satisfying. Not everybody I mean, I think we lost one every session. We just didn’t get it or shouldn’t be. If you don’t want to work hard for yourself, then you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur. The only reason you want to go into business for yourself is nobody else will hire you, that’s also maybe a bad way of going into this. And yeah, some of some people fell away that way, but there’s at least 2 or 3 every session I think have gone out and really had an impact and really make a living. That’s really — it was very cool. Thank you for that again.

Marianne Haegeli: 14:18

No thank you because it makes all the difference. Right. So everybody has these notions, many of them romantic and running your own business. And I love the true confessions because you never mince words about all the hard stuff that comes with it and all the rewards that come with it. Also, and it’s great to have that balance and have people react to that and understand mitigating fear by instilling a reasonable respect of what it means to run your own business.

Dean Thompson: 14:45

Right here is not a bad thing. I’m a little bit going into something. A little bit of fear is really very good, I think. Anyway, you should be afraid. You should be.

You should doubt pretty much every day. What am I doing here? Should I be doing this? And then think, at the end of the day, what could I have done better? Which everybody says that whether you’re, you know, pushing pencils at IBM or doing whatever, but never more true than when you’re working for yourself, and then eventually you get people working for you.

And that’s the ultimate responsibility. Towards the end of the time, I have my own business, which is when you and I met, I went to bed every night with 23 other families, the 23 people who work for me. And can I make payroll? Will I — am I doing the best thing for all of them as well as for my clients?

And that’s a big responsibility. It wears at you eventually, but it’s a big responsibility and very satisfying when it works out well.

Marianne Haegeli: 15:29

Yeah. All right. All right. The question everybody’s waiting for. You spent a chunk of your formative years working for John Lennon.

Dean Thompson: 15:39

I did, yes.

Marianne Haegeli: 15:41

And. Yeah. Go ahead.

Dean Thompson: 15:42

Go ahead. Please.

Marianne Haegeli: 15:43

I know it now has an influence on what you’re doing going forward and right now as well. So tell me a little bit what you did for John and Yoko.

Dean Thompson: 15:53

Okay. First off, working for. okay. I think people know at this point I’m not a kid. I’m 79, when this will be about to be 79 when this is recorded. So when I went through high school and college in the mid to late 60s, the Beatles were the most important thing in the Western world. Outside of — that was it. It was the Beatles were..again, I have been amazed at how that body of work and those four and now two living human beings have continued to have an impact upon not just music, but upon society for now, like 50, 60 years.

It’s really amazing, truthfully. So I am 20. What was I then? 25, 26? I’m working for the same ad agency which brought me from Ohio to New York.

It’s busy going out of business, thank you very much. Not my fault, but it’s going out of business and I’m terrified. What am I going to do now? I never thought of going into business for myself at that point, so I really bumped into an old school guy, an old school chum on the street one afternoon. Seriously.

And he said, I’ve been looking for you. I looked to Manhattan. I can’t find you in the phone book. Well, I live in Staten Island, which is a foreign country, to people who live from New York. He didn’t look at the Staten Island phone book.

Remember when there were phone books?

Marianne Haegeli: 16:57

Yes, I do.

Dean Thompson: 16:59

So I said, yeah. I said, well, I work for a guy who’s doing a film. You’ve got to come see this film. You could probably sell this. But see, I can do this. Oh my gosh, maybe a way of not going back to Ohio with my tail between my legs at this crazy place. So I went to a screening of this film and I won’t give the entire story. The entire story is in my upcoming book, which we’ll promote at the very end.

But I went to the screening, screen and I went. I sat there again. Blindness. And this film is okay. If you ever if you’ve ever seen or heard of the film, imagine it’s based on John’s album Imagine.

And it’s my contention that John and Yoko almost invented MTV because the film is just films, little tiny films of every, each and every cut on the record. Nine, ten songs, nine, ten films runs an hour. It’s wonderful. It’s interesting, but that’s what it’s about. Very little dialogue.

It’s all the music either, you know, sung by John or more importantly, he and Yoko doing stuff under the soundtrack. And so I’m watching this thing in this large screening room from the front row, and I can’t quite see it. Of course, I’m going, wow, I know the music going on there. So the thing’s over. My friend Bob says, what do you think?

I said, I think it’s kind of cool, but, you know, the Beatles have more lawyers than you. And I have friends. You can’t just go use this stuff. You know that, don’t you? And he goes, what do you mean?

You just can’t use this music? It’s. Oh, didn’t I tell you I worked for. No, I work for John and Yoko. I go, oh, well, then I guess it’s okay.

So John’s waiting to meet you right now down at Record Plant. Me? He’s waiting. Oh, yeah. I’ve told him all about you jump a limousine down the record plant where John was recording the New York City album.

And the rest, as they say, is history. I was just blown away. I was sitting in a dreamscape. I sat in it. If anyone’s ever been to a recording studio back then, there was a very high dais.

You walk in, there’s Phil Spector, who was the producer, there’s John and Yoko. They’re all behind this big, massive console. And then down below there’s a couch facing a big double window, and in the studio where the musicians are. So Bob puts me on the couch. Sit here when there’s a break, I’ll introduce you, John.

So I sat on the couch. I sat on that couch, unmoving, for five and one half hours. I was terrified to move the way I had to go to the bathroom badly. That was secondary, I just sat. So about 2 or 3 in the morning.

Bob, what did you think of John? John, I haven’t talked to him yet. I’ve been sitting here. Oh, man, I’m sorry. He introduced me.

So John Lennon stands up, stretches. He looks down and he goes, oh, you’re the salesman. He could have called me an aardvark. Yes, I’m the aardvark, sir. Yes.

Yeah. So he says, let’s go to breakfast, salesman. I need, I need you. Well, that’s why it was so wonderful to meet somebody. I mean, at that point, John Lennon probably was one of the half-dozen most famous people in the world.

In 1972, if anybody goes back that far, and once you’ve spent time working with kind of becoming friends with and brushing up with him almost every day, nothing intimidates you. Nothing.

Marianne Haegeli: 19:38

Not even Yoko?

Dean Thompson: 19:40

Let’s not go there, Yoko. Yeah. Back then, especially not anymore. Now. Yoko is just a person. Everybody is just a person.

I’ve interviewed half a dozen major politicians. I interviewed a pope once. I mean, they’re all just people. Yeah, I remember I did a job for Booz Allen. I went to interview somebody in Pittsburgh who was the head of whatever airlines in Pittsburgh.

This is the chairman of the airlines. Don’t be nervous. Don’t be nervous. I hung out with John Lennon. How can I be nervous?

This is just a big job. He’s a client. Respect him. But I’m not going to be nervous. Thank you.

Marianne Haegeli: 20:10

Well, this is great. I mean, to get set up that way with that respect, but lack of fear of authority figures, I think that is the right approach. And to have that early in your career, I’m sure it had an influence for the rest of it, evidently. And that’s that.

Dean Thompson: 20:28

He was a fine guy with maybe one of the finest bosses, one a person could ever have. Truthfully, yes, he did not. You didn’t have to kowtow. He didn’t. He asked for opinions.

He looked for input as well as giving. He owned the company. It was his film. He’d do what he wanted to do. But he asked everybody, what do you think of this?

What do you think of that? So it was.

Marianne Haegeli: 20:44

Oh, wow. So there’s leadership lessons on top of everything else. That’s amazing. So now. So now, how are you? How do I best put this? How are you making use of that experience in your latest venture?

Dean Thompson: 21:01

Well, I mean, my latest venture to some extent is this. I mean, the podcast is really cool. I really enjoy it. Thank you for the opportunity. It’s really very neat.

But I’m looking for another film company. I’m working. I’ve gone through the point of running my own business for 20,25 years. I guess if I’ve been in business for more than 50 years, I’ve worked for me well, more than half that time, either as a freelancer, which is a way of saying creative unemployment or my own business, which I did for like 15, 20 years. And, you know, I’m back to working as a consultant for a company on the West Coast.

I represent them here on the East Coast. And it’s still the business. You know, I love television, I love film because it’s the best way of documenting life in many respects. I love that I can interview almost anybody for as long as you care. To which unfortunately, Kathy Bagley, who is my producer, has found out the hard way.

I’m sure there’s a lot of “would you please just shut up and end this whole thing” going on in their head.

Marianne Haegeli: 21:52

I’m not ready to end. You wrote a book.

Dean Thompson: 21:55

But I but I’ve, you know, I’ve, I’ve, I like talking to people, I really do. Therefore I love interviewing. And it’s a skill that I don’t know whether. I don’t think I ever took a class on how to do that, but it just came to me naturally, and I passed that information on to people. Because it’s a communication skill, it’s not just something to be used when you’re doing a documentary, you’re interviewing somebody for the TV news. Yeah, or a podcast.

Marianne Haegeli: 22:16

So tell me about your book. What’s it called?

Dean Thompson: 22:18

Oh, gosh. My book is called Imagine Murder. Believe it or not.

Marianne Haegeli: 22:21

Oh, of course it is, Imagine Murder.

Dean Thompson: 22:23

Comes out in December. You can pre-order now. Imagine Murder is. It’s just fictitious.

There was no murder at Joko Films, which was John and Yoko’s film company, for which I worked for about a year and a half. It’s hard to find Joko films. It’s a phase or a part of John’s life that is not well-documented. You know, that’s what I love about this, is that, I mean, I’ve said this line a lot before. Someone said, would you like to write a book about John Lennon? You knew him very well. I was not going to write the 141st. I knew John Lennon best book. Lots of people who knew John better than I did know Yoko, May Pang, who worked for me and then became intimately acquainted with John, members of his family. But I probably knew aspects of him many people didn’t. I was working with him on that, and we’d spend times in the back of a recording studio exchanging information during the screening. I’d spent a lot of time sitting in John and Yoko’s bedroom, which is where they basically did business through most of their life, and they’re in there.

Marianne Haegeli: 23:17

Yeah.

Dean Thompson: 23:18

Just listening to him and just just absorbing stuff because why wouldn’t you? You’re sitting with a Beatle, for God’s sakes. Ask questions. And I did. And the great thing about being young is I didn’t hesitate to say, “where’d that come from?”

“Where’d that where’d that lyric come from?” The people might have been probably today if I sat down with, say, Ringo or Paul McCartney, I might be too intimidated to say, where did that come from? I’m way too aware of myself. But back then, I was just a kid. I was 25, 26.

I’d ask anything and I got what I asked for. I got a lot of information and I got a lot of ways how to communicate with him. He was just a really super.

Imagine Murder is about a fictitious murder that occurs in the film company. It’s written in the book, is told through the general manager of the film company, a guy named David Johnson, who sounds a lot like me, oddly enough, comes from Ohio. Isn’t that interesting? Lives on Staten. Well, through. Through. And there’s lots.

There’s real. I mean, John Yoko are real characters, of course, and one writes a book. You got to be careful about stepping on people’s toes as to who can you write about? We can write about anybody who’s passed away, and if they’re living, you got to get their permission. But if they’re famous, you can write about them anyway.

So there’s lots of characters that float through the book that, because they really did back in that the first book takes place in the summer of ‘72. It’s a fictitious murder that takes place on the evening of the Watergate break in.

Marianne Haegeli: 24:32

Oh, interesting.

Dean Thompson: 24:33

Because David Johnson and Dean Thompson both, ironically, had to go to Washington in the Democratic National Committee on that day. In this case, David comes back and discovers that someone’s been killed in the film company. The rest, as they say, is hopefully worth reading and hopefully worth $19.95 softcover. So yeah.

Marianne Haegeli: 24:49

I’m pre-ordering, but I want a signed copy. So at some point we need to find a way to meet either in Staten Island or Alexandria, Virginia.

Dean Thompson: 24:57

Send it to me and you’ll get a signed copy. Yes, of course. And hopefully the first of many books the publisher puts it’s Imagine Murder: A John Lennon Mystery.

Okay. Stuck with doing more, but I’ve got about a million ideas in my head. So we’ll see what happens.

Marianne Haegeli: 25:15

Excellent.

Dean Thompson: 25:16

Thank you.

Marianne Haegeli: 25:17

Well, well, Dean, I wanted to thank you for taking the time to reminisce with me. And I found out some new stuff, which is always cool. And thank you for supporting NIB’s and NSITE’s vision and mission as actively as you do. I have to say, our entrepreneurship program wouldn’t be half as good without you. And I can’t wait to see what trouble we can get ourselves into next.

Dean Thompson: 25:41

Well, and this is something for everybody out there. I’m always both horrified and amazed when I see a posting on LinkedIn when it says that NIB or NSITE’s got 3000. No no, no. We need more followers. Get online. Follow this thing. If you believe in helping yourself and others in the community, or if you’re not in the community, you’re just concerned about those who are. Follow this thing. Listen to the podcast. Even if you don’t like me very much.

Listen to the podcast. Like it. Promote it. Tell people about it. Because there’s going to be lots of good information out there. I’m very pleased to be part of it, I really am. Thank you.

Marianne Haegeli: 26:10

Thank you very much.

Dean Thompson: 26:12

You got it.

Outro: 26:14

Thank you for listening to the Heard and Empowered podcast. Please make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. For more information, visit heardandempowered.org. That’s H-E-A-R-D-A-N-D-E-M-P-O-W-E-R-E-D dot O-R-G. Join us again next time.