Episode #17 – Jeffrey Sass: This Is the Vegan Geek-out Episode

Listen here or on iTunes. “You can’t, realistically, always follow your passion. What you CAN always do is find something you’re passionate ABOUT.” JEFFREY SASS I probably wouldn’t know about Jeffrey if his article, What Travelling As a Vegan Has Taught Me About Business Negotiation, hadn’t been published on Entrepreneur.com and subsequently blown up on social media. Raise hand if you started your vegan path by reading, watching or listening to at least three different variations of the list of solutions to the issue of eating out when all you eat are plants: be polite, ‘veganize’ vegetarian meals, know which innocent-seeming dishes often contain animal ingredients… So here was this person, obviously with years of experience both as a vegan and as a businessman, connecting the two in a completely novel way and giving a business spin to the problem of communicating your vegan preferences in a steak house. Yeah, I wanted to know who it was. Well, it turns out Jeff is no stranger to podcasting himself, having been both a host and an occasional guest in the past. He’s been vegan for 12 years and vegetarian for 15 prior to that. And he’s a self-confessed gadget geek with decades of experience in marketing and the entertainment industry – at one point, he helped produce low-budget horror classics like The Toxic Avenger, he hung out with William Shatner, set up a company for checking barcodes on your cellphone back at the turn of the millennium, and another for getting ringtones and wallpapers on your phone back when you’d get content by downloading it from the internet and putting it on your phone, before Play Store and iTunes came along. So yeah, I admit, part of this interview is me channeling my inner geek and delighting at the opportunity to be talking to someone who was there when the technologies we take for granted now were only taking off. But even if you’re not a geek yourself, you should listen for the nuggets of wisdom Jeff shares throughout the interview. That quote about passion, that’s just one of them. Right now, Jeff serves as CMO for .Club Domains – which is who you call when you want to register a domain ending in .club. If you’re considering one, definitely check his suggestions for the registration process, because some of the more premium names can go for thousands of dollars – but there is a way around it that he talks about in this interview. And of course, we do talk about how you can always find something vegan to eat, wherever your business travels take you, and why the same people skills apply to ordering food and to negotiations. Show Notes Website: JeffreySass.club Sassholes! blog Dadomatic Blog For all info on .Club domains:  Get.Club Entrepreneur.com article: What Travelling As a Vegan Has Taught Me About Business Negotiation  The producer of B-horror flicks where Jeff worked: Troma Entertainment  Definitely check this one out: The Toxic Crusaders,