Environmental Tech Meets Medical Innovation: Matt Sweetwood’s Multi-Industry Leadership Journey

Anthony Codispoti : Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast, where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codispoti and today’s guest is Matthew Sweetwood. He is the founder and CEO of Greener Process Systems, a forward-thinking EPC and sustainability company. Their mission is to protect the Earth’s environment using innovative technology to reduce ship emissions.

Through their patented CEPH technology, Greener Process Systems has become a leader in maritime environmental protection, driving meaningful change in port operations worldwide. As a professional speaker and experienced innovator, he has shared insights on leadership, personal branding and entrepreneurship. He is also a best-selling author who shares his insights at speaking engagements worldwide. His accolades include being named Photo Industries 2016 Person of the Year by PMDA and receiving the 2014 CMO Club Presidents Award.

But he considers his greatest achievement to be raising five successful kids to adulthood as a single dad. Before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Add Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, the CEO of Greener Process System, Matthew Sweetwood. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Matthew Sweetwood : Anthony, thanks for having me after that. I wasn’t sure you were talking about me. The person sounded somewhat important.

Anthony Codispoti : He sounds amazing. So let’s find out more about him. So Matthew, you’ve led multiple companies over the past 31 years. What initially drew you to develop sustainable technologies at Greener Process Systems?

Matthew Sweetwood : Say in life, there’s no coincidences or there’s serendipity, there’s karma, there’s all sorts of things. And actually, the technology there is on my technology. I’m just good at running companies. So they stick me in front of them like the ratchet. Ratchets are really good at tightening bolts. So I’m really good at running companies and it doesn’t really matter what kind of bolt it is. It’s aluminum, steel, whatever.

I can tighten the bolt. And ironically, I got invited to help run this company by somebody who I helped out in a previous company. Sort of gave this person a job. This is a company that was really impacted by COVID heavily.

It ended up shutting down. But I did something really good for somebody in a job interview and gave him another chance, gave him a job, saved him and his family. And then about a year later, the guy calls me up and he goes, you know, my dad has this invention and they’re just going to get taken from him. It’s a huge opportunity and we kind of want to make your company and get somebody to run the company for it. And I was like, I don’t know what he’s interested in.

Like, okay, never. What is it? What is it? And it turned out to be this really innovative capture technology that allows us to capture the emissions of smokestacks and factories and on ocean going ships while they’re important, believe it or not, out of nowhere. So I spent most of my career in electronics and tech. And the technology is really valuable because you can basically bring a port or a factory. So it gives us the ability to capture emissions and reduce a factory or port to zero emissions. We can take complicated particulates out of the exhaust such as SOX and NOX and diesel particulate and so on. I don’t want to get too technical, but our systems allow us to do that. And in certain instances, even generate electricity off of the smokestack. Really?

Anthony Codispoti : So is the secret sauce and the filter mechanism itself or like what are you guys doing that’s different than other companies?

Matthew Sweetwood : Yeah, that’s a great question. The secret sauce really is in how you capture the smokestack.

Anthony Codispoti : What initially drew you to develop sustainable technologies at Greener Process Systems? How’d that come about?

Matthew Sweetwood : Yeah, I think in my case, it was just a little bit of a luck. It’s not my technology. I was just brought in to run the company and getting the opportunity to run the company was just a little bit of doing a good deed in this world and getting good karma on return. There was a person who worked for me in a previous company who it’s a very interesting story actually about hiring and analyzing because I’ve hired literally thousands of people in my life. And I think it’s one of the most important aspects of running a business, particularly if you’re running a small business and you’re doing it yourself.

Having that opportunity to hire and be involved in the hiring process I think is really important, but I digress. So this was a situation where the company that we were with closed, it was a result of COVID. It was just a very ugly circumstance. COVID just took this company out in every conceivable way that you could.

It was a luxury hospitality company that operated between New York and Florida and the war between Florida and New York and everything that could possibly go wrong, including the government outlawing what we did for two years was interesting. But nevertheless, I had hired somebody for a marketing position and it was sort of a little bit of a desperate young man, had a family, couldn’t get a job, was in a little bit of trouble. And he screwed up the interview that he had with me about as badly as you possibly can. But I saw something in him.

I’ll tell you what he did in the interview. It’s kind of funny, right? I don’t want to leave it hanging like that. Shows up late, shows up completely disheveled. I thought maybe he was drunk or on drugs or something like that. Geez, that’s bad.

Had done no research on the company. And keep in mind, this is in Miami. So if you’ve ever hired in Miami, anybody will tell you running a business in Miami, half the people that show up for interviews usually are stoned. So, you know, the hiring is not always the easiest thing.

So you tend, you know, beggars can’t be choosers. You tend to sort of let the interview, you know, so I started talking to this guy. You know, I didn’t pound him too hard for being late and stuff like that. But he seemed really smart.

It’s just, and then I could see he was like in the interview, he couldn’t even like sit still. So I’m like, listen, I’m like, we’re done, right? You’re not ready for this. You really don’t want this. And he’s like, he’s like, you don’t understand. I went to, I went to this, I went to this interview before you and they made me pay a fee.

They kept me there all day. And then I realized it was a scam. You know, I got a fit, you know, you’ve heard these employment scams and stuff like that.

So I’m like, listen, go home. We’re going to, we’ll, I’ll send you an email or something. We’ll reschedule. Go home. So on the way home, I said, you know what?

This guy, this guy seemed really smart, really, really smart. I send him a text and I say to him, I say, go research the company and give me a marketing plan. Put it on my desk at 9am in the morning. About three hours later, he gives me an absolutely perfect detailed marketing plan for the company.

Bring it back in. I hired him. He worked for the company for about a year or so and then COVID just killed the company. We actually did luxury rentals and they were outlawed for about a year.

You couldn’t, you couldn’t do short-term rentals. A whole complicated thing. So that was about a year later after that, a year and a half later, he called me up and he goes, my dad has this amazing invention. He has a patent in Italy on the invention. There’s an opportunity to install this thing in Italy and he’s dealing with these big companies and they’re just going to steal his patent and throw them in the Mediterranean Sea. So we need to have a real company. We need to, you know, know what we’re doing.

None of us know how to do that. Are you interested? So I took a look at it. The patent was amazing.

It was about 15 years in development. It’s a technology which allows a hermetic seal of a smokestack. Why is that important? Because first of all, it creates an efficient seal of the smokestack if you want to capture emissions. And second of all, it allows for things like the capture of CO2 from the exhaust because you’re able to maintain the temperature of the exhaust, which also increases your ability for filtration. When you have a smokestack, for example, from a ocean-going ship or a glass factory or any kind of factory, an aluminum smelter, there are open stacks all over the world, all over the country. They just billow heat and smoke in particular up into the atmosphere. And if you just kind of try to cover the smokestack, there’s escape, there’s heat loss, there’s all sorts of things you have to put additional energy into the process, which then creates more pollution and so on. We have technology that actually creates a hermetic seal on the stack without damaging the furnace or the engine that’s on the other side.

It allows us to trap the heat in the system, use the heat to power the system and do proper filtration. And in many cases, we can actually generate electricity off of the stack. A good high-pressure stack, you can capture about 60% of the electricity back in the stack.

Anthony Codispoti : So this invention is really cool. So you capture it, how do you use that electricity from…

Matthew Sweetwood : You can actually put it back into the grid or you can power your factory with it.

Anthony Codispoti : So it comes in the form of heat and then so you use that heat to run a turbine?

Matthew Sweetwood : Really as simple as, you know, without getting… Going down that rabbit hole, basically you spin a turbine and… Or there’s other ways, there’s transfer mechanisms and so on. Depending on the stack, you can generate electricity, you can capture CO2 if you actually have a place to put it. We can get to that too, which is one of the biggest jokes in the entire environmental industry is that you want to capture CO2.

People do not realize the kind of volume of CO2 that comes out of an exhaust. It’s actually not practical, but a whole different story. So this technology allowed that. So once I had the… I took a look at it, there was a standing contract in… Or an opportunity in Europe, actually in Italy in particular, which provided funding for the installation of these in a…

In a port in Italy. It allowed for… It allowed for a… There was millions and millions of euros set aside for this.

And the ability to have it funded and have a pilot funded by the European Union was very exciting. And so I really jumped in at the opportunity. I said, okay, we can put this together. And here we are sitting, we have six patents later, you know, all over the world. We have… We’re at a stage now where we have proposals all over the place to install our systems. And hopefully this is, you know, it’s a mid-state startup. And hopefully we’ll really start to install these systems pretty wildly.

Anthony Codispoti : So Matt, what is it that you guys are doing that’s so different from all the other companies out there? You’re just better at capturing the emissions. You’re the only ones that can convert it into electricity. Like what… Kind of give it to me for somebody non-technical.

Matthew Sweetwood : Yeah. So our patented technology allows us to create a hermetic seal on the smokestack. I mean, it seems logical, right? You want to cap a smokestack, let’s say, of an ocean-going ship or a factory that’s billowing smoke. And you want to seal it.

But it’s actually quite difficult because you have different size smokestacks. You have, in the case of an ocean-going ship, import. The ship is actually moving. Even though the ship is docked, you have to realize the ship is moving.

It moves up and down and side to side with the flow of the water and so on. And so you want to make a hermetic seal because it creates a much more efficient capture. Obviously, if you put a bonnet or you put an umbrella kind of device over it or just a cap and you leave space, you lose efficiency in the system.

You have things escaped that you don’t want to. From an operational perspective, the hermetic seal allows us to trap the heat of the exhaust. And when you trap the heat of the exhaust, it allows for a couple of things with better benefit. Number one, you can use the heat from the system then to power the system.

There are systems out there that cover smokestacks, but typically they have to add power into the system in order to capture because the system itself has to run. It has to flow air through and into some sort of filtration system. Ours, we use the heat of the system. If you’re in a really high temperature, high pressure stack, we can actually generate electricity because of the efficiency of the system.

Anthony Codispoti : It’s generating more power than what’s needed to run the system.

Matthew Sweetwood : Typically, a smokestack, you can capture 60% of the lost energy. And all of that just goes up into the atmosphere now. So to answer your question, our patented hermetic seal technology, the capture device, the ECD, we call it, the emissions capture device, this is the magic of our technology. And then obviously there’s a lot of engineering that goes into how you actually filter the air and what you do with it.

There’s alternatives. Sometimes it’s just about cleaning the air so that you have zero pollution or zero emissions or close to zero emissions, we claim about 95% effective. You can generate electricity if the stack is hot enough with enough pressure through something called waste heat recovery, WHR. You Google that thing, you’ll see lots of discussion about it. Or in some cases, not so popular anymore, but for a while there was a big drive to actually capture CO2 out of a smokestack. Capturing CO2 has some complications to it in terms of actually being able to capture it.

I know that sounds a little bit paradoxical. In order to capture CO2 out of an exhaust, you have to have two components. You have to have clean air. You can’t have other materials mixed in with the CO2. And in the case of a fossil fuel burning exhaust coal diesel and so on, the exhaust can have things like diesel particulate, NOX, SOX and so on. All of that has to be filtered out.

So the fact that we’re able to keep the temperature high, we can filter out all of that particulate and then you’re left with sort of this pure air at the end, which you can then capture the CO2. I’m saying it like it’s just click, click, click. This is complicated engineering.

Anthony Codispoti : It’s just the different series of filters, right? Is this out and this one cleans that out? Exactly.

Matthew Sweetwood : Right. One’s made of cotton, one’s made of nuts. I quite like that. It’s a complicated process because the temperature drops, you got all sorts of things that can happen and not good things happen. So and the other difficulty with capturing CO2 is that if you take a typical freighter and you clean the emission that comes out of it and then you capture the CO2, I mean, a freighter, while it’s important, fill a few football stadiums worth of CO2. I mean, it’s crazy kinds of volume. It’s not like it’s in a little box. You know, this is not like a little amount of material. It’s an insane amount of material. And so are you saying that it’s unreasonable to capture CO2?

Anthony Codispoti : It’s basically unreasonable. There are pipelines that were being built, but I don’t know. I think the trend, I somehow feel like the trend is away from this because there’s also now questionable science as to whether the CO2 is affecting. And once companies, here’s what I’m going to tell you about the environmentalist that people don’t know because people see the front facing of companies. So they see companies talking all the time about, you know, we want to reduce emissions. We want to be more environmental friendly. But I’m going to tell you when it comes to the bottom line and spending money on it, they look for every reason to delay, to drag their feet and not do it. It’s not regulated by 2030, by 2040.

That’s the favorite thing. They’re like, we’re going to reduce by 2040, 2050. Everybody’s going to be dead by then. Okay. You know, all the people, I don’t mean physically. I’m just saying all the people that come

Anthony Codispoti : to say, you paint a bleak picture there, Matthew. Yeah.

Matthew Sweetwood : So I found the environmental industry is a little bit of a, particularly this emissions industry is a little bit of a, we’re going to talk to talk, but we don’t really want to pay to walk the walk. A lot of that goes on. The only thing that actually gets companies to reduce emissions are harsh regulations, which is…

Anthony Codispoti : Or if the financial motivations can be aligned, like if it becomes cheaper somehow for them to operate their business by doing… Offer solutions.

Matthew Sweetwood : Okay. I’ll give you a real business examples. So we can go into a place like an aluminum factory, aluminum smelter. They melt aluminum. I’ll just say it the most simple way. They create a big bonfire, very hot bonfire, and they throw all sorts of metal scraps into it, melt it into a liquid and then make aluminum out of it. Aluminum is a multi-material metal. And these factories are out in the middle of America. They just have open stacks, just spewing stuff. We can walk into a factory like that and for five to $10 million, we can seal the stack and generate a million dollars a year worth of electricity off of the stack. Okay. And if the electric rates go up, you generate… They’ll be like 10 years. Who’s paying for the system now? They’re like…

Anthony Codispoti : So do you offer any kind of financing?

Matthew Sweetwood : And then they’re like, well, we have to change our operations. We have to do this. The gain is not… We have one factory we went to. They collapsed their own roof because the design of their smokestack was not good. They poisoned their own employees and the whole bit they didn’t care.

No. They’re making so much money and they’re just kind of like… I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m just telling you, I’m making it more bleak than it is, of course, because we’re on a podcast and it’s more dramatic to do this. But I’m telling you, that’s the general feeling out there. So it’s like, we’re not doing this.

And they’re like, who else is doing it? Are the other factories? No, they’re not doing it. You want to be the first? No, we don’t want to be the first. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti : So harsher regulations, maybe negative press, these are the things that I’ve seen get big companies to move. Yeah.

Matthew Sweetwood : But the thing is, the environmental issues, they don’t affect individuals enough for them to care enough. It’s kind of a little bit of a weird thing. You go out to Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Valley. You have the Port of Los Angeles out there and you have the Port of Long Beach. These are like the two largest ports in the country. You heard when the ships were backed up and all sorts of stuff. There’s an area out there they call the diesel death zone.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay. It’s not a place I want to vacation. Yeah.

Matthew Sweetwood : It’s a place where a lot of people live and they talk about, they walk out and they wipe the soot off their cars. All right. Off the playground swings. I can show you ABC news reports where they go out there and they wipe the stuff off the swings and the kid swings. And California took them, I don’t know how many years, they passed some sort of regulation with respect to tankers. Not freighters, not cruise ships, not in, not tugboats, not the trucks going into the port with generate all sorts of stuff. And this is California, right?

The most environmentally friendly thing. They have a thing and they follow it. They don’t follow it. So I think I can sum this up best with a conversation I had with one of the largest ports here in Florida.

And where there are, there aren’t, and it’s not just Florida. There’s no port regulation and go to the port authority in New York and New Jersey. Well, you know, another humongous port, they don’t, they put in an electric port.

They put in a little bit, they throw a little bit at it, but they don’t really, they’re not really high. He’s like, he’s like, you know, 75% of the fuel oil that comes into Florida comes through my port. He goes, I don’t really think they’re doing anything to me. He’s like, they’re not shutting me down. They’re not doing anything. And if they really want to shut me down, go ahead. It’s okay.

I’m on government salary. It’s no problem. No sweat. It doesn’t affect him.

It doesn’t affect him. So you get, you get sort of this malaise. And then there’s another aspect to this too, which is really important to discuss in this business is that not our product, because we have actually a really amazing technology. But 95% of the stuff that’s in the entire environmental world is no tech or future tech. So it’s not, it’s, it’s just fake. It’s not going to work. It’s an idea or it’s going to work in 2045

Anthony Codispoti : by, by you guys, your tech, it’s here now. It works now.

Matthew Sweetwood : It’s ready for implementation today. If things go well in Italy, we’ll install our really first in a port there funded by, we were approved by the Italian government or technology made it through the ministry of environment and their technical crew. They’ve approved our technology. It’s for real. We can install it in any port in Italy and that probably would extend to the EU and we’ll be able to get the system in.

Anthony Codispoti : How did it start specifically in Italy? That’s where the inventor was. Okay. So he had relationships there. That’s where the conversation started.

Matthew Sweetwood : Europe is way more serious about these things than we are here. They also have a much bigger problem because if you know Europe, you know that the ports dig into the cities. Like you go to Italy, you go to the coastal cities in Italy, the port, the ships dock right against the main street.

Like you can just literally walk from the main street into there. I have some scenes from Napoli. And Napoli, there’s a road right next to the port and in Italy, you have these, they’re ferries, but they’re really like small cruise ships. And you have obviously freighters that come in there. There’s a street right next to the port in Napoli. Vesuvius off in the background. Mount Vesuvius, beautiful scene. And they basically had to abandon all the buildings at the port because of the pollution.

If you stand up, I stayed at the Renaissance once when I was there, which overlooks the whole city. You see this plume of just smoke billowing over the valley from just a few ships in the thing. A typical freighter emits the equivalent of 20,000 cars without catalytic converters every hour, just to give you an idea. But maritime traffic controls the world. So there’s very little effort to put a heavy curtailing on that for environmental. All the projects are long term. The only significant thing that I think was done over the last couple of years in that area was the forcing of low sulfur fuels as you get close to port. They figured out that SOX was the most harmful ingredient. So they make ships burn fuel, which is twice as expensive when they get close to port, basically everywhere in the world.

Anthony Codispoti : So Matt, realistically, timeline wise, when do you think we might see this implemented in the first place?

Matthew Sweetwood : I think over the next three to five years, you’ll start to see us get systems installed. It’s just things, the lines we’re all across, we’ll get a few systems in. There’ll be just absolute need to do it. And you’ll see that happen now that our technology is authorized because one of the problems you have, and this is for anybody with a startup business out there with technology, is that it’s very hard to get the first users to try it, right? Particularly when it’s innovative.

Anthony Codispoti : Somebody wants to be the guinea pig. Yeah.

Matthew Sweetwood : And it’s only that. It’s like, what is it really worth? Does it really work? You know, am I going to get subsidy for this? In the case, what does it count for?

And having the approval of the Ministry of the Environment in, it’s like the EPA approve, it would be the equivalent of the EPA saying that my technology is, does reduce emissions and you can install it and get a government grant from us if you install the technology.

Anthony Codispoti : I want to shift gears and I want to hear about the medical lab that you’re involved with. What’s going on there? What’s the name of it? What are you guys doing?

Matthew Sweetwood : Yeah, sure. So this business is running while this business is going on. It happened to be somebody who I ran into here in my local community, actually on the way to Temple kind of thing. And because, you know, where we live here, you know, this is Israel East. Okay, I’m just letting you know. Nevertheless.

Anthony Codispoti : A lot of your Jewish friends live nearby.

Matthew Sweetwood : Yeah, you might say that. Bokeh is Bill Maher, not a favorite of mine. He actually made a really funny joke about this. You Google it, he actually find it. He goes, he’s talking about how, you know, the Jews are accused of being colonizers in the whole bid and he’s like, this is just completely not true. This is, you know, the whole thing.

He goes, they’ve only colonized one place and that’s Bokeh Rattan. That’s it. So I just figured I’d tell you. So, you know, in a conversation I was having, there was a local business here that the business was struggling a little bit. And that’s been my career, by the way. My career is I’m like the fix it guy. Other than the company I ran, electronics company, I ran for about 25 years in New Jersey when I left that company now almost 10, 11 years ago.

All I’ve done is I’ve gone into companies, fix them, turn them around and move on. And this is a molecular lab. So molecular labs came about out of COVID. If you remember, there was a big need to have a rapid test. You know, it used to be you would take a test, they would do the standard culture and sensitivity method, which means you take the sample, they would take that nasal swab and they would send it off to a lab. The lab grows the culture. They put it under a microscope over simplifying, put it under a microscope and they can tell you whether you have COVID or not. And that takes several days. The problem is the fear at that point with COVID was that you would then, you know, spread it to a million other people and everybody would die.

Okay. So out of that, there was a molecular technology called PCR that came about that. We’re hearing about it at the time. Yeah, that allowed for basically instantaneous results. You can get results in an hour. Just, and it’s not that it takes an hour.

It just physically takes time to put the thing. You actually take the swab and you put it on a chip. You pipe at it on it like a micro drop on a chip and it goes in a chip reader and you, and usually they gang them together so they don’t just one run chip. They run a tray of chips. So you need a bunch, but you can run the test like if you were sitting in the lab, I could take a test and have you a result in 30 minutes.

No problem. So this technology was developed for COVID, but after COVID went away, a lot of the labs just bit the dust. They had nothing because traditional places just continue to use the same method they’ve been using since they were in penicillin was invented. Okay. Which is what they do. And so a few very smart innovators came up with the idea that the speed of the result has an advantage in certain market places. It actually has an advantage everywhere, but doctors don’t necessarily like to change so much. So the place that it has a huge advantage is in nursing homes because in nursing homes, you have an 85 year old patient who is showing signs of an infection. And so what they do in a nursing home is they tend to just prophylactically treat them with antibiotics. So they’ll give them two, three, four antibiotics at one time because they don’t want the patient to pass away because of the infection.

They send the test off to the laboratory and then five days later, they figure out whether they did it right. Huge problems with that. There’s a huge cost to that. You end up with patients in the hospital or coming out of the hospital and then readmitted if that’s where the antibiotic is administered. You develop antibiotic resistance because you’re just dispensing this like M &Ms. And so this was a lab that was designed to pick up a sample at five o’clock at night anywhere in the country overnighted back to the lab and then give them a result in a few hours later electronically. Also a molecular lab can do a better determination of whether a particular bacteria is antibiotic resistant so you don’t give them the wrong thing. So there’s a lot of advantages to doing this. So the lab itself had a really good business model. It just wasn’t being run very well. There was a dispute going on.

Anthony Codispoti : So do the areas that you’re serving, I’m guessing it’s very local, very regional. No.

Matthew Sweetwood : UPS and FedEx can pick up a package at five o’clock anywhere in the country and deliver it by 10 a.m. the next day too. They actually, both of those companies have healthcare divisions specifically for people don’t know this. I didn’t know this either because I knew nothing. Keep in mind, I walked into this business knowing zero. So this is a really good sort of note for your viewers is that business skills are just business skills.

You theoretically can apply them almost anywhere. And this was a company that was having trouble managing staff, managing expenses, lacking sort of IT direction, and so on. And so I walked into the place and within a few months able to fix it up, fix up the business and really make the business run. And so you can actually take samples from any, they’re called, by the way, we’re calling them nursing homes for layman. They’re called skilled nursing facilities, just FNFs. This is an acronym business, by the way, and I’m in refusal to memorize all the acronyms, but this one I walk in the staff.

Anthony Codispoti : I walk into the place, the staff, right, the staff, they’ll like literally give you one of those sentences with like acronyms, you know, the whole sentence is acronyms. I’m like English. You need an interpreter. English, please, you know, full English.

Thank you. So Matt, who, like, who’s the base of your, your, your users? Like, is it mostly these skilled nursing facilities? It’s the skilled nursing facilities.

So you’ve got like a bulk arrangement with them. It’s not like, not like you’re going direct to consumer, I’m not going to send you a test that you mailed me.

Matthew Sweetwood : I mean, if you did, now that we’re kind of friends, I probably would do your test for you. I throw it on there with one of them and give you a result. Yes, I would do that for you.

But since if you’re not my friend, I’m probably not going to. No, we’re just strictly B2B2B, you know, servicing these skilled nursing facilities. That’s right. It’s really an amazing technology that you have almost a million dollars worth of equipment in the lab. It’s, there’s something, you know, it’s kind of like how you, it’s almost in a way how I think about Nourlink, you know, what Elon Musk did when you sort of have a human product, which is a medical sample. It’s a swab. And the swab somehow makes its way onto a computer chip.

into a little like on a computer chip and goes in a device that’s red. There’s something that’s very futuristic about that. I find very cool. And if you think about it, he’s implanted a chip in a human, right? So you have this touching of metal, I guess, to human matter. And I find that particularly like, wow, I’m still amazed by it.

Anthony Codispoti : I find it. So what’s the future of this molecular testing business? Where do you want to grow it? How do you want to take this?

Matthew Sweetwood : I mean, so this is a business that I’ll touch for a while. I will get up and running, you know, we’ll get running. And the idea is just to grow the sample count. You just, you have scalability in this business because your equipment can run tests for two hours a day, four hours a day, or 24 hours a day.

And then when the tests run 24 hours a day, you get another piece of equipment and another lab molecular laboratory certified technician. And they run the equipment and so you can continually scale the business. The business has some other technology in it, which is, I didn’t tell the whole story, which is what initially attracted me to it. It has the owner of the business has has an invention, which I can’t really talk about, which because we’re about to get a patent on it, but it potentially could change the way testing is done even a step further. For example, imagine you could walk into your doctor’s office, they could take the swab and give you the results in 60 seconds. Imagine for a woman in a gynecologist office where they could take a swab and give her a result in 30 or 60 seconds.

Anthony Codispoti : This is this has got like, like Theranos kind of vibes.

Matthew Sweetwood : It’s funny people all say that to me, except we’re like, we’re like, we’re a bunch of real Jewish guys from Boca Raton. Okay, we’re not, we don’t do well in prison. I’m just letting you know. It’s not going well.

Anthony Codispoti : None of us are working on the real deal. Right.

Matthew Sweetwood : We’re working on the real deal and it will get full on FDA approval and it will get full on everything and vetting and there.

Anthony Codispoti : So, so when can we check back in with each other and you can get the update on on this kind of

Matthew Sweetwood : two to three year project, okay, great, two to three year project, realistically to do it right and to do all the pieces and to get it right. The technology looks very promising.

Anthony Codispoti : Would it cannibalize what you guys are already doing or would they be testing for different things?

Matthew Sweetwood : You know, that’s a really interesting question. I think it would eliminate probably if it worked perfectly and you had this device in every place in the country, it would eliminate, you know, 75% of this business, which

Anthony Codispoti : you would be fine with because at that point you’ve got something that everybody else has and is a huge step up.

Matthew Sweetwood : The real problem with this invention, and I probably shouldn’t be talking about it anyway, because it’s just fun to talk about, is that when I saw this thing, I’m like, I’m like, do you have life insurance?

I said this to the inventor. I said, you have life insurance? I said, because if this thing works, you know, Pfizer, you know, they’re going to just, you’re going to disappear.

They’re going to disappear you. Okay, because this is going to put like billion, not Pfizer in particular, I’m just use them as an example, but it’s going to put like

Anthony Codispoti : billion dollar- Big company and it’s threatened by this technology.

Matthew Sweetwood : Yeah, I mean, this is not, I said, we have to do this kind of quietly, get this going, whatever, if it works, it works, it doesn’t work, whatever, and then sell it to somebody or do something before they kill us.

When you have disruptive technology like that, and you’re going after billion-dollar businesses, they don’t just go, oh, well, we got beat. So it happens to the best of us. It doesn’t work.

Anthony Codispoti : More high drama from Matt Sweetwood today, drugs. That’s great. So let’s talk about your book, Leader of the Pack. What is this? Why’d you write it?

Matthew Sweetwood : I wrote it because, and I hate saying it like this because everybody does this, but I wrote it because I had to write it. It just was a confluence of things that happened in my life where I had one of those moments. I’m like, there’s no way this happens to me. All of this stuff happens to me without me supposedly going to write about it. Because if you think that you’re going to write a book and make money off writing the book, this is like, you know, these companies come at you. We’re going to help you write a best-selling book and you’re going to be like Stephen King and life is going to be good for you.

You’re going to be famous and the girls or men, if you’re a man or woman, are going to swoon after you and all this stuff. It doesn’t work like that. It’s more like half Starbucks wage without the health insurance. So the reason I did it was I just had a crazy circumstance of events in my life that was around my raising of my kids and I started talking about it. You know, actually it’s a business story in a sense. I was running an electronics company in New Jersey at the time. Actually it was a camera store and a photographic supplier in electronics and so on. And I started using social media to promote the business. I’m going to give you the full story because it’s really, I think, a really valuable story lesson in life is that I saw we were early adopters of social media. We joked before we got on, you know, that I was using it was on AOL. I mean, we did advertise on AOL. And what’s really sad is probably there’s a bunch of people listening to you now that have no clue what that is.

But nevertheless, for those who do, you know, you’ll know what that know how funny that is. And I started using social media for the company. I wasn’t getting a lot of traction. So I said, and I was managing the social media myself for the company.

So finally, I just like, okay, maybe I’m not doing this right. I hand the social media over to somebody, you know, half my age. And I’m like, you try to do it. And I’m like, I made all these accounts myself. I’m just going to start talking about my own, my own stuff. And I started talking about being a single dad. Like the reaction was, and you have to go back now, we’re going back 20 years, you know, in the world of social media. I mean, you know, was the infancy of social media. So I started talking about myself.

Right. You wouldn’t think I’m not even a pretty girl. I started talking about myself.

Like, you know, what it was like to be a single dad, having mom walk out on the kids having, you know, like all of this stuff and what I would go through. And then I got the idea. I said, you know what, I’m the president of this company. I’m going to give people inside stuff. So I would go meet with the CEO or the president of Nikon or Canon or Kodak or whatever it was. And I’d be like, you know, and I’d start talking about it, what it was like, you know, I went into his office and this happened in his office, you know, he mentioned to me that this might, and all of a sudden I realized that these personal stories are what really get gets attention. And so out of that, I started talking more and more about fatherhood in a way that really nobody had talked about before. And then eventually got approached by a publication called the Good Men Project. And I started writing articles for them. And then eventually the Huffington Post, and then combining this stuff, I was writing for entrepreneur. And eventually I had this sort of collection of stories that I had told about things. And the stories were getting lots and lots of reaction. Then of course, there was pressure, you should write a book about, you should write a book about it.

And so for me, it was really that sort of evolutionary process of just getting the word out there, talking about it and finding what sticks with an audience. And then realize I have enough material, I could really write a book about this. And my book was a bestseller, it was number one. So I have 185 star reviews out there. I was number one in self help for a while. And I will tell you that I get an email once every week or two from somebody that tells me my book has changed their life for the better. They thank me for something I talk about in that book.

Anthony Codispoti : And what influences it having on people? What’s the impact?

Matthew Sweetwood : So the book has its multi-layered. So the first is, can I curse on this broadcast? Do you mind if I curse? Go ahead. Go ahead. I can just unload. It’s how you get out of the worst shit that happens to you in your life. How do you sort of get yourself out of the worst possible circumstance that you can find yourself in? And how really you’re, in most, to blame for why you ended up here and why you need to not keep repeating these things. On another level, it’s a very spiritual journey.

It’s how when you find that part of your side, your spiritual side, how it elevates you and really gives you power to transform yourself. And so it’s a really, it’s a harsh read. My book is a harsh read. Bad things happen in that book. And I’ve had people crying, you know, reading the book and calling me, it’s big me a cope on what I did. But it really helps people.

The other thing that I get a lot from people is they thank me for making the case or explaining why people stay in abuse of relationships. You know, the famous line where a woman is being beaten by her husband and her friend turns to her and says, well, why don’t you just leave? Why do you say, why do you go back?

You know, he’s going to hit you again. So I think, and I can, I think I do because people have told me over and over and over again that I do a very, very good job of explaining how you get stuck there and why you’re there and how you get out of it. Can you summarize it for us here? Yeah, it’s a psychological trap. It’s a spiral that puts you in a ego deflating, I deserve it kind of mode, a distortion of reality and an addiction, a sort of a yo-yo effect of addiction that kind of keeps you there. And there’s other things that keep you there. You know, there’s children can be involved. There’s money which prevents you from leaving and control. But ultimately, it’s a psychological trap. And if you get involved with people that have psychological problems like personality disorders, they have been imbued with a talent of trapping people. They have to trap people because it’s the way they release their pain.

But this is not a psych podcast. So how do you break out of the trap? It’s just an inner strength. In my case, it was spirituality that helped me, that really helped me understand and gain the strength to pull myself out.

Anthony Codispoti : Your Jewish faith connecting with God, to connection with God. And the other aspect, I think, which really helped me was I had little kids. So you turn around and you’re looking at the kids and the kids are looking up at you or like, dad, you got to fix this. Like, do something. Do something.

Do something, loser. And you have your kids. You don’t want your kids ending up on the street in jail, drug taking drugs. You love your kids. So if it’s not for you, at least let’s save the family. So it’s a spiritual connection.

It’s saving the family. It’s a question you have to, and this is my personal motto, which is how badly do you want it? If you want something badly enough, you’re just going to will up the strength to figure out how to do it. And I want to save my kids badly enough.

I want to save myself badly enough. That’s powerful motivation. It’s powerful badly. It’s powerful. And you know, I actually use this when I give talks. I remember I was giving a talk, I’ll give you a really good life example of that.

I’ll transform that into something positive. I was giving a talk, it was actually in Manhattan, right in Times Square in the Microsoft facility. And it was a talk to basically a middle-aged group of Ivy League graduates.

You had to have an Ivy League MBA to be in the room and be unemployed or wanting to change employment. And so the goal was, I was giving the key notes, it was really just talk about anything you want. And the speech was centered around, you can basically do anything. You guys are super smart.

You’re doing all this. This was kind of the talk. It was a leadership talk, motivating talk. And I remember, I’m giving this talk and there’s a woman sitting in the front row, if you’ve ever given a speech, you’re looking at, there were probably a hundred people in the room.

So you’re giving the talk and there’s a woman like in the first or second row. And as I’m giving this, she’s just shaking her head. She’s not agreeing, huh?

She’s not agreeing with nothing. You know it. She’s letting me know it. I’m not a bashful. So you’re trying to, you just sort of go on. Eventually I’m like, okay, I stop.

I go over Lucy, Miss, whatever your name is. I say, you don’t agree with me. And I say, what is it that you don’t agree with?

And she basically disagrees with this basic point that you can have anything you want if you want it badly enough. And she goes to me, she goes to me, what if I wanted to be a doctor? I can’t be a doctor. I’m like, you definitely can.

So I start to question her. I’m like, where’s your degree from? She actually went to, I want to remember, it was an Ivy League school. She had an MBA or something from one of the Ivy League schools.

I want to say Yale. She’s a bright person. Right. Super bright.

You know, super bright. I’m like, can I ask you some personal questions? She goes, sure. I go, are you married? I go, does your, is your husband employed?

Yep. Are you financially okay? You know, obviously I’m not saying, you know, don’t tell me what you make, but you’re financially okay.

You’re making the mortgage. You’re okay. I’m like, and I’m not going to ask your age, but I’m going to guess that if you, if you right now apply to medical school with your degree, you might get in.

Maybe not. Maybe you might have to, because I don’t know what your undergraduate, you might have to take biology, some basic classes, and then you’re a mature person with that. I bet I can find the medical school that you get in. And in 10 years from now, your kids are grown up, right? Yes. Kids are grown up. So in 10 years from now, you’ll be a doctor. You’ll be in your, you’ll be in your mid 40s, even though it should probably be closer to 50s. I’ll be in your mid 40s and you can be a doctor.

You just have to work for 10 years. Do you want that badly enough? If you do, just go do it.

Do it. Nobody’s stopping you. You can afford to live.

You actually have it easy. Your husband’s working. He’s making money. Go to medical school right now. Change careers.

You don’t like what you’re doing. It’s your dream. It’s what you want. It’s your response. She’s like, well, the thing, she basically, I bet I want, I want. She started, she actually took a good attitude about it, by the way, in the end.

She goes, yes, you’re right. But is that realistic? I’m like, it’s realistic if you want it badly enough.

I’m not telling you to go do it. Like if you came to me as a coach, right? And I was going to coach you. I don’t know if I would send you in that direction. But if you’re telling me that you’re lifelong dream and you had, I’ll make out some story. You had children at 17, and you had another child at 19, and you had to go to work and you couldn’t do it and blah, blah, blah. And now you had your career and this was your dream.

Like go do it. You’re going to live to 80, 90 years old. That’s your life expectancy at this point. Go, go do it. You can spend 30 years as a doctor. Go.

Anthony Codispoti : And I’m glad that we touched on this story because it highlights something else that you spend your time doing. You’re consultant, business coach, and keynote speaker. How do you find time for all this?

Matthew Sweetwood : Yeah, because I’m not a vacation guy, a play guy. This is, I don’t know, it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I just high energy a little ADHD kind of, and I funnel that. I’ve been on enough radio, podcast, TV and stuff to try to keep my speech at a reasonable speed.

But so I’m a very energy person. And for me, this is what I really, I really like to do. I have right now in the middle of everything, I have multiple coaching clients. It’s not like I have a coaching business, right, per se, but I have select clients that come to me. I usually high level clients.

I actually have right now three clients. One is a very famous yogi woman, very famous. One is a rabbi, who comes to me for advice, because I do a really good job of bridging that religious world and the regular world. And for a religious person, sometimes that’s helped them. I’ve helped them in his businesses and his life and all sorts of things.

He had a legal thing. I’ve done that. And I have a very high level architect working in a major city, runs a big architecture firm. Those are the kinds of clients I like because they have money to effectuate the things I tell them.

Anthony Codispoti : So you like to think big and you like to put things on, thinking big.

Matthew Sweetwood : Yeah, yeah. Like I’m better. I’m not, like if you tell me I’m on drugs and I’m about to kill myself, that’s for the psychiatrist. That’s not, I, I, that’s not a fit for you. Yeah, I can’t. That’s not a fit for me. I’m not, no, please.

Anthony Codispoti : You want, you want a hyper who wants to give you a little even more. Right, right. That’s really my target, is to take somebody who’s operating at a pretty high level and and what can you do for them?

Matthew Sweetwood : I think, you know what I think it is, because these people are just smart as I am, it’s not smarter. I think what it is, is that on their level of smartness in some range, I’m not saying this to compliment myself, but I give them a non emotional analytical perspective and creative at times on their life. And so it gives them the, because it’s hard to be your own, your own coach. Right. Particularly if you’re working at a high level and you’re under a lot of pressure and there’s complication in your life.

You know, when you’re dealing with, I’ll use the architect, right? He’s got a legal issue going on. He’s got a business issue going on. He’s got an ex-wife. He’s got all, you know, a tax issue. He’s got all these things.

I know all of this stuff. I run businesses. I’ve raised kids. I’ve raised family. I know all of this and I can give them a very unique perspective on it. I also go to reading people so I can understand what’s going on. He’ll be like, why did this person do this?

And, you know, and he’s attached to the person, you don’t understand. So I’m looking at it just from a distance and just from the information. So I’ve actually been very successful. You want to know the truth? It’s probably been my most successful area of occupation in a sense because I’ve helped dozens of people at this level, like really raised their level, usually above my level, the level that I work at. I always think that’s kind of God’s plan for me.

Anthony Codispoti : So if somebody’s listening and, you know, they kind of like what they hear about Matt Sweetwood, like what would be a good fit for you in terms of a coaching client? They are an owner or a founder or their, what?

Matthew Sweetwood : Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, it could be a founder, even a startup founder, because I really know that game. I know the fundraising game. I know how to do that. I know how to set up a business keeping within expenses.

Somebody who’s running a mid-sized company or a small-sized company themselves, the CEO, or one of the senior executives, a professional of any kind, dentist, doctor, lawyer, accountant, whatever, that kind of thing where I can really help them, you know, any kind of entrepreneur, that kind of level person, I can really improve their lives. They typically have complicated personal lives to go with it. Typically that goes with it. I don’t mean complicated, like weird complicated. I mean, they just have heavy, heavy responsible, heavy burdens of responsibility and sort of, I’m very good at helping them juggle that and improve the quality of their life.

Usually make more money and improve the quality of their life and avoid problems. And number three is something I’ve done many, many, many times. Like where I say, don’t do that or do this and something better will happen for you. If you do this, it’s going to go completely wrong.

Anthony Codispoti : Completely wrong. How about for the keynote speaking side of your business? Like what are some good groups that would be a fit for you? What kind of messages can you deliver to them?

Matthew Sweetwood : Yeah, I talk on, I try to not, I’m not the guy that goes in and gives your sales department the sales technique. I’m a keynote kind of speaker. I talk on leadership. I talk on happiness. I talk on finding your purpose on really sort of motivating you to get out of that everyday thing and look to how to better your life to really, really make a difference. I’ve also, I also have a very good talk that I’ve given to temples and houses of worship along the way, but typically I do that for fun, for fun a little bit.

But I’m the guy who shows up at any conference, can give that keynote speech and talk about leadership on how you can better yourself, how you can be more productive or more happy in your life. I have a couple different versions, which I will tailor for the industry that I go in.

Anthony Codispoti : You mentioned something earlier in the interview about how you’ve hired thousands of people and you believe this is a really important skill. Can you provide some advice for our listeners on, you know, I don’t know, good questions, best practices kind of a thing?

Matthew Sweetwood : Yeah, I’ll start with an anecdote. I was at a conference, you know, and after you give a talk, they always, they get you to be on a panel, right? They multitask you, you always, by the way, if you’re ever speaking, you always volunteer for that.

They love you when you do that. So we’re on a panel, I remember I was on a panel with like HR people, which I really should not be on a panel with HR people, but it was okay. I’m there. And they were asking everybody, you know, what were good HR practices? And the final question was name the quality you look, it was like sort of a silly question, name the quality that you most admire or most look for in somebody you’re hiring, you know, when you get the usual answers, you know, I’m looking for a diverse thing that fits in the thing and the thing and it gets along in the whole bit. So I got they really had used up all the sort of traditional stuff when it came to me. And so my answer was I look for kindness.

And so I actually do do that. And I find that particularly, you know, if you have a big company, you’re hiring the meanest to the kindest, you know, it’s a little more difficult when you have to hire thousands of people. But when you’re in a company and you’re hiring two people and four people and eight people and that kind of thing. If you just simply have a kindness score on them, you will hire people that get along with everybody, avoid politic and create a workplace, which is ultimately significantly more productive.

And that kindness factor has really stood me in good stead. I did that at this lab that I have, there’s seven other seven, eight other employees there. I actually when I walked in, I dismissed within a very short amount of time the mean employee.

Okay, even though she had some high level competence. I’ll tell you what I did. So I worked into a place a relatively small facility. And I was only there a few hours a day kind of in as a on a consulting basis. And so I got in there and they introduced me. And I looked around the room.

And everybody had smiles on their Facebook one person, right, who saw me immediately as a threat. Okay, even though this is like a technician, right, like a high level technician, I mean, I wouldn’t know how to pipe that, you know, water into a coffee mug. Okay, so you know what I did? I went in, they had her desk was sitting there and they had sort of this conference table. I went and I said, my desk is on the conference table.

I put my laptop down on the conference table right next to her and worked with her and realized that she was torturing everybody, let her go within a short amount of time and replaced her with somebody, this young man who is just total sweetheart.

Anthony Codispoti : So in that kind of an environment, it’s easy to pretty quickly understand like who’s kind who’s not because you’re spending extended periods of time. Right, that’s right. That’s right. What about in the interview process? How is that something you can vet out?

Matthew Sweetwood : Yeah, so you’re vetting that out along with a bunch of other things. And once you get through, so being always sort of coming being at a top level in a company, I always have an advantage of having basic competency tested before it gets to me. So I’m not in the process typically of testing the competency of the person, right? So if you’re hiring a lab technician as the example, by the time they get to me, I’ve already spoken to the staff and they’ve already told me the person has the right certification, they’ve done this. So then what I do is I try to understand whether the person matches the documents that are standing in front of me because that measures integrity.

Then what I do is I just want to get the person talking. So I almost treat it like a networking opportunity. I was going to say dating opportunity, but that’s bad form in this case. But it’s you use some of the dating and networking use similar skills. And this applies to men and women.

I’m just this is not, it doesn’t matter. And you just, you get, you talk to them, you find something that interests them and you get them talking. And I promise you, if you get someone talking for five or 10 minutes and they’re under a little bit of pressure, right? Because they’re in their interview. So they have some level of nervousness. Their personality comes out almost every time, almost every time.

Anthony Codispoti : And you’re trying to get them to talk about something that’s personal, something outside of work? It could be like drop their tongue a little bit.

Matthew Sweetwood : Like sometimes I’ll be like, I’ll be like, so tell me, tell me about your last name. How’d you like the people there? There’s a great question. You get all sorts of answers.

One of the reasons why I left that lab is blah, blah, blah, you can get an answer like that. They were all great people. I hated to leave. I still keep in touch with all of them, blah, blah, giving you both ends of the spectrum. Then if they’ll say, you know, the people there at Intramulake, so why do you think that? Tell me why you think they didn’t treat you well. What happened? Well, you know, we were meeting at the, we had a party after the thing and everybody excluded me from the party. We were at the yacht club and we were doing this.

I’m like, oh, have you ever been boating? Anyway, I’m just giving you, you just start talking. And if you talk to somebody, you get through basic competency, you double check the competency, you check their facts, you ask very careful questions about their history and see if it lines up, and then you just get them talking. And in getting, if a goal is to measure kindness and truthfulness, all you need to do is get somebody talking. And if I get somebody who is honest and kind and has the core competency, the likelihood of success goes through the roof. I’m not gonna fight with my people. They’re not gonna disrupt the environment and so on.

Anthony Codispoti : Now, Matt, I just got one more question for you. But before I ask it, I want to do a couple of things. First, I’m going to invite all the listeners to go ahead and hit the follow button on their favorite podcast app to get more great content like we’ve had here today with Matt Sweetwood. And I’m also going to let people know the best way to get in touch with you, which I understand is msweetwood.com. It’s also all of your social media handles everywhere they go.

Matthew Sweetwood : Right, at M Sweetwood, at M Sweetwood everywhere, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, everything. Just type in, actually, if you just Google Matt Sweetwood, I do come up. But just don’t believe half the stuff you read. It’s not all true.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay, so Matt, last question for you. If you and I reconnect a year from now, what do you think you’re celebrating? What are you happy about? What are you clicking your heels for?

Matthew Sweetwood : Maybe my seventh grandkids. I have six now. I’m going to be kidding.

Anthony Codispoti : Maybe. Maybe. And I’m glad that that’s your answer because we didn’t, like you sort of talked about it a little bit in the context of your book. But in the intro, we said your greatest accomplishment was raising your successful kids. Talk a little bit about that.

Matthew Sweetwood : Yeah, I mean, so I have a circumstance where you go back to a really date myself. Despite my youthful appearance. Back in the 90s, I was a typical working dad. The idea of staying at home mom raised the kids and my life blew up. Mom walked out on the kids and I ended up having to raise tiny little kids. She walked out when the youngest was 18 months, so in diapers, and the oldest was eight. I had five kids.

And I had to deal with an insane court system, businesses that were failing at the time, and a very difficult to say the least ex-wife who put us under attack. I read about that in my book, Leader of the Pack. It’s a great read. People usually read it in one night, by the way.

I always say I can’t. I’m just going to check it out. Read it all in one night and then like, wow, wow, wow. And so turned me from a boy into a man and learned how to raise kids and run a business and manage life at a high speed and, you know, figure out all the things that were wrong with me that led me to this kind of place. So I’m better mad because of it.

Anthony Codispoti : How did you find the strength to get through that? I mean, one of those things alone could be enough to cripple most people. You had failing businesses. You know, we’re going through a divorce with an ex-wife who sounds like maybe she had some stability issues.

Yeah, maybe. That’s a good… You’re becoming a single dad to one, two, three, four, five kids. All of them young. Some of them in toddler phase. Like, did you have a support system? Is this where you got stronger in your faith? Like, how did you pull yourself through this?

Matthew Sweetwood : It’s sort of a combination of all of those things you talk about. I fortunately was financially just well enough and the divorce was catastrophic. I mean, I write about it in the book. I actually got… I had nanny come help me.

I did. I didn’t have much family. I was a very small family. My mom was older. You know, older. She had Parkinson’s.

I think she had Parkinson’s. It’s my level. Become a man. You know, tough it up. Figure out how to do it. I have high energy.

God gifted me with really good physical strength and as a result, I was able to figure it out and making a spiritual connection really gave me that extra push that I needed. And like I said before, your kids look up at you and you’re looking at them. You’re like, Matt, don’t eff this up. You got to make this work. We need you, dad.

Right. You’re the captain. You’re the captain, man. Do something.

We can’t live like… They’re not saying this. It’s in their eyes. It’s in their… You understand what I’m saying. So you just figure it out.

That’s all I don’t even know. I figure it out. Sometimes it’s funny because now I’ll go out to a restaurant and I’ll see a family with three kids throwing meatballs across the restaurant. And I’m like, why did I do that?

How did I… Is there an adult section of this restaurant kind of thing? How did I do that? I don’t know how. You know what? I think the best answer to you is I have no idea how I did that. You read my book, it’s in there somewhere and that’s it.

Anthony Codispoti : Fair enough. Okay. We got marching orders. We can find that book on Amazon. Give us the name again.

Matthew Sweetwood : Leader of the pack, how a single dad of five led his kids, his business and himself from disaster to success. Love it.

Anthony Codispoti : Matt, I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Matthew Sweetwood : Thank you for having me. Had a really good time here. I appreciate the long form where you don’t have to give meme-ish answers to every question.

Anthony Codispoti : It’s been enjoyable for me as well. Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.