Good morning, American. It's Friday. Yes, it is. And do you have a library card?
I have a library card. I made sure my kids had a library cards at a very early age. And we're going to talk about why today you're going to be very grateful for this. Trust me.
Having a library card is kind of cool because it opens up all kinds of things for you that you don't realize. OK, what do we all think about libraries for going and getting a book to read? All right, get it going to the library and checking out the latest books. My friends Ralph and Jan go to the library every week and then check out a couple of books because they are voracious readers and else that they're in read books.
Take them back. My favorite ex wife Diane does the same thing. She's at the Dunedin Library all the time. I go with her.
You know why I go to the library with her? I don't check out books at the library, but I access their reference material. But one of the things I do is I go and read periodicals, you know, magazines. Remember those and I'll tell you what I do every time I go with her.
I go and I read the latest. I just go get the latest issue of Rolling Stone and I'll sit at a table and read the latest issue of Rolling Stone. And there's a lot of good stuff on that. So I will do that and have done that for years.
That's just one of the things that I like about the library. But there's just there's so much more and we're going to talk about that. You get to access to books, digital resources. Now they have databases that you can if you have a library card, you can access.
Now let me tell you back years ago when I was in a business in business and we owned a pest control business, whenever we would do a customer on a street. You know, we did Mrs. Robinson at 525 West 15th Street, whatever it was, you could go to a database, through the library, a commercially commercial database. And you could look at everybody who lived on that street.
Now you could not download it and it didn't have the zip codes. It had the name, the address, actually the phone number, strangely enough. And but no zip codes, but you know what the zip code was, because you know what the zip code was for that street. But if you wanted to download it, you could pay them, you know, this company money.
But here's what I did, because I'm cheap and the librarian told me how to do it. You cut and paste their names and addresses and all of that. And you throw it into an Excel spreadsheet, just got it right into an Excel spreadsheet, and then you know what the zip code is, you stick that at the top, boom. Duplicate that all the way down.
Now you've got this every time you say you had a technician, say you have a pool cleaning company and you get a new customer or you have existing customers. Every street you've got a customer on, you go to that database and you get all the addresses for everybody on that street and then you send them a postcard, an inexpensive postcard, but you make sure it's really good. All right, make sure that you're doing the right thing. That's a whole nother podcast, but you give them a postcard with a offer that they cannot resist and irresistible offer, as they would say.
We'll talk more about that another time, but the database is there for free. You've got all this information. You've got everybody on the street. Now, if you're a phone solicitor, which I would not and would not advise you to be, you could actually call those people and say, Hey, we just cleaned the pool or we just started mowing the lawn at your neighbor, Mrs.
Richie's house and we could do yours for that type of thing. If you wanted to do that, it's up to you. So that's available at the library and it's free. They have research assistants.
You go to your librarian and you tell her or him what you want to look up and tell them what you're looking for. They at the Dunedin library, where I go, they bend over backwards to help you and point you in the right direction. Okay. Here's the other thing they do.
They have events at the library. Every library has events. I have spoken at the Clearwater library and the Dunedin library. I just went to a program the other day at the library where they had a speaker that I was interested in seeing.
So this is, this is cool. There's all kinds of events happening at your libraries. Just show up, find out or look it up on the internet. Study spaces.
Yeah, you need a place to study for school or even for business. You need a quiet place to work on your laptop. They've got Wi-Fi available for free and most libraries. So you can go there and you can work and you can study and you can look things up.
It is wonderful. Okay. That is good. If you don't have a book in the library, your library doesn't have a book that you're looking for, they're all connected to other libraries and they can get a book shipped to you and you can, you know, you can do that.
Now, here's another thing. This is what my son does. He uses something called the Hoopla app app. I can't talk the Hoopla app.
And from there, he can download comic books or books or magazines, all kinds of stuff and he can listen to audio. There's audio books and music free at the library, but you got a Hoopla app. Why am I calling it an act? It's an app.
If I'm the Hoopla app, you can just listen to it on your phone. It's pretty cool. They also have a movie channel that you can go to. If you've got a movie channel, it's pretty cool.
Canopy. If you've got Roku or any type of streaming service, you can go to Canopy. K-A-N-O-P-Y. I watched, I think you can watch about, I don't know, 10 or 15 movies a month on there.
And they've got new movies. They've got classics. They've got unusual movies. I saw a movie on there, I forget the name of it, but it was about an autistic young lady and she wrote, she entered a contest and she wrote a script for a new Star Trek and she submitted it.
And it was quite a story of her getting this submitted and it was a fabulous movie. So that is good. Online learning, you can take courses at the library through the library for free. And you can, there's just tons of it available.
So you meet people at the library, the people that you meet at the library are usually very interesting people. I love the libraries. I truly do. And I would encourage you to go visit your library and be grateful that we have such a wonderful resource.
It is really nice. All right. I might do a Saturday show. Saturday shows are different than these.
It's called the Saturday show. You never know what will happen. If I do one, I'm done one. I've only done one.
Maybe this Saturday is time to do another. We'll talk to you later. And be believable.