PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Ian Robertson
Jay Wynn, how are you, buddy?

Jay Wynn
I’m doing good, Ian. How are you tonight?

Ian Robertson
Not bad. I asked you that like we didn’t just already complain about 30 different things about running a home inspection business before we hopped on.

Jay Wynn
Yeah. But I guess it’s what you call the formal introduction.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, that’s the formal introduction, but I feel like we don’t need a formal introduction for Drinking With Jay episode.

Jay Wynn
But it’s been a while.

Ian Robertson
I think that’s the beauty of it. It has been, and you know, I actually got a bunch of messages from people saying, “Hey, when you having a drinking with Jay episode?”

Jay Wynn
I wonder why, because it does seem like, at least in the feedback comments that I get, that it’s, you know, maybe not the best podcast, but it seems to be fairly well received.

Ian Robertson
It’s actually one of our more popular segments, and I think what it comes down to is it’s real talk, you know. We have polished speakers sometimes, and we have people talking about business metrics, but this is just kind of like drinking with Jay. It’s like we’re hanging around a fire, just talking about things, and I think it was our first episode that we did this, first time we did this segment, you talked about the things you learned the most is hanging around with the old guys after the job, listening to them drink and talk about things, and it’s true.

Jay Wynn
Yeah, actually it is true. So, yeah, maybe that’s part of it, but I like it. I guess something that maybe strikes me is that I think a lot of people, when they talk face to face, feel like they have to have perfectly finished and polished ideas, but I think the reason we talk to each other as humans is to refine thought. So, it’s okay to have unpolished thoughts, it’s okay to have things in the working, it’s okay to, as you’re speaking with somebody that you trust to be working things out, because I honestly think that’s why we seek other people out to talk, not to have a finished thought that we express, but to work through what’s on our mind.

Ian Robertson
So, you’ve become very sage in your old age.

Jay Wynn
Yeah, all the wise stuff. It’s the gray.

Ian Robertson
Yeah. I mean, that feels like a Seneca quote or something, or Aristotle, you know.

Jay Wynn
Just an observation.

Ian Robertson
No, it’s true. And I think today is going to resonate with a lot of people in general. We as home inspectors and commercial inspectors and just in the industry alone, see people at their worst in general, because they’re the most stressed out when they’re having a home inspection. And you and I have often just randomly messaged each other with the question, are people just getting worse, are people just getting harder to deal with, is a better way, probably to express that, which is the title of our podcast, and I really wanted to talk through this, but first, what are you drinking, Jay?

Jay Wynn
Oh, so I went down into the shelf, and I was going to do an old-fashioned, because I’ve really gotten into mixed drinks, we’re working through a bunch of especially summertime drinks, and I’ve kind of got an old-fashioned dialed-in that I absolutely love, but I just decided to go straight tonight. So I went with Whistle Pig.

Ian Robertson
Oh yeah.

Jay Wynn
Their piggyback one. It’s the six year at 100 proof, and just chilled the glass, and I put a solid ice in there, so it doesn’t dilute it, and I decided to pour double tonight, so we’re going with Whistle Pig Piggy Back six year, and it’s one of my favorite sippin’ bourbons too. It’s just nice.

Ian Robertson
And I love those little frozen metal balls that kind of keep your drink cold.

Jay Wynn
Don’t dilute it.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, I don’t like the whiskey stones, they’re not my favorite. They feel weird when they hit your mouth.

Jay Wynn
What are you drinking?

Ian Robertson
Me? I’m just drinking a Tullamore D.E.W. I have discovered in my old age that no matter what I do, I am just a man of simple tastes. If you give me a $500 bottle of whiskey, I’m gonna feel the same about that as I am a bottle of Tullamore D.E.W. People make fun of me, like, oh, that’s a mixing whiskey. I love Tullamore D.E.W. I love to just sit and drink it. I have good memories with it, when I was younger, a buddy of mine, actually a buddy of both of us, you know, me and him used to sit and drink this when we were young, and you know, it’s just good sipping whiskey.

Jay Wynn
Yeah, sometimes you just want to sit down with a clean Irish whiskey, too, and that’s a good one.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, it really is. Like Jameson and Tullamore D.E.W. are probably my two favorite Irish whiskeys, but they’re very mainstream, but I like them.

Jay Wynn
Another really good one is Writer’s Tears. If you ever have a chance to pull up a bottle of that, go for it. It’s delicious. It’s a copper pot distilled Irish whiskey, and they really do a great job with it. Some places will carry the price points very reasonable. I think that’s the other thing is, I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of looking for those really good whiskeys and bourbons that aren’t $200, $300 or a big name label. I’m looking for the sweet spot of about $30 or $40 that have really good flavor and really good finish. So that’s kind of what I’ve been targeting too, which is part of why I like what I’m gonna get into, and the Whistle Pigs right there. It’s about, I don’t know, about $35, $45 depending on where you get it, so it’s affordable, and it’s a really delicious bourbon, so that’s the other thing too.

Ian Robertson
It’s a campfire bourbon for sure, like you can just sit around and just joke and go into the evening around the campfire with it.

Jay Wynn
Yeah, but nothing wrong with Tullamore D.E.W. either. You’re going Irish and I’m going American.

Ian Robertson
There we go. So, Jay, are people getting harder to deal with? What’s your thought?

Jay Wynn
Yes.

Ian Robertson
End of podcast everyone.

Jay Wynn
Yes. People are harder to deal with. Yes, we have to just put up with it. No, definitely. I would say, in the last couple years, in particular, people have been a lot more difficult on inspections, after inspections, and just in general, and it seems like some of the problems that we’re dealing with just shouldn’t be there. One of the things I know we’ve talked about on the podcast in the past is that I think a really good home inspector may very well be the most competent professional that a person deals with through the whole real estate transaction, and that’s not taking anything away from a great agent or a great attorney, but honestly, great agents and great attorneys are getting harder and harder to come by. I would say, you know, I don’t have anything to back that up, but it just seems like they’re getting rarer and rare. It seems like so many people are flooding into both of those markets that the skill level with both is just going right down, and so I think a competent home inspector, somebody that can field bunches of questions can explain things very simply, probably comes across as the most competent professional they deal with. So, when they have a question and nobody can answer it, well, hey, let’s call my home inspector. When I asked him 40 questions, he had 45 answers and 50 potentials, and he’s, you know, so I think that’s part of it too. But I would say definitely people are getting more difficult to deal with, and I’m curious to see if you have anything to add to that, and in what dimension you would add to that.

Ian Robertson
Well, for me, I always try to be very data driven, and you know, data, what was it Mark Twain said, facts are little malleable things, so you can read them a couple of different ways, but I actually used to give a public discourse, and I used to bring out some data from American Psychiatric Association, or whatever it was, but they measure people’s mental health over time, so they started measuring in the 70s people’s anxiety. They measured it all the way up to just past the COVID time period, and when you look at the chart, anxiety, even during, you know, war times, the Cold War, and everything, we’re like two, three times higher the anxiety levels now than we were back then in just the US. It’s a constantly climbing chart. Here’s some other stuff, some other facts. 40-7% of us adults say behavior is ruder than before Covid. 34% say they often or always see rude behavior in public. Times magazine came out with an article, and this one says 76% of workers experience incivility monthly, 78% witness it monthly, 96% weekly stress from interactions, and so basically it’s a systematic change of people. Nearly one in two Americans experience multiple acts of customer incivility in a year. And, oh, here it is. Here’s the Times magazine article. It says people feel almost entitled to be rude, and this is where the article got interesting. It said, it’s displaced anger. A lot of times when we get mad at somebody, we’re not mad at that thing or that person, we’re mad at the 50 things and people before it. You said something to me once, when you don’t get to recover from the last thing, it compounds on it. So that person yelling at the fast food worker because there were pickles on his burger, is not yelling at the fast food worker, he’s angry about his life, his bills, his family, the friend he lost, the relative who passed away, PTSD from something, maybe was in a foreign war, or whatever. But these numbers don’t lie, people are getting more difficult to deal with, because it compounds. We’re more difficult to deal with as a whole, so we’re compounding somebody else’s stress, which is compounding their stress, which compounds our stress. So we’re just in a circle of angry at the moment.

Jay Wynn
I think I saw an article that called it a negative feedback loop, and it had something to go like this. It’s like there are certain people that go out into the world with a positive attitude, and they project a positive energy, so positive things tend to happen to them. So life appears to be pretty good, and they think life is pretty decent. People that think the whole world sucks, everybody’s against me, everybody hates me, walk into the world with that attitude, project it, and then have that mirrored back to them, and then it reinforces that everything is against me. People hate me. The world’s mean and aggressive. So, I think there are people that do it maliciously, but I got to be honest, I think most people aren’t malicious about it. I think people are just so beat up and so worked up, and I don’t think, and this is something else too, I don’t think they have, we’ve talked about this just between us two, but I don’t think they actually take enough time to recover from the stress and decompress in a way that actually ratchets them down, because let’s be honest, Ian, I’ll use myself as an example. When something irritates me, I can get super angry super fast, but I don’t get super calm super fast. So, if something happens, I can get really, really mad instantly. But it could take 2, 3, 4 hours for me to calm down. And I just wonder if that’s playing out with more people as well. They’re cranked up, they’re revved up, but they haven’t taken the time to really slow down and come down from that stress that they’ve been under, and I think the other problem with it too is that because everybody’s feeling it, we’re thinking it’s normal. Just because something’s common doesn’t mean it’s normal, or doesn’t mean it’s healthy.

Ian Robertson
And remember the never-ending story, the nothing, so how that represented, basically, if everybody believes it’s bad, then it gets bad, and because they believe it’s bad, and now it’s bad because they believed it, now it’s getting worse. It’s basically group psychosis. I mean, are things bad? Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of bad in the world, there’s still good, but basically what you described was the nothing, so I mean.

Jay Wynn
Isn’t it funny how 80s childhood fantasy movies help you interpret modern life?

Ian Robertson
Oh, and the song was amazing, The Never Ending Story song. I’m singing it in my head right now. I won’t subject everybody listening to that song, but it was allegorical of that, and it was, we’ve never been inundated with so much information, and then inundated with so much information, and then still have so much of it be inaccurate. 200 years ago, 100 years ago, 1926, you had a few channels of information, and if the local gossip, you knew them to be unfactual, you just kind of ignored them and moved on and tried to, you know, figure things out. It was a lot less information to assimilate. Whether we realize it or not, even if we turn off our phone, we don’t look at social media, yada yada yada, you know, we can’t help but think, is AI going to take my job? Everybody’s worried about that. Shouldn’t I be worried about that? AI is going to take my job. We can’t help to worry about, what if there’s domestic terrorism again. What’s going to happen? Are we prepared? We were talking about safe rooms and panic rooms the other day, the sales of those have gone through the roof. It’s industries about panic and self-defense, and people are just nervous about where things are all the time, at all times, and at every level. It’s really hard to come down from that, and now when we’re on an inspection, the father-in-law, who’s on that same mental emotional high, is, you know, up our rear end trying to squeeze into a crawl space that you can’t fit into, and then calling you dumb. Yeah, that’s going to be the straw in the camel’s back. And then everybody thinks everybody’s just being a jerk. It’s not everybody being a jerk, we’re just all never coming down from the high, not the high, the what do you call it, the angry level, anxious level.

Jay Wynn
I think high we associate with a positive thing, but it is kind of a high, it’s kind of a cortisol rush, it’s an adrenaline rush, it’s constantly being in a state of fight or flight, which is not healthy for us. And yeah, you had to go with the father-in-law, didn’t you, because boy, it just seems like more and more, and this was something we said, are people getting more difficult to deal with? I would say yes, and I think that’s one of the signs of it is they’re bringing more and more people on inspections, and I’m having to deal with more and more people every time I inspect, to the point where it used to be my client, maybe my client and their significant other. Now it’s my client, their significant other, both sets of parents, sometimes a brother, sometimes a best friend, sometimes another friend that’s a contractor, and it’s not uncommon for me to have five or six people on an inspection. Now, I know some guys are going to go, “Well, that’s not acceptable, and that’s not appropriate.” My attitude is, they’re welcome to be there as long as they’re respectful of the house, they’re respectful that it’s someone else’s property, and they stay out of my way, and let me do my job. I have had to ask people to leave. I will ask people to leave, but as a general rule, if my clients feel comfortable having them there, I will try to accommodate their questions, and I will try to accommodate their input as much as I can without compromising my job. So that’s another thing that I’ve been dealing with with people, and I think that comes down to, these people, they need their group with them all the time, they need their support group there to say this is okay, especially the younger buyers, not so much with with older people—older people, I’m dating myself—but you know, middle age.

Ian Robertson
You are the older people now.

Jay Wynn
I am the older people now. I’m getting to the point where I call everybody a kid, you know, which is funny, yeah, a 40 year old kid, but you know it, especially first time buyers. They have more and more people on the inspection asking more and more questions, and what they don’t understand is they get to run around and just blast through the house and look at whatever detail they want, and oh, well, I just came up with it, whereas we have to systematically take apart the entire house, figure out all the individual pieces, and how they work together as a whole. So, what we’re doing is actually a lot more involved than just running around the house, looking at stuff randomly. So, I think that’s some of it too. Definitely having to deal with more people on site.

Ian Robertson
It’s interesting that you bring that up, because that came across my mind too, not necessarily as a sign of people being more difficult to deal with, but just the opposite. I think a lot of people have lost their support systems over the years. I shouldn’t say I think that, we know that. They talk about that all the time. Statistically, people have less people to go to. I was reading a psych paper. Again, this is what I do with my free time. I was reading a couple different psych papers, and one of them talked about widowers getting married at a higher rate of widows, but the reason isn’t what you think it would be. They found out that the widows had a better support system of people, they built relationships over time. They found that men, once their spouse passed away, relied on their wife, typically for the their social system, and then they got lonelier quicker, and I’m just like, wow, that’s sad, and even a friend of mine, he had a baby shower, and they could only get 10 people. I say only, I mean, you know, he wanted a whole bunch, and then he was kind of sad, because he’s just like, I could only come up with 10 people. I’m like, don’t be sad, you know, that’s good. A lot of people don’t have 10 people, that’s awesome. But, you know, like his family downstate and family from other places, and all that stuff, they couldn’t come. Some of them didn’t want to be with him. You know, family support systems have kind of fallen apart over the years. I can’t tell you, this was really…there was a guy that called me and literally cried on the phone not long ago, and I was telling my wife, I’m like, that’s not the first time that an inspector has called me, told me his problems, and then cried, and I’m a complete stranger to them. I mean, when we say, and you know, he was being a little difficult, you know, not bad, but a little difficult, you know. Sometimes when we say, is a person being difficult, yeah, and in the moment it’s really hard to think, well, what are they going through? But at the end of the day, don’t we kind of need to do that sometimes? Say, why is this guy just like this?

Jay Wynn
Yeah, absolutely, and that’s part of what makes it tolerable, too, is if you try to step back and go, okay, why, you know, why are they being hard to deal with, and let’s just use the father-in-law, okay? Because I’ve had a couple recently that walk in and the first thing they do is they have a chip on their shoulder and the first words out of their mouth, well, I’m here to make sure that my son’s interests are protected or my little girls taken care of. Okay, fair enough. So it’s like, that’s what I’m here to do, and I’m much better qualified to do it, regardless of what you think, you know, especially at this point in my career. But then the question is, why? And you start talking with them, usually it takes about half an hour, 40 minutes, for me to start doing my thing, seeing what I’m doing, seeing how thorough I’m being, and they start to decompress, and almost always you get talking with these people, and you find out that, let’s just say his daughter and her new husband are putting every penny they have into this house, they need it to be a good, they’re borrowed up to the hill, in fact, Mom and Dad are contributing the down payment because they can’t afford to get into a place now. So everybody’s finances are stretched real thin. They need the house to be really in good condition because they can’t afford to find a $5,000 problem after the the house goes through, and if they do, they got nobody around that can help them fix it, because that’s going to be again her calling her dad to come and take care of it, and although he wants to take care of his little girl, he can’t take care of the roof, and he can’t do siding, and he can’t fix a furnace, so you get down to it, and all the intentions are good at a point where they’re all super stressed out, and you know that’s how it just manifests, but the initial engagement has recently, and I said, you know, a couple times in the last few weeks, it’s been right out of the gate. Well, I’m here to do this for my little girl and my son, and so they approached the whole situation with a chip on their shoulder that you got to work through, and I think being willing to do that is also what what separates the good inspectors from the really great ones, too, though, is to look at the human element of things and say, I get it, I’m meeting these people at one of the most stressful times of their lives. And you would probably know this better than I do, but isn’t buying a home like the third or the fourth most stressful thing that people do in their entire life? Isn’t it something like birth of a child, marriage, or divorce, or buying a home, something like that. There’s like three or four, buying a home is one of them.

Ian Robertson
It’s in the top five. Like moving is up there too. I think one of them’s death of a…

Jay Wynn
Death in a family. Yeah, okay.

Ian Robertson
But like immediate family, yeah. So it’s interesting. Imagine meeting that person right as somebody died, like imagine them, their brother died, or their mother died, or somebody died, and you’re meeting them right then. Are you going to see them at their best? But that’s almost the same emotional state that they’re going to be in, almost the same level of stress that person is going to be in, standing there with us, looking at doorknobs and a stain on the ceiling.

Jay Wynn
And here’s the thing, too, we don’t walk in and go, “ooh, pretty, ooh, nice.” As inspectors, we go, “oh, problem, problem, problem, problem, problem, problem.” So we tend not to decompress people, in fact, during the inspection, because we’re pointing out all the problems with this building, they’re already, you know, going through the process with, we tend to ratchet that stress up even more, and I think our approach to things can either make it a lot worse or only a little worse, like we’ve talked about in the past, because they’re going to feed off of your energy too. More than once, I’ve had people look at me and they’re like, are you okay with this? I’m like, yeah, because it can be fixed. Everything here can be fixed, you know. It’s just a matter of having the right conversations and talking about things, and a lot of it is how you present things too, and you can either amplify their stress or help them to mitigate it too. So, I mean, we’re not powerless in this, and I think that’s kind of one of the things I really, you know, we’re talking about, are people more difficult to deal with, and I’d say yes, but I also want to say we’re not powerless in it either, and there’s things that we can do to help mitigate it too, and just make our experience with them even more positive.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, and like I said, mitigate it to an extent, it’s never going to go away completely. There’s always going to be the customer that comes out swinging, there’s always going to be the agent who’s just over the top, and there’s always going to be a situation, but we can make it not as bad. And I think a lot of that comes down to, you know, the most stressed out inspectors that I know, and I know a lot of inspectors, 1000s of them, are the ones that work six days a week, seven days a week, two, three inspections a day, and like, they’re like, oh, I don’t know what to do with myself on a day off. And I always tell him the same thing. If you don’t know what you do with yourself on a day off, you’re doing life wrong, because first of all, you should look forward to a day off. You have your family, you have your kids. I know I’m the worst at relaxing, too, but actually, you’ve helped me over the years. Better is a handful of rest than a double handful of hard work and striving after the wind. Sometimes you just need to sit in a chair and stare at a wall, go outside, take a walk, go drive to a park, and sit on a bench, and feed the birds for four hours straight. Go do a hobby, do like you, and have a sawmill, you know, get into timber framing, something to give our life meaning beyond our work, because here’s the problem with our work giving us meaning. When we find out that our work didn’t bring us meaning, so, for instance, when we retire or there’s a downturn and we work less, when we start to freak out, that worry is not actually our logical side saying, oh man, am I going out of business? Because our logical side would be like, no, it’s just a downturn. Oh, you’re retired, you’re not supposed to work. It is our internal who we are saying, oh crud, we lost something important. We lost who we were. Who we are can’t be compressed floor joists. Can it be part of who we are? Heck yeah. I mean, I still walk into a house 20 years later, and I’m just like, oh man, that foundation has shifted, probably more than a half an inch, you know? I’m terrible at dinner parties. It’s always going to be part of me, but it doesn’t give my life its full meaning. That does not give me value as a human being. I don’t know. I just got metaphysical there. What are your thoughts?

Jay Wynn
No, um, as far as dealing with people, I think what you’re talking about goes back to what we were discussing earlier, but you need to take time away from it to reduce your stress level, and it’s not going to be an hour on, an hour off. Sometimes it’s going to be shutting down for a day or two or three, and turning your phone off, and disconnecting with everyone and everything, and being completely inaccessible, you know, maybe not the people that matter, maybe you don’t disconnect from your wife or your kids, but you know what I mean, nobody has access to you, and you just take time to wind down a lot. Because you say I’ve helped you, but I’ve had to help myself with it, because I couldn’t keep going on that state of constant rev, burning myself out, and it was affecting all of my key relationships with people too. So, not only was it not healthy for me, it was not healthy for everybody else around me too, and a lot of what I’ve realized is part of dealing with people is dealing with it and not taking it home, and that’s, you know, the other part of it too, because I don’t want it to affect my home life. I don’t want my wife and my son to be wound up because I’m keyed up or feeling like they got to walk on eggshells because I just dealt with two difficult dads during the day, you know. So that’s some of it too, is just learning how to prioritize what’s important and what’s not, because I love work, you know. I still do. It’s like there’s days when I’m driving in on an inspection and I’ll just start smiling, thinking about how lucky I got it. I’m looking forward to looking at the building. Lot of times I think I’m lucky in that I know a lot of the agents I work with. They’re great human beings. I’ve managed to somehow, I don’t even know how, get a referral group of really great agents and brokerages that are just good people looking to take care of. So, when I see their name, I know I’m going to have a good inspection, I know I’m going to have a good client, I should have a decent building, and I’m just excited to go check it out. I still love what I do, but it’s not as important as coming home and making sure that those people are in good shape too, and I don’t want to bring stuff from the job home to them, because they don’t deserve that. So, some of it’s just about prioritizing things, too, at least in my opinion.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, I agree with that, and I guess the point I was trying to make before is kind of what you’re trying to make too, is that if people are already at an eight out of 10, we can easily make them a 10 out of 10 in our own minds, because we haven’t brought ourselves down to like a five. You know, everything seems worse when we haven’t stopped for a minute. To give our life meaning outside of an angry client is important. We can’t tie ourselves up in what people say. Angry agents, will the agent refer me again? And then we’re worrying about it in our heads, and then the next thing that happens, somebody might be coming at us at a level three out of 10. Hey, what’s going on, buddy? And then we just snap at them. So, are people getting worse? Yeah, including ourselves. We have to remember that. People are getting harder to deal with, and we’re harder to deal with. If we go back in time 10, 20 years ago, with our current self, people would call us difficult.

Jay Wynn
Absolutely. And I think that’s a key point to keep in mind, too, is that we’re not necessarily better than anyone else around us.

Ian Robertson
Yeah.

Jay Wynn
I know 10 years ago I wouldn’t like to talk to me.

Ian Robertson
I would.

Jay Wynn
Well, you did, but I don’t know why, but no, I mean, but I also remember one time in particular when we were still in the trades, and I was kicking a carpet in, and you walked on the job, and you heard I was kicking the carpet, and you wouldn’t even come up and do it, because you knew I was in a mood. You’re like, I’m not going up there, I’m not talking to him, and I heard that, like, after I finished the job, I heard that you showed up, and then you left, because you didn’t want to deal with me.

Ian Robertson
Well, all right, in my defense, when you’re knuckle dragging, you’re not at your happiest.

Jay Wynn
That’s true. I know, and I walked in there, I’m like, yeah, he’s right.

Ian Robertson
I don’t remember that, but I do remember I usually knew when you were knuckle dragging that, okay, it’s not time to joke with Jay.

Jay Wynn
No. But what I’m saying is to your point, is that you know, 10, 15 years ago, yeah, I didn’t want to deal with me either, so it’s not that we’re better than everybody else, we’re part of the problem too, but I think we can also be part of the solution too. And you know one of the things, this is gonna be one of the stupidest little things that maybe people thought about or not, but you know what I find helps so much is the initial reaction or interaction with the client when they’re getting out of the car, just shoulders up, head back, smile on your face, and hey, how you doing? Nice to see you today, even if it’s a gray, miserable day, or if it’s 30 degrees, and there’s snow coming sideways, you know, have a smile on your face, and just open it up like that. And I find that that takes people, like you said, if they’re at a level eight, well maybe we take them down to a level seven before they even get a chance to start talking. So, I mean, it’s like simple little things like that that you can do, and you just start winding people down a little bit incrementally. But that’s kind of what I mean is I feel like we’re not powerless with it, and I feel like there’s things that we can do, even during the inspection, to help control it. I’ll tell you one that I was thinking about is, because I had this happen just the other day, as I walked up on a job on an inspection. I knew right away the front porch was was collapsing and falling off the building, rather than the first thing I said is, oh this whole thing’s coming down. I’m like, I think we might have a problem here. And like, oh, what do you mean? Well, do you see this settling? Do you see this? Do you see this? Yes, yes. What do you think it means? So, rather than hit him with, oh your whole front porch is falling off, you’re going to have an $18,000 rebuild because it’s going to the second story and up into the roof line, and…it’s like, I think I see a problem. Let’s look at this more. Okay, see how it’s doing this. Okay, this is suggesting a bigger problem. And it doesn’t take long, in a matter of two or three minutes, you can talk somebody into seeing a major, major problem where they receive it better because they’ve had a little bit of time to adjust to it. Almost like if somebody’s in a really dark room and you pop the lights on, it’s blinding and it hurts. Well, give them a little bit of light at a time, and I find that that’s one of the things I’ve been doing lately, just to help people ease into some of the stuff that we find. I walked up on one last week, where it was a great house. It had a porch, and it had a balcony above the porch with three doors that connected to the second story, and it was obvious that there was water getting in somewhere, because the cedar shakes on the porch inside that should have been protected were all water stained and damaged. So, I knew right away we had a major problem with that porch, and yet through the course of the inspection, I said same thing, this staining shouldn’t be here. This suggests we have a problem coming in. Let’s look above, let’s look here, let’s look there. And by the end of the day, you know, he’s still interested in the property. I just pointed out a flashing issue in two doors, could have been five to $10,000 worth of rot in those walls, we don’t know yet, and he’s still fine with it. But we didn’t walk in and go, oh, you got water coming in, everything’s going to be rotten, this is going to be a whole porch tear off and rebuild, you know. So there’s a way you can break news to people too, gradually and easier too. It’s just a thought as we were talking about this, I was thinking about.

Ian Robertson
No, and it’s a really good thought, and the techniques that you use there are techniques that people try to teach in books, like negotiators. They’re like, always bring the person you’re negotiating with to your emotional level, not theirs. Talk slowly, calmly, point out facts that you can both agree on. So, we have a situation here, right? You have three hostages, right? Yes. Now all you’re doing is building a rapport with them subconsciously.

Jay Wynn
You sound like Chris Voss.

Ian Robertson
Who’s Chris Voss?

Jay Wynn
He’s a negotiator. He’s put out quite a few books. One of them was called Never Split the Difference.

Ian Robertson
Oh, yes, I know that book. That’s a very good book.

Jay Wynn
Yes, it is a very good book.

Ian Robertson
He is very good.

Jay Wynn
Okay.

Ian Robertson
Yes, I do know that book. I think we recommended it on this podcast actually.

Jay Wynn
Read the book, it’s awesome.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, he’s a fantastic negotiator. Well, it’s great psychology, and in reality, we can only control one side of the situation, and that’s ours. So, one thing I really hate about modern society is I feel like the internet and social media, and having a camera, video camera on your phone, you know. I loved growing up in the 80s and 90s. There’s no record of all the crazy stuff I’ve done and said, you know, but I feel like, okay, so I scroll through my feed, and everything is inspector related on my feed, or woodworking related, and half these inspectors are just slamming people back who slam them. They’ll slam another home inspector who slammed them. They’ll slam a builder who slammed them back on their social media. Then they’ll slam a seller, then they’ll show an agent that they worked with they don’t like, and they slam them, and then…I’m just like, nobody’s bringing the situation down. If I were a real estate agent or a buyer, and even a buyer in the area, and I saw a home inspector escalating a situation instead of bringing things down where people could reasonably talk, I’d just blow right past that inspector, and I’m not downing anybody in particular, I’m just saying the whole way about how we go with it, about things when we deal with difficult situations, feels kind of backwards nowadays. I went to Home Depot, and I tried to return something. The girl told me to get out of line. I got out of line. She goes, “No, no, sir, you’re in the wrong line. I got out of line on a busy day, went into her line, waited in her line, got to the front, and she goes, “This is the wrong line too. And I’m like, “I’m sorry, but now I’ve waited in two lines. Can you just do this? And she freaked out on me, and I’m just like that…that could have gone one of two ways. You could have been like, sure, because that’s actually what she ended up doing, was just taking care of me. It was just a quick return. It was some flooring, and I’m like, we got to the same result, but instead you’re upset, and it’s a good thing that I was calm, that I could step back, because I was having a good day, nothing was going wrong, and I stepped back and said, well, this is weird. Okay, let’s see what we can do to resolve this. If I had yelled back at her, now we’re both yelling, somebody’s recording us, putting us on TikTok, and we both look like weirdos, and our family’s sharing that video of us online. Where has gone the art of de-escalation? I don’t know, big tangent.

Jay Wynn
Maybe it’s getting old and whatnot, but it seems like that’s a lot of what I’ve learned in the last few years, and I’ve learned to be really, really good at with people, you know, win the father-in-law over, win the mother-in-law over, dignify the agent, because you know as well as I do that a lot of these agents will say something on an inspection, you know, and it’s just either either completely wrong or completely wrong for that application. So, what do you do? Do you say, you don’t know what you’re talking about, you know, stay in your lane. Or do you go, okay. You know, in some situations that might actually apply, but here’s why I don’t think it does in this one. And what you’ve done is, you’ve done dignified their thought, redirected that misinformation, and then you’re bringing it back around without making them look or feel foolish, but I also think that’s why I get to work with really, really great agents too. And I also think that’s why I’m able to pick my clientele now, is because I’ve taken the time to develop. Well, we’ve talked about it before. There’s so many inspectors out there that are great technically, but they have no people skills, no human skills. It’s the soft skills that you really have a hard time teaching people, but I think that’s the reward is that if you can learn the soft skills, you get to work with a better class of clientele as well, to the point where you actually have to deal with less and less problems, which makes your life easier, better, which makes it easier to work with people. So it’s kind of again that positive feedback loop, but I really think you got to be the one to start it, and I really think you got to be the one to stay in control, and that may mean being realistic with yourself, and when you’re burning out, going, I’m burning out, I’m not doing what I should, I’m taking some time off, and I’m disconnecting, because if I don’t, everything I’ve built is going to suffer too, so I mean, some of that’s a little bit of self-awareness, is that when you’re starting to slide, too. So, because again, I don’t think we’re above the problem, I think we are the problem too. So, I don’t want to pretend like we’ve got this all figured out, and the whole world is falling apart, except me. That’s not the case, but over time, I’ve learned that to identify it myself first, and then to scale back.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, it’s, it’s a lot of self-awareness. Ironically, a podcast about, are people getting harder to deal with, comes down to self-awareness, to step back and say, all right, am I at an eight? How do I get myself back down to a five? And I’m not talking about, you know, zen ones and twos, like some people are just chill, like let’s be honest, some people just, life doesn’t bother them. I know a couple people like that, they’re just like I’m chill, whatever. People be yelling at them, and they’re like, yeah, 99% of us, we’re gonna feel it like normal human beings. If we are getting upset at somebody who’s difficult to deal with, there’s still things that we can do. Worst case scenario. Let me ask you, have you ever just walked away from people, even on an inspection? I have.

Jay Wynn
Yeah. In extreme cases, and I haven’t necessarily stopped the inspection, but I’ve looked at everybody and said, I think everybody needs a five-minute break. We’re gonna stop. We’ll come back in five minutes after everybody’s had a chance to take a breather. I’ve done that 100%, and I know there been times even when I’m starting to frustrated, I’m like, I need to go to the truck for a minute, I’ll be back in a few minutes, and I would go to the truck, and I’ll stop, I’ll have a little coffee, a little water, I will put my phone down, I’ll clear my head, I’ll take a few deep breaths, so sometimes I’ve had to walk away from a situation.

Ian Robertson
I suspect you have as well. My favorite trick was Ian time in the attic. Some agents even joked about it, that it was Ian time. When everybody was all stressed and everybody’s getting upset, and they’re all up in my face, most attics in our area, I could go up there and people are like, “Boy, he’s being really thorough up there. Attic inspection didn’t take that long. I’m sitting up there, even in 100 degree temperatures, just breathing a little bit, and you know, with the mask on, but you know, okay, just I need a second away from that high level of emotion. When I come down, I’d always be better, and I would just call it happy Ian time. Even just little things like that, even if it’s a good inspection, I’d spend a little extra time up in the attic. Weird thing to do, but I’ve also walked away and just said, all right, I’m gonna go do some things, and I’ll come back and show you if I find some something, or like you said, I’m gonna go write something up in the vehicle and just sit there for a minute.

Jay Wynn
Here’s a great one, if things are getting tense, just say the battery in my flashlight has died. I need to go to the truck and change it, you know, something as simple as that. You know, all of us carry flashlights, and all of us carry something like that. And it can give you a pause, swap the flashlight out for the next one you got, start that one. But take a minute or two, and just breathe and recenter, because frankly, you’re not doing anybody any good, including yourself, if you try to match their energy level. It doesn’t work, and then it takes you even longer to come down off of that. So, a bad client winds you up, not for a few minutes or a few hours, but typically for a few days or a few weeks after. But the other thing, too, that I find that helps, and we’ve said this before, I’ll text you, I’ll text a couple other inspectors that I have. I have contacts that are in the inspection field that can understand what we’re dealing with, and sometimes it will just be a text of, you would not believe the person I had to deal with today….send it off to my inspector buddies, and they’re like, no kidding, tell me about it. And so I got people around that I can vent that actually understand, and I think that’s the other thing that helps too, is cultivate a peer group, cultivate people that you like, cultivate people that you trust, develop those relationships within the industry with other inspectors, with other people, with other peers, and then it helps to mitigate some of it too, because you can vent with people that can understand, they can understand what you’re going through and what you’re dealing with, and the trade off is when they call you up, you know, you can help them decompress a little bit too, so you help them, they help you, and I think that’s another big part of it. Get a peer group, I think that’s an important way of dealing with it, because we’ve talked about this before, everybody’s afraid AI is going to take your job, I don’t think AI is going to take our job, at least not for a long, long, long time, but I think, and you’ve mentioned this before, the deciding factor between who stays working and who doesn’t will be who can control the human element. How well do you deal with people? How well do you wind them down? How well do you control emotions on site? How well can you handle the in-laws and the agents that are there? I think the human touch is what’s going to make or break us in the next 10 years as AI steps in, because I think that’s going to be the key difference is the experience they have working with you as an inspector. So you know, I think people are getting more difficult, but I think dealing with them is going to be the key to, frankly, a nice career for the next 10, 15, maybe 20 years, because I think the human element is what’s going to be the make or break part of our industry.

Ian Robertson
I really think that’s a fantastic point to end on too. People being more difficult right now is giving us an opportunity, it’s a business opportunity. Learn that soft skill. Yeah, I like that. So, are people getting more difficult? Yeah, statistically they are, and anecdotally, anecdotally it’s ubiquitous, Jay.

Jay Wynn
What I like about this, though, too, is that there’s still so much we can do about it, and, like you said, this is actually an opportunity to really set ourselves apart from the run of the mill inspector out there, so it’s not an impossibility to deal with. In fact, it’s a chance to differentiate yourself from everyone else out there, and I think that’s going to be key for us continuing what we’re doing.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, good point. Listen, Jay, I’m out of my Tullamore D.E.W. I think you’re out of your Whistle Pig.

Jay Wynn
I’m out of my Whistly Pig.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, I always have a blast talking with you. Thank you for being on the show and sharing with the inspectors and all of us. So appreciate it.

Jay Wynn
Happy to do it. Hopefully somebody can take something away from tonight.

Ian Robertson
I know I did. I took away whiskey.

Jay Wynn
I always enjoy our conversations. Well, that’s why we do it, you know. If nothing else, I enjoy talking with you.

Ian Robertson
It’s a good time. All right, Jay, thank you very much. And everybody, we’ll see you again on the next episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk.

Outro: On behalf of myself, Ian, and the entire ITB team, thank you for listening to this episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk. We also love hearing your feedback, so please drop us a line at [email protected].

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*The views and opinions expressed in this podcast, and the guests on it, do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.

PODCAST SUMMARY/BLOG

If you feel like clients, agents, and random tag-alongs are harder to deal with than they used to be, you are not imagining it. In this conversation, we connect the daily reality of running a home inspection business with a broader rise in stress, anxiety, and public incivility. Home inspectors often meet people at one of the most tense moments in their lives: buying a house. That pressure shows up as short tempers, rapid-fire questions, and distrust, even when the intentions are good. The key shift is realizing “difficult clients” are often carrying displaced anger from money worries, family stress, and nonstop bad news, and the inspection just becomes the place it spills over.

We talk through why the temperature feels higher now. Data on anxiety and workplace incivility points to a steady climb, and it matches what inspectors see on site. Add information overload, social media outrage, fears about the economy, and constant fight-or-flight, and people stop recovering between stressors. When nobody gets a chance to decompress, everything compounds: the seller is tense, the buyer is tense, the agent is tense, and the inspector walks into the middle of it. Then we notice a practical symptom that has become common at home inspections: more people attending. What used to be one or two clients can turn into an entire support group, which increases interruptions and emotion, but also signals that buyers feel they need backup to make a huge decision.

From there, we focus on what actually works in the field: de-escalation and clear communication. The biggest advantage a great home inspector has is not just technical competence, but the ability to lower the room’s stress. Simple soft skills matter: start with calm posture, a real smile, and a steady greeting that drops someone from an eight to a seven before the first question lands. When delivering bad news, ease clients into it. Instead of “your porch is collapsing,” walk them through observable facts and let them arrive at the conclusion with you. That approach builds trust, protects the client’s nervous system, and keeps the inspection moving. It also helps when an agent says something incorrect: acknowledge the idea, then redirect without humiliating anyone.

Finally, we get honest about the inspector’s side of the equation. If you are overbooked, working six or seven days a week, and never turning off your phone, you will match the client’s intensity and carry it home. Burnout makes you reactive, and your family ends up paying for a stranger’s bad day. Recovery is not one hour off, it can be a real shutdown day, a walk, a hobby, or simply being unreachable for a while. We also share tactical resets during an inspection: call a five-minute break, step to the truck for water, or take “attic time” to breathe and recenter. Build a peer group of other inspectors to vent with and learn from. In a world where technology keeps advancing, the human touch, emotional control, and customer service skills may be the true long-term competitive edge for any home inspector.