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In this session, Frank Calderoni, CEO Anaplan shared how to build a company that sees hypergrowth by upstanding the character of the company. He shared his insights on his journey in leading a large organization while still maintaining the character-led culture. Bio: Frank Calderoni is the Chief Executive Officer of Anaplan and the chairman of the company's board of directors. Frank is a technology industry veteran with over 30 years of successful executive leadership. Before joining Anaplan, Frank served as the Executive Vice President (EVP), Operations, and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Red Hat, Inc. from June 2015 to January 2017. He also served as EVP and CFO at Cisco Systems, Inc. for seven years. Prior to that, he served as Cisco's Senior Vice President (SVP), Customer Solutions Finance, and Vice President, Worldwide Sales Finance. Frank joined Cisco in 2004 from QLogic Corporation, where he was the SVP and CFO. Prior to that, he was the SVP, Finance & Administration, and CFO for SanDisk Corporation. Frank also sits on the board of Adobe Systems, Inc. Franks Book: Upstanding: How Company Character Catalyzes Loyalty, Agility, and Hypergrowth by Frank A. Calderoni https://amzn.to/3z7igws Discussion Timeline: 0:57 Frank's journey. 2:11 Thoughts on meaning of success for a leader in a large organization. 4:13 Financial metrics vs employee happiness. 8:42 Culture is built from bottom up or top down? 12:00 Culture and strategy. 14:19 Leadership during uncertain times. 19:33 The story behind the book "Upstanding". 20:52 The timing of the book "Upstanding". 24:17:00 How to gauge the character of an organization? 26:39:00 Influence of a leader in determining the character and culture of an organization. 28:23:00 The ideal reader for the book "Upstanding". 30:06:00 Rapidfire with Frank. 33:17:00 Frank's favorite reads. 34:29:00 Closing remarks. About TAO.ai[Sponsor]: TAO is building the World's largest and AI-powered Skills Universe and Community powering career development platform empowering some of the World's largest communities/organizations. Learn more at https://TAO.ai About WorkPod: Work Pod takes you on the journey with leaders, experts, academics, authors, and change-makers designing the future of work, workers, and the workplace. About Work2.org WorkPod is managed by Work2.org, a #FutureOfWork community for HR and Organization architects and leaders. Sponsorship / Guest Request should be directed to info@tao.ai Keywords: #FutureofWork #Work2.0 #Work2dot0 #Leadership #Growth #Org2dot0 #Work2 #Org2

Today... Den breaks down a very sophisticated (and powerful) marketing concept - making it caveman simple to understand and implement.Here's a sneak peek at what you'll hear:Legendary copywriter Eugene Schwartz's ingenious marketing insight that even some pro marketers don't know, much less understand it. - 1:00The dumb mistake almost every business owner makes when creating their sales and marketing messages. This blunder is committed before they even write or speak a single word. - 1:30A certain segment of a market that needs very little information to decide whether to hire your service or not. These people are the very best people to market to. - 3:10A quickie idiot's guide to writing effective sales and marketing messages. - 5:20Obnoxiously good marketing advice for turning skeptical prospects into eager clients with hearts full of trust. - 6:00Why building an email list is a complete no-brainer. If you're not building an email list of interested prospects, then you're leaving “mucho dinero” on the table. - 7:00Even more “no-brainer” reasons to use email marketing to create new business and boost profits. - 7:45A caveman simple thing to put on your website's homepage that can dramatically help you grow your video business. (Best part: hardly anyone in the video production industry is doing this. Want to capitalize on this untapped opportunity? Of course you do. So, listen up at 10:30)A special segment of your market you should be targeting. The prospects in this segment of your market are pretty much laydowns. - 11:40A clever way to use "teaching" to convert more prospects into paying clients. - 13:00A “3-minute” crash course in digital marketing. - 13:10Who NOT to promote your video business to. Even though these people could benefit from your video service, the juice ain't worth the squeeze. - 16:00The absolute worst prospects to market your video service to. Many a business owner has gone broke targeting these exact prospects. (If you want your marketing efforts to be effective, then avoid these rotten prospects like the Rona! - 18:00)Connect with Den on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/denlennie/Get more great resources over at https://www.denlennie.com/Support the show (https://www.denlennie.com/free-training)

Watch the video version of this show on YouTube »Shamanth Rao is the founder and CEO at Rocketship HQ. Shamanth also hosts the Mobile User Acquisition Show podcast, and is the lead instructor for the Mobile Growth Lab workshop series.RocketShip HQ is a boutique growth marketing firm with 8 figures in managed spend. Before founding RocketshipHQ, Shamanth led growth marketing resulting in 3 exits: Bash Gaming (sold for $170mm), Puzzle Social (acquired by Zynga), and FreshPlanet (acquired by Gameloft). Shamanth has also helped many other mobile apps grow and scale.Shamanth is passionate about teaching and sharing everything he's learned about mobile growth. Much of his time and energy goes into the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Shamanth strives to ensure that the wisdom he's gained reaches as many people as possible.In this episode, you'll learn: The history of user acquisition and algorithmic targeting How Apple's AppTrackingTransparency has shifted users to Android What Apple's new tracking policy means for developers Are subscription apps impacted more than other apps by Apple's tracking policy? Links & Resources A Brief History of App Store Monetization episode – with David Barnard A Brief History of Device Identification episode – with David Philippson iOS 14 & IDFA Deprecation How App Marketers Must Adapt - YouTube Shamanth Rao's Links RocketShip HQ's website The Mobile User Acquisition Show Mobile Growth Lab Follow Shamanth on Twitter Shamanth Rao's website Follow us on Twitter: David Barnard Jacob Eiting RevenueCat Sub Club Episode TranscriptShamanth: 00:00:00The more signal you give to the algorithm, the better the algorithm performs, right? You know, in the post AppTrackingTransparency world, if you gain more purchases, the better the algorithm performs, obviously that would take purchases from you and everybody in the world, and it would just do better. Now, obviously it's just taking your trial and doing much, much better.David: 00:00:38Welcome to the sub club podcast. I'm your host, David Bernard, and with me as always Jacob Eiting.Hello Jacob.Jacob: 00:00:45David, glad to be here with you, as always. David: 00:00:48Our guest today is Shamanth Rao, founder and CEO at RocketShip HQ, of the podcast Mobile User Acquisition Show, and lead instructor at the workshop series Mobile Growth. Shamanth's company, RocketShip HQ is a boutique growth marketing agency with eight figures in managed spend. Prior to founding RocketShip HQ Shamanth growth marketing, to three exits. Hey Shamanth.Welcome to the podcast. Shamanth: 00:01:16Honored to be here. Thank you for having me, David and Jacob.David: 00:01:19Yeah. So, I wanted to start with a little bit of a history lesson. You've been in mobile advertising and working on mobile apps for, since very early. So, could you take just a couple of minutes and step us through the history of kind of what led us to today with app tracking transparency, and all the different ups and downs and changes that have happened over the past?Shamanth: 00:01:48Yeah. There's been a lot of ups and downs, as you said. I see two overarching trends, but for folks who want to go into the weeds, I would actually recommend two podcast episodes. One was mine with you, David. A brief history of App Store monetization. You provide a very great perspective into how the App Store itself has changed over the years.The other one was an interview I did with David Phillips, A Brief History of Device Identification You know, we are all about brief histories, but, I think to what we talking about ATT and how essentially disrupted growth in today. There have been two forces that have led up to this point, the last decade or so I think it's important to know and understand both of these, just to know how we got here and why it's important, right.Because ATT just did not happen overnight. There were signs for a decade. And, you know, I think obviously a lot of this is evident in retrospect. but I think it's helpful to know and understand what those breadcrumbs were.Trend number one has been increasing accumulation of particular data platforms over the last decade.You know, I remember, you know, David, as you pointed out, I am a really old person who, which around then, but we don't advertise. It took off, with all this gray hair. But you know, when I started that we were doing CPC buys, CPM buys. I started doing mobile advertising before Facebook even had mobile ads, app ads.There is no conversion tracking. you know, I give it like no conversion tracking. If you, would buy installs, and you're like, oh, we bought 70 stops. We got so many touches that we are profitable and spent like millions on games the time. And suddenly the level of sophistication that emerged in mobile advertising. I don't think we could have posted in 12, 20 13, 20 14. But like I said, from the TPC buys gradually they have a CPI buys as ad networks that now are billion dollar companies. And so it's an app love and have a tiny ad networks at the time.A lot of others basically fell out of the side. know, they, they like, we have enough confidence to be able to build. Rather than just a or impression we have that kind of data, that kind of confidence the next time AEO or purchase optimization. This is 2016, right?It's just, it seems so recent. And it's staggering to think that they could not optimize like athletes if they six, years ago. And that was just the biggest game changer in it. I still remember having a lot of skepticism that this would even work and I'm like, how are they going to find out who's going to purchase?They've never done it, nobody's done it. But clearly, if somebody could do it as a Facebook, they had the budget for data. I can only to that point the time I think it became evident to me, myself, that as to why Facebook was so successful. basically have the IDFA that IDFA on Google ID.They had that idea, with print from on Facebook audience network. So for diva able to predict with ed accuracy, who the purchaser's book, obviously they took it a step further with relapse optimization, So obviously the more data Facebook's SDK gun. The better it got predicting who the purchaser as well.Obviously more data the pixels on the web got the better, the better the accuracy of the SDK became other way around that, because they had, you know, if you made a purchase on a beauty of that site, you would make a purchase on, an e-commerce app. So they put all of that data together.Right? So obviously Google had a very, very similar trajectory. I don't want to go too much into the weeds. Over the last decade, increasing amount of data accumulated by Facebook, by Google folks like apple. And then I am so all add Netflix, everybody got increasing amount of data about users, spectator. they just, weren't doing this in isolation, apple licensed up to this, you know, Google, Google had a bit of a conflict because they were also making money off of this.They are also making money off of this. these less active in pushing back, but you know, apple, the apple, again, not to go too much into the weeds that it's corporate strategy. Two, but for apple to say a hobby, a privacy minded, but it's also very, very much about profits for them. the opera motive.Oh, an ad network. No, I don't know. I don't have a lot of confidence to how they would do anything. Right. So apple said, know, look, we have this beauty ID, which is not great. Let's phase it out. Let's have an IDFA, which is reset the vote, which wasn't too much and improvement. they said, oh, let's make this, idea phase zero, but physio, which means how to use it goes on and off the lab.idea of it becomes and advertisers could not cannot target people. Shockingly enough, to idea, phase zero, which was, I think 2016. But if I use it on the flat adjustment advertises, please don't track the fuse. It's almost like a request. a non enforceable requests, basically needs to attract me, but nobody can, anyway, so even lab Vito was a very, very telltale sign that this is ATD is, where apple is headed.And if you have to look on the web, safari had intelligent tracking prevention. They have obviously. Much more active on the web terms of crackdowns, Mozilla had what what's called ETP. I think it's called it should tracking prevention. I forget what it's called, then Chrome of course said, Hey, we're going to deprecate They've accepted the deadline, but been a lot going on in the direction of privacy. Right. and that, has happened very, very much in parallel that increasing accumulation of data by. And to some extent, you know, it's having these surprises for anyone who's followed the breadcrumbs, not to gone to zero and 2018.Apple said kid stops will not allow tracking. That was almost like a trial balloon bar and of cost 2020. It was not unsurprising, I would say, right. That, it came to be just because of everything over the last decade that I just did.David: 00:09:21Yeah.That's a really great way to summarize it is those two parallel courses with it's like in the shadows, there was like more and more and more and more, more data accumulation feeding all of this, but simultaneously there was more and more and more awareness of privacy concerns.What that data was being used for, and that, you know, it does seem like the press a big influence in this. I mean, when was in New York times and wall street journal, both had big posts in like 2017, 2018, where they showed, you know, how you could track individual users when they're going to, you know, a certain medical clinic or, there was another set of stories around us service members who were being tracked by fitness apps. revealing, basic, we call unknown previously unknown, military installations and things like that. So it, it, yeah, there was a lot going on that has led us to this point. So. So now apple has, has dropped the ball after acting transparency. You know, you you're, you're, you're not allowed to track unless you first prompt.You know, we could, we could talk an hour on all the different motivations and the, and even the way they deliver it, you know, the, the way they. Request the prompt is, is, and the wording of the prompt it has, has even drawn controversy, but let's not get into that.Jacob: 00:10:52Time it comes up, I still don't know what to click, David: 00:10:57Let's talk about the real world impacts because I think there's been a lot of ink spilled in a lot of discussions around, those other things. But, but what I want to hear from you as someone who manages a ton of spandex and works in the industry and, and has to deal with this day in day out.Let's talk through the world impacts of, of, of how this is impacting the apps that you work with and what you've seen kind of in the broader industry. I thought it was interesting before we jumped on the, on the, and started recording, you actually said, you were expecting a crazier summer, so let's just start with that.So you're not quite seeing the disruption you initially expected. Is that, am I over reading that.Shamanth: 00:11:42I don't want to be grand standing here, but I certainly was for worse. and I don't want to jinx this, but suddenly that couple of advertisers really all right, that actually crying.But I talk about the mechanics that may have contributed to that further on, but, I certainly was prepared for far, far, far worse.I would say.David: 00:12:07Yeah. So, so what are you seeing? I mean,Shamanth: 00:12:10Yeah. David: 00:12:10And then one of the things you you've mentioned before is that you are seeing some shift to Android. Tell me about that, shift to Android spend. And is that in certain categories across the board? Shamanth: 00:12:21I think it's across the board. I think it's much more so in gaming. and if you look at a bunch of MMP boats or the estimates, the, shift to about iOS. Yeah, about 30 to 40%. I think that sounds like a realistic range. Obviously there's some verticals that are hit much, much harder, right. yeah.Definitely. I think there's a lot of sped shifting to ad drive. I would attribute some of that to the fact that. Tracking is broken, but you know, oh, I hate to see a, this, like a mother spoke to the work with, and the, also the advice and I've just stopped you. You're like, oh my God. My CPA is a boated by Facebook is terrible because Facebook's not tracking anything.And then when we look at the blended numbers, Basically the money they make and the trials to get and the subscriptions get, which is exactly what I mean by it. Not being as as I expected. You know, look at the iTunes dashboards,Just go crashing down, which is what I was afraid would happen. Right. and that, that has not happened. but what is real and true is like I said, tracking is broken, even if not right. I'm tracking to just grow congested because apple has a concept of privacy threshold. which basically means, if, campaign.Does not have minimum number of stops or purchases. Apple is going to show they report all installed. But, but the report very few purchases. What that means is you are a casual game, our social casino app that has Costco, set it up 150 to $200, is not uncommon for these. each campaign, if you're running $500 a day per campaign, you get two patches.So for people, campaign would just get obfuscated by the privacy threshold, which means if you're going to find a dollar at a campaign, you'll probably get it, but you're just not seeing them, which is better than a was that I'm not.David: 00:14:53Yeah, we We, are we back to the old days of, of half your advertising budget is working. You just don't know which half Shamanth: 00:15:01Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very much true.Jacob: 00:15:05I was going to ask, so the pull back on the spend, like, is that, do you know where that's coming from along the chain? Is that, is that companies not being sure anymore and pulling back? Is it, is it agencies? Is it all long? Because at some point somebody has to, because I, it makes sense that like, one, we don't know how effective all this stuff was to begin with.Right. And so just losing the tracking doesn't necessarily mean it's less effective. It just means we don't know. And so it seems a little foolhardy to just dial back. Right. you know, especially if your business relies on it, but it seems like that's what most, at least some percentage of companies have done.They've they've pulled back just because they're not sure.Shamanth: 00:15:44Yeah.I think I would also say a lot of companies that have pulled back have had strong drive products. the couple of companies that I know that are doing better now, actually don't have very strong, I drive products. We don't have a choice, right? We don't have a choice. I obviously I don't fly that strong guy, but having a fall back means be good to take a little bit easy most time to Android.We figured out what is going on you get to your question. I think a lot of that's coming from companies, especially larger established companies that have. BI teams and reporting systems and dashboards on the creative level alive. We just don't have that in our book anymore. Jacob: 00:16:38And they're spending too much to be confident in just YoloShamanth: 00:16:41Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah, yeah, David: 00:16:44Any specific trends on, on CPMs and cross portrayal or anything like that? As far as with the drop-in. Spend on iOS and the increase on Android has some of the performance on Iowa's not degrading been more to do with market dynamics change versus it actually just working as efficient.Shamanth: 00:17:07Yeah. you know, I try not to look at CPMs just because CPMs are very contingent on the kind of optimization you have to like, you know, and may, if you had value optimization, you be paying QPM segment to their roof and your CPMs on audio sense. I couldn't be higher than Instagram and Facebook and the metric.What I like to look at is really the CPA, but there's a cost, but. also has the capacity because of the privacy, especially for nowDavid: 00:17:41Right. Shamanth: 00:17:41Cost per trial, which I see being steady. Now to your question to your underlying question about, do I attribute back to the underlying market dynamics?Definitely. I think that the fact that there's less of competition, I do think has contributed to, the TPA being steady folks that have continued to do iOS. Definitely. I do think that the lesser competition has pleaded. David: 00:18:06That makes sense. let's talk a little bit, cause this is kind of our wheelhouse at, remedy CA obviously, nice shirt by the way, Jacob. Jacob: 00:18:16Is the original first ever revenue cat t-shirtDavid: 00:18:19Nice. how, how are subscription apps being impacted in, in what you've seen and then how is that different from, you know, games and other categories that you're working. Shamanth: 00:18:31Yeah. I would say subscription apps are hit much, much less odd than. A lot of games, again, I'm qualify. I don't want to sound like I'm grand standing because this is not like a body of Fiesta yet, but I think they're it better than folks who are really clear that I don't want to say clueless, but folks who are just struggling, you know, I talked about, you know, let's just say a hypothetical casual game or a social casino app that has a cost, the big user 150, if you get killed by the privacy test, short subscription app less impacted by that. just because, you know, again, you're off book which is a primary metric, nearly every subscription app, a squat Cheverly under $50, which means for the same $500 budget you getting, you get, you're getting 10 purchases.So. Deceptive as are that privacy threshold. Right. and the other factor that makes the whole ATD tank a lot easier for subscription naps is that nearly every subscription app, I know have 90%, lots of trials happen within the first 24 hours of install. What that means that in the ATP paradigm is A lot, not nearly all of that signal gets captured by the ATT algorithm, by a scab because a scab network workshop with system of timers, right. immediately after install a timer starts and after 54 Davos the timer reset, if y'all, and then the reset of the starts and, if no event has happened in that second time, A lot of the events that have happened first, get sent back to the, get sent back to APO.Not that event gets sent by them. And I'm probably definitely grossly simplifying the, some of this. and, I have a YouTube video that goes into the distance with the V2. People can check that out, but my point being the fact that of the trucks nearly all the trials happened within the first 24 hours.Make it relatively easier for our subscription apps to have to be captured by ad network. that's one of the reasons, lack of trust snaps do quite and obviously, you know, the most signal you give to the aggregate them, the better the I that is in bombs, right. you know, in the P PhET was if you gave most budgets, The better that I go to them, but obviously the algorithm would take you and everybody else that it would just do better.Now, obviously it's just taking your trial and doing much, much better. add onto the trend we've seen is that VAT based flows work a lot better for subscription apps than for games. again, there are challenges in execution, certainly. One of the things that they've seen that allows them relatively most after doing doc, that based lotion.Right. yeah, so I, I would say those are some of the factors that think contribute to subscription apps being better off than games and the post ATT world. again, not to grandstand, not to the, victory yet, but I think that that much, much better.Jacob: 00:22:14Yeah. There's, there's still, also just the dynamic with consumable games. Like, I don't know what retention curves really look like and stuff like this, but with subscriptions, you know, your acquisitions you're making today only effect, you know, a chunk of your revenue in the very short term versus, and you have this like recurring user base consumables.If your new users dry out really fast, like suddenly, you suddenly lost a lot of. Yeah. A lot of them, your business model doesn't work as well. Right. So, but wow, that's incredible that the, so on the CPIs, for like social casinos or whatever, which I imagine is just thought a high spend category, highly competitive space.So if they don't have like value attribution, What sexually driving the CPI so high? Like how do they know like what users to spend that much money on? Is it just, is it just, I guess click-based like, it is still like they can, they can proxy and know like people that click on those are part of that high value group or, or what, what, what keeps the, keeps the targeting good enough so that, you know, cause you can imagine if everything was perfectly anonymous, all CPAs would clicks would be the same, right.Across all apps.Shamanth: 00:23:21Yeah, yeah, yeah, At this point, I don't, would not say if you have a perfect answer or apps with high CPA, I think the best we have right now is true. Facebook reports, metrics, health platform reported metrics that directional, which means your CPA today would not be comparable to your page 80 TCPA, but because it's going to be very, very high, just because of the privacy picture that I just described, if you are getting maybe $500 on this 700 on that, that you just input campaign is better than campaign.But you're not impairing that job. That is your actual cost acquisition. So you're taking the CPA as a relative measure. I think that's true for the game it is for subscription apps. You're treating the CPA as a relative measure cabinet and campaign B or not so much as an absolute measure of unit economic.David: 00:24:20I think that's a great to transition into what's actually working right now. So we're talking about some of the impacts, but, Hinting at it's something that you've mentioned before, is that the best source of truth now is not. These specific return on ad spend calculation, but actually using blended metrics.So tell me a little bit about how, how you approach thinking about metrics as a source of truth versus, you know, the past, you know, five or six years where it's way more focused on. very detailed return on ad spend. And again, to our earlier point, even if that return on ad spend calculation, wasn't actually as accurate as it seemed, Jacob: 00:25:07Okay David: 00:25:08You were at least able to calculate it more accurately.Now it's like kinda everything's out the window. how are you approaching blended spend or blended metrics, to measure these things?Shamanth: 00:25:20Yeah, I would add the caveat that the blended metrics isn't like modern on you. Right? What old school? Offline advertising work. They were like, oh, this is how much I spend. This is how much I made, how they measured everything before the internet. And even with the internet, like of companies, we work.Even three ATT works at blended metrics because we know that a portion of our paid installs drive organics, we have a very, very clear correlation between updated organic. So we would be money on the table if we took into a concept paid users and not organics. So, you know, people have definitely done that.And that companies that have done it just to pursue growth. they're like, look, we need to grow as aggressively as possible. And the way to do that is to take lead and metrics to justify the growth rather than to shackle us. Jeff Pedro lab, back to your question. How, how how do we sort of look at this names will say, this campaign gave us, return on ad spend 20% cost per trial of $30.You're basically saying your overall marketing spent, gave you a $20 cost per trial across paid and organic and social and that you're spending on. Obviously, a lot of people to be uncomfortable with that because they're like, oh no, if I hadn't spent on marketing, I would have still gotten trials a day.And I'm giving credit to marketing for that. And, you know, I, I don't have a direct answer to that, but I think the answer really is. Would you want to be, would you want that's helpful and has to get crew or would you. And model that's accurate, but isn't having you grow. not going to claim I have an answer to that one, but, yeah.So basically looking at your total number of trials and your total spend. obviously this calculation becomes scarier. you have multiple chats, Yeah. If you're running Google, Facebook snap, and multiple ad networks, then you're like, oh, you know, one of the ad networks probably performed badly, but my total blender not change all that much because my other channels, 10% of time stops, but there are challenges, especially at collage level spend, but is very solid source of truth, especially for smaller advertisers who may be on a handful of channels.Here, I guess it's what you see in the back. David: 00:28:19And, you also mentioned that, people, do you, you mentioned web flows are working really well. And I assume what you meant by that is sending people from an ad into, onto the web instead of onto the app store, which is, it's really fascinating to me on multiple levels because. You know, the app stores have always been this black box where you put a certain number of, of clicks into it.Then, you know, you see the end result, but you don't see any of the steps in between. I mean, you have some basic metrics with app store, analytics and stuff. but with the web, I would imagine that that gives you a more direct. Trackable, link from somebody who, sees an ad to then actually kind of what they're doing on your website.So, but then ultimately I've talked to a lot of developers who talk about how on the web, their conversions are actually quite a bit lower in the app because Apple's made it so easy to use an app purchase. So, but it seems like maybe there is somewhat of a balance. There is that maybe you lose fewer people.From having to jump through those hoops of the app before they even get to the onboarding before they can be shown, you know, the value proposition and then being, you know, shown a subscription, page or whatever it is. what have you seen working in regard to web flows and then, and specifically for subscription? Shamanth: 00:29:53Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, I've certainly seen a lot of success bar description apps that have adopted web most, a couple of apps have up 15 month on month group to ATT. not to have typical, revert, but it's that's happened. I think a couple of elements, you know, I think it's, what's most important is to make sure that it's right and there's a couple of possible lows.I think it's important to pick to which one is right. And really, and I think one flow could be showing that. A user goes to a landing page, which is basically like a B2B ought to be, to see that the page on the web and what you would get for a And you have a link that accept call to call to action on the landing pages, go to the app store.So a lot of that experience, but just, and try to explain it's happens on the app store, the web page. I actually does the job of telling the user on the product. And it's my hypothesis that this actually works well because Yvette page can do a much, much better job of selling than the app store can, while still making it clear that this is an app, and while actual conversion happens within the app itself, but, similar, a different flow that's very comparable would be take an ad, take a user from an ad to a landing page where users have to input that.Which again, get, use, it makes it makes it clear to the user that this is an app. is a mobile experience. User gets a text message and use assigned top work. and when they click on the text message, get to go to the app store and download the app. Right. Again, another model could be a user clicks on an ad, to an article or a content page, which is what you would see if you had a Double-A or a printed article or a content page to not store.And I can, the last one I can do, the more complex no is just to have onboard them on the web. basically take them to a webpage and they And, hopefully so I can make the purchase on the web. It mitigates your favorite petty, to be honest, the hottest and most strict food resource intensive.And really it's my recommendation that you put you that back after you put you in one of the best that I recommended, because you don't want to invest a kind of engineering and development time and bending, don't even know that the flow is going to work for you. so I would recommend just testing the web landing pages first then onboarding stuff.But, I think those are most important models that we see work. Somebody else. I think that's also very, very critical. think a lot of people, when they look at a lot of advertisers, I know that have started on the web for the first time. We're like, oh, Put together this nice landing page that looks like our homepage, on our website and just put it out there.Okay.Let's, you're being very intentional about what value propositions to touch on Actually out of your landing page. And we have a structure that we use now. most important, part and value proposition and that's social proof then your most important emotional benefits then. I think the most successful advertisers we work with are very, very intentional about what that, that page is looking like.And they also tested their athlete. I think it elements are very, very critical to making theDavid: 00:33:59Yeah.That's really smart. And I hadn't thought of it quite that way about how, yeah. And that was, I was talking with the apps are being the black box is you're just sending somebody, hoping they look at the screenshots, hoping the icon resonates with them, hoping the title and subtitle are meaningful, but when you send them to the web, it's not just about them right.To subscribe on the web, but it's actually just. Having a better opportunity to communicate the value prop so that by the time they get to the app store, they are, they have a much higher, They have a higher, they're just more likely to actually take action by the time they do get to the app store.Does that makes a lot of sense?Jacob: 00:34:39Tells you a lot about the quality of like the app store as a sales pitch. Right? I mean, but I guess when you're like looking at a, you know, you're trying to differentiate, right, and there's only so much, you can communicate in a block of text and then a bunch of screenshots. Right. And you've seen so much.Data shoved into the screenshots on asking LAMSTAR right. They're not screenshots. Right. They're like deck.David: 00:35:00Billboards Shamanth: 00:35:01Yeah.Yeah. I also think another reason why the app store works so well, pre with Facebook would just show ads to users to install other subscription apps. So if you send them directly to the after, they're almost pretty qualified. case anymore. So I think that absolutely level the field a lot.Jacob: 00:35:27Yeah.It's, it's, it's a tough, skill set though, for a lot of developers because they don't often have web experience internally. I think, I think I'm, I hear so much, like people get so obsessed about the 30%. and they want to jump straight to that last one. You mentioned about building a whole online purchasing thing, which like, you know, Stripe's pretty easy to use.Like it's, it's, you know, it's not that much more work than building a landing page, but you have to remember. okay. Management. So now you got to have a link for somebody who can go and cancel that thing. Now you also have to worry about taxes, Stripe. Doesn't like collect a tax information for you already.You have to, you know, then synchronize that with your backend. And, you know, if you're using revenue, casing grants with us or whatever, but you got to manage all that too. a lot of complexity, for 30%. Right. And when you're just trying to, you know, all of these things can find incremental. But like, as you're saying, it's important to put them in the right order or you can end up a lot of and money.Shamanth: 00:36:28Yeah, yeah. David: 00:36:30Well, I did want to, to move on to the, the, future. So we, we've kind of gotten through the first couple of months of these, this rough patch in or into this, era of, of mobile advertising. Are there any things that you're seeing that are especially promising. the future is the future.Everything we've been discussing so far of just of your advertising works and 50% doesn't mean you're never going to know which, do you, or are there some technologies coming online or some approaches that are just going to take time to of work out.Shamanth: 00:37:12Yeah, I think there's going to be some changes. I don't know. These are going to be shattering, in terms of changing. ATP. I think the most promising though, I would say, iOS 15 custom product pages, basically solve the problem of Jacob. didn't give it to you. How one tomorrow slide deck and everybody sees the same tag and Astro does a terrible job of sending a user on.What the product is basically, the custom product pages can have up to 25 washes off your app store. which means like if you're a, you know, wellness app, if let's just say you're a meditation app that has a meditation for sleep or anxiety and how to meditate. Separate landing page, so to speak on the app store, anxiety, meditation, right.And you can send, get a unique URL for each of these. you're going to have ad for sleep, going to an app store for each sleep for anxiety going to an app. So for anxiety I can, that can help. I just don't think it's going to have too much on the measurement front. obviously.Actual execution is still unclear. The announcements out. Definitely one of the big changes I would take that's coming with 15. The other one would just be that, advertisers are going to be receiving post-docs, which is huge, at least in ensuring of the advertising data so far, completely bonkers right now.Networks like Facebook snap, everybody get your post back from ASCAP network, but you have advertiser you as an advertiser. Which means you basically take the word for it. I do know for a fact that has actually changed values. I don't want to call it malicious because the conversion value was no.And to change it to zero, the problem is that knowledge will have very, very different meanings. You don't mean install. not mean to install happen, and there's no value. know that they did that change. I don't have that company to do it. but my point is, and Google, Google explicitly say we are going to use model conversion.So you basically take out what bird app Facebook face tapping data is accurate. Everything underneath it's modeled, means take out all of this is because the postdoc goes to the metroplex, but not the avatar. if the post that goes to the advertiser, you can add the very least verified that tell me the truth, which bonkers? I think David, you imagining, until all the time, you, you just have to think that, oh, back onto words for it even PhET right.I think That's going to be a big, big change, even though a lot of that will happen under the hood. And I say advertisers for the back majority of advertisers, going to do, they're receiving a Okta. Uh post-bacc but I think that's going to be a big deal, but, I think those are the big changes, the custom product pages and the post-bac to advertisers the tree and the intent of the future.In many ways, I do think it's going to be back to 2013 or 2014. I think I had talked about how. A number of installs and to be held that certain percentages, knew that each of them would convert to Jacob: 00:40:59Okay Shamanth: 00:41:00have a digital subscription. So they the cloud, but think it's going to be a very similar world. We are going to be, you're going to have to be more comfortable making decisions based off of incomplete data.But I do see that thing. David: 00:41:15One of the things I've been hearing a lot about since, since apple announced. The last year is incrementality testing. So systematically on and off, you know, so if you're advertising, I mean, obviously this would be a tool for, for larger apps, but if you're advertising across Facebook, Google snap, TOK, and you know, other mobile DSP.You know, systematically moving spend around and then measuring the difference or even turning spend off in certain channels and increasing spend in other channels. you seen that work? and are you, excited about the potential, of having tools in this space? do you think incrementality testing is a bit over-hyped.Shamanth: 00:42:02Any recommendation like incrementality? I think one caveat that a lot of people miss. That it's useful. What a very, very tiny fraction of advertisers, David, like you said, if. Like all the society building networks, multiple DSPs, ad networks, instrumentalists TV. Yes, absolutely. You know, you should use incrementality because there's just no way you're going to find out if this is going to work incrementality and, media mix modeling.You want to use both of them had an ad to make that work. But I would say the kinds of advertisers who need like this are a very tiny fraction. So the vast majority of advertisers, even the advertisers who are on four to five channels, even advertisers who spend those six tickets in a monthly spend, I don't think testing is going to be, Betty has just because Todd, you know, it's, it just becomes imprecise.Volumes of data. You need a critical mass of data for to be useful. right. I think it's a very similar thing that began X models, right? You need anomalous, anomalous budgets to dose to be useful and helpful. So I do take, these are great. I think the fact that they're not an antidote to all of the havoc that has, about the applicable to our tiny Sheila David: 00:43:39That makes sense. And then if, if you're only advertising on Google or only advertising and Facebook are only advertising on the two of them, they're, they're essentially doing some level of incrementality testing for you right there. Measuring the performance of this campaign against that campaign.And they're up depending on the results that they seem to be seeing. So there's some of that's kind of already covered if you're using those platforms, as your primary sources, Another thing I wanted to get your thoughts on was experimentation with other forms of advertising. I you're, you're very focused, currently on, on, you know, paid user acquisition and I don't think that's going away.And I think for, you know, for a lot of apps that is going to be the, the, the best, most reliable way to continue scaling even without accurate measurement. But have you seen any other. pushes with any of your customers, to work on, on, on different styles of advertising, different, approaches to marketing that are being successful.And do you see their kind of more incentive to try more things these days?Shamanth: 00:44:50No, I spoke about web, and I think there's definitely much, much stronger interest in that campaign than even six months ago. Larger budgets, definitely stronger interest. I would, again, like with the extra mentality, I would say shut on smaller budgets, I do not recommend experimenting.I do not recommend diversifying, but certainly have larger budgets. I would also say that are worth spending in the tens of millions, budgets like that have the, even like millions a month. Uh there's some, these other larger studios. They have already been on influencers that wasn't even advertised on TV, none of this would be new to them.Yeah, so I, I don't, I bet anything radically new that.David: 00:45:42Yeah. And then that kind of gets back to the old tried and true. You just got to build a good product and work on your monetization, and kind of get back to the basics of, of product as well. Jacob: 00:45:54I think sometimes these, these overly complex, overly targeted systems, especially for people who make software contend to be busy boxes, right. They can tend to be, can tend to be things that. Can attract our attention and, and ‘cause, they, they seem very like, you know, oh, we can get it right.And really make it scale. And then some people have right. It's possible. But 80/20, I think for a lot of people out there, like just, just, just focus on the fundamentals and you can go pretty far. And then as time comes, you can layer in the more, you know,Shamanth: 00:46:27Yeah.Yeah, yeah, yeah, and like I said, at a certain level of care, influencers, all of this becomes much, much more meaningful. and like I said, that's certainly more meaningful already. Yeah. You don't need too much. David: 00:46:42Well, I think that's a great place to wrap up. it was great chatting with you and yeah. lot of insight there on, on what's working and what, how to think about things in this, this new world of mobile marketing. you know, as we wrap up, is there any last thoughts to include links to, where people can find you on, on, on the web and to RocketShip HQ and whatnot.Anything else you want to add?Shamanth: 00:47:09No. Though, like I said, guess this not bad as it reported to be. They're raised to mitigate the worse-case scenarios, that helped me out, been able to share. so, hopefully they'll come out on the other side of all of this without too much craziness.Jacob: 00:47:35I think people are going to keep using apps. That's my, that's my prediction.David: 00:47:40And I think people are going to keep advertising apps. Shamanth: 00:47:43Yeah, yeah, It's the, how that's going to have to change and it has to change dramatically and there's no getting around that.David: 00:47:51Well, it was great chatting with you and, we'll talk again soon. Shamanth: 00:47:55Absolutely.Jacob: 00:47:57Thank you.David: 00:47:58Good bye.

What's up everyone! We are back with another episode of the Just Talk Podcast with Episode 203!We start off with Tommy talking about a pipe bursting from the ceiling at his work, we start talking about jobs again hahaha, Little Tommy and his friends' interaction with an orangutan, and the boys FINALLY talk about F9: The Fast Saga.F9: The Fast Saga Spoiler Talk Time Code0:43:35 - 1:15:00The boys talk about more streaming shows and movies and finish it off with some Space Jam: A New Legacy and sports talk. With all of that, thank you all as always for listening and supporting the podcast! We appreciate and love you all very much! Thank you thank you thank you and until next time, we're going silent,Follow Us On Instagram@thejusttalkpodcastEmail Usthejusttalkpodcast00@gmail.comSubscribe To Us On YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCo40E9rCSueQjDxPl21u8Mg

Today we wanted to talk about a home we dedicated to tiger oak that was in the Parade of Homes in Utah and won many awards for its beauty. We discuss the various designs and choices we went with for our client, which you can see in our portfolio on our website linked below. We chose the paint color and style before choosing the furniture or finishing, which helped guide us in deciding on how to approach these other aspects. One unique thing about this home is when you enter it, you can see all the way to the back end, which gives you a greater understanding of depth and how big the place is. In the kitchen there are two tiger oak islands, one of which was a butcher block top and the other was marble, and then we put a big service window which is such a great party trick. About Tiger Oak and the client 2:28The entryway 6:26The neon sign 12:31The parlor 14:37The family room 18:00The dining room 21:08The kitchen 23:01The pantry 29:23The pink heron powder bath 30:44“That's the cool thing about color blocking. Do you know what I mean? When you're just working with colors in general, once you figure out your color, then you have that out, and then all the other decisions can kind of help decide themselves, especially when you had the wallpaper. That was happy up there and it had so many tones to pull from.” 16:46 https://www.alicelaneinteriordesign.com/tiger-oakhttps://www.instagram.com/alicelaneinteriors/https://www.instagram.com/alicelanehome/https://alicelanehome.com/https://www.facebook.com/AliceLaneHomehttps://www.pinterest.com/alicelanehome/https://www.youtube.com/alicelanehomecollectionsaltlakecityNews Letter:https://manage.kmail-lists.com/subscriptions/subscribe?a=HZENWY&g=PFcqV5

Today...Den interviews Jaimee Maree who is the founder of Savvy Copy - a direct response copywriting agency. Ah, so what? Here's the so what: If you want to know how to turn your website visitors into paying clients, then listen closely to this episode, because Jaimee reveals nitty-gritty details on how to do just that.Here's a sneak peek at what you'll hear:What the hell is copywriting? ... and why you should care. - 3:00Why probably 99% of video freelancers who write their own website copy are “penny-wise but pound-foolish”. - 5:25The backasswards thinking of business owners who write their own website copy. - 6:00You know your product better than anyone else, so... you should write your own website copy, right? (Not so fast, Tiger. Listen, there is a reason why the most successful video production companies in the world outsource their copywriting, and it ain't because they're too busy. Full story at 7:45)The “logical fallacy” of business owners who think they should write their own copy. - 8:204 common (but silly) reasons people are scared to outsource their copywriting. - 9:10A crucial element of copywriting even pro copywriters overlook. - 10:00The BIG secret to wildly successful website copy. (This is nothing glamorous or exciting, but this is where the success of a website's copy is won or lost. - 11:10)The acid test for knowing if the copywriter you hire is a pro or a bum. - 11:25Why the word "copywriting" is a misnomer. - 11:40Why world-class copywriters are more like detectives than writers. - 12:00How most video production companies are unwittingly targeting the wrong clients. - 12:50The #1 thing to know about your website visitors. If you don't know this about your website visitors… you may as well get a chimp to write your website copy. - 13:30Insider copywriting secrets - This is gold! - 14:00The little-known (and little understood) marketing maxim called "The Who". (Nothing to do with the English rock band, however... if you don't understand this marketing truth, your website copy will be about as useless as Pete Townsend's guitar after playing Woodstock. - 15:50Beware of the content writer dressed up in copywriter's clothing. (Hear this important difference between the two, and... how to identify the copywriters from the content writers. - 20:00)Why copywriting (when done properly) is like playing 3D chess. - 21:00When your ego is your amigo.  - 23:50A little-known copywriting secret for getting website visitors eager to hire your video services. (You can do everything else right, but without doing what Jamiee mentions at 25:00, your website copy will almost certainly tank.)How you can get more business by repelling website visitors. - 27:00Why website designers should be forced to consult a copywriter before signing off on their work. - 28:00Why an “average” website designer who understands copywriting is far more valuable than a “world-class” website designer who's clueless about copywriting. (Probably less than 1 in 1000 business owners understand this. - 30:00)Connect with Den on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/denlennie/Get more great resources over at https://www.denlennie.com/Support the show (https://www.denlennie.com/free-training)

Andy and Sean examine non musical films about musicians with original songs by looking at Crazy Heart and Inside Llewyn Davis. Two films about different genre of music but both extremely believable worlds.The timings for this week are:Crazy Heart: 3.14Inside Llewyn Davis: 25.00The theme for the next episode is revisionist Peter Pan filmsFollow us on social media:Instagram: frame_to_frame250Twitter: frametoframe2Letterboxd: frametoframeFacebook: Frame to FrameEmail: frame.to.frame250@gmail.comFollow our network:Twitter: @wmt_networkInstagram: @wemadethisnetworkFacebook: @wemadethisWebsite: www.wemadethisnetwork.com Patreon: www.patreon.com/wemadethisMusic:Gothamlicious by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5741-gothamlicious
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Leave us a review on Podchaser or Apple Podcasts!

Today...Den has Andrew Fowler in the studio. If you don't know already, Mr. Fowler is the founder of Lux Films which is a UK-based video production company whose bread and butter is filming live events. But COVID hit and now making good money in live events is now like nailing jello to the wall, right? WRONG! In fact, Andrew's video business has doubled since COVID hit. How did he do it?Well, listen to this episode and Andrew will tell you exactly how he did it.Here's a sneak peek at what you'll hear:Why the number “1” is the most dangerous number in business. - 4:30A special way of using your tongue to get clients. (Nothing kinky here... just a clever way of getting new business that almost any video freelancer could start doing immediately. That's right, if you can string together 5 to 7-word sentences, you can use this clever marketing strategy. - 6:00The case for posting content on LinkedIn. - 6:20Proof that implementation is King. - 7:30A little talked about benefit of joining a business network or hiring a business coach. - 8:10A sneaky (but 100% ethical) way to get your competition to happily hand you some of their best business ideas on a silver platter. - 8:30Why you should NEVER hire staff members before doing this one thing mentioned at 8:50The “7-word secret” to achieving time freedom as a business owner. - 10:40What a “hybrid event” is, and... how it could revolutionize the video production industry. - 20:00What clients don't want you to know about their budgets, especially when hiring video production companies to film their events during COVID. - 23:00Why EVERY video production company should hire an extra camera crew when filming an event, and... what they should tell them to shoot. - 25:00A clever (and very effective) way to market your video business while working on a job. Best part: this clever marketing strategy is evergreen and can help you bring in new business, year after year. - 25:45Are you a video business production owner who's lost focus and motivation? Then listen closely at 31:00The single best investment a video freelancer can make right now... or ever! - 32:30What the VBA is, and why many video production owners all over the globe are talking about it. - 33:00Connect with Den on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/denlennie/Get more great resources over at https://www.denlennie.com/Support the show (https://www.denlennie.com/free-training)

For so many of us as creatives, it's your dream to put your work out there online, share it with the world and have people buy the product you've lovingly made with your amazing creativity. When someone does buy from you, it's the best feeling in the world, so a lot of us either have an online store already or are dreaming of starting one! Today, I'm giving you all the tips and tricks to start, build and launch your online store. Whether you're starting from scratch, adding things to your store or launching new products, you're in the right place - these strategies are going to help make your online store a success.  Read the accompanying blog post at https://www.blackandwhitestudios.nz/blog Timestamps:  Introduction: 00:00The elements of your online store to brand: 03:26How to brand your online store: 11:33Launching your online store: 13:33Wrap-up: 23:39 Ready to start building your brand today? Download my Ultimate Branding Checklist here: http://bit.ly/ultimatebrandingchecklist Tag me on Instagram and let me know you're listening: https://www.instagram.com/blckwhtstudios/

Watch the video version of this show on YouTube »Alex Ross is the co-founder & CEO at Gregarious, Inc. Gregarious is the company behind Greg, an app dedicated to helping people grow healthier and happier plants. Greg's community has grown from 100 beta users in August 2020 to over 50,000 monthly active users today.Alex graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, and studied data science and statistics at MIT. Alex has worked for companies such as Cisco, The Daily Aztec, and Cannon Trading.Prior to founding Gregarious, Alex spent 4 years as Director of Engineering at Tinder. Alex also co-founded Enplug, a digital signage company that was acquired earlier this year.In this episode, you'll learn: The two critical steps in making a successful app An ingenious strategy for partnering your app with retail companies Why you should involve your customers in content creation Links & Resources Tinder Enplug fitbod app Y Combinator (YC) Alex Ross' Links Greg app Alex's Twitter: @AreteRoss Job opportunities at Gregarious Alex's LinkedIn Gregarious, Inc. on LinkedIn Follow Us:David Barnard: https://twitter.com/drbarnardJacob Eiting: https://twitter.com/jeitingRevenueCat: https://twitter.com/RevenueCatSub Club: https://twitter.com/SubClubHQEpisode TranscriptAlex: 00:00:00The two steps in making a successful app business are make something worth using, and then put it in front of the people who would use it.If you have a plant, and you don't know what to do with it, we solve that problem.So, what we did is we reached out to a bunch of plant retailers, “Hey, we will help your customers have a positive outcome with your product.”Can you put in our little QR code? And now when these retailers ship out a new plant, every single one of them has this little QR code in it.It led to our first 15,000 users, I'd say. David: 00:00:30Welcome to the Sub Club podcast. I'm your host, David Bernard. And with me as always, Jacob Eiting. Hello, Jacob.Jacob: 00:00:53Happy to be here. David: 00:00:55You sound incredibly happy.Jacob: 00:00:57It's great. It's a Friday, David. The sun is shining. They're grilling a bunch of chickens in my hometown. I got nothing to complain about. It's gonna be great.David: 00:01:05Our guest today is Alex Ross, founder and CEO at Gregarious, makers of Greg, an app to help you grow healthier and happier plants. Prior to founding Gregarious Alex spent four years as director of engineering at Tinder.Alex also co-founded Enplug, a digital signage company that was acquired earlier this year. Welcome to the podcast, Alex.Alex: 00:01:27Thank you guys. Good to see you. Thanks, David, Jacob.Jacob: 00:01:29Hi. David: 00:01:30So, I'm going to try really hard this whole podcast and not call you Greg, but I've made that mistake.Jacob: 00:01:36I was thinking like, I get like annoying company name questions. Sometimes. I'm like, I'm sure you get more worse than me.Alex: 00:01:43But I'm considering just legally adopting Greg as alias or something. Jacob: 00:01:48Yeah. You know, I mean, that's a news cycle right there. A little bit of earned PR. David: 00:01:55So I wanted to ask you, so obviously, you know, director of engineering at Tinder that's, I mean, what a rocket ship that must've been quite a wild ride. So, tell me a little bit about, about how you ended up at Tinder and then, you know, if you do have any fun, war stories from there, that'd be great to hear. Alex: 00:02:16Yeah, definitely. It was a rocket ship. Definitely some war stories, some wins, some losses. So, I came across Tinder and I was looking to get into like a consumer application. so I was interviewing with Uber and Twitter, and then I came across Tinder on an angel list. Actually the head of recruiting at the time reached out to me and I kind of took it on a whim.To be honest, I had not used the app before, before even interviewing or anything. that's kind of a challenge for Tinder is like, do you, how many of the teammates need to use Tinder? Because a lot of people are married and in relationships, and those are great people to have on the team. And so it makes it odd, and kind of difficult or complicated. But, basically I joined when it was around 70 people, if I recall. So, it was a pretty small team. There was already a global user base, so it was one of the scrappiest, global brands I think probably has ever existed. Because this was all right before Tinder or right around the time that Tinder launched its first monetization efforts.And so there wasn't really awareness as to like, great, there's this like large, global, many millions of people are using this thing, but is it going to make money? Right? That was still an open question at the time that I joined. So, yeah, basically I joined and it was very, it was definitely still a startup.And, so there was not a lot of structure and I think my manager changed on the first day, like the person I was talking about working with's desk changed, but I had a great time and basically I ended up creating the growth team. So I became very focused on, growing the international user base.One of the coolest things that that team did is we decoupled Tinder from Facebook. And this was from Facebook login because like Tinder came to, came to fame by having, you know, you tap one button, it imports your Facebook photos. It basically made online dating as easy as it possibly can be because like you push a button you're in and then you're dating.Right. And by making it that simple, it made it so you felt less than desperate by using it. I think it was like one of the important psychological dynamic, because if you feel like you have to work to start using that application, then maybe it means that like you aren't having as much success in dating in the real world.So, by making it simpler, it made it less stigmatized. More cool. Right? And so when we decided to then allow people to create accounts with a phone number that introduced all this complexity around like, well, are people going to want to do that? Then they have to add profile photos. They have to type in their name.You have to introduce an onboarding process. You have to worry about spam. So, in any case, my team led that decoupling of Facebook and Tinder, and this was like pre Cambridge Analytica, pre GDPR. So it was definitely pressure. And it was like, it was a lot of good foresight and it did lead. It was a very successful project.So, that was kind of what I cut my teeth on it Tinder. And then from there, I ended up creating the trust and safety team. So we then kind of took on anti-spam, which is a major problem for any global consumer or especially a brand that you're introducing people to each other. Like you're introducing strangers to each other.That is a spammer's dream.Jacob: 00:05:32There has got to be just so much abuse on Alex: 00:05:34So much, and it was all stuff. I agree. Yeah. 24 7. and so we ended up creating a team kind of bottoms up. This is a cool effort. Cause it wasn't like an executive side, like, oh, Tinder needs to needs to create this team. But rather. A collection of engineers that were very motivated to solve this problem.So, we created a trust and safety team again, before, before GDPR, like this was before the world was really focused on, privacy and data security and protect users. Very consciously.Jacob: 00:06:01It's it's interesting. Cause now, you know, even with like clubhouse recently have had issues here. I think now the expectation is you need trust and safety from day one, which even five or six years ago, wasn't really the case. It was kind of like, well, I'll just grow and then you'll solve it later.So, that was, I would say early days for even that concept of like a whole dedicated team to those, those, those aspects of, yeah. If you're meeting people in public mind, God, like you need good Alex: 00:06:28Real. Yeah. You really need to continuously try to protect people. Cause there are, there's a rare selection of people that are not great. Right. SoJacob: 00:06:36Yeah. David: 00:06:37So then, tell us a little bit about the transition from being a tender to founding a company, because you had founded companies before and plug, and been at, other large companies before Tinder, but Yeah. What, what led you to, to found Gregarious? Alex: 00:06:54Yeah. I actually saw Jacob and I shared an experience interning at Cisco systems. Is that right? Did you, yeah, Jacob: 00:07:01Wait, when were we at the same? Like onboarding. Alex: 00:07:04No, no. I was actually in the finance organization, so I was doing internal auditing. it was crazy. I was on a team that like investigated other people for like, you know, abusing their corporate cards and stuff like that. So there'd be likeJacob: 00:07:19Interesting. internally. Alex: 00:07:21Internally. yeah. it was a very, Jacob: 00:07:23We've had interns on that team. Alex: 00:07:27It was a unique, it was definitely the only inboard,Jacob: 00:07:29Yeah. Wow. I was testing, I was testing phones, so I'm actually not sure which one of those is more boring. I think actually you might've had me. So Alex: 00:07:38That's for sure. yeah, so I got exposure is Cisco is interesting for anybody who doesn't know cause you have to drive between meetings. Right? Cause the campus is so large. Jacob: 00:07:48Campus. Alex: 00:07:49Yeah, Yeah, Talk about, oh my gosh. Culture. Yeah, so the, the process leading up to, to starting Greg was very deliberate. because I had done a startup before and that company had gone to success a successful outcome, but it was a lot of hard work was honestly grueling.Definitely like, hardest challenge of my life. And so I knew that I wanted to be involved in starting a company and building a culture from the ground up again. but I knew that I wanted to do it differently. and so basically there was a lot of preparation thinking about really the main thing I was thinking about is what is the industry that I want to be working in, because I think that startups often don't go the way you expect.But you can learn so much. And so I was really thinking like, okay, what do I want to become an expert at? Right. Like what do I want, if it doesn't work out in the way we expect, what would I like to have learned four years, five years, seven years worth of information about.And, I really kept coming back to science. and I wanted to, to kind of use my engineering experience and pivot that into, more real world, like physical phenomenon. Right. And like learning how the universe works. David: 00:08:59That's amazing. Alex: 00:09:00And so that's really, a lot of the thesis of Greg is that we apply computer science and software engineering to this specific domain of how to plants work.Right. And, and basically the, the dots kind of connect looking backwards, but it was a process of discovery of like, what's an area that's emerging and like kind of changing, like where is there an opportunity, right. Because I think it's helpful to position yourself at a place where either you can cause change or this change already happened.And, right now, like a lot of people know there's climate change. and there's also a lot of, rapid things happening in plant science world, specifically around like CRISPR and plant genetics and stuff like that, really at the deep end of it, which we can get into, but it's like way deep. but, but basically, this was before the pandemic.So we were actually looking into plants before COVID and already there was like the rate of people bringing plants into their homes was growing by 50 to a hundred percent per year. And we wanted to validate like, Jacob: 00:10:03I really like, that seems like that seems like a thing that would be fairly stable, like, is it, is it, is it a, is it a generational trend, like millennials or younger folks being? I have a lot of people on Twitter. I follow that seem very interested in plants more than I've ever been. Alex: 00:10:20There's a couple converging trends. Yeah. I think that part of it it's associated to like the mental wellness movement. So it's kind of this trend line follows a one that's very similar to like meditation and yoga just five years later. So I think it's a very, it's a lot of adjacent interests there, but then there's also an aesthetic component to plants where like, people are kind of decorating their spaces and they're getting more like trendy in how they, you know, how they, even people who are eating, like you want to have like a space that you invite someone into and it's very nurturing.Right. so yeah, there was definitely a generational kind of tailwind already happening. And then COVID just like crammed that up. Right. Cause then everybody's on zoom and you look in the background, some people have plants and you're like, oh, that looks kind of nice. Like I'd like that.Jacob: 00:11:04I have this. I have, I still have this like barren white wall back here. That is embarrassing. Yeah, I need, that's why I was excited. I, I, I installed Greg today and I was disappointed. I couldn't buy the plants in the app yet. So we'll have to talk about that as we get a little Alex: 00:11:17That's something that is coming. That is the client segment. Yeah, definitely. yeah, so we kind of saw an opportunity and we did some due diligence, some interesting things I think, to identify like, is there a revenue opportunity in my favorite stat that I like to share that blew my mind when I learned it is home Depot, is a publicly traded company.So you can look up their, you know, annual statements and you can see how are they making money. And if you look up their statements, you'll see that they make more money on indoor garden than on any other product segment. Like home Depot sells lumber, paint appliances, all these other the Jacob: 00:11:54That's like, that's like actual revenues. Is that also margin con? Cause I would imagine these are high margin items as well, I would guess. Alex: 00:12:01Yeah. Depending on where you fall on them. But yeah, they're, they're, they're pretty hard margin. and no, we only looked at revenue, but they make like last night, like $11 billion per year in revenue. Which is, and, and they're like 10 or Jacob: 00:12:15Store, right? That's, one. Yeah. And there's like, every town has four of these. Alex: 00:12:19Exactly. Yeah. And home Depot is like 10 or 15% of the plant retail market. Probably. It's hard to estimate.Jacob: 00:12:26Okay. Yeah.So, it's like roughly like a hundred, a hundred billion dollar a year kind of thing in the US. Wow. That's it. That's the size of in-app subscriptions for anybody. Who's curious, like, roughly like in that ballpark.Alex: 00:12:39Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like Apple's app store, subscription Jacob: 00:12:42Oh yeah. Sorry, app store. It's not even subscriptions. I think that's the app store broadly. Yeah.Alex: 00:12:47So we combined the plant Tam with then the app store growth in subscription revenue. And there's our business model.Jacob: 00:12:56There you go. Did you, did you, I mean, yeah. You mentioned like wanting to get into something physical into something science related. Did you have like a passion for plants or was this something that is like deep in you or, or was it more like me and an app subscriptions, which is like, wow, this looks like a good thing I can work on and I actually care about it and know a little bit about it.Right. So how, how did it, how did you go? Like, Yeah.This is what I want to do. Alex: 00:13:17That's a great question. It was like 75% the ladder. So the same as you, where I was kind of, I got exposed to it cause I started getting plants and I realized I did like them, but there was no brand to guide me. And there was definitely no science to help me keep them alive. Right. but I, I grew up in the mountains and so like, I, I, my family, I lived in Mammoth Lakes, California for any of the listeners know where that is.And so I, you know, I, I went on like a solo backpacking trip, like shortly before starting all of this and kind of communed with like being in nature with no people around me. And maybe that put me in touch with the plans a little bit more. but it was mostly, kind of identifying, this is a realm of science I'd like to work in because plants are mostly.Physics-based, this is something a lot of people don't don't realize, but because they're stationary, you can almost view them as like, like a civil engineer would a bridge. so there's not, so you can kind of really think about like the water physics, the light physics. And so they're a really great vehicle for learning, just physics generally, and also how like the sun and earth orbit matters to that plant and that location.There's so much science there that we learned that there's a depth. That was, we were very interested in diving deeper intoJacob: 00:14:31Yeah. Not to mention, not to mentioned biology, right. Alex: 00:14:33There is, but Jacob: 00:14:34As an intersection, right? Yeah. Alex: 00:14:37Yeah. Biology is difficult though, right? Like if you're like an engineer, who's trying to approach it,Jacob: 00:14:41Right. Yeah. Alex: 00:14:42it's messy, you know, I Jacob: 00:14:44Yeah, exactly. Alex: 00:14:46Yeah, yeah,Jacob: 00:14:47But if you think about it, it was a closed system, right? Like yeah. You have it. It's potted, it's planted, you know, lumens in, you know, water in, you know, nutrients in, you can, yeah, you can, you can make some approximations, right. As we like. Alex: 00:15:02The closed system is really important. I can. so what Greg does is Greg predicts when a given plant is going to need to be watered. And that's like the super simple, like simplified functionality. It's one of the main things you need to know. And the way we figured that out talking about closed systems is kind of a fun fact. you can very accurately measure the amount of water that a plant loses by weighing it on one day and then weighing it the next day. And the change in weight is the water lost in grams. And it turns out, so what we did is we did that for like 700 plants for like six months. And we, we then graft what was the grams of water lost per plant per day?And you get this beautiful pattern. It's like it random, like this is a very clear, like almost a heartbeat of a plant, which is a great fit for like machine learning.Jacob: 00:15:56Yeah. So, so, so how did, how did you pull this off? Like practically, did you have like a big garage or warehouse or something like that? That's, that's more work than I usually do for software. So tell me what that process was. Alex: 00:16:09It definitely did. So at one point I had like 150 plants and they all had a plastic, little pots and I had like labels. I named them like a one through nine and then C one through whatever. Cause I had to keep track of it. Right. It's all in our progress database. And but that didn't scale. And so like me and my co-founders, we were all measuring every day, every single day, hundreds of plants, but that didn't scale.So then we went on Craigslist and we started saying like, Hey, we're looking for people to weigh their plants every day, twice per day for a couple of months. And we had hundreds of responses, like people, people care about their plants and they thought that it was cool to be doing like citizen science.Right. And so we ended up with people in Berlin and, and you know, Sydney.Jacob: 00:16:48All right. Cause it doesn't have to be local, right? Yeah. Alex: 00:16:51And actually it needs to be in like Southern hemisphere versus Northern hemisphere because the location of like the sun and solar radiation effects that. Yeah. So we needed a global distribution for sure.David: 00:17:01This is like way off topic for, for subscription apps. But, but if you, if you squint it's, there are a lot of similar problems in understanding user patterns and user life cycle. And like, there's so many hard to understand variables. Alex: 00:17:18Yeah, David: 00:17:18But one thing I'm curious about on the plant science, like how much does like humidity and other things play into that.So if you, if you have, you know, 40% humidity, one day and 60%, the next does that actually impact things. Alex: 00:17:31No humidity. We don't really need to model humidity very much. it's actually, there's a couple of things that are misconceptions. You don't really need to worry about missing or humidity and you don't need to worry about fertilizing. Like all of that is overdone. for the most part, like there's some cases where it, matters, but, I'd say for like 99 out of 100 plant types that you're likely to own doesn't matter.And even more people don't realize that the humidity reading that we see in the weather is what's called relative humidity. And it, it not actually like super scientific way to measure, like how the water in the air relates to a plant. You need to look at absolute humidity, the whole totally different calculation.There's basically relative humidity changes according to the temperature. And so I see as humidity, you can almost, and to be honest, like, ignore, except for a couple of plants, like really evolved to be in, like, you can picture it. you know, in England, like, United Kingdom, like BHAG, right. Where it's just so much water, like, okay, well does like some, some ferns like are from like the Pacific Northwest, like Washington area where it's like constant rain forest, those types of plans.Yeah. You're going to have a hard time if you're not, in a very human environment, but the vast majority of EBI don't have to worry about it.Jacob: 00:18:47I have, I have more questions on the plant physics, but I think, I think I will let, I will, I will have to like save my curiosity.David: 00:18:55Well, we'll have to do the, we'll have to jump on your podcast and talk, talk points. Jacob: 00:19:00Plant Club, just invite V2 to newbies on there. Just to ask questions. We'll be there. David: 00:19:05So from, from all of this, you, you started to alluded to it a bit, but one of the things I was really impressed talking to you a couple of months ago, was just how I'm vicious. Your plans are with Greg. So you're, you're kicking it off with a consumer subscription app. but tell me a little bit about like, where you want to go from there.Alex: 00:19:25Yeah, definitely. That's a part of like, going back to like how we started it, why we started it. I have seen, or like I've worked at companies and like not naming names that are very, very revenue focused. Like just purely prime directive is we just need to make coin and as much of it as possible. Right.And then the question is, well, if you get there, then what do you do? Because if you do accumulate a level of avenue and a lot of influence, you kind of inherit a social responsibility, right? Because like you're accumulating all these resources. If you're like a Facebook or an Instagram, I think there's like general consensus.Like you kind of need to think about the impact that you have. Cause you're too big to not think about it. Right. And so with Greg, like we really thought about if we manage to navigate this very challenging process of getting to scale. Well then what? Right. And our goal what's really interesting that people don't realize is that plants in our homes are just plants that were taken from various places in the world and put in our homes, right?Like there there's no such thing as a houseplant, it's actually just like a giant jungle tree that somebody took a cutting from and then transported it to England and then ended up the United States. Right. so the physical principles that govern, being able to predict how to keep those plants alive is, are the same as the physical principles required to predict how to keep like crops alive.Right. like plants that are grown for our food system of which there are like billions. Right. And those plants, like it turns out plants are really like an infrastructure piece of our planet, right? Like plants are our like big support system on spaceship earth. And it's kind of interesting. Jacob: 00:21:10It's, the, it's the first stage of catalyzing, the sun's resources, right? Like, Alex: 00:21:15That's exactly it. And a lot of people don't realize this, that basically all of life gets its energy from the sun. Like that is the input of all of energy into what we know as life, as you know, maybe there's more on other planets that works differently. But as far as we know, all of life depends on solar energy.Jacob: 00:21:31Yeah, Alex, you're leaving out some very, very, sensitive, bacteria that live by vents. Okay. That, that Alex: 00:21:40I love that you noticed.Jacob: 00:21:43I'm D I'm disappointed in myself that I can't think of what they're called. They're extremophiles some kind of, I Alex: 00:21:47Yeah. Jacob: 00:21:48All, it's all, it's all discovery documentaries, so Alex: 00:21:51There's a vanishingly small number of, like living things that, thrive on geothermal energy from the earth score. Right. But that's like less than like 1% as far as I know. What people don't realize as an example is that like plants. A lot of people think that plants are just taking things out of the ground that is sucking nutrients out, sucking water out. They're actually also putting things back into the ground at all times. And so plants, like, for example, they photosynthesize. So they take energy from the sun and they are the only thing on the planet that takes energy from the sun and then converts it into energy that all other life can use. And it's not only insects and birds and mammals like us, but plants are also depositing sugar into the soil.So it's a bi-directional flow and that sugar feeds the bacteria. Jacob: 00:22:38Is that an active process while they're alive? Is it, or is it during decomposition? Alex: 00:22:42No, that is an active process. Like plants are actively depositing sugar into the soil and that, that those sugars feed the bacteria and fungi and those bacteria and fungi are responsible for breaking down the, inorganic, nutrients like nitrogen into a format that plants can absorb because plants can't just like stop nitrogen.Now they depend on. Those organic, you know, facilitators. And so it's a very symbiotic relationship and there's growing awareness now that like having a quote unquote, living soil is crucial for our planet. And I'll tell you like an example of how, how much awareness there is around this. during my due diligence for Greg, I went to a plant genetics conference.This is like for any engineers in the call, like imagine like AWS reinvent, accepted the geneticists. Right. And so they're like presenting, like how they run their projects. And it's, it's a really cool parallel world, but half of this conference was dedicated to soil like microbiomes, because that's how important it is.It's like truly like a resource. It's an infrastructure for our spaceship earth. Right? David: 00:23:49That's amazing. So, so one of the things, yeah, you and I talked about was not just, you know, consumer subscription to then like funding science, which is kind of what you're talking about now, but then also the potential to take this from, from B2C to B2B. So like you have, nurturing these who have to manage the planets before the people buy ‘em.You have office buildings that have thousands of plants. You have, you know, commercial facilities like there's, you know, plants existed on so many different layers of are of, of, of use, So tell me a little bit about kind of the long and short term plans of potentially transitioning or not transitioning, but, but kind of building on top of what you've done for consumers to then expand into more B2B, use cases.Alex: 00:24:42Yeah, definitely. Some other examples. people don't realize that cities have to like municipalities have to maintain the plant inventories, right? Like there are people who manage the inventory of plants. Exists, you know, or there are small businesses. there are people in most towns, I grow food for their farmer's markets, for example.And so those are like smaller scale farmers and then there's large scale farmers, right? And there's a real dearth of like talented software teams, writing applications for any of those parties. And that's really the long-term opportunity to be spotted. If we can pull together a talented team to make products for those people, that's a longterm opportunity.And my, my thesis on this, which I think we're aligned on is that, like delightful, simple consumer user interfaces, like simple software is appreciated by everybody. Right? Jacob: 00:25:35Okay. Alex: 00:25:35like enterprises don't want to use complicated integrative Jacob: 00:25:40There's tastes now in software, right. And all levels of, employment. I think it's, it's a bit of like our gen my generation aging into the, the enterprise buying world. And, also just like people have enough software experiences in our lives. They've learned to discern like, oh, this is good.And, oh, this is bad. and I think there's, yeah, I think it's really, I mean, we I've, I've done it a ton in making revenue count. I came from the compute super subscription world. I learned a ton of lessons about onboarding and, and, and, and creating delightful experiences and like, you know, playing, playing against and into people's like, you know, habits and things like this that you carry into the enterprise world or B2B world, and it can really supercharge software.And it's probably what we're going to see. Yeah. I think. I think there's still, there's always this like technical leap or not technical in the sense of computers, but technical in the sense of processes and whatnot, when you leap from consumer to, to selling to businesses. But as you said, you bring those teams together, you, you build your data set, you learn more about Alex: 00:26:45Right, Jacob: 00:26:46Act of growing plants, then someday you, you, you can, you Alex: 00:26:49Right. And there are some, some famous examples of this. I definitely see it with RevenueCat. Cause like you compare the UI to a SAS that was created 10 years ago and it's just more of delightful. Right. It's like simple. And I know to use it. I'm not like getting a headache while I'm on it, but it's nice.Right?Jacob: 00:27:05It's very nice. Very nice of you to say Alex: 00:27:07Yeah. Bye-bye But, but like some examples like strike became famous, right? Because like they had a good Jacob: 00:27:14Same. Yeah, yeah. Say my mindset. Right. Just like, make it easy, make it simple, make the, make the shortest possible path to value. Right. Alex: 00:27:25Or, slack would be another example. Right. Whereas it was almost a consumer level application that just took off like wildfire because individuals liked it. Right. Jacob: 00:27:34And then they added enterprise grid, whatever they have now, or whatever to sell it to, to, to Alex: 00:27:39And then nothing is things, Jacob: 00:27:41Need that to begin with.Alex: 00:27:42Right? David: 00:27:43Yeah. So it's just, it's really cool that there's, there's just such a direct path from selling to consumers right now, and then selling to municipalities who are managing their plants in a few years, and then selling to, you know, the, the company should have to manage this at scale and then selling to farmers.That's really cool. One of the things that, again, that you're not talking about, you and I talked for like two hours a couple of months ago. And so there's, there's so much that I would, I would've loved to have recorded that and released it as a podcast. But, Jacob: 00:28:20Glad I can glad I can contribute. David: 00:28:23Yeah, one of the, one of the fascinating things that you talked about was kind of your view on marketing. And so I'd love for you to talk about that more broadly, but then specifically what you're doing with nurseries is just such incredibly smart marketing. Like, I mean, it, let me say tangent for a minute.So it's just so obvious talking to you that you're not the average like app founder, you know, like none of my apps have had even, even like when, when hundredth of the due diligence and market Jacob: 00:28:55Why I was gonna say, I've never, I've never bought some, like, I've never had a physical warehouse of plantsDavid: 00:29:02Yeah. and so it's just, it's just so clear that you, you think about things in a way that, that most, you know, at people don't most software people don't most even founders don't. and, and so I think, you know, we've talked about this on the podcast before, is it just so many apps are trapped in this?You know, we just, we have to advertise on Facebook to grow. We have to do this. And like that clay book, I've just, you know, dumping money, a bunch of money in ads, I think leave so much on the table. And so I just love that you're, you're going to do that. And that we've talked about that, you know, you've got to do paid marketing and, and maybe I've already started experimenting with it, but, but yeah.So tell me about what you're doing with nurseries and then just kind of, you know, some of your thoughts on, on marketing and virality and stuff. Alex: 00:29:51Yeah, definitely. I think broadly, like what I would, I think I'm definitely aligned with that where, your broader point is that like building an app is half technical and UI design and getting the product really, really, really right. Right. But the other half that people are often uncomfortable about is needing to get it in front of the right people.Right. And so in my mind, the way I break this down is the two steps. Like I have a theory that like the two steps in making a successful app business are make thumping worth using, and then put it in front of the people who would use it. Right. And it's like remarkably hard to do either one of those, but, Once we had, the beginning signs of retention.So we got our first, like, I don't know, 5,000 users by like posting on Facebook and on Reddit and like that kind of stuff. Then we started thinking about, what is like the most optimal time for people to be introduced to grade. And what we came up with is, well, we solved the problem of, if you have a plant and you don't know what to do with it, how to keep it alive, we solve that problem.And so the most natural moment would be when you get a new plant, right. Because it's like, that's a moment. And you're like, oh crap, I have this thing. What do I, how do I keep it alive? And, so what we did is we reached out to a bunch of, plant retailers, like online in-person brick and mortar all over the place.And we basically said like, Hey, we will help your customers have a positive outcome with your product. Right. And so let's do this trade where like, we will give them. at this point we had a subscription tier. And so we said, we'll give them free subscription tier for N number of months. At first it was six.And now it's three. and in return, can you put in our little QR code flyer, like nicely designed four inches by four inches recycled paper card that has a QR code and it takes you to download. Great. Right. And so we did that and now like when these retailers ship out a new plant, every single one of them has this little QR code in it.And it's almost like a digital companion to your unboxing experience. Right. And so that was definitely like a very natural fit and it, it led to our first, probably like 10 or 20,000, 15,000 users, I'd say.Jacob: 00:32:10So can I ask, like, did you do that yourself? Did you have somebody on your team? Cause like, yeah. I'm, I'm in the camp that that's outside of my experience. I don't like calling the pizza person. Like I, you know, I, I don't know how to do that. So how, how did you, how did you delegate that and, and Alex: 00:32:24Yeah. Jacob: 00:32:24The resources and a small team to pull that off. Alex: 00:32:27Definitely. so I I'd say I provided the, the oomph behind it. but then I have a good friend, who I've worked with in the past named Colin, who does like growth marketing stuff and that's his comfort zone. Right. And so I definitely did reach out to a bunch of the biggest partners in the beginning.Because the thing is that like with early stage stuff, founder led sales can be great, right? Like you don't always need it. It's better if you don't need it to be Frank. but, we were so early and we had no partners at all that I was like, I ha this is crucial for us. Like, we need to have a better source of user acquisition.That's like our next major challenge to solve. And so I did reach out to them and then call in kind of like took over and scaled that. Right. Cause like, I, I ultimately like I needed to be writing code and stuff. and so now he owns that relationship and he's been able to keep that going further.Jacob: 00:33:22Yeah, it's just one of these unique channels. you know, I don't know, you can, as a, B to C app founder, I think David's points exactly on, I think we've a lot of us have settled into this world where there's one or two channels to like get growth and that's paid, paid marketing.There's a lot of good, growth resources out there. oh yeah, there's a lot of good growth books. I've read, moving into the B2B world that say there's like seven channels or whatever. There's only like so many like ways to get and in and in, and in B to C we tend to be like, well, yeah, there's these two, essentially, but it's not really true.Like you can try seven, I guess the trick is finding stuff that two things, one is approachable. Like, that's why I asked about you. How did you make it happen? Well, you were able to start it off and then you had somebody to work with you to, to, to bring it to scale. But then the other thing is it has to move the needle. Right. And so, and so you have to figure out and like for a price that's reasonable, right? And, and that sometimes is hard to find as well. Because I think with this, you have this adjacent high velocity market of users. You have a place, your users are going every day, which isn't maybe always the case for all apps.Right. It's hard to find there's no meditation store that people are going to day. Right. Alex: 00:34:33Yeah. I thought about this. Jacob: 00:34:34That's your, that's your advantage? You know?Alex: 00:34:37I thought about parallels. Like I wonder if like fitness apps have tried partnering with gyms. I'm thinking like fit. Jacob: 00:34:44I'm sure the gyms wouldn't be as eager maybe. Right? Alex: 00:34:48Well, I mean, possibly I'm just thinking like, if, if like, Jacob: 00:34:51This also like there's also this like benefit right from the, for the Alex: 00:34:54There has to be. Yeah, yeah. But I would just, I just like theory, graph, like I'm thinking if there's an app That helps you track your workouts. Like I use football, I'm a user, it's a great app and, and it's a complete compliment or a gym. Like I can't do gym without, I can't do football about gym. I don't really do gym about that.So, I, there might be a thing there, or like with meditation, I'd be curious if, like yoga studios. Cause here's the thing is Jacob: 00:35:21Find the adjacencies right. Alex: 00:35:22Yeah. And so here's the thing about a mobile app business that I have found is that one of our strengths is that we're building an audience, right? Like mobile apps only really work with retention.And so you're like building up this audience of people that are committed to your app and your brand over time. And these smaller businesses are looking for ways to get audiences. Right? And so in the scale of a mobile app is such that you might actually be able to accumulate an audience that is valuable to those small businesses.That can be a part of that trade. And so we've actually talked about that with our partners where we basically say like, well, you're referring users to us. We can refer users back to you. And our scale is large enough that it could actually be a meaningful number. so I think you can kind of get, it's definitely a B2B strategy where it's like, I'm thinking of the strategic value I can provide to my partners in return for them providing value.Which might be why it's less common in the, in the B2C, like mobile app world, right.David: 00:36:16Yeah. Any other, experiments that you've done or kind of things that you're working on in the, in the marketing realm that you've seen fail or things that are being successful right now Alex: 00:36:27We really want to tap peer to peer referrals and that has not been easy. And so that, that is one Jacob: 00:36:33Have you seen, have you seen the new store kit to stuff? Alex: 00:36:36Not Jacob: 00:36:36Yeah, they did. This is, I don't know when this is going to go out, but they, they dropped in, in, in the dub DC, this, this, this week they announced there's a new API. That's going to make that kind of possible. Now you'll be able to, you'll be able to like extend somebody else's subscription, based on some sort of like action. I think I, I, I don't know if they made it as like, for extending, for like a customer support use case. So there might be a case maybe Apple's like, no, we didn't want you to use it for incentivized referrals, but it could Alex: 00:37:09Yeah, Jacob: 00:37:09Make incentivize referrals work and like a really smooth way. Sorry, I'll derail. But, Alex: 00:37:14I love it. Jacob: 00:37:15It's, kind of a change.Alex: 00:37:17Well, it's probably useful to listeners. we have definitely hacked around incentivizes invites using promotionals that will say RevenueCat has been helpful.Jacob: 00:37:26Oh, so, and so you guys are, you guys are pushing folks, but they have to go through like this, like a user-driven process, right? Alex: 00:37:33They do. Yeah.Jacob: 00:37:34Is friction.Alex: 00:37:35It's friction. It has been fine, but it's not quite as productive as we like. So that one. Jacob: 00:37:39Have a lot of users that get confused about the process. I would imagine. Alex: 00:37:42Yeah. And it's like a deep Linky thing. So it's like not super transparent. the thing that's worked better, the one that I'm most excited about is I love this one. we, created, user generated content loops. so, basically people, there are certain things you can do in our app that like publish web pages on the web.And so for us very specifically, People like Greg, we don't have a database of like every plant in the world yet. Right. There's like 400,000. It's really complicated. And like, that's actually, one of our core IP is, is developing that database. And the only way we can do it is if we allow users to contribute to it.Right. and we need to be like a crowd source, like model and we get really good at curation so people can create new species in Gregg. And then we curate that and then we publish that page on the web and then it starts showing up in Google search traffic for other people searching for information about that species.Right. And so I love the theory of this and like check back in, in a year to see how it turns out. But I love the thing. Because it's like, okay, a user publishes a web page, which then more users find our app through. So then they join the app and then they publish more webpages. And then so more users find the app and then they publish more web pages.Right. And so it's like a very like positive reinforcement loop. And I think those types of recursive positive reinforcing user growth loops can lead to very healthy, growth curves, right?Jacob: 00:39:08Yeah. I mean, that's the, the challenge of these apps. You said it with retention is the big thing. I think you, you you're you're you're you've got some tables. Keeping a plant alive plants live a long time. Therefore, hopefully your app gets used a long time, but then, finding these things that can take what is inherently like a decaying process, which is people leaving your app and turning it into something more stable, which is how you build this, like yeah.Long-term business. And then, you know, for, in your case, like use this as a platform to move into other segments and whatnot. but, but but moving away, from this, like get them in, monetize them, let them go. Right. Model, which like, it seems just like the whole world is pointing us against right. With, with the way that ad tracking is getting less easy to do and all this stuff.Alex: 00:39:54Yeah. Jacob: 00:39:54So I was gonna say SEO, that's one of the seven good channels. Right. So you've hit at least three, Alex: 00:40:01Do end up dependent on, on Google. AndJacob: 00:40:05It's something can change in Alex: 00:40:06Yeah, Jacob: 00:40:07Or. Alex: 00:40:07But like I've been wanting, I've been watching SEO for a while and I think that generally, as long as you're not doing shady things, you don't have to worry about much. Right, Jacob: 00:40:16Content that people click on and find useful it will work. Right? Like, but when I did our blogs for revenue cat, initially the ones that got really good traffic for us kind of got us off the ground. Like I didn't, I didn't think, like I thought a little bit like, oh, what are people going to Google?Whatever. But no, I was just like, I'll just make plus that people will read and spend time on and share. And like that's all it took. And you'll find the posts that some of the posts that I did that were intentionally like, I'm trying to be like, SEO smart. Didn't do that. Well, the ones where they were just really good posts and like contained a lot of really good content and get referenced a lot. Those are the ones that still generate traffic for us. So like, which is nice because you don't have to be like an SEO master anymore. You can kind of just make good stuff and do Alex: 00:40:56Yeah. Jacob: 00:40:56Things. Yeah, David: 00:40:57Yeah, I was going to ask, I think we talked about this, but have you, have you done some paid marketing and how's that gone for you? Alex: 00:41:05Yeah, definitely. We did use paid marketing to like, scale up, by like a two X factor. So did that add a little bit of extra? And, so we've been running on Instagram and Facebook, and it's been pretty productive to the point where it's almost NetSpend zero. it's like we spend a dollar in advertising and then we make a dollar in revenue.We're still very early. And so we haven't had enough months. Like the, the, the pain point is if you do a trial. It's actually a much longer, payback period or like what finance people would call a float. And then a lot of people expect, because let's say you have, we're generous. We have a 30 day trial, which is like a bit much for a mobile app, but we do it.And so 30 days, and then the user subscribes, and then you get paid and then apple will pay you a month later. Right. So you actually end up with like up to a 90 day float. and so that's not as tight as I would like hope for, but it's better than nothing. And I think that's the key is that like, because we're a revenue generating app we're able to do the ad spend in like a reasonable way.I think if that weren't the case, then it'd be very difficult.David: 00:42:12Yeah. And, and at some point, I mean, with, with your other strategies of referrals, of SEO, of building a base of users, that then you can get more and more partners, you know? So, so if you went to home Depot, 10 million active users, then that's a much more attractive proposition to them. so at some point, you know, spending at a loss might actually make sense, but it's amazing that the subscription, model enables you to even spend break even, but keep that flywheel going, which is it's.That's incredible.Alex: 00:42:52And I think the NetSpend break, even that creates an interesting exercise because then it's like, it becomes, we didn't get into like financing, but like if you fundraise That's then a good reason to fundraise because then if you have more capital, you can put that capital to work. Because if you know, you'll make, if you have a dollar, now you'll have a dollar again in 90 days, as long as you can carry that float.Well, then at the end of 90 days you have a dollar and a user Jacob: 00:43:17Yeah, which is like, has, has value, right? Like you've increased the value of your user base has adult, you know, dollar per user active value essentially in the venture market or revalue reevaluate. Right. So, it, it does make sense. So yeah, I w I want to ask, like, You guys, it seems like your apps pretty developed for how long you've been working on it a year and change.Right. and you mentioned, you mentioned this, like finding iterating to like a retention goal. Like how did that go? Did you start with just like the basic function, like the most basic thing and then add stuff until you got, and what, what I guess specifically, like what metric were you looking at to say like, okay, retention is good now. Alex: 00:43:58Hmm. Yeah, that's a great question. So we did start with the most basic core functionality, and I think one of the things that we did that I would do again, We just solved our own problem. So like I, so we, we started at the beginning of COVID, so like New York where I live, locked down basically the day, almost the day that I left Tinder.Right. And so and so I remember I'll never forget things were shutting down. So I ran to the nursery nearby plant nursery, and I bought like 30 plants. Cause I was like, I need to have the problem in order to be deeply motivated to solve it. Right. Cause like, if you actually have like over 10 plants, keeping track of them kind of socks a little bit, it's hard.And so I knew that I needed the problem and that motivated us and, and our whole team really, we basically just wrote like a prototype app to solve our own problem. and once it was working for us is when we started bringing like beta users in, we did like a test flight, version for a month brought in like maybe a thousand or I think it was 2000 beta users total and there in like August, 2020.And. Jacob: 00:44:59Did you, how did you get that list for the beta? Just Facebook and Alex: 00:45:04Facebook. It was, it was mostly Facebook like groups and stuff like that. Jacob: 00:45:07Mm. Alex: 00:45:08Yeah. and it posted on Reddit. Reddit is hard. but, we did a little bit Jacob: 00:45:15Rip off middlemen made easy. That's my favorite. We posted, I posted right. It was where we launched two and I have this, this favorite hater quote that I have like screenshot it on my desktop that I will hold on to until we IPO. Alex: 00:45:27The hater codes or something people should be prepared for, I think,Jacob: 00:45:30Yeah. Alex: 00:45:32But let's see. So we solved that. Here's the key is that we specifically, for our app, we wanted to solve the retention piece first. And so he chose the behavior in the app that would be associated with retention because the way that I personally think about retention is that right.What happens is you have a trigger. So a person needs an external trigger to think about opening your app. Right? So it could be a feeling that they have like Tinder, it's a feeling I'm bored or I'm lonely. And I want to see people, and that's an external trigger that causes a person to think about your app.Then you need value to them to actually open your app. Right? Like, okay, I have this trigger in this app can adjust that trip. Sure. So for us, we didn't have like an emotion, but we did have, the need for reminders. And so basically we, leveraged push indicator very heavily. Our whole app is like a water reminder app right now that's the core value.And so we built that specific functionality, water reminders before anything else, because we wanted to validate, is that a sticky behavior? Is that something that people will actually want to do and use over like six months? Right. And because we knew we wanted to get six months of data, we had to build it first.Right. Because you have to really think about how long it's going to take to get that validation. and we were bootstrapped. And so we knew that like, well, we can't bootstrap for forever. Right. And so we needed to front load the questions that we knew investors would be asking when we went out to fundraise.David: 00:46:57So speaking of which you just raised $5.4 million seed round, how, tell us about the process. It sounds like you were, you know, having been at Tinder and been in Silicon valley and in the industry, that was your goal that you didn't come into it thinking you were going to bootstrap this forever. and you were specifically kind of building up some of those retention numbers and other things that you knew investors would ask for.So, how did fundraising go having kind of iterated into that direction? Alex: 00:47:35It's definitely hard as hell. I don't know, like you don't ever say that it's not. but it wasn't, it wasn't like excruciating. I think recruiting is actually probably a little bit more difficult, especially right now. There's a lot of, a lot of movement in the, in the why people are working, how they wantJacob: 00:47:51It's easier. It's easier. to write a check than it is to take a job. I think, you know, like to give it to somebody to do, do Alex: 00:47:57You can write multiple checks. Right?Jacob: 00:47:58Yeah. It's not your, it's not your every day, you Alex: 00:48:02Exactly. Yeah. So, let's see. We actually, to go back to your first point, we weren't, completely, we hadn't decided that we were definitely going to raise VC capital. and so there was like, like we did work through that as a team and we ended up deciding, various specifically. Our mission is one that we believe would benefit from us being good at raising capital, because we think that if we can bring capital and talent to this industry and this problem domain, that's a good thing.And then even from a life perspective, like we wanted, we want to move quick, we want to be able to grow. You want to be able to like, build delightful things for lots of people. and so that was, that was the main motivation behind the VC capital. I think it's a big trade-off. so we, we definitely did not take it lightly and we did deeply evaluate Jacob: 00:48:49Closes, off a lot of paths, Alex: 00:48:51It does. Yeah, Jacob: 00:48:52You kind of really narrows what your future, I mean, Alex: 00:48:55Yeah, Jacob: 00:48:55You on a trajectory to something potentially much, much bigger, but it Alex: 00:48:58Yeah, Jacob: 00:48:59Of like brings down your, your options. Alex: 00:49:02It does. Yeah. And I think you just have to think about like, am I okay with needing to focus on eventually providing an exit to these people who trusted with their capital, right. Yeah. And I think maybe something that people don't think about is like the CEO, whoever is fundraising. Like you, you build a relationship with your, your, your VC partners, right?Like I consider them like life journey partners at this point. And so it's not that like, it's certainly not an adversarial relationship. It's more like I have a true responsibility to these people because we had a clear, like, this is the agreement is like capital and then they have obligation to their investors too.And so, you know, I'm aligned with that and I think you're right. You just have to think about like, is that, is that aligned with my vision for this, this journey, right. David: 00:49:45And then speaking of, of an exit, you shared with me, you have a very unique approach to employee equity. I'm actually curious to hear at, Jacob's take on this, having gone through the whole thing, himself, but Yeah. Tell us about your equity structure. Alex: 00:50:05Yeah. We, we definitely are, experimenting and trying something different and I think there's pros and cons.Jacob: 00:50:12Investors love that, by the way. I'm sure those were easy conversations. Alex: 00:50:17Surprisingly most investors were, were okay with it. I definitely had a couple that were concerned about, the implications in the medium term, but here I'll get to what it is. So, yeah. Okay. So basically, like we, wanted to distribute as much of the financial ownership of the company across as many of the early teammates as we could.And the reason for that is like the real thought that I had that whether or not other people think about this kind of thing, I would, I would encourage people to ask the best, which is, if I have an exit, how big of an exit would I really want to feel very fortunate about. Right. And like, really think about like how much money do I actually need.Right. Because I think that there's a lot of people who get caught up with like, I want a billion dollars, right. Or like, I want like a hundred million dollars. I've been fortunate enough. Like we pointed out earlier, my first company was acquired for like a fine amount and then Tinder totally exploded. I didn't own as much of it, but it is still a positive outcome.And I can say that like they didn't change anything. And I know it's a very cliche thing to say, but I think it's a productive exercise that if anybody was founding a company, I would recommend asking, at what point am I again, feeling fortunate about the outcome, right? And then what we really thought about is our ability to recruit a great team.And basically the decision that we made is that, there's really two aspects to equity. and I'd be curious again, Jacob's take on this there's there's compensation for risk. So early teammates take more risks, quote unquote. Right? And so that, that's a typical, like reason for, founders taking a large, large Jacob: 00:51:52Costs risk mostly. Right. But Alex: 00:51:54Opportunity cost and risk.And then the other dimension that I think about is. Where, early stage companies are hard for everybody who's involved. And my prior experience pointed towards like the first 20 people who joined the company, or at least definitely 10 or 15, all worked, pretty much as hard. And definitely at least not like 10, it's impossible to work 10 times harder. Right. And so, Jacob: 00:52:19And with less M with less glory, to be honest, Alex: 00:52:22With less boring. Yeah, Jacob: 00:52:23Don't, they don't get all the likes on follows on Twitter or whatever. Right. Alex: 00:52:27Exactly.Jacob: 00:52:28Try to distribute it, but yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's a grindy place to be for sure. Alex: 00:52:33Not getting the glory is like a, it's definitely a double edged sword because I think that that glory is also a responsibility. Right. But, yeah. And so basically we decided to try this approach where we wanted to do this exercise of distributing that equity as equally as possible. And so he set up a mathematical curve where whenever I make an offer, I just look at this math equation.What is the amount of equity that this next person gets. Right. and, and so, and we did that and basically projected out like, okay, each person gets to like, like if we reached a billion dollar company, each teammate should have an outcome of something like $10 million or more, right. Like something, something above that number.And it was really important to map that out because otherwise it can go forward. And, yeah, basically that, that was our exercise. I mean, basically they decided like, okay, can we, can we turn that around a little bit? And, the side effect that I like, so again, we're, we're early in this, like, we're, we're an eight person team we're in a 15 and it may turn out to be complicated.And again, we check in in a year, but what I like about it is it, did enable a completely transparent cap table. Right. And that's nice. Cause like, I don't think it's like maybe required, but I do like being able to show people like this is who owns this Jacob: 00:53:50Who owns with you? Right? Alex: 00:53:53Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so that's a positive side effect.But there's definitely it's complicated.Jacob: 00:54:00Yeah, I well, so David, my take is actually we do something very similar that's I like also like, so interestingly and, and inside, inside baseball, I think, it it's it's we, we did, something similar. No, we weren't as scientific with it for the first, like we had like a rough rule, but it was like the same, like X, each number, like the number like decreased, like, but this backoff curve, I've found it a very, it's a very hard problem to reason about, because you want, you want to think about this, you want the hundredth employee to have some skin in the game.Right. But you, you need to balance that with like, Hey, like come join this company that you've never heard of. And like probably has like worst benefits and you know, who knows it's going to be, it's going to be a mess. Right. And so like, finding that balance is really hard. and, and, you know, Looking at where we're at 30 people now, and the complexity definitely grows. And then I think also you start thinking about like recruiting leverage and like, what, you know, what, how much equity do I need to offer to be able to like, recruit these different types of roles and things like that. And your systems get more complex, but, but, but it's still, did you guys, did you do something special on special on founder equity to create like more, more room on the cap table?Or did you ha how many co-founders do you have?Alex: 00:55:11That's such a blurry line. I don't know if this is just me by name or no, like, well, is that the fourth person? Like, I mean,Jacob: 00:55:18I guess that's true. yeah. Alex: 00:55:20Yeah. Jacob: 00:55:21A, maybe that's a, it's a YC thing is where they're like very clear, like who are the co-founders and who are not But, but yeah, I, I agree. It's probably mostly a, a label.Alex: 00:55:32I feel like we have six co-founders. realistically there were, there were two of us that were like, thinking about this, you know, like that's not true. There were three of us that were thinking about this, like two years ago. so we, I, I called them co-founders and so we're all on this same plans.Like we have this graph where like, I am the first black. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, It's Jacob: 00:55:51Interesting. Alex: 00:55:53Like as much as possible. And so the hardest, this plan is definitely hardest on the first three people and it requires incredible cultural buy-in to that because it means that the outcome, like, I, I definitely worked on this for a lot longer than like the people who are joining today.Right. And like, it was stressful and hard, but here's, here's my, my, my personal take. And, is that I actually think the risk of doing startups and I feel like YC, you may agree with us. The risk of doing startups is like so much lower than most people realize for people who have the fortune of having a safety net.Right? Like if you're, if you, if you have a family and you don't have savings, then like, of course that is a, that is a risky proposition. for people who are relatively early or mid stage in their careers and they have savings and they're not actually gonna end up in a really dangerous spot, then I think that startups are almost always a net positive.If you really apply yourself, because the amount that you learn and grow by solving that many problems, only accelerates your career. Right. And so going back to the risk versus there's also opportunity costs, and then there's effort. I personally discount the risk for people who are fortunate enough to have that safe space.I discount that risk almost to zero, because I think that it's just such a, even this time around for me, my second startup, I have learned so much and it's been such a good life experience that even if it didn't work out tomorrow, net win. For sure. Sure.Jacob: 00:57:17Yeah. David: 00:57:18So part of the reason I brought it up was that I, when I joined and I've told Dick at this, when I joined revenue, this is way inside baseball. Goodness a open, an open enough on the podcast. But when I joined Romney, I thought more along the lines of you, Alex. Like I thought, well, why is Jacob getting so much more of the company and, and revenue Katz, like the first 10 employees and then the next 20 it's actually, it's very generous compared to the industry, like take a, did an incredible job and has been great with equity.So, but, but early on you, you're at a startup and you're like, wow, I'm working really hard. He's working really hard. Like why, why, why is the outcome going to be so different? But honestly, 18 months in and Jacob having raised a series B and like taking a lot of the hardship, like you as a founder are going to have to do things and be under amount of stress.And like, there, there really is. And I, I don't, it's probably somewhat true for maybe those, you know, those first early employees, how carry a little bit of that load, but the F but a founder just has to carry a different load. And so. Jacob: 00:58:29It's always going to fall on that first two, you know, whatever people on the cap table. Right. Whatever it's going to keep rolling until it hits you at some point. And, you know, as it gets bigger. yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I don't know. It's an, it's an interesting, this could very easily devolve into like the nature of capitalism and ownership.Right. Because it doesn't, it plays very much against this, like, you know, constant, like Marxists debate about like labor versus capital and like, what are the value and what is like value and like, cause you know, you like, you had this whatever period it was one month, one year or whatever. That's like such, you know, if you

Today, Den gives a crash course in sales, marketing, and the all-important (but severely underutilized) sales follow-up. This is quite possibly the most sales-inducing, profit-making episode Den has even done.Here's a sneak peek at what you'll hear:The knuckle-dragging mindset many video freelancers have about selling. Most video freelancers couldn't sell a life jacket to a drowning man, much less sell a prospective client on hiring their services. And, it's almost entirely because of this screwed up mindset described at 0:35A little-talked about reason why people struggle with sales. (And, no... this has nothing to do with lacking sales skills. - 1:20)A business statistic almost nobody tracks, but doing so can potentially help boost your business's sales. - 2:30A special type of business software (used by the retail, financial, hotel, and banking industries) that helps drive a business's profitability. (Two benefits: (1) this ingenious app can be used in almost any industry, and (2) it won't break the bank to buy and use.)The all-important sales process broken down Barney style. - 3:105 things you probably don't know about your business's sales process. (If you are on top of these 5 things, then you're most likely to be running a very profitable business. - 4:05)Hey… it sure would be nice to have a proven “done-for-you” sales script to convert more prospects into happily paying clients, wouldn't it? (But... that's just a flight of fancy, right? WRONG. Listen carefully at 4:55)The "3 out of 100" statistic EVERY business owner should know but probably doesn't. - 5:10A HUGE (and very profitable) opportunity in the video business industry right now that any video business owner can immediately take advantage of. (Here's what it is... and how you can jump on and profit handsomely from this gaping big opening in the industry. - 6:10)How to turn your sales process into a well-oiled machine instead of just winging it like most other video businesses. - 7:00The absolute best social media platform to generate high-quality leads for your video business. - 8:30The BIG secret to staying “top-of-mind” in your prospects and clients' minds. - 9:30The “9-word secret” to profitable follow-up. (If you're not implementing this in your marketing follow-up... you are leaving so much money on the table it's not funny. - 10:15)A shrewd (and very effective ) way to pick up new clients and new projects using social media. - 11:00A caveman simple way to dramatically increase your odds of turning prospects into paying clients. - 11:25A “tried and tested” way that can as much as double (sometimes even triple) your business's profits. (I know, I know, it sounds like hyperbole, but before you scoff, listen closely at 13:00)Connect with Den on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/denlennie/Get more great resources over at https://www.denlennie.com/Support the show (https://www.denlennie.com/free-training)

In this episode, we take a look at one of the key steps of infectious disease research, sample collection; exploring the challenges associated with the step and the solutions available to improve infectious disease research around the globe. Exploring the trials and tribulations of infectious disease sample collection with me is Stanislav Forman, Product Developer at Zymo Research (CA, USA). Stan explains the extreme environments in which sample collection often occurs; revealing the difficult transit and storage requirements – often involving cold chain logistics – that can derail infectious disease studies early on. Find out how key solutions to these problems have been successfully workshopped with the US military and have even been used in work with NASA to conduct safe sample collection in space. And discover just how successful these solutions can be when faced with the blazing wreckage of a transit vehicle… Contents Introductions: 00:00-01:20Key challenges of sample collection for infectious disease research: 01:20-02:30Additional challenges presented by COVID-19: 02:30-05:00The emergence of at-home testing: 05:00-07:00Established practices for sample collection and introducing DNA/RNA shield: 07:00-09:00Protecting DNA/RNA samples: 09:00-11:00Working with NASA on sample collection and protection in space: 11:00-14:20Protecting samples in a blazing transit van: 14:20-15:25The impact of inactivating and preserving sample collection products on infectious disease research: 15:30-16:30Areas for improvement in sample collection: 16:30-17:30Closing statements: 17:30-19:20

Today, Den gives one of his most valuable and practical business lessons to date. If you're looking to grow your video business, then you're in for a real treat. *Note-taking is advisable.Here's a sneak peek at what you'll hear:Den slaps down the popular - and annoying – “One Thing" question many business folks ask about business growth. - 1:05A dead giveaway for knowing an online course is probably "all foam and no beer". - 1:40The one thing almost all video business entrepreneurs are guilty of when it comes to growing their business. - 3:00President Kennedy's brilliant Man on The Moon "planning strategy" applied to growing a small business.A mini crash course in how to develop a business growth plan. (Hear Den do some surprising simple number crunching and strategizing that can be applied to any business at 6:00The "Once Every 90 Days" habit that ONLY successful business owners ever develop. - 9:00Why most business owners who have a "strategic business plan" might as well NOT have one. - 11:30Why Benjamin Franklin's famous "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail" quote should be taken as gospel, especially concerning business growth. - 13:00Connect with Den on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/denlennie/Get more great resources over at https://www.denlennie.com/Support the show (https://www.denlennie.com/free-training)

About our Guest:https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/david.builgil.htmlPapers Mentioned in this Episode. Buil-Gil, D., Lord, N., & Barrett, E. (2021). The Dynamics of Business, Cybersecurity and Cyber-Victimization: Foregrounding the Internal Guardian in Prevention. Victims & Offenders, 16(3), 286-315. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15564886.2020.1814468Leukfeldt, E. R., & Yar, M. (2016). Applying routine activity theory to cybercrime: A theoretical and empirical analysis. Deviant Behavior , 37(3), 263–280.https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01639625.2015.1012409Miró Llinares, F., & Johnson, S. D. (2017). Cybercrime and place: Applying environmental criminology to crimes in cyberspace. In G. J. N.Bruinsma & S. D.Johnson (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of environmental criminology (pp. 883–906). Oxford University Press.https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190279707.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190279707-e-39Yar, M. (2005). The novelty of ‘cybercrime': An assessment in light of routine activity theory. European Journal of Criminology , 2(4), 407–427.https://doi.org/10.1177/147737080556056Cyber Security Breaches Survey:https://beta.ukdataservice.ac.uk/datacatalogue/studies/study?id=8638 (2020)https://beta.ukdataservice.ac.uk/datacatalogue/studies/study?id=8480 (2019)https://beta.ukdataservice.ac.uk/datacatalogue/studies/study?id=8406 (2018) Other:The except at the start is from a 1960s film on Safety by general Motors that is part of the Prelinger Archive, a most valuable resource and can be found here:https://archive.org/details/0257_Safest_Township_Anywhere_The_M04696_11_00_44_00The track segment at the end of the episode was made with a little Korg NTS-1.  What a wonderful time to be alive, when such things are obtainable and can make being stuck inside for fear of infection so much more bearable.   

A brand new What The Hell Everything podcast with Smitty had him talking shit about all kinds of stuff. As always, all sorts of NSFW language follows...Intro 00:00The internet went out and we're all going to die 01:10The USA Today is defending their 1st amendment rights against the FBI 02:25Was Microsoft censoring their search engines to remove the "tank man" image from "Tiananmen Square" Bing searches? 04:05The mystery illness on Tik Tok is just a cold 07:25A real "Mystery Brain Syndrome" in Canada is baffling doctors, and the start of the zombie apocalypse 07:25Think you're right? Chances are you're wrong. 08:55A naked chick destroyed the Outback in Ocala FL 10:05Somebody invented an electric jetpack, you guys! 12:00Cavemen danced for hours in 'psychedlic trances" and duh 13:45Some Naked & Afraid contestant had a terrible injury to his junk. And is staying in the game 15:05Jeff Bezos is going to space 16:05Elon Musk's neighbors hate Space X 16:50Bald Eagles attacks in Idaho have left 50 lambs dead 18:10Rob Zombie is making The Munsters 19:05The guy who tried to kill Reagan just wrote some country songs and has a YouTube channel 20:15A new 420 Break - Guys Need To Stop Being Creepy & Why Smitty's Staying Single 22:55Dig the podcast? Become a subscriber. Wanna become a Patreon? Click the link https://www.patreon.com/we3smithsWant to support Smitty's Five Year Plan without the Patreon rigamarole? Click the link https://www.gofundme.com/manage/smittys-fiveyear-planDon't know what the Five Year Plan is? Click the link https://youtu.be/KlmIxK1wUToThanks for checking it out, and thanks for sharing in the journey!Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/Smittydicks)

Today, Den chats to a man who's cracked the code to making mucho dinero selling stock images. This man's name is Chuck Fishbein. Chuck runs a successful video and photography business called Duck you, but his real genius lies in his ability to make passive income from sites such as Getty Images and Shutterstock. And, in this interview, Chuck willingly spills the beans on what it takes to make a bundle of money selling stock images.Here's a sneak peek at what you'll hear:An amusing tale of how Chuck unwittingly hoodwinked his clients into think he was a genius photographer even though he was a complete hack at the time. - 2:00Q. What do the artists U2 and Garth Brooks have in common? A. They both worked with Chuck in the early 80s. - 3:00A little-talked-about “trait” that almost all high-performance athletes, artists, and entrepreneurs possess that makes their body of work stand head and shoulders above their competition. - 6:00A juicy tip for filmmakers who are thinking of making some extra bucks with stock images. - 9:30The ONLY two types of stock images you should bother creating. FACT: All other stock images that don't fit into one or both of these two categories aren't worth a damn! - 12:30Quite possibly the best ever advice on how to become successful at what you do. Listen up at 14:15 folks.A Getty Images "marketing trick" that can bring hordes of eager-to-buy prospects to your uploaded Getty images. - 15:00The unglamorous (and extremely banal) side to selling images on sites like Getty Images and Shutterstock. This might be as boring as doing your taxes on a Friday night, but make no mistake, this insider information can make or break your stock photos' success - 21:00A clever “trick” for turning tedious and deathly dull tasks into fun activities you actually look forward to doing. If you're bit of a procrastinator, this could be the solution. - 21:103 cameras NEVER to use when uploading images to sites like Getty Images or Shutterstock. (And, two cameras that you should use. - 22:40)A mindset “tweak” for shooting images that can make your stock images far more likely to be bought and used for a documentary or film. -23:30Chuck's honest-to-God opinion on shooting in 4K. - 28:40A “moonlight over Manhattan” image will sell better than a generic windmill or boardwalk image, right? Wrong! (Hear what Chuck has to say about this at 32:10)*How to sell stock images without getting your arse sued off. - 33:50The "almost-too-good-to-be-true" story behind how Chuck's business name "DuckYou" came into existence. - 35:00Connect with Den on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/denlennie/Get more great resources over at https://www.denlennie.com/Support the show (https://www.denlennie.com/free-training)

Kevin and Thom today on Washington Football's first day of mandatory mini-camp. Chase Young was back after being the only player on the team to not show up to OTAs. At 15:00The guys talked about whether or not they believe Ron Rivera's first full summer of camps/preseason games will produce a legitimate quarterback competition between Ryan Fitzpatrick, Taylor Heinicke, and Kyle Allen. Kevin thinks the "Greek Freak" isn't good enough in the playoffs. They also discussed the Roger Federer non-injury withdrawal from the French Open on Sunday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode 51: On our first hour of the show, we have an Amazon story that roars like a lion. We have a special guest who will talk about putting together a documentary or movie with industry technology secrets.  We have a tech company stopping the testing of Marijuana in its standard drug test, Netflix to offer video game subscriptions. We have a company making a comeback called “Atari” that some of you have might have heard about in the 80's. They are back – with new plans and hardware releasing soon in a segment that is weeks ahead of the mainstream media.  We have Mike's Mesmerizing Moment brought to us by StoriCoffee® along with our NFT and Whiskey Tastings, all in the first hour packed with technology information.On the second hour, we have our “Letters” segment reading this week's email scams and funny phishing attempts. We have a feature segment with Jason Sherman, the award-winning filmmaker, published author, tech startup expert, and journalist. We continue talking about leaders in technology on the [Stories You Didn't Know] segment that we ran out of time for last week. We are talking about with us talking about Satya Nadella, an Indian-American business executive and chief executive officer (CEO) of Microsoft. “Welcome to TechTime Radio with Nathan Mumm, the show that makes you go "Hummmm" technology news of the week for June 5th - 11th, 2021.   The radio show for the everyday common person, that will impact your future with insightful segments, weeks ahead of the mainstream media.” --- [Top Stories in 5 Minutes]: Starts at 8:29 Netflix is looking into video games to keep subscriptions growing. https://tinyurl.com/4u2fzdmjAmazon is a roaring Lion, sitting back on a tracked break to chill and listen to some groovy tunes The A-Z company is making huge waves this week with purchases and changes to HR policies.   https://tinyurl.com/2vzz3zfk   https://tinyurl.com/7uwkpydrCharlie Bit Me NFT sale: Brothers to pay for university with auction money they received.  https://tinyurl.com/e78tucw--- [Ask the Expert]: Starts at 20:53How to create a successful documentary our guest Jason Sherman is a successful award-winning filmmaker, tech startup expert, and journalist. He explains the process of a great documentary and how to get one published.--- [Gamer Time]: Starts at 41:18Atari is back with the AtariVCS (the console formerly known as the Ataribox) is a blend of nostalgia and next-gen gaming all the details before its release. https://tinyurl.com/tdwvryks--- [Mike's Mesmerizing Moment brought to us by StoriCoffee®]: Starts at 50:38Everyone thinks everything is easy --- [Pick of the Day]: Starts at 53:27 Scratch Distillery Edmonds' Own Whiskey | 83 Proof | $69 Nathan: Thumbs Up | Mike: Thumbs UpEpisode 50: Hour 2 - Starts at 58:35 --- [Letters]: Starts at 1:08:06Nathan reads this week's emails scams sent to him--- [Ask the Expert]: Starts at 1:19:00The tools and technology behind making (or producing) a great film. our guest Jason Sherman is a successful entrepreneur, award-winning filmmaker. He explains the technology and software to make a documentary and get it published.--- [Stories You Didn't Know]: Starts at 1:46:28 Satya Nadella, an Indian-American business executive and chief executive officer (CEO) of Microsoft is explored in this segment.Podcorn: Podcast influencer marketplace The leading podcast marketplace. Connecting unique voices to unique brands for native advertising.

FULL TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODEProvided by Otter.aiEoin Trainor  00:00The views and opinions expressed in Eye on the Triangle do not represent WKNC or the student media. Eoin Trainor  00:34Good evening Raleigh and welcome to this week's Eye on the Triangle an NC State student produced news show on WKNC 88.1 FM HD-1 Raleigh. I'm Eoin Trainor. On tonight's episode, you'll hear my interview with Brooke Dickhart, Brooke is the executive director of the Joel Fund Wake Forest nonprofit that serves veterans. The Joel Fund recently received a federal grant to implement one of its programs at Walter Reed Medical Center. We talked about that, the Joel funds mission and much more. Afterwards is Elizabeth Esser's interview with Dr. Paul Kaloostian, a neurosurgeon and author. Elizabeth talked to him about the effects of stress on college students cognitive functioning. But first you have a quick story from the North Carolina News Service enjoy. Nadia Ramlagan  01:15North Carolina is ramping up plans to lease offshore wind-energy areas to developers, as the Biden administration expresses support for those efforts. The green light comes one year before a decade-long Trump-era moratorium on offshore development is slated to go into effect – on July 1st of next year. Despite the pending moratorium, which includes wind-energy, Democratic Congresswoman Deborah Ross of Raleigh says the state is poised to be a leader in offshore power generation and manufacturing. Deborah Ross  01:43And, with a bipartisan effort in our delegation to seek the ability to harness the best offshore wind in the country – and associated research and technology that will go with it – it will benefit North Carolina for decades to come. Nadia Ramlagan  02:02Earlier this year, Ross sent a letter signed by a bipartisan group of North Carolina lawmakers urging the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to hold lease sales for two of the state's existing wind-energy areas in federal waters off the coast of Wilmington. It's unlikely the Trump moratorium on offshore development would be overturned in such a divided Congress. But Jaime Simmons of the Southeastern Wind Coalition says the most recent move is a sign the Biden administration is willing to take prompt action before the moratorium begins. Jaime Simmons  02:32We're in a unique position here in North Carolina, because we already have what's called wind energy areas identified. It gives a signal to those manufacturers; it gives them the certainty that they need to start making those investments. Nadia Ramlagan  02:47Director of North Carolina Political Affairs for the Environmental Defense Fund David Kelly points out the state already has a reputation as a clean-energy leader and a hub for clean tech. David Kelly  02:58It's reassuring to know that our state's leaders in Congress recognize the opportunity that offshore wind, emerging as a industry in the United States, offers. And that they're taking action to make sure North Carolina is well-positioned to compete for wind-energy jobs. Nadia Ramlagan  03:13Offshore wind is expected to create a 70-billion-dollar supply chain and tens of thousands of new jobs in the United States by 2030. For North Carolina News Service, I'm Nadia Ramlagan. Eoin Trainor  03:31This is Eoin Trainer with WKNC 88.1's Eye on the Triangle and I'm here with Brooke Dickhart, the executive director of the Joel Fund fund, a veterans nonprofit based in Wake Forest. Brooke, welcome to the program.  Brooke Dickhart  03:41Thank you so much for having me.  Eoin Trainor  03:43To start, would you mind telling us a little bit about what the Joel Fund does? Brooke Dickhart  03:48Absolutely. So the Joel Fund helps connect veterans to their communities. We do this through three main programs, we have a resource connection where we will work one on one with veterans and their family members to connect them to the services that they're looking for. We have operation art, which is our art classes for veterans and their family members. And then operation furnish, which is a furniture program locally where we can find gently used donated items for veterans in need. Eoin Trainor  04:20And I've heard that you have a new program of expressive writing classes as part of Operation Art would you mind telling us a little bit about that? Brooke Dickhart  04:27Absolutely. So this program was something that I started in honor of my dad because I after he passed away I found sheets of yellow legal paper where he had tried to write his story and I figured if he had trouble doing it then others probably do also. And so we started working with a with an amazing local writer to develop a class we also worked with a couple of veterans from the Vietnam Veterans of America to develop this class and we launched it a little over a year ago. And it has been a very successful program for us. Eoin Trainor  05:07And how have the veterans and their families who have taken the course responded, did they find it helpful? Brooke Dickhart  05:13Absolutely. They even asked us to bring in a therapist for the class. So our classes, we often say that there it's community therapeutic arts, we're not offering art therapy, however, with writing that can trigger a lot of emotions and that sort of thing. And the veterans who helped us develop the curriculum, really wanted there to be a therapist, as the safety net in the class, so that if they were writing about their time in the service, that they could do it in a safe and secure environment. And so because of those things that we have in place, they have really loved the class and have been able to write freely and feel that they can do it safely. Eoin Trainor  05:59And you recently received grant support for the program, what does that enable you to do anything new?  Brooke Dickhart  06:05Yes, so we just recently, were selected from a national search to do a writing program at Walter Reed Medical Military or Military Medical Center out of Bethesda, Maryland, to bring our writing program to their employee wellness program. So we work with people who work in the hospital, some of them are veterans, they are all caregivers, because of the population that they serve. We've even had a couple active duty soldiers who called in from overseas, you know, the technology that we have with virtual, you know, conference calls, and that sort of thing has really been our silver lining story, because we can now reach more veterans and family members across the world because of this technology, it doesn't have to just be centered to our area. And that has enabled us to take our writing program and expand it and bring it to the people at Walter Reed, which is been amazing. Eoin Trainor  07:09Then what was the transition between Wake Forest and Walter Reed like? Was there any kind of new challenges that you encountered? Brooke Dickhart  07:16Oh, yes, for sure. It's a, it's a much different dynamic when you're offering a writing class for people who work together. And in the military, you know, there's a hierarchy hierarchy. So there's a lot of considerations that we did not anticipate that we've had to navigate but they have renewed our contract. And so we're working through all that with Walter Reed. And they're it's their program is called creative forces. Creative forces is art therapy that is offered, I think it's um, 10 sites across the country, on bases, and then at Walter Reed. And so we've been working with the with the folks at creative forces and Walter Reed to make sure that the program is just right for their for the students that we are getting from them. Eoin Trainor  08:06And then the instructor assigns writing prompts, what are these like? And can you give us some examples of what some of them have been? Brooke Dickhart  08:16So the the writing prompts vary every week, and every class and that is based on who's in the class, and you know, what's going on around us during the time. But one example that I can give you that was for this week was described in vivid language, someone you deeply cared for who served our country, and his, and who is no longer with us. So that was their writing prompt heading into Memorial Day weekend. Eoin Trainor  08:48And if you don't mind, telling viewers, what kind of stuff if you know, did some of the veterans write for that one? Brooke Dickhart  08:55That I haven't seen yet actually, they they will be working on it for Actually, today. They have class today. So I haven't seen the writing yet.  Eoin Trainor  09:05And, did COVID kind of create any unique mental health related challenges for the veterans in your programs? And did you have to adjust any of them at all? Brooke Dickhart  09:18Absolutely. In fact, it was a very scary time for us as an organization that serves veterans, so many of the veterans that we work with come to us as direct referrals from the rec therapy department at the VA. So a lot of them are working through some mental illness and isolation is not a great thing for that population. And so we had to pivot immediately and figure out how to continue to serve them. And because one aspect of our classes is creating this sense of community, and connecting veterans and family members with their peers, we knew we needed to continue to bring that same feeling to these men and women, it's not just a class, we often say that art is just the vehicle. They do leave our classes learning an amazing skill. And they are taught by extremely, very well trained individuals. But we also mentor our instructors on military culture and how to create this feeling of community. And so we had to work very hard to continue to create that online. Of course, it's not a perfect match, but it has still been very effective and before the holidays, there was a group in fact, it was one of our writing classes got together and had a zoom holiday party, one class dressed up at Halloween. So we've really been able to still create this, this feeling of community even though we are online. Eoin Trainor  09:46And are veterans in the course, they're able to kind of share and talk about their writing and their experiences, correct? Brooke Dickhart  10:57Yes, they do love to share it's it's a very intimate group. Usually we have around five students give or take, you know, one or two more, it depends on you know, the day or the time, but they, they will always they have the option to share if they don't personally want to share the instructor will share for them but there is there is under no circumstance are they required to share. One thing that we are going to be doing very soon is now that things are starting to open up and we're able to get together in person again, we are planning to do a reading where the people who are in our class can meet in person, those who are local, and invite family members and friends and they will read their stories that they have written. Such a big part of it is being able to share in all of our classes, whether it's photography, or drawing or painting, they really take some pride in being able to share what they've created with their family members. Eoin Trainor  12:00Thanks for coming on. Brooke Dickhart  12:02Thank you, I really appreciate the opportunity. Elizabeth Esser  12:09I'm Elizabeth Esser with WKNC 88.1 Eye on the Triangle. Joining us today is renowned neurosurgeon, author and speaker Dr. Paul Kaloostian. Dr. Kaloostian is a Board Certified neurosurgeon and the author of numerous books, including the young neurosurgeon, lessons from my patients, from the eyes of a doctor, and my surgical cases told in poems. He's here today to discuss stress and how it affects the brain functions of college students. Dr. Kaloostian, thank you for joining us today on Eye on the Triangle to get us started. What exactly is stress? And what's going on in our brains when we experience it? Dr. Paul Kaloostian  12:49Yeah, that's so that's the that's the million dollar question. So stress is a essentially state of being where your brain and and body communicate in a certain specific way based on the hormones and neurotransmitters that are secreted at that time. And so we've all experienced it, we've all experienced stress, we all really know what what it is because we've we've been through it we experience on a daily basis. And certainly college students experience it, you know, because of everything they're going through in school and others. So but it's but it's really a process that is really regulated by the brain itself. There are specific areas that do that. And these areas secrete hormones and neurotransmitters through our bloodstream that then make our other areas of our body realize, hmm, something's not right, I should feel a certain way, which is stress. So that's what really happens during that stressful moment, or moments of our lives. Elizabeth Esser  14:07And can stress have lasting effects on our brains and bodies? And if so, what does that look like? Dr. Paul Kaloostian  14:14Absolutely. And once again, you know, similar to what I just said before, we've all experienced it. We've had moments where, let's say we're in a particular situation and  we've been in that situation before. So our minds go back to that prior time or times where we've been in that situation. And that makes us nervous and stressed. You know, for example, public speaking, let's say you've, you gave a talk once and something bad happened. I don't know. Maybe someone laughed  at you or you said a word wrong or whatever. And so the next time or next few times after that, you can always remember that particular event where you had a tough time right? So that the the memory center of the brain the hippocampus, We call it is super important in this whole stress response. And so there are permanent features because obviously years later we remember these episodes way back early on in the past. And and so the brain really remembers what had happened in the past so certainly there are permanent aspects to it and there are actually genetic components to it. So stress can affect your actual DNA, believe it or not through a variety of responses, but often through repeated experiences of stress over time. The common thing is, let's say someone you know, a young child, you know, witnesses domestic violence between the parents or some multiple arguments between parents or others. If that happens, often, what has been found is that there's genetic alterations, so that that particular child really, experiences stress a different way, if they see that particular episode. And it's based on all these neurotransmitters that are secreted that affect proteins that are expressed on our surfaces of ourselves. So certainly, there are permanent aspects in many, many ways, as I just mentioned. Elizabeth Esser  16:17And college students undergo a lot of stress for a multitude of reasons. are college aged people differently affected by stress compared to other age groups? And if so, in what ways? Dr. Paul Kaloostian  16:30Well, I think everyone experiences stress differently. And I don't know if I would break it down by age. And I don't know if there are any specific studies that do that. But I think the, the process of experiencing stress in handling stress is really a human trait, meaning, it probably isn't going to be very, very different among all of us, we probably all feel somewhat similar in, in different situations, and how we react to that particular stressor in our life. But certainly, you know, I've done a lot of schooling to become a neurosurgeon, I've been in school for a long, long time, and then training for a long, long time. That comes with a lot of difficult times. I mean, there are a lot of great times to but there's a lot of difficult times, that certainly are stressful. And I remember studying for finals, midterm exams, just all of that, I mean, I'm so thankful that's over. But that certainly was tough. But you know, I want also your audience to know that stress can also be very good, there's, there's good stress, there's kind of a mediocre, or a medium level of stress. And then there's toxic stress. So there's, there's really a variety of different types of stress in the body. And so and I would say that, it's actually a very healthy thing to have some stress in our lives, because it, it actually motivates us to do things we likely wouldn't do if we didn't have this little push, or this little heart rate increase, you know, to get us doing these things. But But I think, you know, college students, they experience, a significant amount of stress. And I think that, you know, most colleges, most universities, have environments where, where students are able to really tap into to look for help to look for methods of de stressing, I think that's very valuable in, in the university setting. Certainly, you know, the places I've went, those those things were present and very helpful. But, but I think most of us experience stress quite similarly. Elizabeth Esser  19:09So like everyone, college students have experienced many new situations in the last year due to COVID. You know, we've switched from in person classes to online learning. And students have been, have experienced isolation due to social distancing, among other things. How have these changes maybe affected stress levels or mental health as a whole in students Dr. Paul Kaloostian  19:38Significantly increased these these issues. I mean, and I see it in many of my patients, I would say, almost daily. I can't tell you how many patients I see that that tell me about all the difficult times that they're going through since COVID. And actually, I think we've, we've we've coined a new phrase post COVID stress disorder, kinda like a post traumatic stress disorder, but it's a post COVID stress disorder, it's really becoming the kind of the new theme now, among medical providers and psychologists. And, I mean, just as you can imagine, Elizabeth, I mean, just just picture, you know, losing someone close to you, and you're not able to go to the hospital to see them. And they're not doing well, and some may pass, you know, just just that situation alone. Imagine that, you know, let's say someone closest to you, you know, how do you handle that, you know, you're just hearing them on the phone, you know, and, you know, and that's the, that's just one situation, imagine other types of situations during  COVID, where people have lost their jobs that, you know, literally companies have fallen under, and people have been fired, literally fired, lost their jobs. I know many people where that's happened to, and, and they have no income, no income source, they have kids, they have grandkids, they have mortgages, etc. Imagine that stress. There's so many, so many different situations, with COVID, where people weren't prepared. And, and how can you be, you know, this is something out of the blue and, and it has really dramatically, unfortunately, affected people's lives in such a negative way. And, but like I said, I think this this disorder is really very important nowadays, you know, for all providers, and psychologists seeing patients, even nurses, others, you're going to see this, that's probably going to be be seen in many, many patients for many years to come. It's a very significant problem. And it just is difficult to to really deal with just given the acuity of COVID how it happened just so quickly, so suddenly. And, and just the psychological component to, to dealing with all of these stresses all at once, I think is is compounding The, the the difficulty of really treating, treating this. So I think it's it's very valuable to really understand what's going on in people's lives, especially as providers to really try and help them best where we can. Elizabeth Esser  22:46Right? Well, absolutely. We've all gone through this very traumatic experience. So I guess, going off of that, we're now at this point where we're sort of transitioning back into normal life, you know, students are returning back to campus this coming semester. Do you have any tips on how students can cope with stress as we make this transition? Dr. Paul Kaloostian  23:15Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are a lot of healthy ways to, to deal with with stress in your life. And I know there are a lot of studies identifying exercise as a very, very critical means of de stressing and, and I won't go into the specific mechanisms of why that that is so but but certainly, you can understand it through exercise, there's a better blood flow throughout the body, because the heart is not pumping stronger, and our muscles are all squeezing the blood back to the heart. And so there's more, there's more blood supply to important areas of our brain and heart and other parts of our body that that allow us to, to clear our minds to have that energy to think beyond the stress and to move forward towards solutions. So I think exercise is just so so invaluable. Sleeping is very critical. Most studies recommend probably about six hours of uninterrupted sleep a day. I think that is fair and valid. Sleep is essentially really the one of the only ways our body can recharge itself. And that's the way I think of sleep. I think of sleep as kind of like charging your phone or charging you know, whatever you need to charge. It's that means of recharging the system or rebooting the system. And during the course of it, a typical day for a college student and others that they can beat you down so to speak just with all the activities that occur both physically and psychologically, you get tired, you get beaten down, your brain is injured, your body's injured. And so that sleep is just so valuable for those six hours or so, to really help those areas of the brain and body just heal, so that it can then do the same thing the following day in a, in a safe way. So I think sleep is so critical. Obviously, counseling, there are and should be, at least at most universities, I'm sure North Carolina State that has methods of seeking help, psychologically, someone to just speak to perhaps a counselor or psychologist others. And I think that is great. I don't think there's any negative stigma attached to that, I think more people should do that. And, you know, we're all social beings, we all need communication needs social interaction. And so I think that's, that's crucial to be able to communicate with someone who's trained to, to help others deal with with tough situations, so that you can then, by speaking, work through those problems that have tangible solutions. I think those are some of the solutions that I would recommend. Elizabeth.  Elizabeth Esser  26:28Great. Thank you so much. And then I guess, finally, is there anything else that you'd like to add? Regarding the topic of stress and college students? what you're working on or anything else? Dr. Paul Kaloostian  26:40Well, you know, I am a writer. So I think writing, you know, would be a fantastic way of de stressing, it's one of the one of the reasons why I have kind of partook in, in, in writing is because it really enabled me to, to de stress. As you could imagine, I just see so many sick, sick patients, gunshot wounds to the head and assaults to the head and spine. And I have to fix this and, and after a while, after many, many 1000s of these cases, I needed to just have an outlet. So I think for me, poetry or in writing, were my methods of doing that. And it really was super helpful. So I would recommend that, you know, the students in college university. Right. And it could be anything could be short poems, like haikus, or it could be a memoir of what they've experienced in their life. I'm sure people would love to read about that. And I think through that, you can get these these emotions out of your system. And I think that'll help you be a little bit more calm and collected and able to tackle any of the next challenges that come your way. Elizabeth Esser  27:56Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Dr. Kaloostian. The work you do is so important, and it was truly a pleasure speaking with you.  Dr. Paul Kaloostian  28:03Pleasures all mine. Thank you. Eoin Trainor  28:09And that is it for this week's Eye on the Triangle. Thanks for tuning in. If you have any questions, comments, ideas, or like to get involved with the Eye on the Triangle team, shoot us an email at public affairs@wknc.org. We'd love to hear from you. Stay tuned for your regular programming. We'll see you next time.

FULL TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODEProvided by Otter.aiEoin Trainor  00:00The views and opinions expressed in Eye on the Triangle do not represent WKNC or the student media. Eoin Trainor  00:34Good evening Raleigh and welcome to this week's Eye on the Triangle an NC State student produced news show on WKNC 88.1 FM HD-1 Raleigh. I'm Eoin Trainor. On tonight's episode, you'll hear my interview with Brooke Dickhart, Brooke is the executive director of the Joel Fund Wake Forest nonprofit that serves veterans. The Joel Fund recently received a federal grant to implement one of its programs at Walter Reed Medical Center. We talked about that, the Joel funds mission and much more. Afterwards is Elizabeth Esser's interview with Dr. Paul Kaloostian, a neurosurgeon and author. Elizabeth talked to him about the effects of stress on college students cognitive functioning. But first you have a quick story from the North Carolina News Service enjoy. Nadia Ramlagan  01:15North Carolina is ramping up plans to lease offshore wind-energy areas to developers, as the Biden administration expresses support for those efforts. The green light comes one year before a decade-long Trump-era moratorium on offshore development is slated to go into effect – on July 1st of next year. Despite the pending moratorium, which includes wind-energy, Democratic Congresswoman Deborah Ross of Raleigh says the state is poised to be a leader in offshore power generation and manufacturing. Deborah Ross  01:43And, with a bipartisan effort in our delegation to seek the ability to harness the best offshore wind in the country – and associated research and technology that will go with it – it will benefit North Carolina for decades to come. Nadia Ramlagan  02:02Earlier this year, Ross sent a letter signed by a bipartisan group of North Carolina lawmakers urging the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to hold lease sales for two of the state's existing wind-energy areas in federal waters off the coast of Wilmington. It's unlikely the Trump moratorium on offshore development would be overturned in such a divided Congress. But Jaime Simmons of the Southeastern Wind Coalition says the most recent move is a sign the Biden administration is willing to take prompt action before the moratorium begins. Jaime Simmons  02:32We're in a unique position here in North Carolina, because we already have what's called wind energy areas identified. It gives a signal to those manufacturers; it gives them the certainty that they need to start making those investments. Nadia Ramlagan  02:47Director of North Carolina Political Affairs for the Environmental Defense Fund David Kelly points out the state already has a reputation as a clean-energy leader and a hub for clean tech. David Kelly  02:58It's reassuring to know that our state's leaders in Congress recognize the opportunity that offshore wind, emerging as a industry in the United States, offers. And that they're taking action to make sure North Carolina is well-positioned to compete for wind-energy jobs. Nadia Ramlagan  03:13Offshore wind is expected to create a 70-billion-dollar supply chain and tens of thousands of new jobs in the United States by 2030. For North Carolina News Service, I'm Nadia Ramlagan. Eoin Trainor  03:31This is Eoin Trainer with WKNC 88.1's Eye on the Triangle and I'm here with Brooke Dickhart, the executive director of the Joel Fund fund, a veterans nonprofit based in Wake Forest. Brooke, welcome to the program.  Brooke Dickhart  03:41Thank you so much for having me.  Eoin Trainor  03:43To start, would you mind telling us a little bit about what the Joel Fund does? Brooke Dickhart  03:48Absolutely. So the Joel Fund helps connect veterans to their communities. We do this through three main programs, we have a resource connection where we will work one on one with veterans and their family members to connect them to the services that they're looking for. We have operation art, which is our art classes for veterans and their family members. And then operation furnish, which is a furniture program locally where we can find gently used donated items for veterans in need. Eoin Trainor  04:20And I've heard that you have a new program of expressive writing classes as part of Operation Art would you mind telling us a little bit about that? Brooke Dickhart  04:27Absolutely. So this program was something that I started in honor of my dad because I after he passed away I found sheets of yellow legal paper where he had tried to write his story and I figured if he had trouble doing it then others probably do also. And so we started working with a with an amazing local writer to develop a class we also worked with a couple of veterans from the Vietnam Veterans of America to develop this class and we launched it a little over a year ago. And it has been a very successful program for us. Eoin Trainor  05:07And how have the veterans and their families who have taken the course responded, did they find it helpful? Brooke Dickhart  05:13Absolutely. They even asked us to bring in a therapist for the class. So our classes, we often say that there it's community therapeutic arts, we're not offering art therapy, however, with writing that can trigger a lot of emotions and that sort of thing. And the veterans who helped us develop the curriculum, really wanted there to be a therapist, as the safety net in the class, so that if they were writing about their time in the service, that they could do it in a safe and secure environment. And so because of those things that we have in place, they have really loved the class and have been able to write freely and feel that they can do it safely. Eoin Trainor  05:59And you recently received grant support for the program, what does that enable you to do anything new?  Brooke Dickhart  06:05Yes, so we just recently, were selected from a national search to do a writing program at Walter Reed Medical Military or Military Medical Center out of Bethesda, Maryland, to bring our writing program to their employee wellness program. So we work with people who work in the hospital, some of them are veterans, they are all caregivers, because of the population that they serve. We've even had a couple active duty soldiers who called in from overseas, you know, the technology that we have with virtual, you know, conference calls, and that sort of thing has really been our silver lining story, because we can now reach more veterans and family members across the world because of this technology, it doesn't have to just be centered to our area. And that has enabled us to take our writing program and expand it and bring it to the people at Walter Reed, which is been amazing. Eoin Trainor  07:09Then what was the transition between Wake Forest and Walter Reed like? Was there any kind of new challenges that you encountered? Brooke Dickhart  07:16Oh, yes, for sure. It's a, it's a much different dynamic when you're offering a writing class for people who work together. And in the military, you know, there's a hierarchy hierarchy. So there's a lot of considerations that we did not anticipate that we've had to navigate but they have renewed our contract. And so we're working through all that with Walter Reed. And they're it's their program is called creative forces. Creative forces is art therapy that is offered, I think it's um, 10 sites across the country, on bases, and then at Walter Reed. And so we've been working with the with the folks at creative forces and Walter Reed to make sure that the program is just right for their for the students that we are getting from them. Eoin Trainor  08:06And then the instructor assigns writing prompts, what are these like? And can you give us some examples of what some of them have been? Brooke Dickhart  08:16So the the writing prompts vary every week, and every class and that is based on who's in the class, and you know, what's going on around us during the time. But one example that I can give you that was for this week was described in vivid language, someone you deeply cared for who served our country, and his, and who is no longer with us. So that was their writing prompt heading into Memorial Day weekend. Eoin Trainor  08:48And if you don't mind, telling viewers, what kind of stuff if you know, did some of the veterans write for that one? Brooke Dickhart  08:55That I haven't seen yet actually, they they will be working on it for Actually, today. They have class today. So I haven't seen the writing yet.  Eoin Trainor  09:05And, did COVID kind of create any unique mental health related challenges for the veterans in your programs? And did you have to adjust any of them at all? Brooke Dickhart  09:18Absolutely. In fact, it was a very scary time for us as an organization that serves veterans, so many of the veterans that we work with come to us as direct referrals from the rec therapy department at the VA. So a lot of them are working through some mental illness and isolation is not a great thing for that population. And so we had to pivot immediately and figure out how to continue to serve them. And because one aspect of our classes is creating this sense of community, and connecting veterans and family members with their peers, we knew we needed to continue to bring that same feeling to these men and women, it's not just a class, we often say that art is just the vehicle. They do leave our classes learning an amazing skill. And they are taught by extremely, very well trained individuals. But we also mentor our instructors on military culture and how to create this feeling of community. And so we had to work very hard to continue to create that online. Of course, it's not a perfect match, but it has still been very effective and before the holidays, there was a group in fact, it was one of our writing classes got together and had a zoom holiday party, one class dressed up at Halloween. So we've really been able to still create this, this feeling of community even though we are online. Eoin Trainor  09:46And are veterans in the course, they're able to kind of share and talk about their writing and their experiences, correct? Brooke Dickhart  10:57Yes, they do love to share it's it's a very intimate group. Usually we have around five students give or take, you know, one or two more, it depends on you know, the day or the time, but they, they will always they have the option to share if they don't personally want to share the instructor will share for them but there is there is under no circumstance are they required to share. One thing that we are going to be doing very soon is now that things are starting to open up and we're able to get together in person again, we are planning to do a reading where the people who are in our class can meet in person, those who are local, and invite family members and friends and they will read their stories that they have written. Such a big part of it is being able to share in all of our classes, whether it's photography, or drawing or painting, they really take some pride in being able to share what they've created with their family members. Eoin Trainor  12:00Thanks for coming on. Brooke Dickhart  12:02Thank you, I really appreciate the opportunity. Elizabeth Esser  12:09I'm Elizabeth Esser with WKNC 88.1 Eye on the Triangle. Joining us today is renowned neurosurgeon, author and speaker Dr. Paul Kaloostian. Dr. Kaloostian is a Board Certified neurosurgeon and the author of numerous books, including the young neurosurgeon, lessons from my patients, from the eyes of a doctor, and my surgical cases told in poems. He's here today to discuss stress and how it affects the brain functions of college students. Dr. Kaloostian, thank you for joining us today on Eye on the Triangle to get us started. What exactly is stress? And what's going on in our brains when we experience it? Dr. Paul Kaloostian  12:49Yeah, that's so that's the that's the million dollar question. So stress is a essentially state of being where your brain and and body communicate in a certain specific way based on the hormones and neurotransmitters that are secreted at that time. And so we've all experienced it, we've all experienced stress, we all really know what what it is because we've we've been through it we experience on a daily basis. And certainly college students experience it, you know, because of everything they're going through in school and others. So but it's but it's really a process that is really regulated by the brain itself. There are specific areas that do that. And these areas secrete hormones and neurotransmitters through our bloodstream that then make our other areas of our body realize, hmm, something's not right, I should feel a certain way, which is stress. So that's what really happens during that stressful moment, or moments of our lives. Elizabeth Esser  14:07And can stress have lasting effects on our brains and bodies? And if so, what does that look like? Dr. Paul Kaloostian  14:14Absolutely. And once again, you know, similar to what I just said before, we've all experienced it. We've had moments where, let's say we're in a particular situation and  we've been in that situation before. So our minds go back to that prior time or times where we've been in that situation. And that makes us nervous and stressed. You know, for example, public speaking, let's say you've, you gave a talk once and something bad happened. I don't know. Maybe someone laughed  at you or you said a word wrong or whatever. And so the next time or next few times after that, you can always remember that particular event where you had a tough time right? So that the the memory center of the brain the hippocampus, We call it is super important in this whole stress response. And so there are permanent features because obviously years later we remember these episodes way back early on in the past. And and so the brain really remembers what had happened in the past so certainly there are permanent aspects to it and there are actually genetic components to it. So stress can affect your actual DNA, believe it or not through a variety of responses, but often through repeated experiences of stress over time. The common thing is, let's say someone you know, a young child, you know, witnesses domestic violence between the parents or some multiple arguments between parents or others. If that happens, often, what has been found is that there's genetic alterations, so that that particular child really, experiences stress a different way, if they see that particular episode. And it's based on all these neurotransmitters that are secreted that affect proteins that are expressed on our surfaces of ourselves. So certainly, there are permanent aspects in many, many ways, as I just mentioned. Elizabeth Esser  16:17And college students undergo a lot of stress for a multitude of reasons. are college aged people differently affected by stress compared to other age groups? And if so, in what ways? Dr. Paul Kaloostian  16:30Well, I think everyone experiences stress differently. And I don't know if I would break it down by age. And I don't know if there are any specific studies that do that. But I think the, the process of experiencing stress in handling stress is really a human trait, meaning, it probably isn't going to be very, very different among all of us, we probably all feel somewhat similar in, in different situations, and how we react to that particular stressor in our life. But certainly, you know, I've done a lot of schooling to become a neurosurgeon, I've been in school for a long, long time, and then training for a long, long time. That comes with a lot of difficult times. I mean, there are a lot of great times to but there's a lot of difficult times, that certainly are stressful. And I remember studying for finals, midterm exams, just all of that, I mean, I'm so thankful that's over. But that certainly was tough. But you know, I want also your audience to know that stress can also be very good, there's, there's good stress, there's kind of a mediocre, or a medium level of stress. And then there's toxic stress. So there's, there's really a variety of different types of stress in the body. And so and I would say that, it's actually a very healthy thing to have some stress in our lives, because it, it actually motivates us to do things we likely wouldn't do if we didn't have this little push, or this little heart rate increase, you know, to get us doing these things. But But I think, you know, college students, they experience, a significant amount of stress. And I think that, you know, most colleges, most universities, have environments where, where students are able to really tap into to look for help to look for methods of de stressing, I think that's very valuable in, in the university setting. Certainly, you know, the places I've went, those those things were present and very helpful. But, but I think most of us experience stress quite similarly. Elizabeth Esser  19:09So like everyone, college students have experienced many new situations in the last year due to COVID. You know, we've switched from in person classes to online learning. And students have been, have experienced isolation due to social distancing, among other things. How have these changes maybe affected stress levels or mental health as a whole in students Dr. Paul Kaloostian  19:38Significantly increased these these issues. I mean, and I see it in many of my patients, I would say, almost daily. I can't tell you how many patients I see that that tell me about all the difficult times that they're going through since COVID. And actually, I think we've, we've we've coined a new phrase post COVID stress disorder, kinda like a post traumatic stress disorder, but it's a post COVID stress disorder, it's really becoming the kind of the new theme now, among medical providers and psychologists. And, I mean, just as you can imagine, Elizabeth, I mean, just just picture, you know, losing someone close to you, and you're not able to go to the hospital to see them. And they're not doing well, and some may pass, you know, just just that situation alone. Imagine that, you know, let's say someone closest to you, you know, how do you handle that, you know, you're just hearing them on the phone, you know, and, you know, and that's the, that's just one situation, imagine other types of situations during  COVID, where people have lost their jobs that, you know, literally companies have fallen under, and people have been fired, literally fired, lost their jobs. I know many people where that's happened to, and, and they have no income, no income source, they have kids, they have grandkids, they have mortgages, etc. Imagine that stress. There's so many, so many different situations, with COVID, where people weren't prepared. And, and how can you be, you know, this is something out of the blue and, and it has really dramatically, unfortunately, affected people's lives in such a negative way. And, but like I said, I think this this disorder is really very important nowadays, you know, for all providers, and psychologists seeing patients, even nurses, others, you're going to see this, that's probably going to be be seen in many, many patients for many years to come. It's a very significant problem. And it just is difficult to to really deal with just given the acuity of COVID how it happened just so quickly, so suddenly. And, and just the psychological component to, to dealing with all of these stresses all at once, I think is is compounding The, the the difficulty of really treating, treating this. So I think it's it's very valuable to really understand what's going on in people's lives, especially as providers to really try and help them best where we can. Elizabeth Esser  22:46Right? Well, absolutely. We've all gone through this very traumatic experience. So I guess, going off of that, we're now at this point where we're sort of transitioning back into normal life, you know, students are returning back to campus this coming semester. Do you have any tips on how students can cope with stress as we make this transition? Dr. Paul Kaloostian  23:15Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are a lot of healthy ways to, to deal with with stress in your life. And I know there are a lot of studies identifying exercise as a very, very critical means of de stressing and, and I won't go into the specific mechanisms of why that that is so but but certainly, you can understand it through exercise, there's a better blood flow throughout the body, because the heart is not pumping stronger, and our muscles are all squeezing the blood back to the heart. And so there's more, there's more blood supply to important areas of our brain and heart and other parts of our body that that allow us to, to clear our minds to have that energy to think beyond the stress and to move forward towards solutions. So I think exercise is just so so invaluable. Sleeping is very critical. Most studies recommend probably about six hours of uninterrupted sleep a day. I think that is fair and valid. Sleep is essentially really the one of the only ways our body can recharge itself. And that's the way I think of sleep. I think of sleep as kind of like charging your phone or charging you know, whatever you need to charge. It's that means of recharging the system or rebooting the system. And during the course of it, a typical day for a college student and others that they can beat you down so to speak just with all the activities that occur both physically and psychologically, you get tired, you get beaten down, your brain is injured, your body's injured. And so that sleep is just so valuable for those six hours or so, to really help those areas of the brain and body just heal, so that it can then do the same thing the following day in a, in a safe way. So I think sleep is so critical. Obviously, counseling, there are and should be, at least at most universities, I'm sure North Carolina State that has methods of seeking help, psychologically, someone to just speak to perhaps a counselor or psychologist others. And I think that is great. I don't think there's any negative stigma attached to that, I think more people should do that. And, you know, we're all social beings, we all need communication needs social interaction. And so I think that's, that's crucial to be able to communicate with someone who's trained to, to help others deal with with tough situations, so that you can then, by speaking, work through those problems that have tangible solutions. I think those are some of the solutions that I would recommend. Elizabeth.  Elizabeth Esser  26:28Great. Thank you so much. And then I guess, finally, is there anything else that you'd like to add? Regarding the topic of stress and college students? what you're working on or anything else? Dr. Paul Kaloostian  26:40Well, you know, I am a writer. So I think writing, you know, would be a fantastic way of de stressing, it's one of the one of the reasons why I have kind of partook in, in, in writing is because it really enabled me to, to de stress. As you could imagine, I just see so many sick, sick patients, gunshot wounds to the head and assaults to the head and spine. And I have to fix this and, and after a while, after many, many 1000s of these cases, I needed to just have an outlet. So I think for me, poetry or in writing, were my methods of doing that. And it really was super helpful. So I would recommend that, you know, the students in college university. Right. And it could be anything could be short poems, like haikus, or it could be a memoir of what they've experienced in their life. I'm sure people would love to read about that. And I think through that, you can get these these emotions out of your system. And I think that'll help you be a little bit more calm and collected and able to tackle any of the next challenges that come your way. Elizabeth Esser  27:56Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Dr. Kaloostian. The work you do is so important, and it was truly a pleasure speaking with you.  Dr. Paul Kaloostian  28:03Pleasures all mine. Thank you. Eoin Trainor  28:09And that is it for this week's Eye on the Triangle. Thanks for tuning in. If you have any questions, comments, ideas, or like to get involved with the Eye on the Triangle team, shoot us an email at public affairs@wknc.org. We'd love to hear from you. Stay tuned for your regular programming. We'll see you next time.

Hilary Evans Cameron is an Assistant Professor at Ryerson Law. Prior to become a faculty member, Hilary represented refugee claimants for a decade. She is the author of Refugee Law’s Fact-finding Crisis: Truth, Risk, and the Wrong Mistake. Her paper on risk salience in refugee decisions that we discuss can be found here. She is also the creator of www.meetgary.ca, a website which provides guidance to both decision makers and asylum claimants on the implicit biases and thought processes that can influence decision makers. She provides training to the Immigration and Refugee Board on this topic. 3:00 The two strong pulls in the law of how a decision maker should make a decision in a refugee hearing that impacts risk salience. 7:00 Can a decision maker ever be truly neutral? 11:00 Does the fact that the refugee process starts with a removal order “set things up” for strict scrutiny? Plus how politicians can influence error preference. 18:30 Refugee acceptance rates have increased recently. Is this a result of new decision makers or the same decision makers applying different maxims. Can someone’s risk salience approach change over time? 22:00 The non legal things that can influence decision makers. 26:30 Studies on accuracy in credibility and how risk salience follows. 30:00 Should decision makers make their biases explicit? 36:30 What is the fear that people have of refugee claimants? 43:01 The illusion of transparency. “The idea that truth will shine through.” 44:30 The myth that a memory is like a video recording. 46:00 The myth that a refugee claimant will never take unnecessary risks. 47:15 The myth of once a liar always a liar. 48:80 The maxim of the perfect applicant. 52:00 The maxim of “our expectations were clear.” 1:01 The inconsistency between standards in refugee law and trauma theory. 1:04 Hillary’s working with the IRB 1:15 Have any IRB members told Hillary that who the representative is can impact how they view the claim? 1:21 When should you admit a past lie?

Today, Den reveals the 8 best battle-tested ways ever invented for accelerating the growth of your video business.Here's a sneak peek at what you'll hear:The single most important metric at the end of the business day. - 2:30The curious reason why Den was about as nervous as a gypsy with a mortgage when buying his first “new” car even though he had enough money. - 5:45A “10-letter word” you should avoid using in your marketing material. Sadly, many video production businesses like to use this 10-letter word in their advertising thinking it will help, but it only ever backfires. (If you do not want to attract low quality clients, then whatever you do, avoid using this 10-letter word! - 6:50)The REAL reason prospective clients don't agree to your fees. Sure, sometimes they can't afford your fees, but more times than not, there's another reason why they say no. Hear this common reason why at 7:10How to make mistakes like a pro. That's right, there is a correct way to make mistakes. Think about it. Nobody can ever avoid making them, but you can learn to minimize the damage. - 7:50A dead giveaway you're dealing with an adult who has the maturity of child. (If you're dealing with an grown-arse man or woman and they do what's mentioned at 9:20, then you should run for the hills. At the very least, don't ever do business with them.)Why trying to improve your business without improving what's between your ears is an exercise in futility. - 11:10An almost spooky effective way to predict if you will fail or succeed in whatever venture or goal you're trying to achieve without having to waste your money on a palm reader or staring into a crystal ball. - 13:00The "Beware of Day Rates" lesson. - 14:00A horrible (but popular) way to determine how much you should charge for your video services. - 19:00Connect with Den on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/denlennie/Get more great resources over at https://www.denlennie.com/Support the show (https://www.denlennie.com/free-training)

Today, Den reveals the secret to success in business. Hey, did you just scoff? I get it. But please suspend your judgment until you hear at least the first two minutes of this episode, okay? There really is a secret to success, but it ain't glamorous, sexy or exciting, but… it does work.Plus, there are sales and marketing tips aplenty.Here's a sneak peek at what you'll hear:How to "plod" your way to great success using the “Gradatim Ferociter” method. - 0:40Laughably stupid Facebook ads (more like Farcebook ads) that promise unicorns but deliver donkeys. Cunning marketers love to use these types of ads to fill up their online courses and sell their wares. (Why are these ads so prevalent on FB? Well, as the saying goes, there's a sucker born every minute, and a lot of them are clicking on these ads! - 1:00)The "rubbernecking business owner" phenomena. (And... how it's costing business owners their time, focus, and confidence. - 2:00)The foolish - and completely nonsensical - excuse we make to ourselves that stop us from taking the action we know we should take. (Ever put off doing something you know would help your business? If so, there's a good chance you are using this excuse. - 5:10)A surprisingly simple productivity hack to avoid those "pissing in the wind" days at work. - 6:40Why obsessing over the differences between B2B and B2C marketing is silly. - 7:00A mini crash course on online marketing for video freelancers. Starts at 9:10How many times does a prospect need to be exposed to your marketing message before they even think about contacting you? I bet your guess will be way off the mark with this one. Find out at 9:40The secret to writing irresistible headlines for eBooks, articles, and subject lines. - 11:30A cracking good business book that will sharpen your marketing fangs to a gleaming sharp edge. - 14:20An admittedly "uncomfortable" (and counterintuitive) marketing approach that, when done correctly, can bring you a horde of new customers clamouring at your door, eager to do business with you. - 15:00The secret power behind "The One Thing" maxim. - 16:00Why you should fall in love with sales.  Sadly, most business owners would rather get a root canal than sell. (And that's why they'll never effortlessly and consistently make sweet, tender sales. - 16:30)Why most business owners are not really business owners. - 18:40When relying on yourself is a BAD idea. - 21:30Connect with Den on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/denlennie/Get more great resources over at https://www.denlennie.com/Support the show (https://www.denlennie.com/free-training)

Today, Den reveals some insider secrets for turning ice-cold prospects into white-hot, eager-to-buy prospects who see you as an authority and expert to be trusted instead of just another business owner peddling their wares.Here's a sneak peek at what you'll hear:What to do if you hate outbound marketing. (Doing this will take some time, but if you can pull this off, you won't need to do any outbound marketing! - 1:15)An almost unknown adman every business owner should study. Many people in the direct response industry call this curious and reclusive man "The Most Persuasive Man of The 20th Century." This adman once wrote a television advert that sold to one in every 14 American TV owners. He made $50 million dollars from a textbook on natural health. Here's how studying this man can help you market your business... - 2:55A hardly ever-talked-about (and very profitable) skill every freelance videographer should develop. Developing this skill can even turn freelance videographers who would rather gargle battery acid than sell, into wickedly good salespeople. (And no... this skill is not sales. What is this skill? Listen up at 3:10)How “super creative” freelance video guys lose business by unwittingly spooking their prospective corporate clients.  - 5:40The "CA" marketing principle almost every business owner is clueless about. (This is the BIG reason why the average business owner's marketing is about as useless as a glass hammer. - 6:18)3 types of business owners you should NEVER market your video production service to. These 3 business owners might be cashed up, be great people, and even need your services, but they will end up being a complete waste of your time and dime. Here's why... - 6:302 types of business owners you should market your video production service to. - 7:00The unspeakably good "downloadable" asset. This is the BIG secret (used by the most successful online marketers on the planet) for getting a horde of prospects chasing you down instead of you chasing them! - 8:40How to “hack” your way to becoming an authority in your industry. Do what Den reveals at 11:15 and prospects won't treat you like an ordinary video guy, but instead... they will revere you, respect you, and see you as an expert and an industry leader.A caveman simple email marketing strategy that when done correctly, can bring in a ton of new business. - 15:40How to get Google and YouTube to send you the perfect prospects for your video business. - 16:10The "mere exposure" marketing phenomena that can when applied to your business can flood your business with new clients and new business. Sadly, probably 98% of business owners are too scared to tap into this extraordinary marketing phenomenon. - 16:45A special type of "book" that can generate your business leads all day every day! - 19:00A clever way to ethically bribe your website visitors into doing business with you. - 25:30The single biggest reason why business owners fail miserably at email marketing. The good news? It's easy and quick to fix. (Here's how... 26:30)Connect with Den on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/denlennie/Get more great resources over at https://www.denlennie.com/Support the show (https://www.denlennie.com/free-training)

It’s been a while! Between (2) quarantines and a terrible case of a stomach bug, we’re back on track to bring you Florida and Georgia. 00:00:00 Name that bool 01:30:00 Long time, no chat 03:18:00 So Florida 05:07:00 Moonstone (For more details on moonstone check out our episode – “Phenomenon-phe-no-me-no-me-non !!!”) 06:45:00 Popularity 07:06:00 Florida state stone 10:41:00 State shell 12:11:00 Georgia – Quartz 13:36:00 2nd most abundant mineral on Earth 14:38:00 Most common mineral on Earth’s crust 15:18:00 Most common mineral in Earth 16:34:00 The core of the Earth 18:42:00 Onto the state mineral—Staurolite 20:33:00 Fairy crystal 20:55:00 Good luck 22:00:00 The legend of the Fairy Crosses

Today, Den talks about ways in which you can hack yourself and your daily habits so you can make maximum money in minimum time.Here's a sneak peek at what you'll hear:Den's two eye-opening observations of his best performing Video Accelerator members. -1:20The "pant shitting" topic that almost always stops flakes, tire kickers, and time-wasters in their tracks. (If you ever feel like a prospective client is wasting your time, just bring up this topic and watch them scamper off like a cockroach seeking a place to hide. -  1:50)Why only drooling idiots ask "What's the key to success?" - 2:15A startling statistic taken from Den's mastermind group that'll make you want to join right quick. You may not believe your ears when Den first gives this statistic at 3:00The “two-word” secret for cranking up your focus, ratcheting up your creative juices, and unleashing a flood of creativity to solve big business (and life) problems you may have right now. (Not to be too negative, but know this: this is not a sexy or glamorous secret, but make no mistake, it works like crazy for those who are not afraid of a bit of discomfort and put this into action. - 4:40)A little-known business book you'd be silly not to read. - 6:50Why the only thing that should dirty a business owner's hands is money! - 9:20A dead giveaway that a freelance video guy is clueless about how to scale a business. (HINT: it's something they say when the topic of marketing comes up. Den said that if he got a nickel for every time he heard a freelancer say this he would put all those nickels in a sock and beat the next person who said it. - 10:10)The little-talked-about marketing "lag". - 11:05What a "trust-building" funnel is, and why you should have one if you haven't already. - 18:00Why you should actively seek to get rid of clients! - 19:20Are you chasing rabbits or elephants? Hear this client-getting lesson at 20:00The “CA” secret to accelerating your business growth and maximizing your business's profits in minimum time. (This one is more mental than practical and can take a bit of discipline, but I'm sure you won't mind when you start seeing the results!  - 21:00)Connect with Den on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/denlennie/Get more great resources over at https://www.denlennie.com/Support the show (https://www.denlennie.com/free-training)

Dennis McCrea was the founder of McCrea Immigration Law. He started practicing immigration law in 1974, and was one of the original members of Vancouver's immigration bar. In this episode we discuss how to build an immigration practice, how the practice of immigration law has evolved, avoiding burnout and more. 3:00 How lawyers use to interact with visa officers. 6:00 The formation of the immigration bar. 11:30 Thoughts on whether it is possible to have both a corporate immigration practice and a refugee or enforcement practice. 15:30 Did the practice of immigration law become more or less fun over time? 18:00 What kept Dennis motivated when it came to practicing immigration law? 22:30 What type of cases did Dennis enjoy the most? 26:00 What are some tools that lawyers can use to prevent burnout? 41:00 Did the practice of immigration law vary depending on which political party were in power? 42:00 How to retire. 45:00 How can junior lawyers who are trying to build a practice have time for hobbies? 48:00 How Steven and Deanna got into immigration. 58:00 Growing a firm. 1:03:00 Should you article at an immigration law firm. 1:06:00 Being too specialized. 1:13:00 What percent of Dennis’s practice was immigration processing, firm management and enforcement? 1:16:30 Thoughts on consultants. 1:19:00 Are decisions getting better or worse? Are boilerplate refusals becoming more or less common?

Today, Den reveals 21 hard-won lessons from 12-years in business.Here's a sneak peek at what you'll hear:Den's honest-to-God thoughts about vision boards. - 3:00A certain character trait EVERY highly successful business owner or entrepreneur has in spades. (Without this critical trait, well... your chances of success are about as slim as Kate Moss on a juice-only diet. - 4:45)Quite possible the ultimate motivation for any freelancer/business owner or entrepreneur who feels like giving up. (Next time you feel like throwing in the towel, just think of what's mentioned at 5:14 and this proverbial "stick" will give you that pep in your step to keep on keepin' on.)A little-known reading "hack" that will allow even folks who are slow readers to quickly consume content as much 2, 3, or even 5 times faster than you do now. - 6:15Perhaps the single most important tip Den shares in this entire episode. But don't get too excited, now. It's incredibly dull and unsexy. That said, if you embrace it and heed the advice, you'll set yourself up for great success. - 7:20Den's clever phone “trick” for never having to listen to people's long-winded voice messages or any voice messages, for that matter. (But… doesn't he miss out on important business matters? Nope. Here' why... 8:20)A BIG risk almost every freelancer takes that can be avoided. - 14:30The very first hire you should make for your freelance business. Forget everything else until you have this key person in place. - 18:50What's best: renting or buying equipment? Well, it depends. Hear Den's advice at 21:30A tempting business option to take that nearly always ends in tears, and that's putting it mildly. - 23:00Hard-nosed insider advice on forming a business partnership. - 23:10Are you considering forming a business partnership with a friend? Then you should listen carefully at 24:00Why Den recently knocked back a lucrative gig from Sony. -27:00Why ideas (even great ideas) are totally overrated. - 29:00The secret to becoming a force of nature in business. This is the big secret behind every truly successful business person. (If you can make what's mentioned at 29:30 a habit in your daily business life, then you will start to appear superhuman to others while they struggle to keep up, and... wonder what your secret is.)Connect with Den on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/denlennie/Get more great resources over at https://www.denlennie.com/Support the show (https://www.denlennie.com/free-training)

Today, Den delivers a masterclass on marketing. If you're a videographer looking to get a horde of new clients rushing to your door, then you'll wanna lean in close and take notes when you listen to this scorchingly hot episode.But first...Here's a sneak peek at what you'll hear:The “9-letter word” that sends shivers down the spine of filmmakers. - 2:20The three “Rs” of marketing. Get these 3 “Rs” lined up correctly, and you're laughing all the way to the bank. - 2:40A head-smackingly stupid mindset and approach to marketing that will leave you about as frustrated as an Amish electrician. (Sadly, many videographers have this exact mindset towards marketing. Hear this at 3:00)Quite possible the best definition of marketing you will ever hear. - 4:05Is marketing getting harder or easier? Hear Den's opinion at 5:15The amusing tale of a pimple-faced videographer who didn't know his arse from his elbow. (This young whippersnapper was asked to film a video testimonial for his company and the person being interview was none other than Den Lennie. Funny stuff.- 7:40)Why the film industry needs to start a Gear Junkies Anonymous. - 10:15The single most important question you must know that answer to before you even think about marketing your video business. - 12:00A common marketing blooper that will undermine ALL your marketing efforts. - 13:00Why videographers who niche down are often better marketers than videographers who don't. Here's why... - 14:25Damn good reasons why you should run a niche business. - 16:40Is writing an eBook for your marketing still a good idea in 2021 or is it a complete waste of time? Hear Den's solid, educated answer at 18:00The single most underrated marketing channel in 2021. - 19:30The "Parthenon Marketing" methodology that can potentially bring you a steady stream of new business even when the economy goes tits up. - 20:00Why the world's best marketers rarely ever think, and... what they do instead. - 21:30The "8 out of 10" marketing statistic you won't want to hear. An ingenious thing bestselling author Tim Ferriss did to come up with his "4-Hour Work Week" book title. Best part? You can copy his book title trick if you have access to social media. (Who doesn't ?) - 23:00What ST is, and... why it's key to your marketing success. - 24:20Connect with Den on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/denlennie/Get more great resources over at https://www.denlennie.com/Support the show (https://www.denlennie.com/free-training)

Joshua Sohn practiced immigration law for over 25 years. He is a past president of the Canadian Bar Association’s Immigration section. He worked both as a sole practicioner, at a small firm and at a big 4 accounting firm. We discuss Joshua’s career, what made him go to law school, whether he took immigration courses in law school, how he started in refugee law, differences between working as a solo practicioner, small firm and eventually at a big 4 accounting firm, and then back to a small firm, differences working in a downtown core vs suburb, and managing the stress of practicing immigration law and running a business. There are a lot of nuggets in here for aspiring lawyers and current practicioners. 2:00 Quitting social media after retirement. 9:00 Law school 14:00 Articles 17:30 Are there any courses or law schools that are best to help someone start a career in immigration? 19:30 Starting a career in refugee law. 22:30 Is it possible to make a viable practice just doing refugee law? 29:00 The law firm as training ground. 32:00 Practicing as a sole practitioner vs at a large firm. 35:30 Does it make sense for someone to do just immigration law or should people getting into the field specialize in another area as well? 37:00 Practicing immigration law in Vancouver vs. Surrey 41:00 Compassion vs. running a business 42:00 How IRCC’s current processes create new pressures on immigration solicitors. 49:00 The Big 4 accounting firms and immigration. 53:00 Mentorship and volunteerism. 1:01 Tips to tell a co-worker who leaves half-drunk coffee cups around. 1:03 Self-care for lawyers.

Rose and Josh are a mother/son co-writing team. They are working on a universe, not just a book. There are plans for multiple books within this universe. Josh works on video games and uses that knowledge to help build his world AND design other items - like the sculpture used in the picture below. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07QTQ3TDW/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B07QTQ3TDW&linkCode=as2&tag=saschneider-20&linkId=87c861249138f13dfc206b016b23b6bd If you'd like a sample of their first chapter, you can read it here: https://www.worldanvil.com/w/talifar-joshforeman/a/the-scarred-king-i3A-exile-7E-chapter-one-article To find out more about their books, visit their website and YouTube channel. https://breathoflifedev.com/ https://www.youtube.com/scrybe Transcript: 1:53 Well, welcome to another episode of discovered wordsmith. And today I have Josh and Rose. How are you guys doing today? Very good. Oh, how am I doing? Except for allergies? I'm doing fine. Well, that's bad enough. Believe me, I know that I have had allergies my whole life. This is interesting for me, because you guys are not only the first Co Op writing partners that I've interviewed, but you're also family. So I get dinner review a mother and son team. I think that's pretty cool. And we'll probably talk a little bit about that. It takes a lot of patience. I'm trashes that part. 3:25Oh, he's not saying anything. So we'll just leave that there. 3:29Alright, so Josh, and rose, tell me a little bit about each one of you a little bit about what you like to do when you're not writing. How about you go first month, I garden a lot. Time. 3:45Got it. 3:47And she has always transformed any landscape that we lived in into a giant garden with the most variety of plants that the biome can possibly support. I think that's a way to describe our name. Well, Rosie, I don't go to public gardens much anymore because my Plexus kit is there's rose, you would probably get along with my father growing up. He turned most of our yard and we've got couple acres, but he turned most of it into garden. So there was gardens everywhere. So you'd probably get along with him very well. So what about you, Josh, where do you live? What do you like to do? Well, we both live in the Pacific Northwest. I'm near Seattle and she's in Vancouver just north of Portland. 4:33And so we have a lot of dark rainy winters. I'm mostly a homebody I do a lot of video games and TV and movies. When I'm usually I'm multitasking I'm watching those in the background while I'm developing on our tails from telephone series, or recording our YouTube videos or updating one of 5:00The 12 different social media platforms we're on. So I keep very, very busy. My my day job is I work on video games, currently working on a game called blancos Block Party, which is a big sort of party game where everyone gets together with 5:17what appear to be collectible vinyl figures and run around and play games together. Oh, nice. And do you have a company you work for? You just do this on your own? Yeah, that's, that's sort of my day job that pays the bills. I've been doing video games for 26 years now. mostly focused on art and level design. my current role is that I'm designing the level building tools and props that players get to build their own levels with so I'm kind of propagating what I've learned over the years and putting that out for players to be able to use so it's really fun kind of high point of my career. Nice. So besides the one you're working on now, cuz I know a lot of my friends and my family do a lot of video games. So what other games have you worked on? games people may have heard of our guild wars, I've worked on all of the Guild Wars games, I was at arenanet for 15 and a half years. 6:16Recently, I worked on Ori and the will of the wisps, which is a pretty kind of side of the game. 6:23And before that,

Discussing #FutureOfWork & Work2.0 with Jeff Kavanaugh. Jeff discussed the importance and tenets of a live evolving organizations. He shared some tips and tricks that businesses could do to ensure they are evolving for faster and agile growth through the age of transformation. Jeff Kavanaugh is global head for the Infosys Knowledge Institute, the research and thought leadership arm of Infosys, a leader in digital services and consulting. Jeff is also an adjunct professor at the business school at the University of Texas at Dallas. He authored the best-selling book Consulting Essentials, and serves on boards of the Institute of Business Analytics at Indiana University, and the Marketing Analytics Advisory Board at the University of Texas at Dallas. Jeff earned an MBA from the University of North Texas. Jeff's Book: The Live Enterprise: Create a Continuously Evolving and Learning Organization https://amzn.to/3pYJFMd Jeff's Recommendations: Contact https://amzn.to/37LvGmB The Nature of Nature: Why We Need the Wild https://amzn.to/37J3PTM Longitude https://amzn.to/3buTEDC Endurance https://amzn.to/3by5hK1 TIMELINE 1:07 Jeff's journey. 4:22 What brought Jeff to consulting? 8:34 Creating knowledge institutes within an organization. 13:07 Initial steps to create a knowledge institute. 17:06 Convincing leadership for data based decision making. 23:07 Challenges in building a knowledge institute. 28:19:00 How are organizations impacted by Covid. 34:59:00 What is the live element in an organization? 38:18:00 Defining a non-live organization. 44:04:00 Turning a non-living organization into a living one. 51:27:00 Defining a quantum organization. 52:55:00 Drivers of a living organization. 57:19:00 The ideal reader for "The live enterprise". 1:01:45 Jeff's success mantra. 1:04:54 Jeff's favorite reads. 1:07:04 Closing remarks. About TAO.ai[Sponsor]: TAO is building the World's largest and AI-powered Skills Universe and Community powering career development platform empowering some of the World's largest communities/organizations. Learn more at https://TAO.ai About WorkPod: Work Pod takes you on the journey with leaders, experts, academics, authors, and change-makers designing the future of work, workers, and the workplace. About Work2.org WorkPod is managed by Work2.org, a #FutureOfWork community for HR and Organization architects and leaders. Sponsorship / Guest Request should be directed to info@tao.ai Keywords: #FutureofWork #Work2.0 #Work2dot0 #Leadership #Growth #Org2dot0 #Work2 #Org2

This week on the pod is nonprofit founder, Chief Executive, and nonprofit startup coach Jasmine Ohen!Jasmine studied dance and was en route to becoming a backup dancer for BEYONCE' (the real Beyonce') when she felt a calling to take a completely different path.TODAY, she is the FOUNDER and CEO of HEEL YOURSELF, a nonprofit that exposes, empowers, and encourages young women to be transformed leaders in Christ.In this episode, we talked about how my girl went from not knowing what a nonprofit is to becoming THE NONPROFIT STARTUP QUEEN. ENJOY!To keep up with Jasmine and all the great things she is up to, please follow her on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasmineohen/ and support Heel Yourself at https://www.instagram.com/heelyourselfinc/Timestamp:Background - 5:03Professional Background Journey - 6:50Studying Dance - 8:00Heel Yourself - 13:00The importance of having Coaches - 18:00OTM Quote - 50:13Please be sure to LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE if you enjoyed this episode and follow https://www.instagram.com/onthematterr/to keep up with daily posts!Support the show (https://www.instagram.com/onthematterr/)

Host Alison Rice has an honest conversation with fashion magazine co-founder and creative director, Annika Hein. In this episode, Annika shares the importance of backing yourself and self-finding your idea, the risks involved in starting your own business and how to maintain your creative integrity — especially when there’s real money on the table. JANE Magazine is a Melbourne-based, biannual fashion and fine art publication shot on film and printed on paper. The magazine explores the disciplines of art, photography, fashion, philosophy and poetry. Sounds a bit intimidating, right? Turns out Annika is anything but. Get ready to hear from a funny, down-to-earth, thoughtful and generous woman who isn’t scared to say what she really thinks. Alison and Annika cover some incredible ground in this honest conversation, including Annika’s pregnancy, a 36-hour home birth that ended with an emergency transfer to hospital, what she and partner Odin learned from living slowly in country Victoria, navigating perfectionism and a sometimes brutal examination of self, how she maintains her creative integrity while building and funding a business, the risks they took to launch issue one of the magazine and what starting her day with rituals helps her to achieve. Please note: Before they get onto business, Annika is an open book about her home birth experience. If pregnancy and birth is either triggering or irrelevant to where you’re at right now, please navigate this episode using the timestamps below. TIMESTAMPSMoving to the country: 00:06:30 – 00:24:13Pregnancy and birth: 00:24:00 – 00:46:20Maintaining her creative integrity: 00:46:38 – 00:57:00The risks involved in launching issue one: 00:57:00 – 01:07:15Allyship and advocacy: 01:07:15 – 01:15:31Morning and evening rituals: 01:15:31 – 01:33:42 Follow JANE Magazine on Instagram MORE FROM OFFLINE AND ALISON RICE Become a student of Self StudyIf you’re interested in learning about True Self, conscious success and more, become a student of Self Study — a series of considered online courses. Book a coaching session Offline’s host, Alison Rice, is an award-winning leader and conscious coach. She offers personal coaching sessions. Find out more or book directly. Early access For early access to new episodes of the podcast, Self Study learning opportunities and Offline events, follow @getoffline.co and @alisonlarsenrice on Instagram or Facebook. Share with those in needIf you know someone who would benefit from hearing these honest conversations, please share Offline with them. Original music by

This week we talk about the tradition of Christian prayer (from Pastor Caleb’s sermon on March 21) and our dreams for the churches that will form after the United Methodist Church splits. Our podcast is divided into chapters for listening ease. Intro - 00.00.00The tradition of Christian prayer - 00.00.43Dreaming of the next Methodist Church - 00.05.55

Today, Den talks about strategic goals, revenue goals, and financial goals, and... how to efficiently and effectively track and measure your business's key metrics so you can save more time and make more dime.Good stuff, indeed.Here's a sneak peek at what you'll hear:When working online, do you find yourself getting about as distracted as a baby at a topless bar? (Many creatives do. Here are some battle-tested and proven ways to keep yourself more focused, thus becoming more efficient and productive. Starts at 1:20)3 questions every freelancer should be able to answer as easily as "What's your name?" (If you sputter and stammer at these 3 simple (but critical) business questions, then that might explain why you get a little distracted or why your business is not taking off the way you know it could. Listen up at 2:30 to see if you can answer these 3 critical business questions.)A surprisingly simple (and very accurate) reason why most small business owners don't hit their financial goals. (This probably explains why their sales and marketing are not dialed in also. - 4:30)What an "app audit" is, and how it can save you cash, time, and... boost your focus. - 6:00FACT: the speed of wireless communications is multiplying faster than a Catholic rabbit, and with that comes an overabundance of apps, gadgets, and technology. (Is there any way to slow this down? Nope. But you can still stay calm and avoid the overwhelm by applying "minimalism" to technology. Hear Den talk about this at 8:00)A marketing "fallacy" that makes the average business owner's marketing dam near useless. - 9:40A hypercritical piece to the marketing puzzle most video business owners always seem to ignore. - 10:20How adding value creates freedom. - 11:00A "no muss, no fuss" way to kill off overwhelm. Starts at 13:00The hidden benefits of tracking and measuring your business's metrics. - 15:00A neat little app that can help you get your time back. (If you feel like there's never enough time in the day to get things done, then you'll love this app. - 16:20)Connect with Den on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/denlennie/Get more great resources over at https://www.denlennie.com/ Support the show (https://www.denlennie.com/free-training)

On this episode Shane Kidwell and Sean Zalmanoff talk about the stories originators tell themselves and how it shapes their business. The guys also discuss the journey through a scarcity or abundance mindset and how that decision is entirely up to you. 2:25 Focus on the mindset9:00The story you tell yourself the most15:00 Scarcity and abundanceQuotes:“Things that you want are things that you do and if you really wanted it, you would do it.”“The story you tell yourself the most is the story you believe the most.”“If you are not becoming the person you want in business and in life, you can change that.”“What if the story became that you are the least important member of your team?’Key takeawaysDecisions and choice are entirely up to you and nobody else. You shape your mindset with your decisions but don’t kid yourself on why the decision you did. The story you tell yourself is the story you become. If you don’t live in scarcity, your life will be full of abundance and prosperity. Links:Mortgage Success Academy -onedollarmsa.comNext Level Loan Officers - https://www.nllodigital.com/mortgage-success-offerLoan Officer Events - loanofficerevents.comSocial Media:Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/NextLevelLoanOfficers/YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwSyHzkvBri1YWJSH7df1CQLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/next-level-loan-officers/about/Text the word: nextlevel to 36260 to download our appThe Next Level Loan Officers Podcast is a proud founding member of the REAL Disrupt Podcast Collaborative. You can check our more awesome podcasts at REALDisrupt.com

Discussing #FutureOfWork & Work2.0 with Kent. He discussed some of the ways business model success could be achieved by minor changes to the process. Learn how a focus on revenue will get many failing businesses to journey of success. KENT BILLINGSLEY is the founder and president of the Revenue Growth® Company, LLC. He has become America's Revenue Growth® Architect by helping thousands of entrepreneurs, and small businesses (representing hundreds of thousands of employees) generate billions in new sales and revenue. He has personally designed, built, transformed, or turbocharged over 1,000 organizations in 36 countries. Billingsley has served in executive and leadership positions in several billion-dollar firms. Over nearly three decades, he has developed thought-leading content and trademarked programs helping thousands of entrepreneurs and their employees become millionaires and multimillionaires from their businesses. Kent's Book: Entrepreneur to Millionaire: How to Build a Highly Profitable, Fast-Growth Company and Become Embarrassingly Rich Doing It Hardcover https://amzn.to/2O13zJa Kent's Recommendations: Think and Grow Rich https://amzn.to/3kqYs0P Discussion Timeline: TIMELINE 0:50 What's fascinating about revenue? 2:16 Advice to companies who don't have a clear roadmap to profitability. 4:31 Pitfalls in the understanding and implementations of revenue. 7:09 Advice to companies not doing too well. 9:10 Fixing revenue model in a fast changing world. 13:04 Growth company vs revenue company. 17:20 Misconceptions of revenue. 19:22 Quick fixes for revenue issues. 22:15 The right time for an entrepreneur to focus on revenue. 25:39:00 Getting started with a revenue model. 30:19:00 Who's responsible for revenue in a company? 32:51:00 Advice for a company doing well on the revenue front. 36:35:00 On "Entrepreneurs to Billionaires". 47:13:00 The ideal reader for "Entrepreneurs to Billionaires". 51:56:00 Who doesn't need to read "Entrepreneurs to Billionaires"? 58:57:00 Tangible steps for revenue generation. 1:02:03 The first clues to that you're doing well in terms of revenue. 1:09:04 Kent's favorite reads. 1:12:42 Sequel to "Entrepreneurs to Billionaires". About TAO.ai[Sponsor]: TAO is building the World's largest and AI-powered Skills Universe and Community powering career development platform empowering some of the World's largest communities/organizations. Learn more at https://TAO.ai About WorkPod: Work Pod takes you on the journey with leaders, experts, academics, authors, and change-makers designing the future of work, workers, and the workplace. About Work2.org WorkPod is managed by Work2.org, a #FutureOfWork community for HR and Organization architects and leaders. Sponsorship / Guest Request should be directed to info@tao.ai Keywords: #FutureofWork #Work2.0 #Work2dot0 #Leadership #Growth #Org2dot0 #Work2 #Org2

What productivity tools do you use to manage your day-to-day operations? If you’re someone who faces outrageous demands every day, you’re headed for burnout if you don’t establish systems and processes to run your days. What if there’s a way to accomplish your biggest goals, work less but get more done, and reclaim control of your time? Learn how you can do this as you listen to Sharran share how his team automated a day’s work using the exact productivity framework that he teaches to the top CEOs whom he mentors.  Get the https://www.sharranvip.com/main-page-playbook (Productivity Playbook) - a personalized 21-day challenge designed to supercharge your productivity, motivation, and energy.  “Amateurs automate for efficiency. Professionals automate for accuracy.”  - Sharran Srivatsaa   Timestamps: 0:00    How to automate 1440 minutes worth of work 2:04 Reporting first 4:53 The Dashboard Creation Project  10:00 The power of building an extra day  12:05 Automating workflows using Zapier 15:09 How to complete 5 automation projects in under 90 days 18:59 The advantage of knowing how the tools work 23:04 Greatness is in the granularity 24:22  The gift of systems-based thinking Tools mentioned in this episode: Slack, Calendly, Zapier, ActiveCampaign, Trello, Dropbox, Google Drive, Zoom Resources: - https://www.sharranvip.com/main-page-playbook (Get Sharran’s Productivity Playbook) - https://sharran.com/4weekmba/ (Grab Sharran’s 4-Week MBA for Free) Connect with Sharran: - https://www.sharran.com/ (Website) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharran/ (LinkedIn) - https://www.facebook.com/likesharran (Facebook) - https://www.instagram.com/sharransrivatsaa/ (Instagram)

A discussion of when someone can be inadmissible to Canada for having committed a crime which doesn’t lead to a conviction. Cases referenced are Garcia v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2021 FC 141 and Dlieow v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2020 FC 59 Sania (Ahmed) Chaudhry was counsel in Garcia. She is currently Legal Counsel (Professional Conduct Proceedings) at Real Estate Council of Alberta. 2:00 Introduction and an overview of Garcia v. Canada. 15:00 The purpose of Canada’s inadmissibility provisions. 17:10 What is the standard of proof for determining that someone committed a crime where there is no conviciton? 19:45 A review of Enforcement Manual 2 30:30 Determining equivalency and issues with inadmissibility findings where there is no conviction. 39:30 Dlieow v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration) 46:00 Living in a society where the State makes everything a crime.

Discussing #FutureOfWork & Work2.0 with Josh Linkner talks about using little creativity spurts to use for disruption. He sheds light on how organizations could embrace creativity and use little creative innovation to help stir for big breakthroughs. She shared lots of examples of big little breakthroughs. Bio: He has been the founder and CEO of five tech companies, which sold for a combined value of over $200 million. He’s the author of four books including the New York Times Bestsellers, Disciplined Dreaming, and The Road to Reinvention. This guy just loves starting and building companies. He’s the founding partner of Detroit Venture Partners and has been involved in the launch of over 100 startups. Today, Josh serves as Chairman and co-founder of Platypus Labs, an innovation research, training, and consulting firm. He has twice been named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year and is a recipient of the United States Presidential Champion of Change Award. Josh is also a passionate Detroiter, the father of four, a professional-level jazz guitarist, and has a slightly odd obsession for greasy pizza Josh's Book: Big Little Breakthroughs https://amzn.to/3usFCLm Josh's Recommendations: Think Like a Monk: Train Your Mind for Peace and Purpose Every Day https://amzn.to/3bzvyYh Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World https://amzn.to/37K4PqW Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know https://amzn.to/37MepcR Discussion Timeline: TIMELINE 0:49 Josh's journey to creativity. 1:54 On Josh's five start-ups. 3:38 Motivation behind working on creativity. 4:53 Surprises while working with companies on creativity. 7:21 Finding a balance between being creativity and being structural. 10:07 Tackling creativity in a mature company set up. 13:15 Creativity coming from unexpected places. 15:45 Precursor to innovation. 17:48 Frugality and creativity. 19:06 Bottlenecks to creativity. 21:17 Small innovations and big innovations within a company. 24:43:00 Innovation during a crisis. 26:15:00 Innovation post Covid. 27:13:00 Misconceptions on innovation and creativity. 29:12:00 Big companies and creativity. 33:10:00 On "Big, little breakthroughs". 34:39:00 The process of writing "Big, little breakthroughs". 39:11:00 Picking great stories for "Big, little breakthroughs". 41:01:00 Ideal reader for "Big, little breakthroughs". 42:10:00 Litmus test for creativity. 44:17:00 Creativity frameworks. 45:45:00 Practical steps to become creative. 49:28:00 Josh's secret to success. 51:28:00 Josh's success qualities. 53:38:00 Josh's favorite reads. 54:46:00 Closing remarks. About TAO.ai[Sponsor]: TAO is building the World's largest and AI-powered Skills Universe and Community powering career development platform empowering some of the World's largest communities/organizations. Learn more at https://TAO.ai About WorkPod: Work Pod takes you on the journey with leaders, experts, academics, authors, and change-makers designing the future of work, workers, and the workplace. About Work2.org WorkPod is managed by Work2.org, a #FutureOfWork community for HR and Organization architects and leaders. Sponsorship / Guest Request should be directed to info@tao.ai Keywords: #FutureofWork #Work2.0 #Work2dot0 #Leadership #Growth #Org2dot0 #Work2 #Org2

Today we interview journalist Tim Shorrock to talk to us about privatized military intelligence, US counter-insurgency methods and his article in The Baffler called Making COIN: The Modern History of an Unstoppable Bad IdeaExamples of COINTim talks about his Cold-War upbringing in Japan and Korea during the aftermath of World War II, the Korean war and through Vietnam, explaining how it gave him an honest “introduction to American politics and American foreign policy” which led him to a career in freelance journalism with a focus on Asian Studies.Show Notes4:25-8:15Private companies are profiting at every level from military spending. In recent years we have seen an unprecedented merging of the military and private finance, “the integration of national security and business.”“The privatizing of intelligence took off in the 1990’s.”The Peace DividendFollowing the Cold War, as austerity and neoliberal budget-cuts were implemented, a wave of people previously employed in intelligence went on to work in the private sector with government contractors.In the latter years of the Clinton administration, we began to see an increase of private military contractors being used to collect intelligence in places like Bosnia and Serbia.Tim explains that after 9/11, under the false pretense of national security, billions were spent on increased military budgets, making contractors “essential parts of US military and intelligence operations”. As the Bush doctrine continued, the Washington consensus increasingly encouraged “the contracting of strategic operations.”8:15-13:05COINCounter-insurgency methods of the US:  “the people become the enemy.”Tim illustrates how a Vietnamese uprising against the US backed Diem dictatorship resulted in massive gains for the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) and how the liberal Kennedy administration’s “hearts and minds” approach, cloaked in the language of evil, only made the violence worse: “part of the idea began to be to separate the people from the guerillas and they would build these camps for the villagers that became, essentially, concentration camps (strategic hamlets)”Many of these violent counter-insurgency methods being used by the Americans were inherited from British Imperialists who had developed these strategies in earlier suppression campaigns against Communists in Malaya in the 1950’s. Related: Listen to our interview with Stuart Schrader on the History of the Modern Police13:05 - 19:26In the first year of the Obama administration, they tried the “hearts and minds” strategy in Afghanistan. “When McMaster was a General in Iraq, he got key press from liberals”The US and their personally-picked government provides neoliberal and privatized “social services”American contractors never built the project that they were supposed to build.Inspector General nominated by congress in regards to contractors. That group has done multiple reports about corruption. “Counter-insurgency is a form of warfare where you adopt various economic and political programs in addition to going after and killing people”. 19:26 – 24:46David Kilcullen’s used to work for Australian special forces. He assisted in the “Jakarta Method” and the death squads Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia. Kilcullen’s called the death squads “armed social work.” He advocated for “global counter-insurgency” (massive death squads of people opposing US corporate theft)Counter-insurgency is death squads under the larger guise of “winning the hearts and minds.”Michelle Flournoy saw counter-insurgency as, “a way that Democrats can be tough, and be hawkish and look smart.”Just another form of warfare. 25:36-29:00Mehdi Hassan from the Intercepted had David Kilcullen on as a guest within the last year. 29:00-34:32The intercept sent the original document to the NSA which got her caught.David Kilcullen’s private contract in Iraq. Tim received leaked documents from Caerus Global Solutions. Kilcullen even wrote the civilian training manual the USAID gives out to civilians. 34:32-38:54Tim confronted Kilcullen in an event. His company is under investigation for the security clearances. Kilcullen’s “100-year war” The Cold-War notion of the “third way” of being non-communist and non-colonial but it always has failed. They put together death squads in Iraq and these were the same people who did the death squads in El Salvador. Read about El Mozote38:54 - 42:27The Death Squads in El Salvador killed 10s of thousands. The real opposition comes from the more conservative people.“We are not into nation-building” is a code word for counter-insurgency.42:43-48:01History of US intervention in Korea.Myths and lies about the US role in the Korean war. How the US dissolved the people’s committee. 48:01-53:00“South Korea, until the late 1980’s, was an authoritarian police state. I was there under this general who took over, Chun Doo-hwah, and it was a scary place. A very repressive place, it was a police state.”“They fought against US backed dictators that held them back for years”. Koreans were being tortured by a US allied regime. The uprising of 1987 only happened after the “death by water torture of a south Korean student” led a mass of Koreans to take to the streets and demand independence from US influence.  The legacy of US counter-insurgency continues in Korea. For example, South Korea’s draconian National Security Law that has been used to silent dissenters even to this day. 53:00-58:00The change in South Korea and their vibrant Democracy.To learn more, visit Tim’s website timshorrock.com Get full access to Historic.ly at historicly.substack.com/subscribe

Today, Den reveals how to get MORE clients by marketing to FEWER people. Plus, marketing and business tips aplenty. But first...Here's a sneak peek at what you'll hear:The REAL reason why about 20% of small businesses fail within the first year. - 2:10Advice for new video business owners you'd be a darn fool not to take. - 2:45Proof that new video equipment is like “crack cocaine” for freelance filmmakers. - 3:00Why “patience” is the small business owner's superpower. - 3:40An emasculating thing most men have to do when they want a holiday. - 4:00Quite possibly the best advice you'll ever hear for entering a business partnership. This can help save you from a world of pain. - 6:00The 5-letter word that strikes fear into the hearts of video business owners. Because this 5-letter word scares them, it keeps their business from ever reaching its potential. - 7:20Den's awfully good "the MORE excuse you make, the LESS money you make" spiel. - 8:00The single most important thing to focus on if your business is currently making less than 7-figures. (In fact, this should always be your #1 focus. - 8:30A simple “litmus test” for identifying a moron. (It's very simple. Just listen to what someone says after they witness a successful person getting a good break or making a good business deal. If they say what's mentioned at 9:20... you'll know that person is a certified moron.)A clever “12-word phrase” to use when asked: “How much are your services?” (Not only do prospective clients appreciate this answer, but it puts them in the right frame of mind. -12:45)Clever ways to avoid looking like a bag of shit when your work schedule has you traveling more than a restless gypsy. (Not only will these ways keep you looking fresh, but they will also ratchet up your productivity, to boot!- 14:30)The case for writing a book. - 17:00A surprisingly simple way to boost your status in your industry. - 17:40The "caveman simple" 6-step formula for writing a book in record time. (This delightfully simple 6-point game plan will work even if you have trouble writing a shopping list. - 18:00)An unusual way to write a book using only your tongue. - 19:00Connect with Den on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/denlennie/Get more great resources over at https://www.denlennie.com/ Support the show (https://www.denlennie.com/free-training)

Today, Den raps about two things video business owners/freelancers can never hear too much about, namely, productivity and marketing. How good is this episode? Well, if Den packaged this audio and sold it for $1,000 dollars, it would still be a bargain! That's how good this episode is. But don't take my word for it (I'm just a copywriter), hear for yourself.  But first...Here's a sneak peek at what you'll hear:'The laughably simple (but powerful) "Can vs Should" productivity lesson. - 1:00The one labor-intensive activity most video business owners stubbornly refuse to outsource. But those who do, NEVER go back to doing this activity. Hear the full scoop at 1:30Quite possibly the best "productivity" maxim ever invented. Hear this beauty at 2:20Need more clients? Fair enough. But whatever you do, don't go off chasing new clients without doing this first....  - 2:30How to tap into the potential goldmine of business that's sitting right under your nose. (Best part: getting new business this way won't cost you one red cent! - 2:50)Den's frighteningly effective email marketing strategy for landing new clients and igniting a riot of new cash. Bonus: Den gives you his exact email copy (script) right down to what to say in the subject line to ensure it gets opened. - Den could charge a pretty penny for this type of information, but for some reason, Den seems to spill the beans whenever he gets in front of a mic. If you're smart, you'll take full advantage of Den's almost over-the-top generosity. The crash course starts at 3:00)A 2-second mindset "tweak" that can take you from being a lousy marketer to an outstanding one. All great marketers possess this mindset. Hear this at 5:20How to do follow-up like a pro. - 6:30A sneaky (and very effective) way to drum up referral work almost out of thin air! (Just follow the advice given at 7:30 and watch what happens.)What NEVER to say to a past client when doing a follow-up. Sadly, this exactly what most business owners blurt out when speaking to a past client. (Saying this will have them wondering two things: (1) why did I agree to this conversation? and (2) How can I quickly end this conversation? - 9:25)An "all but forgotten" marketing strategy that works even better than what it did in its heyday. (If you're looking for new business for your video business, you'd be crazy not to do this...  - 10:45)The “A4” marketing secret most business owners are clueless about. - 12:35How to use coffee beans to land new business. - 13:25How to use an ordinary calendar to bring in new business. - 14:00A hardly ever talked about way to shake the ol' money tree. If you're not currently doing what Den mentions at 14:20, then you're leaving so much money on the table it's not even funny.A ridiculously effective marketing formula that's also caveman simple to implement, yet for some strange reason, people shy away from doing this. Go figure. - 17:30Why using all the best marketing strategies in the world won't amount to a hill of beans if you don't have this one thing... - 18:00Connect with Den on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/denlennie/Get more great resources over at https://www.denlennie.com/ Support the show (https://www.denlennie.com/free-training)

Hello, 2021!! It’s already been off to a crazy start but we will kick things off with the continuation of our “Gems of the US” series. Up next we’ve got Connecticut and Delaware. 00:00:00 Rabbit hole 00:25:00 We’re back 01:45:00 Storytime – wallpaper O3:00:00 Onto Connecticut and Delaware. Neither of which has a state gemstone. 04:12:00 Connecticut State Mineral = Almandine Garnet 05:10:00 The role that Garnet has in Connecticut 05:52:00 The geology of Connecticut 08:40:00 The Garnet trail 09:42:00 Where to collect Garnet 11:19:00 Connecticut has gem-quality material and should have a state gemstone 11:46:00 Understanding mining in CT 12:24:00 Feldspar 12:42:00 Mica 13:25:00 Beryl 16:20:00 Morganite = JP Morgan 18:26:00 Onto Delaware . . . Sillimanite 19:16:00 Where does the name come from? 20:01:00 Why Sillimanite? 21:02:00 Sillimanite as a gemstone 21:56:00 What’s out on the market?

Today, Den drops science on something almost every single business owner needs to hear. And that is this: how to keep calm, cool, and collected when all hell breaks loose. Here's a sneak peek at what you'll hear:Two words that release a feel-good chemical in your body. Sadly, most people only use these two words when they feel obliged to. What are these two words? Hear them at 1:10How your nose can destress you within 10 to 20 seconds. And, no, this does not involve "nose candy", alright? - 3:002 questions to ask when you're stressed outta your brain. (Not only does asking these two questions instantly start to calm you down, but they can also cause you to have less stress in the future. - 3:20)An unusual (and very counterintuitive) thing to say when you're getting put through the wringer. (Admittedly, this is not easy to do, but if you can make a habit of saying this when you're backed against the wall, then don't be surprised when you find yourself become as peaceful as a sleeping baby. - 4:00)How to use an ordinary pen and a blank piece of paper to improve your inner wellbeing. - 5:00The difference between “righteous selling” and “douchebaggery selling”. - 10:00An almost foolproof way to spot a deadbeat prospect. (If the first thing a prospect asks you is what's mentioned at 12:00, then politely inform them that they are a moron and send them packing!)The single most powerful word in all of sales and negotiation. - 12:35The tale of the Mexican fisher. (This story provokes a serious soul-searching question that only you can answer. As profound and thought-provoking this story is, it's also kinda humorous. Hear this story at 16:00)How to find your business/life "sweet spot". -18:00The case study all drinkers and smokers would love to hear. - 20:00How playing chess and reading books can potentially extend your life expectancy. - 21:00An Aboriginal term every Australian knows but very few understand its real meaning. Hear Den (a Scotsman) break it down. Typical, huh? - 22:35Connect with Den on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/denlennie/Get more great resources over at https://www.denlennie.com/ Support the show (https://www.denlennie.com/free-training)

  Sea Shanties 3:00 Aquatic themed music genres 4:00The flow of an album 5:30 Music nerd chat: Melody vs. Harmony 10:30 Trivia Quiz:Name that Band 14:20 Manatee News Network 20:40 Christian’s vacation 22:30 Grocery chat 25:00 Solo Super Swipe Sunday 27:20 #dryJanuary 30:40 How to be happy 32:00 Cyberpunk is still a mess 34:00 Cat chat 37:00 Gamers in relationships 38:30 “Cuffing” Season 44:30 Wandavision 48:00 NFL roundup 51:00 Fan Controlled Football 1:05:00 Top 10 Milks fan response 1:08:30 Twitter @beefy_bois: https://twitter.com/beefy_bois   Instagram @officialbeefybois: https://www.instagram.com/officialbeefybois/   Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/74KwEHTfjzdNNqcBB96TKm   Website: http://www.beefybois.com   YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGgATtKgo1sJtVwRuggL1hA/  

Up next on our journey exploring gemstones across the US we’ve got Colorado. Not only does Colorado have a state gemstone but it also has a state mineral we haven’t covered yet – rhodochrosite. Pull up a chair as we look into into this double-gemmy episode. 00:00:00 Notes 00:29:00 Colorado 01:10:00 The Charlemagne connection 03:52:00 Ranking in most hated states 05:30:00 Aquamarine 05:47:00 1880’s 08:20:00 The discovery at Mt. Antero 09:30:00 About Mt. Antero 09:55:00 High altitude gemstones 12:07:00 Mining story 14:34:00 Commercial mining 16:07:00 Largest aquamarine crystal to be found in CO 18:43:00 Renewed interest in mining 19:46:00 Get a claim 20:41:00 Rhodochrosite 22:13:00 Single-crystal versus an aggregate specimen 23:23:00 Sweet Home Mine 25:52:00 The 1960’s 26:11:50 The Alma Queen 27:03:00 1991 27:26:00 Alma King discovery 27:44:00 The Crystal Wall 29:07:00 Smithsonian 30:13:00 Off-limits 31:31:00 Other gemstones found in Colorado

Today’s guitar villain is Bumblefoot. The unmistakeable wall of sound behind the bands Asia, and Sons of Apollo, Ron 'Bumblefoot' Thal is one of the most creative and staggeringly good guitar players you’ll find. With his trusty double neck Vigier, containing both a standard and fretless six string neck, Bumblefoot crafts riffs and licks that will make you wonder if what you’re hearing can actually come from human fingers. With an obsession for hot sauce and a powerful braided beard that would make even John Petrucci do a double take, you’re in for a real treat on this episode of Guitar Villains.Intro and Bumblefoot's supervillain alter-ego: 0:00Burning Questions: 9:30Name Those Notes: 12:20The best guitar teachers all do this: 33:00The power of the bebop scale: 37:00The melody is not for itself: 39:40The hardest and easiest thing about guitar: 41:13A fretless guitar mini-lesson: 44:15 The weirdest tour stories you’ll ever hear: 47:26The spooky tale of the haunted stage and ghostly guitar pick: 49:15Bumblefoot’s favorite airplane album: 52:48Bumblefoot’s dream band: 54:04Bumblefoot’s supervillain advice: 55:03Bumblefoot's WebsiteBumblefoot's Hot SaucesSign up for Guitar Super System, the most popular independent guitar learning platform on the internet: https://bit.ly/GVBF007

The Leadership Journey - Week 2, Changing the Culture Brian Kight and Keith Grabowski team up for this special Leadership Journey edition of the Coach and Coordinator podcast. This podcast will occur weekly throughout the season, focusing on issues that teams face during the season. Kight discusses changing culture in today’s podcast. 01:20 Alonzo Highsmith’s observation on Hard Knocks 01:58 Patience and discipline in changing a culture 03:00 Culture matters to winning and the quality of the experience 04:10 Culture is not the objective; it must have a function and relevance 05:53 What are you changing the culture for? 06:10 Contribute to the environment you are in 08:29 Urgency plus patience with discipline 09:23 Not urgent enough in pressing people now 10:20 Don’t rush when you see the pay off 11:50 Be urgent in the day and patient over two years 12:58 What does urgency done correctly look like? 13:55 Three things: maniacal commitment, intolerant of anything but the standard, do it with a ton of love 17:00 A unique combination 21:54 Being maniacal and intolerant is not an excuse to mistreat people 25:30 Urgency - don’t let empathy stop you from being urgent 26:27 Discipline is required 28:00 The intent of discipline 29:20 Doing things out of compliance, obedience, or discipline 29:48 Weakness of compliance and limitations of obedience 31:38 What can we learn from the opportunities of game day? 32:20 Culture is measured in years 33:00 Look for language change and behavior change 34:00 Look for micro ways to adjust in-season 34:24 Incremental changes begin to build up 35:46 Make significant major changes in the off season 38:35 The outcomes are going to come the we are good enough to earn them Leadership Journey Playlists: https://soundcloud.com/user-804678956/sets/the-leadership-journey-with https://soundcloud.com/user-804678956/sets/the-leadership-journey-season https://soundcloud.com/user-804678956/sets/the-leadership-journey-with-1