Podcasts about 20well

In this episode, Coach Jo and Coach Kim chat about how consistency and discipline can make a real difference in personal growth and training. They emphasize the concept of “B minus work,” where the focus is on making progress without aiming for perfection. Coach Jo shares how she adjusted her workouts to avoid burnout, choosing quality over quantity. They highlight the importance of self-accountability and adaptability, comparing it to a sailor navigating ever-changing seas. They also introduce the “30 by 30 strategy,” encouraging listeners to commit 30 minutes a day for 30 days to a new habit. Coaches Jo and Kim remind us that real growth comes from steady, ongoing effort and that setbacks are just stepping stones along the way.The coaches also dive into the mental side of staying consistent, talking about the role of self-compassion and resilience when sticking to new habits. They invite listeners to look back on past challenges to uncover valuable lessons for the future. Coach Jo and Coach Kim share their insights on embracing imperfections, keeping a growth mindset, and building healthy habits that suit each stage of life. The Coaches encourage listeners to try the 30 by 30 strategy, practicing self-kindness and seeing discipline as a path to greater freedom in fitness and beyond.Resources discussed in this episode:“Discipline Equals Freedom” by Jocko Willink--Contact Joely Churchill and Kim Berube | Iron Lab: Website: IronLabLacombe.comInstagram: Iron.Lab.LacombeFacebook: IronLabLacombeCoach Jo Instagram: @CoachJoChurchCoach Kim Instagram: @CoachKimBerubeCourse: Metabolic Blueprint--TranscriptCoach Jo 00:09Welcome to Perfectly Unfinished Conversations, the Iron Lab podcast with Coach Jo…Coach Kim 00:14…and Coach Kim… Coach Jo 00:15Where you ride shotgun with us as we have raw, real, unfiltered, and unfinished conversations about trying to eat, sleep, train, and live with some integrity in a messy, imperfect life. Coach Kim 00:27We're all about creating a strong support system, taking radical personal responsibility, having fun, and being authentic. And one of the most common themes you're going to find in this podcast is the idea that we create positive momentum in our life, by doing what we call b-minus work. Coach Jo 00:45We're making gains and getting ahead and loving life without self-sabotaging our goals by striving for perfection. We get it done by moving ahead… Coach Kim 00:55…before we're ready… Coach Jo 00:56…when we aren't feeling like it…  Coach Kim 00:58…and without hesitation. Coach Jo 1:00Be sure to subscribe now on Apple or Spotify, so you don't miss a single episode. It's good enough. Let's go.Coach Jo 1:10Hey gang, let's check in. How are ya? Coach Kim 01:14How's your training going? What are you working on these days? For yourself, specifically, talk to me.Coach Jo 01:20Well, let's chat it out. Like I'm in my “No” season. I'm thinking, I like these boundaries and a lot of no's are happening right now, like I'm having a big shift in my training. Like, no, I do not need to go faster. No, I do not need to go harder and murder myself and all the workouts and sweat my bag off, like, with the busier schedules headed into fall, I knew I didn't want to burn myself out. Like I kind of felt like I did last year. And really, I feel like every fall I've been kind of burning myself out. So I had to change something up, and that started with my training. So I've adapted a different style of training mentality, like slow, lighter weights and simply, I just got to make the moves like, really, really fucking good. I just gotta make them good, and I gotta put my brain in my body and be more intentional about how I'm moving my body. Like I'm still moving I'm just not doing it 4-5 days a week. Like I'm coaching, still sessions, and I'm coaching four out of five of those days a week now that my schedule has somewhat shifted, but I'm only working out maybe two to three sessions a week, and like that to me, feels like a really good fit. At the moment, I've always loved to move my body. It's just a part of me like, Hi, my name is Joely, and I'm a chronic mover since, like, fucking forever, and it's part of my fabric, probably because I'm clinically undiagnosed ADD. Like I am, yeah, I just have all that frenetic energy, and I feel like my skin crawls when I sit still. So just to I need to move, the movement purges my body of all that frenetic energy. And you know, I also know when I need to start moving my body more to like the bitchiness kicks in, the anxiety creeps in, the joints start to hurt. Specifically, I feel my knees more than anything these days, so really, like, those are my signs, and I try not to let, like, any of those limits keep me from moving. I just, I know I need to move when they creep in. So I just when I feel that I gotta go. Yeah, if that makes sense. Coach Kim 03:16Yeah, so well. And it totally it makes sense. And I really admire this about you is that we have spent a lot of the last decade with this real push, drive mentality, drive go heavier, get stronger, go harder, and in order to walk the talk, and in the amount of one to one really deep personal coaching that we've been doing with people, I think what we've discovered is that there is a time and a place to push, and there's a time and a time and a place to back off. It doesn't mean you stop. It doesn't mean you quit. Because I think that, I do believe that this, these are the habits that make you stronger, right, and healthier and feel better and deal with your mental health. Course, yeah, just a physical body, just like you're not just a brain, right? Like it all works together. And so I love that you have kind of allowed yourself to evolve. Because I suspect at some point earlier in, you know, in your training practice, in the developing years, where you were becoming this, you know, hard style kettlebell coach, I think there was probably a lot of that, like, go fucking hard, no matter how you felt, push through it, no matter how you felt. Coach Jo 04:25Level up!Coach Kim 04:26Yeah, level up, Bitch! And so it's nice to, it's nice to actually go, You know what? What can I do in this season of my life where, you know, I've got demands other places, but I still need to remain consistent. There is no fucking quit. You can't quit like you could. That is an option. Quitting is an option. But you know what's on the other side of that payoff, right? You know that, that there is a you know, your mental health, your your energetic state, your physical health, your cranky knees, like you know. 

Click to listen to episode (5:03).Sections below are the following:Transcript of AudioAudio Notes and AcknowledgmentsImagesExtra InformationSourcesRelated Water Radio EpisodesFor Virginia Teachers (Relevant SOLs, etc.)Unless otherwise noted, all Web addresses mentioned were functional as of 9-1-23. TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO From the Cumberland Gap to the Atlantic Ocean, this is Virginia Water Radio for the weeks of September 4 and September 11, 2023. MUSIC – ~22 sec – Lyrics: “Wake up in the morning and get to work; wake up in the morning and get to work.  Got a lot of work to do, gonna go do it, gotta get to it.” That's part of “Get to Work,” by the Harrisionburg- and Rockingham County, Va.-based band, The Steel Wheels, from their 2019 album, “Over the Trees.”  It sets the stage for a water-and-work quiz game, honoring Labor Day by exploring some water-related jobs.  In this game, I'll read 10 short samples of people describing their work connected to water; you'll have a couple of seconds of river sounds to guess the job, then I'll tell you the answer.  Let's get to it! No. 1.  I manage places where marine or freshwater creatures are grown for food, restoration, or other purposes. [RIVER SOUNDS - ~2 SEC]  That's an aquaculturist. No. 2.  I ply big rivers on large, flat vessels full of coal, grains, and other goods.  [RIVER SOUNDS - ~2 SEC] That's a crew member on a river barge. No. 3.  I'm a scientist who studies fish.  [RIVER SOUNDS - ~2 SEC]  That's an ichthyologist. No. 4.  I'm a scientist who studies inland waters, both fresh and salty.  [RIVER SOUNDS - ~2 SEC]  That's a limnologist.  No. 5.  I respond to often dangerous emergencies with the aid of trucks, hoses, pumps, and other equipment.  [RIVER SOUNDS - ~2 SEC]  That's a firefighter. No. 6.  I use filters, chemicals, and tests to treat water going from sources to customers.  [RIVER SOUNDS - ~2 SEC]  That a water-supply plant worker. No. 7.  I use filters, chemicals, and tests to treat used water and send it back to water sources.  [RIVER SOUNDS - ~2 SEC]  That's a wastewater-treatment plant worker. No. 8.  I board huge ships in open waters, then guide the ships safely into port.  [RIVER SOUNDS - ~2 SEC]  That's a harbor pilot. No. 9.  I work to ensure safe, accessible, and effective use of a water-recreation facility.  [RIVER SOUNDS - ~2 SEC]  That's a swimming pool manager, lifeguard, or water exercise instructor. And No. 10.  I use powerful drills to provide access to groundwater.  [RIVER SOUNDS - ~2 SEC]  That's a water-well contractor. Other water-related jobs include boat building, farming, public health, managing lakes and dams, managing watersheds, identifying wetlands, and lots more.  As Labor Day comes and goes, here's a big thank you to people who work to provide, manage, navigate, protect, and teach and learn about our common wealth of water.   Thanks also to The Steel Wheels for permission to use part of “Get to Work.”  We close with some more music, this time by renowned musician and former Charlottesville, Virginia, resident John McCutcheon.  From his 1998 album “Four Seasons: Autumnsongs,” here's about 35 seconds of “Labor Day.” MUSIC – ~36 sec – Lyrics: “Labor Day, Labor Day, September or the first of May.  To all who work this world we say, ‘Happy Labor Day.'” SHIP'S BELL Virginia Water Radio is produced by the Virginia Water Resources Research Center, part of Virginia Tech's College of Natural Resources and Environment.  For more Virginia water sounds, music, or information, visit us online at virginiawaterradio.org, or call the Water Center at (540) 231-5624.  Thanks to Ben Cosgrove for his version of “Shenandoah” to open and close this episode.  In Blacksburg, I'm Alan Raflo, thanking you for listening, and wishing you health, wisdom, and good water. AUDIO NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The river sounds heard in this episode were recorded by Virginia Water Radio beside the New River at Radford, Va., on October 6, 2013. “Get to Work,” from the 2019 album, “Over the Trees,” is copyright by The Steel Wheels, used with permission.  More information about The Steel Wheels is available online at http://www.thesteelwheels.com/.  This music was used previously by Virginia Water Radio in Episode 558, 1-4-21. “Labor Day,” from the 1998 album “Four Seasons: Autumnsongs,” on Rounder Records, is copyright by John McCutcheon/Appalsongs and Si Kahn/Joe Hill Music, used with permission of John McCutcheon.  More information about John McCutcheon is available online at http://www.folkmusic.com/.  Thanks to John Plunkett of Appalseed Productions for his help in acquiring permission to use this music.  More information about Appalseed Productions is available online at https://appalseed-productions-2.square.site/. Click here if you'd like to hear the full version (2 min./22 sec.) of the “Shenandoah” arrangement/performance by Ben Cosgrove that opens and closes this episode.  More information about Mr. Cosgrove is available online at http://www.bencosgrove.com. IMAGES (Except as otherwise noted, photographs are by Virginia Water Radio.) A Virginia Tech worker testing fire-hyrdrant pressure on the university campus in Blacksburg, March 10, 2017.A well-drilling rig at a Montgomery County, Virginia, residential project, June 20, 2014.A barge transporting stone on the Ohio River at Huntington, West Virginia, November 6, 2011.A commercial ship on the Chesapeake Bay as viewed from Kent Island, Maryland, September 22, 2010.EXTRA INFORMATION ABOUT LABOR DAY The following information is from U.S. Department of Labor, “History of Labor Day,” online at https://www.dol.gov/general/laborday/history.  “Before it was a federal holiday, Labor Day was recognized by labor activists and individual states.  After municipal ordinances were passed in 1885 and 1886, a movement developed to secure state legislation.  New York was the first state to introduce a bill, but Oregon was the first to pass a law recognizing Labor Day, on February 21, 1887.  During 1887, four more states – Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York – passed laws creating a Labor Day holiday. By the end of the decade Connecticut, Nebraska and Pennsylvania had followed suit.  By 1894, 23 more states had adopted the holiday, and on June 28, 1894, Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September of each year a legal holiday.” SOURCES USED FOR AUDIO AND OFFERING MORE INFORMATION American Society of Limnology and Oceanography, “What is Limnology?”  Online at https://www.aslo.org/what-is-aquatic-science/what-is-limnology/. Encyclopedia Britannica, “May Day,” by Meg Matthais, online at https://www.britannica.com/topic/May-Day-international-observance. Fire Safety USA, “All [Product] Categories,” online at https://firesafetyusa.com/collections/all-products. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Ocean Service, “What is aquaculture?”  Online at this link. NPR, “Harbor Pilots Reap High Rewards for Dangerous Job,” by Gloria Hillard, March 21, 2012. NPR, “What is May Day?”  For the most part, the opposite of capitalism,” by Emma Bowman, May 1, 2023. Tennessee Valley Authority, “Commodities Shipped on the River,” online at https://www.tva.com/environment/managing-the-river/commodities-shipped-on-the-river. University of New Mexico, “Position Classification Description: Aquatics Manager,” online at https://jobdescriptions.unm.edu/detail.php?v&id=I6001. U.S. Department of Labor, “History of Labor Day,” online at https://www.dol.gov/general/laborday/history. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Learn About Private Water Wells,” online at https://www.epa.gov/privatewells/learn-about-private-water-wells. Virginia Cooperative Extension/Virginia Household Water Quality Program, “Wellcheck Contractor List,” online at https://www.wellwater.bse.vt.edu/wellcheck-contractor-list.php. Karen Zraik, “What is Labor Day?  A History of the Workers' Holiday,” New York Times, September 4, 2023 (first published in 2018).RELATED VIRGINIA WATER RADIO EPISODES All Water Radio episodes are listed by category at the Index link above (http://www.virginiawaterradio.org/p/index.html).  See particularly the “Overall Importance of Water” subject category. Following are links to some other episodes on Labor Day or water-related labor.Episode 279, 8-24-15 – Oysters, Nitrogen, and the Chesapeake Bay. Episode 378, 7-24-17 – The Complicated Challenge of Cleaner Water. Episode 436, 9-3-18 – Labor Day, “Sandy Boys,” and the Big Sandy River. Episode 578, 5-24-21 – Water Well Construction is an Ancient and Modern Human Practice. Episode 635, 8-29-22 – A Fishing Focus for Labor Day, Featuring the Northern Neck Chantey Singers FOR VIRGINIA TEACHERS – RELATED STANDARDS OF LEARNING (SOLs) AND OTHER INFORMATION Following are some Virginia Standards of Learning (SOLs) that may be supported by this episode's audio/transcript, sources, or other information included in this post. 2020 Music SOLs SOLs at various grade levels that call for “examining the relationship of music to the other fine arts and other fields of knowledge.” 2018 Science SOLs Grades K-5: Earth and Space Systems3.7 – There is a water cycle and water is important to life on Earth. Grades K-5: Earth Resources3.8 – Natural events and humans influence ecosystems.4.8 – Virginia has important natural resources. Grade 66.6 – Water has unique physical properties and has a role in the natural and human-made environment.6.8 – Land and water have roles in watershed systems.6.9 – Humans impact the environment and individuals can influence public policy decisions related to energy and the environment. Earth ScienceES.6 – Resource use is complex.ES.8 – Freshwater resources influence and are influenced by geologic processes and human activity.ES.10 – Oceans are complex, dynamic systems subject to long- and short-term variations.

In episode five of Navigating Major Programmes, Riccardo sits down with Shormila Chatterjee, Acting Director at Government of Canada Infrastructure on the high-speed rail project. With 14 years of Canada-wide expertise in large-scale public private partnership (PPP) projects, Shormila has led various aspects of several high profile P3 pursuits and design engineering projects in Canada. She also actively contributes to Women in Infrastructure Network's Ottawa Chapter and serves as a board member of PAL Ottawa. In today's conversation, Riccardo and Shormila go beyond the resume to speak about the adversity (and highlights) of Shormila's career in infrastructure, including meeting ageism and gender bias at the decision making tables.   Key Takeaways:Why diverse voices in infrastructure are required to better serve the communities major programmes are designed forHow to navigating explicit acts of gender bias and Shormila's experience of her competency being questioned based on assumptions over education/experienceAvoiding analysis paralysis and finding your voice in moments of uncertaintyHow motherhood and personal life interconnects with a career in infrastructureWhy projects are people and how adoption of behaviour will propel the industry forward  If you enjoyed this episode, make sure and give us a five star rating and leave us a review on iTunes, Podcast Addict, Podchaser or Castbox. The conversation doesn't stop here—connect and converse with our community: Riccardo Cosentino on LinkedInShormila Chatterjee on LinkedInUse this link to find advice, guidance, and sponsorship at the Women's Infrastructure Network (WIN) Canada websiteWIN on LinkedIn  Transcript:Riccardo Cosentino  00:05You're listening to navigate major problems, the podcast that aims to elevate the conversations happening in the infrastructure industry and inspire you to have a more efficient approach within it. I'm your host Riccardo Cosentino I bring over 20 years of major product management experience. Most recently, I graduated from Oxford University's a business school, which shook my belief when it comes to navigating major problems. Now it's time to shake yours. Join me in each episode as a press the industry experts about the complexity of major program management, emerging digital trends and the critical leadership required to approach these multibillion dollar projects. Let's see what the conversation takes us. Shormila Chatterjee, the acting director of infrastructure Canada, is an ally accomplished infrastructure professional with 14 years of experience in both the public and private sectors focused on social and public infrastructure is evident in our work on the high frequency rail project, a major initiative in Canada. Prior to her current role, she served as primary contact for prominent clients like the City of Ottawa, and Public Services and Procurement Canada, while at SNC Lavalin Shormila. The ability to establish strong relations with public sector counterparts enabled her to effectively address challenges throughout the project lifecycle achieving favorable outcomes. In addition to a professional achievements Shormila actively contributes to the woman and infrastructure network Ottawa chapter, and serves as a board member of the Powell Ottawa. Air involvement with this organization reflects our dedication to supporting undeserved communities, particularly senior arts workers. In other words, show millas commitment to delivery and inclusivity is evident in our effort to create equal opportunities and cultivate inclusive work environments. Hello, welcome to another episode of navigating major programs. Today I'm here with Shormila. Are you doing? Sure Mila, Shormila Chatterjee  02:15I'm good. Thanks, Ricardo. How are you? Riccardo Cosentino  02:17Not too bad, not too bad. Thank you for joining us. It's a pleasure to have you on the program. You and I go back a few years. So why don't we get right into it? You know, I think the audience has heard your bio. So why don't we just start with what what is your current role in infrastructure? Shormila Chatterjee  02:36Sure. Thanks. Thanks so much for having me Riccardo. So I'm currently actually currently right now I'm on maternity leave. But I'm essentially an acting director at infrastructure Canada on the high frequency rail project, which he had mentioned is one of the largest infrastructure projects in Canada, the in that's going to connect Toronto to Quebec City in the in the next couple of years, which is really exciting. Riccardo Cosentino  02:59I guess it's on point. I mean, this is a podcast about women in infrastructure. So I think it's really important that you're actually on maternity leave. These are the things that happen. So I'm glad that I'm actually having a guest that is taking taking a leave of absence in order to take care of a newborn baby think it's very important. So how did you first get into the industry? Shormila Chatterjee  03:24Well, I think like most people, it's by accident. But I started in mining and metallurgy at SNC levelin, when I'm fresh out of school, and the infrastructure division was based out of Vancouver at the time, and they wanted to set up a Toronto office to respond to, you know, the creation of Metrolinx and restructure Ontario, kind of this new Ontario business. So they created a group and we're just looking for people and I happen to hear about it and wanted to join because it sounded really interesting. The projects that I was working on, while interesting, were in very remote places. So I was looking for something that had this mix of being able to apply my technical skills, but also be in more urban environments. So then I was one of the first few employees and the infrastructure that was called transportation at the time, but the infrastructure group in essence is the Toronto office. Riccardo Cosentino  04:16And was it always your plan to build a career in infrastructure? Or did you stumble upon it? Shormila Chatterjee  04:22Yeah, so I sort of stumbled upon it I think for me i i did civil engineering in school and that's quite a wide like you I guess ready Riccardo but like it's a wide pretty wide of things that you can do with civil engineering. I wanted to actually eventually move back to India because I had went to high school in India and moved back to India and and work there but then I had stumbled on infrastructure here in Canada and ended up wanting to stay and such an active industry. So I Yeah, sort of fell in love with it by accident. Riccardo Cosentino  04:54You fell in love during your undergraduate degree or as you started your career. And Shormila Chatterjee  05:02yeah, I would say as I sit here, what what I love, I think of engineering and has, which is what I continue to love in my job now is that engineering and also infrastructure and particularly projects is a team sport. And for me, that's what gets me up in the morning. Like, I'm not a sort of dog eat dog type of person. Like, I like that we're all in this together, and we're all trying to achieve a common goal. And I love working with people who, you know, have that same sort of drive to, to move the needle forward every day. And that's what I really love about sort of engineering is, you know, we're all writing the bell curve together. And now in projects, we're all trying to, to, to build something meaningful together. And that's what i i Like I said, that's, that's the thing that makes me most excited about my job. Riccardo Cosentino  05:53And how do you choose SNC Lavell? And as an employer? Shormila Chatterjee  05:56That's a good question. I it was they had, I think I had applied to them as a summer student between third and fourth year and got a job. And then they actually called me the week before my finals in my fourth year and offered me a job right into school. So I didn't look anywhere else. I have to say, so it kind of relieved that stress. And it was great, you know, working in mining, especially, I think if I had not stayed in infrastructure mining was a great career for a young engineer. It was very autonomous. I got to work in a gold mine in Nevada and work in projects in Madagascar, and Pakistan. So like, it was really interesting. But like I said, you know, very remote locations, but a good good start to my career for sure. Riccardo Cosentino  06:44The Madagascar that's good project is one that I touched. Yeah. touched on i My early mind in my early days, and I see. Yeah, a bit of a marquee project. He was a nickel mine Shormila Chatterjee  06:57was a nickel mine. Yeah, yeah. Riccardo Cosentino  06:59Very interesting. Very interesting project. Yeah. Okay. So that's a good segue into the next question, which is, what were the some of the highlights of your career so far?  Shormila Chatterjee  07:11Yeah, I've been quite lucky. I mean, for me, I think it's obviously the Confederation Line project is one that stands out, I was lucky to be from, you know, the bid phase where it's was was where we met over 10 years ago now, but the bid all the way to the first few years of execution. You know, I remember being in city council when the mayor announced us to prepare for proponent and he was quite emotional when he did that. And just, you know, like, seeing people move their families from across the world to work on this project was really exciting. So, you know, say what you will about Confederation Line, but it's definitely changed the city's makeup and I think, created the sense of, you know, this, you know, this desire for an expansive LRT network in Ottawa, which is exciting. So, I really liked working on that project. And then also, like, I've learned a lot from the ones that we, we didn't always win. So some of the, you know, the Close, but no cigar projects we I learned a lot from as well. So but yeah, the Confederation Line definitely stands out. Riccardo Cosentino  08:16Yeah, I mean, we both we've both worked on that you worked on it a bit longer than me. But yeah, I don't think you were involved in the, in the public inquiry. Shormila Chatterjee  08:26I was not, I got to take my daughter, I'm the first day that the train opened the mascot, so that was me. Riccardo Cosentino  08:37Right. Yeah, I think I think that project is actually it's a very interesting one. Because even though there were a few things that went wrong, you can learn a lot from things that go wrong. And for me, you know, it's been a very, very interesting journey. See it from really from RFQ to today, we've been engaging through the public inquiry, and really learning how complex major projects are. And sometimes it's easy to criticize them without actually understanding what the challenges are. And it's not that simple. And so, yeah, I think I think, yeah, the could, we could write a book about Confederation Line and hopefully one day we will.  Shormila Chatterjee  09:21Yeah, no, absolutely. Really interesting experience. Riccardo Cosentino  09:26So okay, let's let's jump into the into the part of the conversation that is related to working in a male dominated environment. I know you I've known you for many years. I know that you know, on the surface you fit right in. But the interesting to know what what, what has been your experience and challenges in working in such an industry? Shormila Chatterjee  09:50Yeah, so I was kind of thinking about that. And I realized that I feel like I faced more resistance later, as I progress later on in my career than when I did when I was a junior, I think when I was a junior engineer, I had, I've always had great managers, I have to say, but I never really felt the the sort of apprehension of being in a room or unwelcome in a room as I did. Oh, I think pretty much when I started around the time when I actually started working with you, is when I realized because I was in the same at the same table as decision makers, and I think the challenge with projects is, you start usually with a new team. And not everybody knows each other. And, you know, on day one, I was sort of doing a bit of a Rolodex in my head that almost pretty much on day one without fail, at least one man who is probably 10 to 15 years older than me, was I was like, What is she doing and through and sort of met me with some resistance, but and then, by the end of the project, we're sending each other Christmas cards. So it was like, but I, I would say that that was my challenge is sort of, I mean, I don't think I even wore my iron ring until, you know, pretty much seven, eight years into my career, because I didn't really need it before. But I felt like I needed that as like a sort of at least the minimum ticket to entry. Well, I must have done something right to, you know, have that or it's it was really a token. But I felt that, you know, it's been more in my recent history that I had felt that at that sort of leadership or decision making tables where the resistance was called, and then, you know, I don't consider myself usually the smartest person in the room. But I'm definitely probably one of the hardest working and hopefully you can attest to that. But so eventually realizing that, you know, we're all in it. And you know, trying to reach the same goal. Like I said before, it was what got us through it. But that's really what I feel like when I faced a lot of resistance. Riccardo Cosentino  11:57Do you recall or do you? Do you mind sharing? If you do recall some other examples where that how that resistance manifested? Shormila Chatterjee  12:08Yeah, I mean, I think I've I've had, you know, one person explicitly asked for me to be removed from a project because they didn't know if I was capable or competent, without having actually asked or known about my history. And I think especially being on the kind of commercial financial side, dealing with engineers or construction folks, they sometimes there's a feeling like, I'm out to get them or I don't necessarily understand their point of view. So I have had, yeah, some pretty explicit acts of rebellion against me on the team. And like I said, luckily, we sort of rode through it and got through the other side, but because I'm not, you know, I'm not a wallflower. Like, you have said, like, I will express my opinion, I'm there for a reason. So yeah, so it's been there's been some some rocky roads. Riccardo Cosentino  13:13But nevertheless, you succeeded. I mean, you've had a pretty, pretty interesting career so far, with lots of opportunities ahead. And so what what do you think has helped you succeed? I mean, your hard work, obviously. Shormila Chatterjee  13:26Yeah, I think for me, you know, I A Well, one thing, too, that I've I tried to maybe do consciously in the beginning of a project as well, especially, is to be vocal about when I don't know something, you know, working with a lot of technical people, I think they get what, what I've heard this term before, and I use it a lot is analysis paralysis, like nobody wants to say anything unless they know everything. And, you know, when you're, especially when you're in a, in a, in a bidding environment, where there's very little information, and you have to make very consequential decisions based on very little information, you sort of have to go with your gut. And it's okay not to know, and sort of being the one that's very vocal about like, I don't know the answer to this, but let's try to sort of risk assess the situation and move things forward. I think being vocal about that is important in the beginning, and I think that that's helped me and then also being decisive. I think we work with a lot of people who are, you know, you're expected the pieces, kind of incredible of what you're expected to do in, you know, six to eight months of a bid opportunity. And so people who are not used to that and they're used to kind of five to 10 year long projects, they don't, they're not used to kind of moving things forward at that type of pace. So, you know, I'm happy to take the fall if something goes wrong, but you know, I just want to move things forward. So being decisive, especially early on in a project opportunity I think is really important. I try to try to be that the, you know, the sort of the buck stops with me attitude, I think helps Riccardo Cosentino  15:10that's probably why you and I get along. Yeah, Shormila Chatterjee  15:13yeah, exactly. Like, I think you just, you know, it's, it might be the wrong decision six months from now, but you have to make a decision, you know, Riccardo Cosentino  15:22and, you know, other guests in the previous episode that she talked about the challenges of being, you know, one of the few women in the room, if not the only woman in the room, and the challenge was, you know, do I do I modify my behavior to be accepted, or be more myself that your experience in the past, and you find yourself having to modify you, your behavior, or who you are in order to fit in? Is it something that you, you felt you had to do in order to be accepted in a male dominated environment, you or you didn't care? Shormila Chatterjee  16:00I think I, I don't think it's modified. But I do compartmentalize myself quite a bit. I mean, like, you and I have a lot of conversations about sort of Shop Talk, like, I like talking. And I think that's the thing, like, I like talking about the industry and work, and I don't naturally sort of lead my personal life with my I sort of like to compartmentalize those parts of my life. So I don't think I'm sort of censoring or, or altering who I am at all. But it's just like, a different facet of my life is at work. And then a different facet of my life is at home. And so I that's, that's what I just I'm, I don't think it's being in a male dominated, I'm just sort of that type of person. And that's just how I am, but I don't think I've changed myself. And I would say it would be less about being in a male dominated as, when I was younger, I felt that I was very young, like in a, you know, that was more of a thing. I'm that's caught up to me now. But But before I've generally worked with, like I said, just really great managers and mentors, but I never felt I had to diminish myself in anyway.  Riccardo Cosentino  17:20Well, I guess that's a perfect segue to my next question, you know, how important is mentorship for for professional success? Have you had any, any particular mentor and female mentor in this industry?  Shormila Chatterjee  17:34Yes, I've been very lucky to have, I would say, not just mentors, but champions in my career, like they've really all pushed me. And we've had this sort of common thread of stretch goals, like trying to push me further than I think I could go. And that's really, is what propelled my own kind of confidence and like stepping into my own light, which I wish I didn't do kind of when I was younger in my career. And so my mentors have been really instrumental in that. And I think it's important to that I've had both female and male mentors, and I would also suggest that women, mentor men and men, mentor women, just so everybody sort of can see the challenges that everybody else goes through. But I've had great female mentors as well. And I think what they taught me is, you know, you can have it all, just not all at once. And that is what I sort of believe, anyways, is that, you know, there's kind of a season for when to sort of, like, really accelerate your career and sort of, then if you want to focus on the family, if that's what you choose to do, you know, you can always kind of still be very fulfilled in your career, but then have this whole other sort of aspect to your career and hit your stride. You know, when your kids are older, and sort of seeing that ebb and flow of people's progression has been really inspiring for me for you know, seeing these women doing amazing things in their, you know, 50s and 60s, is something that I really, like it gives me this, this, this excitement for the future rather than, that's when people slow down, you know, and that's not the case at all. So that's what I've learned a lot from, from my female mentors, and I'm lucky now that I'm in the at the point in my career where I'm mentoring men and women and so like, I find that really exciting as well. Riccardo Cosentino  19:34Interesting. Very interesting. Okay, so we talked about your past, we talked about your experiences, what are your hopes for the industry as a whole? Like, Shormila Chatterjee  19:47I mean, that's a loaded question. But I think for me, I, I mean, and you will probably remember this as well, and maybe better than me, but, you know, I see a lot of rhetoric around sort of collaborative modeling and and working on a project that has that as well. But like, I think projects are people. And you know, a lot of what we are talking about now how a lot of these models will solve all our problems is a lot of similar rhetoric of what was said when p3 is first became really popular. And so I don't think that models are here to solve all our problems, it's, we really have to sort of look at behavior. And so as an industry, I hope we take these tenants that are coming out of collaborative models and apply them just as an industry as a whole. Because we can collaborate in any in data, like you, but it did, you don't need a model to tell you to do that. So I hope that we take this time to sort of can reflect, and then particularly now that I'm on the public sector side, like what does that mean, as an owner, you know, you we are have to be a sophisticated buyer now. And it's not just to be a contract administrator anymore. So, you know, it's that third P in in in p3 is to be a partner. And it's the same now in a collaborative contract, there's this expectation of an active participant from an owner. So what does that mean? And, and how can we be sort of better partners to each other moving forward? And, you know, I hope that we can just move the behavioral piece forward, regardless of the model. Riccardo Cosentino  21:29Yeah, that's a good aspiration for the industry. I have to say that the, ultimately, the collaboration, you do need a framework around the collaboration, like it's not it's, it's not just the People. Obviously, you need the people, you need the culture, you need the leadership. Yeah. But you also need the legal and commercial framework to incentivize that. Because ultimately, I think that's, that's the problem with PPPs is that although the name has been deceiving, called a partnership. But when you actually look at the commercial, legal framework of a PPP, it's everything back collaborative is a zero sum game,  Shormila Chatterjee  22:12right  Riccardo Cosentino  22:13And so, you know, sure, you can achieve the collaboration. But that's by chance, not by design, because the model is not designed commercially, legally, to incentivize collaborations as zero sum game. But hopefully, yeah, I agree with you. Like, it's more than just the rhetoric, and it does start with people in leadership. I completely agree with you. I mean, ultimately, you need a capable owner, you need, you need trained individuals. And eventually, though, you also need the legal and commercial framework to support the leadership and the people.  Shormila Chatterjee  22:54Right. Yeah,  Riccardo Cosentino  22:55yeah. My Yeah. Another guest Mariska said the same thing, because she's working on a lot of claims. And even though I'm talking myself out of a job, it would be good if it was less, less adversarial. Shormila Chatterjee  23:09Yeah, absolutely.  Riccardo Cosentino  23:11Would you help encourage more women to pursue a career in infrastructure? And as your experience being positive enough? Shormila Chatterjee  23:19I would absolutely. And I think one thing that I love, too, about the industry is how small it is, surprisingly, and I, it hit me again, when I moved to Ottawa, you know, five years ago, and thought I didn't have a network here. And you realize infrastructures, not even six degrees of separation, it's probably three. And so there's this real kind of sort of camaraderie amongst people, at least in Canada. And so I think it's very everybody's sort of, there's just a, just a really kind of great sense of connection and community. Exactly. And so I really, I really appreciate that and, and, you know, like, talking about maternity leave, like, making your kids like my older daughter calls it, her. It's her mom's train, you know, every time she sees it, and for better or for worse, but those things are really it's it is like, sort of exciting, is it to be able to see the legacy building that you do is is something that you can really be proud of. So absolutely, I would definitely recommend it.  Riccardo Cosentino  24:29What would you say to these women that you're encouraging? If you if somebody one of your mentor were to come to you and say, why should they join? Why should they join this industry? Shormila Chatterjee  24:39I think because there's a lot to learn, but also a lot of people need to hear diverse voices. And so to be able to just, you know, give because, you know, these these projects are supposed to be for communities and for the public. So how can we better serve people if there's more people that were being represented? Did in house you know, so the more people that we can have, and so women or people of color or indigenous people, like really, everybody who feels like they don't see themselves in these projects, or they feel like it doesn't really resonate with them, and then come work here, you know, there, I think there's just so much opportunity and you know, projects like high frequency rail, which is, you know, could be such a huge change to how passenger rail service is delivered over 1000 kilometers. Like that's something that we should have as many diverse voices on the on the project side, I think as we can so yeah, I think if to better serve our communities, we need as many voices at the table as we can. Riccardo Cosentino  25:49Yeah, I agree. Some of these projects are defined as nation building, right. So I do want everybody to help build a nation. Absolutely. Especially because I feel like Canada. Yeah. Well, thank you very much for the conversation. Shormila this this was entertaining and interesting, as usual. glad that you joined be Shormila Chatterjee  26:10it really appreciate being here. Yeah, we usually don't talk like this without a beer. But so this is new. But Riccardo Cosentino  26:20you don't know if I have one you can see for the screen right? Say well, you probably have a scotch.  Shormila Chatterjee  26:27Yeah. Okay,  Riccardo Cosentino  26:32well, thank you again, and have a good evening. We'll talk soon. Thank you so much. Bye now. That's it for this episode on navigating major problems. I hope you found today's conversation as informative and thought provoking as I did. If you enjoyed this conversation, please consider subscribing and leaving a review. I would also like to personally invite you to continue the conversation by joining me on my personal LinkedIn at Riccardo Cosentino. Listening to the next episode, where we will continue to explore the latest trends and challenges in major program management. Our next in depth conversation promises to continue to dive into topics such as leadership, risk management, and the impact of emerging technology in infrastructure. It's a conversation you're not going to want to miss. Thanks for listening to navigate the major problems and I look forward to keeping the conversation going Music: "A New Tomorrow" by Chordial Music. Licensed through PremiumBeat.DISCLAIMER: The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by the hosts and guests on this podcast do not necessarily represent or reflect the official policy, opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints of Disenyo.co LLC and its employees.

Welcome to Episode 88 of C3: Crystals, Cauldrons & Cocktails!In this episode,  River and Wren talk about some witchy places to visit in Scotland, England & New Orleans!Grab a cocktail and listen!Sources:https://www.learnreligions.com/witchy-things-to-do-in-new-orleans-2562653https://ghostcitytours.com/new-orleans/ghost-stories/witchcraft-new-orleans/https://www.neworleans.com/things-to-do/attractions/cemeteries/https://www.hexfest.com/https://endlessnight.com/neworleans2023#https://www.hauntedrooms.com/louisiana/new-orleans/haunted-places/haunted-hotelshttps://www.visitscotland.com/blog/attractions/witch-trail/#:~:text=The%20Witches'%20Well%20can%20be,often%20left%20where%20they%20died.https://www.nms.ac.uk/explore-our-collections/stories/scottish-history-and-archaeology/witchs-iron-collar/#:~:text=In%20the%20late%2016th,branks%20(an%20iron%20muzzle).https://www.wanderingcrystal.com/scotlandwitchcraft/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_early_modern_Scotlandhttps://museumofwitchcraftandmagic.co.uk/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Witchcraft_and_Magichttps://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g528825-d612699-Reviews-The_Museum_Of_Witchcraft_And_Magic-Boscastle_Cornwall_England.htmlhttps://www.thewitchery.com/https://be.synxis.com/?_ga=2.33146046.1421090210.1685542081-368994096.1685542081&_gl=1*6a3odc*_ga*MzY4OTk0MDk2LjE2ODU1NDIwODE.*_ga_2MTZJGVPC1*MTY4NTU0MjA4MS4xLjEuMTY4NTU0MjE3Ni42MC4wLjA.&adult=2&arrive=2023-06-29&chain=25766&child=0¤cy=GBP&depart=2023-06-30&hotel=66353&level=hotel&locale=en-US&rooms=1https://www.isleofskye.com/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_Skyehttps://www.visitscotland.com/info/see-do/clava-cairns-p245611https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trossachshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_Mullhttps://www.isle-of-mull.net/River's Etsy store:  www.batsandbaublesinc.etsy.com Intro and Outro Audio:podcast intro & outro music:Góða Nótt by Alexander NakaradaLink: https://filmmusic.io/song/4754-g-a-n-ttLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-liceSound from Zapsplat.com – Witches Cauldrons bubblingSupport the showSupport the show

Reverend Mark Sowersby Discusses his new book "Forgiving the Nightmare" He recounts his survival of both sexual, emotional, and physical abuse fro age 7 to 14 at the hands of his mothers husbandMeet Mark Sowersby. Speaker. Writer. Pastor. In 2019 Pastor Mark went through a time of great healing. He began speaking about the nightmare of abuse and years of suffering he experienced in his childhood. And how condemnation, shame, and guilt were replaced with forgiveness, joy, and life in abundance. He now speaks about his story and his testimony of healing, forgiveness and freedom through his ministry, Forgiving The Nightmare. . Forgivingthenightmare.comhttps://www.instagram.com/forgiving_the_nightmare_/https://twitter.com/SowersbyMarkhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKS97tXY8cSiQLfRXXBCMXwhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-sowersby-660aa1236/Book Pastor Mark to SpeakPastor Mark Sowersby has a testimony to share about how he was set free from a nightmare of abuse and years of suffering. Condemnation, shame, and guilt were replaced with forgiveness, joy, and life in abundance.Mark's ministry, Forgiving The Nightmare is on mission to help those who have experienced hurt, abuse, and pain find freedom and peace through God's love and the many facets of forgiveness.His testimony, told to live audiences, on television, and through his book, is a powerful reflection of the love of our Savior. Since 2019, he's been sharing his story around the world of how he went from hurting to health, from death to life.Transcript Link herehttps://forgivingthenightmare.com/How do you move past the pain that keeps you up at night, leaves you isolated, untrusting, and afraid? How can you possibly forgive them, especially when they don't deserve forgiveness? Pastor Mark Sowersby shares his testimony with his ministry and book by the same name, Forgiving The Nightmare.Pastor Mark Sowersby has a testimony to share about how he was set free from a nightmare of abuse and years of suffering. Condemnation, shame, and guilt were replaced with forgiveness, joy, and life in abundance.Mark's ministry, Forgiving The Nightmare is on mission to help those who have experienced hurt, abuse, and pain find freedom and peace through God's love and the many facets of forgiveness.His testimony, told to live audiences, on television, and through his book, is a powerful reflection of the love of our Savior. Since 2019, he's been sharing his story around the world of how he went from hurting to health, from death to life.Mark Sowersby·00:01John already knew that he was the Messiah. But the stress of prison, this man who lived outside that ete locust that walked everywhere, now he's confined into a prison. The stress of that started to steal his faith away. So he didn't need answer. He was there in the Jordan River with a votes for he just needed a testimony. Asked John. Does he remember? Remember? Does he remember? So I think in my sense I was in a prison of abuse, but I was free in Christ. And I had my answer that the ugliness of abuse is never what God intended for me. But I needed a testimony, not just answer. Introduction·00:44Marcus Averillius said, what we do in life echoes through eternity. What is your life echoing through eternity? Welcome to Echoes Through Eternity with Dr. Jeffrey Skinner. Our mission is to inspire, engage, and encourage leaders from across the globe to plant missional churches and be servant leaders. So join us and hear the stories of servant leaders reverberating lives as God echoes them through eternity. Brought to you by Missional church planting and leadership development and Dynamic church Planting. Dr. Jeffery D Skinner·01:15International welcome in Echoes Through Eternity. I am your host, Dr. Jeffrey D. Skinner. What is God echoing through your life today? I am joined in the studio today by Reverend Mark. Soarsby this is a pretty I just want to give a cautionary tale here. We generally deal with very G rated material and today is a very serious subject. We all recognize that we live in a fallen world and that no one is perfect except for Jesus. There's been one perfect man that has lived and we are certainly not it. And so our homes have a degree of brokenness. All of them do. And some of them have a further degree of brokenness than others. Mark has experienced some trauma and we'll be talking a little bit about that trauma today. He was sexually abused. Dr. Jeffery D Skinner·02:05And so if you have young children and are listening to this podcast, probably do not want them listening to this one. I will always give you a warning. We're not going to get explicit or anything like that, but certainly just want to give you an opportunity that if you are particularly sensitive to that topic or if you have young children, then this probably will not be the episode for you. I think it is an important conversation to have within Christian circles because we do live in a fallen world and this is prevalent in the Kingdom of God as well as outside the kingdom, unfortunately. We know people that have been abused by parents, but also people have been abused by pastors, unfortunately, and Christian leaders. Dr. Jeffery D Skinner·02:48And we're to the point that where we have to do background checks and things like that on Christian leaders today to be sure of that. So that being said, I just want to give you guys a second to check out the podcast. If you have just knowing what's coming here. Again, we will not be explicit, but I do want to offer cautionary tale to kind of let you know that today's subject matter is a little bit PG in the sense that it's very sensitive conversation here. We will not be explicit. I do want to say that beyond that, welcome in, Marcus. It's great to have you, man. Mark Sowersby·03:25Hey, thank you for having me, Dr. Jeff. It's wonderful to be with you and your audience today. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my testimony. Dr. Jeffery D Skinner·03:33Yeah. And so Mark and I got connected through the podcast, through Echoes Through Eternity website. He reached out, said, hey, I've got a book, just wrote basically my personal story. I'd like to send it to you. You read over it, and if you feel like there's a fit for your podcast, have me on and I read it. Very good book is very personal stuff here. And as you said, it is your story, it is your journey, and it's what God has taught you through that journey. And one of the things that you say in your book is that when you go through something with God, make a record of it, record it, journal it, do something to mark that place. Dr. Jeffery D Skinner·04:12We don't build altars to God necessarily anymore as we cross over these places, but we certainly see those as times where they became milestones in the journey of leaders from the Bible times. And so today, whatever that journey is for you, that is one of the things that you encourage. So, yes, the title of the book I'll show you here is Forgiving The Nightmare. It's going to show up backwards on your screen if you're watching on video. And we will include all of Mark's contact information. He's got lots of things in the work. He's been on 700 Club. God is using his story. But anyway, it is great to have Mark in the studio today. And again, the name of the book is Forgiving The Nightmare. Mark Soresby will put all that in the show notes there. He will have a blog. Dr. Jeffery D Skinner·04:59He'll be doing a guest blog. We'll have that up for the show as well. That will be linked in the show notes. Anyway, I just want to get started here. Great having you, Mark. Thanks again, brother. Let me ask you a quick question here. So you are a danger in the Assemblies of God, right? Mark Sowersby·05:14I am. That's right, of God. Dr. Jeffery D Skinner·05:17And you and I were talking before the show. We've got a mutual connection in the Church of Nazarene. You had a former pastor who was in the Church of Nazarene coming to Assemblies of God. Mark Sowersby·05:28Yeah, I kind of grew up in a church that had a blend of assembly of God, Nazarene. So I have a soft spot for both Fellowships, both churches in my heart because I had a lot of great Nazarene people. If you would love me. And the title on the door said assembly of God. That if you walked into the church, it was definitely a blend of both fellowships, learning to come together and to love each other and to lift up the name of Jesus. So, yeah, I would say there's a lot of nazarene in this AG guy. Dr. Jeffery D Skinner·06:02Yeah, well, it's all part of the kingdom, right? And that's what we want to celebrate. And we're all lifting up here at the Kingdom of God. We can all have our opinions and interpretations, but in the end, it's all about Jesus, right? Mark Sowersby·06:13That's right. That's right. Dr. Jeffery D Skinner·06:20Well, Mark, let me get a quick question here. Who would you say this book is for? I know were talking a little bit before you said that it was really less about abuse and more about trauma. Who would you say it's for? Mark Sowersby·06:31Well, I think there's a three statement answer for this. First, when I stepped out to do this, I felt the Lord was calling me to do this. So it's the answer, the yes to the call, to allow myself to be so wid

SPEAKERSSuzanne Noble, Peter MarriottSuzanne Noble  00:10Hello, and welcome to Sex Advice for Seniors, which, surprisingly, is coming to you from a different location today, isn't it Peter?Peter Marriott  00:20It is. We're broadcasting live from the John Radcliffe Hospital, here on hospital Radio 197. No, we're broadcasting from the hospital because I had a bit of a fall. Fell off my bike, and broke my ribs and my jaw. So I might sound a little strange while we're talking today. But we thought it'd be a good opportunity to talk about disability and sex because I also have another disability in that I have MS. So maybe there's the opportunity to do that. To talk about that.Suzanne Noble  01:00Well, I think if anytime is right, the time is now, you have to grab your opportunities when they arise. And if you hear some little background noise and squeaking that's just the lovely hospital ambience coming out to you. So, we can't do anything about that. So Pete had a bit of a fall. And he's laid up here in bed surrounded by three other older men who are looking in far worse condition than you do. Frankly, I have to say.Peter Marriott  01:31Well, they've got things like broken hips and stuff like that. They're really quite badly off. I think one's going for an operation today. Who knows? Who knows? Maybe I'll be released. But, nobody knows. We don't know.Suzanne Noble  01:54So let's talk about disability and sex. Because you know what, that's a really.. when it comes to taboo subjects. If you thought being older and having sex was taboo, well, just goes one level up, doesn't it when you've got a disability because it's something people really, really don't want to talk about at all, I suspect. But, you've had MS for how long now?Peter Marriott  02:18Oh, well, I was diagnosed in 2010. Retired in 2015. Early Retirement. So I've been hanging around thinking about these things for a while now. And disability and sex are a big one. Because, obviously, you know, all the issues we talked about last time were with self-identity, and being virile and strong and young and the rest of it kind of disappears if you have a disability. I mean, luckily for me, sexually, I don't seem to be too badly affected by the MS. So, but I know that for a lot of people is a big problem.Suzanne Noble  03:11And how does the illness for those of the audience that doesn't know how does it manifest itself?Peter Marriott  03:20Well, a million different ways. It starts off very small and it gets bigger and bigger. In my case, for some people, it never develops very far at all. A lot of people apparently find they have MS. Well, not them, obviously, their relatives, find that they have MS at the autopsy stage.  The incidence is probably much higher, but it starts off with niggling pains and pins and needles and balance problems. Quite often sight problems, people go blind for no reason and then their sight comes back, back again. Those things happen and it takes quite a long time before they've discovered the reason for it because they don't really find out when they do an MRI scan and find you've got these lesions on your nerves, which is where the name comes from multiple sclerosis. You've lots of scar tissue on your nerves. And then they go from there and they offer you disease-modifying treatment and all sorts of things.Suzanne Noble  04:46And sexually, did you worry at first that it might have some impact on your sex life? When you first found out that you had MS. Was it something that you did think about or was it kind of pushed to the back in terms of some of the other challenges?Peter Marriott  05:08It seemed it wasn't having too much of an effect. So you prioritise in your head, the different things that are going on. I was more worried, for example at the time that I couldn't play the guitar anymore. I couldn't walk very far anymore. And that distance gradually declined and that was more worrying. But I guess if I'd had sexual problems, then that would have been pretty well at the top of the list, I should imagine. And luckily, I didn't, so I could concentrate on those other things.Suzanne Noble  05:51I suppose the only area is things around as you said, things around your balance, and also just general energy level. And I think that there are a lot of illnesses around that clearly impact people's energy levels. And you have to figure out positions and things where you're not expending as much energy. And the other person maybe takes over from that.Peter Marriott  06:16So whatever happens, then, your sex life is gonna change in lots of ways. , the energy is, is a major problem. Because you have to work really hard to keep your energy levels up. , you know, if you're gonna be fit, maintain your energy levels for sexual purposes then you have to get out and get exercising, you know, and that's the last thing you start running around or jumping up and down. You just want to lie down and take it easy. It affects you in lots of ways. And I think disabilities do that. You're affected by not only your own disabilities, your own inability to, you know, have a full sex life, whatever. But you're affected by other people's perceptions of, more importantly, I, again, I don't, that hasn't been too bad for me, because apart from falling around a lot when people just assume I'm drunk, which sometimes I'm sometimes or not, but if you're in a wheelchair, or you have a more visible disability than I think it's much more of a problem. I think then, you know, you really are up against it, in terms of your sex life, or your or whatever you're doing really. But that it's I think it's a big problem for your sex life if you're severely disabled. Obviously. But, but it's something where people think I will, the sex life is not important. There are more important things. And that's true. But it is such an essential part of being an adult human being that it's quite difficult to, put it aside and say, it doesn't matter. It's more important to be able to walk or, you know, do this, that and the other. I mean, the only reason I play the guitar, for example, is because originally I thought would be a good way to get laid. And so not being able to play the guitar is kind of synonymous with not getting laid. Realistically, there it is.Suzanne Noble  09:14That's such a male thing, isn't it? Like a rock star and thinking of associating it with getting laid? By whatever sex you happen to prefer? I suspect that, as you say, one of the, one of the key challenges I suspect of being somebody who's not got some form of disability, whether it's visible or invisible, is that the medical profession prefers not to think about sex, when it comes to all of this sort of stuff. So as you said, they tend to kind of go, well, let's talk about that. After we talk about all the other stuff. Let's get around to that later and getting around to that later, sometimes, that's the only thing you have to cling on to is the fact that actually, you know, you can have sexual pleasure you can be with someone, you can enjoy it. If you're not able to do some other things, like, for instance, walk very far or you know, or go running or do whatever else people do to get endorphins going throughout their body, then that's one of the few things that you actually can do. And I think to dismiss it as being some are less important than some of these other things is to undermine just how important it is for adults, just in general.I've seen that having been with partners who, you know, were diagnosed with cancer and asked the doctor for Viagra. One of the first things in a previous relationship, somebody I was with, who was diagnosed with late-stage cancer said, Well, can I just have some Viagra please so I can just have some fun for the last few months. And honestly, the doctor's face, his jaw fell to the floor. He could not have been, he didn't know what to do. He didn't know how to react. And he did say, let's think about that in a few weeks' time. Let's just see how you get on after he has just been diagnosed with a death sentence. And he said, What are you talking about? There's no kind of getting on later on. I just want this now. And the unfortunate thing was, I mean, we did go and find it from some backstreet place, this was pre being able to just pick it up at Boots. But I'll never forget how his attitude towards that request was somehow really surprising to me because I thought he couldn't be the only person that just wants to have sex towards the end of his life. I know, it's a morbid thing to talk about. But it did. It was really important to him. And if you...Peter Marriott  11:56If you said to people, you know, you've got 10 minutes to live, what you do, there's always some variation of sex in there. Some, not a very nice version of what they want to do, but, but somewhere there, and John Baetjemen was, you know, he was even in TV, TV ad, I think, at some point. And the end of his life is in a wheelchair and somebody asks him Do you have any regrets at all? You see, I wish I'd have more sex, you know, so, it's such ingrained parts of the human psyche to want that and to see that as an important part of our lives. And, you know, one of the first things the doctor did, in fact, I think it was the first appointment. My doctor offered me a prescription for Viagra. I think I still have them.Suzanne Noble  13:07And, and one of the things I was thinking about as well was that when people talk about pleasure, they often talk about orgasms. And many people, obviously, people who have got more severe disabilities and you have, or perhaps paralysed downstairs or whatever, or, you know, that might be something they're not able to achieve anymore. And I think we've got to stop associating pleasure being solely around orgasms. Because one of the things just jokingly, when, when I was talking to the other Pete the other day, we were, we were talking about, you know, how long it takes to have an orgasm when you're older, in other words, forever. And he said, Oh, I've just, you know, and I just, I just, it just takes so long, I just get bored with myself, you know? And, and that's because, and I said, and I laughed because we all recognise that feeling when sometimes you just think, Oh, I just, I just can't be bothered. It's just taking far too long. And that could be because you're on medication, which makes it take much longer than usual, like antidepressants, for instance, or other types of medication made, which may also have some impact on the ability to orgasm. But what I've come to realise is that actually, there's just so many different ways to get pleasure, and that having that one aim in mind that one goal is so limiting, and can be quite soul destroying sometimes when you just say, Oh, I just don't know if it's gonna happen, you know, but I've stopped thinking about whether it's gonna happen or not. And I kind of like the fact that I'm not bound so much by this desire anymore. to just get to this finish line, because the journey is as fun as getting to the finish line. And sometimes you're not gonna get to the finish linePeter Marriott  15:08I think that is an insight that by definition comes late in life I went to a mid-life crisis tantric workshop. And about the only thing, I learned from that was stop chasing the orgasm. You know, if you have an orgasm fine, it's great. But that's not the point. The point is to have fun along the way to be in tune with your IChing or whatever. However you want to see it. The point is the pleasure, the pleasure, the sex and stop chasing the orgasm. Simple as that really, especially if your orgasm is retreating ahead of you at a rate of knots. And, you know, sort of looking at the watch and thinking for Christ's sake Come on. That's no way to enjoy yourself. And you've got to stop thinking that you're a failure if you don't have an orgasm. I think women have pretended to have orgasms since the beginning of time. Eve was probably there in the, in the, in the Garden of Eden giving it some welly and pretending to have an orgasm. But I'm not saying the men, because that's a bit more difficult. But, you know, just enjoy the sensations you get. I mean, I don't know about other men, but I get little orgasms, sort of mini orgasms while I'm having sex if I'm having a really good time. That's, you know, I think at the end of the session, then we might ask, Well, you didn't come? Are you happy? And you say good, happy? Great, fine, thanks very much. Good night.Suzanne Noble  17:16Well, that's all linked to this, again, this fear of failure, if you don't get to the end, that you somehow failed in some way on both sides. If men haven't, quote, unquote, given somebody an orgasm is if you can give it to them like a gift. Oh, here you go. Like, here's your orgasm or women have, you know, or if the guy's not coming, women often think, well, there's something wrong with me, obviously, I'm not very good at this. And in fact, Pete, the other Pete said, Well, clearly you don't care whether they come. I said I don't really, I mean, I said, No, of course, I do a little bit, but I don't. I don't I'm not fixated on it. Because I know that. If it wasn't fun, then you'd want to stop. You would want to stop now. So, I think that there are many different ways to enjoy yourself. And I think that's really the whole thing about disability and having sex is that there are many, many different ways to enjoy yourself. And being fixated on penetrative sex, or whatever it just is, is only one very small part of the menu. That delightful menu that is, you know, that is sex and pleasure. And, and exploring all of that is where the joy comes in, and the hope and the openness towards being able to explore all the other erogenous zones, rather than the very predictable ones that we're all very familiar with.Peter Marriott  18:43So I have a couple of friends, who are, he's disabled and can't get an erection. But she says she's having the best sex she's ever had in her life. Because, you know, they're taking the time. , to make it work, you know, and different things and experimenting more, rather than just shoving it and off you go It's actually taking retirement to make sex, something enjoyable and pleasurable. Whatever it is, and that, you know, I think that's the message of the podcast so far as to do that. Take the pleasure where you canSuzanne Noble  19:32Yep, take the pleasure where you can you've been in the hospital. I'm in the hospital. Well, I don't know how that's going to work because there's a bit of a catheter issue at the moment. Not that may be too much information there for you guys. Anyway, that's, that's probably the one and only hopefully, episode of Sex Advice for Seniors. Brought to you from the John Radcliffe Hospital in the trauma ward, there you go. And if you know what nobody is going to be nobody else is going to be recording a podcast in this place. Certainly not in this ward. Peter Marriott  22:00Lots of people have been traumatised by us. Okay, all right, Off we go then. Bye-bye bye-bye.Thanks for reading Sex Advice for Seniors! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sexadviceforseniors.com

Who is Simone?Simone is a multi-award winning serial entrepreneur and author who helped to lunch more than 500 profitable businesses before he was 30 through his company GTeX. He is passionate about building thriving community-led businesses where the members are the core and essence of the decisions and development of ideas.He works with startup entrepreneurs and experts who want to grow their existing business as well as multi-millionaires who want to launch new ventures, bringing ideas to fruition at lightning speedKey Takeaways1. Human beings come together into communities, and o interact in communities. Community-led leaders want to stand out from the crowd and build something meaningful for society2. Too often community-led business leaders cannot build an audience, service customers and build offers all the same time and to do that consistently needs help to develop a way to do it3. If you are a community-led business and care about your 'tribe' you need to care about money and cash flow so that you can stay in business and continue to help themValuable Free Resource or ActionSee getx.org.uk has many free resources, podcast and training courses to helpA video version of this podcast is available on YouTube : _________________________________________________________________________________________________Subscribe to our newsletter and get details of when we are doing these interviews live at https://TCA.fyi/newsletterFind out more about being a guest at : link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/beaguestSubscribe to the podcast at https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/podcastHelp us get this podcast in front of as many people as possible. Leave a nice five-star review at  apple podcasts : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/apple-podcasts and on YouTube : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/Itsnotrocketscienceatyt!Here's how you can bring your business to THE next level:1. Download my free resource on everything you need to grow your business on a single page : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/1pageIt's a detailed breakdown of how you can grow your business to 7-figures in a smart and sustainable way2. Join The Complete Approach Facebook Group :  https://TCA.fyi/fb Connect with like-minded individuals who are all about growth and increasing revenue. It's a Facebook community where we make regular posts aimed at inspiring conversations in a supportive environment. It's completely free and purposely aimed at expanding and building networks.3. Join our Success to Soar Program and get TIME and FREEDOM. : https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/Success-to-SoarIf you're doing 10-50k a month right now: I'm working with a few business owners like you to change that, without working nights and weekends. If you'd like to get back that Time and still Scale, check the link above.4. Work with me privatelyIf you'd like to work directly with me and my team to take you from 5 figure to 6 and multi 6 figure months, whilst reducing reliance on you. Click on https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/DiscoveryCall  tell me about your business and what you'd like to work on together, and I'll get you all the details.————————————————————————————————————————————-TranscriptNote, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)SUMMARY KEYWORDSbusiness, simone, community, realise, build, work, running, people, book, absolutely, customers, spending, question, client, podcast, purpose, ideas, launch, service based businesses, moneySPEAKERSSimone Vincenzi, Stuart WebbStuart Webb  00:22Hi again and welcome to It's not rocket science. Five questions over coffee. I haven't actually got a coffee today I'm already over caffeinated. So this is just a water but I'm here today with Simone vincenzi. I don't know if you've got a coffee with you, Simone.Simone Vincenzi  00:40I don't I'm I'm over caffeinated as well. Same. The same thing.Stuart Webb  00:44Simone is, is a multi award winning serial entrepreneur and author, he helped to launch more than 500 profitable businesses before he reached the age of 30, which sounds really impressive. His his company is GTEx. And he's passionate about building thriving community led businesses when the when the members are the core and essence of the decisions and development of ideas, Simone, I'm really looking forward to the discussion today. And welcome to the podcastSimone Vincenzi  01:16that thank you for having me here. And I cannot wait to get started. Thank you forStuart Webb  01:20Well, let's start then with my first question which is So describe your your ideal client, the the perfect person that you help with your with your business, Gtech?Simone Vincenzi  01:29Yeah, people that we work with are people that are generally running service based businesses. And what they are, they are very driven by a sense of community, they're very driven by making a difference and better driven by making an impact. And they've got a core expertise or something that they are doing or something and want to be known for. And they want to get their voice out there, they want to get seen, they want to get known. They want to make a difference with their voice, because they realise that they have some skills that can definitely help other people. And, but having a voice and I mean a story or running a business, they are two different they're two different things. Right? So then they stumble across to say, I want to run a business. And they might get a few clients, and then at some point, they get stuck. And so that's the that's where we come in. And that's the kind of people that we work with.Stuart Webb  02:25Yeah, I know, I know exactly what you mean. And and that leads us very nicely on to the second second question, which is those people that have got stuck, they've often tried things themselves, what are the mistakes you see them making? And how do you help them to overcome some of those mistakes?Simone Vincenzi  02:40Yeah, I think that the biggest mistake that they make is that they only realise what they need when it's too late. For example, they work on their offers, and they work on creating a launch. And then they realise that actually, they don't have an audience, or they don't have a community that is ready to buy their offers. And they realise it often after, because I think that when you're running a business, in particular, if it is your first time, or if it is a new industry now is easy to get caught up into doing doing doing and there are millions of things to take care of, there are millions of hat that we are wearing all the time. And it's easy to lose, focus on really what's important, or what's gonna make my launch successful, what's gonna make things work. And I think there are three things that can solve this problem. One is a community. So the focus, having a focus on building your own community and people that they love what you're doing, they respect you, they want to buy from you. They want to listen, they share what you create, and they are your biggest fans, then the second part is lack of visibility and actually becoming really visible to their audience. Because if they don't know that you exist, then how the heck are they going to be part of your community or even buy? And then the third part is your recurring revenues. I think that a lot of people get stressed with that like to get my next client and my next client and my next client and my next client and the debts why they forget to build their community and be visible and is like a self fulfilling prophecy. But if you focus on your recurring revenues, what's happened is that now you have like a good basic income you have a good stable business and then you have more free thing longStuart Webb  04:36yeah, having a stable business or having stable things that you can offer is so much easier and so much sharp. So it's easy to sort of relax into that which you built the audience with. You built the people around you who you know, were there to become the prospective customers don't they?Simone Vincenzi  04:54Exactly. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and and it is a it is a consistent work is not something that you can do day in and day out, I can do one month in one month off.Stuart Webb  05:06Is it something you see often with, with with people who are starting a business, so they work really hard in order to be able to sort of generate all the ideas. And then they have, then they get a client or they get customers and they get busy doing things for them. And then they forget, they have to go back and start generating new customers. Otherwise, they have a month off, where they're suddenly thinking, I've delivered all those projects, where are all my customers, again, you spend the next month building all those customers back up, don't you that feast and famine is a very common early stage problem.Simone Vincenzi  05:37100%. And I believe that I think that can put things in perspective, in business, often you get paid three to six months down the line for the work that you're doing today. And so the work that you're doing today is what is going to prepare your business for the next three to six months. Not for the revenues. Now, as if you suddenly were today you don't sell for today, but you sell for three to six months down the line? Yes, well, if you do the work today, and day after day, then you can future proof your business in this way by being visible, build your community have a system with the recurring revenues, and then it increase organically. And now you have something that you actually really solid that gives you space that gives you freedom to do other things that or invest in your business or grow it hire more team members and so on.Stuart Webb  06:24Absolutely. Right. Absolutely. Right. So we have scrolling across the screen at the bottom that your website. And I'm hoping that there's some valuable free resources at the website@gtex.org.uk, which community based leaders and the people you're talking to at the moment could go and get those valuable resources from?Simone Vincenzi  06:41Absolutely, there's plenty of free resources out there on their on their website, starting from our podcast, the expert to authority show that everyone can listen to, as well as our we have a training on understanding how to build your community and visibility and recurring revenue. So check it out. And there are and have a look around for your debt training is going to be incredibly valuable.Stuart Webb  07:06Brilliant. So is there a particular concept programme or book which you have found most impactful in your experience? And what is the what's the impact it's had that you'd like to share with us?Simone Vincenzi  07:18Yeah, so I'm Italian, right? No? Yeah, exactly. I'm sure you're being Italian, you know, I'm very family oriented. That's why I'm a big believer in the power of communities. So I'm a big believer in the power of building a circle that is closer than just a following the two of them social media are a number on your mailing list. That is a very tighter network of clients, partners, people that are really there for you and your business, and you're there for them by in return. And there is a great book from Seth Godin, which I absolutely love. And it's called Tribes. Yeah. I don't know if you ever if you read that book, or you heard of it. Yeah.Stuart Webb  08:07Definitely, yeah. Yeah. Very good book. Very, very good book.Simone Vincenzi  08:11Yeah. And it is great, because it talks about how like human beings come together into communities, and our leaders can interact in communities. So then they can stand out from the crowd, while creating something meaningful for society. Incredible book and with big influence in the world that we are doing.Stuart Webb  08:28Yeah, very good. Very good book. Very good book. So Simone, I am sure there is a question that is on your mind at the moment, you're thinking I wish she would ask me this question. So what's the question you would like me to have asked you during this interview? And then answer that question for us. Otherwise, we're going to be spending the next several hours wondering why you asked that question. And I have no answer for it.Simone Vincenzi  08:48Okay, the question is, what are the two main reason the only two reasons why businesses go out of business? They own hands.Stuart Webb  08:56And I would guess that that's it's not for lack of ideas, and often for lack of potential customers, is it?Simone Vincenzi  09:05Mm hmm, exactly. So one is actually they do something illegal. If you do something illegal, you're out of business. The second one is they run out of money, cashStuart Webb  09:16flow. Cash flow, is the key reason that so many businesses run out of steam, isn't it? I've watched it myself many times. And you know, something, Vincent Simona. I often say to people that I'm working with, and they will tell me and this is particularly true of those community based leaders also, but I don't I'm not worried about the money, the money will happen. And I should turn around to them and say, the money is what you have to worry about. You should be thinking about that. Because if you don't have the money, you can't serve your community.Simone Vincenzi  09:48Absolutely. 100 100%. And that's why in particular, if you'd like if you're like a your purpose and your heart is not going to pay the bills. No, I'll let So you make it into a business, which now you means learning about sales and marketing conversions running the community becoming visible. And that's the game. And that's why a lot of people don't succeed a business, because instead of they are too in love, with their purpose and their passion compared to being the love of running the business. And I think that if you do need to combine both to have a successful business, otherwise, there is nothing wrong to do your work for charity. I'm not saying that there is something wrong or that everyone now needs to a business or you're wrong for that. But if you want to have a successful business, you need to fall in love with money, you need to fall in love with running a business and implement your purpose into it. And now you have full personal fulfilment and financial fulfilment together.Stuart Webb  10:44You're absolutely right, Simone. I love that. I mean, yeah, absolutely, you're absolutely spot on with that. I do. So worry about those people that that don't worry about the money because they can't continue to serve the purpose that they have the purpose led life and the purpose led business that they have, if they're not able to pay the bills that will cause the business to fail. So yes, people do you do need to worry about the bills, you do need to worry about whether or not that invoice has been paid. And you need to ring the person and say, that invoice hasn't been paid, I need the money because otherwise I can't keep helping you. That's a really important thing.Simone Vincenzi  11:20And 100%Stuart Webb  11:22Simone, this has been a really brilliant to chat. I really appreciate you spending some time talking to us. That, folks, this is this is why we do these things because we love to get people like Simone who's got really great ideas about how to build really important businesses. And if you want to hear about the people we've got coming on if you were on the on the newsletter list, yesterday, you got an email from me saying join today's call to listen to Simone talk about his business. Get onto our newsletter list by subscribing to it at t ca dot FYI, very simple TCA dot FYI, forward slash subscribe, that's TCA dot FYI, forward slash, subscribe, get onto that list and get on to hearing about some of the wonderful things that people like samode are doing. And if you like some of what we're doing here on the podcast, can you can you rate and subscribe on Apple podcasts and Spotify tell everybody what a great job people like Simone are doing and tell the world that we're trying to help expose more of the sort of great businesses like Simone's doing Simone, thank you so much for coming on and spending a few minutes with us. I really appreciate it. And it's great to hear some of the stuff that you're currently doing with GTExSimone Vincenzi  12:35Thank you very much do I really appreciate and it's been a pleasure being here.Stuart Webb  12:39No problem. Thank you. Get full access to It's Not Rocket Science! at thecompleteapproach.substack.com/subscribe

It's no secret that touring is the lifeblood of most modern-day musical artists. But while most fans only see the finished product — a head-bobbing performance at Coachella or a sold-out nightclub — few get a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes work being done by professionals like Kevin Shivers, a partner in WME's music division. Let this interview with Kevin be your inside look at what goes into the live performances that fuel the entire music industry.Kevin has been with WME since 2008 after a stint in Hollywood. While with WME, he's worked with stars such as Tyler The Creator, Summer Walker, Kid Cudi, and plenty more on their touring strategies. Of course, Kevin's world — much like every other industry — was dealt a massive blow during the past two years. But with live shows seemingly back (knock on wood), Kevin has his eyes toward the future.And the future is an even better fan experience, says Kevin. NFTs, virtual concerts, removing the frictions of going to a real-life show — these are all ongoing evolutions that will better connect superfans with their favorite artists. We covered this near-term future in our interview, plus a whole lot more.Episode Highlights[2:15] How Kevin Broke Into The Entertainment Business [4:00] How Has the Music Business Changed In The Past Two Years? [5:25] The Go-Forward Plan For 2022[6:40] What Spurred Tyler The Creator's Big 2021[9:35] What Data Goes Into Entering New Touring Markets [13:10] Festival Strategies With Artists[14:56] How Has Streaming Changed Touring Trajectory[17:10] The Biggest Touring Mistake[18:30] Social Media's Influence On Touring[19:30] Touring Difference Between Hip Hop And R&B[21:02] How Kevin Measure Success For Himself [23:00] Why Kevin Is So Vested In Mentorship[25:19] Diversity & Inclusion Initiatives Within The Music Industry [28:46] The Impact Web 3.0 Will Have On The Music Industry[31:20] Will Virtual Concerts Replace Live Shows?[32:30] Five-Year Predictions For Music Touring[34:43] How Many Days Will Kevin Spend At Shows In 2022?[35:40] How Do You Find The Next Musical Star?Listen: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | SoundCloud | Stitcher | Overcast | Amazon | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts | RSSHost: Dan Runcie, @RuncieDan, trapital.coGuest: Kevin Shivers, Instagram: @bellmeadallstar  Trapital is home for the business of hip-hop. Gain the latest insights from hip-hop's biggest players by reading Trapital's free weekly memo. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands_____Transcription: The Future Of Live Music with Kevin Shivers, Partner at WMEKevin Shivers 00:00You gotta ask yourself after arenas, then what? Where are you going after that? I mean, like, you know, you might already have that plan in your head, but like these careers are, it's a marathon, not a sprint.Dan Runcie 00:18Hey, welcome to the Trapital podcast! I'm your host and the founder of Trapital, Dan Runcie. This podcast is your place to gain insights from the executives in music, media, entertainment, and more, who are taking hip hop culture to the next level. Today's episode is with Kevin Shivers. He's a partner at WME, and he represents some of the biggest artists in the game like Tyler, the Creator, Summer Walker, and more. We talked about how he was able to maximize the big year that Tyler had last year. I feel like Tyler headlined so many music festivals, and had so many appearances. Kevin talks about what it took to make that happen, especially given how turbulent things were with COVID, and all of the restrictions and variants that came through and how he was able to still make it happen. We talk more broadly about music festivals in the strategy that Kevin has for making sure his clients can get certain buildings on the roster. We also talked about Summer Walker and how he was able to do the same for her. Then, we talked more broadly about what it's like as a black executive, especially in representing artists. There are not too many people at agents that are at Kevin's level that look like Kevin, so we talked about that. Some of the advocacy work and mentoring and giving back that he's done and he's prioritized in his career, and so much more. It was great to have Shivers on here. I hope you enjoy this. Here's my chat with Kevin Shivers. All right, today, we got one of the most powerful agents in the game. Kevin Shivers partner at WME. Welcome to the pod, feels like we're long overdue.Kevin Shivers 01:49Thanks for having me, Dan. It's a pleasure. Dan Runcie 01:51Yeah, it's funny because I feel like this time of the year, I always see the festival posters come up for all of the music festivals. And I'm sure you've seen the one where they replace the names of the festivals with the agencies that they're all part of. And whenever I see the WME, I'm like: Man, Kevin was on his game this year. Kevin Shivers 02:10It's definitely not all me, man. There are so many great agents at work here. Happy to be a part of this team. Dan Runcie 02:15So you've been in the game for a while now. But let's take a step back. Because I know you've been working at the agency for some time. But what was it that first attracted you to the business?Kevin Shivers 02:27I had to say it was my mother. When I was a kid growing up, my mother would drag my brother out of movies every weekend. And that's the first time in my head where I got: Wait, I would love to work in entertainment because I love the movie so much. My mother loves movies so much. Even during COVID, she was still going to the movies. And that's like the really, my first interest into the business. When I graduated from high school, I went to college at University of Texas. I majored in film with the plan of moving out to LA and being a producer. And I did move out to Los Angeles, I started interning at The Weinstein Company at the time. And then I went on to this Company Cost of Beanie films, they had a deal at Weinstein. And from there, I kind of entered into the film business, and I got my first taste into: This is not for me, this is not what I want to do in my life. Partly because I was really bad at my job, like I tried, but I didn't want to read 30 scripts a week. This is not what I wanted to do. And then I pivoted, I left there. And I went to this place called Cats Media Group, which is like they did TV sales. And I knew that, that wasn't long term. And I went there to stay in Los Angeles, and to figure it out. And from there, I figured out I wanted to be an agent and WME. I had some experience in music and in Austin like going to shows. I knew a promoter, this guy Charles Adler, Ramsay Three. And at the time, it was the William Morris Agency. And that's my first interest into entertainment. Dan Runcie 03:56Nice. And I feel like the past year and a half, almost two years now. It's probably been unlike any other time period since you've been in this. What's that been like for you?Kevin Shivers 04:05You mean like COVID, and the ways impacted shows? It's been wild, right? Like if I go back to 2020, there was so much going on in the picture of even the world and in all of our lives. You had George Floyd, you had Trump and you had COVID and uncertainty. So 2020, being an agent, it was moving shows from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. That doesn't work for all the social things that are going on in the world to 2021. The first six months were kind of the same of 2020, and the first light in the tunnel I think was Rolling Loud, like Rolling Loud played, and then Lollapalooza was maybe a week or two later. And then you start seeing Austin City Limits and Outside Lands playing off in some tours. And then we started; it started to make sense, then Omicron came along, and we're like back for a period of time back at square one. But it seems like 2022 is gonna bring a lot of joy, you know. Shows are planned, Superbowl is happening in a few days, Pro Sports are going along. So it seems a lot of positivity.Dan Runcie 05:10What do you think will be different for 2022 and 2023 thereafter? Because I feel like it'll be this gradual shift where eventually things will start to feel like the touring schedule is maybe back to somewhat of what it was before COVID. But how long do you think that will really be like? What do you think will be the first year that we can look back at and say: Okay, this is the first year that doesn't feel like it was impacted in any way?Kevin Shivers 05:36I think there's some hope in 2022. If we just changed the way that we're thinking that this is the new world. Things might pop up, the virus might flare back up and flare back down. But let's try to figure out how to move forward. I think I'm starting to see that people are out and about in shows, they are playing sports, you know. The NFL season went through the whole season, they had ups and downs. And I think that like we're starting to see some positivity, lots of hope for 23. Hopefully 23, we get back to some sort of, or we get to some sort of a new normal, where we're living in this new world, and we're just going with the punches.Dan Runcie 06:12I hear that. So I think the good thing for you though is that even, until we got to that point, you've been moving a lot. And I know that Tyler the Creator is one of your bigger clients and 2021 was a big year for him. Headlined a bunch of festivals, dropped his album. What was it like making sure that everything could line up and that you could have everything set for him despite everything else that was going on with the touring business?Kevin Shivers 06:38First of all, I want to say Tyler's a star and a one of a kind of talent, and he knows exactly what he wants. I'm lucky to be a part of his team, and he has an excellent team around them. It starts with the managers Chris and Kelly Clancy, who are amazing people. The business manager, Joe Colone, amazing lawyer, my partner James Ruby, who does International Day watch after her at the agency and all the other people that touchTyler. But 21 was a great year; we got the headline target the headlines for festivals, but it was also we had some goals from, it was also challenging. First thing is the record comes, the record is amazing and it's also finding a window when we can go on sale when COVID is not surging, and I think that the team and I,we all got lucky because we found a window.We knew Tyler was going to headline Lollapalooza and the goal was after you get all the media, the media hype coming from Lolla. We knew he was going to bring an amazing show; that Monday after Lolla, finding that window where we can go on sale and luckily for us, no COVID spikes out Lolla, nothing crazy. And there's no COVID spikes in the world. So that was the first thing, right? I think the second thing when we thought about touring, is trying to find the markets for him to play Tyler, somebody that wants to push the envelopes. And we ended up putting up 35 arenas, breaking in some new markets. I saw last night a show in San Diego. He was like: I could have done 50 shows. I mean, granted, it was nice to have, you know, the tour. And I was like: Okay, we'll see how you feel at, like, night 33 or something. But we were able to break into new markets. Columbus, Vegas, El Paso, Pittsburgh, to name a few. I think the third thing is that Tyler really, really wanted to give the fans the ultimate experience. This is the lineup: Teezo Touchdown, Vince Staples, Kal Uchis. And I think the last thing is, you know, making sure that we hit the sweet spot in pricing. So we, you know, give the fans a place where they can feel happy, a place where they can buy tickets, but also maximizing the gross, keeping ticket sales in the gross. And this was a joint effort with the managers, Chris and Kelly, Michelle Bernstein, who's an excellent marketing ticketing person and AG team led by Cody over there.Dan Runcie 08:56Talk to me a bit more about the new markets and picking those.You mentioned in Pittsburgh, you mentioned El Paso. What are the data that insights are the field that you look for when you're like: Hey, this is somewhere that we want to consider going to that we haven't gone before. And if we do it, is this the type of venue that we should go in this market as opposed to somewhere like LA or New York where he's already proved himself? Kevin Shivers 09:20Well, I think there's a few things, so one is whenever Tyler, any of my clients, I'm always trying to figure out, I want them to play as many places that they can. Just reach all the fans and maximize the opportunity we're on the road because if it's a Tyler recording or whoever it is, or Cody, you're not gonna get to see them every single year. That is a unique experience. But to answer your direct question, it's one looking at the data if it's from Spotify, or our past sales. Two is looking at the markets and seeing if there's a building or venue that makes sense like Columbus. We know that's a place, there's a college town where Tyler's played there before, played there, sold out. I think a smaller room on the onsale, knew there was demand, didn't realize, I mean, the Columbus sales are insane. But this didn't realize like: Wow, that's, I mean that is really like that's a smaller market that has turned into a market, right? I think it's looking at our diverse lineup of talent on the bill, you know, going to a place like El Paso and looking at: Oh, there's probably going to be some Kali fans, and Vince fans and Teezo fans, right? That's a good place. And that's also a place that doesn't get a lot of entertainment. So like, and that ended up being like a home run. So it's like, kind of looking at the whole picture of what you got and talking to a lot of people that are smarter than you in kind of coming up with a plan. And also just working with good people that have a point of view.Dan Runcie 10:47What are the trade-offs that you have to make for those kinds of decisions? Because I imagine that there's the ones that do cross the threshold to be like: Okay, let's make this happen. But you know, kind of like you were saying before, it's tough to try to do 50 shows in a specific short amount of run or whatever it may be. What are some of those considerations you may have to make in terms of the markets that you can't pick? Or the ones you know, that you may not be able to put in this time, right?Kevin Shivers 11:11I think there are a few things. One, it's like really talking to your clients and letting them know, we might, we're going to try to go in this market. This possibility, it might not go the way that we want, but we have to, to me if you're not trying if you're not putting risk on the line, and what are we doing, right? It's like, I'm actually somebody who's okay with failing, right? And I'm not saying that we fail or anything, but I'm okay with doing that risk for the bigger reward. So it's like really, really like getting in there and talking to them about, you know, the strategy, right? And like, the goal, I think the goal should be like, when you go out every two, three years is gaining new fans, gaining that new network.Dan Runcie 11:50Right, especially now. I feel like for someone like him, it's probably been interesting. I know, you've been with him to see the rise and just to see how the fan base has continued to evolve over time. So I imagine he probably even sees things where he's like: Okay, these are the Tyler fans that ,you know, have been with me since the Globin days. If I go to this city versus, you know, you go to this other city. They may not have discovered me as much until Flower Boy or something like that. I'm sure he does. Yeah, it's fascinating. And I think with him too, if we talk a bit more about the festival side of things, he obviously was a headliner, as you mentioned, his Lollapalooza show was broadcasted. I didn't go to the show, but I was able to see it through Hulu, because they had it coming through there. When you're trying to have someone like him, obviously, you have many different artists and they have different levels that they may want to perform at. And ideally, you want to have everyone maximizing and performing at the highest level or being like the highest row on that festival poster. But for someone like Tyler, is it going into the year like: Hey, headline or buster; if we can't be a headliner for this festival, we're not going to do it. Or does it depend on who some of the others are? What are those conversations like? Kevin Shivers 13:07I think when you start a campaign with any artist, it's just like sitting down with the team and figuring out what the goals are, right? And it's all a trajectory and building on the last. I think you want to, the goal is always to build on the last time you were out, to build on the last year, right? And having that conversation. And you know, different artists have different things. Some people want to specifically target these particular festivals, or you know, you're going out in his window, and you could maybe use a festival to route in and out to get the gross-up for the whole tour. It's just like, really just, it's really spending time with the client spending time with the manager to find out, figure out what the goal is in maximizing the opportunities.Dan Runcie 13:49Is it any tougher to do that though? The way that artists can just rise so fast now, especially in the streaming era. Because I know that there's normally the standard, you know, you do your clubs, you can do a, you know, ballrooms or amphitheaters, and then maybe if you get to arenas or stadiums, that's their trajectory. But with people just getting so big, so fast, does that change the dynamic? Or it's like: Okay, how do you still balance what they may have done last time and use that as a reference point versus how quickly they can rise in this era?Kevin Shivers 14:19I mean, look, you have to have a point of view, and you have to have a plan. And you have to have some thoughts, right? And I think that people can really jump up really, really quickly. But we like to use this thing: don't skip steps, right? You know, sometimes if, you know, you can go play in an arena, why not go play multiple nights at a smaller room and build the momentum, build a buzz, meet people on the streets, leaving, not being able to get to the show. So that when you come back around, you still have gas in the tank. I mean, there's no one size fits all plan. It's like, you have to just know who you're working with, spend time and really kind of draw that. Draw that sketch up and map it out and let it listen. A plan is just a, it's just a roadmap. It can be amended along the way. There's no like set in stone thing, but other than like, no knowing where you want to go, knowing what you think, you know, going to be doing the next year, the next five years. That is what's most important.Dan Runcie 15:13That makes sense. And that reminds me of something I heard. I think it was Olivia Rodrigo, who said in some recent interview when he announced her tour. And someone must have asked her something along the lines of: Hey, you had one of the biggest years in pop music this past year, could you have done arenas? And I think she said that same line, you said: I don't want to skip any steps. This is where that is. So I think that's something that definitely rings true. And we're seeing examples of that.Kevin Shivers 15:39Yes. And you gotta ask yourself after arenas, then what? Where are you going after that? I mean, like, you know, you might already have that plan in your head, but like these careers are, it's a marathon, not a sprint.Dan Runcie 15:49So what do you think are some of the mistakes that artists can make? Like, I mean, you don't have to drop any names. You don't got to put anybody on blast. But is there anyone that you think maybe made a touring misstep? Or there's something where you can look back and be like: Ah, if they had done that a little differently, things could have worked out a little bit, you know, whether it's better or worse, or however for them.Kevin Shivers 16:09I think sometimes when people overthink it and end up doing nothing, that's like a bummer for everybody. That's a bummer for the artist. That's a bummer for the fan, that's a bummer for the culture, like, like you're hot, you're popping right now. We really need to see you really, really need to see you show up and pull up on us and see what you have. I think that, that's a mistake, not a mistake, but that's just a bummer for everybody. We want to see, we want to see you do your thing. And I would love it if instead of doing nothing that artists, sometimes people would do something.Dan Runcie 16:39So you think part of it is that there's a hesitancy to try to capture the moment, or sometimes they can be a bit more resolute or hesitant to do things when there is an opportunity to go back out there.Kevin Shivers 16:51Or they just don't know, or they just are trying to get it perfect. And like, you know, you're going to we're all going to make mistakes, there's going to be ups and downs. I think sometimes you just got to go play, you know, you got to give the fans what they want.Dan Runcie 17:04Do you think any of this has become any more challenging in the social media era? Because one thing that I've heard both on the talent side is that artists are even more so particular about how everything looks from a live perspective, because that shot that goes on Instagram or that shot that goes on Tik Tok, that influences ticket sales, especially from, you know, whether it's the first show or whatever it is. Do you feel like artists are feeling like they need to have things more perfect even though deep down, you know, that it shouldn't be that way?Kevin Shivers 17:33I mean, it's got to be really, really tough because the cameras are always on somebody always, you know, whether you like it or not, is documenting things that you do. So I think that I couldn't even imagine how much pressure that is and how tough that has to be. You know that social media can be good. And there can be some other sides where you're like: Wow, this is tough.Dan Runcie 17:52Yeah, I know, we've talked a lot about Tyler and about hip hop overall. But I know another one of the major artists you represent is Summer Walker. And you know, she had a big year, last year as well. And I wanted the differences whether you're planning a tour for, or you're planning live events, in general, for R&B artists, as opposed to someone in hip hop.Kevin Shivers 18:14I don't think there's really many differences, I just think you have to just, it goes back to the same. There's no any artist planning and really just get, you know, in figuring out what the goals that they have and how you can best service them, right? I don't really think there's a different strategy or a different lane. I think if you love Summer Walker, you love Summer Walker, you're gonna go out and see it, right? And she has, she has an incredible fan base.Dan Runcie 18:40Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. Because one of the things I was wondering with someone like her.Knowing how passionate her fan base is, I was wondering if there was a connection of like: Oh, you know, the streams may show this and the data may show this, but because of how R&B fans are, there may be a bit more likelihood that that could translate to ticket sales or purchases as opposed to other genres.Kevin Shivers 19:02You know, I think the fans are going to come out that they love somebody and Summer respects our fans. People like Summer Walker followers, or they just, they love her. I think they're just going to come out and show up and see her play.Dan Runcie 19:14Now. That's real, that makes sense. So for you, I mean, I know, you got a full roster, and you're always making sure that you can maximize them to the best of their abilities. So how do you measure success for yourself as a partner and as someone that's representing them on their behalf? Kevin Shivers 19:30The answer is really simple: Helping others, right? I got into this business because I wanted to help artists grow. And it's like, it starts with the clients like you start thinking about, about people that I work with, like: What can I do to help them? What can I do to help them grow or give them everything that they need? Are we, you know, from last year to this year? Are we showing up every day to help them get to that next level? That's the first thing. I think also the way I measure success. It's like the same thing with helping others. Like it starts for me every day when my assistant Ebony, I think she's gonna be a great executive one day, but am I showing up for her? Do I slow down enough to answer her questions? Do I mentor her? Do I spend time with her? Because like, that's important to me. We have many, many amazing young agents that work here. Am I showing up enough to help them sign up clients? Am I giving them what they need? I think you know, measuring success. Is everybody around you doing well? Are you doing what's good for the organization? I co-run hip hop with Zach, Isaac, Caroline and James Rubby. And Caroline's always saying we got to take care of youngs, you know, it's Justin neighbor's getting what he needs? Is Sarah and Ronnie getting what they need? And then I think it's just, it's really about creating that culture, creating a universe, that the people you will arise into the next level of being selfless. And then also from a DNI perspective of like: What diverse people can we grow? Can we hire? Are we retaining them? These are all the ways that I measure success. I try not to look at what other people are doing. Because I mean, it doesn't really matter. I want to make sure that the organization and the people around me are set up for success.Dan Runcie 21:14I hear that. And I think a lot of the themes you mentioned there align with mentorship, and whether it's being a mentor or support for the artists that are looking to you for guidance, your co-workers and your colleagues. Can you talk a little bit more about why that's so important to you? Because even in reading and hearing other interviews, I know you've been active on that front, making sure that you can use your platform and where you are to pass the torch and help others along the way.Kevin Shivers 21:40I think mentorship is one of these things like, if we're not mentoring, then what are we doing? Why are we even showing up? You have to always be trying to look out for other people. I've had people that looked out for me and my career, people that still look out for me. And I think that is one of the key things. One of the reasons that makes me want to get up every day and come into the office is, like, helping others. I think that's one of the reasons why we're put on this earth to help people. A non-negotiable thing is mentorship. I mean, the crazy fact about, I'll go do an interview, or I'll do a panel and everybody that writes to me on IG or LinkedIn, I write everybody back, everybody. I mean, I probably send more people to the HR department here for jobs than anybody. Because I just want everybody back. I think that's important, because I was once the young kid who wanted to figure this out. And like I didn't know, I had no clue and people helped me. So I think that's a very important aspect of the job.Dan Runcie 22:35100%. And even on a personal level, I remember the first time you reached out to me, Hey, love what you're doing. Hey, how can I help? And you're just like: Oh, who do you want to interview? Oh, I was listening to them yesterday, boom, let's get this done. So even on a personal level, I need you out. You're looking out for me, man. I appreciate that. Kevin Shivers 22:52Yeah, I mean, well, you're doing it. I listen to your podcast every week. I think it's amazing. I think what you're doing for the culture is great. And I just wanted to get to know you and just to help where I can and, and that's just, that's what I think is important.Dan Runcie 23:05Definitely, definitely. And one of the things that you had put out, because a couple years back, but it really stuck out to me was this was right after George Floyd's murder and the music industry had the show must be paused response. And you had written these guest posts on Pollstar and you were talking about how this industry just needs to do better by its black execs specifically on the recruiting front. And I know you were just talking about how, you know, you're always pushing things forward to HR. And I'm sure this must be really personal for you as well, you are one of the few folks that looks like you in the position that you have in this whole industry. So I'd love to hear how you feel like the industry has responded since everything had happened after George Floyd's murder and the response to where we are now in 2022.Kevin Shivers 23:57You know, in response to your comment about I wanted a person who looks like me in the industry. I always say to everybody, I'm amazing, but I'm not that amazing. There's, there should be more people that look like me doing what I do and and you know, partners in hire, right? And I think we still have a lot of work to do. There's good news though. There's positive conversation around DNI, people are aware, people are aware that there needs to be more black people and more diverse people need to have more opportunities. I still think that we need to keep pushing the envelope, we still have a lot more to do in terms of hiring and creating opportunities for black people. The organization's know they have to do better, but they have to buck the old status quo. They have to go outside of the norm. And today to some people, it might be like: Oh, we're taking a risk. No, DNI has to be inside of your lifeline, inside of your blood, inside of your everyday practices. It's not something that you can just talk about once a quarter, you gotta live it, you got to be in it every day. And I believe that the black people need to be promoted, they need to be elevated. They need to be given the same opportunities and shots. When we were interviewing for jobs, I think in any, in any industry, not just entertainment, you need to be interviewing black people, people of color, LGBTQ, there just needs to be more opportunity. We need more Sylvia Rhone's, more Ethiopia's, more tons Jay-Z and Def Jam. We need more leaders, more partners. I mean, we have to just keep our foot on the gas, keep pushing the envelope because this, we're not there yet. But we're going in the right direction. And we need to keep the momentum.Dan Runcie 25:30Right. And I think even an example of that, the folks you just mentioned, I think a lot of folks in this industry are all on a first name basis. And as incredible as all those folks are, how do we get to the point where they're not on a first name basis, because they aren't just the few black execs in there. I mean, it's definitely going to continue to take time. And I think whether it's conversations like this, or the efforts you're doing will help. But I'm hopeful that it can get there eventually. Kevin Shivers 25:55I'm hopeful, too. I think we got to stay targeted and focus. But also at the same time, remember, like, this just didn't happen overnight, right? It's not going to change overnight. But we have to like, we have to keep, we have to stay on this because it can change and it needs to be better.Dan Runcie 26:11Definitely. So let's switch gears a bit. Let's talk a little bit about the future, specifically with regards to touring and technology and what things will look like in, the potential with Web 3.0 and the metaverse. Because now you have agencies that are specifically I'm sure WME likely also has a division where they focus specifically on digital environments, or getting artists lined up on that perspective. How do you look at that? Specifically, with the artists you have on your roster, what the potentials are for them in these digital worlds.Kevin Shivers 26:50I think Web 3.0 is just it's massive, huge, huge opportunity. You know, if you think about the evolution started in virtual, went over to Fortnite, but I just think it brings control back to the artists in a way. Artists had an act like this the whole time, these music artists, they've had fan clubs, they've had social media, but what Web 3.0 does, it gives more control to them. It's gonna give them more power, but like, it kind of cuts out the middleman and I think you know, things are gonna change in the next six months, next five years, it's gonna be an exciting world. If you look at what Coachella did, by selling the NFT, a lifetime Coachella pass. I mean, I think artists are gonna come up with these things where, you know, if you want to be in the front row of my show, here's the NFT for the chance to buy the front row tickets, or maybe it just goes inside of there. And they figure out what to promote, but I just think like, it's an exciting time. Like, it's the, it's endless. I was just on the phone with A Jones the other day, I love what he's doing with Royal. And I think the deal that he did with Nas and Antony Silay is, like,amazing; that looks like where things are headed. I mean, it's just, you know, like any of these things, it's gonna be ups and downs, right? In the Web 3.0, but I just think the opportunity is endless.Dan Runcie 28:01Yeah, things are early, things are also moving really fast. Six months from now, it's gonna look completely different. And I am excited for the artists that are taking advantage early. I feel like I can already imagine Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival having some type of digital environment or some type of experience in the metaverse.Kevin Shivers 28:21I'm sure it will, I'm sure Lollapalooza and some of these other properties. That's where they're headed. I mean, it's gonna be a really exciting time. I just hope people get off the couch, you still come out to show.Dan Runcie 28:35Is that a concern you have though? Like, do you wonder about that in the future?Kevin Shivers 28:39No, no, I was just joking. I mean, I don't think anything can replace the live experience, just like the Zooms are great, right? But I think when you're in a meeting with somebody, it's 10 times better. And I think a concert is 100 times better. I love, I love going to festivals, I've been to them all over the world. And I love seeing the reactions in real time on people's faces from their favorite artists hidden in the stage. So I don't think anything can replace it. I think it's going to only enhance the experience.Dan Runcie 29:07Agreed. That's what I always go back to. Everything in these experiences are additive and isn't a replacement for anything. And I think it'll probably just force more creativity for every aspect, because you're not just trying to have something be a catch all. So I think I'm interested to see how it'll continue to shape live performances and what that can look like from the, you know, the IRL experience. Yeah. And on that note, do you have any predictions for what you think the next three to five years or so will look like specifically in the lifespace? I mean, pandemic notwithstanding, I mean, obviously, I think we'll continue to see the after effects of that, but any type of, you know, evolutions are any type of future changes that you think will see over time.Kevin Shivers 29:51Yeah, I think 2022 is going to be bigger than we thought. I think that hopefully, I think we're headed to a healthy tour environment. I think there's going to be new players in terms of buyers and festivals. And I think the fan experience will that's going to be the thing of the future. I think everyone has realized they have to zero in on the fan from artists curated weekends and festivals to I think even super service in the fan. Think about this, think about a world where service lets you buy a ticket, has a car that picks you up, dinner reservations, great seats, even find you a babysitter.I think that's where we're going, we're going to this place, we're like: Okay, I can't even be, I'm busy. I didn't want to deal with this, boom, hit a button. And this is where we're going. I think that's exciting. Because you know, getting inside of the mind of the fan, what they really want is going to be the next evolution. Dan Runcie 30:42Yeah, even you mapping that out. If you literally could press one button and solve that, I think you'd also just increase the amount of people that can come through, right? You mentioned the babysitter, the amount of people that have young kids, and it's like, you know, just the thought of them needed like, oh, you know, we got to find someone for this to cover for this night. Like, yeah, if all that can be taken care of.Kevin Shivers 31:00Because I think people love live music, and live music is such a treat. But when you think about the hurdles you have to do, you got to put on some clothes, maybe, you know, show starts at seven, get homework, feed your kids, do this, do that. And if you could just take some of that away from them. That's like, you know, bringing the fan experience to a new level.Dan Runcie 31:21Definitely. So I know that you're always on the go with festivals. And you know, I know you love going into them. But I know it's also for your work as well. If you have to guess, how many shows do you think you'll go to in 2022?Kevin Shivers 31:33I can tell you this. I'd rather answer this way. How many days I plan on hitting a lot of festivals in 2022. So I think I'm going to be, I call it 50 to 60 days watching music, right? That's what I'd say.Dan Runcie 31:48Okay. Yeah. All right. And even that, I mean, that's a lot more than the average person. But I mean, it's just incredible. Because you get to just see all the fine tunes, you get to just see everything. And like you mentioned, this is interesting, you're traveling all across the world for this stuff.Kevin Shivers 32:02Yeah. I mean, that's, that's one of the reasons I love doing what I do. I mean, like, really, I get to go see live music in different parts of the world. I mean, I can't even imagine anything better than that.Dan Runcie 32:12Yeah. So last question. Before we let you go. I know we talked a lot about Tyler. And I know from our conversations, just the uniqueness of you seeing that star power and star potential, even from the first time you connect it. How do you find that next tile? Or how do you find that thing to know? Okay, yeah, this is the one that we need for this next generation. Kevin Shivers 32:34Oh, wow. I think when I'm looking to sign somebody, I'm looking for somebody that has a unique point of view, for somebody that is fearless, and then wants to do the work.Dan Runcie 32:43That makes sense. Hear that man. Hey, before we let you go, man, this was great. I'm glad you could come through and make this happen. But is there anything else you want to plug? Or let the Trapital audience know about it?Kevin Shivers 32:54I think everybody should go out and see some shows this year. I think 2022 is going to be a good year, and then one thing I want to say is to somebody who wants a career in entertainment, I think you should go for it. I think you should move to LA, move to New York, move to Atlanta, move to Nashville. Call, email some people; call, email me. I'll probably write you back pretty soon and just go for your dreams.Dan Runcie 33:15What's your email address?Kevin Shivers 33:17Kshivers@wmeagency.com. It's all good.Dan Runcie 33:23Now appreciate that, man. I welcome man. Thanks for coming through this as a pleasure.Kevin Shivers 33:27I appreciate you Dan.Dan Runcie 33:31If you enjoyed this podcast, go ahead and share it with a friend. Copy the link, text it to a friend posted in your group chat, posted to your Slack groups. Wherever you and your people talk, spread the word. 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Who is Jamie?Jamie is a CRM expert. No matter what size your business is, the importance of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system should not be underestimated. Over time it will become your greatest asset for delivering more sales.Key Takeaways1. An effective CRM system means you capture the details of each customer from their personal details (with full GDPR compliancy) to how they found you, what they bought, the value, when they bought, how they use your product/service and so on. This also gives your customer the feeling that you understand their needs and show a degree of care which in turn delivers a great customer experience. This customer experience will hopefully develop into customer loyalty which will help to generate referrals for your business.2. You need to think about GDPR - if you're not registered with the ICO, and you store data about people's personal details, you are subject to putting yourself in a very difficult position when it comes to being fined for breach. So yeah, that the whole GDPR process is becoming very much, much more strong.3. You really need a CRM strategy, If you don't have a strategy for how to build a relationship with customers. And that comes from their stakeholdersValuable Free Resource or ActionSee Jamie's website at https://jamie-allan.com/crm/A video version of this podcast is available on YouTube : https:////youtu.be/zrPDzr2q-Bo————————————————————————————————————————————-TranscriptNote, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)SUMMARY KEYWORDSbusiness, jamie, crm, data, problem, customers, relationship, question, people, book, talking, companies, coffee, realise, programme, clean, called, smes, database, contactsSPEAKERSJamie Allan, Stuart WebbStuart Webb  00:33Hi, welcome back to it's not rocket science, five questions over coffee. Although today I have in front of me very nice green tea being a little bit more healthy than having too much too much coffee in the morning. I'm here with Jamie Allen, Jamie, and welcome to the podcast. I'm looking forward to this conversation very much. Jamie is a CRM specialist and has been a CRM specialist for all let Jamie decide if he wants to say how many years it's been. He's been a CRM specialist, let's just say it's more years than I want to accredit him with. But I think he's more than happy to answer any CRM questions. So, Jamie, welcome to It's not rocket science, five questions over coffee really looking forward to the conversation.Jamie Allan  01:17Now, thanks for inviting me, Stuart, and I've suitably complied with my coffee.Stuart Webb  01:22Excellent. Well done. Okay. So, Jamie, let's, let's just start by asking you the obvious first question, which is, who is your ideal client and what's what's the problem that they've got, which you help them to overcome?Jamie Allan  01:38Ideally, their businesses are growing, so they're at least three years old, want to develop the business, get people on board get new products and services, so very focused on that that development stage. But one of the main problems is actually finding out that they've got data that they don't know where it is. So they need to centralise that, and more importantly, need to get it clean, because a lot of companies do is they can go through their business career, it just keep on going for new business without actually understanding about the existing business, and looking after your existing customers. Because relationships are really important. So really, the biggest problem is actually realising that they need to clean the data, because it goes out of date, really, really quickly. But every six months, you should really do a review. And very, very few companies, I haven't come across a business yet, that's got an absolutely clean database. It's it's, at best, okay, which is no good. Because it's the old 8020 rule. 80% of your business comes from critics and your customers. So make sure at least that 20% is right. And that's where you build the relationships. And reallyStuart Webb  02:44interesting you say that, because regulators are getting more and more firm at the moment with the idea of making sure that you're not just contacting people unnecessarily, the GDPR, the, the even in California, they're now getting very firm on there. So we've really got to be much more careful about how many emails and contacts we meet with people, which are just inappropriate, haven't we? Yeah.Jamie Allan  03:06Oh, very much. So the the ICO was started off going for the larger companies, but they're really powering down now on the SMEs. I mean, they sent out a an email to all SMEs saying, Are you registered, and it costs 40 quid a year. But if you're not registered, and you store data about people's personal details, you are subject to putting yourself in a very difficult position when it comes to being fined for breach. So yeah, that the whole GDPR process is becoming very much, much more strong. So far as the ICO is concerned.Stuart Webb  03:41Sorry, I interrupted you, I think you're gonna go on and say a second problemJamie Allan  03:45I get the second problem was, they really don't have a CRM strategy, they don't have a strategy for actually how to build a relationship with a with their customers. And that comes really from the fact that they don't get input from their, from their stakeholders. So they buy a CRM, put it in the system and make it work with really, you've got to plan the workflow, about how everybody wants to use the system. So that data gets put onto the system and managed properly. Because if you've got Duff data going in, you've obviously got data going out, which means the reports are useless. So your CRM is never going to work. And I've been into many organisations, and they've said, look, what we've got just isn't working, can you make it work? Or should we start again? So we do that whole process of well, what have you spent, what's the investment? If we do this, what's the return on investment on a new project? So, we have to go through that phase, but more often than not, we go back to the basics was start small and keep it simple. If you keep it simple, people could then build and see value as they as they work through the the business and and develop those relationships. So you then got a centralised CRM, which is not siloed so all your data Once cleaned, is centralised, you know, sales marketing admin accounts, everybody looks at the CRM because the customer is everybody's responsibility. So everybody needs access. So that's really the second part of it. Keep it simple growers, the business needs it. So don't have all the bells and whistles, which, obviously, a lot of the online businesses, they have to offer all the options, because they have to be a one for all. But what I'm trying to do is say, look, tell me what you want, what's your workflow, and then make the business? Have a CRM that actually works for the business?Stuart Webb  05:38Terrific, Jamie? What are the common mistakes that people make them when they're trying to solve those problems without any sort of help?Jamie Allan  05:47Well, they try and do it themselves. I mean, once they do realise and accept that they may have an issue, they try to themselves. But again, you've heard the stories of companies just sending out emails willy nilly, oh, you know, we've got this fantastic product you were with with us a few years ago, would you like and what they're doing, they think they've got it right. But actually, when you try and clean a database like that, and you have been in touch, you really need to actually, first of all, say something like, you used to do business with us, would you still like us to keep in touch, you shouldn't try and market to them. Because for all you know, three years ago, whatever they could have said, we don't want to be contacted anymore. So you've got to start again. And if there's any doubt, just get rid of it and start again, just to be safe. So that's the main thing. They try and do it themselves. And they can't they fall into holes occasionally. The second thing is they think that they need to do well, they, they think that they ought to do it sooner rather than later. So they give it to some employee, like a marketing manager or somebody in the business. So go on and do that. Well, they've got the same problem. So it's passing the buck almost. So you've got to actually, if you're going to do it yourself, you've got to actually do your research, and get onto it and do it properly. And it takes time.Stuart Webb  07:09Yeah, brilliant. So what's that valuable free action or valuable free resource that the audience can implement that will help them solve that problem?Jamie Allan  07:20Well, there's so much research out there, all you need to do is punch into the, into the URL, free data cleansing, or data cleansing services, and a number of opportunities will pop up. I mean, I think you've got a link on the on the programme now. But if you go to something like data cleaning tools, you've got a plethora of options that you can tag on to where you can get some ideas as to how to do it for yourself. I mean, there are companies out there that will do up to a certain amount of time for nothing, just to give you an idea of this is what it could look like we will do a sample I mean, I work with a business that we do samples, this is what the data will look like. And then if you want to clean the rest of the data, then obviously we'll do a quote. But there are data free data cleansing tools out there. But again, you've got to learn how to use them. So you've got to invest the time. So this is balance of do I invest the time? Or do I actually do a horses for courses? They've got it what doing they're doing? I'm going to do what I'm doing? Why don't we just share the share the results?Stuart Webb  08:28I completely agree with you, Jamie, I'm so frustrated by so many business owners, even even very serious, large business owners, who so often attempt to do things, as I call it, using the path of least assistance. They also around say, well, that's something we could do. And often I turn around to them and say, it would be cheaper, quicker and easier to just employ an expert who does nothing but this because frankly, even if you have bought bought the the time and effort to learn how to do it yourself, they'll do it better. They'll do it so much easier than than trying to sort of learn how to do so much. So much of this yourself, it's so much easier to just get an expert and say, just make that happen for me, please and then walk away confident that it's going to happen.Jamie Allan  09:15Well, you're right, because again, data is a real asset. A lot of companies think data is a whole lot of numbers, words on a page. It's actually what your business is all about. It's your customers, it's the value that your business will deliver for you. So why don't you just get it done, right? What's the right people at the right time and help everybody get more business as a result? It is not rocket science. I mean, this is really what the process is. It's keeping it simple. Get it right. Talk to the right people.Stuart Webb  09:49Brilliant, love it. So what's the concept or or books that's been most impactful in your experience that you want to pass on?Jamie Allan  10:00Well, two areas, first of all a book and then a programme. But the book that has been quite influential. It's a recent book written by a Michaels V band, Zed VI, ba, MD. And his book was called success in your sphere. And what this does is it leverages the power of the relationship. So you can achieve your business goals. So the focus is on the hot the customer journey, effectively what you do from start to finish. And he's got an an acronym called capital. And I don't know if you picked up the notes that I sent you, but essentially, that the capital is the see is the consistent execution. So you need to be able to develop good habits, stronger customer relationships. So you need to have the right customers at the right level. And then the aggregate, you need to actually then curate the the database of who your professional contacts and what level they're at. And then you prioritise. So you order that database, you investigate, which is the eye, so you collect intelligence, I mean, the whole thing about a CRM is to collect the soft, the soft aspects, you know that the birthday dates, the children's names, the dog's names, so that you can go back to them and you have this empathy with this emotion, emotional capacity. Another another book, two links to this to the power of persuasion by Robert Cal Dini, he talks about the law of reciprocity. And you know, if you if you, if you give, or if you take the time to learn about others, it will be astounded, and then that, that, that that relationship gets stronger, because the know like trust in a relationship is really important. You can't get to doing except this without, in the first place, liking them. And then trusting them. It's when you get to the trust, and say, the V band book, it's all about getting through that process and building that strong relationship. So the T is timely engagement, then you add value, then you leverage the process. And you constantly doing this with your contacts that match your power.Stuart Webb  12:14Or make sure that that accurate and that that goes into the notes, Jamie, because I think that's some valuable stuff to try and remember there, Jenny, my final question to you, and this is my Get Out of Jail Free card. I'm happy to admit it. So what's the question that I should have asked you today? That I haven't? And please bear in mind that having told us what the question is, please answer it. Otherwise, you'll leave us hanging, waiting for part two of the of the podcast.Jamie Allan  12:47Well, how do I keep customers that my task my leads and maximise sales opportunities? It's a straight question. And you do that by making sure the data is out there. And it's clean. Because without data, there's no business. If you understood data, you can get more out of it. And really, it's about looking at what you've already got. maximising what you've already got. So it's actually the way we came in. It's looking at that at 20% Your customers will deliver 80% Your Business. Jamie pretty imposed profile business, and you threw a cent.Stuart Webb  13:29Sorry, you broke up for a minute, just just carry on. Gone. Now I'm just I'm so glad you put it like that. Because I don't know where I got to. You were talking about the fact that you can you can leverage the data in order to maximise customer value.Jamie Allan  13:47Yes, the data is everything.Stuart Webb  13:51It is. It absolutely is. Jamie, it's fascinating. I'm sure we could talk for many more hours on this, but we've run out of time, largely because otherwise coffee will be getting cold. And none of us want that. So I'm just gonna remind everybody if you want to see more of these and know when they're coming up, because we do get out and tell people when they're coming up. You can you can find us all over the social medias. But also we're on this link which is HTTPS, colon forward slash forward slash TCA dot FYI, forward slash subscribe. I'll just see those last few things again, t ca dot FYI, forward slash subscribe, get onto the mailing list, and then we will let you know what's coming up in the next couple of weeks. Jamie has been an absolute pleasure talking to you this morning. It's been so I'm so pleased. You're talking about this. And I think it's incredibly important that people understand how they can use those relationships use that understanding they've got of customers in order to be able to maximise the time they spend with their customers and and sell more of them. stuff to customers. Because, you know, if you've made a sale to a customer, it's probably because they really want to have more of what you've got. And just understanding the right time to engage them. And understanding more about them enables you to do exactly that. So it's been a brilliant conversation. Thank you so much. I look forward to seeing more of your more of what you're talking about on the internet. And I really hope that we get to do some of this again, thank you so much.Jamie Allan  15:25Thank thank you for inviting Mr. Pleasure.Stuart Webb  15:28Absolutely, no problem. Speak to you soon. Bye._________________________________________________________________________________________________Subscribe to our newsletter and get details of when we are doing these interviews live at https://TCA.fyi/newsletterFind out more about being a guest at : link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/beaguestSubscribe to the podcast at https://link.thecompleteapproach.co.uk/podcastHelp us get this podcast in front of as many people as possible. 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Ben and Lexi reminisce about the quintessential coming of age movies of our youth - kind of. Dork You Forget About Me find Ben and Lexi looking back at classic 80's teen movies. Both Lexi and Ben struggled to fit in with humans and had to turn to movies to learn how to be a teen, which means watching copious amounts of John Hughes! In this episode, Ben and Lexi dork out about classic John Hughes movies, which holding them up to the test of time. Have these movies aged well? Listen now and find out! Show Notes:Lexi and Ben talked about the following movies:Uncle BuckThe Breakfast Club16 CandlesPretty in PinkHome AloneFootlooseWeird ScienceFerris Bueller's Day OffPump Up the VolumeCan't Hardly WaitAnd more!The  full list of John Hughes movies can be found hereYou can find the episode of Art Intervention we mentioned hereWe talked about  Margaret Atwood being a TERF and you can read about the 2018 conflict here and the more recent one hereSOCIALS:Here's where you can find us!Lexi's website and twitter and instagramBen's website and instagram and where to buy his book: Amazon.ca / Comixology / Ind!go / Renegade ArtsDork Matter's website(WIP) and twitter and instagramIf you're enjoying Dork Matters, we'd really appreciate a nice rating and review on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your pods. It would very much help us get this show to the other dorks out there.“We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that's all.” Transcript:Lexi  00:00One time I was driving to work and listening to like, you know, rap and I like aggressive hip hop, and I was listening--Ben  00:08[chuckles] Someday I'll ask you to define that, but not now.Lexi  00:12Okay, so, like, for example, I was listening to Run The Jewels one day, [Run The Jewels plays] which I wouldn't even classify as, like, super aggressive anyway, and I was trying to psych myself, like, "I gotta get in this building. I gotta be, like, in a good mood and talk to people all day," and so I was listening to it, fully cranked, and the windows were flexing, and I didn't realize there was just like a sea of children sitting there watching me, like, pound coffee, and try to, like, psych myself and, like, "Get out of the car, go inside,"  and it's just like, "Well, whoa, nope! Sorry, kids. I'm just gonna turn that off real quick". [music stops] I don't know what happened. [laughs]Ben  00:50I don't know how to get myself psyched up. When I worked in an office, I had about a 15- to 20-minute walk to work to, sort of like, just not be the person I normally am, and become work person. That didn't always work. I still a pretty grumpy shithead, usually. I don't like being bothered, and, you know, being in an office means you're just constantly bothered. It doesn't matter what you're trying to do.Lexi  01:15And you have to make small talk. Like, yuck. Ben  01:17Yeah, I had to learn how to do that. I've always been an introvert and making eye contact with people, when you have a conversation and just like... And so, I'm actually pretty good at just talking bullshit now with people. I don't like it. I don't like doing it. I don't like this other version of me is just talking to people, and I'm just like, "Eugh. Glad I'm not that guy."Lexi  01:36There are so many times where I'll finish doing, like, a presentation or having small talk with someone, and I'll go away and I'll be like, "Oh, she's terrible," and I'm referring to me. Like, I hate that part of me like, [upbeat] "Hey, how's it going?" I'm like, "Eugh! God."Ben  01:51Yeah. So that's an interesting thing with, like, being a stay-at-home parent now too, is like, I don't get to go to a different place and be a different person for a while, and divorce myself from who I think I am, versus the person I have to be in a work setting. Now, it's all just me, and it's all just gotta try to do well all the time. Lexi  02:11That sounds hard. Oh.Ben  02:13Can't phone it in like I used to when I'd go to the office. [laughs]Lexi  02:17Well, I mean, you could. You could just like plunk him in the laundry basket in front of the TV.Ben  02:21No. I mean, I'm incapable of doing that.Lexi  02:24That's good. That's good.Ben  02:25I am your Cyclops archetype. I am responsible to a fault. "No Fun Ben", I think, is what I  used to be called.Lexi  02:33Oh, I was the old wet blanket. Ben  02:35You know, you guys would be like, "Let's go to a party and get drunk." I'm like, "I don't know about that. I gotta be home by 9 PM and, you know, we're underage." [laughs]Lexi  02:43I do remember being at a party at your place when you lived with Brandon, and in the middle of the party, you did start doing dishes. [Ben laughs] I remember, I was like, "Hmm, this is interesting."Ben  02:55They were stacking up. You gotta keep 'em clean. You gotta keep them clean. That's just respectful to other people.Lexi  03:00Fun is fun, guys, but come on. Like, clean up after yourselves.Ben  03:04"No, no. Y'all keep having fun. I'll clean the dishes." That's a nice thing for me to do. [laughs]Lexi  03:08I was the wet blanket in terms of like, you know, at the sleepovers, I'd go, "Oh, it's getting late, ladies. It's probably some shut-eye time."Ben  03:16Oh, god. You're lucky you didn't get Sharpied every time.Lexi  03:20Those people, I think maybe they were like, "Is she...? Is she, like, you know...? Should we be nice to her because she's not all there?"Ben  03:29"The same as us."Lexi  03:29Yeah. And sometimes I kind of wondered, like, "Did they think that I am maybe on the spectrum or something?" which I kind of wonder if I am sometimes.Ben  03:38God, I wonder all the time if I am, and I'm not trying to say that as a joke. Like, I constantly--Lexi  03:41No, no.Ben  03:43--wonder if my inability to connect with people is something neurodivergent.Lexi  03:49Oh, do you do-- okay, sometimes I'll watch people. I'll watch-- like, especially when it comes to women, and when I was a teenager, I would watch groups of girls interact, and I felt like I was watching, like, a nature program. Like, "Ah. That is how the female species puts on makeup," and it never made sense to me to like go up to them and be like, "Hey, gals, let's all put our makeup on together." I was just, like, so awkward that I didn't understand how to talk to them.Ben  04:18Yeah. The thing for me was that I was just always felt on outside, as well. Like, I never felt like I had a group of friends in any situation. Part of that was moving schools a lot. Part of that was never feeling like I connected with other individuals. So yeah. No, I definitely should probably figure out if I'm--Lexi  04:35But I think that that's a great thing that people are learning more about themselves at all times because sometimes, like, I'll talk to adults that are like, "Well, I probably have a learning disability and that would have made school a lot easier, but what's the point in finding out now?" I'm like, "Well, why wouldn't you?"Ben  04:51How would that make... Well and, like, record scratch. [scratching record DJ-style] How would that make school more easy for you? Would you have had maybe more support? Maybe, but maybe not. It depends on where you were, what kind of, like, financial supports the school had, what your parents believed. Like, you know, there's no reason to think, like, if you have a disability, you have it easy. That's a wild take.Lexi  05:11Yeah, I think you can... You're right. Like, it depends on where you are, that you can access different types of supports, but I think we're also moving towards a more inclusive education model in the old Canada, where you should be treating everybody... It's like, it's technically universal design for learning where everybody should benefit from like, you know, flexible due dates, and, like, more understanding progressive assessment practices, because, yeah, like if you do have a disability, and you need a little bit more support, that's great, but if you don't, you can still get support, too, and that's fine, too. Ben  05:49Yeah. Lexi  05:50But, ah, that's interesting. This is maybe a good, like, introduction, though, because as teenagers when we were watching, trying to learn how to be a teenager, you turn to movies to try to understand, like, how to fit in.Ben  06:05Right. So the question is, like, "Should we have ever even looked at those other groups and people and been like, 'I'm supposed to be that way?' Or was that something we were taught by John Hughes and his movies?"Lexi  06:18Oh, John Hughes. I'm so conflicted. Ben  06:21So we're here tonight, as you've certainly guessed, to talk about '80s teen movies. You know 'em. You love 'em. We are going to revisit our memories of those movies, talk about some things that don't really hold up, some things that do just fine, and some things that are problematic and it matters to dorks. Wow, that was rough. Lexi  06:47That was-- I won't lie about it. It wasn't your best.Ben  06:51No, let's hit the theme song and let's try again after. [Lexi laughs] [theme music "Dance" by YABRA plays] Ben  07:22Welcome to Dork Matters--Voiceover  07:24[echoing] Dork Matters.Ben  07:24--the show by and for dorks, made by dorks, in a tree of dorks. We're like little dork elves, Keebler elves that make you dork cookies.Lexi  07:34Oh, I like that. Ben  07:36Yeah.Lexi  07:36That's a nice little image.Ben  07:38Yeah. Lexi  07:39We grow on trees.Ben  07:40[chuckling] Yeah, or are we are inside of trees, baking tree.Lexi  07:44Yeah, 'cause we don't like the outside so much. Ben  07:46No, I'm not an outside person. [Lexi laughs] I am your Dad Dork host, Ben Rankel, and with me, as always is...Lexi  07:53Your Movie Buff Dork, Lexi Hunt.Ben  07:56Oh, wow. No alliteration at all. You're just flying--Lexi  07:59Nah, just gettin' right in there. You know what? Fuck it.Ben  08:03You are going to have to be the movie buff dork tonight. I have tried to bone up on our subject, and I'm like, "Good God, I need a week to prepare for this by rewatching every single teen movie from the '80s," because that's what we're here to talk about tonight, or today, or whenever you're listening to this. Time is a flat circle. [chuckles] We're here to talk about teen movies of the '80s.Lexi  08:26[sing-songy] I love this episode.Ben  08:30The good, the bad, the ugly, the ones that hold up really well, the ones that do not hold up. We're gonna just shoot the shit on teen movies 'cause that's what we do. Lexi  08:39Oh, yeah.Ben  08:40We're gonna get a bunch of shit wrong, as usual, and that's half the fun here.Lexi  08:44Can I start by saying, like, how many movies did John Hughes create? My god, that man was prolific. Ben  08:51Yeah. So it depends on if we wanna look at whether he directed it, or produced it, or whatever, but if we just go by Wikipedia filmography, let's count these out. 1, 2, 3, 4... (fast-forwarded counting) 38. 38 different films.Lexi  09:16And a lot of them, like, I didn't actually know that he did some of them. Some of them, of course, I was like, "I knew that one. That's a John Hughes," but, like, Maid in Manhattan? What?Ben  09:27Yeah. Flubber.Lexi  09:28He was part of Flubber.Ben  09:30He was part of Flubber. He produced Flubber. Yeah, all the Home Alone's, right up to Home Alone 4: Taking Back the House, that seminal classic. We watch it every year at Christmas. Not the earlier three Home Alone's, just Home Alone 4, the one everyone remembers.Lexi  09:47Yeah, the one that went straight to VHS release.Ben  09:50Yeah. I think, unfortunately, it was even DVD at that point. Just DVD. [Lexi groans]Lexi  09:55But then there's so many great ones too, that... Actually, I was talking to John about, you know, "What movies did you guys watch when you were growing up that we you would classify as a teen movie?" and he was more in the action side of the '80s and '90s movies, so he was like, "I can talk to you about The Rock. How do you feel about that?" But not so much... I think he said that they watched Breakfast Club in school, which I find incredible. Like, "Why did you watch that in school?!" Like, listening to it, there's so many messed-up things like Emilio Estevez talks about supergluing a guy's butt crack together. Like, "I know, and I'm going to show my grade nines today." [chuckles theatrically]Ben  10:38And that's one of the tamer things that happens in that film, like, that doesn't hold up. [Lexi laughs] I mean, we might as well get into it. Let's start with the seminal classic, The Breakfast Club with, you know, the greatest brat cast that you've ever seen. Everyone has seen this movie. We all know how it ends, that jumping fist pump in the air. [Simple Minds "Don't You (Forget About Me)" plays]Lexi  11:00You can hear the music right now, can't you?Ben  11:01[sings] Don't you forget about me.Lexi  11:03And I gotta say, best soundtrack. Ben  11:07[sings] Forget about you.Lexi  11:10[sings] Don't you... [speaks] I also like that like weird slide guitar. [sings descending glissando, imitating slide guitar] That's a great '80s sound right there.Ben  11:17[chuckling] I want you to do it again. [Lexi sings imitation along with slide guitar] Nice. Let's start a band.Lexi  11:23I can play the mouth trumpet. [laughs] And that's... Okay, that sounds really dirty, but it's actually like... [sings melody, buzzing lips] [laughs]Ben  11:29I can play the mouth harp, as well, as long as we're embarrassing ourselves. [Lexi laughs] [harmonica plays] That's right. I play harmonica, as if I couldn't get any loser-ier. That's a word.Lexi  11:37Hey, man, I played the clarinet in the old high-school band for many years. [clarinet plays basic melody] Ben  11:41I think I played clarinet at one point, too, in the band. Lexi  11:46It's a great instrument. So Breakfast Club, which is weird, because Sixteen Candles... Okay, let's let's go through--Ben  11:55I feel like Sixteen Candles is probably the greatest offender of any teen movie--Lexi  11:59Oh.Ben  11:59--we're gonna talk about.Lexi  12:00It's so bad. Yeah. Ben  12:03And, you know, everyone loves Breakfast Club. I feel like maybe Sixteen Candles is a little less watched, still. I mean, we can talk about 'em both, but let's turn to Breakfast Club, first. Let's talk about some of the fucked-up shit that you remember happening and see if it's all true. You guys let us know if we make up anything.Lexi  12:19I couldn't get over the fact that, first of all, I was like, "Who the hell has detention on the weekend?" Because that's more of a punishment to the teachers than anything. Like--Ben  12:29Yeah, that's not happening. Lexi  12:31And what parent would be like, "Yeah"? Parents would be like, "No, I'm not doing that." [laughs]Ben  12:37Yeah, "You wanna keep my kid half an hour after school, that's one thing."Lexi  12:42Like, "Go nuts." Ben  12:42But yeah, they're not coming in on a weekend." And what teacher wants to do that? Like, you're not getting paid for that. Is that extra-curricular at that point? [Lexi blows through lips]Lexi  12:50I think that there's just so many issues with detention as-- like, that's a whole other issue. But to, like, spend your weekend... I know they're trying to demonstrate that, like, the character of-- god, what is his name? The assistant principal who hauls everybody in. It just shows what a miserable git he is. But, eugh, to me, like, that, already, I was like, "This movie is just setting me up for"--Ben  13:15Principal Richard Vernon, who, like, already is a problem, because this guy just treats these children--Lexi  13:21He's so horrible.Ben  13:22--and they are children, just awful. Yeah, just like a way that he would have lost his job if it was nowadays. There's no way he keeps his job past that weekend. There's no way he keeps his job past, like, his first interaction with, I think, Emilio Estevez with the stupid devil horns and, like, [in devil voice] "the rest of your natural born..." That'd be on TikTok. In, like, five minutes, there'd be a whole crowd of people knocking down his doors. The school board trustees, they'd be like, "Nah, you don't have a job anymore."Lexi  13:46And, as well they should. Like, you can't... There's one part in the movie where Judd Nelson's character--Ben  13:53Bender.Lexi  13:54--is playing basketball in the gym, and he's like, "I'm thinking about going out for a scholarship," and that's such a great point that, like, he could have just been like, "Okay, let's play," and then like, look, you're building relationship and you're not being a complete d-bag. Then, like, get to know him! Just play basketball with him. It's, literally, a Saturday, and you're sitting in your office. You may as well.Ben  14:16Yeah. Instead, he yells at him, if I remember correctly, and tells him he's never going anywhere. Lexi  14:21Yeah, that he's a, you know, piece of trash. Just, you don't talk to people that way. It's terrible. So, it's so, just, offensive to... You should never treat anyone like that, and you should never, 100%, have teachers speaking to students that way. That's just unacceptable.Ben  14:38The movie is in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, for its culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant nature, so that's something that I didn't just read off of Wikipedia.Lexi  14:51I mean, it is a huge part of culture that, kind of, changed the way that we, you know, talk about things.Ben  14:57Do you remember where the movie's set?Lexi  15:00They're all kind of set in the same...Ben  15:03Middle America. Lexi  15:04Yeah, like a Michigan kind of place.Ben  15:08Michigan is what I would guess. I have no idea. I can't remember any more. It's a very white cast, as well, which is interesting.Lexi  15:15Oh, yeah.Ben  15:16Yeah, what are some other egregious issues that we have with that one?Lexi  15:19Well, I don't like the way that Claire, so Molly Ringwald's character, she is berated, harassed by Bender the entire movie. He's got his head between her legs at one point, because he's hiding, and, at the end of the movie, she, like, goes and makes out with him and they become, like, boyfriend and girlfriend because he's wearing her earring and, like, you don't reward, like, a guy that treats you like trash, a person that treats you like trash. They're not gonna change. [laughs]Ben  15:51Yeah. I, 100%, remember it seeming, sort of, weird that that was, like, his reward for having some sort of character redemption is that Molly Ringwald will date him. And that's supposed to be character growth for her, is that she's not so stuck up anymore, she'll date somebody who's... poor and abusive?Lexi  16:07I guess? Or that, like, she's pushing back against her parents or... Like, I didn't really care for that part as much. Ben  16:18Yeah. Lexi  16:18But then, like, then you've got Claire and Allison, at one point, doing, like, makeovers and Allison's the kind of the quiet one who's the artist and the freak who's-- she's choosing to be at the detention instead of being sent there, and so Claire gives her the makeover and, all of a sudden, she's She's All That-ed. She's pretty, and now Emilio Estevez's character, Andrew, is, like, into her. If it wasn't for a lame... Before, he didn't see her, but as soon as Molly Ringwald puts some makeup on her, and pulled her hair back, well, now Allison's a person. I just thought like, "Ugh, that sends the wrong message."Ben  16:55Yeah.Lexi  16:56But, as a teenager, you're like, "Oh, that's how I get the attention of a boy."Ben  17:01Yeah, "I've gotta conform to beauty standards that are set out for me." Yeah, it's not great. It doesn't hold up. It feels wrong nowadays. I mean, it's really difficult to watch and think anything positive of it anymore.Lexi  17:14[laughs] The soundtrack was good. Ben  17:16Yeah, the soundtrack was good. Lexi  17:17But then John and I are having a conversation about that, and he's like, "Yeah, but at the time, that's what was a successful movie, and so, how fair is it for us to judge something from the past by today's standards?" Like, "Well, it's a difficult one. Like--"Ben  17:33Absolutely. Lexi  17:34I think we have to.Ben  17:36I mean, yeah, and also, like, what does that really mean, the idea of fair? Like, I mean, it feels sort of like the wrong question to apply to, sort of, reexamining past media. Like, you don't get a pass just because it was from the past.Lexi  17:54Yeah, there you go.Ben  17:55And the whole point of looking at something from the future is to reanalyze it from the scope that we have now. Like, you can do that and still acknowledge that, at the time, that general awareness of these sorts of things wasn't what it is now, but that's not really the point, I guess, is what I'm getting at.Lexi  18:12I can understand the criticism of like, yeah, you know, it's a questionable movie, but at the time, it was very progressive. And even now, like, I'm sure there are some TV shows, movies, books, whatever, that we think are pretty progressive that, in the future, people have problems with, but that's the point. Like, if we're all staying the exact same, that's the issue. Could we not be able to move forward, and then look back and be like, "Eugh. I shouldn't have done that"? Let's have a conversation about it.Ben  18:37I think the world and where it existed, and when it was made, is not where we are now. Like, that's not really the point. So Breakfast Club, like, none of these movies are really going to hold up to every standard that we have nowadays.Lexi  18:47No, it's impossible.Ben  18:48The bigger question is like, "Can I still enjoy this media the same way?" And you can't, especially... I mean, I don't think this movie, you can really... Like, I can watch it. I could enjoy parts of it, I suppose, but I don't know. I don't know if I really even would try to rewatch this movie. It used to come on TBS a lot, so we didn't have much of a choice, but...Lexi  19:10Yeah, I think now I would fast forward through a lot of it. Ben  19:14Yeah, I can't see myself going back to rewatch this, unlike a movie like "Footloose", which I still think is a fun watch. Same era, same sort of idea. There's a lot going on in that movie, too that's kind of effed up. Like, I think the main character, whose name I cannot remember, but it's Kevin Bacon, he moves to the small town where dancing and music is outlawed, and the girl that he falls for, her dad's abusive, her boyfriend's abusive, but I think, at one point, her boyfriend actually just punches her, and I'm just like, "Why would even?" Like, [sighs] in that sense, they're not trying to glorify that behavior necessarily, but it's... Yeah, so that's the interesting thing. Maybe that's what you gotta look at is the depiction of the thing in the movie something thing that they're doing as a "We're not thinking critically about this because that's the era we're from," or are they presenting it in that era, but they're saying, "This isn't a thing that should be happening," and that's a tough one. I can't remember that movie well enough. But I still like the dancin'.Lexi  20:17You like the dancin' part of it, hey?Ben  20:19Yep. Kevin Bacon, finally, in 2013, I think, admitted that he had a dance double for parts of that, but he did a lot of the dancing himself, he said.Lexi  20:28Did we not know that? I thought that that was widely accepted.Ben  20:32I don't know. It was just a thing I remember reading a while back, but yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like, that movie, I could rewatch again. I feel like it's worth going back for the dancing. I don't know what would bring me back to Breakfast Club, aside from the soundtrack, which I can just listen to on my own.Lexi  20:46Yeah, I would just listen to the s... Like, if it was on the TV.Ben  20:50I guess I like Emilio Estevez. I like Molly Ringwald. Like--Lexi  20:53Then watch "Mighty Ducks", Ben. Ben  20:55Yeah, and that's what I do. We're gonna have to do an episode on "The Mighty Ducks". I love "The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers" on Disney+. Lexi  21:02Oh, there you go. Yes. Ben  21:04Disney+ isn't sponsoring our show, but if they want to. [Lexi laughs] I like "Game Changers". It's a little weird. It's a little bit--Lexi  21:13I can't say that I've watched it, but, you know, I'll take a look-see.Ben  21:17Yeah. Oh, are we gonna do a "Dawson's Creek" episode or teen TV dramas of the 2000s? And those are-- a lot of those are trash but, like--Lexi  21:26Yes.Ben  21:26Yeah.Lexi  21:27I could talk about those, just "Smallville". Oh, my god. We need to talk about "Buffy". What are we doing, here?Ben  21:32That's an interesting one, like, 'cause, you know, 'cause you have to deal with the Joss Whedon. I call him Josh now. He lost his privilege at two "s"-es.Lexi  21:41You know, you strike an "s" off the name. Okay. We have to talk about Sixteen Candles, though, because it is the worst.Ben  21:50The worst. There is nothing--Lexi  21:53I think that a couple come close. Ben  21:55I could rewatch Breakfast Club, yeah. Like, I could re-watch Breakfast Club. There's a lot I don't like about it, and a lot that doesn't hold up, a lot of analysis of, sort of like, teen issues that doesn't really feel like it really got it, but I could rewatch it. I will not re-watch Sixteen Candles. I mean, give us a rundown. Give us the point-by-point. What's wrong with Sixteen Candles, aside from everything?Lexi  22:17If you've never watched Sixteen Candles before, don't. I will just run through it really quick. Basically, it's a party movie. Sam, play by Molly Ringwald, it's her birthday. It's her 16th birthday, but her entire family has basically forgotten, and she's really pissed off about the whole thing, so she's a real b-word all day at school. Meanwhile, she has this huge crush on this guy Jake Ryan who's, like, the quintessential hot dude of the school. Ben  22:42The perfect dude. Yeah.Lexi  22:44And, like, everyone of their little friend group is just like, "No, he's got such a hot girlfriend." They even show her showering naked in the girls' change room to really hammer home the fact that this lady is like a full-blown babe.Ben  22:59Wait. I do not remember this part of the movie. There's a naked scene of Molly Ringworld as a teenager?Lexi  23:06Yeah. Not Molly Ringwald. It was the girlfriend.Ben  23:08Oh, I'm sorry. I missed that. Lexi  23:10Molly Ringwald and her creepy friend... It's so creepy. They're leering and watching her shower because Molly Ringwald is comparing her chest to Jake Ryan's girlfriend to be like, "Oh, she's such a... She's a woman and I'm a girl. Why would he ever pay attention to me?" because boobs are the only thing that matter, apparently. Ben  23:10Mm.Lexi  23:30And then, meanwhile, so at the same time, Sam, Molly Ringwald, her grandparents come to her house, and they bring their foreign exchange student.Ben  23:41No. We can't even get into the foreign exchange student. It's so bad.Lexi  23:45It's so bad. I'm not even gonna. Like, you can go look it up. I'm not gonna say his name because it makes me feel uncomfortable, if I'm honest, but it's like a derogatory name that is just, like, it's just so offensive, and every time he's--Ben  23:58It's intended to mimic what white people make as sounds when they try to, you know, do Asian voices or language, and it's just a continuous shit show of racism.Lexi  24:12Oh, Ben, every time the character is on the screen, a gong sounds.Ben  24:15Yeah, I remember that part.Lexi  24:16Like, oh. [groans frustratedly] So then, Sam goes to the dance because she still has a thing for Jake, and she has to bring people with her, and now enter Michael C. Hall.Ben  24:17Oh, he's Ducky, right?Lexi  24:31And his creepy little character because... No, that's "Pretty In Pink". Come on. Jesus Christ, Lexi. Get your shit together.Ben  24:39Oh, god. I'm mixing up movies. Well, I'm sorry that all good John Hughes movies start to blend together after a while. [Lexi laughs] Sorry, I can't specify which Molly Ringwald film we're talking about. She wears the same thing in every movie, too.Lexi  24:51No. She... Ben  24:52She looks exactly the same.Lexi  24:53She... Well, yeah, that's good.Ben  24:54I'm pretty sure she's in a pink dress in every movie.Lexi  24:56Okay, I will accept that. Anthony Michael Hall's character is Ted, and they refer to him as "Farmer Ted" the entire movie, which I don't really understand why that's the thing.Ben  25:06Oh, he's the one that gets sent home with what's-her-face? Lexi  25:09Yes. Ben  25:10Right? When she's drunk, and he, basically...Lexi  25:11Yeah, right?Ben  25:13It's a date rape situation. How fun. Lexi  25:15Well, and first, like, he won't leave Sam alone at the dance. He keeps following her around, won't take no for an answer, and she basically has to barter with him to piss off by giving him her panties. So... And then he pretends that he like got them, however, and is cheered on by, like, a full bathroom full of dorks-- not our people-- but then this devolves into a party at Jake's house. Everybody kind of winds up at this Jake's house party, where Jake's girlfriend is drunk and kind of an asshole. He kicks them all out and gives Ted the keys to his car, and his passed-out girlfriend in the backseat, and long story short, he winds up making out with her when she comes to, eventually.Ben  25:59Yeah, I remember that.Lexi  26:00And, when she asks, "Did you take advantage of me?" and he said, "No,"  and she was like, "Cool." [laughs] Like, what?!Ben  26:08Wait. Don't they actually end up, like, doing it in that movie? And neither of them remember it, or am I thinking of another movie again?Lexi  26:15It could. You know what? Ben  26:16Remember that they, like--Lexi  26:17I haven't seen it in a while.Ben  26:18"I don't remember if we did it or not," and then they're both like, "Yeah, we did it," and it's like, that's supposed to be cool or something, and I'm like-- and, like, a virtuous moments where--Lexi  26:24That does sound about right. Ben  26:25Yeah, I remember throwing up. Like, I don't think that movie even sat well with me in the '90s when I was a teen, seeing it for the first time. I was like...Lexi  26:32[whispers] No.Ben  26:34"..eugh." Yeah,  Sixteen Candles is gross. What else? Is there anything else gross about  Sixteen Candles that we need to mention before we move on? Don't rewatch Sixteen Candles. It's no good.Lexi  26:42Don't. Well, it ends with Sam getting Jake and he gets her a birthday cake, and, you know, it's this beautiful moment between the two of them, but it's just like, she spent the entire movie comparing herself to other people, about how she was shit and not good enough for him, and he spends the entire movie pissed off at the world that he lives in because he's, like, this wealthy, white dude with a dumb girlfriend, and he's brutal to her. Like, he's really mean to his girlfriend, like, sends her off to be, like, you know, ravaged by some stranger.Ben  27:15Yeah. He sends her off to get raped. Lexi  27:17Yeah. And then it's like, "Okay, movie over." Ben  27:19Yeah, and I remember him also saying like, a bunch of really crass shit to her before, because she's drunk, and being like, "I could abuse you all I want if I wanted to. Yeah, it's super fucked-up and that's supposed to be a virtue for this guy--Lexi  27:31Yeah, he's the good one.Ben  27:32--that he looks down on her for being drunk.Lexi  27:34Oh.Ben  27:35Yeah. Fuckin' dumpster fire movie, and so this is why, like, people, you bring these up and they'll be like, "I fucking hate Ron Hughes." Yeah, Ron Hughes. I don't know who that is, but I hate him, too, just for sounding like John Hughes. [Lexi laughs] Fuck you, Ron.Lexi  27:50But, I think it's also like, the genre of, like, rom coms. Like, eugh. This is where it's kind of like stemmed from some of these teen movies . People think, "Like, this is maybe like the norm?" Like, "No, it isn't. This isn't good."Ben  28:04What's next on our on our shit shower?Lexi  28:07"Weird Science".Ben  28:09Are we doing "Pretty in Pink" at some point?Lexi  28:11"Pretty in Pink", technically, comes after "Weird Science". "Weird Science" was released in 1985.Ben  28:16Oh, we're doing these chronologically? Okay, my bad. Okay, "Weird Science" it is. So like, are we even gonna find teen... Like, John Hughes defined this era and defined what it meant to be a teen in this era, so I guess we may not get away from his movies. I mean, "Footloose" wasn't one of his, so that was good, but that's wild. It's basically just a John Hughes shit episode. Fuck you, John Hughes.Lexi  28:37But, no. I've got some redeeming ones.Ben  28:40And your brother, Ron. From John Hughes? I don't agree.Lexi  28:44I've got one. I got a couple that I'm gonna fight for, saying they're good.Ben  28:47What? Okay, you're gonna have to try real hard to make me like john Hughes in any capacity. "Weird Science", let's just get the premise out of the way. These two losers decide that they're going to robo-code their-- I'm just gonna use fake science words 'cause that's what they do in this movie-- they're gonna robo-code their digi-ideal woman and build her to be perfect and subservient to them. The whole premise is fucked up and weird and gross, and then, through the magic of--Lexi  29:11Yeah, the magic of science.Ben  29:12--science, I don't know, this woman comes true. She's there. Suddenly, they built her, and they can do anything they want with their new robo-girl or whatever. [Lexi sighs] Lexi  29:24And... [groans].Ben  29:25The only thing that's redeeming is a nice title song written by Oingo Boingo, the new-wave band from the '80s.Lexi  29:32Ah, Oingo Boingo. Yep. I know that it was this whole, you know, the dorks or the geeks strike back where like Revenge of the Nerds and that was also another popular problematic movie of the era, of just, like, dorks who aren't... You know, it's basically like  these, the nice guys, the incels.Ben  29:52Incels.Lexi  29:53They can't get-- no girls will pay attention to them 'cause they're not popular jocks. Wah, wah, wah. So what we're gonna do--Ben  29:59No, this is great. I like this line we're riding. I like this. This is, we are what's-his-face from It's Always Sunny.Lexi  30:07Dennis?Ben  30:08No. Not Dennis. We're not Dennis. Nobody's Dennis. Dennis is a sociopath. Lexi  30:11I was gonna say.Ben  30:12Ferris Bueller is Dennis. Lexi  30:13He's a serial killer. Ben  30:15Well, that's--Lexi  30:16Mac?Ben  30:16No, not Mac. Goddamn. Charlie.Lexi  30:18Charlie?Ben  30:19We're Charlie at the wall with the line, and we have just gone from John Hughes movies to the nice-guy phenomenon, and then straight on past that to the incel, the current incel disgusting thing that we have going on. Lexi  30:35Well, all of like...Ben  30:36It's all Ron and John Hughes' fault.Lexi  30:39Anthony Michael Hall basically played an incel [chuckling] for, like, his entire teenage youth--Ben  30:46God.Lexi  30:46--of the best friend who's just waiting around. "When's it gonna be his turn, gosh darn it?" because that's what it takes.Ben  30:52Yeah, and if I put in enough, you know, "nice coins" into the Woman Gashapon I will get the sex prize in the little ball. Lexi  31:00Exactly. Ben  31:01Yeah, I mean, fuck, as a white male, this is the kind of shit that I was taught, too. Like, I had some very strong, and I mean that as in of character, women, who... I mean, I could have been a very shitty person if I didn't have people that were better than me that helped me learn to be better. That should have been the responsibility but, like, "Thanks for being in my life to help me not end up like these fuckers." 'Cause I didn't get that from, like, my upbringing and, like, watching this kind of bullshit, or from, like, my religious upbringing. You definitely were taught that, like, the idea was that you put those wonderful little friendship points in, and eventually, you're gonna get what you want back out of it, which is not a relationship with another human being. It's vagina. Lexi  31:46Yeah, they just, the pure physical nature of it. But then, if we can move on to Pretty In Pink, which I think Ducky is the worst character for that, is the most blatant character for that. I mean, like, he's--Ben  32:01Oh, yeah. He's nice guy.Lexi  32:02[groans] He is so horrible, such a, like, you know, kickin' rocks and, "Aw, gee, when's it gonna be my time? Nobody loves you like I love you," like, gaslighting Molly Ringwald's character.Ben  32:15Unrequited love sort of thing is supposed to be, like, romantic, as opposed to creepy.Lexi  32:20Well, and speaking of creepy, then James Spader's creep-ass character is even worse because he's the king gaslighter of pretending to absolutely hate Molly Ringwald's character, Andie, but then, secretly is like trying to get with her and like, "Yeah, there it is. There's the douchebag," and I did know guys like that in high school that would pretend, "Oh, we don't talk when we're at school, but then I'll message you on MSN later tonight."Ben  32:48Yeah, I mean, this this is where I get ranty because this leads me into one of my hot topics and also not a sponsor of the show. [Lexi laughs] Wish they were. Do they still exist?Lexi  33:01Yeah, they do. There's one at Market Mall.Ben  33:04Yeah, you can get, like, records from them, and film. They're the only place that sell record players and film anymore. Lexi  33:09[laughing] Yep. Ben  33:10But this is one of, like, things that gets me kind of passionate is that, when this kind of subject comes up, men get mad at people pointing it out, white males specifically get mad at people pointing out that, like, this was sort of the culture that we were steeped in, what we were built to be like. I feel like men should be super fucking angry that this is what society tried to turn us into, did turn us into. Like, but instead, we double down on this shit. We get mad. We try to defend it. We try to defend that like "culture", but like, we should be fucking pissed all the time about what society, what our society, patriarchal and you know, colonial as it is, like, what it tried, and tries, and continues to try to turn white men into. Like, but dudes just don't get pissed at that. For some reason, they just can't. They can't find that, and it makes me mad on a daily basis. I see myself as, sort of like, this robot that was built by, you know, these fucking people to do this thing, and it makes me mad every day that I almost didn't have a fair shot at being like a normal-ish human being that could treat people with empathy and kindness because of this kind of media, of this kind of culture, this pervasiveness, and yeah, fuck it. It just gets me that other dudes, you know, aren't just constantly pissed off about this.Lexi  34:27Well, when you talk about, like, systemic racism, and lots of people are like, "There's no such thing ," which is bullshit--Ben  34:32Yes. [along with dancehall airhorn] B-b-b-bullshit. Sorry. I hadn't gotten one of those in in a few episodes.Lexi  34:36That's all good. We've gotta have one of those per episode. I feel like these, like, not necessarily these ones but movies like these, this is a part of it, of just like keeping everybody in their place, and telling everybody what role. "You sit on that chair over there. You wear that type of T-shirt." Like, this is-- and even like looking at the '90s movies, it's just as bad because now we have like--Ben  34:59Oh no. Yeah, definitely.Lexi  35:00It's just as bad, and even now, I was thinking like, "What are the current teen movies?" They're not that different, really.Ben  35:08I don't really know. Well, no, 'cause I guess it's still the same machine, and the same systemic system. [laughs] The same systemic system that's still turning this shit out. It hasn't-- like, the decision makers, the money and stuff, are all of a certain, I don't know, persuasion, ilk, build, and so that hasn't changed, so why would the content change? You know, there might be veneers put on things from people at certain parts of the process, but the assembly line is still largely the same and has the same intent. The blueprints haven't changed.Lexi  35:41You know--Ben  35:42Have I mixed my metaphor enough?Lexi  35:45You got a little... They're good. Ben  35:46Yeah. Lexi  35:47Like, just so thinking of the other podcast, "Art Intervention", there was one episode where I found out a lot of research about why the art industry, especially, like, art galleries, and museums, are so white, and one article I found was talking about, they're super white because those types of institutions, typically, they don't have a lot of government support. They don't have any, like, you know, public money coming in that's really keeping the lights on, so you really have to rely on the private sector for donations, and, unfortunately, a lot of the wealthy patrons for a lot of these big, big institutions are, largely, white patrons, and they don't wanna feel uncomfortable, and they don't wanna feel like--Ben  36:38No. It always comes with strings.Lexi  36:40It's always coming with strings, and so they don't want you to be bringing in an artist who is calling out the white patriarchy of the art society. They want someone who's gonna like, you know, ruffle a little feathers, but not be too, you know, radical, and so it's creating this industry that is perpetually keeping people in their place and keeping the dialogue moving along, and I think, like, some institutions are getting a little bit better, but it is a huge problem in the arts, and a lot of times people are like, "Oh, but the arts are... You know there's so many black actors that are very famous," and there's'--Ben  37:19What does that even mean? Lexi  37:21Exactly. Like, it's still an industry and it still has a lot of problems, and I think we're just scratching the surface on the whole like #MeToo" Harvey Weinstein thing, and even the fact that, like, #MeToo was appropriated from a black woman who had been talking about it for years, and all it took was, like, a couple white actresses to be like, "Yeah, I've had similar experiences," and pfff, it blows up. Ben  37:44Yeah. What was that shitty joke, where, like, the white dude is like, "Oh, if I was in charge of equality, you know, we wouldn't need feminism anymore," or something. Or like, "If I was in charge of feminism, we'd all have equality by now," something like that.Lexi  38:03That's a great joke.Ben  38:04The idea is that the joke is in the idea of this guy saying that he could fix a problem that he is the creator of, or part of the system. [Lexi laughs] There's the joke. You're supposed to laugh at the premise of the guy.Lexi  38:17It's so sad, though. Like, "Yeah. There it is."Ben  38:21[Lexi laughs] Speaking of sociopathic white males, let's hit Ferris Bueller. [along with dancehall airhorn] B-B-B-Bueller. Lexi  38:28[along with Yello's song, "Oh Yeah"] Oh, yeah. Bom-bom. Chik-a-chik-a!Ben  38:31I mean... [along with Yello's song, "Oh Yeah"] Oh yeah. Bom-bom. So that basically--Lexi  38:36[along with Yello's song, "Oh Yeah"] Bom. Oh.Ben  38:38That's enough right there. Really, like Ferris Bueller is a sociopath. He manipulates everyone. He can't empathize with other people's feelings. He manipulates his friends into doing things because he thinks it's for their own good. Like, he gets to decide what's best for Cameron. He gets to decide how Cameron deals with his emotionally-abusive parents or like, "Oh, steal the car." Eugh, but, like, Ferris Bueller is just a smug piece of shit, and, you know, Matthew Broderick, I like you enough, but you're much better in Godzilla 2000. [Yello song "Oh Yeah" continues]Lexi  39:06I think the real hero of that movie is Jennifer Grey's character, Jeanie Bueller. Jeanie is the true-- 'cause she's the only one that sees him other than Ed Rooney, Jeffrey Jones. She's the only one that sees him for his bullshit, but she sees it, more or less, like a sister just wanting to rub her brother's face and like, "You're not all that. How about that, kid?" Like, it's more she just wants to prove him wrong, not ruin his life, like Ed Rooney, but she's trying so hard the entire movie to get people to, like, see through his bullshit, and I always felt really bad for her because I was like, "Yeah, he shouldn't be doing all those things." [Yello song "Oh Yeah" continues]Ben  39:49Yeah, he's a terrible character. Yeah, that movie. You know, you've got Ben Stein in there as well, and he hasn't held out well. He's aged poorly, as far as he--Lexi  39:51Has he?Ben  39:52His movies are pretty, pretty shitty. He's a pretty smug asshole most of the time and very-- [Lexi sighs]Lexi  40:11Well, I mean, same with Jeffrey Jones, hey? [Yello song "Oh Yeah" continues]Ben  40:14Oh yes, I know what happened to him. We don't need to discuss that. That's just such a--Lexi  40:17 Yeah, that's--Ben  40:18A disgusting human being, so we're better off--Lexi  40:20There's a couple, like, Charlie Sheen, like that's--Ben  40:23Who, Charlie Sheen was in that?Lexi  40:25Yeah, he's the creepy dude that's hitting on Jeanie in the police station when he's like, "Why do you care so much about what your brother does?"Ben  40:32Oh man, now I remember that.Lexi  40:33He's the one that kind of like helps her, right?Ben  40:35Yeah, yeah. [Yello song "Oh Yeah" continues]Lexi  40:40Controversy comes from us all, Ben.Ben  40:41"Just be more like Charlie Sheen," is a thing that nobody should say. [laughs]Lexi  40:44No. Be more like Jennifer Grey is what I think.Ben  40:49Like, the actor or the character?Lexi  40:53Eh, the character in this one.Ben  40:53I don't know anything about the actor.Lexi  40:56Neither do I. I hope that she's not... I hope that no one is, like, actually.Ben  41:01Do we have anything that can bring us back? Like, we need some redeemable teen movies. I had a little bit of being like Footloose could be fun still. Are there ones we can watch? I've got one more that I sort of like.Lexi  41:11Oh, I've got one I love. Ben  41:12I'll do mine. You're more passionate. I'll do mine first. It's called... [laughing] Oh, god now I'm blanking on the name. Lexi  41:20Uh-oh. [laughs]Ben  41:21It's with Christian Slater, and he is a, like, pirate radio host. Pump Up the Volume. Lexi  41:28Okay.Ben  41:28So, there's some stuff that doesn't do it for me, which is sort of that, like, white suburban kid ennui that you see in, like, the '90s. It's technically a 1990 movie, but it was produced... That's when it was released, so it was produced in the '80s. So it's got a lot of that, sort of like, white teen ennui that we see in the '90s a lot with, like, the navel gazing and, like, "Let's just, you know, not worry about anything except our white privilege problems." So there's a little bit of that, but there's also a lot of like, sort of challenging the way that kids' problems are sort of downplayed by adults, or like, they're tried to be brushed aside when, like, you know, kids are actually suffering with problems. One of the things is a student kills himself and, like, that's sort of an impetus for the main characters to sort of go on and speak out about what's happening and tell the other students not to be quiet and to, like, live their, like... "Talk hard," is his line in the movie. Talk hard and, like, say the things that are a problem for you, and not hold them back, so I feel like I could rewatch that one again. I feel like it probably is watchable. He gets arrested at the end for his pirate radio, which is just such a great idea, a pirate radio, broadcasting illegally on the FM channel. Fuck, can you do that? I wanna broadcast illegally on an FM channel.Lexi  42:52I think it is something that's elite. Like, you have to be allowed to do it.Ben  42:56Yeah, I mean, I just don't even know anybody who'd be interested. Why do that when you can make a podcast? [both laugh] Yeah, I guess, you know, somebody would still have to tune to your pirate radio frequency, so... [chuckles]Lexi  43:11They'd find you.Ben  43:12Yeah. So the villain of the movie or whatever, is like the FCC comes to find Christian Slater's character and shut down his pirate radio.Lexi  43:21The FCC won't let him be.Ben  43:23Yeah, the FCC won't let him be. [laughs] Lexi  43:26Thank you. Thank you for that.Ben  43:27You're welcome. Thank you. I don't know what you're thinking me. You did it. That's great.Lexi  43:31I always like a good laugh, Ben. You know? Ben  43:33Yeah. I think yeah, give Pump Up the Volume a watch if you haven't. I haven't watched it in a while. I should re-watch it, but let us know if I'm wrong about that, and if it's a total trash fire, as well.Lexi  43:44I'm going to end this with a bang, Ben, because I'm gonna explain to you the greatest coming-of-age movie of the John Hughes-era is Uncle Buck.Ben  43:48Okay, so here's my thing with Uncle Buck. Is it a teen movie, though? Lexi  43:58Yes.Ben  43:59You think?Lexi  44:00I think so. I watched it all-- I watched it with my mom, and then I watched it with my friends when I was, like, 15, and I've watched it many times since because, I don't know. It was about, like, to me, it was about connecting with an adult in your life.Ben  44:16That's interesting. I appreciate that take. I guess I just find, like, the centering of John Candy as the main role in that, sort of, takes it away from being a teen movie for me.Lexi  44:24But that's why I think it's key because teenagers are so stuck in their own bubble, that it's hard to see your angst when you're living in it, and I think that was the reason my mom made me watch it.Ben  44:35Oh, interesting. So you were saying, like, the point-of-view character being the adult but having the show and the content geared at a teen gives you some outside of your own situation-ness, some self-awareness.Lexi  44:47Yeah.Lexi  44:48'Cause, see, like his... Oh, gosh, the... bup, bup, bup... Tia, so Tia is 15 and she's the oldest of the three kids and she's like, if you've never seen the movie, she's a cow. Like, the entire movie, she's just being an asshole for no purpose.Ben  44:48Interesting.Ben  45:06No, I've seen it a number of times.Lexi  45:09I watch it every Christmas. That is my Home Alone. Ben  45:11It's been a while, though.Lexi  45:13And it's just because she's so brutal, and then John Candy's character comes in and, you know, she's got a couple of lines that she says that are just horrible, so, so mean and callous, and then, she treats her family like garbage. She winds up shacking up with a dude who's trying to take advantage of her, and I think that this is really key, and a lot of people should watch it that if you are a 15, 16, 17 year old, and you are dating someone who is older than you, it is not an equal relationship. I'm sorry. It just isn't. And that's something that, like, when I was a teenager, I was like, "I can take care of myself," and so many times, like, yeah, to a point and then you pass a line, and then it gets real tricky, and what I like about that is, even though she treated people poorly, like, John Candy came to her rescue and supported her, and helped her to take her power back from this douchebag who tried to hurt her.Ben  46:12Right. So, in a typical John Hughes movie, we'd see her get a come-uppance of some sort of degradation or sexual assault as, sort of, the character arc. Like, "Oh, that'll teach you to be a b-word, though. You got what was coming to you. Haha." But that doesn't happen in this film. Interesting.Lexi  46:29Well, it kinda... Like, it almost does. Like, her boyfriend tries to pressure her into having sex. She's not ready so she leaves the party, and he does, like, make fun of her, and then, John Candy comes and finds her walking away from the party and, you know, she's embarrassed and whatever, and then he basically kidnaps the boyfriend in the back of the car, and then they hit golf balls at him to really, like... [laughs]Ben  46:53Sounds good to me. I'm fine with that.Lexi  46:56I don't know. Like, it's still you're right. Like, she's still like, there's that, like, "Haha, you were almost, like, you know, taken advantage of."Ben  47:02"That will show you."Lexi  47:02"That's what you get for being a little bag," but I just feel like, of those movies, this is probably the one that has, like, aged the best because even John Candy's character is so flawed. Ben  47:15Yeah, yeah.Lexi  47:16And it shows, like, all these redeeming qualities about him.Ben  47:18Yeah. I mean, that sounds like a good synopsis to me. I'd rewatch that. I'll give it a shot. And you all should give that a shot too, see what you think, see if there's some aspects of that film that we forgot that maybe cause it to bump off a little bit, although it sounds like Lexi watches it pretty regularly, so she knows what's up.Lexi  47:38I'm gonna be really sad if someone out there is like, "But, did you forget about the scene?" Because probably.Ben  47:43Maybe, but you know, that's just an opportunity. Yeah, this is an opportunity to appreciate what happened there, and, you know, that doesn't mean you have to stop watching Uncle Buck. It just means we have to somehow create a 15-minute episode addendum to this that people are forced to listen to that, "Okay, so there's this part in the movie and we have to talk about it where things go blah blah, blah." Yeah, I have to imagine that we'll end up doing a lot of retraction or correction episodes. Maybe that should be just a fun off-week thing we do. We do, you know, corrections and just 15-minute episodes every other week when we're not on our regular schedule. "So here's some shit we got wrong last week," and we just list it.Lexi  48:27Yeah. Just, "Sorry about this. Sorry about the following things."Ben  48:30"Said this. Didn't mean to."Lexi  48:32Ben, we haven't done Who's That Pokémon? yet.Ben  48:35Oh, fuck. Let's do Who's That  Pokémon? here. I think we've got another little ways to go. We should do a wrap up, but let's do a Who's That  Pokémon? Is it your turn again to come up with the Pokémon?Lexi  48:46Well, I've done many. I'm happy to keep explaining wet bags of sand to you, but do you wanna take a crack at Who's That  Pokémon?Ben  48:52I didn't come up with one, so it'll be on the fly. Yeah.Lexi  48:54Oh, do it.Ben  48:54I'll do it unless you have one prepared. Lexi  48:56No, no, no. Ben  48:57Okay. Okay, [along with "Who's That Pokémon" theme music] Who's that Pokémon? and I will describe now the Pokémon with which you need to guess. Lexi  49:06Excellent. Ben  49:07It's sort of like a pitcher.Lexi  49:09Okay.Ben  49:11Imagine an upside-down... No, right-way-up, like a pitcher as in, like, a vase. Not a--Lexi  49:18Okay, like, like a pitcher of lemonade. Ben  49:20Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then there's, like, some sort of leaves coming off, leaf-shaped protrusions, one on each side of this pitcher.Lexi  49:30Oh, my god.Ben  49:30And then there's also some sort of circular balls atop the pitcher.Lexi  49:35Are you explaining an actual Pokémon to me or is this like a...?Ben  49:38Yeah, yeah.Lexi  49:39It's an actual Pokémon! Oh, I thought we were being cheeky here and--Ben  49:43No. It's time for us to break out our--Lexi  49:45Anthony Michael Hall. [Ben laughs]Ben  49:47Oh shit. That's not bad. Lexi  49:48Oh, I gotta remember.Ben  49:49I'll change it. It's no longer Victreebel. It's Anthony Michael Hall. You got it. [Lexi laughs] [along with "Who's That Pokémon" theme music] Who's that Pokémon? [Lexi laughs]Lexi  49:59It's Anthony Michael Hall. Ben  50:00I'm gonna Google you a picture. [scratching record, DJ-style]Lexi  50:03Oh, Victreebel. Ben  50:04Yes. It was a real Pokémon.Lexi  50:05Damn it.Ben  50:06I think if I ever do them, they'll probably be real Pokémon.Lexi  50:09We still have to do a Pokémon episode.Ben  50:11It'd be interesting to talk to Mr. Hall and ask him how he feels about his part in the rise of incels.Lexi  50:18I'm sure he probably doesn't see it that way. [laughs]Ben  50:21I don't think many people do, as a child actor. I'm sure there's a lot more going on. I am being glib for the sake of humor.Lexi  50:27Hey, Ben, he had a redeeming role in Edward Scissorhands, where he dies.Ben  50:31He had a lot of good TV roles.Lexi  50:34Yeah, he has. He's had a very big career.Ben  50:37Mm-hmm. This is now the Anthony Michael Hall podcast, where we just talk about--Lexi  50:42Dissect him.Ben  50:43--the different works of Anthony Mic-- Michael Hall. I can't say his name anymore. It's lost all meaning.Lexi  50:50AMH.Ben  50:51AMH. He's been active as an actor since 1977. Is that something you knew? Lexi  50:56Wow. No, That's, that's...Ben  50:58He's 53 years old. He was born in 1968, April 14th, in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Can we stop and talk about Massachusetts for a second? And how difficult a fucking place that is to say?Lexi  51:10Yes. I have such a hard time with it, I'd rather just be like, "That place," or write it down and point to it because I feel like I can't say it appropriately.Ben  51:17Yeah, and I'm not gonna make fun of the name 'cause I don't know its origins, etymology or anything, and I don't want to step on something, but, like, just saying, "Mass-a-chu-setts", like I've always said, "Massachusiss", or whatever, as a kid. I've always said it wrong, and then I was in New York, and I said, "Massachusiss", and somebody said, "What the fuck is wrong with you?"Lexi  51:35"Mass-a-chu--"Ben  51:35"Mass-a-chu-setts". Lexi  51:37"Mass-a-chu-setts". Ben  51:38Okay, yeah. It sounds wrong. Just say it-- okay, everybody at home listening, say "Mass-a-chu-setts"  about five times, maybe 10 times in a row, and see if you still like yourself.Lexi  51:49That's a tough homework assignment. [chuckles]Ben  51:52Yeah, enjoy. What else do we need to know about M-- Michael Anthony Hall? That's it. I'm good. Let's move on. [along with "Who's That Pokémon" theme music] Who's that Pokémon? We're back. We're back into the regular show, no longer the--Lexi  52:07AMH.Ben  52:08Anthony Michael Hall hour, the AMH hour. Is there anything else we should hit here on the way out? Lexi  52:15I mean--Ben  52:15Like, he produced or something Beethoven, so that's interesting.Lexi  52:18He also did Home Alone, which is a beloved movie.Ben  52:22Produced, yeah. He didn't--Lexi  52:23Oh, I thought... Okay.Ben  52:24But still.Lexi  52:25That's good to know.Ben  52:25He produced Miracle on 34th Street, which, you know, I've always enjoyed.Lexi  52:29He did Mall Rats, which again, like, is a very big movie [Ben groans] that I think a lot of people are like, "That's a cultural icon," but, like, it's also a very, like...Ben  52:39It is. Yeah, it's not a good flick. It does not hold up, and it is one of those ones that, like, yeah, as a rite of passage as a 14 year old, at least around our neck of the woods, you definitely watched, and thought was the greatest thing that ever happened. "Oh, shit pretzels." [Lexi groans] "Ha, ha, ha, ha. In the back of a Volkswagen." Lexi  52:59It's just...Ben  53:00Yeah.Lexi  53:00I feel like it's a really weird mix of, like, heartwarming children's movies and then, like, really problematic teen raunchy comedies.Ben  53:10Yeah.Lexi  53:10Like, well, it's an interesting mix you got there, pal. Ben  53:13Yeah. It's a wild time at Ridgemont High, which is movie I would have-- we should have talked about, but we didn't get to. That's fine, and I don't really remember enough about it except one of the Penn is in it. I think it's Sean Penn who was problematic, as well.Lexi  53:28Yeah. It's Sean Penn. Yeah.Ben  53:30Yeah, yeah.Lexi  53:31Oof. There's... We could... There's a lot of other very problematic teen movies. I mean, like, we've got the whole '90s to stare down. Ben  53:40Yeah.Lexi  53:41She's All That.Ben  53:42I mean, you know, those are movies that I definitely... Can't Hardly Wait. Lexi  53:46[groaning] Oh, I used to love that movie. Ben  53:50Of course you did. We all thought it was great. Lexi  53:51And I watched it recently. Oh, god.Ben  53:54No, I know. There's not a single aspect of that movie that I think holds up.Lexi  53:58Oh, you mean Seth Green's character isn't a redeeming figure throughout history?Ben  54:03It is an absolute travesty that that was allowed to become a thing. Lexi  54:08[whispers] Oh, my gosh.Ben  54:09That... yeah. The racism in that character alone in that, like, sort of characterization that we saw a lot of in the '90s and early 2000s is just wild. Lexi  54:19[softly] I know.Ben  54:19Just wild that that stuff had no critical second thought. Like, I know, we talk about, like, history and culture as these eras, and, like, we didn't have this sort of cultural awareness of these things at the time and, like, it's true, but also like, "So fucking what?" Like, that doesn't--Lexi  54:36Doesn't make it okay.Ben  54:37I just can't see that as an excuse. Yeah. Can't see it as an excuse.Lexi  54:43"Can't Hardly Use it As An Excuse?Ben  54:45[laughs] Yeah, Can't Hardly Wait to use it as an excuse. Like, I just can't use that as a way to be like, "Ah, I can still watch this film and not think of it critically," which I guess nobody's really asking anyone to do. Lexi  54:55But then it, like--Ben  54:56Problematic media is a whole other topic.Lexi  54:58It is, because it does beg the question of, "Do we look at the art versus the artist?" because then, like, we're leading into that era, and even, like, there's a little controversy this week with the old Margaret Atwood and her comments. Ben  55:11Oh, God. Lexi  55:13And I'm not gonna say that "I told you so, world," but I did say that Margaret Atwood isn't a great... I mean...Ben  55:20Well, I mean, she started to swing problematic for a while now. But like, this is also the advent of, sort of like, internet as well, is like, we did not have the information earlier on to know her thoughts on subjects that, you know, were outside of what she'd write about in her books, and maybe more intelligent people than myself picked up more of, like, her problems. I read her books, the ones that I enjoyed, which were like the MaddAddam trilogy, when I was in my early 20s. I don't consider that I was even like a proper adult human with critical thought until I was 25, so like, I still miss stuff all the time, and yeah, that's interesting. Margaret Atwood though. Way to hold my beer, JK Rowling. Jesus.Lexi  56:03Yeah, I did make a couple jokes of like, "Oh, she's really J.K.-ing herself this week." Like, just, if anyone has ever... Like, here's my piece of advice. Just stop. Just don't. Just don't. Like, and, a lot of times, don't weigh in. This is not a place for, "Oh, you know what I think about this?" Nothing. You think nothing about it. Shut up.Ben  56:23Oh, no, trust me that's a lesson I learned as a white dude on the internet that's like, more or less cishet, like, you know, maybe I don't need to offer an opinion on this. There's gonna be a lot of other takes, and I could probably do the most for myself by just reading how this goes out, and if I have questions about things, do some fucking Googling and try to understand these points that I'm having trouble with, and...Lexi  56:48Well, this has been a depressing and sad episode about our failed teenage years of just disappointing racism and sexism. [laughs]Ben  56:58Yeah. Well, you know, and again, this goes back to my really good analogy about, like, conveyor belts and machines or whatever. Like, we haven't fixed the problems with the blueprints and the machinery that's making this shit, so why would we expect it to be different? A different outcome just because, now we're aware that, you know, the shit shouldn't be happening, but apparently, we haven't taken the right action yet to correct where that's coming from, and so that stuff still comes.Lexi  57:29Well, maybe in another couple of decades we'll look at it a little closer. Ben  57:33We'll see. We'll see.Lexi  57:34The rom coms of the future are gonna be more uplifting and diverse and positive.Ben  57:38Okay, well, rom coms are a whole 'nother thing we need to get into 'cause Nora Ephron.Lexi  57:42Teenage.Ben  57:44Nora Ephron, I'm coming for you.Lexi  57:46I don't even wanna talk about rom coms because I don't think that I could say anything other than, "Bleuch."Ben  57:51We broached the subject. I mean, we kind of came into the teen movies thing with the intention of having some positivity to balance it out, [Lexi laughs] but it's hard when you have about 15 to 20 years, dominated by one figure, who has a way of looking at the world that's pretty shitty, and made all the, like, pop culture in that time.Lexi  58:10This is why you need a diverse group of people making content so that you have a wider array of things to look at to form your identity, because, when you're growing up, and the only teen flicks that are out the

What do you do when not only you are suffering with a mental health challenge, but you actually have a child who is suffering from their own mental health issues?Assalamu alaikum, and welcome to the Mentally Fit Muslims podcast. I’m your host, Saba Malik. Thank you so much for joining me.And today I’m talking to a Muslim mom who has bipolar. And she also has a child who’s suffering from their own mental health issues. Inshallah, we’ll be talking about motherhood, setting boundaries in your relationships, and growing from your challenges. Stay tuned till the end, because I have two exciting announcements that I’m only sharing on my podcast and on my email list, nowhere else. So it’s a way for me to say thank you for being a loyal listener. And you can also join my email list here www.mentallyfitmuslims.org/join so that you can stay up to date with all the exciting announcements coming up for my podcast.All right, enjoy the show.Asalaamu alaikum Hayat.Hayat Omar Hubert 1:11Wa alaikum asalaam warahmatullah wa barakatuhu.Saba Malik 1:14How are you doing?Hayat Omar Hubert 1:15Oh, gosh, I have the light cannot complain every day is a beautiful day.Saba Malik 1:20Well, it’s nice to hear. That’s very nice to alhamdulillah. So, we actually met online on a zoom meeting. And I just, I think the moment you said I have bipolar, I’m like, Okay, well, we’re sisters in bipolar. So I want to talk to her and find out you know, what’s your story and just how you’ve been dealing with it. So before we start, I’m just gonna read your bio. You send me a blurb so I’m just going to tell my audience a little bit about you.Hayat Omar Hubert is a community engagement specialist with a decade of successful experience in all aspects of the event, program planning, development, and management. A strong believer in living a life of service that has no boundaries of race, creed, or religion. She works hard to take a stand for unity in the community to serve and take part in forming alliances and partnerships to maximize resources and energy. Hired regularly works in partnerships with other organizations to make a difference in her community doing services, such as cooking for the homeless, collecting hygiene kits, community cleanup, she regularly volunteers by participating in programs to empower youth. Her educational qualifications include an associate’s degree in early childhood education, a bachelor’s degree in social science, a concentration in sociology, and a master’s degree in social work. high art enjoys reading and writing poetry. Wow, Mashallah. You are pretty accomplished. Alright, so te

What do you do when not only you are suffering with a mental health challenge, but you actually have a child who is suffering from their own mental health issues?Assalamu alaikum, and welcome to the Mentally Fit Muslims podcast. I’m your host, Saba Malik. Thank you so much for joining me.And today I’m talking to a Muslim mom who has bipolar. And she also has a child who’s suffering from their own mental health issues. Inshallah, we’ll be talking about motherhood, setting boundaries in your relationships, and growing from your challenges. Stay tuned till the end, because I have two exciting announcements that I’m only sharing on my podcast and on my email list, nowhere else. So it’s a way for me to say thank you for being a loyal listener. And you can also join my email list here www.mentallyfitmuslims.org/join so that you can stay up to date with all the exciting announcements coming up for my podcast.All right, enjoy the show.Asalaamu alaikum Hayat.Hayat Omar Hubert 1:11Wa alaikum asalaam warahmatullah wa barakatuhu.Saba Malik 1:14How are you doing?Hayat Omar Hubert 1:15Oh, gosh, I have the light cannot complain every day is a beautiful day.Saba Malik 1:20Well, it’s nice to hear. That’s very nice to alhamdulillah. So, we actually met online on a zoom meeting. And I just, I think the moment you said I have bipolar, I’m like, Okay, well, we’re sisters in bipolar. So I want to talk to her and find out you know, what’s your story and just how you’ve been dealing with it. So before we start, I’m just gonna read your bio. You send me a blurb so I’m just going to tell my audience a little bit about you.Hayat Omar Hubert is a community engagement specialist with a decade of successful experience in all aspects of the event, program planning, development, and management. A strong believer in living a life of service that has no boundaries of race, creed, or religion. She works hard to take a stand for unity in the community to serve and take part in forming alliances and partnerships to maximize resources and energy. Hired regularly works in partnerships with other organizations to make a difference in her community doing services, such as cooking for the homeless, collecting hygiene kits, community cleanup, she regularly volunteers by participating in programs to empower youth. Her educational qualifications include an associate’s degree in early childhood education, a bachelor’s degree in social science, a concentration in sociology, and a master’s degree in social work. high art enjoys reading and writing poetry. Wow, Mashallah. You are pretty accomplished. Alright, so te

 Episode 14SPEAKERSBrian, Lindsay Lindsay  00:00I'm Lindsay Mustain and this is the career design podcast made for driven ambitious square pegs and round holes type professionals who see things differently and challenge the status quo. We obliterate obstacles and unlock hidden pathways to overcome and succeed where others have not stagnation feels like death. And we are unwilling to compromise our integrity and settle for being average in any way. We are the backbone of any successful business and those who overlook our potential are doomed to a slow demise. We do work that truly matters aligns with our purpose, and in turn, we make our lasting mark on the world. We are the dreamers, doers, legends, and visionaries who are called to make our most meaningful contribution and love what we do.  Welcome to the career design podcast. I'm Lindsay Mustain. Today I'm with Bryan Heinz who literally stopped me in the tracks when he made this powerful statement about progressing on your career path. And then what I called getting bit slapped back into a different zone of the path and where you were actually trying to proceed in your career. So I want to talk a little bit about that today because I felt like you had such good insight on truly walking the path and why career path failure isn't really a failure, and what it actually means when you don't get what you're truly focused or I think you said hyper-focused on. So tell me a little bit about you, Brian, and why this came up between us. Brian  01:22It came up we were talking about as a group we were talking about the past and our goals and if you got stuck, hyper-focused, and only focusing on one company or one area, you weren't allowing other influences to come in. And, you know, everybody has a group and everybody in dream job hack and has come to the come to some realization that they need another influence. So that's the beginning and after years of ins and outs and ups and downs and lots of layoffs, you know, being able to realize that you have to allow that and coming to that conclusion or that realization many years ago at this point. And it's you know, obviously built to that point. But getting to where I'm at now has only been because I've allowed other ways of thinking and allowed what I call the universe to come in and influence and understanding what the influence is. Lindsay  02:24I say you know, I use the universe too. But whatever you want to use that as your higher belief, that is what I want you to insert into the universe here and allowing the pathway. But one of the things I want to focus on here is that when we get really focused, we're thinking, Okay, I have this career path, like I knew I wanted to be a CEO like that was one thing. I'm like, What am I going to do? Well, in fact, I had one person tell me, they're like, I'm gonna bloody all of the toes on the way up the ladder like that's the way like they're super aggressive masculine, like dominate energy. And then somehow, it's like, we're reaching out for him to get snatched away. And this happens, like when we get laid off, or when we are at the final stage of an interview, and we're just ready to take that next step. And then it gets taken away. What happens to people when that happens to them? Brian  03:14Well, I think the first, the first thing you have to realize is its loss. And you're going to go through the five stages of grief, you really are. And whether it's you know, lay off is a big, a big deal. You know, because it affects you in on so many levels. But rejection is the same way. It's just a very shorter, the shorter span, of dealing with that. You can, you know, you get a rejection letter, you can deal with that. And about, you know, in an hour, you can push that one aside. Or if you really want it may take you half a day or a day, you know, you get laid off and your livelihoods affected what do you do next? And especially if you don't have any experience, you don't know what to do, you don't know how to find a job. You know, the first time I got laid off, I didn't know how to do anything I had. I realized later that I didn't know how to do it, but I didn't know how to do anything about how do I keep going and how do I find my next opportunity. And so you go through that stage, you go through loss, you go through denial, you go through the what the fuck am I gonna do stage first kind of thing and then you progress through the rest of it. And then you get motivated. You know you find a way to be motivated. And if you don't allow for help outside of that, and you try to do it by yourself. You're not going to you're not going to succeed. Lindsay  04:42Absolutely. So you get this goal like okay, at the very end, it's taken away and you're going through the stages of loss. But you said that's the universe redirecting you So talk to me about this because I like to talk about the inner stage or the inner state of yourself if you were feeling chaotic and misaligned internally, that is exactly how the world will show up for you. So whether you want to call it manifesting or whatever if you ever walked into something where you're like, this is going to go badly, I guarantee you, it's going to go badly. If you walk in with the idea like this is going to go, well, life is always working. For me, that also tends to work. So talk to me about that idea. Brian  05:20Well, it's exactly what you put out, you give back, what you put into the universe is what's going to come back to you. If you're going to, if you're going to just focus on the negative, and all you're looking at it, the negative aspects of the situation, the fear, the loss, the anger, the as a Star Wars fan, that all lead to the dark side kind of thing. And, yeah, and, but if that's what you're continually thinking and continually putting out to the universe, that's what's going to come back to you. Because that feeds, you can tell the universe what you want, and you can show the universe what you want and ultimately, that's what comes back to you and successful people, in most cases, do that. There's a couple of assholes in the bunch but you know, in most cases, they've done something well to somebody, for somebody or for a group of people, you know, yes, they started a company to make money but at the same time, the, what they learned along the way was the value of the was the value of people and the value of those that have helped me help make them successful. Lindsay  06:41So how do you reframe when you have that opportunity taken away from you, how do you reframe the idea, instead of saying something's wrong with me into that was not meant or it is just known, for now not know, forever? Brian  06:57I think it takes somebody else to tell you that, for me, the situation was everything around me was fear, and oh my god, what are we going to do? And somebody, I had the luck of being given outplacement services and understanding that this isn't the end, it's just time for something new. And learning that in my 20s, you know, to where I'm at now in my 40s, you know, are two very, it's I learned that a long time ago has changed a lot for me as years have gone on. And, you know, when I finally took the time to understand what the universe was, what the energy around me was, and how to put that all together. That's what has kept me sane, kept me from following falling into those lows, that, you know, we experienced as a group, you know, some weeks as well. And then just being able to understand that work and do that takes somebody else to remind you that this isn't the end, it's something new for you to do, let's go do something new. And the funny thing is, I haven't deviated from the basic industries that I've been in the whole time. It's been the same industry, and, or a version thereof. But I never, I have really haven't strayed from the industries that I've been tied to my entire career. Lindsay  08:42So I like to say that this is a reframing of the idea of what you experienced, and then redirection. It's kind of like when you're coaching little kids, I think about my son who played soccer, and you're like, no, the goal that you're going for is that way, it's just your learning that the where the actual in the game is and that if you're so tied to the outcome, then everything else looks like failure. And instead, you either win. Or you either learn if you take that and so the idea that you're always failing, and changes to that I am always progressing and I'm always getting better and I'm constantly being redirected to what is correct for me, that will allow you a lot more opportunities to bring forth and recognize opportunities versus being so focused that you literally have blinders on you have tunnel vision on the Indigo you don't allow yourself to receive. So I wanted to talk about like allowing the path what what what advice would you give you maybe three ways that after you get that redirection, how do you allow yourself to fall into that and then to that, so that scarcity, mindset, that abundance mindset of growth and redirection and reframing versus something's wrong with me, I've failed, and I'm not good enough. How do we change that? What would you say worth? Three things that you would do. Brian  10:05First is actually looking for the positive, the first thing I do is look for the positive in the experience you just had, you had an experience. And the, that's the key to understanding the whole situation is, you had an experience. And it's the same for if you're fired or laid off, or whatever, you had, the positiveness of having that experience, and building on what you learned in that experience and saying, alright, I'm done learning at this place. Or I learned what I needed to learn about this company in this interview. It's not where I'm supposed to be. So first and foremost, I look, I look at all of those situations as an experience and another learning opportunity. And take that, and then once you find them, once you find that experience, and what the positive look for the positive in it, as well, you know, whether you hated the company or not, there's something positive that came out of that experience, and something that you learned, and it could be simply, I don't ever want to work for a boss like that, again. Lindsay  11:17Yes, embrace the pain, Brian  11:20Right? And then turn. The second thing I do is, stop and take a breath. And let, let it go. Just stop and let it go. And somebody in our group, put that on the Facebook page the other day, you know, stop and let it go. And maybe have a conversation about it. And when you talk through, even if it's your spouse, your best friend, or whatever, when you talk through it, sometimes you realize, yeah, that would have turned into a pile of crap, and not been the place for me. And then it's simply saying, alright, what's next, and looking for what's always looking for what's next, in my very first outplacement situation I was ever in a mentor at the time, someone who I had worked with, we both got laid off from the same company, but he was at a higher level than me, the one thing he, he taught me that has always stuck for me is when you land, whether you land your dream position or not, you're always looking for your next opportunity. You never take your sight off of what your next opportunity is. And while a dream job may be what you think it is, now, in five years, it changes. Lindsay  12:45And maybe even say that your it changes the moment you're in it. Brian  12:49Exactly. Exactly. I would agree with that. I would agree with that. You know, Lindsay  12:55I'm gonna recap here, which you said, there are three ways to reframe. And when you have that redirection, which is one look for the positive in it, even if it's that I had something to add to my resume, and they paid me for being here. Brian  13:07Exactly. Lindsay  13:08The second is to take a breath, allow your feelings, and allow them to release. Because if we hang on to that, that energy that and we embed it internally in our body is that will manifest outside of ourselves. So for you, if we have that we feel like we feel less than if that becomes our story, we integrate it, we have to learn how to take a breath, and whatever you need to do to take care of yourself to increase your state, but then to let it go. And the last one was to think about what's next. And so not we get to this place where like a shame spiral, I should have done this. I could have done that I was like I'm not good enough. Whatever it is, but to think about Okay, this is redirection. So what do I want to choose intentionally for myself to go forward next? Brian  13:53Perfect. Lindsay  13:55Okay. Amazing. Brian, thank you so much for joining me. I feel like since you did talk a little bit about dream job hack. Will you tell somebody a little bit about your experience in that program and what you've seen around because you've been able to witness a lot of success including your own. Brian  14:08Right, exactly. So the biggest, the biggest thing for me is it's a family and it's a group of people in the same situation. And when or with the same desire for something more in something greater for themselves. And whether that's what you really thought it was or not when you first come into it. That's what it is. For me, things revolve around energy. And you know, I, I had followed you for years on Facebook or LinkedIn and finally decided, well, let's listen to this chick and see what's going on and see what she insight on and your energy was what grabbed me in but once I got into it and once I read into it, it was a no brainer for me because it was about people, which this whole thing is about people and sharing experience and supporting each other. I'm a big believer in service to others. And, you know, it would allow me to share my experience where I've come from and see what see if that helped anybody, you know, or see what came about. And then what I found was, you know, the in the overall dream job hack program, everybody's there for the same reason and sharing. And there's, there's, you know, a lot of sharing that goes on in the members-only Facebook page and things like that, that you can learn something every day from a single individual. If you find it to join the collective, you know, you get an even closer-knit group that, you know, success, success breeds success. And as I've seen people come and go in that group, because they've found success or didn't know they were going to find success and something that we've all said, Hey, you should try that. Or you should put that to posting, you know, or something like that. It's, it's, the group itself has come together. And while you know, I found success, in some ways, I still come back to that group, every week if, if possible, because I'm going to learn something, and I'm going to learn something more, or I'm going to share something and I'm going to share my success with the group. And hopefully, that bleeds off onto somebody else. Lindsay  16:51Amazing. Or we are getting ready to open the doors to dream job hack, actually this next month in April of 2021. And there's some really cool thing. So if you are listening, and you were interested, I'm going to drop a link for you to sign up for the waiting list. So you can get to hear all about what's coming out. I haven't offered this training in a couple of months. And it's going to be new and revised. And I'm so excited. And to give you ideas how powerful this program is, in 2020, the middle of the greatest recession of our lifetimes, we were able to create job offers 2.1 job offers a raise of about $50,000 over your last salary in less than nine weeks. That's what the average client did. That meant there were some people who had multiple hundreds of $1,000. And there are people who still got like $10,000. And we were able to average that and it becomes when you intentionally focus and you allow yourself to receive and you understand what you're truly selling. So Brian, thank you so much for joining me today. I've so enjoyed it and thank you again for sharing your voice and your gift with the world. Brian  17:50Thanks for having me.

SHOW NOTESWinter is the ideal time to reflect on last year's garden and plan for the year ahead, but when seed catalogs start arriving it can be overwhelming. In this episode of Granite State Gardening,  New Hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station Becky Sideman, Emma Erler and Nate Bernitz share and discuss proven tips and solutions for selecting the right varieties and developing your garden plan. Part 1 of this conversation was packed with experience and insights to help make 2021 your most successful and rewarding gardening season yet, and our next episode will feature the second half of the discussion.Featured question: What is the best way to get an accurate soil temperature reading and what's the ideal temperature for planting a variety of vegetables?Featured plant segment: nasturiums, TropaeolumClosing gardening tip: Garden fencing considerations Connect with us at @askunhextension on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to the monthly Granite State Gardening newsletter.Email us questions, suggestions and feedback at gsg.pod@unh.edu Background Reading: Soil Temperature for Seed Germination (Penn State): https://extension.psu.edu/seed-and-seedling-biologyGrowing Big Onions: https://extension.unh.edu/blog/how-do-i-get-my-onions-grow-biggerWhen to Plant Vegetables: https://extension.unh.edu/resource/growing-vegetables-when-plant-your-vegetable-garden-fact-sheet Preparing a Vegetable Garden Site: https://extension.unh.edu/resource/preparing-vegetable-garden-sitePreventing Garden Diseases: https://extension.unh.edu/resource/10-easy-steps-prevent-common-garden-diseases-fact-sheetManaging garden pests with IPM: https://extension.unh.edu/blog/garden-IPMUsing leftover seeds: https://extension.unh.edu/blog/are-my-leftover-seeds-last-year-still-good-or-do-i-need-buy-new-onesSaving seeds: https://extension.unh.edu/blog/how-do-i-save-seeds-next-year%E2%80%99s-gardenStarting plants from seed: https://extension.unh.edu/resource/starting-plants-seed-fact-sheet Transcript As transcribed by https://otter.aiNate B  00:00Greetings Granite State gardeners. I'm Nate Bernitz co-host with Emma Erler of the Granite State Gardening podcast a production of UNH extension. This episode features an incredible conversation with the University of New Hampshire's Dr. Becky Seidman. And as part one of two because we decided to split our interview into two episodes. Part Two will be released in a couple weeks, and this episode part one we focus on understanding different kinds of seeds and vegetable garden planning. In part two, we'll take a deep dive into understanding and utilizing the wealth of information on seed packets, and within seed catalogs, physical and online, and how to use that information to take your garden planning to the next level. Dr. Becky Sidman is our first guest on the Granite State Gardening podcast, a colleague of ours at UNH Extension. In addition to Becky's work as a sustainable horticulture state specialist at UNH extension. She's a professor and coordinator of undergraduate programs in sustainable agriculture and food systems within the Department of Agriculture, Nutrition and Food Systems at the University of New Hampshire, and a researcher with the New Hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station. Becky's research emphasizes vegetable and berry crop production, including season extension practices for Northern New England. Let's get into part one of our conversation with Becky Sideman.Becky, Emma, I am so glad to be sitting here talking with you today about one of my favorite topics and certainly a timely topic as we're getting our seed catalogs in the mail, snows on the ground. And we're just yearning to be outside and warm weather back in our gardens. And seed catalogs, of course, have so much promise the the new varieties, the exciting varieties, all the benefits, the solutions to last year's problems. They're all in that seed catalog. But I think it makes sense to start with a little bit of science as we sometimes do an extension. So Becky, was wondering if you can demystify a few terms, the big two categories, when it comes to seeds, open pollinated and hybrid, what are we talking about? They'reBecky S  02:25Sure, I agree, this is my favorite time of year with the same catalog start coming in. And we get to spend our time poring through them.Emma E  02:34Basically, an open pollinated variety is one where you can save the seeds, and they come out looking something like what you started with. And so it's basically an inbred thing that you can keep saving, and selecting, and so forth. A hybrid is a variety, that's the result of crossing to parents that might or might not look anything like each other. And as a result, it's pretty uniform, and usually has pretty predictable characteristics. But if you saved it seed, it wouldn't come out. Like the thing you started with. Am I in your experience when you're looking at a seed catalog or a seed packet for that matter? Are they actually going to say open pollinated? or hybrid? Are they going to have other terminology as well? And how does that all fit together? Yeah, I'm glad you asked that Nate, a lot of times that information is listed right on the seed packet. it'll it'll sometimes say open pollinated, will often say is heirloom, which all heirloom varieties are open pollinated varieties. They've just been around for a while, like they've been around probably since 1950. Or or earlier. So these are things that people have been have been saving the seeds from for four generations. Typically, what you will see to on on seed packets is an indication if a seed is hybrid, so it'll either say hybrid on the label or it will often say f1. I personally sometimes go for the hybrid varieties just because they do have some sometimes stronger characteristics might have a more robust plant might there might be some sort of resistance to a disease, let's say, and I don't try to save seeds myself. So that's perfectly acceptable for my garden.Nate B  04:30And Becky, you're coming into this with several perspectives because not only are you an avid gardener, but you're a researcher and searcher and you know you have extensive experience in plant breeding. So for you saving seeds isn't just, you know, a hobby or a pastime. It's something that has been essential to your work. So I'm curious, wearing your various hats but maybe especially your hat as a garden. What do you see as the pro and cons, when you're evaluating broadly what category you're aiming for?Becky S  05:09That's an awesome question. As a gardener, I tend to actually grow a whole mix of things, I grow a mix of modern hybrids to new open pollinated varieties to much older varieties and heirloom varieties as well. So it really just depends on the particular characteristics I'm looking for. And the particular crop we're dealing with. I do have some species where I like to save my seeds from year to year. And for those I'm using primarily, heirloom open pollinated varieties that I'm saving. But I also have some crops where I want the latest best disease resistant and the most vigorous varieties, and the latest coolest hybrids, and so I have a real mix of all of these things in my garden. Okay, so you're not putting all your seeds in one basket, you're, you're diversifying, trying to, you know, get the best of all worlds. INate B  06:16I know this is a little nerdy, but that we're used to that we're okay with that. I was wondering if you could just before we move on from this topic, can you actually explain why seeds would be open pollinated? Like what that actually means? Why something might be a hybrid? What, what results of that? Like? What is the actual science behind these terms? And what are the different ways that plants in the garden actually are pollinated? Like for something that's open pollinated? How is it actually getting pollinated? For something that's hybrid? Where are those seeds actually coming from?Becky S  07:00Oh, that's a super awesome question. And we could get really deep in it. But I'll keep it kind of, I'll give sort of an a general general response here. So it all comes down to the biology of the plant. So some plants some plants need to be pollinated by other members, other individuals, sort of like, you know, we do as humans. And so for example, squashes need, they have female and male flowers. And that female flower cannot be pollinated, except by another flower, a male flower. And so it sort of facilitates and encourages cross pollination. Lots of plants that are open pollinated, don't have that reproductive strategy. And instead, they can pollinate themselves. And they do so very cheerfully. And so a plant that does very well with open pollinated varieties is probably usually one that naturally self pollinate or naturally in breeds. So you could kind of see that each of these strategies has advantages. The advantage of outcrossing and needing to be pollinated by somebody else, is that you're always bringing in new genetic diversity. And that tends to be kind of good for adapting to new chain, you know, changing environments, and so forth. But on the flip side, you have to have another individual nearby. And if you self pollinate, you can just do this all on your own. So you're kind of you know, you're a little more independent in that way. So it really just comes down to the fact that different plants have different reproductive strategies. Basically, that's what it comes down to.Nate B  08:56And it's nice because the seed packets while it's not actually going into the biology, by knowing whether something's open pollinated or hybrid, you're actually getting some of that information, you know, if you if you understand this topic, and of course, now we all do, thanks to that wonderful explanation. So last week, Emma and I were getting ready for this episode. And we started to get into this, we're like, Okay, so we're going to talk about the science and then we're going to go right into the seed catalogs and packets and how to, like make these decisions. But we both realized, actually, before you get into all that there's a lot of planning that you need to do and so this time of year is not only exciting for circling what you want and your seed catalogs and, but it's also really important for planning. So I was wondering, What are you thinking is the most important checklist of pieces you want to get lined up before you even start thinking about what you're going to order.Emma E  10:05I guess for me, it kind of depends on on where you're at in your gardening career. If you've never garden before, this is going to be your first year, starting a vegetable garden or even a flower garden for that matter. First, you really need to assess your site. So assess your your yard, wherever you're planning to put this garden to make sure that it's actually going to be appropriate for what you want to grow. If you've been gardening for years and years, and you have this really bright, sunny, you know, full sun spot that's well drained, then, that part, you've probably already figured out the space where you're going to be putting that actual garden. But if you're brand new, first making sure that you have a good spot, a spot with that that good well drained soil with with bright sun is really important, it's also going to be important to determine how much you're going to grow. I think a lot of times when you've never garden before, it's easy to get really carried away. In the spring, when you're starting seedlings, maybe even when you're let's say tilling the plot where your garden is going to be the first time. So trying to have a real honest, look at how much energy you're going to have to actually maintain that garden. Because I think one way that's one really easy way to get frustrated and not come back to gardening is if you start too big, too fast. And then you don't end up having that much success either. Because you can't you can't keep up with the maintenance, whether it's watering, weeding, weeding can definitely be a big problem the first year that you start a garden, or you know, any year going down the line, depending on what weeds you're dealing with, or you might even have pest issues. So have a realistic look at what you're actually going to be able to accomplish.Nate B  11:55So I guess as a gardener, you want to plan for both the best and worst case scenarios to some extent. So best case scenario, everything you plant thrives, and you end up with a huge haul. So your options are consume what you can, if you're a canner preserver, you're doing that. Maybe you're giving stuff away to family and friends, of course, that there's that time every year where everybody's trying to unload all their zucchini, and there, there's these predictable different times of year where if you actually succeed, you're really overwhelmed potentially by all you have. So you should plan for that. And also plan for what happens if things don't go your way has diseases, drought, whatever your obstacles are that that you're okay,Emma E  12:43absolutely. And I would say to you know, if you have any knowledge of gardening, just knowing that some crops are going to take a bit more effort and work than others, you know, something like a tomato is actually going to require a fair amount of work to get it to be productive, you're going to need to stake that plant in some way, you're probably going to have to do some sort of pest management and whether it's insects or diseases, and you're going to want to be around to harvest too. So that's that in my mind is going to potentially be a little bit harder than just putting in a row of radishes.Nate B  13:25Today's featured question comes from a virtual panel we offered in January, which included Becky as well as reps from local seed companies, unexciting vegetable varieties. The question was, what is the best way to get an accurate soil temperature reading and what's the ideal temperature for planting a variety of vegetables. Let's start with getting an accurate soil temperature rating and why that's important. gardeners typically think about the last frost as the marker of when to plant and that's important, but soil temperature is just as important. soil temperatures affect whether seeds will germinate and whether plants will grow. Using a soil thermometer. Take the soil temperature at eight or 9am for several consecutive days at a depth of two to four inches and then average the results. Sunshine snow, cold rains and overcast conditions all affect soil temperatures and it's worth noting raised beds and soil under black plastic will heat up a little bit more quickly in the spring. While soils covered with organic mulch, like straw will warm up a little bit more slowly. Now for the second part of the question, New Hampshire gardeners often circle Memorial Day weekend on their calendars for planting. This is somewhat conservative as the last frost is usually well before that. But having patience is a virtue in May, when it's so tempting to take the risk of planting warm season crops a few weeks earlier. If you're in a warmer microclimate or using season extension techniques like row cover, you can move up your planting window a little bit, but again, soil temperature remains important. Generally speaking, cool. season crops like leafy greens, peas, onions and root crops can germinate in soils as cool as 40 degrees, and some even as cool as 35 degrees. But most seeds tend to germinate best at between 70 and 80 degrees. warm season crops are typically transplanted into the garden as seedlings. So the last frost date is typically what gardeners are focused on for those crops. For corn, beans, okra and vegetables in the cucurbit family. soil temperature is an important consideration for direct sowing. corn and tomatoes will germinate and soil as cool as 50 degrees. But the optimum temperature is 80 degrees. Snap beans as cool as 55 degrees but also optimally 80 degrees and cucumbers, eggplant, pepper and squash and soil as cool as 60 degrees. But optimally 80 or so degrees. This has been your featured question. Emma, you've brought up pests a few times. I'm curious, Becky, as you're gardening throughout the year, you're taking note of what pest issues you have, how does that actually inform how you plan for the next year's garden?Becky S  16:16Well, you're right, I do keep really good track of what problems we have had. And I keep notes about those. I'm kind of lucky in that I have three little garden areas. So I can move things around. And a big part of my planning is actually figuring out my rotation and figuring out okay, if I had my squashes over here last year, and boy, I really would like to get those far away, because I'm rotating away from squash bugs hopefully, Part A big part of my planning and juggling involves drawing little pictures and lists of things in the different spots of the garden. So I think that even if you don't have a huge space, anything you can do to sort of move things to areas where they weren't before is going to serve you well.Nate B  17:11So I'm glad you brought up like actual visualizations, the pictures the list, because when I think about a garden plan, I think about it visually, I think about the layout, because for one thing, every crop is gonna need its own spacing. So there's the whole spacing, and then there's actually how many of each plant Do you need, you know how many squash and so you do a little bit of multiplication there, if you have five squash plants, and they each take up, you know, X amount of feet. That's kind of giving you your formula. But you also need pathways and access your accounting for all the different rotations potentially successions that you're planning on doing with your plantings. Maybe you're even accounting for cover cropping during the summer, or in the early fall. So how do you account for all of these variables when you're actually doing your planning, Becky?Becky S  18:09Well, in my case, I've been doing it long enough that I have kind of an idea in my little map of how much space we devote to given crop to particular crops like, oh, we're going to need a whole row of this, we're going to need a wide row of that. All of these things can fit in one row, that kind of a thing. So I I kind of have a sense of how much space they'll take. But especially I think if you're newer, you might not have that sense. And I will be honest, even though we've been doing this for a long time, sometimes we get it wrong. And the plan changes. And this is okay. We do our best like, like you said, to kind of calculate out how much space where we think we're going to use and where we think things are going to go. And then then we would modify on the fly if we haveEmma E  19:03to. And I'd say that finning is sometimes Okay, too, right. So if you end up with too much of something, say you have you have tomatoes and you've spaced them 12 inches apart, and it should really be, let's say, two plus feet apart, probably even more than two feet. Ideally, if this is a large indeterminate tomato, it's okay, you know, you might actually end up with more produce at the end of the day, if you weed out some of those plants to get that spacing a little bit better. And that's true. I think when you're growing some other crops to you, you really have to thin them a bit so that you're getting that full size produce that you're looking for. Let's take carrots, for example. You really need to be pulling some of those out. Even though it might seem a little a little painful at first to be throwing away what seems like perfectly good plants that could be providing you more food, you're not going to get as good a harvest if if they're spaced too closely.Nate B  20:00Well, I'm glad you brought up specific crops, because earlier you were talking about how some crops require more work than others. You talked about how some plants are going to require thinning. I was wondering if you could, I guess this question is really for both of you, in your experience, what crops are going to require more work? What are some of the easier lower maintenance crops,Emma E  20:22I guess I always considered tomatoes to potentially be a little bit higher maintenance. And I guess that's, that's kind of hard because everybody wants to grow tomatoes in their garden, right. But tomatoes can definitely have some more issues, just the fact that there are a number of fungal diseases that can be problematic. insect diseases, if anybody's familiar with tomato, or tobacco hornworm. It's incredible how quickly these these caterpillars can come in and defoliate your plants if you're not paying attention. So scouting is going to be really important making sure that you're in your garden often. And you definitely are going to need to be doing some staking and trellising. I, often if I don't think that I'm going to have a whole lot of time to spend in the garden, I will definitely be going more for some of the root veggies. Just because you know, once I've thinned them out, once they've come up, I don't feel like I have to do all that much more besides come through and harvest them. And I definitely don't really need to be doing any pruning, staking trellising, they're just going to do their thing. So as long as I'm not dealing with any sort of soil borne past, I think those are a bit easier. Yeah, IBecky S  21:36would agree. And also, you know, the thing about tomatoes is that, you know, if you don't get a great Head Start, you probably won't be harvesting them until sometime in August, if you're lucky. And a lot can go wrong between spring when you plant them and August. And so even though some crops like I think about peas, for example, as being really a lot of work, the work is picking and picking is pretty fun, and it happens pretty early. So you know, in a gardening setting, even though peas are a lot of work, I think they're one of the easier crops one of the more rewarding crops to grow, because you get such anEmma E  22:18early start to things versus say the shelling bean, that's going to be a little bit later. Exactly. There's a lot of work that goes into it. And you might already be a little a little weary from weeding and monitoring past hopefully not too much watering, but depends on the season. Of course.Becky S  22:38I think another thing is there's the easiness factor, but there's also this space utilization factor. And I think that squash is while it's in some ways, sort of set it and forget it, if you don't have terrible pest problems. It's a huge space hog or can be similarly with, you know, melons. And, for example, dry beans, dry beans are a tremendous space hog for the amount of beans you get. And those can be really valuable, wonderful crops to grow. But you just have to have plenty of space. And if you have real limited space, you might not spend it on those crops.Nate B  23:21Yeah, so what if someone does have a pretty small space and they want to maximize it and grow a variety of veggies? What would you recommend,Emma E  23:30I mean, I would definitely try to be growing some greens because they don't take up very much space and you can plant them more than once say you get a harvest and as long as it's not too hot, you can get another harvest after that. Same ago for radishes. If you like those you can get a couple harvests in you might be able to get away with if this is a very small spot a determinant tomato variety. So tomatoes really typically fall into two camps, determinate or indeterminate. And determinate tomatoes will basically form all of their flower buds at the ends of the branches there, they're going to bloom all at the same time, you're going to get fruit that's developing at the same time and pretty much ripening all at once. So really helpful if you're if you're looking to have an efficient harvest because everything's ready to go. Pretty much at the same time. These plants also stay smaller, which sometimes makes them more appropriate for small spaces or for patio plantings. indeterminate tomatoes are going to produce fruit over a longer period of time. These are going to keep growing throughout the course of the season, and are going to be producing flower buds continuously as they go. So you're going to be say only harvesting a few fruit at a time but you're going to have those over a longer period of time. But those plants get very, very big. So usually for the very small space in your garden or in a container. They're not the best choice and I You would probably forego the zucchini summer squash if I was if I had a very small space or just a single raised bed, because I might only in that situation have room for just that, let's say, one, maybe two zucchini plants. And if I have a neighbor who gardens, there's a good chance that I'm probably going to be able to get my hands on some fresh zucchini anyways,Becky S  25:24that's a good point, my, my, let's see, he was my step father in law had a very small single raised bed garden in the retirement community in which he lived. And it was always fun to see how he, what how he got the most out of that tiny, tiny space. And he always planted at least one indeterminant cherry tomato, because a cherry tomato just goes and goes and goes, and at least a couple cucumbers. Because also they just go and go and go. And so if you're willing to harvest a little bit each day, and you know, you're willing to take care of that one plant, it was so shocking how much produce he could get out of this very tiny space from these couple of real productive plants.Nate B  26:18Do you see growing vertically as a solution to small space gardening for any crops? You know, of course, when you're talking about these space hog plants, you're talking about plants that are vying along the ground, taking up huge quantities of space. But to what extent can you try and train plants to grow up instead of outBecky S  26:40sure that works really well for things that are vining plants. And there's lots of ways that you can creatively sort of either steak them up or install some kind of trellis. A quick google image search of trellising your favorite crop will yield countless creative options for how to do that. But I think you know, cucumbers, certainly tomatoes, pull beans, peas, these are all things that really do great, with some kind of sticking up.Emma E  27:17But I probably wouldn't try though, is something with a heavier fruit, like a pumpkin or a melon, unless you want to go out and rig up some sort of system to provide support for that fruit what you could do. Again, if you if you do a Google search for images, you'll you'll see different ways that people have made nets and different webbing systems to hold up the fruit. But that weight can potentially be too much for the vine itself. So it's either going to pull the plant, well, it's probably just going to pull the plant down or potentially break a stem. So I would stick to something more like those cucumbers, maybe a smaller gourd beans. Those are things I've had success with in my brief vertical gardening career.Nate B  28:00That sounds like fun. If you're into that kind of thing. Emma, when we get questions from people who are trying to do their garden planning, something we get a lot is people really struggling with lack of full sun space. You know, they've assessed their backyard, and you know that their flat area over here is great, except that it doesn't get full sun and the area that does get full sun, it was more of a marginal growing site. And that really limits your options. Once you pick up that catalog. What do you recommend for people in that situation,Emma E  28:46if you don't have full sun, meaning you don't get at least eight hours of full direct sun in that area day more, more is definitely better, then you're going to be looking at maybe growing some things that don't fruit. So you want to let's say grow greens. These typically tolerate less less sunlight, you might be able to get away with some of the root vegetables. Nothing's going to be quite as big or full or robust as it would be if you grew the plants in full sun, but you can still get something out of it. You might also play around with herbs if you think you might have a use for those. But if you don't have a full spun spot, I wouldn't waste your time with peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, squashes, because they really do need all of that sunlight in order to be able to photosynthesize effectively and create enough energy to be able to grow a fruit.Nate B  29:41We're gonna have to cover this topic in a different podcast, I think but one other consideration that comes to mind for me for garden planning is just what are you actually going to start from seed indoors? What are you going to direct sow, and what are you going to potentially buy as a seedling? So I think the only question I want to ask on this topic is for beginner gardeners, what do you think should be considered for buying as a seedling instead of ordering it as a seed from a catalog.Emma E  30:13I mean, I think that if, if you, you know, don't have the capacity to be starting seeds indoors. So if it's either start directly in the garden or, or buy seedlings, the tomatoes that Becky mentioned, are probably helpful to buy as established plants, you typically don't get as good a variety selection when you buy the plants versus buying seeds. So the tomatoes may not have all the characteristics that you're looking for, you know, either it's not gonna have the flavor, you're looking for the plants not gonna have the growth habit that you were hoping for. Or probably most importantly, you're not going to have, let's say the disease resistance characteristics that you really need in your garden. Other than that, I mean, a lot of times what you'll find are some of the cold crops, so broccoli kale cauliflower that you can buy as a starts, I've had luck directly sowing these in the garden, although the germination rate definitely isn't as good as it would be if I started them indoors in advance. So if you're looking to get a real early start in your garden with some of these crops that will take a light frost and you don't have room to start them indoors, then maybe getting some some kale or broccoli into the ground that are already established plants might be good, so that those plants can produce for you before we get into the heat of summer. Because they don't, these are things that really don't like the heat,Becky S  31:40I might add to that list onions, because they're notoriously one of the longest, one of the slowest growing young transplants. And so usually the first thing you'd have to start if you were going to produce those transplant yourself. And so I might think about whether you could find the onions you were looking for started by someone else that might be something might get,Nate B  32:09you have to be kind of careful about buying onions, though you need to get the right variety for our area. So when you think New Hampshire growing onions, and you're looking for, are they called sets, when when they're at that size, I think what are you actually looking forBecky S  32:27what set is a tiny onion, so it looks like a little pearl onion, but it's dried down. And you would just plant it like a little bulb and it would grow into a big onion that you would then harvest. So that's one option. And yes, you do have to be careful to get varieties that will grow in our long days, we have long days, even though we have a short growing season compared with short day onions that grow down south. So you'd have to be kind of thoughtful about that. But you can also buy transplants, which are little young onion plants that look just like little scallions. And I'm a number of nursery sent local nursery centers, garden centers would likely have onion started as small plants that you could could get, you can also purchase onion plants, mail order shipped to you, I tend to be a little cautious about doing that. Because usually those are raised in much warmer places than here where they have many onion pests. And often you're also purchasing in small insects with them. So that that could be a caution. That would be one reason to raise your own or purchase local seedlings.Nate B  33:47Well, it's a it's a good point about being cautious just in general about where you're ordering from because I think that really gets us into the catalog phase. A lot of gardeners get several catalogs, you're not ordering all maybe from one company. And you mentioned a preference, possibly, at least in some instances for local companies. So Becky, how do you think about choosing a company or companies? I know we're not going to give endorsements of Oh, you know, shot from this company? They're the best. But in general, what considerations are there for who you're shopping from and maybe what you're purchasing from a particular company?Becky S  34:27Well, that's a good question. And I personally purchased from a whole array of companies every year because I'm a real variety nut and I want all the varieties of everything. And so I really have to go to lots of different companies for that. But I think your consideration about local is really important because we have a unique growing climate here in the northeast, we've got a short growing season. And it's humid. And it's just really different than many other parts of the US. And so I would want some level of assurance that the varieties that I'm going to grow are going to have been evaluated and are going to grow well, in a climate like ours. That's not to say that I only buy from companies based in the northeast, there are certainly good reasons that you might go outside this region. For example, if you want to really excellent peanut selection, you're going to have to go to Southern companies for this,Emma E  35:40for example.Becky S  35:42But I think that that, knowing that things have been evaluated with the diseases and insects and climate that we have, is a really important factor.Emma E  35:54I guess I I sometimes base things too, just on reputation. You know, if I know somebody, or if I have a friend who says they had really great luck with the company, then I might be inclined to shop from them. I also love it too. And companies have a really good customer service department. So make sure that there is a number right there that you know, you can call to reach out, I think sometimes it is possible to buy seeds from other, you know, online distributors that might seem really cheap. But I would definitely be, you know, thinking if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. And be ordering from a well known company that that does have a reputation for producing quality seeds, plants, etc.Nate B  36:44So whether you're actually using physical catalog, some people really like to actually receive their catalogs in the mail, they get to circle things and use them in the way they always have. But you can also shop online, and many of these companies have excellent websites, where you can do all or most of what you would do in a physical catalog, maybe even some things that you wouldn't be able to do in the physical catalog. So I'm curious for both of you, how do you actually like to use a catalog, whether online or in person, what's your process as a shopper?Emma E  37:20Well, I guess I actually like to look through catalogs and decide what I want to order from the catalog. And I guess one reason I like that is that all of the offerings for let's say a specific crop tend to be clustered together. So I can quickly compare all of the different descriptions of the different varieties that they're offering, you know, just by looking at a single page or two, versus if I go to the website for that, that same company, and I'm looking at the catalog from, I'm probably gonna have to click on every single variety to take a look at, you know, its description. You know, let's say it's the number of days to maturity. So I just like the the catalog for that. Plus, a lot of my favorite catalogs have really nice glossy pictures and just kind of fun to sit back, you know, let's say next to the woodstove and look through the catalog. I will say that I am more modern though when it comes to actually placing orders. So I'll probably pick out from the catalog what I want, you know, I have things circled there, start and then go online, and select what I want, make sure that it's still available, because a lot of times online, you can look right away and see if something's out of stock versus filling out your your paper order slip, sending that off and then not getting what you want. And then I can pay with card. But definitely still really appreciate that that hardcopy catalog that shows up in the mail,Becky S  38:47we have a super similar process, I lay out all the catalogs, and I proceed through crop by crop comparing all the offerings and make my spreadsheets and then go online to place the order and then I can pivot if necessary if they're out of stock or of something. It is true though, that sometimes it's good to check online. Because it they see companies have printing deadlines. And they have to print the catalog at some point earlier in the season. And it may be that things get out of stock, but it also happens that things get added. And so you can be delightfully surprised by new and exciting things that aren't even listed in the catalog.Emma E  39:34That's a good point too. I guess probably the only time I would go online first is if I'm ordering from a company that I never have before and I don't have a physical catalog from them. But if so if they don't automatically send me a catalog, I might sign up for one too so that in future years that that catalog will be part of my collection.Nate B  39:54And Becky when you said that you go crop by crop, kind of going back to the garden plan when you Actually sketched everything out by the end of that garden plan process? Do you actually have a list of the crops that you want to grow the quantities that you want, you know, where everything's gonna go? That's all happening before you're actually getting to that process of laying your catalogs out?Becky S  40:17Well, yes, but that does make it sound more organized and scientific than it is. In reality, I just need I know, I need a whole bunch of this, that and the other and only a little of this than the other. So it's, it's not as worked out as you make it sound. But I will say I maintain this spreadsheet. And every year, I just add a new tab to it. And this has come in shockingly handy when you want to go back and see what variety did I grow last year, that was such a failure, or that one that was so successful, where did we get that that was three years ago. And it's just like, it's so wonderful to have this resource of all the things I've ordered over the years.Nate B  41:07I love that from an extension person. And one sentence, it's not that organized. It's not scientific. On the other hand, I have this spreadsheet, and each tab correlates with a different year and I'm able to cross check and everything that's, that's such a classic extension perspective, not that scientific.41:24It just doesn't have amounts in it.Emma E  41:29And I'm assuming there's always room to for that one thing. You see where you're like, Oh, I gotta try that. That's really cool. That wasn't originally part of the plan.There's a miscellaneous section.Emma E  41:42That would work for your gourd garden, right?Nate B  41:44That's right. I'm planning on having a magnificent gourd garden this year. Speaking of space hogs, I think my entire garden might just be gourds growing sideways growing up growing every which way. And I guess that miscellaneous category what what's that kind of the equivalent of a junk drawer? Right,Becky S  42:01exactly.Emma E  42:27Though we're talking about vegetable variety selection this episode, I wanted to feature one of my favorite annual flowers that often gets planted in vegetable gardens. The Mr. shum tropaeolum. nasturtiums are a really lovely annual plant. They're typically grown for the ornamental features, although they're also edible. They grow really well in poor to average well drained soils that are in full sun, and they're even moderately drought tolerant, which makes them a good choice for New Hampshire landscapes, where the weather tends to be a little uncertain. nasturtiums will also tolerate a fair amount of neglect, and really don't require much maintenance during the growing season. They shouldn't even be fertilized because this can increase leaf growth and decrease flowering. nasturtiums can be sown directly in the garden after the spring frost date, or planted indoors four to six weeks before the last spring frost. Now nasturtiums are interesting largely because of the their actual features. The leaves are rounded and peltate which means that the leaf stem aka the petiole attaches to the center of leaves instead of at the base as is more standard in most plants. The flowers are funnel shaped with five petals and a distinct spur at the back. They come in shades of red, yellow, orange or cream, and the flowers are also fragrant. All parts of the plant are edible except for the roots and have a peppery flavor. The leaves, flowers, pods and even seeds can be added to fresh salads. an assertion is often listed as one of the best edible flowers. So give nasturtiums a try in your garden this season. No vegetable garden is complete without them.Nate B  44:25For today's closing gardening tip like to talk about garden fencing. An important part of your garden planning is protecting your harvest from animals and today's closing gardening tip is about using fencing around your garden. Depending on what animal species have been the biggest nuisance in past growing seasons, the type of fencing that will work best will differ. Some animals can jump over fencing if it's not tall enough, like deer, while other animals can dig under fencing if not designed to prevent it, including rabbits and groundhogs, also known as well. Chuck's while other animals can climb up and over fencing such as porcupines your budget will in part dictate what materials and style of fencing you install. Plastic and wire are less expensive options than wood or electric fencing. But all have pros and cons. Appearance may also be a consideration So combining function with a statics may be part of your planning. If you rent or for another reason, don't plan on Gardening in the same plot for years to come. You may consider something that can be moved, whereas that may not be a consideration for homeowners with well established garden plots. This has been your closing gardening tip. This conversation continues but we've split it up into two episodes. Make sure you're subscribed to Granite State gardening so you know when Part two is released, which will feature the second half of this conversation as well as another listener question gardening tip and featured plant. Look for Granite State gardening in your podcast feed every two weeks and look out for episodes and the not so distant future on seed starting pruning, emerald ash borer and foliage house plants. email us your questions, suggestions and feedback to GSG dot edu. This podcast is just starting out. So there are a couple things you can do to help other gardeners find us. One simple thing is just to share it with fellow gardeners and friends. And if you're listening on Apple podcasts, you can give us a five star review there which actually helps people find the podcast. Beyond that you can connect with us on social media to get more regular tips and updates from us. Just search for ask UNH extension on Facebook or Instagram and give us a follow there. We also have the link to sign up for our monthly newsletter, also called Granite State Gardening in the show notes, where you can find lots of helpful resources related to what we talked about in this episode. Thanks for tuning in to Granite State gardening. Until next time,Becky S  47:16keep on growing Granite State Gardeners.Nate B  47:24Granite State Gardening is a production of University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension and equal opportunity educator and employer views expressed on this podcast are not necessarily those of the university's its trustees, or its volunteers. inclusion or exclusion of commercial products in this podcast does not imply endorsement. The University of New Hampshire US Department of Agriculture and New Hampshire County is cooperate to provide extension programming in the Granite State. Learn more@extension.unh.eduTranscription by otter.ai

Some of the most exciting active travel research is done as part of a PhD, and this is our first Active Travel Podcast to showcase a couple of recent PhD studies.These two projects, from Dr. Katja Leyendecker and Dr. Emma Mbabazi, use qualitative methods to dig into the how and the why of travel. Katja's project tackled questions around policy, advocacy, and governance, with a mix of methods from retrospective video diaries to semi-structured interviews. Emma conducted over 80 in-depth interviews with commuters, to get their ‘mobility biographies', i.e. how transport has fitted in with their lives, and vice versa, over time. They're both very different projects, but each tells us a lot about how and why things change – or (perhaps more often) don't change. Katja's work can be found at https://katsdekker.wordpress.com/ , including blogs and links to her published thesis and articles.Emma's LinkedIn page, with info and article links, is here https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmerentian-mbabazi-ab6b7459/?originalSubdomain=ug, and her PhD thesis is here https://www.ros.hw.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10399/3292/MbabaziE_1216_egis.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=yTRANSCRIPTRachel 00:01Hello, and welcome to the Active Travel Podcast. I'm Rachel Aldred and I'm the director of the Active Travel Academy. And in this episode I'll be talking to Dr. Katja Leyendecker and Dr. Emma Mbabazi about their two PhD research projects. PhDs involve somebody focusing on the topic for at least three years and doing some really in-depth innovative research. So I wanted the Active Travel Podcast to also capture some of this and translate it into a form that hopefully people will be able to engage with over around half an hour of conversation with the person who did the PhD. Katja's PhD focuses on cycling, advocacy and activism and transport planning, and Emma's focuses on commuting behaviour, and what are called travel scripts. In the first half I talk to Katja and in the second half to Emma in the about their different but complementary PhDs, both using these really exciting and in-depth qualitative methods. I hope you enjoy it. Very excited to have with me today Katja Leyendecker, who completed her PhD last year in 2019, which is on cycling advocacy, activism and policy. And so hello, Katja really pleased that you're with us.Katja 01:16I'm certainly the one who was pleased, Rachel. Great. It's great to be here.Rachel 01:20Brilliant. So I've got some fairly general questions. And we'll kind of drill down into bits of the thesis as we go. But I wonder if we could just start by because you had maybe a slightly unconventional path to the PhD as well. A lot of people do. So I'm just wondering when you started the PhD, and before you started the PhD, so maybe four or five years ago, maybe even longer when you're thinking about doing a PhD? What motivated you? Was it a sudden decision or something you'd been thinking about for a while?Katja 01:52I started thinking about, let's call it going back to university. When I was still working as an engineer, so, I came out of these kinds of technical – I'm a civil engineer by training. So it's all about the applied natural sciences, big data sets, and I worked in water engineering, which certainly had to do with big data sets and analysing them, and it was numbers and figures was my life. Engineers get themselves into these careers of team leaders, project managers, programme managers, and that was part of what I did as well. But I had started to be a bit uncertain about how the future would pan out. That it felt as if there was a almost like a bit of a dead end. It was interesting to be in engineering to start with, I think I'm someone who always likes the excitement of something new, I like starting new things as well as I might add that here as well as finishing them! So it's not that I'm one of these kind of starting off projects and finishing nothing kind of person.I kind of looked ahead in engineering and couldn't really see where I was going and was slightly kind of started to be disillusioned. And it was a time of my life where I also felt being a woman in engineering is hard work. There's a lot of inequalities in that and it's often quite difficult to talk about them as well because if the field is not prepared to listen and to receive maybe a bit of mild criticism and deal with it flexibly, you know, it can be unwelcoming, and that's kind of what it felt to me at the time. And so I started looking at what's going to be my next step. And bearing in mind I was let's say 37,38 at the time that I started to think like that. And yeah so there was always the open mind to well, I've got a master's degree, go to university do another master's degree, a PhD sounds great actually, now that I think about it and and as I've always found in my life anyways, that when you start to think about something and then talk about it as well, sooner or later, some doors open and that's happened to me here that I got together with Seraphim Alvanides, who works at Northumbria University and is also interested in geography and the sociology of cycling and especially the big data streams of it. And we started to think about how we could get me into university. And that was our little project for a couple of years. And eventually it, it turned out to be the case that I had written a PhD proposal. I applied for it, interviewed for it, and it was supposed to be about infrastructure, women and space and politics. And, and that's where I started. I was 42 at the time, I was just almost on my 42nd birthday that I started my PhD jungle journey. And yeah, and that's how I got into it so sort of developed over the years and became more and more possible. And then really concrete in the end and that was exciting and scary, huh?Rachel 06:05Wow. Yeah. And that this sort of this specific idea of the PhD was something presumably very linked to some of the advocacy and activism that you were doing yourself as well as to some extent your engineering, the engineering experience.Katja 06:19Definitely. I realised Of course, later on that my mind was quite heavily shaped by my engineering training. But also when I started the PhD, it came about because I was interested in in cycle activism so nothing to do with water engineering at all, nothing with engineering and not much with water, either. And, yeah, that was the starting point for that, that in 2010. I was really starting to be frustrated and disillusioned with Newcastle Council and the politics that happened there around transport. And I had started to form a campaign, co-founded a campaign with Claire Prosper in Newcastle. So two of us got together, and then set up a petition had garnered 800 signatures, handed it over to the council. That's kind of the history to that before my kind of disillusionment started, but nothing is happening. Yeah, everything's so clear, we need to do something, we need to devise ways of getting out of this and allocating space to cycling and walking and yeah, it was the activism that got me into university it was the activism that that Seraphim and I collaborated on. That was the point where it came together.Rachel 08:04So that motivated you to sort of study it to study the activism and the advocacy and to learn more about it through the PhD?Katja 08:11Definitely. Well, that's that's almost, two years into the PhD because I got into the whole thing, with an engineering mindset, technical figures, numbers, and let's create some data sets and let's analyse them and it took me two years to figure out and it's not, through the lack of helping from others, from university folks, it took me for me personally to understand these two years to, to see that it's the activism that really interests me in it. It's the activism, how it clashes with the politics for transport that interests me as well as being a woman campaigner interested me in it as well, because we've had all sorts of talks about such as me being a woman in this, that makes it so difficult or where does it all come from? And yeah, so yet again, another not so straightforward pathway, it started off with me doing a lot of reading, talking to people, the term ethnography started to come up. And I started in something that for an engineer, ethnography, that's wholly sitting in sociology, it had nothing to do with me. And it took ages. If I look at it, through really rather critical eyes, it took kind of two years for me to have the confidence to understand ethnographic methods, feminist methods, critical theory methods, as well as you going one step beyond, which is using not just ethnography, but also ethnography. So, that was yet another final step that I, that I took. And I have to say, I mean Rosie Parnell, my supervisor, she was just, so helpful. And so patient I mean, Seraphim was patient as well, with this, this journey that I underwent. And Rosie really supported me in auto ethnography, and not just supported me, but made me understand, the important aspects of it, what I should focus on, sort of slashed the pathway free a little bit for me so that I could start to look ahead and so whilst I say it's my own journey, in the end, there were so many people sitting on the sidelines, kind of cheering me along, and really helping me and, kind of the research community as well as the activists and so many different aspects coming together that meet the PhD so multitudinous somehow as well, that's quite a few aspects in it that needed to be brought together.Rachel 11:18Yes, I mean, and that's one of the things that I found most fascinating about it was this intense mix of qualitative methods and I've dabbled a little bit with ethnography, but nothing like the intensity of what you've done. So I wondered if you could describe, for the podcast listeners who may not be familiar with this kind of methods what you specifically did in this?Katja 11:39And now just pearls of sweat start forming on my head!Yes. So that's, there's various strands to what I did. And it had to do with that I had to sort of Hoover up, I felt, quite a few years of campaigning. It was at a certain time, say 2017 that I started to get really serious about data collection. And luckily, and it had nothing to do with my PhD as such in the beginning, but I had written started writing a blog, just for my own gratification in many ways, for my self-development. I started writing that in 2015. So, I have two years' worth of blogs, blog posts, that I could analyse, it turned out to be over 100,000 words, really interesting analysis, it was a PhD in itself, when you just look at the sheer number of words. So I started looking at, very, very, let's say, conventional methods of, what are the themes in here, what did I talk about? How can I group these into themes and subsets of it? So that was really lucky that I had that data set there. But that still didn't cover anything before 2015 as such, and I started campaigning with my co-conspirators in Newcastle in particularly Claire and then later on Sally in Newcastle in 2010. So I had to find the method I thought of getting that down somewhere, gathering that and as well as analysing it, what is it that happened there? So I devised a method of a sort of retrospective video diary, I called it going back through old emails, and that was really lucky that I'm, I kept emails, the campaigning emails and that's helped to find a method of condensing them and analysing them. And the condensing happened by sitting down through 2017 every day to record three minutes worth of a summary that happened in a week's worth of campaigning, to get to grips with these kind of 5,6,7 years, and by recording a week's worth every day, for three minutes for a year, I got to these, what turned out to be 17 hours for me talking about campaigning and activism. And I could listen to that again and then sift through, and that was really interesting sift through the kind of emotional aspect that happened in it. What's what were the things that really riled me up or elated me, or what was it that really then alongside that happened, so to kind of sift through that. I don't want to talk down the emotions here at all. I think it's really important for what I was trying to do, to use those as kind of guideposts to the key things that happened, at least to my mind. And yes, I went through that process and as you can imagine, when I said about the blog posts, a hundred thousand words read through, that was 18 hours to listen for, not just once but maybe second time, third time, sometimes just letting things play in the background and you'll be alerted to: oh, you seem to be, something is really happening here. That seems to get a hold of you and go back. Listen to it again. What is it that you're trying to say here? And then doing something similar again? What are the themes here? What happened here? What is? What is the nub, what, what's the what's the key aspects? And? And yeah, so I started to have the blog post and the themes in the video diary and the themes that started to grow up through that. As well as a timeline of campaigning events, the video diary was very helpful for that as well. And then yeah, so alongside that, or maybe even before that I had started look at policy, Newcastle transport policies. And in my research, I do speak German as well as English, so it would be good - I have to say Seraphim was really helpful, he said if you speak German you have to use that somehow, not everyone can go to Germany and speak to Germans in their own language. I mean that's an asset, do it! And I had campaigning friends in Bremen, which is a city in North Germany, a big German cycling city with 25% of all trip cycled so, a real cycle city, especially from a UK perspective. And I had started to, look at Bremen a little bit and started to look at the policy there and the start of a policy comparison and it ended up, it wasn't specifically devised to be as such but it ended up in the PhD. And it also ended up as a as a book chapter in a book edited by Cox and Koglin. The Politics of Cycling Infrastructure. So that's another thing that, kind of puzzle piece that fell into place by just being interested in background analysis, I thought, which policy analysis was to me that. That in itself, though, is not a primary, produced data set, it's data that's already out there in the public domain that ended up as another chapter. So another data stream that was analysed. And then yeah, then I talked to women campaigners in Germany as well as in the UK, specifically, of course in Newcastle as well as Bremen But yeah, I talked to women campaigners with long extensive interviews again analysed for themes and understanding of what is it that happens here and also talked to Newcastle as well as Bremen, decision makers, a politician in each city and a transport officer, senior transport officer in each city as well. And that I think concludes the data in my PhD. So, it came together from various sources.Rachel 19:31Yes, I mean, it's an incredible amount of data. And did you get the idea of the retrospective video diary from somewhere else, was there other research that had influenced you on that?Katja 19:44It's, it didn't as such, very loosely though. I mean, I grabbed myself a couple of Sage publications, Sage is quite a good publisher for methods, for methodology. And I had started reading around there, what methods are, what methodologies are, again, always with a background of, some sort of - what's the feminist aspect in this, and it came through that. But as such, when I went to start looking at, it came to me, let's just put it like that, metaphysically it came to me that this would be right for what I was trying to do, namely, get this retrospectively understood what happened. As well as kind of having some sort of raw bits in there, raw feelings and emotions not being lost and not just being a technical analysis of it. It seemed to be just what was the right thing to do and it kind of it was cobbled together as such. Helpful for and very useful for what I was trying to do. But when I started looking at how to describe what I was doing, I couldn't really find anything. I mean that there's blogs, and academics have written about blogs and how our blogs are really useful. And academics have written about diaries and how they're useful. And they might well be video diaries but it might not be about this kind of retrospective diary. There were always aspects of it, which weren't quite there. So it was different pieces put together, which I still think is quite good, for what I was trying to achieve. And it kind of did the job for that. So it was right and that's kind of one feminist aspect in it. Don't be constrained, know what you're trying to do. Not where you're trying to end up, you know, that's always a different thing, more what you're trying to do. And then the method is supposed to help you along with that, rather than that there's this very set, a set of methods and that's the only toolbox you've got. No, methods are also mix and match as long as you can explain what you've done. And if it's open and transparent, always, where you're coming from as a researcher as well, and what you're trying to achieve with it, then mix and match is definitely a good way to go.Rachel 22:31That sounds like excellent advice to me. So what would you say the sort of central puzzle that you were solving with all this data? what's what's the central question that kept you going?Katja 22:43Yeah, I started campaigning and as I said, with a very technical mindset, and I had not quite made a leap into sociology, let's call it that. I hadn't quite understood that there's people theorising about how society works, how activism works, how politics work, that there's a field that's called Political Science and, or about any kind of psychosocial aspects of it. And it was that, that I had to kind of work through and the PhD as such is a working through that process of coming from a rational mindset and ending up in a wider frame of mind. That's taking the social and the political in the psychological by all means, into account as well. So that's in short, the journey that I underwent, but the original question was, why is nothing happening? To me, as well as to my fellow campaigners things seem to be logical, why things needed to change. And yes, we thought it's not going to be easy for politicians, but we wanted to work together with them to get new narratives to find out what we can say and how it could be said, by no means we thought it was going to be easy, absolutely, you put the Newcastle transport system into an upheaval, of course that was not going to be easy and it was about space. So it was heavily political and politicised. And, yeah, my question was, so five years in, starting with the campaigning 5,6,7 years after, why is it still hard. Why could we not talk to the politicians, in a way that felt conducive to inducing change. That was my big puzzle question, the big question mark that I was trying to find an answer to - why is nothing changed, why is change so extremely slow when something rational is, is underpinning all this and could be used to frame new ways to find new narratives.Rachel 25:33And so, from the research you did, how would you answer that question now?Katja 25:39Yeah, as you can imagine, with all these different aspects coming together, of which a lot of them were personal. And I underwent change the, the whole, the data sets were different to each other and needed to be woven together, somehow. So, I then started to look at the themes and how they related to each other, the themes of the blog post, the themes from the video diary as well as the women activists' interviews and then the decision makers. I made the decision first of all, start with myself that's what's interested me here, what is it that didn't get answered? What is it that I'm grappling with? And I devised the framework out of that which I then looked at, again, once I had analysed the women's interviews and what themes came out of that. And came up with a with a framework of there is automobility, and anything that that we do with cycling always, because it is, now hegemonic sits in, in in the shadow really of automobility. So you can't start talking about the bike without having an understanding of automobility and how that system, socio-technical system operates. And I in my thesis, I then split it in the framework into two aspects, the social automobility, the one that we actually do, we just enact, we have the roads, we have the transport systems, we've got our social norms. We all play our role within it, often totally unbeknownst to ourselves, and we're sort of actors in it. Often not having much space to act, we do our thing. Do the things that the space allocation, for example, tells us or that happens all around us. And yeah, and then there's institutional automobility and that is not such a new aspect, but it's the technical and political aspect of it, namely, how did we end up with those roads? Okay, we've got those roads, now. We want to change them. How could we change them? And that's me speaking as an activist here as well. So, we in Newcastle knew that the way to change that was that we have to go through the system, we have to talk to decision makers and policymakers, we have to talk to officers, and we have to talk to politicians. And that's the way to change it, or there's a chance to change it that way. So It's the institutional automobility that keeps us where we are, as every one individual person acting within the system. And the question then was and became interesting because I interviewed the decision makers. I then had my framework and wanted to appraise it against what these decision makers actually say.And then it started to be clearer that there is a framework here. That these women activists, and I don't think it's a massively gendered, particularly, framework, that activists for cycleways, for allocating space for cycling, have set up, that's the framework and what is the difference if any, to these decision makers and what they make out of it now. I didn't go to them with a framework, I went to them asking, asking them about their roles, what their responsibilities are, what they feel about transport and change and how they as a politician, or as an officer, perhaps, would bring about change. And that started to be really interesting for me because I, I had then sort of understood various aspects of it and wanted to also as with any PhD, link it to existing theory, as you well know, because you helped me with that. I then started to look around kind of political sciences, a bit more, automobility, of course that fits in sociology as well. So in the political sciences and sociology, I mean, there's one theory that's called the post-political theory. And just suddenly reading through that, it became absolutely clear that in Newcastle, we are dealing with post-political concepts, namely, that the politics have sort of receded, from the public arena, and that it's more and more difficult for the public, or for groups and individuals to make their voices heard. As well as more difficult for the political technical system, so the council, for example, to actually link back into the public arena and the public arena. I mean, sort of a concept of that people can come together and talk and devise plans for the future, talk about change, new ideas and how, what it could look like, and how could how change could be brought about. Whereas in Bremen, I couldn't really see the post-political aspects. There was a public arena, but also automobility happens there, and that's another aspect, another finding also. Through an old style of cycle campaigning as well, which was I'm a cyclist, I don't need any special space. I'm fast enough. I can cycle amongst cars, the vehicular cyclists, and that was present in Bremen. And that vehicular cycling attitude amongst campaigners always meant that if nothing needs to change, but just a change in attitude, then it was very difficult to politicise that and to make that into a political demand. Because we'd seen in Newcastle and in the UK, that over all those years, we had all sorts of liberal campaigns, get your bike out of your shed, start to cycle. It's about you, you, you, it's about you, you have to change and, and we've seen that that, for decades. It doesn't, hasn't made a difference in the uptake of cycling. In fact, it just stuck around the kind of the 2% or in Newcastle 1% of trips cycled. But in Bremen, the public arena was relatively intact, you know, there were there were ways and means and places, and communications, debates, discussions happening. It was just that the kind of the technocratic process of ‘Yeah, we don't need to do anything at all the space is fine. There doesn't need to be any engineering feat here, any spatial redesign.' It had yielded the same results which, which was the system that we've got is fine. Nothing needs to change. Now. I mean, in Bremen you do have your cycleways and people do cycle there. But I was still there and talking to activists and they felt in the shadow of automobility again, they felt not heard, not understood, side-lined, excluded, and they had this thing about them, ‘I'm just a cyclist, no one listens'. And I found this absolutely bizarre coming from the UK context where we really do know what it feels like to be marginalised, not just as a cyclist trying to enact the cycling thing but as a campaigner as well, you know being marginalised in in the demands for more space, building cycleways, they're all the latest thing now, protected cycleways, temporary ones, are springing up all over the place. And so it was interesting to see these parallels between Newcastle and Bremen but then also the absolute and utter differences that existed, but in the end having a similar result for activism, which was, ah, this is why we are stuck here. And yeah, for the hopes that I've got, I mean, Bremen can change that relatively quickly if they still have a socio-political arena in which you can debate, in which you can you can fill in information there, and it can be discussed and it's not just pushed aside and forgotten about, then great. I think Bremen has lots of cycling happening there anyways, and maybe then it can build on that and maybe come up to Dutch levels of cycling because I mean, that is there is ways to go for Bremen and that's up as well.And then Newcastle. It is, it will be extraordinarily difficult because if you've got a very closed or even non-existent public and political arena where the politics have shut themselves away they're not in this conglomerate, with the technical, with the officers, then it's going to be really hard to bring about change there. But again in Newcastle was interesting I talked to the officer and that person was actually, that person wanted change and had ideas about it and that officer found it difficult to initiate change because ultimately it was the missing public arena, so if you have to, if you want a starting point, Newcastle has to put a lot of time and effort into reconnecting and opening up that space again. Learn to in many ways learn to listen and learn to understand differences and that's through differences that the learning process works.Rachel 37:59Fantastic. Thanks so much Katja. There's loads more we could talk about about your research and your thesis, but hopefully this short conversation has given people an idea about the amazing methods that you use, how you combine them, some of your findings and the PhD process. So really just Is there anything else that you would like to add that we haven't covered?Katja 38:20Well, any PhD and particularly because mine is kind of an auto ethnographic one, it always sounds like there's just this one person doing it. Far from it. For me, it was an absolute journey, a real jungle, that I had to kind of slash my way through. And I was given the tools by other people, and given the confidence by other people, to persist with it. And to give certain directions so without my supervisors, I should probably briefly also say, this was Northumbria University. It was done on a studentship, absolutely amazing what they allowed me to do in that time. Absolutely amazing that I was allowed to combine it with personal aspects, but then also to travel around, spent loads of time, as you can imagine, in Germany, living there, living the transport system and breathing and living the campaigning, life environment as well. I can't express the gratitude to these eight women activists, who got together with me spending a lot of time, sometimes up to three hours to sit down and get on record and what their campaigning journey was, how they got into it. What was amazing. To them, and, yeah, and, of course thanks as you can imagine, to the decision makers as well. It's just, a PhD is not just a one person, feat and activity, it's a real project, that needs real people. It does need the one PhD researcher the candidate to put it to pull it together and put it together in the end. And of course that is my product. And, if anyone doesn't find themselves in the PhD, then yeah, it is my product in the end and my understanding of what people said and their themes in what we were all saying and, then a complete mixing together with all these different data streams. But yeah, it's a humbling journey. It's an absolute, I would always do it again weirdly enough, it was as scary as it was exciting.I can only say that, if you if you're interested in bringing yourself into the PhD it can be done. And it's not always easy to find the right supervisors for example for it. It was a mega project, and it felt exhilarating and deflating at the same time when I finished it. There was always these polar tension points throughout the PhD and you live in this kind of grey zone and these kind of polar tensions and once it's finished, it's kind of done. But in your head I think the PhD never finishes because it kicks off so many new things. So many new thoughts, so many new people you've met through it. And possibilities for the future. It's amazing.Rachel 42:32Brilliant. Well, thanks again, Katja. And if you want to find out more about Katja's work, I'll just direct you to her website where there are links to peer reviewed papers and that full thesis and various other blog posts, debates and so on. So it's katsdekker.wordpress.com. Brilliant. Thanks again.Rachel 43:05I'm Rachel Aldred. And I'm really pleased to be talking to Dr. Emma Mbabazi for the Active Travel podcast today. Emma completed her PhD research at Heriot-Watt University on the impacts of travel scripts on commuting behaviour. She's now a research fellow at the Uganda National Roads Authority. I'm going to talk to her about her PhD research. One of the things I found really interesting about it was it takes a social science approach to commuting behaviour using this concept of travel scripts. And I was intrigued to find out Emma that you've got a background in construction management with an incredibly high grade for your undergrad degree. And then you've ended up doing a social psychology PhD. So how was it to move from construction management to a very quantitative social science thesis?Emma 43:47I'm really glad to be here, Rachel. And yes, you are right. I do come from a more, well, I wouldn't say technical background but yeah, construction management background. It's really when I did my master's at Heriot-Watt, I did a Master's in Urban and Regional Planning. And that I, I got exposed to these social psychological issues. And I found them really interesting. Because as people, we are interesting. It's never a matter in transport, for example, it's never a matter of just let's build it and they will come. It's never that. And it's always about the people and what are they thinking and what will they do. So I find that really interesting. And I think that's, that's something we all have to consider as policy makers and as researchers. I think it's really important for us to try and understand that and see how we can help each other do the right thing in whatever circumstances we're in. So that's why I went with that. I was just really interested in that and it was a challenge because it was new to me, but I liked it.Rachel 45:02Amazing, I agree. My background is sociology myself so I'm always really interested in qualitative methods in transport and so you're investigating, your full PhD title was ‘The Travel Script: Exploring the Construction and Engagement of a Mental Structure as the Link between the Influence of Situational and Social - Psychological Factors in Commuting Decisions along a Life Course'. So that's looking at this concept of travel scripts. Could you explain for people who are listening what a travel script is?Emma 45:32Right. So we as people, we form mental representations about the things around us and they could be just mental representations to help us categorise things. So we have what we call schemas. So like a stereotype, that's a schema, you're categorising something, but at travel script is more mental representation of the things around us of the things that we know through time, because the script is looking at engaging in a particular action or a particular behaviour over and over again, based on what we know, and the more we engage in it, the more we inform what we know about it. And so that's really what a travel script is, it's a mental representation of the things we know about how we travel, about where we want to travel, and, and what constrains or enables that. And, and so how are we going to put that mental representation into practice? And that's why it has to be both the construction and the engagement because I mean, the mental representation is there, but we only see it as a person engages a particular behaviour or a particular action.Rachel 46:56So maybe, I guess, if I were a habitual car user, part of my travel script might be that buses are slow, they go around the houses, that I can't get a bus where I need to go and that's shaping my behaviour.Emma 47:10Exactly something like that. It might be just as you said, what you think about the buses, but also what you think about the car, and what you like about it and what it does for you, and what it helps you to do and the things you want to do in your life that the car enables that you think the bus or the bicycle will not do for you in the way you want it to.Rachel 47:39So I was just skimming through the thesis this morning and one of the things that I kind of like about it is that the hassle, the focus on hassle and the fact that in a lot of ways when we travel, we're not trying to get good stuff. Sometimes we're trying to avoid hassle and we're trying to minimise the amount of effort and annoyance.Emma 47:59Yeah. That I found that really interesting. And it came about really early on. When I started interviewing people, a lot of people did talk about the hassle. And but we deal with hassle in different ways. As you said, sometimes it's not that we would travel because we want this, that we all want to travel in this high-end Mercedes or whatever. It's just we travel because we may sometimes want to avoid something. Yeah. But we deal with the hassle in different ways. Sometimes the hassle is about the things in our environment. So some people think buses are crowded and when the windows are closed, it's all foggy and dirty or things like that. While other people when they travel on public transport, they'll think, ah, I don't have to think about the road. And I don't have to think about and looking at the mirrors and all that and I can sit down and read a book so people look at hassle in in different ways and all that comes from something else that we've experienced or people close to us have experienced that we take on into our mental structures.Rachel 49:09Mm. That's so fascinating. So I'm imagining you could have two people sat next to each other on the bus and having completely different experiences. One is really annoyed about the crowding and think it's foggy. The other person is thinking, ah, this is time for me. I think one of your interviewees said ‘stolen time' that they get that time back for themselves on the bus. Yes, exactly, exactly. So if we just take it back to what you did and sort of starting the thesis you say you interviewed 82 commuters, that's quite a lot, isn't it? That's an awful lot of data. And how did you choose them? Where did they come from?Emma 49:48Right. These were people commuting to the Heriot-Watt University campus in Edinburgh. So the campus is made of is made up of the university and then there are other businesses and organisations that are situated at that campus. I was lucky that at the time I was doing my dissertation, my research, there was a survey already from Transition Heriot-Watt, a general study about how people come to work. And I just requested from that person that was running it if I could have just a question of if people who wanted to be contacted for my research, and so that's how I got people responding that yes, I would like to be contacted and when they brought back those contacts, I later contacted them. Of course, I had a process of whittling it down with particular criteria and but once I had done that, I just started sending out emails. And really I was so glad that a lot of people responded. That's how I ended up with so many, such a large number for a qualitative study, I realised that but I think the way that research went, it was important for me to to have those large numbers, because then they helped me in the end to form those personas that I created with my research, to look at people with the same characteristics and try to see what persona could that take on, when they were born and what life events might have influenced them. So that's that's actually how I ended up with such a large number for a qualitative study.Rachel 51:49Mm. And the approach you took as well, you weren't just asking people what they think of the bus, you're taking this mobility biographies approach. Could you say a little bit more about how that way,Emma 52:00Right. So I was looking at the construction of a travel script alone somebody's life course. And mobility biography looks at the stability or the changes in the way in travel in someone's travel behaviour over time. And so I was looking at things in somebody's life, and how they've experienced them, and how that might have influenced the way they commute today. And I actually found that because I simply asked somebody, so please tell me how you have travelled since you're a child. So they just told me a bit of their life story, like when I was at kindergarten, my parents took me to school. Later, I asked people to start really from the time they went to university, to further education, whether it was university or college or something like that. And because that's the time we start to make the decisions, our own travel decisions, and I thought, let me start here, because there's really a lot of data before. And I found the different things in a person's mobility biography. So the mobility biographies are also influenced by other biographies. So you have like, household biographies. And that's changes in your life. Maybe starting a family, you're marrying or something moving in with a partner, or employment biographies. So that's changes in your work, or education, things like that. And your residential biographies, of course, changes in home. So all that will affect your travel behaviour over time. So I had to put all that in mind and try to see at different points in people's lives, how they travelled, or how their travel changed. And if it's been sustained, when did that start? And how long has it been sustained? And then I would know that at least the person, if it's sustained, say, maybe for five years, somebody will know this is when I started using the car and they will kind of think back to the situation around that time that made them change the car to the bus or start cycling and then start to see a certain mental structure that's being that has been built up to that point and is being enabled for that time and being sustained for that time. So that's why I took the mobility biography approach. That's why a mobility biography was important to me just to see the changes in travel behaviour, and then where they sustained and why it's sustained.Rachel 54:38One of your important turning points, I think, was around having children you specifically looked into your use. I don't think they didn't all have children, but most of them did, I think.Emma 54:46Yes, I specifically looked for interviewees that had children because from the literature that seemed to be quite a big thing and also from my pilot interviews, when I spoke to the people that had children, there seemed to be some really interesting things to look at there. Of course, I had to look at people that did not so that I could compare. But yes, this turned out to be quite an important turning point for a lot of people. Because it created quite a number of constraints, even when people's locations or there was infrastructure for cycling, or buses, and that was good enough, and they themselves said it was good enough, but just having to make so many trips regarding their children as well as their work, just changed the way people view that. But for some people, you find that when those constraints were removed, so when the children were not so little and could do things for themselves, could walk to school by themselves, for some people. I mean, they move back to the public transport that they liked. For others, it was like, Oh, well, I'm already here, and this is good and I like being in my car. And, and I'll continue with that. And I found that, I found that that that that distinction between the two kinds of people interesting.Rachel 56:13Yeah, I was gonna ask you a bit more about that as well because you say that there's the car default people and the alt default people. So could you tell me a bit more about those that distinction and what that meant?Emma 56:23Right, so in my research, I categorised people who are commuting by car at the time. I did these interviews in 2014,2015. So I categorised people who are commuting at that time. So let's say currently, but currently of 2014-15 by car, and then people who are commuting by alternative modes, which was the bus or walking or cycling as the other people. And so I would look at your travel scripts at the moment, so what it is pushing you towards you engaging with commuting with a car, let's go backwards. Or at least that's how I was analysing the data although that's not how they told it. Let's go backwards and see how you go to the car. And then for the people with alternative modes which I called alt default, so their default mode at the moment was to travel by bus or by bicycle. And so your travel script at the moment that you're engaging is that it's having you commute by bus, walking, or by bicycle. Let's try to move backwards in your life course and see how you go to that point. So that's how I got the car defaults, that's the people commuting by car currently for most days of the week. And then the alt-default, that's the people commuting by bicycle or by bus or walking to Heriot-Watt campus. At the time I did that interviews, there was another categorization of the cohorts. So I divided the interviewees into cohorts and my cohorts were looking at, there was a 1970s and 1980s, and the 1990s cohorts. This is not when the people were born. Actually I was looking at when the people turned about 17, because I know that's about the age that most people in Britain can get a driver's licence. And that's a big thing for someone to start driving, obviously. So that's how the cohorts were so that people who turned about 17 in the 1970s, and people who turned 17 in the 1980s. And then the people turned about 17 in the 1990s. And just to follow that through, whether they decided to get the car then and continue with it and the different constraints, and when that constraint was removed, say for example, most people at the time they were in a junior tertiary education. I mean, you're skint, you don't have money. And probably you live close to where you study anyway. So you walk or you cycle, or you go by bus and then when you get a bit more money and you start working, I found a number of people then decided to get cars because that enabled them to get to where they were going, but others did not. Because maybe where they started walking, they did not require a car. Or then they formed that habit of going by bus and they liked it. And then they started choosing where to work or where to live in such a way that they wouldn't have to use the car or something like that. So those are the different categories within my research that helped me to, to sort of interrogate the different narratives I was getting from people's life courses.Rachel 59:57And that's quite an interesting part of the thesis, the way, which people yeah, they've established that behaviour and then they talk about looking for a house or a flat in a particular area. But one thing I was going to ask you about actually is the Heriot-Watt is a campus University, so it's on the outskirts of Edinburgh. And I think you mentioned it moved from the city centre was that important for people the fact that it moved and it was no longer a central location. It was on the outskirts?Emma 60:22Yes, for I met a few people who were with Heriot-Watt at the time. It was in the city centre, and then it moved to the outskirts and actually, I remember one of them said at the time it was in the city centre, he was fine, he would walk, it was okay. And once they moved out, he just decided to start using his car because well the parking was free at the time, was still free at the time I was there anyway. And, and the bus is too slow. The person was just not used to using buses. The person was fine cycling. But cycling that far on the road was not something that the person was used to and the easiest thing for him at the time was let me get into my car. So the location of where you're going really matters Rachel 61:18And then the habits, you were talking about how people start using a mode and they sort of get used to it and that becomes part of their becomes part of their identity and so, once that person has used a car for a while, then they likely to carry on doing so.Emma 61:34Yes, there is a quite a bit of literature about travel identities. So people do form these travel identities and and the more you do something, the more you feel that I am the sort of person that does this, so this is me. So yes, habits are important and when people started using the car, and it became the easier thing for them. And then they started to look at themselves as the sort of people that use cars and that's okay. So they continued with it. I did find a few people who, their identity as somebody who is very much involved in environmental issues sort of overrode, or influenced their travel identity a lot more than just the way they travel. So even when they faced, let's say, really long commutes or a bus commute where they need to change buses and things like that. And they had already told themselves, let me use that phrase, they had already told themselves, ‘I'm not the not the sort of person who travels by car', let's say, ‘and so I'm going to do whatever I can to travel in in what I think is a sustainable way'. And that's how I also came up with that the different group have the habit, the habit helps us, sort of reduces the mental effort that we have to go through in making a decision. Yeah. Because you've done it before. So it's quick. But other people had to sort of dig deeper. In my research, I called it ‘an extra little thing in the system'. So that they would not just go for what is the easier. I mean, as human beings, it's normal, we go for what's easier to what, what will be the easiest decision to make. But there were those people who, even where they looked at the situation and the situation was not that enabling. They put things in there either in their minds, or in their space, to help them travel in the way they wanted to travel. And most of those people had identities that influenced more their travel identity than just the way they travel. So for example, if we have certain strong environmental thoughts about your carbon footprint and what you're doing for the environment and, and things to do with fuel and petroleum industry or things like that. And so they would choose to either use buses or cycle even when say, I mean, it rains a lot in Scotland, even when it's raining. I remember one of them told me it's not about the weather, it's about how you're dressed. So it's these little things that they either tell themselves, or we tell ourselves, it's really to make ourselves comfortable with what we're doing. I mean the car-default people are comfortable, but also the alt default, people are very comfortable with what they are doing. Even though somebody on the outside might look at them and say, Oh, what a hassle I have to change buses, I have to take two buses and take like a one hour commute to work. For somebody else it would be a no no, but for them, it's okay, I will do this, and once I get on the bus, I'll be able to listen to this programme or I'll be able to read this book.Rachel 65:32And you talked about how as well, for some of the people who use the car, but they have environmental identities, they were trying to manage that. And one of them I think was talking about, he felt bad about it so he got a lower emissions car. So there's some people who sort of managed the car using identity in that way.Emma 65:49Yes. So, as I said, people cope in different ways. We all try to make ourselves comfortable with whatever decision we make, really. Which is what we should do because if we're not, then I don't know, how we'll go around. But yes, so those who felt they had no other choice but to use the car, but had strong environmental beliefs, said it's worth it to spend more on a more fuel-efficient car or hybrid car. And that's what they would do to make themselves more comfortable with commuting by car. And this was not in any way in contradiction with their environmental beliefs, because they were trying to find a compromise of travelling by car which they know all the issues around it, all the environmental issues around it, but also their strong environmental beliefs. And so, in trying to find a compromising belief, a thought that, to spend more on a hybrid or more fuel efficient car is how is how they'll go about it. Yeah.Rachel 67:01Presumably potentially you could redefine yourself as being less environmental that, that instead it's the convenience and the speed that matters to you, for instance?Emma 67:09It's interesting that you mention that. I did not get that actually, now that you talk about it, they did not try to change what they thought they were. But they tried to change their perception of that behaviour to fit in what they thought they were. So actually it did not go the other way around. No, it was I'm behaving like this, but this is not in contradiction with what I believe or if it is, this is what I am going to do. It was never, or maybe I don't believe that. And I know that there are theories that say that the way you behave tells you, but I think maybe because I used retrospective interviews, they had already gone through that maybe subconsciously They were not going to think about who they were when they're talking about something they've done over and over again. Yeah.Rachel 68:10Yeah, yeah, it's a coherent picture of who they are now. Now. Yeah. So, but presumably, only a minority of people had strong environmental identities. So for the others, what was what was it about instead?Emma 68:25So the others, it's really the situation around that helped to help them to form certain habits. So I remember clearly one interviewee who, who talks about the fact that they wanted to teach their children certain things. And so to their children, they didn't want their children to be so used to the car. So even in the rain, they would help their children put on all the gear and the raincoats and the boots and all that and just go out with them, they had to walk to school. But the situation helped so the people who lived near cycle paths or the people who lived near a bus stop especially. That came out very clearly that the situation around and the infrastructure around them, when it is there, it helps to form the habits. And once the habits is formed, even when they moved or when they are moving, they try to stick to it. I met this young lady, she did not have children and she'd moved from England and to Edinburgh. And she said when she was in England she used to drive just because she left University and she got a car. She borrowed her mother's car first and then she got her own car and she used to go to work that way. But when she moved to Edinburgh, the first flat that she got was in the city and there was a direct bus to Heriot-Watt where she was working. And so she just, she didn't see any reason to use the car then. So at the time she'd been using buses. And when she even, when she moved flats, she was looking for a place, you see the habit had now started to form so that when she moved flats, she was looking for a place that will enable her to do that, to still travel to work by bus. So the infrastructure is is certainly important. And I think that's why I looked at both the situational factors, we cannot do away with them and also the socio-psychological factors.Rachel 70:57So, and if if we were thinking to get people out of their cars, particularly people who don't particularly have strong environmental views, would it be about the infrastructure then do you think?Emma 71:07To start with, to start with it would be about the infrastructure. And I think designing programmes that ask them to do just something small. It's not, I mean, it's daunting for someone to think I have been travelling by car for all these years, and yes, I understand all the environmental issues around but can I really start travelling by bus for every day, five days of the week? So that can be a bit daunting. And so I think it would be important to start with smaller programmes where we maybe in a workplace, Monday is the public transport day or something like that. Just something small. So when we, when they can start with that small thing, they then can move in and I think that then causes a foot in the door when someone has done something small or behaved in a certain way, but on a very small scale, they can start to build it up. And I actually did meet people who, who said, yeah, they had started by travelling one day a week by cycling, one day a week and the rest of the time they would go by by their cars. And then they worked it up to two at the time I spoke to them, they were just doing two days a week. But really, that is, those are people who, who, again, they want to, what can I say? They want to be in line with their own with their beliefs, with the thing that has touched them, but at the same time, you cannot make such a huge change. So the situation of the infrastructure is really important to help somebody because if it's not there, so if your cycle path is not there, or the road is not moving in such a way that the cyclist feels safe, or the rules on the road are not in such a way that the cyclist feels safe, then even the small thing that you're asking them to start with will be very hard for them to do because they will feel unsafe.Rachel 73:19And we've mentioned already about sort of infrastructure like bus stops and cycle paths, but were there things that you found that you thought the university was doing or should be doing to support people to travel more sustainably?Emma 73:33Well, it would have to be the university working together with the council. I mean, at the time I was there, I used the bus a lot in Edinburgh and I felt the bus was quite good. I don't know if it was just coming from Uganda and comparing it to the public transport system there. And then I actually learned to cycle when I was in, I was doing my PhD, I learned to cycle in 2015 with someone through Transition Heriot-Watt and they were offering free classes. And cycling around the university was fine. Cycling outside of the campus was not. I mean, we were okay because we were with the instructor and so we thought it would be okay with her, but I don't think I would do it on my own. At the time I was in Edinburgh, so as about three years ago, there were no dedicated cycle lanes and the bicycles had to go in the bus lanes, which was okay, because that's the space they had, but yeah, it was not ideal. It was not something that would enable somebody who wants to get into that to do it, it's the people who already do it. Other people are already proficient cyclists, but it's not the easiest thing to do. I think dedicated cycle paths would help but I don't know how far Edinburgh Council or the university itself would be willing to go to do that.Rachel 75:11I'm just going to ask, really sort of coming to the end of the podcast, if there was, if there was anything that you wanted to add, if there's anything that particularly surprised you, or you found particularly interesting about that the PhD research?Emma 75:28Well, for me in general, from the beginning, when you said it was a jump from my construction background to the social psychology, for me, so everything was different. I had not had these concepts and dealing with them myself, was different, but that's what was interesting about it, and then going out to talk to people and actually finding that you can trace these different concepts that you're reading in literature, things to do with mobility biographies, or things to do with people's feelings about these things. These are real things. I know they can sound abstract to somebody coming from that background. But these are actually real things. We don't see them, but they are real and they actually affect the way we use things or the way we behave. Just in the same way as building a road or putting together a good fleet of public transport or something, they really have the same weight, and they will affect behaving in the same, not in the same way but with the magnitude, with a similar magnitude with a similar impact that that those other situational factors will. And for me, it was interesting to actually trace that in what people were saying and I actually did not prompt them, because all I told them was ‘Tell me how you've travelled since this' and it's only after they told me the story that I then went back. And I think it is important for us, I know that in Europe and in the UK, you're already clued in to these things and, and I just hope that back here like in Uganda, people know them. It's just the policy will is not yet there yet, for us to, to read, to do research and then start implementing such things. So although I did my research in Edinburgh, my ears and eyes are always open for how that could be done back home here in Uganda.Rachel 77:44Thank you. Yeah, that was really interesting. I really appreciated the chance to learn more about your research and it's a great case for qualitative social science research in transport. So and if people want to read your thesis, they can find it via The British Library Ethos service and I'll include a link to that on the web page and also to your LinkedIn page where you've got articles that you've written, and so on. So, yeah, thank you very much, Emma. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcription:Ken Paulus 0:03Caregivers will be put back in a position to drive these big complicated specialty treatments instead of throwing these patients over the wall to us. And I think pharma will move from a sales model to a knowledge model where their job is to put information in the hands of caregivers, health plans, and members to make the right decisions at the right time in the right placeGary Bisbee 0:28That was Ken Paulus, President and CEO Prime Therapeutics, discussing the fragmented nature of today's healthcare system. I'm Gary Bisbee and this is fireside chat. Ken has been a health plan and large IDN CEO and now leads a pharmacy benefit manager with 30 million lives. He's in a unique position to comment on integration between pharma health plans and providers. Let's listen to Ken express the need for an air traffic controller to manage care for the patientKen Paulus 0:57I'm most concerned about fact that today, for any given American, there's really no captain of the ship. There's really no clear advocate or some person, entity-relationship that is air traffic control for a patient in need.Gary Bisbee 1:17Our conversation includes Ken describing the role of the PBM. And its value equation, barriers to quality and outcomes confronting caregivers, the need for physicians to be in charge complicated care paradigms, how Prime Therapeutics work with the federal government to ensure specialized drugs remain available during the COVID crisis, and the importance of developing a long term relationship with the patient. Let's listenKen Paulus 1:42COVID has shown us that we need somebody to focus on that long term relationship and it's just not happening today. Again, with great challenges come great opportunities now that's a big one. And if I was running a health plan business or an IDN right now I’d be running like heck, to solve that problem and fill that void. Our nation needs it now.Gary Bisbee 2:05I'm delighted to welcome Ken Paulus to the microphone. Well, good afternoon, Ken, and welcome.Ken Paulus 2:16Gary, Thanks for the invite. And I really look forward to talking to you today.Gary Bisbee 2:20I've interviewed you in person a couple of times with live audiences. So we're delighted to have you at the microphone. Let's get right into your background if we could. I know you grew up in the Chicago area. What was it like growing up? You had five siblings, six of you in the family? What was it like growing up with that group?Ken Paulus 2:38It was a very special upbringing, in a way. I'm from a middle-class family. My dad was a grocery store manager. My mom ultimately was a homemaker became a teacher, but neither one of them finished college. Kind of a classic Catholic family where they started having a family early both of them had to quit and basically raised the family. It was kind of a values-based upbringing. In even though we didn't have a lot, it was rich and full and positive and supportive and ended up being what gave me a lot of my resilience and in a lot of ways, feeling supported regardless of the circumstances. It's all good. I mean, I say I had a very good upbringing and nothing I look back on in a negative sense, other than maybe I was a little bit of a rebel and got myself into a little bit of trouble as a teenager.Gary Bisbee 3:25Well, there's learning there as well.Ken Paulus 3:28Yes, there is. I have some scar tissue from those days. But I was blessed in so many ways.Gary Bisbee 3:32Right. We were talking before and you indicated you basically worked your way right from the very early days right through school, that that turned out to be a good experience, any lessons learned there?Ken Paulus 3:43It was interesting. My parents didn't finish college. So it was very clear with them that we were all going to college and there is an expectation you go to college and you go to grad school or medical school or law school, so you're not stopping at a four-year degree and I'm thinking, well, who's paying for that? And the answer was you are. And the only way to pay for it was to work basically every free moment. So I had a paper route until I was 13 or 14 and then I became a busboy at an Italian restaurant and believe it or not, was owned by the mafia, and worked there for two or three years. And then when I was old enough to get a real job, I became various jobs within the grocery business because my dad had friends that could give me jobs. And I did everything. I was literally a night crew worker. I was an apprentice meat cutter a couple of summers, I did it all. And I learned a ton the learnings from how and when you saw good management was fairly readily observed if you were willing to observe us and I have to say I learned a lot about management from all of those crazy jobs. It's a good experience.Gary Bisbee 4:52Six siblings in the family. You're all in healthcare. How did that work out?Ken Paulus 4:57Well, it was interesting. My mom in particular had three things that she expected of us and I'll never forget it. And it really rang true for all of us. One was going to college, as I mentioned, the second one was critical. And she said, and both of them actually did this. They said, You really have to do something where you're making a difference. And then the third one was just an oddball thing. They're both smokers. They both quit in their middle-age years. And the third thing was don't smoke, please. And if you don't smoke by the time you hit 21, you get $100. So, I'm like wow, okay, well, that's worth it. And I never got my hundred dollars, but I never smoked so that was good. So this making a difference. Standard and expectation are what I think led us all into the helping profession of healthcare and it's been exceedingly rewarding and I'm so happy I'm in this business. I really love it.Gary Bisbee 5:46Well, after college at Augustana in Illinois, off to the University of Minnesota, the MHA program was the leading MHA program at that time, what got you to the Minnesota MHA program?Ken Paulus 6:01Gary, it was mostly that it was that they were the best in the nation at the time. I think they're still probably top five or so. And I was a science major. I was a human physiology major. But I have an entrepreneurial business streak in me. And I was literally trying to find an industry that married science with business. And healthcare is really the perfect combination away for me. Once I figured out that that's what I wanted to do, and I wanted to work in the nonprofit side of things. Then I just went on the search for the best program and this program in Minnesota was the best program and I have to say, it was an eye-opener and a critical event in my life to open my eyes to a much bigger opportunity set. It really was very possible.Gary Bisbee 6:47What was your first job then out of the MHA program?Ken Paulus 6:50So this 21 or 22-year-old kid, having never stepped foot in a hospital before this point in time has only worked in grocery stores and restaurants. I literally stepped foot into this hospital as a fellow post-graduate school and became an assistant vice president of a hospital that's part of Catholic healthcare West in Los Angeles. And it was quite the experience. I literally remember the first day on the job, the CEO said, Well, Ken all of your direct reports are waiting for you up in the conference room on the seventh floor. Introduce yourself. I said, Okay. I walked into the meeting. There were 10 folks around the table all roughly in the 40s and 50s. mostly women, as it turns out, running departments like occupational therapy and PT and nursing leaders. And I sat down at the head table and they looked at me and the first woman said, well, who are you? And I said, Well, I think I might be in charge of all these departments and they laughed out loud. No, like They laughed and they said, Are you kidding me? They all had 20 years on me. But I will say, Gary, I made one critical move that was probably saved my career. I just said, Hey, listen, I don't know anything about management and leadership. I've really never done it before. So if you all are willing to teach me, I'm willing to learn and I will try not to annoy. And they became just stunningly good leadership group. And they taught me management and leadership, these middle-aged men and women, mostly women and healthcare, taught me how to lead and forever I will be thankful and in gratitude for that experience, it was really special.Gary Bisbee 8:40What took you from that start to Partners Community Healthcare in Boston.Ken Paulus 8:44I had worked in California for the better part of probably a decade or more. And actually, my boss, the CEO, was pinged by a recruiter to come out to Partners Healthcare System, which is a brand new system that was just been formed. And they wanted him to lead the creating the risk-bearing entity partners called Partners Community Healthcare, Inc. and he declined. And he's a California guy, he's not leaving the state. And in an incredible show of support of me, he said, Ken, I hate to even bring this up to you because you are like, my number two, go-to guy. But I actually think this might be a really great job for you. And I don't want you to go I don't want you to take this wrong. I just want you to know that I'm a mentor, and I'm your friend. I think you should at least have a conversation if you can work for the mass general of Brigham in Harvard Medical School and have that on your CV it's probably gonna change your life. I said, Really? You're telling me you think it's a good idea? He said I don't want you to leave. But I think I owe it to you to take a look at it. So I did and next thing you know, I was In my car driving cross country and working at Partners. As probably the fourth or fifth employee hired post-merger, the Brigham in general.Gary Bisbee 10:07Wow, that was a terrific opportunity. What did you learn about managing risk there?Ken Paulus 10:12Oh, gosh, scary. I have so much scar tissue from those days. We built this risk network, this group of physicians and acquired a number of primary care practices, married them in our network to all the specialists of the Brigham and the general and then took full risk, full capitation risk, but with Blue Cross of Massachusetts. And we proceeded to get our hats handed to us. We just got crushed. We lost so much money so fast that we literally had to go to Blue Cross, we said that we just have to tear up this contract. We can't, we can't do it. And we did. They agreed, thankfully, to tear up the contract and start over. And what I learned was we were ill-equipped to take full risk. We've had no data. I had no systems to manage risk. No way to track patients and patient care. The incentives are completely wrong. Our teaching hospitals nationally Brigham wanted to bring everybody into a tertiary center. And that's just doesn't work with a risk insurance business. So we were just upside down in terms of our ability to take on risk and we lost a lot of money. It was quite a learning experience. I never want to repeat it. But again, that scar tissue is invaluable. And there's so much to be learned from the process.Gary Bisbee 11:28Great foundation, though, ultimately, you made your way to become the CEO at Allina in Minneapolis, what caused you to want to tackle a leading health system?Ken Paulus 11:38It had been on my mind Gary for a while that I was looking for a place where the physicians, the hospitals, and all the ancillary services of pharmacy and lab and home care and hospice and all that could all reside under the same roof. And if I had a chance to run a company that had all those pieces in one place, could I do something different and special to really put a dent in what I think are many intractable problems in healthcare. So that's what attracted me. And I think secondly, I'm from the Midwest, I had always wanted to come back to the Midwest at some point. But it was mostly this engaging opportunity of having all the pieces in one place. And it was quite a good ride. It was there for just under a decade, and I really, really liked it. It was good fun. And I think we made a ton of progress.Gary Bisbee 12:26If you could identify one main lesson that you learn to lead a large health system, what would it be Ken?Ken Paulus 12:32It was plus-minus Gary, On the plus side. I think having the physicians as part of the health system was crucial. I can't imagine a day where we'd ever go back or the caregivers, not just doctors, but doctors and nurse practitioners and all the people that take care of patients every day, day in and day out. Having them on the team was critical and crucial. And I think that allowed us to do some things that we wouldn't have been able to do otherwise, I think the negative or the downside of at least our idea was we were still so acute care centric, that limited our ability to innovate. And we were hooked on the drug of fee for service medicine. And because of that, all of our profits came from our hospitals. And the more acute, the more complex, the more of a specialty nature of treatment. The more we did, the more we made. And we could not get off that treadmill. And I gotta tell you, I'm a fairly transformative thinker. And I like to find ways to disrupt healthcare. I put my shoulder to that wheel, and I made some progress, but not a lot. And it's just part of how healthcare is delivered that acute care was the center of the universe. That's where all the money was. And it was hard to ever leave that and we didn't really make much progress against that. Unfortunately, you know, for that I'll forever have some regrets.Gary Bisbee 13:59You've got an interesting background and just regionally, Los Angeles, Boston, Minneapolis Midwest, and you had some unrest there in Minneapolis. How do you kind of think about the balance between management outcomes, maybe unions, how would you factor all that in with what happened there in Minneapolis?Ken Paulus 14:20Well, it's interesting in all of the markets have worked in, they've all been very high concentrations of union activity. And I'm very neutral on unions. I think they play an important role in some ways. And I'm not anti-union. I'm not pro-union. I think it's part of the system and it can work. It has worked, and most of the places I've worked, it's been a really good outcome. What's really stunning to me in terms of what's happened here with the racial unrest in Minnesota, and particularly this behavioral issue with the police, is that we're finding as we dig deeper into it, that much of the problem lies with management's inability to To act and to deal with poor performance, and the union's ability, or at least creation of a structure that would keep management from moving out poor performers. And unfortunately, the lead actor in this most recent event was a poor performer with multiple examples of performance issues, and he could not be removed. And I think what it tells me is there has to be a new day with how management and labor work together. And we have to have more of a collaborative partnership model. And both parties need to be held accountable for performance. And we're lacking that today. It's more of an advocacy model today. And I think we have to move to a performance model and it's a real opportunity. And it's also one of the root causes of probably ended up where we are, at least in Minnesota, and how policing takes place here. And it's unfortunate but from every bad circumstance comes an opportunity. progress. I think that's what this is going to prove to be.Gary Bisbee 16:02Well, on a happier note, let's talk about Prime Therapeutics. You recently celebrated your one year anniversary with Prime. Will you describe Prime Therapeutics for us?Ken Paulus 16:13It's a very interesting industry and company, we're in the pharmacy benefit management space. And I've always been in the IDN side of things. I spent some time in the health plan business at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care when I was running the physician side of the staff model. So I know the health plan side, I know a lot about risk and capitation. Having done that, in many places across the country, we sit squarely in the middle between pharma, providers, caregivers, IDNs, if you will, and health plans and we are a construct of a broken system in some ways. The fact that the interest of pharma the interests of providers and caregivers and the interests of health plans are not aligned. And as such, the PBM industry came before and we're in the middle trying to get pharma care to reduce prices, through rebates and other management formularies, passing those savings on to health plans and then working with providers to manage utilization. And it is purely a construct of a system that doesn't work. And in the ideal world, if the United States healthcare system really was efficient, there's no need for us. Unfortunately, we aren't efficient, we're not aligned, the incentives don't really work, and we actually are critical right now to make sure that the cost of medicines does not spiral out of control. So we're a reflection of a broken system that's still compartmentalized and still has incentives that don't deliver the outcomes that our nation needs, which is a stunning thing for me to say as a CEO of a PBM. But that's quite frankly where we are.Gary Bisbee 17:48So why the transition to pharmacy benefits manager to Prime, why did you do that Ken?Ken Paulus 17:54Gary, I had run my course of working in the IDN side of things. And I have mostly worked with physicians and caregivers throughout my whole life. And I've loved it. I've absolutely loved it. But I really needed to see a different side of healthcare, I needed to get out from under the IDN space, and see how others view it. And mostly I'm seeing health care from the payer, and PBM pharmacy management space now. And I'll have to say some of the things I'm seeing I wish I would have known as an IDN leader. The fact of the matter is, we're missing some very important issues on the provider side that you don't see when you're in the middle of it. And now that I'm not in it, it's like, wow, it's very apparent that there's an opportunity. So I absolutely love it. I never thought I would. But it's a great learning experience. I've learned a ton about how this system works. And it's very interesting to see how insurance organizations and health plans view the health care world. It's quite different and quite important.Gary Bisbee 18:56So how does Prime work with the patient? How do you work with blue plans?Ken Paulus 19:02The plans really come to us to work with pharma to stand between them and pharma to make sure that they're getting a reasonable deal. That's basically in a nutshell what we do. So they at Prime we represent 30 million Americans across 23 states 23 blues plans, and our job is to make sure we represent with pharma with pharmaceutical industry, that block of business and we buy and procure and source all of the medications and treatments that pharma represents. we acquire those treatments on behalf of our health plan partners and try to do so to create efficiencies, and it's very effective. I have to say, I know there's a lot of unusual perceptions around the PBM space because it is so opaque. The fact of the matter is in at least in our case, we're transparent PBM we pass through everything to our health plans, which you see is what you get. We don't have a lot of these arcane structures to move money around within the system. And we do play a critical role I can tell you, there are billions of dollars of savings that come through to health plans, and then to employers and then ultimately to patients and members. That wouldn't be there, at least in today's healthcare industry, if we weren't doing our jobs. So very interesting. And it's a critical role that said here, I have to say there's some aspects of this business that are incredibly inappropriate and broken, that create undue friction, and actually, harm quality in some ways. Those are some of the things that I'm very excited about working on.Gary Bisbee 20:37How do you work with the IDNs then?Ken Paulus 20:40That's where I do think that we're creating barriers to the very best quality for patient care. And there are two ways I can see with the IDNs that we should be integrated and working with them. One is what I call the friction model. Our model today is built on creating, you know, I hate to say this but barriers and gates for providers and caregivers to get through to make sure that they follow a formulary so that we can then use that formulary to lever pharma to get a better price. And it's a crazy way to do business. But it's the only way we have right now. So we have a very high friction model that we use with caregivers and patients to put them through these barriers and gates if you will hurdles. And that forces the system to drive to an outcome that again, we can use then to save money. That's one big problem. I'm not a fan of using friction for caregivers and patients. And having worked on that side for 30 plus years, the friction is untenable. We are putting caregivers through so many hoops and barriers that they can barely get their jobs done now. So that's one major problem. I think the other major problem or maybe opportunity, is that what's happening and pharma is the science is stunningly good. I mean, if there's one industry in this world that we actually lead-in, it's this bioscience, this creation of new solutions to pithy, complicated healthcare problems through incredible advances in science. And I think we're gonna look back and say this is the golden era of development. It's like when antibiotics were created back 50 years ago, this whole business of using the genome to unlock opportunities to treat patients in very different ways. It's really stunningly good. What's remarkable about that is that while we're breaking through on a daily basis with science and finding these new solutions, they're very complicated. They're very expensive, and there's no integration between pharma what we do and what caregivers do. I think the second big opportunity is for the health plan and the PBM leaders organizations to work very closely with pharma and the provider side to create partnerships in ways that we don't have today. We're basically buying cooperatives now that's interesting. It's a short term solution to a big puffy, complicated, expensive problem. But I just don't think it's going to deliver us to Nirvana, I think we're going to need a very close relationship with providers. And once we have that, and we bring pharma into the equation, I think two really important things will happen. One is caregivers will be put back in a position to drive these big complicated specialty treatments instead of throwing these patients over the wall to us. And I think pharma will move from a sales model to a knowledge model where their job is to put information in the hands of caregivers, health plans, members, to make the right decisions at the right time in the right place. And boy, if those two things happen, we will advance quality lower costs substantially in our healthcare system. So that's what I'm really excited about those two things, taking unnecessary friction out of the system, and bringing in a partnership level perspective for pharma and providers and what we represent so that we can create a breakthrough. And that's what's exciting about this job.Gary Bisbee 24:20Very exciting. What's your guess, I mean, we talking three years, five years, 10 years for this change to unfold?Ken Paulus 24:26Unfortunately, Gary, I'm 61. And I can't do this forever. I am in a hurry. We have got to show improvement and progress on this in the next three, four years, we have got to put a down payment on this. So for lots of different reasons. One is it's what the healthcare system needs. Two, it will save substantial money. Three, it will vastly improve quality. And I think probably most important, if we don't do it, I just can't imagine how this fragmented healthcare system will survive. I just I'm not seeing it. I just don't think it's working today and we have so much to improve. This is probably my last chance to run a big healthcare organization that could make a difference. I have got to go out in good form, I have got to be able to look back and say I was part of the solution not part of the problem?Gary Bisbee 25:16Well, we're looking forward to that. We have some confidence you will make a difference can let's move on to the COVID crisis. What observations from your current vantage point? What observations have you made about trends that might have already been in occurrence but that the COVID crisis accelerated?Ken Paulus 25:34There really is one big one that has me quite concerned. And you can worry about our inability to track infectious disease and our lack of preparedness and all those things. They're all things that we need to improve. But I have to say I'm most concerned about the fact that there's today for any given American there's really no captain of the ship, there's really no clear advocate or some person, entity-relationship that is air traffic control for a patient in need. And this crisis brought that to bear. I mean, if you are sick during this COVID crisis, you couldn't reach a primary care doctor's office, it wasn't clear who you'd go to for advice on well, do I do this test or not? Do I go into urgent care now or not? It is a fragmented combination of solutions and you had to do the best you could. Do I call telehealth? Do I go drive into my office? Do I go to the ER, it just wasn't clear. And we are in this position where COVID put a light on this incredibly broken system of no coordination. And there's really nobody in charge. So the patient's left to his or her own devices. And man that is just not a way to run a healthcare system. And that's what we've got today. And I think What you're seeing across the nation is any number of approaches to how to manage this crazy thing. And we're, of course, we're not getting much leadership from the government, not that that would have made much difference, but there certainly isn't much leadership from healthcare either. The industry hasn't done a great job and we are very fragmented and we're paying the price the fragmentation right now.Gary Bisbee 27:20Did COVID affect Prime's business model at all or Prime's economics at all?Ken Paulus 27:26Not really, because I think we acted relatively quickly. One of our first worries was the run on the bank for medications and there was one early on. And people were so nervous about getting their medications, chronically ill patients that needed their medications that they were stockpiling. And we had to immediately lay in rules that would manage the supply so that they were 30-day supplies or shorter supplies so that we didn't have patients with years of supply and not having other patients that needed medications and they couldn't get them. So we immediately worked with the government to put in rules and structures to manage the stockpile run on the bank kind of circumstance, and we avoided that, thankfully. So we didn't really run into shortages. It was close. There were some shortages around the hydroxychloroquine run that took place after the President made his comments. But they were short-lived. And I think we've managed through them pretty well. So I think, for the most part, we got through it, and we avoided any really significant problems. Thank God.Gary Bisbee 28:26It's evident that public health is now part of national security. We just never thought about it that way. How do you think about that, Ken?Ken Paulus 28:34I think public health has never gotten it's appropriate do in our system? It harkens back to our earlier comments, scary when you ask question around well, how IDNs work, you know, whatever. Public Health just isn't rewarded. Our nation doesn't really prioritize it. Now, I think we're realizing a pandemic. It's critical. And countries around this globe that are really good at public health has have done a great job of managing and pandemic in an incredibly difficult circumstance. We have no public health assets really, in terms of the scale or the integration or the coordination of public health in this country, we don't have it. So we ended up with our fragmented system which we already know isn't really well-coordinated doesn't communicate, put through the wringer. We have no public health system really to rely on and we ended up with the mess we've got and you get what you pay for. We got what we paid for. We've never prioritized public health. So I think we're gonna have to find a balance in the future between acute care, public healthcare, centricity of a patient, where is the place where cares delivered, acute care can be the center of the universe any longer. It's not even urgent care. It's not even home or maybe I think it might actually be virtual that there's a virtual system and public health has to be tied into that virtual system. So we're all coordinating and gosh, it's going to be so hard for us. Our political parties and our constant bickering back and forth, somehow we're gonna have to break down these barriers. And I'm not sure exactly how that's gonna play out.Gary Bisbee 30:08It is hard to see. But I totally agree with you. We need to get there. Well, let's turn to leadership, you've ideally positioned in the sense that you've led a variety of different kinds of companies. All in healthcare, of course, but when you first became aware of the COVID crisis, what was your first thought?Ken Paulus 30:28I really think my first thought was two concerns, one, protect my employees, and to make sure patients get their medication so we don't cause havoc. And I think those two things I thought oh my gosh, we have got to make sure that those two things are intact. And it's a scary time and critical time.Gary Bisbee 30:51So moving from that to what are the most important characteristics of a leader during a crisis, Ken?Ken Paulus 30:57There's much to be written about this. But for me, the first thing was calm in a storm. I mean, we're in a frightening circumstance, we still are, we don't understand it. And I think leaders must stay calm. We can't panic. I think the second thing for me was very regular, transparent, and high levels of communication. At a time of uncertainty. People need to know what's going on. Even if you don't have the answers. It's okay to say that you don't. I think third, it requires action. I mean, you really have to have a propensity to act. Assuming you're calm. Assuming you're highly communicative. I think you have to have some courage to make some tough calls and move. And I think that's critical. So I think for me, those three things really are like the three legs of a stool to get through a crisis. There's that great line from Rahm Emanuel during the financial crisis that I ascribed to and they were going Through with Obama and Rahm Emanuel going through this process of the Great Recession, and he said, You never want to, I'm paraphrasing, but you never want to let a good crisis go to waste. It's your opportunity to do great things. And that's really what we have here is an opportunity to great things. And the question is, do we have the courage to do it? That's really what's gonna come down to and I hope our leadership does and I hope I do. That's really what we need to accomplish today.Gary Bisbee 32:28Well, it's all about leaders at a time like this. No question about that. Has the COVID experience change you as a leader in any way or as a family member?Ken Paulus 32:37For sure it points to the importance of relationships and in health care, we're in the relationship business. It's critical. You can't optimize health for somebody that that's one of your charges, somebody you're responsible for without a really good trusting relationship. And I think we all now are looking at our relationships differently and realizing how important they are to us. I think that's probably the key takeaway for me, Gary is social distancing has put a spotlight on either the ability to maintain or the importance of those relationships and also the some of the challenges of not having a social connection that is a critical part of the human beings needs. So I do think it's all about relationships and social connection. And if I had to say on health care, the patient relationship or not even before they become patients and individual relationships, that trusting relationship is up for grabs. It will be very interesting to see who owns that for a lifetime. Will it be IDNs? Will it be primary care doctors? Will it be some health care, air traffic controller? Will it be a health plan? I don't know. But somebody is going to play that role. And I'll tell you, there's a lot of disruption in healthcare because nobody has stepped in to fill that void. COVID has shown us that we need somebody to focus on that long term relationship and it's just not happening today. Again, with great challenges come great opportunities. Now that's a big one. And if I was running a healthcare business or an IDN right now, I'd be thinking, we have got to be running like heck, to solve that problem and fill that void. Our nation needs it now.Gary Bisbee 34:23That's a terrific finding. This has been an excellent interview. Ken, thanks so much. I have one last question. If I could. You're a board member. Of course, you sit on the board of Teladoc, but you've been experienced boards throughout your career. What are the key questions a board members should be asking in a crisis like this?Ken Paulus 34:41I think it's really a couple things. One is definitely getting through the acute phase of crisis. We're in that now. And it takes all of those leadership skills that we talked about. I think those are really important and staying steady at the helm, communicating the heck out of it and acting and moving, and having the courage to make some really critical, tough decisions. I think that's really important. actually think the bigger opportunity is envisioning what your organization will look like when this thing's all said and done. And this is one of those unique opportunities to take a completely fresh look. blank sheet of paper, we're going to come out of a crisis, a very changed nation in a lot of ways. And could you do something substantially different, that would really advance your organization, your service, your connection to consumers, whatever. I think this is one of those rare moments in all of our careers where you can basically be bold, and go for it. The second thing I suggest to all leaders of the boards I sit on is to get through the crisis phase. But while you're doing that, put equal time in the recovery phase. And in that recovery phase, it's a chance for just incredible transformation. Take advantage of it, run with it. That's where the action is going to be with this.Gary Bisbee 36:00Well said, thanks, Ken, terrific interview much appreciated Good luck to you and Prime as we move forward.Ken Paulus 36:07Thank you so much, Gary. It's been a pleasure talking to you.Gary Bisbee 36:09This episode of Fireside Chat is produced by Strafire. Please subscribe to Fireside Chat on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now. Be sure to rate and review fireside chat so we can continue to explore key issues with innovative and dynamic healthcare leaders. In addition to subscribing and rating, we have found that podcasts are known through word of mouth. We appreciate your spreading the word to friends or those who might be interested. Fireside Chat is brought to you from our nation's capital in Washington DC, where we explore the intersection of healthcare politics, financing, and delivery. For additional perspectives on health policy and leadership. Read my weekly blog Bisbee's Brief. For questions and suggestions about Fireside Chat, contact me through our website, firesidechatpodcast.com, or gary@hmacademy.com. Thanks for listening.

In this episode of Beneath the Subsurface we turn back time with Daniel Orange, our ONE Partner for multibeam technology and seafloor mapping - and incredible storyteller - and Duncan Bate, our Director of Project Development in the Gulf of Mexico and Geosciences. Dan takes Duncan and Erica on an expansive journey through time to meet a special variety of archea that dwell in the impossible oases surrounding sea bottom vents. We also explore the relatively recent discoveries in geoscience leading to seafloor mapping and how seep hunting offshore can enrich the exploration process today. TABLE OF CONTENTS00:00 - Intro03:35 - What is a seep?09:06 - The impossible oasis11:45 - Chemotrophic life24:15 - Finding seeps26:51 - The invention of multibeam technology30:11 - Seep hunting with multibeam32:48 - Seismic vs. multibeam34:43 - Acquiring multibeam surveys44:32 - The importance of navigation46:20 - Water column anomalies49:12 - Seeps sampling and exploration56:23 - Multibeam targets59:12 - Multibeam strategy1:03:11 - Reservoir content1:06:44 - A piece of the puzzle1:10:21 - ConclusionEXPLORE MORE FROM THE EPISODELearn more about TGS in the Gulf of MexicoOtos MultibeamEPISODE TRANSCRIPTErica Conedera:00:00:12Hello and welcome to Beneath the Subsurface a podcast that explores the intersection of Geoscience and technology. From the Software Development Department here at TGS. I'm your host, Erica Conedera. For our fourth episode, we'll welcome a very special guest speaker who offers a uniquely broad perspective on the topic of sea floor mapping. We'll learn about the technology of multibeam surveys, why underwater oil seeps are the basis of life as we know it and how the answer to the age old question of which came first, the chicken or the egg is the Sun. I'm here today with Duncan Bate, our director of projects for the US and Gulf of Mexico. Do you want to go ahead and introduce yourself Duncan?Duncan Bate:00:00:56Sure, yeah, thanks. I basically look after the development of all new projects for TGS in the, in the Gulf of Mexico. I'm here today because a few years ago we worked on a multi beam seep hunting project in the Gulf of Mexico. So I can share some of my experiences and - having worked on that project.Erica:00:01:15Awesome. And then we have our special guest star, Dan Orange. He is a geologist and geophysicist with Oro Negro exploration. Hi Dan.Dan Orange:00:01:24Good morning.Erica:00:01:25Would you like to introduce yourself briefly for us?Dan:00:01:28Sure. Let's see, I grew up in New England, Texas, so I went to junior high school, just a few miles from where we're recording this. But I did go to MIT where I got my bachelor's and master's degree in geology, then went out to UC Santa Cruz to do my PhD and my PhD had field work both onshore and offshore and involved seeps. So we'll come back to that. And also theoretical work as well. I had a short gig at Stanford and taught at Cal State Monterey Bay and spent five years at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Again, pursuing seeps. I left MBARI and started working with the oil patch in 1997 and it was early days in the oil industry pushing off the shelf and heading toward deep water and seeps were both a bug and a feature. So we started applying seep science to the oil industry and have been doing that for oh, now 21-22 years.Dan:00:02:32The entire time that I was at Embargin, and working with the oil patch. And in fact, ongoing, I do research for the US Navy through the Office of Naval Research. It started out involving seeps and canyon formation and it's evolved into multibeam seafloor mapping and acoustics. And that continues. So in the oil patch I was with AOA geophysics, we formed a company AGO to commercialize controlled source EM sold that to Schlumberger. And then we formed an oil company, Black Gold Energy, that would use seeps as a way to, go into oil exploration. And we sold that to NYKO, since leaving Black Gold with Oro Negro. We've been teaming with TGS since 2014 so now going on five years mapping the sea floor, I think we just passed one and a quarter million square kilometers, mapping with TGS as we mapped the sea floor and sample seeps, pretty much around the world for exploration.Erica:00:03:35Awesome. So let's begin our discussion today with what is a seep, if you can elucidate that for us.Dan:00:03:41So a seep is just what it sounds like. It's, it's a place on the earth's surface where something leaks out from beneath. And in our case it's oil and gas. Now seeps have been around since the dawn of humanity. The seeps are referenced in the Bible and in multiple locations seeps were used by the ancient Phoenicians to do repairs on ships they use as medicines and such. And in oil exploration seeps have been used to figure out where to look for oil since the beginning of the oil age. In fact that, you know, there seeps in, in Pennsylvania near Titusville where colonel Drake drilled his first well, where Exxon, had a group of, of people that they call the rover boys that went around the world after World War II looking for places on the Earth's surface that had big structures and oil seeps.Dan:00:04:39Because when you have a seep at the sea floor with or on the Earth's surface with oil and gas, you know that you had organic matter that's been cooked the right amount and it's formed hydrocarbons and it's migrating and all those things are important to findings, you know, economic quantities of oil and gas. So seeps have been used on land since the beginning of oil and gas exploration. But it wasn't until the 1990s that seeps began to affect how we explore offshore. So that's seeps go back to since the dawn of humanity, they were used in oil exploration from the earliest days, the 1870's and 80's onward. But they've been used offshore now since the mid 1990s. So that's, that's kind of, that seeps in context.Duncan:00:05:31But it's actually the, I, the way I like to think about it, it's the bit missing from the, "What is Geology 101" that every, everyone in the oil and gas industry has to know. They always show a source rock and a migration to a trap and a seal. But that actually misses part of the story. Almost every basin in the world has leakage from that trap, either, either directly from the source rock or from the trap. It either fills to the spill point or it just misses the trap. Those hydrocarbons typically make their way to the surface at some point-Dan:00:06:04at some point and somewhere. The trick is finding them.Duncan:00:06:08Yeah, that's the seep. And thus what we're interested in finding.Erica:00:06:12As Jed Clampett from the Beverly hillbillies discovered.Erica:00:06:15Exactly.Dan:00:06:15I was going to include that!Erica:00:06:19Yes.Dan:00:06:19Jed was out hunting for some food and up from the ground came a bubbling crude. That's it.Erica:00:06:27Oil that is.Dan:00:06:29Black gold.Erica:00:06:29Texas tea.Dan:00:06:30That's right. So that's that seep science. So today what we're going to do is we're going to talk about seep communities offshore because what I hope to be able to, you know, kind of convince you of is if oil and gas leak out of the sea floor, a seep community can form. Okay. Then we're going to talk about this thing called multibeam, which is a technique for mapping the sea floor because where you get a seep community, it affects the acoustic properties of the sea floor. And if we change the acoustic properties of sea floor or the shape of the sea floor with this mapping tool, we can identify a potential seep community and then we can go sample that.Dan:00:07:14And if we can sample it, we can analyze the geochemistry and the geochemistry will tell us whether or not we had oil or gas or both. And we can use it in all sorts of other ways. But that's where we're going to go to today. So that's kind of, that's kind of a map of our discussion today. Okay. So as Duncan said, most of the world, he Duncan talked about how in- if we have, an oil basin or gas basin with charge, there's going to be some leakage somewhere. And so the trick is to find that, okay. And so, we could, we could look at any basin in the world and we can look at where wells have been drilled and we can, we can look at where seeps leak out of the surface naturally. And there's a correlation, like for example, LA is a prolific hydrocarbon basin. Okay. And it has Labrea tar pits, one of the most charismatic seeps on earth cause you got saber tooth tigers bubbling outDuncan:00:08:18It's literally a tourist attraction.Dan:00:08:20Right there on Wilshire Boulevard. Okay. And it's a hundred meters long by 50 meters wide. So a hundred yards long, 50 yards wide. And it, that is an oil seep on, on the earth surface in LA okay.Duncan:00:08:32Now, it's important to mention that they're not all as big as that.Dan:00:08:34No, no. Sometimes they're smaller. It could just literally be a patch of oil staining in the sand.Erica:00:08:41Really, that's little.Duncan:00:08:41Oh yeah. I mean, or just an area where there's a cliff face with something draining out of it or it, you know, it could be really, really small, which is easy to find onshore. You know, you send the rover boys out there like you mentioned, and you know, geologists working on the ground, they're going to find these things eventually. But the challenge, which we've been working on with, with the guys from One for the last few years, and now is finding these things offshore.Dan:00:09:06So let's, let's turn the clock back to 1977. Alvin, a submarine, a submersible with three people in it went down on a Mid-ocean Ridge near the Galapagos Islands. And what they found, they were geologists going down to map where the oceanic crust is created. But what they found was this crazy community, this incredible, oasis of life with tube worms and these giant columns with what looked like black smoke spewing into the, into the ocean. And so what they found are what we now call black smokers or hot vents, and what was so shocking is the bottom of the ocean is it's a desert. There's no light, there's very little oxygen, there's not a lot of primary food energy. So what was this incredible, oasis of life doing thousands of meters down on, near the Galapagos Island? Well, it turns out that the base of the food chain for those hot vents are sulfide rich fluids, which come spewing out of the earth and they fuel a chemically based, community that thrives there and is an oasis as there because there's so much energy concentrated in those hot sulfide rich fluids that it can support these chemically based life forms.Dan:00:10:34So that's 1977 in 1985 in the same summer, chemically based life forms, but based on ambient temperature, water, not hot water were found in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Oregon that same summer, 1985 in the Gulf of Mexico, the base of the food chain, what was fueling this chemical energy was hydrocarbons, oil and gas, and off the coast of Oregon, what was fueling it was hydrogen sulfide. So this is 1985, the year I graduated college. And so I started graduate school in 1986 and part of my research was working with the group that was trying to figure out the plumbing that was bringing these chemically rich fluids up to the earth's surface that were feeding this brand new community of life. You know, what we now call cold seeps. So, we, you know, depending on what you had for breakfast today, you know, eggs or pancakes or had your coffee, all the energy that we've got coursing through our veins right now is based upon photosynthesis.Dan:00:11:45We're either eating plants that got their energy from sunlight or we're eating eggs that came from chickens that eat the plants that can, where the came from, sunlight. Everything in our world up here is based upon photosynthesis. So, but the seep communities, the hot vents and the black smokers and the cold seeps, the base of the food pyramid is chemical energy. So they're called chemosynthetic communities or chemoautotrophic because the bacteria get their trophic energy, the energy that they need to live from chemicals. And so the bacteria utilize the chemicals and organisms have evolved to host these bacteria inside their bodies. And the bacteria metabolize the chemical energy to produce the enzymes that these larger organisms need to live. So these larger organisms can include clams, tube worms, the actual bacteria themselves. But, so the kind of how does this work is- let's get, because if we understand how seeps work and we know that seeps can be based upon oil and gas seepage, then you'll understand why we're using these seeps to go out and impact, oil and gas exploration.Dan:00:13:09So the- at the bottom of the ocean, we have a little bit of oxygen, but as we go down into the sediments, below the surface, we, we consume all that oxygen and we get to what's called the redox boundary to where we go from sulfate above it to hydrogen sulfide below it. And so below this redox boundary, we can have methane, we can have oil, but above that redox boundary, the methane will oxidize and the oil will be biodegraded and eaten by critters and whatnot. Now, living at that boundary, are bacteria who metabolize these compounds, and that's where they get the energy they need to live. These bac- Okay, now kind of turned the clock even farther back before the earth had an oxygen atmosphere, the only way that organisms got energy to live was from chemicals. Okay? So before we had algae and we created this oxygen atmosphere that we breathe billions of years ago, the organisms that lived on earth were chemosynthetic.Dan:00:14:13So these bacteria survive today and they live everywhere where we cross this redox boundary. Okay? So there they're actually archaea, which are some of the most primitive forms of bacteria, and I'm not a biologist, so I can't tell you how many billions of years ago they formed, but they're ancient and they're living down there.Erica:00:14:33So they haven't changed since then. They're basically the same?Dan:00:14:36Nope.Erica:00:14:36Wow.Dan:00:14:36They figured out a way to get energy to survive. It works.Erica:00:14:40Why change it?Dan:00:14:41If you're an Archea, right? So they're living down there at that redox boundary. Now, if we have seepage-seepage, is the flow of liquids. You actually lift that redox boundary. And if you have enough seepage, you can lift that boundary right to the sediment water interface. If you step in a pond and you smell that, sulfide, that rotten egg smell, your foot has gone through the redox boundary.Dan:00:15:08Okay? And you've disturbed some archaea down there and they'll get nudged aside. They'll go find someplace else. Okay? So with seepage, we lift the redox boundary to the sediment water interface and, and the bacteria are there and they're ready to utilize the reduced fluids as their source of energy. And so you can see them, we have pictures. You can do an internet search and say, you know, bacteria chemosynthetic bacteria and images and look at and look at photos of them. They it, they look like, okay, when you put the Guacamole in the back of the fridge and you forget it for three weeks and you open it up, that's what they look like. It's that fuzzy. It's this fuzzy mat of bacteria. And those are the bacteria. They're out there. They're metabolizing these fluids. Okay. Now in the process of metabolizing these fluids, they produce the bacteria, produce enzymes like ATP.Dan:00:16:01And I wish my partner John Decker, was here because he would correct me. I think it's adinase triphosphate and it's an enzyme that your body produces and sends out to basically transmit chemical energy. Okay. Now at some point in geologic time, and I'll, I'll actually put a number on this in a second. The larger fauna like clams and tube worms, evolve to take advantage of the fact that the bacteria are producing energy. And so they then evolve to use the bacteria within themselves to create the energy that they need to live. Okay? So, what happens is these seep fauna produce larva, the larva go into, you know, kind of a dormant stage and they're flowing around the ocean. And if they sense a seep, okay. They settle down and they start to grow and as, and then they, they, they, the bacteria become part of them.Dan:00:16:56They're the, the clams. You open a clam in the bacteria live in the gills. Okay. And so they'd grow and, and so these clams and tube worms start to grow and they form a community. Okay. So that a clam, what a clam does these clams, they stick their foot into the, into the sediment and they absorb the reduced fluids into their circulation system. They bring that, that circulating fluid to their gills where the bacteria then metabolize these reduced fluids and send the enzymes out to the tissues of the clam so it can grow. So this clam does not filter feed like every other clam on the planet. The tube worms that host these bacteria in them don't filter feed. So the base of the food chain is chemosynthetic. But the megafauna themselves, don't get their energy directly from methane or hydrogen sulfide. They get their energy from the bacteria, which in the bacteria, you know, the bacteria happy, they'll live anywhere.Dan:00:17:59But sitting here in a clam, they get the reduced fluids they need to live and they grow. Now it's what's cool for us as, as seep hunters is different species have evolved to kind of reflect different types of fluids. So if you know a little bit about seep biology, when you pick up like a batheum Modiolus mussel, you go, Huh? There could be oil here. Okay. Because that particular mussel is found in association with, with oil seeps. Okay. So that we won't go too far down that path, but there are different organisms. The important thing is that these communities, form again an oasis of life, a high concentration of life where we have a seep. Now, the oldest seep community that I'm aware of is Devonian. So that's between 420 and 360 million years. It's found in the high atlas mountains of Morocco.Dan:00:18:58And that seep community, a fossil seep community includes the same types of clams in tube worms that we find today. Okay. But they're also found with authigenic carbonate. Okay. Which is like limestone. And so, and that limestone in cases, this fossil seep community and has preserved it for hundreds of millions of years. So where does limestone come from? So remember we've got methane, CH4 in our, in some of our seep fluids. Well, if that's oxidized by bacteria, cause they're going to get energy from the methane they produced bicarbonate, which is HCO3 as a negative charge on it. And that bicarbonate, if it sees calcium, they like each other. And so they'll form calcium carbonate, limestone. And since sea water is everywhere saturated with calcium, if we have a natural gas seep, the bacteria will oxidize in natural gas and the bicarbonate will grab the calcium to form this cement.Dan:00:20:04Now deep enough in the ocean, it actually is acidic enough that that cement will start to dissolve. So we just have this, we have a factory of of bacteria. It might be dissolving some places, but most of the places we look, the carbonate doesn't dissolve. So we've got clams, tube worms, we've got the limestone authigenic carbonate, and if the pressure and temperature are in the right field, that methane can also form this really cool substance called gas hydrate and gas hydrate is a clathrate the, it's a combination of water and methane where the water forms an ice-like cage and the methane sits in that cage. And so you can light this on fire in your hand and the gas will burn. Nice yellow flame will go up from your hand and the cage will melt. The ice melts. So you get cold water on your hand with flames going up. It, it's cool stuff.Erica:00:21:03Did you bring one of these to show us today?Dan:00:21:06The pressure and temperature in this room are not, methane's not an equilibrium. You need hot, you need high pressure, moderately high pressure and you need very low temperatures. So, if we had-Duncan:00:21:20Neither are common in Houston, (Laughter)Dan:00:21:22No, and we wouldn't be terribly comfortable if that was what it was like here in this room. But the, the important thing for us now as we think about seep science and, and seep hunting is that this, this limestone cement, the authigenic carbonate, the gas hydrate, the shells of a clam, okay. Are All harder. Okay? Harder, I will knock on the table. They're harder than mud. So the sea floor, most of the most of the world's ocean is gray-green mud and ooze from all sorts of sediment and diatoms and plankton raining down onto the ocean floor. So most of the world's oceans is kind of just muddy sandy some places, but sediment, it's where you get these seep communities that now we've, we've formed a spot that some that's harder and rougher than the area around it. And that's our target when we, deploy technologies to go out and, and look at seeps.Dan:00:22:26So, so hot smokers, hot vents were discovered in 1977. Cold seeps were discovered in 1985 and were found to be associated, in the Gulf of Mexico with oil and gas seepage. That's 1985. Those were discovered with human beings in a sub in submersibles. Later, we deployed robotic submersibles to go look at seeps, ROV's and even later we developed tools to go sample seeps without needing to have eyes on the bottom and we'll come and talk and we'll come back and talk about that later.Dan:00:22:57But for kind of recap, a seep is a place where something is leaking out of the earth surface. When we talk about seeps, we're talking about offshore seepage of oil and gas that supports this profusion of chemically-based life forms as well as these precipitants, the authigenic carbonate limestone and gas hydrate. And the important thing is they change the acoustic properties of the sea floor.Duncan:00:23:28Yeah. Then the key thing is that you've gone from having, seeps onshore, which are relatively easy to walk up to and see, but hard to find, to seeps offshore, which are impossible to walk up to or very difficult. You need a submersible to do it. But because of this, chemosynthetic communities that build up around it and our knowledge of that and now gives us something to look for geophysically. So we can apply some geophysics, which we'll get on to talk about next in terms of the multibeam, to actually hunt for these things in a very cost effective way and a very fast manner. So we can cover, as Dan said, right at the start, hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, even over a million now, in a cost effective, timely manner and identify these seeps from the sea surface.Dan:00:24:15Now fishermen, know where seeps are because all of this limestone provides places for fish to leave their larva where they might live, they call them refugia. It's a, it's a place where, you know, lots of little fish and where you have lots of little fish, you have lots of big fish. And since we're also increasing this primary productivity, you get, you get profusions of fish around seep communities. So we've found authigenic carbonate in the front yards of fishermen in areas where that we've gone to study seeps. And if you chip a little bit off it, you can go and analyze it in the lab or if you can get somebody who fishes for a living to tell you their spots. And that involves convincing them that you're not going to steal their spots and you're not gonna tell everybody where their spots are. But if you go into a frontier area, if you can get somebody who fishes for a living to talk to you, you might have some ideas of where to go look for them.Dan:00:25:14So it kind of, one other point that I wanted to make here about seeps is, remember I talked about how seep organism creates kind of a larva, which is dormant and it's kind of flowing through the world's ocean, looking for a seep community, doing some back of the envelope calculations. If, if a larva can survive for about a month. Okay. And you have a one knot current that larva can move about 1300 kilometers in a month, which is about the length of the island of Java. And it might be about the length of the state of California. So if you think now, so if you think about that, then all you need is a seep community somewhere to be sending out larva. Most of which of course never gonna survive. And then if we get a seep somewhere else, the odds are that there's going to be a larva bouncing along the sea floor that is going to see that and start growing.Dan:00:26:08So for us as explorationists as the, the important thing is if there's a seep, there's a pretty good chance that, that a seep community will start to form, if the seepage lasts long enough, it will form a community depending, you know, might be large, might be medium size, but it changes the acoustic properties of the sea floor. Okay, so that, remember we're going to talk about seeps what they, what, what's a seep and that is how it's related to hydrocarbon seepage out of the or natural gas oil, you know, reduced fluids. What we were going to talk about, and now we're going to talk about how offshore we use this technology called multibeam to go and find them. Okay.Dan:00:26:51So back in, back in the Cold War, the air force came up with a tool to map the former Soviet Union called synthetic aperture radar. And when the navy saw the air forces maps, they said, we want a map of the sea floor. And at the time, you know, if you remember your World War II movies, the submarine sends out a Ping, somebody listening on, their, on their headphones and and the ping comes back and the amount of time that it took for the ping to go out and the ping come back is how deep the water is. If you know the speed of sound in water. But that's, that's just one point directly beneath you, that's not good enough to get a detailed map of the sea floor. So, driven by these cold war needs, the navy contracted a company called general instruments to develop a tool to map the sea floor and they develop what's called SASS, the sonar array sounding system, which we now call multibeam.Dan:00:27:49In the 1960s, it was unveiled to the world during a set of, submersible dives to the mid Ocean Ridge, I believe in 1975 as part of the famous project. And the geoscientist looked at that map and it was a contour map of the mid ocean region. They said, holy smokes, what's that? Where'd that come from? And the navy said, well, we kind of developed a new technology and it was first commercialized in 1977 the same year hot smokers were discovered on the world's oceans. And it has been continuously developed since then. And in about the 1990s, it got resolute enough for, for us to take this, this kind of seeps, seep hunting science and take it offshore. So until then, 1980s, we were deploying submersibles. We were going down and looking at them. We had very crude maps. We had some side scan shows, a little bit about, the acoustic properties of the sea floor.Dan:00:28:46But it wasn't until the mid 1990s that we realized that with these tools, these sea floor mapping tools that had acoustic, analyzing techniques that we could identify areas that were harder and rougher and had a different shape, that allowed us to start, instead of just driving around and, and, we're finding one by, by luck or chance actually saying, Huh, there's a, there's an interesting acoustic signature over there. Let's go take a look at it. And deploying submersibles and ROVs and realizing that yes, we had tools that could, be used to, to map the sea floor and identify seeps and driven by their own interests. The Navy, the US navy was very interested in these and, was, was a early, early funder of seep science and they've continued with it as well as academic institutions around the world that got very interested in seep communities.Dan:00:29:45And in fact, NASA, NASA is really interested in seep communities because they're chemically based life forms in what are basically extreme environments. And so if NASA wants to figure out what life is going to look like on a different planet, or a different moon on it, or surrounding a different planet that doesn't have an oxygen atmosphere, here's a, a laboratory on earth that, that they can use. So NASA has been funding seep science as well.Dan:00:30:11So multibeam what is it and how does it apply to, to, to hunting seeps. So multibeam, which is this technology that was developed by and funded by the navy in the 1960s and commercialized in the 70s uses two acoustic arrays of transducers. one array is mounted parallel to the length of a ship. And when you fire off all those transducers, it sends out a ping. And the longer the array is, the narrower that beam is. That's how antennas work. So that that long array sends out a ping, which is narrow along track and a shape, kind of like a saucer. So if you can imagine two dinner plates put together, that's what this, ping of energy looks like. And that's what we call the transmit beam. So then if you listen to the sea floor with an array that's perpendicular to the transmitter ray, we are now listening to an area that's, that's narrow across track. Okay. And it's long elongate a long track. So we've got this narrow transmit beam in one direction that's, that's now perpendicular to the ship. And we've got a narrow receive beam that's parallel to the ship and where those two intersect is what we call a beam. And so with, with lots of different, transducers mounted, perpendicular to the ship, we can listen from all the way out to the port about 65 degrees down below the ship and all the way over to starboard, again, about 65 degrees. And we have lots of beams.Dan:00:31:51So right now the system that we're using, on our project has 455 beams across track. So every time we send out a ping, we ensonify the sea floor on, on these 455 beams. And as we go along, we send out another ping and another ping. And we're basically, we're painting the sea floor. It's, it's like mowing the lawn with a big lawn mower or using a Zamboni to drive around an ice rink. You can just think of it as as a ship goes along. We are ensonifying and listening to a wide patch of sea floor and we typically map, about a five kilometer, about a three mile, a wide swath, and we send out a ping every six or 10 seconds. Depends how, you know, depends on the water depth. And so we're able to map 1000 or 2000 square kilometers a day with this technique. This multibeam technique.Duncan:00:32:48Since a lot of our podcast listeners might be familiar with seismic is that's probably the biggest percentage of the, the geophysical industry. This is not too different. It's an acoustic based technique. I guess the main difference is are we live working in a different, frequency bandwidth. And also that we have both the receiver and the transmitter both mounted on the same boat. So we're not dealing with a streamer out the back of a boat. we have transmitter and receiver are both whole mounted. But after that it's all pretty similar to seismic. We go backwards and forwards, either in 2D lines or in a, in a 3D grid and we build up a picture. Now because of the frequencies we're working with, we don't penetrate very deep into the sea floor. but as, as we mentioned, we're interested in seeing those seep communities on the sea floor. So that's why we this, this is the perfect technology for, for that application.Erica:00:33:40Oh, can you talk a little bit about the post-processing that's involved with multibeam?Dan:00:33:44Well, let me- Erica, Great question. Let me, come back to that later cause I want to pay, I want to pick up on what Duncan talked about in and add one very important wrinkle. So first of all, absolutely correct, the frequencies are different. In seismic, we're down in the hertz to tens of Hertz and in Multibeam we're in the tens of kilohertz and in very shallow water, maybe even over higher than a hundred kilohertz. In seismic, we have air guns that send that radiate out energy. And we, we designed the arrays so that we get most of the energy in the direction that we're looking with multi beam. We have a narrow, remember it's one degree wide in here. If you got kids, see if anybody still has a protractor anymore, grab a protractor and look at how wide one degree is. It's very narrow.Duncan:00:34:39There's probably an iPhone app for that. (Laughter) see what one used to look like.Dan:00:34:43But with, with seismic, the air guns sends out energy and we listened to the reflected energy out on the streamer back behind the ship or on a node somewhere else. It's reflected energy. With multibeam, the energy goes out and it interacts with the sea floor and the shallow subsurface. Most of it gets reflected away and we don't, we don't, hear that it, but some of it actually comes back in the same direction that the sound went out and we call that backscatter. So backscatter energy comes back to you and it's that backscatter that, can increase when we have hard and rough material either on the sea floor or buried below the sea floor. So the way that we process it is since we know the time of length, the time of path on how long it took to get out, hit the sea floor and come back, or you can correct for path lengths, energy radiates outward and spherical patterns. So we correct for spherical spreading. we know the angle that it hit the sea floor, so we correct for angle of ensonification. And then the next and most important things are where was the ship, when the pulse went out? And where is the ship when the pulse comes back, including what's the orientation of the ship? So we need to know the location, the position of the ship in X, Y, and Z to centimeters. And we need to know the orientation of the ship to tenths of a degree or better on both the transmit and the receive. But the key thing is, if we know that path length in the spherical spreading and we correct for all of that and we get a response that's much greater than we expected, we get higher backscatter energy and it's, it's those clams and tube worms authigenic carbonate gas hydrate that can increase the hardness and the roughness of the sea floor that kicked back the backscatter energy.Dan:00:36:46Okay. Now what happens if the oil and gas, or the reduced fluids if they shut off? Well, I'm sorry to say for the clams and the tube worms that they will eventually die. The bacteria will still live at that redox boundary as it settles back below the sediment. And then when we pile some sediment on top of that dead seep community, it's still there. The shells are there, the carbonate's still there. So with the, with multibeam that the frequencies, we use 12 and 30 kilohertz penetrate between two, three 10 meters or so into the sediment. So if you shut off the seepage and bury that seep community, they're still there. And if we can sample that below that redox boundary at that location, chances are we're going to get a oil or gas in, in our sample. And in fact, we encounter live seep communities very, very, very, very rarely, you know, kind of one in a thousand.Dan:00:37:50But, we, we encounter seep fauna down in our sample cores, which we'll talk about later, much more frequently. And, and we, we find hydrocarbons, we are very successful at finding hydrocarbons. And the key thing is we're using seep science to go look in, in basins or extend outward from basins in areas where there may be no known oil or gas production. And that's why the seeps are useful. So multibeam unlike a seismic, we got to collect the data, then we got it and you to do all sorts of processing and it takes a while to, to crank the computers and whatnot. Multibeam we can, we can look at it as it comes in and we can see the backscatter strength. We can see what the swath that it's mapping every ping, every six seconds. And it takes about, it takes less than a day to process a days worth of multibeam.Dan:00:38:47So when our ships are out there working every morning, when we get the daily report from the ship, we see another thousand or 2000 square kilometers of data that were mapped just the previous day. So it's for, those who can't wait, it's really satisfying. But for those of us who are trying to accelerate projects, it's great because when the data come off the ship, they're already processed. We can start picking targets and we can be out there, you know, in weeks sampling. So that's so multibeam it's, it's bathymetry, it's backscatter, but we're also imaging the water column. So if there's, a gas plume, coming out of the sea floor, naturally we can see that gas plume and, so that we can see the water column. We can see the sea floor or the bathymetry, and the backscatter. Erica, you asked, you know, about the processing and I talked about how we have to know the position and the orientation, of the ship, that means that we have to survey in using a laser theodolight.Dan:00:39:54We have to survey in every component of the system on the ship to, you know, fractions of a millimeter. And we drive the surveyors nuts because we are, we are more demanding than the, the BMW plant in South Carolina. And they point that out to us every time. Yes, we're more demanding. But if they have a problem with, with a robot in the BMW plant, they can go out and survey it again, once we put this ship in the water, I can't go survey the array that's now welded to the bottom of the ship. It's there. And so that's why we make them do three replicate surveys and do loop ties and convince us that we've got incredibly accurate and precise system. So that's when we survey the ship. We use, well we go back and we go and we check their math and we make sure all the numbers are entered into the system correctly.Dan:00:40:46We, measure the water column every day so that we have the best velocity data that we use to correct the, that position. We measure the salinity in the water column because it affects how energy is absorbed. It's called the absorption coefficient. We measure the acoustic properties of the ship. So we understand maybe we need to turn off the starboard side pump in order to get better multibeam data. And we evaluate every component of the ship. Something. Sometimes they'll have, you know, the, the waste unit was, was mounted onto the, onto the deck of the ship and nobody thought about putting a rubber bushing between that unit and the hall to isolate the sound. And it just so happens it's at 12 kilohertz. So it swamps your acoustic energy or degrades our data quality because it's all about data quality so that we can find these small, interesting high backscatter targets. We polish the hull. We send divers down every eight weeks or 12 weeks or 16 weeks because you get biofouling you get, you get these barnacles growing in a barnacle in between your acoustic array in the sea floor is going to affect the data. So we send divers down to go scrape the hull and scraped the prop.Duncan:00:42:05So it's probably worth mentioning that this is the same type of multibeam or multibeam data is the same data that is used in other parts of the oil and gas industry as well. So I mean, any pipeline that's ever been laid in the last few decades has had a multibeam survey before it. Any bit of marine infrastructure that an oil and gas company wants to put in the Gulf of Mexico. Certainly you have to have a multibeam survey ahead of time. what's different here is that we're, we're trying to cover big areas and we're trying to get a very specific resolution. So maybe it's worth talking a bit about that. Dan what we're actually trying to achieve in terms of the resolution to actually find seeps.Dan:00:42:42You got it. So we, we can, we can control the resolution because we can control how wide a swath we go and how fast we go. So, if you're really interested in, if you want to do a site survey and you want to get incredibly detailed data of a three kilometer by three kilometer square, you could deploy an autonomous underwater vehicle or an ROV and get very, very, very resolute, like smaller than half a meter of bin size. for what we do, where our goal is exploration, the trade off is between, do I want more resolute data or do I want more data and it that that is a tradeoff and it's something that we struggle with. And we think that the sweet spot is mapping that five kilometers swath and three miles wide, swath at about oh eight to 10 knots. So let's say about 16 kilometers an hour.Dan:00:43:40That gets us a thousand to 2000 square kilometers a day. And by acquiring data in that manner, we get a 15 meter bathymetric bin independent of water depth and our backscatter since we subsample that bathymetric bin for the backscatter, we can get a five meter backscatter pixel. So now if I have four, if I have four adjacent pixels, you know, shaped like a square, that's a 10 meter by 10 meter spot on the sea floor, it's slightly larger than this room. We could, you could see that now you might need a couple of more to be larger than that. So to have a target actually stand out, and that's about how accurate our sampling is with the core barrel. So, the long answer to your question is about a 15 meter bathymetric bin and a five meter backscatter pixel is what we're currently doing for our exploration work.Dan:00:44:32Now we pay attention to what's going on in the navigation and the positioning world because it affects our data quality. So the higher the quality of, of our navigation, the higher the quality of our data on the sea floor. So about a decade ago, the world's airlines asked if they could fly their airplanes closer together and the FAA responded and said, not unless you improve GPS and so sponsored by the world's airlines. They set up ground stations all in, in the, in the most heavily traveled parts of the world that improve the GPS signal by having an independent orbital corrections. What that means is for us working off shore, we take advantage of it. It's called wide area augmentation. And, using this system, which is now it's a, it's add on for a GPS receiver, we're able to get six centimeter accuracy of a ship that's out there in the ocean that surveying.Dan:00:45:27So that's six centimeters. What's that? About two and a half inches. And for those of us who grew up with low ran and very, you know, where you were lucky if you knew where you were to within, you know, a quarter of a mile. it's, it's just astonishing to me that this box can produce data of that quality, but that flows through to the quality of the data that we get on our surveys, which flows through to our ability to find targets. So I think, I told you about sub sampling, the bathymetry for backscatter and I've told, I told you about the water column and we've talked about the resolution. I think we've, we've pretty much hit what multibeam is. It's, it's a real time near real time acquisition, high frequency narrow beam. We image the sea floor and the shallow subsurface. Okay and we use that to find anomalous backscatter targets.Duncan:00:46:20Well, let's talk about the water column a little bit more done because I know we've published some pictures and images from our surveys. Showing the water column anomalies. The backscatter data, in the water column itself can actually help us find seeps. The right mixture of oil and gas coming out of this, an active seep and migrating up through the water column can actually be picked up on these multibeam data also. So that's, a real direct hit that you've got to see and that it's actually still producing oil today,Dan:00:46:53Right, so when, when gas and oil leak out of the sea floor, the gas bubble begins to expand as it comes up, just like a would in a, in a carbonated beverage because there's less pressure. So that gap, that bubble is expanding. If there's oil present, the oil coats the outside of the bubble and actually protects it from dissolving into the water column. And so the presence of gas with a little bit of oil leaking out of the sea floor creates these bubbles that, are big enough to see with these 12 and 30 kilohertz systems. And so when we see a plume coming out of the sea floor, that's natural, a seepage of gas, possibly with a little bit of oil and it provides a great target for us to go and hit. Now those seeps are flowing into the water column and the water column has currents and the currents aren't the same from one day to the next and one week to the next.Dan:00:47:47So if we image a seep a couple of different times, one day it will be flowing in one direction and the next time we see it flowing in a different direction. The area in common between the two is pointing us toward the origin point on the sea floor. And that's what we're going to target. And if you, if you hunt around, look for NOAA studies of, of the US Gulf of Mexico, over Mississippi Canyon near where the deep water horizon, went down because there are, the, NOAA has published, images of the gas seeps in that area where there are natural oil and gas seeps leaking, leaking other, the sea floor. And these natural seeps occur all over the world. Okay? And they're bringing oil and gas into the water column. But remember, nature has basically provided, the cleanup tool, which is the bacteria. So where oil and gas settle onto the sea floor, there are bacteria that will consume it. You don't want a lot of it in one place, cause then then you've got, you know, a real environmental disaster. But natural oil and gas seepage goes hand in hand with natural seep consuming organisms that metabolize these fluids. So a multi beam seeps backscatter okay. That I think we've, we've talked about what the target looks like. Let's talk about how we go in and sample it.Duncan:00:49:12Yeah, no, I think that's the real key thing. Particularly here in the Gulf of Mexico. I mean we talked at the start about how I'm using seeps can tell you whether a basin has hydrocarbons in it or not. Clearly we're decades past the point of knowing whether there's oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico. So even in the deep water gulf of Mexico, especially here in the US side, we know that there's oil and gas, so that information is long gone. We don't, we don't need an update on that anymore. What we need to know is information about the type of oil, the age of the oil, the deep positional environment that the oil is deposited in. And if we can actually get a sample from these seeps, then that's the sort of information that modern geochemistry can start to pull out for us.Dan:00:49:57we've sat in the same meetings where the, the potential client companies have said, why are you, why are you gonna map the deepest part of the Gulf of Mexico? There's no oil out there. And lo and behold, we found anomalous backscatter targets on a diapirs, which are areas, mounds out in the deepest parts of the Gulf of Mexico. And lo and behold, if you, if you look at the data, know that that statement was incorrect. There is oil and gas out there in other parts of the world. We've had companies say, oh, this part's all oil and this part's gas. Well, how do you know that? Well, because we've drilled for oil out here and we don't think there's any oil. Once you get out there and you don't know, you don't know what you don't know until you go map it and sample it and then you come back, you put the data on their desk and they go, huh, hey, we were wrong man. I guess there's oil out there. And, and in other parts of the world where you know, we've done all our exploration close to land or in shallow water, we go out into the deepest part and nobody's ever drilled a well out there. So, you use the seep science to go to basically fill that in.Dan:00:51:09So in order to make money exploring for oil, you had to have organic matter. Originally it had to be, it had to be buried and cooked. Okay. So you needed temperature and pressure. You need time takes time to do that, then it needs to migrate. Okay. With the exception of unconventionals, we're not gonna talk about unconventional today with the exception of unconventionals, the hydrocarbons have to migrate, so they're concentrated so that you can go drill them and recover them. And they need to be in a reservoir.Dan:00:51:41And it has to be sealed. And so when we find a seep and all of that goes into what we talk about in oil exploration as the risk equation, like what's the probability of success? If you don't know whether you have a migration, you have maximum uncertainty and that flows through into your, into your risk. Well, if we find a seep, remember we've proven that there was organic matter. We've proven that it was buried and cooked for the right amount of time to create oil and gas and that it's migrated. We can't tell you anything about reservoir or seal or timing, but we can, we can materially impact the risk equation by finding a seep. Okay. So right before you drill a well, wouldn't you like to know whether or not there's oil or gas in the neighborhood? Cause a well can be a can be $100 million risk.Dan:00:52:34Okay. Usually you wouldn't, wouldn't you like to know? So remember when we started looking at seeps, 1977 for the hot vents 85 for the cold vents, we used human beings in a submersible. Later we shifted to using robotic submersibles where a human being sit on a ship in a control room, operate the ROV with joysticks, and you watch the videos come through. Well, those are great, but they're really expensive and you can't look at much sea floor on any given day because you're limited to how fast you can move across the sea floor and how much you can look at. So if we surveyed 2000 square kilometers in a day, we want to be able to evaluate that in less than 20 years. We want to be able to evaluate that in, you know, in a similar length of time, a day or two. So what we've done is we've shifted toward using what we, what's called a piston core, which, which is a six meter long, 20 foot long tube with about a thousand kilos on a 2,000 pounds.Dan:00:53:37And we lower it through the sea floor, operating it with a winch from a ship. And by putting a navigation beacon on that core, we can track it through the water column in real time. And if we have this high backscatter target on the sea floor, we can lower it to the water column. Once we're about fit and we're within 50 meters, 150 feet of the sea floor, we can see whether we're on target and then we let it go. When the pist- when the, it has a trigger weight on it, you can look this up, how to, how do piston cores work, that the core, lets go and it free falls that last little bit and it penetrates the sea floor. You haul it back to the surface. Now if it had gas hydrate in it, if it has oil in it, if it has gas in it, you can see it right away. when you pull the clear liner out of the core, and there it is, you know, whether or not you've got success, for most cores, there's no visual evidence of hydrocarbons that we sample that core tube, three different samples. One of them, we take a sample into what we call a gas can and seal that. And then we put a couple of hockey puck size chunks of sediment into Ziploc bags and everything goes into the freezer. And you ship that back, from the next port call. And about a month later you get a spreadsheet in your email, that says, oh, guess what you found methane, ethane, propane, butane, and Pentane. And look at this, you've got enough fluorescents that this is a guaranteed oil hit. So, again, you think about the time we map a couple thousand square kilometers a day.Dan:00:55:18We mapped for a month, we'll look the data for a month. We go out and core for a couple of weeks and a month later the Geochemistry starts flowing in. So real quick, multibeam as we've, as we've discussed as a way to get a detailed map of the sea floor, both the shape of it and the hardest roughness, acoustic properties. So any company laying a fiber optic cable across the world's oceans is acquiring multibeam data. Any, municipality that's worried about how deep their ports are and whether there's enough space for the ships to come in, is acquiring multibeam data. The corps of engineers who pays companies to dredge sand in the Mississippi River has to have a before and after multibeam a map, when MH370 went down and needed to be hunted for before they deployed the real high resolution tools. They needed a map of the sea floor and that was a part of the ocean that has never been mapped in detail before.Dan:00:56:23So most of the world's oceans have net have never been mapped in the detail that we're mapping them. We're using the tool to go hunt seeps. But there are all sorts of other uses of, of that multi beam technology. So, what are we looking for when we, when we, when we're looking for seeps, you know, what have, where have people found oil and gas leaking out of the sea floor? What does it look like? Or what are the targets? Well, if the gas burps out of the sea floor, it creates a pockmark. And those are targets, in many parts of the world, the Apennines of Italy, Azerbaijan, there are what we call mud volcanoes, where over pressured mud from deep down in the earth is kind of spewing out gently, slowly and continuously at the earth's surface. And lo and behold, it's bringing up oil and gas along with it. So mud volcanoes are known, oil and gas seeps onshore. Of course we're going to use them, offshore. Any place where we have a fault, you can create fracture permeability that might let oil and gas up. Faults can also seal, but a fault would be a good target, an anticline, a big fold that has a, can have seeps coming out of the crest of, it's similar to the seeps that were discovered early in late 18 hundreds. And in, in the USA, we can have areas where we have oil and gas leaking out of the sea floor, but it's not enough to change the shape of the sea floor. So we get high backscatter but no relief. Those, those are targets. So when we go out and we sample potential seep targets, we don't focus on only one type of target because that might only tell you one thing.Dan:00:58:04So we spread our, our targets around on different target types and we'll spread our targets around an area. Even if we, if we have more targets in one area than another area, we will spread our targets all the way around. Because the one thing that we've learned in decades of seep hunting is we're not as smart as we think we are. Nature always throws a curve ball. And you should, you should not think that you knew, know everything before you go into an area to analyze it because you might, you probably will find something that's, that startles you. And you know, as someone who's been looking at seeps since 1986, I continue to find things that we've never seen before. like our recent projects in the Gulf of Mexico, we found two target types that we've never seen before. The nearest analog on earth, on the surface is called a Pingo, which is when ice forms these really weird mountains up in the Arctic. And the one thing I can guarantee you that's not on the bottom of the world's ocean is an ice mound similar to what's forming the Arctic. But, but it had that shape. So we went and analyzed it and lo and behold, it told us something about the hydrocarbon system.Dan:00:59:12So those are all different types of target types so that the core comes back, we send it to the lab, we get first the very, what call the screening geochemistry, which is a light gases, methane through Pentane. We look at how fluorescent it is, cause that'll tell you whether or not you, you have a chance of of having a big oil hit. And we also look at what's called the chromatogram, which is a gas chromatography. And that tells us between about C15 and C36 C being the carbon length. So the, all your alkanes. And by looking at a Chromatogram, a trained professional will look that and say, oh, that's biodegraded oil. Or, oh, that's really fresh oil cause really fresh oil. All the, alkane peaks get smaller as they get bigger. So it has a very, very distinctive shape. Or they can look at it and they can tell you, you can, you can figure out the depositional environment. You can figure out whether the organic matter came from a lake, lacustrine, or maybe it's marine algal. We can say something about the age of it because flowering plants didn't evolve on earth till about the end of the age of dinosaurs. So at the end of the cretaceous, we got flowering plants. And so flowering plants create a molecule called oleanane. And so if there's no oleanane in the oil, that oil is older than cretaceous. So now we're telling something about a depositional environment.Dan:01:00:39We're saying something about the age, we can say the, the geochemist can say something about the maturity of the oil by looking at the geochemistry data. So all of this information, is now expanding what we know about what's in the subsurface and everything we know about seepage is that it is episodic in time. And it is distributed on earth's surface, not in kind of a random scattered, fashion. You get seepage above above a mud mud volcano, but for the surrounding hundred square kilometers around this mud volcano, we don't find any seep targets. Okay. So, our philosophy is that in order to find, in order to analyze the seats, we have to go find where we've got the highest probability of seepage and leakage. And that's where we target. So if you went out and just dropped a random grid over an area, you have a very, very low chance of hitting a concentrated site of seepage. And so, our hit rate, our success rate is, is high because we're using these biological and chemical indicators of seepage to help us guide where we sample. We have very precisely located sampling instruments this core with this acoustic beacon on it. And so we have, we have a very, very high success rates. And when we get hydrocarbons, we get enough hydrocarbons that we can do all of this advanced geochemistry on it.Duncan:01:02:13That's a good point Dan, even with- even without just doing a random grid of coring, piston coring has been done in the the US Gulf of Mexico for a long time now. And using seismic information, to target it. So like you say, looking for the faults and the anticlines and those type of features and very shallow anomalies on the seismic data. Even even guiding it with that information, typically a, a 5% hit rate might be expected. So you take two or 300 cores you know, you're going to get maybe 5%-10% hit rate, where you can actually look at the oils, and the geochemistry from the samples that you get. Using the multibeam, we were more like a 50 to 60% hit rate. And that's even with like Dan said, we're targeting some features where we know we're not going to find oil. so we could probably do even better than that if we, if we really focused in on finding oil. But obviously we're trying to assemble all the different types of seeps.Dan:01:03:11One of the things that we're asked and that we've heard from managers since we started working in the oil industry is what is this sea floor seep tell me about what's in my reservoir. And there's only, there have been very few, what we, what we call the holy grail studies published where a company has published the geochemistry at the reservoir level and the geochemistry on a seep that they can tie to that reservoir in the Gulf of Mexico. We collected dozens of seeps that can be tied to the same basin where there is known production. So in that Gulf of Mexico Dataset, a company that purchased that data and who had access to the reservoir oils could finally have a sufficient number of correlations that they could answer that question. What is the sea floor seep? Tell me about the reservoir. Because once you're comfortable in the Gulf of Mexico, that that seep is really telling you what's down in your reservoir.Dan:01:04:08Now you go into other parts of the world where you don't know what's in the reservoir before you drill and you find a good, a fresh seep with fresh oil right at the sea floor. Now you're confident that when you go down into the reservoir that you're going to find something, something similar. So let me talk a little bit about other things that you can do with these cores. And I'll start by kind of looking at these mud volcanoes. So this mud volcano, it had over pressured mud at depth. It came up to the surface of the earth and as it came up, it grabbed wall rock on its way up. So by analyzing a mud volcano, if we then go look at, say the microfossils, in all the class in a mud volcano, we can tell you about the age of the rocks that mud volcano came through without ever drilling a well.Dan:01:04:54So you can look at, at the, at the vitrinite reflectance, you can look at the maturity of the, of these wall rocks that are brought to you on the surface. You can look at heavy minerals. And when we go out and we do field geology, you know, you remember you're a geologist has a rock pick they and they go, the geologist goes up to the cliff and, and she or he chips a rock out and they take it back to lab and take a look at it. And that's how they tell something about what's in the outcrop. Well, it's hard to do field geology on the bottom of the ocean using a multibeam map and - acoustically guided core. We can now go and do field work on the, on the ocean floor and expand our knowledge of what's going on in a field area.Duncan:01:05:42So maybe it's worth talking a bit Dan about how we're jointly using these technologies or this group of technologies, at TGS, to put together projects. So the, I think generally the approach has been to look at, basin wide study areas. So we're not just carving off little blocks and doing, one of these, one of these projects over, over a particular block. We'll take on the whole Gulf of Mexico. So we, we broke it up into two. We looked at the Mexico side and the US side. But in total, I think it was nearly a million square kilometers that we covered and, about 1500 cores that I think we took, so we were putting these packages together in different basins all over the world, whether they're in mature basins like the Gulf of Mexico or frontier areas like places we're working in West Africa at the moment. But I think we're, we're looking to put more and more of these projects together. I think the technology applies to lots of different parts of the world. Both this side of the Atlantic and the eastern side of the Atlantic as well.Dan:01:06:44So since 2014, five years, we've mapped, we as in One and TGS have mapped, I believe over 1,250,000 square kilometers. We've acquired over 2000 cores. Oh. We also measure heat flow. We can use - is how the earth is shedding heat. And it's concentrated in some areas in, and you want to know heat flow if you're looking for oil, cause you got to know how much your organic matter has been cooked. So we've, we've collected thousands of cores, at dramatic success rates and we've used them. We've used these projects in areas of known hydrocarbon production, like the shallow water Gulf of Mexico, but we've, we've extended out into areas of completely unknown hydrocarbon production, the deep water Gulf of Mexico, the east coast of Mexico over in the Caribbean. We're looking at northwest Africa, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and the area, that's a jointly operated AGC. And we're looking at other frontier areas where we can apply this to this technology in concert with traditional tools, multichannel, seismic, gravity and magnetics to help, our clients get a better feel for the hydrocarbon prospectivity. You've got to have the seismic cause you've got to see what the subsurface looks like. But the, the multibeam which leads to seep targets, which leads ultimately to the geochemistry is what then affects the risk going forward into a basin.Duncan:01:08:20That's a good point, Dan. We don't see this as a technology that replaces seismic or gravity or magnetics or anything else, but it's another piece in the puzzle. And it's a very complimentary piece as well.Dan:01:08:31It is. And any areas you could argue that probably the best places to go look are where, your colleagues and other companies have said, oh, there's no oil there. Well, how do you know? Well, we don't think there's oil because we don't think there was a organic matter or we don't think that it was cooked enough. Well, you don't know until you go there and you find, so if you found one seep in that field area that had live oil and gas in it, you would know that that premise was incorrect. And now you have a competitive edge, you have knowledge that others don't and that can, that can affect your exploration, strategy in your portfolio. we haven't talked about cost. Multi beam is arguably one of the least expensive tools per square kilometer in the geophysical toolkit. Just because we don't need chase boats. We're not towing the streamer, we're going 10 knots. We're covering a couple of thousand square kilometers a day. So it's, it's, it's a tool that's useful in frontier exploration. It is complimentary to seismic, and it's a tool that, that you can use to guide where you want to spend money and how much money if you, if we survey a huge area and let's say half of it has no evidence of oil and gas and half of it has excellent hydrocarbon seeps, both oil and gas. I would argue that as a company you might want to spend less money on the first and more money on the second. You migh

Episode 039 Hike Italy : The Italian Lakes District   Hike and Kayak the most beautiful lakes in the world*   Located in the Italian alps, the Italian Lakes District has spectacular pristine lakes surrounded by the majestic alps!  No wonder so many celebrities like George Clooney, Madonna and Sir Richard Branson have purchased homes here.   On today’s Active Travel Adventures podcast, we interview Christine Jenkins, who went on Active Adventure’s ‘Dolce Vita’ fully guided ten day adventure travel holiday.  Christine explains that each day, she thought if she had to go home that day, her expectations were exceeded, and still every day got better still!   She hiked stunning trails overlooking the lakes, and kayaked on Lake Como and Lake Orto (the latter being her favorite since it is less crowded).   Of course, in Italy, all the food and ample wine was divine - and plentiful!   Here is the Dolce Vita itinerary: Day 1:  Arrive Milan Malpensa, visit Sacromonte Varallo Day 2: Hike to Rifugio Crespi Day 3 — Hiking the Walser hamlets of Valsesia Day 4 — Hike down to Pella, boat to Orta San Giulio Day 5 — Sea kayak Lake Orta Day 6 — Hike the Mottarone mountain range Day 7 — Hiking Val Grande National Park Day 8 — Journey to Lake Como, hike to Vezio Castle Day 9 — Sea kayaking Lake Como Day 10 — Back to Milan Malpensa   Links mentioned on today’s show: Ep 28   Annapurna Nepal with Stan Ep 35   Mont Blanc hike through Italy, Switzerland and France Active Adventures fully guided 10 day hike and kayak of the Italian Lake district Podcast web page www.ActiveTravelAdventures.com Host of the Active Travel Adventures podcast   Twitter@Kit_Parks Facebook Group:  Active Travel Adventures Instagram:  parks.kit   Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00   Intro 02:13   How Christine got in to adventure travel 02:30   How switched from regular travel to adventure travel 03:30   Making new friends on adventure travel holidays 03:55   Why chose the Italian Lakes vacation 04:58   What makes Active Adventures different 05:32   How difficult was this adventure 06:11   Adventure travel as team building 06:24   Where were fellow travelers from 06:47   How did she train 07:33   Is elevation an issue 07:59   Landscape 08:47   UNESCO Valsesia   09:48   Favorite memories 10:20   Refugios 11:45   Hike into Alagna 12:06   Alagna 13:06  Breakfasts 13:47   Italy does food right 14:49   Dinners 15:48   Typical daily activities 17:36   Describe the lakes 19:21   Describe the landscape 20:35   Visit to the glacier 20:57   When did Christine go 21:42   Using hiking sticks 22:06  Surprise lake swim 23:16  Christine describes her group 24:32   The trip exceeds all expectations 25:53   Mont Blanc and Annapurna (Nepal) 26:58   Celebrities at Lake Como 28:28  Played hooky 29:38   Using a local guide 30:02   Paragliding 31:57   Naked boaters at dinner 33:30  Christine’s guides 35:15   Fresh foccacia 35:49   Accommodations 37:25   What she wished she’d known 38:19   Traveling solo 39:23   Advice to anyone considering the Italian Lakes 40:20   How Christine chooses where to travel 42:15   ATA and affiliate partners 43:13   How to get the FREE Travel Planners 43:29   A shout out to Pat 43:37   Reach out to Kit   Time Stamped Show Transcript   Christine: 00:00I said to my roommate, my neighbor, I said, you know, if I have to go home tomorrow, I'm still ecstatic. I've had the best time ever. So each day was like a bonus day... it just can't get any better, and it kept getting better. That's all I can say.   Kit: 00:21'Dolce vida' the good life, the sweet life. Today we're going to explore the sweet life in Italy. We're going to the Italian Lakes district, an area of Italy you may not be familiar with. Welcome to the Active Travel Adventures podcast. I'm your host Kit Parks, and if you're listening to this podcast, you're not interested in an ordinary life. You want a bigger life, one filled with excitement, adventure, interesting people and challenges. You want to explore the world and different cultures. You want to stretch yourself. You get your jollies off a conquering a difficult feat, and you love how adventure travel can propel your life forward. At the Active Travel Adventures podcast, website, and community, our number one mission is to provide you with the information and tools that you need to take on these adventures. Each show explores an exciting new destination to see if it's something you're interested in and you'll be learning what to expect from someone like you who's actually done it.   Kit: 01:11If the destination piques your interest, then head over to the website where you can see photos, get more detailed itinerary information, and other important information on the website. Also, you can download the free printer friendly travel planner. The planner has all the important links and recommendations you need to actually plan your adventure, or you can wait for the beginning of the month when I send out a monthly and note, I say 'monthly' newsletter that includes all the new travel planners along with other tips and deals. I'll never sell your email or spam you, I promise.   Kit: 01:41 So today we're going to be going to the stunningly beautiful Italian lakes district. Our guest today explains how she enjoyed the good life in the Lakes District of Italy. So let's get started. If you could start by just introducing yourself and perhaps telling us your age.   Christine: 02:01My name is Christine Jenkins and I am 66 years old.   Kit: 02:05 And how did you first get into adventure travel?   Christine: 02:08I probably started a good 15 years ago. I've always wanted to travel. I've always wanted to see the world. I think I got that from my mom who never had that opportunity, so she always was encouraging. And I also love the outdoors and I just connected my two loves.   Kit: 02:28 How did you make the leap say, okay, I want to do that kind of travel versus the tour bus or go to the cities and all that? And so what, what was the thought process or how did you finally say, okay, this is what I'm going to do? And then what did you do?   Christine: 02:40Well, I actually, I have done the bus tours. I did two with my mom and then one day I, and this was before the Internet was really popular, I knew there was a hiking trip in Nova Scotia, Canada and I decided to sign up for that and flew Halifax in Nova Scotia. And my husband was a little worried about me going by myself, so that was my first test and I loved it ever since. I love the outdoors. I love the sounds when you're by yourself. I love getting off the beaten track. Usually you're with a group of likeminded people. I've met some fabulous people on all my hikes.   Kit: 03:22 That's one thing I, that's a recurring theme in this show is that you meet people... That usually each trip I make one or two lifelong friends from that trip.   Christine: 03:32I still keep in touch with two people. In fact, one couple lives in North Carolina. Actually, no, it was my second trip. It was to Newfoundland and there's a couple, both doctors, and they're in Raleigh, North Carolina. And I still keep in touch with them.   Kit: 03:47 And today we're going to be talking about the Italian lakes. So, of all the different trips that you've taken, what made you say that's where I'm going next?   Christine: 03:55It's actually a kind of a funny story. I knew, you know, I was looking around to see where I wanted to go next. I happen to be on Facebook and one of my Facebook friends kept saying, you know, he liked Active Adventures, so I thought, -- and he's kind of an outdoors guy... he teaches physical education... he's a kind of a historian... So I decided, I'm going to checkout this Active Adventures.   Christine: 04:21So I checked it out and I saw the different hikes, but the one that really drew me was Italian Lakes District, I think partly because of the length of time it was 11 days, which was really nice. We could fly in from Toronto to Milan. So it was a direct flight. It was easy to get to, but I think the kicker was we got to kayak for two days, which broke up the hiking. And I love kayaking and it was perfect. I asked my neighbor, "Do you want to come?" She said, "Sign me up," and away we went.   Kit: 04:50Perfect. Yeah, that's, that is one thing I like about Active is it's usually not just hiking. They usually mix in some cycling or paddling or something like that, so multisport, but predominantly hiking.   Christine: 05:01That's right. Predominantly hiking and if you didn't want to hike in a day, that's fine too. We had a lady who had a a meniscus issue and she had a torn meniscus. She had come in from Iceland. She was a photo journalist and so they accommodated her and so she got to do what she wanted to do during the day. So they were very accommodating, very flexible   Kit: 05:24 And how difficult is this, because you know, there's different degrees of difficulty for some of these adventures. On a scale of one to five, where would you place this particular adventure?   Christine: 05:33I would probably put it, I'd say between three and four. I mean I've certainly done more challenging hikes, but there were a few days it was challenging, like our very first full hiking day, you know, because where I live we don't have mountains to climb, so yeah, it was, I thought it was challenging, but it wasn't beyond... none of us had to say, "I can't do this. I give up." We all did it. We all pulled together and we had a great time.   Kit: 06:02 It's almost like a team building experience as well.   Christine: 06:05It was. It was and a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. And trust me, when you got to hike through some of these beautiful alpine valleys, it was worth it!   Kit: 06:16 And that's one thing that we really didn't tell folks exactly where the Italian lakes are... And this is in northern Italy. So you're in the Alps?   Christine: 06:24You are in the Alps. When you land in Milan, you can actually... It doesn't take long for you to leave Milan and you can see the Alps in the background. And a couple of places where we were, Switzerland was across the lake, so that's how far north we were.   Kit: 06:39 Wow. Wow. So what kind of training did you do to prepare for this?   Christine: 06:44I kayak because I live near a lake, so I did a lot of kayaking. I try to walk, I have two dogs. I walk them everyday, so that's seven kilometers. And I did small day hikes in my area. I've always had good cardiovascular health and so I didn't really find it a problem. I just keep active in the winter. I snow shoe and I cross country ski so I always had my heart rate up and I think that's the key. And pacing yourself, you know. Pacing yourself, if you pace yourself too, you don't have to feel like you have to be at the head of the line all the time. If you do, not to say slow, but a, a steady pace, it works out.   Kit: 07:25 Was elevation an issue for you or for any of the other hikers?   Christine: 07:30No, not here. I've had it in Peru, but no. I did not experience it and I don't believe any of my other fellow hikers experienced it, or, they didn't mention it at all.   Kit: 07:42 Okay. So most of the higher mountains are surrounding you, is that right? I'm trying to get a visual. Tell us a little bit about the landscape so we can kind of get a picture what it looks like.   Christine: 07:50Well, at the beginning, like I said, in our first full hike, you know, we went up through the alpine meadows. There was snow up higher in the mountains. You went through these little lush valleys. It's just like a picture postcard you would think of as a for Switzerland, but you were still in Italy. And you come to a little hamlet in the middle of nowhere and the people were lovely.   Christine: 08:14We'd have our lunch at a refugio somewhere. We'd have local meats and cheeses and you're just looking at the mountains and the waterfalls, and all you can hear when you're hiking is a bit of a breeze. The cow bells, because all the cows have bells around their necks and it was... there was no other manmade sound. So it was, it was beautiful, priceless.   Kit: 08:38 Very cool. Now in that first valley you go to as a UNESCO World Heritage site and I'm going to say this wrong, I say everything wrong, Valsesia, something like that.   Christine: 08:48Valsesia. Yes. I believe that's how it's pronounced.   Kit: 08:51 Can you tell us a little bit about that?   Christine: 08:53It was nice because as far as landscape, it was stunning. I'll probably use that word a lot in my descriptions, but everything was stunning... spectacular. At the main center was Varallo, and it was beside a river. And we hiked up to a UNESCO world heritage site and there's a monastery there. And you can come out over edge and looked down over the town of Valsesia.   Christine: 09:17Yeah, and yeah, it was incredible. Incredible. Some of the oldest religious structures in Italy are located there in. It's on the side of the valley.   Kit: 09:27 I see here in my notes that the Franciscan friars built that in 1491. For those of us here in the States we are like, "Whoa, that's old. Right?"   Christine: 09:36That's the year before Columbus sailed the ocean blue.   Kit: 09:41 Well seeing that sounds like a great way to start your adventure. Any other favorite memories from that day?   Christine: 09:45You know, it's funny, one of the memories I have is looking at the ledge over the town below and we could see this thunderstorm, this huge thunderstorm coming down a valley across the way. So that was really kind of neat to see and you could see it approaching us. And the thunder in the mountains, you know, they bounce: the echoes of the thunder bounces off the mountains. So it's sounds a lot louder than it was probably was.   Kit: 10:08 . You mentioned refugios. For those that may not be familiar with that term, can you explain that please?   Christine: 10:17It's a small hamlet or a refuge, I guess would be the English way. We went to a couple of them for a couple of hikes and one in particular we had to hike up to this place where we were going to have our lunch, and it was uphill and it was a, it was a challenging hike and it was by this really wildly raging river. Anyway, we get to this refugio. It's like a little hamlet there.   Kit: 10:43 Okay. I need some more clarification there. I think of refugio is kind of like a mountain hut.   Christine: 10:48There was, there were several huts, so you could actually, I think stay there, but I don't think they're privately owned and they had this restaurant. And there's no road in and the food was outstanding, like it was just, you know, you couldn't believe like you could have fresh cheeses and meats from the local valley.   Christine: 11:13There was fresh rabbit, there was fresh fish. Nothing was deep fried. Like in North America, we would not hike or walk our way to a restaurant like that. If we did, people would complain, but everything would be deep fried. Everything here is fresh and you could sit out in the patio and look at the mountains and the rivers and it was beautiful. Just beautiful.   Kit: 11:36 And so after your lunch, then what did you do?   Christine: 11:39Well, we had a bonus because we get to go downhill the whole way and we hiked all the way back into Alagna and that's where we stayed for three nights in Alagna. And actually one of our guide's, Andrea, he was from Alagna. So he was able to give us the inside scoop on Alagna.   Kit: 11:58 So tell us a little bit about Alagna.   Christine: 12:00Alagna, it looks like a little Swiss town, but you've got to keep reminding yourself that you're in Italy. There's all little cafes, shops... Where we stayed - at the hotel Monterosa - it was right beside the church and the church rings the bells every hour and a half hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But it was a beautiful little hotel where we stayed. The town was old. Alagnal is sort of off the beaten track for North Americans to go over, especially in the winter. But English wasn't... It wasn't difficult to get by when you were talking to a shopkeeper or in a little cafe, you were understood or you figured it out. But there were all little side streets. There was a beautiful little river going outside of town, which we could hear from our hotel. And yeah, it was a lovely time. We were there for three nights. Fabulous breakfast in the morning. Yeah, it was great.   Kit: 12:57 And so what, what kind of foods do they have for breakfast? And from my notes, it looks like that whole area was populated by German people that moved there in like fifth century AD or something.   Christine: 13:08Yeah, the Valser people. Yes. Well the hotel we stayed at for the three days are actually owned by some, a couple from Sweden and think that's been a couple of generations in their family. But in breakfast we had fresh fruit, Granola, homemade breads, homemade jams, coffee, tea, yogurt. Really good yogurt. You didn't starve. That's all I can tell you. It was probably the best Granola I've ever had in my life.   Kit: 13:37 Probably freshly made and everything. And they do food right!   Christine: 13:40It's all fresh. I can tell you that whole trip I did not have... We did not have one bad meal anywhere. It was hard to come home.   Kit: 13:50 We could sure learn how to do food better from the way they do things we do. We do. And they eat seasonally to. They wouldn't think of having strawberries in the middle of winter. They eat what is locally produced and available then.   Christine: 14:01They do eat seasonal and the other thing they do is they eat as local as possible, so you may get... If we had a prepared lunch, like maybe our guide, we had two guides, Andrea and Jo, and they might prepare, pick up some stuff, at little stores or grocery stores and they put out this fabulous picnic lunch with cheeses that were from that valley. That was the only place you could get it or salamis... That type thing. Breads, fresh fruit and yeah, it was. It was incredible. The wine, of course we had wine at lunch.   Kit: 14:37 Nice. Nice. And what about dinner?   Christine: 14:39Well actually I was going to say that was one of the things that was outstanding for this trip was the food. All our meals were covered and nothing was skimped on. We ate the best you could possibly have. We had wine with lunch. Usually we had wine with dinner, but what was interesting is after we'd finished our hike for the day or our kayak, we go back to our rooms, change, meet for dinner. We'd always have an aperitivo, which is like... it was a tray brought out and the had meats and cheeses and crackers and add wine. Then I'd think, "Oh, that's our dinner." No, it's not dinner, and then we'd still go to a restaurant. And so I'm really glad that we were hiking because I'm sure I'dve come home about 10 pounds more than I normally am.   Kit: 15:27And you're in Italy so you know everything's going to be good.   Christine: 15:31Oh yeah. Everything was beyond my expectations. Everything was fresh, nothing was processed. It was awesome.   Kit: 15:39 Very cool. So now you're using this as your base camp. So what kinds of things did you do each day?   Christine: 15:44If we didn't do hiking, we did the kayaking on the lakes: Lake Orta and Lake Como. We didn't kayak on Maggiore. There was one day we decided as a group -- and we had a small group that was just five hikers-- so that was kind of nice, and we decided one day we didn't want to hike and were in Stresa, which is on Lake Maggiore. So we went and walked into town. Some went to the islands and we did a little bit of shopping. So we just, like I say, the guidess were very flexible, and like I said, we decided we didn't want to hike that day.   Christine: 16:19On the days we went kayaking, we'd be out by the water's edge at nine in the morning and then there was a gentleman by the name of Juliana who came up from Genoa, Italy. He brought the kayaks first time, most all the people had kayaked before, so that was good. But he gave us safety instructions. We got fitted with life jackets and we were usually by 9:30, we were out on the lakes. We stop about maybe 10, 30, 11 at a little village and stop for an espresso and then we get back in our kayak, kayak a bit more and then stop it another village and maybe have lunch or stop at a beach. And our guides would put lunch out. In between that we go swimming in the lakes. And then in the afternoon we might stop about 2:30 or 3:00 in another little village and have gelato. It was very civilized. It was, yeah. It was very civilized.   Christine: 17:19And swimming: The lakes were clear and it was... It was hard to believe you weren't at the ocean. The colors of the lakes were beautiful.   Kit: 17:28 So tell us about the lakes itself. What is it? The fact that the lakes are surrounded by mountains or the lakes are particularly pretty in and of themselves? I'm trying to get a feel for what it looks like.   Christine: 17:39Well, the lakes are, they are like jewels. And there was this one day we did hike to the top of one of the mountains , and we could see Orta and Maggiore on both sides. So we had a really good view. Orta is the smallest, then Maggiore, then Como. The lakes were like a blue color, like a aqua blue color. Very clear. Especially in Como. The sides had these old Italian homes that have probably been in families for generations.   Christine: 18:10You know, there's the Piazza's nearby, and I think George and Amal Clooney live on Como, (but we didn't see them). But very steep sides to a lot of the lakes, but there are some beaches. Two of the lakes are Lake Como and Lake Orta are what they call 'crypto depression' and that's the one word I took away... my takeaway from that trip. Crypto depression means the bottom of the lake is actually below sea level and there are a few other ones in the world. Actually the Finger Lakes up in New York state. And actuallyOrta is not a crypto depression. Maggiore and Como are crypto depression, so they're below sea level and the lakes are usually long and narrow and their shores are very steep.   Christine: 19:06I think it was in Maggiore that they believe Mussolini hid his gold and it might be lying at the bottom of the lake. He had a hideout on Maggiore, on one of the islands on Maggiore. So that's the legend. That's a local legend   Kit: 19:12 OK, so when you're doing the hiking, are you in pastures, forests, or what are you hiking through?   Christine: 19:17We're doing it all. There were pastures, forests... There was one day we went through a whole, for about an hour and a half, all it was was chestnut trees. And it was quite a challenging hike. It was steep and it was very hot, but it was so, it was so pretty and so quiet. And we came out to pasture area, and then we had to go under some fences. So yes we had a real variety of landscapes for. hiking.   Christine: 19:57There was another day when we went up in a gondola and then we went up on a series of three gondolas, too. We actually got up to where the glaciers were, and that was an interesting day. It was cold and there was a lot of ice hikers, they had the crampons on their boots and they were doing some ice hiking. But we had to take three sets of gondolas to go higher and higher and higher. And if you have a fear of heights, you may not want to take it. I found that kind of a challenge, but you know, it was very barren landscape, which is a rock and ice and we'd be going along and you'd think that the gondola was going to hit the side of a rock face and then suddenly it will go up and then you were in your station where you get off and walk to the next one and keep going higher up. That was quite incredible.   Kit: 20:33 Did you get to walk on the glacier or just look at it?   Christine: 20:37Yes. We got to walk on the snow. Yes, we did. That is so cool. It was down below. It was probably in the upper eighties, low nineties up (there). It was a bit of a reprieve.   Kit: 20:49 And so what month did you go?   Christine 20:50 July   Kit: 20:52 July. Okay. So you're in the heat of summer.   Christine: 20:53Oh yes. Yes. But apparently it was very warm there in June. They had a trip in June, so I understand it was warm then, but you know what? It wasn't a really oppressive heat. It wasn't really humid. It wasn't really dry, but it was manageable. If you're dressed appropriately, I would strongly recommend a sun hat, especially to cover the back of your neck and your face, I would. That's the one thing. And the other thing I would suggest to people is to take hiking poles. Some people didn't. I think that they're really is helpful for, steadying yourself and, and pulling yourself up on steep parts or giving you some stability.  And when we're on the way down the mountain.   Kit: 21:33 Well I like poles too, for going downhill because they take a lot of pressure off my knee. Yes. And also I'm clumsy. I cannot tell you how many falls they've stopped by having that extra appendage to me or crossing a river or creek. They give you that little extra stability. I don't think I've ever fallen in a creek. I don't want to jinx myself though.   Christine: 21:50No, I haven't either, but one never knows.   Kit: 21:54 Of course. Now I will. Now that I've put that out in the universe. Any other special memories from that area?   Christine: 22:00Well, one of the days I have that sticks out in my mind was on Lake Orta and we went over to San Giulio Island and it's... There's a monastery there and abbey and you could... It's very easy to walk around this little island and there's several spots where you looked down like the old cobblestone streets.   Christine: 22:20Very narrow. In fact, I don't even think there was vehicles on it. I don't even recall any vehicles anyway that you could go swimming. So our group (Jo left us, she had to do some things), so our group, we went down the small passageway to the lake and four of us didn't have bathing suits on, but they were in our pack sack, so we lost all modesty. Just went into just a little dip in the wall, threw caution to the wind, stripped down, put on our bathing suits, dove in the lake, and we thought, well, if there's cameras out there, there's cameras out there. So be it. But the water felt so beautiful against your hot skin. It was...it was beautiful. It was just the most incredible feeling. You can feel yourself cool down and we were laughing like crazy, yet we felt like kids.   Kit: 23:07 That was fun. In your group, you said there's a small group of five: men, women or a combination?   Christine: 23:12All women. My neighbor came, and then there was a lady from San Diego and a lady from Manhattan, and a lady from Rochester.   Kit: 23:21 And what would you say the age group range was?   Christine: 23:24I would say the age group would have been maybe 52... The lady from San Diego was in her fifties, early fifties and to about in the upper seventies. And these ladies -- all of them are really in great shape -- they did their age group proud. They had nothing to be ashamed of . We had the lady from Rochester who was in her seventies and she was fabulous. She was in fabulous shape.   Kit: 23:55 Wow. Those are my role models. In fact, I interviewed a guy by the name of Stan on the Annapurna episode, which I'll put a link to in the show notes. He's in his seventies and has already planned an adventure for two years out. Unbelievable! Cool. That's how I want to age.   Christine: 24:07Wow. That's good for him. Well, I'm planning to go to Mont Blanc next year. I've already booked my trip.   Kit: 24:16 Alright, so any other, any other thoughts about that area before we go to the Val Grande National Park?   Christine: 24:22All I can say... I'll just reiterate just the whole atmosphere. You know, it's funny, I was thinking about it last night: thinking about what I was going to say each day of that trip, the whole trip and combination each day. I, I remember saying to my roommate, my neighbor, I said, "You know, if I have to go home tomorrow, I'm still ecstatic. I've had the best time ever. So each day was like a bonus day, a bonus day. It just... it can't get any better, and it kept getting better. That's all I can say. This has been no doubt, the best hiking trip I've ever had, and I've been to a lot of places. There was nothing I have to say bad about it. Nothing.   Kit: 25:10Wow. And that sure says a lot.   Christine: 25:12Yes. And I'd actually consider going back again in two years... Do it again.   Kit: 25:17 Yeah. It hadn't really even been on my radar, but then I started doing some research, and I thought, that looks really nice. I think that's now on the radar.   Christine: 25:23Well, it hadn't been on my radar either. I mean I have looked at other places. I've looked at Scotland, I've been to Scotland before. I thought about Iceland and I do know Active Adventures does Iceland now, but I was supposed to go to Mont Blanc with another company two years ago, but I badly broke my arm so that put a caboosh on that. So anyway. But anyways...   Kit: 25:46 In fact, the Mont Blanc episode is probably one of my most popular ones.You'll want to take a look at that? That's episode number 35, and I forgot to mention that Stanley, the guy that I said in the seventies that did Annapurna in Nepal, his was episode number 28. Anytime you want to look at an old episode, just go to ActiveTravelAdventures.comslash the episode number, so it'd be slashed 28 or 35, or if you forget, just go to the Directory Page, and then you can either use the search bar or just scroll down and see what rocks your boat.   Kit: 26:15On the website. You can either directly download and/or listen to the podcasts.Plus, you'll also find more details on the trip itself, including itineraries, tons of photos, often videos, and there's just a lot of information there. If you need either even further details, you can download -for free- the travel planners that have clickable links that can get you directly to the information or places that you need in order to plan your trip. And those come automatically with the monthly -- and note that I say monthly-- newsletter. I do not spam you or sell your name. Or you can download them as you need them from the website. Let's go back to the interview.   Kit: 26:50I know from the pictures that you sent, and from my research that the Italian Lakes area is absolutely gorgeous. But to put that in prospective, residents have included George and Amal Clooney, Richard Branson, Madonna.. These are folks who can buy and live anywhere: where money is no object. Yet, this is where they choose. That demonstrates how beautiful it is there.   Christine: 27:13There are some beautiful mansions and you can tell they've been in families for a long, long time and they're old architecture but so beautifully maintained and what was really neat is the boat pulls into a garage at the side of the cliff. It's like a boat garage, you know, and these beautiful old wooden boats. Oh yeah. Fabulous. Fabulous. Obviously this is a ritzy area, very private, very exclusive, especially at Como and. But you'll also see a lot more North Americans there too. Like eEnglish is extremely common, and British and British accents or North American accent. So on my flight over to Milan, there were people... That's where they were going to Bellagio on Lake Como,   Kit: 28:04 A Huffington Post article once ranked the Italian Lakes district as the most beautiful lakes in the world.   Christine: 28:10Oh, I can understand that! Orto is not as busy a lake. It's the smaller of the lakes. I preferred that lake just because it was less busy.   Kit: 28:21 So let's switch gears and now you're going to the Val Grande National Park. an you tell us a little bit about that?   Christine: 28:24Yeah, that was the one day... We actually that day we did not do that. That was the day we decided not to hike. That was the hookey day. So a couple of us walked into Stresa, which is a small village, beautiful little boardwalk from where we were staying, all the way into Stresa. And some of these beautiful old hotels along the lake side, you know, something you would see from the 1920's-30's. I'm sure they're wildly expensive and then there's three islands on the lake and you could take the boats to them. And we all met on this one island for lunch.   Kit: 29:02 But it sounds like that was a well worth it Hookey Day.   Christine: 29:04It was well worth the hooky day. So no, and everything was fine. We enjoyed our day so I can't comment on Val Grande National Park except to say apparently there's a lot of hiking trails in there. And they suggest you have a guide or a proper map because there are people who have gotten lost and they have never been found there. So that kind of struck the fear of God into us.   Kit: 29:30 So I think to a lot of times when you're hiking in some of these particularly remote areas that it's good to have a guide with you.   Christine: 29:37I think it is too. I mean you learn so much too. Especially somebody local, right?   Kit: 29:41 Yeah. The flora and fauna as well. You might see an animal. You have no idea what it is or a pretty flower and it's just something you take a picture of where they can tell you, oh, that's a little, little whatever it is.   Christine: 29:52Yeah, exactly. Exactly.   Kit: 29:54 When people ask you, "Oh, how was your trip?" What's the story that comes to mind?   Christine: 29:57Well, I did something on the trip that was accommodated for me and for the lady from San Diego. We were able to do it. It's not so much funny, but it was fun. We were able to do it, I think, because we had a small group and we went paragliding.   Kit: 30:17That sounds fun.   Christine: 30:19Yes. So, and that was in Alagna. So two of us went paraglidingone morning. When we went with a pilot -and we went separately- and we had to take a gondola up to the site is about at 8,800 feet. And we were up for about 20 minutes and then you could come in. And we landed over in Alagna and I remember the pilot saying to me, "Do you want to touch the steeple of the churches as we go by?" I said that I'd pass on that one.   Kit: 30:47Oh brother, I don't know if I'd have the nerve to do that!   Christine: 30:52So that's wasn't in the plans. And and I don't think if they had a big group that they could do that, but they accommodated, us. And we were able to do it because we could do it early in the morning and the weather was right, the window was right, that type of thing.   Christine: 31:07So the other things we did that was a lot of fun is we went down, it's called LP Land and it's on Mottarone Mountain and it's up at the top. You start at about 1,490 meters and it's a go cart, and you go down the mountain in a go kart by yourself (or with somebody else) and it zigzags down and you can reach some pretty high speeds. That was, you know, you get a beautiful view of the lake, although you're trying to not scream as you're going down, so not die and hope hang onto your water bottle or if you know. But um, that was fun.   Kit: 31:47 Any funny story come to mind?   Christine: 31:49Oh, okay. I do have a funny one. Actually. We were on Lake Orto. We were out for evening dinner. One night we were at arestaurant right on the lake. Beautiful meal as usual, and w see this boat going by. And there's three naked men in it, and they're raising their glasses of wine to all the patrons of the restaurant. So everybody's kind of stunned and we thought, well, we'll wait for them to come back. We'll have our cameras ready. But they never came back. But we all had a good laugh over that one. That was. Yeah, that was funny. That was funny.   Kit: 32:21 And Europeans have a different mentality about nudity than North Americans.   Christine: 32:25You know what? And that's the other thing too, is I really like. You're absolutely right. I saw a lot of ladies who would be in their fifties, sixties, seventies, and they were wearing bikinis. And I thought, "Good for you!" In fact, I almost thought about buying one for myself, but Jo our one guide, she said that their attitudes over here are so different. And yeah, I thought: it is what it is, and they were out there in their bikinis.   Kit: 32:54I'm surprised they had tops on, but maybe that's just the south of France.   Christine: 32:58I saw all with tops if they were standing up or sitting up. But their men folk were attentive to them. They were draped in gold jewelry and all that.   Kit: 33:08That's so interesting. Yeah. And France, most of the women didn't have tops and it didn't make a difference what shape your body was in skimpy bathing suits.   Christine: 33:17I know, I know. And we have a lot to learn in North America.   Kit: 33:23 Any other things you want to tell us about your Italian lakes adventure?   Christine: 33:27 I want to tell you that we had two guides and I really want to mention our guides, Andrea, who is from Alagna, Italy and Jo.Jo was originally from Wales but lives in Auckland, New Zealand now. Those guys were outstanding. They were knowledgeable. They were patient, they were flexible. Andrea, he was a really good van driver. He navigated all these little narrow roads. Sometimes we go through these little villages where the road was barely wider than the mirrors of vehicle and yeah, he, you know, we always felt safe with him. Jo was funny. We gave her a nickname. We called her '10 minute Jo' and the reason was, if we'd be hiking a particularly challenging day,she'd go, "Well there's a refugio up ahead." "Well, how far is that, Jo?" "Oh, it's about 10 minutes," and then a while later we'd be thinking. Well, it's been 10 minutes. She'd then say, "Oh, it's another 10 minutes." Everything was 10 minutes with her, so we ended up calling her '10 minute Jo'.   Kit: 34:29That reminds me when I was doing a two week section hike of the Appalachian trail with my girlfriends, Gerry and Jane. And I had the elevation map and so I would always know exactly how many more hills we had to climb, but as we're getting tired at the end of the day... Everybody's pooped., ready to find a camp site and all that. I'd be like, "Come on, you can do it. This is the last hill, I promise! This, the last hill!" And we'd get up over that hill, and of course there'd be another hill. I was like, "Oh no,really, THISis the last hill." So I'm not sure what they called me behind my back, but I doubt there were as kind in calling me "10 minute Kit". Sometimes to make it to the end, you've just got to fib.   Christine: 35:03Yeah, I know.   Kit: 35:07 Anything else about your guides or transit?   Christine: 35:09 Well, one of the other little things I have to tell you about is Giuliano, who was the gentleman... He would drive up from Genoa twice with all the kayaks. And the second time he came up he brought us some foccacia from a local bakery. He left at 5:00 AM in the morning from Genoa to get up to the Lakes ,and he had this fresh foccacia. And it was actually still a bit warm when we had it at our break. That was memorable, and it was so good.   Kit: 35:36Oh, how sweet and thoughtful.   Christine: 35:39Yeah. Very thoughtful.   Kit: 35:42 And I forgot to ask you accommodations. Are you in guest houses or are your camping? I know you said you were at one place for three days. Tell us a little bit about where you stayed.   Christine: 35:49We stayed in hotels. The first three nights and we were in Alagna. It was a beautiful old hotel run by a couple from Sweden and I love the wooden shutters because they could open up, you know. And clean, clean rooms. In Stresa, all the rooms were clean and had air conditioning. Yeah, there was nothing too. ..There was absolutely no complaints about the accommodation. It was close to everything. If we wanted to walk somewhere, the one place we stayed at, and I can't think of the name of the town, but they would mostly have balconies or a little doors that open up, although we didn't because it was quite warm. Yeah, it was. The combination was excellent. Excellent.   Kit: 36:30 I'm surprised you had air conditioning. That's great.   Christine: 36:32I know, I know. The one thing, over in Europe, if anybody's ever traveled there, the elevators are very small, so if you know, maybe two people get on with one suitcase each. No more than that. So that's the one adjustment. The other adjustment is a lot of times in Europe they don't use face cloths, so you might, if you, if you are big on using a face cloth, you might want to bring your own face cloth, that type of thing. But other than that it's um, you don't want for anything. I mean, if you need a toothpaste, it's easy to get. If you need wine, it's easy to get. So it's not like you're in a third world country. But little tips like that.   Kit: 37:16 Is there anything you wish you'd known beforehand that you could share with us?   Christine: 37:23No. The only thing I know in the guide -our gear guide- they suggested bringing is a hat and gloves and long underwear. We definitely did not need to pack that. It was too hot. So that took up room and maybe they have a standard gear list they give to everybody, but if I was going in June or July to the Italian Lakes District, definitely don't worry about that. You wouldn't have to worry about that.   Christine: 37:51But I would strongly. I've mentioned earlier, I would strongly suggest poles.   Kit: 37:55Yep. That's a given for me.   Christine: 37:56I know some people don't like them, but I. Yeah, that's a given for me too as well.   Kit: 38:00Yeah. I don't hike without them anymore. I don't care where I'm going and also keeps my rhythm.   Christine: 38:04Oh, it does! Yeah, it does. And it really does. And it gives you a bit of an upper body upper body workout to.   Kit: 38:11 One final thing. You say you travel solo. Usually you will pair up with a group or something like that. I just finished an episode, in fact, I just finished editing it this morning on solo travel. Do you have any thoughts on solo travel?   Christine: 38:23It's how I usually travel. I happened to ask my neighbor. We have traveled once before together and she's a great traveler. We had gone to Point Reyes national seashore in California. We went for a week with a group.   Christine: 38:37I prefer... I like solo traveling because I can, in the evening if I want to go to bed earlier, if I want to read till 1:00 in the morning, I'm not disturbing anybody. You meet some great people traveling solo. I used to be really nervous about traveling solo. Not anymore. There's a lot of women out there that travel solo now. A lot more than one would think. And, and if you find there's other solo travelers, you just kind of end up connecting and looking out for each other. And that's the other thing too, as a group, you spend that much time together. You do become a big family and you do look out for one another.   Kit: 39:16 Two final questions for you. Number one: Somebody says to you, "I'm thinking about going hiking in the Italian lakes." What do you tell them?   Christine: 39:25I say, I'll give you the name of Active Adventures. You will have the best time ever. I promise. I promise you. In fact, I'll go with you.   Kit: 39:34 My last question for you. Where's next?   Christine: 39:38Next year in Switzerland, Italy where you fly into Geneva. So I'm going to do that with Active Adventures. That's my next one. And then in 20,20 I always say I want to go back to the Italian Lakes, but there's so many places to go in this world. I've been to New Zealand but I've never hiked in New Zealand. So I mean there's always that option. There's so many places, so little time, you know, and you want to do those things when you're healthy.   Kit: 40:07And I mean this is not an ad for Active Adventures, but we're both fans. Do you now, when you're picking out which trips are you looking at their website and say where do I go next from there? Or how do you pick your next trip?   Christine: 40:20Well, like I said I had wanted to go to Mont Blanc two years ago and was I had already booked it and I was actually going with my neighbor, the one who went on this one, but I had broken my arm. She went on ahead so it was always in the back of my mind and I was going to go with another company, but I saw through Active Adventures they did Mont Blamc but they also do a kayaking day, which I thought I liked that it kind of changes things up a bit, so that's why I'm going with Active. I've put my deposit down and I'm ready to roll next June.   Kit: 40:51Cool. And so is that how you choose your trips?Is by looking to see where they go now that now that you're a fan or do you follow what I'm saying? How do you choose your next trip? Are you looking at their website to see where they go and choosing from there or do you pull from different areas are or how do you pick your next destination?   Christine: 41:09Oh, so if I was going post 2019, I would see if they have any changes in what places they want or new additions. If there was a particular place I want to go, let's say I wanted to go to Croatia or I wanted to hike in Portugal. I may look online and see about other hiking companies or if it's doable, so I kind of explore. I kind of explore a bit, but to see what others have to say. And like you say, the only reason I found out about Active Adventures was through a friend on Facebook who his Active Adventures kept coming up. So I said, you know, yJo Blow likes Active Adventures. I thought I'm going to have to look into this because I know this guy and he wouldn't just say that. So that's how I got onto it.   Kit: 41:56Well thanks Christine for your time. It's been great and we sure loved learning about the Italian Lakes with you. We'll have to have you back on when you do your next adventure.   Christine: 42:03Alright, for sure.   Kit: 42:05 I love how adventure travel doesn't always mean that you're getting in the mud and all that kind of stuff. Sometimes you can even go to luxurious locations like the Italian Lakes District and live the good life.   Kit: 42:15Regular listeners will know that I don't accept any advertising at all for this program so that I can keep it commercial free. However, I do have affiliate partnershipswith companies that I have selected that I truly believe in, that I recommend to you and with these affiliates at absolutely zero cost to you. Sometimes I'll either get a discount or I might make a commission or sometimes I'll get some bonus travel and such like that. And I want to mention that Active Adventures, even though their name sounds very similar to Active Travel Adventures, we are two totally separate companies, but Active Adventures is one that I highly recommend because my friends and I are true believers that It's just a great company.   Kit: 42:51The people just really spend their time trying to give you a trip of a lifetime, so if like Christine, you want to explore the Italian Lakes District with a guided tour company, I would recommend Active and if you do so, please be sure to let them know that I sent you either by using any of my links or just by letting them know when you book. Using any of my links is a great FREE way for you to show your support of this program.   Kit: 43:13 To get the FREE Travel Planners, be sure to sign up for the newsletter. You can do so by going to the ActiveTreavelAdventures.com website and then clicking on the newsletter tab, or you can just write me a Kit [@t] active travel adventures.com and ask me to put you on. I'll be happy to.   Kit: 43:29 A special shout out to Pat.Pat did just that, and then it wasn't long before we were on the phone chatting. And before you knew it, we're going to be roommates on a great trip to Egypt this fall. I can't wait!   Kit: 43:37 Reach out to me.I'd love to hear from you and I'd like to make this a two way conversation. Until next time, I'll be back in two weeks with another great adventure. This time we're going to go a little bit further north. We're heading up to Norway, which I can't wait to share that with you. Until then. This is Kit Parks, Adventure On.   *According to the Huffington Post      

The race that Joseph wanted to win his age group category..He did in a time of 43:20Well done "Crazy Legs"!

[Episode 13.5] It's another compilation episode! In the opening, Arlill explains (again) why there hasn’t been a new episode in almost 2 months. He also talks about a new home-brew project he’s been working on to make up for the podcast drought. In the next segment, we hear Arlill and Gary try to sum up their summer experience in 2010 then we transition to bloopers and outtakes from Episodes 12 and 13. Check out the technical info at this link: http://pastebin.com/YfjLL1wq http://archive.org/download/1313.5WellTheDaysHaveGoneBy.../13%20(13.5)%20Well,%20The%20Days%20have%20Gone%20By....mp3

"Drawn To The Well" is this week's sermon from Pastor Adam Breiner.January 18, 2014Andover Seventh-day Adventist Church is located at:http://www.andoversdachurch.org

click here Visit the Recover In Christ web site. Romans 11 I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid. For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. 2God hath not cast away his people which he foreknew. Wot ye not what the scripture saith of Elias? how he maketh intercession to God against Israel saying, 3Lord, they have killed thy prophets, and digged down thine altars; and I am left alone, and they seek my life. 4But what saith the answer of God unto him? I have reserved to myself seven thousand men, who have not bowed the knee to the image of Baal. 5Even so then at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of grace. 6And if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace. But if it be of works, then it is no more grace: otherwise work is no more work. 7What then? Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for; but the election hath obtained it, and the rest were blinded. 8(According as it is written, God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear;) unto this day. 9And David saith, Let their table be made a snare, and a trap, and a stumblingblock, and a recompence unto them: 10Let their eyes be darkened, that they may not see, and bow down their back alway. 11I say then, Have they stumbled that they should fall? God forbid: but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy. 12Now if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles; how much more their fulness? 13For I speak to you Gentiles, inasmuch as I am the apostle of the Gentiles, I magnify mine office: 14If by any means I may provoke to emulation them which are my flesh, and might save some of them. 15For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead? 16For if the firstfruit be holy, the lump is also holy: and if the root be holy, so are the branches. 17And if some of the branches be broken off, and thou, being a wild olive tree, wert grafted in among them, and with them partakest of the root and fatness of the olive tree; 18Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee. 19Thou wilt say then, The branches were broken off, that I might be grafted in. 20Well; because of unbelief they were broken off, and thou standest by faith. Be not highminded, but fear: 21For if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not thee. 22Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off. 23And they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be grafted in: for God is able to graff them in again. 24For if thou wert cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and wert grafted contrary to nature into a good olive tree: how much more shall these, which be the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree? 25For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. 26And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: 27For this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins. 28As concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sakes: but as touching the election, they are beloved for the father's sakes. 29For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance. 30For as ye in times past have not believed God, yet have now obtained mercy through their unbelief: 31Even so have these also now not believed, that through your mercy they also may obtain mercy. 32For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all. 33O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! 34For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor? 35Or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? 36For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen.