Podcasts about 45it

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

Unknown 0:16Good afternoon, everybody. It is Friday, October 15. Then we have, we're going to discuss the weather synopsis for the United States.Unknown 0:25We're going to start off there's four different air masses that are influencing our country at big time. Let's start off with number one high pressure systems situated over Georgia this afternoon, we'll be continuing to move south east right off of the coast by tomorrow morning. This high pressure system is pumping a South flow of warm and even humid air off the east coast bringing well above normal temperatures. In fact, this is unseasonably warm heat, double In fact, this is a late summer season weather pattern that's happening on the East Coast today. Temperatures might be breaking records south of the Mid Atlantic area, perhaps in North Carolina or South Carolina. But when you go up further north records probably will not be broken but it will be warm. With high temperatures in Baltimore, mid May be Upper 80s, Washington DC, mid 80s. Philadelphia, probably low 80s. And tomorrow, we're even going to continue to see temperatures probably low 80s for Baltimore, even 80 degrees for Philadelphia tomorrow, but as seabreeze will develop in Atlantic City highs only in the mid 70s. Let's go back to today because I just want to know what is the audience feel? What What do you feel about temperatures being in the 80s? Those on the East Coast?Unknown 1:45It's like late summer it's like not too hot, but it's just amazing. What do you guys feel? That is complainer response? That's what I thought because that's what I would feel. It's alrea for sure. But you know, in Baltimore I want to know, oh, this isUnknown 2:13but how do you guys feel in Baltimore over the fact that it's almost going to be warm enough to break a record? but not quite. Yeah, I love breaking records. And that's just too bad that we don't get to break a record. But it's gonna be warm as we said, nonetheless. I want everybody to realize the following this is a very unique in the Chicago Tribune. It said the cold this temperature yesterday was eight degrees and it occurred. I get ready for this. Get ready for this one. It occurred 37 miles south east of this little town in Utah. The newspaper I don't remember. But the newspaper mentions the little town. Now I want to know. Like if it's if it reached if the warmest temperature. Yesterday was in St. Louis, with the newspapers say the warmest temperature was 300 miles southwest of Chicago, Illinois. It would just say the actual town. So why does it say 37 miles south east? Why would it do that? Again, no wouldn't do that by Chicago or St. Louis. Why would it do that then? Isn't that strange? That really is strange. That needs a tremendous explanation. Where who has this weather station isn't someone's on someone's roof? Like what? Where is it? What How come this place doesn't have the name of a town. The Chicago Sun Times agrees but the temperature the coldest temperature in the US was eight degrees. But it says it wasn't body Park, California. They actually have some clarity. I know it's so nice to have clarity. But you know what is nice to do is to have clarity. It's so awesome to have humor to have humor that Chicago Tribune 37 miles Don't you want to check that requires like an investigation and I hope you're listening to the instruments in the background because you know, it's definitely requires an investigation and those that those instruments the experience over here, don't they? Now let's go ahead and pull ahead with the warmest temperature in the US now that we mentioned the coldest the warmest temperature was in Falcon Lake, Texas once again. Falcon Lake Texas with a high temperatureUnknown 4:58of I completely forgot what the high temperature was. I think it was 102 degrees. If it was 102, what is the audience feel about that? About a being 102?Unknown 5:24No response. No response, I guess why should that get a response anyways, it was just it was 102 degrees. That's maybe wasn't under into, but I'm pretty sure it was. As again, we have that unseasonally warm air on the East Coast chances of showers and thunderstorms off in the southeast part of this country, especially Florida. Periodic showers also up in the New England area, higher chances occur in the western parts of the area. But by tomorrow, we're going to see showers and thunderstorms develop all across the East Coast. However, the instability is not as intense as it usually is when a vigorous cold front goes by. But nonetheless, rain and possibly even heavy could occur. That's what's going on today, we have a strong storm system located off in the East Central Illinois. And that storm system has a barometric pressure of 29.7, it's going to be moving to just north of Cleveland, today, it's going to be strengthening to 29.5 as it does, and then continue into southern Ontario, into Canada, strengthening to 29.3, that's actually considered rapid intensification of a storm system. I know I also love it when storms intensify so rapidly, that's just I definitely love it when it does that. So I'm glad the crowd agrees in the on that along the storm system along the way. associated with the storm system, we have a cold front going all the way down into South Texas temperatures ahead of the front or in the 90s in Houston, Texas. But most areas are in the 80s for the southern part of the US ahead of the front and the 70s. When you head to the northern parts of the United States ahead of the front, behind the front, we have temperatures in the 50s for the northern half of the US in the 60s for the southern half. But then you when you go down into Texas temperatures are in the 70s. So it's certainly a 20 degree difference. But heading to the front and behind the front. The one of these articles pointed out that people should be on the lookout for the heavy rains associated with this fun and storm system. Especially because waterlogged trees, waterlogged trees. I know who's ever heard of this waterlogged trees might may fall on powerlines. And people may use lose electricity. I've heard of snow covered trees falling, especially with leaves. I've heard of wind blowing down trees or tornadoes, but waterlogged trees falling down on the powerlines. I hope the audience is not laughing at the fact that people are going to be losing power. Because that, I mean, what is the audience feel about that? Thank God, so I still have people with sensitivity in my audience. That's wonderful weather enthusiasts with sensitive sensitivity. It's just the waterlogged the trees. I'mUnknown 8:49not even sure exactly who were laughing at. I don't know if we're laughing at but something's funny. IUnknown 8:57just don't know what, in any case. Okay. In any case, that's really what they're saying. People should be careful about that. Is that one of the results of climate change that we're seeing an increase of waterlogged trees over the years.Unknown 9:20Now, I don't really mean to make fun of climate change. It's just it's just something other people do. So I decided to do it. But it's funny nonetheless, even you know, you could take climate change seriously no issue with that at all. We could have spoken about that on different podcasts. In any case. Moving right along over here. We have the this is a good one. Actually. When you go into Indiana in places to the east, this Storm Prediction Center has put those areas in a marginal risk for severe thunderstorms. That means a 10% chance for severe weather within a 25 mile radius. The only problem is the National Weather Service says they really don't know if there's enough instability to even produce a storm. So there's very little chance for a thunderstorm, chances of a severe weather are higher than a thunderstorm. That's just impossible. So let's just assume there's a 10% chance for both. But I don't really think that's true either. It's probably there's probably just people are expressing their chances differently. And that's perhaps what's going on over here. But the moving Okay, we covered the East Coast we covered in the system here in the US. Let's go over now to the west coast and discuss the developing situation over in Los Angeles. Santa Ana winds are developing perhaps because of a high pressure system located on the border of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. That high pressure system is going to be moving into Texas tomorrow, but let's stay focused on to the list.This transcript was generated by https://otter.ai

The pandemic caused us all to readjust our values and focus on what truly matters. It also forced us to alter how we communicate and innovate.In this special episode of Prism, Dan Harden moderates a discussion with founders Fred Bould and Caroline Flagiello on how we can use the lessons from this experience to create an exciting new era of Design. The panel reveals:How to make the most of our newly realigned values, the work-life blur, and virtual creative collaborationsWays to implement the new design thinking that's emerged which values experiences, quality of life, and purposeThe ideal vision of Design and the roadmap needed to get thereListen in on their perspectives on how we can all find design nirvana.GuestsCaroline Flagiello, founder of Akin, is an innovation expert with two decades of experience leading teams and designing for every kind of organization, from nascent startups to high profile Fortune 500 companies, in industries ranging from consumer electronics to fashion to food and beverage.Fred Bould, founder of Bould Design, has collaborated with leading innovators such as Nest Labs, GoPro and Roku. Their work has met with both commercial and critical success. Recognition includes numerous IDEA, Core77, D&AD, and Red Dot Awards, as well as the Cooper Hewitt and SF MOMA Permanent Collection. Bould's design solutions are noted for usability, simplicity, and elegance.This episode of Prism was originally recorded as a live Whipsaw virtual event on July 28, 2021.Episode TranscriptDan Harden 0:07Hello and welcome to Prism. Prism is a design oriented podcast hosted by me Dan harden, like a glass prism that reveals the color hidden inside white light. This podcast will reveal the inside story behind innovation, especially the people that make it happen. My aim is to uncover each guest unique point of view, their insights, their methods, or their own secret motivator, perhaps that fuels their creative genius.Okay, hello, and welcome to finding design Nirvana. I'm Dan Harden. Whipsaw's Founder, CEO and Principal Designer and with me are Caroline Flagiello and Fred Bould. We're here to discuss how we can evolve from this somewhat dark time that we find ourselves in. We've experienced something truly extraordinary in the last Well, now what year and a half, and it's still going on. But how can we evolve from that time that we have all experienced into a better we'll call it designed to future. That's why we call this finding design Nirvana. We think we should be learning from these tough times in order to advance design to a higher Well, maybe even more ideal state, if that's possible. That's what we wanted to investigate with this discussion. Tonight, we'll talk about the lessons we have learned from the pandemic that can help us re examine how we think about design, especially in terms of what design should be focused on where the opportunities lie to innovate, and how design should or can be practiced. So without further ado, let's meet our panelists, Caroline, Fred. Fred is the Founder and Design Director of Bould design, Bould, has collaborated with great companies such as nest labs, GoPro, Roku, and many, many others. They've won lots of Design Awards. They've got worked at the Cooper Hewitt and SF MoMA. They're designed many of you know it. They're designed as noted for simplicity, elegance, and a focus on usability. They always do great work can always count on Fred and his company. I met Fred in the 80s when we both worked at Henry Dreyfus associates. And we've been great friends ever since. Good to see you, Fred.Fred Bould 2:21Great to see you. Carolyn. Good to see you. Yeah. My first got to know Dan, when I was an intern at Henry Dreyfus associates. And Dan was one of the young hotshot designers there that everybody looked up to. So it's, it's really, it's really gratifying to find myself here, you know, 100 years later. We're working in close proximity to Dan and, and his elk. So this is great.Dan Harden 2:52Thanks for joining Fred. My other guest is Carolyn Flagella. Carolyn is Founder and CEO of Akon a firm she founded in 2015. Caroline is an innovation expert with two decades of experience leading teams and designing for every kind of organization from Little startups to high profile Fortune 500 companies. She also worked at Pentagram and IDEO, and I've known Caroline for over 25 years. She helped me chair the National idsa conference in 2002. I still can't thank you enough for that, Carolyn. And you may have also seen Caroline on the CBS series, California by design. Welcome, Caroline. Thank you for joining.Caroline Flagiello 3:33Oh, thank you for having me. Yes. And good to see Fred. Um, yeah, Dan, when I first met you, it was at the MoMA. And it was during an idsa Awards event. And you were President of Frog at the time. And I was like, Oh, that's Dan. And so, you were you know, you were the god. Oh, well, I was still, you know, starting off in my career. So anyway, it was a long time ago, but you were still the god.Dan Harden 4:05Oh, my God. Okay, we did not practice Believe me this.Okay, so let's, let's get into our discussion, but thank you. So, let's start out kind of broad. Alright, so this crazy pandemic that we've been through, I mean, it has rocked us all to the core in so many ways. But let's talk briefly about its impact on work, especially, like, How were your practices impacted? And how did you adjust? Did you survive obviously, or how did you thrive?Fred Bould 4:41Carolyn, you want to take?Caroline Flagiello 4:44Sure, so, um, when I started Akon seven years ago, it was relational based consultancy. So basically, our goal is to have long term key clients and reduce that churn and spend And I also thought that there was a different way to be able to create a consultancy that didn't look like the consultancies that we've all you know, and love and work for, and thought that we could leverage global talent in different ways. So I leveraged a distributed teams, as well as our core team. And so like, our practices really haven't changed. But what we did is we really honed the ability to connect in hybrid ways and connect through video, you know, seven years ago, and that, you know, being able to access global talent is just really important. And I think, really, we've seen the the fruits of that, through hybrid work, quite honestly. And I think organizations are really realizing the power of accessing global talent and that way. But in terms of our practice, we're continuing to thrive in this hybridized environment. Now, others who see the power of that are really appreciating and understanding that, and our clients are getting even more comfortable with that now that it's become more of the norm. So we haven't changed so much in the way that we have practiced, but I everyone around us has. So that's been really nice, because now it's elevating all of us.Fred Bould 6:30Yeah. I guess I, my experience, I'll be really honest, I was, even though at the beginning of my, when I first started Bould design. I worked actually worked from my house for several years. And, and even despite that, I was kind of To be honest, I was a work from home skeptic, I really was I felt like, you know, it's, how are we going to review mockups, and, you know, share sketches and things like that. And, but then when I kind of saw it coming, but I have a brother who lives in Shenzhen, so I've been talking to him about, you know, he was on lockdown, months, months before we were and it was still in question whether it was going to sort of make its way here and you know, what the, what the depth would be and so on. But at some point, I turned to my partners, and I said, Hey, we need to get set up for this. And, you know, we got our we got our system set up so that people could take computers, we'd all be connected and be able to connect to the server and whatnot. And, and sure enough, about two weeks after we did that we you know, the word came down that everybody had to be work from home. And I wasn't, I didn't have a lot of anxiety, even though I was kind of a work from home skeptic, I kind of said, Well, you know, we don't really have a choice. So let's, let's, let's do this. And, you know, 24 hours later, we were set up, you know, 16 people working from 16 different places around the Bay Area. And it worked fine. It was I, you know, I can't say I was surprised because we're, we're very good communicators, and we're well organized. So I think that that that helped us. But it it went pretty well. I think some of our some of our clients saw things go quiet on on their side, you know, in terms of sales, because I think people were, you know, hesitant to go out and buy things when they didn't really know whether they would have jobs or not. I'm talking about the the general population, whether they would have jobs and whether they would be getting paychecks and things like that. But you know, I think when the government stepped in and said, Okay, we're going to, we're going to give people money and people felt reassured and they said, okay, you know, there, somebody, somebody has our backs. And so a lot of our clients have done extraordinarily well. You know, we have clients that are involved with, you know, streaming entertainment, well, guess what, when people can go out, guess what they do? networking equipment, sick, things like that all became very important. So it's actually it's been a pretty good year. And I think we've we've learned an awful lot about the boundaries of what works, you know, for work.Dan Harden 9:29Yeah, it sounds like you've adjusted. I know. Personally speaking, I would agree with you. I've always been a wfh work from home skeptic right when when I would get an email as an employer, you don't want to see wfh, I'm down I'm going to be working for like, Yeah, right. But you know what? My team blew me away. They're so effective. I mean, I never would have guessed that this was possible. But but it does take adjustment and adjust. We did and not only survived, but I think we're thriving more than ever because of it, we learned a lot about one another. Partly because we're all on this equalizing grid like we are right now. And people that didn't work together before, you know, especially the certain engineers and designers or the UX team working with engineers, they get to hear one another's problems and issues. And it's, it's really created a lot of empathy and understanding among individuals in the company. But I can't tell you like, you know, like that first week, when it all came down, this pandemic is going to be such a big problem. I can tell you in one week, we lost three clients. It was like 10% of our business in one week. But you know, this is like, Royal Caribbean, like everyone's like, No, no, I'm not getting on a cruise ship. So you know, they call they're like, stop all work. Some of the gaming industry stop all work. There were a few clients like that it was kind of alarming, I must say.Caroline Flagiello 10:58Yeah, I think a lot of clients gave pause. Right. And they did it, whether it was a couple weeks, or a couple months, you know, we all paused quite frankly, we didn't know we were stuck at home, literally couldn't move. Right. And we didn't know what the virus was doing. A very scary information was coming every day. We were it was social unrest. I mean, we had some major things all happen at once. So I think it was a lot as humans to take in. But Dan, I love what you mentioned about humans, because we saw each other's humanity. I think as as work has changed, our work has completely changed forever, right? We have seen each other's humanity in ways that we've never thought were professional, or we've redefined professionalism for ourselves now.Dan Harden 11:49wOkay, but what does that mean, when it comes to real effective virtual collaboration, because collaboration, you know, it's just it was a buzzword 10 years ago, you have to collaborate, build your team. And we're, we're all used to doing that, you know, in jam rooms, or war rooms, whatever you want to call them. But what about virtual collaboration? And the creative fields? Where are the challenges that you guys have found? And how have you overcome that? Do you think it works?Fred Bould 12:17Yeah, I mean, it's funny, because we looked at things like, you know, like getting tablets and stuff that we could sketch on, and things like that. But then after not too long, we ended up just basically saying, you know, here like this, and, you know, flashing sketches up on, on on the camera, and then on the other side, people go click, and they capture it. And then we'd have these, like, documents, these, like, you know, shared documents running all the time in the background. And it I guess, it was a little bit ad hoc, but it was effective, you know, like, we'd have like a Google present, you know, document going that we would just throw stuff into, we'd like take pictures of sketches and throw them in there or cap, you know, do you know, screen captures and stuff like that. And we kind of got pretty fluid, it was a little bit, you know, a little bit Herky jerky at first. And I have to say, at the end of the day, I would be I would be exhausted. Because you, you know, when you're having a conversation with somebody face to face, you're taking in all this information cues, you know, all sorts of things that are absent when, you know, you're talking to people on little boxes. And so your brains kind of working in overdrive to fill in, you know, to, you know, pull out all the information to camp. And so I would, you know, I enjoyed work, but I have to admit, at the end of the day, I'd be like, wow, I need to go stick my head in a bucket of cold water.Dan Harden 13:58That was such a surprise that that that condition ones mindset after day, it feels like more work even though it sounds like it should be less right working from videowall to design is so social, you know, that's why I was worried about it working in this manner. Because you learn so much through nuance, you know, the subtle look on somebody's face when you see our concept that may not quite resonate with someone, it's enough of a signal to tell you Oh, maybe I should work harder on that detail.Fred Bould 14:28So we're even like the curve of a line on a whiteboard sketch. You don't need it. It can you people will look at it. You can say yeah, it's sort of it accelerates here. And it's harder to do that like this.Caroline Flagiello 14:45It definitely is. But I do think with tools like Miro and like you said screen capture and being able to you know, draw either virtually or you know, I am being able to post you get really fluid. And I think what's really interesting is that we haven't ever leverage the power of video in the way that we have recently, right? Like, we have all these tools. And we've talked about the future of work and what it looks like. But the pandemic accelerated all of these tools in our toolbox. And honestly, like our mirror has been a lifesaver. We like Nero vs mirror roll. But you know, obviously, there's, they're both there. Because our clients are now being able to jump in the boards with us see, the process, it doesn't have to be the tidhar that we've, you know, used throughout our careers, and they get to see the workings we collaborate a lot easier. And then from a design perspective, we get to populate what we want to and then what's great is you can turn those into pages, so you can make those into a presentation. But, but like the design piece of it, like when you're designing physical products, yes, I mean, that's probably the more challenging component of design. But when you're designing systems, culture, change, you know, all of those things, that's a lot easier within the virtual environment. But I do think that we're honing our skills and being able to read each other.Dan Harden 16:18True, there's a really great question that just came in, where do you go for your creative inspiration when you're stuck in your house?Caroline Flagiello 16:24That is a good one.Fred Bould 16:25For me, it's about it's about asking questions. I obviously I want to know, the environment that I'm that I'm operating in. But I think for us, you know, we just looked really closely at who you're designing for, you know, what the what the newest nuances are the function of the the device that you're developing? And, and and prototype.Dan Harden 16:49So, yeah, I would even I would add that design for me is, yes, there's a physicality to it. But even more so I think design is more of a mental construct, requires seeing, observing, feeling sensing, while simultaneously thinking and solving pragmatic problems. And sometimes there's a benefit to having environmental context. In other words, getting out and seeing the world. Yes, sometimes those acts are benefited by having people around you being in a studio. Of course, I missed that. But I can always jump on video as a medium, it kind of replaces that in person. In order to get those juices flowing. And get creative with whatever is around, you might have one one of our designers, he didn't have any polyurethane foam, and he couldn't get in his car to go find polyurethane foam because the stores were closed. So he used aluminum foil to create this, the Hand tool thing I was like what in the world is this pile of aluminum foil, but I'll be darned the shape was there. The idea was there, the ergonomics were there. It was it was really cool to see that. So get creative with whatever is around you. The most important thing is to just stay creative, no matter where you are. I mean, if you're stuck in a little village and in Vietnam, and you get a design idea, figure out with what's around you to whatever you need to do, do it.Caroline Flagiello 18:23I think that that we our creativity has been pushed to new limits, right? How you get access to content, where you search for content, and spread, you aren't stuck in your home, maybe you can go out with a mask. We definitely have done that we literally do are designing this cooler for camping. And I had the design team Meet me at the campsite. So we ended up camping over the weekend. And we were designing in context. Which, you know, normally you visit and then you leave, but we were literally designing and context as a team. So I think you just get creative about how you do things. But I feel like in that creativity, it's opened up new processes for us and new ways of gleaning inspiration and and inspiration from a material standpoint. Like if you think about sustainability, I think we're thinking about what are those materials out there that we can have access to you start making phone calls, you get stuff shipped to you I have boxes coming multiple times a day, write to our studios so we can see the latest, the greatest get get your hands on stuff. So hybrid work does not replace physical touch physical experience is just how you do it. And this process does take longer. That's the other thing. I will say that does design in general has taken longer during COVIDDan Harden 19:52It has that something's longer something faster because you have the tools to make certain decisions like right now. With your client, you know, we're drawing online in video and showing concept literally real time. So there is there is some odd benefit. So considering that the process has certainly changed, did the type of work that were coming into your companies change it certainly did it whipsaw I mean, we got way more health care, work, protection work. Certainly a lot of home goods, because people aren't spending money, you know, their budget allocations going more toward material things that will help them in their home versus getting on an airplane and flying somewhere. And also service design. But where have you guys seen the the uptick and different kinds of work?Fred Bould 20:46I just want to go back to the collaboration thing, because just for one second, because I would actually venture a guess. And like, if I go into the room next door and say, Tell me the truth. Did you guys like the fact that you were kind of, you know, for long periods of time, you were kind of on your own, you had more independence, you had time to think you could try things that maybe wouldn't try when you were in the studio, you know, that there was just a little bit more, I'm guessing that a lot of designers probably felt more independence. And that was probably, you know, liberating and refreshing. I mean, we tried, you know, trying to give designers space, but you know, their schedules and meetings and stuff like that, but I'm venture I'd venture to guess I'd say a lot of designers felt like it was.Dan Harden 21:37I would agree with you, Fred, I might even venture to say that the creative people. Well, you're either more creative when you are very relaxed and your zone, not pressured. Or, or under extreme anxiety. Like I've got a deadline tomorrow morning, Daniel, I got to figure this out. Now, you know, I find that I'm either in one of those two extremes, or I'm very, very heady and kind of like trying to reach my subconscious for solutions on the one hand, and the pandemic has been good for that actually come up with some wild ideas, just like sitting around in my sweatpants. I don't wear a sweat pants, but we don't need to discuss what I wear. So yeah, that's it's really interesting. I think there is an upside to it.Fred Bould 22:27To answer your question, we saw a continuation of what we were what we were saying before, but we did, we did pick up some medical and we actually, one client was COVID, a COVID related project, it was this disinfecting device for commercial spaces. And you know, that had to happen really fast. So we started, you know, we started the project in June last summer, and they were like, yep, we want to be shipping in October. So that's June, July, August, September. That's four months, including design for manufacturing and everything.Unknown Speaker 23:09Well, yeah.Caroline Flagiello 23:11I mean, our work stays pretty consistent. I mean, we're purpose driven and the work that we take on. But what was interesting was the focus is shifted to even more culture, more, the future of so I'm a big futurist, we love the future of tight projects. And the future of work was one that we've worked on in many different sectors, within industry, within governments, and thinking about what it means to reinvent work for ourselves, and or embrace this new way of working because we're in a working Cultural Revolution right now. Where big companies are, like, you know, come back to work, or else and workers are saying or else, right? And so, we need to be flexible. And because we started realizing what's really important to us as humans, we started reevaluating our own values around life work, and it's not work life balance, it's actually work life fluidity. And those boundaries between work and home, they were already starting to shift with, you know, Fridays off or, you know, flex Fridays, etc. But no, it's actually very different now. And so being able to, as designers think about how we're able to incorporate that fluidity in a way that really services people, their heart, their their soul, and feeds us in a different way. We were missing our family, we're missing the life with our heads down work ethic that we have all experienced. And so that's the kind of work that we started seeing more of as well as transitions. What does it mean to transition Thinking about as a culture and as a human, as you go through these transitions? How, what support do you have? What models do you have out there? And, you know, what is your ecosystem? What's your network? And who are the people that thrive in transitions and don't? And so that that's the kind of deeper human work that we started getting into over the course of the pandemic.Dan Harden 25:23Very cool. You know, one, one thing in addition to that, I've also seen that the pandemic has acted like an accelerant for certain businesses and technologies, for example, we're starting to see way more interest in different kinds of precision medicine, or very specific solutions around healthcare. Partly because the technologies are realizing that that's where the answers are, if you look at, you know, what Pfizer and moderna had to go through to create that, that vaccine. And of course, all of this relates to design because we have to ultimately package these solutions and present them in a way they're palpable and understandable intuitive to those end users that that we want to have consumed these products. So we're starting to see way more AI driven diagnostics, lots of biology plus electronics, netting products that are very weird and wild, something like we did recently for this company called Conoco just really unusual things. And the pandemic is, it's been like this, this catalyst in some way good. Some people are like, well, the heck with it, let's do this.Fred Bould 26:34Yeah. There was a doctor at the National Health Service in England, who said that they've seen 20 years of innovation in two weeks. And I, I experienced it myself, I had a pinched nerve in my neck from doing stupid things. And so my doctor said, Well, do you want to do PT on zoom? And again, I was skeptical, but I said, Yeah, sure, that sounds great. Let's do that. And it worked. It was a little bit, you know, was a little bit odd. But it, it worked. You know, here I am three months later, and no more pinched nerve than I, you know, other than seeing the physical therapist online, I'm sure it made their job much harder. Because they couldn't, you know, like bend my neck and say, Hey, Did that hurt, or things like that. But I think we've seen a tremendous amount of innovation in a very short time. And I think that it's opened people's eyes to opportunities for new types of products and services.Dan Harden 27:41Yeah, it is a plus. I think that, you know, when things get tough, people have a tendency to really reassess what they want out of life, and start to think about things like quality of life being more important than quantity of life. And this is, this is really where I want to move the conversation is, it sounds to me, you know, all three of us are experiencing the same kinds of changes in our companies. There is more of an emphasis on quality of life and health care and home centric design. But will it stick? I want it to stick, because it seems like people are being a little bit more sensible. I think quality of life and quality of design go together like peanut butter and jelly. I mean, they work well together. So but but we all live in a wild world, and everybody's trying to make more money, and they're, you know, the traffic's coming back. And are we gonna fall back into these patterns? How can we make it stick in the foreseeable future?Caroline Flagiello 28:38Well, I think one of the things that we are missing, and we're seeing this in our, we've been auditing Silicon Valley companies and honestly, nationally as well. And what's missing is that friction, that friction and that need that, that innovate helps innovators and creatives Spark, and if we don't get back to that level of Spark, which comes from interacting with each other, and or, you know, seeing things and being inspired, you know, like going to see us For example, when person brought up how CES was important to kind of Spark. She used the word envy, but I don't I don't know if it's envy, but like just Spark, you know, that that creative, Uh, huh. Like I want to get in the mix, we will start seeing a push for the lack of comfort, you know, in the home so that we can get to that creative spark. So that's one of the things that we need to think about how do we create that spark or keep that spark going, and we're also posting on a lot of our relationships that we had pre pandemic. So starting a project with a client that you've never met in person and or teammates that maybe you have new hires that just started really hard to do. If you haven't met in person, a lot of projects are failing, all around and every company with teams that haven't met in person. So how do we keep it going in terms of that balance and and honoring what people are feeling like they're missing? But then how do you just keep that that creativity, that hunger alive? haven't figured that out yet?Dan Harden 30:32What do you think, Fred, about that?Fred Bould 30:36I think that there was a lot of friction to enough friction to start a lot of a lot of different fires. So I, you know, I think likeCaroline Flagiello 30:48creative friction, versus like, destructive fire affection.Fred Bould 30:53Yeah, no, I, I think that the, I think that the pandemic, just really, I mean, for me, personally, it, it definitely helped me kind of realign, I feel like there's, you know, within the studio, there's just, I think there's a lot more empathy for everybody. And I think that when people are more empathic than they, they, they're more attentive to each other's needs, and they're kinder to each other. And I think that plays into design, I really, I think that helps you know, us, you know, when we're because we're always sometimes we're the uses of things that we're designing, but a lot of the times where we have to imagine and so I think that when you're more empathic, it's easier to imagine, you know, and you go that extra mile to make create a better experience.Dan Harden 31:42But Fred, how do we make this the tangible benefits that we just heard? And I think there are more unforeseen dividends, right, that have happened from this pandemic? I mean, it's, it's been held for a lot of people, let's face it, not to mention that the disgraceful loss of life, but how do we make some of these, these these good things stick?Fred Bould 32:04I think they'll stick because it's a value shift, the underlying, you know, like, he talked about, you know, mass flow, I think the shape of the pyramid of the base has changed, and what what people are, are going to support and tolerate, it has changed. And so, you know, they're some of the biggest companies in the world, you know, come back and said, Okay, here's what we're gonna do. And people have said, No, I don't think so. I'm not doing that. What else do you have? And so I do think that there, there's a shift and that that employees feel and understand that they have more power. And so and I think that, you know, whoa, whoa, to the, the organization that doesn't take that on board, you can, you can go and pick up the Economist magazine and read, you know, dozens of articles about this kind of thing. Things have things have changed, and things have shifted, and I don't I don't, you know, I feel like it's a, you know, the toothpaste has come out of the tube. We're not you can't put it back in.Dan Harden 33:24Yeah, like, I really, I agree, I hope that some of these, these benefits that we're talking about, really, really do stick, I think it's incumbent upon us designers to make sure that we we do we do carry a new kind of torch, and that we are strong and persuasive, and making sure that we're offering good sound meaningful, truthful solutions to the clients and be brave stand up and just, you know, proclaim what innovation means to you. That's okay. I think there's, I think the big message here is, it's okay. Make your Proclamation. Everybody is we're in this time now.Fred Bould 34:03Yeah. I also kind of wonder, like, so, you know, as a work from home skeptic, you know, I was proven wrong. And I think that, that kind of has emboldened people to say, Okay, well, what other things that I held to be true, are also incorrect. And so I see, I see my designer is asking questions like, well, do we really have to do it that way? Or, you know, is, you know, why is that a sacred cow? Why can't we change that? So? I don't know. I think that I think there's I think there's a shift going on.Caroline Flagiello 34:44Right. Well, I do think as I mentioned before, the idea of work fluidity, that you we as designers need to design tools and experiences that allow work fluidity, so that we are It's not flexibility. And this is the difference. So and I stumbled across this Aha, you know, thinking about the future of work, that it isn't about either or, it's about that we are working in our cars, at the cafe, at home with our teams that are home office back, you know, hopping on a plane working on a plane, like work happens everywhere. And while we may have thought about that, we still think about it as binary work from home, right? Well, actually, it's not just from home. So work fluidity needs to happen as our devices pick up from one area to another, you know, content, our access to content, our access to people, we need to think about that even more, because honestly, our tools are still very limited in what they can do and how they support idea generation collaboration. Well, it's great that we have what we have now, they're really still very, very limited. So I think, to keep it going and moving forward, we need to reinvent our tools for creation, collaboration, communication, and start thinking about other dimensions. So we're even playing around with VR, right, and collaborating conducting meetings, we have, we are just on the precipice of an amazing time, if we choose to take it, our muscle memory is so strong to the way it used to be or normal, I think that we may be missing a big opportunity in advancing how we create, how we work, how we think, how we transmit ideas. And so VR is the real untapped dimension, quite frankly, on how we can collaborate together and start bridging some of those arenas. But I don't want to diminish, you know, the, the in person power because we as human animals can communicate and transmit energy that you just don't get anywhere else. So we need to not forget that, obviously, in person is hugely valuable. But I don't want to miss out on all of the other dimensions that we haven't really tapped fully.I think designers intrinsically, are so good at that. Because many of us are crafts persons, artists, musicians. And it allows you to have this, this touch point with your own humanity. And it's often that that element of that designers bring is sometimes sidelined by big business and managers and CEOs that maybe value the bottom line more than an individual's big idea. So if it's allowed us to bring out more of our humanity, that's, that's awesome. I love that perspective. Carolyn, do you think it's do you think,Fred Bould 38:02you know, like, great tools, right, we have zoom and Google Hangouts, we have all these other things. And when we first you know, I think that the people who develop them were sort of like, Oh, crap, we have like, you know, 500 times, number of people using this now. And I think that they really, they probably, you know, people generally, like, I'm very thankful to be able to talk to people like this. But in fact, the software could be better. You know, it could be easier to use, it could be more flexible, it could allow us to share more easily. And so I'm, I'm guessing that there's this sort of unseen groundswell of people out there going, Wow, there's a lot of opportunity for making this a lot better. And so I think that when you say, how are we going to do it? I think it's probably happening, you know, you know, out there in Silicon Valley and across across the world, people are probably imagining great new ways for collaborating.Dan Harden 39:18To do you think this pandemic in both of your opinions has made us especially designers, has it made us more accountable? Is it going to make us more responsible? Will it prompt us to really think about the essence of a problem and how to how to really go about solving it that might additionally be very sustainable in every way, not just environmentally sustainable?Caroline Flagiello 39:44For sure. I mean, honestly, at the beginning of the epidemic last year, I was on a panel where scientists were talking about from the UK we're talking about you think this viruses bad wait till the Climate change hits you, and you're worried about being in the home now. Just wait. And it's in years, not in 10 years, it's in a couple years. And I honestly, you know, we've heard climate change. And it honestly, it doesn't stick with you, as much as when this scientist was talking, it scared the bejesus out of me. And ironically, from that, that conference to when clicked, you know, client work started picking up again, it was all about sustainability more than ever before. And, and it really gives you pause about, and especially as design leaders, being able to say, Hey, wait a minute, I don't know if that deserves to exist, this product that you want to create, like, let's prove, why does that deserve to exist. And I don't know if I want to partake in creating that thing. And I think also when we think about sustainability, for the product, its lifecycle. And the onus that we have as designers, not just in sustainability, but in the creation of things, or services or experiences, just because I think we really have a lot more power and being able to redirect a refocus. And also be able to shift and build a business case for maybe something that's an alternative that actually has much more positive outcomes. And that process of development as well as much more positive. So in that, though, I will say as designers, it is crucial for us to get up on many different manufacturing techniques out there for let's say sustainability, because I don't think that we have in our toolbox, enough sustainable knowledge to really design effectively, cradle to grave. and beyond. I just thought why don't just think I know. And I think it behooves all of us to really get deep into what this looks like. And sustainability, not just in physical product, but and the whole cycle of our experience, from product services, culture, everything needs to be sustainable. We worked on a program years ago around human resilience, human resilience as part of sustainability, right? And thinking about how we're able to tap into ourselves to be sustainable, which also mirrors back into a earlier point that you made down around. How is this changed us? Like how were we more sustainable as humans in the condition that we're in right now, but also sustainability and the products, as I mentioned, and the services that we design? Yes, we do have greater responsibility than ever before, because we've seen the effects.Dan Harden 42:55Yeah, I also see this, there's has been for the last 50 years, this relentless Corporate Drive to make more money through design. And honestly, I know I do design for a living, but that kind of motivation simply does not inspire me. I mean, my my definition, and the pandemic has really driven this home is of my definition of prosperity is totally the opposite. And like a lot of designers, I mean, I think we have to value meaning over money and outcome for users of our income for corporations. I think growth of cultural value is more important than growth of shareholder value. I think we have to somehow through the means that you just mentioned Caroline, keep pushing for these, these values that are more sustainable, and more holistic definition of what sustainability even is. And I think that's our big challenge. I mean, Fred, I know you because I've known you for a long time. I know so wholeheartedly, you would you would believe in that or tell me maybe that you don't? What do you thinkFred Bould 44:10I i've always I've always been frustrated by the, in order to see real change in sustainability. You have to have a change in you know, it's like steering a supertanker. They are like we've we've gone out many, many times and looked at you know, different types of material that are more ecola more environmentally sound. And they're always these these nice things, but I think it's things are slowly changing, because people are starting to understand, well, you know, I can still do well, by doing good and, you know, at some point, something's going to happen. It's like I've always said with With consumer electronics, if you go and look at the reviews, or you'll get what's selling the best, it's not like something selling 40. And this one's 40%, this one's 30%. And this one's 20%. This one's 10. It's like this one's 90%, because it's the best. And then this one is 6%, because it's cheaper, and then this one selling 3%, because it's really, really cheap. I think we have to get to that situation with, with sustainability, where we can go out and there there are options for you know, for materials and systems that are better. And that we can and that there we can be they can be deployed on a massive scale, not Nish. I'm not talking about, you know, making lamps out of orange peels. I'm talking. Go Go look on the scene, it's there. But no, I'm talking about like, really, really meaningful ways of doing things like, you know, at the at the Tokyo Olympics, they made the they made the beds out of cardboard. Okay, that's awesome. Why, you know, I would it be okay, sleeping on a cardboard bed? You know, I don't I don't, it doesn't, it doesn't need to weigh 600 pounds. You know, I? So I think that there's, there's two things, there's the systems, the infrastructure, and then there's our limited ways of thinking about them.Caroline Flagiello 46:33Right? Well, I wanted to ask, so we're working on sustainable running shoes right now. And it's interesting when you start investigating, like in the running shoe category, you know, all these proclamations, right, from big companies that we all know and love and have worked for around their sustainable shoe. But you know, there's a lot of carbon credits that they're buying, right? And as does he mean, you know, it's kind of cheating, right? It's not, it's not really being sustainable, or using an ecologically sourced material, but it's still last forever. As designers, you know, how now I'm taking your role dance, as designers. How do you feel about pushing back in that arena? Like, what would you work on a project where you knew the client was buying carbon credits, and, you know, basically buying their way into sustainability? Or, you know, how does that fit with you guys?Dan Harden 47:36I think as long as you are able to make the positive change that you should be as a designer, then the means in which that occurs, providing the ends is a good result, some benevolence, some benefit to the end user that I'm okay.Caroline Flagiello 47:52Yeah, it's kind of interesting, because, you know, our client isn't necessarily advocating for that. But it was just the investigation out there seeing the greenwashing if you will, and it doesn't sit well with us, we're like, Huh, if you're really willing to make a change, we're there for you. Right, we're gonna take it, we're gonna see this through. But if you're, it's a marketing ploy. We're not really that interested in engaging?Dan Harden 48:20Oh, I misunderstood your question. And then I hate anything disingenuous. So you know, we and we are often every design firm will you'll pick these moments when you have to ask yourself, should we be doing this? You know, we'd turn one down this morning, a client that wanted to work with us, and we're just like, no. And, yeah, you're those are hard decisions sometimes, because they're, they're often not black and white. Right?Fred Bould 48:47You know, I think you have to ask yourself, okay, is this is this supertanker? Do they want to make a turn? Or do they just want you to, you know, get on the deck and cheer them on? And I think that if you can, if you can make even even an incremental positive impact than it, then it then it's worth doing, because there's definitely somebody else out there who won't care and will just say, yeah, sure, we'll do that. So, you know, if you can, if you can get in there and and even make, you know, like, if we could, if we could get a client to just make a change in their packaging, to go from say, you know, a plastic insert to a compostable insert, you know, from go from like a styrene, or something like that, which is horrible to, to, you know, an egg crate or something like that. Then it's, you know, these these things are, they're all incremental, but they're, I think they're meaningful.Caroline Flagiello 49:53Yeah, and that's a really good point, right, like, increments do add up, they do stack up It is important. And I think to answer the circle back down with your question around responsibility. I do always we're all saying that yes, we do have responsibility to bring up these really hard questions. And then also to guide the process to guide the process towards a better answer are utilizing things that they've already used but a new way. And that's where doesn't always have to be reinvention. Right. It could be rejiggering of an existing system, but just optimized in a way that actually improves exponentially over time. So I just want to circle back.Dan Harden 50:38Yeah, good. Very, very good point. If there's ever a time that we have the IRS, you know, in the C suite, or clients, it's probably now because with all of this change, we're seeing, I mean, whether it's social change, climate change, changes in the Delta variant. I mean, there's just so much that we're dealing with right, it's hard to cope. designers are good at coalescing solutions, at culling from what we see in the world into some form of betterment. I think that spells when there's so much change going on, that spells opportunity to me, change occurs, and very difficult times and very positive times. So I think that's what we're seeing here. And it is our moment to do exactly what you're just saying. So this is this is awesome. we've, we've covered so many interesting things. There have been so many incredible questions coming in. So there are so many here on our list. I'm going to just hand select one or two or three, maybe let's see if we can get through them. These are real time. Let's see. Work From Home is made everyone worked more than ever. And where to guess that end is blurred the line between work and home life? What's your plan for returning to a healthy balance of work and rest for your employees?Fred Bould 52:21Well, we're actually we track that pretty closely, we actually we actually go to people and say, we think you're working too much can what can we do to help you balance your workload? Because I mean, we know that when, when people are working too much, the actual productivity goes down, their happiness goes down. And, you know, the work just isn't as good. There's, there's definitely, you know, there's a limit to how much you should work. And we, we we actually be reviewed that every Monday, we look at how much people the leadership team here looks at it and says, Okay, well, everybody's good, you know, sort of like everyone's somewhere around 40 hours. If somebody is above, then we'll go and talk to them and say, Okay, well, how can we help balance your load? It's, it's super, it's super important that people have known this for for ages to there's, you know, somebody works 70 hours, 70 hours a week is not doing a good job for a number of those hours.Caroline Flagiello 53:35Right. Right. I think also, you know, not capping vacation time, I think, what's been really interesting is, you know, people don't tend to abuse that. I mean, some people can, but if you take the time that you need, and expect everyone to be responsible adults, obviously tracking what's going on, you're able to flex and people are happier, as you had mentioned, Fred. You know, I think also, at least for us, like Gone are the days of, I need to see you working in, you know, your desk, 40 hours plus a week, if I don't see you working, then you're really not productive, right? I think, being able to understand that work in life, if they're going to be more fluid, they're going to happen. And you know, what's interesting is that you need to also take care of your wellness. And we are big advocates of that meaning like, Hey, I just need to take a little bit of time to go for a walk or, you know, I you know, at certain time I'm taking this Pilates class or you know, you know, what have you or I want to take a painting class, and it's, you know, started it this time in the evening. That that says it being able to be fluid, but also you can't abuse it, right. So trying to find that that fluid line, and we've been pretty successful in doing because everyone has that drive to do well, I mean, that's we're hungry, if you're a hungry designer who needs to create and innovate, that's great, but then you have rest time, otherwise, you will never replenish. And when you go, go, go, which is what I think as a society we've been doing, but as designers, if you do not give yourself that downtime, you are an empty husk, empty husk and you will not be able to give your best give your all it's why great ideas come in the shower, right? You need that experience during the day, to be able to and it's daily, to be able to do that. And I think with the way that we've been working, and how easy it is to get on video. I mean, I have to admit, I have not myself been very good. At the end of the day, like I just told my husband, also a designer, I'm like, you know, at the end of today, we're running out of here screaming and going to go get dinner, we call it purple dinner, because we eat in our car, but um, you know, mobile dinner and myrin. So, you know, whatever that is, you need to find that joy,Dan Harden 56:23I would agree that also design it's it's one of these professions where you're so informed by the things that you're not necessarily at the moment thinking about or trying to solve, you know, it's, it's, it's the subtle observation you made about an individual in a conversation that somehow informed the way you're thinking about a design problem a year from now. It all goes in, it all goes in, and then it's your job as a designer to sort of readily access it when you need it the most. And, and apply it and sometimes walking around in your sweatpants. A that's all of a sudden you use career something you see something. Yeah, that's all. So here's my final question for you too. What does design Nirvana mean to you, you know, society as gone through something. And as designers, if we're to learn anything from this, we should be able to carry our profession forward in some way to elevate what we do to advance it to bring it to a higher state of existence. I mean, that's kind of what Nirvana is. But is there such a thing as designer about a will the world really benefit from design? And if so, how? How can we move our, our society you know, we went from an industrial society to a creative one, where are we going now? And what is design Nirvana?Caroline Flagiello 57:55So I will say, for me, I have, personally this mix of futurist with light. And I. So think that we are in this age of technology, and design, much like fashion, where it's hope future, it's in your face, we are we're tethered to our products were tethered to our phones, were tethered to our technology. I think for me, design Nirvana would be that technology recedes into our environment more than it ever has. And we call upon it when we need it. But we need to be able to get back to our humanity in a way that I don't think that we have, and it's why home family, and you know, family values, all these things have resurfaced, when you have a very serious question of life or death, right? And for me, I would love to see technology recede into our walls more recede into our environments more, like I said, and populate, you know, when when we need it, and then it recedes back again. And so for me, if we can as designers almost get over ourselves, and the flashiness of look at the cool thing I just made or the cool system I just designed, and be like, wow, and then it just goes away. That to me would be Nirvana.Fred Bould 59:27I would say for, for me does design Nirvana is and we were talking about this recently, is just meaningful, meaningful, hard to solve problems. Because I think that that's, you know, that's, that's what makes work interesting is to have have a hard problem that that needs to be solved, to work for clients that recognize and value our Our efforts and are supportive of the process that we go through. And I, I would say we have that in our clients are generally very, very supportive of what we do and how we do things. And then, you know, to be to be working with a team of a team of experts, people who are super engaged, and, and really engrossed in love what they're doing. I think that's what that's what makes the the studio special is that there's this, this just sort of, kind of, sort of unspoken understanding amongst everybody that, you know, that we're, you know, what we're doing is, is, is, is challenging, but but fun. And, you know, and we all grow, sort of engaged as a group and supportive of each other as individuals.Dan Harden 1:01:01Awesome. You know, I think we're out of time. And it's a shame because we have received so many questions. There's got to be a way well, you can find all three of us online. Sorry to have just volunteered your more time Carolinian friend. But if you wanted to ask any of us individually, any questions I know, I'd be open answer a few questions. And I'm dan@whipsaw.com. And you can certainly follow us at whipsaw design. I just want to thank everybody for tuning in. It's always a pleasure to do this kind of thing. We do have to just stay connected. What we're trying to do is really just keep our community together and have stimulating conversations like this with really cool people like Caroline and Fred. So thanks, everybody. Huge. Thanks, Caroline. Fred, wonderful. As always seeing you guys and good night.Caroline Flagiello 1:02:00For you, Dan. So good to see you, Fred, too. Thank you for havingFred Bould 1:02:04likewise and thank you to which song for organizing this. I know a lot of work went into it. I appreciate everybody on the team for making it happen.Caroline Flagiello 1:02:14Yes, great job team. Right,Dan Harden 1:02:15that good set. Yeah. Great. Thanks to my team. Alright. Goodbye, everybody. Thanks a lot. Thank you for listening to prism, follow us on whipsaw.com or your favorite streaming platform. And we'll be back with more thought provoking episodes soon. prism is hosted by Dan Harden, Principal designer and CEO of Whipsaw, produced by Gabrielle Whelan and Isabella Glenn, mix in sound design by Eric New See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

GOSPEL POWER l AUGUST 8, 2021 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time Gospel: Jn 6:41-51 41Then the Jews began to complain about Jesus because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven'?” 43Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. 44No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. 45It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.' Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. 46Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. 47Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. 48I am the bread of life. 49Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” Jesus' mission of revealing the Father's gift of eternal life is like describing colors to a person born blind. Eternity is inconceivable because it lies beyond the scope of human experience. To make it understandable, Jesus uses bread, the staple food of the Jews, as the instrument of revelation. But when it is time to cross the linguistic barrier, the Jews cannot. They remain fixated on material bread, looking to Jesus for an unlimited supply of it. As Jesus speaks of himself as the “Bread of life,” they become suspicious and begin to question his origins. Their distrust of the Revealer closes their hearts to the revelation. Jesus interprets their reaction in the light of his Father's will, for no one can come to him unless drawn by his Father. Lord Jesus, thank you for the gift of faith, which enables us to perceive your presence in the material form of bread, and trust your promise of eternal life. Amen.

Watch the video version of this show on YouTube »Andy Carvell is the Partner & Co-Founder of Phiture, a mobile growth agency. Here he has worked with some of the biggest apps on the App Store, including Headspace, Spotify, Triller, and VSCO.Prior to founding Phiture, Andy worked on the marketing and growth teams at SoundCloud. His team built SoundCloud's activity notification system, which delivered over 500 million pushes per month, and increased M1 retention by five percentage points in its first few months of operation. Andy has been in the mobile industry since the late ‘90s, when he started working at Nokia. Andy has a deep interest in technology, strategy and the execution of ideas.In this episode, you'll learn: Andy's user retention techniques The most overlooked component in marketing your app How to optimize your customer's App Store experience Andy's formula for maximizing your app's notification strategy Links & Resources SoundCloud Headspace Spotify Triller VSCO Nokia RevenueCat Salesforce Intercom Elevate KiwiCo Braze Leanplum Iterable Andy Carvell's Links Phiture Phiture's Mobile Growth Stack Andy on Twitter: @andy_carvell Andy on LinkedIn Work at Phiture Follow us on Twitter: David Barnard Jacob Eiting RevenueCat Sub Club Episode TranscriptAndy: 00:00:00So the impact that you can drive with notifications is reach, times relevance, times frequency. What we learned from the time at SoundCloud was not all notifications are equal, and the really killer ones that are going to really supercharge your business, have high reach, high relevance and high frequency.And then, then you're in that golden quadrant.David: 00:00:35Welcome to the Sub Club podcast. I'm your host, David Bernard. And with me is always Jacob Eiting. Hello, Jacob.Jacob: 00:00:42Hi, David. David: 00:00:43It's a thundering in your neck of the woods, I hear. Jacob: 00:00:46It's, you know, it's cleared up now. I think we're gonna make it.David: 00:00:50I've got a plumber. Our guests might have some construction workers. It's going to be a fun one today!Jacob: 00:00:55Is it, David? You're breaching the magic of podcasting and it's going to get audited out.David: 00:01:01All right. Speaking of our guests, our guest today is Andy Carvell, partner and co-founder of Phiture, a mobile growth agency. At Phiture, Andy has worked with some of the biggest apps on the App Store, including Headspace, Spotify, Triller, and VSCO.Prior to find founding Phiture, Andy worked on the marketing and growth teams at SoundCloud.Welcome to the podcast, Andy.Andy: 00:01:23Thanks, David. A real pleasure. Thanks for inviting me on. Excited to be here.David: 00:01:27Yeah. So, you and I were chatting a little bit about your background as I was kind of prepping your bio, and you shared a really fun anecdote. So, I think I'm like, “Old man in the mobile space,” you know, or Jacob and I both; we both had apps on the App Store in 2008, you know, we were early. But you started in mobile a little, just a few years before that. Andy: 00:01:52Just a little bit more. David: 00:01:53Tell us about that. You were at Nokia making games in 1999.Andy: 00:01:58Yeah, right out of university, I graduated computer science in ‘99. I always wanted to be making games, and I was applying for roles in the games industry, and then the agent that was kind of helping me find those said, “Hey, there's this company Nokia. They make mobile phones.”I didn't own a mobile phone at that point. None of my friends did, but it was just kind of reaching the tipping point, and they wanted to put games on these things, and I'm like, okay, that's sounds interesting.I went along to the interview. I really was very kind of amazed at the, you know, the R and D center there. It was like, like pretty space age, you know, they were working on some real next level shit.And, I was actually pretty excited by the idea of like cramming, you know, decent games into like 16 kilobytes, which is what I had to play with building embedded games on a black and white 84 by 48 pixel display.Jacob: 00:02:55So, I was going to ask, are we talking like Snake, or are we talking like Java level stuff?Andy: 00:03:00It was pre Java. It was an embedded game. So, I was coding in C in Assembly, and I basically had to like build the whole game from start to finish. We had this shared designer who did the pixel art, and I had to cram it into 16K and make it fun. Yeah.I wrote a pretty game called Space Impact there, which was released on the 3310 phone, which I think wasn't available in America. But in the rest of world a lot of people played that game. It was like the first, side-scrolling arcade, shoot-them-up, on a mobile.David: 00:03:30That is amazing. Jacob: 00:03:31Well, it's pretty incredible. Just even think like the iPhone wasn't that far behind that right? Like you were doing 16K assembly and C, and like eight years later, we were going to have like open GL driven games. So just pretty wild.Andy: 00:03:51Yeah, it's moved on a lot.David: 00:03:53So after Nokia, you spent some time at SoundCloud, and there's a couple of things you did at SoundCloud that I wanted to dig into, because it seems like you've kind of continued that work at Phiture, and it's really relevant to our audience in subscriptions. So, one of those is the mobile life cycle program, and this is something I think so much about.There's such a huge story that's hard to tell, and hard to really understand. It's something like, you know, I think we can help with at RevenueCat that I'm constantly thinking of from a product perspective, and I think developers often it's like, you get an install, you get them to start a free trial and they convert and like, but there's so many other journeys and so many parts of the life cycle that, that need to be studied.So, tell me about this mobile lifecycle program, kind of the origins, and then, you know how you see it today?Andy: 00:04:53Yeah. Yeah. I was that SoundCloud for about four and a half years in the end. I was working on various teams, but ended up actually building out a cross-functional team focused on user retention, which is where I got really into the lifecycle topic.And yeah, it's, you're absolutely right. It's, it's a pretty complex topic. It's one that we have continued to develop processes and, and, you know, best practice around at Phiture, where we're helping companies like Cisco and, yeah. Blinkist actually is a, is another one that we're working with, recently. But yeah, everybody seems to struggle with this because it is such a, a giant topic, as you say, David, there's a lot to it.There's a lot of different touch points you can have with the user. And it all comes, starts with understanding the user journey, right. And understanding users probably better than you currently do. And that, for me, always starts with asking them questions rather than diving straight into the analytics and looking at funnels.I think it's something that's really overlooked in, in tech companies. You know, we have all this data available. And so the instinct is just to dive in and look at the numbers. Now, I think quantitative tells a very interesting story and for sure you need to be tracking what, what users are doing to, to understand those users quantitatively.But, you also want to understand the psychology of the user at these different points. What are they thinking? What are they hoping for? What are they expecting? And you know, I think a great lifecycle program from, you know, actually user life cycle starts outside of the store right outside of the app, rather. So it starts in the stores.Jacob: 00:06:38Yeah. So did the need, right?Andy: 00:06:40Yes. It starts with a need or what? and then, you know, hopefully. Somehow the user discovers the app. It's either through an advert or maybe a friend has mentioned it, or, you know, there could be many ways that they come to the App Stores, but then, you know, they're all going to go through that App Store, which is why the Phiture.We also put a lot of work into App Store optimization with our clients. You know, you start the user journey there, you're setting the expectation, in your ad creative and in your App Store page. It's a great opportunity to. To sell the benefits of the app and qualify your users, you know? Well, because you're, you're really then.You know, setting, setting that expectation, which you then need to deliver on in the very first session in the app. So then you get into onboarding and activation and, you know, that can be both within the product, but also augmented by a multi-channel messaging approach, which is we did a lot of work with that at SoundCloud.Because this is like, for me, this is the kind of the hack, right? The magic bullet. Is that not that. Not that CRM is the most effective lever for, for engaging users, actually that's product. but CRM is a great way to circumvent a six month product backlog and engineering backlog and, and, and rapidly iterate on ideas.And, and also it's got built in measurement and, and segmentation. So you can do some really interesting stuff. Sorry. You had Jacob: 00:08:07So, yeah. So when you say CRM, I mean, like, I know CRM is like in my world, Salesforce, or maybe Intercom or something, I guess, but when I've heard, I've heard this used in the marketing world, but what is, what is the more, seems like there's a lot more broad context or a broad definition of that term.Andy: 00:08:24Yeah. And there's so many different terminology and definitions around it. It's a, it's very confusing as with everything in tech, but. Yeah. So when I say CRM, which is customer relationship management, and, and that goes back to the sixties and seventies, you know, classic business, you know, theory actually, it's nothing new that we've invented it just with tech, but, when I'm talking about CRM in a mobile app scenario, I'm talking about leveraging a customer engagement platform like braise or Leanplum or, Iterable maybe.And, You know, it's typically what you've got available in that kind of stack would be, something sort of rudimentary analytics enough to do sort of targeting and triggering of messages as well as basic measurement around like what the effects of those messages are. Although typically you'd want to pair that with.Your product analytics to get a deeper view on how it's affecting retention or, you know, or monetization for that matter. but yeah, you're able to sort of carve out segments of users and then craft, interaction. So, so the, the tools you mentioned there, Salesforce, IndyCar, definitely still in that mix.We don't, we don't see them so much specifically Salesforce. We see it more in enterprise. most, mostly. Let's he around email as a channel. but you know, this sort of more modern or mobile first platforms such as prays, for example, you know, really kind of built to leverage, mobile specific channels, like, push and rich push, mobile in-app messaging, which is a killer channel for engaging users who are in the app.And it's where it kind of bridges the gap between classic products. Classic marketing, because you can really kind of overlay an old man. New experiences on top of what's what's built in the product, which sometimes causes some tension with, with the designers. But, but actually you can make them look, you can make them look super native.And, yeah, you can test and iterate on them quickly, which is the real benefit I think of using a platform like that is you can, if you have testing on onboarding for example, and you're looking at day zero users, you've got a fresh cohort every day. You can run. You know, if you've got enough, big enough cohorts, you can, you can iterate every day if you want, or at least every couple of days.Jacob: 00:10:45Yeah. As long As you're getting a few thousand downloads, right. Or, you know, or even like even hundreds, right. If you're getting hundreds of downloads, like those are significant enough cohorts, especially if you're running, you know, tasks very towards that, very beginning of the experience. Right. So you get like lots of exposure, but yeah.And then it's typically very high leverage too, right? Because we found this at elevate a lot. just the nature of funnels is that. There were all these like tests and kind of experiments we wanted to do further down the funnel, like, oh, how was like the last step look and all this stuff. And it turns out nine times out of 10.It was not really that important because what really mattered was the first step or the second step, because that's just where the most people were. Right. It didn't matter. We could get half the lift there, but it mattered more because they hadn't decayed all the way through the funnel. Right. Which is, there's a lot of these like unintuitive aspects of, yeah.I guess when you think about a CRM, it's like, The pre-experience finding you getting into the app. Re-engaging right. That are in some ways, like there's an overlapping piece with products. Right. But it's broader, right. It exists like sort of outside of the, the, the specific software itself. and, and yeah.Thinking about it holistically, as David was saying earlier, it's difficult. Right. It's difficult because of the time-based aspects is to, because it's, multi-platform, it's difficult because, you know, The tooling still leaves something to be desired. but, but, yeah, I think it's really interesting to, to, to talk about using your user interviews in that process, because, you traditionally think about doing that in a product process, right.When you're like trying to talk to users about what to build, but you actually need to be talking to them about how, how do they, what do they, want? Like, why do they, why are they here? Like, why did you want to inform, like, you know, how are you contacting them communicating with them, et cetera. Andy: 00:12:32Pretty much so. David: 00:12:33Yeah. And then. So part of that, life cycle management is this multi-channel notification systems. And you've kind of already mentioned that a little bit, but, so in mobile apps and the clients that you're working with at Fisher Phiture, and then some of the work you've done, you did previously at SoundCloud. how do you kind of manage the. The breadth of available channels. Now you've got email, you've got in-app, you've got push. you know, and have you seen kind of patterns in, in certain channels performing better with these kinds of mobile audiences?Andy: 00:13:11Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think to some extent it depends on the, the, the app itself and the audience for that app. you know, we still see SMS, for example, being a really impactful channel in, in some specific categories, like, you know, SoundCloud couldn't send SMS. I think it would be a bad idea.Possibly in some markets, you know, maybe they're a slightly less developed. They have all the funds, but I'd say it's probably not a great channel for SoundCloud, for example. But, you know, we, we did some work with, with good RX, which is a, like a prescription yeah. discount service in America is huge.I think they, I think they might've had IPO recently, but, yeah, in any case, SMS is still a huge channel for them. because they're, you know, a lot of their customers are older people. With, you know, with who are not necessarily engaging with, with emails or, or necessarily in app messages. I mean, I think an app is generally a pretty great channel for anyone who's in the app, but actually with some, some apps it's not a very valuable channel at all because the users barely in the app, if you're thinking about sort of very functional experiences, like, I'd say Uber, Uber is a, is a good example.Like there's definitely some room. To even with mobility startups to interact with users while they're in the app, but you don't want to get in their way because they're there to book a ride and get in it. So you have like limited surface area. So yeah, really, you know, when we go in this Phiture, you know, our retention team goes into to build out a, an engagement strategy with a customer.We very much like to understand not just their usage. But also, you know, figure out what is the right channel mix. That makes sense. We actually put up, I think a while back a, a, a matrix, which kind of highlights the pros and cons of each channel and how they can be used in combination. Maybe a I can, I can take out the link and we can include it in the podcast. David: 00:15:02Yeah. And you know, it's funny. I feel like I see all these like threats on Twitter about like, especially from like the kind of indie developer scene about like, you know, don't, you know, do a newsletter, like email is evil and like, and then I'm always the one that's like, I kind of liked newsletter. It's like, as long as it's not like overly aggressive.And then same with SMS. I found myself lately, just ended up with a couple of apps, like a thrive market. It's like a shopping. it's kind of like Amazon grocery ish kind of stuff. And they're texting me and I kinda like it. And I never would've thought, you know, cause like they're pushing notifications, they just get lost.But like I care about when my order shifts and I care. And so it's interesting how I think, you know, sometimes we in tech underestimate. That when somebody really cares about something, they don't mind. Getting notified about it, but that's where you have to like, be really careful of where you draw these lines and how you do your messaging and what the user really cares enough about.But when they do, you know, you, you know, it's always felt to me as a developer, like, oh, SMS is like, it's just off the table. Like, I wouldn't touch that. But then like, now I'm like, wait a minute. Like if it's something I use, it really cares about like, it's a Bible platform and as a Jacob: 00:16:21For transactional stuff, right? Like your ship order shipped and things like that. And then, you know, it's becomes something you can piggyback marketing messaging or expansion or product marketing onto. Right. but I always, I was the, at that point is super validated across to you is your Twitter is not really.Right. and, and it's totally true that like the developers and the communities and the styles that we have often as people who make software and our insiders is very different from the, the median consumer, which is not even a thing. There is a median consumer, right. You're dealing with this huge distribution of users and different, they have different tastes and they have different appetites for, for marketing and all this stuff.And yeah, I always believe. Give them control. Like obviously don't do anything on tour. Don't message people. If they say not to write and give people like an opt in opt out, like, you know, as clear choice in the onboarding funnel. But yeah, you'd be surprised. Like people don't have as much stuff going on sometimes or have as much noise in their, in their feed.Really want to engage. And those are the users that you really should be reaching. Right. Because they are like, they're, they're not only installing your app, but they're willing to show some intent to engage with you. Right. Because they have a real purpose to be there. Right. As opposed to like a drive by or something like this.Right. And so, yeah. I don't know. I think that that is. Goes beyond just this one particular topic. Cause like we, yeah, we hear developers all the time. Like being like, oh, I don't want to tell. I mean, I even remember me going back to elevate again, being when we started to, we hired a growth marketer and started to work some of these new notification channels.I was very against it. Like I thought this was like disrespectful to our users. It was just growth hacking. It was whatever. Then I saw the numbers, right? Like, I don't know the retention didn't go down. All the other numbers went up. I was like, well, I guess people don't care. Right. Or at least like the people that don't care aren't big enough to matter.I mean, they matter, but like, I don't know, I'm building a business here at some point. Right. So, it's, counter-intuitive,David: 00:18:17This goes to your earlier point though. And I was just going to bring it up up is 12 south. I just bought this forte stand thing. That's like one of my favorite products I bought in a long time. It's amazing. It's like wireless charging for my phone. I can drop my AirPods pro on there and it charges a little ad for them real quick.But I went to unsubscribe to their email because they were sending me like two weeks. I was like, well, I don't want to, I don't want to unsubscribe. It's actually like 12 south lake. They make good products. I love this product. I just bought from them. I want to know what they're up to. So I go to unsubscribe because I was like, I just can't, I can't do two emails a week from these people.And then the, the email thing was like, Hey, do you want to just hear from us, you know, twice a week, once a week or once a month, I was like, once a month. Cool. Like, I'd love to hear from them once a month. I wish more newsletters would do that. And the opposite. I subscribed to Kiwi co boxes for my kids.And they email me like four times a week and I've even talked to their Twitter team and they're like, we're going to put you on the like slow thing. And they don't, and I keep getting four emails a week, so I'm just going to unsubscribe.Jacob: 00:19:21A lot. It's a lot, right? Like it's a lot to, like, we're talking about, I'm sure, Andy, you deal with this all the time. Like just getting that first version of like a marketing product marketing campaigns going, it's hard to add in like, well, okay, you'll have the, the one month and you know, it takes time to build those things up, so it doesn't surprise me, but it is.Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to, well, it's a tough choice as product and builders. Right. We always have to decide like, what are the corners we're going to cut? What are the, like the boxes we're going to shove everybody in. Right. Because we're not gonna be able to like, perfectly meet. Everybody's like appetite for this stuff where they are.Right. That's going to be impossible. and so, I mean, I feel like that's where the measurement comes in, right? Andy?Andy: 00:20:00Yeah, so you've touched on so many interesting points there. I know we don't have two hours to discuss them all, but I would love to just quickly pick up on it. before we get onto to measurement and, and personalization, I think it's all going to flow. So, first point, you mentioned like, you know, developers. Maybe not the target audience for the app. That is so true. And I mean the less, unless you get, get up, you know, for sure. But, you know, for the vast majority of like consumer apps that are targeting essentially, you know, global audiences of more or less like, you know, broad audiences, like, you know, I don't know, 18 to 30 males and females or whatever, who were into a particular.Sport or something like this. These people are not, they're not engineers. They don't hate notifications. Right? You know, the only way you can prove that as a growth marketer is by getting a little bit of surface area where you are allowed to run experiments. or as, as we, as my team tit in, in, at SoundCloud in the early days, we would run them in places like Pakistan.We would just, SoundCloud's going to kill me when they hear this, but, you know, we would just. Just just not send them to Berlin, you know, where all the engineers were based, but we tested me the rest of the world, or if it was particularly something like a bit more daring, a bit more bold and you need to run Volvo experiments.Sometimes we would run them in Pakistan. We'd get a good feel for like, you know, what the uplift was and then we'd take it to the lawyers. Cause sometimes there was, you know, there were also even legal issues about where we could tread the line with user generated content and promotion. music licensing is a minefield, but, but yeah, my point.Jacob: 00:21:45Yes,Andy: 00:21:45It's only when you can kind of come back with data and show it to, you know, the exec team and say, look, we just moved retention five percentage points. This is huge. then they kind of give you a bit more leeway to, to send a few more notifications. and yeah, like the, the, but, you know, we had so much resistance from, from the tech team and, you know, the engineers.Convinced we were going to destroy the product and it comes from a very, very good place. You know, they care about the product. They care about the users, they just, they just are not representative of the users. and that comes to my second point. Which is, I learned a lot from my time at SoundCloud and from building out a, real-time notification system that was, you know, from, was kicking out around 500 million push notifications per month.So it was, you know, we, we got there in the end with the, with the volume. but, you know, one of the things which I kind of distilled later when I was at Phiture, I kind of thought back to that time and distilled it into a formula. So the impact that you can drive with notifications, is reach times relevance, times frequency.And I'll just break that down very quickly. So reach we're talking about, you know, your overall channel opt-in rate. So how many people are actually opted in for push or in this case? I'd also like what if your segment that, that whole, audience then what stage of the funnel they're at, which is to David's point earlier about how you have a greater surface area or a greater reach as I would put it, earlier on in the funnel, because more users are still around.So. yeah, so that's your reach and that's a big lever on, on how much impact you're going to drive with any particular notification. Is that is your size of your target audience. That's addressable, second one relevance, which you've also touched on, in your examples there. if it's highly relevant, users will tolerate not just tolerate, but actually welcome a high volume of notifications, which is th th the third, parameter there in that formula that the third variable, which is pretty cool.How frequently can you send this particular notification before people start to opt out and then it like brings you a reach down. So it's basically like a, it's not a Seesaw because there's three elements to it. Right. But it's some kind of 3d sea sore, where if you get the right balance and you're able to tweak, tweak those things, there's a tension between those three variables.Right. But if you're. April to increase relevance by, by personalization, you know, by providing in SoundCloud's case more relevant recommendations for content. Or, looking at what users have listened to before and, and telling them more things about artists that they've been listening to and things like that that would increase the relevance, which means you can proxy that by click through rate, they're much less likely to turn them off and you can send more of those notifications.You can increase that frequency. And so what I learned from that, what we learned from the time at SoundCloud. Not all notifications are equal and the really killer ones that are going to really supercharge your business, have high rates, high relevance, and high frequency. And then, then you're in that, that, that golden quadrant David: 00:24:51Would imagine. I don't know if you, if y'all have built things out internally to, to Phiture, but I imagine that kind of 3d Seesaw is really hard to measure. It's really hard to understand. Which, which ones are driving relevance, which ones.And especially once you get into personalization where now you're not dealing with just massive AB tests, you're actually like almost doing user level, understanding of what's relevant and what's not SoSo it brings us to the, to the next big topic and we can kind of dive into that aspect of it later, but you got to build out a stack for this.And so, and this is something I, I, you've done a great job of, of kind of boiling a lot of this down into the mobile growth stack. And I wanted to talk through a few kind of levels of the mobile growth stack. So a lot of apps. You know, I taught as developer advocate. I talked to a ton of revenue, cat customers.So a lot of apps all the way from like, you know, Hey, we just have an idea where we're like thinking about subscriptions to Indies, to like huge companies. And, but you have a lot of people super early who are kind of overbuilding and then you have people in the middle, like, what do I do now? So let's talk through kind of a stack for, for your MVP and then onto your kind of intermediate and then to your kind of growth stage.Like what's the like, MVP I'm want to get this out, but I want to have just enough, you know, measurement just enough analytics, just enough data to, to start growing this thing.Andy: 00:26:28Yeah. Great question. And, and, yeah, it's a, it's a really good topic actually, because you know, this mobile growth stack framework, which, which, which I published originally at SoundCloud, and we continue to develop a Phiture, you know, it's, it's huge, there's loads of stuff on this. It's basically trying to encapsulate everything that, you know, Could form part of your marketing strategy and your, your growth approach to growing, growing a mobile app.So, so sometimes people misinterpret that as, oh, I have to do all of these things have to tick all of these boxes in order to be successful. no, absolutely not. Like, you know, you have to play to your strengths and also to you. So your company stage and your, your priorities, right. And for sure, if you try to overreach, you try to do everything.You're going to do it all really badly, or at least most things, so much better to focus. And, yeah, I think this could be another good, blog post actually that I should write. But, but yeah, let's, let's dive into it now. Let's let's have a go. So like early stage, right. Prelaunch or, well, Let's skip pre-launch for a second.Let's say you've just launched into the market, with your, you know, with your new app. I think what I see often is a challenge with early stage customers and frankly why we don't work with super early stage customers. Because they have unrealistic expectations. They, they think they're ready for growth.But in, you know, accepted except in absolutely like, you know, stand out anomalous cases like maybe flappy bird would be a good example, that that was ready for hyper-growth pretty much from day one, I think just, just happened to catch the zeitgeists, but you know, you can't bank on that. And most 99.9% of apps will not have that kind of success.So actually what an early stage. Team needs to work on is product market fit. Whether they, whether they think they do or not. They're probably two, two or three years away from market product market fit. That means they need to iterate on the product and they need to iterate on the marketing and, you know, meet there somewhere in the middle with some level of, you know, kind of a retention curve that flattens out at least somewhere along that curve.Jacob: 00:28:34Was thinking about this, this, this product market fit meaning, and I don't know, it's one of these words that it's, it's, it's, it's constantly an enigma to founders and because nobody can tell you what it is, right. I think because it's different for every product is different for every segment is different for every market.Like what it actually looks like in our, in this space consumer subscription space, it generally has to do. The, yeah, the, I think that's the best, a very good definition of it. The pretension curves that do flatten out because like, you don't get in this face, you don't tend to get like, exp like super stable user cohorts.They always like drop off to some level, but you want to see like some reasonable level out in some like shortest period of time, which takes a while with subscription apps to really understand like 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 months, or like for the annual renewals, it takes a year to really understand it. but focusing on the product.Yeah, it's really what you need to do at elevate. We actually, before we even launched and we weren't subscription when we launched, but we. We had a, an just an or, yeah, we just released on, Android. So we had an Android app. We could, it was great. Cause we could release a new version every week, and do a beta list.And we could, we, we, we curated a list or it was sorry, it was Android and iOS. And we used like test flight, distributions. But, and we measured each cohort. Right. And it's not talking about, we weren't AB testing. We weren't like driving in massive downloads or anything like this, but we were just looking like each, like some subsequent cohort, like what was their first.10, you know, what were these like how many signed up? How many finished? Like activated and we just watched and like watched we iterated on the app until we felt like that number was pretty good. And then we launched, but we didn't do AB testing. We didn't like massively like go over the top and tracking.Right. It was just like a handful, like really things. Cause the thing is you're going to score. Right. Like AB testing is really hard. It's expensive. Not because of the tooling, it's expensive because operationally it's really difficult to get. Right. And you gotta put a lot of people on it. So, that, that really starting simple mentality will save you a lot of headaches. I think.David: 00:30:37Yeah, we had a great episode with Doris Maura from reflecting on this about just, just that minimally viable, like shoot for product market fit. And, you know, don't do sophisticated AB testing. Don't do all this stuff you think you need to do. And then even some of the stuff that they, you know, you could install braise or like try and do these big things early. You can find ways around it. Like you can do simple email surveys, you can do simple user testing. You can, you can, you know, use Zapier for things to kind of like bridge the gap and don't go build a ton of internal tooling around it, but like do the simple hacky things that don't scale early on and then move on.So then let's talk about like, okay, you've reached some level of market product market fit, you know, your, You know, your, your marketing seems to be resonating. You've got some decent retention and you're starting to really pour money into user acquisition. What's kind of that next level up, that you think companies should start layering on new new services and new sophistication.Andy: 00:31:46Yeah. So I'm talking here like primarily about, you know, growth stuff rather than Phiture building. I'm kind of assuming that there's, there's always more Phitures to build, although, you know, I would actually say. Probably people generally keep building Phitures when they should probably stop. They always think that another Phiture is going to be the thing, which really helps what right.Exactly. And can I say be detrimental to a point, you know, like when, when it becomes too crowded, so, but yeah, so talking about the, you know, the, the growth stack and the, the, the growth activities that would. Appropriate as, as you've got that initial traction and you're looking to scale it, which is where Phitured can get involved.By the way like this. Typically we work with either kind of traction and growth stage companies, or actually more mature kind of increasingly like enterprise folks who maybe have a very mature product in the market. And they're looking at they're kind of plateaued and they're looking to scale it, but yeah, in, in that growth place, super exciting phase, there, I think it's really about. You know, you want to be able to start to scale. So that's. You're going to need to upgrade your analytics, probably in stock, trucking more stuff, to get a better understanding of, you know, deeper understanding of your engagement, your retention, and for sure the performance of your acquisition channels, whether they're, whether they're organic, paid or some mix.Because you'd likely to want to start adding layering in more acquisition, either scaling the channels that are working for you, or when they max out or start getting expensive, you know, layering in other channels. I would also recommend like, you know, I wouldn't build it right at the start, but in this growth phase, it's good to experiment with virality.Like, you know, I always say it's, you can't really plan for virality, but you can at least. So the seeds and see if they germinate, right? Like you, if you don't cultivate the right conditions for virality to occur, it never will. but if you, you know, if you have like, you know, the ability to share content, if there's a content app, if you put those share Phitures in, then at least you can kind of see what the kind of natural PR, prediction of, of users is to, to share to their users, to share to their friends.For example, the networks, then you, if you see something. Some traction there, you can, you can optimize it, but even if it's just doing it a little bit, it may be it's helping to keep your paid acquisition costs down and you have your blended acquisition. Costco is a bit more sustained. and maybe you see that actually you go super viral.You know, I've seen it happen. So I think like, you know, building potentially referral systems or content shares depends on your app, but I'd say if you do them in a fairly cheap way, but just at least at least put those in and see if that, you know, is going to be something that's going to help you grow.Because if you find that it is for SoundCloud, virality was huge, you know, so, but of course it, it works better with, with social apps and content apps. Yeah. Apart from that, you know, I'd say like, you know, you're going to be, you're going to be continuing to iterate on the product. I'd say ASO becomes more important at this point.Like, so optimizing your App Store page for, you know, for organic discovery, making sure that you're ranking for the right keywords. and also start to think about international. I think a lot of companies. Focus on their coal market and the one that they know best, which is often, you know, us or, you know, whatever country that, you know, the team is based in.They often start there and they know that market best. But, you know, I think one of the things which going back again to SoundCloud, what are the things they did very well was, you know, even though they were headquartered in Berlin, they didn't have this German outlook actually that, that the founders were not even from here.And they built it global from the start, you know? So they, they basically, it was available everywhere. you know, when I came into to help them level up on, on mobile, you know, we made sure that we translated the App Store page into all the languages. When I came in, it was just an idea. but even English is a good start compared to, you know, most of the languages.But you know, pretty, I'd say at this growth stage, see, it's about exploring you don't necessarily, you know where those big leavers are for scale yet, but it's about discovering them. So maybe, maybe it's virality. Maybe, maybe there's a market that you're not localized in yet, which could. You just, you just catch fire in that market, you know, so it's not about doing huge installations, the launches and doing a huge, you know, traditional kind of PR push in, in, you know, launching in us or whatever, but, you know, at least making sure the apps available there are, you know, in, in, in as many of your big markets as possible, make sure that it's translated, you know, localizing the applicant, using the App Store presence and just seeing, you know, getting a feel for.You know, are you going to be a very local app or you, do you have a global, potential you have really trying to tease out, like, what are the acquisition channels that are going to work for you? And what are the, what are the other leavers for growth, you know? And, probably you want to start doing a little bit more in terms of CRM or customer engagement at this point. you know, Which, which does also doesn't make sense when you, when you're a superstar. But you're sort of building the foundations for the next phase of growth and then leading into the things which are showing promise. David: 00:37:05Nice. And then we are coming up on time, but, can you give us a, like a 92nd, two minute, quick drill? I think, you know, I, I don't know that that many, like massive apps are going to be listening to this podcast, so maybe it's not even quite as relevant anyway. Jacob: 00:37:23David, I think I like to think every apps can be a massive David: 00:37:25Every app. Yes. Andy: 00:37:27Right. The massive apps of the future Jacob: 00:37:29Yeah, David: 00:37:30Once you get to that stage of a head space of calm of disco, you know, what, what is the stack start to look like there?Andy: 00:37:37So, when you get to that kind of scale and we're working with folks like, you know, like, like this go, like, Blinkist, Headspace folks, you mentioned, an a and a whole bunch more, some that I'm not allowed to talk about, which I wish I could name drop, but, I'll get into trouble. but some, some really big enterprise brands and some household names.And when you're at that kind of scale, you know, when you're doing, oh, I can mention Trilla trailer's is a good one. I'm going to give them a call out there. They're a customer of ours, awesome platform. anyway, when you're at that scale where you're just seeing like, Insane acquisition, just on a, you know, that becomes the norm to get like more than a hundred thousand thousand downloads, you know, like a day, which, which we see with some of the apps, when you, when you're at that kind of scale.Even incremental gains can be really, really meaningful, particularly on monetization. Right? So I would say there, you really want to then focus on subscription optimization and revenue optimization, way more than you would in the earliest stages, because you're, you've proven you've, you've got all the elements in place.You can really then start to scale. And if you can, you can increase your, you know, average subscription lifetime by a month, or you can increase your conversion rate even by like, Point one of a percent on your, you know, your subscription conversion at that scale, it's it can be really meaningful.Right. So, I think activities which maybe you wouldn't have spent so much time on before, maybe you've built out rudimentary stuff for maybe you have rudimentary tech in place for it's time to start upgrading that stuff and, and going deep on these topics. So things, again, like, you know, ASO, it's more like.You know, something which you need to keep doing. You're constantly kind of optimizing there to get as many organics in as possible. You want to be of course, continuing to optimize your, your acquisition. But I would assume at that point, you've kind of got those things more or less nailed and it's, it's almost like a hygiene factor.It's more than a hygiene factor, but sorry, you said to keep this quick. yeah, I'd say I I'd say like big focus on yeah. Retention because you know, again, it's a slow moving metric, but if you can move it even, yeah. Point five of percentage point that'll give such compound growth and also like, you know, knock on gains for monetization work a lot, you know, diligently on conversion optimization and starting to sort of segment your user base further, to provide more segmented experiences, you know, because you will have those cohorts in that scale where you can start to do really interesting stuff and, and lean into AI and personalization to, to really get to that increased relevance in your recommendations and community.Jacob: 00:40:13This is why it makes sense to really do AB testing. Right? Cause you can hire a team, right. To focus on it. You had multiple data people. You've got engineers, you've got, you've got to have an entire growth engineering and experimentation team. and that's what you need. Andy: 00:40:28Bring in Phiture.Jacob: 00:40:29Yeah, there you go. Or, yeah, bring somebody in, right? If you need it in a pinch, you know?So, yeah, it's, it's, it's a different game. This is how all of these things go, though. It's like, you gotta every incremental compounding something like a business like this, like every, every, the next 10 X is always going to just be different, because, like different tools, different mindset, there's going to be different, different returns on different actions, right?And I think, you know, when I talk to people at different stages, a lot of times folks get this, get this wrong. They, they, they think they need you. You were mentioning at the beginning, Andy, like just thinking we're ready to scale when you're really not. Right. And so it, there is a lot of value in just understanding how different a hundred thousand downloads is from 10,000, from a hundred, right?Those are very different numbers. All of those, like none of those tell me, like, you're dead, right? It's just a different stage. And, and doing the right things at this stage is super important. So I, I really like how you break this down into like, different phases.Cause I think that's how, app developers should be thinking about it.David: 00:41:36I think as a, as a summary and talking through this with you and he's really helped me kind of frame it finally is that when you're early, you take big swings that don't need sophisticated measurement to see the result. You don't need sophisticated A/B testing. You don't need sophisticated analytics.You need to take big swings that give you big results. Those obvious results. Then as you grow, you can start taking smaller swings that require a little bit more sophistication. And then as you're scaling huge, that's when you get into minutia, and too many small apps are getting into the minutia too early.So, big swings early, you can take those smaller swings later. But anyways, as we wrap up we're going to put in the show notes your Twitter, Growth Stack, great places to follow. You're constantly sharing amazing content there. Anything else you wanted to share with our fine cadre of a subscription app practitioners?Andy: 00:42:36Yeah, actually I've got a really exciting announcement. This is the perfect audience for it. At Phiture we're hiring right now for a Subscription Optimization Lead position. It's a super exciting role. You get to really be in on the ground floor, building out a team and an essentially a new P and L line that we're going to breaking out from our existing services.I'm really doubling down on subscriptions because it's like such a big topic, and we're really looking for the subscription expert to come in and lead that team, you know, a fantastic place to work, et cetera, et cetera. You know, you'll work with some AAA clients, some great names that I can't talk about today.You work with a fantastic team of experts if you can come to Berlin and work with us here, because it's obviously not in Berlin today, but Berlin is an awesome place to move to. We'd also consider remote, I think, don't quote me on that, but, yeah. Get in touch. you can find the job spec to go to the Phiture site: phiture.com, and go to the careers page. You'll find it there and to subscription optimization.Yeah, we'd love to get that out to your audience, because I'm sure there's some people there that might be really interested in that role.Jacob: 00:43:44I'm looking at the requirements, here, proficiency in IAP management, you know, it's right in my wheelhouse. So maybe I'll throw my hat in the ring.David: 00:43:53Well, Andy, it was really great having you on the podcast. And, yeah, we're going to have to have you back on there's so much more, and Phiture does such great work. And we, we share some customers and so, you know, we see the, the results of the work you do on our end. And it's really great.so, thanks for being on the podcast, and we'll talk again soon. Andy: 00:44:15Thanks for having me on. Thanks, David. Thanks, Jacob. It's been a pleasure.

THE WEEK OF JUDICA - MONDAYLESSON: JOHN 8:45“Because I tell the truth, you do not believe me.” John 8:45It is true that no pastor's life is ever so good that it is without sin before God. And so, it is enough if he is blameless in the eyes of his people. But his doctrine must be so good and pure that it stands up not only before men but also before God.A godly preacher may well find himself in a position to ask his hearers, “Who from among you is going to find fault with me? From among you, I say, my fellow human beings! But before God I am a sinner.”Moses does the same thing when he claims that he had not taken anything from them or harmed any one of them (Numbers 16:15).Samuel, Jeremiah, and Hezekiah could also appeal to their blameless lives before the people to stop the mouths of slanderers.Christ does not speak about His doctrine here. He does not say, “Who among you can fault my doctrine.” He says, “because I tell the truth.”One must be sure that one's doctrine is the truth and right before God and must not be concerned only how it is regarded by men.SL.XI.568,3AE 76,409PRAYER: Grant us at all times such conviction of faith, heavenly Father, that we never have the slightest doubt that the whole truth of salvation has been revealed to us in and through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.

Navigating toward the “new normal” in the speaking world is proving to be a large learning curve for all of us.  On this episode of The Wealthy Speaker Show, I have invited 2 of my long-term friends and veterans of booking speakers for large scale meetings to join me.  Today I am thrilled to welcome Diane Goodman and Kris Young to share their thoughts on what meetings in the future may look like and how to make yourself more “sellable” to the speakers bureaus. Diane is the founder of Goodman Speakers Bureau and brings her 30+ years of experience and vast industry knowledge to every team she works with. Her clients trust her expertise and guidance when selecting the right speaker. Kris has had a more diverse path in the speaking industry and is currently working as the VP of Speakers and Entertainers for Heroic Productions.  She also has 30+ years of experience in the speaking industry and has worn many hats making her a great addition to this discussion with well-rounded insights to share.    Highlights you won't want to miss:Adjusting and retooling to COVID 19.  4:00Virtual keynotes...are they booking and what to keep in mind.  8:45It's a good idea to find a production studio in your area.  13:20How meetings could look in the future  16:00Getting innovative in your virtual presentation.  21:20How to adjust your presentation for a virtual setting.  29:30Big budgets and virtual fees.  34:30When to approach a speakers bureau.  41:00 "Is it time for you to check in with a speakers bureau?  Join me to hear from the pros, what they are looking for and what can help you stand out from the virtual crowd." If you would like to hear directly from the people who do the booking...what it is they want and how you can provide what it takes to get yourself moved to the top of the short list, you simply can't afford to miss this episode! I hope you'll download and learn. Links:Diane - Goodman Speakers: https://goodmanspeakers.com/Kris - Heroic Productions:   https://www.heroic-productions.com/Virtual DemosPhil Hanson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVyUrOG0tEcThe Passing Zone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2xRoMRm0rYRohit Bhargava: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD61wXJE9q0Mike Super Goes Virtual: https://www.mikesuper.com/latest-news/mike-supers-magic-goes-virtual

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/ARationalFearMAILING LIST: www.arationalfear.com The pod must go on — from our separate homes we keep cup and carry on — on the show this week we bring you the best and brightest brains on COVID19 including Eureka Prize winner Dr. Darren Saunders, comedian Rosie Piper, Dj Dylabolical, hosts Dan Ilic and Lewis Hobba and comedian Bec Melrose drops in to do 5min from her cancelled Melbourne Comedy Festival Show. (00:00) Preamble.(01:40) Start.(02:50) Introductions.(04:27) Sponsor: Visit the 90's.(06:22) The 3rd week of Coronarama.(12:28) Dr. Darren Saunders gives some COVID19 answers.(26:40) Alan Jones on the Coronavirus(29:10) Bec Melrose does 5min of her cancelled MICF show.(35:50) Wrap up(36:47) News Fighters Dan Ilic 0:00Well, before we start, the building committee festival has been cancelled. Lewis actually predicted this the day before they actually cancelled it on our last week's show. I've actually got a clip of you Lewis predicting this. Here it is. Now before we start letting people know that our Melbourne Comedy Festival show Tickets are on sale at this stage. The Melbourne Comedy Festival is still going. Yeah, I mean, what is it? It's currently Thursday evening, I would say we have 12 hours left for you to purchase tickets, feel good about them and then feel the need to return them when the coroner predicted predicted Louis hell but what do you think about that? I mean, obviously, I'm a genius. I see everything. It's palpable tonight. It's Thursday again $60 million. It's gonna be number 37. Touch all your money. I'm 37. Now if you if you get a refund, I should let you know. become one of our subscribers on Patreon. For as little as five bucks a month you can support a rational fear to bring you podcasts and videos. This week. We actually double Our Patreon subscriber limit term to 11. And a big shout out to someone named Margot haba. Who is now donating any relation Louis maga haba hey, yeah, that's my Lewis Hobba 1:14mom shout for mom. She's been financially Dan Ilic 1:18helping me out since day job. So it's still good to know that she hasn't laid off Thank you, mom. And also, for every patient subscriber who wins will expected like 50% of that to go to restaurant fears pitcher Patreon. Thank you very much, Louis. It's very generous of you. irrational fears are coated on gadigal Land of urination. I pay my respects to elder's past, present and emerging. Let's start the show. Unknown Speaker 1:42A rational fear contains naughty words like bricks, camera, Unknown Speaker 1:48and gum and section 40 of a rational Unknown Speaker 1:51fear recommended listening Unknown Speaker 1:53by a mature audience. Dan Ilic 1:54Today on irrational fear cuantas is reportedly seeking a government bailout when asked What they did with their recent $5 billion profit, a spokesman suggested it was stuck on the back of the cuantas lounge. The NFL is seeking a bailout from the government claiming that Australia won't be Australia without Rugby League, which is news to people in Western Australia, South Australia Victoria Northern Territory in Tasmania who all said who is rugby lake. Tasmania has shut its border to mainland Australia. On top of a 14 day quarantine people will be deported from the island if they don't test positive to being a close cousin. There's plenty of toilet paper for everyone. This is irrational. Unknown Speaker 2:38irrational. Dan Ilic 2:50Welcome to irrational fear. Now let's meet our fear mongers tonight billed as one of Australia's premier transgender lesbian Canadians maybe it's rise pifo Hello Hello, in 2019 he was the winner of Australia's most prestigious science prize in 2020. He's shutting down his lab because as it turns out, being good at important work is not valued in Australia. It's Dr. Darren Saunders. Good, I will look I'm fine. And as someone who is pretty good for the apocalypse and as someone who has to live with the uncertainty every day in the cutthroat, chaotic world of US public broadcasting, it's Lewis. Hello. Hello, Dan. Yes, a joy to be here. Not broadcasting. I can't hear anything. It's actually can I say, my my Cynthia virus here and everyone's been working from home. This current setup of a million people speaking from different places, has become the norm. And I feel like I'm just back in high school watching my substitute teacher struggle with the DVD player again. And on the pots and pans, it's DJ diabolical Unknown Speaker 3:59now Now I've always stood up the back end being the silent DJ and the whole by Paul Shaffer and I took a global pandemic to get me on the mic. You will probably regret it. Thank you, Dan. Dan Ilic 4:09A little later on the show broadcast. Alan Jones shares his view on Corona virus comedian Beck Melrose will be popping by two to five minutes after cancelled Melbourne Comedy Festival show and della balika will deliver us fresh new news fighters. But first, we couldn't do this show without our sponsors. Here's our first sponsor for tonight. Hi, Unknown Speaker 4:29I'm unindicted war criminal and foppish former Prime Minister Tony Blair. And I mean, look, these are uncertain times, right? Like 2020 his brothers coronavirus, the climate crisis and married at first sight. And since international travel has been banned, I'm inviting you to take a break and book a journey to somewhere when nothing interesting happens. The 90s I mean, look, you could learn to surf the web with Morgan Freeman. Unknown Speaker 4:55Click on Netscape Navigator Unknown Speaker 4:56and type in www dot But you thought out the vista.com Unknown Speaker 5:02then search for the answer to anything you want. Like why can Kevin Costner do Unknown Speaker 5:06an English accent? Or go on a tour of the White House with my good colleague, Bill Clinton. And in this drawer is where I put all the things I want to disappear, lock cigars use tissues and genocide in Rwanda. I've never even heard of that place. Sir. Mr. Epstein's on the phone. Oh, Unknown Speaker 5:25excuse me, Unknown Speaker 5:26Jeffrey. Hi. Of course, Saturday's great for me. Or you could even visit the set of a television commercial with Donald Trump. I don't even drink vodka. They want me to sell it because I can sell it. Vodka. It's Unknown Speaker 5:42fantastic. Believe me, but Oh, hang on a second. Hello. Hello Jeffrey. Jeffrey Epstein. My friend is a billionaire just like me. It's what we have in common. Saturday. I'll be there of course. Unknown Speaker 5:57So look, book a ticket to of the 90s when the war on terror was just sparkle in my eye. What has it hasn't finished yet? This month? Oh, good, who? Actually Don't tell me I'll watch it on DVR. So pimp your right to the 90s. Right? a time where if you wanted to enjoy an apocalypse, you have to go to the cinema. How about good deeds? Unknown Speaker 6:22Thank you. Dan Ilic 6:23This is irrational fear we're into the third week of coronavirus on last week on inside is paid event ensel and tweeted that when tweeted when the CMO into the studio he offered to shake everyone's hand. Later that afternoon the Prime Minister suggested that everyone stop shaking hands which gave us a huge release to everyone who is forced to meet the prime minister and Kobe did a monologue this week from his bath. The NBC today show as Al Roker the weatherman did the weather from his kitchen TV shows are doing shows with that audiences which is nothing new. We did we did it tonight lay all the time the difference is popular shows are seeing their audiences to stay at home and people in the middle Panic buying weed. So my friends, how is the apocalypse treating you so far? Unknown Speaker 7:05I think Unknown Speaker 7:07people would probably expect it to be worse than it is. Right. But I've been doing some thinking. Because a lot of people think that like comedy is in like a bit of crisis at the moment, right? Like the comedy festivals being cancelled and everything. And that's obviously, you know, a bad thing. But I think like, it's actually going to, sort of, in at least when like, everything kind of blows over in the end, it's actually going to set the comedy community out quite well. And I like I've been talking to a lot of comedians and whatnot. I've just got like a sort of like a list of things he that I'd like love to go through. Sort of like, tell everyone, what, what sort of good, good stuff we've got to look forward to right. So like, at least while we're all like self isolating, socially distancing and whatnot right now. There's a Everybody is being pushed to like the podcasting world, right? Dan Ilic 8:04Unfortunately, yeah, this is how we do it. We were unfortunately having to make a podcast over Google Hangouts. It's very shoddy. Unknown Speaker 8:11Yeah. Well, I think there's gonna be a lot more of that right and like obviously like, that's a great thing because all we want is a lot more straight white men telling us which movies we need to watch right? So I've talked to like a few people who have got some like podcasts in the in the works and I just want to go through some of them right now. So I've heard there's there's one coming up was called Mighty Morphin Power recap, right? Which is a it's two middle aged white men just sort of watching Mighty Morphin Power Rangers episode by episode and going through that and I can only imagine that that is going to be some truly interesting content. Another one that is come through my my friends podcast, you should go to the fuck are you looking at again, middle aged males Come on there and discuss all the best fights that they've gotten into over their, over their lifetime. So that's a pretty good one is there's also one called, we'll just tell you a mother, we ate it all, which is essentially it's two white males and a trans woman who watched sort of that American Pie style teen sex comedies every week and discuss those and I know you're thinking that doesn't sound like it has any legs at all. It couldn't even have 100 episodes. It didn't celebrate that today. Please listen, please listen. Dan Ilic 9:30Is this is this your podcast? Right? Unknown Speaker 9:33Oh, no, it's certainly not mine. No, I don't know he's talking about I don't have any involvement in that podcast at all. Please listen. We really need it. Please listen, Unknown Speaker 9:41this there's certainly going to be a lot of time for binge watching. So I see those podcasts going well, I'm just not sure about the restaurant review and travel podcasts how they're gonna car living, Unknown Speaker 9:51may not suddenly gonna suffer. Yeah. Unknown Speaker 9:56I think what it's gonna come down to is a lot of kind of reminiscing style. ones another one that I've heard of, sort of in the vein of in the vein of guys we fuck these chicks we've routed so I'm sure there'll be quite a lot of tasteful material covered in in that podcast yeah or Unknown Speaker 10:12remember what toilet paper was or what was food Unknown Speaker 10:17Yeah, that was that was actually quite a good thing I haven't posted I wait I wait I might move out today and left behind or who gives a crap toilet paper so we are set Dan Ilic 10:26oh my god that is my leaving behind gold. Unknown Speaker 10:29Yeah, I was surprised except Dan Ilic 10:31you can watch your mom with it. Unknown Speaker 10:34You can watch it on with gold if you try hard enough. Unknown Speaker 10:36Yeah, probably get to that point. Dan Ilic 10:38I think it's a it's a rough endorsement if someone facing a period of potential quarantine with housemates is moving out right now. Like I don't want to spend two weeks with you specifically. Thanks not even two weeks. It's like It's like people would really have to be bunkering down for if month so I pick people that are saying the next five months are going to be awful in this house if I don't move. It's gonna be a real test, particularly if you live in a share house. I think a lot of people are talking about the the rate of babies going up in nine months after this, but I think people are gonna start talking about the rate of divorces going out. Unknown Speaker 11:20Statistically divorces have gone up in China because of the all the all the isolation. Well, really well. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's it's already in this in the stats. Unknown Speaker 11:30Yeah, that's the biggest problem actually. Yeah. Well, Darren, what's your Unknown Speaker 11:34best shot his biggest problem? Dan Ilic 11:36Darren, what are you saying? What are you predicting will happen in five months time? Unknown Speaker 11:40Ah, look, I think I just want to point out that I think I was way ahead of the curve. I'm shutting down my lab because unless you're building covert test kits or vaccines, everyone's shutting down their lab. So that turned out to be quite prescient, actually. I'm just yeah, I'm, it's where are we gonna be in five months time? Well, I think the world's gonna look really different. I hate to be really heavy about that, but I think actually, you know, to put a positive slant on it, I reckon we're gonna come out the other side of much better society and a much better community. I think we're getting a really good reminder of what's actually important in life. And I think that's a good that's a good thing to hang on to. As we go into as we go into pastor it's definitely a good thing to hang on to. I've been eating I've been eating types of pasta and rice I never even knew existed this week. Unknown Speaker 12:23First time in about five years. Dan Ilic 12:27Darren, it's great to have you on the podcast because we're not experts at all. But you know, you are an expert. You are a doctor now a professor. So can you tell us I'm sure people were turning to you for all kinds of scientific advice because your head is often on the television. Often your voices often on the radio as a as a communicator of science. What are the kinds of questions I thought maybe I could ask you to collect a bunch of questions that people have been asking you and maybe you could quiz us tonight on the answers and so we'll we'll try and provide With the answers, and then you can tell us whether we're right or wrong. Dr. Darren Saunder 13:02Oh, this is perfect. I've got more questions than I can answer so I can feed these back to people this will be excellent. I reckon the good ones will lead off with is what? What's the effect of what bushfire smoke we all breathe in for months and months and months on what's going to happen? We've covered infection. Dan Ilic 13:20Your lungs will taste like smoked salmon. Unknown Speaker 13:26Fewer koalas are alive to die. Unknown Speaker 13:30That's a positive shadow that koalas can get covered up? That's a good question. Unknown Speaker 13:33Let's find out why I gave I gave them chlamydia. Rose Piper 13:39I think in effect it will have is because we were all told that we were breathing, whatever it was, like 37 dots a day or something like that. But now the economic downturn is probably going to cause some people to stop smoking. So it was like kind of getting your fixing before you before you quit, you know? Unknown Speaker 13:57Yeah, yeah, it's not not a bad way to look at it. Dan Ilic 14:00actually did buy a facemask during the bush fires that turned out to be quite handy in the long run Unknown Speaker 14:06ahead of the curve again, Unknown Speaker 14:07yeah, you're like Nostradamus Dan Ilic 14:13Listen to me more. But what what do you think Dan? What do you think the the ramifications of breathing in that bushfires mega? Unknown Speaker 14:21The actual answer is we probably don't know the guests or the hypothesis would be that we're probably a little bit more susceptible to infection all that smoke has been damaging our lungs the whole time we bring breathing it in and it's probably making us a little bit more susceptible to the infection as for having fictional play out in people had to say so it's not a good news story. That one. Dan Ilic 14:41There was such a weird point in kind of time where the smoke you couldn't really avoid it anywhere like you like with the corona virus. I feel like you can probably do if you don't have it, you can probably do your best to not have it for a long time. But the smoke was just so unavoidable because you couldn't really escape to any place that didn't have it. Unknown Speaker 15:01Yeah at one point I was sharing it the water tank where I was staying actually got permeated with smoke. It was like sharing scotch. It was not pleasant. Unknown Speaker 15:10Yeah, it sounds pretty good. It's not you Dan Ilic 15:14could you could you could sell that at a Gwyneth Paltrow resort. Out showering genuine Australian bush is a $300 so I'm just gonna make a note of that. That's actually pretty good. What's your next question? Derek? All right, next question was Unknown Speaker 15:32what is going to happen to everyone that's swimming and can we swimming pools? Can we swim in the ocean and avoid covert Dan Ilic 15:39thought calls? Were a no no rush think the ocean should be fine, right? Unknown Speaker 15:43I hope the ocean is fine. Dan Ilic 15:45That's my thought to my thought is that the ocean is antibacterial. Every Unknown Speaker 15:53interesting one isn't the ocean. Nobody knows the ocean. The sunlight kills a lot of germs. But if probably want to kill the viruses. But Dan Ilic 16:03before you go on are the answers to all your question is nobody knows. There's a lot of Unknown Speaker 16:11things that we're all getting it right. Dan Ilic 16:13It's good. All right, great. What's the next question? Unknown Speaker 16:17When are we gonna have a vaccine? Dan Ilic 16:20I got this one. I got this one. I got this one. Nobody knows. Unknown Speaker 16:25Louis, what do you think? Unknown Speaker 16:26I would have said, Yeah, nobody knows. Dan is one of the few things we do we actually don't know. Unknown Speaker 16:34I'm gonna I'm gonna get confident and Unknown Speaker 16:36get on the front foot and say within a month. Unknown Speaker 16:38Damn. Oh, that's a big goal. Wow. Unknown Speaker 16:42I was actually hoping that Louis would say that because then it would happen. Oh, that's not Unknown Speaker 16:49to say that I'm afraid. Unknown Speaker 16:53So this one I picked deliberately because I can't actually answer this one. This is ah, Unknown Speaker 16:58so I don't know if you saw Yes, I think it was yes. Today Unknown Speaker 17:00the very first human guinea pigs patients got the first test doses of one of the new vaccines. So Unknown Speaker 17:07where were they? Where can we get it from? Unknown Speaker 17:10Woollies? I think I think Trump's bought it already. Probably. That's what Unknown Speaker 17:13he tried to he tried to buy one of the German companies. Dan Ilic 17:16So where were they doing where who got Unknown Speaker 17:18the first vaccine? Why don't we find out? I believe they were in Europe. I could be wrong. I don't remember precisely. We've got a we got a vaccine in development in Australia that's been in animals now. So it's almost ready to test in humans. And then the trick is making enough for hundreds of millions of people that that will take a few months at least. Dan Ilic 17:36Right. Is that when you're gonna start your lab again, that's the that's the plan. Unknown Speaker 17:40We're just gearing up for that. Now. Dan Ilic 17:42Do you have another question for us about 19? just mash misconceptions. Unknown Speaker 17:46Oh, look, here's the one. Here's the question of the day or the question of the week is, why haven't they shot schools yet? Unknown Speaker 17:53Why haven't they shot the schools yet? That's the one that's on everyone's lips around here. Why haven't they shot the schools yet? Dan Ilic 17:58Because people need To know about white history and forget about colonialism. That's why schools Yeah, this time, the white man fixes everything. That is why they haven't shut the schools yet. Unknown Speaker 18:09There's probably too many decision makers in there who've just had the kids get to school age who have gone I'm not fucking taking them back in the house now. I feel Unknown Speaker 18:18like Dan Ilic 18:20it is consistent with like this government's long term war against teachers, namely that it's hoping that instead of having to underpaid them, though, they can just get what? Unknown Speaker 18:42destination crook? Unknown Speaker 18:44Yeah. It's funny. Remembering the value of all of these kind of jobs like nurses and teachers, right. Dan Ilic 18:50What is what is it Darren, I mean, you're someone who's seen the brunt of this kind of attitude from our government that there seems to be a dislike or distrust of expertise of really smart people who know things. Why is it that this government does have all got this government? Not in this not it's not particularly this government coming through all around the world? Yeah, have a have a distaste and a distrust of people with expertise and doing everything they can to seemingly defund them and get rid of them. I think Unknown Speaker 19:22the brutal truth of that is because they delivered some uncomfortable facts and truth to them that didn't suit their sort of political ends. And so they undermine them as much as they could, you know, people have been profiteering politically and financially for years of undermining facts and truth. Dan Ilic 19:38But getting rid of like that getting rid of like the pandemic unit for the CDC in America seems like a completely counterintuitive act, Unknown Speaker 19:48given that we're just they're just sitting around doing nothing. It's just Dan Ilic 19:52wasting money, and then we can get them back. We want them we know where they are. We can get them back whenever we want. Unknown Speaker 20:00No like firemen, they just sit around all day doing nothing get rid of them. Unknown Speaker 20:03Most medicine? Dan Ilic 20:05Do you honestly think Darren that that is like that is the motive like it's it is purely, you're you're delivering information that is too dangerous for us politically to even have. Unknown Speaker 20:14But I think well, you're probably I mean, if you look at the climate change, the climate change is an obvious one, you know, that's where it seems to be the lightning rod for this sort of approach of denying truth, or whatever you want to call it. And it was literally that there were some really rich people and big companies that were, you know, their profits are under threat, and they've spent a lot of money trying to prop up those profits by sitting down, you know, we saw the tobacco companies do it before them and then and then what's happened is the political parties have all figured out that that's a really good way of getting hold of power is to is to take that approach, you know, and I think that that's fine when the threat is just as existential as the as the coronavirus, but it's, you know, 20 or 40 years down the road and suddenly that model doesn't work when the threat is very real and very now, huh? Dan Ilic 20:56Well, here are some good things about Kovac 19. There has been a huge reduction in co2 emissions up to 10%. In some countries, because of the ban on cruise ships, the Venice canals have become extremely clear and you can see to the bottom bottom of them without pollution and sediment. And another good thing about the Cova 19 is that your revision has been cancelled for this year. So no Eurovision what are the good things have we seen out there because it covered 19 do you think Unknown Speaker 21:25a lot of videos of penguins loose in zoos looking at the fish for them all sounds pretty good. Unknown Speaker 21:32I think my favourite good news story was the directive from ISIS that came out through the way Unknown Speaker 21:41ISIS put out a press release banning the Unknown Speaker 21:47suicide bombers from going to Europe because obviously, you know, Venice, probably beautiful but you know, even all h&s sit up today. They've ended it. If terrorists you go into Europe Unknown Speaker 22:03you don't want to you know, blow off a building while you're feeling a bit snotty in the nose there Unknown Speaker 22:10is a one way ticket surely I don't quite know what they're saying. Unknown Speaker 22:16And then I believe the the mayor of Baltimore has ordered everyone to stop shooting each other so they can. So they can create rooms for in the hospitals for covered victims. So I think they'll be a massive downturn in street violence until we run out of toilet paper and then there'll be a massive upturn in street violence. Dan Ilic 22:37Well, Arnold Schwarzenegger has been making great content from his home he's been advocating for social distancing you may have seen earlier in the week him feeding his ponies inside his home. Here is one of him sitting in a sitting in a in a hot tub, smoking a cigar giving some very good advice. Unknown Speaker 22:55I just finished a bike ride and a little bit of workout and I just didn't keep staying at home all the way from the crowd and away from outside. The reason why I'm saying that is because I still see photographs and videos of people sitting outside compares all over the world and having a good time and hanging out in crowds. That is not wise, because that's how you can get the virus. That's how you get it, like contact with other people. So stay away from crowds stay away from being in restaurants and outdoor cafes, especially now it's springtime, all the kids are going to the beach and celebrate and drink and all that stuff. This is not a good idea to stay away from the crowd, go home, and then we can overcome this whole problem. This whole virus in no time, but you got to go and follow those orders. Just remember, stay at home. Don't go go to crowds, but they took it down. Dan Ilic 23:55Think he's been incredibly responsible. He is the most responsible vendor out there. I've been trying to tell my mom to stay away from her church and stop going to the shops. But she just ignores me She completely says she says, you young people are too worried we're at church and we're not coughing over each other. The upside of that is I can say my inheritance will be coming a little bit earlier than I expected, but it's silver linings, a silver lining, how do we convince how do we convince our parents that they should be staying home kalon that there's a property that they can buy inside their already existing property? Unknown Speaker 24:33negatively? Unknown Speaker 24:38Many negatively, Unknown Speaker 24:41that it just sort of folds in on itself, and then they'll never leave. They'll always be searching for that next property that we can't have Unknown Speaker 24:49a good excuse for them to be more xenophobic, because then they can blame someone for them. Having to be Dan Ilic 24:57I hate to tell this story, but my mom, you very quietly xenophobic. whenever she's telling anecdotes she will dip her voice whenever she has to name the race of the person in the anecdote so she'll be like, and then at the shops I saw, man and he just went. Well, that's nice Alicia, Alicia blunting is xenophobia. Unknown Speaker 25:18My mom went from complete and utter coronavirus denial to full blown prepper in 24 hours. So I had a quiet word to use. Unknown Speaker 25:26What was the turning point? Because I'm curious. Yeah. Cuz a lot of Berman's like everything's fine. And then they turn what was the feed for them? Unknown Speaker 25:32I pointed out she was letting me down. You know, I was going on TV and radio and telling everybody all this stuff. And she was basically making me look like a fool for ignoring me. And, you know, no mom wants to embarrass this unlike that. I was talking to a girl and she's gone from, you know, you need to teach the kids how to grow their own food they need to know how to so she went right back to full on 1930s self sustaining skills. Can she talk to my mom, we can swap numbers. Unknown Speaker 25:57I think the main thing the responsibility for all of us to do Is share our netflix possible with our parents. Unknown Speaker 26:05My mom the shares with me. Dan Ilic 26:10I'm just trying to do as many irrational fear podcasts as we can because I know as a passionate subscriber, we make a lot of money. We'll just keep listening and you'll never be able to leave the house. Thank you, Margot harbour. Thank you very much. A little later on comedian back Melrose will join us to do a type five from her cancelled Melbourne Comedy Festival shot. But I don't know if you heard this. Earlier this week. Alan Jones compared the corona virus to climate change claiming it was a high experimentally yesterday and clarified a few things. Good morning everyone. A lot of people have suggested to me that I'm not taking Corona virus seriously enough by comparing it to the hopes of climate change. Oh, God. Well, let me tell you Cova 19 as they're calling it, that some sort of scientist or something Ah God, nerds. kovat 19 is a hoax much like carbon dioxide. I haven't seen it with my own eyes so it doesn't exist. And my eyesight is very good, like posted on the door on the other side of my Southern Highlands studio where I'm broadcasting from for the next six months for no reason in particular, I could read a sign that says warning stay 1.5 metres away from this door. Nothing to do with coronavirus I've just got to keep the home studio sounding crystal clear. Don't want some sort of goose coming in here squawking at me, and I'm not talking about any easy God. Now my good friend Scott Morrison has just told me you must stop panic buying it's clearly an Australian Well let me tell you something. He got something wrong there. The only thing you should be panic buying is my new album, Alan Jones's songs for a life of isolation. Got me Alan Jones singing all of your favourites like oh bye bye Unknown Speaker 28:00Don't want to pay Oh Unknown Speaker 28:07give us a call the open line Unknown Speaker 28:10wonderful. Don't forget that classic don't don't Unknown Speaker 28:16don't sketch show close to me. And how about a cheeky Jewett? You give me feed Unknown Speaker 28:25when you kiss me fever when you hold me tight Unknown Speaker 28:32in the morning fever all throughout Unknown Speaker 28:35the night taken away Anthony Kalia Dan Ilic 28:38god what a voice wait till you hear him sing our water voice. We had to do it on Skype but still you get the idea so don't believe what you read. There is no Corona virus. If you can't see it, it doesn't exist a bit like the Bledisloe Cup. I've never seen it so we've never lost it. All ballad joads Alan Jones there. Unknown Speaker 28:58That's right. I haven't I haven't been travelling work for a few weeks but I feel like I just had a nice taxi ride to the airport. That was fantastic. Dan Ilic 29:04irrational fear and I haven't touched my face in weeks and weeks since the Melbourne International Comedy Festival has been cancelled I thought wouldn't be great to get some of our comedy Friends of the show to come and do their best tight five from the cancel shows that they can't perform in Melbourne and coronavirus is really knocked that right out of the park. Now we have to do it on Google Hangouts, but we're going to try it anyway. I thought we'd get back Melrose to give it a go since she's gonna be on the show on irrational fear next week, I thought what better way to get her to come on the show but do a bit of a warm up by doing her best High Five from her cats of Melbourne, Melbourne Comedy Festival show. So ladies and gentlemen without any further ado back Mel rose. Unknown Speaker 29:51Hello are legends. How are we doing? Dan Ilic 29:53Yeah, well. Unknown Speaker 29:55Good, good. Unknown Speaker 29:57Nice crowd work. Unknown Speaker 30:01What I do for a living? Unknown Speaker 30:03I thought I do. I'm the top five of my office gear because some I thought I wrote that thinking it'd be evergreen and I'd be able to use it forever, but we don't have offices anymore. So I might as well give it a run. Unknown Speaker 30:17Please come straight from work. Give us a word. Yeah, Unknown Speaker 30:23that's all right. Don't worry. Unknown Speaker 30:25What's blocked isn't it? I've just started working in an office so my zest for life is draining faster than the Murray Darling I can assure you No one's talking to one another like human beings in the office. There's all this jargon and buzzwords and shit that get in the white. My favourite one they use it my work is as per my last email. Have we heard this? Unknown Speaker 30:49A power move. As per my last email. It's the closest you can get to saying Fuck off. You grow up at work, isn't it? Unknown Speaker 31:00As per my last name I haven't got the confidence to use as per my last name I like 50 Bernie brown TED Talks short of the conference it takes to use as per my last email but there's so much of this bizarre language at work I kept hearing my boss say well why don't you give that project to back she's got capacity but once we got one over the back she's got capacity pass that over the back she's got capacity Unknown Speaker 31:25to fucking Tupperware container Unknown Speaker 31:28absolutely ridiculous. And everyone works worried about AI taking their jobs robots taking our jobs. I'm not that worried yet. I've seen the test online to prove you're not a robot. I reckon it's I can't check a box. So pick out a bridge in a lineup. I don't reckon they'll be coming for our jobs anytime soon. But even when they do, like my job, I don't give a shit. Let's see you try and machine learn your way through the social obstacle course. passive aggressive If kitchen signs we did set in my office had a sign above another sign that said read the sign. Unknown Speaker 32:11Never mind a robot that shit would short circuit a robot. Unknown Speaker 32:16We are decades away from developing the kind of technology that's going to be able to definitely navigate pretending to give a fuck about nails weekend's No, but we can do the same argument about I don't mean that it's going to save us so much time. So what we're just going to find more bullshit to fill the time with anyway. All the time we saved not having to turn our own butter that bought a training time just dissolved in extra weeks in a single generation. But my boss has been trying to get in a roll up but my work amongst a spate of redundancies and he kept trying to get us to do a sweep for the last races and no one was ever came. And I felt kind of sorry for him. So All right, so I printed out photos of everyone in the office and put us all into a little bowl. You're about to pick someone out. Unknown Speaker 33:08Now we just have to wait and see who gets the next redundancy. Unknown Speaker 33:13Someone's gone home with a hammer. Someone's kids aren't going to Disneyland this year. But we'll pull it ourselves a glass of yellow and we filed into the boardroom watch the real race unfold. It's a beautiful day for it. The race it stops a nation the crow's nest regional office redundancy cop. Janet from accounts is playing up in the barriers and what do you know what Alan the it lead made it to the start after having every Monday off for the last financial quarter. Unknown Speaker 33:45It is a miracle. Unknown Speaker 33:48They're all in. The lights are on set. Unknown Speaker 33:52Racing in the crow's nest regional office redundancy copy combo from comms is started strong closely followed by as per my last email Do you have five for a quick chat and Kathleen What do you even do? They round the corner and who called the unions coming down the outside buffeted by clearly the intern mansplain Mark has midfield on the rails just behind no before I've had my coffee and that's sort of my job description. Coming down the street is unsolicited neck massage on med KPI and some pre k my sandwich. Just a quick one for years going steady. Peter from risk is yelling, but nobody's listening. Hop ahead to For God's sake. Rob, why do you have the microwave? Oh, we've had a fall. It's clearly the intern. Clearly the interns broken down at the 650 and Neil says millennials just can't hack it in the workplace off the road. Deborah the gender and diversity lady is going strong having a renaissance in relevance off to some dodgy comments were made at the Christmas party. Janet from accounts hasn't wasted energy on a single smile as they had for him and he called the union's out in front of Monday morning small talk common from concert Oh, good birthday song. But he comes accidental reply Oh, accidental reply. Oh, Challenge by Rich Craig left jr in the lunchroom 350 to go in the crow's nest regional office, redundancy kaput, it's over called the union number called the union. Kathleen What do you even do and get fucked at smartcard, but who's this coming down the outside? It's the favourite wrench reparations is the line down the outside. He's not going anywhere. He plays tennis with the chairman. He's utterly useless and he's here to stay at wrench taking out the crow's nest regional office redundancy cop. hoffa had to wake on fire the CEO and a further third between should have stayed in Union I'm useless but the director is my uncle. Unknown Speaker 35:34Thanks, guys. Thanks very much. My I lost my job but I did want a hand. Dan Ilic 35:41You can't say back Melrose at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival tickets are not on sale now. Well, we're gonna be back weekly with irrational fear since our Comedy Festival show isn't going so please hit us up on Patreon give us a few bucks a month. Also FBI Radio where we normally record this needs your help. So please go to FBI radio.com for slash donate and give them a few bucks particularly if you live in Sydney and you love independent radio and and great music Special thanks to this episode to Rupert de gas Jacob Brown, FBI radio, Darren Saunders Lewis haba, Rose Piper, Dillon, Bain and the wonderful Beck Melrose. Unknown Speaker 36:25News guys. Dan Ilic 36:27Thanks so much. We'll leave you with the latest news fighters on the coronavirus Dylan Do you want to introduce it? Unknown Speaker 36:34Sorry coronavirus I actually did it on the NBA March Madness. No one I haven't haven't. Unknown Speaker 36:44What's coronavirus? Unknown Speaker 36:47This is new spiders. Unknown Speaker 36:52So you don't have to. One of the Unknown Speaker 36:54great things about the current age of having internet and social media is being able to watch your favourite celebrity breakdown over the corona virus pandemic in real time. sama handling it better than others he is rapid kadhi Bay who had her to a cancelled Unknown Speaker 37:09guess why because Corona Corona virus is this Unknown Speaker 37:19Corona virus shake on me like a couple of weeks after she was gonna be a couple of months after she let me know soccer star motherfucking backing up all foods a man clear so a bass can move to motherfucking Antarctica which once again cardi Bay the voice of reason in an age of confusion. Meanwhile, Arnold Schwarzenegger is living his best life hanging out at home with Danny DeVito. Oh, no, wait, sorry. That's a miniature horse. Unknown Speaker 37:45Luna loves carrots. Whiskey loves carrots. I just said my little bitter vegan food. Oh, that was yummy. Hmm. I just had a fantastic broker that the house amount, Jim. Unknown Speaker 37:58Yeah, I am at home. Take Michiko Both hills stoeger Unknown Speaker 38:05finished a bike ride and a little bit of workout and I just you know keep staying at home. Unknown Speaker 38:10Yes Do like on a stay at home, but maybe don't smoke a cigar I think we might need your lungs to be as healthy as possible. Meanwhile, Michael Stipe from REM isn't coping too well. It's the end of the world as we know it. And I feel stop trying to help Michael Stipe And don't you dare pivot to that shiny happy people bullshit either. We need you to stay calm in this time of crisis. Now a lot of musicians are getting in on holding online quarantine concepts, including Chris Martin of Coldplay whose music is like coronavirus for your ears. Unknown Speaker 38:49They were Oh Unknown Speaker 38:52look, I'm not trying to say that keyboard sounded bad but geez I think the audio is better on Keyboard Cat Just when things couldn't look any worse, Willie Nelson son Lucas hates us about the years with the biggest cliche he could reach for. Unknown Speaker 39:22Now look, if any government out there is listening Scott Morrison Trump bars Angela Merkel, the UN who I don't care, please Institute an immediate indefinite ban on performances of hallelujah. This is actually a policy I've been pushing for years long before Corona virus but this is the time we can make it happen. Meanwhile, Aussies returning home from overseas are going to be facing two weeks of self isolation. And most of them seem to be handling it pretty well. Yeah, just gonna lock myself in and just have some kinds for kotlin eyes. Unknown Speaker 39:53You're gonna spend the next two weeks again thanks Unknown Speaker 40:04Okay, that's news five is an irrational fear to listen to the full episode, subscribe to news fighters on your podcasting app or check us out at news fighters calm. I'm Dylan Bane. Keep washing your hands and bye for now. Unknown Speaker 40:16This is News spiders where we find the news. So you don't have to Transcribed by https://otter.ai A Rational Fear on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ARationalFear See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

MELBOURNE COMEDY FESTIVAL TICKETS ON SALE NOW: https://bitly.com/ARF_MICFPATREON: https://www.patreon.com/ARationalFear Well, Dan lost the show. Always eject the disk properly people!We lost the show! But we still have a podcast! Chock a block of content. (03:30) Sponsorship announcement: Local Newspapers. (05:25) We speak with journalist Asher Wolf about how people with vulnerable immune systems are taking coronavirus seriously. (10:30) And we speak with progressive comedian Francesca Fiorentini about the wash up of Super Tuesday and the way forward for Bernie Sanders' supporters. (17:50) Credits (19:00) Newsfighters on Coronavirus ____________________________TRANSCRIPTION by Otter.ai: Unknown Speaker 0:00G'day Dan Ilic, here from A Rational Fear. Well, we just had a great show. We had Christiaan Van Vuuren. We had Madeline Stewart. We had Louis Hobba. All in this space here at FB high radio, and we had a fantastic show. But I lost it. Yes, I pulled the hard drive out before I was meant to. And the whole show is totally gone. But the good news is we've got a stack of content to get through stuff that we have made earlier for the show. And I'm just going to put it together and run it for you right now. It's that easy. So before we play, the hits, are gonna let you know we do have a Melbourne Comedy Festival show. The Tickets are on sale. Now. We're about 30% 40% sold out. So probably in about five weeks time when the show is on will be completely sold out. So make sure you get your tickets for that. We're playing the Melbourne Town Hall on April six. One show only. It's a big show. We've got the ARIA award winning comedy Joe bridey and white from tonight late we've got the Walkley award winning Patricia vellus the Walkley award losing James Colley he writes for the weekly Unknown Speaker 1:00Multiple award winning Alex Fraser, DJ Dylan Bain with their Louis harbour and I will also be there we have been nominated for several esteem prizes. Also, we have a Patreon go to patreon.com forward slash irrational fear and give us some money. The show takes a little bit to kind of put on the road. So we've got a few expenses if you can help us do that, that'd be great. I would love 100 of you who listen to jump on Patreon and subscribe to the three bucks a month. I promise you we'll be delivering new podcasts that exist now and won't get deleted. Oh my god, I can't believe it deleted the first show back. This show is recorded on gadigal Land of the euro nation and I pay our respects to elder's past present and emerging sovereignty was never stated. And as I would normally say let's stop the show. A rational fear contains naughty words like bricks cambro fan and section 40 of a rational fear recommended listening by emerge your audience Unknown Speaker 2:00Tonight on a rational fear as the Australian Government prepares to ban cash transactions over $10,000 It leaves drug dealers with only one choice to buy and sell drugs with rolls of toilet paper instead. And the federal government has rolled out funding Australia's only dedicated bushfire Research Centre, claiming that there's no way to guarantee the prevention of bushfires in only marginal electrics. And after last year cutting $100 million from the CSI row, the federal government generously boosted their funding by 2 million to fast track a Corona virus faxing $2 million. So to put it in a way that a government minister might understand it's about the same price as a rugby clubs women's change room, wash your hands twice and don't touch your face. This is irrational fear. Unknown Speaker 2:58Like I said at the very top of the show where you Unknown Speaker 3:00We have a very short show for you tonight. First up, we spoke with journalist Asher wolf about what kinds of things people should really be stocking up on during this coronavirus pandemic. And from AJ plus MSNBC and the Young Turks, comedian Francesca Fiorentina, he gives us a taste of what young progressives are feeling like after the Joe Biden search on Super Tuesday. Also, we've got a great sample of news fighters as they wade into the petri dish. That is the corona virus. The first step it's 2020. And as well as the Patreon we also have sponsors. He's our first sponsor for irrational fear this year. Unknown Speaker 3:37Hello, I'm rupert murdoch, defender of freedom and owner of some of the world's greatest democracies. Therefore, I was a successful mogul of many media. I started out in just one local newspapers. Well actually I inherited from my dad, but that's beside the point that always used to say TV, gonna rock your mind. So I thought, that's how Unknown Speaker 4:00And I started Sky News. He also used to say radio doesn't have pictures and I thought that's perfect for ugly men with beautiful things to say. He also used to tell me you can't tear the internet into strips and wipe your ass with all he would have if he was alive fucking internet. So why not get hold of a news corp local newspaper today? We're specialists and providing two or three pages of inaccurate and poorly written local articles copied and pasted from press releases by 19 year old kids whose dreams of being real journalists will slowly fade. Mix in 50 pages of real estate porn for houses your neighbours don't want to live in ads for sex workers traders, secondhand car sales and third hand power sales and you've got yourself a local newspaper. Pick up a free local newspaper down Put on the nature strip or underneath a hedge new you today. Unknown Speaker 5:00On have a rain. Actually, we don't care if you do, we've already been paid by the advertisers. So they're Unknown Speaker 5:10fair. During the last taping of irrational fear. We did speak a lot about the crazy pandemic and panic buying that people are going through when it comes to stockpiling toilet paper. But you know, some people have no choice to take this stuff seriously. Here is a chat I had with someone who has to do just that. Unknown Speaker 5:31Joining us now is one person who has a real reason to be cautiously pragmatic. It's journalist Tasha wolf. She suffers from Ehlers danlos Syndrome and autoimmune progesterone anaphylaxis. She's basically allergic to her own hormones. And while she's actually a young person, even the slightest threat to her immune system is very, very real. Ashley, thanks for joining us. Unknown Speaker 5:55If someone who, whose body is actually probably more prone to this virus than Unknown Speaker 6:00But being still a young person how do you deal with all the jokes about missing toilet paper and things like that? Look on one hand there is some crazy cracking going on where people are right out there grabbing Kansas, you know my wife cheese Unknown Speaker 6:16but on the other hand it's a privilege to make fun of people who Unknown Speaker 6:21probably are at a higher risk of being seriously ill if they catch cruda virus but you have people who are like, you know, it doesn't matter to me like the 1% of people who are seriously ill who are going to die and I'm like, yet I'm one of those 1% who have low immune to skin issues. If I catch a general flu, I walk away feeling terrible. For months. I really like not to catch coronavirus. Unknown Speaker 6:45It's a risk. It's a real risk to me, but I also didn't want to go wild, I guess you could say with prepping, but I wanted to be cautious. The other night you put out a list on Twitter about things that folks with disabilities have to think about. Unknown Speaker 7:00During this oncoming crisis, what are some of those things that people with disabilities kind of need to consider when you're a person with disability quite often you have a very different experience of life and survival than the average Christian you know, you might not have the income to order Unknown Speaker 7:18on a regular basis, you may be allergic to certain foods, and it becomes quite hard to eat out, or you know, order a great because now even if you did have the cash to do it, then you're allergic to half of the things that get put in, you know, take away food, you really do need to cook for yourself, if you have some allergies and sensitivities say, for me, it would be completely it'll be both impractical and potentially cause me a good deal of pain if I was just you know, 100 or a noodle dish for demonstrate if I had to stay home. So there's a few people who I've talked to on Twitter, who said certain things going off their shelves like crazy like people are obviously Unknown Speaker 8:00bulk ordering. So they call doc storage. And then distortions that are used for online orders, things that they really seeing flying off the show. Nothing formula. If you're a parent with a small toddler quite often, you find that some toddlers have certain issues with like regurgitation, and they can only use certain sorts of formula. If you had a child like that. And it's already difficult to find the right formula. I would be stocking up as a parent with a child like that. I mean, to me, it's just if things go badly wrong, I don't want to injure myself tryna handle a trial and illness and your mid I had to to access any my schedule, right? You might want to have a chat to your doctor about the supply chain of short, sir, get you like drugs because it's absolutely awful to detox off those kinds of meds at home without support just because you want out and you can't get anymore. The other thing people might want to have a chat to their doctor about is is they have meds that are already hard to access. Unknown Speaker 9:00Kind of like acid to start building sometimes. And sometimes it takes interrupted for migraines you want to get for the packet when it comes to sumatriptan with trying to mimic acid dozle already some problems with supply chain, you might want to put aside a little bit extract or getting early research your scripts now because proximately 90% of our meds come from China and things not shipping as per normal contract. What kind of late time Can Can people still those kinds of meds on their own in their own fridge? right they weren't that's the problem. There's a thing called psycho script, which means that you get deemed a pharmacy if you try and take out certain men early. For one way around. It may be that doctors decide to order the script, put it in their own fridge and hold it for a month for patients. And then they can release it to patients when needed. But I think it would be a really terrible situation. If you ended up with people who are or IPS. You know, there's a range of skinny Unknown Speaker 10:00Drugs fortunate Unknown Speaker 10:03including palliative care patients. Unknown Speaker 10:17turning out to Super Tuesday, Joe Biden's search past all predictions and knocked the wind out of Bernie Sanders the sales. The most surprising thing of was, of course, was that Mike Bloomberg didn't win anything after spending $700 billion of his own money, except for American Samoa. Earlier today I spoke with Bernie Sanders Die Hard and comedian Francesca if you're intending on just how she's feeling a day after the bomb and wipe out Unknown Speaker 10:48in a bunker somewhere in California is a comedian and broadcaster too scared to face the reality of what could be the return to normcore 90s politics in the USA from AJ plus and MSNBC and TYT Unknown Speaker 11:00Francesca Fiorentina. Hello, Francesca. Hello? No, just Yeah, all the acronyms. I love it. Unknown Speaker 11:08I assume people know what all those things. Unknown Speaker 11:12It's the day after Super Tuesday in the USA right now or I, as I believe you call it woeful Wednesday. How is progressive America dealing with the news that Joe Biden could be the new daddy? Unknown Speaker 11:24Yes, it's it's Boxing Day for our hopes and dreams. And what the Biden pill has been, the vitamin pill has been one that's a little bit tough to swallow, because, you know, he is a very rapid, rapidly ageing, cognitively eating old man. And I know that's strange to say when someone like Bernie Sanders is in the race, but, you know, Biden has like regular mental gaffes. And you're kind of just like, I don't know if I want to watch this debate between Biden and Trump, which effectively is like you're in Unknown Speaker 12:00Laws arguing over who's going to carve the turkey with it? Oh, you gotta use an electric knife. No, you know. And that, I think is the fear that a lot of people are looking at like, Are we really going to put our senile old man up against their senile old man? Unknown Speaker 12:20And I don't know if our see no man's gonna win? Well, at least you know being from the left. It's a fair fight. No. And obviously it's not over yet. I mean, that's the big thing is that there's still more than half the delegates to get remember, in this country for some reason we have and just in this party, we don't elect the nominee based on popular vote. It's just this ridiculous, kind of wonky delegate math that nobody gets. And so there's still more than half the delegates. It's not over yet. Of course, a lot of folks are saying that young people didn't turn out to vote over Super Tuesday. Why is it that young people in America don't like divide? It's not cool, and it's long Tick Tock? No, it's got it. Unknown Speaker 13:00Once and this is a thing, Bernie or Biden will have to be big on Tick Tock and once they are, if they have a coordinated dance where every elbow jab also points to like, where the voting station is like that's, you know that that's when voting becomes cool, but no, I think Bernie, Bernie is the renegade Ben Bernie could do the renegade. He is the original Renegade. Oh, absolutely. Unknown Speaker 13:25I mean, I think young folks, I'm not sure about all the data. That's like one article that I saw that was like young folks aren't turning out. Unknown Speaker 13:32I do think that of all the young people, it's the Sanders campaign that has overwhelmingly the majority of support among young folks of all races, religions, ethnicities, etc. But it is a hard moment in your life to go out and vote in a primary, right? You're like, just starting to have sex and smoke weed. You are you're you're maybe in college, you're like, how am I gonna afford to pay for this? Also, I'm learning about Unknown Speaker 14:00colonialism. Oh my god. So you're like voting that feels stupid. So I think there's a lot of reasons why young people, especially in a primary are like I got, you know better things to do. Why would I vote without? There's only six on me? Yeah, I just exactly get it off. Now even though Mike Bloomberg did get in the race quite late, he spent half a billion dollars he did win American Samoa, what do American Samoans see him Bloomberg and no one else can listen. I'm pretty sure he bought the entire island. Oh, my mistake. This is the thing with every time there's a you know, there's an election and we're like, wait a minute, we still have American Samoa what like what are these like vestiges of colonial past that for some reason the US wields way too much power over and as like devastated and impoverished. And I think it is kind of sad to be totally honest with you that people aren't reaching out to American Samoa and then it was advertised Unknown Speaker 15:00Mint dollars, mostly that reach them. But it's hard to send canvassers out there or it's hard to get, you know, canvassers there. Listen, I'm happy to be sent to Americans and volunteer work on the very end. I thought that'd be fun. I would learn how to serve and cook barbecue or something. I think a hunger a hunger, I think I think they call it a honey. It's a barbecue in a pit. Yeah, a honey. Exactly. And we will barbecue the billionaire's roast them on an open flame. When Bernie Sanders gets into office. Obviously, that's what democratic socialism is about. At the time of recording right now. Warren still hasn't conceded she's still hanging in there. Why do you think that is? Unknown Speaker 15:40Yes, it's this is a very interesting for progressives in the US. Unknown Speaker 15:46And people out there just progressives, again, people want actually something a little bit different than then, as you said, a return to 90s politics, which is the Warren question and whether she should have dropped out sooner or not. I just want to say from the outset, like Unknown Speaker 16:00I distinguish between her supporters who I feel like, I'm not all but a lot of them, their hearts are in the right place. They do want, as she says big structural change. They believe that she was the best messenger and the best vehicle and the best leader for that structural change, I think after three or four races, and US states where she came in, third, fourth, and fifth, you can't really say that anymore. You can't really claim that she's got a plan for everything because clearly that plan should have included at winning at least one of the early states, whoever is running her campaign, and her herself. They've really been watching this. It's been hard to watch the heel turn away from Medicare for all the heel turn when she was swearing that she wouldn't raise the taxes of the middle class. And it's like, you know, that's a trick question. Elizabeth, like, you know, you were just being asked whether you were going to raise taxes on the middle class, just to Unknown Speaker 17:00appeal to a conservative voter who would never even vote for you anyway. And you kind of fell for it in the same way that you fell for a DNA test to prove that you were point 03 percent Native American. She absolutely needs to drop out now. And but we'll see. You know, I liken it a little bit to Game of Thrones, no spoilers, but you know, the generic question is like, which way is she going to go? How is it going to end is Khaleesi going to be on the side of good or on the side of burn it all down? And that would be I think, going with Biden, throwing the progressive movement under the bus, a rational fear. Knowing your viewers know how crazy Trump is, and they know that same people have to work together. Unknown Speaker 17:48You can listen to the full interview of Francesca on our Patreon. Also, you can check out Francesca's work on a j pluses news broke and MSNBC. Red, white and hurt now next week on irrational fear. Unknown Speaker 18:00promise we will have a show that I won't lose. Chris Taylor will be on the show from the chase bridey corner from tonight will also be here, and we're back weekly until our Comedy Festival show so please head to our Patreon and give us a few bucks to help us make the show cost us a little bit of money each way to make it a big thank you to Robert De gas Peter G. Jacob brown FBI radio and our fear mongers tonight Lewis harbour Christian Van Buren, Madeline Stewart, who have all got great things on that they need to plug including Madeline Stewart has got a comedy festival Sharon called the underdogs. She's taken to the Melbourne Comedy Festival and the Sydney Comedy Festival. She runs a great night called crypts and crepes. It's for comedians who have got disabilities. And she runs it monthly at one of seven projects in Redmond. So do go check that out. We'll leave you right now with the latest news fighters episode on coronavirus from DJ diabolical Until next week, there's always something to be scared of, namely, pulling the USB disk out before it's free. Unknown Speaker 19:00fully exploited a rational fear and I haven't touched my face in weeks and weeks. This is News fighters. Unknown Speaker 19:10We fight the news so you don't have to. Okay, so first up, it's time for an update on the coronavirus and a New South Wales. Things are getting real health minister Brad has suggested that people stop shaking hands. I think it's time for us to stand shaking. It will be sensible not to be hand shaking, no hand shaking, no hand shaking. I mean, I think for sydneysiders this will be normal for us. I mean, our traditional grading when we encounter someone for the first time is just to get out of my way. So what is the New South Wales health minister suggesting we do instead of shaking hands then why would be suggesting to the community in New South Wales and a more morally afoot, the time that Ozzy's actually gave each other a pat on the back, you know, like your parents never gave you But it doesn't stop there. You could be exercising a degree of care and caution with Unknown Speaker 20:00Whom you choose to kiss? What no more indiscriminately French kissing my mailman and my barrister on a daily basis. Sorry Corey normal kissy kissy for you the new self was fun police have ruled it out. But New South Wales health minister bread has odd says there's no need to be totally alarmed. Common Sense should prevail. Unknown Speaker 20:19It's not as if faces are constantly touching public spaces. Yeah, except for this passionate fellow in Iran. This man is one of several who've posted videos of themselves licking a famous shrine to prove it safe. Yeah, he was just looking at trying to see if it was safe from the coronavirus. He wasn't still high from Mardi Gras on the weekend or anything. Meanwhile, around the world the authorities are saying there's one simple way to protect yourself from coronavirus. Wash your hands so you got to do we all have to be washing our hands. The single most useful thing that we can all do is to wash our hands washing my hands. This is Sydney we haven't had a public toilet with soap in it since 1998. All right. How long should I Unknown Speaker 21:00wash my hands for two times Happy birthday. Keep scrubbing until you've sung the Happy Birthday song twice. You know that song your parents never sung you to get the hand marching message out the World Health Organisation has joined us social media platform, tik tok normally harm to lip synching videos and dance offs. Here's a clip from their first video frequently clean your hands using an alcohol based hand rub product like in jail or wash your hands with soap and water. Boring who you should add some rap music or some dancing at least. Unknown Speaker 21:32New coronavirus Unknown Speaker 21:35Yeah, I did a bit of a troll through the old tik tok means and it turns out there's already the perfect tik tok Corona virus meme template. It's this one for when the government tells you you have to self isolate for 14 days, but you can't because you've never had paid sick leave in your entire life. You know, I'd really like to do that. But I don't have any fucking money. I don't have any fucking money. And if this is making you feel doomed, maybe that's why Unknown Speaker 22:00Doing this as the virus spreads, so too does the panic buying bulk buying at supermarkets as shoppers stockpile food essentials and toiletries. Yes, everyone is panic buying because of the corona virus. Or at least that's what I said when I ran into a workmate who caught me buying 10 frozen pizzas and four blocks of chocolate last night. Yeah panic buying coronavirus got a stuck up, but there's no need to worry everyone while the Australian media keeps us up to date and well informed with this smartest and brightest coronavirus experts. Well for more on the coronavirus emergency we're joined by nationals and pay Barnaby Joyce. Unknown Speaker 22:36This is Unknown Speaker 22:38where we fight the news. So you don't have to A Rational Fear on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ARationalFear See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this second episode of the Legacy Series, our friend Kim Evans stops by to inspire, encourage, and call us back to the powerful opportunity we have to let God to use us. We can get so discouraged when our lives and faith can feel dull or dysfunctional, but do not lose heart, God is not done with you. Stay faithful, take courage, and watch God work in and through your life. About the Speaker:Kim Evans is from Philadelphia and she has been a faithful follower of God for 40 years! Kim has been married to Walter for 36 years and together they have 3 adult children, 4 grandchildren, and a giant grand-dog named Charlie. Kim just lost her beloved father, Robert Gempel, late last year but works to continue the family legacy of service to those in need around the world. Episode Notes: Pray, Anticipate, and Watch God Work.Pray GUM- God Use Me. You might be surprised what God has in store. Luke 1:26-45It’s okay to question, struggle, or be afraid; but ultimately land in a place of trusting God and letting Him use your life in powerful ways. Luke 22:43God sent an angel to comfort Jesus in His time of need. God does this for us too. John 14:12- Even greater things; this only happens when we let God use us. We don’t always like the ways God moves, but He moves powerfully. God is not done with you, friend. As women we can be so triggered by the idea of being used- we can accept that life isn’t fair; while simultaneously trusting that God loves us and will take care of us even in the injustices of life. Lordship is huge- giving God the driver seat of your life. But we are submitting to a good, gracious, and sovereign God. It is so important to work to REMAIN under the lordship of Jesus. Letting God use you requires a deep surrender. How do you distinguish the voice of God from the voice of our own desires?Communicate to God what you want but then get to a place of surrender. Surrender usually includes waiting. Support the show (https://tithe.ly/give_new/www/#/tithely/give-one-time/678206?giving_to=Woven%20In%20Truth%20Podcast)

The effort and hard work of the Gallatin Police Department in protecting our citizens is indeed priceless. In this Miracle CDJR Special Edition podcast episode, host John Haggard talks to Chief Don Bandy, Gallatin and Sumner County’s very own chief of police. Together, they talk about the following topics: Chief Don Bandy’s BackgroundGrowing up in GallatinChief Don’s HobbiesHow Don Became Chief of Police in GallatinIs There a Decrease in New Police Applicants?Tips in Protecting Cars from BurglaryDoes the Police Department Have Body Cams?How to Protect Gallatin BetterCommon Police Force MisconceptionsCombatting Crime and Drug ProblemsImproving Traffic EnforcementsGallatin Police Department Annual Golf TournamentShop with a Cop and Santa Classic ProgramsPolice Department Visits the Veterans HomeHow to Reach the Police Department for Those Who Want to Participate in Their ProgramsThe Biggest Challenge of the Police Department TodayWords of Advice from Chief Don Transcript John Haggard 0:02Welcome to the Miracle Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram Special Edition podcast where we also interview community leaders on topics that are of interest to the Gallatin area. And today we’re honored to have Donald Bandy. He’s the chief of police for Gallatin, and Sumner County on the podcast. Hey, Don, welcome to the podcast. Chief Don Bandy 0:21Well, good to be here. Thanks for inviting me. John Haggard 0:23Well excited to have you here. Before we dive in into what’s going on in the police world in Gallatin these days and for people who are either new to the podcast or new to this area or may not know you, tell us a little bit about you like, for example, did you grow up in Gallatin? Chief Don Bandy 0:39I did grow up in Gallatin, born and raised here. My mom pretty much raised me from a small boy and, like I say she was from this county. But I was born, grew up here, went to school here. Graduated Gallatin High School and go Green Waves! And just like I say I’ve been here the majority of my life. John Haggard 1:06You know that’s a real advantage because, every back alley, every front alley, I mean the entire layout, probably no surprise to you where any hidden corners or anything might be, right? Chief Don Bandy 1:18That’s true, that’s true. Well for the most part with all the new growth in our community it’s starting to expand. I have to get out of the office every once a while and ride some of these new developments. And learn my way around there. But as far as the neighborhoods that have been established for years I grew up here and have a lot of great friends and memories from this town. John Haggard 1:40I bet you do. Let’s go back on some of those memories back to high school what were maybe what was the most fun thing that you did in high school? You know? Chief Don Bandy 1:48I think it would, be thinking on this reflecting, I think it’s probably the relationships are built. Playing, I played football and played some basketball and just establish relationships with some friends for life. Coaches and again your teachers, it was really enjoyable it as you grow older and mature you kind of look back, you think they really didn’t have my best interests at heart as far as our coaches and teachers. And it’s always good to catch up with friends especially with social media these days. We went to school with. But that would probably be my most fond memory is the way athletics and in building those relationships for life. John Haggard 2:27Now you said you played football. What position? Chief Don Bandy 2:31I was an offensive lineman. I wasn’t really big, I was taught to wear a lot of pads. I look bigger. But things are so different these days. They’re these kids these days are very athletic and a lot of large. Athletic kids and they’re a lot faster than I ever was. So that’s kind of funny to see that. But I did, I played that and tried to play a little basketball. But you know how that is, again I couldn’t jump that high. I always laughed at. You could put paper on my feet, but I couldn’t do that. So, I think I have a coach now, Coach Ryan Berg. Love him to death. And he always jokes with my officers that he could lock me in the gym by myself all night and I couldn’t score two points. But, I said, coach, please don’t tell everybody that. But a lot of fun, yes sir. John Haggard 3:16What do you think it is? Why are the kids so much bigger today? Is it the water in Gallatin or what is it? Chief Don Bandy 3:23I think it’s everywhere. I think, for the most part, I hear kids are playing from everywhere. I know, Gallatin is having a great season at football. But, just kids in general. I mean, they’re just, it’s just a different age. I mean, from college to the pros to, obviously high school. And I have seen some kids at the middle school game the other day, and I was like, holy cow, we were never, I wasn’t that big in high school. So it’s just, I don’t know, I really couldn’t answer that. But it’s amazing to see that, yes sir. John Haggard 3:45It is. So from Gallatin, you are. So you still have a lot of family in the area, I would think? Chief Don Bandy 3:56Well, actually I was the only child. So and of course, my mom’s she’s been deceased since 2012. So it’s me and it’s my wife’s family. But again, I have a lot of great friends that I consider family and a lot of folks that mean a lot to me in this community. John Haggard 4:15Did you go to college as well, Don? Or did you elect to go to work early? Chief Don Bandy 4:19I did. I tried the Vol State experience, right off the bat. And, it’s kind of one of those things, you gotta be dedicated to it, and I wasn’t. So I took a couple of semesters, and then I decided not to. And then that I began the whole work thing. Life, that’s what it’s like. I started doing that. And, recently in 2012 I actually finished my degree in criminal justice with Bethel University. So glad I went back finished. I wish I’d done it a long time ago. And I tell especially our younger officers, go ahead and get that while you can while you’re at it. If you’re able to. And of course, college is not for everybody, but I do encourage you to try to do that and get a skill and get into something they will help you in the future John Haggard 5:01Yeah. So what do you like to do on your time off? Chief Don Bandy 5:04I got two boys. And they’re playing basketball and baseball right now. They’re a lot better athletes than I ever was, I tell them. But I like hanging out with them running back and forth. When I can I love love to play golf. I had been playing along and pretty bad at it. But I always say my B or C player is a lot better my A player so. But I do enjoy doing that so. John Haggard 5:26When you shoot golf, what do you, what’s your best score? Chief Don Bandy 5:29I would have probably gotten the 80s maybe a couple of times so I’m still… Well with that, yeah that’s having a lucky day for me so. But I like to say I really enjoy it. When I do get to do it, they say it’s supposed to be a stress release, but sometimes I feel like it’s the opposite. But, I do I keep going back for more… John Haggard 5:52There you go. Do you have other favorite hobbies that you like? Chief Don Bandy 5:55I try to work out. I try almost every day. Sometimes I don’t make it but I do. I go to the local civic center here, the Gallatin Civic Center. And, again, it’s just trying to stay in shape and keep your body healthy I think a lot of times the older I get I know that they say the diet is more important than working out and I do believe in that because it doesn’t seem to be catching up any. John Haggard 6:19Yeah. Chief Don Bandy 6:21I gathered I just said that. But yeah, pretty much that. Golf and I enjoy, loving to do that. And of course, going to my boys’ ball games, that type of stuff. John Haggard 6:30So of course, you grew up in Gallatin, as you said. So how did you get to be chief of police for Gallatin in Sumner County? Chief Don Bandy 6:38I started law enforcement in 1992. I had a friend that was a US Marshal and he kept encouraging me to get in law enforcement. And I had no desire to but I thought I’d give it a try. So I got my start there and worked within the county and met some good friends and changed jobs kept talking back and forth and then I just got, here Gallatin. And I don’t know, I just, all those things where you just say I’m just gonna stay put and work hard. And the next thing you know, I got to Sergeant and then I get to Lieutenant. And then I was blessed and I got called upon and I put my name for Chief and I truly believe that the community was behind me 100% on that to get the job. And I’ve been Chief since May of 2011. So I’m very blessed. John Haggard 7:25You’re close to 10 years. Chief Don Bandy 7:27Yeah, yeah, it’s kind of… they say the life expectancy of Chiefs around three, four years and that… John Haggard 7:34Really? Chief Don Bandy 7:35Yeah, that’s what they say. John Haggard 7:37Why is that? Chief Don Bandy 7:38I think it’s probably a lot of things people want to… they may move on to different jobs or different careers to move up the ladder if you will. Some people may go. We had a chief from Kentucky, we had one that was here from Mississippi and you always go back home, so to speak. So, but my case, I’m not resume-building, do you know what I’m saying? I’m just here because I grew up in this community, I love it, and I want to do my best to serve it. And hopefully, I’ll be here for several years to come. So… John Haggard 8:11Yeah. Now before you became involved in police work, did you have another profession? Something else you were involved in? Chief Don Bandy 8:17I worked for a company called Rebound. It was a brain injury rehab facility. And it was one of those things where, I kind of tried the college thing and I was like, “Oh, good, gracious, I don’t want to do this.” And, at the time it spreads my got me in over there. And it was really, I think it really helps me now because you got to have a lot of patience. Because you do have some folks that have experienced the brain injury and their decision making is an obstacle for them. So it helped me to, again, have patience and learn from that. I think it helped me in law enforcement and I really do truly believe that. As I look back on that time working there. I think they met a lot of good folks there and I truly believe that helped me do this job. John Haggard 8:59How big is The Gallatin Police Department? Chief Don Bandy 9:01We have 87 sworn positions, and we are four short right now. So we just tested which will be probably filling some of those… we’re in that process. And we have, I think, another 10 as far as civilians because, I mean, there’s so much in what they do… they’re more support staff. Really we can’t do our job without them these days, they prepare records and document them and getting everything the way it should be, because everything has got to be to a tee as far as that stuff goes. We have to have that stuff. And they do that stuff on a regular basis. I mean, they’re always keeping the wheels rolling, I say because, we have officers out on the street, but there’s so much that goes on behind the scenes that they do a great job, too. So… John Haggard 9:22Do you find an interest in the career of law enforcement for a police officer? Do you find more candidates than you used to? Fewer candidates or about the same or is there any trend there? Chief Don Bandy 10:00It’s dropped off. And I think it has across the board with other agencies I’ve talked to. Other chiefs and sheriffs, and… used to you’d have 60 applicants or 80, or whatever. And now, you may have 20 or 30. And I don’t know, I hope that, to me, it’s a profession that’s a calling. A lot of people, we run towards chaos and bullets and other people run away from it. And again, I always say about our officers and our staff and myself included, we’re not perfect. But we’re doing our best to try to do the right thing and give you the best service possible. John Haggard 10:37Well, let’s talk about protection. People would like to know, are there any really good tips, or maybe the best tips. Let’s say, if someone wants to protect their car from burglary, or having a car stolen, are there are some basic tips, you would say, “Hey, based on the area where we are, here’s, here’s what you ought to do to help prevent that.” Chief Don Bandy 10:56Well, and again, that’s a great question because a lot of our crimes are burglaries of vehicles. And what we’ve experienced is especially in neighborhoods, people say well I’m leaving my doors unlocked. But a lot of folks that when they do go to do this, they will not take the time to try to break out the window. They will just check your door handle and going to the next driveway. And so I always encourage them now to… There’s always that chance they bust one out still. Especially if you leave something of value like a computer a purse, weapons. Please don’t leave anything in a car like that. Just be mindful and try to get them out of there and if you’re somewhere that you do have that stuff in there please put them in the trunk and make it as difficult as possible. Because when I see it in plain view that maybe, in a parking lot at Walmart or whatever that may be their great opportunity to bust out that window and grab your computer or your purse, what have you. But at your home when we have those burglaries that we have subdivisions that will go through at night in the past and others hit driveway to driveway. So we encourage you to lock that door because they will not take the time. They don’t want to make the noise to get them go on to the next one. And that’s the usual case. Now say that and they somehow call me and say, “Hey, by the way, I tried that it didn’t work.” But, for the most part, we do encourage you to just keep it out of sight, especially when you’re out and about. And with the holidays coming out, goodness gracious, we always have a lot of problems with that. Just be aware of your surroundings. When you were in a parking lot, or wherever you are, try to get to where the light, where it’s well lit, and just be aware of it. Keep your head up, don’t be reading your phone, walk into the car that, just the simple things like that. John Haggard 12:30Chief, a lot of people hear a lot today on the news about home invasions. Any tips or, this is kind of a big fear where you wake up and all of a sudden hear somebody in your bedroom or whatever. Chief Don Bandy 12:43Sure. One of the main things is home security. I have one myself and I encourage that and then advertise it. And there are all types of cameras you can have you have them, in your doorbell or what have you. Now I encourage you there, they’re fairly as many as out there now, yet they’re fairly cheap. And I encourage you to go out and spend the money, it would be worth it to have a little bit more security to have a little peace of mind, if you will, that hopefully the bad guy that they noticed that they’ll go on to the next one. So we do encourage that. And, the simple things… just be aware, when you come out. If you got shrubs up around your house, keep them trimmed down where you can see the simple things like that. If something doesn’t look quite right, somebody’s in your neighborhood or cars there that you don’t think, is usually there and it doesn’t look right, we would rather you call us and us to find out the hard way that they didn’t belong. So if we offend you, going to check it out. We apologize, but we just want to make the street safe. And most people that they’re in their neighborhood they know what’s right or wrong or what doesn’t look right. And you got to trust your gut feeling and your instincts and a lot of times they’re right when you give us a call we go check something out. It wasn’t up to snuff, so. John Haggard 14:03Yeah. And speaking of cameras, does the police department use body cams? Chief Don Bandy 14:08Yes, sir. We do. It’s a, I think we started in, I want to say 2014, 2015, somewhere around there. And we, we’ve always had in-car cameras since back when we had VHS tapes in the 90s. John Haggard 14:21Right. Right. Yeah. Chief Don Bandy 14:22So we’ve had those for a long time. And I just felt it was a great opportunity for us to do that. So actually, we went out and actually use drug fund money where we had gotten fines and fees and seizures off of narcotics-related offenses. Yeah. And we use that money instead of using other taxpayer money. We use that money to equip all of our officers with that. Of course, technology’s ever-changing. So we’re trying to stay up to date on that. And they are quite expensive, but to me, it’s worth it. It protects the citizen, it protects our officers, and again, it helps us. I mean even like you say when we do make a mistake. It helps us to look at that and try to get better. And then again, sometimes when, unfortunately, there are false claims against us, it sometimes in a lot of times, it shows it’s not true. And, sometimes we give the citizen the opportunity to sit down and look at it with us. And they realize that, hey, I wasn’t quite right in my recollection. And that’s embarrassing by you calling anybody out, but I think it’s just a great protection for all of us. Especially in this day and age and the citizens, they deserve the best, and that’s what I mean. To me having those is, to me a no-brainer that I think we owe that to the citizens to do our best and to make sure we’re doing it the right way. John Haggard 15:43Yes. And, you know, cameras are just everywhere today. I mean, on your cellphone, you know just everywhere. And I would sure think when people know something or somebody or a camera is photographing you it’s got to be a deterrent. Chief Don Bandy 15:56Yes, sir. Yes, sir. You would think so. And there’s another thing that we’re working on because we have red-light cameras, which are not really popular for a lot of citizens. But we have a thing that we’re implementing, and we’ve used it in the past, but we’re trying to again, funding is always a problem with these types of things. Technology is expensive, but they’re called license radars, we call it up ours and. Israel PD. is doing it, this county is doing it, and we were doing it one time. And again, we kind of get caught up in the expense of it. But we’re trying to implement those we get some we just implemented and what they do is they read a tag. Say a tag is stolen or a person is wanted that goes back to that tag. And if that’s entered into a database, it will alert our officers via computer and our dispatch via computer which will say hey, the black truck is out all for 109 South. It has tag ABC 123. And we start looking for it. And it won’t tell us exactly where it is, but it would give if they say that tag was stolen or that truck was stolen. Over the weekend, we found a stolen vehicle like that. Yeah so it… And again that’s not Big Brother watching because if your tag doesn’t show in the database as stolen, wanted or what have you, it won’t even notify us that you pass by. But if one passes by that were stolen, little bells go off and it lets us know that, hey it just passed over such a such Boulevard and we need to be on the lookout. So our guys get to obviously saturate that area. It works pretty well for us. I know, I hear Hendersonville has had a lot of success because they have a lot more than us. But it’s just another way you try to fight crime and every time you come up with something, the bad guys come up with something better it seems like. You’re staying behind the wheel you’re doing your best to stay firm but sometimes staying behind. John Haggard 17:41Yeah. So is there anything just overall that you would say that people don’t seem to understand or maybe they misunderstand about the police force in general? Chief Don Bandy 17:52Well, I would say that, you hear all the time that they gotta get the quota or the right number of tickets today and that is so far from the truth. It’s, and we preach this philosophy that any county enforcement action, whether it’s an arrest or ticket or whatever we do, it’s to deter behavior. It’s not to hurt somebody’s wallet. And I know people are hardworking and trying to make money. But, if you see us work in the areas where is, okay, we’re stopping a lot of cars, it’s probably because somebody complained. Because as the city is growing, it’s hard to keep up, you try to stay proactive, but we’re almost reactive in our efforts sometimes with traffic enforcement. And again, citizens let you know, when somebody’s speeding, they’ll let us know, let the mayor know, they let the council know. So, they pass it down the line and we do our best to work on it. So we’re not there. Just because we don’t have anything to do I promise you we have more than we say grace over but we, we’re there because, there’s been a high number of crashes recently there or somebody just said, “Hey, there there are a lot of speeders on the road. Could you please come check it out?” And that’s what we try to go out and address those especially John Haggard 19:01Yeah, and as you look out, we talked a little bit about initiatives and things that are going on that you have. If you look in the next say, three to five years, Chief, and are there just a lot, with technology? And what do we have to look forward to, I guess, in terms of fighting crime, or just kind of what’s going on? Chief Don Bandy 19:17It’s the whole thing of technology, cameras, I know we’ve really worked hard putting cameras up on our greenways and our parks and now we’re trying to do license plate readers. So, as you say, everywhere you look there’s that type of technology that’s coming up and we’re trying to keep up with that we think it’s going to be beneficial in deterring crime. And, like you say if you see that camera, you may not commit that crime. And we will let you know. The cameras there so maybe you’ll understand how you got to go somewhere else. So I think that’s going to be huge in the years to come and of course, there’s always technology of IT. And, in general, it’s just changing every day. And, we’re trying our best to keep our staff working on… that’s a totally different ball game when it comes to how to address a certain crime. Compared to the old school days of just breaking into car and stealing something, so yeah, you got to just keep rolling. And of course, I mean, we have a big problem with the opiates, heroin and getting all being put into everything and it’s, that that’s what’s scary. We’re having overdoses. I don’t know the numbers off-hand. But it’s, it’s tremendously increased over the last couple years that, and again here and not just here – everywhere. And we’re always trying to meet as law enforcement officials and trying to find out, plans of action what we can do to try to knock that down and deter it and it’s just a scary time as far as that type of stuff is out there. John Haggard 20:44So I would think that you would also have speaking of drugs and trying to suppress and get those off the street, a drug interdiction unit there or undercover people who are in that line of work? Chief Don Bandy 20:56Well, we do have, we call it a flex unit and they work Lot of narcotics situations and investigations if you will. We have two K-9s that are trained to detect drugs and also track and apprehend criminals. So we are trying and we also work and we try to work closely with our judicial district, Drug Task Force and the other agencies that are also trying to combat these types of problems. So, yeah, we’re constantly working on those things and trying to ID where the problem might be, or any kind of Intel we can gather and where we can put our resources. So it’s a constant, and right now, it’s an uphill battle, but it’s something we gotta fight that fight. So, and keep going forward. John Haggard 21:39Back to traffic enforcement for just a moment. Some people will say, you know, the speedometer on my car is three or five miles or four miles different from the officer who said, “Hey, you know, you were going 70 in a 65.” Is that possible or does is the radar, hey, it doesn’t matter? Chief Don Bandy 21:59It can, it can be in and we try to encourage our officers and tell them to give it a little bit of leeway there as far as that go. Now, I’ll say that we don’t write tickets three to five miles over. And I say that, somebody will bring one to me, but we encourage them not to just because of that, but there’s so many things. We calibrate those radars, and we have to do it by law to make sure every one of ours are calibrated. And so there’s tires and transmission roads or what not. Whatever that could make it vary. And, we we’re talking about earlier that there are all types of apps out there… I know there’s a life 360 that tells you how fast you’re going and others. Google Maps that will tell you exactly what you’re going in your car now or the exact… I don’t know, you couldn’t testify that in court. But it will maybe give you a better idea, especially if somebody has experienced getting a citation and you felt you’re only going so many miles an hour and we said five or six over so or whatever, if there was that big a difference, you could try that to see where you’re at to see maybe if there’s something going on with your vehicle, we would encourage that. John Haggard 23:12Gotcha. Is there anything that you do as a police department annually that’s involved in the community? Chief Don Bandy 23:18Absolutely. We’ve got a, of course, it’s coming up. We’ve got a golf tournament that we set up every year. It’s a Shop with a Cop. It’s for Shop with a Cop where it benefits kids. And we call it the Santa Classic and this year we’re having it at the Fairvue Country Club at the Fairvue Plantation. It’s going to be November the 11th. So if you guys know of anybody that that wants to play and wants to get the money goes, all the money goes strictly to our Shop with a Cop program, which the first week in December, the first weekend in December, we take around anywhere from 100, 120, 130 kids shopping at Walmart. We spend quite a bit on them. So all that money goes to them. And of course obviously there if there’s anybody in need during the year we try to recognize that we also take some of that money and we help out some veterans out here at the Veterans Home every year and give them a little Christmas because a lot of those guys don’t have and gals don’t have family. So that’s a good cause. If you don’t play golf, we’ll take any kind of donation but we’d love for you to come out, play golf with us. Then if you want to register you can contact our department and contact Craig Gregory here at the Gallatin police department. And if not, you come out on the day we do Shop with a Cop and you’ll get a blessing I promise we will pair you up with officer or a fireman or whoever and a child and you’ll have a big-time I promise John Haggard 24:48Sounds like a great event, it really does. Chief Don Bandy 24:50Yes sir. Also, we do, before I forget, we also take those funds and we do a backpack giveaway right before school. We give out about 200. We’ve been partnering with the West Eastland Church of Christ here in town over on West Eastland. And we’ve been doing that last two or three years and we just put some school supplies in there and we meet great kids and we let them know we’re there for them, we’re their friend. And give them something to start school with and hopefully, they’ll have a good school year. So we do that. And those are the types of things. We also do a citizens police academy yearly which is we’re in the process of right now. But it’s a chance for our citizens that are interested that, I always say, I appreciate those folks that want to know what we do for real because, you watch TV, and I promise you it’s not really like that. Yeah. Oh, it’s a different animal. Yeah, even with the commercials. It’s not like that. We can’t solve a case that fast usually, but sometimes we do. But it’s a chance for them to come in and see what we really do and see how it works. And again, we build some friends, build up some relationships that I think are very important for what we’re doing here at this department. John Haggard 25:58So what would you say, just as a general sum, the biggest challenge that you face today in that policing environment? Chief Don Bandy 26:08I hate to go back to the narcotic problems but it’s gotten to where it’s you just don’t know. People are using those substances and you’re trying to educate folks and your kids are coming up and you just worried. I mean, back in the day there was marijuana and some things like that. But these things are so dangerous and us trying to stay on top of, that means they’re just, cooking they’re just mixing some stuff in, like what you see on the Internet, that you put fentanyl and marijuana… fentanyl and whatever. And that’s what I mean, obviously, that we say there’s no boundary. I mean, you may have somebody who lives in a million-dollar home where you may have somebody living in a car, that overdoses. And there’s no rhyme or reason and that’s what it’s very discouraging and disheartening. But again we got to do our best to try to find the sources and take take them to task, if you will. So that would probably be one of the main things, is just trying to knock this problem down. To me it’s very serious and very dangerous. John Haggard 27:13Right, right. Would you say over your entire career, Chief, if you were just thinking about that, is there any one main important thing that you’ve, you know, you’ve learned personally, either about life or just it’s something that you would pass on to someone? Chief Don Bandy 27:30Well, it’s, as far as being a police officer that, we’re human, we’re people. We have bad days just like everybody else. And again, I know we’re held to a higher standard than we are to, to not that we’re better than anybody but we just try to tell our officers… Hey, you always say… well, how would you want to be treated but think how would you want your family treated your brother, your sister, your mother, your father.. How would you want to be treated and hopefully, our officers will keep that to mind and go out and do their very best job. And, take into consideration that when you call the Police Department, you’re probably not having a good day? You’re not calling to go, “Hey, How y’all doing?” I mean you’re calling because you had a crash or you had something stolen or… you’re in contact with us because of unfortunately maybe getting arrested. So I always tell officers to treat those folks with the utmost respect and kindness, because they’re people, they’re humans, and they didn’t like, say, they probably didn’t bargain for that on this particular day, but just treat them the best you can. John Haggard 28:34I was just thinking as we were talking, let’s say that you had a billboard somewhere in the city or on a county road or wherever it might be. If you could have that billboard with anything on it some saying or something there, what would it be? Chief Don Bandy 28:50It would probably be what I kind of want to just discuss. Like I say, I’m a Christian. I might say, God says look, you love Him then love each other next. And that’s kind of what it’s all about there. It’s how you treat folks and just think about it before you lash out or you might be having a bad day or say some things you regret. But just think how would I want my mom and dad treated and that’s where my family or my brother my sister. And just don’t be selfish and stay humble and go forward that’s a lot to put on a billboard, ain’t it? John Haggard 29:24It is, yes! Chief Don Bandy 29:26But it is we need to make some good rules life and we just preach to the choir when I say that time to myself looking in the mirror. So this is a great call and great profession. And we’re blessed to be in this community and serving it, so… John Haggard 29:40So let me ask you this one final question. What would be the one thing about you, Chief, that most people would not know and that someone would be really surprised to know about you? Chief Don Bandy 29:53Oh, goodness. I’m really afraid of heights. I don’t know if that would be a surprise, but I did have to admit that I tried out for a fire department one time and I got halfway up the ladder and I thought, “Man, I’ve got this leg I’m going to make it this please let me get that.” I looked up and I’m only halfway there and I had to go all, I couldn’t just stop. So I went all the way up the ladder and I said, “Lord if you just let me down, I don’t want to do this.” I did not want anybody to come up beside me. And I thought how I ever looked myself at my face in the mirror, so yeah, definitely scared of heights don’t like them at all so. John Haggard 30:29Anything I didn’t ask you that you would want people to know. Chief Don Bandy 30:32Think you covered it really well. Just, as you say, be patient with us. We’re doing best and if you have any questions or problems always say, “Hey, don’t argue by the side road. Please call my office. I’ll be glad to sit down. We will watch a video or whatever we need to do to try to work out the problem.” John Haggard 30:50Great. Yeah. So what is the best way if somebody wants to get in touch with you personally? Chief Don Bandy 30:55Yes, you could call for 452-1313 and the extension is 3219. Or you can always just send me an email dbandy@gallatinpd.org and I mean, I have this fancy iPhone with me all the time so I have it on there. I never turn it off. So, if I respond to you at 9 o’clock at night, don’t be surprised. John Haggard 31:18All right, that’s Donald Bandy folks, the chief of police for Gallatin and summer county on the podcast. He’s our special edition guest today on the miracle Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram podcast. So join us again, right here for another special edition of the podcast. In addition to our regular topics that we do discuss each month, on the best ways to purchase and lease service and maintain, accessorize and sell your vehicle for the highest resale value possible. When you’re ready. Don’t forget the transcript of each podcast. It’s right here so you can go back anywhere and look up what it was that you missed, so you don’t have to listen to the entire podcast over again. I’m your host, john haggard, and we will see you next time. Bye

Find us online at: AdventNYC.orgEmail us at: Podcast@AdventNYC.orgTalk with us at: Advent Sermons & Conversations on FacebookCome to a service and hear the sermons live and in person Sunday morning 9am and 11am in English and 12:30pm in Spanish at 93rd and Broadway.Reading for this Week:1 Kings 19:4-84[Elijah] went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.”5Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.” 6He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again. 7The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” 8He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God.Psalm 34:1-81I will bless the Lord| at all times;  the praise of God shall ever be | in my mouth. 2I will glory | in the Lord;  let the lowly hear | and rejoice. 3Proclaim with me the greatness | of the Lord;  let us exalt God’s | name together. 4I sought the Lord, who | answered me  and delivered me from | all my terrors. R 5Look upon the Lord| and be radiant,  and let not your faces | be ashamed. 6I called in my affliction, and | the Lord heard me  and saved me from | all my troubles. 7The angel of the Lord encamps around those who | fear the Lord  and de- | livers them. 8Taste and see that the | Lord is good;  happy are they who take ref- | uge in God! REphesians 4:25--5:225So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. 26Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, 27and do not make room for the devil. 28Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. 29Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. 30And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. 31Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, 32and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. 5:1Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, 2and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.John 6:35, 41-5135Jesus said to [the crowd,] “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. 41Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” 43Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. 44No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. 45It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. 46Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. 47Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. 48I am the bread of life. 49Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

The Names and Titles of Jesus – Jesus the Bread of Life Episode 97 This series of the names and titles of Jesus will give us a more in-depth understanding of Jesus Christ our Lord. This is the sixth in the series. The following is an outline. I AM ἐγώ εἰμι Exodus 3:14 God's name “Give us this day our daily bread” Jesus feeding the 5000 A completely different Understanding of what bread 2. The sign of the feeding of the 5000 3. The background of the Jewish culture where God feed their ancestors with mana every day to sustain them Jesus is the true Bread of God that gives life because 1.He is the true Mana from God Context: 24when the people, therefore, saw that Jesus was not there, nor His disciples, they also got into boats and came to Capernaum, seeking Jesus. 25And when they found Him on the other side of the sea, they said to Him, “Rabbi, when did You come here?” John 6 26Jesus answered them and said, “Most assuredly, I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw the signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled. 27Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to everlasting life, which the Son of Man will give you because God the Father has set His seal on Him.” 28Then they said to Him, “What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” 29Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent.” 30Therefore they said to Him, “What sign will You perform then, that we may see it and believe You? What work will You do? 31Our fathers ate the manna in the desert; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” 32Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. 33For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” 34“Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.” 35Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. Isaiah 55:1 “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. 2Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare. 3Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live. I will make an everlasting covenant with you, my faithful love promised to David. 32Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. 33For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” 34“Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.” 35Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. 36But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe. 37All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. 38For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. 39And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me but raise them up at the last day. Jesus is the true Bread of God that gives life because He is the true Mana from God 2. He does the will of the Father 40For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.” 41At this the Jews there began to grumble about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42They said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven’?”43“Stop grumbling among yourselves,” Jesus answered. 44“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day. 45It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God. ‘Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me. 46No one has seen the Father except for the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father. 47Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life. 48I am the bread of life. Jesus is the true Bread of God that gives life because He is the true Manna from God 2. He does the will of the Father 3. He gave His life so we can have eternal life 49Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. 50But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. 51I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” 52Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” 53Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. 55For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.56Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. 57Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. 58This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” 59He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum. Something must die for me to live 60On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” 61Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you? 62Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! 63The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life. 64Yet there are some of you who do not believe.” Subscribe to the podcast: {Apple Podcasts}{Stitcher}{Google Play}{IHeartRadio}{YouTube}{Spotify} This series of the names and titles of Jesus will give us a more in-depth understanding of Jesus Christ our Lord. This is the sixth in the series. The following is an outline. I AM ἐγώ εἰμι Exodus 3:14 God's name “Give us this day our daily bread” Jesus feeding the 5000 A completely different Understanding of what bread 2. The sign of the feeding of the 5000 3. The background of the Jewish culture where God feed their ancestors with mana every day to sustain them Jesus is the true Bread of God that gives life because 1.He is the true Mana from God Context: 24when the people, therefore, saw that Jesus was not there, nor His disciples, they also got into boats and came to Capernaum, seeking Jesus. 25And when they found Him on the other side of the sea, they said to Him, “Rabbi, when did You come here?” John 6 26Jesus answered them and said, “Most assuredly, I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw the signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled. 27Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to everlasting life, which the Son of Man will give you because God the Father has set His seal on Him.” 28Then they said to Him, “What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” 29Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent.” 30Therefore they said to Him, “What sign will You perform then, that we may see it and believe You? What work will You do? 31Our fathers ate the manna in the desert; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” 32Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. 33For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” 34“Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.” 35Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. Isaiah 55:1 “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. 2Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare. 3Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live. I will make an everlasting covenant with you, my faithful love promised to David. 32Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. 33For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” 34“Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.” 35Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. 36But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe. 37All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. 38For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. 39And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me but raise them up at the last day. Jesus is the true Bread of God that gives life because He is the true Mana from God 2. He does the will of the Father 40For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.” 41At this the Jews there began to grumble about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42They said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven’?”43“Stop grumbling among yourselves,” Jesus answered. 44“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day. 45It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God. ‘Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me. 46No one has seen the Father except for the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father. 47Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life. 48I am the bread of life. Jesus is the true Bread of God that gives life because He is the true Manna from God 2. He does the will of the Father 3. He gave His life so we can have eternal life 49Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. 50But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. 51I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” 52Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” 53Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. 55For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.56Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. 57Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. 58This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” 59He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum. Something must die for me to live 60On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” 61Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you? 62Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! 63The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life. 64Yet there are some of you who do not believe.” Subscribe to the podcast: {Apple Podcasts}{Stitcher}{Google Play}{IHeartRadio}{YouTube}{Spotify} This series of the names and titles of Jesus will give us a more in-depth understanding of Jesus Christ our Lord. This is the sixth in the series. The following is an outline. I AM ἐγώ εἰμι Exodus 3:14 God's name “Give us this day our daily bread” Jesus feeding the 5000 A completely different Understanding of what bread 2. The sign of the feeding of the 5000 3. The background of the Jewish culture where God feed their ancestors with mana every day to sustain them Jesus is the true Bread of God that gives life because 1.He is the true Mana from God Context: 24when the people, therefore, saw that Jesus was not there, nor His disciples, they also got into boats and came to Capernaum, seeking Jesus. 25And when they found Him on the other side of the sea, they said to Him, “Rabbi, when did You come here?” John 6 26Jesus answered them and said, “Most assuredly, I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw the signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled. 27Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to everlasting life, which the Son of Man will give you because God the Father has set His seal on Him.” 28Then they said to Him, “What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” 29Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent.” 30Therefore they said to Him, “What sign will You perform then, that we may see it and believe You? What work will You do? 31Our fathers ate the manna in the desert; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” 32Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. 33For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” 34“Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.” 35Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. Isaiah 55:1 “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. 2Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare. 3Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live. I will make an everlasting covenant with you, my faithful love promised to David. 32Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. 33For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” 34“Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.” 35Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. 36But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe. 37All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. 38For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. 39And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me but raise them up at the last day. Jesus is the true Bread of God that gives life because He is the true Mana from God 2. He does the will of the Father 40For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.” 41At this the Jews there began to grumble about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42They said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven’?”43“Stop grumbling among yourselves,” Jesus answered. 44“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day. 45It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God. ‘Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me. 46No one has seen the Father except for the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father. 47Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life. 48I am the bread of life. Jesus is the true Bread of God that gives life because He is the true Manna from God 2. He does the will of the Father 3. He gave His life so we can have eternal life 49Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. 50But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. 51I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” 52Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” 53Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. 55For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.56Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. 57Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. 58This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” 59He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum. Something must die for me to live 60On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” 61Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you? 62Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! 63The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life. 64Yet there are some of you who do not believe.” Subscribe to the podcast: {Apple Podcasts}{Stitcher}{Google Play}{IHeartRadio}{YouTube}{Spotify}

Who is Mike Campbell? Mike Campbell is the author of the book Unleash Your Alpha and has been a Man Coach for 12 years. He specialises in supporting men to find significance, worth and personal power. By challenging the broken model of manhood, he helps men to get out of their own way, and in doing so become their own perfect mix of James Bond, Nelson Mandela & Batman.Why did I bring Mike onto the show? Mike recently launched a web TV series called Beyond the Beers which encourages men to have conversations that go beyond sports, booze and sex. I wanted to talk to Mike about what motivated him to launch this series and to find out what he feels is holding men back from having more open, vulnerable conversations. We also discuss how he helps clients reconnect with their sense of purpose and why Mike believes that the model of manhood is broken in today's day and age. The first episode of Beyond the Beers went live last week and you can watch it here.What will you learn? How to find personal power and take ownership of your storyWhy is masculinity broken in today's day and age?The steps you can take to be more present and vulnerable in conversationsHow to reframe vulnerabilityThe importance of expanding your emotional vocabularyHow Mike supports men to reconnect with their purposeAbout Mike's Kickstarter campaign for Beyond the Beers and the challenges he had"To fear vulnerability, because we fear showing weakness, is weakness." - Mike CampbellReach Out and Connect with Mike: Mike's Facebook Mike's website Beyond on the Beers TV Series Show Notes: Challenges his clients to take ownership of their narrative @ 9:00Why is masculinity broken? @ 9:45Allowing women to be powerful in their feminine @ 15:15How do you make your clients more comfortable with opening up? @ 16:45It all starts when we're young... the longer you wear a mask, the harder it is to know what's underneath @ 21:00The importance of expanding your emotional vocabulary @ 23:15Project Me - make yourself your purpose. We neglect ourselves. The goal becomes solving you. Everything else in your life will improve as a byproduct of focusing on yourself @ 24:30Men's love language @ 28:45How did you get started as a Man Coach? @ 29:45Beyond the Beers and Mike's Next Chapter @ 33:00Having more challenging conversations @ 39:25My favourite Mark Twain quote @ 41:00The importance of self intelligence (self awareness) @ 41:45You're going to screw sh%t up, be easy on yourself @ 42:45How was the experience of launching a Kickstarter campaign? @ 43:00The internal self-talk Mike faced during Beyond the Beers  @ 45:30The inspiration behind the show @ 50:30Mike's willingness to listen to feedback, especially playing in a field he's new in  52:45Think about the conversations you're not having or want to have @ 55:15Mentioned in this episode: Connor Beaton - ManTalksJuVan LangfordMarianne WilliamsonDavid Deida

This week we welcome user experience (UX) designer Elena Moon as our guest curator. She has this fantastic way of explaining what works and why, and she’s going to lead us through her own work and the designed world, from parking meters to space ships.User Experience 101 - 00:00We kick off with a quick primer on UX. Whether you’re talking about everyday objects or brand new apps, solid design is anything but accidental. Elena explains why some brands stand out. Take Uber, for example. Whatever you may think of the company’s business practices, the interface of the Uber app is a gold standard for how to serve up visual information.Portland’s Parking Meters: Design Fail? - 04:13We explore how design is in play in even the simplest of tasks. Elena and April scout out a hub of meter activity in the Pearl District and speak with some of the people who maintain the meters, technicians Anto Bayu Aji and Molly Twoohey.How to Teach Grandmothers to Install Solar Panels - 14:19UX isn’t just for software. Elena talks about working on a project with India’s Barefoot College on a project that trained grandmothers to do their own solar engineering in rural communities in India. How can teachers work across language barriers? How do you keep learning going after everyone heads home to their village? As Elena explains, the conversation gave rise to some unexpected answers.How Do You Improve on the Coolest Hotel in Town? - 19:06We eavesdrop on Elena’s meeting with the Ace Hotel design team for a look inside the design process. The company already has a robust brand and online presence, but it enlisted Elena to help refine the experience of visiting its website. What’s most intuitive to potential customers?Designers' Film Club - 24:52A few years ago, Elena and her partner, Jos Vaught, had the chance to work on some UX projects for NASA and SpaceX. Can a designer who’s seen a real space capsule interface ever look at Ridley Scott the same way again? We reality-check "The Martian,” “Minority Report,” and “Star Trek: Into Darkness.”On the Designers Shelf Life and the Accumulated Wisdom of Fly Fishing - 34:45It’s no secret that, within tech circles, the industry is not kind to workers over 35. Elena contrasts this for us with another discipline in which practitioners don’t get anywhere without decades of hard-won knowledge: fly fishing. We head out to Maupin with seasoned guide Amy Hazel of Deschutes Angler to find out about the beauty and craft to be found on the river. Are Tiny Hobbit Homes the Way of the Future? - 44:27Are Tiny Hobbit Homes the Way of the Future? - 44:27Elena turned us on to the amazing work of Abel Zimmerman Zyl: the totally charming gypsy caravans that look plucked right out of "The Hobbit." Zyl tells us about the nuts and bolts of tiny house construction.