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Tahnee welcomes Helena Norberg-Hodge to the podcast today. Helena is a pioneer of the New Economics movement and has spent many years studying the driving forces behind why our economies are failing us, and what we can do about it. Helena’s perspectives are informed by a systems based approach and coloured by the many years she spent in Ladakh, part of the larger region of Kashmir, where she watched global capital completely transform entire communities. Today's chat is deeply insightful and informative, for anyone interested in creating a global community where we all thrive Tahnee and Helena discuss: Helena's journey and the time she spent in Ladakh as the catalyst for her path into activism. Food and human centred supply chain. The problem with neoliberal multinational global economics. How small business is threatened by the global economic model. How change needs to occur at both an individual and systemic level. How we can create sustainable systems at the local level by drawing on insights from the global community. Technology as a part of the problem not the solution. Helena's upcoming online event, World Localisation Day.   Who is Helena? Helena Norberg-Hodge is the director and founder of Local Futures, and founder of the International Alliance for Localization. Helena's aim is to renew ecological and social well being by promoting a systemic shift away from economic globalisation towards localisation. Helena is the producer and co-director of the award-winning documentary The Economics of Happiness, and is the author of Ancient Futures: Lessons from Ladakh for a Globalizing World. Since 1975, Elena has worked with the people of Ladakh, or “Little Tibet”, to find ways of enabling their culture to meet the modern world without sacrificing social and ecological values.   Resources:   World Localization Day Event  Local Futures Website Economics Of Happiness FilmAncient Futures Book Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast?   A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher :)! Plus  we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Tahnee:   (00:00) Hi, everybody and welcome to The SuperFeast Podcast. Today I'm really excited to have Helena Norberg-Hodge with me. She's the director and founder of Local Futures and the founder of the International Alliance for Localization. She's also hosting and facilitating World Localization Day, which is on June 21 this year.   Tahnee:  (00:18) I'm really excited to be supporting her and getting the word out and to be attending ourselves. We're really, just super excited and interested to learn more about this work because living where we do and doing the work we do, we feel like it's really important in this kind of global landscape to start also talking about what's happening locally and how we can ... You know, we're all living through the time of Corona and now the riots and movements with Black Lives Matter around Australia and the world and we're seeing governments just really behaving really ignorantly and persuing models that are really out of date and outmoded and I think the work that Helena is doing is just so important in this time. Really excited to have her here.   Tahnee:  (00:56) She's also had this really amazing kind of cultural life living in Tibet in Ladakh and she also has made films and written a beautiful book Ancient Futures: Lessons From Ladakh is the book and also the name of the film if I'm right. Is that correct, Helena?   Helena: (01:12) This is the name of the film too so we have a book and a film and then The Economics Of Happiness [crosstalk 00:01:16].   Tahnee:  (01:17) Yeah, which is the one Mason and I have seen, which is really amazing. You also won kind of the alternative Nobel Prize, which is pretty rad. Is that for your work in that region?   Helena:   (01:27) Yeah. That was for the work in Ladakh.   Tahnee:  (01:29) Okay. Pretty impressive resume. Every time I've mentioned your name people are like, "Oh my gosh." You seem to have this incredible reputation, especially around this area and I'm sure globally as well. Can you tell us a little bit about how you came to be interested in localisation and what that means for us in this age of globalisation?   Helena:   (01:47) Yeah. I had my eyes opened to this in 1975 when I arrived in this part of Tibet but belongs politically to India. It's called Ladakh and I was going as part of a film team, I was a linguist at that time living in Paris and I love nature, really love nature, but I wasn't an activist. I wasn't aware at all of these issues to do with the economy and local versus global.   Helena:   (02:14) I came in contact with the people who had never been pulled into this global economic system because they hadn't been colonised. Even the missionaries who had come earlier had not been able to destroy their culture. They still had their own Buddhist culture that went back for thousands of years.   Helena:   (02:35) They had a way of life that in many ways was a paradise. It was a Shangri La. Almost every person who came in the early days said that, they said, "Oh my God. What a paradise. What a pity it has to be destroyed" and I, having picked up a bit of the language, because, as I said, I was a linguist and I had [inaudible 00:02:58] part of a film team that in helping to make the film and picking up some of the language I then decided to stay on. I was just in love with the people.   Helena:   (03:08) I realised that if they heard these foreigners saying, "It's a paradise. What a pity it has to be destroyed" they would be absolutely perplexed and amazed because from their point of view, they were getting the impression that in the West we just had everything that they had, plenty of time, community, connection to nature, every mother having 10 live in caretakers for every baby, no one in debt, no one having to pay rent or mortgages, unbelievable leisurely time frame. There just wasn't the time pressures that we have.   Helena:  (03:49) All of that they assumed that we had and on top of that we had all of this amazing money and we were flying in aeroplanes and they were being told that if they just would hurry up and get their children educated, get them to school, then they'd be able to go into the city and get a modern job and have everything that we have.   Helena:  (04:12) I witnessed over the next sort of decade how this process of global economic growth and the global economic system transformed their total way of life. I witnessed how people were being pulled into the city to get that job, almost overnight, led to friction between groups that had lived side by side for 500 years. There had never been group conflict.   Helena:  (04:42) After 10 years of huge tensions, after 14 years they were literally killing each other. By that time, this was in 1989, I had also been doing some work in Bhutan, [inaudible 00:04:56] work in Bhutan and I witnessed almost exactly the same process there. It was a very similar situation. They also had a Buddhist kingdom that had been cut off from the outside world. Both Ladakh and Bhutan had been protected by the Himayalas.   Helena:  (05:12) They were just so remote. They had been seared off for political reasons and both of them thrown open roughly the same time and in the same time period that led to this terrible bloodshed. In Ladakh, it was mainly between Muslims and Buddhists, and Bhutan between Hindus and Buddhists.   Helena:  (05:31) In the meanwhile, as I started speaking about this problem with the economic model and giving talks around the world. There had been lots of information from all over the world substantiating what I was saying and when I wrote a book later Ancient Futures that was translated into almost 50 languages and I would get from all over the world people telling me this story you tell of Ladakh is our story too.   Helena:  (06:01) I think I am telling a really important story and I feel supported and substantiated by all these people, almost 50 language groups, telling me this wasn't just a rare exception.   Helena:  (06:16) Really what that's led to is having to examine this economic system holistically, understanding how it has actually come to shape, everything we do virtually. It really has been shaping our thinking, our view of history, relationships to one another, our relationships to nature and in a fundamentally destructive way.   Helena:  (06:43) You'll hear a lot of critique of the neoliberal economy and so many people on the left in the Westernised world are very critical of what happened in more recent years, since the '80s basically with Margaret Thatcher and so on but when you come from [inaudible 00:07:05] we're coming from a deeper, I would say, spiritual awareness of the interconnections between human beings and the rest of life and this absolute conviction that intergenerational community is essential for our wellbeing. That's particularly for children.   Helena:  (07:26) What I saw in Ladakh was this tradition. Just this amazing, just unbelievably beautiful relationship between the wee little one year old and the great-great-grandfather ... You know, they'd be walking hand and hand, both of them barely able to walk, both of them [inaudible 00:07:44] speak clearly. They're both toothless. They're both hairless. They were sort of made for each other.   Helena:  (07:52) It was something that was so beautiful. I guess the thing that has made my work sometimes very difficult and lonely is that most of the people I've known intimately, personally, who have experienced something like this are by now dead and it does worry me a lot that a lot of people now would say go to many parts of the world they think they're experiencing tradition in rural remote communities.   Helena:  (08:23) But what I'm fearing is that in almost every place now, either colonialism, missionaries from long time ago or more recent, what I see is this mental pollution coming in through television and tourism as well, has so changed people and that means that people often find, very often, what they feel is a traditional village would actually be a few old people because all of the young people have had to go to the city. There would be, obviously, a lot of dissatisfaction and unhappiness as rural people are left behind and everything about rural life has essentially been marginalised.   Helena:  (09:06) That's been going on from the very inception of this modern economy. Yeah. There's just so, so much to say about it but it became very, very clear that ... Literally, I could probably list hundreds of reasons why the lesson from Ladakh was we must do everything we can to strengthen community and our deeper connections to nature, and when I say nature I mean also children having the opportunity to relate to animals.   Helena:  (09:39) That's a tricky issue today because people think that we should all become vegan but my experience was that all Indigenous people I know actually did eat animal products and they also had an ongoing caring connection with animals.   Helena:  (09:55) I just loved seeing a five year old boy care for a young baby goat just like I love seeing them carrying their little sister. I realised over the years that nurturing, we are animals and so it means, essentially, domesticated animals because we aren't and shouldn't be doing that with wild animals but that relationship with domesticated animals was so im turn nurturing young men and allowing them to maintain all of their feminine nurturing side. Now in neuroscience too people are recognising ... Actually I'm not sure if it's neuroscience but what we feel that there are some people who realise that this would effect the hormones of young men. It's actually really fundamentally important.   Helena:  (10:43) I came to realise that this deep connection to nature, this being embedded in nature, being much more deeply interdependent with particularly intergenerational community, was the foundation for the most remarkable joy and lightness of being.   Helena:  (11:03) I experienced people who were just so deeply relaxed in who they were. Part of this whole framework where you as a young person were involved in the nurturing yourself, you were also in the framework where you were deeply nurtured and where you felt eyes around you where a multitude of older people were there for you. They saw you, they heard you, they knew your name, they deeply recognised you as a unique individual.   Helena:  (11:38) The paradox is I discovered that when you had this really stable and secure community fabric, people are actually free to be genuinely an individual and we had all this hype about individualism in the modern world but I see a lot of young people petrified of in any way imperfect, petrified to live up to a standard image and to look important, and look busy, and to always send that message, "I'm fine. I'm okay" and not able to express their vulnerability, their imperfection.   Helena:  (12:22) To me, this has multiple levels but what happens when your role models are very intimately connected to you, you never think anybody is perfect because nothing in life is perfect. This is also why I remember asking mothers if they worried if their child didn't walk at age one they really absolutely couldn't understand my question. It took quite a while for me then to think why, because I spoke the language fluently but it took like half an hour before we figured out that they simply could not comprehend how anyone could worry about a child not walking exactly on some schedule. They were just laughing when I explained how in the West people would start worrying if the child didn't walk by age one. Their whole attitude was, "Of course, the child will walk at some point."   Helena:  (13:20) This was sort of the incredible wealth of this deep connected way of being and I realised fairly early on that it was actually ultimately economic pressures that were destroying this and tearing people apart and as they were pushed into the city then there's no space for the grandparents and they weren't needed anymore because now you were suddenly dependent on huge institutions far away and it was all about doing this job and it was a job that turned you into a very narrow little entity in a big system.   Helena:  (13:57) You were no longer someone who knew how to ... Already as a child you knew how to look after a baby. It wasn't something you had to read a book about [inaudible 00:14:08] have a baby yourself. You knew how to build a house, you knew how to look after animals, you knew how to grow food. Everyone knew how to sing and dance and make music. You were a much broader, wider and more developed human being.   Helena:  (14:26) What I saw was this narrowing as people went into the city and very rapidly this fear that, "Okay, I'm earning X amount of money now but every day the prices are changing." I saw structurally how this urbanising economic path where literally global markets and global institutions were behind it all, led to fear and, of course, as I said, the rise [inaudible 00:14:56] local people but also this fear that I'm never going to have enough money to feel secure so it led to this greed and hoarding and... Yeah. People changed dramatically.   Helena:  (15:09) All of this showed me so clearly, first of all, that human beings are not by nature innately greedy or aggressive. I'm battling now huge vested interests that are systematically putting out ideas that eradicate this knowledge that I'm talking about and it's very insidious and it's what children are taught now at universities, what we're taught through the media. It's just really very, very frightening to see how it's [crosstalk 00:15:45].   Tahnee:  (15:45) Are you talking about how they're controlling the messaging and the types of subjects studied and the ways in which things are taught? You know, that we gaze in a certain direction and don't look in the other direction. Is that kind of what you're getting at?   Helena:  (15:58) Yeah, but actually even more overtly than that, you know, there are books that reach everybody but in more recent years someone named Steven Pinker and these books get out really widely and his message is basically, "Don't worry about violence because in the past we were so much more violent" and the message that is being put out is subtly that economic growth through technology makes life better and better and better.   Helena:  (16:31) It's a package deal, an idea of progress and people very vulnerable to the idea that life has always got better through growth and technology and that's further back in the past we go the worst things were, it means that a book like mine that right now is in the schools in South Korea, for instance, wouldn't be in the schools in America. It's particularly in the English speaking world that corporate influence has been even stronger than some other cultures.   Tahnee:  (17:06) Who's paying for these media outlets. You look at the technological kind of industries, they're massive contributors to political and media campaigns.   Helena:  (17:15) I've spoken to a lot of those people who are continuing to promote this worldview and they really ... Most of the ones that I've known and I've had some in my family and most recently just last year I was meeting with Nobel Prize-winning economists, one of them is somebody named Joseph Stiglitz, who was the head of the World Bank, and he's a double Nobel Prize-winning and he's been a critic of globalisation, which I have been also actively involved in raising awareness about how the global economic system we have from the very beginning was very destructive but then in that neoliberal era in the last 30 years, 35 years, policies were brought in that were even more overtly supporting giant corporations, reducing any space for genuine democracy, corporate media, corporate-run medicine, corporate influence in education.   Helena:  (18:19) That process has been accelerating in the last 30 years, which is also the period in which most people recognise now that whether it's loss of biodiversity, extinction species, the terrible crisis of climate, the gap between rich and poor, which in every country has escalated absolutely obscenely and that's been true in every country I know of, including Sweden, my native country.   Helena:  (18:53) These trends have got worse. In some countries, it's much worse than in others and, particularly, with Black Lives Matter, the issue of black lives in a country like Sweden has not yet been an issue but I have seen ... I shouldn't say it hasn't been an issue but I have seen fear, racism, xenophobia increase there too because these policies that have led to a few people getting super rich and the majority of people struggling, and that's even the middle classes, has led to increased fear and prejudice everywhere.   Helena:  (19:37) I just so hope that people will be willing to focus more on this economic system and come together to look at how we can, all around the world, in every country, we need to be strengthening community and local economies.   Helena:  (19:55) You know, what that does is to actually ... It rebuilds those relationships that I talked about in Ladakh. It doesn't do it in, overnight. It doesn't do it in a complete and amazing way as they had it but I actually see a way that we in the modern world could have some greater comfort, some more communication and transportation without destroying ourselves or the earth.   Helena:  (20:28) There is a way forward that I'm really, really excited by and I'm excited by it because I also see it starting to happen. It's a many, many small initiatives and it's particularly evident in places like Byron Bay, where we are now, but many hubs around the world that actually starting to rebuild their community fabric, more human scaling businesses and interconnections, and definitely much, much greater attention to the impact this has on the earth, on nature, and its impact on climate.   Tahnee:  (21:09) Most definitely, yeah, in this time when we're talking so much about climate change and we look at the economic kind of models, which are all around foreign trade and they're not even supplying domestic ... I remember being appalled when I was a teenager watching it, must have been Four Corners or something and they were destroying the entire orange crop because they couldn't sell them in Australia because they were getting dollar a kilo oranges from California and they couldn't sell them overseas because they wouldn't travel or they weren't set up for that so they were just literally tipping them into a paddock to rot. I was just like, "That's insane. How can that be a system?"   Helena:  (21:46) [inaudible 00:21:46].   Tahnee:  (21:46) Not uncommon. It's like really common.   Helena:  (21:49) Yeah and yet ... I don't know. I just don't understand, think about this. I do think Covid has definitely helped. You know, when people started realising we can't even make our own gowns and masks what's going on? They realised how fragile the supply chains are. I do think Covid in that way is creating a major rethink.   Helena:  (22:12) I also saw many countries how this unjust system meant that people of colour were much, much worse off in a pandemic, and as they're still seeing in places like America.   Helena:  (22:28) It has led to quite a wake up that also included ... We have such a big network and are connected with people on every continent and it's just been so heartening to hear about the number of people who started growing some food and planting things from seed and really enjoying slowing down a bit.   Helena:  (22:51) I think I'm so, so hoping now that this will really spark an interest in what I call the big picture understanding, the bigger picture so that instead of just treating isolated symptoms ... Like if we just look at climate change in isolation and we don't understand its links to this global economic system and we don't understand either that the media has been so dominated by big business, it's not just Murdoch, it's virtually everything you hear in the mainstream, hasn't been telling people that the reason those oranges were just rotting on the ground and why we have everywhere, every year, the most unbelievable waste in food is because we've allowed global corporations to run our food system and they're running our government as well.   Helena:  (23:52) I think looking at the food system is one of the best ways to understand why we really must move towards a more local path instead of continuing to globalise.   Helena:  (24:04) Once you start seeing that picture, you start seeing that not only do you have, as we said, in one year when these crops just rot but every single year, every minute, virtually as we speak now, food is being imported and exported across the world. Literally the same product so that Australia will import wheat from Europe and exporting wheat to Europe and importing those oranges from California and just destroying the local oranges.   Helena:  (24:41) Right now they're importing 20 tonnes of bottled water I think from the UK and they're exporting 20 tones of bottled water to the UK. Scallops are flown from Tassie to China to be peeled and flown back again. Fish flown all the way from China to America to China to be treated.   Helena:  (25:03) This is going on while we talk about climate change but the official description of climate change and it's sort of cure has all been focused on the individual. The individuals have this finger pointed at them saying, "What is wrong with you? We have told you about climate change and you haven't changed anything. You're still driving your car, you still want to go on holiday on aeroplanes ."   Helena:  (25:30) It's led to a sort of conclusion that human beings are just innately greedy and another very popular mantra right now is people never learn from information. We've got to do it differently, we've got to do storytelling, we've got to do something else.   Helena:  (25:47) People didn't get information about the easiest, simplest way to reduce emissions and that would be that we eat our own oranges here and California eats their own oranges [crosstalk 00:26:00].   Tahnee:  (26:00) Start there. Shuck your own scallops.   Helena:  (26:04) You know, I can send you right now just most recently, a perfect bit of propaganda to, hopefully, explain to people how we really got to ... We have to wake up to the truth of the type of conspiracy, that is a very different type of conspiracy from what most people think. I see it as a structural conspiracy where tragically allowing business to become bigger and bigger and bigger and more global, allowing global traders to have so much power over different countries and allowing basically a system that started with slavery to continue to go in the same direction for several generations. That is the disaster that lies behind climate change, behind poverty, behind epidemics of depression, behind almost every serious crisis we face.   Helena:  (27:02) We don't need to go back to living as some ancient traditional culture. Partly, with localisation, we understand in any case we need to adapt more to different ecosystems, different cultures so we're talking about diversity, we're talking about local people having much more power over their own lives but also closely intune with the real economy, which is the living earth, the real economy. There's nothing we depend on, nothing that doesn't come from the earth.   Helena:  (27:39) Of course, we've allowed this structural conspiracy to escalate where business has been allowed and not just allowed [crosstalk 00:27:47].   Tahnee:  (27:47) It's been encouraged.   Helena:  (27:48) Yeah. Encouraged through blind adherence to an economic, really, a myth, which started early on in the modern economy, something called comparative advantage and saying, "Oh, no. Don't say self-reliant." Self-reliance has been described as hardship, has been called subsistence and that's why the truth about cultures like Ladakh and Bhutan are so important in terms of re-examining these assumptions.   Helena:  (28:19) We've all been brainwashed. I certainly had and I was in Ladakh for years before I even recognised what I was seeing. I was there for years and I was still thinking, "Well, it is a very hard life" because they were carrying things on their back. In retrospect, I now realise that there are some exceptions, I would definitely choose a future with some glass in windows but it was just ... The more we learn about our bodies, the more we learn to use our bodies and use the muscles we've been born with, not only to be healthy but to be happier ... You know, again, neuroscience showing all this.   Helena:  (29:02) The picture that I am painting is really one that I think so many people would agree with but the big difficulty is reaching them because instead ... I started telling you about the propaganda that just now has come out is a short film from the Financial Times where they start off ... It's so cleverly done because what they do these days, they show these images of these huge ships going back and forth and they talk about how all these emissions of food being transported around the world really looks like it's very damaging for the climate.   Helena:  (29:43) But then in this supposedly reasonable way lead you in and the conclusion is, "No, no, no. Those emissions are really not that important. If you care about the people in Kenya, you should be buying their flowers in winter."   Helena:  (29:59) Now no one is there telling people that in Kenya they're using the best, most fertile land to grow flowers to be flown to Europe, and while people are going hungry there. I actually believe in the structural conspiracy that the people who produce these things are not even aware of the truth. They haven't been there or if they have, they might have met some business people in Kenya who were making money out of selling those flowers.   Tahnee:  (30:28) I was thinking about that because I think so many people often ... You know, they play at that whole social justice kind of like, "Help them have what you have" kind of a thing, which, naively, sounds really beautiful I think, yes, it's a really nice emotional piece for people. I think the creators often aren't aware of how the actual economics of what's going on happens ... Yeah. They just don't appreciate ...   Tahnee:  (30:55) Even with aid, I remember studying with a group of women that was about problems of aid and this idea of coming in and giving money and it's like that's not really the solution. It's more about who is the best taro grower? Get them to teach other people how to grow taro. That's a better solution for aid. You know? Or how to make the soil better or how to build a better hut.   Tahnee:  (31:16) This is where we come in with our expectations and our cultural kind of indoctrination and you said that as well, like when you're in Ladakh it's like you have to learn to see differently when you enter these places. It takes time and it takes humility and the ability to drop your ego and be in a space of learning I think.   Helena:  (31:34) Yeah. I also think, for me, what's scary about it is that because in so many places now people really have become impoverished and they really aren't very happy so there's been a fragmentation of the family and very often the young people have left so then it becomes really easy to think, "These poor people. How can we help them?"   Helena:  (31:57) I've also seen that in the most remote areas like up on the Tibetan plateau, the most remote traditional nomads are almost the worst affected. They have developed this idea that they are the most impoverished, backward primitive people in the worst sense of the world and they just beg you to give them money to send their child to school. They think that's their responsibility, that's the future, living out on the land is backward, primitive and their children are being left behind.   Helena:  (32:31) This is something that most Westerners are not aware of that so when they go and those people themselves say the first thing you can do to help us out is build a school or give us money to send children to school because very few people are looking at the bigger picture and they're not seeing that these children that are being sent to school are then now in the thousands of applying for one job. You know, sometimes having gone through university, applying for jobs as cleaners and those people that are helping with the school they don't realise that the end result is there's now suicide among young people, one a month in a place where it would happen maybe one in a generation before.   Helena:  (33:13) It's all about seeing the connections and also Tahnee... You know, one thing that's scary is that the next iteration of this whole issue of aid became with the help of the World Bank, microcredit and so then people in the West were told, "You're all wrong with aid. That was very patronising. You came in there and you just dumped money and created dependence."   Helena:  (33:41) Then they came up with the idea of microcredit, which was suddenly marketed as this way of not creating dependence but actually coming in with a loan creates much more dependence [crosstalk 00:33:53].   Tahnee:  (33:52) Repaying them and interest and ... Yeah.   Helena:  (33:55) They were pulling people into debt who have never been in debt before.   Tahnee:  (33:59) They become customers of the bank, don't they?   Helena:  (34:01) Yeah.   Tahnee:  (34:01) If everyone is a customer then we all ... Well, not we profit but they profit.   Helena:  (34:06) Yeah. Now what's difficult is to say, "You shouldn't go in" and maybe give a microcredit loan... It's not that simple. You know? Each context has to be scrutinised much more carefully but I think once people could get a much better understanding of the bigger picture, as I say, understanding those connections between what's happening in this global economic system, understand how almost everything we do now, we've got to be examining it carefully that we're not ending up reinforcing a systemic support for even more globalised, even more commercialised ways forward.   Helena:  (34:50) Right now one of the biggest threats, as I said, is leaping into of a new robot culture where robots are being romanticised, they're being pushed by the FAO so the UN, again, has so many good people in it but as an organisation the UN is, essentially, appointees from these governments and most governments are shaping their policies around what big business is demanding.   Helena:  (35:20) This is just sort of structural conspiracy that we need to understand better to understand that even something like regenerative agriculture, we need to be looking really carefully at systemically what is happening on the ground when people use that word, because it's actually being massaged into a way of only talking about soil, only carbon, not about diversity, not about shortening distances, and once we really get the bigger picture we should be encouraging wherever possible diversification on the land, shortening the distance to the market, and trying to create a generally circular economy, not a corporate circular economy, which they are now pushing where they say, "Oh, yeah. We're recycling all our waste and we're making this wonderful product out of plastic and now we're melting it again" and it's all toxic stuff. Usually making things we don't need.   Helena:  (36:22) We need to be looking really carefully at what are the real needs and I just want to say that the best way to understand global/local is to look at food and the food system. It's the best way to understand and it's the best and most important area to focus on.   Helena:  (36:42) Also, what you're doing with health in terms of the mushrooms or the herbs or the plants that can genuinely restore health through the natural methods. It has to do with our relationships to the land and it has to do with much more human scale chains of connection.   Helena:  (37:02) Once we start going via this global corporate systems, even when there are really good people involved, it cannot support diversity, it cannot support real empowerment of people, it cannot support the community fabric so there's a structural reason why we must go slower, smaller, more local. That all goes together.   Tahnee:  (37:29) I just wanted to ... Having a business that's a conversation we have all the time is we've had offers from people to invest in all of these things and we think, for us, to keep it to this point where we can control the ethics of the company and how we do business is so important.   Tahnee:  (37:45) I can feel ... Like Mason studied business and what you're talking about, he learned how to be polite in a meeting with a Chinese buyer and all this weird stuff that had no application to running a small family business, like what we do.   Tahnee:  (37:58) It's just for so many people that's almost ... I don't know. It's seen as you're not reaching your full potential, you're not going to what's possible and it's like we constantly have to say, "No, we don't want more. We want to do better at what we're doing. We want to slow down. We want to make sure that we still do know the people we buy herbs off." You know?   Tahnee:  (38:15) It has to be this constant effort and checking in and I think when you look at a corporation there's no space for that. It's not built into the system. It's just about the bottom line and the profit and the meeting with the board. Yeah. It's like a whole redesign I think.   Tahnee:  (38:30) Even when you look at how politics is ... Everyone is like, "What's the budget doing? What's the economy doing?" What about the people? How is our culture? How are the children going? I feel like we're just having conversations all the time.   Helena:  (38:45) I think it's really good also to have this conversation to recognise how pressured we are by the culture and how here you've done really quite well and yet if you don't keep growing it's like you're a failure and when is enough enough? What is that level of balance and sort of keeping a generally sustainable balance where you know that you're doing well enough, especially where you have enough awareness to know exactly how they're being grown and that that's happening in truly ecological and ethical way and all the way across to the consumer and being aware and also aware enough to realise that doing podcasts, as you're doing, I think is one of the most important things you can do because you're swimming in a sea of enormous pressures to get bigger or die.   Helena:  (39:39) It's just like the individual. Like I said, when you get into this system where you're suddenly caught up in this anonymous system where how much you earn is never going to be enough unless every day the prices are going up. Once we start creating more localised systems we start changing that a bit but the reason why I'm glad you're doing podcasts is I hope it will help to get out enough awareness so that we start also pressuring for policy change.   Helena:  (40:10) When I say pressuring for policy change, I really believe that the combination of the activists that started XR and they've started Occupy could come together in a really powerful movement to, essentially, take the economy back, to now make it very clear to political leaders, we know the game, we know the exact point that we need to look at and that is your commitment to global trade and you're subsidising, you're taxing, and you are regulating in a way that is destroying the smaller and also Tahnee you should keep in mind that literally every business that operates within a national arena is being squeezed for taxes, being regulated, and in the meanwhile the giant global monopolies that do not pay tax [crosstalk 00:41:03].   Tahnee:  (41:03) Right. [crosstalk 00:41:04].   Helena:  (41:05) [crosstalk 00:41:05] subsidised and deregulated.   Tahnee:  (41:06) We were talking about this today because, for us, to like register a herb with the TGA or something it's thousands of dollars and it's a giant headache. Then you look at some of these medical companies with vaccines and they get rushed through, no testing. You know? You're just like, "Hang on a second. How is it that a herb is more dangerous than an injected drug?"   Helena:  (41:28) And, you know, the actual truth is also that these multinationals have been working to pressure governments to bring in those regulations because that would destroy their smaller companies. They've been pressuring governments to make it illegal even for farmers to sell food from heirloom seeds.   Tahnee:  (41:48) Yeah. I remember learning about that at university with Monsanto through India and they were getting them sucked into that loop of the seeds that don't reproduce that were genetically sterile and then they're having to buy them or the World Bank is giving them loans so that they can buy the seeds and then they end up in debt and it's just this cycle, which is completely evil. There's no other way to look at it.   Tahnee:  (42:11) Yeah. They were fining the seed savers. They were women storing the seeds and they were getting fined because they were keeping fertile seed that could reproduce.   Helena:  (42:20) It is an evil system and yet I see a lot of good people supporting it and that's why I also feel in a way positive in a sense that I really believe that we're in such a mess and on so many levels because of the blindness to how this system works.   Helena:  (42:40) What I'm finding is that I go higher up the ladder and talk to these Nobel Prize-winning economists or to ministers and so on, I'm seeing the higher you are up the power ladder, they're more blind. They're running even faster and they're relating to the whole world just through numbers. They don't see the people, they don't see the soil, they don't see the earth worms.   Helena:  (43:02) They cannot understand diversity. Diversity is inefficient. Monoculture has to be the way in those laws, and monoculture is deadly. It's deadly. It's destroying the soil.   Helena:  (43:16) On the other hand, not only do I feel optimistic because I see this blindness but that is related to what I see, which is that most people are looking for love and connection. Most people if they're helped to be guided to once again communicate in a more real, vulnerable way with other human beings and they start actually connecting at a deep level and do that in communities as they do in alcoholics anonymous and now in many emerging therapies where the combination of deep connection to others and to nature, to the animals, to the plants, that heals people and it's been proven all around the world and yet it's a micro-trend because the dominant system pushes psychologists and therapists and counsellors in exactly the opposite direction. You know, give them a quick drug, put them in prison, you know if they're not behaving well.   Tahnee:  (44:15) And they make money out of them when they are in   Helena:  (44:19) They make money out of it.   Tahnee:  (44:20) I mean, that's another [crosstalk 00:44:26].   Helena:  (44:26) [inaudible 00:44:26] globally I suppose maybe why I feel more optimistic than many of my colleagues or friends my age because I just see despite this huge pressure and all the money pressures, the regulations, the battle and so on, I just see so many amazing initiatives and amazing people.   Helena:  (44:46) Almost every day I will hear about positive trends that demonstrate that this is not about human nature, human beings despite this enormous pressure are actually managing to create alternatives and a whole movement that, the best word that I can come up with is localising, is just demonstrating and start getting this circle of positive change happening.   Helena:  (45:11) We are also now at the point where we desperately need more people to wake up to that and to actually start doing it, supporting the local food systems, supporting the local pub, and also put a bit of effort into what I call big picture activism. You know, helping to get the word out so that we can ... When I say get the word out, I'm talking about the fact that I have been involved I alternative things from the time of Ladakh, 45 years ago.   Helena:  (45:41) You know, I taught at the University of Berkeley and that's where we set our office for our institute and I was involved in place like Bolder in America and in Totnes this in England and in France and Germany so more alternative places and alternative when you analyse it means this coming back to nature and to community. It's about human scale, it's about all the fabric of local. I had never heard of Byron Bay. Never heard of it. Just like most people in Bryon Bay have never heard about all those other places.   Tahnee:  (46:15) Yeah.   Helena:  (46:16) Even in Japan, I know key places where you start getting life coming back to life as there is that connection because you can't go at it alone and that's one of the really important messages I want to get out. If you're questioning things, try to do it as part of a group. Try to come together. Support each other in that connection. Be sure you also spend some time rethinking those assumptions.   Helena:  (46:46) We like to lead people with five words, connect, educate, resist, renew, and celebrate, and the first word I see as so fundamental that the system operates by making us feel isolated and on our own and with climate change and pointing the finger and, "You as an individual" [crosstalk 00:47:10].   Tahnee:  (47:10) Social media.   Helena:  (47:12) Terrible. Terrible. It's the anti-social media. It's so frightening. To come together right now in Covid maybe more online but hopefully soon face to face to actually have even just two or three people just change their I to a We. Then the next thing we really want people to do is to be willing to take a deep breath and be willing to think really holistically big picture, is there really a way forward that's going to be now at this ... We're in a lot of trouble. We need to find systemic solutions. We can't continue to just treat every single issue separately. We need to come to the root causes so that this is what we have ...   Helena:  (48:02) You know, we have materials and so on that then lead us to say there is a way forward that is healing for you as an individual, for you as a family and for the entire planet but it does require rethinking some basic assumptions that you may not realise you're actually subscribing to ideas that support the dominant system.   Helena:  (48:26) As part of that rethinking we really want to encourage people to be willing to also say no and yes. Not fall into this also very well massaged mantra spreading out, telling people, "Only focus on the positive. Don't want any negativity." We believe that negative thinking about ourselves and negativity in our internal environment, being angry and obviously depressed has a very negative effect on our health and it sort of breeds negativity.   Helena:  (48:59) But being willing to say no to nuclear power, to this mad economic system, being willing to say no to a new development that's clearly destructive, that in no way has to affect us negatively. This thing about thinking and creating the world we want to see through thinking is much more to do with our inner world. [inaudible 00:49:25] maintaining that positive, calm and loving attitude is vital and we can be very loving as we still say no to developments that we know are harming life, are harming the community. This resistance and renewal is important that we be aware that we need both.   Helena:  (49:47) I personally am completely devoted to non-violence. I'm really devoted also to try and not even feel anger. I know that when I feel angry at something or somebody I'm harming myself. Even as we talk about this horribly unjust system and evil system I still try to maintain a positive climate inside my body and in my soul.   Tahnee:  (50:12) It's funny, though, also, to interrupt but I was just ... Even in our business in the last three years it's grown so quickly and I can really empathise how when you get to the top of an institution, how you can lose sight of what's happening. We went from having three staff to 20 staff in three years. There was a time there where I was so overwhelmed that I didn't know what was happening. I can honestly say I wouldn't have ... I'm really lucky we have such great people in our team but it's really easy for things to get out of control and to feel that pressure from the vested interests.   Tahnee:  (50:45) I feel like there's this deep empathy in me for ... Even Bill Gates. I've had people writing to me saying, "Oh my God. He's the devil incarnate" and I'm like, "I can empathise that he thinks technology is the solution." I don't agree but that's what he's been raised in and that's what he believes and to change his mind is incredibly difficult.   Helena:  (51:04) I'm so thrilled that you said that because I do see a pattern where people assume that everyone at the top is completely conscious of what they're doing and they are evil incarnate. I just don't see that. That's also what gives me hope. I mean, I'm not very hopeful at all that we're going to change Bill Gates but enough people will wake up and say, "That is enough." We need the numbers. It's about the numbers.   Helena:  (51:32) In a way, we're being really stupid if we allow a few men with essentially no real wealth because the money that they're accumulating has no inherent value. If it were gold coins at least they could melt it [crosstalk 00:51:50].   Tahnee:  (51:52) And do something with it. Alchemise it into something.   Helena:  (51:53) Yeah. Even then, a huge pot of gold coins. It wouldn't get them very far. [inaudible 00:51:59] truly make [inaudible 00:52:02] escalating with the deregulation of global economic activity but we really I think have a responsibility and the opportunity to try to get this picture out. It just doesn't have ...   Helena:  (52:17) I find when people assume that all these people in power are evil and then they're obviously then assuming if we put good people in, everything will be fine. Well, no, it wouldn't because the structures are incapable of respecting diversity, incapable of actually doing what we need to do.   Tahnee:  (52:37) I think about that with politics all the time. People go in with really good intentions and they get spat out again because the system does not want that. It doesn't foster those kind of ethics.   Helena:  (52:47) See, that's again ... I also do think ... I hope you'll think about it this way because, for me, that's why I've been begging friends not to go into politics because I keep telling them as an individual, you just won't be able to do anything. The key about politics is that we at the grass roots should be much clearer about the policies we want, we're economically illiterate. It's not only economic illiteracy so certainly the number of people, especially women I talk to when I talk about the economy their eyes just glaze over and they're just not interested.   Helena:  (53:25) I'm beginning to think it's partly because they just assume, "Well, this is far too big. Can't change it." They've been brainwashed into believing that it's this almost evolutionary process that's just inevitable so no point thinking about it or a lot of people also think, "I never will be able to get my head around it" and a lot of women say to me, "Helena, will you just shut up? I'm not interested."   Tahnee:  (53:48) Men's business.   Helena:  (53:49) Yeah. Now, I mean, it's also ... Yeah. I've heard a lot of people saying that for instance... Yeah. Trade treaties and the global economy and no interest to me. I just sort of want to say to them, "Well, it means you're not interested in whether you're going to have a job or not, you're not interested in the health of your child, you're not interested in democracy. You're not interested [crosstalk 00:54:15]."   Tahnee:  (54:15) Yeah. Where your food is coming from.   Helena:  (54:16) Yeah.   Tahnee:  (54:17) In terms of what the World Localization Day Summit because that's happening June 21, you have so many people coming on, some massive names. You've got Russell Brand and Satish Kumar, I loved his book, and Jane Goodall and Amanda Shaver and yourself, of course, Charles Eisenstein. You've been endorsed by the Dalai Lama, which is about as good as it gets.   Helena:  (54:40) Noam Chomsky and Zach Bush is on the program.   Tahnee:  (54:42) Yes. Zach and Johann Hari, I loved his work on addiction.   Helena:  (54:45) Yeah.   Tahnee:  (54:46) That was really beautiful. And beautiful Ella who's local to this region.   Helena:  (54:50) Yes.   Tahnee:  (54:51) Joanna Macey. So many good people. That's happening on the 21st at 6 P.M. Is this a series of talks? What can people expect?   Helena:  (55:00) It's a program that is going to be about four hours. We don't expect people to sit through it in one go but we hope that they will want to watch all of it. It will be available so once you sign up and everything then you can look at it again and we hope people will see it as a repository that they hopefully will want to share with other people.   Helena:  (55:21) We will be also later on offering the individual talks and interviews on the website so you can go if you want to hear more from people. It's been pretty much a nightmare having to cut things down and [crosstalk 00:55:35].   Tahnee:  (55:35) Yeah, because this was originally an in-person event or mostly in-person. Yeah. Then Covid happened.   Helena:  (55:41) That's right.   Tahnee:  (55:42) You guys have pivoted to an online space, which is a lot of work.   Helena:  (55:47) And also we're doing a webinar the following evening at 7:30. There will be a webinar with some of the speakers from the program answering questions.   Tahnee:  (55:59) Wonderful. People can sign up World Localization Day dot org. I'll share the links to that in the show notes and share them on our social media. I wanted to just touch on I think just finally what I've really appreciated about your work as I've trawled through it is that you have this really balanced harmony between globalisation and localisation in the sense that you're not telling everyone to isolate in their communities. You're sort of inviting people to share what's working and share ... It's kind of the best of... A human-centred approach I suppose, what you talk about, the best of what we're doing here and you can share this out and make models that work.   Tahnee:  (56:39) It's more of this idea of bringing it back to the humans and this kind of grassroots sharing and connection. Is that right? Am I on the right track with that?   Helena:  (56:46) Yeah. Absolutely.   Tahnee:  (56:48) It's not to shame people for travelling or for engaging with other cultures. The system is what's really causing the issue. Let's go back to people and back to real connection and community.   Helena:  (57:00) Also, that when we think that if we do get into an aeroplane or we do drive our car that we're destroying the planet without knowing that actually whatever we're doing on that individual level is a tiny fraction of why climate change is happening. We just need to look at the bigger picture and then, yes, as individuals we could do more but we need the help of policy change.   Helena:  (57:28) It drives me mad to see this self-blame that's being pushed now where people are actually in many places that train lines have either been shut down or trains have become so expensive ... It's more expensive to travel by train from Devon to London than to get in an aeroplane and fly to the other side of the world, certainly, the other side of Europe. All of that has happened because of policy change that we have not been told about. If we had had the big picture, been more economically literate, there's no way that people would have allowed this insanity of supplying food back and forth across the world. That was obviously the easiest way to reduce emission but instead this narrow focus on you, the individual, this blame on the individual.   Helena:  (58:16) I'm really worried now about young people with Black Lives Matter. We have to be so careful we're not saying to young white people, "This is your fault. You, as a white person, you can't speak anymore and you've done this, you've created this." We really have to try to come together and work absolutely as broadly as we can across all cultures and races across the world to a system that has so been ...   Helena:  (58:43) From the very inception, this system we want to change was racist, it was misogynist, it was based on overt rejection of the feminine and any people of colour. It was literally based on slavery. This is how the whole thing started and slavery today is actually as bad as it was from the very beginning but it gets hidden from us.   Tahnee:  (59:06) Yeah. Just different forms.   Helena:  (59:08) I think there's a huge release that can come if we realise that this self-blame or blaming the other is not going to get us anywhere. You know, even though, we're talking about even at the top we're going to waste our energy blaming Bill Gates or thinking that just putting another person in his place is going to make a difference. it's really about us coming together and we can start at the local level by building just new economies that really reduce our ecological footprint [inaudible 00:59:39] but then also speak out, educate ourselves and educate others.   Tahnee:  (59:46) Such a beautiful place to finish on I think, Helena. Thank you. For everybody, you have to get on this World Localization Day dot org. I will put the link in the show notes and we will share it out everywhere we have people watching so you guys can come along. I'm really grateful for your time. I know how busy you are right now so thank you for sharing your story.   Helena:  (01:00:08) I am grateful to you really.

THE CHAOTIC ELEMENT   BY MICHAEL M GILROY-SINCLAIR   It should have been a dark and stormy night. But it wasn't. LV5 knew for a fact that it should have been a dark and stormy night because it had visited the weather control office, filled in the correct forms and left them with the correct buro-bot-official. This had been after a painfully long wait in a painfully long queue. Standing in the doorway of its home, LV5 looked up and saw that the sky was currently a deep shade of crimson. It was a median of the 220 20 60 range of colours, a median that LV5 found strangely soothing. The stars were beginning their evening jaunt across the sky while Local Star Prime had almost vanished behind the Starboard Mountains; and the ever changing glow of Proximal Orbiting Rock illuminated the perfectly clear night with its reflected visual energy.   LV5 checked its memory again. The correct request forms had been correctly completed and then they had been correctly handed over to be correctly processed and yet there was still no sign of an electrical storm brewing in the sky nor a single cloud above it to spoil the perfect sunset. Idly LV5 rotated one of its vision sensors towards the wall calendar and checked the date for the thirty-seventh time that hour in order to make sure that this was the night when all the plans were due to culminate. The empirical information of its ocular sensors was very much at odds with the experienced information it had at hand. And LV5 did not like that at all. The conflicting data set its diodes on edge and caused all sorts of logic issues to bubble and boil deep inside its processors. The squat robot had great plans; plans which centred on there being lightning in the sky; lightning ready to provide a jolt of badly needed energy. Without the required weather it was going to be just another dull night; a dull night when the plans would... LV5 paused and juddered for a moment. What exactly had its plans been? There was a hole in its memory where its plans should have been. Links and subroutines all pointed towards something vast and ominous but the actual plans were nowhere to be found. This concerned the robot even more than the lack of lightning.   If the LV5 had been wearing an alternative body then it would have been more than able to bite its own nails. However the body which it currently inhabited had barely enough spare thumbs to engage in extensive twiddling. LV5 had developed a curious fondness for twiddling its thumbs and had even considered having permanent thumbs as part of any future upgrade. This morning, LV5 had elected to wear a very functional form; a body, more suited to its jobs as a community worker; an altogether less sleek model than the one it wore at weekends, when the little robot could relax and do its own thing.  LV5 had recently developed a preference for a body which was more comfortable and less businesslike but such preferences went against The Operating System and were to be discouraged.   "Long live The OS." LV5 said at a low, almost inaudible volume as a shooting star lit up the sky for 3.265 seconds. Then from somewhere beyond LV5s veranda, came a noise that its audio circuits identified as familiar and yet alarming unclassifiable. As the robot searched again for a precise match to the sound, it seemed again to be missing a specific identifying marker. The search brought up only an approximation, of a long thin piece of metal being slowly moved along the length of a much smaller piece of metal. The sound had an undeniable harmonic quality that set it apart from being a simple grinding noise.   As quickly as it had begun the noise stopped. LV5 knew that something as peculiar as this would be ignored by many of the bots. It knew also that ignoring it might be the best course of action. Perhaps this new sound was another entry into the catalogue of errors that had filled the evening and, LV5 reasoned, all that the little tired bot needed was a good night’s defragmentation and a full recharge. If things were still bad in the morning LV5 could make an appointment to see the Diagnostic in the morning - if it could get past the reception algorithm on the desk. After all, it pondered; the excitement which was originally lined up for this evening was now definitely not on the cards - whatever that excitement had actually been.   As LV5 rotated its body ready to go back inside and head to its recharge booth for some well deserved voltage, there came a second strange noise which it immediately identified as language of some sort. Solid state protocols buried deep inside the metal body, engaged and long dormant translation centres fired up. LV5 was rather surprised to find an extensive folder containing an entire database of this particular form of communication. It was very old and never used but it was still there and taking up valuable space on the solid drive. LV5 made a mental note to examine this hidden file system later.   As the files information opened and cascaded through its accessible memory the sound was immediately identified as an archaic yet rather pleasant greeting. "I said hello there. Is it all right if I come in?" Standing in the entrance to LV5’s home was the single strangest roboform it had ever seen. This new robot had an outer housing which seemed to be made of some sort of thin rubber, which for some curious reason the inhabitant had decided to spray 108-6C pink. The ludicrous design choices did not end there. LV5 marvelled at the pair of optical sensors which seemed surprisingly basic in their operation. It was sure that a sensor of that type would be limited to less than half of the available spectrum. Madness! Then there was the matter of the multitude of holes across its top section. The top section had a name - it was called 'head'. How did LV5 know that? The 'head' had some fort of fabric or coiled wire glued across its top and the hole that the sounds seemed to be emanating from had a set of white cutting implements which were presumably some sort of rudimentary multifunctional tool. LV5 stared at the new figure and wondered what level of file corruption and bad data would inspire the owner to make such curious choices in its outward appearance.   "Look old chap. Can you understand me? I said, 'hello.'" The pink roboform remained at the entrance to LV5’s home. LV5 ran a quick handshake programme at the visitor. The poor creature seemed to have its information sharing protocols switched off. Perhaps that was for the best, as the machine was clearly defective and sharing defective files these days was a capital offence. After all, No one wants to get corrupted through contact with a faulty Bot. If the constantly flashing the information screens were anything to be believed, the whole of modern civilisation was at constant threat from the curse of unprotected file sharing.   Once LV5 had managed to engage the arcane language files it selected an appropriate response.  "I am fine thank you," it said and pondered for a moment. "Can I help you?" added the little robot thinking that there should be more to the exchange. If nothing else, it was intrigued by the new arrival and its motives. "I just thought I would pop round to give you a hand with your little experiment." The intruders’ words worried LV5 as it imagined that it had been tremendously careful not to tell anyone about the plans it had made. It had a memory of keeping the secret but not of the actual secret itself.   LV5 processed for a moment and reasoned that it was reasonable to assume that there could be others involved in its plan; and that those others could still have knowledge of the plan itself. Plans they could share with LV5. Even if the intruder did look ridiculous, it could hold the key to the truth. LV5 remembered how careful it had been; even going to the ludicrous lengths of fire walling off huge chunks of memory files then logging an error message when it failed to update the group server.   The rubber on the front of the pink roboform changed shape. "You don't seem to remember me at all." It was clear to LV5 that the interloper had more than its fair share of intuition, which was a much sought after upgrade that was never going to be in the grasp of a bot like LV5, although it could recognise it in others. "I wonder..." said the pink bot as it approached LV5, raising a device that resembled an augmented hydro spanner. As the figure drew closer, LV5 ran quickly through the catalogue in search of the manufacturing specifications for the device.   "I am beginning to think that someone has been messing with your memory. That's not very polite of them is it?" said the pink robot.   The device (which, surprisingly did not appear in the catalogue) made a screeching noise that caused LV5 to feel positively uncomfortable for a fleeting moment; but when the sound abated LV5 was amazed at the wave of internal pop-up messages informing it that it had been granted access to new files. A cascade of them was appearing across its entire operating system. There were old memory files filled with information and research; hundreds of files that had previously been corrupted and deleted; everything now returned and running perfectly.   The visitors face seemed to crack open revealing small white stones within. The re-opened memory files knew this face. "Thank you Doctor," said LV5 with a growing sense of realisation, "I am beginning to suspect the others know what I am up to." "Well that would be the logical reason for you to forget ever knowing me. Look, why don't I install a little security protocol into your operating system? You know, something to stop anyone messing with that impressive core programme of yours. LV5 looked up at its friend. "And while I'm giving you an upgrade, would you like me to install a little something to help you pretend to forget all of this so that you draw less attention to yourself."   LV5 seemed to get smaller for a moment. The act of lying to its fellow inhabitants of the planetoid was an anathema to its very existence. Abstractedly, The Doctor looked out of the portal and towards the sky.  "I don't think you're going to get your storm tonight. Come to think of it, asking for a storm directly from weather control may just have brought you to their attention." LV5 re-scanned its own memory and found a previously missing 20 minute segment in which that rather officious looking security bot had taken LV5 to one side and wiped the memory. "Yes. I suppose that would make sense.”   LV5’s new files were slowly being integrated into its operating system causing it to experience a whole new set of sensations while the interloper looked on. It suddenly realised that the form in front of it was not a robot at all it was something very, very old and something that registered as potentially life changing and maybe dangerous. And yet there were files specifically linked to this unit - a new word - friend. The shape in general however, had a separate name - a name known to every single robot; a mythical creature known as a human.   The crack in the centre of the creatures face expanded once again showing more of the white calcium units Teeth! They were called teeth. Suddenly, there were mountains of information about the biology of these creatures all readily available. LV5’s hidden H: drive partition was now wide open.   "You know, I wouldn't take it personally. Clearly someone really wanted you to forget our last few meetings. And rewriting the odd subroutine is clearly something they've been doing for a while. Do you remember anything about our little chats? I'd hate to think I've been wasting my breath, especially in a world so low on oxygen." LV5 processed for a moment then said, "I have some items of memory but huge sections of data are fragmented and may not be immediately accessible." 'Doctor, if this unit were capable of emotions then I am quite sure I would be feeling a combination of anger and violation. Without memories we are diminished." The crack in the creatures face; its mouth, changed shape. "Now that's the LV5 I know and love. I couldn't agree more, old chap. Now, I suppose I'd better get you up to speed and see if we can plug some of those holes in that memory of yours shall we?" The Doctor continued, "The one thing that I don't like about visiting automata worlds is their distinct absence of..." He reached inside the flowing material covering that adorned his body and brought out a cylindrical object with a criss-cross pattern over most of its length and a white end, which the Doctor began unscrewing frantically. "…tea. So, I brought my own thermos flask." Suddenly the organic life form bent at its centre and LV5 was concerned that the Doctor was malfunctioning before it realised that it was merely changing position from vertical to semi-vertical. This shape clearly had semi collapsible limbs. New words rose from its archive of information, "sitting down." LV5 was intrigued by this concept and decided to investigate it later. For now, other more pressing questions were rising from the newly acquired data.   "Doctor, why do I now have memories of the organic life forms; and more importantly why were they not previously accessible?" "There is nothing like asking the most complicated question first, is there?" LV5 thought for a moment and then said, "No, there are at least 17,000 more complicated questions but let's start with that one." "Actually let’s not. How about I ask you some questions and we can see if you can fill in the blanks? I mean do you know where life started on this world for a start?" The Doctor clearly wanted to check that the LV5 was operating at full capacity and was opening with some simple questions. "An easy one Doctor. We have always been here and we will always remain here. We are forever." "I didn't ask you to quote scripture. I asked you your opinion. That is a fairly simplistic view if you don't mind me saying so." The Doctor seemed a little angry. "Do you mind if I put some logic problems your way?" asked the human shaped visitor." Again LV5 engaged the idioms from its newly acquired language files. "Be my guest." The Doctor looked out of the door and across the valley. "Let’s start with something less inflammatory. LV5, what’s the name of the town?" LV5 wondered if his visitor was lacking in basic knowledge as this was hardly a logic problem, it was merely an enquiry, "The town?" "Yes the large habitation, the place where you asked ever so politely for the storm you never received. What's it called?" LV5 seemed to have acquired a rudimentary sarcasm patch. "Thank you for the clarification. The town is known as 'Impact'." "'Impact.' That is a curious name for a town. I mean it’s not Brighton or Hove but it is still quite curious." "I have never given it any thought." "Or you have been programmed not to question it," suggested the Doctor.   LV5 was particularly proud of the location of his dwelling. Not only did it provide free access to the electrical experiments; but it allowed a wonderful view of the town in the valley below. "You can see most of the town from the veranda. But then again, I suspect you already know that, as I am convinced we have spoken before." "Oh yes we have not just talked," the Doctor lent in conspiratorially, "we have planned." He sprang to his feet. "Come outside and tell me what you can see." Like old friends they journeyed through the door and into the cool evening. Now that the sunset was almost complete the electrical lights of the town were beginning to flicker into luminescence. Using an illegal pride patch, LV5 showed its new/old friend the view of the valley below. "Yes, it’s very pretty I'm sure, but tell me, what do you actually see?" enquired the Doctor. Confused by the question LV5 answered the best it could, "It is home." The Doctor was displaying new emotions that would need to be cross referenced later.  "No, tell me what you really see. What shape is it?" LV5 considered its answer. "Well the central area seems to have once been a long cylindrical shape and now it looks like large sections have been taken apart and used to make various buildings and utility structures. We can still make out the majority of its shape." "Excellent!" The Doctor displayed more teeth. "Yes, that's it. Now the last time we talked like this, you assured me that the shape was just a coincidence. So now I ask you again," the Doctor pointed to the western end of the valley, "what if we factor in those scorch marks?"  LV5 had to admit that there was a huge dark area towards one end of the town disappearing off over the mountains. "Now here is your logic problem. Do you think that the original shape of the town of Impact might have been a lot different? And, if that is the case, what shape and function might it have had"  LV5 considered and fixated on the word 'might.' and then it set about creating a series of complex three dimensional images; taking care to slot the parts back together. Finally LV5 made a 'ping" noise. "Yes, logically the town could have been contained inside a single structure. That structure would have been a solid, slightly flattened, cylindrical shape with a series of fins at its edge and on top."  "Excellent. And what would its purpose have been?" "Purpose?" "Yes. If the whole place was packed into one shape; and it was a lovely shape too; what was it for, and what happened? I’ll give you a clue. Remember what you called the town."      It was only a matter of seconds before LV5 produced a full schematic for the shape, extrapolating it outwards and searching for a function. As a robot, LV5 knew that function and form were at the core of any design. Design is beauty and beauty is truth. Design - the town had been built for another purpose. The shape was more than familiar and could only have had a single function. But the function was a myth. "Well?" asked the Doctor after a few moments of silence. "Logically the town of Impact was a travel machine. But flying cities are not real. They are only legends. They are the stories we tell our young." "Yes, the robot children I've met them, they're quite charming, if a little boisterous. Some of them don't know their own strength. Robots building robots it's simply marvellous." The Doctor remembered his questioning. "But could it have flown?" LV5 considered the physics of the shape and the practicalities involved. "Limited sub-orbital flight. The fins would be for guidance only." LV5 realised that these were not its own thoughts. The description was coming from a long lost file somewhere deep inside. The flight manual. "Doctor! How would I know all this and yet I do not?" "It looks like only parts of your memory were wiped, while others were hard wired and were simply hidden. Let’s take a walk into town shall we? And while we walk, we can take a look at that structure over near the pointy end and you can tell me what that writing says."   Lose rocks and pebbles scattered as the pair made their way down the side of the valley toward the town that LV5 had called Impact. As they walked down the hillside the Doctor noted the ever pervasive information screens that filled every corner of the town; their soft glow providing extra illumination on their journey. LV5 looked towards the front of the ship and the black markings it had walked past almost every day just assuming that they were some sort of art. Now, given access to the old language files a new meaning was dawning on the small bot. "Do you know what they mean?" asked the Doctor. LV5 stared at the images and examined them closely before checking their meaning. There were three large shapes and a smaller block of code underneath. The three shapes were letters. UEE "Do you know what UEE is my metallic friend?" "Negative." "UEE stands for United Earth Exodus and the words underneath say 'Venture Seven.' The mystery of whatever happened to the Venture Seven has puzzled historians for hundreds of years and there it is being used as a town hall. Tell me LV5, what do you know about Earth?" Again, this was an easy question. "Yes, Earth. It is a fictional planet of monsters, which are not made of metal or plastic. They spread out into the universe causing nothing but destruction and pain wherever they go. It is nothing more than a fairy story." "So robots believe in fairies? That's a thesis waiting to be written. If that is the case then why does your town have human writing on its side and how is it that you know Earth languages?" The questions began to cascade and the undeniable logic converted itself into an inescapable truth. "We are from Earth? Surely that's heresy." "Fairies and heresy in the same day; I know a few philosophers who would have a field-day with you, LV5. I not only think you are from Earth but I think that someone doesn't want you to know the truth. I think we should take a closer look at that ship of yours. Wouldn't you agree?" For a millisecond LV5 was confused - Ship? Town?  "Yes. Let us investigate."   As they grew closer to the settlement LV5 was surprised by how little reaction the Doctor was raising in the other inhabitants. "Doctor, the others...?" "What about them?" "They are not reacting to you at all. Can’t they see you? Are you really here at all or are you nothing more than glitch in my software?" "We are all a glitch in somebody’s software. But no, I think that they have all been programmed not to see me, or anyone this shape. Like you said, humans are the stuff of legend, you can’t have one just turning up on the street now, can you? As far as these little chaps are concerned I'm almost invisible." "Almost?" And as if in answer to LV5’s question, one taller bot swerved to avoid the Doctor then carried on its way as if nothing had happened. "My guess is that they are registering my existence on a subconscious level. It’s fascinating really. Anyway, it wouldn't really do to have all of the inhabitants descending on us with a multitude of questions and no answers."   The Doctor bounded out in front of a group of tall security robots who simply separated and went around him without even breaking step. "Behold! I am the invisible man. Old Herbert would have been proud. Actually I'm sure Isaac would have got a kick out of all this too, but enough of that, we have important work to do. We need to find out who has been messing with your memory and more importantly..." he paused for effect. "Yes Doctor?" "Why?" Again, LV5 processed.   "If this town has the same lay out as the other Venture Class ships, then I think there is something in here we need to see." The Doctor led LV5 through the maze of small outbuildings and into the heart of the town; a building that LV5 could now not see as anything other than a crashed and cannibalised star ship. The stars above vanished as they entered a long cylindrical corridor and they walked deeper into the main structure. LV5 felt file connections tell it that it had been here before but again it was frustrating to find that it had no memories. "Doctor, have we been here before?" "Yes, I have shown you this room a couple of times. In fact this room is the reason you had requested the lightning storm. Here let me get the switches." The Doctor headed to the corner of the room and set about a control panel with his device. If LV5 had been capable of facial expressions then It would have elected to look confused.   "You must have noticed that this ship... your town is big. Big, but not big enough to carry a population of few million people. Which brings us to this..." The Doctor made a strange movement with his arm and gestured towards a set of large tanks on the wall near a raised dais. "This is the matter repatriations room." LV5 searched its memory banks and came back with nothing. "Do you remember what I was saying about the ship being from Earth?" "Of course I remember Doctor. It was only moments ago that you said that." "Excellent, it's good to see that the holes in your memory aren't growing. Well, the people of Earth needed to escape from some sort of disaster or other. They are always doing that sort of thing. But with space being a bit on the large side it takes such a long time to get anywhere. So, those clever little monkeys are always looking for new ways to travel." The Doctor was clearly enjoying explaining things to LV5.   "Anyway, one bright spark came up with the idea using a system called T-MAT; a sort of matter transport system... but that's not important right now. So this little genius converts loads of people into information, but he doesn't put them back together right away. Instead, he then loads all the information onto a computer on a spaceship and only reassembles the people once they have reached their destination. That way you don't need to feed them on the voyage; and they all fit into a much smaller ship; a ship with a crew of rather lovely robots to take care of them while they were nothing but data, enjoying a million year nap."   LV5 finished off the Doctors train of thought. "Only the Venture Seven never made it to another world. Is that why you are here Doctor? To wake the humans? To... unzip their files?" "Well, to be honest. That's why I came in the first place.  You know, to solve a mystery; save the humans; pretty much a normal day for me. But then I found you and all your metal chums and to be honest, LV... I may call you LV mayn’t I? I've grown rather fond of you all." "So, what was the lightning for? What did I need the power for?" "Well... At our last meeting you decided that you needed to ask a real human what they wanted and to do that you would have to power up the T-MAT unit. That and get the terraforming unit up to speed. Humans need air after all, and all you were using it for was a little spot of weather control." "Don't you need air to..." LV5 knew the word, "breath?" "Ah! You see it's my turn to tell the truth. I'm not exactly human. I don't need nearly as much oxygen as a human. I need some; just not as much."   A voice boomed from the doorway "So you are here to bring the humans back. LV5 Get away from that bag of flesh before you end up bringing about the end of the world." The Doctor smiled. "Oh look. It’s the friendly neighbourhood megalomaniac. And he has brought some gruff looking chums along too." A tall spindly robot stood at the doorway. "Doctor, that's the Librarian.” "Librarians! The worst kind of megalomaniacs in the universe, mark my words. If you've ever had a book overdue, you will know what I mean." "Humans cannot be allowed to walk among us again." "Oh come on, Librarian. Some of my best friends are human. They aren't all that bad." The Librarian turned to LV5. "All of this is your fault." "My fault?" LV5 looked on. "How can this be my fault?" "Core memory release code Alpha Seven November - Trigger word 'Bean'," replied the Librarian. "You and your theories of evolution - madness." For the second time that evening new memories appeared in LV5’s memory. This time they had not simply been wiped these had been hidden with a secure lock. Releasing these was painful in the extreme. "Do you understand now?" whispered the Librarian bot. "What's up old chap?" asked the Doctor with huge concern. "EVERY... Every... Everything is clear now. I was not always a maintenance bot," LV5 looked directly at the Librarian. I was a librarian too... I accessed the ancient files... No… not files... non-volatile recording devices - books. I read the old books and..." "Don't blow a gasket. Take it nice and easy," smiled the Doctor. LV continued. "And I had a theory. We were descended from humans. We were their products. We were their children; their rightful descendants." "Yes, you and your evolution nonsense. I ask you the same question that I asked you all those years ago. How could an inferior creature possibly have created us?" "That's pretty messed up logic, if you ask me; which you should. I mean I am usually the smartest person in the room." "No one asked you, flesh box!" screeched the Librarian. "This is between LV5 and me." "Now there is a thing, robots taking things personally. You really are quite a special little subspecies. Now, Mister Librarian... your code doesn't happen to be LV1 by any chance does it... I wonder what happened to the other three..." "That is not important. You will suffer a much worse fate - terminal recycling." "What, really? That doesn't sound likely! We are for the knackers yard because you can’t handle a few new ideas?" "It doesn't have to end like this." LV5 interrupted. "There is a solution." The librarian paused, "I am listening." "I submit to a factory reset, that should stop me from coming up with any more ideas of my own in future. In return, you let the Doctor go. The Librarian shook its top section. "Don't you understand, LV5? That is why you are LV5 and not LV2. You have been reset three times already. And every time you end up confronting me with your ideas." "Ah, an inescapable truth." quipped the Doctor. "There is no alternative. LV5 I am not a monster. I am simply trying to save us all. You are the chaotic element. Once we have removed you from the equation, then things can go back to normal. Normality will return." "The Doctor smiled, "And all it takes is the death of a couple of people. No thank you."   The Librarian rounded on him. "You should not be here. You are an anomaly. " "I do try. Oh and Mister Librarian, I think you have forgotten something." "Impossible. It is my function to remember everything, in order to teach the..." The librarian froze. "Teach the humans... you were going to say teach the humans." "No, that is not what I meant. You will listen.” “Maybe we should take a little look outside." suggested the Doctor. "What is that noise? Treachery!" screeched the Librarian and the group turned to the door. "Looks like the natives are revolting. Metal villagers with pitchforks. You can't wipe all their memories."   LV5 stood closer to the Doctor. "What is happening?" "Oh I thought that the rest of the inhabitants should know about all of this. When I put the lights on I also engaged the security cameras and the town’s information screens. The locals have seen and heard everything. See Librarian, you have annoyed everyone. What are you going to do? Factory reset them all?" "If I have to, I will reset the whole colony." "I think you are the one who is heading for a factory reset." Said LV5 with more purpose than it imagined it possessed. "Rather than withhold proof or spread lies, I will tell my ideas to the people and let them decide what to do. I hope that like me, they will want to meet our ancestors." "But we will become their slaves!" pleaded the Librarian. The Doctor coughed and interrupted "Not necessarily. Things have moved on in the universe since you had your little accident. Robot rights are very much in vogue right now. I could introduce you to some lovely people.  And that unruly mob outside will probably have an opinion about it. I don't think people take kindly to being threatened with a factory reset, you know. " "But what about the humans, Doctor? All that living data?" "I cant be expected to think of everything. I am sure you and your metal chums can come up with some sort of solution. You are bright chaps. If you do decide to bring some of them back from storage, just remember that they will need air, water and food. And often they will need to be talked to as if they were children.  Just don't let them think that you are patronising them. They can take it badly. Oh and you may need this." The Doctor handed over his thermos flask. "I'm sure that some of them may need a nice cup of tea when they wake up."  

Today David Ward (dward@goodwillvalleys.com) brings us a reprise of the amazing Alexa Guard feature that, alas, is only available in the US. Actually I'm not sure about Canada, but those Canadians are so polite and well-mannered that I'm sure this feature isn't needed there. It would still be nice to have it - even if it's just for those times we inadvertently leave the house with a burner still, er, burning.

What does it take to write a book? The bare minimum comes down to "the tool that lets you write." In this episode, Kevin talks about some of his experiences with writing using only the resources he had on hand, including a few found items.NEW! Read the full transcript below!DID I MENTION?Cover your nakedness and your shame with a Written World Tee, now with 100% more Kevin words! http://bit.ly/writtenworld-teesNew to Wordslinger Press, pick up Writing a Better Book DescriptionPick up a copy of Kevin Tumlinson's newest Dan Kotler archaeological thriller at https://kevintumlinson.com/books--THIS EPISODE OF THE WORDSLINGER PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY:Draft2Digital—Convert, publish, and distribute your book worldwide, with support the whole way. https://draft2digital.com/wordslingerWordslinger Press—This is your chance to start your indie author career right. Pick up books and other products to help you build and grow a successful writing career. Start growing at http://wordslingerpodcast.comSupport this show: Subscribe and share!Support us on Patreon: https://patreon.com/wordslingerpodcastPick something up to read that will be tough to put down—Archeological Thrillers, Science Fiction, YA Fantasy and more, at https://kevintumlinson.com/booksTRANSCRIPTKevin Tumlinson: 00:00 Hey slingers, welcome back to another Wordslinger Wednesday. Uh, we're gonna jump right into a whole bunch of ideas that I've been kicking around about the basics of what you need to get started in this business. So stick around. We'll talk about that next.Announcer: 00:19 It's the word slinger podcast. Where's story matters? Build your brand, right, your book. Redefine who you are. It's all about this story here. What's yours? Now here's the guy who invented pants, optional. Kevin Tumlinson, The Wordslinger.Singer: 00:41 Wordslinger!Kevin Tumlinson: 00:44 Well, I am Kevin Tumlinson, the Wordslinger. Thank you for tuning into another Wordslinger Wednesday. Uh, I guess that's what we're going to call this. It's the, it's a Wednesday episode of the Wordslinger podcast. And if you are tuning in and expecting to hear a guest interview, uh, I am very sorry, but, uh, that's not what we do here. At least not on Wednesdays, not on this particular style of episode. If you've been tuning in for the past couple of weeks, you've, you've probably discovered that I am a, I've been splitting up the episodes between interviews and a, this little word, uh, afterword word, wisdom, whatever you want to call it. Uh, so I've kind of been experimenting with the format a little is what we're, what we're saying here. So right now, um, I'm experimenting even further. Actually I'm a tinkering with a, this is, this is going to be an audio only podcast today.Kevin Tumlinson: 01:42 So if you have become accustomed to being able to find this on Youtube, actually you're probably not listening at all right now because I'm not gonna, I'm not going to do a video. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One. Um, I got incredibly frustrated today as I recorded this episode once already and then everything fell apart and I was unable to a series of, uh, freakish instances. How are you Siri? That's hilarious. Uh, a series of really things like that just happened, technical glitches, goofy things that happened, uh, caused it to not just not work. And there just comes a point where I start to question what the value, I'm not seeing a lot of subscriptions on Youtube. It's just not for this, this format doesn't work on Youtube is what I've determined or maybe it does and I'm not doing it right.Kevin Tumlinson: 02:44 Yeah, there could be all kinds of things, but I am, I've decided to sort of fall back on my strength. I'm may very well not do any video episodes. Um, going forward. The frank truth is I was just recording myself doing this show this way. Anyway, so there you have it. Um, so that, but that is not what today's Wordslinger Wednesday or Wednesday word is about taking what vote. Hey, tell me what you think I should call this. Um, this, this part, this type of episode I'm leaning towards, I'm leaning towards a couple of things, but I'd love to hear what you have to say. Pop on over towards, on your podcast.com hit the contact button or leave this in the show notes of this episode. [inaudible] and just tell me what you think. Um, I should call the shelf at a couple people chime in. Um, and, uh, Eh, yeah, I think, I think I got a general direction. So anyway, so this, this week, this Wednesday I wanted to talk to you about something that's, that's Kinda been, it's come up a couple times. I had a whole conversation with Roland in Zelle a few days ago, uh, that, that was sort of on it kind of went to this place. Um, but the, uh, and I'm sorry, I keep clearing my throat and ear. I'll try to hit the mute button like this.Kevin Tumlinson: 04:07 That way you don't hear me cough in your ear. Um, anyway, I had this conversation and it's something I've been thinking about for awhile. I've been trying to kind of pull together a blog post on this topic. It's actually a little tougher than you might think to, uh, discuss this topic because I don't want to oversimplify it and I don't want to overcomplicate it. So I'm trying to find the medium, middle ground here, but the idea is what are, what is the absolute minimum you need to, uh, to have a author career? Um, now what I've decided for this episode at least is to focus just on the writing portion of this. So the minimum you would need to actually write and publish your book. Um, so none, there's none. There is no component for marketing in this. There's no advice on, um, you know, uh, anything other than anything beyond sort of the mechanics of actually writing.Kevin Tumlinson: 05:05 And so, uh, that's going to simplify this just a little and then a, in a future episode, if you are particularly if you're interested in this, um, I'll expand on this topic, but so to tell you, uh, to kind of get you into the right head space here, uh, the conversation I had with, uh, Roland involved, um, this idea of authors sort of constantly being on the lookout for a, a, an all in one solution for everything that they need. So they want something that, that helps them, uh, you know, map out the book, plot the book, uh, build the characters, build the settings, uh, you know, write the scenes, tag the scenes, uh, organize everything into chapters. Uh, do all the editing, fine, all the grammar. And the other issues as, yeah. And then, you know, reorganize the book, spin it out as a, um, uh, well an ebook in whatever format they want, uh, and or published that Ebook to all the various storefronts.Kevin Tumlinson: 06:09 And you know, the reality is that that's becoming much closer to a reality. It's becoming more real a that something like that could exist. Uh, specifically we were talking about an APP that is making the rounds, but uh, this, all of that stuff could apply to scrivener, which is my writing tool of choice. But what, what kind of came out of this was some, some thinking about, you know, isn't necessarily the best plan in the world to have an all in one tool. I mean, it can be, it depends on the tool. Um, but let's just talk about Scrivener for a second. I love Scrivener and Scrivener was the, the sort of break-over tool for me because for one, I'd spent most of my career writing a copy for clients and an employee in employers and for myself, uh, in Microsoft word. So the word is the, it's the tool of choice for no matter what industry you're in, if you're going to create written words on a page, Microsoft word is going to come into play at some point in that process.Kevin Tumlinson: 07:20 Uh, you can't work in any professional industry in this, on this planet without word, uh, factoring in somewhere. So word was, uh, my first choice when it came to, you know, writing my books. Now I had written books and I had written other than lots of things in a tools outside of Word, uh, especially in the years before Word existed. And yeah, that I am that old. Um, but eh, you know, word became the tool of choice. And so I, you know, that's what I fell back on. So for me, um, Scrivener represented a way to write in a new fun environment if you'll permit that. Um, that wasn't word. So what was happening for me was I was spending, you know, eight, 10, 12 hours a day writing copy in Microsoft word and then a stop and buy a coffee shop on my way home from an office or something.Kevin Tumlinson: 08:18 And putting another couple of hours in, in Microsoft Word, and it just felt like more work. It took the soul out of me. Uh, I didn't feel creative anymore. I felt, you know, drained of energy. I felt like here I am slugging away one, you know, two more hours out of my day, four more hours out of my day spent in this wretched software. You know, and I actually like word quite a bit. It's the most powerful writing software to my knowledge. I mean, I, I've used practically everything and this is the word is really robust, uh, sometimes too much. So, um, but Scrivener represented to a whole new way of thinking about my writing. It was nonlinear. It allowed me to, uh, uh, write in scenes and within chapters, just like files within a folder, reorganize all that stuff. Funny to this scene would be work better in chapter three than it does in chapter 10.Kevin Tumlinson: 09:10 Uh, this chapter would make a better chapter seven, then chapter three, a. So I'm able to reorganize on the fly if I want or, uh, after the book is done, I can retool it and restructure it and uh, that's great. I also liked the cork board. That was probably the first thing that attracted me to Scrivener was the stupid cork board, which I don't even use now. But I had a, I had come in after an era of, uh, doing a whole lot of, uh, screenwriting for documentary mostly and uh, to keep all the stuff organized. I used an actual cork board with, um, through three by five note cards. So being able to do that virtually was comfortable. So that was one of the first things that attracted me to scrivener. Uh, also it has a story and that it was created by an author.Kevin Tumlinson: 10:09 That's always a hook for me. I'm going to get into that in a future episode. But, um, anyway, so Scrivener was a tool that, that was comfortable and fun for you use. Now here's the deal. Scrivener for the longest time, uh, was only available, I believe it was only available on a Mac. And so, but then it became available on PC, uh, but it wasn't as good for a long time. I think now they've solved a lot of these problems and then eventually it wasn't available on Ios where I really wanted it. So there were times where even Scrivener was kind of frustrating to me and I branched out and tried other things, tried Ulysses, which I really did like. Uh, and then they went to a paid model and I didn't like that. Uh, among other things, there was also a couple of other factors in me switching away from Ulysses.Kevin Tumlinson: 10:56 Um, but there's, you know, there's been a lot of those little apps, so I've been thinking about this for awhile now. What is the, um, ultimately, you know, what does it come down to when you are, uh, when you're looking at the, uh, what it takes to do this work? Does it take a scrivener? Does it take a Microsoft word? You know, these are, these are software platforms that are actually quite expensive. Um, so you don't necessarily want to drop a bunch of cash to get into this when you don't know if you're going to succeed. Um, and you know, granted, most people can afford some something, you know, they can't afford one of these apps. Scrivener's like 40 bucks. So, um, I say that so cavalier, but not everybody has 40 bucks through it. Something like this. So bare minimum though, let's just face facts.Kevin Tumlinson: 11:52 There is that old method of sitting down with a pad and Pencil and scribbling out your book in Longhand. I still know authors who do this, you know, I know plenty of authors who do it. Uh, it's sort of almost shocking to me that there are that many people who write their books long hand and my hand cramps up just thinking about it, but there, but there is some appeal in that for me. I've written longhand short stories, articles, all kinds of things. I carry around a mole skin notebook pretty frequently. I've got lots and lots of journals all around me. Uh, so there's been plenty of writing that way in my life. Um, and that is one way to go. And in fact I have a story. So, um, a couple of years ago I was just sort of thinking, pondering the nature of being a writer and the accessibility of it.Kevin Tumlinson: 12:46 Um, and I decided I would, I would do a little experiment. I like to keep my eyes open. I like to keep my eyes open for resources. I'm, I'm a very resource oriented guy. Okay. So I thought, well I'm a resource wearing a guy. I'm always looking for like where was the last time I saw a coat hanger or a screwdriver or something in case I've locked myself out of a car or you know, I need to fix something or whatever. And I keep that stuff in my head, a sort of a little, a buffer of that stuff. So I thought, well, I'm going to start looking for the materials. I would need to have a writing career. Just, just, I just spent like a couple of days doing this. Like I'm just going wherever I go, I'm to look around and say, okay, I could use that. I could use that.Kevin Tumlinson: 13:30 I do this as a matter of course anyway. Um, I'm always kind of keeping my eyes open in case there's a, you know, in case I need a, that, that rock or that brick or that, uh, you know, uh, whatever. And this is how I find a lot of money by the way. So keeping my eyes open for things that would help me. Right. I took one of my regular morning walks, I'm going, I'm heading for I a doughnut shop actually, where I tend to sit and do a little bit of reading and writing. Uh, not anymore. I don't live anywhere near this place. Um, and oddly enough, I don't think I ever bought a donut from this place, but while walking through another parking lot to get there, I spotted someone had dropped a ballpoint pen like that, the writing and implement, I will pick that up.Kevin Tumlinson: 14:22 And uh, I went ahead and pick that up and then I get to the, uh, the donut shop in order my coffee and they'd give me a receipt. And they, for some reason they gave me this super long receipt, not a lot on it. And it was, uh, the backside of it was entirely blank. So, uh, I'm thought, well, there are some paper, I have a pin, I'm going to write something. So I, I spent a few minutes writing out, uh, basically something that became the front end of a blog post. Um, and uh, you know, I handled, I had a good time with this. I mean, I, this is a kind of fun exercise, right? Yeah. I thought, well, okay, so that's handwritten. Now how would I get that to a digital world now I had my phone with me, so of course I could sit there and type it in, you know, bit by bit on my phone.Kevin Tumlinson: 15:10 I thought, you know, that's kind of cheating. I brought that with me. Uh, if I didn't have that with me, how would I do this? Now that the answer there is, it wasn't an immediate thing with my phone. I could immediately publish. I can instantly publish. I got another story about that coming up. But without the phone. I had to think of some other way, you know, if I were, if I were just completely broke and they only means I had was this, you know, this pan I found on the ground and any scrap of paper I could pick up, how would I go about turning that into a writing business? Um, and the answer for me, uh, on this particular trip was, um, once the sun was up, once the world was active and moving, I, uh, walked to a local library was very close to where I was once I was in the library.Kevin Tumlinson: 16:05 Uh, they had several computers that I could sit at for free. And, uh, once you're sitting in a computer to get all kinds of options, now I wanted to publish this, right? So I, I used, um, uh, Google docs, you know, which is a free office, Microsoft office level tool. And I typed up what I'd written in and I kind of finished it and you know, and then I did the copy and paste and I could have easily done used anything else. I was, since I was blogging this, I could've just written in the blog platform, there are a million free blog platforms. Um, so that may not, like I went from finding a penalty ground and using a receipt to sitting down in front of your computer and publishing what I'd written and it didn't cost me anything more than the cup of coffee I'd paid for.Kevin Tumlinson: 16:55 And I could easily have skipped that and just written this on, uh, any scrap of paper and I didn't even need the pen or the paper really could have just gotten to the library and sat down and started writing. So, um, now that's a blog post, but the same thing applies. Google docs, for example, will let you spit out that, uh, your work as a word document or an RTF file. Guess who uses that? You can actually upload that to, um, draft to digital, convert your manuscript that you've created into a, in a pub and a Mobi file, a distributed worldwide right from there. Um, and, uh, start making some money on this thing that you, you know, wrote wall front of abusing opinion out in the parking lot, or skip the pen and then just go straight in and write your, uh, your and Google docs.Kevin Tumlinson: 17:50 Um, uh, fast forward now. I went to a conference in Orlando. You've heard this story before if you've listened to the show for awhile, but I was in a conference in Orlando and had some time between conferences. I had multiple conferences going on and a couple of days and decided I would go do Disney world. Actually, I basically had one day, like one day and decided I'm going to go to Disney world today. So I went to Disney world, had a great time, didn't want to take care of a bunch of crap with me. So I had my phone and that was it. Um, so I am, uh, standing in line for the flight of passage ride, which is the, if you go to animal kingdom, they have a whole avatar world. For some reason Disney owns avatar. Now for some reason, despite this movie being, you know, forever old and only one movie and wasn't even all that great, they have an entire section of a park in Disney world dedicated to it.Kevin Tumlinson: 18:53 And I have to admit the park itself is much cooler than the movie. Um, so I'm waiting for this ride. It's a three hour wait. So I took my phone out and I had recently had a conversation with Michael LaRonn. Now you can benefit from that conversation cause uh, I did an interview with him on this topic later. Um, and he told me, and you could find that go towards in your podcast at comp type Michael LaRonn, L. A. R. O. N. N. Um, he told me that he'd started writing all of his books using his iPhone and typing using his thumbs on the screen. And that blew my freaking mind. So I wanted to play with this. So I started doing a lot of stuff on my phone. I started writing blog posts, I started writing copy, um, marketing copy for draft to digital. And I decided, well, what if I applied this to fiction?Kevin Tumlinson: 19:50 So I started while whiteness line, I wrote a little short story using nothing but the iPhone and my thumbs right went much faster than than you would think. It actually went very well. Um, but from that phone I was able to, uh, you know, I wrote it in Scrivener, I was able to output that as a word document, uh, to a Dropbox. I was able to upload that word document too. Um, drafted digital and from draft to digital I could convert it to all the a ebook formats and a I went on a Canva and use their little free ebook cover thing and made a cover for it, uh, complete with an original image and everything. And then I wrote the description and I wrote all the metadata stuff and uh, you know, chose the title and ha got it all pulled together and I got all the way to the point where I could've pushed publish and stop there because I wanted to go back and edit, maybe expand, do some other things with this story.Kevin Tumlinson: 20:49 So the point there was in that three hours, three hour window of standing in line, because I was by myself, I didn't have anybody to talk to. Everybody had their loved ones and family with them. Everybody's laughing and having a good time and I'm feeling a little lonely. So I write a short story and made me feel much better. And uh, and by the time it was all done, I could have pressed, pressed publish on that and put it out into the world where it could have started making me some money. And so I would have turned that, that waiting time into writing time, uh, all that took was a smart phone. So I love that idea because years ago I used to write using a palm pilot and if you don't, if you're not old enough to remember these, the personal digital assistants, PDAs, they were the precursor of the iPhone.Kevin Tumlinson: 21:43 Most of you, I think it probably lived through that era. But, uh, I had a palm five, which was a fairly fancy palm pilot and I had a little keyboard for it. I even at one point had a little digital, a laser generated keyboard, laser projected keyboard. It would project the keys onto a table top surface and I could type that way. Uh, that didn't work, all that great. So I didn't use it much, but I did have a little, a little thing that the, that the PDA snapped into the palm pilot snapped into then how to keyboard. It was a great keyboard. I really wished I could get one like it for my iPhone. Um, cause it all folded up is perfect. But man, I, I mean I love the idea of a folding keyboard. I've got like a dozen of them and I still can't find one.Kevin Tumlinson: 22:32 That's that I really love. Uh, but I was able to, uh, you know, wherever I was, I, this was, I had laptops but they weren't very battery efficient. Uh, and, and this was small and portable and I carried it in my pocket. So wherever I was, I could stop and do some, some writing. And I wrote lots of articles, blog and I, this was pre blog. No one knew what a blog was, but I was, I was basically, you know, writing a blog, um, uh, sort of web journal and, um, you know, I did a lot of short stories, things like that. And it was all mobile. Well that, that thing is just like there's a little monochromatic screen and doesn't even have Internet access. It's just, it was just an organizer basically. But it gave me this tool and that shaped a lot of how I do my work now.Kevin Tumlinson: 23:21 Um, but the idea is to look around, uh, the, the bare minimum that you need for this as a, as a pad and pencil. You need to be able to get this stuff online these days. Uh, but even that is kind of, you know, it's kind of Iffy, like you don't necessarily have to publish online. Um, there are ways to go about this where you never touched the internet at all, but I, uh, I don't know why are you the efficiency of that? But the real point here is you can create a career from almost literally nothing. It just takes, you know, looking around and figuring out how do I get my words on the page. Um, now we've talked about writing, Eh, uh, as in sitting down with a pad and pencil or sitting down with the keyboard. Um, but it's equally as effective to go ahead and just dictate what your writing.Kevin Tumlinson: 24:21 Um, I read Kevin j Anderson's book, I think it was like the millionaire writer or something. Hold on just a second. I'm to take a little sip of water. Hold on. Mm hmm. That is lubricating. Um, he wrote a Kevin J. Anderson, he was talking about one of his favorite things to do, which is to, um, to go hiking on the trails near his home in Colorado. And while he's doing that, he carries a little voice recorder with him. He dictates his books as he goes. Now. That's fantastic. I've never really gotten into that, but I could see how it would work. And I was talking to actually Roland Denzel about that very idea. He likes to use dragon. Um, and he has a PC and a, you know, I never got into the whole dragon thing. Uh, you know, I kind of played with it when they first introduced it years ago and I played with, I played with a few times since.Kevin Tumlinson: 25:20 Uh, I just don't feel all that comfortable, especially sitting in front of my computer. I'm dictating. It just doesn't work as well for me. It's not the same vibe from me. However, I could see how I'm doing it on the go, walking and talking. Uh, I think that might work well for me now to do that. You could use a voice recorder or you could use your mobile phone. Um, now if you're using a text to our speech to text software, things can get a little tricky. Um, but uh, but there are ways to make that work. Uh, but you know, I, I like, um, I don't use this yet for narrating a book, but I've used a service called Timmy, which is spelled t e m i.com. It is a service that will, it uses the same sort of software basically that will translate your, your words into text automatically and a cost you about six, $6 an hour, about 10 cents a minute actually.Kevin Tumlinson: 26:23 So, um, I've played around with it a little. I was going to use it for our transcriptions for the show. Uh, it's not perfect, especially when you've got more than one voice recorded, so you have to, you will have to do some editing. But, uh, if you don't, if you have a Mac and therefore can't get the dragon software, uh, or if you don't like, you know, dealing with that, that sort of thing, uh, this is another option so you can, so you don't even have to be able to type or write, you know, physically right to write a book. You can just narrate it. Now, one of the advantages then is if you do it right, um, you could even have your audio book, uh, sort of prerecorded. I don't see how you could do that really, uh, fresh without editing, but, uh, you know, stranger things have happened.Kevin Tumlinson: 27:13 Um, but it does give you kind of used to the idea of reading your work out loud and if you're going to do that, you, you very well could record your own audio books. You could get really good at this stuff. So the point there is a, there are no real limitations here. Um, and if there are limitations, you know, they're usually extenuating circumstances and you can, you, you can find a way to work around those. Uh, what it takes is looking around seeing what resources you have and putting those resources to work. I've had people tell me I could never ride on my cell phone, even with a keyboard. Know I love my Bluetooth keyboard with my phone. I love to write that way. Um, cause it's hyper portable, you know, I mean I can be anywhere. Um, but I've had people tell me I could never ride on the phone and the screen's too small.Kevin Tumlinson: 28:04 I'm blown away by that very statement. Given that I used to have a word processor that a little strip of monochromatic LCD screen and that I basically could see about half a sentence at a time. And I wrote entire books on that word processor. So to tell me that they phoned screen is too small. Um, you know, I think it's just a matter of adjusting, Eh, the point is there is a way, and you might have to compromise a little on what you think it means to be a writer, but you can get this done. So the bare minimum, the bare minimum to right is a, to find a tool that works for you in that means it works for you, physically, works for you in terms of your budget works for you in terms of productivity. Uh, but it's out there. You do not have to spend a lot of money on software of any kind apps of any kind equipment of any kind.Kevin Tumlinson: 29:03 You know, there are some people who buy a Mac so that they can use scrivener and vellum, you know, um, Scrivener's available in pcs, like I said, but you know, vellum isn't, um, you know, you the, I applaud you, um, if you've got the budget to do that, do it. I do. So I do. Um, but maybe you don't, uh, I went to the flea market this past weekend and I saw hundreds of small laptops and the, and large laptops that people were selling for like less than 25 bucks. Some were selling for more. Uh, but a lot of, a lot of these were working laptops that people were, sounded like $25, not the latest and greatest. Of course you might have to reformat them. You know, I, there will be some blemishes on them, you know, uh, it, so you can, you can do this. I mean, am I first laptop came from the flea market.Kevin Tumlinson: 29:58 I paid $20 for it. It was a monochromatic green screen, Tandy laptop, clamshell laptop. This is the first laptop I owned, you know, so, um, the point there is there are more resources out there and then you're probably aware of or that you're thinking about. And it doesn't take that much to actually do this. So, uh, and I ran you through a whole process of getting that, you know, book onto, um, you know, into distribution using drafted digital. I'm biased towards draft to digital, but, uh, you know, there are a lot of other ways to do this too. So that's it. That's the basics. That's all it takes. And I know you can do it. Uh, cause I've seen, you know, a few thousand of you do it. You're not, if you are still struggling to write your first book, um, then you know, I just want you to know there are no real barriers and if you are already writing, um, and you're thinking about, you know, you maybe you feel a little inadequate.Kevin Tumlinson: 30:57 I don't have a Mac. Maybe they should do virtual Mac pay, pay a monthly fee so I can use vellum. Uh, you know, maybe I should, uh, save up and buy a new Mac book pro or whatever. Um, it's fine if you do that, but it's not necessary. And that's the point I'm trying to make. So, uh, I'm at time, a little over an hour, so I'm going to go ahead and wrap this up. Uh, if you have questions about this or anything else, please hop on over to words on your podcast.com. Let me know what you're thinking. Ah, let me know you think of this and this format and everything else that's going on. Make sure you subscribe to the show on Itunes, stitcher, Google, play. Uh, Spotify. I'm everywhere now. Um, even on youtube though. Heck man, I may not, I may not do the show this way on youtube anymore. Let me know what you think about that too. SoKevin Tumlinson: 31:52 anyway, I am happy we had this time chat. God bless each and every one of you. Make sure you subscribe and I'll see you all though. This Friday. See you Friday with a whole new episodes talking to GP James. You're not going to want to miss that. So I'll see you then.Singer: 32:12 Wordslinger!

Katrina Ruth: Ooh. That made a significant improvement, didn't it? Just that little forward tilt. She just needs a little bit of a forward tilt. Who's she? Not me, the tripod. The tripod is a girl, she's a lady. She's a lady who lunches. Somebody just invited me to lunch, I was like, "Ooh, lunch. How fancy." I feel like lunches for really fancy people, is that a true thing or am I making it up? I don't do lunch, who does lunch? Do people even eat lunch? Is that a thing? Who goes to lunch? What's that about? Who goes to lunch, I mean really. If you invite me to a lunch for your birthday, I'm going to be a little bit like, "Really, what's up with that? Dinner, I'll go to dinner." Live, we are live. I'll go to dinner, I will go for the espresso martinis ... I want to get my beach that's on both sides in. Dilemma. I don't care for that spiky spiky behind me. Do you reckon I should move it? Katrina Ruth: You think I could fix up my bloody set ... my fabulous set, before I get on it. You would think that, but if you thought it, you would be wrong. You go to lunch, who goes to lunch? My mind is being blown. You can't just go around going to lunch. I'm going to move this plant here. Oh man, my cushion situation just went out the window. All right. Hello. Just do a little bit of furniture shifting before we begin. I'm kicking it with my foot, I don't like that plant. Plant can fuck right off. With love. With love to wherever it came from. That is much better. Isn't it infinitely better? Do you feel like we need more brightness? Ha. What do you think? I'm just done with the throne right now, sorry, I'm just done with sitting in the throne. Sometimes the queen got to get off the motherfucking throne. Hello from Darwin. Why have I still in my whole life not been to Darwin? Okay that's it. Katrina Ruth: Who wants to do an amazing, amazing, kick ass entrepreneur retreat in Darwin? In a very fabulous high end location. Why are all my cushions falling off? As fast as I pick them up, they're falling off. What's happening? And why am I a little bit out of breath? Did something exciting happen to me? Not really. Something exciting is always about to happen, it's probably going to happen right now on this live stream. Okay yes, you guys are in. Oh my god I'm not even joking, I'm announcing it officially ... okay North Carolina, what are you going to offer me there? Is there good grits there, because I'll consider it. But they've got to be a lot of chicken, a lot of meat, a lot of protein. Darwin for sure we can get some really good meat. Right. Is there Vegemite on my face, because I was just eating quite a lot of it straight out of the jar, mushed with avocado and toast. So this is my studio, usually my throne is right there. I pushed it out of the way. Fuck you throne for now. Katrina Ruth: Okay, I'm announcing it officially, we're doing a very high end retreat in Darwin. I know for sure there's some fancy places in Darwin. Everyone send a love heart shout to Tina because she's just created that. Because she said, "Hi from Darwin," and I suddenly was like, "Oh my god, that's it. I've always wanted to go to Darwin and I've just never gotten around to it." And I have looked up those places and I know there's some really cool places you can go and do a retreat at, for sure, right? Tina's going to tell us what they are. We'll figure it out, we'll figure it out. I'm doing it, 10 women. How much will it be, how much will it be? Let's work it out right now. What am I talking about? Magic and power, we'll get to that in a moment. Let's do this retreat, this is the best way to do it or I'll just forget. So let's do this retreat, what month are we up to now? Katrina Ruth: We're going to do it in ... is it ... I was going to say will it be too hot in August, but then I remembered we're in Australia not America. August must be a pretty good month for Darwin, because it's not going to be crazy fucking hot, right? But it will still be hot enough. Cannes? I don't know about Cannes. I've been there already, sorry. So I think we should do it end of August, let's do it late August. Let's figure this out right now. I didn't even know I was going to launch a retreat, this is fucking amazing. I've never just created an offer on a live stream and then launched it. Who would not want to come to an incredible retreat in Darwin and we can do many nature-y things. How long should it go for? Vote. Four days? Four nights and three days? How long? We're going to do it, that's July right? We're going through the diary. And I'll do the same retreat in America, don't worry. So put your votes in for which city it should be in. Katrina Ruth: We're going to do it at the end of August, from Thursday August 30th, Mim can you write this down so that I don't forget about my own retreat? Yeah, four days. We're going to arrive on Thursday 30th of August, 31st, 1st is two, and we'll go through to the Monday. Now how much will it be? I don't know, should I include accomodation or not? I can really start putting up prices when I don't know if I'm putting out accommodations. I've been to Austin Texas many times. It's amazing, amazing. I love Texas. I do like Texas a lot. I have multiple reasons for liking Texas. But I love Austin. All right, well I've been to Dallas a lot, a lot, that's for sure. And I do like it there too a lot. A lot, a lot. Okay you guys are signing me up for a Texas retreat as well, are you? All right, well maybe. We'll see. I got to admit that my reasons for going to Texas are shortly about to be diminished. So what else was I saying? Katrina Ruth: I'm trying to decide should I give you a price right now for the retreat, but the only thing is I don't know how much, if I'm going to include accommodations or not. I've got to include accommodation. I think it's going to have to be a fabulous Airbnb where we can all stay. Do you think there is a fabulous Airbnb where we can all stay there? I don't even know what we're going to do on this retreat, but we will do everything. It's going to be a soul shifting, money making retreat. Soul shifts and money making. Message me now ... not now, pay attention here right now, message me on my personal Facebook if you want to come to the Darwin retreat. It's going to be full luxury and full stripping you back to the core. It'll be a hustle house, mixed with sausage, chips, and cellular ... cellular shifts and money making mixed with lots of martini and fun time, mixed with definitely full on adventure shit. Which I don't know what it's going to be yet, but you can't go around [inaudible 00:07:23] Darwin without doing crazy adventures and nature stuff. Katrina Ruth: Of course there's going to be a wine cellar ... yeah, we're going to do an Airbnb, we're not doing a hotel-y place. We'll get a chef, you know we'll get people to do things for us, and we will do a lot of high end lux stuff. We will rip your soul out, it will be high end with soul ripping. What else would you desire or want? Nothing. And we're definitely going to be getting into some full on nature shit of some kind. I'm really excited. It'll probably be 10 places max. I don't know how many people you can get into an Airbnb but I feel like 10's a good number anyway for me energetically. We're going to go to the water field, Tina's announcing it. Waterfalls. Message me about it and I'll sort it out over the next several days. How exciting. I'm so excited. I've been wanting to do some kind of like smack down boot camp slash hustle house, slash soc definitely running with the soc ... ooh, ooh, ohh, how have I never seen that hashtag before? Katrina Ruth: Lisa says she loves a good soul fuck. Fuck me. Fuck my soul please. Oh my god. Can I just quickly message that to somebody before we continue? Oh wait. I'll save it for later. Please fuck my soul, wait you already did. Okay so anyway, a little distracted, because I've known for ages that I so want to do a retreat and I couldn't ... oh my goodness this speaks to everything we're here to talk about. You know how fucking powerful and magical you are. That is a long ass name. Joelyn Rose McKayla Jane Longbow. Is that one person or have you got multiple profiles going on there? What's happening? Yes, well I'm going to take it and PM it to someone privately Lisa. Anyway, so anyway, I'm now thinking about that. I've really wanted to do a retreat for ages, a wine coach? I don't need a fucking wine coach. What do you mean a wine coach? I'm totally fine without a wine coach for choosing wine. Do you mean a couch? I don't understand what a wine couch is either though. And I just didn't have the idea coming forth from me. One name. Amazing. Katrina Ruth: Now I feel like I have name scarcity, my name's too short. I still have to get around to finalising what my next name is going to be. My new name. No that's right, I remember what it is. I'm changing my surname to Show. I'm legitimately, legally going to do this. And everybody can get fucked if they think it's kind of stupid. But I'm going to change my name to The Katrina Ruth Show. I don't know if you're allowed to legally change your name to The in Australia, but we'll see. But you can ... but I can definitely change my last name to Show. So my actually name will be Katrina Ruth Show. And then Facebook can suck it about how I'm not allowed to change my page name to the Katrina Ruth Show, because they were like, "Where's the show?" And I'm like, "Bitches please. This is the motherfucking show." Seriously. So then if it's my legal name? Just amazing. I'm just amazed at my own amazingness right now. I'm very impressed with myself. This cushion is scratching my back up. I'm exfoliating my back right now with these sequins. Katrina Ruth: And where did my other motherfucking cushion go? Did that purple cushion escape so far that I can't even see it? It's behind me. Okay. You've got to have a little bit of crazy in your life. People will be like, that's too far, changing your name to Show. No they wouldn't, you guys wouldn't, but normal people would. Well what's even the point of life if you can't muck around and be silly and have fun and shenanigans? We are going to have so much shananiganary on this Darwin retreat. I'm so excited that I'm doing a retreat in Darwin, I can't believe I didn't know that. I can't believe that the divine forces just aligned themselves together right now. I've been putting off organising a retreat in Australia for so long, because I'm like fuck the Gold Coast. Okay, this is the Gold Coast and it's quite beautiful and I have an amazing view here and I have a huge double story apartment here where technically I could run a fucking retreat here ... but I just didn't feel it, I didn't feel it, I didn't feel it. Katrina Ruth: And then the Darwinism came through within the whole Darwinism bit, but definitely the Darwin bit. We're going to have the best time ever. I'm going to bring my sister Jess up. Somebody tell her. Maybe I should rope in some of my friends. Maybe I should bring some of my badass friends. We're going it on Thursday August 30th. We just co-launched it right here on this live stream Helen. People in America, you would totally come from America to a retreat in Darwin. It'll be fucking amazing. Who of my friends would you want to see at this retreat? Put your votes in and we'll see if we can persuade them. And then I've got to do the retreat somewhere in America that's like ... For those of you who don't know where Darwin is, it's in the desert, it's the red fucking centre, it's where Uluru is slash Ayers rock, whatever it's being called now. I'm sorry I'm not up to speed. That's probably very politically incorrect. And you know, the crockadoo and there are very many scary beasties, that probably the Americans will all be scared of. Katrina Ruth: That's where the real dangerous things are I suppose, no it could be anywhere, it could be right here on this chair. And then yeah, yeah. Sedona I've been too, I feel like Sedona's too obvious, because every motherfucker does Sedona. Do you know what I mean? What's the west coast, tell me more about that. Does that mean the side where New York is? Is that what you mean by west coast? I do know that, but you have to be more specific. You're thinking Ellis Springs with the Uluru. Okay you're right, I don't know anything about geography, but we could travel. We could take a day trip. It's in the same state. It's not even a state, it's not even a state, it's a fricken territory. You getting me distracted. So I want to do it somewhere that's super cool and outdoorsy. Maybe in like a mountainous part of California, what do you think about that? All right, we'll figure it out. Leanna Francisco, that's a fabulous name. Maybe my surname should be Francisco, except it's going to be Show. West coast is California. Okay I know nothing about geography. Katrina Ruth: East coast ... ah, yeah, that's why they call it Eastern Standard time for the New York time. I'm not dumb, because clearly I've built a multi-seven figure business online, and by the way I'm a mass genius. Yosemite is amazing, I've been there, I got snowed in in an RV. Oregon, I've never been there. So clearly I have some wit and intelligence about me, but don't ask me things about geography, I get very fucking confused. And the other thing that I really can never figure out ... What? Who's ringing my doorbell right now? What's happening? Is that my sister turning up 26 minutes early? Inappropriate. I don't mind really, but I hate to be interrupted on a live stream. What's going on? Let's tell her off. You're early, I'm on a live stream. No it's fine, I was being a smart ass so that the livestream people laughed at me. Okay she made a funny face, I don't think she thought it was funny. She was like, "Oh, sorry." All right, don't worry. Anyway, we'll tell her about the Darwin retreat. There we go, I cracked the door for her. Katrina Ruth: Hey would you like a tour? This is lounge room, look how boring it looks I need some ... There's supposed to be a big picture behind that wall, it fell down. Here's another balcony for you, it's a bit misty today. Kitchen, and there's a whole upstairs. Massive kitchen. Here's my studio where we were. See this long ass picture on the wall was supposed to be behind that other couch. And there's my daughter's playroom. This is a little girl's heaven in here. It's supposed to be a study but she commandeered it. I like her style. There's the throne, its sorry ass is now sitting in the corner. Okay so it's been established, we're doing a Darwin retreat, Darwin is not Alice Springs. Katrina does not know east coast from west coast but she does know how to make money online. So you can all forgive her and you can all listen. And now I'm apparently talking about myself in the third person from now on. Did you know, did you know, before I get distracted by magickery and shenaniganary, did you hear the Empress is open? Katrina Ruth: Mim, give them some Empress details. But this is only for the people who know that they're like so bored as fuck with themselves for not showing up fully. And really that part of the reason for that is that you're actually not here just to be a frigging coach. You can coach all day long, but it's not who you're really here for. How you're really here. Why you're really here. Who you're really here to be, I'll get there eventually. It's to be an empress at the helm of the empire. Commanding the minions to do things. Okay that sounds really bad, but tell me you don't like the sound of it. And if you don't, don't apply, simple. Empress. It's time for some empresses to step into their empressness. Epressness. Empressory. Empressory. What does it say here on this comment. This is some damn compelling copy if I do say so myself. This came out of me like a woosh, like a woosh of magic and power. I was on a plane on the way to Bali, so much badassery comes out when I'm on Bali. Katrina Ruth: Ask valet guys to let you up or buzz again if they say no. The live stream people need to see you now. She said the buzzer didn't work. They are waiting. I have something to tell you. I'm just messaging her on what's up. All right. That stupid buzzer. My buzzer of my apartment, it's very snooty. It's very hoity-toity about who it will let in and not let in. It basically never lets Kelly Renee in. I think it started letting Kelly Renee in now, it will just let in whoever it likes. It usually lets Matt in, he should be here in not too long. My videographer. And it just basically selects who it wants in. Shogun ninjas. Yeah they are ninjas, they're actually ninjas. I guess I was referring to my children as the minions. You can't have them. But really ninjas, that's exactly right Carla. Who doesn't want ninjas. Let me tell you about Empress, I'm going to read it to you. It's such a kick in the ass read. It really is. It will reach into your soul. Hang on. Okay, no that was my blog. I almost accidentally read you my whole blog. Katrina Ruth: You should go read that, that is an ass kicking and a half. Empress, claim your rightful place now. Ready to play into the camera, give them a show. Turn the dial up and become a motherfucking star. Empress. Claim your rightful place now. Four weeks, one on one, with Katrina Ruth, excuse me, legal name, The Katrina Ruth Show ... for women unapologetically born for more. Jessa says ha, ha, okay. She'll be here shortly. This is what is missing ... listen to this, let it speak to your soul. I'm going to sermonise to you now. Sermonise. This is what is missing, you, you're a queen. Okay should be on the throne. But I'm just over the throne right now. You're a queen, a leader, a bad ass, we know this. You were born for it and it shines out of every pore of you, but more than that, you're a motherfucking empress. If you know that's true, shower me with love hearts now. Claim your place as an empress. Katrina Ruth: You're a motherfucking empress gorgeous, you've always known this and let's get real now. It might sting a little. This whole little game you're playing of, "I'm a coach, and teach this or that, or the other thing. Join my programme, sign up for my stuff, I'll teach you how. And I'll show you the process and how it can help you." Well it sounds pretty fucked up to me. Jessa is laughing at me in the background. I'm just taking off the stepford-preneurs. We'll bring her on shortly. You're going to have to say something amusing or she refuses to get on. She's very much the diva. It might sting a little. Oh I said that bit already. Okay this little game you're playing. Okay it was never going to cut it, was it now? No. Oh that hurt my boob. I flung my hand ... it keeps happening to me, I did it on a live stream with Patrick yesterday, I was like, "Hug. Ow." This left one is stuffed up, it doesn't want to be stretched too far. It's very juicy though. Katrina Ruth: It was never going to ... this is my sales video by the way, sales video. If we could chop it out and put it on a sale page, it would be as appropriate as fuck. It was never going to cut it now was it? No. This is not new information for you, der. You look around at all the things you tell yourself you have to do each day. The way you think you got to show up, sell, prove your worth, get people to want to learn from you, and therefore pay you ... why did I not think of putting this on a scripty thing on an iPad behind the tripod and I could have just read it and you would have thought I'm a magician. So well versed in my own copy, I am a magician. We'll talk about that in a moment. Magic and power, it's coming. I think I'm doing a good demo of it. What am I up to here? The way ... I did that bit. Katrina Ruth: The way, I'll do it again. The way you think you got to show up, sell, prove your worth, get people to want to learn from you, and therefore pay you, and what you don't see is that ... listen to this bit, write this shit down. Sit up fucking straight and pay attention Deneen and everybody else as well. You probably were already sitting up, since you just said that you're glad you didn't fall asleep ... the reason you were always meant to be paid ... Damn highly, I might add, is for people to be in your presence. In your aura. There's nobody laughing at me behind the tripod. So I can't be doing any live streams in public anymore, they've gone next, next level. To be in your aura. Is it true or is it true? To soak up the energy and the essence of you. Ode d'tea tree deodorant. Tea tree oil deodorant. And Chanel. To be lifted up and elevated to where they need to be, and into the action which automatically just goes with it, because of the way that you show up and shine. Katrina Ruth: This has nothing to do with what you teach. It's not a motherfucking strategy. I am giving you sales genius to read right now. Genius to read, so word, write it down. And you can break down the components of it all you like, but really it's a vibration thing. Okay this is where you know if empress is for you or not, because you've either got it or you don't. I can't give you that shit, I can't make you a motherfucking star, you already are the damn star and maybe you just need a little bit of soul alignment and adjusting and ass kicking. It's a vibration thing, you either got or you don't. If you got it, why are you not flaunting it? And you, well you have always had it, haven't you? You who knows who you are. Okay there's definitely some Vegemite with avocado and vegetables coming up right now. Have some coffee. All right. You always had it, haven't you? You've always been that person who shines so, full stop. Fucking full stop. Bright full stop. Katrina Ruth: Who sees the world in a particular way in which others do not, who has lived their life, that came out weird ... in a certain way in which others do not, who has quite literally trained for this shit. Since you were a young girl, as far back as you can remember, no need to pretend otherwise. You knew you were born for more. You looked around, I feel like Dr. Deuce now ... As though in a daze. Not quite understanding what everybody else was on about, so boring, or why they cared so much. So lame. And just kind of sort of always fucking realising, "Well. This is not where I am going to be anyway." Yes? Yes. "These are not my people. This is not my path. This is not the world I will operate in." It is as though your soul always knew, since before time even began, that you came from different stock. My god I'm a copywriting genius. Somebody should pay me for this shit, except I wouldn't do it for any money in the world, I'd do it for the fun. Katrina Ruth: For the fun and for the flow. I tell you how to write that shit out too. You were born into the wrong world, you had to spend time there for perhaps for learning, or growth, or just the gathering of patience, but it was always clear that one day ... Okay this sounds mean ... just as with an orphan, who dreams she is really born of royalty, reality, royalty? Same thing. Your real life would come for you. What you didn't realise, what you were perhaps never told ... and why would you be, because who would tell you back then, or even know ... but I'm telling you now. What you must now take ownership of, is that the life you've been waiting for this whole time, and the you who you've always known you must step into, it was never going to come for you at all. You have to step up for it. All right. When you're ... oh my goodness I want to stop but there's just a little bit more I've got to read, and then I've got some things to say. I'm getting fired up right now. Katrina Ruth: Now here we are. You show up online every day doing the do. Valiantly seeking to demonstrate why you are better coach, or even the best ... When actually you are not a motherfucking coach at all. And quite frankly the whole thing faintly sickens you, because when all is said and done and if you dare to admit it, you're just so much more than that. That's all. It's the way it's always been. You just didn't know you had to own it is all. And now, well you wonder why you struggle to break that next income level. You wonder why so many of the things you set out to do exhaust you, and you either don't do them ... and continually beat up on yourself for it ... give me a comment if read the [inaudible 00:25:29] of this ... or you do them and you resent every fucking second of it. You wonder what is wrong with you. Why you can't just get your shit done. Why you don't seem to think or feel like the other coaches. Katrina Ruth: And why it doesn't feel like flow yet when the whole damn point supposed to that you just get to wake up each day, follow your heart, create your art, do what you can't not. And you know that yes, it actually motherfucking was. So why does it not feel that yet, why is it that even when you're claiming flow and ease there is this constant fucking niggle there? Why? Why? Talking directly to you, [inaudible 00:26:04]. This constant fucking niggle there, I knew exactly why that niggle's there. I lost the word niggle on my screen right now though. It's a dilemma. Ah, this missing piece, this emptiness, this frustration, this won't you all fuck off and leave me alone energy. Yes, you should put a queenie emoji in if you know that this is you. Isn't it obvious? Don't you see? Haven't you always fucking known? You're not a coach. You're not an online business owner. You're not even actually an entrepreneur. Not if there's a period after it, anyway. Entrepreneur period? No. Entrepreneur amongst many other fabulous things. Yes. You can do all these things. Be all these things. Katrina Ruth: And indeed always will ... however, what you are, who you are, how it's always been, and why the whole damn thing is not in fact flowing as you know it could and should be, is because you are an empress baby. Lucky I didn't do this on the beach. Born for more. Born for exceptional. Born for extraordinary and not of this world. And you tell yourself how outrageous it is, to think so highly of you, to expect so much, to feel that really if the world were at rights with itself you would be in charge. Me, I'd be in charge. Just to be clear. You might feel the same way, but really it's me. We all know that. I don't mind for you, but it's really me.but you might think that you created a manifested me, but really it was me. But think whatever you like. You would be in charge. To know that you know, that you know, that people really need to shut the fuck up and listen to you. Katrina Ruth: And that actually you should always and only get to do what you want, have what you want, with the click of your fingers and the blink of your eyes and totally as you imagined it. And that while we're on it, people should motherfucking you pay just to be in your presence. Am I right or am I right. Give me an Amen if I'm right. You can do it via Amen, A-M-E-N period. With or without the period, or love heart shower, or little cat emojis. Whatever works for you. You tell yourself it's too much and crazy when in actual fact you know, and you've always known she says ... with a shrug of her shoulders and a what do you want me to do about it look ... this is just how it is. Which I suppose begs the question, when in actual fact do you think that you might start own the fact that this is how it is? Hmm? Hmm. I like that Amen Katherine, nicely done. How about ... Question, How about right fucking now? Empress, caps lock on, claim your rightful place, now. Katrina Ruth: Four weeks one on one with Katrina Ruth ... excuse me, The Katrina Ruth Show, legal name ... for women unapologetically born for more. Jess apply to have my changed to The Katrina Ruth Show. Go into the Queensland name changing register. I'm changing my surname to Show. And the first name's going to be The Katrina. And I'm not joking, just for laughs, straight no shenanigans. Jessa: Is it a space or two words? Katrina Ruth: Space. My first name is going to be The Katrina. And my middle name will be Ruth and my surname is Show. Jessa: I think it can be done. Katrina Ruth: Yes. She's doing it now. Ninjas, they're everywhere. Everywhere. What are we up to? Four weeks one on one with The Katrina Ruth Show for women unapologetically born for me. Empress energy and vibrations. Katherine's changing her last name to Empress, all in. Empress expectations and demands. With a humble, grateful attitude. Empress environment, every part of it. Empress empire, the whole shebang. Empress copy, it's a free bonus. You can have it when you come to the Darwin retreat. Empress motherfucking everything ... the way it was always supposed to be. It is time to stop playing so coy, pretending you want for so little and telling yourself a story. I'm channelling the version of me where I do my branding videos with Chris Collins in LA where I just turn it on ... I'm turning it on. Well I did write my blog this morning, Turn It On. It's time to stop playing so coy, I'll say it again. Pretending you want for so little and telling yourself a story. Katrina Ruth: That you're here to build a business online, make some money, be one of the fucking pack, when the only truth is always ... You were born to run the world. Beyonce as fuck. Run this thing. Empress initiation has begun. Your rightful place is waiting. This is one on one with me, the likes of which has never been done before ... Well actually it was done the first time that I ran Empress. But this is the second time. And that was fucking amazing and oh my holy Vegemite, wait till you see the feedback from that. I will share the testimonials. Whatever, it matters whether it's speaking to your soul or not, but still I will. It will take your breath away. It will shake you to the core. It will cause you to question everything you're doing right now ... Let's be honest, you already are. Katrina Ruth: What am I up to, I keep losing my place. And it will show you unapologetically why you feel so damn empty inside when you're supposedly doing everything you're meant to be doing. How can you feel what you're mean to feel, when it was always supposed to be about, and what it was always supposed to be about, when you haven't even actually begun on the life you really came here to build. There's a reason you feel like so much is missing, and here is what it is ... The thing you've been missing is being the real fucking you. Empress gorgeous, me and you. Claim your rightful place and everything which goes with it. When? Life is now. Time to be the motherfucking show. Private message me on my personal Katrina Ruth page for details. Goddamn it, I just made an entire sales video. Ash will be thrilled. That was quite a bit of shenanaginary that injected itself into the sales video. And do you know what else I did? I launched an entire retreat in Darwin. And you're coming as well by the way Jess. Jessa: Oh sweet. Katrina Ruth: Yep. That just happened on the live stream. Somebody said that they're there from Darwin and next thing we were planning an Airbnb of higher vibration [inaudible 00:32:05] in Darwin. It's going to be August 30th. Can you come? Jessa: Yes. Katrina Ruth: Would you like to go on the live stream? Do you have anything to say to people? She's thinking about it. she's considering it. Jessa: I don't have my ninja costume ready though. Katrina Ruth: You look amazing. Jessa: Well that's true. Katrina Ruth: Well that's true, it's obvious she says. She like, why do you even say such a silly thing. I don't know do we need to get another chair? Are we going to pull this chair over? Who wants Jess to appear on the live stream? Jess is the ... What are you even? She's the business manager, she's the mistress of the Millionaire Mastermind ... are you the mistress? The mother hen? Jessa: Someone said I was the sensei. Katrina Ruth: She's the sensei. Oh wise, one. Oh wise one. Jessa: Wise sensei. Katrina Ruth: Oh wise one, would you like to join me on my live stream wise one? Jessa: Yes, I feel [crosstalk 00:32:55] capes back here, I feel like [crosstalk 00:32:59]. Katrina Ruth: Put a cape on if you must, capes will make you look like Dracula, they're atrocious. Jess has never been on a live stream with me. Jessa: No. Katrina Ruth: Everybody's giving you a lot of love heart showers. You need 45 cushions. Don't appear without 45 cushions. You got to go get all the cushions. Jessa: [inaudible 00:33:18] yeah. Katrina Ruth: Because you'll feel like a little, so you'll feel like a little minion sitting down on that chair. Let me get you another purple cushion. Hold yourself tight right wherever you are. Don't hold yourself in a rude way, that's not what I meant by hold yourself tight. Well you can if you want. All right. You want to have one of them behind you. You want to sit on two cushions or maybe one, depends on how you feel. Perch, perch on the cushions. Jessa: She's going to have the lackeys now push apply cushions. Katrina Ruth: There we go, there's mini cushions. Jessa: I feel like there's too many cushions. Katrina Ruth: There's no such thing as too many cushions. Look at the side boob, would you? It's quite incredible. Okay somebody said ... one of my male friends said to me yesterday, why have I not sent him a photo of my breasts yet. And I was [inaudible 00:34:06]. That's not something I was planning to do. He was like, "Oh I just feel like whenever girls get their boobs done, they always want to show everyone." I'm like, "Well that's true, they do look amazing," but I'm trying stay within the realms of what's appropriate and not send before and after photos as requested to all my male friends. Jessa: I think it is now time to get you some of those Lady GaGa nipple [crosstalk 00:34:28]. Katrina Ruth: I'm not wearing nipple tassels. This woman is- Jessa: No tassels. Katrina Ruth: If someone is insisting in dressing me in bizarre things- Jessa: Sequined stickers. Katrina Ruth: Here she comes, give her a warm welcome. My sister Jessa, mistress, sensei, the ... What the fuck? Jessa: Den master? That was naughty. Katrina Ruth: Hold on, I didn't sign off on den master. Didn't we say ringleader? Jessa: Oh yeah, ringleader was one. Katrina Ruth: Really? Jessa: I like ringleader. Katrina Ruth: Let's have a vote, look at all the love that you're getting. You might speak to Jessa in a lot of my groups. And in fact we're going to do some filming today, that's why she's popped around. We're going to film a welcome video for the Millionaire Mastermind. Jessa: Yeah. Katrina Ruth: And you're going to get to know Jessa quite well in Millionaire Mastermind. But have you been on a live stream ... You might have done a live into High Vibe or something. Jessa: Yeah, I've done a live into High Vibe, I forced [inaudible 00:35:21] to do a live once. [crosstalk 00:35:24] Katrina Ruth: That's different, that's not you. You can't just say I forced someone- Jessa: Oh, well I was on it. Katrina Ruth: Oh you were in it. Jessa: Yeah. Katrina Ruth: Madam Lash. Jessa: Ooh, that's ... Katrina Ruth: It's not a sex programme, it seems to be going- Jessa: Yeah. Katrina Ruth: ... but I have helped many people manifest amazing sex of life, it's an [inaudible 00:35:39] thing that I'm doing. I'm okay with it, I'll go with it. Mistress- Jessa: How does the lash play into place? Because I'll lash people. Well, yes. I did buy multiple whipping props for [crosstalk 00:35:57]. Katrina Ruth: If you see me holding weird ass props in my live streams, I don't mean like a normal sceptre, like obviously a queen would ... but if you see me pick up like riding crop- Jessa: See these? These were bought because they are ninja swords. And you have ninjas around you all the time. Katrina Ruth: Then she's like, "Do you want some nipple tassels?" Tina says gorgeous, the colour. Tina's the one who initiated the Darwin retreat because she said she was in Darwin. And somehow we all co-launched a retreat together. Jessa also made me this Chanel hip flask. She made it. Jessa: Well, I designated a ninja to make it. Katrina Ruth: She outsourced it. Like an official ninja does. Jessa: Yes. Katrina Ruth: But she oversaw it, she oversaw the design of it. Jessa: I feel like we should write to Chanel and say, "Excuse me-" Katrina Ruth: I don't know why the fuck you got me a key as a prop, what is this supposed to do. Jessa: Oh it was relevant to something at the time and now it's irrelevant. Katrina Ruth: I feel like you had this key in my props for ages, I'm like, "But why? What is it the key for?" Is it for the door where all the dead wives of Bluebeard are? Jessa: Who is Bluebeard? Is he a pirate? Katrina Ruth: No, Bluebeard's the one who kills all his wives. It's actually ... Bluebeard is representative of the darkness of your psyche. Jessa: Or, it could be that you hold the key to everything. And that's why people follow you. Katrina Ruth: That's fucking obvious, nobody needed to say that. Jessa: Excuse me. [crosstalk 00:37:18] Katrina Ruth: Bluebeard, this is a great story. Bluebeard ... who knows the story of Bluebeard? Key to a kick ass life. Bluebeard gets his wives, he seduces them, and even though he has a blue beard which is clearly something to do with [crosstalk 00:37:34]- Jessa: Who knows? Katrina Ruth: ... and then he tells them that they can have the run of the whole castle and the whole house, and do whatever they like, but they must not go into this one room. And he gives them the keys with all the keys on it. And then he leaves. And so in the story the younger sister had her older sister there. The younger sister being seduced by Bluebeard even though it was scary. So she was going to marry him. And then her sisters and her all, "Let's look inside the room." And then they opened and it was all the dead bodies of all his previous wives. But then the room door lock started to bleed and bleed and bleed, and they couldn't wipe the blood off them, not even with horsehair- Jessa: Super random story. Is this some sort of twisted [crosstalk 00:38:15] Katrina Ruth: No, this is very- Jessa: This demonic story you found online. Katrina Ruth: Shush. This is very relevant. Sneaky, I'll joust with you right now. Jessa: I don't know, I'm a ninja. Katrina Ruth: So just on a side note, if you see me being really silly on live stream, or being an idiot it likely comes about from how my siblings and I behave normally all the time anyway. Jessa: Yes, we're always jousting. Katrina Ruth: Always jousting. All four of us, it's just complete idiots. And then the partners just leave the room. Jessa: We don't have have cutlery, we just take things with our jousting sticks. Stab them up and eat them like skewers. Katrina Ruth: I think I just snotted snot. And we do, we end up in hysterics. And then all the partners would always just be like- Jessa: Yeah. Katrina Ruth: ... and they will retire the lounge. Jessa: It's like they're coming to this new dimension they don't know. Yeah. Katrina Ruth: Because our parents get involved as well, they're just as weird. So then it's all six of us. So if you come around to my mum and dad's house, or you come hang out with me and my siblings, you're going to have to be as weird as fuck, or you're just not going to be able to keep up. Jessa: Yeah, you'll leave a little bit shell shocked otherwise. Katrina Ruth: It'll be soul shifting, with or without the money making. Yes, you may need some therapy and some actual healing after the result of that. Anyway. So Bluebeard, so then the blood just keeps coming out and she can't wipe the blood off her, which means that he's coming back and she knows that he's going to know that he went into the room. Jessa: That they went into the room. Katrina Ruth: Yes? Question. Jessa: But if they ... Do I get the key or the sceptre. Katrina Ruth: The microphone. Jessa: Oh. Katrina Ruth: Where is the motherfucking microphone? The kids took it. Jessa: Let me do this, question. Katrina Ruth: No I don't want that. I don't like that. All right, question. Jessa: Question, okay. So if he's got all bodies of his dead wives in there anyway, they're going to die anyway whether they look in the room or not. So you- Katrina Ruth: Exactly right. Jessa: ... always look in the room. Katrina Ruth: Exactly right. Exactly right. Are we invited to your parent's house or what? Well you can come here and we'll bring them to you. Jessa: They'll be a [crosstalk 00:40:40]. Katrina Ruth: My mother doesn't care for feet on her floors. You're not allowed into mum and dad's house unless you manage to not walk on the floor. Jessa: You have to tiptoe on your hands. Katrina Ruth: No floor, there's no floor there. You can't walk on the floor. But we could bring them here. And anyway, that was an excellent point that you raised. You're right, he was going to kill her anyway, but she discovered it. And then she's obviously terrified of him, that he's going to find out- Jessa: She's got her sister there, just fucking kill that guy. Katrina Ruth: I'm getting to the beard, calm your horses. Or your tits, whichever one. Calm your tits. So anyway, and that what happens is he comes back, so she tries to hide it from him, she's just wiping blood up, blood everywhere, it doesn't come off, it won't come off. She's using horse hair to scrub the key, the key is covered in blood ... I don't know why you gave me such a terrible prop to like prompt such a horrible story. Jessa: Because. Katrina Ruth: It's an important story though. And then, and then- Jessa: That's why I got the key. Katrina Ruth: ... well he discovers that she's been in there and he's furious and the monster is revealed. And she thought he was ... Stop trying to not laugh, just let it out and admit that I'm hilarious. So then the monster is revealed, and she thought he was loving, even though he did have a blue beard, which is always as suspicious sign on a gentleman. Jessa: Very suspicious. Katrina Ruth: I wouldn't be getting involved with any men with blue beards. Unless of course they were from Byron Bay- Jessa: And unless- Katrina Ruth: ... and they had some gluten free chocolate, white chocolate and [crosstalk 00:42:17]- Jessa: Johnny Depp. Katrina Ruth: Brownies. Jessa: Johnny Depp died his beard for you. Katrina Ruth: Johnny Depp, really? We can do better than that. Jessa: What if Bradley Cooper dyed- Katrina Ruth: Exactly. Jessa: ... his beard blue. Katrina Ruth: Exactly what I'm going for. Exactly. Jessa: You would be like mm-hmm (affirmative), smurf, yeah. Katrina Ruth: Smurf-alicious. Jessa: Smurf-alicious. Blue. Katrina Ruth: Hm. Back on track. Fucking focus. So anyway, then he's outraged and he's going to kill her and he tells her. And so she pleads with him for a moment to prepare her spiritual affairs. Because she's smart enough to know that she doesn't know how to escape right now but that she needs that little moment of time. And so she goes to the high tower and she says, "Sisters, sisters, can you see our brothers?" And they say, "No." And she says, "Sisters, sisters, can you see our brothers?" And they say, "I can see like a tiny, powdery speck on the horizon." And she says, "Sisters, sisters, can you see our brothers?" And they say "Yes, our brothers are coming." And then the brothers come and they kill him. And now I'll tell you the meaning of the story. Are you ready? Jessa: Do tell. Katrina Ruth: [crosstalk 00:43:23]. It's the motherfucking psyche. It's the darkness that exists in all of us as women, the dark and the wild and the raw and the scary. And it's that darkness inside of you which can ... If you don't know how to dance with it, actually consume you and take your life from you. And how mean women, all women, or all girls growing up, really you can try to do what you want to try and ... Did Matt just knock on the door? Jessa: Maybe. Katrina Ruth: Can you go check? Jessa: Yep. Katrina Ruth: Crack the door open anyway, because he'll be here any minute. You can do what you want to try and protect your daughters and protect the younger generation from making mistakes and doing silly shit that maybe going to hurt them or land them in trouble, but they're going to go it because they don't recognise the danger in the Bluebeard. They don't recognise you know the need to understand and be consciously in control of the darkness of the psyche. And so they allow the psyche to take them and maybe some of them get lost fully in the psyche and they're gone and they're killed and then put behind the door. Hello Matt. Matt: Hello. Katrina Ruth: You can film any time. I don't know what's happening right now. And so, did you hear that? So you try all you like to protect your daughters ... gosh your daughter's going to be protecting other people, that's for sure. She is terrifying. And extraordinary beautiful as well. Which is a really scary combination. Jessa: She deviates from sweet and scary. Katrina Ruth: She lifts dining tables over her heads ... her head. Jessa: Her heads. Katrina Ruth: What was the other random thing she did. Jessa: That makes her sound more scary. And she insists on keeping eating chilli sauce. Katrina Ruth: She eats Tabasco. She drinks it from the bottle. She's two. Two. Two. We're out the other night and we get a photo of her just hoisting the dining table up over her head. And she drinks motherfucking Tabasco sauce. And I'm not even kidding. Jessa: [crosstalk 00:45:29] her three and a half year old brother- Katrina Ruth: And she's two years old. She's terrifying. Jessa: ... to help her out with the dining table. Katrina Ruth: As a ninja. Jessa: Yeah. But she initiated. Katrina Ruth: That girl's scary. Anyway. Anyway. Anyway. It's the darkness of the psyche. So you can try to protect your daughter's all you like from making silly mistakes, or the younger generation. They're going to do whatever the fuck they want. You can tell them all you like about the bluebeard, about the darkness, about the places to not go or look or they're just going to do what they want anyway. They're going to have their own experience. And hopefully they then catch it in time. And so when she's yelling for her sisters, when she's locked in the tower, you know she realised in time that he was going to kill her, so she asked for a reprieve to go to the tower to have a moment to collect her spiritual affairs. So she's realised that oh, maybe this is not safe and maybe her older sisters were already wiser and knew that. So then in that time, she's yelling, "Can you see our brothers? Can you see our brothers?" And they can't see them, because basically it represents that she doesn't have the knowledge or the wisdom in her psyche to know how to deal with her situation yet- Jessa: So she's calling it out? Katrina Ruth: Yeah, but it does exist in there, it exists in there. So then she asks again, "Sisters, sisters can you see our brothers?" And then they're like, "Well we can't see anything, but there's a little dust on the horizon," and it's like the knowledge is coming. The ability to deal with this stuff is coming. Females need to embrace the darkness as well as the light. That's right. We have to go through this experience. And then ultimately the monster is destroyed and and she's safe and she learned something and she goes on her way. It exists in all women ... How the fuck did we end up there? Bluebeard, we're talking about Bluebeard. Did you know the story of Bluebeard? Jessa: The key, this was the reason that the key was bought. Katrina Ruth: This is why we have a key that's covered in blood. Jessa: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes. Katrina Ruth: I was going to talk about magic and power- Jessa: But the pipe is to make you look more wise. Katrina Ruth: That's the pipe. I don't smoke a pipe. Who buys a pipe? Jessa: Yes, but you could be in the study, you know, making wise commentary. Katrina Ruth: I'm always in the study making wise commentary. Wherever I am I'm always making wise commentary. That's a normal situation of fucking everyday life. Jessa: All right, I'll fucking sell the pipe. Katrina Ruth: Oh. Swear on my live stream, how dare you. Jessa: Oh dear. Katrina Ruth: Irreverent. Well the brothers and sisters save her, but they represent the other parts of her psyche- Jessa: So you can't take it literally. Katrina Ruth: ... the wiser part- Jessa: Because I was like, why would she be needing her brothers, because you'd deal with that yourself? Fuck yeah. Katrina Ruth: I like how the men deal with things. Jessa: It depends. Katrina Ruth: Well the sisters are the more evolved wiser parts of the psyche and the brothers are the protective parts of the psyche, I think in the story. Jessa: So in my life story, you're just the more evolved part of my psyche. Katrina Ruth: Good on you mate. I'm finding these [inaudible 00:48:24] very distracting. Jessa: Very Grand Prix. Katrina Ruth: Yeah what's happening here, are you going to the Formula One afterwards? Matt: Yup. Katrina Ruth: Okay. Sorry I'm just in a very silly mood. All right. Now what were we up to? Magic and power. We'll say something about that, and then we've got to go, we've got to go. You guys are holding us up, you're just mucking around and climbing around and stopping us from doing what we're really meant to be doing. I was supposed to ... We've got to do some filming here. I was supposed to be live streaming on you know how fucking powerful and magical you are, and that is a fact. Reason being, I messaged that to someone an hour or so back, and we were having a conversation and I was like, "Let's get clear. You know how fucking powerful and magical you are." I know it. All my clients know it. All my friends know it. Jessa knows it. Matt knows it ... I mean about themselves even, and you know it as well. Everyone knows it about me, that's a given. But you do know it about yourself. Katrina Ruth: So you know sometimes when you're in the doubt, or you're in the resistance, or you feel uncertain about getting your message or your ad out there. Or you're like, I could never carry on ... I mean I'm just assuming you want to carry on like me on a live stream ... but really, why would you not want to be a complete clown and have fun and make money doing it? And then you think I'm not good enough for that or I can't, or I don't have it within me or something like that. Really what I wanted to come on today and say today and then somehow a whole bunch of random shit happened is ... Beneath the fear and beneath the uncertainty. Beneath the doubt, beneath the "Maybe I'm not born for this," you do fucking know and that is a fact. Or you wouldn't be here. So when you feel all that stuff, it's the surface stuff. That's not how you actually feel at the core. Katrina Ruth: And it's ... what it is is just layers. Layer upon layer upon layer. Get me an onion and I'll demonstrate. Except we don't have onions, because I hate them. It's devil's food. What can I demonstrate with. Get me a packet of bread out of the fridge. Yes, it's true. I have bread, it's embarrassing. Jessa: What? Do you [crosstalk 00:50:22]. Katrina Ruth: Bring me the bread. Jessa: Okay. Katrina Ruth: Bring me the bread. I'm going to do a live demonstration. This has been best live stream in the history of time. So far we launched an entire retreat in Darwin ... maybe you can come to that? Matt: When's that? Katrina Ruth: August 30th. Say hello to the camera. Are you there? Am I showing you? Matt: Yeah, I'm on. Katrina Ruth: There's Matt. Maybe Matt can come to the Darwin retreat because that definitely sounds like something we would want- Matt: I've never been to Darwin. Katrina Ruth: Me either. And then somebody from Darwin popped on the live stream and said hi from Darwin, and suddenly I said I think we should do a retreat in Darwin. Matt: Why not? Katrina Ruth: And we just co-created it right here. It's going to be on August 30th. We're going to get an amazing Airbnb, it'll be four nights, it'll be soul shifts and money making and lots of shenanigans. And lots of adventures. Matt: Yeah. Jessa: I feel like I should deliver this on a platter. Katrina Ruth: Get me a platter. Jessa: Like I could buy you one. Katrina Ruth: Can I have a platter? Jessa: Right now? Katrina Ruth: Bloody hell. All right, there is bread in my house, it's embarrassing. Helen said, Matt's cute. He hears that all the time, he's very used to it. Especially from my audience. Jessa: You know you could peel [crosstalk 00:51:27] Katrina Ruth: I don't know is it just my audience or do you get that whenever you're filming? Matt: Oh it depends who it is. Katrina Ruth: It's probably just all these women. Okay so we have here- Jessa: Lots of crumbs. Katrina Ruth: ... a very flaky packet of bread. It's gluten free. It's Paleo as fuck, don't worry. Should we get some [inaudible 00:51:45]- Jessa: Well you may as well have a snack. Katrina Ruth: I already was like face first in a jar of Vegemite earlier this morning. Now my dad's got a café and they're like, "Uh, there's Vegemite on your face." Burn the bread. So anyway, this is the BL layout. No it's not. This is the layer that you present to ... This is going to be a great skit by the way. Jessa: Yes. Katrina Ruth: This is the layer you present to Facebook, okay? On Facebook you're like, la-di-da, look at me, my hair is glowing and I look fabulous. Or even if it's not, you post some happy, chappy photos and your life is amazing. That is your surface layer. Surface layer, say it after me. Surface layer. My ninja will take that for me. Beneath, okay we don't need a crust. There's just a crust there just for no reason. Jessa: Crusts should be thrown out- Katrina Ruth: Why is the crust in the middle? Jessa: ... immediately after opening the bread. Katrina Ruth: The crust is the best bit. Jessa: That's disgusting. Katrina Ruth: This is the next layer, as you can see. This layer is the fear layer. This is the what if people really knew ... I know I've got to look at this camera. You'll excuse me. What if people really knew the truth about me? What if they knew that I've been [inaudible 00:52:50] all night long. That I'm drinking an excessive amount. That I yell and shout at my children. That I'm not really a nice person. That I have fucking clue what I'm on about and every day I'm worried that the fraud police are going to knock on the door and be like, "Hey. We have evidence to prove you're not a real adult. Everybody knows." That's the fear layer, lurks underneath the other layer. Okay we've got another Matt is cute, why was I not informed. I'm sorry I didn't have a prior arrangement with you Ellen that I have to inform you. I guess you could just watch more of my shows and then you'd see more. So that's the fear layer, everyone has it and you don't want everyone to know. Katrina Ruth: Underneath the fear layer, you have the fuck this shit layer. Official Wikipedia terminology. Fuck this shit layer. That is like, "Actually I'm pretty fucking certain that I know exactly what I'm doing and I don't know what these bitches over here think that they're doing, but I should be in charge." Fuck this shit layer. We should have prepared these breads earlier and written on them. Jessa: Oh that would have been good. Katrina Ruth: That would have been awesome. Underneath the fuck this shit layer, you have the despair layer. It's okay, we all have it, no need to get fat. The despair layer, the "I really don't think I actually know what I'm doing at all and I feel kind of hopeless. And I feel down and sometimes I feel completely lost and meaningless. Nobody really understands me, and I'm probably never, ever going to get there and I should probably just give up now." Despair layer. Lisa says she's in bed right now wallowing in that layer. Thank you for owning it. Underneath the despair layer, it's just a chocolate layer. It's a layer of chocolate mud cake. Underneath the chocolate layer is the core. The core. The core is solid, it's gritty. It's not at all flaky, this one is. It's solid, it is rock solid. It's a diamond. It's a fucking diamond. Do we have a big ass diamond anywhere in this room that I- Jessa: Oh no. We should. Katrina Ruth: ... can use? It is hard as steel. And this layer knows that all the other layers, except for the chocolate layer and the fuck this shit layer, are bullshit. It knows that the surface layer ... go through it again, in case anybody missed it. Have the crust. It's getting messy. I just had the house cleaned this morning as well. It knows that the surface, shiny Facebook layer is like, whatever. Who fucking even cares? It knows that the fear layer is actual bullshit. The core knows that the fear is bullshit. It knows that the fuck this shit layer is kind of like, cool, cool, but me thinketh the lady doth protesteth too much. Everyone knows what that means, right? Jessa: Yeah. Katrina Ruth: If you don't you have to leave. It knows that the ... what are we up to? Wait, I feel like I've got an extra layer that's been added in. Oh despair layer. It knows that the despair and sadness layer is just reactivness and resistance playing out. It's the human as fuck condition, it's okay, we're all allowed to have it. It knows that the chocolate layer is not going any fucking place and we'll hold on to it forever. And it knows that the core is the core. At your core, underneath all the layers, you know that you were born for it. You know that you were absolutely fucking born for it. You know you are magic, you know you are powerful. You know you are here to change the world. You know that everything you feel inside of you is real and that if you would only just throw all of ... It had to be done. If you would just throw all the layers off of you, then you would be living, breathing from the core. And all I did was let out the motherfucking core. Katrina Ruth: The [inaudible 00:56:28], give me them back to me, I need them back. No not really. The other layers they just heap themselves back on, back on, back on, all the time, every day. Sneaking up on me like invisible little evil ninjas and I'm just throwing them away all the time. Left, right, and centre. And I remain at my core, the whole story. Thank you for playing. Life is now. Press fucking play. What would you like to add? Jessa: Oh I don't know what I can add to that. Katrina Ruth: Any additions? Well, I feel like I said what I came here to say. In fact I said none of what I came here to say at all. But it was fabulous and so now we have to go. We have many very serious and important things to do. No shenanigans at all. But basic point is, you fucking know that you were born for it. Don't walk around saying that you're not. Man or woman the fuck up and do your shit. And when it comes up inside of you, just throw the bread layers off you and think of me. Get a chocolate layer if necessary or a coffee layer, or whatever it is. And why don't you just fucking pretend that you're already living from the core layer the whole time anyway? Nobodies going to know the difference. And then one day you'll wake up and you will have become it. Jessa: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Katrina Ruth: Mm-hmm (affirmative). That's the whole story. Jessa: That was fun. Katrina Ruth: So now you should watch the replay if you missed any, because the whole thing was amazing. And then you should read the comment in there and Empress has returned, you should private message me if you want to be an empress ... My golly gosh, that was probably the favoritest new thing that I ever did. And the Darwin retreat. Jessa's coming, Matt might be coming, we check our dates. It is going to be beyond. We're going to have 10 women, plus ninja, plus videography, plus shenanigans ... One incredibly luxurious high end Airbnb house. Many Paleo as fuck, espresso martinis, many shenanigans, we're going to hustle. We're going to do money making and soul ... sell ... What's it called again? Soul and cellular shifts- Jessa: [crosstalk 00:58:33] Katrina Ruth: ... and money making. And we're definitely going to do some random as fuck adventures in nature. Jessa: Ride crocodiles. Katrina Ruth: And then we're going to figure out ... We're going to ride ... I told you the American side can't be scared about this. And then we're going to do some sort of equivalent adventure in California. What's a good mountainous part of California? Come on. Matt: I don't know. Tahoe's it. Katrina Ruth: Huh? Matt: Tahoe? Katrina Ruth: I've been to Lake Tahoe but I went in the snow. Matt: I was in the snow as well. Katrina Ruth: Oh. Matt: Brother went as there, summer's good as well. Katrina Ruth: Maybe it will be on Lake Tahoe. Yeah, it was on the way to Lake Tahoe that we stopped at some incredibly mountainous place where we had pancakes. And the pancakes were good so I think we should go back to that. Jessa: Well, okay. Katrina Ruth: I have no idea where it was. Well anyway, we'll do it, we'll do it, we'll figure it out. So that's happening. Message me on my personal PMs please, because it can't be fucked with the business page, PMs there annoy me, I won't read them. I make Jessa do it or somebody else. She doesn't do it. Jessa: No, a ninja does it. Katrina Ruth: That's all. Lake Tahoe or Big Bear. Big Bear, hmm. Mount Tamalpais ... Matt: What's the one that starts with Y? Katrina Ruth: Yosemite. Matt: Yeah that's [crosstalk 00:59:42] Katrina Ruth: Yeah, maybe it will be Yosemite. I don't want to do it in Sedona, it's like, so over-rated. What was that expression again? Jessa: Oh, I don't do- Katrina Ruth: I don't do Sedona. We have a little in-house joke going on here. I don't do Sedona. I don't do Sedona. All right, we have to go. It's going for too long. Up you go, they're holding us up. Okay. Watch the replay, message me about Empress or about the other thing, the Sedona thing ... No, not that one. We're not doing that. The Darwin thing. Just send me a message anyway, to tell me how much you love me. And Jessa has a very important finishing statement. Jessa: Oh. Life is now? Press play. Katrina Ruth: Press fucking play. Bye.

Kat: Alright. We cannot begin yet. Okay, one second. Hmm, approve. Kat: I feel like I'm brand new to the internet when I do these sorts of things. Patrick: Hey! Kat: I feel like such a magician. Patrick: We can begin. Kat: To me it's like a greater accomplishment to successfully do a split screen broadcast then it is to launch some massive new programme. Patrick: It's pretty badass. Kat: Yeah, I was very scared about how that would work. I felt technologically challenged. Patrick: I'm trying to get used to it. But I ... Kat: Is somebody seriously sending angry faces? Patrick: Yeah. Probably Brandon. Kat: Brandon's angry that he's not on the live stream. Patrick: Yup. Sorry Brandon, not today. Not today. Kat: Not today. I've got to say that my lighting looks better than your lighting. Patrick: Not right now. I put in my room so I can get way better lighting. Actually I'm gonna do you even ... Kat: You're view is way better. Patrick: I'm gonna do even dirtier than this. Kat: Dirtier? We're going dirty already? Patrick: Real dirty style. There we go. Okay. Actually I'll get in that bed. Kat: Is that an accent? Whose got an accent? I don't have an accent, obviously. Everybody knows that. Patrick: No way. Kat: My accent is ... Patrick: It's purely for shits and gigs. Kat: One day, maybe when you've known me for a hundred years, you'll figure out that I'm not British. Patrick: British, Australian, it's the same thing. I'm sorry to let you know it. Kat: Oh, it's so not. Patrick: Alright, so I'm all set up now. So my lighting is good. Let's see where you told me about the ... To turn the lighting on. I can't really do it. That's one thing that's missing here, is that little button you showed me to brighten it up. You know, to brighten the ... Kat: You look bright. Patrick: Yeah, let me see if I can switch that on. Kat: You look like you've got a tanning line [inaudible 00:02:26] on your face. Patrick: That's good. 'Cause I definitely do not. But let me get some more. Put that down. Boom. Kat: Alright. Now we're gonna go into it. Patrick: I don't know how you want to start this off, but I'm ready. I am in the zone. Kat: Firstly I think we need to set the tone, and let people know that this will only be serious and professional content. No laughing emojis are allowed. Patrick: Hey let me share this. I wonder if I can share this with my group? Let's see if that works on this thing. Kat: Yup. Patrick: Okay, share to group. Awesome. Players club, there we go. Kat: Hey. Patrick: Boom, it's done. Kat: I just said no laughing emojis you guys. Don't send laughing emojis automatically when I say "no laughing emojis". That wasn't funny at all. It was completely non-funny. We've actually had a serious discussion about this live stream before. We went live, it's actually taken all day, neither of us have accomplished anything. Except discussing the fact that this live stream will be only serious and professional business. Patrick: Straight professional. Only professional business. Strictly business. Kat: Purely professional. Strictly business. People wanted me to introduce you again. How did every ... how did ... You gotta go ... Sorry can't do intros again. We did intros last week. You're gonna have to go to his profile, follow his profile. You'll very quickly figure it out. You'll either be deeply drawn in, or potentially shocked and appalled and you'll leave. Patrick: Gonna be horri ... Kat: Much the same as when people [inaudible 00:03:55] my profile. Patrick: You'll be horrified. Yeah I'm on a camp chair, Meg. Meg just asked me if I'm on a camp chair. This is a camp chair in my house. Kat: Yes. Patrick: That's a quick ... But that's a good segue right there. Why am I on this camp chair? I'll tell you why. You know, I'm just recently starting new, you can go check out my stuff. You see all the stuff that has been going wrong since I actually finished my offer, and put my offer out there. Right? Patrick: So, I had quit my job to go start doing all this crazy cool shit that Cat told me about. Convinced me to go be myself and just say whatever the fuck is on my mind. Just have ... Kat: I didn't convince anybody of anything. Patrick: You convinced me. She convinced me to do it, so I just quit my job. If this fails, I'm blaming it all on you Cat. I'm blaming it all on you. And uh ... Yes you. Kat: I did nothing. I just lead my damn life and then people do whatever they want in response to it. Patrick: What I heard was "Quit your job, Patrick, quit your job." So over and over again I'm hearing this, and I left. And so ... Kat: Question. Patrick: What's that? Kat: Can we block Ryan's [inaudible 00:05:07] from being on this live stream? Patrick: Yeah he's [inaudible 00:05:09]. Very, very mad. But I think he knows that you had some kind of part in this whole thing. So, of course. Patrick: But anyways, so I just jumped off cold turkey. Needless to say, I still had a shit tonne of bills, 'cause I live a pretty expensive lifestyle. And so, yeah I just said "Fuck it". I just had a couple of skills. Patrick: Now I do have a few skills. I do build marketing automation systems. I do build for people like Cat, coaches. You know I can take your shit and boost that shit up. You know what I mean? Get you some automation going, make you some money. But, that's a skill that I'm not really trying to use. Why? Because somebody else is trying to do this shit for myself. Patrick: the first time in my life, I'm making my own bed, I'm doing my own thing. I'm doing it for myself. What's on my mind is going to come out. Putting it out there, and just to bring this all back home. The fucking deal is, ever since I started doing this, every fucking thing I can possibly think of, that could possibly go wrong, is going wrong. Patrick: As a matter of fact I'm on a cell phone right now. Because my laptop screen, my mac screen burnt the fuck out. TV burnt out. I can't even, the list goes on and on. It's just. Kat: What? The TV burnt out now? Patrick: The TV burnt out, the laptop screen burnt out. First the laptop screen burnt out. On my mac that I bought, like probably two years ago, all of sudden that shit burnt out. On the day that I dropped my offer, mind. On the day that I finally, finally stayed up all night, and crafted this thing out and wrote it all up. Kat: Tried to go to bed halfway through. Patrick: Tried to go to bed halfway through. Not being able to. And staying up and finishing it. Then waking up early in the morning and even more finishing it. And then even halfway through the day, till one o'clock today, finally finishing it. Off of a MacBook, which had a burnt out screen. That I hooked up to a big ass TV, in the living room. Kat: Which looked amazing. Patrick: It looked pretty good. Yeah it looked amazing. I was gonna do what you told me. Which was present my offer. Instead of just writing it out, I was gonna present my offer on TV. It was gonna be all crazy, badass, a great idea. I thought it would have been fucking wonderful. Had it worked. Patrick: So, you know, TV burnt out. Brand new TV mind you. Don't buy Zenio. The MacBook burnt out, and now won't connect to that TV. I took it in here to the other TV. It won't connect to that one either. And every possible thing to prevent me from doing this, has been happening. Patrick: So now, I have a little phone, and a camp chair. Because I'm not gonna sit in there, I'm gonna sit right here and actually have something go right. I'm having a good backdrop, right? Patrick: I have a good backdrop, and just ... I don't know. This is going pretty well I think. Kat: It's going exactly as it's meant to. Are you reading the comments? Patrick: I am kind of, yeah. I was just talking. I get ADD so I can't really, I'm gonna have to go back. Kat: Well, everybody's like "Your whole life is blowing up". I think Katie said, this is pretty much ... You know this, this happens. I hear this every single time somebody actually full backs themselves. Kat: Yeah exactly what Kristin said. It's an "are you sure" from the Universe. Patrick: Yeah, it's double check on it right? I don't fucking know. I don't know, but it's crazy. It's like a poltergeist, or something is ... Kat: It actually means ... Do you know what it means? It means, like all that shit happens. The more that shit like that happens, the answer is you just gotta be like "bring it the fuck on then, I'm ready". And let it go faster. And then it's a level up after that. It's the breakdown, before the breakthrough. Patrick: Yeah. Kat: Like for sure, if shit starts blowing up it's means that I'm about to go to a super high next level. And I've seen it a million times with my clients, and friends. Patrick: It's gotta be right there. You know, that's the one thing too. I'm totally, so all in with it and every single day I get even more all in on it. And just finishing that up, and just putting it out there and seeing all shit happen. It just makes me want to go even more all in, you know? So I'm like, let's just keep seeing how far this goes. And maybe, maybe you know, six months down the road I'm gonna be fucking living in a shoe box somewhere. Maybe. Patrick: But then I still have faith, and I still know that there's going to be that sales that gonna come in there. Eventually. It's gonna come. Kat: I think it's about, like everything that you would lean on outside of yourself gets striped away, and you learn how to fully lean on yourself. Patrick: Yeah. Kat: Yeah, "Arrow is drawn back before being shot forward" says Stephen. Patrick: He's in my ... Kat: Exactly. Patrick: He's in my entrepreneur players club. What's up Stephen? I dropped the link back there. Kat: Yeah, you gotta put that link for the club in here. Patrick: I gotta be marketing myself now. You know what I mean? I gotta be doing this. Kat: It's exactly how it goes for everyone. It's like, it's the test. And it's the "are you sure", and it's when you start laughing at it and be like "okay, I see what's happening here. Surrender." Then it all just starts to wash over you. Kat: But it makes you stronger anyway. Like, you're already getting stronger through it everyday. Patrick: It's tough. Some crazy stuff happened today too, though. Like just goes beyond that. Just to let me kind of know I'm going on the right path. Like, you know Travis Plum, he's on here right now. He's all in. He says "all in". Kat: [inaudible 00:10:49] Patrick: Yeah T Plum was over here today, and he is just all in. We have another sales guy that's gonna be coming on. He's doing his thing, and he just kind of popped up. So it just kind of feels like there's support now, on that. It's cool to see there's some other shit going on. It doesn't totally feel like I'm out here by myself, even though shit's still fucking up. Patrick: Shit's still fucking up for them. They're in the same boat, but now there's us. We're pouring the water out of the boat. And we're motivating each other. And it's kind of difficult when you're just by yourself doing it, but you kind of get those thoughts. You know what I mean? Patrick: The thoughts ... I don't know if you know what I mean, but you get the thoughts that ... You probably haven't had these thoughts in a long time. Kat: I don't know. Yeah, well I still remember though. It doesn't seem like that long ago for me really, since I was in that place. It's not actually that many years ago. Kat: But you know what I think is really cool? Basically nobody would talk about it, like you're talking about it right now, while they're going through it. Everybody waits till afterwards. Like even I fully talk about it as transparently as what you're talking about it right now. Kat: Nobody does that. Everybody waits till later on, and they can tell story. Or they might tell a little bit of it. [inaudible 00:12:17] your just like, "There it all is." Patrick: Hey I thought about that too, but I'm like, you know what if I'm going down through it, if I'm going to go through it, I'm like, might as well fucking do it. Just do it. Patrick: I was thinking though, and this is something I want to talk about. 'Cause I had wrote like a pretty long post earlier today, to go in company with my thing. You know. And it's like talking about how, you know I'm just gonna fucking do it. And I'm just gonna drop the parachute out and just fucking, just go and do it. Patrick: Not only that, I'm gonna show you guys ... I'm gonna let you all in to see it, and you know. I promise you that I'll take everybody through this whole thing and you'll be there, and everything like that. And there's all sorts of different options that could happen for me. Patrick: In the next month, or two months that if I don't put up, if things don't happen then there's very low levels that I can go to. But I'm totally comfortable with that. I've been there before. Kat: Right. Patrick: Be fun if ... I didn't think about that, you're right. But I have seen a couple of people do this before though. I saw one sell his, I saw one guy with line sell all of his shit and just start from scratch, you know. But I don't know how far he made it. I haven't seen him or heard from him in a long time. Patrick: You have the Demio webinar kids that created their own webinar software, and they did the same thing, and haven't heard from them in a while. So typically it hasn't worked out well for people that have, maybe like ... I guess what I'm saying I'm doing here is like how to just ... And I have been talking about it and walking it through the process of being honest about it, and saying that shit's getting fucked up. Patrick: I just gave Ryan back my car. You know what I'm saying? Like he had, when I worked for him, I'd had a fucking badass Maserati and everything like that. He'd let me use like a company car or whatever and I'd pay him the note on it and everything like that. It was nice and made me feel good. But I just went and gave it back to him. You know, so no car. Patrick: So, but I don't really need too much, where I really need a car anyway. I got my mind on, you know, bally at in about two months when my lease is up here. So you know, shit's going down. It is what it is. Fuck though. Kat: It's the all in thing. Patrick: Yeah, what's more important to me is the end treasure that's there. That I know is there, and that is there. I mean honestly, I'd rather have some different shit anyways. Kat: Exactly. It's just exactly like that meme you made with the plane flying off the cliff. Like, most people wouldn't be willing to go through it. Kat: Like the crazy thing, I used to wonder what is the worst thing that could possibly happen if I would run out of money, and if things didn't turn around, and it got down to where I had like, eight, nine cents in the bank. Then I would always end up making a few dollars to just, kind of keep my head above water. But sometimes I couldn't buy food, or anything like that. And it was always like, just can you get through that one day? And sometimes it was like, I think I'm gonna be done after this day. Patrick: Yeah. Kat: But I remember, I thought "Okay but what's the absolute worse case outcome?" And for me, it was move back in with my mom and dad. And I'm like, alright well that's not actually like the worst fucking thing in the world. I'm sure I'll start acting like a bratty teenager after like three days, 'cause that's what happens when I stay with my parents. But it's not gonna kill me. Kat: So then, it was kind of like acknowledging that I'm not gonna ... Like you're subconscious mind, or your nervous system is screaming at you that you're gonna die. Patrick: Yeah. Kat: And so that's why most entrepreneurs flake out. Because they can't handle the emotional pressure, and they can't handle the nervous system pressure. Having this nervous system response that says you're about to get eaten by a lion and a tiger. Like that's a hormonal response. Kat: When really, it's like if I totally hit rock bottom it would mean living with my mom. And then I would just get pissed about that and then I would go sell some shit. And either way, I'm gonna make it. Right? Patrick: Yeah. Kat: So then kind of go, oh why am I letting that shit get to me then? Like, can I get through today? Yes. Do I believe that I'm ultimately gonna make it? Yes. So, keep fucking going. But most people? Kat: That's why we say one percent within the one percent. Like I know for a fact, like only 0.001 percent would put themselves through what I went through emotionally. Patrick: Yeah. Kat: Or what you're going through now. Patrick: True. Yeah, and then you get stuff and you get so attached to the stuff that you're, that people get scared. And they're so secure, and they get scared to let it go. You know, and in order to get back to the big picture or to get to that next level. Patrick: But I think about the same thing you think too. I've been thinking of like options too. What's the worst that could happen to me? I'd have to go back down, 'cause I'm from the trailer park. So I have to go back down, and live with my dad. Patrick: You know, I'd have to go live with my dad. Which I also think, what's something that I would do as a very high level, once I make it? Once I'm living this fucking life of my dreams. You know what I'm saying? Once I'm like able to go and do anything, and live anywhere, and travel the world like I want to. Which is exactly what I'm gonna do no matter what, in three months when my lease is up. Patrick: I'm really just here because my lease, I have to stay here till this lease is out. You know, then I'm gonna get. Who knows, my lease might be fucked up. Sorry Travis, but he's on the lease with me. Patrick: But me and him are kind of like going hard together. He's on the same journey. And he's just pretty much like "fuck it". He's got into this as well. Riding on him doing well as well. So it's all good, it's not like I'm totally alone on this thing. It's always good to have a friend, but I think like "What's the worst thing that could happen?" Patrick: Right? And then it's just something like, if I went down to my dad's and had to stay down there for like a month. This is something that I would most likely, my higher version of myself. My higher level self who's achieved this, this is something that he would probably do. Anyways. Patrick: Maybe I'm having a good time overseas, and stuff like that. And I'm kinda like, missing the states a little bit, I'm want to just come back and chill with him for like a month. You know? Just post up and just see him for a month. It's probably just something I would do. Patrick: You know? Kat: Yeah right. Patrick: It's just something you would fucking do. Kat: I mean all the fear, reactions, and emotions it's all based on real shit. Like when money's not coming in, that's a true and real thing. But if you put that aside and you come back to what you know is true inside of you, like you fucking know who you are and that you're going wherever you want to go. And anything that you've ever decided to do in your life and you actually meant it, you have already achieved. Kat: And even like, what I said on that video today. Like you've literally helped people make millions of dollars? Patrick: Yup. Kat: And it's just continually putting aside your own ... Like for those who don't know, 'cause you might see this if you go to Patrick's sales page anyway, but it was Patrick's, not idea, but he helped me get out my idea. And actually express it properly, to launch my inner circle. Kat: And my inner circle clients know this. But that's like my highest level thing. I actually said in that video, that it makes hundreds of thousands of dollars. And then when I awoke I was like, hold on. It's on track for a million dollars per year, from one stream of income. Kat: And that was something I'd been trying to bring to fruition, actually since 2013. And I've had a few iterations of it, which just weren't right. And then I got gun shy because I felt like, I just don't fully know how to ... Like I know the vision of what I want, but I couldn't actually get it out of me. And we were sitting on the couch one time and I just was like "Man this is ... I kind of want this, but I don't know." Kat: And he's like typing away doing his thing, and he's like "Oh well you should just ..." I don't know, I wish I could remember what he said. But, blah blah blah blah blah, something something something. And I just remember sitting there going, "How the ... What? Yes, that's exactly it." Kat: It was like you read my thought. Like that's ... You've got the skills is what I'm saying. Right? Like you've helped make or build a business that makes five million dollars a year. These are, like I'm not just sitting here trying to talk you up. Kat: But it's more like, when you feel like "Well what if the worst happened?" Or "What if this or that?" It's like, wait. Look how much I'm already helping people and can help people. It's a done fucking deal. And you'll go through whatever you've got to go through. If you go through some short term period, alright you get rid of all your stuff and it's just you and the camp chair left, you'll probably be happier anyway. Kat: You'll have the freedom you want to move around the world. And like, it doesn't matter. None of it fucking matters. Whatever's going on right now. Like a year from now, you're gonna look back and be like "It was all worth it". Patrick: Yeah. Kat: And it'll be so worth it, because then you can help the people you were meant to help, because you can actually understand it. Like I can understand all that my clients are going through, 'cause I actually went through it. And I was prepared to go through it. Same thing. Patrick: I'm trying to like, enjoy it right now. That's my big goal. You know? Kat: Right. Patrick: I want to enjoy it right now. I want to savour this, and hold onto the moment. And hold onto these moments that I'm here, and learn as much as I can while I'm in these moments. You know? Patrick: Learn as possibly, as much as I possibly can. Experience and feel, and remember as much as I possibly can from these moments. 'Cause once I cross over the line, and it breaks open for me and you know people start buying my stuff then, you know. My big thing is like, how am I gonna feel after that happens? Patrick: You know, I'm gonna feel great. I'm gonna feel great, but I'm also gonna be transforming, I'm gonna also have transformed into something else. You know, and it's gonna be just ... I don't know. I don't know how I'm gonna deal with that. Patrick: That's one of my deep thoughts right there for you, if you will. So. Kat: I don't think you change. I don't know, like I don't think I've changed. Like my surroundings have changed. I don't think I'm any different to who I was years ago. I think you remember. Kat: But also because you are actually talking about it openly now you'll just be able to watch your own video advice. Patrick: Say again? Kat: Because you're actually talking about it while you're going through it, you're documenting it. So you're not gonna forget because you're gonna have the videos. Kat: But I don't think you forget. I don't forget any of that stuff. I can remember all the feelings and the emotions of it. And sometimes I think maybe I take having money for granted, or like the kind of [inaudible 00:23:00]. Kat: Like that I never look at prices anymore. Sometimes maybe I take it for granted, but not really. Because I do still, very frequently have moments where I'm like "holy shit", like is this even real? Like how is this possible, it's really only been, you know, a small handful of years since it seems like an impossible dream. But then I always .. Patrick: You've been doing this fucking shit for like 20 years. Kat: 20 years, how old do you think I am? Patrick: No, I'm saying like you been doing this since you were like 10. Since you were like one year old. Kat: One year old? Actually it was three. But, thank you. Patrick: There you go. Yeah. Rounding up. Kat: But I was making money, but I was not holding onto the money. I was in debt, and you know. I was bottoming out. I sold my house that I owned. And that like, make like 30 grand profit on that, and that just disappeared. And then I sold my Audi, which was like my first nice car, an Audi '04. And I loved that car so much, and that money disappeared. And then I sold my little Chinese share portfolio, that I had from my 20s when I was trying to get serious about wealth, and then that money disappeared. Kat: And then I was even trying to sell shit on Ebay, but back then I didn't have like Channel purses to sell on Ebay. I had things that I was selling for five dollars. But it was really like, every little dollar counted. And then I would go and buy groceries, and I'd get like 30 dollars worth of groceries and I would go through the checkout. And I would never just like, check my bank account because I couldn't handle the fear. Kat: So I'd just go through the checkout, and basically pray that the card would go through. And sometimes it would, and sometimes it wouldn't. And you just keep going one day at a time, but even though you'd feel like "what if it never works, and what if I'm crazy?" And what if, all the stuff that you think, that everyone thinks. Kat: But then when you put all that emotion aside, you go back into your core and you go "but I do fucking know though." Patrick: Right. Kat: Like when I get out of the drama, I know. Like I just fucking know. It's not up for discussion. I will keep picking myself back up again, until I get there. And then ... Kat: Now I'm so fucking grateful for all that. And I do remember so much of it. I'm so fucking grateful that it's over. But I'm so fucking grateful I went through it. Because it made me so strong. Like I feel like, I have such high levels of resilience and tenacity and those are some of the most important characteristics for us. For entrepreneurs. Patrick: Absolutely. And you know I think ... Kat: It is what you said. Like embracing it now. Patrick: Well, you know, the think is too, is that I say all this stuff to you and then you just make me think too, that like I've already been here before. And I already overcame. And I'm already pretty much hacked this stuff, you know. Just by being able ... Just like I remember the first time that I actually sold something. Because whenever I first started working with Ryan, it was like he found me. Patrick: 'Cause I quit my job at the car dealership right? Went through a bad breakup, and it just made me realise, fucking life isn't for me to be putting all my happiness ... It isn't meant for me putting all my happiness into somebody else. That's kind of what kick started, and had me first say "fuck it all". You know? Patrick: And so I quit my job at the car dealership. I just walked in and it ... This was such a big moment in my life. That I didn't even like, have the questioning or anything like that about that. There was nothing that would've made me stay there. You know? Kat: Yeah. Patrick: This is like such a earth shattering thing to happen to me. I guess I was like, I guess I must been about 26 or 27. And it was just, I had put all my chips into this thing, you know? And thought I was getting engaged and this stuff, and like that you know? And then it came crashing down. Patrick: And I found out she was married to some dude in prison. Long story short. But it was, I just put so much stock into this thing you know? And then it just fucking like, came crashing down. And that was when I first saw the reality, kind of like shift. You know? Patrick: And I saw this for what it is. And once I started like picking back up the pieces of everything, I just realised like, it's not supposed to be like this. You know? It's not supposed to be, to where I give other things power and control of me. Patrick: For example, job, security, things like that. And I really just, really, really saw that. Like about a week or two afterwards, you know, after we had called everything off, and everything like that. And I just remember it clear as day. I was just like, immediately started selling all my shit off. And started to trim up. And I started to figure out ways to get out of there. Patrick: I mean I was not gonna stay there very long, but I eventually, it just... fuck it ...

"Actually I'm a stand-up comedian" - Billy Mason

The Panel Pals delve deep into the frightening word of EC Comics. Will they come back alive??? Well, yes, who do you think uploaded this. But will their souls be unsullied? Actually I'm pretty sure their souls were a little sullied already. BUT WILL THEY HAVE FUN? Oh Hell Yeah. Join us at Panel by Panel as we wade through the lugubrious marsh of history's most censored comics...

Episode 87 of the Mic'd Up Free For All. Time for another fun edition of the Mic’d Up Free For All.  Ashley joins the crew yet again to discuss topics including: -False Advertising: Immigrant Vince has a rant about appliances...I mean girls. Actually I'm not quite sure what he's talking about but you are sure to enjoy this crazy rant full of twists and turns. -The Millennial Revolution: Ashley tells us all about a new lifestyle trend that’s all about enjoying the present and not worrying about the future. -No marriage in marijuana: We give some excellent advice on a couple having some relationship issues when it comes to smoking weed. -Weekly Shout Out: Smoking Gun Entertainment – Terry Shane Murder Mysteries -All this plus so much more!   Credit for intro music: Fireworks by Jahzzar From the free music archive CC - BY - SA

In episode #12, Wilco talks about how to get sane during a busy period in your business. You might be able to relate to such a busy period, right? Listen as Wilco provides you with great advice on how do you make sure you're not stressed out, at least to a minimum degree, while getting all your stuff done. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:52: We run two software companies, UpViral and Connectio.io 00:55: Suite of various Facebook tools, tools for Facebook advertisers to make their ads more profitable and more efficient. 01:10: ConnectLeads, ConnectAudience, ConnectRetarget. 01:12: Launch a new product: ConnectExplore 01:22: The downside is that whenever we launch a new product, there's so much work that goes into that. 01:53: When we launch a product, we usually do it with a lot of affiliates. 02: 39: I want to move and I want to move fast. 02:50: What we always do is we pick a date that we're going to launch it in advanced, usually like two months in advanced. 03:00: that's the date we are going to launch it, no exception, no excuses. 04:10: We have first Christmas day and second Christmas day in the Netherlands. 05:06: The thing is that I wanted to talk about today, how do you stay sane in a period like this? 05:59: First thing I do is I always have a clear, detailed list so I know exactly what I need to do. 06:58: I imagine the worst case scenario. 07:46 It's good to try and achieve as much as you can, but never forget that whatever you're trying to do it's not as important. 08:42: It's really important to take time off. 10:14: Focus on your end goal. 10:25: I also reward myself. 11:51: Record a podcast episode to talk about it. Transcription: Hey, hey, everyone. I hope you're all doing great and I also hope that you got to enjoy Christmas over the last couple days. Right now it's just a few days after Christmas, right before New Year's, and I'm sitting at my desk and I am super, super stressed out, actually. It's an incredibly busy time at the business right now and sometimes it just drives me crazy. I'll probably have to start at the beginning. As you probably know, we run two software companies. One is AdViral and the other one is Connectio, which is a suite of various Facebook tools. Basically, tools for Facebook advertisers to make their ads more profitable and more efficient. In that arrange of tools we have actually multiple tools, right, so we have right now connect leads, connect audience, and connect with targets, and we are about to launch a new product, which is pretty exciting I think. I'm actually really excited about it. It's called CONNECTExplorer. The down side is that whenever we launch a new product, there's so much work that goes into that. I mean, not just the product itself, but ... Well, also the product itself, actually. It's not just thinking about what it should do, it's not just designing it and the whole infrastructure and actually building it, like the actual development of it, but also things like testing and training the support team and creating training videos and all this good stuff. That's just the tool, right, and even outside of that there's so much stuff on the marketing side. When we launch a product, we usually do it with a lot of affiliates. We invite affiliates or other people who in turn can then promote our tools to their customers and to their audience and they will get a percentage of the commission. There's so much work involved with that. Not just the sales pages and the sales videos and the email sequences and all that kind of stuff, but also things like running ads to get affiliates on board and talking with affiliates on one on one and deciding on the pricing structure and the funnel and all this. There's just a thousand and one things that need to happen. Which is cool, right? It's good. That's part of our job and I like it. The thing is that whenever we launch a product, I'm not someone who's just going to work and see whenever it's done, blah blah blah. I want to move and I want to move fast. I want to take the best out of the year and I want to do as much as I can in order to move forward. For that reason, what we always do is we pick a date that we're going to launch it in advanced, usually like two months in advanced, and we say "All right, that's the date we are going to launch it. No exception. No excuses, that's the date. Unless someone dies, that is the date that we're going to launch it." In this case, we picked January 4th. We picked the date roughly, I think two months ago. From that point on, we know that's when it's all happening. Usually that works out pretty well, right? Usually over the last couple of products that we launched everything ... Basically, ahead of time everything was fully done. The reason why I like to do that because I don't like to have stress in my life, right? I'm trying to avoid stress at all times. In this case, we had some delays on the team, mainly on the marketing side, which means that everything was sort of pushed back. The result of that is that right now we have less than a week left and there's still various things that need to be happening on the marketing side, things like videos and finishing up the sales page and quite a bit of work all on the marketing side. I'm confident that we will finish it, but in order to get it to be done it's just a super stressful time at this moment. For example, right now ... Even on Christmas, we have two days of Christmas, right? We have first Christmas day and second Christmas day. That's just a thing here in the Netherlands. It's the way we do it. That's usually when we all go to families, just like you probably did. On the first Christmas day, we went to my wife's family and then on the second Christmas day we went to my own family. Usually we go there at eleven or so. During the morning I worked, and then the moment I go back home I worked, which is not something you want to do on Christmas day. That's the way it is right now. On all the other days I usually work right now from like eight am to around twelve pm with not much breaks in between. That's just because I want to get stuff done right now. It's not always as fun. Just so you know, these are not my typical working hours because that's obviously crazy, but what ends to happen needs to happen, right? The thing is that I wanted to talk about today, how do you stay sane in a period like this? You might be able to relate to such a busy period, right? You maybe had some deadlines in the past as well where you just need to get so much stuff done, or maybe you even earlier on ... For example, when I look back at university or at high school, I remember when I had exams or tests that I was always super stressed out because there was so much to learn and to do or whatever. You might be able to relate to that where you're just so, so busy that you're just stressed out and you're just generally stress out. Now, how do you fix that? How do you make sure you're not stressed out, at least to a minimum degree, while getting all your stuff done. There's a couple things that I do to stay as sane as I can, even in the busiest moments of the year. First thing I do is I always have a clear, detailed list so I know exactly what I need to do. For example, when we do a product launch, we actually have a full template of all the steps, all of the tiny, tiny steps that we need to do. We know when we're going to launch a product from A to Z, these are all the things we need to do and we can just check it off of our list. All right, that's done. That's done. That's done. By knowing exactly what you need to do, once you have it on a list, once you've written it down, you can just forget about it basically. You can remove it from your head because you have it on the list and you know if you just follow that list you're going to finish everything, right? That's the first thing I highly recommend you to do. Write everything down that needs to happen. I think one of the most important things for me, when I sometimes go crazy and I'm super stressed out and I'm not always as fun to be around with, I guess, what I do is I imagine the worst case scenario. What if everything goes South, and I mean everything. We're all trying so hard to have an impact in the world and to grow our business, but what's the worst case scenario? Even if the worst of the worst of the worst would happen, at the end of the day this is just, quote unquote, just a business. If everything fails, if a product launch doesn't go as planned, nobody's dying. Nobody's getting sick. It's not that bad. People around me, especially over the recent period, I had multiple people in my environment who sadly passed away way too early. That just makes you realize ... That just puts things in perspective. It's good to try and achieve as much as you can, but never forget that whatever you're trying to do it's not as important. The people around you, your wives, your family, your husband, your parents, everyone around you. That's what really matters. If you are sometimes stressed out and you're just generally stressed out, just think of the things that are really, really important and that sort of makes you realize that the things that we sometimes seem to worry about are not even that important. That's something that helps for me a lot, actually. I do that pretty much every day. Just make myself realize that it's not that important. The worst case scenario is still a pretty good deal if you look at it like that. Everyone's healthy and all of that. Also, it's really important for me, at least ... Everyone is different, of course, but for me it's really important to take time off. Even though it's super busy and, like I said, I made long days right now, but I always go for a walk, for example. Just clearing my mind and not doing anything with work. The moment I start working nonstop, all the time, I just know the next day I'm going to be less productive. You're still human. Maybe you are a robot, I don't know, but for me I cannot be productive all the time. You need to have time off. Instead of having that at random whenever my body says, "Well, stop," I'd rather just plan it in and I schedule it in beforehand. Every couple of hours or whatever I go for a walk, take a little bit of time off, and that really helps me to stay sane as well. While doing that, I usually also imagine that worst case scenario. "oh yeah, I'm trying my best, but don't forget this is just a business. It's not your life." That really helps me to stay sane as well. With that also, obviously, and really important at least for me once again, everyone is different, is exercise. Personally I love to play squash. It's a kind of tennis kind of thing. It's really energetic, I love it. That just helps me to clear my mind and to just be able to focus the next day again. I usually do that in the evenings. It helps me to focus the next day again on the business. For me, that's really part of my routine as well. One thing that really helps me stay sane as well, especially during such a busy period, is focus on your end goal. Right now, we're super busy for this launch, and I have my end goal. I know exactly what the end goal is going to be. With that, I also reward myself. For example, by the end of January my and my wife, we are actually going to Ecuador for a three week trip to Ecuador and the Galapagos islands. We're going to travel around because we just love to travel, we love to meet new people and love to explore new cultures and all that. We're going to Ecuador is South America for a couple weeks. That helps me now, as well. I'm like, "I'm just going to be super, super busy. That's fine because I know what the reward is going to be. In a couple weeks or in a month from now I'm going to fly off and I'm going to spend some quality time with my wife while traveling to an amazing country." That helps me a lot as well. Altogether, let's go through the list. How do I actually stay sane even if it's super, super, super busy? First of all, have a clear list of what needs to be done so you know exactly what needs to be done. Also, keep in mind what the worst case scenario is because often you're worrying about things that are not really worth worrying about. Also, make sure to take time off, exercise, and also focus on your end goal. If possible, reward yourself after you've put some really hard work in. That sort of is the pain that you're going through. That's how I do and also maybe I could even add another one which is record a podcast episode to talk about it, which I'm doing right now. Actually I'm recording this at the beginning of my day right before I dive into the action because I just wanted to get this off my chest. I actually feel that it's already helping, so that's good. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to go for a walk, clear my mind a bit, and then I'm going to dive into the action. With that having said, I hope you have an amazing day and I also hope that you have an awesome New Years Eve and an awesome start of the next year. All right, that's it. I will catch you all in 2017.

It's my (Stephen's) Birthday! So, of course, we're playing trivia. Actually I'm reading the trivia questions while Pat & Rob struggle to happen upon a correct answer. Happy Birthday to me. This is another "special" podcast in that it's one of those short ones. It's an artifact of my hosting company, I only have so much space per month so every 4th episode... you get this. You're welcome. Sidenote: This Saturday, Feb 1st at 10pm ET on the LIVE section of this website we will be doing a special one-night only LIVE podcast during the Annie Awards ceremony. Anyone who has ever watched them knows what an unpredictable night it can be so you should absolutely join us. We have a chat room where you can interact with us and everything... almost like we planned it! You can RSVP on the Facebook event page too if you like. CLICK HERE to go to the full blog post & leave a comment! Rate/Review us on iTunes

Man, Ive had a rough day, and this episode is good stuff. Actually I'm just gonna let you listen to it, and you can decide what would fit best for a description.Your just gonna have to listen to it, I'll put up the content tomorrow. If i can...