Podcast appearances and mentions of amy what

TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part byLaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visitlaunchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I'm Jesse DeRose.Amy: I'm Amy Negrette.Tim: And I'm Tim Banks.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways we've seen AWS used and abused in the wild with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure. Today, we're going to be talking about a recent addition to the AWS family: AWS Application Cost Profiler.Tim: But hold on for a second, Jesse, because AWS Application Cost Profiler we can get to; that's rather unremarkable. I really want to talk about how impressed I am with AWS InfiniDash. I've been benchmarking this thing, and it is fan… tastic. It's so good. And we could probably talk about for a while, but suffice to say that I am far more impressed with AWS InfiniDash than I am with AWS Application Cost Profiler.Jesse: You know, that's fair. And I feel like InfiniDash should absolutely get credit where credit is due. I want to make sure that everybody can really understand the full breadth of everything that InfiniDash is able to accomplish. So, I want to make sure that we do get to that; maybe in a future episode, we can touch on that one. But for right now, I have lots of feelings about AWS Application Cost Profiler, and what better place to share those feelings than with two of my favorite people, Amy and Tim, and then all of you listeners who are listening in to this podcast. I can't wait to dive into this. But I think we should probably start with, what is AWS Application Cost Profiler?Amy: It is [unintelligible 00:01:54] in a trench coat.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: Which is the way AWS likes to solve problems sometimes. And in this case, it's talking about separating billing costs by tenants by service, which is certainly a lot of things that people have problems with.Jesse: That is a lot of buzzwords.Amy: A lot of words there.Jesse: Yeah. Looking at the documentation, the sales page, “AWS Application Cost Profiler is a managed service that helps us separate your AWS billing and costs by the tenants of your service.” That has a lot of buzzwords.Tim: Well, to be fair, that's also a majority of the documentation about service.Jesse: Yeah, that is fair. That is a lot of what we saw, and I think we'll dive into that with documentation in a minute. But I do want to call out before we dive into our thoughts on this service—because we did kick the tires on this service and we want to share what our experience was like, but I do want to call out that this problem that AWS Application Cost Profiler is trying to solve. This idea of cost allocation of shared resources, it is a real, valid problem and it is one that is difficult to solve.Amy: And we've had clients that have had this very explicit problem and our findings have been that it's very difficult to accurately splice usage and spend against what's essentially consumption-based metrics—which is how much a user or request is using all the way along your pipeline—if they're not using dedicated resources.Jesse: Yeah, when we talk about cost allocation, generally speaking, we talk about cost allocation from the perspective of tagging resources, broadly speaking, and moving resources into linked accounts and separating spend by linked accounts, or allocating spend by linked accounts. But if you've got a shared compute cluster, a shared database, any kind of shared resources where multiple tenants are using that infrastructure, slapping one tag on it isn't going to solve the issue. Even putting all of those shared resources in a single linked account isn't going to solve that issue. So, the problem of cost allocation for shared resource is real; it is a valid problem. So, let's talk specifically about AWS Application Cost Profiler as a solution for this problem. As I mentioned, we kicked the tires on this solution earlier this week and we have some thoughts to share.Tim: I think one of the main things around this AWS Application Profiler like I said, there's some problems that can be solved there, there's some insights that people really want to gain here, but the problem is people don't want to do a lot more work or rewrite their observability stack to do it. The problem is, that's exactly what AWS Cost Profiler seems to be doing or seems to want you to do. It doesn't get data from, I think it only gets data from certain EC2 services, and it's just, it's doing things that you can already do in other tools to do aggregation. And if I'm going to do all the work to rewrite that stack, to be able to use the Profiler, am I going to want to spend that time doing something else? I mean, that kind of comes to the bottom line about it.Jesse: Yeah, the biggest thing that I ran into, or that I experienced when we were setting up the Cost Profiler, is that documentation basically said, “Okay, configure Cost Profiler and then submit your data.” And [unintelligible 00:05:54] stop, like wait, what? Wait, what do you mean, ‘submit data?' And it said, “Okay, well now that you've got Cost Profiler as a service running, you need to upload all of the data that Cost Profiler is going to profile for you.” It boggles my mind.Tim: And it has to be in this format, and it has to have these specific fields. And so if you're not already emitting data in that format with those fields, now you have to go back and do that. And it's not really solving any problems, but it offers to create more problems.Amy: And also, if you're going to have to go through the work of instrumenting and managing all that data anyway, you could send it anywhere you wanted to. You could send it to your own database to your own visualization. You don't need Profiler after that.Jesse: Yeah, I think that's a really good point, Amy. AWS Cost Profiler assumes that you already have this data somewhere. And if not, it explicitly says—in its documentation it says, to generate reports you need to submit tenant usage data of your software applications that use shared AWS resources. So, it explicitly expects you to already have this data. And if you are going to be looking for a solution that is going to help you allocate the cost of shared resources and you already have this data somewhere else, there are better solutions out there than AWS Application Cost Profiler. As Amy said, you can send that data anywhere. AWS Application Cost Profiler probably isn't going to be the first place that you think of because it probably doesn't have as many features as other solutions.Amy: If you were going to instrument things to that level, and let's say you were using third-party services, you could normalize your own data and build out your own solution, or you can send it to a better data and analytics service. There are more mature solutions out there that require you to do less work.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by ChaosSearch. You could run Elastic Search or Elastic Cloud or Open Search, as they're calling it now, or a self hosted out stack. But why? ChaosSearch gives you the same API you've come to know and tolerate, along with unlimited data retention and no data movement. Just throw your data into S3 and proceed from there as you would expect. This is great for IT operations folks, for App performance monitoring, cyber security. If you're using ElasticSearch consider not running ElasticSearch. They're also available now on the AWS market place, if you prefer not to go direct and have half of whatever you pay them count toward your EDP commitment. Discover what companies like, Klarna, Equifax, Armor Security and Blackboard already have. To learn more visit chaossearch.io and tell them I sent you just so you can see them facepalm yet again.Jesse: I feel like I'd missed something, broadly speaking. I get that this is a preview, I get that this is a step on the road for this solution, and I'm hoping that ultimately AWS Application Cost Profiler can automatically pull data from resources. And also, not just from EC2 compute resources, but from other shared services as well. I would love this service to be able to automatically dynamically pull this data from multiple AWS services that I already use. But this just feels like a very minimal first step to me.Tim: And let's be honest; AWS has a history of putting out services before they're ready for primetime, even if they're GA—Jesse: Yeah.Tim: —but this seems so un-useful that I'm not sure how it made it past the six-pager or the press release. It's disappointing for a GA service from AWS.Amy: What would you both like to see, other than it just being… more natively picked up by other services?Tim: I would like to see either a UI for creating the data tables that you're going to need, or a plugin that you can automatically put with those EC2 resources: an agent you can run, or a sidecar, or a collector that you just enable to gather that data automatically. Because right now, it's not really useful at all. What it's doing is basically the same thing you can do in an Excel spreadsheet. And that's being very, very honest.Jesse: Yeah, I think that's a really good point that ultimately, a lot of this data is not streamlined and that's ultimately the thing that is the most frustrating for me right now. It is asking a lot of the customer in terms of engineering time, in terms of design work, in terms of implementation details, and I would love AWS to iterate on this service by providing that dynamically, making it easier to onboard and use this service.Amy: Personally, what I would like is some either use case, or demonstration, or tutorial that shows how to track consumption costs using non-compute resources like Kinesis especially, because you're shoving a lot of things in there and you just need to be able to track these things and have that show up in some sort of visualization that's like Cost Explorer. Or even have that wired directly to Cost Explorer so that you can, from Cost Explorer, drill down to a request and be able to see what it is actually doing, and what it's actually costing. I want a lot of things.Jesse: [laugh]. But honestly, I think that's why we're here, you know? I want to make these services better. I want people to use the services. I want people to be able to allocate costs of shared resources. But it is still a hard problem to solve, and no one solution has quite solved it cleanly and easily yet.You know what? Amy, to get back to your question, that's ultimately what I would love to see, not just specifically with an AWS Application Cost Profiler necessarily, but I would love to see better native tools in AWS to help break out the cost of shared resources, to help break out and measure how tenants are using shared resources in AWS, natively. More so than this solution.Amy: I would love that. It would make so many things so much easier.Jesse: Mm-hm. I'm definitely going to be adding that to my AWS wishlist for a future episode.Tim: How many terabytes is your AWS wishlist right now?Jesse: Oh… it is long. I, unfortunately, have made so many additions to my AWS wishlist that are qualitative things—more so than quantitative things—that just aren't going to happen.Amy: You become that kid at Christmas that, they get onto Santa's lap in the mall, and it's a roller page that just hops off the platform, and just goes down the wall, and all the other kids are staring at you and ready to punch you in the face when you get off. [laugh].Jesse: [laugh]. All right, well that'll do it for us this week, folks. If you've got questions you'd like us to answer please go to lastweekinaws.com/QA, fill out the form and we'd be happy to answer that question on a future episode. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review, give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us how you allocate the costs of shared resources.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

About Amy Arambulo NegretteWith over ten years industry experience, Amy Arambulo Negrette has built web applications for a variety of industries including Yahoo!, Fantasy Sports, and NASA Ames Research Center. One of her projects modernized two legacy systems impacting the entire research center and won her a Certificate of Excellence from the Ames Contractor Council. She has built APIs for enterprise clients for cloud consulting firms and led a team of Cloud Software Engineers. Currently, she works as a Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group doing bill analyses and leading cost optimization projects. Amy has survived acquisitions, layoffs, and balancing life with two small children.Website: www.amy-codes.comTwitter: @nerdypawsLinkedin: linkedin.com/in/amycodesWatch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xc2rkR5VCxoThis episode sponsored by CBT Nuggets and Lumigo.TranscriptJeremy: Hi everyone, I'm Jeremy Daly, and this is Serverless Chats. Today, I'm joined by Amy Arambulo Negrette. Hey, Amy thanks for joining me.Amy: Thank you, glad to be here.Jeremy: You are a Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group, so I'd love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and your background and what you do at the Duckbill Group.Amy: Sure thing. I used to be an application developer, I did a bunch of AWS stuff for a while, and now at the Duckbill Group, a cloud economist is someone who goes through cost explorer and your usage report and tries to figure out where you're spending too much money and how the best to help you. It is the best-known use of a small skill I have, which is about being able to dig through someone's receipts and find out what their story is.Jeremy: Sounds like a forensic accountant, maybe forensic cloud economist or something to that effect.Amy: Yep. That's basically what we do.Jeremy: Well, I'm super excited to have you here. First of all, I have to ask this question, I've known Corey for quite some time, and I can imagine that working with him is either amazing or an absolute nightmare. I'm just curious, which one is it?Amy: It is not my job to control Corey, so it's great. He's great to talk to. He really is fully engaged in any conversation you have with him. You've talked to him before, I'm sure you know that. He loves knowing what other people think on things, which I think is a really healthy attitude to have.Jeremy: I totally agree, and hopefully he will subtweet this episode. Anyways, getting into this episode, one of the things that I've noticed that you've done quite a bit, is you create technical content. I've seen a lot of the talks that you've given, and I think that's something that you've done such a great job of not only coming up with content and making content interesting.Sometimes when you put together technical content, it's not super exciting. But you have a very good way of taking that technical content and making it interesting. But then also, following up with it. You have this series of talks where you started talking about managing FaaS, and then you went to the whole frenemies thing with Fargate versus Lambda. Now we're talking about, I think the latest one you did was about Lambda and the container support within Lambda. Maybe we can just go back, or start at a point where, for people who are interested in maybe doing talks, what is the reason for even creating some of these talks in the first place?Amy: I feel a lot of engineers have the same problem, just day-to-day where they will run into a bug, and then they'll go hit the all-knowing software engineer, which is the Google search engine, and have absolutely either nothing come up or have six posts that say, I'm having this problem, but you won't ever get an answer. This is just a fast way of answering those questions before someone has to ask.Jeremy: Right. When you come up with these ... You run into this bug, and you're thinking to yourself, you can't find the answer. So, you do the research, you spend the time digging through, and finding the right way to solve it. When you put these talks together, do you get a sense that it's helping people and then that it's just another way to connect with the community?Amy: Yeah. When I do it, it's really great, because after our talk, I'll see people either in the hallway, or I'll meet someone at a booth, and they'll even say, it's like, I ran into this exact same problem, and I gave up because it was such a strange edge case that it was too hard to fix, and we just moved on to another solution, which is entirely possible.I also get to express to just the general public that I do, in fact, know what I'm talking about, because someone has given me a stage to talk for 30 minutes, and just put up all of my proofs. That's an actually fun and weirdly empowering place to be.Jeremy: Yeah. I actually think that's really interesting. Again, for me, I loved your talks, and some of those things are ... I put those things at the back of my mind, but I know for people who give talks, who maybe get judged for other reasons or whatever, that it certainly is empowering. Is that something where you certainly shouldn't have to do it. There certainly should be that same level of respect. But is that something that you found that doing these talks really just sets the tone, right off the bat?Amy: Yeah, I feel it does. It helps that when someone Googles you, a bunch of YouTube videos on how to solve their problem comes up, that is extremely helpful, especially ... I do a lot of consulting, so if I ever have to go onsite, and someone wants to know what I do, I can pull up an actual YouTube playlist of things that I've done. It's like being in developer relations without having to write all of that content, I get to write a fraction of that content.Jeremy: Right. Unfortunately, that is a fact that we live with right now, which is, it is completely unfair, but I think that, again, the fact that you do that, you put that out there, and that gives you that credibility, which again, you should have from your resume, but at the same time, I think it's an interesting way to circumvent that, given the current world we live in.Amy: It also helps when there are either younger engineers or even other younger professionals who are looking at the tech industry, and the tech industry, especially right now, it does not have the best reputation to be able to see that there are people who are from different backgrounds, either educationally or financially, or what have you, and are able to go out and see someone who has something similar being a subject matter expert in whatever it is that they're talking about.Jeremy: Right. I definitely agree with that. That's that thing, where the more that we can amplify those types of voices and make sure that people can see that diversity, it's incredibly important. Good for you, obviously, for pushing through that, because I know that I've heard a lot of horror stories around that stuff that makes my blood boil.Let's talk to some of these people out here who potentially want to do some of these talks, and want to use this as a way to, again, sell themselves. Because I can tell you one thing, once I started writing blog posts and doing talks and doing those sorts of things, clearly, I have a very different background, but it just gave me a bunch of exposure; job offers and consulting clients and things like that, those just become much easier to get when you can actually go out there and do some of this stuff.If you're interested in doing that, I think one of the hard things for most people is, what even makes a good talk? You've come up with some really great talks. What's that secret sauce? How do you do that?Amy: I think it can also be very intimidating since a lot of the talks that get a lot of promotion are always huge vendor events that they're trying to push their product, they're trying to push a solution. That usually takes up a lot of advertising real estate, essentially, where that's what you see, that's what you see all the threads and everything. When you actually get to these community conferences, or even when I would speak at AWS Summit, it was ... I had a very specific problem that I needed to solve. I ran into a bug, the bug was not in the documentation, because why would it be?Jeremy: Why would you put that in there, right?Amy: Of course. Then Google, three pages down, maybe put me on the path to finding the right answer, and it's the journey of trying to put all of the bug fixes in place to make it work for your specific environment and then being able to share that.Jeremy: Right, yeah. That idea of taking these experiences that you've had, or trying to solve a problem, and then finding the nuances maybe in solving the problem as opposed to the happy path, which it's always great when you're following a blog post and it says, run this command, then run this command, then run this command. Well, what happens on that third command when the thing blows up, and you have no idea what to do? Then you end up Googling for five hours trying to find your way out of that.You take this path of, find those bugs or find that non-happy path and solve it. Then what do you do around there? How do you then take that ... You got to make that interesting somehow.Amy: Yes. A lot of people use gifs and memes. I use pictures of food and screencaps from Dungeons and Dragons. That's usually just different enough that it'll snap someone just out of their phone going, "Why is there a huge elf on my screen trying to attack people screaming elf errors." Well, that's because that's what they thought it would be great to call it. It's not a great error code. It doesn't explain what it is, and it makes you very confused.Jeremy: Right. Part of that is, and again, there's that relatability when you create talks, and you want to connect with the audience in some way. But you also ... This is the other thing that I've always found the hardest when I'm creating talks, is trying to find the right level. Because AWS always does this thing where they're like, it's a 200 level, or it's a 400 level, and so forth. I think that's helpful, but you're going to get people of all different skill levels, and so forth. How do you take a problem like that, and then make it relatable, or understandable, probably? Find that right level?Amy: The way I see it, there's going to be at least one person of these two types in the room that are not going to be your target audience, someone who doesn't know what you're talking about, but sees that a tool that they're considering is going to pose a problem, and they want to know how difficult it is to fix it. Or there's going to be a business person who has no technical background, and they just want to know if what they're evaluating is worth evaluating, if this error is going to be so difficult to narrow down and try to resolve that, yes, why would we go through something that my engineers are going to spend hours to try to fix something that's essentially a configuration issue?When I write any section of a talk, I make sure that it addresses a person who may not have come into that with that exact problem in mind. For the people who have, they'll understand the ... In animation, it's called key images, where there are very specific slots where you understand the topic of what is happening and the context around it. I always produce more verbose notes that go with my presentation. I usually release it either at the end of the day, or later on that week, once everyone has had time to settle, and it provides a tutorial-esque experience where this is what you saw, this is how you would actually do it if you were in front of a screen.Jeremy: Yeah.Amy: There are people who go to technical talks with a laptop on their lap because they're also working while they're trying to do it. But most of the time, they're not going to have the console open while you're walking through the demo. So, how are you going to address that issue? It's just easier that way.Jeremy: I like that idea too, of ... I try to do high-level bullet points, and then talk about the bullet point. Because one thing that I try to do, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this as well. Here I am picking your brain trying to make my own talks better. But basically, I do a bullet point, and then I talk through it. I actually animate the bullet points coming in.I'm not a huge fan of showing an entire slide with all the bullet points and then letting people read ahead, I bring a bullet point in, talk about the bullet point, bring another bullet point in. Is that something you recommend doing too? Or do you just present all the concepts and then walk people through it?Amy: I think it depends. I tend to have very dense slides, which is not great for reading, especially if you're several rows back. I truly understand that. But the way I see it, because I also talk very fast when I'm on stage that I want there to be enough context around what's happening, so that if I gloss over a concept, then you visually can understand what's happening.That said, if that's because the entire bullet block on my slide is going to be about a very specific thing that's happening. It's not something that you have to view step-by-step. Now, I do have a few where, especially in a more workshop scenario, where you're going, I want you to think about this first and then go on to this next concept. I totally hide stuff. I just discovered for a talk that I was constructing the other day, that there's an animation that drops them down like index cards, and that's now my favorite animation right now.Jeremy: When you're doing that, like because this is the other thing, just for people who have ever ... If you're out there and you've ever written a talker or you've given a talk, the first iteration of it is never going to be the right one. You have to go through and you have to revise. It is sort of weird, and I don't know, maybe you felt this way too, in the pre-pandemic world, when you would give talks in person, most of the time, you'd give it to a relatively small audience, a couple of hundred people or whatever, as opposed to now, when we do talks, post-pandemic, and they're online, it's like, they're immediately available online.It's hard to give the same talk over and over and over and over again, without somebody potentially having seen it. A lot of work goes into a single talk. Not being able to use the same time over and over again, is not great. But, how do you refine it? Is it that you tested it with a live audience, or do you use a family member or a friend, or a colleague? How do you test and refine your talks?Amy: I'm actually an organizer at a meetup group, and specifically built around giving people of marginalized gender identities, and a place to stage and write technical content. It is a very specific audience.Jeremy: I can imagine.Amy: But it addresses that issue I had earlier about visibility, it also does help you ... If you don't have a lot of contacts in this industry, just as an aside, technical speaking is a way to do it, because everyone loves talking to each other after the stress has worn off, and you become the friendliest person after you've done that.But also, there are meetup groups out there, specifically about doing technical feedback, or just general speaking feedback. If you want to do something general, Toastmasters is a great organization to do. If you want to do strictly technical, if you do any cloud-related stuff, the DevOps communities are super friendly, even if it's not specifically about DevOps. I'm not a DevOps person, but I have a lot of DevOps friends. Some of my best friends are DevOps people.And you can get on a meetup or a Zoom call and just burn through your slides for about 10 or 15 minutes and see ... Your friends will be very honest with you, in a small group.Jeremy: Right. One of the things I did notice, too, giving a speech in person or giving your talk in person versus giving a talk via Zoom call, is sometimes when you don't hear any laughs or chuckles from a little joke that you make in there, it can feel very lonely in that space after you're waiting for something in there, but. It's a little bit ...Amy: It's worse when there are people in the room. I assure you, it is so much worse.Jeremy: That is very true. If something falls flat, that's a good point. Just going back to more this idea of creating good talks, and what makes a good talk. Where do you find ... You mentioned, maybe it's a vendor conference or something and you maybe install the vendor stuff, and you find the bugs and so forth. But is there any other places that you get inspiration from? Are there any resources you use to sort build some of these talks?Amy: Again, the communities help. The communities will tell you, really, it's like, I don't understand this thing, can someone hop on a call with me for real quick minute and explain why this concept is so hard? That's a very good place to base your talk off. As far as making them engaging, and interesting, I tend to clone video gaming videos, just because that's what I watch. I know, if it's going to be interesting to me, then it will probably be at least different than the content that's out there.Jeremy: Right. That's a good way to think of things too, is if it's something that you find interesting, chances are, there are lots of other people that will find that interesting. All right, let's go back to just this idea of creating new talks. You had mentioned this idea of, again, finding the bugs and so forth. But one of the things that I think we see quite a bit is always that bleeding edge stuff. People always want to write content about something new that happened.I'm guilty of this, I would think from a serverless standpoint where you're talking about things that are really, really bleeding edge. It's useful and they're interesting. Certainly, if you go to a conference about serverless, then it's really nice to see you have these talks and what might be possible. But sometimes when you're going to more practical type things. Again, even DevOps Days, and some of those other things, I think you've got attendees or talk listeners who are looking for very practical advice.I guess the question is like, how do you take a new piece of content, one of these problems, whatever it is. I guess, how do you keep finding new content is probably the better way to ask that question?Amy: Well, to just roll back just a little bit. My problem with bleeding edge content, I love watching it, but bleeding edge content will almost always be a product demo because it's someone who developed a new solution, and they want to share with everybody, which is just going to walk you through how it's used, which is great, except, and this is just a nature of what the cloud industry is like, all of this stuff, it changes day-to-day.These tools may not be applicable in a few months, or they may become the new standard. There's no way to tell until you're already six months out, and by then, they've already gone through several product revisions. I once did a talk where I was talking about best practices, and AWS released their updated best practices the day before my talk, and I had to update three slides. It threw off my timing, it was great.That's just one of those kind of pitfalls that you have to roll with. As far as getting new content, though, especially if you're dealing ... It depends who your audience is, because my audience tends to be either ICs or technical leads, and by then you're usually in a company ... If you're not developing these bleeding edge solutions, you're just using the tools that's out there already.You had brought up my "Serverless Frenemies," which is still my favorite title of any talk that I've ever made, because when I did the managing containers one, and I love all my Devro friends, but they all got into my mentions about why don't you just use Fargate? If you're at the containerization stage, why don't you just use Fargate, because it's not even close to the same thing, it is closer to Kubernetes than it is to Lambda, and I'm looking for a Lambda-like solution. That's what that whole deal was about, and I was able to stretch that out into I think 30 minutes because Twitter will tell you what's wrong, whether or not it's accurate or not, and whether or not they're actually your friends. They are my friends, but come on.Jeremy: Twitter can definitely be brutal. I think that, and maybe unpack a little bit what you were saying, is you're creating content around existing tools. One way to do it is, you're using existing tools, you're creating content around that, or you can create content around that. Looking at those solutions, you introduce a new solution to something, or you're even using an existing tool, nothing's perfect. You had mentioned that idea of bugs and so forth. But just, I guess new solutions, or just solutions, in general, maybe higher-level abstractions, everything creates some new type of problem that you have to deal with, and that's probably a pretty effective way to generate new content.Amy: It is. If you ever have to write down an RCA, which, for those who have not had the pleasure of doing one is called a root cause analysis, where you took down production, and you had to explain why.Jeremy: Yep.Amy: Or you ever did this, hopefully, in stage, or hopefully, in development where you ran into a situation where ... I had a situation once where Lambda would not delete itself. I call it my Skynet problem where it just hit a stage where it was both trying to save and delete at the same time. It would lock itself and I had to destroy the entire stack and send that command several times just to force that command through.If you ever have a problem like that, that is a thing that you write up instantly, and then you turn it into slide decks, and then you go to SlidesCarnival, you throw a very flashy background on it, and next thing you know, you have a TED talk, or a technical talk.Jeremy: Right. The other thing too, is, I find use cases to be an interesting, just like ... Non-traditional use cases are kind of fun too, how can I use this in a way that it wasn't meant to be used, and do something like that?Amy: I love those. Those are my favorite. I love watching people break away from what the tutorial says you have to do, and I'm going to get a little weird with it, and that to me is totally fascinating. When the whole, I fed these scripts into a computer meme came out, I thought that was super fascinating because that was something a company I had worked for did, they used analytics ... I used to work for Fantasy Sports, to write color commentary for your Fantasy Football team, and they would send it out.If you did really well, you would get a really raving review, and if you did really poorly, you would get roasted by a computer, and then that gets sent to everyone in the league, and it's hilarious. But that is not a thing that you would just assume a computer would do, is just write hot takes on your Fantasy Football team.Jeremy: That's ... Sure, go ahead.Amy: It's so much fun. I love watching people get weird with the tools that are there.Jeremy: There are times where you could do something like that, you could maybe create a content around some strange use case or whatever, and I love that idea of getting weird with that. The other part of it, though, is that, I guess, if you're sitting through a talk, and it's some super interesting problem that you're listening to, and again, I don't know, maybe it's some database replication thing, that you're just really into, whatever. That makes sense. But I think the majority of problems that developers have, are not that interesting, they're just frustrating.Probably the worst thing to do is wanting to sit through a talk that talks about some frustrating issue you have. Is there a way to basically say, "Look, I have a problem that I want to talk about. It's not the most interesting problem, but how can you flip that and take a problem that's not interesting and make it interesting?Amy: The batching containers and the frenemies talk was all based off of a bin library error from within the Lambda AMI. That, on paper is extremely boring, and should be a thing that you can easily look up, it is not. When I went around it trying to make tracking down library errors interesting, just saying it is very slow and can drain the energy out of your voice.But, I put a lot of energy into my work in general, and that's just how I had to approach pulling these talk is like, I like what I do, just, generally. When I try to explain what I do to people, it sounds super boring, and I own that. Now I'm doing it with spreadsheets, which is much, much worse. But when I tell people, it's not about the error itself, it's about everything that happened to make this one particular error happen. The reason why this error happened was because Lambda uses AWS's very specific Linux AMI when they did not used to, and they left stuff out for either security or performance purposes.Whether or not we as a group agree with that, that's a business decision that they made. How does their business decision affect your future business decisions and your future technical ones? Well, that becomes a way more interesting conversation, because it's like, we know this is going to break at this part, do we still want to use SSH? Do we still need it for this reason? You can approach it more from a narrative standpoint of, I wasted way too much time with this, did I need to? It's like, well, you shouldn't have, this should not have happened, but no bug should have happened, right?Jeremy: Right.Amy: You work through your process of finding a solution instead of concentrating on what the solution is because the solution they can look up in your show notes later.Jeremy: Right. No, I love that idea of documenting your process as opposed to just the solution itself. You find the problem, you pull the thread and where does that take you? I think to myself, a lot of times I go down the rabbit hole on trying to find the solution to a problem that I have or a bug fix, whatever. Sometimes, the resolution is underwhelming. Maybe it's not worth sharing. But other times, there's a revelation in there. I think you're right, with a little bit of storytelling, you can usually take that and turn that into a really interesting talk.Amy: One of the things it will also do, if you look at it from a process and from a narrative standpoint, is that when you take this video, and you send it to either a technical lead or a product manager, they'll understand what the problem was because you did not bog it down with code. There's very little live code in mine because I understand that people build things differently, just because every code is as different as every person. I get that and I've come to terms with it. This is the best way to share that information.Jeremy: Absolutely. All right, let's wrap up the idea of building talks. What is your advice to someone who is starting out new? What's the best way for them to get started, or what's just some general advice for people starting to build talks?Amy: The best content new engineers can do, and that's mostly because this is never the standpoint from which tutorials are ever written in, is that, as someone who knows very little of the way a language or a framework should work, write down your process, the entire thing on you getting either a framework onboarded, how you build, and a messaging system, things that people have written a billion times because chances are, one, you got that work from someone else's blog post or their documentation, and you can cite that. And two, when you do it that way, you not only get into the habit of writing, but you get in the habit of editing it in a way that makes it more palatable for people who are not in your specific experience.When you do it this way, people can actually see, from an outsider's perspective, exactly what is hard about the thing that they built, or what people who do not have a different level of experience are going through. If a tutorial is targeted at engineers who know where the memory leaks in PHP are, that's the thing that comes with experience, that is not the thing that can be trained.When a new engineer hits that point, and they found it in a new framework where you fix it, then you start knowing where to fix other problems. That way more senior engineers and more vetted people can learn from your experience, and then they will contact you and they will teach you how to find these issues, so you don't run into them again, and you end up with someone you can just bounce ideas off of. That's how you get pulled into these technical communities. It's a really self-healing process.Jeremy: Yeah. I love that. I think this idea of you approaching something from a slightly different angle, your experience, the way that you do it, the way that you see it, the way that you perceive the word or the next prompt that comes back, or how you read an error message or any of those things, you sharing your experience around that is hugely valuable to the people that are building these things. But also, you may run into problems that other people like you run into, and it's just ... Sometimes, all it takes is just a tiny twisting of the words, rearranging a sentence in a way that now that clicks with somebody where the other time it didn't. I love that.That's why I always encourage people, just even if somebody has written his content 100 times before, whatever slight difference there is in your content, that could have a powerful effect on someone else.Amy: Yeah, it really can.Jeremy: Awesome. All right, let me ask you a couple of questions about Lambda and Functions as a Service because I know that you spent quite a bit of time on this stuff. I guess a question, especially, maybe even from a cloud economist, what's next for Lambda and Functions as a Service? Because I know you've written about the Lambda containers, but what's maybe that next evolution?Amy: What AWS did recently when they released Lambda Containers is basically put it at feature parity with Azure and GCP, which already had that ability, they had either a function service or a function to Json service where you could upload your own container. They finally released the base image, where, granted, if you knew where to look, you could get it before, but they actually released it, and announced it to the general public, so you don't have to know someone in order to be able to use it.What I see a lot of people being able to do with this now is they really want to do local development testing, so they don't have to push anything to their account and rack up those charges, when all that you want to do is make sure that whatever one line update you made, actually worked and you didn't put the space or the cab in the wrong place, which is, I guess, how it works now and it takes down the entire stack, which again, we've all done at least once, so don't worry about it. If you've ever taken down production, don't worry, you're not the only one, I promise you. You can't throw a t-shirt into an empty conference room and not hit a dude who took down production. I'm going to save that for later.Local development testing, live simulation is a really big thing. I've seen asked to do full-on data science just on Lambda containers, so they don't have to use Kubernetes anymore, because speaking of cost stuff, it's easier to track cost-wise than Kubernetes is, because Kubernetes is purely consumption-based, and you have to tie a bunch of stuff together in order to make that tracking work. That would be great.I think from here on, and a lot of the FaaS changes, they're not going to be front ends anymore, it's all going to be optimizations by the providers, you're not going to see much of that anymore. It's not like before, where they would add three more fields and make a blog post about it. I think everything is just going to be tuning just from Lambda's perspective now. That and hooking it to more things, because they love their integrations. What good is Lambda if you can't integrate it yourself?Jeremy: Right, if you can't hook it up to events. It's interesting, though, this move to support containers as a packaging format. You're right, I think this has been available in IBM, it's been available in Google, it's been available in Microsoft, these capabilities have existed for a while to use a container, and again, that's a very overloaded word, I know, but to use that as a packaging format. But moving to that, the parity there with the other cloud providers is one thing, but who's that conversation for? Whose mind does that change about serverless, or FaaS, I guess.Amy: The security team.Jeremy: Security, okay.Amy: Because if you talk to any engineer, if it's a technical problem, they'll find a way to fix it. That's just the way, especially at the individual contributor level, that's how the brain works is like, oh, this is a small thing, I bet I can fix it with a few days, or a weekend. Weekend turns into a month, but that's a completely different problem. I've had clients who did not want to use Lambda because they could not control the containerization system. You would be pushing your code into containers that were owned by Amazon, and the way they saw that, they saw that as liability.While it does have some very strong technical implications, because you're now able to choose the kind of runtime you do, easier than trying to hamstring layers together, because I know layers is supposed to fix this problem, but it's so hard. It's so hard for something that you should be able to download off of Docker and then play with it and then put it back. It's so unnecessarily hard, and it makes me so angry.If you're willing to incur that responsibility, you can tweak your memory and you have more technical control, but also you have more control at a business level too, and that is a conversation that will go way easier as far as adoption.Jeremy: Right. The other thing, in terms of, I guess the complexity of running K8s or running Kubernetes is one of those things where that just seems like a lot of complexity. You mentioned the billing aspect of it and trying to track cost. Not that everyone's trying to narrow down exactly how much this Lambda container ran them, maybe you have more insight into that than I do, but the idea of just the complexity.It seems to me that if you start thinking about cost, that the total cost of ownership of running a container and a Lambda function or running it in Fargate, versus having to install and maintain ... I would say, even if you're using one of the managed services like EKS, or something like that, that the total cost of ownership of going down the serverless route has got to be better.Amy: Yeah, especially if you're one of these apps that are very user generater based. You're tracking mostly events and content, and not even a huge amount of content, you're not streaming video, you're sharing pictures, or sharing ... If you were trying to rebuild Foursquare, you would just be sharing Geo data, which is comparatively an extremely small piece of data.You don't need an entire instance, or an entire container to do that. You can do that on a very small scale, and build that out really quickly. That said, if you go from one of these three-person teams, and then there's interest in your product, for whatever reason, and it explodes, then not just your cost, but if you had to manage the traffic of that, if you had to manage the actual resources of that, and you did not think your usage would stick with your bill, that's not great.Being able to, at least in the first few years of the company, just use Lambda for everything, that's probably just a safer solution, because you're still rapidly iterating, and you're still changing things very quickly, and you're still transmitting very small bits of data. That said, it's like there are also large enterprise companies that are heavy Lambda users, and even their Lambda bill compared to their Kubernetes bill, it is ... If you round it to down there Kubernetes bill, you would get their Lambda bill.Jeremy: Right. Gotcha. I think that's really interesting because I do ... I actually would love to know your thoughts and whether you even see this. I don't know if we have enough data yet to know this, but this idea of using Lambda, especially early on in startups, or even projects within an enterprise, being able to have that flexibility and the low operational overhead and so forth, I think is really great. But do you see that, or is that something that you think will happen is, you'll get to a point where you'll say we've found some sort of stability point with this product, where we now need to move it over to something like Kubernetes, or a container management system because overall, it's going to end up being cheaper in the long run.Amy: What usually happens when you're making that transition from Lambda to either even ECS or Fargate, or eventually Kubernetes is that your business logic has now become so complex, or your infrastructure requirements have become so complex that Lambda can't do it cleanly anymore. You end up maxing out on either memory or CPU utilization, or because you're ... Apparently Lambda has a limit on how many times you can invoke it at the same time, which some people have hit in real life.Those are times when it stops being a cheaper solution, and it stops being a target solution because you can run your own FaaS environment within instances, and then you can have a similar environment to what you're building so you don't have to rebuild everything, but you don't have to incur that on-demand cost anymore. That's one path I've seen someone take, and that's usually the decision is that Lambda, before, when it was limited, can't hold it.Now that you can put your own container, so long as it fits in that requirement, you can pad that runway out a little bit, and you can stretch out how long you have before you do a full conversion to ECS environment. But that is usually how it is because you just try to overload or you have, maybe, 50 Lambdas trying to support one application, which is totally a thing you can do, it may not be the best ... Even with Step, even with everything else. When that becomes too complex, and you end up just going through containers, anyway.Jeremy: Right. I think that's interesting, and I think any company that grows to the point where that they need to start thinking about that next little infrastructure, it's probably a good thing. It's a good point to start having those conversations.All right, I got just one more question for you, because I'm really interested. You mentioned what you do as a cloud economist, reading through people's bills and things like that. Now, I thought Corey just made this thing up. I didn't even know this thing existed until, Corey comes out, and he probably coined the term. But in terms of that ...Amy: That's what he tells people.Jeremy: He does tell people that, right. I think he did. So, I will definitely give him credit there. But in terms of that role, of being a cloud economist and having to look through people's bills, and trying to find them ways to save it, that's pretty insane that we need people like you to do that, isn't it?Amy: Yes, it's a bananas job. I cannot believe this is a job that I'm actually doing. It's also a lot of fun. But if you think about it, that when I was starting out, and everything was LAMP stack, when I started. That was a hot new tech when I started, was the LAMP stack. The solution to all of those problems were we're going to throw more hardware at it. Then the following question was, why are we spending so much on hardware?Their solution to that problem was, we're going to buy real estate to store all of the hardware on. Now that you don't have to do that, you still have the problem of, I'm going to solve this problem by throwing more hardware at it. That's still a mindset that is alive and well, and you still end up with the same problem, except now you don't have the excuse that at least we own the facility that data is in because you don't anymore.Since you don't actually own the cases and the plates and everything, you don't have to worry about disposing of them and having to use stuff that you don't actually use anymore. A lot of my problems are, one of our services has gone out of control, we don't know why. Then I will tell you, who is spending that money. I will talk to that team to make sure that they know that it's happening because sometimes they don't even know what's happening. Something got spun up into their account, and maybe it was a testbed, maybe it was a demo, maybe they hired a vendor to load something into their environment and those costs got out of control.It's not like I'm going out trying to tell you that you did something wrong. It's like, this is where the problem is, let's go find out what happened. Forensic cloud bill person, I'm going to workshop that into a business card, because that sounds way better than the title that Corey uses.Jeremy: Forensic cloud accountant or something like that.Amy: Yes.Jeremy: I think it's also interesting that billing is, and the bills you get from AWS are a leading indicator of things that are potentially going wrong. Interesting, because I don't know if people connect this. Maybe I'm underestimating people here, but the idea that a bill that runs, or that you're seeing EC2 instances cost spiking, or you're seeing a higher load or higher bandwidth or things like that. Those can all be indicators of poorly written code, it can be indicators of the bad compression or missing compression settings, all kinds of things that it can jump out at you. Unless somebody is paying attention to those bills, I don't think most developers and most teams, they're not going to see that.Amy: Yeah. The only time they pay attention when things start spiraling out of control, and ... Okay, this sounds like an intuitive issue, and first thing people will do, will go, "We're going to log everything, and we're going to find out where the problem is."Jeremy: It'll cost you more money.Amy: There is a threshold where cloud watch becomes very expensive.Jeremy: Right, absolutely.Amy: Then they hit that threshold, and now their bill is four times as much.Jeremy: Right.Amy: A lot of the times it's misconfiguration, it's like, very rarely does any product get to the point where they just can't ... It's built so poorly that it can barely hold itself up. That's never been the case. It's always been, this has been turned off, or AWS also offers S3 analytics. You have to turn them on per bucket, that's not a policy that's usually written in anyone's AWS config. When they launch it, they just launch it without any analytics. They don't know if the thing is supposed to be sending things to Glacier, if it's highly used data, there's no way to tell.It's trying to find little holes like that, where it seems like it shouldn't be a problem, but the minute it becomes a problem, it's because you spent $20,000.Jeremy: Right. Yeah. No, you can spend money very, very fast in the cloud. I think that is a lesson learned by many, many people.Amy: The difference between being on metal and throwing hardware at a problem and being on the cloud and throwing hardware at a problem is that you can throw hardware at a problem at scale on the cloud.Jeremy: Exactly. Right. There's no stopping point like we have to go by using servers ...Amy: No one will stop you.Jeremy: No one will stop you. Just maybe the credit card company or whatever. Anyways, Amy, you are doing some amazing work with that, because I actually find that to be very, very fascinating. I think, in terms of what that can do, and the need for it, it's a fascinating field, and super interesting. Good for Corey for really digging into that and calling it out. Then again, for people like you who are willing to take that job, because that seems to me like poring through those numbers can't be the most interesting thing to do. But it must feel good when you do find a way to save somebody some money.Amy: Spreadsheets can be interesting. Again, it's like everything else about my job. If I try to explain why it's interesting, I just make it sound more boring.Jeremy: Awesome. All right. Well, let's leave it there. Amy, thank you again, for joining me, this was awesome. If people want to find out more about you, or maybe they have horribly large AWS cloud bills, and they want to check out the Duckbill Group, how do they do that?Amy: Honestly, if you search for Corey Quinn, you can find the Duckbill Group real fast. If you want to go talk to me because I like doing community engagement, and I like doing talks, and I like roasting people on Twitter just about different stuff, you can hit me up on Twitter @nerdypaws. If you want to be a professional, I'm also on LinkedIn under Amy Codes.Jeremy: All right, and then you also have a website, Amy-codes.com.Amy: Amy-codes.com is the archive of all my talks. It's currently only showing the talks from last year because for some reason, it's somehow became very hard to find a spot for the past year. Who knew?Jeremy: A lot of people doing talks. But anyways, all right, Amy, thank you again. Appreciate it.Amy: Thank you. Had so much fun.

Partial Transcript“Welcome to the Books on Asia podcast, I’m your host, Amy Chavez, and today we have with us Alex Kerr who is going to talk with me about his newly published book Finding the Heart Sutra: Guided by a Magician, an Art Collector and Buddhist Sages from Tibet to Japan. (Allen Lane, Penguin U.K. Nov. 26, 2020)."Amy: Your book "Finding the Heart Sutra" is coming out this week, congratulations!Alex Kerr: This book is a result of 40 years of what's basically been an obsession with the subject. I did the calligraphy on the cover as well as the kanji throughout the book. Calligraphy is another obsession of mine since I was a boy of nine, and calligraphy is key to the Heart Sutra. Millions of people in Japan, China and other parts of Asia, chant the Heart Sutra, but you can also write it. Writing it, called shakyo— copying the Heart Sutra by hand—is the traditional way to gain merit. So calligraphy has been associated with the Heart Sutra from day one.Amy: What moved you to write a book about about the Heart Sutra?Kerr: The subject is the emptiness of life - the deepest subject that there is. Also, part of it is the fascination with the brevity of the sutra. It's really short. It's roughly 50 lines. You can recite the whole thing in a minute which means it's compressed, intense, kanji by kanji, line by line. Universes of Buddhist thought are compressed into mere phrases in the Heart Sutra. I call these jewel phrases. The more you learn about the sutra, the deeper you can go. There's a story in it as it moves from start to finish, and there's also this incredible depth. Many of the words have been discussed at length by commentators, but I found to my surprise others that hadn’t been talked about at all because they seemed obvious.Amy: Can you talk about how the Heart Sutra relates to Japanese culture?Kerr:  The Heart Sutra has gone really deep into Japanese culture. Especially the famous lines "The material world is itself emptiness. Emptiness is itself the material world." All the Japanese know that phrase. When they hear it in kabuki, they get it immediately. You hear it quoted on television; it’s printed on fans, neckties,  Evanescence, impermanence, that's maybe the biggest subject of Japanese literature. Those things arise from Buddhism in general, but you feel them most intensely in the Heart Sutra. Because it was so short, something everyone knew, it has infused literature, gardens, sculpture, all of those things have the Heart Sutra in them.MoreIf you'd like a primer on the author's mentor David Kidd, read Books on Asia's previous interview with Alex Kerr about mentors here.Other Books by Alex KerrLost JapanDogs and DemonsAnother Kyoto (w/Kathy Arlyn Sokol)(Upcoming) Japanese Pilgrimage (in Japanese)(Upcoming) Another Bangkok

Amy Honey is a pull, no punches, powerhouse, speaker and trainer in the areas of customer engagement, body language, behavior modification, sales and habit transformation. She has extensive background in high ticket sales and is known by her peers as a powerful closer, Amy is also passionate about helping girls and women find their courage just as she had to do starting at the age of 16, when she found herself alone and independent through her own resourcefulness, she still managed to graduate from high school. Her passion for personal growth, travel and transforming lives has taken Amy all over the world, helping people transform their lives through behavior, observation and habit change.   Learn more about Amy. Learn more about The Passionistas Project. Full Transcript: Passionistas: Hi, and welcome to The Passionistas Project Podcast, where we talk with women who are following their passions to inspire you to do the same. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington. And today we're talking with Amy Honey, a pull, no punches, powerhouse, speaker and trainer in the areas of customer engagement, body language, behavior modification, sales, and habit transformation. She has extensive background in high ticket sales and is known by her peers. As a powerful closer, Amy is also passionate about helping girls and women find their courage just as she had to do starting at the age of 16, when she found herself alone and independent through her own resourcefulness, she still managed to graduate from high school. At age 20. She became a single mom and chose to put her family's welfare first while overcoming numerous obstacles in an unreceptive marketplace. It was during these life challenges and her entrepreneurial journey that she crossed paths with personal development and discovered her love for speaking and training her passion for personal growth travel and transforming lives has taken Amy all over the world, helping people transform their lives through behavior, observation, and habit change. So please welcome to the show Amy Honey. Amy: I'm so happy to be here. Passionistas: Oh, we're so happy to have you. What are you most passionate about? Amy: Personal growth. My path through that is sales. Do you ever watch any of chef Ramsey, Gordon Ramsey stuff? He does this show called Kitchen Nightmares and he goes in and what that shows really about is about personal growth, but his, his avenues through cooking, you know, so that's his version of it. So I think everybody has their version of personal growth. Passionistas: Talk about your journey through life, where you started out your experiences, that we talked about a bit in the intro at the age of 16, becoming independent, and why personal growth has become such an important concept to you through your journey? Amy: I probably started in sales at two years old. I was just like, I was just in, I was just, I loved the idea of being able to create something and then, and then make money for my time or my creation. And so even as a little kid, I made like pet rocks and sold them to my family, or like we would travel through Germany were my dad was a military. So we traveled and I was, I was adopted. So it's my, I'm a single, an only child. Oh, come into play later. So we were traveling through Germany and we had this like VW bus and it had this rack in between. So my parents was very difficult for my parents to get to the back of the, of the VW bus, you know, camper and the frigerators right there. So they would ask me for food and I would just charge them. So it was like, it'd be like a nickel, like, okay. Yeah. And I would like walk up with my little, you know, you know, I'm like eight years old and I'd walk up with my little paper and say, you know, okay, I'll take your order, you know? Okay. That'll be five cents, you know, whatever, but they paid it because they didn't want to get it into the back of the bus. Little did I realize supply and demand, but I learned it very early on, I guess. And and so then from there, uh, later on, I actually started out. So, so it was a dance instructor. So I'm really into dance. I'm really into moving energy. So I became a dance instructor at age 13. So very young, my dad, since the time I was three taught jazz, tap, ballet, gymnastics. I taught everything. I started assistant teaching at 13. And then by the age of 16, I was teaching my own classes. And then at the same time I was working two jobs, so, and going to high school. So I was working on the phones for Kirby vacuum cleaner. So I sold Kirby vacuum cleaners on the phone from the age of 14. And then at the age of 16, I was allowed to go door to door. So I wasn't allowed to do door to door sales until I turned 16. So this is back in the eighties, dating myself here. So at that point, I just was good at talking to people because for me, it was about connecting. And then at age 16, I'm out on my own. And I moved out on my mom and dad's house. I just they're great people. We just had large differences in opinions. It's very interesting DNA to me is very interesting because my parents are really good people, but I got the opportunity to meet my birth family about five years ago. And now I'm really, really close with my brothers. I've got four brothers that never knew I existed. And so what I found so interesting is that I'm so much like them in the way that I think about the world and my sense of humor and all that stuff it's naturally in your DNA. Right. And so there was just a difference of opinion. And so when I moved out at 16, I always felt like it, like I did something wrong. This is my fault. I'm a bad kid. I'm horrible person. But in the meantime, I am putting myself through high school. Like I still worked. I still graduated high school on time. So, you know, it was, I was just had a really, I always had a really strong work ethic anyway, but I also had an ethic of like, okay, I just, whatever it takes to get it done, like whatever it takes to get it done at the same time, I started really seeking at that point. Because I really thought something was wrong with me. Like I was, something was wrong with me. So I started seeking and I sought out counseling and I sought out, you know, which was also kind of like wrong. Like if you went to counseling, like by my parents' standard, you know, you were wrong or you needed to be fixed or something goes wrong with you. But I don't think that we put enough emphasis on the importance of mental health. So I just started seeking and I, I started finding books and I remember one of the very first books I read way back, when is a book called peeling, the sweet onion. And it was always all about the layers of who we are and how we're going to forget it kind of over and over and over again, and how to really become more of, of the center of who we are, like getting the layers of the, kind of the crap off, you know? And so that was one of the very first and it's, it's an old book and it's not really popular these days, but it's still super relevant, like really super relevant. So, and then I just, you know, went on to Tony Robbins and you know, all of these other people. And then I started working in the seminar industry, doing sales, like doing sales, but doing coaching because for me, sales is not just like getting the number, like it's funny. Cause like I get on, like I talk to my family all the time. I was just talking to them last night and you know, all sale. I had a good day or I had a bad day, you know? Uh, and, and my daughter was asking me, well, what, what makes it good is like, if you just get a sale and I said, no, no, it's the conversation. If I can get on the phone and help somebody and have a great conversation and they don't buy anything from me, I had a great day because I impacted somebody's life in a way. So to me, sales is about service and connecting the right people with the right products and figuring out the right flow of energy with the sale. So maybe that right flow of energy might be a no, but when you come to the highest point of service with that person, and you're not just looking at them as a transaction or a number, when they are ready, they will come back to you and maybe they never will be ready and that's okay too. But if you push them into a sale, you're going to it's, it's just, it's horrible, bad karma on you. I think bad energy on you. You're, that's where you're going to get higher cancellations. You're going to get people complaining about your company. You're going to get all these things, right. So to me, it's just not worth it to push a person into a sale. Passionistas: And then when did you start public speaking? Amy: I've been a teacher since a young age. So I was in front of groups of people with no problem and teaching dance. And I teach zoom by owned. I owned a gym. So, you know, just I've always been in front of people, not a problem. I was also a stuntwoman. And so I'm don't have any problems being in front of cameras. That's my husband and I are both stunned, Exxon actors. So I just never had a problem being in front of people. But when I started working in the seminar industry, I was forced to get in, you know, we would have to intro the speaker. So it was like all of a sudden I had to introduce a Les Brown or somebody and I'm just, Whoa. Okay. Okay. So it was just kind of run into it. And then I just started speaking. And for me, I just think when you can speak to a group of people, it's a lot easier than trying to one-on-one because there's always things like a, every single, every single business. I believe that we have to educate our clients because an educated client is a good client and when they understand it and they're educated enough. And so I feel that there's things that every single business repeats over and over and over again. So if we can take those things that we repeat over and over again, and I end make a video or, or get them as together as a group and say it, you're not exhausting yourself saying it over and over and over again to each client. Passionistas: Tell us a little bit about being a stunt woman. What attracted you to that world? Amy: I was always into fitness. I wanted to do martial arts from non-time. I was a real little kid, but I was, I had to do, you know, I had to dance. So dancing was the thing or piano, piano, piano for a while. It was not ladylike to do martial arts. So it wasn't allowed to do martial arts. So as soon as I turned eight, well, as soon as I turned 16, I moved out. But by the time I was 18, I had my feet underneath me and I'd graduated high school and stuff. And so at that point I was like, Oh, I can take martial arts. No, one's stopping me. I can pierce anything. I want, I can get tattoos. So yeah. So I did, I went and started taking martial arts. And at that same time I was body doubling as an actress. So I was living in Oregon at the time and I was on this movie set and I met a stunt coordinator on the movie set, Steve, his name was Steve, really super nice guy. And I was like, huh, that's interesting. And so I was, I was an extra on the set. So as I was body doubling and I met this I met the stunt coordinator and he said to me, and I started just digging and asking questions. And he said, look, if you're really interested, why don't you fly out to LA and meet with our stunt guys and see what you think? And I said, Oh, okay. And so I booked a flight to LA and it was so funny. Cause I'm like, I'm 51 years old. Now I think I was 22 or 23. At that time I weigh a lot more now than I did then. So I was probably like 105 pounds, like soaking wet, five foot tall, I'm little. And so I get on this plane, I get on the plane. This is 1994. It's like, get on the plane and no one's on the plane. And I'm like, this is really bizarre. Right? Well, come to find out, that was the 1994 earthquake in Northridge that had just happened that morning. So everybody canceled their flight, right? So like I'm on the flight by myself and I'm heading to LA and they've got this guy, his name was big. Wayne picking me up at the airport. This is a guy I've never met before. Right now, big Wayne is like a massive dude. He kind of looks like the rock and is probably about as big. And I walk up and he's holding the sign and I'm like, this is how every horror movie war starts like, Oh my God, what? I'm like, I'm just like, I'm walking into this thing. I don't know this guy. I'm getting in the car with a stranger. I'm in a strange town. I was just like, what was I thinking? Like I'm freaking out at this point, like inside my heart is like, but I'm like, no, no, I trust my gut. I trust my gut. So he took me out to eat with a couple of the other stunt actors. And it was very interesting because they wanted to know my philosophy on life. Like they wanted to know if I believed in fate, they wanted to know if I believed in circumstance. They wanted to know if I believed if I created my own reality at that point, like I was really young, but they wanted to know these things because they weren't going to trust me with teaching me some of these things. If I didn't believe that things happen for a reason that you're in the right place at the right time that you trust yourself. Because it's very important when you're doing choreography with another stunt actor, you have to trust that when they're supposed to Zig, they're going to Zig. And when they're supposed to zag, they're going to zag. Otherwise you're going to collide and people get hurt. So that's how I learned. And so the kinds of stunts that I do were our high falls and lighting myself on fire and fight scenes. Passionistas: What projects did you do? Amy: Oh gosh. Like I did a lot of a lot of TV and I did quite a few like Showtime, HBO movies. And I couldn't even tell you some of the titles because they have what's called a working title. And then, and then, and then it goes to print crime strike was one of them like any like cops reenactments. I played in a battered woman a lot because I get beat up really well. So I can really, I can really sell, I can really sell a punch. There's a really cool chase credit card commercial. And it's actually a friend of mine. Her name is Melissa Barker and she's gets hit by a car and she comes off and she's like, yeah, you know, like you can't, I can't predict everything what's going on, but I can predict what's in my wallet kind of thing. And um, so she's actually a really big stunt woman. And she, she was one of the girls I trained with early on and with her and her husband, Eric, Betsy's another big stunt guy. So yeah, she's still going strong. I'm 51. I don't bounce. Like I used to. And um, and I got out at a point when, you know, I realized that most stunt people have broken their back at some point. So I was like, yeah, I think I'm going to cash it in quit while you're ahead. Passionistas: Your husband was also a stunt person. Did you meet him in that industry? Amy: The funny thing is we did not. We actually met, do you know who, uh, Joey Dispenza, Dr. Joe Dispenza. He's written a book called breaking the habit of being yourself. He's a, he's a speaker. And again, it's personal growth. So we met doing personal growth. That was really funny. Cause we were at this thing where he was talking and I think we were like the youngest people in the crowd. So like, we were both like 36 at the time. And so we were like the youngest people there and everybody else was like, well, over 60. And so we were just like, Hi, a young person. And so, and it was like, he was like, Oh yeah, I'm a star. I'm like, Oh my God, I'm gonna stop a woman. So that was interesting. But he did, he is from Australia and he did stunts for a live action shows. He did some movies, but he mostly did live action. So he did, he was a Warner brothers movie world. He opened up the universal Japan. He went to Indonesia. So he was a stent, a livestock action performer for years where he did shows daily after it, that you eventually opened your first business together. Passionistas: So what was the first business you started together? Amy: It was the gym that we started together before that we were kind of doing our own things, but then I'm an entrepreneur and a big risk taker. And it's funny, he's a stunt man, but he's not risky. So I'm more of a rule breaker and a risk taker. And he's more by the book by the rules. So jumping off a building is not risky to him. As much as like purchasing a brand new business is scary, scary to him. So, uh, so he always worked for the people kind of thing, but now he's learned to be an entrepreneur. So the gym was the first business that we opened together. Passionistas: Tell us about running your own gym, what was that like? Did you like doing that? Amy: Oh, I'm so glad we're not doing that. I loved helping the people. It was great, but God, it w like what a babysitting project that was because our gym was a little different. We were like our more high-end studio. So you didn't just come to the gym and work out when you wanted everything was classes. So I taught Zumba, I taught spin. I taught, I created my own classes like riding row, which was like a, like a spin and row class combined. And then I had employees and stuff, but Oh man, what a headache? What a headache and a brick and mortar. And I'm so happy that we do not have that during, like when the pandemic started, all I kept saying was like, I'm so glad we don't have the gym. I'm so glad we don't have the gym. We never would have survived it. Passionistas: Now while you had the gym, you developed the Five Elements of Health. So tell us about that and why each one is important? Amy: What Jamie says is you've got five elements of health, exercise, sleep, hydration, nutrition, and emotional environment. And when you get all five, you've got a grip on your health. That's what he says. You got a grip on it. Um, so they're all important, but the most Important one of course is emotional, uh, environment. And what emotional environment contains is the energy around you. Emotion, emotion is energy in motion, and it's the people around you. And it's your, it's your health space. And it's your, it's everything that has to do with your mindset. And the emotional environment is the most important one because you, it's almost like if you think of a triangle and you think of like, the emotional body is like at the top of the triangle and the physical bodies at the bottom. If you change the physical body, but you don't change the mind up here, you're just going to come back to that physical body that you were at before. So you could lose all the way you could do it. This is why people lose weight. And then they come right back to here. This is why people win the lottery and then spend all the money and don't have the money because they got the physical level, but they didn't do the mind level up here. So what I realized in that is that the mindset was the most important piece. So, so for me to really help people would be to focus on the mindset. So that's what we kind of shifted to, is focusing on the mindset. I worked with people that needed to lose hundreds of pounds. That is, it can be a slow moving boat. You got to kind of give them a wide berth and let them be able to, you know, come around to this new lifestyle. And it takes patience and it takes, but it's really takes shifting that mindset. And so this has changed. Nothing's going to change in the body and if it does change, it's just going to go right back to where it was at. If the mindset doesn't get changed along with it. And so, Passionistas: So is that what inspired you to create Improv for Impact? Amy: Improv for impact is more my husband's business, but it's a tool that I use in sales, Tai Chi. So improper impact. He's, he's always done improv, but when people think of improv, they think of comedy or they think of like, whose line it in any way, or they think of like comedians. Oh, that's funny. What I realized when I was recognizing it and watching what he was doing was I was like, Oh my gosh, what a brilliant way to, and a fun way to figure out what people's habits are that are holding them back from success. Because as he's playing the games, I'm watching the patterns. And what happens is when you play a game, there's always rules on the game, right? So anytime you add rules, it adds stress. But even though it's fun, stress, anytime we're in a moment of stress, like it, like if you think of like, like fun games where you're like, ah, and you're like, you're like kind of get a little stress. We always revert back to our habit in times of stress. So then I could identify, I easily identify what the habits were. So there's certain games where we can watch it or say, Oh, that's interesting that person doesn't like to take responsibility for things, or, Oh, that's interesting. This person always wants to push their idea, but they're not willing to listen to other's ideas or, Oh, that's interesting. This person always says no before they hear it out because in their head and this is, this really can help teams. It can help innovation with business. Because what we see, a lot of people do is like, say I'm an employee. And I come to the boss with an idea and the boss goes, well, we can't, no, that's not. We can't do that because in the boss's head, he's thinking, what's going to cost this. It's going to cost this. What are we going to do? Right. But if the boss had just said, yes, okay, well, let's figure out how that can happen. Maybe another idea is going to come out that maybe it's not that idea, but if he was open to it, instead of just immediately blocking that idea, he would be able to innovate and be able to come up with something completely new. I love Apple. What Apple did. Steve jobs came back. When he came back after he had been gone from his company for a while, they spent, I think, a few days on this. And they said, well, what business are we in? And they said, well, we're in the computer business. And he said, no, no, no, no. What business are we really in? We're what are we really in? What are we really doing here? And they took days to figure this out. And they spent time just minds, you know, brainstorming what they ended up coming up with was no, we connect people to their passions. And that's how they came up with the iPod. That was when they first came up with the iPod because, Oh, well, their passions are what their passions are, music, their passions or photos, their passions, or family emails, their passions are, you know, these kinds of things. So that's was, became their motto. And it was like, it was a different, innovative way of thinking about things. So if we can stop blocking that, then we can, then we can, then we can identify who in the companies doing these things. Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington. And you're listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Amy Honey. To learn more about Amy, visit her website amyjohoney.com. Now more of her interview with Amy. How can people transform their habits to, to connect better with their clients and communicate their values better? Amy: We teach about the energy of sales. So we teach about looking at the energy and then we also teach really active listening, truly active listening to somebody, and we teach them how to stop blocking them. So for instance, if I come to you and I say, Hey, Nancy, I got this great health product. Are you open to taking a look at it? And you're just like, no, I'm like, Oh, okay, cool. What, what interests you the most? Right. So like trying to connect on a different level, right? When somebody tells you no or blocks it, you have to accept it. So what I see a lot of salespeople do is they keep pushing. Yeah. But this is really good for you, but this is really… no, Nancy, this could really benefit you. Like really? You need to look at this, right? No, she already said no. Right, stop it. And just stop. Like sometimes it's better just not to sell. Passionistas: You really are passionate about helping girls and women find their courage. So how do you do that? Amy: And especially single moms because I was a single mom. So especially single moms. I met my husband when my daughter was 18. So how do I do that? How do I help women? I, I think that women are really powerful in who they are. And I love, I specifically love helping women and teaching women how to sell because we are, we are nurturers. We are naturally a nurture and we naturally create through pleasure. So men push, push, push hard, hard, hard, buy, buy, buy women don't function that way. So I like to teach women sales by just using their own nature of who they are. You know, don't try to be me. Don't try to be the other best salesperson in the world. You've got to be you to do it. And you are valid and you are valuable in who you are. And so that, so I, I, I, I, especially just, I mean, I work with companies and corporations, but I really am super passionate. Like when I see a woman, especially a single mom, I'm kind of like hone in on her. And I'm just like inner ear, like really amazing. You can do it. Passionistas: What's the philosophy of Sales Tai Chi. How does it work? Amy: So Sales Tai Chi right now, the main thing that we're training teams to do, we're training them how to recreate their live events to online, because it's just necessary right now. So how do you recreate that live event experience and do it online? Sales Tai Chi is all about the energy of the sale and the flow of energy and how to take whatever comes at you and move it into the energy that you want it to be moved into. So rather than blocking the energy of a no accepting the energy, turning the energy into what you want. And when, when you do get to know what I train our teams to do is to accept that no, you know, when you get objections, that's different than a no. When you get objections, you want to turn that objection and vet and validate their objection. Because if somebody says to you, Oh, I just, I just don't have the time right now. Well, that's just, that's an ex an objection in reality. It's an excuse because they just told me they really wanted this, but now they're telling you they don't have time. Right. So you never want to say, Oh, but you've got plenty of time. Or you got, because you're just invalidating their excuse and their excuse in their own head is really valid. So it's more about asking questions, you know? So when they, when they say, Oh, I don't have time. Oh, I know. Yeah. Time can be. That can be tough. Do you want more time? You know what I mean? So it's like, it's like accepting, accepting it. And if it's a no, except the no sales is like kissing, the other person has to be leaning in, or you can't kiss them. Passionistas: You talk about how I shouldn't try and sell the way you try and sell. So how does somebody tap into their, their personal strengths to figure out what their best approaches? Amy: So I would just ask you, like, when you're like, do you, do you sell anything right now? Passionistas: We sell a subscription box. Amy: Okay. Oh, cool. What's in it? Passionistas: It's all products from women owned businesses and female artists. Amy: I love that. That's great. Okay. So what is your favorite thing about the products? Like what are you most excited about that excites you about that product? Passionistas: To me, the most exciting thing about the subscription box is that we're supporting other women. Like it's just, you know, we, we beyond selling the products, we, uh, interview every woman in the box and we share their stories so that people are, aren't just buying the product. They're supporting the woman behind the product. And to me, that's what I love about doing the subscriber. Amy: What do you absolutely hate about selling? Passionistas: Asking people for money. Amy: Okay. Yeah. So then what I would do with you is I would shift your mindset around about that because are these products gonna serve that person? Passionistas: Yes.    Amy: So if you're not selling, you're not serving. So I would just help you shift that mindset around asking people for money because it is value. It is valuable, right? Passionistas: Oh, yeah. Amy: And then how do you sell as yourself is you just find the things that you like. So if you really love connecting with women, then just connect with them. You don't have to sell them anything. Right. Just connect with them. If that's your favorite part about it, and you hate asking money, but you love connecting, then just connect and then it's, it doesn't even feel like you're asking for my needs similar to like, you know, would you tell your best friend about a great movie that you just watched? Passionistas: Sure. Amy: So why wouldn't you tell them about the subscription box? So you're going to just tell your friends as if you were telling them about a great movie. I'll leave you with a little story. This was a kind of a big lesson for me. So when I did own the gym, I had a, I would help people lose hundreds of pounds. And I had a program that was $5,000. I'd be with you for a year. I guaranteed at least a hundred pounds of weight loss. So during that, I thought, you know what? I want to really help everybody. I really just want to help everybody and not everybody can afford me. So maybe I should just run like a free, almost weight Watchers type of a class on the weekends. So on Saturday I did an, a full hour. I had about 18 as a smaller town side, about 18 people that came during that entire year that I did that. I was there every week. Not one person lost one pound. And the worst part about it was there was a guy and he passed away at age 36, at 450 pounds. I feel like if I had sold him that package, that he would probably be here today because when people put, put money in the game, they're invested, they're, they're gonna do it. They're gonna, you know, and, and just think about the women that do buy your box and that why, like how excited are they when they get this box? I mean, who doesn't love to get a box of stuff where you're just like, I don't know what's coming and I can't wait. It's like opening. Right? Like, so tap into that excitement that the women feel that buy your box. And then that makes it a little bit easier to ask for the money because you know, they're going to be excited to get it. Passionistas: What advice would you give to a young woman that wants to be an entrepreneur? Amy: Go for it. Jump in with both feet. Don't hesitate. It's like stunts. Once you go to jump off that building, if you stop yourself in the middle of it, you're going to get hurt. Once you commit, commit and do it, don't hesitate that hesitation. That's like, there's, there is a lot of dead squirrels on the road to indecision, right? So don't hesitate when we hesitate. That's when we know, are we going to make the right decisions all the time? Probably not. That's okay. Stop beating yourself up about it. Take a little risk. It's okay. Get out there and do it. Passionistas: Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Amy Honey. To learn more about Amy, visit her website, amyjohoney.com. Please visit ThePassionistasProject.com to learn more about our podcast and subscription box filled with products made by women owned businesses and female artisans — to inspire you to follow your passions. Sign up for our mailing list, to get 10% off your first purchase. And be sure to subscribe The Passionistas Project Podcast, so you don't miss any of our upcoming inspiring guests. Until next time stay well and stay passionate.

PART TWO OF COSPLAY SEX STORIES (without Amy) What masks does a guy like to put on before chasing his wife around the house and having sex with her? What interesting costume request did a guy have for his wife? Who did one lucky guy have sex with in a taxi? How many guys did one woman have sex with during a zombie prom themed Halloween Party? What did one woman get all over her Halloween costume? How did one woman accidentally sleep with the wrong twin? We talk about those stories and more. Enjoy! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wigo/support

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Amy: How about you? Have you ever been in an accident?Paul: Not a car accident. I was in a bicycle accident.Amy: Yeah?Paul: I laugh now but at the time, it was pretty bad.Amy: What happened?Paul: It was dark and it was Christmas day. And I was on my bicycle going down a quite steep slope and my telephone rang. And I looked at my mobile phone and I took it out of my pocket whilst riding my bike. And looked at it and noticed it was my dad and he was ringing to wish me a happy Christmas.So I felt sort of compelled to answer the phone. So answering the phone, still going down the hill, probably gathering speed. It's dark and I'm trying to get my dad off the phone as soon as I can. And before I knew it, I drove straight into the back of a parked black car.Amy: Oh no.Paul: I saw it at the very last minute. So I hit the back of it and my body slammed into the ground, and I broke a few bones, yeah. Yeah.Amy: Oh no.Paul: Yeah, yeah. It was a pretty miserable Christmas to be honest with you.Amy: I'd say it's terrible. That's the worst.Paul: Yeah.Amy: Did the owner of the car see what happened? Did you damage the car?Paul: I didn't stay long enough. I got out of there pretty quickly.Amy: And went to the hospital.Paul: No, I was a bit stubborn. I don't know why. I was the worst night sleep I've ever had but yeah, I didn't go to the hospital until the next day.Amy: What bones did you break?Paul: I broke my collarbone, the clavicle.Amy: Oh, a nightmare.Paul: And I broke a few ribs.Amy: Oh no, ribs. That's the worst because they can't do anything for it. They just send you on your way and you just have to cough in pain.Paul: Hmm.Amy: Oh no.Paul: Yeah. But it could have been a lot worse, you know.Amy: Hmm, that's true.Paul: Yeah. I could have broken my neck.Amy: So how long did it take you to recover?Paul: It took me about probably six weeks, I suppose.Amy: Hmm.Paul: Yeah, because then—actually, in the following —it happened on Christmas day, so three months later in the March, I was lucky enough to win a place in the Tokyo marathon. And I really wanted to do it because it's quite difficult to get. It's like a lottery now. There's so many people who apply to get a position.So I wasn't going to let this accident stop me from running the Tokyo marathon. So I was trying to rush it, really and I shouldn't have. But I did. I've run there.Amy: Did you?Paul: Yeah.Amy: Oh, my goodness.Paul: Yeah, I finished it but—Amy: Congratulations. But how were you? That must have really hindered your recovery.Paul: It hindered my training period for the marathon, yeah, so.Amy: But you finished it though.Paul: I finished it, yeah.Amy: Well done.Paul: I wouldn't do it again. Marathons are miserable things to be. Really. Why put yourselves through that pain? I still like running so maybe in the future, I'd do a half marathon or something, yeah. But a full marathon—my marathon days are over, I think. Yeah.

Hi everyone! It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? I’m back today with this special episode, covering a film that I saw just before the stay-at-home orders were issued in California for the current pandemic. It’s going to be an extended episode, with an update on things here at One Movie Punch, my review of THE REPORT entangled with an essay on how the pandemic has affected the film industry in the short term and the long term, and for those that stick around afterwards, a fun audio drama to tide you over during the extended absence. We last left you with our review of LETO back on March 14th, which feels like forever ago, and like yesterday. I had been following the news regarding the Coronavirus, and lamenting how little was being done to contain it, when things began to snowball in New York and New Jersey. Folks were already hoarding food, water, and apparently toilet paper. I remember standing in line, prior to social distancing and masks, listening to someone calmly argue with anyone willing to listen that this was all a hoax, even while dropping three months of food into their cart. I can still remember wondering if anyone around me had it, and if I was going to die, and when I got back to the house that day, I let the team know they could put their pending reviews on permanent hiatus. There was supposed to be a break anyway. I had a Patreon episode planned out that was announcing a three month break for the podcast so I could concentrate on two major projects: First, our website needs a massive update, and every episode we publish makes that task grow ever larger. We know folks can’t find much on our website right now, and we want to change that, while changing hosts. Second, as our team continues to grow, we need a better back-end system to manage our content. I needed some time to work on these projects, and couldn’t do that keeping a daily podcast going on. You’d think that with the pandemic, and the initial stay-at-home orders, that this would have been a slam dunk. Unfortunately, it was anything but that. I spent the first two weeks at home in a downward spiral, one driven by anxiety over whether I had contracted the virus standing in line, and amplified by the depression which followed each anxiety attack. The only way I could get it under control was to occupy myself, which I did by playing “The Witcher III: The Wild Hunt”. We felt reasonably safe after the first two weeks, but rationality doesn’t do much for anxiety and depression once it gets going. It wasn’t until about five weeks later (and completing “The Witcher III: The Wild Hunt”) that I came out of my spiral. Distance learning was limping along for One Movie Spouse and One Movie Spawn, and I decided to get to work with all the free time I had, spending more time reading and exercising, and more importantly to you all, spending four to six hours a day taking online training classes for SQL Server and C#, and building a custom application to help automate our process on the back end. I was making great progress, which came to a screeching halt as our plans were being developed for returning students (and teachers) to school. I was already behind schedule a little bit, and pushed back our restart date to 9/1 to accommodate the delay. Our districts were fortunate enough to adopt distance learning models, but until the final decisions were made, my anxiety and depression cycle started up again. It also meant we had to rearrange our tiny California townhome to accommodate one student and one teacher for distance learning, including rearranging rooms, assembling furniture, and doing some massive cleaning. It also came with some practical issues in continuing the podcast for the foreseeable future. The pandemic has required quite a few families to make sacrifices to accommodate work and school changes. Our family is no exception. The increased expectations for distance learning this fall now require One Movie Spouse and One Movie Spawn to be online for longer periods of time each day, which makes trying to watch a movie at home nearly impossible. There’s also a lot more housework to be done with three people around all the time, which eats into finding time to manage the podcast. I can’t really go back to producing the podcast the way I was before, at least until we’re done with distance learning, or when it feels safe enough for me to work elsewhere. What does that mean? Well, it means the regular podcast will be off the air for the duration of the pandemic. The best I can do right now is continue working on the custom application to automate our process as time permits, and wait patiently for our world to go back to some semblance of stability. Once there’s an opportunity to restart, then we will reach out to our critics, collaborators, and fans to figure out a schedule to bring us back on the air. If that’s possible before the pandemic is finished, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, I want to thank you all for your continued support over the past few years. Big up to our sponsors for their contributions! Thank you for all the work from our critics! And especially to you all, our fans, who we hope will be there when we return. Until then, stay safe and healthy! We’ll be back before you know it. Here we go! ///// Today’s movie is THE REPORT (2019), the political thriller written and directed by Scott Z. Burns. Daniel Jones (Adam Driver) is a congressional staffer who is tasked to investigate allegations of torture by the CIA in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the two occupations that followed. The film also stars Annette Bening as Jones’ boss, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Jon Hamm as Denis McDonough, who eventually became Obama’s Chief of Staff. No spoilers. THE REPORT (2019) closes out an excellent year for Adam Driver, whose additional films in 2019 included Oscar-darling MARRIAGE STORY (Episode #668), fan favorite STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER (Episode #672), and the campy THE DEAD DON’T DIE, which received mixed reviews. This year follows an excellent filmography, which has also recently included BLACKKKLANSMAN (Episode #225), THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE (Episode #523), and LOGAN LUCKY (Episode #065). It seems like Driver appeared out of nowhere in the last few years, but the secret to his success has been his excellent choices in roles, since about 2012, leveraging regular work on “Girls” to take on a number of films with excellent and notable writers and directors, including Scorsese, Gerwig, Baumbach, and The Coen Brothers. All things said, Driver may also be the best thing about THE REPORT, aside from the uncanny resemblance between Bening and Feinstein, mannerisms and all. Everything else about the film is pretty standard, though, and that has to do with the subject matter. The story of Daniel Jones, and the investigation into CIA torture, is definitely an important story, but doesn’t have a satisfying ending. I don’t think this fact spoils the film, as the only satisfying ending to this story would have been trials and convictions for war crimes by everyone taking part, and that clearly didn’t happen. It’s also not the only example of war crimes being uncovered and remaining unpunished in US history. THE REPORT follows roughly the same investigatory and political machination track as Spielberg’s THE POST (Episode #353), but we get the satisfaction of the Pentagon Papers being published and some form of accountability. If it wasn’t for the cast, I’m not sure THE REPORT would have gotten as much attention as it did. I don’t think this takes anything away from Scott Z. Burns’ efforts. The film is still a hell of an accomplishment. It just has trouble competing in our ever-changing film industry, particularly in the wake of the pandemic. THE REPORT, along with THE POST for that matter, falls into a growing category of films that can be experienced pretty much identically at home or in the theater. It certainly wasn’t made for the box office, where it only gathered less than $250,000, but it was made for the growing streaming-only market, much like MARRIAGE STORY or THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES for Netflix. As an aside, that’s a secondary reason for Driver’s success – finding recognition through the growing streaming audience. The pandemic has seen a number of these “theater-independent” films continue to roll out on streaming services, whereas “theatre-dependent” films that try to bank on box office payouts have seen massive delays and declines, along with a few innovative attempts at screenlife films. Disney in particular has been scrambling to develop and solidify its online presence, while managing the previously sunk production costs and the hemorrhaging tourist-driven income of parks and resorts. I’m very much looking forward to the return of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not to mention all the films that really benefit from a theatrical presentation. But I don’t really want to see BLACK WIDOW or MULAN if it’s not on a big screen first. I also don’t think the $29.99 premium VOD purchase point is going to workout, although I’m curious to see the long-term viability. That’s one half of what I would call “theater-dependent” films. The other half are films that benefit from having a large audience, one who is especially engaged to see the film. I hesitate to say “audience-dependent”, because there’s a much different vibe between friends gathering at a home to watch a film, and enjoying a premiere with other film fans. The best film I’ve seen during the pandemic that fits this description is THE LOVEBIRDS, which made a Netflix debut in lieu of waiting for the theaters to reopen. One Movie Spouse and I saw the film, and laughed quite a bit, but I think we both knew that seeing this film with a packed house would have been even better, especially for the raunchier parts of the comedy not spoiled by the trailer. I’ve been really missing both kinds of “theater-dependent” films, mostly because I got a Regal Unlimited pass late last year before everything shut down. It may be the most important distinction the pandemic has made within the industry: that some films require a theatrical experience, and that the industry will remain after this pandemic, in lieu of an all “at home” experience. It doesn’t mean there won’t be fallout among the major movie chains, especially those invested in expensive markets. I fully expect to see some chains go bankrupt and get bought up by Netflix, Amazon, Warner, and Disney as outlets for group-themed premieres of streaming favorites, as well as those “theater-dependent” films. Amazon might have even made a profit from THE REPORT, if they owned a chain to show it in. THE REPORT is a pretty standard government investigation film, elevated by its above average cast, and anchored by a great performance by Adam Driver as Daniel Jones. Scott Z. Burns leverages the Amazon loss leader model to produce his second writer/director feature, which deserves a larger audience, despite its depressing subject matter. Fans of films about government, or fans of Driver or any of the cast members, will definitely enjoy this film. Rotten Tomatoes: 81% (CERTIFIED FRESH) Metacritic: 66  One Movie Punch: 8.0/10 THE REPORT (2019) is rated R and is currently playing on Amazon Prime. ///// JOSEPH: “And now, what absolutely did not happen back in March 2020, nor will be used as a bridge to relaunch the podcast when conditions permit...” JOSEPH: “Really not liking the news lately. The virus looks like the real deal. It’s a good thing One Movie Punch Tower is completely self-sufficient, with power, food, air, and water for up to five years.” EILEEN: “Have we tried any of these items installed by Belko Industries?” JOSEPH: “No, but I’m sure everything will be just fine. They’re a very trusted name in the industry. Built buildings all around the world. Didn’t go with the neural implant upgrade, though. I mean, I’m not stupid.” AMY: “What’s that?” JOSEPH: “Looks like the stay-at-home order has been issued for California. All right, no time like the present to test things out. One Movie Spawn, go press the button for PANDEMIC.” JOSEPH: “Once that’s pressed, the tower begins sealing up. And we should be able to disable it with no problem... Oh BEEEP!” AMY: “What?” JOSEPH: “What button did you press?” EILEEN: “The one labelled PANDEMIC, like you said, on the end.” JOSEPH: “It’s activated the nuclear fallout option!” AMY: “Can we just turn that off?” JOSEPH: “No, it’s set to lock things out for five years minimum.” AMY: “Can’t we just call someone to help us?” JOSEPH: “No. It shuts off all communications. I mean, who was supposed to be left?” EILEEN: “Wait, you mean we’re trapped in here together for five years? I’m supposed to go to college!” JOSEPH: “I’ll get started on getting us out, but it’s going to take some time. How much, I’m not sure. You know, it looks like the buttons were switched on the panel! Did you do this?” EILEEN: “Are you kidding me?!” JOSEPH: “Did YOU?!” AMY: “Of course not!” JOSEPH: “I wonder who did it, then...”

Dr. Amy Novotny founded the PABR Institute™ with the mission to provide pain, stress and anxiety relief to those who seek a naturalistic form of treatment when other treatment methods have fallen short. Her unique approach comes from her experience treating in a variety of settings and with a wide range of patient populations over the past 10 years. Her background in orthopedics, sports, geriatrics, balance disorders, nerve injuries, and most recently, chronic pain; and influences from coursework at the Postural Restoration Institute gave her the foundation to develop this treatment method to address a wide variety of painful and restrictive conditions.   She customizes all treatment plans to the individual to help them achieve their goals, whether it is to pick up a child, get through a work day pain free or play a sport.  She co-authored a #1 Best-Selling book Don’t Quit: Stories of Persistence, Courage and Faith, which shares her journey on how and why she developed the PABR Method™.  Her ability to speak French and Spanish has allowed her to communicate with and help various clients from all around the world, including France, Mexico, Central America and South America.  She has a variety of interests including running 40+ marathons, running 10 ultra marathons (including two 100 milers), completing an Ironman triathlon, photographing wildlife and landscapes all over the world that has led to several of her images being chosen as Photos of the Day, most notably National Geographic Your Shot World Top Photo of the Day. In this episode, we talk about:How and why she founded PABR (Pain Awareness Breathing Relief) Institute.The principles of PABR.How she studied breathing to stop having pain and increase her running speed.How she has helped clients with PABR techniquesExamples of clients who have avoided surgery, decreased the use of medications, and diminished stress using PABR.She also leads us through a breathing exercise.Resources:You can find her at:Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-amy-novotny/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dramynovotnyInstagram: @anovotn, @pabrinstituteTwitter: @amynovotnyazMindful Minute -By Dr. Amy: “What we're going to do today is go through some of the basics of the breathing techniques that I teach. I encourage everyone to sit all the way back into the chair back and not try not sit on the edge of the chair. Don't arch your back. I want to let the low back relax into the chair back without any lumbar support, just naturally let it go back. And when you do that, let your tailbone curl under you a little bit. And then for your legs, we want the knees relatively close together, kind of in line with your hips, and then your feet flat on the floor so that your heels are brown. So the next thing I want you to do is to let your belly button out, let that gut hang out and let it relax. We're going to go through a four step breathing process that I do with everyone. I start off with a simple process. It gets more complicated than that. But we're going to start out very basic today. And just to get you into a rhythm, so the four steps are, I breathe in through my nose. I pause a second, I blow out through my mouth. And then I pause, hold my breath for three seconds. So I'm going to breathe in.  Pause, then I blow out through my mouth.And I pause, holding my breath, three seconds, and then I breathe in. (blows out) And then I breathe in. And blow out (blows out)” To see the full video, please go here.

ROUTINE. What's sexy about routine? Well, while we agree that it might not be the sexiest topic, it's got it's own charm. It doesn't have to mean a rut, or drudgery. Let's dive in and see what we can rock about our routines. The podcast is in four segments, and here’s this week’s breakdown: 1: Rock Your Life with Amy: What, ultimately, is routine about? For me, it's about becoming better little by little, and becoming better is a way of showing gratitude for all that we have- even what we have that exists as potential. Need more clarification? Listen to my segment for my daily routines and more on what it can bring to us and our future selves! Also, I have a free offer available for download to help build new habits! 2: The Interview (19:16): Interview this week is with the very lovely Mariska Nicholson, founder of skincare line Olive + M. Mariska recognizes the obligatory nature of scheduling and we discuss that in contrast to the value of routine. She tells us her self care routine and her skin care routines, and how that helps calibrate the day ahead. She brings up the beautiful ability of being able to change our minds, and how now the grounding of our routines can be something we choose and that we can enjoy. “As I got older, and I saw the value of routine, I made friends with it. And I think that you have to do that with the things that you’re resistant to. If you can make friends with them, you dissolve the resistance, and then you can move to a different place with it.” Listen for lots more, and how she suggests ways to reframe routine! And follow her on Instagram as well HERE. 3: Go Aff Yourself (33:29) with Affirmation Maven Jill Faulkner of stickwithit.co:, How do we feel about routine and the “supposed to” nature of it? And how are we working the affs into it? Jill says she doesn’t have routines… and we dive into what that really means. What is the connotation of the word itself? What does it bring up in you- perhaps, the potential to fail? Routine is important now, and how can we foster that? We get into all this and also Jill's mew meditation practice. This week’s aff is: My Daily Life Includes All That I Need. 4: BYOBBB(48:51) Build Your Own Brand, Biz + Brain with Bijou Finney: Bijou and I talked her thoughts on routine in light of her own personal upheaval, and she gives solid advice on biz and brand routines. She shares also about her upcoming e-course and advice she got about implementing routine in our businesses, and with a bigger-picture scheduling effort: “You should be thinking about routine in your business by the day, by the week, by the quarter, by the year. And think about what that routine is, and religiously do it.” I ask what this means for someone like me, without a team, and she clarifies that I’m still a business, and it should happen no matter what your size. We may have to re-find our way with this and she encourages us to write that down. We cover how to deal with social media routine, how planning can benefit us, and our brain routines that are for brain optimization. Schedule time to make your routine, she says, and while she gives advice on how to go easy on yourself, the routine is about setting up a habit and it’s important to be diligent and consistent. Please rate, review, and subscribe! Lots of references in today's episode, so go to amyedwards.com/blog for links and more that are referenced in the show, and to sign up for the newsletter!

Key Takeaways:3:37 Robyn talks about the plan and challenges she had rescheduling her clients after being closed for almost 2 months7:05 Doug asks Robyn and Amy “What were the emotions you felt when you’re back in and opened and live to the public again?”10:22 Doug asks Robyn and Amy “How did you prepare your staff?”18:25 Jason asks how they are handling the social distance order while the business is open24:40 Amy and Robyn weigh in on question from the chat, “If you could re do your soft opening, what would it look like”?”

In our second See It to Be It podcast interview, Amy C. Waninger chats with Regional Consulting founder Juanita Hines, a career optimization consultant who focuses on helping students and professionals learn how to discover and communicate their intrinsic value, effectively transition from high school to college and college to the professional sector, and a whole lot more. These discussions highlight professional role models in a variety of industries, and our goal is to draw attention to the vast array of possibilities available to emerging and aspiring professionals, with particular attention paid to support black and brown professionals. Check out some of the SI2BI blogs we've posted while you wait for the next episode!Connect with Juanita on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter!Learn more about her book on Amazon!Check out Regional Consulting's website!Visit our page!TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate. Now, look, for those of y'all who are new here, the purpose of Living Corporate is to create a space that affirms black and brown experiences in the workplace, right? There are certain things that only we can really understand, and when I say we I mean the collective non-white professional [laughs] in corporate America. And when we look around--if you, like, Google being black and brown in corporate America, you may see, like, a post in Huffington Post or something that kind of communicates from a position of lack, but I don't know if we necessarily see a lot of content that empowers and affirms our identity and our experience, and that's really the whole purpose of Living Corporate. It's with that that I'm really excited to talk to y'all about the See It to Be It series. Amy C. Waninger, who has been a guest on the show, who's a writer for Living Corporate, and who's also the author of Network Beyond Bias, she's actually partnered with Living Corporate to actually have an interviewing series where she actually sits down with black and brown professionals so that we can learn about what they actually do and see ourselves in these roles, right? So it's a variety of industries that she's--she's talking to a lot of different types of folks. You're gonna be able to see what they do, and at the same time you're gonna hopefully be able to envision yourself in that role, hence the title See It to Be It, okay? So check this out. The next thing you're gonna hear is this interview with Amy C. Waninger. Y'all hang tight. Catch y'all next time. Peace.Amy: Hello, Juanita! Thank you so much for joining me today.Juanita: Hello. Thank you for having me on the show, Amy. I'm excited to be here.Amy: I am excited to have you. So you were one of the first people I met when I started going out on my own and doing my own thing, and I don't even remember how we connected originally, but I know that we kind of bonded over the shared experience of having books that we had self-published. Would you tell me just a little bit about what it is exactly that you do and how you got into that work?Juanita: Absolutely. So I am a career optimization consultant. I provide training for both students as well as professionals. I'm dual-focused. With students, I help to provide them with the information that helps them to transition from high school to college and college to the professional sector. So if you think about a lot of the things that you don't necessarily learn in high school or college that you're expected to know when you go in the workforce, things like how to negotiate your salary, how to network, what that means, how to build strategic partnerships and relationships, the importance of managing your social media and really the type of implications that that can have on your future, those are the type of sessions that I work with with college and high school students. And then for professionals, I partner with companies to help them train and retain staff so they don't have to fire and rehire or lose and overuse. So I help people to more effectively engage within their careers, which will in turn help companies to be able to retain talent as well.Amy: That's fantastic, that you found a niche that meets the employer's needs and the employee's needs, but you also work with students, and so I'm imagining that you work a lot with colleges too. Is that correct?Juanita: Yes, absolutely. Amy: Very good. And so how did you get involved in this work? Because this isn't an obvious--like, there's probably not a job posting for this somewhere, right?Juanita: Absolutely. Not at all, [laughs] and if it was I would've loved to find it because, you know, to be under the corporate umbrella of someone that's doing exactly what I'm doing is definitely--would definitely be an interesting perspective. So I was a recruiter initially when I transitioned from college. I'll be honest with you. I initially--when I was looking for jobs upon graduating from college I was applying for all of these public relations positions, and I kept being told I didn't have enough experience, so out of frustration I ended up going into a staffing agency, and I just said, "Look, I need a job," and they said, "Okay. Well, let's see what we have for you. Are you open to recruiting? What are you looking for?" I said, "Honestly I can do anything. I just need someone to give me a chance." And so they sent me out for a two-day position at one of their corporate clients, and they had phenomenal feedback I guess. Like, they were saying "Oh, my goodness, we want to look at hiring her." One of their HR execs came down and said, "I need your resume." I was voluntold to give him my resume, and I gave him my resume.Amy: Wow.Juanita: Yeah. So they called that afternoon because I knew that we weren't supposed to go on the internet and we weren't supposed to give our resume, and after being insisted upon telling him "No, I'm not supposed to give you my resume," he was like, "Look, I don't care about all that. Give me your resume." So when they called I said "Hey, just want to let you know that everything's going well," but he did make me go on the internet and print out my resume. They were like "Juanita, don't worry, you'll never have to go back there again." I was like, "No, no. I'm not saying that it's a bad environment. I love it here." But yeah, so a long story short, they ended up calling me about three minutes after I left that day and asked if I would be open to coming to work as a recruiter--well, to temp in their office until they could afford to hire me because they had to create a position to hire me because they couldn't afford to do it at that moment. And so I went in to assist them, and then I was there for a couple years. So I had the opportunity to function as a recruiter. I loved my job. I loved everything about it, and I was spiritually led to leave. Yeah, about three years or so later I had the--you know, I was really delving into--and I know this is a long way of going about answering your question, but, you know, I was really honing in on my relationship with God and learning, you know, that He talks to you and that kind of thing, and so, you know--and I was like, "Lord, whatever you want me to do, wherever you want me to go, I will do it. Let me know." And so then he said, "Okay, well, I want you to leave your job." Wait. "Lord, are you sure this is You? I don't know that this is You." [laughs] So a long story short, I ended up giving my job a month's notice, and in that time I was praying about my purpose and what I would do. I went to a purpose boot camp the week after I left my job, and at the purpose boot camp they were talking about, you know, your purpose and what you were created for, and on the way back from the purpose boot camp I started getting all of these crazy thoughts, and I said "Maybe I should jot some of this stuff down." And so I'm driving from Maryland to Virginia, and when I get home I look at my notebook and I'm like, "What is this?" And I called my dad. I was like "Hey, Dad, I think God is telling me to start a company," and he was like, "Well, if he's telling you to do it you need to do it." So that's pretty much how I transitioned into having my own company. In terms of career optimization, I was led out of recruiting because I had recruited for about six years or so providing services for a variety of different companies within oil and gas, energy, travel, a variety of different companies that partnered with me, and then God said "Okay, now you're done with that, so it's time for you to leave that." And I said "Wait, what am I doing now?" And he gave me the vision to actually start doing what I'm doing now, and it's been about 6.5, 7 years or so. I've gone into high schools here--high schools more so I usually do more local here in the Houston and surrounding areas, but colleges I've branched out and also for organizations as well.Amy: What's the name of the company you run?Juanita: It's called Regional Consulting.Amy: Regional Consulting. And I was gonna get to this later, but we'll just bring it up right now. You have a book.Juanita: I do.Amy: Tell us about your book.Juanita: My book is called Master Your Career Playbook: Resumes. It is actually a book that's about writing resumes, but not just writing resumes. It helps you to more effectively articulate your value, because just like I was in that situation, what I didn't realize was that it wasn't that I did not have the experience. It was that I was not effectively articulating the value that I offered to the employers to which I was applying, and so what I did is I actually--you know, I actually used to write resumes for clients, and I had a client that continued to send me countless individuals, and I jokingly said one day "You know what? I'm gonna write a book just for you, just for you to give to all of your friends," and so I did. So I wrote the book, and--well, actually I wrote 15 pages and I sat on it for 2.5 years, and then people started asking me, like, right when I got ready to start writing it again people kept asking me "When is your book coming out?" "Hey, where is your book?" "Do you have a book?" I was speaking at different conferences and they were like, "Hey, where can I purchase your book?" And I'm just sitting here like, "Oh, my gosh. Are you serious? I don't have a book." And I talked to a speaker, and he was just telling me--he inspired me and connected me with someone who was able to help me get my thoughts down on paper, because the hardest thing or the most challenging part about the writing process is 1. taking the time to do it, but then also making sure that you can effectively articulate the words that you are trying to get across and that it comes across like you intend for it to, especially within resume writing, because no one really gets ecxited like "Oh, my gosh, girl! Guess what I'm doing?" "What?" "I'm reading this book about writing my resume! Yes! I'm so excited!" And you're like, "Oh... okay..." So yeah, that was--and I wanted it to be engaging. I wanted it to be kind of similar to how I present, but I wanted to be honest, and I wanted to give people a very candid view from a recruiter perspective, because I've had the opportunity to place across the employment spectrum, up to senior level executives on down to entry level office support positions.Amy: I think that's such a valuable perspective too. I have people all the time who are wanting me to help them with their resumes, and when they ask me, I always quote them--I ask "What's your budget for this service?" And then they usually are thinking in their heads "I don't want to pay you, I just want you to do it." And then when they say "What do you charge?" I give them a number that they would never, ever, ever pay because I don't want to do that work, but I do recommend your book to them. Because I say "Oh, you need to read this book and this will help you, and I won't." [both laugh] So--isn't that terrible?Juanita: No, it's not terrible, and I will tell you--because resume writing is a very time-consuming process, and a lot of people just think that--you know, the thought process is "I'll just give you a regurgitation of my experience and I'll let you pick and choose what's important out of here and hopefully it will land me the interview." That's not what happens unfortunately.Amy: And I know how to write my own resume 'cause I lived it, but I don't know how to write someone else's and I don't pretend to. So anybody who's listening to this, do not call me for resume advice. Call Juanita. You'll be good.Juanita: Actually, and I'm just--I'm the opposite. I can kick someone else's resume out when I have the details of their experience, but my own resume? Let me tell you how it took me about 2.5 weeks to write my own resume. I'm not kidding. "Well, what do I do about..." I mean, it was really pulling yourself out of the equation and looking at yourself extrospectively. Like, not introspectively, but, you know, "How do I describe this great person that I know she is on paper and how do I get those words down to an employer that will actually help me to be able to get an interview?" And knowing the purpose of a resume, because so many people think that the purpose of a resume is to get you a job, and it's not. [laughs] The point of the resume is to get you the interview, and so so many people just put all of the information into their resumes and they just think "Okay, I'll just throw it on out there and see what happens and hope it lands."Amy: Yeah, wow. Yep, I've seen everything as a hiring manager, but probably nothing compared to what you've seen as a recruiter. [both laugh] So what's something--switching gears a little bit back to your career optimization work, what's something that surprises you about this work or that surprised you when you started it that you weren't expecting?Juanita: You know, I'll be honest, working with students. I wasn't sure how I would respond in working with students. I would say that high school students are not my forte. I always had the impression that high school students were just very disrespectful, they don't listen, and, you know, you see some things outside and what you see on social media and those types of things and you're just like "Oh, I don't want to work with those audiences," and I have gone in and--I will be honest, I have had some of the most amazing students, and what I've learned is that a lot of students are actually eager for the information, but they just have people that talk at them and not talking to them and helping them to understand the importance of the choices and decisions that they make today and how they can potentially impact tomorrow and what their future will look like. So I try to--I try to help them enjoy the process. And I didn't think I would enjoy speaking to students so much, I'll be honest, and now I do. I truly do. And I've had people that say "Well, why don't you choose whether you want to speak with adults or with students?" And honestly I can't choose. I can't choose.Amy: Well, I'm sure it makes you more effective in both camps that you have that interaction in both areas, because, you know, if you don't talk with working professionals, then you wouldn't have the insights to give the students that they need to move forward, right?Juanita: Absolutely, yeah. And if you're talking to students and they're like, "Uh, uh-uh. Who is this lady? I don't want to hear anything that she has to say." You know, it kind of keeps you engaging and it keeps you on your toes, because they will let you know if this is not something that they're feeling. They'll "Uh-uh, no," and--Amy: Yeah, I've got two of 'em in my house and they will tune you out in a hurry. [both laugh]Juanita: Yes, absolutely.Amy: But I like tha tyour surprise was a happy surprise. A lot of times when I ask that question it's like "You know, I had no idea how hard it would be," or "I had no idea, you know, how crazy people were," or whatever, but I love that your surprise was a pleasant one. That's great. So if someone's looking to get into doing this kind of work, if they want to, you know, kind of bridge that gap, that college to workplace gap, where can they start looking for resources or how might they break into this kind of work? Juanita: You know, honestly I would say a lot of it starts with relationships, you know? Building relationships and strategic partnerships. I always tell people "either you're networking or you're not working." We actually met--and I'll answer your question when you said earlier "I can't recall how we met"--I think we met on LinkedIn. And so we connected on LinkedIn, and we started talking--I think we connected over a mutual article or something, and--which is interesting, because you never know how you can make connections and extend the life of whatever you're doing. And, you know, I always tell people it's about selfless networking, not necessarily what's in it for me. It's about really reaching across the aisle and saying "What is it that I can do for you?" And being that supportive person. I think that anyone who knows me or who has been able to build a relationship with me will tell you and attest that I'm very--I try to be very selfless, and I'm--you know, I try to always ask "What can I do to help?" Because that's really what I'm about. And so first and foremost it starts with those strategic partnerships and relationships. If you have companies or corporations that's willing to sponsor you, that's a huge plus right there. That's half the battle, because you can get those sponsors that can sponsor you to go in as opposed to you having to get the organizations to pay for it themselves or the students. And I've actually had student organizations that have sponsors and have paid themselves out of their own budgets, but, you know, sometimes it--depending on what the budgetary allocations are and what your fees are, you know? And often times I will tell people--they think it's really glitzy and glamorous, but it's really a lot of hard work, you know? It's a lot more than just showing up and saying "Okay, yeah, I'm gonna make this fun and engaging," you know? And sometimes people look at it from the outside and they're like "Yes, I can do that. I want to do that," but they don't realize the work that goes into it sometimes.Amy: Yeah. You're not getting paid for the hour on stage. You're getting paid for the 95 hours of prep you put into that hour on stage, right?Juanita: Exactly. [both laugh] Amy: As an entrepreneur, how do you find support for yourself? Like, where do you go for a sense of community in the work that you do?Juanita: Part of where I go--I have a great network of professionals. I'm very actively engaged with my community. I'm actually the chair of the program committee at the Greater Houston Black Chamber [of Commerce?]. I'm a graduate of the Houston Black Leadership Institute, and I'm also involved with the current Houston Black Leadership Institute classes. I'm also a member of the Houston Area Urban League Young Professionals. I try to, you know, have really great networks and people that continue to pour into you. So you have to find out what that niche is for you and find out, you know, where can you impact the greatest? Where can you have the greatest impact? And initially, even before I was with the chamber and the HBLI I was with HAUL YP, and so I joined because they had opportunities to volunteer and give back to the community, and through HAUL YP I've been introduced to all of these other aspects of life and that have poured into me in so many different ways. And so I would say first and foremost find something to get involved in. Find something that you're passionate about and pursue that, because you never know how that can open doors of opportunity for you that you can't even imagine or that you don't even anticipate.Amy: No, that's great advice. It's so true that when you start doing what matters to you, the people that you need kind of show up, and you show up for them, and--it's almost a magic that happens. I don't know if I told you this the first time we talked, but I call it the Billie Jean lights.Juanita: [laughs] Okay.Amy: Do you remember the old Michael Jackson video? [?]Juanita: Yes, when he stands on the little thing [?]--Amy: And they light up, right? And when I started out, when I started doing what I'm doing, it was like I didn't know what the next step was, but I'd put my foot down and it would kind of--the path would start to light up, and I'd put my foot down again and the path would light up, and it was like it just kept going until those lights came so fast that it started to look like a runway, and I knew that that was the right path. But I think, you know, part of it is just, like, taking those steps at first to get the--Juanita: Yeah, absolutely. And that reminds me of Martin Luther King's quote, "Faith is taking the next step without seeing the whole staircase." You know? And so sometimes you can take that, and that was really what it was like for me, except for I didn't even see a house. I just pretty much was like "Wait, where am I stepping?" It was just like "Okay, I'm stepping over a cliff," but then it came into view as I started walking. So I will say, you know--and I tell people "Look, I'm not telling everybody to leave their jobs tomorrow. [laughs] So don't put that on me." Like, "Juanita said I could leave my job today!" [laughs] No, no. That is not--Amy: That's not Juanita's saying.Juanita: Yes, absolutely, let me be clear. But I will say that, you know, if you're willing to put the work in and if you're willing to do what's necessary, it will--it can benefit not just you. And I think your cause has to be greater than just you. It has to be more than just "Okay, I'm doing this for the money." And I'll be honest, I put a lot of sweat equity in early on, so I didn't--there were events that I did not get paid for. I did a lot of volunteering when I initially started speaking with student organizations in probably for the first, what, five or six years or so. So even when I was doing recruiting, when I was doing contractual recruiting, I was still going into organizations. I was volunteering my time, and people got to know me, and so when God called me out and I had that vision to actually start going into the training and development pieces, it was more of a seamless transition. Not effortless, but it was seemingly seamless for most people, like, looking on, because they just thought "Oh, wow. She just stopped recruiting and now she's doing training and development." But that's not how it was. I was actually putting in a lot of sweat equity, and that's the things you don't see from the background.Amy: Absolutely, absolutely. On those days when I'm not seeing results, I try to measure my progress on how many seeds did I plant today, how many seeds am I gonna plant tomorrow, and I keep planting seeds until something starts to sprout, right? And once things start sprouting you keep planting seeds because you're gonna need something to sprout tomorrow and the next day and the next.Juanita: Absolutely, absolutely. You just water it. You can't see exactly when it's growing, exactly when it takes root, you can't see exactly when those roots are extending, but eventually you will start to see the flower when it rises above the ground.Amy: Absolutely. So I would like it if you would answer--just finish the following sentence. "I feel included when ______."Juanita: I feel included when I am amongst people who are open-minded and who are open to listening to other people's perspectives or points of view. Amy: Very good. And then "When I feel included, I _______."Juanita: When I feel included, I soak everything in and I make the best of the opportunity. [laughs] I'm often times a comedian, I'll be honest. So sometimes in those moments I'm so excited, like, my excitement will sometimes make me start--like, I'll start cutting jokes and stuff, and they're like "Oh, my gosh." And so people are like "Wait, is she funny too?" Which is [?]--Amy: You get goofy.Juanita: I do. Well, yes. Professional goofy, yeah, but yeah, it is. [?]. I've actually had students that have asked me at different schools. They're like, "Are you a comedian?" No, I'm not, but I get excited when it's something that, you know, I feel included in, especially when students kind of make you feel included and show you the love, you know?Amy: Mm-hmm. I love that about when students make you feel included, because I think a lot of times students don't realize that they exist in an environment, right, they exist in a culture, and when somebody comes in, even somebody with authority or somebody from the outside, there's still a desire from that person to be included in that group, right? You aren't coming in to be other. You're coming in to have an impact, but you want to be welcomed and you want to be kind of embraced by that group, and I think that's such an important point for people to realize. It doesn't matter what group you're in as an in-group. When somebody's new or somebody's coming in, making them feel welcome will make such a difference in what you get from them and what they take away.Juanita: Yeah, absolutely agreed.Amy: Juanita, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for sharing your journey with us.Juanita: Yes, thank you for having me. I'm excited to--it was just a great experience. I'm excited to be a part of the show and that you thought about me to have me on, so.Amy: Well, of course. Thank you so much.

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! My guest today is Amy Eaton of AmyTakesPictures.com Amy is a photographer-turned-educator who teaches makers + Etsy sellers how to DIY their own gorgeous product photos. I was connected to Amy by my team member and right hand woman Laura who also works with Amy, and she kept telling me “You gotta get her on the podcast, she’s awesome!”  And you guys, I’m SO glad I did because Amy had a TON of fantastic advice for you guys to help you grow, and she’s the perfect example of someone who took a service traditionally done one on one that required her time and physical presence - and turned it into a scalable business that doesn’t require her to be there to run. Not only that - my conversation with Amy was another transformational one for me where I had the realization that I’ve been playing it small in my business and that it’s time to make some big changes… More on that later. Today we’re talking about: How Amy took her skills and created an online course to teach photography to non-techie product makers. Amy’s journey from side hustle to self employed, why she then went back to corporate and what ultimately made her go all in and take her photography business full-time. The one thing that’s more important to the success of your business than anything else. What Amy did after her business failed. Exactly how Amy built her audience and her email list. The power in knowing your numbers. Why you should ask yourself what you really want out of your business. Why to avoid focusing on what you offer, and what to focus on instead. How playing small might be holding you back, and how to start playing it big. Amy’s advice for you if you’re struggling to get traction in your side hustle. The one belief Amy had to change about herself to get where she is today. And just one more thing before we dive in - we unfortunately had a really spotty connection for our interview - but our conversation was SO GOOD I didn’t want to stop and reschedule because sometimes, you lose the magic of that first connection, you know what I mean? There is so much actionable and inspiring stuff in this interview that I hope you’ll give me a pass on the audio - I did my best to clean it up for you guys… but shocker, I’m not a professional sound engineer!! Okay, so let’s go ahead and dive into my interview with Amy Eaton of AmyTakesPictures.com My favorite quotes from Amy: “What strategy do you bring that’s unique to you that's going to transform the people you serve?” “You can create the best thing in the world but if nobody knows about it, it doesn’t matter.” “Helping people is important to my life, it feeds my soul.” “Persevere until you have nothing left and then keep going more.” So I mentioned in our intro that my conversation with Amy was another transformational one for me where I had the realization that I’ve been playing it small in my business and that it’s time to make some big changes…  And I realized that it’s finally time for me to press pause on taking one on one web design clients and focus exclusively on my signature programs, the Website Marketing Lab and the Web Designer Academy. I’ve been scared to do it, because the one on one jobs are my security blanket. They’re my steady paycheck.  But my goal from day one has always been to make 100% of my revenue from scalable sources - my courses.  And talking to Amy solidified what I’ve known for a long time… I’m not spending my time on my goal. I’m spending 80% of my time on client work, which brings in 50% of my revenue. I spend 20% of my time on marketing my own business, which brings in 50% of my revenue. Imagine what I can do if I shift how I’m spending my time to my own business? So I did it. I made the decision to stop accepting one on one clients for at least the next 6 months and focus on growing my audience and marketing my courses. It honestly feels like I made the decision to quit my day job again. I’m having all kinds of deja vu over here... But I’ve been playing small for a long time, and thanks to conversations on this show with people like Amy, I’m ready to start playing big. So stay tuned! Amy is hosting a free 5 day challenge to help makers get better product photos in just 5 days from September 23rd - 27th.  Registration for 5 Days To Better Product Photos is now open at www.amytakespictures.com/challenge.    Resources mentioned in this episode: www.amytakespictures.com The Startup Podcast: Pirate Needs Pirate Snap, Sell, Succeed Course Bio: Amy is a photographer and educator with over 10 years of experience in this wild world of chasing light and creating images. As a product photographer, she's worked with handmade and product-based sellers for several years, and now empowers makers to take their own beautiful product images through her signature program Snap, Sell, Succeed.  After side hustling (and struggling) for several years, Amy was able to finally break free from her day job and launch her online product photography courses for makers. Within two years, Amy has achieved her status as a six-figure entrepreneur and reached two major goals - knowing she'll never have to return to her day job again, and being able to replace her husband's income as well, which allowed him to leave his full-time job as well. They now work from home together, growing their business and raising their two young children. Amy's work has been featured on podcasts an publications, such as Handmade Seller Magazine, Maker Academy, Heart Soul & Hustle, Being Boss, and Happily Ever Crafter. Connect with Amy: Website: amytakespictures.com Instagram: @amy.takes.pictures Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amyeatonphotography Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/amyeatonphoto/ YouTube: www.youtube.com/amyeaton

What do staffing firms need to do today to prepare for 2019?  It's just one of the many topics we cover with staffing industry consultant Amy Bingham from Bingham Consultant Professionals.  I also ask Amy: What metrics should staffing owners be looking at when evaluating their internal team? What should the staffing industry be doing to find the next crop of young talent? What are some of the most important characteristics staffing owners and managers need if they are going to scale their business in 2019? What’s the staffing industry’s biggest threat in 2019? What’s the staffing industry’s biggest opportunity in 2019? To find out more about Amy check out http://www.binghamcp.com.

*We interview Amy a Full Time rideshare driver. *Talk about the constant issue parking in front of the Bob *Uber's new patent request for software that detects if the passenger is too drunk to ride. * We watch a video from Terry Tips:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0WZ6sOIKNI&app=desktop    this guy is hilarious. Lots of fun videos. *Instapay wasn't working for some drivers because the passengers had not paid for the ride and uber told them that they couldn't cash out. . *Much Much More!  Please email us with any questions at grrideshareadventures@gmail.com Follow us on Facebook Subscribe on Youtube Follow us on Twitter Love the show? You now have the opportunity to support the show with some great rewards by becoming a patron. Thanks for all your support!   Show Notes:   Questions for Amy: What kind of vehicle do you use for rideshare driving?   Do you like uber or lyft better?   What are some negative experiences you have had with uber/lyft?   Do you think help is readily available if needed from uber/lyft support?   Thoughts on passenger ratings and driver ratings?   Issues that you see being a female driver?   What types of rides do you do? Airport? Bar crowd? Event crowd?   Do you you ever feel unsafe driving?   Would you recommend driving for uber/lyft to other female drivers?   Do you think females receive more tips?   Thoughts on the women only rideshare company in Canada? It’s called DriveHer.   Rideshare in the news:   http://wgntv.com/2018/06/10/too-drunk-to-drive-you-may-also-be-too-drunk-to-get-into-an-uber/   Uber is apparently developing some sort of algorithm to detect if the pax is to drunk. Will Apple allow this much invasion on their platform?   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0WZ6sOIKNI&app=desktop Hilarious video!!! Terry Tips on youtube.   http://wgntv.com/2018/06/10/lyft-passenger-killed-in-logan-square-crash-driver-charged-police-say/?utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A+Trending+Content&utm_content=5b1d847304d301168ce66873&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=facebook   The driver of the lyft vehicle and the driver charged with dwi on drugs…. Lyft passenger was killed. I am curious if she was wearing a seatbelt.   Instapay not working:   Apparently uber stated that the driver had a bunch of paxs that card didn't work and so she couldn't cash out…..WTF?   Tip Time:   Steps when you get a puker:   What do you report to uber What do you do first? How to keep someone from puking.   Questions from our Local Facebook Group:   Where is the proper place to drop off at the bob?   Can I drive with a friend in the car for safety?   Can I turn on Uber and Lyft at the same time or do I need two phones?   Current Events:   https://www.thedailybeast.com/dominos-pizza-is-helping-fix-potholes-across-the-country   https://www.thedailybeast.com/anthony-bourdains-estranged-wife-posts-tribute-i-hope-you-are-having-a-good-trip-wherever-you-are   Today I learned:   https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/8pg9y2/til_phyllis_from_the_office_would_pay_bills_and/?st=JI6MB693&sh=c904ab2b   https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/8qdmya/til_that_venus_flytraps_are_native_to_north_and/?st=JIB0GHY7&sh=bebdc911

Change Creator is a platform for motivated social entrepreneurs who are ready to create solutions to the world’s problems. What would it take to produce one million new change creators per year for the next 10 years? That’s the question that Adam Force, Amy Aitman, and Keisuke Kubota of Change Creator Magazine sat down to answer. The result of that question is a new strategy. Change Creator Magazine is a multimedia platform empowering forward-thinking change creators and established enterprises to drive social progress. Their mission centers around three of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They focus on SDG 1, No Poverty; SDG 6, Clean Water and Sanitation; and SDG 7, Affordable and Clean Energy. According to Adam, “People want to make a living doing something that matters, aligning their capital to values.” Adam thinks of Change Creator Magazine as an ongoing form of mentorship. They interview social entrepreneurs and global icons to learn about their strategies, how they get their ideas, and how are they scaling. Some examples of notable figures featured in the magazine are Tony Robbins, Dale Partridge, Ariana Huffington, and Guy Kawasaki. Based on reader surveys, Change Creator Magazine is changing technology platforms, creating an improved reader experience. The magazine uses responsive text for mobile and desktop. Also based on this feedback, they are featuring more stories of every day social entrepreneurs. “There is so much more we want to offer people in to help them along their journey,” Adam says. To take on additional changes, Change Creator is launching a crowd funding campaign. This will allow them to create new educational and consulting offerings. They will be able to offer virtual summits, speaker series, and online courses. Social Entrepreneurship Quotes “They want to make a living doing something that matters to them.” “One of our key values is collaboration.” “The magazine is an ongoing form of mentorship.” “We extract these insights and we put them in the magazine.” “We’re doing the heavy lifting and saying, here are the strategies.” “Our focus is listening to our audience and giving them the interviews they can’t anywhere else.” Amy “We want to put out awesome content that has value.” Amy “The more you dig through, the more value you find.” Amy “What are we providing people to give them the outcomes they’re looking for?” “We’ve developed a crisp vision called our brand network.” “We have six new channels that we will be rolling out.” “Phase one is crowdfunding to start development of the next program.” “Our point is building a community.” Keisuke Kubota “We want to create 1,000,000 change creators a year for the next 10 years.” Amy “Really put yourself out there to build relationships.” “Don’t think that just because you put a strategy together that if it doesn’t work your done.” Social Entrepreneurship Resources: Change Creator Magazine: https://changecreatormag.com/tonyloyd Change Creator Magazine on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Change_Creator Change Creator Magazine on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/changecreator/ Change Creator Magazine on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/change_creator/ Book: Crazy Good Advice: 10 Lessons Learned from 150 Leading Social Entrepreneurs: https://tonyloyd.com/book  

Trading Block: What's going on in the market? The BBI explained. What would drive the VIX up? Interactive Brokers to Stop Options Market-Making Activities. Snap options set for strong demand on market debut. Crude oil prices fall below $50 as US stockpiles rise. Odd Block: Puts trade in ILG Inc (ILG), puts trade in SPDR S&P Oil and Gas (XES) and puts call and puts trade in SPDR S&P Oil and Gas (XOP). Strategy Block: Uncle Mike Tosaw discusses credit spreads. Mail Block: Listener questions and comments Question from C.J. Magnuson: Is Interactive Brokers basically being squeezed by pay for play? Question from Amy: What is the shortest expiration available for plain vanilla options? Around the Block/This Week in the Market: Mar 10: Unemployment, Export Prices

Today is our 2nd part to this weekend's Cabral HouseCall question and answer edition and we've got some great ones! Here are today's community questions: Ann: Recommendations on how to whiten teeth? Amy: What causes RLS (restless leg syndrome) and how do you prevent it? Jodi: I’m thinking about getting into the health field. Do you think I should go back to school to become a registered dietician or get a nutrition certification instead? I hope you enjoy the Q&A and thank you for tuning into this week's Cabral Concept! - - - Show Notes: http://StephenCabral.com/246 - - - Get Your Question Answered: http://StephenCabral.com/askcabral    

Your email list is where your true gold resides. Joining us to talk about how to grow that list through paid advertising like Facebook is the queen of social media herself, Ms. Amy Porterfield. Amy is my good friend and a true expert on the subject of paid list building, especially through the use of Facebook ads. On this episode of Youpreneur FM Amy and I talk about the best way to get started with Facebook ads, the components of your ad and whether or not you should be running your own ads. This show is so chock full of knowledge I highly recommend you get a pen and paper or your Evernote handy to take notes while you listen!Essential Learning Points From This Episode: How much time does Amy spend on Facebook every day and where does she invest it? What is the best way to use Facebook ads? What are the 3 most important pieces of your Facebook ad? How much should you pay for a lead, according to Amy? What does she spend on Facebook ads on an average day? Much, much more! Important Links & Mentions From This Episode: Amy Porterfield's website (http://www.amyporterfield.com) Online Marketing Made Easy podcast (http://www.amyporterfield.com/category/podcast/) Amy Porterfield on Twitter (http://twitter.com/amyporterfield) Episode 001 with Amy Porterfield (https://www.chrisducker.com/facebook-marketing-with-amy-porterfield/) Episode 80 with Laura Roeder (https://www.chrisducker.com/social-media-laura-roeder/) (www.youpreneuracademy.com) Thank You for Tuning In! There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose mine, and I'm grateful for that. If you enjoyed today's show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the top and bottom of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes (https://www.chrisducker.com/itunes) , they're extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally! Lastly, don’t forget to (https://www.chrisducker.com/itunes) , to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live!

Xiaohua: A teacher’s pet is someone who is greatly favored by a teacher. To become a teacher’s pet it will take a bit of work, but the results are phenomenal. When you are a teacher’s pet, the teacher is more likely to accept excuses from you, give good opportunities to you, and write positively on your evaluation. But of course everything comes with a price.While favored by a teacher, you’ll risk being hated by the entire class. 在班上老师总是会偏爱一两个学生。他们虽然会被班上的同学鄙视，但是被老师偏爱的好处也是无穷的呀~今天Round Table就来教你如何成为老师的宠儿。Yes, so we are giving you advice on how to become a teacher’s pet. But really is it worth trying to become a teacher’s pet?Mark: What we should do is what we said should be done with teaching gifts. We should all declare an interest if we have one. Were any of us the teacher’s pet? I can say that I definitely was not. XH: What about you Amy?Amy: I think I definitely was. Mark: Really?Amy: I was a total goody two shoes. I definitely sucked up to the teachers. Not on purpose, it wasjust I was usually in the gifted and talented programs and stuff. And so, I don’t know, I just had this compulsion like be good. (XH: Please people.)I could get in trouble I’d feel like terrible and I’d cry if I got in trouble. Mark: You’ve gotten red, Amy. You’re blushing. XH: Amy’s a Cancer. And as a Cancer myself, I can totally understand your feeling. Cancers don’t like to upset people. Satisfying people is their biggest wish in life. Somethinglike that. They cannot feel the same rebellion that’s in other people’s heart. They just don’t want to do that. Amy: I always wanted to be a rebel. I just couldn’t find it in my heart to do it. XH: Exactly, so that’s not your fault. But anyway, Amy, maybe you should read out all these advice on how to become a teacher’s pet. Is there anything that impressed you?Amy: Let’s see. I think asking questions, always having your hand up when the teacher said “Does anybody know the answer?” “I do! I do! I do! Call on me! Call on me!”Mark: I did that. I did that too. Amy: You did? See, maybe you were a teacher’s pet. Mark: Perhaps I was a teacher’s pet anddidn’t know it. XH: Yes, perhaps. Also you have to ask the right question. Asking questions I think is always good. The teacher encourages some class participation. But if you accidentally ask the question that the teacher doesn’t know the answer of, then it’s not very good. Amy: I don’t know. I think in the States, that’s like a sign that you’re a good student. So the teacher will be like “That’s a very good question Amy. Let me figure that out for a second. The teachers like the smart students. They like the well-behaved students. They like the students that talk to them. So I guess if you spend a lot more time with the teacher than you do with the other students, that’s teacher’s pet. Mark: I’ve just remembered a terrible thing I did to our teacher, a German teacher who was actually German. I would take CDs of these sort of German punk songs. I knew there were full of rude words. And then I’d ask her to play it, and “Could you translate it for us?”XH: What?Mark: And embarrassed her.Amy: Really?XH: That would be regarded as a challenge of authorities, and not welcomed.Mark: I think she said something that I knew it wasn’t right. I just had to accept whatever words she said it meant. Amy: See, you were a teacher’s pet. Mark: No, that’s the opposite of being a teacher’s pet. You can see that I really would not want to be a teacher’s pet. For us, it was the last thing you’d want to be. So I’m fighting against this accusation of being a teacher’s pet. Amy: But nobody wants to be the teacher’s pet. That’s like a very bad thing to be. And I think I was only the teacher’s pet because I was just like kind of a weird kid. Mark: Do you think teachers respect the teacher’s pet, or just feel sorry for them?Amy: I think they feel sorry for them. XH: I don’t think so. I think it depends on whether you acted it out naturally or whether you were being too pretentious, and trying to make too much effort. I think teachers can see that. You know, you’re kids. The teacher is like several decades older than you. So they know whether you’re pretending to be nice, or whether you’re just naturally nice. Mark: There’s a difference though. There’s a difference between being a teacher’s pet, like Amy was, or being the English monitor, like Xiaohua was, cause you were made to do it, won’t you? Xiaohua: I was made to do it. Mark: You were instructed. You didn’t volunteer for it. Xiaohua: No I didn’t. Amy: What does that mean, the English monitor? Xiaohua: The English class representative meaning I have to help the English teacher with a lot of assignment collecting and things like that. Mark: That’s fair enough. That’s not a teacher’s pet. Amy: See, if you did it voluntarily, that would be a teacher’s pet. Mark: It would be. It’s easy. It is all to do with not what you do but what your attitude is while you are doing it, whether you’ve volunteer for it. Xiaohua: I don’t think it’s a healthy attitude. What is wrong with being helpful? For example, if the teacher finishes a class and there’s a blackboard full of chalk writing, and the first one who came up and tried to wipe those will that be considered as a teacher’s pet or trying to impress the teacher? Mark: I mean I think it’s all to do with maturity and being an adult really. Cause now I totally agree with you. I mean I think if I was a teacher I think it will be great if someone volunteer to help out. This is how we function at work. Everyone helps each other out. But at school, it’s a different situation. In British school, anyway you must not be seen to be siding with the teachers or helping them. Amy: You will definitely get picked on for helping her clean the black board. Xiaohua: I think even in China, that’s true. What about helping your teacher hand out some sheets of paper or test results? Mark: I think that’s OK. Because that’s a sort of you don’t really often have a lot of choice, do you? You were given them and you have to give them out. Xiaohua: So it depends on whether you willingly want to help out. Amy: Exactly, that is the difference. Teacher’s pet or not a teacher’s pet. Xiaohua: OK. People are being punished for being a good person. That’s all.

Did you know that the alcohol that gets you drunk in a beer or a cocktail is actually the waste products of billions of dead yeast organisms? Or that most of our crops were initially grown to make alcohol and only later were actually used for food? These are just some of the crazy facts that we learn this week as we interview New York Times Best Selling author, Amy Stewart. Amy is the author of 7 books, and perhaps her most popular is the one we focus on this week, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks. This fascinating concoction of biology, chemistry, history, etymology, and mixology will make you the most popular guest at any cocktail party. Amy Stewart is the author of seven books. She has written six nonfiction books on the perils and pleasures of the natural world, including four New York Times bestsellers: The Drunken Botanist, Wicked Bugs, Wicked Plants, and Flower Confidential.  She lives in Eureka, California, with her husband Scott Brown, who is a rare book dealer. They own a bookstore calledEureka Books.  Since her first book was published in 2001, Stewart has appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition and Fresh Air, she’s been profiled in the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, and she’s been featured on CBS Sunday Morning, Good Morning America, the PBS documentary The Botany of Desire, and–believe it or not– TLC’s Cake Boss. Amy has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many other newspapers and magazines. She is the co-founder of the popular blog GardenRant. ____ "Next time you have a beer or a cocktail, just remember what you are drinking is the waste products of billions of dead yeast organisms." - Amy Stewart Quotes from Amy: What we learn in this episode: How did humans discover alcohol? How is alcohol made?  What plants and/or grains are used to make each style of alcohol? Resources: The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks http://www.amystewart.com/ @Amy_Stewart Amy's Favorite Alcohol: Strega Cocchi Americano Woodford Reserve -- This episode is brought to you by: Lynda.com: Do something good for yourself in 2015 and sign up for a FREE 10-day trial to Lynda.com by visiting Lynda.com/smartpeople. WealthFront: The automated investment service that makes it easy to invest your money the right way. Visit wealthfront.com/smartpeople to to get your first $10,000 managed for free.

“I have to say, this is the first round where I did a 95% clean load and MAN what a difference it makes. I've had literally NO hunger these first 3 VLCDs.” – AMY What is the traditional, or regular … Continue reading → The post Loading Low Carb (Clean) for the hCG Diet- What It Is and Why I Do It appeared first on The HCG Diet Plan with HCGChica.