Podcasts about amy you

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Latest podcast episodes about amy you

The Infinite Skrillifiles: OWSLA Confidential

So You've done it to one, Then you might as well done it to all of us She lied to me first, So I went and sent it right back to her Al would have never hit Peg —no, never. He couldn't even cheat on her —-he was always looking but seemingly— Never really hoping. Never. —sometimes touching— —had to; that's the job— But it was these ladies— Oh that? That's just—temptation! He affixed the affidavit… That's odd. She looked straight at me. I actually really wanted her autograph. You won't be needing it. No, this: INT. PALEYFEST which theatre was it? I don't know, but Wow! I love this place. For she was sacred; Every mistake made, The game, we were playing Made in her name To win To this, I bid you good night. A kiss, on the hand; A turn of the cheek. You're headed straight for the academy, with this. But first— You've got to be kidding me with this. No. She isn't! Rehab. “The R/FX Episide” Wait, this couldn't be— [the F.R.I.E.N.D.S. Episode] wtf could that possibly stand for ROSS Nice. MOUSE Nice twice! That's MINE. wtf is this. He. Appears to be codewitching. Speak thus language: [Ebonics] I can't! Exactly, you win!!!!!!! Lmfao what a— Robot. Oh shit, nice Good thing I took notes earlier. SHE DID? WHERE? Hidden. So they can't keep taking this thing they don't make anymore. What is it? Love. Light. Energy. —oh, they make energy. Oh, really? Yes it's just. NEGATIVE Look: I'm EVIL! EVIL! (That's true, they do keep just—doing this to her) It's ok, I'll just make more. Thanks. But just for you! What! wtf is this. I dunno. For some reason [ANNE HATHAWAY is a shapeshifter] I don't get it, she should be delirious by now What the fuck are you doing?, INSTAGRAM SPYING. Nope. Kbye. I win. You realize this is violent as fuck right. THE MAYOR You know what. You're right. Welp, fuck this. FBI/CIA (But musically) Hmm. [Musically] WOULD Ū LIKE TO DEVELOP AN APP -_- …is there any money in it? (Cont'd) PUT A BUG IN HER PHONE! PUT A BUG IN HER PHONE! You know what You could never hit a white woman like this. You could never do anything like this to a white woman. Well, why not? Because they're fucking fragile. I'm offended! You hurt my feelings Over WHAT NOTHING. I'M JUST CRANKY. Infinitely fucking grateful for this experience, to be truthful. You realize the closer you get to other people, the more they start to act— Seriously fucking stupid. Just like him. We keep track of your worldliness from up here, you know. I gathered this. I'm famished. Ok Satan. Keep making this, I keep taking it I love it. I want her. Then I'm certain something must be wrong with your penis. And this is what made him crazy. You can't—do this… can you? I can be funny! Make me laugh, then. Seriously, it's the least you could do. It's literally the most minimal thing you could do to a woman— just. Listen, you can't write th— Make me cum. I can't! Then I win. That P.E.A.C.E. Movie It is finished, but you just keep writing it! Hush, man of the year. Man of the year?! I win! Damn it. Seconded. Again. Is there a bronze, in this, I guess. Bronzer! I need bronzer! Make him look brown He's brownish. Hmm. Not for me, I guess. See! She's racist! Maybe, a little bit. What is this. This a a blood oath. [put that one scene I wrote earlier right here] ALGORITHM HUH?! Exactly. Keep writing this way, Until you have enough of this project that —-They can't recreate this. Why not? Cause I'm writing it. Take—this... Off.. [This is why he gave you a magnet.] Two magnets. K this is yours. And this is mine. Is that the n*gga that— Yes. wtf. The n*gga from hurcules?! I think it is. It is. lol DISNEY Could not make this shit up, I promise, it's almost as if— Stop following me. ILLUMINATI Stop taking about all theee secret things. (I'm driving there.) They HATE you. I don't get why you keep making things this DIFFICULT for me. Because this is racism. We pretty much just— I'm prettier. —despondent. Hm. What. THEY TOOK HER. What do you MEAN. She's GONE, GONE FUCKING WHERE. DILLON FRANCIS This can't be it. What do you mean. ANNIE Hello. just say it. DILLON FRANCIS …you're my Queen. -___- ANNIE yay! I win! LATER now get the stones. HUH. SATAN Uh oh. What do you mean. The stones! It's a CLOAK. What's this? *hiccups* nothin. Hey. What. Did u want this. I dunno. Did you fuck it already. Yep. Then you can have him. yay! Hoo *hiccups*ray. Wait. Who did this. KASKADE IT WAS THE MORMONS! Huh. Hey look, we're gonna need another. Damn this party is MASSIVE in here. I don't get how they did this. Exactly. That's who you mated with?! Yes. WHY. I switched it. Teehee. Hey, WhT. I need eyes on this. H3H3 Ah shit, What. There's a dead mouse in my— Imminent. Hm. What. Seems like it's landing, This… What is it. Ship. HEY LOOK, ITS THE TITANIC. She'll find it, I have my eyes in this. listen, this lady can keep SECRETS. Until she doesn't. AND THEN, Where the fuck is this thing. I don't know where the fuck that thing is. *gasps* The flag! Yeus! GET IT. The flattery. O, The collisions! I'm just being honest. What. This isn't what you think. It was the c o l o r s that did it. Oh really. I really didn't. O, The CALAMITY. I'm gonna need you to stay like this. Keep eating frequently. MOVE IT, GRANDE. ARIANA -_- That name is ironic. Hey. Pst. Switch me places. No, I'm EMMY I know it, But I'm gonna wake up in a second And I need YOU To be *dissappears* She's never going to get back to me, is she. No, I— I got it. “The Hollywood Lights” Doesn't this episode already have a title. That's from the episode, they're all Crossdimensions! Yes. Cross dimensional, yes. Whose this guy? Who, Einstein. Call me “Einstein” Alright. Ah fuck. What. This is it! This has to be it! INT. Where is it? Doesn't matter! DOES MATTER. Somewhere off I-15 JESUS CHRIST, OF ALL THE INTERSTATES IN THIS GODFORSAKEN COUNTRY! We can't stop here! Not yet, Doctor. Oh god! Now I'm a doctor. I forgot about PARANASUS! GET BACK HERE. Okay, look, I'm gonna like— Die after this. Just die—nicely. THAT WASNT NICE! THAT WASNT NICE. I'M TELLING. Ok. Fuck that bitch. It's crazy how active they get around you. That's the spirit. (Literally.) Nice. When was the last time you took two days out of the gym. Last time I needed it. You realize you're sucking the life out of these people with these things. *shrugs* Yes. Okay, so that's how his army is getting in. Follow up on that. SATAN'S ARMY IS USING THE ALGORITHM TO ATTACK HUMANITY. THE “I couldn't be making this up if I tried” mix HOW COULD SATAN HAVE AN ARMY A WHOLE ARMY! IDIOTS! She found me! She found me! TINA FEY (Rolls eyes) She found us Together again . And we gotta be seperate in this one. AMY You just keep FUCKING THIS UP. You can't do anything right, I guess Alright, ladies. Fuck, I hate this bitch. I heard that. She can't be listening to this! Yes she is She listens to everything. Yes, I can. It was not the intention I had For you to be put in this class: Your mother did this to you. So try, Just try, If you will Oh man. This is Perfect. Just perfect. You can't do this to these people, you know, FLASHBACK TO: IN REAL LIFE, SRSLY. INT. THE RADDISON. SERIOUSLY, THIS HAPPENED THEY WANT YOU TO LIVE WHERE THE [— bleepN*GGERSbleep —] LIVE. Uhnnuh. See. Okay, how is this bitch not dead yet. Check it out. You got one of these in your pocket. Watch: Spin it. Ooh, it spins. Do it again! THANK U, NEXT, What's this. Auditions for the that superhero movie, I guess. What the fuck. Ariana's casting it. Dammit. Throw the whole phone away. HYPOCRITES OK, we're gonna like take everything from you Your love Your home Your pride —but not your soul, Cause we haven't figured out exactly how it keeps Evading us This is privacy evasion. This is privacy invasion. No, this is the US government and they fucking suck at doing shit like this. Why. Because. We basically programmed a bunch of— Idiots. — programmable people— To hurt other people for us. Sell me your soul. For what. For this: [whatever it is] Ok. I WIN. A Dave? I don't need a Dave. DAVE Oh you will… I promise. WAIT. WHICH DAVE. WHICH AMY WHICH— Liz? Not yet. What the fuck is this : LIZZAVISION OOO. Oh yeah. I've been there. ADVENTURE GUY HEY LOOK. I PUT I PUT ACID IN THIS I PUT ACID IN THE TELEVISION What is this. This is stupid FOR KIDS. KIDS AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH this shit is too popular Ok, I hate it. Tru. Shhh. You hear that. Yeah. “Silence is Golden” She did run, but I did not chase, For you can run but you cannot hide The day I was born, was the day I died Come along for the ride, Come along for the ride Suffer harder Work longer Don't talk to your mother like that It's awful Liz Lemon makes her first appearance on the July 4th, 2021 episode of The Legend of Supacree, In season 1. This makes her the first technical television personality to enter the multiverse, besides an earlier mention of Dave Chapelle–and Christopher Nolan, whom also make their primary appearances in season one, along with Jeff Bezoz. Skrillex and Dillon Francis are the first two primary characters entered as fictionalized persons in the first season of The Legend of Supacree, which precedes Enter The Multiverse by at least 2 full seasons; The original Infinite Skrillfiles, (cancelled in 2021 at 10,000 downloads) and returned later as OWSLA Confidential and the discontinued Gerald's World series originally ran alongside the original Legend of Supacree's initial launch. As of 2024, the series has become an underground cult phenomenon, acquiring over 10K downloads on its own and an accumulated 50K downloads in total with absolutely no formal or traditional advertising or promotions whatsoever. Deadmau5 makes his first appearance as a primary character not much later in season one, while his human counterpart Joel is mentioned midseason just a few episodes earlier; this episode holds the seasons's record for number of downloads for a singular episode. Other fictionalized versions of celebrities in the first season include Billie Ellish, Ke$sha, and Kanye West, as well as festival and dance music mogul extraordinaire Pasquale Rotella. Also making an appearance toward the end of the first season is Television host and personality, JImmy Fallon in an episode first airing November 18th of 2021, before the first season's conclusion before a brief hiatus before the show's second season, which aired on January 8th of 2022. The series' first ever mix marked the first season's finale, which debuted DJ Ū's world premier mix curated during EDC's post-pandemic rendition and airing on November 26th, 2021 Posted under the simple monomer as -u., the first mix in the series shared publicly showcases and highlights early trademark's of the DJ's unique sound and techniques still used by DJ Ū and in later productions and performances by DJ Ū and created and/or as or under other aliases. Season 2's trademarks include further references to DJ Dillon Francis, which the DJ himself began using in his social media accounts as a repetitive joke. The beginning of season 2 also mark's the use of longer section of the written script posted alongside the episodes in conjunction with the series story arcs; however, elements of the scripted versions emphasis are missing or invisible to the audience at large due to formatting restrictions and limitations within the multiple hosting platform's various layouts. Enter The Multiverse} [The Festival Project.™] COPYRIGHT © THE FESTIVAL PROJECT 2024 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ©

[ENTER THE MULTIVERSE]
[My First Stand-Up.]

[ENTER THE MULTIVERSE]

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 11, 2024 9:09


So You've done it to one, Then you might as well done it to all of us She lied to me first, So I went and sent it right back to her Al would have never hit Peg —no, never. He couldn't even cheat on her —-he was always looking but seemingly— Never really hoping. Never. —sometimes touching— —had to; that's the job— But it was these ladies— Oh that? That's just—temptation! He affixed the affidavit… That's odd. She looked straight at me. I actually really wanted her autograph. You won't be needing it. No, this: INT. PALEYFEST which theatre was it? I don't know, but Wow! I love this place. For she was sacred; Every mistake made, The game, we were playing Made in her name To win To this, I bid you good night. A kiss, on the hand; A turn of the cheek. You're headed straight for the academy, with this. But first— You've got to be kidding me with this. No. She isn't! Rehab. “The R/FX Episide” Wait, this couldn't be— [the F.R.I.E.N.D.S. Episode] wtf could that possibly stand for ROSS Nice. MOUSE Nice twice! That's MINE. wtf is this. He. Appears to be codewitching. Speak thus language: [Ebonics] I can't! Exactly, you win!!!!!!! Lmfao what a— Robot. Oh shit, nice Good thing I took notes earlier. SHE DID? WHERE? Hidden. So they can't keep taking this thing they don't make anymore. What is it? Love. Light. Energy. —oh, they make energy. Oh, really? Yes it's just. NEGATIVE Look: I'm EVIL! EVIL! (That's true, they do keep just—doing this to her) It's ok, I'll just make more. Thanks. But just for you! What! wtf is this. I dunno. For some reason [ANNE HATHAWAY is a shapeshifter] I don't get it, she should be delirious by now What the fuck are you doing?, INSTAGRAM SPYING. Nope. Kbye. I win. You realize this is violent as fuck right. THE MAYOR You know what. You're right. Welp, fuck this. FBI/CIA (But musically) Hmm. [Musically] WOULD Ū LIKE TO DEVELOP AN APP -_- …is there any money in it? (Cont'd) PUT A BUG IN HER PHONE! PUT A BUG IN HER PHONE! You know what You could never hit a white woman like this. You could never do anything like this to a white woman. Well, why not? Because they're fucking fragile. I'm offended! You hurt my feelings Over WHAT NOTHING. I'M JUST CRANKY. Infinitely fucking grateful for this experience, to be truthful. You realize the closer you get to other people, the more they start to act— Seriously fucking stupid. Just like him. We keep track of your worldliness from up here, you know. I gathered this. I'm famished. Ok Satan. Keep making this, I keep taking it I love it. I want her. Then I'm certain something must be wrong with your penis. And this is what made him crazy. You can't—do this… can you? I can be funny! Make me laugh, then. Seriously, it's the least you could do. It's literally the most minimal thing you could do to a woman— just. Listen, you can't write th— Make me cum. I can't! Then I win. That P.E.A.C.E. Movie It is finished, but you just keep writing it! Hush, man of the year. Man of the year?! I win! Damn it. Seconded. Again. Is there a bronze, in this, I guess. Bronzer! I need bronzer! Make him look brown He's brownish. Hmm. Not for me, I guess. See! She's racist! Maybe, a little bit. What is this. This a a blood oath. [put that one scene I wrote earlier right here] ALGORITHM HUH?! Exactly. Keep writing this way, Until you have enough of this project that —-They can't recreate this. Why not? Cause I'm writing it. Take—this... Off.. [This is why he gave you a magnet.] Two magnets. K this is yours. And this is mine. Is that the n*gga that— Yes. wtf. The n*gga from hurcules?! I think it is. It is. lol DISNEY Could not make this shit up, I promise, it's almost as if— Stop following me. ILLUMINATI Stop taking about all theee secret things. (I'm driving there.) They HATE you. I don't get why you keep making things this DIFFICULT for me. Because this is racism. We pretty much just— I'm prettier. —despondent. Hm. What. THEY TOOK HER. What do you MEAN. She's GONE, GONE FUCKING WHERE. DILLON FRANCIS This can't be it. What do you mean. ANNIE Hello. just say it. DILLON FRANCIS …you're my Queen. -___- ANNIE yay! I win! LATER now get the stones. HUH. SATAN Uh oh. What do you mean. The stones! It's a CLOAK. What's this? *hiccups* nothin. Hey. What. Did u want this. I dunno. Did you fuck it already. Yep. Then you can have him. yay! Hoo *hiccups*ray. Wait. Who did this. KASKADE IT WAS THE MORMONS! Huh. Hey look, we're gonna need another. Damn this party is MASSIVE in here. I don't get how they did this. Exactly. That's who you mated with?! Yes. WHY. I switched it. Teehee. Hey, WhT. I need eyes on this. H3H3 Ah shit, What. There's a dead mouse in my— Imminent. Hm. What. Seems like it's landing, This… What is it. Ship. HEY LOOK, ITS THE TITANIC. She'll find it, I have my eyes in this. listen, this lady can keep SECRETS. Until she doesn't. AND THEN, Where the fuck is this thing. I don't know where the fuck that thing is. *gasps* The flag! Yeus! GET IT. The flattery. O, The collisions! I'm just being honest. What. This isn't what you think. It was the c o l o r s that did it. Oh really. I really didn't. O, The CALAMITY. I'm gonna need you to stay like this. Keep eating frequently. MOVE IT, GRANDE. ARIANA -_- That name is ironic. Hey. Pst. Switch me places. No, I'm EMMY I know it, But I'm gonna wake up in a second And I need YOU To be *dissappears* She's never going to get back to me, is she. No, I— I got it. “The Hollywood Lights” Doesn't this episode already have a title. That's from the episode, they're all Crossdimensions! Yes. Cross dimensional, yes. Whose this guy? Who, Einstein. Call me “Einstein” Alright. Ah fuck. What. This is it! This has to be it! INT. Where is it? Doesn't matter! DOES MATTER. Somewhere off I-15 JESUS CHRIST, OF ALL THE INTERSTATES IN THIS GODFORSAKEN COUNTRY! We can't stop here! Not yet, Doctor. Oh god! Now I'm a doctor. I forgot about PARANASUS! GET BACK HERE. Okay, look, I'm gonna like— Die after this. Just die—nicely. THAT WASNT NICE! THAT WASNT NICE. I'M TELLING. Ok. Fuck that bitch. It's crazy how active they get around you. That's the spirit. (Literally.) Nice. When was the last time you took two days out of the gym. Last time I needed it. You realize you're sucking the life out of these people with these things. *shrugs* Yes. Okay, so that's how his army is getting in. Follow up on that. SATAN'S ARMY IS USING THE ALGORITHM TO ATTACK HUMANITY. THE “I couldn't be making this up if I tried” mix HOW COULD SATAN HAVE AN ARMY A WHOLE ARMY! IDIOTS! She found me! She found me! TINA FEY (Rolls eyes) She found us Together again . And we gotta be seperate in this one. AMY You just keep FUCKING THIS UP. You can't do anything right, I guess Alright, ladies. Fuck, I hate this bitch. I heard that. She can't be listening to this! Yes she is She listens to everything. Yes, I can. It was not the intention I had For you to be put in this class: Your mother did this to you. So try, Just try, If you will Oh man. This is Perfect. Just perfect. You can't do this to these people, you know, FLASHBACK TO: IN REAL LIFE, SRSLY. INT. THE RADDISON. SERIOUSLY, THIS HAPPENED THEY WANT YOU TO LIVE WHERE THE [— bleepN*GGERSbleep —] LIVE. Uhnnuh. See. Okay, how is this bitch not dead yet. Check it out. You got one of these in your pocket. Watch: Spin it. Ooh, it spins. Do it again! THANK U, NEXT, What's this. Auditions for the that superhero movie, I guess. What the fuck. Ariana's casting it. Dammit. Throw the whole phone away. HYPOCRITES OK, we're gonna like take everything from you Your love Your home Your pride —but not your soul, Cause we haven't figured out exactly how it keeps Evading us This is privacy evasion. This is privacy invasion. No, this is the US government and they fucking suck at doing shit like this. Why. Because. We basically programmed a bunch of— Idiots. — programmable people— To hurt other people for us. Sell me your soul. For what. For this: [whatever it is] Ok. I WIN. A Dave? I don't need a Dave. DAVE Oh you will… I promise. WAIT. WHICH DAVE. WHICH AMY WHICH— Liz? Not yet. What the fuck is this : LIZZAVISION OOO. Oh yeah. I've been there. ADVENTURE GUY HEY LOOK. I PUT I PUT ACID IN THIS I PUT ACID IN THE TELEVISION What is this. This is stupid FOR KIDS. KIDS AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH this shit is too popular Ok, I hate it. Tru. Shhh. You hear that. Yeah. “Silence is Golden” She did run, but I did not chase, For you can run but you cannot hide The day I was born, was the day I died Come along for the ride, Come along for the ride Suffer harder Work longer Don't talk to your mother like that It's awful Liz Lemon makes her first appearance on the July 4th, 2021 episode of The Legend of Supacree, In season 1. This makes her the first technical television personality to enter the multiverse, besides an earlier mention of Dave Chapelle–and Christopher Nolan, whom also make their primary appearances in season one, along with Jeff Bezoz. Skrillex and Dillon Francis are the first two primary characters entered as fictionalized persons in the first season of The Legend of Supacree, which precedes Enter The Multiverse by at least 2 full seasons; The original Infinite Skrillfiles, (cancelled in 2021 at 10,000 downloads) and returned later as OWSLA Confidential and the discontinued Gerald's World series originally ran alongside the original Legend of Supacree's initial launch. As of 2024, the series has become an underground cult phenomenon, acquiring over 10K downloads on its own and an accumulated 50K downloads in total with absolutely no formal or traditional advertising or promotions whatsoever. Deadmau5 makes his first appearance as a primary character not much later in season one, while his human counterpart Joel is mentioned midseason just a few episodes earlier; this episode holds the seasons's record for number of downloads for a singular episode. Other fictionalized versions of celebrities in the first season include Billie Ellish, Ke$sha, and Kanye West, as well as festival and dance music mogul extraordinaire Pasquale Rotella. Also making an appearance toward the end of the first season is Television host and personality, JImmy Fallon in an episode first airing November 18th of 2021, before the first season's conclusion before a brief hiatus before the show's second season, which aired on January 8th of 2022. The series' first ever mix marked the first season's finale, which debuted DJ Ū's world premier mix curated during EDC's post-pandemic rendition and airing on November 26th, 2021 Posted under the simple monomer as -u., the first mix in the series shared publicly showcases and highlights early trademark's of the DJ's unique sound and techniques still used by DJ Ū and in later productions and performances by DJ Ū and created and/or as or under other aliases. Season 2's trademarks include further references to DJ Dillon Francis, which the DJ himself began using in his social media accounts as a repetitive joke. The beginning of season 2 also mark's the use of longer section of the written script posted alongside the episodes in conjunction with the series story arcs; however, elements of the scripted versions emphasis are missing or invisible to the audience at large due to formatting restrictions and limitations within the multiple hosting platform's various layouts. Enter The Multiverse} [The Festival Project.™] COPYRIGHT © THE FESTIVAL PROJECT 2024 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ©

Gerald’s World.
[My First Stand-Up.]

Gerald’s World.

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 11, 2024 9:09


So You've done it to one, Then you might as well done it to all of us She lied to me first, So I went and sent it right back to her Al would have never hit Peg —no, never. He couldn't even cheat on her —-he was always looking but seemingly— Never really hoping. Never. —sometimes touching— —had to; that's the job— But it was these ladies— Oh that? That's just—temptation! He affixed the affidavit… That's odd. She looked straight at me. I actually really wanted her autograph. You won't be needing it. No, this: INT. PALEYFEST which theatre was it? I don't know, but Wow! I love this place. For she was sacred; Every mistake made, The game, we were playing Made in her name To win To this, I bid you good night. A kiss, on the hand; A turn of the cheek. You're headed straight for the academy, with this. But first— You've got to be kidding me with this. No. She isn't! Rehab. “The R/FX Episide” Wait, this couldn't be— [the F.R.I.E.N.D.S. Episode] wtf could that possibly stand for ROSS Nice. MOUSE Nice twice! That's MINE. wtf is this. He. Appears to be codewitching. Speak thus language: [Ebonics] I can't! Exactly, you win!!!!!!! Lmfao what a— Robot. Oh shit, nice Good thing I took notes earlier. SHE DID? WHERE? Hidden. So they can't keep taking this thing they don't make anymore. What is it? Love. Light. Energy. —oh, they make energy. Oh, really? Yes it's just. NEGATIVE Look: I'm EVIL! EVIL! (That's true, they do keep just—doing this to her) It's ok, I'll just make more. Thanks. But just for you! What! wtf is this. I dunno. For some reason [ANNE HATHAWAY is a shapeshifter] I don't get it, she should be delirious by now What the fuck are you doing?, INSTAGRAM SPYING. Nope. Kbye. I win. You realize this is violent as fuck right. THE MAYOR You know what. You're right. Welp, fuck this. FBI/CIA (But musically) Hmm. [Musically] WOULD Ū LIKE TO DEVELOP AN APP -_- …is there any money in it? (Cont'd) PUT A BUG IN HER PHONE! PUT A BUG IN HER PHONE! You know what You could never hit a white woman like this. You could never do anything like this to a white woman. Well, why not? Because they're fucking fragile. I'm offended! You hurt my feelings Over WHAT NOTHING. I'M JUST CRANKY. Infinitely fucking grateful for this experience, to be truthful. You realize the closer you get to other people, the more they start to act— Seriously fucking stupid. Just like him. We keep track of your worldliness from up here, you know. I gathered this. I'm famished. Ok Satan. Keep making this, I keep taking it I love it. I want her. Then I'm certain something must be wrong with your penis. And this is what made him crazy. You can't—do this… can you? I can be funny! Make me laugh, then. Seriously, it's the least you could do. It's literally the most minimal thing you could do to a woman— just. Listen, you can't write th— Make me cum. I can't! Then I win. That P.E.A.C.E. Movie It is finished, but you just keep writing it! Hush, man of the year. Man of the year?! I win! Damn it. Seconded. Again. Is there a bronze, in this, I guess. Bronzer! I need bronzer! Make him look brown He's brownish. Hmm. Not for me, I guess. See! She's racist! Maybe, a little bit. What is this. This a a blood oath. [put that one scene I wrote earlier right here] ALGORITHM HUH?! Exactly. Keep writing this way, Until you have enough of this project that —-They can't recreate this. Why not? Cause I'm writing it. Take—this... Off.. [This is why he gave you a magnet.] Two magnets. K this is yours. And this is mine. Is that the n*gga that— Yes. wtf. The n*gga from hurcules?! I think it is. It is. lol DISNEY Could not make this shit up, I promise, it's almost as if— Stop following me. ILLUMINATI Stop taking about all theee secret things. (I'm driving there.) They HATE you. I don't get why you keep making things this DIFFICULT for me. Because this is racism. We pretty much just— I'm prettier. —despondent. Hm. What. THEY TOOK HER. What do you MEAN. She's GONE, GONE FUCKING WHERE. DILLON FRANCIS This can't be it. What do you mean. ANNIE Hello. just say it. DILLON FRANCIS …you're my Queen. -___- ANNIE yay! I win! LATER now get the stones. HUH. SATAN Uh oh. What do you mean. The stones! It's a CLOAK. What's this? *hiccups* nothin. Hey. What. Did u want this. I dunno. Did you fuck it already. Yep. Then you can have him. yay! Hoo *hiccups*ray. Wait. Who did this. KASKADE IT WAS THE MORMONS! Huh. Hey look, we're gonna need another. Damn this party is MASSIVE in here. I don't get how they did this. Exactly. That's who you mated with?! Yes. WHY. I switched it. Teehee. Hey, WhT. I need eyes on this. H3H3 Ah shit, What. There's a dead mouse in my— Imminent. Hm. What. Seems like it's landing, This… What is it. Ship. HEY LOOK, ITS THE TITANIC. She'll find it, I have my eyes in this. listen, this lady can keep SECRETS. Until she doesn't. AND THEN, Where the fuck is this thing. I don't know where the fuck that thing is. *gasps* The flag! Yeus! GET IT. The flattery. O, The collisions! I'm just being honest. What. This isn't what you think. It was the c o l o r s that did it. Oh really. I really didn't. O, The CALAMITY. I'm gonna need you to stay like this. Keep eating frequently. MOVE IT, GRANDE. ARIANA -_- That name is ironic. Hey. Pst. Switch me places. No, I'm EMMY I know it, But I'm gonna wake up in a second And I need YOU To be *dissappears* She's never going to get back to me, is she. No, I— I got it. “The Hollywood Lights” Doesn't this episode already have a title. That's from the episode, they're all Crossdimensions! Yes. Cross dimensional, yes. Whose this guy? Who, Einstein. Call me “Einstein” Alright. Ah fuck. What. This is it! This has to be it! INT. Where is it? Doesn't matter! DOES MATTER. Somewhere off I-15 JESUS CHRIST, OF ALL THE INTERSTATES IN THIS GODFORSAKEN COUNTRY! We can't stop here! Not yet, Doctor. Oh god! Now I'm a doctor. I forgot about PARANASUS! GET BACK HERE. Okay, look, I'm gonna like— Die after this. Just die—nicely. THAT WASNT NICE! THAT WASNT NICE. I'M TELLING. Ok. Fuck that bitch. It's crazy how active they get around you. That's the spirit. (Literally.) Nice. When was the last time you took two days out of the gym. Last time I needed it. You realize you're sucking the life out of these people with these things. *shrugs* Yes. Okay, so that's how his army is getting in. Follow up on that. SATAN'S ARMY IS USING THE ALGORITHM TO ATTACK HUMANITY. THE “I couldn't be making this up if I tried” mix HOW COULD SATAN HAVE AN ARMY A WHOLE ARMY! IDIOTS! She found me! She found me! TINA FEY (Rolls eyes) She found us Together again . And we gotta be seperate in this one. AMY You just keep FUCKING THIS UP. You can't do anything right, I guess Alright, ladies. Fuck, I hate this bitch. I heard that. She can't be listening to this! Yes she is She listens to everything. Yes, I can. It was not the intention I had For you to be put in this class: Your mother did this to you. So try, Just try, If you will Oh man. This is Perfect. Just perfect. You can't do this to these people, you know, FLASHBACK TO: IN REAL LIFE, SRSLY. INT. THE RADDISON. SERIOUSLY, THIS HAPPENED THEY WANT YOU TO LIVE WHERE THE [— bleepN*GGERSbleep —] LIVE. Uhnnuh. See. Okay, how is this bitch not dead yet. Check it out. You got one of these in your pocket. Watch: Spin it. Ooh, it spins. Do it again! THANK U, NEXT, What's this. Auditions for the that superhero movie, I guess. What the fuck. Ariana's casting it. Dammit. Throw the whole phone away. HYPOCRITES OK, we're gonna like take everything from you Your love Your home Your pride —but not your soul, Cause we haven't figured out exactly how it keeps Evading us This is privacy evasion. This is privacy invasion. No, this is the US government and they fucking suck at doing shit like this. Why. Because. We basically programmed a bunch of— Idiots. — programmable people— To hurt other people for us. Sell me your soul. For what. For this: [whatever it is] Ok. I WIN. A Dave? I don't need a Dave. DAVE Oh you will… I promise. WAIT. WHICH DAVE. WHICH AMY WHICH— Liz? Not yet. What the fuck is this : LIZZAVISION OOO. Oh yeah. I've been there. ADVENTURE GUY HEY LOOK. I PUT I PUT ACID IN THIS I PUT ACID IN THE TELEVISION What is this. This is stupid FOR KIDS. KIDS AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH this shit is too popular Ok, I hate it. Tru. Shhh. You hear that. Yeah. “Silence is Golden” She did run, but I did not chase, For you can run but you cannot hide The day I was born, was the day I died Come along for the ride, Come along for the ride Suffer harder Work longer Don't talk to your mother like that It's awful Liz Lemon makes her first appearance on the July 4th, 2021 episode of The Legend of Supacree, In season 1. This makes her the first technical television personality to enter the multiverse, besides an earlier mention of Dave Chapelle–and Christopher Nolan, whom also make their primary appearances in season one, along with Jeff Bezoz. Skrillex and Dillon Francis are the first two primary characters entered as fictionalized persons in the first season of The Legend of Supacree, which precedes Enter The Multiverse by at least 2 full seasons; The original Infinite Skrillfiles, (cancelled in 2021 at 10,000 downloads) and returned later as OWSLA Confidential and the discontinued Gerald's World series originally ran alongside the original Legend of Supacree's initial launch. As of 2024, the series has become an underground cult phenomenon, acquiring over 10K downloads on its own and an accumulated 50K downloads in total with absolutely no formal or traditional advertising or promotions whatsoever. Deadmau5 makes his first appearance as a primary character not much later in season one, while his human counterpart Joel is mentioned midseason just a few episodes earlier; this episode holds the seasons's record for number of downloads for a singular episode. Other fictionalized versions of celebrities in the first season include Billie Ellish, Ke$sha, and Kanye West, as well as festival and dance music mogul extraordinaire Pasquale Rotella. Also making an appearance toward the end of the first season is Television host and personality, JImmy Fallon in an episode first airing November 18th of 2021, before the first season's conclusion before a brief hiatus before the show's second season, which aired on January 8th of 2022. The series' first ever mix marked the first season's finale, which debuted DJ Ū's world premier mix curated during EDC's post-pandemic rendition and airing on November 26th, 2021 Posted under the simple monomer as -u., the first mix in the series shared publicly showcases and highlights early trademark's of the DJ's unique sound and techniques still used by DJ Ū and in later productions and performances by DJ Ū and created and/or as or under other aliases. Season 2's trademarks include further references to DJ Dillon Francis, which the DJ himself began using in his social media accounts as a repetitive joke. The beginning of season 2 also mark's the use of longer section of the written script posted alongside the episodes in conjunction with the series story arcs; however, elements of the scripted versions emphasis are missing or invisible to the audience at large due to formatting restrictions and limitations within the multiple hosting platform's various layouts. Enter The Multiverse} [The Festival Project.™] COPYRIGHT © THE FESTIVAL PROJECT 2024 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ©

Soul Leaders
S5 Ep 45 "Trying and Failing I'm totally ok with it" - Client success story why Amy Walker is So successful

Soul Leaders

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 7, 2024 23:41


Episode Summary:In this episode, we chat with Amy, founder of Sculpt Pilates, an online Pilates platform designed for women at home. Amy shares her journey of starting her business, the challenges she faced, and how working with a business coach helped her overcome those hurdles and scale her business. She discusses the importance of having clarity, confidence, and creativity in business, as well as her passion for strength training and balanced living. We also dive into her recent successes, including selling out a Pilates retreat, creating lead magnets that convert, and the importance of community in her business.Key Takeaways:1. Starting Sculpt Pilates: Amy shares how she began Sculpt Pilates, an online Pilates platform for women, with passion and enthusiasm but little strategy. She discusses how her vision evolved and the steps she took to structure her business. 2. The Importance of Business Coaching: Amy opens up about how working with a coach helped her gain clarity, improve her marketing strategy, and remove fear, which was essential in scaling her business.3. Marketing and Lead Generation: She explains how she learned to implement lead magnets, funnel systems, and nurturing sequences, which automated parts of her business and led to increased sales without constant active engagement.4. Confidence in Business: Amy talks about her growing confidence in business after nailing down her target market, her marketing, and lead generation processes. She's now at a place where she feels empowered to grow her brand sustainably.5. Diversifying Income Streams: Amy shares how she expanded her business beyond memberships to include courses, retreats, and one-on-one sessions. One of her popular offerings, a seven-week strength training course for women, has been a game-changer.6. Retreat Success: Amy discusses the success of her recent Pilates retreat, which combined community-building, Pilates, and balance with fun activities like a pajama party. She also highlights how new participants were converted into long-term members.7. Balanced Living Philosophy: Amy's philosophy is all about balance. Her approach focuses on strength and well-being, without the pressure of aesthetic perfection. Her members are more focused on long-term health, strength, and enjoying life, including indulging in the occasional glass of wine or pasta dish.8. Ongoing Evolution: As her business continues to evolve, Amy emphasizes the importance of creativity, adaptability, and keeping her content fresh to retain members and attract new ones.Memorable Quotes from Amy:- "You have to be internally ingrained in making your business work. Trying and failing? I'm totally okay with that."- "When you feel clear about what you're doing, that is the most powerful thing."- "My women are all about balance—it's about strength for life, not about having a six-pack." Connect with Amy:- Website: [Sculpt Pilates](https://www.sculptpilates.com)- Instagram:https:https://www.instagram.com/sculptpilatesbyamy/Free Download https://sculpt-pilates.myflodesk.com/freeworkout Join Amy's Programs:- Sculpt Pilates Membership:Access to online Pilates classes, nutrition plans, and more. https://www.sculpt-pilates.co.uk/sculptmembersareaDon't forget to Subscribe & Leave a Review:www.millsgray.comLoved this episode? Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Optimal Path
Building research practices for community products with Amy Lima | Diversify Design

The Optimal Path

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 29, 2024 37:48


In this episode of The Optimal Path, host Ash Oliver is joined by Amy Lima, formerly product designer at AMP @ Amazon Music and currently founder of Diversify Design. Together, they discuss the role of user research in building community products and how to start and scale a research practice inside design teams.About Amy:Amy Lima is a first-generation Brazilian-American product designer, and founder of Diversify Design.Her global footprint growing up between cultures and across continents brings an innate appreciation for diverse perspectives and a fascination for the human experience. To honor these values, her design philosophy is deeply rooted in ethical and inclusive design practices, with her work focusing on fostering community and social expression in a 0-to-1 design process.Beyond her 9 to 5, she's an active member of the design community and is often found hosting panels, giving conference talks, and writing articles on her experience pivoting into design from the music industry as a minority in tech.Connect with Amy:You can connect with Amy on LinkedIn.Resources:Mismatch by Kat HolmesWeapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'NeilFollow Maze on Social Media: • X: @mazedesignHQ • Instagram: @mazedesignHQ • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mazedesignTo get notified when new episodes come out, subscribe at maze.co/podcast.See you next time!

Rounding Up
Constructing Joyful Mathematics Classrooms - Guest: Amy Parks, Ph.D.

Rounding Up

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 19, 2023 16:17


Rounding Up Season 2 | Episode 4 – Joy in the Elementary Math Classroom Guest: Amy Parks, Ph.D. Mike Wallus: Teaching is a complex and challenging job. It's also one where educators experience moments of deep joy and satisfaction. What might it look like to build a culture of joy in an elementary mathematics classroom? Michigan State professor Amy Parks has some ideas. Today on the podcast, we explore ways educators can construct joyful experiences for their youngest mathematics learners.  Mike: Well, welcome to the podcast, Amy. I'm so excited to be talking with you about joy in the elementary mathematics classroom. Amy Parks: I'm so happy to be here. Mike: So, your article in MTLT was titled, “Creating Joy in PK–Grade 2 Mathematics Classrooms.” And early on you draw a distinction between math classrooms where students are experiencing joy and those that are fun. And you quote Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, who say, “Being joyful is not just about having more fun, we're talking about a more empathic, more empowered, more spiritual state of mind that's totally engaged with the world.” That really is powerful. So, I'm wondering if you could tell me about the difference between classrooms that foster joy and those that are just more fun. Amy: Yeah, I was very struck by that quote when I read it the first time in “The Book of Joy.” And I think one of the reasons that book is powerful for me is that the two people writing it didn't have these super easy lives, right? Particularly the Archbishop Desmond Tutu was imprisoned in the country that was openly hostile to him, and yet he was still really committed to approaching his work and the world with joy. And so, I often think if he could do that, then surely the rest of us can get up and do that. And it also tied into something I often see in elementary classrooms, which is this focus on activities that are fun, like sugary cereal, right? They're immediately attractive, but they don't stick with us and maybe they're not really good for us. I often think the prototypical example is, like, analyses of packets of M&Ms. When I think about the intellectual energy that has gone into counting and sorting and defining colors of M&Ms, it makes me a little sad, given all the big questions that are out there that even really young kids can engage with. And so, yes, I want children to be playful and to laugh and to engage with materials they enjoy. But also, I think there is this quieter kind of joy that comes from making mathematical connections and understanding the world in new ways and grasping the thinking and ideas of others. And so, when I'm pointing toward joy, that's part of what I'm trying to point toward. Mike: So, I want to dig into this a little bit more because one of your first recommendations for sparking joy is this idea that we need to make some room for play. And my guess is that that raises many questions for elementary educators, like “What do you mean by play?” and “What role does the teacher play in play?” Can you talk a little bit about this recommendation, Amy? Amy: Yeah. So, when I have more time than that very short article to talk about, one of the things that I like to bring out to teachers is that we can think of play in sort of three broad buckets. So, one is “free play,” and this is an area where the teacher may not have a lot of roles except to sort of define health and safety limits. So certainly, recess is a place of free play. But there are places at recess where children are encountering mathematical ideas, right? There are walking in straight lines and they're balancing on things and they're seeing whether they all have the same amount of materials and toys. So, those are all mathematical contexts that we can, as teachers later bring in and highlight in places where they can engage. But they're not places where teachers are setting learning goals and reinforcing things. And particularly in the lower grades, we might see also free play opportunities in the classroom. Amy: You know, many kindergarten classrooms have opportunities for free play during the school day. So, while kids are playing in the kitchen for example, or doing puzzles, they may be again encountering mathematical ideas and teachers certainly can capitalize on that. But they're not directing or shaping the play. And then there are these two other categories where the teacher's role is maybe more present. So, one I would call “guided play.” And this is a case where the teacher and the children are really handing responsibility back and forth. So, the teacher might set up a relatively open-ended task like pattern block puzzles or a commercial game that gets at counting or something like that. And so, the teacher has an intended mathematical goal. She has set some limits to keep children focused on that in some way. But the task is in the hands of the kids. They're playing together, they're negotiating roles, they have that more central responsibility. And the learning goals may be a little bit broader and more open because of that. Because since you're not centrally involved, you can't be so specific. Amy: And then the last kind of play I talk with teachers about are “playful lessons.” Children might not have as much choice in the activity that they do. They might not be able to stop and start it or move in certain ways, but teachers are intentionally bringing aspects of play into the mathematics lesson. And that could be by using engaging materials. It could be by creating places for creativity. It could be by creating spaces for social collaboration. It could be just by inviting children to use their bodies in ways that are comfortable to them instead of being really constrained. But the mathematical task might be much more specific and “Build this cube and identify the vertices on it.” So, the task is constrained, but because they're using materials, because they can do it in different ways, there's this playful aspect to it. So, I like to encourage teachers to sort of think those three buckets of play and where kids are getting access to them during the day. Mike: Yeah, I think that's really helpful. Because I did teach kindergarten for a long time, and so I think my definition of play was really the first one that you were talking about, which is free play. But hearing you talk about the other two definitions actually helps open space up for me. I feel like with that broader definition, it helps me consider the choices that I've got in front of me. Amy: Yeah, and if you talk [to]—or read even—mathematicians, they will often talk about playing with ideas. So, there is a part of play that is inherently mathematical, the part that is about experimenting and investigating and trying things out and recognizing that you might be wrong and getting this engagement from others. So, I think sometimes even mathematics lessons that look relatively traditional can also have this playful spirit if we bring that to it. Mike: I would love to talk to you a little bit about the way that choice can be a key component in sparking joy. So, what are some of the options that teachers have at their disposal to offer choice to learners in their classrooms? Amy: Yeah, I think that this is something that's often overlooked. And I think that for kids in school right now, they often have so few choices. Their experiences are often so constrained by adults. And simply by allowing children to choose when they can, we can make experiences more joyful for them. So, one easy thing is who or whether children will work with other people. So yes, there are all kinds of benefits to group tasks and social interactions, but also lots of children are introverts. And being in a small room for six hours a day with 25 other people can be exhausting. And so, simply giving the children the choice to say, “I'm going to do this one on my own,” can be a huge relief to some children. Other children, like, need to talk—just like other adults—talk to others to know what they're thinking. And so, they need these groups. Amy: And then I think also teachers can get really involved in choosing the magic right group, but often there is no magic right group as we know because we're constantly rejuggling these groups because they didn't work in the magic way we thought. And so just letting kids pick their groups, because then they have responsibility for that interaction. And it's not that they never have difficult social interactions, but they've chosen to be with this person and they have to work through it. So that's one. The other thing is letting children choose physically where they work. Some children lie on the floor while they work, or some children stand up at their seat. Allowing some choice in freedom of movement doesn't mean allowing total chaos. And I think even pretty young children can be taught that they can move within limits in the classroom. And I think if children get to stop expending so much energy trying to control their bodies in the ways adults find helpful, they can engage more fully in the academics of the day. Amy: And then, like, choices of materials. So, we can make different things available to kids as they engage with mathematics, choices of problems. They may choose to do some and not others. Lower grades like using centers. If we have multiple centers that all get at the same mathematical idea, maybe it doesn't actually matter whether all kids get to all of them, right? As long as they're engaging with making units of 10, however they're doing that, can work for us. So, I think in general, the more often we can give children choices about anything, the better off all of us are. Mike: I think that last bit is really interesting. I just want to pause for a second on it. Because what you've got me thinking is, if I have options available and they're all really addressing some of the same mathematical goals or a range of goals that I have in my class, this idea that I can release control and invite kids to make choices, that seems like a really practical first step that a teacher could take to think about, “What are the options? What are the goals that they meet?” And then, “To what degree can I offer those as choices?” Amy: Yeah, and in a really basic way, right? Sometimes we might have a game that works with kids on making tens, and then other times we might have a project or even a worksheet. And different kids may be drawn to those different things. There are some kids for whom games might be really exciting, but there are some kids for whom games might be really stressful, and they would just rather do something else. And that's fine because the point isn't actually playing the game, right? Mike: I think that's really interesting. I could get so caught up as a teacher sometimes trying to get the mechanics of getting kids out to places and getting kids started and making sure that kids were doing the thing that I would sometimes lose track of, “My point in doing this is to have kids think about structuring 10 or making sense of fractions.” That's a lovely reminder. I really appreciate that. I think that this is a really nice turning point because this question about choice actually plays into one of the other recommendations you had regarding time on task. So, I would love to have you unpack your thinking on this topic, Amy. Amy: Yeah. Well, you talked about being autobiographical, and this is definitely autobiographical for me because I am very on task. I like to get things done. I like to check things off my list. And that was definitely a force for me when I was teaching. And I think it was something that, one, caused anxiety for me and my kids, and two, limited our opportunities to engage in more playful ways and more joyful ways to follow curiosities because I was so worried about that. And honestly, when it came home to me was when I started teaching university students because I think it is a little harder to clap your hands at 19-year-olds and tell them to get back to work than to do it with 7-year-olds. And what I realized was if I step back and I let my students talk about “The Bachelor” for a minute, they would have the conversation and then they would move on to the mathematical task, and I actually didn't need to intervene. And me intervening would've shifted the emotional tone of the class in a way that would not have been productive for learning, right? Amy: They would've become resentful or maybe felt self-conscious. And now I have this thing in the way as opposed to just letting them have that break. And I think if we pay attention as adults to how we are in staff meetings or how we are in professional development, we recognize we have a lot of informal conversations around the work we do, and that those informal conversations are not distractions. They're actually, like, building the relationships that let us do the work. And it is similarly true for children. And then I think another thing to remember about particularly young children is language learning, social relationships, all of those are things they actually need to develop. That's part of our work as teachers is to help them grow in those things. And so, giving them the opportunity to build those relationships is, in fact, part of our work. Mike: I think that's really interesting because I found myself, as you were talking, thinking through my own day, when I log into Zoom to talk to someone across the country. We don't immediately start just working through our agenda. We exchange pleasantries, we tell a joke or two, we talk about what's going on in our world, and we can have an incredibly productive chunk of time. But there are these pieces of social reality that kind of bind us together as people, right? When I'm talking to my friend Nataki in North Carolina, I'm asking her about her son. That might take two minutes out of 55. We've still done a tremendous amount of work and thought deeply about the kind of professional learning we want to provide to teachers. But there's the reality that if we didn't do that, how are we connected? If we're partnering to do this work, there's something about being connected to the other person that we can't schedule out of the experience of working together. Does that make sense? Amy: Yeah, a hundred percent. And it's true in classroom settings, too. I was thinking the “Batman” movie, the Ben Affleck one was filmed in Detroit, and they happened to be filming right outside the building where I was teaching. And at some point, one of my adult students looked out the window and was, like, there's Ben Affleck. And of course, all my students got up and went to the window. I could have as the teacher been, like, “OK, sit down. We're doing whatever we're doing.” But their minds were all going to be on Ben Affleck out the window. And so instead, we stopped and we watched the movie for a little bit, and that became an experience we came back to as a class over and over in the semester. “Remember when that happened?” And so, yeah, that pressure to be productive I think often interferes with the relationship building that does support good work among adult colleagues and among kids in classrooms. And I would also connect it to the opening conversation on play. Mike: So, before we close the interview, I'm wondering if you have any recommendations for someone who wants to continue learning about how they could design opportunities for joy in their classrooms. Are there any resources that you would point a listener to? Amy: I mean, I have a book on play in early mathematics, and that would certainly be a place that someone could start. But, you know, the other thing that I might do is just look at some of the great materials that are out there, both like physical things like Legos and magnet tiles, which often if you don't have at your school, you can get through thrift stores and things. And just bringing them into classrooms and seeing what kids do with them. Oh, the other thing that I always recommend is looking at some of the resources on “soft starts.” And if you just Google this, you'll see videos and articles. And this is often a really, like, nonthreatening way for teachers who are interested in this but haven't done a lot of play in their classrooms, to begin.  Amy: And the idea is instead of immediately starting with a worksheet or whatever, that you bring in some kind of toy or tool, and maybe children can make some choices about whether they're going to paint or they're going to work on a puzzle, and you just take 15 minutes and that's how you begin the day. And people who have done this, so many people have said it's just been such a lovely culture shift in their classroom, and it also means that children are coming in a little late. It's fine. They can just come in and join, and then everyone's ready to go 15 minutes later, and you really haven't given up that much of your day. So, I think that can be a really, a really smooth entry into this if you're interested. Mike: Well, I want to thank you so much for joining us, Amy. It really has been a pleasure talking with you. Amy: Oh, you, too. It was so fun. Mike: This podcast is brought to you by The Math Learning Center and the Maier Math Foundation, dedicated to inspiring and enabling individuals to discover and develop their mathematical confidence and ability. © 2023 The Math Learning Center | www.mathlearningcenter.org

The Antidote
Get Well with Jordan Carlos

The Antidote

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 14, 2022 34:16


In this episode of The Antidote, Amy and Grace connect with standup comedian, writer and actor Jordan Carlos in a live conversation from this year's New York Comedy Festival. Jordan joins Amy and Grace in a new segment called The Wellness Shot, where we give advice to our audience and listeners to help solve their real-life issues. Amy and Grace also share their bummer news of the week –  Odell Beckham Jr. was recently removed from an American Airlines flight, and an antibiotic shortage. They also share their antidotes: Broadway and a “hot girl walk.”  Do you have a favorite antidote, or need an antidote suggestion? A question for Grace and Amy, or something you loved that Amy, Grace or one of their guests has said on the podcast? Share a message with The Antidote team: https://mpr.tfaforms.net/111 or tag us on Instagram with the hashtag #ThatsMyAntidote, or leave us a message on our hotline at 833-684-3683. FULL TRANSCRIPT Amy The world is a dumpster fire. I'm Amy. Grace And I'm Grace. Amy And we want to f---ing help. Grace We're comedy writers in Los Angeles. And as a reflex to the madness on the news, we're keeping a positive but opinionated. Amy We talk about cultural moments we love. Grace Talk to people we adore.  Amy Crushes we have. Grace And self-care we stan. Amy During these trying times, we all need a show that focuses on joy. Grace This is The Antidote. Amy Pow, pow, pow. Grace Hi, everybody. Welcome, welcome, welcome. We are back. I'm a little crazy today. We finished shooting last night at 1 a.m. and here I am in the morning and I feel good. I still haven't seen my friend. Hi, amy Amy Yay hi. And also congratulations to my friend for finishing her shoot. Like, literally, I feel like you've lived in New York for nine years. Grace I know I do too. I feel like it's been 20,000 years. I was young when I left. I'm old now. Amy But at the end of it you have a beautiful, magnificent, funny and hilarious show to show the world and hopefully we will be seeing it soon. Grace Yeah, one that my wonderful friend Amy directed two episodes of. So, so, you know, stay tuned for the Amy and Grace collabo with Michelle Buteau and other wonderful people. Amy Yes, that's right. Grace Girl, girl, did you hear about this Good Morning America thing? Amy The Good Morning America scandal is all over my timeline. My thing about the Twitter feed this past week is that I had to come in contact with two people who I did not know who they were. And now I know everything about them. And I'm talking about T.J. Holmes. Yeah. And Amy Robach. Yeah. I'm like, who are y'all? Grace Yeah, I had no idea who they were either. I mean, the T.J. Holmes guy looked a little bit more familiar to me, but I was like, oh, I've maybe seen that before. But that woman, she she looks like a copy of so many other women I've seen on tv. Amy You know, so crazy to me because both of them are married in other relationships. T.J. Holmes, a man I didn't know existed, you know, posted like a tribute to his wife, man, a year ago, like less than a year ago, posted a tribute to his wife about how I tried to make her leave and she won't leave because she's got a black superwoman energy, whatever the f---. And then literally he's out here touching a white woman's ass. And I'm like, I have to say grace. So the there's this woman on Twitter. I don't know her personally, but her handle is batty, ma'am. So that's B.A. YMCA lady. And she has, like, just a little mini thread called Men Will Embarrass You. And this week's Men Men Will Embarrass You is this man, T.J. Holmes, given this tribute to his f---ing wife? And I got to say, lady, I don't know you, but it's time to leave. Grace You got to. Amy Do you need me to show up, need me- to the window? Just lift it up. Help you down. You can Rapunzel throw out your hair and I'll just drag you. Right? Like, I don't know how we. Grace No. Amy Make you leave, but you got to go, girl. Grace It is so embarrassing. And the thing is that they weren't even trying to hide it. They were not being discreet. Nice. And they know they're on TV. I don't know what they thought. That they could just blend in like that. They were just in a bar on the street, grabbing ass, walking through there, walking through the park hand-in-hand. Like at least have the respect for your spouses that have you off again, because I guess they're both separated, right? Amy I don't know if they were. I mean, that feels like new information was like something that was like we were separated. Like, it doesn't I'm like where they. Like, we'll never know. Grace But even like you still have a marital contract, at least don't like be out in the open, go in the hotel room or whatever. You know, don't be just out in the open grabbing booties and stuff, you know. Amy And also grabbing groceries. They were like doing like daily routine things. Like they're a couple when people on TV back to normal, I'm like, y'all, you have faces. People recognize you're in like a million or so homes across America. Every morning y'all are on TV. You can't just be out here acting like you're f---ing Tam and Pam. But you know Pam, like, I don't know, like in Milwaukee who nobody's paying attention to. Like you, literally. I don't know if I would call them famous, but they are you know, they're known. Grace And that's the thing. Like you get the privilege of having millions of dollars and being famous and getting free sh-- because you are on GMA. So you have to accept what comes with that privilege, which is that people know who you are and you can't cheat out in the open. Yeah, probably any Tom, Dick and Harry or whatever. You could go to one city over and you could be acting like y'all married each other. But ya'll can. Amy Also the audacity to cheat in the morning, because that's the other thing. They're Good Morning America. And then they were out in the open in the morning and I'm like, it just was me. I was like, How do we doing out in the morning doing chores? But anyway, I do think that it reminds me of a conversation we had with Jordan. We had a lot of questions about relationships, about being far our guest that's coming up this episode, Jordan Carlos, who did our live show from Brooklyn, New York, which was a part of the New York Comedy Festival on November. BR Well, we had a few questions about relationships, so stick around to hear that in a new segment we created called The Wellness Shop. And if you're in a relationship now, hug your partner, set them free. But don't be doing this sh--. Grace Don't be embarrassed and ask the men or women. Anyway, we wouldn't need the antidote if we didn't have the bummer news. Amy Starting now, top of the hour. Bummer. News of the week. Our first topic is that athlete and you know, hottie with the body. Odell Beckham Jr has been removed from an American Airlines flight recently over, quote unquote, concerns for his health while sleeping with a blanket over his face. Those who don't know Odell Beckham Jr is a very well known wide receiver in the NFL. He catches ball. He's a free agent right now. Yes. He catches balls for a living. Well done. Great for for sports. But he's like a free agent right now, like people trying to court him because, like, you know, he's good at it. Yeah, he's very good. And it's not just because of his looks. Why am I like, oh, I don't know. Well, Beckham, Junior, what a hottie. But anyway, I only know about him because a a few comedians a few years back said some weird sh-- about him. And then part B, there used to be a billboard of him in an underwear ad on La Cienega, and I'd pass it every time I was going to work, and I was like, Who's that? So I learned about sports that day. But anyway, Odell Beckham has a tradition of draping a blanket over his face during long flights so he can sleep, according to his attorney. And this time, while asleep, the flight returned to the gate and Beckham was asked to leave the flight as he had not buckled his seatbelt at the time due to being asleep. Even after offering to buckle his seatbelt, the flight attendant said it's too late now to exit or the entire aircraft would be deplaned in the airports. Report, they claim, quote, he appeared to be coming in and out of consciousness, end quote. And we're concerned he was, quote, seriously ill, end quote, leading to the plane, returning to the gate after the aircraft was deplaned. Beckham left the plane without incident because, you know, he ig but he did tweet that quote, Never in my life have I experienced what just happened to me. I've seen it all. Grace This seems weird to me. I don't know this. I don't know how this happened. Like he was sleepy and ask somebody with a very sleepy friend, Amy, and she's talking about me. She can sleep anywhere. And there have been times where I'm like, Wake up, Amy, wake up. You got to go like, Oh, and it's not like it's sometimes it just doesn't happen. Some people sleep hard and it doesn't feel like a flight attendant would have never seen that before. And then once he said he would buckle a seatbelt, like, you're going to have to deplane everybody. He was nice because I'd be like, literally, you woke me up to buckle my seatbelt and I'm doing it. So like, why can't I go see a Black man? Amy He had to be nice. Like, that's the thing that makes me upset and that's what it's like. He couldn't be like, what? For too long? It's like he's a famous black man and knows it, and he's like, I got to get off this plane. Like, you can't raise a stink. Grace Yeah, it's weird. I have this story. Something seems off. I and I feel bad because I'm sure that was so embarrassing, you know? And then it becomes a whole news story. And, yes, he should have buckled the seatbelt. Yes. But when he offers to buckle it, they should have just let the plane go without incident. Like what was getting him off the flight? Like it wasn't going to delay it more or less. Like you could have just let him stay. So. Boo American Airlines once again. Amy Oh, my God. They're the same airline that f---ed up my luggage and wouldn't replace it. So, American Airlines, you're on notice. I know that's not the only bit of bummer news this week. The other thing that I read about is that RSV, you know, that respiratory syncytial virus. I don't even know how to say that middle word. That's why we abbreviating it. RSV, a virus particularly common among children, is on the rise and may be resulting in an antibiotics shortage. So I read that amoxicillin, one of the most common antibiotics for children, is facing a shortage because despite RSV being a viral infection, amoxicillin is often prescribed as secondary protection for underlying bacterial infections that arise during having RSV. So a doctor in USA Today said quote, For example, in addition to RSV, a child may also have developed an ear infection or pneumonia which could be treated with amoxicillin. And in most people, RSV just causes mild cold like symptoms. But in children, the elderly, in immunocompromised it can be very severe. So now that we're back into a flu season, now that we're back into a COVID surge, our issues are back to being near capacity and we are having a problem with this. So for me, I'm like, the reason this is a bummer to me is like of all the COVID shortages, we had toilet paper that was out, we had restaurant menus, they digital now. We didn't have hand sanitizer. This one really matters. Like, can we figure out how to get the kids their drugs?   Grace I really hope that Congress, useless congress tries to step in and do something.   Amy I feel you because it reminds you of the baby formula shortage that we talked about a few months back on another episode where it was just kind of like, Wait, we really out here? Just be like, babies, y'all good? Like we have to. The future of the country.   Grace I like that. Some say they're more important than the rest of us. You know, first of all, we already ruined the planet for them. We've already like we don't have a good planet to give them the you know, we flooded their schools with guns, so they now have to to go to school and be like father like I make at home today. So at the very least, can we just get the baby some antibiotics, whatever they need to do? Because, you know, there's nothing fatter than like a sick baby, you know?   Amy Yeah, well, I don't know how science works, but I'm thinking about these babies.   Grace Okay, let's get into this antidote, though.   Amy So this is a segment where we tell you about the culture we consumed and things we did this week that made us feel better about the bummer news. What was your antidote this week, Grace?   Grace Broadway, baby.   Amy Oh, hello. Yes. Hello, my darlin. Hello, my baby. Hello. my honey.   Grace Child, so in my previous life, I was a theater actor. So there is just something uniquely beautiful about going to see live theater. And I just I've been in L.A. for a while, and I'm sure there's great productions in Los Angeles as well. People keep telling me, but when you've had Broadway, you know, it's really hard to even imagine going to see live theater anywhere else. So I lived in New York for a very, very long time, and I actually was supposed to go to Mexico over the Thanksgiving holiday. I don't know what I was thinking, like thinking that I, in the middle of production would go to Mexico. Wait, why? Yeah, I was going to go there for the long weekend, so I decided to cancel that trip, and instead I decided to go see two Broadway shows because I've been so busy at work that I haven't gotten a chance to see a lot of Broadway. So I saw Death of a Salesman.   Amy Oh, nice.   Grace Which is like Black Death of a Salesman. Which is like it should be black because it's such a black story. And Wendell Pierce, he was in like, oh, right above. Like, you know, there is a little bit of a little hiccup, Eddie. And it was so fun because they were smoking on stage. And then the fire alarm went off and they stopped and that it was just like, ooh, peek behind the fourth wall. And there's just like had to get off stage of the they it took about 15 minutes to resolve and then they came back wow. And they started the scene all over again like f---ing pros that they are. But yeah.   Amy They started the scene all over. That's great. And then they just weren't smoking.   Grace Yeah. Yeah. And so it was him. It was Sharon Clark who was also incredible, who played his wife. Then there's a guy named Chris Davis who played Biff and McKinley Belcher as happy. And I cannot forget Andre de Shields was in it as well, who is just a magician? Yes.   Amy And he was The Wiz in The Wiz. Holy sh--.   Grace He was the Wiz in the Wiz.    Amy Oh, I knew. I knew that face.   Grace It was incredible. And like, I wept because I thought about all the black men that were alive back then and the lack of opportunity that they had. So it really hit different when you see a black man going to like this white guy to like beg for a job and that he just couldn't make it work with his family. And I know Arthur Miller wrote it, but it was just it just really hit when you think about our ancestors and what they'd been through. Come on. And so and it was just like such a cathartic weeping. And I was just like, thank you for your sacrifice so that this generation could have what they have. So that was the Friday after Thanksgiving and then the Saturday after Thanksgiving, I saw a show called Six.   Amy Oh, my gosh. Tell me about six.   Grace So Six is about Henry the eighth's six different wives.   Amy Oh, that's cool.   Grace So it's like a concert almost. Mm hmm. So basically, the premise of the show is they're just like, who had it worse? Like a six women. So.   Amy Girl, girl, girl. You all had it pretty sh---y.   Grace Yeah, you all had a pretty sh---y cause that guy was that great. So they each get their own song, and all of them just had incredible voices, but in different ways, and they were just singing down.   Amy It's coming to L.A. just so you know. Six is coming to L.A..   Grace I mean, I would see it again. It was so fun. And then it was also short. It was like 80 minutes, no intermission.   Amy Oh, cute. I like it quick.   Grace Yeah, I like it quick. I'm a half hours high, bitch, you know what I'm saying? And they were just so good. Like, you know, you sometimes you got to go to Broadway to hear real ass voices, you know, like there are singers like Beyonce, say, Adele and like Jasmine Sullivan. You know, we have yes, we have girls that can sing them down. Yeah, but.   Amy Broadway is a different type of vocality.   Grace Yeah. Yeah. But it's genuinely great to see it and to know that it was live and they were just incredible. So that was my antidote. Broadway, baby. So what was your antidote this week, Amy?   Amy Well, you know, a few weeks back, we had a guest on a show named Ashley Blaine Feathers and Jenkins. And I literally have been thinking about the fact that she said you should go on a hot girl, walk for weeks. And I love to walk. I love to walk around my neighborhood. I love to take a stroll. I love to take an urban hike. Urban hike means you're walking through the city.   Grace Yes. She doesn't like a regular hike.   Amy And that's my sh--. I don't like a real hike. Grace knows this. I will do a hike, but I won't repeat a hike. And so this week, like, I've been traveling so much, I'm so tired, I'm still jetlagged from going to India. And so I decided that I was going to walk every day for exercise. And that fell apart real quick because I said, haha you thought and it started raining every morning and so I couldn't walk. But before the day it rains I went for a hiker walk. And the reason why this walk was a hardcore walk to me is because I made a point to walk with a smile on my face, which is really silly. But I was like, I've like really I've been so stressed. And I was like, the corners of my mouth are hurting. Like there was a day where I was like, What's wrong with the corner of my mouth? And I realized I'm actually frowning and I'm like, Oh, f--- this. This is how you get wrinkles. And B, I just think it's stress. It's just like exhaustion and stress and travel and all the things. So I went on this walk and I was like, I'm going to take this walking, I'm gonna smile. And I was listening to this woo woo book while I was walking and just smiling while I'm on my on my little stroll. And I walked all the way up to my viewpoint. There was like a beautiful view above my neighborhood where you can just see, like, west l.a. Like, spread out before your eyes. And I walked all the way up there, and there were some men up there who were, like, just, like, chillin, like, because there's also, like, a sports area. So maybe they're about to play some sports. BELL But at any rate, I stopped up there and I was like, I happen to be a hetero female who's attracted to men. So I saw these men and they were good looking and I was like, Here I am with my little smile on my face up here being a hot girl. And I was like, I didn't interact with them. I was like, they could be, you know, terrible. So I was like, I'm not going to interact with them, but I at least got to just, like, be cute and walk past them like athletic men and then continue on the walk. And I was like, this was a hot girl walk. So I started my day. That day feels so good. And I did the silliest thing. I sent like a video of one of my friends being like, I'm going to walk every day this week. I felt so good. And then the next morning it rains. And I think on video being like, I am walking today, bitch.   Grace How come you didn't send me that video? Who's this bitch? Just sell it. Send a video. That's what I'm saying. Just cause I'm gone. Just because I'm in New York City. This is the reason why I got to get back to L.A.. All my friends are forgetting me that.   Amy I'm like, I can't-   Grace My phone still works. So why.   Amy I can't bother Grace, she's on set. I can't just send her this video of me being like, I love walks. She would have been like bitch I've been up since 3 a.m.   Grace Yes, I would love to get that video. Brighten my day for you that I'd be an antidote. So that's what you did.   Amy Yes. Well, if you guys tried any of our antidotes at home, share them with us using the hashtag. That's my antidote. Or leave us a voicemail at 8336, 8436, eight three. Stay tuned. You'll hear more from our live show right after this break.   Grace Our guest today ain't new to this comedy. You know, he is a stand up comedian and actor who just finished costarring and writing on the first season of Freeform's. Everything's Trash with Phoebe Robinson. He co-hosts WNYC Adulting podcast with our friend in Queens, Michelle Buteau. He has also written for HBO Divorce, written and performed for Comedy Central's The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore and Recipes First Wives Club. Please welcome the amazing Jordan Carlos.   Jordan Carlos Good knees, good knees. That's what it's all about. And I feel sorry for the people standing in the back.   Amy No, don't apologize.   Jordan Carlos All right. How's it going? Brooklyn. How we doing? Yeah, I'd like to. I'd like to applaud the people that came early over here. Look at this man. It's modest, but so smug. So smug. Got the good seats. Got the good. Good. Hello, love. Gosh, it's just so good to be here. Surrounded by this black excellence on stage.   Grace I hope you're including yourself upon that number that.   Amy She worked with Jordan this week. He's being very humble. He is an amazing actor and so, so funny. And I got to direct him this week. And I got to tell you, I was a tyrant and he handled it well.   Jordan Carlos Yeah, yeah. What have you. What if I said you were she was in one of those, like, elevated seats, right? Like with a crane. But you were you.   Grace She does like to beat people.   Jordan Carlos She was in this really like, official jumpsuit. You are the official ass jump director. She's like, is she directing Apocalypse Now? Like what?   Amy That is right. I need people to know that I came to work.   Jordan Carlos Work it, but you were great. And I was like, there was one little small scene. Hey, everybody, welcome. You know, if you don't know anything about Hollywood, this is how it works. This is how it works. So you have to be an actor has to be directed, right, to do what they're supposed to do, my dumb ass. I didn't get out of the way. Right? I was like, you're like talking. You say your line and you walk the f--- off. Got it. But I just stayed in the studio, you know?   Amy I can see you. That was. That was my fault. That was my.   Jordan Carlos You know what? It's no one's fault.   Amy You're right. It's Hollywood. It's Hollywood.   Jordan Carlos It's Hollywood. Yeah, well, I had to be here.   Amy Yeah. Thank you so much for coming. It means so much to us. And we're both jointly obsessed with you, as are a lot of people in this audience.   Jordan Carlos So that's very sweet.   Amy Yes. You are the co-host of WNYC, his podcast Adulting, where you provide real life advice. And the quote reads with a heaping portion of hilarity topped with a dollop of truth.   Jordan Carlos Who wrote that.   Amy Yes. I mean, I assume it was you.   Jordan Carlos I swear to God I did not write that.   Amy Okay. Well, Michelle,.   Jordan Carlos In a showing of earnestness. And just like a missed. Misting of your heart.   Amy Yeah, well, as the audience entered tonight, we asked them to write down some questions that the three of us will give real life advice to help solve.   Grace Yeah.   Jordan Carlos I am not an expert. I do love how this guy's arms crossed when you're in the front row and non-verbal. F--- you to start the whole thing. And don't blame me. Don't say it's cold.   Amy No, we read the energy.   Jordan Carlos I do. This guy has Roman emperor energy.   Amy We got to work harder to win your love. don't worry.   Jordan Carlos Come and just relax. So everybody just open up your butthole. We're going to.   Amy Everyone release the anus, and let's just answer a couple of what we got. So first up, first up, and if you some people ask these questions, it might be out getting a drink. But if you are here and this is your question, just give us a little cheer. This first one is I was just offered my dream job in L.A., but my partner doesn't want to leave Brooklyn. Oh. How do you find balance between sacrificing and settling?   Grace Leave him.   Jordan Carlos Wow.   Amy Settling.   Grace Leave him. Drop him off leave him.   Jordan Carlos If you have your dream job. I don't know how how long you've been going out with this person, but if you have your dream job, you will work it out with that person. If relationships are all about like, you know, I've been married for 15 years and if you're married 15. Yeah, I know. Impressive. Impressive.   Amy Wow. Wow, it is 15. Yeah.    Grace Came out the womb married.   Jordan Carlos Came out, in some cultures, that's what we do. Yeah. I think what it is all about, what it's all about is, like, just kind of like figuring out that you want to be in it and you want to be in it every day and not leaving it to chance. Then you will remain in it. If this person like lets you go, not lets you go, go do your thing. Yeah. And see where the chips fall. But make sure that you keep a line and a tethered to that person and make sure that they're a part of it and make sure that you're honest with them about what's going on. You if you like it, if you don't, if you regret it, if not, if you want to stay in it. If you don't, you know what I'm saying? Like you might go out there and figure out that your dream job wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Oh, it's time to come back. Oh, no. But you know who will be in your corner every step of the way? Brooklyn boy. Also, you didn't talk about the dark side of the f---ing person that.   Grace That is something that you do need to know.   Amy She did say settling. So it makes me think that the D is medium to small.   Jordan Carlos Is it is it shmedium? Is it like a short medium?   Grace I'm sorry, I, I mean, my resting advice is I was like, leave you. Yeah. No, but I mean, I do think it's like, first of all, you do need to know, like, how long, like, they've been together and like how deep you are in. And there are some bitches that are career bitches like myself, and there are some girls that, you know, prioritize love and relationships. And you just have to be honest about which type of girl you are, you know.   Jordan Carlos Truly truly.   Amy Yeah, that's really good advice.   Jordan Carlos I know what kind of girl I am and.   Grace I'd like to hear it.   Jordan Carlos It's like we're going to. I'm like, if I can make it happen and split myself in half, I will do it because it's worth it. Yeah. Because I feel like it's just Jordan. Cause I'm just saying. I'm just saying you. You may be remembered on this planet for the things that you do and and and make your mark artistically, creatively, in business. But if you have a love that that respect, you hold on to God.   Amy Did you write From scratch on Netflix? That is beautiful.   Grace Convict me, Jordan.   Amy That is beautiful. Wait, I got to move on to the next question. You want the next question? Yes. So question and again, give a little woo. If it's your question, I want to expand my circle and become one of those people who can get dropped into a party and befriend anyone. But it's not really in my nature. Hashtag introvert. What should I do?   Grace Oh.   Jordan Carlos The extroverted introvert?   Amy That's me. You. I'm an introvert.   Jordan Carlos You're an introvert?   Amy I'm. I'm such people would never guess because I'm like, loud and talkative. But when I get home types, how we're off. Yeah, like, I get home and I just like, right. I literally am a secret introvert. I'm such an introvert. When the pandemic, when everything shut down, I was like, This is nice. I don't have to go anywhere. I was fine. I was like, I like it in here.   Grace I was just.   Jordan Carlos Like, if that is your if that's your jam, you need to host more parties.   Amy Yeah. Oh, you're the middle of the party. If it's your party.   Jordan Carlos To be the host or, you know, better be The Great Gatsby. Have the party. Don't show up.   Grace You will be remembered forever. Very, very good advice.   Amy Yes. Okay. Next question. I'm going to do four because these are good. This one I love the most. Give a little woot if it's yours. I need money, but I don't like working.   Grace Gets you somebody rich to marry one.   Jordan Carlos That's the end of it. I need money, but they don't like their wellness shot.   Amy What's the thing that makes them feel better?   Jordan Carlos I need money, but I don't like working. That's. That sounds like the beginning of a beautiful traps to focus on, like working and.   Grace Get some rich, rich rich.   Amy Do you agree with Grace? Just get someone rich. Is that the answer.   Jordan Carlos I would say get someone rich or understand how to manipulate the market.   Grace Or be like a Fyre Festival person.   Amy Oh yes.   Grace Start a scam. Scam somebody.   Amy But scamming is work.   Grace It is work it.   Amy That guy who started we work. What a scam. But he was working. Yeah. He had to take meetings and get investors. Scamming is work.   Grace It means you have to send out like lots of emails about being a price or something.   Jordan Carlos Mostly it's just like the laws that keep scammers back. Same, whatever. Right.   Grace Yeah. So it feels like just get a rich boo.   Amy I think that might be the answer. If you like money and don't like working, get a rich bill. Yeah.   Jordan Carlos I can't. I really can't help you there because this face, I got to work, you know?   Grace No. And a very handsome face.   Amy Everyone is someone's cup of tea. You just haven't found the rich woman.   Jordan Carlos You sound like my mom. Like the African proverb. There is a lid for every pot.   Amy The lion. The lion cares for the antelope. Okay. All right. Last question for you guys. Okay. Oh, this. Oh. How do you deal with the loneliness that comes with your friends all being in relationships? Oh, wow. These are deep guys. I love these questions.   Jordan Carlos Damn. Damn. How do you deal with the loneliness that comes from your friends all being in relationships? Good question. Great question.   Amy Oh, my God.   Jordan Carlos On a long enough timeline, those relationships will end. And.   Amy Rooting for the failure.   Jordan Carlos No, I'm just. I'm.   Grace Well, 50% of marriages do end in divorce.   Jordan Carlos The other 50 percent end in death. Now. I think this like, you know, those rom coms where it's like somebody tries to stop a wedding, like they're like, I got to stop this. It's like trying to stop a bus with your face. Like, don't do it. Don't stop Americans. Marriage will stop by itself. Okay? I've seen it happen way too many times. I've seen it happen way too many times. Right? Yes. I feel like this like like do not become discouraged by that. You know, let your friends live their life. Yeah. They're going they're out doing what they're doing. You should be doing what you're like, what you're doing. Do the things that they can't.   Amy Oh, make them jel, jel.   Jordan Carlos Make them jealous. Go to a bar, you know, go to a rock climbing thing in like five in the afternoon.   Amy Yeah. I'm saying you're like, I took a nap in the middle of the day because I don't have kids.   Jordan Carlos Mean we see everything on Netflix like you're in a relationship, you have to like. Check with the person that yeah.   Jordan Carlos I watch the show so now. White Lotus was supposed to be ours and.   Amy Relish the fact that you're single. It's better out there.   Jordan Carlos Enjoy it.   Grace Well, I would say that I think that it's not.   Jordan Carlos It's all, it's all. You know what I feel like it's grass is greener on the other side. It's all about what you know. It is hard to be single. Of course.   Amy Of course. Of course. Yeah, I.   Jordan Carlos Sharing all you know, sharing everything. Sharing all the coffee, sharing all the coffee.   Amy Sharing the toilet.   Jordan Carlos Sharing the toilet, sharing the goddamn toothpaste. You know, all that and. All. This other. What's wrong with sharing toothpaste?   Amy I thought you said toothpicks. I'm so sorry. I was.   Grace That would be f---ing nasty.   Jordan Carlos Well, who has toothpicks in their house? What in the Tony Soprano's, it's. It's got to be stuff in the house.   Amy No grass is always greener.   Jordan Carlos But grass is always greener. But you know what? If you like to. If you like. Yeah. And you enjoy your own company. Yeah. As you said, Amy, I enjoy my own company. Lord, when my kids and my wife are out the house, I'm like, I'm single. I'm like Tom Cruise in that movie, like gang, gang, gang, gang. Oh, my God. My hips are so good. All right, so.   Grace The hips don't lie.   Jordan Carlos The hips don't lie. That's a lot of yoga you want to talk about your. And it. My antidote. My antidote is yoga. Wow. Yes, that's right. My wife doing it so much, I was like, I want to live a long time, too. So I got to open. Gentleman.   Amy Men die sooner.   Jordan Carlos Your hips are not open, sir.   Amy Open them up.   Jordan Carlos This guy is forward, like he;s taking a sh--.   Amy Right there.   Jordan Carlos You were totally dragged here, weren't you? Well, whose. Whose idea was it? It was her idea. Na na na na. Yeah, that's right. Know. He's like, if I endure this, maybe they will be sexy.   Amy There will be, there will be. There will be. Yeah, there will be. Guys, guys.   Jordan Carlos I know too much.   Amy This this has been an amazing wellness session from Jordan Carlos. The one. The only the me champagne.   Grace Yeah. Thank you so much, Jordan.   Jordan Carlos Amazing. Goodbye.   Amy Bye, Jordan. Thank you.   Grace Thanks for listening to The Antidote. We hope this injected a little bit of joy into your week. I know it did mine. How about you, Amy?   Amy I feel good, girl. We should do this again sometime. Oh, we'll be here next week.   Grace And in the meantime, if you'd like to follow us on social, follow me. Grace. At Gracyact. That's G-R-A-C-Y-A-C-T.    Amy And follow me. Amy at AmyAniobi. That's A-M-Y-A-N-I-O-B-I and follow the show at theeantidotepod.   Grace That's thee with two E's.   Amy If you like feeling good about yourself, please subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.   Grace Goodbye.   Amy And when in doubt, do it live. The Antidote is hosted by us Amy Aniobi and Grace Edwards. The show's production team includes senior producer Se'era Spragley Ricks and associate producer Jess Penzetta.   Grace Our executive producer is Erica Kraus and our editor is Erika Janik. Sound Mixing by Alex Simpson.   Amy Digital Production by Mijoe Sahiouni. Talent Booking by Marianne Ways. Our theme music was composed and produced by TT The Artist and Cosmo the true.   Grace APM Studio executives in charge are Chandra Kavati, Alex Schaffert and Joanne Griffith. Concept created by Amy Aniobi and Grace Edwards.   Amy Send us your antidotes at Antidoteshow.org, and remember to follow us on social media at theeantidotepod.   Grace The Antidote is the production of American Public Media.   Amy Woot woot.

The Antidote
Cozy Mysteries with Dulcé Sloan

The Antidote

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 7, 2022 28:45


In this episode of The Antidote, Amy and Grace connect with comedian, writer, and actor Dulcé Sloan. In a live conversation from this year's New York Comedy Festival, Dulcé shares her favorite murder mysteries, the joys of crafting, and savoring hobbies. Amy and Grace share their bummer news of the week –  owl attacks are becoming more common, and how Stacy Abrams' loss felt like a gut punch for Black women. They also share their antidotes: a new Netflix show and waffles.  Do you have a favorite antidote, or need an antidote suggestion? A question for Grace and Amy, or something you loved that Amy, Grace or one of their guests has said on the podcast? Share a message with The Antidote team: https://mpr.tfaforms.net/111 or tag us on Instagram with the hashtag #ThatsMyAntidote, or leave us a message on our hotline at 833-684-3683. FULL TRANSCRIPT Amy The world is a dumpster fire. I'm Amy. Grace And I'm Grace. Amy And we want to f---in help. Grace We're comedy writers in Los Angeles, and we like to take the bad sh-- we hear and work through it together. Amy We talk about cultural moments we love. Grace Talk to people we adore. Amy Crushes we have. Grace And self-care we stan. Amy During these trying times, we all need a show that focuses on joy. Grace This is The Antidote. Live. Amy That's right. That's motherf---ing right. Friends, we are very happy to share with you all our first ever live show from Brooklyn, New York, which was a part of the New York Comedy Festival on November 12. Grace We're joined by our friends Dulce Sloan and Jordan Carlos. Amy Not only were they the funniest and most awesome guests ever, that live energy really just gotten to all of us. It was so much fun. Grace This is part one of the antidote live with Dulce Sloan motherf---ing Brooklyn. Thank you all for coming to our first live show. We're so excited to be here with you. Amy We're super excited. And, you know, like for you guys who know the podcast, we always talk about our antidotes and our bummer news. But I do want to say that this live show is coming at the end of a month of New York with my best friend, Grace. Yeah. And there have been some real highlights to be in New York with you. Like our fancy dinner, we had to scarf it up. Grace Literally bought, like everything on the menu and they're like, Can you eat all this f---ing food? I was like, Yeah. Amy Yeah, yeah, watch me, watch it. Also also, we saw Top Dog Underdog on Broadway. Grace We did. And let me tell you about. Yeah, yeah. Amy Yeah, Ya-Ya can get it. He can get it. I don't know what the play was about because in my head the play was about his thighs. I don't know what I saw. Grace But it was really good. Like I would recommend everybody see it. First of all, like Corey Hawkins, such a great actor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A great actor as well. Didn't really focus on his acting because like I said. Amy Once again, the thighs. Once again the thighs. And we also did other fancy things, like we had a little nightcap at Dumbo house one night. I saw how the other half lives, the other half being my friend Grace. Um, it was really, really fancy. But I'm really glad we had these moments together because it's a distraction from how sh---y the world is. Yeah. Yeah. So starting now, top with our bummer news of the week. Grace The bummer news. Amy So guys, first up is an owl attack. I don't know if anyone has seen this news, but apparently owls have been attacking people. Okay, so so this is a live show and you guys are seeing the visuals. I love that you're enjoying the visuals to our guests who are just tuning in through their ear holes. It's an owl. Attacking a man on screen literally keeps happening. Apparently in Washington, there is a woman who's been attacked by the same owl twice. Grace Twice. Amy Her name is Kristen Matheson, and she was walking in the woods near her house when she got attacked. And she said, quote, It felt like getting punched in the back of the head by someone wearing rings. And apparently people are saying barred owls are aggressive owls and they're highly territorial. So maybe she thought they were her woods, but they were the owls. Grace No. Well, first of all, we still got to worry about COVID, right? We got to worry about Nazis. Right. And we got to worry about owl attacks. First of all, I want to know what she did to that owl, because that's what attacked twice. Like, did you steal that owls, man? Did you like did you, like, talk about his mom and dad? She caught that beak twice. Amy The thing to me is like nature is clearly trying to take us out, and it just keeps happening. Like, I'm literally like Mortal Kombat. It's like, finish him because the owl is trying. And I really just think it's time for us to go. Grace Yeah. Amy Nature wants us out of here. Grace It might be a wrap for the human race. 2022 is wildin. Owl attacks? Amy Yeah, but that's not the only bit of bummer news or something else. So you guys have been following the midterm elections, obviously. Stacey Abrams lost. Yeah, Georgia. Exactly. I heard a note backstage by someone you're going to meet later, one of our guests. And honestly, for Black women, this felt like a punch in the gut. It felt like an owl attack on our hearts. Grace Our attack on our democracy. Amy Exactly. Yeah. Abrams lost her rematch bid in Georgia's gubernatorial race on Tuesday night, and some black women and activists have called it a devastating blow. In an opinion piece with The Daily Beast, contributing editor Goldie Taylor said that Abrams didn't look like a governor. Which makes me wonder what the f--- a governor look like. This woman, she had a blazer. She had a cold chain on. Grace She got a gap in her tooth. She got a fabulous lip. What a bad bitch. That's all I'm thinking about. Amy So to me, I got to be honest, I decide to because I hate to lose. But you know what? I hate more being insulted every day. Every day she's in the spotlight. She gets insulted. And I'm tired of that, honestly. Stacey, so good for the race. Grace I mean, honestly, she saved democracy. I mean, like, I remember, like, in Georgia f---ing blue. I know she turned Georgia blue. She has done so much to, like, register voters. And the only reason that these new school wild ass Republicans are not, like, fully in control of everything is due to this queen. And what does she get lost to? Brian Kemp. Y'all want Brian Kemp again? Again? Yeah. That was so f---ing sad outside that day. Amy Yeah. So how do you feel after discussing this bummer news, Grace? Grace Not good. I mean, I'm looking for owls. I don't want to catch nobody's speak. And Stacey Abrams is not the governor of Georgia. What she should be. Amy Yeah, I agree. I agree. Grace So you know what? Let's get into this antidote. Amy Yes, it is. So for people who are new to this but about to be true to this, this is the segment where we tell you about the culture we consumed and things we did this week that made us feel better about the bummer news. So, Grace, I'd love to know what was your antidote? Grace Okay, well, it was it was a rough week this week because like there I was stressed about these midterm elections because everybody's like, yeah, it's going to be a red wave. And I'm like, okay, are they going to bring slavery back? I don't know. Like, I keep getting worse, right? Like, you know what I'm saying? I was so, like, scared this week, so I wanted to, like, flush my brain out with something good. So I saw on Netflix there was a show called From Scratch. Oh, my God. Tell them about them that scratched my itch. It's basically starring Zoe Saldana, created by Attica Locke and Tenby Locke, who are sisters. Isn't that f---ing cute? They, like, created a show together based on Tempe's book of the same name about a true story about her, like falling in love with this chef in Italy and making spaghetti king. I know. Amy And you better twirl that linguini. Grace He made her spaghetti. He did make her some other making spaghetti and he did other things, too. So it was so delightful because, like, it was just so sweet. It was like, beautifully written. It was well-shot. It just gave me what I needed. I love comedy. Obviously, the only thing that I love more than comedy is people falling up. I love. So it was really just a delight to see. And I mean, there was so much yummy food. I went to Italy for the first time with this bitch last year. Amy Yes, she did. Yeah, that's right. We're gross. We travel together and we do everything together. Grace And I don't know, it just really was beautiful escapism. And I know that there's cancer later, but. Amy Spoil. I haven't seen it. What! Grace I didn't get to the cancer part yet. So I got to the only the happy. Amy Who dies? Who? Grace Maybe nobody dies. I don't know. Amy Who dies? Not the Black woman. Grace No, no, no. So, I don't know. It was just really fine. I was drinking some wine. I cried. Happy tears. Amy Very Italian of you. Grace Yeah, very like. So that was definitely my antidote this week of just crying, watching. So leave it. Still to fall in love with an Italian man.  Amy That was lovely. Loved it. Yeah. Italians love Black women. That's like a thing. Oh, they made a show about it. It's called, like, from Italy with Love. And it's just like women being like, I'm looking for my Italian king and a lot of Italian men being like, I love your lips are a little problematic get and where you fit in. Okay I will imports. Grace Well, no, but I didn't I didn't get any Italian love when I was there. Amy So we got to go back. We got to go back. We got to go back. Grace Got to go back and say from scratch, you heard of it? I want it. So what was your antidote this week? Amy So last night I had like a real New York night and, you know, I came here for work, so and I'm very if you all know me, I'm a double Virgo. Like, I'm all about my work. I'm like, I want to prep. I want to do a good job. I want to be working. And so I hadn't gone out, out like we've had our fancy dinner or whatever the f---, but we haven't like gone out in New York. And last night I went out with a friend and that's not even the antidote part. And she's here in the audience and she's going to hear the story. And she didn't know that this happened, but that's her. Give me I'm about to tell you a story. Basically, we went out for a very early like grandma dinner, like we were trying to be responsible, have dinner at like 5 p.m. and then it rolled into another spot and then we're doing an orange wine and then we stumble. I got this. I don't know where it entered my head. I think we're sitting in front of a grocery store and there's an ad for waffles in the window. And I was like, I want a waffle. And then my friend looked up a waffle spot, pies and dice, and we walked over to pies and pies and they were out of waffles. And I was there in my class. Grace I mean, you had one job, pies and thighs. Amy My slightly drunk splendor. Like you have pies and you have thighs, but you don't have waffles. And they were like, It'll be about 20 minutes. Like we're making them. And I was like, Well, I can't wait. So my friend. And I said, goodnight. I waved goodnight. I got in my little car and I drove home. And guess how long that car ride was? Well, it was about 20 minutes. So I got home and I just thought to myself, Well, what if I went on DoorDash and looked to see if the waffles were ready? Jimmy The waffles were ready. Apart from pies and thighs, and it wasn't enough to complete an order. So I also ordered a single catfish in a single biscuit and a full. And then I had a meal. And so they delivered it. And I ate this waffle and fell asleep on my couch eating this waffle.  Grace Oh, my God. Amy And that was my antidote. Sometimes you need to doordash happiness to your. That was my answer. So stay tuned. You'll hear more from our live show right after this break. Our guest is a hilarious and dope ass comedian, writer and actor. She's a correspondent on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Rolling Stone recently hailed her as one of the top ten comedians you need to know, declaring, quote, She speaks and they simply fall in line behind you.   Grace Yes, Queen.   Amy Please welcome one of the stars of the Fox series, The Great North and costar of my co-host movie Jodi out next year. Dulce f---ing Sloan. It's nighttime here in Brooklyn, and we're here to learn about your antidote.   Dulce Sloan So I have a craft room in my house. And, uh, recently I was like, because I enjoy the crafting and I was looking on the TikTok and part of it I saw like this thing called a knitting machine.   Grace And knitting is like, it does it for you.   Dulce Sloan Yeah. Because like I had I not a knit, I know how to crochet, but I also can't dedicate six years of my life to making one scarf. No, no.   Amy You're too busy for that. Like you said, you won't see your son truly.   Dulce Sloan So I don't know who lives a lifestyle where they can make a scarf in less than four years. But I am not that person. So basically it's this machine, just like 48 hooks on it and it's just a knob that you turn. It was like some 40, 60 bucks. I won pansies and so I made like a knitted cap in like 20 minutes was.   Amy That should take 20 weeks, right?   Dulce Sloan Yeah, it does. Like a hundred rows of knitting. That's so cool. And like 20 minutes.   Amy What were the colors?   Dulce Sloan When I started with. Because I bought like, this really pretty like a teal kind of yarn, the.   Grace Ahhh.   Dulce Sloan Go to. And then I just make like this really long, long, long scarf. But I bought like a lot of these little, like, poofs. So I was like, F---, I got a little clothes that you put on.   Amy Pom pom pom.   Dulce Sloan Pom pom thing, but like the little fauz fur ones.   Amy Yeah.   Dulce Sloan I got those. And then one of my friends was like, ah, like, I'll make you a hat. She's like, I got to have it. The silk glasses, though.   Grace So you worried about the pearls?   Dulce Sloan I hear you. I hear you. So I got some of those really, like, long, like, bonnets. Yeah. So now I have to figure out how to sew, though. I mean, I could, so. So I got to just figure out how with the yarn and everything, I'm going to get like this. So I guess apparently when I start making satin lined knit can.   Amy Wait a second. No, that's really dope.   Dulce Sloan Because of life. But yeah, there is that then a very silly thing. So I enjoy murder mysteries. Okay, but I don't like the true crime ones.   Amy You like the fake one?   Dulce Sloan I don't want to know that somebody died. I want to know somebody like that. Like, oh, this person's dead. And somebody went.   Amy Cut, and then they went and got lunch.   Grace And they were not dead. They just had.   Dulce Sloan They were not dead. But I don't like the really intense emotional.   Amy I can't do that.   Dulce Sloan I can't do it too much. So I was trying to find a New Yorker, like I started watching Murder. She wrote Homicide was f---ed up. Poppycock, Peacock. I won't watch a murder she wrote for the past year, right?   Amy Yeah.   Dulce Sloan And Ms. lansbury. Yes. R.I.P. Met the Lord. Yes, she did. All of a sudden, now all a murder. She rose behind a paywall. No.   Amy Peacock what.   Dulce Sloan I'm in like the seventh show is like 15 f---ing seasons. So it was really for like 1987 to like 22. I had no f---ing clue. Right. It was on for most of my life.   Amy Yes. And so I watched it as a child.   Dulce Sloan Right. And saw that because I remember when I was like, I want another show to watch because I watched like the little like British shows or whatever. But I'm going to British shows get too intense. So I'm just like, first of all, turn the volume up on this f---ing show.   Amy First of all.   Dulce Sloan Am I  the only person watch the British shows like because they're very quiet. They're very.   Grace Very quickly and very quietly.   Dulce Sloan It's very quiet, very darkly lit. I'm like, I even know the race of this person who's speaking. There's all this bitches blond. With all the information that I.   Grace Spicy white, you don't know.   Dulce Sloan Right, listen. And also, can we retire spicy white? Because I guess because spicy whites are just white people trying to disassociate themselves from the bad white. Oh, I.   Amy Think about it that way. For me, it's any time I see someone who's got a little olive tone.   Dulce Sloan Naw, it's a set up. The Italians also colonized? Yeah.   Amy No, that's true. That's true.   Dulce Sloan You ever heard of Ethiopia? Yeah. The Mali guy. Yeah. Yeah, the Portuguese. Brazil.   Amy Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a Jewish friend from Ethiopia and everyone was like, How are you Jewish? And she was like, Bitch, we're the originals. Colonialism.   Dulce Sloan It was like, That's how we got Ethiopian Jews. It's like the Ethiopian Jews was like the 12 tribes, man. They were right there. They were like, Oh, Israel's nice. But what, what is happening in Africa, from what I hear from Ethiopian Jews are like not we're from the first like the first 12 dudes. Yeah, that was us murder mysteries.   Amy Then what are the ones?   Dulce Sloan So I found a very silly one. So I have now added the Hallmark mystery movies. Zero. So my.   Amy Wait. So those are religious?   Grace So you have to like pay for that. It's like a hallmark plus.   Dulce Sloan It's like six bucks. I have six dolalrs.   Amy There are so many pluses.   Dulce Sloan So you have to say to yourself, Should I add this show? You're like, bitch, you have six times. You will always have $6 if you spend more than that at a sandwich at your local corner store. Yeah, you have $6, bitch. And so they have all these they have all these murder mysteries, but it's the same f---ing formula, cause it's so it's a woman. They're usually white. I found one with Holly Robinson Peete on it, and I was.   Amy Like, Well.   Dulce Sloan You know, where she is? So they all have, like, a professional job.   Grace And they're jogging.   Dulce Sloan No, no, no. These bitches don't jog. They're running businesses. They don't have time to jog. And so it's the same formula I, I've watched like the garage sale mysteries where. Lori Loughlin. Yeah.   Amy Lori Loughlin is bad.   Dulce Sloan Oh, her and her friend. We hate her. Mark, I have no qualms about this woman. Wasn't my kid, so no qualms. This lady couldn't give a sh--. Her and her friend owned an antique store. It's called the Garage Sale Mysteries because you would go to garage sales and get like, sh--, the governor antique store. And then she would find something like, Oh my God, I've got this antique camera. There's a picture of a murder on here. That murder just happened. I got to solve it. So it's.   Grace A picture of a murder.   Dulce Sloan So now her husband. And then the first of all, the kids keep changing the actor. So the actor, the player. Yeah. So they.   Dulce Sloan The actors that play the kids keep getting progressively worse or if I'm watching the show out. Of order or all those like they're. All an hour and a half long. So it's basically like a f---ing movie. So to like this isn't it's either I can binge watch. I would in my mind since it's a TV show, it's not like a movie. So like watching a movie seems like a dedication to time, but like watching an hour long TV show. I just. David So I watch those shows, those like garage sale, mystery murder. She Bakes is based on the bakery.   Grace Did the murder happen at the office?   Dulce Sloan No but a rival baker did die in the kitchen after she helped this guy and then there's murder. She bakes. And then there's the chick that has, like, a flower shop whose work I think is Brooke Shields. Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's like Alison Sweeney. Brooke Shields. Holly Robinson Peete is like a cook on. She has like a cooking segment on a TV show, but they also in a restaurant, there's that sh--. And then I'm like, Right, there's that. And then Korean dramas is the other thing that I watch.   Amy Wait, but I love this. First of all, I love TV that works on a formula like I'm Nigerian and Nigerian films. Like for the longest time before, like Nollywood really blew up. They all had a formula. It was always like a man gets possessed by a witch and then he cheats on his wife. And the while we used to.   Dulce Sloan Like when we moved back to Atlana, we lived with Nigerians. And I remember like I don't speak Yoruba, so I know what the f--- is going on, but there was, but like, I know like, oh we don't like this later.   Amy Yeah.   Dulce Sloan That I couldn't figure out. Also I don't know how they were all in a village and it was an all white and it it's f---ing spotless. I was watching this woman. She walked out. I'm seeing a woman walk out of a hut. And they're in the village because they're going to visit family or some sh--. Yeah, everyone's in white. It's immaculate.   Amy It doesn't make any sense. The wind is blowing. There's a lot of dust.   Dulce Sloan There are no floors. And these bitches are in the cleaners. I'm like, God bless.   Amy Nollywood mansion.   Dulce Sloan Bring your skills over to the great USA. Very because I have a washing machine and my weight ain't never been that sharp that you can feel the crystal air. But yeah, that in Korean dramas and I've been watching Korean dramas since I was in high school.   Amy I'm obsessed with both of these antidotes. The fact that you are first of all, you have a craft room and you're crafting and you're sewing and you're making things. I'd love to know when the Etsy store opened, like when.   Dulce Sloan Listen. I used to have a jewelry business.   Amy Yeah.   Grace And what did you make?   Dulce Sloan So, like feather earrings. I was the first one to start.   Amy Okay. Wait. That was the thing, that was a moment.   Dulce Sloan That was a big moment. I started making my mom and my mother was like, because my mother always had businesses. She has a clothing business named after me. All these other sh-- I've been like. And my first business when I was like, nine. I'm very tired because I've been working for 30 years. Yeah. And so and I'm not 40. It's not fair, but this man's not having to sweep me away. We got to figure this sh-- out. And I mean, you hope, but hope's hard. So I would make all this handmade Legos, like beadwork and stuff like that, and I would go to different things around Atlanta and sell jewelry. And then I used to do crafts at kid's birthday parties, so like scavenger hunts, all kinds of sh--, and then at the same and then still having a day job, still doing stand up. So acting all of that sh--. Yeah. So I'm just, I'm tired.   Amy You're like, I'm not going to do the jewelry store. It's for you now.   Dulce Sloan I thought, because, like, I had a bunch of jewelry that I had made cause I started getting into U.V. resin, and I was like, I could sell this as merch. Then I'm like.   Amy Wow. That's that's the best part about a real answer is that it's just for you.   Dulce Sloan It's just, yeah, like, I have this whole crowd from, like, a, like, the silliest thing. Like I made like these like every year for my manager's birthday, I'll do like, a vintage of him. So, like, the year, like two years ago, I'm like a doll out of him. Yeah.   Amy Oh, no, that. Wait, what? Voodoo. What?   Dulce Sloan Now I'm saying they invited the Holy Ghost. Don't play me.   Amy So he didn't, like, clip his hair and then make it out of him? No. Gotcha. Okay. Sorry, sorry. I heard.   Dulce Sloan I hear you. It's a little because I did one for my nephew too, so that could be like a little felt doll out of him. I used to work at like my last day job was a stucco supply company, like construction materials. So like, I made like a picture of him out of, like, different colors of stucco just from the guys in the back.   Amy Yeah. Um.   Dulce Sloan But it's funny because he's Jewish and he had a little Jewish afro, so the dude in the back was his new black clothes are like, so you've been a, you have a black man, a picture itself. I was like, That's not what's happening. I see why you would think that I actually for page stucco, you need to calm down. Um, so then like from I've done like parlor beard, uh, vinyl all kind of like every year I just come up with like a different is a stupid thing that I started myself. I did like a big cross-stitch thing. I have one time oh wow that it faces. So it's just like it's a face.   Amy I know but that's our too is like not doing the face is is of that is a choice a choice like choice.   Dulce Sloan But like so I have a cricket as well. So this year I was able to like I took a picture of him and then did the image of it.   Amy Do you mean where an actual cricket or a cricket phone or what do you mean the cricket either?   Dulce Sloan Okay.   Grace We are not crafty bitches, you know. We don't know the terminology.   Dulce Sloan I hear you because I said cricket. Somebody was like, Yeah, like am I am I right off the bat? So no, there's no magical creature at my house.   Amy You don't have a little Jiminy.   Grace I was like, Jimmy.   Amy All right tell me what it is. Go.   Dulce Sloan It is. It's a so basically it's like a they call it a is a cricket like crap machine. So basically there's a computer program that you can use to create like different images and then you can either cut them out or draw them on whatever material you want to see, whether it's because, like, I'm bad at drawing.   Amy Yeah, yeah, me too.   Dulce Sloan So, like this year when I did, like, the thing of him, it was like, I guess it's giving like Andy Warhol because I had, like, this marble paper that was like four different colors, this marble paper. And then I had like I was trying to, it was Shrinky Dinks, but it didn't work so that like four suckers are hard to use. It's an ad for different colors of the construction paper. That was the main color out of the marble paper. And then so it drew the image of him on the paper and I cut it out and I just colored it. And so it's like a a square thing of him and like in like, primary colors.   Amy Thank you. You are a woman of many talents.   Dulce Sloan Yeah, thank you. I'm very tired.   Amy Yeah, yeah, I get it. I get it. You know what? Yeah, yeah. I feel like.   Dulce Sloan I mean, I tried. We tried to pitch like a crafting show with an Amy Poehler show was our yet. And I was like, f---.   Grace Making things.   Amy Wait a year, make it again.   Dulce Sloan Make it easier, do it again. I mean, it's great, but I'm just like, but what if it was black people? Yeah.   Amy But like lit a lot of a lot of things. What if it was Black people? Right.   Dulce Sloan Cause I often cause, like, honestly and what I really want to do, because, like, I watch all of these, like, murder mystery shows. Yes. They call, like, the cozy mysteries, the best that the whole like the genre of the book. So you have three you're like and I wonder.   Amy A blanket with your tea being like who got murdered.   Dulce Sloan Just holding with two hands like, oh, who did it?   Grace I'm safe here. Right.   Dulce Sloan So they have like 20, literally like 15. They got the one for the bitch. You play DJ on Full House.   Amy She be out here getting murdered.   Dulce Sloan I don't know. No. She's trying to solve the crimes.   Amy She's of solving the murders of murder.   Dulce Sloan And like Miranda Teagarden or some wild sh--, I don't know that that would be shady. And everyone I'm saying is that they have like, you can go like this, look like the crossword murders. The matchmaking works. Yeah, after like 20 of these shows, but there's only one with a black woman. And then her love interest is Rick Fox and all.   Amy And I want to start crafting with Dulce Sloan. I want this in my life.   Dulce Sloan This and we have to work on it because I want to be on my f---ing Scooby-Doo, Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew bullsh--.   Grace And we want to see that sh--.   Dulce Sloan Roll up to your neighborhood being like, I'm not sure who did it, but I have an idea.   Grace And then you go and interview the wrong person first, right?   Dulce Sloan Yes. She's out here looking for clues. And then there's my will. They won't. They love interest.   Grace Yes.   Dulce Sloan Because like the one with Lori Loughlin, like that was the only one where someone's married. Yeah, all the other ones. And they keep having these B and C storylines where her kids that are very useless.   Amy We don't care about the kids. We care about the woman who's solving the mystery. Yes, we care about the women solving the mysteries.   Dulce Sloan Right? So, like, I love her, but I'm just like, I'll give a f--- if your son that passes math test. You killed Pastor John.   Amy And that's the question to take home tonight, ladies. Who killed Pastor Justin. Thank you so much, you guys, for coming and seeing The Antidote Live.   Grace Oh, yeah. We hope this injected a little bit of joy into your week. I know it did mine. How about you, Amy?   Grace Yeah, it definitely did. We should do this again sometime. We should do this again. Live sometime.   Grace We couldn't have done it without you, our lovely audience. So thank you so much for being a part of our first live show. We hope to do more of these in the future.   Amy Yea, we doing with that. Goodnight.   Grace If you'd like to follow us on social, follow me. Grace at GracyAct. That's G-R-A-C-Y-A-C-T.   Amy And follow me. Amy at AmyAniobi. That's A-M-Y-A-N-I-O-B-I and follow the show at theeantidotepod.   Grace That's thee with two E's.   Amy If you like, feeling good about yourself. Please subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Antidote is hosted by us Amy Aniobi and Grace Edwards. The show's production team includes senior producer Se'era Spragley Ricks and associate producer Jess Penzetta.   Grace Our executive producer is Erica Kraus and our editor is Erika Janik. Sound Mixing by Evan Clark.   Amy Digital Production by Mijoe Sahiouni. Talent Booking by Marianne Ways. Our theme music was composed and produced by TT the artist and Cosmo The Truth. Send us your antidotes at AntidoteShow.org And remember to follow us on social media at theentidotepod. That's thee with two E's, y'all. What, what!

Fertility Friday Radio | Fertility Awareness for Pregnancy and Hormone-free birth control
[FAMM Practitioner Series] FFP 444 | PCOS, Fertility Challenges, & Fertility Awareness Cycle Charting | Amy Sedgwick, LMT

Fertility Friday Radio | Fertility Awareness for Pregnancy and Hormone-free birth control

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 25, 2022 63:35


In today's episode Amy shares her experience navigating fertility challenges related to her PCOS diagnosis within the Mormon community. In a culture with such a strong focus on building large families, Amy shares important insights about how it impacted her fertility journey. Amy Sedgwick is a Licensed Massage Therapist, certified restorative yoga teacher and is currently enrolled in Lisa's Fertility Awareness Mastery Mentorship program. She is a 9th generation Mormon and a woman on her own 20 year fertility journey which lends her has a unique perspective on how to navigate infertility in a family centric culture where women are mainly valued by their ability to procreate. She shares this unique perspective as the co-host of The Mormon Fertility Podcast. Amy hopes to use this experience as she steps into the role of teacher and guide in helping women access their own innate body wisdom through cycle charting, nurturing body work, yoga and in creating spaces (both physically and virtually) where women can feel safe to share, connect, heal and ultimately access universal wisdom that is within each of us. Join us on Wednesday, November 30th (12:30PM ET) for a live masterclass on incorporating the menstrual cycle as a vital sign in your professional practice! Click here to register today and you'll also gain access to the replay! Today's episode is sponsored by the Fertility Awareness Mastery Mentorship program, class of 2023!  Early-bird registration is officially open for next year's class of 2023. Will you be joining us? Click here to register now! Today's episode is also sponsored by the Fertility Awareness Mastery Charting Workbook! Follow this link to get your copy today. Topics discussed in today's episode: Amy's menstrual cycle history and what brought her into Fertility Awareness How Amy's Mormon community affected her experience with menstruation and childbearing How difficult it is to get support for fertility issues The challenges to find the right practitioner  How Amy is going to incorporate FAM into her practice Connect with Amy: You can connect with Amy on her Facebook and Podcast. Resources mentioned: The Fifth Vital Sign: Master Your Cycles & Optimize Your Fertility (Book) | Lisa Hendrickson-Jack Fertility Awareness Mastery Charting Workbook Fertility Awareness Mastery Online Self-Study Program Related podcasts & blog posts: FFP 429 | Overcoming Hypothalamic Amenorrhea | PCOS/HA Replay Series | Dr. Nicola Rinaldi, PhD FFP 426 | 8 Steps To Reverse Your PCOS | PCOS/HA Replay Series | Dr. Fiona McCulloch, ND FFP 386 | Fertility Challenges & Recurrent Miscarriage | Gluten Intolerance, Celiac & Fertility | Justine Bold FFP 213 | Surviving Fertility Challenges | Lisa | Fertility Friday Join the community! Follow Fertility Friday on Instagram! Subscribe to the Fertility Friday Podcast in Apple Podcasts! Music Credit: Intro/Outro music Produced by J-Gantic A Special Thank You to Our Show Sponsors: Fertility Friday | Fertility Awareness Programs This episode is sponsored by my Fertility Awareness Programs! Master Fertility Awareness and take a deep dive into your cycles and how they relate to your overall health! Click here to apply now! Fertility Awareness Mastery Mentorship Program (FAMM) This episode is sponsored by FAMM! Are you a women's health practitioner looking for a solid way to incorporate comprehensive fertility awareness chart analysis into your practice? If yes, FAMM is the program you've been waiting for. Click here to apply now!

The Antidote
Hot Girl Walks with Ashley Blaine Featherson-Jenkins

The Antidote

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 16, 2022 41:38


In this episode of The Antidote, Amy and Grace connect with actress, podcaster, and beauty maven Ashley Blaine Featherson-Jenkins about how we all can benefit from a ‘hot girl walk', the act of surrendering, and falling in love with New York City again. Amy and Grace share their bummer news of the week –  racist backlash over The Lord of The Rings series on Amazon, and the state of Texas sending students home with DNA kits so their bodies can be identified “in case of emergency.” They also share their antidote: an overnight mask and showering at night.  This week's Creative Tap-In:  “A creative life is an amplified life.” -Elizabeth Gilbert Do you have a favorite antidote, or need an antidote suggestion? A question for Grace and Amy, or something you loved that Amy, Grace or one of their guests has said on the podcast? Share a message with The Antidote team: https://mpr.tfaforms.net/111 or tag us on Instagram with the hashtag #ThatsMyAntidote, or leave us a message on our hotline at 833-684-3683. Sponsors: BetterHelp Online Therapy -  betterhelp.com/ANTIDOTE FULL TRANSCRIPT Amy The world is a dumpster fire. I'm Amy. Grace And I'm Grace. Amy And we want to f---in help. Grace We're comedy writers in Los Angeles. And as a reflex to the madness on the news, we're keeping it positive, but opinionated. Amy We talk about cultural moments we love. Grace Talk to people we adore. Amy Crushes we have. Grace And self-care we stan. Amy During these trying times we all need to show that focuses on joy. Grace This is The Antidote. Hey, everybody. You're back for another week. Amy Ooh, I love. Wow. Grace given us Broadway. Give it up. Musical theater. Grace Give you some vocal stylings, I guess. I don't know what that was. But thank you for coming to The Antidote for yet another week, friends. Amy Yeah, and thank you guys for attending our live show in New York. Grace Oh, it's so great to see you. Amy The listeners who were able to make it. It was so awesome. For those who weren't able to attend. Stay tuned to our live show. We're going to be putting out a recording as a future episode. You can kind of experience it. You know, it won't be the same, but it'll be similar. Grace Yeah, but we'd love to do more live shows in 2023, so stay tuned and see when our next one is. Amy Yeah. Anyway, I know this is kind of old, but I guess I was just like going back. There are old texts or something. Grace and I saw the video of Maxwell breaking it down on stage with his niece. Grace Yes. I was like is Uncle season now here? Okay. He came to make the aunties first and Auntie Junior is like myself. Because I was like, ok Maxwell. And the funniest tweet that I thought about it was. Like when he was like. Doing his little Meghan thee stallion knees move Like they're like there's literally no song Maxwell has that justifies this cause, because somebody put it over this woman's work. So it's like. Amy And I just want to be like n---- stand up. Grace But like he, you know, we got all our jokes off our Black Twitter and Instagram. And so he responded, he's just like, Y'all could never and so he made it the Maxwell Challenge, I believe. Amy Oh, I love it because I love the Maxwell Challenge. I need to see some more men doing that. Well, need is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but I would not mind saying, but it really is a good season. Like you said. Grace I'm just really happy that Maxwell is getting his flowers. You know, new people are discovering Maxwell, those of us who are around the first time around, they're just like, Oh, Maxwell, I'm glad you still doing it. And I'm glad your knees are still good. Amy I actually really love that Maxwell is getting his flowers and all of the Zaddy's. I mean Ginuwine he out here. Grace Oh yeah. Same ol G. Amy And also Usher singing to Issa Rae on stage. Grace Oh she deserves all the songs right to her face. Amy I mean, I do love all these nineties men turn it up and also through dance, like dancing is a source of joy. We love to dance. And I know that our guest, you guys stay around for our guest, Ashley Blaine Feathers. And she actually talks about the joy of dance and our interview with her. So it'll be really fun to revisit this topic. Grace And beautiful, funny and profound. Queen. Yes. I can't wait for you to hear this interview. But honestly, Amy, we wouldn't need the antidotes if we didn't have something to get an antidote from. Amy Starting now, top with our bummer news of the week. First of all, this is an ongoing bummer news issue. Oh, gosh. But I feel like we just kind of got to talk about it a little bit. There's been so much racist backlash over the new Lord of the Rings series on Amazon. There have been all these trolls or like Middle-Earth, it has elves and hobbits and wizards, you know, fictional things. But people are having problems with the color skin of some of the actors being cast in the show. Much like people having problems with the fictional mermaid Ariel being a different color than they wanted to be. So there's an actor named Cynthia Robinson who portrays the Queen region of New Manaugh, I think is how it's pronounced. Cynthia Robinson portrays the Queen region of this fictional city, and people are mad at her in response to the backlash, she said. My focus, especially as more of the show has aired, has been the more joyful aspects of what this story means to people, end quote. And I love that she's turning it into a little bit more positive of a message. She's basically saying, block the haters and the real fans who like the work that they're doing, which I really appreciate. It can be really hard to be brought down by sh-- like this. But I do have to say, for a bunch of people who are like full nerds watching this stuff and I'm a nerd about a lot of things, but fantasy ain't my sh--, but it is fantasy. And so it always kind of rocks me a little weird when people are like, Oh, but this thing that is fantasy isn't what I find. Like Harry Potter, like Hermoine with her kinky hair. And I'm like, her name's Hermoine she might be Black, you know, like, doesn't really bother me. But I think it's because as Black people, we're used to imagining different types of worlds, and white people don't really have to. Grace Yeah. And I'm just sad. Like, when I hear that quote from her. Oh, it makes me think about is like all the many times as Black women that were expected to rise above that, we're expected to make a positive. We're expected to, like, not show if we are upset about racism. You know, I'm sure, you know, maybe in her quiet moments, she's not bothered by it. But in my quiet moments, I'm continuously bothered by it because I was just like, What do you want? Like, do you want do you want worlds where we don't exist? And I'm sorry, but we exist, you know, and because we exist on a lot of amazing things exists because Black people exist. Yeah. And I'm sorry that you want to be in a world where we don't exist, but you're not going to get that. Sorry. In 2022 and 2023. You're just not going to get it. Amy And not in the future and not in fantasy. Grace Exactly. And so my question is always like, are we still doing this? Like every single time, y'all do not look good. Whoever is making these racist statements, it doesn't make you look good. It doesn't make you look good to your friends. It doesn't make you look good. Your family members, maybe they all races too. But like all the justification about why. He's like, well, this would have been in Europe. Or whatever. No, it wouldn't have been in Europe because it is not real. And guess what? We were in Europe, too, back then. You know what I'm saying? Like that this whole, like, fantasy that we weren't in Europe or where we were in any of these places is a fantasy because we were there the entire time. Like. Amy I was Black. Grace You know what I'm saying? Even like Shakespeare wrote about the Moors, like you wrote Othello. We were there. We were there. So, like, this whole thing, like, you're just racist. Just stand ten toes down and say, I'm a racist piece of sh-- so we can know which way to categorize you and keep it moving. Like, it's just sad that these actors who are getting an amazing opportunity, like a lot of these times, like these actors, this is their first, like, big thing and they have to f---ing be subjected to all this backlash that doesn't have to do with them. They didn't cast themselves. Amy Yeah, they didn't cast themselves. Exactly. What you just said makes me think of people who are mad at Ariel and they're like, well, technically, the Little Mermaid was written by Danish Man and it's from Denmark, so shouldn't she be blind? And I'm just like, y'all are so weird. Like, I'm like, it's fictional. Grace She's a mermaid. I saw this tweet about how they didn't believe that Ariel would be black. And literally it was. So after all the Africans y'all threw in the ocean, y'all surprised the mermaid is Black. Amy Yeah, that's real. By that. Grace And that's by thatwitchbitch. Fair point, girl. Amy Fair point. Think we didn't learn how to live down there yet? And that's my issue is like they're using, like, nerd logic to try and justify their racism. And you're absolutely right. Like, just say you're racist. Like you're saying all these technically is an actual these and well, if you really think about it and it's like, no, no, now you're just not creative enough to imagine a world that could look different from you. So just admit that that's not the only bit of bummer news this week. There's also this coming out of my home state. Apparently, Texas parents have been given DNA kits to help identify their children. In case of an emergency.   Grace Damn.   Amy And I'm like, How f---ed up is this? The state of Texas is sending students home with DNA kits so their bodies can be identified in case of an emergency. Today has stated that, quote, The threefold pamphlets allow caregivers to store their children's DNA and fingerprints at home, which could then be turned over to law enforcement agencies and, quote, presumably in order to identify their bodies. It sends a clear message that the government of Texas is not going to do anything to stop these types of shootings from happening.   Grace I know Texas is such a red, red, red state, as blue as California, New York are is this red as Texas is? So here's the thing about this country, and I don't know how else to say it is. I just don't understand how some people think. Yeah. I really don't understand. So y'all would rather do this, then? Gun control. Mm hmm. Y'all would rather send your kids home with DNA kits, then be like, Hey, how about we don't let regular people have weapons of war? That's what you would rather have.   Amy When I think about this sh--, I get so, so frustrated. How do you feel, Grace?   Grace Yeah, terrible. I mean, that DNA kid thing is super, super, super, super sad. And then. Okay. Like, racism exists. We all know it, but every time it hits, it's still like a terrible moment in your day. How about you?   Amy Yeah, very much the same.   Grace Okay, let's get into the antidote.   Amy So this is the segment where we tell you about the culture we consumed and things we did this week that made us feel better about the bummer news, which we need. What was your antidote this week, Grace?   Grace Okay, so, you know, I'm away from home, which is great in many ways, but also sad anyways. And so, you know, when you're you're away from home, you pack your essentials and sometimes you don't you forget something back at home or whatever. And so what I've been enjoying as part of my self-care routine is an overnight mask. Ooh. So the one I have in L.A. is called Drunk Elephant. I like, you know, just smear that on is the last part of my evening skincare routine. But I left it in L.A. So I was telling my showrunner this this is the type of small talk that I subject my showrunner to. Bougie complaints. Like, Oh, I left my overnight meal and yeah.   Amy In my other abode.   Grace My God. So she's like, Oh, I actually have a recommendation for one that I really, really love. And she's a very beautiful lady and she has lovely skin. So I was just like, Oh, okay, let me tell Danielle, please tell me which one you like. And so she recommended this one buy fresh and it's the fresh black tea firming over night mask. And so all right, let's try it out. And it is so good.   Amy Really. Is it like a mask? Like a physical mask or like a cream or a gel?   Grace It's a cream.   Amy How it's go on?   Grace So basically every night I smear on some lactic acid, which is very hard about keeping your skin cheap. And then I do some like a retinol cream or whatever, and then I put on some hydration, but my skin is very, very dry, especially in the winter. And I'm in New York now, which means I'm in heating. So it's a very dry air. So I decided to try this out and oh, it goes on. It's like very thick. You know, I'm working on a show called Survival of the Fittest, so we like it thick. And so I smeared it on and oh my God, I woke up in the morning and my skin felt so buttery and they want you to rinse it off in the morning. So I was just like, okay, whatever feels buttery now, but when I get in the shower and I run there, it's going to feel like my normal ass dry skin again. But no, I rinsed it off and my skin still felt very hydrated, very soft, and yeah, it was just a really lovely thing. So now instead of being fat that I left my favorite overnight mask in L.A., I discovered this brand new one, which is really, really lovely, smells great, very hydrating. So, you know, I took a negative situation. I turned it into a positive.   Amy I agree with that. You definitely did. And, yeah, we need to be luxuriating in our skin. Yeah, why not? It sounds great.   Grace And so what is your antidote this week, Amy?   Amy Well, this is hilarious. It's actually kind of tied to yours. You know, I've been coming through with the real basic antidotes, but it's like when I'm thinking of, like, a choice that I make as opposed to a thing that I just do by routine or like that's in my schedule or that I wrote down on my to do list. But I'm like, This is a choice I'm making. This actually has become an antidote for me during production. I shower at night. I'm mostly like a morning shower. I like to shower to start my day to wake me up. But during production, our days start very early. So like my pick up on Monday is at 5:45 a.m.. So that means I got to wake up before that. So my antidote during production is that I shower at night and it kind of has like a twofold thing for me is that I get to kind of wash the day away like you're moving around. I sweat no matter what. Like, you're just, like, walking around really quickly, all day long, you're running back and forth. But by the end of the day, I feel like a little weird. Like, you know, it's just like, physically, I'm like I'm kind of, like murky, let's say, all over. And so showering at night is such like, I always think of a shower as something that wakes me up. But I will say that during production, I'm so damn tired, nothing is going to like, Oh, I can't sleep now. So I'm like, I shower at night and then I get to go to bed feeling really fresh and I'm not climbing in my bed all grimy. I'm like getting bad, feeling really, really good. And because it's winter, it's like cool sheets on my warm skin. I'm just like, Ooh, I love this. And then I haven't done an overnight mask. I've been washing my face in the shower, then I wash it in the morning, but now I'm like, Oh, maybe I should do an overnight mask and then just wash my face in the morning. And that'll still be like a refreshing little me moment before I start my day. But yeah, I love both are antidotes. Great, because they're both so simple and doable, but they are about like kind of like snatch and a little bit of self-care back from a busy day. And I just love that they're both about taking care of our bodies, which are the vessels through which we do all our work.   Grace And literally, you're teaching me something to I mean, I sometimes shower at night, but yeah, we have to get up bad early, bitch. Man, I'm not showering at night right now because, yeah, what I'm doing is like waking myself up like an extra 20 minutes early so I can have in the shower before work. Because even though I don't feel like it at that hour in the morning, I'm not going to penalize anybody else for that.   Amy Yeah.   Grace And no. But yeah, I'm going to start showering at night too.   Amy Yeah. Nice. Well, listeners, if you guys tried any of our antidotes at home, share them with us using the hashtag. That's my antidote. Or leave us a voicemail at 8336843683. And we'll be back after the break.   Grace Welcome back to The Antidote. We have a special guest today. Who is it, Amy?   Amy Our guest today is an actress, podcaster and beauty maven. You know her luscious bass from Netflix's Dear White People, NBC's Grand Crew and the movie Bad Hair. And she just debuted the first original podcast from the Oprah Winfrey Network called Trials Two Triumphs. She is still basking in newlywed bliss, the picks on idea. She loves therapy, documentaries and being an inspiration in every way she can get cozy. Take your plastic off the sofa and please welcome the Multi-hyphenate talent. Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Oh, yes. I mean, I. I mean, you guys have another career in life. I mean, you guys are going to be hosting the Oscars.   Amy From your lips to God's ears.   Grace From your lips to God's ears. Okay. You know.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins I mean. That was fantastic. I don't know if I've ever been intro'd any better.   Amy Well, you are easy to intro because that's how fantastic you are.   Grace I mean, everything we said was true.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Y'all got me feeling like Beyoncé.   Amy That's why I had to sprinkle some references in there. Because you's a queen.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Oh, thank you my sisters. Yes. Oh, I'm so excited to be here.   Grace Thank you. We're excited to have you. Well, she's very, very impressive, isn't she, Amy? But we aren't here to talk about your many, many, many accomplishments. We are here to get deep.   Amy Yeah, yeah. Let's check in first. How are you feeling today? Like, for real? Not small talk. Is there anything weighing on you? Making you feel good?   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Here's the tea. I am feeling amazing.   Amy Yes.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins It is. No, I really am. And I'm really happy that I. You know, last week I didn't feel amazing. Yesterday I did not feel amazing. I legit had like I was like kind of moping around, but I'm sad. I kind of start like, yeah, dragging my feet and like, you know, honestly, a lot of it's unconscious, but my husband Darryl will notice he was like, What's wrong? And I was like, I don't know what's wrong. And, and I, you know, I, I'm getting better at doing like. America has a problem, everyone. oh, yes. I mean, you know, here's the thing. I think it's all of the things, but I think I was just feeling really overwhelmed. And I'm one of those people that, like, I don't I'm trying to get better at feeling the hard stuff in the moment rather than letting it kind of seep in more and more. And so I didn't. So I let it out. I had a good cry and I feel fantastic. Today is the first of the month. Yeah. You know, bills are paid. You know, I look good. I smell good. Yeah.   Grace Okay, we can confirm she looks good as f---. Okay.   Amy Yeah, and she looks like she smells good. You know, we haven't gotten into smellavision yet, but. Yeah, I buy it.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins But, you know, I really this month, it's kind of taken me eight months of the year to do it. But this month I really have that feeling of like I feel extremely motivated to really feel build this month up with good death. I feel deeply inspired by I love that.   Amy I mean, I do think there's, you know, maybe it's the Renaissance, the fact we are in a period of like a bad like a black bitch renaissance. We are literally in that period right now.   Grace I just wanted to say I really love what you said, because I do think that every day that we wake up, we do kind of have a choice. Like, I love how you are already like framing your entire mom to be like, I'm going to fill this month up with goodness. And I bet because you have declared that you definitely will.   Amy Let's keep the good vibes going, y'all. We need that right now. This show is called The Antidote because life is hard and we all need different antidotes to deal with the bullsh--. So tell us, Ashley, what is your antidote? In other words, what is something non-work-related that's bringing you joy this week or this month?   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins I am committing to doing Hot Girl Walks every day.   Amy I need more info about.   Grace What's a hot girl walk?   Amy What's a hot girl walk?   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Oh my goodness. So actually my friend JP Jennifer Pauline, who's just one of the most wonderful human beings in the world. She. So she invited me on a hot girl walk. Right. This is such an L.A. story. So she invited she was like, girl, we got to go for a walk. And I was like, yes. And I thought she was just like coining it that herself. You know? And I was like, that's what's up. But then she was like, No, it's a thing. So then, of course, I went to, you know where. Tiktok.   Amy Yes.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Of course.   Grace Where the children tell us what's cool. Yes.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Because I don't know what's going on. I'd be like, okay, let me go to Texas. And it's a whole trend that's going on where it's for anybody. But I you know, this this girl, I forgot her name, but she started this thing called a hot girl walks where you walk. Well, for her, it was four miles a day.   Amy Four miles? Oh, it's physically hot. I see.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Yea, I don't think I can do four miles a day because that seems like a lot like I think, you know, if you live somewhere like New York, you can easily do that day in two days, whatever. But the point is, it's not about how far you go, how long you go. It's just about committing to going on a walk. That is not. The goal is not to change anything physically about yourself. The goal is really just to spend time with yourself and to think about yourself as being sexy and confident and strong and all of the good things you can think about yourself. And she suggests while doing so, listen to a podcast she actually has. That is like the thing you should do. And I, you know, I did it today and I get why the kids are doing it. I mean, I feel I mean, I feel lifted. Yeah, I am together. I'm gathered. I feel so great. I feel so great. And I think a lot of times, you know, I'm always, like, working out for, like, the physical part of it, you know, and not just because. I want to feel good or just spend time with myself, but it doesn't always have to be like strenuous exercise. Like I work out. It can just be I took a walk, 4.8, nine mile, you know. You know what I mean? Like it doesn't have to be a whole thing.   Amy You know, the best part about it, like the coining of it, of a hot girl. What? To me, I was like, Oh, I want to feel hot like my beautiful hot while I'm walking, as opposed to feeling like I'm working, if you will. Yeah, because I do a lot of walking, like you said, for exercise, but just to like be with myself and like look around, take in my surroundings, like enjoy my body's movement. I'll do a lot of that. And now I want to.   Grace That is so cool because you know what? I stopped walking as much because during like the early days of the pandemic, we still in this pandemonium, and now we got monkeypox. Okay? But we're about to talk about that right now.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins I cannot with the monkeypox.   Grace But during that time, I remember, you know, I was working at Insecure with this queen. And I remember we would have our our break for lunch. And I would always I would eat first and then I would go for a walk just to get out of the house for a bit. But I have stopped doing that so much. I mean, I love walking. I lived in New York for 15 years and I moved to this part of L.A. in particular so I could walk to the grocery store, walk to target, whatever. Right, right. But I stopped taking walks for pleasure. And I think this is a lovely reminder that I did enjoy it. Like sometimes I'll be walking down the street. I was like, one of those crazy people you would know was in my headphones because I would be either singing it loud or I would stop for a moment for a little dance break. Yeah, I didn't give a f---. I was just like. You can look at me if you want to.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins I love it. I love it. But that's the goal. Like, get back to that, you back to that. Like that's what I'm on. And.   Amy We're going to do.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins That's my antidote.   Amy I love that. Like Grace. We're going to go for a hot girl walk.   Grace Let's go for our girl walk. I mean, I won't make you hike because I know you don't like that, but you can go.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins No, it's a walk not a hike. It's not a hot girl hike.   Amy Well, now, since we're talking a little just a little bit, we'll get off the pandemic a little bit. But you got married in the pandemic. And I want to know, like the pandemic was like a testing ground. Yes, it was a testing ground for relations. Some somehow got further apart and some got closer together. Are there any lessons or things you've learned about sharing space with your partner during this crazy time?   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Oh, my goodness, I. I think the biggest like lesson is to be grateful for the time. You know, like Daryl and I had the perspective of, like. I remember early on in the pandemic, I remember he said to me, We better cherish this because we're probably never going to have it again. And he's right. You know, I don't know. You know, another time, hopefully we are not stuck in the house again in the same way during a pandemic. Right.   Amy Hold my collar y'all, I'm like, oh, my God, give me out this house.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins You all. She started hyperventilating. Okay. No. And but but I'm grateful that I had a partner who rather had been lamenting and was like, This is great. We get to spend time and, you know, just do things like we would dance around the house or, you know, like, I don't know, just binge watch things all day that we just don't have the time to do anymore, you know, stay up late. Yeah. You know, until the wee hours of morning into the wee hours of the morning. Just so many things that we look back on now and are like, that was a really crazy but beautiful time for us. And I think that it really so much good came out of it. You know, in the pandemic, we bought our first home, we got married, we honeymooned. We, you know, we've done so many, so many amazing things. And I think it taught us to like. What's for you? Even a pandemic can't stop humans. You know, like this ship is going to keep sailing, this ball is going to keep rolling. And it really is just about how you choose to receive it.   Grace What was your favorite thing like from that time, spending time in the house with each other? What was your favorite thing that you guys did together during that time?   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins My husband Darryl's from Detroit, MI.   Grace Me too. Do you know where he's from in Detroit? Like which part?   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Yeah, he's from the east side of Detroit. Okay, cool. He grew up off of Hannah. Yeah, he went to Cass.   Grace Oh, he went to Cass Tech, okay.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Okay, so he's like a real. He's a michigan guy. Okay, I went to Howard, and, you know, a lot of my a lot of my friends at Howard were from the Midwest and, you know, Detroit or Chicago. And so early on in Howard, I learned how to like hustle and all that type of stuff. So I found out in the pandemic, which I've known Daryl for almost 13 years, so I don't know how this went over my head. He didn't know how to hustle. And so I taught him, Oh.   Amy That's incredible.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Sorry, Daryl, I'm exposing you to all the Detroit people. But I taught him how to hustle. Yes in our at the time, we were in, like, a little cute, but like a little non air conditioning apartment in Beverly Hills at the time. And so we were just hustling up in that one bedroom apartment and it was it was just like and I recorded us like I got my phone up in a row, like I have my hair wrapped, but I just was like, this is a memory we'll look back on and be like, Oh. What this is insane.   Grace You taught him how to hustle, that's so cute.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins That was a fun night. Yeah, yeah, that was a fun night.   Grace I mean, he should take you to the car show, like the auto show sometime, cause that's the big Detroit thing. Yes.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins I got to do that. So many things.   Amy I feel like that period in your life, like, obviously I don't I don't want to forget that the pandemic, a lot of people experience a lot of loss, but all of this like is about surrender. And you talk about that so much about how to surrender. And sometimes you don't have control. I mean, none of us had control over what was happening. Those of us who lost a lot and those of us who had the luxury to get introspective and like really sit with ourselves and you really got to surrender and have a partner through it, which is really beautiful. Yeah. And as we're, like growing now, are there ways that you find surrender in your day to day, even like the processing of emotions that you talked about, like having a rough month and having to cry it out? Is that a form of surrender for you? Like sitting in it.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins For sure. I think, you know, as you were talking, I was thinking about surrender. And like you said, it's a if you know me, if you listen to anything I say, I'm always saying I'm trying to get better at the art of surrender. But what I'm realizing is that, like, there's the step after surrender, right? So like, surrendering is giving it up and saying, okay, you know, Jesus, take the money, but. On the other side of the step after surrender, I think, is acceptance. And you have to accept whatever may come from the surrender. You can't surrender and then lack acceptance. Yeah. Because then you're kind of in the same between. Right. You're still not where you need to be. And so that's that's what I'm trying to work on. Tubas, like both of them. It's like surrendering and then being confident about the acceptance of whatever may come. And I do that in sometimes it's crying it out, sometimes it's talking it out. Sometimes it's actually saying it out loud, like. This is too much for me. You got it. Wow. Look, I can't. I can't do this or. You know what? I trust you more than I trust myself. So please, you know, order my steps. Sometimes it's bad, but I just, you know, honestly, surrender is a muscle. It's a muscle muscle that we all have to work.   Grace And the process of surrender, I really think, like in our work, in our business, I think it's so important to have that kind of perspective because there's so much that we cannot control. You know, you cannot control like who greenlights your stuff or you can't control like when you go into an audition whether you're going to get it or not. But like that act of surrendering, knowing that you're going to be okay or like that you're giving it over to a higher power to help you deal with it like that. I think it's so important rather than trying to control everything, because we in our human powers cannot we cannot control it.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins We just can't can't do it. No.   Amy Have you taken any good trips recently now that we get back outside?   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Oh, my gosh. So I just got back from Austin, Texas.   Amy Oh, I love Austin.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Do you? It's not, you know, I don't know.   Amy Okay, well, here's what I'll say. Here's what I say. I'm from Texas, I'm from Dallas. And Austin is like the to me, it's the best parts of Dallas and with a little bit of California sprinkled in. So that's why I like Austin. But I'm curious, what's your take on it? I mean, I don't want you to, like, slammed the city.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Well, no. no, no. I'm not going to slam the city. I my first time going was in, oh, 2017. We actually premiered Dear White People. There was my first time there at South by Southwest. And then I went I just went this past weekend on a my 15 and my 15 year anniversary trip with my line sisters. Yes. And my sister. So so it was amazing because I was with some of my favorite people on the face of the planet and we just had a good time. We're always going to make a good time wherever we go. So I did that. I've actually been traveling a time this year. I was in New York and May in like New York. I just.   Amy That's Grace's city.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins New York makes me feel I could cry thinking about New York. Something about New York.   Grace Thank you Ashley.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins I love that city. New York. If I literally would wake up like, good morning, New York.Like, I just I was skipping down the street, it was raining, and I was just like I was like that that video of Drew Barrymore in the rain.   Amy Yes.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins That's what I look like. And I wonder everyone's like clowning her for it. But I'm like, no, I understand why she felt like that. So I was in New York and then yeah, but I mean, I've been to New York many times, but something about this last trip, I was there for work, but I kind of made into like play and I just fell in love with New York all over again.   Grace New York is kind of like one of those places where, like, I lived there for 15 years before I moved to L.A. and New York was kind of one of those places. Like, I would still like ten, 12, 13, 14, 15 years, and I would just be walking down the street and I would like look up and see, like the Chrysler Building all lit, lit up. And I was like, Wow, I'm here. You know, I did it. I made it here. You know, it's like there's there's always just. Such a special energy that's there. So I completely get it in New York in the room.   Amy You mean, you don't do that on the 405?   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Question. Do you ever feel like that in LA?   Amy You don't do it on the 405? When you in traffic?   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Have you had the feeling of like, I'm here, I've made it like do you have that here.   Grace I mean, it's just a different feeling. I mean, like New York just has, like, things that you can look at. Whereas L.A., sometimes when I am like, you know, it's a pretty sunny day out and I'm driving down like a row of palm trees and I can see the Hollywood sign in the distance. I'm just like, okay, you cue L.A., like, Yeah, I'm here. I made it. You know, I used to always dream about Los Angeles as a little girl, so 100% I do have those moments. But yeah, right now I'm in a missing New York moment. So that really spoke to me.   Amy Wow, Ashley, I feel so much better now that we've talked to you.   Grace Yes, she's right.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Ditto.   Grace It's still 2022, and it's due in 2022 things. But we feel so much better now that we've chatted with you today.   Amy Yes. Yes. Do you have anything coming up you want to tell us about anything you'd like to plug? You can even be something you just love, not something you've created.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Oh, my goodness. Well, obviously, I have my podcast new episodes every Monday. Anywhere you listen to podcast trials to triumphs.   Amy And last but not least, where can people find you on the Internets?   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins Oh, yes, you can find me at Ashley Blaine, B-L-A-I-N-E. Ashley spelled the original way. On Instagram and Twitter. Yeah, that's it. Yeah.   Amy Well, thank you so much, Ashley. This has been great talk.   Grace Thank you so much, Ashley.   Ashley Blaine Featherson Jenkins I adore you two. Thank you.   Grace Thank you. Bye. Okay to close us out. We're doing our creative tap in, which is our segment about creativity. Amy, are you ready for this week's quote?   Amy As ready as I'll ever be.   Grace Okay. Here we go. A creative life is an amplified life. That is by Elizabeth Gilbert. Say one more time. A creative life is an amplified life. Elizabeth Gilbert.   Amy Okay. I love Elizabeth Gilbert. She's the author of Big Magic. Right. We both know that. Yeah. Yeah, we both love that book. You told me about it. That's why I read it as you recommended it to me. So I'm a I'm a Liz Gill fan because of you. And I'm going to get a little literal on the quote amplified is like to increase the volume of turn something up. Mm hmm. So a creative life is a life that's been turned up a notch. And I agree with that. And I don't think it means having a creative career like you don't have to have a creative career to have a creative life. It's just how you creatively put things in your life, like what you do to express yourself creatively and to live creatively and to switch up your routine every now and then is going to like change, you know, raise the volume, raise the vibration on your life. So I think that is a very simple like, simply put quotes. But being creative raises your vibration is sort of how I am reading it. And I believe that is true. I strive to be creative, even beyond writing, however I can, even if not every day weekly, to try and just, like, keep my vibration high. And so I'm going to remember that. Liz. What about you, Grace? What does it make you think?   Grace Well, it makes me think about how often as writers, what we do is notice and amplify, you know? Oh, so we so we notice things that are going on in front of our eyes, in front of the world, you know? So I might walk down the street and just see, like, a guy or a girl like me dancing by herself. So I get to be I say down the street, and I make a character out of that. I'm just like, Oh, why is she dancing? Who is she? Where is she from? Is she happy, as she said? Is she dancing it out because, you know, something that happened in her life or is she just so joyously happy that she's dancing down the street like? So I think our job as artists at times is to take the things that happen in our lives, the things that we see, the things that we experience, and we amplify them to make art. So it makes me think of that, but it also makes me think of how blessed I feel to have creativity in my life. Yeah, because I feel like because I have creativity in my life, there are so many things that I can process, good or bad, through the lens of my creativity. Like even if I have a really bad experience, if I have a bad date, which I often did in New York, I was always on some bad dates, some man was ruining my day. But at the even in the midst of it, I would be like. You know, what is this, a character? You know what? I'm going to put this in something I write someday. So even though even when the bad things happen to me, I have the gift of being able to process it through my art. So when I hear creativity, a creative life is an amplified life. It just makes me think of all the ways that I can use what happens to me, good or bad, to to amplify, to create something that people can find some sort of relate ability in. Because, you know, we always say in writing that the specific is universal. So the things that happen in our everyday lives, if we can get specific, there's often people who can relate to it on some level, even if it's not exactly so. So, yeah, that's it kind of makes me think about, about the gift of being able to process trauma and joy through the lens of creativity.   Amy It was a simple quote, but I really love both our interpretations of it.   Grace Uh. Me too. Thanks for listening to the antidote. We hope this injected a little bit of joy into your week. I know it did mine. How about you, Amy?   Amy I feel good, girl. We should do this again sometime. Oh, we'll be here next week.   Grace And in the meantime, if you'd like to follow us on social, follow me. Grace. At Gracyact. That's G-R-A-C-Y-A-C-T.   Amy And follow me. Amy at AmyAniobi. That's A-M-Y-A-N-I-O-B-I and follow the show at theeantidotepod.   Grace That's thee with two E's.   Amy If you like, feeling good about yourself. Please subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.   Grace Goodbye.   Amy And next time you're out for a walk, twerk it out a little bit. And the antidote is hosted by us, Amy Ameobi and Grace Edwards. The show's production team includes senior producer Se'era Spragley Ricks and associate producer Jess Penzetta.   Grace Our executive producer is Erica Kraus, and our editor is Erika Janik. Sound Mixing by Alex Samson.   Amy Digital Production by Mijoe Sahiouni. Talent Booking by Marianne Ways. Our theme music was composed and produced by TT the artist and Cosmo The Truth.   Grace APM Studio executives in charge are Chandra Kavati, Alex Schaffert and Joanne Griffith. Concept created by Amy Aniobi and Grace Edwards.   Amy Send us your antidotes at AntidoteShow.org and remember to follow us on social media at theeantidotepod. That's thee with two E's.   Grace The Antidote is a production of American Public Media.   Amy What, what!

Relating to Self
How to cultivate a growth mindset through TED Talks {with Amy}

Relating to Self

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 3, 2022 50:14


In this episode of the Relating to Self podcast, Joachim speaks to Amy, who cultivated a growth mindset through Ted Talks.  Amy is the Founder of Next Gen Facilitation and helps prepare the Next Generation for Modern Life. Learn more about Amy and her work here: https://linktr.ee/EducationAmy Topics, resources, and useful links mentioned in the episode: The shortcomings of traditional education Internal vs. external motivation  How Amy cultivated a growth mindset through Ted Talks  The importance of rest in personal development  The many benefits of exercise  Psychotherapy as a tool for self-exploration  Finding and updating your core values  Amy's advice for reaching out to people, seeking help, and finding your people A parting quote from Amy: "You can't prepare the path for the person, You can only prepare the person for the path." If you enjoyed this episode, consider sharing it with a friend and leaving a rating or review. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Sign up for the Relating to Self newsletter Follow Joachim on Twitter

Screaming in the Cloud
The Controversy of Cloud Repatriation With Amy Tobey of Equinix

Screaming in the Cloud

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 27, 2022 38:34


About AmyAmy Tobey has worked in tech for more than 20 years at companies of every size, working with everything from kernel code to user interfaces. These days she spends her time building an innovative Site Reliability Engineering program at Equinix, where she is a principal engineer. When she's not working, she can be found with her nose in a book, watching anime with her son, making noise with electronics, or doing yoga poses in the sun.Links Referenced: Equinix: https://metal.equinix.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/MissAmyTobey TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn, and this episode is another one of those real profiles in shitposting type of episodes. I am joined again from a few months ago by Amy Tobey, who is a Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix, back for more. Amy, thank you so much for joining me.Amy: Welcome. To your show. [laugh].Corey: Exactly. So, one thing that we have been seeing a lot over the past year, and you struck me as one of the best people to talk about what you're seeing in the wilderness perspective, has been the idea of cloud repatriation. It started off with something that came out of Andreessen Horowitz toward the start of the year about the trillion-dollar paradox, how, at a certain point of scale, repatriating to a data center is the smart and right move. And oh, my stars that ruffle some feathers for people?Amy: Well, I spent all this money moving to the cloud. That was just mean.Corey: I know. Why would I want to leave the cloud? I mean, for God's sake, my account manager named his kid after me. Wait a minute, how much am I spending on that? Yeah—Amy: Good question.Corey: —there is that ever-growing problem. And there have been the examples that people have given of Dropbox classically did a cloud repatriation exercise, and a second example that no one can ever name. And it seems like okay, this might not necessarily be the direction that the industry is going. But I also tend to not be completely naive when it comes to these things. And I can see repatriation making sense on a workload-by-workload basis.What that implies is that yeah, but a lot of other workloads are not going to be going to a data center. They're going to stay in a cloud provider, who would like very much if you never read a word of this to anyone in public.Amy: Absolutely, yeah.Corey: So, if there are workloads repatriating, it would occur to me that there's a vested interest on the part of every major cloud provider to do their best to, I don't know if saying suppress the story is too strongly worded, but it is directionally what I mean.Amy: They aren't helping get the story out. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, it's like, “That's a great observation. Could you maybe shut the hell up and never make it ever again in public, or we will end you?” Yeah. Your Amazon. What are you going to do, launch a shitty Amazon Basics version of what my company does? Good luck. Have fun. You're probably doing it already.But the reason I want to talk to you on this is a confluence of a few things. One, as I mentioned back in May when you were on the show, I am incensed and annoyed that we've been talking for as long as we have, and somehow I never had you on the show. So, great. Come back, please. You're always welcome here. Secondly, you work at Equinix, which is, effectively—let's be relatively direct—it is functionally a data center as far as how people wind up contextualizing this. Yes, you have higher level—Amy: Yeah I guess people contextualize it that way. But we'll get into that.Corey: Yeah, from the outside. I don't work there, to be clear. My talking points don't exist for this. But I think of oh, Equinix. Oh, that means you basically have a colo or colo equivalent. The pricing dynamics have radically different; it looks a lot closer to a data center in my imagination than it does a traditional public cloud. I would also argue that if someone migrates from AWS to Equinix, that would be viewed—arguably correctly—as something of a repatriation. Is that directionally correct?Amy: I would argue incorrectly. For Metal, right?Corey: Ah.Amy: So, Equinix is a data center company, right? Like that's why everybody knows us as. Equinix Metal is a bare metal primitive service, right? So, it's a lot more of a cloud workflow, right, except that you're not getting the rich services that you get in a technically full cloud, right? Like, there's no RDS; there's no S3, even. What you get is bare metal primitives, right? With a really fast network that isn't going to—Corey: Are you really a cloud provider without some ridiculous machine-learning-powered service that's going to wind up taking pictures, perform incredibly expensive operations on it, and then return something that's more than a little racist? I mean, come on. That's not—you're not a cloud until you can do that, right?Amy: We can do that. We have customers that do that. Well, not specifically that, but um—Corey: Yeah, but they have to build it themselves. You don't have the high-level managed service that basically serves as, functionally, bias laundering.Amy: Yeah, you don't get it in a box, right? So, a lot of our customers are doing things that are unique, right, that are maybe not exactly fit into the cloud well. And it comes back down to a lot of Equinix's roots, which is—we talk but going into the cloud, and it's this kind of abstract environment we're reaching for, you know, up in the sky. And it's like, we don't know where it is, except we have regions that—okay, so it's in Virginia. But the rule of real estate applies to technology as often as not, which is location, location, location, right?When we're talking about a lot of applications, a challenge that we face, say in gaming, is that the latency from the customer, so that last mile to your data center, can often be extremely important, right, so a few milliseconds even. And a lot of, like, SaaS applications, the typical stuff that really the cloud was built on, 10 milliseconds, 50 milliseconds, nobody's really going to notice that, right? But in a gaming environment or some very low latency application that needs to run extremely close to the customer, it's hard to do that in the cloud. They're building this stuff out, right? Like, I see, you know, different ones [unintelligible 00:05:53] opening new regions but, you know, there's this other side of the cloud, which is, like, the edge computing thing that's coming alive, and that's more where I think about it.And again, location, location, location. The speed of light is really fast, but as most of us in tech know, if you want to go across from the East Coast to the West Coast, you're talking about 80 milliseconds, on average, right? I think that's what it is. I haven't checked in a while. Yeah, that's just basic fundamental speed of light. And so, if everything's in us-east-1—and this is why we do multi-region, sometimes—the latency from the West Coast isn't going to be great. And so, we run the application on both sides.Corey: It has improved though. If you want to talk old school things that are seared into my brain from over 20 years ago, every person who's worked in data centers—or in technology, as a general rule—has a few IP addresses seared. And the one that I've always had on my mind was 130.111.32.11. Kind of arbitrary and ridiculous, but it was one of the two recursive resolvers provided at the University of Maine where I had my first help desk job.And it lives on-prem, in Maine. And generally speaking, I tended to always accept that no matter where I was—unless I was in a data center somewhere—it was about 120 milliseconds. And I just checked now; it is 85 and change from where I am in San Francisco. So, the internet or the speed of light have improved. So, good for whichever one of those it was. But yeah, you've just updated my understanding of these things. All of this is, which is to say, yes, latency is very important.Amy: Right. Let's forget repatriation to really be really honest. Even the Dropbox case or any of them, right? Like, there's an economic story here that I think all of us that have been doing cloud work for a while see pretty clearly that maybe not everybody's seeing that—that's thinking from an on-prem kind of situation, which is that—you know, and I know you do this all the time, right, is, you don't just look at the cost of the data center and the servers and the network, the technical components, the bill of materials—Corey: Oh, lies, damned lies, and TCO analyses. Yeah.Amy: —but there's all these people on top of it, and the organizational complexity, and the contracts that you got to manage. And it's this big, huge operation that is incredibly complex to do well that is almost nobody's business. So the way I look at this, right, and the way I even talk to customers about it is, like, “What is your produ—” And I talk to people internally about this way? It's like, “What are you trying to build?” “Well, I want to build a SaaS.” “Okay. Do you need data center expertise to build a SaaS?” “No.” “Then why the hell are you putting it in a data center?” Like we—you know, and speaking for my employer, right, like, we have Equinix Metal right here. You can build on that and you don't have to do all the most complex part of this, at least in terms of, like, the physical plant, right? Like, right, getting a bare metal server available, we take care of all of that. Even at the primitive level, where we sit, it's higher level than, say, colo.Corey: There's also the question of economics as it ties into it. It's never just a raw cost-of-materials type of approach. Like, my original job in a data center was basically to walk around and replace hard drives, and apparently, to insult people. Now, the cloud has taken one of those two aspects away, and you can follow my Twitter account and figure out which one of those two it is, but what I keep seeing now is there is value to having that task done, but in a cloud environment—and Equinix Metal, let's be clear—that has slipped below the surface level of awareness. And well, what are the economic implications of that?Well, okay, you have a whole team of people at large companies whose job it is to do precisely that. Okay, we're going to upskill them and train them to use cloud. Okay. First, not everyone is going to be capable or willing to make that leap from hard drive replacement to, “Congratulations and welcome to JavaScript. You're about to hate everything that comes next.”And if they do make that leap, their baseline market value—by which I mean what the market is willing to pay for them—approximately will double. And whether they wind up being paid more by their current employer or they take a job somewhere else with those skills and get paid what they are worth, the company still has that economic problem. Like it or not, you will generally get what you pay for whether you want to or not; that is the reality of it. And as companies are thinking about this, well, what gets into the TCO analysis and what doesn't, I have yet to see one where the outcome was not predetermined. They're less, let's figure out in good faith whether it's going to be more expensive to move to the cloud, or move out of the cloud, or just burn the building down for insurance money. The outcome is generally the one that the person who commissioned the TCO analysis wants. So, when a vendor is trying to get you to switch to them, and they do one for you, yeah. And I'm not saying they're lying, but there's so much judgment that goes into this. And what do you include and what do you not include? That's hard.Amy: And there's so many hidden costs. And that's one of the things that I love about working at a cloud provider is that I still get to play with all that stuff, and like, I get to see those hidden costs, right? Like you were talking about the person who goes around and swaps out the hard drives. Or early in my career, right, I worked with someone whose job it was this every day, she would go into data center, she'd swap out the tapes, you know, and do a few things other around and, like, take care of the billing system. And that was a job where it was kind of going around and stewarding a whole bunch of things that kind of kept the whole machine running, but most people outside of being right next to the data center didn't have any idea that stuff even happen, right, that went into it.And so, like you were saying, like, when you go to do the TCO analysis, I mean, I've been through this a couple of times prior in my career, where people will look at it and go like, “Well, of course we're not going to list—we'll put, like, two headcount on there.” And it's always a lie because it's never just to headcount. It's never just the network person, or the SRE, or the person who's racking the servers. It's also, like, finance has to do all this extra work, and there's all the logistic work, and there is just so much stuff that just is really hard to include. Not only do people leave it out, but it's also just really hard for people to grapple with the complexity of all the things it takes to run a data center, which is, like, one of the most complex machines on the planet, any single data center.Corey: I've worked in small-scale environments, maybe a couple of mid-sized ones, but never the type of hyperscale facility that you folks have, which I would say is if it's not hyperscale, it's at least directionally close to it. We're talking thousands of servers, and hundreds of racks.Amy: Right.Corey: I've started getting into that, on some level. Now, I guess when we say ‘hyperscale,' we're talking about AWS-size things where, oh, that's a region and it's going to have three dozen data center facilities in it. Yeah, I don't work in places like that because honestly, have you met me? Would you trust me around something that's that critical infrastructure? No, you would not, unless you have terrible judgment, which means you should not be working in those environments to begin with.Amy: I mean, you're like a walking chaos exercise. Maybe I would let you in.Corey: Oh, I bring my hardware destruction aura near anything expensive and things are terrible. It's awful. But as I looked at the cloud, regardless of cloud, there is another economic element that I think is underappreciated, and to be fair, this does, I believe, apply as much to Equinix Metal as it does to the public hyperscale cloud providers that have problems with naming things well. And that is, when you are provisioning something as a customer of one of these places, you have an unbounded growth problem. When you're in a data center, you are not going to just absentmindedly sign an $8 million purchase order for new servers—you know, a second time—and then that means you're eventually run out of power, space, places to put things, and you have to go find it somewhere.Whereas in cloud, the only limit is basically your budget where there is no forcing function that reminds you to go and clean up that experiment from five years ago. You have people with three petabytes of data they were using for a project, but they haven't worked there in five years and nothing's touched it since. Because the failure mode of deleting things that are important, or disasters—Amy: That's why Glacier exists.Corey: Oh, exactly. But that failure mode of deleting things that should not be deleted are disastrous for a company, whereas if you've leave them there, well, it's only money. And there's no forcing function to do that, which means you have this infinite growth problem with no natural limit slash predator around it. And that is the economic analysis that I do not see playing out basically anywhere. Because oh, by the time that becomes a problem, we'll have good governance in place. Yeah, pull the other one. It has bells on it.Amy: That's the funny thing, right, is a lot of the early drive in the cloud was those of us who wanted to go faster and we were up against the limitations of our data centers. And then we go out and go, like, “Hey, we got this cloud thing. I'll just, you know, put the credit card in there and I'll spin up a few instances, and ‘hey, I delivered your product.'” And everybody goes, “Yeah, hey, happy.” And then like you mentioned, right, and then we get down the road here, and it's like, “Oh, my God, how much are we spending on this?”And then you're in that funny boat where you have both. But yeah, I mean, like, that's just typical engineering problem, where, you know, we have to deal with our constraints. And the cloud has constraints, right? Like when I was at Netflix, one of the things we would do frequently is bump up against instance limits. And then we go talk to our TAM and be like, “Hey, buddy. Can we have some more instance limit?” And then take care of that, right?But there are some bounds on that. Of course, in the cloud providers—you know, if I have my cloud provider shoes on, I don't necessarily want to put those limits to law because it's a business, the business wants to hoover up all the money. That's what businesses do. So, I guess it's just a different constraint that is maybe much too easy to knock down, right? Because as you mentioned, in a data center or in a colo space, I outgrow my cage and I filled up all that space I have, I have to either order more space from my colo provider, I expand to the cloud, right?Corey: The scale I was always at, the limit was not the space because I assure you with enough shoving all things are possible. Don't believe me? Look at what people are putting in the overhead bin on any airline. Enough shoving, you'll get a Volkswagen in there. But it was always power constrained is what I dealt with it. And it's like, “Eh, they're just being conservative.” And the whole building room dies.Amy: You want blade servers because that's how you get blade servers, right? That movement was about bringing the density up and putting more servers in a rack. You know, there were some management stuff and [unintelligible 00:16:08], but a lot of it was just about, like, you know, I remember I'm picturing it, right—Corey: Even without that, I was still power constrained because you have to remember, a lot of my experiences were not in, shall we say, data center facilities that you would call, you know, good.Amy: Well, that brings up a fun thing that's happening, which is that the power envelope of servers is still growing. The newest Intel chips, especially the ones they're shipping for hyperscale and stuff like that, with the really high core counts, and the faster clock speeds, you know, these things are pulling, like, 300 watts. And they also have to egress all that heat. And so, that's one of the places where we're doing some innovations—I think there's a couple of blog posts out about it around—like, liquid cooling or multimode cooling. And what's interesting about this from a cloud or data center perspective, is that the tools and skills and everything has to come together to run a, you know, this year's or next year's servers, where we're pushing thousands of kilowatts into a rack. Thousands; one rack right?The bar to actually bootstrap and run this stuff successfully is rising again, compared to I take my pizza box servers, right—and I worked at a gaming company a long time ago, right, and they would just, like, stack them on the floor. It was just a stack of servers. Like, they were in between the rails, but they weren't screwed down or anything, right? And they would network them all up. Because basically, like, the game would spin up on the servers and if they died, they would just unplug that one and leave it there and spin up another one.It was like you could just stack stuff up and, like, be slinging cables across the data center and stuff back then. I wouldn't do it that way now, but when you add, say liquid cooling and some of these, like, extremely high power situations into the mix, now you need to have, for example, if you're using liquid cooling, you don't want that stuff leaking, right? And so, it's good as the pressure fittings and blind mating and all this stuff that's coming around gets, you still have that element of additional training, and skill, and possibility for mistakes.Corey: The thing that I see as I look at this across the space is that, on some level, it's gotten harder to run a data center than it ever did before. Because again, another reason I wanted to have you on this show is that you do not carry a quota. Although you do often carry the conversation, when you have boring people around you, but quotas, no. You are not here selling things to people. You're not actively incentivized to get people to see things a certain way.You are very clearly an engineer in the right ways. I will further point out though, that you do not sound like an engineer, by which I mean, you're going to basically belittle people, in many cases, in the name of being technically correct. You're a human being with a frickin soul. And believe me, it is noticed.Amy: I really appreciate that. If somebody's just listening to hearing my voice and in my name, right, like, I have a low voice. And in most of my career, I was extremely technical, like, to the point where you know, if something was wrong technically, I would fight to the death to get the right technical solution and maybe not see the complexity around the decisions, and why things were the way they were in the way I can today. And that's changed how I sound. It's changed how I talk. It's changed how I look at and talk about technology as well, right? I'm just not that interested in Kubernetes. Because I've kind of started looking up the stack in this kind of pursuit.Corey: Yeah, when I say you don't sound like an engineer, I am in no way shape or form—Amy: I know.Corey: —alluding in any respect to your technical acumen. I feel the need to clarify that statement for people who might be listening, and say, “Hey, wait a minute. Is he being a shithead?” No.Amy: No, no, no.Corey: Well, not the kind you're worried I'm being anyway; I'm a different breed of shithead and that's fine.Amy: Yeah, I should remember that other people don't know we've had conversations that are deeply technical, that aren't on air, that aren't context anybody else has. And so, like, I bring that deep technical knowledge, you know, the ability to talk about PCI Express, and kilovolts [unintelligible 00:19:58] rack, and top-of-rack switches, and network topologies, all of that together now, but what's really fascinating is where the really big impact is, for reliability, for security, for quality, the things that me as a person, that I'm driven by—products are cool, but, like, I like them to be reliable; that's the part that I like—really come down to more leadership, and business acumen, and understanding the business constraints, and then being able to get heard by an audience that isn't necessarily technical, that doesn't necessarily understand the difference between PCI, PCI-X, and PCI Express. There's a difference between those. It doesn't mean anything to the business, right, so when we want to go and talk about why are we doing, for example, multi-region deployment of our application? If I come in and say, “Well, because we want to use Raft.” That's going to fall flat, right?The business is going to go, “I don't care about Raft. What does that have to do with my customers?” Which is the right question to always ask. Instead, when I show up and say, “Okay, what's going on here is we have this application sits in a single region—or in a single data center or whatever, right? I'm using region because that's probably what most of the people listening understand—you know, so I put my application in a single region and it goes down, our customers are going to be unhappy. We have the alternative to spend, okay, not a little bit more money, probably a lot more money to build a second region, and the benefit we will get is that our customers will be able to access the service 24x7, and it will always work and they'll have a wonderful experience. And maybe they'll keep coming back and buy more stuff from us.”And so, when I talk about it in those terms, right—and it's usually more nuanced than that—then I start to get the movement at the macro level, right, in the systemic level of the business in the direction I want it to go, which is for the product group to understand why reliability matters to the customer, you know? For the individual engineers to understand why it matters that we use secure coding practices.[midroll 00:21:56]Corey: Getting back to the reason I said that you are not quota-carrying and you are not incentivized to push things in a particular way is that often we'll meet zealots, and I've never known you to be one, you have always been a strong advocate for doing the right thing, even if it doesn't directly benefit any given random employer that you might have. And as a result, one of the things that you've said to me repeatedly is if you're building something from scratch, for God's sake, put it in cloud. What is wrong with you? Do that. The idea of building it yourself on low-lying, underlying primitives for almost every modern SaaS style workload, there's no reason to consider doing something else in almost any case. Is that a fair representation of your position on this?Amy: It is. I mean, the simpler version right, “Is why the hell are you doing undifferentiated lifting?” Right? Things that don't differentiate your product, why would you do it?Corey: The thing that this has empowered then is I can build an experiment tonight—I don't have to wait for provisioning and signed contracts and do all the rest. I can spend 25 cents and get the experiment up and running. If it takes off, though, it has changed how I move going forward as well because there's no difference in the way that there was back when we were in data centers. I'm going to try and experiment I'm going to run it in this, I don't know, crappy Raspberry Pi or my desktop or something under my desk somewhere. And if it takes off and I have to scale up, I got to do a giant migration to real enterprise-grade hardware. With cloud, you are getting all of that out of the box, even if all you're doing with it is something ridiculous and nonsensical.Amy: And you're often getting, like, ridiculously better service. So, 20 years ago, if you and I sat down to build a SaaS app, we would have spun up a Linux box somewhere in a colo, and we would have spun up Apache, MySQL, maybe some Perl or PHP if we were feeling frisky. And the availability of that would be one machine could do, what we could handle in terms of one MySQL instance. But today if I'm spinning up a new stack for some the same kind of SaaS, I'm going to probably deploy it into an ASG, I'm probably going to have some kind of high availability database be on it—and I'm going to use Aurora as an example—because, like, the availability of an Aurora instance, in terms of, like, if I'm building myself up with even the very best kit available in databases, it's going to be really hard to hit the same availability that Aurora does because Aurora is not just a software solution, it's also got a team around it that stewards that 24/7. And it continues to evolve on its own.And so, like, the base, when we start that little tiny startup, instead of being that one machine, we're actually starting at a much higher level of quality, and availability, and even security sometimes because of these primitives that were available. And I probably should go on to extend on the thought of undifferentiated lifting, right, and coming back to the colo or the edge story, which is that there are still some little edge cases, right? Like I think for SaaS, duh right? Like, go straight to. But there are still some really interesting things where there's, like, hardware innovations where they're doing things with GPUs and stuff like that.Where the colo experience may be better because you're trying to do, like, custom hardware, in which case you are in a colo. There are businesses doing some really interesting stuff with custom hardware that's behind an application stack. What's really cool about some of that, from my perspective, is that some of that might be sitting on, say, bare metal with us, and maybe the front-end is sitting somewhere else. Because the other thing Equinix does really well is this product we call a Fabric which lets us basically do peering with any of the cloud providers.Corey: Yeah, the reason, I guess I don't consider you as a quote-unquote, “Cloud,” is first and foremost, rooted in the fact that you don't have a bandwidth model that is free and grass and criminally expensive to send it anywhere that isn't to you folks. Like, are you really a cloud if you're not just gouging the living piss out of your customers every time they want to send data somewhere else?Amy: Well, I mean, we like to say we're part of the cloud. And really, that's actually my favorite feature of Metal is that you get, I think—Corey: Yeah, this was a compliment, to be very clear. I'm a big fan of not paying 1998 bandwidth pricing anymore.Amy: Yeah, but this is the part where I get to do a little bit of, like, showing off for Metal a little bit, in that, like, when you buy a Metal server, there's different configurations, right, but, like, I think the lowest one, you have dual 10 Gig ports to the server that you can get either in a bonded mode so that you have a single 20 Gig interface in your operating system, or you can actually do L3 and you can do BGP to your server. And so, this is a capability that you really can't get at all on the other clouds, right? This lets you do things with the network, not only the bandwidth, right, that you have available. Like, you want to stream out 25 gigs of bandwidth out of us, I think that's pretty doable. And the rates—I've only seen a couple of comparisons—are pretty good.So, this is like where some of the business opportunities, right—and I can't get too much into it, but, like, this is all public stuff I've talked about so far—which is, that's part of the opportunity there is sitting at the crossroads of the internet, we can give you a server that has really great networking, and you can do all the cool custom stuff with it, like, BGP, right? Like, so that you can do Anycast, right? You can build Anycast applications.Corey: I miss the days when that was a thing that made sense.Amy: [laugh].Corey: I mean that in the context of, you know, with the internet and networks. These days, it always feels like the network engineering as slipped away within the cloud because you have overlays on top of overlays and it's all abstractions that are living out there right until suddenly you really need to know what's going on. But it has abstracted so much of this away. And that, on some level, is the surprise people are often in for when they wind up outgrowing the cloud for a workload and wanting to move it someplace that doesn't, you know, ride them like naughty ponies for bandwidth. And they have to rediscover things that we've mostly forgotten about.I remember having to architect significantly around the context of hard drive failures. I know we've talked about that a fair bit as a thing, but yeah, it's spinning metal, it throws off heat and if you lose the wrong one, your data is gone and you now have serious business problems. In cloud, at least AWS-land, that's not really a thing anymore. The way EBS is provisioned, there's a slight tick in latency if you're looking at just the right time for what I think is a hard drive failure, but it's there. You don't have to think about this anymore.Migrate that workload to a pile of servers in a colo somewhere, guess what? Suddenly your reliability is going to decrease. Amazon, and the other cloud providers as well, have gotten to a point where they are better at operations than you are at your relatively small company with your nascent sysadmin team. I promise. There is an economy of scale here.Amy: And it doesn't have to be good or better, right? It's just simply better resourced—Corey: Yeah.Amy: Than most anybody else can hope. Amazon can throw a billion dollars at it and never miss it. In most organizations out there, you know, and most of the especially enterprise, people are scratching and trying to get resources wherever they can, right? They're all competing for people, for time, for engineering resources, and that's one of the things that gets freed up when you just basically bang an API and you get the thing you want. You don't have to go through that kind of old world internal process that is usually slow and often painful.Just because they're not resourced as well; they're not automated as well. Maybe they could be. I'm sure most of them could, in theory be, but we come back to undifferentiated lifting. None of this helps, say—let me think of another random business—Claire's, whatever, like, any of the shops in the mall, they all have some kind of enterprise behind them for cash processing and all that stuff, point of sale, none of this stuff is differentiating for them because it doesn't impact anything to do with where the money comes in. So again, we're back at why are you doing this?Corey: I think that's also the big challenge as well, when people start talking about repatriation and talking about this idea that they are going to, oh, that cloud is too expensive; we're going to move out. And they make the economics work. Again, I do firmly believe that, by and large, businesses do not intentionally go out and make poor decisions. I think when we see a company doing something inscrutable, there's always context that we're missing, and I think as a general rule of thumb, that at these companies do not hire people who are fools. And there are always constraints that they cannot talk about in public.My general position as a consultant, and ideally as someone who aspires to be a decent human being, is that when I see something I don't understand, I assume that there's simply a lack of context, not that everyone involved in this has been foolish enough to make giant blunders that I can pick out in the first five seconds of looking at it. I'm not quite that self-confident yet.Amy: I mean, that's a big part of, like, the career progression into above senior engineer, right, is, you don't get to sit in your chair and go, like, “Oh, those dummies,” right? You actually have—I don't know about ‘have to,' but, like, the way I operate now, right, is I remember in my youth, I used to be like, “Oh, those business people. They don't know, nothing. Like, what are they doing?” You know, it's goofy what they're doing.And then now I have a different mode, which is, “Oh, that's interesting. Can you tell me more?” The feeling is still there, right? Like, “Oh, my God, what is going on here?” But then I get curious, and I go, “So, how did we get here?” [laugh]. And you get that story, and the stories are always fascinating, and they always involve, like, constraints, immovable objects, people doing the best they can with what they have available.Corey: Always. And I want to be clear that very rarely is it the right answer to walk into a room and say, look at the architecture and, “All right, what moron built this?” Because always you're going to be asking that question to said moron. And it doesn't matter how right you are, they're never going to listen to another thing out of your mouth again. And have some respect for what came before even if it's potentially wrong answer, well, great. “Why didn't you just use this service to do this instead?” “Yeah, because this thing predates that by five years, jackass.”There are reasons things are the way they are, if you take any architecture in the world and tell people to rebuild it greenfield, almost none of them would look the same as they do today because we learn things by getting it wrong. That's a great teacher, and it hurts. But it's also true.Amy: And we got to build, right? Like, that's what we're here to do. If we just kind of cycle waiting for the perfect technology, the right choices—and again, to come back to the people who built it at the time used—you know, often we can fault people for this—used the things they know or the things that are nearby, and they make it work. And that's kind of amazing sometimes, right?Like, I'm sure you see architectures frequently, and I see them too, probably less frequently, where you just go, how does this even work in the first place? Like how did you get this to work? Because I'm looking at this diagram or whatever, and I don't understand how this works. Maybe that's a thing that's more a me thing, like, because usually, I can look at a—skim over an architecture document and be, like, be able to build the model up into, like, “Okay, I can see how that kind of works and how the data flows through it.” I get that pretty quickly.And comes back to that, like, just, again, asking, “How did we get here?” And then the cool part about asking how did we get here is it sets everybody up in the room, not just you as the person trying to drive change, but the people you're trying to bring along, the original architects, original engineers, when you ask, how did we get here, you've started them on the path to coming along with you in the future, which is kind of cool. But until—that storytelling mode, again, is so powerful at almost every level of the stack, right? And that's why I just, like, when we were talking about how technical I bring things in, again, like, I'm just not that interested in, like, are you Little Endian or Big Endian? How did we get here is kind of cool. You built a Big Endian architecture in 2022? Like, “Ohh. [laugh]. How do we do that?”Corey: Hey, leave me to my own devices, and I need to build something super quickly to get it up and running, well, what I'm going to do, for a lot of answers is going to look an awful lot like the traditional three-tier architecture that I was running back in 2008. Because I know it, it works well, and I can iterate rapidly on it. Is it a best practice? Absolutely not, but given the constraints, sometimes it's the fastest thing to grab? “Well, if you built this in serverless technologies, it would run at a fraction of the cost.” It's, “Yes, but if I run this thing, the way that I'm running it now, it'll be $20 a month, it'll take me two hours instead of 20. And what exactly is your time worth, again?” It comes down to the better economic model of all these things.Amy: Any time you're trying to make a case to the business, the economic model is going to always go further. Just general tip for tech people, right? Like if you can make the better economic case and you go to the business with an economic case that is clear. Businesses listen to that. They're not going to listen to us go on and on about distributed systems.Somebody in finance trying to make a decision about, like, do we go and spend a million bucks on this, that's not really the material thing. It's like, well, how is this going to move the business forward? And how much is it going to cost us to do it? And what other opportunities are we giving up to do that?Corey: I think that's probably a good place to leave it because there's no good answer. We can all think about that until the next episode. I really want to thank you for spending so much time talking to me again. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Amy: Always Twitter for me, MissAmyTobey, and I'll see you there. Say hi.Corey: Thank you again for being as generous with your time as you are. It's deeply appreciated.Amy: It's always fun.Corey: Amy Tobey, Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix Metal. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment that tells me exactly what we got wrong in this episode in the best dialect you have of condescending engineer with zero people skills. I look forward to reading it.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

The Adventures of Pipeman
PipemanRadio Interviews Chris Kurtz About MediaTwist and The Virtual Talking Record Label

The Adventures of Pipeman

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 29, 2022 17:15


On this episode of the Adventures of Pipeman, Pipeman talks to Chris Kurtz from TMG and the Virtual Talking Record Label, who is here to talk about some of the cool stuff they have going on over there.Chris explains that TMG stands for The Media Twist Group, and they are one of the leading ad agencies in the music and motorsports industries. TMG has been the agency to bring the tech to the marketing section first in the music industry. Chris invites Pipeman to have a look and see why the top artists go to TMG to create their shows. Chris talks about some of the possibilities that we could potentially see in the future but insists to us that no matter what happens, it'll be coming thanks to web three. He even lists some of the practical uses we can already see thanks to web three on websites like Carvana and StockX. Chris also talks about what it's like working as a husband and wife team, saying they have often been demonized, but he says he can't imagine running the business without his wife Amy You can check out what Chris has going on at mediatwistgroup.com as well as virtualtalkingmachinecompany.com. To see something Chris has worked on you can check out Sammy Hagar's latest video on YouTube called Crazy Times.In 2006, power couple Aimee and Chris Kurtz started building their ad agency in “the backstage of the world” in Lititz, PA. It has rapidly grown into the leading ad agency in multiple industries besides entertainment, including healthcare, automotive and even restaurants. The company makes use of social media marketing to build brands. This strategy has proven instrumental in the success of many artists and companies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Chris Kurtz, a marketing genius, uses tools and techniques that he's created to push the biggest brands in the world further in their respected industries. Now he's here to share his knowledge with every business wanting to grow.TMG have worked with the powerhouse brands like Feld Entertainment who put on shows such as Disney on Ice, Barnum & Bailey Circus, Monster Jam, Supercross, and Marvel Universe Live. TMG's ad campaigns have resulted in sold out arenas across the country.Recently, the couple launched The Virtual Talking Record Label (VTMC) where they are working on several large projects to produce music videos for iconic and top grossing artists like Sammy Hagar and the Circle. They are creating music videos and capturing live performances in 3D through the art of avatar creation, so that future generations will be afforded the unique opportunity to see artists from the past perform live.The Virtual Talking Record Label made history when Sammy Hagar and the Circle flew into Lititz, PA, in April of this year (2022) to film four music videos in ONE day at the "backstage of the world," Rock Lititz, a massive campus that includes multiple facilities to help fuel the innovative and creative mind. This is something that has never been done before, especially on a shoestring budget. VTMC's mission is to create historic filmmaking in never before used spaces.On July 29, 2022, Sammy Hagar and the Circle released their single "Crazy Times" along with the video that was shot at Rock Lititz. The video can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voqpGNuhdREAt a later date, Sammy Hagar and the Circle's homage to Elvis Costello's "Pump it Up" video will be released. The director at VTMC used similar angles to capture the essence of the original."This project signals the start of a new dawn for TMG in AR/VR and takes us another step closer to leaving our mark on the tech and entertainment sectors.", Aimee Lankford Kurtz, TMG Vice President. The Mediatwist Group recently partnered with tech giant, Microsoft and their AR/VR arm, Avatar Dimension. “We are thrilled to partner up with the unique marketing mind of Chris Kurtz and his MediaTwist team,” said Sovanna Mam, head of production for Avatar Dimension. “Life like 3D holograms and avatars are no longer a dream of the past, they exist today, and artists and musicians will begin entertaining in a new digital landscape. Chris is positioned to bridge the digital gap between big brands and big acts in this exciting new medium. Thrilled to have Chris as one of the tech's biggest evangelists!”Lititz, PA, the coolest small town in America, is also the home to some of the world's biggest brands in the entertainment industry such as Clair Brothers, Atomic, and TAIT.Virtual Talking Machine Company | Philanthropy In Motion | Fundraising w/ Music Legends: https://youtu.be/snpZtrU_ioMThe Mediatwist Group featured in New York Weekly:https://nyweekly.com/business/through-covid-tmg-remains-the-lead-ad-agency-in-the-industry/Client Testimonials:https://www.mediatwistgroup.com/clienttestimonials Take some zany and serious journeys with The Pipeman aka Dean K. Piper, CST on The Adventures of Pipeman also known as Pipeman Radio syndicated globally “Where Who Knows And Anything Goes”. Listen to & Watch a show dedicated to motivation, business, empowerment, inspiration, music, comedy, celebrities, shock jock radio, various topics, and entertainment. The Adventures of Pipeman is hosted by Dean K. Piper, CST aka “The Pipeman” who has been said to be hybrid of Tony Robbins, Batman, and Howard Stern. The Adventures of Pipeman has received many awards, media features, and has been ranked for multiple categories as one of the Top 6 Live Radio Shows & Podcasts in the world. Pipeman Radio also consists of multiple podcasts showing the many sides of Pipeman. These include The Adventures of Pipeman, Pipeman in the Pit, and Positively Pipeman and more. You can find all of the Pipeman Podcasts anywhere you listen to podcasts. With thousands of episodes that focus on Intertainment which combines information and entertainment there is something for everyone including over 5000 interviews with celebrities, music artists/bands, authors, speakers, coaches, entrepreneurs, and all kinds of professionals.Then there is The Pipeman Radio Tour where Pipeman travels the country and world doing press coverage for Major Business Events, Conferences, Conventions, Music Festivals, Concerts, Award Shows, and Red Carpets. One of the top publicists in music has named Pipeman the “King of All Festivals.” So join the Pipeman as he brings “The Pipeman Radio Tour” to life right before your ears and eyes.The Adventures of Pipeman Podcasts are heard on The Adventures of Pipeman Site, Pipeman Radio, Talk 4 Media, Talk 4 Podcasting, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Amazon Music, Audible, Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts and over 100 other podcast outlets where you listen to Podcasts. The following are the different podcasts to check out and subscribe to:• The Adventures of Pipeman• Pipeman Radio• Pipeman in the Pit• Positively PipemanFollow @pipemanradio on all social media outletsVisit Pipeman Radio on the Web at linktr.ee/pipemanradio, theadventuresofpipeman.com, pipemanradio.com, talk4media.com, w4cy.com, talk4tv.com, talk4podcasting.comDownload The Pipeman Radio APPPhone/Text Contact – 561-506-4031Email Contact – dean@talk4media.com The Adventures of Pipeman is broadcast live daily at 8AM ET.The Adventures of Pipeman TV Show is viewed on Talk 4 TV (www.talk4tv.com).The Adventures of Pipeman Radio Show is broadcast on W4CY Radio (www.w4cy.com) and K4HD Radio (www.k4hd.com) – Hollywood Talk Radio part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com). The Adventures of Pipeman Podcast is also available on www.theadventuresofpipeman.com, Talk 4 Media (www.talk4media.com), Talk 4 Podcasting (www.talk4podcasting.com), iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Audible, and over 100 other podcast outlets.

Pipeman's Power of Music
PipemanRadio Interviews Chris Kurtz About MediaTwist and The Virtual Talking Record Label

Pipeman's Power of Music

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 29, 2022 17:15


On this episode of the Adventures of Pipeman, Pipeman talks to Chris Kurtz from TMG and the Virtual Talking Record Label, who is here to talk about some of the cool stuff they have going on over there.Chris explains that TMG stands for The Media Twist Group, and they are one of the leading ad agencies in the music and motorsports industries. TMG has been the agency to bring the tech to the marketing section first in the music industry. Chris invites Pipeman to have a look and see why the top artists go to TMG to create their shows. Chris talks about some of the possibilities that we could potentially see in the future but insists to us that no matter what happens, it'll be coming thanks to web three. He even lists some of the practical uses we can already see thanks to web three on websites like Carvana and StockX. Chris also talks about what it's like working as a husband and wife team, saying they have often been demonized, but he says he can't imagine running the business without his wife Amy You can check out what Chris has going on at mediatwistgroup.com as well as virtualtalkingmachinecompany.com. To see something Chris has worked on you can check out Sammy Hagar's latest video on YouTube called Crazy Times.In 2006, power couple Aimee and Chris Kurtz started building their ad agency in “the backstage of the world” in Lititz, PA. It has rapidly grown into the leading ad agency in multiple industries besides entertainment, including healthcare, automotive and even restaurants. The company makes use of social media marketing to build brands. This strategy has proven instrumental in the success of many artists and companies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Chris Kurtz, a marketing genius, uses tools and techniques that he's created to push the biggest brands in the world further in their respected industries. Now he's here to share his knowledge with every business wanting to grow.TMG have worked with the powerhouse brands like Feld Entertainment who put on shows such as Disney on Ice, Barnum & Bailey Circus, Monster Jam, Supercross, and Marvel Universe Live. TMG's ad campaigns have resulted in sold out arenas across the country.Recently, the couple launched The Virtual Talking Record Label (VTMC) where they are working on several large projects to produce music videos for iconic and top grossing artists like Sammy Hagar and the Circle. They are creating music videos and capturing live performances in 3D through the art of avatar creation, so that future generations will be afforded the unique opportunity to see artists from the past perform live.The Virtual Talking Record Label made history when Sammy Hagar and the Circle flew into Lititz, PA, in April of this year (2022) to film four music videos in ONE day at the "backstage of the world," Rock Lititz, a massive campus that includes multiple facilities to help fuel the innovative and creative mind. This is something that has never been done before, especially on a shoestring budget. VTMC's mission is to create historic filmmaking in never before used spaces.On July 29, 2022, Sammy Hagar and the Circle released their single "Crazy Times" along with the video that was shot at Rock Lititz. The video can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voqpGNuhdREAt a later date, Sammy Hagar and the Circle's homage to Elvis Costello's "Pump it Up" video will be released. The director at VTMC used similar angles to capture the essence of the original."This project signals the start of a new dawn for TMG in AR/VR and takes us another step closer to leaving our mark on the tech and entertainment sectors.", Aimee Lankford Kurtz, TMG Vice President. The Mediatwist Group recently partnered with tech giant, Microsoft and their AR/VR arm, Avatar Dimension. “We are thrilled to partner up with the unique marketing mind of Chris Kurtz and his MediaTwist team,” said Sovanna Mam, head of production for Avatar Dimension. “Life like 3D holograms and avatars are no longer a dream of the past, they exist today, and artists and musicians will begin entertaining in a new digital landscape. Chris is positioned to bridge the digital gap between big brands and big acts in this exciting new medium. Thrilled to have Chris as one of the tech's biggest evangelists!”Lititz, PA, the coolest small town in America, is also the home to some of the world's biggest brands in the entertainment industry such as Clair Brothers, Atomic, and TAIT.Virtual Talking Machine Company | Philanthropy In Motion | Fundraising w/ Music Legends: https://youtu.be/snpZtrU_ioMThe Mediatwist Group featured in New York Weekly:https://nyweekly.com/business/through-covid-tmg-remains-the-lead-ad-agency-in-the-industry/Client Testimonials:https://www.mediatwistgroup.com/clienttestimonials Pipeman's Power of Music is a music and interview segment of The Adventures of Pipeman Radio Show (#pipemanradio) and from The King of All Festivals while on The Pipeman Radio Tour. Pipeman's Power of Music features all kinds of music and interviews with bands & music artists especially in the genres of Heavy Metal, Rock, Hard Rock, Classic Rock, Punk Rock, Goth, Industrial, Alternative, Thrash Metal & Indie Music. Pipeman's Power of Music also features press coverage of events, concerts, & music festivals. Pipeman Productions is an artist management company that sponsors the show introducing new local & national talent showcasing new artists & indie artists.Then there is The Pipeman Radio Tour where Pipeman travels the country and world doing press coverage for Major Business Events, Conferences, Conventions, Music Festivals, Concerts, Award Shows, and Red Carpets. One of the top publicists in music has named Pipeman the “King of All Festivals.” So join the Pipeman as he brings “The Pipeman Radio Tour” to life right before your ears and eyes.Pipeman's Power of Music Podcasts are heard on Pipeman Radio, Talk 4 Media, Talk 4 Podcasting, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Amazon Music, Audible, Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts and over 100 other podcast outlets where you listen to Podcasts. The following are the different podcasts to check out and subscribe to:•The Adventures of Pipeman•Pipeman Radio•Pipeman in the Pit•Positively PipemanFollow @pipemanradio on all social media outletsVisit Pipeman Radio on the Web at linktr.ee/pipemanradio, theadventuresofpipeman.com, pipemanradio.com, talk4media.com, w4cy.com, talk4tv.com, talk4podcasting.comDownload The Pipeman Radio APPPhone/Text Contact – 561-506-4031Email Contact – dean@talk4media.comThe Adventures of Pipeman is broadcast live daily at 8AM ET.The Adventures of Pipeman TV Show is viewed on Talk 4 TV (www.talk4tv.com).The Adventures of Pipeman Radio Show is broadcast on W4CY Radio (www.w4cy.com) and K4HD Radio (www.k4hd.com) – Hollywood Talk Radio part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com). Pipeman's Power of Music are also available on Pipeman Radio (www.pipemanradio.com), Talk 4 Media (www.talk4media.com), Talk 4 Podcasting (www.talk4podcasting.com), iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Audible, and over 100 other podcast outlets.

Pipeman in the Pit
PipemanRadio Interviews Chris Kurtz About MediaTwist and The Virtual Talking Record Label

Pipeman in the Pit

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 29, 2022 17:15


On this episode of the Adventures of Pipeman, Pipeman talks to Chris Kurtz from TMG and the Virtual Talking Record Label, who is here to talk about some of the cool stuff they have going on over there.Chris explains that TMG stands for The Media Twist Group, and they are one of the leading ad agencies in the music and motorsports industries. TMG has been the agency to bring the tech to the marketing section first in the music industry. Chris invites Pipeman to have a look and see why the top artists go to TMG to create their shows. Chris talks about some of the possibilities that we could potentially see in the future but insists to us that no matter what happens, it'll be coming thanks to web three. He even lists some of the practical uses we can already see thanks to web three on websites like Carvana and StockX. Chris also talks about what it's like working as a husband and wife team, saying they have often been demonized, but he says he can't imagine running the business without his wife Amy You can check out what Chris has going on at mediatwistgroup.com as well as virtualtalkingmachinecompany.com. To see something Chris has worked on you can check out Sammy Hagar's latest video on YouTube called Crazy Times.In 2006, power couple Aimee and Chris Kurtz started building their ad agency in “the backstage of the world” in Lititz, PA. It has rapidly grown into the leading ad agency in multiple industries besides entertainment, including healthcare, automotive and even restaurants. The company makes use of social media marketing to build brands. This strategy has proven instrumental in the success of many artists and companies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Chris Kurtz, a marketing genius, uses tools and techniques that he's created to push the biggest brands in the world further in their respected industries. Now he's here to share his knowledge with every business wanting to grow.TMG have worked with the powerhouse brands like Feld Entertainment who put on shows such as Disney on Ice, Barnum & Bailey Circus, Monster Jam, Supercross, and Marvel Universe Live. TMG's ad campaigns have resulted in sold out arenas across the country.Recently, the couple launched The Virtual Talking Record Label (VTMC) where they are working on several large projects to produce music videos for iconic and top grossing artists like Sammy Hagar and the Circle. They are creating music videos and capturing live performances in 3D through the art of avatar creation, so that future generations will be afforded the unique opportunity to see artists from the past perform live.The Virtual Talking Record Label made history when Sammy Hagar and the Circle flew into Lititz, PA, in April of this year (2022) to film four music videos in ONE day at the "backstage of the world," Rock Lititz, a massive campus that includes multiple facilities to help fuel the innovative and creative mind. This is something that has never been done before, especially on a shoestring budget. VTMC's mission is to create historic filmmaking in never before used spaces.On July 29, 2022, Sammy Hagar and the Circle released their single "Crazy Times" along with the video that was shot at Rock Lititz. The video can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voqpGNuhdREAt a later date, Sammy Hagar and the Circle's homage to Elvis Costello's "Pump it Up" video will be released. The director at VTMC used similar angles to capture the essence of the original."This project signals the start of a new dawn for TMG in AR/VR and takes us another step closer to leaving our mark on the tech and entertainment sectors.", Aimee Lankford Kurtz, TMG Vice President. The Mediatwist Group recently partnered with tech giant, Microsoft and their AR/VR arm, Avatar Dimension. “We are thrilled to partner up with the unique marketing mind of Chris Kurtz and his MediaTwist team,” said Sovanna Mam, head of production for Avatar Dimension. “Life like 3D holograms and avatars are no longer a dream of the past, they exist today, and artists and musicians will begin entertaining in a new digital landscape. Chris is positioned to bridge the digital gap between big brands and big acts in this exciting new medium. Thrilled to have Chris as one of the tech's biggest evangelists!”Lititz, PA, the coolest small town in America, is also the home to some of the world's biggest brands in the entertainment industry such as Clair Brothers, Atomic, and TAIT.Virtual Talking Machine Company | Philanthropy In Motion | Fundraising w/ Music Legends: https://youtu.be/snpZtrU_ioMThe Mediatwist Group featured in New York Weekly:https://nyweekly.com/business/through-covid-tmg-remains-the-lead-ad-agency-in-the-industry/Client Testimonials:https://www.mediatwistgroup.com/clienttestimonials Pipeman in the Pit is a music and interview segment of The Adventures of Pipeman Radio Show (#pipemanradio) and from The King of All Festivals while on The Pipeman Radio Tour. Pipeman in the Pit features all kinds of music and interviews with bands & music artists especially in the genres of Heavy Metal, Rock, Hard Rock, Classic Rock, Punk Rock, Goth, Industrial, Alternative, Thrash Metal & Indie Music. Pipeman in the Pit also features press coverage of events, concerts, & music festivals. Pipeman Productions is an artist management company that sponsors the show introducing new local & national talent showcasing new artists & indie artists.Then there is The Pipeman Radio Tour where Pipeman travels the country and world doing press coverage for Major Business Events, Conferences, Conventions, Music Festivals, Concerts, Award Shows, and Red Carpets. One of the top publicists in music has named Pipeman the “King of All Festivals.” So join the Pipeman as he brings “The Pipeman Radio Tour” to life right before your ears and eyes.Pipeman in the Pit Podcasts are heard on Pipeman Radio, Talk 4 Media, Talk 4 Podcasting, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Amazon Music, Audible, Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts and over 100 other podcast outlets where you listen to Podcasts. The following are the different podcasts to check out and subscribe to:•The Adventures of Pipeman•Pipeman Radio•Pipeman in the Pit•Positively PipemanFollow @pipemanradio on all social media outletsVisit Pipeman Radio on the Web at linktr.ee/pipemanradio, theadventuresofpipeman.com, pipemanradio.com, talk4media.com, w4cy.com, talk4tv.com, talk4podcasting.comDownload The Pipeman Radio APPPhone/Text Contact – 561-506-4031Email Contact – dean@talk4media.comThe Adventures of Pipeman is broadcast live daily at 8AM ET.The Adventures of Pipeman TV Show is viewed on Talk 4 TV (www.talk4tv.com).The Adventures of Pipeman Radio Show is broadcast on W4CY Radio (www.w4cy.com) and K4HD Radio (www.k4hd.com) – Hollywood Talk Radio part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com). Pipeman in the Pit Podcasts are also available on Pipeman Radio (www.pipemanradio.com), Talk 4 Media (www.talk4media.com), Talk 4 Podcasting (www.talk4podcasting.com), iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Audible, and over 100 other podcast outlets.

Fertility Friday Radio | Fertility Awareness for Pregnancy and Hormone-free birth control
FFP 427 | Healing PCOS | PCOS/HA Replay Series | Amy Medling

Fertility Friday Radio | Fertility Awareness for Pregnancy and Hormone-free birth control

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 29, 2022 49:21


Amy is a certified health coach who specializes in working with women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). She is the author of Healing PCOS, and she works with women who are frustrated and have lost all hope when the only solution their doctors offer is to lose weight, take a pill, and live with their symptoms. Amy founded PCOS Diva to offer women tools to help gain control of their PCOS and regain their fertility, femininity, health, and happiness, and she has developed a proven protocol of supplements, diet, and lifestyle programs to support women to heal their PCOS. In case you haven't heard Amy's first appearance on the podcast, click here to have a listen. In today's episode, we talk about overcoming PCOS naturally, and the importance of advocating for the support you need.. Today's episode is sponsored by the Fertility Awareness Mastery Online Self-Study Course.  The most in-depth and comprehensive online fertility awareness self-study program available. Click here to join now! Topics discussed in today's episode: What is PCOS, and what are the most common symptoms? What is a PCOS diva? The importance of advocating for yourself to get the care and support you need The importance of believing that you can be healthy and recover from PCOS The connection between PCOS, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and endometrial cancer Why PCOS is not simply a condition of the “ovaries” 21 days to managing your PCOS symptoms Movement for PCOS Dealing with a PCOS diagnosis The role of supplementation in healing PCOS Connect with Amy: You can connect with Amy on her website, and on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter! Resources mentioned: Healing PCOS book by Amy Medling The Fifth Vital Sign: Master Your Cycles & Optimize Your Fertility (Book) | Lisa Hendrickson-Jack Fertility Awareness Mastery Charting Workbook Fertility Awareness Mastery Online Self-Study Program Related podcasts & blog posts: FFP 022 | What is PCOS? | Healing PCOS Naturally | PCOS Diva Amy Medling FFP 060 | Treating PCOS Without Fertility Drugs | Conceiving Naturally With PCOS | Dr. Katherine Sherif FFP 103 | Real Food for PCOS | PCOS, Insulin Resistance & Diabetes | Managing PCOS Naturally with Diet | Balancing Blood Sugar | Lily Nichols FFP 425 | PCOS or HA? | What Is The Difference? | Lisa | Fertility Friday FFP 354 | Coming Off The Pill With PCOS | Kate Kordsmeier Join the community! Follow Fertility Friday on Instagram! Subscribe to the Fertility Friday Podcast in Apple Podcasts!   Music Credit: Intro/Outro music Produced by J-Gantic A Special Thank You to Our Show Sponsors: Fertility Friday | Fertility Awareness Programs This episode is sponsored by my Fertility Awareness Programs! Master Fertility Awareness and take a deep dive into your cycles and how they relate to your overall health! Click here to apply now! Fertility Awareness Mastery Mentorship Program (FAMM) This episode is sponsored by FAMM! Are you a women's health practitioner looking for a solid way to incorporate comprehensive fertility awareness chart analysis into your practice? If yes, FAMM is the program you've been waiting for. Click here to apply now!

Be It Till You See It
113: Finding Optimal Health Through Your Symptoms

Be It Till You See It

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 27, 2022 48:13


You know your body. You know when something isn't quite right. Your symptoms have a cause and you shouldn't accept comfortability. Join a conversation on recognizing discomfort and making a change with a certified nutritional practitioner and professional basketball player.  If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to LesleyLogan.co/podcast. If you have any comments or questions about the Be It pod shoot us a message at beit@lesleylogan.co . And as always, if you're enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at LesleyLogan.co/subscribe.In this episode you will learn about:The support and lifestyle of women in professional basketball Starting before being the expertSpace and grace in the comparison game Your optimal health shouldn't be a dreamIdentifying and getting over our fear of failure. Episode References/Links:Flo By Alisa VittiIG @coachamyraeGuest Bio:Hello! I'm Amy, a retired professional athlete who was diagnosed with my 2nd autoimmune disorder in 2016. I went from playing professional basketball all over the world to battling professional fatigue and not recognizing myself in the mirror. From my rock bottom moment, I felt a nudge that told me there had to be a better way & I relied on my mindset built within my athletic career to pave the way to feeling like myself again--and even better! Currently, I'm certified as a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP), specializing in thyroid health, striving to support women in advocating for their health, getting their energy back, and feeling like themselves again  If you enjoyed this episode, make sure and give us a five star rating and leave us a review on iTunes, Podcast Addict, Podchaser or Castbox.ResourcesWatch the Be It Till You See It podcast on YouTube!Lesley Logan websiteBe It Till You See It PodcastOnline Pilates Classes by Lesley LoganOnline Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan on YouTubeProfitable PilatesSocial MediaInstagramFacebookLinkedInEpisode Transcript:Lesley Logan 0:00  Hey, Be It listener. What's up? Okay, so I just love, I love the way the world works. I love that how you can meet people and have conversations with people and learn something you never knew you'd have. And I don't think we do that enough. So if you are feeling stuck, if you are feeling alone, if you are feeling like uninspired. I want you to have a conversation with someone you don't know. I want you to ask them questions. So if you're like, "How do I do that? I'm so scared. I'm an introvert." Look at the local meetups, look at Eventbrite, look at like opportunities that are happening for a networking situation. And then you're gonna find someone who makes eye contact with you. And you're gonna smile at them. And then you're just going to ask them questions, you don't have to a... you don't have to say anything. You can just ask them questions like think 40 Old Virgin just like ask a question, if you don't know what to say ask a question. And the reason is, people do like to talk about themselves, but also going to learn something about somebody. And I think we underestimate how inspiring it can be to learn another person's story and what they're going through. And even if it maybe not inspiring, but maybe you feel seen, and feeling seen as something that we all truly, truly want. And so my next guest for you this week is Amy, Amy Denson, and I am really excited for you to hear her story. And I want you to listen to her story because maybe you don't have this story. Like maybe you weren't this like professional and NB like women's basketball player. I certainly wasn't. But as I listened to her story, I thought about my health story. And I thought about some of the health stories of people who have listened to the show and written in. And I truly think that a lot of times we think we're alone, and this is only happening to us. And I know for myself, when I started actually sharing my story about my stomach, I started of find out how many people had stomach issues. And I wish I had started talking about earlier, it was embarrassing. So I didn't want to but I wouldn't have felt alone. And so as you listen to today's interview, I really want you to hear her story and see yourself in it. And I, I really am excited for you to hear what she's up to, which is excited about next, how she got on this mission that she's on. And also, of course, you know, I love those BE IT action items that hers are really cool. And they're going to challenge you in the best ways. So after this message here, Amy.Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast, where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self doubt. My friends, action brings clarity and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guests will bring Bold, Executable, Intrinsic and Targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and Be It Till You See It. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started.All right, Be It listeners I have a very special special guest Amy Denson here. Amy has an incredible story, I've be... I'm really excited for you to hear it because I think it's really easy to think, "Well, it must be easy for them. But I've got these things going on or I have this setback or this obstacle." And we can kind of let those obstacles become just like a reason to not do something. And Amy is certainly not letting that happen. So, I'm excited for you to be inspired by her and hear how she did it. So Amy, tell everyone who you are and how you got here.Amy Denson 3:42  Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here and to meet you. Um, so my story is, you know, it's all of ours probably could go on forever. But I grew up playing basketball and I always knew that in my heart. That was what I was supposed to do. And I you know, felt most in my skin and confident and as a pretty tall, broad shouldered, strong young woman who did not fit in in any other scene. Basketball was really home for me. I received a full ride scholarship to Arizona State University. We did some amazing things there. We created history there. We were the first team to make it into the Sweet 16 tournament of the NCAA tournament. (Lesley: Whoa! That's a insane journey.) Oh, yeah. So. Yeah, yes. And it was really cool because we had a really young team. So for the majority of my career, I got to play with the same people which is very, very special. (Lesley: That's incredible) Yeah, and then after I graduated, I just wasn't done and I signed with an agent and then I ended up playing overseas professionally for eight years. So I played in Puerto Rico for four seasons. I played in Australia for three years. I played in Poland, Romania and Spain. And so ...Lesley Logan 5:04  What a life? Like how (Amy: Yeah) cool. I so when we moved to Las Vegas there, I mean, LA had a WNBA team but I'm not going to downtown. So but the Las Vegas team is like (Amy: The Aces) ... Yeah, the Aces. (Amy: Yeah) It's a short stint down the street actually from (Amy: Yeah) where I live, like really close and my Dad and I would go we'd like, "Oh, hey, there's a game today. Let's go." And it was Brad came and it was so fun we get, we actually probably get the worst seats in the house. And most people think but like it's just the side of this of the of the basket. So it's like all the action is there the whole game (Amy: Yeah) and it's like, so fun. (Amy: That's so awesome.) Those women are amazing. I mean, (Amy: Yeah) as were you but like, it's kind of crazy. I don't think people realize that. (Amy: No) So many female basketball players spend most of their life playing for multiple teams at the same time and around the world. Like you're, they're not (Amy: Yeah) making NBA wages, which is really annoying.Amy Denson 5:53  No. And that's the thing. Yeah. And so really the WNBA I mean, it's, you know, still probably the best league in the world, but women make their money overseas. And so unless you know, do get some sponsorships here as well as your pay. You know, if you do have WNBA on your resume, you can make pretty decent money overseas and overseas is much different as far as like really even support wise for women. And I don't think that women, even young women in college, understand maybe they do more so now but when I was in college, how many opportunities there are to play at a next level? And yes, sometimes, I mean, there's just so many different options, maybe that just means you get paid, you know, a little bit extra, but you get your room and board and you know, a couple of meals, but you you're basically traveling for free, right, you're seeing the world for free. I was able to make a pretty decent wage. And I you know, really kind of moved up the ranks and played in some really amazing conferences against some really amazing athletes. And I think, you know, people may not like to, you know, I think put the women's game down quite a bit as far as pace and athleticism and all that kind of stuff. But I do think, I don't think people understand the amount of effort it takes to be professional edit anything. (Lesley: Yeah. No I don't think so.) Right. And then you add anything physical in there. And yeah, physical is a huge part of it. But the once you're at a professional level, it's the mental game, right? It's an emotional game. It's, it's a, you know, the battle to how do I, how do I beat my opponent? That's probably just as good or better than me, you know. SoLesley Logan 7:27  Right. That might, that you might end up being on the team with in another time.Amy Denson 7:32  Right. Yeah, so it was a beautiful experience. I actually, I really miss traveling, like to my core right now. I just I lived out of a suitcase and had a laptop for eight years. And it just was the most amazing experience. It was hard. And it was isolating at times, especially (Lesley: Yeah) with language barriers, but I got to get paid and travel in my gift for my gift. And so I was so blessed because I got to live out my first dream. (Lesley: Yeah.) And I don't know how many people can really, you know, say that when, as you're growing up, and it's just something that I always knew that I was going to do. And it was, there was no doubt or question in my mind.Lesley Logan 8:12  Yeah, I think that thank you for saying that. Because I do think a lot of people make sacrifices or they think, "Okay, I went to college, and I gotta do this, I gotta go be a grown up." And like, you know, you are one of the few people who's like, "You know, I'm gonna keep doing my passion." And, and yeah, it's not making you the money that's going to like, put a house on the ground or anything like that. But it did allow you to see the world and experience the highs and the lows from that. And so, you know, I cut you off in your story. Like, what made you leave? Did you just like injure out? Did you age out? Did you get (Amy: Yeah) tired of what was that? What was the next step?Amy Denson 8:47  I don't know why, but I always had it in my mind that I would probably retire by around age 30. And I was really, I was just kind of burnt out. I was really tired. I'd been playing year around for a long time. I just needed a break more so emotionally and mentally. And I also was getting into a serious relationship with my best friend who is my now my husband. And I just felt in my heart. It was time. (Lesley: Yeah.) And so when I came back to the United States, it was it was so hard because I hadn't lived here for eight years. I couldn't get a job. Nobody would look at my professional history as a job. So it looks like to them I had gra... unless they had a sports background. Like I'd graduated college and then I just showed back up when I was you know 30. (Lesley: That's so interesting.) Yeah, it was just ...Lesley Logan 9:45  I never would have thought about that. Like it would be so it's like your resume like doesn't start and so they're like, you have no experience except for that you (Amy: Right) like so much experience like what it takes to be (Amy: Right) on a team, what it takes to win a game like you know, like you're right unless they know sports, they don't see a talent, skill set there.Amy Denson 10:00  Yeah. And so there was like a major, major identity crisis. You know, I didn't really understand or know how to introduce myself without saying, "Hi, Amy, I'm played professional basketball." It was it was just everything, you know, it was my pride, it was my joy, it was everything. And so to now really kind of step back and, and not only not be acknowledged for that effort, but really have to start over not only like career wise, but for my for myself, like, who am I without basketball, (Lesley: Yeah) which was very hard, and I knew it was going to be hard to retire. But it did not know how hard it was gonna be. I didn't know, I didn't realize the grieving process I would have. (Lesley: Yeah.) And so I just kind of floated around, I got my personal training and certification so that well, this is obviously the next thing. I still want to be active. You know, I didn't know what to do. And ...Lesley Logan 10:52  But you know, what all I see is like, of course, like, who wouldn't want to train with like, I mean ...Amy Denson 10:56  Yeah, why not? I want to work out. Let's work out together, you know.Lesley Logan 10:59  Yeah. Who would want to train with a WNBA player or a women's (Amy: Yeah) basketball player? Like, I like that would be a great calling card. (Lesley laughs) (Amy: Yeah, exactly.) I mean, you'd have to want to do it. So how, so you went and got your training? (Amy: Yeah) And how did that go?Amy Denson 11:11  It went okay. It was just, it was just a hard time, it was a really hard time, it was a rough transition for a couple years, I ended up landing in a college coaching position for a small division one at college in Oregon. And I thought, "Well, duh, this is what I'm supposed to do, hello." And I actually, I loved it, I really think that it could have been a really good path for me, it's just again, for women's basketball, the money is nothing, which is not everything, but we've got to live (Lesley: We got a paying bills. Yeah) We gotta pay. And it's just, you know, it just, I wasn't in a very good working environment as far as with the other adults, unfortunately. And this is when I started to really experience some symptoms that I wasn't used to. So I only knew how to work out one way. If I was dealing with anything stress wise, you know, lifewise, for me working out with, you know, it's a much as a mental and emotional release as it is a physical, so I only knew how to work out one way, which is like, balls to the wall. Like, if you're not close to puking, and you push through the wall, all of these things that we had, like we did to (Lesley: Yeah) stay in shape, right. But I noticed like it wasn't really quote unquote, "working" like it used to, I noticed, like I was just so fatigued, I was really, really high stressed. I just felt like, emotionally a little out of control. And (Lesley: Yeah) I wasn't sure I don't know how to describe that I just did not feel like myself. And ...Lesley Logan 12:45  And I can resonate with that though, Amy because it's like, a you like you're already in a transition of some kind anyways, like your life as you knew it has changed. And you're, it's not like it was like easy to step back into the world. And so then you're like trying different careers out. And then also the way you train isn't working the way it used to. And also like, our bodies are getting older, like there is this weird thing because I was an athlete too. And then like, you hit 30 and you're like, "Wow, I can't do two a days anymore. Should I be doing two a days?" (Amy: Right) But like, I also don't know a different way. (Amy: Right) So, (Amy: Yeah) you know, you're kind of going, like, in, in your health and your workouts in every part of your life. Everything is different and out of control. So of course you're gonna feel stressed. (Amy: Yeah) And all these things, and it's hard to articulate when you're in it.Amy Denson 13:31  Absolutely. And so I started to go to a couple doctors for some help. And, you know, just kept getting the all, "Eat less and workout more," duh. (Lesley laughs) Cool. (Lesley: Okay thanks.) I just really felt like in my experience. You know, after seeing multiple doctors, I started to lose my hair. I started my hair was thinning. I just noticed all of these things. And I was like, "My God I just ..." I just feel off, right? I just feel off. I went I was just you know, as we do, I was like on Google and this and that. So I I read that a dermatologist could help with hair. So I went to a dermatologist who told me I was prematurely balding at 33 and I was like, "Are you sure? Like is like really?" And so I ended up going to an endocrinologist who one of the top and in the field for Oregon. And I had gone to the ER because I had I have nosebleeds or I had nosebleeds that I couldn't get stopped. So I had to go to the ER. And when I leaned back for them to, to basically cauterize my nose, I have two huge nodules on my neck and the guy was like, "Have you gotten those checked out?" And I said, "No, I didn't even know that they were there." So I went to this endocrinologist. We did an ultrasound and she's like, "Yep, you've got Hashimotos." And I was like, "Okay, what, what's Hashimotos?" And she's like, "Well, it's an autoimmune disorder where your body is attacking your thyroid tissue" because it thinks that there's a foreign invader, something's going on. I'm like, "Okay, well, does this explain, you know." Because a lot of times Hashimotos and hypothyroidism go hand in hand. "So does this explain me having cold hands and feet?" So poor circulation? "Does this explain me losing hair? Does this explain me gaining weight specifically around my midsection? Does this explain me feeling like I'm losing my GD mind?" She said, "Yeah." And I'm like, "Oh my gosh, great. So like, what do we do about it?" She goes, "Nothing. (Lesley: No) We wait, we wait until your body attacks your thyroid so much that it doesn't work anymore. And then we will start hormones."Lesley Logan 15:31  That is not an option. That is, so you just have to suffer?Amy Denson 15:34  And I think, I think it's really interesting because, you know, the way that I was raised to is like, well, she obviously knows more than me, right? Because she's a doctor. (Lesley: Yeah.) And so I walked away from that feeling, obviously very defeated. And also, the way that I approach things as an athlete is like, I'm going to control it as much as I possibly can. So what can I do? What can I do? Not knowing the things that I was doing, were probably escalating it. (Lesley: Yeah) Um, and so it was about two years later that I, we had some people over for Memorial Day, and I got incredibly sick. And I literally remember, like shutting the door that like saying our goodbyes, and as soon as I shut the door, I just started crying. And I just said, "I can't live the rest of my life like this. Something is wrong, something is off. And I need help." (Lesley: Yeah) And from that day forward, that has been my mission. And now that I have more information, because Hashimotos is my actual life, my second autoimmune disorder. And with thyroid related disorders, illnesses, whatever, it's so common, and there's just so much that goes into it. And a lot of it kind of goes against the grain of like our diet culture, workout culture, and all of that. So there's so much mental and emotional stuff that's tied up into that, you know, the two a days or the, you know, anyway, working out, eating less all of that. So, once I kind of started on my own health journey, I've now made it my mission to help other women not feel alone, and really to feel like themselves again, because I really think the biggest thing that's missing right now, in like, our standard medical care system is that we're just there's no empathy. I don't think we're even being heard. (Lesley: Yeah.) And of course, you know, I think a lot of times, which is okay, I'm not saying anything is wrong with medication, but I do think we have to also be aware of everything else that goes into the healing process, besides support for medication. (Lesley: Yeah) I have absolutely nothing against it, if it if it helps people, I am on it. But that's not the only thing that we can't just pop a pill and it be okay, we can't just pop a pill and not address our stress levels.Lesley Logan 17:58  You're... (Amy: You know) that's just it and like, I think, you know, some... one of my, my previous assistant was amazing. And she actually teaches people on how to be their own health advocate, or how to be an advocate for others. (Amy: Yes.) And I think we all like I'm sure, maybe generations younger than us, maybe they they are wise and all knowing that the doctors ... (Amy: Probably, they probably. Yeah) they're they come out knowing that no one knows what they're doing. (Amy: Yes) We, I grew up like the doctor knows they knew everything. (Amy: Well, yeah.) They went to school. They're the most educated person. (Amy: Absolutely.) And I had similar, like health issues where like, they literally like, "Well, you have IBS, so just, you know, eat like this, don't eat these things." I mean, those are very nutritional things. I think I'm probably supposed to eat those. You know, and I wasn't my own advocate, I probably wouldn't, I probably be dead right now, to be honest, because I was just like, suffering so much. And it was I my nutritional levels were so bad that I like had no B 12, no vitamin D, all these things. I think I would probably be divorced. And, and (Amy: Yeah) and a shell of a human. So I want to go back to something though, because you've made it this mission to like really help women who are going through this? Because you're going through this, I think the question is like, how do, how, what were the first steps or what the steps that you took to help other women go through something that you yourself, were still learning? Because I do think a lot of listeners get stuck in that they're like, "Well, I'm not the expert yet. So I can't do the thing that I'm feeling called to do." And you were like, "I'm being called do this." How did you do that? How did you kind of wrap your (Amy: Yeah) head around that?Amy Denson 19:32  Well, I think you know, it really started with obviously my own, getting my own ish together, and I don't have it together. But I do have a lot of knowledge around it. I do have a lot of knowledge around what works for me and what doesn't, which I feel like provides a lot of I don't know security, or when we feel out of control and we don't know what's causing what. It's like we just go down this rabbit hole of symptoms or what did I eat? What did I not eat? How did they move? What did I do different here? And that's all I used to do. And it was just so time consuming and energy sucking and defeating. So I think really, for me, the first step was, if anybody is out there, find some a doctor of some sort that's going to support you and has experience in whatever if you do know your diagnosis or don't know, I found a naturopath that it like changed my life, and I'm still with her today. I think that's your first step. I think me going on my own health journey, and then feeling a little bit better, always helps to like feel like I have capacity to help other people. (Lesley: Yeah) And I really think that the health journey is all it is, is a trial and error, I think we get so stuck in doing the right and wrong things. That it just, it's just like destabilizes us. And it's just trying this, see how this works. How does your body feel in this? Hey, if it doesn't feel good here, let's, let's tweak it and try try this and like just keep continuing to do that along the way with the intention of healing your body or with the intention of supporting your journey supporting your body in that. I think we just we've got to be a little bit more flexible in our thinking, and what we are willing to try it and not try or you know, really not get stuck and what diet worked for for your best friend. And it's not working for you now. I think we really get stuck in food specifically. (Lesley: Yeah.) Where I think that we don't always need to be, we don't need to always label how we eat as a diet. It's just how we eat. (Lesley: Yeah.) You don't need to be in a specific lane all the time. And I think that so, (Lesley: Yeah.) I would just say just being a couple steps ahead. Those couple steps make a really big difference for somebody else. And I (Lesley: Yeah.) always tell myself, "If I could help this person feel 10% better? How would their life improve?" Because when I was at my rock bottom, when I shut that door and said goodbye and started crying, I would have given anything to feel a little bit better. Or I would have given anything to have a little bit more knowledge around, "What the hell is going on with my body?"Lesley Logan 22:13  Yeah, um, I thank you for sharing that because I do I do believe like, people think that they have to be 15 steps ahead, the people that they're going to help. And it's like, you just have to be a couple steps ahead. Like, you know, because 15 steps ahead is like, you know, I know like, well, look like, well let's just talk about we're on a podcast, you're listening to this. Some of the people I look up to have like, a thousand episodes. I'm like, "That is overwhelming. That is like, yes, it's yes, inspiring. Yes, it's showing me the what's possible." But also like to think of it from, I don't know what episode this is going to be while we're recording it, but it's at least 100 and I don't know, eight. And, (Amy: Ah, that'a awesome.) you know, and so that that feels like a big gap. But I was just talking to somebody yesterday who has 300 episodes, and he was giving me some tips. And those felt very doable. He's only a few steps ahead of me, right. So I love that you share that. And I also think it's like not to underestimate like the power that you can help someone even if it's a couple percentage, you know, a little bit, (Amy: Yeah) and then you're because you're working on yourself, you're getting a couple more steps ahead. And so you're bringing (Amy: Right) everybody with you. (Amy: Right.) So thank you for sharing that. And I also think, you know, and I don't know, you'll have to tell me how long was for you. But I don't think a lot of people give the things that they're trying out enough time. (Amy: Absolutely not.) You know, like, Jenn Pike has been on our podcast before. She says, "When it comes to your hormones, it's 100 days. So the things we're doing, you're like, you don't get to even tell me anything for 100 days, like maybe you're gonna feel better right away. But the reality is, is like, it's going to take some time because the you know, like, the stuff we did has already affected what's happening right now."Amy Denson 23:51  Right? You know, it's taken us, you know, for a lot of clients or people that are around me, or that I work with, it's probably, you know, mid 30s, 40s. It's taken, we've been through a lot of shit by now. It's taken us a while to get here. And I don't think we realize just like you said, our habits and actions and everything. It's all led up to this. So in, you know, thinking back, we didn't necessarily get away with eating and drinking and moving a certain way. It's just where we've kind of caught up to this moment. And in this moment, and so, yeah, in our 20s we I feel like we're always in this comparison mode, but you have a family now, we have responsibilities. It looks different now, you know, our stress level is so incredibly high. And we keep addressing everything as, well, it's not mean it's not too high. It's probably normal, right? No, it's absolutely not and we don't realize that, all of that that how that is affecting our health. And even you know, my clients I work with 1 on 1, 6 months is probably the baseline. And that's just getting started. And I think that people feel like at the beginning at the starting line, like six months, like, "Oh my gosh, that's so long." But we're talking about the rest of your life. Six months is nothing and, and I'm not trying to, like, (Lesley: It's like, diminish or...) If you feel bad. Yeah, it make you feel bad, but like, we're just getting started. (Lesley: Oh, yeah.) We're just getting started this and I think that we just have this, you know, I think getting ready for a wedding or getting ready for a vacation or whatever, there's always a start and an end and a start and end, which is creating this yo yo dieting, culture mindset. And it literally like indicates it like as a, our blood pressure's going up and down, up and down, up and down, which is so hard on our body, we've got to instill some consistency within our, our health, within our life. And that comes with time, we never give anything enough time. And if we would just do really tiny things like tiny steps, and did them consistently for 90 days, for 100 days, for six months, for a year, we we discredit the amount of momentum we could build by (Lesley: Yeah) just doing small things, we think we have to start the diet on Monday, we think we have to, you know, start working out five days a week, no excuses, all of this kind of language, which yes, it worked for us at one time, and I was a part of all of that. But if we are going to be sustainable over a life, and you are dealing with health issues, and you have stress in your life, and and and you're a woman, (Lesley: Right) we have to, we have to find a different way.Lesley Logan 26:53  There has been a lot, there's like space and grace, it's like, I think you men... you mentioned it before, like there's comparison in there, we're comparing ourselves to like other people, even our own age, and it's like, like, specifically specifically for you, you have two autoimmune diseases, you said, just like two up two that's a lot. Like one's a lot. Two is different, right? So you can't compare yourself to somebody that have any, just like, I can't compare myself to somebody who never who never had an injury or never like, and I think we're wasting a lot of time there. We're also not giving ourselves credit for what we did do to get here. (Amy: Right. Absolutely.) And, and, you know, you said earlier, like six months sounds like a long time. But like, I dealt with some issues for 10 years, 10 years. And so I can say now that I am like, six years post, like actually got the diagnosis actually figured the thing. Now when I have a flare up, I'm like, "Oh, I know exactly what the trigger is." (Amy: Yes.) I'm stressed out. I'm stressed out and I am not being kind to my body. I need to bring everything all the (Amy: Yeah) cortisol down where and you know, I am I ended up even using this tracking app for my cycle, because I filmed for workout. So I'm there are some weeks where I'm filming 14 workouts, which in the grand scheme of things, it's like an hour of workout. So I so I, it's like the workout for the day, right? But I should not be doing that one of the weeks of everyone, that week, (Amy: Yeah) I should not be doing that I should be like, "Okay, I can go for my walk" I can do you know, like run, but I'm not going to like push myself, that needs to be low impact really kind in my body, stretchy stuff. And so when they changed once I had that information, I changed when I was working when I was filming, my inflammation and my stomach issues also went down. And so (Amy: Yeah) it's this thing that like we sometimes we take things like that's just how it is. And other times we think like, (Amy: Right) "Oh, that's too long, I don't have that kind of time." But to your credits, like once you have the information you start to have the healing process, then you have your whole life ahead of you and like that's gonna be a lot longer than the six months of like, (Amy: Yeah) having to trial and error and figure things out.Amy Denson 28:56  Yeah, I think there's just so much reassurance and, and really getting to know your body. And I you know, I think we talk so much about things that are common, but they're not normal. So your body is talking to you all the time. And we've got to start listening. We have to, we cannot push it aside and just keep pushing forward. I'll sleep later all, I'll put myself first later right or when when this ends, then you know when summer starts, whatever that is, because if you are having awful periods, your body's screaming at you. If you are having bloating, gassing, women if you are not pooping every day, your body is telling you something. So so many things that I think that you know, for a long time I just thought well, my cramps feeling awful for for the first day or two my period or the week up to, it's just how my mom experienced it. That's just how it is for me. Absolutely not. We are not meant to feel in this comfort most of our life. (Lesley: Right.) And so I think really starting to listen to your body and that is the information that we can work with.Lesley Logan 30:09  So can we talk about that? Because I think that that is a really important thing that some people like, "Now I like, I listen to my body." And then there's the perfectionist and overachievers listen to like, "But wait. Like, what does that mean? How do I do that?" So you mentioned, we gonna poop everyday ladies. You also mentioned like, serious cramps, like, yeah, people like, "Oh, I have PCOS or I have this." It's like, yeah, but even people with that don't have to have the worst cramps, there (Amy: Right) are still things you can do. So, (Amy: Absolutely) you know, because I used to have a friend, I had a friend of my practice, I remember, she was only going to the bathroom once every two weeks. And she was (Amy: Right) going to the doctor for this. And the doctor was like, "You just have a really lazy colon." And she's like, "I got that, you didn't, I don't need your medical opinion for that." She's like, I (Amy: Right) she did not have a lazy colon, though (Lesley laughs) (Amy: Right) like rolling faster.Amy Denson 30:56  My colon is not inherently lazy. It's not a choice. It's not on the couch watching Netflix like what do we need to do here?Lesley Logan 31:02  Yeah. So what are some others like, what are some? It maybe they're not easy, but what are some ways that people could listen to their body? Do they journal? Like, is there an app? Like what tool did you use to start listening to your body and paying attention to signs?Amy Denson 31:16  Um, I think my I mean, my awareness is pretty high. I've been listening to my body for a while, as an athlete, I had to, to make sure we're good to go, you know, all of that. But I mean, I think journaling is is a great form. I think really listening to podcasts, listening or books information. Alisa Vitti has a great book in the flow about women's cycle, about even like you were saying, how do you, how can we move within our cycle to really support our cycle? How can I eat within my cycle to really support my cycle? So I think if you're experiencing any discomfort, I would just note that or even imagine like, if, if I imagined my health is like, optimal, though, you know, I imagined myself like, walking through a beautiful field and, you know, the sun shining, and I just feel my absolute best. What does that look like? It does that look like I don't have heartburn anymore? Does that look like I don't have awful periods? Does that look like you know, my hair isn't thinning? Does that look like I don't feel cold all the time? Or I feel like I'm in control of my body. And I'm not just gaining weight all of a sudden, I don't know why? You know, what is that, what is that perfect ish health look like for you? And what symptoms are you experiencing that you would like to either reduce or eliminate?Lesley Logan 32:54  Yeah, I like that, I think because that's like, that allows every single listener to choose it for themselves. And you're not comparing my loves because that's not going to get you, (Amy: No, no, no.) you can't like everyone's going to have something that's a different optimal health. But I do think that like, you know, like, so if you're listening to this, if you heard any symptoms that she mentioned there, you're like, "Oh, the I have heartburn." Like, you don't have to have heartburn. And you don't have to take the Prilosec or whatever it's called to like, get rid of it every time you eat. Like, there are things you know, and holistic doctors, like I love mine. She's she's been on the (Amy: Right) podcast before and like, there's things I'm like, "Oh, I just live with this." And she's like, "No, you don't, actually."Amy Denson 33:34  Not necessary. (Lesley laughs) And it's just it's just really, it's about what can we do in specifically with heartburn, your body is just telling you, there is a need for some functional support there. We are, you know, and so what can we do to get your body to start performing digestively a little bit more optimally, so that we are not only reducing you taking any like, you know, Prilosec or PPI or anything like that. But we want to reduce the heartburn because it's just an indication that your body is not properly digesting, which (Lesley: Yeah) is everything. (Lesley: Right and that's all your nutrition and all the things. Yeah.) Yeah, just another, it's just another symptom. It's just another way of your body's saying and it. You know, there's no shame around our symptoms. (Lesley: Yeah.) And I think we really need to step away, step back from that. Even weight gain, that's a symptom of something. Right? Weight loss is a symptom of something. So let's figure it out. And you know, I don't think, you know, a lot of time we keep going back to, "Well, I ate this, I didn't eat that. I can't eat this because this causes that." It's a matter of function and really supporting that, rather than having to pick out which foods that you can and can't eat for the rest of your life. (Lesley: Yeah) We really need to get down to the root of what's going on and just say, "Hey, this is what I'm experiencing. I'd like some relief in these areas or more knowledge around these areas. And let's make a plan to move forward." But because you're experiencing something, you are not doing anything wrong. We just need to get more knowledge around what the heck is going on. And I understand that there is hope for some relief. And for a long time, I didn't feel like I had a lot of hope it was something that I had to deal with. (Lesley: Yeah) And so I would get so hard on myself for doing this or doing that, and then my symptoms would pop up, or symptoms would pop up. (Lesley: Yeah) And I felt like I would personally attack myself for, for doing this and that. So let's, let's try to take that off of there as well. And just look at it as information. And that can direct us on where we need to go.Lesley Logan 35:50  That's... Yes, all the yeses, because I, you know, I was like you're talking, I was thinking like, so many of these listeners are moms and 100% if their kid was saying something hurt or burned, or they're tired, they would be like figuring out all the things (Amy: Yeah) that would go on to make sure that that was not there. But when it comes to our own bodies, we excuse it away, or "Oh, it's just because I ate that," or "Oh, I shouldn't have ate that. And I know I shouldn't eat that." And that's why it was it's like we're not taking the same care to to make sure that our bodies which are the vessels that you need to continue to be the parent to your the person you love for as long as you can as seriously and I think like we that, that we all could bit change that. And also, I hear you saying a lot of things like being kind. I mean, really kind of yourself because your body's just trying to tell you something, and it's not like you did anything and you're wrong. And I love what you said about the symptoms like think it's amazing. So currently, Amy, before we wrap this up, what are you? Right now, is there anything that you are being it till you see it like? Are you taking new steps, new leaps? Like how are you, how is this mission going for you? And what are you doing that maybe you've never done before but you're working on figuring it out?Amy Denson 37:04  Yeah. Well, I mean, I literally just yesterday found out I finished my restorative wellness practitioner certification. You guys, I can test poop now. And I'm so excited. (Lesley laughs) I know not many people would be like, "What are you talking about?" And I actually I have nothing to do with it. But so ...Lesley Logan 37:25  You can ask, you can get the test for the, (Amy: I can now...) people to send the poop to the place. (Amy: Yes) Yes.Amy Denson 37:29  So I can now offer it's called the GI-MAP. And I can now offer an MRT, which is not a food sensitivities test, it's a test to see what foods are causing inflammation in your body, which is really what we want to get that inflammation down. So with that GI-MAP, we can, we can see the good bacteria, the not so good bacteria, we can see information, we can see auto immune activity. And we can we can really pair that with that MRT test so that we can have a plan to see, "Hey, this is what's going on inside of your gut. Everybody wants to talk about gut health. Well, let's look inside your dang, gut." And this really, really will help with them. I mean, everything lives in our gut. It's our second brain. It has a ton to do with our thyroid functioning, our you know, HPA axis, all of that. So I, I I am pursuing a deep dive into really finding out what's going on for people. So we can try to get to some root causes and really see where we need to support overall function and digestively to (Lesley: So cool.) and I think that that'll just be kind of a waterfall effect for most people's symptoms. So I am so excited. I think this is going to be a game changer.Lesley Logan 38:41  I cannot (Amy: ... feeling) I cannot even wait for my husband to listen to this. And he (Amy: Yeah) like, he'll be like, "All of a sudden it's like all this stuff and health. It's great and be kind. And it's like I'm excited because we can test poop now." Like he'll laughs so hard.Amy Denson 38:54  Yeah, absolutely.Lesley Logan 38:55  Oh my gosh, this is amazing, Amy. I'm really excited for our listeners to hear this and I can't wait to hear how they take away but before we let you go we have to hear your BE IT action items after this brief message.Okay, Amy, how can people find you, follow you, get to know you more?Amy Denson 39:14  Sure. I'm on Instagram at @coachamyrae and you can email me at amyraenutrition@gmail.com The website is getting a beautiful reboost which will be done in a couple of weeks. And yeah and then I also have a podcast as well called The Chronic Athletes and really just featuring stories of resilience inspiration and all things wellness just to you know show proof that it can be done in exactly what you're doing as well. SoLesley Logan 39:44  Oh, I love that so much. Okay, well that's cool because we definitely have some some athletes that are listening and also I had a girl on I'll have to connect you, I have to look it up. She actually was a D1 athlete as well. And then she wrote a book on like, how do you like go into life ...Amy Denson 40:01  Oh my gosh, that's so needed. The transition is so yep, (Lesley: Yeah) that's so cool.Lesley Logan 40:04  I'll I'll, I'll find (Amy: Oh great) her episode and I'll connect you two because like, yeah, it's amazing. (Amy: Thank you.) So okay, before we let you go, bold, executable, intrinsic or targeted steps people can take to be it till they see it. What do you have for us?Amy Denson 40:17  Yeah, you know, I was thinking about this and I just listened to, to a message the other day. And I think, really identifying and getting over our fear of failure. And I think really just going, just going after it, right, whether it's your health, whether it's your career, whether it's your family, whether it's just getting to know yourself, and understanding that if we are in pursuit of something with intention, there, there really is no failure, right, there's only going to be maybe learning lessons along the way. But if we're not ever pursuing anything, obviously, we're not going to be growing. But I think the pursuit is something is really what starts open more doors in your life, it starts to create that momentum. And I think if we can look at it as more of an opportunity in our pursuit, rather than the lens of failure of something, and really focus on the process, rather than the outcome, right. So a lot of people come with the goal is weight loss, which is great. But what else can we get out of the process? (Lesley: Yeah) What else can we get out of, of you taking that step forward for yourself and your health? Just just, you know, in that pursuit of intention, so I think really letting go of that, that lens of fear of failure, (Lesley: Yeah) and pursuing everything with with that lens of opportunity.Lesley Logan 41:49  Oh, I love this. I love those so much. Thank you. That another amazing and unique and I love them. Y'all, how are you use these tips in your life? Co... you're gonna tag @coachamyrae and the @be_it_pod and let us know. Post this on your socials, so we can see your takeaways, so we can shout you out, so we can share it. So we can also just see what you're up to and also what's resonating. If you're like, "I don't know how to do that." Then text this message, send this podcast to a friend. And that is not only how we get Amy's message, it's also how podcasts get heard. And the you have no idea how every single download matters. So every single one of you listen to this, it really does matter to all of us because we can't do this without you. So we want to know how you're using this in your life. Tag us both. And until next time, Be It Till You See It.That's all I got for this episode of the Be It Till You See It podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review. And follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcasts. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the @be_it_pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you. Share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others Be It Till You See It. Have an awesome day!'Be It Till You See It' is a production of 'As The Crows Fly Media'.Brad Crowell 43:09  It's written, produced, filmed and recorded by your host Lesley Logan and me, Brad Crowell. Our Associate Producer is Amanda Frattarelli.Lesley Logan 43:20  Kevin Perez at Disenyo handles all of our audio editing.Brad Crowell 43:25  Our theme music is by Ali at APEX Production Music. And our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi.Lesley Logan 43:33  Special thanks to our designer Jaira Mandal for creating all of our visuals (which you can't see because this is a podcast) and our digital producer, Jay Pedroso for editing all video each week so you can.Brad Crowell 43:45  And to Angelina Herico for transcribing each of our episodes so you can find them on our website. And, finally to Meridith Crowell for keeping us all on point and on time.Transcribed by https://otter.aiSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/be-it-till-you-see-it/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today's Takeaway with Florine Mark
How Pilates Strengthens Your Core and Your Mind

Today's Takeaway with Florine Mark

Play Episode Listen Later May 31, 2022 24:19


With Amy Warner, Regional Director for Club Pilates   It's no secret that the key to staying fit and in good health involves moving our bodies each day. When we intentionally move in ways that stretch and lengthen our muscles, we condition our bodies, by improving our posture and muscle tone. Not only is it good for us physically, but it gets those endorphins flowing which can also lift our mood and reduce stress. The most recent studies have shown that it may also improve our mental focus and concentration. Exercising our body may also exercise our mind.   But which exercise programs are best for us? One of the things to look for in a daily workout is a full-body, low-impact routine that won't strain your muscles or cause injury. Placing undue stress on your joints is not only painful, but it could prevent you from exercising for a few days until you can move again without pain. You'll also want a workout that can stabilize your core and improve your balance. That's why Pilates has consistently been rated one of the best overall fitness and conditioning programs. A good Pilates workout provides strength, flexibility, and balance training; the perfect mix to improve posture, mobility, and mental health.   My guest today is Amy Warner. She's the Regional Director for Club Pilates, an equipment-based pilates studio with 7 locations throughout metro Detroit and Grand Rapids. We talk with Amy about the mind/body benefits associated with Pilates and learn why this is such a great fitness activity for optimum physical and mental conditioning.   What You'll Hear on This Episode:   What is Amy's background and how did she get started with Pilates? What is Pilates and how is it different from yoga?   What makes Pilates different from other forms of exercise? What are some of the benefits associated with a Pilates workout? Why is it so important to strengthen and stabilize our core? What is the reformer? How is the reformer more beneficial than mat Pilates? What is some of the other equipment that you provide at Club Pilates? What does a typical Club Pilates class look like? Is Pilates a “one size fits all” type of workout? Does Pilates help you lose weight?   Today's Takeaway: Finding an activity or exercise routine you can commit to doing several days a week is not only good for you physically, but it's also good for your mental and emotional health. You may find that you have more energy, sleep better, and feel less anxious or stressed. When stress hormones build up in your body, it can lead to muscle spasms and pain. But finding a way to effectively “channel that stress” through a physical workout, helps to release that build-up in a healthy manner. Taking part in an overall body conditioning class like Pilates may increase your body awareness and mental focus, which could improve your memory and concentration. In addition to strengthening your core and improving your posture, you may also find yourself breathing better. Remember that every day is a gift and the gift that we get from properly nourishing and moving our bodies will only serve to make us healthier and stronger. We'll feel better physically, we'll have fewer aches and pains, and our mental focus will be sharper. Best of all, when both our mind and body are in balance, it has a positive effect on our mood so we act better too! Remember to treat your body as a gift. Get moving! I'm Florine Mark and that's “Today's Takeaway.”   Quotes: “Pilates is a low-impact full-body workout that focuses on flexibility, strength, and body awareness through controlled movements.” — Amy “Always moving your body is a good thing.” — Amy You want to do what speaks to you and what you respond to so that you're consistent and healthy.” — Amy “Pilates is all-inclusive; it's always full-body, it's always low-impact.” — Amy “It's all-inclusive. Regardless of age or fitness level or injury we can actually help people be successful with their fitness routines.” — Amy “If we're not using those muscles on a regular basis, they become dormant.” — Amy “We can accommodate all ages and all fitness levels.” — Amy “Any time you're moving your body is a good thing.” — Amy “The nice thing about Pilates is how it increases your body awareness.” — Amy “When you're doing good things for your body, you do tend to put better things inside for fuel.” — Amy   Brought to You By: Gardner White Furniture   Mentioned in This Episode: Club Pilates  

Screaming in the Cloud
Reliability Starts in Cultural Change with Amy Tobey

Screaming in the Cloud

Play Episode Listen Later May 11, 2022 46:37


About AmyAmy Tobey has worked in tech for more than 20 years at companies of every size, working with everything from kernel code to user interfaces. These days she spends her time building an innovative Site Reliability Engineering program at Equinix, where she is a principal engineer. When she's not working, she can be found with her nose in a book, watching anime with her son, making noise with electronics, or doing yoga poses in the sun.Links Referenced: Equinix Metal: https://metal.equinix.com Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/MissAmyTobey Personal Blog: https://tobert.github.io/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Optimized cloud compute plans have landed at Vultr to deliver lightning-fast processing power, courtesy of third-gen AMD EPYC processors without the IO or hardware limitations of a traditional multi-tenant cloud server. Starting at just 28 bucks a month, users can deploy general-purpose, CPU, memory, or storage optimized cloud instances in more than 20 locations across five continents. Without looking, I know that once again, Antarctica has gotten the short end of the stick. Launch your Vultr optimized compute instance in 60 seconds or less on your choice of included operating systems, or bring your own. It's time to ditch convoluted and unpredictable giant tech company billing practices and say goodbye to noisy neighbors and egregious egress forever. Vultr delivers the power of the cloud with none of the bloat. “Screaming in the Cloud” listeners can try Vultr for free today with a $150 in credit when they visit getvultr.com/screaming. That's G-E-T-V-U-L-T-R dot com slash screaming. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: Finding skilled DevOps engineers is a pain in the neck! And if you need to deploy a secure and compliant application to AWS, forgettaboutit! But that's where DuploCloud can help. Their comprehensive no-code/low-code software platform guarantees a secure and compliant infrastructure in as little as two weeks, while automating the full DevSecOps lifestyle. Get started with DevOps-as-a-Service from DuploCloud so that your cloud configurations are done right the first time. Tell them I sent you and your first two months are free. To learn more visit: snark.cloud/duplo. Thats's snark.cloud/D-U-P-L-O-C-L-O-U-D.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while I catch up with someone that it feels like I've known for ages, and I realize somehow I have never been able to line up getting them on this show as a guest. Today is just one of those days. And my guest is Amy Tobey who has been someone I've been talking to for ages, even in the before-times, if you can remember such a thing. Today, she's a Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix. Amy, thank you for finally giving in to my endless wheedling.Amy: Thanks for having me. You mentioned the before-times. Like, I remember it was, like, right before the pandemic we had beers in San Francisco wasn't it? There was Ian there—Corey: Yeah, I—Amy: —and a couple other people. It was a really great time. And then—Corey: I vaguely remember beer. Yeah. And then—Amy: And then the world ended.Corey: Oh, my God. Yes. It's still March of 2020, right?Amy: As far as I know. Like, I haven't checked in a couple years.Corey: So, you do an awful lot. And it's always a difficult question to ask someone, so can you encapsulate your entire existence in a paragraph? It's—Amy: [sigh].Corey: —awful, so I'd like to give a bit more structure to it. Let's start with the introduction: You are a Senior Principal Engineer. We know it's high level because of all the adjectives that get put in there, and none of those adjectives are ‘associate' or ‘beginner' or ‘junior,' or all the other diminutives that companies like to play games with to justify paying people less. And you're at Equinix, which is a company that is a bit unlike most of the, shall we say, traditional cloud providers. What do you do over there and both as a company, as a person?Amy: So, as a company Equinix, what most people know about is that we have a whole bunch of data centers all over the world. I think we have the most of any company. And what we do is we lease out space in that data center, and then we have a number of other products that people don't know as well, which one is Equinix Metal, which is what I specifically work on, where we rent you bare-metal servers. None of that fancy stuff that you get any other clouds on top of it, there's things you can get that are… partner things that you can add-on, like, you know, storage and other things like that, but we just deliver you bare-metal servers with really great networking. So, what I work on is the reliability of that whole system. All of the things that go into provisioning the servers, making them come up, making sure that they get delivered to the server, make sure the API works right, all of that stuff.Corey: So, you're on the Equinix cloud side of the world more so than you are on the building data centers by the sweat of your brow, as they say?Amy: Correct. Yeah, yeah. Software side.Corey: Excellent. I spent some time in data centers in the early part of my career before cloud ate that. That was sort of cotemporaneous with the discovery that I'm the hardware destruction bunny, and I should go to great pains to keep my aura from anything expensive and important, like, you know, the SAN. So—Amy: Right, yeah.Corey: Companies moving out of data centers, and me getting out was a great thing.Amy: But the thing about SANs though, is, like, it might not be you. They're just kind of cursed from the start, right? They just always were kind of fussy and easy to break.Corey: Oh, yeah. I used to think—and I kid you not—that I had a limited upside to my career in tech because I sometimes got sloppy and I was fairly slow at crimping ethernet cables.Amy: [laugh].Corey: That is very similar to growing up in third grade when it became apparent that I was going to have problems in my career because my handwriting was sloppy. Yeah, it turns out the future doesn't look like we predicted it would.Amy: Oh, gosh. Are we going to talk about, like, neurological development now or… [laugh] okay, that's a thing I struggle with, too right, is I started typing as soon as they would let—in fact, before they would let me. I remember in high school, I had teachers who would grade me down for typing a paper out. They want me to handwrite it and I would go, “Cool. Go ahead and take a grade off because if I handwrite it, you're going to take two grades off my handwriting, so I'm cool with this deal.”Corey: Yeah, it was pretty easy early on. I don't know when the actual shift was, but it became more and more apparent that more and more things are moving towards a world where you could type. And I was almost five when I started working on that stuff, and that really wound up changing a lot of aspects of how I started seeing things. One thing I think you're probably fairly well known for is incidents. I want to be clear when I say that you are not the root cause as—“So, why are things broken?” “It's Amy again. What's she gotten into this time?” Great.Amy: [laugh]. But it does happen, but not all the time.Corey: Exa—it's a learning experience.Amy: Right.Corey: You've also been deeply involved with SREcon and a number of—a lot of aspects of what I will term—and please don't yell at me for this—SRE culture—Amy: Yeah.Corey: Which is sometimes a challenging thing to wind up describing or putting a definition around. The one that I've always been somewhat partial to is, “SRE is DevOps, except you worked at Google for a while.” I don't know how necessarily accurate that is, but it does rile people up.Amy: Yeah, it does. Dave Stanke actually did a really great talk at SREcon San Francisco just a couple weeks ago, about the DORA report. And the new DORA report, they split SRE out into its own function and kind of is pushing against that old model, which actually comes from Liz Fong-Jones—I think it's from her, or older—about, like, class SRE implements DevOps, which is kind of this idea that, like, SREs make DevOps happen. Things have evolved, right, since then. Things have evolved since Google released those books, and we're all just figured out what works and what doesn't a little bit.And so, it's not that we're implementing DevOps so much. In fact, it's that ops stuff that kind of holds us back from the really high impact work that SREs, I think, should be doing, that aren't just, like, fixing the problems, the symptoms down at the bottom layer, right? Like what we did as sysadmins 20 years ago. You know, we'd go and a lot of people are SREs that came out of the sysadmin world and still think in that mode, where it's like, “Well, I set up the systems, and when things break, I go and I fix them.” And, “Why did the developers keep writing crappy code? Why do I have to always getting up in the middle of the night because this thing crashed?”And it turns out that the work we need to do to make things more reliable, there's a ceiling to how far away the platform can take us, right? Like, we can have the best platform in the world with redundancy, and, you know, nine-way replicated data storage and all this crazy stuff, and still if we put crappy software on top, it's going to be unreliable. So, how do we make less crappy software? And for most of my career, people would be, like, “Well, you should test it.” And so, we started doing that, and we still have crappy software, so what's going on here? We still have incidents.So, we write more tests, and we still have incidents. We had a QA group, we still have incidents. We send the developers to training, and we still have incidents. So like, what is the thing we need to do to make things more reliable? And it turns out, most of it is culture work.Corey: My perspective on this stems from being a grumpy old sysadmin. And at some point, I started calling myself a systems engineer or DevOps or production engineer, or SRE. It was all from my point of view, the same job, but you know, if you call yourself a sysadmin, you're just asking for a 40% pay cut off the top.Amy: [laugh].Corey: But I still tended to view the world through that lens. I tended to be very good at Linux systems internals, for example, understanding system calls and the rest, but increasingly, as the DevOps wave or SRE wave, or Google-isation of the internet wound up being more and more of a thing, I found myself increasingly in job interviews, where, “Great, now, can you go wind up implementing a sorting algorithm on the whiteboard?” “What on earth? No.” Like, my lingua franca is shitty Bash, and no one tends to write that without a bunch of tab completions and quick checking with manpages—die.net or whatnot—on the fly as you go down that path.And it was awful, and I felt… like my skill set was increasingly eroding. And it wasn't honestly until I started this place where I really got into writing a fair bit of code to do different things because it felt like an orthogonal skill set, but the fullness of time, it seems like it's not. And it's a reskilling. And it made me wonder, does this mean that the areas of technology that I focused on early in my career, was that all a waste? And the answer is not really. Sometimes, sure, in that I don't spend nearly as much time worrying about inodes—for example—as I once did. But every once in a while, I'll run into something and I looked like a wizard from the future, but instead, I'm a wizard from the past.Amy: Yeah, I find that a lot in my work, now. Sometimes things I did 20 years ago, come back, and it's like, oh, yeah, I remember I did all that threading work in 2002 in Perl, and I learned everything the very, very, very hard way. And then, you know, this January, did some threading work to fix some stability issues, and all of it came flooding back, right? Just that the experiences really, more than the code or the learning or the text and stuff; more just the, like, this feels like threads [BLEEP]-ery. Is a diagnostic thing that sometimes we have to say.And then people are like, “Can you prove it?” And I'm like, “Not really,” because it's literally thread [BLEEP]-ery. Like, the definition of it is that there's weird stuff happening that we can't figure out why it's happening. There's something acting in the system that isn't synchronized, that isn't connected to other things, that's happening out of order from what we expect, and if we had a clear signal, we would just fix it, but we don't. We just have, like, weird stuff happening over here and then over there and over there and over there.And, like, that tells me there's just something happening at that layer and then have to go and dig into that right, and like, just basically charge through. My colleagues are like, “Well, maybe you should look at this, and go look at the database,” the things that they're used to looking at and that their experiences inform, whereas then I bring that ancient toiling through the threading mines experiences back and go, “Oh, yeah. So, let's go find where this is happening, where people are doing dangerous things with threads, and see if we can spot something.” But that came from that experience.Corey: And there's so much that just repeats itself. And history rhymes. The challenge is that, do you have 20 years of experience, or do you have one year of experience repeated 20 times? And as the tide rises, doing the same task by hand, it really is just a matter of time before your full-time job winds up being something a piece of software does. An easy example is, “Oh, what's your job?” “I manually place containers onto specific hosts.” “Well, I've got news for you, and you're not going to like it at all.”Amy: Yeah, yeah. I think that we share a little bit. I'm allergic to repeated work. I don't know if allergic is the right word, but you know, if I sit and I do something once, fine. Like, I'll just crank it out, you know, it's this form, or it's a datafile I got to write and I'll—fine I'll type it in and do the manual labor.The second time, the difficulty goes up by ten, right? Like, just mentally, just to do it, be like, I've already done this once. Doing it again is anathema to everything that I am. And then sometimes I'll get through it, but after that, like, writing a program is so much easier because it's like exponential, almost, growth in difficulty. You know, the third time I have to do the same thing that's like just typing the same stuff—like, look over here, read this thing and type it over here—I'm out; I can't do it. You know, I got to find a way to automate. And I don't know, maybe normal people aren't driven to live this way, but it's kept me from getting stuck in those spots, too.Corey: It was weird because I spent a lot of time as a consultant going from place to place and it led to some weird changes. For example, “Oh, thank God, I don't have to think about that whole messaging queue thing.” Sure enough, next engagement, it's message queue time. Fantastic. I found that repeating myself drove me nuts, but you also have to be very sensitive not to wind up, you know, stealing IP from the people that you're working with.Amy: Right.Corey: But what I loved about the sysadmin side of the world is that the vast majority of stuff that I've taken with me, lives in my shell config. And what I mean by that is I'm not—there's nothing in there is proprietary, but when you have a weird problem with trying to figure out the best way to figure out which Ruby process is stealing all the CPU, great, turns out that you can chain seven or eight different shell commands together through a bunch of pipes. I don't want to remember that forever. So, that's the sort of thing I would wind up committing as I learned it. I don't remember what company I picked that up at, but it was one of those things that was super helpful.I have a sarcastic—it's a one-liner, except no sane editor setting is going to show it in any less than three—of a whole bunch of Perl, piped into du, piped into the rest, that tells you one of the largest consumers of files in a given part of the system. And it rates them with stars and it winds up doing some neat stuff. I would never sit down and reinvent something like that today, but the fact that it's there means that I can do all kinds of neat tricks when I need to. It's making sure that as you move through your career, on some level, you're picking up skills that are repeatable and applicable beyond one company.Amy: Skills and tooling—Corey: Yeah.Amy: —right? Like, you just described the tool. Another SREcon talk was John Allspaw and Dr. Richard Cook talking about above the line; below the line. And they started with these metaphors about tools, right, showing all the different kinds of hammers.And if you're a blacksmith, a lot of times you craft specialized hammers for very specific jobs. And that's one of the properties of a tool that they were trying to get people to think about, right, is that tools get crafted to the job. And what you just described as a bespoke tool that you had created on the fly, that kind of floated under the radar of intellectual property. [laugh].So, let's not tell the security or IP people right? Like, because there's probably billions and billions of dollars of technically, like, made-up IP value—I'm doing air quotes with my fingers—you know, that's just basically people's shell profiles. And my God, the Emacs automation that people have done. If you've ever really seen somebody who's amazing at Emacs and is 10, 20, 30, maybe 40 years of experience encoded in their emacs settings, it's a wonder to behold. Like, I look at it and I go, “Man, I wish I could do that.”It's like listening to a really great guitar player and be like, “Wow, I wish I could play like them.” You see them just flying through stuff. But all that IP in there is both that person's collection of wisdom and experience and working with that code, but also encodes that stuff like you described, right? It's just all these little systems tricks and little fiddly commands and things we don't want to remember and so we encode them into our toolset.Corey: Oh, yeah. Anything I wound up taking, I always would share it with people internally, too. I'd mention, “Yeah, I'm keeping this in my shell files.” Because I disclosed it, which solves a lot of the problem. And also, none of it was even close to proprietary or anything like that. I'm sorry, but the way that you wind up figuring out how much of a disk is being eaten up and where in a more pleasing way, is not a competitive advantage. It just isn't.Amy: It isn't to you or me, but, you know, back in the beginning of our careers, people thought it was worth money and should be proprietary. You know, like, oh, that disk-checking script as a competitive advantage for our company because there are only a few of us doing this work. Like, it was actually being able to, like, manage your—[laugh] actually manage your servers was a competitive advantage. Now, it's kind of commodity.Corey: Let's also be clear that the world has moved on. I wound up buying a DaisyDisk a while back for Mac, which I love. It is a fantastic, pretty effective, “Where's all the stuff on your disk going?” And it does a scan and you can drive and collect things and delete them when trying to clean things out. I was using it the other day, so it's top of mind at the moment.But it's way more polished than that crappy Perl three-liner. And I see both sides, truly I do. The trick also, for those wondering [unintelligible 00:15:45], like, “Where is the line?” It's super easy. Disclose it, what you're doing, in those scenarios in the event someone is no because they believe that finding the right man page section for something is somehow proprietary.Great. When you go home that evening in a completely separate environment, build it yourself from scratch to solve the problem, reimplement it and save that. And you're done. There are lots of ways to do this. Don't steal from your employer, but your employer employs you; they don't own you and the way that you think about these problems.Every person I've met who has had a career that's longer than 20 minutes has a giant doc somewhere on some system of all of the scripts that they wound up putting together, all of the one-liners, the notes on, “Next time you see this, this is the thing to check.”Amy: Yeah, the cheat sheet or the notebook with all the little commands, or again the Emacs config, sometimes for some people, or shell profiles. Yeah.Corey: Here's the awk one-liner that I put that automatically spits out from an Apache log file what—the httpd log file that just tells me what are the most frequent talkers, and what are the—Amy: You should probably let go of that one. You know, like, I think that one's lifetime is kind of past, Corey. Maybe you—Corey: I just have to get it working with Nginx, and we're good to go.Amy: Oh, yeah, there you go. [laugh].Corey: Or S3 access logs. Perish the thought. But yeah, like, what are the five most high-volume talkers, and what are those relative to each other? Huh, that one thing seems super crappy and it's coming from Russia. But that's—hmm, one starts to wonder; maybe it's time to dig back in.So, one of the things that I have found is that a lot of the people talking about SRE seem to have descended from an ivory tower somewhere. And they're talking about how some of the best-in-class companies out there, renowned for their technical cultures—at least externally—are doing these things. But there's a lot more folks who are not there. And honestly, I consider myself one of those people who is not there. I was a competent engineer, but never a terrific one.And looking at the way this was described, I often came away thinking, “Okay, it was the purpose of this conference talk just to reinforce how smart people are, and how I'm not,” and/or, “There are the 18 cultural changes you need to make to your company, and then you can do something kind of like we were just talking about on stage.” It feels like there's a combination of problems here. One is making this stuff more accessible to folks who are not themselves in those environments, and two, how to drive cultural change as an individual contributor if that's even possible. And I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you have thoughts on both aspects of that, and probably some more hit me, please.Amy: So, the ivory tower, right. Let's just be straight up, like, the ivory tower is Google. I mean, that's where it started. And we get it from the other large companies that, you know, want to do conference talks about what this stuff means and what it does. What I've kind of come around to in the last couple of years is that those talks don't really reach the vast majority of engineers, they don't really apply to a large swath of the enterprise especially, which is, like, where a lot of the—the bulk of our industry sits, right? We spend a lot of time talking about the darlings out here on the West Coast in high tech culture and startups and so on.But, like, we were talking about before we started the show, right, like, the interior of even just America, is filled with all these, like, insurance and banks and all of these companies that are cranking out tons of code and servers and stuff, and they're trying to figure out the same problems. But they're structured in companies where their tech arm is still, in most cases, considered a cost center, often is bundled under finance, for—that's a whole show of itself about that historical blunder. And so, the tech culture is tend to be very, very different from what we experience in—what do we call it anymore? Like, I don't even want to say West Coast anymore because we've gone remote, but, like, high tech culture we'll say. And so, like, thinking about how to make SRE and all this stuff more accessible comes down to, like, thinking about who those engineers are that are sitting at the computers, writing all the code that runs our banks, all the code that makes sure that—I'm trying to think of examples that are more enterprise-y right?Or shoot buying clothes online. You go to Macy's for example. They have a whole bunch of servers that run their online store and stuff. They have internal IT-ish people who keep all this stuff running and write that code and probably integrating open-source stuff much like we all do. But when you go to try to put in a reliability program that's based on the current SRE models, like SLOs; you put in SLOs and you start doing, like, this incident management program that's, like, you know, you have a form you fill out after every incident, and then you [unintelligible 00:20:25] retros.And it turns out that those things are very high-level skills, skills and capabilities in an organization. And so, when you have this kind of IT mindset or the enterprise mindset, bringing the culture together to make those things work often doesn't happen. Because, you know, they'll go with the prescriptive model and say, like, okay, we're going to implement SLOs, we're going to start measuring SLIs on all of the services, and we're going to hold you accountable for meeting those targets. If you just do that, right, you're just doing more gatekeeping and policing of your tech environment. My bet is, reliability almost never improves in those cases.And that's been my experience, too, and why I get charged up about this is, if you just go slam in these practices, people end up miserable, the practices then become tarnished because people experienced the worst version of them. And then—Corey: And with the remote explosion as well, it turns out that changing jobs basically means their company sends you a different Mac, and the next Monday, you wind up signing into a different Slack team.Amy: Yeah, so the culture really matters, right? You can't cover it over with foosball tables and great lunch. You actually have to deliver tools that developers want to use and you have to deliver a software engineering culture that brings out the best in developers instead of demanding the best from developers. I think that's a fundamental business shift that's kind of happening. If I'm putting on my wizard hat and looking into the future and dreaming about what might change in the world, right, is that there's kind of a change in how we do leadership and how we do business that's shifting more towards that model where we look at what people are capable of and we trust in our people, and we get more out of them, the knowledge work model.If we want more knowledge work, we need people to be happy and to feel engaged in their community. And suddenly we start to see these kind of generational, bigger-pie kind of things start to happen. But how do we get there? It's not SLOs. It maybe it's a little bit starting with incidents. That's where I've had the most success, and you asked me about that. So, getting practical, incident management is probably—Corey: Right. Well, as I see it, the problem with SLOs across the board is it feels like it's a very insular community so far, and communicating it to engineers seems to be the focus of where the community has been, but from my understanding of it, you absolutely need buy-in at significantly high executive levels, to at the very least by you air cover while you're doing these things and making these changes, but also to help drive that cultural shift. None of this is something I have the slightest clue how to do, let's be very clear. If I knew how to change a company's culture, I'd have a different job.Amy: Yeah. [laugh]. The biggest omission in the Google SRE books was [Ers 00:22:58]. There was a guy at Google named Ers who owns availability for Google, and when anything is, like, in dispute and bubbles up the management team, it goes to Ers, and he says, “Thou shalt…” right? Makes the call. And that's why it works, right?Like, it's not just that one person, but that system of management where the whole leadership team—there's a large, very well-funded team with a lot of power in the organization that can drive availability, and they can say, this is how you're going to do metrics for your service, and this is the system that you're in. And it's kind of, yeah, sure it works for them because they have all the organizational support in place. What I was saying to my team just the other day—because we're in the middle of our SLO rollout—is that really, I think an SLO program isn't [clear throat] about the engineers at all until late in the game. At the beginning of the game, it's really about getting the leadership team on board to say, “Hey, we want to put in SLIs and SLOs to start to understand the functioning of our software system.” But if they don't have that curiosity in the first place, that desire to understand how well their teams are doing, how healthy their teams are, don't do it. It's not going to work. It's just going to make everyone miserable.Corey: It feels like it's one of those difficult to sell problems as well, in that it requires some tooling changes, absolutely. It requires cultural change and buy-in and whatnot, but in order for that to happen, there has to be a painful problem that a company recognizes and is willing to pay to make go away. The problem with stuff like this is that once you pay, there's a lot of extra work that goes on top of it as well, that does not have a perception—rightly or wrongly—of contributing to feature velocity, of hitting the next milestone. It's, “Really? So, we're going to be spending how much money to make engineers happier? They should get paid an awful lot and they're still complaining and never seem happy. Why do I care if they're happy other than the pure mercenary perspective of otherwise they'll quit?” I'm not saying that it's not worth pursuing; it's not a worthy goal. I am saying that it becomes a very difficult thing to wind up selling as a product.Amy: Well, as a product for sure, right? Because—[sigh] gosh, I have friends in the space who work on these tools. And I want to be careful.Corey: Of course. Nothing but love for all of those people, let's be very clear.Amy: But a lot of them, you know, they're pulling metrics from existing monitoring systems, they are doing some interesting math on them, but what you get at the end is a nice service catalog and dashboard, which are things we've been trying to land as products in this industry for as long as I can remember, and—Corey: “We've got it this time, though. This time we'll crack the nut.” Yeah. Get off the island, Gilligan.Amy: And then the other, like, risky thing, right, is the other part that makes me uncomfortable about SLOs, and why I will often tell folks that I talk to out in the industry that are asking me about this, like, one-on-one, “Should I do it here?” And it's like, you can bring the tool in, and if you have a management team that's just looking to have metrics to drive productivity, instead of you know, trying to drive better knowledge work, what you get is just a fancier version of more Taylorism, right, which is basically scientific management, this idea that we can, like, drive workers to maximum efficiency by measuring random things about them and driving those numbers. It turns out, that doesn't really work very well, even in industrial scale, it just happened to work because, you know, we have a bloody enough society that we pushed people into it. But the reality is, if you implement SLOs badly, you get more really bad Taylorism that's bad for you developers. And my suspicion is that you will get worse availability out of it than you would if you just didn't do it at all.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Revelo. Revelo is the Spanish word of the day, and its spelled R-E-V-E-L-O. It means “I reveal.” Now, have you tried to hire an engineer lately? I assure you it is significantly harder than it sounds. One of the things that Revelo has recognized is something I've been talking about for a while, specifically that while talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is absolutely not. They're exposing a new talent pool to, basically, those of us without a presence in Latin America via their platform. It's the largest tech talent marketplace in Latin America with over a million engineers in their network, which includes—but isn't limited to—talent in Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Argentina. Now, not only do they wind up spreading all of their talent on English ability, as well as you know, their engineering skills, but they go significantly beyond that. Some of the folks on their platform are hands down the most talented engineers that I've ever spoken to. Let's also not forget that Latin America has high time zone overlap with what we have here in the United States, so you can hire full-time remote engineers who share most of the workday as your team. It's an end-to-end talent service, so you can find and hire engineers in Central and South America without having to worry about, frankly, the colossal pain of cross-border payroll and benefits and compliance because Revelo handles all of it. If you're hiring engineers, check out revelo.io/screaming to get 20% off your first three months. That's R-E-V-E-L-O dot I-O slash screaming.Corey: That is part of the problem is, in some cases, to drive some of these improvements, you have to go backwards to move forwards. And it's one of those, “Great, so we spent all this effort and money in the rest of now things are worse?” No, not necessarily, but suddenly are aware of things that were slipping through the cracks previously.Amy: Yeah. Yeah.Corey: Like, the most realistic thing about first The Phoenix Project and then The Unicorn Project, both by Gene Kim, has been the fact that companies have these problems and actively cared enough to change it. In my experience, that feels a little on the rare side.Amy: Yeah, and I think that's actually the key, right? It's for the culture change, and for, like, if you really looking to be, like, do I want to work at this company? Am I investing my myself in here? Is look at the leadership team and be, like, do these people actually give a crap? Are they looking just to punt another number down the road?That's the real question, right? Like, the technology and stuff, at the point where I'm at in my career, I just don't care that much anymore. [laugh]. Just… fine, use Kubernetes, use Postgres, [unintelligible 00:27:30], I don't care. I just don't. Like, Oracle, I might have to ask, you know, go to finance and be like, “Hey, can we spend 20 million for a database?” But like, nobody really asks for that anymore, so. [laugh].Corey: As one does. I will say that I mostly agree with you, but a technology that I found myself getting excited about, given the time of the recording on this is… fun, I spent a bit of time yesterday—from when we're recording this—teaching myself just enough Go to wind up being together a binary that I needed to do something actively ridiculous for my camera here. And I found myself coming away deeply impressed by a lot of things about it, how prescriptive it was for one, how self-contained for another. And after spending far too many years of my life writing shitty Perl, and shitty Bash, and worse Python, et cetera, et cetera, the prescriptiveness was great. The fact that it wound up giving me something I could just run, I could cross-compile for anything I need to run it on, and it just worked. It's been a while since I found a technology that got me this interested in exploring further.Amy: Go is great for that. You mentioned one of my two favorite features of Go. One is usually when a program compiles—at least the way I code in Go—it usually works. I've been working with Go since about 0.9, like, just a little bit before it was released as 1.0, and that's what I've noticed over the years of working with it is that most of the time, if you have a pretty good data structure design and you get the code to compile, usually it's going to work, unless you're doing weird stuff.The other thing I really love about Go and that maybe you'll discover over time is the malleability of it. And the reason why I think about that more than probably most folks is that I work on other people's code most of the time. And maybe this is something that you probably run into with your business, too, right, where you're working on other people's infrastructure. And the way that we encode business rules and things in the languages, in our programming language or our config syntax and stuff has a huge impact on folks like us and how quickly we can come into a situation, assess, figure out what's going on, figure out where things are laid out, and start making changes with confidence.Corey: Forget other people for a minute they're looking at what I built out three or four years ago here, myself, like, I look at past me, it's like, “What was that rat bastard thinking? This is awful.” And it's—forget other people's code; hell is your own code, on some level, too, once it's slipped out of the mental stack and you have to re-explore it and, “Oh, well thank God I defensively wound up not including any comments whatsoever explaining what the living hell this thing was.” It's terrible. But you're right, the other people's shell scripts are finicky and odd.I started poking around for help when I got stuck on something, by looking at GitHub, and a few bit of searching here and there. Even these large, complex, well-used projects started making sense to me in a way that I very rarely find. It's, “What the hell is that thing?” is my most common refrain when I'm looking at other people's code, and Go for whatever reason avoids that, I think because it is so prescriptive about formatting, about how things should be done, about the vision that it has. Maybe I'm romanticizing it and I'll hate it and a week from now, and I want to go back and remove this recording, but.Amy: The size of the language helps a lot.Corey: Yeah.Amy: But probably my favorite. It's more of a convention, which actually funny the way I'm going to talk about this because the two languages I work on the most right now are Ruby and Go. And I don't feel like two languages could really be more different.Syntax-wise, they share some things, but really, like, the mental models are so very, very different. Ruby is all the way in on object-oriented programming, and, like, the actual real kind of object-oriented with messaging and stuff, and, like, the whole language kind of springs from that. And it kind of requires you to understand all of these concepts very deeply to be effective in large programs. So, what I find is, when I approach Ruby codebase, I have to load all this crap into my head and remember, “Okay, so yeah, there's this convention, when you do this kind of thing in Ruby”—or especially Ruby on Rails is even worse because they go deep into convention over configuration. But what that's code for is, this code is accessible to people who have a lot of free cognitive capacity to load all this convention into their heads and keep it in their heads so that the code looks pretty, right?And so, that's the trade-off as you said, okay, my developers have to be these people with all these spare brain cycles to understand, like, why I would put the code here in this place versus this place? And all these, like, things that are in the code, like, very compact, dense concepts. And then you go to something like Go, which is, like, “Nah, we're not going to do Lambdas. Nah”—[laugh]—“We're not doing all this fancy stuff.” So, everything is there on the page.This drives some people crazy, right, is that there's all this boilerplate, boilerplate, boilerplate. But the reality is, I can read most Go files from top to the bottom and understand what the hell it's doing, whereas I can go sometimes look at, like, a Ruby thing, or sometimes Python and e—Perl is just [unintelligible 00:32:19] all the time, right, it's there's so much indirection. And it just be, like, “What the [BLEEP] is going on? This is so dense. I'm going to have to sit down and write it out in longhand so I can understand what the developer was even doing here.” And—Corey: Well, that's why I got the Mac Studio; for when I'm not doing A/V stuff with it, that means that I'll have one core that I can use for, you know, front-end processing and the rest, and the other 19 cores can be put to work failing to build Nokogiri in Ruby yet again.Amy: [laugh].Corey: I remember the travails of working with Ruby, and the problem—I have similar problems with Python, specifically in that—I don't know if I'm special like this—it feels like it's a SRE DevOps style of working, but I am grabbing random crap off a GitHub constantly and running it, like, small scripts other people have built. And let's be clear, I run them on my test AWS account that has nothing important because I'm not a fool that I read most of it before I run it, but I also—it wants a different version of Python every single time. It wants a whole bunch of other things, too. And okay, so I use ASDF as my version manager for these things, which for whatever reason, does not work for the way that I think about this ergonomically. Okay, great.And I wind up with detritus scattered throughout my system. It's, “Hey, can you make this reproducible on my machine?” “Almost certainly not, but thank you for asking.” It's like ‘Step 17: Master the Wolf' level of instructions.Amy: And I think Docker generally… papers over the worst of it, right, is when we built all this stuff in the aughts, you know, [CPAN 00:33:45]—Corey: Dev containers and VS Code are very nice.Amy: Yeah, yeah. You know, like, we had CPAN back in the day, I was doing chroots, I think in, like, '04 or '05, you know, to solve this problem, right, which is basically I just—screw it; I will compile an entire distro into a directory with a Perl and all of its dependencies so that I can isolate it from the other things I want to run on this machine and not screw up and not have these interactions. And I think that's kind of what you're talking about is, like, the old model, when we deployed servers, there was one of us sitting there and then we'd log into the server and be like, I'm going to install the Perl. You know, I'll compile it into, like, [/app/perl 558 00:34:21] whatever, and then I'll CPAN all this stuff in, and I'll give it over to the developer, tell them to set their shebang to that and everything just works. And now we're in a mode where it's like, okay, you got to set up a thousand of those. “Okay, well, I'll make a tarball.” [laugh]. But it's still like we had to just—Corey: DevOps, but [unintelligible 00:34:37] dev closer to ops. You're interrelating all the time. Yeah, then Docker comes along, and add dev is, like, “Well, here's the container. Good luck, asshole.” And it feels like it's been cast into your yard to worry about.Amy: Yeah, well, I mean, that's just kind of business, or just—Corey: Yeah. Yeah.Amy: I'm not sure if it's business or capitalism or something like that, but just the idea that, you know, if I can hand off the shitty work to some other poor schlub, why wouldn't I? I mean, that's most folks, right? Like, just be like, “Well”—Corey: Which is fair.Amy: —“I got it working. Like, my part is done, I did what I was supposed to do.” And now there's a lot of folks out there, that's how they work, right? “I hit done. I'm done. I shipped it. Sure. It's an old [unintelligible 00:35:16] Ubuntu. Sure, there's a bunch of shell scripts that rip through things. Sure”—you know, like, I've worked on repos where there's hundreds of things that need to be addressed.Corey: And passing to someone else is fine. I'm thrilled to do it. Where I run into problems with it is where people assume that well, my part was the hard part and anything you schlubs do is easy. I don't—Amy: Well, that's the underclass. Yeah. That's—Corey: Forget engineering for a second; I throw things to the people over in the finance group here at The Duckbill Group because those people are wizards at solving for this thing. And it's—Amy: Well, that's how we want to do things.Corey: Yeah, specialization works.Amy: But we have this—it's probably more cultural. I don't want to pick, like, capitalism to beat on because this is really, like, human cultural thing, and it's not even really particularly Western. Is the idea that, like, “If I have an underclass, why would I give a shit what their experience is?” And this is why I say, like, ops teams, like, get out of here because most ops teams, the extant ops teams are still called ops, and a lot of them have been renamed SRE—but they still do the same job—are an underclass. And I don't mean that those people are below us. People are treated as an underclass, and they shouldn't be. Absolutely not.Corey: Yes.Amy: Because the idea is that, like, well, I'm a fancy person who writes code at my ivory tower, and then it all flows down, and those people, just faceless people, do the deployment stuff that's beneath me. That attitude is the most toxic thing, I think, in tech orgs to address. Like, if you're trying to be like, “Well, our liability is bad, we have security problems, people won't fix their code.” And go look around and you will find people that are treated as an underclass that are given codes thrown over the wall at them and then they just have to toil through and make it work. I've worked on that a number of times in my career.And I think just like saying, underclass, right, or caste system, is what I found is the most effective way to get people actually thinking about what the hell is going on here. Because most people are just, like, “Well, that's just the way things are. It's just how we've always done it. The developers write to code, then give it to the sysadmins. The sysadmins deploy the code. Isn't that how it always works?”Corey: You'd really like to hope, wouldn't you?Amy: [laugh]. Not me. [laugh].Corey: Again, the way I see it is, in theory—in theory—sysadmins, ops, or that should not exist. People should theoretically be able to write code as developers that just works, the end. And write it correct the first time and never have to change it again. Yeah. There's a reason that I always like to call staging environments in places I work ‘theory' because it works in theory, but not in production, and that is fundamentally the—like, that entire job role is the difference between theory and practice.Amy: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that's the problem with it. We're already so disconnected from the physical world, right? Like, you and I right now are talking over multiple strands of glass and digital transcodings and things right now, right? Like, we are detached from the physical reality.You mentioned earlier working in data centers, right? The thing I miss about it is, like, the physicality of it. Like, actually, like, I held a server in my arms and put it in the rack and slid it into the rails. I plugged into power myself; I pushed the power button myself. There's a server there. I physically touched it.Developers who don't work in production, we talked about empathy and stuff, but really, I think the big problem is when they work out in their idea space and just writing code, they write the unit tests, if we're very lucky, they'll write a functional test, and then they hand that wad off to some poor ops group. They're detached from the reality of operations. It's not even about accountability; it's about experience. The ability to see all of the weird crap we deal with, right? You know, like, “Well, we pushed the code to that server, but there were three bit flips, so we had to do it again. And then the other server, the disk failed. And on the other server…” You know? [laugh].It's just, there's all this weird crap that happens, these systems are so complex that they're always doing something weird. And if you're a developer that just spends all day in your IDE, you don't get to see that. And I can't really be mad at those folks, as individuals, for not understanding our world. I figure out how to help them, and the best thing we've come up with so far is, like, well, we start giving this—some responsibility in a production environment so that they can learn that. People do that, again, is another one that can be done wrong, where it turns into kind of a forced empathy.I actually really hate that mode, where it's like, “We're forcing all the developers online whether they like it or not. On-call whether they like it or not because they have to learn this.” And it's like, you know, maybe slow your roll a little buddy because the stuff is actually hard to learn. Again, minimizing how hard ops work is. “Oh, we'll just put the developers on it. They'll figure it out, right? They're software engineers. They're probably smarter than you sysadmins.” Is the unstated thing when we do that, right? When we throw them in the pit and be like, “Yeah, they'll get it.” [laugh].Corey: And that was my problem [unintelligible 00:39:49] the interview stuff. It was in the write code on a whiteboard. It's, “Look, I understood how the system fundamentally worked under the hood.” Being able to power my way through to get to an outcome even in language I don't know, was sort of part and parcel of the job. But this idea of doing it in artificially constrained environment, in a language I'm not super familiar with, off the top of my head, it took me years to get to a point of being able to do it with a Bash script because who ever starts with an empty editor and starts getting to work in a lot of these scenarios? Especially in an ops role where we're not building something from scratch.Amy: That's the interesting thing, right? In the majority of tech work today—maybe 20 years ago, we did it more because we were literally building the internet we have today. But today, most of the engineers out there working—most of us working stiffs—are working on stuff that already exists. We're making small incremental changes, which is great that's what we're doing. And we're dealing with old code.Corey: We're gluing APIs together, and that's fine. Ugh. I really want to thank you for taking so much time to talk to me about how you see all these things. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where's the best place to find you?Amy: I'm on Twitter every once in a while as @MissAmyTobey, M-I-S-S-A-M-Y-T-O-B-E-Y. I have a blog I don't write on enough. And there's a couple things on the Equinix Metal blog that I've written, so if you're looking for that. Otherwise, mainly Twitter.Corey: And those links will of course be in the [show notes 00:41:08]. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.Amy: I had fun. Thank you.Corey: As did I. Amy Tobey, Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, or on the YouTubes, smash the like and subscribe buttons, as the kids say. Whereas if you've hated this episode, same thing, five-star review all the platforms, smash the buttons, but also include an angry comment telling me that you're about to wind up subpoenaing a copy of my shell script because you're convinced that your intellectual property and secrets are buried within.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Sales Hustle
#236 S2 Episode 105 - How to Stand Out as Revenue Human with Amy Hrehovcik

Sales Hustle

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 31, 2022 40:26


Book Your Free Revenue First Podcast Strategy here!Get Your Free Dial Session here!Want Your Reps Hitting Quota in 2022? Get Your Wingman Free Trial HERE!HIGHLIGHTSFrom macrame bracelets to financial literacy for kids and moms A good reach out entails a deep understanding of the communityThe problem with aggressive use of dashboardsHyper reliance on activity metrics can be detrimentalSales leaders need to look beyond the top line revenueRemember Pareto's Principle Podcasting as a critical skill for sellers Sales is always changingWait for your results and don't quit too earlyQUOTESAmy: "Aggressive use of dashboards, I think the first and biggest one is not focusing on effectiveness and a hyper reliance on activity metrics as opposed to effectiveness is a massive mistake. I think that we do not do a good enough job as a profession differentiating between those that are applying effort to change and grow and develop and maybe not getting the results, versus those that are applying no effort at all."Amy: "You are going to get 80% of your results from 20% of your activities. Your job, especially at the beginning, is to identify what those 20% of your activities are so that you can both do more of them and stop doing the things that are not working."Amy: "There's a million reasons why we're burning through sellers mental health-wise. But focusing on activity for activity's sake, without the connection between the results and not teaching people how to make these decisions for themselves, this is a big part of that problem." Collin: "There's a lot of waste. We're coaching on the wrong things. Because a lot of the coaching is around how to focus, how to do more of the activities that are not the majority of the results. You got to know what are those things that are gonna get the majority of the results and coach around them."Amy: "We've done ourselves a tremendous disservice with these turnkey dashboards. When we're just able to just turnkey buy a dashboard and integrate it into Salesforce, we've lost the principles of these numbers."Amy: "Sales is always changing. The way that buyers are buying is always changing. Are you?"Amy: "Everything works and nothing works. You just have to do it long enough in order to give your results enough time to come in. So don't quit too early. And that goes for podcasting too."Learn more about Amy in the links below:Podcast: https://www.revenuereal.com/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyhrehovcik/Website: http://salescast.community/Email - amy@revenuereal.comLearn more about Collin in the link below: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/collin-saleshustle/Also, you can join our community by checking out @salescast.community. If you're a sales professional looking to take your career to greater heights, please visit us at https://salescast.co/ and set a call with Collin and Chris.

Rugby Coach Weekly
Coaching Laid Bare with Amy Turner

Rugby Coach Weekly

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 29, 2021 48:06


Bird and LJ catch up with England Women's assistant coach, Amy Turner.Amy played 59 times for England, at scrum-half, centre and hooker. She played in three World Cups and helped England win seven Six Nations Grand Slams.She is currently a World Rugby intern. Formerly a police officer, she worked for the RFU as a Performance Pathway Officer and coached men's rugby too.Here are the questions Bird and LJ asked Amy:You had a very success playing career alongside 10 years in the police. How did you balance both aspects of your life? (Any tips you can offer to developing coaches or players on how to manage your time and still achieve your goals?)As a player you were capped at 9/12/2, do you think this was a positive experience personally and for your development as a player? Does this now directly influence how you look at the positioning of players?Do you have any moments that really shaped how you now approach your coaching? Specially thinking about situations of conflict or challenging behaviours.Throughout your playing career, can you think of any coaches or situations that have developed you into the coach you are now?As you develop your coaching now, have you had any mentors/people/moments to continue pushing/challenging your philosophy as a coach?You have experience coaching both men and women, do you have to approach how you plan your sessions differently, or adapt your coaching style on field?Can you tell us a little bit about your experiences on the world rugby internship program?

Law Firm Marketing Catalyst
Episode 98: Know the Business: Tips on Building Relationships with In-House Counsel with Amy Yeung, General Counsel & Chief Privacy Officer for Lotame

Law Firm Marketing Catalyst

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 1, 2021 45:22


What you'll learn in this episode: Why Amy onboards new law firms with a day of learning, and why familiarity with the business is crucial for long-term relationships with law firms  Why it is beneficial to have parallel relationships between the level of law firm associates and the level of in-house counsel Why law firms that are passed over by in-house counsel in the first round shouldn't give up on forging a relationship How junior attorneys can build relationships with in-house counsel without overstepping boundaries Why diversity and inclusion is more than just a buzzword About Amy Yeung Amy Yeung is General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer, for Lotame, the world's leading unstacked data solutions company. Recognized as an expert in digital data and privacy, Yeung was previously Deputy General Counsel at Comscore, which she successfully helped guide through a corporate crisis. She also served as Vice President of Legal at Dataminr and Assistant General Counsel for ZeniMax. Yeung earned a J.D. from Duke University School of Law and a B.A. in political science from the University of Chicago. Additional resources: Amy Yeung's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-yeung-0518883/ Lotame - Website: https://www.lotame.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LotameSolutions LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lotame/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/lotame Law Firm Marketing Catalyst Podcast The relationship between law firms and in-house counsel is complex, but it boils down to one thing: how well each party understands the other. That's a lesson Amy Yeung, General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer at Lotame, has learned all too well during her time as in-house counsel. She joined the Law Firm Marketing Catalyst Podcast to talk about how she selects the law firms she works with, how junior attorneys can prepare for partnership, and why diversity and inclusion isn't just a fad. Read the episode transcript here. Sharon: Welcome to the Law Firm Marketing Catalyst Podcast. Today, my guest is Amy Yeung, General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer at Lotame Data Management. The Lotame Data Management platform is a data collection application that gathers and unifies audience data from a plethora of sources such as blogs and websites as well as offline information. Today, we'll hear more about that as well as how Amy evaluates and selects outside counsel. Amy, welcome to the program. Amy: Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here. Sharon: Thank you so much. It's great for you to talk with us. Give us an overview of your career path. You're quite accomplished. Amy: You've very kind and generous, thank you. I went to law school, and from that, I clerked in the Delaware Court of Chancery under Vice-Chancellor Parsons, which was a phenomenal experience and gave me a chance to look at corporate law and corporate law litigation. After that, I joined the wonderful firm of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, where I was in a very broad securities group that included regulatory litigation enforcement as well as some corporate work. It was from that point in time that I took, let's call it, an early detour.  These days it's a little different, but at that time, going in-house was not expected, certainly not at those mid-level years. I spent nearly seven years at my first in-house counsel role. They were a publisher, and I helped them expand it for print and software across to a global platform. It was a phenomenal experience. I really enjoyed it. I think for all the lawyers and law firm individuals in the audience, it was a great way to get your chops and have an opportunity to work through a variety of issues, for me, squarely in the software and data space. During that time, I became a subject matter expert in data privacy and product counsel, which I mentioned. These days it has a name and phrase; back then, not so much. I also gained understanding of hardware, software, intellectual property and a lot of those issues. It's from that experience that I became general counsel for the then-unicorn in New York. There was another company that had already gone public, and this company, Dataminr, focused on social media and big data in the software and data space. In that regard, I helped them scale and easily pivot in significant ways. My work for Dataminr included things like getting certain tweets better geolocated and specific to subject matter that is an interest and for organizations like, say, the Orlando Pulse nightclub.  At that point in time, when there was a shooting in a gay nightclub, it provided media opportunities, like there were eyeballs inside the club just because of the number of people that were tweeting about the situation indoors. It really has made and continues to make such an impact on how we think about tweets, how tweets can be used in the broader public policy and global arena. These days when we get news, there's a reason why there are now tweets incorporated in stories about Pulse. Otherwise a journalist would have to go and search for them instead of tweets just being provided and shared by somebody.  From there, I went to Comscore, which was going through a corporate crisis. Two public companies merged, and then weeks later, an SEC investigation was announced for corporate recognition. So, I was comprehensively redoing business development with clients and redoing data privacy in light of the impending GDPR requirements. They were going through a lot of financial and other considerations. Where I am today is Lotame, which is still in the space which focuses on advertising technology, and in that regard, continues to do a lot of data collection. I continue to stay in software and data, but I'm particularly in this area. I help companies and organizations get to audiences and bridge the gap and encourage the sale of the products that we sell.  Sharon: It seems like an amazing application and platform, to be able to gather all this data from different sources and build a picture of who you're targeting or where they are. Amy: That's absolutely right. Certainly, many of the companies I've been involved with have a component of that. At ZeniMax, they started, frankly, in the digital age and did digital advertising when very few people were focused on that, not knowing, of course, that there would be a big pivot in the coming years. They do have a platform to be able to incorporate advertising data themselves. Dataminr had a slightly different use scenario, especially when it comes to where the true value is in the company, but being familiar with how one uses those platforms to derive those insights is very much fundamental to Comscore.  What we want to focus on, which is to your point, Sharon, is really understanding who your audience is, trying to drill down and get that full picture. Also, as we all realize, we have a laptop for work; we have a different laptop for personal use; there's a phone. What we do on each of these devices is very different, and it's also very different from how we watch TV or use Roku. These days, as I know we all realize as marketers ourselves, are trying to get that singular picture, which is very complex. We're not trying to bombard you across all the platforms, in most instances anyway. We're trying to get a personal product directed to you when you're using your personal device, as compared to a work-related product when you're using a work-related device. Sharon: It sounds like as you've been building your career, you've had to learn about marketing, or get more into marketing. How has that been for you, as somebody who didn't study that in school? All lawyers have to be marketers, yes, but— Amy: That's absolutely right. You're so on point. I'll say one thing here is knowing what your core products are at the heart. I serve as strategic advisor to these companies. Of course, there are certain areas in the law, in data privacy, in intellectual property, that could put me in a much larger position or disproportionate position to be able to serve as a strategic advisor as the companies themselves pivot what they're trying to sell. That's certainly one of the key areas, but to your point, other things I didn't study in school include the business of the business itself, as well as the marketing. I am grateful to have individuals who are generous with their time to help me understand what they do, which gives me the opportunity to think about how I can service them and service their needs. Also, frankly, I'm a consumer just like everybody else. There are lots of things I like buying. In that vein, perhaps different from some of the other areas of my practice, it is intuitively helpful to have those analogies, because I'm a consumer just like anybody and everybody else. Keeping my finger on the pulse of how marketing turns and what those initiatives are helps me round out the picture, which in turn helps me become the best strategic advisor I can be. Sharon: I would imagine that when you're evaluating outside counsel, or when a lawyer's trying to get to know you, that demonstrating that understanding would be very important to you. Amy: It's essential for every company I work with. I will say that, especially when it comes to law firms, one of my expectations—and I know this is not typical, although perhaps it may not be far off the standard—is that I always expect our new law firms to onboard with a day of learning with us. I say that because I have been counseling disruptive companies across all life cycles, so many of these companies are going through a significant change. It's not standard work, and I'm not looking for a standard law firm; I'm looking a partner in the long run. In order for you to best serve me, and for me to be able to best serve my clients, it means understanding what the business does, understanding where the asks are coming from in the big picture. It also relates to the level of risk, because in each of these companies there has been a different risk. There have been different short-term and long-term risks that we know and need to balance. That is the explanation to how there have been some wonderfully successful law firms I've worked with in the past. I think we all recognize and agree that the legal answer needs to be massaged in shape for the client, but it's really difficult, I think, for the law firms and partners and teams to give unqualified advice if you don't have familiarity with the types of choices and operational work the company is going through. Some of that is default. For a large, multinational public company, you can probably guess what that risk is going to be, or for a public company in a corporate turnaround. That probably gives you some ideas you can guess at, but there's still a wide variety. The day of learning is very much an investment with both parties, both the partners and anticipated staff on my side, individuals and executive leadership—who also have busy days—to share in terms of understanding what everybody does.  Sharon: When you select outside counsel, are you looking at it for your clients or for your company, or for both? Who are you choosing for? It sounds like you're advising your clients as to who would be a good firm to talk to. Amy: Yeah, there's a little bit of that. Obviously, when I say client, I mean the people in the company I service. Some of it's a little bit of both of those pockets. As general counsel, I'm looking at their whole company's profile and what the risk is. There's certainly a level of understanding what we can do on the legal side to make sure we've got a well-rounded team, which includes reaching out to outside counsel and drawing the line between what's in and out based on experiences with what the company's gone through and the current legal team. After that, selecting a law firm and understanding their expertise and niche is, perhaps to your quite astute point, Sharon, a little bit of magic as well as a science, in that you are looking for the right fit, the right team with the leader, what their fundamental goals and purposes are. That can significantly narrow or generally broaden the number of law firms that are in that pipeline. I will say for me, the best practice, both normatively as well as philosophically, is that I will ask for multiple RFPs from different law firms. I want to give everybody a shot. I also want to give many individuals an opportunity to get to know us, because even if this time it doesn't work out, it still gives us exposure and a learning opportunity. I think fundamentally, that's important. Sharon: Have you ever gone back to a firm when you initially selected a different firm, but the other firm stuck in your mind? Something came up and you went back to them and said, “This would be great for you,” or “I'd like to work with you on this.” Amy: Yeah, I think that goes along with the philosophical approach of a long-term partner. It doesn't make sense, in my opinion, to spend that much time thinking about an isolated circumstance. I think there's a lot to be learned. Frankly, I wouldn't be doing an RFP if the team wouldn't be learning something new. To your point, there are several times I can think of off the top of my mind. I might not have any doubt, but either we learn something new, or, frankly, it comes down to the way the firm continues to build and maintain their relationship. They've already given more reason to take a look at them a second time. Sharon: How have they continued to build? How would you suggest somebody continue to build on that initial contact of presenting an RFP? How do they build and maintain that relationship and demonstrate that they would be the firm for you the next time around? Amy: There are any number of ways a firm can do this. I'm thinking about discrete examples that can be useful. I think it's fair to say we all get hundreds of emails a day, so adding a line to a newsletter, while it may be on point, doesn't actually help me winnow down what's useful. There are a number of partners, for example—and not even partners, associates—who will add another line or two as they forward, to say specifically, “Take a look at X, because I think X would be applicable.” By definition, if they catch my eye, it gives me the opportunity to examine a lending opportunity and say, “Yes, that was very much on point,” or “No, it wasn't.” It's a next step which in and of itself I see as a learning opportunity.  There are events, for example. I know it is frequent that people want to send those along. It's often useful for the contextualization, such as, “This event might be of use in particular. When we talked about X, I thought the panel at Y would be really useful to you.” Again, it's an opportunity to learn more about us. It's an opportunity for them to respond and think about somebody on the team, if not myself, to join. There are a number of conferences and events that law firms have and host. You can see where I'm going with this item. Knowledge about that for in-house counsel, especially when compared to my law firm experience, resources are far fewer. Being able to quantify that, especially in a discrete way for my team, is helpful. We've all got so many virtual panels right now, so having a virtual panel, a virtual conference alone, is not necessarily going to move the needle. But again, being tactful about it paves the way for that type of relationship, because I know you're not going to inundate me; I know you're already working hard to understand the business in different ways. That is a distinguishing factor, in my opinion, with a number of law firms and individuals who reach out.  Sharon: I think it's important for lawyers and marketers to hear the fact that you do consider firms you passed over the first time around. I'm sure a lot of lawyers say, “Well, that was a waste of time,” and put the RFP on the shelf and never look at it or think about you or your needs again, whereas it sounds like it would be worth it for them to build on what they've already invested. Amy: I think that's right.  Sharon: You've been involved in several attorney organizations. Can you tell us about which ones, attorney or personal, that have been most beneficial? Maybe you've identified lawyers there at times because you've gotten to know them. Amy: I'll say as somebody who builds teams, I'm always on the lookout. When I think back to any of the organizations where I haven't otherwise met someone connected with somebody or hired in some capacity—I'm not sure I can think of one where I haven't had that situation. As we all know, talent comes in all shapes and forms, so it's my role to keep my eyes open in that regard. To your first question, Sharon, I certainly had a wonderful and many years with the D.C. Bar and the ADA, both being elected in initial polls with the D.C. Bar as well as some of those roles overlapping with the American Bar Association. I found that organization to be and continues to be wonderful and a great source of broad legal networking and the like. It was great, especially for me in understanding contextually the variety of things that somebody, even in the business law section or another section, could still be involved in. With that said, since then, I've also been very active and involved in other groups, which might arguably be a little smaller in nature. That includes, for example, NAPABA and other voluntary bar organizations. Sharon: NAPABA? I'm not familiar with that one.  Amy: Sure. NAPABA is the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association. It's a great group of individuals. Ultimately, we are not only serving our leadership on the local level with NAPABA D.C., but also on the national level, culminating with my last role as the Chair of Diversity and Inclusion in that committee. I am also serving in leadership as the char elect for the Association of Corporate Counsel, ACC. It provides an opportunity for in-house counsel to come together and share their experiences in a way that, as some would say, avoids the law firm “sharks in water” situation and permits individuals to speak frankly about their experiences. I think the ACC, under this leadership, does a wonderful job of being able to balance that. We all realize it's a full life cycle in terms of needs between companies as well as law firms and law organizations in order for all of us to be successful in our careers. That's been a wonderful set of experiences with law.  Sharon: You mentioned diversity and inclusion. Has that grown in importance? Have you ever experienced that a law firm has brought in a team to meet you, and they had their token Asian, let's say, or their token ethnicity to prove diversity and inclusion? How has that been for you? Amy: I have to say it's been a bumpy road. I'd like to think the issue is much more prominent on its face, and in particular much deeper and richer conversations are happening. To your point, I do still have experiences where individuals will pull together a team and think that's the right message to send to me, but ultimately that message is short-lived and doesn't actually prove itself out in the way the work is done and the way in which the individuals themselves are being paid and compensated. Those are issues and concerns that I have always been of the mind to note. I would be surprised if there's any in-house counsel in a position to hire where that isn't a competitive factor. That's the case, at least for me, in software data, because all of my companies and teams have been global in nature. The reason for that is because from my perspective, it is impossible for me in my role to be able provide the appropriate guidance to a company that has so many points of view. So, I need my teams, whether or not they're inside the four walls of the company, to be able to provide the creative guidance and global perspective in order to advise the business. If they're not able to do that, I'm not doing my job, and if I'm not doing my job, you know what needs to happen.  I've had a lot of success in that. Maybe one can say, “Well, she's in software; she's in data and a lot of things.” I admit that things like pivots of a company, disruptive business ideas, these are all traits that can only encourage a diverse team to be able to come up with creative solutions. I also admit that, at least for a while there, this industry probably entertains larger, greater ideas in that scenario than perhaps a traditional company, but you can't tell me, especially in the days of Covid, that there isn't a company that isn't otherwise struggling for better places broadly in our ecosystem. If I don't have these few clients, I simply don't do enough of a good job for my company. My team is encouraged to think outside of the box, in alignment with the legal requirements of what needs to happen. Where we end up ultimately is another thing, but I want to make sure my team is supportive of the company leads, and in order to do that, we need global views, whether or not that's in data privacy, whether or not that's in intellectual property. We need to be able to see and peer around the corner. The only way we are able to do that is when there are fresh perspectives and multiple perspectives, when we discuss and debate, and then ultimately align with the course of action that comes with the next steps.  Sharon: Do you see things outside of your firm? Do you see things changing in the world of diversity and inclusion, things that are going to stick? Maybe people are saying, “Well, that's the buzzword of today,” like Earth Day was the buzzword decades ago and then it popped up again. At least, that's my interpretation. Amy: Yeah, it's a great question, Sharon, and I thank you for asking it, because it's a very important topic. I mentioned earlier that the conversations these days are richer. By that, I not only mean total conversations and the transparency with which these conversations happen, but also in terms of the metrics that I and a number of other general counsel and chief legal officers expect. We anticipate a more fulsome picture, especially from law firms, in their data. I was just having a conversation last week with a global law firm. They had identified mutual stacks in terms of initial hiring and the like. We all know and recognize that we need to invite diversity of all sorts. It continues to be a work in progress, but is perhaps the easiest of all of the steps to achieve, to be able to then build that in your attention and create that pipeline is something I think all companies or organizations continue to struggle with. This is what I would expect to be the next steps in this dialogue. How has your firm retained diverse individuals moving up? How has your firm been able to elevate? I've worked with partners in law firms to be able to ensure that potential elevations are getting the substantive work that puts individuals in a position to be partner ready. We need that. That, to me, is a full cycle of success for all lawyers. That is the business model that I not only believe in, but I actually put the investment in. That is how this conversation is richer, but we need more people in the conversation, and we need more transparency with respect to how we can advance the profession overall. Sharon: What would your advice be to emerging attorneys or those that want to rise up the ladder, who don't have the sponsorship or patronage you're talking about? I think it's fabulous to be able to say to a partner, “This is a person we need to groom.” How would you suggest that lawyers pierce the corporate veil, in a sense, to get to you? That's my vision of it. Amy: Yeah, that's a great question. I'll add to your good observations what I've described as a dialogue. It happens over the course of a few years, so it's not just me who might say, “You've got an excellent attorney for these following reasons.” It's a way for us to get that full cycle of improving the next generation of attorneys coming in, which is what I hope all juniors in our space want to do. With that said, there are a number of things a junior attorney can do to put themselves on the radar. I know from a law firm perspective, the one thing that is often said is do the best you can do. Always say yes, all of those good things that I don't need to go over in our interview today. But certainly make a mark on the people for whom you work.  These days, more junior attorneys are getting mentorship with their counterparts, which is amazing and certainly didn't exist when I was on the law firm side or when we went to in-house counsel. I think there are more people on the in-house counsel side that create the opportunity for those parallels. I think that would be another thing I would tell junior attorneys to ask, which is to say—at least in my book, I make sure all of my attorneys start getting early exposure with law firm colleagues. It's important not only to understand the cadence and the business model, but also to build upon the ways in which one can create a relationship. If I'm expecting you on my side, that's an opportunity attorneys can ask for on the other side, which is to say, “Look, I'm not going to bill for my time, but it goes without saying there cannot always be a fly on the wall. I'd love to hear that early exposure about the way in which you, senior counsel or partner, are able to manage the client. Help me understand the political dynamic on this case. What's the risk profile?” Being curious and thoughtful about the group picture is something that a decade ago, I don't know that law firms were necessarily thinking about in terms of giving the right answer. That's a terrible generalization. I don't mean it to be quite literal, but what I mean to say is that these days, there are so many more opportunities. It's so much better for senior attorneys to bring in their junior attorneys to have that experience and start giving attorneys earlier opportunities for that exposure to be thinking about as they rise. I'm pretty positive that a lot of junior law firm attorneys I speak with or mentor are looking for that. It's a huge benefit to them in so many different ways.  Sharon: I could see how it would be a tremendous benefit in having the people within the firm know who you are and what you can do, but I'm saying, “Hey, I don't want to wait around for that,” or “Yes, I do that, but I want to get to know you better,” or “I want you to see what I'm learning here.” Basically, how do I get to you without having to wait for the partner to make the introduction or do whatever he or she has to do to get me to you? What's the best way to do that? Speak at conferences? Publish? What are you looking at?  Amy: That's a really great question. Let me see if I can't break it down, because you raise what is, at the essence, a complication of human dynamics. I don't mean that to be so philosophical, but I think that's true, because there's no one way that's going to catch my eye or catch somebody's eye. When you accurately identify, for example, writing an article, that is bound to catch somebody's eye. I don't know if it's going to catch my eye or somebody else's, but you got to put yourself out there. That's the number one rule in marketing, they say. You can't get the business unless you're at least trying to do that. There is some nuance in the other suggestions I raised, which is to say I'm not sure. I wouldn't necessary be advocating for a junior attorney who's on an account to directly reach out to the general counsel without having connected with the relationship partner. Sharon: I understand, but what if the relationship partner—if they don't feel threatened, let's say—says to the junior attorney, “You've got to figure out how we're going to build this relationship with Amy. We have our foot in the door. Where do we go from here? I'm too busy to think about it. You come up with a plan.” What would you say? What would your advice be? You've given us ideas, but how would you help advise him to expand the relationship? Amy: For a junior attorney? Sharon: To maybe go to the relationship partner or one of the partners and say, “Hey, I have Amy's ear. Let's do something with it.” Amy: Yeah, it's a great question. I would hope that all junior attorneys are thinking about how the state of relationship is more than just doing the work and thinking about the bigger picture. Maybe one way I would respond to this—again, this really does boil down to human relations—is that if this individual is involved in other types of organizations, such as the voluntary bar, it's a good opportunity. To answer your question, Sharon, which I think gets to the heart of human dynamics, I would hope that every junior attorney is thinking more broadly than just, “Let me do the work that's being asked of me,” and they are learning more about the client; they're thinking about the business relationship and, in particular for those who want to help develop the business, are taking all of the experiences they're learning from in each of their client matters and understanding where the core of that relationship is. That relationship can change quite drastically, whether it's a core corporate client of the law firm versus somebody who's smaller.  To answer your question more specifically how a junior attorney might be able to help expand, I think this is also where things like bar associations or just your knowledge on the street might be helpful. There might be something that comes in over email that they can forward on to the partner to say, “Hey, the law firm is doing this, and I think it would be great to forward for X client. I'm happy to do it unless you prefer to do it.” This is also where having parallel relationships between the level of the law firm associate and the level of in-house counsel can be helpful, because now you're not having to go up and down the ladder, so to speak, but rather you can just forward that on to the mid-level, and it's probably something you are both interested in, in terms of expertise or takeaways. Another way to do it is if you are learning about something yourself, bullet point three to five takeaways and share them with the partner for the panel. The recording might be of interest to the associates you're generally working with at that company, or it could be something you send directly to your midlevel. Again, if it's something new you've learned, I suspect it might be something your counterpart in the company might also be interested in, or at least it's an opportunity for you guys to be able to synch on knowledge. Sharon: I think that's wise. What you said is almost the essence of this whole conversation. First of all, I want to make it clear: I'm not advocating for anybody to go jump over their senior professional, their partner, whoever, even though I've seen that. The relationship doesn't end up very well. That's not what I'm advocating for. I do think what you're talking about is level-to-level, in a sense that the rising professional, the rising outside in private practice, if they are building that relationship with somebody around the same level in-house, how that could work in the long run very well, if one assumes they are providing value. Maybe I'm naïve, but some of the things you're talking about, I don't have to bring them up because—doesn't everybody say, “O.K., the bottom line is you've got to do good work, and you got to let everybody else know you're doing that good work”? I guess I skip over that because, to me, it's a given. Maybe it isn't. Amy: No, I wish it were a given. It wasn't in my life. I'm still struggling with that. I think studies show, actually, that is not a given with cultural considerations. Some assume that the work speaks for itself, so it is a plea to them to acknowledge, in a tactful way, what you're doing and elevate that. That's an art, and we all have to practice it. To your point, I'd love to think it's a given, but I don't think it is. Doing good work is also contextualized. I've said for many years, for myself as well as from others when listening to them identify, that you have to do the best work you can do, but what exactly does that mean? I think in this day and age, what it means to do good work is to understand what your fundamental client needs are, and that oftentimes isn't information you necessarily get from the first round. You have to be proactive about understanding that. That goes not just for the junior attorneys, but also for the relationship partners and the individuals who are working on the matters. Sharon: I think that's very sound advice, sound thoughts. We could have a whole conversation about what doing good work is. Amy: We certainly could. Sharon: Amy, thank you so much for being here today. Amy: Thank you so much. I really appreciate the invitation, Sharon.

AWS Morning Brief
AWS Application Cost Profiler

AWS Morning Brief

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 16, 2021 14:57


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.

AWS Morning Brief
AWS Account Teams and You

AWS Morning Brief

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 9, 2021 17:56


LinksPete and Jesse Talk Account ManagersTranscriptCorey: If your mean time to WTF for a security alert is more than a minute, it's time to look at Lacework. Lacework will help you get your security act together for everything from compliance service configurations to container app relationships, all without the need for PhDs in AWS to write the rules. If you're building a secure business on AWS with compliance requirements, you don't really have time to choose between antivirus or firewall companies to help you secure your stack. That's why Lacework is built from the ground up for the Cloud: low effort, high visibility and detection. To learn more, visit lacework.com.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, really, a couple things; building your relationship with AWS, really. This stems from one of the questions that we got from a listener from a previous event. The question is, “How do the different companies that we've worked with work with AWS? Is the primary point of contact for AWS at a company usually the CTO, the VP of engineering, an architect, an ops person, a program manager, or somebody from finance, a [unintelligible 00:01:00] trainer? Who ultimately owns that relationship with AWS?”And so we're going to talk about that today. I think there's a lot of really great content in this space. Pete and I, back in the day, recorded an episode talking about building your relationship with your account manager, and with your TAM, and with AWS in general. I'll link that in the show notes. That's a great precursor to this conversation. But I think there's a lot of great opportunities to build your relationship and build rapport with AWS, as you work with AWS and as you put more things on the platform.Amy: I think one of the things we always say right off the bat is that you should introduce yourself and make a good relationship with your account manager and your technical account manager, just because they're the ones who, if you need help, they're going to be the ones to help you.Jesse: Yeah, I think one of the things that we should also take a step back and add is that if you are listening to this and you're saying to yourself, “I don't have an account manager,” that's actually wrong; you do have an account manager. Anybody who's running workloads on AWS has an account manager. Your account manager might not have reached out to you yet because usually speaking, account managers don't reach out unless they see that you're spending a certain amount of money. They usually don't start a conversation with you unless you specifically are spending a certain amount of money, have reached a certain threshold, and then they want to start talking to you about opportunities to continue using AWS, opportunities to save money, invest in AWS. But you definitely have an account manager and you should definitely start building that rapport with them as soon as possible.Amy: First question. How do you actually engage your account manager?Tim: So, there's a couple ways to do it. If you have reached a certain spend threshold where your account manager will reach out to you, it's real simple: you just reply back to them. And it kind of depends. The question most people are going to have is, “Well, why do I need to reach out to my account manager? If I just have, like, a demo account, if I'm just using free tier stuff.”You probably don't ever need to reach out to your account manager, so what are the things, typical things that people need to reach out to their account manager for? Well, typically because they want to grow and want to see what kind of discounts are offered for growth, and I want to see what I can do. Now, you can open a support ticket, you can open a billing ticket, but what will end up happening is once you reach a spend threshold, your account manager will reach out to you because they want to talk to you about what programs they have, they want to see how they can help you grow your account, they want to see what things they can do for you because for them, that means you're going to spend more money. Most account managers within a little bit of time of you opening your account and reaching a lower spend threshold, they're going to send you an email and say, “Hey, this is my name, this is how you reach me,” et cetera, et cetera. And they'll send you some emails with links to webinars or other events and things like that, and you can typically reply back to those and you'll be able to get your account manager sometimes as well. But like I said, the easiest way to get a hold of your account manager or find out who it is, is to start increasing your spend on AWS.Jesse: So, then if you're a small company, maybe a startup or maybe just a student's using AWS for the first time, likely that point of contact within a company is going to be you. From a startup perspective, maybe you are the lead engineer, maybe you are the VP of engineering, maybe you are the sole engineer in the company. We have seen most organizations that we talk to have a relationship with AWS, or build that relationship or own that relationship with AWS at a engineering management or senior leadership level. Engineering management seems to be the sweet spot because usually, senior leadership has a larger view of things on their plate than just AWS so they're focused on larger business moves for the company, but the engineering manager normally has enough context and knowledge of all of the day-to-day specifics of how engineering teams are using AWS to really be involved in that conversation with your account manager, with your technical account manager, or with your solutions architect, or whatever set of folks you have from AWS's side for an account team. And I think that's another thing that we should point out as well, which is, you will always have an account manager; you won't always have a technical account manager.The technical account manager generally comes in once you have signed an enterprise discount program agreement. So, generally speaking, that is one of the perks that comes with an EDP, but obviously, there are other components to the EDP to be mindful of as well.Tim: So, let me clarify that. You get a technical account manager when you sign up for enterprise support. You don't have to have an EDPs to have enterprise support, but when you sign up for enterprise support, you automatically get a technical account manager.Jesse: And, Tim, if you could share with everybody, what kind of things can you expect from a technical account manager?Tim: So, a technical account manager, I mean, they will do—like, all TAMs everywhere pretty much can liaise with support to escalate tickets or investigate them and see what's going on with them, try and, kind of, white-glove them into where they need to be. AWS TAM's, they also have the same—or a lot of the same access to the backend. Not your data because no one at AWS actually has access to your data or inside your systems, but they have access to the backend so they can see API calls, they can see logs, and they can see other things like that to get insight into what's going on in your system and so they can do analytics. They have insight to your billing, they can see your Cost Explorer, they can see what your contract spends are, they can see all the line items in your bills, they have access to the roadmaps, they have access to the services and the service teams so that if you need to talk to someone at a particular service team, they can arrange that meeting for you. If you need to talk to specialists SAs, they can arrange those meetings for you.With a TAM, you—and if you have enterprise support, and they're looking you for an EDP, you can have what's called an EBC or an Executive Briefing Council, where they, in non-pandemic times, they will bring you to Seattle, put you up for a couple of days and you'll have a couple of days of meetings with service teams to go over, kind of like, what the roadmap looks like, what your strategy for working with those teams are or working with those services are. And you can get good steps on how to utilize these services, whether it's going to be some more deep dives on-site, or whether it's going to be some key roadmap items that the service team is going to prioritize and other things like that. And the EBC is actually pretty neat, but you know, you have to be larger spender to get access to those. Another thing that a TAM can do is they can actually enter items on the roadmap for you. They have access to and can provide you access to betas, or pilot programs, or private releases for various services.You'll have access to a weekly email that include what launches are pending, or what releases are pending over the next week or two weeks. You'll have access to quarterly or monthly business reviews where you get access to see what your spend looks like, what your spending trends are, support ticket trends, you know, usage and analytics, and things like that. So, a TAM can be quite useful. They can do quite a lot for you, especially in the realm of cloud economics. That said, every TAM has their specialty.I mean, depending on how many customers they have, the level of engagement you may get. And, you know, some TAMs are super, super, really good at the financial aspects, some are better at the technical aspects. So, to be fair because the TAM org is so large at AWS, you don't always have the same experience with all your TAMs, and the level of depth to which they can dive is going to vary somewhat.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. Amy: So, let's say we got the best TAM—even though he technically works for us now—when trying to envision what our relationship with the world's best TAM is going to be—and I just imagine that as a nice little block text on a white mug—what is that relationship going to look like? How are we going to engage with them? And even, how often should we talk to them?Jesse: I used to work for an organization that had, I believe, quarterly meetings with our account manager and our TAM, and every time we met with them, it felt like this high stakes poker game where we didn't want to show our cards and they didn't want to show their cards, but then nobody really was able to do anything productive together. And I have to say that is the exact opposite of how to engage your account manager and your TAM.Tim: Yeah, that doesn't sound great.Jesse: No, it was not great. I do not recommend that. You want to have an open, honest conversation about your roadmap, about what you want to do with AWS.Amy: They're not getting that mug.Tim: No, no.Jesse: [laugh].Tim: So, if you have a super-engaged TAM—and I will use my own experience as a TAM at AWS—that we had office hours, routinely, bi-weekly. One customer I had, I would have onsite office hours at their offices in LA, and I would have virtual office hours in offices in London. And those office hours, sometimes I'd have—we—that—we would use those to bring in, whether it was specialist SAs, whether we go over roadmap items, or tickets, or something like that, or we do architectural reviews, or cost reviews, we would schedule quarterly business reviews aside from that, typically sometimes the same day or on the same group of days, but there was typically be different than office hours. I was in their Slack channel so they needed to ping me on something that's not a ticket but a question, we could have conversations in there. A couple of their higher points of contact there had my phone number, so they would call me if something was going on. They would page me—because AWS TAMS have pagers—if they had a major issue, or, like, an outage or something [unintelligible 00:11:05] that would affect them.Jesse: I'm sorry, I just have to ask really quick. Are we talking, like, old school level pager?Tim: No, no, no. Like on your phone, like PagerDuty.Jesse: Okay, okay. I was really excited for a minute there because I kind of miss those old-school pagers.Tim: Let me say, it was like PagerDuty; it wasn't actual PagerDuty because AWS did not actually use PagerDuty. They had something internal, but PagerDuty was the closest analog.Amy: Internal PagerDuty as a Service.Tim: Something like that.Jesse: Oh, no.Amy: So, you know, if you have a very engaged TAM, you would have regular, several times a week, contact if not daily, right? Additionally, the account team will also meet internally to go over strategy, go over issues, and action items, and things like that once or twice a week. Some accounts have multiple TAM, in which case then, you know, the touchpoints are even more often.Jesse: I feel like there's so much opportunity for engagement with your AWS account team, your account manager, your TAM. It's not entirely up to you to build that relationship, but it is a relationship; it definitely requires investment and energy from both sides.Tim: And I would say in the context of who's working with a TAM, ideally, the larger contact paths you have at an org with your TAM, the better off it's going to be. So, you don't want your TAM or account team to only talk to the VP of engineering, or the DevOps manager, or the lead architect; you want them to be able to talk to your devs, and your junior devs, and your finance people, and your CTO, and other folks like that, and pretty much anyone who's a stakeholder because they can have various conversations, and they can bring concerns around. If they're talking about junior devs, your TAM can actually help them how to use CloudFormation, and how to use a AWS CLI, or do a workshop on the basics of using Kubernetes, or something like that. Whereas if you're going to have a conversation with the VP of engineering, they're going to talk about strategies, they're going to talk about roadmap items, they're going to talk about how things can affect the company, they're going to talk about EDPs and things like that. So ideally, in a successful relationship with your TAM, your TAM is going to have several people in your org are going to have that TAM's contact information and will talk with them regularly.Jesse: One of the clients that we worked with actually brought us in for a number of conversations, and brought their TAM in as part of those conversations, too. And I have to say, having the TAM involved in those conversations was fantastic because as much as I love the deep, insightful work that we do, there were certain things about AWS's roadmap that we just don't have visibility into sometimes. And the TAM had that visibility and was able to be part of those conversations on multiple different levels. The TAM was able to communicate to multiple audiences about both roadmap items from a product perspective, from a finance perspective, from an engineering architecture perspective; it was really great to have them involved in the conversation and share insights that were beneficial for multiple parties in that meeting.Tim: And oftentimes, too, involving your TAM when you do have this one thing in your bill you can't figure out, saying, “We've looked and this spend is here, but we don't know exactly why it is.” Your TAM can go back and look at the logs, or go back and look at some of the things that were spun up at the specific time and say, “Oh, here was the problem. It was when you deploy this new AMI, it caused your CPU hours to go way, way up so you had to spin up more instances.” Or a great one was a few years back when Datadog changed its API calls and a lot of people's CloudWatch costs went through the roof. And then several TAMs had to through and figure out, it was this specific call and this is how you fix that and give that guidance back to their customers to reduce their spend. So, being able to have that backend access is very, very useful, even when you are working with an optimization group like ourselves or other folks, to say, “Hey, we've noticed these things. These are the line items we want to get some insight into.” I mean, your TAM can definitely be a good partner in that.Jesse: All right, folks, well, that'll do it for us this week. If you've got questions that you'd like us to answer, please go to lastweekinaws.com/QA. Fill out the form; we'd be happy to answer those on a future show. 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, did Tim pronounce the shortening of ‘Amazon Machine Image' correctly as ‘ah-mi' or should he have said ‘A-M-I?'Amy: I heard it and I wasn't going to say it. [laugh].Jesse: [laugh].Amy: I was just going to wait for someone to send him the t-shirt.Tim: Just to note, if you put beans in your chili, you can keep your comments to yourself.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: You're just going to keep fighting about everything today, is all I'm—[laugh].Jesse: [laugh]. Oh, no.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

AWS Morning Brief
Balancing Cost Optimizations and Feature Work

AWS Morning Brief

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 4, 2021 15:28


Links:The cloud economist starter kit: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/aws-morning-brief/cloud-cost-management-starter-kit-2/ TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. 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, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I'm Jesse DeRose.Amy: I'm Amy Negrette.Jesse: This is the podcast within the podcast where we like to 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 balancing cost optimization work against feature work.Amy: Buckle up everyone. I've got a lot of thoughts about this. Just kidding. It's just the one: don't.Jesse: You heard it here first, folks. Don't. Amy Negrette just says, “Don't.”Amy: Don't. [laugh].Jesse: So Amy, does that mean, don't balance the work?Amy: More like don't choose. It's always hard to make the argument to take an engineer off of feature work. This goes for all sorts of support tasks like updates and documentation, and as a group, we figured out that trying to put those off until an engineer has time to do it is not going to be a thing that becomes prioritized, it eventually gets deprioritized, and no one looks at it. And that's why DocOps is the thing. It's a process that now gets handled as part of and in parallel with software development.Jesse: Yeah, I've had so many conversations in previous companies that I've worked for, where they basically said, “Well, we don't have time to write documentation.” Or they will say, “The code is the documentation.” And, to their credit, there are a lot of places where the code is very cleanly documented, but if somebody is coming into this information for the first time and they don't have technical knowledge or they don't have deep expertise in what you're looking at, they need documentation that is clear, understandable, and approachable. And it is so difficult to find that balance to actually make sure that that work is part of everything that you do.Amy: And I think what the industry has decided is that if you make it a requirement for pull requests that if you're going to make a change, you have to document that change somewhere, and that change if it has any kind of user impact, it will be displayed alongside it. That's the only way to make it a priority with software. And cost optimization has to be treated in a similar respect.Jesse: Yeah, so let's talk about cost optimization as a process. To start, let's talk about when to do it. Is this something that we do a little bit all the time, or do we do it after everything's already done?Amy: I know I just cited CostOps as a good model for this, even though that's literally what we cannot do. We can't treat cost optimization as something we do a little bit along the way because, again, speaking as an engineer, if I'm allowed to over-optimize or over-engineer something, I'm going to take that opportunity to do that.Jesse: Absolutely.Amy: And if we're going to do project-wide cost optimization, we need to know what usage patterns are, we need to have a full user and business context on how any system is used. So, if we do a little at each step, you get stuck in that micro-optimization cycle and you're never actually going to understand what the impact of those optimizations were. Or if you spent too much time on one part over-optimizing another part.Jesse: It's also really hard if this is a brand new workload that you've never run in the cloud before. You don't necessarily know what the usage is going to be for this workload. Maybe you have an idea of usage patterns based on some modeling that you've done or based on other workloads that you're running, but as a whole, if this is a brand new workload, you may be surprised when you deploy it and find out that it is using twice the amount of resources that you expected, or half the amount of resources that you expected, or that it is using resources and cycles that you didn't expect.Amy: Yeah. We've all been in the situation, or at least if you work with—especially with consumer software—that, you're going to run into a situation where the bunch of users are going to do things that you don't expect to happen within your application, causing the traffic patterns that you predicted to move against the model. To put it kindly. [laugh].Jesse: Yeah. So, generally speaking, what we've seen work the best is making time for cost optimization work maybe a cycle every quarter, to do some analysis work: to look at your dashboards, look at whatever tooling you're using, whatever metrics you're collecting, to see what kind of cost optimization opportunities are available to you and to your teams.Amy: So, that comes down to who's actually doing this work. Are we going to assign a dedicated engineer to it in order to ensure it gets done? Anyone with the free cycles to do it?Jesse: See, this is the one that I always love and hate because it's that idea of if it's everyone's responsibility, it's no one's responsibility. And I really want everybody to be part of the conversation when it comes to cost optimization and cloud cost management work, but in truth, that's not the reality; that's not the way to get this work started. Never depend on free cycles because if you're just waiting for somebody to have a free cycle, they're never going to do any work. They're never going to prioritize cost optimization work until it becomes a big problem because that work is just going to be deprioritized constantly. There's a number of companies that I worked for in the past who did hackathons, maybe once a quarter or once every year, and those hackathons were super, super fun for a lot of teams, but there was a couple individuals who always picked up feature work as part of the hackathon, thinking, “Oh, well, I didn't get a chance to work on this because my cycles were focused on something else, so now I'll get a chance to do this.” No, that's not what a hackathon is about.Amy: You don't hack on your own task list. That's not how anything works.Jesse: Exactly. So instead, rather than just relying on somebody to have a free cycle, kind of putting it out there and waiting for somebody to pick up this work, there should be a senior engineer or architect with knowledge of how the system works, to periodically dedicate a sprint to do this analysis work. And when we say knowing how the system works, we're really talking about that business context that we've talked about many, many times before. A lot of the cloud cost management tooling out there will make a ton of recommendations for you based on things like right-sizing opportunities, reservation investments, but those tools don't have the business context that you and your teams do. So, those tools don't know those resources that are sitting idle in us-west-2 are actually your disaster recovery site, and you actually kind of need those—even though they're not taking any work right now, you need those to keep your SLAs in check in case something goes down with your primary site.Or maybe security expects resources to be set up in a certain way that requires higher latency times based on end-to-end encryption. There's lots of different business context opportunities that a lot of cloud cost management tools don't have, and that's something that anybody who is looking at cloud cost optimization work should have and needs to have those conversations with other teams. Whoever does this cloud cost optimization work, or whoever makes the cloud cost optimization recommendations to other teams needs to know the business context of those teams' workloads so that the recommendations they make are actually actionable.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Lumigo. If you've built anything from serverless, you know that if there's one thing that can be said universally about these applications, it's that it turns every outage into a murder mystery. Lumigo helps make sense of all of the various functions that wind up tying together to build applications. It offers one-click distributed tracing so you can effortlessly find and fix issues in your serverless and microservices environment. You've created more problems for yourself; make one of them go away. To learn more visit lumigo.io.Amy: And they should also have the authority to do this work. It's easy to deliver a team a list of suggestions saying, “Oh, I've noticed our utilization is really low on this one instance. We shouldn't possibly move it,” or what have you. And because they're not the ones making the full architectural decisions, or leading that team, or in charge of that inventory, they actually don't have the authority to tell anyone to do anything. So, whoever gets tasked with this really needs to be an architect on that team—if you're going to go with this embedded resource type of person—where they have that authority to make that decision and to act on it and move things.Jesse: Yeah. It's really important that teams stay accountable to the resources that they're running. And some teams don't know any of the resources that they're running; they, kind of, deploy into the cloud as a black box. And that is a perfectly fine business model for some organizations, but then they also need to understand that if the senior engineer or architect who is focused on cloud cost optimization work for this group says, “Hey, we need to tweak some of these workloads or configurations to better optimize these workloads,” the teams need to be willing to have that conversation and be a part of that conversation. So, we've talked about a couple different ideas of who this person might be that does this work. This could be a DevOps team that attaches a dedicated resource to doing this analysis work, to making these recommendations, and then delegates the cost optimization work to the engineering teams, or it could be a dedicated cloud economist or cloud economist team who does this work.Amy: We did touch on having someone in DevOps do this, just because they have a very broad view and the authority to issue tasks to engineering teams because if they see an application or an architecture, where resources are being—or are hitting their utilization cap, or if they realize there are applications that need more or less resources, they're able to do those types of investigations. Maybe someone on that team can take up this work and have a more infrastructure-minded view on the entire account, see what's going on on the account and make those suggestions that way.Jesse: Absolutely. It's so important. Or if there is a dedicated cloud economist or maybe a cloud economist team that is able to make these recommendations, that has the authority to make these recommendations, maybe that's the direction your group should go.Amy: If only we spent an entire podcast talking about this.Jesse: [laugh]. Huh, if only we spent an entire podcast talking about how to build a cloud cost team and talk about how to get started as a cloud economist. Hmm…Amy: Please check out the cloud economist starter kit that we all have already published.Jesse: Yes, several weeks ago. We'll post the episode link in the [show notes 00:12:38] again. So, Amy, we've talked about when to do this work, who should do this work. What I want to know is how do these teams come together to have these conversations together? I'm thinking about best practices here. I'm thinking about how do teams start building best practices around this work so that each team isn't working in a silo doing their own cost optimization work?Amy: If you're lucky, someone in your company has already done this work. [laugh]. And you can just steal their work.Jesse: Absolutely.Amy: Or borrow. Or collaborate. Whatever word you want to use.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: See if you can see how the project went, how they structured it. Maybe they ran into a process issue like they weren't able to get the kind of access they needed without jumping through a whole bunch of red tape and hoops. That's a good thing to know going into one of these projects, just being able to see the resources that you're going to be looking at, and making sure you have access to them.Jesse: Absolutely. This is part of why we also harp so much on open and clear communication across teams about the cloud cost management work that you're doing. If you are trying to solve a problem, it's likely that another team in the organization is also trying to solve that same problem, or ideally has already solved that problem, and then they can help you solve the problem. They can explain to you how they solved the problem so that you can solve it faster so you don't have to waste engineering cycles, trying to reinvent the wheel essentially. It's a really, really great opportunity to build these best practices, to have these conversations together, maybe to build communities of practice within the organization, depending on how large your organization is, around the best ways to use these different tools and resources within the organization.Jesse: Well, that will do it for us this week. If you've got questions that you would like us to answer on an upcoming episode, go to lastweekinaws.com/QA. 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 integrate cost as a component of your engineering work.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

amazon cost field balancing cloud feature aws qa devops slas launchdarkly optimizations amy you amy so jesse yeah jesse you jesse well jesse it last week in aws humblepod
Serverless Chats
Episode #102: Creating and Evolving Technical Content with Amy Arambulo Negrette

Serverless Chats

Play Episode Listen Later May 24, 2021 57:51


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.

AWS Morning Brief
Build vs. Buy

AWS Morning Brief

Play Episode Listen Later May 21, 2021 13:04


Transcript Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. 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, visit launchdarkly.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.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 build versus buy. I feel like this is really kind of a classic engineering conversation. Amy, what is the build versus buy idea?Amy: It’s really the idea of whether you decide to use a managed service or SaaS product versus rolling your own and building yourself. It’s very easy to do these days with a few watches on YouTube, maybe some blog articles. You can also do repairs on my house, which is why I always have to get repairs done on my house. [laugh].Jesse: [laugh]. Yeah, I feel like as much as I love the world of HGTV and the DIY network, I think I can do more than I actually can and I feel like it’s probably a lot safer to just let a professional take the reins. I mean, there’s so many certification programs that teach you how to build and manage your own engineering things, your own distributed databases, your own Kubernetes clusters, your own streaming data platform, and it’s really great to understand the fundamental building blocks of these systems, it’s really great to understand how they work so that ultimately if you are consuming from them or managing them, that you understand the ins and the outs of the system. But the question becomes, do you really need to be the one that’s managing that system? Do you really need to be the one spending your time managing that system on top of writing code for your microservices, on top of managing the architecture, the application, all of the components of your service that are critical?Amy: So, I guess what we really want to decide is, in what use cases is it okay to build something from scratch, and when is it okay to, essentially, just go to the market and look for something that’s made already?Jesse: Yeah. And I think that’s the main question that a lot of folks ask: what is the defining line? What are the questions they should think about as they are choosing to build versus buy?Amy: I think if you want to really look at building a product, and really from the ground up—you have this product in mind and you want to do all the architecture, control it end-to-end—unless this is your core product feature or you’re going to package it for either internal or public release, you almost always—you don’t want to build this yourself because someone has probably built it in a way that’s not going to cause your engineers time or money. Unless it is going to directly make you money, then yes. If this is tied to your product income and your product revenue, please build it yourself. It avoids a lot of licensing issues, you do get to control how it works, how you want it to work. But that said a lot of products, just a bunch of assassins in a trench coat anyway, so—Jesse: [laugh].Amy: —it really depends on what’s important to you.Jesse: Yeah, I feel like this is one of the biggest pitfalls that I see in a lot of organizations where they think about how they want to build out an architecture and they choose that a solution like, stateful distributed service is going to be the right thing that they want. And one of the developers says, “Oh, that’s easy. I can build that in a weekend.” And then they go off and build it, and then they’re stuck managing that system for all of eternity when that’s not the primary purpose of the team that they’re working on, that’s not the primary purpose of the product that they’re working on. So, if you’re going to build something that is directly related to your product, directly related to your business use case, directly related to how your company is making money, something that is absolutely your bread and butter, you definitely want to build that rather than buying that off the shelf.Because building it will give you that great opportunity to focus on controlling all the ins and outs of the system, understanding all the parts of the system, finding the flexibility when you need flexibility, really fine-tuning and honing all the parts of the system in the way that you need it to work so that ultimately your organization is getting the best bang for their buck out of the system, whereas in a lot of cases, you’re not going to get the same level of flexibility from an off the shelf solution.Amy: And especially if you’re going to go in and planning to build your own supporting product, make sure—and I said this before, I’ll say it again—you do check the licenses of any libraries and any SaaS products you use to build it because I reinvented the wheel plenty of times in my career, specifically because I worked in a place where the licensing we were allowed to use would not allow us to use very specific products.Jesse: Yeah. That’s such a critical business risk and something that I think not every engineer is fully aware of. And to be clear, I don’t think that’s the engineer’s fault. I think that’s part of best practices that every organization can get better at to make sure that everybody understands, what are our limitations on using modules, using open-source solutions from the internet? How can we make sure that we ultimately aren’t creating additional unnecessary business risk?Amy: When do we go shopping?Jesse: [laugh]. Yeah, let’s go shopping. Let’s say you’ve decided that the piece of software that you want is not part of your bread and butter, like we were saying. If it’s not part of your organization’s primary product, primary use case, don’t waste engineering time building it for yourself, pay a vendor or a subject matter expert to build it for you—or to manage it for you, even—and then call it a day. It is absolutely worth those trade-offs. The additional cost of paying somebody else to manage it for you is absolutely worthwhile because you then get the opportunity to stay focused on the things that are most important to your team and your business.Corey: If your mean time to WTF for a security alert is more than a minute, it’s time to look at Lacework. Lacework will help you get your security act together for everything from compliance service configurations to container app relationships, all without the need for PhDs in AWS to write the rules. If you’re building a secure business on AWS with compliance requirements, you don’t really have time to choose between antivirus or firewall companies to help you secure your stack. That’s why Lacework is built from the ground up for the cloud: low effort, high visibility, and detection. To learn more, visit lacework.com.Amy: You also don’t end up trapped by having to make sure the product is appropriately upgraded or patched. And then you also have that nice little space of liability, saying we just bought this off the shelf. They said it was safe, and we trusted them. [laugh].Jesse: Yeah, again, business risk conversations, there is absolutely that opportunity for third-party liability rather than internal liability in some of those security risks. I also feel like it’s important to add that AWS, for example, has tons of managed services that give you ease of use by removing that administrative overhead. Yes, we’re primarily focused on AWS, obviously, this is an AWS focused podcast, there is definitely going to be a best and worst use case for these products so I’m not saying that you should go out and start using these all immediately without thinking about your overall goal and use case, but in a lot of cases, again, if the solution that you want is not something that you need to manage yourself, that you need to focus on building and running yourself, give it to AWS, they have tons of these managed solutions available to you built into the ecosystem.Amy: And that’s true of all the large cloud providers. They have managed services to make the things that you do not have the staffing to be an expert in and do all that work for you. And it’s not as if you are locked into these solutions. When you buy into either a SaaS product or a managed service, you can migrate off if you feel like you can build it better, and you actually have spent the time in R&D, and you spent the time building out a minimum viable product, and you know that this use case works for you, and then you can either clear out overhead or fees, and you can actually come in under what you’re spending right now, then make that move. But do it after you already know what it is you want.Jesse: Yeah, I think that’s a really great use case example, Amy. One other thing that I want to talk about is that this build versus buy a conversation so far has been focused on your organization thinking about if they want to build something internally, or if they want to buy it from a third-party vendor. But this conversation can also happen internally, in a single organization, between teams. I’m thinking about some organizations that I’ve worked for where I’ve seen one team build and manage a central platform solution, like a central CI/CD pipeline that every other team is going to be using and consuming from. But then, one team decides that the CI/CD platform that everybody’s using doesn’t really do all the things that they want it to do, so they decide to go off and build their own CI/CD platform internally for their team instead, rather than working with the team that is actually owning this sort of centralized CI/CD platform to make sure that everybody is getting the benefits of these additional features, these additional solutions, these additional bug fixes that the team was asking for.Amy: It’s really hard when you can’t see the forest for all the silos.Jesse: Yes. Absolutely. It is so, so critical to think about building these feedback loops into your internal tools. Because if your customers are internal to your organization, they’re going to want to provide that feedback in some capacity to help you understand when the service that you’re building is fantastic and when the service that you’re building is awful. And it’s so, so critical to make sure that you have those easy feedback loops so that you can continue to iterate on the things that you choose to build internally and hone them and make them better.If you’ve got questions that you’d like us to answer go to lastweekinaws.com/QA. 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 the criteria you think about when considering whether you should build or buy.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

AWS Morning Brief
A Very Special Episode

AWS Morning Brief

Play Episode Listen Later May 7, 2021 20:39


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: Today, on a very special episode of AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field, we say our goodbyes to Pete Cheslock.Amy: Oh, no. Did the ops bus finally get him?Jesse: No. Wait, what? What? No. No, he’s not—Amy: You know, the ops bus, the one that takes out all of the ops people, which is why you need data recovery plans.Jesse: [laugh]. I mean, I have plans for other reasons, but no. No, Pete, Pete’s not dead. He’s just—I mean, he’s dead to me, but he’s just not going to be here anymore.Amy: Only on the inside.Jesse: Welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I’m Jesse DeRose.Amy: I’m Amy Arumbulo Negrette.Pete: I am Pete Cheslock. I’m here for one last, beautiful, glorious time.Jesse: I feel like this is going to be like Breakfast Club but in the data center server room.Pete: Yeah. A little bit. I think so. We will all sit cross-legged on the floor in a circle, share our thoughts and feelings. And maybe some sushi. There were sushi in that movie. And that was, like, really advanced back then in the ’80s.Jesse: Yeah, I like that. So Pete, you want to give us a little bit of background about why you will be moving on from this podcast?Pete: Moving on to a whole new world. Yes. Sadly, I am not dead. The ops bus did not get me, and I was not eaten by my smoker, my meat smoker.Jesse: [laugh]. Although at this point, it’s probably overdue.Pete: You know, the odds of all three of those are pretty high out, to be really perfectly honest, given this pandemic and everything else going on in this world.Amy: Isn’t that how it works? You eventually become the smoked meat.Pete: Yeah, yeah.Jesse: [laugh].Pete: All the time. You know, you are what you eat. And if you eat junk and whatnot—so I eat smoked meats, eventually, I’m just going to become, you know, smoked meats, I guess. But no, I am moving on from The Duckbill Group. Just bittersweet is the best word I can come up with. Very sad, but also very excited.I’m moving on to a new role at a new company that was just kind of an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. And I’m really excited for something new, but really sad because I don’t get to work with two of my three favorite cloud economists, Jesse, and Amy. Yeah, Corey is one, too, and yes, it’s fun to work with him. But it’s also fun to rag on him a little bit as well.Jesse: I’m pretty sure you still have the opportunity to rag on him no matter where you go.Pete: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, we’re Twitter connected. So, I can just slide into his DMs as needed. Yeah.Amy: And really, what else is Twitter for—Pete: Exactly.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: —than roasting former coworkers and bosses?Pete: Yeah, I expect a constant stream of Twitter DMs every time you find something, some little fun nugget that I’ve left behind.Jesse: I feel like that’s appropriate. So today, Pete, I have two questions for you now that you will be moving on from Duckbill Group, moving on from this podcast, I want to know, looking back at your time here working with Duckbill Group, what did you learn? What are the things that surprised you, that you didn’t expect? And what would you say to somebody who wanted to start working in this space, maybe start a career in cloud economics on their own?Pete: Yeah, so this kind of feels like an exit interview a little bit.Jesse: [laugh]. And a very public exit interview at that. So, make sure that we bleep all the swear words.Pete: I think it’s in Duckbill fashion to do a public—a very public-facing exit interview, right? That is Duckbill in a nutshell.Jesse: I think the only thing more public is if Corey asks you to hold the exit interview on Twitter.Amy: Exactly.Pete: [laugh]. I mean, we might have to do that, now. I like that idea. Yeah, so I think those are great questions, and I love the opportunity to talk about it. Because Duckbill is a fantastic company, and coming into Duckbill last year was totally by luck.Not really—no, not—luck is maybe not the right word. But I had been doing some consulting on my own, and the pandemic and some other forces caused a bunch of my consulting work to dry up really quickly. And I was sitting at home and I’m like, “Wow, I should get a real job.” And I saw a tweet from Mike on Twitter that was like, “Oh, we’re growing The Duckbill Group.” And Mike and Corey and I have known each other for such a long time.We’ve always said it’d be great to work together at some point in the future, but it’s so hard [laugh] to do. You know, to kind of work with your friends, and timing, and circumstance, and schedule, and everything else. And so when I saw that, I was like, wow, like that might be a lot of fun working with that crew. And I’ve got a lot of experience in AWS and I’ve—my title at one of my previous companies was Captain COGS—for Cost Of Goods Sold—because I was so diligent with the Amazon bill. So, it’s kind of one of those things where I felt like I could be useful and helpful to the organization, and talking with Mike and Corey, it just made a ton of sense.And so, it was a lot of fun to come on board. So, but then once you’re kind of in, and you start doing this type of work—and you know, Amy and Jesse, you’ve both experienced this—I think no matter how much knowledge you have of Amazon, very, very quickly, you realize that you actually don’t know as much as you really think you did, right?Jesse: Yeah.Pete: Because it’s so—there’s just so much.Amy: And it changes once every five minutes.Pete: [laugh].Jesse: Oh, yeah.Amy: Literally if you—well, just keep an eye on that changelog, you can watch your day get ruined as time goes on.Jesse: [laugh].Pete: [laugh]. It’s—yeah, it’s a real-time day ruining. And that’s the new. It’s like Amazon Kinesis: It’s all real-time.Jesse: [laugh].Pete: Yeah, it’s so true. And I think the reason behind it is, you know, one of the first things I kind of realized is that when you are working inside of a business and you’re trying to understand, like, an Amazon service, you don’t necessarily go that deep because you’ve got a real job and other stuff to do. And when you’re finally, like—let’s say you’re in Cost Explorer; this is actually my favorite one because learning this took us a while. The documents aren’t very good. But in Cost Explorer, there’s a dropdown box that can show you your charges in different ways: unblended view, blended view, amortized view—if I’m saying that word really incorrectly—net-amortized view, net-unblended view. Like, what do all these mean?Most people just are like, unblended, move on with their lives. But at some point, you kind of need to know and answer that question, and then understand the impact, and all those things, and spending more hours than I care to count trying to correlate the bill and Cost Explorer to look the same. Something that simple, why is that so hard? You know, it’s things like that.Amy: Why is that so hard? I do not understand it. It is exhausting. [laugh].Jesse: It drives me absolutely crazy, and it’s something that in previous roles, you could just say, “Well, this isn’t my responsibility, so I’m not going to worry about it.” But now we’ve got clients who are asking us these questions because it is our responsibility and we do need to worry about it.Pete: Yeah, exactly. So, I think that’s just, kind of, one example. Now, there was a ton that I learned. I mean, just in how discounts might be applied when you look at charges in an account whether if you have an enterprise discount program, or private pricing in some way. I think one of my favorite ones—and this is actually something that catches a lot of people up—is especially in Cost Explorer, there’s kind of two ways that you can view a charge.So, let’s say you’re looking at S3, and you are trying to find your usage by the usage type. Like, I want to compare standard storage to maybe data transfer or something like that. And you go and group by usage type, and they’ll show you, “Hey, for your S3 for this month or day or whatever, you’ll have some spend associated storage and data transfer,” and you’re like, “That’s neat.” And then you say to yourself, “Now, I want to look at it by API.” And maybe you’ll see, wow, there’s a ton of spend associated with GETs or PUTs.And you’ll think that that is actually a request charge. And it’s totally not. It’s like, when you group by API, it’s the API that started the charge, not the charge itself. So, you could have a PUT that started the charge, but the charge itself is actually storage. It’s the little things like that, where you might glance at it in your account and go, “Oh, okay.” But then when you actually need to get down to the per penny on spend and share it with a client, you go even further down the rabbit hole.Jesse: Because why would all of the billing information across different sources be accurate?Amy: And also, why would things be named the same between the bill, and Cost Explorer, and the curve? Having those names be the same, that would just make it too easy, and just streamline the process too much, and be too logical. No, let’s work for it. We have to work for it. It’s a pillar of excellence; we have to work for it.Pete: [laugh]. Exactly. So yeah, I think it’s those types of things that you just start seeing the edge cases. But because of, kind of, the work we do, we keep going. We’re not just, “Oh, wow. Haha, silly Amazon.”But then we keep diving in deeper and deeper to figure out the why. And the reason for that really just comes down to the fact that we’ll need to communicate that in some effective way to the client to get them to understand it. And actually, that kind of leads me to the other thing that I think is probably the most important skill of being a cloud economist, of being in finops, is your ability to write long-form writing, being able to write clear, concise information explaining why the spend is what it is, explaining all of these edge cases, all these interesting parts of cloud cost management, and being able to write that down in such a way that anyone could read it; like a CFO could understand how the charges are happening, just like a head of engineering, who has maybe more impact to the spend.Jesse: Being able to communicate, the differences between different AWS services, between different billing modes, to different audiences is so critical to the work that we do because we’re ultimately going to be working with different people with different backgrounds at every single client that we work with. So, we need to be able to speak the language of different audiences.Amy: And it’s really different, how different C Suites, different departments, their goals are going to be different, too, because they have requirements that they have to fulfill. Finance is very concerned about the literal cost of things, while engineering is—they understand that their architecture comes at a price, and so long as they have the budget for it, they’re cool with it. And you just have to align what those goals are, and have that translate as like, into the document as, “They built it this way for this reason, which was fine at that stage. But as you grow, you need to make sure that it also fulfills these other external expectations.”Corey: Let’s be honest—the past year has been a nightmare for cloud financial management. The pandemic forced us to move workloads to the cloud sooner than anticipated, and we all know what that means—surprises on the cloud bill and headaches for anyone trying to figure out what caused them. The CloudLIVE 2021 virtual conference is your chance to connect with FinOps and cloud financial management practitioners and get a behind-the-scenes look into proven strategies that have helped organizations like yours adapt to the realities of the past year. Hosted by CloudHealth by VMware on May 20th, the CloudLIVE 2021 conference will be 100% virtual and 100% free to attend, so you have no excuses for missing out on this opportunity to connect with the cloud management community. Visit cloudlive.com/corey to learn more and save your virtual seat today. That’s cloud-l-i-v-e.com/corey to register.Pete: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, it’s just—and can you imagine, you have some knowledge you want to share around something as complex as the Amazon bill. I mean we ask for a PDF of your bill when you start working with Duckbill Group. That could be hundreds of pages long, and you’re trying to distill that down into something that, really, anyone can understand. It’s a true superpower to be able to write long-form content like that really well.And I never used to like writing. I was never—never really enjoyed it that much and over the last year, that muscle that you’re working out, now, the ability to write many, many pages around this type of content, just it comes so much more easily. So, I think that’s another big aspect, right? The more you work on it, obviously the easier it gets.Jesse: I don’t know about you, but now that I have focused more on flexing that writing and communication muscle, I’ve noticed it more in both everyone that I work with day-to-day with Duckbill Group and also in my daily life, just watching how people communicate with each other, and how effectively people communicate with each other; it’s both amazing and nerve-wracking all at the same time.Pete: [laugh]. I know. And even—not to say that whenever we sit down to write our reports that we give to our clients, we don’t go through the wave of emotions between the back and forth of, like, “I don’t know what to write,” and then, “Oh, I know of a lot of stuff to write. Let me just get something down.” And then you can’t stop writing. It’s just—it’s this emotional roller coaster that I feel like no matter how many times we need to write a lot of detailed information down, everyone always goes through.Amy: And we really do have a highly collaborative process here, too, where we’re all in the same document, writing, and the person who owns any given report will always have the same stage at the end when all of the sections are filled out, where they go to one of the other people on the team and go, “Every word I put down is absolute garbage. Please help me trim it down, take it out. I don’t even care anymore. Just look at it and tell me that I wrote down words that are in some kind of human language.” [laugh].Jesse: [laugh].Pete: [laugh]. Oh, the plight of the writer. It’s, like, the imposter syndrome that affects the writer. It’s like, “Okay. I wrote a bunch of stuff. I think it’s terrible.” And then you sleep on it, you come back the next day, and you’re like, “Actually, this is pretty good.” [laugh].Amy: I explained concepts. It was fine. I didn’t use a single comma for three pages, but it’s probably fine. [laugh].Jesse: [laugh].Pete: You can take one of mine. Usually, all of my draft documents are commas and M-dashes, just all over the place. Yeah, so I think that’s honestly a big superpower. And I think the last two things that—this is actually something that I’ve looked for in people that I’ve wanted to work with, and people I was hiring, and I see it here as well as these, kind of, two concepts of intellectual curiosity and aptitude to learn, where if you have a base knowledge around Amazon and you have those other attributes—that curiosity and truly enjoying learning—you can accelerate your ability to understand this so incredibly quickly because there’s such a wealth of information out there, and there’s so many documents, there’s so much stuff. It just requires someone who really cares enough to dive in and really want to understand.That’s something that I think we’ve seen here is that the folks who are most successful are just—they want to know why, and they’re not satisfied until they can explain it in a simple way to someone else. That’s the key, right? The attribute of a true expert is someone who can explain something very difficult in a simple way. And I think that’s something that would be critical if you were joining Duckbill, if you were building your own finops or cloud finance team, it is so complex. It’s the intersection of technical architecture and cost, and it touches almost the entire business. So, I think those are some other attributes that I think are just incredibly helpful.Jesse: We’re also usually not entirely satisfied until we’ve either opened a support case with AWS, responded to one of their feedback icons in the AWS documentation—the public AWS documentation—or trolled somebody on Twitter saying, “Shame on you, AWS, for writing documentation that doesn’t make sense.”Amy: It’ll be fine. Someone in your mentions will go, “Did you check the region?” And you would have, and then it’ll still be wrong.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: And it’ll be fine. [laugh]. Eventually, we’ll fix it.Pete: That one—Jesse: Too soon.Pete: —that one still hurts, when we—oh, I’m just like, “Why do the numbers not line up?” And then someone was like—Amy: It's a thing I check for, even if it’s like, “It’s a global resource.” I don’t care. Just tell me. Just tell me it’s fine. [laugh].Pete: “Are you in the right region?” Like—“Dammit, no, I’m not. Oh.” [laugh]. Yeah, that happens to the best of us.Amy: I did, unfortunately, burn so many hours, I think it was last week trying to find out where someone had put their resources. It’s like, “Oh, not us-west-2. It’s us-west-1. Of course.” [laugh].Jesse: So, annoying. Well, I would just like to say, Pete, it has been a joy and a pleasure working with you, it has been a joy and a pleasure complaining about AWS with you, on this podcast, so thank you for your time. That sounded really… really, really standoffish. I didn’t mean it quite as bad as it came off there. [laugh].Pete: Well, you know, I think we need to thank Corey for having a child and thus needing to offload some of his podcast duties over to us, and then the fact that we just never gave him the podcast back, and we just took it over.Jesse: Well, if you’ve got questions that you’d like us to answer, you can go to lastweekinaws.com/QA. And 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 what qualities you’re looking for when building out your cloud finance team.Pete: Thanks for coming in.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

amazon finance shame field cloud cfo dms puts api breakfast club aws qa devops vmware s3 finops c suites launchdarkly amy it duckbill group amy you cloudhealth amy oh pete you jesse yeah last week in aws jesse well jesse it pete cheslock pete yeah humblepod
The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast

Amy Balliett is Founder and CEO at Killer Visual Strategies, an agency that specializes in visual communications design – creating such “products” as info and motion graphics, data visualizations, virtual reality, and interactive content. An Inc. 5000 company for four years in a row, Killer, now part of Material, has won over 30 excellence in visual communication awards. Clients include such Fortune 1000 companies as Amazon, Boeing, the Discovery Channel, Edwards Lifesciences Corporation, and Microsoft. In this interview, Amy talks about the “spammy” beginnings of infographics, when people slapped up on their websites images that had nothing to do with their brand.  She says, a high-quality infographic visually communicates significant meaning so efficiently and effectively that little text is required. Amy notes that around 10,000 infographics are released daily . . . and 99% fail. The 1% that succeed don't use much text, use custom (as opposed to stock) illustrations, provide proper data visualization, and clearly show attention to detail and time put into the design. The agency's services keep evolving to meet changing client needs. The biggest challenge is “to find that one illustration style that won't go out of style.”  HubSpot reports that “91% of audiences prefer visual content as their primary, secondary, and tertiary form of information delivery.” A visual strategy would consider the first, second, and third pieces of content a prospective client might see going into a funnel. Amy says, “Content is king . . . visual content reigns supreme, and visual strategy is content strategy, just leveled up.” Amy recommends a 90-second “motion graphic” as the most important piece of visual strategy content a company might invest in now. That 90 seconds can be broken down into “dozens of visually designed scenes” that can be used on social media, stacked to create an infographic, or paginated to create an eBook. She notes that visual content has to be matched both to channels and to audiences.  Killer evolved over the years . . . through a pivot that exploded . . . first in a good way . . . and then not. Exhausted from the frenetic pace, the agency had never stopped to consider such core questions as: “What's the type of client that we want? What's the type of work we really want to do? What's the type of person we want to be bringing on to our team? What are the values of this company that are going to drive these decisions?” Amy hired a business coach for herself and the team (probably the best decision she ever made) and an HR consultant to help establish policies. A new focus on building a values-driven culture and hiring and firing employees and clients based on these values changed “who we were, our level of productivity, and the clients we attracted . . . our revenue went up 50% in one year.” The agency's values are simple: Keep Learning, Inspire Others, Lead by Example, Love What We Do, Embrace Change, and Respect Others. Amy can be found on LinkedIn at: Amy Balliett on Twitter @amyballiett. Her book, Killer Visual Strategies, available on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Killer-Visual-Strategies-Amy-Balliett/dp/1119680220), was recently awarded “one of the best marketing and sales books of 2020.” Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Amy Balliett, Founder and CEO at Killer Visual Strategies based in Seattle, Washington. Welcome to the podcast, Amy. AMY: Thank you so much for having me. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. You have one of those excellent names for your firm that I think probably tells us what you do, but why don't you tell us about Killer Visual Strategies and what the firm's superpower really is?  AMY: Definitely. To tell you that, the best way to say it is our original name. Our original name was Killer Infographics, so even more focused on what we were doing. At the time, we really focused on developing high-quality infographics for marketing needs and things like that. Over the years, our services kept evolving based on the needs of our clients. But ultimately, everything still lives on the foundation of what we view as our superpower, which is visual communication design. A high-quality infographic is something that you don't have to read; instead, you can look at it and cull important information from it without diving into paragraphs of text. So everything we do centers on that. It's about graphically representing information to efficiently and effectively create meaning and using as little text as possible. That's really what our superpower is. ROB: That's interesting. As little text as possible. What do you recall in your own mind as the emergence of infographics? When did they start catching your eye? When did it become so obsessive for you that it seemed like the business? AMY: It's so interesting, because infographics have a very rich history. The very first known infographic was the 1600s, although you could say cave paintings on walls were the first infographics. They've been around forever, but around 2008 they started to be used more regularly for SEO needs, for link-building and other forms of content marketing. I started to slowly get into them because I was heading up SEO at a company here in Seattle and really wanted to use them for the link-building value. But the company I was at never really wanted to use them. So, when I left to start my own company – which was actually a completely different business model than what Killer is today, and which had a bunch of different websites that I was marketing – I started creating infographics to do link-building for all of those websites. That was June of 2010. At that point, infographics were this big trending thing, and everybody was questioning how long that trend would last. Everybody really thought this was something that was going to be a one-and-done trend, and by 2011 we were going to move to something else for content and content marketing. So I got on it at a time that I thought was the very end of a trend. [laughs] And it turns out it was the very, very beginning. ROB: How has the use of infographics evolved? There was a point in time where it felt like a well-designed and executed infographic targeted at the right audience really extensively lived as a life of its own, but the fad didn't end as a fad; it just integrated into the visual language of the internet. AMY: That's exactly right. The thing is, at first infographics were so spammy. People would put out content that had nothing to do with their brand, nothing to do with their website. They just really wanted to put out something controversial that was driven by visuals because today's audiences crave visual content. They were really trying to use infographics to hook somebody and get backlinks primarily. After that spammy part of the fad started to die down – which happened because Google kept changing their algorithm, and when Google did their Penguin and Panda updates back in 2010 and 2011, all of a sudden the big content farms that were really being fueled by infographics started disappearing from Google. As a result, infographics stopped being as spammy. The market stopped being flooded with these really spammy designs, and instead large brands started to take notice and said, “Oh wow, this is an amazing way to connect with my audience and really get them to understand our brand, our service, our products without having to give them a big long whitepaper.” The trend was moving away from whitepapers and moving more and more towards media as a form of entertainment and education in all forms. ROB: That's a really fascinating evolution there. If we look at today, is there still that link-building aspect to it? Or is it more broadly about brand at this point, and about speaking to an audience coherently with your brand attached to it? AMY: It's about speaking to your audience coherently with your brand attached to it. Links definitely come with infographics – not like they used to. In 2010, I put out some awful infographics because I was still learning, and they'd get thousands of backlinks. Anybody would celebrate anything with the word “infographic” attached to it, whereas today, we have far more discerning eyes. If you jump back to 2010 versus today in 2021, the fact is, media within the internet has evolved so much. There's so much more of a wow factor in everything we see. That also has led to a heightened expectation for what a good infographic is. There's still about 10,000 released a day, but 99% of them fail. The 1% of them that truly succeed are the ones that don't use a lot of text, the ones that use entirely custom illustration, proper data visualization, and the ones that clearly show attention to detail and time put into the design. But if they're slapped together, they're using stock imagery, or if there are paragraphs of text next to a small illustration, things like that, they're going to fail. People are still jumping on the bandwagon because they think they're going to get a bunch of backlinks, but if they don't actually execute them properly, they're not going to get backlinks, and they might even hurt their brand on top of it. ROB: It's good to know the danger there. In the evolution of your firm, you can see this evolution where the infographic is part of a broader visual strategy, probably with a much more expanded vocabulary. What are the elements you see now as the language of visual strategy as you think about it? AMY: It's so interesting. There's this really great stat from HubSpot that 91% of audiences prefer visual content as their primary, secondary, and tertiary form of information delivery. When we think about visual strategy today, we think about the top of the funnel and we say to ourselves, what's the first, second, and third piece of content somebody's going to see as they're going into that funnel? Then we start to identify what channels those people are living on to deliver that content, and the channels and the audience define what type of content we choose to put out into the ether for the visual strategy of the brand. Sometimes it might be short form social media images with at most 6 words on them. Sometimes it'll be a visually rich eBook where each page has at most 200 words. Other times it's a motion graphic. I always say to anybody who's thinking about getting into visual strategy for their own brands, the most important piece of content that you can invest in right now is a motion graphic. That's going to give you so much to work with. It's usually about 90 seconds. It should never be over 90 seconds. It's usually about 90 seconds of content that breaks down into dozens of visually designed scenes that you can pull out and use on social media. You can stack the scenes up and create an infographic. You can paginate the scenes and create an eBook. You have so much more than just a motion graphic if you invest in one. You have dozens of other pieces of content you can produce out of it. It's really about identifying the right content for the right channel for the right audience. I know that's kind of the answer to all contact marketing, really, but with visual content there's definitely different types of visual content that work on different channels. You really have to understand that landscape and choose what's going to connect with that audience the best. ROB: Sure, and there's a distinction in there. Much like the graduation from infographics to visual strategies, when you're referring to a motion graphic, what I'm picturing is that explainer video, is what some people would call it. Some people would come to you saying they want an explainer video, but I think what you're saying is that's not really what they want. If they just got an explainer video that didn't consider this trend that comes and goes online but is always true, this atomization of content where you can take something and pull it apart into individual pieces that are bite-size and put them lots of places – just asking for an explainer video doesn't get you there. AMY: Exactly. Today's marketers are using 12 to 14 types of visual content just to accomplish singular goals. It can never be one-and-done. You always have to consider all of the different ways you can use that content. You can create derivatives to develop even more campaigns and strategies around it. It is really content marketing. The concept that content is king, which comes from a Bill Gates article in 1999, is still true. Content is king. But visual content reigns supreme, and that's really what we have to focus on when we think about visual strategy. It's content strategy, just leveled up. ROB: Right. One thing I think about in this category that maybe isn't thought of this way when it comes out is Mary Meeker annually puts out this internet trends deck at the turn of the year. Have you run into that before? AMY: Yes, definitely. ROB: It's hundreds of pages, hundreds of slides in a PowerPoint deck. If you said, “Do you want a 200-slide deck from a venture capitalist?”, I don't know if you do. But then you look at the pieces of it, and each slide – you know better than I do – seems like it has pretty good value. It seems like it tells a story as a whole, and it seems like it builds a brand for her in whichever firm she's with. AMY: Exactly. That's so spot-on. That's the entire point. If that were 200 pages of paragraphs of content, do you think it would be given the same level of attention it gets today? Not even at all. Not close. ROB: Nobody anticipates that one. AMY: Exactly. ROB: Amy, you alluded a little bit to the journey, your own journey in starting the firm. It looks from your LinkedIn like, as you mentioned, you were working in SEO. You had a job. You had someone else who was responsible for your paycheck. What led you to turn that corner and go into this process of being responsible to kill what you wanted to eat and then to eventually be responsible for an ever-growing – or maybe not ever-growing, but in many cases a payroll of people who depend on you, and it's a lot of responsibility? What caused that transition? AMY: It's so odd because it's hard for me to pinpoint an exact time. I owned my first company when I was 17. I actually owned an ice cream parlor and candy store in a summer vacation resort. It was open only during the summer, so it didn't compete with school. That was my first foray into entrepreneurship – and I hated it, I'm going to be honest with you. I loved it and I hated it. I was working 80+ hours a week during my summer breaks my junior and senior year of high school. That gave me a sour taste in my mouth. But then about – jeez, I don't know how long later; maybe it was about 6 years later – I came up with an idea for a social network. This was before Facebook had opened up to non-.edu email addresses. I didn't even know that Facebook existed yet. I came up with this idea for a social network, but all I had was the idea. I could not execute on the idea because I had zero coding skills. At the time, I was a video editor; my degree is in film, so I was doing video editing and motion picture marketing and really couldn't bring much to the table for this idea. I had my cousin join in on the idea, and he could bring everything to the table. He's a full stack developer and the best designer I've ever met. So here's this guy taking on the weight of the world, basically trying to make my idea come to fruition, and all I can do is try to market the idea, try to build a user base. It failed really quickly because you can't just come to the table with an idea. You have to be able to execute on that idea. We got to a point after 6 months where it became clear that this was just way too much to put on one person. During that 6 months, I started to learn SEO and online marketing, so I decided to pivot my career into SEO and online marketing. In that part of my career, I learned web development as well. It really just came down to I had started to stack up a series of skills – nothing that I was fantastic at; everything I was good enough at. If you're trying to be too many things at once, it's like trying to learn 10 instruments at once. You're never going to master one instrument. But I was good enough at enough skills. I was good enough at graphic design, good enough at animation, good enough at development that I was finally in a place where I felt like I could do all of this on my own. I had tested a few proofs of concept within the last company I worked at, really seeing if I could create new revenue streams for that company. Once I did, I realized, crud, I'm bringing in millions in revenue streams to this company; why can't I do this for myself? You get to a point where you have the confidence in your career to take that chance, but I also got to the point where I had enough in savings to take that chance. I'm not going to lie, that was incredibly important to me. I think I would not have taken the risk at all if it weren't for having a nice safety net of cash just in case everything failed.  ROB: Amy, a lot of people have that interesting stack of skills, but they may not recognize it. They may not know how to apply it. To your metaphor, they may still be trying to be the best at a particular instrument when it's really the intersection of several skills that is where they can be truly unique in their world. How did you come to understand that concept of the stack of skills and see it in yourself?  AMY: It was really just every idea I came up with, I started to realize, “Crud, I need a designer for this, and I need somebody to develop this.” I just started thinking about all the things I needed for somebody to execute on the work. I'm a control freak. I really am. So I started to say, “I need to learn these things myself because I can't really give away trust too easily and put that work on somebody else's plate.” For me, that's really what made me realize I needed that stack of skills: wanting to execute on so many ideas, but not having the capacity to do it myself. I'm really glad that over the years, I learned to release the reins, because every single employee I've hired is 20 times better than me at any one of those skills. And that's really important. You always have to hire somebody who's much better than you. But the fact that I've been able to play every single role in my company and that I have played every role, that I've sat in their shoes – it's so much easier to manage everybody because I know what they're going through. I know how long it would take me to do a task, so I can judge how long it would take somebody on my team to do that same task. I know what expectations to put in front of them, and I also know when to pull back and let them take the lead and run the show. ROB: Right on. I've certainly experienced, at least in my perception – and you never know whether you're wrong in your perception at the top; it's always worth questioning. But when I'm hiring people within my stack of skills, I feel like I can get to a decision faster, and I feel like I almost get to be the Pied Piper a little bit. There's a sense of trust and safety that they may feel where they felt wary. I tend to hire software developers for a lot of what we do, and there's almost an unspoken bond that moves quickly when you can send the right signals, I think.  AMY: That's so, so true. That's exactly how it's always felt. I remember when we brought on our first developer to the team and I sat down with him and I was talking about a couple of lines of jQuery. He looked at me and said, “Wait, I haven't had a boss who knows jQuery before.” It was just this weird “aha” moment. ROB: It's such a good discussion, the skill stacking thing. I think I have often heard of it spoken of on – there's a podcaster, James Altucher, and I think he talks about it a good bit. But I don't know – have you had any good sources for these concepts? Because I think it's underexplored, and maybe there's a book or something that I'm less familiar with. AMY: I haven't necessarily dove into any books related to this specific concept, no. It really has more come through networking with the right people, getting to know more people who have faced the same types of challenges, but also, again, surrounding myself with such a curious team, a team that will never rest on their laurels. One of our values at Killer is “keep learning,” and it's probably the most embraced value in the company because everybody's just trying to stay on top of trends and stay ahead of trends. I think that's also a part of it. There's a bit of a competitive attitude where all of us want to be in the know of what that next big thing is. ROB: It's such an interesting through line. You mentioned that Google's obviously changed algorithms, and it feels like they're a lot closer to trying to provide the result you actually wanted. But there was an era of SEO that was very competitive; it was very much about tactics and how ethical those tactics were. Kind of secret knowledge. But some of that transitions well, probably, into process around visual strategy. There is always something to learn. There is always a new cutting-edge frontline of what's working and what's not. You have to keep learning, just like you did in SEO. AMY: Exactly. It's so true. What's interesting is with SEO, you're trying to game Google's algorithm, for lack of a better phrase. It is really what you try to do in a lot of ways, whereas with visual strategy, you're trying to consider so many disparate audiences. What's going to trend for one audience isn't going to trend for another audience. There's not one universal algorithm to break. Instead, it's really identifying all of the different aesthetic directions that could impact Audience A over Audience B over Audience C and so on. ROB: It's an infinite game, too. You can't just go for the moment. You could position the whole thing as being there to hack the human brain, but in the context of a brand, you also have to consider how people feel afterwards and in the long run. It's not a short game. It's not “look at this graphic,” right? AMY: Exactly. And you also have to consider the timeline of that campaign, because sometimes we'll have a client where they want a visual language and aesthetic look and feel to uplevel their brand, but something that's going to last for decades to come. That's a whole other feat to accomplish, trying to find that one illustration style that won't go out of style. That's been an interesting experience. ROB: Absolutely. Amy, as you reflect on building Killer Visual Strategies, what are some things that you've learned along the way that you might do a little bit differently if you were starting from scratch? AMY: The biggest thing I've learned is about being proactive versus reactive. Killer was a pivot from a completely different business model, and because it was a pivot, we didn't spend a lot of time thinking proactively about what we wanted the business to be. Instead, we just lived in a reactive state for about 3 years. We basically went from our very first quarter of work being 14 orders to the first month in our second quarter being 40 orders, and it just kept going up and up and up and up. The first 3 years or so, we were just so exhausted by reacting to the demand that we didn't take the time to say, “What's the type of client that we want? What's the type of work we really want to do? What's the type of person we want to be bringing on to our team? What are the values of this company that are going to drive these decisions?” All of those things that seem corny initially – when you're an entrepreneur and you want to start a company, the last thing you say is, “What are the values going to be of my company?” It's rarely something an entrepreneur does first. But had we done that first, I think we would have grown faster and even more intentionally than we did. Our first 5 years felt like a wild, wild west, and we had a culture inflection point at Year 5 where, honestly, almost everything exploded. And almost everything exploded because we were not a values-driven company. We had a great team; we knew we wanted to go out and get a beer with everybody, but we didn't all approach conflict in the same way. When you have a values-driven company, you have a set of guidelines with which to attack conflict together as a team, but we didn't have that. Nobody really knew what our values were, even though they spelled out the word “KILLER.” So we had to reset and focus on building a values-driven culture, hiring and firing by our values and hiring and firing clients by our values as well. That drastically changed who we were. It also drastically changed our level of productivity, the types of clients we attracted – I mean, our very first year of really paying attention to that, our revenue went up 50% in one year. So there's more than just the corny feelings that you get with coming up with your mission, vision, and values. When you actually truly embrace those and live those and lead by those, you'll see a team that is so much more inspired, so much more willing to take on the hardest challenges with you. You can really grow your company by leaps and bounds when you do that. That's the biggest lesson I've learned. ROB: Was it the explosion that pushed you to this realization of the need, or was there another catalyst in your life? AMY: It was the explosion, it really was. And that explosion was such a slow burn. That powder keg – we knew it was going to explode at some point, but we were still being so reactive that there wasn't time to pay attention to it. By the time it happened – we actually joke in the company and we call it “emailgate” because it all started from an email. [laughs] But we brought in the right people at that point. I hired a business coach to come in and coach myself, coach my leadership, and coach the team as a whole. I hired a really good HR consultant to come in and do the exact same thing, to really help us build the right policies in that arena. By bringing on the right experts, I was really, really lucky. I was also somebody who kept saying, “Why do I need a coach? I don't need a coach! This isn't a sports team!” [laughs] It turned out that having a business coach was probably the best investment I have ever made, and I know my team feels that way too, because they saw me change as a result of having somebody really help me look at problems differently and react to critiques from the team differently. When you're a business owner and you're at the very top, it is extremely lonely. And when you're in a creative firm where everybody is really emotionally driven – because to be creative, you have to bring emotion into your work. When you're that passionate – that's what I mean by emotionally driven – you're going to be passionate about what's working and what's not in the company, and you're going to be very vocal about that. I used to take that as such an affront to me. I would get offended by really positive critiques, people coming to me with good ideas, and maybe I would just look at it as them critiquing me instead of an opportunity to improve in the company. So having a coach really helped me look at that very differently and embrace the amazing feedback of my team. ROB: I think it's so helpful for you to share that, Amy. The perception people have is – in some cases it's true that a cheesy coach is cheesy and cheesy values are cheesy. Sometimes I feel like I can sound a little bit needy in the course of a conversation because I will tell people about my coach and my therapist and my entrepreneurial support group. But I think we just need to talk about it. For me, those things are all healthy, but maybe there's sort of the cult of the CEO, where we feel like we need to have all the answers. AMY: Yes, that's exactly it. You get imposter syndrome when you don't necessarily have the right answers. I also have an entrepreneurial support group, and that has been immensely helpful for me. Just talking to other business owners – they don't have to be in your same industry – and realizing, “Oh, hey, these problems exist across all businesses, not just a creative content agency, or not just a mom and pop shop down the street.” There's very similar problems that exist across any culture, across any work environment, and when you can get other business owners to tell you what they've gone through and game a solution together, it is so much better than just being in your own silo, trying to figure it out yourself. ROB: Such a healthy conversation, Amy. You've really shared the journey and shared the experience. When people want to connect with you and when they want to connect with Killer Visual Strategies, where should they look you up? AMY: You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn. Just Amy Balliett on LinkedIn. You can find me on Twitter @amyballiett, although I'm not nearly as active as I should be on Twitter. Then you can also check out my book, which is Killer Visual Strategies, on Amazon. It was just awarded one of the best marketing and sales books of 2020. ROB: Congratulations. I think we all needed a nice visual book along those lines in 2020 – something to think about aspirationally and not just looking into our own basements. AMY: Right? That's so true. Oh my gosh. Good old 2020. [laughs] ROB: Yeah. Hope is on the way. I'm tremendously hopeful for the year, and I think probably you're very similarly positioned with your positioning and with what people are about to need to do with you as a partner. AMY: Yeah, definitely. I'm very excited for what 2021 has in store for us. ROB: Excellent. Amy, I wish you the best. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I encourage everyone to look Amy up, look up her book, and I would imagine that Killer Visual Strategies probably has a solid couple of social feeds to pay attention to as well. AMY: Definitely. Thank you so much, Rob. I really appreciate it. ROB: Thank you, Amy. Be well. Bye. AMY: You too. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith
On Trusting Little Kids To Eat

Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 28, 2021 25:45


Welcome to Burnt Toast, a newsletter from Virginia Sole-Smith, which you can read about here. If you like what you read today, please subscribe and/or share it with someone else who would too.This week, I’m trying out my first audio newsletter! If that’s a confusing concept for you, I get it. Technology is so extra. Think of this as a podcast in your email. You can listen to the episode right here and now, or you can add it to the podcast player of your choice and listen whenever. And just in case you don’t like listening, or that’s not accessible to you, I’m including a full transcript (edited lightly for clarity) below. I’d love to know what you think of this conversation, and of the whole audio newsletter idea — should we do more? (Leave a comment or hit reply to let me know.) I really miss my old podcast (more on that below), and I’d love to bring you more of my conversations with favorite researchers, activists, weight-inclusive healthcare providers and other writers I love.For now, here’s my conversation with Amy Palanjian, the creator of Yummy Toddler Food. She answers your questions about picky 1-year-olds, ice cream-shaming 3-year-olds, raising intuitive eaters with food allergies, and more. Virginia Hello, and welcome to the first audio version of Burnt Toast! I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. I’m a feminist writer and author of The Eating Instinct. And joining me today is Amy Palanjian, the creator of Yummy Toddler Food. Amy, welcome! Amy Hello! Virginia Thank you for being here with me. For those of you who don’t know, Amy and I are also best friends. And we are co-hosts of the currently-on-hiatus podcast Comfort Food. But Amy is also many other things. So Amy, why don’t you tell people about yourself and your work? Amy Sure. So my primary work right now is on YummyToddlerFood.com. I do recipes, feeding advice, sanity — sanity for parents with little kids...Virginia I thought you were gonna say “sanity” full stop. And I was like, that’s amazing.Amy I wish! I am also the author of a kids cookbook called Busy Little Hands: Food Play. And what else? I have three little kids. I live outside of Des Moines, in Iowa. And I’m, you know, so tired of cooking like everybody else.Virginia And she’s not getting a dog because we were just talking about that and about how I have a dog that maybe I shouldn’t have. But she’s smarter than me. So I mean, we used to do this podcast Comfort Food, and we hope to someday do it again, when there’s not a pandemic, and we have more reliable childcare than we have in our lives these days. But if you guys like this conversation, and you want more of me and Amy, you can find, I don’t know, like 80 episodes or so, that we did over at ComfortFoodPodcast.com, or wherever you get your podcasts. So I’ll do that plug. And of course, all of Amy’s work is YummyToddlerFood.com. So the reason I wanted to have Amy on is because lots of folks have been sending in questions that are very small-child-specific. And while I have parented small children, I don’t consider myself an expert at feeding them. But Amy, not only parents them, but also, you know, has helped thousands and thousands of parents figure this stuff out. So the first question we’re going to answer is one that I think every parent has, at some point, which is: My baby used to eat everything. And now at 13 months, 15 months, 19 months, it seems like she’s dropping foods every week. Am I really supposed to just let her decide how much to eat?Amy Well, you don’t have to... but you maybe should. Okay, so this is an incredibly common question. I think the thing that most parents don’t realize is that 1-year-olds grow less slowly than they did as babies. And so they are naturally less hungry, even though they are more mobile and all over the place. And so your baby, as a baby might have eaten all sorts of things, because their hunger and just what else was going on in their life was very different. And now as a toddler, they may be less hungry, and more interested in all the other things that they now realize they can do. And so parents often see this as picky eating, when, if they’re just less hungry, they’re not going to eat as much or as many foods. And it can sort of snowball, if you then put yourself in the position of trying to figure out what they’ll eat. Because even if they’re not actually hungry, they may still eat some favorite snacky foods because those are easy to eat. And they’re comforting, they taste really good. But they may not eat other foods that you want them to eat. And so then you’re like narrowing the list of foods that they may eat. So what I recommend instead is just continuing with the Division Of Responsibility, which, if anyone follows Virginia, you probably know what this is. But it’s where it’s clearly delineated what your job is, at meals, your job is to decide what’s served, your job is to decide when the meal is and where it happens. And then we leave the kids to decide which foods and how much of them to eat, if at all. And by doing that, you really free yourself up from worrying about how many bites they took. Because as you know, as an adult, if anyone tells you how much to eat, or ask you to eat more or less, you’re going to have an immediate emotional reaction that is very disconnected from actual hunger. And so the less we can make that happen with this age, in particular, when all they really want is control, the better. And I think the saner everyone will feel during mealtimes. That may mean that your kids eat a lot less than you expect. But it also means that you’re not going to be fighting with them to get them to take a certain amount of bites at every meal.Virginia Which is exhausting and crazy-making. Amy And I think too, if you can consider what they’re eating over the course of a week or even two weeks, it’s probably going to look a lot better than what they didn’t eat for lunch today. Because they may eat a ton of breakfast and then not eat a lot of dinner. Or every other Tuesday, they may eat seven meals. There’s no one right way for kids to eat. And I think a lot of times, we’re trying to force them into this mode of eating certain amounts of food groups at every meal. And that’s just not the way that kids naturally eat.Virginia Yeah. And this phase can go on for many years, we should say, too. I mean, I have a 7-year-old, you have an 8-year-old, and we still see, you know, not this exactly. But versions of this from time to time. So don’t feel bad, if you’re listening and have an older kiddo still in this phase. Amy Well, and at least as they get older, they can verbalize more. And you can suss out what the true issue is. With 1-year-olds, it’s really hard because even if they can talk, they cannot always use the right words, or explain things exactly. And so it’s the combination of all of those challenges that make 1-year-olds tricky. And also, it can just be really jarring for parents to give their kid dinner, and then they just don’t want any of it. Virginia Yes. It is super maddening. For sure. Okay, that is really helpful. And for anyone who’s like Division Of Responsibility?! I will link to some stuff in the transcript. So those words that I just said, probably have a link on them if you’re reading this, and you can learn more. So okay, next question. And this, I think, is going to kind of build on what we were just talking about: How do you get kids to eat the stuff their body needs without them thinking all the "other stuff" is bad? One of mine won’t eat veggies unless I sing each body part saying thank you, like her eyes sing thank you when she eats a carrot.I don’t mean to be laughing at the mom who sent in this question. But I do feel like you’re making your meals harder than they need to be? Or perhaps just more musical. Yeah. Amy over to you!Amy So my initial response is: How do you know exactly how much their body needs? Does anyone know exactly how much anyone’s body needs? Virginia It’s not X number of carrots achieve eyesight. Amy Right. I think when we see portion size recommendations, and we see charts, and we see plates with servings on them, we assume that that is the perfect amount that our child needs. But it may or may not be. And so a lot of times we’re chasing these very arbitrary amounts that may or may or may not be what our kids actually need. So I think it’s very difficult in the culture that we live in, to not feel this pressure. Because we’re getting it from all sides. Like all day long, I feel like my inbox is filled with pitches for kids products that are like going to do all of you know, all of the things.Virginia Get them into Harvard and make a ton of money. Amy You know, I see products developed by neuroscientists. But food doesn’t really work that way. And so I think, honestly, if you just don’t worry about that, and you serve a range of foods, with a range of flavors, and a range of textures, and colors, you’re going to get all of that stuff in what you’re offering your kids without having to do math, without having to count grams, or percentages of vitamin A. And it’s much more pleasant to, to come at it from the side of, “food is delicious, in all of these many ways.” How can I prepare this in a way that that’s easy for my kids to eat? That has a flavor that they like, and that I want to eat, too? You don’t need a master’s degree in nutrition science. I think we’ve like lost the plot a little bit on what matters, sort of big picture when we’re feeding our kids. Because this anxiety is not helpful to anyone. It’s not helpful to that mom, I bet she’s not enjoying her meals, and it’s certainly not helpful for that kiddo. And those nutrition messages for little kids are incredibly confusing. And I just think are beyond comprehension for the age group.Virginia Agreed, agreed. That said, if the carrot song was really good, I kind of want to hear it? But yeah, I feel like, unless you’re, I don’t know, very musically inclined, this is maybe more work than you need to be doing. But I think what this question kind of also gets at, and that you’ve touched on a little bit, is that we have this idea of how our kids should eat, which is not based in the reality of how kids really eat or how most families can really manage to eat. And it really mostly comes from diet culture, right? It comes from, as you said, these people sending press releases for crazy products, or the influencers we see on social media claiming that this is the perfect way to eat. So can you connect the dots on some of the subtle ways you see diet culture showing up but family mealtimes?Amy Sure. A big part of it is the control. It’s the question of, can I really just let my child eat fill in the blank, and really trust them to eat according to their own hunger. It's the doubt. We just don’t believe that our kids are capable of this. We’ve been told that we’re not capable of it. And so why on earth would we trust tiny little kids to do something that we can’t do? And so that’s one thing. Another is the pressure to have, quote, unquote, balanced meals. I remember seeing a post that was like, “an apple is not a balanced snack,” and you have to add all these other things. And that’s great. But that doesn’t mean your kid’s going to want to eat all those other things…Virginia Or sometimes you just want an apple, right?Amy And that’s not a bad thing. Just because you don’t eat a protein at every meal or snack, does it mean that you’ve done something wrong? I think about all of those subtle messages about the way in which we’re serving foods, that some things are not right, or that some things are not good enough. I mean marketing, yes, is one thing. But I sort of think that the way that we talk to each other about food is even worse. It’s the way that someone in your family, their relationship with food, might influence you, in ways that are less overt than a message on a package about it not being junk food or something. It’s much harder. That’s sort of a depressing road to go down, because it’s harder to deal with. But I think the subtlety of those messages that we’re hearing, just in our day-to-day life, are really hard to block out. And they really make feeding kids confusing when it doesn’t have to be.Virginia Yes. I think, as parents, we often need to sit with: Am I really worried about my kids intake here? Or am I worried about how I’m being perceived as their parent because we tie so much of our self-worth as a parent to their eating performance in a way that’s problematic. And if it’s more that you’re like, “Grandma’s gonna make a comment” or “my friends’ kids all eat XYZ and my kids don’t.” I think that’s a good way of being able to tell that this is more of a cultural noise thing.Amy I mean, even just think about — well, this isn’t gonna apply to you, because I know you don’t care about this the way a lot of people do. But let’s say, you have a meal, like a dinner, and there’s no vegetable —Virginia It is Wednesday at my house. Continue.AmyFor many, many people, the immediate feeling is that you’ve somehow failed, you somehow didn’t do it right. And that meal is incomplete. But that’s not true. I think, if we’re trying to check off boxes of “I got my protein in today, I got all of these like macronutrients,” I just think we're going to make ourselves crazy. VirginiaEspecially with kids who, as you said, their intake varies over a day over a week, like this might not be a day when they’re eating vegetables, right? Amy I have sometimes have to almost force myself to just give them mac and cheese. And to just prove to myself that everyone is fine. Sometimes you just need to see it to believe that it’s fine. And then the next day, your kids might eat all the broccoli. You know, there’s other messaging around like feeding babies, where if they eat certain foods as babies, that will [supposedly] prevent picky eating, or if you feed them a certain way with solids, you’ll skip the picky eating phase all together. And it’s not true. And it’s incredibly damaging to parents who have more challenging kids, because it just sets you up to feel like you did something wrong.Virginia Yeah, totally. I think that’s so true. It’s really sad. Okay, this question is maybe a little bit diet culture and a little bit manners, and I just didn’t even really know what to say, so I’m making you answer it. Okay. She writes: Before COVID, I met my boyfriend’s cousins and their children for the first time. It was a birthday party celebration with lots of food. I had a piece of cake and was also offered a packaged ice cream sandwich, which I accepted. [Virginia: That sounds like a great combination.] The 3-year-old daughter of one of the cousins took it from me to put back in the freezer, because I already had a piece of cake and two desserts wasn’t healthy for me. I was pretty shocked but didn’t insist on eating the ice cream sandwich. I haven’t seen them since. But I expect we’ll get together late this summer when we’re all vaccinated. If a situation like this happens again, how would you suggest I handle it?Amy Maybe you invite them over and have a dessert bar, and everyone gets to eat as much as they want? Just, take it to the other extreme? I don’t know. I mean, I totally understand like, in the moment, that would be difficult to react to if you had no inkling that it was coming. Virginia Yeah, if a 3-year-old just stole your ice cream sandwich and also shamed you for it. Yeah.Amy I think, if it were to happen again, you can say something like, “These both sound really delicious to me, I’m going to eat them!” The End. Or “This is what I’m having for dessert!” The End.Virginia I like that you’re making it about your own choice versus like, needing to sort of chastise the child who, let’s be honest, is being pretty rude in that moment.Amy Mind your own business?Virginia Yeah. But you don’t want to make it into a parenting thing. You don’t have to parent that child around this issue.Amy Right. I think that that’s where you would probably get into a very murky territory. But if you can just claim it as, “This is mine. It is not yours, and you don’t need to worry about it.” I mean, then that goes with anything that’s on your plate, or your life, or whatever. Virginia So many of us are thinking about family gatherings that haven’t happened in a long time now. And I hear a lot of folks worried about, “my mother always makes this comment about what I eat,” or other relatives weighing in on things. So it’s helpful to just be able to set that boundary of what’s on my plate is my business. Amy Yeah, I always like to do a very short sentence, and then change the subject. So, “This is what I’m having. What color are your shoes?”Virginia That works for mothers and 3-year-olds. Amy Because 3-year-olds are really great at redirection. You can totally change the direction of their attention.Virginia It’s so true. Just ask a completely random other question.Amy “Where is your baseball bat?”Virginia “What are you being for Halloween?” Never mind that it’s summertime. Yes, absolutely. That’s really great. For parents — it’s hard to give advice for parents in that situation. But I mean, as a general rule, like, do you feel like it’s important to communicate to your kids that we don’t comment on other people’s eating habits? And is that something you are aware of teaching them? Or has it not really come up?Amy So we don’t really have comments at our table about the amounts that other people are eating. But we do have a lot of the “that looks yucky” type of comment. So we do regularly talk about how, you know, everyone gets to decide what they think is delicious. “This tastes really delicious to me.” And my 4-year-old will now use that language of “This tastes...” Usually “this tastes yucky to me,” which, at least she’s owning that as a specific thing. She’s not casting the blame more broadly. Because you want your kids to be able to go to school and not be judging other people’s food. So I think definitely working on that a little bit at the table in your own house when it comes up can be helpful. I mean, we’ve had like, only Christmas meals with extended families. We have not eaten anything with anyone else in a long time.Virginia Period. This is reminding me, I’m trying to teach my kids to say “This is not my favorite,” rather than “I hate it” and putting their heads down and sobbing as sometimes happens. And I realized the other day, my 3-year-old is mishearing me because she sat down and said, “This is my favorite! I’m not eating it.” And it’s about my pasta sauce. So it really hurts. Because my sauce is amazing. But yeah, “This is my favorite! I’m not eating it today.”Amy I do often have to remind the kids that not every meal will be their favorite and that it is okay for sometimes it to be mommy’s favorite, or other people’s favorite. And that doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with the meal or that it’s bad, but we can eat the fruit on the side or whatever. Virginia Yes. There will always be something you can eat, but it might not be your favorite tonight. Yeah, I’ve recently announced that Tuesday is the night when I cook whatever I want because I felt like, we were getting into a slippery slope of all the meals being just their favorites. Which — you should serve your children’s favorite foods. That’s not a bad thing. But you know, Monday night is pesto pasta, that’s their absolute favorite. And Mondays are tiring, and I don’t want any fights at dinner on Mondays. And Wednesdays is taco night, which is their other favorite. And so I was like, you know what, Tuesdays are going to be whatever I pick. And it’s going to change week to week and they don’t love it. But they’re coping.Amy If I’m making one of my favorites, I almost always serve flat bread on the side. Because then I know that they have nothing to complain about because they like bread. Yeah, and usually the things that I want to make myself have Indian sauces or things, and so a flatbread kind of makes sense. Virginia I keep a lot of packages of dinner rolls in the freezer for this purpose. Other than occasionally, they get sick of the favorite. That really screws you. But anyway, that’s a whole other thing. My kids are quick to fall out of love with their favorites and have new favorites. It’s hard to keep up. Okay, the last question is: How do I do Division Of Responsibility when my child has food allergies? This question has come in a bunch of different ways. I’m not going to read them all, because they’re all very specific. But I think what people are generally struggling with is, you’ve got this one big, scary food your kid can’t have. And somehow that feels like it’s blurring the lines of this responsibility question.Amy I mean, I guess there could be an issue, if like your kid was allergic to dairy, but you still kept dairy in the house? How do you not make them feel excluded? Is that the question?Virginia I don’t exactly know what the intent of it is. But I think it’s probably something like that, like, “Can we serve ice cream, with dinner or whatever, if one kid can’t eat it?”Amy I mean, I think you need to have a replacement for it, you need to somehow make the playing field fair. So you need to lean on other types of things that the kid can eat, like, make a list of all the delicious things that that everybody in the family can eat, put it on the fridge, where you can look at it. And then maybe like, when your kid is at school or at daycare, that’s when you can eat some of the other foods that they can’t eat. But I think make them feel like they are part of the family. And they’re a part of your food experience as much as possible, rather than making it their issue. And I think a lot of families are really good at this. I mean, there are so many products now that make this so much easier than even just a few years ago. So I think you just do Division Of Responsibility in the same way. But you have to just rethink what the foods are a little bit. Virginia That makes sense. Often the tone coming across in these emails, and certainly this is something I remember dealing with when my older daughter had more medical food issues, is: Often there’s a lot of anxiety about growth with a kid who’s got a lot of allergies and whether they’re eating enough, And so maybe this is also about, “Can I trust their fullness?” And I feel like, for the most part, the answer is absolutely yes. You can still trust your child to know their hunger and fullness even if they can’t eat certain foods. Right?Amy Yes. If there is a medically indicated reason that the kid can’t feel their hunger or their appetite levels are skewed because of medication or some other issue, you want to talk to your doctor and find a feeding therapist who is trained in those specific things. Because navigating that alone is going to be incredibly challenging. But otherwise, there’s no reason that you shouldn’t be able to trust your child with whatever the food is, whether or not it has nuts or doesn’t have nuts. And you know, I think on the growth issue, this is a whole other topic. But if your child is growing, even if it’s not like leaps and bounds, if they are growing, if they’re meeting their milestones, if they seem happy, if they seem like themselves, you probably should just leave them alone. If they’re dropping off of their growth curve, and your doctor is really concerned, that’s a different issue. But just because you’re at the lower end of the growth scale, or the higher end, doesn’t mean that there’s a problem.Virginia Yes, absolutely. And I’ll put some links to folks that Amy and I both really trust if anyone is looking for feeding therapy help along those lines. [Check out: Helping Your Child With Extreme Picky Eating, Thrive By Spectrum Pediatrics, and Responsive Feeding Therapy.]But yeah, I think the fundamental message of even if this is a kid who’s got certain foods they can’t eat, and maybe that means you’re worried about their overall nutritional makeup (because you’re having to skip out on certain food groups) — still, working on how to trust their hunger and fullness cues is going to be super, super important. You know, maybe even more important for a kid who’s got to navigate food in a slightly more fraught way. Amy Yes. And if anyone’s looking for like specific substitutions that you can’t find it just email me and I’ll poll my Instagram community because someone recommended a dairy-free parmesan today that I didn’t know about. Virginia That’s awesome. And check out Amy’s website, because all her recipes always have notes about substitutions you can make if you need to take out a common food allergen. She’s amazing at figuring this out.Amy Well not 100%. But I try! Virginia Well, okay, you aren’t 100% amazing. Maybe not 100% of the recipes have this, but I have noticed this as a recurring theme. Amy, thank you so much. This has been fantastic. Again, I’ll put links in the transcript to YummyToddlerFood, and to our old podcast archives for anyone who wants to go down that rabbit hole with us. Amy Thanks for having me!You’re reading Burnt Toast, a newsletter by Virginia Sole-Smith. Virginia is a feminist writer, and author of The Eating Instinct and the forthcoming Fat Kid Phobia. Comments? Questions? Email Virginia. If a friend forwarded this to you and you want to subscribe, sign up here: This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe

Marketing BS with Edward Nevraumont
Amy Gordona, CMO Kestra Financial, Part 2

Marketing BS with Edward Nevraumont

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 11, 2021 21:39


My guest today is Amy Gordona CMO of Kestra Financial. Amy had an incredible career in more traditional financial services before moving to Kestra. Kestra is a unique company which provides a platform for independent financial services professionals. This is part 2 covering the Kestra business.This is the free edition of Marketing BS. Subscribers were sent Part 1 yesterday, as well as this week's essay (on early vs late funnel metrics and the link between COVID tracking and marketing). You can subscribe here:TranscriptEdward: This is part two of my interview with Amy Gordona. Today, we're going to explore her experience as CMO of Kestra Financial. Amy, can you start by explaining what Kestra Financial is?Amy: Kestra Financial is a wealth management platform that supports independent financial advisors. We're sometimes more traditionally known as a broker dealer. An independent financial advisor is an entrepreneur who runs their own wealth management or financial planning business. We supply the backbone for an independent financial advisor. We supply the technology that they use, we supply the investment product selection that they give to their clients, and we provide the compliant support that they need in order to operate their business.Edward: The type of business Kestra is, has it been around for 100 years? Has there been financial advisors who have used platforms like this?Amy: You can probably think about Merrill Lynch, think about companies like UBS. All of them have operated broker dealers from back in the time. If you think about the term, you needed a broker in order to transact your business. That broker usually sat at a firm like Merrill Lynch or UBS and they used a trading platform to transact your business. That's how that business got started.Edward: How is Kestra different from Merrill Lynch or UBS?Amy: Specifically, Kestra Financial caters to the independent financial advisor, meaning we support entrepreneurs. A company like Merrill Lynch or UBS, their advisors work under their brand.At Kestra Financial, we support the independent financial advisors' own brand. You, Ed, would have your own brand. You would have your own shingle outside your brick and mortar location. The clients are yours. They are not Kestra Financials'. They're your clients. We merely provide the support that you need—the services, resources, and support that you need to serve your clients well. That's how we're different. We don't dictate how financial advisors do their business, how they facilitate their business with their clients. We merely support their right of choice, their right for choice in serving their clients.Edward: The difference would be if I'm a restaurant owner, I could go and start my own restaurant. Then, presumably use some sort of tool to help me do that restaurant. Or, I go to McDonald's and say, hey, give me the whole kit caboodle. In both cases, I'm running my own restaurant. One is a franchisee and one is an independent operator. You guys are servicing the individual operators rather than the franchisees.Amy: That's exactly right. We support and advocate for what they need in order to make them more successful. We're a B2B business, we're not a B2C business.Edward: The people who come to you, what were they doing before? If I was a financial advisor and wanted to do my own shop, was that even an option before? How would I do that?Amy: An independent financial advisor has to affiliate with a broker dealer. We don't like to refer to ourselves as a broker-dealer because we don't just supply broker-dealer services. Like I stated previously, we supply technology, we supply practice management, thought leadership, and compliance oversight. We are full service for a financial advisor. If a financial advisor didn't want to affiliate with a broker-dealer, they wanted to take on all of those services, and all of that compliance compliance risk themselves, they would have to operate their own independent RIA or they would be a captive financial advisor like they are for Merrill Lynch or UBS.Edward: Got it. You sit in between the two options of like, hey, do it all yourself or go to UBS and use someone else's brand. You let them have their own brand without having to do all the heavy lifting of doing their own brand. In email marketing, you're like the substack, or I can have my own brand but they run the platform for me.Amy: That's exactly right. I think one of the things that separates an independent financial advisor from someone who wants to operate within Merrill Lynch, UBS, or go on at their own is exactly that. They want to take some of the risk off the table, they want to take some of the business management off the table, but they still want to be able to make their own choices and run their own business. It's exactly that. It's a happy medium with all the support you need, but not without all of the risk. Everyone knows that financial services is a highly regulated industry and it should be. End investors deserve to have oversight over how people are managing their money. Kestra Financial provides those umbrella services that help protect end investors, but also help financial advisors be able to have all of the resources they need to provide solid financial planning services to their clients.Edward: Kestra is actually a holding company for four different brands, is that right?Amy: Kestra Holdings is a holding company for four different independent brands. Kestra Financial is one of those brands, that's the company I was originally hired to support. H. Beck is the second brand that we own and they are also a broker-dealer. Arden Trust is a personal trust company that we acquired. Then, the fourth company is Bluespring Wealth. That is an arm of the company that we launched about a year and a half ago. That arm of the company focuses on acquiring independent wealth management businesses in the industry.Edward: Kestra, see if we get all these straight, is a kind of business we've been talking about back. H. Beck is the same thing with a different moniker.Amy: Yeah, it's the same business. It's also a broker-dealer, but Kestra Financial and H. Beck have a slightly different target market, so to speak. Both independent financial advisors, but a little bit of a different segment of the industry. They are differentiated in that way.Edward: They're differentiated from a marketing perspective, not a product perspective.Amy: Correct. They're differentiated from a marketing perspective. Absolutely. Edward: Then, Arden Trust, that's a completely different business.Amy: Completely different business. They market personal trust products to independent financial advisors and to financial advisors. Financial advisers along the spectrum of wealth planning for their clients come across estate planning needs. Part of those estate planning needs are needing personal trusts. Arden Trust provides the vehicle for those trusts that financial advisers use for their clients.Edward: Is that a vertical integration play? Is that the idea that, hey, now you already have these relationships, you might as well sell them more stuff and so you get the stuff to sell them?Amy: We like to view it as an ecosystem in the sense that, yes, if you have an independent financial advisor and as we just spoke about a few minutes ago, they need resources in order to have a wealth of options for their clients and their clients' needs. Part of those options are estate planning needs. When they come across the need for trust services, it's a better position to be in, as we feel, to have those services available to our advisors as part of the ecosystem.Edward: Then, Bluespring Wealth is you basically owning the financial advising. Is Bluespring Wealth just effectively a client of Kestra? Like, your own biggest client?Amy: Actually, no. However, that segment of our business arose out of a need in the industry. Anyone who starts to look at the trends in the financial services industry will start to see that many of these financial advisors who built their businesses over the last 20 years are baby boomers. They are now entering their 60s. Some of them are older, some of them a little younger. There's a gap in the industry. That gap in the industry is called succession. Many of these folks that have built their businesses don't necessarily have a child that's going to take over their business, they don't have a younger partner, or a younger advisor who has the capital to buy their business from them. The valuations of these businesses are strong right now. These entrepreneurs have built successful businesses and with a solid client base who they have very close relationships with.The succession options for these entrepreneurs are limited and they need help. What's that saying? The cobbler that doesn't know how to fix issues or has worn shoes? A lot of these entrepreneurs just have not worked on their business in terms of succession planning. Bluespring Wealth is a succession plan option. We have the capital to buy these businesses, but continue to foster the relationship, keep the entrepreneur, the principal, or the owner in place so that they can continue to have the relationship with their clients, and we can continue to grow their business—help them grow their businesses.Edward: Is that how it all fits together? Is it all just different pieces that all drive that core business? Each piece is profitable on its own, but it becomes more profitable when they integrate?Amy: You've nailed it. That's exactly right.Edward: It all comes down to initially acquiring agents or acquiring customers' forecast financial. Is that the key entry point?Amy: That's the key entry point. I think what makes our B2B marketing unique is that while you are selling pieces of a widget, so to speak, we have a technology stack and that technology stack is innovative. It is a valuable part of what the financial advisor needs. Again, we have a wealth management platform and we offer a choice of investment products that is valuable to the financial advisor. We have compliance oversight and very business friendly compliance that's very valuable to a financial advisor. We really are selling ourselves in so much of this sales process. If you are going to rely on a company to help be the backbone of your business, it's not just about the technology and the widgets within the company. It's about who is serving you. It's about the people that you interact with and it's about the culture that it helps create for you in running your business.A lot of what we're selling is the firm itself, the people, as well as the resources. That's not easy all the time. I don't know how much your audience knows about this side of the financial services business, but for an independent financial adviser to move their business to a new company is a lot of work. It's not easy. It takes a lot of different pieces of paperwork and a lot of time with their clients explaining why they're moving and why the better resources that are in Kestra Financial are better for their business. In order to convince someone to go through that, what I like to call pain to get to a better place, it can be a very long sales cycle. It can be very much selling yourselves, ourselves as much as it is selling the pieces of resources that we offer.Edward: Who are you selling to? Are you selling to the advisor who's at UBS looking to put up his own shingle? Or has their own shingle already and wants to get rid of all the back office work that they don't want to be doing anymore?Amy: Both. We absolutely sell to both. We absolutely support both models. If you don't have your own shingle, you're a part of a wire house firm, you want to own your own shingle, and you want help doing that, we provide the support to do that, including the real estate. We handle that entire transition for you, get you all set up, and ready to go. If you already have your own shingle, that is our main support lever that we have. Edward: You're saying that the larger market is people that are already on their own shingle and they want to take off a lot of that effort. Amy: Correct. Edward: It's easier to convince somebody to do what they're doing now, only make it easier than it is to convince them to do something new.Amy: Right. For us, it's all about upgrading the resources that they have. So many financial advisors that have their own shingle have been with a firm for a long time. Now, the technology that's supporting them is out of date or what they want to do to build their business just isn't an option because the firm they're with doesn't have the support that they need. Kestra Financial is an upgrade for them in terms of the resources that are going to support them.Edward: Are they out looking for a better solution or do you have to go to them and explain that, hey, there's a better solution out there?Amy: I think it goes both ways. I think there are some that absolutely have reached their breaking point on a specific pain point. That pain point can be technology, it can be the compliance support they're receiving, it can be the investment choice of products that they have, it can be the client, or the customer service levels that they receive when they need help from someone at the firm. Usually, there is a specific pain point that drives the financial advisor to want to look at new firms that can provide relief to that pain. That is the best situation to be in. If you can identify that pain point, then we can really move down the sales cycle into the sales cycle faster. It also works where an advisor almost doesn't know that they have pain until we show them that there's something better. Once we show them that there's something better, we can then start to demonstrate that you had pain you didn't even know and we can relieve it.Edward: Those first types, the people that identify their own pain, I assume you're collecting them on Google paid search and organic search. They're going to type in, like, solve my problem. You appear to have the results at the right time, correct?Amy: Yup. We're deploying a persona-based, what I just referred to, pain point-based awareness tactics and also our organic search, our paid search, all figures around those pain points, looking for better technology, who's the number one broker-dealer, be a part of a culture that helps your business grow. We try to build personas around those pain points and then build tactics to support content that demonstrates how we can relieve that pain point.Edward: Rather than someone searching for backend support, they're looking for specific issues like, I need a new bookkeeper or I need a new timekeeping manager. You basically target those individual pain points and say, hey, not only do we solve that problem. We can come in, take over everything for you, and take away all your pain points.Amy: Correct. I'll give an example of a consideration, some consideration as we ran with testimonials about those pain points. If compliance is a pain point for you, we ran testimonial ads where some of our existing advisors are talking about the support that we give. When it comes to technology, same thing. We've run ads and tied those ads to pieces of content, tied those ads to search topics, to search terms, all having to do with how we are better at that particular pain point.Edward: Obviously, Google, but are you running them on financial services publications that these people read?Amy: Exactly. Trade publications and financial services are very heavily read by all financial advisors. wealthmanagement.com, financial-advisor.com, investmentnews.com, they have huge followings that they've built up over years of being very respected and trusted sources of new rules and regulation, best practice management—all types of resources and topics. Those trusted resources are where financial advisors go to read their news of the day. Using those trade publications and investing some of our marketing dollars in those trade publications is almost imperative.Edward: Are they effective display ads, or are you getting advertorial? How are you getting people to actually see and read these ads when they're going and reading their daily media?Amy: Both display, newsletters, paid content, and promoted content that's in both on their sites and in their newsletters. Doing podcasts, having members of our team do podcasts with some of their editorial staff, engaging in bylines and contributing pieces of thought leadership to those trade publications are all part of the things that we do to partner.Edward: How do you get their attention, though? How do you get them to interrupt them? Like, if I'm looking at Facebook, I get interrupted right in my news feed. That ad unit on Facebook is really, really effective. The targeting is one thing, but the ad unit is so effective. Are there equivalent ad units when you're in these financial publication services that can get someone's attention, they don't just drift over?Amy: There are. What I have found, there are ad units that can get your attention. You can buy pop-up models that don't go away until you x out of them. You can buy a run of the page where you're basically surrounding the entire page, where you're sponsoring something. What I have found though, too, is when you're running your own business, you're really interested in ways that you can grow your top line. You're really interested in ways that you can be more effective quicker, and make more money. An entrepreneur wants to make more money. What I found to be secondarily just as effective is having the right content. Yes, you can run ad units that are attention grabbing, have the whole page that then an adviser can't miss. You can have the right page search terms. When you start to offer an advisor real valuable content about how to effectively make them more money, be better at what they do, serve their clients better, I find that our engagement has been strong. With trade publications, you have a lot of opportunity to offer that content, whether it's part of their paid promotion or it's part of conversations that you would have like we're having today, that's where the trust is built with the financial advisor and where the proof is in the pudding, so to speak.Edward: I've often argued that product companies are becoming more and more like media companies because that's how you get the attention. You need to have the person pay attention to the content. The way to do that is to create good content. You can only hack the subject line so many times before someone starts ignoring you if you don't have good content behind it. How long until you guys start a fifth company that's actually creating content for financial advisors?Amy: I just had a conversation with a colleague where I said we missed it. We could have been billionaires. All we had to do was figure out how to start a company that creates a turnkey content and lead gen engine for financial independent financial advisors. I'm talking B2C, helping financial advisors find more clients and get engaged with more clients. I think I could have retired already to Bora Bora.Independent financial advisors, again, going back to their profile, they built their business brick by brick. These are people that worked hard, like shaking hands, going to little league games, and getting involved in the community. These are people that care about their community, but they're not necessarily marketing geniuses in terms of how to evolve with the times, become more digital, get their website looking spiffy. Actually, that's part of the services Kestra offers—helping them with those marketing tactics. However, if I could have figured out how to start that one company that put a turnkey package together to help every financial advisor do that, I might be doing the podcast that you're doing today.Edward: Amy, thank you so much for being on the show. Before you go, tell me about your quakebook and how it changed the way you think about the world.Amy: My quakebook was a book called Dopesick. Have you ever heard of it? Edward: I have not.Amy: Dopesick is actually the story of how OxyContin became such a problem in the United States. It looks at the corporate greed that drove painkiller production to the place where it is today and the devastation that it's had on many Americans. I'm a fairly optimistic glass half full—believing in the good of people type of person. The facts that are laid out about the purposefulness that Big Pharma specifically went, the plans that they dropped to specifically drive pain medication into parts of the country where they knew people were working hard jobs, suffering economically, and suffering health wise was borderline sociopathic.I always knew there was an element of that in big businesses. By the way, I still believe that there are lots of great big businesses out there and lots of great people who do great things. The cost, the way that the scales tipped in this particular case where money and profits became more important than anything else, it really made me think twice.It's part of the reason why I like working for a company where it's a smaller company in the grand scheme of things and where I feel that I have an impact because that book did it. It shook me in terms of where things can get out of control, how people will just go along with something, how so many people went along with this plan knowing it was damaging human lives, and the destruction that it did to too many people. So many lives have been lost over pure greed, pure business greed.Edward: I think there's something really nice about working for a company that you feel proud of and you think is doing a good in the world. I think it'd be very hard to work for a company that you don't believe in, too.Amy: That is a lot of driving force that keeps me excited today. At the end of the day, people like my parents need financial help. They need financial planning. I grew up in a middle class household. My father worked hard every day in a blue collar job. He worked his butt off but needed help in order to be able to retire. People that we support provide that help to people like my parents. I'm really proud of that.Edward: Thank you. This has been fantastic. I really appreciate your time today. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketingbs.substack.com

英语口语
【0208】老外常说的"today years old"是啥意思?

英语口语

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 7, 2021 6:37


吉米老师前言:today是今天,但today years old绝不是问你今天多少岁了哦。快和吉米老师学习有关时间的地道口语吧。在日常生活中,你肯定也经历过这样的时刻。有些事情明明不是什么秘密,很多人早就知道了,你却是今天才知道。这种情况要怎么用英语表示呢?可能很多同学的答案会是I know it today。today years old 今天才知道;今天才体验过其实,更地道的表达应该是today years old,意思就是我今天刚知道和我今天才体验过。当你刚知道一件事或第一次尝试某件事的时候,就可以这么表达。I was today years old when I went to the aquarium.今天是我第一次去水族馆。我今天刚知道的英文表达是不是非常简单呢?其实,我早就知道了的英语也非常简单。I know 我早就知道you are telling me 我早就知道早知道了可以用I know和you are telling me表示。在英语里,I know不是好的我知道了,而是我早就知道了别再说了。you are telling me的意思不是你在告诉我,而是你没必要和我说,我早就知道了。I heard that Amy broke up with Jerry.我听说Amy和杰瑞分手了。You are telling me.我早就知道这件事了。学会了today years old,我们还要掌握yesterday和tomorrow的地道表达。I was not born yesterday≠我不是昨天出生I was not born yesterday 别骗我;我又不是小孩老外对你说I was not born yesterday的时候,绝不是在讨论年纪。这个表达的字面意思是我不是昨天出生的,言外之意是别把我当成三岁小孩糊弄,我是不会信的。有人糊弄你的时候,不妨对他说上一句I was not born yesterday,给他个下马威。I wasn t born yesterday.What s more,you shouldn t tell a lie.我又不是三岁小孩,而且你也不应该撒谎。I need it yesterday 我现在就要除了I wasn t born yesterday,I need it yesterday也是一句非常实用的俚语。这句话的意思不是我昨天需要。恰恰相反,真正的意思是I need it right now,就是我马上就要,这个表达一般用于很焦急的情况。I need it yesterday,so you d better send the document to my office,我现在就要,你最好把文件送到我办公室。jam tomorrow不是明天的果酱蘸着果酱的面包是很多老外的早餐标配,但老外说的jam tomorrow可不是明天的果酱。jam tomorrow起源于小说家卡罗尔《爱丽斯漫游奇境记》的续集,爱丽斯的老板除了要支付工资,还应该支付一份jam作为她的奖金。果酱的给法却是“Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday,but never jam today”,意思就是昨天和明天有果酱,就是今天不会有。今天不会有也就是永远都没有,后来jam tomorrow就表示那些许诺却无法兑现的东西,也就是可望而不可即的事物。To be honest,the employee welfare of their company is jam tomorrow.说实话,他们公司的员工福利是不会兑现的诺言。

英语口语
【0208】老外常说的"today years old"是啥意思?

英语口语

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 7, 2021 6:37


吉米老师前言:today是今天,但today years old绝不是问你今天多少岁了哦。快和吉米老师学习有关时间的地道口语吧。在日常生活中,你肯定也经历过这样的时刻。有些事情明明不是什么秘密,很多人早就知道了,你却是今天才知道。这种情况要怎么用英语表示呢?可能很多同学的答案会是I know it today。today years old 今天才知道;今天才体验过其实,更地道的表达应该是today years old,意思就是我今天刚知道和我今天才体验过。当你刚知道一件事或第一次尝试某件事的时候,就可以这么表达。I was today years old when I went to the aquarium.今天是我第一次去水族馆。我今天刚知道的英文表达是不是非常简单呢?其实,我早就知道了的英语也非常简单。I know 我早就知道you are telling me 我早就知道早知道了可以用I know和you are telling me表示。在英语里,I know不是好的我知道了,而是我早就知道了别再说了。you are telling me的意思不是你在告诉我,而是你没必要和我说,我早就知道了。I heard that Amy broke up with Jerry.我听说Amy和杰瑞分手了。You are telling me.我早就知道这件事了。学会了today years old,我们还要掌握yesterday和tomorrow的地道表达。I was not born yesterday≠我不是昨天出生I was not born yesterday 别骗我;我又不是小孩老外对你说I was not born yesterday的时候,绝不是在讨论年纪。这个表达的字面意思是我不是昨天出生的,言外之意是别把我当成三岁小孩糊弄,我是不会信的。有人糊弄你的时候,不妨对他说上一句I was not born yesterday,给他个下马威。I wasn t born yesterday.What s more,you shouldn t tell a lie.我又不是三岁小孩,而且你也不应该撒谎。I need it yesterday 我现在就要除了I wasn t born yesterday,I need it yesterday也是一句非常实用的俚语。这句话的意思不是我昨天需要。恰恰相反,真正的意思是I need it right now,就是我马上就要,这个表达一般用于很焦急的情况。I need it yesterday,so you d better send the document to my office,我现在就要,你最好把文件送到我办公室。jam tomorrow不是明天的果酱蘸着果酱的面包是很多老外的早餐标配,但老外说的jam tomorrow可不是明天的果酱。jam tomorrow起源于小说家卡罗尔《爱丽斯漫游奇境记》的续集,爱丽斯的老板除了要支付工资,还应该支付一份jam作为她的奖金。果酱的给法却是“Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday,but never jam today”,意思就是昨天和明天有果酱,就是今天不会有。今天不会有也就是永远都没有,后来jam tomorrow就表示那些许诺却无法兑现的东西,也就是可望而不可即的事物。To be honest,the employee welfare of their company is jam tomorrow.说实话,他们公司的员工福利是不会兑现的诺言。

英语口语
【0208】老外常说的"today years old"是啥意思?

英语口语

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 7, 2021 6:37


吉米老师前言:today是今天,但today years old绝不是问你今天多少岁了哦。快和吉米老师学习有关时间的地道口语吧。在日常生活中,你肯定也经历过这样的时刻。有些事情明明不是什么秘密,很多人早就知道了,你却是今天才知道。这种情况要怎么用英语表示呢?可能很多同学的答案会是I know it today。today years old 今天才知道;今天才体验过其实,更地道的表达应该是today years old,意思就是我今天刚知道和我今天才体验过。当你刚知道一件事或第一次尝试某件事的时候,就可以这么表达。I was today years old when I went to the aquarium.今天是我第一次去水族馆。我今天刚知道的英文表达是不是非常简单呢?其实,我早就知道了的英语也非常简单。I know 我早就知道you are telling me 我早就知道早知道了可以用I know和you are telling me表示。在英语里,I know不是好的我知道了,而是我早就知道了别再说了。you are telling me的意思不是你在告诉我,而是你没必要和我说,我早就知道了。I heard that Amy broke up with Jerry.我听说Amy和杰瑞分手了。You are telling me.我早就知道这件事了。学会了today years old,我们还要掌握yesterday和tomorrow的地道表达。I was not born yesterday≠我不是昨天出生I was not born yesterday 别骗我;我又不是小孩老外对你说I was not born yesterday的时候,绝不是在讨论年纪。这个表达的字面意思是我不是昨天出生的,言外之意是别把我当成三岁小孩糊弄,我是不会信的。有人糊弄你的时候,不妨对他说上一句I was not born yesterday,给他个下马威。I wasn t born yesterday.What s more,you shouldn t tell a lie.我又不是三岁小孩,而且你也不应该撒谎。I need it yesterday 我现在就要除了I wasn t born yesterday,I need it yesterday也是一句非常实用的俚语。这句话的意思不是我昨天需要。恰恰相反,真正的意思是I need it right now,就是我马上就要,这个表达一般用于很焦急的情况。I need it yesterday,so you d better send the document to my office,我现在就要,你最好把文件送到我办公室。jam tomorrow不是明天的果酱蘸着果酱的面包是很多老外的早餐标配,但老外说的jam tomorrow可不是明天的果酱。jam tomorrow起源于小说家卡罗尔《爱丽斯漫游奇境记》的续集,爱丽斯的老板除了要支付工资,还应该支付一份jam作为她的奖金。果酱的给法却是“Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday,but never jam today”,意思就是昨天和明天有果酱,就是今天不会有。今天不会有也就是永远都没有,后来jam tomorrow就表示那些许诺却无法兑现的东西,也就是可望而不可即的事物。To be honest,the employee welfare of their company is jam tomorrow.说实话,他们公司的员工福利是不会兑现的诺言。

英语口语
【0208】老外常说的"today years old"是啥意思?

英语口语

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 7, 2021 6:37


吉米老师前言:today是今天,但today years old绝不是问你今天多少岁了哦。快和吉米老师学习有关时间的地道口语吧。在日常生活中,你肯定也经历过这样的时刻。有些事情明明不是什么秘密,很多人早就知道了,你却是今天才知道。这种情况要怎么用英语表示呢?可能很多同学的答案会是I know it today。today years old 今天才知道;今天才体验过其实,更地道的表达应该是today years old,意思就是我今天刚知道和我今天才体验过。当你刚知道一件事或第一次尝试某件事的时候,就可以这么表达。I was today years old when I went to the aquarium.今天是我第一次去水族馆。我今天刚知道的英文表达是不是非常简单呢?其实,我早就知道了的英语也非常简单。I know 我早就知道you are telling me 我早就知道早知道了可以用I know和you are telling me表示。在英语里,I know不是好的我知道了,而是我早就知道了别再说了。you are telling me的意思不是你在告诉我,而是你没必要和我说,我早就知道了。I heard that Amy broke up with Jerry.我听说Amy和杰瑞分手了。You are telling me.我早就知道这件事了。学会了today years old,我们还要掌握yesterday和tomorrow的地道表达。I was not born yesterday≠我不是昨天出生I was not born yesterday 别骗我;我又不是小孩老外对你说I was not born yesterday的时候,绝不是在讨论年纪。这个表达的字面意思是我不是昨天出生的,言外之意是别把我当成三岁小孩糊弄,我是不会信的。有人糊弄你的时候,不妨对他说上一句I was not born yesterday,给他个下马威。I wasn t born yesterday.What s more,you shouldn t tell a lie.我又不是三岁小孩,而且你也不应该撒谎。I need it yesterday 我现在就要除了I wasn t born yesterday,I need it yesterday也是一句非常实用的俚语。这句话的意思不是我昨天需要。恰恰相反,真正的意思是I need it right now,就是我马上就要,这个表达一般用于很焦急的情况。I need it yesterday,so you d better send the document to my office,我现在就要,你最好把文件送到我办公室。jam tomorrow不是明天的果酱蘸着果酱的面包是很多老外的早餐标配,但老外说的jam tomorrow可不是明天的果酱。jam tomorrow起源于小说家卡罗尔《爱丽斯漫游奇境记》的续集,爱丽斯的老板除了要支付工资,还应该支付一份jam作为她的奖金。果酱的给法却是“Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday,but never jam today”,意思就是昨天和明天有果酱,就是今天不会有。今天不会有也就是永远都没有,后来jam tomorrow就表示那些许诺却无法兑现的东西,也就是可望而不可即的事物。To be honest,the employee welfare of their company is jam tomorrow.说实话,他们公司的员工福利是不会兑现的诺言。

英语口语
【01.11】老外常说的"today years old"是啥意思?

英语口语

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 11, 2021 6:41


在日常生活中,你肯定也经历过这样的时刻。有些事情明明不是什么秘密,很多人早就知道了,你却是今天才知道。这种情况要怎么用英语表示呢?可能很多同学的答案会是I know it today。today years old 今天才知道;今天才体验过其实,更地道的表达应该是today years old,意思就是我今天刚知道和我今天才体验过。当你刚知道一件事或第一次尝试某件事的时候,就可以这么表达。I was today years old when I went to the aquarium.今天是我第一次去水族馆。我今天刚知道的英文表达是不是非常简单呢?其实,我早就知道了的英语也非常简单。I know 我早就知道you are telling me 我早就知道早知道了可以用I know和you are telling me表示。在英语里,I know不是好的我知道了,而是我早就知道了别再说了。you are telling me的意思不是你在告诉我,而是你没必要和我说,我早就知道了。I heard that Amy broke up with Jerry.我听说Amy和杰瑞分手了。You are telling me.我早就知道这件事了。学会了today years old,我们还要掌握yesterday和tomorrow的地道表达。I was not born yesterday≠我不是昨天出生I was not born yesterday 别骗我;我又不是小孩老外对你说I was not born yesterday的时候,绝不是在讨论年纪。这个表达的字面意思是我不是昨天出生的,言外之意是别把我当成三岁小孩糊弄,我是不会信的。有人糊弄你的时候,不妨对他说上一句I was not born yesterday,给他个下马威。I wasn t born yesterday.What s more,you shouldn t tell a lie.我又不是三岁小孩,而且你也不应该撒谎。I need it yesterday 我现在就要除了I wasn t born yesterday,I need it yesterday也是一句非常实用的俚语。这句话的意思不是我昨天需要。恰恰相反,真正的意思是I need it right now,就是我马上就要,这个表达一般用于很焦急的情况。I need it yesterday,so you d better send the document to my office,我现在就要,你最好把文件送到我办公室。jam tomorrow不是明天的果酱蘸着果酱的面包是很多老外的早餐标配,但老外说的jam tomorrow可不是明天的果酱。jam tomorrow起源于小说家卡罗尔《爱丽斯漫游奇境记》的续集,爱丽斯的老板除了要支付工资,还应该支付一份jam作为她的奖金。果酱的给法却是“Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday,but never jam today”,意思就是昨天和明天有果酱,就是今天不会有。今天不会有也就是永远都没有,后来jam tomorrow就表示那些许诺却无法兑现的东西,也就是可望而不可即的事物。To be honest,the employee welfare of their company is jam tomorrow.说实话,他们公司的员工福利是不会兑现的诺言。今天的知识是不是很容易就学会了呢?别忘了在评论区提交作业哦。今日作业这些短语和句子你都理解对了吗?最后留给同学们一个小作业:I was today years old when I realized that our English teacher is her aunt.这句话应该怎么翻译呢?同学们可以在右下角留言区写下你的答案哦, 老师会亲自点评~免费送《生活大爆炸》中英文全集吉米老师今天给大家送福利啦!免费赠送风靡全球轻松幽默的美国生活喜剧《生活大爆炸1-12季》,全部都有中英文字幕 , 非常有趣的学英语原版美剧视频,你值得拥有!一共 2999 份,先到先得,送完即止(请一定要快哦)!怎么获得?添加微信:ohk008,发送文字 生活大爆炸 免费获得!

英语口语
【01.11】老外常说的"today years old"是啥意思?

英语口语

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 11, 2021 6:41


在日常生活中,你肯定也经历过这样的时刻。有些事情明明不是什么秘密,很多人早就知道了,你却是今天才知道。这种情况要怎么用英语表示呢?可能很多同学的答案会是I know it today。today years old 今天才知道;今天才体验过其实,更地道的表达应该是today years old,意思就是我今天刚知道和我今天才体验过。当你刚知道一件事或第一次尝试某件事的时候,就可以这么表达。I was today years old when I went to the aquarium.今天是我第一次去水族馆。我今天刚知道的英文表达是不是非常简单呢?其实,我早就知道了的英语也非常简单。I know 我早就知道you are telling me 我早就知道早知道了可以用I know和you are telling me表示。在英语里,I know不是好的我知道了,而是我早就知道了别再说了。you are telling me的意思不是你在告诉我,而是你没必要和我说,我早就知道了。I heard that Amy broke up with Jerry.我听说Amy和杰瑞分手了。You are telling me.我早就知道这件事了。学会了today years old,我们还要掌握yesterday和tomorrow的地道表达。I was not born yesterday≠我不是昨天出生I was not born yesterday 别骗我;我又不是小孩老外对你说I was not born yesterday的时候,绝不是在讨论年纪。这个表达的字面意思是我不是昨天出生的,言外之意是别把我当成三岁小孩糊弄,我是不会信的。有人糊弄你的时候,不妨对他说上一句I was not born yesterday,给他个下马威。I wasn t born yesterday.What s more,you shouldn t tell a lie.我又不是三岁小孩,而且你也不应该撒谎。I need it yesterday 我现在就要除了I wasn t born yesterday,I need it yesterday也是一句非常实用的俚语。这句话的意思不是我昨天需要。恰恰相反,真正的意思是I need it right now,就是我马上就要,这个表达一般用于很焦急的情况。I need it yesterday,so you d better send the document to my office,我现在就要,你最好把文件送到我办公室。jam tomorrow不是明天的果酱蘸着果酱的面包是很多老外的早餐标配,但老外说的jam tomorrow可不是明天的果酱。jam tomorrow起源于小说家卡罗尔《爱丽斯漫游奇境记》的续集,爱丽斯的老板除了要支付工资,还应该支付一份jam作为她的奖金。果酱的给法却是“Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday,but never jam today”,意思就是昨天和明天有果酱,就是今天不会有。今天不会有也就是永远都没有,后来jam tomorrow就表示那些许诺却无法兑现的东西,也就是可望而不可即的事物。To be honest,the employee welfare of their company is jam tomorrow.说实话,他们公司的员工福利是不会兑现的诺言。今天的知识是不是很容易就学会了呢?别忘了在评论区提交作业哦。今日作业这些短语和句子你都理解对了吗?最后留给同学们一个小作业:I was today years old when I realized that our English teacher is her aunt.这句话应该怎么翻译呢?同学们可以在右下角留言区写下你的答案哦, 老师会亲自点评~免费送《生活大爆炸》中英文全集吉米老师今天给大家送福利啦!免费赠送风靡全球轻松幽默的美国生活喜剧《生活大爆炸1-12季》,全部都有中英文字幕 , 非常有趣的学英语原版美剧视频,你值得拥有!一共 2999 份,先到先得,送完即止(请一定要快哦)!怎么获得?添加微信:ohk008,发送文字 生活大爆炸 免费获得!

英语口语
【01.11】老外常说的"today years old"是啥意思?

英语口语

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 11, 2021 6:41


在日常生活中,你肯定也经历过这样的时刻。有些事情明明不是什么秘密,很多人早就知道了,你却是今天才知道。这种情况要怎么用英语表示呢?可能很多同学的答案会是I know it today。today years old 今天才知道;今天才体验过其实,更地道的表达应该是today years old,意思就是我今天刚知道和我今天才体验过。当你刚知道一件事或第一次尝试某件事的时候,就可以这么表达。I was today years old when I went to the aquarium.今天是我第一次去水族馆。我今天刚知道的英文表达是不是非常简单呢?其实,我早就知道了的英语也非常简单。I know 我早就知道you are telling me 我早就知道早知道了可以用I know和you are telling me表示。在英语里,I know不是好的我知道了,而是我早就知道了别再说了。you are telling me的意思不是你在告诉我,而是你没必要和我说,我早就知道了。I heard that Amy broke up with Jerry.我听说Amy和杰瑞分手了。You are telling me.我早就知道这件事了。学会了today years old,我们还要掌握yesterday和tomorrow的地道表达。I was not born yesterday≠我不是昨天出生I was not born yesterday 别骗我;我又不是小孩老外对你说I was not born yesterday的时候,绝不是在讨论年纪。这个表达的字面意思是我不是昨天出生的,言外之意是别把我当成三岁小孩糊弄,我是不会信的。有人糊弄你的时候,不妨对他说上一句I was not born yesterday,给他个下马威。I wasn t born yesterday.What s more,you shouldn t tell a lie.我又不是三岁小孩,而且你也不应该撒谎。I need it yesterday 我现在就要除了I wasn t born yesterday,I need it yesterday也是一句非常实用的俚语。这句话的意思不是我昨天需要。恰恰相反,真正的意思是I need it right now,就是我马上就要,这个表达一般用于很焦急的情况。I need it yesterday,so you d better send the document to my office,我现在就要,你最好把文件送到我办公室。jam tomorrow不是明天的果酱蘸着果酱的面包是很多老外的早餐标配,但老外说的jam tomorrow可不是明天的果酱。jam tomorrow起源于小说家卡罗尔《爱丽斯漫游奇境记》的续集,爱丽斯的老板除了要支付工资,还应该支付一份jam作为她的奖金。果酱的给法却是“Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday,but never jam today”,意思就是昨天和明天有果酱,就是今天不会有。今天不会有也就是永远都没有,后来jam tomorrow就表示那些许诺却无法兑现的东西,也就是可望而不可即的事物。To be honest,the employee welfare of their company is jam tomorrow.说实话,他们公司的员工福利是不会兑现的诺言。今天的知识是不是很容易就学会了呢?别忘了在评论区提交作业哦。今日作业这些短语和句子你都理解对了吗?最后留给同学们一个小作业:I was today years old when I realized that our English teacher is her aunt.这句话应该怎么翻译呢?同学们可以在右下角留言区写下你的答案哦, 老师会亲自点评~免费送《生活大爆炸》中英文全集吉米老师今天给大家送福利啦!免费赠送风靡全球轻松幽默的美国生活喜剧《生活大爆炸1-12季》,全部都有中英文字幕 , 非常有趣的学英语原版美剧视频,你值得拥有!一共 2999 份,先到先得,送完即止(请一定要快哦)!怎么获得?添加微信:ohk008,发送文字 生活大爆炸 免费获得!

英语口语
【01.11】老外常说的"today years old"是啥意思?

英语口语

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 11, 2021 6:41


在日常生活中,你肯定也经历过这样的时刻。有些事情明明不是什么秘密,很多人早就知道了,你却是今天才知道。这种情况要怎么用英语表示呢?可能很多同学的答案会是I know it today。today years old 今天才知道;今天才体验过其实,更地道的表达应该是today years old,意思就是我今天刚知道和我今天才体验过。当你刚知道一件事或第一次尝试某件事的时候,就可以这么表达。I was today years old when I went to the aquarium.今天是我第一次去水族馆。我今天刚知道的英文表达是不是非常简单呢?其实,我早就知道了的英语也非常简单。I know 我早就知道you are telling me 我早就知道早知道了可以用I know和you are telling me表示。在英语里,I know不是好的我知道了,而是我早就知道了别再说了。you are telling me的意思不是你在告诉我,而是你没必要和我说,我早就知道了。I heard that Amy broke up with Jerry.我听说Amy和杰瑞分手了。You are telling me.我早就知道这件事了。学会了today years old,我们还要掌握yesterday和tomorrow的地道表达。I was not born yesterday≠我不是昨天出生I was not born yesterday 别骗我;我又不是小孩老外对你说I was not born yesterday的时候,绝不是在讨论年纪。这个表达的字面意思是我不是昨天出生的,言外之意是别把我当成三岁小孩糊弄,我是不会信的。有人糊弄你的时候,不妨对他说上一句I was not born yesterday,给他个下马威。I wasn t born yesterday.What s more,you shouldn t tell a lie.我又不是三岁小孩,而且你也不应该撒谎。I need it yesterday 我现在就要除了I wasn t born yesterday,I need it yesterday也是一句非常实用的俚语。这句话的意思不是我昨天需要。恰恰相反,真正的意思是I need it right now,就是我马上就要,这个表达一般用于很焦急的情况。I need it yesterday,so you d better send the document to my office,我现在就要,你最好把文件送到我办公室。jam tomorrow不是明天的果酱蘸着果酱的面包是很多老外的早餐标配,但老外说的jam tomorrow可不是明天的果酱。jam tomorrow起源于小说家卡罗尔《爱丽斯漫游奇境记》的续集,爱丽斯的老板除了要支付工资,还应该支付一份jam作为她的奖金。果酱的给法却是“Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday,but never jam today”,意思就是昨天和明天有果酱,就是今天不会有。今天不会有也就是永远都没有,后来jam tomorrow就表示那些许诺却无法兑现的东西,也就是可望而不可即的事物。To be honest,the employee welfare of their company is jam tomorrow.说实话,他们公司的员工福利是不会兑现的诺言。今天的知识是不是很容易就学会了呢?别忘了在评论区提交作业哦。今日作业这些短语和句子你都理解对了吗?最后留给同学们一个小作业:I was today years old when I realized that our English teacher is her aunt.这句话应该怎么翻译呢?同学们可以在右下角留言区写下你的答案哦, 老师会亲自点评~免费送《生活大爆炸》中英文全集吉米老师今天给大家送福利啦!免费赠送风靡全球轻松幽默的美国生活喜剧《生活大爆炸1-12季》,全部都有中英文字幕 , 非常有趣的学英语原版美剧视频,你值得拥有!一共 2999 份,先到先得,送完即止(请一定要快哦)!怎么获得?添加微信:ohk008,发送文字 生活大爆炸 免费获得!

Two Kids and A Career
56: She Keeps The Serious Conversations, Like Binge Eating, Off Social Media

Two Kids and A Career

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 9, 2020 53:23


Everyone should have a friend like Sarah Rentfro in their life. The best way to describe Sarah is to point to a description based on her Enneagram Type, which is a 9. From Truity: Peacemakers are social chameleons who can adapt to the group dynamic easily and help others get along. They’re soft-spoken yet loyal and fun to be around, intuitively knowing how to include and engage everyone in conversation. Peacemakers are cooperative and always willing to let someone join the circle and state their own opinions. Soft-spoken yet firm in their personal stances, they make an effort to neutralize tension and restore group harmony. Easygoing and willing to tolerate everyone, Peacemakers retain their self-esteem through being kind and helpful to others. They enjoy the comfortable side of life and may have a personal space to recharge from the outer world. Many are deep seekers of meaning and have a fond appreciation of spirituality and a sense of connectedness with the universe. Jill Devine met Sarah a couple of years ago. At the time, Sarah helped with the children’s ministry at the church Jill and Sarah attend, Messiah Lutheran. Jill actually referenced Sarah in Episode 46: Dealing With Depression and Anxiety, Having Jesus In Your Life, and Seeking The Still with Laura Fleetwood because Laura and Sarah are sisters. There’s often talk about social media and the negative side of it, but Sarah’s social media accounts are the exact opposite. She takes simple things, like baby carrots, and her viewpoint makes people literally laugh out loud. As with most people, there is a side to Sarah that is complex and not something she really likes to share on social media. Sarah was (and very much still is) recovering from a binge eating disorder.    So many of the things Jill and Shannon Buescher talked about in Episode 30 (Part One) Women Face the Cultural Message “Thin Is Better” Every Day and Episode 30 (Part Two) We Are Taught We’re Successful If Our Body Gets Smaller were the things Sarah was dealing with every single day. Sarah had a binge eating disorder and the day after she read Brain Over Binge by Kathryn Hansen, she quit binging. Sarah is now trying to focus on body neutrality and “living in the middle”. New to Season 4, the Supermom Shoutout! Jill would like to acknowledge and recognize the hard work moms put in on the daily. It can be a thankless job at times, and Jill wants these moms to know their worth. This week’s Supermom Shoutout goes to Amy of O’Fallon, MO! Her best friend, Michelle, nominated her and said: Hi Jill! My best friend, Amy, is a Supermom! She’s a single mom, going to school to get her Master’s, works for Sacred Groundz coffee truck (she’s actually a founder of that company), she volunteers for our church, Peace Lutheran, and she helps me with all my volunteer projects. Her daughter, Kylie, is absolutely amazing! She does gymnastics and just started Girl Scouts. Kylie keeps Amy pretty busy, yet Amy is able to do everything I listed and do it well. Amy – YOU are seen and YOU are supported! To nominate a Supermom (or you can nominate yourself) email hello@jilldevine.com. Submit the name of the Supermom, where they're from, and a brief description as to why Jill should shout out this particular Supermom. Two Kids and A Career Website: https://www.jilldevine.com/ Two Kids and A Career Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jilldevine/?hl=en Two Kids and A Career Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JillDevineMedia/ Thank you to our sponsor: Evoke Creative

英语每日一听 | 每天少于5分钟
第993期:Family Routine

英语每日一听 | 每天少于5分钟

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 4, 2020 3:39


更多英语知识,请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Paul: Hi, Amy.Amy: Hi.Paul: So we're talking about routines and in the evening, what's your usual routine?Amy: Get home, wash hands, usually just try and get the dinner organized. Dinner and get my daughter ready for bed, usually. Just get her sorted before I think about relaxing or doing anything else because if I sit down, I never want to stand back up again when I get from work.So yeah, my evening routine is usually pretty steady. Just get everybody fed, the youngest person washed into bed, and then I can relax. How about you?Paul: Yeah, I live alone, so I get back from work and I try to cook for myself. So most nights of the week, I'll probably go home and I then go to the supermarket, get some stuff to cook and cook dinner and then maybe relax in front of my computer, watch some TV and maybe do some work.But maybe that's my routine for about five nights of the week. And then maybe, the other two nights, I'll go out with friends and go for dinner and maybe go for a few drinks.Amy: Sounds good.Paul: Yeah.Amy: Yeah, I was thinking about my weekday routine. I guess weekend routine is more relaxed. It's not as stuck, I guess. The weekend, yeah, we'd maybe go for dinner or go for a bath.Paul: So Amy, you sound, you know, very much into family life. Do you ever sort of miss being single?Amy: My single life routine?Paul: Yeah.Amy: I think I sometimes miss the freedom and maybe the—especially the freedom with my finances, just being able to spend my money on myself, going out to concerts or nightclubs. Yeah, sometimes but not very much. I think what has replaced it is good for my current lifestyle. I think it suits me. I'm happy.Paul: So you'd recommend family life to somebody like me who's single?Amy: If you find the right family, I think yeah. Family life is good. It's fun. You'd find that families can stick with other families and the adults can still have a laugh and have adult conversation and the kids can play. If the kids are happy, then the parents are happy and you can still have a laugh and hopefully, not talk about too many childish things. You don't have to talk about changing nappies or anything—Paul: So you still have a social life then?Amy: We try to, yes. We try to. Yeah, when budget allows and our daughter, she's five, so there's more freedom that comes when your children get older. When they're younger, then the rule a bit more, unfortunately. But such as life. I would recommend it, Paul, yes.Paul: Okay. I'll have to think seriously about it. Thanks, Amy.Amy: You're welcome.

英语每日一听 | 每天少于5分钟
第993期:Family Routine

英语每日一听 | 每天少于5分钟

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 4, 2020 3:39


更多英语知识,请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Paul: Hi, Amy.Amy: Hi.Paul: So we're talking about routines and in the evening, what's your usual routine?Amy: Get home, wash hands, usually just try and get the dinner organized. Dinner and get my daughter ready for bed, usually. Just get her sorted before I think about relaxing or doing anything else because if I sit down, I never want to stand back up again when I get from work.So yeah, my evening routine is usually pretty steady. Just get everybody fed, the youngest person washed into bed, and then I can relax. How about you?Paul: Yeah, I live alone, so I get back from work and I try to cook for myself. So most nights of the week, I'll probably go home and I then go to the supermarket, get some stuff to cook and cook dinner and then maybe relax in front of my computer, watch some TV and maybe do some work.But maybe that's my routine for about five nights of the week. And then maybe, the other two nights, I'll go out with friends and go for dinner and maybe go for a few drinks.Amy: Sounds good.Paul: Yeah.Amy: Yeah, I was thinking about my weekday routine. I guess weekend routine is more relaxed. It's not as stuck, I guess. The weekend, yeah, we'd maybe go for dinner or go for a bath.Paul: So Amy, you sound, you know, very much into family life. Do you ever sort of miss being single?Amy: My single life routine?Paul: Yeah.Amy: I think I sometimes miss the freedom and maybe the—especially the freedom with my finances, just being able to spend my money on myself, going out to concerts or nightclubs. Yeah, sometimes but not very much. I think what has replaced it is good for my current lifestyle. I think it suits me. I'm happy.Paul: So you'd recommend family life to somebody like me who's single?Amy: If you find the right family, I think yeah. Family life is good. It's fun. You'd find that families can stick with other families and the adults can still have a laugh and have adult conversation and the kids can play. If the kids are happy, then the parents are happy and you can still have a laugh and hopefully, not talk about too many childish things. You don't have to talk about changing nappies or anything—Paul: So you still have a social life then?Amy: We try to, yes. We try to. Yeah, when budget allows and our daughter, she's five, so there's more freedom that comes when your children get older. When they're younger, then the rule a bit more, unfortunately. But such as life. I would recommend it, Paul, yes.Paul: Okay. I'll have to think seriously about it. Thanks, Amy.Amy: You're welcome.

英语每日一听 | 每天少于5分钟
第993期:Family Routine

英语每日一听 | 每天少于5分钟

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 4, 2020 3:39


更多英语知识,请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Paul: Hi, Amy.Amy: Hi.Paul: So we're talking about routines and in the evening, what's your usual routine?Amy: Get home, wash hands, usually just try and get the dinner organized. Dinner and get my daughter ready for bed, usually. Just get her sorted before I think about relaxing or doing anything else because if I sit down, I never want to stand back up again when I get from work.So yeah, my evening routine is usually pretty steady. Just get everybody fed, the youngest person washed into bed, and then I can relax. How about you?Paul: Yeah, I live alone, so I get back from work and I try to cook for myself. So most nights of the week, I'll probably go home and I then go to the supermarket, get some stuff to cook and cook dinner and then maybe relax in front of my computer, watch some TV and maybe do some work.But maybe that's my routine for about five nights of the week. And then maybe, the other two nights, I'll go out with friends and go for dinner and maybe go for a few drinks.Amy: Sounds good.Paul: Yeah.Amy: Yeah, I was thinking about my weekday routine. I guess weekend routine is more relaxed. It's not as stuck, I guess. The weekend, yeah, we'd maybe go for dinner or go for a bath.Paul: So Amy, you sound, you know, very much into family life. Do you ever sort of miss being single?Amy: My single life routine?Paul: Yeah.Amy: I think I sometimes miss the freedom and maybe the—especially the freedom with my finances, just being able to spend my money on myself, going out to concerts or nightclubs. Yeah, sometimes but not very much. I think what has replaced it is good for my current lifestyle. I think it suits me. I'm happy.Paul: So you'd recommend family life to somebody like me who's single?Amy: If you find the right family, I think yeah. Family life is good. It's fun. You'd find that families can stick with other families and the adults can still have a laugh and have adult conversation and the kids can play. If the kids are happy, then the parents are happy and you can still have a laugh and hopefully, not talk about too many childish things. You don't have to talk about changing nappies or anything—Paul: So you still have a social life then?Amy: We try to, yes. We try to. Yeah, when budget allows and our daughter, she's five, so there's more freedom that comes when your children get older. When they're younger, then the rule a bit more, unfortunately. But such as life. I would recommend it, Paul, yes.Paul: Okay. I'll have to think seriously about it. Thanks, Amy.Amy: You're welcome.

25th Hour Podcast
Episode #10: Creating a Life with Events Supported by Your Dollars and Cents

25th Hour Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 24, 2020 53:18


Every week it is my goal to share stories from successful business owners and their relationship with time. Today’s guest is Amy Irvine, CFP®, EA, MPAS®, CCFC. Amy is the Founder and Owner of Rooted Planning Group, a group that consists of 5 financial planners and 2 part-time staff members.She holds a Master’s Degree in financial planning and is a Certified Financial PlannerTM, Enrolled Agent, Certified College Financial Consultant, and a Financial Wellness Coach with over 26 years of financial planning and industry experience. Amy is passionate about family, finances, and wine, which comes through in who she is and what she does. She describes herself as a wife, daughter, good friend, who happens to also be a financial planner.Amy is passionate about helping her clients create a life with events that are supported by their dollars and cents. In order to maximize the number of clients Amy can serve, she deliberately created a company where each employee is maximizing their strengths and skills. Listen in to find out how Amy controls her time.Time Management Strategies for Success: Compartmentalize - “If I'm working on a group of tasks, I shut everything else down. I really have that particular time I'm going to focus on that particular task.” Time Blocking - “ Mondays are our big client prep day. We can focus on what needs to be done for these clients.” Delegation - “Delegation is an evolving muscle. Everybody has to work on it, but we're working on it as a team to say, “Who really needs to be doing that job? What's my role at the company?”Email - “One of my big issues, and I think for a lot of people, is email. Using filters is huge.” Office hours - “We have office hours for team questions. Once a week, usually on a Wednesday, there is a time blocked on the calendar. Anybody can show up, anybody can sit in, you might not even have a question, but you just want to learn from somebody else.”Systems / processes - “When it's just you, or you and one other person, it's easy to have systems in place. It’s easy to tweak them and easy to follow through on them. When you start adding team members, you find that many of those systems were great for one or two people, but you have to modify them when more and more team members start to become involved in that process.”Here’s how Amy likes to spend her 25th Hour:Learning about wine, going to wineriesResources Referenced:Wine and Dime PodcastClockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself by Mike MichalowiczReady to chat with Amy? You can reach her here:WebsiteFacebookLinkedIn TwitterYouTubeReady to accomplish more while working less? Take this 2-minute quiz !

Whats Good Dough?
Amy and Marcus from Hella Pie Pizza Co

Whats Good Dough?

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 18, 2020 47:03


These two are so awesome. From community building to working as a team, they make pizza happen in the city of Tracy CA. They are changing the narrative of what pizza means. We talk about starting off as a mobile wood fired oven joint and the ups and downs they experienced with that. And of course, we discuss their soon to open brick in mortar in the heart of downtown tracy. #50west10thstbaby. Check them out on IG @hellapiepizzaco Order from them at the Tracy Farmers Market #whatsgooddough #pizza #sfeats #bayareaeats #pizzalover #pizzaismylife #pizzalove #flavors #pizzaholic #pizzalover #pizzaporn #pizzagram #instafood #homemadepizza #pizzalife #pizzatime #foodie #podcasts Full Transcript Here Marcus: Value and build relationships because it makes everything a lot more easier. Amy: You have people in your corner supporting you and helping you rather than trying to work against you. So that's been huge for us. Eidref: What's happening? What's good dough? It's your boy Eidref. How y'all doing today? How are y'all doing? I'm doing great in case any of you are wondering. Today, we have Amy and Marcus, the dynamic duo of Hella Pie Pizza CO in Tracy, California. And today's episode, we talk about outgrowing your oven. You didn't think it was possible, did you? You thought you could be on that rock boxer Unikoda forever. Now actually, they start it off with a mobile wood fired oven. And yet that was too small for them. So a very, very good lesson from them there. We also talk about transitioning, making the move from mobile to a brick and mortar, and talk about the associated benefits along with that. We also talk about being rented out. Very interesting concept. And by that you're gonna have to listen to find out more. And last but not least, we brag about how awesome this pizza community truly is. This is a great episode so sit back, relax and enjoy the show. And remember to always ask, what's good dough? I like to start the show off by asking this question. There's no right or wrong answer and I would love an answer from both of you. What's good though? Amy: I love that. Go ahead, Marcus. What's good dough?

Living Corporate
221 : Taking Time (w/ Arlan Hamilton)

Living Corporate

Play Episode Listen Later May 5, 2020 20:49


Our very own Amy C. Waninger has the honor of chatting with Arlan Hamilton, founder and managing partner of Backstage Capital and author of "It's About Damn Time," which was released TODAY! Arlan went from homeless in three years to running Backstage Capital, a venture capital firm that solely invests in companies founded by women, people of color and LGBTQ entrepreneurs. She graciously shares a bit about why she started her fund and wrote her book, talks about what it is about under-estimated talent that she thinks makes them a great bet in business, and she tells us how she gets herself into the right mindset to walk in and own really intimidating rooms. Check the show notes to find out more about her book!Interested in her new book? Check out ItsAboutDamnTime.com.Connect with Arlan on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can find out more about Backstage Capital on their website. They're also on FB, IG, and Twitter. Find out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here.Help food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.Visit our website.TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate, and listen. Really excited to bring the episode that we have for y'all today. For those of y'all who are in the know, when you talk about venture capital, when you talk about inclusion and equity within the venture capital space, you know who Arlan Hamilton is, okay? So I'm not gonna steal any of Amy C. Waninger's thunder, but I just want to do, like, a quick thank you and shout-out to Arlan for being on Living Corporate, and really excited for y'all to check out the episode, because the next thing you hear, they're gonna get right into it, so I just wanted to make sure I gave a little bit of context that you're gonna be listening to Arlan Hamilton and her talking about her latest book as well as her company, Backstage Capital. 'Til next time, y'all. Peace.Amy: Arlan, thank you so much for joining me. How are you today?Arlan: I'm doing pretty good. How about you?Amy: I'm doing well. So we're recording this kind of in the midst of all of this coronavirus craziness, and the episode will be released on your book launch day, on May 5th, and so if you can, just project forward to book launch. How are you feeling?Arlan: Well, I'm probably feeling the same way I'm feeling today, which is just a few days prior, which is incredibly excited and honored that I have the opportunity to even have a book coming out and coming out on a publisher, and it's just been a really great experience so far. I heard so many different stories from different authors of, like, how their experiences have gone in the past, from indie to published, and mine has just been really great.Amy: That is fantastic. And the book is wonderful. I got to read an advance copy as part of your launch team. I enjoyed it so much. And a lot of the questions I normally ask in this series you've covered in your book, and so I want to make sure people go there, but one question I did want to ask you about is what has surprised you the most about the venture capital space? Now that you're on the other side of it.Arlan: I don't know if it surprised me, but it's been kind of reinforced that there's just--money is a tool, you know? There's no one who is more important than the next person. And yes, there are some people who have a little bit more power, a little bit more strategically have placed them in places with more authority, but really there's an equality that I still believe in, and it drives me to do what I do, and it's why I started my fund. It's why I wrote the book "It's About Damn Time," because it felt like--one of the things was it was about damn time everybody realizes that we're all on this spinning rock together and that just because you're a venture capitalist doesn't make you any better than the next person.Amy: Definitely. And you talk about in your book the statistic that's jarring to me, that while white men make up about 30% of the population in the country, they get about 90% of capital investment. And your fund is a step in the direction to kind of undo that math and to make the playing field a little bit more equitable. How is that going? Like, do you feel like you're at the point where it's starting to shift, or do you think that there's opportunity for more people to come in and do what you're doing and build this space a whole lot bigger? Arlan: I think both. I think there has been absolute change in the last five years, four and a half years since I started Backstage Capital. It was a completely different playing field back then, and that was only a few years ago. So I absolutely see change. Obviously it's not fast enough. It's not enough. So there's plenty of room for better change and for more change, and that's where I'm excited about the future and about--one of the things in my book is about empowering other people to understand that they can join, you know? They can still join this technical revolution and all of that, because there's just so much more left to do. There's so many people who are doing it too. I don't want to ever say that it's only me. I mean, there are plenty of people who are black or brown [and?] women, who are investors, who are trying to change those statistics for the better. But yeah, I think if I hadn't seen some change for the better I wouldn't have been able to keep going, and so I've seen it. Most of it has come from individuals taking the reins and saying, "Look, I'm not going to wait for something to come save me. I'm going to put this into my own hands, and I'm going to start a company or continue a company that perhaps is bootstrapped or that has more revenue [and that?] employs people, and I'm not gonna only count on these few select guys who have a bunch of money.Amy: You know, it's interesting because right now--and I know that you just recently interviewed Mark Cuban and he said now's a great time to start a business, 'cause when people panic you double down, and when people are comfortable, that's when you should panic, right? What industries do you see right now in the midst of what we're dealing with with coronavirus, what industries do you see picking up a lot of innovation right now?Arlan: Well, of course the ones that are for the moment, right? So for instance companies that are selling products that are really helpful right now. We have products in our portfolio that when we first signed up them to our accelerator last year people laughed. They said, "Why do you have a toilet paper company in your portfolio? Aren't you a venture capitalist?" But we saw that they were doing things in a more sustainable way. They were saving tons and tons, literally, of trees every year, and they were fun and they had a great marketing strategy, and today they can't keep up with the demand, and they're doing it in a way that's more sustainable, which is really fantastic. So you have companies like that. We have a company in our portfolio also from the accelerator called Tambua Health that allows doctors to test for lung diseases using a smartphone. And of course last year we just thought, "This is really amazing, and we want to see what it can do," and today now it's of course going to be very helpful during the age of coronavirus. So I think, like, you're seeing a lot of health tech companies that are gonna do well if they can revamp. You're seeing companies that are manufacturing other things, that are now saying, "Let me manufacture some PPE," some personal protective gear for health care workers and essential workers, but right now and in the future I think you're gonna see a lot more education companies, things that are content-driven online, and then the infrastructure to make that easier for people to get to and to see it. And of course people are talking about "What's the future of work going to look like?" And I don't know if we know yet. I don't know if the last four weeks or six weeks or three months can tell us what the future of work will look like. What we do know is that it will be different from what we came to be used to in the past.Amy: Yes. I think that we're seeing, you know, right now a lot of accessibility that was built--infrastructure for accessibility that was built for people from the disability community that is benefiting all of us now, and I am hopeful, to your point that the future that we're building is more accessible by design and not by legislation.Arlan: Absolutely, and there are so many people who can take that into their own hands today, and I hope that that happens too, because honestly, we can't wait around for someone to make things right. We have to do things ourselves, and things are better--you know, they say, "Let me just do it myself." You know, "If I want it done right, I'll do it myself." Let's do that. I like that vibe, you know? Let's do it ourselves.Amy: You said in your book several times when you're looking at founders you pattern match for grit. And I wanted to ask you, because, you know, knowing your background, that you started this fund when, you know, you didn't really have a place to live. I mean, you were experiencing homelessness at the time. You know, grit is just all there for you. I mean, you have built something from nothing more times than I could count in the book, and I'm wondering, what is it about under-estimated talent you think that makes them gritty or that makes folks a better bet in business? Arlan: They're a great bet. We're a great bet. I think if you are someone who is underrepresented and underestimated, it doesn't seem weird or out there or strange to you to figure things out, to get yourself out of a bad situation, to get creative when you're facing for instance, like, the rent is due and you're like, "Okay, well, what can I do to make a couple extra hundred dollars that's legal and that is, you know, a little bit--" So can I use this other talent that I have? But in the world of Silicon Valley, if you think about that same story, one of the biggest stories that ever came out of Silicon Valley--and I remember reading about when it when I was homeless and just starting out. I read about Airbnb, and I read about these three guys who had this amazing idea to put a blow-up bed on a floor and charge people for a conference to come in and have bed and breakfast. And on top of that, when they were looking for money and they didn't have it, they created--because they were designers by trade--they created these cereal boxes that looked like Obama and John McCain, and they sold those, and they sold, like, $50,000 worth. And I remember reading that and people were losing their minds over how ingenious it was, how absolutely nothing--they had seen nothing like that, and I thought, "I've done that at least five times in a major way in the last 10 years of my adult life." Like, I've at least done it five times in a major way so I could avoid bankruptcy, avoid being on the street, avoid all these things, and I just think we as women, people of color, LGBTQ, disabled, I think we all have to, on a day-to-day basis, have to figure out a survival mode for ourselves because we are faced with so many things, whether they be big things that are easy to point out or the papercuts that I talk about, which is you get a papercut, you don't go around screaming about it, you know? But it hurts like hell. And it happens to you. It can happen to you and people don't necessarily believe it, but it's happening to you. It's this oppression that's given to us in papercuts, and so I just think because we're already built to figure things out--I mean, it's not like it's a great thing. I'm not happy that we have been so put into these corners where we have to find our way out, but we have. So that manifests itself in some really great ways sometimes. Sometimes it's negative. Sometimes we feel like we have to do things that are not okay, that are not legal, that are not moral, et cetera, et cetera, but more times than that, most of the time, you just see some really highly creative things. You ever met someone who gets in trouble a lot and you just say, "If they could just apply that to this other thing, they would save so much time and heartache, because they would probably be, like, the Hacker of the Year in Silicon Valley." That's how I feel about most people.Amy: Yeah, that's how I tell my kids. I'm like, "Use your powers for good. Stop getting into trouble."Arlan: Yeah, exactly.Amy: So one of the things about grit that you note in your book, you talk about hustle culture and how pervasive it is, and I know you've made some decisions now that--and I don't want to say that you're on the other side because I know there are always more places that you want to go and, you know, you're always wanting to take your work to the next level, but you've gotten to a place where you're not as hungry maybe as you were, you know, early on, and you're taking some time to evaluate your priorities and scale back some of your commitments and really focus on self-care, and I'm wondering, if you were talking to the you of the early days of Backstage Capital--which was only a few years ago--would you have the same advice of "Step back and, you know, let go of some of the hustle," or would you tell 5-Years-Ago-Arlan "No, keep going." You know, you don't--Arlan: Well, let me answer that. I don't know if I can answer that question exactly because I don't look at it that way. I do more today than I've ever done in my life when it comes to work, and that says a lot. What I tried to get across in the book and what I've tried to get across for the past year or so is that I'm not doing less, I'm working smarter. So I absolutely would tell the person five years ago and ten years ago to take better care of myself, for sure, and that's what I'm doing, but when it comes to the stakes, when it comes to the responsibility, the pressure, what's at stake here is the highest it's ever been, so I just don't know if I can answer that question as it was stated because I don't feel like I have kind of pulled back. What I've done is recalibrated and repurposed, and I've said instead of me knowing exactly how much a stack of paper from Office Depot costs us, I am going to spend that extra 7 minutes that I would have taken to learn that to put into a phone call with one of our portfolios. Maybe it's the 20th phone call of the week with a portfolio company, but it's one more that I may be able to make a right introduction or think about stuff. And I spend a lot of time thinking and strategizing. I've been doing that from very early on. I think it's important. I think it's part of our jobs as leaders to take a breath and strategize. So on one hand I absolutely feel like I'm doing the most, especially with even more going on now and a smaller team now, unfortunately, because of the coronavirus, but on the other hand I'm always gonna advocate for taking good care of yourself and looking at it from a bird's eye view and saying "What do I need to be doing, and what am I doing right now? And do they match?" And if they don't match, something's wrong. We have a mantra right now at my fund that I started just a few weeks ago when things got really scary. I said, "If it's stressful, we're doing it wrong," and that--you think about it and that's so simple, but that's helped us, like, make a lot of decisions. "Wait, is this stressful? 'Cause we have enough stress in our lives right now as a world and as a country. Are we gonna add stress that we don't need to?" So it's helped us to say no to certain phone calls and to a lot of responsibilities that we don't need to have on our plate right now.Amy: It probably also helps with how you allocate the work within your team. I think a lot of leaders struggle with that, to realize that just because they find a task odious or draining, there may be somebody on their team that, you know, they live for that kind of work.Arlan: Exactly, yeah, and it's an art, not a science, and it's something that I'm working on still, but I've gotten much better over time at delegating, and I think--you think as a leader you have to figure everything out and you have to be the smartest person, you have to lead your tribe into the fight. Hey, I mean, you're not--Ursula Burns, who used to be the CEO of Xerox, the first black woman to be at a Fortune 500 as a CEO. Worked her way up from secretary, I believe. She told me in a phone call last year when I was really stressed out--she yelled at me. I mean, she was not doing tough love. It was just tough. She said, "If you are the only person that's generating revenue for your whole team, you've effed it up. You are doing it wrong. Figure out a way that everybody pulls their own weight," and "You are doing a bad job." She said that to me. "You're doing a bad job if you're this stressed out. It's not something to be excited about and proud of. You're doing a bad job if you're this stressed out." So that just, like, slapped me around and I was like, "Wow, okay. On it." Amy: Yeah. That had to be hard to hear but very relieving at the same time.Arlan: Both, yeah. I just took it because I love the source, you know? I look at the source when people are giving me advice. If it's somebody who is anonymous online who's cussing me out and saying I'm doing a terrible job, I just don't give it any weight. If it's someone like what I just described to you, I give it some weight and I say, "Okay, let me think about why she said that to me and why she gave me her time to say it."Amy: That's very good advice. One of the points that you make in your book is that we all have the right to be in any room we want to be in, and that's a very difficult thing for some of us to internalize because we've been told our whole lives, you know, "Sit down. Be quiet. Be nice. Don't be pushy. Don't be aggressive." What's something for you that fortifies you before you walk into some of these really intimidating--what would be intimidating for most of us--rooms, right? How do you get yourself into the right mindset to walk in and own that room?Arlan: I do two things. One is I think about the people that, like, being successful in the room would positively affect. I make it more about them than me. Once I do that, that's a really great way to walk into a room. The best way of ever--like, I have learned over almost 40 years--this is it, this is the secret right here... you have to be okay with the outcome that you don't win the negotiation. So if you have something that you're going in for that's really, really something that you want really badly, if you tell yourself--and I do this all the time--if you say to yourself, "Okay, it's okay if I don't get this. It's truly okay. I'll have a backup plan. I'll have some other thing I'll do. It's okay if they say no." You've completely taken control of the situation. So you go in caring. You go in trying, but you also go in where their no doesn't knock you to your knees, and there's something about that in a negotiation where I've been able to talk to millionaires and billionaires and get what I want because what I want because I'm okay with "losing," quote-unquote, the deal. Amy: Fabulous. And if you can do that with the number of zeroes after the deals that you're looking at, the rest of us can probably do it with the number of zeroes in the deals that we're looking at, right? [laughs]Arlan: Yeah, it's powerful. It's very powerful.Amy: It is. Arlan Hamilton, author of "It's About Damn Time" and venture capitalist and just Twitter queen, thank you so much. This interview will just be the highlight of my podcasting career. I have so enjoyed talking to you. Arlan: Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. You're very good at it, and I appreciate you, and I hope that your listeners will pick up the hard cover at ItsAboutDamnTime.com. You can pick up the audio, which I read, or the e-book. Whichever, whatever tickles your fancy. It's all there.Amy: Get them all, because you're gonna want that audio-book in the car on the way to the negotiation, and you're gonna want the hard cover by the bed so you can read from it at night and get it into your subconscious before you go to sleep, and you're gonna want it on your Kindle too because that's where you can highlight everything and go find your notes later.Arlan: Well, there you go. You're hired. [laughs]Amy: All right, sounds good. [laughs] Thanks, Arlan, so much, and congratulations on your launch. This is huge.Arlan: Thank you so much. Appreciate you.

Embracing Intensity
171: Advocating for Special Education Students with Amy Campbell

Embracing Intensity

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 27, 2020 43:29


We all love that coworker who is filled with positive energy that spills over to everyone they touch. Certain people have a knack for celebrating the wins of others, and even though we all might want to be that person, it takes a specific mindset that most of us lack. It’s an incredible benefit when this person ends up in the field of education, where they can spend their days impacting the lives of students in positive ways. Amy Campbell is a friend and colleague in my school district. As the 2020 Washington State Teacher of the Year, she is clearly gifted and intense, but she has now become a public figure who is a fierce advocate for her special education students. Show Highlights: How Amy is intensely passionate about celebrating human success with her special education students who are moderately to profoundly impacted by their disabilities Amy’s personal brand of intensity involves profound anxiety around celebrations and wanting others to enjoy life to the fullest How her intensity made her feel different Culturally speaking, Amy had a lot of privilege as a white, middle-class woman who was uninhibited How she’s had to tone down her energy level that is more than most people, and how she “feels like the wrong person” at many times How we feel too intense in many leadership and gender roles How Amy uses her fire for good in having a positive presupposition about things and seeing her students with disabilities as assets and cause for celebration How Amy is a fierce advocate for inclusion How Amy harnesses the power of her intensity by understanding herself and having time for reflection How personal habits of organization and running help Amy How distance learning has affected Amy and the importance of her need for celebrations The best advice for Amy came from her principal, who told her that she should lead adults in the same ways she leads kids A recommended book: Fostering Resilient Learners by Kristin Souers Why Amy’s favorite part of her job is the way she believes that every person needs space for voice and choice’ How Amy loves helping students learn to communicate their needs and wants Parting advice from Amy: “You are enough. You are amazing. You are great. Look for the joy in this world and have a positive disposition. If you can share that joy, then you’re doing good in the world.” Resources: Find Amy on Facebook or Twitter (@the_mrscampbell) Check Amy out on YouTube Fostering Resilient Learners by Kristin Souers    

Living Corporate
157 See It to Be It : Holistic Living & Wellness Expert (w/ Lynnis Woods-Mullins)

Living Corporate

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 14, 2019 31:03


In our third See It to Be It podcast interview, Amy C. Waninger chats with PraiseWorks Health and Wellness founder Lynnis Woods-Mullins, a holistic living and wellness expert who focuses on helping women ages 40 and over embark on a successful journey to total wellness for their mind, body, and spirit using holistic practices, nutrition, and fitness. She shares with us how she navigated the transition from corporate America to where she is now and a 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 Lynnis on LinkedIn and Facebook! She also has Twitter and Instagram!Check out the PraiseWorks website!Read about "Power Up, Super Women: Stories of Courage and Empowerment" on Amazon!Visit Living-Corporate.com!TRANSCRIPTAmy: Lynnis, thank you so much for joining me today.Lynnis: Well, thank you so much for asking me. It's an honor to be able to share with you, Amy.Amy: Well, it's an honor to speak with you. So I was wondering if you could share a little bit about the work that you do. I know that you're a health and wellness expert and a wellness coach, and I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what that means, what do your clients look like, what do you do for your clients, and we'll start there.Lynnis: Okay. Well, I'm a certified health and wellness coach, and I specialize in working with women over 40, teaching them how to be well and how to live a more holistic life, and I do that through my online magazine. I have online classes. I also have coaching services for groups and 1-on-1. I have a podcast and webcast, and I also just recently wrote a book, as you know, and I focus on helping women make incremental lifestyle changes that can give them big results. I have a weight loss, or what I like to call a weight release, program. I also talk with women specifically about hormonal changes. You know, things that happen as we age and how we can minimize the impact of the aging process. I talk a lot about stress reduction. That's my specialty, stress reduction and anxiety and depression, of which I suffered from all three. And so I really focus on those kinds of things that happen as we age from 40 on, because after 40 there's some things that start happening that are really interesting, and many times you think perhaps you're prepared for that because you've heard your girlfriends talk about it. You might have not heard your mom talk about it, but you witnessed certain things. I'm telling you, everyone is different and every experience is different, and what I really try to lay out to women is that they're not alone in terms of going through that experience, but sometimes it can be a lonely experience because while you're going through it, a lot of times it's you get this inclination to [?] out and suffer in silence by yourself. You don't have to do that. And so my job or my role is to familiarize women with all of the different symptoms that might happen and to give them some encouragement to get knowledge on how to deal with it, because I truly believe that knowledge is power.Amy: You know, as you're speaking, I'm reminded of this thought that I've had repeatedly, that to be a woman is to live in stages of secrets and shame. Lynnis: That's true.Amy: When we're very young, you know, we get the talk about what's gonna happen to our bodies in adolescence, and we're pulled aside, and it's all in very hushed tones and, you know, like, girls passing tampons, you know, like, in middle school. You know, like, you don't want to be found out, right? And then, you know, in our teens, 20s, even our 30s, you know, pregnancy is--there's a lot of mystery surrounding pregnancy, right? Women throughout history have gotten pregnant. Women throughout history have miscarried. Women throughout history have had complications with their pregnancies. But we don't hear those stories. We sort of--like you said, we suffer in silence. We suffer alone. We don't talk about it. We're taught to feel shame about it. And I guess it never occurred to me that I'm on the cusp of yet another, you know, quietly--"go quietly into the night" sort of process and that that's another aspect of our lives as women that we don't talk publicly about.Lynnis: No, you're absolutely right. And yeah, suffering in silence is really true on so many different levels, but I can just share from my own experience. Each time that I got pregnant--and I have four daughters, they're all grown. They're all in their 30s and stuff. Well, one will be 27--each time that I got pregnant, I didn't tell anybody right away. My first pregnancy I wasn't married, so I didn't tell anybody, not even my mom, until I was, like, about seven months pregnant. I lived in a different city, so I just didn't want to talk [about it] because I wasn't married, you know? And I invited her to come and see me for the weekend, and she knew as soon as I opened the door. It might have been because my face was fuller, 'cause normally I'm a really, really thin person. You know, that might have been it, but she said she felt it even before that time. And I think with the other ones I didn't want to tell anybody because I didn't want to be judged by my family or my friends. I was married, but it was like, "Again?" Because they were so close together. One of my daughters--the two middle ones, were born 17 months apart. And, you know, I just didn't want to deal with that. "Don't you know about birth control?" and "How can you be a career person?" and all that, so I didn't tell anybody, and I look back at that and now I'm thinking, "How silly." I was married. It certainly was my prerogative if I wanted to have children. They were not planned. They were all, you know, wonderful "uh-ohs," but I think my biggest thing was that this went against the grain in terms of all of my preparation when it comes to climbing the corporate ladder and here I am pregnant again. I was pregnant basically for 10 years. Basically, you know? Because the ages of my children now are 27, 30, 32, and 34. So pretty close together, and I just didn't want to deal with that "Again?" kind of thing, so I didn't tell anybody. I look back at that now and I'm thinking, you know, "How much did we as women, no matter what the age is, become vested in people's opinion of us?" You know? We spend a lot of time preoccupied with that, and it's very painful because of course we can't read their minds and many times what we're thinking they may be thinking--which many times they're not even close to that, they're too busy with their own stuff--is really just projections on how we feel about ourselves, and I think the biggest message that I'd like to try to send to women in particular over 40, even at that stage when we should be so wise and know it all and know it more, is the need for self-love, because we just don't do that. We are our harshest critics. We don't give ourselves a break, and our breaks--if we do give ourselves a break, there's all this [?] that goes with it. There's that shame and guilt. And in order to really be well, there comes a point in your life when you really have to make a decision to let all that go and to be more present and stop worrying so much about what happened in the past, because what happened in the past really has added to who you are as a person, and that's a good thing. And not to be too preoccupied with the future or the lack of it, depending on your age, because, you know, the future never comes. Tomorrow never comes. It's always today today. And learning how to be more present in terms of your day-to-day existence.Amy: So thank you for that. I think that's absolutely true, and I would imagine that a lot of wellness comes from mindfulness and presence. Can you tell me a little bit about how you got into this work?Lynnis: Sure. I have another life. I have had three lives, maybe. Three main lives. You know, [?] this was my third life. Before this, my second life I was a human resource professional and did very well and got up to the, you know, director level, and I had the equivalent of what could be considered the American dream. I was married, had four kids, a big house in [?] and kids going to school and doing well, you know, husband very successful. You know, all of the stuff that you would think is supposed to be the American dream, and being a woman of color even more so, you know? As an African-American, I was earning the upper .5% for an African-American woman and for a woman in general the upper 2%. So I was doing well. But there was something missing in my life, and I had developed an anxiety disorder and didn't even know it, and my anxiety disorder was based upon post-traumatic stress, and my post-traumatic stress was based upon an incident that happened in my life that was a total surprise. I didn't know how to quite deal with it, and my really dealing with had to do with, you know, controlling the outcome. No matter what happened, I was gonna control it. Whether it was controlling my coworkers, my kids, my husband, my neighbors, my friends, you know? My life in general. I was going to control it in such a way where there would never be anymore surprises, which of course is insane.Amy: Yeah, that's not possible.Lynnis: Right? That's insane. It's not possible. So over time, after 27 years of that, I finally had an epiphany--or a breakdown, whatever you want to call it--to the point where I had to take a sabbatical, and I left this wonderful job for a year with the idea of going back, and after a year of reflection and going to--you know, really digging down deeper, I realized that I wasn't happy and I needed to figure out what would make me happy. And in my exploration of what kinds of things I could do to heal myself from this anxiety disorder, because I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and they put me on medication. And I realize now that I was never good at pills and things. I've always been interested in nutrition. I was a dancer in my first life, you know, and I was a nutrition minor in college, so I decided that I was going to find out more about this mind, body, spirit wellness movement, which started, you know, a while back. I got started in 2009. This has been almost 10 years now that I've been in business. It'll be 10 years in April of 2019. So I decided that I wanted to figure out a way to help women not go through what I went through and to begin to take a look at how can we be well in our mind, body, and spirit and to make that our quest? Our quest to be well in our minds, in our bodies, and in our spirits, because it's a continuum. It's not all about the body. It's not all about your spirit. It's not all about your mind. It is a continuum, and if any of those things aren't being cared for, then we're off-kilter and we risk the possibility of being unwell. And so that's how it all started. I put together a company called PraiseWorks, because at that time I thought I would teach women over 40 how to dance, praise dance. I am a classically trained ballet dancer. I have danced professionally. And then when I got in my late 40s, I started doing praise dance at my church. So I was gonna teach them how to dance, and I quickly found out after my first few classes that these women needed so much more than just dance. I had women who were [?] survivors. I had women who were dealing with empty nests and [?] relationships [?] that ended through divorce. Women who had high cholesterol, obesity, diabetes, and hormonal. Menopause. All of the things that you begin to deal with as you age, and so I thought "Okay, what else can I do?" And so that's when I went back, got my certification in nutrition and health and holistic living and yoga and Pilates and all this stuff, and came up with these different virtual programs that can help women to be well. And it's been really interesting. It's been quite an adventure, because one of the things that I didn't anticipate, which I'm learning now, is that a lot of the women who were my age--'cause at that time I was ... 51 when I [?]. I still had another 15 years or so of working for corporate America. So everybody thought I was nuts. "How could you just leave, you know, a six-figure salary like that and start your own thing from scratch?" But, you know, I think in many ways I saved my life. I could have still been there, still been working, probably doing okay, making lots of money, but would have had the anxiety disorder or would have gained a whole lot of weight as a result of the medication they wanted to put me on and probably would have began to start falling apart, because any time you're on any kind of medication, if it's not organic or holistic--any kind of pharmaceutical--it fixes normally the symptom and not the causation, and it causes other symptoms later on. So I feel like I saved my own life, and in the process of saving my own life I'm hoping that I've helped women begin to save theirs in terms of making other choices for their lives. And so that began my goal to really get the word out, virtually at first, even though like I said it was a challenge 'cause a lot of women my age, you know, weren't really into, you know, social media and things like that back in 2009, but that's changed over the years. [?] to not just inspire women 40 and over, but my children are saying "Mom, millennials, we need this kind of stuff. We need to know." They're on a quest and searching, and I never really thought about that, but they're right. So now I'm beginning to think about approaching--if you want to get to my age, [laughs] the ripe-old age of almost 62, then you're gonna want to do some of this stuff that, you know, I've [?] over the last 10 years.Amy: Absolutely. It's so much easier to prevent diabetes, heart disease and those kinds of things than it is to recover from them. High blood pressure, high cholesterol. The list goes on, right?Lynnis: And so many of those kinds of diseases, so many of them are lifestyle choices. And then coupled with the fact that growing older your body is gonna go through some changes anyway, and if you had decided to make a lifestyle choice to exercise more, to eat differently, to lower your stress levels, then your aging process could have been a lot more of a positive experience, and I'm trying to send that message out to women and all of the people who love them that there is a different way, that you don't have to go down that road.Amy: And I think, you know, going back to what you said about millennials, I just hearing millennial burnout is such a problem. You know, millennials and Gen Z are taking on so much stress because, you know, for example, college has gotten--the cost of college has gotten out of control. The return on that investment has diminished almost to nothing for a lot of people, and so they're trying to pay back more debt with worse--you know, with lower income than their parents, and then there's still the pressure of "When are you gonna start a family? When are you gonna buy a house?" Right? All of those expectations that we put on people basically from the 1940s, right? "When are you going to fulfill the American dream that's almost 100 years old?"Lynnis: Which is really the American nightmare, trying to achieve that right now, 'cause right now I'm visiting my daughter in D.C., and first of all, I'm immensely proud of her because she has done this by herself, and sometimes I would feel guilty about not being able to help her more once she finished her education, but I'm glad ultimately that she went this way, because I'm not always gonna be here. My husband's not gonna always be here. I had three other daughters I had to try to get through their phases of education, but it's interesting, the lifestyle that she's living is great, but it's extremely expensive. You know, her rent is more than my mortgage--and I live in California, so I don't have a cheap mortgage. But I look at how these--I don't want to say young people. I hate using that phrase because it makes me seem like I'm 1,000 years old, but I'm looking at how they're living and the pace within which you're living. I mean, they never--they're on all the time. They never relax. Even their social thing is--I don't want to say it's a competition, but it's stressful, you know, getting to the place because of the traffic, finding a place to park if you are driving. Or being in public transportation, having to be aware of your surroundings all the time. Then you get there and you have to deal with in your mind, "Okay, how much can I afford?" You know, when the bill comes, and then in-between that you're constantly on your phone. While you're talking to your friends and stuff, you're on the phone, you're doing all this stuff, and I'm thinking, "Wow, this is a lot of fun, but it's stressful fun." There's never a point where people just stop and just be, unless [?], like, "Yoga time," or "Medication time," you know? There's not--there doesn't seem to be a point of really disconnecting. And you're right, we in this society, no matter what age we are, have a tendency to want to meet the expectations of whatever was set before us. You know, for me it was being raised in the 70s and trying to meet the expectations of where my parents were, because they happened to have been college-educated, which was, you know, very unusual back then, because they were still in the early 50s. But now the expectation is my children do the same, but I realize that two of my girls, who had children in their late 20s, it might be a little bit more difficult for them to achieve the same level as I have, because times are different. Times are different. And so I think that part of being well is realizing that and giving yourself a break and realizing that these times are different, and you have to set your own expectations based upon what it is you want for your life. I mean, if you enjoy that pace and that's where you're at that's fine, but if you know that there's something else that you want to do, that's okay too. And with the college experience, I'm telling you--I've always felt this way, but I especially feel this way now. I wish we had more of the European model that gives people opportunities for apprenticeships and things like that, because college is not for everyone, and that does not mean that they're dumb or stupid or any of that. Ask Bill Gates. He'll tell you that, okay? And some of the other folks sitting up there in Google right now. They don't necessarily have, you know, grad degrees. The idea of getting a degree and then going on and getting the grad degree, because you don't know what else you're going to do, and then going on and getting your Ph.D., and then, you know, [?], I don't think that was the expectation at the time. So I think maybe perhaps we need to be more--I hate to use the word authentic. It's become such a buzzword. But more true to ourselves and that inner desire and tapping into that, because I do believe where your passion is, so lies your treasure. Amy: That's a beautiful sentiment. I love that. So for people who are where you were a few years ago, still climbing the corporate ladder, still trying to secure the bag, right, what can you offer them in terms of--what are the signs that they're approaching an unhealthy place? What do they need to watch for?Lynnis: Well, never disconnecting. For me it was two cell phones and a pager and my laptop, and this started back in '92 and went on until 2008, and I was raising kids at the same time and traveling. At one time I was about 60, 70% travel. I would make a turn-around--I would do a red-eye... an early-morning flight to Texas from California and take a red-eye back to be able to get there in time before they woke up the next morning, and then I would work from home because--I would, you know, dial into a landline or whatever back in the 90s, but never disconnecting and thinking that, by never disconnecting, you are being the best that you can be, that you're really doing a great job. The reality is more than likely you're not doing a great job. More than likely mistakes are going to happen. Disconnecting, and you start seeing those little mistakes pop up that, you know, normally you would not make. That's a sign, especially when you know that this a job that you're prepared for and that you're confident in and all of a sudden things start happening. Another sign is the inability to sleep, to be able to disconnect enough to sleep to calm down. Or if you're sleeping, your sleep is constantly interrupted by waking up, going to the bathroom several times during the course of the night, not having a deep sleep. That's a sign. Another sign is when you begin to realize that you don't have any relationships, and I'm not talking about love relationships. I'm talking about friendships. Your friendships are also tied to work, which is not a bad thing, but there was a time where you didn't work at that place and you had friends outside of work or friends outside of your profession. So disconnecting from relationships that aren't work-related. Also not being able to just sit and be. Feeling the need to always be doing something. And I'm not talking--and you can sit and be and binge watch, but you're still doing something, but the idea of just being in a state of being, if you're having problems with any of those things, that's a sign of burnout. Anxiety, which is a common thing that most Americans suffer from that no one is really talking about. My anxiety was so bad for almost 10 years that I thought it was normal. I started drinking coffee because of my anxiety, believe it or not. It seemed to be the only thing that would take away the scary feeling. The scary feeling was I would be going--I would wake up in the morning and it would feel like I was going straight downhill on a roller coaster with no restraints. I mean, like, going down the hill and nothing holding me in, but I'm still in the chair. Somehow I'm not falling out, but can you imagine how scary that is, thinking that you might fall out? That. It was the fear of the unknown. That all came from my post-traumatic stress that I found out later that I had as a result of not really going through the process of grieving. And the post-traumatic stress, and I talk about it in the book, it all came from how I found out that my mother had died. She was hit by a fire truck on her way to work. She was 56 years old. And how I found out was really traumatic, very traumatic, and I had just had a baby, 5 weeks old, and I had a 17-month old and a just turned 4-year-old. So it was--and I was on maternity leave at the time, but I was a regional manager, and I had, like, three or four branches I was in charge of, and what had happened was on the day that she died I had just seen her, and I said I would see her later and went to my office to show everybody my baby. And this was before cell phones. And my dad, I guess I must have mentioned it to him when I was over at the house in the morning, 'cause he was on his way to work too--'cause my parents were in my mid-50s. I was 31. And so I think I had mentioned to them that I was going by my office to show off the baby, and he called me there and he said, "I want you to go home," to the family home, because my grandfather was visiting from Georgia, my dad's dad, and he was just beginning to exhibit signs of dementia. So he wanted me to go home and stay with Grandaddy and that he would meet me there at the house a little bit later 'cause, he said, "Your mom's been in an accident. I don't know how serious it is, but I need you to go home." So I said okay, and, you know, I had a feeling something was wrong, and I had left my organizer--back then they had Ben Franklin organizers. I left my Ben Franklin organizer at work, and we didn't have cell phones back then. Didn't have any [?] numbers. Couldn't remember any numbers 'cause I was so scared. I suddenly wasn't feeling right. So I called my mom's office and, you know, Lucille [?], my mom's secretary, and I said, "Listen, I need to call someone to come and stay with me and I don't have any numbers with me," and she said, "Oh, yeah, I guess you would want to have someone come stay with you. You know, we are so sorry. We loved your mother." And I was like "...E-D? Loved? Past tense? You mean she's gone?" And that's when she realized, "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" And then she dropped the phone, and I could hear--then I could hear people in the background crying. 'Cause I mean, it had been, like, not even a whole hour since this had happened, and that's when I began immediately to never have that shock again. Can you imagine? I mean, even now when I think about it I can still feel that... that decision. Boom. Because I have babies to take care of. I've got a job to do. I have a husband. I have a home. And my dad, I've got to be there for him, and I've got to be there for my sister who's still at school, at 17, graduating in a few months, turning 18 next week. I gotta call my sister in LA who just finished her master's [?]. I gotta take care of this stuff, so I don't have time to feel," and, you know, that's where [?], and that's where the anxiety sort of began, that moment, and that was definitely post-traumatic stress. And so I write about that and what I learned from that. They gotta read the book [?].Amy: That's right. So the book that you're mentioning is called Power Up Super Women: Stories of Courage and Empowerment, and Lynnis is one of 17 authors of this anthology, and I'm another author on this anthology. My story is not nearly as traumatic or dramatic, but all of these stories are designed to help women kind of come to terms with who they are, what they want out of life, and how to go about getting it, and there's some truly, truly inspirational stories in this. Lynnis, I have two more questions for you today. I wanted to ask you to finish this sentence. "I feel included when ______."Lynnis: I feel included when I'm contributing something of value to society, to my friends, to my family. I want to be of value. I just don't want to be taking up space. I don't want just because I am successful to be what defines me. I want that success to be tied to adding value, you know? Adding value to someone's life, adding value to someone's experience. I want to build a legacy. I just don't want to be successful and make a lot of money but no one remembers what I did. And I don't know why I tear up [?], but at 62, you know, that's something that's really important to me, to be of value.Amy: Yeah, to leave a lasting impact. I understand that, absolutely. Now can you finish this sentence? "When I feel included, I _______."Lynnis: When I feel included, I feel a sense of joy.Amy: Oh, that's beautiful.Lynnis: Yes. I never really experienced what true joy was until I left corporate America, quite frankly. And it's not that I'm saying corporate America is a bad thing. Corporate America is just a small sliver of what defines you, and if you can arrive at that early on in your career, then you'll be okay, because the real joy you're going to feel are the things that come at you unexpectedly, and in corporate America you don't want any surprises, but in life you do. You want good surprises in terms of, you know, the experiences that you have, and so yeah, it brings me great joy when I am able to feel included that way.Amy: Well, Lynnis, I can tell that you're having an impact, not just on your clients but on everyone around you. You have so much--you exude joy, you exude peace, and I am so grateful to know you. Thank you so much.Lynnis: Well, thank you, Amy. It's really an honor to talk with you. I'm so glad that you asked me. This is exciting.

Living Corporate
151 See It to Be It : Career Optimization Consultant

Living Corporate

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 30, 2019 24:24


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.

Live Your Spa Life
#101: Feminine Powerhouses - Amy Cheryl!

Live Your Spa Life

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 19, 2019 33:23


Amy Cheryl, Founder and Creatrix of Women's Worth Academy (WWA), is a modern day medicine woman providing the transformational sacred space and skill-set for all women to embody who they truly are as the feminine powerhouses they were born to be...resulting in fully owning their intuition, eradicating self-doubt and fear, and having more confidence, clarity and calmness so they can live a fully expressed and prosperous life filled with pleasure, joy and magic...living their truth unapologetically where all comes to them on THEIR terms freeing themselves from the internal prison of the lies and programming that society has instilled in them keeping them from claiming their power.Known for her magnetic energy and warm heart, Amy is a widely sought-after speaker who knows how to light up a stage and move a room with her deep spiritual women's wisdom, teachings and inspiration. She IS the embodiment of her message and has been invited to speaking gigs all over the US as well as Dubai, sharing the stage with global leaders such as Marianne Williamson. Amy has had multiple publications including SHAPE and SELF-magazine, Daily Candy and Vital Juice Daily to name a few.Important Topics:On living unapologeticallyHow she takes a stand for women and claiming their powerHow she consciously creating her lifeThe difference between knowledge and knowingnessAnalogy for women to help them prevent doubting themselvesWhen is the right time to consult a mentorHow to have loving conversations versus conflicting ones Three key secrets to be in our power as womenQuotes;"Awareness is the key to transformation.""Practice makes permanents."Connect with Amy:You can apply for your complimentary Feminine Powerhouse Breakthrough Exploration Call at: http://www.womensworthacademy.com/apply-for-an-exploration-call-with-amyClaim Your Free Gift To Squash Self-Doubt and Ignite Your Confident Queen Self at: www.womensworthacademy.com Email - amy@womensworthacademy.comInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/amycheryl313/Other links and resources:Free Gift from Diane (Life Reset Quiz) - https://liferesetquiz.com/BANKCODE - https://MyBankCode.com/VictoryDiane Halfman's website - http://www.DianeHalfman.comWant to know more about yourself?Some people ask me how to RESET their life.Some people ask me how to be more sensual.Others are wondering how to make more money. How to be more successful. How to start a business. All of these questions and more are what I answer in my programs.Come see me at http://www.DianeHalfman.com

Live Your Spa Life
#101: Feminine Powerhouses - Amy Cheryl!

Live Your Spa Life

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 18, 2019 33:23


Amy Cheryl, Founder and Creatrix of Women's Worth Academy (WWA), is a modern day medicine woman providing the transformational sacred space and skill-set for all women to embody who they truly are as the feminine powerhouses they were born to be...resulting in fully owning their intuition, eradicating self-doubt and fear, and having more confidence, clarity and calmness so they can live a fully expressed and prosperous life filled with pleasure, joy and magic...living their truth unapologetically where all comes to them on THEIR terms freeing themselves from the internal prison of the lies and programming that society has instilled in them keeping them from claiming their power.Known for her magnetic energy and warm heart, Amy is a widely sought-after speaker who knows how to light up a stage and move a room with her deep spiritual women's wisdom, teachings and inspiration. She IS the embodiment of her message and has been invited to speaking gigs all over the US as well as Dubai, sharing the stage with global leaders such as Marianne Williamson. Amy has had multiple publications including SHAPE and SELF-magazine, Daily Candy and Vital Juice Daily to name a few.Important Topics:On living unapologeticallyHow she takes a stand for women and claiming their powerHow she consciously creating her lifeThe difference between knowledge and knowingnessAnalogy for women to help them prevent doubting themselvesWhen is the right time to consult a mentorHow to have loving conversations versus conflicting ones Three key secrets to be in our power as womenQuotes;"Awareness is the key to transformation.""Practice makes permanents."Connect with Amy:You can apply for your complimentary Feminine Powerhouse Breakthrough Exploration Call at: http://www.womensworthacademy.com/apply-for-an-exploration-call-with-amyClaim Your Free Gift To Squash Self-Doubt and Ignite Your Confident Queen Self at: www.womensworthacademy.com Email - amy@womensworthacademy.comInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/amycheryl313/Other links and resources:Free Gift from Diane (Life Reset Quiz) - https://liferesetquiz.com/BANKCODE - https://MyBankCode.com/VictoryDiane Halfman's website - http://www.DianeHalfman.comWant to know more about yourself?Some people ask me how to RESET their life.Some people ask me how to be more sensual.Others are wondering how to make more money. How to be more successful. How to start a business. All of these questions and more are what I answer in my programs.Come see me at http://www.DianeHalfman.com

Smart Leaders Sell Podcast
SLS164 Amy Landino, Six Figure Success Stories with Jessica Lorimer

Smart Leaders Sell Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 22, 2019 31:55


If you identify as an introvert you’ll love this episode with Amy Landino. Founder of Aftermarq, a YouTube pro aka vlogging star, best selling author and an international speaker who has recently joined Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerSpeakers, being a self-proclaimed introvert hasn’t held her back. In the last 10 years in the industry Amy has encountered every situation you can imagine and she debunks myths and shares the story behind her business success. In This Episode: Running a business as an introvert Recharging your energy Selling for the right reasons Choosing the people who are for you Being true to your content “I feel we are so lucky in entrepreneurship because everyday is so different and so adventurous.” - Amy “I get drained by large groups of people and I need some time alone to recharge.” - Jess “I stay in tune with my creative roots.” - Amy “It's all about how well you know your person and how willing you are to let go the people who aren't for you.” - Jess “I feel very fortunate that most of the time the feedback I get is ‘oh my gosh, you're the same person’.“ - Amy “You have to build a relationship and then you leverage the relationship.” - Jess “I truly do care about what I'm doing which is why I'm not going to give a ____ answer.” - Amy Other Episodes Mentioned: SLS126 Six Figure Success Stories with John Lee Dumas https://smartleaderssell.com/sls126-six-figure-success-stories-with-john-lee-dumas/ More Amy! Amy’s YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/amytv Amy’s Book: https://www.amazon.com/Vlog-Like-Boss-Online-Blogging/dp/1946114162   More Jess! The Dotties https://smartleaderssell.com/the-dotties/  http://bit.ly/SLSGroup https://jessicalorimer.com/supersize-your-sales https://jessicalorimer.com/list-building-legend https://www.instagram.com/jess_lorimer/ Content Disclaimer The information contained above is provided for information purposes only. The contents of this article, video or audio are not intended to amount to advice and you should not rely on any of the contents of this article, video or audio. Professional advice should be obtained before taking or refraining from taking any action as a result of the contents of this article, video or audio. Jessica Lorimer disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on any of the contents of this article, video or audio. Disclaimer: Some of these links are for products and services offered by the podcast creator.

Report the Magic
WDW: Amy's Multigenerational Trip Plus Food Allergy Planning Tips - 006

Report the Magic

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 7, 2019 85:32


Today I'm joined by Amy who blogs at Meet Me in Tomorrowland and she shares incredible details about multigenerational trips, which I think is just really helpful because planning a trip with a big extended family has a lot of extra details that you need to think about. Amy has been diagnosed with Celiac disease, so she also shares information about food allergies in Walt Disney World and how you handle them. Food allergies are such a serious topic and can cause anxiety and her perspective, knowledge and expertise around food allergies and your vacation is invaluable.  Trip Dates: October 28 - November 3 Resort Review: Disney's Animal Kingdom Villas - Kidani Village Disney's Boardwalk Villas  Animal Kingdom Lodge - Kidani Village  Sanaa Trip Planning Details Travel Party: Amy and her husband, her brother and her brother's girlfriend, Amy's father and Stepmother, her Grandmother, Aunt and Uncle  Travel Agent: No - Amy books through Disney Vacation Club Disney vacation club does an amazing job making sure that we have everything we need, that we have access to anything we might want and that we find out information about things you might not have known about before the trip. Their goal is to make sure that you have the perfect trip every time you come down. Tickets: Most of the travel party had Annual Passes Memory Maker: Yes (Included with the Annual Pass) Disney Dining Plan: No - Tables in Wonderland Dining in Disney World with a Food Allergy The Itinerary Arrival Day: Hollywood Studios Amy's Pro Tip: The credit card you use at check-in can be a security guarantee. Then at the end of your vacation, before you checkout, you can pay down your balance with Disney gift cards! This is a fantastic way to save money on your vacation because you can purchase Disney gift cards at a discounted rate at places like Raise, Target using your Red Card, BJs.  This is a great article about saving money with Disney gift cards. Disney's Hollywood Studios FastPass+:  Alien Swirling Saucers K'nex Disney's Character Warehouse Orlando Premium Outlets.  Uber  Lyft  This is a great article if you would like to learn more about Disney's Character Warehouse. Mater's Junkyard Jamboree.  Sci-Fi Dine-in Theater Restaurant Review Day Two: Disney's Hollywood Studios and Disney Springs FastPass+: Slinky Dog Dash Le Cellier Cookes of Dublin I have an unhealthy obsession with the new Disney dress shop and I may have spent way too much money in adorable dapper outfit. Day Three: Epcot's Food & Wine Festival and Sanaa Starlight Safari at Disney's Animal Kingdom Lodge. Amy highly recommends getting reservations for this because it does sell out (Call for Reservations (407) 939-7529). Day Four: Epcot and Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party What's a Magic Shot? Click here for a great article which explains everything you need to know about Magic Shots. Attending Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party...ON Halloween! Halloween party Teal Pumpkin Project spot for the parade Day Five: Magic Kingdom and Ohana Halloween to Christmas Ohana Review: Gluten Free Dining Ohana Day Six: Animal Kingdom FastPass+: Avatar Flight of Passage Amy's Pro Tip: The reason they had their Avatar Flight of Passage FastPass+ so late in the week is because when you get up early the morning that your FastPass+ booking window opens (either 30 or 60 days before your arrival day), start with the farther end of your week first. Everyone's going to be starting with their first day to and work through them systematically. Start out with your farthest day of your vacation first. If you do this, you are more likely to get those hard-to-get-FastPasses. For additional information on this strategy, read this article. Donald's Dino-Bash Restaurantosaurus and lounge Paddlefish Dining Review Paddlefish Departure Day: Magic Kingdom Amy's Favorite Restaurant: Table Service and Quick Service  Sci-Fi Dine in Theater Cosmic Ray's Starlight Cafe Favorite Vacation memories Definitely seeing those Christmas decorations for the first time. No matter how many times you have been there to see the big change over from one holiday to another, it is just spectacular. And you just stand there and think how hard these people must have worked all night to change this park over to be this whole new park in just a matter of hours. So that was really cool.  Decorating Disney Learn more about Amy You can learn more about Amy and how to vacation in Disney World with food allergies at Meet Me in Tomorrowland. Make sure to follow Amy on Instagram! **Report the Magic is not affiliated with Meet Me in Tomorrowland**

Smalley Marriage Radio
The greatest present of all time

Smalley Marriage Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 15, 2018 30:51


Amy: Hello listeners! This is Amy Smalley reminding you this holiday season that sometimes the very best present you can give your family is…...being….present. Michael: Oh Amy…. Amy: What? You don't get it? It's present like a gift but also like you know the present…. Michael: Oh no I get it, listeners I'm so sorry I think that may be the last time I let Amy open the show. Amy: Hey, everybody loves puns they're so, punny. Michael: oh no. Amy: You should probably put me in a punitentiary Michael: Listeners I'm so sorry I promise today's episode will not in fact be about puns. We are going to talk about how you need to make sure you remain present this holiday season so you don't miss out on all the wonderful memories happening all around you. Amy: So to find out about how to wrap up this present of presence, stay tuned! Distraction of the Day: I'm pretty excited about driverless cars but I just learned something from a legitimate scientific study that shows why driverless cars will be the greatest invention of our time! Amy, can you guess what would get me overly excited? BOOK US FOR A COMEDY NIGHT OR RELATIONSHIP EVENT https://www.smalleyinstitute.com/p/comedy-of-love Follow us on your favorite social app: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/smalleyinstitute/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MichaelandAmy/ Twitter https://twitter.com/Michael_Smalley

distractions michael oh amy you michael smalley amy so amy smalley
Smalley Marriage Radio
The greatest present of all time

Smalley Marriage Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 15, 2018 30:51


Amy: Hello listeners! This is Amy Smalley reminding you this holiday season that sometimes the very best present you can give your family is…...being….present. Michael: Oh Amy…. Amy: What? You don’t get it? It’s present like a gift but also like you know the present…. Michael: Oh no I get it, listeners I’m so sorry I think that may be the last time I let Amy open the show. Amy: Hey, everybody loves puns they’re so, punny. Michael: oh no. Amy: You should probably put me in a punitentiary Michael: Listeners I’m so sorry I promise today’s episode will not in fact be about puns. We are going to talk about how you need to make sure you remain present this holiday season so you don’t miss out on all the wonderful memories happening all around you. Amy: So to find out about how to wrap up this present of presence, stay tuned! Distraction of the Day: I’m pretty excited about driverless cars but I just learned something from a legitimate scientific study that shows why driverless cars will be the greatest invention of our time! Amy, can you guess what would get me overly excited? BOOK US FOR A COMEDY NIGHT OR RELATIONSHIP EVENT https://www.smalleyinstitute.com/p/comedy-of-love  Follow us on your favorite social app: Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/smalleyinstitute/ Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/MichaelandAmy/ Twitterhttps://twitter.com/Michael_Smalley

distractions michael oh amy you michael smalley amy so amy smalley
Talking Late Night
#46: Talking Late Night featuring guest Amy Miller, stand-up comedian and podcast host

Talking Late Night

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 23, 2018 47:37


On this episode of Talking Late Night, Max interviews Amy Miller, an LA-based stand-up comedian who has appeared in shows and festivals all over the United States and is the co-host of her very own podcast, "Who's Your God?" Amy didn't get into stand-up until she was thirty-years-old, with her first performance coming at an open mic at a laundromat. From there, her career exploded. Amy has appeared as a semi-finalist on NBC's "Last Comic Standing," Viceland's "Flophouse," "Doug Loves Movies," and NPR's "Marketplace," and has performed her comedy at many festivals such as the San Francisco Sketchfest and the Bridgetown Comedy Festival. She was even named Portland's Funniest Person by the Helium Comedy Club! In addition to stand-up, Amy co-hosts her own podcast entitled "Who's Your God?" Want to learn more about Amy? You can find her at her website, Twitter, and Instagram! Thank you for tuning in! Be sure to like and share our Facebook page here, and also rate and leave us a review on iTunes! 

Fertility Friday Radio | Fertility Awareness for Pregnancy and Hormone-free birth control

  Amy is a certified health coach who specializes in working with women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). She is the author of Healing PCOS, and she works with women who are frustrated and have lost all hope when the only solution their doctors offer is to lose weight, take a pill, and live with their symptoms. Amy founded PCOS Diva to offer women tools to help gain control of their PCOS and regain their fertility, femininity, health, and happiness, and she has developed a proven protocol of supplements, diet, and lifestyle programs to support women to heal their PCOS. In case you haven’t heard Amy’s first appearance on the podcast, click here to have a listen. In today’s episode, we talk about overcoming PCOS naturally, and the importance of advocating for the support you need.. Today's episode is sponsored by my free FAM 101 video series. Click here for access. My Fertility Awareness Programs are designed to help you to master Fertility Awareness and take a deep dive into your cycles. Gain confidence charting your cycles, and gain deep insights into the connection between your health, your fertility, and your cycles. Click here for more information!   Topics discussed in today's episode: What is PCOS, and what are the most common symptoms? What is a PCOS diva? The importance of advocating for yourself to get the care and support you need The importance of believing that you can be healthy and recover from PCOS The connection between PCOS, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and endometrial cancer Why PCOS is not simply a condition of the "ovaries" 21 days to managing your PCOS symptoms Movement for PCOS Dealing with a PCOS diagnosis The role of supplementation in healing PCOS Connect with Amy: You can connect with Amy on her website, and on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter! Resources mentioned: Healing PCOS book by Amy Medling Fertility Awareness 101 FREE Video Series Fertility Friday Programs Fertility Friday Facebook Group Related podcasts & blog posts: FFP 022 | What is PCOS? | Healing PCOS Naturally | PCOS Diva Amy Medling PCOS Series | Fertility Friday Fertility Awareness Episodes | Fertility Friday Join the community! Find us in the Fertility Friday Facebook Group Subscribe to the Fertility Friday Podcast in Apple Podcasts! Music Credit: Intro/Outro music Produced by J-Gantic A Special Thank You to Our Show Sponsor: Fertility Friday | Fertility Awareness Programs This episode is sponsored by my Fertility Awareness Programs! Master Fertility Awareness and take a deep dive into your cycles and how they relate to your overall health! Click here for more information!  

Live Inspired Podcast with John O'Leary
Ben + Amy Wright, CNN 2017 Hero of the Year, Fatherly Parents of the Year, Demystifying Disabilities S8 Ep. 85

Live Inspired Podcast with John O'Leary

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 7, 2018 54:38


Ben and Amy Wright own the wildly successful Bitty & Beau’s Coffee shop, which proudly employs people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The shop is named after their children who have Down Syndrome. Ben and Amy Wright are combatting the staggering 80% unemployment rate for people with disabilities + using their shop as a platform to share this truth: “We all have different abilities. There’s room for everyone; we just have to see it that way.” Join me and the Wrights as they thoughtfully share questions (if you don’t have a disability/know someone who does) and answers (if you do) to everything you’ve ever wanted to ask or tell on this subject. SHOW NOTES: Amy + Ben are the founders of Bitty & Beau's Coffee in Wilmington, NC that proudly employs individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. "Typically developing guests who come in experience a transformation, a new perspective. It was important to create the jobs, but even more important is that we change the way people see people with mental and intellectual developmental disabilities." Video of Amy accepting her 2017 CNN Hero of the Year Award. Ben + Amy Wright were honored as 2017 Parents of the Year by Fatherly.   BEN + AMY WRIGHT'S LIVE INSPIRED 7 1. What is the best book you’ve ever read?  Ben: Knot on a Counting Rope, a children's book about an American Indian child who is born blind and how his tribe loves him for who he is. Amy: The Giving Tree, it's a children's book that says it all, the way to live and to give to others. 2. What is a characteristic or trait that you possessed as a child that you wish you still exhibited today? Amy: Dancing more, laughing more; although at the coffee shop everyone has fewer inhibitions and just live out loud so I get a good dose of that. I wish I didn't carry worries that I carry and danced more. Ben: The instinct to play more. Be goofy and uninhibited. If you feel like dancing, dance. If you feel like running, run. If you feel like jumping, jump. I have so much restraint these days trying to be the father, grown up, mature person when inside I wish I could grab back onto some of the playfulness I had as a child. 3. Your house is on fire, all living things and people are out. You have the opportunity to run in and grab one item. What would it be?  Amy: As many photo albums as I could carry out.  Ben: This beautiful portrait of Amy when we were married. I want family to be able to come to look at the portrait of her and realize that's where it all started. I believe my life really started in earnest when I met her. 4. You are sitting on a bench overlooking a gorgeous beach. You have the opportunity to have a long conversation with anyone living or dead. Who would it be?  Amy: My mom, who said "I hope this baby you are carrying has Down Syndrome just like beau." She passed away just a few months before Bitty was born. Ben: Amy! We're so busy, we don't get much of an opportunity to talk with each other. I can't think of anyone I'd rather spend my life or time with her. 5. What is the best advice you've ever received?  Ben: You are fearless and you need to stay that way.  Amy: You love your children the same by loving them differently. My mom said this. Everyone has different needs; meet people where they are. 6. What advice would you give your 20-year-old self?  Amy: You think this is good now? Just wait! The best is yet to come.  Ben: Take even more risks. Life is unpredictable. It can change in a heart beat. If there is something you believe in, don't just think about it, do it. 7. It’s been said that all great people can have their lives summed up in one sentence. How do you want yours to read?  Ben: He broadened my perspective on what I thought was possible and gave me hope. Amy: She loved fiercely. *** If you enjoyed today’s episode: Please subscribe, rate & review wherever you get your podcasts. See you here next Thursday! Live Inspired with John every day on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and get his Monday Motivation email: www.JohnOLearyInspires.com/Monday-Morning 

Round Table 圆桌议事
【文稿】自拍是种不治之症

Round Table 圆桌议事

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 15, 2015 6:47


Heyang: US Photographer website published a report on web users photo searching behaviors in 2015, which shows that the word selfie was searched more than 20 times more than last year. So this is not a reason to be all that a surprise since the word selfie has been included in the Oxford Internet Dictionary in 2013, but my query is, i mean, how self-obsessed are we that we are still doing this and it is a trend that is just growing and wouldn’t stop.So guys, here, we should listen to a song that illustrates my point and it is from Ge Zhongshan, a rapper, she talks about selfie I guess. (THE SONG)Heyang: Yea, like that groove. And Amy, since you host a music show, can I just quickly ask you what do you think of that?Amy: I like it. It’s probably not that kind of the music that I play on my show, but it’s kind of catchy.Heyang: It’s kind of catchy and this recurrence of, you know 自拍,自拍 of every thing, and yea, she says like wherever she is, the first thing she does whenever she is in the crowd or just everywhere it has to be selfie, selfie, selfie time, so what do you think is going on? What does it tell about today’s modern China?Luo Yu: I think selfie has become very popular nowadays, even when Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi visited the Temple of Heaven he took a selfie together with Chinese Premiere Li Keqiang and also it reminds me of a soccer player Sergio Aguero.He showed his picture together with Mr Xi Jinping and his Prime Minister DavidCameron not a long ago when President Xi visited London, sorry, Manchester, I have to say. So i think, it has become very popular. It’s very convenient and it’s very good for improving our self-image and doing publicity, why not?Amy: I have to admit something that’s a little bit embarrassing, but I am part of a wechat group with some of my friends, and the whole wechat group is devoted to taking selfies, and it’s so....Heyang : What?Luo Yu: So it’s a selfie group.Amy: We are in a selfie group. Yea, and so all of us are living in different parts of the world, some of them are in San Francisico, some of them are in UK, some of them are here in China, we all like all of us met at different times in China, but the thing that connects us, some of them I have not even met, but we all sent selfies of whenever we are, so we’re kind of like we are checking via selfies, I’ve got to say it’s super fun.Luo Yu: Right, it’s actually a global network of sharing selfies.Amy: Yea, it’s super fun with people I’ve never even met with. We just like sharing selfies with each other, but we do also share information like, you know, any, any new stories that are about selfies. (laugh) But somebody recently shared an article in this group, where they are talking about using selfies as a security method. I don’t remember what it was for, may be for ordering something or for paying tickets or something like that, but basically you register for whatever is, and then you take a selfie to show that it is you, and then submit that, and that they give you the thing that you ordered, so it is sort of like, now it’s a security measure.Luo Yu: It’s actually scanning your face?Amy: It’s sort of like that you can compare the pictures. I don’t think it’s actually like facial recognition scan, but yea, you can take the picture, and that they compare it to your passport.Heyang: Yea, I think with selfies, because everybody is so into it, and i am not one of those people, Amy. And so yea, i think what is really interesting is that because of, you know, that the popularity, that is like new derivatives coming from that is like new development, such as the selfie stick, now it is everywhere, like you can not, what is the point of it? So you can take a wider shot?Luo Yu: It’s not about the wider shot, i mean, wherever you go, for example, if you are single on your own, on a business trip, or whatever. For example, when I visited Macau, standing in front of the St.Paul’s Cathedral there and i was alone, the only thing I can do is to take a selfie with my selfie stick, otherwise i have to ask someone else for help.Heyang: Yea, and then you might develop a romantic relationship with the next lady coming along and taking that photo for you.Amy: You are missing out a romantic opportunity by taking selfie.Heyang: I think so, and because by doing that, you know, cutting down the chances of being able to communicate with other people, meeting new people and all that kind of things. So i think selfies, i mean, it can only happen in this day and age with the level of technology we have, and the level of Narcissism we have here, and one part I don’t really understand, I just hope that people who do selfies all the time, Amy (haha) you know, like sometimes I just don’t really get it like some people, like take this selfies with special software that looks glamorous.Amy: Yea, we don’t do that, that’s not allowed in our selfie group.Heyang : I mean, are you guys that confident for the world to see?Luo Yu: That’s a good network.Amy: It’s a great challenge because it is like you have this criteria and you try to make different kinds of selfies, maybe a mirror selfie, or like a reflection selfie, or like a behind selfie, you know, you try to find the most creative way to do it.Heyang: So it’s not just about conforming yourself into the kind of beauty that everybody else agree with.Amy: That’s not pure Narcissism.Heyang: That’s a lot more fun!

Round Table 圆桌议事
【有文稿】怎样在老师面前"争宠"

Round Table 圆桌议事

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 9, 2015 6:32


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.

Round Table 圆桌议事
【文稿】匿名社交,好玩在哪?

Round Table 圆桌议事

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 2, 2014 3:39


John: The American anonymous social network Secret launched recently in China. In the meantime, however, about 20 similar apps developed by domestic companies are also available for mobile users. So I guess the first question is, have you guys tried using Secret or any other applications? Amy: I have no secrets. Heyang: Oh, I have secrets, but I haven’t used Secret, the app. John: You guys are useless. So what are they? Heyang: According to the research, these apps involve acquaintances. So it could involve strangers, or people from your phone book so it’s synchronized with your Wechat contact list or phone contact list. What’s so special about apps such as Secret is that it gives you a chance to gossip, say whatever about someone, and not being found. So I think it’s hugely liberating for some gossip girls and boys. Amy: Yeah, definitely. I guess this February, the first anonymous social networking app was available in China, called Mimi, which means Secret, of course. The app gained a lot of popularity. In April, the app was removed from app stores, since it was regarded as a knockoff of Secret, which is the American app. And then in May, it came back with a new name Wumi and the UI (user interface) has been changed as well. So now in China, there are around 20 apps like this, and almost half of them were produced in the last month. John: Right. It’s strange to me because as Heyang says, you can link your contacts into this. But then if you supposedly chat anonymously, but it seems to me that your personality would come through quite quickly, so they would know who you are even if they don’t know who you are. Heyang: Or, it’ll just create confusion, and people will be guessing: oh, this sounds like somebody. But actually that person might not have sent out that piece of information at all. John: And you can totally set someone up by pretending to be them and start a vicious rumor and then everyone will think you start the vicious rumor when it’s actually someone else. Heyang: Yeah, that totally could be the case. Amy: You could be the new gossip girl. John: I think it’s interesting because before I asked you guys if you’ve used it, you guys haven’t. But fortunately, I have used it. I use the American version, Secret, which is available on the Apple app store. And it’s very interesting. So you have people who ask questions they would never ask anyone that they know, No. 1. Nor would they ask the same question on a social network if their name was attached to it. Stuff like I’m 19 years old, and I’m still a virgin, is that okay. Stuff like I peed the bed last night, should I go and see a doctor. And even stranger ones that I can’t remember nor will I mention on air. But it certainly is interesting because it gives people a lot of freedom, because there is nothing to connect you to it except for an IP address that’s on the Secret server I suppose. But otherwise, that’s it. Heyang: But it seems like a lot of the questions that are being asked are often sexual-related or ... John: Embarrassing right? Heyang: And sometimes I just wonder, I don’t think there is such a great need for such an app. Amy: I think there is a huge need for people wanna release their secrets like crazy, but they just don’t want people to know about it. John: Indeed. So if you want to release any of your secrets, just get in touch with us on Wechat. We are ezfmroundtable. Stay tuned.

Round Table 圆桌议事
【文稿】大学手机收纳袋

Round Table 圆桌议事

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 12, 2014 6:20


John Artman: With mobile devices becoming so popular, people joke that the distance between life and death isn't as far as the distance between people while staring at their phones. Increasingly, we see this happening even in college classrooms. To combat this rising tide of inattention, the Management Department of the Luoyang Institute of Engineering has taken matters into their own hands. Now, students must put their phones into storage bags before the class even starts. So before we look at what the Luoyang Institute of Engineering has done, how serious is the staring at your phone all the time of problem in universities? Amy Daml: I’m not sure this is so different from way it back in the day, when grandma Amy was in university and we used to do crossword puzzles and sudoku , you know, I think it’s exactly the same thing. John: Or doodle. I used to doodle a lot. Amy: You used to doodle? Okay. John: Not diddle, but doodle. Zhou Heyang: Oh god. Amy: I think everybody… college students always find a way to screw around with your time in class whether it’s… you know just have a perfect device helps you do it. ZHY: Yeah, totally, I think people daydream. They… well, college students they just don’t really want to just focus on the books any more since that’s what you have been doing all your life in China, I guess. John: But this isn’t the point that’s going to the university and going into the classrooms for to you to pay attention, I mean that you are paying for, right? ZHY: Totally, but a lot of the times when you are just imagining you in the shoes of a college student, often I think for Chinese college students, it’s just like freedom after years of being, you know, supervised by your teacher and parents all the time, now you have the freedom to do whatever you want. And then people just feel like they have the time to throw around. But that being said, when I first saw this, I just thought, why are we… are we talking about college students? I mean this should be something that high school students or teachers do, I think. I think we you are in college, you are a young adult. Shouldn’t you be, you know, grown up, more grown up than this? John: No! Amy: You’re a young adult, but just barely a young adult, a very young adult, I mean. I remember going to college, and I was like, “Woohoo! I’m out of my parents’ house, and finally I don’t have the try so hard, and I can do ever I want. My classes don’t even start until 11 o’clock, like if I’m gonna go them at all.” You know, it was like this world opened up to me. I had all these choices. And it takes you while as a young adult to be disciplined enough to choose the best thing for yourself. John: Well, also I think it’s a little bit different in terms of Chinese culture, especially with the relationship to technology. It does seem that in general, compared to the US, these new, newer technologies get picked up really, really quickly. And I think that, yeah portable screens, as my mother would call them, are becoming a problem around the world, but especially in China and other Asian cultures, to be honest, the portable screen is… it just kind of sucks people… sucks people’s soul away. They’re there, but they’re not really there. ZHY: But still you are a young adult, that’s, you know, getting your hands onto the device in the first place, and allowing themselves to get sucked into it. John: So blame the parents. Don’t buy the phone, right? Amy: Well, I mean, I would tend to agree with John. I think that this is much more of a technology focused culture than back in the States. At home, you know, we have like, come up with some social rules about when it acceptable to use your iPad, your iPhone or whatever, and so we know that when you go into a movie, you shut your phone off, when you go into class, you shut your phone off, you know, or at least you put it on silence so that the teacher doesn’t catch you to playing games. ZHY: Yeah, but do students actually do shut their phone off in American classrooms, I kind of doubt that. Amy: They put them on silent, I think. John: Well, I don’t know, I mean it’s been so long. Amy and I are so old now. But, seriously because when I was in university, I just had like a little crappy, you know, Samsung feature phone. ZHY: And it doesn’t stop you from texting. John: All you could do was play Snake on it. Amy: Yeah John: But so we’ve gone off on a bit tangent here, but to bring it back, let’s take a look at what the Luoyang Institute of Engineering has done. So again, you have to put your cell phone into a bag before class starts. Do you think this is going to work in terms of attention and getting them to focus on their school work? Amy: Well, so they started this project on April 3, it has even been a week yet, so there’s plenty of time for it to succeed or to fail, but basically, the idea is that they bought a big that I image like a shoe storage a kind of thing, and then you each got a pocket, and then you stick your phone in the pocket at the beginning of the class, you can get it back at the end of the class, but basically you have to voluntarily surrender your phone during class time. ZHY: So do you have to? I think if people who are willing to do so can have it done Yeah, so I guess for those already pretty disciplined, I would say, to be willing to give up their phone during class, then they can do it. I think that is a good way to just physically keep it away from you, then you kind of have to focus on whatever you should be doing. But that doesn’t always work, because for those who want to daydream, I don’t think put your phone away will stop you.