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We're talking about raising kids with type 1, the journey to diabetes independence, and educating around the use of emergency glucagon. We're bringing you a panel discussion from Moms' Night Out Frisco! We have terrific speakers at our Moms' Night Out events but we also have some panel discussions. This time around it's Stacey and Cami DiRoberto. Cami's daughter, Maci, was diagnosed with type 1 at age 7 in 2017. She and turned 13 just after our conference back in October. Couple of quick housekeeping notes: this was presented and recorded as a hybrid Zoom and in person presentation – Cami broke her arm and was unable to attend in person. Her audio is fine, but Stacey's recorded through the computer mic and isn't up to our usual standards. We're providing the transcript below. Cami is a Gvoke ambassador and this panel was sponsored by Xeris Pharmaceuticals, the company that makes Gvoke. This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Note: Gvoke is a prescription injection for the treatment of very low blood sugar in adults and kids with diabetes ages 2 and above. Do not use if you have a specific type of adrenal or pancreatic tumor, starvation, chronic low blood sugar, or allergy to GVOKE. High blood pressure, hypoglycemia, and serious skin rash can occur. Call your doctor or get medical help right away of you have a serious allergic reaction including rash, difficulty breathing, or low blood pressure. Visit www.gvokeglucagon.com/risk for more information. Find out more about Moms' Night Out  Please visit our Sponsors & Partners - they help make the show possible! Take Control with Afrezza  Omnipod - Simplify Life Learn about Dexcom  Edgepark Medical Supplies Check out VIVI Cap to protect your insulin from extreme temperatures Learn more about AG1 from Athletic Greens  Drive research that matters through the T1D Exchange The best way to keep up with Stacey and the show is by signing up for our weekly newsletter: Sign up for our newsletter here Here's where to find us: Facebook (Group) Facebook (Page) Instagram Twitter Check out Stacey's books! Learn more about everything at our home page www.diabetes-connections.com  Reach out with questions or comments: info@diabetes-connections.com Episode transcription:  Stacey Simms  0:05 This is Diabetes Connections with Stacey Simms. This week talking about raising kids with type one, the journey to diabetes independence and educating around the use of emergency glucagon. I'm bringing you a panel discussion from moms Night Out Frisco. This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Welcome to another week of the show. You know, we aim to educate and inspire about diabetes with a focus on people who use insulin. I'm your host, Stacey Simms and my son was diagnosed with type 117 years ago this week right before he turned to he's almost 19 years old. He's a freshman in college and he's far from perfect. I'm far from perfect but cannot believe how far we have come at our moms night out events. We always have terrific speakers. Coming up for our Charlotte event. In February we have Sarah Stewart Holland. She is the co host of pantsuit politics, and her son was diagnosed really not too long ago. She went through that very publicly, and just going to be sharing her story. Our other speaker is Madison Carter. She is a local TV news anchor who lives with type one herself. But we also have some panel discussions at these events. This time around you're going to hear me and Cami de Roberto hammies daughter Macy was diagnosed with type one at age seven in 2017. She had her birthday just after our conference, which was back in October a couple of quick housekeeping notes. This was presented and recorded as a hybrid zoom and in person presentation, kami broke her arm and was unable to attend in person. Her audio is great, but mine recorded through the zoom. And it is pretty rough. My amazing editor John has worked his magic the best that he can. But I'll be honest with you my side of the conversation is not up to what I think our usual standards are around here. I will tell you though, I'm putting a transcription in with this episode. Wherever you're listening, you should be able to scroll down on the podcast app and see and read what you're listening to. If there's any confusion about my side of the conversation, you can always head over to diabetes connections.com and click on the episode homepage to read it as well. Also, Cami is a Gvoke ambassador and this panel was sponsored by Xeris pharmaceuticals, the company that makes Gvoke you know I like my full disclosures around here. But they made this really easy. This is a genuine Parent to Parent conversation. And it's mostly about independence. You know how you get from a kid who's totally dependent on you to a young adult that you you can send off on their own. And one more thing about mom's night out the early bird special for our next event in Charlotte has ended but I'm gonna give you a promo code right here just use m n o mom's night out m n o 30 to save $30 off Charlotte registration. Alright, that is a long enough introduction. The panel is up next and since I just told you about CAMI I took out the introduction that I gave at the event and the big lead up so we're going to just jump directly in right after this important message. Gvokeis a prescription injection for the treatment of very low blood sugar in adults and kids with diabetes ages two and above. Do not use if you have a specific type of adrenal or pancreatic tumor starvation, chronic low blood sugar or allergy to Gvoke High Blood Pressure hypoglycemia and serious skin rash can occur. Call your doctor or get medical help right away. If you have a serious allergic reaction, including rash, difficulty breathing or low blood pressure visit Gvokeglucagon.com/risk. For more information. I think everybody has heard my family's diagnosis story. My son was going to the strip before he turned to one can tell us a little bit about Macy's diagnosis.   Cami  4:01 Yeah, so Macy was diagnosed in second grade. It was the tail end of her second grade year. I'm sure like many of you, I was completely ignorant about type 1 diabetes. I knew there was a type one I knew there was type two, I really didn't know the difference. I knew one kind of struck children, but I was completely ignorant. So it was like the last week of her second grade year at school and we had just moved back to California from Arizona actually. So we were kind of transitioning and all in all areas of life. And she had three bedwetting accidents in a matter of three weeks. First time she was at my mom's house, like having a little sleepover with me. And my mom called me the next morning and I called and checked in. Hey, how was everything? You guys have fun last night? She said yeah. She said we're just we're cleaning up to today. Macy had a little accident and I was like, well that's really weird. She hasn't done that in years. But that's so weird because it's not totally outside of the norm for a seven year old little girl you know it could happen so that was weird, but a week later happened again and I was like, Okay, are we drinking too much water before we go to bed? What's happening? Let's let's really so I started to pay more attention happened one more time a week later on, I was like, something's wrong. The red flags, you know, we're going off. And so it was a party it was because it was the last week of school. It was a party at school. And I woke her up and saw that she had had an accident and it kind of laid some towels down and changed your sheets. And I said, Oh, honey, I said, You had another accident. I said, I think we probably need to get in and see a doctor now. I said, Do you feel okay, you know, in my mind, I was hoping like bladder infection or something like that. But somewhere in the depths of my mother's instinct, diabetes flashed across my brain. And i i To this day, I don't know why. So I was sort of praying that it wasn't gonna be that, but I didn't really even know why I was thinking that it was all very blurry and confusing. But she said she felt fine. She wanted to go to school. So I said, okay, and I made an appointment with her pediatrician that afternoon. So I picked all three of my kids up from school that afternoon, and the four of us had at the end of the pediatrics office, and she checked it out and you know, took her vitals and sort of a physical exam. And she said, I think she'll show your daughter fine. She said, I think she's growing. It's hot outside, you know, but she's fine. And I said, Okay, I said, we'll upgrade nose and I said, Can you just indulge me? And could you check for diabetes. And I swear to you, I still don't know why I felt so convicted to request that. But I did. And she did sort of begrudgingly. And our blood sugar came back at 323. I'll never forget time kind of stopped in that moment. Doctor came back after the nurse came in and prick Macy's finger, you know, she left when three, the four of us were playing I Spy in the room. And like 1015 minutes later, so kind of like now that I look back and inordinately long time, the doctor kind of knocked on the door and up and said, Hey, Mom, can you come out in the hallway for a second? So I walked out. And she had the landline kind of cradled her shoulder and she she was clearly on hold when she said I am so sorry, I don't really know how to tell you this. But you're right, your your daughter has diabetes, and you're going to be heading to the hospital for a couple days. And you know, here's my office, if you want to make arrangements for your other kids, and just the world just kind of stops for a second. And in that moment, I didn't even know what I didn't know. I mean, I'm sure many of you can share that sentiment. It's just confusing. You don't even really know what you're about to deal with. But that was how she was diagnosed. And then off we went to children's Fortunately, she was, you know, we avoided DKA, which I'm so grateful for, like I said her blood sugar was 323. So they actually sent us home and called us when a bed was ready for her. So we were able to go home and pack a bag and kind of try to be positive and find some sanity for us. But also,   Stacey Simms  7:34 we were so lucky, our pediatrician, I called them similar symptoms. And she said, You have never seen diabetes, can anybody under the age of two to provide your program and so we can move on out. And we had such a incredible start to the families today because of that very smart pediatrician didn't let it get to be a routine thing. Can you talk a little bit of you mentioned your other children. This could be a whole separate discussion unto itself. But to talk about the impact to your to your family,   Cami  8:03 if you can believe this, at the time she was diagnosed, we were literally living through a kitchen remodel, my whole dining room was set up I had like a hot plate and we had moved our refrigerator was like an all the way by the front door. Our house was an absolute disaster. And of course, we needed to figure out our new sort of diet plan as well after all this. So kitchen remodel and type 1 diabetes diagnosis were not ideal at the same time. So my husband Tori and I were in the hospital for two nights. And fortunately, we have a big family here. And so we had my sisters in law and my brothers and I mean, we had all kinds of family that came and stayed with my kids. But those first nine to 12 months were really particularly rough on Macy's, little sister Emma, they're they're really close in age, but 14 months apart. I think it's so confusing. She was six at the time. And I think she was terrified. And so much attention goes to managing it's in those early weeks, months, gosh, even the first year who you're still trying to figure out what your cadence for management is, you know, how often are you going to prick your finger and where and when and how do you leave the house and make sure you have everything that you need. I mean, there's so much it's like everything else stops and all you can do is focus on how to make sure this child of yours stay safe. And so I think there there definitely was an impact on my two younger children because all the focus was on me so we worked really hard on my husband and I like taking turns to like take the other two and do kind of go do special things and get them out of the house. But that was tricky for a while. That was definitely tricky, but we encouraged my other two kids to like prick their fingers and hey, let's all check our blood sugar. So we did a lot of that in the first couple months, which was kind of fun. My Anna Macy sister was not not a fan of the prep but my son was like all about it. He was doing it to my sister so that was super cute.   Stacey Simms  9:53 It is hard it still works to this day. I don't want to seem genuine so like self promotion machine like I did talk to my daughter went off tests. It is one of my favorite episodes. It was just last year. It's part of the sequence and it's okay to acknowledge that what helped me was just really honest. Aisha Nina, she's 22 She is really got an interesting perspective. It's been a while to see she was fine with me was diagnosed and she's very honest. And she still has some hard feelings about it. But she's an adult to, to acknowledge why it was the way it was. And she's also it was a lot of fun to talk about that damn Calgary, Kimball. Because my son was diagnosed who for the first time all that disrupted Alright, so I'm gonna ask him, I'm gonna put my own two cents in real quick. So we're gonna talk about that what was going through your head when Macy was diagnosed? Right and talking about your concerns and views for the future? Here's how. I don't want to say dumb. Here's what I didn't know about diabetes. So my little 23 months old. My first question for the endocrinologist was, don't I have to be shuffling his feet and put his toenails differently? I was like   something is like, okay, no, it's got to be like that. I mean, we're talking about bigger fears. But you know, that's where I started out.   Cami  11:27 Yeah, I'm not too far off. My first question was, was she going to have to like wear on her body because I didn't want her tiny little frail body like Mark with devices. I was like, am I Heartland my, my mind went immediately, like pacemaker I'm like, can we get this stuff inside, so we don't have to, like be visible about the so my first little vanity, which is a concern, you know, I didn't want her to have to wear stuff. And they were like, now there's, there's no pacemaker type machine. That's gonna. I mean, it's amazing how quickly I got past that. I mean, we were we had we used to call it a power packs. And so you know, the more visible we could be the better. So we got past that. And thankfully, I think we might even touch on this a little later. But she's super open about her devices. And when people ask her and said that, so that was great. But yeah, my initial thought was, oh, my God, oh, my gosh, and and it really wasn't until I got home, Stacy that I realized the 24/7 hour nature just and actually, I remember, I think it was day two, and we were on lunch of day two. So we had checked in like late afternoon on I think, a Thursday. And so we had dinner at the hospital. And then we had breakfast at the hospital. And so we were working on lunch at the hospitals for our third meal. And the nurse comes in and says, okay, so it's time to, you know, let's do our carb counts and let dial up our insulin, we know what our ratio is. And we were like, Yeah, we got this and I looked at when I went, hey, just to like, be clear, I go, we're not this isn't like, Bro. This is like, like, while we're in LA, oh, we're gonna, this is gonna level out. We're not gonna have to do this all the time. Right? And she was like, yeah, no, this is basically, this is how we have to do meals. Wow. So that was a moment to   Stacey Simms  13:05 Yeah, we're here in order to talk about dealing with loans preparing for loans. Do you remember when you realize, because when you and I were talking, I'm gonna ask you to some of these things I have the answer to so Don't be coy. I didn't think about this for a while but used to think about this in the hospital already. When they started applying with us. Right. It   Cami  13:24 was discharged day. And it was our last meeting with the diabetes educators who were fabulous. By the way. They were wonderful contents. Yeah, it was our last day. And so we like our final meeting. And you know, Macy stayed in a row and just touring and I went into the diabetes education room. And they kind of did like an overview. And then they said, Okay, and there's, you know, there's one more thing that we need to make sure we go over with you. And that's, you know, what we call severe lows, and they pulled out the red glucagon emergency kit. And they said, You know, sometimes you can have too much insulin or too much activity. And, and it doesn't happen very often. But, you know, sometimes it can happen, and you need to be prepared to use this kit. And I was like, what? Can you pause for a moment? And let's just rewind a minute. What do you mean, and that was a massive moment in time where I realized, so this medicine that you're telling us, we have to give her, and we have to decide how much to give her to keep her alive, if we give too much, could also be fatal. And, boy, that was a poignant moment. And I'm sure one we could all share and pause on because that is the reality. But yes, that was when we left the hospital and I was absolutely terrified, terrified about severe lows.   Stacey Simms  14:42 I want to just get to the other question before the one in terms of like, do you have those fears, but you you still want him to lose their life? You still want them to be independent? I mean, your seven year old so you're going to immediately send her off to be super independent. But how did you Once the engine, you know, I hesitate to see how did you get the cast that but how did you move forward with that?   Cami  15:05 It was difficult, um, you know, that was sort of the age, you know. So we're now heading into third grade and I remember I had this like special lunchbox for her that whenever she ever we would leave the house, we go anywhere and had all of our staff had had her with an emergency kit and had her sugar it had her testing all the stuff. We all we all have that. And I remember there were a couple of times where Macy got invited to have playdates at some friends house. And again, we kind of knew what the school kind of knew newly back in California, so I didn't know everyone yet. And she had a couple playdates. And so I sent mom would text me and say, Hey, Mom, you know, so and so wants to know if Macy can come over after school and play. And so I would respond and say, yes, she would love to however, I just need to make sure you understand BCS type 1 diabetes, and this can mean this and you know, she's, she's on it, but I really need you to just have your phone with you all the time. And I will tell you, it was challenging because we didn't get a lot of repeat invites. And then and then I would go over how to use that glucagon emergency kit, because I was scared. I mean, what if, what if they're out jumping on a trampoline? And God forbid, that's her first low. I mean, so I felt like, I had to do that. But it was really tough because I didn't want to and I think her social life. So you know, then I I tried to include an invite over to our house. So I did you know, slumber parties. That was a whole nother chapter to get through. But we did them in our house. You know, we didn't have in our house for a long time. But as long as I had a willing person on the other end, I allowed me to go do those things. As long as I had a mom or a trusted, you know, dad or trusted caregiver. On the other end, I really tried to give her that opportunity to go and be away from me. Like frankly,   Stacey Simms  16:38 it was interesting. He was a two year old, my son. We taught him some things. And I know we're gonna talk about that a little bit later. But did you start teaching Macy to do her own care with like with supervision, pretty much   Cami  16:51 immediately, immediately. I have videos of her coming home, like five days after the hospital and going okay, here's Macy, she's gonna give herself her insulin injection, and I'm videoing her and she's smiling on the couch. And so immediately, I mean, we really, and I don't know why I certainly could not have possibly had the foresight to know that that was important at the moment. I don't know why we did that. But I'm glad we did. I mean, Stacy for you. I mean, he was so young. How, at what age? Did you start giving him independence? Or or? Yes.   Stacey Simms  17:25 Everybody curates differently.   Unknown Speaker  17:27 I noticed, you know, I   Stacey Simms  17:28 jokingly call myself the world's worst diabetes mom, but slight. And I, we always wanted to raise our kids to leave home. And if it's about them, and you know, everybody, everybody's different. But when he when we both worked full time, so my kids were both in daycare, and we're, we're the luckiest people, I think when it comes to the type one things that happen. And so when I brought him back to daycare, the manager was like, oh, yeah, I used to be a minute, I can get injections. And I was like, Can you sleep here because I don't want to give you the money. And then go, actually, the whole team here started learning how to do it. And once he got an Insulet, on six months later, everybody was like, Yeah, I'll check that out, you know, and two of the ladies there became nursing students, not because of him, but like he was just cool. He didn't have a desk calm because this was 2006. He didn't get a desk until he was nine. And so we decided that when he was going into kindergarten, which honestly was one of the most terrifying things for me, like that was a hard, hard transition. Because we've had it so good at daycare, we told preschoolers, as we called that, like, hey, we want Benny to know how to check his blood glucose and muses, champions to kindergarten. And so we're going to teach him that at home. And can you help us out a daycare? And if your kids have ever been in daycare, like that's where they are independent, they come home, they would do anything for being going to calculus and the dude helping us a four steps. So let's do one. He talked to him, like, boys took their own leadership when kindergarten things like demonstrated I was able to do it so that once you could do that, and he always knew, officially, I have to show my there was always a responsible adult, he wasn't just doing that. So that helped us because in our neighborhood, first grade is when people start going playdates pretty much by themselves. And so we would line up, no Dexcom. But people have to call me and be like, Here's what a meeting person and I'm going to be helping from the dose and I want everybody in my neighborhood a person, which is really fun. And that's what I believe is really good friends with London because we get the case. Every evening on the counter for the kids, I don't know it's like after school.   I could go on and my answer to that question is very gradually, every year he did something else that is more leading more and more towards independence. Was the blood sugar perfect? Absolutely not. But that's the trade off I think sometimes. Alright, so we come back to our stuff we're talking about. Do you have any lessons you learned that can help other moms with, you know, similar aged kids just starting out?   Cami  20:14 I think probably, and again, not not because I did this, because I knew what I was doing. But as it turns out, we gave me see the confidence or Macey develop the confidence to be really open about her diabetes. Um, there's actually an influencer, who she's now a PA, some of you may follow her. But she's, she's a PA, she has type 1 diabetes, and she just had chant twins a couple years ago. But anyway, she did this whole post online, maybe three years ago, something like that, about the importance of teaching your kids to be confident about this, and to talk about it enough to be embarrassed about it. Don't go into the corner and trick your finger. Don't try to hide all your stuff. Because what she found she was talking about her own experience when she was younger, she said, there was so much curiosity among kids about what you know what, what is going on? What are you doing over there? And why are you freaking out? You know what's happening? And she said, When I tried to hide it, that's when people really got curious. And it became kind of this big thing. And she said, as soon as I was like, Oh, I'm pricking my finger, because I have type 1 diabetes, and I just need to know my blood sugar. They were like, oh, okay, no big deal. And when she said that, it resonated with me, because I feel like we did that, again, by the grace of God, not because we knew what we were doing. But, you know, we really encouraged me see, to talk about it. And to educate people, I said, you know, you have this for better or for worse. And it's kind of your responsibility to talk about it and to educate and to kind of be an ambassador for this. And if you see someone else who has come on, welcome and introduce yourself and say, Hey, like, like your next column. And so to be open about it, and to embrace it, I really think it's helped or to just be confident and to accept it. And I, you know, it's easy for me to say, because my daughter was seven at the time, I think if you have a diagnosis, when you're you know, on stage, it may be for you to a little bit like that, if you have a diagnosis with a 16 year old boy, man, I think that would be really, really challenging, because you just might not have that same response from him or, you know, 15 year old girl. So I think that's difficult, but to the extent possible, I really think that's invaluable. Probably one of the most valuable components of Macy's type 1 diabetes life is that she's not embarrassed about it. It is what it is that she wished she didn't have it. Of course she did. But it is what it is. I would say that's probably my number one piece of advice,   Stacey Simms  22:21 I think to you, you kind of as I said, we were very lucky. Betty is extremely outgoing, don't know where to get stuff from. And she nearly it was never shy about diabetes, daughters Natori introverted. And I would worry, I think it would be different, but I worried about her in middle school in high school, it would have been a different experience. I think, overall, they're just different kids. Yeah,   Cami  22:43 I mean, I think as they get older, you know, Macy's in eighth grade, right for 14, and college scares the heck out of me. I mean, when she goes spent the night at a friend's house, where I know the mom very, very well. And five minutes away from me, that's one thing, but I'm terrified of college, and her leaving the house, we're doing everything we can to prepare her. But I'd love to hear a little from you. Well,   Stacey Simms  23:08 you know, I'm gonna start by my mother gave me advice a long time ago, especially when he was really little, which is don't borrow trouble. Like there's enough to worry we have in front of us. So when he was two, she was like, don't think about college yet, but you'll get there. So I won't say don't think about just obviously, your top two. But that kind of helped prove a little bit. But I will say and we touched on this a little bit. The gradual independence that we gave Benny really helped us. I mean, it helped him, but it helped us. So our diabetes educator who is just an amazing woman recently retired, she has two adult sons with type one, one of whom was in New chronologist now, and she told me that the first time we met her, I said, like, oh, you know, do you have any advice? So that what can I basically I was like, How can I not mess this up and make him a good person and a healthy adult. She's like, why we can't tell you how, but I can tell you what not to do. She said, I just taught an 18 year old who's had this for a long time how to get insulin shot, because he had never done it. And he's going off to college. And she's like, don't do that. Don't do that. And you know, we all know that families don't want to pass judgment. I don't know what's going on. But I just was like, Okay, we've got a long time to get into the printer. So what we did was at the beginning of every school year, I would say, Hey, how you want to manage diabetes this year? What's your goal? And so I didn't give him that choice in kindergarten because I was ticked like I said, I was terrified. But in first grade, he said he wanted to eat lunch by lunch at the cafeteria once a week, at least. You know, by fifth grade. He was like, I don't want anyone ever checked in with the nurse because we live in North Carolina where they don't have full time school nurses. So we had a nurse at the office maybe two days a week. We had amazing staff who were like very caring individuals but didn't really know who diabetes. So that's another reason why I taught him to check his blood glucose. Because Jeff's calm which was not just been scheduled this time. So don't shut down we got we got Dexcom we had no Sherawat follow. So I mean we do is at the time he was supposed to pick us up and even just look at the steps. So he's your team didn't really change very much. But fifth grade was I don't want anybody looking over my shoulder anymore. I'm just going to Joe's gonna be compromised. Because I don't know about you guys but Middle School fifth, sixth, seventh eighth grade Marines like Whovians. So I do anything that I need a thumbs up to your teacher, that you gave yourself insulin for lunch. And he was like, Cool. Mr. Parker said, we're good to go. Then Middle School, he's like, I'm not checking in with anybody. I'm on my own. But I want you to text me every day before lunch. You're young, you're bolus. Oh, how wonderful. You would think how wonderful and you want to do bolus every day of that we just want to run with it. And we also talk, a little wonder, but we also have the same conversation starting in middle school about how are we going to manage Dexcom share, because I have a very funny Facebook post that I pulled out for the second book. And it's one of the first to share, he went on a field trip. And I was like, how do people do this? This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me. I have to look at these numbers all the time. Oh my god, this is overflowing. I need this. So I sat him down and I'm like, but if you read above this number for this long, I will text you if you're below this evergreens, Islam, I will text you and we went every year we changed that. By the time he was a junior in high school. I turned off the high alarm senior here, which was our independence here. I was like, okay, but the junior senior high school, I am not going to help you. And once you really, I turned off my love. The real turning point for us was that when he was 16, he went to Israel for a month with a kid, not at the biggest scale just because of regular sleepaway camp. And when he didn't Well, and came home, I said, What am I supposed to do now? Like you're done? I'm done. You're cooked. When you say now your customer service. And we went to camp this summer where he was a lifeguard. And he said, we're done. Like off with follow. So I don't follow. Kids, we're doing this before sharing follow up. You're like, right,   Cami  27:12 is to allow anyone to follow him.   Stacey Simms  27:15 Know that he's following him right now. But I know in the heads of the question, I'll ask him. In the past, he's had friends follow him, friends with him without diabetes. And that's fine. He's young. He has a roommate. He's not alone. I'm sure. My concern right now is more about highs than lows, because he's just kind of doing the minimum. I do like index complexity. But you can see the back end look. I'm gonna talk to him about it, because I figured he's a busy freshman figuring it out. Yeah. So again, we all hear differently. And because I feel him in one cameo, and I'll wrap it up in a second. But because we took all those steps to independence, already, we had really bad diabetes experiences. He's been low on sleepovers. He's been high on sleepovers, he has had his infusion sets come out. He's walking on insulin at restaurants. He walked across my neighbor's lawn to our lawn that intersect without telling anybody at four o'clock in the morning because he was low and didn't like the juice selection. Do you realize   Cami  28:19 that follow over   Stacey Simms  28:21 when they're 62. Right? So we've got a lot of time to make a lot of mistakes and realize like he's a tough cookie. So it's really yeah, we've done it all. Okay, so um, but Matt, what's your question for me? I want to ask you to county before we move on, you mentioned the Congress and things and it's tough on their stuff. And I mean, everything stuff. My daughter's maybe like, can you complain to me, too? Am I the guide a little easier, she's older and she doing 13 to 14 is like when they're really pushing you to make them more independent here to them more.   Cami  28:56 You guys. Yes. So for her birthday, last year, her 13th birthday, she had all these friends that did some these like elaborate parties and all these things she could mom, all I want is I want to go to the mall with my friends. I don't want you hiding in a coffee shop down the street. Property, I want you to drop me and my friends off and leave go back home. All you when we're ready to be picked up. So I dropped her off. And that was what she wanted for her birthday. They went out to dinner. And you know, they I think they were there maybe four hours. But she literally asked for independence for her birthday. You know, we also take advantage of this technology. So she she wears an Apple Watch. So even at school like you know, if we see we're on a chain actually, it's my husband and I and Macy and then they have an iPad in the school office, that some chain so we're always watching her numbers. And if she goes really high, you know, we kind of have to kind of have thresholds like if she's too high for too long, then we're like Amy see, are you having insulin? If she goes low, he may see or you know, are you having sugar so we've kind of got this cadence of communication. And I think because we've so to hold her accountable, it's been easier to allow her to be more independent. Because she and we'll talk about this, I think in a few minutes, Didi like, you know with low she communicates mom and having sugar mom I know I'm high I'm gonna give myself three units. So that's great you know she she communicates but back to your point a few minutes ago there Her brain is also gone because she's 13 and this junior high where it's just like, sometimes we'll be on dessert already through a meal and I'm like, oh Macy bullet strike. She's like, Oh, I forgot. I'm like, provide like we've been doing this for seven years every time you put a morsel of food in your mouth?   Stacey Simms  30:34 Yeah, that's a change. Yeah. I do want to talk about, we're gonna change gears a little bit and talk about severe blows. I noticed people very nervous. I do want to say this is meant to be educational and not scary. But CAMI is going to share some stories. But I do need to say that definition realize that severe lows occur when blood sugar gets too low for your body to function optimally, and requires immediate health to recover. It is really important to be prepared for the unpredictable. And I joke around a lot. But we do take this very seriously in the afternoon students of preparation when I think of the Ford Academy, because you had unfortunately not experienced with us.   Cami  31:16 Yeah, so Macy's had three severe love, none of which happened in the first like four years of her diabetes diagnosis, which was, you know, wonderful, because we never had to use the red mix kit. I don't know if I even would have been able to do that in a moment of panic. And as I walked through the story, I think this will make more sense. But initially, when we were informed about severe lows, what they could look like what they were, I was so terrified, it was like this taboo that I almost didn't even want to think about or talk about, I knew it was there. And I acknowledged it but I just wanted to do everything I possibly could to never ever, ever have to even get into that realm of a severe low and say. And things changed for us a little bit, to be honest, when I learned about Gvoke and how it could be used. So let me walk through, you know, our severe lows and kind of how those played out. So the first one was a few years ago, and my husband was traveling, he was out of town. And so it's just me in the kids home and I tried to eat pretty low carb, but for whatever reason, this pasta night, so I made some pasta. And Keith and I were eating and Macy bolused for her entire plate of pasta, and then eat about half. And then when I was jumping, kind of like a trampoline this like Airtrack thing we have in our backyard at the time, my son was really into like learning how to do flips. So he was like, Macy, come on, let's go out. Let's go out jump on the Airtrack. And so they were out and my daughter and I were kind of inside. I think we were watching a movie or something. So all was quiet, everything's fine. Kids were having fun. It was just a regular night. And then I get the alert on the Dexcom. And it's 50 to two arrows down. And right at that moment we see blast through the front door. She's like Mom, I feel really low. So I'm like okay, so I get her some apple juice. I think we actually use the little gunk, she doesn't like apple juice. So we give her some gummies waited a few minutes. And then then the reading said low we prepped and it was extremely, she was really low. And I said Macy. You can keep pounding sugar I said or we can pull out your G book right now. And she was like, let's just do the G book.   Stacey Simms  33:08 Hey, this is Stacy jumping in. Just to give a little bit of an explanation. Here. Hypoglycemia is defined by level one glucose lower than 70 milligrams per deciliter, and greater than or equal to 54 milligrams per deciliter level to glucose lower than 54 milligrams per deciliter. And level three is a severe event characterized by altered mental and or physical status requiring assistance. This level of hypoglycemia is life threatening and requires emergency treatment, typically, with glucagon. Now, back to kami. And   Cami  33:45 so we were in that moment, I gave her a choice because she, in the absence of intervention, she was going to pass out and she was headed down. And so we injected G voc. And within a very few short moments, she started feeling well and recovered. I think she got up to about 180 and then ultimately leveled out. That's it. That was experience. Number one. Tell us about Jimi Hendrix. Number two was a little bit kind of the same, but kind of different. Again, my husband was it was during a period of time where he was working on something and so he was traveling quite a bit. So it was after dinner, I had to open like 839 o'clock at night. We were actually all up in my room. And my when my husband travels or just forgotten early on, all my kids get to have a slumber party in my room. So Macy and I were reading I think I had one on like a blow up mattress on the floor. And we were watching a movie and just kind of his quiet moment. And the Dexcom alarm goes off. And it's super low reading. And so it was we treated it the same way where we tend to treat with sugar first. And we had no we had no idea. She was I think she was 49 Two arrows down and she had like three and a half units of insulin on board. To this day, we still don't even really know what happened. And so she had sugar continued to drop, we pricked her finger, and she actually that time said, Mom, I want to use Gvoke and so We have several of them. And so we opened it, she actually injected it herself into her the first time I did it in her arm. Second time, she gave it to herself right in her thigh. And same recovery scenario. It was amazing. It worked really quickly. And I knew that it was going to give her what she needed, so that we avoided that biggest fear.   Stacey Simms  35:19 Stacy here again, just jumping back into give this disclaimer, it's really important to understand that Individual results may vary. And you've always got to consult your healthcare provider.   Cami  35:28 Right? I mean, think of severe hypoglycemia, you think of someone on the floor on that worst case scenario? I mean, really, that's what you're thinking, think of incapacitation? And I mean, is my child going to lose his or her life, I mean, that that's really what we've kind of been trained to think about severe low, and there was sort of this paradigm shift for me in my mind about using glucagon, not to say that you use glucagon every time you have a low, not at all, you know, always, of course, treat with sugar. But there are scenarios given the way technology has progressed, we know when someone is headed for disaster, we can prick a finger, we can look on it next time, we can look at their symptoms. And we know that in the absence of intervention, something bad's gonna happen. And with G voc, you can use that to ward off that unimaginable moment of someone passing out. Actually, that's a perfect time to bring up the last time she's just a little over a year ago. She was at a slumber party. That was a birthday party 13th birthday party. I know the mom quite well. She's one of those very supportive moms that you just want to hug and say thank you for understanding and for taking this on and sleeping with one eye open when my daughter spent the night at your house, they had gone out to dinner, they went to PF Changs. And so she had shared a bunch of food with our friends. And they've gone back to the house and they were all getting ready to go swimming. And Macy got a LOW Alert ello w. And I was like, oh, okay, and so we stayed on the phone. And she said, Yep, she just administered it, and she feels fine. And, you know, call you back in a few minutes. She knew she needed it, she was afraid she was gonna pass out. And she administered her Gvoke, her blood sugar popped up within a few short moments. And she never had to experience the full blown incapacitation, that gives me such comfort, knowing that she knows how and when to use that. Because you don't know when it could happen. as vigilant as we all want to be they happen. And so knowing that she has the confidence to pull that out and know when she needs to use it is a massive source of comfort for me. And we're   Stacey Simms  37:20 going to start wrapping up in just a couple of minutes. And I have another quick question for you can we but I want to share, we need to set the amount of comfort, we'd have not had to administer anything that wouldn't have gone. I would have liked it in a few places. We've been to some external markers, that red box here. But one of my proudest parenting moments, wasn't even there for freshman year of high school being wrestled in high school for a couple of years. And we didn't do this in high school, but the sports teams to travel now love them. And they fundraise and they say right hotels and I, I had an instance where I was, you know, still following me as a freshman, and I couldn't reach him. So I called the teen mom. And she was like, Oh, he's actually my son tonight. Like, I'll ping them. And of course, he just wasn't looking at his phone. And he was like, I was laying on me. That's kind of mine. Fine. But he came home though. I said, What would you have done? Like, let's talk this through more, because now I am thinking about more. You know, how do you manage that he's like, Oh, my gosh, luck is anytime I'm with new people overnight between summer camp and wrestling and sleepovers. Anytime when we meet people, I take out the G book United type 1 diabetes I'm going to be and this is the other thing I'm not drinking, if I'm passed out or I'm slurring my orders or anything like that, I'm actually Lucky's like, call the coach then use this and he shows them how to use it as well. Like I really don't want another 15 years of administering. Yeah. But at the same time, I was really proud. And then I said, Well, do you ever like Does anybody ever gets to change rooms? Because of the hammer because of the BB? And he's like, Oh, my God, Mom, I already see what works, you know. But I was really so my one of my last questions who can be here as I don't have a child who has used this? You would like you said, you were there the first time there was another adult there the second time she used it, but have you been talked about? Like, how is it helping? The chief? She fearful? What is she doing? She think about it? You   Cami  39:11 know, I've asked her? And she said she just feel safer? Because she knows that there. She's not scared of it. And to me that's everything because there's a lot of fear involved in this disease, fear of your client, my blood sugar is too high. What's that going to cause in the in the future? I mean, we're we're constantly you know, trying to mimic them an organ, a human organs. You know, there there's a lot involved in that. So just knowing that that component, that fear factor part of it, she's got a plan. She believes she's covered. If she gets to that point, and we do everything possible to avoid it, of course, like all of us do. But if God forbid it happened again, she'll know what to do. And that's amazing that Benny educate other people. I think that that's huge because sort of like wearing your seatbelt right? We we don't put our seatbelts on every day when we get in the car because we think we have a high probability of getting a new car accident but what if we put our seatbelts on? It's the same kind of concept   Stacey Simms  40:09 you're listening to Diabetes Connections with Stacey Simms. Big thanks again to CAMI for zooming on in again, she broke her arm just before the event. And I give her so much credit. I had a crowd to talk to. But she was basically just looking at herself. You know how Zoom is. So I really appreciate that. Kami. Thank you so much. We did take some questions after that last comment of camis. I know it ended a little bit abruptly, but the audio really fell off. After that. There's only so much that John can do with his editing magic. If you liked what you heard, please share the episode. And please join us for mom's Night Out Charlotte in February. And for our other three stops in 2024. I am scheduled to share those locations this week. As you're listening I may have already done it. So please be sure that you're following me on social media. You can always reach out though Stacy at diabetes dash connections.com I will say there was one city that we heard the most comments from and that is on our list. So definitely let me know if your city or a place you cannot get to is on the list. Definitely ping me for 2025 We are listening to you. And we are I mean I'm going forward with this full steam ahead in probably four events a year until I don't know until people stop coming. Thanks again to jump you Candace, my editor and a big thanks again to Xeris for all of their support. I'm gonna read that important safety information one more time. Gvoke is a prescription injection for the treatment of very low blood sugar in adults and kids with diabetes age two and above. Do not use if you have a specific type of adrenal or pancreatic tumor starvation chronic low blood sugar or allergy to Gvoke High Blood Pressure hyperglycemia and serious skin rash can occur while your doctor or get medical help right away. If you have a serious allergic reaction including rash difficulty breathing or low blood pressure, visit Gvoke glucagon.com/risk For more information, I'm gonna link all of that up and the link in the show notes. And Stacey Simms. Thanks so much for joining me. I'll see you back here soon. Until then be kind to yourself.   Benny  42:14 Diabetes Connections is a production of Stacey Simms media. All rights reserved. All wrongs avenged.

Microbiologist Tyler Kokjohn joins us again on Paratopia. Why back so soon? Because Jeff received a message that concerns us all from his man in the black shroud, who, for the first time, urged him to talk about it publicly. Since this concerns brain chemistry, we thought, who better to spring it on than a doctor working to cure Alzheimer's Disease? What started as a simple question ended as a feature-length show covering not just this but also Budd Hopkins' recently-released rebuttal to Carol Rainey's article in Paratopia Magazine, Lloyd Pye's Starchild Skull, issues of dementia and human consciousness, and much more.

In this episode, we reflect on strategies to optimize the school experience for introverted and extroverted students by sitting down with two teachers in the field of gifted education. Jim Leesch (Middle School Math) and Jeff Westbrook (1-8 Drama) share their insights about accommodating different personality traits. Jim has over 30 years of experience teaching children in math, science, and drama. Seeing students in a wide variety of contexts has given him insight into the ways that teachers can learn about each student as a whole child. Working in independent schools for most of his career, Jim values this approach to teaching and learning. By ensuring that students feel seen, known, and valued, teachers provide the best possible environment for their learning and growth. Getting to work with exceptional children has enriched his appreciation for the wide variety of talents and gifts that children bring to school, and he is passionate about helping them see the fullness of their potential across all parts of their lives. Jeff Westbrook, currently a 1-8 Drama Teacher. One of the things he prioritizes is having every student participate in the drama program, regardless of natural talent, experience, or even interest. Meaning that the students who have the potential to gain the most from theatre experiences might be the ones who would not take drama as an elective. Jeff has 34 years of teaching experience in elementary and high schools. Because Jeff is not focused simply on “the drama gang,” he has developed interest and insight into exploring how to teach students with varying personalities and proclivities, including those for whom drama and performance is not an immediate or obvious fit. Jeff's curricular focus is on cultivating student work in playwriting, acting, and design, and he looks for opportunities to give students so that all of them find an area in which they can flourish.

what's good. Everybody welcome to dank as new. Hey, I was watching. Yeah, well, too bad. There's too many adults in this, Jeff, go watch something else dan. Why? Why do you hate adults so much, Jeffrey? I've explained this to you so many times and you still refused to hear me. Adults are traitors to life and you should be treated as such. It's on the wall. Yeah, I know, but but why? Because Jeff look, look, I don't hate adults, Okay. I hate what some adults do and how the other adults do nothing to help stop. And I'm aware that most adults are victims because they're tied down from the most basic needs. And in order to get those needs, they have to give away literal time to another more fucked up adult. But it's not something I want you or anyone in here to be a part of being an adult is just a broken cycle that constantly has every person involved, either causing pain to gain pleasure or sacrificing pleasure. Just so you can survive. There's this fucking narrative that everyone bends to and somewhere in that narrative, adults forgot about creation. They forgot about joy and love and how they we're supposed to help shape the world to be a better place for you. Not run it into the ground while stating kids are the ungrateful ones. I only shun adults because what I'm saying is true and by me not being a part of it, I'm deemed destructive. And so in order to maintain my values and your true happiness, we have to do the same.Check out the replies and reactions on Beams.fm

EP288 - News and Q4 Earnings Reports  News Amazon Stock Split Shopify Fulfillment Network eBay “The Vault” Twitter E-Commerce Pilot Retail Media Networks are on fire Inflation continues to rise Q4 Earnings Reports Winners Dicks Sporting Goods Walmart Target Neutral Best Buy Ulta Kohls Gap Nordstrom Ralph Lauren Losers Dollar Tree Abercrombie & Fitch Macy's Episode 288 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday March 10, 2022. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 288 being recorded on Thursday March 10th 2022, I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scott Wingo. Scot: [0:39] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott showed listeners Jason covid is defrosting and you are getting yourself back on a plane and I saw that you went out to eat tail. Jason: [0:50] It is true I don't know if listeners can see me knocking on wood when you say that but yeah I yes went to my first post covid trade show that felt like trade show from before covid which is cool. Scot: [1:04] Sprinkle what was what was the buzz in the like the first time and well I guess in RFC some folks got together did you end up you didn't go to. Jason: [1:15] I did not go to in our app and an attendee and sit in our F was I think there are people that went in and found a good but attendance was significantly down from a normal and RF show. Scot: [1:28] Was kind of the first normal. Jason: [1:29] Yeah and the interrupt timing was just rough because that was kind of In the Heat of the Omicron variant like re-emerging and. Um but so e-tail is in Palm Springs in February you know. People are like turning off Mass mandates and it felt pretty good and so the show was sold out the hotel was fully booked and if you if I just popped you on at the trade show for. It wouldn't have felt any different than e-tail 2019 felt to me so I think people were like frankly pretty excited about getting back together. And took full advantage of the you know typical trade show activities that cocktail parties and and all the frivolity. So I did a couple of sessions I did a keynote interview with the chief marketing officer from Signet Jewelers and they have a pretty interesting story during the pandemic the, you know they even have an interesting story in the metaverse that like I didn't realize this but millions of people have gotten married on the metaverse and are buying jewelry for it. Scot: [2:39] Nice can you buy a is your diamond and ft. Jason: [2:43] In some cases yeah. Scot: [2:46] I'd like to see picture I found it. Jason: [2:49] Yeah I don't want to actually bring up the topic of buying jewelry and then tell her it's digital jewelry because that won't that won't go where I was wanting it to go. But so so that was good I did a panel on on sort of growth tactics with a bunch of kind of younger digital native Brands and so that's fun to get you know some some different perspectives and some novel stuff and I did record a couple podcast there so listeners have that to look forward to will drop those over the next few weeks and so some good good conversations with with real people in the industry. Scot: [3:26] What was the back of the hall conversations the you and I have talked a lot about the impact that the Apple and Google privacy changes have had was that kind of one of those yeah you're on the stage everything is Rosy but behind the scenes I was like oh no what are we going to do with this this whole thing that's crashing down around us. Jason: [3:44] Yeah it depends I because I feel like there's a couple of different cohorts at Eddie tell like there is a cohort of them kind of smaller direct to Consumer Brands and I think those guys are right in the Wheelhouse of those impact so that absolutely was coming up you know it there is a pretty big like e-commerce vendor community in the show and so there you know weaning into the the super high P Trend so everyone's talking about metaverse and, in ftes and trying to convince you why they're the world needs 107th personalization engine, so you know there's a fair amount of that stuff and then you know there's some of the big wholesale retailers and there they were like more interest like the trends that are impacting them the most right now are things like retail media networks and stuff like that. Scot: [4:38] Brickell all right so anything else I need to run jump in the news. Jason: [4:45] No not yet let's we got a lot of news to cover so let's get to it. Scot: [4:50] Cool well it wouldn't be a Jason Scott show if we didn't talk about a little bit of Amazon news. Jason: [4:56] Amazon news new your margin is there opportunity. Scot: [5:08] Yes so one of the things it's been a busy week for Amazon so just yesterday they filed one of their SEC documents their annual report effectively and surprised Wall Street with two little good nuggets so one of them is they've they've expanded their stock buyback over time as you issue stock options and restricted stock units to employees as incentives your stock count grows and EPS is calculated by earnings / your Share account so when your chair count goes up it puts a natural pressure downward pressure on your EPS number. [5:44] So Wall Street loves the buyback so they increase the available by back to something like 20 billion which is pretty big number, but then more and more interestingly Amazon's been one of those stocks that has kind of refused to split and then just recently alphabet, I think ask is the after microphones off that announced a split and Amazon did that to this is this is one of those kind of fascinating psychological things so when you do a stock split does it change the economics at all right so you just say hey we had 500 shares in there worth a dollar and now we have to let's see if they usually do a reverse split so you have there were. So 500 shares the dollar and we're going to get down to 50 cents we have a thousand and fifty cents so the economics are the same but what happens is in many brokerage accounts you can't buy a fractional shares so it makes the retail investor Amazon stocks kind of around over a thousand dollars so when you do a split it does make it so more people can buy and then there's a psychological thing that's irrational where people just feel like it's cheaper. [6:55] Even though it mathematically is so so all that was really well received and then and it's been interesting because, they also signaled that. They're not going to be doing as much capital expenditure this year as prior year so so Amazon goes to these invest in Harvest phases and on the call the you and I covered it they were, they were pretty cagey about it and I think Wall Street didn't like that they were going to be an investment especially after covid it didn't kind of make sense they built so much fulfillment centers, so there were some elements of this where they clarified some things and it gave Wall Street a really nice kind of vibe that they're not going to be investing a ton on capex and then I thought it was interesting they announced they've announced a lot of these little kind of Acquisitions and they did one recently this company called Vico if I'm saying that right veq oh it's kind of like a multi-channel shipping solution so they've you and I have long. Posited that Amazon is not a fan of Shopify and all the gmv that they've grown in that's going through there and in Amazon's eyes they view them as a competitor and so you know. [8:09] There's a lot of speculation that they're going to come out with some kind of a Shopify killer or some kind of competitive offering to Shopify so this gives them a pretty interesting shipping kind of non Amazon shipping solution kind of like a ship station they acquired point of sale system that was based out of India then this goes back like 18 months ago they acquired a little e-commerce player out of Australia so it kind of feels like they're assembling some pieces to something so it's either little local groups doing random things or there's a big plan and they're assembling things I've said this before I'm still think. [8:48] I think the best strategy here is to take all these Services create microservices out of them, and then sell them and compete with like the fabrics and the Commerce tools is that the other one always forget it yeah you kind of so have a headless option and put it in aw that's because you already have so many developers using AWS that would be a great entry point into people that are like pay I need I need a cloud-based point-of-sale functionality of some kind or I need any of these little pieces that's my guess who what's going on and then and then some people that talk to you said all right if they do that then cows an SMB how are they going to compete with Amazon with Shopify do smbs going to use these micro services and, I think then they also build a little kind of Shopify killer on top of those microservices almost like a, demo that basically says look what you can build with these micro Services of a Shopify like platform that's what I think is going on but I'm curious to hear what you think. Jason: [9:49] Yeah so I kind of think you're wrong we'll see the I could easily see them like they're they're releasing a ton of microservices on AWS all the time right and so I will not be surprised at all if they release a stack of Commerce oriented microservices for AWS that. Could compete with Shopify I just don't think they would do that by acquiring these companies that are on like a whole disparate set of Technology stacks and you know don't have significant scale and aren't necessarily like, have some competitive IP like I'd like Amazon could buy all these could build all these capabilities that these companies have. With very little effort so I look at each one of those companies and I'm like it kind of solves a practical problem for a particular. [10:42] Stakeholder in a particular Market I mean you know Amazon's trying to expand their into Australia and they bought a Marketplace that had a bunch of sellers in Australia right Amazon's trying to capture more share in India and in India a bunch of the orders don't get shipped to the consumers home they get shipped to a retailer the Aggregates the orders and then customers go to that retail and pick it up so now they bought a POS system that a bunch of those retailers run in these small villages in India and I do think Amazon is, interested in is certainly going to make a bigger move in shipping and. You know I think if you're trying to get people to use Amazon Freight and Amazon shipping for non Amazon packages one of the things you need is a is a shipping manager software package to give to all of those, those companies so I think that's what the qos so I think I don't see these Acquisitions as some sort of super strategic set of Mike rolling up of microservices. But we shall see. Scot: [11:48] Yeah we should go back in the hot tub time machine and we record our annual predictions but next time. Jason: [11:56] And side note I will one other prediction I'm glad we're not going to go back and visit is. Um Whole Foods did open their first just walk out store in Washington d.c. this month. And I will readily admit a year ago in this show when we talked about the significance of just walk out I said. Probably be a long time before we see this in a Whole Foods because there's all these logistical challenges that like are not an Amazon go store but are in the much bigger grocery format like you know. Each has of fruit and stuff you know bulk items that have to be weighed and you know retrofitting this technology into an existing store that wasn't designed for it is a lot harder than building a purpose-built. Environment and you know there's there's challenges with things like bathrooms I listed all these things and very smugly said so don't expect to see. Just walk out in a Whole Foods anytime soon and then less than a year. Scot: [12:53] I remember you saying it was pretty much impossible. Jason: [12:55] Yeah clearly I thought it was impossible and I feel like that that created a moonshot team at Amazon which then did it. Scot: [13:06] Because Jeff is just like oh Jason's challenge me now the gauntlet is down. Jason: [13:12] Exactly so so congratulations to team Amazon I have not gotten a chance to shop that I have shop the the Amazon Fresh stores with just walk out so which is kind of an intermediate step so so I'm excited to see how that plays out. Scot: [13:27] Yeah kind of a a tangential Amazon news story we talked about this on our last episode which shut out the listeners we had really, your kind of strong engagement from from you guys about the Amazon Logistics deep dive we appreciate everyone not only listening to that at you know we were concerned it would be a little boring kind of going through all these counts of what they're doing but at least I find it riveting and but we got really good feedback on that and we appreciate when listening to that buried in that at the time we did talk about shopify's earnings where they basically came out and said their previous iteration on partnering with 3p else to do chipping hadn't worked, and this was actually predicted by by facile over it fabric I think he mentioned on the show he's been pretty vocal on Twitter about it too I'm not revealing some secret and, um Wall Street was then they said they're going to spend what was it a billion dollars on fulfillment centers which seemed laughably small especially in the context of the. [14:30] 260 ish large fulfillment centers Amazon house and that would get them two day shipping which just doesn't logically make sense to me and then Jason you pointed out that's not not even where the market is now but the update on that is Wall Street was not amused and what happens is. When you're high-flying stock with a big multiple and your your your model. [14:56] Becomes part of the story and your Shopify has these really high both gross and net margins and relatively high growth and so their growth has slowed down and then Wall Street kind of it was kind of a doomsday scenario so all streets like all right you're slowing down your growth you've got the shipping problem you always talk about how you're not worried about Amazon but something's going on here and then on top of that you know they basically, said to Wall Street we're going to change our margin structure because we're going to take all our ibadah and plugged it into this spying warehouses so Wall Street hates it when you make a change like that and you kind of say I'm a 80% gross margin business and now I'm going to be a 60% right whatever it is so the stock has like been in a world of hurt so it's basically gone down by half I think depending on whatever timeframe you look at and then there's been a lot of stories about folks leaving and it's kind of create a little bit of chaos so it's going to be interesting to see can Shopify executed on this can they do it and not I'm really freaked out there investor base what happens with employee turn so so it's kind of the first time they've had a bit of a misstep or or a resetting of their valuation so it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. Jason: [16:12] Yeah yeah I I've been following closely I side note on facile dazzles the CEO of fabric which is a headless Commerce company that in some ways competes with Shopify and I actually ran into him in detail and side note he just raised they just raised like two hundred million dollars at a billion dollar valuation. Scot: [16:33] Yeah I'm a super jealous of his ability to raise capital. He seems to preemptively do it he was always like I know we just raised a hundred but these guys really want end so we're letting him in for like 200 at a you know a bazillion dollar valuation so high class problem. Jason: [16:49] You would know better than I but I have heard the advice frequently repeated that the best time to raise money is when you don't need it. Scot: [17:01] It is true yes I always raise money when I'm down to my last dime which is the worst. Jason: [17:06] Yeah I did tell him I was expecting like fancier suits in a bigger Booth a detail and he seems like he's not spending the money on that stuff it's. Scot: [17:17] Now he's hiring Engineers like crazy. Some other news and I know Jason you have some to run through Saga through this quick the still follow eBay because it's kind of an interesting story and you know they've even been to the pandemic they. Jason: [17:34] Sorry for our younger listeners eBay is a website that sells stuff like Amazon but before Amazon. Scot: [17:41] Yeah it's this auction format where you like you takes a week to figure out if you bought the product or not it's not not great in today's instant, instant feedback but to be fair most of their products are sold with buy it now so they're auctions is not the majority but they're still kind of always called the auction company so they've had that. There's all these startups that are nibbling away at eBay in different categories because for the longest time I felt like eBay should have vertical buying experiences because if you're a comic book collector you want, to search for certain things that matter to you versus a shoe collector versus a, electronic Gadget buyer versus whatever but they stubbornly would never vertical eyes that experience and so now they are very closing the experience so they're finally kind of waking up to this there's let's see they're going to have some some different experiences for what was it, it was couple luxury goods shoes sports cards then this interesting there's this kind of one interesting Trend in Collectibles that I think is going to go into other areas is. [18:50] Different ownership models so taking a physical good and putting a digital ownership on top of it so there's a site called dibs and this actually came up Greg Bertinelli we had on the show two years ago he's a VC that really kind of execs eBay guy and he's focuses on these kinds of models but what dibs does is let's say you have some really cool rare baseball card and you could certainly sell it and then extract all the value but what if you could. [19:19] You put it in a digital Vault a vault somewhere and then you could sell 40% of it so you could get some liquidity from your baseball card but you still own it and then you you could you don't have to sell the whole card, um and then you know some of those fractional rights could be shared and and whatnot or if someone wanted to buy the whole card they could and then you could transfer to them and it would stay in the ball so there's all these companies that are doing really Innovative things around this all this this side of digital marketplaces is within the purview of the SEC so all this is this is not crypto which is kind of over on its side the side kind of going rogue outside the SEC for the most part these are all blessed by the SEC and and then there's two that are very popular ones called Rally Road in the other ones called Otis and they do more they actually go out and buy various Collectibles and things and then you can have fractional ownership so for example in the comic book world one of the most famous comic books in my generation is called Amazing Fantasy 15 and that's the first Spider-Man. I don't have that comic book because it's like 300 thousand dollars or something like that and that's that's crazy and but you know. [20:31] But it's actually an interesting investment because I've watched it for 30 years and it's gone from five thousand dollars when I was a kid to three hundred thousand dollars now so. You can invest in that by buying a fraction so eBay announced their starting this thing called the eBay vault which is going to be this 31,000 square feet secured facility we're going to be able to store all these assets they say it's going to the largest one in the world which didn't make a hundred percent since me because that just doesn't I guess we just had you know Mark on, talking about million square foot fulfillment center so 31,000 square feet just doesn't seem huge but I guess it's full of vaults. Then that also enable them the whole eBay model and this is kind of like the Shopify story we're for the longest time they refused to touch a product because you know they're their margins are super high because they never touch the product, so it's a zero asset business well all these companies have come along that touch the product so there's. I mentioned some of them but then there's like goat and the shoe company's stock X where they'll actually get the sneakers in and they'll thumbs up and say we've looked at these These are really you know Michael Jordan error. Sneakers and they we've authenticated them there's a lot of companies that do this in handbags who's the one that does it for apparel. We could put all your apparel you want to sell in a bag and they'll take it and. Jason: [21:57] Rio Rio our thread upper. Scot: [21:59] Thredup thredup that's what I'm looking for so it's interesting if you look at it every eBay category someone has kind of come in and added a high-touch experience and chewed up a fair amount of the GMB that used to be on eBay so they're finally kind of reacting to them, and then I thought you would find this interesting they are going to launch a, they're gonna let you put videos on your listings and then they're going to have a live video streaming pilot for sellers so that could be kind of interesting. I'm kind of excited to see you like what your average eBay sellers live stream looks like it's going to be it's going to be kind of a. You know a menagerie of things to look at there that'll be funny and then I thought you being a payments guy you'd be really excited about this Innovation that call it the digital wallet and lets you store balance from your eBay sales and then you can use those let's say Jason you sold one of your widgets for $100 you can use that hundred dollars to now go buy stuff. Jason: [22:52] Wow that's an amazing idea. Scot: [22:54] Yeah it's also known as PayPal 1997 so so so let's. Jason: [23:00] For our younger listeners as Scott's not being sarcastic PayPal did start out as a eBay digital wallet and they spun it off so this is kind of a redo. Scot: [23:10] Yeah yes they're basically having to you know. They've got divorced from PayPal they had this they got separated from PayPal and then they went their separate ways and now they're basically having to just reinvent PayPal instead of eBay it's kind of. Kinda weird but they you know being eBay they didn't just say well let's do it everyone else doesn't just license stripe they've got all this features they had to kind of like go do it all themselves so they're now just finally getting a digital wallet so there's been this period of time where if you sold on eBay there was no way to take this fund and then put them back on eBay you just you know and I've been doing some eBay selling and it's like super painful it's like constantly emailing me and it's like it feels like literally like, the first version of PayPal so so doing some Innovative things there and then other areas they're just kind of like they've been hobbled because of some of the corporate structure things that have gone on. Jason: [24:01] Yeah and we are teasing eBay a little bit but In fairness they still are like the second or third largest e-commerce site in the u.s. so. Scot: [24:09] Yeah I love eBay and I wish I still feel like there's this big kind of nugget of goodness in there that needs to be unlocked they just needed to kind of do it faster and kind of more aggressive with. Jason: [24:21] That now did you talk about the vault already. Scot: [24:24] I did. Jason: [24:25] Yeah so prediction for next year that I'm going to put on my list is there's going to be a Nicolas Cage movie where he has to break into the Vault and steal something you heard it here first exactly in Ft. [24:45] Yeah there's nothing Scott likes better than than talking about like Amazon antitrust and inflation has his two favorite topics but I should note while we're covering all the news that the, the monthly inflation numbers came out and there's there's a ton of different numbers but one that gets talked about the most is this Consumer Price Index which is kind of a random basket of goods that were selected in the 1950s, and based on that index over the last 12 months that index has gone up by 7.9% so that's the. The highest it has gone up in the last I don't know more than 30 years, so that's pretty significant and that was one of the big talking points at e-tail is. You know what what are the impacts of inflation going to be on the market and in Howard consumers going to react so, there is significant inflation out there right now and it is like factoring into a lot of retail and e-commerce players plans are you worried about inflation at all Scott you think it's overhyped what's the. Scot: [25:53] Now I'm very very worried about its going to hit that. I don't think it's in control at all and it's in this kind of spiral I think we'll hit the this stagflation thing so you know imagine your retailer your labor is going up imagine you're an e-commerce gas prices are you know hitting between four and seven dollars depending where you are in the country so now you have all these yeah I'm shocked we haven't seen fuel surcharges for everyone maybe they have and I just missed them so now it's going to be, more expensive to ship stuff and then you have to raise your prices and then that causes more inflation and then you know and then people need more wages to afford the stuff you just raise the prices on it that there's a vert there's kind of a worry there's a bit of a flywheel there that I don't know how you break out. Jason: [26:43] Yeah no and even before all of this fuel unrest like fuel was already the, the category with the highest inflation and now it's you know likely to go even much higher so that that's in very unfortunate and it does I've seen some studies, and this is may be counterintuitive but when you think about it it makes sense. Inflation is impacting the the low price sellers the most right so if you if you have a little extra margin in your product you can act as a shock absorber a little bit and absorb some of this inflation but if you are, are selling at razor-thin margins so think dollar stores like they're getting hit the hardest by inflation and. Scot: [27:30] The other three dollar stores now. Jason: [27:31] Exactly and the consumers that shop lower-priced retailers which you know tend to skew younger consumers so Jen's ears. [27:42] They're feeling inflation much more than older cohort so it's. It is in unfortunate and definitely has a potential to be stifling on on a lot of the growth we've been talking about over the last couple of years. So awkward transition off of that. Ring in a piece of news from from last week Nordstrom became the the latest retailer to launch a retail media Network. And I will talk more about. What I think the prospects are for a Nordstrom retail MIT media Network on another show but I just wanted to use that to sort of highlight. It's one of the topics that's coming up most in my conversation with retailers and Brands is. Every retailer is leaning into launching these advertising networks like we talked on our Amazon Deep dive about Amazon disclosing, the revenue from from their Network and it's huge so every retailer and their brother is trying to launch one and they're trying to collect dollars from every brand and the brands don't really know how where and why they should be investing in them so there's a, a lot of discussion and test and learn. And debate at the moment about retail media Network so I did knock out my position on them on Forbes article that I'll link to but I was going to propose to you that we should, finder there I guessed and do a deep dive in retail media networks in an upcoming show. Scot: [29:12] Yeah I don't think anyone knows more about it than you are so maybe it'll just be a jacen solo deep death. Jason: [29:17] Yeah I think 10 of my co-workers and pupusas just rolled over in their grave when they're just say that they're like dude that dude doesn't need his head to be any bigger and we all know more about it than he does. Scot: [29:27] Well we get a lot of listener feedback that's essentially more Jason so can never have too much Jason. Jason: [29:34] That may have something to do with I have the direct email to the feedback account. Scot: [29:38] Me Jason: [29:39] And then one last piece of news that happened yesterday is our friends at Twitter, um expanded in e-commerce pilot that they've been running so they have had this this limited pilot where you could essentially on your Twitter account. Sell three items so you kind of you had a carousel that could show up in your Twitter account for these three items and the expansion is that they now let you upload a product feed with 50 or 10,000 items in it so you can you can send Twitter 10,000 items you sell and at any given time you can, activate up to 50 of them so you kind of have a little mini store with kind of like a, you know a category page with a bunch of product tiles in it and you can you can shop through any of these these 50 items, and it's it's what we would call a non-endemic check out so if you decide you want to buy one of these items you don't buy it. From Twitter and give Twitter your payment information you click on that product tile and it takes you to. The that Brands e-commerce site on their on their store and you check out there so it's kind of a. [30:59] Twitter cause it e-commerce but it's really a referral site to these Brands and it's interesting that there. They've tried a lot of different Commerce experiences none of them have been a home run, this is a new one and I have to say and I know you have had similar feelings about this I'm kind of skeptical that the referral is a very good customer experience because what tends to happen is. You upload this product fee that you know was probably accurate when you uploaded it but this is all Dynamic data something that you upload goes out of stock or the price changes or you you fix an error in your CMS on the URL and so that now the product listing on your website, doesn't perfectly match the product listing. On Twitter and that you know customers really don't like that when they click a product at One Price or in one color or you know that that you say is available and then you get to the website and it's, a different price or a different color or not available and on launch day they had five. Different vendors that could sell stuff and I click through all of them and three of them you know, had we're selling five products that were already wrong on day one so it looks a little problematic. Scot: [32:17] You have literally had this like conversation with five iterations of the Scituate ER and it goes like this is super. They tend to be this isn't just one of al-ahly Silicon Valley companies they're like super arrogant where insert company name and we know all about software okay and hey we're going to do this Marketplace and it's gonna be great and here's how it's going to work we're going to sell stuff and we're going to run people through this check out and then at the end we want to figure out how much inventory there's and I was like well you could do that but that's exactly wrong right because you want to before someone dies something you want to make sure you have it in stock or else it's a consumer is going to get really frustrated and leave and they're always like well it's a beta we can fix that later why invest in real time inventory now and then they never got a beta because us so then they're always like I'm like how'd the test go and like well consumers hated it and I'm like so we're not moving forward and I'll say will you realize you set yourself up to fail, like no our data indicates that they wouldn't have engage with it even if the inventory thing worked you're just like. [33:23] I don't understand so we'll see if yeah they don't don't understand the importance of this stuff and that the customer Journey they want you know people want, colors to be the same variance the all the all the blocking and tackling of e-commerce is actually pretty hard if you don't think it through and most of these companies this kind of say oh my God third party cookies are going away we need an e-commerce solution and then it travels down to an engineer that that has no idea how to how to get it done. Jason: [33:55] Yeah and I guess In fairness I don't there's no easy answer like one of the five beta clients is Verizon and I don't know this to be the case but highly likely the Verizon told Twitter we don't want you to take the customers money because then you're the seller of record we want you to send customers to our website right so like the. You've got this conundrum that that like the brands that want to sell stuff want want to own the customer they don't want to rent the customer from Twitter but then you know when you do have this kind of two step experience it totally breaks and it's got as you know we have these kind of consistency problems, just on our own website so when you add Twitter to the mix like it gets much worse and it's it never works for customer experience. Scot: [34:42] Yet built a whole company to solve this and it has like 120 Engineers working on it all the time it's a hard problem it's not it's not going to be something you can like put like a five-person engineering team on and have this great integrated e-commerce experiences just like not going to happen. Jason: [34:56] Yeah but that company you just mentioned sound like such a good idea though that sounds cool. Scot: [35:00] Thanks thanks it's been a good run. Jason: [35:03] Especially after you turned over the keys to competent leadership I feel like that was been a. Scot: [35:08] Finally hit its stride after I got out of the scene. Jason: [35:11] Exactly so I thought we would try something new we just covered a bunch of interesting to us but random news over the last two weeks it also kind of is, quarterly earnings season and so a bunch of retailers over the last couple weeks since our last show have had their their Q4 earnings which of course also gives us their their 2021 earnings and we could do it a tower show on all these earnings but what I thought we would just try to do is a earnings rapid fire. Because we are known for for being able to summarize things really briskly and and concisely what do you what do you say to that. Scot: [35:54] Plus rapid fire this puppy lightning room. Jason: [35:56] Awesome so what I've done is I've taken all the companies that I thought would be relevant to our listeners and I've bundled them into three buckets what I'm calling the winners which are companies that had a really good year what I'm calling the neutrals which kind of you know tread water and when I'm calling the losers, um which are you know the folks that lost ground so in my winners category the first earnings is Dick's Sporting Goods they actually had a mediocre Q4 they were up 5.9% versus, 20:21 there in 2021 was up 28% versus 2019 so so decent growth, um the their digital was actually down Q4 of this year so you'd go Jason why are there winner well, the if we look at their full year their sales in 2021 were up forty percent from their sales in 2019 so the so, huge growth throughout the pandemic and they were such a big winner in the first year of the pandemic that they still had growth in the second year but it was on top of these huge comps so, um so you know forty percent growth on a two-year stack you know for a retailer of their size, is a huge win and just a fun stat I'm trying to track for a bunch of these guys that now puts them at 27 percent digital sales so one out of every four dollars that dick stakes in, is from their e-commerce site. Scot: [37:24] Does that purpose. Jason: [37:27] It would include both of us are curbside pickup. Scot: [37:32] Okay that's Jean. Jason: [37:34] Um so then my second winner is Walmart. The their Q4 was up 5.6% you know again they're the largest retailer in the world so they have the hardest number to move, and 5.6% is considerably up from there they're sort of historical average and that's on a big comp because they were up 8.6 percent this quarter, last year but the real reason they're a big winner is e-commerce. On a two-year stack was up is up 70% so this was. The third largest e-commerce site in the United States two years ago just behind Amazon and eBay there now the second largest e-commerce site in the US and they've grown 70% in the last two years so that's astronomical and again. They're their full year sales were pretty good up 6.4% last year up 15% on a two-year stack and this is a company that normally goes up two or three percent a year so. So I another big winner and then my biggest winner for the year is Target so. [38:47] They had great numbers across the board they were up eight point nine percent for the quarter they were up 20% this quarter last year so too. You know big numbers on top of big numbers again on the full year they're up 20% versus 20 versus two years ago and their digital is a standout in all of this there there. Two years ago their digital was up 145 percent and then they grew another 21 percent last year on top of that. So monster numbers and I like how they break out their sales so so just a couple of things to know they're the only company I've seen that report two. Segments they report store originally needed sales versus digitally originated so where did the order get placed, and they also separately report store fulfilled sales versus fulfillment center fulfilled sales so. [39:46] Eighty percent of their orders comes from a store 20% of their stores, of their orders come from digital but 96 percent of all their sales are fulfilled from a store so virtually all their e-commerce has fulfilled from the store what's interesting about that is what that means is they are selling. The 60,000 items that fit in a store are all of their sales versus if you look at, Amazon eBay Walmart a huge chunk of their e-commerce sales are this super long tail of millions of skews so it, Target had big numbers and they're doing it differently than everyone else and then the the number I talked about the most is. [40:30] You know they've been really successful with their own Brands and to kind of put that in perspective about 26 percent of all of their sales where sales of of exclusive stuff you can only buy at Target so those own Brands were 30 billion of their 106 billion in sales, so that's phenomenal and then you you were talking about curbside pickup the curbside pickup numbers are also silly in 2020 during the pandemic curbside pickup went up six hundred percent at Target and then last year, you know that six hundred percent is crazy but you go oh yeah because all the stores closed and people had to drive up but then last year when stores reopened you'd expect that to dip way down and they curbside pickup went up another 70% on top of the six hundred percent from the previous year so so curbside pickup is a huge growth they, you know they bought a curbside company right before the pandemic and so I like they're kind of clicking on all cylinders right now. Scot: [41:33] The 96% number 95. That's so I'd go to a lot of targets and I've never seen like, most stores that have shift from Storer there's like some corner where it's like a total poop show of people trying to, package stuff in the middle of the store and things Target is that true I never see that and it's kind of fascinating to me it seems like the stores would have this huge shipping piece that I'm not seeing somewhere, and it's not like they have a ton of storage in the stores. Jason: [42:04] So they did a really. Scot: [42:06] Just a shipped is it shipped that's doing it is that kind of what they're coming in there. Jason: [42:09] No it like they did a remodel for most of the Target stores where they actually Shrunk The Selling space so they used to have no back-of-house like they'd have all the live inventory on the floor and they actually Shrunk The Selling Space by like 10 or 15 percent and built a shipping center in the back of the stores that you can't see right, and so they now have dedicated shipping they like they literally had to go like negotiate with other carriers because carriers are used to delivering stuff to these stores but not picking stuff up from these stores so they had to work all that and they're there doing so much volume now that you know what they're big players got they have their own sortation centers and they work differently than Amazon the search the stores instead of shipping to the customer. Like do multiple shipments a day via private trucks to the sortation center and then all the items are shipped from the sortation center and so that lets them use this like hub-and-spoke and have super stores that have extra inventory for these orders but all the inventory is sitting in a store until a customer orders it and then it goes through this this multifaceted distribution system to either go to the front of the store for curbside pickup via shipped or to the back of the store out to a sortation center and then via USPS to a customer nearby. Scot: [43:31] You want ship from store came out everyone in e-commerce kind of laughed because you're taking the most expensive commercial real estate, and using it as a shipping and warehouses are dirt cheap well it's inverted so. Jason: [43:46] I say that used to be true. Scot: [43:47] So now it's actually probably more economical to ship from the store than anywhere else from open Pure commercial real estate angle because covid is killed so much retail space and then at you know at some point like office parks. That that that used to be the highest and then you so you should be Office Park retail and warehouse and now it's Warehouse retail and Office Park so so it's totally all all mixed up and creating a whole nother economic model that we'll have to kind of see what happens there's you know a lot of people are taking these malls and converting them into fulfillment centers I was in one I was in a Sam's the other day and I was like. Billy I'm in feels like a Sam's that I guess it was a Sam's and it was one of those sounds that he commissioned and they turned it into this weird kind of open Office Space and it was it was very strange because it felt like. Literally having an office in a Sam's. Jason: [44:41] Yeah yeah that doesn't sound appealing when you describe it like that. Scot: [44:44] And they had that whole what do you. Jason: [44:46] Do they still have like like samples necks. Scot: [44:48] Well they were saying they were saying. They had a hard time putting some like 3D printers in it they had a hard time because the floor was angled and it was because it was like where some freezers were and they dangled the floor to act as drainage and I guess they had to come in and re-engineer like a whole big section of it. And I shopped in this house before too so it's kind of weird like a new kind of where all the stuff was in her but they also do that what is that we some of your buildings do it where you check in and you don't have a spot every day as a fan. Jason: [45:21] Like hoteling. Scot: [45:22] Yeah hoteling so they like the couldn't they couldn't understand like why no one wanted to come to work so like make it so you know Dad like all these impediments for people to come to work and they're like we don't know why more people aren't coming in it's like well. You've made them feel like you know kind of fourth class citizens they kind of they don't have a place to sit every day they can't bring any personal items it was kind of funny and they're basically sitting in a Sims. Jason: [45:48] All right yeah I think there's going to be an interesting question about like reuse of all this the the brick and mortar space then closes so but it doesn't sound like you're you're going to be investing in the we work 2.0. Scot: [46:02] Pregnant. Jason: [46:04] Side note and I I miss the most by far important and Brilliant move in that whole Target Whitney the major feature they announced is that you can now order Starbucks to be included in your curbside pickup order. Scot: [46:20] Game changer. Jason: [46:22] That that does feel like a game changer. Scot: [46:25] I was picturing you being first alone. Jason: [46:27] It feels like they're targeting a couple people than I know. Scot: [46:30] Well as fellow Starbucks kind of Sword the target ones I have found out you're not as good or know that you like the. Jason: [46:39] Controversy. Scot: [46:40] Some of it the taste is not the same. Jason: [46:43] Their franchisees. Scot: [46:45] Yeah and you can't mobile order which is government I guess this is mobile ordering. Jason: [46:49] Yeah yeah so I think it is a clever move to like so these impulse and consumed on the way home items at curbside I bet we're going to see a lot more of that but I am with you if I have the option I usually like to go to a Starbucks Company Store over a franchisee because the the experience is more consistent at the company store but I'm saying that to someone that's selling a bunch of franchises so we should maybe be careful about that. So neutrals I have my first neutral is Best Buy they had a slightly negative quarter they were down 2.3 percent they were up 12 percent this quarter last year. You know they actually did decent their kind of, two-year stack they've grown about ten percent which is you know above what what a lot of retailers grow, but they they are in a category that in my mind like seems like should have really benefited from the pandemic and you just don't see. Like this huge huge benefit in their full year numbers so I put them in my neutral. They are now at 39 percent of all their their sales are digital and at the peak of the pandemic it was over 50 by the way. [48:10] So certainly increasingly their most important store Ulta beauty you know they're their company that was probably pretty negatively affected by the the pandemic and they had you know a decent year their full year comps. Um we're. [48:27] Pretty significantly this year but it was because they were so awful last year so they were down 20 percent last year they're up 30% this year so they're up on the two-year stack but not amazingly, and then all the apparel guys like in my mind there's two kinds of apparel guys there's apparel guys that had a horrible Court year last year and or two years ago and did better last year and ones that, had a horrible year two years ago and are still really struggling right so Kohl's Gap and Nordstrom and Ralph Lauren are all in that kind of. Had an atrocious year two years ago and are having a decent little recovery this year. Um and then like Abercrombie and Macy's I would put in that category of had an atrocious what your. Two years ago and you know so far pretty weak recovery this year. So those are my first two losers are Abercrombie and Macy's and then someone who you would think would be really poised to benefit from, the kind of economic downturn but have really struggled over the last two years are the dollar stores and and especially Dollar Tree, their Q4 was decent it was up. 2.5% but they're they're basically up 1.1 percent for the year. Which is you know pretty slow growth when the industry grew like 20%. [49:53] So that that is my super rapid fire earnings recap are you impressed. Scot: [50:00] Nice I am I like how you segment it do the dollar guys. But I didn't listen to the reports are they signing inflation is kind of basically or is it like so it's their own pricing but I imagine going after that value or any consumer unfortunately they're they're the ones that get hit the hardest with inflation is that was that kind of what's happened in there. Jason: [50:23] Yeah so that that is happening now like most of their negative performance over the last two years is kind of dollar stores are the least digital so in the pandemic when people are going to the stores last they they became a less viable option right like if you didn't want to go to a Target you could shop from Target online like pretty seamlessly but dollar stores very often don't offer e-commerce they were disproportionately impacted by supply chain disruptions right so you know if you're a big General Merchant you could make all these plays to try to line up merchandise but you know the dollar stores are trying to buy. Distressed inventory in remaindered remainer remaindered inventory so they like didn't really have the option to be as proactive as some of the the, the discount General merchants and so so they had a lot of supply chain disruption so that those were there, they're bad news the last two years there's a school of thought that they'll, have a they'll be decently positioned in an economic downturn but but we shall see. Scot: [51:29] Coble thanks for doing that. Jason: [51:31] If that was helpful for you we will remind you that the way you can repay us as you can jump on iTunes and leave us that five-star review. Scot: [51:40] Thanks everyone we appreciate it and until next time. Jason: [51:44] Happy commercing.

Cohost Kid joins Paul again to talk about “Laid-Back Camp” by Afro (Yen Press) volumes 1-2. This charmingly low-key manga was an enjoyable read. But first, dad and kid talk about other recent comics reads for each of them, including the “Wings of Fire” series by Tui T. Sutherland and Mike Holmes (Graphix), the “Frazzled” series by Booki Vivant (HarperCollins), “¡¡Manu!!” by Kelly Fernandez (Graphix), “Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles” by Fermín Solís (Self-Made Hero), and “Welcome to the New World” by Jake Halpern and Michael Sloan (Metropolitan). And of course, we HAVE to check in with “It's Jeff!” the Jeff the Landshark Infinity Comic by Kelly Thompson and Gurihiru on Marvel Unlimited. Because JEFF! Check out the Comics Syllabus SubStack, and find out how you can support Paul's work on this podcast, at comicssyllabus.substack.com Find the Comics Syllabus at its home at Multiversitycomics.com: http://www.multiversitycomics.com/tag/comics-syllabus/ Find the weekly audio podcast version of the Comics Syllabus on Sundays at its home at Multiversitycomics.com: http://www.multiversitycomics.com/tag/comics-syllabus/ For video segments, subscribe/follow the Comics Syllabus on Apple Podcasts or video-friendly podcast apps like Pocket Casts. You can try this RSS feed including video or watch the segments here at our podcast host Castos. For audio-only episodes, you can find us on Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, your favorite podcast app, or use this weekly audio-only RSS feed.

The Challenged crew joins me to discuss episodes 5 and 6 of CBS' Survivor. Join us on the Survivored group on Facebook to hear when we go live and call in like Kat did. Who's going home tonight? Answer: No one! Because Jeff has more twists up his sleeve this episode.

One of the most essential parts of our entrepreneurial journey is the ability to continually learn. We should never stop learning. If we stop learning, we stop growing.    Sir Richard Branson, a business magnate, investor, and author, said, “Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.” If we can learn from great books and courses, our mistakes and successes, our mentors, our critics, and our customers, we will have the ability to continually find success. The worst thing we can do as entrepreneurs is to think we know everything and stop learning.   Jeff Burningham is a serial entrepreneur who has founded some very successful businesses in his career and has been on over 10 start-up boards. He is also the founder and chairman of Peak Capital Partners, a $2 billion real estate investment firm, which was named the second fastest-growing company in Utah and one of the 500 fastest privately held companies in the United States by Inc. Magazine.    In today's episode, we're going to discuss Jeff's career and how his passion for learning helped him get to where he is today.    A Passion for Learning    Brian Herbert, an American author, said, “The capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill; the willingness to learn is a choice.”   We should always be growing and progressing, and the only way we can do this is by learning. From a young age, Jeff developed a passion for learning and created a growth mindset. Each life experience he went through, he found a lesson to learn. However, this is often easier said than done.   Learning is a choice. We should actively search for new opportunities for growth if we want to constantly progress. There are so many different ways and things to learn we could easily miss if we aren't paying attention. We can learn skills, history, spiritual lessons, or life habits. We can learn by reading books, listening to stories, or watching the examples of mentors. We can even learn from the massive glaciers in Alaska.    Jeff went heli-skiing in Alaska and learned a new skill. While he stood on the massive mountain, watching the northern lights flicker over the horizon, he learned perspective.    We can learn from everything around us if we are looking. Some of the best and hardest ways to learn are through trial and error. Making mistakes is hard and unfortunately, guaranteed. What determines our success is not the intensity of the mistake, but the way we react to it. If we can look at our challenges and failures as opportunities to learn, we will have much more success in our businesses and in our lives.    Here are a few examples of experiences Jeff took as an opportunity for new insights, knowledge, and growth.    Relationships   Over the course of his career, Jeff learned that relationships matter most.    “It's about relationships,” Jeff said. “We often focus on results or things we want to get done and sometimes those are important, but really, at the end of the day, the result we really want are the relationships, and whether that's an MBA program, or a business, or a family, or a community, those relationships are what matter most.”   When Jeff was about 12 or 13 years old, he started a carpet-cleaning business. His parents bought him a carpet cleaner so he could start cleaning the carpets at school, the dentist's office, and churches. He eventually handed on his business to his little brother, but he said this first step on his entrepreneurial journey taught him some of the greatest lessons.    “We don't get there alone; we almost always need help, whether it's through investors or mentors or partners or employees,” Jeff said. “Without my mom and dad . . . I wouldn't have been able to make it.”   While we may have the skills necessary to start a business by ourselves, we will have a much greater capacity for success when we get the help of others. Jeff learned this lesson from his parents and re-learned it again with his mentors, partners, and investors. When we focus on relationships, whether it be with our customers or partners, success and profit will come naturally.    Exit Transactions    Jeff learned a lot from his first scalable business. He started Mind Wire, a technology company, as an undergrad at BYU, and he won the BYU Business Plan Competition in 2001. He later sold his business to a publicly-traded company, learning a few lessons in the process.    Jeff and his partner had scaled their business up to about 20 employees and created a great team of people. When he sold the company and made that transaction, he learned that watching his small company get absorbed by a bigger company was harder than he thought. He also stayed with the publicly-traded company for about two years until he left to open his own office.    “I learned a lot about transactions [in] that early sale,” Jeff said. “I also learned that it was hard for me to work for someone else. It wasn't motivating to me to follow someone else's vision. I always like to set the vision, set the plan, set the course within my team.”    By selling his company, Jeff learned new ways to negotiate with others, and also learned something about himself. He learned that he doesn't work great under someone else. He learned he works better when he can implement his own ideas and visions with a team.    Partnerships    After Jeff left the publicly traded company, he teamed up with two of his friends to create Peak Capital Partners. There were times when they weren't sure if they would make it as they had about two to three years of no revenue. However, as they continued to work hard and pursue their vision, they turned it around. Since then, they have been one of the fastest-growing businesses in Utah for the last 5-10 years and have scaled their business to about 800 employees.   During his time with Peak Capital Partners, Jeff continually looked for new opportunities to learn. He first learned to never give up. It took Jeff two to three years to earn a profit, but because he put in the hard work and effort, he was able to turn our business around and become extremely successful.     We also need to be very intentional about who we choose to partner with. “I've learned the value of good partners,” Jeff said. “Don't ever get a partner that doesn't have your same baseline ethics or morals, and I'm not talking about religion. I'm talking about honesty, integrity, work ethic, etc. Find partners that see the same way you do in that regard. Also, get partners . . . that complement your weaknesses. Be self-aware. Know where you're strong, know where you're weaker, and get partners that can complement your weaknesses.”    As we constantly seek new ways to learn and implement what we learn, we will find that our chances of success will increase. Because Jeff was able to learn from his experience and the experience of others, he found strategies that work in a business and others that don't, and that helped him in his future ventures.   “I really love the early stages [of a business],” Jeff said. “There's a lot of risks. It's really hard, but I find it to be . . .  such a rich time of learning. And so I love those first five years. I love the startup.”    Key Takeaways   Thank you so much Jeff for sharing your stories and insights with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode:   We should never stop learning. If we stop learning, we stop growing.  Learning is a choice. We should actively search for new opportunities for growth if we want to constantly progress.  Our businesses should be about relationships. While we may have the skills necessary to start a business by ourselves, we will have a much greater capacity for success when we get the help of others.  It might take two to three years to earn a profit, but if we put in the work and effort, we can turn our business around and become extremely successful.   We should be intentional about who we choose to partner with. Our partners should have similar values as us and should complement our strengths and weaknesses.    Connect with Jeff   If you want to learn more about Jeff or connect with him, you can find him on LinkedIn or Twitter, or visit his company's website at PeakCapitalPartners.com.    Want to be a Better Digital Monetizer?   Please follow these channels to receive free digital monetization content:   Get a free Passion Marketing ebook and learn how to be a top priority of your ideal customers. Subscribe to the free Monetization eMagazine. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation YouTube channel. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.  Follow Monetization Nation on Instagram and Twitter.   Share Your Story  What are the most important lessons have you learned during your career? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers.   Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/158-why-entrepreneurs-should-never-stop-learning/ 

Podcast Co-host and Guest:  Jeff Wuorio:   Jwuorio@yahoo.comTranscription:Kris Parsons00:00Welcome to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best life and how you can figure out how to do it too. Join us with your lively host Ray Loewe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.Ray Loewe00:15Good morning, everybody. This is Ray Loewe. I don't know if I'm the one. I'm the lively host, but I'm certainly a host. And I'm sitting here in scenic downtown Woodbury, New Jersey, with my engineer Taylor, and he's gonna make sure that this program runs really well for us. And our guest today is Jeff Wuorio. And Jeff has been on before. And we're going to do a really interesting show today because basically, we're gonna write the last chapter in a book. So good morning, Jeff, how are you today? I'm excellent. How are you? Good. So let me introduce Jeff a little bit further. Jeff is a writing and publishing consultant. He's also a ghostwriter. I met Jeff years and years ago when he was a writer for Money magazine. And we've kind of stayed in touch over probably a 30 year, timespan. And Jeff has been on our podcast as a guest. And if you go back to Episode 42, you'll find out everything you want to know about Jeff. So Jeff, good morning. And the subject today is a little different. Because Jeff, you helped us write a book. And we're gonna talk a little bit about that. So, first of all, explain to, our listeners, what a ghostwriter does.Jeff Wuorio01:39Basically, the term is very apt because it does kind of describe in its entirety, what a ghostwriter does.  A ghostwriter essentially works with people to write a book without usually the requisite amount of credit that goes to writers, there may be a width, you know, he's with someone or something like that. But for the most part, we are behind the scenes largely. And it's a wonderful way to write because you meet remarkable people as a matter of routine, and help them express their thoughts and ideas to the best of your ability. So in that sense. It's like being smart, but somebody else is supplying the intelligence. And all you're doing is kind of massaging it a little bit so. Ray Loewe02:43Well, you know, it's a really interesting experience, because KC, who was my co-host for since the inception on this, changing the rules podcast, and I started this book, and then we got stuck. And we went to our friend Jeff, and Jeff got us unstuck. And I think it's kind of a two-way street. Because I think in one sense, you provide expertise that we don't have, you provided a flow for us, when we got stuck, you were able to make the words go together the right way. And so one of the things I would strongly suggest is that anybody who's got a book in their head, and has been thinking about trying to get it out that you use somebody like Jeff to get it out on the table. And we're mostly done with this book right now. And the interesting part of our podcast today is I think we're going to use it to write the last chapter. Yeah. Go ahead. Well, let me ask you a couple of questions. Jeff, I think this writing is a two-way street because we learn from you and I think you learn from us. So as we put together this book on the luckiest people in the world. What did you learn about the luckiest people in the world?Jeff Wuorio04:03It's really been inspiring, that, if any, if I gleaned anything from it, it is just how inspiring some people can be in living their lives in terms of going outside the norm and going outside the prescribed box that a lot of us are supposed to be in personally professionally and what have you and the creative and innovative ways in which they do that. It's just remarkable. How and when I guess one of the messages of the book is that there are so many avenues with which you can do this. That it's open to everyone who's willing to at least experiment to a certain extent.Ray Loewe04:53Yeah, and I think anybody can be the luckiest people in the world. But  you have to want to do this. And I think a lot of times, we sit there and we're not inspired. Let me go back to my old financial planning days. And tell a quick story. We had a lot of people that were in their 60s, who had tons of money and claimed they hated their jobs. And yet they refuse to quit. And why? And that's a rhetorical question, I really don't want to answer it, we'll answer it in a minute. And, then we had some other people who were in their same zone 50, 60, 70 claim they hated their jobs. And quickly, as soon as they thought they had the opportunity runoff and, stop doing what they were doing. And I think what happens in here is two things, it's the same thing. And in both cases, there wasn't a plan, and there wasn't some thinking about where you want to go. And those who had the money and refused to leave just didn't feel comfortable with the future, they didn't feel comfortable with change. And so they tend to, stay where they are, and put up with the agony that they had and the dislike of their current situation because they didn't know how to do it better. And, many of the others that ran off, were unhappy with their jobs. And what we found out is after three or four or five years, guess what they were back to being unhappy because they had no direction as to where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do. And, you know, one of the things that we're trying to say in this book here is that the luckiest people in the world are those people who personally design their own lives, and then live them under their own terms. And the interesting thing is, these people are happy almost all the time, they're challenged and fulfilled, they know who they are, and what they want out of life. And they found a way to spend their time following what's fascinating and motivating to them without taking on obligations that they're not mentally or emotionally committed to. And when you think about this, and you think about the people that have been able to achieve this, you have to ask the question. So who wouldn't want to do this? Go ahead, Jeff.Jeff Wuorio07:28Just a quick thought, who wouldn't want to do this? Well, I think one thing that's, you know, for better or worse, we're all creatures of habit. We defer to the familiar. And I think that's a kind of a compelling reason why people, you know, this is the way it is, this is the way it was for my parents, my grandparents, that kind of thing. It's just the natural way of how things are and going outside of that is unnerving for a lot of people just because it's a break in habits, a breaking routine, and it's a breaking the status quo. And that can be very, very unsettling for a lot of people you know.Ray Loewe08:15Yeah, and you hit the nail on the head here because to,  make changes, you actually have to change. And, you know, we talk about changing the rules on this podcast all the time that, we get, ensconced in everybody else's rules and past situations, and a lot of people say, you know, the reason I hate work is because it's supposed to hate it, no, that's why they call it work. And the fact is, you don't have to do that. But you really do have to make change, and you have to want to make change, and you have to be able to implement those changes. And that I think, is what sets everybody else apart.Jeff Wuorio09:01Yeah, I'm working with a gentleman now, who basically one of his essential messages that he's trying to convey is that we are always unhappy or unhappier than we need to be, when we let you know, forces outside of ourselves dictate how we live our lives. The dictum of, you know, you go to school, you go get a job, you get married, you know, all these kinds of things that are external forces. And if you fall victim to them, as he says, you not only are going to be less happy than you can be but all the more important, you're going to be a whole lot less fulfilled and successful. however, you define success in terms of how you live your life. So it's not just touchy-feely, good kind of things. There is a pragmatic and practical element to this because you're more successful in what you deem an important component of success by not letting others dictate what you do and why?Ray Loewe10:09Yeah, and so this is what we tried to do in this book. And, Jeff, you did a masterful job in helping me lay this out. But we talked a little bit about this definition of the luckiest people. And we, have tons of stories in there about people who do this in their regular life, who have the mindsets that are necessary to feel lucky and be lucky. And we laid out what those mindsets are, and you know, often is still not quite enough. And that's what we kind of want to do in this last chapter that we're going to try and write today while we're on the air. And, that is that people tend to need support, that you can kind of want to be the luckiest person in the world, you can kind of try to be it. But it's a lot easier, it's a lot more fun when you hang out with other luckiest people in the world. And, and we have a community that has been forming over the last umpteen years of the luckiest people in the world. And what we've been trying to do is to try to do some things to support that community. So what we found is that change keeps occurring, that the world doesn't stay static. So one day, we feel like we're the luckiest people in the world, and then we get hit by COVID. And all of a sudden, the world shuts down. And those people that really are the luckiest people in the world have found a way to handle it and change. And usually, they do this because they have other friends that they can talk to other people that they can listen to. And that's the purpose of the podcast that we're doing right now. It's to kind of put in front of people, other people who are the luckiest people in the world, and allow you to sit there and say Why? Why are they? And what can I learn from them? So one of the things we've been trying to do, Jeff is put together a community and we actually have several things that we do to support this community. One is this podcast, where we try and put in front of everybody, a whole series of luckiest people in the world. So that you can sit there and say, Wow, this person did something that maybe I can do to or I can never do that in a million years. They don't all work but in there somewhere is something that will work for you if you listen to enough of them. And we also have this thing called coffee and conversation that we do and cocktails and conversation. And every Thursday, we get small groups of people together. And we try and have a conversation about what's going on in the world, and how we can feel luckier, and how we can learn from other people. We do a conference a couple times a year, and that conferences are either virtual or their real life, where we bring in some speakers to talk about how to feel luckier. And you know, one of the big things that I want to try to talk about a little bit before we get off the air today is .travel. And the travel connection that we put together because traveling is a great way to meet new people and to see the world through the eyes of other people. Unfortunately, we couldn't do that for the last year and a half. But we're getting back into the concept of being able to travel together. So what we hope to do is to invite people to join our group of the luckiest people in the world or form your own, whichever works for you. So go ahead, Jeff, I'm monopolizing this conversation, as I often do.Jeff Wuorio13:48By no means, I think in terms of the group, just the fact that there is such a group or there are such groups, I think helps mitigate that fear of doing something different because if nothing else, you realize you're not alone in doing this. There are other people who have considered this and have done so successfully. So you don't feel quite so singularly adventurous as it were, you find out there are other people doing the exact same thing, and here's what they're doing. And that's comforting and supportive. And I think the another thing to bear in mind is that when we say you know, the luckiest people in the world, it doesn't have to be a wholesale 100% other revision of your entire life. You know you don't have to be working on Wall Street pulling down $5 million a year. And then you chuck all that to become a pearl diver or something like that. There are gradations and there are levels of change. That can be very, very rewarding. And it doesn't have to be a complete redo of your entire life, even if just a component or two is changed, and make a world of difference in how you see that, how you feel, and how you view everything else.Ray Loewe15:12You know, that's a really good point. And I've got a couple of examples. But let me quantify this a little bit there,  tend to be three groups of people that need this kind of a community. There's a group of people out there that have made up their mind somewhere that they want to feel luckier than they are that they really want to take the time and design their own lives and live in the way they want. But they're stuck. They don't know how to do that. And a lot of times, they're stuck by circumstances, you know, they feel closed in they need the money that they have because they have a family, they've got kids that are going to go to college. And so they can't just chuck their job like you said. So how can they become lucky? So hold that thought for a minute. The second group that we get in here, are a group of people that say, you know, I used to feel like a lucky person in the world. But now for some reason, I don't. And I've gotten into this Limbo status. And it could be because of sickness or illness, it could be a change in family, it could be something like this COVID thing that we went through. And the idea is you fall off the wagon, and how do you get back. And one of the best ways of doing that is to have people to talk to, and maybe a mentor to help pull you out of that abyss that you're in. And the third group that fits in here are those people who truly feel like they're the luckiest people in the world now, but they don't want to fall off. And they're always looking for more, you know, if you stay status quo in life, you're usually going to wind up back where you were, at some point in time, you have to keep moving ahead and keep looking for what you want and how to expand and we have a whole bunch of people who are actively looking for how do I steal the next best thing that you're doing from you? Because I want to do it too. Okay, yeah. So I took some time before this podcast, I called up a couple of the people that are a show up all the time in our luckiest group, membership group. And I was talking to a guy by the name of Bill Hughes, and Bill is an executive coach. And he's been in the financial services business for most of his life. But one of the comments that he hit is this goes back to what you were saying before, it's not an all-or-nothing thing. And he finds that a lot of people get stuck because they're busy. You know, it could be a housewife that's got two or three screaming kids at home and is trying to work a job and take care of the family and do all these things. And when Is there time for me? And he said he uses something called opportunity days all the time with his clients. I think it's a wonderful thing. Where you know, you take a day off once a month, and you say, I'm going to find a way to create a day for me. And then I'm going to use that day to start to work on this, how do I get lucky? Or how do I get more control over my own life? How do I move forward? Okay. And then that one day maybe becomes two days a month, and then three days a month, and before you know it, it takes over and becomes the norm. So thanks to Bill Hughes for that comment, because I think it solves this issue of this all-or-nothing thing that you were talking about before. We had a young lady on our podcast not too long ago, her name was Lourdes Nichols. And Lourdes has a full-time job. She likes her job. She does advertising work with some of the newspapers in the Greater Chicago area. But she had an event that took place years ago when she was in high school and she found out that her mother was born in a Japanese internment during World War Two. And she was so horrified by this experience of people just losing a portion of their life. When maybe they didn't deserve it. You know, there were a lot of reasons why these camps were, put together. Most of them not good. But anyway, if you find yourself in that kind of situation, what do you do? Well, what Lourdes has been able to do is she said, I'm not going to quit my job, but I am going to take this cause I am going to make this cause part of my life's work. And I'm going to get engaged in it and I'm going to be fulfilled by it. And she's created this portion of her life for herself without quitting her job. Again, all of this comes from being able to listen to podcasts of what other people are doing, being able to talk to other people and find out what's important to them and how they're managing to do this stuff. You know, I think one of the people that we wrote about in our book, Ruth Kinzler. Ruth had a stroke during a summer event down at the Jersey Shore, and all of a sudden found herself partially paralyzed. So what did she do? She quit her job. And she started doing what she loved to do baking and cooking for people. And it just created a career for her. And it's, you know, how do you find out about these things? How do you get motivated to do these things? Well, I think you listen to podcasts, you talk to other people.Jeff Wuorio20:54And I think to, again, the group in its various forms. If nothing else, it just gets I hope I and I believe it will just get people thinking a little bit, if nothing else, in terms of maybe it's never crossed their mind that they could do something else. Or maybe it's never crossed their mind that they could keep the job that they like, and yet have this adjunct element of their life that they find incredibly rewarding. It's just a Kickstarter for creativity and thinking in ways that perhaps you never have before.Ray Loewe21:30Yeah. And again, you need help you need somebody to seed the idea for you, because we, unfortunately, can't think of all these things that are out there. And then how do you make it happen? How do you take little chunks and make those chunks bigger and bigger and bigger? You know, one of the other people I talked to prepare for this podcast was a young lady by the name of Bonnie Shay. And Bonnie is a professional organizer. And she specializes in photo organizing, and she's on all of these, she listened to all of these podcasts. And she said, You know, I've realized that I was brought up by my parents to be self-sufficient. They told me and I guess, parents like to do this, they want to raise you. So you're independent, and you can do whatever you have to do. And she said, By listening to these things and talking to other people, I realized that this is really a strength-based world. And I have certain strengths and things that I'm really good at. And when I do them, I'm happy. And when I do those things, I can't do very well, I'm not happy. But there are other people out there that can do those things for me. Yep. Yep. And part of this collaboration. Go ahead, Jeff,Jeff Wuorio22:45just interject very quickly, a very dear friend of mine that I see often here we play music together after he retired from an engineering post, began a financial planning practice, because he'd always wanted to do that. And he's enjoying it like nobody's business. It's wonderful. And when we got together this weekend, he as it happens, he said, I'm going to be hiring an assistant in the coming year, and I said, Well, that's great, you know, you're growing, you'll need some help. And he goes really that and I want to really clearly delineate what I do versus what I want my assistant to do, I want to do the things that I enjoy doing that I am good at that I value. And I do not want to do the things that I'm not particularly good at or don't particularly enjoy. And that's going to be the function of my assistant. So I can really focus on what really resonates with me. And it really parallels what you were just saying,Ray Loewe23:46and see this is how you craft your own life. This is you know, if you're gonna do what you want to do, you have to realize that there are a whole bunch of things that need to be done. It's just that you don't have to do them, you have to figure out how you're going to put this together. You know, another comment that Bonnie made to me, that was really interesting. She was sick for a while she had to get some radiation treatment for something and she was radioactive and she wasn't sick, sick. But she couldn't see other people and she said, You know, I had people delivering meals to my door because they knew I needed help. And you know, I would never think about giving a meal to somebody because it would have had to be perfect. And all of a sudden she realized that these meals that she got weren't perfect. They were just gifts and she appreciated them so much that she realized now she can give this gift other people don't have to be perfect. All right. So all of these wonderful things come from sharing and they come from talking to other people and they come from learning. So this is what we want people to do. It's if you want to be the luckiest one of the luckiest people in the world. You know you got to have the right mindset, you got to have the right kind of plan. And then you have to surround yourself with people who can support you.Jeff Wuorio25:10I also think it's important to point out that this does not necessarily focus specifically on older people, for, however, you care to define that the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, that kind of thing. This group and this mindset is for everyone, and, to a certain extent, you know, and again, to, it can be difficult for young people, you know, if you're just married, and you know, you've got a new mortgage, and you've got a baby on the way and things like that, you can say, oh, I've just got too much on my plate. But even if you can carve out a small amount of time, to have this, this element that really you value most, you're incredibly lucky, then because you're, you're gonna jump on something so important than something so wonderful that people, older people, like myself, didn't get to until later in life. And it reminds me of the story of in the book that you share about going to the Antarctic and going to see the penguins and one of the members of the group so that we couldn't go see the penguins because we were no longer physically capable of doing it. illustrating that, you know, if you put this off too long, you may not be able, to accomplish or even experiment with something that is of true value to you. So it's a call to action for everyone.Ray Loewe26:41Yeah, and it's a call to action that everybody should take, because why live in a state of unhappiness for a period of time. And let me just give you another example, I have a friend of mine who's 40 ish, okay. She's got a great job in the standpoint it provider with a lot of income and a lot of money. And she's got two kids at home. And she realized that her job is just not fulfilling. It's, great from the standpoint of making money, she's doing some good things, but she's not doing those things that she feels passionate about. So she took some time during this whole COVID thing when she was forced to stay at home, and went back to school and an online version and started taking courses. And those courses now are giving her the ammunition to start opening up maybe a new job search or new thinking about what she wanted to do and where she wanted to go. So it's all there. But we need to get those ideas thrown at us we need to feel. Find the passion, you know, one last story, and then we're going to kind of have to wind up. But we used to do these trips all the time with our clients. When I was in the financial planning business and uh. We're doing them now again, with the luckiest people in the world is a group. And we'll get active again, now that COVID is pretty much under wraps, and start traveling. But my wife, Sandy, and I did some traveling on our own. And it was great because we got to share experiences with ourselves. And we got to dictate where the trip went. But we also did a lot of traveling with other people. And we found out that when we traveled with other people, we not only saw the world through our own eyes, but we got the chance to see them through other people's eyes. And not only that, but the other people shared other experiences with them. And all of a sudden you sit there as you check countries off around the world that you've been to now. And every time I check off one country Jeff, I wind up with three or four new ones, because I'm getting the shared experience of other people. And they're just getting me excited about life and what I can do. So this is this isJeff Wuorio29:04In our experience, too. And travel my wife and I, a couple of years ago before COVID went to Scandinavia for a month. And yes, you do see how other people live. And you talk to them. And it's wonderful to see different value systems, different priorities, different lifestyles, things of that nature. But it's also reciprocal in that. I remember meeting these two young Italian women on the train with my wife, and they were just fascinated to see, you know, as fascinating as we were to hear what they how they lived. They said tell us about America, you know, what is it like, you know, you know, what stereotypes Do we have about America, but I'm not entirely accurate. And so it's a very reciprocal kind of benefit. You know you gain a lot but you also give a lot?Ray Loewe30:02Well, you know, unfortunately, Jeff, we're at about the end of our time over here. And I think the idea is that we've got this book ready to go, which should be out in the next couple of months. And we're excited about it because it shares how you can become one of the luckiest people in the world. But one of the big parts, and it's going to be the end of this book is that it's much more fun to do it with other people. And it's much easier to do with other people. And finding the community where you can get excited about life and people keep you there is really a great thing. So uhJeff Wuorio30:40I look at it is to say, You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.Ray Loewe30:45Yep. any last comments before we cut off Jeff?Jeff Wuorio30:48know that that I was saving that pearl for the end? So let's wrap up with thatRay Loewe30:52So okay, we'll have to back up. That was the end. All right. So everybody, stay with us over the next couple of weeks. We're gonna have another great podcast next week. And we'll try and give you more and more ideas about how you can be the luckiest people in the world and be part of that group, and enjoy life more and more and more. So thanks for being with us.Kris Parsons31:19Thank you for listening to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best life and how you can figure out how to do that too. join us with your lively host Ray Loewe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.

In this episode, I'm speaking with Jeff Warnick. Jeff is a portfolio Executive Director and marketing lead at Bristol Myers Squibb, a $140 billion pharmaceutical company that manufactures prescription drugs for cancer, HIV/AIDS, heart disease, hepatitis, arthritis, and psychiatric disorders.  Passion-driven marketing is where we focus on what our customers are passionate about and connect with our customers through those passions. In today's episode, Jeff Warnick and I discuss how his company has successfully implemented passion marketing, credibility marketing, and other marketing strategies. Connecting with Physicians through Passion Healthcare is one of the most passionate markets, especially for someone like Jeff who is working with oncologists who are trying to help cancer patients. The customers are in life-or-death situations. It's a tough area to market in because you are marketing a product that helps customers conquer something they hate (such as cancer) rather than marketing through a level-10 passion that customers love. People don't exactly line up for chemotherapy as they do for the newest iPhone. The industry Jeff works in is also heavily regulated, and he doesn't have the creativity and freedom most marketers do. Previously, Jeff and his team had marketed to oncologists using primarily analytics with lots of charts and tables, focusing on the data. They wanted to better identify the passions of the doctors and test connecting with doctors through those passions.  How Jeff Connected to the Passions of His Customers Jeff helped set up a system of market research about the doctors' passions. When physicians participated in this market research, they came into the interview with certain expectations. They thought Jeff was going to give them a patient case study. Instead, Jeff had them lay back on a couch with the lights dimmed. He asked them why they decided to become a doctor. This takes the physicians out of their element, causing neurons and synapses in their brain to fire that they weren't expecting. To do this, Jeff asks questions such as, “Why did you become an oncologist? How can I work with you to help patients more? Where is a place where you are happy?” and more. He also thanks to them for their hard work.  This disruption from the normal gives the physicians something unexpected, appealing, and intriguing. Because Jeff has established an emotional connection by showing the physicians that he cares about them, their patients, and their passions he is able to establish deeper connection and communication. When Jeff would ask these physicians why they became a doctor, it almost always came back to a family member or friend who had cancer or got sick. He realized that they had deep personal connections that drove them to choose their careers. Understanding this core motive had a big impact on Jeff. He wanted to help these doctors help their patients. Patients always want more time, and if they can't have that, then they want the best quality of time they can receive.  Focus Groups with Multiple Doctors Sometimes Jeff does the same exercise in a focus group with multiple doctors at the same time. These doctors are used to other doctors attempting to trip them up. They are continually testing each other because that is the culture of the medical world with lives on their hands. So Jeff has to be careful about which doctors he chooses for each group. If there is someone with an alpha personality, the other doctors might be more hesitant to open up. Or, the oncologists often don't like to get emotional in front of each other, so they tend to be more analytical about it. Using Story to Focus on Passions “The highest level passions are the emotions attached to the decision, not the decision.” -Jeff Warnick As marketers, we often focus on the buying decision itself because that's where we get paid. The key to successful passion marketing is to focus on the passion behind the customer's decision to buy.  If we know that a customer likes chocolate ice cream, we can't just say “here's chocolate ice cream.” However, if we realize that they like chocolate ice cream because they used to have it with their grandpa every summer, we can connect with that. We can use the story to find a parallel path and serve it up as the emotional driver. The passion is not the ice cream; the passion is the experience associated with the ice cream. Recurring Revenue The healthcare industry looks at recurring revenue a little differently than most other industries. They don't like to think of people's illness as recurring revenue streams because unfortunately, that means they're not being cured or they're still ill. However, there are certain types of medical conditions, like diabetes, that end up being recurring. They are also trying to evolve cancer treatment to be something that is manageable like diabetes, making progress toward it being a chronic condition instead of a terminal condition. Recurring revenue is still beneficial to companies like Jeff's because they are a public company with shareholders they are responsible to. However, they don't look at it in dollars; they look at it in terms of patients. How is staying on a medication going to improve a patient's life? How is the medication going to combat their symptoms or keep their blood pressure where it needs to be? This patient-oriented view can be beneficial in other industries as well. We can look at how our product or service will improve a customer's life and market it that way, implementing a recurring revenue system to ensure our products and services continue to improve their life. The key takeaway here is to build our products and services around something that improves our customers' lives on a sustainable basis and not just one time.  Credibility Marketing Personal health is an intimate subject, so physicians are very careful with how they make decisions. Their patients, however, really need two major things when they are making decisions. The first thing patients need is all the information. They want to know about the side effects, co-pay assistance, what they should talk to their doctor about, etc. The second thing they want to hear about is the experience of someone else who has been in their situation or who has their condition.  We can use both of these elements when we are building credibility with our customers. We can give our customers all the necessary information they need to make an informed decision and share the experience of other customers through testimonial videos.  Key Takeaways Thank you so much Jeff for sharing your stories and knowledge with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode: Passion marketing is a great way to make sure we are focusing on our customers and their core wants and needs. We can get great results if we mix passion marketing and analytics. One way to connect with customers is to disassociate them by taking them outside of their everyday life. Then we can get to the truths behind what they're passionate about. Focus on the passion attached to a customer's decision, not the decision itself. Use a story to package that passion. Focus on how a product or service can improve a customer's life. Build credibility by giving customers all the necessary information they need to make a decision and by helping them connect with other customers. Connect with Jeff If you enjoyed this interview and want to connect with Jeff, you can find him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-warnick/.  Want to be a Better Digital Monetizer? Did you like today's episode? Then please follow these channels to receive free digital monetization content: Get a free Monetization Assessment of your business Subscribe to the free Monetization eMagazine. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation YouTube channel. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.  Follow Monetization Nation on Instagram and Twitter. Share Your Story  How have you seen successful businesses use passion marketing? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers. Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/67-how-a-140-billion-pharmaceutical-company-used-passion-marketing/ 

In this episode, Bits & Pretzels' Editor-in-Chief Britta Weddeling talks to one of the most successful cloud communication entrepreneurs in the tech world, Jeff Lawson, the co-founder & CEO of $8.5 billion firm Twilio. Get insights into 1) how he has launch a million dollar company within just six weeks, 2) how your customers lead you the way to build better products and 3) why you have to push ownership & responsibility in your startup to get better results. Because Jeff himself successfully did all of the above to climb the ladder in Silicon Valley. Today, his company Twilio is used by millions of developers around the world and big tech companies including Airbnb and Uber. Twilio allows software engineers to programmatically make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, and perform other communication functions using its web service APIs. The company is getting a boost from the pandemic as its customers both old and new scramble to update their operations for a new digital age. Shares of Twilio are up over 160% so far in 2020.  More to explore: Stay updated on news & insights from us about founders, startups in Bavaria, Austria & Switzerland at www.bitsandpretzels.com. Signup for our media newsletter to get the next episode of this podcast delivered right to your inbox: www.bitsandpretzels.com/media-signup. Hosts: Britta Weddeling (@bweddeling), Editor-in-Chief of Bits & Pretzels (@bitsandpretzels) Featuring: Jeff Lawson (@jeffiel), founder of Twilio (@twilio). Former Amazon (@amazon) executive Follow us: Twitter: @bitsandpretzels Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bits-&-pretzels If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review. You can also send us feedback at podcast@bitsandpretzels.com. Production: professional-podcasts.com (Regina Körner, Migo Fecke), Sophie Dechansreiter

 There are a lot of things going on in the world today, so let’s just focus on some fun NFL Draft QB Rankings. Jeff has his top ten picks and discusses some of the NFL Draft Rankings he’s had in the past. He keeps them all in a file, so if you have any doubts or questions, call him out on it on Twitter and he’ll tell you who he was rooting for, way back when! Key Takeaways:[3:15] Jeff knows 12 people now who are positive for COVID-19 and one of them has already passed away.[6:00] Jeff is tired of winning at poker over at Elite Sports Betting. So come get in on the action.[6:55] Jeff thinks TikTok is the best social media platform out there![9:00] Okay, why is Tua Tagovailoa a top two draft pick?[11:55] Jeff’s opinion on Twitter will change![15:40] Because Jeff is in this industry, he has to watch all the players, not just the favorites. So many people in this industry take the easy way out and don’t form their own opinions.[19:10] Don’t be a sheep. Put in the work and form your own opinions.[24:15] Jeff’s biggest miss on a quarterback was Russell Wilson. He didn’t like him at first.[30:55] Jeff is not crazy about Josh Allen for Buffalo, but he’s still waiting to see where he goes.[34:55] Jeff shares his thoughts on Dak Prescott.[37:00] Everyone hated Daniel Jones! But Jeff did like him.[41:35] Jeff shares his thoughts on EJ Manuel in 2013.[43:45] Top ten quarterbacks for the 2020 draft.[44:00] Let’s talk about Joe Burrow.[50:20] Jeff likes Jordan Love.[58:10] Let’s take a look at Tua Tagovailoa.[55:05] Some promise in Justin Herbert.[1:07:25] Jake Fromm… Some likes and dislikes here.[1:09:10] Jaylin Hertz from Oklahoma is six on Jeff’s list.[1:11:50] Steven Montez is up next.[1:14:40] Jeff loves Riley Neal’s potential.[1:17:10] Jacob Eason. Talented kid.[1:19:30] Jeff is excited to see where James Morgan will go.[1:23:00] Like this podcast? Share it with a friend! Resource:Elitefantasy.comFantasyguru.comElitesportsbetting.com Promo code: Radio20Jeff on Twitter Quotes: “If you ever want to hit me up at Twitter or wherever and say, ‘Hey what did you think, 2013, football rankings? NFL draft previews.’ Well, I got the running back position for Marcus Lattimore of South Carolina.” “Russell Wilson, I didn’t buy into him for a year. I will tell you very little has changed in my opinion. He does a lot of things wrong. Like, a lot.” “Dak Prescott. Wasn’t a heavily recruited guy, was not sought-after in his class. I thought he was a starter in a national football league.”

They’ve been friends, co-workers, business owners and the most recognizable duo in fantasy sports radio for 25+ years. Now you get to hear the stories of how they met, why they decided to work with each other and what it is like co-hosting with a polar opposite. From the early days of Ted’s backyard parties to the stories of Jeff almost dying, you must hear the true uncensored story of how Mans met Schuster. Ted Schuster has been Jeff’s childhood friend for over 25 years. They have grown up together, they’ve experienced a lot of hardship together, and they’re even in business together. Jeff first met Ted at Walmart, back when they were getting paid $7 bucks an hour! Ted and Jeff talk about when they both knew this friendship was the real thing and take a trip down memory lane.Key Takeaways:[1:25] What is happening to Tommy G?[4:00] When things fall apart, you end up seeing everyone’s true colors.[4:45] How is Ted dealing with the coronavirus?[8:15] There’s going to be way more crime and broken homes because of this virus.[10:25] Ted’s mom had it rough and he learned how to survive from the chaos going around in his house.[11:15] Fair doesn’t exist in life or even in nature.[11:40] Where did Ted grow up?[15:50] How did Ted get into sports?[18:00] Ted as a teenager… well, he got arrested.[21:55] What was Ted’s first impression of Jeff?[28:00] Ted throws a rager and his mom would help.[33:25] Jeff’s mom was also depressed and would try to commit suicide.[35:00] Both Jeff’s dad and Ted’s mom both died around the same time and that experience brought them closer together.[39:05] Jeff doesn’t like children's sports.[42:35] Ted used to date this crazy chick at Walmart. She ended up telling a couple of guys that Ted was abusive and Jeff went ballistic.[49:00] Jeff’s appendix had burst and not knowing any better, he went to play basketball with Ted.[53:50] Walmart paid well and Jeff and Ted were the wealthiest kids for their age.[57:50] Jeff gets married first out of their friend group, and then Ted second. Jeff had a kid, but Ted was still throwing ragers![1:04:30] How did Jeff and Ted get into fantasy sports?[1:11:05] Because Jeff and Ted have known each other for so long, they have chemistry on the air that just can’t be replaced.[1:16:25] Jeff and Ted worked a long time before they saw any money come out of fantasy sports betting.[1:18:25] There’s no way Jeff and Ted would be friends if they had to live together.[1:21:10] What’s next? Ted wants sports to come back. Resource:Elitefantasy.comFantasyguru.comElitesportsbetting.com Promo code: Radio20.Jeff on TwitterTed on TwitterTommy G on TwitterNo Mercy Podcast Quotes: “Any adversity in today’s day and age is seen as a negative.” “We’re different people entirely than we were when we were 15–16. I’m not nearly the same person.” “First and foremost, let’s all not die.”

Martin Thompson on Arrested DevOps, Dr. Carola Lilienthal on Legacy Code Rocks, Jeff Gothelf on Agile Atelier, Safi Bahcall on Coaching For Leaders, and Mike Burrows on A Geek Leader.  I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting August 19, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. MARTIN THOMPSON ON ARRESTED DEVOPS The Arrested DevOps podcast featured Martin Thompson with host Jessica Kerr. Martin and Jessica talked about the parallels between optimizing the performance of software systems and doing the same for human systems. Using ideas from queuing theory, they discussed the notion of adding small amounts of slack to a system to make it drastically more responsive. Martin connected Amdahl’s Law to the more general Universal Scalability Law, which is more comprehensive because it takes into account coherence cost, which is the time needed to reach agreement between parties working together. He added that Brook’s Law from The Mythical Man Month is the Universal Scalability Law by a different name. They talked about the difference between parallelism and concurrency. Parallelism, Martin says, is doing multiple things at the same time. Concurrency means dealing with multiple things at the same time, a definition Martin says he stole from Rob Pike. He further decomposed the universal scalability law into its parameters. One parameter represents whether you can subdivide the work (the contention penalty) and the other represents the time to reach agreement (the coherence penalty). If your team can reach agreement faster, they can get better throughput because they can have more parallelism with less concurrency. They got into a discussion of the importance of feedback in information theory. Sending information and not confirming reception is a naïve approach and this has been understood for a long time and yet software is still built that ignores this. Two phase commit is an example. If you study the two phase commit protocol in any detail, Martin says, you realize it is fundamentally broken, yet corporations don’t want to say that. They talked about how to design distributed applications in the presence of partial failures. Martin says to make your communications idempotent, give each message a sequence number, and use this sequence number to identify and ignore replayed messages. According to Martin, designing your systems this way is just good hygiene and professionalism. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/protocols-and-sympathy-with-martin-thompson/id773888088?i=1000444947737 Website link: https://www.arresteddevops.com/protocols/ DR. CAROLA LILIENTHAL ON LEGACY CODE ROCKS The Legacy Code Rocks podcast featuring Dr. Carola Lilienthal with hosts Andrea Goulet and Scott Ford. They talked about Domain-Driven Design. Carola said her company read Eric Evans’ book and immediately took to it. Talking to users, writing software in the user's domain, and using a common vocabulary fit with what they were already doing so they adopted it easily. They talked about Carola’s modularity maturity index. It consists of three areas of sustainability: 1) modularity, 2) hierarchy, and 3) pattern consistency.  Andrea brought up the fact that larger codebases aren’t necessarily more difficult to change as Carola found in her research. Carola says that, based on the three hundred systems she’s studied, systems under a million lines of code are often in a worse state than larger systems. Around a million lines of code, she says, something happens: either people start structuring the system and putting in guard rails that keep the product maintainable or the system doesn’t grow any more. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/sustainable-software-architecture-dr-carola-lilienthal/id1146634772?i=1000443349633 Website link: http://legacycoderocks.libsyn.com/sustainable-software-architecture-with-dr-carola-lilienthal JEFF GOTHELF ON AGILE ATELIER The Agile Atelier podcast featured Jeff Gothelf with host Rahul Bhattacharya. Rahul and Jeff talked about the intersection of Agile, Lean, and Design Thinking to find commonalities. They examined customer-centricity, measuring success, continuous testing, and the importance of having a hypothesis. Jeff had been working as a designer on waterfall projects for the first decade of his career and, on a good day, only saw 50% of his work get implemented. Ten years into his career, Jeff got exposed to Agile software development and it forced him to revisit his design process and his process for doing product development as a whole. Because Jeff was in a leadership position and had a boss that understood the new methodology, Jeff got the chance to run process experiments to learn what the best collaboration model was for him and his team. This became the basis of his book, Lean UX. Rahul asked Jeff how he would define Design Thinking. Jeff described Design Thinking as applying the designer’s toolkit to solve business problems. This includes empathizing with customers, brainstorming ideas, prototyping, testing ideas with customers, and iterating.  Rahul asked if there is a specific situation in which to apply Design Thinking. Jeff says that he has yet to find a client or an industry where customer-centricity, continuous learning, risk mitigation, experimentation, and iteration don’t make sense. Even when working with people at GE who make locomotives and working with organizations that make room-sized air conditioning units that sit on top of skyscrapers, Jeff was able to successfully introduce them to ideas like talking to customers, identifying risks, and continuously improving their product. Rahul asked how the principles of Design Thinking fit with the Agile principles. Jeff says that everybody thinks that Agile is its own thing, Design Thinking is its own thing, Lean Manufacturing and Lean Startup are their own thing. The tactical execution of those methodologies might be different, but at their core, Jeff says these methods all share the same principles.  They are all customer-centric. They all measure success as an outcome, as a change in customer behavior. They all focus on testing your ideas quickly and moving off of bad ideas quickly. And they all focus on continuously improving and iterating the thing you are making as you continue to invest in it. They then got into a discussion about the importance of measuring the impact on the user of the product you are building. Jeff says that, unfortunately, shipping the thing is still one of the major definitions of success for most organizations. But in a world of continuous software when you can push a software update five times a minute like Amazon does, delivering the thing is a non-event and it should be a non-event. We shouldn’t celebrate it. What we should celebrate is the change in customer behavior that tells us that we’ve delivered value. These are things like showing up at the website, engaging with the app, buying the product, telling your friends, whatever it is we care about for our product. This line of thought led to the quote above. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-11-intersection-agile-lean-design-thinking/id1459098259?i=1000445718430 Website link: https://rahul-bhattacharya.com/2019/07/30/episode-11-the-intersection-of-agile-lean-and-design-thinking-with-jeff-gothelf/ SAFI BAHCALL ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Safi Bahcall (author of the book Loonshots) with host Dave Stachowiak. They talked about what science has to say about the best ways to nurture new ideas. They started out with a discussion of children’s books and Safi’s first example of a loonshot was Dr. Seuss. He had just been rejected by every publisher he took his first story to when he ran into a friend in the street. This friend asked Dr. Seuss about what he had under his arm and when he found out it was a manuscript for a children’s story that Dr. Seuss was taking home to burn, the friend revealed that he had just taken a job at a publisher across the street and asked Dr. Seuss if he would like to come into the publisher’s office. The Cat In The Hat was born. Safi used the story of the moon landing as an illustration of the difference between a moonshot and a loonshot. A moonshot was Kennedy’s speech announcing that the United States would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. A loonshot was forty years earlier when Robert Goddard suggested getting to the moon with liquid-fueled jet propulsion and was ridiculed by many, including the New York Times. The reason it is important to understand the difference is because Goddard’s ideas, though neglected by the Americans, were embraced by Nazi Germany. German scientists used Goddard’s ideas to build jet engines and planes that flew 100 mph faster than any Allied plane. The mistake of neglecting Goddard’s ideas was fatal. Companies often ask Safi how they can innovate and create new products while continuing to keep their original product or service competitive. He thinks about these situations using three metaphors: the ice cube, garden hoe, and heart. He starts by thinking about the artists who create new product ideas and soldiers to execute on turning those ideas into real products in the marketplace. The ice cube is a rigid phase that suits the soldiers and a melted ice cube is a fluid phase that suits the artists. Understanding the problem starts with the ‘beautiful baby’ problem. The artist sees their new idea as a beautiful baby. The soldiers look at the same thing and see a shriveled up raisin. They’re both right. The garden hoe comes from understanding that the failure point in most innovation is rarely in the supply of new ideas, it is in the transfer between artists and soldiers. Great leaders are those who think of themselves as gardeners managing the transfer between the artists and soldiers. The heart is about loving your artists and soldiers equally. When we lionize the artists as the media often do, we demotivate the soldiers. I liked what Safi had to say about the problem with following the standard advice about active listening. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/418-the-way-to-nurture-new-ideas-with-safi-bahcall/id458827716?i=1000443895174 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/nurture-new-ideas-safi-bahcall/ MIKE BURROWS ON A GEEK LEADER The A Geek Leader podcast featured Mike Burrows with host John Rouda. Mike talked about his career leading up to the writing of AgendaShift. He described the goal of AgendaShift as trying to introduce agility not by prescribing a set of practices or rolling out a framework but by getting agreement on outcomes and working out different ways of achieving them in an hypothesis-driven way. He then mentioned his newer book that he was working on at the time the podcast aired and has just come out this month, Right to Left. Right to Left is about working backwards from outcomes. John asked what the shift was that led to this outcome-focused approach. Mike said that while working in the government digital space in the UK, he witnessed rapid change. Instead of one supplier creating documentation for a new system, a second supplier building it, and a third supplier supporting it, and the whole thing being an expensive mess that disappoints its end users, he says they now have a system where projects will be halted if they are not serious about engaging with users, doing user research, understanding needs, and working iteratively to deliver evolving services. He says that if it can happen in the government space, it can happen anywhere. John asked about what a new manager coming from an individual contributor role would need to learn for dealing with the people side of managing projects. Mike recommended tempering any temptation to micro-manage. On his first day taking over a management position at UBS, he had people lining up at his desk looking to be micro-managed because that is how his predecessor worked. He told them that if this is how it is going to work, it is going to make him miserable and it is going to make them miserable and he encouraged them to self-organize. Mike’s second recommendation is to learn to value and respect people who come from other disciplines than technology, as he says in the above quote. John asked Mike to describe AgendaShift. Mike says that the best two words that describe it come from Daniel Mezick: it is an engagement model. Much like Daniel’s OpenSpace Agility, AgendaShift describes how change agents can engage with their organizations. In the Lean/Agile space, pushing Agile on people is self-defeating and creates more problems than it solves. Instead, facilitate outcomes that the people of the organization can agree on and start solving problems. AgendaShift starts with discovery. There are workshop tools to creating a high-level plan. Then they use an assessment tool for identifying opportunities to increase transparency, get workloads under control, or to engage better with customers. They identify obstacles and the outcomes hiding behind those obstacles. They use a “clean language”-based game to model a landscape of obstacles and outcomes and get people to think about the journey, their priorities, and what the key landmarks along the way will be. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/agl-081-agendashift-with-mike-burrows/id1043194456?i=1000424584602 Website link:https://www.ageekleader.com/agl-081-agendashift-with-mike-burrows/ LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Jeff Ullrich is a pioneer in the podcasting world. In 2010, he launched Earwolf, a leading comedy podcast platform that houses the shows of some of your favorite comedians. He later founded Midroll, an advertising platform that monetizes podcasts. This one-stop-shop of companies was acquired in 2015 for more than $50million. Because Jeff was not able to find any investors to believe in his vision early, he owned the majority of the company, thus making him a multi-millionaire seemingly overnight. Links: Twitter Midroll Earwolf Stacey Abrams Fair Fight Campaign Sponsor This episode is sponsored by DigitalOcean. Apply for DigitalOcean Hatch. (To inquire about sponsoring the YFM podcast, please get in touch.) Credits Producer and Editor: Anna Eichenauer Senior Producer: Bryan Landers Additional audio mixing and mastering: Alfred ‘Rook‘ Hamilton Additional production: Chacho Valadez Executive producer: Arlan Hamilton Music by Jeff Kaale (1, 2, 3, 4) --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/yfm/message

What fresh hell is this?!? Has hell frozen over?!? Possibly. Because Jeff and Jordan are back in 2019 with new episodes of All Us Geeks! In this episode, the Geeks review Gloomhaven while trying to remember how to do this podcasting thing!  General Opening Conversation We’re back! Patreon will … Read the rest

In this special episode of The Mastin Kipp Podcast, I'm talking with my friend and mentor Jeff Walker. Jeff is my only mentor when it comes to learning how to get more people, clients and attention for my business. Jeff's heart, his realness and his presence put him a step ahead of all other business "gurus" I've met out there. Because Jeff doesn't see himself as a guru and he as no ego. If you don't know where to start, or how to get started, or if you've been feeling like all these business teachers are teaching the same thing over and over again, but it's not relevant to you... Jeff's LAUNCH Masterclass is what you've been waiting for. >Click here to join Jeff Walker for his free Launch Masterclass happening now through September 28th.

In this episode, Brad Loomis, Jeff Alberts, and Andrea Valdez chat about how to lose a bodybuilding show. No, they are not telling you to suck or to be a bad athlete, but they are actually talking about how they handle losses in a sport built on subjectivity. The bulk of this conversation revolves around Andrea picking apart the most individually devastating losses in both of the lives of her more experienced colleagues. Because Jeff and Brad have had so many highs and lows throughout their decades as physique athletes, they are able to give us some unique insight on the anger, disappointment, depression, and hurt that can come from unrealistic expectations or self-inflicted ultimatums. The coaches also talk about the difference in competitive attitudes and approaches when going from an amateur to a pro athlete, and how they have learned to continue enjoying a sport that can often leave a bitter taste in your mouth if you feel robbed or cheated out of your would-be successes. Join the conversation by leaving comments, reviews, and insights throughout any and all social media outlets using the handle @team3dmj. For the full video interview, show notes, and links discussed throughout in this episode, visit our site at 3DMuscleJourney.com The post #37: How to Lose in Bodybuilding appeared first on 3D Muscle Journey.

And now it’s time FOR….   Well, you know the rest! Or do you? Because Jeff & Jordan are joined by Anime Don! If you join us on Mixlr you get to hear us talk Geek News as we record! ;-} http://mixlr.com/all-us-geeks/   New family members to United Geeks Network:… Read the rest

Are you ready for some draft picks? Well too bad! Because Jeff and Sarah once again take up the challenge of presenting new crowd funding projects, that aren’t quite funded yet, and matching them up in a draft style game. Welcome to Season 2 of  The Game of Crowd Funding … Read the rest

Are you ready for some draft picks? Well too bad! Because Jeff and Sarah once again take up the challenge of presenting new crowd funding projects, that aren’t quite funded yet, and matching them up in a draft style game. Welcome to Season 2 of  The Game of Crowd Funding … Read the rest

Microbiologist Tyler Kokjohn joins us again on Paratopia. Why back so soon? Because Jeff received a message that concerns us all from his man in the black shroud, who, for the first time, urged him to talk about it publicly. Since this concerns brain chemistry, we thought, Who better to spring it on than a doctor working to cure Alzheimer's Disease? What started as a simple question ended as a feature-length show covering not just this but Budd Hopkins' recently-released rebuttal to Carol Rainey's article in Paratopia Magazine, Lloyd Pye's Starchild Skull, issues of dementia and human consciousness, and much more.