Podcasts about clif bars

PBR is getting into the diet game, pollen is up, Clif Bars are getting hyped and March Madness is over!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Drew Decker is a graduate research assistant at Ohio State University, and on this episode, we dive into some of the science and research studies surrounding a ketogenic or low-carb diet. I have a lot of respect for Drew and the research he's doing, and I have no doubt you'll learn something from this episode.    What we discussed:   Ketogenic diet and its effects on exercise performance, with a focus on a recent study comparing Clif Bars and our Keto Bricks (4:31) Exogenous ketones for performance and cognitive function (12:02) Nutrition and supplements for athletes, with a focus on military populations (16:43) Ketogenic diet and muscle glycogen replenishment, with a focus on the importance of time and consistency (24:13) Ketogenic diets and exogenous ketones for military personnel (32:02) Keto and the potential benefits for mental health, including reducing depression symptoms (36:45) Current and upcoming studies on keto and nutrition in general (44:33)   Where to learn more:   Low Carb OSU   If you loved this episode and our podcast, please take some time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, or drop us a comment below! 

On this week's podcast, Coaches TJ David & Zoë Rom discuss 2023, from their most memorable moments, to pop culture, to their rose, bud and thorn. This conservation spans everything from relationships and life to athletics to coaching and business. As usual, the two also discuss several hot or not topics, including Normatech Boots, Peloton, Planks and Clif Bars. You won't want to miss this episide. microcosmcoaching@gmail.com microcosm-coaching.com

Episode Summary On this week's Live Like the World is Dying, Margaret and Inmn finish their talk about go bags. They talk about important documents, knives, tools, sleeping systems, shelters, coping with isolation, food, water, firearms, specific situations you might need a go bag for, and of course, DnD. Host Info Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery. Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Margaret on Go Bags Part II Inmn 00:14 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host Inmn Neruin, and this week we're continuing to talk about go bags. We have the second part of an interview with the founder of this podcast, Margaret Killjoy, where we continue our conversation from last week at literally the exact place that we left off. But first, this podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network. Doo doo doo doo doo. [Making noises like a song] So Margaret, we've gone through hygiene kit, survival kit, and... I immediately forgot the third part of it. Margaret 01:39 First aid. Inmn 01:39 First-aid kit. And so that wraps up kind of like an emergency pack? Margaret 01:44 Yep. Inmn 01:44 What what what else goes in a bug out bag. Margaret 01:47 So, now that we get to the bag itself, I would say the next most important thing is a water bottle. Specifically, I like--and I give to all my friends--single wall steel canteen style water bottles. And the reason that I like these is that you can boil water in them. The double wall vacuum sealed canteens, they rule for a lot of purposes, like actually, they're really good for like putting hot soup in your bag. If you're going out hiking for the day and you get to the top of the mountain you get to--as if I've ever climbed a whole ass mountain. By my standards where I live, the mountains are very short. And so when you climb up a whole ass Appalachian mountain, you can have your warm soup up at the top even when it's snowing and shit, you know. But overall, I use 32 ounce steel wall canteens. I like them a lot. And then you're also going to want to make sure that you have food in there, protein bars and other snacks. So that's the core. But then for the bag itself, it's really going to depend on what you're doing. So, I guess I'll go over the not camping stuff first, the kind of like...the stuff that is like...Okay, because there's all the camping shit. And that's really useful depending on your situation. But, things to put in your go bag: your passport. If nothing else, if you don't want your actual main documents in here, you're going to want to put photocopies and digital copies of your stuff in here, which is of course somewhat of a security risk. If someone steals your bag, they get this stuff, right. But for me, the threat model is that my passport is more useful to me in my backpack than it is at home in a safe when I'm 1000 miles away. So, your passport, which I would push anyone who was capable in the United States of making sure that they have an updated passport, especially these days. You want your important documents backed up. This could be some of your medical records. It could be your dog's medical records. It could be your children's medical records. And, you might want the deed to your house. You might want some of the vehicle registration stuff. You want your like stuff--not necessarily the originals in this particular case--but you want the documents of it in case you're like coming back later and need to prove some shit. You know? Because a lot of crises might disrupt a lot of the institutions of bureaucracy. And you would think that in times of crisis, bureaucracy will be like, "I guess we kind of get in the way of human freedom." But no, in times of crisis borders will still be like, "Oh, I don't know about you. You don't have the right document. I don't care that the road you're on is literally on fire." or whatever the fuck you know. Another way to back these up is to literally just to take pictures of them on your phone and have it on your phone. But I think it's actually a good idea to have a USB stick with these documents as well and you might want to consider encrypting that, which I don't know if all computers can do easily but at least my computer can do easily. And you probably want...you might want more of an expanded first-aid kit in this. I guess I gets into the other thing thing. And then the other thing that I think you're gonna want in your go bag is you want fucking entertainment. Like this gets over overlooked so much. But, when when Covid hit, the way that my mental health works I was very isolated, right? I could not put myself at risk to Covid because of my mental health. And so, I lived alone in a cabin without much electricity. And the best purchase I made was something called a Bit Boy, and I highly recommend it. It is this tiny...it looks like a tiny Gameboy and it has all of the Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and everything else games like on it. And it uses almost no battery. It's rechargeable. It's a little finicky. If you like turn it off it like fucks it up because it's like a it's like a $30 thing full of pirated shit, right? So it's super finicky. But, I swear that this thing had a better mental health effect on me then like almost anything else during that time. And the other thing that got me through it was I had legally purchased downloads of TV. And so even though I didn't have internet, I once a week, once a day, like sat down and ate my cold soup and watched fucking Steven Universe, and that she got me through it. And so like a USB stick full of like movies, TV, also, specifically, a USB stick full of like survival guides and information about how to build things, fix things, all of that shit. I think it's a super useful thing for a bug out bag. And I leave it up to... Inmn 06:32 It's funny because I feel like this episode is something where we're covering a lot of stuff that--and I just want to start flagging things--we did a whole episode on how you can build a mesh network essentially to have things like libraries of entertainment, or Wikipedia downloads, or like survival bits. So, if you want to learn more about that then go check out that episode. I believe it's called Andre on Solar Punk. Margaret 07:08 Oh, yeah. I forgot we talked about some of the mesh network stuff. That shit's fucking cool. And yeah, so have a library with you. You know, keep a download of Wikipedia on your computer. My computer bag is an example of the kind of bag that theoretically I should be a little bit smarter and kind of keep next to the bug out bag when it's not in use, right? Because I'm going to throw my laptop into my bug out bag if I'm running, right? And so it's like people are like, "Oh, but where's your like giant knife." and like, don't get me wrong, I have a giant knife on my bag. But. I also now have a Nintendo Switch in there, which is an upgrade from the Bit Boy. And like, I am proudest of that of all of the things in my bug out bag. I see that as the most likely for me to use. And I remember before Covid, I remember thinking to myself as I was preparing a library hard drive. And as I was preparing--well I didn't have the Switch yet--but I was like, "Man, what kind of Apocalypse leaves you with free time?" And I'm like, "Oh, Covid." or the next pandemic or fucking hanging out in a refugee center for trans people in Canada or whatever the fuck horrible shit we're gonna have to deal with, you know? Inmn 08:24 Yeah, and just sorry, just to clarify, free time for a lot of people and an incredible amount of not free time for a lot of people. Margaret 08:33 Well, yeah, no, I I think I mean more about isolation. It's not like I like...maybe I'm just being defensive. But it's like at the beginning of the pandemic, my cabin did not sustain life. And so I had to put all of my work into plumbing it, solaring it, you know, washing all my clothes by hand, like doing all this shit, right? But, I think that especially in times of isolation there's like downtime that people don't expect. And I could be wrong, but I suspect that this would be true almost no matter the crisis is that there's like downtime you don't expect where turning your...where not thinking about the crises that are happening is incredibly important. No, it is funny. You're right because I think in my head there's like the beginning of Covid a lot of especially middle class people were like, "Oh, fuck, I'm stuck in my house and bored." Right? Versus a lot of working class people who are like, "Well, now I'm still working in the middle of this nightmare," you know? I think that like...but I would guess that...I dunno, whatever I'll stop being defensive. Inmn 09:41 Yeah, sorry, less of a push back and more just a bringing in this other piece of the piece of the context. But, you know, there were also overworked doctors who were separated from their families. And so, I imagine they also did have probably this weird amount of downtime where It's like, "Well, I'm not at work, but I'm not with my family. What am I doing?" Margaret 10:04 Yeah, and specifically for me, games are a really good anti-anxiety because I definitely hold by the, "Busy bee has no time for sorrow." But then you're like, "Well, it's dark out and I don't have lights in my house. Fuck am I gonna do?" You know? Okay, so that's some of the stuff from a bug out bag point of view. That's the kind of...like;, documents and things like that matter a lot. You're also going to want anything that you need for taking care of other loved ones and or animals that you might have to do. Like, my dog has a smoke mask. He does not like it. If we were in a wildfire situation, he would deal with it. You know? And so there might be like different stuff like...I should probably get a muzzle for my dog. I do not. I do not muzzle my dog on any kind of regular basis. But, I could imagine a situation in which like, everything is so stressful that it would be necessary, right? And you're gonna know better than us what specifically other other stuff you need. But I guess we'll talk about more of the expanded survival stuff that a lot of people are gonna put in their bug out bags, if that makes sense? Inmn 11:20 Yeah, totally. And sorry, just to keep flagging some things. So folks, if you want to learn more about other little pieces of this topic like how to prepare for needing extra medications in a world where like medication systems kind of break down, we do a whole episode on it. I'm blanking on what the episode title is. But I believe it's called "Taking care of your medical needs." Margaret 11:50 That sounds right. Inmn 11:51 And I forget who the guest was. But yeah, I love that we're having this go back conversation now. Because I feel like we can really tie a lot of larger topics that we've talked about before into it, which I'm really loving. Margaret 12:08 Yeah. And then maybe we'll go through, you know, kind of some more of this checklist type stuff and then talk more about the different situations in which one might need to go bag. How does that sound? Inmn 12:18 That sounds great. Margaret 12:19 Okay. So, for the bag itself beyond the emergency kit, you've now added your documents, you've added your water bottle, you've added snacks. And for snacks from my point of view, I recommend snacks that you don't like because otherwise you're going to eat them beforehand. If you're me. [laughs] I used to keep Clif Bars and not Builder Bars as my snacks because I didn't like Clif bars, but I ate so many builder bars as part of my regular life as being an oogle that now I'm kind of sick of them. So now it's like reversed. And Clif Bars are my regular protein bar and Builder Bars are my my snacks I throw in my bag, you know. And, everyone's gonna do this a little differently. And then that stuff is like...most of the stuff in here is...Like I also pick things that don't really expire, but food expires. And also so does that medication, although the medication tends to just lower its efficacy rather than become dangerous. Other things I keep in my bug out bag: a collapsible plastic water canteen. These are useful for a bunch of different things. Like if you just need to hold more water for a while, you might want one of these. I also have moved to a hydration bladder. A lot of people move away from them. I've recently moved towards them. People kind of go back and forth in the hiking world about hydration bladders. As an oogle, I never used them. As a hiker, I really like them because you can hands free or like minimal effort drink as you go, you know. And, you know, more water good except for the weight part of it, you know? And you're also going to want, to keep talking about water, you're going to want to filter in water. And I think that this is true in most circumstances. I think that this is like...you know, some of this like survival stuff is very back woodsy, but a lot of the survival stuff also applies to cities. And it applies to cities where like if you got to boil advisory... like I don't know, anyone who's not had a boil advisory where they live at some point or another, right? You know, every now and then they admit that the water isn't drinkable in your area, and also a lot of like urban survival stuff is like...whatever, I've like slept on a lot of rooftops in my life and shit, you know? Like shelter from the elements is often easier to find in a city but not necessarily a lot of other stuff. So for myself, there's a lot of different water filters. A lot of them are designed for backpacking and those tend to be pretty good. I use a Sawyer water filter. They're these little tiny ceramic water filters and they have a bunch of different attachment sense to them. I used one of these at the beginning of Covid for all of my water because I didn't have a great water source. And, I was just like basically like...I set mine up to a five gallon bucket system where I put water in the five gallon bucket, and then it goes through a hose into the Sawyer filter, and then it gravity drips into a five gallon jerrycan. That's like a stationary kind of thing. For a go bag, you use the same water filter, but it has like one bag of dirty water and one bag of clean water. You can also just rely on chemical filter...not filtration but like purification. Some people like the UV filter chemical things. I've never used one. I don't totally understand them. I mean, I understand the concept, but I don't...I can't attest to them. It seems like most people are picking ceramic water filters. There's also a LifeStraw. And a LifeStraw is a perfectly fine thing to have. I keep one in my hiking day bag. These are these cheap water ceramic filters--like 15 bucks often--and you just drink through it. Usually I go up to the stream and you stick this thing in it and you drink out of the stream. Inmn 16:09 It acts as a filter but also you can't get viruses or stuff? Margaret 16:14 Exactly, it's a ceramic filter that...Yeah, all of these filters are designed to take like mountain stream water and make it potable. Actually, the thing that they're bad at is filtering large stuff like mud. And these can get like clogged up. It's the biggest downside of a ceramic filter. What a lot of people do is they take their bandanna or their...if you're an oogle you use a banana. If you're a military bro, you use the...I forget what they're called. They're the like, giant bananas that...Folk...I can't remember the name of them. Folks in the desert and like, you know, Southwest Asia and stuff tend to use, I think. You use one of those. And then if you're a hiking bro, then you use your...what did I decide they were called? Buffs? Inmn 17:11 Yes. Margaret 17:13 So, you filter all the water through that if you want to keep the ceramic water filter lasting longer. I haven't done as much like hiking filtering, I usually just bring enough water because I don't go on really long hikes. But, I mostly have used the ceramic water filter in a stationary sense. So that's like my personal experience with it. But, that's what I carry. You can also add, if you would like, you can add these more ready-to-eat food besides just like bars and stuff. They make these...it's basically Lembas [like in "Lord of the Rings"] bread. They make these like military rations that are like vacuum sealed and are good for five or ten years. And it's just like oil and flour. And it tastes like nothing. And it's just calories. It's just like a block of calories. And your body can go a fairly long time without food compared to water, right? But like, for peak efficacy--and also to not be a grouchy asshole--you want to at least put calories if not nutrition in your body. A lot of the survival food isn't really focused on nutrition because like it's not the end of the world if you don't get your vitamins for a couple days. Inmn 18:21 Yeah, but obviously everyone has different, you know, body needs or like food requirements. Margaret 18:27 Yeah, totally. Inmn 18:28 And so this is like maybe a good time for folks with diabetes or just any any other kind of predisposition that requires to have more food around. Margaret 18:39 Yeah, and different types of food. And I think it's actually worth having a variety of types of food also for the people around you because I think a lot of this is going to be based on sharing, because greediness in times of crisis, people are like, "Oh, that's when you got to be greedy." And I'm like, "The single most useful tool you can have is another person." Like I can't imagine something I would rather have in a time of crisis than someone else. And so like, yeah, having a variety of types of foods, I think is great from that point of view. No, yeah. And like, yeah, everyone's going to need different things. Okay, so next, fire. In most people's day to day life, fire is not a big component of it. And honestly, most random overnight...like, when I was in oogle, I didn't like fucking stop and make a fire in the woods most nights, you know? And if I did, it was kind of like a celebration type thing, you know? However, from a survival point of view, there's a lot of situations where being able to have a fire is really useful specifically mostly for warmth, also for other like, you know, signaling purposes and for like...you know, if you make a wet fire, it'll smoke more and things like that. And for both boiling water to...another way to, you know, purify your water or whatever. And also for cooking. It's kind of a morale thing for cooking a lot of times. A lot of foods you can just eat them cold and that's especially the kind of stuff you might want to keep in your bag. But for fire, you might want to have additional fire methods, but you've already got a lot of them going on in the rest of your kit. The kind of thing that I always sort of made fun of, but now I understand, is the big fuck-off knife. I mean, you're a knife maker. So you probably think about knives more than the average person. But... Inmn 20:39 It's true and I think I'm curious what you have to say about the big fuck-off knife mostly because I've kind of worked my way back from it, because I used to have a big fuck-off knife all the time. Like when I was an oogle, I was that oogle with the big fuck-off knife. Margaret 20:57 The big fuck-off knife has two purposes. One, is to get people to fuck off. It's not even about drawing it, it's about fucking open carrying it. It's just about being like, "Yeah, I'm in a miniskirt. And I have a like seven inch knife on my waist." Like, people just fuck with you less when you have a big fuck-off knife. And so that's like one of the purposes. But then, bushcraft. I didn't understand why survival knives were big because I was like a big knife...I'm not a knife fighter. I think anyone who is a knife fighter is not thinking about how long they want to live. Like, that's why I mean having a big fuck-off knife is to make people leave you alone, not to like fight them with it. But just to like fucking get people to leave you alone. But the giant knife is really useful for bushcraft. It's really useful for processing wood especially if you don't have a hatchet or something with you. That's what I've like come to understand as to why survival knives are big and how specifically they're bladed on one side with a wide--you're going to know these words better than me--like spine. [Inmn mummers affirmatively] And they have a wide spine so that you can split wood with it. You can take a stick and you can put it on it on the end of the stick and then you can hit it with another stick or a rock. And you can push the knife through the thing. That's [Inmn interrupts] Inmn 22:18 Can I? Margaret 22:19 Yeah. You know more about knives than I do. Inmn 22:21 Yeah, yeah. Just to offer a little bit of re-contextualization. So you know, I'm not a bushcrafter by any means. I wish that I was. I'd be. God, I'd be so much cooler. But I do know knives pretty well and I've been asked to make bushcraft knives before and so you know, I did a bunch of research about bushcraft knives. And what I found was that and then what I found from use is that like the big fuck-off knife is not actually great for bushcrafting. Margaret 22:58 Oh, interesting. Inmn 23:01 Yeah, most Bushcraft knives are like they kind of max out at six inches. And a lot of people err more on the like, you know, four and a half to five and a half range. And what that gives you...because for bushcraft, it's like--you described batoning earlier--if you're batoning your knife through wood to reduce it you don't need a big knife for that. You need a sturdy knife for that. And with a smaller knife, you kind of get a lot more manual dexterity so you can do all of your other tasks. I love knives, I love big fuck off knives. I agree that the purpose of a big fuck-off knife is for people to fuck off. And, you know, I can imagine like survival knives are often longer because you might need them for heavier, larger tasks. But I'm honestly a fan of having a belt axe for that purpose because it's does that thing better. Sorry. That's my that's my segue into knife world Margaret 24:06 No, that makes a lot of sense. And if you ever want to lose a lot of your life--and I feel like you might have also--read people talking about survival knife versus axe versus saw versus machete, about what you're supposed to bring into the woods, you know? Inmn 24:27 Yeah. And what you're gonna learn is that knives...there's no single knife. That's good for everything just like there's no single bag that's good for everything. You need to pick the things that you're comfortable doing. And you need to pick the tasks that you need done. And then find the right tool for it. Margaret 24:48 No, that makes a lot of sense. I will say in terms of saws and knives and all that shit, I have found that the little wire saw is sort of bullshit. Have you seen these? Inmn 25:01 I always wondered. Margaret 25:03 But yeah, I think...and the one...I haven't used that much. I think I tried to use one once. The pocket chainsaw is not bullshit, which is basically a chainsaw blade with two loops on either end, and you loop it around a limb, and then you like, saw back and forth. You know, I think those are not bullshit. Although I think, personally, I'd rather have a folding saw. But they're bigger. So. Inmn 25:30 Yeah, yeah. And that's the key thing here is like if you want to build shelters, use the saw. Don't...You could use your knife for some of it. But yeah. You don't want to build a structure with like hacking 10,000 sticks into something. Get a saw. Margaret 25:51 No, I think you've convinced me. Because I've been like, I've been pondering my--I have a survival knife on my bag--and I've been pondering its actual usefulness versus its weight and stuff, you know? And like, besides the like, I keep it on the outside of my bag and it's a little bit of a like, leave me alone, you know? I think that I have been seeing...Yeah, like, yeah, I think I want to fuck with this more. Redefined my own...Because the knife that I use on a day-to-day basis is my folding pocket knife. You know? It's what I use for almost everything. I'm not going to baton wood with it. Well, I would. It just wouldn't do a very good job of it. Inmn 26:27 Yeah. And, you know, I say this as someone who is always going to have a big knife, probably. And I don't have a purely rational reason for that. But yeah, it makes me feel more comfortable. Margaret 26:45 No, and it's like, and I think it's telling that backpackers don't tend to have large knives. They don't tend to have survival knives at all. Backpackers also tend not to have axes or saws because they're not really...they're focused on getting somewhere and camping, not like building large fires or building structures and things like that. Yeah. And then like, I think more and more, I think fighty type people have been focusing more on smaller knives anyway. Like the karambit is a popular fighting knife or whatever and it's not a big knife. Inmn 27:19 Yeah, yeah. And if you see the...like a lot of the like, original from...I actually don't know where karambits come from. But, where they were developed, they're incredibly small knives. They're like inch and a half long blades. They're incredibly tiny. Margaret 27:36 It's Indonesian. I just looked it up. Yeah. Yeah, no, yeah. It's not a like...Like don't fight a bear. Like a general rule. Don't live your life in such a way where you're fighting bears. And then, if you are then use bear spray. If you're not using bear spray, use a 10mm handgun. Like, you know? Oh, we haven't really talked about firearms. Inmn 28:06 Anyway. Sorry. Derail into knife world over. Margaret 28:09 No, no, I think that...I'm really...It was useful. I learned some. It's probably worth carrying some kind of knife sharpener. If you suck like me, you can use the pull through style--that Inmn is probably going to be disgusted that I use because it destroys the initial original bevel. If you know how to sharpen a knife properly, you can bring a whetstone. It's a little... Inmn 28:31 But, whet stones are heavy. Margaret 28:33 I know. And it's also...or you can also bring a little diamond sharpener stick and stuff like that. Yeah, what would you...Okay, what would you suggest? What would you suggest as your portable knife sharpener? Light and transportable? Inmn 28:45 Yeah, so you know, a knife doesn't do much good if it's not sharp. And most people's knives are not very sharp. I would say that it is a great skill to invest in is learning how to sharpen a knife. There's a lot of stuff... Margaret 29:06 I've tried it so many times. I don't believe in it. I don't think it's real. Anyway, yeah, let's continue. Inmn 29:13 And yeah, like, you know, like what I have at home are these big series of benchtop whetstones. There's a million grits and...but one of the better things that you can have is a strop. Just a leather strop, which is just some like full grain leather. You want it to be fairly thick and use some green polishing compounds that you rub on it and you strop the edge, which helps maintain the edge. And, but as far as pocket sized sharpening devices, the strop doesn't sharpen the knife, the strap like helps redefine the burr on the edge. And there's a million different little pocket sized whetstones. But, the important part is that you want something coarse and you want something fine to like refine the bevel. And so like if I had to build a little to-go kit, I would get a little miniature like 400/1000 combo stone. That is probably not something ceramic because it's heavy. But, they make a bunch of different things. I'm actually less knowledgeable about these pocket things. Yeah, but you want something coarse and you want something fine. 400/1,000 are great grits and then a strop to kind of like polish out the edge with. With that you can't go wrong. Well, you can go wrong... Margaret 30:48 Yeah, I will go wrong. Inmn 30:49 I don't know enough to tell you how to go wrong. Margaret 30:51 No, I will successfully go wrong. I've been trying to sharpen knives my whole life. I will continue to do it. I can kind of do it. I actually use a little all-in-one pocketstone, a little bit larger than the like stick ones, and it's a longish yellow piece of plastic with two sides. And then also has a little fold out part that can be used for filing in the saw parts. And it has kind of a guide, has a little bit of an angle guide built into it, and that's the most useful part for me. So that's the only time I've been able to sharpen knives to where they like can shave. Inmn 31:28 Knife sharpening is is a skill. Don't...That would be my advice is don't think that you're going to...don't rely on learning how to sharpen your knife for the first time when you're in an in an emergency. Practice that now. Margaret 31:40 And I will say as someone who has used all knives for almost everything over the years, it's like, it's all right. I mean, it's not as good. But, I can still cut a cord with a shitty knife, you know? Inmn 31:54 Yeah, well, you know, the old knife making adage, "A dull knife..." or sorry, the old kitchen worker adage, "A dull knife is a dangerous knife." Margaret 32:02 Yeah, so live dangerously. Cut... Cut paper with your knives and never sharpen them. Yes. Okay, let's talk about sleeping systems. Inmn 32:06 Live dangerously? [laughing] Sleeping systems! Thank you for indulging my derailment. Margaret 32:20 It's what we're here for. And some of this we might kind of like...some of the like camping stuff we might not dive as deep into. We're already on episode two of what was going to be one episode. So, I believe in the sleeping bag. And that's leftover from being oogle. I would say that the one thing I would carry in any kind of bag is a sleeping bag. This is not always true. I don't always carry sleeping bag. But, it's like almost a comfort item. It's a like no matter what I'm warm kind of item. I believe in sleeping bags with a good stuff sack. I personally don't use down. Backpackers tend to use down. It's lighter. It compacts more for the same warmth. However, it doesn't insulate once it gets wet. And that is a big deal from my point of view, from a survival point of view. When everything is fine, I prefer a non down one. They're also cheaper. And that might be why I have that preference. And also, I don't know anything about how the birds who produce down are treated. So, sleeping bag super important. A lot of backpackers have now moved to backpacking quilts. And then a lot of old timers will actually just use like wool blankets and stuff like that. I love a sleeping bag. You're gonna want to get off the ground. However, that said, in an urban environment you can use cardboard. You just need to layer it a lot. And it's not as good as a sleeping pad. But it is still useful. And you're going to need a sleeping pad that is appropriate to weather and desired comfort. If you want to hear me learn more about sleeping bags and tents you can listen to me talk to Petra a year and a half ago. I don't remember the name of the episode besides Petra being the guest. And that's where I learned that the combo move of an air mattress and a foam pad is is often really good. For shelter, the sort of three choices kind of is a tent, a bivy, or a tarp. This is not necessarily in a lot of bug out situations. It is necessary in my bug out situation and it might be in yours. And the advantage of a tarp is that it is like only one object. It is light. It is kind of easier to hide in a lot of ways. And I actually, when I'm sleeping in dangerous situations--like a lot of oogle life is like trespassing--I don't like tents because tents, you can't see out of them. Like it's like a little bubble. It's why people do like tents is that they want to be in their little bubble and I totally get that. And I'll probably be a tent person moving on because it's like comfortable, and safe, and stuff. But when I was younger and everything was well, not easier, my life was fairly hard. But like whatever. It was easier for me to not bother with a tent so I used a tarp. And then the other option is the bivy. And a bivy is like a...It's like a waterproof sleeping bag. And there's like ones...like I have one that has like one pole, just to keep the head of it off your face, you know. And these compact really small. This is what a lot of people who are rucking, who are doing military shit, tend to prefer are bivys. They're not popular among backpackers. The kind of closest equivalent is hammocks. A lot of people also use, but that involves there being good trees in the right place. However, hammocks can be light, and good, and stuff, too. And these are all gonna be preferences. And the reason I no longer fuck with bivys is I have a dog. And he's coming with me. And so I'm now probably a tent camper. Because if I'm sleeping outside, I'm just leashing my dog to a tree. But, I don't want him to get rained on. I want him warm. So I'm probably going to be a tent camper from now on. And then some tents now, a lot of backpackers are moving to these tents where you use your hiking poles to keep them up and then they're super lightweight and they're actually kind of cool. And they're a little bit...like some of them are like almost halfway between a tarp and a tent. And... Inmn 36:06 I love as like camping technology evolves it just like...I feel like it gets more old timey and more oogley but with you know, fancy stuff. Margaret 36:17 The $700 oogle tent. Yeah. Some of these tents are like fucking $600-700 and made out of like, space material or whatever. Yeah. What's your favorite shelter for camping? Inmn 36:32 So this is funny. I once bike toured across the entire country. From the west coast to Chicago, I built a tarp tent every night. Margaret 36:47 Like an a-frame? Inmn 36:50 Yeah, I built like a little tarp tent every night, which I had to get really creative in the West. As you know, there's not a lot of trees everywhere it turns out. And then when I got to Chicago, I went out and bought the Big Agnes ultralight backpacking tent, which is like sort of halfway between....Yeah, it's halfway. It's like...It's not a bivy, but it doesn't have a much larger footprint than a bivy. And it was the best thing that I've ever spent money on. I'm embarrassed to say that I spent money on it. Margaret 37:28 Whatever. Whatever. Inmn 37:29 But, I did. Margaret 37:30 I'm revoking your oogle card. You didn't scam it from REI dumpsters? I can't believe you. Yeah, yeah. Fuck yeah. Inmn 37:41 All right. Yeah, but I love that thing. But, I would love to move to a bivy. Yeah. Margaret 37:45 Yeah, I think that..Yeah, honestly, like, I've only...I haven't slept a ton in my bivy. But I was like, "Oh, this works." The other downside of a bivy is that your bag doesn't fit in the tent with you. And so if you sleeping in a bivy in the rain, you're going to need to work on waterproofing your bag. But that is something that like as a backpacker, you're probably trying to do anyway. The main ways that people do it is 1) a pack cover that goes on the outside. And then 2) people often either put things in dry bags, or just like fucking contractor bags, like trash bags, inside their bag and let the bag itself get wet. And if you're, if you're bivy camping, you're accepting that your bag is getting rained on and you just need to work around that. Which, is I think part of why it's the tactical person's choice or whatever. Because you're like, "Comfort doesn't matter. Surviving to get where I need to go shoot somebody is what matters." or whatever, you know. Or not get shot or whatever. Which actually, you're going to have to take into mind when you when you choose what kind of color for all of these things you want. I personally would lean towards the camo type stuff for my...I live in a red state. I could imagine having to leave. Inmn 38:49 Yeah. Margaret 38:50 I'm gonna like I'm gonna like speed run the rest of the camping stuff. You might want a poncho or a raincoat. Some people like ponchos because you can also turn them into shelters or whatever, but I think sometimes it's a little bit just fucking carry what you like. You want additional socks in your go bag no matter what, no matter what you're...Even if it's not a camping go bag, put some fucking socks in there and some other...change of underwear and possibly like better soap, like camp soap, like more hygiene type stuff. My go bag has a fucking battery powered Waterpik so that I can floss with water at night because I have spent a lot of money on my teeth. They are not in great shape and water picks rule. I also have a portable battery powered electric toothbrush that I fucking love. You might want an emergency radio. If you're like good at radio shit, you might want a Baofeng. It's like an all channel and it can send as well as receive. It's called a transceiver. It's really easy to accidentally break the law with a Baofeng because you're not allowed to actually use any sending signals on it most of the time. But they're very useful crisis if you know what you're doing. On the other hand, I would just say get one of those like, your little battery powered weather AM/FM radio. Have and put it in there. At home, I keep one of those like hand crank solar panel everything survival radios or whatever. But they're like a little bit bulky and a little bit cheap. And so, I like don't quite trust it in my bag, but I keep one at home. But, other people feel differently. I like having a monocular or binoculars in a go bag. I like this because looking at shit is cool. And sometimes also, I could imagine there are situations where I would want to look at and see what's ahead and not go there. If I had money, if I was a money person, I would have at least a thermal monocular if not full on like night vision shit. But that's money. You want the rain cover, the dry bag, you want to beef up your first-aid kit a little bit. You probably want an ace bandage at the very least. There's some other stuff like moleskin and other things for like long distance walking that you might want. I've heard good things about leukotape--and I haven't used it yet--but as like...people use it as a replacement for moleskin for covering blisters and shit. You might want cooking stuff, which I'm just not gonna get into cooking stuff here. And you might not. You can also like cold soak your food and just like put it in like a peanut butter jar with water and fucking have it turned into food. Whatever. You might want hiking poles. You might want a solar charger. You might want, as we've talked about, a folding saw, a hatchet or machete. You might want more light. Like some people like the collapsible LED solar lanterns. They're not like a great bang for your buck in terms of like, I mean, they're actually really light and shit, but like, you know, you can use a headlamp just fine. But, like sometimes if you've got like a family and shit, it's like nice to have like a little bit of ambiance and niceness or whatever. Especially like maybe if you're in like a building right when the power's out, you know, like that's the kind of thing that like is a little bit more likely and is useful. You probably want a plastic trowel of some type for pooping outside or a little aluminum trowel for digging a hole so you can poop into it. And alright, guns really quickly, and then...My recommendation is only carry firearms if you train in them. Unlike everything else. Carrying something you don't know how to use is fine if you know you don't know how to use it and you get someone else to use it, like your first-aid kit. Like, my IFAK for gunshot wounds, If I'm shot in the belly, it's for someone else to use on me if at all possible. You know. I am trained in how to use it, but so guns are the exception to this. Do not carry a gun unless you can keep it secure at all times and you pay a lot of attention to the ethics and also the legality around firearms. Those have been covered a lot more in other places on this show. Specifically, my current recommendation that I'm a little bit this is like do what...Whatever, I haven't yet mastered this. The handgun that I keep near my bed in a safe, in a quick access safe, would go into my bug out bag in a moment of crisis or be on my person. And then in the bug out bag is additional magazines with 9mm ammunition. 9mm is by far the most common ammunition besides like .22LR, which is a survival round meant for hunting small animals. But, for a self defense point of view, I believe a handgun 9mm. And if you are the type who wants long guns, if your whole thing is you're gonna be surviving in the woods or whatever, you might want to consider some type of backpacking .22. They make, I think it's the AR-7 is one type of survival collapsible .22. And then the other one is a 10/22 with a backpacker's stock that folds. What I personally plan on carrying if it was a get out past the militia checkpoint the US government has fallen scenario or whatever is a folding 9mm carbine, which is a rifle that shoots nine millimeter rounds. A lot of people don't like these from a tactical point of view. It's not nearly as effective at long range stuff as say an AR-15 or other rifles that are meant to shoot larger rounds, right, or not larger but more powerful rounds. But, the ability to use the exact same magazines that I already use for my other gun and the exact same ammunition makes it worth it for me for specifically a bug out bag scenario. I don't have enough money to do this yet. That is why I don't have that. My only bug out bag gun is my handgun that is also my home defense gun. And now everyone knows what I have at home. Anyway, that's my firearms. Inmn 44:30 They know one thing that you have at home. Margaret 44:32 Yeah, totally. Or do they!? They think I have a 9mm but really I have a 10mm. Whatever. Oh, and then the other thing. Randomly. Okay, if your other threat model, if you're in like fucking Alaska or some shit, you might want a 10mm, but you already know this if you live in Alaska. 10mm is a round that's better at shooting really big animals. It doesn't really have any like particular advantage against people in it and shit, right, but like against grizzly bears and shit. One, bear spray more effective. There's a bunch of studies, bear spray is more effective at stopping a charging bear than any gun that exists. Whatever, I mean maybe like a bazooka or some shit, I don't know whatever. Oh, poor bear. And then also, you don't kill the bear. It's just trying to fucking scare you and live its life. Yeah, yeah, that's my bug out bag. Do you feel ready? And or do you wanna talk about, really quickly, like some some scenarios? Inmn 45:35 Yeah, I feel a lot more informed. I feel overwhelmed, Margaret 45:40 I should address the overwhelm. And I should have led with this. I'm so sorry everyone. You don't need all this stuff. This is the "I'm building a bug out bag. And I have all the time." You slowly build the bug out bag. You slowly get prepared. There's no one who's entirely prepared for all things. And the purpose of a bug out bag from my point of view is to ease your mind. When I first made my bug out bag and my cabin in the woods, I was able to say to myself, "If there's a fire in this forest, I know what I will do. And now that I know what I will do, I am not going to worry about a fire in this forest anymore." And so the first little bit that you get is the most useful. You get diminishing returns as you spend more money and more size and things like that. Massively diminishing returns. The everyday carry, your cell phone is the single most important object. You know, the pocket knife, the pepper spray, the the basic shit is the most important. If you have purse snacks and a water bottle, you are more prepared than almost anyone else. Yeah, I should have led with that. Inmn 46:57 Yeah. Oh, no, no, it's okay. I feel like, you know. We eased into it then it got real complicated. And I'm, grateful to think about the overwhelm afterwards. But, Margaret, so in thinking about a lot of these things, there's like...I'm like, okay, like, if I'm in real life DnD or if the literal apocalypse happens then I could see needing these things. But why else might one need a bug out bag? What is some threat modeling kind of stuff to think of? Margaret 47:42 Yeah, I mean, like, again, it's gonna depend on where you are. If I were to pick where I'm at, I can imagine gas supplies running out, right? I don't think...or like getting interrupted in such a way that, you know, suddenly, there's a lot of limitation to the amount of fuel that you can have, right? I could imagine grocery store stuff. I could imagine like, you know, supply chain disruptions. We're seeing supply chain disruptions. People might have to leave because of earthquakes. People might have to leave because of fires. Like, natural disasters is like probably the number one thing, right? And where you live, you will know what the natural disasters are. Where you live, personally, I would worry about drought. And I would worry about water war. But, and I would focus my prepping around rain barrels and you know, keeping five gallons of water in my truck or whatever. I didn't even get into the shit you should put your vehicle. Some other time will the vehicle preparedness. And but yeah, I mean, like there's scenarios where like...it was completely possible that January 6th type stuff could have happened on a much larger level, right? They tried to have it happen on a much larger level. We could have had a fascist coup in the United States, because they tried. And in that scenario, you might need to leave the country or you might need to move to a safer part of the country. Or you might need to move to a place so that you can prepare to defend. God, defend the country. But like, fight fascism, even if that means being like, "Alright, it's us and the Democrats versus fascism," or whatever, you know? Like, I can't imagine like the partisans in Italy were like, "Oh, no, you're a bourgeois capitalist. I'm not going to fight the Nazis with you." You know? Like, I mean, actually, that probably did happen. Inmn 49:46 Yeah, or how there's...there have been tons of anarchists who are fighting in Ukraine. Margaret 49:52 That is a...Yeah. Yeah, totally. And like if we were suddenly invaded by Russia, there would be like us and some patriots next to each other fighting on the same side, and it would be real awkward. Right? Real awkward, but like, you know. Okay. And so I think that it was entirely possible, at that moment, that my threat model included, "What if I need to get out of the south?" you know? And if I need to get out of the south, yeah, I'm driving until I hit the points where I start thinking that there's gonna be militia checkpoints. And then I'm in the woods, you know? Yeah. And like, so. It's not nearly as likely as other things. But, most bug out scenarios, yeah, are like, "I need to go spend a weekend somewhere." It could even literally be like, a go bag is like, if I got the call that my dad was in the hospital and I just need to get in my fucking truck and go see my dad, right? Like, nothing else bad is happening in the world. It's still real nice to have the bag that I am grabbing and walking out the door. You know? Yeah. Yeah. What are some of the scenarios that you imagine that you would worry about? Inmn 50:01 There's kind of, there's kind of a lot. I mean, there's, you know, there's a lot of scenarios, and I'm wondering if this is the potential for like, future episodes is like...You know, where I live, I do think about drought, I think a lot increasingly more about militia checkpoints, because I live in a--I mean, I feel like everyone lives in a place where there could suddenly be an active militia--but I think about those things. This is a whole episode that we should do. But, I think about friends who live in places where it floods, I think about friends who live in places where there's hurricanes. Margaret 52:01 And a go back is also getting to go...If you need to go help someone who's in a tight place of crisis, you know, like having your truck--don't drive your truck into standing water ff you don't know how deep it is-- but like, if you needed to get into a disaster zone to help people, if you're more prepared, you're more able to do that. Inmn 52:22 Yeah. Oh, and actually, could I suggest an addition to to go bags? Just as a thing. Yeah, I would love to heavily urge people to have in their go bags or to have this as a separate bag in your emergency kit is, you know, something that we're learning a lot from harm reduction communities and organizing right now is harm reduction supplies. Yeah, Naloxone or Narcan, fentanyl testing strips, drug testing stuff in general. And, you know, even if you don't use drugs, then I would suggest having stuff in case other people who do use drugs and need them to some extent or have complicated dependency around them, having that kind of stuff for someone else could be life saving to someone else. Margaret 52:29 Of course. No, everything I said is the only stuff you can use. Inmn 52:41 That is a really good point. Alright. Well, that's some stuff. Is there anything else we should talk about go bags. It's cool to have a go. That's what I'm gonna say. Don't let the right wing have it. It's fucking cool. Being prepared rules. People are gonna think you're cool. They used to make fun of you, but now...now they don't. I have two kind of silly questions, because I love rooting these discussions in humor and light heartedness. There's another word for it. Margaret 54:14 I famously hate joy. Inmn 54:16 Yeah. Okay, so we've just gone through this big list of stuff and do you remember Donny Don't from Crimethinc? Yeah, what is the Donny Don't of go bags? Margaret 54:33 Donny Don't is a, just so people know, it's the don't do with Donny Don't does. And what is the Donny Don't of go bags? It's probably the like crazy overkill versions. Like I probably don't need an ice axe in my go bag. Now that I say that I'm like, I mean, if I had to cross into Canada on the East Coast I would actually need an ice axe. So, but like, gear obsession, I think that and letting go bags be an endless bottomless non fun thing. If it is fun for you to geek out and find the the version of the thing that's two ounces lighter, do it--as long as you give away the old one or like, you know, maintain it in such a way that it's useful to somebody else. But yeah, I think that Donny Don't is the overkill, like a bag that you can't carry. Unless, I mean, some people can't carry certain amounts of weight that they would need and then they need assistance and things like that. That's actually okay too. But like, but overall. Yeah. Inmn 55:42 Cool. Yeah. And actually, that is my retrospective answer for which knife to bring is the knife that you will carry. Margaret 55:49 Yeah. Inmn 55:49 Is the knife that does not that does not impede you from caring it. And then my other comical question because I can't do a single interview without talking about it is: So in Dungeons and Dragons, you have the adventuring kit and what is the 50 foot of hempen rope, which every single adventurer uses at some point, and what is the like climbing like...not crampons. Pitons. What is the pitons thing that no one has ever used. If you use them, please tell us about it. Margaret 56:32 Everyone uses the the eating stuff. The spork, the utensils. Everyone uses...Yeah, the stuff that everyone uses is the tiny light cheap shit. You know? It's the fucking BIC lighter. And know what what no one uses is the magnifying lens to start the fire, which I didn't even include. I actually include tiny little magnifying lenses in the kits because they cost like five cents, like little Fresnel lenses size of credit card. But, it's mostly so you can read small stuff. And that weighs nothing. I like throwing it in. But the magnifying lens. That's the Yeah. Inmn 57:21 The piton thing. Margaret 57:25 Yeah. Whatever it is. Inmn 57:29 Cool. Thank you. Thank you for indulging my silly questions. Well, it seems like maybe we should do some more...Talk about this more some other time. Margaret 57:41 Yeah, you should ask me about vehicle preparedness sometime. And home preparedness. Inmn 57:46 Yeah, vehicle preparedness, home preparedness, like specific disaster preparedness. Yeah. Like, I know, we're gonna...we're planning on doing a hurricane thing at some point. Margaret 57:58 We're just gonna throw a hurricane. Inmn's a level 17 Wizard. Inmn 58:07 And, you know, maybe we like...do we eventually started talking about...Do we just throw you, Margaret, into situations and say, "How would you deal with this issue?" Like as an episode concept? Margaret 58:22 I thought you meant physically. Like, while I'm on tour, be like, "Sorry, Margaret, you're suddenly survivor lady." And I'm like, "Wait!" Inmn 58:32 No, no, I'm thinking of like, this funny episode concept where we come up with situations, almost like roleplay situations, but real life, and you tell us how you would prepare and deal it. Margaret 58:46 Okay. Yeah, we should do that sometime. I guess I'll have to get good at this. Usually, because I'm like...Well, my whole thing is I'm not quite an expert. At this point. I think I do know more than the average person. But my whole point was like, I'm not an expert. I find experts and ask them things. But, I guess at this point, there's a lot of this shit that I either sometimes have hands on experience and sometimes I just fucking talk to people about it all day. So. Yeah, sounds good. Well, Inmn 59:12 Well. Thanks so much for coming on this, what ended up being a two parter episode of your own podcast that I am a weird guest host of right now. Margaret 59:24 No, it's our podcast. It's Strangers' podcast at this point. Inmn 59:29 Yeah. Do you have anything that you would like to plug? Margaret 59:34 You can hear me on my podcast, Live Like the World is Dying, it's a community and individual preparedness podcasts published by Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. You can also hear me talk about history. I spend most of my time reading history books and talking about it on a podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff on Cool Zone Media. It's very confusing that one of my podcasts is on CZN and one of my podcasts is on CZM, but that's the way it goes. And my most recent book is called "Escape from Incel Island." You can hear me talk about a shotgun that I used to really want, the Celtic KSG which is what Mankiller Jones carries. It's no longer that shotgun I lust after. Now I want to Mossberg 59A1. But, you know, I don't know whether I want to change what they're carrying. And I'm on the internet. @MagpieKilljoy on Twitter and @Margaretkilljoy on Instagram and you can also follow...I'm now trying to make people follow our social media, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. You can also follow us on social media @TangledWild on Twitter and then at something on Instagram. I'm sure if you search Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness it will come up. Do you know what it was? What is our Instagram? Inmn 1:00:48 It is @tangled_wilderness on Instagram. Margaret 1:00:51 We did a really good job of grabbing all the...we've been around for 20 years and we didn't fucking grab good Instagram handles at the beginning. Yeah, that's what I got. Inmn 1:01:00 Great. Great. Well, we will see you next time. Margaret 1:01:04 Yeah. Inmn 1:01:11 Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, please go make a go bag and then tell us about it. But also tell people about the podcast. You can support this podcast by telling people about it. You can support this podcast by talking about it on social media, rating, and reviewing, or doing whatever the strange nameless algorithm calls for. Feed it like a hungry god. And, you can support us on Patreon at patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Our Patreon helps pay for things like transcriptions, our lovely audio editor, Bursts, as well as going to support our publisher Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. Strangers and in a Tangled Wilderness is the publisher of this podcast and a few other podcasts including my other podcast, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, which comes out monthly and is usually our monthly feature of anarchist literature or something. We also put out the Anarcho Geek Power Hour, which is the podcast for people who love movies and hate cops. And we would like to make a special series of shout outs to some of our patrons in particular. Thank you Anonymous, Funder, Jans, Oxalis, Janice and O'dell, Paige, Aly, paparouna, Milica, Boise Mutual Aid, Theo, Hunter, Shawn, SJ, Paige, Mikki, Nicole, David, Dana, Chelsea, Kat J., Staro, Jenipher, Eleanor, Kirk, Sam, Chris, Michaiah, and Hoss the dog. I love that this list just keeps getting longer and longer and longer. And seriously, we could not do any of this without y'all. So thank you. I hope everyone does as well as they can with everything that's happening and we'll talk to you soon. Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

Hi, I'm Mareya otherwise known as The Fit Foodie. I'm a chef, holistic nutritionist, author, inventor and mom. And I want to welcome you to my podcast. It's called Recipes for Your Best Life and with every episode, I'm peeling back the onion on fitness, nutrition, health, wellness and family. The truth is, you're the chef of your life, and for every important pillar, there's a great recipe worth sharing. So every week, we'll explore them together. Think of it as food for thought you can really sink your teeth into. So, join me, and let's squeeze the joy out of this life. Can I get a Fork Yeah?

How many Clif Bars does one eat in a lifetime? Tough to say; but Forrest Shearer is claiming over five thousand. From the most iconic session to ever go down on Chad's gap to breaking down the art of the turn, Forrest Shearer showed up with answers. He's an environmentalist at heart and uses his love for snowboarding as a bridge to connect with other people and places he otherwise wouldn't have. Forrest is powered by his own two feet and still managed to summit Denali with practically no preparation. He's hoping to be be able to hit Chad's gap one more time at age 100 so we recommend you keep your eyes on him. Sit down, grab your granola, and join us as we keep the banter flowing with Forrest Shearer on this week's episode of The Bomb Hole!

In this episode, I sit down for a chat with my friend Bryn Cohn (she/Her). We talk career transitions, and the evolution of identity that comes with that. We look at this through the lens of her pursuing creative direction as an expansion of her artistic universe. And we also explore what it means to create sustainability practices both in dance and in this shifting landscape of social media and it's power in advertising and our lives in general. Join us for this wide-ranging and salient discussion. About Bryn- Bryn Cohn is an award-winning choreographer, educator, writer, movement and creative director. Her choreography has been presented by Jacob's Pillow, Danspace Project, Bryant Park, Hudson Valley Dance Festival, 92nd Street Y, Kaatsbaan International Dance Center, McCallum's Choreography Competition and REDCAT Theater among others. She has been commissioned by BalletCollective, Repertory Dance Theatre, Los Angeles Ballet II, Big Muddy Dance Company, Missouri Contemporary Ballet, Youth America Grand Prix and Billy Bell's Lunge Dance. Recent collaborations include with visual artist Olafur Eliasson and composer Alex Somers in her newest work "The First and Last Light" which was performed at Trinity Church in New York City. Cohn has been hired for commercial, fashion and visual art projects with Louis Vuitton, Smartwater, Betsey Johnson, Artists & Fleas and Tribeca Art Night.Cohn was nominated for a Princess Grace Fellowship in Choreography. She was selected to participate in the New Directions Choreography Lab at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater – a creative residency supported by the Ford Foundation. She has been in artistic residence at Cal State Fullerton, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, University of Minnesota Duluth, Stockton University, Texas Christian University, Roger Williams College, University at Buffalo and Grand Valley State University. Cohn received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from CalArts and was honored as a distinguished alumni. She has a Master of Fine Arts from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as a High Honors, Chancellor's and Regent's award recipient. Cohn is currently pursuing a career as a creative director in Los Angeles. She is enrolled in a professional development course through Art Center and has worked on campaigns for BMW, Converse, Clif Bars and In N Out.Where to find  Bryn: On Instagram Bryn's website  Where to find me: Connect with me on Instagram Check out my website Sign up for a free consult

Have you ever hiked in the pitch black night with nothing to guide you but your headlamp and a somewhat reliable GPS?  We've done more than our fair share of night hiking, but Whitney wins for being the most impressive, oppressive, and exhilarating! We scored a single-day permit for Mt. Whitney for July 31st of 2022! Now, what this means is that we were blessed with a 24-hour period in which to hike the tallest peak in the contiguous U.S.A., 14,505 ft of forests, creeks, and granite over ~23.5 miles up and back down with ~6,400 ft of total hiked ascent (according to my Garmin; 20.9 miles, 6,600ft according to AllTrails).  This trip was made extra-special by some dramatic weather that opened up on us with ~5 miles to go in our hike, resulting in washed out trails, washed out selves, and rockfalls booming down the mountain as though Thor was having a temper-tantrum. We loved a lot, learned a lot, and lucked out a LOT on this trip! We hope you enjoy hearing about our experience!Gear List - a lot of this is our tried-and-true standards:Osprey Tempest 20 & 22L daypacks (his & hers) with hip beltPlatypus 2.5L bladder with hose and Camelbak bite-valveGregory 2L bladder/hose/valveel-cheapo trekking poles off Amazon (we will be replacing after this trip, but they've lasted 10+ years)T-shirt-turned bandana from our church (gotta represent!)Amanda:Danner Trail 2650 Gore-Tex boots (LOVE!)L.L.Bean hiking zip-off pants and anorak Mountain Hardwear tank top and Ghost Whisperer packable down coatMammut med-weight jacketEx-Officio undersVS wireless medium-impact sports braSmartWool Liner socks and Merrell wool-blend hiking socks (extras packed for wet feet)Dan:Asolo Agent Gore-Tex (his go-to boots)Mountain Hardwear hiking zip-off pants Mountain Hardwear Gore-Tex raincoat Mountain Hardwear buton-down and med-weight jacketSmartWool liner and hiking socksEx-Officio boxer-briefsFood:Stinger Waffles, Clif Bars, Clif Blox, Quest bars, some gross high-protein cookie Dan got excited about, Kind bars, dried fruit, candied nuts, Stinger Gels, candied ginger (for the win!), Justin's Nut Butter individual packs, bagels

In Ep. #28, hear Brooke Donberg, the Sports Marketing Manager at Clif Bar & Company, tell the story behind featuring six women athletes on CLIF BAR packaging for the first time ever.Back in 2020, for the first time in the brand's 28-year history, CLIF BAR replaced the iconic male climber on the packaging with real-life trailblazers - six women athletes.  The six athletes included Venus Williams, Megan Rapinoe, Ashima Shirashi, Jordyn Barratt, Lakey Peterson, and Katerina Nash - representing six different sports ranging from traditional events like cycling, tennis and soccer, to newer sports like skateboarding, surfing, and climbing.This decision was made to celebrate the incredible athletes who require sustained energy to push boundaries and go farther in their discipline. Clif Bar & Company has been a vocal advocate for women and women athletes since its founding days in the mid-1990s. At the headquarters office, the company provides many benefits to support women and parents including a robust parental leave policy, extensive health and wellness programs including an onsite gym, subsidized onsite daycare, a lactation room with hospital grade pumps, and the choice to work a reduced work schedule upon returning from maternity leave. When LUNA Bar was created in 1999 as the first nutrition bar for women, the brand naturally focused on supporting causes that women care about, like equal pay and women in film. In 2019, LUNA Bar closed the World Cup roster bonus gender pay gap for the 23 women on the US Women's National Soccer Team, paying each of them $31,250 to ensure their equal pay for equal work. Clif Bar is adding to this legacy of supporting women by highlighting these six athletes and their contributions to their sports.In this episode, hear Brooke Donberg - a long time Clif Bar team member and advocate for women's sports - tell the story behind how & why women athletes ended up on your Clif Bars back in 2020. 

While studying architecture at the University of Michigan, photography was just a hobby for Adam Wells. But it was while he was working at marketing job right after college that he realized this could be a full-time career.But even before all that, Adam says his time at Cranbrook, where creativity and the arts are fostered, was a crucial starting point on the road to becoming a full-time photographer.Adam Wells is an ex jock & Cranbrook hockey player, and currently works as a freelance brand narrative and lifestyle photographer, having worked with names like REI, Clif Bars, and Cotopaxi.He joins host Qadir to discuss curating online portfolios & freelance work, analog vs digital cameras, and looking back on the nuances of Cranbrook's architecture.About The Guest:Adam Wells works as a freelance brand narrative and lifestyle photographer, having worked with names like REI, Clif Bars, and Cotopaxi.Reach Him At:hello@adamjosephwells.comAdam Wells on LinkedInAdam Wells on InstagramAdam Wells on FacebookSelected Quotes:Adam on his creative process05:54 - I think that's the creative process, is just being comfortable in the uncertainty of trying to create something and hoping that it's gonna succeed. That your idea is gonna come to life in this beautiful fashion. On learning the tools of the photography trade07:10 - The more developed that relationship is that you have with your tools, the easier it is to express yourself through them.On his future & flexibility 17:06 - I'm honestly really resistant to saying [photography] is something I'm doing for the rest of my life, because I'm still 30 and I'm hoping I've got a good 60 years ahead. And if at any point I feel like it's time to pivot and explore new things, I think it's great to keep an open mind and stay flexible.

Are V8 juices and CLIF bars really as healthy as advertised, or is it all just marketing? In this episode, Mark and Danielle discuss the pros and cons of these products, as well as give some tips for tracking calories to align with your goals.To submit a question to be answered on a future episode, visit: www.imagonutrition.com/podcast  Theme song, Thinkin' Bout Food, courtesy of Happy Pill.

Whether you are a decades-old brand or a start-up, there are do’s and don’ts to building your brand. Paul McDowall and Catherine Clark, founders of ClarkMcDowell agency, are here to share their insights on a few brands they’ve worked with through the years. Clarkmcdowall has three approaches to brand building: creating from scratch, transforming, and amplifying. We’ll hear about the transformation of brands like Palmolive and the amplification of a brand like Kind Bars. Paul and Catherine’s long-time friendship/partnership shines through in the beautiful ways they work together. They call it “intelligence and imagination” - combining the strategic thinking brain with the graphic or creative brain– both have equally important roles and neither is relegated to that specific function. Join us as we discuss old and new ways of branding, the effects that the lightspeed technology changes and generational changes may have on your branding direction, and some tips and tricks to think about, wherever you are in the branding process. The “NexxtLevel Brands Podcast’ is hosted by G. Steven Cleere, Founder and “Chief Pot Stirrer” of NexxtLevel Brands. This show focuses on disruptors and thought-leaders from the Entrepreneurial Food, Beverage, and CPG Industry, but we also share tips from veterans and key suppliers that may help fellow CPG professionals achieve their goals. Discussion Points How Catherine and Paul met and decided to work together How ClarkMcDowell approaches branding Storytelling and branding Mission-based product branding Keeping the important qualities when transforming older brands How do you approach branding for a new startup? Which is more fun– transforming an older brand or starting from scratch? Lessons and learnings: Weight Watchers, Kind Bars, Clif Bars and more How do you work with companies after the initial presentation? Generational categories and how to speak to them Disruptors and challengers vs. older, static brands Advice from Paul and Catherine Resources: ClarkMcDowall Website Catherine Clark LinkedIn Paul McDowall LinkedIn NexxtLevel Brands Website Steven Cl

Fluff up your road mullet and bring a gun to a footrace as Veronica A. Brown and Lynn Bixenspan turn their third eyes to the Blood Hive. (Not) brought to you by Dunkaroos and Clif Bars.See You in Your Nightmares podcastKelly Anneken's Hilarious PatreonKelly on Venmo See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week on the pod Travis is joined by Kait Boyle and Kurt Refsnider!Kait Boyle and Kurt Refsnider are professional ultra endurance cyclists. Kurt holds a PhD in geological sciences and has won and/or set many records in cycling events including Tour Divide, Arizona Trail, Colorado Trail, Grand Loop, and Kokopelli Trail. Kait is an experienced outdoor educator who has won the 24 Hour Mountain Biking World Championship, Arizona Trail 300, Kokopelli Trail FKT, and many more.  Travis and guest host Phillip Vaccarella talk with Kait and Kurt about cycling minutiae, CLIF Bar overdosing, the Colorado Trail Race, power meters, the winning mindset for people who want to live fully, Kait's comeback from a terrible car accident, Carhartt hats, Pivot bikes, sleep deprivation, and more.In This Episode: Kait Boyle Instagram | Website Kurt Refsnider Instagram | Website Phillip Vaccarella Instagram | WebsiteBikepacking Roots Instagram | WebsiteTravis Macy Instagram | WebsiteMark Macy on Instagram Subscribe: Apple Podcast | SpotifyCheck us out: Instagram | Twitter | Website | YouTubePodcast Produced & Edited by Palm Tree Pod Co. 

Football is back! Featuring Adam and Connor, we evaluate weeks 1 & 2 of college football and NFL football. More importantly, we discuss our love of Clif Bars.  --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sportifyp/message

Psychological safety in the workplace has been getting a lot of traction in the midst of the pandemic. Do you feel like you can bring your whole self to your team and work? Many people cover or feel like they have to portray only certain parts of themselves with their team or at work, but in the face of remote and hybrid work environments, psychological safety is becoming more important than ever before.   Psychological safety is the belief that one can speak up without the risk of punishment or humiliation. It is the ideal that we should all be striving for, but what will it take to make psychological safety happen in the new future of remote and hybrid work? Psychological safety is the number one thing that all leaders, all businesses, all organizations need, especially in this future of work. Join me as I explore the critical importance of creating physiological safety as we face the future, the inner game skills that we need to cultivate, and the simple words that we can all use to increase psychological safety in the workplace and in the world. If we can create psychological safety at work just imagine what we can build in our world together.   How to Create Psychological Safety in the Workplace SEO Description:   Psychological safety in the workplace is the belief that one can speak up without the risk of punishment or humiliation. It is the ideal that we should all be striving for, but what will it take to make psychological safety happen in the new future of remote and hybrid work? Psychological safety is the number one thing that all leaders, all businesses, all organizations need, especially in this future of work. Join me as I explore the critical importance of creating physiological safety as we face the future, the inner game skills that we need to cultivate, and the simple words that we can all use to increase psychological safety in the workplace and in the world. If we can create psychological safety at work just imagine what we can build in our world together.   Resources mentioned in this episode: What Psychological Safety Looks Like in a Hybrid Workplace from Harvard Business Review Conscious & Inclusive Leadership Retreat “How Leaders Build Trust at Work Through Authenticity” from Mindful.org Leading from Wholeness Executive Coaching Leading from Wholeness Learning and Development Resources Shine: Ignite Your Inner Game to Lead Consciously at Work and in the World by Carley Hauck Contact Carley Hauck   The Imperfect Shownotes   Carley Hauck 00:01   Hi, my name is Carley Hauck and I am the host of the shine podcast. Welcome to season four. This podcast came about over two years ago, as part of the research I was conducting for my new book shine ignite your inner game to lead consciously at work in the world. Shine debuted four months ago, and is getting wonderful acclaim and acknowledgement.   This podcast is about three things: conscious and inclusive leadership, the recipe for high performing teams and awareness practices. I will be facilitating three episodes a month. Today's episode is about the important topic of creating psychological safety. In the midst of the new future of remote and hybrid work.   Imagine that your monthly one on one is happening with your supervisor. And he, she or they say to you, I really appreciate how you've shown up at work and with the team in the last year. I imagine it wasn't an easy time for you. It wasn't easy for any of us.   I am wondering if we can create a new foundation today?   What might I say? Or do that would create a greater sense of helpfulness or would support you to feel like you could be really open in our conversations. I want you to know that I have your back. And that this is a safe space for you.   How do you feel hearing this? Open suspicion, appreciation, relaxation. Just allow yourself to notice: what do you feel the sensations in your body? What is the emotion present? Hearing this? Whatever arises is welcome. What if the next statement out of your supervisor's mouth was this?   I've been reading a lot about the importance of psychological safety. And I would like to invest more in this concept in our team and in my interactions with you. Notice how that impacts you. What is psychological safety, maybe it's a term you've never heard. I believe it is the number one thing that all leadership teams, all businesses, all organizations need, especially in this future of work.   03:55   Psychological safety is the belief that one can speak up without risk of punishment or humiliation. It has been well established as a critical driver of high quality decision making, healthy group dynamics and interpersonal relationships, greater innovation, and more effective execution in organizations. Essentially, to be successful on a team and as a team. psychological safety is the enabler. This insight is the result of almost 30 years of research by Dr. Amy Edmondson. This was supported and reinforced by an extensive two year research program called Project Aristotle where 15,000 employees at Google were assessed to see what was the number one trait that was supporting high performance and innovation. And it came down to psychological safety.   In the last year, every organization around the world has gone through a reorganization. We are still going through it as each company is reevaluating their business model, their values, their mission, what are the products and services that make sense to market build and produce now these are the conversations that we've been having and will continue to have If you don't have trust, you won't have loyalty from your team members, your stakeholders or your customers. Marc Benioff, the CEO of the technology company, Salesforce, and one of the conscious and inclusive leaders that I highlight in my book, SHINE has been quoted as saying, you'd better decide now that trust is your highest value. Because in this new world, when everything is changing, people want to know they can trust you. So, if we don't have psychological safety, we don't have trust. And that often leads to dangerous silence.   People that are aware of the risks of a situation but they don't dare to speak up for fear of being called out or punished for it. We've seen this happen, or avoidable failure. This means people are more focused on avoiding failure and getting the most out of work. People also will tend to make more mistakes that could have been avoided if psychological safety levels were higher. When we think about the skills necessary to manage in this new remote hybrid work environment, it is more important than ever, that we have cultivated these skills that support collaboration, decision making and innovation, the people skills, the real skills are what I like to refer in my body of work and in my book, the inner game.   06:50   New research from David J. Deming at Harvard's Weiner Center for Social Policy, examines lifetime earning patterns and shows how the peak earning years have shifted dramatically up the age continuum. Over the past five decades, this study has been getting some buzz in the last few weeks. This trend has been driven by changes in the mix of skills required in the workforce, away from routine tasks and toward non-cognitive domains like critical reasoning, and decision making. Again, the inner game skills. I have been specializing in organizational and leadership development consulting coaching, and I also teach on leadership topics as an instructor at Stanford and UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. And what I found in these last 10 years of working with lots of organizations, LinkedIn, Pixar, Clif Bars, and then tech, Asana, and also with leaders, and emerging leaders at these two academic organizations, is that when these folks possess a strong inner game, they're really able to align with what really matters, and where they can actually support the sustainability of psychological safety in their teams and then the culture. And so these inner game skills are self awareness, emotional intelligence, which comprises of self management and empathy, and social awareness and relationship mastery. Another inner game skill is resilience, we can think of that as having a growth mindset.   Love releasing from love, not from fear, well being, and authenticity. Again, these inner game skills, I see are necessary to be able to have these brave exchanges to create psychological safety, and our one on ones, our teams, our senior leadership, and our greater culture at work. And since the workplace is a microcosm for the greater world, if we can create inclusion, belonging, psychological safety, and collaboration at work, just imagine what we can build in our world together.   09:50   So I want to give you an example of a senior leader that I have been coaching since the beginning of the pandemic. And he utilized this strong inner game to create more psychological safety and trust in his team. Let's call this leader Scott. First I want to highlight that this leader already has High self awareness, a growth mindset.   He showcases humility, empathy, compassion, he has high performance and his motivation for his work, his company, and his role is something that's intrinsic to him. I feel honored to have been able to serve this leader and to watch his growth. And one of the things that we've really been working on together is his discomfort with conflict.   So we decided that it would be important to assess the psychological safety in his team. Based on what I've already seen this leader express in our coaching sessions, for example, his commitment to his own learning, growth and development, his willingness to be humble, take personal responsibility to be coached. He is the exception, I would say not the rule in my professional experience. But this kind of leadership can be inspired and can be nurtured. And I had the suspicion that when we did the psychological safety assessment with his team, that it would be high.   So this is what I did. I conducted a psychological safety scan with this leader in his for direct senior reports earlier in the year. The psychological safety scan is an anonymous survey. It has been validated by Dr. Amy and Manson's work on the subject, I spoke to her earlier. And she is a woman that I deeply respect, and think of as a mentor to me. And actually, I feel very delighted that a few months ago, she endorsed my book and body of work. The survey and the scan is one of the very first things that I do with organizations when I'm brought in to assess or build out an inclusive leadership or Management Development Program, to engage in a change management strategy to support team building to get a sense of what's happening in the culture. And this scan is basically measuring four different dimensions of psychological safety. And as I shared before, I had a sense that this score would overall be high in psychological safety, but I forecasted that the team would probably score low in one quadrant. And that actually ended up being true. The area that needed the most improvement was the team's comfort with failure. So what do I mean by that? Can each member of the team willingly showcase and share mistakes with one another. Based on some of the culture pieces that were present in the company, they didn't feel comfortable to make mistakes and to share them openly in the setting of the team.   13:20   But based on talking openly about their scores, and creating a social contract for psychological safety, they were able to talk about why. And we could make a game plan for how they might grow this part of their team. Just the process of talking openly about their discomfort with sharing mistakes as a team, increase the psychological safety and the comfort level. As a follow up to this team debrief on psychological safety, I encourage the team and Scott, the senior leader, to have a failure party. This would encourage an environment where mistakes are seen as normal, where folks can learn and grow from them, and then innovate and collaborate better. So a few months back, Scott put in their team meeting agenda that they would create a failure party. And he set this up first by creating a social contract for psychological safety, which I had coached him how to do. And we had set at the first debrief where we all met as a team and I facilitated that session. And then how he created the context for the failure party was he went first, he shared a mistake that he'd made earlier in the week, what he learned from the mistake, how he course corrected and even how he asked for support to navigate the next steps. He then asked other members of the team to share as well.   15:05   One of the best ways that you can increase psychological safety with your direct reports, or with your team is to be willing to be vulnerable to go first. So as a result of Scott, going first in the team, one of the team members shared that they've had this ongoing challenge with self management and reactivity with one of their direct reports. They're actually working with a coach around it. And they were able to express openly with the team, but they made a mistake earlier in the week, and they lost their cool, and they were able to check it in the moment, come back, course correct, you know, put in an apology, take some personal responsibility, and being able to share this openly in the group to be witnessed in it. And then to note that this is something they're working on, they're growing, they were able to get positive reinforcement, so that it didn't have to be a place of shame, but a place for healing and transformation.   In my professional experience, many successful executives encounter serious negative feedback for the first time in their careers, when they take on larger roles or responsibilities, like the example above of this particular manager in being able to shift emotional reactivity. That often is feedback given to leaders that often centers on style rather than skills or expertise. So if that leader isn't able to have a growth mindset, it can feel like a threat to their identity. But if they take on a learning mindset, they can grow.   17:10   We can imagine that in the last year, we've all had more challenges than normal, because of the pandemic. We are sorting through a lot of systems and structures that are being reinvented, that are taking into account the unveiling of racial injustice, systemic oppression, more emphasis on business models that are in alignment with regeneration, with sustainable development goals, and even the added pressures of mental health, needing to care for the elderly and for children. We are navigating a lot. And while we were always bringing our whole selves to work, we have literally been in each other's living rooms in the past year. So there has been more that has come to the light, like young children bursting into a meeting, divorce, struggles with healthcare. And this burden has been on managers and leaders to hold to navigate hearing about all of these work life situations. And this isn't going away with remote hybrid work. So there is a real need for managers, for leaders to support psychological safety in this new foundation of remote and hybrid work, so that each individual's needs, preferences and or limitations are taken into account and they feel safe to speak up. And once the leader is able to showcase that it is safe, there can be accountability and empowerment for each member of the team, and even the culture to uphold it so that everyone can feel they can bring their whole and best self to work and thus feel like they belong.   19:15   Psychological safety is needed today to enable productive conversations in new, challenging and even potentially fraught territory. By viewing ourselves as works in progress, and supporting a learning culture. We can really reconcile our yearning for authenticity and how we work and lead with an equally powerful desire to grow. The place we want to be has high psychological safety and accountability. If this podcast was meaningful to you, and you are wanting to bring a foundation of psychological safety with your one-on-ones, your team or your culture, this subject is something I feel really passionate about. And this is one of the first things that I do with any of my coaches, with any team building, our larger inclusive manager development program, organizational change management, that I am asked to come in and conduct. If psychological safety is low, in my experience, there will be a large challenge in the long term success for anything that I can possibly bring into the company. But if we are able to create a foundation of psychological safety, then the sky's the limit.   If you'd like to work with me to create psychological safety, there are three ways. First, you can book a free consultation with me, the link will be in the show notes. And you can provide me with more information on what you're needing, why this might be important. And I can talk you through the steps of how I might be able to do that with your supervisor, your team, or your culture. The second way you could work with me is you could bring me in for a training session on psychological safety. And in this session, I'll customize it to your particular needs and culture. But I'll be able to assess and show you how to create and sustain psychological safety and trust as individuals in your senior leadership team and within your greater culture.   The body of work that I've been facilitating as an organizational and leadership development consultant, and as an adjunct instructor at Stanford, and UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business is on creating a strong inner game. And again, these essential skills are necessary to really support a sustainable culture of psychological safety and trust. And number three, if you are seeking someone to support you in a more full time capacity on this topic, please reach out. I would love to book a free consultation with you on how I can support you in this new future of work.   22:26   I want to leave you with just a few thoughts on psychological safety as a way to really bring this home. There are societal factors that favor silence over voice, self protection over self expression. Self protection remains a contracted and fear based stance, which doesn't support one to lean into their purpose and courage. It's protecting against the thought, what is the worst thing that could happen, versus what is the best thing that could happen? It's playing safe. But in playing safe, we miss opportunities to grow for fulfilment and contributing skillfully to something wonderful in the world. When people feel praised and encouraged for their efforts to speak up, that increase the psychological safety. The simple words of thank you for speaking up does wonders.   Lastly, psychological safety is fragile, and it needs constant nurturance and renewal. I have a wonderful article that I wrote with Mindful magazine earlier in the year which focuses on the inner game of authenticity, and thus the outer game of building trust. I will leave it for you on the show notes. And now, I have a special invitation for you. Over Labor Day weekend, I will be offering and facilitating a conscious and inclusive leadership retreat with my good friend and colleague Brian McCormick. We are taking applications now and it will be at a beautiful retreat center in Black Mountain North Carolina, which is on very special and healing land and a creek that runs through the whole property. There will be time for renewal, learning community, healthy food, nourishment, and play. I would be delighted to have you come. We will also have time to explore the concept and practice of creating psychological safety in this setting in this deeper dive. I feel so excited about being able to bring people together after this long year and hope. Holding space for transformation. Before I began writing my book, I was leading conscious leadership retreats for women at this beautiful eco lodge in Mexico once a year. And when I started writing the book, I pushed pause on the retreats, but I knew that once shine was out, I would start hosting retreats again. It is undeniably one of the most favorite things that I get to do with my work bringing people together for immersive experiences, for transformation, healing for growth. And I would be delighted to have you join us and you'll see a link for the retreat in the show notes. If you have any questions or comments, please email me at support at Carley. Hauck dot com. I'd love to hear from you. Finally, thank you for tuning in and being part of this community. I have many more wonderful podcast episodes for you. So until we meet again, be the light and shine the light

Here it is, as promised, super hopped up on caffeine… Episode 3: Part 2 of the Appalachian Trail murders. Jen takes us through the very sad and senseless murders of Rebecca Wight, Geoff Hood, Molly LaRue, Lollie Winans, and Julie Williams. Please support Outdoor Online at their website outsideonline.com!

In ch. 17-18, we're asking hard questions, like: What if Berelain was a mentor to Egg? What if Rand used creative problem-solving? Where does Juilin put the thieves he catches? And which fruit WAS it, actually, in the Garden of Eden?

In this episode of Teach Me How To Vegan, we share the Stages of Change model, how it can be used to help you (or someone you know) continue moving forward on the journey of going vegan, and provide specific information, individualized strategies, and tips that can be applied right now, depending on what stage you are in. Recipes Mentioned: Vegan Pancakes https://apnm.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Pancakes-Recipe.pdf Chickpea Salad https://vanillaandbean.com/smashed-chickpea-salad-sandwich/ Tofu Scramble https://apnm.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Tofu-Scramble-Recipe.pdf Cheese Sauce https://gourmandelle.com/best-vegan-nacho-cheese-sauce/  Egg Yolk https://apnm.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Fried-Eggs-Recipe.pdf Products Mentioned: Beyond Burger https://www.beyondmeat.com/products/the-beyond-burger/ Vegan Mayo https://www.bestfoods.com/us/en/products/organic-and-vegan/vegan-carefully-crafted-dressing-and-sandwich-spread.html Tofurky Deli Slices  https://tofurky.com/what-we-make/deli-slices/smoked-ham/ Larabar https://www.larabar.com Nutritional Yeast https://www.iherb.com/pr/KAL-Nutritional-Yeast-Flakes-Unsweetened-22-oz-624-g/19095 Clif Bars https://www.clifbar.com/shop/product_line/clif-bar Resources Mentioned: Albuquerque Vegan Meetup https://www.meetup.com/ABQVEG  Further Reading and Resources: The Stages of Change http://www.cpe.vt.edu/gttc/presentations/8eStagesofChange.pdf The cruelty of the egg industry https://humanefacts.org/eggs/ The cruelty of Dairy https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/30/dairy-scary-public-farming-calves-pens-alternatives

Business can follow a purpose and make a profit.  They can do both and grow and thrive.  In this episode we explore 2 elements of purpose which help businesses to do that:Its purpose for being and working with purpose.   In this episode you will discoverHow purpose led businesses are growing faster than those which are not.The impact of being purpose led on employees and on customersHow you can weave purpose into your businessWhat helps businesses to grow purposefully The importance of looking at your business as a business Timestamp:1.42 Purpose led economy and growth of purpose led businesses3.31 What helps purpose led business grow5.36 Clif Bars and purpose7.34 What helps you to grow purposefully10.06 Looking at your business as a business Mentioned in this episode:DeloittesBcorpCone| Porter NovelliClif barCheeky Panda

  It is going to be a very different stage for marketing as we come out of the ashes of the COVID-19 pandemic and into a brave new world. To talk about what this pivot means for the promotional marketing space, Pica Marketing Group (https://www.picamarketinggroup.com/) join Bob Roark on the show. With decades of experience in coming up with innovative marketing solutions for businesses, Paul and Stephanie are experts in promotional marketing and spreading the marketing message using promotional tools and products. Listen as they talk about the future of promotional marketing in the post-COVID world and share some very amusing and incredible stories of marketing strategies that you never thought anyone could have pulled off. --- Listen to the podcast here:[smart_track_player url="" title="Promotional Marketing In The Post-COVID World With Paul And Stephanie Zafarana" ] Promotional Marketing In The Post-COVID World With Paul And Stephanie ZafaranaWe have a special episode. I have my good friend Stephanie Zafarana and her husband Paul on. They're from (https://www.picamarketinggroup.com/) . We're going to talk about marketing post-COVID pandemic and what they're doing to serve their clients. Stephanie, Paul, welcome to your episode. Thanks for having us. Tell us a little bit about the Pica Marketing Group and who you serve. Pica Marketing Group was conceived in 2008. There isn't a better time to start a company. We learned a lot of lessons starting in such a crazy environment, but we incorporated it because we saw the needs that not only were our clients and people in the marketing community looking for innovative marketing ideas. They were looking for hard numbered returns. They were their board of directors and all of the people that they report to for real numbers. No longer was it okay to throw money at the marketing and sales department without any actual results. That is why we call it Pica Marketing Group because pica is a unit of measurement. It plays well to our audience. We work on serving nonprofit organizations, healthcare, and then manufacturing. Those are the vertical markets that we serve the best and we engage in a couple of different ways. We have some large clients where we're able to plug into their already established marketing department and be that outside voice. We’re that different perspective to help them accomplish a particular project. Be plugged in to some of those smaller organizations that maybe have a person that's the office manager/marketing director. We become the marketing department for them, offering ideas, working and collaborating to get their message out, but doing that heavy lifting. It seems to work well for our clients. The great part is we find ourselves dealing with all sides of projects. Nothing's too big and too small. The more creative, the more fun we all tend to have. In the end, it is about results. We like to start the conversation with what you are trying to accomplish and work from there. It's been an interesting time. We're starting to come out of some of the quarantine and restrictive movement events post-COVID. A lot of the companies, their worlds changed. What are your thoughts on these companies on, what they should be thinking about as far as marketing and spending money and both from their customer perspective and also how to keep their employees safe? One of the biggest things that some people may or may not realize is back in the late '80s, early '90s when there was another recession that happened, a big player came out of that and that was Clif Bars. Those energy bars that everybody has. They were a big player in that and the time to spend on marketing and advertising is in these times. People tend to remember those brands that are out there that are there for them on a personal level. They tend to remember that they were there for them during this whole time. That's been a huge part of it. You want people to...

Since March, only five of Milk Bar's 18 locations have been up and running, but founder Christina Tosi tells Guy she is determined to bring the joy of baking to the doorsteps of family, friends, and healthcare workers. Gary Erickson and Kit Crawford have donated more than 3 million Clif Bars to doctors and nurses during the COVID-19 crisis. They tell Guy about the importance of morale when running an essential business during a pandemic. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series, where Guy talks online with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating these turbulent times.

Speaker Bureau Ready Ever wanted to know how to become speaker bureau ready? In today's episode of The Speakers Life, James Taylor interviews Josh Linkner about: Being An Innovation Keynote Speaker Becoming Speaker Bureau Ready The eight attributes of top speakers Reinventing your speaking career Josh Linkner has been the founder and CEO of five tech companies, which sold for a combined value of over $200 million. He is the author of four books including the New York Times Bestsellers, Disciplined Dreaming and The Road to Reinvention, as well as his latest book, Hacking Innovation. He has invested in and/or mentored over 100 startups, and is the Founding Partner of Detroit Venture Partners. Today, Josh serves as Chairman and co-founder of The Institute for Applied Creativity. He has twice been named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year and is a President Barack Obama Champion of Change award recipient. He is a regular columnist for Forbes, The Detroit Free Press, and Inc. Magazine. Josh is also a passionate Detroiter, the father of four, and is a professional-level jazz guitarist. Resources: Josh's website https://joshlinkner.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshlinkner/ Please SUBSCRIBE ►http://bit.ly/JTme-ytsub ♥️ Your Support Appreciated! If you enjoyed the show, please rate it on YouTube, iTunes or Stitcher and write a brief review. That would really help get the word out and raise the visibility of the Creative Life show. SUBSCRIBE TO THE SHOW Apple: http://bit.ly/TSL-apple Libsyn: http://bit.ly/TSL-libsyn Spotify: http://bit.ly/TSL-spotify Android: http://bit.ly/TSL-android Stitcher: http://bit.ly/TSL-stitcher CTA link: https://speakersu.com/the-speakers-life/ FOLLOW ME: Website: https://speakersu.com LinkedIn: http://bit.ly/JTme-linkedin Instagram: http://bit.ly/JTme-ig Twitter: http://bit.ly/JTme-twitter Facebook Group: http://bit.ly/IS-fbgroup Read full transcript at https://speakersu.com/sl052-how-to-bec…ith-josh-linkner/ James Taylor Hi is James Taylor, founder of SpeakersU. Today's episode was first aired as part of International Speakers Summit the world's largest online event for professional speakers. And if you'd like to access the full video version, as well as in depth sessions with over 150 top speakers, then I've got a very special offer for you. Just go to InternationalSpeakersSummit.com, where you'll be able to register for a free pass for the summit. Yep, that's right. 150 of the world's top speakers are sharing their insights, strategies and tactics on how to launch grow and build a successful speaking business. So just go to international speakers summit.com but not before you listen to today's episode. Hey, there is James Taylor, your keynote speaker on creativity and artificial intelligence and your host for international speakers summit. Today I speak with Josh Linkner, and we talk about building a successful speaking business and the art of reinvention. Enjoy this session. Hey, there is James Taylor and I'm delighted today to be joined by Josh Lincoln. keynote speaker Josh Linkner has been the founder and CEO of five tech companies, which sold for combined value of over $200 million. He is the author of four books including the New York Times bestsellers, disciplined dreaming and the road to reinvention as well as his latest book hacking innovation. He has invested in and or mentored over 100 startups and as a founding partner of Detroit Venture Partners today, Josh serves as chairman and co founder of the Institute of Applied creativity. He has twice been named the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year and as and as a President Barack Obama Champion of Change award recipient, a regular columnist for Forbes, the Detroit Free Press and ink magazine. Josh is also a passionate Detroit, the father of four and a pro level guitarist as we're going to find out. So given it's been gives me great pleasure today to welcome Josh onto the summit. So welcome, Josh. Josh Linkner Thank you so much. Great to be here and contribute James Taylor So share with everyone what's going on in your world just now. Josh Linkner Well, it's it's wonderful. It's it's an amazing gift to be able to share ideas with people all over the world. Last year, I did 163 pages. No, it's so it's been, it's been quite the ride. And to be able to get make a difference. I mean, obviously that meeting cool people is great that the performing arts element is great learning about companies is great. But the real juice to me anyway is being able to get those nodes six months later of someone saying this changed our company or changed our lives. And that is a deeply rewarding thing and a gift that we're able to share. James Taylor So you have this really fascinating background from entrepreneurship and business VC investing jazz guitar. happen, where did the the speaking part of you that we know know your view today about the keynote speaker, when did that begin? And as you were kind of getting into into the world of speaking, who are your mentors and people that can be to you under their wing or help guide you in those early days? Josh Linkner Yeah, so I know my background is I'm an entrepreneur. So I've started building sold five companies, I launched a venture capital fund, but I loved always getting the chance to share ideas. And I would speak often as the CEO of my company, and I felt like I was in the zone and people would often give me compliments, like, Hey, you were better than the keynote speaker. But I realized that I was an amateur to be clear. So I knew I had to go at least from a bad amateur from a good amateur to a bad professional does that I work with one of the folks you interviewed actually for Dr. Nick organ, who is an incredible mentor and trainer, he helped me develop my speaking style and helped me bring my voice out and work on the technical aspects. And I kind of learned the ropes from him. And and from there, we really spent the next decade or so studying the craft and studying the business of speaking. And so I got really deep and analytical on how decisions are made. And how does one speaker get hired for, compared to a different one and, and how, why is one cause 50 grand and others 10 grand. And so today, it's really in a very good read. We're getting about five to 15 inbound inquiries a day. And again, as I mentioned, I had the chance to deliver 163 engagements last year. James Taylor So as you as you were kind of going on building your your speaking career. One of the interesting things you did is you took that entrepreneurial mindset that innovators mindset and applied it to the world of speaking. So I'm wondering, initially from as an outsider, although you were speaking as part You're, you know, the the VC world and entrepreneur world, as you were kind of coming into speaking kind of full time, what were the things that you noticed that that you wanted to apply your innovation brain to you went like, why does this need to be this way? Why? Why is this? Like, what were some of the things that can niggled you about the industry you maybe wants to change? Josh Linkner Well, really so many things. And I, we could spend hours talking about this. I'm so passionate about it. But one thing is that if you're going to be a professional, like a high level, let's say a professional sports athlete, you'd have to train and sacrifice and really work on your craft, or a Broadway actor or a software engineer. But I feel that unfortunately, in speaking the bars a bit too low, I mean, sort of anyone who says, Oh, I gave a toast to my aunt's wedding, I'm sure I could be a speaker, you know, and, and I it bothers me that people don't take the craft as seriously as they ought to studying not only the delivery of a story and in the mechanics of speaking, but also really running it like a real business. In our case, from the business standpoint, I took the same rigor that we had as I build a 500 person software company. and applied it to speaking. And so we look very carefully, like how do buyers interact with speakers? How does what does the bureau channel and how does that all work? And, and what are the attributes under which a decision is made. And so we took this very sort of scientific approach to it. And it took me a while. I mean, it took several years to really figure it out. But now that we did, it's, it's been it's been magical. So I think what I would say to someone who's in the ramp up process, number one, treat it seriously, you know, treat it like a real profession. And I know it sounds kind of goofy to say that but a lot of people don't they just say I can mail it in and they have junky slides, and they have pixely headshots and, you know, but but if you were a Broadway performer, would you would meticulously work on every aspect of your craft and the business, you should do the same as a speaker. The other thing though, I would say is that from a business standpoint, one thing that I learned is that if we're really looking at this business business of speaking, you're not really in the business of giving speeches. You're in the business of selling speeches. And that was kind of like this mind blowing thing that hit me a few years back So if that's really the business that you're in, it shifts, I mean, you have to be great on stage to be clear, again, caring for the craft, but most people don't put as much thought and energy into the meeting before the meeting. In other words, not the audience in front of you from stage, but the eight person committee meeting that's going to decide which speaker they select. And when you shift your perspective like that the part of your job, if not the part of your job, is selling speeches that just giving speeches, I really allows you to go deep and understand the parameters which will fuel your your your business forward. James Taylor So that I'm just thinking now I was using the chatting with Eric Reese, find that they can lean startup methodology. So he talks a lot about minimum viable product and iterating. You know, failing, failing fast, all those kind of things that we hear now as part of the startup world. Do you apply some of those same things? What was like the what was the minimum viable product version of you because we see you today now, hundred and 63 speeches like and you're traveling all around the world. What was movers the the beta version of you like the 1.0 version of you, and and what what were some of the key learnings at that stage? Josh Linkner Well, one thing is I think you're I, by the way, you know, I've studied the Lean Startup methodology since it came out, but they I agree with you. I mean, I think you got to get out there as a speaker, and you got to get out there and, and and when I look back at video, two years ago, let alone 10 years ago, it's painful to watch because, like anything, you get better and you develop your skills and all but I think so much of it is getting out there. There's a saying that the more you speak, the more you speak. In other words, if you're out there in front of hundreds of thousands of people and planting seeds, sometimes those seeds will take a little while to sprout. But you're sort of to a degree marketing yourself over the years. I think you just there's there's something that just comes from experience. You can't it's like you can't learn guitar and I know your dad's a basic jazz guitarist that I just adored. And I play music but you can't learn a guitar by reading a book about guitar at some point you got to pick the thing up and actually you know, get some blisters. And same is the same is true with speaking of The only caveat that I would say is that when you look at the bureau Channel, the bureau channel is so critically important if you want to speak at high volume and high fees. If your goal is to speak for, you know, five grand, you're in there at the local community center, perhaps this doesn't apply as much. But if you want to achieve, you know, 2530 $50,000 speeches, a huge chunk of that that business is is overseen by the speaker bureau world. And in that case, my only comment is that you only have the chance to make a first impression once. And so if you go out too early to, you know, some of the largest bureaus in the world it with it with not the greatest video or your marketing materials aren't so polished, I think you could actually do yourself some harm. So Well, I think it's important to do the minimum viable, viable product as you get out there and practice your craft, I would be thoughtful about your approach to engaging with your channel partners, just because if they see something that's not up to stuff, they may quickly dismiss it and maybe even harder for you to get back in for a second one. James Taylor So what stage Do you need to be using as a speaker in both your craft and also in the business in terms of the level of gigs that you're doing every year that can affect level to really make it make sense for you then to start having conversations with viewers. Josh Linkner I wouldn't I would? Well, I'm going to dissect that a little bit. I think that first of all, you need to be what I would call bureau ready. And to be bureau ready, there are a handful of things that really are important. Like you have to have a good video, you know, ideally great video, but at least a good video that is professionally shot. It can't be on someone's iPhone, like it's got to be, you know, high quality, high quality professional headshots again, can be taken from an iPhone to be taken seriously, a really thoughtful, well developed site that looks like it's professionally built, not just slapped together. There's gotta you gotta have a great bio and speaking competence, and hopefully a couple references and a few other things. So I wouldn't say Don't even think about going to a bureau unless you at least have that kind of locked out. also thinking about what your lane is, and we talked about this often in the industry, and I speak on innovation. I the way I've raised hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital, so I could probably speak on finance also, but I dumped in other words, so many smart people want to speak they say I could talk on customer service and leadership and And this and that in the other. I think as a speaker one, one suggestion is take the one thing that you're going to share, be the expert in one thing and go really deep, go go go mile deep and an inch wide instead of the opposite. Anyway, once you have all that, I think it would be what I would call bureau ready, but doesn't mean that all bureaus are the same. So when I think about the bureau world, I kind of stratified stratified into into three categories, call them a BNC. And by the way, doesn't mean better the center quality judgment, it's more of a size and scope judging. So there are some smaller bureaus call them a sea level Bureau. Again, not it's not a quality judgment at all wonderful, talented people. But those people may be more open to working with a new speaker and giving someone a chance. Then you have the next level of speaker bureaus that sort of middle tier and and that small tier might be a one or 2% shop and middle tier might be five or six agents. Again, I would start with the lower one, get some gigs get get some experience before you go to the middle tier at that point. Now they're gonna say, well, who have you worked with and you can reference some other girl work you've kind of sharpen your craft a bit but but then only after you've done that for a little while as well before before you then go to the a level group and the a level group of the names that we know Washington speaker's bureau at premier speakers and Kepler and speak Inc and big speak and leading authorities but the problem go in there too fast as if you call it bleeding authorities and say hey, I'm a brand new speaker I I've done you know, two speeches, none of them paid, but I really want to get into this industry. You could be a wonderful amazing person I don't mean to be disparaging at all, but they're, they're not kind of geared up for that they're geared up to working with somebody who already has momentum, it's harder for them to take you from a dead stop that perhaps some of those smaller bureaus So that would be my recommendation number one, get your ready. Number two sequentially go against the market started with the smaller ones and working your way up to the most prestigious ones. James Taylor Now when it when I think about you, I think I think of like the innovation guy that is kind of going to Brock and we we can send extense we we people got confused like creativity and innovation and this difference is reversed Going on this this interview, but I can think of like you really have that you've chosen that lane around innovation. That's that's kind of way where you are. But I wonder then when you mean even innovation is a big area, it's a big. So I wonder when as you started to build your business, your speaker business, I'm thinking now something like Tesla, for example, where we think of them their electric car companies when we're thinking about them, but they went into like the high end sports, electric car first and then they gradually built out and like trucks and all kinds of things. What was the first market the do you identify yourself as a speaker to kind of put that flag in the ground? And then how did you gradually build that out and maybe move into other verticals? Or the countries? Where did you where'd you go from there? Josh Linkner Yeah. So I don't know that I did it smart way, by the way, but what I did is I just sort of went out there and said, I have this message about innovation that I could share with any size company in any industry. And I don't know that I'd recommend that if I were to do it again. I like what you're just saying there with Tesla, where you take a smaller focus and get good at it. So maybe, for example, I could have been the innovation guy, I'm sticking this on healthcare. And so you start in one industry about innovation or maybe you're you know, innovation for for, for hyper growth companies that are mid sized companies trying to become bigger. So I think you're actually better off honing your skills in a smaller aperture and then expanding over time, it's a tricky thing picking your lane because you don't want to pick a lane that is so narrow that no one wants to hire you. So if you like for example, if I said I'm a speaker, only for left handed guitarist that happened to live in Detroit that have been venture capitalists and, and also I have four kids like that would be a market of one which speak. On the other hand, if I take a topic, so broad, like customer service, it's very hard to compete in such a broad industry. So my suggestion would be pick a broad macro topic, so that you there's enough work for you, but then inside that macro topic to begin anyway, narrow your focus and then as you get momentum, you can expand your focus outward inside that same category. Great. James Taylor That makes a lot of sense because it is then as it is then you it's more like a sequencing question. You're asking yourself you think I want to speak in this industry Listen, but then it's thinking about which is the first then how are you going to grow from there so so I understand that. So that's, that's a really great way of thinking about that. Because picking your lane can sometimes feel it can be a little bit constricting at first and it doesn't quite fit. Sometimes it feels like I guess a good phrase. But then the same time it just it doesn't quite cover all the bases. What other lessons that did you take from your your real deep understanding of innovation that you then applied into the mode of speaking? Josh Linkner Well, one thing that we did was pretty fun, is that I don't know if you ever played video games or not. I'm not a huge gamer, myself. But inside a video game, if you're a player in a video game, imagine there are some attributes that allow you to perform better. So in other words, attribute might be strength, or speed or agility. And based on your score in those attributes that determines how well you play the video game. So we started this About Wait, is there a way that we could have said the same approach for a speaker? In other words, are there actual attributes that determine whether a speaker is going to get hired over speaker B, or speaker is going to get more fee than speaker B. And so we did a ton of research on again, this is that sort of innovation lens you're asking about. And I talked to speakers and bureaus and everybody and actually narrowed the field down to eight. There's eight core attributes that determine one success as a speaker. And if you work on those eight, that it actually gives you a lot of focus. And you know what, Georgia, so I'm actually going to just pull this up what we're talking about it as the folks listening actually may want to check it out. Let me see if I can grab this one. Sorry about that. I wasn't prepared to grab it. I could find it real quick. There we go. So here's my I'm gonna hold it up to the screen. I know if you can see it or not, but I'll explain it. So this is my speaker card, and I did this with actual scores for myself. So you can see there's eight attributes, and this is my overall score. I'll just go through them real quick. If anyone's curious. One of them is fame. So I could be a terrible speaker. But if I was on Shark Tank, I might get hired versus someone who's a great speaker who nobody knows. So famous one attribute and how well known are you? your speaking skills? Obviously sounds kind of obvious but but not always the case, you know how, you know, a strong Are you from from the craft, that third one is message. So if you have a message that is very generic and not unique and not compelling, versus someone who's really got a twist and an interesting perspective on things, and that's what its credibility. So if I speak about startups, I have the credibility because I've spent 28 years as a startup CEO and I raised hundreds of millions of dollars and created almost 10,000 high tech jobs. And someone just said, Hey, dude, I want to speak about startups, they would lack that credibility. So credibility is a factor. That's what real quickly is visual flair. And this doesn't only apply to your slides it applies to everything that an audience consumes even a meeting planner consumes. So that is your, your, you know, what you're wearing on stage and how do you use visuals and audio and how do you engage with the audience? So what's the visual representation when speaking the that's when entertainment value. So if I have great content, but I'm boring as watching toast, again, that's a problem. And audiences at planners that I want that intersection they want high impact, but they also wanted entertainment. So are you using humor? are you engaging? Is it a? Is it a fun lean forward presentation? Or does it feel like a boring college lecture? The next one is impact. And by impact I mean, not only do people have a feel good moment, but do you leave something that lasts that it doors for the months and years to come? Are you really changing the audience? Are you transforming the people that hear your message from from one state to another, and then finally, marketing Polish if you came to my website and I had pixelated photos, and it was all sloppy typos and it was it looked like a template of design, you know, that would give you one message of my brand. On the other hand, if you came and it was beautifully crafted and it would look like a piece of art that would give you a totally different message. So again, we've added these eight attributes aggressively with speakers, bureaus, etc. And for emerging speakers listening today. Those are eight attributes, the more you can work Are those even if you raise your score one point in any of those, it will drive the two things that matter most to us from a from the business of speaking fee and volume. James Taylor And then on that that's the seventh one, the impact. I'm wondering how do you go in terms of measuring that impact? Because we think of, you know, in another company, the thinking about ROI of innovation projects that say, you can track that and you're looking to see what that how that reflects the bottom line, it comes like 3am have a certain percentage, they want to ensure that a percentage of their revenue every year of profit is coming from products, which hadn't been invented so many years ago. How did you do that? When it comes to working with clients? How are you to track the impact that your speech has had on that client? Josh Linkner Sometimes? Yes, and sometimes No. So if the if there's a clear directive, you know, because because you're going to keynote is typically like 60 minutes, you know? And so in one case, I did a keynote with a breakout with a client and they wanted to use some innovation technology approaches to solving a cost problem, and we came up with new ideas that they never considered and six months later they called said hey, we just a four and a half million dollars. So that was a good ROI for that client. You know, like, you know, it was high, but one of the four and a half million dollars, so they enjoyed some results. But But often it's not as clear cut as that, frankly. Because if you speak on, you know, you and I creativity and innovation, the way I measure it is less scientific generally. It's more about when I talked to people later, and do they reference back to it. So here's a good example I was I gave a keynote to a client three or four years ago, and I just spoke to them last week. And they said, you know, there's not a day that goes by where we don't use one of your terms. And we're like, one of the things I talked about is something called a judo flip, which is flipping a tradition upside down. He's like, I can't tell you how many times we're in a meeting and we're trying to figure something out and we say, hey, let's Judo flip it. So for me anyway, I know what people are using sort of my language and they're referencing back to the keynote. And they're, they're embracing techniques that I've shared. I feel at least that's creating that enduring impact that we're that we're seeking. James Taylor And it'll be interesting because some of those people that you you speak to them, they may be at that point in their career, maybe they're that mid level and they're in the management of that organization, and you're going to meet them in 10 years time. And they're going to be using some of those same techniques that they learned from you. And now that the vice president of the CEO of that organization, you're going to be able to tell you completely different stories about how that's impacted upon upon their, their company. So I love that just thinking. Because it's hard. It's one of the hard ones I find in this area of innovation and creativity, but how you the measurable is the ROI of that one, you can see it I was speaking about an employee retention is an easy number to to be able to pick up on and say, we decreased, you know, the employee turnover by this percentage. So that's great. I love that how it's just you can do those things that you do flips. Now you hear those time and time again. Now, Josh Linkner one thing I'll just share real quickly, though, is that as speakers, we got to we all got to realize is that, you know, assuming you have a positive message, you're sort of like spreading positive energy out into the world. And sometimes it'll come back to you sometimes you'll get a call or someone to bump into you. It's like, Oh my god, I can't believe I'm in an elevator with you. I saw you five years ago. And let me tell you the difference that this made to me and my family So those are those like deeply rewarding moments, but there's a lot of things the impact that you've created that you'll never hear that. And so I think we have to be confident that kind of makes up for the flight blades and the bad hotel rooms and such, but that you're spreading good ideas and positive energy into the world. And you know that it will manifest and somebody will your back. But some you won't be missed, you know that you're making a difference in the world. And that's there couldn't be something more intrinsically rewarding than that. James Taylor Now, I know something you are very passionate about is the place that you are based. You're in, in Detroit, an incredible city that's been going through a renaissance in it over the past few years. And it kind of got me thinking, Oh, you've written a book about this in terms of the road reinvention. I know a lot of speakers have been attending this summit, or maybe that stage in their career. They've been speaking for maybe 10 plus years. And they're known in that topic, but they want to reinvent their brand as time you know, the thing that they were speaking about before, just doesn't really cut it anymore. They want to just have that that reinvention. Are there any lessons that that we as speakers can learn? Maybe if we're at the stage about Korea will be that time we really want to reinvent our brands that we can learn from somewhere like Detroit that did so well. Josh Linkner Thank you In Detroit's a fascinating tale, by the way, you know hundred years ago Detroit ram today is that was the Silicon Valley of the United States. But then we lost our way and for many years, we just became so clinging to the past, hoping then to turn around and that was a terrible strategy. But now our city is rising from the ashes. It's an amazing time in Detroit, and it's one of rebirth and reinvention. It speakers a couple thoughts, you know, real tangibly, if you are fairly successful and known in the industry and through bureaus and you speak on a particular topic, I'd be very, very cautious dump the whole topic, go into some downward if you're known as a sale or and then all of a sudden, you want to reinvent yourself as a, as a health care, Doctor, patient care speaker or something. It's a big leap and it's kind of an uphill battle. I would say if you are passionate enough in the past to be a sales speaker, I would suggest if you can reinvent yourself in the same light. Now you can be a more modern sales speaker of course. There's lots of Different things happening in the world. And you could scrap all your content which I throw away everything I do at least once a year, by the way, I'm always reinventing myself. But I generally stay in the in the lane of innovation, creativity, because it's hard to retrain the market into a totally different category. And I've actually seen speakers fail at this, if someone starts out as a relationships guy, and then the next thing they come out with a Book Two years later, and obviously on the salesperson sales speaker, and that's, oh, no, I'm a customer service speaker. And the market doesn't respond really well to that you tend to I've seen speakers who are doing 80 days a year ago, down to 20 days a year. So my broad suggestion is, unless you're not passionate about it anymore, if you can find a modern interpretation of what worked in the past, same lane, new take on it, for sure. That actually creates less friction for you. James Taylor And what about Are there any other things that we could be learning from someone like like Detroit, because I mean, one of the things that I noticed, though, is it had this reputation as a place and obviously there was things going on internally in the city that we're changing as well, but it was also how it projected itself out into The world obviously did a number of things. And so people started, they kind of are they are they kind of started asking this question. Oh, yeah, it's like, it was like telling me it was it became like a Tell me more. Tell me more about that place. And I've seen it. Here in the UK. I'm in the US being from you in the UK today. There's the cities near near Ryan. They're just going through that same Renaissance as well as it's become that Oh, tell me more. That's not what I was expecting. Is there anything else in terms of almost like communication strategy, that marketing strategy of a place that you would you think could be applied? Josh Linkner Yeah, great question. And the answer is Yes, for sure. So one thing that made Detroit's Renaissance, very palpable for people to enjoy, is that we are it we're still true to who we are. So when you think about Detroit, which has suffered greatly, but there's this sort of, we make stuff with our hands and it's gritty, and it's, you know, kind of hustling and you know, kind of street. And so we're not trying and I've said this many times, we we don't want to be the Silicon Valley of the Midwest. We want to be like the Detroit of Detroit. So my point to a speaker is instead of trying to copy somebody else's Something that you're not, I think you double down on what makes you different. And if you have weaknesses, like in our case we suffered, we made some bad choices as a community, maybe play the, you seem to flip that upside down and find an inherent strength in that. So ours is that, you know, we're again, the street fighters, and there's something kind of romantic that we can all relate to where the underdog rising back up. And so I think, again, if you're, if you're a speaker, instead of ditching everything that made you special in the past and copying the next person, I would say, really examine yourself and see what makes you different, what makes you unique and compelling. And double down on that, because that authenticity really carries forward, people tend to have a very well developed bs detector. And so if you just try to, you know, pretend that you're something that you're not that I think that could backfire. But on the other hand, if you have suffered and there's been a problem, maybe double down on why you had that problem in the first place, that can be a very compelling thing. People love a great turnaround story. James Taylor So some quickfire questions as we start to finish up here. Josh, what is in your speaker bag? I know you're just about to hit the road. You just told me what your schedule is going to be as insane schedule that you have over the next few days. Why isn't that bank that speaker bag that you never leave home without it has all your bits and pieces what's in that bag? Josh Linkner Well certainly you know laptop and audio flash drives that kind of stuff headphones noise cancelling headphones. But I'll tell you one thing that that may be helpful to the folks. I always keep a an eye mask and earplugs. Because time zones are all real goofy like I'm going to be. I go from here Detroit today go to New Orleans, New Jersey and an end up at Boston tomorrow night doubleheader tomorrow. Then I go from there to Honolulu to Holly I don't get to my hotel room to 6:30am East Coast time. So then I have to perform the next day and then I have a red eye to San Francisco to get to Austin. So the reason I'm bringing this up is that it's crazy flight times in your in your body clock gets messed up. So when I tried to do is if any way possible I tried to keep East Coast us time. And so if I'm on an airplane and it's not the middle of the night that I'm asking with earplugs and make a huge difference because I can try to you know, keep my sleep schedule regulated. I also make sure I get noise cancelling headphones is one and then also healthy snacks. I know it sounds kind of like obvious but no airports are not always the best. place that I'd rather keep a Clif Bars and some nuts or something. So you're not you know, in a, in a frantic moment eating, eating terrible. James Taylor And what about book is there one particular book that you would recommend to speakers it could be on the art or the craft of speaking or actually may not be necessary on speaking, but it has lessons that you think apply to the world of speaking. Josh Linkner Yeah. Well, I'm speaking Dr. Nick borga, who I know you've interviewed wrote a great book called give your speech change the world, which is wonderful. By the way, if you're not using the platform to change the world, you shouldn't be a speaker in the first place. I don't say the negative way. It says, we have that privilege every time we take the stage to be able to make a difference and make the world better. So hopefully people treat that, you know, what would they do respect that it deserves. I always loved the book, the monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin Sharma. It's not directly about speaking but there's so many wonderful tips and tools about living well and making an impact. I think it's also great recommendation. James Taylor And what about a tool? Is there one particular tool or mobile app you find really useful for your work as a speaker, Josh Linkner why use Prezi? I feel that if we want to stand out why would We want to use something as as traditional as PowerPoint. The only thing with PowerPoint and Keynote is that they are linear. Slide one, slide two, slide three Prezi. For those that don't know it is you basically have a big blank canvas and you put different elements all over the canvas, it could be an image, it could be a piece of text, it could be a video clip, and then you kind of map the way that camera goes across this canvas to the audience. So I think it creates first of all a more dynamic presentation, and helps you stand out versus looking like everybody else's PowerPoint, but also the, it's better to create it, I just find that much better in terms of nonlinear approaches. And also by the way, it allows the speaker to communicate the interrelationship between one item and another. So if something is a bigger point than another one, you can go from big and then zoom into the little one that shows the corresponding relationship. So I know the President PR James Taylor one phone will put all these links here that we're speaking about on the show notes here as well for everyone to check those out. And if you had to start again, I'm going to let you choose any any city in the world where you can start again but I'm guessing you're probably choose to try your your your You're home city. But you know, no one, no one knows you, and you have to restart. What would you do? How would you restart? Josh Linkner If I was restarting in the speaking world, James Taylor if you restart to speak, I'm going to assume that you have all the skills that you have today. It's just you don't know anyone and no one knows you. Josh Linkner I would, I would take a fairly thoughtful approach about who would be able to help me and I would reach out to add value to them. Instead of asking for help, I would say how can I help you? So if there was a conference that was looking for a speaker, I would reach out and say, Hey, let me show what I can provide to help you or maybe start doing some of them for free. So I guess it would take zooming out, I would give it a take a service approach. It's not about what you could get. It's more about what you can give. And certainly with bureaus, by the way, I see speakers call up bureaus and say, like me, me, me, booked me booked me. I think you should call it the Bureau, you want to say, Hey, what's going on for you? How can I help you? Yeah, they do have some expertise that you could offer to serve, serve them. So I think I would just take a an approach of service and that tends to replicate itself very well. The other thing is, I think, especially today with so many brands, Messages, I think we need to do something to stand out. So it gets back to that point, what really makes you different as a speaker? You know, for me, there are others that speak on innovation, not too many others that are also the traders and venture capitalists and startup, guys and jazz guitarists. So I think you try to kind of weave together something that is compelling and unique about you something that nobody else can represent and double down on that. James Taylor Now I know you have it, you have a great program. We've had a couple of guests on this to gone through your three ring, three ring circus boot camp. And so we're going to have a link here below. I'd love to have you just just start to finish up here. tell folks about what there is to know has had a huge impact on a number of the speakers I've spoken with who have kind of gone that they've gone through that program. And I know we have a special offer for anyone that wants to learn more about that and attend that particular boot camps and tell us a little bit about it. Josh Linkner Sure. So as I mentioned when I started speaking, there was wonderful people to help me with what to do onstage mentioned Dr. Nick Morgan, but the stuff that was offstage speaker business training was pretty cheesy. It's like I can't stand it when people spell the word success with dollar signs just rubs me the wrong way. And there's you know like the zillionaires speaker and the mega rich speaker and it just didn't feel right. And so I figured this out myself and I, but if someone sat me down today, like what I know now, I would say four years ramping up. So my partners and I decided, let's do that to give back to the speaker community. We do once a quarter a very small and intimate bootcamp in Detroit. It's only 25 speakers backs. So it's very small and intimate. We have many girlfriends come to the boot camp. So our bureau partners include Washington speaker's bureau, the Harry Walker agency, premiere speakers, ww SG and speaking, among others, and so actual bureaus calm and we have this intimate, full monty exposure, total transparency of what works and what doesn't, in the spirit of building your speaking business. And so again, it's a training program, not around what to say onstage, all the stuff you have to do offstage so that you get on stage and we also provide some ongoing trading, training and support. They call it a three ring Circus by the way, Learning to be a bit playful and in a bit sort of mocking the whole silliness of the industry and realizing at the same time, it's a bit of a performance out there. It's like you're juggling a lot of things all at once. But this is something that we share from the heart. It's designed to help people scale their speaking business, get more gigs at higher fee, and they're welcome to check it out just three ring circus.com the numeral three, and for anyone listening today, if you buy a $500 off the bootcamp just use the discount code summit 500. And again, we are pleasure to have you in any way that we can be helpful. James Taylor Amazing. That's it. That's a great offer for everyone. So is a firing dose of summit 500 is this code I'm going to have a button here so you can going to go through and learn learn about how it works as well and a great opportunity it if you haven't visited Detroit. Good, good reason to go to Detroit as well. And Georgia, thank you so much for coming on today. I know you're about to be heading off to be catching a plane at some point very soon as well. It's been an absolute pleasure speaking to you I've I've really studied from what you do from afar. I just think you want to an exemplary exemplary example of a great speaker this doing some very, very cool thing. So thank you so much for coming on today. Josh Linkner Well, thank you my friend By the way, thank you for doing this. I know this takes a lot of energy and time and the fact that you're giving back to the speaker community and helping raise others up is is really is notable. I mean, we have such a privilege to help others take the great message and help them get out there and share with the world and so I have a lot of respect for the great work you're doing here. James Taylor Today's episode was sponsored by speakers you the online community for speakers, and if you're serious about your speaking career, then you can join us because you membership program. Our speakers, you members receive private one on one coaching with me hundreds of hours of training, content, and access to a global community to help them launch and build a profitable business around the speaking message and expertise. So just head over to speakers u.com to learn more. #SpeakersLife #ProfessionalSpeaking

Today you get a special episode with Brother Boggs and Tony Matesi. You may know Tony from The Legend of Death Race Podcast, That Endurance Guy, or Team SISU Pacific Northwest. Tony tells us some stories about his experience in the Death Race, including the story from the chapter Coming in Hot with Rob Barger. Well, now Tony has completed his Book "The Legend of Death Race", including the forward by Joe De Sena himself, and is being hosted by Arundel Books in Seattle on March 10th from 6pm-8pm sponsored in part by CLIF Bars. Tony talks about how these got him through the Death Race. We want to see you there. Come meet Tony and listen as he tells some stories from the race and reads from the book. Pick up a copy of the book and have the Author sign it. Be sure to find and subscribe to Tony's Podcast here: https://anchor.fm/legend-of-the-death-race And if you are new to the BeastNet, do us a favor and subscribe to our show also here: https://anchor.fm/beastnetpod To stay up to date on Tony's latest adventures you can follow him on Instagram @thatenduranceguy or visit www.thatenduranceguy.com Arundel Books in Seattle on March 10th from 6pm-8pm, in case you missed it above. #beastnetpod #raceLOCAL #runLOCAL Have a listen, do us a favor and rate us and leave a review on your favorite Podcast Platform. Screenshot it and email the review to us at BeastNetPodcast@gmail.com and we will send you a sticker. www.BeastNetPod.com Get Your Groove On by Ron Gelinas Chillout Lounge | https://soundcloud.com/atmospheric-music-portal Torn by Ron Gelinas Chillout Lounge Freedom by Twisterium | https://www.twisterium.com Bittersweet by | e s c p | https://escp-music.bandcamp.com Wandering by Numall Fix | https://soundcloud.com/numall-fix Runaways by MegaEnx | https://soundcloud.com/megaenx Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en_US #BeastNetPod --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/beastnetpod/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/beastnetpod/support

Bart and Brian go “on the road” to visit with Tom Inners from Clif Family, on Howell Mountain, in the small town of Angwin. If you thought Clif Family wines would be mass-produced and available in every store like the Clif Bars, you would be wrong, very wrong. They make Read more... The post The Wine Makers – Tom Inners appeared first on Radio Misfits.

In a unique showdown, the You Tried Dat?? crew tastes three different bars.  They try out Lucky Charms Bars, Peanut Butter Nut Filled Clif Bars, and Lion Bars.  They also discuss bad hotel stays and unfortunate neighbors.  Finally, they try to figure out the names of famous food songs in one of the more bizarre segments to date.

I can't believe how many people joined in to ask questions. I wasn’t able to get to all of them during the livestream, so afterwards I answered a few more which you’ll be able to hear today as we get this kicked off.

I can't believe how many people joined in to ask questions. I wasn’t able to get to all of them during the livestream, so afterwards I answered a few more which you’ll be able to hear today as we get this kicked off.

Since I've been getting loads of questions from you folks and we now have semi-reliable internet up here in the mountains, I decided to do a surprise “Ask Me Anything” livestream. I can't believe how many people joined in to ask questions. I wasn't able to get to all of them during the livestream, so afterwards I answered a few more which you'll be able to hear today as we get this kicked off. In this Ask Me Anything, you're about to learn: Simple Snacks for families, performers, UPS drivers, and other people on the go Benefits of drinking a green smoothie (and what happened when one accidentally fermented in the front seat of our car in Texas) What I really think of Clif Bars (and other bars marketed to athletes and outdoorsy types) And tons more... I hope you enjoy.

Since I've been getting loads of questions from you folks and we now have semi-reliable internet up here in the mountains, I decided to do a surprise “Ask Me Anything” livestream. I can't believe how many people joined in to ask questions. I wasn't able to get to all of them during the livestream, so afterwards I answered a few more which you'll be able to hear today as we get this kicked off. In this Ask Me Anything, you're about to learn: Simple Snacks for families, performers, UPS drivers, and other people on the go Benefits of drinking a green smoothie (and what happened when one accidentally fermented in the front seat of our car in Texas) What I really think of Clif Bars (and other bars marketed to athletes and outdoorsy types) And tons more... I hope you enjoy.

Are you putting out tons of material but your conversion rates are poor? Do you wish that you could stay a step ahead of the competition? How do you even begin competing in a saturated market like SEO? Don't worry! These questions are normal! Are you putting out tons of material but your conversion rates are poor? Do you wish that you could stay a step ahead of the competition? How do you even begin competing in a saturated market like SEO? Don't worry! These questions are normal! In this episode, we'll cover: * How to dominate by niching. * 3 of the best conversion tools. * #1 way to boost your agency's profile. Today, I talked with Chris Ching CEO and Founder of ElectricEnjin (https://electricenjin.com/) — an eCommerce website design and SEO agency. Chris is a long-time fan of the podcast, and he's here to share some tips on how he catapulted his agency into adulthood. I love hearing from fans of the show, especially when they come on and share some killer strategies with me. Chris is insanely talented, and he has a few tips that will definitely help new and old agencies alike. HOW TO DOMINATE BY NICHING Chris is definitely a hustling agency owner. He went through 3 iterations of his business before he found a winner. We've all pivoted before. But, his best tip on staying competitive in a dense market is this — niche down. I've talked about niching plenty on this podcast. But, this is a reminder — niching brings success (https://jasonswenk.com/niche/) . There are a plethora of agencies that are going to be competing with you. You need to find what makes you different. Figure out what you're really just good at and use it. Don't focus on your weaknesses! Focus on your strengths! You cannot be the best at everything. So pick one and dominate it. Plus, when you're great in one industry or one skillset, you're more likely to get hired for your expertise. Think about it. Would you want to hire an agency that's good at digital marketing or amazing at SEO? It's a no-brainer. 3 OF THE BEST CONVERSION TOOLS One of the toughest parts of starting an agency is figuring out what kind of content converts. Do you start throwing up LinkedIn ads? Should you put out white papers? According to Chris, these are three of the best conversion tools in today's atmosphere. * #1 Lead Magnets: Chris's agency offers a free site audit as their lead magnet and they're totally crushing it with converting those free audits into paid clients. * # 2 Chatbots: I'm a big believer in chatbots (https://www.facebook.com/jasonswenk/videos/facebook-messenger-bot-best-practice-a-strategy-that-generated-250k-revenue/1045222472312264/) . In fact, I have one! Chatbots are 24/7 sales machines that grab leads, convert, and engage with minimal investment. It's silly not to have one at this point. * # 3 Personalized videos: I send personalized videos to ALL of my clients. They form a connection quick. Chris started using personalized videos on his free website audits. He said they made a huge difference. In fact, he says his audit conversion rate is 50%! #1 WAY TO BOOST YOUR AGENCY'S PROFILE If your agency website is not converting the way you'd like, you can change that by making sure your content is ranking for the people who're searching for it. Run a content audit on your own website. Develop a customer avatar (or several of them) and make sure your content is directed to those avatars. Take a hard look at the value you're providing compared to your competitors. Write the content your prospects are actually looking for and maybe even delete old stuff that's cluttering up your site (https://jasonswenk.com/increase-website-traffic/) . Chris and I talked about one of the most common problem areas for agencies — not branding an experience well. It's not enough to tell people you do x,y, and z. You have to form an emotional connection with your clients. Chris gave a great example. Clif Bars logo has the guy hiking up a mountain with a nature backdrop. They're chunky, unique, and rugged. PowerBars tell you what's in them. It's entirely functional. Sure, PowerBars still sell. But, Clif bars were able to jump into a market and beat out the Goliaths by transforming themselves into more than the product. They're an experience. Same thing with Apple and Microsoft. Both of them have done tons of branding. But, one offers an experience, the other offers function. Both can succeed. The difference is this — Apple was able to outsell Microsoft and enter a saturated market. How? They branded an experience. 

Jerry Henley has run over 90 marathons and was sponsored by Asics, Saucony, NordicTrack, and Clif Bars. We had a blast talking about life lessons learned in running and other everyday things such as swimming among great white sharks in a rusty cage.

In November 2014 we went on a wonderful trip to the most magical place on earth. In this episode, we discuss how we planned it and what we learned. Hopefully some of these tips will help you! Also, we're not sponsored by Clif Bars. Or fruit.

A follow up to our food episode with a new meal and new products. This time around, it's Jiva Cube Coffee, Food for the Sole Dehydrated Meals, Jimmy Bar, and Clif Bars with Nut Butter.

Topics: -One of Jerry's local clients needs assistance with updating the OS.  He ends up working on it off-site and doing his magic to bring it back to life. -The guys discuss working off-site vs in front of the client's eyes as well as keeping equipment like external monitors on hand -Sam talks about setting up Ubiquiti equipment in his office to be in his comfort zone and coming to the client with a fully configured Wi-Fi setup -Sam realizes a downside to having an office...spending money on lunch! -The topic of nutrition comes up again, when the work day gets away from you.  Sam likes the Clif Bars and Jerry is a fan of the Lara bars. -Jerry loves the podcast How I Built This and interestingly enough, they had Lara on to talk about how she started her business. https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this -Right up to the start of the show, Sam was working on an iPhone with water damage with a good friend of the family.  An odd situation came up with relation to iCloud backups.  Jerry has a suggestion based on an old trick to resolve Time Machine backups.  Stay tuned to the next show to find out what happens! -A pet peeve of Jerry's is when he might shave off some time to be nice.  A client pays and then keeps you around to enter information in the register, delaying you even more. -Sam recalls that awkward moment when a client was opening a safe in front of you and trying to make sure you aren't able to see -As Jerry is running, he listens to podcasts.  He shares another pet peeve for playing sound effects that scares the heck out of you while running on the road. -Working with SonicWall is nothing new to Sam but he had a moment of frustration setting up the SSL VPN client on Windows 10 -While on the Windows topic, Jerry has problems with a computer that ended up being Windows Home Edition -The dreaded employee or friend that gives a client bad advice that makes them second guess you -Jerry deals with Windows 5?? (Windows NT) and trouble with UPS -Sam shares a funny story about hanging out with Adam Rice at ACEs and learning that Reachability actually does exist on the iPhone X!  Chalk that up to something he should have known. -We have probably all been there before: Jerry talks about a client that swears that a feature existed before when it actually didn't.

Jackie Slomin is a sports dietitian who helps high school athletes get recruited to top tier colleges on scholarship with her Fuel Your Full Ride program.  Having previously worked with hundreds of division I and II athletes from all different sports and holding a master's degree in sports nutrition and exercise science, Jackie is an expert at helping athlete's discover how to improve their performance, energy and recovery time by up to 50% with advanced sports nutrition principles that can be used by even the busiest of families.  Jackie works with student-athletes, families, coaches and teams to help them discover how to gain a competitive edge through nutrition.  When Jackie isn't working with athletes, she loves weight training, kayaking and trying new foods. In this week's episode, we discuss the specifics of what constitutes a healthy eating regimen for junior and college-bound tennis players and how and why a good diet can impact the recruiting process. Jackie shares her tips for what foods to eat to maximize training and competition as well as how to find the best foods for each individual player. She delves into the particular foods and drinks to eat before, during, and after competition to maximize performance and minimize the risk of fatigue and/or cramping.  We also discuss the warning signs of eating disorders in our junior athletes and how we can recognize those signals in a timely fashion and get our athlete the appropriate help. Please remember that eating disorders occur in both males and females. Jackie is offering a free online nutrition training that teaches you how to put together a sports nutrition plan for your junior player. You can register at: FREE Sports nutrition training: https://training.jackieslomin.com/jit-sports/  You can find Jackie online at http://www.jackieslomin.com/. You can contact her via email at info@jackieslomin.com. Jackie mentions BodyArmor Sports Drink which you can find here. She also mentions Clif Bars which you can find here. Thank you to STØNE for our music! You can find more of his music at SoundCloud.com/stonemuzic If you're so inclined, please share this - and all our episodes! - with your tennis community. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or via the ParentingAces website.

Welcome to the Peru Travel Podcast! In this episode, we cover everything fitness, training, gear, and nutrition to make sure you are successful on your Inca Trail, Salkantay Trek, or Extreme Inca Tour. We discuss the training that you should do so you don't end up hating your life while out on the treks. Your best bet is to slap a backpack on with some weight and go for a hike a few times prior to your trip to Peru. David talks about the nutrition required so that you have enough energy to sustain yourself on a difficulty multiday hike. At Cachi Life, we love Clif Bars and Beef Jerky. Just don't eat all your snacks on the first day. And it's probably best to avoid the booze. What is the best gear to bring that you may not think of? You shouldn't leave without your toothbrush or toothpaste. But, we REALLY like baby wipes. It can be tough to keep that clean feeling when you haven't been able to shower for four days. Finally, we cover why you NEED to book your trip on the Inca Trail at least 6 months ahead. For those of you who missed out, there is the Salkantay Trek, which may be even more beautiful. Be sure to visit us at our homepage or email us at info@cachilife.com for any questions or topics that you want us to cover. Follow us on our social media, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube.

Earlier this month the Taste Radio team met with GT Dave, the founder of best-selling kombucha brand GT’s Kombucha. In an interview recorded for this episode, Dave discussed the origins of GT’s, a brand he created 22 years ago and its pioneering role in the fast-growing and high-profile kombucha category. Recorded at the company’s headquarters in Los Angeles, Dave explained his belief that most "successful businesses come from a pure place" and stressed that brands should attempt to connect with consumers on a personal, intimate level. He also discussed why the company is constantly innovating and attempting to improve. “Complacency is a part of human nature, but I believe it’s also a version of corporate cancer,” he said. “As soon as you feel like you’re coasting, you’ve done enough or you’re great is when you start fail.” Also included in this episode: a conversation with SnackNation founder and CEO Sean Kelly, who discussed the company’s approach to optimizing office culture through better-for-you snacks and aspirational brands. In the latest edition of Elevator Talk, we spoke with Lilly Wunsch is the co-founder and COO of 4th & Heart, a maker of ghee-based foods. This episode is presented by Sovereign Flavors. Show notes: 1:20: We’re Loko About These Four Things: The hosts chat about their current crushes in food and beverage, including alcoholic seltzers, Sunday night meal prep, innovative cocktail ingredients and new kombucha offerings at Trader Joe’s. 12:00: Interview: GT Dave, Founder/CEO, GT’s Living Foods -- Dave discussed explained how the brand and company have evolved over the past two decades while remaining independent and staying true to its core values. 43:02: Interview: Sean Kelly, Founder/CEO, SnackNation -- SnackNation is a company that delivers boxes of healthy snacks to business across the U.S. In our conversation, Kelly explains the company’s mission to create happier, healthier and more productive people. He also discusses the company’s efforts to be known for thought leadership and why he believes a company’s core purpose is not birthed, it’s “discovered.” 1:02:09: Elevator Talk: Lilly Wunsch, Co-Founder/COO, 4th & Heart -- Lilly Wunsch is the co-founder and COO of 4th & Heart, a maker of ghee-based oils, butters and spreads. We met Lilly at Expo East 2017 and discussed the company’s mission to “modernize ancient pantry staples.” Brands in the episode: Good Wolf Kefir, Vermont Village, Hudson Standard. Drink Maple, GT’s Kombucha, Health-Ade Kombucha, Revive Kombucha, Capital Kombucha, Brew Dr. Kombucha, Nauti Seltzer, White Claw Seltzer, Clif Bars, Krave Jerky, Skinny Pop For sponsorship opportunities, feedback and suggestions, contact podcast@bevnet.com.

This week I'm joined by comedian and friend (in that order) Sabrina Brennan! Join us as we talk about gay sex in Beauty and the Beast, masturbating to the idea of Clif Bars, and even more bathroom/gynecological mishaps. Theme music: Harry and the Potters "The Human Hosepipe" If you have any awkward situations please email unfortunatelyme123@gmail.com follow us on twitter @unfortunatecast tweet at us with the hashtag #unfortunatecast

We are starting off the new year by getting social with local indie-rock band The Social Animals.  Dedric Clark and Tony Petersen, half of the Cloquet-bred band, stops by to talk about the band's promising outlook for 2017. A new album is expected to drop, more touring and more shows, which all leads to more CLIF Bars and gas station hard-boiled eggs being eaten out of a gold van with a clever name. Everyone shares their New Year's resolutions and Dedric and Tony let us close out the podcast with their song "Cold," which has a spontaneous backstory.  What is your favorite song by The Social Animals? Let us know by emailing us at podcast@duluthnews.com. 

Episode Show Notes jeffsanders.com/175 Learn More About the Show The 5 AM Miracle Podcast Free Productivity Resources Join The 5 AM Club! Connect on Social Media Facebook Group • Instagram • Twitter • LinkedIn Episode Summary This may be the most common question on this show, but how can someone truly wake up at 5:00 am? In this week's episode of The 5 AM Miracle I get back to the basics of the podcast and discuss the fundamentals of waking up early consistently. In the Tip of the Week segment I share my updated checklist for my FBOTs (focused blocks of time), plus a new app to block distracting websites. Resources Mentioned in the Show Mornings 101 Series [Great way to get started with early mornings] Freedom [Block distracting sites on any device] Focus@Will [Productivity music designed by neuroscientists] My FBOT Checklist (Focused Blocks of Time) Get a snack and a drink (usually bananas/Clif Bars and water/coffee/tea) Bathroom break (can’t forget this one!) Put the FBOT sign on the door (this is for my wife Tessa, my favorite co-worker) Turn OFF iPhone and hide it (without hiding it I will habitually check my phone) Light the candle (I just like to burn things) Set the timer (I use Nice Timer on my mac) Turn on Freedom (block distracting sites on any device) Turn on Focus@Will (productivity music designed by neuroscientists) Put on Headphones (over-the-ear headphones are best for cutting distractions) Go!

We recently invited folks to tweet in their sports nutrition related questions. In this episode, our in-house Nutritionist, Tara, answers some of these questions. What are some great ways to prepare for a marathon, what are some good recovery tips and, maybe most importantly, just how many Clif Bars can you have in a day?

Mike and Tom discuss Clif Bars, rock climbing, and the importance of putting safety first Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mike and Tom discuss Clif Bars, rock climbing, and the importance of putting safety first

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: There’s so many zillions of startups trying to try every single angle and opportunity in that area. And so the marginal return to investing your personal time in terms of the impact on the world might be relatively smaller there. Whereas there’s this whole space that I feel like is really under explored. And if you just make it about 80%, making a profit and 20% making a statement, that opens up all kinds of incredible opportunities. 00:00:29 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined by Mark McGramigan. Hey, Adam. And Mark, since we last spoke, I am a father. Congrats. Yeah, it’s great, or at least the non-sleep deprived parts are great. I’m actually on parental leave right now, but I enjoy doing this podcast enough. I thought I could sneak back for just an hour here, but if my brain is not at full capacity, let’s just say you’ll have to carry things for us. OK. Now, way back in episode 4, we talked about our partnership model. And the context there was we were hiring the 5th member of our team, our engineering partner, and I’m happy to say we have through that process, we added Adam Wulf to the team, really great engineer with a particular specialty in inking, which is quite important for us, and he’s been doing great on the team, so we’re now 5. And in the course of that, of course, we talked about kind of the nature of the company and how it’s different from other models, particularly the startup model, but I thought it would be good to both first take an episode to talk more explicitly about what this somewhat unusual business structure we chose was, and then also it’s been a year and a half actually coming up on 2 years now since we started this thing and so being able to essentially say how’s it going? Is this working out the way that we expected. And just to frame things up a little bit, a starting place and a point of inspiration for both of us is a book called Small Giants, and I read this many, many years ago, I think when I was in my startup lifestyle, I would say, but it it had a big impact on me, and the book basically profiles a bunch of, let’s call them, businesses that are maybe have an outsized impact. But they’re less about huge size or making it to the S&P 500 or something like that. So for example, they have Clif Bars in there or Whole Foods, which I think at the time the book was wrote was really kind of an up and comer, independent up and comer, or Union Square Cafe, which is quite kind of unique restaurant in the New York area, since expanded to other locations. And the process of profiling these businesses, they showed kind of a maybe an alternate to, I think they’re thinking more an alternate to the standard kind of public company path, but I at least for me, I read it as an alternate to the startup world, which at the time I was just completely immersed in. I was kind of the only way to do things with the startup way, and this book suggested another path. 00:03:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that book was quite influential on me as well. So Adam, I’m curious, what from the book did you find yourself taking away the most and applying to your future adventures? 00:03:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, in prep for this episode, I went and pulled out my Kindle highlights as a PDF and scanned through those a bit, and I have to say I’m not sure it’s actually a great book in terms of how it’s written, but there’s just a couple of core ideas that really hit home. One of those is they talk about businesses with soul or another term they use quite a bit is mojo, which is kind of a funny one. They talk about optimizing for mojo overgrowth and growth, of course, a business exists to Earn money, that’s it’s kind of practical function in the economy, and growth typically goes with that, it’s almost a requirement. So if you’re not growing, you’re stagnating. And that is taken to a real extreme in the startup world. I mean, Paul Graham even has an essay, Startup equals Growth, which just says, that is your sole purpose for being, grow, grow, grow fast as you can, and the counterpoint this book presents is mojo and expressing something kind of artistically and Having the soul is something you can choose. Of course, you still need to pay attention to the business fundamentals. You do still need to grow, but you can choose to have maybe a different balance where you say, you know what, this mojo thing we want to optimize for that and have enough growth to be successful but not have it be growth at the cost of absolutely every other thing. 00:04:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. For me, there are a few layers here. There’s that first layer of, OK, you don’t necessarily need to be a huge business or to grow really fast. It’s a sort of mechanical matter, there are existence proofs of businesses that haven’t gotten huge or growing that fast, they’re doing just fine. OK, that’s great. That’s kind of the first layer. Then there’s this mojo idea of you can use the business as a vehicle to accomplish something non-monetary to make a statement. To do an artistic expression, and that’s something that was really important to me in starting this venture. I’m gonna spend the next 25, 10 years of my moral life working on this. I want it to be about something more than making money. And then there’s kind of a third layer, and I don’t know how much they get into this in the book and if you would even agree, but I think there’s a sort of arbitrage here where there are so few businesses that are operating with mojo, as it were, that you can have a sort of outsized impact if you choose to do so and do it well. This is where I think the small giants can punch above their weight class. It’s because so few people are actually operating with this mojo, this sense of artistic expression, that when you do, you really stand out, even if you’re smaller. 00:05:38 - Speaker 2: There’s some examples of companies that come to mind for you that are high mojo. 00:05:43 - Speaker 1: The one that’s top of mind for me these days is Signal. I’m not sure if that’s the company name or the app name, but, you know, I’m referring to the company that makes the Signal app, and I would expect they’re quite small. I’m not actually sure about the size of the firm, but it can’t be that big, but the impact that they’re having on the global discussion around the right of citizens to communicate privately is huge, and they could choose to have a huge impact going forward. So that’s one that’s kind of mindfully these days. 00:06:08 - Speaker 2: One that comes to mind for me is Panic. So they make kind of a variety of weird things, including, I don’t know, FTP clients, but also games. And now I think they’re working on a handheld game console and probably an example of a company that does have both mojo and a lot of growth, but maybe they took their time with that. The growth happened over a relatively speaking a pretty long time period and can build up slowly over time. Another one I remember you speaking about, we talked about this before, is Vanguard. Tell me more about the unusual structure there because I wasn’t familiar with it. 00:06:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so Vanguard is like one of the greatest business hacks of all time, and I feel like it’s an understudied story. So my understanding of Vanguard is the founder, I believe his last name is Boggle, wanted to make investing more accessible and more successful for individual retail investors, and he had this insight around indexing, whereby if you index into the market and operate those index funds at a very low cost way, it would be very beneficial to the people who are investing. Now he could have taken this insight and developed a huge and hugely profitable firm with it, but my understanding of what he did instead was he did this move where the firm is effectively owned by the people who invest in the funds. So essentially all the profits that would get plowed back into the funds in the form of lower fees. So he basically forgoes a huge personal fortune to help bring low cost. Indexing investing to the masses. And then it got to the point where it was so successful that it becomes quite hard to compete as a for-profit indexing firm because you can’t plow all your profits back into lower fees, right? Or at least your investors wouldn’t approve necessarily. And that’s kind of the sense of almost art that he’s shared with the world in the form of this somewhat unassailable venture to bring low cost investing to the masses. 00:08:01 - Speaker 2: index funds, you know, S&P 500, ETFs, guess what they’re called nowadays, is this huge technology, or maybe you call it a social technology or just a financial tool or something, but it had this huge democratizing effect for individual investors compared to the managed mutual funds that came before and yeah, the art. Start, as you say, you know, for me that is the reason I am in business is it is a vehicle for expressing something that matters to me about how I think the world should be or how it could be better and the business and the mechanics of all that, how it’s incorporated, how it’s funded, how it earns money, all that stuff is really a means to an end. Right, so optimizing for mojo, businesses with soul, expressing something artistically, that all sounds nice. What does this mean practically in terms of the business that you’re building? And here you start to think about these mechanics, which is, OK, you’ve got a group of people and you’ve got a thing they want to express. Product they want to bring into the world or a piece of art they want to create depending on how you want to think about it. That needs time, it needs money, it needs organization, and that leads you into what I usually think of as kind of a container or a vehicle, which is typically a legal entity, could be a corporation or a nonprofit. Um, and then there are certain models that fit with different kinds of businesses. So, for example, if you’re gonna open a restaurant, and for a lot of people creating a certain kind of food and a certain kind of environment, that is very much an artistic activity for them. You certainly see that if you watch something like the Netflix series Chef’s Table on kind of the high end, but I think even more for your local corner restaurant, many times those businesses are not very lucrative. They’re open because people are really passionate about food and sharing a certain kind of experience with their customers. But there’s probably a certain kind of legal entity you’re form and you’ll probably get funding as a small bank loan or some other things like that. And that’s extremely different from, let me start a startup, move to Silicon Valley, join Y Combinator, get venture funding, and ultimately you still have the legal entity, a source of funding, you know, way to hire people or bring team members on board and the sort of mission they’re signing up to, but the mechanics of them are very, very different. And there’s, you know, there’s a list of other things as well, including nonprofits, or even pure artistic activities, art projects, Burning Man art installations, or you’re starting a band or some, you know, writing a book or something like that. All of these need capital and ways to organize people. And there’s legal mechanisms for that. And so knowing both the mechanisms, but also what you want to express, and therefore, what is the right vehicle for that, I think that’s worth thinking through rather than reaching for a default, which is, I don’t know, everyone starts startups, so I’ll start a startup, for example. 00:10:45 - Speaker 1: Yep. Well, now you got me thinking about the Wall Street that stuff that’s going on on Reddit and in that case, I guess the optimal vehicle was a series of memes. 00:10:55 - Speaker 2: That’s right, I do think it’s ever evolving, and you mostly mean that as a joke, but honestly, the internet has brought us some new structures, right? We have Kickstarter, for example, Patreon. There’s new ways potentially to, in the end, it is really about organizing groups of people. Probably if you’re a solo artist, you’re painting, you’re painting, you’re doing something. Individual, maybe this stuff matters less, but as soon as you have a group of people over time they are investing their energy, their effort, their emotion, and certainly their money, then you need mechanisms, governance and understanding for both what we’re going to put into this and what we expect to get out of it and what our goals are and all that sort of thing. So that brings us to the vehicle we created for Muse, which I think borrows elements from some of the different types of containers we’ve mentioned, but we think also has its own special blend. Can you explain a little bit what that container looks like? 00:11:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so first of all, we did believe that Muse needed to be a commercial entity, and the main reason was, well, maybe two main reasons. One is you need a significant amount of investment to develop a novel product like Muse and bring it to market. We’re talking about 3 to 5 engineers or 3 to 5 staff members for 123 years. So it’s not something you could do as a pure art project, you know, say. Furthermore, if you have this vision of impacting the world in a particular way, it helps to have ongoing self-sustaining funding for it. So that’s another reason to make this a business versus a nonprofit or an art project. The meat of what makes Muse unique is how we treat the staff and the other participants around the business. And the top level thing there was we wanted Muse to be the place that we wanted to work and the place that we wanted our collaborators to work. And that meant a few things. One is we wanted to be a relatively team, which has a bunch of implications that we can talk about. We wanted everyone to feel like peers who were at the top of their craft and operating at the top of their game. And we wanted everyone to be treated as well and as fairly as possible. And in particular, we didn’t want to sort of founder class versus an employee class where they’re very different, as in typical startups. And lastly, we wanted a sense of dynamism in the staff and the team, where people come in, they go, and that’s a very natural thing to happen, and you’re less kind of bound and handcuffed to the company. And furthermore, you’re also not constrained in how far you can rise in terms of your impact and your influence and your ownership, just by virtue of when you joined. It’s more a function of your contributions and commitments to the company. So those were kind of our goals that inform the structure and then in terms of where we ended up, well, first of all, we did end up with the Delaware Corp, which is the standard vehicle for startups, among other things, mostly because that’s the best understood by all the potential participants, staff, investors, and has the best support for people having ownership, a variety of people having ownership in the firm, which was really important to us. But then where we went in a quite different direction was this idea of a partner. So at a typical startup, you have sort of three classes of people. You have the investors, you have the founders, then you have all the employees, and they’re all treated very differently and have different economics in the firm, and they’re a function of kind of how you join and how you come to be participating in the firm. And we want this model, like I was alluding to before, where it’s more like the staff members are peers with each other and have the opportunity to rise to that level over time regardless of when they joined. So that’s where our partner model comes in, which is sort of drawn from the world of professional services firms, like law firms and accounting firms, and the idea that There is, if you start a law firm, you get to put your name on the sign because you started it and your partner right away, presumably, but also over time people can join and through their contributions to the firm and their commitment and they’re taking responsibility for the success of the business overall, they can eventually become a partner, just like the founding partners. So that’s sort of the idea that we have with the Muse partner. They’re someone who can become a peer with the other partners and have corresponding responsibilities at the firm. So it’s not just that you’re responsible for being a good engineer, you’re responsible for helping basically directs how the business operates, making big business decisions and things like that, and you have corresponding economic interest in the business, much more so on a percentage basis than a typical employee would have. So I guess if I had to summarize with the partner, it’s the idea of we want everyone to act like a real owner in the business, and in order to do that fairly, you need to actually make them a real owner in the business. 00:15:24 - Speaker 2: One way to understand the business structure or how the container is different, is to compare and contrast with other options. You mentioned taking investment, we did take some seed funding from a lovely firm called Harrison Metal, who happily turned out to be understanding or at least willing to try out. Weird model here, but you could compare to other ways of doing this. So bootstrapping, for example, and there’s a few different approaches on this. I’ve done this in past businesses where you essentially do consulting work on the side or maybe it’s kind of related to you can try to sell your product to someone, but you sort of do some consulting. With them at the same time that like helps you pay the bills until such time as the product is self-sustaining, or something you see a lot in the iOS developer world is these what I call these indieDevs. Many times they have multiple apps, but it’s usually one person or maybe two people tops, and they can craft an app in Pretty short amount of time, a few months, maybe they’re doing it on the side, maybe they have other kind of some passive income from existing apps, or maybe they’re just doing it in their extra time alongside a job, and they can do that reasonably in 6 months, put it out on the app store, and then start making not a huge amount of money, but enough to make it pretty worthwhile for a single person. But as you pointed out, for Muse, which has this first of all very forward thinking or trying to reinvent a lot of these gestures, the human computer interaction aspects, the tablet power user interface, there was just a big investment first on the research side when we were in the research lab, but then even once we left the lab and we’re trying to take this kind of validated prototype and turned it into a product people can really use that just took a lot of time, a lot of iterations in a way that let’s say a safer kind of app wouldn’t. And similarly, there’s something that I do think is common in the startup world, which is big investments in design and brand, and you expect this from Slack and Tesla and Apple, and certainly Any up and comer startup, you have the money to be able to put a lot of effort into that sort of thing, and maybe we didn’t want to be quite at that level, but I also felt that a lot of investment there was part of allowing this first part of what we wanted to express artistically, but then secondly I think necessary for it to be successful. So that sort of says, OK, the iOS indie developer path or bootstrap path is really not viable. We need a little more upfront capital than that. But then you can compare it to startups where, in fact, by start-up standards, the amount of money we’ve taken is ridiculously small. I don’t think it would even count as a precede. And furthermore, coming upon 2 years into this, we’re a 5 person team with no particular plans to expand, but in the startup model you’re expected to really quickly scale out the team, be 8 people, 10 people, 12 people in that first year or 1st 2 years. And so from that perspective, the 5 person team, we would be growing much too slow, but we felt that that rapid team growth first of all, wasn’t necessarily quite the kind of environment we wanted to work in. And second, it wasn’t quite right for what we wanted to express with the product. And so we ended up in this middle ground that was neither the bootstrapper path nor the startup path, and that led us to thinking, OK, how do we get some investment, be able to make that investment in things like design and brand and exploring this more radical interface, but not necessarily go on the, you got to become a unicorn startup path. 00:18:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Another way to think about the funding situation would be, as you get more funding and you have more external investors and owners, you tend to have fewer degrees of freedom. So at the extreme end of you’re a large publicly traded company in many respects, including basically legally at the whims of the owners, they can more or less insist that you act purely in their best judiciary interests, and if they don’t like what you’re doing, they can take over your company by various means. And at the other extreme, you would have the art project where you’re in your house, you can do whatever you want. And, you know, in some respects it’s nice to be doing the art projects you have infinite degrees of freedom, but then you don’t necessarily have the capital and the collaborators and the teammates in a sense to help you accomplish a bigger mission. So, when we were looking at funding the venture, we wanted to go in the direction of raising a little bit of funding, but no more than we kind of strictly needed to, A and B. In order to minimize the extent to which raising that funding impinged on the desired degrees of freedom in the firm, we raised the funding from people who were aligned with our sense of mojo, if you will, or what what we wanted to do with the venture, and we’re therefore not going to use the fact that they were investors and owners as a way to shape the business in a way that wouldn’t fit with what we wanted to do. So being aligned with the investors was important, I think. 00:20:10 - Speaker 2: Another piece of the puzzle on funding and money flow generally is that all businesses should go through this cycle of they need upfront capital, even if you’re a lemonade stand, you gotta get the lemons and the pitcher and the cups and the poster board and the marker so you can make your sign. Everyone needs some amount of capital, but there’s always this cycle where initially you’re in the red. You’ve put in capital but you haven’t produced a functioning business yet and you hopefully over time in that time period could be very long. I’m gonna say for, you know, a business like Amazon, maybe it took them a decade plus to go to cash flow positive, whereas maybe for more bootstrap things you expect to get there basically right away, but for us, we wanted to have enough capital to make these investments we knew were necessary to even get a product that people would want to use or pay for. But it was also important to me or it was part of what I wanted to express with the business was to make a self-sustaining business where the product exists because people are paying for it, not because of continuous injections of venture capital. And partially this is my experience in the startup world, both with my own companies and other companies I’ve advised. But in the end, you will always serve the needs of the people who give you money, and that’s just kind of the physics. You can resist that in some ways, but it’s just kind of the long term, you’ll always converge to that. And so if your customers are the ones giving you money, then they’re the ones you’re serving. But of course they can’t. Maybe putting aside some unusual cases of big Kickstarters or whatever. For the most part, you can’t be completely customer funded to start. That’s where professional investors can really help out. They want to give money to fledgling businesses for a chance at a return, and so that’s a good deal. But if the startup path tends to be one where there’s long, many, many of capital and so you’re in some ways I’ve seen the it’s quite a joke or a criticism or something, but they say that startups in many cases their product is their stock. What they’re really trying to do is sell their stock and sell it for ever increasing prices and the product that they give to users and maybe even charge for but not enough to break even, that is secondary. And I really wanted the other way around, which is, of course, we need to do our fiduciary duty to our investors and give them hopefully a solid return over time, but ultimately, the sooner we can be funded by customer money rather than investor money, I think the more that will shape the company and the product that I want to make in a way that really is focused on serving customers. 00:22:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And one of the reasons that I like that approach is I basically prefer to serve paying customers versus free customers in general. This goes back to kind of the patio 11 thing of, you get what you charged for or something, where customers who pay serious money for tools tend to be invested in them and want them to succeed and understand their value and things like that. So it’s yet another reason to focus on paying customers. 00:23:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s a way to filter out people who really find a lot of value in your product from those that like free stuff. Everybody likes free stuff, that’s fine, but I think a business and a product works out best if you can have that real focus on, here are the people that get the most value from what I’m doing. Yeah I’ll note that I think it worked pretty well for us, this idea of we’ll take this seed-ish round, and then we’ll try to use that to get to, if not profitability, at least kind of a sustainability, at least not be losing money, and that really did create a lot of urgency on the team, I feel, to charge sooner and it was a challenge actually because I think as craftspeople. You think, OK, I don’t feel ready to charge money for this yet. I think it can be better. It still has bugs in it. There’s so many features to add. It’s a very natural thing when you hold yourself and your work to a high bar, but then you made this spreadsheet that basically mapped out cash and how we were spending it and what would happen if we started charging and it really made a difference starting charging just a few months. Earlier, because it really takes time to build up your customer base and that that is recurring over time, we could get to this sustainability on a trajectory that would allow us to not need to sort of go back to the well for for more funds and or just go out of business, and that was really focusing and I think it pushed us to charge a little sooner than maybe we would have otherwise. And that in turn I think really changed our relationship with our users who are now customers because now we have a different obligation to them and I think that further focused our ability to make a good product. So overall that kind of charge money sooner and then in turn try to grow into that price you’re offering or that product you claim to be offering. For me that was a really powerful focusing thing for the team and for the product. 00:25:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that was big and by the way, it was made all the more challenging by our take on pricing on iOS. Part of the hypothesis about how this venture can work with a small team, a relatively modest amount of funding, but still reaching self-sustainability. Is a prosumer price level on the $10 a month, $100 a year range, versus almost all iOS apps, which are $0.03 dollars, $5 maybe $999. It’s the wrong number of zeros to be able to make the physics of the business work. And so at the same time as we are craftspeople who it’s tough to charge for a product that isn’t where we want to be eventually, we’re also dealing with the challenge of we’re doing something quite different with iOS pricing, so it’s dealing with two things at once there. 00:25:47 - Speaker 2: Great, so we’ve got kind of this partnership model, small talent dense team, people who are all owners in the business. We’ve got a small bit of seed funding, so we can do a bigger investment than a pure bootstrap thing, but something trying to get to Sustainability sooner, and not be on a long term kind of multiple rounds of investment, and we’ve got prosumer pricing that potentially makes it possible to get to something sustainable for a 5 person team within kind of the physics of how many people are out there that need a tool like this, and what they’re willing to pay and that sort of thing. So that was, I think, kind of roughly the picture we put together, we wrote an internal memo that outlined mostly everything we just talked about back in the summer of 2018. So now the question becomes, OK, we’re coming up on two years in, how’s it going? Is this working the way we thought it would? 00:26:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it’s working out great so far. Now, there is a huge question mark around the financial success and viability of the business. We haven’t fully demonstrated that yet, and that’s a question mark that’s going to be out there until we have that information, it’s hard to fully evaluate this model, right? But in terms of how it feels to work day and day and the staff that we’ve attracted, that feels. Great to me, and I especially love this feeling with the partnership model that you have 5 people who are operating at the top of their game, and who you fully trust to make great decisions for the business independently. That feeling is awesome and really helps us, I think, move quickly and punch above our weight, even as a 5 person team. 00:27:19 - Speaker 2: You know I’ve always kind of liked the what I think of as the pirate ship model, kind of a group of people who band together for a common purpose, but it’s not this top down classic command and control. One person is in charge, everyone else just executes, and individuals can pursue their own decision making, as you said, but the reality is, I think I don’t. how it would be with even more than 5, but certainly any, I don’t know, before this you were working at Stripe as part of a big team there and amazing company, but it’s just there’s hundreds or I don’t know even now thousands of people and there has to be some coherence to the decision making and so that in turn leads you into cascading OKRs and all the Big company stuff you think of it’s necessary, and you know, I think it’s necessary to do something at that scale, but for me personally, yeah, it is a lot more fun to make individual decisions for my own work and then for my teammates to be able to trust that we have enough shared vision, alignment around purposes, sense of trust in each other’s capabilities as craftspeople, but also that we were seeking a similar outcome in the business. And that people can have a lot of autonomy while at the same time, we’re working together for a common purpose. We’re not making decisions that contradict each other or will make the whole thing feel incoherent. 00:28:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And furthermore, I think there’s a sort of talent arbitrage that we’ve been able to pull off here in two respects. First of all, I think people are stepping into a level of responsibility and impacts and skill that they wouldn’t have stepped into so quickly or just such a. extent, if they were in a bigger organization where they had a more specialized and confined and limited and structured role. And that’s the result of you give people responsibility, you trust them with it, and you make them big owners in the business, and they take that very seriously, and they tend to step up to the challenge if you find the right people. And second of all, I do think that the model is very attractive to some people, and I won’t put on the spot here, but I, I think people have found their way to the venture that otherwise they’re basically not hirable by general purpose companies, right? But because the model is so unique and attractive, and because there is that mojo, I think you can bring people into the venture that otherwise you basically wouldn’t have been able to hire. 00:29:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for me, looking back at this almost 2 years, we’ve been doing this slightly unusual model. I actually went to review the memo that we wrote back in summer of 2018 just to kind of look at our original goals and see the degree to which we’ve executed that versus it’s evolved. And one interesting thing in there was essentially what the risks or open questions are, and I’m happy to say that two of those we’ve already answered in that. Intervening time, just as we’ve discussed. One is just our ability to raise money. So we went out to look for seed funding from the kinds of investors who normally would invest in startups, and we had kind of a weird story where we basically said, look, this isn’t unicorn potential. We’re not trying to follow the standard startup model. We do think there’s something quite interesting here. We think there’s a potentially a very good business here. But, you know, we’re explicitly not on that path, and we’re looking for less money in exchange for less ownership, and we’re not gonna fit the normal model and for many, actually most investors, that was a, well, we like what you’re doing, it’s interesting, but this just doesn’t fit our model. But we did manage to find some folks who liked what we were doing and certainly it helped, I think a lot that you and I have and others on the team, you know, we have a really nice CV. In the tech world and the amount of money we were asking for was so small that people felt they could take a risk. I think that would be tougher to do without the career capital that we have in this particular team, and I would like to see if there are more businesses that can do with a model like this. It would be nice if it was more possible for people who didn’t necessarily have the background of Stripe and Hiroku and whatever else to be able to get this kind of funding. So that’s one item to risk is the raising of money. The other one is the ability to hire, and I think I outlined that in the previous podcast episode on this, which at the time we’d just been joined by our fourth partner, Leonard, but it’s one is can be an outlier, so I thought, OK, well, we got pretty lucky with that, and he really seemed interested in being not just a great designer as he is, but also someone who would have broad ownership in the business and interested. All pieces of it, not just his sort of specific discipline, can we replicate that? And the addition of Adam Wulf to the team made me say, OK, yeah, it seems we can, right? We got not just the original three who wanted to do things this way, but then 2 more we were able to attract, as you said, maybe even people we wouldn’t have been able to hire if we were a slightly more conventional company, that that was appealing to them. And I do think it’s not a highly scalable model, but it’s scalable enough to serve our purposes, and we have no plans to expand the team beyond 5 for the foreseeable future, but we also think that’s the right number of people to execute on this vision. So from the perspective of answering those two risks, I would say that is going well. 00:32:02 - Speaker 1: What are the other risks on the list? 00:32:05 - Speaker 2: Uh, the other big one is the one that you just mentioned, which is can we get sustainability, right? Because I think that for the record, at the time of this recording, we are not revenue sustainable. Let us say if we run out of our little nest egg in the bank here, we would not have enough to keep the business going, at least in its current form. But the graph is trending in the right direction, we have new customers every week, and if you look at the way that the lines meet in terms of, you know, bank account going down, revenue, and new customers coming in, we do think it is viable to get there, but we won’t know until it happens. So I think that remains the biggest risk, and if we do start to get close to being in the red on the bank account, and then we have to ask the question of, OK, you know, do we just sort of give up and go to business, to be revenue based financing, which could be interesting, but I think maybe we might not be the right shape of business for that, or do we go back to Silicon Valley investors, but now we’re sort of like breaking our model, right? We’re saying, well, we were just going to raise this one round and charge money right away and try. get to sustainability based on that, but if we need to go and refresh from that well, that pretty naturally takes us into just the startup path of raising perpetual rounds of funding, and your eventual outcome is acquisition by a larger company or in some cases going public, but I just don’t think we have the right kind of business, nor is what we want to express the sort of thing that makes sense for a big public company, right? Yeah, and then addressing the more personal side of it, which is just creating this company, this vehicle uh that is a place we want to work. I like you wanted to be a little less of a manager, a little more of a maker, and It is interesting because, you know, we do spend a lot of time. I spend a lot of time tweaking CSS and manually typing expenses into QuickBooks, which is a perpetually rote and frustrating activity and many other small things that were, how we raised a little more money on the startup path. Yeah, we would be hiring office managers and other kinds of people we would have a bigger team that would mean that we could do less of that stuff. You get more leverage or something like that, but that’s actually what I wanted. I’ve gone both directions and I think I’m at my best when I’m, I like being on a team, that’s really important to me. I want to do things that are big enough that they require a team as opposed to just, you know, kind of a solo activity or even like a two person partnership. But I like to be on a very small team where you can be doing a lot, but most of what you’re doing is making, I would call it, rather than the management and leadership tasks that come naturally with the expansion of a team. 00:34:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. And I think in addition to this maker versus manager access and how that’s influenced by the size of the team, I also think that a smaller team gives you more degrees of freedom, which is great if you’re someone who just likes freedom, like me, but it’s also great if you want to do something unique that requires moving several variables at the same time. So for example, this local first idea that we’re working on, this idea that you have all the data on your device and it’s very quick to access and it’s secure to you and things like that, that requires pulling levers on engineering, products, business strategy, the client side, the server side, interfacing with the research at the lab. There’s all the stuff that you Got to kind of pull together. And if you had to coordinate a bunch of people to do that with meetings and planning documents and all that, it would take forever. It might just not get done. Whereas if it’s a small number of people or even one person, you’re much more able to come up with these weird combinations of variables to produce novel results. And that goes back to this idea of making a statement or building something unique for the world. 00:35:43 - Speaker 2: Another element of degrees of freedom is outcomes. So outcomes could include, you have a profitable business, but it could also include something like an acquisition or an IPO and the startup world, there’s really the outcomes that matter are acquisition, IPO, or go out of business, and that’s sustainable but moderately sized business is a non-goal. That’s actually a bad outcome from the perspective of investors and the whole. The system is kind of built around that. You shared a nice article with me some years back called VCM Math, which I’ll link in the show notes, but the way the person puts it is, you know, venture capitalists in pushing these businesses to become a billion dollar company in 10 years. This is not because they’re jerks, it’s because the model demands it. This is how it works. That’s where this money comes from. It’s only possible if you push for these polarized outcomes. And that’s well and good if you know what you’re getting into and you’re seeking that kind of go baker bust result, but for the, I think potentially large number of potential mid-size businesses, very solid mid-sized businesses, that’s of course not a fit. And so by keeping that smaller amount of Capital upfront, keeping the team smaller, we leave more possibilities for what counts as a good outcome. And so, of course, we still can have a startup style outcome, and that might be something we consider good, but there’s also other outcomes that I would consider extremely good. But that in turn leads into, OK, how do investors as well as the partners who have this significant equity stake and in fact are taking lower salaries than they would in other places in order to get this equity stake, but how does that equity become worth something? So the startup world typically it’s through. or IPO and there’s no other outcome. So you did quite a bit of work on the financial pieces that could potentially make this work. So how do investors or partners over the long run, if news is able to be a successful and profitable business, how do they realize the results of their effort? 00:37:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a tricky one. So certainly if there’s a standard outcome in the startup world, like an acquisition or something that’s straightforward and it’ll work like other places, just the percentages would be different because again, we’ve given much more ownership to the staff. But if you are profitable, it’s quite challenging. So I hope our listeners who have joined for discussions of gesture-based interfaces will forgive my aggression in US tax law here, but it’s actually really important for how you compensate your staff. So, tax and securities laws makes it quite hard for people, individuals to get cash out of a company like this, and I can kind of play through the different scenarios that we thought about. So one thing we’ve considered is the idea of small scale tender offers. This is where a company or someone else offers to buy shares from existing investors and in that way, existing owners of the equity could get some liquidity and have cash to support their families or what have you. 00:38:46 - Speaker 2: And small digression there when I first encountered the term tender offer, I just thought it was the sweetest thing. Here’s an offer for you tenderly for your shares, but I, I don’t think that’s what it is. It’s, it’s that they are tendering an offer, right? But it basically just refers to an internal stock purchase, right? A transaction where one person has some and they’re going to sell it to someone else on an open market transaction. And is that similar to or the same thing as stock buybacks and kind of public companies? 00:39:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so a stock buyback would be buying the stock from the public, which I guess could conceivably be some of your staff if they own it on the public markets, where the tender offer, I associate that more with a more closely held private company, and it’s not a public transaction, it’s more of a private offer to specific individuals to buy the equity. 00:39:33 - Speaker 2: How does that relate to, we mentioned taking inspiration from the partnership model, attorney firms, and so on, and I think it’s pretty standard there that when you’re going to leave the firm, they buy you out, right? Even maybe with a restaurant, you know, you can imagine a couple of people in a restaurant, one person decides they’ve had it with the business or they’re moving on to other things in life, it’s normal for one person to buy out the other person’s steak. Would that be a tender offer or something else? 00:39:57 - Speaker 1: Hm, interesting. I suspect that’s a little bit different because those are probably LLCs or otherwise not Corps, and again I associate tender offer with basically with the Delaware Corp, and that could, for example, even be written into the contract that not only are they gonna offer to buy you out, but in fact you have to sell. At perhaps a formulaically determined price, so that way they might specifically not want the ownership to escape the currently active employees, for example. Basically, I think when you have LLCs or other non-Corp structures, things can get a little bit weirder and different just because they’re not as solidified and standardized in terms of how they operate. But there’s some similarities in spirit of, OK, you’ve completed this part of your journey and you want to get some liquidity for that, and the company has interests in acquiring that equity, and so it makes mutual sense to do this transaction. 00:40:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess they all seem similar to me in that typically an ownership stake in a private firm of any size is just totally non-liquid. You cannot really do anything with it. You can look at, OK, in theory, our last funding round value us this amount or I could take a multiple of revenue, the company is worth a million dollars and I have 50% of it. Yay, I’m a half a millionaire, but that’s not really how it works because you can’t actually sell those shares versus public markets, which of course, It’s very good for liquidity in that way, and then an acquisition scenario where one company is buying 100% of the stock of another company, and then you just divvy up that share price among the owners, and that’s why those two scenarios create exits for the investors or create ways to get liquidity for the investors and the employees who have taken options. But if you say, as we have said, You know, we don’t plan to take either of those paths. We want to build a profitable business that goes in perpetuity, making good software. OK, then how do I ever realize the outcome of my shares? And so the tender offering is one mechanism, as are these others we mentioned for creating liquidity isn’t the word for it, but just the mechanism for one person to sell their shares and get out and get some money to someone else who’s maybe more active in the business. 00:41:58 - Speaker 1: Yep, yep. And another nice thing about tender offers is they don’t need to apply the same to every person, by which I mean if it’s just the case that you or someone else because they’re leaving or whatever, wants to make this exchange, we could potentially set that up versus having to do something equally on the basis of current ownership. And another example of something like that would be a dividend which we can talk about. Yeah, there’s a lot to like about tender offer, but it’s not something that we would do lightly. There’s a variety of reasons. One is that you need quite a bit of capital for it to actually make sense for it to be material, and for you to have an appropriate amount of cash in the bank and the company even after the transaction. So in that sense, it’s definitely a ways out. But also, unfortunately, there’s all kinds of really weird tax consequences which we don’t need to go into the details here, but Basically, by doing a tender offer, you could potentially impair the equity of the other owners, if you do it wrong or do it at the wrong time or do it too much. So it’s fairly fraught. But it’s a potential thing out there. Another thing that we thought about and liked was dividends, and dividends are nice cause they’re very mechanically fair. 00:42:56 - Speaker 2: Big fan of dividends. Yeah. So just to define that, this is the idea that in a way it feels like almost the purest expression of capitalism or how businesses are supposed to work, which is when a company turns profit, they can choose to take some portion of that profit. Some, they’ll reinvest back in the business, kind of retain earnings, I think that’s what that is usually called, but then the rest they say, hey, we made some money, let’s share it with everyone who helped make this business happen. And that share is determined by your ownership in the company. And so for me, I had a, I guess personal experience with this in my very first business, which was a basically a bootstrapped. Business, a payment gateway called Trust commerce, and we had been operating, I don’t know, founders, you know, living on their own savings and whatever, just trying to pay our bills with whatever money came in, or trying to pay the basic business bills, servers and offices and phones and stuff like that. And I remember the first time we were left with $1000 in the bank account that was not accounted for us, well, what should we do with this? Well, we could pay ourselves, that’d be great. And so we wrote dividend checks for $300 for each of us, because there were 3 people in the company, and it felt really great. It felt like this, we made a product that people valued enough that there was a little bit left over that then we could give to ourselves. And even though the, the number, the absolute number was small, that feeling of kind of profit in its purest form is a really nice one. And so dividends are just the idea that the company is making money, so you share it with the owners, and that’s something. It’s not really part of the startup world and even not really as much a part of, I feel like public equities, where I think they could usually call them growth stocks or something like this. I’m probably speaking out of my wheelhouse here or income stocks or whatever, but the idea of just you’re going to buy the stock in a company, so that then when that company makes money, they send you a dividend. Those are usually a lower return type of stock versus ones that are based on the growth of the stock itself. You buy it at a lower price, you sell it later for a higher price. But the income stocks, again, that is business at its most pure and fundamental, which is the company made money, you own a piece of the company, therefore you get a portion share of that. 00:45:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it’s nice because it’s mechanically fair. If you have $100,000 to distribute in dividends, you look at the cap table, so and so has 5%, great, they get a $5000 check, and you know that everyone is being treated fairly, at least insofar as the equity in the company is owned fairly, and you don’t need to have a lot of discussions and machinations about how you actually split up the cash. But dividends are challenging for their own reasons though. One reason, for example, that you don’t see a ton of dividends in the public markets is some companies don’t have cash to throw off. A lot of it is currently, instead of being dividended out, it’s being used to buy back stock, which is kind of equivalent actually, but buybacks get basically better tax treatment. So there’s those pesky tax laws again, causing weird distortions, but in our case, it’s hard because Some staff have straight stock and some staff have options. And that again is because of tax law. Basically, the US government doesn’t want you giving straight stock to people. They view it as compensation that needs to be taxed immediately, even though it’s a liquid. So basically, to avoid bankrupting your staff, you have to give them options. But then options in uh the Corp, when you dividend now you dividend to the stock owners, the straight up stock owners, not the option holders, so that probably wouldn’t be fair to them. 00:46:13 - Speaker 2: And to be fair to the tax man here, trying to levy income taxes on stock earned for work is very challenging because that stock has zero value when you get it, and it’s very likely to have zero value ever, but then in some cases it can be worth a lot, right, that initial stake that, I don’t know, you know, the Google founders had turned out to be worth a huge amount, but the vast majority of startups and even businesses will end up. Not being worth anything. So how do you tax something when you can’t know its value except extremely retroactively? Yeah. And I’ve had my own challenges with that because I’ve basically built a career around starting companies or advising for companies and taking equity and kind of have this, I don’t know, flywheel of I basically earned some money on past ventures, and then I can use that to pay my bills or whatever and earn pure equity in future ventures, and then All of those pan out, but I kind of have a portfolio strategy, you might say if I own stock in companies I’ve started over the last decade or decade and a half as well as companies I’ve advised for in some cases invested for. And so all of that income, all of that stock was worth 0 when I got it, but much of it turns out to be worth $0 ever, but then some of it turns out to be worth a good bit. And when I can cash that out, I can use that to pay my bills and continue my career. But how do you tax that because Typically you tax things at the time they’re earned, but this can only be evaluated when it kind of resolves, which can be often 10 years later, that a piece of stock you earned pans out and has a value that can be attached to it. So it’s not an easy problem. I think it’s still an evolving area. Certainly the US tax law. I know Europe is grappling with this as well, because it’s just the standard models for how we think about income just don’t fit well with us. 00:48:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely an area that’s being worked on. It’s just too bad that it hasn’t been figured out yet in a way that would be more advantageous to basically giving staff more compensation. 00:48:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it can be frustrating, which is basically trying to do something that’s as fair as possible for investors and people earning what they call sweat equity, where they’re essentially earning stock in exchange for their work. We cannot treat those the same because the tax law basically means that, as you said, the people earning equity through sweat get screwed, and so then you have to create these different classes of stock and do different things, but then that effectively means You have more and more divergence in the stakeholders, which is against the spirit of what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to create this thing where everyone’s in it together, we bring different things to the table. Some people bring their efforts, some people bring their money, some people bring both, but everyone can hopefully have a sense of fairness in the sense of kind of knowing what you put in and knowing what you potentially get out or how to share in the success long term. 00:49:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah. And there are ways you could potentially work around this for dividends. You could do a sort of phantom dividend where you say there’s 100% of the cap table and straight stock and there’s an additional 40% in options. You can dividend it out 140 units, 40% to the option holders, and 100% to the stockholders, and the stock would be straight dividends and the option holders would get like a bonus basically. To do something like that, and you could even imagine doing more basically ad hoc type things like that where you essentially make a formula and then do a bonus payout, but make it more formulaic less just like, oh I think you did a good job this year, here’s a check and more you have this sort of ownership in our. Current cap structure and based on that, according to this formula, we’re doing bonus payouts like that, but that also gets messy because there is an element of discretion and also when you’re dealing with investors, like they don’t want to get a $17 check, and you got 4 more employees, you got to take down their address or whatever. This is a lot of weird mechanical stuff there. So I, I think realistically it’s, we gotta wait a few years and see how this all plays out and what the shape of the business is, but what we’ve done is we’ve built up a lot of potential energy, a lot of ownership, a lot of equity with the staff members, and hopefully we can find a way to convert that into kinetic energy to continue the analogy in the future. And I’m pretty optimistic. It is asking the staff to trust us to a significant extent that we’ll be able to figure that out and treat it fairly, but I’m pretty hopeful that we would be able to do something that’s fair to everyone. 00:50:28 - Speaker 2: So, would you recommend a structure like this to someone else who wanted to start a company and or do you imagine, you know, if you had to start a new company yourself today, would you reach for a structure like this? 00:50:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, we thought about this for a very long time and it was hard to come up, and we spoke with a lot of experts, and it was hard to come up with a better setup. So one way to think of this is, insofar as we’re talking about staff compensation, equity ownership, it’s kind of in the standard Silicon Valley model, but with the percentages dialed way in favor of the staff. So in that respect, it’s kind of strictly better, I would say, than a typical Silicon Valley model. And so it can’t be that wrong, strictly better at least for the staff, I would think. And we didn’t talk about the other things that we do there in terms of very long exercise windows and more favorable investing schedules and so on, but basically, we’ve taken the standard mechanisms that are used in stock, Delaware Sea Corps and turned the variables that we can so there’s as favorable as possible as staff. And I think at least that is a good thing if you would have otherwise considered it a standard Silicon Valley model. The one other option that I do think is interesting, but that I couldn’t quite see ourselves going down was Using more like a phantom stock approach, where you have essentially an internal ledger that’s separate from the ledger that you have with Delaware in terms of the equity ownership in the company, and it’s on the basis of that internal ledger that you would make decisions about how you do payoffs. And there are some companies that are exploring this, you know, it’s like every month you work with the company, you earn a point, and then if we ever do dividends, you divide the dividend by the number of points and that’s how much we send you a check for, something like that. That’s nice cause it gives you a ton of flexibility, but it’s much less precedented, and it places even more trust in the company, because you have less of the legal guard rails to confine what they can do or not do. So I think that’s interesting because of the flexibility, and I would love to see people try that more, but I wasn’t ready to, you know, establish a whole bunch of new case law just for the sake of this venture. 00:52:21 - Speaker 2: Now, precedent is very important. There’s the general business wisdom is try not to innovate on the model, try to focus on your product and your and don’t get too caught up in company mechanics. It turned out that this was something that we were both passionate enough about in terms of the place we wanted to work, but also I honestly do think we needed a different type of container, right, that we knew that as we talked about towards the beginning there where an individual productivity tool and what you can sell for even at a prosumer price and what the mechanics of distribution and things look like there versus other, you know, there’s a reason why Venture funded stuff is either Enterprise, SAS, or, you know, a monetized consumer products. Those are models that work well with that funding style, and the thing we wanted to express in terms of the product and the thing we wanted to exist in the world, as well as the company that we wanted to work at, I think just demanded a different model. I don’t think it would have worked with another one, so I think that was a way to justify the ways in which we are deviating or innovating a little bit on the container side of it. But then at the same exactly as you said, I remember a lot of design choices we made and things like, you know, we’d love to give employees options or we’d love to give employees pure stock, but that’s just way too hard or even impossible without these punishing tax consequences. So, OK, we’ll kind of have these two classes of ownership in the company, that’s not the spirit of what we’re doing, but like, at some point you gotta bend a little bit to realities and what there’s precedent for and what attorneys and accountants are used to working with and all that sort of thing. 00:53:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think in all of this there’s also a very real morale element where let’s suppose the company is very successful some years from now, all the current and former staff are going to remember that we worked very hard to try to do the best we possibly could by them. They were like basically on all the email chains with the lawyers, more or less literally, and we would debrief and talk about, OK, here are the options that we have. What do you all think? Does this work well for you and things like that, versus a model where That was all opaque and there was not even an effort made to try to set things up as best as possible for the staff. I think that just helps people feel like they are being treated well. 00:54:28 - Speaker 2: Well, speaking for myself, I am sometimes in the position of offering advice, let’s say, to folks who are thinking about what kind of vehicle they use for their business, and kind of the new approach does come up and Certainly, it’s huge to ask, what are you actually trying to make, because you need the right vehicle for what you’re doing. If you need huge upfront capital or a big staff, I’m not sure this model can work, to be honest, or if it’s something that can be done with more of a small team, 1 people, 2 people in a shorter period of time, then maybe this is also not the right way to do it. And there’s other kinds of vehicles as well. For example, I think The nonprofit is a little bit underutilized, can be an incredible vehicle even for software and technology products. We know of maybe someone like Mozilla or the Apache Foundation. There’s many smaller examples such as processing Foundation, which does this kind of generative art coding tool language thing. There’s many others where I think if you think, OK, what we want to make is more open source or it’s more of Long term kind of benefit, less of a maybe it’s more educational or maybe the targ