Podcasts about clint you

About ClintClint is the CEO and a co-founder at Cribl, a company focused on making observability viable for any organization, giving customers visibility and control over their data while maximizing value from existing tools.Prior to co-founding Cribl, Clint spent two decades leading product management and IT operations at technology and software companies, including Splunk and Cricket Communications. As a former practitioner, he has deep expertise in network issues, database administration, and security operations.Links: Cribl: https://cribl.io/ Cribl.io: https://cribl.io Docs.cribl.io: https://docs.cribl.io Sandbox.cribl.io: https://sandbox.cribl.io TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Today's episode is brought to you in part by our friends at MinIO the high-performance Kubernetes native object store that's built for the multi-cloud, creating a consistent data storage layer for your public cloud instances, your private cloud instances, and even your edge instances, depending upon what the heck you're defining those as, which depends probably on where you work. It's getting that unified is one of the greatest challenges facing developers and architects today. It requires S3 compatibility, enterprise-grade security and resiliency, the speed to run any workload, and the footprint to run anywhere, and that's exactly what MinIO offers. With superb read speeds in excess of 360 gigs and 100 megabyte binary that doesn't eat all the data you've gotten on the system, it's exactly what you've been looking for. Check it out today at min.io/download, and see for yourself. That's min.io/download, and be sure to tell them that I sent you.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Sysdig. Sysdig is the solution for securing DevOps. They have a blog post that went up recently about how an insecure AWS Lambda function could be used as a pivot point to get access into your environment. They've also gone deep in-depth with a bunch of other approaches to how DevOps and security are inextricably linked. To learn more, visit sysdig.com and tell them I sent you. That's S-Y-S-D-I-G dot com. My thanks to them for their continued support of this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I have a repeat guest joining me on this promoted episode. Clint Sharp is the CEO and co-founder of Cribl. Clint, thanks for joining me.Clint: Hey, Corey, nice to be back.Corey: I was super excited when you gave me the premise for this recording because you said you had some news to talk about, and I was really excited that oh, great, they're finally going to buy a vowel so that people look at their name and understand how to pronounce it. And no, that's nowhere near forward-looking enough. It's instead it's some, I guess, I don't know, some product announcement or something. But you know, hope springs eternal. What have you got for us today?Clint: Well, one of the reasons I love talking to your audiences because product announcements actually matter to this audience. It's super interesting, as you get into starting a company, you're such, like, a product person, you're like, “Oh, I have this new set of things that's really going to make your life better.” And then you go out to, like, the general media, and you're like, “Hey, I have this product.” And they're like, “I don't care. What product? Do you have a funding announcement? Do you have something big in the market that—you know, do you have a new executive? Do you”—it's like, “No, but, like, these features, like these things, that we—the way we make our lives better for our customers. Isn't that interesting?” “No.”Corey: Real depressing once you—“Do you have a security breach to announce?” It's, “No. God no. Why would I wind up being that excited about it?” “Well, I don't know. I'd be that excited about it.” And yeah, the stuff that mainstream media wants to write about in the context of tech companies is exactly the sort of thing that tech companies absolutely do not want to be written about for. But fortunately, that is neither here nor there.Clint: Yeah, they want the thing that gets the clicks.Corey: Exactly. You built a product that absolutely resonates in its target market and outside of that market. It's one of those, what is that thing, again? If you could give us a light refresher on what Cribl is and does, you'll probably do a better job of it than I will. We hope.Clint: We'd love to. Yeah, so we are an observability company, fundamentally. I think one of the interesting things to talk about when it comes to observability is that observability and security are merging. And so I like to say observability and include security people. If you're a security person, and you don't feel included by the word observability, sorry.We also include you; you're under our tent here. So, we sell to technology professionals, we help make their lives better. And we do that today through a flagship product called LogStream—which is part of this announcement, we're actually renaming to Stream. In some ways, we're dropping logs—and we are a pipeline company. So, we help you take all of your existing agents, all of your existing data that's moving, and we help you process that data in the stream to control costs and to send it multiple places.And it sounds kind of silly, but one of the biggest problems that we end up solving for a lot of our enterprises is, “Hey, I've got, like, this old Syslog feed coming off of my firewalls”—like, you remember those things, right? Palo Alto firewalls, ASA firewalls—“I actually get that thing to multiple places because, hey, I want to get that data into another security solution. I want to get that data into a data lake. How do I do that?” Well, in today's world, that actually turns out is sort of a neglected set of features, like, the vendors who provide you logging solutions, being able to reshape that data, filter that data, control costs, wasn't necessarily at the top of their priority list.It wasn't nefarious. It wasn't like people are like, “Oh, I'm going to make sure that they can't process this data before it comes into my solution.” It's more just, like, “I'll get around to it eventually.” And the eventually never actually comes. And so our streaming product helps people do that today.And the big announcement that we're making this week is that we're extending that same processing technology down to the endpoint with a new product we're calling Cribl Edge. And so we're taking our existing best-in-class management technology, and we're turning it into an agent. And that seems kind of interesting because… I think everybody sort of assumed that the agent is dead. Okay, well, we've been building agents for a decade or two decades. Isn't everything exactly the same as it was before?But we really saw kind of a dearth of innovation in that area in terms of being able to manage your agents, being able to understand what data is available to be collected, being able to auto-discover the data that needs to be able to be collected, turning those agents into interactive troubleshooting experiences so that we can, kind of, replicate the ability to zoom into a remote endpoint and replicate that Linux command line experience that we're not supposed to be getting anymore because we're not supposed to SSH into boxes anymore. Well, how do I replicate that? How do I see how much disk is on this given endpoint if I can't SSH into that box? And so Cribl Edge is a rethink about making this rich, interactive experience on top of all of these agents that become this really massive distributed system that we can process data all the way out at where the data is being emitted.And so that means that now we don't nec—if you want to process that data in the stream, okay, great, but if you want to process that data at its origination point, we can actually provide you cheaper cost because now you're using a lot of that capacity that's sitting out there on your endpoints that isn't really being used today anyway—the average utilization of a Kubernetes cluster is like 30%—Corey: It's that high. I'm sort of surprised.Clint: Right? I know. So, Datadog puts out the survey every year, which I think is really interesting, and that's a number that always surprised me is just that people are already paying for this capacity, right? It's sitting there, it's on their AWS bill already, and with that average utilization, a lot of the stuff that we're doing in other clusters, or while we're moving that data can actually just be done right there where the data is being emitted. And also, if we're doing things like filtering, we can lower egress charges, there's lots of really, really good goodness that we can do by pushing that processing further closer to its origination point.Corey: You know, the timing of this episode is somewhat apt because as of the time that we're recording this, I spent most of yesterday troubleshooting and fixing my home wireless network, which is a whole Ubiquity-managed thing. And the controller was one of their all-in-one box things that kept more or less power cycling for no apparent reason. How do I figure out why it's doing that? Well, I'm used to, these days, doing everything in a cloud environment where you can instrument things pretty easily, where things start and where things stop is well understood. Finally, I just gave up and used a controller that's sitting on an EC2 instance somewhere, and now great, now I can get useful telemetry out of it because now it's stuff I know how to deal with.It also, turns out that surprise, my EC2 instance is not magically restarting itself due to heat issues. What a concept. So, I have a newfound appreciation for the fact that oh, yeah, not everything lives in a cloud provider's regions. Who knew? This is a revelation that I think is going to be somewhat surprising for folks who've been building startups and believe that anything that's older than 18 months doesn't exist.But there's a lot of data centers out there, there are a lot of agents living all kinds of different places. And workloads continue to surprise me even now, just looking at my own client base. It's a very diverse world when we're talking about whether things are on-prem or whether they're in cloud environments.Clint: Well, also, there's a lot of agents on every endpoint period, just due to the fact that security guys want an agent, the observability guys want an agent, the logging people want an agent. And then suddenly, I'm, you know, I'm looking at every endpoint—cloud, on-prem, whatever—and there's 8, 10 agents sitting there. And so I think a lot of the opportunity that we saw was, we can unify the data collection for metric type of data. So, we have some really cool defaults. [unintelligible 00:07:30] this is one of the things where I think people don't focus much on, kind of, the end-user experience. Like, let's have reasonable defaults.Let's have the thing turn on, and actually, most people's needs are set without tweaking any knobs or buttons, and no diving into YAML files and looking at documentation and trying to figure out exactly the way I need to configure this thing. Let's collect metric data, let's collect log data, let's do it all from one central place with one agent that can send that data to multiple places. And I can send it to Grafana Cloud, if I want to; I can send it to Logz.io, I can send it to Splunk, I can send it to Elasticsearch, I can send it to AWS's new Elasticsearch-y the thing that we don't know what they're going to call it yet after the lawsuit. Any of those can be done right from the endpoint from, like, a rich graphical experience where I think that there's a really a desire now for people to kind of jump into these configuration files where really a lot of these users, this is a part-time job, and so hey, if I need to go set up data collection, do I want to learn about this detailed YAML file configuration that I'm only going to do once or twice, or should I be able to do it in an easy, intuitive way, where I can just sit down in front of the product, get my job done and move on without having to go learn some sort of new configuration language?Corey: Once upon a time, I saw an early circa 2012, 2013 talk from Jordan Sissel, who is the creator of Logstash, and he talked a lot about how challenging it was to wind up parsing all of the variety of log files out there. Even something is relatively straightforward—wink, wink, nudge, nudge—as timestamps was an absolute monstrosity. And a lot of people have been talking in recent years about OpenTelemetry being the lingua franca that everything speaks so that is the wave of the future, but I've got a level with you, looking around, it feels like these people are living in a very different reality than the one that I appear to have stumbled into because the conversations people are having about how great it is sound amazing, but nothing that I'm looking at—granted from a very particular point of view—seems to be embracing it or supporting it. Is that just because I'm hanging out in the wrong places, or is it still a great idea whose time has yet to come, or something else?Clint: So, I think a couple things. One is every conversation I have about OpenTelemetry is always, “Will be.” It's always in the future. And there's certainly a lot of interest. We see this from customer after customer, they're very interested in OpenTelemetry and what the OpenTelemetry strategy is, but as an example OpenTelemetry logging is not yet finalized specification; they believe that they're still six months to a year out. It seems to be perpetually six months to a year out there.They are finalized for metrics and they are finalized for tracing. Where we see OpenTelemetry tends to be with companies like Honeycomb, companies like Datadog with their tracing product, or Lightstep. So, for tracing, we see OpenTelemetry adoption. But tracing adoption is also not that high either, relative to just general metrics of logs.Corey: Yeah, the tracing implementations that I've seen, for example, Epsagon did this super well, where it would take a look at your Lambdas Function built into an application, and ah, we're going to go ahead and instrument this automatically using layers or extensions for you. And life was good because suddenly you got very detailed breakdowns of exactly how data was flowing in the course of a transaction through 15 Lambdas Function. Great. With everything else I've seen, it's, “Oh, you have to instrument all these things by hand.” Let me shortcut that for you: That means no one's going to do it. They never are.It's anytime you have to do that undifferentiated heavy lifting of making sure that you put the finicky code just so into your application's logic, it's a shorthand for it's only going to happen when you have no other choice. And I think that trying to surface that burden to the developer, instead of building it into the platform so they don't have to think about it is inherently the wrong move.Clint: I think there's a strong belief in Silicon Valley that—similar to, like, Hollywood—that the biggest export Silicon Valley is going to have is culture. And so that's going to be this culture of, like, developer supporting their stuff in production. I'm telling you, I sell to banks and governments and telcos and I don't see that culture prevailing. I see a application developed by Accenture that's operated by Tata. That's a lot of inertia to overcome and a lot of regulation to overcome as well, and so, like, we can say that, hey, separation of duties isn't really a thing and developers should be able to support all their own stuff in production.I don't see that happening. It may happen. It'll certainly happen more than zero. And tracing is predicated on the whole idea that the developer is scratching their own itch. Like that I am in production and troubleshooting this and so I need this high-fidelity trace-level information to understand what's going on with this one user's experience, but that doesn't tend to be in the enterprise, how things are actually troubleshot.And so I think that more than anything is the headwind that slowing down distributed tracing adoption. It's because you're putting the onus on solving the problem on a developer who never ends up using the distributed tracing solution to begin with because there's another operations department over there that's actually operating the thing on a day-to-day basis.Corey: Having come from one of those operations departments myself, the way that I would always fix things was—you know, in the era that I was operating it made sense—you'd SSH into a box and kick the tires, poke around, see what's going on, look at the logs locally, look at the behaviors, the way you'd expect it to these days, that is considered a screamingly bad anti-pattern and it's something that companies try their damnedest to avoid doing at all. When did that change? And what is the replacement for that? Because every time I asked people for the sorts of data that I would get from that sort of exploration when they're trying to track something down, I'm more or less met with blank stares.Clint: Yeah. Well, I think that's a huge hole and one of the things that we're actually trying to do with our new product. And I think the… how do I replicate that Linux command line experience? So, for example, something as simple, like, we'd like to think that these nodes are all ephemeral, but there's still a disk, whether it's virtual or not; that thing sometimes fills up, so how do I even do the simple thing like df -kh and see how much disk is there if I don't already have all the metrics collected that I needed, or I need to go dive deep into an application and understand what that application is doing or seeing, what files it's opening, or what log files it's writing even?Let's give some good examples. Like, how do I even know what files an application is running? Actually, all that information is all there; we can go discover that. And so some of the things that we're doing with Edge is trying to make this rich, interactive experience where you can actually teleport into the end node and see all the processes that are running and get a view that looks like top and be able to see how much disk is there and how much disk is being consumed. And really kind of replicating that whole troubleshooting experience that we used to get from the Linux command line, but now instead, it's a tightly controlled experience where you're not actually getting an arbitrary shell, where I could do anything that could give me root level access, or exploit holes in various pieces of software, but really trying to replicate getting you that high fidelity information because you don't need any of that information until you need it.And I think that's part of the problem that's hard with shipping all this data to some centralized platform and getting every metric and every log and moving all that data is the data is worthless until it isn't worthless anymore. And so why do we even move it? Why don't we provide a better experience for getting at the data at the time that we need to be able to get at the data. Or the other thing that we get to change fundamentally is if we have the edge available to us, we have way more capacity. I can store a lot of information in a few kilobytes of RAM on every node, but if I bring thousands of nodes into one central place, now I need a massive amount of RAM and a massive amount of cardinality when really what I need is the ability to actually go interrogate what's running out there.Corey: The thing that frustrates me the most is the way that I go back and find my old debug statements, which is, you know, I print out whatever it is that the current status is and so I can figure out where something's breaking.Clint: [Got here 00:15:08].Corey: Yeah. I do it within AWS Lambda functions, and that's great. And I go back and I remove them later when I notice how expensive CloudWatch logs are getting because at 50 cents per gigabyte of ingest on those things, and you have that Lambda function firing off a fair bit, that starts to add up when you've been excessively wordy with your print statements. It sounds ridiculous, but okay, then you're storing it somewhere. If I want to take that log data and have something else consume it, that's nine cents a gigabyte to get it out of AWS and then you're going to want to move it again from wherever it is over there—potentially to a third system, because why not?—and it seems like the entire purpose of this log data is to sit there and be moved around because every time it gets moved, it winds up somehow costing me yet more money. Why do we do this?Clint: I mean, it's a great question because one of the things that I think we decided 15 years ago was that the reason to move this data was because that data may go poof. So, it was on a, you know, back in my day, it was an HP DL360 1U rackmount server that I threw in there, and it had raid zero discs and so if that thing went dead, well, we didn't care, we'd replace it with another one. But if we wanted to find out why it went dead, we wanted to make sure that the data had moved before the thing went dead. But now that DL360 is a VM.Corey: Yeah, or a container that is going to be gone in 20 minutes. So yeah, you don't want to store it locally on that container. But discs are also a fair bit more durable than they once were, as well. And S3 talks about its 11 nines of durability. That's great and all but most of my application logs don't need that. So, I'm still trying to figure out where we went wrong.Clint: Well, I think it was right for the time. And I think now that we have durable storage at the edge where that blob storage has already replicated three times and we can reattach—if that box crashes, we can reattach new compute to that same block storage. Actually, AWS has some cool features now, you can actually attach multiple VMs to the same block store. So, we could actually even have logs being written by one VM, but processed by another VM. And so there are new primitives available to us in the cloud, which we should be going back and re-questioning all of the things that we did ten to 15 years ago and all the practices that we had because they may not be relevant anymore, but we just never stopped to ask why.Corey: Yeah, multi-attach was rolled out with their IO2 volumes, which are spendy but great. And they do warn you that you need a file system that actively supports that and applications that are aware of it. But cool, they have specific use cases that they're clearly imagining this for. But ten years ago, we were building things out, and, “Ooh, EBS, how do I wind up attaching that from multiple instances?” The answer was, “Ohh, don't do that.”And that shaped all of our perspectives on these things. Now suddenly, you can. Is that, “Ohh don't do that,” gut visceral reaction still valid? People don't tend to go back and re-examine the why behind certain best practices until long after those best practices are now actively harmful.Clint: And that's really what we're trying to do is to say, hey, should we move log data anymore if it's at a durable place at the edge? Should we move metric data at all? Like, hey, we have these big TSDBs that have huge cardinality challenges, but if I just had all that information sitting in RAM at the original endpoint, I can store a lot of information and barely even touch the free RAM that's already sitting out there at that endpoint. So, how to get out that data? Like, how to make that a rich user experience so that we can query it?We have to build some software to do this, but we can start to question from first principles, hey, things are different now. Maybe we can actually revisit a lot of these architectural assumptions, drive cost down, give more capability than we actually had before for fundamentally cheaper. And that's kind of what Cribl does is we're looking at software is to say, “Man, like, let's question everything and let's go back to first principles.” “Why do we want this information?” “Well, I need to troubleshoot stuff.” “Okay, well, if I need to troubleshoot stuff, well, how do I do that?” “Well, today we move it, but do we have to? Do we have to move that data?” “No, we could probably give you an experience where you can dive right into that endpoint and get really, really high fidelity data without having to pay to move that and store it forever.” Because also, like, telemetry information, it's basically worthless after 24 hours, like, if I'm moving that and paying to store it, then now I'm paying for something I'm never going to read back.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats V-U-L-T-R.com slash screaming.Corey: And worse, you wind up figuring out, okay, I'm going to store all that data going back to 2012, and it's petabytes upon petabytes. And great, how do I actually search for a thing? Well, I have to use some other expensive thing of compute that's going to start diving through all of that because the way I set up my partitioning, it isn't aligned with anything looking at, like, recency or based upon time period, so right every time I want to look at what happened 20 minutes ago, I'm looking at what happened 20 years ago. And that just gets incredibly expensive, not just to maintain but to query and the rest. Now, to be clear, yes, this is an anti-pattern. It isn't how things should be set up. But how should they be set up? And it is the collective the answer to that right now actually what's best, or is it still harkening back to old patterns that no longer apply?Clint: Well, the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed. So there's, you know, I think an important point about us or how we think about building software is with this customer is first attitude and fundamentally bringing them choice. Because the reality is that doing things the old way may be the right decision for you. You may have compliance requirements to say—there's a lot of financial services institutions, for example, like, they have to keep every byte of data written on any endpoint for seven years. And so we have to accommodate their requirements.Like, is that the right requirement? Well, I don't know. The regulator wrote it that way, so therefore, I have to do it. Whether it's the right thing or the wrong thing for the business, I have no choice. And their decisions are just as right as the person who says this data is worthless and should all just be thrown away.We really want to be able to go and say, like, hey, what decision is right? We're going to give you the option to do it this way, we're going to give you the option to do it this way. Now, the hard part—and that when it comes down to, like, marketing, it's like you want to have this really simple message, like, “This is the one true path.” And a lot of vendors are this way, “There's this new wonderful, right, true path that we are going to take you on, and follow along behind me.” But the reality is, enterprise worlds are gritty and ugly, and they're full of old technology and new technology.And they need to be able to support getting data off the mainframe the same way as they're doing a brand new containerized microservices application. In fact, that brand new containerized microservices application is probably talking to the mainframe through some API. And so all of that has to work at once.Corey: Oh, yeah. And it's all of our payment data is in our PCI environment that PCI needs to have every byte logged. Great. Why is three-quarters of your infrastructure considered the PCI environment? Maybe you can constrain that at some point and suddenly save a whole bunch of effort, time, money, and regulatory drag on this.But as you go through that journey, you need to not only have a tool that will work when you get there but a tool that will work where you are today. And a lot of companies miss that mark, too. It's, “Oh, once you modernize and become the serverless success story of the decade, then our product is going to be right for you.” “Great. We'll send you a postcard if we ever get there and then you can follow up with us.”Alternately, it's well, “Yeah, we're this is how we are today, but we have a visions of a brighter tomorrow.” You've got to be able to meet people where they are at any point of that journey. One of the things I've always respected about Cribl has been the way that you very fluidly tell both sides of that story.Clint: And it's not their fault.Corey: Yeah.Clint: Most of the people who pick a job, they pick the job because, like—look, I live in Kansas City, Missouri, and there's this data processing company that works primarily on mainframes, it's right down the road. And they gave me a job and it pays me $150,000 a year, and I got a big house and things are great. And I'm a sysadmin sitting there. I don't get to play with the new technology. Like, that customer is just as an applicable customer, we want to help them exactly the same as the new Silicon Valley hip kid who's working at you know, a venture-backed startup, they're doing everything natively in the cloud. Those are all right decisions, depending on where you happen to find yourself, and we want to support you with our products, no matter where you find yourself on the technology spectrum.Corey: Speaking of old and new, and the trends of the industry, when you first set up this recording, you mentioned, “Oh, yeah, we should make it a point to maybe talk about the acquisition,” at which point I sprayed coffee across my iMac. Thanks for that. Turns out it wasn't your acquisition we were talking about so much as it is the—at the time we record this—-the yet-to-close rumored acquisition of Splunk by Cisco.Clint: I think it's both interesting and positive for some people, and sad for others. I think Cisco is obviously a phenomenal company. They run the networking world. The fact that they've been moving into observability—they bought companies like AppDynamics, and we were talking about Epsagon before the show, they bought—ServiceNow, just bought Lightstep recently. There's a lot of acquisitions in this space.I think that when it comes to something like Splunk, Splunk is a fast-growing company by compared to Cisco. And so for them, this is something that they think that they can put into their distribution channel, and what Cisco knows how to do is to sell things like they're very good at putting things through their existing sales force and really amplifying the sales of that particular thing that they have just acquired. That being said, I think for a company that was as innovative as Splunk, I do find it a bit sad with the idea that it's going to become part of this much larger behemoth and not really probably driving the observability and security industry forward anymore because I don't think anybody really looks at Cisco as a company that's driving things—not to slam them or anything, but I don't really see them as driving the industry forward.Corey: Somewhere along the way, they got stuck and I don't know how to reconcile that because they were a phenomenally fast-paced innovative company, briefly the most valuable company in the world during the dotcom bubble. And then they just sort of stalled out somewhere and, on some level, not to talk smack about it, but it feels like the level of innovation we've seen from Splunk has curtailed over the past half-decade or so. And selling to Cisco feels almost like a tacit admission that they are effectively out of ideas. And maybe that's unfair.Clint: I mean, we can look at the track record of what's been shipped over the last five years from Splunk. And again they're a partner, their customers are great, I think they still have the best log indexing engine on the market. That was their core product and what has made them the majority of their money. But there's not been a lot new. And I think objectively we can look at that without throwing stones and say like, “Well, what net-new? You bought SignalFX. Like, good for you guys like that seems to be going well. You've launched your observability suite based off of these acquisitions.” But organic product-wise, there's not a lot coming out of the factory.Corey: I'll take it a bit further-slash-sadder, we take a look at some great companies that were acquired—OpenDNS, Duo Security, SignalFX, as you mentioned, Epsagon, ThousandEyes—and once they've gotten acquired by Cisco, they all more or less seem to be frozen in time, like they're trapped in amber, which leads us up to the natural dinosaur analogy that I'll probably make in a less formal setting. It just feels like once a company is bought by Cisco, their velocity peters out, a lot of their staff leaves, and what you see is what you get. And I don't know if that's accurate, I'm just not looking in the right places, but every time I talk to folks in the industry about this, I get a lot of knowing nods that are tied to it. So, whether or not that's true or not, that is very clearly, at least in some corners of the market, the active perception.Clint: There's a very real fact that if you look even at very large companies, innovation is driven from a core set of a handful of people. And when those people start to leave, the innovation really stops. It's those people who think about things back from first principles—like why are we doing things? What different can we do?—and they're the type of drivers that drive change.So, Frank Slootman wrote a book recently called Amp it Up that I've been reading over the last weekend, and he talks—has this article that was on LinkedIn a while back called “Drivers vs. Passengers” and he's always looking for drivers. And those drivers tend to not find themselves as happy in bigger companies and they tend to head for the exits. And so then you end up with the people who are a lot of the passenger type of people, the people who are like—they'll carry it forward, they'll continue to scale it, the business will continue to grow at whatever rate it's going to grow, but you're probably not going to see a lot of the net-new stuff. And I'll put it in comparison to a company like Datadog who I have a vast amount of respect for I think they're incredibly innovative company, and I think they continue to innovate.Still driven by the founders, the people who created the original product are still there driving the vision, driving forward innovation. And that's what tends to move the envelope is the people who have the moral authority inside of an even larger organization to say, “Get behind me. We're going in this direction. We're going to go take that hill. We're going to go make things better for our customers.” And when you start to lose those handful of really critical contributors, that's where you start to see the innovation dry up.Corey: Where do you see the acquisitions coming from? Is it just at some point people shove money at these companies that got acquired that is beyond the wildest dreams of avarice? Is it that they believe that they'll be able to execute better on their mission and they were independently? These are still smart, driven, people who have built something and I don't know that they necessarily see an acquisition as, “Well, time to give up and coast for a while and then I'll leave.” But maybe it is. I've never found myself in that situation, so I can't speak for sure.Clint: You kind of I think, have to look at the business and then whoever's running the business at that time—and I sit in the CEO chair—so you have to look at the business and say, “What do we have inside the house here?” Like, “What more can we do?” If we think that there's the next billion-dollar, multi-billion-dollar product sitting here, even just in our heads, but maybe in the factory and being worked on, then we should absolutely not sell because the value is still there and we're going to grow the company much faster as an independent entity than we would you know, inside of a larger organization. But if you're the board of directors and you're looking around and saying like, hey look, like, I don't see another billion-dollar line of bus—at this scale, right, if your Splunk scale, right? I don't see another billion-dollar line of business sitting here, we could probably go acquire it, we could try to add it in, but you know, in the case of something like a Splunk, I think part of—you know, they're looking for a new CEO right now, so now they have to go find a new leader who's going to come in, re-energize and, kind of, reboot that.But that's the options that they're considering, right? They're like, “Do I find a new CEO who's going to reinvigorate things and be able to attract the type of talent that's going to lead us to the next billion-dollar line of business that we can either build inside or we can acquire and bring in-house? Or is the right path for me just to say, ‘Okay, well, you know, somebody like Cisco's interested?'” or the other path that you may see them go down to something like Silver Lake, so Silver Lake put a billion dollars into the company last year. And so they may be looking at and say, “Okay, well, we really need to do some restructuring here and we want to do it outside the eyes of the public market. We want to be able to change pricing model, we want to be able to really do this without having to worry about the stock price's massive volatility because we're making big changes.”And so I would say there's probably two big options there considering. Like, do we sell to Cisco, do we sell to Silver Lake, or do we really take another run at this? And those are difficult decisions for the stewards of the business and I think it's a different decision if you're the steward of the business that created the business versus the steward of the business for whom this is—the I've been here for five years and I may be here for five years more. For somebody like me, a company like Cribl is literally the thing I plan to leave on this earth.Corey: Yeah. Do you have that sense of personal attachment to it? On some level, The Duckbill Group, that's exactly what I'm staring at where it's great. Someone wants to buy the Last Week in AWS media side of the house.Great. Okay. What is that really, beyond me? Because so much of it's been shaped by my personality. There's an audience, sure, but it's a skeptical audience, one that doesn't generally tend to respond well to mass market, generic advertisements, so monetizing that is not going to go super well.“All right, we're going to start doing data mining on people.” Well, that's explicitly against the terms of service people signed up for, so good luck with that. So, much starts becoming bizarre and strange when you start looking at building something with the idea of, oh, in three years, I'm going to unload this puppy and make it someone else's problem. The argument is that by building something with an eye toward selling it, you build a better-structured business, but it also means you potentially make trade-offs that are best not made. I'm not sure there's a right answer here.Clint: In my spare time, I do some investments, angel investments, and that sort of thing, and that's always a red flag for me when I meet a founder who's like, “In three to five years, I plan to sell it to these people.” If you don't have a vision for how you're fundamentally going to alter the marketplace and our perception of everything else, you're not dreaming big enough. And that to me doesn't look like a great investment. It doesn't look like the—how do you attract employees in that way? Like, “Okay, our goal is to work really hard for the next three years so that we will be attractive to this other bigger thing.” They may be thinking it on the inside as an available option, but if you think that's your default option when starting a company, I don't think you're going to end up with the outcome is truly what you're hoping for.Corey: Oh, yeah. In my case, the only acquisition story I see is some large company buying us just largely to shut me up. But—Clint: [laugh].Corey: —that turns out to be kind of expensive, so all right. I also don't think it serve any of them nearly as well as they think it would.Clint: Well, you'll just become somebody else on Twitter. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, “Time to change my name again. Here we go.” So, if people want to go and learn more about a Cribl Edge, where can they do that?Clint: Yeah, cribl.io. And then if you're more of a technical person, and you'd like to understand the specifics, docs.cribl.io. That's where I always go when I'm checking out a vendor; just skip past the main page and go straight to the docs. So, check that out.And then also, if you're wanting to play with the product, we make online available education called Sandboxes, at sandbox.cribl.io, where you can go spin up your own version of the product, walk through some interactive tutorials, and get a view on how it might work for you.Corey: Such a great pattern, at least for the way that I think about these things. You can have flashy videos, you can have great screenshots, you can have documentation that is the finest thing on this earth, but let me play with it; let me kick the tires on it, even with a sample data set. Because until I can do that, I'm not really going to understand where the product starts and where it stops. That is the right answer from where I sit. Again, I understand that everyone's different, not everyone thinks like I do—thankfully—but for me, that's the best way I've ever learned something.Clint: I love to get my hands on the product, and in fact, I'm always a little bit suspicious of any company when I go to their webpage and I can't either sign up for the product or I can't get to the documentation, and I have to talk to somebody in order to learn. That's pretty much I'm immediately going to the next person in that market to go look for somebody who will let me.Corey: [laugh]. Thank you again for taking so much time to speak with me. I appreciate it. As always, it's a pleasure.Clint: Thanks, Corey. Always enjoy talking to you.Corey: Clint Sharp, CEO and co-founder of Cribl. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment. And when you hit submit, be sure to follow it up with exactly how many distinct and disparate logging systems that obnoxious comment had to pass through on your end of things.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

911, what's the nature of your emergency?  Ashlie: Welcome back to another episode of Tactical Living by LEO Warriors. I'm your host Ashlie Walton.  Clint: And I'm your co-host Clint Walton. Ashlie: In today's episode we're going to talk about how switching up your routine even in the smallest amount could start to change the trajectory of your entire lifestyle. So just sit back, relax and enjoy today's content. Clint, you just shared with me a couple of the techniques that you like to use with your own clients when it comes to starting to implement new routines into their lifestyle. So I am wondering if you could share that a little bit with the listeners.  Clint: You know one of the biggest problems that I'm always dealing with my clients that they present to me is they want to achieve fitness goals. They want to get the body that they've always wanted for themselves. But they never have the motivation or the energy to do it. So I started the approach of changing their morning habits. You know a morning habit you wake up, you roll out of bed, you go to the bathroom, you get your cup of water whatever it may be is just what you do. None of us know why we do it. It's just how we do it. So in the approach I take is I tell them you roll out of bed and you roll onto the floor and start with one push up, one sit up and when they do this they're already starting their day off not only with gratitude but with that fitness mindset. I know one pushup doesn't seem like a lot or one sit up. But in doing that you're like well I'm already down there, I know I can do more. So when push up turns into two to five to ten and then you start a routine on it. And now that two morning habit instead of first going and grabbing that cup of coffee with tons of sweetener and sweet cream in it and overtime you increase that goal from one push up to 50 pushups to 100 pushups and you really establish that mindset of what you want for yourself. You know then you can also transition that into workouts and whatever else in your life that you truly want. Some people practice meditation right out of bed.   Ashlie: And it's funny that you pointed this today because I believe in a pattern interrupt. I believe that it's important. And that's one of the only ways that we can start to move forward when it comes to growth in our lives. And for me one thing I started doing about six months ago was I started taking stock of the things that I do routinely every morning. I'm the type of person to where the first thing I need to do is brush my teeth. I don't even want to drink coffee before I brush my teeth and in identifying that I started to think of what else I could do while I'm brushing my teeth and you touched on gratitude. And for me what I do is I start to visualize the entire day before it's even started while I'm brushing my teeth and I start to embody all of the things that I know I'm going to be grateful for throughout the day to come and I do this in a way to start to draw those sorts of things to me. But most importantly for me to be able to be very intuitive and very intentful when it comes to trying to identify those things as I go about my day. We brush our teeth for what a good 20 minutes, floss my teeth runs maybe it takes a total of three minutes. So that's three minutes of very direct focus on gratitude for what the day is going to bring me. This ranges from my experience in the day with you Clint. This also stems into my relationship with other people I know I'm going to come into contact with throughout the day. This goes into how grateful I feel sometimes for the ability to just process water through my kidneys every day. I say that because I drink over 100 ounces of water every day and Clint and I have a friend who just recently had a kidney transplant after years of literally dying while waiting on the transplant list. So in him sharing that story with me, it allowed me to incorporate that into my daily ritual of being grateful every morning as I'm brushing my teeth for literally being able to process the water that I've been taking. That might sound minute. It's something so small to me, yet it means everything for my friend and those are the types of things that I try to pick up on every day. Those are the types of small things that I try to ask myself what I'm taking granted for everyday and I think it's great Clint that you're able to use that small tactic to incorporate into your client's training because it just starts with one small technique. One small pattern interrupt that's going to start to change or even mold the foundation for your entire day. And I love that you have them doing that in the morning. It's how we say like one good habit leads to another and one bad habit leads to another. And it's easy to say, oh screw it I just eat some crap food and the rest of my days screwed anyways I might as well keep eating crap food. Well it doesn't work that way. But it's so hard for us to have that self-discipline to be able to stop ourselves when we've already started to go down this negative spiral. And the key is just unlocking the morning, unlocking the morning with such intent that you know you're taking full ownership of what's going to happen throughout your entire day. For us we've included a lot of rituals, a lot of things that we do without question. Feeling our bodies every single day with a green smoothie. That goes without saying we do that consistently. We do that because it's the first thing that we can do to supercharge the nutrients that we need in our empty bodies first thing in the morning. Clint: And with that specifically it sets you up to where you're like, well I put so much time and effort into making that this morning I don't want to throw it all out the window by going and eating five donuts.  Ashlie: Absolutely and then you start to realize the difference in the way, that you feel that morning fatigue. We haven't felt that and I don't know how long. That desire for those cravings for those pastries or those carbs that early in the morning, it goes away. Because you realize that ok if I eat that it's going to make me feel this way and in learning to fuel your body instead of eating for feelings, that's really what it comes down to, it makes all the difference in the world.  Clint: And with you mentioning that I just had a deep conversation with one of my clients in reference to that. You know sugar is a very addictive substance and our body craves it, because we're not fueling it with what it truly needs.  Ashlie: Yeah and Clint and I just watched a documentary called the c word. C stands for cancer and it's crazy because apparently the manufacturers of like big tobacco. When they started to realize all of the federal regulations that were being imposed on tobacco products and how this was impacting their sales what they did was they turned to the biggest food manufacturer companies of the world, like Nabisco. And in doing that they're using the same addictive chemicals that they put into cigarettes and they're putting it inside of the foods that you and your family eat every single day. The crackers, the cookies, the Cheetos and is doing the same exact thing that tobacco products have done. It's creating this addiction. It's creating this feeling of you not having your own self-control and not taking ownership of yourself because you're allowing other people to take it away and they're trying to expose the truth as to what's happening with these foods. Manufactured foods are literally becoming the death of America in particular. And I think it's a shame that the FDA is allowing this to happen. There's no regulations on this yet. Maybe years and years down the road after we've lost more and more people that we love because of the big c word. Maybe then they'll come around. Maybe it will take them losing somebody that they love because of the big c word for them to finally realize what we're doing to our bodies. We're literally putting chemicals, byproducts and these things that were never intended to become consumed orally into our bodies. It's like putting dirt inside of a vehicle, doesn't run that way and it breaks it. It ruins it. And we're doing the same thing to our health. And I think it's amazing the way that like natural path medicine is becoming more and more popular. It used to be something that was more of a western remedy or a western way of living. And as organic foods and the whole rush of being more holistic has starting to come to the united states more and more, these medical professionals are the ones that are just trying to make the waves and just educating people. There are many stores like Trader Joe's. You go to trader joe's you think you're buying something healthy. They sell it at trader joe's, it must be great right. That's what they publicize. But the truth is in the united states, there's a very small percent of the amount of organic that has to be in an organic product in order for it to be labeled as organic. I know that on the east coast there are a couple of stores that actually tell you this is 52 percent organic. Okay well that means 48 percent of it is all of the other shit stuff. So what's organic about it if you're still consuming 48 percent of the pesticides and who knows what else. I think people need to wake up. People need to know exactly what they're eating. The only way for us to truly do that is by trying to live the way that our grandparents did. Eat the things that are wholesome. Shop in the perimeter of the grocery store, not the center. And this doesn't mean you need to go blow a bunch of money. This doesn't mean I'm telling you that I believe that organic is solely the way to go. But what I do believe is that it is important for you to be educated on exactly what you're eating and not just taking for facts as to what it says on the label. I can guarantee you they're lying to you. Unless you can see touch sense taste and know exactly what's inside of that product, I can guarantee you they are lying to you and it's a shame. It's a shame because it's being allowed. We're being allowed to consume products with the intent and belief that we're consuming something healthy when really a lot of these products especially, the manufactured ones are doing more harm for us than good. More harm for us in a way that as science becomes more and more readily available on these types of products. All of the other issues, the underlining symptoms that we're having with these behavioral health problems, speech impediment issues in children like the list goes on and on as to what's happening and how the foods that they are consuming are a byproduct. Food as medicine. But it has to be food. It can't be these chemicals. It can't be these genetically engineered products that are being slopped into a box with some all natural gluten free like, who the fuck cares if it's gluten free. You know how many Americans don't even understand what gluten free means. That means you have celiac disease. That means you have an allergy to wheat. Do you know how few people actually have an allergy to wheat? You need to shit on a stick and submit it to your doctor in order to even see if you have celiac disease. How many people do you know brag about the fact that they are gluten free. Next time you hear that ask them. Cool, so when did you shit on a stick? I bet the answer will be never. But that's the way that society is conditioning us to think, that gluten free aisle keeps growing bigger and bigger and we're sucking it up. We're sucking it up because that's what society tells us we're supposed to do to live a healthy lifestyle. That's not healthy. That's misinformation. That should be illegal. That should be pinpointed as to why Americans have the highest obesity rate in the entire world. This is not okay. I know I just went on a rant.  Clint: You were on a roll, so I was just going to let you keep going because you're on point with everything you're saying. Ashlie: And as you sit there and you listen to this maybe this is not news to you. Maybe it is. But it's my hope that you're able to take this information and understand that you are what you eat. But if you don't understand what it is that you're eating, who knows what you are or what's growing inside of you. Maybe check out that documentary. Clint and I don't have Netflix, you we got it on amazon prime. Think it was like three ninety nine. And the point I'm trying to make is that when you take ownership of the fact that what you read and see on the labels and what everybody is trying to produce as being this persona of the healthy lifestyle just might not be that healthy. And in the very least it might not be that healthy for you, we are all unique. We are all unique in the manufacturing and the compounds of what we need internally. And when you're able to identify that your needs are unique in yours and that you don't follow into the same category as everybody else, then you're really able to enjoy your Tactical Living.   Balance. Optimize. Tactics.  Hit that subscribe button so that you don't miss a day of the added value that I am dedicated to sharing with you weekly.  Let's Connect!  Facebook  Instagram  Email: ashliewalton555@gmail.com  LinkedIn  Website: www.leowarriors.com

911, what's the nature of your emergency?   Ashlie: Welcome back to another episode of Tactical Living by LEO Warriors. I'm your host, Ashlie Walton.   Clint: And I'm your co-host Clint Walton.   Ashlie: In today's episode, we're going to talk about the difficulties that officers might face when their family members or the family members of their spouse let's just say… live alternative lifestyles. So just sit back, relax and enjoy today's content. Now, I have five brothers. I'm the only girl. And at one point or another most of my brothers have done things that let's just say Clint's career wouldn't quite align with. And there have been many times where we've had to completely avoid family gatherings. There have been other situations where we use a lot of deliberate thought in what we involve ourselves in and what we don't what types of things we talk about. The limitations on discussions with other people who might not share those same lifestyles in our family but we know we wouldn't want that information shared with those people that do lead that lifestyle directly. So Clint, I just want to know your viewpoint as an officer on some of the struggles that you faced and knowing that some of my brothers have done things that we both don't agree with and that we know the law also does not agree with.    Clint: You know some of the hardest factors involved with this is just shutting ourselves out from it where it's hard to either cut those people out or limit your contact with anybody. For me it's always been with your brothers in specific. It's kind of been hard because I knew you had such a close relationship with them growing up and in saying that it's we still see your brothers in a safe environment where we know they're not conducting illegal or illicit activities for the most part and we're not put in a situation to where we just go out and hang out with them on a regular basis either. So those hardships that I've been presented with is one I feel you can't have the relationship with your family members that I knew you wish you could have. And so because of my line of work it's kind of forced you to not have that relationship. And we've talked about that over and over again over the years we've been married and I know it doesn't affect you to the way that I think it used to. Because you've kind of accepted the fact of we can't just go out and be with your brother so to speak. Ashlie: And I would have to argue to your point a little bit, because I mean I have my own choice in it. I've never, I mean luckily I've never gone down that path of feeling that I need to abuse substances in order to feel like I'm sustaining in life in some way and that path that some of my brothers are on, you know this is something that I didn't just start when you and I got together. This is a road that they decided to take long before that even happened and the dynamics of our relationship certainly has changed in terms of what we allow ourselves to be a part of. As you were speaking one thing that came to mind is we would never even being be in a vehicle with some of my brothers. Because we would literally need to search the home in order to feel comfortable with having them in one of our vehicles. And we certainly wouldn't feel comfortable with having them drive us.   Clint: I can only imagine telling your brother to grab the back of my truck while I searched him. Ashlie: Yeah. So we can go out to dinner.  Clint: Yeah exactly. Ashlie: And I mean that sounds funny but it's really sad actually. Because I do I love my brothers and they are very well aware of where I stand as it pertains to the alternative lifestyle that they live. And yet they've never done anything but show me an endless amount of respect. And in thinking about it, it's actually humbling the fact that they have such an acceptance and an understanding for the variation in lifestyles that we live based on the fact that number one, I don't do drugs and number two, that I'm married to a police officer. And there are boundaries there. Any time that there's ever been a situation where maybe they have had to be interjected into my world. They've always been respectful and cognizant of the fact that the answer might be no.  Clint: And I do have to say we're extremely fortunate with your brother's response to my profession and to us and everything the respect that they've shown us. Because I know of other people who their brothers sisters family members call them, hey can you get me out of this. And they've definitely never tried doing that. Ashlie: Yeah and I think if anything they've come to you in particular with questions of guidance. And you know inevitably when you're involved in any kind of criminal activity be it a substance abuse problem or what have you. Eventually the law is going to catch up with you. And that's happened with my brothers and they have maybe in some aspect they've been uncomfortable coming to pose these questions. But they've still gotten up the courage to reach out to you and to ask for guidance and help with certain situations that they're in. And this has never been a beating around the bush. Like how can I avoid this. Helped me hide myself. This is always like sound legal questions or questions about how the legal process works or what to expect and you've always been really forthcoming with them in answering those questions. Clint: Yeah and the questions always have been very direct and just asking me so what can I expect now and I'm able to articulate it to him.    Ashlie: And I'm grateful that we still have that open line of communication. It's not like I've shut them out and they're not in my life at all. As I said I love them and especially after my mom died and you know the family dynamics are unique when you're growing up in a home with five brothers and you're the only girl. So doing things like Christmas holidays and things like that. It's important to me to still be that female figure for them and my little brother has a four year old son and I know how important it is for my little brother to have his son experience what the female side of life is in our world because it's not very big. There was my mom and I. So we do, we have them over for holidays. We make the rules very clear. They know that one wrong move will result in us asking them to leave. But we don't focus on that during those times. We pretend like that doesn't exist. We don't even have to pretend, it doesn't even take intention. Because that level of respect is there that we're all able to just enjoy ourselves. Clint: Yeah we don't have to follow your brothers around the house thinking that they're doing something wrong or because of that respect factor that is there. Ashlie: Yeah I mean the other side of that is we're not naive. We know that that possibility could exist like if they were to, I don't know let's just say they stole something from us. They don't have a history of that, I'm not saying they ever would do that. But we're not naive to the fact that those types of things exist not in my brothers, but in addiction and being able to set that aside and to still have my brothers in my life to the extent that I'm comfortable with and Clint to the extent that you're comfortable with, it's still not easy. We don't call each other all the time. It's usually them reaching out to me first when they need something or they have a question. I'll admit that. But it's not the brother sister relationships that I see that most other people have. There's some envy that I have in there. There's some envy in that because it's not me that created that sort of relationship. It's based on their decisions and their choices in life that have really made no other choice but for me to have that guard up to some extent. But we make it work. And I think being in a family of law enforcement it's important to really have those guards up and to know that you're putting yourself at an increased risk and liability based on your profession if you're just leaving it all open and you're taking things to chance. Like I can run through a million different scenarios. If we didn't have those guards up. Like somebody grabbing your gun or you know there are things or stories you create in your head.  Clint: And it's funny you said that because I was just going to say you know, that is one thing we do before any family gathering such as that. Put all the guns in the safe instead of just lying around the house.  Ashlie: Like normal.  Clint: We do. We go through we do this roundup of making sure everything is put away. But that's just another point that we're trying to make is having that ability to be cognizant of the fact that you don't want to lay it all on the line and make it easy. Ashlie: And I just want to point out as you listen that I know so many families be them in law enforcement or not that have somebody or multiple people in their family that struggle with drug addiction. It's not easy. It's not an easy battle, because your family doesn't turn out the way that you always thought it would. Maybe it's not the way that it was when you guys were kids. But that doesn't mean that it has to go away completely. I hate drug addiction more than many things and that's because of how much I've experienced it as a byproduct of the people around me that I love being faced with those types of addictions. But no matter how much I despise that, my brothers are the only bloodline that I have. It's just me and them and going forward as you listen if there's not one person in your life that maybe you don't even talk to anymore, maybe you don't talk to you because you've gotten so fed up with their addiction and the way that they acted and treated you. I would challenge you to consider how you can still have some sort of relationship with them that still creates that bond and keeps that link open. But that makes you comfortable enough to know that you're the one taking charge of how that relationship looks. And when you're able to still allow the people that you love into your life to some extent especially as you get older, it allows you to know that you still have a family that's there and you're not alone. When you know you're not alone and you're able to take ownership of the things that you still want because you know that you have control over them. Then you're really able to enjoy your Tactical Living.   Balance. Optimize. Tactics.  Hit that subscribe button so that you don't miss a day of the added value that I am dedicated to sharing with you weekly.  Let's Connect!  Facebook  Instagram  Email: ashliewalton555@gmail.com  LinkedIn  Website: www.leowarriors.com

[Intro]  911, what's the nature of your emergency?   Ashlie: Welcome back to another episode of Tactical Living by the LEO Warriors. I'm your host Ashlie Walton.  Clint: And I'm your co-host Clint Walton.    Ashlie: In today's episode we're going to talk about why it's so important to be able to measure your body metrics and how there's so much more than just what you see on the scale. So just sit back, relax and enjoy today's content. Clint and I discovered what a Bod Pod was and we were intrigued. As you sit there if you're not familiar, it's literally like this little personalized spaceship looking egg that you sit inside of. It's a chamber that closes, you wear little to no clothing and as it pressurizes it gives you an entire analysis of your body composition. Most importantly your ratio of fat to muscle and even goes as deep as being able to tell you which area of your body consist of what element of fat and muscle. So we've been online. Clint actually booked the appointments for us. We were so excited to go there and we show up and she's like I'm so sorry you guys we actually don't have the bod pod anymore.   Clint: They use this whole new skill process that you stand on the scale and it has like electrodes that you put your fingers on and it does the same thing without sitting in the spaceship. But I was excited to sit in the spaceship. Ashlie: Yeah it's a body composition test. So Clint and I both did it. I was working on some other things physically so I did a little bit more of an extensive test, but both of us got the breakdown of our body composition and for us Clint and I are both left handed. So it was really cool to see. For some reason I have a pound. Well 1.32 of a pound more muscle in my right hand than I do in my left hand.   Clint: And I was something to the effect of like three quarters of a pound more in my right arm than I did in my left.   Ashlie: Yeah. And that's something cool to point out. And the reason that's important to point out is because once you're aware of that you start to fixate on it and you start to pay more attention to it.   Clint: And the girl that was reading our results to us kind of explained well when you're left handed you do most tasks with your left hand, but you use your right hand as more of a supplement. So you're actually lifting more heavy things because you can lift heavy things with your right arm compared to your left arm where you free that up to use and whatever else you may need to do.  Ashlie: And vice versa if you're right handed and I wonder if there's some kind of maybe subconsciously we tried to protect our dominant hand by lifting those heavier things with the other hand.  Clint: Well and that goes for me as being a police officer. I always, I'm trained to keep my gun hand free. So if I'm ever carrying anything at work like I carry it in my right hand. So in case something happens I can draw my weapon real quick and deal with what I need to deal with.  Ashlie: So if you're like you grab a bottle of water you're more likely to drink it with your right hand?  Clint: Absolutely, carry bags,  just anything. My site book I hold it in my right hand. Of course I have to because I'm I guess I'm writing with my left. But just anything throughout the day the training in the academy. I remember I still remember to this day the first day of the academy you know I ran in, you have to run into the academy to go get changed to put your uniform on and stuff and I was carrying my bag in my left hand and there was tac officer there started yelling at me and I had to drop down and do push ups because I was carrying my bag in my gun hand. And they questioned me on it and I had no clue. And from that point on I was like well I guess that's the end of caring stuff on my left hand.  Ashlie: That's interesting. And so by going through this analysis of our body composition it was a wake up call for both of us. Because our fat percentage, it actually tells you how many pounds of fat you have not just your fat percentage. It was far more than Clint and I had guessed that it would be for both of us and it actually made me quite proud because my muscles in my biceps are, if you were to take an analysis of the ratio from man to woman it shows you the breakdown of like okay so most women are in this range. So mine far exceeded that. So I was like pounding my chest a little bit, like yes the hard work is paying off. Clint: You should see her all the time, she'll flex and show me look at my muscle. And I'm proud of her for doing it. Because she has these biceps that are awesome.  Ashlie: Got to get the blood flowing baby. And this test, it's not that expensive. It was less than $40 to do this test and it gives you a full picture of exactly where all the fat and muscle is stored in your body. The percentages, how you compare to others. The healthy ranges, things like that and in not having that, it's very difficult for you to just gauge exactly where you're at. Apart from looking at that scale and that's what I was struggling with. Because I was the same weight for like a year. But during that year I worked out harder than I have in my entire life. And I was seeing a change in my physique, but I wasn't seeing that scale move. I swear to you like my whole body looks so different and people are like oh my god you're losing too much weight. And I'm like I promise you I haven't lost anything. Like I don't know what it's going to take for me to prove that to you, but my number on the scale is exactly the same. And what has happened is the change in my body composition because I'm gaining more muscle, which of course weighs more than fat. And I'm just redistributing my physique. It's just kind of being reframed in a different way. And I'm able to really focus on the areas I want to target by everything being pointed out to me. Clint: And it's so interesting to see the difference in every element of your body, whether it's your arms, your legs, your core and what's cool with this is it also breaks down the amount of water you have within your system. And it's interesting to see. They tell you then well either you're dehydrated or not or how much molecular water you have within your muscles that you need more or you need less. Because over hydration is not good either.  Ashlie: Yes it actually points out to you if you have any kind of inflammation and that can stem from possible infections. It can also stem from over exerting yourself. So if you're working out too hard it's actually working against you. And Clint and I was just having this discussion of how I mean you would think one pound of fat is the same as one pound of muscle right. But the difference with that is that there is a density for the level of fat that you have and that density level is 0.9 grams per milliliters. And then the density of muscle is 1.1 grams per milliliters. So if you were to take the same density and you were to try to say okay I want to equivalent everything to one pound, then the density of muscle that you have weighs far more than the density of fat just based on the variables. Clint: Yeah and I was completely wrong in my thought process with that. And it just goes to show how under educated I am in those instances and where I think I know something or I've heard something without actually following up the research that I should have before even bringing up the topic. Ashlie: Yeah. But then by challenging yourself to being open to exploring new possibilities of like ok maybe I'm not right, that allows you to really grow and expand. And that was the whole purpose of going into this bod pod is to get more information then just like what that number I'm seeing on this scale that I'm getting so fixated over. Like somebody tell me. So I go to a who, who knows how to do the how and explain to me. I mean these are people that often work with nutritionists and very educated professionals that work in the bodybuilding industry and people that are so empowered by those numbers not only on a six month basis, but literally like on a week to week basis. They want to see those stats and see everything change. And I think if you have the opportunity to just like google bod pod or like even body...  Clint: Body Metrx.  Ashlie: Yeah. It's like body metrics, but it's abbreviated body Metrx. Then see if there's one close to you and I would highly encourage you to just see what your numbers are. Clint: Well it's with the BMI testing that we did on that scale and also kind of gives you a rough outline of your resting metabolism rate and I know you did the test further on that.  Ashlie: Yeah I got profiled for the resting metabolic rate just to you know if you don't know what that is, it's just educating you on exactly how many calories you do burn just by living like literally just by being sedentary and not doing anything without your workout considerations and your  diet and your lifestyle considerations just how many calories you would need in order to live as a human body. Clint: Well i wish we would have known beforehand because we signed up for both of them, but if we were none the first test was pretty accurate in the same results that you got back with that.    Ashlie: Yeah we could have saved another $150. Just the body composition test it was like $40 and then they added on the extra. But live and learn.  And as you sit there, if there's one thing that I would hope for you is that you take your health into the utmost consideration when it comes to anything that you want in your life. I've seen this with the death of my own mom. I've seen this with almost everybody that I know. They have some kind of health ailments and that health ailment in my opinion is not a diagnosis it's an acute symptom of an underlining issue that usually stems from something in their lifestyle. Be it their diet or be it something that they are or are not involved in activity wise.  Clint: Its something you're exposed to on a regular basis that you can control and in some instances you just can't.  Ashlie: Yeah and that's about bringing that awareness. I mean we are very fortunate to be going to school where the training is stemmed from Dave aspirin and the whole bullet proof world where we're learning about things like mold toxicity and even something like burning those amazing bath and body works candles that we used to do all the time. It's literally creating carcinogens in the air. And if you don't believe me like hang out in a closed room for an hour or two with one of those candles burning and take a q tip and swab the inside of your nose and see the soot that comes up on that white q tip. That's literally cancerous toxins that we're breathing in constantly. And we used to do that nonstop and it wasn't until we became aware that we don't even go there anymore. We don't burn those candles. We have tons of those candles, we're giving them away as like birthday gifts as it comes along. And I mean it's the type of thing to where if you're not only aware of it, but you actually believe in it and then do the research for yourself. Because I've told countless people that same information and they still burn those candles. Like okay we'll just make sure that when I'm over you're going to be cool when I blow it out. And just spreading that awareness and understanding that there are so many resources out there. And by talking with people and sharing these types of experiences I just hope that it prompts something in you to want to discover these things for yourself. Because the more knowledge that you have about what it is that's inside of your body, this is your vessel and you need to protect it. And when you have the knowledge to be able to do that then you're really able to enjoy your Tactical Living.   Balance. Optimize. Tactics.  Hit that subscribe button so that you don't miss a day of the added value that I am dedicated to sharing with you weekly.  Let's Connect!  Facebook  Instagram  Email: ashliewalton555@gmail.com  LinkedIn  Website: www.leowarriors.com

[Intro] 911, what's the nature of your emergency?  Ashlie: Welcome back to another episode of Tactical Living by LEO Warriors. I'm your host Ashlie Walton.  Clint: And I'm your co-host, Clint Walton.  Ashlie: In today's episode, we're going to talk about how regardless of what you're trying to advance with, your mindset is key…and in particular for Clint, how different his mindset is NOW compared to the last time that he tried to test for a detective and how he's about to go through this journey again, only this time with a different mindset. Clint: That's so important and I'm glad we're talking about this subject. Because before, I let my nerves always get the best of me and I'm going into this with a completely open mind and not really having the nerves that I did before.  Ashlie: So baby for the listener, take us through the journey of what you've tried to accomplish in your past and where your mindset was. Clint: Well my mindset, it's always been just study, learn a huge amount of information over time and see if we could really dial in what I need to have to prepare myself. You know the process is very entailed.  There's about a five-step process.  Ashlie: And we're talking about testing for detective. Clint: Yeah. And in that process, it's… people say, you know testing for detective is harder than testing for higher positions in the department because it's like getting your foot in the door to that promotional process. And I've always looked at the entire situation of well they already know who they want to select. They already know what they want to hear and the questions are always open up for interpretation. And as I go through this process, I really understand the points of, yeah the questions are open for interpretation but if you present them in such a way of what they're looking for, you'll succeed. And I've always let the nerves get the best of me, like I've already said. And as I prepare for my interview, as I prepare for my written exam and my scenario that I have to do, I'm going in and I really realize I know all the information that they're going to ask me. I practice it on a daily basis and I just need to get out of my head and be present in this situation.  Ashlie: So baby, before, we had spent together collectively and then you solely many many hours, many weekends in the past. You've tried to test for detective before. You didn't make the list. And this time you're going into this with a completely different mindset. So talk me through what the difference is between where you were trying to test the last time versus where you're at now. Clint: You know, my mindset has always been I need to memorize all the subjects. I need to memorize my opening, my closing... just everything surrounding it. And the penal code book… it's huge. It's something that there is no way anyone can memorize the whole thing in a year's time. And as I look at this, I practice every day what I preach so to speak. Now, I just need to articulate that into the answers to my questions. And I've always tripped myself up by. I'll memorize it and then the nerves get the best of me when I start trying to articulate it. And as I go into this process, I'm not memorizing anything. I'm going into it as I know the answers to the questions already and just letting the answers flow out. A lot of it has to do with just my mindset and how I'm approaching it and not letting the nerves get the best of me. But it's really something that I just need to speak clearly and get my message to them and I kind of am manipulating the situation into, you know… we do a lot of training when it comes to marketing and stuff like that. And there's a hook, story, offer mindset that I have used for everything and anything that we do. And so I'm using that with answering my questions. So I see what the question is and I see the exact terminology that they'll be looking for, but then I give them a story of how I've implemented that process for myself and then my offer is going to be why I'm the best candidate for the position.  Ashlie: You've got to love some Russell Brunson. I think a lot of us don't always realize the fact that anywhere we're at in life, we are always sales people. I remember being a kid and using that hook, story, offer methodology when it came to trying to sell my dad on buying me a new toy or even letting me go out and stay a little bit later with friends. We're always selling something in our life. And when you hone in on that and you're able to start to pick up on the fact that you're actually doing it whether you realize it or not, you're able to get better at it. And as it pertains to the hook, story, offer, as you listen, if you're not familiar with that what the hook is,  pretend that you're scrolling through your Facebook and all the sudden you see something that catches your attention…so you scroll back on it for a second. And that hook could be something like a really bizarre picture or a really awesome picture or a headline that says something like, ‘See How Eating Fish Every Day Can Make You 20 Years Younger.' You know something like that… is that true or is that not true? And it might get you to click on that button to further explore it and then in the story, the story goes on to talk about all the different ways using examples. And same as Clint said as it pertains to testing for detective, all the ways that he's implemented what they're asking him to do in the position of a detective in his daily work anyways without that title yet. And then in the offer, it's the best reasons why he's most applicable for this job and in doing the offer in a way that you're not comparing yourself with anybody else but you're showcasing like, you get me and I have this. But on top of that I'm going to give you bonus bonus bonus bonus, to where somebody is stupid for not choosing that particular offer, and not that anybody interviewing you is going to be stupid. But in the real world with the hook, story, offer, like you would be foolish not to take advantage of this low-cost offer because you're not just getting that one thing. That one thing comes with all these amazing bonuses. Clint:  And that's exactly how I'm going to sell it. In selling like you said. We do it in every day no matter what we live, whatever we experience. And that's what people are attracted to. And that's what I'm utilizing.   Ashlie: I think that can go along the lines of anything like not just in your career, but I mean, I use that example of being a kid. But there's been so many times where I think you've had to do this a little bit more than me to you, where you try to sell me on an idea of something.  Clint: Like my truck. Ashlie: Exactly. Tell the story about that. That was a good one. Actually I was really proud of you. You literally like created this presentation to give it to me beforehand.  Clint: Apart from having a PowerPoint, I think if we would have had a whiteboard at the time, I would have drawn it out for you too. So I wanted the truck. I saw this truck. I was like man I really want that and I only had my previous vehicle for a certain amount of time; maybe a year or two, and we are like, I don't need a new vehicle. So one day, I go to the dealership and I sit down with the general manager and actually start talking to him and explaining to him the process that I'm going through. I want to get a killer deal on this because I need to sell this to my wife. So if we can come to a number that we both agree on, great. So after maybe an hour or two of talking and just you know shooting the shit but also negotiating on the price, we got to a number. And so, when you got home from work that day, I had all the numbers because you're very analytical and you like to see numbers. And I had everything drawn out exactly how you would want to look at it. You don't care about why I needed. Ashlie: And I didn't care about all these extra features or that it had these bigger tires and the lift… and I am like okay so what?  Clint: You just wanted to see the numbers make sense and that's what I knew would sell you on it. And so I did the whole cost analysis and the payments and I articulated everything to speak to you on the numbers wise where after you heard my probably 20-minute presentation of why I needed this truck and why I needed to trade in my jeep, I sold you on it.  Ashlie: And not only that but the trick with this whole process is, and in Clint's case, it's a perfect example, is he was able to solve every objection that I would give to him beforehand to where by the end of what his view was, I literally had no reason to tell him, no you can't do this or no I don't think it's a good idea and this is why. I had no counter objection to everything that you presented to me. Clint: And what's funny is this is before I even had that mindset of hook, story, offer. Dealing with trying to sell things to you in a certain way. I just knew what you'd be looking for and how I needed to approach it.  Ashlie: It's a perfect example of how that plays into our day to day when we don't even realize that it's happening, but in identifying that and using that as a perfect example, it's easier to hone in on okay who am I selling something to? What is that something? How can this benefit them and what objections can I prove false before they even have a chance to say no to, regardless of how I end this, they would be foolish not to tell me yes. And when you're able to do that and you understand that this works in nearly every area of your life as you're communicating with other people, I can think of many times that we've sold one another on huge vacations that we've wanted to do internationally. Name something. It will work in almost every area. And just by identifying that and even practicing it, you'll get better and better at it. And as it pertains to advancing in your career, all you need to do is really focus in on what objective you have, what it is that you want, who you're trying to sell it to, the ways that make you stand out from other people and in doing that you can pick apart all the different things that make you such a variable in comparison to everybody else or everything else, that you don't ever need to say oh well I'm better than so-and-so because. It just organically lets you appear that way and you're being completely honest. There's nothing manipulative about how you're presenting it. It's just you're presenting it much smarter than most people do. And by really queuing in on the fact that you're able to use this tool in every area of your life, then you're able to see yourself excel and ultimately get the things that you want and start to make some waves in your own world. And when you're able to do that and you're able to take in this sense of knowing that you own that power for yourself and use this as a tool that you practice consistently to where it's without effort by the time you really practice is enough to where it becomes natural for you, then you're really able to enjoy your Tactical Living.   Balance. Optimize. Tactics.  Hit that subscribe button so that you don't miss a day of the added value that I am dedicated to sharing with you weekly.  Let's Connect!  Facebook  Instagram  Email: ashliewalton555@gmail.com  LinkedIn  Website: www.leowarriors.com

[Intro] 911, what's the nature of your emergency?    Ashlie: Welcome back to another episode of tactical living by Leo warriors. I'm your host, Ashlie Walton.  Clint: And I'm your co-host Clint Walton.  Ashlie: For today's episode I want to talk about what guys really think about the amount of effort that girls put into themselves in order to look pretty. So just sit back, relax and enjoy the content. Clint and I just got back from a little mini trip to Las Vegas. And while we were there, I couldn't help but notice how many sore feet there were. And I say this from a place of me sitting at a machine and instead of paying attention as I'm pressing the button, I was looking at the feet and most importantly the area of the Achilles tendon.   For any girls listening you know that area that rubs like crazy on the back of a high heel. I saw girls with bandages. I even saw men with like sores behind their feet. And it's kind of funny because it brought me back to a place where that used to be me. I used to be the girl thinking that going to Vegas meant that I needed to get all dolled up in a way that made me think I looked pretty. But in reality, also made me really uncomfortable. And as I started noticing this it's one of those things where your attention starts to be directed to it more and more. So as the night went on and girls started to come out in their cute little black dresses, I started to notice the way that a lot of them were walking and coming from a girl's perspective it's something I can definitely relate to and understanding how uncomfortable it is to walk in high heels or these five inch wedges and they looked cute don't get me wrong.   But just by seeing the discomfort of them walking while they're trying to enjoy themselves, made me wonder what men actually think when us as women put forth so much effort, but yet we're not comfortable in what it is that we're walking around in or how we look even. So baby share with me maybe from your perspective how you feel or even how you felt when that would be me going to Vegas. Clint: You know I think a lot of it comes from that sex appeal. You know men and women both want to have that sex appeal if they are going to the club or they want to have that feeling of looking good to appeal to whoever they're trying to appeal to. And I noticed too you know you always see women walking around the strip or just walking around hotels barefoot with their heels in their hands and it's a funny sight to see because you know they absolutely had to be uncomfortable the whole night they're wearing them.   How many times you see you guys walking around holding their shoes. It's not very often at all. But I think it all goes into that basic nature of us trying to peacock ourselves to show the opposite side of the sex or whoever you're trying to appeal to have that look. And I think it's something that we all have this appearance that we feel we need to keep up. But it really doesn't settle into our own happiness levels of what we want. Ashlie: And also it boils down to where you're at in your life, I believe. Because in the beginning of our relationship I would get all dolled up, wear these completely ridiculous uncomfortable shoes and I would pretend like I'm enjoying myself when in reality I was suffering in pain based on my choice of attire or my shoe choice and then I got to this place where we got married of course and you get more comfortable with one another. And I don't want to say I've ever gotten to the point to where I don't put forth the effort to look good for you.   Clint: Absolutely not. You look beautiful every day. Ashlie: Thank you baby. But to be honest Clint I don't do that for you. I love doing makeup. It is a craft of mine. And for me every morning it's always been something that I do that's very therapeutic for me. It might sound funny as you're listening to this, but there's something about this methodical nature of applying makeup and color combination and blending different products and just testing to see what works together and what doesn't. And it's just always been an interest of mine. I'm sorry baby, but this is the truth. I never wonder what Clint's going to think about my eyeshadow today.    Clint: But I always recognize it and I do notice it. Because I love the time you spend on your makeup and how beautiful you look with or without the makeup. Ashlie: I appreciate that. But the truth is I don't do that to become more appealing for you. I do it to become more appealing for me. It makes me feel good and it makes me know that I'm wearing my face out in the world in a way that makes me comfortable and I don't ever do it to impress anybody. I don't go on wearing like chunks of glue and glitter to make my eyelids stick together to where it's uncomfortable. I have done that before. Maybe for an event and things like that.   But I'm never doing something to where I need to put forth enough effort to make myself look good for somebody else. And on the back end of that where I'm suffering inside. But for women it's tricky. For women it's tricky because we're constantly flooded with this imagery of what perfection is supposed to be. Especially as a young mind being developed. I couldn't imagine what it would be like to be my 13-year-old self in today's world. Where my influence is not the Pop magazine anymore. That's what I used to be. I used to have these collages of pictures and boys and, you know boy bands up on my wall in my bedroom. And the influence truly was MTV, music videos and those magazines I used to beg my mom to buy whenever we would go to the grocery store.   But today the level of influence especially in the eyes of this younger generation, it's getting so much more difficult to emulate and as a byproduct of that, it's becoming nearly impossible to develop your own identity.  Clint: And I agree with that from a male perspective as well. I think men have this image that they want to present themselves with. Whether it's having a very muscular body and I'm not just saying being in shape or being fit. I'm saying this appearance of having huge muscles in this Statue of David image about themselves where they are comfortable walking around with their shirt off and having their muscles all exposed and not showing their true selves of what who or what they are. Ashlie: Don't get me wrong. These people that put forth the effort in a natural way to develop those body is for the most part, a lot of them, these are like athletes or these are people to where their bodies are their career and the time that they spend on their bodies is time that a lot of people don't have the luxury of, because a lot of people work a 9 to 5 job. But getting back to the topic of perception. How do you view, as a man, looking at those other men? Does anything ping at you when you see them? Clint: Well it makes me feel like I want to have that image of myself. Whether it's super muscular or just fit and it's just that stigma that's around it to where I'm more attractive for you. And I think in realizing that, it's something that we all have this image of who we want to look like or who we want to be to fit society's image of what we're supposed to look like. Ashlie: Why is that so important?   Clint: It's just what we've been groomed into thinking men and women alike.  This is the image that we're supposed to be. You see movie stars, you see athletes, you see all these really public figures and that's the state of their success you feel, and I don't care who you are, everybody wants to have that level of success in their own lives. Ashlie: It's interesting you use the word success. So for you as a man seeing another man that maybe makes you feel a little inferior based on the comparison and body type. That's really the same thing that women go through when it comes to comparing themselves to other women. Being at the clothes that they wear, their body type, how much they weigh, the makeup that they wear. Like for women it goes on and on. For men it's pretty much your body and your clothes really. And there's this compounding effect on women where that level is never met. And I know for me one of the biggest things and I'm definitely subject to that, but it's definitely taken a lot of self-work.   Really, stemming from the fact that I grew up in a home with five brothers, me being the only girl. My mom was a very modest mom in a home. And that was her whole world. So she didn't really care about makeup and clothes and things like that. It's was most comfortable for me to be a mom and work in the home and you know drive her kids everywhere and all these things that she did for us. So I didn't have anyone else to look up to in that sort of influence and it was important for me as I got older to understand that what I thought was a positive influence in terms of how I felt about myself shouldn't have ever come from media at all.   And I was very very blessed to have parents that were so supportive and really instilling the fact that I need to discover my own voice and do what values myself and never let anyone walk all over without or take that away from me…that I began to understand as I got older, the importance of doing the things that make me happy and make me comfortable. Going to Vegas couple days ago I'm wearing you know workout pants, a t shirt and sure I may doll up my makeup and my hair. But I do that every day. That's something I do for me; I don't do it for anybody else. And by having the ability to understand that, you're allowed to make your own decision about what you deem to be your own perfection based on your own comfort level. Then it allows you to challenge yourself to be creative and discover who you really are.  Clint: And really establish the fact that it's okay to be who you want to be.  Ashlie: I love that, and I think it's becoming a little bit more brought to the surface. I've seen a lot of campaigns where women will not wear any makeup at all and I have an amazing niece who very humbly posted her bare skin, acne and all with these beautiful, beautiful eyes with the most gorgeous eyeshadow on just showcasing the reality about what happens underneath all of that. What happens underneath all the makeup and the clothes, when it's just you and who you really are and to still be accepted for that.   And I think people will relate to that even more. People start to understand that we're all human. We all at one point or another think that we're in this race with everybody else when the reality is that we're only in a race with the person that we were yesterday and when you're able to realize that and you understand that, it's okay to not have to be that girl walking down the Vegas strip with blood coming out of your heels and the man at the gym who's satisfied with looking at himself in the mirror without having the wandering eyes that then allow you to compare yourself to other people.   Then you can start to take ownership of what you have and make it better. Better not by a comparison of other people, but better like I said, to who you were yesterday and in moving forward and looking at what it is that you want to be. Understanding how you feel is really what's most important. Do I want to sit there and feel ashamed about my body, ashamed about who I am as a person? Do I want to feel bad about myself because I don't live up to this other imagery of somebody else? Well those expectations are only yours. So who cares? And when you're able to understand that and take ownership of who you are and know that you have the ability to craft your own reality based on what makes you most comfortable and what allows you to stay most true to yourself,  then you're really able to enjoy your tactical living.   Balance. Optimize. Tactics.  Hit that subscribe button so that you don't miss a day of the added value that I am dedicated to sharing with you weekly. #LEOWarriors Let's Connect!  Facebook  Instagram  Email: ashliewalton555@gmail.com  LinkedIn  Website: www.leowarriors.com

[Intro] 911, what's the nature of your emergency?  Ashlie: Welcome back to another episode of Tactical Living by Leo warriors. I'm your host Ashlie Walton.  Clint: And I'm your co-host Clint Walton. Ashlie: Today is an unnerving day. And that is because here in southern California we've been rocked with quite a few earthquakes. Quite a few aftershocks and now what they're calling a pre quake. So just sit back, relax and enjoy today's content. One of my biggest fears in life is earthquakes. I'm a native of southern California. Clint and I both were born and raised here, and we've experienced a significant amount of earthquakes in our lifetime. But this earthquake that happened last night it was a 7.1 and it was the biggest one that we've had in 20 years. Baby do you remember the one that happened back in 1999? Clint: I do. It is the landers quake and that one was really powerful, and I was a kid at the time. So I just remember how much a shook and that super close to us, so it really shook us good.  Ashlie: Do you remember what they said the magnitude of that quake was?  Clint: I want to say 7.4.    Ashlie: Okay. And then this one that we had last night with a 7.1 and let's see in 1999, so I was 12 years old when we had that landers quake.   Clint: Yeah. And what's crazy about that one was it was actually the epicenter was so close to us in comparison to even this one. Ashlie: I remember that one very vividly because it happened so late at night and the entire home was asleep and it started shaking so violently. And my mom ran into my bedroom. She knows how petrified I get at earthquakes and I remember that one. It was unique because it was like a violent shaking. And in the midst of that anyone who's never experienced an earthquake before, they're very loud. You can hear creaking cracking rumbling shaking everything in your house banging together. But for this one I knew something happened like I could hear this loud crashing and being at late at night I remember my folks turn on the hallway light, we all kind of congregate in the hallway. My brothers and my parents and I. And then we walk out into the den and my dad had built several shelves up on the wall. My mom had a collection of them those oil lanterns. Clint: Oh like those kerosene lanterns? Ashlie: And some of them still had the kerosene in them probably from wherever she had gotten it from. I don't know maybe my dad brought it home from a job site or something, he is pretty notorious for doing stuff like that. And that whole entire shelf with all these collectibles was all over the ground. And I remember we all just looked at each other because we've never experienced something of damage like that together as a family. And nobody said anything. But we all just started cleaning it up.   There was oil everywhere like smeared all over the carpet and glass was shattered. And the boys and my dad took up the big boards that were once the shelves and we all just started cleaning together. And I remember leaning down and my hands were trembling. I was so scared. And in southern California we get primed with the notion that the big one is coming. So I think a big part of it for me is like okay well when is the next one going to happen.   Clint: And it's something that's instilled within us since we're kids, the big ones always the next one. And looking back at our history, the San Francisco quake, the Northridge quake and seeing the damages that we've seen in our lifetime is just what's the next big one if those winds could create so much havoc and damage.  Ashlie: And to be honest with you we're sitting upstairs right now, and I told Clint before we came up here that I was scared. I'm scared to even be sitting up here because I mean we know that the statistics for us having another earthquake, especially a bigger earthquake than the one we had last night shortly after they say within the first week or two. But I mean this one we just experienced was even bigger than the one that we had a day prior on the fourth of July. So even talking right now I'm like nervous being up here as we record. But as we're cleaning up this mess and my hands are trembling when I leaned down to pick up what is now just a bunch of trash. I remember trying to reach for something and my hands were shaking so bad and then all the sudden as a lean over this, it was like a white shelf that I'm trying to pick stuff up off of. And my nose started to bleed. Like I was so petrified that it gave me a bloody nose.   And my mom felt so bad and she made me sit down so I couldn't help anymore and just experiencing that kind of fear as a child I think I've carried that with me and in my mind like earthquakes are fear. And so last night we were for I should say fortunate enough, but we were in Vegas on the fourth of July. So we actually, although many people did, we didn't feel that earthquake. Which is strange because at the time it happened it was around ten thirty in the morning. And I was sitting on the counter in the bathroom doing my makeup. And if anyone's going to feel an earthquake it's going to be me.  Clint: You give the slightest of shakes and Ashlie is like, "oh my gosh is that an earthquake." Ashlie: Yeah, I feel it's like your cell phone when you have these ghost vibrations. I feel like I have these sorts of phantom earthquakes because I'm just always waiting for it to happen. And last night we were just sitting on the couch together and I was like, Clint oh my god, oh my god Clint and I don't think he realized at first what was happening. And in full transparency he is probably so used to me thinking we're having an earthquake when we are not, the fact that we actually were it took him a moment to register and all of a sudden like it wouldn't stop. And I had a blanket over me.   So I took my blanket I threw it on my poor puppy, and he is like struggling because he can't see anything, because I just covered him with the blanket and then we get up and I take the blanket off my dog. I pick him up and I go to head for the backdoor because it still wouldn't stop. And it started to become more and more aggressive. So for me, I'm like okay well I had this entire story of a home on top of me, like I don't want to be inside. So I grabbed the dog, Clint grabs another dog. Our poor oldest dog, she's like being summoned to follow us and we open up the back door. We go outside, Bella follows.   And I remember bracing myself on this pillar that we have outside, and it still wouldn't stop. And this one was really different for me, because it was like you're on a swing set. It wasn't swinging, it was literally swinging back and forth, and it got to the point to where it lasted for so long. I think this one was probably a good 60 to 90 seconds. And as I am bracing myself and it's still not stopping, I started to get vertigo and like immediately started to feel sick. And I'm like okay well is it still really swinging or is it just me that's swinging and the poor dogs they were so nervous, because I was so nervous. And even in that moment when things start to settle down. You're wondering like are these plates going to continue to shift below us and then it's going to start to get more and more violent. And you're just waiting for that to happen.   And finally we go inside and Clint trying to calm me down and I am still trembling like even thinking about how that feeling was last night and I hate it. It's just something we all have that one thing. And for me earthquakes is definitely one of them. And then you try to calm down, but then the aftershocks starts to happen.   Clint: And that's one thing is really crazy because we were watching the news and seeing just everything that was unfolding and seeing what the USGS was saying about the earthquake. And then you see this like timer come up on the screen and it was counting down and it goes five and then we started shaking again.    Ashlie: Yeah like it's incredible the level of technology that's being created really because of these seismologists and things like that. And to have the capability to have some sort of preface and some sort of precursor to you know get ready the ground's about to shake. I've never experienced before where it's like actual live time and we're watching this counter and we think that the airing was maybe a couple of seconds delayed.    Clint: And the lady who speaks on the earthquakes she gets so excited and it's just, it's funny to watch her because she always gives you a calming with that. Because she goes, oh here comes another one and then she sits there, and she goes there it is and she has a big smile on her face and it is really funny. Ashlie: Yeah. And then just to pay witness to what's about to happen and then the ground just starts to shake again and the cool thing about that is it told us it was a 5.3 magnitude. So we knew we were going to feel it. But at least we knew it wasn't going to be as bad or even worse than the one we had just experienced and the advances in technology to have that capacity to be able to forewarn when an earthquake is going to happen, especially here in southern California, I think it's so important. Because it gives people, even if it's 30 seconds of time to be able to, I mean we're supposed to ducking cover here in southern California. But for me I'm like, fuck that shit like get me out of the building. And so to have that, that moment's notice to be able to prepare yourself whatever that means for you, it's incredible how far we've come.   Because I mean think about 20 years ago, we never would have been able to prepare for something like an earthquake. And they also, when things like this happen it also increases the awareness for you to make sure that you're prepared when the big one strikes. Clint and I live about 10 miles away from the San Andreas fault line. Luckily this one was not centered anywhere near the San Andreas fault.    Clint: Which if you don't know anything about the San Andreas fault, it's one of the biggest fault lines that we have throughout California. It's huge, it's massive.  Ashlie: Yeah. And when you're studying and following the mapping of these earthquakes and you see that there are these releases on the fault line. My mom used to always say, like it's okay you want the smaller ones to happen because it's releasing the pressure. So like the big huge one doesn't happen. I don't know that I believed her. But it's something that I'm sure she just used to kind of cool me with. And the important thing when you start to experience any kind of natural disaster like this, it's a great wakeup call for being able to be more prepared when the big one hits. And you know we've heard it now for over 30 years, it's not a matter of if, it's a when it's going to happen. So having your supplies, having an exit plan. Like understanding okay if we have an earthquake, we're going to go out the side bedroom door. Having your supplies, your water, your food, your generator.    Clint: And having that stuff not just in one spot, but somewhere where in case you know god forbid your house does collapse or something like that to where you can access it outside of your house. In your vehicle, in an outside shed somewhere where you can store it safely.    Ashlie: Yeah or even underground. I mean that you can get creative with. But it's a matter of just understanding that there's a need to be prepared and this could be with you know any kind of manmade or natural disaster and having something so devastating happen. I know last night we were watching the news and as a byproduct of the earthquake, there was homes that were burned down because of electricity problems, gas leaks. And it really helps to prime agencies and prime the individuals in the community to be able to understand how it is that you're supposed to respond when something like this happens and not having this chaotic scene, which for the most part I didn't really see any kind of chaos on any of the videos that we watched.   Everybody I think for the most part we're pretty used to it and doing things like screaming and trampling over one another is obviously not going to help the situation. But there is a sense of panic where people always talk about fight or flight. But the third response that people don't talk about is freeze. So there's fight flight or freeze. And when it comes to an earthquake most people I think just freeze and watching those videos last night. You know we paid witness to that because people were just like looking at each other and like oh shit do you feel that. And looking at things swaying on the ceiling.  Clint: Pulling out their cell phones to record everything.    Ashlie: Those mother fuckers. Like I will never understand that. Like you could be in potential harm right now and your first instinct is to pop out your cell phone.    Clint: And you see it in so many levels and so many major incidents, not just national disasters but just anything.    Ashlie: Yes, we digress on that one because that's a whole other episode. But I think a final thought here is to understand the fact that natural and manmade disasters are inevitable. They will always happen as long as you live on the face of this earth. And by experiencing these either personally or as a byproduct by paying witness to it on the news or sharing these experiences with people that you know or even don't know. It's a wakeup call to make sure that you're prepared for the worst-case scenario.    And by being prepared and using these sorts of events as fuel to really allow your mind to be diverse and creative and get in the mindset of what would I do when this happens, then it allows you to come to terms with the fact that it will happen eventually and you need to have a plan b. Talking about it with your families, having that disaster kit in place, knowing where to go to or even if you need some kind of emergency word to share with one another when you're out at a restaurant and one of you sees danger. These are the types of things that I think having an event like this starts to spark and really allows your train of thought to go there, into that dark place for a moment. And it's necessary to do that. Because we're wherever you're at in life, whether you're in an area where you fear tsunamis or tornadoes or us for earthquakes.   We're all also in the reality of knowing that there could be an active shooter just by going into the grocery store. And by having this awareness and having these discussions with your family and the people that you're closest to, especially the people that you live with. It allows you to be a little bit more prepared mentally and when you're prepared mentally and the inevitable does happen and you're a little bit more confident with your abilities and what you think your actions and reactions will be as a byproduct to that, then you're really able to enjoy your tactical living. Balance. Optimize. Tactics.  Hit that subscribe button so that you don't miss a day of the added value that I am dedicated to sharing with you weekly.  Let's Connect!  Facebook  Instagram  Email: ashliewalton555@gmail.com  LinkedIn  Website: www.leowarriors.com

[Intro] 911, what's the nature of your emergency?    Ashlie: Welcome back to another episode of tactical living by Leo warriors. I'm your host Ashlie Walton.    Clint: And I'm your cohost Clint Walton.    Ashlie: And for today's episode I want to talk about how important it is for the health of a first responder to be in alignment with their career choice. So just sit back, relax and enjoy today's content. Now Clint I am going to pick at you a little bit.    Clint: Dang it.   Ashlie: I want to just have this journey where we can reflect on this time last year versus where you're at today in terms of your physical health and how that pertains to your line of work.   Clint: You know this on last year I weighed two hundred and eighty-three pounds and over this journey where I've really, I had an epiphany almost of changing my outlook on food. I didn't do any of the fat diets. I really darted to eat things that gave me nutrition instead of eating processed foods and everything all the time and when I had that epiphany and made it so easy for me just to lose the weight and stop eating the junk food that's out there and through that it's increased my energy levels. It's you know made me feel better about myself and tying that into you know law enforcement, a lot of times you know I got an ideal suspects and they look at you like man I could run away from this guy and he would never catch me.    Ashlie: Can we dive into that a little bit. And can you maybe think about some things that were actually difficult for you to do being overweight that you identify now that really held you back in your career,    Clint: You know being overweight is not fun. But it was comfortable for me at the time. In going into my day to day job you know I had to get bigger uniforms. I had an appearance where I felt I didn't look as professional as I wanted to. It was one of those things where I just didn't feel like I could, if someone did run for me, I felt like I couldn't catch them. So I didn't let that happen. But in those instances that we all have where they decide to run or they decide to fight, my endurance just wouldn't have been there. And that led to a safety issue for me. And that's not even what gave me the motivation to want to change my outlook on food or to really start bringing in physical fitness into my life as a regular practice. It was just my own feelings about myself.    Ashlie: So can you talk about those moments of the possibility of inflicting maybe a lack of safety on yourself as an officer because of being overweight, not in shape and not having that endurance. Like put yourself in the worst-case scenario. How does being out of shape in that line of work create a more dangerous situation for you as an officer?   Clint: Well most of all it leads to more injuries. So if I were to start fighting with somebody, I'm more likely to injure myself. Because my joints, my bones, just my body's not able to protect itself as much. But for anyone who's ever been in a fight before you fight for say one minute. One minute seems like a lifetime if it's a fight that you're legitimately fighting with somebody and if you run out of energy, if you gas out on that, the aspect, they'll get the upper hand on you easily. That's why you know luckily, I'm good with my tactics and how I approach different situations and I'm good with my wrestling skills or whatever else it may be.   But if that person was in better shape than me and I wasn't able to take them into custody very efficiently, I would have gassed out and they could have gotten my gun. They could have taken any of the weapons on my belt and used it against me or one of my partners. And that's not something that I would ever want to happen. The safety aspect of it is just so huge when it comes to your fitness levels. I have a partner he you know was shot in the line of duty and the one thing that really saved his life was being in as good physical shape and having taken care of his body so well where it would have killed anyone else who wasn't.    Ashlie: Yeah that's a crazy point to bring up. Can you maybe talk about how any of your training has changed in your ability to like dive into those tactics and be more resourceful by having a new physical outlook on your health as it pertains to your career.   Clint: Well it starts out, it's funny because I'm a very hands on person if need to be. I very seldom utilize any of the items on my belt. I go hands on with people if I have to and that's it that situation deems necessary. So I've always been the type that I won't push back and try controlling situation with my baton or pepper spray or something like that. I go straight into it and use my manpower to take them into custody. That has changed for me over the years a little bit because you know the older, I get the less I recover from you know slamming my knees on the ground or just the minor abrasions or bruises that you get. You get sore from it. But I never associated that with being overweight.   I just associated with I was getting older. When I started this journey I didn't even think of it about that and I've really started utilizing my own strengths and weaknesses turning those weaknesses into strengths to where I can combat those situations with minimizing injury to myself or the suspect and the tactics have changed just on, I got into a foot pursuit maybe a few weeks ago and I actually beat my trainee to this suspect because and she straight out of the academy and I'm not knocking her in any way. She's actually very capable of doing it. I just was quicker than her and I tease her all the time over it.   But it's one of those things I would have never been able to do that before and seeing what I'm capable of now compared to where I was is just an amazing feeling and it gives me motivation to keep down this journey and it also does help extremely because you have people recognized that haven't seen you in a long time like, you don't even look like the same person anymore. And I just kind of chuckle and but inside that makes you feel good. So it all goes around and around. Whether it's your own personal well-being making you feel motivated to keep going down that route or just safety wise of not injuring yourself as likely or your recovery time is a lot better if you do get injured during those altercations.    Ashlie: So it's easy for you now to be able to identify this motivation. But you didn't have that a year ago. So if you could go back and tell yourself one year ago without any kind of prequel, without knowing what you know now what kind of advice you would give to yourself or maybe to the listener as they're listening to this. If any of this hit with them to help them to just take that first step.    Clint: You can't give up on yourself. It's not easy. By far it's not easy but you have to keep yourself motivated and you have to have people in your life that motivate you, like you motivate me, and you have to have those forgiveness for yourself. Because there's going to be days where like you know I really don't feel like working out today and that's where that motivation factor from your spouse or whoever else it may be comes into play.   But for me personally it was, I would start working out and I would look back at when I was in high school. I could work out for hours and I would be sore the next day but I could go back and do it again and I start comparing myself to how I used to be compared to where I was at that point when I started this journey and get less motivated because I'm like I can't do what I used to be able to do. So why am I even trying.    Ashlie: And I'm just thinking back to when this new journey began for you. I've always worked out and there's been countless times where I'll be upstairs working out and you would be downstairs doing whatever it was that you were doing but not working out with me. And in reflecting back to where I see that your turning point first started with all of this, I drink a green drink every single day, I do it religiously. And I remember you decided let me try it out. I started to talk to you about all the health benefits of it.   You know I have a stomach condition, so I had to make sure that I really researched every little ingredient in this particular drink. And it was trial and error and so I had been taking this green drink for about six months or so.  And this is a powdered green drink one that when we're on the go we drink. And I remember you were apprehensive, and you were worried that it was going to cause you more harm than good. And so I remember the first time that you ever drink it and you had a little bit of a sour face but then you understood that this actually doesn't taste bad at all. This one that we have in particular it tastes like green tea.  It's awesome and it has two servings of vegetables, tons of micronutrients, minerals and I remember you telling me you had an upset tummy felt like the first week or so but then you stuck with it and you started drinking it every single day. And I think that one small change started to snowball and lead to more and more changes in your life.   Clint: Absolutely. That one little change for me was like well I took this step, so let me take the next step. And it just snowballed from there. And so when I started drinking that I started working out a little bit more when I didn't feel motivated.    Ashlie: I kicked you between the legs.    Clint: You would, after I got up from the ground, I would get upstairs and I'd workout. And that green drink I never really thought about it that way of that was that first step for me to really start changing the behaviors, my patterns that I had before, and it was just a simple scoop of green drink in the morning.   Ashlie: And we hear the experts, we hear the gurus, we hear all these people at these different fad diets, and they all have their own opinions on what you should and shouldn't do. And it's my personal belief that your fitness journey belongs to you. Like your health belongs to you. And whatever pings that you as what could potentially be your first step, I would encourage you to lean into that.   Maybe you're still one of the people that drink soda or any form of sweetened drink. Maybe you think you need to live on energy drinks. Maybe it's ok for you to stop through the drive through because you just had a 12-hour shift and you think you deserve it. I get that. We've all been there. But I encourage you as you sit there to think of one thing that could be your start to your own snowball effect to start the trajectory of turning your reality into something absolutely incredible to where people don't even recognize who you are and you're proud of it.   Clint: And I have to put this in there just as the recognition side. I was somewhere I was eating lunch with my parents and they were sitting somewhere, and I walk in and my mom looks right at me and then looks down. She didn't recognize who I was and that's my own mom.    Ashlie: And that's incredible. And another thing I think is important to point out is that you did not do any of this in an unhealthy way. You did not starve yourself. You didn't take any of these bogus fat loss pills. You didn't stick to any strategic diet, be it of a thousand or more that are out there on the market. You said okay I know what I want to be, and you incorporated your own lifestyle, your own diet, your own fitness regimen and you did a lot of trial and error to see what worked best for you. And it's hard for you as you're sitting there for any of us to understand that we have the ability to create our own diet, our own lifestyle.   It doesn't have to be this structured rubric just because it has the title keto in it. Make it your own, but it has to start somewhere. And I hope you can find that one thing, that one thing you can change in your life that will start to lead you down the path of making more like decisions and when you're able to do that and you understand that you deserve to create your own path, your own journey, then you're really able to enjoy your tactical living.

[Intro] 911 what's the nature of your emergency?  Ashlie: Welcome back to another episode of tactical living by Leo warriors. I'm your host. Ashlie Walton.  Clint: And I'm your co-host Clint Walton. Ashlie: In today's episode we're going to talk about the power of your mind and how having the ability to sift through your thoughts to pull out the positive ones can help you in almost every uncomfortable situation. So today just sit back relax and enjoy the content. There was a moment that I can think of very vividly that I have revisited at least a thousand times in my mind since it happened, a moment so funny that because of how many times I've revisited that moment I can tell you everything that that picture in my mind looks like. I could tell you the colors. I could tell you the smell. I can tell you how I felt and even thinking about it right now, I want to like stupid laugh. So when you're married to a first responder especially in the beginning there's not a lot of time that you have to spend together.   This one evening in particular Clint and I had the opportunity to go and hang out and do something. It had probably been about a year and a half since we went to see a movie. And we decided to head up the movie theater. I don't even remember what movie it was. And just have a good time spending some time together. Now in true fashion we got into the theater, purchased our tickets. Clint gets the biggest bucket of popcorn that they sold, the biggest probably diet coke that was available. And we give our tickets and we start walking down this long hall to find the theater that our movie was playing in.    And we're happy and Clint has both the popcorn in one hand and this giant soda and the other hand and we're just laughing and we're just happy we're getting ready to see a movie it was later at night and I remember this particular showing was at the very end of a long hallway. So we were walking and just laughing and probably bullshitting the entire time as we're walking down the hallway and it's really hard for me not to like to bust out laughing just as I'm recounting this story. But let me give it a shot. So let's say that the theater was number 13. And we're getting ready to walk into the door for a theater number 13. And Clint's just so jolly, I can see him so vividly. And he starts to walk not into the door of the theater, you can enter on the left you can enter on the right and directly in the center is this dark black wall. And instead of walking into one of the doors I see him heading for the wall.   So I stop and I am about 10 feet back from him. I. Watch and he face plants straight into this black wall. There was popcorn that flew everywhere. His soda top popped open, there was ice cubes and soda everywhere. He was so wet. And I remember looking around me like did anybody else see that? And we were all by ourselves. I was laughing so hard I literally like was about to pee my pants. And poor Clint he had his tail between his legs because his wife was just laughing her ass off about what he just did. Clint: And you know in my defense the wall was black. It looked like it was the entry door. And I didn't even really notice. You know how the doors are open normally you think you could just walk through and it was dark inside.  Ashlie: It was so funny. As you're sitting there maybe you can think of a time when your spouse has done something that you're just like are you freaking kidding me. And so the reason I bring up this moment and you can hear it in my voice I'm sure. And even Clint bursting out laughing as he's thinking about what happened. As I said I remember the look on his face. I remember seeing the brown diet soda like fly all over the place, the shiny ice cubes on the floor. I've literally revisited this moment as many times as I've needed to. And what I mean by that is I've had a lot of moments when I've been uncomfortable.   Maybe I'm getting ready to present in a meeting, maybe I'm getting ready to meet somebody of higher authority let's say and it makes me uncomfortable. I've used this going into interviews before. I've used this dealing with my sick and dying mom as a way to help me to enhance my mood during those darkest times. And it's fascinating to see the way that you're able to pull from a memory like that and not only recall it but to also have the ability to dive into that moment so realistically that you can put yourself there and I'd use that moment not only as a time to be able to reflect upon when I need it, but also a time for me to allow myself to make a mood shift anytime that I need to.  Clint: You know and that's something that you have a completely different outlook on than me when it comes to how funny that specific instance was just because it hurt. I mean it's definitely funny and I can definitely laugh at it. But imagine my face just smacking into the wall.  There was no bracing, there was no stopping and realizing that everything was okay. It was painful, but in looking at that and everything you just said what do you do negatively that focuses on the negatives of something compared to those positives, utilizing that same thought process of thinking about the store you've created in your own head or going down the negative route and making yourself feel worse about the situation.  Ashlie: Absolutely. And that doesn't mean that. Every time that I'm in a slump that I even remember to pull from that memory. We all it's in our human makeup to go down this negative spiral. And it takes a lot of repetition and a lot of practice to be able to take ownership and be the CEO of your own mind and not allow certain circumstances, instances and especially people to have the power over the influence of how you allow yourself to feel and react to any situation that you're in.  Clint: And it's hard to get out of your own head when it comes to that stuff and it's you know focusing on different thought processes different meditation techniques whatever it may be is really key in getting out of living in your head and living within presence in your body. Ashlie: And it boils down to the fact that we have the choice, we have the choice to say, okay here's this situation, I just got another bill in the mail that I didn't expect to get. So with that I can either choose to pull from the pity pile, of course this happened to me. This always happens to me. And I'm no different. Clint you and I spent a majority of our marriage probably the first six or seven years or so of always allowing ourselves to fall into that negative spiral of, well shit of course this happened to us. It always happens to us. Who else would it happen to?  Clint: And every time, well what's going to happen next. You know I'm sure well if it happens this way, this is just going to get worse from there. Ashlie: Yeah. We allowed that to control every aspect of our life and we had this negative connotation that almost created this pretense for how we allowed things to enter into our lives. And we didn't know how to control that. And I remember very vividly we took step number one and when we did that it changed everything. All that shit that always happened to us, it stopped happening. And it's not some magic tool. I remember the first step for us was reading the secret. They also have that on video form.    So we watched the video first and you and I spent a week reading it aloud to one another and we would stop, and we would talk about it and maybe we read a chapter or two night together. But we practice that, and we made sure that we were all on the same page and understanding it and knowing like let's try this. Because what we've been doing before hasn't been working and I want to touch on that for a second. Because I think that a lot of people might think it's like woo woo and I get that. And it's understanding the principles and being able to articulate it in a way to where you can apply that in your own life and even the visualization techniques.    We started doing that and one of the craziest things and I don't want this to be taken out of context. I'm not saying we study the secret and then boom this magically happened what I'm about to explain. But I truly believe that this is the reason as to how and why these circumstances were created. And I wanted a z4. It was my dream car. The most beautiful car you can imagine, black leather seats, a light vehicle. I pictured it. I saw pictures of it. I replayed that image in my mind over and over again.   And I drove in an eclipse at the time and I remember every single time I would drive my car, my eclipse I would pretend that I was driving that z4 instead. I envisioned the way that this steering wheel felt. I pretended that I can smell what this new car, with this new leather smell like around me. I knew exactly how it felt in those moments to be driving a z4 as I was driving my eclipse. And it felt good. And it just made me want that z4 more than anything. And I decided to just try that technique and it was probably a good six months and the time came where I had finished my MBA and we talked about it and we decided together that you know what let's make this dream a reality. And of course you need to start. You go and you check out different dealerships. We searched online for days and it wasn't exactly the car that we could find.     Most of them were a white car with a red leather seats. A lot of them were far away to where you would have to pay the hefty convenience fee of being able to ship it over to your location. And we just couldn't find it and I remember not being frustrated but just thinking to myself like, okay well if I can't find it, like it just wasn't meant to be. And I knew for sure and I had talked with Clint about that…that I wasn't going to be swayed into getting something else. Like it was either this specific car with these specific features or it wasn't. I was just going to keep driving my eclipse. I'd rather do that than not have exactly what I wanted. So we go to the dealership, one of the dealerships and we had looked online and Clint said Ashlie I found your car, it's at this dealership. We go there, we're scouting the parking lot looking for this car. I'm so excited. Clint says it's here. And then we're greeted by probably a thousand salesmen. And I don't know how that even works. Like how did a salesman say okay you can have that one. Maybe they take turns.   But the salesman comes to us and I tell him, I don't want to waste any time. This is the car that I want. We know that you have it on inventory because we saw it online. And he says I'm sorry, but we don't have that car and we're arguing with him a little bit, because we came here specifically for this car. We know that you have it. Technology tells us the truth always. And it's showing as being here on your lot right now. I just can't see it. So tell me where it's at. No mam can't help you it's not here. So he leaves and he goes into the office. I let him know, he tries of course to convince me to get another car and he comes back out and he says, you guys I'm sorry but you're right we do have this car. It's here right now. It came to us on the lot with one of the speakers was damaged. Not even the speaker, it was like the metal casing that surrounds the speaker on the side panel. And I'm like, well shit you're fixing it right now, cool.   Long story short I was able to get that car and I can't even explain to you…that was one of the most exciting purchases that I've ever had in my life. And I remember driving that car and it felt exactly how I had envisioned it to feel when I was driving my eclipse pretending I was driving that car for six months. I remember going to the window at the office managing a pediatric practice and, in the morning, when the sun would come up, of course I got there at five o'clock every morning. I would just sit there for a moment and just stare out the window at my car ingratitude not believing like holy shit this car is really mine. I am so grateful that this belongs to me. And this isn't to try to showcase any kind of bragging rights.   I just want to demonstrate to you the power of being able to use your positive thinking and understand that it's a way to allow every other action and reaction that you make in your life to align with that positive thought. I know that we were able to as a byproduct of me envisioning this purchase work a little harder, save a little bit more money. Do some rearranging and really figure out how to make that a reality. And it wasn't like okay I want this car. Now let's try to strategize what we need to do to do it. It was an inadvertent reaction to having that positive thought. And when you're able to just take the ability of being able to shift what it is that you're thinking and really own your own way of thinking, then you're able to make incredible things happen in your life. And by shifting from the negativity that's so easy to get caught up in to and by demonstrating what it is that you actually want in your life and then allowing yourself to be so immersed in that positive image, then you're really able to enjoy your tactical living.  

Ashlie: Welcome back to Tactical Living by Leo Worriers. I'm your host Ashlie Walton and I'm here with my co-host Clint Walton.  Clint: how are you doing? Ashlie: Today's episode we're going to dive into a topic we see on the news almost nightly. And that is police brutality. And baby I want to talk about police brutality. The connotation portrayed on the media. Be it truthful or be it biased, and a lot of the times fabricated. And how that affects community policing. Clint: You know around the topic of community policing in itself it makes it really hard when we're already we're fighting that uphill battle when it comes to trying to repair and create new relationships involved around the police in whichever community you may work for. And especially when you're in an environment where you already have a stigma about you where kids are raised to think that the police are bad. All they do is arrest you and just go around beating people for absolutely no reason.   Ashlie: So is it okay if we maybe start from the beginning a little bit. So let's talk about when we were kids and our view of law enforcement. For me I remember the only time actually I can recall two times where we ever had to call the police for anything. One of them was an instance where my brother's bike got stolen and I remember the officer coming to the house, he filed the report. He was very welcoming; we were really comfortable when he came there but also had a pretty high level of authority towards him. We knew that there was this respect boundary and I was probably 7 or 8 at the time. And another instance I can think of was when my mom and I were at the grocery store and she took me to the bathroom and I think I was probably 9 years old at the time and it was one of those ages where I wanted to be a big girl. And my mom let me go into the bathroom by myself. And it was just a single stall bathroom. So she was waiting out right outside the door. And I sat down to go pee and I looked on to the side of me and I saw something falling down and I look on the floor and it was like watered up toilet paper. And I'm like that was strange and I'm a little girl I'm like going pee midstream and I didn't think of looking up. But it happened again, and I think this time it brushed my shoulder or maybe even my arm and that's what caused me to look up and kind of behind me where the toilet was like all the plumbing and things like that I guess would be. And when I look up, I see there was a hole. And what I thought at the very naive age of eight or nine was a finger sticking out of the hole and I got so scared. It was probably my first time being allowed to go into the bathroom by myself. And I remember I was still like dribbling pee, but I had to like to pull my pants and go running out to my mom and she was right outside the door. She was really upset immediately and asking me what the matter and I had told her there was like somebody sticking their finger out of a hole from the bathroom that was adjacent to the one that I was in. And I guess the man's and the woman's restrooms were right next to each other separated by this wall. And I remember my mom getting so so upset and me not knowing at the time but now as an adult understanding that it wasn't a finger. There was a man in the bathroom next to me and he had stuck his penis through this hole in the door or I'm sorry the wall. And that's what I saw. And my brother worked there at the time. My mom only shopped at that grocery store, so she knew everybody there. And the manager came, they found the guy that was in the bathroom and they blocked him in. I guess he was a transient apparently. My dad got off work shortly after that. He got home from work and I remember my mom was like crying she was so upset we had gotten home and she's like pleading with my dad to not go back to where the grocery store was because she didn't want anything to happen. And apparently the manager and my brother had like held this guy there until my dad came and my dad went there. And the story I am told was that he beat the shit out of this guy for exposing himself to his daughter and the police were called and nothing ever happened to my dad. I think it was probably a father who could relate to what had happened and sure times are different now and maybe you know things would have been different in terms of any kind of charges that would have been filed against my dad for something like that happening. But as you sit there if you are a parent, I'm sure you can relate to a situation like that in how grateful you would have been for the officers understanding for a situation like that. Clint: Yeah. Can you only imagine if that officer just immediately went and handcuffed your dad and started taking the approach of you know well you violated the law? So I'm going to have to take enforcement action on it compared to really looking at the bigger picture of it. Now like you said the times have changed recently, notions a reason over the years and things would be handled the different way but it doesn't mean your dad would necessarily go to jail or anything. But that approach that that officer took was one of building a relationship with your family. And not only that but also the manager of the store. And I'm sure he appreciated knowing that law enforcement was there and present and understanding for the community as well as being a father and bringing yourself down to that level of being human which is something we try to voice as much as we can in our own coaching practice. You know as a police officer there is a human behind that badge. There is a real life that exists outside of putting on that uniform  Clint: Oh absolutely. And there is a lot of us who you know we have huge hearts. And that's why we do what we do. We want to help the community we work for. We want to build those bridges. We want to show that we're more than just people who go out and arrest other people.  Ashlie: So then let's fast forward a little bit. I'm not this 9-year-old girl anymore. And things start to happen in the world. 9/11 happened when I was in ninth grade. Even going back to the point of eleven years ago when we got married, pone week, actually it wasn't even a week. We got married on a Saturday and the Monday after we got married you started the police academy. Clint: Happy honeymoon. Ashlie: Yeah. That was three years later. But even at that place in time the perception of law enforcement to you as somebody who was not a police officer yet is so far from where we perceive law enforcement today. So talk to me about what transpired from your point of view during these last eleven years. Clint: You know there's so many instances that's changed policing throughout just my career in law enforcement.whether it's the localized terrorist attacks, whether it's active shooters in schools or the severe incidents of protests against police brutality or just citizens and self not trusting the police. There's a level of respect to that used to be there and like you're saying is growing up there was a level of respect even if you've never had any contact with law enforcement. But that just comes from your being raised with having your parents instill in you, you know respect your elders and people of authority you need to, yes sir, no ma'am that mentality. You have to approach all situations. Those officers don't necessarily deem that as necessary. But when that happens well that's a really respectful kid or adult and we should be doing that not just with law enforcement and just with everybody. Ashlie: Well for sure we absolutely should. And we see the repercussions in our daily life of not acting in a civil way. Whether that is I mean in the American culture especially and we've been fortunate enough to travel to so many different countries to where we can compare that. But for the American culture its customary for us to say "hi good morning, how are you? Fine how are you." it's just a matter of okay now we've established this pleasant foundation to conduct business or place an order at a restaurant or I don't know maybe you just waited two hours in line at the DMV like name something. Clint: And you know I think even taking that a step further as a human being when you ask someone how are they, give them a second to respond and just allow them to tell you how they're doing. That's one way I've used every day just to build that bridge to ask people really what's going on and let them start opening up within my normal life or as a police officer and every time I've done that I've built relationships throughout the whole community that is then life changing in so many ways. Ashlie: And it's important to touch on that because I remember as a kid in school, we would constantly have police presence. They would come to our assemblies. They would always be there you know just showcasing the positive imagery of call us if you need us, like we were taught how to dial 911. We were taught when we were never supposed to dial 911 and in my opinion, what's happened incidentally between the time you became a police officer and the advances in technology coincidingly, you're everywhere. You can't hide from it.  And it's not showcasing this positive let's give an elementary school child a sticker and a pencil and then show them that police are good. Media can't sell that. So in the advancement of technology you also have media capitalizing on that. And every single view, every single recording it's always turned in. So if I record something, I mean you know somebody who took pictures actually essentially stole pictures of Britney spears and pawned them off to capitalize on them.  The photos don't mean much nowadays. But having that raw material you know that real footage is what sells. So you not only have the media hiring people to go out and just capture all the stuff that will sell. It's not going to sell if you help a little girl learn how to ride a bike when she's getting her training wheels taken off. But if you catch the wrong view of a hostile situation to where there's few instances of excessive use of force that are actually validated but they don't follow up on that ever in the media. And having that one view that showed that one aspect you know with a car blocking what actually happened and then the viewer can just pay witness to this high action thing that they perceive as being truthful and being reality and then that random person that took the shot gets to turn it into you know TMC or whatever news source, whatever outlet will pay them the most for that  video. That's all that they care about. It's all that matters. Clint: It's the almighty dollar and that stigma around that eye-catching news story.  Ashlie: And then I believe it creates this negative spiral whereas a citizen or as a very manipulee child with a mind that's growing and developing, when they're seeing this negative association with law enforcement could there be this hesitation when they actually need to call the police. Are they going to second guess whether or not they should call for help when they need help? And hey guess what if you don't like the police in your area it's not like you have a second choice and you can go and call a different nine one one line. It doesn't work that way.  Clint: Yeah you don't get to pick what police officer you want to respond to your house unfortunately. And you know kids they're intimidated to talk to police in general anymore just based off of that stigma that's out there and they could have seen something horrible that they should have never seen but they're scared to even tell us about it to where we can go out and take an action off of it. Ashlie: And to be honest this is not just about community policing. This is with any type of industry. There are good and bad no matter where you work. But there is also like the factual hardcore this is the reality of things because we're behind the scenes and we see the footage, we see the truth. We're not just looking at this filtered subject that sells like media. And when you're able to take a step back and start to analyze and really dig into the research and the validity of the facts behind whatever it is that you're seeing that sparks interest/ you see a video expressing police brutality on social media. Okay wow! That triggered something in you. But instead of leaving it at that why don't you go and do something of value like further investigating and reading and exploring even call to get more information about whatever it is that you're seeking. Interview people if you want to if you were that concerned about it to where you want to go and make a fuss about it and repost it and then put your own spin and twist on things then at least have the decency as a human being to have some kind of education and facts to back that up. And I'll be completely honest with you but also don't be an idiot in the eyes of the people that actually know what happened by saying oh look it, I found this thing and can you believe that so-and-so did this based on a simple post that you decided to just press a button on to read posts. Like what is that? What does that mean? And when you have something and I don't care if it's something positive or negative related to law enforcement related to your industry, but anything that sparks that's something it pings that you in some way so much so that you feel the ability to just have to share it with somebody take a second and do a little bit of research and then share that post. But back it from 0 and then check out this article that I read from so-and-so fill in the blank with a valid a publication that actually makes you look intelligent and worthy of what it is that you're talking about. And when you're able to share your feelings and share any of those things that ping at you by backing it up with a valid resource it'll make people look at you in a completely different way. It will give you a new sense of actual knowledge and you'll really be able to enjoy your tactical living. Balance. Optimize. Tactics.   Enjoy Your Tactical Living.   Hit that subscribe button so that you don't miss a day of the added value that I am dedicated to sharing with you weekly.   Let's Connect!   Facebook   Instagram   Email: ashliewalton555@gmail.com   LinkedIn   Website: www.leowarriors.com

I have the incredible honor of speaking at Carnegie Hall in September with MARTHA STEWART, MICHAEL E GERBER, DAN KENNEDY, HAL ELROD, and other beasts. I'm beyond humbled by this. Here's the full scoop...   Frankly, I just love being on stage speaking and teaching.   Some of the early stages I got to talk on were Russell's - I did a lot of fulfillment for the original Two Comma Club program.   Back in the day, we did something called the FHAT Event which lasted for 3 awesome, intense days.   We’d go from:   Day #1:  9:00am to 6:00pm   Day #2: 9:00am - 1:00am(ish) - it was a long day.   Day #3 :9:00am - 6:00pm   By the end of the event, everyone was just exhausted.   Russell did the first event because he was testing materials and seeing where we needed to change things…   Then after that, he largely handed it over to me, and he just came in for a few one or two-hour guest speeches.   WHAT I LOVE ABOUT ENTREPRENEUR EVENTS   I remember there was this one particular FHAT event…   On the second day, I took a break to grab some food and went to Russell's office to sit down. Russell was like, "How are you doing?"   I was like, "Wheeew….”  I was just bringing it down... and trying to relax for a second…   ... THAT was a  very aggressive fast-paced stage for me - I loved it.   Russell goes, "How's everyone doing out there?"   We’d always talk about how the audience was responding:   Were they getting it?   Did they understand?   Which principles had tripped them up?   Had we managed to bridge the gap for them?   We’d chat back and forth exploring all the scenarios, but this time, when Russell asked, "So how are you doing?"   I kinda paused for a second…   https://media.giphy.com/media/1qXJDYI8lTG8SVhUZW/giphy.gif   Russell noticed and asked, "What is it?"   He may not remember this, but I said, "Dude, I can see those who are getting it and those who aren't. They're not telling me. I can see it."   And he goes, "You're getting that already, huh?"   I was like, "That's a thing?"   Russell said, "Yeah, yeah, I can stand up at any moment and, I've been doing it so long, I can see those who are with me and who it's clicking for and those who it’s not -  so I'll stop and I'll cater to those people who aren’t getting it."   https://media.giphy.com/media/7YCVWDMbIWTBNuTD9c/giphy.gif   I was like, "Okay, that's what that is. I'm starting to see that.”   MY FAVORITE MOMENT…   My favorite moment on stage, (and this may sound a little cheesy), is the moment when I see in somebody's eyes that they suddenly realize, "Oh my gosh, my capacity is greater than I thought it was and it's actually always been there."   It's funny to watch as people…   Have personal breakthrough moments   Suddenly see the road map and things start to click.   They're like, "Oh, that dream I've been going for all along is actually possible now."   I don't know. I don't know how else to describe it besides that…   But it's a thrill for me because you can see it happen in peoples' eyes as they listen to you.   Those of you guys who educate, teach or get on stage, you know what I'm talking about.   There's that moment where you can look at them, be like, "Bam, right there... I just caused the epiphany." About 6 months ago, during the Two Comma Club Cruise, I’d just finished a big session,  when a guy walked up to me and goes, "You're a really dynamic speaker."   People have told me that before,  and I still don't know what that means... So I said,  “Cool! Thank you,"  but what he said next made my jaw hit the ground…   He looked me straight in the eyes and asked "Do you want to come  speak at Carnegie Hall?"    I was like, "Are you completely serious right now?"   He said, "100%. We're going to see if we can get all these huge names," and I was like, "All right. Cool. Just keep me in the loop."   Six months later,  it's happening - it's in the bag -  it's an event called Living Legends, which is extremely honoring.   So I'm going to share an interview that explains EVERYTHING to you…   BECOMING A CELEBRITY ENTREPRENEUR I have a very special guest…   His name is Clint Arthur.   Clint and I, have frankly only known each other personally for probably six months, but I am blown away and just completely floored with what he does, his skill set, and who he helps.   What he does, when you're in a certain place, is completely magical and I'm very, very honored to have him on here.   So Clint, thank you so much -  welcome to the show.   Clint:       BOOM!   Steve:       In the middle of Carnegie Hall. What?   Clint:       Yeah.   Steve:       It's a proxy BOOM! Oh man.   Clint:       That's a Carnegie Hall ‘BOOM!’ for you - that's what that is.   Steve:       You're warming it up for us - thank you so much.   Clint:       Yeah, baby. Yeah, baby. Well, it's a pleasure to be with you... I met you on the cruise, I think.   Steve:       Yeah.   Clint:       The 2CCX Cruise - that was an amazing experience…   Really, the best part of the whole 2CCX program was the cruise.   I really believe that's because it was a special event.   When you participate in special events, it's not only great for the sales funnel… it's great for sales funnels for a reason...   It really does deepen the experience of the customer/client/ the person you're trying to transform their life... it opens up possibilities for people to have MORE community.   So as a result of that, here we are -  so great to be with you.   Steve:       That's so awesome. We're really honored, honestly.   Now just because some of my audience may not know who you are, which is baffling... but could you tell everybody what is it that you do?   Clint:       I am a celebrity entrepreneur -  which means:   I'm the MOST famous guy that nobody's ever heard of.   I’ve created systems, formulas and scientific methodology for creating celebrity positioning in the eyes of your customers and prospects.   So part of that is,  I have done 107 television appearances.   You might have seen me on FOX Business Channel, CNN, Headline News, or The Today Show with Brooke Shields… When Brooke Shields said, "Clint, you can have all of these plans and want to scale Mount Everest, but how do you keep from falling off the track?”   I said, "You've got to invest in mentors."   I said it then, and I meant it… and I mean it even more now.   Investing in mentors has been part of the reason why I have gotten to where I am.   Part of what I've done to become a celebrity entrepreneur is to become  Dan Kennedy's Info Marketer Of The Year - that's a great honor for me.   It’s something that really opened things up for me in my career and deepened my relationship with Dan Kennedy as my mentor.   So those are some of the things I've done.   I've also written a bunch of best-selling books...   My new book is called Celebrity Entrepreneurship.   Some of my other best sellers include:   What They Teach You At The Wharton Business School - I’m a graduate of the Wharton Business Schools entrepreneurship program.   The Greatest Book Of All Time...   I wrote this other book called The Last Year Of Your Life  - where you live as if you're going to die at the end of the year…   I told one of my friends, I'm going to add in videos and audios, it's going to be the greatest book of all time with those attached as links in the Kindle book, and he goes, "Why don't you just call it The Greatest Book of All Time?"   So I did, and that became my first real big selling book…   I sold 26,000 copies of that book.   Steve:       Wow. That's awesome. That's incredible.   Clint:       And it has contributed to …( I don't even think you know this…) Starting June 8th, I will be the host of a NEW talk radio show on WABC Radio in New York City called The Greatest Show of All Time.   Steve:       Oh my gosh. That's amazing. Just pushing straight on in there. That's incredible.   Now, actually, it was Peng Joon I started talking to about what it is that you do, and everything…   He was talking about just how incredible your stuff is and how amazing it is.   Why is it important to eventually become a celebrity entrepreneur for your audience?   Clint:       Well, I say on the back of my book that entrepreneurs struggle because they think that people are buying their products and services, but really people are buying you.   Who you are is more important than what you actually do.   ...especially if you're selling a product or service that's similar or equivalent to others that are in the marketplace...   The only difference is you.   If you're a financial advisor/  a realtor/ a doctor, or selling any kind of widget, there's a similar widget to what you sell - the main difference is who you are.   HOW TO BE A SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEUR…   What I do as a celebrity entrepreneur is help my clients position themselves as celebrities in the eyes of their customers and prospects.. and that's really using marketing on your personal brand.   That's what *this* is all about.   … and that makes all the difference in the world because people are NOT buying your widgets; they're buying you.   Steve:       Absolutely. I just so appreciate you taking that angle on it too.   There are a few places I've spoken at... where it's only been about getting authority for authority's sake, but you're saying let's get it so it pushes the message and the product more…   … because that's what they're gonna be buying anyway.   I love that. I'm very, very thankful for that. It's awesome.   How did you get started doing this?   There are gonna be a lot of questions revolving around ...   This is not something that my audience is gonna be very familiar with.   Clint:       Hey, I started out as an entrepreneur selling butter.   Steve:       Really?   Clint:       Yeah, really. That's really where this all began.   I was selling portion controlled butter in Las Vegas to hotels and casinos.   So if you've ever eaten bread and butter at Bellagio in Las Vegas, thank you for helping to put my daughter through the University of Southern California…   For a long time, pretty much every piece of bread at Bellagio was buttered with Five Star Butter, which is my company.   What happened was a lot of these celebrity chefs starting coming in: Bobby Flay, Gordon Ramsay, Emeril... and I wanted to get the celebrity chefs, so I came up with this idea…   What if I could be a judge on Iron Chef America and make myself a celebrity butter expert, not just the guy selling butter?   I talked the producers of Iron Chef America into making me the judge of Battle Butter... (you can watch that episode on my website, fivestarbutter.com and see me judging Battle Butter).   That was the beginning of my celebrity positioning as an expert.   Now, I tell you what, it changes things when you become a celebrity expert in what you do, it really does.   THIS WILL BLOW YOUR MIND   I heard a statistic that:   The number one top celebrity in the marketplace gets 50% of all the revenues.   The number two celebrity in the marketplace gets the next 25% of the revenues.   Number three, through infinity, split the remaining 25%.   That's why, if you're not the number one top celebrity, you are surviving on crumbs while everybody who you admire is feasting on giant pieces of pie.   For example, Tony Robbins, Date With Destiny…   Date With Destiny alone represents 10% of the entire live event seminar industry in its revenue.   Steve:       Oh my gosh.   Clint:       If you do the math, which I have, you will see that just that one event is 10% of all live seminar tickets.   Steve:       Geeze. I had no idea.   Clint:       Because he's the number one guy ... And here's the funny part…   Go into any bank in America and ask the teller, "Do you know who Tony Robbins is?"   … they're going to say ``No,” because he's NOT a real celebrity - He's a celebrity entrepreneur.   The same thing goes for Grant Cardone, who everybody worships…   I will show you videos where I'm doing seminars with financial advisors and I'd say, "Anybody recognize this guy?"   Not one hand goes up.   Nobody knows who he is because they're NOT his customers or prospects... and yet two months ago, he filled up Marlin Stadium...   And most of the people watching this video know exactly what I'm talking about.   Steve:       OH, YEAH.   Clint:       When you're a celebrity entrepreneur, (which is something that I pioneered, systematized and scientifically analyzed how do you do it), you're a god to your customers and prospects…   ... but the rest of the world doesn't know who you are.   And that's what I help my clients to do.   Steve:       It seems extremely magical sitting on this side of the screen listening to that. That's impressive. That’s so, so amazing.   Now, what should somebody do if they're trying to get started as celebrity entrepreneur?   Clint:       Okay. Well, the important thing to understand is that there's no time that’s too soon.   The sooner you start building your positioning as a celebrity in the eyes of your customers and prospects, the better off you are... because the product you're selling is irrelevant.   A lot of people come to me and say, "I don't have a product yet. I don't have a book yet. I don't have this data or anything yet, " and I just say;   “But you have you. You're already you. And you're always going to be you so you might as well start building your personal brand."   Really, there are five ways to do it.   Television is the most powerful way.   I'm not saying you have to go on Good Morning America first - that's a mistake. Don't go on Good Morning America first, go on little tiny local TV shows first.   Then the second great way to do it is by becoming a speaker.   I wanted to meet you, Steve, because you're such a great speaker…   I don't know if you've always been, but I doubt you've always been…   I’ve personally found that speaking is an acquired skill.   You have to learn how to be a great speaker - so there's no time that's too soon to start learning that, is there?   So go out there and start learning how to speak and start speaking in important places - the second part of my formula is to become a VIP speaker speaking in very important places.   The third part is one of my favorite things, celebrity attachment.   That's taking photos with famous people, and anybody who goes to my website will see I'm in photos with all kinds of famous people from Brooke Shields to Caitlin Jenner  - Ringo Star to Mike Tyson - Hilary and Donald Trump. I don't care.   I'm an equal opportunity celebrity selfie slut.   The more famous they are, the more I like it. That's it.   Part four my formula for celebrity entrepreneurship is to be a best selling author.   I've already dropped some of my best selling book titles on you guys. The fifth part is to be an award winner -  Win Awards!   I told you right in the beginning, I was Dan Kennedy's ‘Info Marketer of The Year,’ and you, as an entrepreneur, need to figure out how you can win awards too.   Steve:       That's amazing...   TV   Speaker   Celebrity Attachment   Best Selling Author   Award Winner   Clint:       Ideally you want to win an Academy Award, but if you don't have an Academy Award, then you've got to win something else.   You won a Two Comma Club X award, you won a Two Comma Club award -  whatever you can get!   The better it is, the better it's going to be…   You put all those steps together and you’ve radically transformed your positioning in the eyes of your customers and prospects.   Ultimately you want to accomplish each of those things.   Steve:       That is insanely valuable. I hope everyone's enjoying that. I can't put it off anymore… Where are you standing... and why are we talking about it right now?   I can't even hold it back…   CARNEGIE HALLClint:       Right now I'm in the lobby at Carnegie Hall in New York City.   Steve:       Oh!   Clint:       Yeah! And the reason why I'm in the lobby of Carnegie Hall in New York City is that I just finished my meeting with the production manager, the stage manager, the person who did all the contracts for my first of its kind entrepreneurial conference at Carnegie Hall.   They've never had an event like this before…   “It's so unique, Clint. We've never had anything like this, Clint. We're so excited. We can't wait to sit in on and see some of the people that are going to be ... You're really going to have Martha Stewart at your conference?"   Yes. I'm really having Martha Stewart at this conference.   "You're really going to have Coco and Ice-T?"   Yes. Ice-T and Coco are really going to be there.   "You're really going to have Scorpion -  the guy who produced five seasons of the TV show Scorpion for CBS? My dad loves Scorpion."   Steve:       That's a good show.   Clint:       That's what the lady said.   I'm like, “Yeah, Scorpion himself. You're going to be able to pick the brain of the smartest man on earth. Imagine what you're going to find in there.”   Albert Einstein previously spoke at Carnegie Hall. His IQ was 160. Scorpion's IQ is 197.   Steve:       Holy Cow!   Clint:       ...and who else is going to be speaking there?   Dan Kennedy will be speaking at this conference.   Michael Gerber, the author of The E-Myth, number one New York Times best-selling book for years and years and years   ….he’s changed so many entrepreneurs' lives.   Michael will be doing multiple days of speaking at this event, including the hot seats on the stage.   Amazing. Who else?   Jerry from Ben and Jerry's ice cream, the founder.   So look at this…   You've got Martha Stewart who turned herself into a household name...   Then you've got a guy who turned cream and sugar into a household product. Right?   Steve:       Yeah.   Clint:       Who else is going to be here?   Oh, Hal Elrod, ‘Miracle Morning’. Are you familiar with that book?   Steve:       Very. Yep. Got that and the journal right here.   Clint:       Right? Self-publishing phenomenon. By the way, he's one of my students.   Steve:       Oh, cool.   Clint:       He couldn't afford to come to my Celebrity Launch Pad TV Publicity Transformation Event.   He registered, and then he calls me the next day and goes, "Clint, I'm really sorry. I talked it over with Ursula and we really just can't afford it."   I'm like, "Wrong. I'm going to make it possible for you to do it. We're going to come up with a payment plan and you are coming on Celebrity Launch Pad."   He booked himself on 13 shows   I have the video of him, and he's like, "Any time I'm being considered for a speaking gig, I send them my TV appearances for them to evaluate me because it separates me so much from everybody else who's trying to get those same speaking gigs."   Anyway, he's one of my students and he will be speaking there.   Who else is going to be speaking there?   Princess Marianne Parker, another one of my students.   She transformed herself from a Bulgarian peasant to the princess of etiquette.   She's going to tell you how etiquette saved her life and made her wealthy.   And who else is going to be speaking there?   This guy named Steve.    Steve:          I heard he had big eyes and he’s probably gonna yell a lot. He's gonna drop a few ‘BOOMS!’ in the Carnegie Hall.   Oh!   Clint:       This event is called The Living Legends of Entrepreneurial Marketing.   This man, Steve, built 500+ funnels for Russell Brunson and ClickFunnels. How freaking legendary is that? Unbelievable.   I'm really excited to have you join us on the main stage for two sessions of dropping booms all over Carnegie Hall.   I'm really excited to share you with my audience because you're such an amazing speaker man.   Dude, you are an amazing speaker. I love you and I'm excited to share you with all of my friends who are going to be coming to this event.   HERE COMES THE SCARCITY & URGENCY   There are only 600 tickets total for this event.   Steve:       Holy smokes.   Clint:      Super special. Super special event. Tickets are available and people should be getting their tickets as soon as they can.   Steve:       That's awesome. Hey, so what are the dates so people know?   Clint:       September 26th/ 27th/ 28th in New York City at Carnegie Hall. Yeah, the one, the only Carnegie Hall. That's right.   Steve:       The actual Carnegie Hall.   Clint:       Yeah, the actual one!   You know who's spoken in here besides Albert Einstein? This is the coolest.   In 1906, Mark Twain gave his last lecture at Carnegie Hall.   I've asked Dan Kennedy to come and give his last lecture.   I said, "Dan, if you were going to die and you knew you were going to die and your kid came to you and said, ‘Dad, what should I do to thrive as an entrepreneur?’ that's what I want you to share with the audience."   That's what Michael Gerber is going to share.   That's what Martha Stewart's going to share, Ice-T, Coco, Scorpion, everybody. You too.   What is the magic sauce to thrive as an entrepreneur?   I'm so excited to hear what everybody has to say.   Steve:       Yeah. I just, I can't even tell you how stoked I am.   When you asked ... I was trying to ... “Oh, yeah, no, I'll be there, Clint. Yeah. Let me check. Yeah, no, I can be there.”   Then I hung up and I just started yelling.   I'm so excited, man.   Thank you so much. Very excited for it.   And you guys, you can go to seestevelive.com and it will take you over to the tickets - so you guys can go get booked up. Only 600 tickets, guys. That is NOT many. Go get one - especially for all those names.   Clint:       There's not 600 left... I've already been selling tickets.   Steve:       Oh, really?   Clint:       A lot of the VIP and Elite Tickets are already taken.   There are different levels…   There's general admission -  if you just want to come and you're scraping it together to make it.   Step up and show up for this thing - it will change your life. Going to events really does change you.   Steve:       Yeah, it does.   Clint:       You told the story of going to your first Russell Brunson's ClickFunnels Live and how that changed your whole freaking life.   Steve:       Yeah, everything.   Clint:       Well, that's what's going to happen here. Where was that ClickFunnels live? Somewhere in Orlando?   Steve:       Yeah. San Diego, actually. Yeah. Yeah. It's far.   Clint:       San Diego. Dude...   This event is at Carnegie Hall with Martha Stewart, Dan Kennedy, Michael Gerber, you and Scorpion, the smartest man in the world.   You see, what people don't understand is that the venue changes the event.   You can have the same performers, one of them performing, one time performing here and the next time performing at some arena someplace.   You're going to get a much more intense performance at Carnegie Hall because the venue brings out the power from the performer.   The performers rise up to the venue.   You know who else has spoken in Carnegie Hall? Aside from Albert Einstein and Mark Twain, we had…   Franklin Delano Roosevelt   Elenor Roosevelt   Teddy Roosevelt   Martin Luther King   Ernest Hemingway   Groucho Marx   Andy Kaufman   Jerry Seinfeld   The Beatles   Frank Sinatra   Liza Minnelli   If you have been a living legend, you've performed at this venue.   ...and that's why I selected it. That's why I'm paying the big money to get it.   That's why I'm paying the big money to have all these incredible names come and share their last lectures with my audience to change entrepreneurs' lives and their vision of what's possible in the future.   Steve:       Man. I'm not going to stop press and record. This is so awesome. Holy smokes!   I'm so psyched about it.   So September 26th through 28th. Literally Carnegie Hall! Obviously, New York City. 600 people.   Go to seestevelive.com.  and it’ll take you right over there.   Anyways, Clint, thank you so much for being on here. I really appreciate you being on. I can't even explain what kind of an honor this is.   Clint:       I'm so excited to be doing this. I have a testimony on my website from Peng Joon, because he came and spoke at one of my events at NASDAQ, and he said:   "Clint specializes in creating experiences."   That's really what I do... and that's what I've created here:   The experience of this unique first time ever entrepreneurial conference in this venue is going to be historical, life-changing, and career changing, and you don't want to miss it   I'm looking forward to sharing it with you, all of your friends and your audience; September 26th, 27th, and 28th. Thanks, Steve.   Steve:       Oh, sir, thank you so much. Appreciate it. We will see you there.   BOOM!   SEE STEVE LIVE   So several years ago, I walked by a stage in a basketball stadium.   It was my college campus and I was deeply concerned with what I wanted to do in my life.   For some reason, I looked at the stage and thought, "Huh, one day I wanna be on stage. I wanna be an entrepreneur and I wanna buy and sell companies."    Well, while the last one hasn't happened ... yet, Muahaha... stage and entrepreneurship have.   And as my business has grown and my message has spread, a frequent question I'm asked is, "Steve, what stage will you be on next?"   Now I totally get that this feels, maybe, a little conceited here...   But considering my childhood fear of speaking up, being heard, extreme lack of self-confidence, and getting in front of people, back in my growing up days, I feel satisfied.   I thought I'd tell you where I'll be in the world coming up.   And funny enough, just literally go over to seestevelive.com, and it'll forward you to the next place.   I love stage and it's one of my biggest things to look forward to in my current role in my business.   From little 10 person masterminds all the way to gigantic 5000 person events - from free seats to paid events - events have always been one of the ways I can deliver the MOST value and get the greatest “AHA’s” in the shortest amount of time.   Just come say hi, and go over to seestevelive.com.

On this episode, we dive into the conversation around Sekiro and accessibility as we chat with Clint Stewart about his experience playing Soulsbourne games with an arm and a foot. iTunes Page: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/noclip/id1385062988 RSS Feed: http://noclippodcast.libsyn.com/rssGoogle Play: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/If7gz7uvqebg2qqlicxhay22qny Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5XYk92ubrXpvPVk1lin4VB?si=JRAcPnlvQ0-YJWU9XiW9pg Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/noclippodcast Watch our docs: https://youtube.com/noclippodcast Sub our new podcast channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSHBlPhuCd1sDOdNANCwjrA Learn About Noclip: https://www.noclip.videoBecome a Patron and get early access to new episodes: https://www.patreon.com/noclip Follow @noclipvideo on Twitter Hosted by @dannyodwyerFunded by 4,501 Patrons.  ------------------------------------------------------------- - [Danny] Hello and welcome to Noclip, the podcast about the people who play and make video games. I'm your host Danny O'Dwyer. We've had a lot of people on who have made video games, so it's about time we've had someone on who plays them. And this isn't just anyone, this is a friend of Noclip and somebody I've wanted to collaborate with for quite awhile. So I'll let him introduce himself. Clint, how are you doing this fine Friday afternoon? - [Clint] I'm doing great, thank you. Hey Danny. - [Danny] Tell us a little bit about yourself. I'll kind of get into what we're gonna talk about in a hot second, but tell us your name, where you are right now, and what we're here to talk about. - [Clint] Alright, my name is Clint Stewart. I go by DisabledCable on Twitter and JehovahNova on Steam, bunch of other names. I think TreeLegDog may be one of them. I've been a gamer most of my life and almost seven years ago, I was injured very badly and I lost my left arm and I broke my back as well, so trying to learn how to play games one-handed has been quite the challenge. - [Danny] And you're somebody who can kind of speak to the accessibility question from somebody who has experienced playing games with no disability and experiencing games with a pretty heavy one as well. We've a lot to get into today. Before we sort of talk about, I guess, your experience more generally, I just want to let everyone know how this came to happen for this episode of the podcast. I've been wanting to do something with Clint for a long time because his insight into this is super refreshing and he's a very eloquent speaker but we've sort of struggled to get that project up and running. We're hoping to do it the future. But what happened in the past month I guess is this sort of general conversation that's been going on around Sekiro easy mode and accessibility, which I did a video on on Noclip. You can watch an episode of Bonus Level that's kind of all about that. And that was kind of my opinion on it but I thought, the way Noclip works is that we often ask the experts about these things. People who aren't, we're not just giving my option on the state of development or design or anything but we go out and we find people who are experts in these issues. Clint is an expert in this. Not only because of the way in which he plays games but also because he's a fan of the particular series in question. So pretty early on I kind of tapped him up and was like, hey, when you've played the game a bit can you come on the podcast and sort of chew the shit with us about this? So first of all, thank you so much for coming on and making the time. - [Clint] Yeah, thank you. I've gotta say to start off with too, you did buy it for me. So I gotta be, first off, I've never been called an expert and you did buy the game for me, so that's all. All that's out of the way and start now. - [Danny] Yeah, we don't let interns, we don't do unpaid internships or don't pay people who are contributing to our work so yeah, yeah, no. Absolutely, it's the least we could do. So before we touch on Sekiro, can you tell us a little bit about how you generally play games? Like if you're going out to buy a game today Clint, what are the considerations that you have to sort of take into account? And how do you actually play them? - [Clint] Definitely, and this is a great first question because it really made me think about the Souls games and games like those and just everything that I have to take into consideration when I buy a game. The last game that I bought that was similar to Sekiro would be Neo. And I had to refund Neo when I first bought it because they released that PC port with no mouse keyboard controls whatsoever. I'm used to some games mouse and keyboard not working in the menus or maybe I can't rebind the keys in-game but I can do it in the Razer Synapse software, but with Neo, it was just like no. You better buy a controller or it's just not gonna work. And just one of the only times I've ever had to refund a game. - [Danny] Is that rare? Does that happen often? - [Clint] That is extremely rare these days, thankfully. And enough people, I got on Twitter which my tweet might have got two likes. I don't think I got noticed by anybody but more than just me who's coming out saying, hey, this needs mouse and keyboard support. You can't release a PC game with no mouse and keyboard support. And I was hoping that maybe the Dark Souls, before the remaster that just came out, the community got together and made mouse keyboard controls work in that game as well. Because the first Dark Souls port was horrible. It's one of the worst ports I think I've ever played. And the community got, what was it called? The DS Fix, I guess the one guy made. But then they added on to it and added mouse and keyboard support, but they still didn't get the prompts right. So you would get a prompt on the screen to do something but it would say, it would be the controller prompt. You still wouldn't get the mouse and keyboard, which is extremely frustrating when you're trying to remember. You've just changed everything up and you think you remember what you did but then you know, that's extremely frustrating. Generally when I buy a game I look, does it have rebindable keys? And if not, that's not always a deal breaker, but does it just have mouse and keyboard support in general? Because I have two different one-handed controllers and I don't want to knock the guys that worked on those, that created them. One of them was the first guy who I'd ever seen even do this. He has a channel on YouTube. And each controller has it's own issues, but I mean for what they are, there really is no other choice if you have to play console games. I mean because they still haven't gotten around to adding mouse and keyboard support fully on the Xbox. I think PlayStation has some in a couple games. But even like Xbox, they just added it and they have a partnership with Razer, but yet if you were to turn on the Xbox and try to just use the mouse and keyboard, or in my case the mouse and footboard, which is the Stinkyboard, you can't do anything. You have to use a controller to navigate the UI. And then to find the games that will work with mouse and keyboard. It's a lot to think about when you're looking at games. - [Danny] Yeah, it's a whole lot of questions that most of us don't really have to consider at all. So when you're interacting with these games, obviously the bindable keys, you said, is a really important part of it. But what are you using physically? Because presumably you're not using both a mouse and keyboard. You're remapping this to a third-party peripheral, or sort of a-- - [Clint] So yeah, just let me explain that a little better. I use a 19 button mouse that's called a Razer Naga. Razer is the company that makes it and the Naga is the brand. And basically it's made for MMO. It's called an MMO mouse. Which I have used it in an MMO, and we can talk about that later. I think that's, one of the games that I used to try to teach myself how to play again was World of Warcraft. And then I also use a Stinkyboard, which is a four button footboard. Now both of these hardware have software tied to them as well that will allow you to completely rebind. You can make any of the buttons whichever button you want. And then the Razer software is even more powerful because you can make macros as well. And there are certain games like Devil May Cry 5, that just came out recently. That's a beautiful game. It's brilliant, it's a lot of fun to play. But for me as a one-armed gamer that was infuriating because you had to press three different buttons to be able to do some moves. And that was including having to hold down a button for lock on. So I ended up having to go in the Razer Synapse software and make a simple on/off macro for lock on, just so I could do some of the moves in that game. Out of all the things that they forget to add, like of course I would love to see ultrawide support or unlock frame rate. The game does have unlock frame rate, but just simple lock on. Being able to just toggle that on or off. Just like maybe you want to have sprint always on, have a toggle on sprint or a toggle on crouch. For lock on should be something that just needs to be industry standard. Do you want it toggable or not? - Wow. - Just help people out. That's definitely something I've come across in a few different games. - [Danny] Yeah, I hadn't thought about that consideration at all. When you're playing then, so you have a prosthesis, right? Like you have some sort-- - [Clint] I actually do have government subsidies, or I should say subsidized, because I had to go through a legal battle just to get Medicare and Medicaid. I've talked to you about my story before, you know what happened. They denied me disability. I actually got denied twice and had to get a disability lawyer to get disability. And then when I finally got in court the judge was like, oh my lord, son, we're gonna take care of this. - Oh my goodness. - And I was in and out of there in two minutes. - [Danny] On what grounds were they? - [Clint] You know what, the first letter I got back they were like, oh he can still bend over and lift things. I'm like, with what good back and what two arms? Did you even read what your doctor said? Ah, bureaucrats, man. - [Danny] That's incredible. So the judge like took one glance at you and kind of-- - [Clint] Yeah, soon as I got in front of the judge he was just like, I am so sorry sir, and we're gonna get this taken care of. Within the next three months I had an arm. You know, I think the government paid $90,000 for it, I wanna say. And it's very nice but it's very limited. I mean, it's the first version, right? Like if I had, I've got a few complaints about it, but one of the most being is how heavy it is. Because it's carbon fiber and it's got a battery. And also due to the kind of amputation that I had. I don't have a lot of arm left so it's pretty much just resting on my shoulder which is supported by my back which again, my L3 and L5 were severely cracked and my L4 looks like a spiderweb. They didn't think I'd be able to walk again. So that's a miracle in itself that I'm still walking and talking. So I count my lucky stars and I don't complain about too many things. But definitely this whole conversation around accessibility versus difficulty's really got me thinking. Your video is great that it looked at the nuance of it. You didn't just do one hot take or try to ride the fence. I saw your other tweet where you compared it to how you play racing games, and that really hit home for me because I would love to play VR games but yet you don't see me demanding them make all VR games playable for me with one hand because they're still creating that space. Like if I were to buy VR now I might be able to play Dirt Rally or maybe Elite Dangerous. They'd probably be the only two games I could really play in VR. - [Danny] Yeah so let's jump into that then there, since you brought it up. How did you feel then about that sort of, I mean it was a very broad conversation that sort of was almost like numerous different conversations that were bumping into each other. But just speaking from the heart, what was your initial reaction to the conversation about that and what was your opinion on it? - [Clint] Honestly, I really feel like it's a branding problem. I feel like, let's say they added an easy mode tomorrow in Sekiro or the Dark Souls games, you're not gonna care, right? Is it gonna lesser the experience that you had? No. Matter of fact, I could enable easy mode in my game right now because I ended up getting that mod. They patched it and then my workaround for the ultrawide fix wasn't working anymore so I found a mod that unlocks the FPS, does the ultrawide, lets you choose some camera adjustments. Where the game works now is if you target someone the camera automatically snaps to you. Or if you move at all, the camera automatically will snap back on you and this mod will disable that as well as give you FOV adjustment. I know it's something TeeVee was always preaching about. That really makes a huge difference when you're sitting really close to the monitor. Having a bigger FOV, it's huge. But that same mod will also let you turn down the speed, which isn't that how the guy from PC Gamer, I forget his name, but he was like, I cheated and I feel fine. - [Danny] Right - [Clint] I feel like it's just a branding problem, right? If we called it cheats I think everybody would be happy, because the people that don't care would just be like, yeah, I cheated, who gives a shit? And then everybody else would be like, you cheated yourself and the game. - [Danny] That's a good point. - [Clint] 'Cause it's all the same thing. We're just talking, like you said, we're talking around each other. We're all talking about different things but they do kind of correlate. I really do feel like it's a branding problem. Let's just call it cheats and be done with it. 'Cause even though I could cheat in this game I'm not gonna do it. I love this game. Honestly, the boss I had the most trouble with so far was a miniboss. It's not in the main bosses I've encountered. And I should say, I haven't beaten the game yet. You got it for me a couple weeks ago. I've been taking my time. I've been enjoying it. I've been exploring everywhere. - [Danny] Good, me too. You're way ahead of me, buddy. - [Clint] Oh, really? That makes me feel good. - Oh yeah. - [Clint]I'm like, he's probably gonna beat the game and be like, you're where? But yeah, the biggest difference for me I feel like with accessibility versus difficulty, like I recently beat The Witcher 3 as well. And that's a game that I had to start over because I ended up having to wipe my hard drive so I lost like 80 hours. And then I ended up like, I'm just gonna do everything. And so I spent another 150 hours just trying to clear my map. And so I finally beat that recently and that was a game I actually turned down the difficulty on a few of those last fights, just because they were annoying. The controls are transcendent in Sekiro, even more so than Dark Souls. - [Danny] Well, it's funny like you're talking about how you're adding all these things and you're saying you're not cheatingsome people could argue that you're playing the game at a way higher level. 'Cause you're playing with your foot and one hand, whereas most of us have access to two analog sticks. - [Clint] This game makes me feel like a ninja, it really does. I'm playing a one arm ninja, so the symbolism is not lost on me. I completely adore this. And the fact that you said maybe I'm playing on a higher level, I have felt like that has hindered me in some games. Take Dark Souls for example. Even on the remaster the mouse and keyboard controls are not perfect, they're not. I have to make a macro in that game for the jump attack and then like a kick I think, where you have to press two buttons at once. One of them's like forward and attack and the other's like, I forget exactly what it is. But I had to make that simple macro just because those buttons wouldn't always register because I've got W on my footboard. So I guess I should just tell you a little about this. I've got W and S on my footboard. So where those are very close together where I can press them very quickly if I need to. And the first two buttons I have on the Naga, there's a row of 12 buttons on the side, and the very first two where my thumb constantly rests are left and right, so A and D. I did it that way so I could press them in combination together because the Stinkyboard, when I first got it, it's first driver revision it wouldn't allow you to press more than one key at a time. So I couldn't, for instance, press two buttons on there at the same time. Where if I tie it to the mouse I'm able to do a Shift move to the left and move forward at same, it's kind of like a diagonal, you know. You're pressing three buttons at once to do what two buttons should do. And it's little workarounds like that that I've had to get comfortable with. I used to make a profile for each game that I would play. I mean, I've got a gigantic Sting library now. I started to realize, I need presets, right? Like this is the preset for action RPGs. This is the preset for shooters. This is my strategy preset. So I've just kinda had to learn just by doing, like okay, this is what I should do. - [Danny] Right, are some genres that are totally off the cards? You're saying up, down, left, right. Like Mortal Combat just came out. Are you able to play that at all? - [Clint] I have not played a fighting game since my accident and I would say, now I grew up playing Street Fighter. I had a Street Fighter callous. People that played that game will no what I'm talking about. If you played enough of it you would develop a callous. Depending on what kind of characters you like playing too and I never played the guy, the M. Bison kind of characters. I always liked the Ryu and the Ken's and the 360 characters like Zang and stuff. So my thumbs got destroyed, especially depending on what controller you used. And now with the setup I have I could play Street Fighter if I programmed everything or if I played with simplified control. 'Cause I think they introduced that in one of the games. It was like, you could do advanced moves by just pressing a button and I tried it and was just like, this is so boring. Now I haven't tried it since I've been hurt. This was several years ago. And I just know that the game wouldn't be fun to me, to play it that way. Like I'm not looking for something so easy that it's just mind numbing. That's not, I do play games to be challenged and to have a good time. Just pressing one button over and over's not really, that's not a good time. - [Danny] I think that's why I was so impressed by the fact that you were playing these games because for me, as somebody who has both my hands, I was incredibly intimidated to play Bloodborne last year. I'd never really played a Soulsborne game until last year and then the reason I played it was we'd just had a kid and I was spending hours and hours lying on the sofa with her asleep on my chest and there was nothing I could do except play games. And I thought well, fuck it. This is probably a good a time as ever to actually try and-- - [Clint]Are you playing with the baby on your chest? Wow. - Yeah, yeah. - [Clint] Heard about being cold and in the moment. - [Danny] It forced me to actually, I don't know, be very intentional. And I couldn't get frustrated because she'd wake up if I started to shout or move or get angry or throw a controller. So going back and playing the first Dark Souls which I did months after when the remaster came out, and also playing Sekiro, I found them very, very intimidating. What other games do you play? And is there something special about those Sekiro, Soulsborne games? - [Clint] So yes, yes. First of all they are brilliant. They're a masterclass in game design, whether it's the art team. Now, the only thing you could really knock against it may be the story. The story in the Souls game's pretty obtuse. You kinda have to go looking for it. Maybe you need to watch some lore videos. I am glad that this new game there are cinematics. There's like more of a traditional story. I do appreciate the fact that it's not quite so, they respect the player. And that when they teach you something, they expect you to have learned that and to begin, not necessarily master it right away, but begin to start working on it. There are so many times where after I've beaten a boss I've been like, okay, so let me see, what's the cheese for this strategy? Is there a cheese? And I'll look it up after just to see did I do it the cheat way? I actually thought that I had beat, what's her name? Lady Butterfly, I had thought I had cheesed her because how I killed her was I kind of, I love they have fake attacking in this game. Like you can act like you're gonna attack and then block and it will fake it. And that's very similar to World of Warcraft, fake casting. As a caster in WoW, you don't want them to interrupt your heal, like when you gotta get off, or the spell you have to get off, so you kinda have to fake. Like you're, I'm gonna cast, I'm gonna cast, use your interrupt, ha ha I got ya. That's built into the gameplay. So I kinda tricked her and baited her to get into a corner and then one of her really killer moves in the air, I only had to dodge twice and I'd be able to attack her. At least get like two attacks on her when she's in a corner. So I look up the cheese on her, and the cheese is like do this one move over and over and over and over and over. And I was like, holy shit. That's so cheesy. I did not, I thought I'd cheesed it but no, I didn't cheese it at all. - [Danny] You talking about cheeses is like, also sort of goes into the previous point you made about this being a marketing issue. The delineation between accessibility and cheats and then cheeses and strategy, because one of the things that came to my mind when were talking about easy modes in these games was the music box in Bloodborne, which is like, it's a fucking easy mode. - [Clint] I'm not familiar with that. - [Danny] So if you, you know, Father Gascoigne is a, oh, have you played Bloodborne? Of course, it's a PlayStation-- - [Clint] So yeah, I should say, yeah, it's on PlayStation. I haven't played it because I only have the Xbox one-handed controllers. I'm hoping they just add, they bring everything to PC. I know they're not gonna bring everything to PC but at least let me use mouse and keyboard, or in my case mouse and footboard on console. 'Cause one-handed controllers, no matter which one I have, they don't compare. For me, they have a one-hand, a mouse and this footboard, there's just nothing that comes close to that. Such a shame. I saw the tweet from the God of War guy and I'm like, yeah, your game's really aren't accessible to me at all, buddy. And I know it's, I know he wasn't thinking like that but I hate exclusivity, man. I really do. I wish you could play everything on anything. That's what I hope the future of gaming is, honestly. - [Danny] Yeah, I'd never even considered the fact that basically the PlayStation games are completely off the cards. So Spiderman. - Played Bloodborne, I haven't played Spiderman. Yeah, Spider-Man's the one that's killing me. Even more so than Bloodborne or God of War, is Spiderman. I wanna play Spiderman so bad. - [Danny] Metal Gear Solid V, did that come out on PC? - [Clint] Yes, that was on PC, yes. And that was actually a great-- - [Danny] Let me quickly explain that, the music box thing 'cause then I've got another question, just now that we've brought up the Metal Gear Solid thing. So in Bloodborne, they're one of the first bosses you meet, Father Gascoigne. Earlier, I'd say at least half of players run into this like windowsill where somebody, who I think you later find out then is his daughter, gives you a music box. And if you use the music box during the fight he basically staggers and you can use it infinitely up until I think, no you can use it three times during the fight. But it's basically a free hit. - Oh wow. - [Danny] And it completely changes the difficulty in that. I would say cuts the difficulty at least in half for that fight for new players. - [Clint] You used or did you avoid it because you knew about it? - [Danny] Yeah, the first time I played through it. The first time I played through it Bloodborne had been out for so long that at that stage, you know, I think I was working at GameStop when it came out so somebody did a video about that. So when it came round, the first time I played it I definitely did it. But in subsequent playthroughs I haven't bothered because I've gotten better at it by that stage. Which, you know, that's kinda how those games work, right? - [Clint] You use the skills that you have, right? That makes sense. The difficulty, they want you to learn. I feel like these games are trying to teach people patience and just not to give up. - [Danny] Totally, but at the same time they're not completely walling it off to people who-- - [Clint] I don't think so. - [Danny] No, I don't think that's the intent. I don't think it's some crazy hardcore. - [Clint] The quote that everybody loves to put up when they talk about, oh, it'll never have a easy mode. This is from Miyazaki, I'm sure I'm saying that wrong, the quote that everyone always loves to through up is, we don't wanna include a difficulty selection because we want to bring everyone to the same level of discussion and the same level of enjoyment. The next part of that quote is, so we want everyone to first face that challenge and to overcome it in some way that suits them as a player. That's the part everyone always leaves out. And I feel like with this one, they've really nailed it because they include a lot of options in terms of changing the keybinds. In some of Dark Souls, you couldn't change some of the keys at first. Like it was just completely locked out. The camera options that they added in, the fact that even include a selection now to show keyboard and mouse prompts instead of just, even though you changed the settings and maybe even changed what the keybindings were it still will show up Xbox buttons. That's so infuriating. - [Danny] Absolutely, and whenever I play PC games and I've got my Xbox controller plugged in that happens. And it irritates me, but obviously the other way round it happens all the time, I imagine. - [Clint] There's the other side of that too, where games like Battlefield, and I don't know if this works in the newest one, but it did work in Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4, as well. You could set up different keybindings, right? Like they've always allowed that. But then they also would allow you to set the plane to a flight stick. So if you had a cheap little joystick or something, or a controller even, you could set it to where when you've got it in the plane it would switch over to the controller. And then when you ejected, you could move back to mouse and keyboard. And I always thought that was brilliant and I wish more games would do stuff like that. Granted you're taking into account people have additional expensive hardware and that's the other thing people don't always think about is all this accessibility stuff is really expensive. I even saw the Xbox guys getting crap 'cause they're XAC was $100. When you look at what they did, they could have easily charged $300 for that. And they still probably would have been taking a loss. - [Danny] Another element of this that you brought up a second ago was the way in which the lore of Sekiro sort of marries with your personal experience as well. I've actually noticed, I'm not sure if this is just because accessibility's been part of the general gaming conversation more now than it certainly was in the past, but I've noticed this recent trend with player characters with prosthesis on their arms. Am I crazy or has this just suddenly appeared everywhere? - [Clint] No, it's definitely starting to be a thing. I got asked like what was my favorite disabled superhero maybe four, five years ago. And the only one I could even think of in gaming or in comics was the guy from Deus Ex, the remaster, the remake, or whatever. What's his name? - [Danny] JC, no JC Denton was, Jensen? What was it? - [Clint] Jensen was the guy from the last two, I think. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. - [Danny and Clint] Adam Jensen. - [Danny] We got there. - [Clint] Yeah, you got me thinking JC Denton and I was like. That's the original, but the remakes or whatever, the reimaginings. 'Cause he was the only one I could really think of and then since then you've had the chick on the Battlefield cover. There's people in Overwatch that only have one arm. - [Danny] Apex Legends, I think. - [Clint] Apex Legends as well. Well, they got a whole cyborg in that one too. - [Danny] Right, Solid Snake? - [Clint] Yeah, that actually, you know what, that hit me the hardest. That's something I could talk about real quick. - [Danny] Yeah, go for it, absolutely. - [Clint] That scene was so powerful. It totally blew my mind. Now, I didn't have exact similar experience where I woke up. I knew, I came into the hospital talking about chop me off. Chop it off, just chop it off. I know it's gone, chop it off. And those doctors and nurses looked at me like I was crazy. Like damn, how is he living? I don't know if I told you this story but they didn't even know about my back. I woke up after my amputation and was like, holy shit, my arm is gone. I need a smoke. And they were like, you can't go outside? I'm like, you can't tell me what to do. And then I fell on my face and that's when they were like, oh, we need to check something. That's when they found out my spine was all screwed up. But yeah, getting off topic. So Call of Duty, in the last two or three Call of Duty's, it seemed like they just kept having, Buddy would always get his arm chopped off. There would always be that scene where like, it's just gruesome and they're tearing the arm off or it's getting trapped in a door or something. And you see, you get dragged away and your arms left there. They did that, I know for at least two years in a row. That never bothered me or impacted me at all. I played that opening scene in Metal Gear and all, granted most of it is just kind of a walking Sim for the first hour, hour and a half. But that first 20, 30 minutes is very powerful because you wake up. And I do remember waking up in the hospital bed and being like, what do you mean I can't get up? Oh, you did what to my back? Oh my god, my arm is gone. That was very surreal, very powerful. And the have David Bowie playing over it too. And of course those guys come in and kill the one guy couple minutes later but it was a very powerful scene. I love Hideo Kojima, that guy is a genius. I hope I get to play his next one. - [Danny] What was it like, I guess as well, the subtitle for that game is Phantom Pain, which we've talked in the past, that's obviously a massive issue for yourself and for people in your situation. - [Clint] And trying to describe that for people is nearly impossible. I mean, it's a constant thing that I have to worry about and over the last, I wanna say the last year or so, it's gotten a lot better in terms of I'm not getting the spikes. Have you ever had a searing headache to where, or let's say stomach pain, where your stomach's hurting, right? But then you get those surges to where you just wanna double up and you can't do anything. Phantom pain is like that. It can be a constant aggravation. Just something's constantly in the back of your mind. Or it could constantly just be bringing you to your knees where you can't do anything else. There is no, I mean I've cussed out my mama before. I love my mama, I would never do that, right? I've been hurtin' bad enough to cuss my mom out. That's kinda how I have to explain it to people. It hurts bad enough that it'll make you cuss your mom out. And you the type of person that normally do that, that's saying a lot. It's a mindfuck, man. And I'm sorry for cussing, really no other way to describin' it. It is unreal. I wish there were words that I could use to give it justice. And for some people, I've heard stories of where it lasts 90 days, they lose a limb and 90 days later, they're fine. Maybe it aggravates them every now and then, but for the most part they're fine. But for some reason with me, this October will be seven years and I'm still dealing with it. So I wish I had an answer as to why, but I don't. - [Danny] Does that, presumably not just playing video games, but that must impact every moment of your life. - [Clint] Oh yeah, the first thing I did when I got my disability was not build some crazy super rig and buy this Razer Naga and all this stuff. I bought a chair. I bought a very expensive chair that was good, felt comfortable to sit in and supported my back. That was the first thing I did and it was, it cost me $400 but it was worth every penny. I still have the same chair. It doesn't need an upgrade. I'll be ready to upgrade this computer before I'm ready to upgrade this chair. That definitely helps a lot. But dealing with pain and dealing with pain management, I've had to learn a lot of things because when you're constantly, your head's constantly cloudy it's hard to think clearly about anything, much less be able to deal with, you know. Let's say I get a cold or something, sometimes that's enough to just ruin my day whereas having a cold before was no big deal, whatever. 'Cause it's just addition, right? You keep adding on the things. I'm grateful that you followed me this long on Twitter, man. I can't imagine you haven't wanted to just mute me before. Because I either would just go blackout for six months or just rage for several days in a row. And then be like, oh, I love this, I love that. - [Danny] I think that's everyone on Twitter actually. Myself included. - [Clint] I kinda noticed that a little. Basically there to just bitch. - [Danny] I mean, was there any then, you know, just in relation to the thematically, this has been used in games a number of times, what was your experience with what happens in Sekiro and his use of a prosthesis? - [Clint] It's genius, it blew my mind. Like I know it's game design, right? And this is not, like none of it's real. But it really got me thinking, well, what if some of this was kind of based on some history? Like how much of this, because when I first lost my arm that was, me and my friends were talking about it like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if it had a blade like the dude from Deus Ex? You think you could, what all could you fit in there? Would it fit grenades? And it's like, no man. Why would I walk around with, you know, not serious talk. Just friends being, they were drunk and being stupid. And just thinking about what all different things could you do with an arm? And then I'm like, I wish it was the future where I could just walk up to a system and be like, okay, I would like a soda from this machine. Or give me 10 grand out this ATM. Have you seen the anime where the little finger pops up and the little wires come out? Like that would be amazing. But yeah, I love the use of the prosthetic. And I feel like that balances some of the difficulty, especially early on. I've seen a lot of people have trouble with that first red-eye ogre. And when I came across 'em I had already done the memory and beaten Lady Butterfly, so I was super powerful. I felt super, I mean I had the flaming barrel, I had plenty of oil, and I totally messed that dude up. He might have killed me once, twice maybe 'cause I didn't know about the add with the spear. Oh man, there's definitely some moves that once you get 'em, they tell you how useful they are and they'll even warn you again. And some of the handholding. That's actually hurt me, and something I'm sure they didn't think about. So I have to take my hand off the mouse, go over to the Escape on the keyboard, hit Escape, try to get my hand back on the mouse before I get smacked. Nine times out of 10 I'm getting smacked. And I know they're doing it to help people and trying to remind them like, hey, this is what this does. But that kept getting in the way for me. I realize what they're trying to do and I know they're trying to make these games more accessible. And I think that fact that it sold two million copies in 10 days, that surprised me even. I didn't think this game would do that good. These games are notoriously hard. My brother said I can't believe you're playing this. Not because he thinks I'm too disabled, but because he thinks it requires too much patience. They all have the impression they're so hard that nobody can actually play these unless you just can control your rage. - [Danny] Yeah, they do sort of have a, I don't know, there's a sort of a mythic quality to this, which is earned in many ways, but there's an urban legend aspect to it as well which has kind of made it a bit ridiculous. One question actually we got from somebody. I put a call out on Twitter just before we went live for questions and one we got in actually rubs up against that which was, Video Attack asks, how much of the reputation for the series being obtuse and difficult do you think could be addressed with proper tutorializing and making more in-depth mechanics easier to understand? I love the series, but I don't always feel they've done well explaining mechanics to the player. I found that in the early games that was kind of part of the discovery of those games, was trying to figure it out. But Sekiro I feel like is so, I feel like you really have to defeat bosses in very particular ways, in ways that I maybe aren't, I don't know. Maybe I'm just lacking the patience for it a little bit or something. How do you feel? 'Cause they've definitely done a better job of the tutorials. It's interesting to here you say the tutorials were getting in your way. - [Clint] They've definitely done that. Yeah, and that's just for me having one hand. Let's say maybe I had decided to put Escape for whatever reason and I macro'd that, or put that on my footboard or somewhere on the mouse, then I wouldn't have this issue. But of all the keys that I could afford to re-keybind, Escape is almost never one of them. Escape and Map are the last two things I worry about in games So they've definitely done a better job in terms of addressing that. But I feel like it's only gonna get as good as it can. Again I tell you, this does this and this is when you should use this. Now whether you remember to use it then, when you're supposed to, that's not really up to them, right? So a lot of I think like is perspective. Like you can die to a boss 10 times and think, oh, this is bullshit. I'm never playing this game again. Or you could die 10 times and during those 10 attempts somewhere you see where you made a mistake. Maybe you panic, maybe you got overaggressive. I feel like their games are trying to teach you certain things but at a certain point they do expect you to put it all together. And not everyone is the type of gamer to have read the messages and pay attention to what it is. Maybe even practice what the move is and been able to put into practice at the right time. I don't really know what they can do to do that besides even more severe handholding which I think would just detract from the game, honestly. - [Danny] It reminds me a little bit of just how games have changed over the past 20, 30 years. And one of the instances where this sort of, at least from my experience, reads most clearly is, the first game I ever completed was The Secret of Monkey Island on the Amiga. And it took me I think three months. I was pretty young when it came out. I think I was eight or nine. And it took me like three months, a whole summer basically, to complete it. And then the remaster came out. I wanna say it was on 360 and PS3 maybe. And it was really cool and updated graphics and loads of cool new music and all that stuff, but they also had the tip system in it. And there were some things that you had to do in that game. Like to get to one of the little islands off of Melee Island, you had to use a rubber chicken and a wire to zip across it which kind of makes no sense. I remember being stuck on that forever. But in this thing, you could use a tip and it would like, I think there was three levels of tip. They would give you a little bit of a nudge, a little bit more of a nudge, and they would just say, just use the fucking chicken wire on the wire, right? And I remember thinking, oh that's a good thing, right? Kind of, 'cause it's helping people. But I guess it says less about how difficult games were and more about where our expectations of difficulty came from. Like when that happened years ago I didn't think, oh they made this game wrong. Or you know, this is stupid. I wish they did something to let me know how to do this. I just thought, oh I'm dumb. I don't know what to do to get to that island. Whereas these days we have this expectation that we sort of need to constantly be getting this positive feedback. Even when, like you said in the boss fights, often times I'll die 10 times in a row but it's because I was using the same tactics 10 times in a row. Other games might actually, some games if you play the boss fight for the third time, they without letting you know will make that boss fight easier. And they don't signal it. Games are constantly doing this sort of stuff. - [Clint] The new Resident Evil does that, I believe. I died one too many times in the police station and they were like, would you like to make the game easier? And I was like offended by it. I was like, hey man, F you. It's not my fault your buddy cornered me. I was trying to leave I was like, I appreciate the offer but at the same time, I was like, that would be great for someone who needs it. And it didn't offend me that it was in the game, it just offended me that they thought I needed it. I was like, hey, hey, I got this, man. Leave me alone. But I have no problem with it being in the game. I honestly don't care. - [Danny] And that was an instance where they told you. Where sometimes they don't even bother telling you. Actually, now that I think about it, there is another bell. Speaking of bells from Bloodborne. There's a bell in Sekiro, have you seen this one? The bell that you can ring and it makes the bosses harder. - [Clint] You know what? I've come across it but is that what it does? It makes stuff harder? - [Danny] I think it does two things. I think it makes one thing easier and one thing harder. Like I think it might increase the drop rate on certain things but it makes the bosses more difficult. I don't know exactly what it is. But definitely if you ring it it will make the game harder in some respects. - [Clint] I've come across it and the message was a little bit cryptic. It sort of made it sound like it was gonna be a harder game if you rang the bell. - [Danny] It's something like, don't ring the bell, or something. - [Clint] Yeah, yeah. I was like, I'm just gonna ignore this for now 'til I know what this is. I'm sure there'll be a lore video on it eventually that I can figure out whether or not I should ring it. This kinda makes me think of Wolfenstein, Doom. You could pick easy mode in those games and then have them like sucking on a pacifier. They're letting you know, like hey, you can play this way but don't you feel like a man about it. Like don't go bragging about it. And you know, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Why not? - [Danny] And it's pretty funny that you mention that because when this conversation was happening, I think one of the questions I put out was like, let me know a game you play on easy because you don't care. And the one I said whenever I'm in really bad turbulence on a flight, I have my Switch with me usually and what I usually do is I just put it on easy mode and I try and score as many goals as I can and it kind of takes my mind off things. But the one that so many people kept saying which actually, now that I think about it, I have totally done as well is the MachineGames Wolfenstein games. Those games are brutally hard and a lot of the time they're kind of, I don't know, I feel like a lot of us play it because we want to feel powerful but also we just want to see what the story, where it goes. So I feel like that's, again, a lot of people play on an easier mode just so they can get through it and enjoy the experience. - [Clint] I used to play the Call of Duty's on like the Veteran or whatever the hardest one was until I realized, I don't remember which, it was probably one of your videos or somebody's videos, where it was like, you know this is just a visible line you have to cross, right? As soon as you cross that invisible line you stop spawning. And I was like, oh shit. So you mean I've purposely just been driving myself crazy? 'Cause some of those games there's certain sections where you're just like, how the fuck, how did he shoot me, no way. - [Danny] That's your World of Warcraft shit. You are farming them. You're just sitting back and farming these dudes. - [Clint] Basically, and I'm thinking like, we're gonna make it. Oh no, here comes some more. It's just like, I'm killing myself and for what? Like I could be having the same level of enjoyment and my frustration level's not getting near as high if I just turn it to the appropriate difficulty. Now, whether or not they should, there's a whole 'nother can of worms, should they include it? Like if it's gonna takeaway resources and time and if they have a vision, I think you're getting more into the singular vision versus the design by committee, right? Miyazaki obviously has a singular vision for his games but he also, I don't think he enjoys the fact that everyone thinks his games are so hard. I don't think that's something he takes pride in. I think he wants more people to play 'em. I think he's pretty much said as much. - [Danny] So I guess yeah, taking everything we've talked about today, like the different ways in which games can be more accessible to people, the sort of amorphous conversation about cheesing and difficulty and cheats and how they all sort of blend into each other. As somebody who has experience in these games, who enjoys them, who has been playing them, as far as I'm concerned, on a much harder difficulty level than most of us, what do you feel about Sekiro and how challenging it is? And how you were able to play it as somebody with a disability? Where do you land on it? - [Clint] Honestly, since I downloaded that mod couple days ago, it really got me thinking. Because essentially I've done the same thing the PC Gamer guy has done, except I haven't enabled the cheats, right? Some people may say, oh, you're using ultrawide or unlock frame rate, like you're cheating. And I would say, yeah but I paid for that 2880. I want my frames. I paid for this ultrawide. I'm not changing the game design so much as I'm just adding things they should have maybe thought about if they're gonna release a PC port today. I love the challenge. I feel like each encounter, sounds cliche, but it's like a dance of death, right? If you get surrounded by two or three normal guys, they can kill you. The bosses are very, very hard. Now, granted I haven't beaten the game. I'm sure there's gonna be a boss where I'm just like, oh my god, I'm gonna die 20-plus times. But so far, the most I've died was maybe, actuaLly it was the guy after Blazing Bull. I can't remember the name. I've started calling him General Fuck You. Because every time I get to him he'd just be like fuck you, you're not getting past the gate. And he was such a bitch. He had like a grab and a sweep and then also like, it was the first guy I think I encountered that had three of the warnings and they were all different things. So it took me a while. And you're fighting that closed little section between the walls and it made the camp bit, oh that was a pain. I probably died 10-plus times to him. That's probably the only guy I've died that much to. Maybe Lady Butterfly, might have died like seven or eight, nine times, maybe. I love it for what it is. And I can't thank you enough for it, man. I've had a blast playing it. It's really made me think about a lot of different things. Eventually I'd like to make a video on it or something. Do something more. But you know, I appreciate being brought on this podcast, man. I've had a blast thinking about this and ways that we could try to improve the game for people with disabilities. And I feel like they've done the best job they could. These controls are super responsive. I think transcendent's probably the best way I can describe it. I don't feel like I'm using a mouse and footboard when I'm playing and I feel like I'm the one-arm wolf. - [Danny] Well, you are the one-arm wolf and we really appreciate you coming in. There you go, just in case you didn't already have enough really good internet handles. You can add that one to your repertoire. We really appreciate your time, plqying the game and coming on to talk to us today. For folks who want to follow you, where can they catch you on the Twitter and whatnot? - [Clint] DisabledCable on Twitter. - [Danny] Awesome, good stuff. And yeah, how much more time do you think you have with it? Just as the parting question. Do you think this'll be something you play for the rest of the year? Or another couple of weeks? - [Clint] Honestly, probably another couple of months. I tend to have, like I'll have my action game. I'll have my shooter. And then I'll usually have a role-playing game. Some of those can be interchanged, kind of be the same thing. And this has been my go-to. Like alright, this is my single-player game. If I'm gonna play something with my brothers it's either gonna be Destiny or Vermintide. Not playing any MMOs now. So this is, I'll probably beat it sometime, I would say in the next month, month and a half. Something like that maybe. - [Danny] Awesome, well we wish you well on the journey. I'll be right there with you. I'll be probably a couple of bosses behind you actually. Thank you so much for coming on. And thank you so much to all of our Patrons for funding our work. As ever, you know you can follow us on Twitter @noclipvideo. I am @dannyodwyer on Twitter or /noclip if you wanna follow us on Reddit. And of course this podcast is available early if you're a Patron. Go to patreon.com/noclip to support this show, get it early, and also support all the documentaries we make on our YouTube channel. - [Clint] Go hit up this man's Patreon. Come on, y'all. - [Danny] Thank you so much We've actually got another YouTube channel for the podcast, youtube.com/noclippodcast. If you wanna watch this one. Alternatively, we are available on basically every podcast service in the known universe. iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play, and loads, loads more. Soundcloud as well. We fixed the Soundcloud. There was a problem with our uploads but it's all right and ready now. Thank you so much for listening. Subscribe, give us a review if you can. We've never asked really, much, so if you can do that on iTunes or whatever. I mean, give us a good review. Don't give us a review if you think it's shit maybe. Just forget this part of the podcast. Go do something else. But thank you for listening, thank you for your time, and we'll see you next time. Actually, hold up one second. One little thing to add to the podcast before we close it out. I got an email from Clint after we recorded who felt bad that he had, in the haze of the podcast conversation, forgotten to call out two important people that helped him quite a lot on his journey. The first person is his brother, Matt, who sent him the Naga which he used when he first started coming back to play games. The other is his friend, Kyle, who was actually building him a two button foot switch when they found out that somebody was actually making one commercially., the Stinkyboard, which he ended up using afterwards. Clint's journey to actually being able to play games was quite long. He was in bed for the best part of a year, had to play on a laptop. And then through the help of using those inputs over the course of the next couple of months, learned to play with his feet and learned to play properly with one hand. So he wanted to give a shout out to the two of them who helped him so much when all this was going on, six, five years ago. And I thought I should definitely make the point of sticking it into the end of the podcast. So thank you so much to Matt and Kyle. Clearly he couldn't get to where he is right now without your support and help, so thank you very much.

How do you determine rents for properties you’re thinking about buying? As an investor, are you going to get a return on your investment? If you don’t, then you could get behind every month. Clint Coons of Anderson Business Advisors talks to Scott Abbey of RentFax, who will tell you how to determine rents for your properties. So, when you make investment decisions, you’ll have a range to use to budget wisely. Highlights/Topics: Scott pulls data on properties from the Census Bureau to track indicators of positive vs. negative experiences and determine if he could sustain an income stream Scott makes sure to understand the risks involved when taking on a property to establish a reasonable expectation from a client’s perspective Quality of the location has a direct outcome regarding your income stream and understanding what rents need to be Scott looks at a certain area to determine the rent range; 77,000 census tracts are available to identify the neighborhood’s risk and rent range If your subject and comps are in the same demographic area, it’s likely that those comps will be more powerful, desirable, and accurate than those outside the demographic area Process involves including the square footage and number of bathrooms of subject and comparing them to comps; RentFax adjusts rents to compensate for differences Start at the high end of the predictable range, and then market through it over a few weeks by lowering rent, until you get worthwhile applications Condition of Subject: Some investors barely make changes/fixes, but others modernize and make it nice; take your subject to a higher level to charge more rent Season of Subject: Some seasons generate less traffic; market rent prices based on number of clients looking for a place to rent and the season Use RISC Index to identify the risk of your property; rent affordability becomes a major indicator or cause of failure to sustain a cash flow stream RentFax is helpful for you to buy outside your market and to find comfortable risk tolerances; it quickly offers critical data, appreciation rates, and demographic information Most people who self-manage tend to be below market; but if they fall far behind the market, then they’re not capturing the full benefits from their investment Past three years has seen a large growth in rents - a 20% gain; recently, rents have started to slow down Buying properties in high-risk areas with low-risk tolerances is an investment disaster; RentFax matches area risk, subject location, and client’s expectations/tolerances Resources RentFax (Use COONS15 code to get 15% off) Census Bureau RISC Index RETS Clint Coons Anderson Advisors Tax and Asset Protection Event Full Episode Transcript: Clint: Hi everyone, it’s Clint Coons here at Anderson Business Advisors and in this episode, we’re going to be discussing how you determine your rents for those properties you’re considering buying. As an avid real estate investor, I have over 100 properties across United States and many of these are single family homes. One of the issues we all face as investors is are we going to get that return on our investment? We’re taking capital, we’re tying it up in a property, and we’re anticipating then that property is going to put X amount of dollars back in my pocket. But if it doesn’t do that, then we could be in a situation where possibly we’re behind every month. There’s more month left at the end of the money when it comes to covering all of our expenses and we never want to be in that situation. It’s something that I’ve seen in the past with my own investing and I’ve seen a lot with our clients who have made purchases in markets that they thought they could get a certain return on, that their cap rate is going to be X and it turns out it was Y, and they realize they’ve made a mistake. What I wanted to do in this episode is bring on an expert who can show you how to determine what those market rents will be for your properties so then when you’re making your investment decisions, you know going into it what that range is going to be so you can budget accordingly. With that, I want to bring on Scott Abbey from RentFax. Scott, thanks for being on. Scott: Thank you, Clint. Clint: Tell us a little bit about yourself. Scott: I’m a property manager of 26 years. We managed properties at 450 single family homes in the Kansas City area and by night I am a daily geek. Clint: What does that mean, a daily geek? You just sit up all night long? I mean, what comes to mind here, you’re maybe sitting in your boxer shorts and a tank top, and you look at the computer, you’re drinking a beer. Scott: Not quite, but I raised that story because years ago as my business was just getting started, in fact, the year 2000, I was able to bring down free data information from the Census Bureau, and I started studying the differences between properties that I was having positive and negative results in, that were in close proximity to each other. Using the same manager and the same scoring techniques, same screening techniques, same collection techniques, I found that house A and house B didn’t necessarily perform the same consistently even if the management was the same. So, I pulled down data and data from the Census Bureau. That’s when the night time work came because I had to sort the data out by zip code and then find I had to build statistical models from my property inventory, and I started tracking things that would be indicators for when I had positive experience versus negative experience. That experience as I referred to is, was I able to sustain an income stream? How long was the sustainability of the income stream versus other properties in similar type neighborhoods? It was a very crude Excel spreadsheet that then went to a database, was able to create a scoring model between 0 and 100, and then compared it to all of the neighborhoods with the zip codes in the Kansas City area, and developed a comparative tool that said, “Neighborhood A will perform better than neighborhood B based on these demographic nuances.” Clint: And I assume it started working out for you. Did you see that your rental income started going up when you based all your investments on that? Scott: It took over 10 years of changing the sauce and finding the right algorithms, but I brought in a partner, Shane Sauer, who is an engineer by trade and who also managed properties at the time. We were able to put the tool on steroids and we tested it in seven or eight different markets. That was really the foundation of RentFax. What I, more than anything else selfishly, I wanted to make sure that when a new client came to me, I understood what the risks were of taking that property on so that I could establish a reasonable expectation from a client’s perspective. In real estate acquisition, location, location, location really is there for a reason. It is a critical part of the decision-making. When you try to quantify location with a realtor, it’s always vague and ambiguous. The quality of the location has a direct outcome in terms of what your income stream is and it also helps drive understanding what the rents need to be. Clint: Wow. There is a lot that went into putting this together when you started RentFax. How long have you been in business then? Scott: 26 years. Clint: 26 years. How many clients do you have right now would you say that are using it? Scott: Oh, wow. Well, RentFax hasn’t been in business for 26 years. My client base of my property management company—I have 450 doors—I don’t actually know how many clients are using RentFax right until it’s expanding all the time. Clint: Got it. What you’re doing then is that you’re looking at a certain area and you’re determining the rent range. I’ve got two questions. Number one, is this all across the United States, no matter where I’m investing you have data on those areas? Scott: Yes. There are 77,000 census tracts. We used to use zip codes, now we use census tracts. It’s a smaller area so it’s even more accurate. We have data for all census tracts for the risk of the neighborhood and the rent range. Now, I will tell you that when you’re in low density markets when you have a small number of rental properties, it’s hard to build a statistical model big enough to get accurate data. So, in those rare instances, if the data’s not there, we can’t provide an outcome. But those are very small in number. Clint: When you’re looking at a particular area to come up with these ranges, how do you determine that? You’re looking at what their current rental rates are for homes if people are listing them for rent? You don’t have to give me your whole secret sauce here but, kind of what’s in the details? What’s in the mix? Scott: We go out and we pull the most recent listings from the web and then they’re de-duped so that we’re not duplicating listings because listings get populated to a lot of different places. And then we look for the like type which is single family home or multi family. Our product is designed for residential that means four and less, and it’s either single family or it’s a multi family. Then it looks for the number of bedrooms. Then it brings in the closest group of comps that it can for the proximity of your subject. Then it give you those rents that are being charged. We take it a step further because there’s a lot of products out there that offer rent information but typically the range of rents that are offered are very wide. So, it’s not as helpful as it would be if we could bring the range down to a more manageable number. What we’ve learned is, is that if your subject and your comps are in the same demographic area, the likelihood of those comps being more powerful and more desirable, more accurate are higher than those that are outside your demographic area. The further you go away from your subject, the less accurate the comp is, so we look at distance and we weight the comps accordingly. We also do something that many don’t. We look at the square footage of your subject and compare it to the comps, and we look at the number of bathrooms, and then we adjust the rents up or down to compensate for differences in square footage and number of bathrooms, much the same as an appraiser would do. Clint: Wow. There’s a lot of information. Scott: And then we drive it into a 70% probability curve, and that brings your desired rent range into a fairly manageable number. What I’ve learned as managing properties for all these years is that no one can tell you exactly what rents are because it’s a function of how many competitors do you have at the moment, and how many customers there are at the moment. So, to pick a single number is generally flawed. What we suggest is you start at the high end of the predictable range and then market through that over a number of weeks by lowering your rent over time until you start getting good applications. Clint: You advise then if I was going to going into a certain market, say Kansas City, I should probably base my rent on the property I’m buying and what maybe the lower end, and then like you said, market it from the top end, and make sure my numbers take into consideration that I may end up at that low-end number. Is that advisable? Scott: Well, one question one would ask is the condition of your subject. A lot of the investors will barely put a bandaid on a purchase and others will go in and modernize and make them nice. So, the data that you’re getting is of the average market. Kind of get it? It’s somewhat driven by the economics of the market. But if you take your subject to a higher level of the market, then you want to be sensing the fact that you can charge more rent. Whereas if you look ugly at the street, you’re probably going to need to drive down the rent numbers. Also, like in Kansas City, we have seasons. We’re in a season now where the traffic is much lower. So during this time of year, I tend to market closer to the lower end to accommodate for the smaller number of clients that are going to be looking for a place to rent. Clint: Okay. With that in mind, let’s assume that I’m looking for property now in Kansas City. When you use your modeling, does it then break it down by month? If you’re going to start renting it in, say December, then you ought to expect to charge high end this amount, low end this amount, versus if you’re doing the same thing in June. Is that how— Scott: It doesn’t do that. You have to be sensitive to the fact that when year-end climates that have cold and hot, generally speaking, as a general statement across the United States, your March to August time frame is where most of your moving actually takes place. It’s even more exacerbated where you have cold weather because people are less likely to get out. I know here in Kansas City, January-February are just miserable periods of time. The number of people that want to move in January-February are pretty slow. Now I’ve had warm Januaries where we had good activity. As an investor, you have to be sensitive to those kinds of tactical things you want to consider. The other thing that I want to emphasize is that, when you’re looking at rents, it’s helpful to know the risk of your property because the RISC Index will tell you, “Is this a good property on the neighborhood in the city? Or is this not so good?” As you go up in a risk, what we find is that rent affordability becomes one of the major indicators or one of the major causes of failure to sustain a good cash flow stream. As you are in the lower realm of your economics, you want to start being very sensitive to affordability. Our system looks at your median income and what happens is, usually in a neighborhood, tenants are attracted to similar neighborhoods and see you have to be sensitive to the median income of your applicant, being sensitive to the rent affordability. The thing I tell you is as your rents go down in value, generally you see that the tenants that are renting from those properties, sensitivity to job interruptions is greater and if they’re accustomed to getting five hours overtime a week and that’s cut off, that could have an impact on your ability to get paid. I can also tell you that, particularly in the lower economic areas, utilities become a huge part of the rent. In winter time, for example, if you’re renting a property for $800, it’s not unreasonable to see utility bills that represent 40% of that bay. When you’re looking at that total rent cost of utilities and rent and then you compare that to the gross income of your applicant, it provides a reason for you to consider driving your rents down more on the context of preserving your tenants over long periods of time versus the money that you hope to make from having a short-term tenancy. Clint: The program itself, when you start using it, does it gives you a profile of a typical tenant in that area? Scott: If gives you a profile of the demographics of that area. It provides a lot of information for investor-making decisions about where to buy. For example, if you’re an investor from out-of-area and you’re coming to Kansas City, for example, and you find 2-3 bedroom houses comparatively, and you’re looking at the rents in there reasonably comparable, but you look at the demographic score that we have and the risk score, I would tell you, you want to pick the house that has the better score because that house will, over time, perform better at providing a steady income stream. Clint: Okay, so then what I’ve seen, and correct me if I’m wrong here, if I have two addresses of two different properties I’m looking at, I would go to your site, log in, and then I put in the address of the property that I’m looking to acquire, and run the report on that, and then do the same thing on the other property or do you put in multiple and then compare them? Scott: If you want to load up multiples, you can. But generally, most people, they’re looking at two or three. You just enter one and you study it, and then yet another and study it, and yet another and study it. It is a fast way for you to have some really critical data because it shows appreciation rates, it will give you demographic information that’s helpful to learn. What I’ve learned with clients that have been using it for a while, they have an investment that works for them. They’ve got A-B-C house on such-and-such address and the thing just consistently works for them. Then they’ll run a RentFax on that property and understand what that RISC Index is. And they’ll look for like index numbers or above to buy property because an index of 33 in fill-in-the-blank, Philadelphia will have similar results of Atlanta, Georgia, if they fit the same index number. It’s a very helpful tool for you to buy outside of your market and to find the risk tolerances that you’re comfortable with. I have some clients have loved the high risk, which generally reflects a perceived high cash flow. I have other clients that are risk-inverse. They are at the end of their run and they want to preserve and protect. They want higher risk numbers because generally in the higher risk number, you have less yield but you have greater probability of appreciation. Clint: Got it. This is for people who are considering in purchasing property. They definitely want to run the property through the analysis. How about for somebody who already owns property you’re considering? All right, my tenant is going to be moving out the end of the month and I’m wondering now, should I move up my rents $500 a month? I can see someone wanting to run their own existing properties here. They’re to see where they should peg their new rental amount at. Scott: Right. What I’ve learned in managing property is that most people that self-manage tend to be below market. They usually are by design which, at a strategic level, I agree with being below market but if you fall far behind the market, then you’re really not capturing the full benefits you can from your investment. What we do on our renewals, is since we’re 90 days away from a renewal date, we’ll pull a report, we’ll send it to our client and we’ll make a recommendation of what we should do with rents. And then after he gives us a blessing on that, we send it to the tenant and we show the tenant that, “Look, your property is under market. Although we’re raising the rent, we’re not raising it as high as we could and if you go out and look for another house, here is the market.” Over the last three years, we’ve seen a large growth in rents. Now, I’m sensing recently that those rents are beginning to hit a slowdown point but there’s been 20% gain over the last 3-4 years in rent values and a lot of self-managed properties leave money on the table and not keeping those numbers up. You can see the report justified to the tenant. Clint: I’ve talked to a lot of investors and they see if the market slows down, that somehow that’s going to impact their rental income, personally, what I experienced when the market crashed in real estate back in 2008-2009, my rents went up considerably because people were displaced, they didn’t have houses, they couldn’t qualify for loans, and they had to become renters. That gave me an opportunity, of course, to make a little more money. Then once the properties have worked their way through and people started getting back into buying homes, I actually start reduction in my rental income because that pool of tenants started to shrink up some. Having, I think, that kind of data as well, especially now I think would really really important, given the fact that interest rates have gone up, and you’re starting to see a decline in purchasers now of homes. I was talking to a title company, an officer just the other day and she told me that they were getting 100 a day. And now, they dropped to 70 since the rates have gone up per home. Scott: I think there’s some surprise pressure, too. In my market, a house going to market and there being multiple bids and no mobile offers. It was a bidding war. Some of them would get to close and they wouldn’t approve this. I think that frenzy is behind us for now. My sense right now on RETS, in my market at least, is that I want to be careful to overstep the market in rents. We had our foot on the slow go during some of the economic troubles to keep the rents and to keep the rents affordable because I didn’t want to lose tenants. Then the rents went up and then we put the foot on the gas, but we’re now pulling our foot back off the raising of the rents because we’re seeing some pushback on rents and we’re seeing some affordability questions. Not everybody’s boat is rising at the same rate, and again, it depends on the economics of your property. You talk to someone that has a rent that rents for $2500 and you talk to others that rent for $750, that’s a whole different economic group. You have to be sensitive to both, though. Clint: I think what’s unique is you built this to sound like for yourself, initially, for your properties, and then you saw there’s an opportunity that other people can take advantage of it because it helped you with your business. Is that a fair statement? Scott: It is to an extent. I have to say selfishly when I first developed it, I didn’t want to have to drive to every house to look at the neighborhood before I accepted it. There are neighborhoods in Kansas City that, at the time, I wouldn’t accept to manage because the neighborhood was so difficult. But subsequently, as I started investing more and more of my passion into the product, over the years I’ve seen so many people come into my business, sit down, and said, “I want to hand you, I want you to manage this property for me,” and the first thing I’d do, I would, of course, pull a RISC Index. I found that a lot of people were buying properties in high-risk areas with low-risk tolerances. It turned into an investment disaster because the risk of the property area didn’t match the tolerances of the investor and the investor would burn out after two or three tenants. It was important to me to help match the risk of the area, the location of the subject property to the expectations and the tolerances of the client that was making the purchase. Clint: Yeah, because you don’t want to have pissed-off clients. Scott: I’ll share a story. A little lady and her son walks into my office and sat in my conference room. He had taken her retirement money and paid in cash for a house, or was about to pay cash for a house that was in a very high-risk area. I might work but the greater probability is it wasn’t going to work than it was going to work. He just kept telling her, “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay,” and I ran the report and I gave it to both of them. When she saw the risk, when she saw the demographics, and she saw the crime factors and such, it had a big impact on her decision on whether she was going to give grandson the $75,000 he talked her into to buy this house. I can repeat story after story. A couple of retired teachers came in with three houses they have packaged up. They wanted zero risk but they were told that these were a good deal and they were low cost and how can I go wrong. They were in a war zone in our city. Clint: Yeah. They didn’t get out and visited the properties at all? Scott: They did but unless you have an experienced eye, you don’t recognize some of those things. Clint: Correct. Scott: And not everybody that goes into real estate investing has the training and has the knowledge they should. They make bad investments and oftentimes they’ll blame it on the realtor that sold it to them, or they blame it on the manager that manages it, but in fact, part of the problem was the due diligence they did on the front side of the acquisition and understanding where they are in terms of their investment protocol, like, “Do I have enough cash to sustain three months of vacancy if something terrible would happen? Do I have enough cash to sustain a new roof? Am I comfortable with what appears to be great cash flow but can often be nine months tenancies where there’s eviction every two years?” Those are things that can happen in the higher risk areas. And then, just making sure that there’s a good match there so the investor gets out of the experience what he had hoped for. Clint: And this is why when I first came across your company, I was so intrigued by it because we have a lot of clients that are on the coast that buy in the Midwest because it’s affordable. You can’t get the returns on the coast right now that you can in the Midwest. But the problem I see is that they hook up with these people who sell properties, that are buying them and then rehabbing them and then selling them as packaged deals to these investors, and the investors don’t even know what they’re buying. All they see is the numbers like, “Oh my gosh. That house is only $85,000. That same house out in California would be $500,000. Give me four.” Scott: That’s it. I’ve seen it for 20+ years. That’s one of the motivating factors that drawn all those late nights in developing a tool that not only can I use for my clients but can be used universally for investors to make a good match between the investment risk of the neighborhood because in real estate, it’s about location. Location has driven so many other factors that impact the asset as it ages and the tenant that it attracts. Clint: Got it. I know this that you agreed to give us special discount to Anderson clients that come to RentFax. We negotiated that so we can get 15% off if they go to our site, they go through the length that we’ll have up there for them and then they could take advantage of all the services you have to offer. I want to thank you for that. Scott: Yes. What’s important is that the folks use it and study it. The product I suggest the most is the Rent Package because it has a detailed risk report, it has a rent report, and also shows the historic vacancy report. When you look at those three factors, that really gives you most the tools you need for making decisions about what properties to buy and how to manage those properties. Clint: Great. Yes everyone, when you go to the link, you go to the site, make sure you put in the coupon code COONS15 in there and that’s going to get you the discount on those reports that you’re going to be running. Scott, I want to thank you for coming on today. This has been a great podcast. I know a lot of people are going to get great information out of this and they’re going to be coming to your site to start running those risk analysis because those are things that many people do not realize are so important in making an investment decision. Anything else you like to add? Scott: I wish everybody good luck with their investing. Thank you very much, Clint. Clint: All right, Scott. Take care. Thanks.

Let’s face it, even if you use an LLC, you still need insurance. However, when we need insurance for LLCs, corporations, and land trusts, our local insurance people and providers don’t know how to write the right type of policy to protect our assets. Clint Coons of Anderson Business Advisors talks to Shawn Woedl from the National Real Estate Insurance Group (NREIG) about the importance of insurance and different types of policies that are available. Highlights/Topics: Creating a Limited Liability Company (LLC) doesn’t relieve you of your responsibility to insure the property REIGuard: Accommodates portfolio of one to four family rental dwellings or any line of commercial real estate through any phase of occupancy, anywhere in the country Flippers should purchase Builder’s Risk Forms that include liability coverage for the premises Fix and flips are highest risk type of property for an insurance company; investors are forced to buy a longer-term policy, but won’t get a refund if they sell the property sooner Liability claims take down a company faster than any property loss, regardless of size General Contractor’s Policy covers faulty workmanship; a general contractor needs to provide Certificate of Liability Coverage and Workers’ Compensation Coverage Call monthly to verify their coverage, or add yourself to their General Contractor’s Liability Policy Flipping through a corporation can make it difficult to obtain policies; some carriers only offer coverage in the property owner’s personal name Local insurances don’t insure LLCs, only individuals, because of pre-negotiation through their reinsurance treaties and contracts, so they can’t accommodate for it Insurance agents encourage separate policies for each LLC, not an umbrella policy, to run up the cost; NREIG can aggregate them under one policy to lower rates Name anyone who has an ownership interest in the property that can potentially be included in a lawsuit as additional insured on your policy New investors who come to NREIG discover that they have many choices for property and liability insurance; NREIG structures unique coverage based on client’s needs Resources National Real Estate Insurance Group REIGuard Clint Coons Anderson Advisors Tax and Asset Protection Event Full Episode Transcript: Clint: Hi everyone, it’s Clint Coons here with Anderson Business Advisors and today I have Shawn Woedl on from National Real Estate Insurance Group, and he’s going to talk to us about the importance of insurance and the different types of policies that are out there. We all know as real estate investors that when you go out and you try to find insurance, you talk to your local guide. Many times they look at you as if you’re from another planet, because you’re using strategies that they’re unfamiliar with. We’re talking about LLCs, corporations, and land trust and we’re putting our properties into these entities or as a protection. Many times, when we need the insurance, our local insurance individual does not know how to write the right type of policy that we need to protect our assets. Because let’s face it, even though you use an LLC, you still need insurance. Just this week, I was speaking to an attorney who’s an investor. They called me up, and he said, hey, I have this property in an LLC, and my tenant has been hurt. The ceiling fan fell down and hit him on his foot, and he can’t walk anymore, he’s going to be permanently disabled, and he’s suing my LLC and I don’t have insurance. You think I have a problem? Now, of course, you do have a problem, because even though you create a Limited Liability Company, it doesn’t relieve you of your responsibility to insure the property. So, when we’re setting up these structures, it’s imperative that you get the right information. That’s why I brought Shawn on, I think he can explain, why that’s important. We’re going to ask him a number of questions, and hope that by the end of this, you’re going to understand this is the group you want to go to. So, Shawn, thanks for coming on. How are you doing? Shawn: Doing well, thanks. Thank you, Clint, for having me. Clint: Great. With National Real Estate Insurance Group, can you just give me a brief background as how this came together –  this group, because you offer a number of products out there that I think are really advantageous for investors. Shawn: Absolutely. National Real Estate Insurance Group itself is a national independent insurance agency who are licensed and active in all 50 states, with a focus on real estate investors. About twenty years ago, we developed what’s now known as the REI guard insurance program, and it kind of started with two separate programs that came together as one. We have Mike Wrenn here, one of our owners in Kansas City that was working with the home investors franchises and developed renovators insurance, which was a short term program for guys and girls who were doing fix and flips that needed a month or two of coverage and the insurance industry wasn’t responding to their need. Tim Norris and myself were in Cincinnati, Ohio, and we were developing National Real Estate Insurance Group and National Condo and Apartment Insurance Group, with the focus on residential real estate investors that were buying hold opportunities, as well as larger apartments, condo, association, really any line of commercial real estate. In 2010, after really passing some business opportunities back and forth that multiple events across the country, Tim and Mike actually merged their agencies, and developed this crazy program called through National Real Estate Insurance Group called REIGuard, that now can accommodate for a portfolio, one to four family rental dwellings through any phase of occupancy, anywhere in the country, on monthly recording. And then in 2014, I went ahead and merged my agency as well, and we now can accommodate really for any line of commercial real estate an investor decides to dive into. Clint: Wow. I mean that just, I mean, seems like it’s perfect for our clients especially, because at Anderson, we pride ourselves as being a one-stop shop for real estate investors, giving them the tax information, business planning, and asset protection, even a state planning. And it seems like what you’ve done with National Real Estate Insurance Group is hit the same type of demographic target, and that you saw there was a need out there, and people could then go to one place to make sure all their insurance needs are covered. And that’s refreshing, because I know how frustrating it can be, even with my own investing. As I tell people, I own over a hundred properties and it’s just difficult to go out there and find an agent that gets it, and it sounds to me in my experience with working with you, that you guys understand it. And I can tell you this, it took us a long time to finally find someone such as National Real Estate Insurance Group that understands real estate investors. I’ve been real happy with our relationship, to make you a trusted resource for our clientele because of the value you bring to them. So with that, you’re talking about policies. Can you tell me why is a flipper, because we have a lot of flippers, they go out, they buy and sell properties. I don’t think they understand the importance of the insurance, and what type of insurance should they get? Shawn: So, a couple of quick points that I’d like to make on those builders risk type of policies, or forms that these investors can purchase for these fix and flip opportunities: one, it’s typically a builders risk forms for property only. So, unless you specifically ask for liability coverage, that can be an exposure on a lot of builders risk forms to think of, maybe slips and falls, personal injuries like you just mentioned with one of your friends there, that’s happening, those are exposures on a lot of builders risks forms unless you specifically ask for liability to be included for the premises. Understanding the market the way we do, because we’re all investors ourselves, we of course include that into our forms, but to just kind of piggyback on that –  renovation properties, short term fix and flips, are considered probably the highest risk type of property for an insurance company to agree to insure. There’s lots of parties going in and out, there’s a lot of ongoing operations, typically, those are susceptible of theft or people breaking and entering. So, insurance companies are going to force investors most of the time to come in and buy a longer-term policy, a six-month to an annual policy, which doesn’t make a lot of sense if the flip in your possession, you think you’re going to have it done in three to four months. Because these policies are fully entered in conception. Meaning, from the get-go, as soon as you agreed to purchase coverage from your carrier, you have to pay the full premium up front, and by the way, if you cancel early because that flip’s completed, you can’t get any money back from the unused premium, that’s the cost of doing business with a lot of these carriers that will agree to actually take on risks, and it’s just on renovation property. And it’s really just because they don’t have an appetite for the risk they’re taking on and they don’t understand the market. Clint: Wow, yeah, I did not know that. I haven’t flipped properties in years, but yeah, I bet a lot of people think that when they buy a policy like that, once they cancel it, they’re going to get a refund of the premium, but they’re not. So that’s good to know. So you’re saying that with all your fix and flip policies, and you’re going to automatically include that liability coverage for them? It’s not something they have to ask for? Shawn: Yeah, this premises liability that’s going to be included on every opportunity that we propose and go over with an investor, whether it’s regardless of its occupancy, we think it’s more important to cover the liability exposure than any property exposure. Think about it, a liability claim, a wrongful death, a personal injury that is severe, can take a company faster down than any property loss regardless of the size. It’s the unknown, once you fail on it, liability goes a couple of years down the line where you think your business is growing well, and then all of a sudden get hit with a lawsuit for a slip and fall that occurred on the site a couple of years ago when you had ownership and percent of property. So absolutely, we always include liability. The only time we’ll ever remove it is if it’s specifically asked for by an investor during a proposal process. Clint: So, you just said something interesting in there. So if I bought this property and renovating it, and then I sell it, and then a year and a half later, somebody brings a claim, that they were injured on the property while they were working on it. You said that would be covered under your policy. Shawn: It would be covered – liability is a slippery slope, there’s a lot of gray areas, right? So, if the injury happened, and they were just maybe, maybe they were breaking and entering, or the house was left unsecured, and they fell down the steps and were injured, then yeah, then that type of exposure would be picked up under the premises liability coverage that was enforced at the time of the loss. If it’s a loss that was occurred under from general contractors negligent, or if you, as the investor, were actually doing the renovations yourself, and then a lawsuit was filed for faulty workmanship post-sale by the new owner, those are all types of stand-alone coverages that you have to purchase in addition to your premises liability. But yeah, a lot of those would be covered under the premises form. Clint: Got it. So there’s other policies you can or additions you can acquire when you’re purchasing a builders risk policy to cover that. So I’m going to give you an example. Just the other day, someone came into my office. They had rehabbed the property, they sold it, and it turns out there’s an issue with a catch basin in the basement. They have both greywater and rainwater that run into it, that pump it into the sewer lines. Supposedly, that’s not correct, and that needs to be changed. Would you have, would an insurance policy cover that type of change, that the contractor screwed up on or not? Shawn: The general contractors policy would pick that up, for faulty workmanship, right? So, your carrier, the premises liability, if needed, would provide you with defense clause, would go in and help you, you know, go against the general contractors policy, but that’s a GC exposure. So, you know, typically what we always recommend that our investors do, is when a general contractor comes on to your site just to bid on the property, to work on a property, they should be able to give you two pieces of information: their certificate of liability coverage that tells you their business is covered adequately, as well as their workers compensation coverage, if they have employees that are going to be on site as well. And you know, the certificates of liability give you a couple of cool pieces of information that you can use. It gives you the carrier that wrote the piece of business, as well as the agency. So if you want to go in and reach out to the agency each month and make sure their premium is paid, this will get a nice shiny certificate for a year showing coverage by paying a month or two of premium up front. You can do one of two things, and I always recommend the second, but the first one is you can call monthly to make sure their coverage is in good standing, or you can learn as an investor that those general contractors policies can work for us as investors, and we do that by adding ourselves as additional insured to their general contractors liability policy for the duration of time they’re working on your property. Those are always, those are usually free to do, or at most it costs $50 to endorse their policy, it’s well worth it to pay that money if they’re bellyaching about it. But that extends their liability coverage to you, if they do something negligent and you’re named in the lawsuit. And equally as important, it’s going to notify you as an additional insured prior to their policy cancelling or non-payment, or any other underwriting issues, and you can get out ahead of it and make sure that it’s right. Clint: Wow. Sounds like, kind of like buying a tail, then, on their policy. Nice. So how about if they, when someone comes to you and they have a corporation, because a lot of our flippers will teach them is it, either flip through a corporation, or better yet, flip through unlimited liability company that is owned by a corporation. Does that pose any difficulty for obtaining these policies? Does it matter? Shawn: It does for a lot of carriers, and a lot of carriers are limited to only being able to offer coverage in the personal name of the owner of the property. Again, knowing the market as we do, we’re all residential real estate investors ourselves, it made little to no sense for us to put that limitation on our investors, so we can actually accommodate for any type of name insured ownership entity, we can still have them all on one single schedule so we can leverage portfolio size and activity to keep an investors property rates and costs down at a time, because you’ve got common ownership or interest in the property, so LLCs, corporations, IRAs, trusts, you name it, it can all be bundled together through our program. Clint: Okay, so hold on, I’m going to back to that topic, because that’s really important for the listeners here. But just on the side of talking about insuring the LLC, for instance, if it owns the property. Why don’t local insurances agree to insure the LLC? Why do they only want to insure the individual? What’s their hang up there? Shawn: The best I can tell you is that it’s already been pre-negotiated through their re-insurance treaties and contracts, if they have, that’s just, they can’t accommodate for it. And those are the companies that you run into, like the State Farm, the Farmers, the Allstates of the world, they’re all, by the way, tremendous companies for what they do, and what they specialize in are home and auto and some life policies, some lower-risk type of deals homeowner policies. When you start getting into the investor world, where these are higher risk locations, your tenant’s more likely to burn your house down than you are, they always offer the coverage out of a sense of obligation to their existing clientele. They don’t have an appetite for it, and you can tell by the fact that they require you to insure a property through a very high evaluation per square foot, more than you’ll ever recover from in a loss. And they do that in an effort to garner, to recover enough money in the premium to offset the risk they’re taking on on a higher risk location. So I think it’s just not having the appetite for the risk, more than anything, along with the contracts that they’ve negotiated to be able to extend coverage to them. Clint: Interesting. Yeah, I can never figure that out, because it seems to me like you’re insuring me, I’m the owner of my LLC, it’s still the same insurance policy, who do you care or what does it matter who owns it, if there’s a claim made, you’ve still got to pay, so yeah. That makes sense. So, when you’re talking about this bundling, that’s something that’s really important, because the few that I’ve talked to, clients that have actually found that maybe their State Farm agent would offer them a policy, and I’ll give an example here. An investor comes into their State Farm agent and they have six limited liability companies, with one property in each LLC. The agent tells them, you need to have six separate individual policies, we can’t give you an umbrella policy over all of these, we have to do six separate agreements. And it just seems to run up the cost. Did I hear you to say that you can aggregate them together, it doesn’t matter how the properties are held in different LLCs, we can do it under one? Shawn: Absolutely. That’s exactly what we do when it comes to property, and the primary premises liability, your underlying liability, we’ll touch on umbrellas here just a second, but it’s a master schedule for a particular investor or investment group, and it allows you to add and delete locations from your schedule as need me, but think about it, me, myself as your agent, right, if you came to me and said hey, I’ve got one location, and I’ve blanketed it out to the 250 different, you know, carriers that I’m contracted with. One location, as opposed to ten locations, as opposed to a hundred, the more leverage I can get with that underwriter to drive your property rate down. So when we do a one-off policy for each location, you’re really at the mercy of the underwriter on what they want to assign as a property rate, and that can be based on the different areas of the country maybe that you’re investing in. could just be the mood they’re in that day. So, leveraging that, just it gives me more, you know, kind of fire power to go to, ammunition, we call it, and you go to the underwriter and drive those rates down for you. Clint: So, tell me this. So, who should you name then as the additional insured on your policy? Shawn: You know, it’s a good question, and we run across that all the time, and you can look at a couple of things if you have a lender on the deal. So, somebody, you know, whether it’s private or a larger institution, they’re usually going to require that you listed as additional insured, or the very least, certificate holder on your liability insurance. That way, again, they’re notified prior to your policy lapsing for non-payment or any other underwriting issue, on the off-chance that they’re named in a lawsuit, which would never happen and your liability cover, it would also extend to them. But you can, you know, many property management companies, if you’re dealing with a large property organization, would also require that you list their company on your liability as additional insured, so, again, you do something negligent, their liability coverage, or excuse me, your liability coverage extends to them. And you can do the same thing, vice versa, and be listed on their liability coverage, but really, anyone that has an ownership interest in the property, they can be potentially dragged into a lawsuit. Clint: Okay. So as far as if you had a corporation that’s the manager of an LLC, should it be named then as additional insured, as well? Shawn: No, the corporation would be listed as first name insured, though if the corporation’s managing other locations, if they don’t have ownership ventures then at that point, yes. That doesn’t stop, that doesn’t prevent them from having to seek out the correct liability coverage to cover the property management operations, as well. But, at least with the premises, they’d be covered without being listed as additional as well. Clint: Perfect. Okay, so you can do business in all fifty states, right? Shawn: Absolutely. Clint: And then, for our clients, all they have to do, we have that link that we’ve set up that drives them right to your page and then they can put in some information and then someone will contact them, is that how it works? Shawn: Yeah, and we do things a little bit different, as you well know, I’m sure. The last thing we do, especially if a new investor comes to us, and says hey, I need coverage but I don’t know what kind of coverage I need. You know, we’re not just going to send them a proposal and say, hey, take it or leave it. The most important thing that all these investors, all of our investor friends can know is that they have so many choices when it comes to property and liability insurance. So, what we do is we get one of my license advisors or myself to actually jump on a phone call with our prospect. In the first ten, fifteen minutes of the call, we want to listen to you. We want to know exactly what your business model is, we want to know what your appetite for risk is, what you’re okay self-insuring, what you’re not, what you do, God forbid, a total loss occurs. Would you rebuild the property, or would you clean the land up, sell it, and go buy something else like it? Are there lending insurance requirements that we need to comply with? And then, we’ll help structure your coverage, unique, whatever your package need on it. Clint: Perfect. All right. Well, I want to thank you for taking the time to be on this podcast today, and I know that for sure we will end up giving hopefully more people brought over to you so they can have their insurance needs taken care of. So with that, Shawn, thanks a lot, looking forward talking to you in the future. Shawn: Thank you, Clint, have a good weekend. Clint: You too, bye.  

I'll do my Donn voice. "Hi, I'm Donn."Our Guest+Clint KrauseShow Notes after the jumpGuest NotesRed Moon Medicine ShowVacant Ritual Assembly zineDon't Walk in Winter WoodStygian Garden of Abelia PremDriftwood Verses (upcoming)Show NotesClint talks a bit about his Driftwood Verses supplement (1:42)Adam makes up a definition of Weird Horror (4:30)Clint: You can't force creepy, it happens on its own (8:50)Adam: dissonance between player agency and terror (12:00)Clint: build up and absence of a creature (Hitchcock effect?) (13:00)Donn: the unknown! (16:00)Adam: the seductive allure of the unknown (17:50)Donn: ghosts! Give 'em stuff they can't fight! (19:10)Clint: Keep players wondering (20:23)Donn still hates Adam's Senior Sugarskull (21:25)Clint: what's mechanical, what's scenery? (23:00)Clint is prep-heavy. Donn finally has an ally.Adam: ever good GM has a moment of self-doubt right before a game starts (26:00)Clint & Donn: prep makes a session real for the GM (26:30)Adam: communicating a feeling is more important than communicating a fact (28:20)Donn takes over (30:43)Adam talks about reality & phenomena again (35:00)Donn: immersion means presenting things to the characters rather than the players (39:00)Clint: if everything's weird, nothing is; mundane stuff creates essential contrast (41:00)Adam: when you name a thing, it ceases to be unknown (45:40)Clint makes Adam's points coherent (48:00)The Third Rail: Is The "Quantum Clue" worth the loss of failure?Clint: No. The chance of failure is a small issue.Donn: Has never played either.Adam: It's complicated. It solves a problem that isn't one. Rather, its answer is more useful for everything other than the question that it attempts to answer.Mythoard is awesome. You should do it. (Not a paid advertisement) http://www.mythoard.comThanks for joining us for this episode of Drink Spin Run. If you like what you've heard, share us with your friends, leave us an iTunes review or send us an email at dsr@kickassistan.net. You can also support us at http://www.patreon.com/DSRCast. Our theme music was generously provided by the band Blue Snaggletooth (http://bluesnaggletooth.bandcamp.com). Once again, thanks for listening, you gorgeous listeners.

It's the second Friday of the month, which can only mean one thing: another great Gutter Talk Three Questions episode with great information and even better music. In this episode, Patrick Yurick meets up with Dawn and Clint Wolf, the creators of the webcomic Zombie Ranch, and poses three questions smack dab in the middle of the halls at WonderCon 2015 this year. These are Dawn and Clint's three questions: Question 1: (Clint) You've been lucky enough to write for various things, whether that's games or even possibly doing some technical writing when you once worked in tech support. What are some of the things you took away from those writing jobs that you've been able to apply to current work in comics? Question 2: (Dawn) In one of the Inktober challenge drawings, you did it on a skirt but is there a medium you prefer and why? Question 3: (Both) What are some of the pros and cons of working together not just as collaborators but also as a married couple? Also be sure to head over to iTunes, if you're not there already, and give us a rating and review. This really does help boost our presence in the comics and podcast communities, which in turn helps build the amount of knowledge and love we can provide and spread out to all the comic creators around the world. Their Links: Zombie Ranch site (@zombieranch) Kickstarter for Zombie Ranch Our Links: Intro Music: Nightmare by Jahzzar is licensed under a Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org) Segment 1 Music: Vultures of the Horn by Ga'an is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org) Segment 2 Music: Spider Farm by Andrew Howes is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Germany License (http://freemusicarchive.org) Segment 3 Music: Corona Norco by Charles Atlas is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org) Outro Music: First Rays by Jahzzar is licensed under a Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org)